plus 3, Movie Review: 'Our Family Wedding' - Delaware County Daily Times

Movie Review: 'Our Family Wedding' - Delaware County Daily Times
Akon to break out some Hindi for Bollywood movie soundtrack - Monsters and Critics
Investors can soon make bets on movie box office - Baltimore Sun
Movie Review: 'Remember Me' - Delaware County Daily Times

Movie Review: 'Our Family Wedding' - Delaware County Daily Times

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:58 PM PST

By Jake Coyle, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) --- One enters a movie like "Our Family Wedding" bracing for cheesiness.

As a genre, wedding films are typically about as cloying as two-hours worth of kitten videos on YouTube. Add in the equally checkered history of stridently ethnic movies, and you might want to start asking moviegoers to remove their belts before entering the theater.

But as Rick Famuyiwa's "Our Family Wedding" — which combines both elements — moves along, the fingers in front of one's eyes (usually a shield reserved for horror films) slowly part. The realization dawns that Famuyiwa has made a mostly charming movie despite its cliche milieu.

The performances help.

And the center is America Ferrera (as Lucia) and Lance Gross (as Marcus), a young couple in college in New York who return home to their families in Los Angeles to break the news that they're engaged.

Neither family — one Latino, the other black — much like the decision. Miguel Ramirez (Carlos Mencia), Lucia's father, and Brad Boyd (Forest Whitaker), Marcus' dad, quickly become rivals.

To be sure, there are plenty of predictable jokes reliant on stereotypes. But "Our Family Wedding" often smacks of real people.

As the families feud, they use racial stereotypes less as a crutch for identity than a means for sarcasm, self-deprecation and — if at all possible — ammo against their potential new in-laws.

Insisting that the wedding also include African-American traditions, Whitaker temporarily draws a blank before remembering the custom of the bride and groom jumping over a broom stick.

Whitaker's Brad is a radio D-J and an aging playboy. Mencia's Miguel is — as all fathers of the bride are in movies — overprotective. Though both are somewhat outlandish, neither sinks to cartoon level — always a threat for the comic Mencia.

A number of characters hover on the outside: Regina King as a longtime family friend; Lupe Ontiveros as an over-the-top, conservative grandmother; Anjelah Johnson as Lucia's droll sister; Diana Maria Riva as Lucia's mother.

As friends of the groom, Charlie Murphy and Taye Diggs make a brief, funny appearance for an argument over marriage as either "sex on the regular" or "marital Guantanamo."

Unfortunately, "Our Family Wedding" loses its balance around the time the goat gets loose and eats a bunch of Viagra. Still, though cheesiness is all around, it never quite penetrates "Our Family Wedding."

Famuyiwa (who directed "Brown Sugar" and "The Wood") opens the film in a way coincidentally similar to the recent romantic comedy "Valentine's Day": A D-J (Whitaker) spins a tune dedicated to lovers on Valentine's Day.

"Our Family Wedding" is significantly better than that utterly artificial film. It's not as overstuffed, it has authentic quiet moments and it has better music, too: Sharon Jones & the Dap-Kings kick off a soundtrack of Daptone soul.

"Our Family Wedding," a Fox Searchlight Pictures release, is rated PG-13 for some sexual content and brief strong language. Running time: 101 minutes. Two stars out of four.

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Akon to break out some Hindi for Bollywood movie soundtrack - Monsters and Critics

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 05:54 PM PST

American rapper Akon will break out some Hindi for a Bollywood movie. Akon was leaving the Maida Vale studio after appearing on the Radio 1 Live Lounge. Akon Stopped by to pose and sign autographs for awaiting fans before he left in convoy of chauffeur driven vans. - Laurent Despois / Splash News

Akon was leaving the Maida Vale studio after appearing on the Radio 1 Live Lounge. Akon Stopped by to pose and sign autographs for awaiting fans before he left in convoy of chauffeur driven vans. - Laurent Despois / Splash News Akon, 36, will record a song for the movie soundtrack of RA.One, a science fiction action flick that will feature Bollywood heart-throb, Shah Rukh Khan, and the actress Kareena Kapoor. Akon follows Snoop Dogg in the rap into Bollywood. Snoop recorded music for the soundtrack of the 2008 Singh Is Kinng, a comic caper about a Punjabi villager who becomes 'Kinng' of the Australian underworld, according to imdb.com. AFP reports Khan said in Mumbai: 'He [Akon] is a gracious person. He will record a song in Hindi and will also feature in the video. He has flown [in] with his family, friends and team of musicians.' Akon, who is donating his services gratis, said: 'India is my next focus area. I want to try different things, want to explore – want to enjoy my work. We have the same kind of entertainment, the only difference is of tradition and language.' copyright notice

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Investors can soon make bets on movie box office - Baltimore Sun

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 04:33 AM PST

Reporting from New York and Los Angeles -- Welcome to Hollywood's newest version of risky business: movie derivatives.

Two trading firms, one of them an established Wall Street player and the other a Midwest upstart, are each about to premiere a sophisticated new financial tool: a box-office futures exchange that would allow Hollywood studios and others to hedge against the box-office performance of movies, similar to the way farmers swap corn or wheat futures to protect themselves from crop failures.

The Cantor Exchange, formed by New York firm Cantor Fitzgerald and set to launch in April, last week demonstrated its system to 90 Hollywood executives in a packed Century City hotel conference room. Amid a spirited trading-floor atmosphere, the participants shouted out guesses and made bets on how much "Alice in Wonderland" might rake in at the box office

On Wednesday, Indiana company Veriana Networks, which says its management includes "veterans of the Chicago exchange community," unveiled the Trend Exchange, its own rival futures exchange for box-office receipts.

Both firms say they expect to win regulatory approval within the next couple of months from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, which oversees futures markets.

With handicapping the weekend box office now a topic around the family breakfast table, Cantor and Veriana hope they can harness the national obsession to create a safety net for the risky and expensive business of producing movies.

If Universal Pictures, for instance, had traded a futures contract for "The Wolfman," it might have mitigated its losses on the recent flop.

"There is a tremendous amount of risk in every movie and a need to manage that risk," said Don Chance, a finance professor at Louisiana State University who has studied financial exchanges for the entertainment industry. "I would think a futures market would have great potential to do that."

Reducing the financial risk of filmmaking through futures contracts, a type of derivative, could bring more investment to Hollywood. The surge of private equity money into the movie business a few years back has dried up because returns were uneven and often lower than promised.

"This product could help to even out the volatility of the movie business," said Clark Hallren, a former JPMorgan Chase & Co. entertainment banker who is consulting for Veriana.

Although the backers say the main purpose of the exchanges is to reduce risk, it could also allow a lucky speculator to profit enormously by betting the long odds on a dark horse. For example, someone who bought a contract for the seemingly unlikely outcome that "The Hangover," last summer's raunchy comedy, would be a blockbuster could have made a killing.

But the markets, some say, could be subject to conflicts of interest and manipulation by Hollywood insiders. If someone involved in a film saw the results of a test screening or knew how much would be spent on marketing, for instance, he or she might have a big leg up over the public.

"Insider trading seems like it would be a non-trivial issue," said Isaac Palmer, managing director of media and entertainment investment bank Mesa. "If a studio is hedging a bet on its own movie, wouldn't that be insider trading by definition?"

Cantor and Veriana say they plan to guard against conflicts of interest by collecting employment information about each user of their exchanges, closely monitoring big trades and limiting the amount that investors in a specific production can invest in its box office.

The bigger question, however, is whether Cantor and Veriana can persuade professionals in the insular entertainment business to adopt the type of complex financial tool that, as evidenced by the recent mortgage meltdown, doesn't always work smoothly.

"Obviously the futures industry is new to film, but I look at what it did to the energy market and the agricultural market," said Richard Jaycobs, who is overseeing the Cantor Exchange after working at a number of futures markets. "There will be a whole bunch of strategies that will develop and make it easier and cheaper to get funding."

It also remains to be seen whether studios and producers will be willing to bet against, or short, their own films. In a business where relationships and reputation are crucial, such a move carries more risks than just losing money.

"I can't in a million years imagine someone shorting their own movie," said David Friendly, a producer whose credits include "Little Miss Sunshine." "It would be like betting on the 'no pass' line at a craps table. It's not going to make them popular."

Between the two entrants into the new field, the Cantor Exchange may have an edge because for the last nine years it has owned the Hollywood Stock Exchange, an online box-office market that uses imaginary money. Cantor bought HSX in 2001 with the intention of turning it into a real market exchange, but those plans were delayed when the firm, then at the World Trade Center, was devastated by the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

Now Cantor hopes for its exchange to be the first of many complex financing products for the entertainment industry. In one of the more ambitious plans, Jaycobs wants to team with filmmakers to create something like an initial public offering of stock in a specific film, staking out a potential new way to finance production.

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Movie Review: 'Remember Me' - Delaware County Daily Times

Posted: 11 Mar 2010 09:58 PM PST

By Jake Coyle, Associated Press

NEW YORK (AP) --- In "Remember Me," Robert Pattinson has temporarily stepped away from "Twilight," apparently in search of his "Five Easy Pieces" or "Rebel Without a Cause."

When Pattinson's character — a wayward, rebellious 21-year-old named Tyler Hawkins — meets who will quickly become his love interest — a fellow NYU student named Ally (Emilie de Ravin) — he informs her that his major is "undecided."

"'Bout what?" she responds.

"Everything," he says.

As a character-defining quote, it's a long way from Marlon Brando's "Whaddya got?" in "The Wild One." Perhaps an earlier draft had him saying he's getting a "Ph.D. in misanthropy."

Pattinson may be on leave from the narcotic melodrama of "Twilight," but he's still in full-on brooding mode. The young actor has an unmistakable screen presence. However in "Remember Me," he pours it on thickly and self-consciously.

With low eyes, sleeves rolled up just so and cigarette drooping artfully from his mouth, Tyler (like Edward Cullen) is a reluctant romantic. He quotes Gandhi in voiceover, makes love to Sigur Ros and (understandably) can't be moved to laughter by "American Pie 2."

His deepness runneth over.

"Remember Me" begins ominously with the Twin Towers lurking in view behind an elevated subway in 1991 Brooklyn. A woman is senselessly murdered while her young daughter watches.

When the film shifts 10 years later, the girl is Ally, whom Tyler meets through a rather preposterous revenge plot directed at her father (Chris Cooper), a New York police officer who roughed Tyler up.

Their meeting is orchestrated by Tyler's roommate, Tate, played by Aiden Hall. But there will be no fan-created Team Tyler vs. Team Tate here. The roommate is an annoying chatterbox, whose comedic moments drag the film.

A sense of dread — hinted at by the movie's title and intoned by Marcelo Zarvos' score — is carried though the film, which is set in the summer of 2001. Sudden spurts of violence punctuate the story.

Long before the big reveal ending, one begins to feel "Remember Me" is romanticizing — even fetishizing — tragedy. There's a pretentious reveling in emotional scars and painful loss.

Tyler is the son of a high-powered attorney (Pierce Brosnan), an absent father to Tyler and his young sister, Caroline (Ruby Jerins). Some time earlier, Tyler's older brother committed suicide — the hurtful event that has given Tyler much of his grimness.

Heaviness weighs on Ally and her father, too. Cooper is typecast as an uptight, overbearing father, but he's predictably solid.

Brosnan is the highlight of the film, again proving — as he did in Roman Polanski's recent "The Ghost Writer" — his character actor chops. Tucked stoically behind a suit, he ably sports a Brooklyn accent in believable, confrontational scenes with Pattinson.

Director Allen Coulter shows the same skill in creating atmosphere as he did in "Hollywoodland," but the script by Will Fetters (his first) is uneven.

The most pleasing thing about "Remember Me" is its boldness. It may be affected, but "Remember Me" is at least aiming for an intriguing character study — a positive sign in the young career of Pattinson (who is also an executive producer).

He may very well grow into a less showy actor. For now, Tyler's response to Ally when she tells him that she's 19 is the most telling.

"I can do teens," he says.

Yes, sir. You certainly can.

"Remember Me," a Summit Entertainment release, is rated PG-13 for violence, sexual content, language and smoking. Running time: 113 minutes. Two stars out of four.