movie-reviews.com.au

dir: Guy Ritchie
Guy Ritchie: bad director, rejected even by Madonna
I wish I could say that RocknRolla is a return to form, finally, for the guy who hasn’t made a decent flick since Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels. And, in fact, I can say it. It is a return to form. The problem is, the movie is still a total fucking mess. The difference is that compared to his other recent movies, it’s an entertaining mess.

Lock, Stock’s supreme virtue is that it was Ritchie’s first flick, so it was the first time we saw him do his shtick, and, on the most part, we liked it. Everything he’s done since then has either been a dull retread or a painful revelation of how little he brings to the directorial table. Don’t ever watch his stupid flick called Revolver. You’ll kill someone afterwards if you do. Possibly even a puppy.

RocknRolla possesses all the negative elements typifying Ritchie’s work (more characters than a Tolstoy novel, overbearing voiceover narration, bad Cockney accents, nonsensically convoluted plots, painful machismo, amateurish reliance on coincidence ex machina and characters doing shit that makes no sense in order to allow the next cavalcade of fun to begin), but it has a few sequences of humour, brutality or wit enough to almost justify the two hours I spent in these retarded people’s company.

A group of crims calling themselves the Wild Bunch somehow get possession of a building. Another old school Kray Twins ripoff called Lenny, who styles himself the underworld king of London (Tom Wilkinson), rips off two of the Wild Bunch, being One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba), scams them out of the building, and convinces them that they now owe him 2 million euro through some idiotic scheme involving a councillor (Jimmy Mistry) with development approval.

Lenny enters into partnership with a Russian mobster/businessman, who he intends to sell the property he scammed the other guys out of. The Russian (Karel Roden), very much wanting the business deal to come to fruition, loans his priceless lucky painting to Lenny as a gesture of good faith. Whenever the Russian tries to physically transfer the money Lenny requires, by some coincidence, One Two and Mumbles end up ripping the accountants transporting the money off through the collusion of the Russian’s accountant, an icy femme fatale who consorts with crims because she’s bored (Thandie Newton). Oh, yeah, that old chestnut.

Would you have sex with this man?dir: Clark Gregg

I have respect, much respect, big respect for Chuck Palahniuk, but I’m starting to think that maybe he is the American literary equivalent of Dexy’s Midnight Runners. Sure, Come on Eileen was a wonderful little pop ditty that still stinks up greatest hits radio decades after its use-by date, and it probably resulted in a lot of laundry for a lot of women called Eileen, but what else have the musical impresarios and master storytellers of Dexy’s Midnight Runners done for us lately? I’m not going to go so far as to say that Chuck is a one-hit wonder for Fight Club, which I still think is a great book and a great film (a great, great film in the hands of David Fincher). The problem is that I just don’t know what else he has to offer either the book or the film worlds anymore.

Choke is a premise without much of a meaningful plot and without a character worth following for 90 minutes. I’m not sure if it’s Sam Rockwell’s fault as the lacklustre main character, because he seems okay for the first half of the film. What I can’t tell is whether the problem is that the flick doesn’t know where to go, or whether Rockwell decided he no longer wanted to be in the flick.

Whatever the reasons, this ostensive comedy seems clever enough for a while before it falls apart. It starts off by following the adventures of a hellishly seedy-looking sex addict Victor Mancini (Rockwell), who even goes to his Sex Addicts Anonymous meetings in order to have sex with another sex addict (on the bathroom floor, no less). She is, for a sex addict, probably the skankiest looking woman I’ve seen since the last time I saw Asia Argento in anything, her being the reigning Queen of Cinematic Skanks. Some canny director could capitalise by bringing these two skanks together for a movie. Make it so, Hollywood: it could be like the Foreman / Ali Rumble in the Jungle, except with the superheavyweight skanks of the world locked in mortal combat instead.

dir: Baz Luhrmann
You know we hate each other and ourselves
Pundits, wags and wits were saying that this here flick Australia was going to be Baz Luhrmann’s, and Australia’s, blockbuster answer to Titanic.

In a way they were right, in that Australia is a disaster, a tragedy and a testament to man’s arrogance and eternal hubris.

To say that this film is awful doesn’t really capture what is achieved in the opening half hour or so of this flick. I’m not sure if the film embarrasses me more simply by dint of my being Australian, or because I feel deep shame that people overseas watched this flick thinking it had something to do with Australia the country, as opposed to Australia, the Baz Luhrmann opium-suffused candy-coloured, brain dead fantasy.

dir: McG
I will destroy you, puny humans!
It’s a sad day when you acknowledge for your own benefit that the world no longer needs Terminator movies. New ones that is. The first two will always be classics of a sort, but it’s just a sad realisation to see that it’s unlikely that they’ll ever be able to approach them in quality, let alone match them.

The curious element was that the story we were always watching was never really the main story. The main story was always the reason for watching these various people and cyborgs run away and try to fight progressively more advanced robots, but it was never the overarching plots of these films. The battle between the remnants of humanity and the ruthless artificial intelligence called Skynet was always some nebulous threat in the future: our immediate concern was supposed to be the survival of some people in the present.

Salvation, being the first of the Terminator flicks that doesn’t have time travel as its main plot device, is set during the time when this apocalyptic conflict has already destroyed most of the world, or at least North America. Sure, the protagonists are all still trying to survive assault from fiendish and relentless machines, but it’s not for some way of safeguarding humanity in the future: it’s survival in the here and now.

So when John Connor screams at people about doing or not doing something, it’s not to protect a timeline or the birth of some saviour of humanity, it’s to protect his own miserable life. Seems a bit selfish, doesn’t it?

dir: Gavin Hood
Oooo, Shiny!
I know that the X Men movies have been pretty popular, and I know that a major component of their success has been the efforts of Hugh Jackman as the most popular of the mutant comic book characters, being Wolverine. And I can see why making a film just about Wolverine would have seemed like a winner right from the start.

I mean, it just feels like a logical progression. If the X Men films were successful, and, the theory goes, Wolverine or Logan is the key ingredient, then if you take all the distractions and unnecessary components out, you’re left with something pure and wonderful.

I believe it’s the same process used in manufacturing crack cocaine.

dir: JJ Abrams
Organised by rank, and by how much they probably got paid
Excitement might have been high in some quarters; dread might have been higher in others. The prospect of a new Star Trek film might have seemed inevitable to some, and downright puzzling to most. After all, the Trek flicks, either the ones with the ancient crew or with the still quite old Next Generation crew never really made that much money (certainly not blockbuster numbers), and the last hurrah critically and financially was back in the 90s.

And yet they kept putting out films as if there was a burning need in the public to see these same weak characters age poorly and deliver groan-worthy jokes that seemed outdated even back in the era where the only form of mass entertainment were cave paintings and hitting each other over the head with clubs.

As with a whole bunch of other franchises, properties, brands recently, they decided to bring it all back and to undertake a reboot / reinvention in order to rekindle interest in a largely apathetic public. And they handed the responsibility for directing this, the eleventh, or XIth, if you want to get all Roman numeral and classy, entry in the franchise to J.J. Abrams, the guy who, amongst other crimes, created the television shows Felicity, Alias and Lost, and directed the third Mission: Impossible flick.

I will admit to not being a fan of any of those shows, but I am a fan of Star Trek in all its forms, permutations and combinations over the years. Not a dress up and go to conventions kind of fan, not a buy-the-commemorative-merchandising kind of fan, not a true keeper of the flame screaming zealous murder against one flavour of Trek over the other kind of fan. But a fan all the same.

A fan who didn’t look forward to new films or rebootings or anything to do with Trek anew because the material itself, the characters and the depiction of this kind of space opera was just too tired and stale to ever appeal to me again like it did when I was younger. The films, as far as I’m concerned, should have ended with First Contact, because that’s the last time this shit looked even vaguely credible on the big screen. Even then I probably would have been happier if they’d never made any further films after The Wrath of Khan.

dir: Bryan Singer
I know he's evil, but the film's still watchable. Honest
A fair few nerds were angry and dispirited when youngish director Bryan Singer, famous for directing the criminal mindfuck that was The Usual Suspects, and powerful after directing the first two X-Men films, chose not to make the third X-Men flick, and instead wanted to make a pouty-faced serious flick about some Nazis who failed to kill Hitler. I certainly count myself amongst those pitchfork-toting nerds after watching that dire 3rd X-Men flick, which left me angry and unfulfilled, but it wasn’t because I felt Singer had some kind of personal obligation to entertain me.

It’s just that I hated that third movie so goddamn much. It seemed strange at the time that Singer, whose baby the X-Men movies were considered to be, would voluntarily choose to neglect his responsibilities and go off to make a flick with Tom Cruise playing a ‘good’ Nazi with an eyepatch. In fact, it seemed downright comical.

Having just watched Valkyrie, which I fully expected to be terrible, I can see why Singer was attracted to the story. Of course, the cynical side of me also sees that such material is prime Oscar-bait, which has an allure all its own, but considering the treatment of the material, it doesn’t feel manipulative or false. Singer had been trying to make this flick for most of the 2000s, and to me it looks like he got to make exactly the flick that he wanted to make. Each scene is meticulously put together, and it really is a remarkable piece of cinema independently of the acting or the story.

dir: Courtney Hunt
Oh, the woe and suffering of the noble underclass!
It’s funny when I tell you that this flick deals with illegal immigrants, white trash, Mohawks, people smuggling and desperation, and you immediately think it must be set somewhere on the US-Mexican border and star Tommy Lee Jones.

Funny in the sense that it’s odd, not funny as in hilarious.

It’s funny in the sense that of course this flick is instead set on the border with Canada, and instead of the main character being a noble immigrant sorrowfully leaving behind their dirt farming existence in order to come to the States to enjoy its bounty in the form of hamburgers and novelty toilet seats, it’s about one of the people smugglers.

In no sense does the story bother with the refugees as characters. Its focus is entirely on a white trash woman living in a trailer home with her two kids, who kind of falls into people smuggling as the only way to look after her kids after being abandoned again by her worthless Mohawk husband.

dir: Catherine Hardwick
Love is stronger than Death, even stronger than mental retardation
Oh good gods is it terrible! Make it stop!

Stop the night terrors, the images of atrocious acting that march through my nightmares each night since subjecting myself to this awful, awful movie. I know I’m prone to exaggeration, but this truly is a flick so atrocious that it almost seems like a parody of itself, a parody of teen vampire romances, and a parody of filmmaking in general. This film uniquely captures, the way dogcatchers uniquely capture stray and rabid dogs, a collection of actors giving performances so terrible that if they were racehorses, you would surround the cast and crew with screens, load up the shotguns, and put them all out of our misery.

I’ve seen this director direct decent films before, with young casts, so it’s not like she’s out of touch with the young ‘uns and completely unable to elicit decent performances from them. She seemed to do okay with Thirteen and Lords of Dogtown, the former dealing with young girls, the latter with young boys. Here, well, it’s as if she either a) didn’t care how terrible the performances were, using takes of scenes with obviously unintended mistakes and woeful line readings instead of redoing them, b) thought wooden, unconvincing performances would be more inline with the terrible prose of Stephanie Meyer’s truly awful books, or c) she was so angry at studio interference that she deliberately set out to sabotage the production with substandard everythings on every level.

dir: Paul W.S. Anderson
Statham: He's looks like he's carved from granite, and acts like it too
There are two Paul Andersons who work as directors in contemporary cinema. There’s probably more but there’s two main ones I’m concerned with. Paul Thomas Anderson is the guy who made Hard Eight, Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood. The other Paul Anderson, with the W.S. initials betwixt the Paul and the Anderson, is the British chap who made films such as Mortal Kombat, Event Horizon, Resident Evil, and Alien Versus Predator.

Guess which Paul Anderson made this flick.

Death Race is a remake of a flick that was called Death Race 2000, made in the seventies. I guess calling this version Death Race 2000 would have given people the impression it was a period piece, a Merchant Ivory bittersweet coming of age story with Model T Fords and horse drawn carriages fighting it out for the love of a good woman / boy / pony.

Death Race 3000 would have hurt people’s brains by being so clearly set in a far too distant future. Like Futurama.

Death Race, on its own, unadorned, is a purely functional name, the way this flick and Jason Statham’s head and acting are purely functional. In this film, there’s car racing, hence the Race portion of the name, and people are killed, hence the Death. A team of scientists, fresh off of mapping the human genome, synthesised the Race and Death parts together into a working title, yea verily, and nominated Paul W. S. Anderson to extrude, expel and otherwise excrete this film upon an uncaring world.

Truth be told, by way of saying that this isn’t the shittiest film Anderson has directed, it’s almost like saying it’s one of his best ever achievements as not only a director, but as a human being. His best achievement, despite his complete and utter horribleness and staggering incompetence as a writer, producer or director of movies, is the fact that he and Milla Jovovich had a child together.

Yes, it’s all well and good that he’s become a father, and as long as he’s a good father, all his multiple failures as a filmmaker can almost been forgiven. It’s the theory I use to justify my own life in the face of a) multiple failures and b) becoming a father. What I really mean is that the high point of Paul W. S. Anderson’s achievements are that he got to fuck Milla Jovovich.

dir: Scott Derrickson
I've come to destroy your world because of all the bad actors upon it
The Earth Didn’t So Much Stand Still on This or Any Other Day, it More Kind of Farted, Rolled Over and Went Back to Sleep.

Perhaps a bit long for a title, but it’s certainly more accurate. Of course if they didn’t use the original title reminding people this is a remake of the Cold War era classic, then no-one would be any the wiser, and no-one would have bothered to go and see it.

On a scale of 1 to 10, 1 being pointless, and 10 being pointed, this remake of a beloved alleged sci fi classic sits somewhere between pointless and pointlessly enjoyable. Ascribing a numerical value to that itself is pointless, but that’s probably not going to stop me from assigning a numerical rating at the end of the review. The Day The Earth Stood Still is not as entertaining or scolding as its predecessor, but it certainly looks prettier.

dir: Pierre Morel
I don't think French food is that good, honestly
Taken is a glorious throwback to the 70s and 80s where revenge wasn’t a dirty word. Sure, revenge flicks are a dime a dozen, and one is released every week (to the cinemas, with about five per week going straight to DVD), and they travel very well overseas. I guess it’s because everyone can relate to revenge.

That being said, revenge is a fundamental cinematic genre in and of itself, but that doesn’t mean that most of these flicks are good. They’re not. They’re easy to fuck up.

I guess it’s the fact that they should be so easy that lulls people into a false sense of security, or a real sense of insecurity. They don’t take the time to craft them well, or to make the main protagonist worth following in their journey to blissful, blood-spattered Old Testament style vengeance.

dir: Tomas Alfredson
Little girls aren't always made of sugar and spice and all things nice
You would think that the vampire genre has been pretty much tapped out by now. The well went dry right about the time someone decided vampires could be an excellent Mormon stand-in for preaching abstinence and that sunlight, instead of burning them, would make them go all shiny and mirror-ball. How pretty! All Twilight needed further was ponies, and it would have been complete!

The endless permutations, allegorical renderings, highbrow and low trash versions mean that almost each and every possibility has been explored and then some.

So if you’re one of the many who’s heard of this strange little Swedish film and you’re wondering why it made so many critics end-of-year lists last year, and why it’s gotten so much acclaim, you might think it’s because it takes the vampire genre and radically twists it around and makes it all new again, kinda like that surgery they claim can turn women back into virgins. Yeah, as if.

You would be, like I was, surprised to find that Let the Right One In, based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist isn’t really that different. Even in Swedish, even set in the 80s, it’s a recognisable part of the vampire canon of tales and stories. This vampire needs blood, has to avoid sunlight, has to be invited in to a house in order to enter it, and its bite alone can turn its victims vampiric if the vampire neglects to kill those it feeds on.

So nothing radically new there. The difference is in the telling, and in the way we are meant to care not only about the vampire, but the main character, a human boy of only 12 years of age.

dir: Oliver Stone
Mission Accomplished, cocksuckers!
On some level I have to suspect Oliver Stone wants to think of himself as one of the premiere chroniclers of the American nation . Kind of like a Ken Burns or Sir David Attenborough of presidents, wars and otherwise momentous times. True, he did the dirty with Alexander the Great, which is an abomination wrapped in a travesty wrapped in a fiasco, but his focus has generally been on the American soul and body politic in all its glory.

After JFK, after Nixon, he’s taken the curious step of eulogising or biographising a president still in office at the time of the film’s release, which seems odd. There hasn’t been time for history to either elevate or diminish a statesman’s legacy to any appreciable degree yet, to warrant such a going over, you could say. There hasn’t been the time for the dirt to come out, for the squealers to squeal, for the many damning versions of the truth to accrete, accumulate and overflow. You question the purpose, the intent, the objective. The point.

Oliver Stone is not a subtle man, nor a humble one. Making a film about a sitting president is as much about trumpeting the director’s view of that president to the world as it is about the president himself. You’d think the intention, thus, is critical or at least condemnatory.

dir: Ari Folman
Waltz with Bashir
Animated movies don’t usually tackle genocide, massacres and the delayed effects of traumatic memories on people as their main themes. They’re usually about the virtues of being yourself, or about believing in yourself, or about what it would be like if dogs, cats and robots were lucky enough to have the voices of celebrities.

Israeli director Ari Folman has made something quite unique here, in that it is a documentary about his lack of memory about something he was involved in, and it is an animated documentary, at that. How many animated documentaries can you think of, off the top of your heads?

None, because there aren’t any. It really is quite remarkable. The animation itself is straightforward and comparatively simplistic, in that this isn’t something you’re watching because it’s a technical marvel. But it serves the story perfectly, because it doesn’t distract from the telling of the story; it facilitates it. For a completely rendered version of what happened, it approaches a kind of truth many if not most documentaries lack.

dir: Danny Doyle & Loveleen Tandan
Dancing our hunger away
The question shouldn’t be whether Slumdog Millionaire really was the best or one of the best movies of 2008, or whether it was worthy of the top honours at the Academy Awards most recently. Such a pointless question can’t be answered objectively, because everyone knows, deep down in their heart of hearts, that the Oscars are no measure of worth, artistic or otherwise.

They are a measure of Hollywood’s self-regard, on the other hand, where it likes to reward itself for being so goddamn wonderful and deeply humanist, despite being an industry based on its brutal treatment of people. Every now and then (as in, pretty much every year), films that no-one could actually like are rewarded because of how wonderfully the voters make themselves feel for being so incredibly open-minded and cosmopolitan.

The real question is how the Academy can live with itself for giving an Oscar to the same man who directed A Life Less Ordinary, which is one of the most downright fucking awful movies ever made.

dir: Clint Eastwood
Grrrr
What a sweet, crusty, curmudgeonly old man Clint is. And boy, is he old. He has officially reached Methuselah age, but it’s not slowing him down, not a bit. Gran Torino was one of two films Clint put out in 2008, following closely on the heels of his other massive two-film endeavour, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima. So age has clearly not wearied him. He’s making more films than ever, and his films are more loved than ever. The man’s certainly not in decline.

All the same, as a director Clint happily works far harder than as an actor, since he’s earned the right to just coast along by now. And coast he does, playing the same Clint he’s been playing for forty years, just older and crustier.

And we love him for it, and are more than happy to let it slide. Even when the melodrama is as cheesy as it is here, even when the acting (admittedly by non-professional actors) is atrocious, and when the script is so appalling. We don’t care because it’s Clint.

Here Clint plays Walt Kowalski, a grizzled, Korean War vet who’s recently lost his wife and basically hates everything and everyone around him. Or, we’re supposed to believe, he only gives the appearance thereof. He is continuously, aggressively abusive and racist to all and sundry, with especial grunting slurs being aimed at his neighbours, none of whom are white enough for Walt’s liking. Everything that mattered to him is tattered or gone, or was never there in the first place. He can’t stand his sons or his grandkids, but you can’t blame him, because they are represented as being loathsome, mercenary people with not a single likable trait.

dir: Zack Snyder
The Last Laugh
It’s almost unbelievable to me that this flick has eventuated, has been realised and ended up on the big screen. I don’t say that as a fan of the graphic novel that spawned this monstrosity, but as someone simply who’s read the story and thought it could never work as an audience-pleasing, seat-filling, multiplex product. Watching Watchmen hasn’t convinced me otherwise.

The story, well, let’s just say I can’t imagine it ever connecting with the kinds of audiences who go to the cinema to watch a flick chock full of super heroes. People, the vast majority of people who go to the cinema to watch a flick based on a comic book are expecting and wanting something along the lines of Spider-Man, Batman, Iron Man, stuff with Man in the title. Maybe Dark Knight’s incredible success has broken down some barriers and prepared people for more ‘serious’ and ‘complicated’ stories, but I don’t think it’s going to do much for people’s appreciation of Watchmen.

It is a complicated book, with a very convoluted plot and difficult ending, and worst of all from the perspective of PR people and the ugly trolls who work in marketing, it’s supposed to be a complete deconstruction not only of the whole comics genre, but of the characters who strap on the masks and fight crime for reasons that seem to have little to do with seeking justice. But you can’t sell something like that to audiences who want to watch good guys fight bad guys and triumph in the end.

In other words, you can’t sell what Watchmen stands for to audiences without hiding what Watchmen is. That it has gotten this far is amazing enough, in and of itself.

dir: Clint Eastwood
I am honoured to be working with me
Before Gran Torino, the highest grossing and 437th film directed by Eastwood, stunk up the multiplexes and delighted American crowds with its rascally racist protagonist bellowing at Hmong immigrants to get off his lawn whilst aiming a shotgun at them, Clint unleashed this curious little true crime / period piece movie to less fanfare but more critical acclaim.

At least initially. Before it premiered at Cannes, and was still known as The Exchange, the buzz was that it was one of Clint’s best films. Of course, after actual humans and not PR cyborgs saw the film, a resounding ‘meh’ was heard to echo around the cinemas of the world. Angelina Jolie receiving a nomination for playing the main character here is very strange, unless, there’s a new Biggest Lips – Anglo Category I haven’t heard of to be honoured at the next Academy Awards, but otherwise most of the world tried to pretend the film never existed.

So it was a bit of a surprise when I found the film quite enjoyable and interesting despite Jolie’s presence, since she has the thankless role of playing a mother whose most compelling dialogue is “I want my son back” and “this boy is not my son, I want my son back.”

There’s only so many ways you can say it, and only so many tears you can cry before the audience starts thinking “yeah, okay, we get it, now let’s move on”.

dir: Ron Howard
I'm trying to meet you half-way, ya damned hippies
I’m not old enough to have really cared about the horrors of life under Nixon, or about Nam, Agent Orange or the Bee Gees when they were all at their peak evilness. So I’m not old enough to have watched or known about the ‘famous’ interviews that served as the basis of the ‘famous’ play that this ‘famous’ film is based on. I am old enough, on the other hand, to know who Nixon was, and to marvel at the way the old rascal still permeates the Western pop cultural consciousness, even in death, even to this day.

In fact you could argue that he’s even more prominent now than prior to his death. You have to wonder why. No president of the last hundred years has been as endlessly quoted, maligned, parodied, written about or portrayed in films and tv shows as Richard Milhous Nixon. Well, Kennedy, maybe, but he’s the other side of the coin.

And next to no-one should know who David Frost is/was. If this film is to be believed, ably directed by the guy who played Richie Cunningham on Happy Days, then their interview together wasn’t solely the single most important interview in the history of interviews, it was the only trial and conviction Nixon was ever going to receive for his crimes against the world in general and the American people specifically.

This, being a Ron Howard film, has no time or place for subtlety in its shameless apple-shining and grade-grubbing pandering for Oscars. So a character (James Reston, played by Sam Rockwell) has to explicitly state for the stupid audience’s benefit, who couldn’t work out for themselves that making a film about the interviews themselves meant it was important enough. He has to huffily point out, during the preparations for the interviews, that this is the trial Nixon deserves for having threatened the very institutions that underpin the American way of life.

dir: Darren Aronofsky
Fear the Ram!
It really doesn’t feel like you’re watching Mickey Rourke’s comeback to the big screen. It feels more like you’re watching his swan song. Rourke himself and the character he plays in The Wrestler are so intertwined that it becomes impossible to tell where Mickey Rourke ends and Randy “The Ram” Robinson begins, and vice versa.

Rourke himself has undergone a transformation, but I’m not sure all of it was for this film’s benefit. This isn’t his comeback, since it was only a few year’s ago that he was being lauded for his work in Sin City, but the strangest thing is that I realised watching this that much of what I thought was make-up and latex facework when he played the Frankenstein-like Marv in Sin City was anything but.

Violence, drug abuse of the legal and illegal variety and plastic surgery have rendered his face a curious mess, combining both hyper-feminine plumped up lips with deep scarring, peaks, troughs and leathery textures perhaps not so readily found in nature. In short, like many wrestlers, body builders, face lift survivors and plastic surgery addicts, he has become a grotesque parody of a human being. He is still, in a testament to his abilities as an actor, capable of putting those grotesqueries into the service of delivering a tremendous performance as a fading wrestler way past his use-by date.

All Gun, No Fundir: John Moore

In a lot of ways, Max Payne, which is overall a pretty mediocre action movie, is as good as you have any right to expect something to be that stars Marky Mark Wahlberg, and that is based on an extremely violent and thus extremely enjoyable computer game.

But if they can’t even use the musical theme from the game in the film, then it was never going to work, was it?

The usual dismissals and criticisms aimed at ‘based on’ fare don’t really apply, since both of the Max Payne games were a distillation of pure 80s Hollywood cop / vengeance crap filtered through a comic book / pseudo-noir sensibility, with liberal splashings of guttural voiceovers and over the top set pieces. Thus you’d think making a film of it would be easy, since there is no shortage of flicks based on a) killing mobsters, b) wanting to kill hundreds of people in retaliation for the murder of one’s family, and c) guns guns and more guns.

dir: D.J. Caruso
Yes, I am interested in making savings on my long distance phonecalls
See, there's precious little I can say about this flick, and about why it's so tedious, and why it's so unsatisfying but still adequate, without giving the whole game away. As in, there's a basic spoiler so spoilerish in its basic spoilerishness that to not say it means I've got nothing else to say about the film apart from mocking it in general and Shia LeBeouf specifically, and that the review itself will not be fulfilling its fundamental obligation to you, the dear reader: telling you what the film is about so you can decide whether to invest two hours of your precious life or not.

Or maybe I can manage it, who knows. Let's see, shall we?

dir: Mathieu Kassovitz
Let me just shoot my agent
What the fuck? Sorry, but there’s only one reaction I can have to having watched this alleged movie. But first, allow me to digress for about a thousand words…

I recently spent nearly three months of my life plowing through a book called Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace, who committed suicide last year. Since he killed himself, which all the cool artists do, and since many people, book critics and regular humans alike, wanked on rhapsodically about what an amazing writer he was, I started reading it to see for my self.

Imagine my disgust when after suffering through a thousand pages penned more with bongwater than ink and fully more satisfied with itself than it ever deserved to be, I came to the end of the novel only to find that the novel had no ending. No resolution to any of the story it was telling. Nothing to justify the three months of my life where I could have been reading multiple better books during my lunch breaks and train trips to and from work.

Suffice to say, I was pretty fucking angry.

dir: Thomas McCarthy
Economics Lecturers need love too
Low-key. This film is so low-key that it almost shouldn’t exist. But exist it does, and I found it sweetly enjoyable, far more than most of the films I’ve watched lately and forgotten before the credits have rolled.

Which is odd, quite odd. Because little if anything happens for the whole film’s duration. And instead of using the term ‘low-key’ to describe it, it’s possible that inventing and applying a whole new term to describe such a film might be more appropriate: no-key.

This no-key film begins with an emotionally dead academic played ably by Richard Jenkins, taking piano lessons from a woman. He's not very good at it, and doesn't like the woman teaching him, informing her that though he intends to take more lessons, it won't be with her.

It's only with a bit of time, subtlety, that we figure out what's really going on. His wife, now dead, used to play the piano. Since her death, he tries to keep playing it in order to honour her / remember her, but it doesn't really work. When he speaks to people, he is completely shut down, completely uninterested in those around him, especially when it comes to his work. He teaches one class, and even that's under sufferance.