By Roger Moore
FILM: Peace, Love & Misunderstanding
CAST: Jane Fonda, Catherine Keener, Elizabeth Olsen, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chace Crawford, Kyle MacLachlan
DIRECTION: Bruce Beresford
Peace, Love & Misunderstanding is a forgiving little trifle, an open air feast of Woodstock Generation cliches. But how much you forgive this depends on your tolerance for tie-dye, Jane Fonda, senior citizens who never outgrew their ’60s idealism and the Grateful Dead.
Fonda lends a little ’60s sass to a timeworn tale of daughters testing and judging their mothers. Whatever other thin virtues the movie can claim, she alone is worth it a watch.
Fonda is Grace, the mother to that “patron saint of the uptight”, New York attorney Diane (Catherine Keener). Mother and daughter have been estranged for 20 years. They have issues, and not just wildly divergent lifestyles and politics.
Whatever their differences, Diane flees to Grace’s farm with her college-age daughter (Elizabeth Olsen) and teenage son (Nat Wolff) when Diane’s husband (Kyle MacLachlan) demands a divorce.
Granny Grace lives in Woodstock, New York. She tells the story that Diane — whom she named Diana — was born during the Jimi Hendrix set at the famous concert there, 43 years ago. Grace, in every way you can imagine, never left Woodstock.
There’s the weekly Saturday morning protest, the Full Moon celebration of fertility that all the local women come to (Rosanna Arquette among them). And the painting.
Diane is still embarrassed by her mom’s refusal to grow up. But her daughter, Zoe, is just as ashamed that Mom is all on board the divorce train, and that she slips into an easy flirtation with local singer/furniture maker, Jude (Jeffrey Dean Morgan).
Idealistic Zoe tests her anti-violence/vegan beliefs when she’s attracted to the town’s hunky butcher (Chace Crawford). Socially inept Jake (Wolff), who videotapes everything, gets seduction advice from Granny when he takes a shine to a local hippie teen.
Keener, cast against her Earth Child vibe, struggles to suggest a woman who would be in the least bit conflicted by being drawn to hipster Morgan and the skinny dipping/free love lifestyle her mother espoused. Morgan, in his second shot at a Woodstock movie (Taking Woodstock), has an easygoing charm here. And he and Keener share one magical moment - a duet on a song that he plays in concert, that she knows from her childhood.
The kids are likeable, with Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) meeting her beguiling match in hunk-du-jour Crawford (What to Expect When You’re Expecting).
But it is Fonda, serving up the ’60s, who is reason enough to check this one out. Her Grace is an open invitation to Peace, Love & Misunderstanding. Everybody’s welcome, even those Fonda peers who never got over their lifelong Fonda hate. As Grace would put it, “Exclusion is an unnecessary violence, don’t you think?”- MCT
An emotional wreck
By Betsy Sharkey
FILM: Love, Wedding, Marriage
CAST: Mandy Moore, Kellan Lutz, James Brolin, Jane Seymour, Jessica Szohr
DIRECTION: Dermot Mulroney
I fear no amount of therapy could cure what ails Love, Wedding, Marriage. The romantic comedy, which stars Mandy Moore as a couples counsellor taking desperate measures to keep her parents’ marriage together and her brand-new one from falling apart, is an emotional wreck of major proportions.
While movies have long had good fun at the expense of the therapy trade - watching Richard Dreyfuss’ pompous Dr Marvin deconstruct in What About Bob? remains priceless 20 years after the fact - Moore’s Ava is a complete head case. Scattered, whiney, with a tendency toward tantrums and pouting, you wish someone would hand her a bottle of Zoloft and be done with it.
Perhaps Dermot Mulroney, who usually plays such nice guys on screen, just couldn’t shake his soft side when he slipped into the director’s chair for the first time. There’s a tentativeness that can be felt in nearly every frame when a lot of tough love was needed. He is not helped by a silly script from Anouska Chydzik Bryson and Caprice Crane, a first feature film for both as well.
Ava’s unfortunate hubby is Charlie, with Kellan Lutz doing what he can as an increasingly exasperated new spouse. He has my sympathy. Jane Seymour and James Brolin as Ava’s parents, ready to throw in the towel on the eve of their 30th anniversary, just flounder. Seymour turns stridently over-the-top, Brolin nearly disappears into the cracks.
When Ava’s not trying to save their marriage, she’s obsessing over the surprise anniversary party their split might derail. Meanwhile things are getting rocky at home with Charlie. By the time she gets into a tug-of-war over a patient file with her sister/receptionist (Gossip Girl’s Jessica Szohr) and tumbles into a client, you’re long past caring about the relationships. You’ll just want out. — Los Angeles Times/MCT
Cause and effect
FILM: Silent Hill: Revelation
CAST: Adelaide Clemens, Radha Mitchell, Sean Bean, Carrie-Anne Moss
DIRECTION: Michael J Bassett
Christopher DaSilva (Sean Bean) and his adopted daughter Sharon (Adelaide Clemens) have been on the run since Christopher’s wife Rose (Radha Mitchell) disappeared inside Silent Hill, West Virginia, six years ago, settling in new towns and taking new names on a regular basis; today they’re “Harry” and “Heather”.
Heather doesn’t remember her ordeal in Silent Hill, but she has strange dreams and when her father is taken (and “come to Silent Hill” scrawled on their new house’s wall in blood), she and fellow new kid in town Vincent (Kit Harrington) head out to rescue him.
The main way that writer/director Michael J Bassett improves on the first movie is in the script; where Silent Hill is a mess of idiot-plotting and demonstrations that the video game routine of “go place, find strangely-hidden clue, repeat” looks ridiculous in any other context, the new movie has some understanding of cause and effect and at least suggests an interesting theme of Sharon/Heather’s enforced isolation being the true enemy. Bassett even has a nice moment where he just gets an inevitable “surprise” out of the way rather than dragging it out until the last act.
Of course, he’s hampered by the fact that this is a Silent Hill movie, which means that it’s tied to a mythology that is much more convoluted than the scale of the plot requires (because video games need to last more than 90 minutes) and ultimately just seems random.
What information the viewer who missed the first movie (or doesn’t remember the details from six years ago) gets is vague and doesn’t necessarily fit with the story. For instance, there’s a reasonably creepy sequence involving mannequins that might work damn well in a mannequin-themed horror movie, but just doesn’t seem to have anything to do with everything else that’s going on. It’s a well-made sequence that has no reason to be in this movie specifically.
At least that one is executed fairly well; many more feel like Bassett and company just throwing grotesqueries with a monochromatic colour scheme up and expecting that to scare. Other bits are just ridiculously telegraphed - cut to an otherwise inert amusement park mascot suit enough times and it’s no surprise when the head finally turns.
Still others just feel like obligatory repeats from the first film or ports from the game, just not done quite as well. Any genuinely scary moments are dwarfed by ones where people just go through the motions.
The cast is somewhat guilty of that as well. Adelaide Clemens is game enough as Sharon/Heather, but doesn’t quite give the sort of performance that boosts a lacklustre movie. Harrington’s first line is his best, while Bean gives the sort of performance that this sort of movie so often winds up with: making an effort, but never having enough takes to really nail it.
The first Silent Hill was saved from being a complete disaster by its director’s style, while this one is able to manage basic narrative competence. It ends (clumsily) with the potential of more, but maybe the producers shouldn’t press their luck: eventually, they’re not going to be able to climb up to “below average” from “terrible”.- JS
(DVDs courtesy:
Kings Electronics, Doha)
