MargaritaLevieva Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Hollywood has a long history of showing us charming "golddiggers" in film, whether they're cute Depression-era heroines trying to get a free meal, a trio of Fifties fashion models scheming to land rich husbands, or soft-pedaled prostitutes of either gender. In Spread, the golddigger is a young man, much like Joe Buck in Midnight Cowboy if he'd succeeded in his original plans, but unfortunately not debonair or complex enough to overcome the feeling that the movie is more sordid than sweet or sharply comic.

Nikki (Ashton Kutcher) -- and what guy with that name spells it that way? -- wants to live a life of luxury with as little effort as possible. He succeeds nicely by picking up rich woman and sponging off them for as long as he can. He has no car, no home and no savings, even though at least one woman buys him expensive clothes and gifts. Perhaps he just doesn't have a knack for acquiring expensive baubles like Marilyn Monroe's character in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, or more to the point, he has no long-term ambitions.

The Invisible is typical David Goyer fare, in that it feels very much like a superhero origin story. The main character, played by Justin Chatwin, could be called 'Almost Dead Man.' After suffering a vicious beating at the hands of a couple of street hoods, his body lies expiring at the bottom of a ravine while his spirit has been knocked loose and is able to roam freely. He can see and hear everything, but other people can't see or hear him, and interestingly, he is able to touch and interact with his environment, but only in fantasy flashes. He can pick a book up off a desk and throw it across the room, but as soon as it hits the wall, its back on the desk. He can punch someone in the face and watch them be knocked backwards, but it didn't really happen, it's just his overactive ghostly imagination. Almost Dead Man is chiefly concerned with figuring out who tried to kill him and why, but I wish he wasn't, since it doesn't make for a really compelling story.

Goyer has one trick up his sleeve, as far as the plot is concerned. He tries, in a very screenwriter-ish way, to combine the film's main villain and love interest characters into one, but even that strains the credibility of the story to the point where we end up examining it more than we are engaged by it. The character in question, Annie Newton, is played by Margarita Levieva as a toboggan-wearing teenage punk who smashes windows, rips rides, and does pretty much everything you wouldn't expect from a girl who looks like she could star in her own Nickelodeon show. She's the one who Nick had the bad luck to cross paths with, and after she leaves him for dead, the film sets up its two parallel story lines. Nick is walking the earth as a coma-ghost and investigating his own assault, which will eventually lead him to Annie, and Annie is evading the cops, dealing with her untrustworthy fellow hoods and undergoing a crisis of conscience over committing what she thinks was a murder.