IF (4 Stars)

"IF" stands for "Imaginary Friends". 12-year-old Bea is living with her grandmother in New York City while her father is in hospital waiting for heart surgery. She finds that strange creatures live in an apartment in the building. They live with a man called Cal who collects imaginary friends that were abandoned when children grew up into adulthood. Cal is looking for someone to help him reunite  the imaginary friends with their former owners. Bea accepts the job, but she's not too successful.

I shan't go into the plot in any more detail to avoid spoilers. After seeing the trailers I was surprised that it's very much a children's film. I expected something that would bridge the gap between children's films and adult films, but there's hardly anything adult in the film.

I never had an imaginary friend as a child. As far as I know. One of the main themes of the film is that adults have forgotten their imaginary friends. As a child I was a loner. Until I was eight I lived on the grounds of Little Aston Hall. There were only three families, and neither of the other families had children, so I didn't have anyone to play with. If anyone ever needed an imaginary friend, it was me.

Trolls Band Together (4 Stars)

The five trolls Floyd, John Dory, Spruce, Clay and Baby Branch are in a highly successful boy band called Brozone. They disband after a concert that goes wrong. It's not just the band that splits up. The five brothers go their different ways.

15 years later Branch is no longer a baby. He's in a steady relationship with Queen Poppy. He hears that Floyd has been kidnapped by giant trolls, referred to as bergens. Floyd is trapped inside a diamond that channels his singing ability into the wearer. The only thing that can break the diamond open is perfect family harmony, so he goes on a quest to find his brothers and sing a song to free Floyd.

As you can tell from my brief description, it's a whimsical tale, but it has an overwhelming charm, especially for children. My grandson Oliver loved it, but the biggest reaction was from a girl two seats away. She was leaning forward on her seat for most of the film, and she couldn't stop laughing. I didn't laugh out loud, but I still found the film amusing.

The songs were sung by Justin Timberlake and various boy bands. That's not my sort of music. Normally I would have turned away, but in the context of the film it was perfect. Heavy metal wouldn't have been suitable.

It's a film I want to see again.

Snatched (4 Stars)

"Snatched" is a comedy film made in 2017, starring Amy Schumer and Goldie Hawn. I admire Amy Schumer a lot, primarily for her real life personality, rather than her acting. On the other hand, in films like "Snatched" she's playing herself, so it's the real Amy we see. She's goofy, inappropriate and determined that the whole world should march to her drum. In other words, she's the sort of woman I could fall in love with.

Amy plays Emily Middleton, a single woman in her early 30's. She's dating a rock musician who dumps her in one of the opening scenes. Boo! Boo! Hiss! Hiss! The trouble is that she's booked a romantic trip to Ecuador, and she doesn't want to go by herself. She rings round all her friends, but they all have excuses, even though she offers the trip for free. Eventually Emily asks her mother, who also turns down the offer because she's paranoid. She lives her life in fear of being attacked, so she hardly leaves her house. She lives with her son, Emily's older brother, who spends all day at home playing computer games.

But Emily eventually persuades her mother, and off they go. It looks like paradise, even though Emily needs a lot of effort to persuade her mother to leave the hotel. Emily even meets an attractive young man who takes the two on a day trip. It's too good to be true. He's a member of a gang that kidnaps American tourists and sells them back for ransom. Emily is single and her mother is divorced, so the gangster Morgado demands $100,000 from Emily's brother. Puh-lease... how many Americans have that much money in their bank account?

The two women are driven into Colombia. They escape from the car trunk, and hit Morgado's nephew over the head with a shovel, accidentally killing him. She doesn't know her own strength. In a following fight she kills Morgado's son with a spear gun. Now it's personal. Morgado no longer wants to sell the women, he wants to kill them. The women flee, trying to reach the US Embassy in Bogota, with Morgado and his men in pursuit.

I love the film with its crazy comedy. Okay, the tapeworm scene is disgusting, apart from being totally infeasible. Can you really tempt a tapeworm to leave a person's body by holding a bloody steak in front of the mouth? That scene alone made me want to lower my rating to 3½, but I'll be generous and leave it at 4.

No, the gangsters don't keep their captives naked. In this scene they're playing strip poker while escaping by boat. But they can't keep their hands on their breasts all day. They have to hold their cards.

"This is another fine mess you've gotten me into!"

In a more innocent scene, Emily/Amy shows how to take a good selfie. I've never mastered the art of selfies. I can't smile. I have to concentrate on getting the pose just right, and the concentration turns my face into a grimace.

To keep Amy Schumer's fans happy, here are a few more screenshots. She looks amazing!

And she can even manage a double selfie.

She makes mommy smile. Being hugged by Amy Schumer might make me smile as well. But I can't guarantee it.

I realise this isn't a film for everyone. The zany humour isn't everyone's taste, but I love it. Apart from the tapeworm. I need to fast forward over that the next time I watch it.

Success Rate:  - 0.6

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I Feel Pretty (4 Stars)

This is a comedy with a serious message that most women can relate to.

Amy Schumer plays Renee Bennett, a technical employee for LeClaire, a large cosmetics company in New York. Her job is to manage the company website, so she's evidently intelligent, but that's not enough for her. Her body doesn't match the beauty ideals projected by her company, so she feels inferior. When she visits fashionable stores the saleswomen hint that she's too fat for their products. She goes to a fitness studio and immediately feels intimidated because all the other women are thinner than her. On her first visit the exercise bike breaks under her weight. She has trouble dating, not because men don't look at her, but because of her attitude: she assumes men don't want to look at her.

On her second visit to the fitness studio she falls off the exercise bike and cracks her head. This changes her. She thinks her appearance has changed completely, so much that her friends won't recognise her any more. She looks in the mirror and sees a beautiful person. Nobody else sees a change, but it's a complete attitude adjustment. She feels beautiful and she acts like it.

She applies for a job as receptionist in the LeClaire headquarters, a big wage drop, but she wants to be seen. She wants to put her beauty to work. At first this is alienating to the woman around her who think that her appearance doesn't match her attitude, but her self-confidence is so overwhelming that it's impossible not to like her.

Renee meets the company's CEO, Avery LeClaire, who is suffering from different self-confidence issues. She's constantly being belittled and told she's not good enough by her grandmother, the company's founder. Renee gives useful insight into a new product line, because she remembers what she felt like buying cosmetics before she became beautiful.

The film rolls through one comic situation after another, but it's very serious when it shows that the fashion industry's beauty ideals are flawed. Women look at pictures in magazines and feel they aren't good enough. Even women who fulfil the beauty ideals still think they're not good enough. An example is the model Emily Ratajkowski who appears in the film as a woman who thinks she doesn't look good enough. Self-confidence is sexy. That's what Renee discovers in the film, and I know enough about Amy Schumer to realise that she's playing herself.

The question about whether beauty is even important is hardly mentioned by the film, but I'll deal with it here. Many women consider it a feminist ideal to be able to succeed in life without being beautiful. I disagree. The women who say that are the ones who consider themselves unattractive. They work hard in their careers and congratulate themselves on succeeding without having good looks. That's wrong. They should start off by accepting themselves the way they are. Every woman can cry out "I feel pretty!" She can walk into her office every day with an air of self-confidence before she sits at her computer to do her job. Intelligence and beauty don't have to be contrasts, they can go hand in hand.

I hope I've managed to express myself well.

Trainwreck (4 Stars)

Everybody's left a dog in a hot car at some point in their lives.

I can't think of anything to say about this film that I didn't already write in my original review. Amy Schumer is a genius. If this is supposed to be a trainwreck I want to jump on a train with her and break all the speed limits.

P. S. I've never left a dog in a hot car. Not literally, anyway. I need to think about how I can apply that to my life.

Trainwreck (4½ Stars)

This is one of the funniest films I've seen for a long time. It's a romantic comedy that follows the pre-defined rules of rom-coms, but the comedy element is in the foreground. It's a romantic comedy with a small R and a capital C. It was written by Amy Schumer, who also has the lead role. The character in the film is called Amy, which points to the fact that she's playing herself, as far as the personality is concerned.

Amy is a writer for a magazine called S'Nuff. Please don't forget the apostrophe. She leads a promiscuous lifestyle, because she believes that monogamy is unnatural. Her preference is for big strong men, all muscle and no brains. She has a selfish attitude to sex. She likes men to go down on her, but afterwards she often pretends to fall asleep, because giving a man pleasure bores her. Even if she does have intercourse with a man it's her rule that they don't spend the night together. No romance after the sex is over, it's not allowed.

Of course, like in the classical German Novellas, there has to be a turning point, leading to a chain of events over which the protagonists have no power. Amy has to interview a sports doctor for her magazine. He's not like the men she usually dates. He's intelligent and has a smaller build, but she falls in love with him. Of course, she doesn't use the L word, because she's in denial, but the audience knows it's love.

I would probably have given the film five stars if the doctor, played by Bill Hader, weren't such a dull character. I realise this is deliberate, a straight man as a contrast for Amy's comedy antics, but I think it's overdone. Bill could have played the role with a bit more spice.

Amy, on the other hand, is brilliant. I'd never even heard of her until recently, when she created a scandal by posing as Princess Leia in a photo shoot for GQ magazine. This was done without permission from Disney, the company which owns Star Wars, and possibly makes the magazine guilty of copyright infringements. That's a question for lawyers to decide.

Another recent incident was the red carpet at the Time 100 Gala, where Amy Schumer deliberately fell over in front of Kanye West, the "greatest living rock star on the planet". The photo says it all. Everyone in the room was laughing. Even Kim Kardashian cracked a smile. Only Kanye kept a straight face. If he had laughed with everyone else he would have retained his pride, but by being the only person in the room with a glum face it made him look like a fool.

Also worth mentioning is John Cena, better known as a WWE wrestler. Did Amy write the role of her boyfriend Steven with him in mind? I suspect so. He's a very intelligent, articulate man in real life, but in the film he's the complete opposite, a stupid person incapable of putting words together to make appropriate sentences in any situation.

Then there's the film within a film, starring Daniel Radcliffe as the Dog Walker. I hope this mini-film will be available as an extra feature on the Blu-ray.

P. S. I've repeated the rules of romantic comedies so often, but here they are once more for anyone who's too lazy to search my old posts:

1. Girl meets boy.
2. The girl doesn't like the boy, but as time goes on she grows to like him.
3. Girl and boy go different ways. (Sometimes geographically, sometimes she returns to an ex-lover).
4. Girl realises she can't live without the boy and returns to him.

Don't make me repeat myself again!