This Week in Film: May 9 2008
I love a good David Mamet movie. His dialogue and plot twists are always top-notch, putting his signature speech patterns on every character he writes. Witness The Untouchables or Glengarry GlenRoss or The Spanish Prisoner, movies with plots that are not dumbed down for a mass audience. They're full of smart, intellectual characters who speak in rhythms and puzzles, pushing the viewer to use their brain rather than give standard expository dialogue to move the story along and make it easier for a wide audience to digest. Luckily for us, his new film Redbelt opens this week. It stars Chiwetel Ejiofor as a martial-arts instructor who gets forced into participating in a prize bout against his will through a series of typically shady Mamet-esque circumstances. Featuring a supporting cast that includes Joe Mantegna, Emily Mortimer, Ricky Jay and Tim Allen (!) as a washed-up actor, Redbelt has been getting slightly mixed reviews, but for Mamet fans, like myself, that won't stop us from going to see it first weekend.
Ashton Kutcher returns to give more reasons for an assassination attempt in his new film What Happens In Vegas..., starring with his female equivalent Cameron Diaz. It's about two predictably zany people who get drunk and wake up to find out they got married. My question is didn't this already happen in an episode of Friends? I hate to defend that show but you know generic Hollywood comedies are running low on ideas when they start ripping off a 10-year-old episode of Friends.
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