TANK GIRL

dMYD DVD

Starring Failure

Trailer

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A little d? Why? Even the automatic capitalization editor disagrees. Listen up, Microsoft Word flunky, I know you love a bad bullet point. Here’s everything that’s wrong with the motion picture adaptation of Tank Girl:

. The cover of Devo’s Girl You Want that starts the film.

.The opening sequence re-appropriates Jamie Hewlett’s original comic book art and spins it around a bit.

.‘Ice-T’ appears in the opening credits.

. There is a clear misunderstanding of almost every aspect of the source material.

. Lori Petty’s voice and accent in the role of Tank Girl.

. The concept.

. The setting. (A post-apocalyptic Australia)

. The back-story.

. The script.

. The costumes.

. In the opening visuals, Tank Girl is riding through the desert on a cow.

. The budget.

. The direction.

. The concept of the ‘Rippers’ (They’re genetically engineered Kangaroo soldiers, 38 times less impressive than this sounds.)

. The chiming rock guitars when Tank Girl removes her helmet for the first time.

. Jamie Hewlett’s sterile drawings of various scenes from the film.

. The prop design.

. The other actors.

. The early attempt at feminism through getting a man to take his clothes off.

. The fact that all this has happened in the first two minutes of the film.

. Tank Girl has an adorable family with small children.

. Her adopted daughter, whilst carving, says the wood ‘talks to her’.

. Tank Girl has been given a real name. It’s ‘Rebecca Buck’.

. Malcolm McDowell.

. Malcolm McDowell’s character trait consists of a love of hoarding water.

. The plot revolves around water. The film is essentially about water.

. Malcolm McDowell kills a subordinate in his first scene to show how evil he is.

. Malcolm McDowell extracts water from people’s bodies with a plastic bottle.

. The expression on another subordinate’s face when this happens. (‘Sergeant Small’)

. Sergeant Small.

. Malcolm McDowell walks on glass.

. Tank Girl lives in a big, normal looking house in the desert.

. Tank Girl’s mannerisms, words and general demeanor are extremely annoying.

. There are attempts to add emotional resonance.

. Tank Girl teaches children to swear.

. There is a scissor-centric, grunge-sound tracked attempt at a sex scene.

. The design of the soldiers.

. Tank Girl doesn’t seem to be perturbed by her house and family being attacked by a large group of soldiers.

. There are tit jokes whilst her family is massacred.

. A soldier says ‘Ah, shit.’ Before exploding.

. There is still a problem of tone.

. Tank Girl is useless and ineffectual.

. Tank Girl has a boyfriend.

. Tank Girl’s boyfriend is murdered and she says ‘No’.

. There is a slow motion sequence.

. The evil ‘Water and Power’ company attack the house in the desert with a jet.

. Tank Girl gets beaten up by some soldiers.

. Tank Girl exhibits more emotion when her cow gets shot than when her entire family is killed in front of her.

. The words ‘This is me unconscious’ appear on the screen.

. Tank Girl says ‘I like pain’.

. All the lines in the film.

. A soldier says ‘If I feel teeth, you feel lead’ when pressuring Tank Girl for a blow-job.

. The design of Malcolm McDowell’s room.

. Malcolm McDowell recites a poem about the number eight.

. Malcolm McDowell says ‘Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.’

. Tank Girl doesn’t seem to care that all her friends and family are dead.

. The soundtrack.

. The boredom of watching the film.

. There are pop-culture references to Baywatch.

. The line ‘How’s the Jet, Jet?’

. Naomi Watts takes the film seriously and attempts to act well despite everything else about the film.

. The shower scene.

. One pen has run out in taking the notes up to this point.

. Gratuitous, but tame, lesbian titillation.

. Naomi Watt’s general awkwardness as she notices the rest of the film’s awfulness around her.

. ‘Shaft’ style music plays when Tank Girl sees the Tank for the first time.

. The Tank can talk.

. The Tank is a product of ‘Water and Power’.

. There are attempts at a plot.

. The plot is nonsensical, but not in an entertaining way.

. Naomi Watts begins to look genuinely upset and annoyed at having to act with Lori Petty.

. The cheap-looking Tank interior set.

. The film is slow and boring.

. The characters.

. Naomi Watt’s forced laughter at Tank Girl’s jokes.

. The humour.

. Naomi Watts tells Tank Girl how ‘edgy’ she is.

. THE PIPE – Malcolm McDowell’s main method of torture in the film is to place Tank Girl into a long pipe that gets smaller the longer it goes. It’s a long pipe. This is the most utterly implausible, ridiculous method of torture ever commited to film. The exact same sense of dread and discomfort could be produced by simply placing someone in small space, a box or a coffin. The idea of it being a long pipe is completely pointless.

. It is unclear why Malcolm McDowell wants Tank Girl kept prisoner.

. Tank Girl is ‘sassy’.

. Tank Girl’s insults towards Malcolm McDowell.

. Tank Girl’s insults towards Malcolm McDowell eventually degenerate into giving him the middle finger.

. Tank Girl says ‘I win’ after torture.

. ‘Water and Power’ have a lot of tanks, devaluing ‘the’ Tank.

. The design of the Rippers.

. Didgeridoo music.

. The Rippers fail to be frightening.

. Malcolm McDowell’s character is called ‘Kesslee’.

. The sequence where Tank Girl finally drives the Tank.

. There is an animated sequence presaged by Naomi Watts receiving a bump to the head.

. The animated sequence.

. Malcolm McDowell asks a doctor for a prognosis after just being given a prognosis.

. Malcolm McDowell’s ‘cybernetics expert’ says ‘All the king’s horses and all the king’s men wish they had the technology I have’.

. The time it takes to write this out.

. The doctor is killed for no reason.

. Naomi Watts is forced to find Tank Girl playing with a fish endearing and amusing.

. More characters.

. The acting.

. The montage.

. Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin’s complicity in the film being made and the making of the film.

. The Tank.

. The costume department’s attempts at replicating Tank Girl’s comic-book clothes.

. The Jet looks better than the Tank.

. The film’s running time.

. The design, concept and execution of the ‘Liquid Silver’ nightclub.

. The child prostitution.

. The CGI effects.

. The club’s dressing room design and dresses for its dancers make it look like the ‘Cyberdog’ clothes shop in Camden.

. The dressing up sequence.

. Tank Girl has safety pins on her dress.

.SOLE EXCEPTION TO THE RULE: Iggy Pop plays a pedophile who gets his hand impaled on a spiked ball. Tank Girl’s daughter then says ‘That’s what you get for being a perv.’

. ‘The Madam’, another inconsequential character, is introduced with a cartoon.

. Naomi Watts is forced to wear a colander on her head.

. The singing.

. The musical number.

. The dancing.

. The dance choreography.

. Tank Girl’s larking about results in her adopted daughter being kidnapped again.

. Naomi Watts is forced to recite expositional dialogue that the audience won’t care about because of the failings of the rest of the film.

. The Rippers live underground.

. Tank Girl is incarcerated in a room full of balls.

. The Rippers.

. One of the Rippers wears glasses.

. The Rippers are all thinly disguised African-Americans for some reason, perhaps a cynical attempt to appeal to a more ‘urban’ market.

. Ice-T takes the film and his performance seriously.

. The broad characterization.

. Stereotyping.

. The clichés.

. Booga says ‘totally negatory’.

. The slang.

. Booga calls DNA ‘NDA’. This is a joke.

. The non-talking Rippers have markedly poorer quality costumes than the talking ones.

. More attempts to form a plot.

. When Tank Girl attempts to infiltrate the enemy compound, Naomi Watts says

‘What are you doing? Those guys’ll mangle you!’

Tank Girl then replies ‘Jet, they’re men.’

. The infiltration sequence.

. The ‘male calendar’ sequence.

. The vehicle sequences.

. The comparison between the action in the comics and the action in the film.

. Tank Girl says ‘I’m too young for this shit.’

. Managing to make a girl jumping for a speeding truck look unexciting.

. THE PIPE AGAIN – The pipe returns. This time, water is slowly poured down it, thus steadily rising around Tank Girl’s adopted daughter in an attempt to drown her. Again, this is completely and utterly pointless. Anything else could have the same effect; a box with a leaky water pipe, a coffin and a kettle, a puddle. The scene defies all rational human thought, and is wonderful in the sense that it was ever even filmed.

. The adopted daughter shouts ‘REBECCCAAAAAA’

. When the Rippers jump.

. The Rippers love vegetables.

. The Rippers don’t use guns.

. The Beatnik Ripper.

. The Beatnik Ripper’s poem.

. The other Rippers.

. The name ‘Ripper’.

. The ‘praying’ sequence.

. Naomi Watts getting dry-humped by a man in a kangaroo costume.

. Tank Girl seems to have forgotten about her kidnapped adopted daughter.

. The attempt at ‘Missile Boobs’.

. The attempt at spirituality and mysticism.

. Booga.

. Everything Booga says.

. Ice-T says ‘Motherfucking Kesslee killed Prophet.’

. When the Rippers howl.

. Things happening for absolutely no reason other than the director mistakenly thinking that they look cool.

. Ice-T rapping about the plot.

. The parachute sequence.

. The budget running out.

. Ice-T finally respecting Naomi Watts because she calls him deformed.

. The plan to get into the enemy base.

. The enemy base.

. Malcolm McDowell says ‘ Shoving a small innocent girl down the pipe and then letting her drown… is that wrong?’

. The Rippers have body armour.

. The Ripper’s body armour.

. The ‘courageous Beatnik’ sequence.

. The Beatnik’s death.

. The sax solo that plays at the Beatnik’s death.

. The fight sequence.

. By this point Hewlett’s pictures don’t match up with the events in the film.

. Malcolm McDowell’s plan and motivations make no sense.

. Malcolm McDowell’s CGI head.

. The concept of Malcolm McDowell having a CGI head.

. The science behind Malcolm McDowell’s CGI head.

. The design of Malcolm McDowell’s CGI head.

. The design of Malcolm McDowell’s robotic arm.

.The fight scene between Tank Girl and Malcolm McDowell.

. Tank Girl is willing to sacrifice her adopted daughter rather than admit defeat.

. Tank Girl says ‘I’d rather her die than live as your slave.’

. The film’s dubious moral message.

. The Tank is full of cans of beer in a world devoid of water.

. Malcolm McDowell says ‘COME ON!’ to the Tank.

. Naomi Watt’s final exchange with her captor.

. The ending animation.

. The ending.

. Wasting thirteen pages of notebook paper.

.The fact that there are 191 things that are wrong with this film and in all likelihood more that are missed on a first viewing and/or are a matter of opinion. In addition to this these are only surface details and any more looking into the movie with a background in film theory or basic human storytelling ability would inevitably lead to more problems. It’s in all likelihood the worst film that anyone has ever seen.

Go on, don’t watch it.

TRON LEGACY

dMYD

Starring Jeff Bridges

Trailer

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Gus Van Sant directed a remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho where he copied every frame of the original film to the letter, shooting a completely faithful shot-for-shot simulacrum because he’s a fat, demented voyeur with a penchant for filming incestuous Frenchwoman ripping their clitorises off with household appliances. So how faithful should you be to the work of an auteur? Tron Legacy isn’t a remake, but it may as well be; only John Lassister and two dogs who walked in by mistake watched the original in 1985 and the film’s subsequently sunk to a level of public recognition somewhere between Peter Sutcliffe and The The. Tron’s also not strictly the work of an auteur, but since no one can remember the director’s name and he didn’t do anything else of note, it almost fits the bill. A stark but striking experiment of emptiness, the 1982 model is near impossible to watch today, being devoid of emotion, narrative interest and slower than Peter Andre. It sits as a relic of technological progress, the first feeble jump to the CGI domination that invigorates/degrades every high-price lump of drama you’ve seen over the past ten years. No Tron, no Toy Story 3, no Tron, no Clash of the Titans. A mixed Legacy, rather like its sequel. HAHAHAHAHAHAA.

If the second Tron’s aim was to emulate the original in every conceivable way it’s succeeded admirably, producing a technologically updated 2.0 that improves visually and orally on its predecessor in every neon-coated, 3D-gouging manner, but then 28 years of dicking about with a mouse mat will do that. Where the sequel is most faithful is in its unflinching depiction of utterly unreal, implausible human relationships and dialogue, with even the ever-excellent Jeff Bridges failing to instill feeling into a script beeped out by a processor. Three decades have done wonders for the design, graphics and spectacle, but nothing for the words written on the script; it’s the same empty, un-relatable cack-talk that was peddled out in 1982 underneath a veneer of progress, even though this time it’s meant to revolve around a troubled father-son tete a tete and the emergence of a digital utopia. Eye twisting to look at and beautifully realized, it’s a worthwhile addition to a film with diminished horizons in terms of basic human emotions, and as such Tron Legacy is truly the child of its 80s forebear; an impressive, humourless spectacle, one point removed from all the other soulless money-vacuums playing the in the multiplex. Sweet light cycles though, wicked.

THE LAST PICTURE SHOW

dMYD DVD

Starring Timothy Bottoms

Trailer

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Looking back, you can sugarcoat or flambé, make up your own story or burn off the memories to present that gosh-darned past in all its life-wrenching detail. Peter Bogdanovich takes the second path, revising teenage years and fifties cinema to reveal the reality that was missing from them first time around, a world of feelings, failures and fear. Ingeniously framed and shot as a picture of the time, the film contrasts the harsh teenage years of its leads with the sweet-natured nostalgia of the John Wayne distractions they worship, the deserted pool-halls and general stores of Anarene acting as a wasteland as barren and unfriendly as the Duke’s beloved cattle trails. Constantly surprising, full of small-scale twists and throbs, the simplistic nature of the narrative shields a subtle empathy with the teenage foibles that ensue, from the sweet-natured innocence of Sonny Crawford to the sociopathic longing of town-nympho Jacy Farrow. Often compared to the early work of big fat fatty Orson Welles, Bogdanovich’s mentor/waste-disposal unit, because of its use of unknown actors and uh… black and white, it nonetheless never attempts to hit those giddy genius-heights that served Welles so well to his pauper’s grave. But then again, neither has anything else in the last 69 years, except Avatar, obviously. (89^th Special Edition Out Now, Blu-Ray, 3D, Something) It’s a very different last picture, more subtle and maybe more affecting; like many of its kind it’s a film about life repeatedly kicking childhood in the hope, but the understated nature of its performances and direction go some way to building a truthful picture-postcard of a time that all too often fades into the fuzzy comfort of nostalgia as the years go by. Watch it and remind yourself; times have always been hard. It’s why the good bits are so good.

Yes, Timothy Bottoms is the lead actor’s real name. It’s probably why you’ve never heard of him.

MACHETE

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Starring Danny Trejo

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Progress is an ebbing, churning cycle of death and rebirth, tossing aside established concepts and lumps of history in its wake and laughing, always laughing long and hard into the eternal dusk. Machete’s a B-Movie, and back in the days before you were thinking and crying and stuff that meant that it would be a back-up feature for an A-movie, aka the thing people came to see starring Cary Grant. A filler, a distraction, an extra bang for a buck, it was never expected to match the quality of the a-list and very momentarily-distracting it was too. We don’t have them anymore, progress having warped cinema to the point where people don’t get any extra entertainment for their huge wads of cash, unless you count the same Simon Pegg trailer played TWICE IN THE SPACE OF EIGHT MINUTES. So Machete’s not a B-movie, it can’t be, ‘B-Movie’ isn’t a genre. Except it is now, and it’s also run back as a concept because people don’t pay to watch movies anymore. The internet superpowers of whistle blowing and freedom have led to entertainment having the cash value ripped out of it by force, a dizzying prospect for the way we rate things that won’t be fully rationalized until someone figures out a way to entirely monetize the internet in 2013 and it’s back to torment as usual. You didn’t put anything into watching Machete save time, but karma will forgive you because Robert Rodriguez forgot to try as well, and he was making the damn thing. Piss-dribbling scripting, grunty acting and a rambling nonsensical narrative are all fun parts of the B-movie tradition: Robert De Niro and a bizarre fascination with Mexican border politics aren’t. The boredom-sponsored border patrol segments make up the good eighty percent of movie that isn’t a Danny Trejo’s stab-party, whilst De Niro makes his 85^th shambling, dead-eyed cash-grab run-through of the century, further dashing his credentials against some jagged rocks until he comes to resemble Ben Kingsley, the walking phone. These bits are terrible, and not in an enjoyable way. The parts where Jessica Alba showers and Danny Trejo eliminates every sentient creature living in the year 2010 are terribly incredible; exactly what you didn’t pay any money to see. It’s just a shame that Robert Rodriguez seems to have corkscrewed this knowledge out of his talent.

YO YO GIRL COP

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Starring J-Pop Sensation Aya Matsuura

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DUE DATE

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Starring Robert Downey Jr.

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M… Or D if there’s some sort of brown bag full of green money available.

Blame Simon Cowell. One man’s insane, successful crusade to place his own wealth above the cultural interests of an entire country has led to an interesting/terrifying national craze: steadily redefining the boundary of what ‘great’ means! It’s a good thing – by lying every Saturday night in front of an audience of millions, one man has managed to pick up the goalposts of cultural achievement and throw them eighty-six thousand miles out of the stadium and into outer space, creating a newer, better world. Things that were once ‘good’ are now ‘great’. Things that were ‘great’ are ‘genius’. ‘The Hangover’ was ‘the funniest film of the year’. ‘Due Date’ is ‘the funniest film since The Hangover’. And so it continues; money has finally triumphed over reality itself and it’s laughing all the way to the bank. Due Date is alright. It’s funny, in bits. People laughed. People were silent a lot as well. People checked their phones, and kissed, and wandered off to the toilet. During the funniest film of the year. It’s not of course; it’s a carefully constructed piece of play-safe cinema cash-grab with likeable actors and overblown set-pieces. But money says its ‘great’ and damn-hell-ass do we love money; money says don’t care that the characters aren’t well drawn enough for us to care about them, money tells us that it doesn’t matter that the film’s not funny enough to make it work as pure comedy. It’s fine. It’s alright. Which, in this brave new world, means it’s the BEST. FIVE GOLD STARS I LOVED IT FUN FOR THE WHOLE FAMILY THE PERFECT WEEKEND TREAT YOU’LL LAUGH UNTIL TEARS RUN AWAY FROM YOUR FACE AND TAKE YOUR LOVED ONES HOSTAGE IN A GIANT TANK DESIGNED TO HOUSE TEARS AND DROWN FAMILILES BUT THEY WON’T CARE BECAUSE THEY’LL BE LAUGHING SO HARD EIGHT THUMBS UP

TRANSFORMERS: THE MOVIE

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Starring Awesome Welles

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There’s something hugely appealing about depicting Orson Welles, the monumental prototype auteur genius/ professional fat-ass, as a gargantuan winged beast prone to devouring planets whole in a fit of galaxy-sized hunger, complete with a robot mustache the size of Greece to compound his devilishness. All-consuming awfulness acts as both character trait and film synopsis here, as everyone’s favorite Autobots are wiped out in the first eighteen minutes of scratched-out crapimation in a desperate lurch for the wallets of children. They’re all dead, the new characters are terrible, the celebrity voices are terrible, the humour is terrible, the phrase ‘crapimation’ is real now, a genuine phrase, there are 80s rock ballads every twelve seconds, and nobody cares about anything or anyone.

Welles’ final film, its best watched as a direct sequel to Citizen Kane, a meta-fictional dinosaur pile-up of how bad cinema can get, the direct line from the greatest film ever made to a cheap series of images designed to sell plastic. If he wasn’t so fat he’d be spinning in his industrial strength coffin, and if there’s any justice in the cosmos he’ll be back to eat everyone involved in the production, including Leonard Nimoy. Go on, imagine that for a second. Orson Welles, slowly cutting up and devouring a grunting Leonard Nimoy. For dietary pleasure and divine retribution. Chewing slowly, emitting a guttural chuckle as he takes his time over the ears. Wait what? What was happening? A film review? No, it’s terrible. Go outside instead. FOR THE LOVE OF GOD GO OUTSIDE.

THE SOCIAL NETWORK

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Starring Jesse Eisenberg

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Facebook: The Movie, scoffed everyone, everywhere, on their Facebook walls. Why are you making a movie about my homepage? Well, because that particular bundle of binary is your life, and this is the historically essential story of the idiot-genius who made it your life, and it’s written by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s the only decent script that’ll be read all year. Let’s go! It’s good! Let’s make ‘Like’ jokes!

It’s funny, it feels fresh, it works as both a gripping boardroom-figures shakedown epic for people who love money and a condemnation of the increasingly insane manner in which we live our ‘personal’ lives for anyone who enjoys the coming apocalypse. Young talent crackling among the actors provides a pleasing dry-run for future success; Andrew Garfield’s going to be a likeable Puny Parker, Jesse Eisenberg should be able to pick and mix projects from now on and J.T forgets his Jackson fetish for two seconds to produce his best work since shooting up spirituality in Southland Tales. Even David Fincher redeems himself for Benjamin ‘Fucking’ Button, muting everything in low hues and autumnal drabness, flicking back and forth through time and relationships for emotional resonance and imbibing the piece as a whole with a sense of surface skimming, an unreality based on flickering screens and shafts of digital code, like the Matrix at Harvard. Those twin-things are definitely a glitch in the system.

It’s a film of fakes and fakery, where everyone save the fall guy has an agenda and a pathological urge to appear as something they’re not to fit into something they don’t really want. Staging the whole thing as a drama allows the film to mirror the weird sub-reality that Facebook itself allows; little of what’s depicted here is real, but audiences the world over will be willing to accept it’s twisting of events as fact because it’s far more gripping than the tired old universe they live in. A great drama about Facebook reflects the site’s warping of boredom itself, a world where profile pictures become epic folly and character traits bulk up into Greek myth. It’s certainly not real life, but who wants that old pile of disappointment for a friend anyway?

THE ILLUSIONIST

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Starring The Pioneering Spirit of Jacques Tati

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No, not another entry in Edward Norton’s impressive adventure in career decapitation. It’s a different film entirely…. (This isn’t fancy literary speak. It’s not the film starring Edward Norton. Honestly.)

Rescuing old scripts from the lurching sepia hell of the past should be a more widely accepted form of ratcheting up celluloid gold: though not strictly new or fresh, they’re still original and unseen, unlike the 98% of remakes, rehashes and rewanks currently populating the DVD isles. (This isn’t even willfully hilarious exaggeration.) The Illusionist rips some tatty (JOKES) paper from the corpse of French comedian extraordinaire Jacques Tati (SEE, JOKES) and proceeds to rub loveable Gallic animation all over it, resulting in a… loveable Gallic animation. Minute details of human existence are lovingly rendered in watercolour swathes from the boiling of a kettle to removing ones shoes, whilst the care and attention chucked over the production leads to moments of genuine pathos and the greatest rabbit ever drawn in a glorified flip-book. Brilliantly devoid of dialogue throughout, the characterization relies on movement, expression and talent, whilst the settings of 50s Edinburgh provides wonderfully twee vistas of a lost world of decency. Behind the trappings of intimate beauty sits a sad tale of the death of innocent entertainment, the illusionist himself serving as a beacon of simplicity in a culture searching for something more; the repetition of routines combined with the accepting look on his face throughout the film gives a sense of satisfaction to a lost art that’s missing from the myriad hyper-speed extravaganzas at work elsewhere in the cinema-space. A minor triumph that no one will see, it’s worth watching for the greatest final-frame twist in cinematic history alone. Bring a tear-sucker…

BURKE AND HARE

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Starring Simon Pegg

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The moral of the story? Stick with your friends and chop up your idols. Not the film, the makers: here a smackering of Spaced-alumni scarper from the comfort and genius of Edgar Wright’s woollen hat sanctuary and straight into the arms of huggable Uncle John Landis, beloved purveyor of their childhood dreams and werewolf fantasies. The result’s a complete fucking disaster.

Real life makes Landis seem a big, frightening, lovable man, adjectives that have no business being bandied about in terms of this latest waste of celluloid, amazingly his first effort for thirty-eight thousand years. A roustabout murder-comedy with the laughs chopped off, it acts as a handy fail-mirror to the giddy heights of Wright’s latest work: Scott Pilgrim casts a motley clutch of youngsters who you’ve never seen or heard before, proceeds to let them say and do astoundingly entertaining things, and basks in the warm afterglow of cult quality. Burke and Hare rips Ronnie Corbett from his cut-price coffin and has him stand there. For two hours. Saying nothing funny. Wearing a hat.

This isn’t the way to make humorous films. Landis has been running around London with an oversized bag stuffing in funny people before having them… exist. On film. Hey, there’s Steven Merchant, the goggle-eyed Office thing-man! He’s smiling! His scene’s done! Papa Lazarou’s walking about, with a gun! And he’s… he’s shouting and… no, he’s gone. He’s gone. What’s happening? Oh thank God, Simon Pegg’s back and... he’s wiggled his ears a bit, and he’s run off and disappeared, and another scene’s ended, and nothing’s happened, and nothing’s funny. Landis has farmed some success in the past (specifically with Carrie Fisher pushing a high-calibre rifle into the pudgy face of a shit-coated John Belushi); it’s why everyone is working with him here. But he’s failed, and so have they: it’s a beyond-rubbish amateur project from a 60 year old man with form and goodwill on his side. So does that make it sadder that only six people turned up to watch it, or that none of them laughed once? Two morals then, three, another one for the road. Never let the men who wrote St. Trinian's 2: The Legend of Frittons Gold near pen, paper or oxygen ever again, and have Edgar Wright direct, write and possibly even star in every film made for the next fifty years. GO HOLLYWOOD, GO.

THIS IS ENGLAND '86

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Starring Vicky McClure

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(NOTE: THIS IS A TELEVISION SERIES. IT HAS NO BUSINESS BEING REVIEWED HERE)

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Flipping Heck, what a corpse-pounding good time that was. Midlands Scorcese Shane Meadows strikes again, deftly clubbing convention to paste with a blood-drenched bouncy castle of laughs, oddity, devastating emotional realism and reality-defying haircuts, all wrapped up in a soundtrack to make forty-year-olds weep. Reinventing realism by the simple realisation that life is both giggles and fists, the maestro hops around effortlessly from mucking about to tragedy, criss-crossing the steady chipping away of teenage abandon and innocence with a boy in a Dogtanion outfit and a parrot called Ian. TV really hasn’t seen anything like it for a bad long time. TV? Oh, yes, that decrepit thing in the corner that’s been pissing out Come Dine With Me on the carpet for the past few years; it’s just been given a shot of adrenaline and a bucket of MDMA. Meadows used to make epic films on his mobile phone, so a simple switch of screen size to allow for a bigger story isn’t exactly flying to Venus in a kitchen cabinet; when you write characters this likeable, compelling and believable it’s a pleasure to spend three hours with them, medium be hung drawn and quartered, characters which are nothing without the modern day troop of players assembled here; all brilliant, but none more so than Vicky McClure, graduating into the aloof bracket of actors who can make you cry with an eyeball movement. And Stephen Graham, who’s always been there anyway and BUY THE DVD OF THE FILM NOW IT’S ABOUT TWO POUND IN HMV. Television so good that it kicked everything else out of the screen and yet more proof of an underrated, home-grown auteur, a man who’s work won’t be truly appreciated for years to come until a decrepit Jamie Theakston wheels out the zimmer for ‘I HAVE REMEMBERED 2010’ and watches his kidneys pack up when he realises how good it was.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD

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Starring Michael Cera

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Anytime spent reading can be spent watching the film again.

THE MALTESE FALCON

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Starring Humphrey Bogart

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A-list Pulp fiction, a trail-blazing noir masterpiece wedged full of treacherous dames, chain-smoking Bogart and snivelling weasels, all lit with the same acrid glare of slumbag San Francisco 1941. Peter Lorre and Bogie dry-run for Casablanca, waterfall dialogue and slap happy physicality ratcheting them up to the peak of the pre-war pile, whilst Hammet’s schizoid plot writhes and twists like a sentient rope. It’s brilliant. You won’t watch it.You’ve seen a Bourne film in the past couple of months. It’s quick. Compared to The Maltese Falcon it’s like having a seizure in a combusting fireworks factory. All the masterful techniques at the birth of an art form can’t compete with the attention span of a modern man with phone in pocket, headphone in one ear and an eye on the door, and they shouldn’t have to. Something else will come along in a few weeks to fuck your face, so don’t worry about it. But where does that leave The Maltese Falcon? Better than 90% of the films released this month but tough to sit through unless you’re dead or a ponce, the kill-off with kindness seems to be to jack it up with credo and seal it off as art. A relic of bygone time with atmospheric effects that James Cameron can’t even get invited to (blurring the lens, the crackle of sound, jumping on lines), the piece can stand as a monolith of Spielberg-stamped-out simplicity, a beautiful, slow dive into patience and time. Plus, in fifty thousand years this is what the archaeologists will think the real-life forties looked like, when pulp titans roamed the earth. Then they’ll watch Bourne 8065 in 7.2 nanoseconds and get back to work, cultural time-code stamped for the day. Good film.

PRINCE OF PERSIA: THE SANDS OF TIME

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Starring Jake Gyllenhaal

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Ticktockticktockticktockticktock. Hollywood’s reaching a critical mass and the bullet train can’t be stopped, movies flying out the sides and cracking unsuspecting farm workers in the wallet with the all the force of a bad idea. Gyllenhaal’s second time-travel escapade sees all the ingenuity and heart that made Pirates of the Caribbean become formula; English actors painted brown, offbeat Yank hearthrobber pulling an accent for the lead, throw in a guy from Coupling and set it in ye olde computer-generated world: Bam! No. For all its plot holes the biggest absence here is the size of Saturn: there’s no Johnny Depp. It’s Pirates with Will and Elizabeth as the leads, and every bit as jump-out-of-a-harrier death wish inducing as that sounds. However, the problems go far deeper than a simple case of cut and paste money-running; a dearth of quality dialogue and direction seems to be the blockbuster’s leprosy at the moment, but big-time Hollywood crawls on with half a leg and three fingers left regardless. The script hasn’t been proofread in a tent-pole film since Star Trek, whilst pacing flies out the window in the face of computer programming gone bat-shit; stopping the running and jumping every fifteen minutes for a two-second sound bite window means there’s no time for characters, plot, tension or caring, a fundamental fuck-up in following anything that’s going on around you. There’s something horribly, soul-meltingly sad about watching decent actors trying to say nothing with charm and aplomb, even when you can still catch Ben Kingsley in the corner, the dollar signs rolling out of his black, empty sockets, furnishing his tomb. Look back at Spielberg, ring up George Lucas in ’77 and remember that people are capable of this. Prince of Persia stands not only as a gigantic dog-fucking failure, but a terrifying example of Hollywood’s increasing inability to remember the basics of telling a story, symbolized best by the ending; as Jake grimaces and scowls nobly in a literal sinkhole of CGI, you can see the humanity of the entire movie industry being sucked away into a big empty pool of money. Full of sound and fury, signifying nothing, it makes Iron Man 2 look like Citizen Kane. But the ticket does say POP: SANDS, which sounds like an anime flick from the future. Wait for that instead.

JARRING INTERRUPTION ONE: GET FUCKED FILM FESTIVAL

Being thrown in the back of a van and beaten with yeast before getting shipped to a nearby asbestos warehouse didn’t make for the best day of Louis Fitzsimmon’s life, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. His captors were well-meaning and friendly, violently nationalist Sarkozy supporters who had been locked in a three man-coffin for five years, unaware that their man had already won and retained Presidency of the beloved motherland. Cheerfully beaten around the face and lips when he related this information, Louis was subsequently tied to a chair for eight hours and forced to watch footage of Qwop Qwop’s disastrous bid for the 1984 Commonwealth 100 metres record, before a door slammed stage right to wake him from his stupor. They had left.

Shuffling his half-man-half-cheap-wood-substitute frame over to the window, he caught the van coughing and tipping its way around the corner and back to France, a trail of confetti and grenade rounds in its wake. Tear stained eyes found a small table in the corner of the room. A table stuffed with eight pills, four packets of mushrooms, three large bags of sticky, gummed up weed and a forklift truck full of cheap Romanian Vodka. The French knew how to say sorry.

There’s always a catch. A note scribbled in hasty crayon left Louis with his predicament; two movies, no time, a butler’s dozen of barbiturates. His synapses clogged with cheap drugs and seafood, the poor lab-lad had no choice but to bow to the demands of French Terrorism. Lurching violently around the room to the antique VHS player, he picked the film with the tits.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

dMYD DVD

Starring The Carrie Nations

THIS IS MY HAPPENING AND IT FREAKS ME OUT

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Delorean delivery! What’s the dial? 2662 and the sun’s gone out, but Raptor Jesus, look what I’ve found! How’s that? What’s what? In the hand dummy, the colour, the shape! Never? Never! Well I never, how I wonder, time for a show! Dig these sounds, you can see the notes on the back of that guy’s neck… but only after one. Then the neon flares up and you can’t see the floor for bubbles. Sweet talking, Candy Man! But… what are they doing? Why is it so… I feel so strange… Whoah! Hold up there Play Doll, the party’s only just started! Take three of these and call me in six, but watch out for the actors on the banister… they haven’t got any idea… I went into that room. I went into that room in the hall. And? They’re drinking, and smoking, and they don’t have any clothes on and… and one of them had a cape! Z-Man! Women and children first, the lifeboats have no linen and the rhinestones are falling over the bough… But holy hell little darlin’ you want a trip you get with Z-Man’s crew! I’m telling you he’s the only cat in all of this downtown that knows what they know and a whole lot of what they don’t! Hang cool teddy bear, eyes to the screen. It’ll all be over soon but you still wanna go back. Find it! Oh baby now, FIND IT! Find what? Jeez, quit fooling around and swing from that branch, I can hear them from way on over here. Walls of light and the keys to the wild frontier! Dames! Kittens! A man in the box on the edge of the world and he knows the way to find you, he’s taking you with him baby and all you’ve gotta do is follow it… You’ve gotta follow the sweet swingin’ beat of The Kelly Affair!

Stifling a cry he began weeping with joy. Realising the contradiction in terms for what it really was, his remaining hair fell out and ran to the door, pleading to escape the rolling hills of papyrus and gravity that his existence had become. Arch blades of childhood wonder rooted him to the spot, his drool spooling around the marbled floor of the warehouse in an ever circling spiral of film knowledge and criticism. A microphone pressed to his lips on the other side of the wall. He could see them! He could see himself talking!

‘Mr Fitzsimmons, your thoughts on the motion picture?’

‘It’s the 1960s.’

‘Yes, yes it is. Have some more MDMA.’

As he began to wear his own sense of discomfort, he knew something was up. There was a pit of bulls and something was stuck behind a garden, just out of reach…

Screaming silently as he fell down the rapids, it occurred to him that, really, only one man could help him now. He spat out his future and popped in the second video.

THE INVINCIBLE IRON MAN

dMYD DVD

Starring Lobotomy Stark

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Iron Man is the best superhero ever. Carefree, cocksure, powered by money, he’s a shrapnel-blasted war-cripple who snaps his frown sideways-round by building a flying life-support system with lasers and rockets and everything cool from the middle of an eight-year old’s mind. He’s even an alcoholic, with all the slurring, vomit and misplaced civilian casualties that this entails. He flies, he smiles, his armour’s a golden funtimes-magnet.All of which makes it incredible that Marvel Animation Studios managed to fuck this up so incredibly. What do you like best about Iron Man? Is it Iron Man? Would you like to see Iron Man in a film about Iron Man? Is Iron Man important to you in your definition of Iron Man? Where is he? WHERE IS IRON MAN?He’s about an hour in for around five minutes. He’s poorly animated, badly voiced, strangely characterised and completely uninvolving. His own father hates him, and wants him dead. He loves ancient Chinese temples. He’s an approximation of what blind people with no hands think is 3D. Admittedly Marvel Animated features fall somewhere between Cruel Intentions 3 and John Cena movies in terms of quality, but writing a parallel universe fan-fiction animated by bears a year before Robert Downey Jr. rips up the silver is a recipe for avoidance from all but the most desperate, death pleading, Stella-drenched film babblers. If you remember the sixties you should be dead, but if you’ve read any reprints of the blast-coloured births of these modern idols you’ll notice a jumping, jiving, fizz-bombing run up to fun, two men in a beige room main-lining pop-art genius and doing it for a day-job. They made Iron Man. These guys ripped him up and painted him grey. A pile, then. Walk on eight year olds, follow Uncle Robbie to the back of his van. Ignore the smoke.

VANS? NO, no more vans, I can’t see for the smoke and the light… what’s the time? Why isn’t he Iron Man yet?

Concrete. He was back. If anything could beat drugs it was the crushing disappointment of seeing your favourite capitalist raped and used by a cheap animation company to make money. It was what the shareholders wanted. Everyone approved. The best part of the movie was the expectation that it was going to be good. Biting off his shackles and crawling to the door he decided to go back to work, the vain hope of someday building his own high-intensity Swiss army suit the only thing keeping him from dashing his head against the rocks. The drugs were crawling slowly out of his tear ducts and forming into a purple mass on the floor as he groped blindly for the catch that would save his life.

As the warehouse burned he stepped dizzily out into the light of the free world. The purple creature behind him reared up and followed him down the road, grabbing idly at his testicles.

DOWN BY LAW

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Starring Tom Waits
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Children by their millions scream all morning across the world – it’s time for school, it’s time to learn and it’s time to get punched in the face. The comparable adult experience is the mass hysteria that grips an average crowd at V Festival or that Hyde Park-O2-Mediocrity-Wireless-Backslap-Gathering-Thing. These people aren’t screaming for The Script, or Scouting For Girls. That’s medically impossible. No, en masse they’re pleading, screeching, bleeding from their mouths because they’ve been told that they have to watch an art-school film, on pain of being tarred with the idiot brush. Time to get cool.
Down By Law is art. It’s not entertainment. But, wait, no, of course it is, if you’re entertained by black and white, boredom, tracking shots and interminable stretches of silence, like a wistful psychotic reality-bendingly trapped in a 1940s photograph. Don’t go expecting to be mildly diverted even if you’re a fan of Rain Dogs; though the piece does stand as a Monotone Waits Festival dedicated to his gravelnessess’ fearsome acting prowess, it has none of the dive-bar charm of the man’s music or tightly drawn characters, preferring instead to cruise along blasting vagueness from a rusty grey cannon, never committing to a style or a meaning. It’s a Jim Jarmusch film, so you get some bang for your stolen torrent from a cornucopia of themes, hastily sketched out in whatever genre the director pinned his tail on that day. It’s a film about men, freedom, isolation, Tom Waits, the breakdown of language, brotherhood, mime, time, crime, nature, lust, emptiness, DJs, relationships, Italians, music, meaninglessness, misunderstanding, law, Tom Waits, slapstick, footwear, inanity, intolerance, barriers, boredom, fighting, loss, coffee, choices, penance and Tom Waits. If you’re interested in skimming lightly over all of these at the same time then Down By Law is the best experimental work in the medium of celluloid ever made. If you only want one or two then go watch Toy Story, it’s a laugh riot and the third one’s coming soon YIPPEE, WHOO, COOL!

HOT TUB TIME MACHINE

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Starring John Cusack
Trailer

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You don’t need a time machine, you’ve got DVDs. Watch these again instead, the evergreen ‘80s fantasy-fuelled hilarity houses that this abom-a-thon wishes it could touch:

1) BACK TO THE FUTURE
Still the King. Such a fine slice of flux that every copy has created its own
time loop paradox, making it impossible get bored of even if you’ve seen it
on eighty-six separate bank holidays. Crispin Glover’s calling card and simultaneous disappearing act.

2) GHOSTBUSTERS
Saturday Night Live vs. Satan, and amazingly twenty-eight times better than that
sounds. Considering it already sounds like Dan Ackroyd dreaming up an eighty-foot Staypuff Marshmallow man to suffocate the entirety of New York with his
creamy goodness, the film still stands as a greater achievement than the Berlin Wall falling over. Bill Murray’s finest hour.

3) INDIANA JONES AND THE TEMPLE OF DOOM
The worst one, and still more fun than a bucket full of neon-robot fun-dispensers.
Indy gets racist, beats up a Marwell’s worth of wildlife and smacks child-labour
laws back to the reign of Victoria, mostly with his shirt off. Plus thanks to the
wonders of time travel, that fourth one with the monkeys NEVER EXISTED.

4) GROUNDHOG DAY
The unbearable hell of eternity, made wonderful by cake, love and punching
nerds. Check the DVD extras for the scene where he spends twelve years
hanging Ned from a meat hook by his testicles and screaming Gilbert and
Sullivan into his chimp-masked face. Bill Murray’s finest hour.

5) BILL AND TED’S EXCELLENT ADVENTURE

WYLD STALLYNS!

The funniest thing about Hot Tub Time Machine is the unbearable likelihood that the Steve Parker lookalike will become a big star, despite being a lump of flesh ripped from Jack Black’s forearm and left to grow in a petri-dish full of liquid failure. Run away from it, run, the water burns the skin.

AN INCONVENIENT TRUTH

dMYD DVD
Starring The Greatest Threat To Existence That Humanity Has Ever Faced
Trailer

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Tiresias with Powerpoint, a prophet from Capitol Mount come to spread the doom-word amongst a populace of cud-chewing, oil-flambéing sub-humans, One time Presidential Loser Al Gore seems an unlikely saviour of an entire planet. And he will be, if nobody listens to him. Though placing far too much reliance on the Gore Family Good Time Tedium Hour in order to placate the personality-obsessed sceptic septics, the film does make a convincing and terrifying case for how much we’re date-raping the planet while God’s away, making it a horror movie of sorts, but one where the audience can choose the ending by switching their lightbulbs off. If there’s any justice in the world it’ll go down in history as a world-uniting interactive exercise. If there isn’t there won’t be any history, any justice, or anyone left to read these words or laugh at how boring Gore used to seem before he got passionate about the planet not dying. There are other ways to get information about how not to condemn your grandchildren to an ungodly oblivion scenario, but this is as good an entry point as any, entirely worth watching for the bit at the end where Gore very calmly weighs up the options: MONEY…. or BEING ALIVE. Watch it, then do something about it. We’re all going to die anyway but we don’t have to take the entirety of human creation with us.

FOUR LIONS

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Starring Riz Ahmed
Trailer

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Have you read these all the way through? The reviews? You don’t have to of course, and they’re long, a couple of paragraphs at least. It takes time, you could be doing something else, so there’s a big letter to give you the gist, and the name of one of the actors, if you follow films based on a gurning, largely money-hungry ‘personality’. There’s even a trailer, because a moving picture tells eighty-six thousand, two hundred and forty eight words. But this bit, this is just lecturing, it’s sermonizing the blessed and eulogizing the Michael Bay powered atrocity exhibitions that plague your soulless multiplex. (This isn’t a pretentious subconciousness metaphor: Cineworlds are shit.) If you’ve read this far you’re either a trooper, hopelessly sympathetic, or not yet evolved to the state where only whippet-quick images of explosions and tits hold your attention for more than twelve seconds. You’re playing catch up with the world. But don’t worry; the world’s still playing catch up with Chris Morris.
Nobody seems to know how to hold a debate on Islamic extremism, possibly because they’re still blowing our limbs off on a semi-annual basis and generally poking Western Civilization with a long stick laced with nitro-glycerin and faith-fuelled hate. Anyone without genitalia swinging from their forehead knows not to listen to the right-wing fuckjams constantly decrying the whole Muslim world as a vat of Satan, but equally the Liberal Left’s delicate, nuanced and longwinded arguments for actually thinking about things is boring enough to make you want to lodge a spatula into your frontal node. In truth, there are only two people who have worked out how to deal with the problematic issues involved here; Chris Morris, lanky trickster-God creator of The Day Today, and the complex Coloradoan gestalt entity known as TreyParkerMattStone. They’ve done it in a way to beat the stubborns, corner the attention-deficits, and piss off the die-hards. Their solution is to make ‘em laugh.
People pay attention when they’re chuckling. They want to laugh more, so they look, and they listen. Morris’ genius here is to ‘do for suicide bombers what Dad’s Army did for the Nazis’ – making them a ridiculous figure of such baffling stupidity that dimwits across the country can form a kinship with their ideological enemy, sing along to Toploader and generally all be human. Because that’s what everyone is; human, which makes us all fair game for being laughed at long and hard, until our lungs ache and we can taste the tears. Black humour isn’t the universal reaction to being in a terrorist attack, but it’s a damn appealing one. When the concrete’s crumbling around you and logic’s run off down the road it’s a beautiful freedom of everybody to sit back and laugh at everyone; the bombers, the zealots, the politics, the stupidity and emptiness of death, yourself. All you can do is laugh.
Morris has made a career of laughing uncontrollably into the abyss, chucking corks and bits of debris in a futile attempt to plug it up. Anyone expecting the delicate brilliance of Jam or Brasseye is going to be disappointed here; despite the occasion lapses into absurdist ‘clarkey cat’ lingo it remains a fiercely broad form of comedy, utterly different from anything else he’s attempted before barring The I.T Crowd. Stylistically it’s a return to more conventional comedy ala Gervais and Merchant’s soul-stomping shitfest Cemetery Junction, but unlike that drooling sell-out marathon, Morris has chosen to write a long-form sitcom about Jihad, saving it from being worthless by actually having a worth. If humanity stops running in cycles of stupid this may be seen as a game-breaker for the freedom to laugh at anything you want, in much the same way that South Park’s recent Mohammed baiting challenged the frightened rabbits and generally… sort of lost. Maybe they’ll all get shot and dumped in a river in black bags after all, and the world can carry on being serious and scared as it’s always been. Your choice. Oh… the film’s quite funny and the actors are all very good. Sorry.

VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA

dMYD DVD
Starring Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem
Trailer

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Sit down and glaze, tilt your head to the side, feel your right palm drowning in that jar of mild salsa, your jeans moving slowly off the leather in a gravity-indulgent trip to the floor. Open your mouth a bit, lower your lids. Nobody can see, and if they could… well, they might forgive you. Relax. It’s time to watch a pretty load of nothing.
Film as landscape painting, the simplicity of Vicky Christina Barcelona is sat there in the title, beckoning you forward with a stylish DVD case and a bottle of cheap red. It’s an easy ride for the dumbest senses, your eyes lazily following Scarlett Johansson as she runs across the grass, heart beating slightly out of step as Javier Bardem pops on his nerd-glasses and eviscerates himself on canvas. The languid vistas and dappling shadows of Barcelona ebb in and out of shot as the mannequin stunners traipse across bohemian idylls; the galleries, the streets, the fields, the poetry vineyard and the view from the top of the world, all lit in the same soft warmth of terracotta and sunlight. Spanish guitar hovers around the corners of every scene, framing everything in an easy fantasy world, a film as aesthetic pleasure, something beautiful to run in the background and enjoy as you start to drift away…
Actually no, of course not. It’s a Woody Allen film. Turn the volume up and the gentle pastels on the screen schism and slide into two separate portraits, a gulf between what you hear and what you see on the celluloid. Listen to the words whilst staring at the lips. This is Allen filtered through some of the most beautiful people alive, the director choosing his place and actors for maximum discomfort, a surreptitious contrast between perfection and perception. Essentially four essays on the facsimiles of love and art, creepy uncle Woody picks up some of the most attractive mouths in the world and uses them to deliver a deliberation and observation of their confused attempts at lust, creation and meaning. Each character compulsively lies to themselves on the subjects that keep them alive, brief moments of happiness and assurance overridden by time marching on, twisting relationships and dissolving constructs to create a sense of dull chaos pervading humanity’s lack of meaning. The assured Spanish ‘artists’ have the most to lose, but it’s Johansson’s character that elicits the most sympathy; a girl searching for something that doesn’t exist, but something that she couldn’t understand if it did, living a fiction. The neurotic world-hater mercilessly piles on the juxtapositions between vision, narration and cold-hard emptiness, culminating in a final shot of emotionally-unknowing lost folk so sad it’d make The Graduate cry. One of the world’s most cynical men delivering a sermon through four of the world’s most beautiful people, it’s an odd experience that leaves you dissatisfied with everything and contemplating inserting a biro into your head. But it is very, very pretty.

IRON MAN 2

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Starring Robert Downey Jr.
Trailer

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Iron Man is a terrible superhero. Boring, pious, powered by money, he’s a globetrotting guilt-merchant constantly found moaning about how hard life is whilst blasting above the stratosphere in his blindingly fast greatest-piece-of-technology-ever. Which he keeps to himself. He even only became a comedy drunk for ten minutes so that he could spend the next thirty years of comics espousing the wonders of sobriety.
All of which makes it incredible that Jon Favreau and Robert Downey Jr. managed to make a walking goatee the coolest cape-fancier on the celluloid block two years ago, a whippet-smart multimillionaire sex pest who fixes martinis whilst Cyclops cries, or laughs in Batman’s face as he endlessly bangs his head against the grave of his parents. Have they done it again? No.
Well, a bit; this is still Downey Jr’s playground. Funny, smart, ad-libbing and pissing about in an endless grab-bag of scene stealing, his natural charm burns through the tedious dumb-assery of the script whilst simultaneously running eight laps around the rest of the cast, tying them to a chair, and setting them on fire. Without a decent idea to cling to, the rest of the characters devolve slowly into the shining, empty CGI-effigies of themselves that adorn the posters; Mickey Rourke does nothing with nothing, Scarlett Johansson gets her lips out, and Samuel L. Jackson sits around and gets fatter in a disappointingly boring interpretation of a man named ‘Nick Fury’. The only one who escapes from drowning in Downey is the eterna-dependable Sam Rockwell, playing Tony’s evil nerd-twin in such an offbeat and easy manner that you wonder if he spent the 90s sucking on the same pipe of magical talent crack, dreaming of a day when he could headline an incredible film that nobody wanted to watch. The makers have taken a running leap into the stupidity that makes up 96% of superhero films but neglected to bring any excitement with them; when you can count the action scenes in a two hour slog on one hand it’s clear you’ve got a problem. When the best one of these consists of a tattooed piece of mahogany armed with ‘Repulsive Whips’ being repeatedly rammed by a fat man in a car, you’ve made a bad film. A bad film nonetheless saved by a great actor, but the sheer level of disinterest in the cardboard characters doesn’t bode well for 2012’s all-star spread-thin smack ‘em up spectacular. If only The Avengers was being directed by the greatest writer of ensemble comedy-drama of the last ten years, a man able to sum up a character in three lines whilst retaining a borderline-genius for pacing and emotional nuance… Sigh…We may never know…
Still, Iron Man 2. Moan that it’s not Spider-man. Thank Stan Lee that it’s not Spider-man 3.

ERASERHEAD

dMYD DVD
Starring Your Own Subconscious Fears and Desires
Trailer

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You have no idea who you are. You’ve got no idea why you’re doing what you’re doing, when you’re doing it. Rickety Evil Neighbour David Lynch knows, but luckily he’s here to tell you in the most oblique way possible, with a punctured lung and an aged woman screaming blindly in the face of chicken. A dripping psychoactive plume of black trapped in a DVD, the disc festers away in a hive of apprehension and legend, daring you to watch it and get dark ‘n’ freaky, thirty years of reputation piled on top of it to stop the oddity running off. But it doesn’t need wives’ tales or write ups. It’s good. It’s very good. Not a film in any relatable sense, it really is a genuine experience, and like anything that doesn’t dump everything at you on a plate its worth depends on what you put into it. It’s your choice: a sofa-centered laugh riot with a bucket of marshmallows or a running jump into the frightening pits of your own soul, the whole thing depends on how much you’re willing to give to Lynch’s sparse canvases of image and metallic noise, like pressing your face against a Rothko painting in the dark, with a CD player full of rust. Sublimely ridiculous and ridiculously sublime at the same time, it defies genre, description and words, demanding to be seen or ignored depending on how far you’re willing to go. Just don’t touch the Lady in the Radiator.

THE JONESES

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Starring David Duchovny and Demi Moore
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The young guy in the eighties business movie with the chequered tie and huge framed glasses has nothing left for the meeting with the big-wigs and he sweats and he mumbles as he stands to the head of the table all eyes on him it’s time to get fired and he looks about and he clears his throat he’s got nothing he’s got nothing for this fiscal quarter he’ll be eaten by the wolves think of something think of something now now NOW: ‘I uh… uh…I… STEALTH MARKETING.’ He stares. He’s silent. The older board members sit back, light cigarettes, smile. He’s laughed out of the room. He jumps.
Of course it’s ridiculous. Dead-eyed scumbags and struggling students acting around you, all the time, faking their lives and yours for the ability to sell three more cans of Cloven Hoof scented body spray? It’s the stupidest idea since David Cameron. It’s evil, rotting and warping the very reality around you into a commercial fug of unknowingness; it’s the end of Dollhouse where the corporate world bursts over the earth with fake humans and fake personalities, no one knowing who to trust, but this time… it’s to sell you something. Again. Always to sell you something. The most ridiculous part is that ‘Stealth Marketing’ is completely real, and it’s started: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Undercover_marketing
The Joneses is probably the first mainstream movie to address this detestable headfuck, but yesterdays’ paranoid yet prescient sci-fi toss is this afternoon’s limping, predictathon romantic comedy; it’s not a great film. A hammer-powered smackdown between frightening satire and Hollywood bollocks, presumably the backers of the film were too terrified of losing future funding to allow a complete damning of product-world, preferring instead to slap a patronizing, humanizing ending onto a previous hour of refreshingly warped family values. The characters bizarrely react to each other like a real household, making it pleasantly odd to watch as daughter bed-hops with dad and mum sends the kids to their rooms for not making enough sales, though this weirdery rarely strays into actual entertainment; as a comedy it’s as hilarious as tetanus. The whole thing works as a simplistic reveal of how commercialism is slapping it’s way into our basest moral make-up, but to learn up on the creeping phenomenon its probably better to actually read about it or something before the smiling corporations stick an extension cord into your neck to pump adverts for meat straight into your purchasing cells. Nice try against the inevitable wave of evil though, and Duchovny does his best with a mouthful of exposition. It’s almost a shame that a movie built on advertising has the most boring title in the history of film; no one’s going to see it, and it’ll be too late. Now quit your moaning and saddle up; we’re all going to Burger King, to cheat on a cow or something. What?

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

dMYD DVD
Starring Swedish Actors You’ve Never Heard Of
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZJUgsZ56vQ

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Essentially Twilight from a parallel reality where filmmakers don’t hate you, this charm-oozing paint-poem of a movie is casually designed to probe the stranger questions of human connection through an inhuman, blood-drenched lens. The only half decent vampire revision since Joss Whedon was fictional king, here the overused haemoglobin enthusiasts are smacked down into a brutally realistic evocation of empty small town Europe in the late 70s, swathes of white and grey illustrating the drab nothingness that little Oskar has to trudge through on his way to a big, pointless school. However, the startling crimson injection of its dentally-challenged heroine changes the whole make-up of the piece, chucking questions of morality, love and monstrosity around like other horror films flick entrails. Child acting has always been a mine-field of am-dram mumble-a-thons battling screaming balloons of Daddy’s money, so it’s refreshing to discover that here it’s the kids who should quickly write up a new contract to never work with idiots or adults, deftly combining silent restraint with nanoseconds of heartfelt glances and reactions. The two leads almost single-handedly deliver a subtle treatise on the beauty and horror of naivety, aided and abetted by quiet support and a delicate, reverent script, never obvious but always sincere. Daringly ambiguous, touching and macabre, it also has the benefit of feeling very little like anything that’s come before, barring a psychotic breakdown on a school trip to Helsinki. In love. Run fast to the internet and watch it now before the inevitable Americana remake, an infinitely more soul-crushing prospect; nothing alive in the next year will be more terrifying than Miley and Billy Ray gothing up in order to teach us all how to be a little more ‘human’. Gee. And Shucks.

CEMETERY JUNCTION

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Starring Ricky Gervais
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XYDeHIszUqA

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Don’t mess with science. Science did everything first, science knows why you cry, and science is going to stop the inevitable black-hole-end-of-all-things with a Pan-Dimensional Hadron Collider and a Bucket of Paper Clips. Science’s big discovery this weekend is the long-debated half-life of talent: its ten years. Ten years from being a trailblazing cement-balled idea-fountain to facing a dull grey slide into rehashing the past-glories of the eighty-six million generations before you and dying, cold and alone, buried in a pit of money. Paul McCartney. John Lydon. Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant. The Office is brilliant: Cemetery Junction is the stuff they used to laugh at whilst thinking up David Brent in Wetherspoons, huffing ingenuity and running on Rustlers and cheap lager. But that was ten years ago. You can see what they’re doing; it’s a youth movie, made by grown ups. It’s an escape fantasy delivered in a style that was haemoragingly boring and out of date even in the film’s heavy handed 70s setting. It makes you want to set fire to your premier seat, just to watch the Minstrels popping about as you burn. The actors aren’t at fault here; this is all Gervais and Merchant’s mess, a cliché decathlon with 6th form dialogue and characters devised on the back of miniature cereal packets. Pity the first-timers caught up in it, even the one whose acting style consists of staring at a wall for eight years, causing the hands of your watch to move backwards as boredom becomes your new stepdad. Pity Ralph Fiennes even more, forced to do his best with a villain so pantomime he might as well wear a cape and sit at the end of a pier downing Lambrini. This probably isn’t the end for the former GENUINELY FUNNY MEN but it does represent a big old spit in the eye for any integrity they used to carry around as the result of writing one of the best sitcoms ever. Occasional flashes of the old dialogue slither through, but overall it’s worth waiting and praying for the other offerings from The Big British School of Comedy this year: Pop-Cultural Cardinal Edgar Wright’s Proto-Seminal ‘A RENZOKUKEN TO THE FACE OF THE ENTIRE FILM INDUSTRY, THE MOVIE’(http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU) and Chris ‘Christ’s Fat Cock’ Morris’ ‘Jihadi Dad’s Army, Four Lions (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yGk2TojOd-4) Both will be ninety eight times better than this. And death by Black Hole.

SONIC THE HEDGEHOG THE MOVIE

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Starring the mysterious Hyper Metal Sonic

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If one in every hundred novels holds a great film, then THERE HAS NEVER BEEN A GOOD MOVIE BASED ON A VIDEOGAME. Visceral thrills for people too scared to leave the house, button-cracking-games at their best jam interactivity at your palms and retinas, screeching into your ears about Metroids, Jinjos and other pixellated oddities that sound like a list of complaints at an STD clinic. That feeling of control? It’s not there in a film. It’s gone. You can rant about it for eight hundred years afterwards on message-boards and worthless blog-matter, but it’s not yours, you didn’t make it, you can’t change it. Which is a shame for Sonic the Hedgehog The Movie, because it really is a bucket of rubbish. Animated by half a scarecrow with crayons for fingers and a bag of piss for a brain, the whole endeavour is really only worth it for the parade of unwieldy accents that the desperate, content-ignorant hacks bring to the script, Sonic in particular sounding like a schoolgirl with no lungs attempting to play Blanche DuBois. For normal people it’s perplexing, but at least fans will be happy – all your beloved Sonic characters are present, including Princess Sara, someone called the ‘President’ and pre-school favourite ‘Drooling, Cursing, Mentally-Deficient Owl’. The plot makes no sense whatsoever, riffing on Terminator, cross-dressing and childhood nightmares from playing the Mega Drive for eighteen hours, whilst the soundtrack is awful enough to make you crave death by contortion. Disjointed, crack-dubbed nonsense then, but unfortunately not good enough to be vaguely entertaining. Excellent title though, great job 1996.

KICK ASS

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Starring Aaron Johnson

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Does exactly what it says on the tin. But not exactly. Summer 2008 saw two-hour misery spectacular The Dark Knight eating up time and wallets with dour abandon, so naturally along came beady eyes, grasping hands and a gnawing, stumbling critical acceptance of the superhero movie, in turn freeing filmmakers from the shackles of jumping through hoops of pure origin in order to twist the formula and take the piss. Hence Kick Ass. But again, not exactly. From the first shuddering radio crackles of men in the sky to the final geek-jump circle-jerk Joker quote it’s clear that Kick Ass is a film designed not to rip sheets off the spandex set but rather to gently poke at them with a stick of love, homaging and toadying in equal measure. Doing this with a free platter of bone-shattering violence and glaring primary colours is a nice touch, but ultimately the whole thing’s not quite as shocking and revolutionary as it thinks it is; the ‘real life superhero’ aspect gets thrown out the penthouse window when jetpacks, gangsters and katana wielding-tartan-skirted cartoon characters are chucked in, creating a film that has no idea what it is or what’s going on, but is going to have some fun trying to work it out. The whole thing drags a bit by the end, some of the acting is pantomime-hilarity and the script occasionally falls down a manhole and bleeds, but these are minor cynical window-dressing to what is essentially an eleven year old girl getting kicked in the face by a grown man. Its fun, isn’t it? Yes it is. Go see it, have fun. Here’s the best part: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xgOLmjhxVVU

RAGING BULL

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Starring Blobert De Niro

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Fuck men. Fuck them. They’ve fucked you, they deserve it. They’ve fucked women, they’ve fucked each other, and they’ve fucked an entire planet. Every conceivable problem in the world at any given time is the result of a McCoy chomping, dick swinging, Jaguar sliding Y chromosome, but for what reason? Why? The answer is balls. Big balls.
Raging Bull is a film about balls, a film about men, and a film about a man. And that man is Robert De Niro. In the most sado-masochistic casting decision until Alec Baldwin signed up for Thomas and the Magic Railroad, De Niro here elected to gain 27 kilograms to play the demented, wife-mashing Jake LaMotta, with phenomenal results. The film belongs to the him, to a performance so nuanced and natural that you feel you’re watching the real LaMotta’s own dreams of his wasted life, Scorcese’s elegant, classical tone and direction making beautiful the story of a man whose choices made him one of the ugliest creatures alive. As a document of the failings of a gender it’s heartbreaking, the raging LaMotta simultaneously a flailing figure of compassion, desire, fear, disgust and ultimately pity, De Niro showing every conceivable facet of a man as complicated as any. On a technical level it’s probably the best of the duo’s get-togethers, mixing a timeless classical quality with the harsh realities of being a fuck-up with no future, whilst De Niro has never really bettered it. But he didn’t have to, it’s one of the greatest performances of the twentieth century, which probably qualifies it for a quick two hour torrent between making soup and playing Modern Warfare 2 again. For the rest of your waking life. You’re a regular Raging Bull.

THE WHITE STRIPES: UNDER GREAT WHITE NORTHERN LIGHTS

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Starring Jack White and his sister, Meg

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Christmas at Cinema’s was business as usual. Comedy was half-cut by eleven, tripping over the table cloth while attempting to scream at the ceiling about how funny he was this time, Indie and Arthouse pulling him back and telling him to shut up; Blockbuster was sat in the big chair in the corner, smoking a Havana and giving them that look that meant he was threatening to cut them off. Period-Drama shrieked and tittered at his poorly scripted quip, before looking down sadly at her reflection in the ashtray and thinking how old she looked. Late again, Music Documentary sighed as he turned away from the window, flicked up his collar and slowly wandered off into the rain. Poor bastard has to work extra hard, pull every stylistic trick and quirk in his repertoire to get a fraction of the other’s meat. Because he’s different. He’s specialist. Music documentary has a tragic case of aggressive limited appeal.
A sobbing shame, because whatever you think, or completely fail to care to think about Jack White, man and music, he’s unarguably one of the few modern uber-buskers to earn the batted-about term of ‘rock star’. A frighteningly streamlined collision of talent and drive has culminated in a walking, guitar-lacerating embodiment of old fashioned blues and Warhol-level stylistic tropes, wrapped up in a seven foot tall red-clad doll of porcelain skin and scarecrow wig hair. He’s a terrifying man, a more terrifying star, a true enigma in an age of playing chum-buckets with your idols. Though seemingly a documentary, this isn’t a film about reveals, rather it’s another product of the singular vision that Jack White has brought to his life and career, all blacks, whites and reds, fuzzy cuts and oblique quotes. Any fan looking for gossip and rumour behind the three colour genius of his meticulous art-block-barrier will stomp off disappointed, but for anyone else in the world with a pulse that beats to a rhythm the film serves as a timeless portrait of an artist on top form, a demented screaming beast of a showman who seems to be channeling eight generations of dead bluesmen through his head at the same time, shuddering and screeching as he blasts them out through his throat and fingers. Musically it’s incredible; White Stripes shows seem to be entirely built of those tiny moments in other gigs where your favourite band deviates slightly for a fraction of a second during a song, when the world comes alive and your heart races at how much you love them. This is nothing new. There’s no doubting that the man is a genius, one of the few in the history of the medium to ever hold the title, and the film does a nice job at saluting him and bolstering the legend. But the real meat, red and dripping, comes straight from the eyes of his beloved ‘sister’ Meg. As the film progresses it centers more and more on her, the camera gazing intently as she listlessly peers from windows and across arctic beaches, cigarette fuzzing down, saying nothing. Humanity trickles out of the film whenever they share an interview, the strange glances and suppressed giggles suggesting a childish game being played on a global scale, a private joke stretched to a decade-long career. By the end it’s almost entirely Meg’s show as emotion begins to mix with the music, not the wall-cracking intensity of Jack’s blood squall guitars but something smaller and quieter, a tear on a piano pedal. Being the greatest bluesman of the modern age guarantees some soul; the man clearly breathes and pisses music every second of the day, and as musical portrait it’s something to be kept in a box and treasured. But the film goes some way to revealing that it’s Meg White who is something different, something smaller and greater. She’s his heart.