No great films to critique on this occasion but sometimes you don't want a great example of cinema. Sometimes you have eaten and drunk too much and want a movie to sort of lap over you rather than having to commit yourself to a headlong dive into its waters. That slovenly mood has been upon me for the past couple of days so these films fitted the bill. First up is
Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. It is a grand tale but the juvenile acting still lags embarrassingly behind the very fine adult talent on display. I would rather read
Harry Potter than watch the films. Almost sacrilegiously I feel the other way round about
Lord of the Rings. Does this make me a bad person? Oh well. The Potter film - 60/100.
Well-paced and nicely mixing slap-stick with occasional pathos,
Planes, Trains and Automobiles delivers plenty of laughs. The bedroom sharing sequence is my favourite, closely followed by the build-up to the car crash. This movie has no pretensions to be high art but it is good at what it attempts - 61/100. I discover that it is to be remade with Will Smith in the lead. Why? But equally, I suppose, why not? As another incidental aside, I think that we can just about call this a Christmas film - on the grounds that, to European eyes, one can elide Thanksgiving and Christmas.
Finally another warm-hearted and affecting piece of comedy.
Baby Boom could have been thoroughly dreadful - perhaps one of those made-on -the-cheap TV movies that litter the fag end of the film channels. But here we see the benefit of good acting because everyone delivers fine work, most particularly Diane Keaton and Sam Shepard. Even the baby (actually it's a pair of photogenic twins) is good. 61/100.
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