Michael Vartan | pinartarhan.com

Monster in Law starring Jennifer Lopez, Jane Fonda and Michael Vartan

Posted on September 14, 2010 Written by ripitup

Monster in Law starring Jane Fonda, Jennifer Lopez and Michael Vartan. Written by Anya Kochoff. Directed by Robert Luketic, director of The Ugly Truth. 2005.

Charlie (Jennifer Lopez) is a young woman who works at temp jobs and walks dogs for a living. One day on a beach, she runs into the handsome doctor Kevin (Michael Vartan). Soon they start dating and they are the perfect couple: the relationship is easy, passionate, loving and fun…until Kevin takes Charlie to meet his recently-fired, famous TV personality mother Viola (Jane Fonda). Viola is depressed, neurotic and totally driving her P.A/best friend Ruby (Wanda Sykes) insane. Kevin, unintentionally, kills the chance of a good relationship between his mother and his girlfriend when he asks Charlie to marry her at their first visit. From then on, Viola decides that Charlie is absolutely the wrong girl for her son so she turns into the future mother-in-law from hell. The idea is to show her evil side to Charlie and make her run.

From then on, the “typical” romantic comedy turns more into a fun comedy. It is no longer about two people finding love and getting together but the monster-in-law’s psychotic plans to break them up.

Now, I am not saying this movie is without clichés, in fact it has many. But this is not your typical romantic comedy either. Finding your “soulmate” part is especially cut short so that we have more time for Jane Fonda’s hilarious act. And what makes it so annoying and ridiculous at parts comes from the fact that unfortunately mother-in-laws like that do exist. My father’s mom was pretty much the only problem my parents had during their marriage. The moment my mom stopped contact with her, the marriage was saved.

While avoiding this film won’t exactly make you miss much, watching it can entertain you a great deal if you let it. And while girls can cross their fingers to meet a guy like Kevin, they sure as hell should remember to wish his mother isn’t like Viola. Sure, for the sake of being a (romantic) comedy, things do end well but…in real life, she sure would keep up the witch bitch act for good.

One of my favorite lines:

Viola (Jane Fonda): Have you got anything on the girl yet?

Ruby (Wanda Sykes): Nothing. No criminal record, no death….

Viola: What about drugs? What about promiscuity?

Ruby: She did fewer lovers in her life than you had on the closing day of Woodstock!

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7 Engaging Tv Shows with Suspense Featuring Castle, The Mentalist, House, NCIS Los Angeles and More

Posted on June 16, 2010 Written by ripitup

crime scene — Case-solving, murder, mayhem, mischief and mystery. These are the 7 shows to provide all or some of those elements. Image from: southcarolina1670.files.wordpress.com/

How do you like mystery? Crime? Drama? Thrillers? Secret Agents? Detectives? If you like smart characters that follow clues, pay attention to detail and solve cases or if you simply like to play spy, go under cover and enjoy shows with multi-tasking, multi-tasking operatives, I have 7 shows for you. The list is here.

But if you want detailed profiles on these shoes, below are the individual pages.

Alias starring Jennifer Garner and Michael Vartan
Castle starring Nathan Fillion and Stana Katic
House starring Hugh Laurie
The Mentalist starring Simon Baker and Robin Tunney
NCIS Los Angeles starring Chris O’ Donnell and L.L. Cool J.
The Forgotten starring Christian Slater
My Own Worst Enemy starring Christian Slater

Never Been Kissed starring Drew Barrymore, Michael Vartan and David Arquette

Posted on November 21, 2009 Written by ripitup

I have kissed guys. I just never felt that thing.

Never Been Kissed with Drew Barrymore, David Arquette and Michael Vartan

Please get your minds out of the gutter, after all English is a pretty flexible language. : ) But, this is a PG-13 romantic comedy and there are not any explicit scenes. It might even be considered unrealistic in many aspects. After all people totally buy that Drew Barrymore and David Arquette are high schoolers, and sometimes romantic movies feel less realistic than an extra futuristic fantasy /sci-fi movies. But it is all in the name of some good fun and unless you are feeling cynical (or you despise the genre as a rule), this movie is good to watch.

That thing…that moment when everything around you becomes hazy and the only thing in focus is you and this person

The lead character is Josie (Drew Barrymore)- a totally unhip, unattractive and anti-social female working as a journalist. She is also a die hard romantic who feels like she has never had the perfect kiss. Yeah, girls in general tend to enjoy kissing more if there are some intense feelings going on. One day she gets to do a feature undercover story about today’s highs schoolers. But there’s a problem. As her brother Rob reminds her, she used to be an unpopular, fat kid everyone made fun of. She was of course in love with the most popular guy and as you can imagine, she didn’t get him. Now she has to put herself put there, make friends, get popular and find some juicy story to write about. She might be wiser and much lighter this time around, but she’s still clueless when it comes to social activities and popularity. She just gets along better with the nerds than the popular kids. And to make matters more complicated, her English teacher (played by Michael Vartan) might just be the guy she’s been looking for all her life…

The movie is a romantic comedy but it generates enough laughs before it gets all romantic on you. Drew Barrymore and Michael Vartan make a nice couple but there are some interesting names in the cast with small roles such as James Franco and Jessica Alba. Try to make sure you catch this film from 1999. I revisited it recently and it is still fun.

IMDB rating: 5.7 from 25,370 people.

[pro-player width=’530′ height=’253′ type=’video’]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d97O5zOBwcw[/pro-player]

Other Posts on Michael Vartan

Alias starring Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan and Bradley Cooper

Monster in Law starring Jane Fonda, Michael Vartan and Jennifer Lopez

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Whip It starring Ellen Page, Kristen Wig, Juliette Lewis and Drew Barrymore

He’s just not that into you starring Barrymore, Scarlett Johansson, Bradley Cooper and More

Donnie Darko starring Jake Gyllenhaal, Drew Barrymore, Jena Malone and Patrick Swayze

Alias TV Show starring Jennifer Garner, Michael Vartan, Bradley Cooper and Victor Garber

Posted on November 2, 2009 Written by ripitup

Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow in Alias — Some of Sydey’s many disguises in Alias

Before 2001, I had no idea who Michael Vartan, Jennifer Garner and Bradley Cooper were. I had no idea the terrific actor that is Victor Garber existed and that Ron Rifkin made such a great villain. In 2001 – before Lost- there was Alias. The connection between the two shows? The creator/executive producer J.J. Abrams. The two shows could not have been more different. Yes, both include mystery, some unexplained supernatural possibilities (Alias will remember “Rambaldi”) and lots of action. But for the life of me, I can’t figure out why Lost became the phenomenon that it still is. Sure it is captivating and all, but Alias had created an addiction in me that Lost didn’t. For those of you who never caught Alias, here’s the plot (although I should mention that the order we are given the story is more complicated & intriguing than my orderly version).

THE BACKGROUND

Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow

Sydney Bristow (Jennifer Garner) is a promising college student, with a great boyfriend Danny (Edward Atterton) and loving friends (Will and Francie; played by Bradley Cooper and Merrin Dungey). Her estranged father Jack (Victor Garber) is a businessman she barely talks to and her mother died when she was a kid.

What she told Danny and her friends:

Graduation is taking a tad longer, since she is “working at the finance department of a bank called Credit Dauphine”.

REALITY, as Sydney knows it:

It’s not really a bank. It is SD-6, a secret branch of the CIA and Sydney is a secret agent there. She fights well, speaks many languages and knows her hi-tech gadgets, prepared for every mission by the fast -talking and nice geek Marshall

(Kevin Weisman). Every time she tells her friends, she is going on a business trip, she is actually going on a deadly assignments with her partner/trusted friend Dixon (Carl Lumbly). But Danny proposes ans she feels obliged to tell him. So she does..

He gets into shock and leaves a drunken message on her machine. The agency guys has him killed. Why would CIA kill an innocent civillian? They wouldn’t. They also wouldn’t go after her to kill her.

REALITY

She’s rescued by her absent businessman father and is told the truth: SD-6 is not CIA, in fact SD-6 is an enemy of CIA. Also, he is not a businessman; but a senior SD-6 agent. He offeres Sydney an escape route. But Sydney is upset and she wants vengeance. So she proves herself useful to her boss Arvin Sloane (Ron Rifkin). She further proves her loyalty by undergoing tests/interrogations and is cleared. After all, she is the best agent they have. Then she goes to the real CIA and joins them.

There she meets her “handler” Michael Vaughn (Michael Vartan– the guy who is supposed to tell her about the counter-missions. Oh,that’s right! Now she is only pretending to be loyal to SD-6, while being true to the actual CIA. Now each mission has a counter one, making the timing harder, the missions more dangerous. She also has to pull this off under the unsuspecting nose of her SD-6 partner, who is genuinely a good guy that doesn’t know what SD-6 is really up to…

Then of course her father isn’t really only SD-6. He is also CIA, and he is loyal to them, not Sloan.

It is full of action. Car chases, gadgets ( lipstick with cameras and all that nice stuff), disguises, plane crashes, travelling all over the world- even 3-4 countries in each episode back to her resident location: Los Angeles.

MISSIONS

Jennifer Garner as Sydney Bristow

Michael Vartan and Jennifer Garner in Alias.

Of course as smart, gorgeous and dangerous as she is, Sydney is only human and taking all of the below very badly:

Arvin Sloane:

*Arvin is the man whom she regarded as a father figure until he turned out to be a psychopath and her fiancée killed. He also sent men to kill her. We also know he has lied to her everyday, since her recruitment. Now she has to see him everyday and smile to his face; so that she can bring the whole organization down when the time comes.

Not to mention the fact that she has to live with the fact that she worked for that organization for 7 years, thinking that she was helping the government whereas she had been betraying it.

Jack Bristow

* What is worse than an absent father? Probably a father who lied to you all your life, and seems to be revealing the truth at his own convenience: Oh yes, he has more secrets. He is not just SD-6, he is also CIA-a double agent. He also seems to be deprived of emotion. The guy has a poker face that makes him a great agent and the social bonding skills that make Hugh Laurie’s House seem like a teddy bear. He does love his daughter but he really has to work on the honesty issue. Her mother may not have been a school teacher after all. Telling what happened to her will be a spoiler, sorry…

WILL & FRANCIE

Will and Francie played by Bradley Cooper and Merrin Dungey

*Oh, she has great friends who know nothing about this secret life so she can only talk about trivial stuff with them and hang out. They love her and for the lives of them can not figure out why Sydney doesn’t leave her boring bank job. Pl?us, Will is a journalist and nosy by nature; and he suspects Danny’s murder was no ordinary crime. If he gets close, he too will be killed so she has to protect him from himself. It gets tricky to lead a double life when you live with one of your friends (Francie) and the other is fixed on solving your dead fiancé’s mystery.

DANIEL HECHT

* She has to live with the fact that her fiancée Danny was killed by her boss, and because she told him who she is.




MICHAEL VAUGHN



If her cover is blown, and he is discovered to be of CIA, they are both screwed (as in risking to be murdered by SD-6)…It really doesn’t help matters that they keep getting closer and become increasingly attracted to each other…

Their relationship never lacks adrenaline, friendship, honesty, sexual chemistry, bottled up feelings and not to mention the fact that they both face death almost everyday. It is nerve-wrecking to go on missions and fight together on the field- without being detected by SD-6 and it is worse for Michael to sit and watch as Sydney overtakes one deadly mission after another. So she can tell Michael anything. But she can’t even go out with him. Another thing about her life that drives her mad.

This is as close to a date it gets for Syndey Bristow and her handler Michael Vaughn. She’s being briefed about her missions while pretending to be too strangers streching on the benches.

So this eventually happens: Sydney and Vaughn get together. But how many episodes does it take? You are just going to have to see it for yourselves.

The Guest Stars

Yes, of course each episode has many guest stars but some of them are remarkably famous and it was certainly fun to see them in those kick-ass episodes: Ethan Hawke, Christian Slater and Quentin Tarantino.

Ethan Hawke appears in Alias episode Double Agent (Season 2, Episode 14)

Christian Slater appears in two episodes of Alias: Endgame (season 2, episodes 15 & 19)

Quentin Tarantino appears as McKenas Cole in 4 episodes of Alias.

TO SUM UP:

Season 1 is brilliant with an incredible season finale.

Season 2 does not dissapoint. Moreover it features guest stars that I love; such as Ethan Hawke and Christian Slater.

The whole season is amazing and the finale is arguably even more shocking than the first season’s. In season, 3 the show is still good- you hardly get upset with the script but with some actions of some characters (major actions of major characters, to be exact) but after season 3…The show is no longer addictive. It lose its vibe. The characters and their actions aren’t interesting anymore. The story twists are sort of desperate and you say “Come on,what the…?” a lot. Don’t even get me started on the 5th season. Of course they are worth watching in the sense that you want to know what eventually will happen to characters you have come to care about but still, if you quit with the 3rd, I am not gonna blame you.

My guess is J.J Abrams found a new show idea that he liked (Lost) and fell out of love with Alias. Writers wrote with the philosophy of “anything goes” and since this is not a soap opera, they failed.

However I watch the first 3 (and especially 1st &2nd) seasons over and over. After all, real life is never going to get that interesting and exciting. It is fun to be in a world of lies, deceit, passion, fights and chases and espionage for about 40 minutes each episode.