Reviews

Being a fan of Steve Carell, I have always been slightly disappointed with the quality of films he has stared in. Whilst his co-staring roles have been very good (Ron Burgundy, Bruce Almighty) his lead role have been generally quite poor (40 year old virgin excluded) However, in Get Smart he appears to have found the type of role that suits his undoubted comic talents.

Get Smart is based on the 60th TV series of the same name and, apparently, pays just enough homage to the original (had to ask my American friend about that as I only had a vague recollection of the TV show.) It is based on the bumbling antics of Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), a frustrated analyst for CONTROL (a US government spy agency) who is desperate to become an Agent and do battle against KAOS, a terrorist organisation led by the shady character known only as Siegfried (Terrence Stamp) Unfortunately, despite passing his agents exam, Smart is refused promotion due to the Chief of Control (Alan Arkin) insisting his analytical skills are too valuable to the organisation. However, after Controls HQ is attacked and all other agents identity is compromised, Smart is promoted to Agent 86 and, along with Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) must infiltrate KAOS and thwart their plans to set off numerous nuclear devices worldwide.

This leads the two agents to firstly parachute into Eastern Europe, where they attend a party hosted by a member of Kaos. Then onto a bakery and finally back to America where they discover the initial target is a concert hall where the president (James Caan) is due to attend a concert.

The plot is nothing special but the action moves along well and is generally well acted. Whilst some of the comedy moments are less than successful - the scene with Agent 13 (Bill Murray) talking to Agent 86 from within his tree costume being one that immediately spring to mind - their are a number of genuine laugh out loud moments that left me with aching sides (Smart trying to remove plastic handcuffs using a dart gun whilst in an aeroplane toilet being my favourite.) The support cast all play their parts and whilst the twist at the end is not a major surprise, you do find yourself routing for Agent 86 The film is not perfect and there are moments where you feel more rigorous editing would have helped. However, I would have no hesitation in recommending it as a enjoyable way to pass 90 minutes and it does show the creators of Jonny English how to do this style of film. I look forward to Get Smart 2 (which has been announced.)

This romantic comedy stars Anna Faris, Colin Hanks, Emma Stone, Katharine McPhee, Rumer Willis, Dana Goodman, Kiely Williams, Tyson Ritter, and Kat Dennings.

The Film is very similar to the fabulous film - Legally Blonde. In fact it has the same director - Fred Wolf in charge, and the films executive producers are Anna Faris herself and the very funny Adam Sandler.

The film is about a 27 year old Playboy bunny, called Shelly Darlington (played by Anna Faris), who is kicked out of the Playboy mansion because she is considered to be to old.

Subsequently, she stumbles upon the Greek Row campus of a university, and becomes the house leader of a sorority group called Zeta Alpha Zeta.

The members of the sorority sisters - who also have got to be the seven most socially clueless women on the planet - are about to lose their house.

These sorority sisters are characterised as social outcasts, something the former bunny plans to fix.

The movie also features songs by artists such as Rihanna, Ashlee Simpson, Metro Station, The Cab, Ingrid Michaelson, Phantom Planet and Avril Lavigne.

The message of this film is that: The girls need the support of what only the eternally bubbly Shelly can provide... but they will each learn on their own, to stop pretending to be what others want them to be, and start being themselves.

Well worth watching.

Having loved the original Hellboy I was fervently looking forward to this sequel and while Hellboy II The Golden Army isn't a disappointment neither is it up to the standard of the first film. Having said that anything that lets director Guillermo Del Toro propagate his extraordinary imagination is well worth seeing for that reason alone and this film displays that to superlatively sumptuous effect.

Ron Perlman reprises the role of the wisecracking Hellboy who we see as a boy in the opening sequence being told the story of the golden Army by his human father ( John Hurt) who once fought against human kind( the golden army that is , not his father ) but have been mothballed by dividing the crown that controls them into three separate pieces kept in secret locations. Elf prince Nuada ( Luke Goss) may look a little on the pasty side but he is a great warrior and is determined to awaken the golden army so he can wage war on human kind. His twin sister Nuala (Ann Walton) is rather more moderate realising the chaos this would unleash .She also holds one of those missing pieces.

This is pretty standard fantasy fare and there is an argument that Del Toro and Hellboy creator Mike Mingola , the writers should have come up with something stronger in terms of the story , though the script does have a certain sardonic frisson and there is some tremendous character interplay.

Hellboy is still working for the secretive Bureau For Paranormal Research And Defence and still annoying his overbearing boss Manning (Jeffrey Tambor ) who laments his lack of discipline and the fact he keeps getting photographed and put on "You Tube" ."I hate You Tube" he tells Abe Sapian ( Doug Jones) the polite blue skinned amphibian . Hellboy,s partner the fiery (literally ) Liz (Selma Blair) is finding "Reds" lack of domesticity a problem and there is another potential dilemma lurking . Agent John Myers from the first film has been dispatched to Antarctica we are told ( this is because Rupert Evans who played him in Hellboy was unavoidable due to stage commitments)"He likes the cold" Hellboy sneers, and is replaced by ectoplasmic agent Johann Krauss ( voiced by "Family Guys " Seth McFarlane with an amusing mangled German accent which he based on Jeremy Irons character in Die Hard 3) whose officiousness rubs up Hellboy the wrong way.

The film makes points about selfless sacrifice , the power of love, the magnetic need for normality (Which it shares with Batman ) and hints broadly at a potential conflict of interest for Hellboy to resolve if there is another Hellboy film . The performances are great again and it,s nice that Liz is given a more developed role other than looking mopey. Really though it's the visuals and set pieces that astound with this film .Del Toro has an incredible eye and will make a scene fantastical even when something ordinary would do. The "Troll Market" scene is astonishing and the high-speed acrobatic denouement between Hellboy and Nuada in a cavernous city surrounded by enormous golden mechanical beings and massive rotating cogs is just breathtaking . There is no cheap CGI for Del Toro , everything looks authentic and he even invokes the demise of a giant "elemental" creature with a sense of magic and loss.

Del Toro clearly feels close to the Hellboy character .He turned down the chance to direct "Halo " , Harry Potter And The Half Blood Prince" and "I An Legend" to bring this sequel to the screen . It wouldn't be the same without his marvellous vision yet if there is to be another Hellboy ( I very much hope there is) film he needs to work more on the story . Can you imagine a Hellboy film with the same allegorical and dramatic punch as his masterpiece Pans Labyrinth ? Till then this will do nicely though.

RICKY GERVAIS/MEL Gibson:SEPARATED AT BIRTH? I was very intrigued to see whether Gervais could make the transition to the big screen - so few Brits do. Simon Pegg made it by consolidating his UK TV success in Brit movies, thereby hanging on to the thing that made him successful in the first place - the blend of humility, pathos, cruelty and irony that makes British humour unique. Whether he will have lasting success in the irony-less USA mainstream remains to be seen.

Ricky Gervais's British success is based on a very specific brand of humour. He is always hinting that the cruelty of his character is actually real. Basically, he convinces as a completely unlikeable character. It's a bitter persona, with its roots in Basil Fawlty or Blackadder (neither of whom ever had a genuine romance in their TV series). I'd see him as a hit man or a serial killer before I'd think of him as lead in a romantic comedy. He'd have done better as the principal ghost in this film.

The trouble is, this genre has too many hard-and-fast rules. It has to start with a flawed male (after all, it's usually the ladies who watch these things) show his redemption in the middle and end with a marriage to the babe who engineered his transformation into something marriage-worthy.

This film loosely follows the plot of 'What Women Want' a fairly innocuous romcom starring Mel Gibson. That film was fun, light entertainment, but only worked because we all knew that Mel was already a good guy deep down and the film got a lot of humorous mileage out of its unique feature - the fact that Mel Gibson could hear women's thoughts.

Ghost Town misplaces the focus on Gervais, giving him lots of rope to hang himself. The schmaltz of the last few scenes does not sit well with someone who has been inspiring loathing in his fans for a decade. It's like meeting the guy who mugged you last week doing community service in Mothercare.

The inclusion of Ghosts in the plot is utterly pointless. The film is not about them, and they get in the way of the main plot which is 'learn to love Ricky Gervais, he is going to be a big star one day - honest'. As soon as any ghost gets on screen, Gervais shoos them away.

I'd say that this film has been warped out of shape - there is no real story, just a very long 'Gervais Promo' which shows that he could do something funny in a movie, but - the lead in a romantic comedy? He's just not that kissable.

Twilight begins with 17 year old Bella, moving to Forks, a small town located in north western USA. She finds herself captivated by the handsome Edward and soon discovering that he and his family are vampires. So it sounds awfully like it's aimed at teenage girls. That's because it is. However the on screen romance between the films two central characters, Bella and Edward, plays out with such tender affection and excellent pacing, that issues of age and gender soon become irrelevant. While at times Robert Pattison (Edward) is unable to give weight to thirst for Bella's blood that his character is constantly fighting against, his performance is on the whole utterly convincing. The delicate portrayal of Bella, by Kristen Stewart is equally solid and believable. Unfortunately her efforts are often undermined by the film-makers frequent use of ex positional voice over.

With an on screen chemistry that goes deeper than your typical sexually charged teen movie, while not too challenging, is refreshing. And director Catherine Hardwicke does well not to rely too heavily on emotional investment from the audience to drive the plot forward. Introducing a trio of some not so wholesome day walkers from the films open shot, a firmly rooted undertone of threat spans the entire film.

Even if you see Twilight seeking tradition horror, to be disappointed by Meyer's rather refreshing revamp of the vampire mythology; the picturesque landscapes beautifully depicted throughout are an undeniably enjoyable cinematic experience. Ultimately Twilight is a very faithful and well composed adaptation of a highly successful book.

I have just returned from a screening of Quantum of Solace and am struck by how it left me completely cold. Bored is one thing I never thought I could feel in a Bond film. Casino Royale was a brilliant addition to the Bond canon - it had the vintage feel of a classic Bond film, a newly-defined Bond with a Flemingesque ruthlessness and gimlet eyes, a very fine villain in Mads Mikkelson, and a great script written with the aid of the award-winning screenwriter to Crash.

The screenwriters to Quantum seem to have done an about face. We are left with the Brosnan antics of Die Another Day - preposterous stunts, back-to-back action with little development of plot or character, little time for any chemistry between Bond and the female lead, a denouement in a villain's lair in the desert with all the ludicrousness of a Roger Moore instalment. And that makes sense, because the screenwriters for this film are the same ones as worked on the Brosnan franchise.

Something didn't square at all, and I think a large factor is the script. We don't need camp humour or biting one-liners, but we do need dialogue. The showdown between Bond and Dominic Greene required some kind of conflict, after all right from the beginning of Casino we have been led towards this climax between these two men, and yet Marc Foster had given is nothing in the screenplay to suggest that these two men had a developed hatred of one another.

Mathieu Almaric cuts a puny villain, and his henchmen are all puny henchmen. Gone is Grant or Oddjob or Rosa Klebb or Nick-Nack or Tee-Hee. Greene's henchman, who is called Elvis in the credits, but is never referred to by name in the film, wears a toupee and is weedy and ineffectual. There is no drama at all between him and Greene. You can't fault Almaric as a villain because he has absolutely nothing to work with. The demented turn Greene takes with an axe at the film's close is perhaps really Almaric venting his frustration out on the flat character he has been given.

The theme song was appalling. I can't recall a truly evocative Bond song since the days when John Barry composed the score, but this one really was the pits.

It may be that the thirty minutes of commercials (a lot of them playstation combat or apocalyptic games) before the film commenced had already numbed me for Bond, but in any case the action was sheer overkill. Back-to-back Bond in a car, Bond on a rooftop, Bond in a boat, Bond in a plane, and then I finally realised that it could just as well be any action hero as Bond. The camera never allowed you to settle on Craig in action, the viewer is just roughly manhandled from scene to scene, from one roller-coaster to the next. Whole sequences, as others have said, were lifted straight out of the Bourne franchise - the opening car chase like bumper cars, the naturalistic close combat with a double agent in a Haitian apartment, the epilogue in a snow swept Russia that ties up all the loose ends (the epilogue to The Bourne Supremacy anyone? also set in a snow swept Russia, tying up loose plot-threads).

Finally, the dastardly plot. Just what is it? Greene is hoarding vast reserves of water in the Bolivian desert to do what? Sell it for extortionate prices to Bolivian farmers? I may be wrong, but Bolivia last time I checked was a small South American nation with a negligible GNP and a people who had suffered under one lousy regime after another. If Greene really wanted a plot for global domination, he should monopolise the oil industry and hoard it so that consumers all over the world have to pay extortionate prices at the pump. Now we all know that is a plot that can work.

All this is a crushing pity, because, for my money, Craig could just possibly be the best Bond we've had (and I know this may ring like blasphemy to Conneryphiles). A blunt instrument is what he is, just like Fleming's Bond.

Sorry about the rant, but someone needed to give this film a rundown. Anyway, definitely enough said.

Even after eight disastrous years as the most powerful man in the world George W Bush is, in some strange way, still rather unknowable. It's probably because he's so ridiculous, so gaffe prone, and so seemingly stupid, that most coverage of the man doesn't look far beyond that surface. You'd think that Oliver Stone would be the perfect person to look deeper into the real George Bush, but W., while entertaining, feels like a fast flip through a scrapbook rather than anything deeper.

It's a jumble of a movie, with events leading up to, during, and immediately after the prosecution of the Iraq war in 2002/3 frequently interrupted by flashbacks to Bush's earlier life as a hard-drinking', hell raisin' disappointment to his family. This approach means that, while it dwells on an important part of the Bush presidency, the film leaves many huge events utterly untouched. W. often feels like a film made to a release date and a running time.

In casting his Bush, Stone has wisely gone not for a doppelganger, but an actor. The handsome, chiselled, square jawed Josh Brolin seldom looks remotely like the man he's playing (though in some of the 'TV' footage, there's a resemblance), but he gets the voice and the mannerisms ('heh') down perfectly. That, though, is only half the battle, any third rate impressionist can pull out a Bush caricature, but to make the left's current pincushion human, that's a bigger job. Brolin does it though; in the flashback scenes he creates a flawed, sometimes petulant, but always real, person. Here we can see some of the reason that people like Bush, Brolin makes him come across as a generally decent, engaging guy, but one with deep flaws, such as his alcoholism. One of Brolin's best moments (and the scripts) is W's first meeting with future first lady Laura (a too young, but otherwise pretty good, Elizabeth Banks), here the charm that is so often talked about with Bush really comes through, illuminating a side of Bush we don't see.

The rest of the cast range from Thandie Newton's bang on impersonation of Condi Rice, a fine bit of mimicry, but one that never advances beyond that single note, to James Cromwell's statesmanlike George HW Bush, to a couple of supporting turns which threaten to steal the film. The first is Toby Jones' Karl Rove. A squat presence in the shadows of every scene at the White House he is, visually, depicted as the Machiavellian schemer at Bush's side, but Jones goes deeper, humanising another figure generally depicted as something of a bogeyman (as he was, to enduring effect, on American Dad). The best performance comes from Jeffrey Wright, a chameleonic actor who is always excellent, however large or small the role, as Colin Powell. The script uses Powell as the voice of reason, the movie's conscience. This could easily have been heavy handed but Wright, as well as doing a spot on Powell, gives those speeches such gravitas that they transcend the slightly schematic writing.

Perhaps the biggest problem with W. is its brevity. Stone has made epics before, 3 hour films about Alexander the Great, Nixon and JFK's assassination and W. feels like it needed to be one too, because the film's 2 hours pass by fast, and miss some hugely important moments in the Bush presidency. For example why is there not one scene set on or in the immediate aftermath of September 11th? It's the defining event of Bush's office and the absence of any consideration of it here feels like a gaping hole. So too does the lack of any scene set in the three week limbo after the 2000 election.

One might expect Oliver Stone, being the filmmaker he is, to use this film as a stinging indictment of Bush. He doesn't, and that's admirable. He knows that in the real world Bush has dug his own grave and here he paints him as a man whose ambition has taken him too far for his ability to deal with. Aside from a few moments though he doesn't present Bush as an idiot (and the times when he does feel shoehorned in, like the use of the famous 'Can't get fooled again' line, in completely the wrong context). Brolin, too, seems to have set aside judgement of Bush and though the film can't really be said to be a sympathetic portrait most of it is surprisingly even handed.

That said Stone does make missteps. A dream sequence at the tail end of the film arrives out of nowhere, and says very little, and the film feels brutally shortened (look it's Noah Wyle, for three seconds). Visually he's mostly got it right though, the detail of the various periods and of the White House itself rings true, but he slips by letting Elizabeth Banks, as the rest of the cast age around her, play Laura Bush right up to her mid 50s with only a wig as concession to making her look the part, a distractingly incongruous detail by the end of the film.

W. is a fine entertainment, and Josh Brolin's central performance, along with several others, make it worth seeing, but it's also distractingly shallow, too narrow in its focus, and crying out for a Director's Cut DVD.

This is science fiction set in the not too distant future.It is also fair comment on the present US administration reaction to terrorism and it's real actions. Great special effects but hey film makers, isn't it time we dispensed with people emerging unhurt from these horrendous car crashes,sending wrong messages to immortally minded youth! The plot was great and I felt calm through all the tension. The only let down was the ending, it seemed that they didn't know how to end the film or potential carry it on into a sequel. Am finding that Hollywood writers at the moment seem to be fixated on the special effects and not the nitty gritty story line. Still worth watching.