March Sadness

The Edge of Love
Couples Retreated
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

It’s WWII and London’s being bombarded by Germany. A beautiful young girl (Keira Knightley) takes refuge in an Underground Tube station, while she awaits desperately for the return of her true love, an average Joe solider, fighting on the front lines on mainland Europe. Sounds purty much like the borefest that was Atonement (and to some extent, A Very Long Engagement), dunnit?

With John Maybury‘s The Edge of Love (with a script by Knightley’s mum Sharman Macdonald… who also suffers from mosquito bites) that’s where the similarities with Atonement end, since her boy (the always creepy Cillian Murphy) comes home after the war, to Wales where she waits, and instead of an annoyingly jealous lil sister gumming up the works of our lovers, it’s her real life (yep, this is a truish story!) childhood poet pal Dylan Thomas (Brothers & Sisters‘ Matthew Rhys, a semi-doppelganger for James McAvoy) doing more damage than a close-up of Glenn Close. Thomas is married to casual Mondays-Fridays Sienna Miller, but his heart belongs to Knightley (she’s a bit conflicted herself, but ultimately stands by her man). The two couples live and booze it up before Murphy’s deployed (the ladies share a bath, but sadly it’s not a dirty one), and when he comes home shell shocked, their relationships and friendships strain more than 89 tons of spaghetti in the world’s largest strainer

The four lead performances are golden (even if we’re all suffering from K Knightley period piece fatigue), the production values are top notch, and the settings are simply gorgeous (book us on the first flight headed to Wales please!), but when the story hits its post-war patch, it lost much of the flavor it built up along the way. Yet we stuck with The Edge of Love to the very end (involving the lowest-keyed courtroom scene we’ve viddyed in ages), which cannot be said of Atonement (we kissed it goodbye after the first act). So is Love Knightley’s atonement to us all for Atonement? Without that irksome typewriter score, we’d have to say yes

They Shoots, He Scores!: the film’s luscious soundtrack was overseen by the brilliant Angelo Badalamenti, a frequent David Lynch collaborator. Some of the songs in the film were performed by the likes of Siouxsie Sioux, Suggs from Madness and even Knightley herself! Lisa Stansfield appears in the film, but does not lend her pipes

Verdictgo: it borders a lil bit on Meritville, but it also has badges so Jeepers Worth A Peepers

Tokyo!
Three Stories Low
Trailers & Mo | Official Website

Michel Gondry slowly turns a girl into a chair for no reason, Leos Carax lets a bearded creature on the loose and then puts him on trial, while Joon-ho Bong makes a shut-in stack pizza boxes and then finally go outside. Yep, that’s the gist of the three pointless lil stories that are being spun in Tokyo!, a head scratching affair that shoulda been called Tokyo? What more is there to say? Nothing, cept you should Netflix Paris, Je T’Aime instead, where the shorts are shorter and the hit to miss ratio is even, not all misses

Verdictgo: Very Little Merit But No Stinkin Badges

The Edge of Love opens in LA today, NY next week, and elsewhere elsewhen, while Tokyo! is currently playing in limited release

and until next thyme the balcony is clothed…