I can’t wait to see this movie because it’s funny, delightful, heartwarming and a pleasant change of venue. Plus, I enjoy this trailer. Do I like Larry Crowne? Yes, I do.

Directed by Tom Hanks, it’s a contemporary tale about a guy named Larry Crowne (Hanks). Until he was downsized, affable, amiable Larry Crowne was a superstar team leader at the big-box company where he worked since his time in the Navy.

Behind on his mortgage and unclear on what to do with his suddenly free days, Larry heads to his local college to start over. There he becomes part of a colorful community of outcasts, who are trying to find a better future for them while sharing their interests in scooters.

In his public-speaking class, Larry develops an unexpected crush on his teacher Mercedes Tainot Julia Roberts), who has lost as much passion for teaching as she has for her husband.

The simple guy who has every reason to think his life has stalled will come to learn an unexpected lesson: when you think everything worth having has passed you by, you just might discover your reason to live.

Here is an interesting story, When Harry Tries to Marry, a romantic comedy directed by Nayan Padrai. The movie includes Rahul Raj, Freishia Bomanbehram and Stefanie Estes. From what I see of the trailer, it looks cute and kind of funny as a refreshing take on a guy marrying the wrong girl.

The story is a cross-cultural romantic comedy about a young Indian-born bachelor who lives in New York City. Harry’s handsome and charming, but he’s cynical about love. He’s never really gotten over his parents’ divorce — they were a modern Indian couple who married for love and it didn’t last.

So to improve his odds of living “happily ever after,” Harry decides to have an arranged marriage, and asks his uncle back home in India to assist him in arranging the introduction to an appropriate Indian woman.

Harry’s parents and friends aren’t too happy to say the least. To make the story even more interesting, Harry finds the perfect girl and embarks on a long-distance courtship. But unexpectedly, Harry’s friendship with Theresa, a fun and sexy American student, becomes confusing, appealing — and maybe a little bit romantic.

The movie has a limited release opening in select theaters on April 22, 2011.

The day of celebrating Ireland, St. Patrick’s Day, hits pubs around the world this week (March 17th to be exact). Cinematic representations of the Emerald Isle range dramatically, from the desperately twee (The Quiet Man, Leap Year), to the noble yet gritty (The General, Once). But there’s more to Ireland than just films about the country. One of the many tricks of film-making is portraying a place without having to film in it. This is especially common with films based in mythical lands or in busy cities. Lately Ireland has become incredibly attractive for large-scale productions due to its apt facilities and tempting tax breaks. So to honour the day of getting notoriously drunk, here’s a list of famous films that you didn’t know were filmed in Ireland.

Saving Private Ryan
Steven Spielberg’s award-winning epic story needs no introduction. Set in WWII France, it commences with one of the most memorable sequences in cinema’s history: the invasion of US forces on Omaha Beach (watch it here). The sequence, shot in a handheld style, is brutal, exposing the audience to the horrors of surrounding enemies with bullets flying everywhere. For 30 minutes it takes us deep into the battle and the harrowing world of soldiers under fire.

The entire sequence was filmed in Ireland. For two months Ballinesker Beach in County Wexford was occupied by hundreds of cast and crew. Amongst the 2500 extras (many provided by the Irish Defence Force) were real amputees were hired to realistically portray the loss of limbs from explosions.

The Princess Bride
A cult classic that probably has more fans now that when it came out in cinemas, the Princess Bride marked the peak of 80’s fantasy films. In the film a faithful farmhand strives to rescue the virtuous Princess Buttercup. Rob Reiner’s US studio production was filmed in the UK and Ireland due to the extensive and lush green expanses of both nations. One of the film’s most exciting scenes takes place on top of the Cliffs of Insanity, where the masked man (the farmhand in disguise), fights a bunch of bandits to rescue Buttercup. The Cliffs of Insanity actually exist, but are known as Ireland’s Cliffs of Moher, situated in County Clare in the west of the country. The 700 foot-high, 8 kilometre wide cliffs are one of Ireland’s primary tourist attractions, and are vying for one of the Seven New Wonders of Nature. The Princess Bride also supposedly filmed in the nearby Burren, a barren 250 km-squared stone expanse.

The cliffs also appeared in David Lean’s epic Ryan’s Daughter, and in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince.

Braveheart
Another Oscar-Winner, Mel Gibson directed and acted in this story of Scotland’s conflict with their oppressors England. The film was noted for its savage battle scenes and for William Wallace’s (Gibson) cries for “freedom”, and also it’s fabrications of real events. And it’s not just the film that was rife with inaccuracies, but also its locations. While some of the earlier scenes were filmed in Scotland and northern England, it was Ireland where most of the film’s outdoor locations were filmed.

The Battle of Stirling Bridge (where Wallace makes his big pre-battle speech) was filmed in the vast Curragh Plains in County Kildare. Hundreds of members of the Irish Army Reserve were used for the sequence, and they doubled up to portray both sides as they rush to clash. See a clip here.Many of the battles scenes of King Arthur also used this location.

The Curragh Plains wasn’t the only Irish location Gibson filmed on. Trim Castle was used for the York Castle, which Wallace storms early in the film, as well as for the King of England’s courtyard. Close to Trim lies the ruins of Bective Abbey, where several scenes set in the King’s castle were shot. Westminister Abbey was recreated in Dunsaney Castle. And the castle grounds of Robert the Bruce, where Wallace is betrayed and ambushed, were filmed in county Dublin’s private Dunsoghly Castle. READ ON »

The Warner Archive Collection sent me a copy of Finishing School starring Ginger Rogers as a celebration of her Centennial Birthday.

Finishing School is available for the first time on DVD only from Warner Archives .

The story is a parody on the snobs of society being two-faced. The rules at a finishing school are no smoking, no drinking and no lipstick. As long as you don’t get caught, then you are proper girl and will not disgrace your family name. However, pretty Virginia Radcliffe (Frances Dee) earnestly accepts the strict rules enforced by exclusive Crockett Hall.

But her roommate Pony Ferris (Ginger Rogers) suggest have a smoke, have a drink and have a wild weekend in New York, suggests her roommate Pony Ferris. The rules have nothing to do with the girls’ welfare and everything to do with the school’s reputation.

But, I must admit Rogers is adorable and confident as the third-billed actress, giving pretense a swift kick in the comedy keister as she plays the role of mother-hen to her classmates through a booze-and-bad-boy Manhattan fling. The frank pre-Code storyline even allows innocent Virginia to wind up pregnant…and unpunished. Although the movie never says she is pregnant, they didn’t say such things in movies back then, the story sure did give a big enough hint.

Directed by Wanda Tuchock, Billie Burke (The Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz) and Bruce Cabot are wonderful as supporting actors.

Interesting featurette that tries to explain the movie and its premise of astrophysics and time travel.  I am nowhere near their brain waves.  I just want to watch a great movie that entertains me for a couple of hours.  Source Code seems to be that type of movie.

The movie is directed by Duncan Jones and has a great cast, including Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright.

The story is about a decorated soldier Captain Colter Stevens. He wakes up in the body of an unknown man. He discovers he’s part of a mission to find the bomber of a Chicago commuter train. He learns he’s part of a government experiment called the “Source Code.” The Source Code is a program that enables him to cross over into another man’s identity in the last 8 minutes of his life.

Colter relives the incident over and over again, gathering clues each time, until he can solve the mystery of who is behind the bombs and prevent the next attack.

The movie opens in theaters on April 1, 2011.

All right, folks, today we’re going to get just a little bit lit’ry with a dose of some Ernest Hemingway. The folks out at Lions Gate sent over a copy of Garden of Eden, and it’s going to be a profoundly weird ride.

Based on the Hemingway novel The Garden of Eden, Garden of Eden will take a young married couple, David, a writer, and his wealthy young wife Catherine on a honeymoon trip across Europe. But when they get there, what they’ll find waiting for them is a whole lot of temptation, and some particularly unpleasant mind games. And now, the two of them will struggle to keep their marriage–indeed, their very lives–in tact.

It’s hard to say much of anything about Garden of Eden–it moves very quickly, but to just where, it’s not easy to tell–and that makes it tough to tell just what’s going on.

Give them credit, though, and for more than one reason. For accuracy, when the newlyweds are sucking back absinthe at their hotel, they’re shown preparing it in the full tradition, complete with slotted silver spoon and sugar cube. For scenery, when they go to any of a variety of places, from the French Riviera to Madrid and beyond, they go to only the most iconic and downright impressive places. Oh, and for its sheer tolerance, too–there’s more booze in this movie than the entire last season of Mad Men. Seriously, these two make Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce look like an AA meeting.

But then, about midway through, the focus starts an odd shift between the real world and the world of the novel that the young husband is writing while he’s out on his honeymoon. It’s a strange sort of intermittence that’s really getting in the way of the overall coherence of the work–the switches are entirely too often, and frankly, the novel world really doesn’t help the plot development of the main story, so it’s basically extraneous.

It doesn’t help that Catherine’s nudging steadily closer to sheer insanity with every passing day. At first, she’s kind of this cheery, free-spirit type, but by the end, well, she’s gone purely over the edge into full-blown lunacy.

If you’re okay with a movie that doesn’t make a lot of sense, a movie that’s got a lot going on but precious little of it actually connected to any kind of rational thought process, which is probably a pretty good explanation of a honeymoon in general, as best I understand it.

The Screenhead Ten Scale, in turn, gives this massive ball of confusion and beauty a six out of ten for being bizarre but downright spectacular about it. It’s hard to scoff and dismiss a movie that’s clearly put so much into its own existence, but seriously, Garden of Eden is as impenetrable as the diamond center of a big ball of titanium.

No one will ever accuse Drive Angry of being a cerebral movie. It’s just not possible to do that. But it will be a lot of fun, with plenty of explosions, chases, and naked women to go around, often within minutes of each other. It’s true that Nic Cage movies are only good about every one time in three, but this will be one of the good ones.

Drive Angry follows John Milton (pretty much the closest thing we’re going to get to a literary reference here, the writer of Paradise Lost), a man who’s just broken out of hell in a bid to do three things: one, kill a cult leader, two, get revenge for his murdered daughter by killing the cult leader who, in turn, killed his daughter, and three, save his kidnapped granddaughter, who was kidnapped by the cult leader who killed his (Milton’s) daughter. All roads lead to this cult leader, Jonah King, who has apparently managed to find a way to bring hell to earth, a development that Satan is apparently not at all pleased with. But since the only thing he really cares about is getting Milton back in hell, Satan’s dispatched The Accountant, a demon with all the powers necessary to capture the militant escapee.

First off, this is indeed a good Nicholas Cage movie. It’s not going to be anything great, but it will keep you munching popcorn as happily as you might in summer. William Fichtner, however, steals the show as the coolly focused Accountant, because this reminds me so much of his earlier performance as a bichon frise toting detective in What’s The Worst That Could Happen?, a movie that shows what happens when you put a godawful hack like Martin Lawrence in the same room with the genius that is Danny DeVito.

Fellas, this is the time to cash in your date movie points for sitting through the godawful chick movie slop–this movie is pretty much stamped “GUY MOVIE” on every frame, especially considering that, within about the first half hour or so, Nic Cage will shoot about a dozen guys with a .45 handgun while holding a bottle of whiskey and simultaneously having sex with an attractive blonde waitress he had met only an hour before. And he does NOT take off his clothes for same.

That may well be the freakiest moment of the entire movie, until the Accountant goes driving through a cloud of police cars behind the wheel of a tanker truck of hydrogen. That will likely be freakier. No spoilers, of course, but it’s still something to see.

Okay, so it’s no one’s idea of Oscar territory. But it will be a wild, blood-dripping, gunfighting, hard-driving romp that will keep you entertained for a hundred odd minutes, and thus worth even your inflated 3D ticket prices.

The Screenhead Ten Scale gives this popcorn-muncher a seven out of ten–you’ll forget about it in a week or so, but you’ll love it while you’re there.

Tree of Life director, Terrence Malick, released a photo from his next top-secret film, which is featured in the current issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine.

The director’s Tree of Life opens on May 27, 2011, but Malick already has his next film in the can waiting for a release date. The untitled romantic movie includes Ben Affleck and Rachel McAdams. The film also features Javier Bardem and Olga Kurylenko.

Malick is very hush-hush about his next film, but this is a great shot of the wheat fields in the background with Affleck and McAdams in a somewhat romantic pose.

All right, Bollywood fans, pay attention, because the folks out at Image Entertainment sent over a copy of Kites for us to review for you, and this one’s going to be something for a lot of reasons. Not only will you get the original Bollywood production, but you’ll also get the “remix”, a version remade in the United States. And while you’ll have to make your own call which is better, the fact that you get both is no small point in this one’s favor.

Kites–either version, really–follows J, a hustler from Vegas who finds himself falling in love with Natasha (or Jay and Linda in the American version), a woman engaged to his soon to be brother in law. And yes, J’s engaged himself, and to the daughter of a powerful gambling magnate. J and Natasha find themselves getting together, and thus ending up on the run. And with the gambling boss’ legion of henchmen in hot pursuit, J and Natasha find themselves desperate for escape…and escape together. Can they survive the onslaught of terrors awaiting them? Or will they find themselves dead for the double shot of insult they’ve leveled against one of the most powerful men around?

You likely won’t be surprised to find there are plenty of differences between the original Bollywood version of Kites and its American response. Bollywood is really its own style, the kind of thing you generally can only love or hate. Interestingly, this is also the best way to describe the American version.

This one is for the people who love romantic dramas, and only those people. No matter which version you actually go with, this thing is going to be romantic drama enough for most anyone. In fact, it’s even fairly appealing for those who don’t like romantic drama. This thing is romantic drama excelsior. Naturally, the American version is carrying what I’d call a bit more action to it (largely owing to its compressed nature; the original runs just over two hours, and the “remix” dumps a half hour from that), but still, either is going to be pretty heavy on the romantic drama.

Date movie? I’d say so. And guys, it won’t even be unbearable, and that’s good enough for many. And keep watching through the end, because there will be some last minute surprises worth watching on this one.

The Screenhead Ten Scale manages to surprise itself and gives the ultra-niche Kites and its accompanying remix a seven out of ten. This is romantic drama at its most pronounced, folks, but you’ll still do all right here, even if it’s not a date night.