A Simple Favour

Stephanie (Anna Kendrick) is a single mum, recently widowed, who fills her time with a crafting video-blog, demonstrating decoupage and baking tips to a teensy number of subscribers, plus volunteering over-enthusiastically at her son’s school. When she meets working mum Emily (Blake Lively) and is brought along on a playdate between their sons, she’s impressed by the immaculately dressed, effortlessly cool career woman. But when she does a favour keeping Emily’s son overnight while Emily works late, and Emily later goes missing, things begin to career out of control. Investigating what happened to her friend gets Stephanie into more and more trouble, mixing with fashonistas, the police and Emily’s very attractive husband.

This sorta falls into the middle zone of “Gone Girl” knockoffs – it’s better than “Girl on the Train” but not as good as the original – but it does have a nice gentle whimsy to its distinctly female take on a crime story. If this isn’t really a solve-it-yourself story (there’s at least one twist which comes straight from the desperate writer’s toolkit), it makes up for it with strong casting (Kendrick is a delightfully daggy heroine and Lively drips both contempt and poise as the cooler-than-everybody Emily, in a series of spectacularly fashionable outfits, including one suit that really shouldn’t be containing her boobs) and a nice sense of whimsy and general lightness.

Juliet, Naked

The latest film based on a Nick Hornby novel bears some resemblance to one of his most successful, “High Fidelity” – being a film set in the world of music fanatics and those who love (or don’t love but have put up with) them. But this one’s a little sharper – telling the story of a fanatic vlogger, Duncan, whose website devoted to the one-album-and-disappeared-twenty-years-ago star Tucker Crowe consumes vast amounts of his life, to the chagrin of his partner, Annie. But when a raw recording of the original sessions of his album becomes available, Annie is the first to listen to it, and her reaction causes fractures both with Duncan and, surprisingly, with Crowe, whose reclusive life recovering from the disasters his rock star life left behind gets challenged when he gets in contact with Annie to agree with her dismissive review of his old work. This has a much less gentle view of male self-indulgence than “High Fidelity” did – it recognises the self-regard, obstinacy and entitlement that can live within fan culture far more clearly and mocks it far more readily. The film version is perfectly cast in the three lead roles – Chris O’Dowd’s belligerent nerd, Rose Byrne’s exhausted girlfriend and Ethan Hawke (being a relic of the 90s himself) channelling a little of what worked in the later scenes of  Boyhood as the guy who is resigned to the consequences of the life he picked up when he was too young to know better. It’s maybe a little meandering, but it’s charming and funny and gently wise with a biting final line that ensures you leave the film grinning.

Crazy Rich Asians

Based on the first of the popular trilogy of novels, this is an indulgent bit of entertainment as a young game-theory professor travels to Shanghai for the wedding of a friend of her boyfriend, only to discover he’s a lot richer than she thought he was, and his family has very definite ideas about who’s suitable to marry their boy. To a certain extent this is a “celebration of culture” romantic comedy along the lines of, say, “Big Fat Greek Wedding”, and like that film it’s got some very traditional pleasures along with some shamelessly corny comedy. In this case, director John Chu is a very capable visual director – he makes the opulence glisten and the food-porn of a Shanghai market look suitably drool worthy, and there’s some good stuff in the supporting cast (particularly Michelle Yeoh as the boyfriend’s mother – around her, it can be a pretty marginal comedy, with her, scenes elevate to feel like they’re out of a Jane Austen novel, where social codes and working within them are all-important and taken very seriously). The two romantic leads are a little dull (Constance Wu has a bit of pluck to her but doesn’t really get a chance to cut loose very much, Henry Golding is a very pretty lump of wood but his chest is nicely chiselled), there’s a strong supporting cast (Awkwafina from “Ocean’s 8” does the best-friend job with charming goofiness), there’s maybe a few too many subplots (Ronnie Chieng ends up having basically only one joke and no actual plot, and Gemma Chan, so good on TV’s Humans, gets stuck in a sideplot that presumably meant something in the original novel but feels marginal here), and if you examine too closely you might end up thinking maybe a guy who’s prepared to drop his girlfriend in a situation like this without proper preparation isn’t the guy you want to end up with, no matter how loaded he is. But it’s mostly glossy populist fun with a couple of reasonable twists.

The Happytime Murders

This is a mess. And it’s a mess in very strange ways – a puppet detective movie in a world where puppets are a discriminated underclass in a world mostly run for and by humans, where a series of murders going through the cast of an old TV show bring out a lot of dark and dirty secrets, this could have been a twistedly entertaining romp along the lines of Meet the Feebles or Avenue Q. But instead this is very clunky – the lead puppet, Phil, is a fairly dull compendium of PI clichés, and Melissa McCarthy as his human offsider isn’t really breaking the mould of her recent run of “yell very loud” performances either. Nobody really seems to get the tone of how this should work, which is ridiculous given this is the Henson organisation’s attempt at doing something a bit more wide ranging. None of the puppets really appeal, and the only human performance that even vaguely gets the tone right is Maya Rudolph as Phil’s secretary – she’s got a blissful goofyness that briefly lightens up the screen when she’s on, reminding us this is meant to be fun, not a slog. But her role’s too small to really give this much more than a tiny lift. Very missable.

The Meg

I’m not too proud to admit that this was a film I’d anticipated at the beginning of the year. Jason Statham versus a Gigantic Prehistoric Shark? This looked like goofy pleasure made right for my stupid pleasure bone. No, Statham’s never going to trouble the Oscars with nuanced performance and emotional transformation, but in meatheaded classics like the Transporter and Crank films, he’s got a certain go-for-broke machismo which can be ridiculously entertaining.

Alas, this doesn’t really fulfil those wishes. It all feels very by-the-numbers and blunted down, whether it’s the minimisation of any actual gore from the prehistoric shark attacks, Statham being in the uncomfortable position of having to be forced into playing both traumatised and romantic rather than just unstoppable badass, the overstuffed supporting cast (Ruby Rose, for instance, has proved she can be a good addition to an ensemble, but in this film she has virtually nothing to do – she’s not even spouting exposition behind a computer screen, the most she does is briefly give the Megaladon an option for a potential feeding frenzy that doesn’t really happen).

Look, this has its occasional moments – a couple of reasonable shark attacks, a cute kid who is, I’ll reluctantly concede, definitely cute, and a half-decent ending. But I hoped for a whole lot more than I got.

Slenderman

The popular internet myth/meme becomes a movie, presumably because the marketing department thought there was a need for one. It doesn’t’ become a very good movie, though – this is sorta a teen “The Ring” retread, with a lot of enthusiastic googling to try to find how to deal with an evil creature that has crept into the lives of four average teenagers. The problem is, these are four very average teenagers with little distinguishing personality beyond “One with a Boyfriend”, “One with a sister”, “Black one” and “The one who disappears first”. And there’s a few surrealistic scare sequences that would fit right in as the most boring element of a lesser Nightmare on Elm Street sequel. But this adds up to very very little – there’s nothing you haven’t seen done better a thousand times before, and it’s a fairly dull non-event of a film.

Mirai

Mamoru Hosada is one of the best anime creators of recent years. In the last decade he’s made multiple classics – “The Girl that Leaped through time”, “Summer Wars”, “the Boy and the Beast” all combining fantasy elements with touching stories of human connection. “Mirai” is on a much smaller scale, from the perspective of a somewhat moody four year old whose desire to be pandered to by his parents is thwarted when a baby sister shows up. And as he plans to get their attention back, he starts to encounter other members of his family in the garden, from different times of their lives – including a teenage version of his brand new baby sister.

Mostly taking place inside one house, this is not my favourite of Hosada’s work – I missed the more outlandish elements that things like “Summer Wars” and “boy and the beast” brought into it, and the four year old protagonist is age-suitably self-centred and whiny for much of the running time in ways that don’t make him easy to take to. But it’s still full of beauty and wonder and gentle soulfulness, and if you like the softer side of anime, this might very well appeal.