RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE***

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE is a Bridgerton-adjacent piece of mildly entertaining rom-com fluff that satisfies our need for cheesy romantic dramas where love triumphs over bigotry, everyone looks pretty, and sex scenes are steamy but still reassuringly safe. I gave it an extra point for including a sensible conversation about safe gay sex and for featuring an inter-racial gay couple because representation matters.

The unreasonably pretty (but apparently not gay - how do we feel about that?) Nicholas Galitzine stars as a closeted gay British royal prince who falls for the Latine bisexual son of the US President (Taylor Zakhar Perez).  Naturally they start out hating each other but that soon changes as they are forced to spend time with each other as their countries negotiate a trade deal.  The POTUS is amusingly played by Uma Thurman with an insane southern accent, and her husband by Clifton Collins Jr - where has he been? They are super supportive of their son and his political ambitions.  This stands in sharp contrast to the homophobic British King, amusingly played by the real-life gay Stephen Fry. In both cases I find that the movie glosses over the political and social backlash each family would face. But I guess that's not what this film really is.

At any rate, this really is not a work of art, but it is fun enough and important. Kudos to Tony award winning playwright and debut feature director Matthew Lopez for getting this on screen.

RED, WHITE & ROYAL BLUE is rated R and has a running time of 118 minutes. It was released last weekend on Amazon Prime Video.

THE INTERN

Writer-director Nancy Meyers has carved a niche as the purveyor of banal, slightly funny chick comedies, often focussing on romance among the older generation.  Evidence for the prosecution would include SOMETHING'S GOTTA GIVE, IT'S COMPLICATED and now THE INTERN. This is a harmless, very schmaltzy, barely comedy starring Robert de Niro as a 70 year old widower who goes to work for Anne Hathaway's stressed out boss of an internet start-up.  We're told again and again that Hathaway's character, Jules, is meant to be hard to deal with. A younger version of Meryl Streep's character in THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA if you will. But of course neither Hathaway nor Meyers are willing to let Jules get that ugly and so we are less invested in how charming silver fox Ben (de Niro) gets through to her. Turns out that she's actually all soft and fuzzy, and so is he, and that she's just battling with being asked to take on a CEO, and a dissatisfied stay at home dad. Naturally he becomes an avuncular figure, giving advice to all the lost millennials in the office and brings Jules some measure of work-life balance.  There's nothing actively bad about this movie. It's earnest and decently enough acted and does what is says on the tin. It's just sad to see a movie so transparent in its plot movements and emotional manipulation.

THE INTERN has a running time of 121 minutes and is rated PG-13. The movie is on global release.

THE HELP - the Driving Miss Daisy de nos jours

Tate Taylor, director of the anonymous 2008 comedy PRETTY UGLY PEOPLE, somehow managed to get the studios to allow to write and direct THE HELP, a soupy drama based on the best-selling novel by Kathryn Stockett. Not having read Stockett's novel chronicling the travails in 1960s racist Mississippi, I don't know whether the emotional manipulation and superficial politics come from her of from the director.  Either way, the resulting movie looks handsome, and made me shed a tear in the final reel, but has all the genuine engagement with the issues of DRIVING MISS DAISY.  It's a bland feelgood movie about a topic that should make us angry and agitated.  It's a movie in which the main African American character's son is lynched and yet we come out feeling warm and fluffy.  Double plus not good.

The film makes the mistake of telling the stories of these African-American maids through the lens of a perky white wannabe journalist - Skeeter (Emma Stone) - a move that immediately tells us we're in a world where a harsh tale has to be made palatable for a mainstream audience.  Ironic, also, in a movie that makes such a big deal about going right to the source.  Skeeter serves as the vessel through which the maids will dish the dirt and get their story published.  The movie is scrupulous in telling us that Skeeter is sharing the royalties with her informants - but while she gets a cool job in New York out of it - they are at risk of being sacked, imprisoned or lynched. The risks and rewards are clearly completely asymmetric, but the film doesn't embrace and mine that fact - it would mess up the fluffy finale.

Worse still, there is no subtlety in the characterisation - no shades of grey. You're either a good-hearted liberal white (Skeeter, her shamed and reformed mother, Jessica Chastain's character Celia), or a nasty racist white (Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly and her acolytes).  And as for the African-American women they are largely painted in tones of full-on heroism, with even the thief seen as a martyr to a mean mistress.   As for the subject matter, awful, horrible petty racism is seen on screen, but racial violence is referred to rather than shown.  Ditto the subject matter of domestic abuse.  And I couldn't help feeling insulted that the subject of vengeance against racism was reduced to a scatological joke. 

All this isn't to say that the production isn't handsome - with lush on location lensing from DP Stephen Goldblatt (JULIE & JULIA) and wonderful period costumes.  And the female cast is good quality and does the best with the narrowly written characters they are given.  In particular, it was a joy to finally see Jessica Chastain able to round out a character - rather than just being a virtuous icon, as in THE TREE OF LIFE and CORIOLANUS.  

But this movie, so hyped, so likely to win awards, is not a good movie. It's politics are dicey - it's reluctance to truly grasp the profundity of what it's tackling frustrating - it's emotional manipulation dishonest.  I have no time for it.  

THE HELP was released in the autumn in the US, Canada, Australia, Hong Kong and Sweden. It was released in October in Portugal, Finland, Norway, Lithuania, Singapore, France, Ireland, the UK and Spain. It was released in November in Spain, Hungary, Poland, Malta, Estonia, Denmark, Greece, Kuwait and India.  It opens on December 8th in Germany; on December 28th in Belgium; on Dcember 29th in the Netherlands; on January 20th in Italy; on February 3rd in Bulgaria and on February 6th in Brazil.  THE HELP is likely to be feted during awards season judging by the studio campaign and early indications from the New York Film Critics Circle and the Hollywood Film Festival.

JULIE & JULIA - boring and brilliant respectively

JULIE & JULIA has the dubious honour of being the first movie based on a blog - the blog of a thirty-year old failed writer called Julie, cooking her way through the legendary cookbook, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" by Julia Child. I say legendary, and there's even an SNL spoof by a young Dan Ackroyd showing how far this 6 foot 2, preppy woman had entered the American mainstream with her cooking show. I'd never heard of her.

The movie, written and directed by Nora Ephron of WHEN HARRY MET SALLY fame, is a bit of a mixed bag. To my surprise, I was utterly captivated by the story of Julia Child. Meryl Streep is absolutely enchanting as Julia - no-nonsense, up for any challenge, relentlessly optimistic, and yet hard-working too. In Paris after World War Two, she took Cordon Bleu courses designed for professionals and peopled by men. She studied hard, tested and tested recipes, honed her skills, and many years later received great success. All this with the unfailing support of her charming husband, Paul, a US diplomat, played by Stanley Tucci. They seemed to have a rather wonderful marriage, appreciating each other's eccentricities. Indeed, this is one of the most wonderful depictions of a happy marriage I have seen on screen (and stands in contrast to the mawkishness of AWAY WE GO.)

I would have loved a proper biopic of Julia Child. But, the price we pay for this new-found interest in Julia Child is dealing with Julie Powell, the blogger. Now I know that there is no little criticism of Julie Powell on the blogosphere - that she exploited Julia Child for fame* - but that strikes me as partly envious of her ensuing book deal, and overlooking the naive and casual ways in which most of us start blogging. Okay, she didn't study like Julia, and so maybe didn't deserve her success as much. But she never claimed to be a master chef. No, my objection to Julie Powell is more simple. She takes time away from Julia Child. A mousy Brooklyn wife, who can't really cook and throws temper tantrums and moans about how poor she is really isn't any competition for Julia Child - a pioneer, self-taught expert and true-life eccentric.

The result is a movie that's still worth watching, purely for the Streep-Tucci segments, but which is boring during the Amy Adams segments. My only other criticism is that, unlike BIG NIGHT, this movie never had me drooling over the food, and surely that's a must?

*Judith Jones, senior editor and vice president at Alfred A. Knopf, and Child's editor and friend, shared Child's sentiments with Publisher's Weekly: "Julia said, 'I don't think she's a serious cook.' ... Flinging around four-letter words when cooking isn't attractive, to me or Julia," Jones said. "She didn't want to endorse it. What came through on the blog was somebody who was doing it almost for the sake of a stunt."

JULIE & JULIA was released earlier this year in Canada, the USA, Germany and Austria. It is currently on release in the UK, France and Argentina. It is released next week in the Czech Republic and Estonia. It opens on October 2nd in Finland and Norway. It opens on October 9th in Australia, Bulgaria, Poland and Sweden. It opens on October 15th in Belgium, Hungary, the Netherlands, Russia, Singapore, Slovenia, the Ukraine, Brazil, Denmark, Romania and Taiwan. It opens on October 22nd in Greece, New Zealand, Iceland and Italy. It opens on October 30th in Croatia and Mexico. It opens on November 6th in Spain, on November 19th in Portugal and on November 28th in Japan.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR - funny/scary morality tale

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is whip-smart, viciously funny and scarily based in fact. Wilson was the Republican Congressman who channelled monumental sums of money to the Afghan militias fighting the Soviet Union in the 1980s. In doing so, he forced the Soviets to retreat ignominiously and precipitated the fall of the USSR and the end of the Cold War. But as Wilson realises in the moment of his greatest triumph, "we fucked up the endgame." By pulling funding as soon as the fighting stopped - y refusing to rebuild Afghanistan - the US left a power vacuum that was filled by all those CIAl-trained Islamists, armed to the teeth by Charlie. They went on to wreak havoc in Afghanistan, and later, the world.

The movie is brilliantly funny, thanks to an incisive, ballsy script from Aaron "West Wing" Sorkin and the fundamentally scoundrelous subject matter. The paradoxes abound. Wilson is a Republican Congressman from Texas, expert at wheedling favours out of Committee-men, but he's also a womanising, cocaine-snorting, whisky-swilling good-time boy. Wilson has the private morals of a skunk but he's curiously good to his word when it comes to the big stuff. He does what he promises and he's intelligent enough to feel the tragedy of his Committee's refusal to fund a reconstruction. That's why Tom Hanks is perfectly cast here. He's made a career out of being charming and decent, so that even when he's sleazing around a hot-tub you still love him. Wilson is matched pound for pound by all-time scoundrelous CIA agent and bad-ass Gust Avrakotos. Philip Seymour Hoffman's is on top form as the angry, devil-may-care but politically astute CIA fixer who finds his ultimate sugar daddy in Wilson. The only down-side is that, chaps aside, the women in this flick get short thrift. Julia Roberts is magestic and menacing as the Christian fundamentalist fund-raiser Joanna Herring but you never really understand why a Texan socialite would become obsessed with Asian politics. Amy Adams and Emily Blunt are wasted in small roles as Wilson's PA and mistress.

Some critics have complained that there isn't enough politics in this movie. Specifically, that the script does not explicitly show the impact of Wilson's war on the Soviets occupying Afghanistan, or the way in which the arms and training fuelled Jihadists that ended up in the Taliban, Al Qaeda and Iraq. Frankly, I think they're missing the point. We all know the grim repurcussions of the Afghani war. We're living with them. It's far more incisive to see how that sad misadventure began. And frankly, it's a lot more entertaining.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR was released in the US in 2007 and is currently playing in the UK, Greece, Kuwait, Japan, Portugal and Greece. It opens later in January in Belgium, France, Iceland, Argentina, Australia, the Netherlands and South Korea. The film opens in February in Estonia, Italy, Mexico, Norway, Sweden, Venezuela, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Denmark, Finland, Turkey, Slovakia, Spain, Egypt, Singapore and Brazil. It opens in Russia on April 24th 2008.

RENT - why did I cry when I found this movie so dull?

The thing about RENT is that it features a bunch of people that I can empathise with but whose lives are so divorced from my own that it takes a lot of effort. They are a bunch of singers, song-writers, artists, film-makers, strippers, junkies....who are mostly gay or at least bi-, some of whom are HIV positive. What they have in common is that they have dropped out of mainstream society and squat in a loft in downtown New York. Now, RENT means a lot to a lot of people because it captures a time and a mood - when the AIDS crisis hit hard at a point in the 1980s when it seemed like Anglo-Saxon society had collectively sold its soul to flash consumerism. It was the first musical in a while to capture what was going on in contemporary society and make it from off-Broadway to Broadway proper and into the mainstream consciousness.

The problem is that RENT then is not the same as RENT now. What seemed like viciously acute concerns then are no less concerning but have played out differently in a different context. The meatpacking district is now chic and the subject matter in RENT the movie now seems so tame it was given a PG-13 rating by the notoriously strict MPAA.

The other problem with RENT is that the music, choreography, lyrics and story-line were always rather mediocre and had none of the subtlety, seduction or sheer danger of, say, CABARET - which similarly focuses on marginalised members of a brutish society. Added to that, the movie makes the mistake of using members of the original cast who are clearly too old for the parts they play. Anthony Rapp looks plainly absurd in some of the dance moves - a fact highlighted by ham-fisted director, Chris Columbus' decision to focus on him at bizarrely painful moments. Added to the director's rap-sheet we must also point out that barring La Vie Boheme, none of the numbers had any energy. I've seen RENT live and the entrance of Angel is usually a HUGE moment. Here is was throwaway. And finally, if Rapp's character, Mark, is meant to be an aspiring Indie film-maker, why not make his footage actually look inspired rather than like America's worst home videos?

All in all, I found this to be a pretty uninspired movie. However, seeing the final reels of all the friends before drugs and AIDS takes hold, you can't help but be moved. I shed a tear when the stills of Angel are flashed across the screen at the end. A rare moment of directorial brilliance.

RENT is already on release in the US and UK and opens in France and Germany next week.