Just For Lookin' Thru

Generally implausible. Unlikely marriage followed by unlikely affair. April (Helen Hunt) marries Ben (Matthew Broderick), a Jewish boy with arrested development. She is almost 40 and desperate for a baby, and their odd relationship indicates lust for each other although they are unable to communicate, despite supposedly being best friends. Ben leaves her and goes back to mother. That same day she meets Frank (Colin Firth) and within a few days is in love with him but she still wants to have sex with her estranged husband. Already neurotic and fragile, her adoptive mother dies, leaving April with a lot of emotional baggage to deal with. But this is not all. Her birth mother, Bernice (Bette Midler), has tracked her down and wants a reunion. This set up is perfect for a farce and there are light moments. April initially doesn’t believe Bernice is her mother and gets pretty stressed about the near-stalking. Understandably attracted to Frank as the only stable character in this

Kristen Scott Thomas plays Juliette, a woman just released from prison after serving 15 years. Reunited with her much younger sister, Léa (Elsa Zylberstein), Juliette tries to find where she fits in with her family and the outside world. When first seen, Juliette looks depressed, is silent and withdrawn, and almost hostile to her younger sister’s attempts to integrate her into her own warm family set up. It is not clear for a while where she has been, why the sisters are estranged, and why Juliette seems so resentful. Léa’s husband, Luc, is suspicious and family tensions are nicely observed. With little dialogue and a strongly visual emphasis, the narrative flowed a bit slowly at times and the reason for her imprisonment could have come a bit earlier. Only one scene in the entire film was clumsy exposition, with the awkward attempt by a social worker to draw out Juliette. Deeply wounded and fragile, she is too intelligent to be befriended by a busybody, however well meanin

Casino Royale left Bond wanting revenge. QofS follows up with a frenzied opening car chase sequence, with Bond in the Aston screaming through tunnels, round bends, getting shot at and, eventually delivering his cargo. The unusual thing about this car chase is the camerawork. Rarely seeing whole vehicles, jigsaw close-ups of tiny bits of cars are slammed at the audience. This dizzying, anxiety inducing onslaught feels like being repeatedly hit in the face and deafened at the same time. Several times the cinematography mixes two dramatic events together, ie a horserace above ground with an interrogation below. The result is confusion and disorientation and is reminiscent of the noise and colour of carnival intercuts from early Bond movies. QofS incorporates motifs from other Bond classics – a flight battle in mountainous terrain and a speedboat pursuit. However, QofS omits the humour, the characterisation, the sexiness, the glamour, and a storyline. There is little sense of