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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.

ISBN: 1795100229

Movie Review:

When I first saw Narnia I had recently seen Lord of the Rings and I compared them unfavourably. Not so, the books. When I read the books of The Lord of the Rings and later The Chronicles of Narnia there was no such comparison. Tolkien and C.S.Lewis, who were good friends, by the way, produced such different works in style and scope there was no thought of ranking them at all. Both are wonderful works and the two movies are also both wonderful in a very different way. Narnia’s beautiful prose is easily read by upper primary children but the Lord of the Rings is best left until high school. The director of Narnia has taken C.S. Lewis’s amazingly clear and simple writing style and transferred it to the screen as well as may be possible. Perhaps one day someone will do it better but none of the other attempts I have seen is as good as this movie. I am a bit sad that some of the people who see this movie will not see beyond its surface to the allegory of Christ represented by Aslan the lion but it would work without that understanding. I love the director’s making little Lucy the key character and am sure Lewis would have enjoyed that immensely. To me, this movie avoids the common trend to make the bad creatures in movies too realistic. I saw a movie in my childhood that lingers in the memories of my sisters and I as too scarily realistic. Have children become tougher? I think many have but we all know sensitive children and I don’t believe every child is emotionally capable of watching some scenes from recent children’s movies without real fear. Congratulations director Adamson for producing a children’s movie that is really for children and is set at their level.

ISBN: 1558905731

Review:

It’s pretty standard to knock a sequel, natural enough too because the novelty value is not there and don’t we love novelty? Personally, I love Sandra Bullock’s style and I would never tire of her. She is just a naturally funny lady and extremely enjoyable. Sure, this movie is not quite as good an experience as the first one was but it is still great entertainment. It is so hard to believe William Shatner is the same guy who played the fearless Captain Kirk in Star Trek years ago. The ingratiating coward who appears on your screen in this movie would surely have spelled danger to The Enterprise and even the unshockable Spock would have raised his strange eyebrows. There are plenty of laughs in this movie as Miss Congeniality sets out to rescue the dippy Miss United States and recovers her toughness, which has been temporarily put aside in favour of glamour.

Heather Burns is suitably bubble-headed as the kidnapped beauty queen who speaks with sincerity in as predictable phrases as any true beauty contestant would use. Regina Butler as Agent Sam Fuller is a full-on agro-chook (excuse the Aussie slang) who outdoes Gracie Hart in the wouldn’t want to know her category. The males have no chance against Hart and Fuller even when they hate each other.

It’s a great movie and I’m sure it will make me laugh a few times in the future although I’m not one for watching films many times over.

ISBN: 0788848291

Review:

Steve Martin reveals his serious side in this movie, by writing the book, co-writing the screenplay and by hardly cracking a smile through the whole movie as one of its leading actors. And hey there, he succeeds! It is a calmly flowing movie that might seem a little overdone to some in the early scenes when Jason Schwartzmann’s character, Jeremy, first bumbles on to the screen. Why would Mirabelle be interested in him? The flow carries us along and builds credibility for this relationship, losing a little when Jeremy becomes hooked on self-realization, motivation and meditation, emerging as a super cool guy. Only a momentary glimpse of Mirabelle’s dad enlists our understanding of what might draw her to him. However, what seems like a caricature of Jeremy as I write it is transformed into a real person by the directors’ skill. We come to love Jeremy and sympathize with his inadequacies. Martin underplays the role of Ray Porter with some excellent portrayals of private emotional struggle so that his rich guy with everything exterior doesn’t convince us, but he captivates the maiden for a time. We don’t like him but we don’t hate him because we suspect there are things we don’t know about why he lives the life he does, and we think they might be sad reasons. We never find out. Claire Danes is everything she ought to be, the country girl alone in the big city, the romantic young woman desperate to reveal her passionate side, and the matter-of-fact mistress who knows it will all end some day. In the magic way of women she understands it all intuitively though her mind is having difficulty sorting through it all and she’s going to survive because she expects the worst will come. Like Jeremy and Ray we fall in love with her, at least for the duration of the movie and a little while after. She’s gorgeous and we can’t resist her. The directors’ sparse approach, rejecting the temptation to use Martin’s comedic talents to enliven Porter, rejecting erotic intensity in the love scenes, avoiding deep and heavy psycho-theorizing on the characters’ behaviour, just draws us deeper into the complex of relationships and leaves us still diving at the end of the movie. Well done director Tucker and well done Steve Martin for stepping out of your public stereotype. Which is the real you? You have created a very un-American movie full of quiet humour, thought provoking and replete with meaning, European in its depth. Congratulations to Jason Schwartzmann, Claire Danes and the rest of the cast. It is a movie I won’t forget, I’m still thinking about it.

ISBN: 1415711003

Review:

Enduring Love is a disturbing film for those of us who are secure in our male bodies, believing we are safe from the horrors of violence mainly inflicted on females by males. The film begins with a man running with other men to try to save a boy in a hot air balloon which is having problems. The men all grab hold of the basket or a trailing rope and try to encourage the boy to jump out. In his fear he just hides in the bottom of the basket and then the balloon starts to rise. Most let go but one man hangs on until he falls to a horrifying death. Two of the men run to where his body is. One of the men feels a strong bond for the other and that is what the story is built on. Rhys Ifans (Jed) plays a man with a strange obsession for the other, played by Daniel Craig (Joe). Craig’s character has a definite case of post traumatic stress disorder, but, a rationalist philosopher, he refuses to believe he could have such a thing. Then Jed turns up and the stress rises and finally Joe realizes that he is the love object of a stalker. The drama rises in this unusual thriller till it reaches its unusual conclusion, or is it unusual? Only for men? It’s all too possible and all too common amongst women. Maybe we men should watch out too.

ISBN: 0740742206

Review:

After seeing this movie I thought to myself, Will I be able to review this? Where is my unique voice in it? Well, the problem is that the movie itself has no unique voice. It is a technical exercise relying on plot twists and clever inventions. The team work as a team and the same can be said of the acting. It is an integrated team effort. Efficient and characterless. If anyone stands out at all it is Catherine Zeta Jones who really sparkles amidst the men, who just do their job. It’s a pity Julia
Roberts didn’t have more to do. She was excellent in what she was given. The film is so so, as most Chinese speakers of English would say, seeking to find a translation of the Chinese ‘mamahuhu - horse horse tiger tiger’. Well, that will have to be a different blog. This is a movie that you can watch on an off night to pass the time but no more than that. I don’t recommend it unless you’re so obsessed with one of the characters that you have to see all their movies. That’s all I’ve got to say this time.