At the movies with Dan Slevin

WHAT a lovely summer we’ve been having – for watching movies.
While the Avatar juggernaut rolls inexorably on there have been plenty of other options for a dedicated seeker of shelter from the storm.
Released at any other time of year, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones would be getting a decent length evaluation (and probably a headline) here but with 15 films to discuss we’ll have to live with the bullet point version: not un-moving.
My companion and I spent about an hour after watching TLB discussing its flaws and yet both ended up agreeing that we’d actually enjoyed the film quite a lot, despite those problems.
Personally, I think Jackson’s occasional whimsical in-jokery typified the uncertainty of tone (I’m thinking of his unnecessary camera shop cameo for example) but the fundamental message – that the people left behind after a tragedy are more important than the victims – was clearly and quite bravely articulated. And when I saw the film at a crowded Embassy session, during the pivotal scene where the sister discovers the evidence to catch the killer, I could only hear one person breathing – and it wasn’t me.
I haven’t tried to offer a plot summary here as I’m guessing most people have seen it by now, haven’t they?

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a nasty piece of work that has somehow managed to persuade the world that it is reinventing the serial-killer thriller while still flirting with every single cliché of the same: a crusading journalist on the skids is given a shot at redemption by a sad old man wanting answers to a 40 year old mystery. I’d yawn if I wasn’t worried about throwing up at the same time.

In Creation, Paul Bettany and wife Jennifer Connolly play Mr and Mrs Darwin and their struggles with his theory of evolution (a story told with more rigour by Arthur Meek in the Downstage play Collapsing Creation last year): Too much sentiment, not enough science.

Surprise hit of the holidays was Guy Ritchie’s re-boot of Sherlock Holmes with the reliable Robert Downey Jr as the great detective. No major star takes a beating like Downey, he really is first rate, and his ability to do “stoned” is remarkable considering his own sobriety.
Holmes is hugely entertaining and a great future is assured for the franchise. It turns out the way to get a great Guy Ritchie movie (his last few have been truly terrible) is to keep him away from the typewriter – he really can direct and really can’t write.

Last year Woody Allen’s Vicky Christina Barcelona was a pleasant surprise but lightning doesn’t strike twice with his new film, Whatever Works. Star of Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David, plays an intellectual misanthrope who discovers that life among the “cretins” and “midgets” might not be so bad after all. It’s an appealing, humanist philosophy being espoused by Allen here – I just wish his filmmaking nowadays wasn’t so slapdash.

Wes Anderson’s delightfully whimsical Fantastic Mr Fox is already one of my films of the year. A witty script for the adults, cute furry animals for the kids and wonderful production design for the aesthetes make it a winner all round – I’m sure Roald Dahl would be pretty happy too.

The kids ought to be happy with The Princess and The Frog, too: Disney’s return to old-fashioned hand-drawn animation. To me it was as if the Pixar people (who run things at Disney animation nowadays) have run all the classic Disney cartoons (The Lady and The Tramp, Beauty and The Beast and even Bambi are referenced here) through a machine that can take all those elements and produce a new version at will. The eight-year-old I went with immediately said she wanted the DVD and that’s not a bad recommendation in my book.

Paranormal Activity is garbage, fit only for the credulous and the gullible – the kind of people who’ve made these over-hyped non-films successful for years. A bland yet annoying Californian couple think they might be haunted and so film their every move with an expensive handicam – supposedly this film is made from the tapes they left behind. Yuck.

Lean pickings in the arthouse this summer: Mid-August Lunch is a subtly ingratiating Italian concoction about a middle-aged man living with his ageing Mamma. As Rome empties out for the summer, his apartment fills with even more visiting old ladies who, at first, drive him mad. Mid-August Lunch gets extra points for being the shortest film of the holidays – 73 minutes. More like this please.

The First Day of the Rest of Your Life hails from France and follows an ordinary French family through those moments, big and small, that define a family’s relationships. Sadly, the fussy direction and banal insights meant for a disappointing experience.

Cold Souls, on the other hand, is a neat idea that isn’t exploited as well as it might have been. Paul Giamatti (Sideways’ pinot snob) plays a New York actor called Paul Giamatti who is struggling with the character of Vanya in the Chekov play he is rehearsing.
His agent recommends a visit to David Strathairn’s Soul Storage facility where his burdensome soul can be removed.
While Giamatti experiments with various different souls, his own ends up lost in the obscure Russian soul black market.

Walt Disney used to make great family films (often about talking dogs, giant dogs or men that turn into dogs). Now they are just making rubbish like Old Dogs, a collection of the lamest, most obvious and least funny jokes you can think of. Stars John Travolta and Robin Williams mug to little effect and I wanted to strangle the Music Supervisor with his own earbuds.

The family movie gap is filled very nicely by Walden Media (Chronicles of Narnia, Bridge to Terabithia) and their latest, Tooth Fairy, turns out to be a hoot. Dwayne Johnson stars as a washed-up ice hockey player who specialises in crunching the opposition – hence his nickname The Tooth Fairy.
He also specialises in cynically puncturing kids’ dreams which leads to an appointment with chief tooth fairy Julie Andrews, a two week stint as a real tooth fairy, and a fairy case worker (genius casting of Ricky Gervais’ off-sider Stephen Merchant).

Drew Barrymore’s first feature as a director, Whip It, is a jolly and rambunctious little film about a teenage Texan (Juno’s Ellen Page) who finds herself through the wild world of Roller Derby: Pretty entertaining, even though the rules of the game remain about as explicable to me as Whack Bat in Fantastic Mr Fox.

Last, but definitely not least, is the excellent Up in the Air which stars George Clooney as a corporate down-sizer who discovers that none of his glib assumptions about the world and his place in it are worth a hill of beans.
I was particularly taken with the surprisingly (yet appropriately) downbeat ending. Clooney seems to specialise in cool customers whose world unravels around them and I don’t think he’s ever been better than he is here.