Son of the Bride (121 mins, 15) Directed by Juan José Campanella; starring Ricardo Darin, Héctor Alterio, Norma Aleandro
Full Frontal (100 mins, 18) Directed by Steven Soderbergh; starring David Duchovny, Julia Roberts, Catherine Keener,
The Hot Chick (104 mins, 12A) Directed by Tom Brady; starring Rob Schneider, Anna Faris
As has often been remarked, a good many of the best movies of the past couple of years have come from Spain and Latin America. A pleasant addition to this group is Son of the Bride, directed and co-scripted by Juan José Campanella, a filmmaker who divides his time between the United States and his native Argentina. It's another movie with a restaurant setting, though this isn't a picture in which the audience is stuffed with cinematic food like a flock of Strasbourg geese.
The picture centres on Rafael (Ricardo Darin), the good-looking 42-year-old manager of a popular restaurant in Buenos Aires that his Italian immigrant parents created. He's troubled by unreliable suppliers, unsympathetic bank managers, a difficult ex-wife, an alienated young daughter, a young lover from Spain he doesn't properly appreciate and a restaurant chain that's trying to buy him out.
This isn't the adult life he saw ahead of him when he'd dress up in a Zorro costume as a carefree child. Moreover, his mother is in a nursing home suffering from Alzheimer's, and his charming father, who loves his wife as if nothing had happened to her, wants to give her a full-scale church wedding to make up for the civil ceremony he'd insisted on 44 years before. Not surprisingly, Rafael has a heart attack, which puts things into perspective, if not into order.
This is a comedy that touches sensitively and truthfully on tragic matters in a kindly, sympathetic way. The performances are uniformly excellent. The veterans Héctor Alterio and Norma Alean dro are magnificent as Rafael's parents, and there's a lovely turn by Eduardo Blanco, a Roberto Benigni lookalike, as Rafael's boyhood friend, a minor movie actor. The wonderful climactic sequence elicits laughter and tears and carefully skirts sentimentality.
Between his remake of Ocean's 11 and his remake of Solaris, Steven Soderbergh made Full Frontal, a messy, narcissistic movie about moviemaking, starring a bunch of actors from his earlier films, Julia Roberts, David Duchovny, Catherine Keener and Brad Pitt among them.
Over a single 24-hour period, some tiresome showbiz people in Los Ange les are variously pitching a movie, shooting a movie, preparing to attend the twentieth birthday party of a successful producer at a Beverly Hills hotel, rehearsing a terrible play called The Sound and the Führer, and so on. There's a film within the film, and another within that; the texture of the film stock varies from the home-movie fuzzy to Hollywood glossy; and Soderbergh invites the audience to do work that isn't worth doing.
At the end of this self-indulgent farrago, one takes some consolation in the thought that it's probably better that the stars should be appearing in this than coming over here to go slumming on West End stages.
Anyone visiting The Hot Chick in the expectation of seeing a biopic of Colonel Sanders is in for a bad surprise. It's a dire life-swap comedy starring Rob Schneider, even less attractive and even more gross than Adam Sandler, who produced the film and has a small uncredited role. Schneider plays Clive, a scummy thief who, as a result of a pre-historic Ethiopian curse, swaps bodies with an arrogant 17-year-old high-school cheerleader.
On the way to learning sentimental lessons in humility and mutual understanding between the sexes, there is a succession of jokes about peeing, farting, penises, gays and incest. I am opposed to censorship but generally in favour of classification, and I think this Disney production should have been given a 15 Certificate.
