Something's Gotta Give (128 mins, 12A) Directed by Nancy Meyers; starring Jack Nicholson, Diane Keaton, Keanu Reeves
School of Rock (109 mins, PG) Directed by Richard Linklater; starring Jack Black, Joan Cusack, Mike White
Charlie (94 mins, 18) Directed by Malcolm Needs; starring Luke Goss, Steven Berkoff
Sunrise (95 mins, U) Directed by F.W. Murnau; starring Janet Gaynor
Marilyn Monroe died while making Something's Got to Give, and when the script was refurbished for Doris Day it was called Move Over Darling. When great footballers die it is customary to retire their number, at least for a decent interval, and I suppose the producers of Something's Gotta Give think that enough time has elapsed. Anyway, the Monroe movie was to be a remake (of Garson Kanin's My Favourite Wife), and this likable romantic comedy is an original screenplay by its director, Nancy Meyers. It's a great improvement over anything she's done before.
Seeing this movie, I had a curious sense of déjà vu during a couple of rather beautiful scenes in which Jack Nicholson and Diane Keaton walk and talk along a deserted Long Island beach that has the beauty of a painting by Winslow Homer or Edward Hopper. I suddenly remembered a similar sequence in Warren Beatty's Reds (1982), where Keaton and Nicholson, as feminist writer Louise Bryant and playwright Eugene O'Neill, are having an affair on the Connecticut coast.
In Something's Gotta Give, they play fictional characters. She's the 55-year-old playwright Erica Barry ('the best woman playwright since Lillian Hellman,' someone says, though the acerbic comic writer Jean Kerr would seem to be the model). He's the 63-year-old multi-millionaire entrepreneur and philanderer Harry Sanborn, creator of Drive By Records, the world's second biggest rap company.
I mention their ages because they are crucial to the plot and the film's romantic and demographic thrust. Erica is a divorcée, Harry is a priapic bachelor who never dates anyone over 30, and her 28-year-old daughter (Amanda Peet) has brought him to the family's elegant beach house in the Hamptons for the weekend. Just as he's about to have Viagra-assisted sex with the daughter, he has a heart attack that leaves him groggily walking the hospital corridors exposing his flabby backside.
A handsome 36-year-old doctor (Keanu Reeves) insists that he recuperate locally for a few days and an extremely reluctant Erica agrees to put him up. Predictably, Erica and Harry end up in bed to comically romantic effect ('I've never seen a woman that old naked before,' he says). Harry's ideas about sex and friendship are the same as that other Harry's (the one who met Sally), so can he commit and change his ways? Well, go on, guess.
The film's a little overlong, but there are lots of bright lines; Nicholson sends up his public image hilariously; Diane Keaton is a continuous, quizzical delight as she turns their affair into a play. Her performance is as good as her best work with Woody Allen.
Since the deaths of John Belushi and John Candy there has been a vacancy for an aggressive, slobbish, overweight comic star. Richard Linklater's surprisingly conventional School of Rock, an inspirational comedy almost identical to the awful recent The Fighting Temptations, proves that Jack Black is the successful applicant. He plays a failed rock musician who passes himself off as a qualified supply teacher to get some much needed bucks at an expensive prep school in New Jersey and redeems himself by transforming a class of 15 ten-year-olds into a professional punk band. This is Dead Poets Society with rock music as the subversive art for challenging the Establishment. Black is a remarkable, physical comedian who can perform astonishing contortions with his body and face, and he's scarcely ever off-screen. His role is that of an overgrown child who has made rock his religion, and at the climax he actually dresses in short trousers and school uniform.
Opposing him, as the straight-laced headmistress is the reliable Joan Cusack, She's the sister of John Cusack who worked so well with Black in High Fidelity, and one can see School of Rock as a development of Black's role in that film. The movie is loud and only intermittently funny, with its best joke coming in the final credits when in the list of musical acknowledgements T.S. Eliot (as author of 'Memory') appears between David Bowie and Joe Strummer.
There is something disturbing in the way British rock stars have happily played well-known criminals in aggran dising biopics - Phil Collins as Great Train Robber Buster Edwards, Roger Daltrey as John McVicar, Gary and Martin Kemp as the Krays and now, Luke Goss, formerly of Bros, as the south London gangster Charlie Richardson in Charlie. Most of this dislikable and unconvincing movie is told in flashbacks from his 1966 Old Bailey trial as he sits in the dock with five other crooks, Mad Frankie Fraser among them, while a succession of villains give evidence against them that results in Charlie going down for 25 years.
The courtroom drama is ineptly handled (counsel strut around the well of the court, Perry Mason-style) and Richardson's activities are obscure, especially those in South Africa. Much of the footage is given up to scenes of graphic torture, a major preoccupation of the Richardson gang.
The final credits are preceded by the statement that all the witnesses at the Old Bailey were subsequently jailed on various charges, that Charlie would have been acquitted if the trial had taken place today, and that he's alive and well, running a goldmine in South Africa. The film is moderately better than Shoreditch by the same director, Malcolm Needs. As to its purpose, one can only echo Lear's plea, Question not the Needs.
Made in 1927, Sunrise, the great F.W. Murnau's first Hollywood film and one of the last great silent movies, is back in the cinema in a newly restored print. It is a cinematic poem subtitled 'A Song of Two Humans', featuring generically named characters (eg 'The Man', 'His Wife'), with no specific setting. A handsome, smallholder (George O'Brien) is tempted by a cloche-hatted, silk-stockinged, cigarette-smoking Jezebel (Margaret Livingston) to murder his wife, a simple, adoring soul (Janet Gaynor), abandon his little baby and move with her to the city.
But instead, he resists and the married couple's love is tested and renewed. The stylised sets for the countryside and the city are magnificent, and the picture is immaculately edited by Harold Schuster, who came to Europe in 1937 to direct Wings of the Morning, the first British movie in Technicolor. The best way to see Sunrise is on the big screen, but if you can't get to a cinema showing it, an outstanding two-disc DVD version has just been released by Eureka video. It features a commentary by cinematographer John Bailey, which is a masterclass on the art of lighting and design.
