What a day to forget

One Day
DIRECTED BY: Lone Scherfig
STARRING: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Patricia Clarkson, Ken Stott
CERT: 12A

One Day is based on the much-loved recent novel of the same name by David Nicholls. The book passed me by but, by all accounts, it’s a fine read. I suppose, as with any written work that gets the screen treatment, the film’s release inspired the usual mix of anticipation and dread among the novel’s admirers.
Perhaps the dread was eased somewhat by the news that Nicholls himself wrote the script. Though, as it turns out, that probably makes the film a bigger disappointment.
It opens in Edinburgh on July 15 – St Swithin’s Day – 1988. A bunch of college students are celebrating graduation in the traditional fashion and much drink has been had. Dexter (Sturgess), a handsome upper middle-class charmer, takes a liking to Emma (Hathaway), a shy, studious girl of less advantaged stock. They end up back at her place but don’t exactly consummate their one night stand. They do, however, become lifelong friends.
The story follows the course of this friendship over the next two decades and more, dropping in on the pair every Saint Swithin’s Day to see where they are and what they’re up to.
After college they both head to London, where Dex hits the ground running, breaks into television and lands his own late night show. Emma, meanwhile, ends up waitressing at a Mexican restaurant while working on her big plan.
Hardly surprisingly, celebrity gradually turns Dex into a bit of a twat. As the years go by he picks up a coke habit, a stupid new accent and a long line of bimbos and airheads. Still, Emma sticks by him, the loyal friend, resigning herself to the fact that she’ll probably never be anything more.
Exactly why a fine lady like herself would want anything to do with this prat illustrates the main problem with the movie. There has to be more to this ongoing friendship than we’re seeing – good things, say, some sense of warmth and connection – but the structure of the film doesn’t allow for much of that. We see them once a year and perhaps it required a more skilled screenwriter to better combine their immediate circumstances with strong hints and updates on what we’ve missed. It doesn’t help, either, that there really isn’t a lot of chemistry between Hathaway and Sturgess.
Individually they do fine, particularly Sturgess. Hathaway is a likeable actress who tries hard with a character she’s probably unsuited for and though her English accent can be distracting – in the space of a sentence it can roam from London to Yorkshire and across the country to Manchester – she can hardly be blamed for the weak writing or the absence of a better dialect coach. She can’t be blamed either for the fact that, unlike Dex, Emma seems to have no family background at all.
The best acting on show comes from the great Ken Stott, as Dex’s distant father. As his arty mother, Patricia Clarkson is underused, and Rafe Spall is unusually unconvincing as a stand up comic.
Overall it’s a bit of a shambles, really, irritatingly structured and far too frequently dull – which makes it seem much longer than its 107 minutes.
Which I’m sure is a great disservice to the book. Maybe I’ll give it a shot and see, as soon as I’ve forgotten the film. And that won’t take long.

Conan the Barbarian
DIRECTED BY: Marcus Nispel
STARRING: Jason  Momoa, Ron Perlman, Rose McGowan, Stephen Lang
CERT: 15A

Say what you like about Arnold Scwarzenegger but no matter how bad his films were – and with a few exceptions, they were mostly bad – the man himself always brought a certain amusing charm to his characters.
The original Conan The Barbarian, from 1982, was an atrocious movie. In it, Scwarzenegger – fresh from his career as a champion bodybuilder – showed no sign that he could speak intelligibly in any human language, let alone act. Yet his Conan was strangely likeable and mysterious – almost like a big, brutish version of Eastwood’s Man With No Name. The Man With No Brain, perhaps.
There is little such charm to be found in this brash, juvenile remake but for the first few minutes it is very amusing stuff. Whether or not it was supposed to be funny, I don’t know.
It opens with a Morgan Freeman voiceover, which was perhaps intended to set a suitably sombre tone and might have if it was possible to understand what he was talking about. In fairness, poor Morgan probably didn’t have a clue either.
Then it’s straight into the middle of a bloody battle, where a woman valiantly fights off invaders while simultaneously going into labour. She’s rescued by her husband Corin (Perlman), who arrives just in time to perform an emergency Cesarean with his trusty sword. He then holds the baby aloft with a big manly roar. The child’s mother survives just long enough to say, “He shall be named…Conan.”
Sure you have to love it.
Later, as a teenage boy, Conan (Leo Howard) sees his father killed by the evil warlord Khalar Zym (Lang), something to do with a fancy mask. Conan swears revenge and, like a flash, he’s all grown up and built like a tank, played by the imposing Jason Momoa (most recently seen providing similar human tank duties in TV series, Game of Thrones).
Well, the rest is a series of grisly battles, and occasional enounters with Zym and his mad, witchy daughter Marique (McGowan) who likes to utter strange screeches and flash her big steel claws.
It culminates in a final showdown inside a crumbling volcano – with Conan’s woman Tamara (Rachel Nichols) strapped to a spinning wheel. Who couldn’t love that?
Indeed. Though it might be easier to like it if what happens between the start and the finish made any kind of sense at all.