The Invention of Lying (2009): review: 5.5/10

 *

A screenwriter discovers the possibility of lying, and as a consequence gets money from a bank, seduces beautiful women, improves his career and then persuades the broader public of the existence of God, the afterlife, Heaven and Hell.

Sometimes funny, if occasionally needlessly puerile, it has too few ideas for its length.

*

Creation (2009): review: 6.5/10

Darwin's faith, and that of his wife, become challenged by his conculsions as he works on The Origin of Species in his country home.

He is troubled by sickness and one of his children dies. He is encouraged by friends in the scientific community. His relationship with the Parish Vicar deteriorates.

The directing style is imaginative, but the films themes are probably unfilmable and it drags.

The Break-up Artist (2009): review: 3/10

A girl runs an agency which helps young couples seperate. It suffers from competition from a rival agency and, losing clients, the heroine accepts a commission to re-connect a man with his ex. The man is an art teacher and is quite sensitive.

All this is narrated by a girl with one of those very squeaky nasal American accents.


Slick, somewhat charmless film, lacking the freshness of real life about it, and featuring many smug women: however I found it just about watchable.

The Rebound (2009): review: 6/10

An attractive suburban brunette discovers her husband is having an affair: she decamps with her two small children to New York, where she rents an apartment above a coffee shop. She begins a successful career in TV.

The fellow running the coffee shop is an insipid mommy's boy, the ill-dressed, unhaven going-nowhere son of a wealthy, charmless Upper West Side family. His accent is hatefully nasal, and he quite vomit-inducingly, a-sexually nice. His best friend, who aspires to a career on the stage, is a sleazy loser, and a rotten actor.

However, being quite immature, coffee-shop boy gets on well with the children: mother finds this quality sufficient to inspire copulation.

It is dreadful to think that women might really go for men like this.

Entertaining drivel; might be good to watch on a long flight.

Mr Nobody (2009): review: 6.5/10

It's the future: the oldest man in the world is dying: the film consists mainly of his memories of childhood in the UK. Specifically, the painful esperience of his parents' seperation, then the experience of having the daughter of his mother's second husband as a lover, and his growing resentment of his mother.

These relationships are explored with depth of feeling though the film is considerably overlong, and the film style mannered as if inspired by pop videos or advertisments.

The "from the future" aspect, seems quite un-necessary, and I feel that there is a very good, simple film here trying to escape from some pretentious wrapping.

Confessions of a Shopaholic (2009): review: 1/10

In New York, a journalist finds great delight in shopping and as a result has a great many credit card debts: she therefore attends a shopaholics anonymous group. Ironically, she is hired to write for a financial magazine: she forms a romantic attachment to her editor.

Inept, graceless romcom with little to reccomend it: the plot rambles hopelessly, and the "comic" scenes have something horribly forced about them. Worse, the central romantic couple make an absurd combination, having zero sexual frisson.

The subsidiary characters seem pointless. The starring actress is two-dimensional: one can feel no pleasure in getting to know her through the film.

City Island (2009): review 7/10

A prison guard brings a convict home to live with his family- an ill-mannered, if amusing collection of Italian New Yorkers which includes his sharp tongued wife, his insolent son (who has a fixation with fat women), and  pole-dancing daughter.

This is a very enjoyable, classic screwball comedy, with much fun arising from the characters' various secrets.

The film begins very promisingly, alternatingly surprisingly between black comedy and pathos, and is very well acted, but it loses its sharpness somehow along the way as the plot works towards its conclusions

There are very poor table manners in this film, with much gesticulating with forks and even food being thrown across a dining table.

The Man Next Door (2009): review: 7.5/10

*

A precious furniture designer lives with his wife and child in a Corbusier house: his idyll is destroyed when his neighbour constructs a window in his wall looking onto their house.

With much wit, the film describes the vacuity of the designer, his vanity, casual dishonesty and snobbery. However the film is somehow incomplete, the various narrative threads not closed with total efficiency.

 I am not sure if this is deliberate or not.

*

The White Ribbon (2009): review: 9/10

As narrated by a schoolteacher, a series of bizzare events occur in a North German village just before The Great War:

The film depicts the life of a village through narrratives folding about several households: that of three prominant village figures- a doctor,  the landowner and the pastor, and that of a family of labourers. These households reveal a patriarchal culture of harsh discipline, hypocrisy, ignorance and unkindness: children are often the victims.

The film is beautiful, with startling images of the villages through the seasons which contrast strangely with the cruel social atmosphere.

Perhaps the film is unbalanced, but the many narratives are comunicated with immense skill and the acting is supurb.

The Open Road (2009): review: 4/10

A baseball player's mother is ill. At her insistance, he goes to find his father- a famous baseball player, drunk and egotist- to bring him to her, taking along an ex-girlfriend for company.

This is a road movie with some beautful scenery, concerning the triangulated relationship of the three. It is well-acted, but laboured and overlong, with Jeff Bridges in particular overplaying his hand.

Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (2009): review: 2/10

A journalist decides to pursue a District Attorney, whom he believes has been falsifying evidence to win convictions. He has a personality-free girlfriend whose happens to work for the DA too.

A film that plods helplessly along, failing to entrance at all, featuring implausable characters and zero wit.

It is also lacking in atmosphere and has an annoying glossiness about it.

Solitary Man (2009): review: 5.5/10

An aging lothario and disgraced car dealer visits a university campus with his girlfriends daughter, with whom he has sex, something which causes him no end of bother.

Michael Douglas plays the usual, as do Danny deVito and Susan Sarandon in a piece that, while entirely watchable, does little to suprise.

The reason for this might lie with the moralistic intent of the makers. We are supposed to tut tut, I think, at Douglas's character all the way through: the true dreadfulness of pursuing skirt and all its destructiveness apparantly revealed. But since nothing Douglas does in the movie is really bad, this attitude serves merely to dampen the viewers' delight in seeing a shark gobble its fish.

Happy Tears (2009): review: 8/10

A woman returns from San Francisco to Philadelphia, to her father's house. There she helps her sister take care of their aging, occasionally bilious father.

This is a melancholy film depicting, in an episodic and occasionally surreal style, the world from a female perspective. It deals specifically with the heroine's desire for a commited relationship, her relationship with her sister and absentee lover, and her father and his chequered past.

Both filming and acting are elegant...perhaps even too elegant?

You Might as Well Live (2009): review: 3/10

*

Dissuaded from suicide, Robert R. Mutt is encouraged by his baseball hero to get money, a special ring, and a girl.

The film fails to create a sympathetic hero, Mutt having really no redeeming qualities other than a desperate persistence. Black comedy as relentless as this becomes is two dimensional, and seems to be driven by a desire to mock unfortunate people.

 However, the film works reasonably as a critique of provincial society (specifically Hamilton, Ontario) with it's low level drug dealers, low culture, lack of ambition, anti-paedophile protests and atmosphere of weariness.

*

I Love You, Man (2009): review: 7/10

Recently engaged in LA, our hero lacks a best friend to be his best man: he meets several contenders and forges an unlikely but strong bond with Sydney Fife.

The film is a celebration of male friendship, male companionship, of drinking, Rush and hanging out. These elements of the film, driven by strong acting, are its best parts.

However, it starts badly, trying too hard to be funny with the "gross out" comedy that has become such a staple of Hollywood films. Then it settles into making some cringworthy points about the insincerities demanded of masculine friendship code. Fifteeen minutes later the script calms down a bit, but desperate comedic effort continue to belabour the film.

It is as if the film-makers are ashamed of being sincere- ironically, given that much of the film is about sincerity in the first place, so a film that could happily rival Sideways*, fails to.

Nonetheless, it is hard not to enjoy it.

*There is indeed a similar big man - small man friendship

Everybody's Fine (2009): review: 3/10; table manners in American films

A retired widower attempts to visit his grown children, travelling across the USA, to discover that he has been given a false immpression of their lives.

The films contains elements of the road movie, and is a sort of right of passage film, showing shifts in attitude and expectation  taken by different generations.  The film is also, I suspect, about American decline and disappointment, as Americans learn to live with diminished world status and reduced  individual chances of achieving the American Dream.

The film offers glimpses of these themes, but does little to grapple with them, instead washing us over with sentimentality, providing lazy solutions to the various relationship crises described. All this is underscored by syrupy music.

 *

As so often in American films, the characters have terrible table manners, speaking with their mouths full and biting food off the prongs of their forks with their moths open, leaning over their plates or slouching with their elbows on the table (Julia Robets is particularly guilty of these offences). In "Everybody's Fine" the dismal manners of a brattish child become a focus for one of the conflicts in the film.

These atrocious table manners can be seen in films showing Americans of all social classes, but seem most striking among their middle classes. It's a form of arrogance: they think that because they are wealthy they are above regarding the feelings of others and has a sartorial equivelent in the way they inisistantly dress casually even in formal situations. However, they haven't yet started, I think, to swear as is now common among the British upper middle classes (see the Guardian Newspaper)- or maybe they have, but it is censored from films.

Whatever Works (2009): review: 7/10

In New York, an opinionated misanthrope meets and helps a simple young woman from the south.

The piece has the construction of a sitcom, with plain sets and uninteresting photography.

The script is often extremely funny, making a virtue of the -somewhat obvious- set-piece character contrasts that lend it momentum.

Peter and Vandy (2009): review: 8/10

Ennui and irritability wreck romance.

Witty and observant with much good, if occasionally stylised, acting, and an interesting use of flashbacks. It has something in commpon with Linklater's romance films.

It also includes splendid arguments about the tipping of bar staff and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches.

The Answer Man (2009): review: 5/10

In middle class Philadelphia, the charmless author of self-help books assists a bookshop owner and begins a relationship with a chiropracter.

Coy, somewhat preachy offering, albeit made with a definate efficiency.

Chloe (2009): review: 6/10

Icy Toronto: a woman hires a prostitute to discover if her flirtatious husband is susceptable to having an affair.

This, as we discover during the film, is a very foolish thing to do.

Well acted and swiftly directed, if somewhat formulaic.