How To Be Single

How To Be Single is surprisingly good. On the surface it seems like a standard unimpressive rom-com, but it ends up not at all adhering to any of the tropes of the genre. Despite the name of the film, I had thought that the main character Alice would end up with some guy and be happy, but it completely goes against expectations. Something that was promised last year with Amy Schumer's Trainwreck, that that movie ultimately failed to deliver on.

Alice (Dakota Johnson) decides to split briefly from her college boyfriend Josh (Nicholas Braun) so she can learn how to be her own person. She moves to New York where she befriends Robin (Rebel Wilson) who teaches her how to enjoy single life. Meanwhile, Alice's sister Meg (Leslie Mann) is a career oriented doctor who decides that she wants to have a baby and embarks on the IVF process. Alice gets caught up with bar owner Tom (Anders Holm) who shows her his honest tactics when it comes to sleeping with girls and not getting attached with anyone. He does however have a crush on Lucy (Allison Brie), a girl who lives above his bar and is focused on getting married to someone soon. Alice also gets involved with David (Damon Wayans Jr.), a father who is still reeling from the death of his wife two years earlier.

The overall message of the movie is a positive one. Most romantic comedies make it seem like it's the end of the world if your story doesn't end with you meeting that person who is perfect for you. How To Be Single teaches you to just be comfortable with whatever situation you end up in, whether it's being single or in a relationship. I like the realistic way in which this film comes together. All the character interactions are completely organic and the character arcs happen the way they would in real life as opposed to a Hollywood movie. Alice doesn't get back together with her old boyfriend and even though Tom gets his chance at giving his big emotional speech, it doesn't end up working at all. Despite these positives, there are some flaws with the script. Meg comes to the realisation that she wants to have a baby after spending a few minutes with one. It's as if all her ambitions of having a career give way to maternal instincts just because she holds a baby one time. Also there's a bit of a black hole in the third act when we just flash forward to three months later without referencing anything that happened during them.

Watching this movie, I realised that Dakota Johnson can't really act, showing that acting talent isn't exactly hereditary (her dad Don was one half of Miami Vice), but in this movie it's okay because the audience is able to put themselves in the shoes of her character, despite the lack of personality. Also Rebel Wilson plays the same Australian character as in the other films she's in, making me wonder how bad her American accent is (Dakota Johnson on the other hand does quite a passable Aussie accent). Thankfully we don't see Johnson and Wilson for all the movie and the supporting cast actually has a lot of screen time. Leslie Mann has always been a remarkable actress and is great at playing serious against funny which comes in handy here. Allison Brie is fun as Lucy, but can do better. The male cast members take a back seat but are still pretty funny, especially Jason Mantzoukas and Jake Lacy, who I thought was a lot funnier here than his last role in Love The Coopers. Damon Wayans Jr. has the potential to be a hilarious actor, but sadly his role wasn't calling for it. Both Nicholas Braun and Anders Holm play serious guys as well.

How To Be Single offers a refreshing take on modern relationships that is more in keeping with reality. But if you're not into that and just want to watch an easy rom-com, this movie isn't going to hurt you at all either. Poor lead performances aren't enough to make it horrible either.

Carol

“Just when you think you can’t get any worse, you run out of cigarettes” 

Todd Haynes has previously demonstrated his expertise with character dramas in Far from Heaven and his miniseries Mildred Pierce. Now he reunites with his I’m Not There star, Cate Blanchett in Carol, an adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s novel of the same name. 

Christmas in the early 1950s. Therese Belivet (Rooney Mara), an amateur photographer, is working in Frankenberg’s department store, calm amongst the chaos of the seasonal period. Across the room, an elegant older woman, Carol (Cate Blanchett) admires a model train set. The two get chatting and she orders the trainset. After Carol ‘accidentally’ leaves her gloves behind in the store, Therese mails them off. So begins a series of rendezvous between these two women, stuck in their individual unsatisfying relationships and each looking for something more intimate. 

This really is a slow-burn character drama, which might not be to everybody’s tastes. It takes its time to build nuanced characters, although the interactions between Carol and Therese escalate into a relationship a little too quickly to be entirely believable. Phyllis Nagy’s screenplay does an excellent job of exploring sexuality beyond the confines of the labels. It’s difficult to tell exactly where the two leads each sit on the broad spectrum of sexual identity - given their unfulfilled yet notable liaisons with men - but the definitions get swept aside to focus on a multi-layered relationship between two women that aren’t sure where they’re going with their lives. 

Set in the 1950s, Carol manages to be subtle in its portrayal of the era, by which I mean it doesn’t overdo it to the point of caricature as some recent period pieces have. The film was shot on 16mm film by cinematographer Edward Lachman, and the soft, warm image with unexpectedly dull colours mirrors the tone of the film. At times Carol even takes on aspects of film noir, an effective style for both the setting and the duplicitous aspects of the story. 

Blanchett is, as usual fantastic. Carol’s dry-wit and cynicism act as a shield to the fragility that we as

an audience see in her. Her difficult husband and divorce proceedings are only part of the problem as she seems to be hiding more about herself than at first glance, which turns out to be her lack of satisfaction in life. All of this comes across with subtlety and ease thanks to Blanchett’s devoted understanding of the art. 

Rooney Mara is just as good; Therese in a similar yet different way to Carol, has a vulnerable streak to her and has an innocence that comes out through things like her photography. Although it’s more of an aside, Therese’s photographic hobby, in the way that it’s developed (pun not intended) felt like a nod to the naval-gazing characters of French new wave films. Carol could have so easily become a melodrama, but - aside from one scene - it manages to stay grounded thanks largely to the two lead performances. 

Todd Haynes has developed another detailed character drama with Carol, thanks to a great screenplay and brilliant performances. However as I said it is very much a slow-burn film and for quite a while I lost focus. I feel that I’ll need to see this again to really pick up on the details.

Love The Coopers

I love Christmas movies. I've grown up with every single one you can imagine, from conventional ones like Home Alone and The Santa Clause to more adult ones like Scrooged and Bad Santa. Even cheesy ones like Christmas With The Kranks (when you think about it, Tim Allen has been in a lot of them). So when I came to watch Love The Coopers, I thought it was going to be a cheesy one, especially since it stars Diane Keaton. I wasn't expecting a movie about divorce, unemployment, political differences, child abuse, sexuality and, least of all, a magic dog voiced by Steve Martin.

Charlotte Cooper is hoping to bring her large family together for a big happy Christmas. She wants this desperately because it will be the last Christmas she has before her and her husband Sam (John Goodman) get a divorce after forty years of marriage. Everyone of their relatives are living their own troubles. Charlotte's sister Emma (Marisa Tomei) gets arrested for shoplifting, her divorced son Hank (Ed Helms) is having financial troubles, her daughter Eleanor (Olivia Wilde) can't face her mother's disappointment and her father Bucky (Alan Arkin) is struggling to express his love for the much younger Ruby (Amanda Seyfried).

The drama outweighs the comedy heavily in this movie about a supposedly happy time of year. Some of the themes alluded to are quite obvious, such as Sam and Charlotte's divorce and Hank's redundancy, but others, like Ruby's abusive childhood, are a little harder to identify. The most heartbreaking part of the movie comes when Officer Percy (played by a hard faced Anthony Mackie), the officer who arrests Emma, reveals that he could never live up to the expectations of his mother, despite the fact that she is welcoming of his homosexuality.

This film has a lot of weird film techniques that I would not expect in one like this. Whip pans and crash zooms that you'd expect in some Paul Greengrass political thriller are used liberally and with almost every character's situation. I found the use of an extreme close-up on Olivia Wilde but not on the person she was talking to very unnerving, but I suppose that might be a personal taste issue.

As you'd expect from an ensemble film like this, everyone brings their best. The standout performances for me come from Amanda Seyfried, Timothée Chalamet, Anthony Mackie and June Squibb. All of these actors have a small parts, but they all make them their own roles. Especially June Squibb, who doesn't love her? Anthony Mackie is almost unrecognisable without his signature facial hair and Amanda Seyfried brings her character an underlying pain that I didn't even know she could pull off.

Despite all these deep and dark themes, the film does come together nicely at the end. It's definitely one worth watching if you like Christmas movies, but not really too much of a stretch for comedy fans.