• Tools:
• Save |
• Print |
• E-mail |
• Most Popular |

EW review: Utterly awful 'Happily N'Ever After'

By Gregory Kirschling
Entertainment Weekly

Adjust font size:

(Entertainment Weekly) -- "Happily N'Ever After" is to Pixar what color-by-numbers is to traditional Disney animation.

The press notes boast that the total production time was only 15 months, "unheard of for a first-class computer animated movie." Maybe there's a reason why that's unheard-of.

This thrown-together, dumpy-looking misfire finds Cinderella's wicked stepma (Sigourney Weaver) taking over Fairy Tale Land. Sounds subversive, but "Happily" is stuffed with stock characters -- the vain prince, the critter sidekicks -- who adamantly stay stock.

EW Grade: D-

'Venus'

Reviewed by Owen Gleiberman

The best way to age well is to have such great infrastructure that the years melt away everything but your handsome facial bones. That's Peter O'Toole in "Venus."

At moments, he looks like he just levitated off a slab, yet he makes decay beautiful -- you can fall in love with his weary gaze and still-noble cheekbones, with the withered smile that can't decide whether it's glowing or dying.

O'Toole, over the decades, has played drunks and egomaniacs and wastrels, yet he's unique among the generation of British actors who grew up in the shadow of Olivier (Finney the bellowing lion, Burton the neurotic ham) in that he has always kept his eyes turned up to the heavens.

He does it again in "Venus," where he plays Maurice, an ancient London actor -- a minor celebrity of the theater -- who has lived a life of art and pleasure and now, with prostate problems and a nagging libido, is headed none too quietly into that good night. He meets Jessie (Jodie Whittaker), the shapely, boozy, crass yet fresh-faced working-class grandniece of a fellow old actor, and he nicknames her Venus.

The two are as spiritually removed from each other as Humbert and Lolita, yet according to the movie's sentimental logic, that's why they're destined to be the best of friends. Or more.

Written by Hanif Kureishi ("My Beautiful Laundrette") and directed by

Roger Michell ("Notting Hill"), Venus has a swank pedigree, but in this case that doesn't mean it's much more than a quaint machine to elicit tears and awards. The film's soft edge is that it pretends to make no bones about what a horny old goat Maurice is.

His relationship with Jessie is an elaborate seduction -- the two barter over which body parts he can touch -- yet even as O'Toole plays the literate lech as a cranky charmer, the film cops out by sanctifying his lust, turning Jessie into a punk Eliza Doolittle and his coveting of her into a "soul" connection that's barely supported by anything we see.

Maurice, at the brink of death, looks over his life, yet somehow he never confronts that he lived it only for himself. That's the magic -- or is it just the fab trick? -- of the O'Toole twinkle.

EW Grade: B-

Click Here to Try 2 RISK FREE issues of Entertainment Weekly

Sotomayor pressed on abortion, gun control Supreme Court nominee Sonia Sotomayor avoided direct answers Wednesday to persistent questions about her personal views on abortion and gun control by repea ...

---

• 168 killed as jet crashes in Iran
• Exchange students live nightmare
• Reeling in 'ocean sprawl'
• Africans face U.S. misconceptions
• Day 3 of Sotomayor hearings

• Jet crash kills 168, creates huge crater
• Exchange students live American nightmare
• Spear, jungle stereotypes shock Africans in U.S.
• Sotomayor felt 'out of place' in Ivy League
• Sebelius: Health care can't wait