At the cinema: St Vincent
Nobody does loveable curmudgeon quite like Bill Murray. So although his new movie St Vincent isn’t exactly reinventing his on-screen persona, we can’t help loving it anyway. Bill plays the titular Vietnam War veteran Vincent, who ends up becoming the world’s least likely childminder after newly divorced Melissa McCarthy moves in next door with her young son. She probably didn’t intend Vincent to take her son to bars, the race track and hangout time with his pregnant Russian poledancer girlfriend (Naomi Watts – random casting alert!), but, hey, Melissa is real busy at work and it’s hard to keep track of what is going on at home. This is classic cross-generational mismatched-buddy fare and you know there will be plenty of bumps along the way to the sentimental finale, but it’s all good. Mind you, if you haven’t seen Paddington yet, St Vincent should go second in the queue.
On DVD: The Inbetweeners 2
Although this sequel didn’t take quite as much money at the box-office as the original The Inbetweeners Movie did in 2011, it was still pretty damned huge, and deservedly so. For our money, it’s even more dementedly funny than the first film, as Simon, Will and Neil pay a surprise visit to serial fibber Jay on his gap year in Australia. The film contrives to have them all hang out at a student hippie backpacker resort, and the ensuing fish-out-of-water antics set a high bar for hilarity. This time, writers Damon Beesley and Iain Morris are directing, and there is evidence of a bigger budget and greater creative ambition. This DVD is inevitably going to be a huge gifting item for Christmas. We’re sure nobody is going to mind if you watch it before wrapping it – just to check the disc isn’t faulty.
On TV: Step Up 2 The Streets (Sunday, E4, 8pm)
When we first saw bad-boy Channing Tatum and nice girl Jenna Dewan in the original Step Up back in 2006, we never suspected that four more Step Up movies would follow, or that the pair would end up getting married. Hey, Jenna, he’s a keeper! This film is the first sequel, in which Channing basically has a cameo (randomly doing a danceoff in a nightclub), and it’s all about orphaned bad girl Briana Evigan joining the prestigious Maryland dance academy, where she puts together a crew to challenge her old streetdance mob the 410, who have now rejected her. Yes, the storyline is pretty ridiculous, but it’s all about the dance moves, and this is the one that introduces Adam Sevani as funny sidekick Mouse. When we reviewed this at the cinema, as our verdict was: “Leaving no teen-dance cliché uninvestigated, Step Up 2 The Streets is all-corny, all-entertaining all of the time. Guilty pleasure of the week.” Our opinion hasn’t changed.