JULIE AND JULIA: Meryl triumphs in culinary smackdown

JULIE AND JULIA pits "old" Hollywood against one of cinema's hottest up and coming actresses but the final result is never in doubt. Meryl Streep easily wipes the floor with perky newcomer Amy Adams.
The film's not intended to be an intergenerational boxing match but it's difficult to avoid making the comparisons. It's not often that we get to see a film with two strong female leads given equal screen time and acting in their own spaces. 
JULIE AND JULIA is about the relationship which develops between 30 year old New Yorker Julie Powell (Adams) and legendary tv chef Julia Child (Streep) although the two never meet. Separated by space and time the connection is Childs' famous cookbook "Mastering the Art of French Cooking" which inspires Julie to attempt to create all 524 recipes in one year while writing a blog charting her efforts.
Julie's progress is mirrored by Julia's, from bored wife of an American diplomat (Stanley Tucci) in late 40s Paris through her apprenticeship in cordon bleu to the final publication of her book.
Streep effortlessly dominates as the warbly-voiced, slightly bohemian and definitely tall Childs. Hers is a character which lends itself to easy parody but it's a measure of Streep's talent and experience that while her jaws may occasionally lock on the scenery she never resorts to gnawing it. She keeps Childs' real while also expressing her unrestrained uniqueness.
Julie by comparison is small and mousey and ordinary. The story unconsciously suggests that modern day living has sucked all of the individuality out of us. Perhaps it's just a severe case of rose-tinted glasses syndrome but life and people were more vibrant, more alive, 60 years ago. Julia is irrepressibly optimistic while Julie is weighed down by the burdens of the world.

Perhaps it's not entirely fair to compare the two as equals. Julia was living the relatively privileged life of a diplomat's wife, while Julie is a government worker, trapped in a cubicle in downtown Manhattan taking phone calls all day from relatives of those killed and injured in the Twin Towers attack on 9/11. Perhaps the deck was stacked in Streep's favour before a single foot of film had ever been shot, but she's not an star given to scene-stealing or diva demands. She did her thing while Adams did hers, and experience won out.
Just as Gena Rowlands blew Kate Hudson off the screen in the otherwise eminently forgettable "The Skeleton Key" so does the 60 year old Streep demonstrate how age and a few wrinkles can make for a more satisfying performance than the youth and a perfect figure which Hollywood studios believe we want to see all the time.

 

THE INVENTION OF LYING: the honest truth

THE INVENTION OF LYING is a very good idea for a one hour tv romantic comedy. It's considerably less effective as a 99 minute movie. There's just not enough story to sustain the concept, and the acting and direction are flat and unfocussed.
British comedy wunderkid Ricky Gervais must take the lion's share of the blame for this. He not only stars in but also produced and co-wrote and co-directed the film with newcomer Matthew Robinson, and it all seems to have gone to his head. Gervais is undoubtedly a very talented comedy writer and actor but he's not Orson Welles. THE INVENTION OF LYING shows him very clearly in over his head.
He plays Mark Bellison, an overweight loser in a world where everyone always tells the truth about everything. The idea of lying just doesn't exist until Bellison finds himself in a particularly stressful situation and tells an untruth. The result is miraculous. It gets him exactly what he wants because no one can conceive that he is being anything less than honest, and this initial success inspires Mark to reshape his entire life into what he wants it to be rather than what it is. At the top of his list is winning the love of Anne McDoogles (Jennifer Garner), a highly desirable young lady who, by mutual consent, is out of his league.
This is where everything in the story starts to lose focus. 
Mark decides he's not going to lie to Anne to get what he wants from her, although he does lie to her about plenty of other things including the existence of "the man in the sky" who controls everything in the world.
Although it's never explicitly confirmed, it's obvious that the Man in the Sky is God, and Mark finds himself cast in the role of God's messenger by a public fanatically eager to learn more. But the story isn't very clear on whether it's suggesting that Mark invents religion as well as lying, or whether there's an inherent connection between the two.
At more or less the same time as the focus fades the same thing happens to the comedy. THE INVENTION OF LYING is never laugh out loud funny but once the apparent invention of religion is added to the mix it ceases to be anything more than very intermittently slightly mildly amusing. The situation's not helped by the oddball cast who fail to gell or demonstrate the slightest talent for genuinely funny comedy. Cameos from Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ed Norton, Tina Fey, Christopher Guest, Justin Bateman, and Rob Lowe all add nothing to the proceedings, and a brief scene between Gervais's "Extras" co-stars Stephen Marchant and Shaun Williamson only serves to suggest what might have been.
The film's an even bigger disappointment because it was so badly missold by the cinema trailers. They promised a sharp, witty and very dry comedy but what we get is a stillborn mish-mash of comedy styles with barely a hearty laugh to be had and even less of a story. 
Extremely unsatisfying. 

CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT: the dream factory has Christmas all wrapped up

A word of caution about CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT - don't watch this film on an empty stomach. There's so much talk about juicy steaks, roasted chickens and chocolate cakes topped with ice cream, that it'll send you running to the kitchen to raid the fridge.

Food is the thread that pulls together the disparate elements of this World War II comedy - a shipwrecked sailor, a magazine columnist, a pompous architect, an overweight publisher, and an equally rotund Hungarian restaurateur with a knack for mangling the English language.

The sailor is Jefferson Jones (Dennis Morgan), hailed as a hero by the newspapers for surviving 18 days on a life-raft after his destroyer is torpedoed by a German U-boat. Recuperating in hospital, Jones reveals he's never had a real family and dreams of spending a traditional Christmas surrounded by loved ones and large amounts of delicious home cooking.

Spotting a golden opportunity for publicity, Alexander Yardley (the wonderful Sydney Greenstreet), publisher of the bestselling magazine "Smart Housekeeping", bullies his star columnist Elizabeth Lane (the equally wonderful Barbara Stanwyck), into inviting the sailor to join her and her perfect family for the holidays at their perfect farmhouse in Connecticut.

Lane is the Martha Stewart of 1940s magazine cookery writing. Her weekly column with its gushing references to her husband, infant son, and their idyllic home, is read and admired by millions of Americans. But Elizabeth is hiding a very guilty secret. She has no husband, child or farmhouse and - even worse - she can't cook. All her recipes are created by a Hungarian restaurant owner called Felix (S.Z.Sakall).

Yardley's edict, and his decision to join the Lanes for Christmas himself, sets in motion a comedy of errors which keeps the story bubbling merrily for the ensuing 90 minutes.

Originally released by Warner Brothers in mid 1945, CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT is a superb example of the Hollywood studio system's ability to create entertainment that was both escapist and rooted in the reality of a world coming to the end of a devastating world war.

The film taps into the hopes and dreams of hundreds of thousands of families looking forward to a reunion with husbands, sons and fathers after four Christmases apart while they were away fighting for their country and for freedom. Jones' story reminds audiences just why the sacrifices were necessary, and anticipates to a brighter future when the grimness of war would be banished to history, and people could concentrate on the simple human pleasures of friendship, love and food.

Even if a traditional Christmas is not in your plans this film is guaranteed to lift your spirits, and that is due in very large part to the wonderful and extraordinarily talented cast of actors who have since become Hollywood legends.

Stanwyck is an absolute delight as Elizabeth Lane. One of the most versatile female stars of the 30s and 40s she was as deft at comedy as she was at film noir. In fact CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT was her first film since starring as cold-hearted femme fatale Phyllis Dietrichson in "Double Indemnity."

The same is true of Sydney Greenstreet. Typecast as the sinister heavy is films like "The Maltese Falcon", "Casablanca", and "Passage to Marseille," he reveals an unexpected talent for light comedy as the overbearing boss who's really a giant teddy bear.

Acting alongside these two powerhouses could have easily overwhelmed the lightweight and non-descript Morgan so it's to his credit that he more than holds his own and succeeds in making Jones likeable and credible as the everyman who is naive yet also charismatic enough to seduce the leading lady.

Warmhearted, funny and full of affection, CHRISTMAS IN CONNECTICUT simply oozes Yuletide cheer.

It's a film to fall in love with.

GOODBYE LENIN: communism's never been so much fun!

The words comedy and German cinema are rarely seen in close proximity to each other, but the two concepts collide head on in GOODBYE LENIN.

Although it opens in East Berlin in 1989 and spans the period from the fall of the Berlin Wall to the reunification of Germany, this is most definitely not a history lesson. Instead, it’s a funny, sad, heart-string tugging family story, using the collapse of the East German communist state as a backdrop.

The family are Alex (Daniel Bruhl), his sister, and their mother, Christiane (Katrin Sass), who’s a dedicated socialist. She slips into a coma just days before the fall of the Wall and when she awakens 8 months later, her doctors warn Alex her health is so fragile that any shock could kill her.

So he embarks on an ambitious and increasingly ludicrous scheme to prevent her from learning of the monumental changes that have occurred by pretending not only that the GDR still exists but that it has actually triumphed over capitalism. This involves shutting her off from the outside world, then creating fake tv news programmes on video to persuade mum that West Germans have become so disillusioned with the excesses of free enterprise that they’re swarming east in their thousands. He also bribes friends and family, and even a former cosmonaut, to participate in the charade.

It sounds like the set up for one of those farcical comedies where the audience is asked to suspend disbelief in the quest for an easy laugh, but its to director Wolfgang Becker’s credit that the story is anything but that. He skilfully blends the comic potential of a ridiculous premise with the sadness of seeing an entire culture swept away in the space of a few months to create what he describes as “a sad comedy” of ordinary folk caught up in the whirlwind of uncontrollable change.

GOODBYE LENIN picked up 9 awards, including Best European film, on its release in 2003, and became the most successful German film to date, but that's not why it's worth seeing. You should watch it because it's a damn good story very well told.

MILDRED PIERCE: solid gold entertainment with so much to say

MILDRED PIERCE is the golden age of Hollywood at it's very best - a compelling story beautifully told.

Joan Crawford deservedly won the Best Actress Oscar as the abandoned housewife and mother who claws her way to business success by sheer force of personality only to discover that money doesn't bring happiness. 
The film's subtext is that women who succeed in a man's world must be punished for their audacity. In Mildred's case she's cursed with the most ungrateful daughter (Ann Blyth) in the history of cinema and dragged down by the weak-willed, sponging and greedy men she chooses to surround herself with.
Bruce Bennett, an actor who exuded solidity and terminal dullness, is perfectly cast as Bert Pierce, Mildred's bland, weak, philandering husband whose abandonment of her for a woman who'll service his needs sets her off on the path to material success and emotional meltdown.

Mildred replaces him with Wally Fay (a bravura performance by the underrated Jack Carson), Bert's former business partner and a grade-A sleaze who literally drools at the mouth as he gropes her while describing what her wants to do to her. Unsurprisingly (to everyone except Wally) Mildred gives him the heave-ho when he introduces her to handsome, suave but impoverished playboy Monte Baragon (Zachary Scott), a man with little self respect and even less spine.Mildred's ambition emasculates Monte, consigning him to the role of the female in the relationship, dependent on handouts from Mildred to keep him in the style to which he is accustomed. Mildred meanwhile assumes an increasingly masculine attire. 

It's a message that would not have been lost on audiences when the film was first released in October 1945. Millions of men were returning home after service in World War Two expecting that the millions of women who'd taken their place in factories and many other traditionally male domains for the duration would now revert to their former status as wives, mothers and homemakers.

Even if we put aside the social context of the film's creation, MILDRED PIERCE remains a powerhouse production. Crawford is magnificent under the direction of the superbly talented Michael Curtiz. The film relaunched her career after she'd been ignominiously dumped by MGM and recast her as a woman destined to suffer for daring to believe she was the equal of any man. 
With so much to offer on so many different levels, MILDRED PIERCE is a must see film for anyone who is serious about cinema.