Whip It (futuremovies.co.uk)

From infant star to wild-child persona to cutesy rom-com stalwart backed by a shrewd business sensibility, Drew Barrymore has continually found new ways to win audiences’ affections. And with her first film as director she maintains that track record, gathering a fantastic cast and making an unashamedly fun and feelgood movie, and putting something clearly close to her heart onscreen in the process. She places a niche women’s sport – Roller Derby - front and centre, but Whip It is no chick-flick on wheels; its mix of sporting action, silly humour and memorable characters will appeal to anyone who loves a good time at the cinema. The former Charlie’s Angel also scores a bullseye with the casting of leading lady Ellen Page, an actress who has such a likeable onscreen presence that no audience could help but cheer her on.

Page plays Bliss Cavendar, an average 17-year old from smalltown Texas who discovers the punk-infused appeal of Roller Derby and, despite the expectations of her beauty pageant-obsessed mother, secretly starts taking part. While the role isn’t as unique or challenging as those that she so brilliantly performed in Juno and Hard Candy, Page makes Bliss completely her own, and effortlessly draws the audience in, even in the context of this rather formulaic story. Her achievement is no small one considering that she’s surrounded by a wealth of endlessly watchable actresses, including Juliette Lewis, hugely entertaining as jokey nemesis Iron Maven, and ace comedienne Kristen Wiig, who gets a rare chance to play a slightly more serious role, and proves herself well able. Barrymore keeps the most broadly comic part for herself, and has a great time crashing into things and punching people as the short-fused, accident-prone, wonderfully-named Smashley Simpson.

Working from a script by Shauna Cross, who also wrote the source novel, Barrymore lets some of the domestic scenes hang around for too long, but directs with energy and confidence on the track. Getting her camera right in amongst the fishnets and mini-skirts, she gets a great balance of intensity and fun, and successfully builds to a final event that feels properly exciting. Jimmy Fallon, a former Barrymore co-star and a fine comedian, adds more laughs into the mix as trackside commentator Johnny Rocket, and aptly sums up the film’s easygoing approach to explaining Roller Derby’s rules: “we’ll keep track of the score, you keep track of the fishnets”.

While Whip It’s plot is aptly summed up in the title of Radiohead’s No Surprises - one of the many great choices on the film’s excellent soundtrack – it doesn’t really matter; the real enjoyment is in seeing this great cast on supremely entertaining form. With Page easily handling what little dramatic weight there is, the support players are free to focus on being funny, and they give it their all. Deserving particularly special mention is Andrew Wilson, who plays Razor, the girls’ coach. He very accurately sets the tone of the film in his performance, a deft balance of sincerity, hope and silliness. And that’s not a bad summary of what Drew Barrymore has served up with Whip It.

7/10

Whip It is out now. This review first published on futuremovies.co.uk.

Up in the Air

Jason Reitman's third film, and first since his breakout hit Juno, is an enjoyable, quality production in classical Hollywood style, with George Clooney perfectly cast and complemented by terrific support performances from Anna Kendrick and Vera Farmiga. Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a man who makes his living by firing employees for clients across America, and spends most of his time flying from state to state, ensuring that he never has to maintain meaningful relationships with family or friends. He exists alone and likes it that way. The fact that we don’t instantly hate him is due to Clooney’s charmingly self-aware performance and director Jason Juno Reitman’s skill in getting the tone of the film just right. It’s light and easygoing, but there’s depth and reality to each of the characters, right down to a heartbreaking single-scene appearance from JK Simmons, which takes us right into his character’s life in a few brief moments.

Kendrick plays a new employee shaking things up in Bingham’s industry, while Farmiga, clicking with Clooney in all the right ways, is Bingham’s equal and opposite. The way Reitman brings these three characters together is skilful and supremely entertaining. As with Juno, the director demonstrates his ability to not only understand the touchstones of contemporary life in the Western world, but to get beneath these characters’ surfaces – particularly Clooney and Kendrick – in ways that are believable and insightful. The film is also very funny, and while the final third lacks the grace and ease of the first 70 minutes, Up in the Air is a wonderful example of grown-up mainstream cinema.

8/10

Jennifer's Body (futuremovies.co.uk)

When Juno became such a huge hit in 2007, it announced the arrival of several exciting new talents, the most heralded of whom was the film’s writer, Diablo Cody. Cody went on to win that year’s screenwriting Oscar, and wasted no time in getting on with more work: writing a very well-received, Spielberg-produced TV series called United States of Tara, and developing a handful of film scripts while seemingly keeping many more ideas swilling around in her mind. Jennifer’s Body is the first of these scripts to make it to the screen, and while it is unmistakeably from the same witty and culturally aware mind as Juno, it falls short of the high bar that Cody set for herself with that excellent debut.

Jennifer’s Body is, on the surface at least, another high-school horror movie. And with FHM’s favourite lust-object Megan Fox in the role of Jennifer, along with that suggestive title, it would be natural to expect the kind of bog-standard pervy exploitation that contemporary ‘horror’ tends to present as entertainment. But apart from one shamelessly gratuitous girl-on-girl kissing scene, this is not what Jennifer’s Body offers. The problem is that neither Cody nor director Karyn Kusama seem sure of what they want this film to be instead. It’s funny in parts, but not consistently so; it dabbles in Lynchian weirdness, but never fully commits; it’s fairly gory, but lacks any proper scary bits.

Retold to us by Needy (Amanda Seyfried), the plainer best friend of Jennifer, chief cheerleader and object of desire at their small-town high school, the story concerns Jennifer’s transformation from metaphorical to literal man-eater after a tragic fire destroys the town’s only bar during a busy gig night. Needy relates events from the women’s prison we first find her in, beginning with the great line “hell is a teenage girl”. Cody’s idea of paralleling female adolescence with demon-possession shows that she understands how powerful the horror genre can be, but her tendency to defuse situations with annoyingly quirky dialogue undercuts the film’s potential to genuinely disturb an audience.

Similarly, Cody introduces an interesting subtext about the irrational extremes people can go to in the aftermath of tragedies, but keeps it fairly buried and undeveloped. The one element of the film that really works is the slow reveal of just what has caused Jennifer’s transformation, thanks to a very funny joke concerning a no-hoper indie band and a great deadpan performance from Adam Brody as the lead singer. To go into any more detail would spoil the gag, but it certainly made me chuckle. That idea shares the spark of originality that pervaded Juno, and hopefully there will be more of it in evidence in whatever Cody does next.

6/10

Jennifer's Body is in UK cinemas from 6 November. This review originally appeared on futuremovies.co.uk.

Smart People

Screen Fever Score: 6/10

Verdict:

Too many over-familiar indie movie trappings to be essential viewing, but worth checking out for its well-written characters and great performances.

Full review:
A little film with a big cast, Smart People could easily be dismissed as yet another self-involved indie flick in the style made popular by Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach et al. But under the familiar surface are some interesting and well-drawn characters, brought to life by strong performances from Dennis Quaid and Ellen Page in particular. The film, from debut directing/writing team Noam Murro and Mark Poirier, takes a gently humorous look at the lives of a family of intellectually ‘smart’ people who, it becomes painfully clear, have no idea how to engage with the real world.

Quaid plays Lawrence, a widowed university professor who lives a selfish existence ignoring the emotional needs of his two teenage children, and is none too pleased when his adopted slacker brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church) turns up in need of somewhere to live. Matters are complicated further when Lawrence ends up in the ER after some ill-advised trespassing, and there encounters Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), an old student of his and now head of the ER. A romantic connection of sorts ensues, but only serves to highlight Lawrence’s complete inability to connect meaningfully with others.

Similarly stunted in her emotional growth is Vanessa (Page), Lawrence’s daughter, an uptight and old-before-her-time Young Republican whose sole focus is on getting a perfect score in her SATs. Vanessa’s quick wit and sharp tongue make her immediately reminiscent of Juno MacGuff, but in truth she is a much more complex character, in denial of her own neediness, leading to a fumbling attempt to get closer to the bemused Chuck. Page’s performance is marked by the same skill and subtlety that earned her an Oscar nomination for Juno, and is one of the film’s highlights.

Some over-familiar indie movie elements make Smart People difficult to warm to, particularly the seemingly obligatory intrusive acoustic soundtrack, and the initial feeling that we have seen these characters before. In the case of Chuck that’s not too far from the truth, as Church is basically doing the same slobby thing he did, to similarly entertaining effect, in Sideways. There’s also some fudging of issues in the latter third of the film, with things working out much too easily for all concerned; a little more reality wouldn’t have gone amiss. Nowhere near top of its class then, but Smart People has enough interesting elements to mark Murro and Poirier as a creative team to watch.

Info:
Director: Noam Murro
Writer: Mark Poirier
Cast: Dennis Quaid, Ellen Page, Thomas Haden Church, Sarah Jessica Parker
Cert: 15
UK release: 16 May