A story that yields to sentiment

Take it as a tribute to actress Gemma Arterton that a movie as contrived and maudlin as Summerland could be even the least bit watchable. Theater director Jessica Swale makes her big-screen debut with a story about an academic writer (Arterton) living in a remote coastal town in England.  Set mostly in the 1940s, the story begins in earnest when Arterton's Alice Lamb is taken by surprise: An escort brings a boy (Lucas Bond) to her home. The reclusive, acerbic Lamb has no interest in the boy who has been shipped from London as part of a program to save the city's children from the Blitz.  Eventually, Alice warms to the boy and him to her with Arterton doing her best to keep Alice from becoming a one-note character. As the story proceeds, we see flashbacks to a time when Alice established a relationship with a young woman (Gugu Mbatha-Raw) awakened Alice to life's possibilities before declining the invitation to a long-term relationship. Mbatha-Raw's character couldn't imagine a life without children. More an emblem than a character, Mbatha-Raw has little to do beyond looking luminous. The interactions between Alice and Frank -- her new charge -- are well-handled but the movie concludes with a couple of dubious twists, one that milks emotions and the other that strains credibility. Penelope Wilton portrays the aging Alice in opening and closing scenes and the movie features Tom Courtenay as a gentle, compassionate small-town man. Swale mostly ignores social responses to lesbian love during less tolerant days, makes little reference to race, and seems most interested in providing a cinematic massage to soothe troubled spirits. I kept wondering whether the thorny, evidence-driven character Arterton creates possibly could have made it through the soggy third act.

Bob's Cinema Diary: 9/6/19 -- Satanic Panic, Vita & Virginia

I'm never sure whether films have real-world impact, but if Satanic Panic does alter anyone's behavior, it probably will be America's legion of pizza delivery people. In this case, a pizza delivery girl (Hayley Griffith) makes a delivery to a wealthy area that's way out of her normal zone. When the recipient disappears after refusing to tip, she bangs on the door, hoping to shame the stony-faced jerk who stiffed her. Our heroine might normally have gone on her way, but her moped’s nearly out-of-gas and she's afraid she won't make it home. Entering the house through a conveniently open side door, the pizza girl quickly becomes ensnared in a meeting of devil worshipers who want to turn her into a human sacrifice. Purposely overstated performances, particularly by the group's head witch (Rebecca Romijn) seem intended to give a comic spin to the proceedings, but this kind of acting also can create an amateurish feeling that may not have been what director Chelsea Stardust hoped to achieve. Gore gluttons will find enough plasma to satisfy, but too much of the movie simply doesn't work, either as straight-ahead horror or macabre comedy. Ruby Modine supplies a witty spark that's otherwise missing from a movie that aims to produce crowd-pleasing moments for horror buffs who are well enough versed in genre tropes to recognize when the movie is poking fun at them. All else aside, it may be reassuring to know that even Satanists are sensible enough to crave pizza, thus prompting the movie's most intriguing aside: Ritual sacrifices of young virgins never should be performed on an empty stomach.

Vita & Virginia

Vita & Virginia, a well-appointed look at the lesbian relationship between Vita Sackville-West (Gemma Arterton) and Virginia Woolf (Elizabeth Debicki), too often fails to break its period-piece shackles. The Bloomsbury scene depicted by director Chanya Button doesn't prove interesting or eccentric enough to shock us with its rejection of bourgeois convention. Both Vita and Virginia are married, Vita to a husband (Darren Dixon) who indulges his own same-sex interests but fears that his boldly flirtatious wife will jeopardize his public standing. Virginia's husband Leonard (Peter Ferdinando) shows more tolerance for his wife's inclinations. He publishes her books, loves her and even believes that she might benefit from a fling with Sackville-West. Isabella Rossellini shows up as Lady Sackville, a woman who clearly disapproves of Vita's undisguised recklessness. Arterton approaches her role with crisply delivered openness; Debicki's Virginia seems depressed and dreary, perhaps to suggest the despair that ultimately led Woolf to suicide. There's nothing wrong with Vita & Virginia that more unruliness wouldn't have cured. But Vita & Virginia seems too intent on becoming a movie of certifiable cultural significance to feel as if it's full of new insights.

Movies in the time of war and heartbreak

A great cast makes Their Finest irresistible.

I can't recall the last time I saw a movie set during World War II that made me feel better than when I sat down to watch it. Don't get me wrong, Their Finest, the movie to which I refer, never mires itself in cheap sentiment. Rather, it celebrates the pluck required to persevere in the face of terrible loss -- and, in this movie, those losses can be felt.

On one level, Their Finest is a comedy about British moviemaking during the World War II. It's 1940, and the British government wants films that are both authentic and inspirational. In search of a realism that also will appeal to the female audience, the Ministry of Information recruits an advertising copywriter (Gemma Arterton), who may have a flare for such matters. Initially, Arterton's Catrin is assigned to writing only women's dialogue, which -- in the trade -- inelegantly was referred to as "slop."

Danish director Lone Scherfig (Italian for Beginners and An Education) offers period-piece comforts and a cast that hits every note, including the most acerbic, with bracing clarity.

The heart of the story involves a burgeoning relationship between Arterton's Catrin and a snidely witty screenwriter played by Sam Claflin. Because of his writing skills, Claflin's Tom Buckley has been exempted from the military; perhaps his position at the home front explains Tom's cynicism. But Claflin reveals a man who genuinely cares about the movies and hopes to make a good one.

There's a complication: Catrin happens to be married. I won't say more about how the movie works this out, but know that Arterton and Claflin make a great screen couple. They argue plenty, but also set off sparks -- and, even better, their attraction springs from something akin to an appreciation of each other's skills. They're unlikely soul mates.

Joining Arterton and Claflin are Richard E. Grant, as a studio head, and Bill Nighy as an actor whose ego is stronger than his recent successes. If you didn't already know, Nighy qualifies as a comic treasure, an actor who can inflate a character's sense of self-importance without turning an audience against him. His timing remains exquisite, and he brings sincerity to scenes that require it without being cloying.

I'd love to see an entire movie about Nighy's character and Sophie (Helen McCrory), the woman who eventually inherits the job of being his agent.

The movie's writers and filmmakers are working on a screenplay for a film about Dunkirk, which is supposed to buoy British spirits, bring tears to the eyes of war-weary Londoners and help persuade the US to join the war effort. To support the latter purpose, a hunky American (Jake Lacy) who has been flying in the British air force is foisted on cast and crew. He flies better than he acts.

Set during a time when most of Britain's young men were away, Their Finest shows how the door of opportunity opened for women. Arterton's character is more than ready to walk through it. It also makes clear the horrors of the Blitz, the ceaseless bombings that made life in London truly hellish. Young men were dying at the front and civilians were dying at home.

OK, it's not exactly a revelation to say that we must keep on even when times become terribly bleak, but I had no problem watching this group of actors deliver the message.

Scherfig manages a neat trick. She has made a movie that juxtaposes smiles and heartbreak and emerges on the far side of maudlin. Good for her.

They're old, but they still sing

In Unfinished Song, Vanessa Redgrave proves impressive as an indomitable woman who refuses to allow terminal cancer to keep her from participating in the amateur choir that meets in the community center of the small British town where she and her husband reside. A more mannered Terence Stamp keeps pace as her grump of a husband, a retiree who desperately tries to shelter his ailing wife. Stamp's Arthur is afraid that Redgrave's Marion will hasten her demise by attending too many choir practices. Of course, he's even more afraid of losing her. Writer/director Paul Andrew Williams can't entirely avoid sentimentality, and the movie's choir sounds anything but amateurish as it works on unlikely tunes such as Salt-N-Pepa's Let's Talk About Sex. I suppose we're meant to find humor in the fact that aging singers would tackle such youth-oriented material, but it's an awfully cheap joke. Gemma Arterton, also on view this week in Neil Jordan's Byzantium, plays the militantly cheerful music teacher who leads the choir and who eventually persuades Stamp's grieving character to participate. In a scene that doesn't quite mesh with the rest of the movie, the screenplay suggests that Aterton's character may be hanging around with older people as a form of emotional protection from serious involvement with people her own age. An underdeveloped subplot puts Arthur into conflict with his son James (Christopher Eccleston). Some audiences will find Williams's movie moving (Stamp's solo rendition of Billy Joel's Lullaby seems intended as a tear-jerker), but too much about Unfinished Song seems pre-packaged for seniors, and too little of it feels as if it involves any sort of genuine discovery.

A vampire movie with little bite

The new season of HBO's True Blood is well under way, adding yet another helping of vampire mayhem to an already crowded field. These days, vampires seem to offer something for everyone, including, of course, the avid tween hordes who adored and supported the commercially successful Twilight movies. Can vampires for pre-schoolers be far behind?

Although, director Neil Jordan's Byzantium can't be accused of sinking its fangs into the same old vein, a case of vampire fatique (maybe mine) keeps it from drawing fresh blood. I'm too sick of vampires to go for this downbeat, time-fractured story about a sexy vampire (Gemma Arterton) and her resentful teen-age companion (Saoirse Ronan).

When the movie opens, Arterton's Clara's is working as a lap dancer to support Ronan's Eleanor. A vampire with a conscience, Eleanor only will feed on people who regard death as a comfort. Her vicitims tend to be old and sick.

The movie takes its time clarifying the exact nature of the relationship between Eleanor and Clara, which I won't reveal here. Of the two, Clara is by far the more enthusiastic vampire.

Written by Moira Buffini, Byzantium gets lost in a gloomy, noirish fog as the story vacilates between the present and the 200-year-old story of how the two women became vampires.

Best known for movies such as Mona Lisa, The Butcher Boy , The Crying Game, Jordan makes his second foray into the world of vampires, following 1994's adaptation of Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire.

Telling the story from the point of view of its women characters proves vaguely interesting, but the tale isn't developed in the most convincing ways with Ronan's Eleanor trying to figure out how to have a "responsible" relationship with a young man (Caleb Landry Jones) she meets in the crummy town where the two women flee after Clara decapitates one of her victims.

There's also a running backstory about male vampires who harbor a long-standing grudge against Clara, who evidently broke their manly rules.

Byzantium leans more toward the Swedish movie, Let the Right One In, than toward more traditional vampire fare, but it's nowhere as creepy, resonant or memorable.