Sweet Nothings

To complete my LFF tripleheader - yet another film featuring death as a central plot point. I swear I'm not doing this on purpose... The Descendants comes a whole seven years after Alexander Payne's last film Sideways , so to call it long-awaited would be an understatement. Saying that, Payne’s films exist in such a completely different world to most Hollywood fare that discussing them in such terms seems almost vulgar. This one centres around George Clooney as Matt King, a father-of-two struggling to cope after his wife falls into a coma from a near-fatal jetski accident. He's also responsible for the imminent sale of an important piece of land on behalf of his family, land passed down from generation to generation from their ancestors (the Descendants of the title). Typically for a Payne movie, even the balmy Hawaiian climate doesn't shield the characters from any of fortune's outrageous slings and arrows. Both Matt's daughters have their issues, the youn...

WARNING! ***CONTAINS KOOKINESS*** Gus Van Sant's latest, Restless ,   shares a major theme with 50/50  whilst taking a very different approach. Far from being some kind of weird mortality obsession on my part (though this film certainly has one), instead my interest was piqued by the presence of Van Sant (because whatever else he's done, Good Will Hunting remains a wonderful film) and of Mia Wasikowsa, with whom I've become slightly obsessed after her astonishing performances in shrink drama  In Treatment (season one: Sky Arts; season two: Sky Atlantic, where I can't watch it. Fuckers.) Restless begins with our hero Enoch laying within his own chalk outline; we then follow him on his way to a funeral at which, it becomes quickly apparent, he has no business being. Here he meets Wasikowska's Annabel for the first time, who then saves Enoch's bacon when it he's about to be busted at another funeral he's gatecrashing. We quickly learn that Enoch has a...

I managed to book for three films at this years London Film Festival , a 50% improvement on last year. At this rate I should be able to catch the entire festival output by around 2063. Here goes with the first one (spoilers ahoy): 50/50 Judd Apatow has a lot to answer for. Whilst both Knocked Up and Superbad  were terrific fun, they were the harbingers of a grim new era for Hollywood comedy wherein smut and vulgarity rule at the expense of character development and charm (with Apatow himself directly or indirectly involved in much of it). One of the many recent nadirs was The Change-Up , the direct result of a terrible power lunch pitch along the lines of "wouldn't it be great if we rehashed the old Freaky Friday bodyswap plot, but with 90% of the jokes about poo and porn?" This drive to break all possible taboos now brings us 50/50 , which could easily be marketed as a CancerCom. You would be forgiven for not holding out high hopes for a comedy movie centred aroun...

Celebrity deaths, and more specifically the reactions thereto, are a curious business. The print and broadcast media will necessarily adopt a measured and neutral tone, mostly painting each newly-extinguished life in a positive light in all but the most heinous cases. Meanwhile in the worlds of the internetz and social media, which require no such filters of tact or taste, there are explosions of activity. On my Facebook feed, there will be several "RIP actor X/pop star Y" status updates, to which more obscure names often prompt amusing "whos that then hun?"-style responses. Yesterday I noticed one or two more elaborate ones, "Thanks to Steve Jobs for changing the world" for example, as well a couple of links to inspirational Youtube clips. There is nothing wrong with positivity of course, although I can't help feeling that when some people (and it's always the same people) put up an RIP for every single semi-famous person it's more of a refl...