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DVD Noel
A contemporary romantic drama borrowing inspiration from It's a Wonderful Life, this thought-provoking holiday film explores the lives of five strangers as they intersect at a crossroads of forgiveness and redemption. In his directorial debut, Chazz Palminteri lends a delicate hand to allow his talent-laden cast creative latitude to portray a handful of odd bedfellows who share little in common but loneliness on Christmas Eve. Susan Sarandon is remarkable as Rose Harrison, a divorced book editor who spends the holidays at a nursing home with her mother deep in the clutches of Alzheimer's. Although Rose's own story bleeds pathos, she shows genuine compassion toward others—whether it's the abandoned, mysterious patient across the hall, or the desperate fiancée, Nina (Penélope Cruz) who broke her engagement to her beloved Mike (Paul Walker) because of his suffocating jealousy. In separate subplots soon to collide, a strange bartender (Alan Arkin) divulges how his past was forever altered by someone he thinks is Mike, while another Alzheimer's visitor, Charlie Boyd (Robin Williams, uncredited) helps Rose accept the possibility of miracles in an uplifting climatic twist. Though some of the storylines inch toward the improbable, the film manages to veer just to the right of maudlin. Instead, it arrives as a heartwarming, life-affirming tale that tugs at the heartstrings (with a haunting musical score by the famed Alan Menken). Grab some 'nog and a hanky. (Rated PG for sensuality, language, and some intense thematic material) --Lynn Gibson
Last weekend I bought the movie "Noel" at Walmart. I thought it would be a good Christmas movie for my family to watch. We love to sit down together and watch movies but this one was a disappointment. It was rated PG but to me it was more like a PG-13 rating. It had alot of bad language and scenes about sex and pre-marital sex. After about 30 minutes of the movie I finally turned it off, because it was offensive for my family to watch. As far as I'm concerned it will be going in the garbage. I consider it a wasted $19.99. Wish I had known about it before I bought it. Oh well, maybe this review will help someone else not make the same mistake. That is, if you care about what your family watches.
Hope this is a help!
Kim
Christmas is obviously a time of miracles in Noel.
With its unabashed melodrama, it's hokey premise and contrived plot; it's hard to imagine that Noel has anything going for it. It's such a thick and gooey slice of holiday bunkum and it's hard to understand why an estimable actor like Chazz Palminteri chose David Hubbard's awkward script for his directing debut. On the up side, however, Palminteri is able to draw some very fine performances from his cast - which actually makes Noel worth watching.
Set in New York on Christmas Eve, Noel follows a disparate group of lonely souls, whose lives will eventually intersect. Susan Sarandon is a middle-aged workaholic book editor, a man-shy divorcée who desperately tries to communicate with her mother who is in the final stages of Alzheimer's. Gorgeous office worker Nina (Penélope Cruz) and her strapping, hunky taxi driver fiancé, Mike (Paul Walker), are madly in love, but Mike's jealousy - he breaks out into fits of rage when another man even looks at her - threatens to derail their relationship.
Alan Arkin is a diner employee who in turn is convinced that his late wife's spirit has entered Mike's body - his first encounter with Mike where he offers him some butter cookies is one of the best scenes in the film. In the most thankless role, Marcus Thomas is a young man whose childhood was so brutal that the only happy Christmas he ever had was when family violence sent him to a hospital.
The various stories swirl together, some drifting into the realm of the supernatural and others into the more prosaically therapeutic. But Mr. Palminteri's direction is often choppy, giving no spin or shape to the complex structure. And his message is constantly hammered at us, that Christmas is the perfect time to reach out and touch someone - even if that someone isn't there.
The drama unfolds on an especially emotional and opportune cold winter's eve, and as we watch these people find the resolutions to their problems, the means with which they do this occasionally rings silly, but because the actors and the director seem to have so much faith and belief in there material, we're mostly able to accept the preposterous turns of events and roll with it.
The extras include interviews with the director and the cast, where Sarandon and Walker comment that the film is destined to become a holiday classic. Well, that's a bit of a stretch, but Noel does represent some of Cruz's and Walker's very best acting, with Walker's final encounter with Arkin taking a surprisingly poignant and heart rendering turn.
Just when we've suffered through another cloying cliché, we find ourselves deeply touched by Walker's beautifully realized character. And Sarandon is so vulnerable that when she is startled to find Robin Williams - or, rather, his mysterious character - sitting next to her mother's hospital room, she aptly conveys the tone of the movie - the miracles do happen, even if, in this movie, they're sometimes put to a pretty severe test. Mike Leonard November 05.
Cheesy
Noel is a cheesy Christmas movie and a waste of a decent cast. I like Arkin and Sarandon, but the material they're giving doesnt allow them to do a decent job. All the movie is is bad, mushy lines that fit into a stereotypical Xmas movie. Walker and Cruz are also laying on the cheese, but I dont expect much from them.
In this elaborately scripted fantasy, when three aging businessmen are unexpectedly left without guests on Christmas Eve, each tosses a wallet including a ten dollar bill from a window in hopes that someone honest will return one, and be asked to dinner, to make their holiday less lonely. Two of the three billfolds are returned, by a young man (Richard Carlson) and a young woman (Jean Parker) whose lives are acutely changed as they are welcomed not only to the table of the three gentlemen but also into their hearts and those of their two retainers (Maria Ouspenskaya and Alex Melesh). The young pair quite appropriately fall in love, only to have their beatitude marred when their sage benefactors die in a plane crash, but when the three promptly return to their town manse as apparitions, a... More Info about this DVD Director(s): A. Edward Sutherland DVD Release Date: Released the 12 October 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The sight of two lost souls finding something unavoidably necessary in each other carries The Upside of Anger through it pleasant episodic drift. When Terry Wolfmeyer (Joan Allen) realizes that her husband won't be coming home again, she hits the skids and the bottle, leaving her four thunderstruck daughters (Alicia Witt, Keri Russell, Erika Christensen, and Evan Rachel Wood) to fend for themselves while she fends off the attentions of concerned neighbor Denny Davies (Kevin Costner). Writer/director Mike Binder (who has a good bit as Costner's sleazy producer) juggles too many subplots in this comedy/drama--his charming young actresses are all but wasted--then tosses in a wrongheaded climactic twist and terrible explanatory narration from young Wood. But the two leads do... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Joan Allen - Kevin Costner - Erika Christensen - Keri Russell - Alicia Witt Director(s): Mike Binder DVD Release Date: Released the 26 July 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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While it works better as a somber mood piece than a futuristic thriller, The Final Cut posits a unique what-if scenario that some viewers will find fascinating. In a role that calls for his low-key One Hour Photo persona, Robin Williams plays an expert "cutter" who's in demand for his ability to distill anyone's lifetime into a feature-length "rememory" film that highlights the better side of anyone's nature. His profession is made possible by the "Zoe" chip, a prenatal brain implant capable of recording a person's entire lifetime--a technology opposed by a former cutter (Jim Caviezel) and puzzled over by Williams' on-and-off girlfriend (Mira Sorvino). First-time writer-director Omar Naim divided critics with his impressive visual style and lackluster screenplay, which fails... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Robin Williams - Mira Sorvino - James Caviezel Director(s): Omar Naim DVD Release Date: Released the 22 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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As one of many in the ongoing trend of resurrecting old TV shows and turning them into contemporary Hollywood product, Bewitched tries awfully hard to distinguish itself. It succeeds in lots of surprising ways, not least of which is the star power brought by Nicole Kidman and Will Ferrell. Even if they don't create the kind of romantic chemistry that would have elevated the already high concept, they act as delightful foils to each other, but more often to themselves. The conceit of this Bewitched is that it's a self-reflexive look at the entertainment business, with Ferrell playing Jack Wyatt, an actor starring in an updated version of the classic TV show. Out of favor with the Hollywood elite and desperately in need of a hit, he insists on an unknown to play Samantha, as... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Nicole Kidman - Will Ferrell - Shirley MacLaine - Michael Caine Director(s): Nora Ephron DVD Release Date: Released the 25 October 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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With Queen Latifah holding court over a cast of sassy females, Beauty Shop continues the Barbershop franchise in entertaining style. Reprising her role from Barbershop 2: Back in Business, Latifah plays Gina the big-booty stylist, now on her own (she's a widow) and moving from Chicago to Atlanta, where she gets sick of her flamboyantly bitchy boss (played by... Kevin Bacon?), inherits her two best clients (Andie MacDowell and Mena Suvari) and her popular formula for "hair crack" conditioner, and opens her own styling shop with a $30,000 loan and a rainbow coalition of hairdressers played by Golden Brooks, Sherri Shepherd, Alfre Woodard and Alicia Silverstone. While it lacks the frank, sharply observant racial humor of Barbershop, this easygoing comedy moves... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Queen Latifah - Alicia Silverstone - Djimon Hounsou Director(s): Bille Woodruff DVD Release Date: Released the 23 August 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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