Films ... with Tim Milfull
It’s Complicated (M)
Director: Nancy Meyers
Stars: Meryl Streep, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin
Rating: 3/5 120-minutes, screening from tomorrow, Thursday January 6
Alec Baldwin has been enjoying something of a renewal in recent years with his performance as the charming if vaguely sociopathic studio executive Jack Donaghy in Tina Fey’s excellent sitcom, 30 Rock.
In It’s Complicated – written and directed by Nancy Meyers (Something’s Gotta Give and What Women Want) – Baldwin stars alongside Meryl Streep as Jake, a baby boomer who suddenly realises that he may have made a mistake a decade ago, when he left Streep’s Jane for a much younger woman.
Aside from raising three children into adulthood, Jane has built a thriving bakery – shades of Julie & Julia, perhaps? – and pretty much healed over the scars of her failed marriage. When the family unites in New York to celebrate the graduation of Number One Son, Jane and Jake find themselves sharing a drink in a hotel, and later … a bed.
Suddenly, Jane is the Scarlet Woman, and Jake discovers what he might have lost. Writer-director Meyers has a well-developed talent for Hollywood rom-coms – if we can forgive the execrable The Holiday – and It’s Complicated is the kind of flick that will have the cinemas crowded with baby boomers keen to find a rom-com they can relate to.
Streep offers a good performance as the hapless Jane, while Baldwin’s shameless Jake is consistently amusing. If you can set aside some atrociously wet characterisation in their adult, but very sulky children, and the wasted Steve Martin as Jane’s new love interest, It’s Complicated is a pleasant enough diversion.
Clooney’s character no air head
Up in the Air (M)
Director: Jason Reitman
Stars: George Clooney, Vera Farmiga. Anna Kendrick Rating: 4/5
109-minutes, screening from January 14
Apparently, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) has one very clear, simple goal in life: to earn a certain number of frequent flyer miles. As a high-flying specialist executive who rarely spends more than forty days in his hometown of Omaha, Ryan is in the perfect position to realise his dream.
The rest of the year sees the highly organised, commitment-phobic Ryan jetting back and forth around the world, living in hotels, drinking in airport lounges, racking up points, and occasionally taking directions from his reptilian boss, Craig (Jason Bateman). But when Ryan is suddenly called back to base – and his dingy one-bedroom apartment – he learns that his dream is under threat; a fresh-faced Ivy-League graduate, still wet behind the ears, has convinced the company that there might just be a much cheaper way of getting his job done.
When he points out that there’s more to his job than simply setting up a video link, Ryan is saddled with an unwelcome sidekick – new media wunderkind, Natalie (Anna Kendrick) – and told to show her the ropes on the road.
Clooney is excellent as the vapid corporate funky who is willing to step in where cowardly bosses fear to tread, and Kendrick is perfectly cast as the icy twentysomething careerist with no idea about the harsh truths of the real world. But Ryan and Natalie are small cogs in a larger story adapted by Reitman and Sheldon Turner from Walter Kim’s novel about the devastation of corporate downsizing. I found Up in the Air powerful, engaging, and oddly tragic.
THE BINGE
Beautiful, terrifying and weird
I have something for everyone in this first chat about DVDs in 2010, with a kids’ show, a strangely beautiful and terrifying tale from Australia’s convict past, the latest weirdness from Korea, and a compelling documentary about the fashion industry.
Ponyo is the latest gorgeous film from the prolific anime master Hayao Miyazaki, whose Studio Ghibli prides itself on old-style, hand-drawn animation. This film is no exception, echoing Miyazaki’s now customary theme of the interaction of humanity and the environment.
In Van Diemen’s Land, Tasmanian writer-director, Jonathan auf der Heide took his film school short, Hell’s Gates, and fleshed it out into a feature-length exploration of similar territory: man’s relationship with his surroundings. But this dark tale – based upon Australia’s most infamous cannibal, Alexander Pierce – eschews the saccharine beauty of Ponyo, and focuses on the harsh wilderness of Tasmania, and the desperation of lost convicts.
Korean director, Park Chan-wook (of the Vengeance trilogy fame) uses his latest film, Thirst, to throw another hapless victim into an awful situation and see what happens. After a terrible accident, Father Sang-hyeon (Song Kang-ho, from The Host) suddenly has to learn how to manage as a vampire. His coping strategies include a perverse relationship with the desperate Tae-ju (Kim Ok-bin.
Finally, documentary-maker, R.J Cutler spends a month in the New York offices of Vogue magazine charting the publication of The September Issue, edited by the legendary Anna Wintour. The resulting film is surprisingly compelling, especially given that in the shadows of the woman whose life was portrayed in The Devil Wears Prada, there lurks a team of remarkably talented individuals.
