THE OTHER GUYS: overwhelmingly underwhelmed again

It's rare to find genuinely ad-libbed genuinely funny comedy in the movies.
Film making generally doesn't lend itself to making it up as you go along. So much needs to be locked down in terms of dialogue and movement before the camera rolls to ensure the director gets exactly the shot they need, and the actors say the lines they're required to say to advance the story.

Robin Williams used to be a rare exception. Supposedly a great deal of his dialogue in "Good Morning Vietnam" was improvised and much of it is damned funny. Will Ferrell is not an exception yet directors continue to allow him to riff on a theme while the camera's rolling despite the evidence of his recent films - "Land of the Lost", "Step Brothers", "Semi Pro" and "Blades of Glory." THE OTHER GUYS just adds to this list of shame.
I've got no solid proof but it seems to me very probable that Ferrell is improvising the dialogue in many of the scenes of this overblown and spectacularly unfunny mismatched buddies cop caper. Why? Well he's paired with a straight co-star, Mark Wahlberg, who's eager to please and happy to react to whatever Ferrell throws at him, hoping that some of that comedy gold will rub off on him (it doesn't), and their characters are placed in one set-up after another which just shriek "here's the premise. Now run with it!" to a star of Will's stature and proclivities.
And if my feeling about this film isn't good enough for you just stick around until the very end of the final credits. There's a scene cut from the main movie in which Ferrell is very obviously and un-amusingly riffing on the lines Wahlberg is feeding him.
The alternative to my improvisation abortion theory is almost too horrible to contemplate - that all the dialogue has been scripted and Ferrell is simply repeating his lines as written. For humour this lame to have been written and revised before director Adam McKay called "action!" verges on criminal. At the very least it opens the door to a charge of taking money under false pretences on behalf of all those who bought cinema tickets or the DVD believing they were paying to see a comedy.
For the sake of his reputation Ferrell should step away from the cameras and wait for a genuinely funny script to come along. If he continues on this current course of believing he's talented enough to make a silk purse out of any sow's ear that lands in his lap he'll wind up as the next Eddie Murphy.

EASY A: I give it a B-

It's probably not the done thing these days to heap any kind of praise on actress turned professional wild child Lindsay Lohan but I reckon she would have made EASY A into a much better film than Emma Stone does.

Stone plays Olive Penderghast, a southern California high school student who takes her literature class's study of "The Scarlet Letter" too much to heart and invents a slutty sex life for herself.
Her initial intention is simply to help out a friend but the scheme rapidly spirals out of control as reports of her numerous (fabricated) one night stands spread through the school like wildfire. Olive finds herself the object of the entire school's contempt and admiration, and nothing she can say will persuade them that none of the gossip is true.
In the hands of Lohan Olive would probably have come across as smart, funny, vulnerable and lonely, hiding a big heart beneath a tough shell. In other words she'd have been likeable and I could have empathized with her situation. As played by Stone she's a smug, snarky,smart-alec who's so disdainful of everything around her that's it's difficult to feel anything remotely positive for her or her self-induced predicament.
However it's not Lindsey Lohan that director Will Gluck is reaching for but legendary 80s writer-director John Hughes. The film makes several references to "Pretty in Pink", "The Breakfast Club", "16 Candles" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" accompanied by brief clips from those now classic coming of age movies, and it's not clear what message Gluck intends to convey by doing this. Is he suggesting that EASY A is the modern day equivalent of these beautifully crafted tales of teenage angst - in which case he's deluding himself - or is Olive drawing parallels between her predicament and those endured by the characters in Hughes' films and wishing her life was like theirs - in which case she's deluding herself?
Either way, the fulsome tribute to Hughes doesn't work. Rather than adding much needed lustre to Gluck's pedestrian project it made me want to stop the film and slide "Pretty in Pink" into the DVD player in its place.
Despite the criticism I'm giving EASY A a B minus because of the supporting cast. What induced them to work on this film is beyond me but for the brief time that Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are on screen as Olive's 'cool' parents the story is worth caring about. They bring a lightness and sparkle to the script which makes it sound for more entertaining than it really is.
An eminently forgettable viewing experience.

CHARADE: Cary's lost his sparkle

Much has been written in the decades since it happened about Cary Grant's decision to retire from acting in 1966. Despite his assertion that he was too old to continue playing the leading man convincingly many of his fans insist Grant could have gone on romancing ladies half his age for many more years to come.
On the evidence of CHARADE I believe Grant made the right decision.

He was all of 59 when this comedy-thriller was released in 1963 which is certainly not old, but he looks tired. The sparkle that made Cary Grant 'Cary Grant' is missing and he plods through the film with the air of a man who's getting "too old for this shit." There's no sense of enjoyment in his performance even though Audrey Hepburn's character makes it quite clear to him that she's his for the taking.
While in real life Grant was attracted to younger women he apparently felt it unseemly to be seen pursuing ladies young enough to be his daughter on screen and perhaps he allowed this discomfort to influence his performance, even though the script had been changed to make him the pursued party.
Whatever the real reason the result is disappointing. CHARADE never comes to life in the way that "To Catch a Thief" or "North by Northwest" did a few years earlier, The blame is not entirely Grant's. While Walter Matthau is impressively understated, George Kennedy and James Coburn play their parts too broadly to be convincing heavies and Hepburn is (ironically) starting to look a little too grown up to be entirely plausible as the naif.
Grant's talent, even when not firing on all cylinders, was considerably superior to may other lesser stars on their best day, so CHARADE is nothing to be embarrassed about and the film did respectable business at the box office on its original release.Grant though, was reportedly stung by the reviews which focused more on the age gap than the acting and he would make just two more movies before calling it quits.

CASH ON DEMAND: a thriller that's tight and to the point

This tight little British thriller from 1961 feels so much like an extended episode of 'The Twilight Zone' that I expected Rod Serling to appear and deliver a closing homily as the story wrapped up.

CASH ON DEMAND is a B-movie from Hammer studios about a rigid, mean-spirited and unlikeable bank manager, Fordyce (Peter Cushing), who gets his comeuppance on the eve of Christmas Eve when his bank is robbed by a charming but ruthless crook, Hepburn (Andre Morell), posing as a representative of the company which insures his bank against loss.
The story's based on a play and it shows. Almost all of the action takes place within the confines of the bank's front office and the manager's office but what stops it feeling claustrophobic or stage-bound are the fine performances by the two lead actors.
Cushing's tight pinched features and fussy, buttoned down demeanor bring credibility to the part of the bloodless and prissy Fordyce, while Morell endows Hepburn with a smug swagger and air of superiority which never veers into caricature.
With a tight 80 minute running time every moment has to count and director Quentin Lawrence sets up the story perfectly,subtly offering up a great deal of information in the first few minutes that proves important later on. Suspenseful and deceptively straightforward with a completely unexpected twist in the tale, CASH ON DEMAND is living proof that big stars, a bloated budget, colour and car chases are not essential to create an effective thriller.

ECLIPSE: dear god will this never end?!!

Question: how do you stretch 10 minutes of plot into a two hour film?
Answer: by having the main characters talk endlessly and repetitively about the same damn thing!
I should have learnt my lesson after suffering through the snoozefest that was 'New Moon' but this third installment in the apparently interminable 'Twilight' saga is even worse.
Almost nothing of any consequence happens as Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) carry on like a pair of lovesick pups, and Jacob (Taylor Lautner) tries to insert his ridiculously overdeveloped pecs between them.
There are well written and entertaining dramas about teenage love (think of almost anything by John Hughes in his prime) and then there's this tortuously sappy teen angst fest which does nothing but revisit the lack of action in part two.

WINNEBAGO MAN: cussing his way to internet immortality

Documentary films used to be the preserve of the famous - famous people, famous places and famous events, and if they weren't famous they were special or inspiring (see my earlier review of 'Best Boy'). Maybe it's the fault of The History Channel and the A & E Channel but it seems these days precious few film makers are interested in creating documentaries on worthy subjects. The focus has switched to mining pop culture's rich seam for subjects with instant name recognition, even if we don't actually know their name.

WINNEBAGO MAN is a perfect example.Director Ben Steinbauer sets out to find Jack Rebney, better known as 'Winnebago Man' or 'The world's angriest man' following his appearance in a compilation of outtakes from a late 1980s promotional video for Winnebago's RVs. The clips showing Rebney repeatedly losing his temper and swearing profusely as he forgets his lines made the rounds for years on VHS and then beame an internet sensation thanks to YouTube, but he appears to have vanished from the face of the Earth.
Steinbauer wants to discover what Rebney thinks of his internet notoriety and whether he's even aware of it. It's a thin premise for a 90 minute film but Steinbauer succeeds in stretching it out by creating drama where there really isn't any and endowing Rebney with far more meaning than he deserves.
Rebney's a cantakerous old coot living alone in a cabin in rural northern California. He's still got his foul mouth and short temper but he's not the cult figure that Steinbauer's so eager to paint him as. There's a couple of half-hearted attempts to launch him as a kind of video-blogging Howard Beale who's "mad as hell and isn't going to take it anymore" but it's clear that beyond a general dislike of the Bush-Cheney administration Rebney has no organised philosophy or message.
What's also very clear is that despite his often contemptuous attitude towards Steinbauer and the fans of his Winnebago outtakes, Rebney loves the attention and can't resist playing up to the camera. The real Rebney is finally forced out into the open when he attends a film festival in San Francisco celebrating the world of weird and wacky videos and comes face to face with his admirers. He turns into a gruff but sappy teddybear who has nothing but smiles, compliments and thank yous for those who've paid money to meet him.

It's not that his anger and profanity in those 1989 outtakes was an act, it's more that 20 years later he's not that same man however much he tries to turn back the clock for Steinbauer's camera. And while it might appear that it's the director manipulating his subject in an effort to create a story that fits his initial premise, the reality is that they're both using each other.
The result is a series of events that feel more staged than organic, and while it's certainly interesting to discover more about the star of this viral video sensation, WINNEBAGO MAN also destroys the magic. Just like in 'The Wizard of Oz' the man behind the curtain isn't half as fascinating as his public image.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK: how to become popular without being likeable

It's easy to forget that Facebook is a relatively new creation. It's had such an incredible impact on the way we communicate and interact with one another that it's difficult to remember a time without it, yet when I joined a little over four years ago a .edu email address was still required for membership, which meant that many of the friends I wanted to talk to online were excluded from sharing in the fascinating moment by moment updates on my life.
THE SOCIAL NETWORK is an absorbing account of how this social media behemoth came to be and it's not a happy tale. There's enough business skullduggery here to grace the boardroom of a long established multi-national conglomerate. At the centre of the storm is Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the Harvard student and computer programming genius who invents - or steals depending on your viewpoint - the website which exploded into the global social phenomenon called Facebook.
To fellow undergrads Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss he's a thief. They hire him to build their concept for a Harvard-only online social networking site and can't believe it when he launches "The Facebook" a few months later and insists it's all his own idea. To best friend Eduardo Savarin, who bankrolls the fledgling project, he's a cold-hearted bastard who tricks him out of his rightful place in the business once it starts to take off.   
Zuckerberg is not an easy character to like. In addition to his questionable business ethics, he's introverted, socially graceless, arrogant, aggressive, inept with girls, and a perennial outsider. This man doesn't just have a chip on his shoulder, he's got a 5 pound sack of potatoes, and while the film never explicitly says so it's difficult not to be left with the feeling that part of what motivated Zuckerberg was a desire to show those on 'the inside' that he was better than them.
His computer programming skills are undeniably impressive. The idea of watching a guy typing code onto a screen is not something that fills me with excitement but screenwriter Aaron Sorkin and director David Fincher succeed in making the actual donkey work of creating Facebook into a process that holds the attention. They wisely sidestep the tired visual cliche of computer screens reflecting on faces to focus on the enthusiasm and anticipation of those doing the programming.

Zuckerberg's partner in engineering Facebook's ascent to world domination is Sean Parker, the teenage creator of Napster. As played by Justin Timberlake in serious actor mode, Parker comes off as only marginally less unlikeable than Zuckerberg. He sees in Facebook an even bigger opportunity than Napster offered (and fraught with far fewer legal headaches) and he seizes it, playing on Zuckerberg's idolising of him to force Savarin from the company and take control of its future direction.
There's a couple of messages to take away from THE SOCIAL NETWORK. Never go into business with a friend who's more talented than you, and don't blame Zuckerberg for Facebook's ubiquitous presence. It's that big because we made it that big. No one held a gun to our head and made us friend people we barely knew and then immerse ourselves in the minutae of their lives.
 THE SOCIAL NETWORK clocks in at just over 2 hours but doesn't feel a moment too long. The use of flashbacks to describe how Zuckerberg and his creation got to where they are today keeps us constantly wanting to know more. I enjoyed this film much more than I expected to. It's well written, well acted and should be required viewing for everyone of the 500 million of us who just can't get through the day without a fix of Facebook.

SALT: rubbed into wounds and every other place

In attempting to describe this atrocious Angelina Jolie spy thriller I'm thinking of a four letter word which also begins with the letter S and ends with the letter T.
This word is often preceded by the word 'horse.'

BEST BOY: mum's the word

This 1980 Oscar winner for Best Documentary follows three years in the life of mentally disabled middle aged Phillip Wohl - Philly - as he takes his first steps towards a more independent existence after a lifetime of care and protection by his now elderly parents.

Philly is also the cousin of writer-director Ira Wohl which gave him unique access to his subject, and it shows in the relaxed way that Philly and his parents, Max and Pearl, interact with the camera, despite the cramped conditions at their apartment in Queens.
Philly's enthusiastic and affectionate and he helps out with chores around the home but he's able to do very little for himself and requires attention 24-7. Max is elderly and ailing so most of the burden falls to Pearl, who's no younger than her husband but in better health.
The portrait that Wohl paints of Pearl's devotion to Philly is for me the true heart of this film. Her unconditional love for the son she calls her 'best boy' is truly inspiring and moving. She's dedicated 50 years of her life to caring for Philly while also holding her family together through some tough times. Her eldest son died of cancer two years earlier and her husband no longer has the energy to indulge Philly.
Pearl's unwavering smile is my abiding memory of this film. It falters just slightly when she accompanies Philly to his new home in an assisted living apartment, but after half a century of spending every day with him that's hardly surprising. She deserves admiration not for making the best of a bad situation or any of those other patronising and demeaning cliches that get attached to the parents of handicapped children,  but for her apparently infinite capacity to love and support those nearest to her through everything that life has thrown at her. She lives her life with no regrets and no sense of having missed out on anything. Pearl is one of those rare human beings who makes the world a better place by being in it, and, perhaps selfishly, I wanted her to go on forever. The biggest sadness is that Philly will never be able appreciate how much his mother has done for him.
Ira Wohl's directorial style is simple and straightforward although I felt on at least a couple of occasions that he was manipulating his subjects to achieve the desired result. I'd be interested to learn whether he ever felt conflicted during the three year making of the film - was he able to separate being a concerned family member from his responsibilities as writer and director focused on capturing good material for his documentary?
Those concerns aside he's created a film that will linger in the memory, and I'm particularly grateful to Wohl for giving me the opportunity to get to know the wonderful Pearl and her beautiful, life-affirming smile.

HERE WE GO ROUND THE MULBERRY BUSH: revisiting the 60s minus the rose-tinted glasses

The travails of teenagerdom and the pursuit of that elusive first shag are given a limp psychedelic twist in this British coming of age comedy-drama from 1968.

25 year old Barry Evans is physically implausible as 17 year old Jamie MacGregor who spends all his time lusting after girls and obsessing about sex and whether he's ever going to get any. He's got a real hang-up about losing his virginity which he ruminates about at length (making copious use of words like "birds" and "blokes" and "cor!") as he rides through town on his employer's delivery bicycle. 
Director Clive Donner chooses to illustrate some of Jamie's musings with short fantasy sequences shot in the style of a silent movie on speed. The effect is less than enthralling. His second 'innovation' is to switch the picture to a negative image at random moments and douse it in bright green or bright red. This clumsy effect is completely baffling since it never coincides with Jamie doing drugs, getting drunk or frugging to 'hippie' music - the three activities internationally recognised by filmmakers in the swinging 60s as warranting the use of such film processing trickery.
The explanation may lie in the film's location. Despite his affected working class accent, half hearted rebellion against his parents, and his hankering after sex without consequences, Jamie's not on the make in happening London but in the far-from-swinging Stevenage, a drab provincial town notable only for its characterless shopping precinct and housing estates. In place of drug fuelled orgies in Soho, and achingly cool fashion boutiques on Carnaby Street, he has to make do with a dance at the church hall, and an after hours party in a furniture store. In such a soul destroying environment fiddling around with the picture's colour is the only way to generate excitement. Its depressing for Jamie and depressing to watch. 
Even with the presence of The Spencer Davis Group and Traffic the film succeeds in failing to generate a decent music soundtrack, but it does offer three redeeming features. There's a thoroughly entertaining turn from Denholm Elliott as the demented wine tasting dad of one of Jamie's birds; it reminds us that Barry Evans had a career before "Mind Your Language," and it serves as a valuable time capsule illustrating that regrets over missing out on growing up in the supposedly cool Britannia of the 1960s are really not something worth losing sleep over..

LONDON RIVER: a gentle response to a terrible tragedy

To be caught up in a suicide bombing is something most of us will thankfully never experience, but that makes it difficult to get beyond the blood and fear and "there but for the grace of god..." approach to imagining how we might respond to such a situation.

In focusing in on a small personal drama rather than attempting to encompass the bigger horror of a major terrorist attack, writer-director Rachid Bouchareb has created in LONDON RIVER a story with the power to affect all of us.
The July 7, 2005 terrorist attacks on the London Underground and a bus in Tavistock Square provide the initial cause in this narrative but it is the consequences of those explosions on two strangers who weren't even in London that this story is interested in.
When Elizabeth (Brenda Blethyn) sees tv news coverage of the carnage she instinctively reaches for the phone to call her daughter Jane, who's living in London to check that she's ok. After several days with no response she starts to fear the worst and travels to the capital from her home in Guernsey to search for Jane. While distributing missing posters and doing the rounds of hospitals treating those injured in the bombings she encounters Ousmane, an African Muslim immigrant from France who is similarly searching for his son. 
Elizabeth is initially unable to overcome her prejudice against this man who represents the unknown 'other' to her, and work with him to find their children. But she's forced to reassess her attitude when they discover that her daughter has been dating his son.
What makes LONDON RIVER so much more than just another polemic about bigotry and ignorance are the extraordinary performances by Blethyn and Malian actor Sotigui Kouyate. Where Elizabeth is emotional and judgmental Kouyate as Ousmane is dignified, restrained and resigned. He gives no indication of taking offence at Elizabeth's rudeness, and never attempts to force the issue, choosing instead to give her the space to come around to him in her own time. As she nears the point of emotional exhaustion his inner calm gives her the strength to keep going.
Low key yet immensely powerful and affecting, LONDON RIVER is contemporary cinema at it's best. Quite why this film has not been showered with awards is beyond me.