DVD

Haywire

CINEMA is filled with martial artists who can't act or have no screen presence. (This, incidentally, never stopped Chuck Norris from having a career.) Gina Carano has presence to spare, which we learn in the opening scene of this oddball action movie in which she has a cup of tea at a truck stop and meets with a hungover dude (Channing Tatum) who demands that she leave with him. She refuses. He proceed to beat up on her.

And just when you think you're in the middle of some trailer-park melodrama, she bounces back to efficiently beat the hell out of him.

Director Steven Soderbergh boldly built this entire movie around mixed martial artist Carano after seeing her in action on a network broadcast of one of her bouts.

Carano really can fight. And her frequent scenes of close-quarter combat are not like the manically edited, intricately choreographed fights we've seen in crappy distaff action fare such as the recent Columbiana. That's her up there, kicking, punching, and tossing opponents around the room. And she looks good doing it.

But not too good. In these fights, people get their hair mussed. Like, fatally.

The movie allows Soderbergh the opportunity to leave his off-centre imprint on the action genre with a mix of cerebral elegance and visceral impact.

I hope he makes a sequel, if for no other reason than to prevent Carano from falling into the clutches of some action hack. She's entirely likable, and the fact that she's such a credible female action hero is refreshing.

In one scene, a bad guy counsels an initially reluctant assassin: "It's best not to think of her as a woman." Fortunately, the audience is under no such constraint. 'Ö'Ö'Ö1/2

New Year's Eve

LIKE a disaster movie of old, New Year's Eve is populated with a multitude of movie/TV stars, all coping with a big, inexorable event. But in this movie, the comedy is the disaster.

This holiday release was generated after the unexpected success of director Garry Marshall's 2010 multi-plotted rom-com Valentine's Day. Here, the situations are even more contrived and artificial, the drama is more mawkish, the star turns are more gratuitous, and the production is more slapdash.

Chief complaints:

-- In the role of the 15-year-old rebel, Abigail Breslin attempts to demonstrate her maturity by flashing her bra in a subway station and telling her shocked mom: "I'm 15, mom. This is not a training bra!" Evidently the writer and director have only been exposed to L.A. teens.

-- The only person who looks more buffed and polished than Katherine Heigl is Jon Bon Jovi. He looks like an airbrushed rock-god illustration you might expect to see on the side of a suburban mom's minivan.

-- You don't cast Michelle Pfeiffer as a sad-sack, exploited employee unless she later transmogrifies into Catwoman.

-- Every black character in the film is flat-out saintly in their missions to provide comfort to white characters.

Watching this film, it is evident director Garry Marshall learned his trade via thousands of man hours toiling in TV comedy. Accordingly, he offers up a parade of photogenic stars, sitcom circumstance, and Hallmark aphorisms about the importance of New Year's Eve.

This is not a movie, it's a bad holiday special. 'Ö

Pillow Talk

IF you think an old Doris Day-Rock Hudson movie is not worth your time, keep in mind that in 2003, the comedy Down With Love was made as a feature-length homage to Pillow Talk. There is more to this hit 1959 comedy than just camp-cute quaintness.

Released in a lush, immaculate Blu-ray edition (observing the centenary of Universal Studios), the movie may not qualify as hot stuff today, but the film's abundance of gentle double-entendres and the chemistry of Rock and Doris offer up a good time.

Day plays Jan Morrow, an interior designer who shares a party line with Hudson's playboy songwriter Brad Allen. Their bickering over phone time results in Brad masquerading as manly Texan "Rex Stetson" to woo Jan, while Brad still calls her on their party line to mess with her head about Rex's questionable sexuality, among other things. "There are some men who are devoted to their mothers," Brad insinuates, "the type that likes to collect recipes or exchange bits of gossip."

The gay subtext of the film is all the more surprising given future revelations about Hudson's closeted homosexuality, but as film critic David Thomson points out in a documentary about the film, the film's appeal transcends irony or camp. Co-starring two of the best rom-com second bananas ever -- Tony Randall and Thelma Ritter -- this was just a good, solid but frivolous romantic comedy in which the principle nostalgic thrill comes from the fact Hollywood has essentially forgotten how to make good romantic comedies. 'Ö'Ö'Ö'Ö

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

1. Contraband

2. We Bought A Zoo

3. Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked

4. The Sitter

5. Mission: Impossible -- Ghost Protocol

6. The Descendants

7. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

8. The Iron Lady

9. Puss in Boots

10. The Darkest Hour

MTS Video on Demand, week ending April 29

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition May 3, 2012 E4