![]() Tracy Bennett/Tristar Salma Hayek and Adam Sandler in 'Grown Ups' Such a great way to end any film festival.Grown Ups (2010) Roxanne (Salma Hayek) and Lenny Feder (Adam Sandler) By the time they reach the end of their road, staring out onto the water, trying to imagine their wonderful, scary future, it's all just so satisfying. That weight doesn't exist without the strong throughline of lead performers John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph. Sam Mendes's film of a script by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida is episodic and a bit erratic in parts, but it's also a film that builds steadily, from one setting to another, until the final 2-3 "segments" land with a significant emotional weight. What, are you too good for dancing? Singing? Tyra Banks and John Goodman? Bello's performance as the bar owner is flinty and charismatic, even if she never does get up on that bar to dance. Who says that a film festival has to be all serious and no fun? Who says that it has to be all auteurs like Altman and Stone and Cronenberg? You deserve to have some light, silly fun, and Coyote Ugly does that job. Either way, you'll have a great better sense of Hayek as a performer. Enjoy the crossroads of sex, art, and politics that converge in the film, or assess the merits of Hayek's lone Oscar nomination, or just marvel at that unibrow. You could use some culture in your film festival, and there's no better showcase for Salma Hayek's talents as a Serious Actress than her performance as Frida Kahlo in this passion project. Her performance is sexy, smart, and quick on its feet as she moves from suburban normalcy to something closer to a nightmare. Bello came within a hair's breadth of an Oscar nomination for her work here as the wife of Viggo Mortensen's hitman-in-hiding. Try not to get whiplash from the change in tone, but it's important to take things into a more serious direction, and David Cronenberg's meditation on the violence of men certainly is that. More importantly, with and without Rudolph onscreen, the film is an addictive delight, so comfortable in its musical and comedic chops, and featuring great performances from Meryl Streep, Kevin Kline, Lily Tomlin, and Lindsay Lohan (no, really!). ![]() It was an early stepping-stone for Rudolph and the chance to work with a master in his final days. Maya Rudolph isn't in this film, Robert Altman's last, very much, but in her role as a verrrry pregnant stage manager, she gets to wander through any number of scenes and case such brilliant side-eye. Savages was treated like a middling effort by both critics and audiences, but it's truly a whole heap of fun, with John Travolta giving his best performance in some years, and Aaron Johnson and Blake Lively getting suuuuper sexy. Salma Hayek in particular is a scream as the drug-lord widow whose ruthlessness is only barely tempered by her instincts as a mother. It's always good to kick these things off with something that's high on energy, and nothing fits that bill better than Oliver Stone's underappreciated carnival of sun-burned drug-war intrigue. And what's more fun than a self-styled film festival? Nothing, that's what. Six movies that didn't approach half of the box-office take of the Grown Ups movies (the original took in $162 million domestically). So rather than bum yourselves out contemplating the lack of good roles for women in Hollywood, you could take a pro-active approach and catch these three women in movies that are more worthy the talents of Hayek, Bello, and Rudolph. ![]() All three of them are in roles that don't begin to approach the capabilities of these actresses. With this weekend's Grown Ups 2, once again Salma Hayek, Maya Rudolph, and Maria Bello will be drafted into onscreen service as the wives of Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, and Kevin James. ![]()
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