“You’ll Miss Me” – The debut film by Amanda Sthers can easily be described as the French answer to “Love Actually”. This easily digestible confection is perfunctorily executed by Sthers who smoothly handles about a half dozen intersecting storylines. The film, which does have it’s charms and occasional surprises, takes us through some very familiar territory: old loves re-connecting, new love, chance encounters and youthful folly all factor in Sthers film, leading to pleasantly predictable results. All the standard characters are here a from grumpy old man whose hearts seem stone cold; a divorced father busy looking after his child; and a young woman who is he last in her circle of friends to find true love. Throw in a precocious little girl, a woman dying of cancer and even an illegal immigrant and you have all your demographic bases covered. There is pleasure in the recognizable, as the audience we saw it with loved it, but you can go ahead and call us curmudgeons for shrugging our shoulders at this one. [C+]
“Baby Blues” – Finally, a film about the decision to have a baby that treats the situation and both sexes with intelligence. This smarter than average romantic comedy follows Alex (Karin Fiard), a young professional who is few years shy of her 40th birthday when she is offered a job promotion that will transplant her from Paris to New York. This is great career opportunity but it also forces her to consider whether or not the time to have a child is quickly disappearing. Her partner, Fabrizio (Stefano Accorsi), is happy with their life and unaware of the doubts she is having. The deft script by Bruno Japy and writer/director Diane Bertrand is admirable for really delving into the various issues that are raised when a couple face the decision of having a child or note. Bertrand’s direction is solid allowing the confromtatios and difficulties unfold naturally, though she does making unwise detours into broader comedic territory that really belong in another film. In a nice surprise, Portishead’s Beth Gibbons delivers a solid soundtrack of original songs for the film. They are quite unlike anything we’ve heard from the singer, sounding like her take on breathless, minimal French pop from the 60s and 70s, and as far as we know, they are not available in a proper release. We hope someone remedies that situation quickly. The songs are really quite wonderful, and adds a nice layer of texture to the surprisingly mature film. [B-]
“A Day At The Museum” – Imagine a sketch from the last half hour of Saturday Night Live combined with Monty Python at their most tiresome and you might imagine what sitting through 90 minutes of “A Day At The Museum” is like. This presumed comedy is set entirely in a museum over the course of a single day and riffs on both the patrons and artists that fill the halls and rooms. Unfortunately the writer/director Jean-Michel Ribes hits the most obvious jokes with mind-numbing repetition. Among the running the jokes about the visitors there is a guy who can’t remember where he parked (seriously); a woman who struggles to find the Kadinsky exhibit; a group of school children who are loud; a guided tour group literally running through museum to see everything and finally, a gaggle of girls who can’t pronounce “Paul Gaugin”. The filmmaker’s stabs at artists is slightly more successful, if using fairly tired caricatures of the “pretentious artist”. There is a photography exhibit that is nothing but pictures of cocks; another artist who’s work is simply that of the patrons themselves standing in various rooms and then there is the duo of Sulki and Sulko, a sort of funny hybrid of Andrew & Andrew and Warhol. But the film does have one truly great sequence in which a group of security guards describe the negative effects on their personalities that being in the presence of great art everyday has on them. Satires of the art world are difficult because it’s too easy to exaggerate the personalities beyond the point of recognizable absurdity, and unfortunately it’s what happens here far more often not. “A Day At The Museum” feels like the real version of a bad one: you leave feeling exhausted, lightheaded and you don’t remember a thing. [D]