Internet comedy a mixed bag
Mr Stein Goes Online (M, 101mins) Directed by Stephane Robelin
In French with English subtitles.
Two years after death ended his 50-year-marriage, Pierre (Pierre Richard) has struggled to move on.
Increasingly worried, his family implore him to at least leave the house occasionally and maybe even enjoy himself once-in-a-while.
‘‘You’ve gotten so stingy,’’ his daughter complains.
‘‘At least you’ll have an inheritance,’’ he splutters back, before offering up another stinging rebuke of his own. ‘‘What’s unhealthy is my granddaughter having to move home because her partner is jobless.’’
It’s true Alex (Yaniss Lespert) hasn’t been able to follow up the publication of his first short story with anything more secure. Frustrated, girlfriend Juliette (Stephanie Crayencour) volunteers him to help Pierre install the internet so he can at least bring the world to him.
There’s one rule, Alex cannot to reveal who he really is to the septuagenarian. That means having to bite his tongue when Pierre extols the virtue of Juliette’s previous partner in comparison to him.
Alex faces a more pressing dilemma though when Pierre discovers the joys of online dating websites. After ‘‘borrowing’’ a photo of the younger man, Pierre organises a rendezvous in Brussels, but needs Alex’s presence as well, ‘‘just to represent me for one evening’’.
With an obvious debt to Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, this cross-generational Frenchlanguage comedy (whose original French title translates as the less lyrical, but more informative A Profile for Two) plays out all the potential farcical situations the premise lends itself to.
Writer-director Stephane Robelin (2011’s All Together) story though never outstays its welcome and his two male leads spark up a nice chemistry. However, the female roles seem rather underwritten and disappointingly one-dimensional.
Recommended for those who like their comedy broad and their more mature cinematic characters brazen. Kodachrome (M, 100 mins) Directed by Mark Raso ★★★
A record company A&R man is hanging on to his career by his fingernails.
He promises his boss that he can sign a very sought-after young band. Only minutes later, a young woman turns up claiming to be his long estranged Dad’s nurse and PA. Dad – who was once an internationally feted photographer – is on his last legs, she says, but he is proposing a cross-country drive to drop off a package of Kodachrome film to be developed, at the very last store in the US that still provides the service, in the very last week it will still be open.
"No chance,’’ says junior, fairly ablaze with petulism. But, since Dad’s business manager also has contacts with the band he needs to save his career, junior comes around.
And a three-way road trip of sorts is under way, with Ed Harris, Elizabeth Olsen and Jason Sudeikis in the leads and a serviceable selection of American characters filling out the supports.
Director Mark Raso – who made the quite lovely Copenhagen in 2014 – directs Jonathan Tropper’s script with plenty of flourish and some accomplished movement and framing. But no amount of film-making skill will make Kodachrome credible or engrossing.
Yes, Tropper’s screenplay is based on a tiny kernel of truth. There really was tiny business in Kansas that became the last shop in the world to process Kodachrome film. But the unoriginal drama Tropper ladles over that thin base is too lumpen and predictable to function.
The only thing really holding the slightly clapped-out premise together is a mesmerising shift from the apparently infallible Harris who’s playing a mean old man but seems unafraid to be just that. There’s no ‘‘lovable old rogue’’ twinkling behind Harris’ eyes here. Just an occasionally foul and unapologetic man we struggle to connect with.
Opposite him, Sudeikis puts in a performance that might be good enough for TV drama, but doesn’t really light up the big screen anything like he should, given that he appears in nearly every scene and the film is ostensibly his to carry.
More problematic is that writer Tropper chooses to have Sudeikis and Olsen hit the sheets together.
Olsen plays ‘‘Zooey’’ (really?) as a level-headed young woman but Sudeikis’ middle-aged divorcee never seems anything more than a whinging man-child. Sudeikis does make Matt a credible character, but doesn’t get within a long day’s walk of making Matt shaggable.
It’s also impossible not to be reminded of Alexander Payne’s Nebraska – which was clogging up the award’s nominations lists only four years ago.
Kodachrome apes a lot of that film’s beats and moments, but completely misses the stripped back integrity Payne and his lead Bruce Dern located.
Give me the choice between watching Nebraska for the 10th time tonight, or Kodachrome for the second, and I’ll race you to the nearest video store, how ever far away that may be.