Anjelica Huston Page 2

That kind of relativism -- hoping for the best possible Hilary Duff movie -- is what got me to see Material Girls in a theater (it wasn't screened for critics). It's a Duff movie through and through: Hilary's mom produced it, and her sister Haylie gets second billing. (Casting her less famous real-life sister as her movie sidekick is sweetly misguided, and therefore vintage Duff.) Hil-Hil and Hay-Hay play Tanzie and Ava Marchetta, spoiled heiresses whose cosmetics empire is threatened, landing them in the poorhouse. The opportunity for cheap culture-clash humor (see entitled rich girls adjust to poverty!) and cheap shots at Paris and Nicky Hilton (or even a fictional rehash of The Simple Life), combined with the participation of director Martha Coolidge (an expert in blonde bubbliness by virtue of having made Valley Girl years ago) makes Material Girls a candidate for a teenybopping good time. The peculiar, slapdash movie they made instead nonetheless eclipses most of the star's previous pre-teen pictures, because it finally drives a Duff vehicle into the land of beguilingly awful.

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Set in the year 1967, the film follows the struggles of Agnes Brown, (Anjelica Huston) a recent widow battling to keep her irregularly large family intact (six boys and a girl, ranging in age from 2 to 14). In order to give her husband the funeral he deserves, Agnes must borrow money from the menacing loan shark Mr. Billy (Ray Winstone). As she attempts to pay him back in weekly installments, he terrorizes her and her small children at every street corner. To make ends meet, Agnes sells fruit and vegetables on the street along with her best friend Marion Monks (Marion O'Dwyer). The two are inseparable and Marion is, ironically enough, Anjelica's guardian angel, as she brightens Agnes life and helps her in times of desperate need. When Pierre (Arno Chevrier, a Gerard Depardieu look-alike) comes along in the form of a neighborhood French baker and takes an interest in Agnes, sparks fly as she tries to forge a personal life of her own with the possibility of newfound love, all while dealing with the nuisance of seven hellion children.

Continue reading: Agnes Browne Review

There's a delightful surprise before the opening credits of "Daddy Day Care" -- a very funny CGI-animated short about tadpoles and peer pressure called "Late Bloomers."

The movie itself doesn't demonstrate half the creativity crammed into that four-minute cartoon. But it's not bad either.

Eddie Murphy stars as a workaholic ad exec sacked from his job (for promoting a kids' cereal called Veggie-Os) and saddled with taking care of his 4-year-old son (cute, uncommonly sad-eyed wisecracker Khamani Griffin) while his wife (Regina Hall) becomes the breadwinner, going back to work as a lawyer. But apparently she's a woefully underpaid lawyer because to make ends meet, Murphy turns their home into a day care center and enlists a couple laid-off buddies (pratfalling heavyweight Jeff Garlin and scatty sci-fi geek Steve Zahn) to help.

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A foul-mouthed fairy tale version of every Irish Catholic hardship movie you might have ever seen, "Agnes Browne" is an honest effort at mixing familiar misfortune with barby comedy. But director and star Anjelica Huston bungles it so badly that the finished picture feels like a random series of moments in a lamentable widow's life, with no foundation or organic flow whatsoever.

Supporting her unruly brood of angels-with-dirty-faces offspring on nothing more than a few coppers from her farmer's market produce cart, Huston sports a shaky brogue and a cheeky spirit in the face of her family's hackneyed struggles.

Ostensibly a story of Irish tenement-class perseverance (a pub sing-along anyone?), the picture bounces around between disconnected scenes of generic adversity (sleeping several kids to a bed), trite trials of character (will the malevolent local loan shark addict one son to back alley card games?) and brief intervals of highly-scripted, life-affirming joy.

Continue reading: Agnes Browne Review