SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE

SLEEPING WITH OTHER PEOPLE is a romantic comedy from first time director Leslye Headland. She also wrote the piss-poor rom-com ABOUT LAST NIGHT but seems to have done far better when not shackled with the pressure of adapting David Mamet. That said, this movie definitely drinks deep from the well of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY and has all the basic cultural conservatism of all those so-called transgressive Judd Apatow comedies that basically end up with the romantic leads, well, getting together in wedded bliss. 

THE WAY WAY BACK

You can listen a podcast review of THE WAY WAY BACK here, or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes.

THE WAY WAY BACK is a curious film - often lacking in pace, often obvious in its plot choices, with a style of humour that barely breaks in to laugh-out-loud comedy.  And yet... and yet... there's something about its loveable quirky homespun style that is memorable and enjoyable.

The movie is a classic teenage coming-of-age story set in a contemporary east coast holiday resort that has a ramshackle nostalgic early 80s air.  The teenager in question is a kid called Duncan (Liam James) whose vulnerable and easily led mother Pam (Toni Colette) is dating a passive-aggressive philandering slick-talker called Trent (Steve Carell). Hang-dog, ignored or insulted, he escapes the rather reckless and juvenile adults who are supposed to be supervising him, and wends his way to a ageing, crusty, old school waterpark, where he finds a new kind of family - the kind that boosts your confidence, brings you new opportunities and broadens your horizons.  The employees are led by the frustratingly youthful cool boss Owen (Sam Rockwell).  

There's a lot to love in this tale and it's usually in the unspoken margins of the film.  The on-off romance between Owen and Caitlin (Maya Rudolph) that becomes apparent, in all its nuances, in the spaces between the script.  The joy of seeing Steve Carell playing a properly nasty character.  The nostalgic feel of the production design.  And there's just enough dark backing to the mirror to keep the film sharp.  The holiday escapism of the adults really does have damaging consequences - both for them and their kids.  And there's a real truth to the desperation and vulnerability of the divorced women - played for laughs by a deliciously blowsy drunk Allison Janney, and dramatically by Toni Colette.  So, for all its predictability, kudos to directors Nat Axon and Jim Rash (who wrote THE DESCENDENTS) for pulling it together. 

THE WAY WAY BACK has a running time of 103 minutes and is rated PG-13.

THE WAY WAY BACK played Sundance 2013 and was released earlier this year in the USA, Canada, Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Israel, New Zealand, Finland, the UK and Ireland. It opens on September 12th in Singapore, on October 2nd in Belgium, on October 3rd in the Netherlands, on October 24th in Germany, on November 15th in Spain, on November 21st in Argentina, on November 27th in France and on December 5th in Italy.

iPad Round-Up 2 - GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

When I was a pre-teen and we all obsessively watched the lo-rent sci-fi TV comedy, RED DWARF, the phrase "almost Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety" became a standard term of praise, long before we'd read Swift in class and fully appreciated the radical, deliriously scabrous nature of his political satire. That was back in the day when schools taught children useful shit like calculus and Latin.  Nowadays, family audiences have no use for political satire - although one might have thought that in the post global financial crisis world - with governments insolvent and political systems ossified by special interests - now would be EXACTLY the time for it.  And so, dear reader, we get the movies we deserve. Towit, Rob Letterman's utterly banal children's movie, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - a film based on Swift only insofar as it incorporates a man who wakes up in a land filled with tiny little people called Liliputians.

So, Swift aside, how does it fare as simple family entertainment? Shockingly poor.  A mindlessly simple plot, piss-poor CGI effects, hammy acting from the largely British cast of character actors, and Jack Black playing the character he always plays - the childish, rock-obsessed but ultimately love-able frump. Director Rob Letterman and writer Joe Stillman display none of the wit or imagination seen in MONSTERS VS. ALIENS or SHREK. Must try harder.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was released over the 2010/2011 holiday season. It is now available to rent and own.

PLEASE GIVE - They fuck you up your mum and dad - Part One

So, I've watched about five movies in the past three months - compared to the old standard of five a week. It's been strange. Mostly I've been watching movies on a date rather in a screening room - and typically I've rescinded control of what we're watching, and watched more lazily - less with an eye to detail and a future review. At any rate, the whole experience has been different, and I think speaks to how film critics become jaded by seeing too many films in too sterile an environment. The upshot is that while I had decided to go completely cold turkey from blogging about cinema, I am going to jump back in with a few quick reviews of a couple of films that really made me think deeply about cinema and about relationships.

First up is the latest film from American indie writer-director, Nicole Holofcener. With LOVELY AND AMAZING and FRIENDS WITH MONEY, Holofcener established herself as a director who was able to communicate an authentic idea of how real women interact with each other, as friends and across generations. She writes movies that contain dialogue and situations that are uncomfortably real, and isn't afraid of presenting protagonists who may not be all that likeable. Their conflicts are self-involved and can seem petty to the viewer. But then, in all honesty, how many of us behave differently?

PLEASE GIVE sits somewhere between the lighter, more forgiving LOVELY AND AMAZING and the more bleak, alienating FRIENDS WITH MONEY. It poses difficult questions about body image, how we treat the elderly, and how we can choose not to speak of family trauma as a sort of defensive amnesia. Most importantly, PLEASE GIVE deals with middle-class guilt. How far should privileged people feel bad about how much they have? And is there such a thing as an authentic gesture of giving back, as opposed to mere self-interested guilt-mitigation?

Catherine Keener and Oliver Platt are superb as Kate and Alex - a wealthy married couple living in Manhattan, making a living from buying furniture from the children of the recently deceased, and selling it on at a huge mark-up in their store. Alex feels fine about what they do for a living, but Kate feels guilty about shaking down people who don't know the market price of their possessions. So she reacts by giving beggars money and by volunteering her time. Problem is, Kate is so self-involved in her misery that she brings the people she's meant to be helping down, and comes across as just plain patronising. Kate's self-involvement has more dire consequences. She alienates her teenage daughter, struggling with teenage skin; and bores her husband. One of the best scenes in the film sees the husband and daughter have a conversation that is ostensibly about facials but really speaks to her knowledge that he is having an affair. It's one of the great emotionally devastating scenes in the film. You know that the daughter will remember it for the rest of her life - it's one of those moments of complete emotional damage - all too typical in real life.

Set against this tale of upper middle-class angst we have the story of Audra and her two grand-daughters. Kate and Alex live next door to the 91 year old Audra, and have bought her apartment. Essentially they are waiting for her to die so that they can knock through and create a dream apartment. Audra is an old battle-axe, and her grand-daughter Mary (Amanda Peet - where has she been hiding?!) calls a spade a spade. She has no problem treating Audra like shit, and openly talks about the remodelling plans. But what I love about the writing and Amanda Peet's performance is that you can tell that underneath all that tough-girl no-nonsense jazz there's a deeply vulnerable woman so lacking in self-esteem that she'll throw herself onto a completely unsuitable guy. By contrast, Mary's sister Rebecca (Rebecca Hall) is one of life's quietly suffering good girls - caring, overlooked, but ultimately grounded enough to have a proper relationship.

PLEASE GIVE is one of those films that isn't necessarily fun to watch - I didn't enjoy my time with these characters. But when I watch Nicole Holofcener films I see characters that I actually know in situations I find familiar and it's just so refreshing to see real life on screen. And more than that, to see a writer portray a relationship between a mother and daughter - or between two sisters, that has the ring of authenticity. Thank Christ movies like this can still get made and get some kind of a release.

Additional tags: Yaron Orbach, Marcelo Zarvos, Robert Frazen, Elizabeth Keener, Elise Ivy, Josh Pais, Ann Guilbert, Sarah Steele, Nicole Holofcener

PLEASE GIVE played Sundance and Berlin 2010 and was released in the USA and Canada earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Germany next week.

MARTIAN CHILD - banal bonding movie

Actor John Cusack and director Menne Meyjes are reunited in sentimental father-son bonding drama, MARTIAN CHILD. Cusack plays a grieving sci-fi author who fosters a disturbed young child who combats his feeling of isolation by claiming to be a martian - photosensitive and thus unable to come out from under a box and play with the other kids. Cusack's character starts to believe that the kid might actually be an alien - so spooky is his ability to predict when traffic lights will turn green. The film-makers certainly lead the audience down this road. But in the final analysis, the film-makers aren't particularly interested in creating a spoooooooky film, but a sentimental one. The final scene sees Cusack's character battling a sceptical social welfare panel for the right to adopt the child and there are no prizes for guessing how it all turns out. Paternal love can be the foundation of powerful drama - viz Cusack's GRACE IS GONE - but not in this hackneyed treatment.

The technical aspects of this film are fine but nothing special, and you could say the same for the performances, barring Joan Cusack as a scabrous older sister.

MARTIAN CHILD was released in the US in fall 2007. It went straight to video in the UK and is currently available on DVD.

THE X-FILES - I WANT TO BELIEVE - huh?

Never seen an episode of the X-Files. Never going to. Definitely not after this film, which plays like a sub-CSI police procedural artificially stretched beyond its natural 45 minute run-time.

6 years after the end of the TV show, cultural icons Mulder and Scully are pulled back into the FBI to help find a missing agent with the aid of a psychic, paedophile priest. At the same time, Scully is now a paediatrician, struggling with her conscience: should she give a kid a painful stem-cell treatment with a small chance of success or let him die in peace?

The spoooooky X-Files kidnap/organ-harvesting storyline was very lo-rent. Certainly sub-CSI and at around the level of an Urban Legend spoof. The stem-cell storyline could've been cool but the movie jumps the shark when Scully learns how to conduct cutting edge complex surgery by *googling* "stem cell research". Seriously?!

I'm sure the TV show was better than this. At least, that's what the message boards and my informal sample of 2 frends who are massive sci-fi geeks suggest. But there's no need to schlep to the cinema for this unless you really have a strong fan-boy urge to see Mulder and Scully kiss on the big screen.

THE X FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE is on global release.

THE EX - piss-poor rom-com fiasco

THE EX (a.k.a. FAST TRACK) is a piss-poor alleged rom-com that was released in the US last Christmas and is now straight to DVD in the UK. The cast - Mia Farrow, Zach Braff, Amanda Peet, Amy Adams, Jason Bateman - have all done good work in their time. This isn't it. I guess you just have to blame the all-time uninspired script from newbies David Guion and Michael Handelman. The "humour" of the piece basically rests on Jason Bateman faking paraplegia and trying to sabotage Zach Braff in his new job. Believe me, the paraplegia humour is nowhere near as sharp and well-done as it was in THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY. Hippie ad agents and a kid who eats hamburgers whole are also apparently the height of wit. Definitely one to avoid.

SYRIANA - pretentious, yawn-inducing and inaccurate

SYRIANA is an over-hyped alleged thriller that attempts to explore the politics of the oil business. Featuring a star-studded cast, and the kind of lush photography that you get in advertising, here is a movie that repackages politics for the HBO generation, and fails miserably. While the movie looks great and the acting performances are all fine, the real faults lie in the conception of the movie and the script by Stephen Gaghan. Gaghan is the man behind the infinitely better flick, TRAFFIC. Like TRAFFIC, SYRIANA has a script that inter-cuts three plot strands that are loosely related. This has led some critics to claim that the movie is complex and hard to understand. Actually I had no problem following the story here. Incomprehension was not my problem.

The first major problem is that the movie tells us nothing that we did not already know about US politics, the Middle East or big business. There are no flash-bulb moments, and in many ways, the issues here are "dumbed-down". I found it a really fantastically facile, trite script by someone who clearly has very little cultural or political feel for the material he is addressing. If you want an expose of US politics, check out John Sayles' SILVER CITY. If you want insight on the Middle East go read some history. If you want to see how "everything is connected" - the platitudionous tagline to the film - go see CRASH.

The second major problem is that the movie is just plain yawn-inducing. I LOVE cinema; I love Middle Eastern politics; I love Clooney, Damon and Cooper; but even I could barely keep my eyes open. I do not ask that movies educate me - although when they claim they are going to it is nice if they live up to that promise - but I do ask that they entertain me. I want my intellectual or emotional interest to be piqued. I want laughter, tears, or provocation. SYRIANA did not deliver.

So, now the broad-brush gripes are over, here are some minor geeky gripes. 1. Why do the Pakistani muslim terrorists speak in Hindi? Granted there are Muslims in India but they speak Urdu. And while many Pakistanis do not speak Urdu as a first language, they will most likely speak Pushto or Punjabi instead. It is frickin' ironic that a movie that attempts to get under the skin of Middle Eastern politics, and establish a credible stance on these issues, can mess up on something so basic. I was, frankly, insulted. 1b. What language is George Clooney speaking when in Beirut? He is complemented on his good Arabic, and claims to be speaking Farsi, but the accent is impenetrable and unless this is some dialect, sounds nothing like Farsi. 2. It is absolutely incredible that anyone would address the an Emir in the manner in which Matt Damon addresses the Prince just after the "Marbella incident".

SYRIANA is on limited release in the US, Germany, France, Austria and UK.