The first thing you need to know about It’s Complicated is that it isn’t very complicated at all. The plot, the characters, the gags (dear God, especially the gags) are all perfectly comprehensible – even to those of us with only modest intellectual faculties. Rest assured, at no point will anyone be talking over your head in this one.
Nancy Meyer’s previous film was The Holiday, which easily remains in the bottom ten of the 1200+ films I have reviewed in these pages, so It’s Complicated earns a single point for not being that bad, but that’s where I run out of positives.
Meryl Streep plays Jane, successful baker and businesswoman, who has a drunken one-night-stand with her rogue-ish ex-husband, played by Alec Baldwin. He thinks that they should try again. She isn’t so sure – mainly because he is now married to the woman he left her for ten years earlier and she really doesn’t want to be the “other woman” to the “other woman”.
I’m not normally one to make box office predictions but I have a gut feeling that The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls is going to be massive. It’s an inspiring New Zealand story, well told with plenty of humour and music, and the literally irrepressible Topps’ lust for life shines like a beacon throughout. Using plenty of archival footage and photos, Leanne Pooley’s documentary follows the Twins from idyllic rural Calf Club Days, through the rough and tumble protests of the 80s, to their current status as living legends.
I recommend you take your kids so they can see how much of what’s good about New Zealand (that we take for granted) was fought for by these strong and principled women, who also just happen to be beloved family entertainers.
Steve Martin (right) uses the 90 per cent of his brain that isn’t required for acting in Bringing Down the House to write Don Cheadle’s Traitor.
Actually, not so much second thoughts as something interesting discovered after the the review went to print.
In the blog roll to the right you will find a link to the Creative Screenwriting podcast, which is never less than interesting despite host Jeff Goldsmith’s sometimes annoying ability to miss the interesting follow-up question.
Anyway, I make a point of not listening to a podcast until after I’ve seen and reviewed a particular film – I try and watch everything unmediated by anything more than the trailer – but that sometimes means I miss a gem of context that might illuminate (or add value in some other way).
Last week I was listening to writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff talk about the Don Cheadle war-on-terror thriller Traitor and he outlined how the film got its start: an idea from comedian Steve Martin that he had while working on the Queen Latifah “comedy” Bringing Down the House. Evidently, he had the idea, wrote a treatment, sold it to Disney and then got the heck out of the way.
It obviously went through a few changes since then (as these things always do) but that whole “terrorists want to blow up 50 buses, tricked into all getting on the same bus” thing? All Steve.
You can forget all talk of an Oscar for Heath Ledger’s Joker. If anyone is going to win an Academy Award for wearing some dodgy make-up in a noisy blockbuster no one is getting in the way of Robert Downey Jr. for Tropic Thunder. Totally believable, every second, as Kirk Lazarus, the Australian method actor (and multi-Oscar winner himself) who undergoes a radical skin re-pigmentation in order to portray tough-as-nails African-American Sgt. Osiris in the eponymous Vietnam epic, Downey Jr’s performance is a thing of wonder: A masterpiece of technique, timing, self-belief and dare I say it, soul. I’m still chuckling days later.
Lazarus is one of a handful of pampered Hollywood stars on location to recreate the last great untold Vietnam story – the suicide-mission rescue of “Four Leaf” Tayback during the legendary “Wet” Offensive of ’69. Under pressure from the studio to get back on schedule (and from handless “Four “Leaf” himself, Nick Nolte, to toughen the pencil-kneck panty-waists up a bit) director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) goes verité. With the help of hidden cameras, special effects and some heavily armed South East Asian drug lords, Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) and Alpa Chino (relative newcomer Brandon T. Jackson) find themselves up to their eyeballs in reality. Comedy reality, which is the best kind. One of my favourite films of the year so far, and I haven’t even mentioned Tom Cruise’s dancing.
Compared to the ferocious energy of Tropic Thunder, Tina Fey’s Baby Mama seems like a comedy from a different era. Fey plays über-clucky Kate Holbrook – successful middle-manager in Steve Martin’s organic produce company. Desperate for progeny (yet strangely single), her T shaped tubes make her a poor bet for IVF and the waiting list for adoption is years long. Surrogacy is her only solution and she barely bats an eyelid at the $100k price tag (she must share John McCain’s accountant). Despite the amount of money changing hands it is the surrogate that interviews the, what’s the word, surrogatee and she successfully passes the aura test posed by white trash “host” Amy Poehler (Blades of Glory).
The lively Poehler kick-starts every scene she is in while better-known stars like Martin, Greg Kinnear and Sigourney Weaver phone in their performances. Meanwhile Fey (“30 Rock”) is likeable enough, although the character seems to be in a world of her own most of the time, and Romany Malco from The Love Guru plays the token black character – a servant. Baby Mama is funnier, the more pregnancy-specific it gets. When it goes generic (speech-impediments, Martin’s new age schtick) it misses even the biggest targets by miles.
Paris is both the subject and the object of Cédric Klapisch’s ensemble drama about a cross-section of modern Parisian society. Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche are siblings, single, on the cusp of 40 and alienated from their parents. Duris is told his heart condition may finish him off sooner rather than later and mopes around the apartment, feeling sorry for himself while Binoche (like women everywhere) puts her own life on hold to care for him and her three children. Meanwhile, hangdog academic Fabrice Luchini (Intimate Strangers) has a crush on his beautiful student Mélanie Laurent, his architect brother is about to become a father but can’t stop crying. At street level, the market stallholders are also looking for love in the big city but have a more direct way of going about finding it.
I’ve made it seem a lot more contrived than it actually plays out. The direction is subtle and the performances are involving. It does suffer from the usual French cinematic philosophy, that working class experience is somehow more real than the self-absorbed bourgeois middle classes, but actually argues its case pretty well.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 28 August, 2008.
The first thing you need to know about It’s Complicated is that it isn’t very complicated at all. The plot, the characters, the gags (dear God, especially the gags) are all perfectly comprehensible – even to those of us with only modest intellectual faculties. Rest assured, at no point will anyone be talking over your head in this one.
