POWER BALLAD****

Writer-director John Carney specialises in funny, heart-warming, music-centred films about ordinary people whose lives are transformed by song.  If that sounds schmaltzy and earnest, it is, and the world is better for it.  His latest movie is a genuinely delightful genuinely laugh-out-loud funny film called POWER BALLAD.  

It stars as Paul Rudd as an ageing wedding band musician whose music is ripped off by Nick Jonas' former boy bander who needs a hit to turn his career around.  So Rudd's character and his best mate and band mate Sandy (co-writer Peter McDonald) go to LA to confront the musician and get paid.  The moral of the story is that real love, real family, real friends matter more than success but that most people haven't got the emotional depth to realise it.  I laughed a lot - McDonald's Sandy is iconic - but it also got a little dusty in the cinema at the end. A good time was had by all!

POWER BALLAD has a running time of 98 minutes and is rated R. It is on limited release in the UK and USA.

THE PERFECT COUPLE*

How many shows can we watch where Nicole Kidman plays a beautiful, uptight, brittle, rich woman trapped in a miserable marriage but struggling to hold on to her perfectly manicured life? Enough already.

In this latest iteration she plays a successful murder-mystery writer living in a gorgeous summer house in Nantucket with her handsome husband (Liev Schreiber), hosting the wedding of her second son.  The night before the wedding, the bridesmaid is found drowned and the wedding is cancelled.

Whodunnit? We discover in short order that the bridesmaid was pregnant by the paterfamilias, that the first son is a feckless trader in financial trouble, and the bride is actually in love with the groomsman.  And that's just the first couple of episodes. The set-up is that of a classic Agatha Christie mystery where lots of family members have motives that we have to untangle.  Meanwhile, Nicole Kidman is both a master of PR and selling books, but also trying to move away from her image as part of the "perfect couple".  Her best-selling novels feature a crime detecting couple similar to Christie's Tommy and Tuppence - an alliterative crime-busting perfect husband and wife, and the author's marriage is part of the marketing drive.

The six-part TV show is handsomely cast and handsomely filmed in a lavish Cape Cod mansion. Everyone looks the part.  And yet something about the script and performances feels flat. The show just never takes flight. I never cared. Also, if you know your Christie, the solution is pretty easy to figure out. (More on that in the spoiler section after the release information.)

I think the problem is that while director Susanne Bier is great at creating context and a luxury lifestyle on screen, a murder mystery has to be more than Nora Ephron lifestyle porn. It has to hook us in.  And the modern audience demands more of its murder mysteries, especially those set amongst the super-rich. In a post WHITE LOTUS world, THE PERFECT COUPLE just feels plain vanilla - too straight - too dull - too obvious.  Only the wonderful Dakota Fanning seems to be in a different show and to really be having fun with it.  

THE PERFECT COUPLE debuted on Netflix this week. 

SPOILERS - I have not read the source novel by Elin Hilderbrand but understand that the solution is far more ambiguous in the novel. It tells you everything you need to know about how plain vanilla the adaptation is that they decided to give you a proper murderer and motive and then to tie everything up by having a resolution between the author and the bride too.  The lone attempt to spice things up with the author's sketchy backstory feels very shoehorned in. It didn't cohere.

FLORA AND SON*

FLORA AND SON is the latest music-themed romantic drama from writer-director-composer John Carney (ONCE). I wasn't entirely convinced by that film, and even less so by this one. Nepo baby Eve Hewson stars as foul-mouthed single-mum Flora who gifts her light-fingered son a second-hand guitar. He proves more interested in creating shit rap songs on Apple's Garage Band in a scene of crass product placement that sounded like something Goldie Looking Chain would pen as a spoof.  So Flora takes the online guitar lessons herself, being tutored by Joseph Gordon Levitt's LA-based songwriter. Predictably, their online lessons are soon shown without the Zoom framing device and they are sharing romantic song-writing dates in the same frame. We roll toward a mawkish finale and I was still semi-hopeful we'd at least get a good final song out of it, as we did with ONCE. But no such luck.

FLORA AND SON is rated R and has a running time of 97 minutes. The movie played Sundance and Toronto 2023 and was released on Apple+ this weekend.

ON THE BASIS OF SEX

Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg has become something of a cult figure among today's "woke" youth. She is often portrayed as The Notorious RBG on t-shirts and memes.  Seen as a champion of progressive values, and most particularly women's rights, her newfound fans are putting faith in her longevity to prevent a conservative takeover of the court.  Her legacy, marriage and mind were all celebrated in the recent, superb, RBG (reviewed here) which featured many interviews with her family. At the time, I commented how refreshing and perhaps surprising it was to see RBG as a young woman, in contrast to her current familiar image. 

This new film, written by RBG's nephew, focuses on that young smart woman and how she established herself as one of the pre-eminent sexual discrimination lawyers.  It opens with Ruth as one of a handful of female students attending Harvard Law School, sees her forced to switch to Columbia to support her husband's career, rejected by all the major law firms, and almost as a second choice, become an academic.  Her lack of appellant experience becomes alarmingly clear when she takes on a landmark legal case that the ACLU hasn't the time for - defending a MAN who has suffered from discriminatory legislation.  She works in partnership with her tax lawyer husband Marty, preparing a brief and then arguing in front of the appeals court, leading to a classic final act stirring speech that wins the day. In a final, rather deliberately emotional scene, we see a young RBG climb the steps to of the Supreme Court to argue another landmark case, transitioning to the present day Justice.

As directed by veteran Mimi Leder, this movie has a charming and handsomely old fashioned feel of telling a character driven story patiently and building toward a set-piece finale. The script is just fine - and perhaps best in using Ruth's daughter as a provocation toward more strident and direct action. By contrast, the motivations of the dean of Harvard Law School who at once lobbied to admit women but then is seen as so sexist remain frustratingly opaque. Felicity Jones makes only a cursory attempt at RBG's accent and neither she nor Armie Hammer as Marty seem to age much, even as they acquire a teenage daughter.

And yet for all these faults, I still found this a fascinating and satisfying film, with enough provocative angry-making insults to our heroine, and a sense of purpose and triumph at the end.  It makes a nice pair with the aforementioned documentary - although if you only have time for one, I would still go for the doc, for its wider scope and greater insight.

ON THE BASIS OF SEX has a running time of 120 minutes and is rated PG-13. The film is on global release.

FREE FIRE - BFI LFF 2016 - Closing Night Gala - Day 12

Ben Wheatley's HIGH RISE may have been one of the most disappointing films of LFF2015 but his quick, scabrous shoot-em-up thriller FREE FIRE is a welcome return to form.  Moreover, after 12 days of melancholy art-house movies, it was the perfect palette cleanser and finale to this year's exceptionally good film festival. 

Short, sharp, cheap and nasty, the movie takes place almost entirely in a dingy warehouse some time in the 1970s.   Brie Larson plays the sole woman in the film and is presumably some kind of arms broker.  The buyers are two IRA terrorists played by Cillian Murphy and Wheatley alum Michael Smiley and the salesman are a South African (Sharlto Copley) and his enforcer (Armie Hammer).  Also present are associated side-kicks and half-wits played Sam Riley, Jack Reynor, Noah Taylor and Babou Ceesay.  Basically, this is a bunch of scoundrels, where trust and intelligence are both in short supply. So when a junkie driver brings up an old beef with another moron, shots get fired and pretty soon we're in a full on seventy minute shoot out.  

A ROYAL NIGHT OUT

This year sees the anniversary or many a military event, not least the Battle of Waterloo which I am covering in real time with my @relivewaterloo twitter account. One of those anniversaries is the 70th anniversary of VE or Victory in Europe day. Many of us have grown up with iconic images of that night - the crowds partying in Trafalgar Square and the Mall.  Set against that backdrop, this movie - A ROYAL NIGHT OUT - is a very mild and respectful depiction of what might have happened if Princesses Elizabeth and Margaret had been given permission to celebrate VE Day among the masses.  The movie sees them beg permission of their parents, then hit the Ritz where Princess Margaret (true to later reform) manages to give her chaperones the slip and have a fine old time everywhere from the Ritz to a Soho brothel to the Chelsea Barracks. Meanwhile, her earnest elder sister, Princess Elizabeth tries to track her down with the reluctant help of working class airman Jack.