I’ve been lucky in winning free passes to advance movie screenings lately. Last week we saw Just Like Heaven, starring Reese Witherspoon and Mark Ruffalo. It’s kind of a zany but cute movie (if you don’t think too hard) about a guy who moves into a San Francisco apartment and finds he has an other-worldly roommate. (The premise is a bit more complicated than that, but I’m not going to detail the whole thing here.) What keeps it from being pure fluff is Ruffalo, whose understated style I like. He’s not the type you might immediately cast in a romantic comedy, and yet his sincerity and charm make it work. Of course I love the San Francisco locales, and the to-die-for Russian Hill house in which much of the movie is set has gorgeous views of the Golden Gate Bridge on one side and downtown on the other. Other scenes take place around Mission Dolores and North Beach. See also Thom’s blog.
On Tuesday night I saw Proof, starring Gwyneth Paltrow, Anthony Hopkins, and Jake Gyllenhaal. It’s about a daughter coming to terms with the death of her father, a brilliant but mentally disturbed mathematician, and also dealing with two other people in her life: her father’s former student advisee (Gyllenhaal), and her sister (Hope Davis). I haven’t read or seen the acclaimed play on which this is based, so I can’t compare it to the original. I really wanted to like this movie, and while it does have its moments, it just didn’t grab me. Only until well into the movie does it seem to gather some momentum and interest. (Still the mathematic and academic themes of the movie make me want to dig up my old high-school calculus textbook and see if any of my brain cells remember how to make sense of it.)
Both movies open today, Sept. 16, with Proof in limited release.
In other entertainment news, tomorrow night we’re seeing Brian Stokes Mitchell give a concert with the National Symphony Orchestra at the Kennedy Center. In 2002 I caught his turn as The Man of La Mancha here in D.C., and I can’t wait to see him and hear his lovely voice again.
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corpse brides and were rabbits – the films of october
As Jeff notes, he and I have been pretty lucky at scoring free passes to movie screenings through various sources–Metro Weekly, [The Washington Post] Express, ytic, and others. Two weeks ago we saw Just Like Heaven, and last week Jeff…