Adult Life Skills

Jodie Whittaker feels at home in the shed that is as cluttered as the TARDIS.

(2016) Dramedy (Screen Media) Jodie Whittaker, Lorraine Ashbourne, Brett Goldstein, Rachel Deering, Eileen Davies, Alice Lowe, Edward Hogg, Ozzy Myers, David Anderson, Andrew Buckley, Christian Contreras, Alfie Wheeler. Directed by Rachel Tunnard

 

In 2018, British actress Jodie Whittaker made history becoming the first female Doctor in the beloved sci-fi series Doctor Who. Before that, she was largely unknown other than appearances on the British TV show Broadchurch and the independent sci-fi flick Attack the Block. She also did indie films like this one which opened in the UK two years ago.

Anna (Whittaker) is days away from her 30^th birthday and she’s stuck in a garden shed. Not literally; she’s been using it as a studio for her short films of her thumbs made up as astronauts on a doomed space trip in which they are crashing into the sun. Life must feel a lot like that to Anna; she used to make little videos with her twin brother Billy (Hogg) until he passed away unexpectedly. She essentially lives in the shed which sits on her mother’s property in West Yorkshire. Occasionally, she forgets to bring in clean clothes with her and so has to make a mad dash to the house half-naked to get some.

This has been her living arrangement for some 18 months since her brother died and her mum (Ashbourne) is sick of it. She desperately wants her remaining daughter to move on and start living her life again. Anna’s grandmother (Davies) is a little less frantic about it than her daughter who seems bound and determined to make matters worse but still she knows her granddaughter needs to make changes, although the grandmother thinks a good shagging is all Anna needs.

Brendan (Goldstein), a work colleague (Anna works at an outdoor activities center part time) would dearly love to supply Anna with just that but Anna has decided in her head that Brendan is gay. Brendan is not but he is a realtor who is enlisted by Anna’s mum to find a cheap flat for her daughter which turns out to be a disaster; most of the properties that Anna can afford are absolutely hideous.

When Anna’s best friend Fiona (Deering) returns from travelling, she also tries to kickstart Anna’s life with some success but things really start to change when she meets Clint (Myers), a young cowboy-obsessed boy who is just as quirky as Anna who is undergoing a similar trauma to the one that Anna suffered and the two begin to identify with each other but Anna is an expert at pushing people away. Will she ever find her way back to the land of the living?

The film not only serves as a treatise on grief but also as a paean to the deliberately weird. Nearly all the characters here are off-kilter in one way or another not unlike certain American indie films that star Greta Gerwig. Like those films, sometimes the quirkiness wears on the viewer and becomes almost forced but the good news is that it does only to a lesser extent. However, the thick Yorkshire accents used by the character can be incomprehensible at times; home viewers should definitely watch this with subtitles turned on. The dialogue though when you can understand it is actually quite clever; lines like one in which Fiona, exiting a pub, exclaims “It’s like The Wicker Man in there” can be quite brilliant.

A lot of Whovians are going to want to see this because of Whittaker and to be honest her performance is worth seeing whether you’re a fan of the series or not. It’s a very different role and some of her fans from the venerable BBC sci-fi show may not be able to accept her in a role like this. Anna is far from the self-assured and brilliant Doctor; she is a woman-child coping with an overwhelming tragedy and not always doing it well. In the hands of a lesser talent viewers might just shut down watching Anna make terrible choices and do things that are weird in an eye-rolling sense but Whittaker’s charm carries the day. Like other actors who have taken on the role of the Timelord, she has enough screen presence to continue with a career that transcends the TARDIS; I wouldn’t be surprised if she eventually gets lead roles in franchise films or maybe even some Oscar bait films. She’s truly an incredibly versatile talent.

Like a lot of British films, the soundtrack is absolutely brilliant. The supporting cast is solid and the production design gives the film a cluttered but lived in tone. At the end of the day my recommendation is going to depend on your ability to tolerate quirkiness; those with low tolerances should probably skip this one but those who don’t mind a little off-beat with their independent cinema may well find this delightful.

REASONS TO GO: The film is blessed with a terrific soundtrack. Whittaker is sublime in a very different role.
REASONS TO STAY: The film rapidly goes from quirky to annoying. The dialogue is occasionally incomprehensible.
FAMILY VALUES: There is a fair amount of profanity as well as one sexual scene. There are also some fairly adult themes.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The feature film is based on a 2014 short that also starred Whittaker.
BEYOND THE THEATERS: Amazon, iTunes, Vudu
CRITICAL MASS: As of 1/19/19: Rotten Tomatoes: 74% positive reviews: Metacritic: 49/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: Rabbit Hole
FINAL RATING: 6.5/10
NEXT: Burning

Black Sea

Yo ho, yo ho, a pirate’s life for me!

(2014) Adventure (Focus) Jude Law, Scoot McNairy, Tobias Menzies, Ben Mendelsohn, Grigoriy Dobrygin, Karl Davies, Jodie Whittaker, Konstantin Khabenskiy, Bobby Schofield, Daniel Ryan, Branwell Donaghey, Sergey Puskepalis, Paul Terry, Sergey Kolesnikov, Sergey Veksler, Yuri Klimov, David Threlfall, Gus Barry, Paulina Boneva, June Smith. Directed by Kevin Macdonald

For ratcheting up the suspense, few venues rival that of a submarine. A handful of submariners, trapped in a metal tube below the sea where one tiny mistake, one critical bad break can quickly turn things into a bad day for those aboard.

Captain Robinson (Law) has been cashiered for the underwater salvage company he has worked for nearly 20 years, a victim of robotics. As it turns out, sending unmanned drone subs to the bottom is far less dangerous and far more practical – and economical – than sending humans to investigate wrecks. For his service, they give him a parting sum of 8,000 pounds. That’s just over $12,000 U.S. That isn’t a whole lot of gratitude.

Robinson has no family; they left him because he essentially was never home. His ex-wife Chrissy (Whittaker) and his son Martin (Barry) have lives much better than the one he could have provided them. He misses them both terribly.

So he does what any good red-blooded Scottish man would do; he finds the nearest pub and drags a couple of his fellow unemployed mates to drown their sorrows in a pint or six. And then, he hears something interesting from one of his fellow captains (Ryan): that shortly before being terminated, he located the wreck of a World War II Nazi U-Boat in the Black Sea in Georgian waters. That wreck is very likely the one that sank in 1940 carrying an enormous amount of Nazi gold that Hitler had been sending to Stalin to keep his then-ally in the fight. Because of certain geo-political realities, the salvage company hasn’t been given permission to bring the treasure up yet, but if it is what they think it is the prize is worth many millions of dollars.

So Robinson hits on the nutty scheme of salvaging the wreck himself with a crew of others. Daniels (McNairy), an accounting sort who was also let go from the salvage company, thinks that he can get financing from the mysterious Mr. Lewis (Menzies) so that they can rent and refit an old Soviet attack sub and go grab the treasure waiting on the bottom.

Aiding him are some of his mates as well as a few Russian submariners who know how to run the Russian sub; there’s also the son of a friend, Tobin (Schofield) who Robinson takes a fatherly interest in and the unstable Aussie diver Fraser (Mendelsohn) who is like a loaded gun in a crowded room but the best when it comes to salvage.

Taking the rickety boat down to the bottom is dangerous in and of itself but with the Russian fleet above due to the dubious legality of what they’re doing, things are a lot more dicey. What’s worse that as things start to get more real, some of the men begin to crack. They will have to work together just to make it back home, let alone get the gold which if they do find it, well, you can add greed to the equation that no matter how you write it means that not everyone is going to get out of this alive.

This is a reasonably taut and well-made thriller. Law makes for a pretty solid lead here, making Robinson a believable leader that would inspire most anyone to have confidence in him – when he’s not taking insane risks to get all the gold to the surface. Law has been making some interesting choices of late in the roles he’s been choosing, and this is a very good thing. He’s been challenging himself, playing a Cockney safe cracker, a manic Internet blogger, an ethically challenged doctor and an officious Russian military man along with this somewhat angry sub captain with a “Screw the Man” attitude and an access from deepest darkest Aberdeen.

Macdonald, who has directed such fine films as The Last King of Scotland shows he knows how to keep the tension nice and high. Once the sub sets sail, the movie really hits its stride although there are a few too many scenes of sailors sitting around and reminiscing about their lives. I don’t have a problem with character development which these sorts of scenes often provide but it needs to be more concise given the very tense atmosphere. Some of the information that you get about the background of the characters isn’t really germane to the plot and quite frankly, not all of it is all that interesting. We get that sailor A is lonely, or having financial difficulties, or loves the sea. We just don’t need to have a ten minute conversation about it.

There are a lot of twists and turns and while the plot twist isn’t necessarily innovative, it is nonetheless a big game changer and very welcome when it kicks in near the end of the movie. The script is well-written, giving very logical reasons to why certain things happen the way they do without having totally random events occur, or turn the captain into Superman. This is an example of a good sub thriller that is intelligent, well-written and still tense as all get out. This hasn’t gotten a whole lot of attention or support but it is certainly worth checking out. It’s no Das Boot – then again, what is? – but it is a satisfactory new entry into the genre.

REASONS TO GO: Some nice tension. Doesn’t always go the way you expect it will.
REASONS TO STAY: Should have trimmed about 20 minutes. Too many conversations about personal lives that add little value to the plot.
FAMILY VALUES: Lots of foul language, some fairly gruesome images and a bit of violence.
TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The sub used in the film is an authentic Soviet-era submarine which is normally moored in the river Medway in Kent.
CRITICAL MASS: As of 2/10/15: Rotten Tomatoes: 83% positive reviews. Metacritic: 62/100.
COMPARISON SHOPPING: U-571
FINAL RATING: 7.5/10
NEXT: Paddington

New Releases for the Week of January 30, 2015

PROJECT ALMANAC

(Paramount) Jonny Weston, Ginny Gardner, Sam Lerner, Allen Evangelista, Sofia Black-D’Elia, Gary Weeks, Macsen Lintz, Gary Grubbs, Agnes Mayasari. Directed by Dean Israelite

A brilliant young high school student watches a video of his 7th birthday party and is flabbergasted to see himself at the age he is now in it. Not long afterwards, he stumbles upon a mysterious device in the basement his late scientist father had been working on and realizes that it’s a time machine and the opportunity to make right in his life all that is wrong is too much of a temptation to resist. Little does he know that such accidents have consequences and those consequences might mean the end of existence, or at least of his existence.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and interviews here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Teen Sci-Fi Thriller
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for some language and sexual content)

Black or White

(Relativity) Kevin Costner, Octavia Spencer, Jillian Estell, Bill Burr. A mixed race child lives with her white maternal grandparents after her mother passes away and her father is unable to care for her due to his drug and alcohol problems. When her grandmother also passes away, the African-American paternal grandmother files for joint custody, something the white grandfather – having only his granddaughter left – can’t bear. As many things do in America, it becomes a racial issue as well as a guardianship issue.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: PG-13 (for brief strong language, thematic material involving drug use and drinking, and for a fight)

Black Sea

(Focus) Jude Law, Scoot McNairy, Ben Mendelsohn, Jodie Whittaker. A disgraced submarine captain discovers the location of a Nazi sub at the bottom of the Black Sea filled with gold; it’s only a matter of getting to it and taking the gold. He’ll need some highly specialized men but once they find their prize, greed and paranoia stalk the claustrophobic sub as the men realize that the fewer that make it back home, the more gold for each of them.

See the trailer, clips, interviews and B-roll video here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: AMC Altamonte Mall, AMC Downtown Disney, Regal Winter Park Village, Regal Waterford Lakes
Rating: R (for language throughout, some graphic images and violence)

The Loft

(Open Road) Karl Urban, James Marsden, Rachael Taylor, Rhona Mitra. Five married men, in the prime of their lives and successful in their careers, conspire to rent a midtown loft for use in extramarital activities. When they discover the body of a beautiful but unknown woman in the loft, they realize that one of them must be the killer. Paranoia and fear build, marriages crumble, secrets are revealed and friendships and loyalties tested and discarded as the hunt to find the killer before he strikes closer to home drives them.

See the trailer and a promo here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard (opens Thursday)
Genre: Thriller
Now Playing: Wide Release
Rating: R (for sexual content, nudity, bloody violence, language and some drug use)

Two Days, One Night

(Sundance Select) Marion Cotillard, Fabrizio Rongione, Catherine Salee, Baptiste Sornin. When a woman returns to work after a severe bout of depression, she learns that her co-workers will be voting as to whether to allow her to keep her job. She goes from person to person trying to convince them to allow her to work which would mean smaller bonuses for all of them. Cotillard received an Oscar nomination for her performance here.

See the trailer here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard
Genre: Drama
Now Playing: Regal Winter Park Village
Rating: PG-13 (for some mature thematic elements)

Wild Card

(Lionsgate) Jason Statham, Stanley Tucci, Michael Angarano, Sofia Vergara. A bodyguard in Las Vegas with a gambling problem – which is a terrible place to have a gambling problem – comes to the rescue of a friend who’s being beaten up by a sadistic thug, who in turn gets a beating from the bodyguard. Unfortunately, said sadistic thug is the son of a mob boss. Suddenly gambling is the least of the bodyguard’s problems.

See the trailer and interviews here.
For more on the movie this is the website.
Release formats: Standard
Genre: Action
Now Playing: AMC Loew’s Universal Cineplex
Rating: PG (for some action and scary images)

Attack the Block

John Boyega looks uncertain but his future doesn’t.

(2011) Science Fiction (Sony Classics) John Boyega, Nick Frost, Jodie Whittaker, Alex Esmail, Luke Treadaway, Leeon Jones, Simon Howard, Gina Antwi, Natasha Williams, Paige Meade, Maggie McCarthy, Franz Drameh, Michael Ajao, Sammy Williams, Karl Collins, Jumayn Hunter, Danielle Vitalis. Directed by Joe Cornish

 

In any invasion, people will defend their home territory with the kind of ferocity usually associated with rabid wolverines. For some odd reason, that ferocity increases the worse the neighborhood is. In fact, the kinds of places you wouldn’t want to walk alone in after dark are the places that are most fiercely defended by their inhabitants.

Walking alone after dark in a bad neighborhood though is precisely what Sam (Whittaker), a young nurse does. It’s a bad idea, even though the neighborhood is the one that Sam happens to live in and of course she’s approached by five thugs, led by the charismatic Moses (Boyega). They force her to give up her wallet and things look like they might just get worse for her when there’s an explosion – a meteorite hits a nearby car.

Normally that would attract a lot of attention, but it happens to be Guy Fawkes Day in England and there are fireworks going up like it’s the apocalypse – which it kinda is. You see it wasn’t just a meteorite; there was a creature in it. When Moses goes to investigate, the creature scratches up his face. Where Moses comes from (the block housing of South London) that’s a no-no, so Moses chases down the creature and kills it, allowing Sam to get away.

Soon there are more meteorites falling all over London and inside them are these…things, kind of like a cross between wolves and bears with glowing teeth (in fact, throughout the movie they are mistaken for big dogs) but these things can hover, as well as climb up sheer walls – and rip human flesh to shreds.

Moses and his gang have a lot more than an alien invasion to deal with; Sam called the cops on them so they are dodging the police, and they have brokered a deal with Hi-Hat (Hunter) to sell some pot grown by Ron (Frost), whose apartment contains a hothouse for growing the wacky weed that’s as secure as Fort Knox (in fact it is here where Moses leaves the body of the dead alien for safekeeping), but that deal is going south as Hi-Hat suspects that Moses is planning to start carving out his own territory in the Blocks – and where Hi-Hat comes from that’s a REALLY BIG no-no.

Moses and his crew – Pest (Esmail), Jerome (Jones), Dennis (Drameh) and Biggz (Howard) are now beset on all sides by angry cops, angry drug dealers and angry aliens, not to mention an angry nurse who now must ally with them in order to protect herself from the aliens. It’s going to be a long night…

Most alien invasion movies of late have been pretty awful, to say the least. This is one of the few bright spots. It’s fast-paced, clever, and well-written. Cornish, an English comedian who lived in this part of London, knows the rhythms of life there well and takes characters who are most often supporting cast, used to advance the plot or as designated victims. Here, we see their lives and their motivations more clearly. There’s a bit of social commentary inherent in that.

Cornish mostly cast newcomers or non-professionals, particularly in the teen roles. Most of them are about as well as can be expected with a couple rising above the rest – Esmail, as the aptly-named Pest, provides some counterpoint to the more brooding Moses and it is Boyega who seems to have the most potential. He reminds me of a young Denzel Washington; he has that kind of screen charisma and shows amply the ability to carry a film on his shoulders. He is both villainous and heroic in the same film; not in a 70s anti-hero kind of groove but more like a person growing and transitioning, doing what he has to survival-wise in an unforgiving element.

The creatures themselves are mostly practical effects, surprisingly – there is almost no CGI in this movie. They are amply intimidating and scary and they move in a lifelike manner (mostly because there are people in them thar suits). The explanation for their presence is pretty convincing; I appreciate that there were no government scientists to lead us by the nose; we’re as much in the dark as the kids on the block.

The movie starts off quickly and continues pretty much non-stop with action. The pacing is fast enough to keep us off-balance and to satisfy even the most attention-deficit afflicted. This is the kind of movie Battle: Los Angeles should have been but wasn’t.

WHY RENT THIS: A fun ride. Takes marginal characters and turns them into leads.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Somewhat amateurish at times. Slang can be hard to make out.

FAMILY VALUES:  The language is uniformly foul, there’s a good deal of violence and gore and some fairly scary alien creatures, plus some drug content; all in all, this ain’t no E.T.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: The mugging scene at the beginning of the film actually happened to Joe Cornish; he noted that the five muggers looked as scared as he was and afterwards he looked into the lives of gang members in the area and began coming up with characters for the movie.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: Considering that the film wasn’t what you’d call a big financial success, the DVD got a goodly amount of features on it, including an outtakes reel of the cast attempting to rap (with varying results) and storyboards of scenes that weren’t filmed for budgetary and scheduling issues.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $5.8M on a $13M production budget; the movie lost money during its theatrical run.

FINAL RATING: 7.5/10

NEXT: Mere Brother Ki Dulhan

Good

Viggo Mortensen has to keep telling himself he's not in Mordor anymore...it's worse!

(2008) Drama (THINKfilm) Viggo Mortensen, Jason Isaacs, Jodie Whittaker, Mark Strong, Steven Mackintosh, Gemma Jones, Anastasia Hille, Ruth Gemmell, Ralph Riach, Steven Elder, Kevin Doyle, David de Keyser, Guy Henry, Adrian Schiller, Tallulah Boote Bond. Directed by Vicente Amorim

 

We like to think we know the difference between right and wrong and given the choice between the two, will choose the former. That is the definition of a good person, isn’t it? Someone who always chooses the right thing over the wrong thing? Sometimes, the definitions aren’t so clear-cut.

John Halder (Mortensen) is a literature professor in Berlin in the late 1930s as the Nazi party is rising to power. He has written a book in which euthanasia was a theme and the higher-ups in the Party have taken it as a means of excusing the Final Solution, not that John knows any of this. What he dos know is that joining the Party – whose politics he objects to and disagrees with – can mean comfort and safety for his family. So he joins.

His best friend, Maurice Gluckstein (Isaacs) who happens to be Jewish, sees the inherent evil in Nazism that his friend John (shouldn’t it be Johann if this is in Germany?) obviously has turned a blind eye to. And John isn’t a bad man, he’s just doing right by his family?

But when you take one step down the rotten path, sometimes it becomes easier to take other steps. He leaves his neurotic brunette wife (Hille) for a blonde, Aryan student (Whittaker) who the party approves of. She is much more in tune with Party politics than his wife, who like her parents and his, see the transformation Germany is undergoing with horror. It isn’t until it is much too late that John realizes the evil he has bought into and for that kind of mistake the price is very high indeed.

This is based on a 1982 play by John Wrathall which I understand was staged in a very stream-of-consciousness, minimalist way. The storytelling is a little more conventional here (with a subplot about John’s abominable treatment of his mother (Jones) thrown in for good measure) but there are still holes in it. Part of what should make this an excellent subject for a movie is that there really isn’t much exploration as to why John turned such a blind eye to what his country was becoming. It seemed to be out of almost convenience – it was simply easier to go with the flow. It seems to be an over-simplified explanation from what I know of Germany from that era.

Also, the characters (other than Gluckstein, who is portrayed with marvelous zest by Isaacs) are mostly bland and somewhat  without much personality. John is supposed to be a brilliant man who is motivated out of expedience to care for his family, but what we get is a man who doesn’t much care about what is going on around him – neither do we, then.

To be honest, I’m probably a little bit harsher on the film than I might ordinarily be. If I am, it’s because the potential here is so wasted – this is a wonderful and important idea for a movie. It’s just not executed very well. There are parallels to what went on in Nazi Germany to how America responded after 9-11, so this is certainly something worth exploring, especially now. I just wish they’d explored it a little more thoroughly.

WHY RENT THIS: A very interesting discussion about good and evil and how sometimes the line between the two can be very thin.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Underdeveloped characterization and some shoddy plot development.

FAMILY VALUES: There is plenty of bad language and some adult themes which smaller children might not yet be prepared for.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Romola Garai was originally cast as Anne but withdrew in order to concentrate on her university studies. Jodie Whittaker took the part instead.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: Rather than having a commentary track, there is an interview segment that is nearly an hour long and includes many of the film’s cast and crew.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $1.6M on an unreported production budget; at best I think the movie broke even.

FINAL RATING: 5/10

TOMORROW: For the Love of the Game

One Day

Jim Sturgess finds that when he closes his eyes he really can't find Anne Hathaway's mouth.

(2011) Romance (Focus) Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson, Ken Stott, Romola Garai, Rafe Spall, Jodie Whittaker, Tom Mison, Heida Reed, Amanda Fairbank-Hynes, Georgia King, Emelia Jones. Directed by Lone Scherfig

Our lives are a series of 24 hour periods, stretching from birth to death. Taken as a whole, they form our life. Individually they may not have the same meaning, but it only takes a single day to change our lives forever.

Emma (Hathaway) and Dexter (Sturgess) meet on July 15, 1988 – the date of their college graduation in Edinburgh. They hit it off and almost have sex but it doesn’t quite work out so they decide to stay friends. Their friendship takes them through diverging paths in life; Dexter becomes a TV presenter whose mother (Clarkson) is ill and whose father (Stott) can’t stand him. Emma’s bright-eyed idealism gives way to world-weary cynicism as she gets stuck in a job she can’t stand. Emma and Dexter drift further apart as she struggles to find herself and he becomes lost in stardom.

They seem to be moving on into different relationships; Emma with Ian (Spall), a failed stand-up comic and Dexter with Sylvie (Garai), with whom he has a daughter Jasmine (Jones). Emma’s career begins to take off as a teacher; Dexter’s declines after a series of woeful teen countdown programs in which his growing addiction to alcohol and drugs begins to affect his work, while his age begins to slam doors in his face.

Soon it becomes evident to both of them that they are far better together than they are separately – the sum greater than the parts. Has too much water flown beneath the bridge for them ever to get together?

This is based on a book by David Nicholls (who also wrote the screenplay) and is directed by Scherfig, the Swedish director who in 2009 won acclaim for his movie An Education. This is a disappointment of a movie; one which has two of the most appealing actors in Hollywood and squanders them. It’s quite a shame too; if this had been executed better it might have been a solid movie.

The problem with the movie is the problem that comes from the novel it’s based on – the two main characters spend nearly the entire movie apart. The whole conceit of the movie is that we are encountering the two main characters on July 15th every year (or in some cases every second year) from the day they first meet. Because we don’t see the characters together as much, there is no time for them to develop chemistry together.

One gets the feeling that Hathaway has moved on from roles like this. She has Oscar-caliber talent, evidenced in movies like Love and Other Drugs. Emma is not a role really suited for her. For one thing it forces her to adopt both a Scottish and a Yorkshire accent, which drifts during the course of the movie. It never sounds convincing to my ear; quite frankly I think the movie would have been better served to have cast a British actress in the role (and there are a lot of good ones).

Sturgess has to play an absolute rotter at times and he pulls it off; his disarming grin and boyish good looks aiding him in his portrayal. I hope he continues to get romantic leads because he is uncommonly good at them. Clarkson, like Hathaway, is a very fine actress who again is saddled with an unconvincing British accent. She’s a fine actress but couldn’t she and Hathaway just have been re-written to be Americans? Or have British actresses cast in those roles?

A bit of a spoiler follows here although to any sensible moviegoer it won’t come as much of a surprise. One of the central moments of the movie is the moment when Emma decides that her feelings for Dexter are stronger than she admitted they were and that she truly loves him and needs him. It’s a moment that comes off abrupt and schmaltzy, going from “We’re friends and I don’t have any interest in you romantically in the least” to “You’re the love of my life” in a matter of moments. It’s like a car with bad brakes trying to stop on a dime.

Curiously, the movie gets better in a lot of ways from there, even if it descends into general romantic grab a box of Kleenex territory. Once Hathaway and Sturgess get more time together, the movie really elevates. It’s too bad for most of the first hour or so they’re too busy denying their feelings and saying to all and sundry that they’re just friends. Too much time hitting us over the head with the idea that they’re better together than apart – and then they don’t have enough time together to seal the deal. You never fully get the sense that there’s chemistry between the two.

I really wanted to like this movie because it has not only two of my favorite actors in it but also a director who has an exciting future ahead of him and a high-concept way of looking at a 20-year-romance. It should have come together but unfortunately for a variety of reasons it didn’t. All the beautiful Scottish scenery and longing wistful looks from a pair of attractive actors can’t save a movie from its own shortcomings.

REASONS TO GO: Beautiful scenery of Edinburgh and the north of England looks beautiful onscreen.

REASONS TO STAY: Never get a sense that the couple is actually good for each other. Relationship moves abruptly, a very jarring feeling for the audience.

FAMILY VALUES: There is some sexuality and a bit of nudity. There’s also a bit of violence, and a smattering of bad language. There is also some depiction of substance abuse, drugs and alcohol.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: In order to set the mood for the skinny dipping scene, Hathaway mooned Sturgess, unaware that there was an apartment complex behind her with many of the residents filming the shoot with mobile phone cams. To date, the footage hasn’t surfaced on the Internet which Hathaway has expressed gratitude to the complex residents whom she expressed had “class”.

HOME OR THEATER: A definite cuddling on the couch movie.

FINAL RATING: 4/10

TOMORROW: Takers

Perrier’s Bounty

Murphy, Whittaker and Broadbent stroll away from yet another catastrophe.

(2009) Gangster Comedy (IFC) Cillian Murphy, Jim Broadbent, Brendan Gleeson, Jodie Whittaker, Gabriel Byrne (voice), Liam Cunningham, Michael McElhatton, Domhnall Gleeson, Ned Dennehy, Patrick McCabe, Glenn Speers, Natalie Britton. Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon

Sometimes, you’re left in an impossible situation; one in which, either through your own ineptitude or through no fault of your own there is no good outcome. There are times when the lesser of two evils is to go medieval on somebody’s ass.

Michael McCrae (Murphy) is a small-time hood in Dublin who owes a thousand Euros to Darren Perrier (Brendan Gleeson), a big-time hood. He has sent a couple of thugs to inform young McCrae that they will return in four hours to collect – and if he doesn’t have the cash, they will break a leg. Four hours later they’ll break another leg. And so on and so forth until every limb is broken and all that’s left is to shoot him dead. Perrier doesn’t mess around, obviously.

At first McCrae seeks to get the amount from another loan shark known only as The Mull (Cunningham) but when that falls through, McCrae is left to the mercy of the thugs. He is saved when his neighbor Brenda (Whittaker) whom McCrae has had a crush on for ages, accidentally shoots one of the thugs.

This pisses Perrier off no end; he regards it as nothing less than a challenge to his authority. He authorizes a bounty on the head of the two of ten thousand Euros. Now McCrae are on the run along with McCrae’s dad Jim (Broadbent) who has had a premonition that he’s going to die the next time he falls asleep. With every hood in Dublin gunning for them, fleeing town seems to be the only option but that won’t be easy either.

For more than a decade gangster movies have made a resurgence in the UK and really for my money they are the best in the world at making them (although the Chinese have made some pretty intense gangster movies as well). This is not one that’s going to be at the top of the list, but neither is it going to be at the bottom either.

Murphy is a likable enough sort and he has the acting chops to go a lot farther in Hollywood than he has to date. He lacks that one vehicle to lift him over the top and make him a viable property over here; even appearances in the Christopher Nolan Batman movies haven’t done it for him yet.

Brendan Gleeson is as rough and tumble as they come and he’s done several turns as a bad guy, particularly in In Bruges (although audiences may know him best as Mad-Eye Moody in the Harry Potter films). He’s one of the best character actors in the business and lends a certain amount of cachet to any film he participates in. His Darren Perrier is quite an S.O.B. but Gleeson keeps him from becoming a standard paint-by-numbers villain by making him interesting and quirky.

Most of the rest of the mostly Irish cast (with the exception of Broadbent who is English and also one of the finest character actors in the world) aren’t well known in the States, although Whittaker, who plays Brenda with some spunk and verve should be and could be eventually (although she’s English too – hmmm). Still, there are solid performances all around and the movie is the better for it.

The main problem is that there isn’t anything that particularly stands out from other gangster movies. The idiom requires a hook of some kind; a lead character without a name, a shootout in a medieval town, a language spoken only by a few in the UK, a missing parcel. Something that is more than just trying to get away from the bad guys – although the movie isn’t boring by a long shot either.

The script is well-written and the dialogue is clever, so the movie is smart in its own right. It just doesn’t take any chances, which is a shame because it could have used a few risks. Still, it has a great cast and any movie with Murphy, Broadbent and Gleeson in it is worth watching.

WHY RENT THIS: Gleeson, Broadbent and Murphy are always wonderful and Whittaker does a terrific job as well.

WHY RENT SOMETHING ELSE: Not really very groundbreaking when it comes to gangster flicks.

FAMILY VALUES: There is an awful lot of violence (which you’d expect in an Irish gangster flick), a whole lot of swearing (which you’d also expect in an Irish gangster flick) and a smattering of drug use.

TRIVIAL PURSUIT: Fitzgibbon is currently completing his next film, based on the novel Death of a Superhero.

NOTABLE DVD EXTRAS: None listed.

BOX OFFICE PERFORMANCE: $167,938 on an unreported production budget; I’m thinking this probably lost a few bucks.

FINAL RATING: 6/10

TOMORROW: Rio