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Author:
Joyces Choices
Joyce Kulhawik, best known as the Emmy Award-winning arts and entertainment critic for CBS-Boston (WBZ-TV 1981-2008), is currently lending her expertise as an arts critic/advocate, motivational speaker, and cancer crusader. Kulhawik is President of the Boston Theater Critics Association, a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics, and Boston Online Film Critics Association. Kulhawik has covered local and national events from Boston and Broadway to Hollywood, reporting live from the Oscars, the Emmys, and the Grammys. Nationally, Kulhawik has co-hosted syndicated movie-review programs with Roger Ebert and Leonard Maltin. Look for her arts & entertainment reviews online at JoycesChoices.com
Comments:
These two films couldn’t be more different and I liked them both– one
in spite of its being outright awful and ridiculous, the other because
it pretty much accomplished what it set out to do.
THE SECRET: DARE TO DREAM stars Katie Holmes as a
down-on-her-luck widow named Miranda raising three kids when she
literally runs into a handsome stranger named Bray in the person of Josh
Lucas who has a dreamy glint in his eye and a zen way with words. He
instantly agrees to fix her leaky roof, stays for dinner when a storm
breaks, and knows exactly what to say to her well-mannered but just
troublesome enough kids to be borderline believable: sweetly sullen 16
year-old “Missy” and cherubic-faced little brother Greg. If you didn’t
know better, you’d think this guy was, perhaps, a serial killer. But
nothing that untoward is part of this universe. Neither death nor
hurricane, a meddling mother-in-law or mounting bills takes the pleasant
edge off the world of these characters. Miranda’s boyfriend Tucker
played by Jerry O’Connell is no exception, and never quite gets his
dander up around the handsome interloper. Even though Miranda is broke,
her house remains in shabby chic disarray, and is located on an idyllic
waterfront property with its own dock. Everything falls cutely into
place as we know it will and must with a little jerry-rigging of logic,
very little of the wounding messiness of human interactions, and heavy
reliance on a theory of the universe embedded in the best-selling
self-help book series by Rhonda Byrne on which it is based and doled out
in regular dollops throughout: know what you want and you will attract
it, like a magnet. Too bad this film didn’t attract a decent script.
However, now, when the world is particularly fraught on all fronts
this is a very soothing message. It’s a saccharine, by-the-numbers hunk
of wish-fulfillment fantasy — and I enjoyed every ridiculous,
predictable minute of it. (I did squirm at Josh Lucas’s laid-on-thick
laid back charm.) Forgive me. Put this under JK GUILTY PLEASURE.
Read the full review and where to watch on Joyce’s Choices
On the other hand THE RENTAL is a frightening
frolic through moral failure and psychopathic bloodlust, with a side
trip through jealousy, voyeurism, xenophobia, cheating and recreational
pharmaceuticals at a cliffside hideaway, with enough suspense to keep me
on edge. “The Rental” takes a look at the underside of 4 characters who
decide to rent a vacation house together. How much do I love this
set-up! Put four complicated people with built-in antagonisms and
festering secrets alone together for a weekend and let the games begin.
Throw in a sprawling luxurious house, a creepy rental owner, a
suspense-filled script and direction executed by a credible cast and
you’re just about there. Here “Downton Abbey’s” Dan Stevens, “Mad Men’s”
Alison Brie, Sheila Vand, and Jeremy Allen White mix it up with surly
caretaker Toby Huss. One look at him, and I would have been out of
there. But then–I would have gotten a flat tire and had to walk back
through the woods alone to call a cab that would never come…
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8/5/2020