Review: Ils se marièrent et eurent beaucoup d'enfants / ...And They Lived Happily Ever After (2004)

Does romance end with marriage and children? Three friends, Vincent (Yvan Attal), Georges (Alain Chabat) and Fred (Alain Cohen) ponder the issues. Fred is single and has no problems picking up women, much to the envy of his friends, who are both married. Georges and Nathalie (Emmanuelle Seigner) bicker constantly, while Vincent and Gabrielle (Charlotte Gainsbourg) are drifting apart.

In Yvan Attal's second film about relationships, the characters are recognizably middle-class and a mid-life stage, and it is easy to let yourself get carried away with their ups and downs. There's an unexpected funny and passionate scene when Vincent and Gabrielle rediscover romance, and Johnny Depp makes a long cameo appearance as an attractive stranger.

French with English subtitles

3 out of 5 stars.

Review: Mystic River (2003)

Three Boston boyhood friends, who have drifted apart over the years, meet again in unfortunate circumstances. Jimmy Markum (Sean Penn), a shopkeeper with a criminal past, and David Boyle (Tim Robbins) still live in the same neighbourhood, while Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) has become a police detective. Their lives intersect when Sean and his partner, Whitey Powers (Laurence Fishburne), investigate a murder in the neighbourhood.

I found Sean Penn's acting a rather irritating set of twitches (he won the Best Actor Academy Award for this role, so what do I know?), Tim Robbins is great as the damaged David, while Kevin Bacon, who is given some dramatic space in a subplot with his estranged wife, does an acceptable job. Marcia Gay Hayden is incredible as David's frightened wife, Celeste, and Laura Linney has a curiously underwritten but critical role as Jimmy's wife, Annabeth.

With such an A-list of stars, and Clint Eastwood as director, it's not surprising that 'Mystic River', is for the most part, an engrossing drama and mystery. Shot in a prosaic style by Tom Stern, the gloomy inner suburbs of Boston, its surrounding parklands and the titular river, captures the sad mood of characters. All the overwhelming gloom and sadness, with no relief, becomes a bit wearing and the climax is rather inevitable.

4 out of 5 stars.

Review: Million Dollar Traders (2008)

In a another twist to the reality series format, hedge fund investor Lex Van Dam fronts up a million dollars to set up a hedge fund in London, run by 8 novice traders. The idea is that novices would do as well as experts. The series was filmed in July and August of 2008, which coincidentally, is also the period of the current financial crisis.

You won't find out much about the mechanics of trading in this series; the focus and the drama in this series is about how people deal with the mental stress of making decisions in a very uncertain environment. Intelligent, analytical personalities over-think the effects of their decisions and freeze (analysis paralysis), people used to acting on intuition do better, and those who can combine both and remain calm in the heated environment do best.

This series also captures the current reality of high-powered white collar work (albeit on a compressed time scale) where the traders are treated no better than battery chickens. In one telling scene, after one trader resigns, the team leader requests that there be no farewell drinks because he wants his team regain their focus by the next day instead of still thinking about their ex-colleague.

Both Van Dam and his team leader, Anton Kreill, come across as confident hard-headed fund managers who see their role as making the most effective trading team. You might not like to socialize with them but you probably want them to manage your money.

In the midst of all this drama, the results of the experiment is inevitable: people who keep their cool make money.

Screened on SBS-TV on 2, 9 and 16 June 2009.

4 out of 5 stars.