The opening night film at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival has always been a walk-away; generally an under-cooked indie with no distribution and little shot at getting into general theaters. So why kick a film when it’s down? There’s not a lot of value in heaping negative criticism on a new filmmaker who will likely go on to bigger and better things with more experience. That said, the 27th year of Santa Barbara’s festival brought a heavyweight opening night player in writer/director/producer Lawrence Kasdan, and his Sony Pictures Classics distributed Darling Companion. Basically, fair game. Darling Companion is the story of Beth Winters (Diane Keaton), her spine surgeon husband Joseph (Kevin Kline), and the dog that  brings them together. Or at least, it tries to be about them while clumsily pulling viewers into unnecessary side stories that aren’t particularly interesting. The film suffers on every level, but prominent among its faults is an odd pace that steals away any reason to invest in any of the characters, the spotty narrative, or the wholly expected and unsatisfying ending.

Justin Zackham, the director writer of The Bucket List, has a new indie comedy in the works that already boasts a pretty impressive cast. Gently Down the Stream will star Robert De Niro and Diane Keaton as a divorced couple who pretend that they are still married during their adopted sons wedding, in order to avoid offending his birth mother. Apparently she hates divorced people or something, even though giving a kid up for adoption is A-OK. I don’t know; I’m sure the movie will explain it better than I do. In addition to De Niro and Keaton, the film will also star two young, blonde actresses in Katherine Heigl and Amanda Seyfried. I find the inclusion of these two particular interesting because they are both good actresses who have done a string of really bad movies, and yet Heigl gets a really bad rap for her choices, but Seyfried’s haven’t seemed to have caught up with her yet. Perhaps the difference is that people really loved Seyfried in things like Mean Girls and Mama Mia! and nobody has really liked Heigl in anything since, uh, My Father the Hero? No, wait, she was the niece in Under Siege 2. That movie totally owned. Regardless, I have a weird thing where I will see pretty much everything that Seyfried is in, no matter how bad it looks, but whenever I hear Heigl’s name I always groan. It will be interesting to hear how people respond to the news of this [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

This week, Fat Guy Kevin Carr is like a runaway train filled with toxic chemicals. He could derail and explode at any moment. And it’s a good thing Tony Scott isn’t making a movie of his life because there aren’t enough whip pans and helicopter shots to capture his awesomeness. While he raps Scott’s knuckles with a railroad tie, he also gets giddy over the beautiful Rachel McAdams and gives some props to the Brothers Strause for the effects in Skyline. And then he explodes, and all the toxic chemicals threaten to wipe out a small town in Pennsylvania.

The inner workings of the media have not been depicted onscreen with the incisiveness of Morning Glory in years. Twenty-three of them to be exact, since James L. Brooks released his seminal Broadcast News, the ensemble comedy that convincingly revealed the behind-the-scenes machinations and romantic triangles at an evening news program. Roger Michell’s film is the 2010 morning show set answer to Brooks’ work. Above all, it trades in two fundamental truths: the media has gotten dumber and even more filled with personalities slavishly devoted to a fast-paced, go-getter, plugged-in workaholic lifestyle. Fundamentally ensconced in the longstanding tradition of screwball boardroom comedies, Morning Glory is nonetheless attuned to the way we get our information and to the pressures of a society placing an increasingly sharp emphasis on networking and fraternization — superficiality over substance.

It may have something to do with the fact that I’ve recently watched both Knocked Up and a marathon of How I Met Your Mother, but everything feels like it revolves around struggling broadcast journalists and/or producers these days. Local television morning show producer is the new executive assistant.

There were a lot of bad movies released during the past decade. That’s not anything that distinguishes the aughts from any other decade before it, but then most of these movies were bad in the usual, torturous ways.

Josh Radde gets thrown for a loop by some wayward inter-office correspondence, then quickly realizes that Michael Keaton and Diane Keaton are not the same person. The point is, one of the two are starring in a new movie with Jeff Goldblum and Harrison Ford.