The Big Wedding: Should have been annulled

The Big Wedding (2013) • View trailer 
2.5 stars. Rating: R, for profanity, sexual candor and brief nudity
By Derrick Bang

Hollywood never learns.

American filmmakers simply can’t remake French comedies, much less French sex comedies. The results are almost always stiff and awkward, the actors rarely comfortable with dialogue and ribald situations that just come naturally to our cousins across the pond.

Ellie and Don (Diane Keaton and Robert De Niro, right), although divorced for years,
agree to fake being married, in order not to offend the deeply conservative Madonna
(Patricia Rae, center left) and her deceptively demure daughter, Nuria (Ana Ayora).
The thing is, Nuria isn't as chaste as her appearance would suggest, and Ellie and Don
aren't as "over" each other as they'd like to believe. One would expect hilarity from
such a premise. One would be mistaken.

We Americans simply ain’t got the necessary je ne sais quoi.

That’s certainly the case with The Big Wedding, which boasts a great cast that is all dressed up, with nowhere to go. Director Justin Zackham’s script is clumsy and under-developed, his characters behaving in ways that are insufficiently justified by woefully thin motivations. Indeed, at 90 minutes, this film feels like a savagely edited “dump job” that Lionsgate chopped up and released in the (probably vain) hope of getting at least one good weekend’s box-office take.

Zackham adapted his film from Jean-Stéphane Bron’s 2006 comedy, Mon frère se marie, which in turn borrows several plot elements from 1978’s classic La cage aux folles. Escalating sexual hijinks revolve around the wedding of a young couple, whose respective families are mismatched: one conservative and demure, the other ultra-liberal and sexually liberated.

In order not to offend the former group, the latter attempt to clean up their act. Sort of. With less than optimal results.

Cue considerable hilarity.

Or that was the plan, anyway, but Zackham too frequently stalls at the comedy gate. Yes, some moments are funny; yes, others are poignant and sweet. But far too many scenes emerge as missed opportunities, thanks in part to a sniggering, frat-boy attitude to the sexual humor: no surprise, since Zackham’s only previous feature credit is 2001’s sex-crazed frat-boy bomb, Going Greek.

Indeed, I can’t imagine why he was entrusted with this assignment. Because he also wrote 2007’s tear-jerking The Bucket List? That certainly didn’t qualify him to direct the likes of Robert De Niro, Diane Keaton and Susan Sarandon ... and, based on the results, he definitely wasn’t ready for the major league.

Easy Virtue: Let's misbehave!

Easy Virtue (2008) • View trailer for Easy Virtue
Four stars (out of five). Rating: PG-13, for sexual candor and brief profanity
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 6.18.09
Buy DVD: Easy Virtue • Buy Blu-Ray: Easy Virtue [Blu-ray]


Stephan Elliott, the sassy Aussie filmmaker long absent from the screen — and still fondly remembered for his breakout hit, 1994's The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert — has returned with a project perfectly suited to his talents: a bubbly re-imagining of Noel Coward's Easy Virtue.

Although the characters and primary plot elements are retained from the play Coward wrote back in 1924, the tone and various relationship dynamics — not to mention Elliott's directorial approach — owe much more to Robert Altman's Gosford Park, the delightful 2001 blend of Agatha Christie and TV's Upstairs, Downstairs.

While trying to build a rapoort with her new mother-in-law, Larita (Jessica
Biel, right) unwittingly gives yet another opening to Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin
Scott Thomas) during their chat in the family's greenhouse ... at which point
the older woman learns that her son's new wife is allergic to flowers. Mrs.
Whittaker's weak spot, in turn, is her dog...

Elliott's take on Easy Virtue has a similar brew of arch one-liners, devastating putdowns and biting observations about condescending British aristocrats who wield their birthrights like blunt instruments. This atmospheric shift — Elliott co-wrote the screenplay with Sheridan Jobbins — results in a film that's more breezily entertaining than Coward's play, which, despite its deliciously scathing social commentary, audiences at the time found as cold and foreboding as Wuthering Heights.

Indeed, the austere play's only previous trip to the big screen came courtesy of no less a talent than Alfred Hitchcock, who made a faithful silent adaptation in 1927. The famed director remained unsatisfied with this film for the rest of his career, no doubt because the absence of sound made it nearly impossible to do justice to Coward's rapier wit and felicity of language. (But since Hitchcock was forced to compensate, he still left several strong impressions with his largely silent scene constructions.)

Elliott gives us modern viewers a heroine to admire in Larita (Jessica Biel), a sexy and avant-garde American introduced as she scandalizes 1930s Britain by winning the race at Monte Carlo, only to be disqualified because she concealed her gender. But all is not lost at that finish line, as she attracts the eye of young John Whittaker (Ben Barnes, appropriately callow); the result is love at first sight, and the two quickly wed.

Her adventurous spirit and scandal-hued lifestyle not-withstanding, Larita recoils from her next test: meeting John's family — and, she hopes, being accepted by them — at their quintessential British ancestral mansion and estate.

John does his best to warn her, and Larita always is up for a challenge ... but even she wilts beneath the contemptuous hauteur of John's mother, the imperious Mrs. Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas).

(Considering Hitchcock's fondness for vicious, domineering mother figures in films such as Rebecca, Notorious, Psycho and Marnie, one can see why he'd have been intrigued by Noel Coward's Mrs. Whittaker.)

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian -- Sharp-edged sequel

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008) • View trailer for The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
3.5 stars (out of five). Rating: PG, and far too gently, due to a very grim tone and considerable violence
By Derrick Bang • Originally published in The Davis Enterprise, 5.16.08
Buy DVD: The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian • Buy Blu-Ray: Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian [Blu-ray]

Given Radio Disney's involvement with this film's Tuesday evening preview in Sacramento, and the impressive Mouse House publicity machine at work as these words are typed, one can't help assuming that The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian is designed as a family-friendly follow-up to its lavishly produced and enthusiastically received 2005 predecessor.

The Pevensie children — from left, Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Peter (William
Moseley), Lucy (Georgie Henley) and Susan (Anna Popplewell) — follow their
new friend, Prince Caspian (Ben Barnes), into an underground crypt, where
they're saddened to find the final resting place of Aslan, the wise and kindly
lion who helped so much during their previous adventures in Narnia.

The misleading PG rating also supports that belief.

But while this adventure saga delivers a smashing good time (literally!), parents need to exercise caution: Director/co-scripter Andrew Adamson's second run at C.S. Lewis is very grim stuff, with a mercilessly bleak atmosphere and a body count comparable to that found in Shakespeare's Hamlet or Macbeth. The battle scenes are impressively staged — one intimate, two monumental — but the presentation is comparable to the PG-13 hacking and slashing of all three Lord of the Rings entries.

Bad things happen to good characters in this sequel, and impressionable youngsters are apt to get rather upset when some of their favorite supporting characters don't make it to the final act.

Yes, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe had its share of dire doings, but most concerned the supernatural machinations of Tilda Swinton's White Witch. Although she makes a brief return appearance here, the (ahem) lion's share of battlefield mayhem is of the man-made, sword-wielding variety.

Watching scores (hundreds?) of foot-soldiers on both sides get sliced and diced is a bit more unsettling than seeing folks turned into statues.

I also wonder whether contemporary filmmakers have any sense of the attention span of today's children. Prince Caspian runs an impressive 138 minutes — rather a lot of movie for such a short book! — and while Adamson maintains a lively pace that moves the story right along, that's still asking a lot of the restless youngsters at whom this picture seems aimed.

The slightly older Harry Potter crowd, on the other hand, should have a great time.

After an all-too brief prologue in Blitz-ravaged London, our four young protagonists — Peter (William Moseley), Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes) and Lucy (the still irresistible Georgie Henley) — are summoned back to Narnia by the blast of a magical horn. But they arrive to find that centuries have passed during their single year in London: Everything they remember of Narnia, and all the friendly characters with whom they bonded, are nothing but distant memories.

Indeed, the very magic has been leached from the land: Trees no longer sing or gambol, and most forest animals have reverted to their more primal Earthlike counterparts.

Aslan, the wonderfully wise lion so beloved by young Lucy, hasn't been seen for a millennium.