Kids these days

Lessons in movie marketing #5476: four of the cast of Friends With Kids featured in the highly successful Bridesmaids. Much of the advance publicity, eg an interview with Chris O'Dowd a while back, focused almost exclusively on this connection. Friends With Kids does not, however, share a writer, producer or directer with Bridesmaids, and its two leads are Adam Scott and Jennifer Westfeldt. They're tucked away on the right-hand side of the poster.

Westfeldt and Scott play Julie and Jason, two thirtysomething best friends. Their other friends are two couples whose marriages seem to have gone sour after the introduction of children to proceedings. Julie and Jason then hit on the wizard wheeze of having a child together, giving them all the benefits of a family without the worry of a marriage to be potentially ruined. Yeah I know, what could possibly go wrong with that?

Although this movie is pitched at a grown-up audience and contains dialogue that isn't merely dumb and offensive - sometimes even reaching the heights of moderately amusing - the high concept at its core is as cheesy as any recent Hollywood romcom's, and it all ends in painfully predictable fashion (SPOILER ALERT: they end up together). Plus, the key dialogue revolving around the old "Would you rather die slowly of cancer or suddenly of an aneurism?" condundrum feels like a direct lift from Andy and Maggie's exchanges in Extras.

All this wouldn't be so much of a problem were the leads more charismatic, but Westfeldt is a somewhat enigmatic actress and I found Scott incredibly irritating throughout. I admit this dislike is entirely irrational, but it sure makes a difference when you can really root for a romcom's main man. I'd have been far more interested to see Jon Hamm in that role, and him pulling Megan Fox would've been a damn sight more believable.

Of course, once you know that Westfeldt wrote and directed the film, it makes sense that she would consider herself to have the best handle on the Julie character. Plus, the fact that Hamm is her real-life partner perhaps explains why she avoided the art/life overlap - had she done so the media would have been interested in nothing else. Nonetheless, if you watch this film and then imagine Hamm and Kristen Wiig (chronically underused here) as the leads, you'll wish that Westfeldt did too.

Ken Loach's The Angels' Share isn't represented entirely accurately by its own poster either. The second half of the film does broadly qualify as the Full Monty-style romp suggested above, but the gritty opening acts centred on the rougher edges of Edinburgh working class life certainly don't. The uneven overall tone feels more like Brassed Off, another film that wasn't the feelgood-fest that the marketeers would've had you believe.

I'm not familiar with much of Loach's work but I did love Looking For Eric, which sits alongside Angels' Share at the jollier end of his scale. The key difference between the two is that the former was a lovely postmodern fairytale which created a slightly unreal atmosphere around Steve Evets's Eric and his hallucinations of (the real) Eric and preserved it throughout. This one starts out with a very broad comic scene on a railway platform, then cuts to a montage of several characters receiving sentences in front of a magistrate, and only after a while does it start to focus on Paul Brannigan's Robbie, who is the archetypal decent guy trying to escape from a troubled and violent past, etc etc.

His eventual redemption taking the form of an improbable caper involving a hitch-hike to the Highlands in order to heist some exceptionally rare whisky doesn't quite ring true. The plot develops through some unlikely coincidences and the more humorous scenes jar wildly with what's gone before, especially Robbie's painful court-ordered confrontation with a man he'd assaulted.

Having said all that, the gang's adventures in whisky-napping are often amusing and there is an endearing quality to their quest, the film earning its sentimental payoff. But if I may beg one thing of film-makers: please for the love of God, if you're setting your film in Scotland please don't use The Proclaimers' I'm Gonna Be (500 Miles) as a lazy emotional shorthand anymore. That song has been tortured within an inch of its life through overuse. Thanks.

Looking back, the best free film I've seen so far this year (I do go and pay to see a few too, honest) is Dexter Fletcher's Wild Bill, which didn't get a lot of publicity but worked well as a Brit gangster-style tale with heart that avoided most of the genre's worst excesses. Dexter even came in to say a few words before the preview screening. He tried really hard not to look too downhearted by the half-empty cinema too. Bless.