BLENDED

BLENDED is the latest in the series of harmless rom-coms starring Adam Sandler and Drew Barrymore as Jim and Lauren. In this iteration they play a widower and a divorcee respectively who go on a horrible blind date where he takes her to a Hooters and pays her no attention.  Naturally they are opposites. She's a professional closet organiser and so is portrayed as uptight and overly controlling, with her two boys dressed in smart suits. He's a sports-nut with there girls dressed in athletic wear.  Neither parent is coping particularly well with their kids going through puberty. 

The plot kicks off when Lauren's best friend ends her relationship with Jim's boss freeing up a luxury holiday that the boss had booked. They both get to go with their kids, and while they start of hating each other and protesting that they aren't dating - well, you can guess what happens. 

The humour is very very low key indeed. It's not really a laugh-out-loud movie. But I did, in spite of my in-built cynicism, feel that trademark Sandler-Barrymore warm cuddly feeling and I genuinely liked these people and wanted things to work out. There are no surprises, and I knew I was being manipulated by a script that repeated a tried and trusted formula. But I just couldn't help it.  And you know when I knew this movie was really working?  Terry Crews.  When I first saw his cameo as a South African singer I thought, my god, is this borderline racist?  By the end, I just went with it, and even found it funny. So yes, there's nothing original or pioneering here.  But it works.  It really does.

BLENDED is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 117 minutes. BLENDED is on release in the USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, Puerto Rico, Austria and Canada. It opens on May 30th in Thailand, Bulgaria, India and Vietnam.  It opens in June in Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Singapore, Uruguay, Colombia, Cyprus, Pakistan, Belgium, Iceland, Kuwait, the Philippines, the UAE, Australia, Lebanon, Peru, Indonesia, Panama, Turkey, Azerbaijan, Greece, Romania, Taiwan, Mexico, Spain, Finland and Sweden. It opens in July in Italy, Denmark, Croatia, Hungary, Israel, Macedonia, Portugal, Serbia, Russia, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland, Venezuela, South Africa, the Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Slovenia, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Norway, Brazil and the Netherlands. It opens on August 6th in Egypt, and in Japan on March 11th 2015.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - GOING THE DISTANCE

Documentarian Nanette Burstein (AMERICAN TEEN, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) makes her debut feature with the like-able and sometimes authentic romantic-comedy GOING THE DISTANCE. Drew Barrymore and Justin Long - perhaps two of the most charming light-comedy actors currently working - play a couple who meet and have a fun fling knowing she's about to relocate from New York to San Francisco. Trouble is, they really connect, and so attempt to do a long-distance relationship. I love the honesty of it. Lots of scenes will feel familiar to anyone who's tried this. The financial strain of buying plane tickets - the jealousy of "friends" who are closer by - the justification to friends of why it's worth it - the struggle to weigh up career-choices versus life-partners. And the great thing is that Geoff LaTulippe's script handles it all very lightly. I can't say much bad about the script. It's well acted, contains consistent laughs and I genuinely cared about what happened to the characters. There may be a few rom-com cliché moments (do we really need the crude, OTT tanning salon scene?), but so many as to detract from the overall vibe. Basically, it's all good!

GOING THE DISTANCE was released last autumn and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up - WHIP IT

WHIP IT is a pretty conventional, but charming, coming-of-age flick directed by Drew Barrymore and starring JUNO's Ellen Page. It feels old fashioned - in the way the sports movies and coming-of-age dramas used to be, before they got satirised in movies like DODGEBALL. The kitsch feel stems partly from the deliberately down-at-heel suburban production design, and from the fact that the heroine is torn between her mother's obsession with beauty pageants and her own attraction to Roller Derby - and both seem anachronistic. But it also stems a little from the straightforward narrative arc, the fact that the happy ending is never really in doubt and the rather simplistic shooting style. The fact that this is Barrymore's debut directorial feature shows in her rather unimaginative handling of the Roller Derby scenes in particular.

Ellen Page plays seventeen-year old, suburban, Bliss Cavendar. Her mother, seeing it as a route out of town, makes her enter beauty pageants where she has to extol traditional feminine virtues. But Bliss decides to rebel by lying about her age and joining a Roller Derby league. She meets tough women with real lives, learns to be aggressive, and gets her first boyfriend. But, as in the way of these three act coming of age flick (see WAYNE'S WORLD, even), Bliss ends up pissing off everyone who loves her - her best friend, her mum, her dad, and potentially her team. Of course, in the movies, as opposed to real life, when you have a bratty teen "coming of age", everyone is remarkably forgiving and loving.

So, all in all, you have to ask what really is the point of WHIP IT? A movie so familiar it feels like a US version of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM subbing roller debry for soccer.

Additional tags: Robert Yeoman, Dylan Tichenor, The Section Quartet, Juliette Lewis, Andrew Wilson, Landon Pigg, Alia Shawkat, Zoe Bell, Ari Graynor, Carlo Alban, Daniel Stern, Shauna Cross

WHIP IT played Toronto 2009 and was released in 2009/2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - EVERYBODY'S FINE

EVERYBODY'S FINE is an embarrassingly bad movie - shamelessly manipulative, bland, banal, unoriginal, and just plain dull. It tells the story of Frank Goode (Robert de Niro) - a retired widower whose four children bail on a family visit at the last minute. So, armed with his medicine and against his doctor's advice, he boards trains and buses to visit them all in turn. First he turns up at artist David's flat only to find it deserted. His other three grown children will keep up the evasion of where David really is - trying to protect a father they really have no means of communicating with authentically. Each evasion is more painful than the next. On the second visit, Frank's daughter (Kate Beckinsale) is caught out using her son's illness to escape the family visit. She seems self-absorbed and her son finds the grandfather irrelevant. The third visit is with Frank's other son, (Sam Rockwell), a percussionist in a regional orchestra. His father seems disappointed that he didn't become a conductor - the son seems ashamed to have let down his father but incapable of persuading him that this is what he wants. The final visit is with the other daughter (Drew Barrymore) who seems to have more time for her father, but by this time, he's out of meds and increasingly disillusioned. There is, however, no real enlightenment here. No real questioning or exploration of the relationships. Just think - this is same material - these doubts and neuroses about parental expectations and evasions - that powered the cinema of Ingmar Bergman. And just see what schmaltz and banality it is reduced to in its final act.  I am hardly surprised that this movie went straight to DVD in the UK. 

Additional tags: Kirk Jones, Henry Braham, Melissa Leo, James Frain, Andrew Modshein, Dario Marianelli

EVERYBODY'S FINE was released in winter 2009/2010 in the US, Israel, Mexico, Spain, Poland, Hong Kong, Sweden, Lebanon, Singapore, Panama, Australia, Turkey, the Czech Republic, Kuwait, Estonia, Peru, Argentina, Germany, Greece, the Netherlands, Portugal, the Philippines and Italy.

Late review - HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU is a deeply depressing film about contemporary thirty-somethings dating, divorcing, marrying and generally entering into sado-masochistic relationships. The basic premise of the movie seems to be that women, and occasionally men, read too much into situations and end up getting hurt when they should just stop being delusional and move on....except for when the studio needs a Hollywood-cute ending, and they shouldn't, in fact, move on, but hold out for the fairytale happy ending. I dislike this movie for being too gutless to pursue its world-view to its logical end. I discard the movie for being so poorly directed by Ken Kwapis, whose priors include the abysmal Robin Williams vehicle, LICENSE TO WED. And I despise it for basically crafting a product aimed at women that seeks to, essentially, mock them for their delusional fantasies while simultaneously pandering to them. All this is not to discount the nuanced performances from Jennifer Connelly and Jennifer Aniston, but to regret their choice of script.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU was released in Spring 2009 and is released on DVD next week.

LUCKY YOU - strangely unengaging

LUCKY YOU is a truly banal film. The movie is about a professional poker player called Huck Cheever (Eric Bana) struggling to a) get the entry money for the World Series of Poker b) defeat his estranged father, two-time world champion LC Cheever (Robert Duvall), and c) win the heart of pure-hearted singer Billie Offer (Drew Barrymore).

Each of these three story strands utterly fails to engage the audience. As each actor is gifted, I can only put this down to bad writing and direction. Curtis Hanson, who so skilfully directed LA CONFIDENTIAL, films the poker games in an entirely pedestrian style. He also fails to elicit memorable or even engaged performances from his lead actors. Hanson also fails to use his DP, Peter Deming, well. Consider that the same DP, working with David Lynch, created the unforgettable visuals of MULHOLLAND DRIVE. As a co-writer, Hanson has the bad fortune to be mixed up with screen-writer, Eric Roth. Roth is a serial offender, creating one bloated, over-complicated, banal script after another. I give you MUNICH, ALI, THE GOOD SHEPHERD, and THE HORSE WHISPERER as evidence. Here, Roth resorts to truly painful platitudes. At the key emotional moment of the film, he has Billie tell Huck: "You know what I think? I think that everyone's just trying not to be lonely." Ye Gods. L C Cheever tells his son Huck, "You got it backwards kid. You play cards the way you should lead your life. And you lead your life the way you should play cards." Such wisdom!

The final, fatal problem with this movie is that while there is too much poker for the uninitiated to deal with, for anyone with a passing interest in the game, the hands are either too dramatic and improbable, or too curtailed to be engaging.

Grim. With the exception of fascinating five minute cameo from Robert Downey Junior.

LUCKY YOU was released in the US, France, the Philippines, Australia, Portugal, Greece and Argentina earlier this year. It opens in Brazil, Italy, the UK and Japan this weekend. It opens in Germany on June 28th, in Belgium in Jly 18th and in Spain on July 27th 2007.

MUSIC AND LYRICS - surprisingly good!

I had a fun time watching MUSIC AND LYRICS. Yes, it sticks to the conventions of the romantic-comedy. Yes, it's cheesy. Yes, it has an improbable but ludicrously heart-warming denouement. But compared to a mercenary, over-long, over-schmaltzy product like THE HOLIDAY, MUSIC AND LYRICS looks like a winner.

The movie features Hugh Grant as a washed-up 80s boy-band veteran. He's stuck on the nostalgia circuit - playing school reunions - and desperately needs to write a hit song for a Britney-like singer hip-hop singer called Cora. To this end, he recruits his conveniently lyrically-gifted plant-waterer (I kid you not), played by Drew Barrymore. They write the song, fall in love, and despite the obligatory obstacles, the movie ends happily.

There are three great things about the film. First, it brilliantly spoofs 1980s pop bands - and Hugh Grant clearly has a lot of fun in the role and delivers his self-mocking one-liners with real comedic skill. Second, the ballad that Hugh and Drew are writing is really rather nice and adds credibility to a rather improbable tale. But third and most crucially, Hugh and Drew have genuine on-screen chemistry and grown-up dialogue to deliver. So, as surprised as I am to say this, credit where credit's due: MUSIC AND LYRICS is a great romantic-comedy.

MUSIC AND LYRICS is on release in the UK. It opens in Australia, Malaysia, the Philippines and the US on Valentine's Day and in Bulgaria on the 16th. It opens in Hong Kong, Brazil and Italy on the 23rd. It opens in Iceland and Sweden on March 2nd, in Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Singapore, Austria and Norway on March 9th. It opens in France on March 14th, in Latvia on March 16th and in Spain on April 13th.

PERFECT CATCH - perfect date movie

The first time I saw FEVER PITCH, marketed in the UK as PERFECT CATCH, I hated it. I thought it was a glossy, vapid, Hollywood chick-flick, lacking intelligence and wit. However, I was WRONG. It wasn't my fault: I had been a complete sucker. The marketing posters had sold me a remake of the British film of the same name, based on the novel by Nick Hornby. So, I had gone into the cinema expecting a movie about a middle-aged teacher struggling to come to terms with life as an adult: balancing his complicated relationship with his father and his first serious relationship with his fanatical devotional to Arsenal football club. Both the novel and the original film were trememdous: they were genuinely funny, and genuinely insightful about modern life and relationships. The movie even looked grey and gritty, and in case we were ever in any doubt, we even had the Hillsborough disaster to ground us. By contrast, the Hollywood remake recasts the story in America and instead of a Gooners fan, we have Jimmy Fallon as a Boston Redsocks fan, falling in love with career woman played by Drew Barrymore.

The key to enjoying the remake is to completely empty your brain of any fragment of the source material: to take it as a stand-alone, original movie. Even better, ignore the marketing campaign that tells you it is a romantic COMEDY. Yes, yes, Drew Barrymore is a decent comedic actress and Jimmy Fallon (TAXI aside) is a decent stand-up comedian, but that is not what this film is about. If you look for belly-laughs you'll be disappointed. But if you adjust your expectations as instructed, what you'll get is a really sweet date movie, perfectly cast, that IS schmaltzy and glossy, but that gives you a nice warm feeling inside. Aaah! I love Asian ultra-violence as much as the next girl but, every now and then, it's lovely to inhabit a world where chicks don't mind when their boyfriends watch Match of the Day, and guys don't care when their girlfriends work late, and your team wins the The Ashes, I mean World Series.

PERFECT CATCH/FEVER PITCH is now available on DVD.