Film reviews: The Lucky One | Silent House | Goodbye First Love | American Pie: Reunion

ALISTAIR HARKNESS reviews the rest of this week’s cinema releases

The Lucky One (12A)

Directed by: Scott Hicks

Starring: Zac Efron, Taylor Schilling, Blythe Danner

Rating: *

FOLLOWING in the footsteps of fellow Disney Channel alumnus Ryan Gosling, former High School Musical star Zac Efron takes a few more baby steps into leading man territory by starring in a Nicholas Sparks adaptation. Unfortunately for him, The Notebook author’s latest doesn’t exactly make for compelling big-screen drama thanks to the dopey plot that requires Efron to play a marine called Logan whose life is twice saved by a photo of a woman he finds on the battlefield. Resolving to track down said woman once his tour of duty ends, he walks into the life of kennel-owning divorced single mother Beth (Taylor Schilling), whose killed-in-action brother was supposed to be the beneficiary of the photo’s guardian angel-like power. Unable to confess how he came to be there, the mildly traumatised Logan instead takes a job at the kennel where – at the urging of her sassy grandma (Blythe Danner) – Beth soon falls for his brooding charms. Logan’s true identity is, of course, withheld until it becomes a relationship-threatening plot point, but even without being so mindlessly contrived, there’s nothing about the script, the acting or Shine director Scott Hicks’s sun-strewn visuals that catches fire enough to make this even a mildly diverting romantic fantasy.

Silent House (15)

Directed by: Chris Kentis, Laura Lau

Starring: EliZabeth Olsen, Adam Trese, Eric Sheffer STEVENS

Rating: **

LIKE the microbudget 2010 Argentinian horror film upon which it’s based, Silent House aims to up the creep factor by cleverly editing its action together to give the appearance that it’s unspooling in real time and in one continuous take. Also like the original film, the technique rather falls apart around the midpoint when a rug-pulling plot twist forces us to re-evaluate everything that has come before. That said, for the first 45 minutes or so, it remains an occasionally creepy technical exercise, with rising star Elizabeth Olsen (Martha Marcy May Marlene) fairly effective as the lit-by-torchlight girl who becomes convinced that the boarded-up country house she’s fixing up with her father and uncle is under attack from vicious home invaders. Alas, this being an American horror remake – even one striving for indie credibility (in addition to Sundance favourite Olsen, it was written and directed by Chris Kentis and Laura Lau, the filmmaking team responsible for the similarly gimmicky lo-fi shark movie Open Water a few years ago) – Silent House does foreshadow its big reveal a little too clearly and proceeds to over-explain it once it happens, ensuring that the twist is not only easy to guess but annoyingly executed.

Goodbye First Love (15)

Directed by: Mia Hansen-LØve

Starring: Lola Créton, Sebastian Urzendowsky, Magne-Håvard Brekke

Rating: ***

FOLLOWING the intensely felt romantic travails of a 15-year-old girl as she attempts to get over falling deeply in love for the first time, Father of My Children director Mia Hansen-Løve’s latest film does rather risk alienating audiences with its fidelity to the vicissitudes of indulgent and solipsistic teenage yearning. Dominating the early part of the film, the pretentious-sounding, all-or-nothing musings of schoolgirl Camille (Lola Créton) and her college-drop-out boyfriend Sullivan (Sebastian Urzendowsky) are certainly a little grating. Yet they’re also true to a certain type of teen’s experience of the world and, as the film progresses, it becomes clear that portraying this accurately is necessary to understand how such raw emotions can have a long-lasting effect. Indeed, set over the course of eight years or so, the film is really about the fall-out of how finding a real emotional connection with someone who isn’t ready to return that affection can feed into every choice you make. Though the film’s intermittent structure does resemble the recent Like Crazy, Hansen-Løve’s decision to devote the majority of the film to Lola (we only occasionally catch up with Sullivan) gives proceedings a sharper, more convincing edge.

American Pie: Reunion (15)

Directed by: Jon Hurwitz, Hayden Schlossberg

Starring: Alyson Hannigan, Jason Biggs, SeanN William Scott, Chris Klein

Rating: *

THE appearances in Oscar-winning films have long since dried up, the calls from Alexander Payne, Woody Allen and the Coen brothers are no longer forthcoming, and the action movie offers and big comedy roles are off the table – yep, it’s a fairly depressing sight seeing the once promising teenage cast of American Pie reunited for this belated ten-year reunion on screen (the fact that they missed the decade milestone by three years is turned into a lame gag). With only Alyson Hannigan (current star of long-running hit US sitcom How I Met Your Mother) and Seann William Scott (still scoring sizeable parts in mainstream comedy hits like Role Models) escaping the shadow of the franchise, the rest of the main players – Jason Biggs, Mena Suvari, Chris Klein, Tara Reid, the other two – imbue this fourth instalment with an air of creepy desperation as their on-screen characters’ dull lives and sentimental musings on thwarted ambitions become indistinguishable from their own decidedly non-sparkling career trajectories. That most of the jokes revolve around the same horn-dog antics that were amusing when the cast was in its teens and early twenties is just sad and weird now they’re grown up. Like most school reunions, this one’s best avoided.

Monsieur Lazhar (12A)

Directed by: Phillippe Falardeau

Starring: Mohamed Fellag, Sophie Nélisse, Émilien Néron

Rating: **

WHILE there’s something commendable about the way this 2012 French-Canadian Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Language film strives to subvert the usual clichés of the dreaded inspirational teacher genre with subtle acting (the young kids are particularly good) and a lack of sentimentality, it does hinge on a fallacious and naïve plot contrivance. The eponymous Monsieur Lazhar (Mohamed Fellag) is an Algerian refugee who secures a position as a substitute teacher in a Montreal primary school after one of its teachers hangs herself in her classroom, traumatising her young pupils. Though Lazhar claims to have had 19 years teaching experience, it’s revealed early on that he has nothing of the sort; rather he was a café owner who fled his home country after experiencing a life-threatening tragedy of his own. While the resulting film is doubtless intended as a parable about dealing with grief, this central conceit does undercut the film’s credibility in damaging ways, not least because director Philippe Falardeau uses it to take little pot-shots at the bureaucracy of the education system by suggesting that a saintly, well-meaning amateur with relatable personal problems can just walk in off the street and fix everything that’s wrong.

ALISTAIR HARKNESS