Oscar golden boy’s stab at indie rom com is just too hip by half
Film
AWAY WE GO
Cert: 15
BURT and Verona are a couple of slacker thirtysomethings living in the middle of nowhere. She’s an illustrator, he sells insurance over the phone, and mostly they knock about their beat up, backwoods house wondering what the heck they’re going to do when Verona has her baby. Deciding they can’t stay where they are, they head off round the states in search of the perfect place to nest down, meeting some eccentric characters along the way and learning a bit about themselves in the process.
As you’ll have noticed from the cheery, kooky posters around town, Away We Go is intended to be a cheery, kooky little indie-flick that will charm your socks off with its off-kilter sweetness and cosy, nonchalant sense of cool. It is exceedingly annoying.
The director is Sam Mendes, which is suspicious in itself. The notion that Mendes, English theatrical wunderkind and thus far cinematic purveyor of cynical, connect-the-dots Oscar fodder, should be re-inventing himself as a groovy indie auteur just doesn’t wash, and there’s a sense that he’s still connecting dots, albeit of a more hip and lo-fi kind. Grainy, bleached-out cinematography? Check. Constant downbeat acoustic music? Check. Laid-back, naturalistic dialogue? You bet.
What really rankles, however, is just how perniciously misanthropic this ends up being. The oddballs and eccentrics Burt and Verona encounter on their travels, played in a series of day-glo cameos by the likes of Alison Janney and Maggie Gyllenhaal, are mostly damaged, awful people, freaks who drive them back into smug isolation.
It does have its moments. Mendes is such a great director of actors that he could probably elicit a moving turn from a lamppost, and there’s no doubting the conviction and chemistry of John Krazinski and Maya Rudolph as the hipster couple. The script, co-authored by darling of the liberal literary world, Dave Eggers, has great wit and charm when it isn’t telling you the world is populated by freaks, losers and idiots. Away we go? Go away.
CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF MEATBALLS
Cert: PG
FINALLY proving that someone other than Pixar can make first-rate, family-friendly animated movies, Sony Pictures’ riotously enjoyable Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs is a rather glorious surprise. Based on a 1978 children’s book, it tells the deliciously loopy story of an inventor who manages to make the sky rain cheeseburgers. And pizza. And pancakes. And, of course, meatballs.
Set on a remote island in the mid-Atlantic where the inhabitants have been forced to live off sardines, the film introduces us to Flint Lockhart, a young misfit whose previous failed inventions include flying rat-birds and spray-on shoes. He creates a machine that turns water into food and becomes a celebrity (with the help of a ditzy weathergirl). Inevitably, the whole thing then goes haywire, with magnificently entertaining consequences.
This really is a scrumptious pleasure. The action set-pieces are up there with the best that Toy Story or The Incredibles have to offer, while the anarchic humour is satisfyingly free of in-jokes – this is a film in which kids and adults will laugh at the same moments, and laugh a lot.
The plot twists and turns like a plate of spaghetti, the animation is superb with some truly diverting imagery, and the sense of invention and fun is constant. A goofy, anarchic feast for the senses.