When I walked into the cinema for the screening of Bridesmaids and saw the auditorium chock full of women, my heart sank a little. I have never really been one for chick flicks, least of all chick flicks that take as their subject marriage and all the ritual female bonding and hysteria that goes with it, but within minutes Bridesmaids had won me over. The script, written by Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo is cracking, and there are too many laugh-out-loud moments to count. The strength of the film lies in its characters and their relationships, which are given space to develop and become suitably complicated. There are some great performances, particularly from Wiig, who plays the lead character, Annie. Annie has not only just broken up with her long-term boyfriend, but her business has also gone bust, then she is asked to be maid of honour at her best friend Lillian’s (Maya Rudolph) wedding but the job is made more difficult by Lillian’s new friend, the wealthy and effortlessly glamorous Helen (Rose Byrne) who tries to take over the reins.

The film revolves around the conflict and competition which develops between Annie and Helen and how it threatens to derail not only the imminent wedding but also Annie and Lillian’s friendship. And friendship is precisely what this film is about – there are men in this particular chick flick, but refreshingly they play supporting or comedy roles, indeed there is a nice performance from Chris O’Dowd of IT Crowd fame as Annie’s would-be love interest. Although there is no doubting that this is firmly Wiig’s film, there is some great ensemble acting on display, (Melissa McCarthy as Megan is great) and the funniest moments are when the women are all on-screen together – one of the funniest moments is at an exquisitely ill-fated dress fitting, where an injudicious restaurant choice comes back to haunt the women. It is cringe-inducing but very very funny.

There are only two issues I had with the film: the first is Matt Lucas, it is not clear what he is doing in this film, it seems the producers were determined to shoehorn him into some sort of comic supporting role but his turn with Rebel Wilson (doing a woefully awful English accent) as Annie’s flatmates is just a bit embarrassing really. The second is that Annie’s character becomes almost unlikeable towards the middle of the film when she becomes a slightly too self-absorbed and her life becomes even more of a car wreck and she is seriously in danger of hurting those closest to her through her selfishness. However, ultimately Wiig manages to keep us rooting for Annie throughout.

The film is produced by Judd Apatow (Knocked Up, Superbad The 40-Year-Old Virgin) purveyor of the blokiest of films and indeed the film has been described as the female version of The Hangover. Yet this description does the film a disservice as the characters and relationship dynamics at work here are much more defined and detailed, even though the situations can be equally grotesque. Critics of the film have cited the vomit and sex jokes as overly vulgar, but sex and vomiting can both be hilarious not to mention an integral part of the human condition, so why should men be the only ones allowed to laugh? I left the cinema with a smile on my face and if Bridesmaids is an example of the chick flick of the future, then I’m a convert.

Similar Articles and Artists

Source Code | Film Review
TRON: Legacy — Review
The Next Three Days — Film Review
It Might Get Loud — Davis Guggenheim’s

Director: Duncan Jones. Writer: Ben Ripley. Starring: Jake Gyllenhaal, Michelle Monaghan, Vera Farmiga and Jeffrey Wright. Runtime: 93 minutes

Jake Gyllenhaal has 8 minutes to save the lives of millions of innocent civilians. 8 minutes are all that Jake Gyllenhaal has to stop millions of innocent civilians being murdered. Millions of innocent civilians will lose their lives if Jake Gyllenhaal doesn’t save them in the next 8 minutes.

Welcome to Source Code, the tricky sophomore film from director Duncan Jones, in which Jake Gyllenhaal, has 8 minutes to… well you get the idea. Gyllenhaal plays Cpt. Colter Stevens, and Sean Fentress, in two different realities and has to solve two different mysteries in order to prevent a massive terrorist attack in downtown Chicago. It may sound confusing, and much of the film plays on this uncertainty as it asks the audience to muddle through with Gyllenhaal, but it is to Jones and screenwriter Ben Ripley’s great credit that the narrative complexities never threaten to overwhelm the enjoyment to be found in this finely crafted thriller.

Jones found critical acclaim with one of the standout films of 2009, Moon, and like his first film, Source Code, never feels overly directed. Instead, Jones appears happy to let a clever script, and some talented actors, draw the audience into the film while he gently aids the enjoyment with clever and subtle visual touches; most notably with some impressive physical stunt-work, and a clever ‘reflecting realities’ shot towards the end. Gyllenhaal and Monaghan are believable and likeable in the lead roles, with excellent support provided by Farmiga and Wright.

Pedants will no doubt find fault with the technicalities of the film’s construction, which sees Captain Stevens repeatedly re-inserted to the same, yet slightly different, 8 minute period immediately preceding an explosion on a commuter train. Stevens not only has to solve the mystery of who planted the bomb on the train; he also has to work out why, and how, he has found himself involved in the first place.

As is often the case with this kind of narrative, the logistics are explained as some unknowable combination of ‘quantum mechanics’ and computer wizardry which allows a mysterious division of the United States Military to manipulate the ‘source code’ of our reality. However, the pedants would be missing the point entirely to focus on such trivial technicalities, and I often think that the kind of people who refuse to allow themselves to be swept up into the dream world of a movie are best left at home ironing the bed covers.

The film will no doubt be compared to things like Back to the Future, Big, Groundhog Day, or Quantum Leap, and, perhaps betraying the bias of this reviewer, Source Code should prove as infinitely re-watchable as those childhood classics.

Similar Articles and Artists

TRON: Legacy — Review
The Next Three Days — Film Review
It Might Get Loud — Davis Guggenheim’s

Elizabeth Taylor’s passing yesterday, from heart failure at the age of 79, has undoubtedly saddened many across the globe. One of Hollywood’s most alluring leading ladies has long since been a commanding presence on the big screen but continually commanded our attention away from it. Her work on raising Aids awareness throughout the 80s, her 8th marriage in the early 90s, her friendship with Michael Jackson, and her increasingly fragile health all ensured she remained in the public eye until her death. Hollywood’s original and best loved Glamour Queen had no intention of fading away quietly.

Along with Charlie Chaplin, Taylor remains Britain’s most successful and popular export to the Hollywood hills. Only Chaplin’s enduring popularity can match the attention and adulation afforded to Taylor by the American public. Born in London, Taylor was evacuated to California with her parents in 1939, on the eve of WWII. It didn’t take long for the strikingly beautiful child to be signed up by MGM, and she appeared regularly as a child actress before really coming to the fore in A Place in the Sun (1951), which garnished best actor nominations for her co-stars Montgomery Clift and Shelley Winters. It wouldn’t take long for Taylor to outshine her illustrious contemporaries, and after another commanding performance in Giant (1956), alongside the inimitable James Dean, Taylor was nominated three times successively for Raintree County (1957), Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (1958) and Suddenly, Last Summer (1959), before eventually winning for Butterfield 8 (1961). The sultry, seductive brilliance of Taylor in these roles can easily be forgotten amidst the extravagant glamour of her career from the 60s onwards.

By this point Taylor’s tumultuous personal life had begun to overshadow her credibility as an actress. During the production of the infamously extravagant flop Cleopatra (1963), Taylor acquired her fifth (and sixth) husband, Richard Burton. Their glamorous, but troubled, romance would dominate the silver screen as much as the gossip pages over the next decade or so with the couple appearing in no less than 10 films together. However, it is to be noted, that dung this time Taylor won much critical acclaim, to go with her second Academy Award, for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (1966) in which she shed her sex symbol status to play the unflattering role of Martha, a bellowing, bullying drunk.

Taylor’s acting career continued to trail off, excluding a couple of notable performances in Reflections in a Golden Eye (1967) and Secret Ceremony (1968), and essentially died completely after a series of unremarkable films in the 1970s beginning with the disappointing The Only Game in Town (1970). Her personal life remained captivating however, and she finally shed Burton for her 7th husband, John Warner, a Republican senator, in 1976. Her continuing presence in the gossip columns was augmented by a stint in rehab for alcohol treatment, another marriage, her continuing Aids awareness campaigning, and her often poor health. The sight of a wheelchair-bound Taylor attending a variety of functions, still clinging on to her glamorous heyday has been the most recent image to trouble the paparazzi rags.

Ultimately, however, Taylor will be remembered as one of Hollywood’s great leading women, alongside Audrey Hepburn, Bette Davis, Rita Hayworth, Grace Kelly or Lauren Becall. That kind of stardom, the marriage of classical beauty and sultry talent which inhabited the Golden Era of Hollywood, will long be fondly remembered.

Similar Articles and Artists

Intoxicated Man — A portrait of Serge Gainsbourg
TRON: Legacy — Review

Paul Haggis is good with scripts: two of his screenplays (Million Dollar Baby and Crash) picked up the Best Film Oscar, he has a writing credit on Casino Royale and he penned Clint Eastwood’s excellent Pacific War films Flags of our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima. It would seem odd, therefore, for him to decide to adapt an original French film for the US market – but that’s precisely what he has done in his latest film The Next Three Days. The film is a retelling of Fred Cavayé’s 2008 film Pour Elle (Anything For Her, which is incidentally a much more appropriate and memorable title) and sticks pretty faithfully to the original. The story centres around the characters of John and Lara Brennan, (Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) a blissfully happy middle-class couple with a young son. When Lara is dramatically arrested for the murder of her boss, their lives are completely upended. Haggis cleverly keeps the audience guessing as to the innocence of Lara, never really giving us the full picture of what happened until much later on. Yet her husband’s faith in her innocence is never shaken, so when her final shot at an appeal is thrown out of court, John knows he must do something dramatic in order to reunite the family unit. Up until this point the audience could be forgiven for thinking this is going to turn into a sentimental legal drama, where one man’s gritty determination to clear his wife’s name takes on the might of the American judicial system, but oh no, you’d be barking up the wrong genre. You are in heist movie territory here.

Copyright owned by Lionsgate

And that is what is wonderful about this film, its premise of a world-weary college professor breaking his wife out of jail is nothing but far-fetched, but the cracking script and excellent performances of Crowe and Banks, make this an utterly convincing tale of what ‘normal’ people can be moved to do in the name of love. This version of the film is longer than the French original and you can feel it. The opening is a little plodding and there is a confusing scene right at the beginning, where Banks is shown arguing aggressively with her sister-in-law, that is meant to make the audience question her vow of innocence in the face of her fiery temper. But Haggis should have more faith in Banks’ performance which manages to convey this tempered ambiguity beautifully without recourse to clumsy expositional devices. None of this matters much anyway, since once John gets his break-out plan underway, the film shifts into full throttle thriller mode and masterfully ratchets up the tension making sure that the audience is kept firmly on the edge of its seat.

The Next Three Days suggests that ordinary people can be motivated to do dangerous and extraordinary things when their way of life is threatened and it is a credit to Haggis that by the film’s close the moral burden of what Brennan does to save his family is writ large on his face. In an interesting cameo, Liam Neeson playing a former crook who successfully orchestrated a prison break, tells Brennan that in order to pull something like this off you need to be a certain type of guy, one who is happy to knock over old ladies and leave his kid at the gas station if the circumstances call for it. That Neeson’s words about the sacrifice and single-mindedness needed to be who Brennan has to become resonate throughout the whole film is a testament to the quality of the script.

Copyright — Lionsgate

Although the film does require you to buy in to some quite implausible scenarios, the strength of the performances is enough to keep you rooting for John and hoping beyond hope that he will manage to pull off this whole ramshackle operation. Crowe is in excellent bedraggled form, shuffling about in cords and slippers with messed up hair and trawling YouTube for information on how to break into locked cars. As John Brennan, the reluctant hero, Crowe anchors the film and Banks gives it heart as the mother and wife who can’t face spending the rest of her life away from her family. A masterful script, understated direction and great performances combine to make this is a very rewarding thriller skilfully handled by a consummate story-teller.

NBM gives it 4 stars

The Next Three Days opens in cinemas on 7 January 2011.

Similar Articles and Artists

The Next Three Days — Film Review
It Might Get Loud — Davis Guggenheim’s

The film starts off reasonably well with a quite neat and economical explanation of the intervening 20 years. The director Joseph Kosinski nods in the direction of The Wizard of Oz when, at the film’s key turning point as Sam is drawn into the grid, the visuals shift from 2D to 3D. Although this device led to a shared intake of breath across the audience, the visuals overall were disappointing and this I attribute not to the SFX guys who have clearly worked their little socks off, but to the writers. Almost thirty years have elapsed since the original Tron’s release in 1982 and massive, almost unquantifiable technological leaps have happened to CGI in the interim, most of which are writ large in TRON: Legacy, yet it all amounts to nothing if the audience can’t engage with the characters or plot. And this is the film’s biggest problem: the characters are as two-dimensional as the visuals in the opening 25 minutes and the plot, which aims to build on the already strained premise of the first movie, becomes so contrived that it is hard to follow and even harder to care. There are really only two grandstanding action sequences in the whole film and in neither did I fear for Sam’s safety, largely because I didn’t really care what happened to Sam, but also because the scenes were all about showing of the CGI and not about driving the narrative forward, or revealing character. One of the final battle sequences steals from Star Wars so blatantly that it is almost embarrassing. Tron was about ideas, about new digital possibilities, TRON: Legacy is about what happens when digital possibilities stand in for ideas.

There has been a lot of speculation about the ground-breaking technology used to shave thirty years off Jeff Bridges and although it is a broadly impressive spectacle, that is really all it is, another distracting visual to take your mind of the fact there’s no discernible plot. The character of Flynn is also muddled, he is portrayed as some sort of Buddha-like deity, dressed in curious Obi Wan robes and spouting alternately expositional dialogue and hippy trippy pseudo-spiritual clap trap, at one point he even utters the word ‘radical’. It is a sad waste of Jeff Bridges’ talents. Another sad waste is Michael Sheen who rocks up to do a camp Ziggy Stardust impression and wave a cane around. Olivia Wilde as Quorra, probably gives the best performance of the film breathing humanity into the character of an artificial creature that neither belongs in the grid nor in the real world.

All in all TRON: Legacy amounts to little more than a cynical vehicle to sell endless merchandise and establish a movie franchise. Cillian Murphy, Hollywood’s go to creepy looking cyber villain, crops up in one of the early scenes as Dillinger junior and we expect he will turn out to be the antagonist, but sadly no. Murphy is used for little more than five minutes, which sets off franchise alarm bells, as does the curious underuse of the titular Tron character. Ultimately, the experience of watching TRON: Legacy is one of a disengaged frustration at the sheer waste of effort and lack of ideas. Interestingly, the original film emerges looking all the more fresh and creative for the comparison. In the words of the Master Control Program, ‘You shouldn’t have come back, Flynn.’

Similar Articles and Artists

The Next Three Days — Film Review
It Might Get Loud — Davis Guggenheim’s