Cineast Movie Previews: 'Enemy,' 'U Want Me 2 Kill Him?' 'Bad Words'
Headed to the movies? Looking for something to watch at home on DVD or digital download? Each week, make Cineast your first stop.
Enemy
Not for the squeamish, Enemy stars Jake Gyllenhaal and Bellport’s Isabella Rossellini in a house-of-mirrors-type story that will either pleasingly thrill you or cause you to run screaming in terror for the exit. The film, a Canadian import, has Gyllenhaal as a rumpled professor in a Toronto of anonymous poured-concrete high-rise apartments and bleak plazas that look like they sprang straight from the mind of Le Corbusier. It only stands to reason that, in this filmic world of duplicate buildings, some of those duplicate buildings might contain duplicate people. What does it all mean?
U Want Me 2 Kill Him?
I know what you’re thinking. Prince Rogers Nelson (aka Prince or TAFKAP) has gotten back into making films to mark the 30th anniversary of Purple Rain. I hate to break it to you, but the Purple Prince of St. Rebus is not behind U Want Me 2 Kill Him, nor does the movie seem to offer any cold-blooded tracks to fire up the dance floor. On the contrary, the only things cold-blooded in this film are the English schoolboys who have it murderously out for a friend’s violent, abusive hoodlum boyfriend. Of course, they’re in way over their heads. A British film brought to us, not by The Artist, but by the same people who brought us The Usual Suspects and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
Bad Words
Jason Bateman directs and stars in the spelling bee-based farce Bad Words. In search of some semblance of triumph in his life, 40-year-old Guy Trilby (Bateman) takes advantage of a loophole in the rules in order to enter and win junior high school spelling bees. Mean-spirited and contemptuous of his young rivals, Trilby becomes the shameless scourge of spelling bees, that most nerdy and innocent of all competitive events. Naturally, this does not make him popular—with anyone. That is, except for with 10-year-old Chaitanya, a tiny competitor whom Trilby befriends. Chaitanya becomes Trilby’s sidekick in creating nuisance and havoc. Bad Words promises to be a cheerful frolic through the fields of crude taste and gratuitous mischief: let’s hope it lives up to its promise.
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The Right Kind of Wrong
The Right Kind of Wrong is a modern take on screwball comedy. A failed writer, played by Ryan Kwanten, who has suffered no end of emasculation and humiliation from his cruel wife, falls head-over-heels in love with his perfect woman, played by Sara Canning. Trouble is, this love at first sight happens on her wedding day. With the unlikely ally of his new love’s mother, a salty and flannel-clad Catherine O’Hara, the failed writer sets out to prove that true love is never wrong, or that two wrongs make a right, or something like that.
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