New year, old hat (Sunday Telegraph 3 January 2010)

Did You Hear About the Morgans? (12A) 103 mins **
Spread (18) 97 mins **
It Might Get Loud (PG) 98 mins ***

Cinema 2010 begins not with bangs, but whimpers. With the major awards contenders held back to allow us to sleep off any hangovers, we’re left watching Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker as a estranged couple forced into witness protection together - a concept that might last have got off the ground circa 1994 - or Ashton Kutcher as an aspirant gigolo rutting his way across latter-day Los Angeles. Frankly, you may be better off pulling that duvet back over your head and taking the extra week’s lie-in.

In the first instance, writer-director Marc Lawrence’s mostly dismal Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Grant and Parker play Manhattan highfliers trying to broker a reconciliation when they see a Mob-connected doctor taking a header from a balcony. Dispatched to rural Wyoming, they’re installed in the home of Sheriff Sam Elliott, where a very familiar culture clash - premised on the red state-blue state divide - ensues. We’ve all been here before, and only the cultural touchstones have changed: spying Elliott’s wife (Mary Steenburgen) stocking up on guns at her local Bargain Barn, a horrified Parker exclaims “Oh my God, it’s Sarah Palin”.

The true horror comes from seeing Grant, formerly a shrewd judge of scripts, becoming ever more agonised in his screen persona. His Englishness, always heightened for easy export, now looks as authentic as some of the Union Jack merchandise sold around Piccadilly Circus; in certain scenes, he can’t put one foot in front of the other without appearing to have an umbrella inserted, very firmly, in his behind. Allegiance to the Lawrence pen has already demoted Sandra Bullock (star of the writer’s Miss Congeniality and Two Weeks’ Notice) from the A-list; on this evidence, it’s not doing Grant any favours, either.


As was made clear by his first features, the Scottish director David Mackenzie is fascinated by the cinematic possibilities of sex, but he remains more sociologist than sensualist: like his contemporary Michael Winterbottom, there’s a clinical quality to the way Mackenzie films bodies, and only when he tempers the screwing with a degree of sweetness (as he did in 2007’s Hallam Foe) do all parties end up satisfied. His American debut Spread opens in sub-Bret Easton Ellis fashion, interspersing cock-of-the-Californian-walk Nicky’s hot-and-heavy nocturnal activity with half-felt, post-coital poolside anomie.

Problems soon emerge. Of all the actors to have played the lady-killer role - Warren Beatty in Shampoo, Richard Gere in American Gigolo - Ashton Kutcher is by far the least qualified to engage an audience’s sympathies: he struts through the bedroom like the most odious of fratboys. It doesn’t help that these ladies prove ridiculously easy victims: it’s with particular dismay that you watch Anne Heche - a once tough, flinty screen presence - repeatedly throwing herself at the Kutcher torso as a businesswoman prepared to undergo vaginal rejuvenation surgery to meet her younger lover’s requirements.

Spread (by now, you’ll grasp what that title is getting at) grew on me as it emerged it was devoted to wiping the smirk off Nicky’s face, but it remains a tonally awkward and ultimately unconvincing experience. From setting its sights on something adult - at least by the American cinema’s standards - the film defaults to more or less conventional teen-movie trappings: the final half-hour is pretty much Dude, Where’s My Libido?, complete with vomiting cheerleaders, spooning on the beach, and a 12A-rated moral message. One might suspect producer intervention - only the producers turn out to be Kutcher and Mackenzie themselves.


The title of Davis Guggenheim’s new documentary at least warns sore-headed moviegoers what to expect. It Might Get Loud seeks to draw out a history of the electric guitar by bringing together three virtuosos, their instruments, and their favourite 45s. U2’s The Edge reveals himself as a devil with the effects pedal, striving to make each strum reverberate anew around the world’s stadia; Jack White favours a stripped-down, back-to-basics approach; while elder statesman Jimmy Page assumes a professorial role, talking us through the vibrato intricacies of Link Wray’s still-striking “Rumble”.

The set-up risks muso chin-stroking, duly borne out when the Edge discovers a box of early U2 recordings in (big wows) different time signatures. Guggenheim - as in An Inconvenient Truth - remains uncritical around his subjects, too often allowing the guitarists’ less relevant discursions to get in the way of the music. Still, the White Stripes’ unlikely performance for the Chelsea Pensioners proves rather charming, as does the clip of a pre-teen Page appearing on TV with his first skiffle group, and declaring his ambitions lie in “biological research”. I’ll wager there was a fair amount of that on the Led Zep tour bus.