DARK SHADOWS - Enough already.

When was the last time Tim Burton made a half-decent movie? 2005's CORPSE BRIDE? Well that was animation.  1994's ED WOOD?  And yet I think of myself as a massive Tim Burton fan.  Maybe it's just because I like the idea that in the botoxed, day-glo Wood that is Holly, there is still room for a camp-goth weirdo.  But I guess, like an abused wife, it's time to realise that he may tell you he loves you, and that he's sorry, and that it won't happen again, but that you have too much self-respect to go back yet again to hurt and disappointment.

Am I over-reacting? Maybe. But the mind-boggling stupidity of DARK SHADOWS - the two hours of grating boredom -  have unleashed two decades of pent-up anger, sorrow and regret.  Tim Burton used to be radical. He used to be subversive.  Now he's just predictable, banal and worst of all, aimless. Where once there was auteur vision, now there's just a shapeless, nonsensical mess.

DARK SHADOWS may well be worse than JOHN CARTER.

Ok, so let's take a moment, calm down, and start this review again.  Once upon a time a long time ago, there was a camp-horror TV series called "Dark Shadows".  Tim Burton, Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer fell in love with it. It centred on a 17th century guy called Barnabas Collins, living in then-contemporary 1970s Maine with his formerly rich, impoverished, odd-ball family.  Clue lots of fish-out-of-water comedy, and some good old hammy romance-vengeance as the witch who originally cursed Barnabas continues to purse him.

In this remake, which was can only presume is loving and a fan-fic, Depp takes on the role of Barnabas, Pfeiffer the current matriarch and Eva Green the witch, Angelique.  The film is, as one would expect, beautifully designed, with the exception of Green's shockingly bad blonde wigs. (Second only to Cersei's bad wigs in HBO's Game of Thrones, season one.)

The problem is that the story zigs and zags with no apparent logic.  The movie is tonally all over the place. Is it a spoof? A straight comedy? Is it even trying to be spooky at all? Some characters are under-used and under-developed (poor Jonny Lee Miller as Pfeiffer's brother is a case in point).  Other characters have major plot reveals that are dictionary definitions of non sequitors (Chloe Moretz as Pfeiffer's daughter).  And the key romance between Barnabus and a contemporary nanny just has no emotional purchase on us whatsoever.  This movie is a mess. And not a mess in the manner of a quirky indie movie, whose rough edges are part of its charm.  A mess that is frustrating and boring to endure.

Avoid.

DARK SHADOWS is on global release everywhere bar Argentina, Brazil, Colombia and Mexico, where it is released on June 22nd.

Sundance London 2012 - SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED

I guess it was a sure bet.  Any movie based on a cutesy internet meme (see above graphic) was gonna rub me up the wrong way.  SAFTEY NOT GUARANTEED is the kind of hipster, quirky, indulgent comedy that I hate.  In fact, even calling it a comedy is a stretch given that it peddles the gentlest of gentle comedy.  I only laughed out loud three times, so on that basis it fails the Wittertainment 5-Laughs rule.  I predict that this will end up like last year's lauded hit, LIKE CRAZY. That was another movie the indie community loved and I hated. It too ended up in a bidding war at Sundance only to fail at the box office.

The problem with the film is that everything about it is so contrived that goofy that there's nothing to relate to - no point of entry unless you're also a wannabe oddball hipster.  It also contains precious few proper jokes (as mentioned above), and uneven tone, as it skirts past various genres. I blame Derek Connolly's pretentious script and Colin Trevorrow's lacklustre direction.  Performances are mostly so-so.  Aubrey Plaza (PARKS AND RECREATION) does her snarky, moody thing, but predictably melts when she meets Mark Duplass' oddball paranoid wannabe time-traveller.  They meet up because she an intern at a magazine and her boss Jeff is faking interest in the madcap scheme so as to write a funny story on the guy.  Jake M Johnson provides the only real laughs as Jeff, nicely playing against the "nice Nick" character in THE NEW GIRL.  As for Karan Soni's Arnau, it's nice that we people of Indian origin are starting to get more airtime in movies, but does it always have to be a clichéd geeky hard-working student? I'm starting to get offended.

SAFETY NOT GUARANTEED played Sundance 2012 where Derek Connolly won the Waldo Salt Screenwriting Award. It also played Sundance London. It will play SXSW 2012 and will be released in the USA on June 8th.

iPad Round-Up 7 - SLEEPING BEAUTY

Deeply dull, pretentious art-house flick about a bored young girl who gets paid by fetishists to sleep, drugged, while they do anything they want to her except penetration.  The debut feature from writer-director Julia Leigh, the movie never explores the full creepiness of what is happening, or even who is exploiting whom. It wants to be subversive and provocative but is more uncomfortable because of the amateur-ish acting that because of any explicit content. This is a movie without about as much understanding or interest in sexual fetish as Kubrick's EYES WIDE SHUT. And one can only be thankful that promising young actress, Mia Wasikowska, dropped out before this piss-poor indie hit besmirched her career.

SLEEPING BEAUTY played Cannes 2011 and opened in 2011 in Australia, Kazakhstan, Russia, Estonia, Hong Kong, the UK, Japan, France, the USA and Philippines.  It opened earlier this year in Belgium, Singapore and Brazil and opens in the Netherlands on July 12th. It is available to rent and own.

iPad Round-Up 5 - IMMORTALS

Tarsem Singh's last film, the visually stunning, whimsical, deeply emotionally affecting THE FALL, is one of my favourite films of the past decade. In my mind's eye I can see vivid imagery - breathtakingly framed action sequences, wondrous costumes and locations - but I can also feel how heartbroken I was in a pivotal scene where a sweet little girl is bertrayed by the injured man she is trying to help.  It's a movie that has so much heart - such a simple story, when all is said and done - that it compensates for the distancing effect of the highly-stylised visuals and the baroque story-telling style.

Tragically, IMMORTALS is a movie in which there is style, too much style, too many artfully staged, framed and HD-colour-timed visuals, and too little narrative or emotional clarity.  The resulting film is dull (literally - not sure what was up with my iPad download but it was so dark in places I could barely see the action) and then simply unwatchable.  In theory, the movie is about the Greek myth of Perseus, the Clash of the Titans, and the Minotaur.  I studied these myths in school in depth.  But even I didn't have a clue what was happening, or care why.  The actors do the best they can, I suppose, but they're swamped by the visual effects and no-one comes out of it with any credit.  I also suspect that Mickey Rourke, as Hyperion, was simply mis-cast.

Avoid at all costs.  

IMMORTALS was released in November 2011. It is available to rent and own.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK

A few years ago, James Watkins made a brilliant little British horror film that was genuinely petrifying, and politically interesting, given its use of feral chav kids to hunt down a nice middle-class couple. Sadly, Watkins' latest film, an adaptation of Susan Hill's massively successful THE WOMAN IN BLACK, is about as banal, boring and benign as a horror movie can get. There are three problems - the direction, the script and the casting.  And given that there isn't much left of a movie if you get these three wrong, you can see why I've tagged this review "piss-poor".  

The story is a classic Victorian haunted house horror (though penned in the early 80s).  Arthur Kipps is a young solicitor sent to go through the documents at the deceased Mrs Drablow's imposing and isolated mansion.  The villagers prove hostile and reluctant to take him there - all but the rationalist squire Daily.  Soon, Kipps is seeing a mysterious woman in black; young children in the village are dying in brutal circumstances; and the house is acting against him...  The documents and Daily help Kipps understand the reason for the deaths, and together they try to appease the ghost.....

Apparently the horror afficionado and superb screenwriter Mark Gatiss (BBC's recent SHERLOCK) was asked to write the script. One can only dream of what might have been. Instead we get a screenplay from Jane Goldman (KICK-ASS) that uses every horror cliché without understanding or breathing life into them.  Similarly, James Watkins' workmanlike direction uses every horror trick - malevolent toys, spooky children, diagonal camera-angles - to no real effect.  It's like he read a "Polanski for Dummies" book.  But the biggest problem is the casting. Daniel Radcliffe just isn't old enough to convincingly play a grieving widower and father of a toddler. And he comes across as curiously inert and unexpressive, especially when playing across from the marvellous Ciaran Hinds and Janet McTeer (squire Daily and his mentally disturbed wife). It's going to be curious to see how many of the HARRY POTTER kids have a career beyond the franchise, but this movie, so reliant on Radcliffe alone in a haunted house, does not bode well.

The reason you see so few horror reviews on this site is that I am a complete girl when it comes to horror - I get scared by the smallest things. But I sat through this flick unscared and uninterested. Doubleplus not good.

THE WOMAN IN BLACK is released this weekend in the USA, Canada and Argentina. It opens on February 10th in the UK, Denmark, Greece and Portugal. It opens on February 17th in Spain; on February 24th in the Netherlands, Brazil and Poland; on March 2nd in Italy; on March 7th in Belgium; on March 9th in Turkey; on March 15th in France, Russia and Singapore and on March 29th in Germany, Hungary and Sweden.

iPad Round-Up 1 - THE CHANGE-UP

THE CHANGE-UP is a piss-poor reworking of the FREAKY FRIDAY/BIG body-switch movie genre.  In this instance, Jason Bateman's weary lawyer-father switches with Ryan Reynold's playboy soft-porn actor.  Despite the frequent cursing and references to explicit sex acts, this is basically a deeply conservative movie in which the father learns to appreciate his wife and children and the playboy learns to grow up and start acting like a responsible member of society.  The script, by Jon Lucas Scott Moore (THE HANGOVER) contains very few genuine moments of humour, but a lot of cursing and physical gross out humour that fails to fly. The direction from David Dobkin (WEDDING CRASHERS) is workmanlike. Reynolds and Bateman are actually quite good at mimicking each other's speech styles but in service of a weak script it's all for nothing.  Avoid. 

Script 

THE CHANGE-UP was released in late summer and autumn 2011. It is available to rent and own.

iPad Round-Up 1 - CONAN THE BARBARIAN

The original Arnold Schwarzenegger CONAN movies, based on Robert E Howard's pulp fiction, were given a kind of grandiose Nietzchean purity of purpose and bleakness of vision by director John Milius. This meant that however ridiculous Schwarzenegger's physique, no matter how absurd the dialogue, they were hard to laugh at, and have become as cult-ish and praised as the source novels.  By contrast, Marcus Nispel's (FRIDAY THE 13th) risible remake is a critical and commercial failure - a movie that is superficial and mindless and hammy.  Most of all, it shows us how much charisma Schwarzenegger had - that while we may have seen him as ridiculous, he never did.  He could stand there, covered in furs with a ridiculous helmet on, and just own the space of Conan. Jason Mamoa, in this new Conan, has the muscles, but not the self-belief. Shorn of Howard's philosophy and Arnie's charisma, the resulting movie becomes a stupid, flaccid piece of sword and sorcery buffoonery - not well thought out enough to be accuses of misogyny - mindless to the point of coma.

The story is simple enough (no excuse, however, for making a mindless film).  Young Conan (Leo Howard) lives with his wise father (Ron Perlman) in a kind of magic-induced pre-medieval Europe of rampaging hordes and fierce warlords.  His family is butchered by Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang), an evil warlord trying to gather the pieces of the Mask of Acheron in order to resurrect his wife, a powerful witch, and rule Hyborea.   Years later, an adult Conan (Momoa) journeys through Hyborea with his friend Artus (Nonso Anozie) and finds himself helping a beautiful princess called Tamara (Rachel Nichols) whose blood is needed for the ritual that will activate the mask.  Thus setting up a final conflict between Conan and Zym, his weird-ass daughter Marique (Rose McGowan). 

This film was in development purgatory for nearly a decade, and it shows. It's the unloved ginger stepkid, with directors like the Wachoskis, Robert Rodriguez and Brett Ratner attached. You can see the sliding quality as the film was passed round, and eventually the movie ended up with a relatively unknown horror director and a former music video DP (Thomas Kloss).  Is it any wonder then that the resulting film feels so cheap, so superficial, so ridiculous?  Producers might think that you don't need a great director for pulp material. But I would argue that the more pulpy the material, the harder the director needs to work, the better he needs to be, to prevent the film descending into nonsense.  One can only wonder what voice-over artist, Morgan Freeman, felt when the finished movie was released.

CONAN THE BARBARIAN was released in summer 2011 and is now available to rent and own.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 3 - SARAH PALIN: YOU BETCHA!

SARAH PALIN: YOU BETCHA! is a really bad documentary.  Risibly, embarrassingly so.  And here's why.  1) There's no balance. 2) There's no insight.  3) There's no context and therefore no relevance. 4) Cheap stunts undermine the purported aim of the project.  

1) There's no balance.  Directors Nick Broomfield (AILEEN: THE LIFE AND DEATH OF A SERIAL KILLER) and Joan Churchill (BATTLE FOR HADITHA) claim that they're going to Wassila, Alaska to discover the true Sarah Palin.  They claim they aren't making a "hit movie".  But that's bollocks.  They clearly had already made up their mind about Palin  before they made their movie. They are evidently delighted that it turns out to be a character assassination.  There is no balance.  No attempt at context.  No real seriousness. Where are the interviews with her supporters? If no-one in Alaska would speak to them, why not talk to her supporters in other states - ordinary folk and political operators. Why not attempt to understand her appeal, beyond her charisma? They claim that they want to take her seriously as a political threat, so why not do just that?  But no, this isn't that kind of film.  This isn't serious engagement with the rise of the evangelical right wing, but a cheap National Enquirer type story.

2) There's no insight. One has to assume that anyone who wants to see this movie knows who Palin is and follows US politics. And if that's the case - if you already know about Troopergate; watched those Tina Fey impressions; saw Palin on Fox and watched her popularity plummet after the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords - this movie really doesn't add anything to your knowledge.  I mean, we all know that Palin is ill-educated and ill-qualified for office - that she abhors scholarship, has anti-diluvian anttitudes toward homosexuality, and has used power to pursue personal vendettas. That's why she's know so unpopular that she isn't standing for the presidency.  The only genuine coup is an interview with Trooper Mike Wooten, Palin's ex brother-in-law who she got fired from his job.

3) There's no context and therefore no relevance. The tragedy for Broomfield and Churchill is that their subject matter was crumbling beneath them during production.  Palin had already been eclipsed by Michelle Bachman during filming and during editing not only did Palin's star fall, but by now even Bachman looks irrelevant. Even Rick Perry's numbers have gone South.   The film-makers delude themselves into believing that their documentary contributed to Palin's decision not to run but one suspects that they have come woefully late to the game. The film-makers could've made their movie still seem relevant if they had made more of an attempt to look at the wider movement Palin helped create - The Tea Party - and rise of popular evangelical politics.  Palin's particular character failings have made her unlikely to hold office again, but she remains a kingmaker, and if that's her continued threat, then it needed to be explored. What precisely is her continued power?  Why do ordinary people respond to her? It isn't enough to say personal charisma. We need to understand what she says.  Sadly, this just isn't that kind of film.

4) Cheap stunts undermine the purported aim of the project.   The film-makers claim that while most British people treat Palin as a joke, they wanted to treat her seriously, reflecting the threat that her presidency would be.  But that's belied by Broomfield's trademark, semi-Michael-Moore penchant for cheap stunts and putting himself in the frame.  It starts with shooting fish in a barrel - anyone can, after all, find video footage from Christian fundamentals showing rapture that looks ridiculous to liberal eyes. And continues with cheap tricks: Broomfield getting up with a megaphone at a Palin speaking engagement - or chasing her down at book signings.  Hardly dignified, and not even that funny - just rather pathetic.

Let me be clear. I hold Palin in contempt. But she was for a time a serious political threat, and the movement she represents still is.  This documentary was a valuable opportunity to explore that threat - but instead it looks cheap, nasty, and given it's narrow focus, sadly irrelevant. I suspect that Palin's decision not to run will seriously affect its chances of distribution. 

SARAH PALIN: YOU BETCHA! played Toronto and London 2011 and was released in the US on September 2011.

London Film Fest 2011 Day 1 - 360

Jude Law and Rachel Weisz as an estranged couple in 360

It has long been my experience that the most interesting and exciting films showing at the London Film Festival are those tucked away in the heart of the programme, rather than the red-carpet galas, where one suspects the programmer's hand has been forced by the exigencies of publicity and sponsorship.  Sadly, 360 proved no exception to this rule.  Worse than that, one suspects that Brazilian director Fernando Meirelles' early success with the dazzling CITY OF GOD was a fluke.  Ever since then, his films have maintained their visual style, but lost pace, energy, and tackled subject matter with a heavy handed earnestness that belies their insight.  One wishes that he would stop trying to be clever-clever with his narrative devices and just tell a good, simple story.  

The too-clever concept at the heart of 360 is to show the interweaving stories of people across the world  - the only commonality is how each of them experience a seemingly arbitrary event changes their lives.  The story takes us from a failing marriage in middle-class London (Jude Law, Rachel Weisz) to hookers and Russian mafiosi in Vienna (Moritz Bleibtrau) - from  sex offenders and grieving parents in Denver (Ben Foster, Anthony Hopkins) to forbidden love in Paris (Jamel Debbouze).  In each case, characters are introduced, their love affairs and dilemmas explained, an event occurs, its ramifications start to be explored, and the matter is dropped. Perhaps in a later strand we will meet the character again and see them from a different angle.  But by then, so much has been going on, so many characters introduced, so little time given to being able to emotionally bond with them, that we are past caring.  I left the cinema feeling totally "blah".  I had watched a parade of characters and frankly, didn't care about a single one of them.  And as for the "message" of this ponderous work, it's hardly revelatory or profound.  Some people are cynical sleazebags - some people still naively take a chance on love - the world keeps turning - and random events can change the path we move along. 

Jude Law and director Fernando Meirelles present
360 at the Opening Night of the BFI London
Film Festival 2011.

The result is a film that is utterly unmemorable and actually rather tragic when one considers the talent deployed.  To be sure, cinematographer Adriano Goldman (JANE EYRE, SIN NOMBRE, CONVICTION) creates some arresting visuals, but the rest of the talent is below par.  The actors have little to get their teeth into and are rather unforgettable, except for Anthony Hopkins hamming it up. To be fair, Hopkins is only responding to one of those awfully obvious crass Academy-Award-aspirant speeches by screenwriter Peter Morgan (THE QUEEN) when he finally comes to an epiphany in an AA meeting. 

Overall then, 360 is yet another film by Fernando Meirelles that is technically accomplished, but fails to provide us with characters that we care about and situations that are compelling.  A serious own-goal by screenwriter Peter Morgan too, moving from his typically more straightforward biopic material into some more narratively ambitious, and clearly beyond his capabilities. 

360 premiered at London 2011 and will play Toronto 2011. It will open in Sweden on October 19th 2012.

iPad Round-Up 2 - GULLIVER'S TRAVELS

When I was a pre-teen and we all obsessively watched the lo-rent sci-fi TV comedy, RED DWARF, the phrase "almost Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety" became a standard term of praise, long before we'd read Swift in class and fully appreciated the radical, deliriously scabrous nature of his political satire. That was back in the day when schools taught children useful shit like calculus and Latin.  Nowadays, family audiences have no use for political satire - although one might have thought that in the post global financial crisis world - with governments insolvent and political systems ossified by special interests - now would be EXACTLY the time for it.  And so, dear reader, we get the movies we deserve. Towit, Rob Letterman's utterly banal children's movie, GULLIVER'S TRAVELS - a film based on Swift only insofar as it incorporates a man who wakes up in a land filled with tiny little people called Liliputians.

So, Swift aside, how does it fare as simple family entertainment? Shockingly poor.  A mindlessly simple plot, piss-poor CGI effects, hammy acting from the largely British cast of character actors, and Jack Black playing the character he always plays - the childish, rock-obsessed but ultimately love-able frump. Director Rob Letterman and writer Joe Stillman display none of the wit or imagination seen in MONSTERS VS. ALIENS or SHREK. Must try harder.

GULLIVER'S TRAVELS was released over the 2010/2011 holiday season. It is now available to rent and own.

Random-DVD Round-Up 4 - FRED: THE MOVIE

FRED: THE MOVIE is the infinitely irritating feature-length flick starring self-appointed YouTube sensation "Fred" aka teenager Lucas Cruikshank. Cruikshank's character is an infantile teen with a passion for day-glo clothes, who speaks in a speeded-up Chipmunk voice and has a two-year-old temper tantrum whenever things don't go his way. This might have been charming in the YouTube short-form but it is absolutely unbearable for 90 minutes. Shame on teen pop star Pixie Lott for jumping on its hopefully short-lived PR bandwagon. As for the movie - the colours are Day-Glo, the direction pedestrian, and the basic plot the same as any other teen comedy: the nerdy protagonist has to triumph over the neighbourhood bully to get the prettiest girl in high school. Frankly, I watched 20 minutes before switching off. Admittedly if the movie had taken a right-turn into a slasher flick wherein the main cast get nastily ripped limb from limb, it might have improved. I will never know. 

FRED: THE MOVIE was released as a TV movie in the US in September 2010 and was inexplicably given a theatrical release in the UK and Ireland in December. It is now available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - THE ROMANTICS

THE ROMANTICS is a movie about a bunch of late-twenties college friends reunited at the Long Island wedding of two of the group. The marriage forces the group to re-assess their friendships, loyalties and sexual attraction - and all this should create tension around whether the wedding between Tom and Lila (Josh Duhamel and Anna Paquin) will actually go ahead given that Laura (Katie Holmes) is still carrying a torch for the groom. The audience is meant to be drawn into the emotional lives of characters who feel mixed-up and sympathetic - just like us! And debut feature director, Galt Niederhoffer (adapting her own novel, employs lots of obvious tricks to try and manufacture that empathy and a sense that we are watching an hip counter-culture indie flick rather than an inauthentic Hollywood rom-com: gloomy lighting; painfully indie sound-track; deliberately obscure ending. Sadly though, the film fails on every level. Casting 40 year olds like Josh Duhamel breaks the credibility of the film, especially when we're meant to believe he was a peer of THE OC's Adam Brody. The acting is universally bad and yet for diametrically opposite reasons: chip-board performances from Duhamel and Katie Holmes but hammy, over-the-top acting from Elijah Woods, Malin Akerman and Anna Paquin. The whole thing struck me as self-indulgent; pretentious; inauthentic and dull, dull, dull. Distributors were right to scorn it: there is a reason why it appeared in the UK as a straight to video/TV release. 

THE ROMANTICS played Sundance 2010 and was released in 2010 in the US and Slovenia. It was released in Iceland in March 2011.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - DUE DATE

Todd Philips, writer-director of OLD SCHOOL, SCHOOL FOR SCOUNDRELS and the break-out hit THE HANGOVER, returns to our screens with what can only be described as a piss-poor; woefully under-written; shameless cash-in. The structure of the movie aims to rip off what was best in PLANES, TRAINS AND AUTOMOBILES. Robert Downey Junior plays an up-tight architect on his way home to see his wife deliver their first child. Zach Galifianakis plays the creepy fuck-up who manages to get the architect put on a no-fly list, sans wallet and cash, compelled to take a road-trip with the very man who messed up his travel-plans. What follows is a series of comedy set-ups that just don't work for two reasons. First, Downey Junior and Galifianakis have ZERO chemistry (and made me appreciate just how well Jude Law and Downey Junior worked together in SHERLOCK HOLMES by comparison). Second, Galifianakis is, like Danny McBride, the kind of comedy "talent" that works best in small doses. They always play creepy man-child characters - people who are meant to make us laugh with their social ineptitude. Five minutes to leaven an otherwise grown-up comedy is just fine to add a dash of zaniness. But these guys can't carry a feature - they topple it over. For further evidence, check out McBride in TROPIC THUNDER (perfect!) and FIST FOOT WAY (over-dose).  

Other than the lack of chemistry and over-use of the irritatingly weird Galifianakis, the political satire (anti-terrorist airport security, cross-border immigration) falls flat, and the joke about a dead man's ashes kept in a coffee canister just reminds us how good the Coen Brothers are, and how much subtler their treatment of the same comic material was in LEBOWSKI.  And, dear lord, what on earth are Jamie Foxx and Juliette Lewis doing in this flick?  And will their ever be a comedy cameo to match the sheer surprise of finding Tyson in THE HANGOVER or Bill Murray in ZOMBIELAND? 

DUE DATE went on global release in November 2010 and is now available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - COUPLES RETREAT

COUPLE'S RETREAT is a truly piss-poor alleged comedy starring Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau and Faizon Love as middle-aged men frustrated by middle-aged family life. So they and their wives (Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell, Kristin Davis, Kali Hawk)) take off for a tropical island and a weekend of intense marital therapy run by a spectacularly mis-cast Jean Reno. I just don't know where to begin in terms of reviewing it. It's a movie so devoid of comedic inspiration that it simply falls flat in every scene. I didn't care about any of the characters. I didn't find any of the verbal or physical humour funny. And I wanted the film to end. Quickly. Save yourself the trouble and rent Favreau and Vaughn's genius early pic, SWINGERS instead, and remember a time when they were able to create genuinely sympathetic characters and laugh-out-loud funny lines.

COUPLES RETREAT was released in autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and own.

HOW DO YOU KNOW

HOW DO YOU KNOW is a truly execrable relationship drama that was, for some reason, marketed as a light-hearted romantic comedy. Reese Witherspoon plays a pro soft-ball player cut from the national team as she turns thirty - a move that sends her into a life crisis.  She simply doesn't know whether she wants to be a normal girl with a boyfriend and eventually a baby, let alone who she wants to be with. The choices are Owen Wilson's wealthy but promiscuous pro sportsman and Paul Rudd's earnest but hapless failed businessmen. Hardly a great set of options.  Cue lots of sex with the pro sportsmen, lots of wannabe quirky-cute conversations with the failed businessmen, and a lot of really really boring scenes in which unlikeable narcissists ruminate on how shitty their lives are, all the time in perfectly designed rooms with perfectly quaffed hair.  Witherspoon is mawkish; Rudd is mawkish; and Wilson plays that charming rogue character he always plays.  But no-one is more ill-used than Jack Nicholson.  Where's the emotional insight and wry wit of James L Brooks' AS GOOD AS IT GETS?  Where's the real heart of James L Brooks' THE SIMPSONS.  Poor, poor, poor.

HOW DO YOU KNOW is on release in the US, Canada, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, Egypt, France, Ireland, Spain and the UK. It opens in February in Estonia, Australia, Kazakhstan, Peru, Russia, Bulgaria, Japan, the Netherlands, Italy, Argentina, Hungary, Israel, Iceland and Lithuania. It opens in March in Belgium, Kuwait, Malaysia, Portugal, Singapore, the Philippines, Poland and Norway. It opens on April 29th in Brazil.

Random DVD Round-Up 5 - HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE really isn't as funny as it should be given it's awesome title. It's like the SNAKES ON A PLANE of comedy.

The conceit is that a bunch of schlubby frustrated middle-aged friends go back to the ski resort where they had an awesome batchelor ski-trip. They drink too much, wind up naked in the hot tub, and somehow get zapped back in time to the original holiday. Cue lots of early 80s nostalgia - images of Ronald Reagan and ALF (remember ALF!) on TV, eighties rock on the airwaves, big hair and day-glo ski-suits. It's time for the men to undo passed mistakes and work out what really went down regarding the parentage of the teenager they have in tow.

Problem is, the eighties jokes/costumes are mined for a pretty crude kind of comedy, but nowhere is the humour as brilliantly crude as in, say, THE HANGOVER or SOMETHING ABOUT MARY. Rather, the writing seems to go for the lowest common denominator. Unsurprising to find out the movie was directed by Steve Pink (Justin Long comedy ACCEPTED) and screenwriters Josh Heald (debut), Sean Anders and John Morris (SEX DRIVE). This isn't sophisticated. Which is fine. Not every comedy needs to be STRANGELOVE. But I guess what I found even more disappointing was the complete lack of chemistry between the lead actors - they didn't feel like best friends - and the fact that John Cusack - typically so charming - was basically not at all interesting in this flick.

So, basically, a big let-down and really not worth the time, even on DVD.

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE opened in spring/summer 2010 and is now available on DVD/iTunes.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - HEARTBREAKER

French TV director Pascal Chaumeil makes his big-screen debut with the commercial hit, HEARTBREAKER. It's a whimsical romantic-comedy starring Romain Duris (THE BEAT MY HEART SKIPPED) and Vanessa Paradis (er...Chanel ads?). Penned by Laurent Zeitoun, Jeremy Doner and Yohan Gromb, the plot is driven by a conceit that is so palpably stupid that the film never really recovers from it. Duris plays Alex - a man who is hired by the friends and family of women who are stuck in awful relationships but can't see it. He comes along, charms them, and they, realising how crummy their current boyfriends are, dump them. Problem is that in this particular set-up, Vanessa Paradis' Juliette boyfriend Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln) isn't actually crummy. In fact, he seems to be genuinely in love with Juliette and vice versa. So, if Alex hadn't come along with his Patrick Swayze dance moves, all would've been well. This is a major problem for a romantic-comedy where we're meant to be rooting for a couple to get together.

The humour is sporadic, sometimes plain weird and lazy. The caper aspects - how the heartbreaker team set up the meet-cutes - are just silly. And call me pragmatic, but I was wondering why, if you had such good IT and general spy skills, you wouldn't be using them for something more lucrative and impactful. There's some attempted humour at the expense of Juliette's nympho best friend, but that seems discordant when the tone the director is trying to go for with the main plot is one of whimsical romance. And then, of course, there's the idea that Alex and Juliette fall in love over a shared passion for the film DIRTY DANCING. This could've been tremendous, but I found the pivotal dance scene somehow lacking in spark and fun. Romain Duris seemed to be putting his all into the role, but Paradis seemed rather cold and disengaged. That is, to be sure, part of her character, especially in the early scenes, but we should've seen more of a progression.

Overall, the film struck me a laughably silly but never so silly as to make me laugh. It looks like a hundred minute commercial for Monaco and has very little merit other than that. God help us for the remake. I predict some piss-poor Gerard Butler-Katherine Heigl set-up.

HEARTBREAKER opened in summer 2010 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

THE TOURIST - in the words of the great Ian Dury, what a waste

THE TOURIST is that dirty of dirtiest of Hollywood words, a "troubled" film. This is Hollywood code for a project that has become toxic; stuck in pre-production; riddled with "creative differences"; lead actors dropping out; directors hired, fired, and hired again; and writing credits expanded by the desperate attempts of over-paid script-doctors to hammer some shape and vision back into the bulbous mess. When the revolving doors at GK Films finally stopped turning, many a talented film-maker was trapped between the glass. But to no avail. The resulting film is absolutely without merit (which has bizarrely not precluded it from winning three Golden Globe nominations, once again proving how utterly without merit are Hollywood awards).

A gaunt but Prada-impeccable Angelina Jolie stars as mysterious British woman who seduces a provincial dolt (Johnny Depp) in order to throw Interpol off the scent of her real on-the-lam boyfriend, Alexander. They meet-cute on a high-speed train from Paris to Venice and then spend a few days running round Venice being harassed by aforementioned policemen, not to mention the Russian-wannabe goon that Alexander stole money from. And all the while, what we're really meant to care about is whether Angie really loves Johnny or Alex or what.

What this movie basically wants to be is a classic, beautifully-dressed, elegantly-romantic, quivering-under-the-surface sexy classic romantic-thriller along the lines of CHARADE or TO CATCH A THIEF. 

Problems: 1) Angelina Jolie phones it in as Eloise, doing little more than look arrogantly beautiful and over-dressed. 2) Johnny Depp cannot look like a provincial schlub if he tries. He also can't do physical slapstick comedy, and yes, I AM including Pirates of the Caribbean in that. 3) The police come off as complete idiots. That means there is NO dramatic tension. It's also a waste of Paul Bettany's acting talent. 4) The vengeful mafiosi that Alexander stole from is also completely OTT. Well, I know that's the point of casting Steven Berkoff. But please, this is just hokum. 5) I got the plot twist about an hour before the end of the flick. 6) It's really irritating how the Danieli keeps turning into the Gritti Palace 7) It's quite astonishing how DP John Searle has managed to photograph Venice to look ugly. 8) It's even more annoying that the director and screenwriters don't know what sort of tone they are going for - tense thriller with real threat and violence or physical comedy or whimsical romance? Is this CHARADE or is it RUN LOLA RUN? Or is it just a colossal waste of time?

Let's hope poor Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's reputation survives directing this fiasco, although god only knows why he went from art-house hit THE LIVES OF OTHERS to this confection. I guess Jolie and Depp's careers are fire-proof. Do yourself a favour and watch the Sophie Marceau-Yvan Attal French original, ANTHONY ZIMMER, instead.

THE TOURIST is on release in the UK, US, Egypt, Kuwait, the UAW, Bahrain, Canada, Jordan, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar and Turkey. It opens this weekend in Belgium, France, Germany and Italy. It opens the following week in New Zealand, Australia, Hungary, Indonesia, Malaysia, Serbia and Singapore. It opens on January 6th in Russia, Sweden, Portugal, Slovenia, Estonia and Iceland. It opens on January 13th in Poland, the Netherlands and Slovakia. It opens on January 21st in Brazil and Finland. It opens on January 27th in Greece and Venezuela and then in Japan on March 11th.

Late and incomplete review - London Film Fest 2010 Day 10 - FILM SOCIALISME

We are on a cruise ship. We are in contemporary Europe. We are at the End of Days. We are in Palestine. We are in politics. We are listening to Alain Badiou. We are listening to Patti Smith.  We are in hi-def DV. We are in lo-def pixelated DV. We are in hi-camp Hollywood. We are in present-day desolation. We are mashing up images from everything and everywhere.

So what is the point? That we live in a post-political society? That we decadent capitalist Europeans care nothing for the class-struggle? That we are beyond political redemption? That we are living in a culture mediated by iconic media images, unable to disentangle reality from fiction? That we are merely repeating /parroting media image rather than critically engaging with life? Does there have to be a point? Is the point that there is no point?

FILM SOCIALISME is the worst kind of pretentious, patronising, pseudo-intellectual bilge that claims to have something profound to say about politics and the nature of cinema, but in fact is nothing more than self-indulgent, adolescent nonsense. The fact that it was produced by Jean-Luc Godard, French auteur, means that reviewers have been generous, ascribing to it meaning and coherence and earnest intentions that it simply does not possess. His film is insulting to us as viewers - it holds us in contempt. It tells us that we are not worth narrative structure or coherent exposition because we are party to the contemporary culture it is condemning. At least, that is the most generous explanation I can give for a film that plays like a collage, a scrapbook, where Godard has pasted in scenes from past films, news-reels and other sources into a layered, incoherent mess. Godard basically holds up two fingers to his audience in the film. Indeed, it is perhaps one of the most hateful film I have seen in recent years. The correct response is to walk out. And that is exactly what I did.

Now, a lot of the film's fans are going to say that basically I am just admitting my own ignorance. That I'm not well versed enough in Godard's back catalogue, that I don't speak French, that I don't understand the philosophical and political movements he is engaging with. That, basically, I am a poor creature who can only feel safe in the warm embrace of mindless Hollywood genre-cinema. To them, I say, in the words Godard might've have used as a title to this film, baise-toi! I speak French, I've watched his films, I read philosophy at university, and I like tough cinema. But this film is a case of the Emperor's New Clothes. It reflects back the pretentions of the viewers and cinema-goers who love cinema, LOVE cinema, should fight back.

FILM SOCIALISME played Cannes, London and Toronto 2010. It was released in France in May 2010 and was released on DVD last month.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENGTES - workmanlike and unwatchable

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST is based on the final installment of Swedish investigative journalist Stieg Larsson's wildly popular Millenium Trilogy. The novel picks up from the previous installment. The anti-heroine Lisbeth Salander - genius hacker, emotional anorexic, victim of sexual abuse - spends half of the film in hospital recovering from an attempted murder at the hands of her father and brother - and the other half in court, defending herself for the attempted murder of her father. In both cases she is isolated, communicating with the outside world through an internet connection to her hacker friends, or by means of an autobiography she is writing. Many people risk everything to help expose her enemies and bring her justice - but she is so introverted she can barely register thanks. The first is kindly doctor Anders Jonasson who keeps the rozzers at bay; the second is Mikke Blomkvist, crusading journalist, who plans to expose all in his magazine, with the help of the entire Millenium staff.

The book is compelling for two reasons. First, as we see the conspiracy against Lisbeth exposed, we realise just how high up it goes - to the office of the Swedish Prime Minister, no less. The stakes are high, and as the court case proceeds, the tension mounts. In short, the book is a thriller that is genuinely thrilling. But more importantly, the book works because we've come to care about the characters. Lisbeth and Mikke may not be in the same room together but we feel there connection. And in the novel, Mikke's long-time colleague and sometime lover Erika Berger takes front-stage, when she leaves Millenium for the Swedish Morning Post and starts being bullied with explicit emails and texts. I thought the portrait of a successful career woman trying to balance her job with her emotions was particularly authentic.

Sadly, but not surprisingly, this Swedish adaptation, originally intended for the small screen, fails to do justice to the novel. The direction is visually uninspired, workmanlike and plodding, sapping all pace and tension from the narrative. The character of Erika Berger suffers most in the editing down of the novel to a still unwieldy two and a half hour run-time. The acting is just fine, but the actors have little to do but work through the text. Of the new characters, Aksel Morisse is sympathetic as the doctor Anders Jonasson but the rest are pretty unforgettable. The result was that I was so bored I almost walked out several times, preferring to remember the denouement as I had read it rather than in this insipid, tedious adaptation.

THE GIRL WHO KICKED THE HORNET'S NEST / LUFTSLOTTET SOM SPRENDGTES opened in Denmark, Norway and Sweden in 2009 and in Finland, Iceland, Spain, The Netherlands, Greece, Estonia, Canada, Germany, the USA, Switzerland, Austria, Singapore, France and Japan earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Indonesia in January 2011.