The cheapo CGI animation is ugly as sin, but audiences responded well to Hoodwinked (Weinstein), probably due to its cleverer-than-clever plot, which deconstructs the "Little Red Riding Hood" fable and puts it back together via a twisty, self-referential, heavily layered crime story in which nothing is what it seems. Anne Hathaway, Patrick Warburton, Jim Belushi, David Ogden Stiers, Andy Dick, and Glenn Close all crop up as the voices of a bunch of fairy-tale characters with complicated motivations and sneaky secrets…
If everyone on Earth behaved as abhorrently as the characters in American holiday comedies like The Family Stone (Fox), we'd probably all be cannibals within a week, or at least the types to gnaw on each other's nerves for no good reason. As an uptight urban businesswoman with a cell phone hard-wired to her skull, the shrill Sarah Jessica Parker absorbs waves of contempt from a New England family, but most of its members are just as monstrous as she is. Is this a miscalculation on the filmmakers' part, or are we really this bad?
Who's our generation's Alec Guinness? Unless you guessed Queen Latifah, you're wrong. At least, that's the logic behind Last Holiday (Fox), which remakes a Guinness comedy with Latifah in the lead as a meek store clerk who decides to live it up when she thinks she's dying. She isn't, but the laughs come DOA…
After a decade of playing Ross on Friends, the pity party still hasn't ended for David Schwimmer. As a half-shaven Atlantic City pit boss with a divorce and a drinking problem in Duane Hopwood (HBO), Schwimmer hasn't lost the perpetual hangdog look that's always shrouded his scenes like a dense fog. Any movie that leans on a song in lieu of an ending isn't much of a movie, though bonus points are due when that song is Fountains Of Wayne's beautiful "All Kinds Of Time"…
For a long-lost transition point between the classic movie musical and the postmodern age, look no further than Liza With A 'Z' (Showtime), the 1972 TV showcase for Judy Garland's daughter Liza Minnelli, conceived and directed by former MGM choreographer Bob Fosse, with music by John Kander and Fred Ebb. Unlike Garland, who was captivatingly vulnerable, Minnelli expresses sincerity through smarmy show-business clichés, and Fosse uses that aspect of her personality to stage a visually dynamic show where every "big finish" is like a trip to the confessional.