Because Everybody Else Has One

Hugh Grant is back doing his Hugh Grant thing. Not that I'm complaining. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about With his career in the dumps, Keith Michaels, a once celebrated Hollywood screenwriter, heads off to be the lecturer of a screenwriting course at an East Coast college. What we thought There is nothing at all surprising or remarkable about the Rewrite and there's definitely something ironic about a movie with this unoriginal a script set around a screenwriting course. And yet, there is something oddly comforting about just how familiar it all is. At the heart of all this, of course, is Hugh Grant who is on full-on bumbling, foppish cad mode and though this is nothing we haven't seen a thousand times before, to me at least, he's as endearing and as funny as ever. If you don't like Hugh Grant, you need to stay as far away from this as possible but if you liked him in Four Wedding and a Funeral and any one of the ...

I give it a nine. The Way, Way Back is the kind of film that almost makes it worth sitting through an overall underwhelming "summer" season at the movies, as it's exactly the sort of gem that studios slip in during this time of year as a counterpoint to all those sequels, remakes and franchise properties. It is, as such, rather easy to overlook, but, please, if you're going to see one movie in cinemas this month, make it The Way, Way Back. You won't regret it. The film isn't exactly heavy on plot but, as the best coming of age stories always are, it's very big on character. Duncan (Liam James), a fourteen year old misfit, is stuck on a vacation from hell with his loving, if weak-willed mother (Toni Collette), her hellishly horrible boyfriend (Steve Carell) and his indifferent daughter, before finding some much needed sanctuary in the Water Wizz water park and friendship in the oddball group of characters who run it - but most especially Owen (Sam Ro...