The Other Woman

Director: Nick Cassavetes

Cast: Cameron Diaz, Leslie Mann, Kate Upton, Nicki Minaj

There are certain things that you invariably expect from a chick flick nowadays, you expect the main character to have fallen out of love with someone or have met someone new. You will expect that they main character will, of course, have a hilarious sidekick. There will be the guy that they fall in love with, who is just a bit of two-dimensional nasty guy who they should they never be with and then there will be the nice, patient guy who they are really supposed to be with, but they just haven't noticed that. Some funny things happen along the way, but all is well that ends well. That's the golden formula, stick with it and you will have a box office success.

Now, when we heard that the Other Woman was going to be helmed by Nick Cassavetes, he of The Notebook fame, we thought this was definitely heading in the direction of sentimental territory as well as being completely formulaic. With Cameron Diaz on board and the inclusion of Leslie Mann, who can become a little bit tiresome after two hours and a supermodel in the form of Kate Upton, it was easy to believe that this was going to be at the very least, quite humdrum and at the very extreme, pretty tiresome. Oh, how wrong we were.

The Other Woman begins with an introduction to Carly, played by Diaz, a woman in her late 30's who has begun dating a guy that she has "cleared the bench" for. With things getting a little more serious, she goes to his house to surprise him one evening, only to discover that her love interest, Mark (Nikolaj Coster-Waldau) is actually already married to the lovely Kate (Mann). Going back to the city, determined to move on, Carly receives an unexpected visit from the scorned wife and soon the pair develop a very strange friendship.

While the two beginning to bond over the fact that they have been screwed over by the same guy, they discover that Mark has yet another mistress in the form of the stunning Amber (Upton). When the trio combine over a mutual hate of Mark, they decide they are going to take revenge and not just any revenge, some pretty serious revenge, all the while letting Mark believe that they have no idea that the other women exist.

For all of the reasons listed above, you would be forgiven for thinking you were going to see something that has simply been done hundreds of times before but the Other Woman really works and that is mainly due to the charming cast. Yes, it's hard to believe that these three women in particular could completely win you over, but their friendship and some of the laughs along the way are so honest and at times, hilarious, that you can't help but be won over by them. Mann is just simply charming while Diaz is adorable, vulnerable and quite strong all at the same time. Upton doesn't really have much to do here but that really isn't the point of her role, unfortunately.

The script is actually pretty funny and some of the scenarios that Kate gets herself into are just completely understandable and quite easy to identify with. Despite the star power of Diaz, Mann is certainly the character that you will feel pain for and more than a little emotion, in fact, she is holding the entire film together.

This really isn't anything more than your typical chick flick, but it is most certainly a lot of fun. 

Transcendence

Director: Wally Pfister

Cast: Johnny Depp, Rebecca Hall, Paul Bettany, Kate Mara, Morgan Freeman, Cillian Murphy

If you haven’t heard of Wally Pfister, we really don’t know how exactly we can help with that. Pfister is one of the all-time great cinematographers and one of Christopher Nolan’s right hand men for most of his projects, working on the likes of Batman Begins, The Dark Knight and Inception among others. How beautiful you remember any of those films look is down to the work of this genius, Pfister was certainly in a league of his own when it came to cinematogrpahy, so much so that Nolan was devastated to see him leave and carve out a career for himself.

However, when the rumours began about Transcendence there were more than a few eager beavers excited about this particular project. Going head to head with Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar this year, Transcendence was setting itself up as one of the biggest films of this year. With a budget of $100 million and with the vision that is Pfister, surely we were in for a cinematic treat. Nolan can rest easy, that was never meant to be.

Starring Johnny Depp as Doctor Will Caster, the film tells the story of a brilliant visionary who is working on technology that is self-aware with the view of curing illnesses and generally making the world a better place. While his wife Evelyn (Rebecca Hall) wants to fix things, Caster just wants to understand how things work. However, not everyone is as excited about the ideas that Caster holds for the future and a group that want to stop the technology takeover decide they are going to take out the problem.

With Caster slowly dying, his two fellow researchers, Evelyn and Max (Paul Bettany) decide they are going to help him complete his life work and give him the ability to “transcend”, basically copying his memories and mind to a computer which will operate by itself, keeping not only Caster’s brain alive but his life’s work. But not everything is as straightforward as it seems. Although the pair do their best to keep control over Caster, the computer begins operating independently, recruiting soldiers to its cause and slowly becoming far more of a problem than they ever could have imagined.

Yes, all of the above sounds intriguing and during these times with our over-dependence on technology, it is certainly more than topical, but Transcendence‘s main problem is that the main idea exists and that is all. Much like the computer operating system it depicts, it spins out of control, becoming increasingly more nonsensical the further into the running time we go. The actors utter lines that we can only assume they were embarrassed to read aloud. Cillian Murphy suffers this on not one, but two occasions.

The cast as a whole try to make the most of a bad situation but there is no denying that Johnny Depp’s career certainly needs some kind of resuscitation, perhaps a career kick he thought he might get with this particular project. Sadly, that is just not the case. Depp barely figures himself for most of the film, he exists mainly as the machine. The rest of the cast are fine, but just that, fine. Hall has proved on many an occasion that she is worth far more than a project like this while Bettany just looks like he may never get a break again.

Besides the bad points, of which there are many, in fact you may begin to wonder why you ever bought the cinema ticket, there is one plus; the film looks beautiful, even the machine takeover towards the end somehow looks kind of inviting, almost like a really nice hospital. However, you are not paying good money to admire how good a film looks.

Don’t waste your money, this is just a mess. A mess.