Carter and Highmore.

Describing a movie, the word “sweet” is the kiss of death, but I can’t think of a better adjective for Toast, a funny and charming biopic about the popular British television personality and flamboyant chef Nigel Slater. He may not be a household name on this side of the pond, but nobody who has ever seen his cooking show on British telly can easily forget him. Picture a gay Bobby Flay. You get the picture.

Toast is his story. From the opening credits, in which the cast names appear on cereal boxes on a grocery shelf, to his ultimate triumph revolutionizing the kitchen at the Savoy Hotel, Nigel was a food critic in the making. “I’m Nigel,” says the boy narrator in the opening scene. “I’m 9 years old and I’ve never had a vegetable that didn’t come from a tin.” Some children long for secret decoder rings and electric trains. Nigel dreams of fresh produce. His sickly mother (Victoria Hamilton) is one of the worst cooks in England—a menace in the kitchen whose talent at the stove consisted entirely of throwing cans of braised beef into a pot of boiling water without even opening the lids. The only thing she could make was toast. Nigel’s father (Ken Stott) understandably suffered from severe heartburn. Under the bed covers at night, their eccentric child caressed recipe books with color photos of spaghetti Bolognese and angel food cake. While he grappled with culinary deprivation, Nigel was also exploring his emerging homosexuality, goaded on by his only friend, the sexy gardener who often stripped nude in the potting shed. When Mom died of asthma, his stuffy, working-class father fired his strapping crush and hired a new housekeeper named Mrs. Potter (Helena Bonham Carter, in the funniest role of her career), on whom he developed a crush of his own, much to the little boy’s horror. There was nothing wrong with Nigel that a good meal couldn’t cure, but although Mrs. Potter was a great cook, she was a slovenly, common low-life who competed with the boy for his father’s affection. Scrubbing, polishing and bleaching her way into their lives, even her crown roasts and mince tarts couldn’t disguise the fact that she reeked of cleaning fluid. Mr. Slater married her anyway, and moved them to a country hamlet in the dreary Midlands where Nigel became the only boy in school to study home economics, trying to outsmart his new stepmother the only way he could, by topping her lemon meringue pie. The tension in their rivalry went unabated until his Dad died and Nigel, at 16, got a Saturday job in a country inn where he fell in love with another young chef who inspired him to run away from home and head for the kitchens of London, where he would never have to eat toast again.

The movie shows how it felt for an unloved, neglected child to grow up different in 1960s England, and director S.J. Clarkson and screenwriter Lee Hall get all of the details in Nigel Slater’s memoir right, from the long-handled Hoover vacuums to the wretched home furnishings (ah, that ghastly British wallpaper!). The acting is first-rate, by pasty Oscar Kennedy as young Nigel, and later, by the dazzling Freddie Highmore (memorable as the kid Johnny Depp wrote Peter Pan for in Finding Neverland).  He’s now a dashing 19-year-old with range and maturity who matches feisty, garrulous Helena Bonham Carter scene for scene. Toast broke all records in the U.K. as the most watched single holiday special in the history of British television. It might not achieve the same success here, where the subject is less famous, but I found it poignant, amusing and endearing. No need for marmalade. Just butter, and enjoy.

rreed@observer.com

TOAST

Running Time 96 minutes

Written by Lee Hall

Directed by S.J. Clarkson

Starring Helena Bonham Carter, Freddie Highmore, Victoria Hamilton and Colin Prockter

3/4

1 Eyeball out of 4

It might be time for Johnny Depp and Tim Burton to start thinking about seeing other people. Alice in Wonderland, their seventh film together, is so thoroughly soul-deadening and laborious that the prospect of an eighth collaboration feels like the sword of Damocles.

Based on Lewis Carroll’s books Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, this latest big-screen version of the seminal classics finds a 19-year-old Alice (Mia Wasikowska) heading down the rabbit hole once again, but with no memory of her prior visit; those looking for an origin story will have to settle for the 1951 animated version. Once in Wonderland—or, as it is called by the locals, Underland—Alice must defeat the Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) and return the benevolent White Queen (Anne Hathaway) to her rightful throne.

Perhaps because the plot can basically fit on the inside of a matchbook, Mr. Burton decided that an over-reliance on bells and whistles was necessary. He bathes Alice in Wonderland in so much distracting 3-D computer animation and ethereal landscapes that both James Cameron and Peter Jackson would recoil in disgust. Consider Alice the unwanted spawn of Avatar and The Lovely Bones. There are giant flying birds, growling, doglike creatures and even something called the Jabberwocky, a monster right out of The Lord of the Rings. (It’s even voiced by Saruman himself, Christopher Lee.) Those hoping to be transported to a new world will have to settle for a hodgepodge of old ones. To wit: Alice rides on the back of a furry beast—in a style reminiscent of The Neverending Story—not once, not twice, but thrice.

Alice in Wonderland has all of Mr. Burton’s hallmarks—the silhouetted and broken tree branches, the haunting Danny Elfman score, the pasty heroine (Ms. Wasikowska has an inside track on playing the lead in The Claire Danes Story)—but the film comes off like something directed by a novice who spent one too many afternoons in the Tim Burton exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art. Not one moment during the 108-minute film feels authentic.

Neither does Mr. Depp’s central performance as the Mad Hatter. While Ms. Wasikowska is fine enough, her Alice is written as a straight woman; she’s required to do nothing more than react to the green-screen creations surrounding her. Mr. Depp is tasked with the heavy lifting, but, festooned in an orange fright wig and some very uncomfortable-looking contact lenses, he can’t even be bothered to keep his accent straight (it vacillates between an effete lisp and an angry Scottish brogue).

When he was donning black eyeliner and doing an elaborate Keith Richards impression in Pirates of the Caribbean, you could sense the fun Mr. Depp was having while nailing a tricky performance. In Alice in Wonderland, though, he acts like even being on set was a chore. It wouldn’t have been a surprise to see him break the fourth wall, take the blue pill and return home to Paris. Frankly, with how much the film drags, you’ll probably wish he had.

editorial@observer.com

McG’s Terminator Salvation, from a story and screenplay by John Brancato and Michael Ferris, stipulates a post-nuclearized, post-apocalyptic America in the year 2018. Yes, 2018! That’s only nine years from now! I may actually live that long. And for what? As the elliptically named director McG, tells us in the movie’s  production notes: “We’re telling the story of the becoming of John Connor, the becoming of Kyle Reese, the strengthening of Skynet, and where our humanity lies. This is the moment when humanity takes a stand against the machines.”

I have quoted this passage only to inform my readers that it makes very little sense to me even after seeing Terminator Salvation. The problem may be the result of my never having become addicted to the Terminator series James Cameron initiated in 1984 with The Terminator, which he eventually followed seven years later with Terminator 2: Judgment Day. All I retained from these first two Terminator films was the serio-comic image of Arnold Schwarzenegger with machine-made muscles. I didn’t pick up on all the intricate time-travel subplots in which characters from the future send terminators back into the present to make sure that they are born, and that they are enabled to mature into the future. Hence, all the palaver in McG’s synopsis about this character “becoming” and that character “becoming.”

As it happens, I never did get to see Jonathan Mostow’s Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines in 2003. By this time, Mr. Cameron had become a master of the universe with the global success of Titanic (1997), and had presumably outgrown the Terminator series. The point is that co-screenwriters Mr. Brancato and Mr. Ferris, who wrote the screenplay for Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, which posited the nuclear apocalypse that John Connor and his mother, Sarah, had spent their lives trying to prevent, have now written the story and screenplay for Terminator Salvation. In so doing, they have created a new character named Marcus Wright and played by Sam Worthington. We first meet Marcus on death row, calmly facing execution for an unspecified crime, being visited by a strange woman, Helena Bonham Carter’s Dr. Serena Kogan, who thanks him for donating his body for some valuable and again unspecified experiment. The execution takes place with a set of lethal needles, but the next thing we know, Marcus is seemingly reborn, and embarked on a mission he doesn’t understand.

Meanwhile, a decisive battle is looming between the forces of the human survivors, led at first by General Ashdown (Michael Ironside), and the machines, led by a nebulous organization known as Skynet. I say nebulous because the only identifiable acting entity speaking for Skynet is Ms. Bonham Carter’s Dr. Kogan. McG has dedicated the film to the recently deceased Stan Winston (1946–2008), who designed the original Terminator robot and all its subsequent variations. He won Best Visual Effects Oscars for James Cameron’s Aliens (1986) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991).

Indeed, Winston’s machines are something to behold, though not entirely to believe, even in this age of robotic devices to clear mines and drop bombs on the Taliban without causing American military casualties. The imagined fear that these mechanisms will turn on us is part of the sci-fi fantasy world created with films like Terminator Salvation. I suppose it is a way of escaping our more strongly based fears of a total financial collapse, and an endless series of wars against an infinite variety of insurgencies.

The character of John Connor, humanity’s projected savior, was played previously in his various stages of maturity by Edward Furlong and Nick Stahl. For the current version, set 14 years after the nuclear apocalypse, Christian Bale was cast, and he is very effective in the role, as is Mr. Worthington in the role of Marcus, whom John Connor is not sure whether to trust as humanity’s ally, or to suspect as a spy from Skynet sent to infiltrate the human survivors’ base of operations.

Of course, the varied intrigues cannot be resolved one way or another in view of the needed justification for still another sequel of robotophobia, a sequel that I promise myself I will try to avoid. Nonetheless, I cannot completely condemn a movie that has been very competently written, directed and acted, any more than I can blame Mr. Schwarzenegger for all the woes he has encountered while trying to govern California.

asarris@observer.com

Paul Weiland’s Sixty Six, from a screenplay by Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor, based on a story by Mr. Weiland, reminds me of a Brazilian film I saw not so long ago. That film climaxed with Brazil’s victory in the World Cup competition just as Sixty Six commemorates the year that England won the coveted international soccer title. I must say that the Brazilian movie on the subject had a more interesting political subtext than Sixty Six, which has been subtitled in the production notes as A True…ish Story, and is reportedly patterned after Mr. Weiland’s real-life story, which he related to guests at his 50th birthday party. It seems that Mr. Weiland endured the misfortune of having his bar mitzvah scheduled on the same day as England’s playing West Germany in the World Cup final. Naturally, hardly anyone came to Mr. Weiland’s bar mitzvah, which made it a big flop. Mr. Weiland describes the aftermath of his speech: “The reaction to my telling the story of my 13th birthday was not only a validation of that vulnerable time but also indicated that the story would strike a universal chord.”

Since Mr. Weiland himself had grown up in a Jewish section of North London, he was able to include many details of his own childhood. Mr. Weiland recruited an old friend, celebrated comedy writer Richard Curtis, to help him write a treatment of his experiences. They then turned over the treatment to screenwriters Peter Straughan and Bridget O’Connor while Mr. Curtis stayed on the project as executive producer.

Bernie (Greg Sulkin) is eagerly awaiting the day of his 13th birthday, the date of his bar mitzvah, when he supposedly becomes a man, and can stand on the same footing as his annoying older brother, Alvie (Ben Newton), whose own bar mitzvah was a moderate success, but nothing like the well-attended gift bonanza Bernie has envisioned for himself.

Unfortunately, several storms begin looming on Bernie’s rainbowish horizon. First, his father Manny (Eddie Marsan) sees a giant supermarket opening opposite his neighborhood grocery store. Manny begins worrying about the future of the business he shares with his brother, Jimmy (Peter Serafinowicz). Manny is a comically hyper-cautious character even without his business troubles. He always double- and triple-checks the locks on his car, and to his apartment. Distrustful of banks, he keeps all his money literally in a hole in the wall.

Bernie’s mother, Esther (Helena Bonham Carter), is too busy worrying about her troubled husband to pay much attention to Bernie and his bar mitzvah. She pooh-poohs his worries about England ever reaching the final of the World Cup and thus blighting Bernie’s day of days, a view widely shared by the country’s sports experts. Bernie’s only allies in his forlorn quest are Dr. Barrie (Stephen Rea), a specialist called in to treat Bernie’s asthma, and blind Rabbi Linov (Richard Katz), instructing Bernie in the Torah for his great day.

When a small fire in the apartment burns all of the family’s life savings, and Uncle Jimmy is hospitalized after a fall from a ladder, all seems lost. But not to worry. Everything ends ecstatically for England, Bernie, Manny, Esther and Jimmy. Even so, I can’t say that I understand soccer any better than I ever have in my provincial addiction to American baseball, football and basketball. But who am I to cross the rest of the world both on and off the screen? And despite Basil Radford and Naunton Wayne in their glory days in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1938 The Lady Vanishes, I understand cricket even less.

asarris@observer.com

Days after Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton were delivered the news of their joint Golden Globe nominations for the new film Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, they returned the favor—with a wee baby. Late Saturday night, People reports, the weird and wacky duo added a new member to their family, which already includes four-year-old Billy. “They are absolutely delighted they have a daughter. It’s a lovely Christmas present for the family,” said Karen Maskill, a rep. for Ms. Bonham Carter, 41. According to the actress, the lovers were discussing inducing the birthing process in a doctor’s office when Mr. Burton, 49, got a call telling him about the nominations. “I do look like a globe, so it's kind of funny. I am very round,” she said, adding with a laugh: “Maybe the baby's going to come out with his hands on his ears, [saying,] 'Shut up!'” As long as the infants hands were made of pink flesh—instead of, say, scissors—they’re sure to be a happy pair.

It’s been almost six years since Johnny Depp’s last London slasher flick, From Hell, so it’s understandable that his latest project, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street, left the bohemian-chic thespian a little harried by the whole experience. In Mr. Depp’s first reunion with longtime collaborator Tim Burton since 2005’s Corpse Bride, the 44-year-old actor will co-star alongside Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter and Sacha Baron Cohen. Very nice!

“Having worked with sharp objects before [in Edward Scissorhands], everything was fine until I had to shave someone,” Mr. Depp told Scotland's Daily Record. “The shaving cream made me really nervous. It was the most uncomfortable moment of my life [shaving Mr. Rickman]. Poor Alan. I've never really experienced that full on thing. This is a full beard for me - this is a lumberjack thing for me. But I can definitely appreciate it because when you get into the chair with a stranger and they lather your face up with sharp instruments around your throat...it's frightening."

And while Mr. Depp is no stranger to a little music making—he has worked with Oasis and Tom Petty in the past—he said he was spooked to the max by the prospect of crooning for the camera. “I think I was probably more frightened than anyone. I've never tried karaoke. It scares the hell out of me. I've never been that drunk—and I've been drunk,” he told the paper at a recent press junket. "Tim said he didn't know if I could sing and, likewise, I didn't know if I could sing. I did these demos in my friend's garage studio because I didn't know if I'd be able to hit a note, to be honest, I really didn't. I did that and sent it to Tim and he said we're going to be okay. And then I became a bit more confident," added the seemingly unflappable star.

All funny on-set anecdotes aside, Mr. Depp still knows the importance of actually publicizing his projects at press junkets. Whetting the appetites of critics and fans starving for a little more Johnny, he settled in and got right down to business, saying, “Someone is probably weeping after watching my performance."

To see pictures of the actor from the Sweeny Todd press junket, click here.

Mr. Jonze and Mr. Kaufman are nothing if not shrewd in loading their handiwork with enough slivers of significance to make movie reviewers salivate with antiformulaic, antisentimental and antiromantic frenzy. Indeed, Being John Malkovich reminds me of Woody Allen's Zelig (1983) in being a joyous occasion more for the elitist critics than for the unwashed multitudes.

The film begins with an uncannily histrionic stretch of puppetry master-fingered by Craig Schwartz (John Cusack). Craig's street performances are singularly unprofitable and he reaches rock-bottom as a would-be public entertainer when an irate father hauls off and socks him for exposing his little girl to the sexually suggestive spectacle of Abélard and Héloïse grinding away on opposite sides of the wall separating them from earthly bliss.

Craig's10-yearmarriageto Lotte (Cameron Diaz) has reached a dead end of mutual dysfunction. Lotte has turned into a workaholic pet shop employee to the point that the Schwartz household resembles an ill-kept zoo.

Mr. Jonze does not play his dreary domestic scenes for easy laughs, but rather allows Craig and Lotte to project the kind of disconnected weariness that signals the slow disintegration of a relationship. Craig finally yields to Lotte's half-hearted prodding and goes looking for a job for his nimble fingers.

At this point, Being John Malkovich takes a leap into the wild but logical whimsicality of Franz Kafka, Lewis Carroll and Jonathan Swift. Craig answers an ad for a job as an entry-level filing clerk at Lestercorp, a "small" company located on the seventh-and-a-half floor of Manhattan's fictional Martin-Flemmer building, where an elevator door has to be pried open halfway between the seventh and eighth floors. Craig, like the rest of the normal-size employees has to stoop down when he is walking or standing.

There is a bit of Gulliver in Craig with this "low overhead" absurdity, but again Mr. Jonze keeps everything deadpan in this Dilbert -like office. Indeed, Craig adjusts to the point of trying to start an office romance with a comely co-worker Maxine (Catherine Keener) who won't give Craig the time of day. Maxine's coldly manipulative personality eventually becomes the driving force of the action, anchoring it at every turn with avarice, cynicism, selfishness and insincerity.

One day, Craig discovers a door hidden behind a filing cabinet. Once opened, the door leads to a tunnel that whisks Craig into the mind of John Malkovich so that Craig "becomes" the actor for the 15 minutes it takes Malkovich to drink his coffee, read The Wall Street Journal , hail a taxi and try to convince the driver that he never made a movie in which he played a jewel thief. Thus when the critics claim that Being John Malkovich is a savage satire on our current worship of celebrities, the choice of the eccentric Mr. Malkovich, not much of a target for groupies and stalkers, turns the satire on its head. One of the great charms of the film is the extraordinary generosity of Mr. Malkovich in allowing his versatile acting persona to be frozen as a figure of fun.

The great frisson of the film comes when Craig introduces Maxine and Lotte to the tunnel, thereby initiating a series of gender switches through the mind of Malkovich, with the end result being the union of Lotte and Maxine, with Craig left out in the cold. Like many interesting movies this year, Being John Malkovich tries for too much, and botches its ending. Finally, the movie is not about celebrity worship, nor about sexual identity, but about possession, manipulation and control. Significantly, the most persuasive displays of human feeling come through the agency of Craig's puppets.

While Maxine herself never stops being callously calculating to the very end, the puppet Craig fashions from Maxine's image engages with Craig's own puppet in the only tender and touching love scene to be found in the film. Eventually, we become tangled in several tedious subplots about securing immortality for the homespun but diabolical Dr. Lester (Orson Bean) and his chosen cronies, most notably his terminally daffy secretary Floris (the eternally charismatic Mary Kay Place). By the time the tunnel worthy of the likes of Gulliver and Alice becomes a freeway clogged with bit players, a big chill has descended on all the characters. But before all hell breaks loose, Mr. Jonze and Mr. Kaufman have shown much more than promise, so much more, in fact, that one wonders if they can keep up the pace in their subsequent endeavors.

And there is my quandary. Are wit and ingenuity adequate substitutes for what Leo Tolstoy prescribed for all creative works: the expression of feeling through artistic form? For me, at least, not yet.

All About Paris

Martine Dugowson's Portraits Chinois ( Shadow Play ), from a screenplay by Ms. Dugowson and Peter Chase, stars the increasingly ubiquitous Helena Bonham Carter in a multicharacter ramble through the fashion, movie and media jungle of Paris. My French is not good enough for me to evaluate Ms. Bonham Carter's, but she seems to hold her own with a top-flight French cast.

There are many couplings and uncouplings involved in the proceedings, but the most striking intrigue pits Ms. Bonham Carter as the Margo Channing-like fashion designer Ada against the Eve Harrington-like younger rival Lise (Romane Bohringer). Lise supplants Ada both at the fashion house run by the aging René Sandre (Jean-Claude Brialy), and in the affections of Ada's screenwriter-lover Paul (Jean-Philippe écoffey). These are but four of the 10 participants in the professional and amatory merry-go-round of a particularly volatile sector of Parisian high life.

Ms. Dugowson attracted some attention with her first film, Mina Tannenbaum (1994), and Portraits Chinois is not an unworthy follow-up, though it lacks the sometimes inaccessible but still intoxicating intellectual sparkle of the best French films in that obstinately civilized genre. I was most mesmerized by Ms. Bonham Carter of all performers because I thoroughly approve of her work ethic through a wide range of challenging roles. And perhaps my being a Depression baby makes me more sympathetic to people keeping busy, particularly with obviously low-paying but artistically prestigious projects.

The Hitch: Double Feature

The most fabulous double-bill revival program in town consists of The 39 Steps (1935) and The Lady Vanishes (1938) in spanking-new 35-millimeter prints, running at Film Forum through Nov. 11. These are Alfred Hitchcock's two most famous works from his British period, and British film critics and historians still insist that Hitch was never as good after he went to Hollywood. The French critics always argued the contrary just as vehemently. I have always stood bravely in the middle, suspecting as I do that the Brits are hopelessly prejudiced against anything from Hollywood, and that the French generally failed to appreciate the best British acting, particularly with its delightful flair for understatement.

Be that what it may, Robert Donat, Madeleine Carroll, Lucie Mannheim, Godfrey Tearle, Peggy Ashcroft, John Laurie, Helen Haye and the comparatively unsung Wylie Watson as the immortal Mr. Memory in The 39 Steps provide Hitchcock with a gallery of such histrionic excellence as to come around only once in a lifetime. The Lady Vanishes provides an entirely different cast of almost equal excellence with Michael Redgrave, Margaret Lockwood, Paul Lukas, Dame May Whitty, Cecil Parker, Linden Travers, and the irrepressible Naunton Wayne and Basil Radford as the quintessential British cricket enthusiasts even on the brink of World War II. Trust me, you'll have a jolly good time.