Review: Sixty Six

It’s 1966 and England is hosting the World Cup Finals. It’s also the year that 12-year-old Bernie celebrates his bar mitzvah. But guess what? The final match and Bernie’s big celebration both fall on the same day. And, as England’s hopes of taking the trophy rise, so the scale of Bernie’s bar mitzvah falls. Suddenly, even close family concoct reasons to be stuck in front of the TV on the day that Bernie has looked foward to for years, and has planned down to the smallest detail. But at least the growing soccer mania leads to an improvement in Bernie’s relationship with his rather distant father.

Gregg Sulkin makes a likeable lead as Bernie and Eddie Marsan gives a solid performance as his dad, but the real revelation in this engaging coming-of-age comedy is Helena Bonham Carter, who’s nicely cast as an ordinary wife and mother.

Radio Times rating:

***

UK cinema certificate 12A
Running time 93mins

Review by David Aldridge

News: Working Title Films

Britain’s favourite production company has got plenty more films in the works, following on from this week’s Sixty Six and its global success with the likes of the Bridget Jones films, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Billy Elliot, Love Actually and the rest.

The one most likely to make them truck-loads of money is the Rowan Atkinson-starring Mr Bean’s Holiday, due out in the UK in March 2007. It has been a decade since the last time the mute, bumbling Mr Bean saw the light of day – a blessed relief, in some people’s eyes – yet the 1997 movie spin-off of Atkinson’s TV series met with such unprecedented global success that it’s amazing that it’s taken them this long to get around to a sequel.

Much more promising, however, is another sequel to an altogether different nearly decade-old film: The Golden Age, a follow up to 1998’s superb Elizabeth that will reunite director Shekhar Kapur with almost all the original cast, from Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I through to Geoffrey Rush as the wonderfully Machiavellian Sir Francis Walsingham, with new roles for the likes of Clive Owen as Sir Walter Raleigh. For those history buffs among us it should very much be one to look forward to until its October 2007 release – even if the last movie took sizable liberties with the records…

Another promising new Working Title production is the adaptation of Ian McEwan’s bestseller Atonement, to star Keira Knightley and James McAvoy for a September 2007 release. But the real gem is bound to be Hot Fuzz, Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s follow-up to the magnificent horror comedy Shaun of the Dead. With Pegg starring as a London supercop posted to the sleepy West Country, surrounded by a cast packed with British comedy talent, it looks all set to be version of Shaun using cop movies rather than zombie flicks as its inspiration – and should, from early reports, be truly brilliant. We’ll have to wait until 16th February 2007 to find out, though…

News: Helena Bonham Carter

Despite having won yet more rave reviews as the beleaguered mother in this week’s latest addition to the ranks of British light comedy that is Sixty Six, Bonham Carter’s next project was an altogether more hammy role – as the somewhat sinister and decidedly scruffy-looking pure-blood Bellatrix Lestrange in next summer’s Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. With her added to the cast, there’s practically no big-name British actor left who hasn’t appeared in the Harry Potter franchise…

Bonham Carter does have a few more “serious” roles coming up in the next year, however. She’ll take on the role of Collette alongside Susan Sarandon’s Eleanor in Eleanor & Collette – a story of female bonding as Bonham Carter’s lawyer and Sarandon’s psychiatric patient come together to sue a mental hospital. She will also be taking on a spot of romantic comedy, as one half of a pair of ex-lovers who are reunited within the confines of a transatlantic flight, in Stand By Love.

Surely most anticipated, however – although probably not for the Harry Potter fans among you – will be the Johnny Depp-starring Sweeny Todd, based on the hit Broadway musical and directed by Bonham Carter’s quirky long-term boyfriend (and father of her son) Tim Burton. As Depp and Burton have – as yet – failed to make a bad film together after five joint projects, it should be something pretty special…