THE ROSES****

I was pleasantly surprised by Jay Roach's remake of the iconic late 80s black comedy about a divorcing couple sabotaging each other's lives. The Crown's Olivia Colman plays a talented chef who puts her career on hold to raise the kids while Benedict Cumberbatch (THE THING WITH FEATHERS) goes on to become a successful architect.  The tables are turned when a massive storm both destroys his latest commission and his career but drives a famous food critic into her humble crab shack.  He becomes a stay-at-home dad and she becomes a radically successful restauranteur.  The divorce only moves into view in the final 45 minutes or so, and allows for a deliciously brilliant cameo from Allison Janney as a fierce divorce lawyer. It's then that we get the gonzo sabotage that made up most of the original film.  

I loved everything about this film. The brilliantly nasty verbal sparring from the two British leads, much of which comes at the expense of their shocked, prudish American friends.  No surprise that the script was written by Tony McNamara who so beautifully mined marital bickering in his under-rated and hilarious TV series The Great. But what gives this movie so much more depth and relatability compared to the original was its willingness to explore contemporary marriage dynamics around gender norms. I loved seeing the husband and wife struggle to cope with his feelings of emasculation as she becomes the breadwinner, and the wife struggle with becoming a side-show in her own children's lives.  We may not all build multi-million dollar houses in the Bay Area, but I think a lot of these financial and cultural pressures on marriage resonate. It was wonderful to see them explored honestly on film.

THE ROSES has a running time of 105 minutes and is rated R. It was released in August.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE (zero stars)

Aline Brosh McKenna, the screenwriter of THE DEVIL WEARS PRADA and 27 DRESSES, returns to our screens with her debut directorial rom-com, YOUR PLACE OR MINE. I say rom-com, but this parlous excuse for a film is neither romantic nor comedic. There is no chemistry between the leads, Reese Witherspoon and Ashton Kutcher, and no laugh out loud moments. Even Tig Notaro can't save it. What's worse, the way in which this film deals with the real problems of school bullying and recovery from addiction, are borderline insulting.  No-one actually does any work on themselves in this film. All of life's problems can be fixed by throwing money at mean kids, and having good connections to influential businesspeople.  Maybe this is indeed Aline Brosh McKenna's experience of life. It doesn't fly with normal people.

Witherspoon plays a single mum in Los Angeles who complains about her kid's' medical costs but can apparently afford a beautiful quirky pretty house unlike anything I've ever seen in LA. She works as an accountant but is a book lover. Her best friend is Ashton Kutcher's recovering addict who lives a sleek, rich batchelor life in New York.  They house swap for a week when she needs to take some accountancy exams in New York and her babysitter bails.  He tries to fix her life by making her kid popular at school by pandering to the superficial demands of the bullies. She tries to fix his life by handing in a manuscript to a cute influential publisher she just happens to meet in a bar. It all ends happily ever after. 

The whole thing just hangs on the screen like a damp squib.  One cannot imagine Kutcher and Witherspoon actually having a relationship. They don't seem to be enjoying their time together at all. It's utterly predictable throughout.  The only reason to watch this is to hate watch it, and that's no good for anyone.

YOUR PLACE OR MINE is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 109 minutes. It's streaming on Netflix.