the nanny diaries Tagged Articles at Cinematical

Chemistry. It's a word tossed around in plenty of movie reviews, generally to diagnose whether two actors have it or not. Chemistry can be in the eye of the beholder: some critics may disagree, but if the chemistry is really there, it will show in the way the film catches on. No one can deny that Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan had it in When Harry Met Sally, or that William Powell and Myrna Loy, or Woody Allen and Diane Keaton had it in their many films. But for every hit, there are many, many failed experiments. Here are seven of the most (or least) memorable.

1. Fred Astaire and Joan Fontaine in A Damsel in Distress (1937)
For whatever reason, Astaire decided to break up his hit formula with Ginger Rogers and make this movie without her. His new partner? Joan Fontaine, best known for playing mousy, quietly pretty types (Rebecca, Letter from an Unknown Woman, etc.) and definitely not a song-and-dance woman. Poor Joan was taken to the mat for her lack of singing and hoofing, although the film actually isn't that bad. The ultra-witty P.G. Wodehouse adapted his own novel, it won an Oscar for its dance choreography, and it features another great team: George Burns and Gracie Allen.

2. Hugh Grant and Sandra Bullock in Two Weeks Notice (2002)
Every so often some Hollywood executive gets the idea to team up two big stars, hoping that their massive appeal will translate into screen chemistry; it mostly doesn't. These two romantic comedy masters, who have been wonderful in other films with other people, came together like a dull, wet flint, unable to strike even the most meager spark. Another infamous example of this type of casting came in 1986: recent Oscar winners Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep came together for Mike Nichols' Heartburn. Before it opened, it had lots of buzz. After it opened, it had more of a stench.

I'm thankful for a lot of things this year, my son being first and foremost, but I wouldn't get too far down the list without coming to movies and food, and then food in movies. Showing characters eating or relating to food in some way can be a quick and easy way to capture a magical moment. You can reveal something about a character, you can take a break from an otherwise hectic narrative, or you can simply bask in the sheer, physical beauty of food, the same way another movie might show characters dancing. The following is my second annual "thankful" list of food scenes in current movies playing on 400 screens or less.

I'm thankful for the use of the term "savory snacks" in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited (285 screens). When Jack (Jason Schwartzman) returns from having made love with the Indian stewardess (Amara Karan) in the train's bathroom, his brothers ask: "where's our savory snacks"? I'm thankful for the adorable Sarah Silverman and the way she sighed her way through the line "I want someone to eat cheese with" in I Want Someone to Eat Cheese With (3 screens). And I'm thankful for Scarlett Johansson eating potato chips in bed in The Nanny Diaries (26 screens) -- her only way of dealing with the end of a horrible, horrible day.

It may be a bit early for this, but I wanted to get my two cents in on some of my favorite performances of 2007 so far, especially since most of these will probably get overlooked in the great Oscar crush of December. The awards almost always go to actors who are involved in biopics, message pictures, costume movies or epics, so let's start with the wonderful Alan Rickman, who has yet to earn a single Oscar nomination. This year, he can be seen toiling away once again in the small role of Severus Snape in the fifth "Harry Potter" film, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (283 screens). In the third film, he practically stole the entire movie with the way he read the line "turn to page 394," but in this fifth film, he actually has a scene with some meat to it. In training Harry to block his thoughts, Harry takes a peek into Snape's own mind and finds a disastrously sad childhood. When the flashback ends, the camera lingers on Snape's face for a moment, and Rickman renders an astonishing expression of hurt and hatred that broke my heart and sent chills through my spine.

One costume movie, Becoming Jane (32 screens), was unfairly judged, perhaps because it was too much fun and not somber enough (or not based on a literary source of proper merit). The lovely Miss Anne Hathaway usually lends a kind of smart energy to her best performances, as if she were slightly ahead of the game, and she does so perfectly as the budding Jane Austen. She's playful, but tough, beautiful but restrained. And when she falls in love with her man (James McAvoy), she does so breathlessly and with her whole heart; the movie more or less explains through fantasy how Austen was able to write so passionately from such a dull existence. The real Jane was said to be rather plain, but I'd much rather imagine her like this. Add to this Maggie Smith's delightfully wry supporting performance as the wealthy aunt, who can't understand the impudent youth of today and fires off comically nasty barbs at their expense.

The third film by Julie Taymor, Across the Universe (339 screens), has racked up an intriguing mixture of reviews. Some have ecstatically called the film a rousing success, and Anne Thompson, writing in Variety, has compared Taymor to Orson Welles! Other reviews have called the film an unmitigated disaster of proportions similar to the infamous flop Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band (1978), which also re-imagines several Beatles numbers and incorporates them into an ill-advised movie musical. Myself, I rated the film somewhere in the middle. I thought it had a handful of truly inspired moments, a few truly awful moments (apologies to Eddie Izzard), and a great number of numbingly routine ones. (It reminded me too much of a play, not a movie.)

Writing in the New York Times a few years back, A.O. Scott mourned the absence of total disasters in the movies. A lack of disasters meant that people weren't really putting themselves on the line, and by turns, that safeguard also results in a lack of real masterworks. Pauline Kael once wrote a review of Bernardo Bertolucci's 1900 entitled "Hail, Folly." She praised "huge, visionary epics" of "mad" directors, like D.W. Griffith's Intolerance, Erich von Stroheim's Greed, Abel Gance's Napoleon, Sergei Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible trilogy (left unfinished after Part II), and Francis Ford Coppola's then as-yet-unfinished Apocalypse Now. "The calamity of movie history is not the follies that get made, but the follies that don't get made," she said.

Just to make sure we don't pigeon-hole her in any sort of role, Scarlett Johansson is mixing things up yet again. The girl already did some Nanny time, plus she has The Other Boleyn Girl, Woody Allen's Barcelona flick, possibly Pompeii, He's Just Not That Into You, The Spirit and Mary Queen of Scots on the way. MTV talked with Samuel Bayer, the music video director behind Justin Timberlake's What Goes Around... Comes Around (that she was in), and he says Scarlett got him a directorial gig for another film she's been cast in.

He didn't say too much about the film. It is called Brilliance, it will start shooting this winter, and it's about diamond thieves. What is interesting is his praise for the Jo: "Scarlett is one of the sexiest actresses around. And she can just become her characters... It's stuff like that which makes you know someone's a star." In there, he mentions a scene where she was laughing, but when the camera rolled, she was crying. Now, props should be given to someone who can cry on-cue, but I'm not sure that's becoming the character. I am not as anti-Scarlett as some, but I wouldn't say she's amazing at becoming other people. Ellen Burstyn, Christian Bale, Gary Oldman, and those types, sure. Each of them has made me forget who they are and be enveloped in their role. Johansson, on the other hand, has never made me forget who she is. We've already hashed out her talents, or lack thereof, before -- but who would you consider to be great actors who become their characters?

I've been told by a couple of people who've read The Nanny Diaries and seen the film that the latter is a pale, scrubbed imitation of the book -- to which I reply, 'when was that ever not the case?' I've never read The Nanny Diaries, but I enjoyed the film for what it was -- a jelly-lensed portrait of the awful egomania that exists in that biosphere known as the Upper East Side of Manhattan. Be warned -- this film rarely takes a step that's not telegraphed 20 minutes in advance, but that doesn't mean that the presentation isn't solid, the direction focused and precise, and the acting serviceable in the case of Scarlett Johansson and more so in the case of her two, older co-stars -- Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti, who reunites with his American Splendor team here. Linney and Giamatti play Mr. and Mrs. X -- the cheeky, pointless anonymity was granted to them in the book -- a couple of Manhattan blue-bloods who hire Johansson's naive student character as a live-in nanny for their young son, ridiculously named 'Grayer.'

Johansson meets Mrs. X in Central Park, when a slip of the tongue causes her to be swamped by dog-walking UES housewives who think they've happened upon the Rolls Royce of nanny applicants, as opposed to someone who 'barely speaks English,' as one mother complains in the film. She's soon moved into the house and is essentially performing the role of surrogate mother for the precocious Grayer while his mother attends to more pressing issues, like her husband's possible infidelity and finding the right Burberry jacket to put on. Directors Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini handle this opening act of the film with ease, quickly getting us into the fun stuff without going too far in making Johansson's character a poor Cinderella or another far-out character archetype. Instead, she's just a typical college-aged kid who has absolutely no idea where she's going in the world and thinks she can put off the big decisions for a few more months with some easy nanny work. She doesn't realize she's essentially sold herself into indentured servitude.

The immensely popular 2002 novel The Nanny Diaries had two writers, so it's only fitting that the movie version has two directors. Husband and wife team, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, who were Oscar-nominated for writing 2003's American Splendor, have adapted the book, which tells the story of a young woman, played by Scarlett Johansson, who puts off some major life decisions by deciding to take short-term work as a nanny in the rare air of Manhattan's Upper East Side, where housewives carry business cards, children are treated as well-groomed fashion accessories and the husbands are rarely seen. I recently had a chance to speak with Berman and Pulcini about the special challenges of bringing this book to life as a movie -- anyone who's read it knows that it's a very interior, non-cinematic tome that even goes so far as to withhold the names of key characters from the reader. (Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti are credited as Mrs. X and Mr. X in the film) Here's the interview.

RS: Is this a world that you have first-hand experience with, or just a good story that came your way?

SSB: Well, we live in New York City. We live on the West side, we live across Central Park from the Upper East Side, which is really close, but like, you need a passport to get there. It's a whole other universe away. So, in a weird way, we were familiar with the world, because we would walk around and see women dressed in Burberry jackets with little dogs in matching Burberry jackets. We would see the world, but we were outside observers. It wasn't a world that we were intimately included in.

RS: So when you sat down to adapt this popular book, how much freedom did you give yourself to take it in new places, to make it your own?

RP: Luckily, we had a lot of freedom, because there had been other writers on the project before us, and the studio had come to the decision that it wasn't the easiest book to adapt. Even though it was immensely popular, it was very interior. It was very much a catalog of great details and observations, you know. So how do you open that up, cinematically? So I think they kind of welcomed our approach, and I know the writers have seen the movie and they're very happy with what we've done with it.

The power of the adolescent libido and the need for a good laugh were proven when the teen sex romp Superbad outdid all the competition on its opening weekend. Rush Hour 3 and The Bourne Ultimatum covered the two and three spots, with the fourth-place The Simpsons Movie clinging to the top five for the fourth consecutive week. When all was said and done, this is what the final tally looked like.

1. Superbad: $31.2 million.
2. Rush Hour 3: $21.8 million.
3. The Bourne Ultimatum: $19 million.
4. The Simpsons Movie: $6.7 million.
5. The Invasion: $6 million.

There are six five new contenders this week for the top five positions, so the competition should be fierce. Here's what coming out on the weekend of August 24.

Mr. Bean's Holiday
What's It All About: Rowan Atkinson returns as the little-spoken Mr. Bean, who wins a church raffle for a vacation in Cannes, France.
Why It Might Do Well: Even if I've always preferred his Black Adder series to Mr. Bean, Atkinson is a comic genius.
Why It Might Not Do Well: 1997's Bean scored only $2.2 million on its opening weekend, (though it should be noted that was for a limited release of only 242 theaters) and the British style of humor may not sit well with mainstream U.S. audiences.
Number of Theaters: 1,580
Prediction: $9 million.

The Nanny Diaries
What's It All About: In this film based on the novel by Emma McLaughlin, Scarlett Johansson stars as a young woman hired to care for the child of a snooty New York City couple.
Why It Might Do Well: Paul Giamatti plays the upper crust dad, and he's always worth watching (Big Momma's House notwithstanding), and it should appeal to those who like their comedy on the heartwarming side. Ms. Johansson captured my heart in Lost in Translation, and I'm always game to see what she's up to next.
Why It Might Not Do Well: That booger-eating joke in the trailer was enough to keep me away.
Number of Theaters: 1,800
Prediction: $8 million

Resurrecting the Champ
What's It All About: Josh Hartnett plays a sports reporter who discovers a boxing legend (Samuel L. Jackson) living on the streets.
Why It Might Do Well: Dude, it's Sam Jackson, and the film is sporting an 85% fresh rating over at rottentomatoes.com.
Why It Might Not Do Well: The title may fool the general public into thinking this is the world's first zombie boxing movie.
Number of Theaters: 1,550
Prediction: $11 million

September Dawn
What's It All About: A romantic drama set against the backdrop of the 1857 Mountain Meadows Massacre, which involved the deaths of over 100 California-bound Arkansas emigrants in southwestern Utah at the hands of Mormon settlers.
Why It Might Do Well: Jon Voight makes one scary-ass religious zealot.
Why It Might Not Do Well: Again, Jon Voight makes one scary-ass religious zealot.
Number of Theaters: 850
Prediction: $7.5 million

WAR
What's It All About: War? Huh. Good God y'all. An FBI agent hunts down the assassin who killed his partner.
Why It Might Do Well: Things blow up and with Jet Li in the cast you can bet there will be spinning back kicks aplenty.
Why It Might Not Do Well: When I heard Jason Statham say "They killed my partner!" or words to that effect in the trailer, my cliché alarm went off and refuses to stop buzzing.
Number of Theaters: 2,200
Prediction: $15.5 million

Here's how I reckon next weekend will turn out:
1. Superbad
2. The Bourne Ultimatum
3. War
4. Rush Hour 3
5. Resurrecting the Champ

Here's how the last week's competition ended up:
1. Matt: 12
1. Curt: 12
1. Porcalina: 12
1. Gregory Rubinstein: 12
1. Paul D: 12
1. Bubba8193: 12
1. El Borracho: 12
1. Withasong: 12
1. Andre: 12
2. Josh: 11
3. Anna07: 10
3. Rufus: 10
3. Mario: 10
4. Ethan Stanislawski: 8
4. Jasonsmusicpage: 8
4. Ray 8
5. Mike: 7
5. Blair: 7
5. Tangoeco: 7

Please post your prediction for the top five films in the comments section below before 5:00 PM on Saturday. One point for every top five movie correctly named, two points for every correct placement, and one extra point for the top movie. Come on, make us proud.

If this film was to come out a few years ago, say in the time of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days and Bridget Jones' Diary, there would probably be a horde of chick-flick enthusiasts cheering, while the rest of the movie-going public gives it a collective....eh. However, The Devil Wears Prada seems to have changed things a bit -- some typical chick-flick fare unexpectedly became a big-buzz movie, mainly due to a certain Ms. Streep. Now, we've got The Nanny Diaries, which has its own high-calibre cast. If the just-released trailer is any indication, it hits all of the mainstays of quirky, mainly-for-ladies comedy, but this may or may not be a good thing.

The players: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Alicia Keys and Chris Evans (I second Martha's huh?). The story: The X family get a new nanny and treat her terribly. She's frustrated, but she's also falling for a neighbour, Harvard Hottie. Wackiness ensues. The trailer looks fun, but I'm a bit concerned with all of the familiar bits. Sure, movies take from other movies, but while watching the trailer, my brain kept a running count of spoofs -- the music from Metropolitan as they scan the NYC neigborhood, the poor girl meeting the dashing beau at her low-riding worst, continually seeing him during embarrassing run-ins a la Bridget Jones, the challenging kid and the frazzled nanny like Uptown Girls, the advice reminiscent of Prada and of course, the spy-cam scene from Meet the Parents. Regardless, the film looks like fun, light fare, and it's hard to go wrong with Linney.

I'm sure everyone goes through a brief period in their life where they've realized certain things about past relationships and wish they can dig up the contact info for some old significant others in order to somehow make things right between the two and within themselves. Heck, Rob (John Cusack) did it in the film High Fidelity (based off my favorite Nick Hornby book) after the thirty-something record shop owner found himself suffering through a mid-life crisis.

Well, along the lines of Rob's list of his top five most memorable breakups comes Susan Shapiro's romance memoir Five Men Who Broke My Heart, which Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus (authors of The Nanny Diaries, which was also turned into a film and will be released next year) will adapt for the big screen. Story revolves around a woman (in this case, Shapiro) who, approaching the age of 40, decides to look up five of her old boyfriends in an attempt to figure out why they dumped her. Since no casting decisions have been made yet (although I have a feeling they will target Renée Zellweger), how about we try to come up with a list of actresses (around the age of 40) who would be great in a role like this? I'll go first: Catherine Keener.