THE TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE – Intelligent, Romantic, Tragic

I liked the TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE. It made me cry, and not in a way that made me feel violated and manipulated like TITANIC or DEVDAS. And it made me think, not only about the causal paradoxes that are inherent to time-travel movies – but also about the unique ethical dilemmas the plot brings up.

Ultimately though, the best thing about TIME TRAVELLER’S WIFE is that it doesn’t rotate around the science-fiction aspect of time travel, or about any of the ethical issues it raises – it’s just a good, old-fashioned love story: soft; kind; tragic. The time travel is an interesting twist – it makes a more complex and thought provoking plot possible – it means that, unlike other romances, you can still be thinking about it the day after.

I’ve never read the book, and it’s possible that it doesn’t do it justice, few films do. I would certainly have liked some of the issues explored further. Was the relationship genuinely fidelitous around the conception of the couple’s child? Was the hero’s decision prior to that conception justified? Was the hero cruel or kind at the end? I would imagine the book looks at these in some more detail.

But I’m nitpicking. Eric Bana and Rachel McAdams are convincing in the main roles – the movie is well shot and directed – the screenplay has appropriate depth and feeling. It was funny, happy, sad and thought provoking – and while it won’t be everybody’s cup of tea (I can see young male action-movie-fans balking at this one) - it proved an excellent couples movie and a poignant way of spending an afternoon with Mrs Plainview.

Fundamentally a solid, intelligent romantic drama: highly recommended to all fans of the genre.

THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE is on release in the UK, USA, Canada, Iceland, the Philippines and Mexico. It opens in September in Greece, Singapore, the Czech Republic, Germany, Argentina, Hong Kong and Vietnam. It opens in October in Sweden, Russia and Estonia. It opens in November in Australia, Italy and France. It opens in December in New Zealand and on February 25th 2010 in Portugal.

ORPHAN – Who thinks this shit up?

Orphan isn’t a horror movie. It isn’t scary. It tries to be, it tries desperately.

I’m not saying Orphan is a bad film – it passes the time and keeps the audience engaged and vaguely interested. The characters aren’t wholly unbelievable, the script is decent, it’s not gratuitous or unnecessarily gory. But it’s not scary – and that leaves you asking: what is it then?

Is it a psychological thriller? The character development isn’t strong enough for that. Is it an examination of paranoia and fear in a dysfunctional marriage? It’s not deep enough for that.

No, this film is a hodge-podge. It’s a kinda original but ultimately failed attempt by Jaume Collet-Serra, in his first major directorial release, to combine the two major plot-lines of all good horror films: the evil child and the usurping, jealous female intruder. It’s sort of “Children of the Corn” meets “Hand that rocks the cradle” – it tries to play into the two most basic fears of womanhood – your children being in danger, and your husband being stolen.

Sadly the combination is ultimately ridiculous – you find yourself actually laughing at the climactic scenes – the resolution is ultimately unsatisfying because you just don’t believe anyone would think of making a plot that silly.

In some ways, it’s a big missed opportunity. Had the film firmly opted for psychological thriller rather than falling between stools – it could have been strong. The themes of marital infidelity, suspicion, alcoholism, child neglect, paranoia, paedophilia, and personality disorders are genuinely dark and deeply disturbing. But the film doesn’t have the balls to take a chance on these and run with them – and ultimately cops out and becomes yet another 2-dimensional shock-flick.

That’s not to say I didn’t have fun – I did. It passed the time, and was mildly entertaining. Just don’t get your hopes up for a fright or for intellectual satisfaction. It delivers neither.

ORPHAN is on release in the US, UK, Canada, the Philippines, Taiwan, Puerto Rico, Ireland, Panama, Australia, Singapore, Indonesia and South Africa. It opens in September in Malaysia, Serbia, Brazil, Turkey, Uruguay, Venezuela, India, Argentina, Greece, Slovakia, Poland and Japan. It opens in October in Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Russia, Iceland, Spain, Austria, Estonia, Lithuania, Romania and Portugal. It opens in November in Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, New Zealand and in December in Belgium.

I CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT - amateur tech, naive narrative

I CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT is a film with two problems. First, its production values and performances are amateur. Second, despite its earnest intentions to examine lesbian relationships in the contemporary South Asian and Middle East diaspora, it is actually incredibly simplistic and naive. In one particularly excruciating scene, the protagonist's sister realises she is gay when she spots books by Sarah Waters and k d lang CDs in her bedroom. This naivety carries through into a ludicrously fairy-tale ending. Overall, this is just another example of film-makers shoe-horning more transgressive material into the easy-to-swallow formula of mainstream romannces, viz. IMAGINE ME AND YOU

I CAN'T THINK STRAIGHT played Toronto 2008. It was released in India and the US last year and is currently on release in the UK. It opens in Germany on April 16th.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS - meh

So here's the thing. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is not a disaster. It's quite watchable and occasionally leavened by good performances, both comedic (Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt) and dramatic (Mélanie Laurent), not to mention beefcake (Til Schweiger). There are flashes of Tarantino craziness (in a superb basement-tavern set-piece for one) but somehow the movie never takes off - never quite convinces us that we are in a surreal alternate place. In a sense, Tarantino is too good. He does what he's never done before - he creates genuinely dramatic, emotional, credible situations of fear and tension. And then he expects us to switch back in Tarantino the Comic Fantasist mode. As a result, when Tarantino does something that really fracks with reality (e.g. the ending) it just feels wrong. Final reaction: flat. Meh. Walk out of the cinema thinking, what just happened here?

Now, down to the nuts and bolts. INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS is really two films. The first is a pretty serious revenge movie. Mélanie Laurent plays a young Jewish woman who has watched her family butchered by Nazis, and is now in a position, as owner of a Parisian cinema, to blow up the entire German High Command at a premiere of some Nazi propoganda. Melanie Laurent is excellent as Shosanna Dreyfuss - just watch her suppress her fear when she realises she is taking coffee with the man who butchered her family. Diane Kruger is also notably convincing as a German film-star who has to charm her way into the premiere in order to disrupt it. The tension when she is being interrogated by the same Nazi officer who terrified Shosanna is palpable. The second movie, which surrounds the first, is a more broadly drawn Tarantino comedy in which a bunch of American Nazi scalp-hunters, led by Brad Pitt, team up with Diane Kruger's German film-star and Michael Fassbinder's British soldier, to also blow-up aforementioned Nazis. The comedy comes from Brad Pitt as a sort of Dirty Dozen war hero and his interactions with the Nazi villain played by Waltz (whose performance unifies the two parts of the film). The comedy does not come from a particularly ill-judged cameo from Mike Myers.

My suspicion is that the movie won't satisfy anyone. Tarantino fans will want more Brad Pitt/Basterds craziness and tire of the Parisian drama. Not to mention the fact that, rather bravely, Tarantino has chosen to be vaguely credible in keeping most of the dialogue in French and German. Indeed, he goes further, with a great running gag about Americans not speaking foreign languages. I just wonder whether that gag will back-fire with his target demographic. The cult-fans looking for kick-ass violence and witty dialigue might also object to the fact that, ultimately, this is not really a movie about France, Nazis, the Holocaust or anything other than Tarantino's abiding love of cinema, and his childlike belief that movies really can change the world.

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS played Cannes 2009, where Christoph Waltz won Best Actor, Berlin and Melbourne 2009. It is released next weekend in Belgium, France, the UK, Australia, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Hungary, New Zealand, Russia, Slovenia, Ukraine, Austria, Canada, Estonia, Norway, Sweden, Taiwan, the USA and the Netherlands. It is released the following weekend in Iceland, Argentina, the Czech Republic, the Portugal, Slovakia, Bulgaria and Denmark. It opens in September in Finland, Romania, Israel and Spain. It opens in October in Italy, Japan, Singapore, Mexico and Brazil.

THE UGLY TRUTH - joyless

Despite re-teaming the director and writers of LEGALLY BLONDE, this new Katherine Heigl vehicle/rom-com is utterly mirthless. Heigl plays a character all too familiar from recent rom-coms- the frosty career-bitch who just needs to get laid by a Real Man (Gerard Butler). It's the same basic set-up as THE ACCIDENTAL HUSBAND, THE PROPOSAL et al. She's a TV producer on a dismal morning show - he's the misogynistic guest-host brought in to boost ratings. He bets that if she can follow his advice, she'll get her dream man - if he loses, he'll quit the show. What then follows is an entirely predictable, entirely mirthless affair. Heigl simply does not have the physical comedy skills to pull of a scene where she's wearing vibrating pants in a restaurant. To see it done better check out Jenna Elfman in KEEPING THE FAITH. As for Gerard Butler, he really needs to work on his American accent because at present it's stuck in Scotland. Grim, grim, grim.

THE UGLY TRUTH is on release in the US, UK and Australia. It is released in Portugal on August 20th and in France, Argentina and New Zealand on August 27th. It is released on September 4th in Denmark, Mexico, Norway and Romania. It is released on September 11th in Spain and Sweden. It is released on September 17th in the Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Singapore, Ukraine, Brazil, Finland and Iceland. It is released on September 23rd in Belgium, Egypt and Bulgaria. It is released on October 1st in Germany and the Netherlands and on October 9th in Estonia and South Africa. It is released in Italy on November 27th.

COCO AVANT CHANEL / COCO BEFORE CHANEL - yawn

I am the target demographic for this film. A woman of a certain age with a penchant for period romance and a handbag collection worth the output of a small African country. Coco Chanel defines a large part of my wardrobe, shoes, handbags and cosmetics. More profoundly, I am a career woman, and Coco Chanel was not just a radical fashion designer but also a formidable businesswoman who founded a global brand.

Why, then, did I find this movie so dull? The problem is that COCO AVANT CHANEL wants to tell us how Coco got to Paris, rather than how, once in Paris, she built her global business. The film argues that to know Coco as a young woman is to know all - a highly reductive stance. So we see very little of Coco designing anything, or of her famous business sense. Rather, the film focuses on her struggle to break out of the role pre-WW1 France had ascribed to her: resigned to being a working class shop-girl, a bauble for rich men to be traded like property, trussed up in corsets and unable to breathe.

It's a shame that a woman as radical and, yes, politicised, as Coco didn't get a movie as brave as she was. Rather we get a rather schmaltzy period romance in which our poor young heroine foists herself upon a rich Milord, only to fall for a young English businessman who will marry for money. The whole thing is filmed beautifully, in sumptuous period settings, with a lush score from Alexandre Desplat. But Coco's spikiness is near-smothered by the sepia-tint. It's also deeply hypocritical for the movie to praise Coco's iconoclastic stance and her fierce independence, while, at the same time, reducing her life to one thwarted love affair.

Shame.

COCO AVANT CHANEL was released earlier this year in Belgium, France, the Netherlands, Italy, Spain, Israel, Australia, the Czech Republic, Hungary, Portugal and Poland. It is currently on release in the UK. It is released in August in New Zealand, Germany, Argentina, Singapore, South Korea and Norway. It is released in September in Japan, Sweden and the USA. It is released in October in Russia and Brazil; in November in Greece, Finland and Bulgaria and in December in Denmark.