Mark Steyn

Years ago a movie buff pal said to me he couldn’t understand why I liked the theatre. ‘A great show is only great to the people who were there,’ he said. ‘A great film is for ever.’ Ha! Tell it to your humble critic after a month in which he’s reviewed the ‘new’ King Kong, the ‘new’ Producers and now the ‘new’ Fun with Dick and Jane, with a week off for Brokeback Mountain (or Fun with Dick). Like the old warhorses of the provincial rep, movies are now revived every few years with a new set and a younger cast. And yet, even in as cannibalistic a village as Hollywood, who’d have thought they’d opt for a second bite at Fun with Dick and Jane?

Formula gets a bum rap from critics, but I’m rather partial to it myself. In the Bond movies, it’s pretty much the best bits — take out the flirting with Moneypenny, Q going ‘Pay attention, 007’, Shirley Bassey bellowing the theme song over silhouettes of dolly birds gyrating round giant pistols, and what’s left isn’t that interesting. J.K.

‘The motto of the British Air Force Special Services,’ announces Orlando Bloom, ‘is, “Those who risk, win”.’ Close enough, I suppose. Mr Bloom is from Canterbury and, if he doesn’t care, there’s no reason why I should. But it is oddly representative of Elizabethtown — a movie that even as it insists how true it is has an oddly false tinkle. There’s a moment when Drew (Bloom) is telling Claire (Kirsten Dunst) how he ‘really’ feels. They happen to be in a hotel banqueting suite and the groom’s vows for the following day’s wedding are at his place setting, so Drew swipes the card and starts reading them aloud to Claire.

Hollywood’s two biggest animated features of the month both take place in England, or ‘England’ — in the case of Tim Burton’s Corpse Bride, Victorian London; in Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, a bucolic northern mill town. The latter defers to the reality of contemporary Britain in certain respects (laser security alarms) but is otherwise unchanged from the Fifties. Both films confine any kind of social commentary to the subject of class and both feature the voice of Helena Bonham Carter as lead piece of posh totty — indeed, she plays a lady called Lady Tottington in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit, while as the eponymous Corpse Bride she’s less frizzy-haired and more decomposed.

Joss Whedon is believed to be the first ever third-generation TV writer. In the Fifties, his grampa John Whedon wrote Leave It To Beaver, still earning big syndication bucks today, and in the Sixties The Donna Reed Show. In the Seventies, his dad Tom Whedon wrote Alice, and in the Eighties Benson. And in the Nineties Joss created Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel. Unlike John and Tom, Joss is the first TV writer in the family to be known to the public. He’s not exactly a household name, but he’s more famous than any cast member of Firefly, his space-age TV series to which Serenity is a big-screen sequel, or franchise extension. When he gives TV and radio interviews, the lines are jammed with callers professing to be fully paid-up browncoats.

In my neck of the woods, Madagascar was the first drive-in movie of the summer. Me’n’the kids clambered on to the hood of the truck at sundown and settled in with our hot dogs and shakes. And we had a goodish time. We especially appreciated the dance number whose entire lyric is: I like to move it move itI like to move it move itI like to I like to I like to [pause] move it. It’s sung by a lemur voiced by Sacha Baron Cohen (i.e., Ali G) and he’s so insinuating we bellowed it all the way home. But the rest of the movie pretty much faded away to nothing as we pulled out of the drive-in. Whereas Hollywood in general is having a crummy summer (as discussed a couple of weeks back), children’s movies in particular are having a terrible one.

Every culture creates heroes in its own image: it’s difficult to imagine transferring the British adventurers — Rudolf Rassendyll and Richard Hannay, the Saint and 007 — to America. Likewise, ‘superheroes’ — guys in gaudy tights and capes flying through the streets — never quite work outside the United States. Marvel had a Captain Britain in the Seventies, and Jim Callaghan’s decrepit wasteland could certainly have used one. But he was the superhero equivalent of Elvis impersonators’ night in Romford. I seem to recall a Captain Canada, too, and a few other attempts at Canuck heroes — Mapleman? Beavergirl? — but contemporary Canada is not an heroic culture, never mind a superheroic one.

We Don’t Live Here Anymore is very faithfully adapted from a couple of Andre Dubus novellas I read a long time ago. Quite how long ago I didn’t realise until the point in the movie when Hank, a failed writer teaching literature at some small-town New England college, gets yet another rejection letter and ceremonially burns his manuscript in the backyard barbecue as the bemused kids look on. What’s wrong with this scene? Well, just ten minutes earlier, we’d seen him writing...on a laptop. So there is no ‘manuscript’. It’s on a computer, and probably backed up on CD or some such.

I love Australia, and I used to love Australian movies. But a certain stiffness seems to have set in. Swimming Upstream has two terrific actors, Geoffrey Rush and Judy Davis, and they’re never less than compelling, but Russell Mulcahy directs with a plonking clunkiness that makes the material even more pedestrian than it is. Perhaps he was intimidated by his screenwriter/producer Tony Fingleton, who also co-wrote the book on which the movie is based and whose life story this is. Tony was a champion swimmer four decades back, Silver Medallist at the 1962 Empire Games in Perth. Then he gave up the backstroke, got a scholarship to Harvard, stayed in America, wrote a film for Rik Mayall and became Lauren Bacall’s agent. Then he wrote a bestselling book about the living hell of...