This week's movies reviewed: From Hubie Halloween to My Zoe
Hubie Halloween
Despicable trick or delightful treat? Adam Sandler tends to sharply divide opinion, and Hubie Halloween ensures that the debate is unlikely to be settled any time soon.
Sandler stars as Hubie Dubois, a middle-aged dimwit whose civic spirit is such that he sets out every Halloween to keep the Salem streets safe for kids, even though he’s terrified of ghouls, ghosts and pretty much any horror movie cliché you might care to mention.
Coddled by his Mom (June Squibb) and despised by Officer Steve (Kevin James), Hubie is bullied by virtually everyone in town – most notably by Mr Landolfa (Ray Liotta) – which means no one takes him seriously when he realises that a psychopath has escaped from a nearby hospital with plans to terrorise Salem on Halloween night…
Co-written by Sandler and Tim Herlihy, and directed by Sandler’s long-term collaborator Steven Brill (Sandy Wexler, The Do-Over), Hubie Halloween finds Sandler once more happy to play the butt of his own jokes, portraying Hubie as a hapless figure of fun who somehow fails to realise he’s utterly ridiculous.
Sandler’s deadpan schtick is well established at this point, but it’s virtually impossible for the viewer to maintain a straight face given the sheer volume of visual gags, one-liners, slapstick comedy and farcical scenarios, few of which are classics but deliver plenty of giggles nonetheless.
Regular co-stars such as Kevin James, Ben Stiller and Rob Schneider are here complemented by Steve Buscemi and Maya Rudolph, among others, while the script pays homage to an eclectic bunch of horror flicks including Jaws, Christine, Scream and The Creature from the Black Lagoon. Undercooked in places, overwrought almost everywhere else, Hubie Halloween is an unpretentious comedy flick that simply wants you to laugh out loud, and succeeds on more than a few occasions.
My Zoe stars Julie Delpy as Isabelle, a mother devoted to her young daughter Zoe (Sophia Ally) and constantly arguing with her ex-husband James (Richard Armitage) over their custody agreement. Despite her parents’ ceaseless bickering, Zoe seems to be growing up a surprisingly well-adjusted and healthy young girl.
Then disaster strikes, and Zoe is left comatose, her life entirely dependent on the machinery that sustains her.
Written and directed by Julie Delpy herself, My Zoe quickly develops into an emotional rollercoaster, even as Delpy seeks to distance her story from the conventional tropes of the classic weepy. An immunologist by profession, Isabelle is a rationalist, and much of the story plays out in harshly lit, sterile environments that seem to preclude the possibility of faith, hope or the kind of inexplicable miracle Isabelle’s scientific mind cannot allow herself to conceive.
Besides, Delpy the writer-director has more profound issues that she wishes to explore, and the story gradually evolves into an ethical dilemma when the desperate Isabelle reaches out to Dr Thomas Fischer (Daniel Brühl), a controversial scientist who specialises in stem-cell research.
Delpy has crafted her characters superbly here, doling out flaws and virtues in equal measure in order to create relationships we can all relate to, and especially when the recriminations start flying and the temporary reconciliations between Isabelle and James prove too brittle to survive the impossible weight of their daughter’s life-or-death struggle.
The latter stages aren’t quite as convincing, unfortunately, and lack the emotional heft of what has gone before even as Isabelle plumbs the very depths of desperation in her bid to bring her daughter back. For the most part, however, My Zoe is a finely wrought and deeply affecting account of the lengths to which a parent will go in order to save her child.
David Attenborough: A Life on our Planet (G) *****
David Attenborough: A Life on Our Planet (G) is a sombre affair billed by the beloved naturalist as his ‘witness statement’ on humanity’s blinkered, relentless march towards self-extinction. While the film does feature old footage of Attenborough at play in the wild as it charts his lifetime’s devotion to bringing the natural world to our screens, the greater part of the film is taken up with a straight-to-camera address in which Attenborough outlines the horrifying scale of global despoliation.
It’s not all doom and gloom, as you might hope: Attenborough does provide potential solutions to climate change, employing the ‘rewilded’ Chernobyl as a metaphor for how, left to its own devices, Nature might be able to correct the mistakes made by its dominant species.
Now 94, Attenborough may have lost much of the vim that once allowed him to penetrate to the darkest jungles and highest peaks, but his clarity of vision is undimmed, and his passion for the natural world remains unquenched. Harrowing and inspiring in equal measures, A Life on Our Planet is essential viewing.
