CHURCHILL - THE HOLLYWOOD YEARS: no one's finest hour

Witless crap.
Even within the context of the absurd and unfunny premise this story fails to hang together.
If cinema should last for a thousand years men will still say "This was a massive embarrassment to everyone involved."

THE KING'S SPEECH: words cannot adequately convey this film's brilliance

If you've ever wondered just what a multi-Oscar winning film looks like before it's actually won the little gold statuettes look no further than THE KING'S SPEECH.
This is the kind of film that makes the profession (unpaid) of film reviewing worthwhile. This is the diamond that I search for through the enormous mountain of diamonique that constitutes 90% of the film industry's output.

The story of the unlikely friendship between the Duke of York and future King George VI (Oscar nominated Colin Firth) and Lionel Logue (Oscar nominated Geoffrey Rush), the Australian speech therapist who cured the shy and insecure Royal of his crippling stammer is so beautifully told that only the hardest and coldest of hearts will be left unmoved.
Firth and Rush are perfectly matched with both giving the other the space to express their character and neither trying to steal the scene from the other. Rush is loose and relaxed, confident and comfortable in his own skin while Firth is a bundle of repressed anxieties and frustrations. He views himself as totally unfit for the office of King which he realises could be thrust on him if his older brother, King Edward VIII insists on marrying the twice divorced American Wallis Simpson.
The Duke's life experience is limited to his service in the Royal Navy and he confesses to Logue that he's the first 'ordinary man' he's ever met but Logue is far from that. Not only is he an outsider by dint of his nationality he's also a far from conventional therapist, and is unwilling to change who he is or how he treats patients to conform to Royal expectations of deference.
The ensuing battle of wills is amusing and moving. Logue insists on equality if he is to treat the Duke - "I'll call you Bertie and you call me Lionel" - and while he's respectful of the Duke's position he refuses to stand on ceremony. This takes some adjustment for Bertie and his wife Elizabeth (Oscar nominated Helena Bonham Carter) who have no experience of life outside stuffy court circles and makes for some slyly funny moments.

The crowning achievement of THE KING'S SPEECH is to create an irresistible yet completely unmanipulated sense of empathy and concern for Bertie. By accident of birth he is one of the most privileged people on the planet yet we don't envy him his position. Yes he's the son of a King and Emperor but he's also a very ordinary man in an impossible situation. Oscar nominated Director Tom Hooper promotes this idea from the film's very first scene, with the young Duke forced to deliver a speech in front of thousands of people and relayed to millions more by radio. For anyone who has ever had to speak in public - stammer or not - it's easy to identify with his plight.
This powerful personal story is set in the context of the enormous political upheaval caused not only by Edward's abdication (which shook the British establishment) but also Hitler's relentless expansion in Europe which is pushing Great Britain ever closer to war. Can the new King conquer his personal demons and find the courage to provide his people with the strong and resolute leadership they require to face the challenges ahead?
With great performances, a memorable (Oscar nominated) script, and a touching story the Oscar nominated THE KING'S SPEECH is damn near perfect. You'll laugh, you'll cry and you'll sense the weight of history on your shoulders. What more can you ask for?

EICHMANN: a missed opportunity

This 2007 production really is a missed opportunity to get inside the head of one of history's most infamous mass murderers.

EICHMANN is supposedly based on the interrogation of Adolf Eichmann by the Israelis after they kidnapped him from Argentina in 1961 and brought him back to Israel to stand trial for his central role in the killing of 6 million Jews during World War Two.
But rather than focus on the explanations, evasions and lies of the man who oversaw the logistics of the Holocaust, the film spends at least half it's running time examining the life of Captain Avner Less, the young Israeli police officer tasked with interrogating Eichmann. Director Robert Young clearly believed there was dramatic mileage to be had in exploring the conflict of interest provoked by Less's assignment. Here was a Jew whose father had been one of the six million murdered by the Nazis attempting to draw a confession from the man whose signature had sent him to the death camp.But what we get is a turgid plod through the stresses and strains that Less's task imposes on him and his family, intermittently interrupted by questioning of the prisoner which never does more than scrape the surface.
Irredeemably evil though Eichmann was, he did have something of value to tell us about the thinking behind such a monstrous crime but we never get to hear more than the headlines. It's as if director Young took the decision that he's already guilty so why bother hearing his excuses.
In 2001 Stanley Tucci was icily convincing as Eichmann in the tv movie 'Conspiracy,' a recreation of the 1942 conference which devised the Final Solution. EICHMANN should have provided the other bookend to that story but it simply falls flat, despite a fine performance from Thomas Kretschmann in the title role.

THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND: something less than brain surgery

By the time Boris Karloff appeared as Dr Laurience in 1936's THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND he'd played the mad scientist so many times he could do it in his sleep. That he succeeded in doing it in mine - at least for a few minutes during the middle of the story - is not an indictment of his performance but rather of the creaky and unimaginative screenplay.

Laurience is a formerly brilliant brain specialist whose increasingly radical ideas about the mind and soul have seen him ostracized by the scientific community. "There's something queer about him" as one former colleague so pithily puts it. His only supporter is his former student Clare Wyatt (Anna Lee). A newly qualified doctor she goes to work for him at his crumbling mansion in the English countryside. Her eager boyfriend and cub reporter Dick Haslewood (John Loder) follows her and the article he writes on Laurience attracts the attention of Dick's egotistical millionaire father who sets the scientist up in his own institute.
It's at this point I nodded off.
When I awoke everyone was running around and shortly thereafter the story creaked to it's predictable, implausible ending. There's certainly something charming about the ridiculous collection of junk shop odds and ends that pass for sophisticated scientific equipment capable of transferring the soul from one person to another, but it's not enough on its own to compensate for the lack of energy in everything and everyone else involved in the film.
Karloff churned out so many horror movies in the 30s and 40s that's it's unrealistic to expect every one of them to be a gem. But regardless of the material he's always watchable and that's the saving grace for THE MAN WHO CHANGED HIS MIND.
Just make sure you're full of coffee and sitting on a hard chair before you press play on the dvd remote!

CACTUS FLOWER: a prickly dilemma - to like or not to like

I'm clearly out of step with mainstream opinion regarding this film. I thought Goldie Hawn was the worst thing about it, yet she won the 1970 Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance.

Picking up the ultimate acting award for your first big big screen part is quite an achievement, and she certainly shows there's more to her than the high pitched dumb blonde she played on Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, but she relies too much on biting her lower lip to express emotion. It frankly makes her look gormless.
The other downside for me is the script. It's far too theatrical. The characters spout lines designed to be declaimed in the cavernous darkness of a theatre (which is where this story originated) and not in the more intimate, naturalistic setting of the movie theatre. I don't go to the cinema to see a filmed play, I go to see a film. They're two different arts and require different approaches to the material.The script for CACTUS FLOWER has too many 'zinger' lines where I could sense the performers almost pausing to wait for the audience reaction.
On the plus side Walter Matthau delivers those lines with such style and wit that he almost makes up for the downside. And Ingrid Bergman is wonderful as his receptionist with a crush on him. She not only gives a great performance but also looks so good it's hard to believe that almost three decades had passed since 'Casablanca.'
For me, Matthau and Bergman were better than the material they were given to work with and that's why I stuck with the film all the way to it's predictable end.

THE WRECKING CREW: the sleepwalking spy

The script, acting and direction for this 1969 Dean Martin spy thriller spoof as so lethargic I felt I must have been unknowingly heavily sedated while slipping the disc into the DVD player.
Martin barely has the energy to go through the motions as secret agent Matt Helm. Even the presence of numerous scantily clad sex starved starlets fails to rouse him from his torpor.
An all round waste of time, money and talent, the big mystery is why Columbia ever gave this project the green light.

PEOPLE WILL TALK: and talk and talk and talk..........

Cary Grant rarely made missteps when choosing his films but boy did he fall flat on his ass with PEOPLE WILL TALK.
It's an hour and fifty minutes of pompous, self indulgent, self-important, boring hot air.

Right from the opening titles this film screams "prestigious studio art house project" produced with the sole intention of demonstrating that, despite frequent appearances to the contrary, Hollywood  (and Twentieth Century Fox in particular) knew that culture wasn't spelt with a K.From the name checks for Brahms and Wagner, and studio head Darryl F.Zanuck's 'produced by' credit, to the three pages of explanatory text, it's obvious this isn't going to be just another middle-brow Cary Grant comedy drama. THIS IS SERIOUS ART!
It's also practically unwatchable.
Grant's portrayal of the slightly Christ-like, ludicrously named Dr Noah Praetorius is unforgivably dull. He regurgitates the ponderous dialogue in a flat,monotonous drone, and his tendency to pontification made me want to punch him in the mouth just to shut him up and wipe that expression of smug superiority off his face (which, by the way, is inexplicably tanned to a deep shade of mahogany)..That none of the other characters in the film reach this same conclusion is because they're all equally annoying.
In particular Jeanne Crain, as the object of his affections, matches him line for pretentious line of badly written, overly theatrical dialogue.Neither of them are remotely credible as real people - they're philosophical debates on legs.
Add to this Olympic gold medal-grade windbaggery a plot that is as confused as it is uninteresting and the result is turkey so unappealing not even the President would pardon it for Thanksgiving.

THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT: this dumb blonde's not so dumb

Jayne Mansfield is mostly remembered for the grisly nature of her demise (and misremembered at that) rather than for any of her films. She was the buxom, peroxide washed-up Marilyn Monroe wannabe decapitated in an horrific car crash on her way to a tawdry nightclub appearance.
And as with most one line summaries of a career in the public eye it's neither accurate nor fair.Sure, she was offered up to 50s audiences as a kind of Monroe clone with an emphasis on her more than ample cleavage but actually she wasn't a half-bad actress. While she never achieved Marilyn's level of success or critical praise she was sharp enough to recognise her image for what it was and - for a brief moment - make it work for her. This is perhaps no where more obvious than in 1956's THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT.
The part of blonde bimbo Jerri Jordan was her first starring role but despite her relative inexperience she brings a depth and understanding to the role that won't be immediately obvious to those distracted by her more obviously visible talents.
Jerri's boorish boyfriend Marty 'Fats' Murdock (Edmond O'Brien) hires alcoholic has-been press agent Tom Miller (Tom Ewell) to turn her into a singing star because he wants to be seen dating someone who's a somebody, not a nobody. Despite appearances Jerri's a stay-at-home kind of girl who just wants to get married and have kids. She also can't sing but she reluctantly goes along with Miller's promotional schemes to keep Fats happy.
If Mansfield were in fact a buxom dumb blonde just playing herself she wouldn't be half as impressive as she is. This is a fine piece of acting. She sends up her image mercilessly without ever tipping over into parody. It's not only Tom and Fats and all the other gullible males in the story that she's playing for fools, it's the audience as well.

Mansfield's performance is key to the effectiveness of the film's satirical take on show-business and the then infant phenomenon of rock and roll. Rarely have large breasts and the devil's music been so entertainingly blended on film, creating a story which simultaneously mocks and celebrates both. It's a story that has been so artfully constructed by writer-director Frank Tashlin that it would make it's point just as effectively if all the musical numbers were removed. If anyone's being 'used' in this film it's Fats Domino, Gene Vincent, The Platters, Little Richard and Eddie Cochran. They each get their 3 and a half minutes of celluloid fame but they're little more than window dressing to draw a young audience hungry for this rebellious new musical form that was spreading across the USA.
A genuine comedic gem with great performances from Ewell, O'Brien and especially Mansfield you'll find you can't help liking and maybe even loving THE GIRL CAN'T HELP IT.

THE HISTORY BOYS: a masterclass in sophisticated writing

It's rare that I fall in love with a film these days but THE HISTORY BOYS had me at hello. This big screen version of the Alan Bennett play won't be to everyone's taste but I just couldn't get enough.

Set in a Grammar School in northern England in the early 1980s this drama focuses on a group of high achieving male pupils preparing for the entrance interview that could win them a place at Oxford or Cambridge. Not satisfied with the instruction and guidance from their History (Frances De La Tour)and General Studies (Richard Griffiths) teachers the headmaster brings in a professional prep coach, Irwin (Stephen Campbell Moore) to add some final polish. Just a few years older than the boys he's teaching, Irwin's presence changes the dynamic between the pupils and their teachers, unsettling some and encouraging others to push the boundaries of their relationships to one another.
What makes THE HISTORY BOYS such an enjoyable experience is the dialogue. It's razor sharp, sophisticated and often very witty. Some viewers may find it unusual or implausible for 18 year old boys to speak the way these boys do but it's actually not that surprising considering their teachers' passion for the art of learning (as opposed to simply instructing their pupils on the bare minimum required to get an A), and the pupils status as the intellectual creme de la creme of their school.
The story's stage origins are never very far from the surface but director Nicholas Hytner does a magnificent job of opening out the action without detracting from the importance of the words being spoken, and this is a film that relies on dialogue not action for its impact.

Richard Griffiths is magnificent as Hector, the 'old school' teacher, whose belief in inculcating in his boys all manner of esoteric and apparently irrelevant information is central to their intellectual development. His style clashes with Irwin's modern approach and the contrast is emphasised by their physical appearance. Hector is a waddling mountain of a man while Irwin is slim, smooth and streamlined. Dominic Cooper ('An Education', 'Mamma Mia!')is the best known of the young actors playing the pupils but all of them are excellent and while each represents a different type (the brash one, the working class one, the gay one) they are also credible as individuals.
Most of us spent our school days waiting impatiently for the bell to ring and the rest of our life to start. THE HISTORY BOYS is one masterclass I'd happily stay back after school for.

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE: strike a pose

THE SHANGHAI GESTURE is a truly bizarre viewing experience.

It begins with the opening credits which include a card saluting "a large cast of HOLLYWOOD EXTRAS who without expecting credit or mention stand ready day and night to do their best - and who at their best are more than good enough to deserve mention." In all my film watching experience I have never seen a similar acknowledgment, so it naturally made me wonder just what prompted it. As yet I have no answer beyond the possibility that director Josef von Sternberg was simply a big hearted guy who was concerned that everyone received their due. But given everything I've read about him and his method of working that doesn't seem too likely. There's an indication of the size of his ego in the directed by credit which mentions his ASC (American Society of Cinematography) membership. He's the director from chrissake! That trumps any other title on the production crew and undermines the film's credited director of photography, Paul Ivano, by implying that maybe Sternberg was the real innovator behind the camera.
Actually, this latter assertion is borne out by the film which follows. It is undeniably a Sternberg creation, or rather it's a near parody of a Sternberg creation. The distinctive style which he developed during the 1930s in a series of now classic dramas ('Shanghai Express', 'Scarlet Empress', 'The Devil is a Woman') starring Marlene Dietrich is here pushed to ridiculous, garish extremes.

There's not a single sharp edge in the entire story. Every scene is shot in such soft focus that you'll need glasses to correct your vision by the film's end. It's like watching an ornately decorated marshmallow in action. Speaking of which, there isn't a whole lot of action. The entire cast, from Victor Mature, Gene Tierney and Walter Huston to the numerous unnamed but much appreciated extras appear to be acting while in the grip of overwhelming torpor. A sense of weariness permeates their movements, their reaction to events, and their patterns of speech.
This is further accentuated by Sternberg's insistence that the leading characters strike a pose before delivering their lines. It's as if the production's official photographer is on set taking carefully posed publicity pictures while the cast and crew are shooting the scene. Inevitably this acts as a brake on the fluidity of the action, reducing it to a series of turgid set pieces and adding an unhealthy dollop of ridiculousness to the proceedings. Are these people acting out a story or posing for a catalogue?

With Sternberg's earlier films all these elements of his distinctive visual style coalesced to create a magical, memorable and atmospheric whole. His re-imagining of contemporary civil war China in 1932's 'Shanghai Express' is pure Hollywood fantasy - romantic, sensuous and totally intoxicating. Returning to Shanghai 9 years later the magic is gone despite his obvious efforts to recreate it. With the exception of the sumptuous gambling house with it's circular tiered balconies resembling the descending circles of hell, everything else looks threadbare despite the reported $1 million production budget.
All of these factors inevitably impact on the effectiveness and impact of the story being told. And I haven't even mentioned yet Victor Mature's strange performance as an effete poetry spouting Egyptian doctor. Despite his muscular build (which is mostly hidden beneath the curtain-like cloak he wears) his delicate feminine features undermine the plausibility of his portrayal of the gambling house's resident stud whom women find irresistible. Never the most expressive of actors his woodenness is further enhanced by the need to keep a small fez balanced on his head which hinders his ability to make sudden movements.
A very young Gene Tierney as the centre of everyone's attention is stunningly beautiful but prone to overacting, while Walter Huston plays his part with the air of a fine actor who knows the material is far beneath him.
THE SHANGHAI GESTURE has value as an example of what can happen when a director with an ego and faded creative powers, working outside of the support structure of dominant studio system attempts to impose his own peculiar vision on a project that is never going to get past the censor without drastic rewrites and/or cuts.
But if that's not the kind of cinematic experience that floats your boat you're better off finding something else to watch instead.

TRUE GRIT: not quite the real deal

It's tough to judge this new version of TRUE GRIT solely on its own merits. The John Wayne original is so vividly imprinted on my memory that it's impossible not to compare the two, and each time I do it's the Coen Brothers' production that is found wanting.

Not because TRUE GRIT 2010 is a bad film. It's not. It's actually pretty good and I can see it picking up a fair few Oscar nominations, but it's not the real deal and here's why.
Jeff Bridges is a very talented actor but he's no John Wayne. While Bridges plays Marshal Rooster Cogburn, Wayne was Cogburn. Bridges undoubtedly has greater range than Wayne as an actor but there's nothing naturalistic about his portrayal. He's playing a part complete with scruffy beard, dirty clothes and questionable personal habits. He's putting on the voice and adopting a certain manner of speaking (almost unintelligible) and style of walking. It's clearly Bridges playing a part.

Wayne, in contrast, is playing himself, or that's what he appears to be doing since by 1969 when the original TRUE GRIT was released, Wayne had played cowboys in so many Westerns that the genre was synonymous with him. This association between the actor and his roles was cemented by his off-screen persona. In real life Wayne espoused the same values and behaviours as his on-screen characters. As a result his Rooster Cogburn appeared to be interchangeable with his real self. The character was  a one-eyed version of Wayne. Where Wayne was a legend. who portrayed Cogburn as a myth, Bridges is an actor who plays the character as a man.
However, even with these reservations, I must admit that I enjoyed this new version of TRUE GRIT. There's a surprising amount of humour in this retelling of the story about Mattie Ross, the determined and stubborn 14 year old girl who hires a dissolute US Marshal (Cogburn) to track down the man who's murdered her father. Partly this humour arises from Mattie's situation as the unlikely protagonist, ordering around men 3 or 4 times her age and getting the better of of oily businessmen who can't believe they're being bested by a teenage girl.
14 year old Hailee Steinfield, making her feature film debut as Mattie, is sensational.She brings a confidence and poise to her performance which allows the humour to arise naturally from the situation. There's nothing forced or fake about Mattie's character. She may have an intellect beyond her years but she doesn't mouth implausibly adult one-liners in the way that so many professional teenagers do on film and tv.
Cogburn's not the only bemused to find himself taking orders from her. Matt Damon as the windy and self-important Texas Ranger LaBoeuf is similarly taken down several pegs when he presumes to treat Mattie according to her age.
The Coen Brothers have always done their own thing when it comes to making movies and for the most part they've been pretty successful albeit in a limited kind of way. Judging from the box office returns it looks like TRUE GRIT may turn out to be the most financially successful of all. Whether it can drag itself clear of the giant shadow cast by Wayne's original to become a classic in its own right is another matter, and my sense it that it won't.

127 HOURS: quite literally gripping stuff

It's testimony to the talent and creativity of 127 HOURS director Danny Boyle and his star James Franco that they succeed in making a film about a man with his arm trapped by a boulder in a crevasse for more than 5 days not just compelling but also Oscar worthy.

The true story of mountaineer Aron Ralston is so well known that it gives nothing away to reveal that faced with the choice of dying slowly from thirst and hunger or cutting off his own arm he chooses to do what most of us could never imagine doing. And even though we know from the very start what he will do it takes nothing away from the power of the story which unfolds. If anything it adds to the tension. We know he's going to do it but the question remains of just when will he reach the point when the suffering compels him to do the unimaginable.
To call Ralston an outdoor kind of guy is an understatement. He lives for climbing, hiking and mountainbiking. Anything that gets him closer to nature and further away from civilisation is what he lives for. He's also selfish and singleminded, something that becomes clearer as he flashes back over his life while trapped in the crevasse.
Boyle makes very creative and sparing use of the flashback to not only fill us in on what's lead Ralston to this point but also to get inside the climber's head as he reflects (probably for the first time in his life) on what's brought him to this life-changing moment. These are are complemented by Ralston's entries in the video diary he starts when he realises the hopelessness of his situation. His musings both serious and lighthearted are intended to be viewed by whoever finds his body.
Franco is mighty impressive in a part which requires him to do an awful lot with very little except his own resources.. It's a performance shorn of melodramatic theatrics and ego. Franco immerses himself entirely in the character of Ralston creating someone we can believe in as a flesh and blood human being rather than a star name playing a role.
Franco's up for a Golden Globe next weekend as is Boyle (for screenplay but not direction) and 'Sumdog Millionaire' composer A.R.Rahman for his incredible soundtrack. Each faces tough competition but would be deserving winners, and I'm looking forward to seeing their names featuring prominently when the Oscar nominations are announced at the end of this month.

JESUS CAMP: very creepy and disturbing campers

When I was a teenager I lived next door to a family of missionaries. They'd spent many years working overseas but they were now back in the UK and spreading the word on the streets of my hometown - literally on the streets. Each weekend the husband would set up his easel and paint pots in the town centre shopping precinct and preach to passing shoppers, using his easel and paints to illustrate his message. He was a very mild mannered man but the courage of his convictions gave him the strength to draw attention to himself in crowded places by talking at the top of his voice.

He and his wife had three young kids and family life revolved around religion. There were strict limits on what the children could and couldn't do. The eldest was a girl in her early teens and one evening I heard a noise coming from their backyard. It was her.. She was upset and storming around apparently after having a row with her parents. The noise was her shouting over and over "Bloody Jesus, bloody Jesus, bloody Jesus!"
Whatever the row was about had pushed her to lash out at the way of life and the message that had been imposed on her since birth.
I'm not a religious man but I pray that something similar happens to Tory, Rachel, Levi and the other poor brainwashed Midwestern kids we meet in JESUS CAMP.12 year old Levi (who claims he was 'saved' at the age of 5) is homeschooled by his Evangelical Christian mom who believes she can do a better job educating him than the godless public school system. He wants to be a preacher when he grows up so, as a treat, his family sends him to an Evangelical Christian summer camp called 'Kids on Fire' based at the ironically named Devil's Lake in North Dakota.
There, under the relentless hectoring and cajoling of Pastor Becky Fisher, Levi and his fellow campers are repeatedly reduced to tears as they admit their sins and pledge to become soldiers of Jesus. The scenes of children as young as four and five speaking in tongues and becoming hysterical with fear, guilt and who knows what else over their imagined sinfulness is truly disturbing, and one has to wonder at the sanity of the parents and other adults who believe this is a positive environment for impressionable young children.
Many of these children come across as prepubescent Stepford Wives, dutiful parroting their pastor and parents' views on global warming, the separation of church and state, abortion, atheists, and Darwinism which they can't possibly properly understand.
JESUS CAMP is billed as a documentary but it's clear where the sympathies of directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady lie, and it's not with the creepy Evangelicals they've somehow persuaded to let them into their world. The strength of their case is undermined by some careless editing which reveals sequences aren't always as contiguous as they appear, and by an over-reliance on one Christian radio talk show host to present the opposing viewpoint.
Even with its flaws this window on homegrown religious extremists is creepier and scarier than most horror films. Unlike those Hollywood concoctions this is real and it's happening here and now.

SKYLINE: a story in desperate need of an ending

As the final credits rolled on this sci-fi thriller my overwhelming sense was of having been conned out of the previous ninety minutes of my life.
The ending to SKYLINE is so utterly ludicrous that I did a mental double-take and momentarily wondered whether I’d actually been watching a heavily disguised spoof on the genre.

Up until the final few minutes this is a reasonably entertaining thriller focused on a rapidly shrinking group of twenty-somethings trapped in a penthouse apartment in Los Angeles as an invasion by murderous alien spacecraft wreaks death and destruction all around them.
What’s refreshing is the reaction of this group of tanned muscular hunks and almost alluring young ladies to the mortal threat they find themselves facing. There are no heroics or ingenious escape plans. These people are scared shitless and pretty clueless about what to do to stay alive. In other words, they have the same reaction as 99% of the viewing audience.
Their inability to figure out a way of getting out of the building without being reduced to mincemeat means the bulk of the action is restricted to the penthouse and the roof of the building. The money directors Colin and Greg Strause saved on sets they poured into special effects and it’s cash well spent. SKYLINE is a couple of hundred million dollars short of attaining blockbuster status but the fx are far from shabby. The only time the Strauses let their limited budget show are the brief shots of the oversize aliens stomping over LA. We only ever see one at a time and it’s clearly a crouching man in a monster suit trampling through a presumably miniature model of the City of Angels.
All this life or death tension building through the film has to lead to something – right? Either those left at the end will escape, giving us hope for the ultimate survival of mankind in the face of overwhelming odds, or they’ll go down fighting or at least while trying - heroically – to escape. There has to be a logical conclusion of some sort, doesn’t there?
Well no, apparently there doesn’t.
In the world of Colin and Greg Strause it’s perfectly acceptable to abandon the air of plausibility which has pervaded the entire story (plausible within the context of alien spaceships attacking Earth, that is) and offer up a conclusion which is so ridiculous and unbelievable that it must have been plucked from some parallel universe where the prosaic and the fantastic nestle comfortably cheek by jowl.
Either that or they simply ran out of ideas on how to end the story. Either way it's a bizarre way to go about making a movie.

THE FIGHTER: he could be a contender if his mom let him.

Watching Mark Wahlberg ace the role of hard luck Boston boxer Micky Ward it's hard to believe this is the same actor who was so miscast and non-descript in his last film outing "The Other Guys."

Ward is a part Wahlberg was born to play. He's gritty, working class and tough but with a sensitive interior beneath his muscular shell. He's not the sharpest tool in the box but he knows what he wants even if he needs help from others to articulate it.
Based on a true story THE FIGHTER charts Ward's slow and unsteady climb from punching bag mismanaged by his mom and older brother to genuine welterweight world championship material, but more than just another take on the American Dream this is a tale of family relationships and loyalties and how those that are closest and possessing of the most unqualified love are not always best for us.
Ward's older half-brother Dicky (Christian Bale) is a local legend, having knocked down Sugar Ray Robinson in a fight some years earlier. He's also a crack addict which makes him less than ideal as Micky's trainer. He's full of helpful advice but totally unreliable and, combined with their mom Alice (Melissa Leo) booking his fights with an eye on a quick buck rather than career progression, Micky's heading for Palookaville, and fast.

Until that is he hooks up with the strong willed and assertive Charlene (Amy Adams). She gives him the strength to stand up to his mom, brother and nine sisters (collectively so unappealing they make Cinderella's Ugly Sisters look like Victoria's Secret models) and change the course of his life.
Wahlberg is superb but he's not alone. Equally deserving of an Oscar nomination are Bale and Leo for compelling portrayals of corrupted family love, while Amy Adams also impresses, not least for her willingness to pile on the pounds to give Charlene a figure befitting a young woman from a working class area of Boston.
Director David O. Russell ('Three Kings', 'I Heart Huckabees') - and no less than 13 producers (including Wahlberg) -keeps the entire project in balance giving every character an equal shot at redemption by letting them tell their story from their point of view.
Despite initial appearances there's no good guys and bad guys here, just a bunch of ordinary folk trying to do the best with the cards they've been dealt. Their story is both instructive and uplifting and - if there's any justice - worthy of a bunch of Golden Globes and Oscars.