Eddie Redmayne

The Danish Girl

Director: Tom Hooper (2016)

Oscar winner Eddie Redmayne aims for more Academy gold as a transgender artist in this period drama.

As in The Theory Of Everything (2015) where he played scientist Stephen Hawking, the British actor gives a committed performance as Einar Wegener.

However he is outshone by Swedish co-star Alicia Vikander as his on-screen wife Gerda who offers strong marital support.

She acts with her eyes and he with his mouth. Some of his alarming lip quivering reminds us of his space camp turn in the terrible Jupiter Ascending (2015).

Gorgeous costumes, polished interiors and fresh exterior locations give Copenhagen of 1926 a living, picturesque appeal.

But it’s suffocatingly sincere and suffers from banal dialogue and a lack of conflict.

Plus director Tom Hooper inflicts on us the same close ups and curious framing which marred his films The King’s Speech (2011) and Les Miserable (2013).

Gerda producers portraits and wears the trousers while Einar paints landscapes and discovers he enjoys wearing frocks.

As he discovers himself more comfortable in women’s clothes than men’s, Einar adopts the alter ego of ‘Lili’.

Gradually she becomes his dominant personality and seeks to make a permanent transformation to womanhood.

Redmayne is a pretty boy in real life but no great beauty as a woman, especially when stood between to his gorgeous on-screen wife and her ballerina best mate Oola, played by Amber Heard.

Lili’s selfish behaviour fails to garner much sympathy and nor does she meet much resistant to her life choices. Society is indifferent to Lili’s plight. So was I.

★★★☆☆

 

Jupiter Ascending

Director:  The Wachowskis

There’s little that makes sense and less that’s interesting in this mega budget mess from the sci-fi siblings who many moons ago made the magnificent The Matrix.

There’s majestically designed spaceships, gadgetry and costumes but that counts for little due to flat characters, terrible plotting, woeful dialogue, incoherent action scenes and a vacuum of a performance by Mila Kunis in the title role.

Impoverished illegal immigrant Jupiter Jones (Kunis) and her squabbling comedy Russian family clean the houses of the wealthy Chicago elite.

Her cousin Vladie (Kick Gurry) – the scamp – persuades her to sell her eggs to a fertility clinic so he can buy a really big TV and she a telescope. But as she lies on the operating table she’s attacked by space imps.

Fortunately she’s rescued by a gun-toting former space legionnaire. Hunky man-wolf Cain Wise (Channing Tatum) is temping as a bounty hunter for interstellar bad guy Titus (Douglas Booth) – a member of the powerful cosmic dynasty, the House of Abrasax.

Cain and Jupiter find fellow ex-legionnaire Stinger (Sean Bean) beekeeping in a country shack. It’s these bees that identify her as a queen and she takes it in her sullen stride.

Stinger and Cain beat each other up for a bit until Stinger’s daughter is sarcastic at them. Then she’s forgotten about and there’s another kidnap attempt.

It turns out Jupiter is the reincarnation of a queen who bequeathed to herself her most prized possession – the planet Earth.

Meanwhile Titus is competing against his siblings Balem (Eddie Redmayne) and Kalique (Tuppence Middleton) to control Jupiter and her inheritance.

This trio of fine Brit actors deliver their lines with as much camp energy as they can muster – possibly out of frustration at the quality of the script.

Earth is the richest supply of raw product for the lucrative market in human genetic material, used to keep everyone in space forever young.

Jupiter Jones is a dull, gullible, joyless soul, blithely accepting of her promotion to queen of the galaxy and owner of Earth.

Alien worlds, space travel and terrifying creatures with murderous intent are all greeted with the same doe-eyed indolence.

Formalities dictate she has to truck on down to the dole office to get her stamp before she is formally recognised in her new position.

Desperate stabs at humour are provided by queues of simpering lawyers and corrupt bureaucrats, all performed with embarrassing grotesque campery which are not funny as presumably intended.

Terry Gilliam appears in cameo and must be appalled at the multi-millions of dollars squandered when he can barely scrape together pennies for his own far superior work.

This is a universe which has nudity and space orgies but no sexual energy. Kunis and Tatum share zero chemistry but she falls for him anyway, without hesitation, conviction or reason.

Tatum enjoyed a fantastic 2014 with wonderful, wildly different performances in 22 Jump Street and Foxcatcher. But here he’s lumbered with dodgy tattoos and scar tissue in a generic action role where he spends most of his time sternly whizzing about on flying space boots.

Cinematographer John Troll chooses to drown cosmic cityscapes in a honey glow which is thematically sound but wearing after a couple of hours. There’s nothing groundbreaking among the visual effects to wow us the way bullet-time did back in the day.

The orchestral score of Michael Giacchino tries manfully to suggest excitement but to no avail.

There’s battles, betrayals, kidnappings and then another battle; each more confusing, longer and repetitive than the last. Then there’s another kidnap attempt but despite how busy it all is, there’s little fun or excitement.

Not since The Phantom Menace have shenanigans in the inter-galactic stock-market seemed so dull.

★☆☆☆☆

The Theory of Everything

Director: James Marsh

This tasteful, tear-ridden and terribly British biopic of scientist Stephen Hawking is sadly uneven.

Despite some Oscar worthy acting this brief history of his life is too thinly stretched with the latter half not matching the emotional power of the first.

 Prodigiously clever student Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is at Cambridge University; cycling and studying for his PhD.

He meets the arty, angelic Jane (Felicity Jones) and they enjoy a picture postcard courtship amid the dreaming spires.

It’s an impressively physical performance by Eddie Redmayne and Jones is as excellent as always, great support is offered by David Thewlis as kindly don Dennis and Harry Lloyd as Hawking’s best friend Brian.

His growing clumsiness leads to a collapse and in hospital he is diagnosed with motor neurone disease.

While his mind stays sharp he will lose control of his muscles which will gradually waste away through lack of use.

He is given two years to live.

Moving you to tears with the sort of stiff upper-lip that built the British Empire, Jane refuses Stephen’s requests to leave.

They marry and as walking sticks give way to wheelchairs, his scientific career goes supernova.

Jane is poorly served; transforming abruptly from loving wife to challenged carer, signalling a sea change in their relationship.

However science and the story’s emotional momentum is abandoned for soap opera as the focus moves to marital infidelity and his growing international celebrity.

Meanwhile although we’re left to wonder how years after his terminal diagnosis Hawking is still alive at 72 as the careless script, happy to ponder the scale of the universe, never alludes to that particular mystery.

Nor are we close to knowing whether he’ll ever establish his unified theory of life, the universe and everything.

If only it had ended in physics not platitudes this could have been one of the films of the year.

★★★☆☆