No fun in growing up

The Hangover Part III 
DIRECTED BY: Todd Philips
STARRING: Zach Galifanakis, Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Kim Jeong
CERT: 15A

IN The Hangover Part III, there is no hangover. There is no party, no debauchery, no excessive all-night consumption of heavy substances, from which a hangover might arise. In fact, I can’t remember any of the lead characters consuming anything stronger than a lollipop.
The point here is not celebration but rehabilitation. That’s how it works in this new breed of bad boy movies. No matter how bad the boy is, no matter how crazy the wild man gets, in the end he will grow up and see the error of his ways. He will become a new man, or at least, a man who is now good enough for the girl he loves. Most of the time, this process only takes 90 minutes. It’s taken three films for the Hangover crew to get to it, but you knew they would and that’s an awful pity.
Because this whole growing up business is all well and good in the real world. It might even be necessary that the wild fella finally cops on, that even the maddest of us eventually embraces some semblance of this thing they call ‘normal’. But who wants to see that in a Hangover movie? These films weren’t always hilarious and were a tad overzealous with the vulgarity for my liking, but the lads here are not supposed to be some kind of moral standard bearers or role models for the kids. Audiences enjoyed seeing these wild men going wild ­ they enjoyed it so much, the Hangover series has made over a billion dollars, funny money in the land of comedy. Strange, then, that someone should decide to put a lid on the madness.
Of course, there is only one truly mad individual in the wolfpack, one man who is in supposed need of help. But right now, this man’s life is good.
Alan (Galifanakis) has just bought himself a giraffe. And why not? He’s off his meds and he couldn’t be happier. Why would he dream of changing, even after a tragic motorway accident, or after his beloved Dad (Jeffrey Tambor) goes mad and then drops dead? His only regret is that his mother didn’t die instead.
So everyone agrees that it’s time for an intervention. There’s a mental facility in Arizona that can help. That’s a long drive but if the clinic was local, then Alan’s buddies ­ Phil (Cooper), Stu (Helms) aand Doug (Justin Bartha) ­ wouldn’t have to accompany him on a road trip.
On the way, the boys are run off the road and kidnapped by a crime lord named Marshall (John Goodman). Marshall has a bone to pick with our old friend Chow (Jeong), concerning a stash of stolen gold that vanished before Chow ended up in prison in Bangkok. He has now escaped ­ in an opening nod to Shawshank ­ and Marshall wants the boys to find him. Marshall holds on to Doug for security ­ taking him out of the picture, as usual ­ and he’ll be first to get the bullet if the lads fail.
Turns out Chow has been emailing Alan from prison, though the importance of this is lost on Alan, because on the path from wild man to normal, he must first become a harmless eejit.
So the pack head for Mexico, where the fugitive Chow agrees to help, but not before assuring us that even he is human, with a truly tortured karaoke rendition of Hurt. It’s probably one of those moments that looked better on paper.
As, I’m sure, did the idea of a return to Vegas. But when they get there, well, nothing crazy happens, unless slapstick is the new crazy. In which case, Alan getting stuck in the Caesar’s Palace sign and Chow taking a parachute dive will bring the house down. A visit to Stu’s old lady friend Jade (Heather Graham) reinforces the notion of settling down and gives Alan the chance to have some bonding time with a child from the past. Because even harmless eejits can be deep, man.
They need love, too and Alan finds it with a tough-nut pawnbroker named Cassandra (Melissa McCarthy), whose arrival on the scene brings a welcome few laughs.
Up until then, everyone has been trying so hard it’s painful and you can see that Galifanakis and co. don’t think it’s all that funny, either.
But in the end, the mission is complete and Alan is a changed man, officially a member of respectable society. Though a final scene during the credits suggests his rehabilitation might not be complete.
It’s the morning after a wild celebration, the pack is waking up, their heads hanging off, and to everyone’s amusement, Stu has undertaken another cosmetic alteration.
We’ve been down that road before, but that’s still the film I’d rather see. Not some lazy, sober, humourless rubbish about growing up.

The Great Gatsby
DIRECTED BY: Baz
Luhrmann
STARRING: Leonardo
DiCaprio, Tobey Maguire, Carey Mulligan
CERT: 12A

Fans of F Scott Fitzgerald’s novel, The Great Gatsby, will tell you it’s a book that simply cannot be filmed. In a way they’re right. Gatsby is a decent story but the great pleasure in reading it is not so much the story, but the quality of the writing itself. And you can’t exactly capture that on screen.
Still, like several others before him, Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!) was not to be deterred. To try and get around the problem, he takes the liberty of making the book’s narrator Nick Carraway (Maguire) an alcoholic, telling the story of Gatsby to a shrink in a sanatorium, eventually typing it out as therapy – his sentences floating across the screen in 3D. It’s an interesting gimmick, but rather than solve the big issue, it’s just one of many annoying distractions.
Carraway is a war veteran, a Yale graduate and a would-be writer, who’s come east to New York to make his fortune on Wall Street.
He rents a house on Long Island, next door to a mansion owned by Jay Gatsby (DiCaprio), an enigmatic young man of immense and mysterious wealth. Gatsby plays host to lavish parties, where the city’s rich young things come to dance and play, going mad to the sounds of Beyonce and Lana Del Rey, who were all the rage in the summer of 1922.
Across the bay from Gatsby’s castle, Nick’s cousin Daisy (Mulligan) lives in similar style, unhappily married to our narrator’s old school friend Tom Buchanan (Joel Edgerton), a brute of a man from old money.
Having befriended Nick and introduced him to the seedier side of New York’s respectable facade, Gatsby asks his new neighbour a favour. He and Daisy have a history and, having waited a long time for his chance, Gatsby wants to repeat it.
Two scenes stand out.
One is Gatsby’s first secret meeting with Daisy. She comes to Nick’s cottage, supposedly for tea, while Gatsby waits, a nervous wreck, worried if the elaborate home makeover will impress her. It’s a lovely scene which, in just a few minutes, gets to the heart of who Gatsby is  – “a smitten, insecure, hopelessly hopeful boy behind a fancy mask that was ruthlessly constructed for just one reason”.
It also gives you the feeling that he and Daisy clearly had something special, a chemistry that’s still alive and well, perhaps the kind of great love that is worth everything.
That’s a glimpse of the film Luhrmann could have made, but that one scene is really the only time you get a real sense of these things.
The other standout scene takes place in a New York apartment, where Tom takes his mistress Myrtle (Isla Fisher), with Nick tagging along. Nick gets drunk and a wild all-night party ensues ­ the city itself becoming a character of its own.
If you hadn’t copped it from the earlier extravagant bash as Gatsby’s place, you’ll see here what the director is really up to: he’s trying to remake Moulin Rouge!, swapping Paris for New York, TB for a bullet and Nirvana for the dubious charms of Jay-Z, ­who’s also on board here as a producer. The one mercy is that we are spared the spectacle of Leo and Tobey singing.
The problem with Luhrmann revisiting his finest hour is that, in Moulin Rouge!, it wasn’t hard to be emotionally involved. But Fitzgerald’s characters ­ in the book and doubly so in Luhrmann’s hands ­ are so shallow and frivolous and downright unlikeable, you don’t give a hoot what happens to any of them.
After that, all you’re left with is noise and visual trickery, of which there is plenty – dazzling, bombastic and as hollow as everything else.
Though as far as the music is concerned, that might be sort of the point -­ the hip-hop soundtrack riffing on a culture that’s every bit as vacuous as anything Fitzgerald wrote about.
In the middle of it all, the cast gets a bit lost, despite their efforts. DiCaprio gives it plenty of swagger and charm and though it’s hard at times not to expect him to break out the Spidey suit, especially when the camera goes swooping through the city, Tobey Maguire makes a decent fit as Nick.
Carey Mulligan is a fine actress and there are moments here when her screen presence alone is breathtaking but mostly her weakly-written Daisy is just crowded out of the picture.
That picture is pretty and wild and vivid, even if the 3D is pointless and utterly crap. But by the end, you might find yourself feeling a bit like poor Nick, itching for a drink to make it all go away.