Something for the weekend

25/06/2010

Larry David saves Woody Allen. Russell Brand plays a version of himself...

Wood you believe it

Whatever Works
(12A) Woody Allen

Woody Allen has been dogged by criticism that “he isn’t as funny as he used to be” for almost as long as he’s been making movies – he’s cinema’s equivalent of Viz magazine.

Given his latest run of duds, though, the comment has some truth to it. So for his most recent film, the hard-working, ever-pragmatic Allen has returned to a script he wrote from the early 1970s, a time when he definitely was funny – arguably the funniest guy in the English-speaking world.

The result is Whatever Works, and it’s his most breezy, straightforwardly entertaining film in ages. Larry David – a writer-performer whose angsty, neurotic, self-obsessed persona from Curb Your Enthusiasm owes more than a passing debt to Allen’s work – plays Boris, a middle-aged, reclusive, misanthropic former professor, recovering from a bad marriage break-up and a failed suicide attempt.

When he encounters Melody (Evan Rachel Wood), a naïve young women from the South sleeping rough on his doorstep, he reluctantly takes her in for the night.

However, under his grumpy tutelage Melody develops from a happily dumb Southern belle to a refined, artistically inclined New Yorker. Despite his better instincts, Borisfalls in love with Melody.

Woody Allen films can be wonderfully romantic, but it’s usually a fleeting reprieve from life’s greater disappointments, the brief set-up to a shit-happens punchline.

So it is with Boris’ relationship to Melody: she soon grows tired of his crabby misanthropy, and her feelings for the handsome young Perry (John Gallagher Jr), whom she meets by chance, are stoked by her hard-drinking, Christian fundamentalist mother Marietta (Patricia Clarkson, on great form), who disapproves of Boris when she joins her daughter in New York from Mississippi.

Allen might have updated some of the references from his yellowed script – presumably the Nixon gags were cut – but his vision of New York remains anachronistic: Boris’ cavernous Manhattan apartment would have long since been converted into an upscale coffee joint.

Still, there’s a breakneck farcical energy to the piece, and David – who often breaks up the action to offer a running commentary straight to camera – is a much more appealing Woody Allen surrogate than the great man himself: cranky and eccentric he may be, but Larry David’s comic tirades against the state of the world feel like misapplied passion rather than despairing whinges.
It’s also good to see Allen back in New York after backpacking round various European locations (London, Barcelona, Paris)
chasing funding.

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Branded for life

Get Him To The Greek
(15) Nicholas Stoller

Celebrity plays himself, again Most of Russell Brand’s movie roles have been exaggerated versions of himself. So it’s no great surprise that Brand’s first lead role is about an eccentric, charismatic, womanising English celebrity with a drink and drug habit and a pop star on-off girlfriend. While Brand is terrific at being his past druggie self, he’s less comfortable with the dramatic scenes when Aldous is questioning his lifestyle (yawn). Suddenly, you’re not watching a character, or even an actor – you’re watching a celebrity reciting lines.

BY ANNA SMITH

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Blood brothers

Tetro
(15) Francis Ford Coppola

Godfather director keeps it in the family Tetro sees Coppola relocate to Buenos Aires for a moody, winningly offbeat family drama about two American brothers. Alden Ehrenreich is Bennie, an 18-year-old who’s run away from military school in search of older half-brother Tetro, who has long tried to escape the shadow of their powerful composer father (a creepily imposing Klaus Maria Brandauer) by living in Buenos Aires. An intimate study in sibling tension, choreographed to the melancholy elegance of Osvaldo Golijov’s tango-influenced score. By the end, the simmering hostilities erupt into something grand and operatic.

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Hair-raising docu

Good Hair
(12A) Jeff Stilson

Get your rocks off to weaves Comedian Chris Rock investigates the lengths black American women go to look after their hair, mostly by applying chemical relaxants and expensive weaves to straighten natural curls. This documentary offers an insight into everything from the therapeutic value of black hairdressers through the sway that European ideals of beauty have over the African American community, to the idiosyncrasies of the global marketplace (the hair for weaves is taken from Indian women and sold largely by South Koreans).