THE WAY WAY BACK

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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.

JUMPER - weak performances mar neat-O concept

This poster totally sums up the new sci-fi action flick, JUMPER. On the plus side, there are a lot of cool special effects and glamourous locations thrown up onto the screen. The pyramids, the Colisseum, down-town Tokyo, the beaches of Fiji...The heroes of this film run, jump, speed and slide their way through glamourous location after glamourous location. The problem is that the amount of time and care spent on, oh simple things, like character, motivation, plot and narrative arc, are disproportionately small.

It's a real shame because the basic concept is cool. Certain people have the ability to "jump" - to teleport instantaneously to anywhere in the world. These Jumpers are being hunted down by evil Paladins, who think only God should have that kind of power.

Problem is, the Paladins are led by Samuel L Jackson in a daft blonde dye-job that totally subverts his ability to look scary and threatening. Another problem is the lame attempt to inject a bigger story/possible sequel of the "Luke, I am your father" kind. Yet another problem is the fact that our hero, as portrayed by Hayden Christiansen, comes across as whiny and self-obsessed. There's never any suggestion that David will use his powers to save others. Indeed, the only thing he uses them for is to get with his childhood sweetheart. Rachel Bilson is similarly weak in her performance.

The only person who looks remotely like he's having any fun is Jamie Bell. He camps up his cameo role as a fellow Jumper, and almost, but not quite, manages to turn a weak script into something entertaining.

I'd also like to observe that the two kids playing younger version of David and his sweetheart - Annasophia Robb and Max Thieriot - are infinitely stronger performers than their grown-up counter-parts. So if we must have a sequel, might it not be better as a more fully developed prequel?

JUMPER is on release in Australia, Hong Kong, Indonesia, Kuwait, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Lorea, Taiwan, the US, the UK, Estonia, Iceland, Norway, Poland and Spain. It opens next week in Belgium, Egypt, France, Denmark, Sweden, Israel and Italy. JUMPER opens in March in Slovakia, Finland, Japan, Turkey, Germany and Brazil. It opens in Argentina on April 3rd.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA - the best children's film I've seen in years

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is an outstanding film whether you're a child or an adult. It immediately catapults into my list of Best Films of 2007 if not all time.

So much of what I hate about big summer blockbsters aimed at the "family market" is their complete lack of respect for the audience. Kids films are often patronising and formulaic. They tend to be over-populated with smart-talking animals and oh-so-smart pop-cultural references. They tend to be light on tight storylines, engaging characters and some similarity to real life.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA bucks the trend. For a start it's based on a proper story by Katherine Paterson that has structure, character development and real emotional pull. It focuses on a young boy called Jesse who's having a hard time. He's being bullied at school, he feels his father holds him in contempt, and his parents have no money. His life is changed when the new girl in school, Leslie, befriends him. Thanks to her vivid imagination, they turn a deserted wood and an old tree-house into a fantasy world called Terabithia. The friendship helps both kids to gain in self-confidence. This self-confidence helps Jesse to cope when the darker aspects of real life.

Director Gabor Csupo deserves praise for filming the movie in muted tones and for showing the real strains of life on the bread-line. This is no sugar-coated un-real Hollywood movie. The director also deserves credit for using the beautifully-imagined CGI effects sparingly. At all times, the emphasis is on the fact that the kids are using their imaginations. To show too much of their fantasy on the screen with CGI would defeat the point. Indeed, the only time the director really lets rip is at the very end of the film when, arguably, the audience needs a positive feel-good visual to compensate for the emotional beating beforehand.

And the film does have a profound emotional impact. So much so that I would recommend parents of small or particularly sensitive childrent to watch it first to check whether it is suitable. However I have to say that at the right time in a child's life, seeing such a film, followed by a parental discussion about the subject matter, could be an important way of recognising that life is not all about fun and games.

The only thing that remains is for me to highlight the strong performances by all members of the cast, not least from Josh Hutcherson as Jesse, AnnaSophia Robb as Leslie, Bailee Madison as Jess' little sister and Lauren Clinton as the school bully. In the adult roles, Zooey Deschanel has a small role as a sympathetic teacher and Robert Patrick, aka the T-1000, gives a suitably steely performance as Jess' stressed out father.

BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is on release in Germany, India, the US, the Philippines, Hungary, Russia, Iceland, Germany, Poland, Spain, Malaysia, Thailand, Brazil, Turkey, Belgium, France, Italy, Taiwan, the Netherlands, Serbia, the UK, Singapore, Estonia and Latvia, It opens in Hong Kong next week, in Egypt, in Denmark and Norway on June 8th, in Australia on June 14th, in Bulgaria on June 22nd and in Finland on August 3rd. BRIDGE TO TERABITHIA is released on Region 1 DVD in June 2007.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY – bizarre directorial choices undercut the superb production design

I usually love movies by Tim Burton. He has an originality of vision that is rare in Hollywood and I adore the way he mixes mythic fairytales with the darker, nastier aspects of life. These two characteristics of his directorial skill would seem perfectly matched to the novels of Roald Dahl. I am a great fan of Dahl’s work precisely because he does not sugar-coat the nastiness of life as a kid. A brilliant example is in his novel, The Witches. The hero –a small boy – is turned into a mouse by an evil witch. By the end of the novel, the witches have been vanquished, but the boy is still a mouse. He has not been turned back into a kid in a classic Hollywood-ending. Indeed, he seems rather pleased that, as a mouse, his life expectancy is about the same as for his beloved old grandmother. Dark thoughts indeed for a children’s book. But, as I said, brilliantly suited to a director who made a kid’s animated movie called THE CORPSE BRIDE.

Sure enough, Burton brings a lot to this new interpretation of Dahls’ book. The production is lush and looks expensive, in sharp contrast to the 1971 version starring Gene Wilder. The set and costume design in beautifully realised and the cast is terrific. Freddie Highmore, the little kid from Finding Neverland, is charming as earnest little Charlie Bucket – the poor kid who dreams of a finding one of the five Golden Tickets that will win him entry to Willy Wonka’s famous chocolate factory. And the actors and actresses playing Charlie’s parents and grandparents are all great. It was also inspired to cast Deep Roy as all the oompa-loompas, morphing him in a variety of costumes in the various song and dance numbers, which are all fantastic fun. Compared to the original movie, the oompa loompas now seem to have real personality rather than being ciphers for the narrative-enhancing clever poems.

But there are big problems with this adaptation. First off, I think that at just under two hours the movie is a long play, especially if you are taking a young kid to see the movie. Admittedly, this movie is not much longer than the 1971 version, but I feel that the original was much more likely to hold a child’s attention because the entire second act takes place in the factory. In the new version, while kids will probably be entranced by the singing and dancing inside the factory, when the movie takes a tangent into the back story of Willy Wonka, they are likely to get fidgety. Heck, even I got fidgety. I am just not convinced that we need a back story for Willy Wonka: it just seems like an excuse for Tim Burton to re-tread thematic material he has already covered many times – the relationship between fathers and sons – notably in the cinematic mis-fire BIG FISH.

The second problem is that, in a variety of small ways, Tim Burton has made a rather more malicious film than the original adaptation. A case in point is the contrast between the original and new Veruca Salt. In the original movie, Veruca is a spoilt child, but her father is fully aware of this. A number of times, he looks nervously at Willy and shrugs as if to say, “I know it’s my fault, but now she is out of control and I don’t know what to do!” By contrast, in the new version, Mr Salt is as snobbish and obnoxious as his daughter and equally deserves her fate. Burton has made every parent more reckless and less sympathetic. To my mind these caricatures diminish the original material. Surely the novel is, if anything, a salutary warning to normal parents of the risks of over-indulging your kids. You are meant to look at these on-screen parents and say, “Jeez, that could be me!” rather than “What a bunch of freaks!”

I also found Johnny Depp’s interpretation of the Willy Wonka character bizarre and befuddling. The accent fluctuates as does the persona. Is he a geeky over-grown kid or an adult? The costume and make-up is more than eccentric and showman-like – it is just unsettling. Moreover, time and again we get the feeling that Depp’s Wonka really doesn’t like children at all. By contrast, in the book and the original film, Willy Wonka is just a normal guy, albeit a fairly eccentric one who lives alone in a chocolate factory populated by oompa loompas. He likes children, but not spoiled ones, and despairs of finding an heir. I love the fact that with Gene Wilder’s portrayal he is always an “in control” adult. The costume and song are all for show. Fundamentally he is a canny guy. The key to this is that when he comes out to greet the kids, he is hobbling with a walking stick. Then suddenly he turns a somersault and jumps up, fit as a fiddle. From that moment on, we don’t really know whether to trust him. He isn’t just some dappy, doo-lally, big kid. I respected the Gene Wilder Willy Wonka. I wouldn’t leave the Johnny Depp Willy Wonka alone with my kids. And surely, for a kids’ film, that is a pretty fatal flaw.

CHARLIE AND THE CHOCOLATE FACTORY is on global release.