THIS IS 40: This is awful

Self-indulgent, flabby, unfunny and interminably long, this Judd Apatow written and directed 'comedy' is what it must feel like to be sentenced to life in prison without hope of parole. 
The only end in sight is death.
Scene after scene of characters screaming at one another, and spouting improvised lines which do everything except wave large red flags to attract attention to their supposed hilariousness sapped my will to live.
I wasted 2 and a quarter hours watching this junk and I refuse to waste a minute more writing about it.

BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD: this is what a multiple Oscar winner looks like

Let me save the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a whole bunch of money on postage.
Don't bother mailing out all those nomination ballots this year. Just etch the title BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD on the Oscars for Best Film, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Actress and be done with all the speculation.
BEASTS is not a film you just watch - it's an incredibly powerful, all senses fully engaged cinematic experience!

It's so much more than simply the story of a young girl and her father battling to preserve their own lives and way of life in a coastal Louisiana bayou swamped by a Katrina-like tropical storm, but that's a good place to start.
In her film debut, six year old Quvenzhane Wallis gives the kind of performance many adult actors strive all their professional life to get close to. To describe it as stunning and sensational is grossly inadequate. She displays a naturalism and innate understanding of her character that seems impossible to achieve in one so young and inexperienced. Kids playing themselves in fly-on-the-wall documentaries aren't this convincing!
Wallis is Hushpuppy, a six year old girl living with her unpredictable and unreliable father, Wink (Dwight Henry) in a couple of dilapidated shacks on an isolated bayou island called the Bathtub, cut off from the rest of 21st century America by an imposing levee. Hushpuppy has the kind of freedom most kids her age can only dream of but what she longs for more than anything is to find her mother. It's not clear from Wink's vague explanation whether she's dead or simply deserted them but Hushpuppy won't rest until she's made every effort to find her.
She's presented with an unexpected opportunity when a huge storm floods the Bathtub, destroying the homes and way of life of the small, resilient community who've chosen this edge-of-the-world existence over the bland and sterile life of those living the other side of the levee.

While Hushpuppy's quest to find her mother provides the thread which pulls the pieces of the story together there is, as I mentioned earlier, so much more to BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD. The film is an unapologetic celebration of life on the fringe where friendships, rituals and community as a tribe are more important than money and possessions. Director Benh Zeitlin's handheld camera is in constant motion, bringing a splendor and romanticism to daily life which transcends the reality of the poverty and squalor.
The story also blends fantasy and reality in musing on man's place in and responsibility to the planet. How have events stretching back as far as the Ice Age, and the time when dinosaurs roamed the Earth, impacted on our present existence and at what cost do we ignore a planet in constant evolution? Hushpuppy, at age six, has more insight into her place and importance in the grand scheme of things than any of the adults around her, and eloquently expresses her understanding in a series of voice-overs scattered through the story.
Emotionally engaging, entrancing and visually spectacular BEASTS OF THE SOUTHERN WILD is a remarkable experience. I'm not going to pretend I've seen every film released this year but even if I had I don't imagine I would change my opinion that BEASTS should - if there's any justice - clean up at next February's Oscars ceremony.

THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER: formulaic yet fresh and funny

High School can be a hellish experience if you're not one of the in-crowd.
And, cinematically speaking, John Hughes wrote the book on that subject in the 1980s with 'The Breakfast Club' and 'Pretty in Pink.'
'Heathers' and 'Mean Girls' were notable subsequent additions to the canon, but there have also been dozens of other - lesser - efforts on the same general theme resulting in a pretty crowded field.

It will therefore take a singular creative talent to find something new to say on the topic and THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER writer-director David Chbosky is not that man. But he's done the next best thing. With this big screen adaptation of his own novel he's created a story that is warm and engaging and peopled by characters we can believe in, even as they adhere closely to the stereotypes so often found in this particular vein of coming-of-age stories.
There's Charlie (Logan Lerman), the titular wallflower, anxiously counting down the days until he can graduate and escape the waking nightmare that is high school. He's definitely not a jock but neither is he a nerd. Charlie exists in that nebulous space between the two extremes where a reasonably enjoyable school experience is possible for sociable types, but he isn't. Charlie's not anti-social but there's something preventing him from developing regular friendships, so when he spots an opening with an older student who's as much of an outsider as he is he grasps it with the fervor of a drowning man thrown a lifebelt.
Patrick (Ezra Miller) is the consummate high school outsider. Loudly and proudly gay he has no time for school rules or peer pressure, but - of course - that outward display of confidence masks troubling inner turmoil.
Patrick's best friend Sam (Emily Watson) is similarly conflicted. Charlie finds himself immediately drawn to her but has no clue how to express his true feelings. He can only watch helplessly as she invests her emotions in men he knows are no good for her.
The pressures on and within all three build to the inevitable explosive release and - in one  case - the disturbing exposure of a long repressed secret.
Although Watson is the star name, we watch events unfold from Charlie's point of view, and director Chbosky's careful to give all three characters equal weight. Charlie, Sam and Patrick are indispensable to each other and to the effective telling of the story. Relegate any one of them to a supporting role and it just doesn't work.

And while Watson proves there's so much more to her than just Hermione Granger, it's Lerman and Miller that are the real revelations. Both actors have been around for the best part of decade but have not yet attained real name or face recognition.Their performances in THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER will change that. Miller succeeds in making Patrick a credible, three-dimensional character despite hewing pretty closely to the checklist of traits required cinematically of a gay high school teenager. Lerman's success, meanwhile, is in making Charlie a believable young man without resort to any of the cinematic stereotypes. He's not weird, goofy, strangely dressed, obsessed with computers or some other nerdy hobby, or from a single parent household. He even subverts the cliche of the beautiful girl's asexual best friend.
In addition to the performances I also very much appreciated the setting. The film's not explicit about the timeframe (and the soundtrack doesn't help as most of the songs are not contemporary) but it's most likely the early 1990s, a period that was still largely pre-internet and pre-cell phones. The absence of this technology meant people still had to interact on a face to face basis. Charlie can't use emails and text messages to express to Sam the feelings that he's too shy to tell her in person. Vinyl records, paper based books and cassette-recorded mixtapes are all integral parts of their world along with hanging out in person. It's a window on a forgotten world that will generate a warm glow of nostalgia (and perhaps embarrassment too) in viewers of a certain age.
Charming, engaging, funny and heartbreaking, THE PERKS OF BEING A WALLFLOWER is one of those rare works of fiction that feels like a true story. And it's definitely one of my favourite films of 2012.

GHOST TOWN: dentist in distress comedy loses its bite

British comedian Ricky Gervais seized hold of his first starring role in an American movie with the same assuredness that marked Steve Martin’s early film roles.

There’s edginess to both men’s humour which marked them out as more than just another comedian transitioning from small screen to big. Where Martin was wild and crazy, Gervais is sarcastic and low key. He’s an accomplished stand-up and tv comedian who exudes a clear confidence in his ability to be funny. There’s no sense of “please like me” pleading in his screen persona.

But while it took several movies for Martin’s edge to blunt and middle-aged, family friendly smugness to set in, it’s possible to see the sharp edges on Gervais start to dull over the course of this one film.

GHOST TOWN sets out encouragingly enough with Gervais as Bertram Pincus, a British born Manhattan dentist and world class misanthrope.  A major reason why he loves his job so much is that he’s able to stop his patients talking to him by shoving instruments and cotton swabs into their mouth.

Bertram is at his happiest ignoring people and if they persist in being pleasant to him he’s an Olympic gold medallist at cutting them dead with a few well chosen sarcastic and very funny words. So it’s beyond his worst imaginable nightmare when he comes round following a routine surgery to discover there’s a whole other world of people who want his attention.

A mishap during the operation has left him with the unique power to see dead people and New York City is full of ghosts with unfinished business. None of them can pass over to the other side unless they can persuade Bertram to help them. One recently deceased man, Frank (Greg Kinnear), is particularly persistent. He insists that Bertram do something to stop his widow Gwen (Tea Leoni), from making a huge mistake by marrying a “sleazeball” lawyer.

So far, so good. But here’s where the rot starts to set in. As Bertram very slowly warms to his task and develops a crush on Gwen he goes from all sharp acerbic edges to dangerously warm and cuddly. He starts to like people, to be concerned for the others, and to try and become a better person himself to prove he’s worthy of Gwen’s affections.

The transformation is not quite as soul-destroying as watching Steve Martin in “The Jerk” followed by “Cheaper by the Dozen” but a few more storylines like this and Gervais could find himself in a similar place. GHOST TOWN’s early promise has largely dissipated by the film’s midway point and from thereon it coasts, not unpleasantly, to a standard Hollywood finish where everyone gets what they deserve.

Gervais made his name as the creator and star of the original British version of “The Office” (which, by the way, is considerably funnier and less contrived than the US remake) and it may be that he’s better suited to tv projects where he has total artistic control. “The Office” and his follow-up show “Extras” gave Gervais the freedom to showcase his unique sense of humour without the compromises required of a Hollywood romantic comedy.

It’s not that he’s wrong for GHOST TOWN – his performance is very assured – it’s more that the film is not quite right for him. However I recognise that this perception is based on my prior knowledge of his work on British tv and probably won’t be shared by many American viewers.

Although it ultimately fails to deliver all the goods GHOST TOWN is nevertheless a likeable and reasonably entertaining viewing experience and definitely worth the investment of a couple of hours of your time.

BODY OF LIES: the two faces of America's war on terror

The phrase “truth is the first casualty of war” has become something of a cliché.

But that doesn’t stop BODY OF LIES from banging home the message with all the subtlety of a hammer smashing down on a man’s fingers - which is what happens to Leonardo DiCaprio in one particularly wince-inducing scene of this war-on-terror thriller.

Leo, as CIA station chief Roger Ferris, really only has himself to blame for his predicament. It’s the end result of his being less than candid with his boss Ed Hoffman(Russell Crowe), his Jordanian hosts, and his Iranian girlfriend about his work even though they’re all supposedly working on the same side.

BODY OF LIES takes us inside the secret, dirty, merciless war that’s being fought against the Islamic extremists bent on bringing death and destruction to those they perceive as their mortal enemies.

To borrow another cliché, it’s a story ripped from today’s headlines, complete with bombings of soft civilian targets, home-grown British-born terrorists, a charismatic and elusive mullah, and the “enhanced interrogation” of Moslem suspects.

Ferris and Hoffman personify the CIA’s rather schizophrenic response to the danger. The former is an Arab specialist. He understands the culture and he speaks the language. The latter has none of these skills and sees no reason to acquire them. For him the natural superiority that comes with being American is enough.

Hoffman is an armchair general, running the war from his cellphone while taking the kids to school, eating lunch on the Mall in Washington DC, or ensconced in his hi-tec lair at Langley. For him the battle is something he watches on his big screen tv courtesy of the many US spy satellites circling the globe. He has no interest in the reality of Ferris’s experiences on the ground.

But if BODY OF LIES is intended as a condemnation of American foreign policy in recent years it’s somewhat undermined by Crowe’s unconvincing performance.

This is his fourth collaboration with director Ridley Scott (“Gladiator”, “A Good Year” and “American Gangster”) and it’s easily his least effective. Hoffman is an unpleasant, arrogant racist but he’s not a plausible character. Crowe’s endowed him with just two traits - a less than convincing South Carolina accent and a tendency to tilt his head down and look over the top of his glasses when he talks.

That’s it; there’s nothing else. He’s so one dimensional that it’s not even possible to dislike him.

DiCaprio is considerably more credible as the CIA operative attempting to straddle two cultures and serve two masters, but for me the real star is Mark Strong as Hani Salam, the Jordanian head of intelligence. Salam is ostensibly one of the “good” guys but Strong plays the part as just this side of a James Bond villain and we’re never sure just which side he is really on.

Scott directs with his customary energy. His camera swoops into the crowded streets of Amman, across the empty desert spaces of Syria and between the towering skyscrapers of Qatar, emphasising the restless nature of the Middle East. It’s a region in perpetual motion and not all of it is forward. But he can’t resist coating everything with a patina of Hollywood gloss. He even succeeds in putting a shine on the squalor of the shanty towns land this detracts from the reality of the story he’s telling.

Sprawling and overlong with a conclusion that succeeds in being both implausible and disappointingly formulaic, BODY OF LIES is reasonably exciting but far from outstanding entertainment.Watch is once and you'll never be troubled by the urge to see it again.

JOHNNY ANGEL: masterclass in the ABC of acting - Anything But Competent

Any aspiring actor frustrated at constant rejection and bitter in the belief they're not getting the breaks their talent deserves needs look no further than JOHNNY ANGEL for confirmation that life - for thespians at least - is absolutely not fair.

This obscure 1945 B-movie thriller from RKO is worth investing 79 minutes of your time in simply to savour the impressive lack of talent displayed by the film's two stars - the always reliably wooden George Raft and bland-featured Signe Hasso.  
Their reactions are so rudimentary and cliched you can almost hear director Edwin L.Marin grinding his teeth in frustration as he coaches them from behind the camera in a futile effort to get them to emote convincingly.
"Ok, George. In this scene you're thinking about some information you've just received. I need you to do your thinking face. Can you think for me?"
George wrinkles his forehead slightly and moves his eyes from side to side in a vain attempt to indicate there is some brain activity occurring.
"Now in this scene George you are filled with powerful masculine desire for the young lady you've just seen for the first time across a crowded bar. I want you to show me your deep well of desire, and really focus on this because we're shooting you in close up."
George stares straight ahead, narrowing his eyes slightly. Otherwise his facial muscles remain immobile and totally unexpressive. It could be lust or trapped gas.
Raft was never one of Hollywood's most gifted leading men but JOHNNY ANGEL cruelly highlights his limited range. His hair is more expressive than his face. At least that moves when he gets into a fight. And he gets into a lot of fights. Perhaps the hope was we'd be so impressed by his physical prowess we'd overlook his struggle with the more nuanced elements of acting.
"Ok, Signe darling. George is looking at you with lust in his heart. You're frightened. Very frightened. This man is an animal and you know he wants you and you know he's not going to be gentle about it. You know this from the look on his face. I want you to react. You're frightened, you're terrified, but you're in a crowded bar. You can't just scream and run out of there. Give me frightened, darling."

Hasso proffers a look that is more bemused than terrified, raises her hands a little and clenches her fists. It's a stance that was hackneyed back in 1921 when silent stars used it to pantomime fear, and it hasn't improved with age. Hasso is inordinately fond of the clenched fists gesture to demonstrate terror. Sometimes she holds them just above waist height, while in other scenes she'll raise one to her mouth, as if to stifle a scream. In all instances it's reminiscent of a marginally talented teenager trying out for a part in the village amateur dramatic society's production of 'The Old Dark House.'
Both stars are blown clear off screen by Claire Trevor who acts as if she's in a completely different, more professional production. She gives the material and her co-stars considerably more credibility than they deserve although even she can't convince us that her character, Lilah, would really have married the effete, simpering George Gustafson. As played by Marvin Miller, 'Gusty' is a dime store Liberace minus the jewels, furs, candelabra and musical talent.
The only cast member who escapes completely unscathed is Hoagy Carmichael. In only his second dramatic role he essentially reprises the part of 'Cricket' that he'd played so effectively in his first film 'To Have and Have Not' the previous year. It helps that his character, the ridiculously named Celestial O'Brien, is an observer to the action and mostly stays on the outside of events.
In the hands of a more balanced cast JOHNNY ANGEL could have been a tight and absorbing film noir, but the the 3 stars are so mismatched in terms of talent and ability that the glaring disparity distracts from the storytelling. I found myself more eagerly awaiting Raft's next close-up or Hasso's next reaction than the next plot twist. And I couldn't help but wonder just how bad Raft must have smelt. His character spends the entire film in the same uniform, and all those fights had to have worked up quite a sweat!
JOHNNY ANGEL was a tipping point for Raft. It was the moment at which he ceased to be an A-list leading man and began his descent into his B-movie career. Never again would he headline a prestigious Hollywood production, and it's in this context that I encourage you to consume this particular, otherwise eminently forgettable, cinematic footnote. 

PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND: it's a white bread world out there

So this is how American teenagers celebrated Spring Break in the years before they developed a fully fledged culture of their own.
If PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND is to be believed America's youth in the early 1960s seized this long weekend away from the responsibilities of university and work to let rip and behave like a bunch of boisterous future accountants and housewives.
Some went so crazy they even loosened their tie before chugging their glass a milk.

Thankfully for the reputation of the babyboomers now nearing retirement PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND is less a documentary style snapshot of life in 1963 America and more an indicator of how out of touch Hollywood was with youth culture.
Directed by a 64 year old Norman Taurog, a veteran of almost 180 films dating back to 1926, the film was a break from his main task in the 1960s - that of emasculating Elvis Presley (he'd already directed 'GI Blues', 'Blue Hawaii', 'It Happened at the World's Fair' and 'Girls Girls Girls!' and there were another 5 titles still to come).
And what he did to Elvis with those flimsy travelogues and ridiculous musical comedies, he also did to the youth of America in PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND. Ostensibly a celebration of teenage hormones it's actually about as pheremonally charged as a white sliced loaf. Despite several daring uses of the word 'sex' no one comes anywhere close to indulging in any. Emotionally the characters are still trapped in pre-pubescence, convincing themselves they've fallen deeply in love after a brief first date and agonising about how they'll survive when he returns to Los Angeles and she goes back to her job in the Palm Springs record store.
Not only does writer Earl Hamner (who also created 'The Waltons') fail to grasp the reality of teenage sexuality but he also completely neuters that other trademark of 60s youth culture - the music. While real-life teenagers were sending Little Stevie Wonder, The Four Seasons, The Chiffons and Jan and Dean to the top of the Billboard Hot 100 in 1963, the faux teens (all the wrong side of 20) on the Warners backlot were singing "Bye Bye Blackbird" and dancing the Twist to the vocal stylings of The Modern Folk Quartet. To be fair, they dance The Twist to every piece of music played in the film, whether it's a folk song or a popular standard of the 1920s.
This is youth culture as envisaged by a bunch of 60 year old corporate suits clinging to the values of 1950s Eisenhower America. Their white bread vision of the world extends to the cast, all of whom are interchangeable both in looks and talent. Troy Donahue, Ty Hardin and Robert Conrad display not an ounce of personality, while the girls - Connie Stevens and Stefanie Powers - are similarly one dimensional. And don't get me started on Jerry Van Dyke - Dick's younger brother - who provides the comic relief. Let's just say he less amusing than an exploding car full of circus clowns.
Not only is the cast and the world they inhabit white bread it's also resolutely white. The college basketball team that Donahue, Van Dyke and their chums play for includes not a single African American, nor is there a Black, Asian or Latino face to be seen anywhere in the film.
Not so much escapist as delusional, PALM SPRINGS WEEKEND paints a picture of a youth culture that never really existed and thankfully was about to be swept away by the British Invasion and the rise of 60s counter-culture.

UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO: forget the title, feel the fear

Behind the prosaic yet puzzling title of this 1971 British production lies a genuinely disturbing and gripping story which succeeds in unsettling despite building to a distinctly unsatisfying conclusion.

A cherubically  handsome David Hemmings stars as naive schoolteacher John Ebony who lands his first job at the remote Chantry boarding school for boys somewhere on the English coast. He arrives halfway through the term to replace Mr Pelham, form 5B's previous teacher, who has fallen to his death from nearby cliffs.
The official verdict is that he got lost in the fog but as the boys of 5B soon make crystal clear to Mr Ebony, they murdered him after he got on their bad side and they're quite willing to do the same thing to him if he doesn't agree to their terms. His initial response is to fight back but the boys' willingness to follow up their threats with action soon forces him to yield to their demands.
Hemmings is superb as the idealistic young teacher who's slow to recognise he's way out of his depth despite the blunt warnings from his charges (always couched in the politest of terms and never failing to address him as 'Sir'), the disinterest of the school's headmaster (Douglas Wilmer), and the lack of support from his frustrated wife (Carolyn Seymour) who's struggling to adapt to her new role as a compliant spouse.

Ebony's initial enthusiasm for his new career and misplaced confidence in his ability to best his nakedly evil pupils drains away as director John Mackenzie slowly ratchets up the tension, building to a goose-bump inducing sequence where the boys target Ebony's wife to teach him a lesson. Rarely has a squash court felt like such a terrifying place.
It's tempting to describe UNMAN, WITTERING AND ZIGO as a horror movie, but that wouldn't be strictly accurate. It's more of a psychological thriller, soaked through with menace and an overwhelming sense of claustrophobia. The school is just a bus ride away from the nearest town but for all intents and purposes it exists in a separate dimension, buffered from the outside world by rolling hills and those treacherous cliffs. The isolation is essential for the boys' threat to be credible. Intruders with more savvy than the Ebonys would call form 5B on their behaviour and the spell would rapidly be broken.
To call form 5B 'boys' is something of a misnomer. As with almost every film set in a school, the actors are much too old for the parts they're playing (future star Michael Kitchen was 23 at the time) but it's less of a distraction here and doesn't overly detract from the purpose of their presence. Credit is also due to Tony Haygarth (only 3 years older than Kitchen) as the cynical art teacher who takes Ebony under his wing, and embodies the disillusionment with the profession which awaits Ebony if his pupils don't get him first.
Like me, you may not fully understand or accept the final climax, and while that's disappointing it's not of a magnitude to destroy what's come before. If you can find it (and the film's not currently available on DVD) UNMAN WITTERING AND ZIGO is a rewarding and engaging watch best experienced late at night with the lights off.

SEEKING A FRIEND FOR THE END OF THE WORLD: please god, not like this

I sincerely hope that this is not the way it all ends.
With an enormous asteroid on course to smash into planet Earth writer-director Lorene Scafaria's vision of mankind's final few weeks is irredeemably sappy, spineless and dull.

If there's anything positive to be said for her debut directorial effort (and I'm trying hard here to find something) it makes a change, I guess, from the usual depictions of imminent global extinction.   Barring one isolated, small scale riot on the block where the story's hero lives there's barely any breakdown in law and order (at least, not on the east coast of the United States), and too many people seem content (or resigned) to continuing with life much as normal. The few who plan something special display less imagination or creativity than they would organizing a New Year's Eve party.
It's all depressingly dull.
Just like the hero of our story, Dodge.
As played by a suitably sappy looking Steve Carell, Dodge is one of life's losers, a functionary in a large, impersonal insurance company, he's just been abandoned by his wife and now faces the end of the world alone. Too battered by life's misfortunes to rally himself he plods on with his daily routine despite the pointlessness of it all.
Until that is circumstances bring him together with Penny (Keira Knightley), his downstairs neighbour. She has a similarly bumpy lovelife and Dodge seizes the opportunity to rescue her from her oafish boyfriend and a rampaging mob and offers to help her find a pilot who can fly her home to England to be with her family, if she'll first go with him to find his high-school sweetheart.
And so the long, boring heart of the story gets underway.
Dodge is so bland he gives 'nice' a bad name while Penny is just implausible. Knightley is a talented actress with many strings to her bow but playing a slightly kookie free spirit with no credible reason for living in America is not one of them. She just doesn't sound right - not a single line trips convincingly from her lips - and she looks awful. Not only is she sporting the world's worst haircut but Scafaria has a habit of shooting her in profile which serves only to emphasize her underbite and give the impression of constant gurning.
When the world and every single individual in it is facing inescapable annihilation there really has to be more engaging stories to be told than that of Dodge and Penny. If the intention was sweetness the effect is saccharine - the kind that leaves an unpleasant aftertaste.

SGT PEPPER'S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND: we know you won't enjoy this show

How did it happen?

How did one of the most revered albums in the history of popular music get turned into quite possibly the worst film musical ever made?

I know it happened because I’m holding the dvd disc in my hand but I’m still finding it hard to believe the true awfulness of what I’ve just witnessed.

It’s not actually necessary to watch SGT PEPPER’S LONELY HEARTS CLUB BAND to recognise what a truly bad idea it is. Just take a look at the ingredients.

1. The most mismatched cast in the history of Hollywood. Who thought that pairing The Bee Gees with Peter Frampton, George Burns, Alice Cooper and Steve Martin would create on-screen chemistry?

2. A selection of classic songs so closely identified with their originators that the aforementioned mismatched cast haven’t got a hope of sounding like anything other than a karaoke cover band.

3. A plotline that has to fit the storyline of this bunch of songs which have little or no connection to one another.

4. A title taken from the Beatles famous album for a film that uses songs which are not actually on the album, negating the point of tying the film to the album.

Mix everything together, shake vigorously until it resembles a luridly-coloured mess and then hurl everything at a blank screen and hope like heck that it looks like something vaguely appealing.

The only sensible decision in the whole project was to leave all the dialogue to George Burns.

After all he’d been talking since the turn of the 20^th century and by 1978 was an old hand at it, whereas Frampton and the Brothers Gibb are stretched to the limits of their acting ability just reacting wordlessly to the action around them.

Frampton won the part of romantic lead Billy Shears by dint of his success with the 1976 LP “Frampton Comes Alive” which at the time was the biggest selling live album ever.

But what his chart success didn’t reveal but the film did was that he ran like a girl and had the charisma of an unpainted floorboard. On screen he made Shaun Cassidy look tough.

The Bee Gees had been enjoying similar chart success with “Saturday Night Fever” which was on its way to becoming the best selling soundtrack album of all time.

According to the prevailing logic it was this track record of writing and recording a string of disco hits in their distinctive falsetto singing style which made them obvious candidates to interpret the music of The Beatles.

The only musical act to emerge from the wreckage of this fiasco relatively unscathed are Earth Wind and Fire who succeeded in making “Got to get you into my life” their own by not trying to sing it like The Beatles.

Other bizarre casting decisions include veteran British comedian Frankie Howerd as the villain, Mean Mr Mustard. Well known in his homeland for his leering double entendres he would have meant nothing to American audiences even if he had been allowed to do his thing, which he wasn’t.

The film does no one any favours.  Neither Frampton nor The Bee Gees have ever starred again in an acting role on screen, director Michael Schultz has spent the bulk of his subsequent career directing tv shows, and leading lady Sandy Farina (who made her debut in SGT PEPPER) never made another film.

There’s not even the consolation of kitsch appeal. The film plays it too straight for that, so why watch it?

For me the appeal is in witnessing how so many talented and successful individuals could get it so badly wrong and create this multi-million dollar train wreck. I found myself compelled to keep watching because I wanted to find out how much worse it could get.

It’s a perverse pleasure and certainly not one I recommend paying money for, but if you can borrow a copy it’s definitely worth a look.

SOME GIRLS DO: some filmmakers shouldn't

SOME GIRLS DO has forced me to completely re-evaluate my opinion of 'The Wrecking Crew."
In my January 2011 review I described that 1969 James Bond wannabe as 'lethargic' and "an all round waste of time, money and talent" but it's positively Citizen Kanesian compared to this dreadful, cut-rate British Bond spoof.

Suave and handsome Richard Johnson sells his talents cheaply in his second outing as legendary British secret agent Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond. This time around he's called in to investigate a series of mysterious and deadly accidents that have befallen the scientists and engineers working on the world's first supersonic passenger aircraft - the surprisingly Concorde-like SST-1.
It doesn't take him long to discover the criminal mastermind behind these nefarious deeds. Carl Petersen (James Villiers) stands to make an eye-popping 8 million pounds if the plane is not ready on time, and he's using his army of robot dolly birds to make sure he can cash in.
The robots are actually a bevy of scantily clad young ladies with electronic brains who ruthlessly use their looks to lead men to their death, although their appeal is more that of a reasonably attractive office worker than a genuinely alluring Bond femme fatale. But, to put it in context, this is Great Britain 1969 when a bottle of Blue Nun was considered the height of sophistication, so I really shouldn't expect too much.
Drummond certainly doesn't and appears to be thoroughly enjoying himself as a consequence. It's standard sexist stuff which, depending on your outlook, you'll either find a charming throwback to an earlier less politically-correct time, or offensive and patronising in its objectifying of young women.
For me, the overwhelming sensation was boredom.
The story is feeble, nonsensical and punctured with numerous holes big enough to march a large army of orange bikini-clad robo-babes through, the acting is lame, the thrills limp, and the special effects spectacularly cheap and ordinary.
Just another black mark against the British film industry, SOME GIRLS DO is one of those movies that leaves you wondering why anybody ever thought it would be a good idea to invest time and money in.

BURN AFTER READING: frantic farce with an all-star cast of idiots

"Report back to me when it makes sense” a CIA boss barks at one of his subordinates as this farce starts to unravel.

He does report back but it never really makes sense. BURN AFTER READING is full of characters who think they know everything but actually don’t have a clue what they’ve got themselves caught up in.

George Clooney is a former Secret Service agent, married to a best selling children’s author, and having an affair with children’s doctor Katie Cox (Tilda Swinton).

Katie’s planning to divorce her eccentric husband Osbourne (John Malkovich). He’s quit the CIA after being demoted for an unspecified misdemeanour and is writing his tell-all memoir in revenge.

A copy of the unfinished book lands in the hands of Chad (Brad Pitt) and Linda (Frances McDormand), a couple of fitness trainers at a Washington DC branch of ‘Hardbodies Gym.’

They’re not exactly the sharpest tools in the box but they are creative and unscrupulous. They hatch a plan to extort Osbourne, offering to return his book to him for $50,000. Linda wants the money to pay for the plastic surgery she believes will help her find true love.

When Osbourne refuses to play ball, they try to hawk the spyman’s story to the Russian Embassy, which is where the CIA come in.

BURN AFTER READING is a farce whose roots extend back to 1930s Hollywood and those screwball comedies featuring Cary Grant,  Rosalind Russell,  Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Bellamy talking at a million miles an hour as they get themselves entangled in convoluted plots involving escaped convicts, dinosaur bones and pet leopard called ‘Baby’.

This film’s not quite in the same league as 'Bringing Up Baby,' (1938) 'His Girl Friday' (1940) or 'Nothing Sacred' (1937) but it’s a spirited effort nonetheless.

Writer-directors Ethan and Joel Coen ('No Country for Old Men'), have dialed down the pace a few notches to accommodate Clooney’s slightly more leisurely comedic style and the result if not exactly comedy gold is still mighty entertaining.

Pitt proves he’s no slouch in the comedy department either, playing Chad as a likeable and well intentioned doofus who’s funny just by being himself.

But it’s John Malkovich comes closest to channelling the spirit of those 30s comedy classics as he rants, raves and becomes increasingly more unhinged by the inexplicable events which are turning his life upside down and inside out.

Frances McDormand is effortlessly enchanting as Linda Litzke, making her larger than life without ever tipping over into parody or overacting. Clooney’s 'Michael Clayton' co-star Tilda Swinton, meanwhile, manages to suggest a bottomless pool of bitterness and selfishness without once having to raise her voice.

The script is laugh out loud funny in places and - just like the screwball classics it seeks to emulate - there’s not a single wasted moment. Every line and scene works to keep the plot moving rapidly forward towards its unexpected conclusion.

One of the other pleasures contained within BURN AFTER READING is the Coen Brothers complete lack of consideration for the stature of their all-star cast.There’s no special treatment for the names above the title; their story is an equal opportunity offender when it comes to stripping characters of their dignity.

Funny and pacy (the ninety six minute running time goes by in a flash) but just too lightweight to really stick in the memory for very long afterwards BURN AFTER READING is a fast food delight; very tasty while being consumed but quickly forgotten afterwards.

WAITING FOR GUFFMAN: shining a spotlight on small town America

It’s a complete waste of time to search for the town of Blaine, Missouri on the map.

As the setting for WAITING FOR GUFFMAN Blaine certainly looks like a picture-perfect example of small-town America but it doesn’t exist.

It’s a three dimensional figment of the unique imagination of Christopher Guest, the film’s actor-writer-director and a keen student of the ridiculous in everyday life.

WAITING FOR GUFFMAN zeroes in on Blaine as the burg prepares to celebrate its 150th birthday with a musical celebration titled “Red, White and Blaine.”

The town council hires failed Broadway director Corky St Clair (Guest) to create the extravaganza. Corky’s big on ambition but tiny on talent and misguidedly sees the show as his ticket back to the big time.

He motivates his cast of five amateur thespians (all equally tiny on talent) by telling them that important talent scout Mort Guffman will be in the opening night audience and if he likes what he sees they could all be heading to the Great White Way!

WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is a wonderful example of the genre which Guest has made practically his own – the mockumentary - a comedy masquerading as a documentary.

There’s a real art to this kind of sharply observed, non-judgemental humour and – having cut his mock documentary teeth as Nigel Tufnel in “This is Spinal Tap” - Christopher Guest is a master of the craft.

He peoples Blaine with a cast of characters who are funny precisely because they take themselves so seriously. They see no humour in their behaviour, fashion sense, and relationships and would be embarrassed and appalled if they realised that others were laughing at them.

Guest’s Corky St Clair is blatantly camp with an ill-advised toupee and a barely disguised crush on his hunky leading man, yet everyone with the exception of the leading man’s father, accepts Corky’s mannerisms as “artistic” and nothing more.

Corky, in turn, never thinks to challenge town dentist Dr Pearl’s (Eugene Levy) characterisation of himself as a genuinely amusing entertainer even though it’s obvious to us outsiders that he’s substituting hard work and enthusiasm for any actual showbusiness talent.

And no one at all considers it the least bit strange that city’s sole travel agency is run by the Albertsons, a couple who’ve never left Blaine. Sheila (Catherine O’Hara) is a borderline hysteric with a drink problem while Ron (Fred Willard) is hearty but oppressively overbearing.

It’s the highlighting of these foibles, failings and idiosyncrasies which makes the townsfolk of Blaine so real and endearing. Corky and company unselfconsciously bring to life the eccentricities we recognise in those we work and socialise with, even if we don’t always spot these same flaws in ourselves.

A comedy which is both subtle and laugh out loud funny 1997’s WAITING FOR GUFFMAN was the first of four mockmentaries to team Guest with Levy, O’Hara and Willard and the three subsequent outings  – “Best in Show”(2000), “A Mighty Wind” (2003) and “For Your Consideration” (2006) are all worthy of equal praise.

A hugely entertaining send-up of small-town American life, amateur theatricals and the human condition, WAITING FOR GUFFMAN is a genuine viewing pleasure that will give you an itch you just can’t scratch enough for more of Guest’s output.

LOOPER: I've seen the future and it looks like Bruce Willis

The most depressing aspect of director Rian Johnson's imagining of our near future is not the widespread homelessness or the rampant, casual gun violence.
It's the fact that in 2044 we'll be driving the same cars as we do today!
Seems that President Obama's rescue of the US auto industry 3 years ago wasn't enough to ensure long-term survival and after 2012 Detroit just stopped designing new cars.

All-in-all the next thirty years does not hold much for us to be cheerful about if LOOPER is to be believed. This thriller paints a pretty grim picture of the United States where the only thing that's really different from today is that engineers have found a way to take the wheels off motorbikes and make them hover a few feet off the ground.
Well, that and time-travel.
It still doesn't exist in 2044, but by 2074 it will have been invented and immediately banned, but that doesn't stop criminal syndicates from our future's future using it to send back to their past (but our future) criminals that they want murdered. That's because by 2074 not only will we have time travel and hovering motorbikes, we'll also have a body tagging system that makes it almost impossible to do away with someone surrepticiously.
So those marked for death are bundled into the time machine (which looks like an industrial washing machine) and dispatched to 2044 where Loopers like Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) are waiting with a shotgun to blast them into eternity.
It's a profitable business if you don't mind the blood but it comes with an inescapable expiry date. In order to conceal the fact that they're using illegal time-travel to bump-off undesirables, the mob of the future also periodically sends back the older versions of the Loopers of 2044 to be executed by their younger selves, thereby closing the loop.
Which is how Gordon-Levitt finds himself hunting down Bruce Willis, who is the Joe he's become by 2074, and whose time is now up.
Because Willis was Gordon-Levitt he knows the fate he has in store, and he's determined to avoid it so he can find and kill the child who will grow up into the ruthless mob boss who orders his execution.
(I promise you, this is definitely easier to follow on the screen than in print).
All of which sets up a tense cat and mouse game that allows Gordon-Levitt to show off his impressive Bruce Willis impression (with a little assistance from a prosthetic nose and - more disturbingly - lipstick and over painted eyebrows) and Willis to demonstrate that at 57 he still possesses his 'Die Hard' era tough guy chops.

I'm a sucker for time travel movies and particularly enjoyed writer-director Johnson's refreshing twist on the traditional time travel plot, with the younger Joe having zero interest in learning anything about his future from the older Joe, while the elder Joe's contempt for his younger self's hotheadedness is tempered by his vested interest in keeping him alive.
Stand-out amongst the supporting cast is Jeff Daniels demonstrating there's more to him than two decades of bland leading man roles might have suggested, while Emily Blunt also acquits herself well as the world's most unlikely farmer.
LOOPER is a gripping combination of sci-fi and thrills which will keep you pretty much on the edge of your seat right up to the final showdown. It works because the story is unpredictable, uncomplicated despite the subject matter, and succeeds in avoiding most of the holes and implausibilities which tend to dog time-traveling tales. With just one exception that I spotted, there's not the distractions caused by trying to figure out whether a certain thing really would or could happen when a character travels through time.
With LOOPER to add to 'The Dark Knight Rises', '50/50' and 'Inception' Gordon-Levitt continues his inexorable march towards Hollywood leading man status and director Johnson sets himself a high bar to clear with his next project, whatever that may be. For the rest of us, unburdened by such career opportunities or challenges. there's nothing more required than to sit back and enjoy.

 

ARBITRAGE: forget the title, feel the tension

Wall Street bankers and their ilk are rapidly becoming Hollywood's default bad guys. It's not surprisingly really given the financial misery they've inflicted on millions since 2008.
The latest incarnation of amorality and greed on two legs is Robert Miller.

He's a ultra-wealthy hedge-fund manager up to his neck in the brown smelly stuff.
And it's a situation entirely of his own making.
He's trying to sell his company before the buyers discover a 4 hundred million dollar hole in his accounts.
He's also trying to keep the financial quagmire a secret from his family.
And he's trying to placate his increasingly resentful and frustrated mistress who wants more of his time than he feels able to give. 
Despite the challenge, Miller's proving successful at keeping his head above the far less appealing equivalent of water until the fateful night when he falls asleep at the wheel.
For those who believe that those with money and influence have been getting away with it for too long, what happens next makes for sweet revenge.
It also makes for compulsive viewing.
Where 2011's 'Margin Call' focused on the complexity of the financial deals that brought about the crash of '08 and required close attention to follow what was happening, ARBITRAGE uses the world of high finance as the backdrop to a more traditional style of thriller. The focus here is less on the detail of the monetary shenanigans and more on the man at the centre of them.
As played by Richard Gere, Miller is outwardly a pillar of Manhattan respectability. He's just made the cover of Forbes as a shining example of hedge-fund smarts, and he and wife Ellen (Susan Sarandon) are generous patrons of various charitable causes. Miller's smooth, sophisticated and keeps his iron business fist buried deep inside an alluring velvet glove.
There's been much chatter about Gere's performance being Oscar-nomination and while it's true that he is totally convincing in the part and absolutely holds our attention whenever he's on screen, I'm less sure that what he does rises to the level of Oscar-worthy. He didn't blow me away like George Clooney did in 'Michael Clayton.'
Perhaps the problem is that Gere makes it all look so effortless. He doesn't simply play Robert Miller, he is Miller. He is a character we can believe exists outside of the confines of the movie. He had a life before the events depicted here and will continue living after we take our leave of him.

What is indisputable is that ARBITRAGE is Gere's film. There's strong support from Sarandon, Brit Marling (as Miller's grown-up daughter and chief financial officer at his company), Nate Parker (as a young man whom Miller helps and uses without understanding how the two are mutually incompatible) and Tim Roth as an NYC detective - with a decidedly dodgy American accent - on a mission to bring Miller to justice, but it's Gere who dominates.
Much credit is also due to writer-director Nicholas Jarecki who has created a powerful, tense and compelling story which is nowhere near as predictable as one might expect given the subject matter.  It really does keep you guessing to the very end and, unlike 'Michael Clayton',  the plot is as strong as the performances.
Do not be dissuaded by the title (which, according to the Merriam-Webster dictionary means "the nearly simultaneous purchase and sale of securities or foreign exchange in different markets in order to profit from price discrepancies"). An MBA is not required to appreciate this impressive thriller.

SKIDOO: a drug fueled trip to self-indulgent hell

Few films better illustrate mainstream Hollywood's complete inability to grasp late 1960s counter-culture than SKIDOO.
Otto Preminger's 1968 cinematic rendering of an LSD trip is enough to put Charlie Sheen off drugs for life.
Produced and directed by the autocratic 63 year old and starring two actors with a combined age of 99 this film never stood an icecube's chance in hell of accurately portraying the youth dominated hippie movement and its fascination with peace, love and illegal substances. Heck, it's not even an entertaining parody of the culture!

But it's worst offence is not the patronising attitude towards the teens of America who chose love over war, nor is it the simplistic and stereotypical depiction of their alternative lifestyle.
It's the sheer boredom of the undertaking.
The opening scene is an ominous portend of what is to come, with Jackie Gleason and Carol Channing as Tony and Flo Banks, a long married middle-aged couple bickering over which tv channel they're going to watch. With Preminger's camera holding steady on the Banks's tv screen it switches back and forth between channels as Tony and Flo use their respective remote controls to battle for supremacy.
The temptation to reach for my own tv remote and hit the OFF button was immense, but I resisted, persuading myself - in the words of 1990s Irish dance band D:Ream - that "Things Can Only Get Better."
Oh D:Ream, what a heavy burden of guilt it is you bear.
Not only is that song forever etched in my memory as the soundtrack to Tony Blair's 1997 general election triumph and with it the image of John Prescott, Peter Mandelson and other Labour heavyweights half-heartedly mouthing the lyrics at their election night party, but it is also my automatic default internal debate clincher when faced with unmitigated dross like SKIDOO.
No D:Ream, things did not get better. They got worse.
This nonsensical, inconsequential and completely unengaging waste of space turned an hour and 37 minutes into an eternity - and not in a good way.
The leaden comedy drags along, seemingly oblivious to its awfulness and the absence of elements that might loosely be termed entertainment.
I stuck around because once I start watching a film I am really really really loathe to bail on it and also because I wanted to see how the famous old timers in the cast fared.
Not very well as it turned out.
Groucho Marx looked and sounded all of his 78 years. Not even a jet black wig and painted-on mustache could conceal his tired and weak appearance, and his obvious reading of his lines off cue-cards.

George Raft had a nothing bit part which traded on the fact that he was George Raft, former big time movie star, without giving him anything worthwhile to do. I shouldn't have been surprised at that. It's what he did in practically every film he appeared in after his star waned in the mid 1950s.
Mickey Rooney, Cesar Romero, Peter Lawford and Peter Lawford were all similarly underused.
Which left me with Gleason, whose appeal eludes me, Channing in her underwear, which is now  an image now, unfortunately, burned onto my retina, and a surprisingly charmless Frankie Avalon.
SKIDOO is bizarre, undeniably different and monstrously awful. It's not even bad enough to boast kitsch appeal. It's just self-indulgent rubbish by a director who should have known much better.

SCANDAL SHEET: this thriller really grips!

SCANDAL SHEET is a gritty fast paced film noir that packs a whole lot of punch into its brief 82 minute running time.
Based on a novel by fledgling film director Sam Fuller, this is a story that'll grab you by the throat in the opening minutes and just refuse to let go until its gripping climax.
And that - in no small part - is due to Broderick Crawford's mesmerising performance. Playing Mark Chapman, the brutish, unscrupulous editor of the New York Express newspaper whose only concern is the number of zeroes on the end of his circulation figures, he dominates the screen and absolutely demands our attention.
Chapman has no time for ethics or morals. He doesn't care whose lives he tramples on or whose reputations he destroys. His sole ambition is to give his readers what they want - or what he thinks they want - and that's cheap sensationalism and the exploitation of those who can't answer back.
And while he sits in his office and barks his orders, it's his protege, ambitious young reporter Steve McCleary, who eagerly puts Chapman's philosophy into practice. When we first encounter him in the film's opening scene he's scoring an exclusive interview with a distraught woman whose sister has just been hacked to death. He gets to her before the police do by passing himself off as a detective and laughs in her face when she rails at him for tricking her. 
And it's McCleary in his zeal to please his mentor who sets in motion the seeds of his destruction. Latching on to the apparently run of the mill suicide of a down on her luck middle aged woman in a seedy rooming house, he discovers she was actually murdered shortly after attending an Express sponsored Lonelyhearts dance. He decides to exploit the connection for maximum publicity and insists it be splashed on the paper's front page, unaware that her killer is his boss.
And if that's not a contrived enough coincidence, Chapman actually encourages him in his hunt for the killer because the story is just too good to pass up.

There's no need for a spoiler alert because SCANDAL SHEET is not a whodunit but a will he get away with it. The thrill is not in trying to guess the killer but in watching McCleary painstakingly piecing together the random clues and wondering when - and if - Chapman will act to protect himself from discovery.
With such a short running time all this naturally unspools at quite a lick and that's good because it helps mask the deficiencies of its two young co-stars. John Derek is too much of a fresh faced pretty boy to be entirely convincing as the kind of journalist in whom an experienced editor like Chapman would place so much trust and confidence.
It's equally difficult to understand why Donna Reed, as the conscience of the newsroom, continues to date McCleary when he's so brazen about his manipulation of the news. McCleary embraces everything she disdains yet she's endlessly willing to give him another chance. If McCleary really were the hotshot journalist the film wants us to believe he is he'd be running around town with fast women and hanging out at nitespots til the early hours, not placating dull as ditchwater Donna.
Not quite a hidden gem but certainly not a diamonique bracelet either SCANDAL SHEET is definitely worth checking out just to sweat along with Crawford as he and we wait to discover whether he's gonna get caught or get away with it.