A Manhattan project that’s so misguided
★★✩✩✩ (12, 89 mins)
Woody Allen
Timothée Chalamet, Elle Fanning, Selena Gomez, Jude Law, Diego Luna, Liev Schreiber ★★★★✩
(12, 86 mins)
Simon Bird
Earl Cave, Monica Dolan, Rob Brydon, Tamsin Greig
THE FANATIC
★✩✩✩✩
(18, 85 mins)
Fred Durst
John Travolta, Devon Sawa,
Ana Golja, Jacob Grodnik, James Paxton
CAN YOU admire the art if you have misgivings about the artist? Woody Allen has never been prosecuted over a 1992 allegation that he abused his adopted daughter Dylan Farrow. But rightly or wrongly, for me that old conundrum has hovered over his work ever since.
While I’ve watched all his new releases (and enjoyed a few of them) I’ve stopped revisiting his old classics.
Manhattan was nominated for two Oscars, but the 25-year age gap between Allen’s writer and Mariel Hemingway’s schoolgirl suddenly seemed rather alarming.
Sadly, or perhaps thankfully, that issue didn’t rear its head while watching his latest. Like his previous five films,
really isn’t worth worrying about.as it’s a comedy, its biggest failing is the shortage of laughs. But the most immediate problem is the way he fails to summon up a convincing vision of modern-day Manhattan.
Timothée Chalamet (who disavowed the film when the #Me Too movement took off) is Gatsby Welles who, as his name clumsily suggests, is a wealthy young intellectual.
He’s returned to New York from his upstate college to wow his ditzy Arizona-reared girlfriend Ashleigh (Elle Fanning) with fancy hotels and cocktail bars (big with the kids apparently).
After being separated by events, they end up in separate plots with different co-stars – Ashleigh with Liev Schreiber’s film director Roland and Gatsby with Shannon (Selena Gomez), the wise-cracking little sister of his ex-girlfriend. Scenes where Fanning’s starry-eyed student fawns over Shrieber’s middle-aged film-maker feel deliberately provocative but only Gomez feels like clever casting. Chalamet gives up trying to make us care about Gatsby and concentrates on aping the mannerisms and speech patterns of a young Allen.
The characters are unlikable and their opulent Manhattan apartments quickly lose their glamour.
But the young things’ cultural references, which include Gone With The Wind and Grace Kelly, make you wonder whether a twist is on the cards.
Are these kids actually octogenarian vampires, bitten in the 1950s and stuck in the bodies of their youth?
Sadly not.they are just misguided young stars stuck with a half-baked script and an out-of-touch director.
takes us from a director on the wane to one who is just finding his feet. Simon Bird, best known aswill from Channel 4’s teen sitcom The Inbetweeners, shows a very deft hand for comedy in his charming debut film as director.
Based on the graphic novel by Joff Winterhart and adapted by novelist Lisa Owens, Bird’s wife, the film uses stock comedy characters in surprisingly subtle ways. Surly 15-year-old heavy metal fan Daniel (Earl Cave, son of singer Nick) is looking forward to spending summer with his father’s new family in Florida. Then his dad phones to call the visit off.
Now Daniel will have to spend the school holiday in his suburban house in Bromley with his librarian mum Sue (a brilliant Monica Dolan). For the next six weeks, Daniel sinks deeper into depression while his relentlessly chirpy mother tries to gee him up.
He has one friend – Ky (Elliot Speller-gillott) who tries to affect the dandyish wit of Russell Brand.while Sue has a slightly fraught relationship with Ky’s New Age mother (Tamsin Greig) whose emotional support appears to come with a slightly competitive edge.
There are a couple of minor subplots – Daniel flirts with joining a band and Sue has a brief dalliance with Rob Brydon’s lothario teacher – but this is all about the relationship between mother and son.
Chirpy, cardigan-wearing Sue and morose, teen-in-black Daniel make a funny double act, but we begin to see them as two sides of the same coin. Gradually, Sue remembers her own formative years and Daniel begins to glimpse himself through his mother’s eyes.
Thankfully, the film avoids a big emotional finale.this low key comedy is far too British for that.
John Travolta hits a new low with
a dreadful stalker thriller written and directed by Limp Bizkit frontman
Fred Durst.
The Saturday Night Fever star rocks the worst haircut of his career to play Moose – a mentally ill autograph hunter whose love for an action movie star called Hunter Dunbar (Devon Sawa) takes a very unpleasant turn.
The plot has much in common with Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker, but Travolta’s hammy performance reminded me more of Simple Jack, Ben Stiller’s Oscar-baiting simpleton from Hollywood satire Tropic Thunder.