The Son (15)
**
First, there was The Father. Now The Son. Perhaps French playwright turned film director Zeller can dust down an old play and call it Holy Ghost to complete his trilogy on family misery.
In The Father, a dutiful daughter tried to do the best for her Alzheimer-suffering father. Here a father (Jackman) tries to do right by his troubled teenage son (McGrath.)
Nicholas is depressed, self-harming and not going to school. He worships his successful lawyer father, but resents him for leaving his mother (Dern) and starting a new family with a younger woman (Kirby.)
With his film debut, Zeller was able to transfer his theatrical conceit to the screen with seemingly minimal alteration. The Father was set-bound but cinematic. His play Le Fils, though has required considerable opening out and every time there is a travelling scene - in a car, train, plane, or out jogging and walking around Manhattan - you are intensely aware that this is there for it to seem like a proper movie.
The film's cold look is all brickwork and metal, married with an abruptness to the staging; everything is straight to the point.
Responses to it seem to be steered by the reaction to McGrath's performance. People have complained that he is one note, but probably the role’s written that way. If you have acute depression perhaps moping about, complaining that you are in pain and feel estranged from life, is the extent of your emotional range.
That doesn’t make him any more sympathetic, though. Maybe Zeller is trying to push audiences into revealing the shallowness of their compassion: to show how easily and quickly audiences will tire of his expressions of pain.
Nicholas seems to be little more than a plot device designed to make Jackman look like a hypocrite. This seems harsh; as New York home-wrecking corporate lawyers with political ambitions go, he seems like a decent enough guy, horrified to hear himself saying the same lines his father said to him.
Anthony Hopkins pops up briefly as Jackman’s hated father and takes a GB News approach to the situation, that his son should abandon all this new man, sensitive father nonsense. The surprise is that by the end, Zeller seems to be agreeing with this point of view.
Directed by Florian Zeller. Starring Hugh Jackman, Zen McGrath, Laura Dern, Vanessa Kirby and Anthony Hopkins. In Cinemas from February 17. Running time: 123 mins.
Magic Mike’s Last Dance (15)
**
Stripping is yet another pursuit that the 21st century has ruined.
Once a seedy activity performed in East End pubs during episodes of Minder, it now involves poles, gymnastics, the aerial dispersal of paper currency, and impossibly taut musculature. It all seems too much like hard work.
Part of the change must be attributed to Channing Tatum’s lucrative Magic Mike film, TV and stage Empire. Tatum has decided to finish off the films with a third instalment and what better way to bury something for good than take it to London?
In Miami, wealthy not-quite divorcee Hayek Pinault picks up Mike and takes him to London to direct the ultimate strip show. In Miami it’s fine, but the moment we hit the montage of tourist tat and bus on London Bridge, the whole affair is enveloped in cringe.
The plot sees them scouring London for top dancers, and you could imagine this mirroring the production’s search for the worst actors in London. Unfair; probably, it isn’t the actors but the atrocious roles and dialogue.
Last Dance is an objectively bad film, but Tatum charms and the dance scenes have the desired effect. Buyer beware though; they do not contain anything close to The Full Monty.
Directed by Steven Soderbergh. Starring Channing Tatum, Salma Hayek Pinault, Ayub Khan-Din, Juliette Motamed, Jemelia George and Vicki Pepperdine. In cinemas. Running time: 112 mins.
Marcel The Shell With Shoes On (PG)
***
Everybody's got their own mockumentary these days, even shoe-wearing one-eyed stop-motion animated molluscs with hand-drawn animated mouths.
Marcel (Slate) lives in a real-life Airbnb house with just his granny (Rossellini) for company after the rest of his extended shell family disappeared in a house move. But now filmmaker Fleischer-Camp has moved in and started putting clips of him up on Youtube where he has become a social media star.
Expanded from short clips that the former husband and wife team Slate and Fleischer-Camp have been making for over a decade, this film version is definitely unique. There are plenty of great sight gags and funny lines that merge with moments of poignancy and whimsy.
It reminded me a little of the old Nick Park short Creature Comforts where animated animals mouth the previously recorded vox-pop of satisfied electricity customers - it has the same disconnect between the words and the characters speaking them.
I imagine this is going to be a real audience splitter; many will find it adorable, inspiring and moving; others will feel like they're having their face shoved into a tweegrater.
Directed by Dean Fleischer-Camp. Featuring Jenny Slate, Dean Fleischer-Camp, Isabella Rossellini. Running time: 90 mins.
Go to http://www.halfmanhalfcritic.com/ for a review of the blu-ray release of Bones and All.
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