A time-tested formula gets tantalisingly tweaked in Friends with Benefits, in which Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis attempt to confine their relationship to the purely sexual without the ick factor of emotions getting in the way.
The early gurglings of love, full of vulnerability and risk, thrill and discovery, are the very stuff of the movies. Romance is cinema’s basic currency. Whenever the familiar heroic faces of the big screen are not firing pump action weapons from the hip at CGI baddies, they are falling head over heels. So it is in Beginners, but with one or two eye-catching variants. Hal, just widowed after 44 years of marriage, now wishes to play the field. He’s 75. And as he informs his son Oliver, he is keen to give free rein to his long-repressed homosexuality.
What is it with Hollywood and education? Hot on the heels (shamelessly come-hither pumps, in fact) of Cameron Diaz in the lamentable Bad Teacher, we now get Julia Roberts as a disaffected babe who, we're told, is a teacher even though she spends precious little time in actor-director Tom Hanks's new film doing anything of the sort. Still, at least Roberts's unquenchable radiance lends Larry Crowne some measure of class; otherwise, here's another movie that merits detention for failing to make more than a passing detour in the direction of real life.
Foodies will have a good laugh at Love's Kitchen, the British rom-com that casts Simon Callow as a bibulous restaurant critic and Gordon Ramsay as, well, himself. But cineastes are likely to chuckle, as well, at the filmmaking-by-numbers predictability of it all.
As if the education profession wasn't beleaguered enough at present in America, along comes Bad Teacher, the Cameron Diaz vehicle dedicated to the proposition that the only sector of society more deserving of contempt than students is filmgoers. Here's a movie that asks you to believe that the scarily thin Diaz can gorge out on junk food and retain her figure, that a teacher would steal from her student's parents (during Christmas dinner, no less), and that "dry fuck the fuck out of me" is the new "you had me at 'hello'". Not quite.
Back in 2004, Russell Brand performed Russell Brand's Better Now at the Edinburgh Fringe, one of the best shows I have ever seen. In it he described his recovery from addictions to alcohol and drugs and how he had lost his job as an MTV presenter after one too many, er, misjudgments - coming into work dressed as Osama Bin Laden the day after 9/11, for instance.
Best sit upstairs in the Rose for their new As You Like It, Stephen Unwin's first Shakespeare production in the three-year-old theatre, modelled on the Elizabethan principle. The tilted perspective helps a great deal with the sparse little bit of scenery. From the ground stalls the hummock of leaf-strewn earth and the three oak branches hanging overhead seriously lack the forcefield of a Forest of Arden, hemmed in with black unadorned walls and exit doors.
There's nobody who plays Ashton Kutcher quite like Ashton Kutcher and, in this pleasant and undemanding romcom, he plays another cute guy whom all the girls (and boys of course) swoon over. This time he’s Adam, the sweet and rather vulnerable twentysomething son of Kevin Kline’s rascally-old-devil father, who's three-times divorced, still doing drugs, and chasing young women as his 60th birthday looms.
Just to fill in that blank left by the title, how do you know when you’re in love? It’s the question posed by every romantic comedy ever made, satisfactorily answered only by the good ones. James L Brooks, who wrote, produced and directed Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News and As Good As It Gets, has spent a lifetime in film looking at the problem from a variety of Oscar-winning angles.
Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.
Broadcast News gets reinvented for our ever more frivolous television age, alongside healthy enough dollops of Working Girl, The Devil Wears Prada and Confessions of a Shopaholic (among others) to make Roger Michell's latest Hollywood entry seem like one long, extended pitch. That this comes from the same man who in the past year or so has directed - superlatively - Rope and Tribes on the London stage itself testifies to the divisions between the commercial and the personal, between catering to the marketplace and feeding one's soul, that this movie, in fact, is about. The film itself may not seem plausible for a single minute, but the tensions it describes could not ring more true.