Film review: GNOMEO & JULIET (Kelly Asbury, 2011)

William Shakespeare’s timeless tale of star-crossed lovers gets an animated makeover, with our characters now gnomes of two next door neighbours who hate each other – reds and blues. Gnomeo is a handy lawnmower racer and Juliet is desperate to prove she’s not “delicate” like her dad believes. Cast as the eponymous couple are two bright young British stars who also happen to be two of my favourites – James McAvoy and Emily Blunt.

From top to bottom, Gnomeo & Juliet is an unqualified failure. The in-references to other Shakespeare plays are forced and will be lost on their target audience anyway. None of the characters draw you in; one of the main things that appealed to me about the play was how Romeo was such a hopeless romantic, as well as Juliet’s sense of isolation and malaise. 

TV recap: THE APPRENTICE series 7 episode 2, MOBILE PHONE APPLICATION

Second episode in, 15 contestants left. The participants are awoken at the figurative crack of dawn via a recorded message on a laptop. Alan Sugar tells the group of their new challenge – to market and sell a new mobile phone app. I liked this challenge a lot, in this day and age, a huge majority of people are fiddling with apps on their phone when on the tube, and there seems to be an app for almost everything, however weird or wacky, so it would be an interesting thing for the teams to do. Once again, they’re grouped boys vs girls, so the ladies have a man advantage.

When picking Project Managers, Leon puts himself forward, although he has an agenda; in the last episode, Alan Sugar had commented that he wasn’t involved enough, so he wants to prove Sir Alan wrong. Several other men volunteer to be PM as well, but eventually it goes to a vote and Leon gets the role. The boys are moving along at a good pace and before long have decided on their app – Slang-a-tang, an app that gives soundbites of people from all over the UK, as well as over the world.

Things are going considerably less smoothly over at the girls’ team, where Susan gets herself into a bit of a mess when trying to pitch her idea. She says something along the lines of “Imagine I’m here, and you’re there. And I’m me and you’re you-” Needless to say, the team are massively underwhelmed with her idea and Project Manager Edna tells her to pipe down, which Susan refuses to do. When she’s finally silenced, Susan sulks in a fashion dissimilar to a spoilt child. It’s impossible to warm to the woman.

Film review: HANNA (Joe Wright, 2011)

She's on the right track baby, she was born this way

Flashback 4 years ago. I’d blagged myself tickets to a preview screening of Joe Wright’s Atonement, meaning that, I’d, rather smugly, gotten to see it before most of the British population, and I could not wait to gush about it on my blog. James McAvoy, according to me, was flawless, the score, musical genius, the cinematography and costumes, divine. 

However, I’d gone into the film expecting an acting masterclass from Romola Garai, and, whilst she was indeed very good, it was the younger incarnation of her character in the film – played by blue-eyed Irish lass Saoirse Ronan that really, really impressed. Briony Tallis is one of my least favourite literary gals of all time, yet Ronan’s depiction of her, whilst capturing how annoying and meddling her character was, managed to do something that I felt Ian McEwan was unable to do in his book – humanise her. It was, I felt, the most impressive performance by a child actress of the new millennium, and I went on to wax lyrical about her acting in The Lovely Bones, which, like Atonement, was a book that I didn’t particularly care for and wasn’t even originally intending on watching, but when I heard that Ronan was cast as the lead, I just knew that I had to. 

I had a whole list of problems with Peter Jackson’s film, writing but Ronan was a shining star. When I first walked past the poster for Hanna in the London undergrounds, I checked my walk just to give it a second look (which, if you know Londoners, you’ll understand is saying something) when I realised that it was Miss Ronan on the front. Truth be told, there’s been a few too many female assassin films in recent years for my liking, but the fact that Saoirse Ronan was starring in Hanna meant that I knew I was gonna watch it.

Quality-wise, of the film, I’d say it sits comfortably in between The Lovely Bones – extremely poor, and Atonement – excellent. One can’t help feeling that Joe Wright wished he could have made a more violent film, but was constrained by the need for commercial success – and hence the lucrative PG-13/12A rating. Indeed, some of the fight scenes are definitely the most violent scenes I’ve seen in a 12A rated film, but they are staged excellently, with a kind of gusto that reminded me of the jolly fight scenes in Pirates of the Caribbean (the first one, before they turned bad.) 

Eric Bana and Saoirse Ronan sport these bizarre sounding European accents that made it somewhat difficult to take the things that they said seriously, but in terms of bad accents, Cate Blanchett takes the biscuit. In fact, she should take the whole cookie jar in terms of poor acting, because the woman was not good. A lot of the casting in this film confused me, to be honest, and I’m torn between the joy of seeing some of my favourite stars and the confusion of seeing them in such poorly written roles. 

Nobody exemplified this better than Tom Hollander, who, if you remember, I loved so much that I went through an entire month of watching films with just him in. In Hanna, he plays a crooked sort of-Mafia character, and spends the film in the weirdest range of tracksuits that look like they've come from Primark (and at one point, these skimpy white shorts that leave nothing to the imagination, lol) and his German accent is so camp that I refuse to believe he didn’t do it with a lol inside his mind. I love Hollander and I love how he isn’t afraid to take a role and make it his own with silliness – his Mr Collins in Pride & Prejudice is one of my most endearing memories of his acting – but in Hanna, the fact that he’s meant to be a character to fear, yet he’s wearing all this Primark-style tracksuits and looking dangerously like he’s wearing mascara; it doesn’t all come together, really.

As with Atonement and Pride & Prejudice, the musical score is amazing. Dario Marianelli scored the former two, but his celli strings and piano surges may have been somewhat out of place in a child-hitman film, so the Chemical Brothers were employed instead, and, as with Daft Punk’s score to Tron, the aurals were so strong that it often made me forget about the pictures. One scene in particular, when Hanna is being pursued by Tom Hollander and his two not-altogether-very-effective goons near a building campsite and there’s a whole lot of running away on her part; the music is just incredible.

And of course, Hanna herself. The film begins with Hanna, out in the wild, shooting a dear for food. Her arrow wounds the deer and kills it, but, as she pulls the arrow out, she notes “I just missed your heart.” The screen fills with HANNA in white-and-red writing, to eerie effect, and without giving too much away, the symmetry around this gives the film a nice sense of closure. But to be honest, that’s the only sense of closure we get. Hanna sports more holes in a plot than a piece of Swiss cheese, and it gets to the point where I can’t just brush them under the carpet. But the main character is never not beguiling. Saoirse Ronan really does have the most electric, arresting blue eyes, and the camera picks up on that, and, indeed, much of Ronan’s subtle acting is in her eyes. Emma Watson should take note of this. The eyes, not the eyebrows, lady. :p And, although her character is a killer, it is, as the film points out, out of survival. 

There’s an engaging subplot in which Hanna latches on to a marauding bohemian family and their somewhat spoilt teenage daughter, Sophie. The blossoming friendship between the two is sweet and moving, although I felt the scene in the tent – in which the two share a Sapphic moment – was indulgence on Joe Wright’s part rather than any kind of strong storytelling. It’s a shame, because some of the more understated scenes between Hanna and Sophie were a joy to behold, and captured the dynamic of culture clashes and budding friendships well, and then that somewhat out-of-place romantic overtone killed that off and made it somewhat ~laddish~ and seedy. 

The fight scenes were well-staged but on the storytelling side, I felt Hanna lacked depth. But even in the face of poor directing and poor writing, Saoirse Ronan is never not a queen. She is the film’s anchor, its emotional core, and without her, Hanna would be a fine, fine mess. As it was, it was managed to be a fairly interesting action thriller that was too flawed to take seriously, but definitely had some good things going for it.

Book review: KEY OF LIGHT (Nora Roberts)

Mythology and modern day come together gloriously in Nora Roberts' delightful creation. Malory Price, on the cusp of getting sacked from a gallery she has given many years of loyal service to and in an economic situation that could best be described as "precarious", she sees nothing to lose in attending an unusual cocktail party at the ominously named Warrior’s Peak held by the even more unusual odd couple of Pitte and Rowena, who don't look dissimilar to characters from a Celtic myth themselves.

In the meeting, she meets Dana and Zoe, two women just as in the dark about the invite as she is, and who, like her, are in dire financial straits as she. 

Pitte and Rowena tell the three a tale of trapped demi-goddesses and an evil spirit who keeps their souls locked, and offers them a very generous cash prize if each of the three women can successfully embark on a quest to find the three "keys" to unlock them. Malory, Dana and Zoe are given an initial deposity of $25,000 alone just for trying, and for the women, it seems too good to be true.

Malory, selected as the first up, on further research, discovers the story is darker and more tragic than she could have imagined, with the story of the three trapped goddesses being told in various paintings. Luck would just so transpire that the owner of one of the paintings turns out to be a huge dish, local reporter Flynn Hennesey, who also turns out to be Dana's step-brother. 

The convenient plot turns just keep coming when another painting is owned by Brad Vane, Flynn's mate (who is quite taken with Zoe) and another owned by Jordan Hawke, sexy and successful fiction writer whom Dana once dated but parted terms with acrimoniously. No prizes for guessing where these little match-ups are headed, but they are depicted with enough conviction and male/female repartee to be a delight to read. 

Key of Light, which focuses on Mal's journey, deals more with her budding romance with Flynn, who despite having the semblance of being an everyday cheery guy, has the odd proverbial demon in his closet, and it is up to Malory to unlock those, in the same way she is to unlock the first lock. 

I have only other read one other Nora Roberts novel, small-town murder mystery Carnal Innocence, and the main thing I remember about that (aside from its oh-so-obvious plot twist; Agatha Christie this woman ain’t), was it's t’rifficly steamy sex scenes. It was mainly what urged me to buy this book, andto be quite honest, and Roberts does not disappoint; the romance scenes between Flynn and Malory are appropriately hot and juicily detailed.