PAUL

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Starring Simon Pegg & Nick Frost

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Forget Blue Valentine: there’s a far more heart-rending break-up currently tearing through reality, causing aficionados of late-night early 2000s Channel 4 comedy to jump off buildings and cry into their Wrightinis. All six of them. The mums and dads of Spaced have run off to Hollywood on separate planes, and some of them have crashed on landing; Edgar Wright’s courted genius with Scott Pilgrim, creating possibly the best film ever with just a bunch of unknowns, some big cartoon words and a vat of caffeine. Simon Pegg has… well. This.

Paul is an odd one. For most of its run time it cruises along on happy memories of that fictional flat, with Pegg and Frost playing themselves and generally bumbling along and bumping into things. It’s a dimwitted Yankee cousin of the expert Brit pastiches they produced back home, not without its charms but stuffed full of swearing and playground jokes, like the pair have been growing backwards. Wright’s jitter cam is replaced by loving Spielberg tributes, every comedy actor the two have ever watched stoned turns up in diminishing cameos, it’s all… normal. Normal jokes, normal acting, normal CGI. Slightly boring, but loveable. Whereas Scott Pilgrim repeatedly punches you in the face, climbs up the walls and gives you a cartoon-shag-heart-attack. It’s almost soul-crippling to know that most audiences will prefer a couple of chuckles at joint jokes and the warm sedate knowledge of simply knowing who Pegg and Frost are. Oooh, I like them, let’s go see that………………zzzzzzzzzzzzz WhuHaadflk? Oh, good job to Seth Rogen though. He’s the most competent he’s ever been when you can’t see his bloated, stubbled mess of a stupid face.

STREET FIGHTER: THE MOVIE

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Starring Raul Julia

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Street Fighter, the game, is chess with added explosions, gallons of acrobatics and a man with a perfectly-balanced intestinal tract. Since nothing on this plane of reality can live up to the incredibility of that near-perfect piece of pop-art, the movie was always destined to be flip-flopping bag of failure. But wait: There’s JCVD, the American colonel with a secret Belgian ancestry, there’s two-men playing Ryu and Ken in what seems to be a Lethal Weapon sequel written by dead stoats and look, Kylie Minogue, bizarrely taking everything dead seriously in her first steps towards a film career strangled at birth. Now cower: there, towering above the entire sad-debacle of a failure stands Raul Julia, resplendent in evil-train-driver garb, mangling the very idea of the video-game movie with a performance for the ages. Honestly. Julia is one of those hideously underrated actors who barely gets a mention today on account of his, well, untimely death. A justified hero in his native Puerto-Rico, the man was a maestro of overblown, expressionistic acting, treating movies like pantomimes running on amphetamines and generally blowing anyone else out of the movie like a Dambuster. After his first flush of Hollywood success as Gomez ‘Acquitted’ Addams, he took on the preposterous role of General M. Bison to please his kids, big fans of the game. What a guy. He preens, he pouts, he exhales the virtues of genetically engineered super soldiers, and he has pictures of himself astride a horse. He’s a whirling maelstrom of camp brilliance, and he did it all whilst he was dying. The film itself is a churning nightmare of terribleness: Julia single-handedly rescues it from hell by being basically the best thing ever. Respeck.

SCOOP

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Woody Allen

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The old bastard shows his face at last, and we’re finally getting somewhere. Though still a definite maybe in the grand scheme of asking, Scoop at least shows tingles, shoots of the genius that’s been stamped on Allen’s forehead for so long, doing so with a wit and lightness of touch wholly absent from his other recent attempts. It’s still too early to form the coveted Unified Theory of Allen, but Scoop suggests a good film, bad film, good film, bad film hypothesis akin to the Star Trek movies, albeit with more nerds, unsubtle Jewish guilt and terrible dialogue. Lighthearted is the lazy watchword here, with a plot that even the characters don’t care about chugging along slowly under a barrage of endless Allen-talk whilst pretty established actors trill along to his past reputation. The continuing theme of his London work seems to be to drag every actor in Britain into his maelstrom of averageness whilst carting a drugged Scarlett Johansson after him to smile and look pretty in glasses and pretend to be his daughter. So far so crud. But Scoop has a knowingness about it, an intelligence wholly lacking from his other recent work with the exceptions of Vicky Christina Whosit’s ruminations on art; we see a comic afterlife, witty banter about Alzheimer’s, the basic sense that Allen for once seems to know what he’s doing. And while it doesn’t make for a great film, it’s still a willion times more entertaining than watching Ewan McGregor and Colin Farrell sit on a small boat hurling cockney accents at each other. The key to understanding what may lead to greatness in this retrograde retrospective comes from a scene early on; Allen, essentially playing himself, acts out a tired, old-fashioned magic show as the ‘Great Splendini’. Though the magician is a terrible old fool and the audience can see how every trick is performed, they nonetheless laugh and clap along regardless. Now that’s meta. Much meta.

BRIGHTON ROCK

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Starring Sam Riley

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ADAAAAAAAPSHUN! People who read are better than you and they’re after your respect. When you read a book before seeing the film adaption you’re delivered bragging rights from on high like a cackling, screeching cultural harpy: ‘Dah dah dah dah dah, subtlety, blah smack blah, depth of narrative, gurrrrrnnnnn. And if you haven’t read any of the words? You get this:

Brighton Rock is arty melodrama transplanted to boring old Britain. There’s nothing wrong with seeing seafronts and scumholes you’re familiar with from gigs and gay walks shot up like a modern film noir; you might even get a giddy little thrill the first time Pinkie runs the pebbles under the pier. Ooh look, I’ve been there. And now it’s on a screen, right in front of me. Am I famous? Does that count? What? But then the novelty wears off. Not gripping enough for a thriller, not involving enough for a drama, it’s a sad, self-contained little morality play about two people with no moral leanings whatsoever, a bad-boy gone worse and a bored girl content to kiss up to a psychopath to escape the humming and drumming that make up her half-life. There’s no real weight to the whole thing, least of all the petty insouciance of Pinkie himself; you never get a real sense that he’s a man with his life ahead of him running from the gallows, no depth deeper than the blank stares and petulant sneers that pass for character. There’s a thrilling battle between teenage freedom and Catholic guilt in here somewhere, a daring essay to be argued on the morality of the old world versus the possibilities of the twentieth century youth explosion. But it’s probably all trapped in the dusty old pages of a book by Graham Greene that a Pinkie would never read.

Then again in a few weeks NICHOLAS CAGE FIGHTS SATAN WHILST DRIVING A CAR THAT’S ON FIRE.

HAPPINESS

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Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman

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If Pulp Fiction is Pulp Fiction for psychopaths, then what’s Happiness? Well, it’s a film, and thank God, because films only require a paragraph of your thought and a little letter at the top of the post. Debating the rhetorical query would at least take an essay, perhaps with some follow up questions at the end and some biscuits. Happiness, the film, is a twisted little dog, played for laughs, a damn good dog at that. The sort that brings you dead birds.

It’s only a comedy in the sense that it juxtaposes its hideous circumstances and personalities with a veneer of tradition; the American sitcom, the twee Indie flick, but its real strength comes from the reality under the chuckles. We wander around our dirty streets knowing that there are people behind the windows phoning strangers to talk about cum, we know that there are lonely, empty women desperate for any form of physical contact that will fly into diseased specimens and possible danger. We know there are child-grabbing paedobastards, though not one in every semi-detached house as the Daily Mail would have us think. By making scary light of these everyday insanities the film forces us to giggle at the depths of human nastiness, the only sane course of action aside from stomping it out with a gigantic Facist Doc Marten. Though every character is largely terrible in almost every way it’s hard to avoid the sense of pity seeping through every frame, from the uneasiness of the actors treating the sickness as comic gold, to the croco-snappy dialogue of the writers laughing at the derelicts of the modern condition. A funny kind of sickness, a japesome lump of scum and a timely reminder that the world couldn’t lose its losers but was content to simply paper over the cracks with adverts and action films.

Actually, let’s clear up the other question. It’s biscuits. Happiness is biscuits. Baked with Heroin.

CASSANDRA’S DREAM

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Ewan McGregor

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Is an auteur an auteur if his films make you want to die? Can being an artist trump morality? Will this be known as the ‘Polanski Doctrine’? Cassandra’s Dream is meant to be a thriller, a morality play, a competent piece of cinema. In reality it’s scrawled by a child on a wall, a child who’s a seventy five year old man facing a crippling case of dementia and attempting to show the world he’s still capable of coherent thought… when he’s not. He’s really not. People don’t talk like this. It’s not entertaining, it’s not thought-provoking, its not realistic. Ahhhhhh… but it’s a ‘morality tale’! Films in general don’t have to adhere rigorously to the constraints of realism. Pirates of the Caribbean doesn’t contain an ending where Jack Sparrow peels of a skin lesion and eats it, succumbing all at once to lonely sea-madness and sun-drenched cancerous death, or a disclaimer that states that Johnny Depp is an actor. But if a film’s not realistic it has to be something, not a DVD case sized gulf in the universe. This is yet another sequel to Exposition: The Movie, a technique that might pass for arthouse if it wasn’t so funny. Allen never gave up on making comedies; he simply evolved to a different plane of humour and told the world that he was making serious films, and the world believed him because they hoped they hadn’t put their faith and belief in the ideal of genius into anything more than a clown.

The women come out best again, Hayley Atwell and Sally Hawkins at least attempting to bring some feeling and identification into the bizarre mangles of dialogue they’ve been given. McGregor and Farrell simply look lost and confused, like they might burst into tears at any minute when they realize they’ve wasted their time. And you will. You’ll cry. You’ll weep with the realization that you’ve lost more precious minutes on earth, lost life itself. But have a heart, weep some more for Allen’s followers in the seventies; watching Cassandra’s Dream they’ve time, sanity and respect for a man they once loved.

BLUE VALENTINE

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Starring Ryan Gosling and Michelle Williams

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If you’ve been in love you won’t want to watch the whole thing crumbling away again, with prettier people. If you’ve never been in love you’ll think its nonsense melodrama, because that’s what love is. The film can’t win. It’s a beautiful, quiet story of love as a drug, the only thing in the world while it lasts and the desperation to recapture when it leaves, depicted by two dedicated, obsessive actors mastering their craft before your teary eyes.

It deals in film cliché, in flashbacks and shameful tear-jerking, but the key here is its attention to real life. The flashbacks are essential to show change in all its jarring, unbelievable reality, creating the sense that these characters have woken up one morning and discovered that they’re no longer the people they fell in love with. Of course, that’s not true, and the time difference between first glances and final bruises makes it clear that this has been a gradual disintegration, all the more painful for being so real. The film’s genius lies in its use of cliché to present a jarring change; one minute Gosling serenades Williams on the city streets, a vibrant oddball with a glint in his eye, the next he’s staring down his receding hairline in a motel mirror, unable to remember the feelings that got him there in the first place. None of it should work in a more jaded age but it does, the shameless endless dragging tears rather than tantrums from a crowd who’d rather be watching Harry Potter again. Love’s real, and it hurts. But there’s beauty in sadness and beauty in loss, and this film manages to capture about a tenth of the real life feelings. It doesn’t sound a lot, but if you’ve been in love, you’ll know.

BLACK DYNAMITE

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Starring Michael Jai White

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KICK! PUNCH! IT’S ALL IN THE MIND! Funny’s all in the mind, awesome’s all in the fists; Black Dynamite has a mind, two fists and a huge penis, and he’s using all four in an endless battle against crime. Does that sound like a good film? If it does, it’s because it is. Hooray!

More knowing than Grindhouse with more exploitation than the Murdoch papers, Black Dynamite grabs the Epic Movies, Date Movies and Scary Movies by the metaphorical balls and twists them until they cry, shoving real parody down their honky throats by adhering like a saint to its source material and actually remembering to make you laugh along the way. Escalation of insanity is the order of the day, helped along by hilarious actors you’ve never heard of rather than an addiction to celebrity cameos by people who should have had their careers chopped off at the ego back in the mid-90s. MJ White is the king of this new court; superbly deadpan whilst making people dead; he’s good enough to make you want to seek out the rest of his work for evidence of awesome. Oh. What? He was Spawn? In the movie of Spawn? Ah. No, no, best just watch Black Dynamite again, drunk. It’s funny and fun. What the hell more do you want? Get out of my kitchen.

VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA

LOOK, I’M WOODY. HOWDY, HOWDY, HOWDY.

Starring Penelope Cruz, Rebecca Hall, Scarlett Johansson, and Javier Bardem

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An ungodly, unending nightmare duel between two actors who can’t act, each one landing mimsying luvvie flop-punches at each other inside a battledome constructed of one man’s middle-aged sexual inadequacy. Larry David SHOULD KNOW BETTER whilst combatant #2, a glob of stubbled plastic called Henry Cavill, is the new Superman, a role which will suit him well as it involves standing and smiling, standing and smiling, standing and smiling. It’s all he does here. All he does. He’s effectively the romantic lead. And he stands. And he smiles. And that’s all. ‘Whatever Works’. But it doesn’t work, and that’s the rub; if the whole thing is some hyper-conceptual meta-comedy that laughs at the audience rather than have them laugh at it then fine, seal it away deep, deep overground in Woody’s private DVD penthouse with the old movies and the porn and the demented, sphincter-grappling Hungarian hell-porn but for God’s sake keep it to himself. If it does attempt to be a real comedy, for people and everything, then it’s failed and you shouldn’t watch it. Whatever Works that is, not Vicky Christina Barcelona, which is actually reviewed here, several months ago, largely because Michael Jai White punched out time itself. This thing here, the words you’re reading, is a retroactive review, from last week, the past. Vicky Christina Barcelona is great, meaning any unified theory of Allen is already thrown hopelessly out of the bathwater, or something. Who is he? What does he want? Does he have any form of human interaction anymore? Why is he allowed to make films? Stay tuned for next week!