LOU REED'S BERLIN (12A) ***Lou Reed almost single-handedly made rock'n'roll safe for junkies, transvestites and sadomasochists as leader of the Velvet Underground in the 1960s, but in 1973 he baffled fans and critics with the rel
ease of Berlin, a dark concept album about the downfall of two drug addict lovers living on the outskirts of the divided city which made 'Walk On The Wild Side' sound like 'There's No-One Quite Like Grandma'. The remorseless pitch-black cabaret rock didn't catch on and almost killed his
PARIS (15) **The current 'it' boy of French cinema, the ubiquitous Romain Duris (Exils, Molière) teams up again with director Cédric Klapisch (The Spanish Apartment, Russian Dolls) in yet another homage to the city of love and its inhabitants. Duris plays a young dancer unexpectedly confronted with the possibility of his own death. As he waits for a heart transplant, he watches the people around him from his balcony, including his big sister (Juliette Binoche), her kids, his neighbours, their friends and workmates. A sort of steroid-fed Love, Actually, this sprawling, melancholy comedy about desire and death is just too cluttered by characters and storylines to give anything much depth or coherence. Even so, some scenes are bound to cheer – such as an academic stiff hopelessly trying to court a student by text ("I am 2 hot 4u!"), and the flirty fishmongers seducing a bunch of supermodel types – as vitality triumphs over morbidity.
ANGUS, THONGS AND PERFECT SNOGGING (12A) **Omigod, Gurinder Chadha adapts the breathless diary of a teenage Bridget Jones, played by London To Brighton's Georgia Groome, whose travails include parents who think they are funny (Alan Davies and Karen Taylor) and failed attempts at boystalking Robbie (Aaron Johnson, above), the school's latest Sex God. The tone is amiable and the dilemmas feel authentically teenage, although no one in Georgia's gang appears umbilically tied to their mobiles or iPods.
Despite our heroine's after-school kissing lessons, this is wholesome CBBC stuff and certainly less suggestive than Louise Rennison's original books. Gone from the film title is the novel's more lurid promise of "full frontal snogging", and the references to drugs, smoking and "going all the way" have been ditched too. Yeah, right; like that was NEVER going to happen.
All on general release from Friday; except Lou Reed's Berlin, which screens at Filmhouse, Edinburgh from Friday, and Glasgow Film Theatre, from August 1
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