UNSTOPPABLE: unremarkable but engaging

There's nothing particularly new about the plot to UNSTOPPABLE, and it certainly couldn't be accused of possessing depth or subtext but it does nonetheless offer 90 minutes of clenched fists, buttock squeezing, edge of the seat excitement.

Director Tony Scott has fashioned a rollercoaster ride out of the simple storyline of a runaway freight train and the veteran train driver (Denzel Washington) and his rookie conductor (Chris Pine) who must catch the half-mile long 'missile' and stop it before it comes off the rails in the middle of a Pennsylvania town and explodes, spraying its cargo of toxic chemicals into the atmosphere.
While Scott does pause long enough to give the two leads some back story - Washington has been fired by the train company whose ass he's trying to save, and Pine's fiery temper has estranged him from his wife and daughter - all that is irrelevant to the action that unfolds as the two trains barrel through the Pennsylvania countryside.
The climax is entirely predictable but that doesn't detract from the enjoyment to be had from the various distractions and mini-climaxes Scott sets up along the way, and the relationship that develops between the two main characters.
Suspend your disbelief, switch your critical faculties to the 'off' position, then sit back and enjoy the ride. UNSTOPPABLE is brainless entertainment at its best.

RABBIT HOLE: grown up storytelling at its best

RABBIT HOLE is a gutwrenchingly sad experience.

Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart give such powerful and compelling performances as a couple struggling to cope with the death of their young son in a road accident that it's impossible not to be drawn into their world of inconsolable pain.
Eckhart wants to let it all out while Kidman insists on keeping everything bottled up. It's a recipe for relationship disaster as both turn to people and pursuits outside of their marriage to help them get through the nightmare that their life has become.
It's obviously impossible to imagine what it must be like to face the loss of a young son or daughter but RABBIT HOLE gives us a pretty good idea.

THE TOWN: revisting a familiar neighborhood

Crime thriller THE TOWN comes off like Martin Scorsese-lite.
Set in the rough, apparently crime-riddled Boston neighborhood of Charlestown and populated by characters doing their damndest to get that distinctive Bohwston accent just right the film reminded me of a stripped down version of 'The Departed."
Writer-director-star Ben Affleck has gone for a much simpler take on the familiar cops and robbers genre. There's much less depth to the characters, their back stories and the plot than Scorsese achieved with his multiple Oscar winner.
And that's why 'The Departed' has stuck in my mind for years while THE TOWN is already a fading memory less than 24 hours after I watched it.

BLACK SWAN: look beneath the glossy surface

If BLACK SWAN sweeps the board in the upcoming awards season a terrible injustice will have been done.
Because this film is only half as fabulous as its supporters like to make out.
I don't blame them. It's easy to be taken in.
Firstly there's the reputation of the director, Darren Aronofsky. His impressive, if short, resume ("Requiem for a Dream", "The Fountain", "The Wrestler") has endowed him with the reputation of a stylish arthouse director, and he certainly has an engaging way of telling the story of characters who are chasing a dream.
Then there's the subject matter. Aronosky's succeeded in making the rarefied and most definitely artsy world of ballet interesting and accessible to a multiplex audience.. There's not been this much buzz about ballet on the big screen since Powell and Pressburger's 'The Red Shoes' way back in 1948.
And then there's Natalie Portman's performance as Nina Sayers - the ballerina who loses her mind in pursuit of perfection.
It all adds up to a mesmerizingly shiny surface which can blind one to the reality beneath. 
And the reality is that - at best - this is a good film but it's certainly not one of the great movies of 2010.
The idea of an artist striving too hard for perfection and finding themselves taken over by the character they're interpreting on stage is nothing new. Ronald Colman won the Best Actor Oscar in 1947 for doing something very similar in 'A Double Life.' The big difference now is that technology and a lack of censorship allows Aronofsky to create images that Colman could only dream about.
What did impress me about BLACK SWAN was Portman's performance. Her portrayal of the timid, virginal and repressed dancer who has the technique but not the passion to become a great ballerina is sensational. Her descent into darkness is genuinely disturbing, as she pushes herself beyond what she's capable of, constantly harangued by sadistic ballet company director Vincent Cassel, bullied by her domineering mother Barbara Hershey, and tormented  by the imagined rivalry with sexy uninhibited fellow dancer Mila Kunis.
If anyone connected with this project is deserving of awards it's Natalie Portman. BLACK SWAN is good but she is great.

MONKEY BUSINESS: a superstar just having fun

MONKEY BUSINESS is fun - lots of very silly fun - and the main reason for that is Cary Grant.
He's clearly having a ball playing a rather stodgy middle-aged research scientist who 'discovers' a fountain of youth elixir that causes him to behave like a teenager.

What makes this 1952 comedy so enjoyable is that the 48 year old Grant's impression of an 18 year old is just that - an impression. His teenager bears not the slightest resemblance to James Dean's tortured teen in 1955's 'Rebel Without a Cause.' It's a caricature of a stereotype that probably only ever existed in Hollywood films.
But let's face it. If Grant were going for authenticity he'd have essayed some Dean-like character and we'd have had a drama devoid of any belly laughs.
Grant's a gas and he's got some great support - from Charles Coburn as his exasperated boss with an eye for a pretty young lady; from a pre-superstar Marilyn Monroe as the pretty young thing who's not as ditzy as her boss would like; and from a chimp who follows direction so perfectly you'll be convinced it must be a midget in a monkey suit. The only square in this board of otherwise round pegs is Ginger Rogers as Grant's long suffering wife. When she finally chugs some of the magic water her transformation into an oversize kid is considerably more broad than it is amusing.
MONKEY BUSINESS reunites Grant with director Howard Hawks for the first time since the latter directed the former in the strained and not very funny 'I Was a Male War Bride' and the difference is like night and day.
If you're looking for proof that a film comedy can be genuinely funny without resorting to swearing, nudity, gratuitous violence, or gross-out stunts let me offer MONKEY BUSINESS as exhibit A. It's as silly as the title suggests.

CYRUS: not what you think but better

What I liked most about CYRUS is that it didn't do what I expected it to do.

Consider the facts. The film stars two comedians - John C.Reilly and Jonah Hill - in a story about John (Reilly), a middle aged loser in love who miraculously attracts an attractive single woman, Molly (Marisa Tomei) at a party. She falls hard and heavy for him and everything goes swimmingly until he discovers her guilty secret. She has a 21 year old son, Cyrus (Hill) still living at home and the two are - well - unnaturally close to one another. And Cyrus doesn't appreciate the new man in his mom's life.
It sounds like the perfect set up for a film full of slapstick comedy and gross-out incest jokes with John and Cyrus getting ever more physically violent with one another as they battle for Molly's affections. But that's not exactly what happens.
Directors Mark and Jay Duplass have created that rarest of creatures - a dramedy that keeps the viewer constantly off-balance by refusing to deliver what's expected of this scenario and offers up instead something entirely more satisfying.
I don't mean by this that the story veers off on some bizarre tangent because it doesn't. It really never strays from the straight and narrow, yet it remains unexpectedly fresh and subtly surprising. Both Reilly and Hill demonstrate a depth and restraint in their performances which allows us to believe in them as credible characters rather than simply comic creations. Neither of them exist just to get a laugh. Tomei also surprises as the mom who finds herself torn between her son and her beau. She resolutely refuses to do the things that mom's do when they find themselves in this situation in a Hollywood drama.
In short, nothing about CYRUS is predictable. If you're expecting a wacky comedy you'll be sorely disappointed, but if you're looking for a comedic breath of fresh air this is most definitely the film for you.

THE OTHER GUYS: overwhelmingly underwhelmed again

It's rare to find genuinely ad-libbed genuinely funny comedy in the movies.
Film making generally doesn't lend itself to making it up as you go along. So much needs to be locked down in terms of dialogue and movement before the camera rolls to ensure the director gets exactly the shot they need, and the actors say the lines they're required to say to advance the story.

Robin Williams used to be a rare exception. Supposedly a great deal of his dialogue in "Good Morning Vietnam" was improvised and much of it is damned funny. Will Ferrell is not an exception yet directors continue to allow him to riff on a theme while the camera's rolling despite the evidence of his recent films - "Land of the Lost", "Step Brothers", "Semi Pro" and "Blades of Glory." THE OTHER GUYS just adds to this list of shame.
I've got no solid proof but it seems to me very probable that Ferrell is improvising the dialogue in many of the scenes of this overblown and spectacularly unfunny mismatched buddies cop caper. Why? Well he's paired with a straight co-star, Mark Wahlberg, who's eager to please and happy to react to whatever Ferrell throws at him, hoping that some of that comedy gold will rub off on him (it doesn't), and their characters are placed in one set-up after another which just shriek "here's the premise. Now run with it!" to a star of Will's stature and proclivities.
And if my feeling about this film isn't good enough for you just stick around until the very end of the final credits. There's a scene cut from the main movie in which Ferrell is very obviously and un-amusingly riffing on the lines Wahlberg is feeding him.
The alternative to my improvisation abortion theory is almost too horrible to contemplate - that all the dialogue has been scripted and Ferrell is simply repeating his lines as written. For humour this lame to have been written and revised before director Adam McKay called "action!" verges on criminal. At the very least it opens the door to a charge of taking money under false pretences on behalf of all those who bought cinema tickets or the DVD believing they were paying to see a comedy.
For the sake of his reputation Ferrell should step away from the cameras and wait for a genuinely funny script to come along. If he continues on this current course of believing he's talented enough to make a silk purse out of any sow's ear that lands in his lap he'll wind up as the next Eddie Murphy.

EASY A: I give it a B-

It's probably not the done thing these days to heap any kind of praise on actress turned professional wild child Lindsay Lohan but I reckon she would have made EASY A into a much better film than Emma Stone does.

Stone plays Olive Penderghast, a southern California high school student who takes her literature class's study of "The Scarlet Letter" too much to heart and invents a slutty sex life for herself.
Her initial intention is simply to help out a friend but the scheme rapidly spirals out of control as reports of her numerous (fabricated) one night stands spread through the school like wildfire. Olive finds herself the object of the entire school's contempt and admiration, and nothing she can say will persuade them that none of the gossip is true.
In the hands of Lohan Olive would probably have come across as smart, funny, vulnerable and lonely, hiding a big heart beneath a tough shell. In other words she'd have been likeable and I could have empathized with her situation. As played by Stone she's a smug, snarky,smart-alec who's so disdainful of everything around her that's it's difficult to feel anything remotely positive for her or her self-induced predicament.
However it's not Lindsey Lohan that director Will Gluck is reaching for but legendary 80s writer-director John Hughes. The film makes several references to "Pretty in Pink", "The Breakfast Club", "16 Candles" and "Ferris Bueller's Day Off" accompanied by brief clips from those now classic coming of age movies, and it's not clear what message Gluck intends to convey by doing this. Is he suggesting that EASY A is the modern day equivalent of these beautifully crafted tales of teenage angst - in which case he's deluding himself - or is Olive drawing parallels between her predicament and those endured by the characters in Hughes' films and wishing her life was like theirs - in which case she's deluding herself?
Either way, the fulsome tribute to Hughes doesn't work. Rather than adding much needed lustre to Gluck's pedestrian project it made me want to stop the film and slide "Pretty in Pink" into the DVD player in its place.
Despite the criticism I'm giving EASY A a B minus because of the supporting cast. What induced them to work on this film is beyond me but for the brief time that Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson are on screen as Olive's 'cool' parents the story is worth caring about. They bring a lightness and sparkle to the script which makes it sound for more entertaining than it really is.
An eminently forgettable viewing experience.

CHARADE: Cary's lost his sparkle

Much has been written in the decades since it happened about Cary Grant's decision to retire from acting in 1966. Despite his assertion that he was too old to continue playing the leading man convincingly many of his fans insist Grant could have gone on romancing ladies half his age for many more years to come.
On the evidence of CHARADE I believe Grant made the right decision.

He was all of 59 when this comedy-thriller was released in 1963 which is certainly not old, but he looks tired. The sparkle that made Cary Grant 'Cary Grant' is missing and he plods through the film with the air of a man who's getting "too old for this shit." There's no sense of enjoyment in his performance even though Audrey Hepburn's character makes it quite clear to him that she's his for the taking.
While in real life Grant was attracted to younger women he apparently felt it unseemly to be seen pursuing ladies young enough to be his daughter on screen and perhaps he allowed this discomfort to influence his performance, even though the script had been changed to make him the pursued party.
Whatever the real reason the result is disappointing. CHARADE never comes to life in the way that "To Catch a Thief" or "North by Northwest" did a few years earlier, The blame is not entirely Grant's. While Walter Matthau is impressively understated, George Kennedy and James Coburn play their parts too broadly to be convincing heavies and Hepburn is (ironically) starting to look a little too grown up to be entirely plausible as the naif.
Grant's talent, even when not firing on all cylinders, was considerably superior to may other lesser stars on their best day, so CHARADE is nothing to be embarrassed about and the film did respectable business at the box office on its original release.Grant though, was reportedly stung by the reviews which focused more on the age gap than the acting and he would make just two more movies before calling it quits.

CASH ON DEMAND: a thriller that's tight and to the point

This tight little British thriller from 1961 feels so much like an extended episode of 'The Twilight Zone' that I expected Rod Serling to appear and deliver a closing homily as the story wrapped up.

CASH ON DEMAND is a B-movie from Hammer studios about a rigid, mean-spirited and unlikeable bank manager, Fordyce (Peter Cushing), who gets his comeuppance on the eve of Christmas Eve when his bank is robbed by a charming but ruthless crook, Hepburn (Andre Morell), posing as a representative of the company which insures his bank against loss.
The story's based on a play and it shows. Almost all of the action takes place within the confines of the bank's front office and the manager's office but what stops it feeling claustrophobic or stage-bound are the fine performances by the two lead actors.
Cushing's tight pinched features and fussy, buttoned down demeanor bring credibility to the part of the bloodless and prissy Fordyce, while Morell endows Hepburn with a smug swagger and air of superiority which never veers into caricature.
With a tight 80 minute running time every moment has to count and director Quentin Lawrence sets up the story perfectly,subtly offering up a great deal of information in the first few minutes that proves important later on. Suspenseful and deceptively straightforward with a completely unexpected twist in the tale, CASH ON DEMAND is living proof that big stars, a bloated budget, colour and car chases are not essential to create an effective thriller.