(Judd Apatow, 2015)
Extremely funny but more or less the same old romcom shit under the surface, Trainwreck is most notable for introducing Amy Schumer to the big screen. She should be a big star for years to come. Having written the screenplay, the lead role is obviously tailored beautifully to her personality. She plays Amy, a funny single girl in Manhattan, working as a writer for a laddish Mens Magazine (with stories like "You're Not Gay; She's Boring") and getting wasted as often as possible, she has a thing for casual sex. This is possibly based on the advice given to her as a young girl by her father (Colin Quinn) who informs her that monogamy is insane and can't work. When her aggressive editor (a brilliant Tilda Swinton) assigns her to write a story about a sports surgeon (Bill Hader) Amy and he fall in love, and Amy's equilibrium is destroyed. Can she change enough to enjoy a healthy relationship? The answer is obvious from the start, but the gags come thick and fast, many of them from Hader's relationship with client-turned-friend LeBron James, who gives him romantic advice and hilariously quibbles over who will pay for lunch. Most of them, however, come from Schumer's self-deprecating wit and her observations about male-female relationships, which are truthful and painful in equal measure. Apatow orchestrates it all with typical efficiency, although his tendency to glamorise is also typical.
Still, it is consistently funny, and never remotely boring.
Showing posts with label Romcom. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Romcom. Show all posts
Sunday, 16 August 2015
Thursday, 4 June 2015
RESULTS
(Andrew Bujalski, 2015)
Bujalski pulls an abrupt hard left after the uniquely bizarre wonders of Computer Chess with this relatively slick rom-com. And yet the slickness is all in the production design and the sharp digital photography; underneath it feels strangely of a piece with his earlier, so-called "mumblecore" work, where people try to find happiness and stumble through relationships.
In this case those people are Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a stoner and recent divorcee who inherits a fortune from his estranged mother and has absolutely no idea what to do with it, so he spends it paying strangers off Craigslist $200 to fix his huge tv and decides to hire a personal trainer to get him in shape. That leads him to the gym owned by Trevor (Guy Pearce), who lives in shorts and a t-shirt and talks an awful lot about achieving "goals". He and Kat (Cobie Smulders) have an awkward relationship, having had an "unprofessional" affair some time before. When Kat becomes Danny's trainer, he is smitten, and that complicates her relationship with Trevor.
Classic eternal triangle stuff, then? Well; not really. The film seems to be heading one way before moving off in another entirely, portraying a realistically complex entanglement of friends, colleagues and lovers. These are people unsure of what they want or afraid to try and get it, people who blow their chances to communicate with one another repeatedly. Recognisably normal human beings, in other words.
Corrigan seizes a rare lead role with glee and plays Danny as a confused but likeable clown. Pearce is dryly hilarious as Trevor, and Smulders is perfect as Kat, all temper tantrums and spontaneous gestures she herself doesn't understand. Their relationship, filled as it is with conflict and longing, is beautifully nuanced by Bujalski, whose skill as a writer is growing.
Visually, he remains a little less convincing, although the way this film becomes more intimate and plays with space in his compositions is subtle and pleasing.
Bujalski pulls an abrupt hard left after the uniquely bizarre wonders of Computer Chess with this relatively slick rom-com. And yet the slickness is all in the production design and the sharp digital photography; underneath it feels strangely of a piece with his earlier, so-called "mumblecore" work, where people try to find happiness and stumble through relationships.
In this case those people are Danny (Kevin Corrigan), a stoner and recent divorcee who inherits a fortune from his estranged mother and has absolutely no idea what to do with it, so he spends it paying strangers off Craigslist $200 to fix his huge tv and decides to hire a personal trainer to get him in shape. That leads him to the gym owned by Trevor (Guy Pearce), who lives in shorts and a t-shirt and talks an awful lot about achieving "goals". He and Kat (Cobie Smulders) have an awkward relationship, having had an "unprofessional" affair some time before. When Kat becomes Danny's trainer, he is smitten, and that complicates her relationship with Trevor.
Classic eternal triangle stuff, then? Well; not really. The film seems to be heading one way before moving off in another entirely, portraying a realistically complex entanglement of friends, colleagues and lovers. These are people unsure of what they want or afraid to try and get it, people who blow their chances to communicate with one another repeatedly. Recognisably normal human beings, in other words.
Corrigan seizes a rare lead role with glee and plays Danny as a confused but likeable clown. Pearce is dryly hilarious as Trevor, and Smulders is perfect as Kat, all temper tantrums and spontaneous gestures she herself doesn't understand. Their relationship, filled as it is with conflict and longing, is beautifully nuanced by Bujalski, whose skill as a writer is growing.
Visually, he remains a little less convincing, although the way this film becomes more intimate and plays with space in his compositions is subtle and pleasing.
Saturday, 9 May 2015
TOP FIVE
(Chris Rock, 2015)
Chris Rock is pushing himself in some unusual directions as he attempts to fit the talent that makes his stand-up so provocative and fascinating into cinema. So far, it hasn't entirely worked. On stage, using only his ideas, language and expressiveness, he can discuss anything, and flip between topics at will. His talent means an audience will always go with him. Relationships, sex, politics, showbiz, pop culture, everyday banalities, ageing - he can cover them all in a gig. And with Top Five he tries to do something similar.
But cinema - or cinema audiences, at any rate - demand that each narrative fits into a genre. It's how people understand what they're seeing, how they filter and adjust expectations, how they read stories and styles. And so Top Five is a romantic comedy, of sorts. It follows Andre Allen (Rock), a former stand-up turned Hollywood megastar, best known for a series of action comedies where he plays Hammy the Bear in a full bear suit (one of the best gags in the movie is the way everywhere he goes people constantly shout "Yo Hammy!" at him from the background) as he tries to promote his new film, "Uprize", about a Haitian slave revolt. Allen wants to be taken seriously, but the only thing the media are interested in is his forthcoming marriage to a huge reality star (Gabrielle Union). As part of the promotional circus, Allen agrees to having a New York Times journalist follow him around all day. That journalist turns out to be smart, beautiful, challenging Chelsea (Rosario Dawson), and as they get to know one another, Allen is forced to question some of his decisions and attitudes, and so is Chelsea.
That plot allows Rock to take plenty of shots at showbiz ridiculousness, but there are interesting ideas here about fame and the media, addiction and self-deception. If the big influences here seem to be Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, then the scattergun approach Rock chooses means this film is less consistent than their work. Some of the other material is suspect: much of the stuff about relationships is cliched bordering on retrograde, and there is more than a whiff of homophobia to one extended sequence in particular. But Rock's character is funny in a believable way, working himself up into a rant when forced to, and there are some really good gags here. He shared the yuks around too - alongside cameos for Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracy Morgan, DMX and Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps the best sequence in the movie sees Andre take Chelsea back to his roots, where an impromptu gathering of friends in an apartment is a series of riffs and friendly insults that does more to humanise him than the entire preceding hour.
Rock and Dawson are both good, but their chemistry is better - duelling intelligences, arguing and debating and bonding, all framed against New York in summer, shot gloriously by Manuel Alberto Claro, Lars Von Trier's usual D.P.
So: as a romcom, this works. But it's greater ambitions are what make it really interesting, even if it never quiet fulfils what Rock seems to be aiming for.
Chris Rock is pushing himself in some unusual directions as he attempts to fit the talent that makes his stand-up so provocative and fascinating into cinema. So far, it hasn't entirely worked. On stage, using only his ideas, language and expressiveness, he can discuss anything, and flip between topics at will. His talent means an audience will always go with him. Relationships, sex, politics, showbiz, pop culture, everyday banalities, ageing - he can cover them all in a gig. And with Top Five he tries to do something similar.
But cinema - or cinema audiences, at any rate - demand that each narrative fits into a genre. It's how people understand what they're seeing, how they filter and adjust expectations, how they read stories and styles. And so Top Five is a romantic comedy, of sorts. It follows Andre Allen (Rock), a former stand-up turned Hollywood megastar, best known for a series of action comedies where he plays Hammy the Bear in a full bear suit (one of the best gags in the movie is the way everywhere he goes people constantly shout "Yo Hammy!" at him from the background) as he tries to promote his new film, "Uprize", about a Haitian slave revolt. Allen wants to be taken seriously, but the only thing the media are interested in is his forthcoming marriage to a huge reality star (Gabrielle Union). As part of the promotional circus, Allen agrees to having a New York Times journalist follow him around all day. That journalist turns out to be smart, beautiful, challenging Chelsea (Rosario Dawson), and as they get to know one another, Allen is forced to question some of his decisions and attitudes, and so is Chelsea.
That plot allows Rock to take plenty of shots at showbiz ridiculousness, but there are interesting ideas here about fame and the media, addiction and self-deception. If the big influences here seem to be Woody Allen and Albert Brooks, then the scattergun approach Rock chooses means this film is less consistent than their work. Some of the other material is suspect: much of the stuff about relationships is cliched bordering on retrograde, and there is more than a whiff of homophobia to one extended sequence in particular. But Rock's character is funny in a believable way, working himself up into a rant when forced to, and there are some really good gags here. He shared the yuks around too - alongside cameos for Adam Sandler, Whoopi Goldberg, Tracy Morgan, DMX and Jerry Seinfeld, perhaps the best sequence in the movie sees Andre take Chelsea back to his roots, where an impromptu gathering of friends in an apartment is a series of riffs and friendly insults that does more to humanise him than the entire preceding hour.
Rock and Dawson are both good, but their chemistry is better - duelling intelligences, arguing and debating and bonding, all framed against New York in summer, shot gloriously by Manuel Alberto Claro, Lars Von Trier's usual D.P.
So: as a romcom, this works. But it's greater ambitions are what make it really interesting, even if it never quiet fulfils what Rock seems to be aiming for.
Tuesday, 23 December 2014
THEY CAME TOGETHER
(David Wain, 2014)
Great gags and inspired scenes are studded through They Came Together. The best of those, oddly, are the ones that aren't parodying romcom cliches, the ones that have their own internal humour.
Like the scene where the boss of Paul Rudd's Joel finds himself unable to remove his superhero costume at a fancy dress party - shot by Wain in a series of frantic takes as he contorts his body, his face more and more crimson - and shits his pants, then denies any culpability, having left his soiled costume on the bathroom floor. Or the many random moments of exaggerated behaviour, like Molly's (Amy Poehler) Mom propositioning Joel as a "test" then casually revealing herself as a White Supremacist.
But the film is chiefly a parody of romcoms, and as such it gets so much right, ticking off cliches and conventions as it goes along. Told in flashback by Joel and Molly from a restaurant dinner with another couple, it winks at the audience consistently and from the first moment with it's acknowledgement that New York City is like the "third character" in their story. The problem is that while many of these cliches are presented in hilarious contexts, not all of them are, and it's not enough just to notice conventions; you need to use them somehow, and Wain doesn't do that quite enough.
His cast are a great help, delivering a series of arch "bad" performances full of mugging and telegraphed emotions. Rudd and Poehler have genuine chemistry, which keeps this watchable even as it gets bogged down in a series of short sketches with an at-times-tiresome narrative link. Some gags become funny through repetition (characters constantly say "Shit!" to themselves after somebody else has left, while in other situations, stop people from leaving just so they can say "Thanks.") while some fall flat instantly, but overall this is a pleasantly clever comedy. It's just not quite funny enough.
Great gags and inspired scenes are studded through They Came Together. The best of those, oddly, are the ones that aren't parodying romcom cliches, the ones that have their own internal humour.
Like the scene where the boss of Paul Rudd's Joel finds himself unable to remove his superhero costume at a fancy dress party - shot by Wain in a series of frantic takes as he contorts his body, his face more and more crimson - and shits his pants, then denies any culpability, having left his soiled costume on the bathroom floor. Or the many random moments of exaggerated behaviour, like Molly's (Amy Poehler) Mom propositioning Joel as a "test" then casually revealing herself as a White Supremacist.
But the film is chiefly a parody of romcoms, and as such it gets so much right, ticking off cliches and conventions as it goes along. Told in flashback by Joel and Molly from a restaurant dinner with another couple, it winks at the audience consistently and from the first moment with it's acknowledgement that New York City is like the "third character" in their story. The problem is that while many of these cliches are presented in hilarious contexts, not all of them are, and it's not enough just to notice conventions; you need to use them somehow, and Wain doesn't do that quite enough.
His cast are a great help, delivering a series of arch "bad" performances full of mugging and telegraphed emotions. Rudd and Poehler have genuine chemistry, which keeps this watchable even as it gets bogged down in a series of short sketches with an at-times-tiresome narrative link. Some gags become funny through repetition (characters constantly say "Shit!" to themselves after somebody else has left, while in other situations, stop people from leaving just so they can say "Thanks.") while some fall flat instantly, but overall this is a pleasantly clever comedy. It's just not quite funny enough.
Monday, 28 July 2014
WHAT'S YOUR NUMBER?
(Mark Mylod, 2011)
Despite the reliable efforts on Anna Faris and Chris Evans in the lead roles, What's Your Number? remains frustratingly second-rate throughout. The concept - based upon a lifestyle book - centres on the number of men the average American woman must sleep with before she finds her future husband. The average is 10, so when Elly (Faris) realises she has twice that to her name, she flips out and determines to track down all of her exes, so that she can marry one of them and not pass the 20 mark.
She enlists the help of her slacker neighbour Colin (Evans) in her quest and he sends her across Boston to rendezvous with various men, played by a nicely random selection of character actors including Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg and Anthony Mackie.
Inevitably, Elly and Colin fall for one another but don't realise it until the last five minutes of the film.
This is a romcom lacking in much com. Faris is a great comic actress, blessed with perfect timing and a good sense of physical comedy, and Evans has effortless charm. They have chemistry too, but there are virtually no laughs here. Scenes play out and the mechanics of comedy are visible, but not much works. Its too safe and obvious, too calculated and cold.
Mylod directs it like any one of a dozen directors might have - without much energy or anything visually distinctive. It's just there, wasting its cast, looking pretty.
Despite the reliable efforts on Anna Faris and Chris Evans in the lead roles, What's Your Number? remains frustratingly second-rate throughout. The concept - based upon a lifestyle book - centres on the number of men the average American woman must sleep with before she finds her future husband. The average is 10, so when Elly (Faris) realises she has twice that to her name, she flips out and determines to track down all of her exes, so that she can marry one of them and not pass the 20 mark.
She enlists the help of her slacker neighbour Colin (Evans) in her quest and he sends her across Boston to rendezvous with various men, played by a nicely random selection of character actors including Martin Freeman, Andy Samberg and Anthony Mackie.
Inevitably, Elly and Colin fall for one another but don't realise it until the last five minutes of the film.
This is a romcom lacking in much com. Faris is a great comic actress, blessed with perfect timing and a good sense of physical comedy, and Evans has effortless charm. They have chemistry too, but there are virtually no laughs here. Scenes play out and the mechanics of comedy are visible, but not much works. Its too safe and obvious, too calculated and cold.
Mylod directs it like any one of a dozen directors might have - without much energy or anything visually distinctive. It's just there, wasting its cast, looking pretty.
Tuesday, 26 November 2013
10 YEARS
(Jamie Linden, 2012)
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Gathering together a genuinely impressive cast for his debut as writer-director, Linden tells a loose, modest, at times extremely charming story in the same vein as The Big Chill and The Return of The Secausus Seven and Beautiful Girls, returning a bunch of old friends to their hometown for a Highschool Reunion a decade on and observing the ensuing emotional revelations and collisions with a gentle, affectionate eye.
In doing so, he goes for broad types, and so we have Chris Pratt, stealing most of the laughs as the ex hellraiser and bully, now somewhat gone to seed as the suburban father of two, Justin Long and Max Minghella as the ex-Geeks still in love with the beauty queen (Lynn Collins), Brian Geraghty bringing his new wife who is shocked to discover that he acted like a black guy throughout Highschool, while most of the emotional ballast is carried by Oscar Isaac as the rock star still in love with the one who got away (Kate Mara) and Channing Tatum, who has not seen his first love (Rosario Dawson) since their traumatic split ten years before.
There are lovely moments here of universal humanity; a few big laughs and a couple of good musical sequences. But Linden always seems more comfortable with the romcom elements; and the film comes most vividly to life during the scenes between the excellent Isaac and Mara. The moment when he sings his big hit single for karaoke at a late night dive bar (which she has never heard) and she realises it is about her is beautifully acted by Mara. The cast are the films real glory, lending it a classy finish which it perhaps does not deserve.
Sunday, 24 February 2013
I GIVE IT A YEAR
(Dan Mazer, 2013)
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
A couple of things about I Give It a Year make sense as soon as you realise that writer-director Dan Mazer is best-known as Sacha Baron-Cohen's co-writer on Ali G, Bruno and Borat. The way the laughter isn't really spread throughout the film but comes in sharp little spikes, for one thing. Mazer is great at constructing comic set-pieces that gather momentum and grow funnier as they go on; he is great, in other words, at writing sketches. And so this film is full of them; neat, almost perfectly-formed scenes based around a single, hilarious comic conceit, which the film then pushes as far as it can go. Take the scene where Chloe (Anna Faris) is involved in a threesome with two of her co-workers at a charity and it turns into a wrestling match studded with excrutiating dirty talk, brilliantly played by the actress as a piece of sustained, undignified, unsexy slapstick. Or the scene where Josh (Rafe Spall) attempts to pantomime his way through "Dr Quinn Medicine Woman" in a game of charades by referring to the word "quim" and relentlessly pointing at his mother-in-law and her mother's genitals.
Another thing is the way Mazer introduces a host of brilliant, classically British comic grotesques - generally caricatures - as fleeting supporting characters. Olivia Coleman, for instance, is dazzling as a deranged marriage counsellor. Likewise, Stephen Merchant steals every scene he's in as Josh's best friend Dan, unable to stop himself rabbiting on about anything inappropriate that enters his head.
This is all overlaid atop what is quite a generic romantic comedy setting and storyline:
in a London of cute pedestrian streets, hip bars and cool restaurants, Josh and Nat (Rose Byrne) struggle with their first year of married life, having tied the knot only seven months after meeting. Their differences seem daily more relevant and they are both tempted to stray - Josh by his girl-next-door ex Chloe, Nat by the suave Guy (Simon Baker). Their problems are only magnified by their friends and families, especially Nat's sister Naomi (Minnie Driver), happily miserable with her husband (Jason Flemyng).
Mazer dusts off a series of ancient "men are from Mars, Women are from Venus" observations about the sexes (he leaves the seat up and makes lame jokes, she gets song lyrics wrong and hates his family) and his film is curiously unbalanced. While Josh is a bit of a pratt, his side of the story involves a sympathetic, touching relationship with Chloe, genuinely the one who got away, and their mutual affection and shared sense of humour, together with warm performances from Faris and Spall, makes the audience root for them to get together. That's in sharp contrast with Nat and Guy, who are both beautiful but a little humourless, and whose relationship - played out in corporate spaces, plush hotel suites and factory floors as coldly, superficially slick and smug as their characters - is meant to be based upon a chemistry absent between the two actors.
Like most romantic comedies, the soundtrack here is full of pop songs, only in this case many of them are awful covers of songs which only make you think: Damn, I wish they'd used the original version here...
But Mazer's sensibility is sharper than that evident in the majority of films in this genre, there are some big laughs here, the cast is generally excellent, and it is all nicely paced. Mazer obviously understands the pitfalls of the romcom, and while he avoids most of them, it proves beyond him to avoid all, which is a bit of a shame.
Tuesday, 9 October 2012
LIBERAL ARTS
(Josh Radnor, 2012)
Combining two distinct sub-genres of the romantic comedy: the "manic pixie dream girl" movie and the "stunted manchild is forced to find a new maturity through trauma" movie into a single entity, Liberal Arts is something of an odd beast.
Its not really a romcom, in fact it's barely a comedy at all. For much of its running time it's a likeable romantic drama with a few obvious comic elements, such as Zac Efron's barefoot new age guru, dispensing wisdom and anecdotes to writer-director-star Josh Radnor's sensitive lead Jesse.
Jesse, a thirtysomething graduate working in admissions at a Manhattan College, is tired of his lonely, book-filled life, and he returns to his old College campus in Ohio for his favourite Professor's (Richard Jenkins, who gets a couple of great scenes of quiet regret) retirement dinner, where he meets Zibby (Elizabeth Olsen) an 'advanced' 19-year old student. There is an immediate spark between them - signalled by their thoughtful expressions and off-key wit - which develops and deepens after they exchange precious, oh-so-sensitive letters about classical music, the beauty of the city and their states of mind. She invites him to return, and then things get really complicated.
Radnor's film strains a little too hard for cinematic poetry, but its at its best when it stays modest, revealing a few of the simple truths of the disappointments and compromises of life in ones thirties. Its also a nice portrayal of bibliophilia; Jesse reads books constantly, as he walks in the street, and he and Zibby have their first real fight about her liking of a series of unnamed vampire novels and his snobbish dismissal of them. Olsen is charming and attractive in a role which could have been extremely grating, and Radnor is a likeable lead. A surprisingly strong parallel strand in the narrative has him counsel a depressive student he randomly meets in a coffee shop, and the film has a nice, believable ending.
It is a small film with small pleasures, nice performances and a few small flaws.
Thursday, 27 October 2011
CRAZY STUPID LOVE
(Glen Ficara & John Requa, 2011)
Playing By Heart is a 1998 comedy drama, directed by one Willard Carroll, with a surprisingly starry cast. Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe,, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Madeilne Stowe and Gena Rowlands are all part of the impressive ensemble. It's blandly shot, set to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs, and set in the most middle class, glossily attractive parts of Los Angeles. It's a portrayal of a disparate group of characters in the city and their relationships and struggles with love. Its like a less ambitious, less accomplished, less interesting spin on superior multi-character LA dramas like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. Those films all grapple with multiple themes and deeper trends, with knotty social and emotional problems, and ultimately with life itself. Not Playing By Heart. It's about love, nothing more, nothing less. And that's ok. Love is a worthy and profound subject, and has inspired thousands of great works of art, from pop songs to poetry to novels to cinema. I'm just not sure that the romantic comedy is the genre best suited to discussing it. Well, perhaps the auteur-driven romantic comedy. Creative intelligences like that Woody Allen or Albert Brooks have done it with conspicuous success in the past. But the slick romcom, all effortlessly nice fashion, unconvincingly spacious homes, identity-less, boring music and predictably conventional storytelling? That sort of risk free, lazy film is all about love. But the form seems to prevent any sort of deeper consideration of the subject as a theme. The superficial and narrative elements never go far enough. Love is strange, but worthwhile, is the greeting card conclusion many such films seem to settle upon.
Crazy Stupid Love even includes the word in its title, and its characters openly discuss love as an intangible and an ideal on a couple of occasions. It centres around an interlinked - of course - collection of people in LA. Steve Carell plays a fortysomething whose wife, played with customary class and rawness by Julianne Moore, asks him for a divorce on a date one night. Sent reeling back clueless onto the singles scene he meets a dapper young stud, played by the effortlessly smug Ryan Gosling, who instructs him how to dress, talk and pick up women, before he himself falls in love. Meanwhile Carell's 13 year-old son is in love with his 17 year-old babysitter, who loves Carell and the links and contrivances go on.
There are moments of truth and some laughs in a script which sporadically pops with wisdom on the reality of marriage, for instance, or the cruelty of singledom. The attractive cast makes much of it work much better than it should; Carell's sincerity is nicely-deployed, and contrasts well with Gosling's preening self-regard.
Ultimately, however, it all climaxes in a series of farcical confrontations and public declarations; the kind of thing, in short, that happens exclusively in romcoms. It may provide narrative satisfaction, but it shortchanges the films seeming ambition to examine love as a theme. All that's left, then, are the superficial pleasures; the music, the clothes, the locations, and a couple of decent belly-laughs.
Playing By Heart is a 1998 comedy drama, directed by one Willard Carroll, with a surprisingly starry cast. Sean Connery, Angelina Jolie, Ryan Phillippe,, Jon Stewart, Dennis Quaid, Madeilne Stowe and Gena Rowlands are all part of the impressive ensemble. It's blandly shot, set to an eclectic soundtrack of pop songs, and set in the most middle class, glossily attractive parts of Los Angeles. It's a portrayal of a disparate group of characters in the city and their relationships and struggles with love. Its like a less ambitious, less accomplished, less interesting spin on superior multi-character LA dramas like Robert Altman's Short Cuts, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia or Lawrence Kasdan's Grand Canyon. Those films all grapple with multiple themes and deeper trends, with knotty social and emotional problems, and ultimately with life itself. Not Playing By Heart. It's about love, nothing more, nothing less. And that's ok. Love is a worthy and profound subject, and has inspired thousands of great works of art, from pop songs to poetry to novels to cinema. I'm just not sure that the romantic comedy is the genre best suited to discussing it. Well, perhaps the auteur-driven romantic comedy. Creative intelligences like that Woody Allen or Albert Brooks have done it with conspicuous success in the past. But the slick romcom, all effortlessly nice fashion, unconvincingly spacious homes, identity-less, boring music and predictably conventional storytelling? That sort of risk free, lazy film is all about love. But the form seems to prevent any sort of deeper consideration of the subject as a theme. The superficial and narrative elements never go far enough. Love is strange, but worthwhile, is the greeting card conclusion many such films seem to settle upon.
Crazy Stupid Love even includes the word in its title, and its characters openly discuss love as an intangible and an ideal on a couple of occasions. It centres around an interlinked - of course - collection of people in LA. Steve Carell plays a fortysomething whose wife, played with customary class and rawness by Julianne Moore, asks him for a divorce on a date one night. Sent reeling back clueless onto the singles scene he meets a dapper young stud, played by the effortlessly smug Ryan Gosling, who instructs him how to dress, talk and pick up women, before he himself falls in love. Meanwhile Carell's 13 year-old son is in love with his 17 year-old babysitter, who loves Carell and the links and contrivances go on.
There are moments of truth and some laughs in a script which sporadically pops with wisdom on the reality of marriage, for instance, or the cruelty of singledom. The attractive cast makes much of it work much better than it should; Carell's sincerity is nicely-deployed, and contrasts well with Gosling's preening self-regard.
Ultimately, however, it all climaxes in a series of farcical confrontations and public declarations; the kind of thing, in short, that happens exclusively in romcoms. It may provide narrative satisfaction, but it shortchanges the films seeming ambition to examine love as a theme. All that's left, then, are the superficial pleasures; the music, the clothes, the locations, and a couple of decent belly-laughs.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)