The Heartbreak Kid (2007) (HD DVD)

Eddie Cantrow (Ben Stiller) isn't the type to settle down. It's not that he lives it up like it's Playboy After Dark, boozing it up with strippers and barely-legal co-eds or anything, but Eddie's so reluctant to bite the bullet and get married that he looks for just about any excuse to shove the women in his life to the sidelines. I mean, while rattling off the list of reasons why he broke it off with his fiancée of five long years, Eddie says it's a dealbreaker that she said she hated Caddyshack because the gopher looked too fake. He catches a lot of flak for being so non-committal -- and not even taking advantage of the whole bachelor thing -- by his his horndog pop (Jerry Stiller) and his married pal Mac (Rob Corddry), so when he meets-cute with Lila (Malin Akerman) after squaring off against a purse snatcher, Eddie throws out his usual playbook. They've only been dating about a month and a half when Lila drops a bombshell: the company she works for wants to ship her out to Rotterdam. Since the firm doesn't transfer married couples and seeing as how Eddie has a good thing going, he proposes. Whoops. Before they've even finished driving down to Cabo San Lucas for their honeymoon, Eddie realizes how little he actually knows about Lila, from untamed pubic hair to a violent, voracious sexual appetite to a deviated septum that sends damn near everything she puts in her mouth spewing out of her nostrils. Sure, he tries not to nitpick every last flaw, but it dawns on Eddie just how mismatched they are when he meets up with Miranda (Michelle Monaghan), the way too cool girl-next-door type in town for a family reunion. They hit it off instantly, but Eddie's stuck trying to worm his away around the fact that he's falling for another woman while he's on his honeymoon, so...y'know, hilarity ensues. Or, at least, hilarity's supposed to ensue, what with this being a comedy and everything. I'll admit that The Heartbreak Kid hooked me in at first -- Rob Corddry playing a miserable married man with a fake smile plastered across his balding mug, Eddie's stammering awkwardness around Lila as he fumbles with a pair of her panties in his sporting goods store, and really, just about every scene with Lila as they stumble their way down to Mexico. I hadn't really heard of Malin Akerman up until The Heartbreak Kid hit theaters, but this is the sort of balls-out, completely fearless performance that'd make her a star...if the movie hadn't floundered at the box office, I mean. Akerman may be the drop-dead gorgeous starlet type, but she completely embraces all of the repulsive aspects of her character, yet Lila always comes back with some hopelessly sweet scene where you can see why Eddie is reluctant to completely give her the boot. She's like an incontinent Yorkshire Terrier leaving a trail of piss from one end of the house to the other -- you kind of wanna kick her outside, but....oh, she's just so gosh-darn adorable. The Heartbreak Kid is almost a completely different movie once Michelle Monaghan strolls in as Bachelorette #2. With Lila shut up in their hotel room, only popping up for another quick gross-out comedy scene every ten or fifteen minutes, Ben Stiller steps away from playing the straight man in favor of something out of a more traditional romantic comedy. I liked the scenes with Miranda and her family -- everyone has a heckuva lot of chemistry together, and Ben Stiller plays off each and every one of 'em really well. So much of this stretch of the movie is cute and endearing, but funny...? Not so much. The laughs are pretty much all in the first 45 minutes or so. The Farrellys have been wading around in the PG-13 waters for a while, and their return to an R-rated comedy isn't exactly seamless. They don't shy away from the more crass stuff, but a lot of it's just witless vulgarity, rarely spinning off into an actual joke. I mean, think of Cameron Diaz in There's Something About Mary's money shot; just the idea of cum-in-the-hair in and of itself isn't all that funny, but it's what the Ferrellys did with that from there that earned such a huge laugh. Here, there's just a setup and no punchline. Eddie's 77 year old dad talks endlessly about "crushing pussy" and how "bitches be crazy", and he soaks in a hot tub with an aging, overinflated porn star. That's all there is to a lot of these jokes -- lame dialogue or some random situation that doesn't go anywhere -- and it flops and flounders. Even Lila's stuck with a lot of that as the movie goes on, like when she, uh, helps Eddie out with the old home remedy for a jellyfish sting. The gross-out is all there is to the gag. While I'm griping about The Heartbreak Kid's uneven, kind of anemic sense of humor, it's also worth mentioning that the comic void of Carlos Mencia is on the payroll as Uncle Tito, and...'nuff said there. I was really drawn in by The Heartbreak Kid at first, and the Farrelly Brothers have lined up just about a perfect cast. Clocking in right at two hours, the movie's just too long and doesn't serve up nearly as many laughs as it ought to, and the Farrellys' aren't back on steady footing with the whole R-rated comedy thing. A remake of a classic like Neil Simon's The Heartbreak Kid really shouldn't be this forgettable. Rent It. This HD DVD opens by noting that the movie has been edited for content. I know for sure that one of the extra snippets of footage that played over the end credits theatrically -- a payoff to Eddie's chat with Lila about his bunkmate in camp -- has been yanked out. Whether or not that's the only difference, I'm not 100% sure. Video: The Farrellys rave in the disc's audio commentary about how The Heartbreak Kid is their most beautifully photographed film yet, but it doesn't exactly shine in high-def. Presented at its theatrical aspect ratio of 2.39:1 and encoded using AVC, The Heartbreak Kid has a slightly soft, almost filtered look to it. The level of sharpness and detail are instantly recognizable as high definition, but this is one of the least striking HD DVDs I own of a movie fresh out of theaters. On the upside, film grain is never really intrusive, the image quality holds up better than average under low light, and there aren't any hiccups with speckling or the AVC compression. Its palette almost has an overcast look to it in the scenes in the Bay Area, although things are much brighter and more vividly saturated when The Heartbreak Kid moves its cameras south of the border. The quality is passable, and some of the close-ups and medium shots of the actors do look great, but The Heartbreak Kid just isn't in quite the same league as what I'm used to getting out of these next-gen formats for a day-and-date release. Audio: The Heartbreak Kid may sport a lossless Dolby TrueHD track, but it's still a standard issue comedy mix -- just about everything is anchored across the front channels, with the subwoofer disinterestedly twiddling its low-frequency thumbs and the surround channels reserved solely for light ambiance and to reinforce the music. At least The Heartbreak Kid does have a pretty solid soundtrack, heavy on vintage Bowie and including a couple of songs by The Flaming Lips as well. Still, the technical end of the audio is awfully bland, with neither the music, the recording of the dialogue, or the barely-there sound effects bolstered by all that much of a presence. The whole thing is almost aggressively mediocre. There are also Dolby Digital Plus 5.1 tracks in English, French, and Spanish, alongside subtitle streams in each of those languages and one in Portuguese for good measure. Extras: Dreamworks usually piles on the bells and whistles for their day-and-date releases in high definition, but the only high-def extra this time around is the theatrical trailer. Instead of throwing together your usual overly promotional making-of EPK, The Heartbreak Kid's featurettes are almost entirely centered around the cast and crew, especially the camaraderie on the set. The first half of "The Farrelly Brothers in the French Tradition" (17 min.) swirls around a bunch of the directors' botched business ventures and how they stumbled into the industry. As the two of them talk about their writing process and their loose, freeform directorial style, the mostly general discussion starts to relate more and more to The Heartbreak Kid specifically, marking their return to the whole R-rated comedy thing. The disc's other featurettes include "Ben and Jerry", a five minute piece on the two Stillers playing father and son on and off-screen, a quick look at the Halloween party on the set (including a shot of the Farrellys directing while dolled up like Jennifer Beals in Flashdance), and, um, eight minutes' worth of the proper strategy to pull off a convincing win in the cast-'n-crew's egg toss battles. The other extras are pretty much what you'd expect from a comedy straight out of theaters. The Farrelly Brothers chime in with an audio commentary, spending a good bit of time running through the music used throughout the film, distinguishing their remake from Neil Simon's darkly comedic original, noting the many background parts they auctioned off for charity, and discussing the delicate balancing act in not making Lila overly adorable or too easy to just throw out on her ass. Some of the other topics include a quick use of CGI in the "Operation" scene, the lack of a proper French word for "queef", the collaborative environment at Dreamworks (including one plot point suggested by Steven Spielberg), and gabbing about how the first assembly for Dumb and Dumber was screened at nearly four hours in length. This being a Farrelly commentary and all, it kinda goes without saying that they spend way, way, way too much time pointing out their friends and family in the background and noting who on the crew had worked on their other movies. I thought the whole thing was kind of dry, but it's alright leaving running in the background. There's a four minute gag reel, with a bunch of the usual clowning around, flubbed lines, and unused improvs. Rounding out the extras are six deleted scenes, running right around seven and a half minutes in total. There's nothing all that great in there, and the only particularly memorable bit is Miranda's ex from back home dropping in while she's in Cabo. For whatever reason, the unused sea lion brawl that the Farrellys mention in the movie's audio commentary isn't anywhere on here. Conclusion: Everything about this HD DVD release of The Heartbreak Kid is just alright -- its smattering of extras, the technical presentation, and, of course, the movie itself. Watchable but completely forgettable, The Heartbreak Kid coasts too much on the charms of its cast, and the Farrelly Brothers have spent so much time away from the R-rated comedy game that a lot of the movie's vulgarity feels forced and heavy-handed instead of...y'know, funny. Yeah, Malin Akerman is dynamite in it -- The Heartbreak Kid would've been a breakthrough role for her if anyone had actually seen it -- and Michelle Monaghan is as instantly likeable as ever, but nothing about the movie or its release on HD DVD amounts to anything more than a rental. Sorry. Rent It.

Celebrity A Place In The Sun to feature football star and ex Charlotte Mears

Danielle Lloyd would be advised to cover her face with her hands when new boyfriend Jermain Defoe kisses and cuddles his ex on national TV. The busty model – who's only been dating the football star for a month – won't want to see Jermain house-hunting with ex fiancée Charlotte Mears on Channel 4 show A Place In The Sun. The celebrity version of the popular series, due to be broadcast in the New Year, features the couple bidding on a £1.8 million house in Mallorca. Jermain and Charlotte were recorded on the Spanish island last summer and are shown talking on their mobiles cooing, 'Love you, lover'. Ouch. Danielle, 24, went public with her new romance on 13 December and is due to spend Christmas with Jermain, 25, at his family home in London.

What in the world . . . ?

The arrival of the Terracotta Army and Tutankhamun caught the public's imagination this year. But what about the arts community? We asked leading figures what painting, artefact or building they dream of bringing to Britain

Matthew Collings, Art critic
I would like to see the San Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna, transported over here. This is a sixth-century church. The mosaics are all high up in the air. The largest ones show dozens of men on one side of the building and dozens of women on the other. They carry crowns of victory. They look like Romans. They seem unclassifiable. They're actually vestal virgins and male martyrs, but the impression is dreamlike, the figures strangely large and vivid - 22 women and 26 men. They are a procession. Each line of figures - every one of them slightly different, every one facing in the same direction - ends up with images of Jesus and Mary. The three wise men and various angels are also part of the parade. Flowers, plants, folds in dresses, people's expressions, the direction of their gaze; their sandals, their hands, red caps if they are magi and wings if they are angels - everything fits in a single visual scheme. The overall decorative unity, its solemn beauty, is the moving thing.

What in the world . . . ?The arrival of the Terracotta Army and Tutankhamun caught the public's imagination this year. But what about the arts community? We asked leading figures what painting, artefact or building they dream of bringing to Britain Saturday December 22, 2007The Guardian Christopher Frayling's choice ... Grünewald's Isenheim altarpiece. Photograph: The Bridgeman Art Library
Matthew Collings, Art critic
I would like to see the San Apollinare Nuovo, in Ravenna, transported over here. This is a sixth-century church. The mosaics are all high up in the air. The largest ones show dozens of men on one side of the building and dozens of women on the other. They carry crowns of victory. They look like Romans. They seem unclassifiable. They're actually vestal virgins and male martyrs, but the impression is dreamlike, the figures strangely large and vivid - 22 women and 26 men. They are a procession. Each line of figures - every one of them slightly different, every one facing in the same direction - ends up with images of Jesus and Mary. The three wise men and various angels are also part of the parade. Flowers, plants, folds in dresses, people's expressions, the direction of their gaze; their sandals, their hands, red caps if they are magi and wings if they are angels - everything fits in a single visual scheme. The overall decorative unity, its solemn beauty, is the moving thing.


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In the sixth century, these virgins and saints would have been seen at Easter and on feast days after a singing and swaying procession through town, with the smell of incense, and the mosaic stones glinting in the candlelight, some images looming out and some in shadow. We see them with a very different mentality. But if there could ever be a system of existing that had loving your neighbour at the centre of it, I think this stuff would be a good advert for it.
Richard Eyre, Theatre director
In a small room at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, away from the gods and goddesses, sacred animals, pharaohs and their queens, there is a small wooden statue dating from 2700 BC of a plump, bald man, carrying a tall walking stick. It was found in 1860 by some men working for a French archaeologist, who christened him Sheikh el-Balad because he looked like their village chief. It was subsequently called The Village Mayor and The Schoolmaster of Boulac, but now it's thought to be a statue of Ka-aper, a priest in charge of reciting prayers for the dead. As the guidebook says, politely drawing attention to his near pot belly, he was a man "who clearly enjoyed his food".
In any context, in any century, it's impossible not to be drawn to this sculpture, partly on account of its startling realism, but more for its humanity: among the colossal, formalist monuments, masks of mummies and memento mori, it's a shock to encounter something that's so alive. So much so that apparently its feet were chained by those who had commissioned it to keep it from walking off.
To look at this sculpture is to encounter a vigorous, intelligent, thoughtful and accessible man over a distance of 5,000 years. With its irreducible humanity, its uncontrived charm and its unassertive brilliance, it's a great work of art. Could there be a (temporary) swap - the statue of Ka-aper for the Rosetta Stone?
Christopher Frayling, Rector, Royal College of Art
So many. There are the complete works of Johannes Vermeer - not many of them, only 35 have been firmly attributed, but they have never been gathered in this country before. Unpretentious, domestic in subject matter and with an astonishing clarity of light, they would encourage calm and quiet reflection, and we certainly need that at the moment. And how about the self-portraits of Rembrandt, all 90 of them, presented in chronological order - the finest, most acute and self-aware visual representation of ageing in art history.
After a year like this one, when ageing has been widely mocked by politicians and political journalists, this would be a timely reminder of the beauty of the older human face without the aid of reconstructive surgery.
Then there's Matthias Grünewald's great Isenheim altarpiece, painted between 1512 and 1516, with its fold-out panels showing the temptation and sufferings of St Anthony as well as scenes from the New Testament, and its central terrifying image of the crucifixion - the most physical treatment of this barbaric form of execution I've ever seen. Today, we tend to think of art in hospitals as a comforting, reassuring thing: Grünewald's altarpiece, on the other hand, was intended to remind sufferers from skin diseases that there was always someone worse off than themselves, and that we suffer in the hope of better things. How about bringing that to London?
Above all, I'd like to see the entire Alhambra Palace, built in the late middle ages, transported from the hills of southern Spain to a suitable high place in Britain: pavilions, gardens, fountains, walls like carpets and ceilings like waterfalls - all the key elements of Islamic art and design, which have coexisted with Christian art above the city of Granada for all those years, and still have lessons for us today.
Tony Hall, Chief executive, Royal Opera House
Every time I stand before Ambrogio Lorenzetti's frescoes showing "good" and "bad" government in the Palazzo Pubblico in Siena, I relish the thinking that put them there at the heart of Sienese civic life in the late 1330s. At that time, the city was governed by the "Nine", citizens elected by lot who held office for only two months. There was no more radical form of government in the whole of Italy. They met in a room frescoed by Lorenzetti, entering beneath the figure of Justice, alongside a languid, sensuous, blue-robed Goddess of Peace. On the left-hand wall is a panorama of a well-governed Siena. There's music and dancing in a piazza, a man reading in a bookshop, flowers, a birdcage, and cured hams hanging in a shop window, much as they do today. Outside the city, farmworkers look after well-tended fields, and a rather fine black and white pig is prodded to market. But, says Lorenzetti, if you Nine screw up, look at the other wall. There the devil presides over a wintry Siena of disharmony and unpleasantness. I like the idea that those who govern us should be constantly reminded of the consequences of their actions. So let's take the frescoes first to Westminster, Edinburgh, Cardiff and Belfast, then to town halls across the UK.
Nicholas Hytner, Director, National Theatre
I'd bring the entire Casa de Pilatos from Seville, with its gardens (and preferably its weather). It is probably the most beautiful townhouse in Europe, a wonderful melange of Moorish, classical and Gothic. I'm a sucker for the kind of house that invites you to imagine the lives that have passed in it. Andalucian houses demand an imagination that extends well beyond the European norm, and this one's the best.
Mark Jones, Director, Victoria & Albert Museum
It is quite impractical, of course, but the object I would most like to see here is The Well of Moses by Claus Sluter. Dating from 1395-1405, this is the greatest work of one of Europe's greatest sculptors; remarkable for its formal, expressive and spiritual power. Yet its position, in the remains of a Carthusian monastery now surrounded by a large psychiatric hospital on the outskirts of Dijon, means that it is still little known. If we could show it alongside the Limbourg brothers' Belles Heures du Duc de Berry and Van Eyck's Ghent altarpiece, the absurd but still widespread view that art was reinvented in Italy might finally be laid to rest.
Jude Kelly, Artistic director, Southbank Centre
I'd like to bring the controversial West Bank wall in Bethlehem, which has been painted by Banksy and 30 other artists, to be shown as a temporary installation in central London. The artists have painted the barrier around Bethlehem as part of a project called Santa's Ghetto
This area in Bethlehem has always had some of the best resistance graffiti, and I think it would be a shock if we were to encounter and understand the vast scale and nature of this apartheid canvas - currently 200 miles long, and planned to be 425 miles. The artists' graffiti allows us to understand the wall, which is considered illegal by the UN, as a vast installation for protest. Maybe we could erect the wall for a month as a powerful artistic statement, cutting off one half of central London from the other. It would force the kind of debate around freedom of expression, human rights and national security that Mark Wallinger's recent Turner prize-winning installation was also trying to provoke.
Nicholas Kenyon, Managing director, Barbican
This is an absurd and impossible dream, but there is no artwork I would rather bring here than the fifth-century mausoleum of Galla Placidia, a tiny and almost unbearably moving chapel in Ravenna. Around its ancient tomb, the richly varied mosaics are the finest in the western world, with a barrel-shaped vault of deep blue stars, the piercingly golden symbols of the four evangelists, the symbols of Christ as shepherd, surrounded by sheep and doves, and the fantastically contemporary graphic designs of the barrel vaulting. It would show that there are universal messages of beauty that span the ages, which range far beyond a single religious tradition. We could place its brilliance here in the classic modernist environment of the Barbican, or it could transform the Tate's turbine hall or sit within the landscape of the wonderful Yorkshire Sculpture Park. There might be more practical imports to our shores, but none more powerful.
John Leighton, Director general, National Galleries of Scotland
It is easy to fantasise about retrieving works of art that have been lost or destroyed, or which are in some way out of bounds. But here is a project that is still feasible, if immensely difficult to realise. Towards the end of his life, Vincent van Gogh made 13 pictures, all on the same size of canvas - 50cm by 100cm. The paintings are diverse in style and subject matter. They include the famous Wheatfield with Crows and the even more powerful Wheatfield beneath Thunderclouds, works that are often viewed as anticipating his suicide. The pictures are now scattered in public and private collections across the world. Yet I am convinced that Van Gogh intended these 13 works to be seen as an informal series, evoking the cycle of nature and his fascination with growth, death and renewal as expressed in subjects like the harvest and the working of the land. The fragile condition and the rigours of modern conservation probably make it impossible to borrow these works today. But if we could bring them together, we would see the painter at his best, using vivid colours, bold brushwork and flowing rhythms to evoke both joy and sadness, achieving an intensity of emotion that is rarely paralleled, even in Van Gogh's work.
Ken Livingstone, Mayor of London
Guernica depicts the atrocities of war on an innocent civilian population. This painting, created by Picasso for the Spanish Pavilion at the Paris International Exposition in 1937, expressed the artist's "abhorrence of the military caste which has sunk Spain in an ocean of pain and death".
The work represents the suffering and destruction caused by the bombing of the ancient Basque town of Guernica on April 26 1937, by the Nazi German air force in support of Franco's Nationalists during the Spanish civil war. It was the first major military attack on civilians executed from the air - unfortunately, the first of many. More than 1,500 people were killed and hundreds were injured.
This painting encapsulates a universal story - the destruction and horror of war. That horror has only increased as the technology of killing has advanced through the 20th and into the 21st century. In this, the 70th anniversary year of the destruction of Guernica, I would choose to bring Picasso's masterpiece to London, because its message is as relevant today as at the time it was created.
Grayson Perry, Artist
I would like to see a major exhibition of the work of Henry Darger come to Britain. We have sporadically seen a few of his paintings in the UK since his death in 1973, but never a good representation of this genius of outsider art. Like the finding of Tutankhamun's tomb or the Terracotta Army, the discovery of Darger's life's work is equally dramatic.
Luckily for us, Darger's landlord Nathan Lerner was a designer and photographer and recognised that he had found something extraordinary when he went to clear out the hospital janitor's room after his death.
What he discovered was a complex metaphor for the interior life of a traumatised man - huge volumes of double-sided paintings and collages up to 12-feet long that illustrate his 19,000-page novel, The Realms of the Unreal. They chronicle the adventures of his heroines, the Vivian Girls, who led the child slave rebellion. Disturbing, beautiful, funny and surprisingly sophisticated, these are masterpieces from outside of the art world and a chronicle of survival. As well as his paintings, I would love to see a recreation of his room in Chicago, with its piles of clippings, comic books and Catholic mementoes, along with the desk and chair where he worked and slept his whole adult life.
Charles Saumarez Smith, Secretary and chief executive, Royal Academy
There are two groups of works that it would be wonderful to see together: the first is the two versions of Leonardo's Virgin of the Rocks, one in the National Gallery and the other in the Louvre; and the other is the three versions by Uccello of The Battle of San Romagno, one in the National Gallery, one in the Louvre and the third in the Uffizi. It would be wonderful, but probably will never happen.
Simon Schama, Art historian
As magic carpet jobs go, this one can't be too hard: three from Vienna, one each from Prague and New York; the surviving five of six calendrical scenes Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted for the Antwerp merchant Niclaes Jonghelinck in 1565. Put them together in a smallish room and what you get is not just a rural round of the seasons from deep snow to lush harvest, but an entire picture of the human condition. The whole world is cobbled together here in miniature, as if Bruegel were its Creator surveying from a magisterial height.
In The Dark Day, the landscape stretches from snowcapped alpine peaks to the thatched roofs of a Flemish village; a southern sea is warming at the horizon. Nothing about the cycle is sentimentally rustic. God-like Bruegel summons the elements to test human mettle: the slicing cold of deep winter through which the hunters push a path to get sustenance for their bodies, the ferocious February storm welling up in a dark sky, while wattle-cutters do what has to be done to get to pancakes and the spring. When the May breezes arrive in Haymakers, you register them on your body as the pannier-bearers walk springily along, their gait as musical as birdsong. Come the Wheat Harvest, backs are still bent, gleaning bums are stuck in the air, but the dominance has been reversed; toil in the background, but in front, the gorgeous plumpness of the world.
Amanda Sharp, Co-director, Frieze art fair
It would be great to see Jeff Koons's Puppy in Britain. The 45ft baroque topiary terrier is cute as a button, lolling on its haunches, waiting to be petted. Koons sees the piece as a spiritual work, joyous and pure. The sculpture was first presented during Documenta in 1992, independently of the exhibition in a small town 25 miles from Kassel. As an act of rebuttal, it effortlessly upstaged the grand exhibition. Puppy shows that great art can be a crowd-pleaser. It is possibly the most painterly sculpture ever made, and has been exhibited in New York at Rockefeller Center Plaza and in Sydney outside the Museum of Contemporary Art. It has a permanent home as the mascot outside the Guggenheim in Bilbao. I wish I could see it every day, or at least every summer. In nice weather, it takes on a different life as the plants bloom - it would look perfect in one of London's glorious parks.