By Troy Ribeiro 

FILM: Tomorrowland
CAST: George Clooney, Hugh Laurie, Raffey Cassidy, Brittany Robertson, Thomas Robinson, Kathryn Hann
DIRECTION: Brad Bird

Disney’s Tomorrowland is a typical sci-fi, blockbuster adventure film. Narrated in a non-linear, he-said, she-said manner, the film is initially confusing, but gradually settles down as the exposition gets clear.
The film begins with middle-aged George Clooney, as Frank Walker, telling us: “This is the story about the future and the future can be scary.” He goes on to give reasons for his belief and then states: “When I was a kid, the future was different.”
His version is then followed by Cassey’s.
Frank’s version starts way back in 1964 at the New York World Fair, where, as a teenage inventor, he enthusiastically goes to present his creation, a “jet pack”. His creation is half-baked, but nevertheless he manages to impress Athena, a young girl, about his age, who offers him a shiny badge marked with the letter “T”. This pin leads him to a futuristic place called Tomorrowland.
Over the years, Frank is exiled from Tomorrowland and he now leads a secluded life.
On the other hand, Cassey, an optimistic enthusiast, daughter of an ex-Nasa scientist, is unwittingly introduced to Tomorrowland by Athena. Her quest to learn more about the place leads her to Frank and then their journey begins to save the world, doomed by wars and environmental disasters.
It is their story. Packed with life’s lessons and fantasy effects that include soft-lens-clear images of a beautiful world, Tomorrowland is a dreamer’s paradise. Some of the lessons of optimism are: “The tiniest of action can change the future” and how “In every moment there are possibilities of a better future”.
The film belongs to the brilliant children; Brittany Robertson plays Cassey Newton, Raffey Cassidy essays Athena the machine girl “designed to find dreamers”, Pierce Gagnon plays Cassey’s young brother Nate Newton and Thomas Robinson, the ever-charming young Frank. They steal your heart with their performances.
George Clooney as the grumpy genius Frank Walker along with Hugh Laurie as the ruler of Tomorrowland offer nothing exceptional.
Unlike other films that speak about dystopian societies, Tomorrowland has a very positive and optimistic approach. The only issue is that though the film ends on a very upbeat note, it does not offer any solutions to the issues it raised. - IANS

Fancy garden
By Roger Moore


FILM: A Little Chaos
CAST: Kate Winslet, Alan Rickman, Matthias Schoenaerts, Jennifer Ehle, Stanley Tucci
DIRECTION: Alan Rickman

A Little Chaos is an overlong ditty of a movie, Alan Rickman’s amusingly fanciful version of how a famous outdoor ballroom in the gardens of Versailles came to be.
He directed and co-stars with his Sense and Sensibility love interest, Kate Winslet, in a tale of a woman entering a man’s world, a plucky widowed gardener who carries out design and construction of one of the wonders of Versailles for Louis XIV, “The Sun King”.
Louis (Rickman) wants Versailles to “embody the true glory and splendour of France.” The regular court landscapers are letting him down. The royal landscape architect, Andre le Notre (Matthias Schoenaerts), is ordered to throw open bids to see who can “order” the “chaos” of the swampy landscape.
But Sabine De Barra (Winslet) sees too much “order” in the place. She gets the commission with her design, having an “abundance of chaos”.
Sabine is hurled into lightweight court intrigues and rivalries, hated and sabotaged by many, championed by the Duc d’Orleans, playfully played by Stanley Tucci.
The Duke is the king’s brother, with the effrontery to speak up to his king, who has a big family, a mistress (Jennifer Ehle) and no appetite.
“If the King does not eat,” the Duke reproaches him, “FRANCE does not eat!”
Le Notre, unhappily married to a feckless courtier, is smitten by the swarthy, earthy Sabine. Their flirtation is earthy — and earth-covered.
Rickman, who co-wrote the script, delivers gardening in the rain and a delightfully unlikely meeting between the unrecognised king and the lady gardener, a woman who “adapts, like a well-trained plant”. His is, of course, regal and marvellous as Louis.
The love story at its heart is given short shrift. Winslet and Schoenaerts kind of click in those few scenes where that’s allowed. But Rickman and his players have enough witty and winning moments that we don’t mind.
Even in period pieces, overdoing prim and proper “order” can be a drag. A little more chaos might have truly lit this one up.- TNS

A love story for the ages
FILM: The Age of Adaline
CAST: Blake Lively, Michiel Huisman, Kathy Bates, Harrison Ford
DIRECTION: Lee Toland Kriege

Hollywood long ago ceded “love that stands the test of time” to the realm of science fiction and fantasy, so The Age of Adaline falls neatly into a genre that includes The Time Traveler’s Wife, About Time and even Somewhere in Time.
But building this film around all the willowy, world-weary grace that Blake “Gossip Girl” Lively can muster pays off. As a twentysomething who stopped aging 80 years ago, Lively suggests several lifetimes of experience in a love story that ranges from wistful to hopeful, a romance whose female half understands its consequences.
A pedantic narrator introduces Adaline under “her current alias”, Jenny, on New Year’s Eve of 2014, then backtracks to give a quasi-scientific explanation to the ageing that stopped after an icy car wreck in the early 1930s.
Widowed, we meet her child, see the first attentions her agelessness draws from law enforcement (in the paranoid McCarthy era) and watch her go underground — changing names, changing jobs, investing her money in long-shot stocks so that she’s never pressed for cash.
Now she works in the San Francisco city archives, and she and her retirement-age daughter (a sparkling Ellen Burstyn) are the only ones who know her secret.
Then a rich do-gooder of a suitor, Ellis (Dutch actor Michiel Huisman) fixes his eye on her. And her many polite rebuffs fail to deter him. Reluctantly, she falls for him.
And for an hour, Adaline is warm and charming, with a sombre edge. She’s buried generations of spaniels. She can’t bear to bury another lover.
Then Harrison Ford shows up for the third act as he and the ageless Kathy Baker play Ellis’s parents. And Ford, in a performance as affecting as any he’s ever given, lifts this romance in ways we never see coming.
But it’s Lively’s show, and she wears the period clothes and formal wear as easily as Adaline wears the burden of a body that never ages, even as the memory never forgets history learned, a language mastered or what love felt like when you last let yourself experience it.- TNS

DVDs courtesy:
Saqr Entertainment Stores, Doha