Bridesmaids Movie Review by Anna Smith at Empire

Anchorman, Superbad, The 40 Year-Old Virgin… Producer Judd Apatow has helped make the last seven years a lot funnier. Meanwhile, fans of mainstream female-focused comedies have mostly been offered insipid J-Lo vehicles and Sex And The City movies. Thankfully, Apatow has turned his attention to the fairer sex, although most members of this bridal party are far from coy. Kristen Wiig’s Annie has a blunt wit, a regular fuck-buddy (Mad Men’s Jon Hamm) and could drink Bridget Jones right under the table. She also has a tendency for self-doubt and a problem with organisation, both of which come to the fore when she’s asked to play Maid Of Honour for Maya Rudolph’s Lillian.

Co-writer Wiig has created a heroine with bitterly funny, relatable character observations and a genial, down-to-earth performance. Annie is no clotheshorse tripping in her heels, nor is she man-obsessed. She may go for the wrong kind of guys but her main concern is a female friendship, and it’s this that makes Bridesmaids stand out from the regular chick-flick crowd.

Lillian’s engagement is a wake-up call for Annie, casting a spotlight on her singledom. The last thing Annie needs is an immaculate rich bitch upstaging her at every opportunity. Enter Rose Byrne as Helen. The mistress of the backhanded compliment, Helen’s always on hand with a patronising comment about Annie’s bridal party preparations. She also gives the nervous flyer something to calm her down on a plane, leading to the film’s funniest scenes.

At its best, Bridesmaids is proper, laugh-out-loud, sides-clutching, grin-at- your-mates funny. The airplane scenes see a sky-high Annie trying to sneak into first class to join her friends, even failing in her attempts to insult the air hostess. Meanwhile, each character has a subplot building, including Megan (Melissa McCarthy), who’s confidently cracking onto a man she’s convinced is an air marshal. When these strands come together, it’s explosively hilarious — just like the bridal shop scene where the girls get sudden, debilitating food poisoning. Like many a guys’ comedy, the film isn’t afraid to flirt with gross-out, but doesn’t throw in toilet humour for the sake of it. It makes it relevant to both plot and character and, just possibly, funny to women who normally hate that kind of thing.

Regular Apatow fans will be on the floor at this point, and that’s another thing that makes Bridesmaids unusual: it appeals to men too. Yes, a lot of the humour revolves around female rituals and neuroses, but the writing’s strong enough to bridge the gender gap. It’s no surprise this has been compared to The Hangover, a buddy-wedding-comedy that drew fans from both sexes. Bridesmaids even has its very own Alan in Megan, the outspoken, overweight and somewhat deluded sibling of the groom.

It’s a shame, then, when Bridesmaids shoehorns in a romance, even if it is with the lovable Chris O’Dowd. Playing a kindly cop, O’Dowd provides a shoulder for Wiig’s character to cry on but their scenes cost the film its pace. Even Matt Lucas (Annie’s flatmate) feels like he’s wandered in from another film, albeit a very funny one. Still, while Bridesmaids isn’t perfect, it does have moments of comedy perfection. And precious little in the way of Manolos.

The Tree Of Life Movie Review by Ian Nathan

For his fifth film in 40 years, you wonder whether magisterial slowcoach Terrence Malick took stock of his recent output — such abstruse meditations on war, colonialism, and the ineffable fabric of nature as The Thin Red Line and The New World — and felt it was high time he brought a halt to this worrying slide into crass commercialism. After six years chewing over a bit of Heidegger with his Weetabix, and smothering his intentions in a blanket of secrecy like an impenetrable hybrid of J. J. Abrams and J. D. Salinger, he has summoned forth a dizzyingly impressionistic study of family life that doubles as a vaulting enquiry into the very nature of the universe and the possibility of God.

Kubrick’s 2001 comes close, but Malick’s philosophy pines for the salve of love and spirit, and comes light on psychotic super-computers. Even the hardy concept of dialogue falls prey to his exquisitely aloof vision. Against the constant murmurings of nature, we catch only odd lines and whispered voiceovers querulously calling to a hard-of-hearing deity: “Where were you?”

In other words, the kind of highly personal filmmaking where we must first pass though the dawning of time — literally nebulous bodies billowing cloudlike against the black veil of the universe; raw planets spewing gas and lava, primordial pools fecund with boiling matter; sparks of life in the nuclei of swarming cells, dancing proto-fish spinning lightwards, and a wounded plesiosaur on a desolate beach as a meteor strike scours the surface clear for the birth of mankind — before we get to what is commonly referred to as a scene. Cycles of life and death on a cosmic scale contrasted with the intricate dynamics of family.

Actually, instead of beginning at the very beginning, the film kicks off in the mid-1960s with news of the death of R. L. (Laramie Eppler), our protagonist Jack’s (Hunter McCracken) brother, aged only 19. How he died remains elusive, but Malick’s younger brother is reputed to have committed suicide at 19. This shudder of grief will reverberate like a meteor crash through the film, stirring the first of so many questions: what does the loss of a loved one mean against the backdrop of eternity? Much, it transpires.

It is this unshakable heartache, as bitter as the taste of a madeleine is sweet, that casts Sean Penn’s grown-up Jack down a Proustian time tunnel from the metallic canyons of present day Houston, by way of the aforementioned Creation, to the sun-softened enchantment of his childhood. Jack and his two brothers (all three actors wonderfully naturalistic unknowns) are nurtured in an Edenic youth recalled via an organic pulse of ‘memories’: fragments of story, grace notes, wisps of emotion, the odd flicker of Lynchian weirdness. Together an uncanny distillation of how human memory stirs its keeper, awash in Malick’s transcendent imagery: light cascading through leaves, the kiss of a breeze on wild grass, filigree curtains billowing through window frames, dogs running wild.

Theirs is a harmony held in balance by the opposing poles of their parents. A luminous, angelic mother (Jessica Chastain), made holy by the exaltation of Jack’s recollection, bestows a lilting ideology: “The way of nature and the way of grace. You have to choose which one you follow.” She is exemplified as grace. While the astonishingly mature Brad Pitt as Jack’s terse patriarch — a soul damped down by quashed aspiration, veering between brutal discipline and astringent love — espouses the doctrine of nature: nothing can be achieved without will. Even without the scaffolding of story, this is a sublime evocation of the tides of ecstasy and torment flowing through an American boyhood.

Malick conducts his five editors the way great composers conjure art from thin air, creating an unforgettable symphony of beauty, introspection, and wells of unabashed feeling. And to accompany such cinematic inspiration, not for this director the dreadnought snarls of Nickelback, but extracts of Couperin, Berlioz, Brahms, Mahler and Bach, interposed with Alexandre Desplat’s yearning score. The very execution poses its own spiritual enquiry — how can such beauty be created in a meaningless void?

The result is so disarmingly unironic, and therefore open to mockery, it’s easy to see why it was met with a chorus of boos from Cannes’ sincerity-phobic critics. Sure, at times it lifts off too far, becoming too remote and self-involved to fully grasp. And the closing images of Sean Penn blundering across a metaphorical beach in his sodden Armani suggest a potential afterlife as drunkenly off-kilter as that rum-do at the end of Lost.

It is equally clear why The Tree Of Life landed the Palme D’or — against the brute attack of modern cinema it feels heaven-sent. A film awestruck by life: why are we here? What are we for? Where did it all go wrong? And where could it yet go right? Malick doesn’t pretend to have actual answers. But then neither, one suspects, does Transformers 3.

‘Rescue Me’ Items Head to Smithsonian, Callie Thorne Talks Final Season

‘Rescue Me’ is fast approaching its swansong. As the cast, crew and fans start to ponder life without the drama, it’s been revealed that creator Denis Leary is giving items — including his firefighter costume and tools — to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History.

Executive producer Peter Tolan and actor Lenny Clarke (Teddy Gavin) will join Leary for a donation ceremony at 2PM ET Thursday.

The objects will join the museum’s popular culture history collections. The Smithsonian says today’s ceremony is the first in a series of events to mark the 10th anniversary of Sept. 11 and examine how it will be remembered and how life has changed.

‘Rescue Me’ focuses on the professional and personal lives of a group of New York City firefighters in the fictitious Ladder 62/Engine 99 firehouse as they deal with the grief of losing friends and relatives at Ground Zero. It tackles the daily drama of the life-and-death situations associated with being a firefighter while exploring the ways the men use dark humor to protect their true emotions.

'Rescue Me' Items Head to Smithsonian, Callie Thorne Talks Final Season

The Series Finale of ‘Rescue Me’ is due to air on Wednesday Sept. 7th, a few days ahead of the 10th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks.

Leary’s co-star Callie Thorne, who’s played Shelia Keefe since the beginning, has spoken about the sadness of filming the final scenes after seven years of working with the same cast and crew.

She told ‘People’ that “The final days of ‘Rescue Me’ were terrible. There were a lot of tears. Especially when people heard, ‘That’s a series wrap on Denis Leary.’ A lot of the guys got really choked up.”

“Denis didn’t cry,” she added. “But he was very quiet. Which is a big deal for Denis Leary.”