Book Club - review

Just as you shouldn't judge a book by it's cover, you shouldn't judge a film by its poster.
However this poster is a fairly accurate representation of the film in just how relevance and importance the actual "book" part of the book club has to the film. Can you make it out on the poster? It is there I promise you.
That might be harsh because for all I know most book groups might be a mere front for drinking copious amounts of wine and gossiping about men!
Beginning with a voiceover from Diane Keaton's character, it introduces the audience to the four main protagonists who formed a book club and have been meeting for forty years now.
There is the one who talks via narration (Keaton), the one who is sexually dominant (Fonda), the career minded lawyer (Bergen) and the meek, family oriented one (Steenburgen).
If that line up of characteristics sounds familiar, it does feel like a script for a potential sequel to Sex And The City set 30 years after the original that has been reworked to sell to a studio by including a rather tenuous link to a popular novel. Just like Fifty Shades of Grey and Twilight then!
How tenuous you ask? Well at one point Fonda tells the group "50 million readers can be wrong" only for a minute later to have one of them reading the book with the back cover stating "Over 100 million copies sold" which shows how little the film cares about the book.
In the 2002 TV series The Book Group and 2007 film The Jane Austen Book Club, the plots of the books that were being read become part of the characters lives and influence the story.
Here beyond a few initial smutty jokes, there is very little in the way of plot references.
*Spoilers* There is only one post-coitus scene in the film which is not very progressive for a film about women reclaiming their sexual power*
Instead it is just a rather bland, formulaic, poorly written romantic comedy... just like Fifty Shades then!
(For those who are saying Fifty Shades wasn't a comedy, you clearly didn't see the film I saw)
If the filmmakers wanted to try to convince audiences that this movie was about a book group, they could have included at least one scene of them actually reviewing one of the books let alone all three of them.
The biggest difference between the Fifty Shades trilogy and Book Club is simply the sheer amount of talent attached to the material.
Between the top six names on the cast list are 5 Oscars, 11 nominations, 10 Golden Globes, 37 nominations, 4 BAFTAs, 9 nominations, 7 Emmys and 15 nominations.
Which begs the question? Why are they all starring in this?
At one point Bergen says of Steele's character "She should never have signed that contract!". The same could be said of all these great actors.
Much has been made of the argument that there are not many good roles out there for women of a certain age. Was this script all that was available?
Similar to choosing Fifty Shades of Grey for a book group, was there really no other options?
Particularly when this film was written and directed by a man.
It is an strange situation because European cinema has shown recently that there are great films out there for women such as Elle and Let The Sunshine In so why is America and the UK flagging behind. I say the UK because unless you are a Dame (Dench, Smith or Mirren) your options are still limited. And obviously there is the Streep exemption as well.
The women here still show a sparkle in the eye and have a joie de vivre. Keaton's subplot involves her two daughters believing she is over the hill and unable to look after herself but she learns to stand up to them and say she still has a life to live and leaves them to go enjoy it.
Here's hoping that Keaton, Fonda et all get the chance to have that big screen renaissance in real life too.

1 star

Fifty Shades Of Grey - review

For many film reviewers, going to see Fifty Shades Of Grey this weekend was the very epitome of an S&M experience.
Entering into seeing something that could cause them great physical pain with the knowledge that it could also give them great pleasure by giving it a merciless beating afterwards, or even worse... actually enjoying the film!

Fifty Shades Of Grey is sadly not a romantic comedy about a man who falls in love with a girl who works at a DIY store and helps him pick out the right colour to redecorate his red room with.

It is actually based on the unbelievably successful piece of cliterature by E.L. James and sees a young girl become infatuated with a man who wants her to become his "submissive" and enter into a world of pain and pleasure.

Watching the film you would not be surprised to learn that the book started off life as a piece of Twilight fan fiction. The signs are all there; virginal brunette girl who falls for a cold, distant but really, really ridiculously good looking guy with a secret lifestyle. Walks in the Washington State forests. Dialogue that sounds like it was written by a 12 year old girl.

Yes, the book might have been incredibly popular but people were not buying it because it was the next great piece of literature. It wasn't even the next Harry Potter or the next Dan Brown novel. They were buying this for the sex scenes.

So while Kelly Marcel could try and mount a campaign for a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar next year for excising all the awful "inner goddess" monologuing and producing something which is not a complete train wreck out of such a poorly written source, unfortunately the terrible dialogue remains. A loud guffaw emitted from the audience when Christian Grey's response to what makes him the way he is was "I'm fifty shades of fucked up!". I have to admit that I rolled my eyes at that line. Is Christian going to put me over his knee and punish me for that too?

However like I said, the audience for this movie are not going for the dialogue and performances they are there for the sex (even to the point that some of the audience in my screening were taking pictures of the scenes on their smartphones!),

So how do the sex scenes come across? Is it worth all the fuss?

No, not really.

After taking ages teasing the audience, when they finally get around to having sex it is nothing more erotic than a scene from 90's soft core series The Red Shoe Diaries. After that two spend what seems like forever working out exactly what sort of punishment and reward goes into the submissive's contract (a situation the actors are surely familiar with as they will be having their multi-picture clauses invoked on Monday when the box office figures are in) it is time to visit the Red Room... and nothing good has ever happened to a woman who goes in there, just ask Laura Palmer.

Despite the genuinely impressive cinematography throughout the whole movie (nothing less should be expected from Seamus McGarvey who has also shot the likes of Atonement and Anna Karenina) the actual sex scenes are full of sex but are never sexy. At one point Dornan handcuffs Johnson from the ceiling like a piece of meat that had me thinking the last time I saw a scene like that it was in the original Texas Chainsaw Massacre.

The character of Christian Grey does have a lot of intrigue and potential (sadly not explored here but undoubtably in the sequels as to why he is the way he is, what happened to the previous submissives, etc) and part of me wishes Christian Bale had played the part of Grey as if he were reprising his role of Patrick Bateman because the two characters seem to have a LOT of sinister common ground. The scenes where he talks to Ana while she is asleep, you can imagine him casually saying "I like to dissect girls. Do you know I'm utterly insane?" because he does so many sociopathic and psychopathic behaviours.

Sadly in the end, by Hollywood standards and being unfamiliar with the book, the film finishes on a rather abrupt and slightly laughable conclusion (given the subject matter) but is clearly designed to leave audiences begging for more. After all who hasn't experienced a time when an exciting and racy engagement has been halted by a sudden and unsatisfying climax?

2 stars