Film review: Happy-go-lucky, Flashbacks of a Fool, Protege, Street Kings | Home

Happy-go-lucky

After the dour tale of Vera Drake, Happy-Go-Lucky is not altogether what one expects from Mike Leigh. Here we have perhaps the most crowd-pleasing, entertaining film of his career: Poppy (Sally Hawkins) is a London schoolteacher, irrepressible, colourfully-dressed and infused with a spirited optimism. She lives with her best friend, takes tango classes, helps the homeless and spreads cheer wherever she goes. When her bike is stolen, she begins driving lessons with the considerably more uptight Scott (Eddie Marsan) and their repeated clashes make for much of the narrative. Poppy is initially a startling character - so jinglingly happy that one wonders first whether one can survive two hours in her company, and second whether beneath all that chirp and chatter she might have some terrible secret. She doesn't. And despite all this, the film loses nothing of its fundamental Mike Leigh-ness. It's still rich and vivid and sinewy - a film that feels very much alive.
15, 118 mins

Protege

Derek Yee's movie starts well with a tumbling opening sequence showing the Hong Kong skyline, while deep in the city, drug addict Jane (Zhang Jing Chu) shoots up and passes out before her daughter strays into the room and takes out the needle. It's an abrasive introduction to a movie about drugs - the people who take them, the people who sell them, the people who try to prevent it. Undercover cop Nick (Daniel Wu) has been gaining the trust of upscale heroin dealer Lin Quin (Andy Lau) for eight long years. Now facing ill-health, Lin Quin wants to groom a successor, and selects Nick - a plot device that allows Yee to take us on a drug-themed tour of Hong Kong. It is an interesting idea of course, but one that cannot flourish here. The film seems trapped in a tricky place somewhere between documentary and movie - overgrown with facts, its drama is undeveloped.
18, 106 mins

21

A precocious sort of movie about an equally precocious university student. Ben (Jim Sturgess) aims to harness his maths spoddery and win big at the tables of Vegas, in order to fund his way through Harvard Medical School. He is joined by a gang of his similarly precocious peers, including the object of his affection, Jill (Kate Bosworth), and their oily maths professor Micky Rosa (Kevin Spacey) who's overseeing the project. It's when they get to Vegas that things go awry - both for the students and for the movie. For the former, it's the hard-fisted (though not entirely unassailable) reality of the gambling world; for the latter, it's the clatter and din of Sin City conveyed in a tired old montage of clips - Casinos! Consumerism! Cash! What could have been a very smart film swiftly becomes a souped-up version of that old adage, 'What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas'.
12A, 123 mins

The Orphanage

The most important lesson taught to us by The Orphanage is surely that horror is so much better when it happens to be Spanish. There are plenty of the usual ingredients here: the creaky house miles from anywhere, the good-natured couple, Laura (Belen Rueda) and Carlos (Fernando Cayo), and their adopted son Simon (Roger Princep) and the building's grim history that threatens to blight the milk-and-cookies happiness of the future - in this case, an exceedingly benevolent plan to transform the spooky old house (which is in fact the orphanage where Laura was raised) into a hospital for ailing children. There are also, of course, ghosts seen only by their son, and horribleness galore unveiled by a seance. But first-time director Juan Antonio Bayona somehow turns these weary plot devices into something quite unexpected and really rather poised, balancing supernatural schlock and family melodrama to great effect.
15, 106 mins

Street Kings

Despite the fact that he co-wrote the script, this adaptation of James Ellroy's novel fails to bring the vibrancy of his prose to the big screen - yet it does remain an energetic outing, full of blood, bullets and furious action. Keanu Reeves is Tom Ludlow, a detective with the LAPD who harbours a tragic past. He is also a member of a gang of uber-violent, crime-hungry police officers in the force who bound through the city bawling, cursing and firing rounds, led by the impressive Captain Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker). Ludlow, however, highly-trained and thuggish, is coming to realise that he is somewhat trapped by his own violent schooling, and that the city and police department offer a rather grizzly environment. As movies go, it's as daft as a brush - bloody, shouty, manly. But for all that, it's also boisterously entertaining, and Keanu proves rather awesome in the role.
15, 109 mins

Lonesome Jim

Whether you will warm to this movie or not depends upon your appetite for the kind of slow-paced, loosely-comedic portraits of ennui typified by Steve Buscemi's Trees Lounge. Personally, they're right up my street, so it's rather pleasing to see Buscemi back at the helm for this account of Jim (a splendidly monosyllabic Casey Affleck), who has moved to New York to be a writer, failed, and now returned home, tail twixt legs, to Nowheresville, Indiana. His parents remain much the same: mother (Mary Kay Place) is irrepressibly perky, father (Seymour Cassel) reassuringly curmudgeonly. His older brother is living at home too, following his divorce, and the family potters along in a somewhat distorted version of its younger self. Salvation comes, as it so often does, in the form of Liv Tyler, as the sumptuous Anika, a nurse and mother who's divorced and rather nice to have about the place. Nothing spectacular happens here - no dancing horses, no lame cat-suits or terrorist bombs, but Lonesome Jim is a rather fine thing all the same.
15, 91 mins

My Brother is an Only Child

This vibrant, flavourful film explores the way that politics can divide a family, telling the story of two Italian brothers living just outside Rome in the late 1960s. Manrico (Riccardo Scamarcio), the elder, is a blustery, confident chap with an eye for the ladies, who follows his father into a job at the local factory and becomes a Communist. The younger, Accio (Elio Germano), is of a more intellectual bent and intends to enter the priesthood, but when he is expelled from the seminary he embraces Fascism. It's a division, needless to say, that is not easily reconciled. There's a real punch and immediacy to this film. Its characters are full-bodied and well-textured, and while there are times when one wonders quite what the point may be (other than a nice trip down memory lane), it still remains a rich and hearty kind of movie.
15, 99 mins

Flashbacks of a Fool

Out in Hollywood, Joe Scot (Daniel Craig) has enjoyed a decadent lifestyle and a successful career that is now on the wane. After one particularly extravagant evening, he receives a telephone call from his mother informing him of the death of a childhood friend, an event that forces him, staring out at the Pacific Ocean, to return to his memories of the British seaside town where he grew up - his teenage self (played by Harry Eden) running amok in the arcades, sleeping with his unhappily-married neighbour (Jodhi May) to the distress of his sweetheart (Felicity Jones) and the tragedy that ensued. Ultimately he's compelled to fly back to Britain and confront his past. Flashbacks of a Fool is occasionally overly-styled and wants a more robust flavour, but it's enjoyable nonetheless, and whenever Craig hits the screen you are reminded of what a compelling star he is.
15, 113 mins

Leatherheads

In recent times, Mr Clooney has made an agreeable swerve towards directing (with the impressive Confessions of a Dangerous Mind and Good Night and Good Luck). His latest offering, Leatherheads, is an attempt to rekindle the pep and zing of those 1940s screwball comedies with a bouncy tale of an American football team. The man himself plays Dodge Connelly, the star of a financially troubled professional team in Duluth, Minnesota. As all the glamour dwells with the college teams, Dodge sweet-talks the star of Princeton (John Krasinski) into joining Duluth. It's a marvellous plan - until the two lock horns over Renee Zellweger. So it rolls on, without any particular purpose. Set in the era of prohibition, there are naturally plenty of nods to cops busting up speakeasies, and that's just how it feels when Leatherheads reaches its close - as if everyone is rollicking along having a jolly good time, and then it ends. In short, it's great fun, but without the usual Clooney fire.
PG, 114 mins

Funny Games

Michael Haneke's first English-language film is a remake of his own 1997 German production. He's shifted the action to America but retained the essential message: that our modern infatuation with violence as a form of light entertainment is an ill to be cured. Lovely civilised couple (Naomi Watts and Tim Roth) and their perfect little son are off for a sailing weekend at their idyllic country retreat. Alas! Who should be there to meet them but two dastardly sociopaths (Michael Pitt and Brady Corbett) equipped with instruments of torture and a chilling absence of apparent motive for the violence they inflict - these aren't grunting thugs high on cheap liquor, but articulate young men in pristine white gloves with a penchant for hurting folks. There is of course a worthy message here, and it is most artfully presented. The problem is that one leaves the cinema feeling neither educated nor entertained - the film treads a fine line between taut and unpleasant, and unfortunately it's one which Mr Haneke too frequently oversteps.
18, 107 mins

Lars and the Real Girl

This is a love story, of sorts, set in one of those blank, clapboard corners of small town America, where the sweet-natured, simple-minded loner Lars (the splendid Ryan Gosling) orders Bianca, a life-sized sex doll, via the internet. This is not, heaven forbid, to satisfy some base, carnal desires; rather he regards Bianca as his sweetheart. The strange thing is that the rest of the community comes to regard her in much the same way. This is a little bit weird-Americana-by-numbers, and it comes as no great surprise to learn that one of its creators was a writer for the TV series Six Feet Under. It's similarly quirky, similarly self-conscious, but similarly charming, nonetheless.
12A, 106 mins

Shine a light

Martin Scorsese's latest rock flick - he also made The Last Waltz, with the Band, and No Direction Home, with Bob Dylan - is essentially a Rolling Stones gig movie, filmed over two nights in New York in 2006. But what a gig movie! Jagger (then aged 63) is at his Dionysiac best, prancing, pouting, mugging and leering; Keith is all roguish charm, greeting Hillary Clinton's mother with a raffish "'Ello, Dorothy"; Ronnie loveable; and Charlie cool. The songs (Shattered, Sympathy for the Devil, Some Girls and many, many more) are terrific, while Buddy Guy, guesting on Champagne and Reefer, is all a big voiced bluesman should be. Intercut with old Stones interviews and a running joke about Scorsese not getting the set list, it's a gas, gas, gas - if 40 minutes too long.
15, 122 mins

Son of Rambow

It's the early 1980s, and in a school hallway somewhere in England we see an encounter between two markedly different schoolboys: Will (Bill Milner), whose deeply religious upbringing keeps him away from corrupting forces such as television, and Lee (Will Poulter), the school scallywag who stirs up a fight everywhere he goes. Yet they form an unlikely bond, based largely upon the illicit viewing of a bootlegged copy of Rambo: First Blood, and pledge to spend the summer creating their own interpretation of said action flick for a novice film-making competition. This is, as you might expect, a low-budget film, entirely without affectation or guile - and as a result it is utterly charming.
12A, 96 mins

The Kite Runner

Khaled Hosseini's novel about an Afghan refugee who, having landed in America, looks back on his childhood, receives its big-screen adaptation. Our narrator is a novelist, Amir (Khalid Abdalla), conjuring up his 12-year-old self (Zekiria Ebrahimi), his father Baba (Homayoun Ershadi), and his best friend Hassan (Ahmad Khan Mahmoodzada) - whom he will betray when Hassan is brutally raped and Amir does nothing to save him. Can Amir, in adulthood, repair the damage? In this tale of regret and the search for redemption, there is an appealing waft of Joe Wright's Atonement, but there is also a want of cultural enrichment - we never really get the flavour of Afghanistan that we do in the novel. It does make for a gripping movie, though.
12A, 122 mins