Reviews Film
www.list.co.uk/film DRAMA SHERLOCK HOLMES (12A) 120mins ●●●●●
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s legendary detective is re-imagined as an action hero in Guy Ritchie’s brash makeover. Gone are the deerstalker hat and stiff upper lip, replaced instead with the quick-witted charm of leading man Robert Downey Jr and a pugilist’s mentality. The result is fun, if not entirely successful. Set in 1890s London, Ritchie’s film pits Holmes and sidekick Dr John Watson
(Jude Law) against a sadistic killer (Mark Strong) who claims to have resurrected himself from the dead with a plan for world domination using the dark arts. On the plus side, the film benefits from the strong camaraderie that exists
between Downey Jr and Law, as well as Ritchie’s trademark visual flair, especially during the well-staged action sequences. However the plot is often found wanting, especially given that intellect plays second fiddle to the knockabout sensibility, and neither Downey Jr nor Law are afforded the opportunity to really flesh out their characters. Holmes purists may also lament the lack of a genuinely formidable foe given that Strong’s villainous Lord Blackwood isn’t afforded the screen-time he merits and the fleeting presence of Moriarty is merely a prelude to possible sequels. Taken on crowd-pleasing merits alone, Sherlock Holmes is a lively romp that succeeds as a guilty pleasure, but this is mostly due to the winning personalities of Downey Jr and Law, whose double act is worthy of further outings. (Rob Carnevale) ■ Sherlock Holmes is on general release from 26 December.
DRAMA I’M GONNA EXPLODE (VOY A EXPLOTER) (15) 103min ●●●●● COMEDY POST GRAD (12A) 88min ●●●●●
BIOPIC/DRAMA NOWHERE BOY (15) 97min ●●●●●
Artist Sam Taylor-Wood turns feature director with Nowhere Boy, a portrait of John Lennon as a rather sulky young man. Adapted by Control writer Matt Greenhalgh from a memoir by Lennon’s half-sister Julia Baird, Nowhere Boy focuses on Lennon’s adolescence as he forms skiffle-band The Quarrymen with Paul McCartney (Thomas Sangster) as a creative escape from a dour family tug-of-love involving his Aunt Mimi (Kristin Scott Thomas) and mother Julia (Anne-Marie Duff). Handsome newcomer Aaron Johnson (Taylor-Wood’s boyfriend during filming and now her fiancée) is the rather unlovely Lennon. Taylor-Wood serves up a series of gleaming 50s period tableaux via cinematographer Seamus McGarvey, but Nowhere Boy falls well short of the mark in terms of evoking Lennon’s rebellious spirit, even in a nascent form. Although he claims a love of writing poetry and short stories, there’s little evidence here of Lennon’s caustic wit or imagination; instead he mopes around with a sullen glare, endlessly whinging about his lot and rewarding his friends with head-butts and punches. In attempting to pare down the familiar trappings of Lennon as an artist, Taylor-Wood and Greenhalgh have also stripped away his acerbic personality.
Nowhere Boy is at least an engaging if conventional biopic, allowing the
audience to spot elements familiar from any Beatles biography, from the opening twang of ‘A Hard Day’s Night’ to a trip to Strawberry Fields. But when the drama finally turns up in the final third, it’s pure grim-up-north melodrama, with Lennon shrilly hectoring his over-protective guardians while a perfunctory flashback unfolds to explain his murky origins. The women come off best here with Scott Thomas and Duff inhabiting
their roles with contrasting portraits of buttoned-down morality and erratic free-spirit respectively, but the hole in the heart of Nowhere Boy is Johnson; shorn of Lennon’s rapier wit, Johnson comes over as just another moody pretty-boy, railing at the world to conceal his lack of self- understanding. Nowhere Boy is clearly a labour of love, but while Lennon may not be turning in his grave, he’d be unlikely to empathise with, or even recognise this pallid version of himself. (Eddie Harrison) ■ Selected release from Sat 26 Dec.
Mexican filmmaker Gerardo Naranjo channels Godard’s much quoted mantra that ‘All you need for a movie is a gun and a girl’ in this kinetic homage to Pierrot le Fou. His lovers- on-the-run turn out to be a pair of delinquent fifteen-year-olds Roman (Juan Pablo de Santiago) and Maru (Maria Deschamps) from provincial Mexico, who meet in school detention. He is the rich son of a corrupt right wing politician (Daniel Gimenez Cacho), she is the sullen daughter whose mother is a nurse, and both are equally desperate to rebel against the adult world. Reading from her diary extracts, Maru is a far from reliable narrator, admitting there are ‘conflicting versions’ of the on-screen events, and in a dazzling opening sequence Naranjo plunges us into one of Roman’s homicidal fantasies. Throughout, the handheld camerawork, the colour-bleached cinematography and the jagged editing style reflect the turbulent perspectives of the teenage characters, although the film becomes calmer whilst the runaways set up camp on the roof of Roman’s family villa. It’s clear that the director’s sympathies lie squarely with the young couple – the adults, with the exception of a former political activist, seem irrelevant figures. And if there’s little doubt from the outset that the film will end in bloody tragedy, its energy and verve are impressive. (Tom Dawson) ■ Cameo, Edinburgh and selected release from Fri 1 Jan. See profile, index.
Following his own template right down to the JK Simmons cameo, Juno producer Ivan Reitman professionally mounts another bittersweet story of girlie angst with Post Grad, with would-be career girl Ryden Malby (Gilmour Girls star Alexis Bledel) suffering from post-graduation blues. Denied the LA publishing job she covets, Ryden reluctantly returns to her middle American family home eccentrically peopled by parents (Michael Keaton and Jane Lynch), grandma (Carol Burnett) and cheeky little brother Hunter (Bobby Coleman). While Ryden struggles between part time jobs, she’s also romantically snared between slick neighbour David Santiago (Rodrigo Santoro) and love- struck singer/songwriter Adam (Zack Davies).
Director Vicky Jenson’s career goes right back to being a storyboard artist on John Hughes’ She’s Having A Baby in 1988, and working with first time writer Kelly Fremon, Post Grad occasionally hits the sweet-spot of Hughes’s genre-classic Pretty in Pink, with Bledel evoking the wide-eyed spirit of Zooey Deschanel in the tonally similar (500) Days of Summer. Any comedy-drama which reaches a peak as our heroine cheers on her little brother in a box-car race inevitably plays somewhat thinly, but even if Post Grad doesn’t quite wobble the comedic jelly mould (à la Juno), Jenson’s small-but-perfectly-formed trifle will do nicely until the next big thing comes along. (Eddie Harrison) ■ General release from Fri 1 Jan.
17 Dec 2009–7 Jan 2010 THE LIST 57