BOOK CLUB

Bill Holderman's directorial debut and Erin Simms screenwriting debut comprises a rather gentle but pleasant rom-com aimed at the sixty-something market.   The conceit is that four long-time friends have a regular bookclub, and reading Fifty Shades of Grey re-awakens their interest in sex, dating and love.  Diane Keaton plays a people-pleasing grandma being bullied by her patronising kids into moving closer to them and away from her friends, not to mention a potential new love interest played by the still hot Andy Garcia.  Mary Steenburgen plays a married woman desperate to re-inject some sex into her otherwise happy marriage.  Candice Bergen takes the leap into online dating despite the knock to her self-esteem from her ex's twenty-something new fiancee. And Jane Fonda plays a successful businesswoman who finally allows herself to admit that she needs love in the form of Don Johnson.

It turns out that the issues plaguing sixty-something women are not that different from those affecting their younger counterparts - the inability to be vulnerable, balancing work and relationships, getting over an ex, getting over low self-esteem. As a result this movie was actually more relatable than I'd thought.  Moreover, from what I've seen from friends parents, their is an alarming tendency to co-opt one's parents lives and assume that they have nothing going on - and a need for the grandparents to reclaim their independence. 

The downside is that it also turns out that a sixty-something rom-com has also the same genre cliches as a twenty-something one - the meet cutes, the final act reconciliations.  But I feel that if you take this film for what it is, you'll enjoy the ride. 

BOOK CLUB has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated PG-13.

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN

Catching up on a few releases I missed last year and the first is MAMMA MIA! 2, the inevitable follow up to the phenomenally commercially successful ABBA jukebox musical turned movie. I must confess to a lot of fondness to the original with its top tier hits, performed with elan by the elder cast members - notably a very campy Meryl Streep, always superb Christine Baranski and Julie Walters.  The added surprise was that Amanda Seyfried, playing the young girl wondering which of her mother's one night stands was her real father - had a superb singing voice. It would take a cynic indeed to resist the original movie's charm.

Sadly the sequel doesn't quite live up to the original's infectious joy. Partly that's because a lot of the best songs have already been used up - so that the occasional hits seen here are diluted with some B grade material.  Partly it's because Lily James, playing the young Streep, just doesn't have a strong singing voice to compete with Seyfried - and neither competes with a last minute cameo from Cher as their mum/grandma.  Partly it's because all the young actors in the flashback scenes to Meryl Streep's wild years have to do impersonations of how their elderly versions would act and it's hugely constraining. So we have Lily James not acting as her character but impersonating Streep's exaggerated somewhat awkward dancing - and we have all three young men impersonating Firth, Skarsgard and Brosnan from the original film.  Of the three Harry Skinner does the best as Young Harry, perfectly imitating Firth's stilted delivery.  But a few fun impersonations and a stellar Cher cameo do not a movie make. You'd be better off the just watching the end credit performance of Super Trouper on youtube.

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN is available to rent and own. It has a running time of 1hr 54m and is rated PG.

AT MIDDLETON aka JUST ONE DAY

AT MIDDLETON is a gentle romantic comedy starring Vera Farmiga (BATES MOTEL) and Andy Garcia (OCEAN'S ELEVEN) as two middle aged parents who fall in love while taking their kids (Taissa Farmiga and Spencer Lofranco) on a tour of Middleton College.  The romance plays as a conventional odd couple love story, with Garcia playing a conservative doctor and Farmiga playing the more free spirited Edith. There are lots of rom-com conventions at play here. They meet in an argument and are initially dismissive of each other. There are lots of cute scenes where they discover they like each other.  There's even the classic "he's afraid of heights but she'll help him" skit that we saw between Ryan and Marissa in The O.C.  And yes, there's a cute and irreverent scene involving chopsticks.  I also wouldn't have picked these two actors for a movie that involves physical comedy. 

And yet, and yet... There's something about these two actors that is authentic and the character of the doctor in particular is deeply sympathetic.  And I also like that the children are given a story arc, but not an easy cheesy love story.  The daughter in particular is fascinating - a high achieving kid who wants to study with a famous professor - and the meeting between the two is really worth watching.  So I wouldn't say that this film is a must-watch but for a lazy Sunday afternoon it's somehow more than it seems.  And by the way, the R rating is utterly unwarranted. 

AT MIDDLETON has a running time of 99 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is available to rent and own in the UK and USA and will be released in Spain on March 13th.

THE PINK PANTHER 2 - Cinema Hate-Crime

Peter Sellers made five great comedies playing the incapable but serendipitous French cop, Inspector Clouseau. Herbert Lom seethed with anger as his boss. Burt Kwouk exemplified physical comedy genius as his side-kick Cato. Those movies are Cinema Gold. That Steve Martin fool-headedly decided to remake the Clouseau movies, churning out the piss-poor 2006 film, was bad enough. That he lacked humility enough to try it again is unforgivable. The resulting cinema dreck troubled the multiplexes only briefly, and rolled onto DVD with a mere USD70million gross. Here's hoping that's the end of this humiliating little experiment.

As to the particulars, the plot sees The Tornado stealing priceless world historical arefacts as well as the eponymous French diamond. An international dream team of cops is brought together to track them down. Clouseau embarasses them all, almost loses his sweet-heart Nicole, but finally foils the thief. The movie is set in a stylised picture-postcard Europe, and peopled with characters in stylised costumes and deliberately hammy accents. One can only assume that the likes of Jeremy Irons, Lily Tomlin, Alfred Molina, Jean Reno and Andy Garcia were doing it for the phat cash alone. The exception is Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, who presumably also did it to raise her profile in Western cinema, and whose uneven Anglo-Brit accent is presumably not deliberate. The physical comedy is predictable and worst of all, leans heavily on CGI. The direction is competent at best. The plot is utterly predictable. The only surprising thing about the film is that it us written by Scott Neustadter and Michael H Weber who also wrote 500 DAYS OF SUMMER.

THE PINK PANTHER was released in spring 2009 and is available on DVD.

THE AIR I BREATHE - pretentious wank

"I always wondered, when a butterfly leaves the safety of its cocoon, does it realize how beautiful it has become? Or does it still just see itself as a caterpillar?"

Who writes such nonsense? Debut feature director Jieho Lee apparently. The ensuing film, THE AIR I BREATHE, is a deeply unhappy affair.The laborious structure sees four inter-twining stories each focusing on a character whose story, apparently, illustrates an Asian proverb that life is made up of Happiness, Pleasure, Sorrow, and Love. This apparently gives Lee leave to include dialogue as banal as that quoted above. Forest Whitaker plays a naive low-level banker who loses a ton of money in an illicit gambling den and ends up robbing a bank to pay back Andy Garcia's rent-a-mobster. In an inter-related story, the mobster's cocky nephew (Emile Hirsh) is being shepherded through the night by a clairvoyant goon (Brendan Fraser). The goon will end up saving a teen popster (Sarah Michelle Gellar) from the mafiosi, and all the stories are linked when Kevin Bacon's doctor realises the popster has a rare blood type that can save the life of the woman he loves.

The performances fall into two broad camps. Garcia, Whitaker and Hirsch play to type, lazily. Fraser and Gellar are running as fast as they can from their typical screen personae. The script is banal and never matches up to its self-proclaimed profundity. The direction is gimmicky. Need I say more?

THE AIR I BREATHE was released in early 2008 and is available on DVD.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN are smug bastards

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is an arrogant film. Look how smooth we are; look how well we dress; look at our private jets and our designer sunglasses; look at the luxury hotels we stay in; look at the stand-up friends we have; look how effortlessly we slice through apparently impenetratable security systems.....

In short, look how COOL we are.

We're so cool, you'll pay ten quid to watch us be cool. And we won't have to create genuine plot twists like in OCEAN'S ELEVEN. And we won't bother having a love-story at the movie's heart. Heck, with our ludicrous channel tunnel plot-line we'll break all bounds of credibility. And you won't even care because you'll be so blinded by our dazzling teeth.

The fact that the script-writers have the audacity to rail against the modern Vegas - the crass commercialisation and PG-i-sation the Strip - infuriates me with its hypocrisy. And were they trying to make some point about underpaid Mexican workers? I mean, seriously, do they really think that from THIS platform, they can hint at a social critique? I am stumped.

OCEAN'S THIRTEEN is on global release.

OCEAN’S TWELVE – all style, no substance

For those who didn’t see OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the movie that precedes OCEAN’S TWELVE, the set up is as follows. A bunch of thieves and con artists are gathered together by an ex-convict named Danny Ocean (George Clooney). He plans to pull of the most audacious heist of all time: robbing the vault beneath three large casinos in Vegas owned by Ocean’s nemesis, Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). Benedict stands for the new Vegas – family entertainment, business practices more suited to an investment bank than the old skool, and ruthless efficiency. To cap it all off, he is dating Ocean’s ex-wife, Tess (Julia Roberts). By the end of OCEAN’S ELEVEN, the gang has made off Benedict’s money and his girl. It was a sweet film. Nicely done comic performances from a superb ensemble cast with genuine chemistry; beautifully slick production design; über-cool sound-track and some nice little pop-culture references. But underlying it all was a well-crafted heist-thriller with some clever and credible plot twists. In short, the flick had something for the heart and something for the head, and gave us another reason to forgive Steven Soderbergh for that horrific SOLARIS remake.

Now, OCEAN’S TWELVE is a different kettle of fish. As it opens, the gang is on the run in Europe with Benedict on their tale demanding the original money back not to mention the interest. As a result, the gang is forced to compete with the French master-criminal, The Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), to pull off three separate jobs in three separate European cities, with a gorgeous Interpol agent (Catherine Zeta Jones) shadowing their every move. So, instead of eleven criminals pulling off one heist against one enemy, we now have twelve people versus another criminal, pulling off three heists against one enemy plus one police chick as well as sundry other complications. Now, I have nothing against complex plots per se, and I had no trouble understanding what was going on. But I did feel that the movie suffered from the clutter of plot strands and characters – none of which are given time to develop and catch our interest. In the end, the movie simply collapsed into a serious of beautifully staged vignettes – good-looking people in slick clothes hanging out in nice hotels. Sort of like the cinematic equivalent of reading Condé Nast Traveller magazine. It gets worse. Around two-thirds of the way through, this movie jumps the shark with a move so self-referential and ridiculous that it undermines the credibility of the whole project. The movie doesn’t so much wink at the audience as reach out, grab your popcorn and pour it over your head. I can only hope that this ridiculous manoeuvre sinks the franchise, but I doubt it.

OCEAN’S TWELVE was released in the US and most of Europe last December, but opens in the UK today.