It Ends With Us (15, 130 mins)
Verdict: Bland but beautiful
Rating:
Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel It Ends With Us, about domestic abuse, was a monumental success. It was a New York Times number one bestseller, translated into 20 languages. So now, inevitably, it’s also been translated into the language of cinema, starring Blake Lively as the story’s heroine Lily Bloom, and featuring songs by Lana Del Rey, Lewis Capaldi and Taylor Swift.
The director is Justin Baldoni, who also plays an uncommonly handsome neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid. In real life, nobody called Ryle Kincaid who looks like they should be modelling Calvin Klein underwear has a day job performing brain surgery.
Nor does anyone called Lily Bloom convert a derelict retail unit into the mother of all flower shops, while also looking like Blake Lively.
In point of fact, I’m pretty sure that my Jewish grandmother had a friend called Lily Bloom, and she looked like Danny DeVito.
Colleen Hoover's 2016 novel It Ends With Us, about domestic abuse, was a monumental success. It was a New York Times number one bestseller, translated into 20 languages. So now, inevitably, it’s also been translated into the language of cinema
No one called Lily Bloom convert a derelict retail unit into the mother of all flower shops, while also looking like Blake Lively
Anyway, it doesn’t really matter that It Ends With Us is cheesier than a wheel of Camembert and shallower than a toddler’s paddling pool because, you see, there’s a twist on its way.
First, however, we have a romance to tackle. On the rooftop of a swanky Boston apartment block, Ryle meets beautiful, fragrant Lily, who is gazing pensively into the middle-distance because back in small-town Maine her father has just died, and he, though a pillar of the community, was also a wife-batterer.
Slowly but surely, Ryle woos Lily by ticking off every movie cliché: the flirtation on the roof, the blast at the bowling alley, the fun in the karaoke bar. Meanwhile, Lily’s assistant at the flower shop is Allysa (Jenny Slate), who has not only with weird speed become her very best friend but has also been revealed as... Ryle’s sister. So the die is cast.
Ryle and Lily get married, but not before Lily bumps into the first boy she had sex with, Atlas Corrigan (Brandon Sklenar), once homeless and on his uppers, now one of Boston’s most promising restaurateurs.
The director is Justin Baldoni, who also plays an uncommonly handsome neurosurgeon called Ryle Kincaid. In real life, nobody called Ryle Kincaid who looks like they should be modelling Calvin Klein underwear has a day job performing brain surgery
On the rooftop of a swanky Boston apartment block, Ryle meets beautiful, fragrant Lily, who is gazing pensively into the middle-distance because back in small-town Maine her father has just died, and he, though a pillar of the community, was also a wife-batterer
Sporadic flashbacks shed more light on their teen romance, with Isabela Ferrer looking passably as if she might have turned into the older Lily, and Alex Neustaedter looking like he might have turned into the older Atlas only with the help of a complete head transplant, but let’s not split hairs.
The point is that Atlas and Lily bonded as teenagers partly because they had both watched their mothers being beaten, and now the grown-up Atlas is worried that Lily’s drop-dead-gorgeous husband Ryle might be an abuser too, though we know better. Or do we?
Either way, there are better films about domestic violence that will live much longer in the memory than this one, without being nearly as handsome on the eye.
Babes (15, 104 mins)
Verdict: Coarse but funny
Rating:
Babes, too, is a love story with a difference, because the relationship is a platonic one, between female besties Eden (co-writer Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau). Actress Pamela Adlon’s mostly assured directing debut, Babes is also a comedy, occasionally genuinely uproarious and sometimes, frankly, too coarsely scatological to be even slightly amusing. A burst pipe filling a house with a pooey pong? That’s primary-school humour.Still, when Babes is funny, it’s very funny. New Yorkers Eden and Dawn have been devoted pals since childhood but now adult issues are changing the terms of their friendship — in particular, pregnancy, childbirth and the demands of motherhood.
Babes is a love story with a difference, because the relationship is a platonic one, between female besties Eden (co-writer Ilana Glazer) and Dawn (Michelle Buteau)
Dawn is in a stable marriage when she has her second child, but Eden gets pregnant after sleeping just once with a guy she likes, who then inconveniently chokes to death before they can properly get together.
How the pair navigate their journeys, and the support they offer each other, is the wellspring of the somewhat manic comedy, reminiscent of Bridesmaids (2011) except that instead of being about hen parties and wedding-planners, it’s about labour pains and lactation.
It Ends With Us and Babes are in cinemas now.
Another endlessly wise-cracking little robot? Zap me now!
Others might not share this view but from where I’m sitting, the last thing cinema needs is a whole new comedy sci-fi extravaganza based on yet another video-game series. More jauntily named planets like Pandora and Promethea to get to know, and yet another endlessly wise-cracking little robot? Zap me now.
Still, Borderlands (12A, 102 mins, HHIII) at least has a sensible running-time — and an A-list cast led by Cate Blanchett, with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and, voicing the ‘hilarious’ robot, Jack Black.
The director is Eli Roth, better known for slasher films such as his 2002 debut, Cabin Fever.
Here, Blanchett plays the flame-haired, alpha-female Lilith, who returns to her home planet (yes, Pandora) to find the missing daughter of the most powerful baddie in the universe, Atlas (Edgar Ramirez).
Cate Blanchett plays the flame-haired, alpha-female Lilith, who returns to her home planet (yes, Pandora) to find the missing daughter of the most powerful baddie in the universe
Borderlands has a sensible running-time — and an A-list cast led by Cate Blanchett, with Kevin Hart, Jamie Lee Curtis and, voicing the ‘hilarious’ robot, Jack Black
Pandora’s a lawless junkyard of a place, but happiness and calm can be restored to the benighted planet... if only someone can open a mysterious elusive vault. But who has the key, and more importantly, do we care?I didn’t, I confess; but then I’m not the target audience. I suppose it’s even possible that some folk might look beyond the shamelessly derivative nods to other sci-fi films (Star Wars, Mad Max, Guardians Of The Galaxy, even Time Bandits) and find some originality in this movie. That’s the really challenging quest.
There’s a fine cast, too, in The Instigators (15, 101 mins, HHIII), a comedy heist thriller set in Boston that doesn’t thrill, isn’t especially funny, and come to think of it, doesn’t contain much of a heist, although I think the Boston locations are real.Most of what’s good about the film comes from Matt Damon, convincingly tortured as Rory, an estranged husband and father who agrees to steal money from the city’s corrupt mayor (Ron Perlman) on election night, to raise exactly the funds he needs for alimony and child support.
His unlikely partner in this enterprise is a miserable ex-con Cobby (Casey Affleck), while the gangland boss who recruits them is played by Michael Stuhlbarg, a fine actor but woefully miscast as a sweary tattooed villain.Hong Chau fares a little better. She plays Rory’s therapist who gets dragged into the enterprise after the heist goes badly wrong. But the film, directed by Doug Liman (The Bourne Identity) and co-written by Affleck, is broadly speaking just as misconceived as the robbery.
Borderlands is in cinemas now. The Instigators is on Apple TV+.
