Overlooked DVD of the month - THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB is remarkably like a Jane Austen novel. It's peopled with a group of women searching for love. Althought the women face obstacles, not least their own inability to see love when it's staring them in the face, everything ends happily and order is restored. The entire process is charming and witty and involving and entirely harmless. The ensemble cast do a great job. I particularly liked Hugh Dancy is his role as a relentlessly optimistic IT-geek called Grigg. I've never been particularly impressed by Dancy before but he utterly won me over with his performance in a role which is hard to take seriously. He makes Grigg more than just a two-dimensional nice guy. The upshot is that I finished the movie in a sunny mood entirely at odds with my usual callous, cyncical demeanour.

Once the optimistic glow had subsided, my usual cynicism kicked in and the house of cards collapsed. The whole movie was contrived from top to bottom. The idea is that five women and one man meet once a month and discuss one of Austen's novels. Such is Austen's universal wit and wisdom that they can draw piquant life lessons from her novels and apply them to their own lives in contemporary California. Problem is that a lot of the lessons seem misapplied, or stretched to say the least.

Consider PERSUASION - a wonderful novel about second chances. The lessons are applied to Prudie and Dean. Prudie has delusions of a Left-Bank life; Dean is a neanderthal. Apparently having him read PERSUASION will lead to a rekindling of their romance. Sorry. Not buying it. The whole set up of the film is that they are congenitally unsuited. Reading a novel won't change that. And what about the relationship at the core of the film - between a repressed older woman, Jocelyn, and the younger man determined to win her love - Grigg. Apart from the completely predictable way in which they come together, I really hated the fact that the reasons for Joceyln to be so closed off were never explained. This made it hard to sympathise with her. She just seemed mean.

Apparently these issues are dealt with at more length in the novel and I look forward to reading it. And I suppose any movie can't be all bad if it makes you want to spend more time with its characters....?

THE JANE AUSTEN BOOK CLUB played Toronto 2007 and was released last year. It's now available on DVD.

IT'S A BOY-GIRL THING isn't helping my case

I have rather a soft spot for teen comedies, much to the hilarity of my serious movie-going friends. IT'S A BOY-GIRL THING is not helping my case any. From the writer of the schmaltzy, formulaic romantic-comedy, KINKY BOOTS, comes another teen comedy that is bland and unfunny to the point of frustration. Think of it as a sort of FREAKY FRIDAY for The OC generation. Samaire Armstrong plays the chick who protests too much and the boorish bloke is played by Kevin Zegers in what must be the biggest career reversal since Ed Norton starred in DEATH TO SMOOCHY. Definitely one to avoid.

IT'S A BOY-GIRL THING was released in the UK on Boxing Day. It opens in the Netherlands on Valentine's Day 2007 and in Belgium on July 4th.

TRANSAMERICA - like CAPOTE and TSOTSI - a great central performance in a mediocre movie

There's not a whole lot I want to say about TRANSAMERICA. By now, with the Oscar hoopla over with, pretty much everyone knows that the movie contains a fantastic central performance from Felicity Huffman. Huffman plays a pre-operative trans-sexual who, on the eve of "her" gender re-assignment, discovers that she fathered a child. Posing as a religious worker, she picks up her son in New York and drives him cross country. Felicity Huffman's performance is one of subtlety and authenticity. I took a person who has never seen Desperate Housewives(!) to see this flick, and he did not twig that the trans-sexual, "Bree", was being played by a woman. However, I found the rest of the film chock-full of road-movie cliches, and something of a paint-by-numbers Indie film. It's all here: junkie, hustler teenage drifter son; wise Native American; mean and nasty middle-American mother....Perhaps the director felt that with such challenging core material, he had to situate Bree's story is a conventional genre movie. Alls I know is that while Huffman's on-screen persona is an act of award-worthy transformation, the movie itself was pretty mediocre and left me unimpressed and largely unmoved.

TRANSAMERICA premiered at Berlin 2005 and is currently on release in the US and UK. It hits France on April 26th 2006.