Review No.170: Seeking a Friend for the End of the World

It's true that the Apocalypse has been covered in many different ways over the years away from the obligatory sci-fi uses of the end of the world we've also had some more interesting efforts including last year's Lars Von Trier film Melancholia which divided opinion as I know people who both loved and hated it while I was somewhere in the middle. Playing the situation for laughs is writer/director Lorene Scarfaria, best known for her various work on indie films such as Whip It and Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, who presents a middle-management drone force to face the apocalypse on his own in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World. In the film Steve Carell plays Dodge an insurance salesman whose wife leaves him directly after hearing that all efforts to stop an asteroid hurtling towards the Earth have been in vain so he has to soldier on alone. When he sees one of his neighbours, Keira Knightley's Penny, crying on the fire escape he lets her in only to discover she's upset that she'll never be able to get to see her folks in England again while he finds out that his first love wanted to see him once again however he never got the letter due to Penny holding onto his mail. Eventually the two make a pact - she helps him get to his lost love and in return he'll get to a guy he knows who has a plane so the rest of the film turns into a road movie and inevitably the two develop feelings for each other. Along the way we see how the apocalypse has affected other people with the staff at a TGI Fridays-esque restaurant getting a bit more saucy, one of the people they meet getting bumped off by an assassin and one of Penny's exes building a shelter in the hope of repopulating the Earth. In the end things take an unexpected turn as the pair both find what they're looking for but find out it's not necessarily what they wanted.

If you take Seeking a Friend for the End of the World as a number of set pieces then it works a lot better than as an overall film. I enjoyed several parts of it including a party Dodge attends, Dodge and Penny's heart-to-heart at his ex-girlfriend's parents' house and the discovery of who owns the plane. The film also has some beautiful location shots which cinematographer Tim Orr utilises especially a later scene on a beach where Penny and Dodge discover a lot of lost people getting married. Where the film falls down is that I never felt the believable nature of the relationship between Dodge and Penny despite Carrel and Knightley trying their hardest to play two people who had genuine feelings for each other. Throughout the film we meet several of Penny's former loves, including Adam Brody's waster Owen and Derek Luke's survivalist Speck, both of whom seem to want to do anything to hold onto her however she only has eyes for the man that insults her several times throughout the course of their journey. Individually though the two leads do a good job with Carell perfecting the hangdog expression we first saw on him in Little Miss Sunshine while Knightley's quirky Penny veers on the right side of being annoying. There are also some great cameos from Patton Oswalt, Rob Corddry and one towards the end of the film which I don't particularly feel like spoiling as for me the revelation was one of the best parts of the movie. The soundtrack is also great, someone sitting next to me in the cinema thought so too as she spent a lot of the time singing along to the more recognisable tunes, thanks to Penny's instance of bringing her records along with her this is a film that really knows how to use popular music to advance the story. As a whole though I don't think the story always worked and I felt that after it ended it went on for another ten minutes which spoilt the overall film plus I didn't really understand why Dodge would choose to keep a dog that was left as his feet for the rest of the film even though it was incredibly cute. Though there is indeed a lot to like in Seeking a Friend for the End of the World it still feels fairly uneven and runs longer than it should've done even though I feel it does do a good job of demonstrating how normal people would react if the world were to end in a couple of weeks.

Verdict: Good performances, a number of winning set-pieces and a great soundtrack are spoilt by a lack of chemistry between the two leads as well as an overlong ending so for that reason it gets 6.5/10

Review No.38: Young Adult

A few weeks ago I got the opportunity to go to a free preview screening of Young Adult however due to complications involving times, dates and life in general this had to be cancelled. Thankfully today the internet fairies have blessed me with a copy and I can finally see the new film from Jason Reitman and Diablo Cody who directed and wrote Juno respectively. One of the criticisms of Cody's Oscar winning screenplay for Juno was that her writing for the teenage characters felt like somebody of her age imaging how teens would speak. In response to that the lead in this film, Charlize Theron's Mavis Gary, is a grown-up who writes as a teenage girl as she produces a set of novels that are classed in the young adult range. When we first meet Mavis she is struggling to complete the last in the popular Waverly Prep series for which she writes when she suddenly receives an e-mail from an old flame about his wife having a baby. From this she decides to return to her old hometown of Mercury a backwater suburb where the majority of her old schoolmates still live and in which she hopes to rekindle her old boyfriend Buddy's feelings for her despite him being a new dad. She also strikes up an unlikely friendship with another former schoolmate Matt who, by his own admission, is a fat nerd and who suffered a traumatic experience during high school.

I think for the most part Cody gets everything about Young Adult right with Mavis being a character who is stuck in a state of arrested development and despite being successful and once married to a charming man she still hankers for her old school life where she was the Prom Queen. Charlize Theron gives what is, for me personally, her best performance playing a character who is essentially a bitch but giving her some sort of heart and reason for behaving the way she is. Theron also bounces well off Patton Oswalt who gives a good accounting of himself as Matt the only person privy to Mavis' plan to win back her former love. Patrick Wilson is also fairly solid in his role as Buddy you can believe that he once was a popular high school jock but has decided to settle down with his wife Beth. The whole smalltown of Mercury is very well drawn and I felt a sense of an old town that had tried to be modernised and was still inhabited by the same people that were there twenty years ago only now they all have kids. As you can imagine this being a film from the creators of Juno there is also a lot of emphasis on the soundtrack and how music can evoke certain emotions. As Mavis is obssessed with her high school years there is a lot of 1990s music from the likes of Dinosaur Jr. and 4 Non Blondes however it is Teenage Fanclub's The Concept that is the song that you will be humming after the film has finished. The main problem is I feel that Cody and Reitman didn't know how particularly to finish the film so after the 'big incident' things go off a bit with Mavis' ultimate decision being left in the hands of someone that I feel she would've paid little attention to. Apart from the ending though I really enjoyed this film with two strong central performances, a great setting and an awesome soundtrack.

Overall: A well-written and well-acted comedy which dips a bit at the end yet features Charlize Theron's best performance very gets  8.5/10