Jennifer Lopez

Hustlers

  • Title: Hustlers
  • IMDb: link

Hustlers movie review“Stripper movie” isn’t a term that often imbues a viewer with confidence. That said, the true story adapted for film by writer/director Lorene Scafaria (Seeking a Friend for the End of the World) exceeded my expectations. While not great, Hustlers is solidly entertaining and far from the fiasco of Showgirls.

Set in the early 2000s, the film focuses on a struggling stripper’s (Constance Wu) friendship with the club’s main attraction, Ramona (Jennifer Lopez). Taking the newbie under her wing, Ramona helps Destiny (Wu) earn enough money to keep her grandmother’s house and pay for several high-end shopping trips. The script offers some insight into a stripper’s mentality towards her clients (as Destiny learns to bilk them of as much money as possible).

Stradding the 2008 Wall Street crash, the film shows us the glory days of high-price clients for Ramona and Destiny and the slim pickings just a few years later where the pair, and a couple of new girls (Keke Palmer and Lili Reinhart) step-up their game from maximimizing a drunk client’s spend to actually drugging them and maxing out their credit cards.

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Romantic Comedy Triple Feature

  • Title: Fools Rush In, The Wedding Planner, Made of Honor
  • IMDb: link, link, link

Fools Rush In / The Wedding Planner / Made of HonorThis Romantic Comedy Triple Feature collects three relatively recent romantic comedies in one set which is perfect if you need to torture your boyfriend but not much good for anything else.

Made of Honor is a pretty bland reversal of My Best Friend’s Wedding with Patrick Dempsey discovering he has romantic feelings for his best friend (Michelle Monaghan) after she asks him to be the maid of honor at her wedding. Read the full review.

The Wedding Planner isn’t that much better starring Jennifer Lopez as a wedding planner who falls for the one of her clients (Matthew McConaughey) and ruins his impeding wedding to his fiance (Bridgette Wilson-Sampras). Home-wrecking has never been so sickly sweet.

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Home

  • Title: Home (2015)
  • IMDb: link

HomeAlien occupation has never been so cute. Based on the children’s book The True Meaning of Smekday by Adam Rex, Home begins with the invasion of Earth by an alien race known as the Boov who relocate the entire world’s population to suburban-style camps while taking the rest of the planet for their own.

Oh (Jim Parsons) is a likable screw-up who finds himself on the run from his own people when he accidentally discloses the location of their new home to the alien race which has been pursuing the Boov across the galaxy. After encountering another fugitive in a human girl named Gratuity “Tip” Tucci (Rihanna) the two, along with Tip’s cat Pig, are thrown together as Oh agrees to help Tip find her mother Lucy (Jennifer Lopez) while learning there’s far more to the planet and its complicated people than the Boov’s buffoonish leader Captain Smek (Steve Martin) believes. Despite the number of humans and Boov shown on screen, Home has a tiny cast list. Other than Oh and Smek the only Boov who gets any lines is traffic cop Kyle (Matt Jones), who Oh mistakenly believes is his best-friend and who is sent to track Oh down after his latest mistake.

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Parker

  • Title: Parker
  • IMDB: link

ParkerJason Statham stars as Donald Westlake‘s Parker, a career criminal and anti-hero who keeps to his own code and often, as in this case of this adaptation of Westlake’s novel Flashfire, has to fight for what’s owed him after being double-crossed on the latest score. Statham isn’t the first actor to portray Westlake’s character (Lee Marvin, Jim Brown, Robert Duvall, Peter Coyote, Mel Gibson all played character over the years), but Parker is the first where the title character keeps the name.

The movie begins with a heist of $1,000,000 from an Ohio State Fair by Parker and a group of thieves (Michael ChiklisWendell PierceClifton Collins Jr.Micah A. Hauptman) he has never worked with before who take his cut from the job and leave him for dead on the side of the road. The rest of the film revolves around Parker following the group to Palm Beach and shadowing their latest score with the help of a local Realtor (Jennifer Lopez) before finally taking his revenge.

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