Review: Dan In Real Life is Easy-Going and Charming

As much as I roll my eyes at the generically ironic scenario — he’s an advice columnist, but his personal life is a mess! — I’m delighted by the effortlessly breezy humor of Dan in Real Life. It breaks free from that lame set-up’s confines to go deeper into the psyche of its central character. It’s a smart movie with a deceptively simple premise.Dan (Steve Carell) is a New Jersey newspaper columnist and a widowed father of three daughters whom he loves and wants to keep young forever. He is the epitome of a Steve Carell character: hapless despite being successful, and upbeat despite being a loser. You get the sense he’s just barely keeping his life together, that he’s been just barely doing it for years, and that he could keep just barely doing it indefinitely. He’s got just-barely-coping down to a science.

He and the girls go to Rhode Island for a weekend for an annual gathering of his parents, brothers, sisters, and their families. The clan is large, and I’m not sure I caught, in every case, which were Dan’s siblings and which were his siblings’ spouses. I kind of liked the hecticness of it, though. The long take where Dan first arrives and greets everyone felt exactly like my visits home for Christmas, where aunts and uncles and cousins abound and you try to say hello to everyone without making a spectacle of yourself or interrupting the festivities already underway.

The meat of the plot comes in the form of another potentially oh-too-wacky development. Dan goes into town to buy a newspaper and meets a beautiful woman named Marie (Juliette Binoche). They talk and laugh and have what seems to be a great connection. He gets her number and promises to call soon. When he gets back to the house, she is there, too. She is his brother’s girlfriend, here for the weekend to meet the family.

The brother, Mitch (Dane Cook), looks up to Dan and quotes his writings liberally. Dan is smitten with Marie, though obviously now he can’t do anything about it. Less clear is Marie’s attitude toward Dan. She doesn’t seem as head-over-heels about him — or, for that matter, about Mitch — as Dan and Mitch are about her. And would Dan really fall in love this fast, in one weekend, in the crowded, bustling family-reunion atmosphere? I’m skeptical, and the movie doesn’t do much to allay my skepticism.

Yet, I’m charmed by the realistically cozy depiction of large families, with their inside jokes and their petty, lovable squabbles. There’s a scene of extended riffing on a family acquaintance named Ruthie “Pig Face” Draper, which is terribly mean but terribly funny. (Don’t worry, Ruthie isn’t present.) Don’t we all do that when we’re together with the family? If it’s not OK to make fun of people we know while in the safe confines of the family circle, when is it OK? That’s what families are for.

This is the second film to be written and directed by Peter Hedges, who previously wrote What’s Eating Gilbert Grape? His directorial debut, Pieces of April, was one of the indie gems of 2003, and it also dealt humorously and honestly with family ties. Here he lets the family stuff happen primarily in the background, focusing mostly on Dan’s internal struggles. The Marie situation is the catalyst, but Dan’s real issues go deeper than that, and the film is about him trying to get out of the emotional rut he’s in. He could continue to live right on the edge of a nervous breakdown, he’d just rather not.

There’s a happy ending, of course, and maybe it’s just a little too easy. Maybe some of the conflicts are resolved more carelessly than they ought to be. On the other hand, what does Marie even see in Mitch? Look at it this way: it’s Juliette Binoche and Dane Cook. I mean, come on.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Saw IV Slays in $32.M Debut Weekend

The killer of the “Saw” franchise may be dead, but his sadistic spirit lives on. Lionsgate’s “Saw IV” led the weekend box office with $32.1 million, maintaining the horror franchise’s position as a Halloween perennial, according to studio estimates Sunday.

Debuting at No. 2 was Disney’s “Dan in Real Life,” a romance starring Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche and Dane Cook that took in $12.1 million.

Overall Hollywood revenues declined for the sixth-straight weekend, though business was off only a fraction compared to the same weekend last year. The top-12 movies took in $86.1 million, down 2 percent, better results than the previous weeks, when business had fallen significantly more.

The results for “Saw IV” were on par with the debut of “Saw III,” which pulled in $33.6 million over the same weekend last year. Since the original low-budget “Saw” became an out-of-nowhere fright sensation in 2004, Lionsgate has released a new chapter each October, all hits.

“I would expect to see `Saw V’ next year, `Saw VI’ the year after that and `Saw VII’ the following year if they can keep it up,” said Paul Dergarabedian, president of box-office tracker Media By Numbers. “There’s just something inherently gruesome and compelling about these movies. I don’t know what that says about society in general, but it certainly works at the box office.”

“Saw IV” features post-mortem horrors concocted by the fiendish killer Jigsaw (Tobin Bell, seen in flashbacks), whose autopsy turns up a cassette tape in his entrails that leads the cops into a new snare of torture puzzles the madman left behind.

“Dan in Real Life” was the prime choice for the date crowd. The movie stars Carell as a widower raising three daughters who falls for his brother’s new girlfriend (Binoche) during a family reunion.

In narrower release, Roadside Attractions’ “Bella” opened solidly with $1.3 million. The film stars Eduardo Verastegui as a former soccer player who hooks up with a pregnant waitress (Tammy Blanchard).

Thinkfilm’s “Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead,” directed by Sidney Lumet (“Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network”), opened strongly in limited release at two New York City theaters with $73,500. The film, which gradually expands into nationwide release through November, stars Philip Seymour Hoffman and Ethan Hawke as brothers in financial straits who plot to rob their parents’ jewelry store.

A high-profile documentary, Sony Pictures Classics’ “Jimmy Carter: Man From Plains,” had a poor debut, taking in just $10,573 at seven theaters. The film from director Jonathan Demme (“The Silence of the Lambs”) follows the former president during a tour to promote his book “Palestine: Peace Not Apartheid.”

Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Media By Numbers LLC. Final figures will be released Monday.

1. “Saw IV,” $32.1 million.

2. “Dan in Real Life,” $12.1 million.

3. “30 Days of Night,” $6.7 million.

4. “The Game Plan,” $6.3 million.

5. “Tyler Perry’s Why Did I Get Married?”, $5.7 million.

6. “Michael Clayton,” $5 million.

7. “Gone Baby Gone,” $3.9 million.

8. “The Comebacks,” $3.45 million.

9. “We Own the Night,” $3.4 million.

10. “Tim Burton’s the Nightmare Before Christmas,” $3.35 million.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com

Review: Carell’s Dan Contrives Love

If you’re already groaning at the prospect of spending time with your own lovable but annoying family over the holidays, think twice about seeing “Dan in Real Life.” Do you really want to donate time and money to hang with someone else’s annoying relations?

A love-triangle romance that plays out among Steve Carell, Juliette Binoche and Dane Cook during a family reunion, “Dan in Real Life” is a surprisingly plain, sappy, even insipid comedy, considering the filmmaker behind it.

After years as a novelist and screenwriter, director and co-writer Peter Hedges made a wonderful film debut with another family-reunion tale, 2003’s indie charmer “Pieces of April.”

That film chronicled the icy history of a black-sheep daughter trying to make amends with her unforgiving clan over Thanksgiving. Those people were truly messed up and beset by adversity, yet they were utterly endearing and genuine.

The gang in “Dan in Real Life,” which Hedges worked up from an original screenplay by Pierce Gardner (the woeful horror thriller “Lost Souls”), are fairly well-balanced and warmly affectionate among one another. And they are boring to the point of aggravation.

Throw in a heavy dose of sitcom artifice and gooey melodrama, and “Dan in Real Life” becomes toilsome.

Carell’s Dan is a widowed advice-column writer raising three daughters, sturdy Jane (Alison Pill, stuck here playing the mother hen after her marvelous performance as a self-righteous sibling in “Pieces of April”), rebellious Cara (Brittany Robertson) and adorable Lilly (Marlene Lawston).

Four years after his wife’s death, Dan’s at a solid if lonely state of resignation, devoted to raising his daughters and not even dreaming of new love.

That changes as he and the girls head to the family homestead in Rhode Island, where Dan’s parents (Dianne Wiest and John Mahoney) are playing host to their big clan of kids and grandkids.

At a bookstore, Dan’s sense of romance is magically rekindled by an encounter with Marie (Binoche). The two hit it off immediately, but she turns out to be the new girlfriend of his brother Mitch (Cook), a nice lunkhead who clearly isn’t as suited for Marie as Dan.

Awkward moments abound as Dan and Marie conceal their dalliance and rising attachment. Dan becomes increasingly frustrated and callous as his attraction grows, while his family embraces Marie as a potentially new darling in-law.

There are occasional flashes of chemistry and budding sentiment between Dan and Marie, which arise more from Carell and Binoche’s low-key charm than from the story in which they’re forced to muck about.

But their little mating dance mostly alternates between bad behavior by the jealous Dan, which makes you wonder why Marie’s feelings for him deepen, and stupid gags and hijinks that would have been lame back in the days of “I Love Lucy.” (A scene where they end up in the shower together is painfully contrived; where is Anthony Perkins and his “Psycho” knife when you need him?)

Emily Blunt, a scene-stealer as Meryl Streep’s overbearing assistant in last year’s “The Devil Wears Prada,” is woefully wasted in an obnoxious role as a woman Dan takes on a double date with Marie and Mitch.

“Dan in Real Life” gets a bit of a toe-tapping boost from a blithe soundtrack of songs by Sondre Lerche, whose musical interludes are welcome respites from the monotony of everything else.

Just when the movie is supposedly reaching a dramatic climax, it slides to its low point as Ma, Pa, grown-up kids and all the anonymous cousins stage a talent show that just goes on and on in nauseating banality.

If this is real life, give us fantasy.

“Dan in Real Life,” released by Disney’s Touchstone Pictures, is rated PG-13 for some innuendo. Running time: 98 minutes. Two stars out of four.

Source: www.cinema-pedia.com