Review: Bridesmaids

It's an unfortunate fact that in the world of Hollywood movies, male-driven comedies are for everyone while female-driven comedies are for the most part considered to be just for women. Whether this says more about audience perceptions or the way in which comedies focused on women are made and marketed is up for debate, but it's certainly a shame that mainstream movies about women seem to be so segregated by gender.

Co-written by and starring SNL alumna turned movie star in the ascendant Kristen Wiig, Bridesmaids has a real chance to introduce audiences of either and all genders to the funny side of the distinctly female-oriented process of pre-wedding bridal rituals. With The Hangover 2 failing to recapture the sparky energy of its predecessor (despite, or perhaps because of, being a shameless clone), the film is also in position to become summer 2011's best-loved adult comedy.

Thankfully, Bridesmaids grabs its opportunity by the horns, wrestles it to the ground and shouts jokes into its ears until it busts a gut laughing. Anchored by a central performance by Wiig that's as endearing and well-pitched as you're likely to see this year, the film is a roaring success, bringing out the muck and mayhem of wedding showers, bachelorette parties and the awkwardness of enforced bonding with comedic flair and a genuine feel for character.

The movie opens with our heroine Annie (Wiig) autopiloting through an uninspired hump session with handsome, self-obsessed fuck-buddy Ted (Jon Hamm). The inevitable disappointment that follows these meaningless booty calls echoes the vague sense of defeat that follows Annie around. Her bakery business has collapsed like a wet meringue under the weight of the recession, taking her boyfriend and her life savings with it, leaving her renting a small room from a couple of weirdo limeys (one of whom has a suspiciously appalling accent).

When Annie's best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) tells her she's getting married to her long-term boyfriend, she's secretly worried that they'll drift apart. But she's duly appointed maid of honour, so it's her job to corral Lillian and her friends, including rich, beautiful friendship rival Helen (Rose Byrne), through the fraught process of setting up the bride-to-be for her big day.

The set-up certainly doesn't sound like anything new, but as with all comedy, the secret's in the delivery. And the movie certainly delivers laughs, with the kind of brassy, unaffected style that's so rare in modern rom coms. The character-based comedy rolls easily off the script as the bridesmaids' personalities and histories unfurl, from frustrated mother Rita (on her teenage sons: "Everything is covered in semen. I literally broke a blanket in half, do you see what I'm saying?") to Lillian's future sister-in-law Megan (Melissa McCarthy), a massive slab of a woman who combines hulking machismo, unbridled sexual energy and just a hint of social autism with such commitment that she becomes the movie's most consistent comedy engine.

There's plenty of room for slapstick too, with a hyper-aggressive, mostly slow motion tennis match between Annie and Helen a particular highlight. So much critical vitriol has been poured onto the infamous "dress fitting/food poisoning" scene that I expect to hate it, but it's a pretty spectacular piece of gross-out. You owe it to yourself to behold a fully grown woman in an ornate bridal gown shitting her guts out in the middle of a busy street, staring helplessly at her friends.

But it's the central relationship between Annie and Lillian that binds the movie together and gives it a heart to match its funny bone. Wiig and Rudolph's natural charisma as a duo brings an effortless credibility to their friendship, which in turn gives context to the strain that their relationship endures throughout the movie. Annie's anxiety about being left behind as Lillian embraces a new life and a new set of wealthy friends, as well as her fear of failure and her battered self-esteem, are universally relatable themes, and as the hysteria ramps up towards the end of the film, these themes keep the characters from feeling cartoonish.

Bridesmaids has been hailed by many as a sort of ultra-modern feminist affirmation, but in reality, Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumolo are having far too much fun engaging with and subverting stereotypes of femininity to stick to any particular agenda. While the movie is effortlessly progressive in its portrayal of women as individuals with a diverse set of strengths and flaws (which should surely be a given by now), this is Grade-A entertainment first and foremost. But it's certainly refreshing to see the usually all-engrossing love interest (charmingly played here by The IT Crowd's Chris O'Dowd) sidelined in favour of a genuinely heartwarming female friendship.

A couple of niggling flaws hold Bridesmaids back just enough to be worth mentioning. The core triangle of Annie, Lillian and Lillian's intimidating new friend Helen, impressive as it is, dominates proceedings to the extent that a couple of the bridesmaids are left out in the cold somewhat, with the aforementioned lusty mum Rita and Ellie Kemper's twitchy newlywed Becca not given quite enough room to flesh out their intriguing character concepts. The film also wraps up a little neatly considering the preceding histrionics; Wiig, Mumola and director Paul Feig seem to take their feet off the emotional gas on the home stretch in favour of tried-and-tested rom com cliche.

A couple of minor slip-ups are nowhere near enough to hide Bridesmaids' immense strengths, however. The movie, produced by Judd Apatow, easily stands up with the cream of the crop of the Apatow Productions stable. Like Knocked Up, The 40-Year-Old Virgin and Superbad, Bridesmaids makes walking the precarious tightrope between hilarity and heart look easy. The film may have a hard time marketing itself to a universal comedy audience; several of my friends admitted to dismissing it out of hand, assuming it was cut from the standard chick flick cloth. In reality, it's a hilarious, very sweet movie spearheaded by some very funny women, a must-watch for comedy fans, no matter the shape of their genitalia.
Satisfaction Score: 9/10

Interest Score: 7/10

Review: Green Lantern

Since the idea of a Green Lantern movie was first batted around a few years ago, it was always clear that it would be a project fraught with risks. An interstellar police force that draws power from green power rings and valiantly does battle against evil, injustice and the dastardly power of the colour yellow is a pretty tough sell, especially given the pseudo-credible superhero films that audiences have grown accustomed to. But there was an enticing opportunity, too: to create a colourful superhero epic of truly cosmic scale and ambition, set against the backdrop of distant galaxies and alien space unicorns rather than dreary old earth.

Now that Green Lantern has finally landed, it's become depressingly clear that the most epic thing about this movie is its lacklustre execution and the ease with which the whole story slips from memory on leaving the cinema. The film is not without its fleeting charms, but any strengths find themselves completely outmatched by a plot so bereft of drama that events seem to unfurl in a dull green blur.

Early signs provoked a wave of cautious optimism from fans. Ryan Reynolds looked good as Hal Jordan in the trailers, Martin Campbell (director of GoldenEye and Casino Royale) was at the helm, and early footage showed off fancy effects shots of the Green Lantern homeworld Oa. You can even look at my own summer movie preview for a prime example of the doomed hope that was circling around Green Lantern a couple of months ago.

But from the outset, the film starts to unravel. Instead of introducing us to Hal Jordan and establishing the characters who will accompany him on his journey, we're subjected to a barrage of exposition explaining the background of the Green Lantern Corps, which many eons ago split the known universe into three thousand-and-something sectors, with a Green Lantern assigned to protect each one. We also make the acquaintance of Parallax, a bubbling mass of evil yellow space diarrhea that feeds on fear and serves as the film's main threat. The creature was imprisoned by legendary Green Lantern Abin Sur, but has now escaped, sending a dying Abin Sur haring off to earth to find a suitably square-jawed human replacement.

When Abin Sur crash lands on earth, his power ring (a weapon that creates constructs through its user's willpower and imagination) chooses Hal Jordan, a cocky test pilot held back by memories of his pilot father's death in a plane crash. While Hal cruises to Oa to learn all about his new duties, spurned scientist Hector Hammond is tasked with studying Abin Sur's corpse, and is promptly infected by traces of Parallax, which turns him into a puppet of the monster and turns his head into a gigantic testicle. Cue Parallax heading to our planet, and a newly anointed Hal Jordan's attempt to overcome his daddy fears and save all life on earth.

Green Lantern's main offender is a clunky, often embarrassing script that introduces characters to push the plot or provide motivation for Jordan before unceremoniously jettisoning them without another mention (Angela Bassett's utterly anonymous government agent Amanda Waller is a prime example). Jordan's own character arc is hardly gripping either, amounting to little more than the standard "be handsome, overcome fear, live up to dead dad" trope that we've seen time and again in superhero movies.

The script also fails to inject any urgency or drama into proceedings. Jordan's trips to Oa, which should always have been the film's crown jewel, are insultingly brief, relegating fellow Lanterns like Sinestro (Mark Strong), Tomar-Re (Geoffrey Rush) and Kilowog (Michael Clarke Duncan) to living mouthpieces, explaining the Lanterns' powers and history. Key scenes are often bizarrely edited, leading to a steady flow of jarring, incongruous moments.

The film's effects range from excellent to shoddy, the beauty and detail of Oa contrasting with Jordan's ugly CG mask and a couple of downright inept action shots. For the most part, Hal's Green Lantern powers are effectively and imaginatively employed, however, Jordan creating all number of impromptu objects, including chainsaws, flame throwers and even a giant spiral race track, to overcome his enemies. The action scenes peppered throughout the movie are well-executed and occasionally thrilling, particularly an early dog-fight between a pre-Lantern Hal and two automated fighter jets.

Ryan Reynolds' turn as Jordan is really the only performance worth analysing, given that most other characters are completely side-tracked by the script. He's typically charming and witty, and does well despite the limitations foisted on him by the script; after all's said and done, Reynolds is the most enjoyable element of the film by some margin. Blake Lively's performance as love interest Carol Ferris is so flavourless that one can only pity the actor, who was so impressive in The Town last year, for the gaping hole where her character should have been. Peter Saarsgard's Hector Hammond goes from mild-mannered nerd to scenery-chewing bollock-head with such speed that he loses all credibility, a problem compounded by the complete lack of grounding for the character, or his pre-existing but completely unexplained relationship with Jordan and Ferris.

With Green Lantern, all the raw materials seemed to be in place for a superhero adventure that offered something different from all the scowling men in capes and tortured teenagers that have populated summer blockbusters of the last five years. Unfortunately, it's a sad disappointment from start to finish, with only Reynolds' strong performance and a couple of stand-out action scenes enlivening an experience that feels more like a cobbled-together collection of scenes than a coherent, confident film.

Satisfaction Score: 4/10
Interest Score: 3/10

Click here for an explanation of the Satisfaction/Interest review scores.

Review: X-Men: First Class

X-Men: First Class is a good film. Its performances range from solid to excellent, its action scenes are often spectacular and its involving plot culminates in a genuinely thrilling finale. The film is a massive improvement over both its fuckwitted predecessor The Last Stand and 2009's nonsensical mope-fest X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

So why, on leaving the cinema, was my overriding impression one of niggling disappointment? As exciting and engrossing as First Class often is, it is also flawed along its length and breadth, like a spectacular country mansion overrun by dry rot. Or indeed like a big budget blockbuster movie that swapped directors little over a year before its release and only started filming nine months before its premiere.

The film gives the X-Men franchise a Men In Black-style memory wipe, erasing the sweaty nightmare of The Last Stand by turning the clock back to the 60s origin of the mutant team. Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) has just completed his thesis at Oxford University (accompanied by a young Mystique, who has been his unofficial ward since childhood) when he's contacted by the CIA who are looking into the existence of genetic mutants with extraordinary powers.

Meanwhile, Erik Lensherr (Michael Fassbender) is a very angry young man. Cruelly tampered with by Nazi scientists in a World War II death camp, Lensherr endured the murder of his parents and is now huffing around the globe searching for Nazi war criminals with the help of his power over metal and a head full of unresolved rage issues. His primary target is his chief childhood tormentor Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon), who has become the head of the Hellfire Club, a secret (if ostentatiously named) society dedicated to securing global domination for mutantkind as the world's rightful homo superior.

This set-up leads to the fateful meeting and friendship between Lensherr and Xavier as they search for others of their kind and partner up to thwart Shaw's scheme to exploit Cold War tensions and bring about a nuclear apocalypse from which mutants will emerge as mankind's new rulers (somehow).

First Class's chief accomplishment is in establishing and exploring the early relationship between the young Erik and Charles. As Xavier, McAvoy practically purrs with easygoing charm and the hint of arrogance that probably comes with the territory when you're a handsome mind-reader with a genius intellect and the backing of the CIA by your mid 20s. Fassbender is on another level though (despite the much-discussed "wandering accent"), imbuing our proto-Magneto with an inner furnace of rage that drives him to team up with the nascent X-Men while pushing him ever further down his own dark path. Early scenes depicting Erik torturing Swiss bankers and tracking down exiled Nazi war criminals like a deranged Jason Bourne are shot for maximum impact, and effectively give insight into the overt violence and deeply buried nobility behind his goals. This Erik is a master of magnetism in more ways than one.

His friendship with Charles allows us a glimpse at the man Magneto could have been, as Erik's darkness is softened by emotional vulnerability and the wolfish grin that Fassbender is so rarely called upon to show us. The dynamics between the two men provide the film's emotional momentum, and any future installments of this new X-Men timeline should lean heavily on this new chemistry that McAvoy and Fassbender have created.

The direction of Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, Layer Cake) also provides some highlights. First Class is liberally sprinkled with energetic and well-captured sequences. Erik and Charles's search for new teammates (with a prototype of mutant compass Cerebro developed by a young Henry McCoy, the mutant scientist who will become Beast) nails the pair's excitement at discovering that, far from being alone, they're part of a community.

Similarly, a montage showing Xavier's new team - including McCoy, chest-beam jock Havok, sonic screamer Banshee and a radical but effective reinterpretation of Angel - preparing for their confrontation with Shaw exhibits a freewheeling sense of fun, as well as exploring the notion that Xavier teaches his young students to control their powers by giving them respect instead of the cocktail of fear and anger to which Erik was subjected. The climactic showdown, pitting Erik and Charles's team against Shaw, malevolent psychic Emma Frost, devilish teleporter (and father of Nightcrawler) Azazel and tornado-maker Riptide is a stunning finale. Set in the seas around Cuba with US and Russian armadas ready to initiate nuclear war, this final set-piece sees all the mutants unleash the fury in a variety of bracing and imaginative ways. As an action scene, it's easily the equal of anything we've seen in X-Men movies before.

So with the movie hitting the right note on so many occasions, why the disappointment? Unfortunately, much of the great work done here is undermined by some persistent flaws. The film's effects are excellent in places but elsewhere seem to suffer for its rushed post-production schedule. The biggest victim is poor old Beast. Nicholas Hoult plays Hank McCoy well, expressing his intelligence and deep-set insecurities, but the money shot after his accidental transformation into his feral form is painfully botched.

The idea behind Beast's design is conceptually solid in its attempt to bring out the wildness of his look - as opposed to The Last Stand's "fat blue Elvis" concept - but the execution is almost comedically poor. The promo images looked reasonable but in motion, sadly, Beast looks more X-Muppet than X-Man. Elsewhere, dodgy greenscreen work and other examples of poor costume and make-up design (Jennifer Lawrence's Mystique looks positively uncomfortable and unnatural in her blue skin, possibly explaining why it was shown so little) too often rip the audience out of the story.

More importantly, the frantic pace of the story and the overriding dominance of the Xavier-Lensherr relationship stymies almost any other character development. Mystique gets some attention by virtue of being pulled into the orbit of Erik's descent into villainy, but most of the other mutant players are so emotionally malnourished that they effectively become delivery mechanisms for their powers. This makes a number of character beats pretty inexplicable. A prominent betrayal in the plot makes barely a lick of sense, and Charles's "romance" with CIA agent Moira McTaggert is so underwritten that one would assume they were workmanlike colleagues until they randomly suck on each other's faces near the end (wheelchair fetish, perhaps?). These character missteps should serve as a stark warning to Joss Whedon and the Avengers team on the delicate balancing act that goes into creating a whole team of fully fleshed characters.

X-Men: First Class is a film that gets so much right. The disappointment stems not from what the film is, but what it could have been. With a few more months added to the schedule, the prodigious talent in front of and behind the camera might well have produced the finest Marvel Universe movie to date. Instead, we're left with a film that's often brilliant but fails to coalesce as a satisfying whole.

Statisfaction Score: 7/10

Interest Score: 6/10

Archive comedy review: Louis CK

Comedy reviews seem to be all the rage on this blog at the moment, so I thought I'd reprint a review I wrote for London-ers in November 2009 after seeing the mighty Louis CK at the Bloomsbury Theatre. The man's a master comedy craftsman, so check him out if you ever get the chance.

Original piece here.

Stand-up comedy might just be the ultimate popular American art form. I use the word 'popular' because that allows me to neatly sidestep jazz, which is definitely art but certainly isn't popular. Nobody actually likes jazz, do they? They just like the idea of liking jazz. Yeah, I went there. Suck it, Mingus.

It's true that British stand-ups like Billy Connolly, Eddie Izzard and Lee Evans can stand tall in the weird, deformed line-up of legendary live comedians. But no other country has quite the same heritage as the US, from Lenny Bruce in the early '60s to Richard Pryor and George Carlin in the '70s to Bill Hicks to Chris Rock to Dave Chappelle to Sarah Silverman in a long, steadily evolving line of funny. Maybe it's North America's isolation as a continent; maybe it's that stereotype of American bullishness. Whatever the case, the Americans sure know how to stand up in a packed room and shout an audience to its knees.

Louis CK absolutely deserves his place in that pantheon of American stand-ups. He's been touring the US comedy circuit for two decades, filling the gaps with writing and acting for TV and films. If you've seen him anywhere this year, you'll have seen him in Ricky Gervais' mostly underwhelming directorial debut The Invention of Lying. His acting career has been peppered with cancelled shows and movie flops, but maybe it's better that way. CK clearly shines brightest from a stage with a mic in his hand.

Tonight, the Bloomsbury's filled to bursting with fans (including Steve Merchant, who thankfully didn't sit in front of me) expecting a dose of CK's winning blend of traditional observational comedy and foul-mouthed commentary. If the man is exhausted from his schedule (or the first gig he played at the Bloomsbury just before our late set), he doesn't show it. The audience is firmly in stitches for the duration.

Content-wise, there's nothing new here, CK visiting such well-cropped comedy pastures as air travel, fatherhood and dating. But what makes him such a compelling performer is his ability to take these comedy tropes and rejuvenate them, whether with sly subversion, deft wordplay or pure throat-straining commitment. His descriptions, like that of the middle-class urbanite who doesn't speak but somehow "secretes words out of his head", are dead-on. Just as the audience is lulled into a sense of familiarity with a bit about CK volunteering to help supervise lunch at his daughter's elementary school, he sucker punches us into shocked hysterics by calmly noting that in the event of a fire he'd happily trample other children to save his own.

The benign glint in CK's eye ensures that this isn't a Frankie Boyle-esque aggressive comedy barrage. He's toying with the audience's expectations, tempering pessimism with playfulness while still giving the material enough edge to draw gasps now and then. The word that springs to mind watching CK's set is 'craft'. CK has had 20 years to hone his, and he's seen enough audiences to be able to read us like a book. After all, as any comedy craftsman knows, it's not about the material. It's about the delivery.