2 films with star power

Two Hollywood films that opened in Metro Manila theaters the past week boast of stellar casting – with one utilizing its big-name talents wisely and the other wasting its superstar tandem completely.

In Laws of Attraction, Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore play Daniel Rafferty and Audrey Woods, two lawyers with contrasting personalities who always bump heads and yet in a drunken state decide to get married.

Although Daniel tries to make a go of the marriage, Audrey is still her uptight self – until she decides to end that sham of a union after feeling betrayed by her husband in one of their courtroom battles.

So what happens at this point? I’m telling you it’s not interesting anymore. Not that it is interesting prior to this because I swear even at the beginning of the film, every scene already screams of formula and the more discriminating viewer will start thinking what on earth is Julianne Moore doing in a sorry comedy like Laws of Attraction?

Never mind Pierce Brosnan. After all, he is already a washed out James Bond. (But he should have still thought twice before accepting this dud of a comedy.)

But Julianne Moore? She of The Hours, The End of the Affair and Far from Heaven? There ought to be a law against producers conning top caliber actresses into accepting stinking comedy projects like Laws of Attraction.

For the first time, I see her perform badly. I guess in Laws of Attraction, she suffers from the law of gravity. She is weighed down by such awful script and is unable to rise above the material. (But believe me, not even the late great comedienne Lucy Ball would have been able to survive this film.)

Actually, the film compensates for the bad material by distracting the viewers with glossy shots of Irelands, New York and the apartment of Julianne Moore. But all that is not enough distraction to make us forget what a bad comedy Law of Attraction really is.

Sure, it tries to be charming and succeeds once in a while. But funny? Ha-ha-ha. My decision to watch this film makes me weep.

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The Stepford Wives, a film that features a powerhouse cast – in contrast – brings out the best in each of its stars.

A loose remake of the 1975 film based on the Ira Levin thriller, it is a lot different from the original and the TV-movie versions that followed: Revenge of the Stepford Wives, The Stepford Children and The Stepford Husbands.

For one thing, it’s now more of a comedy than a thriller. The current version, however, still basically follows the same plotline – although it has taken a lot of liberty in changing some of the characters and the parts they play in the story.

The very early part of The Stepford Wives introduces us to the character of Nicole Kidman – Joanna Eberhart, a dynamic network president who gets her TV station into trouble with one of her new reality-based programs.

After getting fired from the network, she suffers from a nervous breakdown and to help her recover, her husband Walter (Matthew Broderick) who always plays second fiddle to her, decides to uproot the family from busy New York to saner Connecticut – in a quiet community called Stepford.

Stepford, however, is suspiciously perfect. It has manicured lawns and neat and lovely houses–all maintained by Barbie-pretty wives with plastered smiles.

While Joanna becomes uncomfortable about her artificial surroundings, Walter has the time of his life in their new neighborhood – thanks to the boys’ club that has turned all the wives into robots who will do everything to serve and please their husbands.

Finding out how the wives are turned into subservient robots is basically the suspense-mystery in the new Stepford Wives edition. The rest is comedy and much of the laughs are provided by Bette Middler as the riotous Jewish writer Roberta (or Bobbie to friends) and Roger Bart as the gay architect Roger Bannister. Even Glenn Close has her moments in the film that are deliciously campy.

The best parts of the movie, of course, are still reserved for its lead star Nicole Kidman who again turns in another marvelous performance. (She is so good in the part where she gets fired, but refuses to show her emotions to other network employees.) The fact that she manages to shine amidst all the talented performers around her only proves that she is truly a brilliant and intelligent actress.

The wonderful performances of the film’s cast members actually make up for some of the lapses and the loopholes of The Stepford Wives. You wonder, for instance, if the robot wives are still flesh and blood. (How could they have turned into ATM machines dispensing cash?) That part is not explained very well in the film.

And while this production is handsomely mounted (seamless production design!) the viewer still ends up begging for more humor because the laughs do not really come in every other scene. At some points, in fact, the film doesn’t know anymore if it’s going to be a comedy or a thriller.

But the movie is still wildly entertaining in spite of its shortcomings. Sure it’s not perfect. But believe me, after watching The Stepford Wives, the last thing you’d desire in your life is perfection.