Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)

If you had just three weeks to live, what would you do? Try and see long-lost friends and relatives before the time came? Make an effort to re-connect with an old love? Finally get round to reading War and Peace? Travel as much as you could? Go on a crime spree? With an asteroid called Matilda hurtling towards the planet, that's the very conundrum facing Dodge Petersen (Steve Carell). Within moments of the car radio telling them that a last-ditch attempt to stop Matilda has failed, Dodge watches on as his wife Linda (Nancy Carell) gets out of the car and runs away from him and their life together. It's probably for the best anyway: she was having an affair and he only married her because he was scared of dying alone. Some people try and flee, as his wife did. Others join orgies and parties and some get things over with and take their own lives. Dodge reacts altogether differently, carrying on his humdrum life as normal. He goes to work, checks his empty letterbox and tries to tell his cleaning lady that with the apocalypse approaching, she doesn't have to come to work anymore. She thinks he's trying to fire her, so he relents and lets her carry on.

Dodge's friends aren't interested in business as usual, not in the slightest. Warren (Rob Corddry) and Diane (Connie Britton) invite him to a dinner party and try and set him up with their enthusiastic friend Karen (Melanie Lynskey), reasoning that no-one should die alone. They've hit the nail on the head - he doesn't want to die alone, but other than that, he doesn't know what he wants. He does know however that he's not interested in Karen or Diane's sexual advances, nor does he fancy taking heroin. So, he leaves the party and goes home. As he reminisces about Olivia, his old high school sweetheart, he sees his neighbour Penny (Keira Knightley) crying outside his window. She's missed the last flight back to England to see her family so he consoles her and invites her in. She falls asleep on his sofa and the next morning, gives him a pile of letters that the postman had wrongly delivered to her apartment over the years. They've never spoken before despite being neighbours for a long time so she has no idea that the man she assumed was his "roommate's boyfriend" was in fact his wife's lover. After trying to kill himself, Dodge reads the letters and finds one from Olivia where she tells him that she's divorced with a son and that he was the love of her life. Filled with a renewed sense of purpose and with a crowd of looters approaching their apartment block, he rescues Penny and tells her that if she helps him track down Olivia, he will hook her up with his friend who has a private plane that can take her back home to Surrey.

Thus begins the movie proper and from this point onwards it's a strange romantic drama-cum-black comedy-cum-apocalyptic science fiction film. Some parts work really well. For example, Dodge maintaining the semblance of a normal life as the sky falls around him (literally); the dinner party at Warren and Diane's; almost joining in an orgy at a diner and attending a mass baptism at a beach. It's just a pity that so many scenes fall flat on their face. Dodge's attempt to commit suicide was either supposed to be poignant or funny and it couldn't decide which. Dodge and Penny's encounter with an unusually vigilant policeman sees the film swerve completely off course and delivers easily the most boring and frustrating five minutes of the film. Their meeting with survivalists had promise but it was completely lacking any satirical edge and just felt like it had been shoehorned in. The only joke had at their expense came when they walked in on one of them on the toilet. Martin Sheen's character likewise feels tacked on and doesn't serve much purpose other than to provide a plot device. Finally, the ending. I can see some people really liking it, but I didn't really. I won't spoil it but of the three main ways I thought it could have ended as I was watching it - abrupt black comedy, tearful reunion and unhappy resolution - they picked the weakest of the three. After it finishes I wondered if there was an alternate ending but there is not.

Strange and unholy mash-up it might be but fortunately, there is glue holding the whole ramshackle structure together and it is the performances of Carell and Knightley. He deadpans his way through the film, his occasional outbursts of emotion and playful flirting making for a confidently understated performance. She is full of spunky energy, another excellent performance to add to the already long list. Together they make a likeable and believable pairing, often providing the only high points in scenes that otherwise drag along under the weight of their own superfluousness.

Seeking a Friend for the End of the World is a bit of a strange film and has as many hits as it does misses. It would all come unstuck were it not for Steve Carell and Keira Knightley. She in particular is superb and without their winning performances, the whole thing would come crashing down.

6 out of 10.

Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (2012)

At the preview screening for Salmon Fishing in the Yemen, I was handed a free copy of the novel the film is based on, which I immediately decided I would give to my mother. That should tell you all you need to know about the target audience.

Ewan McGregor plays Dr. Fred Jones, a fisheries expert for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. One morning he receives a nicely-worded email from Harriet Chetwode-Talbot (Emily Blunt). She works for a consultancy firm that represents Sheikh Muhammad (Amr Waked), an eccentric Yemeni businessman who dreams of bringing salmon to the deserts of Yemen. Dr. Jones replies that such a project would be "fundamentally unfeasible", repeating as such to his wife Mary (Rachael Stirling) and his boss Bernard (Conleth Hill a.k.a. Varys from Game of Thrones). When a terrorist attack at a mosque in Afghanistan threatens to bring another round of bad news for the government, the Prime Minister's press secretary, the highly strung Patricia Maxwell (Kristin Scott Thomas), decides that they need some good news from the Middle East for a change. Drawing blanks, she eventually discovers the Sheikh's salmon fishing proposal and orders Bernard to proceed at full steam. Dr. Jones is ordered to meet Harriet. He does and again rubbishes the plan. Bernard, acting on orders from on high, gives Dr. Jones an ultimatum: be seconded to Harriet's firm and work on the salmon plan or be sacked. His marriage strained and his wife working in Switzerland, he reluctantly accepts.

Harriet, meanwhile, is in a relationship with Captain Robert Mayers (Tom Misom), who is stationed in Afghanistan. Dr. Jones arrives on secondment and she manages to convince him that the Sheikh's vast wealth and the presence of a dam means that the project is "plausible". They meet the Sheikh and Dr. Jones is slowly convinced that he and the project aren't quite as crazy as he first thought. Things almost fall apart when Captain Mayers is reported missing in action but the two go to Yemen to oversee the final stages of the project. Just before he leaves, his wife returns from Switzerland and confronts him about his relationship with Harriet. He admits that he's falling in love with her and they separate. In Yemen, the project initially seems to be a success before it is sabotaged by terrorists and fails. Captain Mayers, recently rescued from Afghanistan, makes a dramatic reappearance just as Dr. Jones declares his love for Harriet and she has to decide who she wants to be with as he must decide whether he wants to stay in Yemen and see the project to completion or return home to Britain.

Not only had I never read the novel of the same name, I had no idea that it wasn't written in prose but as a collection of interviews, official documents, diary entries and emails. While the narrative structure of the novel is quite interesting, the same cannot be said for the film. It's typical rom-com nonsense: utterly predictable and about as strenuous as lifting a spoonful of ice cream from the bowl to your mouth. McGregor and Blunt are pleasant and have a nice chemistry between them but they're never believable as lovers as their off-screen friendship seeps through. The "culture clash" between the two of them is suitably summed up by their names: Harriet Chetwode-Talbot and Fred Jones. Unfortunately, that's as subtle as the film gets, resorting to crude metaphors to convey messages about love and faith. Really, the only bright spot is Kristin Scott Thomas' brilliantly acerbic press secretary, from whom almost all of the laughs come.

Ridiculous, fluffy, sugary, silly, predictable nonsense. The cast at least look like they had a good time making it and if this is your sort of thing, you'll spend an enjoyable hour and forty-seven minutes watching a film about bringing fish to a desert.

5 out of 10.

One Day (2011)

Within the first two minutes of One Day, I'd already worked out exactly what was going to happen. Predictability is the name of the game with romantic dramas but in this case, the plot and the ending are so obviously signposted that they might as well tell you up front exactly what happens.

Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess) meet on the day of their graduation from university in 1988. They almost sleep together but decide to become friends instead. Over the next twenty years, their friendship, career prospects and relationships fluctuate wildly. She becomes a waitress and then a teacher and dates an unsuccessful comedian (Rafe Spall). He travels, then becomes an irritating TV presenter, much to the chagrin of his parents (Patricia Clarkson and Ken Stott), and gets engaged to the glamorous Sylvie (Romola Garai). Emma and Dexter fight, they fall out, they make up, they reminisce, blah, blah, blah. You all know where it's heading.

With a film as boring and predictable as this, you'd at least hope to be drawn to the characters. No such luck here. Hathaway is fine as the boring and straight-laced Emma (even if her "Yorkshire" accent isn't) but Sturgess' character is so awful, so inherently unlikeable, the only thing I found myself wishing for him was that he die a slow and painful death. You're clearly meant to root for the two of them to get together but he's such an utter twat and she's so boring that I didn't give a shit what happened to either of them.

I struggled to think of anything I enjoyed about this film. The narrative is quite interesting, flashing forward in time year by year, and some of the supporting characters are well-acted. Other than that, there are no positives here at all.

This film has almost nothing to offer but boredom and misery. A plodding and predictable plot, burdened by one of the most detestable characters I've seen in a very long time.

2 out of 10.