Dirs. Michelangelo Antonioni, Steven Soderbergh, Wong Kar Wai

Meanwhile, I watched Eros, a series of three short films that supposedly touch on the titular theme. The Hand, the first film, is a magnificent Wong Kar Wai piece. Wong sets it in the Hong Kong of the 1960s that he mined so well in In the Mood for Love and 2046, with that same romantic sense of a time long gone and the passing of time. Wong squeezes so much desire out of the small gestures and quivers of the tailor Xiaozhang (Chang Chen) and the prostitute (Gong Li) who he expertly tailors clothes for and who he clearly loves throughout her life. And while this was the one film without nudity, it was the one that carried the strongest of erotic charges. Let’s just say the title was quite telling. And let’s just say no one expresses the frisson of repressed desire cinematically quite like Wong Kar Wai.

Equilibrium, the next film, was a Steven Soderbergh piece, and while it wasn’t that compelling, it still had its moments. Robert Downey Jr. as usual turned in a good performance as the hyper Nick Penrose, a person visiting a psychiatrist, and Alan Arkin’s role as the doctor was a nice counterpoint: Nick’s mind is everywhere, and Dr Pearl’s is nowhere in the room. Which, come to think of it, is a sort of equilibrium. Still, the main thing I thought about was the sharp lines of the black and white cinematography, and how the light through the blinds reminded me of Ellsworth Kelly. To consider the visual is no bad thing in a film on Eros, I suppose, but the lack of eroticism was kind of like Dr Pearl’s detachment from Nick’s dream.

But the last film, Michael Antonioni’s The Dangerous Thread of Things, was truly, truly terrible. I feel almost bad criticising anything of Antonioni’s - the man’s clearly a cinematic genius, and Blow-Up is some kind of wonderful, to say the least. But how else to put it? The (seemingly dubbed) dialogue is laughably inane, sounding like sentences taken out of an English for non-native speakers book. And while Antonioni has always been a master of the erotic image - Eros was really conceived as a tribute to him, after all - the gratuitous nudity and quasi-portentous images hardly do much to redeem this film.

The Dangerous Thread of Things is roughly about a bad relationship but it would probably be more accurate to say it’s about two women wandering around the beach naked at separate times with a guy while all three culprits spouting faux profundities. Although I suppose being in your 90s and still having the power to ask nubile young women to take off their clothing at your direction is a pretty decent way to age. And I suppose to be fair, apparently there’s a non-dubbed version that may allow one to truly focus on the visuals. But as it stands, the dialogue really kills Thread, making it train-wreck-viewing, and finishing Eros off with an anti-climax.

Dir. Jim Jarmusch
Bill Murray, Julie Delpy, Sharon Stone, Frances Conroy, Jessica Lange, Tilda Swinton

In Broken Flowers, Bill Murray plays aging lothario Don Johnston, who, on the day he’s dumped by current live-in girlfriend Sherry (Julie Delpy), also receives a mysterious unsigned letter informing him that he might have fathered a son years ago. This sparks, with the urging of his wannabe-detective neighbour Winston (Jeffrey Wright), a cross-country trip to visit the women in his past. Don may be a “Don Juan” to Winston, with his software fortune and his material wealth from his software entrepreneurship past, but, as Sherry points out, his behaviour can grow old: “I’m like your mistress, except you’re not even married”.

Using an old-footage tint that adds to the impression of visiting old pasts, Jarmusch sets the film in what seems like the parts of America oft-ignored in films - new developments, old fading houses, nondescript airports and hotels - and the film is as much a series of vignettes on the effects of time and about these women’s confrontations with their past selves as it is an examination of Don’s relationships with women. So we see Laura (Sharon Stone), who married a race car driver who died in a racing accident and now lives with her outrageous daughter Lolita; Dora (Frances Conroy), the former hippie turned real estate agent; and Carmen (Jessica Lange), the lawyer turned ‘animal communicator’. For some there is real joy in meeting this blast from the past - Laura and Don end up in bed together - for others, Don’s arrival is either something to be quickly dismissed (as Carmen does), or dredges up unspecified hurt, as happens to Penny (Tilda Swinton).

Every scene between Don and a woman in Broken Flowers carries a sexual charge, even those involving secondary characters, such as Carmen’s secretary (played by Chloe Sevigny, and the camera lingers knowingly on her thighs) or a florist (Pell James) from who he buys yet another bouquet of the pink flowers that Winston advises him to bring along to every attempted reunion. And through that charge we can see why Don’s arrival can be both disarming and disquieting: he himself, still clearly unsettled, brings in the unsettling force of sex and libido and romance into worlds. But the women he revisits often taken pains to keep that intrusion from the past a blip, packing Don off in ways both friendly and furious.

As might be expected, Murray plays the world-weary Don to laconic perfection - this is a man who has rejected all connection to the outside world (as Winston points out, he’s a software entrepreneur who doesn’t even keep a computer in his house), and spends his nights lying catatonic on his couch. It’s a variant of his Lost in Translation role, except this time his connection to the world is restored not by a woman but by meeting a boy who he thinks could be his kid. Murray has always been a master of economic movement, and here in Broken Flowers, Jarmusch’s still camera and the clear emotion of the women add to the deadpan humour. More than that, Jarmusch evokes, through the vignette-like format, that blend of wistfulness and ennui of seeing wisps of our past and wondering whether the little items we see (Don’s search for pink items in his former lovers’ homes, to match the pinkness of the unsigned letter, attunes our eyes towards spotting details) are clues that could or could not add up to something.

In the end, there are hints that Don has been shaken out of his catatonia, but we as an audience are left with questions for ourselves: does that add up to anything? And how much does wanting to answer that question say about how much we want resolution in the films that we watch, instead of savouring the moments that we do see?

Dir. David Dobkin
Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn

The opening 20 minutes or so of Wedding Crashers form a sequence of sheer joy: Pretence is the essence of play - just see “As You Like It” - and the opening captures the sheer ecstasy of the movie’s underlying scam, in which Owen Wilson and Vince Vaughn play John Beckwith and Jeremy Grey, buddies who crash weddings to take advantage of women’s vulnerability at the occasion and bed them. It’s not as calculative or obnoxious as that sounds: there’s a definite joy in John and Jeremy’s devotion to the art, and no one’s feelings are seriously hurt.

The film then segues quite nicely into the warmth of romance: John and Jeremy crash the “Kentucky Derby of weddings”, that of one of the daughters of the Treasury Secretary (Christopher Walken, hilarious as always), and John falls hard for Claire (Rachel McAdams) while Jeremy finds love with Gloria (a lovably crazed Isla Fisher), the Secretary’s other daughters. And so Wedding Crashers hints at some deeper questions, without bashing you over the head with them: When does the playful insouciance of youth have to give way to the finer charms of commitment? When do people grow too old for pretence? Their guru (played in an excellent cameo by Will Ferrell) still has it, but it looks somehow ineffably sad at his age - and yet, how does one hang on to the joys of play, of childishness? John and Claire’s romance answers some of those question, showing that there is a lot to be said for the joy of childlike behaviour (cycling, silly games), and that such behaviour isn’t incompatible with commitment and responsibility.

The jokes in Wedding Crashers occasionally meander, as does the film as a whole, but that merely adds to the improv charm and feel of the film. And in any case, the film could easily skate through on the charms of Wilson and Vaughn, who play opposite each other perfectly. In particular, Wilson, who’s certainly pretty intelligent - anyone with Rushmore on his writing credits has some degree of smarts - has mastered the art of appearing as a loveable goofy type. And so the leads’ charms translate into a breezy movie, light without being pure fluff, as much a summer getaway as the beach locales of Maryland that much of the film is set in.

Long flights give you lots of time to watch films, but there’s no way I have the time now to write full-length reviews of all of them, so here’s some quick thoughts:

Wedding Crashers - Great stuff. Owen Wilson - comedic genius. I watched this about 3 times and never failed to find the opening 20 minutes or so a sequence of sheer joy. Segues quite nicely into the warmth of the romance.

Must Love Dogs - It’s very hard for me to argue against the plot of a film involving John Cusack and Diane Lane as people recovering from bad breakups falling for each other, and involving dogs. And I’m a sucker for rom-coms.

Crash - Everyone gets caught in the web of racial dynamics. Probably the best thing I’ve seen Matt Dillon and Sandra Bullock in. Don Cheadle’s slow burn continues to be great to watch.

Batman Begins - Chris Nolan directs one of the most atmospheric Batmans yet. Christian Bale is right for the role. Katie Holmes is not.

Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit - As usual, Aardman’s work is superlative, and Nick Park’s creations continue to amuse. Great sight gags and wordplay.

The Forty-Year-Old Virgin - Funny stuff. I always love Catherine Keener and Paul Rudd.

Madagascar - Ultimately lacking in depth, and thus disappointing. One of those comedies where all the best jokes were in the trailer.

Hustle and Flow - The Audience Award winner at Sundance, and I can see why - genuine warmth in everyone, and you really want them to succeed.

Dir. Miguel Arteta
Jennifer Aniston, Mike White, John C. Reilly, Jake Gyllenhaal

The Good Girl of the title - and a bitter title it is - is Justine (Jennifer Aniston, playing against type), a 30-year-old cashier who’s stuck in a meaningless existence working at Retail Rodeo, a K-Mart/Wal-Mart type store, and living with her stoner husband Phil (John C. Reilly, giving a better sad-sack husband performance here than he did in Chicago). Director Miguel Arteta films in such a way as to pale every outdoor scene, as if to emphasise the blandness of it all, while the flourescent-lit colour scheme of Retail Rodeo shows that the indoors offers little respite.

That general sense of suburban ennui leads Justine into the arms of fellow cashier Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), whose seemingly poetic soul is mixed with a sense that his personality is, shall we say, not quite all hinged. Holden gets his self-bestowed monicker from The Catcher in the Rye’s protagonist, and that darkness speaks to something in Justine, leading to a series of assignations in motels. Indeed, the film is peppered with various characters’ quest for something more - passion, religion - from their life or, conversely, the quelling of that quest into cynicism (Zooey Deschanel as Justine’s hilariously deadpan colleague Cheryl) or simly drug-induced retreat (Phil, plus his buddy Bubba, played by Tim Blake Nelson).

The Good Girl is yet another collaboration between Arteta and writer Mike White, following cult favourite Chuck and Buck, and the same sense of dark humour that pervaded that film finds its way here. There are times when the film overplays the “suburban life is destructive to the soul” theme, but this is made believable in the hands of Aniston, who conveys quite clearly the lack of choices of Justine’s world. Although trapped in a life that’s far from ideal, Justine commonly chooses the path of least resistance - sleeping with Bubba, for instance, in order to prevent Bubba telling Phil about her affair with Holden - and we’re not quite sure what to root for: the slow death of the continuing marriage, or the escape with a lover whose immaturity and angst makes him borderline psychotic?

The film’s ending, thus, in its apparent happiness hiding an unhappy veneer and in its surrender to the ordinary life, is both the counterpart to and the antithesis of the ending of The Graduate, that other fine commentary on suburban life (the strains of misogyny that I read in American Beauty detract from that film for me). The quest for meaning and happiness in the world of The Good Girl often leads to unintended repercurssions, and that is the heart of the tragedy of this comedy: either one is condemned to endless dreariness, or one faces the harsh consequences of trying to find happiness.

Dir. Austin Chick
Mark Ruffalo, Maya Stange, Kathleen Robertson, Petra Wright

XX/XY, Austin Chick’s directorial debut, tells a familiar story: being young, reckless, feeling like and acting as though nothing has consequences - and then growing older, and learning to deal with the consequences of one’s actions. Wannabe artist Coles (Mark Ruffalo) meets Sam (Maya Stange) at a party at Sarah Lawrence, and Sam invites along punk grrl Thea (Kathleen Robertson) for a menage a trois. And so begins a classic relationship of youth, prodigal, profligate, promiscuous, and seemingly aconsequential - until the heartbreak when Coles reveals to Sam he has had a one-night stand.

Ten years later, all three parties find themselves back in New York, somewhat altered by the passage of time. Thea now is the wife of a successful restauranteur, Sam has just returned from London, and Coles has given up filmmaking for advertising. And it is Coles’ chance reunion with Sam that triggers off all sorts of conflicts in their respective lives, both of which seem to be merely drifting along. Coles’ relationship with Claire (Petra Wright, in a fine performance), his live-in girlfriend of five years, may feel to him and others like a marriage, but he remains perpetually unable to commit to anything, always leaving his options open - at a crucial confrontation, Claire points out “You still haven’t chosen me. You’re settling for me.” Sam, on her part, has just broken off an engagement in London to come back. And the subsequent reentanglement of their lives gives them an emotional push: indeed, the light that streams into Coles’ spacious flat or into the Hampton resort of the final scenes feels like an airing compared to the flourescent-lit dark parties of their youth.

XX/XY doesn’t judge its characters on the excesses of their youth or the compromises in their aging. Chick’s flick takes it all in, showing the inevitable emotional effects of actions, but also showing that the transition from the halcyon days of youth can be surprisingly achievable: Robertson manages to capture the idea that Thea’s position as restauranteur’s muse is simply an extension of her spirit, rather than any sort of deadening or ’selling out’.

Ruffalo’s turn as the central man is not without its minor flaws - his awkward look during confrontations had too much of an Ashton-Kutcher-trying-to-look-pensive feel to it for my taste - but he captures the sense of a man always looking for something better, oblivious to the consequences of that sort of behaviour on others. Always afraid to pin himself down to one thing because he’s afraid of compromising (the same reason he left film), always afraid to comit, Coles appears callous to others in his youth, but ends up, as the film shows, hurting himself more in the end.

Dir. Jean-Pierre Limosin

Novo tells a story that is part Memento, part 50 First Dates (although this French film, a 2002 product, predates the latter tale): the lead character, Graham (Eduardo Noriega) suffers from short term memory loss thanks to an accident. This being a French film, the memory loss leads to him being kept as a sexual plaything for his boss, Sabine (Nathalie Richard).

The usual aides memoire of memory-loss films - writing in notebooks, on the skin, on the walls - come into play for Graham, particularly after he meets Irene (Anna Mouglalis), an office temp who falls for his clear charm (charm being a property of the immediate, rather than time-dependent). So is love dependent on memory and the accumulation of shared experiences, or can one fall in love at first sight? Oh brave new world.

Unlike either of the other two films mentioned, however, Novo doesn’t do much to develop these philosophical implications of short-term memory loss. Indeed, the film holds the potential for all sorts of interesting questions: how dependent on memory is intimacy? What about Graham’s ex-wife Isabelle and his son Antoine, neither of whom he remembers? Is his real love now the love he has built and learnt to cope with, with Irene? Or that of the past? But there is no depth to the film’s inquiry: these are questions that could’ve been explored, but are instead merely tangentially glanced upon. Novo may shine on the surface thanks to Limosin’s cool direction, and the erotic charge of its early scenes is undeniable, but it settles instead into a film that resembles a charming man without history: elegant, but shallow.

The beginning of an occasional series, featuring a grab-bag of music/film/arts pieces on the web:

The Aristocrats will never, ever make it here to Singapore, I’d hazard to guess. But here’s an interview with director Paul Provenza. I’m dying to see it really - the world’s filthiest joke, a giant comedians’ in-joke, as told by such comedic luminaries as Gilbert Gottfried, Bob Saget, and Sarah Silverman. And I mean filthy - most tellings involve exploring every taboo, from scatology to incest to necrophilia, and then some. Here’s the South Park version (not safe for work, and not for sensitive people).

Incidentally, Bob Saget working blue is hilarious - I always wondered how he reined himself in on such squeaky-clean cheesy shows as “Full House” and “America’s Funniest Home Videos” when he’s quite possibly the most vulgar, dirty stand-up around. The interview hints at that (”shortly after Pope Benedict’s ordination, Bob Saget called to share how much he wanted to welcome the new pontiff with a certain unmentionable sex act”). (Of course, some people think Bob Saget is God.)

So according to the Hollywood Reporter, they’re making a film version of On the Road, the classic Jack Kerouac novel, directed by Walter Salles (The Motorcycle Diaries). I guess, thinking about it, the Motorcycle Diaries does parallel On the Road in that it tells the story through the eyes of someone in thrall to a much more charismatic real-life character - Che in the former, Dean Moriarty/Neal Cassady in the latter - and that’s not always easy to convey in film. But despite liking that film, I remain skeptical of anyone’s ability to adapt On the Road. On the Road was one of those books that made me want to go see America: the book for me felt alive with sheer manic energy, reckless and on the brink, sort of the literary equivalent of amphetamines. And that last paragraph - thinking of Dean Moriarty - always gets to me.

In retrospect, I owe big thanks to Tom Katzenbach, my former high school English teacher who let me go off and read whatever I wanted within the general topic area of “American literature of the 1960s” (with some generous stretching of the decade’s boundaries). I guess I was about 17 or 18 then, and in a span of a few months blew my mind reading Kerouac, Ken Kesey, Thomas Pynchon, and Richard Farina’s vastly underrated Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up To Me, among others.

I know On the Road isn’t necessarily the greatest work ever written (and yes, I know of Truman Capote’s sneering “typing not writing” quote); for that matter, the Dharma Bums is probably the better Kerouac novel. But it meant something to me when I was younger, and I’m certainly not the only one: the film’s going to have to live up to very high standards if it wants to touch the emotional core that the book did.

Technorati Tags: film, kerouac, books

I hadn’t realised there was a DJing mockumentary, called It’s All Gone Pete Tong, natch… add that to the “I hope I get a chance to see this” list.

Just some quick thoughts on the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy before I craft it into a more proper review:

As an avowed Douglas Adams afficionado, there’s a lot I could quibble with - my main gripe would be that Eddie never tried to make tea - but on the whole it was a pleasant enough amalgam of the first and bits from the other books.

Not much to complain about the acting. Martin Freeman is perfect as Arthur Dent - a sort of reprise of his Tim role from “The Office”, always somewhat bemused and bewildered - while Mos Def is a cool Ford Prefect not given enough to do. (They ironed out Ford’s occasional prickliness.) Marvin was bigger than I’d imagined him - in my mind, Marvin’s about the size of R2D2 - but he was great. Big gripe about Zaphod Beeblebrox - I really wanted his two heads to be side-by-side, which would’ve been cooler anyway. And I always saw the Babelfish as a huge-ass fish that was flapping in the ear incongruously…

My main gripe would be that while it’s “pleasant enough”, “pleasant enough” is a far cry from the laugh-out-loud, rolling-on-the-floor-laughing nature of the books. There’s a reason H2G2 references permeate the technical world - from “answer to life, the universe, and everything” on Google to Babelfish…

As usual, everyone headed for the exits once the credits appeared, but I figured there’d be more so I sat there and was rewarded by an amusing little bit on how Arthur’s final words caused a major intergalactic spat.

***

Before H2G2 they played a trailer for the new Chinese movie Initial D, based on the drifting anime series of the same name. Not fond of the pretty-boy stars (Jay Chou and Edison Chen) but I’m still intrigued.

Dir. Zero Chou

Splendid Float, Zero Chou’s first film, depicts the life of a group of Taiwanese tranvestites in a travelling cabaret show. Roy (James Chen), dances and sings in drag (as “Rose”) in the show at night, while spending his day as a Taoist priest conducting funeral rites. It’s a clear dichotomy: his vie en Rose is filled with energy, while his life in the day, as a man, holds nothing but death.

At one of the shows, Rose meets Ah Yang (here translated as Sunny), and the two fall in love almost immediately, making love with that certain urgency that in films tends to portend something tragic - even to someone who went into the show without any sense of the plot, as I did. And indeed, Sunny dies in a freak drowning accident, and the rest of the film is about Rose’s coming to terms with the death.

So Splendid Float becomes a film about the monopoly of loss, about the lover who dares not speak her name. Indeed, why the loss matters so much to Rose in the first place is not fully explicated - the Rose and Sunny relationship seems to arise sui generis, and while there are clear signs of affection, we’re left to fill in what exactly the couple see in each other so much so that they talk about moving in together.

In an ironic turn of events, Roy is the priest chosen to summon Sunny’s soul from the sea, which allows him the chance to mourn the death, if only covertly. Yet even the mourning is not untarnished by suspicions: Sunny had left a cryptic note just before he left, and the standard questions that might gnaw at any young person whose lover died mysteriously are magnified by the situation - did he kill himself to leave her? Rose throws the divination lots to check if she can take an icon of Sunny’s with her from the funeral, and the answers seem to keep pointing to a “no”.

Was she spurned? Was she rejected? Ultimately, as in with most attempts to communicate with the dead, Splendid Float remains resolutely ambiguous on these questions. Rose sees the ghost of Sunny in various times - whether it is a real ghost or she is projecting is deliberately not said - but what he means is never quite clear. That Rose is unable to say that a relationship even ever existed only makes it harder - this is a film about marginalisation rather than oppression, and the lack of even having a way of expressing her love and her loss is clearly painful to see. Rose is the nonexistent widow, as much a ghost in the present world as Sunny is in the other, and her wailings to the sea for Sunny to come back are only met with bewilderment by Sunny’s relatives.

The film also plays up the innate sadness that underpins many Chinese cabaret songs. The melancholic tune that repeats throughout the film speaks of dancing hiding one’s essential misery, which holds obvious parallels to the transvestites’ attempts to maintain a dual life and the sadness that that can cause.

Leavening the weight of the theme are sprinkles of bawdy ribaldry, as well as Taiwanese-language humour. (Admittedly, while there were many in the audience at the Singaporean Film Festival who got the jokes - Hokkien being the dialect of a good number of Singaporeans - there were certainly many other viewers bemused by the laughter.)

In the end, the other drag queens provide a solid support network for Rose, with a closeness that shows the true nature of their friendship, but there’s no denying the impact of the loss of a great love at so tender an age. This is a film of contradictions: the darkest moment is where one finds happiness; dressing up in drag allows one to find one’s true self; through frivolity true friendship emerges. And so, right till the end, the same tune repeats, and the drag queens dance to the music; joy and sadness all mixed in together in a bittersweet performance.

Splendid Float among the Golden Horse nominations.

Dir. Robert Lepage

The Far Side of the Moon, Robert Lepage’s adaptation of his own play, is a beautiful, quirky meditation on a pair of brothers in Quebec coping with the death of their mother from kidney disease. Reflecting the title, Lepage plays both lead roles: Phillippe, a grad student of the philosophy of science, and his brother Andre, a glib weatherman. The two form opposing faces of the same family, Phillippe the more distant, uglier one - the far side of the moon - and Andre the less cerebral pretty boy, and LePage distinguishes them successfully.

Phillippe’s oft-rejected thesis puts forward the theory that the drive for space exploration was a product of narcissism, and indeed the film itself links the self-absorption of Phillippe with his interest in space, which is about as far as one can look outwards. Yet for all his self-absorption and his claims of intellectual superiority to his brother, Phillippe is hardly any good at introspection, and one of the revelations near the film’s end centres around something he should have realised about his mother.

As an aging grad student who works in a call centre, Phillippe carries a fair bit of (humorous) bitterness about life’s rewards being somewhat unequal to his intellect, a bitterness that’s exacerbated by his brother’s success and infuses his speech. Thus, he says of Andre, “I don’t care if he’s gay, but like most gays I know he’s carefree, rich and lucky”. When, in the course of his work, Phillippe accidentally ends up calling the house of his ex-girlfriend, the conversation starts off gentle, even reconciliatory, until he makes an unthinkingly snide-sounding remark on the wealth of her husband.

Yet The Far Side of the Moon is hardly a small personal drama, shifting as it does from the brothers’ lives and the mundane to the deeper questions of the cosmos: is there life out there? How do we make a mark in the world? The visual style of the film matches this seamless shifting between the banal and the cosmic: Lepage doesn’t so much cut between scenes as lets them flow into one another in one continual loop of past and present, such that all the events of the brothers’ world form part of the same space-time continuum, giving equal import to the problems of the personal and the infinite.

LePage balances the weight of existential questions and personal tragedy with the lightness of the film’s dry humour: numerous visual jokes pepper the film, and its dry, laconic tone reminded me occasionally of The Man Without a Past (is it something about the humour that northern climes engender?). Its comedic highlight is the video that Phillippe makes for a SETI contest: filming beds for his video message to extraterrestial civilisations, he notes that “You don’t have to be single to sleep on a single… and twins rarely sleep on twins”.

At one point, the drunk Philippe asks a bartender, how does a cosmonaut reconcile the glories of seeing space with the banality of day-to-day chores? As The Far Side of the Moon shows, it is Phillippe’s coming to terms with both the grand question of our place in the universe and the banal but important facts of day-to-day life that let him achieve escape velocity and weightlessness.

More on Robert Lepage

Dir. Andy Tennant

Hitch is premised on an old chestnut of a romantic comedy setup: a guy with all the theories about love (Will Smith, playing the titular character) falls for a girl who makes him rethink all the theories. Smith plays Alex “Hitch” Hitchens, a man who makes a lucrative career as a ‘date doctor’, sprucing up his clients, teaching them to hide their flaws, and engineering situations that make their chosen women fall for them.

Of course, the title, besides being the lead character’s name, is a reference not just to marriage but also to interruption, and Alex’s blithe take on love as strategy is rudely broken when he meets and falls for Sara Melas (Eva Mendes, who’s far warmer and far better here than in any of her previous films), gossip columnist. And so Hitch comes unhitched: the latter-day Cyrano’s smooth gliding through the downtown New York social scene (oh, to eat the bread of Balthazar again) gives way to klutzy behaviour, allergic reactions, and generally acting in ways he would advise his clients to steer clear of.

Yes, it’s a formulaic set-up. It’s fairly easy to construct, just off the top of my head, a list of films I’ve seen in the last few years in which a man or woman has theories about love that end up being challenged: Down With Love (perhaps its closest relative in recent times, although both clearly recall the Doris Day-Rock Hudson comedies), Someone Like You, As Good As It Gets, How To Lose a Guy in Ten Days, all of which were pretty mediocre movies. But while Hitch clearly shows that spontaneity happens in love, of course, one thing I liked was that it didnt feel the need to disparage the obverse and debunk the theories. It respects Hitch’s work, rather than considering it sleazy (indeed, it goes to great pains to show that Hitch doesn’t accept cads for clients). and thereby acknowledges that just because a moment is engineered doesn’t make the underlying emotions fake - that the standard romantic comedy conceit that love “just happens” is not just unlikely, but sells short the effort needed to create the moment. Sometimes you love people for who they are, unguarded; other times you love them for trying.

Paradoxically, however, while Hitch shows the charms of effort, a great deal of the film’s breezy charm hinges on the seeming effortlessness of its stars. Will Smith has charisma to burn - a ‘flashback’ scene shows quite clearly that his jug ears could make him look nerdy if he weren’t so damn suave - and that charisma smooves over any plot clunkiness. (Sure, it may be unfair that Smith’s natural charms paper over the obvious plot, but as the film itself points out, hey, you only get one shot to make an impression, you better do the best you can with it.) Mendes, for her part, holds her own against Smith. In the secondary plot, Kevin James is funnier here than he ever was in “King of Queens” (not hard, admittedly), playing the hapless nerdy accountant who enlists Hitch’s services to help win the heart of rich, beautiful heiress Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta). James lets loose with dance moves that reminded me of the “Numa Numa” guy, and he and Valletta make a likeable mismatched pair.

It’s always a good sign when a romantic comedy leaves you rooting for the other couples in the plot, not just the main two, and Hitch, for all its cliches (Smith, at one point, makes a cornball toast that includes the line “if you must drink, drink in the moments that take your breath away”), has enough warmth in all its leads to place it a few notches above the average romantic comedy.