DISENCHANTED*

DISENCHANTED is a joyless, tuneless mess of a sequel that may well put Amy Adams' career to bed. Think about it: when was the last time she was the leading lady in an actual hit?  But the real issue here isn't anyone's performance (although to be sure, no-one looks like they're having a good time).  The real issue is a messy,  overly-complex script that doesn't seem to know what it wants the film to be about. 

As the movie opens, we see our fairytale princess Giselle (Adams) now married to her Manhattan lawyer Robert (Patrick Dempsey).  They're both over-tired and stressed parenting a new baby daughter and a surly teenage Morgan (newcomer Gabriella Baldacchino). So, they move to suburbia and meet Maya Rudolph's Malvina - the oppressively perfect mean girl who seems to run the town. At this point we think the plot is going to be about Giselle coping with the reality after Happy Ever After, and dealing with a real-life villain.  

But no. To add a needless complication and magical Macguffin we have King Edward (James Marsden) and Queen Nancy (Idina Menzel) turn up with a magic wand that Giselle uses to turn her town into a fairytale, and herself into a wicked stepmother.  This totally unanchors the plot, which is now about which mean girl will win. By the end, I think the point the movie is trying to make is that Morgan has to accept Giselle as her real mum.  But all that stuff about middle-aged and middle-class ennui seems to have been forgotten, and Malvina is presumably still harrumphing around the town scaring all in sight.

There was nothing charming or funny or wonderful about this film. It felt joyless and directionless and cheap. The quality of the songwriting was particularly disappointing. I am awarding it a sole star for the only decent and mischievous number - where Giselle and Malvina debate who is the most wicked. The rest is disposable.

DISENCHANTED is rated PG and has a running time. It is on release on Disney+.

BRIDGET JONES'S BABY

BRIDGET JONES'S BABY  is the latest instalment in the romantic-comedy franchise centred on the chubby klutzy Londoner (Renee Zellweger) trying to hook up with her real-life earnest Mr Darcy.  In this film, Bridget is 43 and has finally got her life in order - she has a great job, she's hit goal weight and she's quit smoking.  But after a one-night stand at a music festival with a billionaire dating app creator called Jack (Patrick Dempsey) and then with her former boyfriend Darcy (Colin Firth) she finds herself up the junction with no idea who the father is.  So follows a chamber comedy with both men turning up to sonograms and ante-natal classes, and the viewer waiting for the last act reveal of who the father is and who Bridg will end up marrying.

On the plus side, the movie is pretty harmless and contains enough laugh out loud moments to get you through the over-long two hour run-time.  Zellweger sells the physical comedy of being the relentlessly clumsy and awkward Bridget and Emma Thompson as her doctor provides the best laconic one-liners and disapproving looks.

But there are plenty of negatives too.  First off, there's a sub-plot about Bridget and her old-school journo chums being under threat from pretentious millennial hipsters who think old journalism is irrelevant. It's a strong story but goes nowhere. At no point is Bridget's job under threat from her being pregnant - at no point does she worry about what taking a year out of work will do to her career.  But of course she's not worried because - and this is the second point - this movie is deeply conservative and also, therefore, out of step with our times.  Because both of Bridget's potential partners are rich, well-educated, tall dark handsome men who will provide her with a house and financial support.  You can sense Emma Thompson's dissatisfaction with this as she inserts the only line regarding potentially raising the kid on her own - but that's all we get. There is no doubting the fact that we are going to end up at the altar, and that this is the appropriate aim for a single woman with a kid. 

The third problem with the film is Renee Zellweger's face. This has been much written about and is a controversial point - would a man face such a raft of negative press over bad plastic surgery and fillers? Maybe not.  But I wouldn't be giving an honest review if I didn't say that her face is distracting - especially given the fact that the movie chooses to show Renee as a younger less-interfered with woman in flashback scenes.  I spent to much time in the slower middle of this film trying to figure out what she'd done to herself and why. Contrast this with Emma Thompson who is ageing elegantly and beautifully. 

Despite my deep philosophical issues with this film, I did still have a good enough time watching it. But I'd suggest it as a dinner and DVD night film rather than something you have to rush to the cinema to see.

BRIDGET JONES'S BABY has a running time of 123 minutes and is rated R.  The movie is on global release.

VALENTINE'S DAY - not entirely unwatchable

VALENTINE’S DAY is a romantic comedy along the lines of LOVE ACTUALLY – in which we follow a number of characters, all loosely connected, living in contemporary LA on Valentine’s Day. We have everything from a teenager trying to lose her virginity (Emma Roberts); to a serving officer home on leave (Julia Roberts); from a cynical “player” sports journalist (Jamie Foxx) to an old-romantic florist (Ashton Kutcher) and many many more besides.

It is easy to deride VALENTINE’S DAY. It is a movie that has been so carefully constructed in the Excel sheets of Hollywood producers that is feels about as real and alive as a frozen turkey twizzler. Every actor has been chosen for their essentially good looks and winning smile. Every character is broadly delineated as being wholesome and good and thus deserving of True Love or as being superficial and duplicitous and therefore only worthy of being Alone. It’s the sort of movie that pats itself on the back for being so liberal as to have a gay character but doesn’t have the balls to show him making out. There is no plot development that cannot be predicted well in advance and no satire that hasn’t had its rough edges smoothed down. It’s a movie so shiny and brightly coloured in makes LOVE ACTUALLY - with its depiction of at least two “good characters” who end up unloved at the end of it – seem spiky and socially aware.

Nonetheless, I can’t deny that I had a passably good time watching the film, in the same way that a can of coke is predictable, tasty at the time, but offers no nutritional value. In a rising tide of blandness, Queen Latifah delivers one truly superb line, Taylor Swift was surprisingly willing to play dumb, and Anne Hathaway is always good at pulling off vulnerability. As for the rest of the cast, there’s nothing to write home about. The only thing that really pissed me off was the gaff in the writing that had Bradley Cooper’s character flying coach on a fourteen hour flight when he’s rich enough to have a chauffeur-driven limousine. Please. That guy would’ve been safely ensconsed in his personal sleeper seat in Business rather than propping up Julia Robert’s dozing head.

VALENTINE'S DAY is on global release.

Bina007's Danny Dyer Memorial List of the Ten Most Piss-Poor Flicks of 2008

Just in case you'd thought I'd gone soft, we return to bitter invective with this year's Trashcan of Shame. To find each nugget of Cinema Redemption your humble servant must crawl through a veritable sewer of lazy, formulaic, badly produced, stinky bilge. Here are the worst of the many offenders, conforming to the usual mix of shameless cash-in genre flicks; politically offensive exploitation flicks and auteurs gone awry.

THE SHAMELESS CASH-INS GENRE FLICKS.

1. P.S. I LOVE YOU. Hilary Swank attempts comedy. The film-makers mistakenly believe you can make a feel-good comedy out of bereavement. Mawkish. Unfunny. And what accent is Gerard Butler going for exactly?

2. MADE OF HONOR. Another offensively lazy, formulaic and charmless romantic comedy - all the more impressive for killing Michelle Monaghan and Patrick Dempsey's natural charm.

3=. 88 MINUTES and RIGHTEOUS KILL. Lo-rent "thrillers" in which Pacino and de Niro live off viewer nostalgia and clip their pension coupons. You know it's gone Pete Tong when Fiddy is far from the worst actor on screen.

HUMOURLESS EXPLOITATION FLICKS.

5. NEVER BACK DOWN. Like Karate Kid without the naive charm, NEVER BACK DOWN was basically misogynistic macho bullshit attracting the same sort of voyeurs who get kicks from happy slapping.

6. WANTED. Again with the misogynistic, macho bullshit. Bored viewers were left to ponder which was more ridiculous: James McAvoy affecting a six-pack or the Loom of Fate?

7. RAMBO. By far the most tragic entry in my trio of macho idiocy because as lurid as FIRST BLOOD was, it at least had a point. How are the mighty fallen.

8. BABYLON A.D. The existential angst of Vin Diesel vanishes in a puff of improbability. Mathieu Kassovitz flushes his art-house rep (LA HAINE) down the toilet with this star-vehicle sci-fi mish-mash. Even Michelle Yeoh as a kick-boxing nun can't save it.

AUTEURS GONE AWRY.

9. W. Liberal intellectuals wanted answers. Oliver Stone gave them a pastiche. 

10. AUSTRALIA. Baz Luhrmann promised us a knowing epic embracing romance, political injustice and war-time melodrama. He gave us a wooden, poorly edited, over-blown vanity project - a failure of monumental proportions.

Overlooked DVD of the month - THE EMPEROR'S CLUB

THE EMPEROR'S CLUB has much the same setting and set-up as DEAD POET'S SOCIETY but it is a very different film. It lacks DPS's beautiful visual style, emotional heft and moral certainty. The result is a film that is only interesting to look at insofar as it captures the New England prep school as the English like to imagine it. (A sad result given that the DP was the excellent Lajos Koltai.) In terms of pure entertainment, Kevin Kline's finely modulated performance as a deeply repressed Classics teacher is no match for Robin Williams' charismatic poetry don. Kline's Professor Hundert believes utterly in the virtues of his school: Williams' John Keating is a maverick. Hundert's students are, for the most part, a bunch of indistinct swots. Keating's students have their own stories and personalities.

For all that, THE EMPEROR'S CLUB remans a fascinating film precisely because it eschews sentiment and clear answers. Professor Hundert believes in virtue but he is no paragon. His own romantic view of the power of good teaching to reform the class clown leads him to compromise his ideals. He throws the young ruffian an opportunity to reform at the expense of a more worthy pupil. The ruffian repays him by cheating. They point is not, however, the boy's inability to change, even in adulthood, but the teacher's reaction to it. When quietly nudged by the headmaster, Professor Hundert refuses to expose the well-connected boy as a cheat.

What we have here is a quietly played moral drama that provokes serious discussion. Doctor007 and I were talking about for the equivalent of the run-time of the movie. Can character be reformed? Was Hundert right to intervene? How far does this sort of thing go on all the time, in an era when schools and universities are even more dependent on legacies? The perils of benevolent interference are clear in this film, and you look at our foreign policy and you realise how widely applicable these questions are.

So, THE EMPEROR'S CLUB may fail as a technical achievement, but as a provocative drama it certainly succeeds. Moreover, it's always a joy to see Kevin Kline given centre stage.

THE EMPEROR'S CLUB played Toronto 2002 and was released later that year. It is available on DVD.

MADE OF HONOR - a rom-com as weak as the alleged pun in the title

MADE OF HONOR is a desperately weak romantic comedy vehicle for TV star Patrick Dempsey. We know he can be charming and sweet because we've seen him in ENCHANTED. We also know that his lead actress, Michelle Monaghan, can be endearing and like-able because we've seen her in KISS KISS BANG BANG, not to mention as about the only good thing in the god-awful Ben Stiller project THE HEARTBREAK KID. We also know that the movie's director, Paul Weiland, can make emotionally engaging films rooted in authentic history, as he did with last year's SIXTY SIX.

So what went wrong with MADE OF HONOR? The script. Debutant writer Adam Stzykiel has created a collage of rom-com plot points - all of them implausible and none of them grounded in anything so obvious as character development. (Promiscuous, superficial boy realises he is love with his sweet best friend, but it's too late! She has fallen in love with a Scot (Kevin McKidd of ROME fame). So wanker best friend sets about trying to ruin his best friend's happiness so he can get his rocks off. Cue lots of picturesque Scottish scenery and lots of lazy Scottish jokes.)

The whole thing has the artificial, unwholesome, aeriated feel of aerosol can whipped cream and should have been punished for eternity in straight to video hell.

MADE OF HONOR is on release in Egypt, Australia, Estonia, Russia, South Africa, Iceland, the UK and the USA. It opens later in May in Germany, Singapore, Switzerland, Brazil, Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Spain. It opens in June in Argentina, the Netherlands, Italy, Belgium and France. It opens in Japan on July 12th, in Turkey on August 1st, and in Taiwan on August 7th.

Kids flick preview 1: ENCHANTED

ENCHANTED begins as a closely observed spoof of Disney's SLEEPING BEAUTY. A handsome prince meets a beautiful princess but their fairytale marriage is ruined by a wicked stepmother who can transform into a dragon. She banishes the lovely Giselle to New York - "a place where no-one lives happily ever after". Giselle (Amy Adams) is quickly followed by her Prince Edward (James Marsden), his treacherous servant Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and finally by the wicked stepmother herself (Susan Sarandon). Giselle is taken in by a handsome, cynical, divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey) and his cute daughter, Morgan.

The movie manages to have its cake and eat it. ENCHANTED wants us cynical ironic post-modern audiences to have a little more faith in true love. But it also wants the Disney heroines of old to have a little more pluck, and perhaps go on a date or two before falling in love at first sight. It's a far more delicate and honest approach to the position of the fairy-tale cartoon in contemporary cinema than those aggressively post-modern CGI flicks.

The best parts of the movie takes us along with them because the actors are playing this preposterous scenario absolutely straight. Dempsey and Marsden do well in this, but it's Amy Adams who is truly charming. I felt that Timothy Spall and Susuan Sarandon were a little too broadly drawn - simply too camp - especially Sarandon in her platform heels and glitter lipstick. Frankly she looked like a drag queen, as though she was consciously sending up Disney and winking at the audience. This broke the delicate balance between fairy-tale and modernity but thankfully her role in relatively small and the movie survives this small mis-step.

ENCHANTED is on release in Italy, Indonesia, the Philippines, the US, Israel, Russia, Singapore, Spain, France, Malaysia, Portugal and Estonia. It opens next week in Greece, Hungary, Bulgaria, Italy and Venezuela. It opens on December 14th in Austria, the Netherlands, Slovenia, Brazil and the UK. It opens later in December in Belgium, Denmark, Germany, Finland, Iceland, Sweden, Turkey, Australia and Norway. It opens in Australia, South Korea and Poland in January 2008 and in Taiwan on February 7th. It opens in Japan on March 14th.

FREEDOM WRITERS - earnest yet alarmingly crass

FREEDOM WRITERS has everyone's favourite under-dog, Hilary Swank, play an inspirational teacher in inner-city LA. Based on a true story, the movie nonetheless has a tired feel: another white middle class teacher (viz. Michelle Pfeiffer in DANGEROUS MINDS) reaching out to ethnic minority kids afflicted by gang violence. She does this by working extra jobs to take them on trips and buy them nice shiny new books. The mid-1990s hip-hop sound-track has a nice nostalgic vibe (remember when rappers rapped about life rather than champagne?) and Swank plays earnest like no other. But I couldn't help feeling a little scandalised by the parallel drawn between life in urban LA and life for persecuted Jews in Nazi-occupied Europe. Hollywood at its most earnest and yet also at its most crass.

FREEDOM WRITERS was released in the US in January and opens in the UK and Spain on March 2nd. It opens in the Netherlands, Austria, Denmark and Turkey on March 9th and in Belgium, France and Germany on March 15th. It opens in Australia on March 22nd, Singapore and Italy on March 30th and in Brazil, Norway and Sweden on May 18th and in Argentina on May 31st.