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dir: Joe Carnahan
Narcoleptics need not apply
Narc was one of two outstanding recent police-focussed dramas that came out recently, both of which were criminally ignored by audiences and deserved more respect: The other was Dark Blue, but that’s a different review. What they both had was a healthy distrust of the nobility of the boys in blue, and an eye to putting some otherwise decent, hard-working lads in a situation which shows just how much of the law they are willing to break in order to get the job done.

Jason Patric, well, he owns the film. Yeah, so it’s hard to stand up to Ray Liotta, seeing as Liotta always looks like he’s only a second away from biting your face off, but he more than holds his own over the duration of the running time. He is the film’s protagonist, Liotta is, well, we’re not sure what exactly he is, because he is clearly a chameleon whose purpose changes as the story progresses.

At movie’s start we’re introduced to a high energy cop chase which goes absurdly, viciously wrong. It occurs on foot, and has some of the most headache inducing shaky camera work that I’ve ever been privy to. It’s also sped up, and violently jagged and surreal. We see the chase through the fucked up eyes of the man being chased and the man doing the chasing. The manner in which it turns even uglier just amazed me. It’s a hardcore start to a story that seems positively gentle from then on.

This isn’t new ground for either of our two stars. Patric played an undercover narcotics officer in Rush over a decade ago, which had the wonderful Jennifer Jason Leigh in the lead, and Liotta has played both psychopathic criminals and cops his entire career. What Patric has is a great deal of skill as an actor, which he brings to this role, really getting into the head of his character, matching the physicality of the role appropriately, and despite what I guess is a relatively tiny budget helping to craft an interesting police procedural with a surprise ending, which these films rarely manage. Don’t get me wrong, the ending isn’t the reason why this is a good film. This isn’t The Sixth Sense, with a sting in the tale so complete that it changes the entire film for you. The lead up to the end is where the tension is, where the worth is. The end is just an ironic full stop.

dir: Stuart Baird
Which shine-head is which? Seeing double means seeing four Jean-Lucs!
There is a law in economics referred to as the law of diminishing returns, or alternately known as the law of variable proportions. Essentially it states that if one factor of production is increased while the others remain constant, the overall returns will relatively decrease passed a certain point.

Accept for a moment that the number of Trek fans and other obese obsessives is relatively constant, if not decreasing over time. Establish that the amount of merchandising and truly quality television shows pumped out continues over time, with more and more money being poured into this formerly profitable venture. The law of diminishing returns states that past a certain point you cannot get back what you put in.

With 5 television series, ten films of variable quality and millions of dollars worth of merchandise, the Trek franchise has long been the big brother to the prodigy that is the Star Wars empire. Being an elder sibling, it claimed some intellectual superiority and acting credibility which some may have been grateful for in times passed, but now seems to be a dull vintage of sour grapes. The franchise, under the current benevolent leadership of Rick Berman has been run into the ground, well and truly, to the point where Trek is less of a pop culture phenomenon and more of a relentlessly embarrassing joke.

With the bland recycling and laughable pandering of the current television flagship Enterprise, which consistently ranks in the hundreds (as in each week it is about the hundredth most watched show in the States), and the viciously painful last outing at the cinemas, being Insurrection (which still makes me want to perform random acts of senseless violence on innocent bystanders every time I think about it), you'd think that it's time to retire this old veteran. Not so, the geniuses at Franchise Central believe. People do want to keep watching the same shit again and again. We don't need to come up with anything significantly interesting or even compelling. All we need to do is do everything we've ever done before, and have the same people in the room when we're doing it. Surely no-one can be unhappy with that.

dir: Steven Shainberg
There have to be better ways to get the mail. But I fail to hear any complaining.
What a fucking freaky film. It starts off being a film about one freak, who then finds an even bigger freak than herself. It just makes you hope they eventually get together and raise some freak babies.

There were certainly a bunch of people in the audience I saw this film with who didn't have a singular clue about this film. They were the ones that walked out not because of the sexual / sadomasochistic content, but because the psychosexual stuff wasn't sexy. They were actually expecting or hoping for some T & A and double entendres about taking dictation and doing a Lewinsky under the desk. Not a story about a demented self-mutilator and a sadistic obsessive-compulsive.

Let's be honest, at least in the realm of colloquial jokes and in porn the job of being a secretary has been sexualised entirely, which is quite ridiculous when you think about it. Anyone who works in pretty much any work environment knows that secretaries come in all shapes, genders, ages and flavours. Generally none of them are wearing tight skirts that barely cover their arse with tight jackets from within which you can see lacy bras peeking out from their barely contained cleavage. Then there's the whole peaking over those glasses thing and the hair done up in a bun which comes loose with a shake as she licks her full, red lips and says in a husky voice "No sir, I haven't heard about the changes in sexual harassment legislation" before earning herself a promotion by doing what she does best...

dir: Terry Zwigoff
She broke a million nerd hearts with this role
Movies tend to celebrate the triumph of the individual. The underdog beats the less-likeable and usually wealthy favourite to win the adulation of the crowd. Villains get their comeuppance at movie's end, with the hero finally getting the girl and the acknowledgment that they deserve, usually with a large television audience watching in masturbatory glee.

We as people want to associate ourselves with winners, with success, with victory. We can relate to the personal hardships that the film protagonists go through, as we all have mishaps, accidents and fuckups in our lives, just probably not on the same scale. And when they (usually) inevitably triumph over the odds to win the belt, the cup or kill the bad guy, we feel that associative rush as well, sharing in their triumph. We're winners as well. Our value systems, whilst certainly not uniform around the globe, tend to prize success, coolness, triumph in competition against others, the overcoming of obstacles, prejudices etc to achieve what we all ultimately want: acceptance and approval by society and those around us.

It's ingrained into us, inculcated from a young age. From school onwards we are in competition with each other. The entire spectrum of sports and cinema reflects this and projects this onto us as well. Of course, let's not forget the main economic system on the planet of capitalism which is theoretically at least centred around the ideas of self-interest and competition being balancing forces.

dir: Rob Bowman
Matthew McConaghey trying to fuck a dragon in mid-air
Dragons. Post apocalyptic scenarios. People dressed like Mad Max. People being burned or eaten by big lizards. Gay pirates. What's not to like?

Yes, the film has been out for a donkey's age, but I only got to see the film a few days ago. And I must say that I was pleasantly surprised, in that I wasn't violently disgusted by the film that transpired.

dir: M. Night Shyamalan
Signs and more signs for your own protection
It's an interesting film, I'll give it that much. And it's a credit to M. Night Shyamalan that he manages to get the best performance out of Mel Gibson that I've seen in nearly a decade. As for how successful the film is overall, well, that's hardly a question for the ages.

Box office-wise, Signs has managed to dispel the fear that arose of "one hit wonderness" after the lackluster receipts that the far more ambitious Unbreakable was responsible for. He's managing to incorporate the quite difficult aspects of credible film making and ticket sale success, and then some. He is undoubtedly a populist director, making stories that are on the surface fairly straight-forward that manage to tap in to either the collective unconscious or issues of pop cultural currency without being either pretentious or lowest common denominator shit-stupid.

His level of subtlety is not what I would call delicate, but this film at the very least stands as a testament to his willingness to tackle commonplace ideas with his own individual take, willing to not always give audiences what they want initially with the view of giving them something completely different at film's end. It's a conceited bait-and-switch, I know, but as someone who's seen literally thousands of films over the years, it's something I can appreciate.

I had long ago given up on Mel Gibson. In my mind he has become such a ham of an actor that expecting a decent performance from him would be classified by myself as an exercise in futility and by the psychiatric diagnostic manual used by mental health professionals throughout the Western world, the DSM-IV, as a "profoundly delusional state". Picture if you will without getting nauseous the alleged "characters" he's been portraying for the last decade and a half. Whether it be the repugnant all encompassing "father" figure in Ransom, who to me was even more loathsome than the villains in the film, or the even worse character he assayed in The Patriot, the wretched, ham-vomiting Benjamin Martin, in a film that paid the same level of honour to the heroes of the American Revolution that Jerry Bruckheimer did to the fallen in Pearl Harbor: you're not talking quality acting here. I get the feeling that he gave up on the concept of portraying a character in films so much as just giving us the viewers another "facet" of the wonderfulness that is Mel.