The gripping Runaway Bride
By Ervell E. Menezes

REMEMBER Pretty Woman, that box-office hit which catapulted Julia Roberts to fame in 1990? Well, the same trio, director Gary Marshall and the leading pair Richard Gere and Julia Roberts are together again after almost a decade. Now this kind of reunion doesn’t always work. I know that in the 1960s Robert Wise directed Julie Andrews to an astounding success in The Sound of Music but wasn’t able to repeat the success in Star which bombed at the box-office and with the critics too. But Runaway Bride does rather well and that may be because it shifts genres. While Pretty Woman was purely romance, Runaway Bride is more comedy than romance.

With a story as far-fetched as a bride running away from the altar just before the I do stage it can’t be anything but a comedy. What’s more she does it thrice. It is tongue-in-cheek stuff but put across in an amusing manners. It is all about what happens when a hot-shot columnist takes a pot shot at this runaway bride?

Well, the journalist loses his column and job. And then... he decides to meet this reluctant bride to do a human interest story... And then... Cupid lurks around the corner ready to shoot his arrow. Ike Graham (Richard Gere) is the widely read columnist who meets his Waterloo by doing this piece on commitment phobic hairdresser Maggie Carpenter (Julia Roberts) in a newspaper owned by his ex-wife (Rita Wilson).

So Ike travels to small town Hale to meet Maggie and sees how she is ridiculed by all around, including her alcoholic dad (Paul Dooley). What begins as a sort of retaliation shifts gears. But Maggie has the fourth prospective bridegroom lined up. He is a sports enthusiast and mountaineer Bob (Chris Maloni).

Actually, the setting is big town New York guy meeting small town Hale. The screenplay by Josann McGibbon and Sara Parriott covers this aspect rather well and director Gary Marshall picks up from where he left off in Pretty Woman though here he has to deal more with the comic angle. But the journalist/columnist character is well conceived and underplayed and the chemistry takes time to work. It is also credible though of course in romantic comedies one has to overlook certain obvious hiccups.

Cameos by Paul Dooley, Joan Cussack (as Maggie’s best friend) and Hector Elizondo as Ike’s best friend and now husband of his ex-wife, help to provide variety but as in Pretty Woman Marshall tends to prolong the last quarter, somewhat needlessly. But even so, The Runaway Bride more than makes up with its better moments of which there are many.

Julia Roberts, who hasn’t really cashed in on that Pretty Woman start, manages to do better than in some of her previous films (I haven’t yet seen Notting Hill). She throws herself headlong in the part and being a near-fictitious character, it seems to help. As for Richard Gere, greying and elegant, he has to exercise a good deal of restraint which he does with panache. Then he also has to shuttle between cynicism and romance and that too he is able to achieve convincingly.

So, all in all Runaway Bride is a worthy reunion of the Pretty Woman trio but you don’t have to be a fan of any of the three to enjoy this light-as-souffle entertainer. The same cannot be said, however, about Blast From the Past which may have a good premise and is a subject fraught with possibilities, but the treatment is patchy and lackadaisical and puts paid to what could possibly have been a frothy entertainer.

Going back and forth in time seems to have become a hobby with Hollywood after Back to the Future but not half of the films churned out are even watchable. In Blast From the Past the Cuban missile crisis of 1962 is used as a take-off for the Webber family going underground. A plane crash near their house further supports the nuclear holocaust theory and dad Calvin (Christopher Walken) has already made preparations for such an eventuality by building this shelter.

The result is that son Adam (Brendan Fraser) lives for 35 years without seeing the real world, only re-runs of Jackie Gleeson shows and Perry Como records. It is only when his dad suffers a heart attack that he is forced to surface. There he meets Eve (Alicia Silverstone), a modern-day woman disenchanted with men and love who finds a new man in Adam.

But the script by Bill Kelly and Hugh Wilson is rather weak. It flatters only to deceive and director Hugh Wilson can’t be blamed for the fits-and-starts movement of the story. The plot could have been better developed and there should have been a stronger connecting thread. The result is that Blast is more of a damp squib ending in a whimper.