meg ryan Tagged Articles at Cinematical

The first thing everyone seems to mention about Serious Moonlight is that its screenplay is the last one written by the late Adrienne Shelly. Actress Cheryl Hines, who had a role in Shelly's film Waitress, is making her feature directorial debut with the dark comedy, which stars Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton. The movie opened Austin Film Festival this year. It sounds like a sure-fire comedy, but unfortunately it just left me with a headache.

Serious Moonlight focuses on a married couple, Louise (Meg Ryan) and Ian (Timothy Hutton), who are supposed to meet in their country house for a rendezvous, but both arrive a day early. Louise wants to surprise her husband, but finds out that he also has a surprise: he's leaving her. She refuses to accept this, and ends up cracking him on the head with a vase, binding him with duct tape, and refusing to let him loose until he comes to his senses and realizes how much he loves her and wants to stay with her.

Time flies... We're rapidly approaching the third anniversary of Adrienne Shelly's death. Although she spent almost twenty years in the business, Shelly was killed just as her career reached an inspiring new level with Waitress, the sweetly effective story of a woman and creative pie-maker coming to terms with the fact that she's having a child with the husband she hates. Shelly left behind a number of unfinished projects, one of which was Serious Moonlight, a film that Waitress co-star Cheryl Hines took over in her memory.

Almost two years after that news hit, we've finally got a trailer courtesy of Yahoo. (You can see it after the jump.) I'm happy to say that Shelly's vision and personality are immediately visible in the trailer. You could almost close your eyes and imagine what she would have done with it. However, I can't figure out whether it's the casting that I'm having a problem with, or the way it's been morphed into the trailer. I still can't get past Meg Ryan's surgery. And I hate to harp on it, but one of the most charming parts of her acting was her expressive face. However, in their rather positive review, The Hollywood Reporter did say she was "terrific" in the film, and I'm really hoping I agree once it hits theaters on December 4. The rest seem fine, but the magic of the trailer definitely comes from the quirks of the story and the lingering feel of Shelly.

What do you think of the trailer?

Among the many sad things about the 2006 murder of writer-actress-director Adrienne Shelly was the fact that she left behind a screenplay that was apparently intended to be her next film, after Waitress, which she finished just before her death. The acclaim Waitress received from critics and audiences throughout 2007 gave Shelly's husband, Andy Ostroy, even more reason to keep her spirit alive by producing the film, and now audiences will have a chance to see it.

The film, Serious Moonlight, premiered at Tribeca in April, and now indieWIRE reports that it's been acquired by Magnolia Pictures, which will make it available through its video-on-demand system in November and release it theatrically in December. Cheryl Hines, who co-starred with Shelly in Waitress and is best known for her work on Curb Your Enthusiasm, directed the project, her first feature film.

Let me make this clear: when I say that I'm compiling a list of the most contrived rom-com scenarios, I'm not saying that they're automatically the worst -- although a glance at the titles doesn't exactly stray far from that correlation. Tomorrow's The Proposal finds Sandra Bullock forcing Ryan Reynolds into marriage for the sake of holding off immigration authorities and keeping her/their jobs (I guess it's not too soon to remake Green Card and Picture Perfect after all), so we're talking about seven plot points along those lines of high-concept, close-quarters thinking, with some (dis)honorable mentions along the way...

Considering Anne Hathaway in Rachel Getting Married (133 screens), Sally Hawkins in Happy-Go-Lucky (60 screens), Penelope Cruz in Elegy (21 screens) and Vicky Cristina Barcelona (52 screens), Kristin Scott Thomas in I've Loved You So Long (20 screens), Meryl Streep rising above the ineptitude of Mamma Mia! (178 screens), and several others, it has been an exceptionally good year for roles for women -- all except The Women (164 screens). To date, I've spent a good deal of time railing against that movie, without ever asking: what happened to some of those amazing actresses that they should end up here?

Meg Ryan, for example, was once a top star -- one of a trinity of "America's Sweethearts" (with Julia Roberts and Sandra Bullock) -- and a sure thing. She was irresistibly adorable, and she mastered a kind of self-conscious, nervous eye-flick that won over audiences time and again. And she made her debut in the final film by George Cukor, for goodness sake! Her highest point was probably When Harry Met Sally... (1989), where her effortless performance was not as easy as it looked. She had a hard time branching out into serious films, mainly because her cute, sweet, funny quality made it seem as if she had a lack of depth, and she looked out of place in hardcore, delirious movies like The Doors (1991). Her last ten years has given us a string of flops. But I maintain that her best films are the ones that nobody understood.

The gimmick of The Women is that no men appear anywhere in it -- not as background extras, not as voices on the phone, nowhere. It's all women, all the time. Which might sound empowering and feminist, except that the women are all shallow, vain, and petty, and their primary topic of conversation is, you guessed it, men. (Also: shoes, manicures, shopping, facelifts, etc.) If this were any other film, I suspect women would be complaining about Hollywood's sexism and misogyny. But hey, we men had nothing to do with this one. This one is all you.

Written and directed by Murphy Brown creator Diane English as an update of the 1939 George Cukor comedy (itself based on a Clare Boothe Luce play), the film establishes its tone in its first scene, with two women walking their dogs in New York City. The dogs fight, and the women, their faces invisible to us, respond cattily to one another. One remarks that the other's shoes are "last season," then confides to her dog that the other woman is "a word not usually heard outside a kennel." I think that's supposed to be a joke, but if the word she's referring to is "bitch," then I've got news for her about how its usage has spread.

And that's the movie: women harping on and mistreating one another, and cracking jokes that aren't funny.

Two things I enjoyed about Definitely, Maybe, which came out on DVD today: the cheesy jokes about New York City in the early '90s and the fact that it is a chick flick for guys. What I mean by the latter is that the movie seems targeted to females yet it caters more to the male viewer. It's basically a male fantasy: Ryan Reynolds tells the story of how he dated three beautiful women (played by Isla Fisher, Rachel Weisz and Elizabeth Banks), one of whom he married and later divorced -- meaning he's now single again. And he also got a cute, precocious daughter (Abigail Breslin) out of the deal who becomes beneficial to him in his return to bachelorhood.

But then is it really a chick flick? I guess it is if you count romantic comedies in that grouping, though the genre has never necessarily been aligned with the term, nor vice versa. And in the age of Judd Apatow, it's more likely that any new romantic comedy is actually a guy movie. Do many men realize it's a movie for them, though? Probably not. Though chick flicks are typically movies primarily populated by women characters and/or a female protagonist (think Steel Magnolias), romance films not made by either Apatow or the Farrelly brothers may be thought of as being for the ladies, even if they feature a male lead, like Reynolds in Definitely, Maybe.

I'll admit I've always been confused about chick flicks as a term. I apparently enjoy many so-called chick flicks, including even (especially) Beaches. So, I may not be using the term correctly in this list. However, I am a guy and I know what guys want. So, I'm going to do this my way, and answer the following question: What other films may have been initially perceived by males as being made for chicks but which turned out to be more for them (us)?

It might have taken ten years for this to come together (go here for the run-down), but The Women has finally been shot, and now we have the above trailer (you can also catch it on Yahoo). Based on the 1939 film by George Cukor, the film focuses on some gossipy high-society women who find out that the husband of one of them is cheating with a sexy shopgirl (Eva Mendes).

With more modern snark than the original, this one has all the requirements that have been super-glued to women-centric movies: marriage, gossiping, babies, shopping ... shall we keep going? What makes it really disappointing is that this incarnation was written by the woman who penned 37 episodes of Murphy Brown -- Diane English. I can only hope that there's more to it than the commercial shares. (Although it does offer gimlet goodness, which is always a plus.) But there's one thing we definitely won't see -- any emotive and subtle facial expressions from Meg Ryan. I miss the pre-face-freeze Meg days.

Starring Meg Ryan, Annette Bening, Eva Mendes, Jada Pinkett Smith, Carrie Fisher, Debra Messing, Candice Bergen and Bette Midler, The Women arrives in theaters on September 12.

Between Forgetting Sarah Marshall last week, and Harold & Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay this week, the comedy world is all aflutter with dangerous vacations, whether that danger is watching your newly ex-girlfriend snuggle up to her raunchy new pop-star boyfriend, or heading to Amsterdam to get some Maria lovin'.

So this time around, I figured I would dip into vacations that go bad. We could break into the smaller-scale travel films, where protagonists only go a town or state over, but Harold and Kumar already did the close traveling. Now they're going a heck of a lot farther. Interesting adventures, strange people, and romantic dysfunction are the players in this game, and for this week's double feature, I give you: Blame it on Rio and Joe Versus the Volcano.

And, just to be clear, me choosing two infamously bad movies says nothing about my thoughts on H&K. I swear!

Did you know this? I'm not exactly sure why, but news about Serious Moonlight isn't really getting released. I posted about the project back in October -- the film was written by the late Adrienne Shelly, is being produced by her widower, and had Cheryl Hines (who co-starred in Waitress) attached to direct. Sure, it's not the biggest selection of names, but after the shock that was Shelly's murder, and the positive reaction to Waitress, one would think that news about the feature would continue to roll in, especially when bigger names signed on.

While reading Lou Lumenick's current post about Meg Ryan, he mentioned the film and its stars -- Kristen Bell and Justin Long. So, I headed over to IMDb, and yes, the cast stars Veronica Mars and the ol' Apple guy, plus Ryan and Timothy Hutton. Did some press release get lost? The film was cast, and is already in post-production!