Funny Bones (1995)
Directed by Peter Chelsom
Tommy Fawkes wants to be a successful comedian. After his Las Vegas debut is a failure, he returns to Blackpool where his father—also a comedian—started, and where he spent the summers of his childhood.
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What critics compared Funny Bones to
There's a subtle magic to everything, reminiscent of Chelsom's own "Treacle" and "Hear My Song," and the Scottish fantasies of Bill Forsyth ("Gregory's Girl," "Comfort and Joy" and "Local Hero").
Soon her chocolates have sparked the love life of a middle aged couple, started a senior romance between dog lover Guillaume (John Wood, "An Ideal Husband") and war widow Madame Audel (Leslie Caron, "Funny Bones"), engaged timid battered wife Josephine (Lena Olin, "Mystery Men") and secretly reunited Armande and Luc.
Directed by Peter Chelsom, who made the cult classic Funny Bones - an Oedipal showbiz comedy set in Blackpool, England - HM: The Movie handles the strained daddy/daughter bond with sufficient lightness and laughs so that fathers won't mind accompanying their spawn.
But he also made such agreeable films as Serendipity (2001) and Shall We Dance (2004), and such early charmers as Hear My Song (1991) and Funny Bones (1995).
I'm inclined to give Chelsom credit for a lot of what goes right in "Hannah Montana," and if you said that's because I'm obsessed with his brilliant, cracked "Funny Bones," I wouldn't disagree.
Director Peter Chesolm has made better show-biz comedies than this, like Hear My Song and Funny Bones, and yet, it is depressingly certain, he won't ever make one as profitable.
In fact, toward the beginning of his career, he was behind several art house favorites (Hear My Song and Funny Bones ).
Peter Chelsom was once a director who could inject vivid characters and unexpected turns on familiar roads, as in his quirky Irish comedies "Hear My Song" and "Funny Bones."
Director Chelsom, who created the whimsical "Hear My Song," vastly underrated "Funny Bones" and sweetly fantastical "The Mighty," can't obscure the rigging which holds up a plot that should be lighter than air.
Coupled with deft directing by Michael Chelsom (director of the very unfunny Town & Country and the very funny Funny Bones) and the use of time-lapse camera work to illustrate the passage of years -- the film comes off with genuine believability and sincerity.
The film offers considerable improvement over his troubled recent release Town & Country, but without the quirky edges of the British films that made his reputation -- Funny Bones and Hear My Song.
Here's why it doesn't: Director Peter Chelsom (the good director of Funny Bones who's also the poor shnook attached to the fiasco Town and Country) establishes a happy feeling of romantic magic specifically, New York City romantic magic, a proud and now poignant genre.