Salma Hayek Page 3

There was nothing remotely notable about 2010's Grown Ups, and now we have a sequel that's even lazier. Without any actual plot to speak of, the movie merely strings together a series of unfunny scenes that include cheap gags and childish vulgarity but never a punchline. Sure, the scattershot approach might occasionally touch on recognisable situations, but there isn't a genuine laugh in the whole film.

After the reunion in the original movie, Lenny (Sandler) has moved back to his hometown with pals Eric, Kurt and Marcus (James, Rock and Spade). They're planning a big party just like in the old days, complete with a 1980s theme. But their children are getting older and have their own issues, including first dates and driving tests. And in Marcus' case, the kid is a teen thug (Ludwig) he only just discovered he had. But the real problem is that the guys have just sparked a turf war with a gang of idiotic fratboys from the nearby university. And now they have to prove once and for all who's really cool.

As with the first movie, you get the feeling that everyone on screen has somewhere better to be. There's no character development at all, since there are so many people spread across so many short scenes. Hayek, Bello and Rudolph are back as the guys' wives, but get exactly one thankless thing to do each. And it's not much better for the supporting cast of A-list cameo players like Buscemi (as a driving instructor), Lautner (as the fraternity leader) and so many more recognisable actors that you begin to wonder what dirt Sandler has on all of them.

Continue reading: Grown Ups 2 Review

Oliver Stone takes a stab at returning to a nastier, more edgy filmmaking style, but simply can't escape his moralising ways. Indeed, this film looks great, with whizzy camerawork and kinetic editing, and a willingness to travel to some very dark places. So it's even more annoying that it's all such a cop out. Not only are the plot and characters undermined by half-hearted preachiness, but the film has an appallingly trite voice-over narration plus a climactic plot point that feels like a cheat.

The story opens with a scene of domestic bliss, as sexy beach babe O (Lively) cuddles with her hunky ex-military boyfriend Chon (Kitsch) in their spectacular seaside home in Orange County. Then Ben (Taylor) arrives home - he's Chon's best friend and O's other boyfriend, a tree-hugging scientist who has created the perfect marijuana plant. They've made their fortune as local drug dealers, and now a Mexican cartel wants in on the action. They're visited by a goon (Bichir) who makes them an offer they can't refuse. So when they Chon and Ben say no, the cartel henchman Lado (Del Toro) kidnaps O to whip boys in line. But they go into action mode instead. Calling the shots is cartel boss Elena (Hayek). And there's also a Federal agent (Travolta) working everyone against each other.

The plot has promise, and the film starts well, with sun-drenched photography and some strong character-establishing scenes with Kitsch, Johnson and Lively. But once we learn each one's main trait (Chon's tough tenacity, Ben's peace-loving passion and O's annoying stupidity), the script abandons them completely. We never have a clue why Chon and Ben would fall for O, let alone risk their lives to rescue her. We never know why Lado is such a cold-hearted brute. And we can't understand how Travolta's character has survived this long. The only person we enjoy watching is the scene-chewing Hayek, who seems to be the only actor having any fun.

Continue reading: Savages Review

The film is almost too crowded with witty visual and verbal gags to catch on a single viewing. Although it's also too corny to be a real classic.

The Pirate Captain (voiced by Grant) never gets any respect, especially with the Pirate of the Year competition gearing up. But his first mate (Freeman) and rag-tag crew (Tovey, Gleeson and Jenson) are fearlessly loyal. While accumulating plunder to win the award, they accidentally hijack a scientific ship and then travel with Charles Darwin (Tennant) to win a science prize in London. But this means that the crew needs to get dangerously close to venomous pirate-hater Queen Victoria (Staunton).

Continue reading: The Pirates! In An Adventure With Scientists! Review

Puss (Banderas) is a notorious outlaw looking for a way to clear his name and repay an old debt when he hears that redneck thugs Jack and Jill (Thornton and Sedaris) have some magic beans that can be used to find a golden-egg-laying goose. Then he discovers that sexy thief Kitty Softpaws (Hayek) is also after them. And worse yet, she's working with Humpty Dumpty (Galifianakis), Puss' childhood cohort who once betrayed him. When Humpty convinces Puss that he's now a good egg, the trio makes an elaborate plan to get the beans together.

Continue reading: Puss In Boots Review

It's the old west and things aren't well. Tyler Jackson (Yoakam) has used a six-shooter to take over much of the land in Mexico, and wants to use all of this to make connections and money through big time land developers. He makes a mistake when he shoots the father of Maria (Penélope Cruz) and poisons the wealthy father of Sara (Selma Hayek). After some squabbling over class, they decide to pair up as bank robbers and steal all of Jackson's money, getting tips from retired bank robber Bill Buck (Sam Shepard, why?). They eventually pair with a forensic psychologist (Steve Zahn) who starts falling for both the girls as they plan to breach Jackson's big vault.

Continue reading: Bandidas Review

Frida Kahlo's (Salma Hayek) first meeting with Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina) and her injury in a horrible bus accident set in motion the two major forces behind Frida. Bedridden for months in a full-body cast, the young Frida keeps herself busy--and learns to express her internal passions and pain--through drawing and painting. Falling in with the womanizing Rivera and his bohemian cadre of artists and revolutionaries deepens Frida's commitment to her painting and life with the loyal but philandering muralist. Their art carries them from Mexico to New York and back in the company of such impressive historical figures as David Alfaro Siqueiros (Antonio Banderas), Nelson Rockefeller (Ed Norton), and Leon Trotsky (Geoffery Rush).

Continue reading: Frida Review

In Desperado, Antonio Banderas takes the role of the mariachi with no name who leads a charmed life while everything around him dies. This sequel is the story of his quest for revenge against the men who killed the woman he loved and shot him in the hand. El Mariachi travels from town to town with a guitar case full of ultra-powerful weapons, in search for tough guy Bucho, leader of the thugs. As he closes in, things get bloodier and bloodier until the final showdown where everything is revealed. Along the way, he encounters Carolina (Salma Hayek), his newfound love interest, who saves his life more than once through some impromptu surgeries.

Continue reading: Desperado Review

Figgis, who earned a Best Director Oscar nomination for Leaving Las Vegas in 1996, appears to have gone a little funny in the head last year with his inexplicable and nearly dialogue-free The Loss of Sexual Innocence. Now he's fully gone off the deep end with what may be the most ambitious experiment ever: Time Code.

Continue reading: Time Code Review

It is readily apparent that Will Smith, Kevin Kline and Kenneth Branagh had a ball on the set of "Wild Wild West."

Smith -- playing gun-slinging government agent Jim West -- looks so cool in his leather pants, waistcoat, and bolero jacket and hat, that at one point in the movie he's standing next to the voluptuous and nearly naked Salma Hayek (in a largely ornamental role), and your eyes are drawn to him. It's gotta be fun to look that slick.

Kline gets to play government agent Artemus Gordon, an eccentric inventor and master of disguise, which is right up his alley. He can barely keep from cracking himself up in his introductory scene, vamping around in saloon matron drag and pancake makeup.

Continue reading: Wild Wild West Review

Most movies about the lives of famous artists never provide a true sense of what drove the person's creativity. Even in a strongly acted, strongly directed biopic like 2000's "Pollock," for example, the closest it came to explaining why heavily splattered canvases were a breakthrough in modern art was when the painter's wife cryptically proclaimed, "You've done it, Pollock! You've cracked it wide open!"

But in "Frida," a transporting cinematic experience about the life and work of Mexican surrealist Frida Kahlo, director Julie Taymor captures the very essence of Kahlo's creative process through a wondrously rich, freeform visual language that fuses the events of her life with the imagery in her paintings so vividly that the artist's work may take on a striking new significance for anyone who sees the film.

Passionately played by Salma Hayek, who has been personally shepherding this project for seven years, Kahlo comes to life in this picture as a complicated, dynamic, proud and intelligent woman whose frequent hardships informed her art. Opening when she was a plucky high school girl (36-year-old Hayek passes for 16 with remarkable ease), Frida is established as a young woman with a spicy individuality even before the 1925 bus wreck that irreversibly altered her life.

Continue reading: Frida Review

Since the vast majority of the audience for "Spy Kid 3D: Game Over" has probably never seen a 3D movie with cheap, old-fashioned blue-and-red-lensed cardboard glasses, here's a three-point primer for proper enjoyment of any flick in this format:

1) Sit toward the middle of the theater. Because of the twin-image nature of 3D projection, the more off-center you are from the screen, the more you'll see eye-straining "ghosting" of images through your glasses instead of proper depth of field.

2) The left lens (red) always seems uncomfortably darker than the right (blue). Get used to it.

Continue reading: Spy Kids 3d: Game Over Review

"Desperado," the second eye-poppingly stylish and unabashedly outlandish B-movie in Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi" shoot-'em-up trilogy, is one of my all-time favorite action movies, in part because it has its priorities straight: The plot was simple -- a nameless mariachi avenges his girlfriend's murder with a guitar case full of semi-automatic weapons and an endless supply of ammunition -- and the action was non-stop and over-the-top.

Antonio Banderas cut an imposing, mysterious, hell-bent, dangerous and dead sexy figure in his long hair, implacable glower and black suede bandito get-up -- complete with jangling spurs -- as he performed a limber slow-motion ballet of body-twisting, two-fisted gunfire while dodging hails of bullets from evil drug-runners. And all this was set to a steamy, dynamic south-of-the-border score by the great guitaristas of Los Lobos.

But in the new installment, "Once Upon a Time in Mexico," writer-director-editor-composer Rodriguez pollutes the action -- which is uncharacteristically erratic, incongruous and over-edited -- with a needlessly convoluted plot involving 1) a thorny coup attempt against the Mexican president backed by a cartel kingpin (Willem Dafoe) and his turncoat henchman (Mickey Rourke), 2) a crooked and borderline-loco CIA agent (Johnny Depp) playing both sides against the middle, 3) a former FBI agent (Ruben Blades) frustrated with not nailing the kingpin before his retirement, 4) a curvaceous, gung-ho greenhorn federale (Eva Mendez) with ulterior motives, and 5) yet another murder, played out in fantasized-action flashbacks, that the mariachi is out to avenge.

Continue reading: Once Upon A Time In Mexico Review