comedy

LATE NIGHT

Cert 15 102mins Stars 3

Tune into this comedy-drama to watch Emma Thompson dig deep into her stand-up comic roots to compensate for the deficiencies of a well-intentioned but tame and clumsy script.

The two-time Oscar winner plays a TV chat show host whose ratings slump threatens the shutdown of her career, so in desperation she employs an inexperienced woman of colour to freshen up her writing team of entitled whinging white guys.

Scriptwriter and actor Mindy Kaling plays the eager Molly Patel, and her screenplay draws heavily on her own experience of being a ‘diversity hire’ as a writer of the US version of TV’s The Office.

However her millennial point of view patronises Thompson’s character and age group, by suggesting a middle-aged woman twenty year high profile media career wouldn’t comprehend the importance of social media.

Important points are made about employment gatekeeping and inequality, but for a room full of supposed comedy writers, it’s insufficiently funny.

 

 

 

 

MAMMA MIA! HERE WE GO AGAIN

Cert PG 114mins Stars 4

This unashamedly feel-good sequel to 2008’s musical box office chart buster is another sequinned celebration of sisterly love and the unbreakable bonds of motherhood.

With the original pulling nearly half a billion pounds at the global box office, this sticks rigidly to the successful formula.

So once again the irresistible platinum-plated pop tunes of ABBA set the tone for this flamboyant escapist fantasy, which sees the original cast reunite in a split storyline which flicks between events now and from twenty five years ago. 

In the present Amanda Seyfried is organising her Greek island hotel’s grand opening night, and frets about her relationship with Dominic Cooper. Meanwhile a deliciously lusty Christine Baranski and a lovelorn Julie Walters banter for space alongside Colin Firth, Stellan Skarsgard and Pierce Brosnan.

Bless the former 007, he still can’t carry a tune in a bucket but that doesn’t stop him from manfully trying.

There’s a conspicuous deficit of Meryl Streep as Seyfried’s vivacious screen mother, Donna. However the younger version of the character is played in the earlier timeline by Lily James, and the former Downton star treats us to a barnstorming turn worthy of Streep herself.

Bristling with defiance, optimism and enthusiasm, we see how Donna meets a trio of buff and eager suitors who become responsible for the confusion surrounding her daughters parentage.

All this turning back time sets up a show-stopping singing turn by the ever fabulous Cher, who unlike much of the cast, has the advantage of being a bona fide vocalist. It’s one of many preposterous and crowd-pleasing scenes, my favourite of which is set at sea and best described as Dunkirk with a disco beat.

This brazen and cheerfully loopy sense of fun mingles with heartfelt multi-generational bonding and the pains of summer loving.

Among the barely choreographed mass dance-alongs and ill advised attempts at singing lurks a finger so firmly on the pulse of its intended audience it was rewarded at the packed-out world premiere with an all singing and dancing ovation. 

Mamma Mia 2’s manic determination to give you a good time is relentless. I’m not saying it’s a great movie, but if you’re in the mood for irresistible sun-kissed feel good poptastic silliness then it’s terrifically entertaining.

LOVE OF MY LIFE

Director: Joan Carr-Wiggin (2017) BBFC cert: 15

 

One shouldn’t make jokes about cancer and this glacially paced farce certainly succeeds in failing to make us laugh.

Devoid of wit, mirth or ambition, it’s a malignant, morbid and mawkish misfire, unrelentingly unfunny, staggeringly awful and too predictable and painful to endure.

It stars three refugees you’ll recognise from classic comedy, Four Weddings And A Funeral, in John Hannah, James Fleet and Anna ‘Duckface’ Chancellor. The latter in particular is deserving of so much better material.

She plays middle aged mother and architect, Grace, who believes she has only four days to live before she undergoes an operation to remove a brain tumour.

Her arrogant and smug ex husband turns up declaring undying love and wanting to rekindle their romance. Her current hubby is a dithering drunken idiot, and doesn’t seem too put out.

It’s set and filmed in Canada, presumably for tax relief purposes. It speaks volumes even the British film industry wouldn’t stoop to funding this nonsense.

★☆☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

Sing

Director: Garth Jennings (2017) BBFC cert: PG

This giddy animated musical comedy is stuffed with silly sparkling fun and will make you grin until the top of your head falls off.

Produced by the inspired creators of the Minions Movie and The Secret Life of Pets, it’s a gloriously mad musical mashup of TV’s The X Factor and Gene Wilder comedy The Producers.

Buster is a cuddly Koala whose theatre is going to be closed by the bank unless he has a hit show. He advertises a singing competition but a typo means the winnings are far more than he can afford.

As creatures of every stripe and hue perform a dizzying number of pop, rock and soul tunes, the story squeezes in bank robberies and car chases among the first night nerves and pushy showbiz parents.

The animals are stuffed with Judy Garland’s ‘lets do the show right here’ spirit and just about keep Buster’s show on the road. Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Hudson are among those providing the pipes.

★★★★☆

@ChrisHunneysett

Office Christmas Party

Directors: Josh Gordon, Will Speck (2016) BBFC:

Jennifer Aniston does what she can to be the life and soul of this tepid festive comedy but she only succeeds in putting everyone else to shame.

As Carol the boss from hell, in killer louboutins she strides into the under achieving Chicago branch of her data firm and threatens to sack everybody, as well as cancelling everyone’s bonus.

The goofy T. J. Miller plays her childish brother Clay. As the boss of the under fire office, he decides to save his employees by throwing an apocalyptic party to impress an important client and so hit his sales target.

Redundancy is an appropriate theme. There’s a nerdy IT guy, an angry customer relations bloke, and an escort selling party favours. A bloke dressed as Jesus is given the best line.

The more the booze flows, the quicker the plot runs dry. A weak script resorts to a car chase and the cast ad-lib to fill the gap where the jokes should be.

Sadly Aniston is soon ushered off stage and we’re left with Jason Bateman and Olivia Munn and their dull romantic subplot.

Kate McKinnon off-kilter delivery was the highlight of this year’s Ghostbusters reboot but she contributes little to the party spirit as a farting HR officer. There’s no need to RSVP.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

Moana

Directors: Ron Clements, John Musker (2016) BBFC cert: PG

If you thought Zootropolis (2016) was this years high water mark of Disney animation, this awesome ocean going adventure leaves it in its wake.

The sturdy story is streamlined for efficiency, ferried along at pace by by toe-tapping songs and buoyed by a sea so gorgeous you’ll want to dive in.

Newcomer Auli’i Cravalho demonstrates powerful pipes and a sparky spirit as our heroine, Moana. It rhymes with Joanna. She’s the headstrong sixteen year old daughter of an overly protective Pacific island chief.

To save her island from disaster and find her own sense of identity, Moana must brave the open sea and combat storms, pirates, and a lava monster.

Moana is accompanied by a shapeshifting trickster Demi-god, Maui. Voiced by Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, the outsized physique of the former wrestling champ is strangely less ridiculous as a cartoon than it is in reality.

Nicole Scherzinger and Rachel House play Moana’s mother and grandmother, Jemaine Clement adds a touch of camp as a bling-tastic killer giant crab.

Moana is very much in charge of her own destiny as she runs, dances, jumps, climbs, sails and fights. There is a squabbling sibling rivalry with Maui but never a hint of romance. Moana is fighting for her independence, her tribe, the environment, and her future.

The messages of the importance of challenging personal and career boundaries are never laboured. They’re an integral part of the story, not something ungainly and bolted on. If arbitrarily appointed tests are your thing, Moana turns to her grandmother for advice meaning the Bechdel test is passed with flying colours.

Combining elements of classic films such as Aladdin (1992), and The Sword In The Stone (1963), this musical mystical folktale is a joyous tidal wave of fun which will leave you with absolutely nothing to Moana about.

★★★★★

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

Bad Santa 2

Director: Mark Waters (2016) BBFC cert: 15

Where the original Bad Santa (2003) was a fresh feast of ferocious bad taste, this smells of stale beer and leaves a sour taste in the mouth.

It’s been 13 long years since Billy Bob’s Thornton’s drunk safe cracker first stumbled across our screens. That’s a year longer gap than the one between the recent Bridget Jones threequel and its predecessor.

Whereas Bridget Jones’ Baby (2016) improved on Bridget Jones: The Edge of Reason (2004), Bad Santa 2 fails to recapture the coarse Christmas magic of its predecessor.

The original cast of Thornton, Tony Cox and Brett Kelly return, with a tattooed Kathy Bates and a rampant Christina Hendricks as added value elements. The cast gamely debase themselves in pursuit of gags and back alley sex. That isn’t and is a euphemism. You can take it either way.

As perma-drunk Willie T. Stokes, Thornton’s dead pan drawl almost makes this worth seeing. But Cox and Kelly are stuck on repeat, Bates enjoys her performance more than we do and poor Hendricks receives the butt of the worst writing. As a bad girl gone good going bad, the star of TV’s Mad Men plays a punchline to a non-joke in search of a character.

Stokes teams up with his mother and his former partner to rob a Chicago charity. There’s no honour among thieves and are soon plotting against each other. Thin jokes are stretched over the lightest of plots and the cynically ageist, sexist, sizeist, racist and foul mouthed dialogue confuses abuse with wit.

Everyone involved should be put on Santa’s naughty list.

★★☆☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

Bridget Jones’ Baby

Director: Sharon Maguire (2016) BBFC cert: 15

Fans of the UK’s favourite singleton will cheer at this amiably entertaining and almost touching third entry in the romcom franchise.

Renee Zellweger returns as an older, wiser and sadder but still loveable Bridget. The Texan’s talent and charm give the uneven and scattershot script a depth it doesn’t deserve. Her assured underplaying is especially welcome in a restaurant scene of excruciating embarrassment.

Helen Fielding based her original Bridget Jones Diary newspaper column on Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice (pub. 1813). Books and films followed with great commercial success.

Having Fielding, Dan Mazar and Emma Thompson contributing conflicting styles of humour to the script causes unresolved tensions between scenes. Plus there is again a grating change of politics between those found in the source material and some of the broader gags.

It’s not one should expect Austen levels of wit from this generally light-hearted romp, but there is a huge departure from the author’s social concerns in order to land a few punchlines. Austen was highly critical of a society where the second class status of women made them financially reliant on men and forced them to seek a ‘good’ marriage. In Bridget’s world finding a rich man is one what does for sport, not necessity.

Fielding astutely includes her comic standbys of a Bridget film. There is a breathy voice over, an obsession with sex and alcohol, a grand resignation, swearing kids and eccentric OAPs. The famous diary has been replaced by a laptop. It’s all as cosy as one of Bridget’s famous Christmas jumpers, which also make an appearance.

Thompson won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for her adaption of Austen’s Sense and Sensibility (1995. Novel pub. 1811). Presumably she wrote her scene stealing role as Bridget’s maternity doctor, the only consistently Austen-like female character on show.

The brief moment when the tone threatens to take a dark almost Dickensian turn also suggests Thompson’s fingers in charge of the keyboard. This plays far better than Fielding’s indulgent, ill conceived and seemingly Richard Curtis inspired cameos, Italian stereotypes and pratfalls. Having said that, Thompson isn’t afraid to lift a joke popstar Robbie Williams used on Graham Norton’s chat show, during an edition on which she also appeared.

Thompson’s deftly drawn and waspish character is hugely at odds with the presumably Mazar scripted sequence featuring a distressed and suddenly helpless Bridget. Our heroine relies for rescue on a pair of men for transport, only to find their way blocked by a parade of breast baring radical feminists.

At this point all pretence of Bridget as a modern, independent woman is abandoned for cheap gags and a Cinderella subtext. This moment also sees the flowering of another subtext as Bridget’s vagina is reduced to a conduit for a closeted bromance.

In the film’s defence there is a strong if ham-fisted appeal for inclusivity. There is also a decent Margaret Thatcher joke, though not at the Iron Lady’s expense.

Having been nominated for an Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay for co-writing Baron Cohen’s Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan (2006), it’s easy to speculate which elements Mazar contributed. More recently he wrote the Zac Efron/Robert DeNiro gross out comedy Dirty Grandpa (2016).

The film opens in a reassuringly familiar fashion and will immediately win old fans over. Although now a successful if accident prone TV news producer, Bridget celebrates her 43rd birthday alone, drinking chardonnay and listening to her signature tune ‘All By Myself’,  by Eric Carmen.

After a couple of one night stands, the occasional wanton sex goddess finds herself pregnant and unsure whom the father is. One possible parent is Jack Qwant, a billionaire mathematician and internet dating guru at a music festival. American TV star Patrick Dempsey is vanilla at best.

The other is her former lover, the now married but still uptight human rights lawyer, Mark Darcy. Bridget and he bump into each other at a memorial service for his erstwhile and wonderfully louche love rival, Daniel Cleaver.

The absence of Hugh Grant’s Cleaver is keenly felt. Colin Firth’s grumpy and lacklustre performance as Darcy suggests he is pining for Grant’s light comic touch to rub up against.

Jim Broadbent and Gemma Jones offer game support as Bridget’s parents alongside franchise favourites Celia Imrie, Shirley Henderson, James Callis and Sally Phillips.

It all ends in champagne as our heroine becomes the sort of person she once purported to despise. A late and predictable plot twist suggests a fourth film is not out of the question.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

 

Cafe Society

Director: Woody Allen (2016) BBFC cert: 12A

In his latest comedy drama, writer/director Woody Allen serves up his hallmark witty lines and jazz soundtrack with a sumptuous 1930’s glamour.

Flitting between LA and the Big Apple, the plot turns on a love letter written by legendary Hollywood lover, Rudolph Valentino.

A multitude of deftly sketched characters breeze through a revolving door of family dinners, weekend brunches, pool parties and nightclub cocktails.

Between the name dropping, back stabbing and infidelity, several murders occur and there’s an entertaining encounter with a prostitute.

Kristen Stewart stars as Veronica, a down to earth secretary involved in a love triangle with her boss and his young gopher. Steve Carell plays Phil, a powerful Hollywood agent while Jesse Eisenberg is his neurotic New York nephew, Bobby.

The latter essays the role Allen would once have played himself. Wisely the veteran filmmaker remains behind the camera and engineers a nice turn of mood from breezy romance to poignant longing.

Cafe Society is a pleasant place to while away a quiet afternoon but it’s extreme familiarity may not encourage you to return in a hurry.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett

 

Sausage Party

Director: Conrad Vernon, Greg Tiernan (2016) BBFC cert: 15

Supermarket foodstuffs come to life and take on a mind of their own in this saucy animated comedy.

The  cheerfully offensive stoner humour is stuffed with racial and religious stereotypes indulging in an orgy of sex, booze and drugs. It’s an acquired taste and bound to offend many, but once it gets cooking on gas it offers some bite-sized satisfaction.

Each evening the products sing to celebrate the day they’ll be picked from the shelves and taken out to ‘the great beyond’ by the gods of the aisles, the customers.

However when a hot dog sausage and his bun discover their real purpose in life, they struggle to convince their friends of the truth.

They’re also being chased by the Douche, a feminine hygiene product who wants revenge for the thwarting of his plan to reach the afterlife.

Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jonah Hill, James Franco and Michael Cera provide the voices with Salma Hayek plays a tacos looking to spice up her life.

Defiantly and unapologetically rude from the off, this is an adult treat and definitely not one for the kids.

★★★☆☆

@ChrisHunneysett