Celia Shorojk film previews

The trouble with ageing

Film reviews by Celia Shorojk

Hope Springs

Alright you baby boomers, you happy now; they are even making films about sex for you.

Kay (Meryl Streep) wants her and hubby Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones) to zest up their three-decade relationship with Arnold (Tommy Lee Jones).

For God’s sake buy a Winnebago.

But no, she has to drag Arnie to a couple’s therapist (Steve Carrel). With these three strong leads and directed by David Frankel (The Devil Wears Prada) you know it is going to work it is bound to work, after a fashion.

You can almost forgive the silly title – hope springs eternal; ooh, that is clever.  But why cast ace comedian Carrel in a straight role. I suspect the answer is this is a serious film, masked as rom-com to avoid the chick-flick tag.

There has to be worse ways to spend a couple of hours – and better ones.

The Expendables 2

Imagine this! A boomer couple arrives at the monies. She goes to Hope Springs and he ducks in to The Expendables 2. That is what you call an open marriage.

Unlike TE1, here is no Helen Mirren in this late-in-life action film on Viagra.

The first film was watchable though embarrassing in its premise you are never too old to blow things up. You know, you could grow too wise for that sort of stuff.

The film makers will be hoping there are enough teenage boys out there willing to tolerate the old farts (Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone Arnold Schwarzenneger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Chuck Norris) on screen for the sake of nostalgia or pyrotechnics.

Stallone co-wrote the script and this whole thing sounds like an expensive joke. Suddenly Hope Springs looks like aging more gracefully.

Dumbo

We even have a geriatric film, born in 1941.

Dumbo could be the pick of the trio reviewed here.

For starters, it is not self-conscious about aging. It helps that it does not a look a day older than when it was born.

The story goes – and it is a tale which deserves to be true ­ – the Disney studio made Dumbo on the cheap to recoup losses from the earlier animation Fantasia.

The animators concentrated on finely drawing the central characters and forgot about the fancy backgrounds. The film came in at about an hour’s runni9ng time. Don’t you just love it when less is indeed more?

No animal is shot or blown up or suffers existential angst. Who says Walt Disney is a cold sort of person, these days?