“Ocean’s Eleven” has met its match and it arrives in theaters featuring a machine-gun wielding Helen Mirren. Many viewers enjoyed the 2001 remake of “Ocean’s Eleven” with its well-known cast and entertaining premise. The remake wasn’t trying to be much more than a good time at the multiplex and it largely succeeded in reaching that goal. “Red,” which features a higher caliber cast than “Eleven,” replicates the “Ocean’s Eleven” formula and does so in a commendable fashion.

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While “Ocean’s Eleven” featured more exciting actors like Brad Pitt, Matt Damon and George Clooney, “Red” has a stronger and more well-respected cast. It features iconic actors like Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, and Helen Mirren. Both “Ocean’s” and “Red” were far-fetched and over the top, but each movie overcame its shortcomings with its cast.

“Red” opens on Frank (Bruce Willis), a retired and lonely man who receives his pension check in the mail. He’s trying to maintain a relationship with an employee at the pension office named Sarah (Mary-Louise Parker). Once he receives his check, he immediately destroys it and then calls her to say that it never arrived. Frank eventually wants to meet Sarah but she’s nervous about such an encounter. However, meeting her becomes a necessity when a team of assassins targets Frank for elimination. When their plan fails, Frank is forced to kidnap Sarah to protect her from any danger she may be in. (Frank has spent so much time on the phone with Sarah that he fears she might used as a way to get to him.) (more…)

Everyone wants to enjoy their retirement, whether they’re noble people like a schoolteacher or a fireman, or as ruthlessly coldblooded as a black ops agent or Hillary Clinton. But some professions don’t lend themselves easily to kicking back on a fishing boat or rocking on the front porch – a fact that Bruce Willis learns the hard way in the very amusing new action-comedy “RED.”

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Willis plays Frank Moses, a former CIA analyst who was secretly the nation’s most kickass black ops agent. His need for secrecy throughout his professional career has left him with no friends and no one with whom to keep the home fires burning. But he does have a long-distance telephone flirtation with the government payroll clerk (Mary-Louise Parker) who handles his pension check, and when an army of machine-gun-toting killers comes to wipe him out at his placid suburban home, he hits the road to kidnap her by surprise.

The reason is that whoever is out to kill him is likely gunning for her as well, an assumption that proves true almost immediately and forces the pair to further hopscotch the country as Willis rounds up his three closest former RED (Retired, Extremely Dangerous) associates – a crack trio of eccentric agents played with complete joy by Morgan Freeman, Helen Mirren and especially a priceless John Malkovich – to figure out why someone’s out to kill them, and who’s behind the list of a dozen deaths that are being dispatched in quick fashion by agents led by Julian McMahon. (more…)

In what is becoming an annual rite of self-destruction, Broadway has once again chosen to snub many of the big-name stars who have put their film careers on hold to trudge onto the boards eight times a week, take a significant pay cut, and run the risk of being ridiculed for being unable to cut the mustard as a theatre actor  (As Alan Swan famously said before having to appear on live television in “My Favorite Year”:  ‘I’m not an actor, damn you, I’m a movie star!’).  This week’s announcement of nominees for Broadway’s top prize, the Tony Award, was more newsworthy for the names left off the list than for the relatively unfamiliar names singled out for the honor. 

Nathan Lane and John Goodman are selling tickets hand over fist for their revival of “Waiting for Godot” but neither received the honor of a nomination.  Same with David Hyde Pierce, Frank Langella, Mary Louise Parker and Matthew Broderick. 

It was no surprise that Jeremy Piven was included out of the Best Actor category after his famous sushi defense for missing performances in David Mamet’s “Speed-the-Plow,” but not honoring John Lithgow’s brilliant turn in “All My Sons” in the same category is a crime against humanity!  It ranks up there with the snub of Dustin Hoffman as Willy Loman in the 1984 revival of “Death of a Salesman.” Brian Dennehy was honored with the Best Actor award when he did Willy Loman in 2000, but that goodwill did not anoint him worthy of a nomination this year for his turn in “Desire Under the Elms.”  (more…)