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Mr. Bean’s Holiday is the latest in the bizarre adventures of Rowan Atkinson’s funny, somewhat autistic, character. The calamities Bean causes are as outrageous as ever but in this movie he seems to have matured just a little, with a teensie weensie bit more sympathy for some other human beings, notably the child whose father was left behind on the station platform because of Bean’s self-absorption. As ever in funny road trip style movies, everything ends up well. The photography is wonderful and almost hyper real in its clarity but I think this bounces rather heavily on Bean, making some of his facial contortions appear ugly and not funny. There is a little too much reliance on grimaces in the film. Emma de Caunnes’ beauty flourishes in this style of photography but almost everyone else in the film fails the test. Her response to Bean is as bizarre a mystery as anything in the film but hooray for the fascination for a stranger! I do live in China after all. It’s a great film which will have you groaning, laughing or wondering whether to laugh or groan. I don’t think it is quite up to the other Bean works but it’s good enough for me. I’ll watch it again and I wouldn’t be surprised if it has me laughing more the second time and the third time and so on.

Venus is a British black comedy starring Peter O’Toole, Leslie Phillips and Jodie Whittaker. A rude, unpleasant girl is sent by her mother to ‘help’ her ageing uncle, Phillips, and he can’t stand her. His best friend, O’Toole, however, is attracted to her and sets out to win her. As the movie progresses we gain insight into the mind of this borderline delinquent and the two old men, famous enough to get work occasionally but old enough to rise every morning wondering if it might be their last. Whittaker rises well to the challenge of working opposite the two veterans and also to her role as the hardened teenager who is both charmed by the sophistication of the old roue, Maurice, and repulsed by his aged body. I am impressed by the courage of the old actors in allowing themselves to face the cameras without the make-up that perhaps any American actor would have insisted on. They present the truth to the world and in doing so make this film an effective message about the challenges of ageing. It shouts to us that we must deal with reality. Life will not be forever and there will be some pretty grotty, uncomfortable and difficult scenes for us to play before we get old. Maurice mourns his past attractiveness and decides to have one last go. Perhaps in the end we can say that his love transforms Jodie and unlocks a side of her character that has been scarred and blocked, healing and giving her the potential to find both love and beautiful nature that was hiding within her. It is a rude, in-your-face, tour de force. 

The performances by O’Toole and Phillips are great, particularly O’Toole. He was always excellent and is no less so in this movie. What an actor! There has been little said about Vanessa Redgrave’s performance as Maurice’s ex-wife but she too is one of the best actors Britain has produced in my lifetime and I have never seen her do a bad job. Her part is essential to this movie and she deserves more attention for the way she delivered insights into Maurice’s character. Richard Griffiths also performs his role beautifully as the third of the trio of old actors struggling with the demise of their careers and many of their friends.

Congratulations to Roger Michel for giving us a film that unashamedly examines some troublesome aspects of life, that peers closely at the phenomenon of old age and examines the dynamics within and behind an old man’s attraction to a very young woman and his ability to make an impression on her. Good direction and an unsurpassed choice of cast.

Movie Review: CLICK

Now this is more the sort of role I stereotype Adam Sandler in. Click is one of those bizarre movies that materialize now and again in the Hollywood mind. It’s totally off the wall and has no intention of meshing with reality. Occasionally one of those movies works and some of them, like Click, work when you are in a certain mood but on nights when you are not in that mood they leave you wondering why you wasted your time. I’m sure you know what I am talking about and will be able to pick the mood to watch this movie in. Then you’ll enjoy it.

I think there are problems with the script logic but then logic is not what this kind of movie is on about anyway. Done in a different way you could call this a science fiction movie. A guy is given a machine that can fast forward, freeze frame, replay and skip time sequences in ‘reality’. Oddly, the guy at the department store who gives, not ’sells’ this piece of equipment turns out to be an angel, no, it’s not a Christmas movie. Well humour has a logic of its own. the guy in the store who turns out to be the angel of death, well that is all garbage from the logic point of view but in the movie it works ok. Christopher Walken as the angel seems to change jobs somewhere along the line and sort of switches occasionally from funny to sinister but we get the impression he is stuck in funny mode and is funny sinister sometimes, or did he want to be sinister funny?.

The acting? I think to measure the acting I would have to know how these people are in real life and find out how difficult it would be for that person to become the one on screen. I have no way of doing that so I won’t guess at the acting. In a movie like ‘Something’s Gotta Give’ I’m happy to venture a verdict of brilliance but here it’s not obvious. Maybe Adam Sandler is really like that. Christopher Walken has always had a face like an enigma and here it is like an enigma pretending not to be an enigma but turning out to be one of the greatest enigmas in the end. Watch the movie to find out which enigma that is.

I can’t resist this - I hope it clicks with you.

Superman Returns, and he comes back with a bang. When the alien spaceship crashes on the Kents’ farm Martha goes out looking, knowing who is going to come out of the wreckage unscathed and sure enough there he is, her boy. Clark returns to the Daily Planet newspaper office after a supposed vacation around the globe. Then the news comes in and he runs out of the building and down the road, tearing off his clothes to reveal his superman underwear and he flies to make his first rescue back on earth. He lifts a space shuttle free of the jumbo jet which is carrying it and it flies off into space. Then he turns his attention to saving the jet, now on fire from the rocket blasts of the shuttle, and he races after it on its course to the ground miles below. Lois is on board and after a spectacular landing in a packed baseball stadium holding the airliner vertically above his head, he gently puts it down and very cooly greets her. She is obviously the main point, not the rescue.

Marie Antoinette is a pretty movie with scenes in the Palace of Versailles, in forests and ornate theatres, with many people dressed in incredible clothes and eating magnificent platters of wonderfully arranged food. In fact it won awards only given for the visual aspects of movie making.  There is the basis for a great movie, but… It is really shallow.

Producer-director Sophia Coppola comes from an amazing family, father, Francis Ford Coppola, cousin, Nicholas Cage, and several more. She has been an actress and I was tempted to say she should have stayed with that but she produced and directed ‘Lost in Translation’ which I liked a lot and ought to review.It has been trendy since the middle of last century to take Shakespeare’s works and modernize them. This is of the same ilk. Coppola read about Marie Antoinette and attempted to rehabilitate her by modernizing her history, and failed. She took pretty Kirsten Dunst who plays American teenagers really well, and made her do the Queen of France with the character of an American teenager. She also took one of her cousins, Jason Schwartzman and made him play Louis the Sixteenth in much the same way he played Jeremy in Shop Girl. Jeremy was perfect but no one would have allowed the King of France to be like that.

Then there were things which were just downright silly – late 20^th Century sports shoes in Marie Antoinette’s wardrobe, French aristocrats dancing to a rock tune. Oh dear! I sound like a real movie critic. It’s the worst movie I have seen in years, other than some horror stuff I bought and watched by mistake because their titles made me think they were legends I had read and enjoyed (‘Beowulf ‘and ‘The Brothers Grimm’ – really, really bad). This one was boring, don’t bother watching it unless you want to see the beautiful costumes. Music bad, acting terrible, conceptualization worse.