Why is it sweet so often becomes saccharine? So it is with “Letters to Juliet.”

This film deserves points for its earnest treatment of its subject matter: the enduring, transcendent nature of love. But why does it have to be so dull? Surely there are a ton of interesting movies possible about this subject. Indeed some of the best ever made tackled the subject… can you say “Casablanca?”

The film is about a soon-to-be-married woman named Sophie, played by Amanda Seyfried. She is a fact checker for The New Yorker and a wanna-be writer. Her fiancee, Victor, played by Gael Garcia Bernal, is a chef and wanna-be restauranteur. He is in the midst of opening his own Italian eatery in New York and has a singular passion for his food. We know within about 20 seconds of first seeing the couple together, that his singular focus will ultimately leave one… well, single.

The question needs to be asked, why is New York City such a preferred location for romance movies? It seems 80 percent of the love stories in the movies made by Hollywood have to take place somewhere amid the five burroughs. Do other locations in America just not have people who yearn to share their lives with others? The same can be said for superhero movies in New York. What gives?

Anyhow, the story sends the couple onto a baffling pre-wedding honeymoon (I’m still scratching my head as to this setup) to Verano, Italy. The town featured in Shakespeare’s famous play of star-crossed lovers.

Victor is constantly being taken away by “suppliers” to do tours, auctions and sight-seeing. One can only marvel at Victor’s yet to  be accomplished accomplishments. That’s some restaurant owner to not even have opened a restraunt and have suppliers showing him all over Italy. Why such interest from the suppliers, isn’t New York a virtual graveyard for new restaurants? I digress. Victor’s ego-centric ways completely blind him to the original purpose of the vacation, yet his soon-to-be wife relents easily and sends him on his way. This gives the plot a convenient way to get him out of the story for large chunks of the movie.

With her husband gone, Sophie wanders the streets of Verona and discovers a group of ladies in Verona called the Secretaries of Juliet. Apparently love-stricken, crushed women from all over the world write letters and stick them to a wall. The secretaries collect the letters and write handwritten letters responding to their letters. It’s a compelling wrinkle to the story. In this world of email, twitter and facebook, a handwritten note is becoming a lost memento. It takes time to write a note, and we only spend time with something that matters to us.

This is where a sense of time becomes very foggy in the film. Naturally, the vacationer only visiting for a couple of days the secretaries have just met is given a job within moments of meeting the ladies. Within a few more short moments Sophie discovers a very old letter stuck under a chunk of mortar no one else has noticed. It is a letter from 1957, written by a forlorn young woman discussing her lost love from Britain. Sophie replies to the woman’s letter as a new secretary of Juliet.

In a terrific feat of postal speed and air travel speed. The woman who wrote the old letter magically appears in front of Sophie seemingly the next day. I’m left to wonder at the marvelous feat and wonder if I have lost willingness to be wisked by a romance.

The woman, Claire, is played by the timeless Vanessa Redgrave. Redgrave still has it. Some people just take a screen and hold you captive. Even in a perfectly ordinary film she still sparkled on camera.

Claire has come to Italy to find her lost love, Lorenzo. She has brought along her grandson Charlie, played by Christopher Egan. Charlie is a stodgy Englishman who is much too young to be so joyless. Somehow we know what is to come between he and Sophie.

This is the film’s central problem. We know what will happen… yet that is true of most films. But the good ones leave us asking how will they get there. That’s where the drama, comedy and interest is created. This film never inspries us even care to ask that question.

I could go on describing the plot points but most anyone can predict how it turns out. The film desperately needs a wrinkle, a twist something that leaves us guessing about how it could all end up where we know it is going to end up.

The Charlie character is tedious. The budding relationship between Charlie and Sophie feels completely artificial and just as tedious. There’s more chemistry going on in Lorenzo’s wine barrels. The film pushes its more interesting material to the edges in favor of this relationship. Redgrave’s Claire could be interesting, the secretaries could be interesting, Lorenzo could be interesting. All are pushed aside for the Sophie and Charlie relationship and it just doesn’t work.

There are many not-good movies I have seen which make me wrathful about their failures. It’s usually because they create movies that are cynical or patronizing about their audience and their audience’s intelligence. While not a good movie, I can’t be wrathful against “Letters to Juliet.” It believes sincerely in its romantic themes and the timelessness of love. This is to its credit because so many Hollywood movies do not share its convictions about such things. Too bad it chooses to tell the least interesting story possible.

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By Chris Cummins
chief photographer - Glow Imagery

This is a good film but not a great film. “The Young Victoria” has to be very challenging to write, direct and act because, well… the social ethos of the period this film explores was so doggedly stiff and formal. It does well to communicate some passion from its main characters despite the contraints of the period and genre but something does feel like it is missing.

Emily Blunt’s performance as the young monarch shows a actor with considerable range when you compare her performance here with the wonderful performance she gave in “The Devil Wears Prada.” Scene after scene Blunt’s performance shows a woman who is not prepared for the role of queen but she is not ill-suited for it either. We know the queen will grow. We don’t doubt it especially after she stands her ground to those who we know or suspect have only their own interests at heart.

The appeal of these kind of films seems to be learning of these historical figures in a way that kicks the dust off their lives and our stuffy notions about who they might have been. If there’s a monarch the cinema world has not seemed all that eager to explore it is the monarchy of Victoria.

In the past 10 or 15 years there seems to be a small niche of films that are devoted to the subject matter similar to “The Young Victoria” but of different monarchs in different periods. “Marie Antoinette” from 2007 and “Elizabeth” from 1998 come to mind. “Characteristic of these films is a female central character thrown into a world in which she is surrounded by those with hot and hostile ambitions, she defies a mapped out life but we are sure will have to learn the dark arts of politics and position. The lead character has to accept a life of intricate and complex politics just in order to merely survive, forget about succeeding. These are origin stories about a young woman’s ascent to tremendous positions of history, prestige and influence but the stories are even more interested in romances, torrid affairs and tidal waves of handsome suitors with wonderfully quaint and thoughtful manners. Oh, did I mention the wardrobe and locations? Good grief, that’s half the joy of these kind of films.

For most of us, to think of these people as capable of passionate love is an upending of our conventional views created by stiff paintings and dry history books which makes them all the more intriguing.

The film begins with a teen age Victoria who is little more than a human parakeet kept in a risk-free existence in one of the monarchy’s homes. She is not allowed to walk down the stairs without an adult holding her hand. She can’t sleep alone, all of her food is tested by others before she can eat it. We learn quickly these rules are not so much for her protection and welfare as they are to protect the interests and ambitions of her mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) and her suitor Lord Conroy (Mark Strong) who seems to have only read the Cliff Notes version of Machiavelli’s “The Prince.” He has designs on becoming a regent until Victoria is deemed mature enough to assume the throne.

Victoria is the only heir in line after the passing of her ailing uncle King William IV(Jim Broadbent.) The tangle of familial ties is a tradition of royalty. After all, nearly all of European royalty is brothers, sisters, uncles and aunts to one another. They all have their opinions about who Victoria should marry, but somewhere, somehow Victoria has been given the right to choose her husband, a privilege few in her position have. Soon her uncle dies and she ascends to the throne. The duchess and Lord Conroy’s plans of a regency are dashed.

The queen befriends a charismatic and emerging political force in Melbourne prior to her becoming queen. At the same juncture the byzantine politics and family conections of Europe’s royal families have deemed the queen’s cousin Prince Albert a worthy candidate for courtship of the queen. I’m no expert on the predominant marriage norms of any given period but only in such films about elite royalty do we gloss over such a thorny detail as marriage between cousins.

A romantic triangle of sorts ensues among Victoria and the charismatic Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) and the German Prince Albert (Rupert Friend). Melbourne is a smooth operator. His motives and intentions are cloudy and can not be trusted. But the brilliance of such men as Melbourne is their ability to influence us in spite of our skepticism of their cloudy motives.

Soon, the young queen struggles when the political headwinds change and Melbourne is swept from power by parliament. A political crisis ensues in which her deep political loyalty to Melbourne is challenged by the changing mood of the British public. She earns public scorn and rebuke for her stubborness. The queen learns quickly from the crises that despite his warm words and affectionate smiles, what Melbourne wants and what is best for her crown and Britain is not always the same thing.

Prince Albert seizes the moment to prove his worth to the queen and councils her from afar through letters. He is dismayed by her abundant affection towards Melbourne but he persists. Albert quickly works himself into the graces of the young queen. We know he is the one for her.

They soon marry and the film challenges us to see modern values at play in the relationships in the characters. In an era in which women’s rights were not deemed a priority in any aspects of society, politics and relationships it is interesting to watch the queen’s relationship with Albert find its way. He oversteps, she oversteps, they struggle to find the boundaries and roles for one another. Albert has the difficult task of being a true partner with his wife in a world that does not value equality between spouses. It is unheard of a wife holding more public power than her husband but it is a fact of life for Albert. The queen chafes under the control of others, we know not so much because of her title but because of her past experiences.

The relationship becomes timeless because it transcends the period to become something recognizable and admirable even by today’s standards. What the two create is a relationship that is founded upon trust, purpose and mutual respect. She is queen, yes, but they are equals and partners. They find their way and build a loving and gratifying relationship that lasts 20 years until Albert dies of typhoid. The queen endures the longest reign of any English monarch.

There is something absent that does not register with the same charm or heart as other British period films that have been so wonderful. It is hard to communicate passion and arduous emotions in an era which is so well….Victorian.

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By Chris Cummins
chief photographer - Glow Imagery

I love movies like this. The late film critic Gene Siskel once asked this question, “Is this film as interesting as a documentary of the actors having lunch?”

“Up in the Air” is that interesting and more. This 2009 film, norminated for an Academy Award for Best Picture, stars George Clooney, as Ryan Bingham, a man who’s job it is to fly across the country more than two thirds of the year and fire people. Boy does he fire a lot of people.

Our lives influence our careers and vice versa. Undoubtedly both happen and in the case of Bingham he has created a life devoid of meaningful contact and real relationships. We learn early in the film this impersonal, unconnected reality is Bingham’s preferred way of life, personally and professionally. For Bingham, the risks of caring for someone else far outweigh the benefits.

Bingham’s world is artificial, we are shown a montage of Bingham effortlessly and with almost Fred Astaire choreography gliding through his check in, security pass through and boarding. It provides him a peace he enjoys.

This impersonal world of airports, hotels and rental cars is removed from normal life. Such anesthesia to the lives’ of others enables Bingham to do an abnormal job. Bingham has a truly awful job. The film opens with a sequence of terminations in which all we see are the various reactions of employees after they hear the news from Bingham. None of the fired employees know who he is, many ask “Who are you?”

Clooney’s Bingham would be an unlikable fellow but unlikable is relative especially when you consider his boss played by Jason Bateman and the undignified and spineless executives who hire his company to fire employees they have worked alongside and personally known for years. Despite his job’s requirements Bingham in a few scenes we see Bingham with an ability and willingness to challenge people to rethink how they think of themselves and their abilities at this sudden and awful crisis he is delivering to them. There is a company message Bingham uses about empires and huge successes springing forth from othes who have had such hardships. It can feel insincere the more it is mentioned but that doesn’t change the fact that happens to be true.

Early in the film we are introduced to Natalie Keener a fresh out of college newbie to the world of terminations who has caught the eye of Craig Gregory, Bingham’s boss. She has set the company on it’s ear by suggesting that the terminations, usually done in person by people like Bingham, can be done without all the pesky expense of travel simply by using webcams.

This rattles Bingham, a man who is hired by others to do the unpleasant deed yet Bingham can’t see the logic in making the job even less unpleasant via Skype. Bingham reluctantly is required to bring along Keener to show her the ropes of termination.

Throughout the film, Keener, played by Anna Kendrick, wants to do a good job of telling other people about the end of their jobs. We see she is tough and smart but awfully clueless. She can never fully convince herself of what her mentor has convinced himself: that to really be comfortable with the role of terminating other’s means of self worth, one must treat life with a great deal of cool distance.

Early in the film Bingham has a dalliance with an attractive fellow traveler named Alex, played by Vera Farmiga. She’s clearly attracted to elite status and is intrigued by Bingham’s life without strings attached. They agree to make their get togethers a regular thing. Has there ever been a more futile concept as friends with benefits? Or in this case co-travelers with benefits? Bingham’s carefully constructed life of isolation and no personal commitments is a defense for him, but the more proud and certain we all are about such things the more likely life will find a way to tear those defenses down. Bingham can be no different.

In the film’s second act, Bingham is forced to help his family when his sister’s wedding may be ruined by cold feet from the groom played by Danny McBride. It is a powerful scene with the reluctant groom. Bingham, the man who has resisted all manners of friendship and love for most of his life is forced to persuade the groom why committing to others is so essential to life. In this scene, we see Bingham trying to convince another the importance of not making the choices Bingham has made and in the process Bingham seems to convince himself a life shared with others is truly worthwhile.

The music is beautiful, the acting is wonderful. There are several cameos by many actors, many of whom playing newly “not available” employees that are forceful performances.

The film is directed by Jason Reitman whose other films include the wonderful “Juno” and “Thank You For Smoking” among others. Reitman brings forward layers to this story that are at once very global and topical in terms of the recession and job losses but covers the topic in a way that brings home what work means to our self worth. The film suggests many things - all the great ones do - but among the most moving question is if the world is this arbitrary, disloyal and coarse, how can it possibly be endured alone?

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