You already know what happens in Vegas
Opening this week: What Happens in Vegas and Speed Racer, with a Saturday matinée of the New York Metropolitan Opera's production of Donizetti's La Fille du Regiment.
* Baby Mama - Tina Fey didn't write this pregnancy comedy, although her face appears prominently on the movie's ubiquitous posters, alongside that of co-star and former Saturday Night Live cast mate Amy Poehler. The script actually comes from first-time director Michael McCullers, but it could have used more of the mean girl. Mommy culture, with its capacity for smugness and solipsism, seems like a ripe topic for parody, but Baby Mama approaches it with kid gloves. The movie has its zingers and enough laughs to keep it bopping along - that is, until its ooey-gooey conclusion. Rated: PG
* Forgetting Sarah Marshall - Judd Apatow is back in classic form with his latest production. Forgetting Sarah Marshall is yet another crowd-pleasing comedy like The 40-Year-Old Virgin, Knocked Up and Superbad that will make you laugh and squirm the whole way through - usually at the same time. It has just the right balance of the salty and the sweet. Rated: 18A
* Harold & Kumar Escape From Guantanamo Bay - The poster is the best thing about this sequel, depicting the brainy pot heads in orange prison jumpsuits staring in disbelief from behind a wire-mesh fence. That one still image captures all the inherent humour of two wily-as-Bugs-Bunny guys who are about to bust out of the U.S. military's main boarding house for terrorism suspects. Actually seeing them in motion is mostly anticlimactic as the sequel follows the fitfully funny pattern of 2004's Harold & Kumar Go to White Castle. Rated: 18A
* Iron Man - Much of the allure here comes from the fact that we are indeed talking about a man - a real man who has lived a life and made mistakes and experienced regret - not some scrawny, teenage boy who received his superhero powers through a bite from a radioactive spider. No offence to Spidey, the Marvel Comics hero who's already provided billion-dollar summer blockbuster fodder. But there's just something more relatable about Tony Stark, even though he's a playboy industrialist of staggering wealth and arrogance. And in the hands of Robert Downey Jr., he's absolutely riveting. Downey may have seemed an unlikely casting choice at first, but it's difficult to imagine any other actor in the role; he's so quick-witted and he makes such inspired decisions with dialogue that, at times, might have seemed corny otherwise. Iron Man is also a blast - the perfect start to the summer with its shiny mix of visual effects, elaborate set pieces and humour. Jeff Bridges is deliciously villainous as Tony's top executive, Obadiah Stane, with Gwyneth Paltrow bringing understated smarts and class to the role of Pepper Potts, Tony's right-hand woman. Rated: PG
* Made of Honor - This is pretty much a remake of a movie you've already seen: 1997's My Best Friend's Wedding, starring Julia Roberts and rom-com regular Dermot Mulroney. The only difference is a reversal in gender roles - so daring! This time, Patrick Dempsey plays the one who realizes he's in love with his best friend (Michelle Monaghan) and, when she announces she's getting married, he vows to undermine the wedding from the inside. Kevin McKidd plays her fiancé. Nothing is ever funny or cute or clever or romantic, the supposed point. It all feels recycled and trite. Rated: PG
* Nim's Island - This is a movie for kids who like to think and read and use their imagination, and for parents who may be tired of family fare that's nothing but a litany of cutesy pop-culture references. Not much is terribly new or challenging in this adaptation of Wendy Orr's novel. But Jodie Foster and Abigail Breslin do make a smart, appealing pair. Rated: PG
* Speed Racer - The Wachowski brothers have tumbled into a matrix of their own this time, one which has rendered them completely out of touch with the outside world. In adapting the 1960s Japanese anime television series, writer-directors Larry and Andy Wachowski have created a noisy, overlong, mind-numbing extravaganza that seems tailor-made for nobody but themselves and their twisted sensibilities. Their longtime producing partner Joel Silver insists in the production notes (which are almost as lengthy as the movie itself): "Speed Racer is for everybody." Rated: PG
* What Happens in Vegas - Come on, now. You already know what happens in Vegas. You've undoubtedly seen the ubiquitous television commercials in which Cameron Diaz and Ashton Kutcher bicker and beat each other black-and-blue but, secretly, see the with lust. And you already know that they'll end up softening their stances and falling for each other in the end - it's pretty standard stuff by now. One does not go to a romantic comedy for the Shyamalan-style plot twists. Director Tom Vaughan's film strives desperately to harken to those classic screwball comedies of yore while including the kind of gross-out humour (Kutcher peeing on dirty dishes in the kitchen sink, et cetera) that has, unfortunately, become de rigueur for modern-day incarnations of the genre. What happens in Vegas is exactly would you expect: It's formulaic, slapsticky, silly and loud, until it goes all gooey in the end. But still, Diaz and Kutcher have enough charisma individually and enough spark together to make this otherwise forgettable movie from screenwriter Dana Fox (The Wedding Date) vaguely tolerable. And Lake Bell and Rob Corddry as their respective wisecracking best pals steal some scenes of their own. Diaz and Kutcher co-star as opposites who meet in Las Vegas and get married after a night of drunken debauchery. The next morning, he hits a $3 million (U.S.) jackpot on a slot machine with one of her quarters. A judge who's militant about marriage (Dennis Miller) forces them to make it work before either of them can get their hands on a cent. Rated: PG
- With files from Scripps Howard News Service, L.A. Times, The Los Angeles Daily News, The Canadian Press and The Associated Press.
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