ALICE, DARLING****

Actor Mary Nighy (MARIE ANTOINETTE) makes her feature debut with the beautifully observed, urgent drama ALICE DARLING.  The film, written by Alanna Francis, stars Anna Kendrick (PITCH PERFECT) as a woman trapped in a coercive control relationship. The problem is she's been making compromises and adjustments and catering to her partner's fragile ego for so long that she doesn't even realise she's being abused.  When we meet her, the normally ebullient smart Kendrick seems to small and quiet and numb it's a shock to audiences familiar with her presence.  

The good news for Alice is that she has two amazing friends, played by Wunmi Mosaku (Lovecraft Country) and Kaniehttio Horn.  They persuade Alice to join them on a special birthday weekend in the country, not realising that she lied to her partner to manage to get away. As the weekend unfolds they realise how controlling he is, and how lost their friend is, and miracle of miracles, they actually manage to get through to her too.  It's a wonderful and little seen testament to the power of female friendship.  Of course, in the real world we know that it takes abused women  many attempts to leave their abusers, so horrific is the damage done to their self-esteem and so claustrophobic the feelings of shame. As with TO LESLIE I found the ending a little.....American....and easy. But I loved the journey, the central performances, and the centring of the female experience of coercive control.  Mary Nighy may be a nepo baby but she is an assured director with a sensitive and authentic approach to difficult subject matter. Kudos.

ALICE DARLING is rated R and has a running time of 89 minutes. It played Toronto 2022 and is currently on release in cinemas and on the internet.

TROLLS WORLD TOUR

TROLLS WORLD TOUR is yet another film that should've been released in cinemas but is now available for you to stream at home. And I'm pleased to report that it's a delightful movie - and a worthy successor to the 2016 original.  

In this sequel, Queen Poppy (Anna Kendrick) and her best friend Branch (Justin Timberlake) are living happily in their world of pop-music loving happy trolls. That is until they realise that the world is full of all different kinds of troll - and shock horror! not all of them like pop music! Some are into rock, or reggaeton, K-Pop, classical music or country.  Back in the day, their troll ancestors decided that the differences between the trolls were to great for them to live (and sing!) in harmony, so they all went to live in their isolated communities.  In the present day, a rock music loving troll called Barb wants to reunite all these trolls, and restore harmony by playing a magical power chord that makes them all love rock music. At first Poppy also buys into the idea that they should all be united, although for her this means loving pop music.  And so begins a short film about learning that people are better off doing what they love, and that true harmony comes from respecting difference rather than enforcing unity.

What I love about these films is how wonderfully imagined they are - the characters are so adorable - the colours so bright - the songs so infectious. The designers clearly had fun creating characters to embody the spirit of the different music styles - with a particular shout out to whoever came up with the look for Kelly Clarkson's country singer, complete with piled up Dolly Parton hair. This isn't a film with the knowing cynicism of SHREK. It's just genuine heart-felt heart-warming earnest fun.  And I think that's truly what we need right now.

TROLLS WORLD TOUR has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated PG. It is available on streaming services. 

TROLLS - BFI London Film Festival 2016 - Day 4

TROLLS is an adorable, heart-warming, smart new animated children’s film from the folk at Dreamworks. It creates a world in which the happy, huggable, fun-loving trolls are on the run from the mean sad Bergens who think the only way they can be happy is to eat a troll. The trolls are supposedly safely in hiding until a super loud fun party arranged by Princess Poppy (Anna Kendrick) gives away their hiding place to the evil Chef Bergen (Christine Baranski) who wants to cook them for her King (Christopher Mintz-Plasse). This prompts Poppy to go on an adventure to rescue her captured friends with the help of the one unhappy, sarcastic Troll called Branch (Justin Timberlake). But once she finds her friends, Poppy's mission changes. She wants to help a lowly Bergen scullery maid (Zooey Deschanel) find true love with the Bergen King and show all the Bergens that happiness comes from within, rather than from eating a cute little Troll.

PITCH PEFECT 2

You can listen to a podcast review of this film here.

I wasn't super excited by the original PITCH PERFECT movie but that film at least had novelty and some great songs.  This sequel lacks novelty and great songs, and I didn't laugh once.  Even Elizbeath Banks & John Michael Higgins' snarky competition commentators didn't make me laugh.

The irony is that the very story of the film is of a successful group that has lost its mojo, not sure of what it wants to be, misfiring and alienating its audience.  After an early mishap, the Bella's acapella group find themselves banned from defending their national championship title unless they can do the unthinkable and win the world championships.  However, the group is intimidated by a crypto-fascist German group called Das Sound Machine and inwardly fretting over what will happen to them when they graduate.  The mash-up queen, Becca (Anna Kendrick) is secretly interning at a production studio where the boss (Keegan-Michael Key) tells her she has to make something original.  And young Emily (Hailee Steinfeld) just wants to write songs, breaking the cardinal rule of Acapella that you only do covers.

INTO THE WOODS

INTO THE WOODS is a sanitised an anodyne version of the Stephen Sondheim musical that supposedly shows us the dark side of fairytales.  This is, of course, material far better and more deeply explored by Angela Carter in her books and with Neil Jordan in his 1984 gothic horror classic THE COMPANY OF WOLVES - a movie on which I have recorded a full length DVD commentary, which can be found here.  The Sondheim musical is, by contrast, a work that tries to show the dark backing of the mirror - death, disenchament - but never reached the psychosexual depths of Carter.  It has a two act structure - in the first a variety of familiar fairy-tale characters journey into the woods with many of the threads tied together in the story of the baker and his wife who need to collect a handful of fairy-tale items and so lift the curse that prevents them from having a baby.  We meet Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel, some Princes and Jack and the Beanstalk and all more or less get what they want. But then, in the second act we see that fairytales don't end happily ever after. We see death, infidelity, and the high cost of "winning".

All of this is good post-modern stuff, except a few decades too late to pack a real punch.  I wonder how kids in the post-Shrek era will view this rather tame revisionism.  None of this is helped by Disney trying to keep the movie to a PG certificate and running shy of a 3 hour running time. This means that the pivotal, albeit it largely off-screen character of the baker's father - the man who starts so much of the plot - is omitted.  Much of the violence is toned down and character motivation is subtly altered. The result is a wolf with a lesser bite.

Overall, I did still enjoy the film although I wouldn't want to see it again. The acting is just fine, the production design beautiful and the cinematography really very good indeed.  The only misfires are, for me, too (and two) campy performances from Meryl Streep as the witch and Johnny Depp as the Wolf, and the aforementioned ellipses.

INTO THE WOODS has a running time of 125 minutes and is rated PG. The movie is on release in the USA, UAE, South Korea, Canada, Kuwait, Bulgaria, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Russia, Ukraine, Cyprus, Greece, Hungary, Papua New Guinea, Portugal, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Kenya, Romania, South Africa, Australia, Czech Republic, Croatia, Macedonia, New Zealand, Slovenia, the UK and Ireland.  It opens later in January in Hong Kong, Malaysia, Singapore, Belgium, Luxembourg, Peru, Thailand, Spain, Iceland, Pakistan, France, the Philippines, Brazil, Chile and the Netherlands. It opens in February in Argentina, Mexico, Poland, Taiwan, Austria, Germany, Israel, Turkey, Venezuela and Japan. It opens on March 14th in Japan, March 26th in Denmark, March 27th in Norway, on April 1st in Sweden, April 2nd in Italy, on April 17th in Estonia, on April 19th in China and on April 24th in Lithuania.

DRINKING BUDDIES - LFF 2013 - Day Eleven

There's a lot to like in Joe Swanberg's relationship comedy, DRINKING BUDDIES.  He moves on from the narcissistic, solipsistic mumble core stylings of UNCLE KENT to something more mainstream and accessible, but manages to keep the emotional authenticity of his previous work.

Olivia Wilde is fantastic as Kate, a fun-loving, rather fragile girl who works at a micro brewery with her best friend Luke (Jake Johnson of THE NEW GIRL fame).  They have one of those close friendships that verges into sexual chemistry and we feel sure that they're with the wrong people.  This is compounded when we realise that their respective others, played by Anna Kendrick and Ron Livingston, are also actually pretty well paired, and should probably get together.  

In any other movie, this would descend into a cheesy play by numbers rom-com in which Chris breaking up with Kate and Kate rebound sleeping with a sleazy coworker would spark Luke into jealously realising that he should be with Kate all along.  But this isn't that movie. Instead, in a number of closely observed scenes, we get Jill go on vacation, leaving Kate and Luke to become closer but also to be exposed to what each of them really up is and wants.  As an audience, we realise that Kate really isn't as attractive as all that.  She quite immature, maybe developing an unhealthy dependence on alcohol.  And while Luke seems like a similarly fun loving guy, he's actually a lot more grown up.  In fact, the seemingly perfect couple if-only-they-knew-it, well, isn't. 

The joy of this film is seeing the largely improvised and naturalistic way in which these relationships evolve and unravel.  I love that it subverts and depends the classic rom-co characters and tropes.  And I love that I genuinely liked the characters and wanted to see what happened to them.  Kudos to all involved. 

DRINKING BUDDIES has a running time of 90 minutes and is rated R in the USA.

DRINKING BUDDIES played SXSW and London 2013. It opened earlier this year in the USA.  It opens in the UK and Ireland on November 1st. 

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP

It turns out I was almost perfectly primed for Robert Redford's earnest new thriller, THE COMPANY YOU KEEP. I'd spent much of the year compiling playlists from Monterey, Woodstock and Altamont, as well as reading Thomas Mallon's superb fictional account of Watergate, and in doing so became fascinated with the politics of the time, the apparently high stakes, the desperation of the students being koshed at Kent State.  What would it have taken to turn a liberal-thinking, frustrated student into a militant radical along the lines of Baader-Meinhof?  This seems to be a fascinating question.  If I ad been alive then, how would I have reacted?  This isn't the first time I've been obsessed with this kind of practical historical moral dilemma.  I've always wondered whether I and my friends, Oxbridge contemporaries, would've been tempted to spy for the Soviets when faced with the seemingly unstoppable march of European fascism.

At any rate, for whatever personal obsessive reasons, THE COMPANY YOU KEEP found me primed.  As the movie opens a middle-aged woman (Susan Sarandon) hands herself into the FBI, admitting culpability in a radical political bank robbery that took place in the 1960s.  In doing so, she threatens the anonymity of her fellow radicals.  The most prominent of these is a small town lawyer played by Robert Redford, who in a Bourne-like road thriller, has to evade the gaze of both the Feds and Shia LaBeouf's investigative reporter, as he races to connect with his former lover and fellow radical, played by Julie Christie.  His road trip takes him across America and back through time, uncovering the complicity of cops and students alike.  

At times, Redford's ability to call in cameos from marquee name actors - Nick Nolte, Chris Cooper, Stanley Tucci - became a little distracting, but ultimately the clear lines and swift pacing kept me on track.  Whether or not it was plausible that a man of Redford's age could successfully go on the lam as he did, I was hooked by the bait of the final meeting between Redford's mellowing father and his still-radical former lover.   The final confrontation is essentially a talky set-piece, but I found it fascinating.  I loved the genuine respect and even-handedness accorded to each side of the debate, but was all the more disappointed when that was undercut by the final choice of a main character.  Ultimately, we are left with the question of whether familial concerns trump wider political concerns, and the movie clearly comes down on one side of this question.  It is, then, a deeply bourgeois piece, and the worse for it.

THE COMPANY YOU KEEP played Venice and Toronto 2012 and opened last year in Italy. It opened earlier this year in Sweden and is currently on release in the UAE and the USA. It opens next week in Israel and Portugal and on April 18th in Australia and Brazil. It opens on April 26yth in Finland, on May 2nd in New Zealand, on May 8th in Belgium and France, on May 23rd in the Netherlands, on June 7th in the UK, on June 20th in Argentina, on July 11th in Greece and on July 25th in Germany.

The movie is rated R and has a running time of 120 minutes.

PITCH PERFECT

Do yourself a favour and watch THE BREAKFAST CLUB instead.

PITCH PERFECT is a movie made possible by the massive commercial success of the TV show GLEE, and BRIDESMAIDS. It combines a female centred gross-out humour and bonding comedy with remixed and mashed up show tunes, all with a day-glo tongue-in-cheek sensibility.  It's a movie that both mocks and loves GLEE and all its antecedents.  This was going to make it a tough sell for me. I love musicals as much as the next man, but I don't get on with GLEE. I don't like that hyper-pop-music style of singing or the caricature characters. But I *did* like BRIDESMAIDS, so I went into PITCH PERFECT with high hopes.

My viewing experience. I could see characters and lines and pratfalls that were making everyone else laugh, and an intellectual sense, I could vaguely admire them, but I just wasn't laughing. Maybe it was that I couldn't buy Anna Kendrick - the sweetest, most wholesome actress working in cinema today - as an emo rebellious teen?  Maybe I didn't really care about the thinly manufactured rivalry between the all-male victorious campus glee club and our gang of uptight, old-fashioned female acapella singers?  I knew that as much as Kendrick's Beca claimed she was too cool for school, she was eventually going to alienate and then re-woo her sweet boyfriend Jesse (Skylar Astin). And, OF COURSE, we were cueing up for a final showdown where the girls get it together, mash up monster pop hits and take the prize.  In between all that predictability, the vomit jokes and the fat jokes weren't floating my boat.  And are we really okay with some of the racially tinged jokes about Asians?

In fact, the only real joy I got from this movie were Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins as the scabrous glee contest commentators - genuinely edgy and unpredictable!  That, and the fact that it prompted me to go back and watch THE BREAKFAST CLUB, which is to this mush as Adele is to Lea Michele.

PITCH PERFECT opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Slovenia, Iceland, Singapore and Portugal. It is currently on release in Australia, Israel and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Czech Republic. It opens on December 26th in Belgium; on January 3rd in the Netherlands; on February 1st in Spain; on February 7th in Argentina and Sweden; on February 21st in Denmark and Lithuania; on March 22nd in Norway and on May 8th in France.

PARANORMAN

PARANORMAN is an absolutely delightful, heart-warming, funny and beautifully visualised stop-motion animation film about a young troubled boy who finds acceptance when he saves his town from zombies.  Norman Babcock (Kodi Smit-McPhee) is the classic emo kid bullied at school and a cause for embarrassment at home. The reason: he sees dead people.  The social pain reaches a pitch during the school play when he's carrie back in time to when a little girl was similarly misunderstand by Puritan townsfolk and hounded out, sparking a curse that Norman must lift.  True to the touchy-feely wholesome values of this film, that curse is lifted with empathy rather than pitchforks, with the upside that his family finally accept Norman for what he is, and more importantly he finally feels comfortable with his gift and understands that they truly do love him.  The scene where his blonde bimbo elder sister (Anna Kendrick) grabs his hand and protects him from a mob is positively heart-breaking.  The movie works on all sorts of more subtle levels too - I love that they cast geeky Christopher Mintz-Plasse as the voice of the bully - a role he'd never be able to play in a live action film.  I love the balls-out bravery of the final joke between the elder sister and the guy she's been crushing on. I love the subtle and obvious reverential references to horror films throughout the movie. And I love the gentle humour and genuine chemistry between Norman and his eager best friend: "Don't make me throw the humus - it's spicy!"  Overall, there's nothing not to like about this film.  It's less dark than the Neil Gaiman penned CORALINE which many of the team here also worked on, but what it looses in darkness it gains in sheer heart. 

PARANORMAN is on release in  Mexico, Iceland, the Netherlands, Hong Kong, Peru, Canada, Colombia, Taiwan, the USA, Vietnam, Belgium, France, Germany, Russia, Chile, Singapore, Slovenia, Romania, the Philippines, the Czech Republic, Brazil, Estonia, Finland, Pakistan, Greece, Portugal, El Salvador, Ireland, Norway and the UK.  It opens on September 20th in Denmark, Poland and Sweden; on September 28th in Lithuania; on October 4th in Thailand; on October 11 th in Italy; on October 19th in Turkey; on October 25th in Argentina; on October 29th in Israel; on September 21st in December; on January 10th in Australia and Hungary; on January 17th in New Zealand and in Japan on March 29th.

PARANORMAN has a running time of 92 minutes and the movie is rated PG in the USA.

THE TWILIGHT SAGA: BREAKING DAWN - PART 1 - Cronenberg meets Christian fundamentalists

THE TWILIGHT SAGA, based on Stephenie Meyer's turgid novels, and starring the pretty R-Patz, gay icon Taylor Lautner, and professionally bored Kristen Stewart, is critic proof. It will rake in millions upon millions at the box office from hysterical hordes of narcissistic and insecure teenage girls, who dream of being fought over by not one, but two dishy boys - but all, let us not forget, in the safest possible manner.  Because these are films and novels about the wisdom of abstinence until there's a ring on your finger. The result in a saga that have been, up until this instalment, utterly anaemic - foregoing a potent gothic mix of subversive sex and death for the bland trite stylings of Sweet Valley High.  

It comes, then, as something of a relief, to find mopy Bella (Stewart) finally tying the knot with rich cool vampire Edward (Pattinson).  To be sure, in order for her to cope with his powerful vampiric sex drive he's going to have to turn her into a vampire too, and this clearly pisses off Edward's hot-blooded werewolf rival Jacob (Lautner) although apparently not Bella's mum and dad.  For reasons I never really understand, though, Bella decides not to be turned before her honeymoon, and so go at it with gay abandon, but after her honeymoon. The implications of this are that she - beaten and bruised by her vampiric husband - still begs him for sex (sex, that we never see mind you, despite waiting for eons of boring abstemious cinema time) - and then falls pregnant with a half-breed child that kills her as he grows inside of her.  Of course, she won't consider an abortion, this being a book penned by a writer with a specific moral agenda, and the denouement of the film is a kind of explicit body horror that comes straight from the cinema of Cronenberg.

The resulting film is both severely tedious, embarrassingly low-rent, but also provocative. The first hour is a drippy super-romantic marriage sequence that feels like an endless montage and advert for interior decorating.  The honeymoon is similarly out of Conde Nast traveller, and annoyingly coy.  The acting is sub-par. The dialogue stilted.  The second hour of the film then trips into all out body horror that was satisfyingly gory - brilliant FX turning Stewart into an emaciated victim of internal vampiricism - followed by a birthing scene that will turn anyone celibate.  How to reconcile the two?  How to sit still through the boring first hour and twenty minutes before you get to the gore?  By pondering the provocative messages we are sending our teenage girls by giving them a popular culture that combines the famous-for-being-slutty Paris Hilton and Snooky and the equally extreme abstemiousness of the Twilight Saga.  How on earth are they meant to have a healthy attitude toward sex and toward their own physical health? What messages are they getting from seeing a battered Bella beg for sex? I mean, for fuck's sake, shouldn't we be telling them that when a guy leaves you battered, you leave? 

The whole thing is frankly at once highly silly and camp, and yet at the same time, deeply deeply disturbing.  Let's just get Part 2 over with.

BREAKING DAWN PART 1 is on global release.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 3 - 50/50

Anna Kendrick, Will Reiser and Seth Rogen present 50/50

50/50 is that most difficult of tricks to pull off - a movie that is both raucously funny and genuinely affecting.  For that we have to thank the loosely autiobiographical screenplay from Will Reiser and direction from Jonathan Levine (THE WACKNESS, ALL THE BOYS LOVE MANDY LANE) that keeps the movie in delicate balance.  That balance is key - because this movie is about a young man struggling to beat an aggressive cancer, enduring chemo and surgery, and even then only with a 50/50 chance of survival. It's the subject matter of afternoon TV movies and melodramas.  What saves us (mostly) from emotional manipulation is the the brutal honesty and hilarity with which the topic is treated - everything from getting high on medical-strength weed, to trashing a flaky ex-girlfriends painting with eggs and knives, to exploiting having cancer to get laid by sympathetic chicks.  In other words, Reiser manages to avoid mawkishness (at least until the final fifteen minutes) by transforming his experience of cancer treatment into a "bromance" complete with adult humour.  To that end, the absolute hear of the flick is the relationship between Jospeh Gordon-Levitt as the cancer victim and all-round good egg, and Kyle - the kind of typically loud-mouthed, vulgar but heart-of-gold character that Seth Rogen always plays. The supporting cast is also first class, with Angelica Huston adding dramatic weight as Adam's mother; Anna Kendrick showing her comedic chops as Adam's therapist; and Bryce Dallas Howard deliciously shitty and cast against type as Adam's girlfriend.  If I have a criticism of this otherwise superb movie, it's that one might feel emotionally manipulated in the final reel.  I can see that intellectually, but I totally bought into the relationships in the film, was right their with Kyle in the waiting room during Adam's surgery, and enjoyed every minute of the experience.  

50/50 played Toronto and London 2011. It played Aspen where it won the Audience Award and  Hollywood where Joseph Gordon-Levitt won the Breakthrough Award for Actor of the Year. 50/50 opened in the USA in September. It opens in Portugal on November 10th; in France on November 16th; in Hong Kong and the Netherlands on November 17th; in the UK on November 25th; in Hungary and Japan on December 1st; in Sweden on December 2nd; andin Ireland on January 4th.

London Film Fest Day 5 - UP IN THE AIR

My friends typically work for former-I-banks, private equity houses and fund managers, and travel to at least one European or long-haul destination per week. They are nice, interesting people but every time we get together the conversation at some point descends into comparing airline frequent flyer programmes, blackberries and check-listing the best restaurants and concierges in various European capitals. We are the cohort that knows exactly the quickest route through any airport and always turn left upon boarding. But that's not all there is to life. Some have kids - some an unhealthy obsession with movies. We are all aware that the big corporates target insecure over-achievers: smart young graduates who will so identify with the corporate brand that their self-esteem lies in the coolness of their new laptop and how many miles they fly per year. It's as though the apparently elite status they have been sold compensates for working insane hours. Stick with it, kid, and one day you TOO can become a Lufthansa Hons member and make Managing Director. We too were once shiny bright 23 year olds, unleashed upon the world with dreams of summer houses and Porsche Cayennes. Ten years later, the 2001 dotcom crash and the credit crunch later, heartbreak, marriages, divorces have come and gone, and we'll settle. And no, it doesn't seem like failure.

I give you this little round-up to tell you that when it comes to reviewing UP IN THE AIR - the new romantic comedy from THANK YOU FOR SMOKING director Jason Reitman, I know whereof I speak, and I know whereof he speaks. Problem is, I think he's set up a straw man. The fact that he occasionally hits the mark with some biting dialogue doesn't make up for it.

Reitman's central character is a mono-dimensional corporate man called Bingham (Clooney). He's the classic air-miles junkie, happiest in the air, avoiding a real relationship with his family or a potential girlfriend at all costs. The movie is about how he reacts when he falls for a whip-smart woman who is just as career-focused as he is (Vera Farmiga). Along the way, he realises just what a shitty profession he is in (a consultant brought in to fire people) when he sees it afresh through the eyes of the new hire (Anna Kendrick). Reitman has Bingham go through one of those classic rom-com epiphanies, where the caricatured hard-ass central character realises it might actually be nice to have a relationship with someone. (See THE PROPOSAL, THE FAMILY STONE, MANAGEMENT et hoc genus omne). It even comes complete with a running through the night to tell the one you love that you love them scene. I only just forgave Reitman for that hackneyed move. The problem is that the really interesting dynamic isn't about ultra career focused people suddenly realising they'd like a relationship. It's about people, like the new hire, who do want both, know they want both, but can't seem to make it work out. That's the rub.

Anyways, let's be generous and grant that Jason Reitman's fictive career-focused lone wolf is credible and interesting. Given that, how does the movie work out? Well, I like the overall bleak tone, especially the final act twist. Totally brought it back from the rom-com vibe I was getting in the penultimate act. I also really like the way in which Reitman plays the scene between the career woman at 23 and the career woman at 33: very psychologically accurate and superbly done. Other than that, I thought the movie contained too much dead air, and much like THANK YOU FOR SMOKING, wasn't even in tone. Ultimately, I wasn't engaged by the characters, because the central struggle didn't seem real to me, and I thought Reitman didn't really have the balls to deal with the critique implicit in his subject matter of mass lay-offs. It all felt rather exploitative.

UP IN THE AIR played Toronto 2009. It opens in November in the USA. It opens in January 2010 in Australia, Spain, Sweden, Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Norway, the UK, Russia and Denmark. It opens in February 2010 in Mexico, Turkey, Hungary and Singapore. It opens in Finland on March 19th.