The Year of Hanks

"That's the trouble with surveillance! You don't get to see nothin'!" I'm going to start off with a confession: I goofed.  The Man With One Red Shoe was released a month before Volunteers, which was our previous entry, so we're just a smidge out of order.  That said, I had a lot of fun with this one. Hanx plays Richard, a violinist singled out at random by Ross, deputy director of the CIA, to confound a rival operative named Cooper. Ross leads Cooper to believe that Richard is a secret agent, which sees Richard unwittingly becoming targeted for surveillance and tangled in a web of espionage.  The film got off to a bit of a slow start, and I was finding the utter ineptitude of Cooper's team to be a bit ridiculous, but their bungling ransacking of Richard's apartment in the interest of uncovering evidence set up some moments that were amusing, if a little juvenile, later on. The whole thing plays like a drawn-out Three Stooges short, wit...

"He looks so old and wise!" "He's probably thirty." * Note: Unfortunately, it's taken me a bit of a while to blog about this one, as we've had quite a bit of upheaval in our personal lives as of late. That said... I'd never seen this movie before, and actually the only thing I knew about it was that it was the first movie Hanx worked on with his now-wife, Rita Wilson. Given that, I think I expected some sort of very sweet, playful on-screen chemistry between the two that reflects their real-life relationship, something along the lines of Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal in When Harry Met Sally... or Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks in Sleepless in Seattle.  Come to think of it, maybe Meg Ryan is just movie chemistry Match Light. I dunno. Regardless, that really wasn't the case here. Hanx plays Lawrence Bourne III, a spoiled, wealthy college student with a penchant for bad behavior (think Billy Madison in a tux with a really haughty Brahmin accent...