"Cake" (DT 20/02/15)

Cake **

Dir: Daniel Barnz. Starring: Jennifer Aniston, Adriana Barraza, Anna Kendrick, Sam Worthington, Mamie Gummer, Felicity Huffman, William H. Macy, Chris Messina. 15 cert, 91 min

If there’s anything that unites this year’s English-speaking Best Actress Oscar nominees, it’s their ability to elevate – or, frankly, shore up – the patchy material they’ve been handed by a system more concerned with minting new superheroes: it may be that Julianne Moore takes the top prize on Sunday for giving the best performance in the least ordinary film. Given all this, we might consider Jennifer Aniston – a Golden Globe nominee – unlucky not to have made the shortlist for her turn as a depressive L.A. divorcee in Daniel Barnz’s Cake. She’s the one element keeping this unexceptional dramedy halfway watchable.

Screenwriter Patrick Tobin here revives a narrative trope you’d thought had been long benched, presenting us with Woman as Problem, and then trying to puzzle her out. The question is why Aniston’s well-to-do Claire Bennett should be so bitter in rehab and scarred about the face; why she’s inclined to start drinking at eleven in the morning, and beckon the handyman in shortly thereafter for no-fun sex. Aniston plays along, tamping down her usual energy, giving nothing away: we’re informed, swiftly and in no uncertain terms, that this is going to be even harder work than Horrible Bosses 2.

Yet as a study in depression, Cake is undermined by its refusal to address Claire’s condition in isolation. Supporting actors are ushered on as easy steps in a Hollywood-schematic recovery program. Chris Messina, as the ex, has one scene to demonstrate somebody once loved this woman; suicide victim Anna Kendrick smirks at Claire in Technicolor fantasias, at one point bluntly summarising what the film’s really asking (“Why are you such a c**t?”). An obvious cure materialises when heartbroken Sam Worthington opens a door as a species apparently irresistible to New Agey Californians: somebody with whom one might go hang windchimes.

Those chimes, sporadically returned to, prove crucial to the safe, sunny space Barnz fosters so that everybody here can talk out their troubles: it’s a cardigan-clad drumcircle of a film, possessed of an earnestness – underlined by Claire’s midfilm rediscovery of Billy Joel – which raises it above the flagrant insincerity of a Gone Girl, for one. Yet its success depends on one’s ability to connect with a depressive who has a maid to prise her from bed, and a collection of Rothko knock-offs behind which to secrete her Xanax. Viewed as the privileged L.A. story this is, it’s amazing the Academy didn’t vote Team Aniston by a landslide.

Cake is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

"The Wedding Ringer" (The Guardian 20/02/15)

The Wedding Ringer *

Dir: Jeremy Garelick. With: Kevin Hart, Josh Gad, Kaley Cuoco-Sweeting. 101 mins. Cert: 15

Kevin Hart’s latest laughter-vacuum repurposes the plot of 2009’s undervalued I Love You Man for performers whose own relatives probably wouldn’t pay to watch them in a cinema. Where its predecessor used this set-up – friendless groom-to-be hires phoney best man – to observe how funny men can get around other men, Ringer is principally concerned with the indignities wrought on schlubby Josh Gad’s gonads by chilli and hungry dogs, among other elements. Hart continues to demonstrate what Funny People euphemistically termed “a lot of energy”: here, it encompasses ultra-lame dance routines, and behaviour towards women that would likely land one on a register if emulated in real life. 

The Wedding Ringer is now playing in cinemas nationwide.

Boyhood: "Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of"

Stephen Kijak's documentary Show 'Em What You're Made Of opens and closes with footage that rejoins the erstwhile Backstreet Boys - AJ, Brian, Howie, Nick and, lest we forget, Kevin - as the men they are today, embarking upon an impromptu hike through the countryside. Some complain of bad knees. Others have to stop for regular pee breaks. Framed between these bookends is an intriguing question: what happens to a boy band when they don't have the same youth to sell anymore? Kijak answers it rather better than anyone could have expected, or better than any of those ITV2 reunion shows have thus far managed. The Boys' comeback album and tour of 2013 here provide the peg for a look back on the highs and lows of the group's fleeting time in the spotlight. The editorial is willing to allow the possibility BB were no more than a New Kids cash-in, and one from the off defined by its constituent members' ordinariness. No Justin or Robbie here, angling for a post-group solo career; instead, these were a quintet of corn-fed, all-American teens, assembled by Fagin-like impresario Lou Pearlman for their willingness to pull together in a money-spinning operation. Brian and Nick briefly clash over a lead vocal on the new LP, but the tone is generally fond and cuddly; pace Metallica, this is Some Kind of Honey Monster.

Kijak's slumming a little after his excellent Scott Walker doc 30 Century Man, but he takes his subject as seriously as five young men who once appeared in public wearing tracksuits and Peter Andre bangs possibly can be taken: he hoovers up all the crackly VHS footage of Nick Carter's high-school performances that a Backstreet Girl might want, while allowing his interviewees time and space to be earnest and honest about their interactions with Pearlman (who, in the manner of impresarios from time immemorial, screwed everybody over twice, first in branching out - you could hardly call it diversifying - with *NSYNC, then in the matter of royalties), reclusive Swedish songwriting machine Max Martin (who probably merits a profile of his own at this stage) and German groupies, not to mention the inevitable dependency issues that followed in their wake. Even in Dolby, the hits sound as they always did - Cowell-anticipating lumps of processed cheese, indistinguishable from *NSYNC or Boyzone's output, which speak more of commercially savvy production than genuine artistry - but doubtless fans will want them that way. As for Northern Line, Another Level and e-m@le (the boyband on rollerskates): don't go getting any ideas, guys.

Backstreet Boys: Show 'Em What You're Made Of plays in selected cinemas on Thursday 26th, followed by a live concert broadcast.

Mistress and servant: "The Duke of Burgundy"

Since 2009's jolting Katalin Varga, a rape-revenge thriller that cut a notable dash through the Transylvanian countryside, the British writer-director Peter Strickland has been in retreat. 2012's Berberian Sound Studio found a speccy, techy English backroom boffin losing his bearings - and his marbles - while stuck indoors redubbing an Italian slasher movie, and now Strickland has made the kind of film that might well have been dubbed on the Berberian soundstages: The Duke of Burgundy, both homage to and variant on those kinky-gerlinky Eurotrash thrillers churned out in the 1970s by such wayward auteurs as Jess Franco, Harry Kümel and Walerian Borowczyk. (Google 'em, by all means, but be sure to keep Safe Search toggled.)

As in much porn, the set-ups of these fetish items were invariably of less importance than the eccentricities they were dressed up with, the authorial peccadillos they so conspicuously flaunted. Duke announces its own credentials with another of Strickland's stylised opening credit sequences, tweaking Berberian's retro fonts and design. Dress and lingerie here apparently come care of one Andrea Flesch, the perfume via Je Suis Gizelle. You might start to smell a rat around the time the production design is billed as the work of one Pater Sparrow. A similar element of wind-up runs through the narrative that is subsequently unfurled before us.

Two fortysomething women are playing sub-dom power games in a remote country house. The imposing Cynthia (Sidse Babett Knudsen, from Borgen) looks to be the one firmly in control, dispatching the meeker Evelyn (Chiara d'Anna) to clean first her study, then her shoes and panties. All, inevitably, is not quite what it seems, though, for at an early stage, we gather that Lady Cyn is in fact Evelyn's loving and devoted servant, treating her like the dirt she wants to be. We're meant, surely, to view their cohabitation as analogous to the grim power games that go on in many relationships, although the sight of Cynthia using Evelyn's face for a chair is clearly there as no more than joky titillation.

More intriguing is a self-referential streak that again connects the film to its predecessor. As they lie in each other's arms at night, Cynthia and Evelyn give one another notes on how to improve their, as it were, performance during daylight hours. Wigs are put on; cue cards are swapped. An alternative title comes to suggest itself: Celine and Julie Go Muffdiving. Strickland's film is at least knowingly niche, upfront from the off about its sniggering evasion of emotion or seriousness: it frames its musty, secondhand fantasy in elegant quotation marks, then mists it with a heady dash of Je Suis Gizelle. (Many have fallen for it.) Yet like its producer Ben Wheatley's A Field in England, The Duke of Burgundy never loses its air of trainspotter cinema: a film pitched at viewers apt to produce notebooks from anorak pockets, who can feel supremely smug about all the references it allows them to tick off.

You can try and argue there's something radical in Strickland's decision to cast actresses of a certain age in roles a Franco or Tinto Brass would have filled with pliable starlets; the decision also gives Duke's central relationship the tantalising feel of a continuation - rather than a reproduction - of what was going on in all those 1970s films. (Perhaps Cynthia and Evelyn have been playing these games for so long they need a bondage bed to freshen things up.) Still, though, the film relies far too much on audience complicity: you'll need to develop more of a connection with these two pallid, quivering, overdubbed performers than I could in order to find it in any way stimulating. Maybe you just have to like Borgen. Fifteen minutes of them grinding each other's noses into the carpets was enough for me, so I was antsy long before the final-reel headtrip by which Strickland further seeks to shake everybody up.

This will cap a most excellent night out for lepidopterists, at least. The Duke of Burgundy takes its name from a species of butterfly, and is filled with butterflies, both living and dead: three films into his career, Strickland is shaping up as a keen collector and talented mounter of images that catch the eye. Yet in this instance, it's as though this now 41-year-old director has spent the past year reshaping some specialist porn he found torn up in a bush. You can admire the assiduousness with which he's approached his task, certainly, but in the downtime between the whipping and the bootlicking, you might also find time to wonder - given that this director surely had his pick of the projects after Berberian's critical success - whether there isn't something just a teensy bit sad about the whole endeavour.

The Duke of Burgundy opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.

For what it's worth...

Top Ten Films at the UK Box Office   
for the weekend of February 6-8, 2015: 
   
1 (1) Big Hero 6 (PG)
2 (2) Kingsman: The Secret Service (15) *
3 (new) Shaun the Sheep Movie (U) ***
4 (new) Jupiter Ascending (12A)
5 (3) American Sniper (15) ***
6 (new) Selma (15) ****
7 (4) The Theory of Everything (12A) ***
8 (6) Into the Woods (12A) **
9 (5) Taken 3 (12A)
10 (new) The Interview (15)

(source: theguardian.com)
 
My top five:   
1. The Philadelphia Story [above]
2. Love is Strange
3. Snow in Paradise
4. Selma
5. Amour Fou


Top Ten DVD rentals:  
   
1 (1) What We Did on Our Holiday (12)
2 (2) A Walk Among the Tombstones (15) **
3 (3) Before I Go to Sleep (15) **
4 (4) Dawn of the Planet of the Apes (12) *** 
5 (7) How to Train Your Dragon 2 (U) ***
6 (6) The Fault in Our Stars (12) **
7 (8) X-Men: Days of Future Past (12) ***
8 (9) 22 Jump Street (15) ***
9 (new) The Best of Me (12)
10 (new) One Night in Istanbul (12)  

(source: lovefilm.com)
                                   
My top five:  
1. The Babadook
2. Palo Alto
3. Maps to the Stars
4. Coherence
5. Night Will Fall


Top five films on terrestrial TV this week:   
1. 2001: a Space Odyssey (Friday, BBC2, 11.05pm)
2. Lady and the Tramp (Sunday, five, 5.30pm)
3. The Quiet American (Sunday, BBC2, 11pm)
4. No Country for Old Men (Sunday, C4, 12.15am)
5. Erin Brockovich (Wednesday, five, 10pm)

"Coherence" (DT 13/02/15)

Coherence ***

Dir: James Ward Byrkit. Starring: Emily Foxler, Maury Sterling, Nicholas Brendon, Lorene Scafaria, Elizabeth Gracen, Hugo Armstrong. 15 cert, 89 min

Movie rule-of-thumb advises you think long and hard before RSVP-ing to any dinner party invite: chances are, no-one’s going to get through to the Matchmakers entirely unscathed. Luis Buñuel’s prankish The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie repeatedly denied its guests even a starter; those invited to 1995’s The Last Supper found themselves being carved up. To this infernal social calendar, we can now add James Ward Byrkit’s nifty US indie Coherence, which gathers an octet of comfortable Caucasian thirtysomethings at one brightly appointed home, before skilfully undermining everybody’s certainties.

Early, ominous small talk concerns the comet set to pass overhead this particular night. Something’s in the air, all right: one invitee, Em (Emily Foxler), has already seen her phone cut out and its screen shatter en route, a prologue that sets the tone for a film of sudden blackouts and crack-ups. Byrkit’s big reveal comes once the comet’s passed and the lights have been restored: a tentative sally to the one neighbouring house with power brings the party face-to-face with other versions of themselves, no less curious to know what’s going on.

As reality fractures, a rather obviously self-contained production begins to attain philosophical dimensions. Coherence chimes with recent Saramago adaptations The Double and Enemy in pitting doppelganger against doppelganger, yet Byrkit resists those films’ overt stylisation, instead keeping everything within the realms of (relative) plausibility. Quantum physics here comes to rub up against basic table etiquette: one explanation offered for the general disorientation is that everybody’s thrown back too much red wine. Been there.

Part of Coherence’s fun lies in the suggestion this low-key invasion of the body snatchers might just be an elaborate after-dinner game; as the characters reach for pen and paper, or the Yahtzee dice, or a Schrodinger’s cat analogy, their bafflements and breakthroughs become our own. Its success may depend on how alert you’re feeling, but for once you can’t complain that a movie hasn’t given your synapses a thorough workout: as with 2005’s time-travel curio Primer and 2007’s Spanish mathfest Fermat’s Room, this involving puzzle-piece might usefully be prescribed as a means of holding Alzheimer’s at bay.

Coherence opens in selected cinemas from today, ahead of its DVD release on Monday.

"Grease - Singalong" (Guardian 13/02/15)

Grease – Singalong ****

Dir: Randal Kleiser. With: John Travolta, Olivia Newton-John, Stockard Channing, Jeff Conaway. 110 mins. Cert: PG

Yes, they’ve given Grease the big-screen karaoke treatment, and yes, they really did press-screen it: professional courtesy prevents me from revealing which representative of the Murdoch papers gave us a note-perfect “Beauty School Dropout”. The chief takehome is how closely this post-Night Fever exercise in teensploitation – again produced by Bee Gees boss Robert Stigwood – is tied to its soundtrack: it’s the songs, displaying greater storytelling nous than the rest of this oddly shambling, plotless perennial, which give the bubblegum its snap. Today’s T-Birds and Pink Ladies will likely have not one clue who Frankie Avalon is, but it’s still hard not to respond favourably to its gaudy terpsichordia, and hard to miss the timeless urges preserved within these lyrics: even “Summer Nights”, which is hardly thought of as GG Allin, slips in the flagrantly suggestive “She was good/Ya know what I mean”. Follow the bouncing balls, fill in your own blanks.

Grease - Singalong plays in selected cinemas tomorrow (Saturday) night.