iPad Round-Up 3 - PAUL

What is it about British comedians that they go to America, garner a little success, and then get the urge to mock the key difference between America and Britain - Christian fundamentalism. Don't get me wrong - people who believe in Intelligent Design give me the heebie-jeebies - but there does seem something rather odd, and pathological even - in these movies that delight in undermining religious belief. I speak here of Ricky Gervais' THE INVENTION OF LYING and, now, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg's new film, PAUL.

The plot is simple.  Frost and Pegg play two best friends and sci-fi geeks who attend a convention in the US. They pick up an alien who needs to get home, voiced by Seth Rogen, and so set up a comedy road-movie that could've been a clever satire on genre films, just in the same way that SHAUN OF THE DEAD brilliantly spiked zombie movies, or HOT FUZZ spiked cop films.  But  no, Frost and Pegg add a fourth character to their movie - a religious fundamentalist (Kristen Wiig) whose entire world-view is over-turned by her realisation that there is life on other planets.  

Of course this could've been as funny as anything in HOT FUZZ or SHAUN, but somehow - maybe the sensitivity of this material in the US, or maybe the real Hollywood money behind the picture - dulled their wit. (Or maybe it's that Frost and Pegg are without their usual collaborator - Edgar Wright?)  There are still flashes of the kind of ribald, laugh-out-loud comedy that we got in the earlier films, but overall this seems like a much tamer, and less memorable affair.  That unmistakeable damp squib sensation that settles in at about the hour mark isn't helped by a rather flat cameo by Jason Bateman as the spooky Fed, and can't be saved by a cameo from Sigourney Weaver. I also feel that Seth Rogen is straying into the territory occupied by Jack Black - that of always playing himself - even when voicing a CGI alien. 

PAUL was released earlier this year in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Canada, the US, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Ukraine, Australia, Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Hungary, Malaysia, Singapore, Iceland, Italy, the Philippines, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Lithuania. It is currently on release in Sweden, Thailand and Turkey. It opens in Spain on July 22nd.

BRIDESMAIDS - chicks aside, pretty conservative

BRIDESMAIDS is getting massively hyped because, contra-vention, it's a bromance starring chicks and, shock, horror, chicks sometimes talk about sex! The reality is that, once you get over the shock of the all-female cast, BRIDESMAIDS is actually a deeply, boringly, conventional movie with a predictable plot, pedestrian direction, and over-written jokes. (Not to mention a random Irish cop - they try to make a joke about it - but seriously, why?) It all just makes me deeply depressed about how reactionary Hollywood is that such a simplistic gender-switcheroo can have everyone salivating.

Anyways, on to the plot, such as it is. Kristen Wiig plays Annie, a thirty something woman whose life is falling apart. Her business failed, she is divorced, her fuck-buddy treats her like shit, her house mates are kicking her out, and her boss is about to fire her. When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) becomes engaged and, despite picking Annie to be her Maid of Honour, seems to be gravitating toward her new glamorous friend Helen (Rose Byrne), Annie has a mini-breakdown. The pressures of the wedding combined with Annie's low self-esteem, lead to her pissing off everyone who cares for her, not least Lillian and Officer Rhodes - a sweet police-officer whose attentions she scorns. Still, this being Hollywood schmaltz, you just know that all this pain is leading toward a moment of self-revelation, a last minute reconciliation with Lilian, and a Happy Ever After with Rhodes.

I didn't have a totally bad time watching this flick. It was funny enough to get me through the two-hour run-time, although I didn't as many did, laugh at Kristen Wiig's physical comedy and the gross-out humour of the entire cast. Rather, I was kept in play by Jon Hamm's hilariously oleaginous turn as the fuck-buddy; by Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson as Annie's fat flat-mates; and by the normally very pretty Melissa McCarthy ugly-ing up as the butch Megan. I also liked how Rose Byrne managed to transform Helen from an out-and-out baddy into a really sympathetic character, whose insecurity was far more pitiable than Annie's. After all, Annie gets Rhodes while Helen stays where she is. Take a look at Rose Byrne's subtle double-take as she sees Annie look at Rhodes for what she thinks is the last time. Now that's good acting.

BRIDESMAIDS is on release in the USA, Canada, Romania, Slovenia, Iceland, Australia, Hungary, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Norway and the UK. It opens on July 7th in Greece, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore and Estonia. It opens on July 22nd in Germany, Finland, Lithuania and Sweden. It opens on July 29th in Poland. It opens on August 4th in Denmark; on August 10th in France; on August 10th in France; on August 19th in Italy; on August 25th in Thailand; on August 28th in Spain and on September 9th in Brazil.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - DATE NIGHT

There's something almost impressive about the fact that director Shawn Levy has taken two of the funniest comedians working today - Steve Carell and Tina Fey - and create a romantic comedy so utterly joyless and inauthentic. I honestly would not have believed it possible. This movie misses the mark so badly it's like the PEARL HARBOUR of romantic-comedies. Fey and Carell play a happily married but tired couple whose regular date night turns into a caper movie when they are mistaken for a couple that's blackmailing a local politician. Chased by organised crime and some bent coppers, it just so handily happens that Mrs Suburbs was a realtor to a super-buff Mission Impossible type special agent. Whenever I get mistakenly chased down by gansters, I am definitely going to ensure that I too can call on my friendly neighbourhood James Bond type. Anyways, there are shenanigans, and the couple turn out to be far more plucky and ingenious than is plausible, and it all ends with Tina Fey in a strip club. The only reason you might possibly watch this flick is for the James Franco-Mila Kunis scene in which they show the grown-ups how to do it. Presumably you can just you-tube that clip.

DATE NIGHT was released in April 2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jimmi Simpson, Josh Klausner, Leighton Meester

Random DVD Round-Up - WHIP IT

WHIP IT is a pretty conventional, but charming, coming-of-age flick directed by Drew Barrymore and starring JUNO's Ellen Page. It feels old fashioned - in the way the sports movies and coming-of-age dramas used to be, before they got satirised in movies like DODGEBALL. The kitsch feel stems partly from the deliberately down-at-heel suburban production design, and from the fact that the heroine is torn between her mother's obsession with beauty pageants and her own attraction to Roller Derby - and both seem anachronistic. But it also stems a little from the straightforward narrative arc, the fact that the happy ending is never really in doubt and the rather simplistic shooting style. The fact that this is Barrymore's debut directorial feature shows in her rather unimaginative handling of the Roller Derby scenes in particular.

Ellen Page plays seventeen-year old, suburban, Bliss Cavendar. Her mother, seeing it as a route out of town, makes her enter beauty pageants where she has to extol traditional feminine virtues. But Bliss decides to rebel by lying about her age and joining a Roller Derby league. She meets tough women with real lives, learns to be aggressive, and gets her first boyfriend. But, as in the way of these three act coming of age flick (see WAYNE'S WORLD, even), Bliss ends up pissing off everyone who loves her - her best friend, her mum, her dad, and potentially her team. Of course, in the movies, as opposed to real life, when you have a bratty teen "coming of age", everyone is remarkably forgiving and loving.

So, all in all, you have to ask what really is the point of WHIP IT? A movie so familiar it feels like a US version of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM subbing roller debry for soccer.

Additional tags: Robert Yeoman, Dylan Tichenor, The Section Quartet, Juliette Lewis, Andrew Wilson, Landon Pigg, Alia Shawkat, Zoe Bell, Ari Graynor, Carlo Alban, Daniel Stern, Shauna Cross

WHIP IT played Toronto 2009 and was released in 2009/2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

London Film Fest Day 9 - EXTRACT

What is EXTRACT doing in the London Film Festival? It's not a high-brow art film looking for UK distribution. It's not the latest movie from an acknowledged auteur - Jarmusch, Egoyan, Haneke. And it's not a high profile glitzy premiere designed to lure the sponsors - a necessary evil. Nope. EXTRACT is an enjoyable but ultimately lightweight comedy from Mike Judge. Worse still, it's less conceptually interesting than IDIOCRACY, if better executed.

So, let's approach this as if it were just another Saturday night movie. Jason Bateman stars a successful businessman called Joel. On the surface he has it all: great house, great car, pretty wife, and his own business - a flavouring factory. But everything's going wrong for Joel. His staff are morons; his wife won't sleep with him; his neighbour's a creep; and he's falling for a con woman. Worst of all, his best friend (Ben Affleck) keeps advising him to do drugs and other crazy shit.

As the movie opens you think the con woman (Mila Kunis) is going to be the star but she drops off the radar. Then the movie almost becomes a bromance with Joel as Dante from CLERKS and Ben Affleck as his Randall. (Without the swearing and Star Wars jokes, of course.) It all feels a bit PG Kevin Smith. Stuff happens; Affleck, J K Simmons and the guy who plays Brad the gigolo are funny; a few laughs are had and it all winds up happily enough.

Not bad but nothing special either.

And will someone please give Mila Kunis a decent part?

EXTRACT was released in the US and Canada in September. It opens in Iceland on November 20th and in the Netherlands on April 29th 2010.

ADVENTURELAND - surprsingly sensitive

ADVENTURELAND is a quiet little drama focusing on the love-lives of a bunch of teenagers working in the eponymous lo-rent amusement park for a summer in the late 80s. Indeed, it's such a sweet, real film that it's hard to believe it was directed by the same guy who made the crass SUPERBAD. Jesse Eisenberg (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE) plays a nice kid, smart, with dreams of summer travelling through Europe. When his parents can't pony up the cash, he ends working in an amusement park. He falls for an emotionally distant girl called Em (Kristen Stewart), who despite her difficulties is also intelligent and sensitive. But, true to life, our hero is distracted by the standard-issue hot chick egged on by the guy (Ryan Reynolds) who Em is already seeing. I love this film because it feels real - anyone who's spent a summer working a shitty job, feeling that their life is on hold, feeling under-appreciated can relate. And anyone who's ever made a dumb decision in a relationship, knowingly, but unable to resist can relate to. Jesse Eisenberg impresses again, but it's Kristen Bell who really struck me as a good actress, in a nuanced performance so much more interesting than that TWILIGHT schtick.

ADVENTURELAND played Sundance 2009 and opened in the US, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Iceland, Argentina, South Africa, Estonia, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Ecuador and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Spain in two weeks time.