Movie Reviews: ParaNorman
He is respected in America but loved in Europe, so perhaps that’s why the last decade or so has found Woody Allen pursuing his muse through the major European cities. After London, Barcelona and Paris comes which Allen writes and directs, a film in which a number of storylines run parallel without ever really overlapping or colliding.
Hayley (Alison Pill) and Michelangelo (Flavio Parenti) are getting married, thus bringing together her parents Phyllis (Judy Davis) and Jerry (Allen) and his, Giancarlo (Fabio Armilato) and Sofia (Monica Nappo). American architecture student Jack (Jess Eisenberg) falls for his lover’s best friend Monica (Ellen Page), despite the wise words of his (possibly imaginary) mentor John (Alec Baldwin).
Meanwhile, the high-priced call-girl Anna (Penelope Cruz) gets mixed up in the affairs of a newly-married pair of country bumpkins. There’s more story too, including a sub-plot involving Roberto Benigni as a man who has celebrity thrust upon him, but the details of each are less important than the fact that each story allows Allen to write yet another mildly absurd but surely well-intentioned love letter to the Eternal City.
More than any of his other films since Manhattan (1979), perhaps, this is film about film, as each set of characters and their scenarios evoke a classic movie set in Rome.
Ravishingly shot by cinematographer Darius Khondji, Rome is the true star, its allure eclipsed only, and momentarily, when the ridiculously beautiful Penelope Cruz totters across the screen in her ludicrously high hooker’s heels.
Of course, with so many characters to follow it’s very difficult for the viewer to gain emotional purchase on any one story.
It’s a tiramisu of a movie, a gloriously sweet confection composed of tier upon tier of mildly amusing scenes, but one that will leave all but the most devoted Allen fans craving a more substantial offering.
We don’t often see movies about intimacy issues between long-term married couples coming out of Hollywood, so for the sake of its rarity alone you’d like to see things work out for
Desperate to salvage her stuck-in-a-rut marriage, Kay (Meryl Streep) takes the drastic step of enrolling herself and her husband Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) on a course run by Dr Feld (Steve Carrell), one designed to reignite the passions of young love.
Written by Vanessa Taylor and directed by David Frankel, the film is very distinctly split in two. The first half, in which Kay and Arnold spend most of their time at opposite ends of a couch in Dr Feld’s office, feels artificially structured and almost stage-bound, as if the film has been adapted from a play.
Certainly it’s all very wordy, as Dr Feld prompts Arnold to confess to the fact that his generation generally didn’t like to complain about very much, particularly not to their wives, and especially not about third-rate marital sex.
Once Kay and Arnold loosen up and start to have a little fun, the film loosens up too. That allows Tommy Lee Jones and Meryl Streep to kick up their thespian heels and show us what they can do, but by then it’s all a little too late, and we’re almost past caring whether or not they salvage their marriage.
It’s a solid and eventually satisfying melodrama, but the absence of any real spark of originality suggests that it’ll be quite a while before we see another Hollywood movie on this theme.
Beware that PG rating, which was bestowed on appeal after an original rating of 12A was awarded. is a clever animated tale about a young boy, Norman (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who sees dead people all over his small town, which was cursed 300 years previously by a witch.
Will Norman, who is considered a weirdo by his family and is bullied in school, turns out to be the town’s most unlikely hero by neutralising her curse?
Smart animation and plenty of in-jokes for lovers of zombie flicks keep this one ticking over nicely, but the very young might find the horror aspects too convincing and fail to appreciate the extent to which writer-director Chris Butler and his co-writer Sam Fell are engaged in a humorous send-up of the classic zombie B-movies.
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