Deeply unsatisfying, 12 In A Box fails to deliver on all accounts. Too dark to be lighthearted, too slapstick to be a proper black comedy, it’s no wonder the schizophrenic plot leaves the majority of viewers baffled, bewildered and, above all else, bored out of their minds.
Look, we’ve read the news – we know all about Run For Your Wife only taking £602 on its opening weekend, and about Danny Dyer (probably) threatening to cut the faces off everyone at the distribution company in retribution, apples’n’pears, blah. But when we finally made it to a screening, we were amazed. Forget your preconceptions – the only reason Run For Your Wife has bombed is because YOU PEOPLE AREN’T READY FOR IT.
Mother’s Milk is a complicated family drama centring on the fate of a charming holiday orchard house in the south of France. Eleanor Melrose has decided to bequeath the family holiday home in Provence to an Irish shama instructor for its use as a New Age Foundation, rather than giving it to her son Patrick and his family. Over a long summer there, the film explores the relationships between the residents as Eleanor seems on the verge of death. Boringly.
The potential break-down of a marriage is rarely imagined as an area ripe for hilarity. To debut writer-director Dan Mazer, however, it’s rib-tickling gold. Those moments of crippling doubt as you wonder whether you’ve made a mistake; side-splitting! The anguish you feel over your attraction somebody else; uproarious! So, how does Mazer attempt to justify humour in the heartbreak? It’s easy, really – he simply writes protagonists so unlikeable that the audience never cares about them in the first place.
Judd Apatow is back in the directing chair after working as a producer on most of America’s comedy output: Anchorman, The Five Year Engagement, Wanderlust, Get Him To The Greek, Superbad– the list is impressive. However, while Apatow has shepherded a lot of quality comedy talent in those films, his own directing and writing efforts (The 40 Year Old Virgin, Knocked Up) have received mixed feedback. In This is 40, he casts his own wife and kids as a family reaching a crisis point as the couple turn 40, in a plot that seems to imitate his own life. Sticking a little too close to home here proves to be the film’s downfall as laughs are few and far between.
Movie 43 may already be the most derided film of all time, and it’s only been in the cinema for less than a week. It’s an ‘anthology film’ of thirteen or more (depending on how you count) short, non-related comedy sketches directed by various different people. We decided to check it out and reflect on what, if anything, it could all mean.
Claustrofobia is a Dutch horror debut from director Bobby Boermans, starring Carolien Spoor as a veterinary student who finds herself chained to a bed in the basement of one of her neighbours with no idea how she got there. The film explores some aspects of the condition of its title, but not nearly as deeply or darkly as you’d expect.
Cringe-worthy comedy with Bette Midler and Billy Crystal as grandparents causing havoc with the grandchildren when the parents are away on business. Laughs are almost non-existent – save yourself and avoid at all costs.
Actually only the eighth instalment in the phenomenally popular Khiladi series, Khiladi 786 is a colourful farce happy to dress up its batshit story of arranged marriage in a barrage of action sequences and endearingly mugging comedy. The first Khiladi in twelve years, the interim decade has provided director Ashish R Mohan with an array of techniques borrowed from the world of hip-hop videos and action blockbusters. Relocated to the relatively inoffensive and well-meaning world of Bollywood, the slo-mo action comes off as alternately mocking and sincere in a film that above all else does not take itself too seriously.
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