New-ish at the movies: Jobs, The Weight of Elephants, Red 2, White House Down, Salinger & In the House

The best way I can think of to sum up Jobs, the hasti­ly-pre­pared not-quite adap­ta­tion of Wal­ter Isaac­son’s hasti­ly-pub­lished biog­ra­phy of the Apple co-founder, is that its sub­ject would have hat­ed it. After all, Steve had taste and — famous­ly — exer­cised it. He also did­n’t release prod­ucts until they were ready where­as Joshua Michael Stern’s film feels like the win­ner of a race to be first rather than best.

Ash­ton Kutch­er imper­son­ates Mr. Jobs effec­tive­ly enough, to the extent of mim­ic­k­ing the man’s strange lope, but nev­er gets fur­ther under his skin than a blog post or tabloid head­line might. I sus­pect that is not a com­ment on Mr. Kutcher’s tal­ent but on the episod­ic script by first-timer Matt White­ley. Josh Gad’s Woz pro­vides com­ic relief only and the amount of fake facial hair on offer sug­gests the film might bet­ter have been titled iBeard.

Oper­at­ing on a much deep­er lev­el is Daniel Borgman’s The Weight of Ele­phants, a film that pri­ori­tis­es what goes on under the sur­face almost to the com­plete exclu­sion of plot. Gor­geous Demos Mur­phy plays 10-year-old Adri­an, liv­ing with his depressed Uncle Rory (great Matthew Sun­der­land) and Gran (Cather­ine Wilkin) in sub­ur­ban Inver­cargill. The strange dis­ap­pear­ance of three local chil­dren has an upset­ting effect on a boy who is strug­gling to fit in to the world around him any­way.

If NZ cin­e­ma was­n’t already over­loaded with sto­ries about chil­dren strug­gling with absen­tee par­ents I would rec­om­mend it more high­ly — it is a very fine exam­ple of a genre we can tru­ly claim to own — and Borgman announces him­self as a tal­ent to keep an eye on.

There are two “action/adventure for oldies” brands to choose from nowa­days and Bruce Willis has been a fix­ture of both (at least that was until his wage demands got him eject­ed from the next Expend­ables). He returns to anchor Red 2 as a for­mer CIA agent try­ing to build a qui­et sub­ur­ban life with civil­ian Mary-Louise Park­er, who turns out to be rather less keen than he is on white pick­et fences and DIY.

Called back into action by crazy John Malkovich (hav­ing more fun than the rest of the cast put togeth­er), Bruce is forced to dash around the world search­ing for a rogue unde­tectable nuclear weapon that was lost dur­ing the Cold War, a chase that rein­tro­duces a few char­ac­ters from the first Red movie (Helen Mir­ren as an icy British assas­sin, Bri­an Cox as a Russ­ian lothario) and a cou­ple of new ones — Antho­ny Hop­kins in mad sci­en­tist-mode as, um, a mad sci­en­tist and Cather­ine Zeta-Jones sug­gest­ing that the Krem­lin is well-equipped with tan­ning beds. Not hor­ri­ble, by any means, but it is the same joke repeat­ed over and over again.

In White House Down, Willis’s famous filthy sin­glet is passed to the best of the new gen­er­a­tion of heroes, Chan­ning Tatum. I was skep­ti­cal of Mr. Tatum’s poten­tial at first — all beef­cake and earnest­ness — but has­n’t he gone and won me over. As wannabe Secret Ser­vice­man John Cale, trapped inside the White House dur­ing a ter­ror­ist attack that occurs just after he flunks his job inter­view, he dis­plays the relaxed wise­crack­ing style that Mr. Willis owned for so long but that he is no longer able to locate.

WHD so eas­i­ly wins the bat­tle of the two Wash­ing­ton ter­ror­ist movies that it sim­ply embar­rass­ing. Apart from Tatum resound­ing­ly defeat­ing Ger­ard But­ler in the charis­ma con­fronta­tion, White House Down ben­e­fits from vil­lains who are an array of Amer­i­ca’s inter­nal ene­mies rather than eth­nic stereo­types as well as fol­low­ing the Die Hard play­book at almost beat-by-beat lev­el. Fun — and it knows it.

Hi-tech thriller Para­noia’s first fan­ta­sy is the idea that the two biggest mobile phone tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­nies are Amer­i­can and are based with­in blocks of each oth­er in New York. Jason Dean Hall and Bar­ry Levy’s script then goes on to dig itself even deep­er by assum­ing that these two com­pa­nies are con­trolled by vin­dic­tive and pet­ty old white men rather than boards and stock­hold­ers (some­thing that Jobs at least acknowl­edges). So, it gets busi­ness pret­ty much all wrong. How does it do with the tech­nol­o­gy? The peo­ple?

Just as bad­ly, I’m afraid. Liam Hemsworth (Thor’s broth­er) is an ambi­tious engi­neer of some descrip­tion, asked by CEO Gary Old­man to take a job at his main com­peti­tor, owned by Har­ri­son Ford, so he can steal “the feel” (evi­dent­ly) of their new smart­phone. Of course, in this world all the R&D for both com­pa­nies takes place in the most expen­sive Man­hat­tan real estate imag­in­able. Don’t waste your time.

I also rec­om­mend not wast­ing your time with the over-hyped doc­u­men­tary Salinger, pur­port­ing to lift the lid on a life lived pri­vate­ly. No bet­ter than one of those E! True Hol­ly­wood Sto­ries, extend­ed beyond the abil­i­ty of the flim­sy mate­r­i­al to sup­port it, this film tries to sug­gest that it is defin­i­tive about the life and career of an author with­out fea­tur­ing any of his actu­al work, his voice or  his pres­ence beyond a few oft-repeat­ed still pho­tographs. The attempt to beat up some kind of scan­dal and/or per­son­al psy­cho­log­i­cal cat­a­stro­phe struck this view­er as a des­per­ate attempt to find dra­ma where there was almost no evi­dence.

Final­ly in this instal­ment, François Ozon’s In the House presents Fab­rice Luchi­ni as a dis­il­lu­sioned teacher so des­per­ate to believe that his star pupil is a lit­er­ary prodi­gy that he makes some unwise — to say the least — choic­es. Nice­ly bal­anced in terms of what it sug­gests and what it reveals, I was a lit­tle under­whelmed at the time but — prompt­ed main­ly by pos­i­tive respons­es from oth­ers — fur­ther reflec­tion ele­vates its marks from “not achieved” to “achieved”.