DVD OF THE WEEK
Tammy opens to the sound of Willie Nelson crooning Bring Me
Sunshine, but there’s precious little sunny comedy in what follows. That’s because Tammy herself is played by Melissa McCarthy, a perpetually angry loudmouth who thinks raised fingers and four-letter words are the height of wit. Tammy works in a crummy Midwest burger joint – or she does for the film’s first two minutes, at which point she gets fired for, well, just about everything. Returning home unexpected, she finds her husband wining and dining a neighbour and decides, like Thelma and Louise before her, that it’s time to hit the road. Enter Louise, in the shape of Tammy’s boozy gran Pearl (Susan Sarandon). Oh, what fun they have. If only we had some too. But the sad fact is that a few nicely sour one-liners aside,
Tammy is simply one lamebrained slapstick gag after another. I wonder what Oscar Wilde would make of Al Pacino’s take on his tragedy Salomé? That his Brechtian retelling of the tale (which comes with the documentary Wilde Salomé) is ambitious, certainly. But that despite Jessica Chastain’s marvellously rapacious turn in the title role, Al’s hammy Herod ensures the movie loses its head long before John the Baptist (Kevin Anderson) does his. Better Salomé, though, than
Belle, a real-life bustles-andcorsets costumer about the trials that faced Captain Sir John Lindsay (Matthew Goode) and his illegitimate mixed-race daughter (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), living in 18th century England. There’s no doubting that the hearts of director Amma Asante and writer Misan Sagay are in the right place, but it isn’t enough for a movie to be wellmeaning. It must be well-made – and no film whose dialogue consists largely of people telling other people what they already know so that we in the audience might know it too could possibly fit that bill.