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.

CEMETERY JUNCTION

(Ricky Gervais & Stephen Merchant, 2010)

A glossily warm coming-of-age comedy-drama set in a 1973 New Town suburb of Reading and therefore, presumably semi-autobiographical to some extent, Cemetery Junction never quite works.
The premise is classically familiar; three friends, stuck in dead end jobs, plan to escape, to travel, to live exciting lives elsewhere. They are near generic, stereotypical character types: the handsome, funny dreamer, the brawling bad boy from a broken home, and the oddball comic relief. Over the course of the simple narrative, each learns a lesson and grows as a person. It's that kind of film, deliberate, derivative of many better films, and possessing an almost painted-by-numbers quality in it's determination to hit each one of the expected narrative and emotional beats of the smalltown Bildungsroman.
Thats not to say it's without its pleasures; as one would expect of the creators of the sublime UK version of The Office and Extras on tv, there are some spiky character moments here, some finely observed instances of social tension, a few acutely textured scenes which feel true and real. While the three boys can be funny together in a laddish way, the best comic moments are provided by Gervais himself as the factory-worker father of one, casually racist, xenophobic and ignorant, squabbling with his mother over his own success while sermonising to his son from the dinner table. Ralph Fiennes is effortlessly fine as a quietly loathsome working class boy made good, Emily Watson does an awful lot with very little in perhaps five short scenes, and there are a few big laughs.
But the dissonances created by the style and approach are a massive distraction. Gervais has claimed that Bruce Springsteen's "Thunder Road" was the single greatest influence on the film, and that sense of a mythic American angle on memory, youth and backwater lives fits oddly against the time and place depicted. Britain in the 70s was a troubled, grim place, and cinema generally portrays it as such. But here there is a warm glow of nostalgia, and despite the few gags mocking the assumptions and attitudes of the time, this is an unequivocally fond portrayal of the era.
It all ends with a mad dash to catch a train, a will-they-won't-they resolved, and great use of Led Zeppelins "The Rain Song".
Indeed, the brilliant soundtrack of 70s hits is perhaps the best aspect of the whole film; more movies should use "Crazy Horses" by the Osmonds.