Just the Ticket

 Article by Sean Wilkinson, a.k.a. The Ticketmaster The month of love continues with a throwback review of a romantic comedy I covered in SW@ Ticket #37: Sex Wax , Sideways Stories, and the Star- Spanglish Banner (FROM May 12, 2005): Adam Sandler in a non- Happy-Madison dramedy? (You'll never see that sentence again, I promise.) Yes, and it worked. Narrated by Jamie Lynn Seigler and starring Sandler, Tea Leoni , and Paz Vega , Spanglish takes the whole "lost in translation" premise to a comfortable, Award-worthy comic height. Vega is the new Spanish-only maid in the Sandler house, adept at looking pretty while she yells in Spanish, is puzzled by American slang, and walks into sliding glass doors. Family values clash, the language barrier deteriorates, the families become closer, and Vega eventually has to leave because she is sexually attracted to Sandler, who remembers he's married just in time to not look like a total scumbag. Vega's bilingual daughter hat...

I am starting this series as a brief return to movie reviews from 2010 that I neglected to post in order with the preceding five issues of Just the Ticket, four of which were posted online at the Columbia Basin Herald in October 2011. In this first trip back, we visit October 13, 2010 and discover than No Man is an Island : Every family has its secrets. Such is the premise of City Island , as personified by the Rizzo family. Vince Rizzo ( Andy Garcia ) is a proud prison guard—“I’m not a prison guard, I'm a correctional officer!"—with a few things to hide. One being that he is pursuing his lifelong dream of being an actor (under the tutelage of the wise and grizzled Adam Arkin , and managed by a personal-yet-professional Emily Mortimer ), all the while telling his family that he is going to poker games. Enter our hero's second secret—“My biggest secret, my darkest secret, the secret of all my secrets”—his unexpected relationship with one of his inmates ( Steven Strait )...