Les Enfants du Siècle (108 mins, 15) Directed by Diane Kurys; starring Juliette Binoche, Benot Magimel, Stefano Dionisi
The Wedding Planner (110 mins, PG) Directed by Adam Shankman; starring Jennifer Lopez, Matthew McConaughey, Bridgette Wilson-Sampras
Better Than Sex (81 mins, 18) Directed by Jonathan Teplitzky; starring Susie Porter, David Wenham
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie (79 mins, U) Directed by Stig Bergqvist/Paul Demeyer; featuring the voices of Susan Sarandon, John Lithgow, Christine Cavanaugh
Bamboozled (135mins,15) Directed by Spike Lee; starring Damon Wayans, Jada Pinkett, Michael Rappaport
There's an old maxim I just made up that goes: films about celebrated artists tend to be ridiculous; films about literary celebrities are always ridiculous. There are exceptions that prove the rule (Percy Adlon's Céleste , a portrait of Proust and his housekeeper, being one), but generally, the more ridiculous they are, the more I like them. Sadly you've never been able to see in this country André Téchiné's Les Soeurs Brontë (the one with Roland Barthes as Thackeray), possibly because when a very serious British distributor asked me whether it should be shown here, I replied: 'Of course, it's one of the funniest films of the decade.'
Diane Kurys's Les Enfants du Siècle, an earnest account of the torrid three-year affair in the early 1830s between the 29-year-old George Sand (Juliette Binoche) and the 23-year-old Alfred de Musset (Benot Magimel) is not quite in the Soeurs Brontë class. Still, it gets off to a good start with the trousered, lionised and vilified Sand shocking a literary salon with a reading of choice passages from her essay on female sexuality. This is followed by an exchange on the staircase outside between departing and arriving celebs: 'I didn't know you were coming, Musset' - 'Beuve, how are you?' This can't compete with the immortal dialogue between two literary giants passing in the street in the Warner Brothers' Devotion ('Good morning, Thackeray' - 'Good morning, Dickens') but it's a decent Gallic try.
Kurys, who's marvellously accurate on postwar Europe in such semi-autobiographical pictures as Diable au Menthe and Coup de Foudre, is sailing without a historical compass in the 1830s. Her picture claims to be about a generation of artists who (according to the opening titles) 'grew up idealistic but at the same time cynical', but we learn nothing of the influence of the times or of the nature of their work. Sand smiles, suffers and loves her two children; De Musset has a terrible temper, an insatiable appetite for whores and swigs opium as if it were Evian. 'Can't you see? I need to live badly to write well,' he shouts. The picture ends as the bereft Sand poses for Delacroix with a glum, 'I'm ready.' Nothing here to match Merle Oberon's George Sand in A Song to Remember, who receives the news of Chopin's death while sitting in a portraitist's studio and proclaims imperiously: 'Carry on Monsieur Delacroix.'
The Wedding Planner is the inauspicious cinematic debut of choreographer Adam Shankman who constantly cuts to music his supposedly comic dialogues and the participants' exaggerated reactions. What plot this lifeless comedy has turns on Jennifer Lopez as a brilliant wedding organiser incapable of finding a suitable mate, until in a San Francisco street she meets a vacuously handsome doctor (Matthew McConaughey) who - surprise, surprise - turns out to be the fiancé of her next client. At the same time her matchmaking Italian-American dad has lined up a handsome peasant from the old country, who happens to be unskilled, ignorant of English and a couple of strands short of a spaghetti bolognese. The worst joke is having the penis he's accidentally broken off a statue stuck to McConaughey's hand with superglue.
In Better Than Sex, natural history photographer Josh (David Wenham) meets dressmaker-designer Cynthia (Susie Porter) at a party in Sydney and spends most of the next four days in bed with her before his return to London. The endless bouts of love-making (including fellatio in a bathtub) are accompanied by their inner thoughts about sex and commitment, and montages of comments by his and her friends.
Meanwhile, a female taxi driver sits outside playing a role similar to that of Anton Walbrook in La Ronde . Josh and Cynthia discover several things that are better than sex, emotional involvement for one. And the audience realises there are many things better than watching Better than Sex, though watching The Wedding Planner isn't among them. At least one saw a lot of Paris (and some dancing) in Last Tango in Paris.
Rugrats in Paris: The Movie is a tolerable cartoon featuring the familiar gang of diapered devils on a destructive trip to France with their parents. However, the troublesome tots end up spending virtually all their time at a Japanese theme park outside Paris called EuroReptarLand. There they encounter a French villainess, Coco LaBouche (voiced by Susan Sarandon), who tries to run Cruella De Vil a close deuxième, they hijack a giant mechanical dinosaur, and they confront their first bidet ('a potty that sprays you'). There are laboured jokes about The Godfather and Godzilla , and the only member of the American troupe who can speak a word of French is a babe in arms - 'oui, oui' (geddit?).
Akin Ojumo writes: Barely a week after a report published by the Commission for Racial Equality lamented the lack of black and Asian faces on British television, the release of Spike Lee's Bamboozled seems grimly topical. But in Lee's rancorous satire the issue isn't the paucity of black faces on screen, rather the humiliating fate they suffer on it. Damon Wayans, affecting the strangulated tones of a New York Wasp, is Pierre Delacroix, a black Ivy League educated television writer under pressure from his white hipster boss (Michael Rappaport) to deliver a streetwise crossover hit: 'It's not dope, it's not sexy and it sucks,' raps Rappaport on being presented with a Cosby Show-like pitch.
Delacroix is obviously a stuffed shirt because he constantly uses the archaic epithet Negro. Though, initially, his heart is in the right place, annoyed by Rappaport's stereotyping and aided by his assistant Jada Pinkett - the film's moral compass - he decides to create a modern Minstrel show so appalling and offensive it will be thrown off the air. The set-up is reminiscent of The Producers . However, in Mel Brooks's comedy the Hitler musical is a hoot, in Bamboozled the gaudy Mantan: The Millennium Minstrel Show , which echoes the denigrating vaudeville of Amos 'n' Andy, is so awful and old-fashioned, it couldn't become the hit it subsequently does. Is the mass US television audience so brainless? A glance at the top-rated shows of recent years - ER, Frasier, Seinfeld - suggests otherwise.
The appropriation of black culture by corporate America and treatment of blacks on US television are worthy of satire, but this film is too heavy-handed. The cast of Mantan: The Millennium Minstrel Show wear black face make-up and letterbox red lipstick; the house band are the Alabama Porch Monkeys, who dress in chain gang garb; the lead character is a feckless fool called Sleep 'n' Eat.
Lee frequently takes us on a plot detour as a character, often Pinkett's, stops and delivers a state of the nation address in case we've missed anything. There are also numerous cutaways to archive TV material and endless shots of minstrel memorabilia for much the same reason. The film starts promisingly enough, with its skewered look at the TV industry, but once the capricious Delacroix starts having pangs of conscience and Lee gets on-message, it goes downhill.
The director sacrifices much of his usual visual gymnastics in Bamboozled but not his strident tone, which misses the mark here. Lee claims he was influenced by Network , and in homage recreates Peter Finch's famous rant, 'I'm mad as hell'. Tellingly, it's the best line in the film.
