steven.gough Reviews

Eleventh Hour (2006)

Behind you, Doctor! A terrifying hybrid of old BBC sci-fi series!

[2 February 2006]

This flashy po-faced hokum has clearly been built to milk the appeal of Sir Patrick Stewart to the bobble-hat brigade, and it's not as terrifyingly bad as some of writer Stephen Gallagher's other work. But why-oh-why-oh-why hasn't anybody flagged the significant debt to other and - in my nostalgia-loaded opinion - better series?

It obviously re-treads ground covered in the equally watchable but improbable perils-of-science 1970s BBC melodrama "Doomwatch" - created by Doctor Who writers and Cybermen creators Kit Peddler and Gerry Davis.

"Eleventh hour" writer Stephen Gallagher is also a former Doctor Who writer. What, then, do you think inspired the format of a slightly unworldly trouble-shooting "Government Scientific Adviser" with a younger and slightly feisty but unthreatening girl "companion"?

There's a certain amount to enjoy here, not least Jean Luc Picard trying to pretend he's not posh, as he flattens all his vowels and clearly has to be restrained from saying things like "Ay-up", "By 'eck", and "Ah grew oop round ear". That he's supposed to be a boffin is probably funnier, as in last week's episode which had him talking about quantum probability and Chaos theory to a Government accountant before charging off to put down a virus pandemic.

That girl from "Extras" as his sidekick also gets to wave a gun and run down endless stairs in Lycra tops without the benefit of a sports bra, which may offer younger male viewers some light relief.

Despite the slick presentation and casting coup, this isn't ever going to be great and memorable TV. The man who gave us budget-shy early nineties genetic engineering scare-fest "Chimera" (aka "Monkey Boy" - the clue's in the title) and international drugs corporation paranoia in "Oktober" is clearly going to carry on grinding out un-taxing soft-target science-gone-wrong potboilers. The only real social issue in the second story about a killer virus loose in England's Manchester, was the obvious question, "Well, would they really bother?"

Bodyguards (1996– )

Great lost cold war TV show

[31 October 2005]

This short-lived quality action drama series deserved a better fate, but sadly suffered for being either 10 years too early or 15 years too late. Its heritage is the classic UK commercial TV action shows of the 1970s and early 1980s, like the Avengers or the Professionals, cross-bred with the classic espionage world of Deighton and le Carre and updated for the touchy-feely mid-1990s. The result was a show with gun-toting super-cops tumbling away from exploding cars, who still worried about missing their daughter's birthday, while thin-lipped middle-aged men made tough decisions, compromised their principles, and regretted necessary betrayals. Too late to surf the original wave of home-grown action classics and over before it could enjoy the current curious renewed popularity of the slick spy caper, it's my sad duty to report Bodyguards was a better show than many of them. It might suffer now because it relies quite heavily on the tensions and narrative conventions of cold war spy fiction, but somewhere there's a pilot movie and six 50 minute episodes of a more intelligent than average TV show which deserves a DVD release.

Sherlock Holmes and the Case of the Silk Stocking (2004 TV Movie)

Double jeopardy - certainly not Holmes, and not very good

[12 January 2005]

Apart from the names Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson, there's really nothing to connect this original BBC TV movie to the original Conan Doyle stories. It's a return to the old wartime Basil Rathbone films, set in the wrong period, packed with anachronistic detail, and which fails to pay even lip service to Holmes's famous method. It's a poorly written modern police drama right down to the obligatory, clunking serial killer plot. It's just dressed in period costume. Even the plot twist about the killer's identity comes in Edwardian dress, as it could only ever possibly fresh and original in disguise pretending to be a story written a hundred years ago.

The story constantly forces modern elements incongruously into Holmes's necessarily, fundamentally low tech world. The story is set some time after the Victorian era of the classic Holmes stories, apparently to justify the use of telephones and modern police techniques like fingerprinting. Watson is about to marry an American psychiatrist, which opens the door to the modern serial killer psychodrama whose emphasis is on woolly sexual motivation and grotesque patterns of behaviour, worlds away from the traditional Holmes story where logic and deduction solve single victim locked room murders. The oddly un-Edwardian London police set up an incongruous, modern incident room to collate the information about their spiralling body count. In one scene Holmes spins around this room staring helplessly at photographs and maps, unable to connect fact and incident, which reduces the finest logical detective mind in the world to the level of "Inspector X" in any paint-by-numbers police series. Eventually Inpector Lestrade himself time-travels to the 1970s to give a suspect an Sweeney-style kicking to make him talk.

Rupert Everett as Holmes drifts through the first half of the story like someone on a mixture of recreational drugs, which is clearly the writer's deliberate intention. Trying to exploit the radical elements in Holmes's character the story inflates his drug use out of proportion. Conan Doyle saddled his creation with a habit of injecting cocaine, but there is never any suggestion that Holmes had a narcotic monkey on his back. He claims his 7 per cent solution stimulates his mind in times of boredom, a world away from the use of soporifics to deaden his brain.

Ironically it seems that in order to make these seasonal specials featuring Holmes himself the BBC abandoned its own excellent Holmes homage, the quite superb Murder Rooms, which succeeded in every respect that this film fails, injecting modern style and sensibilities while still honouring the source material. They were faithful in period detail and in many respects to the type of detective story which suits the Holmes character, and where they took a post-modern approach were able to underscore rather than undermine the quality of the original. It begs the question, as they clearly have access to writers with the talent to produce this kind of work, why didn't they use them here? Even more ironically, in the UK while this film was one of the main planks of the BBC's Christmas 2004 season evening schedule, the BBC have also been showing daytime repeats of Jeremy Brett as Sherlock Holmes. The strength of this performance, and the faithfulness to the original material, casts the poor work here into sharp relief.

Jet Lag (2002)

Slow, disappointing

[3/10 · 11 January 2005]

I caught this on French TV about 2 months ago, with high hopes because it features Jean Reno, but I was very disappointed. It's a romantic comedy so by definition you expect to forgive some contrived story-telling, but in return you expect some kind of narrative sleight of hand to distract you from the mechanics. Unlike fast-moving classic chick-flick When Harry Met Sally, this film is all talk and no action and it moves at a snail's pace, forcing you to deliberate over every drawn-out narrative twist.

Jean Reno plays an uptight, very private celebrity chef who is obsessively clean. Co-star Juliette Binoche is a Bohemian middle aged beautician who lives behind a mask of makeup, constantly calling her mother and trapped in a destructive relationship. The film asks us to believe that because he loans her his phone and tries to pass on a message, then meets her unpleasant boyfriend, he will offer to share his hotel room when their flights are cancelled due to a strike and that they will both begin to open up emotionally.

The performances are so subtle that they barely register, and the inevitability of the rom-com structure makes waiting through the minutiae of their developing relationship a challenge rather than a joy.

A Series of Unfortunate Events (2004)

What WAS this, other than a huge WASTE OF TIME?

[1/10 · 22 December 2004]

In theory, I could be the studio's ideal viewer. I've never read the Lemony Snicket books, so for me the film adaptation stands or falls on its own merits.

It wasn't very good. A paint-by-numbers Tim Burton knock-off, when even the originals are pretty debased coinage these days, obviously made solely to milk the Harry Potter cash-cow.

Anyone expecting this not to be a Jim Carrey movie will be disappointed. Count Olaf is a re-run of most of his comedy riffs from The Mask and Batman Forever - lots of hand-wringing, chest-hugging, grimacing and lip-licking, and the first entrance down the mansion staircase seemed a note for note lift from his entrance as the full-tilt loony Riddler. Meryl Streep is terrible - but then, when wasn't she? Billy Connolly is a British National Treasure (tm) but he's never been a great actor and gives the worst kind of patronising bedtime-story voice performance I think I've ever seen. The older Baudelaire sister also seemed a little - ahem - physically mature for the part.

I walked out after the Lake Lachrymose sequence, not in disgust but just because there was nothing interesting enough going on to make me want to stay to the end.

Blade: Trinity (2004)

More like Blade WWF in a worrying turn into Robocop 3 country

[8 December 2004]

Always, always worry when the rating of a franchise sequel slips down a notch. In the UK parts 1 and 2 were rated 18, which in simple terms means admit 18 years or over, and part three is rated 15, which opens the gates to the high school crowd. It's a reflection of content, since the first pair were gore heavy horror movies and this is a Spiderman Matrix Happy Days hybrid. With lots of swearing. Anyone who knows the painful descent of the Robocop movies, and the sanitised TV pilot third movie, will understand my pain as I walked in unaware at the top of the movie and saw the red "15" pre-title certificate.

That said, Blade Trinity isn't an all-out car crash. The opening sequence follows the pattern of trying to top the last one. It brings back THE CAR! There is a lot of hyperkinetic martial arts action. In fact, the action sequences as a whole were obviously choreographed, shot and cut by people with attention-deficit syndrome after an all-night Sunny D party. The soundtrack ditches the worst of the Blade 2 guitar-bashing metalhead AOR for the bassy electronica of the original. The final fight sequence reminds you that this is basically a superhero story and the crew do an stand-up job of throwing two indestructible bodies at the destructible architecture. I know what I like, and what I like goes "WHO-O-O-OOM!", surrounded by fracture lines in concrete and falling brick dust.

Sadly, there are a few too many sad and shabby corners. Too much technology, for a start, which only emphasises the weediness of the new supporting cast of post-teen vampire hunters. We love Blade, and Blade uses a big gun and a big stick with a point on the end. If you need a laser-tazer cheese-slice you belong in another movie! There's also straight rip of the Alias tech guy, the post-Buffy teenager who steps in for Whistler, and the wise-cracking ex-vampire who looks like Anthony Edwards with a frickin GOATEE. I mean, really, as if Mark Green from ER is going to kick anybody's butt?

The worst spoiler-free flaw in the film, though, are the two horribly miscast lead vampires. I don't know Parker Posey's other work, but here her queen bitch vampire comes across as a slightly skankier version of MTV casualty Pink, and less like the leader of a high tech master race bent on world domination than a working girl with a monkey on her back. Her only real saving grace is that they guy who plays her boss is worse. Former boy-band singer Matt Goss was a spectacular opponent in Blade 2, but here when we meet the Blade movie universe version of Dracula, King of the Undead, he actually turns out to be a too-old-for-a-boy-band doughboy who is about as threatening as a mild cough.

It's not a patch on the last one, but definitely worth the ticket price, and its saving grace is that it doesn't slow down to draw breath. Also, right at the end, just when I thought Hannibal King couldn't be any more irritating or unfunny he manages a fantastic death-cell tirade against his vampire nemesis which climaxes in a three-syllable insult that starts with the word "thunder" and ended with me falling out of my chair.

The film also features criminally under-rated actor James Remar in a cruelly cut-down role, and I like to see Ajax from the Warriors still getting work.

Alien vs. Predator (2004)

A truly mediocre experience

[21 October 2004]

I had really low expectations for this film, but as it started I thought I was going to be pleasantly surprised. The initial effects, the mildly funny "spaceship overhead" shot which turns out to be of a tiny crevice in a standard earth satellite, and the hackneyed but serviceable sequence assembling the team raised my spirits. Something at least workmanlike seemed to be on the way.

Sadly the film quickly nose-dives into the imagination-free franchise sausage factory exercise I was expecting all along. When the characters arrive at the big pyramid set, any sense that there was a plot or guiding intelligence just evaporates. The machinery grinds out statutory Alien and Predator moments. Chest-burster follows Face-hugger with no tedious hanging around to build up silly suspense. A number of full size aliens not even remotely based on the number of dead people appear out of shadows or haul screaming bodies into light-wells. "Shimmer effect" Predator (soon to be available as an 8 inch action figure) uses its genuine retractable claws to gut over half the admittedly built-in-obsolescent human cast. After an interminable delay one of the predators finally removes its hockey goalie mask and does the team hiss, as if this was a really special moment worth waiting the full hour and a half. There are a number of what were presumably intended as "iconic" face-to-face moments between masked and unmasked predator and alien, that in fact seem as managed as a movie poster photo-shoot.

Most of the action takes place in a huge stone building that changes its internal structure on a timer every ten minutes. Walls open or close, the floor turns into pits or lifts, exactly in the way incongruous traps and elevators enable the gameplay in every first-person shooter since Doom. We're supposed to accept the premise that ultimately the building is supposed to be an Predator paintball alley, but the entire backstory is so juvenile it's an insult to the creators of the original Alien, which alongside Blade Runner always seemed to be one of the few really intelligent science fiction films. This isn't even a comic book. It's not a fresh observation, so I'm sorry, but it has all the charm and intelligence of a video-game without the replay value.

Like most of the people who'll read this I have a crap job grinding thanklessly through routine tasks for a pitiful wage. A privileged minority of people have access to vast sums of money to make the bread and circuses to entertain us coal-face workers, and I have no complaint when that results in whiz-bang popcorn movies like Bad Boys 2. It's a crime and an insult, though, when someone just grinds out mediocre corporate franchise pap like this. If he can only raise his game to the level of this sort of production line pap maybe the writer/director should have his bread and circus privileges revoked, and taste life away from the swimming pool and beach-house community for a while.

The Life and Death of Peter Sellers (2004)

The silence you can hear is the thanks from all those people who REALLY wanted to know why some actor made so many bad films

[8 October 2004]

The biggest problem I can see with this film is, frankly, who cares?

The main argument of this festival of trick photography seems to be that Peter Sellers was a gifted mimic but had no personality of his own. It's the same argument often made about fellow English film actor Sir Alec Guinness, who has also been the victim of a post mortem portrait of the public artist as a private monster. The film makes heavy weather of Peter Sellers's late-fulfilled wish to make a film of Jerzy Kozinsky's book "Being There", about a man who has no personality. Passing over the unnecessary reminder of one of the dullest and most over-rated films ever made, in this case the film seems to undermine its own argument with its portrait of Peter Sellers. We are shown a talented but unfulfilled actor driven by his showbiz mother's ambition, a manipulator, immature but obsessed with sex, prone to uncontrollable rages and cursed with self-doubt. The film also suggests he felt robbed of his father's time and attention, and went on to celebrate him in the performance as Chance the gardener. All quite complex for a man with no personality.

I'm not convinced by the choice of Geoffrey Rush, who is very good in recreations of key film performances but achieves them under only slightly more latex and makeup than was used to disguise Peter Sellers in the originals. Unlike Charlize Theron who is uncannily convincing as Britt Eklund, and John Lithgow who gives a sterling performance as the allegedly much-maligned Blake Edwards, Geoffrey Rush only starts to convince as Sellers himself when playing closer to his own middle age.

I'm baffled at to why so much time and effort was spent on a film about someone who was more an English national treasure than a real world class movie star. Peter Sellers was popular on his home ground as a member of the radio comedy team The Goons, and as the star of some of the better and bigger-budget English films of the 1950s and 1960s. He achieved some level of global fame in "The Pink Panther", and of course "Dr Strangelove", but most of his later films that weren't the sausage-factory Pink Panther sequels are probably better forgotten. He lived a cliché second string Swinging Sixties lifestyle, including marriage to professional showbiz ex-wife Britt Eklund, but his star descended with each progressively mediocre new movie. To paraphrase Dennis Leary's summary of Jim Morrison's career: "I'm weird, I'm nobody ... I'm weird, I'm famous ... I'm weird, I'm dead".

One of the major studios is currently trying to revive the Pink Panther franchise, and it certainly wouldn't hurt to put the original star back in the public eye. Or am I just being paranoid?

55 Degrees North (2004–2005)

Home grown BBC drama is in a sad state when this is the best thing on

[7 October 2004]

I normally wouldn't have touched this with someone else's dirty barge-pole but due to family circumstances ended up watching the whole first series.

It ticks all the right boxes for contemporary BBC TV drama at the moment, so it's set in the North of England and the hero is a marginalised black man. Nicky is a good cop who has done noble but unpopular things in London and been exiled to the night-shift in faraway Newcastle, struggling to stay morally and chemically clean in a profession in which nobody trusts or respects him. Although unfortunately male, in order to meet the BBC's obligation of comprehensive diversity he also shoulders many of the burdens of a typical, English single mother by raising the son of his dead drug-dealer brother and junkie sister-in-law. It's an everyday story of everyday people you probably recognise from your own family. The series also features a statutory number of the limited group of actors guaranteed endless regular work populating BBC drama series.

I will damn it with the faint praise that it wasn't too bad. There are plenty of irritating aspects like the hero's entirely platonic older male housemate, a sort of Caribbean Obi-Wan Kenobi. Each week he dispenses wisdom to Nicky and his proxy son on issues as profound as the importance of making your own carnival costumes and wearing them in the drizzle on deserted English beaches while no-one else is looking.

The acting isn't all bad, and the hero has a lively relationship with a uniformed policewoman who shares the night shift with him. His love interest is therefore a legal aid solicitor played by Dervla Kirwin, who seems to appear mainly because the BBC is contractually obliged to give her work. The relationship is ludicrous and unconvincing, not least because she was clearly heavily pregnant during filming, and performs with all the subtlety of a barrage balloon wrapped in a cheap red overcoat that fools nobody. Her character has lines in every episode but has no active part in most of the stories, and for reasons obvious to no-one becomes Nicky's lover.

Everything important happens at night and is framed and lit to look like film, to give Newcastle the rain-slick and neon-lit character of late 80s action movies starring Eddie Murphy. This is pretty much the house style at the BBC these days, cutting their cloth to ape the US TV shows that the production teams obviously envy but that BBC schedulers piously refuse to broadcast at prime-time in favour of home-grown clones. A conspiracy within the UK media industry maintains a sad and depressing myth that these stunted six-week outings are much "better" than full 22 episode seasons of shows with decent writing, higher production values and charismatic on-screen talent.

55 Degrees North is a passable but parochial series which also happens to be a very good indication of why millions of UK homes are switching to satellite TV broadcasters where they can find wall-to-wall US imports.

Cellular (2004)

A low fat high octane ride, in a world which resembles our own.

[7 October 2004]

If you liked the original "Speed" then there's a good chance you'll enjoy "Cellular". It's well-played and fast-moving nonsense with very little fat and only slightly too much fluff. It jumps off to a flying start with a violent kidnapping then hurtles towards the end credits in a series of overlapping races against time and an inevitable but satisfyingly violent conclusion.

Hero Ryan looks a little too much like Tom Cruise for his own good and I didn't expect to like him as much as I did, but notional star Chris Evans has the ultimate secret weapon in co-star William Macy. He is outstanding as the apparently soft-hearted cop keen to retire and run a day spa with his wife, an apparently candy-floss role that is deceptively well-played and really deserves "best supporting actor" kudos. The character's slightly looney home life and dogged police work provides essential breathing space between the flat-out thrill ride of the main plot, and Mr Macy raises the caliber of the film by association.

There are inevitably issues with real-world logic, if you look for them. Our hero drives in every conceivable wrong direction through busy traffic and doesn't get hit. His cell-phone seems to beep "low battery" longer than some real phones run on a full charge, and while it nearly loses the call signal in a police station stairwell it has no such problem in a later rush up through another building. The phone also accidentally "throws" the call to another phone, which may be a feature of the US cellular system but seems unlikely. Anyone who knows how much memory space you need to store digital video will also nod and smile at one final phone-related story twist.

The film moves too fast for these nit-picks to spoil your fun, and watching William Macy was also worth the price of admission to me.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow (2004)

Ignore the negative word of mouth, especially here, this is excellent

[9/10 · 5 October 2004]

With only a single reservation, this is one of the few films in recent times that I've found lived up to expectations. In fact, even the reservation met with expectations, since I was pretty confident I wouldn't enjoy Gwyneth Paltrow in the film - and I didn't, particularly.

It's true that the initial buzz for Sky Captain relies heavily on the novelty value of the back-to-front CGI effects. Most of the film's critic seem to feel that this is all there is to the film, which I'm forced to say isn't just wrong, it's unfair. I've slogged through some real bum-numbing money-grinders this year, The Day After Tomorrow to name but one, where there really is nothing to redeem a film except the bread and circuses moments where the FX kick in. In Sky Captain the effects do serve a fundamental purpose, not just to provide a distraction form the poverty of imagination elsewhere or to animate things that don't actually exist but to create an complete environment at one remove from contemporary reality.

There are nay-sayers who clearly feel that Sky Captain is itself somehow of "restricted intelligence", and to be fair it is just a comic book confection and not high art. I should probably declare an interest, however, since few things give me more pleasure than a well-executed, post modern comic book adventure and Sky Captain hits the spot in every respect but one for me. Its single flaw, at the risk of repeating myself, is the Gwyneth Paltrow character, who is an uncomfortable mix of anachronistic independent-mindedness and "Girl Power" attitude and the period-piece dumb-ass irritating blonde. There is one depressing moment at the climax of the film - mild spoiler alert - when a control button in the villain's doomsday device morphs from German into English and strays across the line of good taste for a gratuitous, saccharine "cuddly fluffy bunny" moment.

The idea of filming in an entirely virtual environment isn't new, but before Sky Captain the intelligent use of the opportunity has pretty much been wasted. There is, without doubt, more imagination, humour, and truth to the source material here than in the entire Star Wars prequel trilogy.

Those people who doubt the intelligence of the film clearly missed the allusions to a legion of pop art sources - images from the Wizard of Oz, a quote from Orson Welles's War of the Worlds, the Staff of Ra from Raiders of the Lost Ark, and so on.

As I sat watching the film, it simply occurred to me - why would you ever want to make a science fiction film any other way? The prospects for the director's next project, the John Carter of Mars movie, are looking exceedingly good.

Collateral (2004)

Nice film, shame about the 3rd act

[16 September 2004]

About 12 or 15 minutes in came a shot which really makes the case for me for big screen viewing vs. home cinema. Which is ironic really, since large stretches of Collateral were shot on video. The cab, shot from outside, cruises past some downtown Los Angeles tower blocks, and from the third row in the theatre it really was just like being there.

No way that sense of scale will ever translate to a TV screen.

I really enjoyed the first two thirds of this film. The night time setting, the acting, the interleaved story threads as the cops pick up on Max the cab drivers nightmare, are all great.

Sadly, from the moment the shootout at the Fever nightclub starts, everything goes downhill. Hit-man Vincent has to this point been plausibly effective, but suddenly becomes the Terminator. He kills with hands, feet, a penknife, and of course guns .... lots of guns. He can't miss, but at the same time he's a ghost that no-one else's bullets can touch. An intelligent and tightly plotted story unravels in a clunky chase and rescue that blows away all the hard won early credibility. Suddenly, in the limited space of an empty office or subway, Vincent couldn't hit the side of a barn.

Super Size Me (2004)

Wait - fast food is BAD?!? Surely not!!! And there's MORE!?!

[15 September 2004]

Just let me say I'm not a fan of Micheal Moore and his relentless pursuit of sitting ducks in one-note diatribes mounted with the sophistication of an emotionally stunted 12-year-old supercharged on additives. Fortunately for the "Super Size Me" crew, though, it means their only major competition is a fame-hungry hysteric who looks like he INVENTED "Super Size", so Morgan Spurlock walks away looking like a philosophy professor.

This isn't award-winning or life-changing cinema, it's an entertaining and mildly informative anti-corporate stunt. It avoids the worst aspects of Moore's catch-all strategy of taking a film crew to someone's office or home and shouting them until the audience starts to sympathies with the Devil. Spurlock's notional target is McDonalds, but when he fails to arrange an interview with any senior executives he preserves his dignity by choosing not to pursue them to their beds with a loudhailer.

The film is notionally a reaction to a court case in which two obese American teenagers tried to sue McDonalds for making them fat. The film attacks McDonalds's claims about the healthiness of its food with a subtlety only usually seen in Adam Sandler movies. The obvious pitch and tag-line is Spurlock's 30-day McDonalds diet, a childish stunt that is actually an effective smoke-screen for most of the more serious underlying issues he raises.

There are a couple of real triumphs in the film. The lawyer for the two obese teens is literally unable to think of a better motive for the case than the potential cash compensation. An American food industry marketing spokesman slips up and admits "we are part of the problem", and by the time the film was released was out of a job. We're told that most American schools use "lowest bidder" catering giants to provide horrifically unhealthy meals for children, or serve slop that arrives in cartons for the school kitchen staff to nuke and serve. We see how school meals cooked on site using unprocessed ingredients can actually improve the behaviour of "troubled" children. We also discover that most of the American population who are not rocket (or food) scientists have no idea what a calorie is.

There are some nightmarishly wrong-headed moments, like the extended sequence showing how a potentially terminal diabetic the size of a small house, who used to drink 2 gallons of "soda" a day, has most of his stomach surgically removed. An inarticulate bag of lard is embarrassed on a global scale by her pointless recriminations against the sinister character peddling something called the "Subway Diet", an apparent promise to make you thin if you eat at one of McDonalds fast food franchise rivals. And there is always the McDonalds diet itself, a New York slacker's idea of subversive intellectual terrorism which doesn't so much form a thread from which to hang the other stories as dominate everything pretty much to their exclusion.

I mean, what is the water cooler moment for this movie? The school meal technician whose favourite cooking tool is the blade she uses to slice open boxes of pre-cooked stodge? Or the REALLY COOL part where the guy just, like, hurls his Super Size double quarter pounder into the parking lot?

On the whole it was fun, and showed the give and take of global scale corporations. McDonalds won their day in court, a judge decided they officially didn't make the girls fat, so they dropped "Super Size" from their menu. The film-makers get a pat on the back from their liberal peers, a great distribution deal, and a watered-down anti-globalisation message into the marketplace. Occasional fast food customers lose the chance of getting a better-than-snack-size portion for a couple of pennies, and no-one even pauses to wonder would McDonalds have really dropped "Super Size" if it wasn't just a loss-leader with a microscopic impact on their bottom line?

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy (2004)

Your life is too short for this bilge

[13 September 2004]

I don't often walk out of a film, so there's a minor triumph for Anchorman. I've never seen a Will Ferrell movie before, and the great thing is that if he doesn't get a major role in Star Wars Episode 7 I can probably escape a repeat experience for most of the rest of my natural life.

This is one of those crappy, pointless comedy movies that seem to be part of a US social welfare program to get ageing Saturday Live comics' straight-to-video careers off the ground. You know the kind, where a studio grinds out a vehicle for Cameron Diaz or some minor blip on the American TV comedy scene that inevitably gets padded with cameos from the much funnier people they knew at acting school or have kids at the same creche. It's not funny and it's not clever!

Doesn't it make you angry that the people who made this get paid more in ten weeks than you'll earn in your lifetime? Don't waste your hard-earned cash on this pointless, unfunny garbage.

Duplex (2003)

Disappointing chuckle-free Ben Stiller vehicle

[13 September 2004]

I could be wrong, but I think this went straight to video here in the UK, and on last night's DVD viewing I can see why.

Don't get me wrong, I like Ben Stiller. Ahead of most of his one-trick pony peers, at least he's a three trick pony. Sadly this is one of his "Gaye Fokker" movies, the meek worm who turns but screws it up. Switch to Zoolander mode, say in Dodgeball, or Mr Furious, as revisited in Starky and Hutch, and he's a real family favourite. Sadly as the end credits of Duplex (released in the UK as "Our House") rolled, the entire cross-section of the family went "Huh?". We'll never get that hour and a half back, but at least we'll never have to watch it again.

This is "black" comedy, so there are no jokes. You root for Ben and movie wife Drew only because they're less hateful than the crone who makes their lives hell.

The single rewarding feature of this movie was a rare appearance by under-rated supporting player James Remar, who really deserved a better career.

Maybe instead of titles Ben could start numbering his movies, so like Star Trek ones we'd know the odd numbers are gong to be the disappointments.

The Village (2004)

Dull, predictable, and allegedly plagiarised to boot

[20 August 2004]

For anyone else who felt Signs was desperately over-rated, The Village isn't going to retore director Shyamalan in your estimation. I don't actively try to second-guess the plot of major studio films - it's like trying to outwit a retard , there's no real sense of achievement - but even I worked out the major twist in The Village before half way. I hasten to add that I've never read Running Out of Time by M.P. Haddix, the book it's allegedly based on, either. I was just so BORED, my mind started to wander aroud the several yawning credibility gaps. The real giveaway was the pre-eminent role the women played in the Council of Elders. Even if you've only seen the film Witness you'll know that pre-industrial societies weren't keen on giving women any kind of political voice. Either The Village was badly written and had sacrificed realistic period social reality to pander to modern actresses need for more vocal, prominent roles - and let's not dismiss the "badly written" idea out of hand - or there was another explanation for, to give a single glaring example, Sigourney Weaver's character being allowed to lead the town meeting warning about animal mutilations. The film itself is an unrewarding cheat for its viewers, and apparently so closely resembles a best-selling children's novel that it is literally a cheat, with a stolen plot AND twist. I hope Ms. Haddix and her publisher sue Disney till they squeak.

Dirty Deeds (2002)

if you skip this because it's not a blockbuster, you're missing a good film

[19 June 2003]

Ah, yeah!

This is a nicely paced caper and its only real crime is the weak ending.

It's been criminally undersold here, and sad to report I was alone in the dark corner of the multiplex I saw it in. As all the comments here are Australian and a year old, the film has obviously been leaked late to the rest of the world in advance of its video or dvd release. This is lacklustre treatment of a little gem.

First and most important, you don't need to be Australian to understand the dialog. I wouldn't fault any of the performances, which pretty much match the characters' function in the film. Bryan Brown and Sam Neill stand out, inevitably, but John Goodman and Toni Colette are sound in support.

I smiled from the moment this started to the closing credits, laughed out loud more than once, and salute the repeated use of "bouf-head" as a term of endearment.

The Sweetest Thing (2002)

relentlessly rude, but not funny with it

[27 September 2002]

What's the best thing about The Sweetest Thing? Its running time of 86 minutes. What lets it down the most? Cameron Diaz. From the opening sequence when she boogies - badly - up the street to her character's apartment, you realise this is one of those films that seemed funnier to make than it's going to be to watch. The first 10 minutes seem to set up a smart modern romantic comedy, and when Cameron isn't doing much there's some good observational dating and relationship comedy. It quickly descends into a series of poor quality sex and toilet humour set-pieces - the dark side of American cinema's post-"Pie" discovery of rude jokes - that might have worked if the notional star gave any indication she has a flair for comedy. The "too big to fit in here" musical number is probably hysterically funny if you're a woman who isn't comfortable discussing penis size over dinner, but like the film itself once the immediate "shock-yok" is over it outstays its welcome. Watching The Sweetest Thing is like spending time with well-raised teenagers who've decided to stop pretending that they don't know any dirty words. Tiresome. Nice breasts, though.

Separate Lives (1995)

Where B-list movie stars go to "rest"

[30 July 2002]

Not so long ago I was watching Terminator 2 on DVD and thinking "Linda Hamilton WAS the sexiest screen actress of the 1990s!". Some Hollywood high-roller obviously agreed, and tragically this unerotic, mediocre thriller was born. There is, it has to be said, a lot to be said for sweat, glycerine and extreme body-sculpting. Re-packaged as a low budget "rock chick" in rubber-band miniskirts and chromed leather jacket, Linda looks disappointingly like a what a middle-aged movie executive's secretary wears in his dreams. And whatever happened to James Belushi? A former Arnie co-star, like Linda, in the 80's he was the dependable face of action movies that couldn't afford Bruce Willis. This predictable pot-boiler is not a career high for either. James is let down by the director, often looking wooden, and Linda's split personality psychotherapist swings from a reprise of "Sarah Connor on Thorazine" in T2 to her unconvincing rock-chick alter-ego. The twist in the tail murderer is obvious from the moment "Laura's" flashbacks begin. I was ill, I was stuck in bed, and this was the most watchable thing on TV last night. Shame on me, I had a book to read, and shame on the TV schedulers too.

The Time Machine (2002)

Complete waste of everybody's time

[12 June 2002]

Is there anything worse than a bad science fiction film? Like Pitch Black, another perplexing commercial hit, this deserves to be remembered with all the scorn and vitriol otherwise lavished on Waterworld, The Postman and Battlefield Earth. I only wish I'd said it first, but it's true this sucks 31 flavours of something very bad. The writing is poor, the acting - ahem - uneven, and the incidental science is laughable.

In the past, it seems, the Americans were either Australians speaking stage-school European English (Guy Pearce) or English speaking Hollywood American (Mark Addy, reprising his abysmal yankee-doo-doo accent from the Chris Rock Heaven Can Wait remake).

In the future, apparently, everyone will be Oirish, buff and beautiful, and a tasteful and non-threatening light level of "colour". The bad people, obviously, will be very English and very, very white. Was some bizarre shamrock radiation released from the exploded moon, or was Guy Pearce's descent into lilt in the final reel just a subtle nod to show how self-conscious and embarassed he really was?

Guy Pearce heroically casts realistic psychology aside as his neurotic genius character sinks into a 4-year depression when his girlfriend is shot, and creates a time machine. So much for crayoning on the mattress wallpaper of his new bedroom and lots of new white-coated friends. A plot twist shoots him into the far future, where within only 2 days he realises the true secret of happiness is a warm, black teenage R'n'B singer. A brief side-step to the year 2030 shows how frighteningly close we are to developing artificially intelligent holograms so self-aware they can patronise mere ignorant humans. And in a mere 30 years teachers will apparently threaten their museum school-trip charges that they should keep up or she'll "resequence their DNA". This is one of two references which suggest that the nearest this story ever approached real science fiction, let alone real science, is catching occasional episodes of Star Trek the Next Generation.

I feel obliged to point out that H.G. Wells's Eloi are pale, effete and unsympathetic. The Morlocks are supposed to be an ironic observation of the underclass, brutish and ignorant but ultimately ascendant over their surface-dwelling former masters. Ironically enough, here the only half-decent and memorable performance is Jeremy Irons as the "uber-Morlock", who asks the petulant time traveller "Who are you to argue with 800,000 years of evolution?".

If you didn't think this was an insult to your intelligence, you've probably already pre-ordered Attack of the Clones on DVD. Never mind, 30 years from now the moon will sort us all out anyway. See you in the caves! Yum!

Rock Star (2001)

Poodle-perm fun

[5/10 · 16 January 2002]

It's a revelation to me that people haved raved about this film. I couldn't imagine who, except Mark Wahlberg fans, the target audience was supposed to be. Running against the grain of the huge current popularity of modern metal, the film is set 15 years ago when Heart and Bon Jovi rocked the world and features a soundtrack of screaming-guitar poodle-perm AOR. No genuine Heavy metal or new metal fan is going to enjoy it. Jennifer Anniston is missing for a huge chunk at the middle, and the romance story is pretty incidental, so there go the girls and the Friends fans. It's not even that funny, so there's no word of mouth about the laughs or the great set-pieces. Did you even realise this was directed by the same man who gave the world Bill and Ted and Don't Tell Monm the Baby-sitter's Dead? I have to say, I like Bon Jovi, and the concert material made me smile, but I don't understand how money got invested in this project.

The Others (2001)

Scary ... how easily some people are to impress

[7 November 2001]

I suffered this over-rated film last night, so now you don't have to. The plot is thin, shabby and largely second hand. Plot points are delivered with granite-slab subtlety, and things happen that defy even the story's own fragile, self-contained reality. Why does the husband appear at all? How unlikely and contrived are the McGuffins buried under the leaves? People seem to have confused lack of pace and creakingly dull storytelling with "atmosphere". All reviews mention "the twist", so you're going to spend a good minute and a half trying to work it out - and you'll be right! And while I admit one scene did actually make me jump, if you lock me in a dark room in front of something this dull almost any loud noise will startle me awake. Despite the hymns of praise to the contary, Nicole Kidman is also quite weak in the lead role.

America's Sweethearts (2001)

Mediocre star vehicle

[24 October 2001]

This is a funny movie, but sadly no funnier than your average episode of "Friends", and the stars are sadly workmanlike. Hank Azaria's supporting turn is probably the only real acting performance. The film is a slick con, machine-made popcorn fodder masquerading as humorous showbiz self-parody. If you're not a Julia Roberts fan - and I'm not - this will only confirm your preconceptions. She does her vulnerable ugly-duckling routine, based on a borrowed "Monica-from-Friends" backstory that she used to be fat. If you are a John Cusack fan - and I am - then this film stands to his recent run of hits as "Say Anything" does to his first time at bat in the 80s. It has all the elements of a good Cusack romantic comedy, and he hits his marks and does his lines with casual flair, but there's none of the heart or spark of "Grosse Point Blank" or even "Con-Air". Funny but disappointing.

The Score (2001)

Old fashioned film for grown-ups

[4 October 2001]

Only slightly less so than de Niro's last big caper thriller, "Ronin", you could be forgiven for thinking "The Score" was made in the 70s. Only the presence of Edward Norton and the liberal use of the f-word link it loosely to the present. It's also very obviously targetted at a lately adult "born in the 60s" audience. It screams "sophisticated adults only", from the big name cast to the cod-jazz soundtrack to the faux-european setting (Montreal doubles for what probably should have been Paris or London). To its credit, with the exception of "The Crimson Rivers" it is the only big-budget film this year with a plot that keeps working all the way to the end of the 3rd act, and where the French film's plot finally collapses into the improbable this one stays true to its self-imposed "reality" and delivers an obvious but effective double-twist.

The Sword and the Sorcerer (1982)

A joy to watch again and again

[4 October 2001]

"I have a debt to pay" ... for 15 years of viewing pleasure. This film is an absolute joy, untarnished by repeated viewings, sadly overshadowed by Schwarzeneger's vastly inferior Conan movies, and unreasonably critically trashed alongside truly terrible contemporary low budget thud and blunder efforts. The script creaks more than the plot, but reigned in from the curse of camp by director Albert Pyun the actors deliver their lines with a straight face and leave the the audience to find the comedy themselves. Almost a dictionary definition of "ahead of its time", the film is a blueprint for the success of Sam Raimi's Hercules and Xena, right down to the use of Australian bit players. Effects like the demon sorceror's tomb might be managed better technically today, but no more atmospherically, and the closing sword battle is a triumph. The performances are eccentric and electric, and you could not wish for a more motley crew of cut-throats and sidekicks. Richard Lynch eats the scenery with unalloyed zeal, and quite simply more of Lee Horsley as Talon would have made the movie world a better place.