We know we’re in cut-price Sex and the City territory when it’s not iPhones that are getting top product placement billing but Clearblue pregnancy tests. A box was held aloft between the trembling fingers of Jess as the camera slowly caressed its glistening cellophane surface for a lingering close-up.
Director James Mangold says he "set out to create a world that feels completely real to the audience, yet is also deeply comic". Somehow he ended up with Knight and Day, which feels completely unreal and is modestly amusing in places. Tom Cruise, playing CIA super-agent Roy Miller, is so "real" that he can survive lethal assaults by swarms of assassins, plummet unscathed from high windows, swim underwater for miles and leap off flyovers onto speeding vehicles. Walking through gales of automatic-weapons fire, he suffers only a cut across his ribs.
She glides on the arm of a tail-coated swain into an elegant Belle Epoque drawing room. Music swirls, eyes swivel. And no wonder. Her thin black dress hugs a gamine frame, a look of masculine confidence rests on her face. Gabrielle Bonheur Chanel, better known to all and sundry as Coco, is making an entrance. Another one.
It's the eternal human-vampire-werewolf triangle, and at times it feels as though it really will go on for ever and ever. The story so far: in the small North-West Pacific town of Forks, where the sun hardly ever shines, a teenage girl called Bella loves Edward, a 100-year-old vampire who is perfect in every way, except of course that he drinks (non-human) blood, and has a tendency to sparkle on those rare occasions when the sun does come out. But, as we all know, girls like sparkly things, so that's OK.
It occurred to me halfway through Reunited that you could map the characters of This Life – the epochal house-share drama of the Nineties – on to those featured in Mike Bullen’s one-hour pilot feature and see little change in the terrain. All the tropes of modernity 2010-style – Google, Facebook, iPhones – were trotted into shot, but the premise was a dated one, while some of the supposedly edgy, zeitgeisty signifiers – white-painted bare walls, winking references to cocaine – were way off the pace. At least they didn't play any Portishead.
Charity begins at home - or maybe not - in Nicole Holofcener's lovely film, Please Give, which joins the superlative Greenberg as one of the beacons in a summer movie line-up given over to sequels, franchises and pitches that should never have got beyond the story board.
Just when you thought it was safe to go back to the musical theatre (Paradise Found, anyone?), along comes The Fantasticks, and we are returned to square one. How can this be, I hear you asking, given the record book entries clocked up by a Tom Jones/ Harvey Schmidt confection that ran Off Broadway continuously for over four decades before closing in 2002?
What happens when shlock is ennobled to something resembling a state of grace? The answer is on emotionally capacious view in Letters to Juliet, a by-the-books romcom that is raised beyond the ordinary, and then some, by the presence of the great Vanessa Redgrave. The English septuagenarian's lustre will matter not one whit to those drawn to the movie by Mamma Mia! alumna Amanda Seyfried, playing a fish-eyed observer of, and eventual participant in, the wonders wrought by love.
Cosi fan tutte’s arc of human experience is peculiarly effective when heard at Glyndebourne. With the mid-way picnic and wine in the setting sun, how much more aware are you of how easy it is as a day goes by to take leave of one’s senses and behave in a very silly way with serious consequences. Most seriously, to discover things about oneself that one did not want to know.