Kathmandu:

Oscar winning director Sam Mendes takes on the American sub-culture of being a marine and waiting and waiting and waiting for war to happen in the first Gulf escapade. Based on Gulf War veteran Anthony Swofford novel, with Jake Gyllehaal playing Swofford, the movie while being visually beautiful is not an action movie but is one about bonding between Gyllehaal, his sergeant Jamie Foxx, and his loyal, hardnosed sniper-scout partner Peter Sarsgaard.

Jarhead examines the building of camaraderie and in Swofford’s words how “every war is different. Every war is the same”. To quote critic Kit Bowen, “Amid all the alpha male bonding, there are breathtaking shots of burning oilfields, oil-covered horses wandering the desert and sand.”

As writer Dan Vancini writes, “When the war does come, it moves too fast for Swofford’s sniper team, and the one chance they get at a kill — to do the one thing they’ve trained so hard and waited so long for — eludes them, leaving them to wonder what was the point of all they had endured.”

Director Curtis Hanson is also an Oscar-winner and he takes on a character driven comedy-drama In Her Shoes of which he says, “What I loved about the characters in Susannah Grant’s script was they were each struggling with issues of self image, who they were, yearning to be a better version of themselves, and they were each yearning for human connection and a sense of family. That, to me, is what life is about.”

As critic Jeff Shannon declares, “In Her Shoes just gets better and better as it goes along. The polar opposition of smart, plain-looking Philadelphia lawyer Rose (Cameron Diaz) and her sexy, illiterate, irresponsible sister Maggie (the always-excellent Toni Collette) is just the starting point.

In Her Shoes becomes a moving, richly developed character study that deals with painful loss, long-term guilt, negative self-image, and the discovery of a heretofore unknown grandmother named Ella (played with delicate nuance by Shirley MacLaine), whose re-entry into the sisters’ lives sets the stage for the well-earned emotions of a satisfying reconciliation. The movie’s all the more endearing for treating its male characters (played by Mark Feuerstein, Ken Howard, and Richard Burgi) with equal depth and sympathy, further enhancing a classy tearjerker that viewers of both genders can thoroughly enjoy.”

Must Love Dogs has my favourite sequence about a condom hunt that director Gary David Goldberg does with a finesse that is screechingly funny. The movie is about internet dating, dogs and family. It’s a warm fuzzy film that showcases the talents of Diane Lane who is paired of with the always excellent John Cusack.

Says Lane, “I like the theme of how it seems, to women, anyway, that there are so many more of us than there are available, appropriate men. There are a whole lot of people who rely on dating services, and the Internet being what it is, it’s a story that a lot of people can relate to.”

And John Cusack sees himself as, “The character I play sort of thinks as he speaks. He doesn’t have the best edit mechanism, usually, so he sort of gets off to a rocky start, as these things usually do in a romantic movie, because otherwise people would get together in the first act.”

None of three films is more than a divertissement but still in all they are worth a watch.