Reviews

I wanted something light I could do the ironing to, and this caught my eye. With Russell Brand , Billy Connolly, Tim Curry, Eric Idle, Eddie Izzard, Jim Piddock and Tracey Ullman, it's a radio play filmed in front of an audience. You'll laugh until you cry, promised the blurb.

They lied.

What a monumental waste of talent. When I tell you that "Have you seen Dick?" "Not since my coming out ball." is the funniest, most sophisticated joke in the whole car-crash of a show, you'll get an idea of how unutterably awful it is. They must have got the audience drunk as skunks beforehand to get a laugh out of them

I've wasted my time watching it so you don't have to.

I was surprised at just how much I liked this film. At first glance it looks like Mad Max. Set in a post apocalyptic near future in Australia, a man pursues a gang, leaving behind him a trail of death. But it is so much more than that. Whilst it certainly does more than nod at Mad Max, the characters are much more complicated. And whilst the motive behind Max's doggedness is clear from the start, the reason why the protagonist in this film is so hell-bent on getting his car back isn't revealed until the final scene. The violence is reminiscent of a Tarantino road movie, but the characters are much deeper and more believable.

Eric is taciturn, answering almost every question with a question of his own. He kills without a moment's hesitation. He is dogged beyond obsession, asking the same question over and over until he gets an answer. And for what? A gang steal his car, and he is prepared to kill anyone and drive for days to get it back. Why? Despite a big clue half way through, we don't realise it's a clue until the final moments of the film.

Robert Pattinson is the co-star in this movie. Cards on the table, I don't like him. I found him creepy beyond belief in Twilight, and Cosmopolis is the worst film I have ever sat through, but in this film he portrays a simple but conflicted man-child with conviction and sympathy. Damn it, I didn't want to like his acting, but in this he is actually good.

A word of warning, don't watch this at 2 am after a bottle of wine. The director isn't afraid to put in sequences of people sitting still, staring into their own angst, or creeping around buildings in silence. It's a film you have to be alert in. It's not a film you can zone out during the quite bits and still understand what's going on when you wake up.

It's that rare thing, a violent sci-fi film that actually makes you think and surprises you with the ending.

Stallone agrees to test a high security prison. All hush hush and under the radar, so of course nothing is going to go to plan. Cue bromances, prison riots and sadistic guards.

Think of all the prisoner films with the tough guy unjustly imprisoned. Think of any original take on the genre then throw those those thoughts away.

Formulaic thriller. All the good guys are good, all the bad guys bad, 'twists' well telegraphed and of course there's always time for a bon mot when killing a baddie. Arnie phoning in his performance I'm afraid, and Sly being, well, Sly. Not memorable, not one I'll watch again.

An interesting film with buckets of charm. It focuses on Mr. Heep (Paul Giamatti), a stuttering caretaker of a small condo which has seen better days. He cares for them like the father of a dysfunctional family, killing bugs and fixing lights. When he finds a young girl, frightened and vulnerable, in the swimming pool he takes pity on her. From there he is drawn into a world of myths and fables where the young girl's life is in danger and he must assemble the unlikeliest crew of heroes to help her return to her world.

The characters in the film are for the most part eccentric and distinct, all of them 'good' people, even the irascible newcomer, although unaware of their own talents. The comedy is gentle and I started to identify with many of the characters. The voice-over at the start grated a little, giving the backstory which for me gave away too much of the plot to come, but that aside I was so glad I stumbled on this little gem

This is a drama set against the early years of PCs, but please don't let this put you off. As an IT worker I loved the references to the industry at the time, the little jokes you get if you knew the characters and events, but the technology, whilst not dumbed down, is incidental. What counts is the drama.

The three central characters are each flawed in their own way, incapable of achieving great things on their own, but the series charts their rocky road together as they fight together (and often against each other) to launch a ground-breaking new PC.

It was difficult at first not to make comparisons between the two male leads and Jobs and Wozniac. Joe Macmillan is a salesman driven be his own demons, determined to lead a team into greatness, despite not being technically minded. He is unprincipled and evangelistic, scamming and lying his way, even when there is no need to lie. He manipulates engineer Gordon Clark, coder Cameron Howe and everyone else into following his path. As the series unfolds we catch clues as to why he's driven, and why he exited IBM so abruptly.

Clark is an engineering genius, not sharing the sales vision but in his element solving hardware design problems. However, his marriage and his sanity is shaky, and he dislikes and mistrusts Macmillan's shallow non-technical drive.

Howe is a little bit of a stereotype coder, a rebel, anarchic, able to really only connect with the logical world of code. She is both attracted to and repulsed by Macmillan.

Over the series we see the characters grow, their relationships with each other and with the other's in their lives evolve and change. I started to care about these people, even the ones I didn't like that much.

Enjoyable on its own, if you can get a little insight into the PC world at the time, it will enhance the viewing. If you can lay your hands on The Triumph of the Nerds, do so. Not only is it a fascinating and entertaining documentary, it adds to this series. For example, you never see the Apple advert, but if you know it, when one of the characters remarks the girl looks just like Cameron, you know exactly what he means.

I can't help but think a lot of favours were called in to make this. Robert Downey Jnr was of course brilliant, but he appears in a single scene for 5 minutes, and I had no idea why he'd help the ex husband of his ex wife. Dustin Hoffman doesn't appear after the 1st 15 minutes. Ditto his early love interest, Scarlett Johansson.

No surprises in this road trip, estranged dad spends time with his son movie. And everything ends wonderful in the last reel, for no apparent reason.

But yet again we have a Hollywood film where a gorgeous woman is in love with a fat guy. How many films have there been when the fat girl has a gorgeous guy? (OK, so I'm watching Taxi at the moment. Queen Latiffia excepted).

Even Shallow Hal had Gwynneth Paltrow pretending to be fat.

There are worse ways to spend an afternoon, but overall I was left with the feeling I#d seen it before. Great for food porn, but not foe anything else.

... This is how to make a vampire film.

I find it difficult to fault this film. The plot is intelligent and engaging. No one is entirely black or white. The heroes are flawed and complicated, the villains, for the most part, have motivation and even sympathy. I found myself rooting for the murderous, vampiric prostitute as much for the innocent girl trapped into releasing those tired of life.

It's really two films, one set 200 hundred years ago, one in the present time, with many of the same characters and the same location, Hastings, once a fishing village, now a tired seaside resort.

The actors are very good, particularly the leads. As a resident of SE England, I recognised many of the locations. The ending was perhaps a little predictable, but still satisfying.

Don't go see this if you like your vampires to sparkle, but if you liked Let The Right One In and gritty drama, go watch it.

This is a British Comedy Horror film. I know this, because the poster said it was, but if you are looking for another Sean of the Dead, look elsewhere. I saw it in Birmingham, where there was doubt on the night whether they would show it at all. In the event, about 10 sat through it.

In a rainy, rundown seaside town four teenage boys are desperate for sex, and understandably no local girl or tourist will touch the crude, foul-mouthed boys with a barge pole. Their hunt for sex becomes all the more desperate as a werewolf starts picking off the virgins of either sex each full moon.

Enter sexy and mysterious foreign tourist, who takes a shine to one of the boys, but every full moon rejects him and disappears, only to be welcomed back with open arms when she deigns to show up again.

The 'humour' is mainly based around the boys using sauce bottle as phallic toys and the normally wonderful Timothy Spall creeping around in funny clothes and pulling funny faces. I'd guessed the identity of the werewolf early on, even though they try and build up the suspense and mystery.

It's rated as a fifteen, but I can't see anyone over 13 actually finding this funny. It doesn't bite, it sucks. It could suck lemons through a garden hose. Avoid.

I don't normally like this sort of film, being a middle-aged, middle-class Englishman, but being stuck in a distant city with an evening to kill, I thought, why not? I found myself pleasantly surprised. On a scale where anything with Will Ferrell being 1 and Big Bang Theory being 10, this easily ranks 9. The humour is universal enough to travel across the Atlantic, and in between the gags there are real questions about what makes a man more than just a big kid, and how much does love over-rule loyalty.

The CGI and the actors' eye-lines are faultless, the use of stuffed toys and graphics not always being obvious. I loved many of the gags, and being of a certain age, I so identified with the Flash Gordon motif running through the film.

And it is such an original idea. What if a teddy bear really did come alive? The contradiction of Ted's childish appearance with a thirty-something jaded, crude personality gave an added punch to the humour, and Ted himself was not just a cartoon, but showed real pathos and feeling, even though he was a womanising dope-head.

I loved it, and may even try to persuade 'Er Indoors to come see it with me a second time when I get home.

I wasn't sure what to expect from the trailers. Gore and horror aren't my thing, unless it's done well, and so few are these days. However, I was pleasantly surprised. This has less to do with the supernatural and more to do with belief systems in a modern world.

The story focuses upon two scientist professors that fill in the time between classes by investigating and exposing psychic frauds, be they petulant schoolgirls or venal evangelists. So when Murphy presses to investigate a famous mystic, why is Weaver so reluctant to agree? Is De Niro gifted with extraordinary powers, or a clever con artist? The atmosphere becomes more menacing and oppressive as the film progresses, leaving me wondering whether Murphy was becoming paranoid, or whether De Niro really was targeting him. The end, though not exactly the Sixth Sense ending some are proclaiming, was certainly unexpected.

Great acting from the leads, as you would expect. Great dialogue. Not much in the way of action, nor thankfully schlock horror, but the tension mounted throughout the film. A clever and satisfying film.

I can't remember having actually walked out of a film before, but an hour into this film and I couldn't stand it any longer, even when the nasty aliens caught up with the good aliens. I appreciate that I am probably not the target audience (not being a 14-year-old girl), but to me it has all been done before. It's Twilight with aliens, with a little bit of the Lightning Thief thrown in. Cardboard characters and whiny teens just don't do it for me, I'm afraid. I presume the female character trailing the hero catches up with him, but she hadn't after an hour and I got bored watching the interminable angst.

Go see it if you're a Twilight fan, otherwise almost anything else is two hours better spent.

This film, from the very outset, is a nonstop action masterpiece. The set pieces are amazing to watch. If you have ever seen any documentaries about the athletes that jump from building to building then you'll know what to expect.

The chase scenes have our heroes sprinting across terrain in seconds that would take me minutes to navigate, even if I had the guts to attempt it, and it is done with such grace and style. The two heroes are amazingly fit in all senses of the word. It's a lads action film that has plenty of eye candy for the girlfriend too.

Sadly, the plot has holes in it big enough to drive an armoured tuck carrying a thermonuclear warhead through. There are comic touches to lighten the mood, but it does not pay to spend any time at all analysing the storyline. That's not the point of this film. The point is top sit there open-mouthed that two superb athletes can pull of such amazing feats without breaking every bone in their body.