PIECE BY PIECE**** - BFI London Film Festival 2024 - Closing Night Gala

Multi-talented musician, rapper, producer, fashionista and all around creative genius Pharrell tells his life story in a documentary wherein it was shot conventionally and then over-drawn in Lego animation. I guess this is a thing now.  After all, we are getting Robbie Wiliams played by a chimp this week. Why? I dunno. Why not? The result is colourful, creative, imaginative and delightful. Who doesn't work to see Snoop Dogg as a minifig?  And by the way, making this film also made Lego become even more inclusive by radically increasing their range of skin colours and textured hair in the minifig range.

The problem with the technique is that it is distancing - and I think this may be why Pharrell chose it. He gets to completely control the narrative to the point of not revealing his or any of the interviewees' facial reactions to the questions being asked. As a result, I feel like acclaimed documentary director Morgan Neville (20 FEET FROM STARDOM) was stymied from the start.  The doc is therefore as fascinating and well constructed as we might expect from Neville. But Pharrell's falling out with Neptunes band mate is elided over, as just one example, and we get nothing about the Blurred Lines controversy, as another. The resulting film feels like hagiography. And I am a Pharrell fan. But I feel there was some grittier stuff we needed to get into.

PIECE BY PIECE is rated PG and has a running time of 93 minutes. It played Toronto and London 2024 and was released in October.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS**

Nicole Holofcener (ENOUGH SAID) returns to our screens with her brand of low-key rich white people dramedy. At its worst its tone deaf and deeply annoying. At its best it can be pleasantly surprising.  YOU HURT MY FEELINGS is mildly entertaining while also being a giant nothingburger.  I didn't hate it. I immediately forgot about it.  

The movie stars Seinfeld and Veep's Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Beth, a rich white person with rich white people problems. Her psychologist husband Don (The Crown's Tobias Menzies) is deeply loving but one day she overhears him saying he doesn't really like her new book. She reacts childishly. Rather than discuss it, she passively aggressively punishes him for something he doesn't even know he did.  Meanwhile their son Eliot (Owen Teague) is left third-wheeling their infantile psychodrama. The moral of the film seems to be that happy relationships involve some measure of deceit and that we should just get on with it. Okay. Cool. Mind blowing. It's all well enough acted and produced. It just feels so meh.

YOU HURT MY FEELINGS has a running time of 93 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK. It played Sundance 2023 and opened in the USA in May. It was released in the UK on Amazon Prime next week.

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN****

Documentarian Morgan Neville excels at producing well-researched, precisely constructed documentaries about the major pop cultural figures of our times - not least Orson Welles, Mr Rogers and Keith Richards.  In his latest film, he focuses his attention on celebrity chef and travel journalist Anthony Bourdain.  What emerges is a picture of a deeply troubled man - a junkie who beat the habit but turned that compulsive energy into relentless travel and finally an obsessive love affair. At the end, when he had achieved fame and commercial success and travelled the world many times over, he still seemed deeply lonely and depressed, maybe bipolar, and he chose to commit suicide. 

I may be in the unusual position of not having read any of Bourdain's books and not having watched a single episode of his TV shows. I just knew his face as someone on TV and read the stories when he died. This was not a barrier to finding the film fascinating. Because I got to know Anthony threw his friends, fellow recovering addicts, superlative chefs, his ex-wife, his crew. He seemed to be a deeply funny, a wonderful raconteur, and a deeply erudite man who cared deeply about using his platform to show what was happening in the world that usually escapes mainstream attention.  What he doesn't appear to be is a particularly amazing chef! And I suspect, and the movie suggests, that we should truly see him as is a gonzo journalist. 

As a cinephile, I found the final half hour of the movie most interesting, with Bourdain dating Asia Argento in the period where she denounces Harvey Weinstein as a rapist at Cannes, and the industry that sheltered him. Bourdain seems to throw himself into the MeToo movement with a reckless boundary-less energy that suffocates his partner and drives her away.  

Overall, I found this an insightful, sensitive and honest portrait of an addict struggling with mental health issues and entirely relatable for any of us dealing with the same. I felt it could've had maybe 20-30 minutes taken out of the running time, but that perhaps reflects that I am not watching this as a pre-made Bourdain fan.

ROADRUNNER: A FILM ABOUT ANTHONY BOURDAIN is rated R and has a running time of 119 minutes.  The film played Tribeca 2021 and was released in the USA earlier this year. 

THE BIG SICK

THE BIG SICK is a culture-clash romantic comedy based on the true story of how stand up comedian Kumail Nanjiani (SILICON VALLEY) met his wife Emily Gordon (Zoe Kazan - RUBY SPARKS).  He grew up in Pakistan and though settled in Chicago his mum and dad (Anupam Kher) still expect him to be an observant Muslim and to marry a Pakistani wife, a parade of whom happen to drop by for family dinners so that he can choose one.  Even when Kumail meets psychology student Emily, and even when they both fall in love with her, he can't envisage a future with her if it means giving up his family who would ostracise him.  And so she breaks up with him and that should be that.  However, as in real life, Emily gets sick, goes into a medically induced coma, and Kumail realises how much he loves her. He also starts to bond with her parents - played by Ray Romano and Holly Hunter - nuanced characters who both resent his treatment of their daughter, but realise he loves her, and are battling with their own relationship issues.  The sickness also gives Kumail the courage to tell his parents how he feels, and to tentatively navigate a new relationship with them based on truth, chipping away at their froideur. 

DADDY'S HOME

DADDY'S HOME is a comedy from the writers and director of HOT TUB TIME MACHINE and HORRIBLE BOSSES 2. It contains the same kind of raucous verbal humour and physical pratfalls.  Will Ferrell stars as Brad Whitaker - a decent man and earnest stepfather of two kids.  The problems start when their biological father Dusty Mayron (Mark Wahlberg) shows up.  He's more charismatic and popular, even though he actually doesn't have the integrity or care to be a good parent.  At least Brad's wife Sara (Linda Cardellini) understands Brad's pain - she was also sick of being the strict parent when married to Dusty.  

The narrative arc is pretty predictable.  The childish father is obviously going to be redeemed but essentially leave the newly blended family in tact.  And in a set up for a sequel, we see Dusty meet the biological dad of his own stepkid by the end of the film.  Still, we don't come to a movie like this for innovative narrative structure.  What makes it work is the verbal and physical comedy and the genuine heart.  Will Ferrell really sells the roll of the loveable geeky stepdad and the budding bromance between Brad and Dusty by the end of the film is kind of sweet. The end may be a little too on the nose for some, but at least you've had more than a few laughs along the away.  

DADDY'S HOME has a running time of 96 minutes and is rated PG-13.  The movie is on release in the UK, Canada, Cambodia, Pakistan, the USA, Australia and Ireland. It opens later in December in New Zealand, Egypt, Malaysia, Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam and goes on global release in January.

SEX TAPE

Jake Kasdan directed BAD TEACHER starring Jason Segel and Cameron Diaz and it was a genuinely wickedly funny, subversive movie. So why is SEX TAPE, directed by and starring the same actors, so painfully unfunny?  I mean, seriously, I did not laugh once for the entire running time of the film. I didn't even do that inward smile thing. It's not that it was even awkward, what will all the sex-talk.  It was just banal and so at pains to be earnest and good-hearted.  It also features the most absurdly in-your-face and annoying product placement. 

The plot is simple. Diaz and Segel play a happily married couple who realise that they just don't have enough good sex. So one night they get drunk and make a sex tape which the husband is meant to erase from his iPad but doesn't. Worse, it gets synched to all the people who he have his old iPads too, because in the most unbelievably contrived plot necessity, he's a DJ who gives people iPads but doesn't let them resynch them to their own accounts because that would rob them off his awesome playlists.   

Obviously if the film were funnier, the threadbare premise would bother us less. But it isn't witty and the physical humour is just juvenile.  This is most evident in the extended scene where the couple go to the house of the businessman who is on the verge of buying Diaz' website. He espouses family value but is a cokehead.  So while Diaz snorts coke to distract him (how we laughed! not) Segel runs through his mansion chased by a vicious guard-dog. I mean, really?

The whole film is basically just a banal and dull watch where sex is the preserve of well-meaning earnest couples and even pornographers have hearts.  Pass the sick-bucket.

SEX TAPE has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release.

TAMMY

In which Melissa McCarthy (BRIDESMAIDS) plays a woman who has lost her job and her husband, and goes on an impromptu road trip with her similarly unboundaried alcoholic grandmother (Susan Sarandon.) We are meant to be amused by their scampy hi-jinks as they wend their way to Niagara Falls, picking up guys en route (Mark Duplass) robbing a fast food joint and generally being mildly transgressive. The problem is that all of this is way too underwritten - way too unfunny - and it seems that as fine an actress as Susan Sarandon is, she’s not even attempting to truly play an old woman. Contrast this performance with Julie Walters, also aged up to play a granny going on an impromptu road-trip in THE HARRY HILL MOVIE. The only scene worth anything is when Tammy and her grandmother end up at a magnificent house owned by two gay lovers played by Kathy Bates and Sandra Oh. Tammy is feeling sorry for herself but Bates’ character schools her on how hard she had to work for everything she has, as well as acceptance. It’s the only moving and authentic moment in the whole film. Otherwise, TAMMY follows the typical comedy arc with the protagonist falling out with people and then making up, finding self-knowledge en route. I just wish that Melissa McCarthy and the Hollywood producers who throw scripts her way would realise that she is a better actress than this, and just because she played a gross character on BRIDESMAIDS doesn’t mean that she has to play versions of that for the rest of her career. She’s a beautiful woman. How about being daring and giving her a conventional rom-com?  The fact that she CHOSE to co-write this movie makes me all the more sad.

TAMMY has a running time of 97 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on release in the USA, Canada, Germany, Singapore, the UK and Ireland. It goes on release in Kuwait on July 28th, Denmark on July 31st, South Africa on August 29th and Australia on October 16th.

CYRUS - He *loved* his mother

I love CYRUS. It’s a movie that’s honest, funny, dark and moving. I haven’t seen a sweeter more unlikely romance on screen in years – and rarely one in which the characters are at once so spiky and unusual and yet express such honest emotion. John C Reilly plays a basically good guy, also called John, who is still reeling from divorce and lacks the confidence to date again. Pushed to a party by his remarkably tolerant ex-wife (Catherine Keener) he stumbles upon the beautiful Molly (Marisa Tomei). The scene in which they meet could be taught in film-school as a lesson in how to subvert the “meet-cute” with something far more surprising. There’s a drunk, dejected guy pissing against a tree and a woman walks by and says “Nice penis!” I mean, what an awesome reaction! Immediately we know that’s she’s got an off-beat sense of humour. And then John starts talking to her and immediately denigrating himself: “What are you doing in the garden with Shrek?” But as much as he thinks he’s scored, he’s so drunk and, in a sense, so innocent, that when the Human League’s “Don’t you want me?” starts playing he basically brushes her off to go dance in the living room. Of course he makes a complete ass of himself, but the most amazing thing happens. Rather than being weirded out by what a drunk loser he is, the hot chick saves him by dancing and singing too. I think this is pretty much the most genuinely cute meet-cute I’ve seen.

There is, of course, a glitch to this odd-couple romance, otherwise we wouldn’t have a narrative arc. Molly has a son called Cyrus. And Molly and Cyrus have a very un-boundaried relationship. Cyrus is the kind of kid who should have grown up and gone to college and gotten a girlfriend but is so molly-coddled by his mother that he has become self-centred and unstable. He is massively threatened by John, who he sees as a rival for his mother’s attentions and basically tries to sabotage the relationship. This leads to a comedy of manners in which both Cyrus and John pretend to be getting on well to please Molly but are secretly sabotaging each other. Things come to a head and John’s ex-wife’s wedding where all the bitterness is exposed. This leads to a truly amazing third act, where the movie turns from indie rom-com into tragic-drama, as Cyrus and Molly confront how messed up their relationship is.

I love CYRUS on so many levels it’s hard to know where to begin. John C Reilly has that great mix of being able to act both as a loveable chump but also as a wily reader of the messed up relationship he encounters. Marisa Tomei is one of those charming actresses with whom you’re happy to spend time. But the actor who really impressed me was Jonah Hill, who for the first time managed to beyond his smart-ass, slightly weird screen persona and deliver a heart-breaking redemption scene. Behind the camera, I think you have to give the writer-director Duplass Brothers mad props for managing to portray a situation that could have been gross – oedipal complex plays out – as basically sweet, but never cloying. I also love the fact that no scene or line is wasted. There’s an economy to their screenwriting and editing that could also be held up to film students. A classic example is the way in which they handle what would conventionally be a montage scene – mixing visuals with audio from another scene – and audio that sounds improvised and natural. And maybe that’s the biggest achievement of all. The Duplass Brothers have taken a caricatured movie situation – ludicrously clingy son sabotages mum’s relationship – and have used that as a hook for dialogue that actually sounds real, and so moves us.

CYRUS played Sundance 2010 and was released earlier this year in the US, Canada, France, Finland and the UK. It opens later this month in Belgium and in November in Russia, Germany and the Netherlands.