The good, the bad and the average: the best and worst films to keep you out of the sun this week
FILM
MEN IN BLACK III
Cert PG | By Chris Ward
***
Men in Black III has a major problem to overcome before the opening credits even roll: it has been a decade since the last instalment – so why exactly does it exist?
This time, Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones are up against an unrecognisable Jemaine Clement (Flight of the Conchords), an alien on the run from a moon prison who appears to have taken style tips from Steve Earle and of whose biological weaponry David Cronenberg would doubtless approve.
Clement plans to take revenge on Jones’s Agent K, the man who locked him up four decades ago, by travelling in time to 1969 and killing him as a young man. Josh Brolin nails Jones’s mannerisms and cadence as the young Agent K, but, at 44, has trouble passing as the 29-year-old of the script (a piece of cognitive dissonance breezily waved off by a throwaway line from Smith’s Agent J).
Naturally, Agent J gives chase, landing on 15 July 1969 – anyone with even a cursory knowledge of modern American history should be able to see where this is going.
Making only his second film since MiBII, director Barry Sonnenfeld doesn’t exactly come at the material with the vim and vigour of a filmmaker so brimming over with ideas he just had to get back in the saddle. He isn’t entirely bereft of life, though: for every eye-roll-inducing 60s cliché, like the hippies spouting “make love not war”, there’s a touch of genuine inspiration, like an array of aliens at MiB headquarters de-evolving from computer generated creations in the present to men in rubber suits in the past.
There’s no faulting the craftsmanship at work either, from Bo Welch’s typically gorgeous production design to the de rigueur Danny Elfman score and a supporting cast featuring ever-reliable stalwarts including Emma Thompson, Michael Stuhlbarg and Keone Young.
It doesn’t go so far as to wholly justify its existence but it’s a pleasant enough time-waster: hardly a ringing endorsement, but by the usual standards of second sequels, it could have been a lot worse.
Film
MOONRISE KINGDOM
Cert 12A | By Steve Dinneen
*****
He has carved out a visual style every bit as distinctive as the Tim Burtons and David Lynchs of the world, creating richly textured, dreamlike worlds populated by sad, funny, dysfunctional people.
Moonrise Kingdom is a surreal tale of childhood angst, longing and adventure. Twelve-year-old loner Sam goes on the run from his Boy Scout troupe to meet up with a girl who he saw playing a raven in a church production of Noah’s Flood. The girl is a heavily made-up, morose little thing called Suzy, who carries around her parent’s copy of a self-help manual on how to deal with your dysfunctional child. They have issues.
It combines the slightly clanky, home-made feel of The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou with the razor-sharp characterisation of The Royal Tenenbaums. Anderson’s command of his set is unparalleled – every prop, every face, every costume, right down to the individual badges on the Boy Scout uniforms, screams “I’m in a Wes Anderson movie! I’m eccentric!”. On paper, this amount of quirkiness sounds awful, but scenes that would be trite and contrived in lesser hands can be incredibly funny or almost unbearably sad.
The grainy stock and vivid colours are stunning, giving Moonrise Kingdom a far-away, dream-like feel. It is also packed-to-bursting with talent; Bruce Willis plays an earnest but doleful island cop; Edward Norton an earnest but out of his depth Scout master; McDormand an earnest but weary parent (there is a lot of earnestness). Excellent cameos from Harvey Keitel and Tilda Swinton add a little edge to the proceedings but it is, for the most part, a film without villains, where the biggest – and toughest – obstacles are the characters own insecurities.
Tim Burton’s latest outing, Dark Shadows, showed that sticking to the same formula eventually loses its appeal, no matter how good that formula might be. But while Moonrise Kingdom is set very much within Anderson’s distinctive mental terrain, it still feels fresh and alive. Two and a third years will be a long time to wait until the next one.
FILM
WHAT TO EXPECT WHEN YOU’RE EXPECTING
Cert 12A | By Zoe Strimpel
**
Many women can expect to feel sick when they’re pregnant. Most people should expect to feel sick when watching this hugely embarrassing sequence of gestating females and their supportive – if nervous – partners. The raison d’etre of WTEWYE – based on Heidi Murkoff and Sharon Mazel’s best-selling 1984 pregnancy guide – appears to be celebrity shaming, with the likes of Jennifer Lopez going moony-eyed over every baby she sees but unable to conceive (or, in her view, do the one thing that women are supposed to be able to do); Elizabeth Banks as a bloated, moody, farting barrel of uncontrolled hormones and Cameron Diaz as a near-psychotic, publicly vomiting accidentally pregnant older mum. But this is not gross-out cinema – Diaz is Jules, a fitness celebrity with a nationally adored TV show that helps people lose weight after embarrassing them on camera. She looks pretty tasty both before and during pregnancy. So, what can Jules expect? Fights with her handsome dance-hubby about circumcision – the norm in the US whatever your religion, though Jules’s baby-daddy is also, it transpires, half-Jewish. Jules is against – but know now that the quality of her objection lacks intellectual rigour or rhetorical clout.
Banks, AKA Wendy – owner of maternity shop The Breast Choice – was unable to conceive for two years, and was killing off all the romance with her “I’m ovulating!” phone alarms. But chubby hubby Gary (Ben Falcone) still loves her, and after an impromptu bonk in the park – hey presto! But wait, where’s her glow? Instead it’s all water retention and moodiness.
Lopez looks hot, but she’s the pitiable one of the bunch. Unable to conceive, warned by clients about “missing [her] window” she also gets laid off her job as an underwater photographer at the Aquarium. Her husband, the hunky Rodrigo Santoro, isn’t sure about adopting, but in a comically tacked-on scene, they go forth to Ethiopia anyway and collect a baby.
Chris Rock adds some amusement as the leader of a Dad’s group, but generally this is a vacuous retelling of every cliché you’ve ever heard about pre-birth. It’s a bad film, but if you’re in the mood for trash in the mould of New Year’s Eve or Valentine’s Day, this may do the trick.
That Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom was chosen to open Cannes this year gives you an idea of how much of a heavyweight he is. It’s hard to believe that this is only his sixth feature since Rushmore back in 1998 – one every two and a third years.