GRANDADDY WAS A BANK ROBBER
aren’t exactly cock-a-hoop at the idea, you know they’re going to come around. After all, if the worst comes to the worst and they end up in jail, ‘We get a bed, three meals a day and better healthcare than we do now.’
It’s almost impossible not to warm to the strong anti-bank sentiments that give Theodore Melfi’s plot a definite topical heft. Joe isn’t just angry with banks in general – ‘these banks practically destroyed this country, crushed a lot of people’s dreams, but nothing ever seems to happen to them’ – but his bank, the one that foreclosed on his mortgage, in particular. So naturally, that’s the one he wants to rob.
There’s lots to enjoy here – the relaxed banter is classy, the splendidly carnal late-life love affair that Albert enjoys with Annie (a game Ann-Margret) a hoot, and do look out for Back To The Future star Christopher Lloyd, who plays their gloriously confused contemporary, Milton. But it’s a slight shame the film is made by actor and occasional director Zach Braff, who has never directed a mainstream comedy before and, at the age of just 42, doesn’t really know what he’s talking about when it comes to characters twice his age. I’d love to have seen Clint Eastwood have a go; he may be 86 but he’s still near to the top of his filmmaking game (as Sully recently showed) and covered similar senior-age comedy ground in Space Cowboys.
All three principals are also familiar with this late-life territory – Arkin made the excellent Stand Up Guys and Freeman The Heist, while the tireless Caine is about to start shooting Hatton Garden. Here, as bank-robbery theory turns to practice and questions arise about whether our arthritic, prostatechallenged trio will get away it, I found the remake of The Thomas Crown Affair coming repeatedly to mind.
Given these actors’ distinction, popularity and venerable ages, it’s tempting to conclude by saying ‘we shall not see their like again’, but bear in mind one thing. George Burns, star of the original, lived to be 100 and was still making films until a couple of years before his death in 1996. Plenty of time, then, for Going In Style 2…
‘It’s almost impossible not to warm to the strong anti-bank sentiment of the plot’
something called BabyCorp. And when it discovers that adorable puppies are now proving more popular than babies, it clearly has to do something drastic: like sending down a baby who might look like a baby but is actually from management. He wears a suit, carries a briefcase and – unbeknown to his unwitting parents – speaks fluent business English.
Ah, that will be the Boss Baby, which explains why he’s voiced by Alec Baldwin, and why his seven-year-old brother, Tim – hitherto the sole apple of his parents’ eyes – isn’t pleased to see him at all.
This is one of the most contrived and complicated children’s cartoons you’ll see all year. But it’s colourful and well animated, modestly insightful about sibling rivalry, and babies and parenthood are reliable sources of fun.
It’s the keeping up that’s difficult.
More than 130 years after her death, Emily Dickinson would be astonished to discover that her life was considered of sufficient importance to justify a film.
For she enjoyed heartbreak- ingly little success while she was alive – barely 12 of her many hundreds of poems were ever published and she was plagued by ill health, a lack of confidence in her looks and the sheer misfortune of being born a woman at a time when American women were not only at the beck and call of their husbands, fathers and brothers, but also considered incapable of creating what one character here describes as ‘the permanent treasures of literature’.
For a strong-minded, intelligent and initially witty woman like Emily, the frustrations must have been unbearable. As
A Quiet Passion (12A) HHHH – a wordy, stagy but wonderfully atmospheric film – makes all too clear. Directing from his own screenplay, art-house favourite Terence Davies manages to inject laughter and life into what could easily have been a very dry and depressing story.
Cynthia Nixon makes a spirited and straight-talking Emily, even if knowing that the Sex And The City star is 50 does trip you up from time to time.
But there’s nice support from Jennifer Ehle as her constant sister, Vinnie, and from Catherine Bailey as her sharp-as-a-knife best friend, Vryling Buffam. And, yes, she does know that sounds like an anagram. Aftermath (TBC) HH feels like the aeronautical version of
Crash, but with only two story strands as opposed to the many that characterised the 2006 Oscar-winner.
In one, Arnold Schwarzenegger plays an ageing builder whose life is destroyed when his wife, daughter and unborn grandchild all die in a plane crash.
In the other, Scoot McNairy is the air-traffic controller whose carelessness may well have caused the accident. It’s tense, well made and Schwarzenegger is perfectly good, until the final 15 minutes when it falls apart, hampered by the creative decision to follow a tragic story arc plucked from real life.