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Reviews
Happy Ever Afters (2009)
If laughs were oxygen, I'd have suffocated...
I rented 'Happy ever afters' as a wild card DVD to watch with my wife. I was expecting a "Genuine, Laugh out Loud comedy", that's what the DVD jacket promised anyway. To say I was disappointed would be a massive understatement.
In short this is the story of two separate and simultaneous weddings, sharing the same reception venue. The venue being the Hotel Napoleon (and not a restaurant as one reviewer reported).
On one hand we have Freddie (Tom Riley) and Sophie (Jade Yourell) who are inexplicably getting remarried in a Catholic church following their (unexplained) divorce, on the other we have Maura (Sally Hawkins) marrying Wilson (Ariyon Bakare).. The latter being a marriage of paid convenience to keep Wilson from being deported. (Not Wilfred as the same myopic reviewer above stated)
What unfolds is a tortuous non-plot acted out (and I use the term loosely) by disengaged, chemically incompatible actors.
The premise of any good story is that you love, hate or empathise with the characters. With the exception of Molly (Sinead Maguire) playing Maura's daughter and Dessie (Simon Delaney) playing I'm not sure who, but doing it well anyway. I couldn't have cared less about anybody in this film. Even a free Bar wouldn't have kept me at this wedding!
Avanim (2004)
Stone me..
Avanim - Stones in English.. This film is like stones, Kidney stones! I can't spoil this film for you, the makers made a better job of it than I could ever do.
The previous reviews lead to wonder if we watched the same movie..
This is the story of Michale (Assi Levy), an incredibly dour, selfish woman who sets about ruining the lives of everyone around her, including her own.
From its opening it is almost impossible to empathise with her or he circumstances. She seems to care little for her young son Nathi (Metanel Ziv), who she is constantly late for. She is contemptuous towards her seemingly innocent husband Shmoulik (Danny Steg) and is generally unhappy for the sake of being unhappy. Whilst her life is unremarkable, even boring, it never lends itself to the level of selfish destruction she imposes on those around her. We are never treated to any insight as to why she would be so callous, just that she is having an affair with some man to whom she hardly communicates and we never get to know. As a result she is always late to collect her poor cherub of a son from kinder garden.. Oh and the lover, after we see him once, gets blown up by a terrorist.. Well for once, I think that bomber did us all a favour! I didn't care, not for him, not for her. I was more concerned about the other people that may or may not have been killed or injured, such was my lack of interest for these characters.
She works with her father (Uri Gavriel), who is for me a likable man. Her mother died apparently, but again we're not treated to any insight into this misfortune. It's just laid out before us as fact. It's hard to sum up a plot here as frankly there isn't one, we just get to follow people around like lost voyeurs.
Michale is not the heroine of this film, she is just the catalyst of events. My sympathies lay with all the poor folk that had to deal with this excuse for a Mother/Wife/Daughter..
On the plus side, and this is a cloud that requires extreme excavation, the scenes of Shabbat and the lengthy excursions into middle religious Jewish life are very interesting and manage to make this film almost watchable. I love anything to do with Israel, I could watch paint dry on a Jerusalem wall, but this film is a penance..
The one progressive character in this film gets killed by a lucky strike from a stone throwing Talmudic man, which makes it sound like a more interesting film than it is..
To summarise, I'm a non Jewish Englishman married to an Adeni Israeli, so I get the whole culture thing. Sadly, this film is just bad and my wife agrees..