Up and Coming Weekly is a weekly publication in Fayetteville, NC and Fort Bragg, NC area offering local news, views, arts, entertainment and community event and business information.
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Derivative and Predictable Unknown (Rated PG-13) by HEATHER GRIFFITHS Unknown (113 minutes) is an entertaining drive through the spy genre even if the plot holes are big enough to drive a finely made German taxicab through. This particular version of a well-tread story is based on a French novel, but Director Jaume Collet-Serra doesn’t do a whole lot to distinguish his ma- terial from any other mysterious man films. Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) and his daughter Elizabeth (January Jones) arrive in Berlin for a biotechnol- ogy summit. He gets a little handsy with her during the taxi ride over, which might explain her overall shirtiness when dealing with the hotel staff. That’s no way to love your daughter, Dr. Harris! While his daughter checks them into a fancy suite, he real- izes he left his briefcase with all his secret spy papers and es- pionage stuff at the airport so he runs to get it. He ends up in Gina’s (Diane Kruger) cab, and then Gina’s cab ends up in the river. In the first of many, “Gosh, should I save him? Yes, Yes I will save him” moments, Gina pulls an unconscious Harris from the river, and he is taken to a hospital. During his coma he has many inappropriate flashbacks about his daughter — whoops, my bad, apparently that’s his trophy wife — and then wakes up to find that he has been in a coma. Since patients recently woken from a coma with no identification or any way of proving who they are get to do whatever they want in German hospitals, he checks himself out. He manages to get back to the hotel he left from only to find another man macking on his wife and claiming to be Dr. Martin Harris (Aiden Quinn). Since secret agents have absolutely no survival instincts to draw on when they find themselves in bizarre situations, the man with no proof of his identity proceeds to raise a ruckus and draw lots of attention to himself. When that doesn’t work in his favor, he gathers his wits and tricks hotel security into getting him a cab back to Game On Nerds battle for supremacy in Best Player TV by DEAN ROBBINS You will be tempted to bypass Best Player (Saturday, 8 p.m.) because it is a kids’ movie on Nickelodeon. Do not, I repeat do not, make this mistake. The tale of an overgrown videogame champion (Jerry Trainor) attempting to under- cut his embarrassingly young and female rival (Jennette McCurdy) is one of the funniest things I’ve seen on TV this season. It features expert farce, a pitch-perfect satire of the gaming world, and a deliciously awkward romance. The latter includes such classic lines as: “I love her so much I could barf my heart out.” Trainor’s Quincy is a twentysomething slacker who still lives with his parents, conquering the videogame world in their basement. Then comes McCurdy’s Chris, a high school girl with the skills to beat him in a high-stakes tournament. Quincy decides to subvert Chris by dating her beautiful mom, then impersonating her home-economics teacher, then hooking her up with the school nerd — and believe it or not, each of these developments makes sense in the movie’s absurd universe. In his Keanu Reeves haircut, Trainor puts over the gags with rubber-faced genius, creating the world’s most likeably clueless manchild. “Teaching is exhausting,” he says of his home-ec gig. “You have to know things, which is very difficult for me.” I love Best Player so much I could barf my heart out. Women in Science Sunday, 8 pm (Smithsonian Channel) Watching a series like Women in Science reminds you that, contrary to what you normally see on TV, not all women are sex objects, airheads or biggest losers. Even when TV shows do present a smart professional woman, they usually have to dress her in miniskirts and stiletto heels (see the new Fairly Legal) or make her WWW.UPANDCOMINGWEEKLY.COM a clown (see the new Harry’s Law). By contrast, Women in Science offers a rare portrayal of real women doing important work. Glamour is re- freshingly irrelevant to this week’s subject, Dr. Jo Gayle Howard, who has pioneered a method for saving endangered species through an artifi- cial insemination technique. A relatively small number of people will see the series on the low-profile Smithsonian Channel, but maybe that’s for the best. If it ran on a more popular cable channel, Dr. Howard would need to be portrayed by Heather Locklear in a tight blouse and fishnet stockings. Breakout Kings Sunday, 10 pm (A&E) Fox reportedly had a shot at this cop series and passed, consigning it to cable. That’s hard to imagine, since Breakout Kings is one of the best new series in re- cent memory. It’s based on the premise that everybody deserves a second chance. A U.S. marshal creates a special task force to catch escaped convicts, consisting of a disgraced cop and three colorful prisoners who know a little something about jailbreaks themselves. For every fugitive they catch, the prisoners get a month knocked off their sentences. That might not be the world’s most original premise, but the execution is flawless, with brilliant writing and acting. The tone is generally droll, but there’s also plenty of excitement as the team pursues its runners. Car chases, gun battles, wisecracks, con games, sex — for once, all those elements combine into a com- pelling package. Whoever passed on Breakout Kings at Fox should be fired immediately. Everybody deserves a second chance except that chump. MARCH 9-15, 2011 UCW 21 the hospital, then tricks the cabdriver into letting him out imme- diately. Very tricky, this guy. He draws on the apparently limitless funds he was carrying (while leaving all his important paperwork in a briefcase that he totally left at the airport) to blunder around Berlin for most of a day, never thinking to check in at the embassy. Because of the conspiracy? Or something? Eventually he decides that he is, in fact, as crazy as all the conspirators keep telling him he is, so he heads back to the hospital and stays safely out of the way until the end of the movie. Just kidding! A dude totally kills like, a mil- lion important people, and tries to assassinate him thus revealing that all is not as it seems. Duh. All in all, it’s not an awful movie. Why the three stars? Well, when 58-year-old January Jones (or Kruger, for that matter) gets to run around with a 33-year- old James Franco, then we’ll start talking about an extra star. I would LOVE to provide a simpler example … but the male actors who are 25 years younger than January Jones are all currently starring on the Suite Life of Zack and Cody. So the only film where they work as romantic leads is the Lifetime Movie Network’s The Mary Kay Letourneau Story. And I don’t think January Jones has the chops for that. Because she can’t act. And while we’re on the subject, Maggie Grace, who played Neeson’s daughter in Taken is only five years younger than January Jones. Yeah. Think about that. Wow. What a shame that busting on Unknown is so easy … it’s really not such a bad little movie. True, Liam Neeson has pretty much played out his “man with certain skills” range, but that doesn’t make it any less enjoyable to watch him drive around crashing into things. HEATHER GRIFFITHS, Contributing Writer COMMENTS? 484-6200 ext. 222 or editor@upandcomingweekly.com