Gary (Vince Vaughn) and Brooke (Jennifer Aniston) first meet at a Cubs game, where he bullishly sweet-talks her away from her date, a cipher in plaid shorts and a visor. Then, after a montage of snuggly still photographs — the only images in The Break-Up that demonstrate anything like chemistry between its two stars — they stumble into a fight that detonates their two-year-old relationship. Unmarried cohabitants and joint owners of a yuppie-elegant Chicago condo, Brooke and Gary engage in a desultory modern version of the high-spirited sexual combat that fueled the classic comedies of remarriage of the 1930s and 1940s. But the stakes are low, the script (by Jeremy Garelick and Jay Lavender) strains hard after a few easy jokes, and the whole movie feels dull and trivial.
To its credit, The Break-Up, directed by Peyton Reed (Bring It On, Down With Love), is not entirely predictable. In defying some of the rigid conventions of its genre, it shows some admirable pluck and wit, but these would be more appreciated if the principal characters were worth caring about or if we could believe for a moment that they cared for each other.
Each is given a job, a family and a few defining character traits. Brooke, with Ann-Margret as her briefly glimpsed mother and John Michael Higgins as her sexually ambiguous brother, manages an art gallery; Gary, from meaty Polish stock, works with his two brothers (Cole Hauser and Vincent D'Onofrio) running bus tours of the city. He's a slob; she's a perfectionist. He likes baseball; she prefers ballet. And so on.
PHOTO COURTESY FO UIP
The communication problems that wreck their unlikely (and in any case unseen) domestic bliss are strictly Mars-and-Venus, Oscar-and-Felix boilerplate. The arguments Brooke and Gary have, whether about household routines or about feelings, sound more like fumbling PowerPoint summaries of conversations than like real human speech. Reed rarely places Aniston and Vaughn in the same frame, preferring to cut tediously from one to the other. Perhaps this is meant to emphasize the rift between the former lovers, but it often makes it seem as if they are in two different movies, neither one very interesting.
Occasionally, a comic spark will issue from one of the stars, who fall back on the tried-and-true sources of their appeal. Aniston will punctuate a scene with a self-approving tilt of her head and a twitch of her adorable nose; Vaughn will talk fast and throw his bulk around, and you may smile in spite of yourself.
More frequently, what comic delight there is comes from the supporting cast: Jon Favreau as Gary's obligatory doofus buddy; D'Onofrio as his weirdly fastidious brother; Judy Davis as Brooke's vamping boss; and Jason Bateman as their friend and real estate agent in one note-perfect scene. Their efforts, unfortunately, are not enough to make The Break-Up memorable, or anything more than mediocre.
In late October of 1873 the government of Japan decided against sending a military expedition to Korea to force that nation to open trade relations. Across the government supporters of the expedition resigned immediately. The spectacle of revolt by disaffected samurai began to loom over Japanese politics. In January of 1874 disaffected samurai attacked a senior minister in Tokyo. A month later, a group of pro-Korea expedition and anti-foreign elements from Saga prefecture in Kyushu revolted, driven in part by high food prices stemming from poor harvests. Their leader, according to Edward Drea’s classic Japan’s Imperial Army, was a samurai
The following three paragraphs are just some of what the local Chinese-language press is reporting on breathlessly and following every twist and turn with the eagerness of a soap opera fan. For many English-language readers, it probably comes across as incomprehensibly opaque, so bear with me briefly dear reader: To the surprise of many, former pop singer and Democratic Progressive Party (DPP) ex-lawmaker Yu Tien (余天) of the Taiwan Normal Country Promotion Association (TNCPA) at the last minute dropped out of the running for committee chair of the DPP’s New Taipei City chapter, paving the way for DPP legislator Su
It’s hard to know where to begin with Mark Tovell’s Taiwan: Roads Above the Clouds. Having published a travelogue myself, as well as having contributed to several guidebooks, at first glance Tovell’s book appears to inhabit a middle ground — the kind of hard-to-sell nowheresville publishers detest. Leaf through the pages and you’ll find them suffuse with the purple prose best associated with travel literature: “When the sun is low on a warm, clear morning, and with the heat already rising, we stand at the riverside bike path leading south from Sanxia’s old cobble streets.” Hardly the stuff of your
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