New Moon is nothing if not an international advertisement for the hungry virtues of virginity and young people can’t get enough of it
The Twilight Saga: New Moon
Theatre
A smart, prickly and rewarding view of sexual and emotional confusion
Cock
Restaurants
Kitchen W8 is a bargain for this area, if such sophistication is what you crave
Kitchen W8
Too long and drawn out but very entertaining with excellent special effects
This is a peculiar play and does not work for me. Some of it is very funny but there are real flaws
Alex has a strong powerful voice and was faultless, she is far better now than she was on the X-Factor
London,
Derek Malcolm's rating
Reader rating
Dir: Sheri Springer Berman, Robert Pulcini.
Cast: Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney, Paul Giamatti, Chris Evans
Description: Scarlett Johansson stumbles through a docile and predictable satire-cum-romcom set in the world of posh New York childminding, with Laura Linney as her merciless mom tormentor.
Country: US. 2007. 104mins
Sentimental slush: Scarlett Johansson plays a nanny to Laura Linney's rich bitch wife
If you have a cast which includes Scarlett Johansson, Laura Linney and Paul Giamatti, you ought to give them something better to work with than this botched adaptation.
The best-selling novel on which it is based was written by Emma McLaughlin and Nicola Kraus, two women who had spent a combined eight years working as babysitters in Manhattan.
It was intended to be a coruscating satire of the upper middle-class families too busy or idle to care for their children properly. But the film doesn't seem to know what satire is and mixes a clumsy version of it with a sugary sentimentality that totally subverts the intended humour, while the screenplay turns the sharpness of the book's view into a romantic comedy with a fudged ending.
Johansson plays Annie, a young woman from a working-class neighbourhood in New Jersey who has given up her promising start in business and, failing to find any obvious employment, is taken on as a nanny by Linney's rich bitch wife. Giamatti is her stressed businessman husband and they live in bitter and semi-silent conflict.
Their eight-year-old son Grayer (Nicholas Reese Art) grows to love his nanny as the only normal human being in his young life. And Nanny grows to love him too, even when she is courted by Chris Evans (not the ginger-haired DJ), as the Harvard hottie who was similarly neglected as a child.
While Johansson contributes as natural a performance as she can, Linney and Giamatti are asked to overplay their roles so thoroughly that any humour, or possibly shock, generated by their behaviour is squashed flat in minutes. Peeping out of this mess is a film that might have something to say about childcare and parenthood among the lucky rich. But every time a good point is made, hopeless exaggeration renders it dead in the water.
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