Double Feature

January 2007 - My wish for the New Year is not for myself but for Robert De Niro. I wish that, whatever movie(s) he chooses to make in 2007, he makes them in Manhattan or in some other large urban setting. Because it's now clear that when De Niro leaves the city, bad movies happen.

If you recall, in 2004's god-awful Godsend, De Niro ran a fertility clinic in middle-of-nowhere New England and used an unsuspecting couple to try to resurrect his own dead son.

Later that year, he hit the road for Meet the Fockers, an R-rated sequel to the hit comedy Meet the Parents. Ben Stiller returns as the unfortunately-named Gaylord Focker. Teri Polo is back as his fiancée, Pam. De Niro and Blythe Danner reprise their roles as Pam's parents.

The gang heads to Florida in De Niro's bulletproof RV to meet Gaylord's parents, played by Dustin Hoffman and Barbra Streisand. Hoffman is a lawyer who became a stay-at-home dad when Gaylord was born. Streisand is a sex therapist for senior citizens.

The Focker parents are new age, free-spirited and proud of Gaylord to the point of embarrassment. In short, they're everything that De Niro's character despises. So, he goes into spy mode in an effort to prevent his daughter from marrying into this loony family.

Overall review: Hated it! Meet the Fockers is dumb. Just dumb. The first movie was clever. This one resorts to humping dogs, bathroom humor and De Niro wearing a fake breast in an attempt to get laughs. It fails miserably.

Then, in the 2005 thriller Hide and Seek, De Niro starts out in the city but fails to stay there. He's David, a psychologist married to Amy Irving. Dakota Fanning is their daughter, Emily. Mom and daughter have a ritual of playing hide and seek before bed. But, all that fun ends when mom is found in a bathtub filled with bloody water.

David thinks that taking Emily away from New York City will help her recover from the trauma of seeing mom in the bloody tub. So, he buys a house in a vacation community in upstate New York and off they go to their isolated new home.

Soon enough, Emily quits playing with her dolls and starts hanging out with her new friend, "Charlie." Thing is, daddy David can't see Charlie, so Emily must be making him up, right?

Overall review: Ehhh, it was OK. This PG-13 movie is marginally better than Godsend even though Greg Kinnear is not in it. Hide and Seek kind of lazes along for extended periods with bursts of terror here and there. The last 30 minutes is when things really start to happen.

The supporting cast includes Famke Janssen as a psychologist friend of David and Melissa Leo (from Homicide: Life on the Street) as a troubled neighbor. Elisabeth Shue also shows up for a while. She must be saying, "I left Las Vegas for this?"