Judd Apatow’s latest effort behind the camera, after ‘This is 40‘, is based on a screenplay from comedian Amy Schumer and indeed stars Schumer as the eponymous trainwreck – Amy (Schumer has acknowledged autobiographical input), a young girl working as a journalist in NYC and happy to have numerous casual love affairs whilst most of the people around her have things more ‘nailed down’, so to speak. Really, though, none of this makes her different from huge swathes of the populace, thus the film’s hoped for appeal, and so it hardly seems justified to refer to herself as a trainwreck, and indeed a number of her co-workers at the magazine’s HQ would probably do the title much more justice.
Schumer’s work is strongly reminiscent of Greta Gerwig’s, as in the likes of ‘Frances Ha‘ for example, and indeed there are nods to Woody Allen here and there as we watch Amy try to start something meaningful with sports injury doctor Aaron (Bill Hader), whom she is sent to interview one serendipitous day despite her protestations (she hates sport). In this sense the film ends up becoming a very traditional romantic comedy, and its long running time does leave you with the sense a lot of the slightly self-indulgent and predictable dramatic meanderings in the second half could easily have been removed – although much of the comedy that remains is quite fun, making Schumer one to watch for the future. With strong support from Tilda Swinton, John Cena and NBA star LeBron James.
Nicholas Sparks must be the least inventive successful author of his generation, given that his work largely just recycles the same story involving an idyllic, yet troubled by one central threat, romance between a young Venus and Adonis spliced and intermingled with a parallel love story involving two other characters and their, usually tinged with tragedy, tale in flashback. Such is the case in this latest adaptation of his similarly titled 2013 novel, with Britt Robertson and Scott Eastwood (Clint’s son) as the aforementioned mercurial lovebirds and Alan Alda as the old fogey who will engage them with his own tale of romance after the other two save him from a car wreck along with his basket of love letters that he apparently never leaves home without (and which Robertson’s character has no qualms about delving into whilst he’s unconscious).
I have to admit that I did find myself warming to the story as the film went on, despite some ropey acting (some good work too though, especially from Oona Chaplin, granddaughter of Charlie Chaplin, as the flashbacked love interest) and the expected cavalcade of cheesy twangy songs, romanticised countryside and vainglorious displays of tensed biceps and tight jeans. Indeed, since this is the second Sparks adaptation, the other being ‘The Best of Me‘, that I’ve begrudgingly admitted to not despising recently I guess I should cut him some slack, and here director George Tillman Jr. (‘Faster’ 2010, ‘Notorious’ 2009) does a pretty good job with the material and at handling the primary source of tension: the male lead’s occupation of rodeo rider coupled with recovery from a near brain haemorrhage due to the sport the year before (partly inspiring the title, though you kind of imagine Sparks tittering away to himself at perspective double, or indeed triple, entendres whilst he was writing), including cinematically vivid shots of the stunt men in action (some of the scenes are with Eastwood on a mechanical bull, though he did sneak off after the shoot wrapped to try one for real), although here it would have been much better to ditch the schmaltzy formula and replace it with more traditional grit and sweat for a favourable contrast.
It won’t disappoint fans of Sparks but it still lacks anything that’s likely to entice many new prospective converts into the fold.
British romantic comedy that sees lonely thirty four year old Nancy (Lake Bell) mistaken for the blind date of lonely, and in the process of getting divorced, forty year old Jack (Simon Pegg) and who decides to run with it for a bit before being discovered but, wouldn’t you know it, they were having a good time up until then – is it possible they were meant to be together? Puke. Moments of merit do appear every now and then but initially their date plays out more like a tedious horror film with sycophantic, fake conversation and you think to yourself ‘surely no one in the world would actually want to be on this date’. There’s no chemistry between the pair whatsoever, but then after the truth is inevitably dragged out things get much better, and in reality this kind of event with the ensuing arguments is exactly the sort of thing that can bond two people together as it’s unique and more like a random adventure.
As is the par for romantic comedies the laughs don’t exactly come thick and fast, although there are a few decent ones stuck in there, and unfortunately there are multiple cringe worthy moments and areas where the story breaks down completely, such as Jack walking into the ladies toilets because Nancy had ‘been there for a while and he was concerned’. Really? It’d been like, three minutes max, and of course this is the fudge to uncover what’s going on but it’s pretty lame, and the film never completely overhauls its terrible and torturous first third, but at least there is more heart in the remainder and although the trailer suggests it’s the female here that will have to ‘man up’, it’s a little misleading as it remains the male that has to do the lion’s share of the work. Some grit to also be found with regard to moving on from old relationships and bizarrely there’s even an homage to ‘Rocky’ (76) at one point. Not bad, but could so easily have been better.
A very solid period drama with great performances from central players Carey Mulligan and Matthias Schoenaerts and equally well balanced direction from renowned auteur Thomas Vinterberg (whose last feature film was ‘The Hunt‘). Based on Thomas Hardy’s 1874 novel (although he did revisit the text significantly in 1895 and again in 1901) of the same name, I had fully intended on reading the book before watching the film so as to get a proper historical context but alas my plans were thwarted on this occasion, which is a shame as the feminist aspect of the story for the time period (the Dorset countryside is the setting, incidentally, and the film was largely shot on location) in itself suggests it may be a worthy read. Mulligan as Bathsheba Everdene is the central character (Hardy appears to have relished coming up with character names – the other significant ones here being Gabriel Oak, Sergeant Francis Troy, Fanny Robin and William Boldwood {could Bathsheba have been the inspiration behind Katniss Everdeen?}), and we essentially watch as the local men in the area vie for her attention with a mixture of gentile sensibilities as to how to go about doing this, and then the, erm, not quite so gentile, as the fortunes of Bathsheba herself wax and wane, going from educated but poor into the inheritance of a sizeable farm with a score of staff and potential profits to be made admixt with mishaps delivered by the whims of nature.
So, in this sense there is an overt feminist aspect in that Bathsheba is a strong willed, intelligent and capable young woman surrounded by men whom she must on the one hand with their amorous advances reject, whilst on the other she must lead and command the respect of and also be able to barter with and hold her own against the competition. Mulligan is nigh on perfect in the role as she brings to the fore through subtlety the difficulties this incurs – we can see the adrenaline pumping as she faces off against one of the larger men bearing down on her, and yet her steely nerves carry her through, just as the imperfections and naivety of the character are also there to see as she makes mistakes and allows her ego, bolstered by position, to occasionally overstep the mark.
Yet, the absolute central crux of the story remains rooted in the fact that she is considered physically desirable by the majority, if not all, the males around her – would the novel have been commercially viable if she was perceived as a munter and no one wanted her? Now that would be interesting – men wanting to her marry her for financial gain only, she desiring someone but unable to woo him and at a loss what to do about it given the special constraints of the time, ravaged by the vagaries of her lust and jealousy. Male writers engage with the notion of extreme feminine beauty primarily because it’s what they themselves ultimately desire and thus it provides them and their characters with the most efficient fuel, and yet if literature is to endorse the idea of a universal enchantress then the opposite must also be true, feminine ugliness, generic repugnance, therein you would find a much more hard hitting and relevant expose of humanity. Art in general has always been more than happy to sidestep this concept and indeed you almost never see this kind of story told, although Vinterberg would have been the perfect person to tell it really – Far From the Madding Crowd: Redux.
As it is, the director gives us a distinct duality – the moments of expected beauty where we are spoiled by lovely scenic shots of the countryside with its rolling drumlins, valleys and sunlit lustre, coupled with much more down to earth scenes which look exactly as they would if one were standing there while they were being filmed, lacking much in the way of any filmic sheen but working really well because of it. Make no mistake though, this is much closer to a traditional romance than an exploration of the human condition, as there are several resolutions in the plot that will leave you thinking ‘hmm, that’s convenient’, or deus ex machina if you prefer, and Vinterberg himself buys into this, cue kissy moments with rotating camera and rays of sunlight flitting between mouths and bodies. Support from the likes of Tom Sturridge, Michael Sheen and Juno Temple proves continually apt and fitting and certainly if you are a fan of period dramas and classical romance then you should enjoy this one, and indeed it’s been done well enough to please the casual dabbler in the genre as well.
This follows very much in the recent tradition of time frame related tortured love affairs, after the likes of ‘The Time Traveller’s Wife’ (09), ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’ (08) and to a lesser extent ‘About Time‘, and in this case it revolves around central character Adaline (Blake Lively) enduring a fateful car crash in the 1930s which, whilst momentarily unpleasant, had the upside of granting her with eternal youth. Upon realising this she goes underground and attempts to live out the rest of her days as a librarian, clearly not watching ‘It’s a Wonderful Life’ (46) when it’s released and thus remaining unaware this makes her an OLD MAID and is therein a fate worse than death.
It’s doesn’t make any sense really, it’s not like she can read minds or turn people’s pets inside out when she sneezes or anything so one would be forgiven for thinking she may eventually realise she has something pretty useful to potentially offer mankind as it clearly occurred as a result of the happenstance of the accident, but she elects to stay in hiding of course until the strongest force in the universe, cosmic star-crossed love, pulls her away from reading every book ever read and threatens to undo everything she’s been trying to accomplish up until then, which admittedly wasn’t a great deal. Michiel Huisman plays the love interest and to be honest my proverbial hat goes off to anyone who can reliably pay attention to anything he says throughout the multiple dreary dates they go on as it all seems to translate into ‘I am merely saying the first thing that comes into my head right now to stop from salivating and I will do whatever it takes to get into your pants’ all of which is the fault of the writing rather than the performer but the pair have about as much chemistry as cohabitating inert gases.
Adaline herself seems to be of the same mind, and when her beau steals her address from the library so he can see her again and then turns up outside her flat she flips out at him – which was genuinely refreshing to see. Unfortunately though, she quickly changes her tune and ends up, literally, grovelling for his forgiveness. Hopeless. In any event, it becomes apparent that this particularly stale appetiser was simply lining the audience up for the main course, as acting heavyweight Harrison Ford enters the fray and the film then becomes a really good example of how one great actor on form can save everything else from the trash can. Suddenly there is a much deeper emotional connection and more bite to the romance. Lively plays the demure role she’s been given probably about as well as it was possible to do, and the movie is well shot with an appropriate sense of atmosphere, although it does contain one of the longest standing tropes of editing and directing which you will see coming a mile off, and although it’s a great shame there is such a lack of substance in major areas, enough is done by the end to at least claw back something of emotional value for the audience.
Hmm. If you have seen the Wachowski brother’s (sorry, that should be sibling’s – one of them has had a sex change) last outing ‘Cloud Atlas‘ then whatever you felt watching that is almost certainly going to be replicated by this over the top sci-fi blunder/extravaganza, which this time around is both written and directed by them. It often looks quite impressive, and there is action galore, but it encapsulates the very definition of ‘popcorn entertainment’ and there’s a bountiful smorgasbord of cheese dripping and then exploding from start to finish. The opening section is easily the worst, with poor performances and a bad delivery of what’s already a ropey premise – that one Earth woman, Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) is the reincarnation of the mother of the Abrasax triumvirate, the Princess and Princes who rule our section of the universe, and as such she is hot property to be contested for by all, queue lots of men fighting over the pretty girl and rubbish wedding attempts and the inevitable falling for the rugged bounty hunter with a heart who’s the first to reach her – Caine Wise (Channing Tatum) who is also part canine. Yes. It must have taken them a while to think of the character name.
With the added element that the Abrasax family process human beings into chemical compounds that produce a life extending elixir, the story appears to be a simple splicing of ‘Flash Gordon’ (80) and ‘Dune’ (84) and it rarely proves interesting, though things do start to pick up once Sean Bean enters the fray (as ‘Stinger’, he is part honeybee), a past master at making rubbish plots sound feasible. With support from Eddie Redmayne, Douglas Booth and Tuppence Middleton. If you are just in the mood for watching something flashy that doesn’t engage your mind in any way at all then this does tick a lot of the right boxes, but if we compare this to Marvel’s similar space adventure mash-up ‘Guardians of the Galaxy‘ it becomes clear that the Wachowskis have yet to really learn from their multitudinous and oft times glaring mistakes of the past.
Eddie Redmayne annoyed me intensely throughout ‘Les Miserables‘, but I have to admit he is very good in this as the talented and cruelly fated cosmologist Stephen Hawking who developed motor neuron disease when he was just 21, and for once Redmayne does put his hair down for the role (it would have been most amusing had he not done so). It’s an extremely sad story and so the physicality of what happens to the main character necessarily takes up around half of the film’s focus as the disease slowly destroys his ability to use all of the muscles in his body, with the other half zoning in on Hawking’s relationship with his wife Jane (Felicity Jones) from when they meet at Cambridge in 1963 until more or less the present day, in fact the screenplay is based on her memoir ‘Travelling to Infinity – My Life with Stephen’ published in 2008.
The title refers to the ongoing search in physics for a unifying equation that will cover all of the fundamental forces of nature and will bring quantum mechanics and general relativity into harmony with one another, as currently they don’t completely work together suggesting something is wrong with at least one of them somewhere. What is actually more fascinating than the physics (the film doesn’t really delve too deeply into the science involved) is the effect on the marital relations of the Hawkings of other people being introduced into their interpersonal space, and one could easily put the disability issue to one side and extrapolate similar effects for any relationship, and perhaps argue for a more general equation surrounding this type of natural force. Redmayne and Jones are both up for awards – in fact Redmayne has already won the Golden Globe so he may be running as the most serious contender to ‘Birdman’s‘ Micheal Keaton for the Oscar. Despite the seriousness of the film and a story that is quite painful to watch, this is nonetheless a wonderful and heartfelt biography from director James Marsh (‘Shadow Dancer‘, ‘Man on Wire’ 08).
The death of Charlie Countryman is indeed necessary as, frankly, he’s too stupid to stay alive for very long, given he appears to have trouble even getting properly dressed in the morning without aid never mind dealing with murderous criminals in a foreign land. Shia LaBeouf plays the eponymous central character whose mother dies at the opening of the film but her ghost stops on her way to paradise in order to suggest travelling to Bucharest, probably to ‘find himself’, where he goes and essentially gets the shit kicked out of him repeatedly – although since he uncovers some concrete incriminating evidence about someone and then goes right up to them and reveals this information, he was literally asking for it. Wouldn’t you know it, there’s a hot girl involved in the guise of Evan Rachel Wood sporting an accent that may belong somewhere on the Eurasian plate but it’s certainly not Bucharest (accompaniment with her ‘yawning cat’ love making technique ensures this is also a film she’ll want to leave behind pretty fast) and of course Charlie falls instantly in love with her because chances are women back home tend to avoid him. Mads Mikkelsen plays the main baddie and watching him kick Countryman off the chair he’s sitting on and send him flying is the only satisfying moment in the film. Bizarrely with Rupert Grint and James Buckley in support as a couple of travelling plonkers, and with constant jibes that maybe he meant to go to Budapest and not Bucharest, sure to insult all Romanians.
Directed by Michael Hoffman (‘Gambit‘, ‘The Last Station’ 09) and adapted from yet another self consciously trite novel by king of the gushy teen melodrama, novelist Nicholas Sparks. I am slightly alarmed to say I enjoyed parts of this – and it is entirely due to the strength of some of the as yet unfamiliar faces in the movie. Dawson (James Marsden) and Amanda (Michelle Monaghan) are two star-crossed lovers who are brought back into each other’s life when a mutual friend passes away, and we see them stare at each other not quite sure how to act (in every sense of the word) as the film continually flits back in time to show us how they fell in love and also how they came to be strangers.
Their younger selves are played by Luke Bracey and Liana Liberato, and in these parts the story is still formulaic piss but it does nevertheless work well with convincing performances and direction. Afterward, though, that predictability careers downhill with moments of ‘oh no, please tell me this isn’t going to happen. Sigh. It was inevitable for more than one reason I suppose.’ Sparks really is taking the mick here and he needs to hire someone that can extricate the enormous lumps of his own cheese from the plot as some of the rest has enough emotional empathy and resonance to be worthwhile. Fans of his probably won’t be too disappointed by this, unless by some miracle the novel is a serious piece of literature.
An endearingly sweet film that sees central character Megan (Keira Knightley) realise that a decade after the end of high school her life hasn’t really changed all that much compared to her peers and when her boyfriend, the same one from high school, proposes to her she panics and bunks off for a week to live with sixteen year old Annika (Chloë Grace Moretz), whom she befriended after being successfully entreated by the latter to purchase alcohol for her and her mates. Initially, it’s like a breath of fresh air compared to the stuffy seriousness of her more grown up friends but Annika’s father (Sam Rockwell) isn’t exactly impressed when he finds a strange woman sleeping over with his daughter, but since the woman in question is Keira Knightley he quickly decides to get over it and tries to bang her anyway, complicating matters further.
Megan is shown to be carefree but still grounded enough to like – in fact, she has a playfulness about her that is absolutely necessary for adult life and which her friends seem to have forgotten, and this in no small way comes from Knightley herself, shining through into her character quite naturally. Set in America, Megan sports an accent that is at times applied a little too thickly but when a bit more subdued is perfect, and the film is directed by Lynn Shelton who enjoyed success with another comic drama centred around three main characters in 2012’s ‘Your Sister’s Sister’. Some of the comedy here could have done with a few hammer blows to make it stand out a bit more, but it’s quite impressive for a debut screenplay, from writer Andrea Seigel, and the movie is amiable, fun and has a great starring turn from the leading lady herself. Look out for the bit where she flips a sign for her father’s company, all dressed in white – almost like the universal obverse of her Coco Mademoiselle adverts (the ones with the bike and the jumpsuit), and also where she convinces one of the young girls to step up to the plate and tell the boy she likes how she feels, a refreshing and sensible change from the norm.
Keira Knightley recently posed topless for Interview magazine (if you are ever thinking of doing it again Keira, I can offer you tea and biscuits …) to highlight the endemic and somewhat ridiculous use of the fake enhancement of women’s breasts in the media, as she herself has famously had this applied to her own image multiple times by the industry, on the likes of the advertising surrounding ‘King Arthur’ (04) for example, and indeed she wants the photoshoot to propagate for that reason. Ah, human female breasts, fascinating for all sorts of reasons – such as their unique existence within the animal kingdom, human females being the only primates that have protuberant breasts all year round and not just when they have milk in them, demonstrating their primary sexual role and the importance of sex for the human species – whether you argue for pleasure or pair bonding. Indeed, a strong theory is that when your ancestors first walked upright, the females had no breasts, as we would describe them now, and they simply evolved to mimic the buttocks as seen from behind – providing a sexual image from both directions.
The concept of one’s own body compared to another’s is so often manipulated to a sickening degree in the modern Western world, and The Red Dragon’s own personal view has always been to regard it as impossible to criticise one’s looks without also disrespecting your ancestors, and in particular your family. To them you are the most beautiful thing in the entire cosmos and you only hurt them unimaginably by putting yourself down, but not only that if you take a common complaint such as the shape of one’s nose – this evolved in order to adapt itself to the air your ancestors had to breathe, as when it reaches your lungs the air must be within a certain range of temperature and humidity and the nose is nature’s filter, thus not only does its shape point directly to where your antecedents lived but it was also a great aid in their comfortable survival and indeed your very existence, thus you should be proud and grateful – not wanting to change it just to look like someone else. Plus, it really doesn’t matter what you look like so long as you take care of what you’ve got and enjoy it – I mean Keira is quite obviously the best among you but then she has to suffer lots of unwanted attention and screeds of text about her look and people analysing every inch of her body, and ultimately even if one person thinks you are a one out of ten, someone else will think you are a ten – just don’t waste any time or thought on the ones, and as for female’s breasts your femininity is the entirety of your body, mind and soul combined and each elemental part is what makes you unique and special – embrace what you look like, enjoy the truly remarkable creature that you are and for both sexes remember – a genuine smile is always attractive. See below for a mathematical analysis of romance and dating, from another rather appetising human morsel …
