DISENCHANTED*

DISENCHANTED is a joyless, tuneless mess of a sequel that may well put Amy Adams' career to bed. Think about it: when was the last time she was the leading lady in an actual hit?  But the real issue here isn't anyone's performance (although to be sure, no-one looks like they're having a good time).  The real issue is a messy,  overly-complex script that doesn't seem to know what it wants the film to be about. 

As the movie opens, we see our fairytale princess Giselle (Adams) now married to her Manhattan lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey).  They're both over-tired and stressed parenting a new baby daughter and a surly teenage Morgan (newcomer Gabriella Baldacchino). So, they move to suburbia and meet Maya Rudolph's Malvina - the oppressively perfect mean girl who seems to run the town. At this point we think the plot is going to be about Giselle coping with the reality after Happy Ever After, and dealing with a real-life villain.  

But no. To add a needless complication and magical Macguffin we have King Edward (James Marsden) and Queen Nancy (Idina Menzel) turn up with a magic wand that Giselle uses to turn her town into a fairytale, and herself into a wicked stepmother.  This totally unanchors the plot, which is now about which mean girl will win. By the end, I think the point the movie is trying to make is that Morgan has to accept Giselle as her real mum.  But all that stuff about middle-aged and middle-class ennui seems to have been forgotten, and Malvina is presumably still harrumphing around the town scaring all in sight.

There was nothing charming or funny or wonderful about this film. It felt joyless and directionless and cheap. The quality of the songwriting was particularly disappointing. I am awarding it a sole star for the only decent and mischievous number - where Giselle and Malvina debate who is the most wicked. The rest is disposable.

DISENCHANTED is rated PG and has a running time. It is on release on Disney+.

WHAT MEN WANT

WHAT MEN WANT is exactly the kind of film you watch after a year in lockdown when you have no social life and nothing better to do. I knew the reviews were bad, but I had a genuine fondness for the 2000 original WHAT WOMEN WANT and saw Tracy Morgan on the cast list and thought, well, how bad can this be? 

The answer is very, very bad indeed. This film is so humourless, joyless, lacking in originality or surprise, that it genuinely boggles the mind. Adam Shankman (BEDTIME STORIES) directs like a hack. Scenes slickly move forward, but nothing coheres, nothing moves, whether to laughter or tears. It's all just deeply blah.

Taraji P Henson is utterly wasted in the Mel Gibson role. She plays a tough as nails sports agent raised by her single dad (Richard Roundtree). She fears she's being blocked from promotion because she's a woman. But one of the more troubling aspects of this film is that while she IS being disinvited from the boys' poker games, she's actually being blocked not because she's a woman but because she's just not very nice, and certainly not a team player. So essentially this is a film about how its progonist is a dick, and the men are actually okay. Weird. 

Also this may be one of the very few films in which Tracy Morgan - playing the dad of the young sports star the heroine has to sign to make promotion - is just annoying and unfunny.  What a crime against cinema! All of the scriptwriters -and there are many - need to go and sit in the corner and think very carefully about what they have done.

WHAT MEN WANT was released in 2019 but is now streaming on Netflix. This makes the marginal cost of watching it zero but that's still too much.  It is rated R and has a running time of 117 minutes. 

HAIRSPRAY (2006) - so much fun!

HAIRSPRAY is about as much fun as you're going to have at the cinema this summer - joint-equal with DIE HARD 4.0. This movie-musical adaptation of the cult-classic John Waters flick had me laughing, crying, tapping my feet and bursting with energy. It's a movie so chock-full of energy, good-feelings and right-thinking I just don't know how anyone can object to it. And all the negatives I can think of, aren't really negatives at all - rather, the fact that film-makers didn't have time to do more!

John Waters is famous a trash film-maker - as the man who filmed obese drag-queen Divine eating dog-shit. And HAIRSPRAY also revels in human detritus, with it's close-ups of rain-streaked Baltimore suburbia, rats running among the garbage bags, and Waters himself taking a cameo as the friendly neighbourhood flasher. Water's philosophy has never been a Candide-like delusion about how grim life really is. Rather, he wants us to embrace the shittiness of life and our strange differences. Come through smiling - come through fabulous! This is why I've always found Waters' films perversely uplifting. After all, his misfits - gays, ethnic minorities, over-weight people, cinephiles - have always triumphed over the uptight world that tried to hold them down. His message has always been that differences are beautiful. Or to quote the demonstraters in the original HAIRSPRAY - "Segregation never: integration now!"

Adam Shankman's new adaptation of the musical based on Water's original film is true to the spirit of the original. It opens with obese but perky teenager Tracy Turnblad waking up in shitty 1960s Baltimore. It's an era of racial segregation and WASP conformity. She sings and dances her way to school happy in her own physical appearance and determined to become a dancer on the wildly popular Corny Collins TV show. The opening number sets the pace for the rest of the film. The lyrics are witty, the tunes are catchy and lead actress, Nikki Blonsky, is captivating. The rest of the musical sees her over-come a string of prejudices. She helps her mother regain her confidence; helps her best-friend escape from her prejudiced mother and date a coloured boy; and successfully integrates the Corny Collins Show. Oh yes, and she wins the heart of the dream-boat boyfriend of the Waspy blonde.

There's nothing not to like in-front of or behind the camera. The costume design is cracking - especially regarding Michelle Pfeiffer's shiny, spiky outfits. She's like a Size Zero, frosted version of Dolores Umbridge. All the actors and absolutely superb, including a surprisingly moving performance by John Travolta behind the latex as Edna. Perhaps most surprising on the up-side - purely because I haven't seen him in much - is James Marsden proving his gift for comedy as Corny Collins. Most disappointing was the lack of screen-time for Amanda Bynes and the lack of song and dance time for the genius that is Christopher Walken. But absolutely everyone is upstaged by a tiny cameo from Alison Janney as Penny Pingleton's religious zealot mother. Definitely the funniest role in the film. And if you want pure gut-wrenching emotion, check out Queen Latifah's anti-racism anthem, which Shankman is sensitive enough to shoot in a relatively straightforward style.

HAIRSPRAY is on release in the UK and US. It opens in Israel next week. It opens in Argentina, Italy, Russia, Denmark, France, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the Netherlands in August and in Belgium, Germany, Hong Kong, Australia, Iceland, Spain and Brazil in September. It opens in Japan and Turkey in late October.