New Year's Eve: Classic Hollywood froth

New Year's Eve (2011) • View trailer for New Year's Eve
3.5 stars. Rating: PG-13, for fleeting profanity and some sexual candor
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 12.9.11


New Year’s Eve is a lighthearted throwback to classic Hollywood ensemble dramas such as 1932’s Grand Hotel, with star-laden casts that played isolated clusters of characters involved with their own little dramas.

Trying to get a conventional cab on New Year's Eve is impossible, so when
Tess (Jessica Biel) suddenly must get to the hospital right now, lest she deliver
her baby on the sidewalk, husband Griffin (Seth Meyers) does the best he can,
and flags down a pedal-cab.

Additionally, New Year’s Eve is very much like last year’s Valentine’s Day, also directed by Garry Marshall and co-written by Katherine Fugate, who assumes solo scripting chores this time.

And, as was the case with Valentine’s Day, Marshall’s newest effort will be embraced as a fun date flick by folks with romantic souls, and loudly dissed by cinematic snobs who can’t get beyond the calculated pretense and contrived star turns.

A pox on the latter’s houses, and may they be alone on New Year’s Eve.

Sometimes a movie is just a movie, and there’s nothing wrong with that. Marshall knows how to craft slick Hollywood product, and Fugate deftly sketches a dozen or so mini-dramas, adding just enough backstory — in most cases — to involve us with each set of characters.

And we can’t help being impressed by a cast that includes three Oscar-winning best actors, a couple more Oscar nominees and several dozen familiar faces from both television and the big screen. A few are notorious scene-stealers, but Marshall maintains a steady hand and somehow grants everybody equal time.

That’s an impressive accomplishment with a cast this large, and a set of stories this diverse. Which only matters in an abstract sense, because our sole obligation with a film such as New Year’s Eve is to sit back and have a good time.

As the title suggests, the events take place during a single day in and around New York’s Times Square, as a massive cluster of humanity jams the streets in order to watch the big ball drop at the stroke of midnight. This year’s annual ceremony is being supervised by Claire (Hilary Swank), the newly promoted vice president of the Times Square Alliance.

She arrives early, with plenty of time to test the ball. Which — horrors! —gets stuck halfway up the massive pole, with only a few of its many lights flashing.

No Strings Attached: Make a date

No Strings Attached (2011) • View trailer for No Strings Attached
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor, vulgar humor, brief nudity and minor drug use
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 1.21.11


Once it settles down and turns into the film we all paid to see, No Strings Attached is an alternately hilarious and touching romantic comedy, positioned nicely a few weeks ahead of Valentine’s Day.

Rather earthy, as well.

When Emma (Natalie Portman, on the couch) and her roommates -- Shira
(Mindy Kaling, standing) and Patrice (Greta Gerwig) -- retreat into their
apartment because it's "that time of the month," Adam (Ashton Kutcher)
surprises them all by arriving with cupcakes and a rather unusual mix CD.

And therein lies the initial problem. For about the first 15 minutes, writers Elizabeth Meriwether and Michael Samonek try much too hard to enter smutty Judd Apatow territory, and the results are cringe-worthy. The first eye-poppingly vulgar one-liner, exchanged between a boy and girl at a summer camp, delivers a galvanic shock: Did we really just hear that?

(A more apt question: Would a boy that age ever say such a thing to a girl that age? Not for a heartbeat, which is precisely the problem. It ain’t funny.)

Similar raunchy comments flow during the next few sequences, which might be veteran director Ivan Reitman’s version of fair warning, and an effort to clear the theater of patrons too easily offended. But then an odd thing happens: The banter turns measurably milder – if still quite randy – and Reitman manages the deft trick so frequently attempted, without success, by American filmmakers.

He gets very close to the playfully erotic tone of a French sex farce.

Never a bad thing.

All the elements are in play, starting with nice guy Adam (Ashton Kutcher), a mid-level TV production company flunky forever standing in the shadow of his more flamboyant father, Alvin (Kevin Kline), an aging celeb still milking the signature line (“Great Scott!”) that netted him so much willing female companionship back when he starred on a hit sitcom. Not long into this tale, Adam suddenly discovers that his recent ex, Vanessa (Ophelia Lovibond, appropriately sultry) is boinking dear ol’ dad ... which leads to all sorts of uncomfortable questions. (“When did this start, exactly?!”)

After losing himself in an alcohol-fueled effort to find somebody – anybody – to bed that night, Adam wakes the next morning in an apartment shared by Emma (Natalie Portman) and her three med student friends, Patrice (Greta Gerwig), Shira (Mindy Kaling) and Guy (stand-up comic Guy Branum). Rather embarrassingly, Adam is starkers and stretched out on the living room couch; even worse, he has no recollection of the previous evening ... and the teasing descriptions supplied by Emma and the others do little to help him regain any composure.

Kutcher, it should be mentioned, does marvelous work in this scene. His confused, hooded, sidelong glances are priceless, his deft efforts to shield his dangly bits a masterpiece of towel manipulation. (Choreographing this scene, and getting it precisely right, must have been hilarious. Goodness knows, the results are suitably funny.)