THE MENU***

My cousin announced she was getting married in Lisbon and as my husband and I hadn't been to Portugal for decades we thought we would make an extended holiday out of it, planning a road trip by picking every single Michelin one and two star restaurant along the way for dinner every night bar the wedding, starting in Faro and ending in Porto.  We are the greedy capitalist bastards, where the dishes become a blur, that have apparently sucked the joy out of cooking and life for celebrity chefs like the fictional Julian Slowik (Ralph Fiennes).

As a result, he lures a privileged few diners to his remote island restaurant for an epic tasting menu that will fully express his nihilism and totalitarian control of both staff and diners.  If you have the audacity to ask for mere bread, his maitre d, Elsa (Hong Shau) simply says "no".  Every course is exquisitely described and reveals yet more about the contempt in which the diners are held. And so we come to the inevitable horror-comedy conclusion.

For me, this is a superb social satire cum black comedy that takes the piss out of people like me. It comes as no surprise that it was written by two late night comedy writers - Will Tracy (Last Week Tonight With John Oliver) and Seth Reiss (Late Night With Seth Myers). There is a spareness to the comedy that is devastating. And the over-fussiness of the menu seems absolutely spot on.  Mark Mylod (Succession) directs with a cool deadpan tone and kudos to all involved in the production design.  The performances are uniformly good BUT Hong Chau is the stand-out in expressing the cult-like status of these chefs and the rigidity of their approach to actually enjoying food. It's kind of nuts to me that Anya Taylor-Joy has been nominated for a Golden Globe rather than Chau, who deserves awards not just for this but also her performance in THE WHALE. What a year she had in 2022.

However, while I do think the film is worth watching, well-made, and funny, I couldn't shake the feeling that it was a really good 60-minute episode of Black Mirror rather than a feature film: a high concept comedy that couldn't sustain its runtime. 

THE MENU has a running time of 107 minutes, is rated R, played Toronto 2022, and is available to stream.

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL

Sam Raimi's prequel to the WIZARD OF OZ is a movie in which I can see so much to admire but which bored me for all of its overlong two hour ten minute runtime.  

I loved the visual design of the black and white prologue in a turn of the century Kansas carnival, where our anti-hero conman, conjurer and lothario, Oz, escapes an angry husband by taking off in a hot air balloon that will whisk him to a land of his subconscious that he has narcissistically called Oz.  I love the riot of CGI colour and subversive naughtiness by which Oz immediately romances the credulous witch Theodora (Mila Kunis), before breaking her heart and turning her to the Dark Side. I love the costume design that sees Rachel Weisz wicked with Evanora in luscious dark green ballgowns and Michelle Williams' good witch Glenda in gorgeous shimmering white. I love the casting of James Franco - who has always been almost too handsome, and painfully wooden and uncomfortable with that beauty.  His too wide smile and slightly hammy acting perfectly suits the conman role.  Most of all, I love the idea that despite all his petty cunning, Oz is really an idealist, who is full of admiration for Edison's inventions, and wonder at the power of cinema. In fact, OZ can be read as a movie about how cinema saves lives, much like ARGO.

The problem is that the movie just takes too long to motor through its various machinations to finally get Oz into his confrontation with the newly wicked Evanora and Theodora.  It also seems too adult for kids and too kiddie for adults - in sharp contrast to Pixar who seem to be able to entertain both groups simultaneously.  How much of the target kiddie audience really get why Evanora turned wicked, and why Oz' final victory is rather ambiguous? And how many adults were squirming with boredom during the whole munchkin, quadling city scene - in fact, for much of the final 90 minutes?

OZ THE GREAT AND POWERFUL has a running time of 130 minutes and is rated PG in the USA.  The movie opens this weekend in Argentina, Australia, Chile, Croatia, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, the Philippines, Portugal, Macedonia  Russia, Serbia, Singapore, Slovenia, Thailand, the Ukraine, Brazil, Bulgaria, Canada, Iceland, India, Ireland, Japan, Lithuania, Mexico, Mongolia, the Philippines, Poland, Romania, Spain, Turkey, the UK and the USA.  It opens next week in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Estonia, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Taiwan.

DRAG ME TO HELL - works better as loving pastiche than as horror

DRAG ME TO HELL is a very funny, loving pastiche of 70s exploitation horror flicks. It sees Sam Raimi of SPIDERMAN fame return to his roots, and every frame of this movie speaks of the fondness he has for the ludicrous nature of lo-fi horror. The colouring, the low-rent special effects (big on oozing bodily fluids), the two-dimensional characters, the absurdity of the central premise - it's all there. And in every case, the Bad Things that happen aren't scary at all, but just plain funny. This is, then, a movie, with it's tongue firmly in its cheek and, indeed, its pulse firmly on the zeitgeist. After all, in these recessionary times, who doesn't want to see the loan officer foreclosing a house get well and truly skewered?!

The plot is simple. Alison Lohman (WHERE THE TRUTH LIES) plays a sweet little push-over called Christine Brown. Fearing she'll be out-manoeuvred for a promotion by the office kiss-ass, she takes the unprecedented step of foreclosing the creepy Mrs Ganush (Lorna River). The boss at her bank (David Paymer) is impressed, but it all goes Pete Tong when the creepy Mrs Ganush puts a gypsy curse on Christine. For the next three days, she gets all manner of gross bodily fluids thrown at her, before the goat demon comes to take her soul. Her only chance of escape is to transfer the curse to someone else....

Lohman is perfectly fine as the scream-queen, but the movie belongs to the supporting cast. Reggie Lee is hysterical as the office kiss-ass, Justin Long is suitably straight-faced as the drippy boy-friend and Dileep Rao is spot on as the Indian mystic, to whom Christine turns for help. Overall, DRAG ME TO HELL is Sam Raimi at his most entertaining. But horror fans, take heed, this movie is PG-13 for a reason.

DRAG ME TO HELL played Cannes 2009 and is on release in the US, UK, France and Lithuania. It opens next weekend in Malaysia and South Korea. It opens on June 12th in Germany, Singapore, Estonia, Finland, Norway and Sweden. It opens on June 18th in the Czech Republic and Denmark. It opens on July 2nd in Belgium, the Netherlands, Taiwan, Turkey and Vietnam. It opens on July 9th in Russia and on July 31st in Spain. It opens on August 14th in Brazil, and on August 20th in Argentina and Mexico.

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.