Film Reviews / Previews

It’s a tough life being a teenager.

One minute you’re a clear- skinned, sweet little bundle of naïve curiosity, the next you’ve got a face like an angry dot to dot, your parents have become inexplicably infuriating, and you want to hump everything in sight even if you’re not quite sure why.

Tough indeed, but not quite as tough as having all of those things and being a person of indeterminate gender born with both male and female sexual organs. So not only are you getting the hormonal explosion of one gender, you’re having to deal with all the problems associated with both as well as the lovely people calling you a freak and parents who don’t know what to do.

That’s the situation for Alex, anyway- the young lead of this brave Argentinian film from female director Lucia Puenzo.

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The latest project to emerge from the Judd Apatow stable, Forgetting Sarah Marshall has - for UK audiences - one defining aspect that may well put you off seeing the film altogether: Russell Brand is in it. Yes, that Russell Brand - the gurning, repetitive Beetlejuice tribute act who just won’t go away no matter how much we pray to Baby Jesus.

But… wait. There’s more.

If you were to avoid the movie because of his appearance, you’d be making a mistake. Why? Well, two reasons. A) Forgetting Sarah Marshall is a well-acted, superbly observed, snort-into-your-popcorn comic romp that intertwines both sharp characterisation and penis gags with winning effect. B) Russell Brand isn’t actually that bad in it. No. Seriously.

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Just as Samuel L Jackson could star in the biggest box office turd of all time and still come out clean on the other side, so vampire movies can be terminally cack and still stake a place in the hearts of cinemagoers.

A case in point is the Blade trilogy that people liked so much we got a TV series full of lunatic plotlines and enough fake fangs to restock the NHS. Heck, even John Carpenter’s Vampires managed two sequels and that had James Woods AND Daniel Baldwin.

They’re not all bad though, and while the prospect of a new bloodsucker flick starring master of the middle distance stare Josh Hartnett may not fill your soul with glee, we have some shocking news for you. 30 Days Of Night is actually not that bad.

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The 80s gave birth to many great movie franchises; Ghostbusters, Terminator and The Never Ending Story. Okay, maybe not the last one, but we also got the recently reinvigorated Rambo franchise.

And as Sly Stallone recently shuffled his way back into the red bandana his little-known son is also flexing his muscles this side of the pond in the new film Son of Rambow.

Alas, the muscles flexed here are more the comedic type than steroid-induced tree trunks synonymous with Sly. This, however, presents us with one of the most fresh and surprising British films in years and a must-see film.  

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A part-time photographer’s uncle once said “With great power comes great responsibility.” In Hollywood studio terms this means “With lots of money comes no originality.”

Thus when a genre is successfully reinvented, like the Lord Of The Rings did with fantasy, studios will throw their wads of cash at the nearest fantasy book series hoping to squeeze more milky gold from the supple mass market teat.

Since the pitter patter of Hobbit feet was first heard, we’ve been treated to endless fantasy literary adaptations from the good - Harry Potter (Films 3-5), the bad - Chronicles of Narnia, and the scratch your eyes out its so damn ugly - Eragon. So it’s fair to say those furry-footed fucks have a lot to answer for!

We didn’t expect to enjoy The Spiderwick Chronicles and if we’re honest we only went to see it after seeing Seth Rogen’s name in the credits, whose gruff voice and bearish physique has had an effect on us that makes us feel uncomfortable inside. The experience though was enjoyable and had an almost nostalgic feel to the proceedings with a story that happily balances character drama with action and adventure more akin to what we grew up with than most of fantasy stories today that try to outdo the previous offering by enlarging the scope and action.  

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Man-child Will Ferrell playing an unconventional sportsman and  lame lothario may not sound like the most original movie description, but it’s a case of 'if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,' with new movie Semi-Pro.

He attempts to bludgeon the audience into laughter by sheer force of personality. Petulant rants, violent tantrums and hysterical outbursts are what he’s good at and they are here in good measure. Ferrell fans will be delighted, but we can’t help feel we’ve seen this character before.

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The history of cinema has given us many a bad haircut over the years.

Cameron Diaz in Being John Malkovich, Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code and Nicholas Cage in pretty much everything since the turn of the millennium. Never before though has someone with such a bad haircut been so terrifying and menacing than Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men.

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Imagine a world populated only by Will Smith, his dog and a host of blood-sucking Gillian McKeith lookalikes. Oh and it's all Emma Thompson's fault!

That is the nightmarish vision set out in I Am Legend, directed by Francis Lawrence (Constantine). Part sci-fi horror, part art-house stroll, the film is based on Richard Matheson's post-apocalyptic 1954 book about the last man alive on earth.

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Anybody revelling in the recent revival of the epic fantasy flick and expecting similar repercussions with The Golden Compass will be pretty unnerved by the shoddy results on display here.

While we, at first, put down our relentless fidgeting, itching, scratching and belching to poor seating arrangement, we quickly came to realise that it wasn't the chair causing our discomfort, it was this strange, manky moving cinematic sludge glaring before us.     

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Christmas is coming, the geese are getting fat. Or to be more accurate in this day and age, they're probably getting bird flu.

Nevertheless, it's not only the geese that are getting fat. All over Hollywood, producers and powerful studio executives gorge themselves after another year of profit. Once more the Hollywood Scrooges have cashed in on Christmas and generally taken a big shit on Tiny Tim. If we consider the Hollywood films that have been placed under the Christmas tree this year we'll find such shoddy gifts and returnable items as Fred Claus, Alvin and the Chipmunks, Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium and The Perfect Holiday.

Yet one film released this Christmas stands out as the star on top of the tree, The Kite Runner. The seventh film from the gifted Marc Forster, director of Monster's Ball, Finding Neverland and Stranger than Fiction to name a few. The Kite Runner is a story of friendship, taking a stand and the circularity of life. It tells the tale of Afghan refugee Amir, played by Scottish born Khalid Abdalla who featured in United 93. The story comes from Khaled Hosseini's best-selling book, with the screenplay by David Benioff who also worked with Forster on Stay. The film is a pretty accurate conversion of the book, although some information is changed and excluded as you may expect.

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When being asked what we were going to the cinema to see by various members of our friends and family the reply was simply "The Nines," to which we'd be greeted by confused expressions and this exchange: “The What?” “It’s got Ryan Reynolds in it,” “Who?”

Ryan Reynolds' career has hardly taken off and with Van Wilder, Blade Trinity and The Amityville Horror remake under his belt it's not hard to see why. The man clearly needs a hit and with a back catalogue of romantic leads and action men personas that he flexes his shiny forehead into, it’s surprising that we’ve come out of The Nines thinking this low budget indie flick might be the thing to thrust him into superstardom.

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This whimsical postmodern Disney offering marks a return to the bogus 'fish out of water' cycle, cemented in hammy 80s comedies like Splash!, Earth Girls Are Easy, Crocodile Dundee and Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home and 90s sequels Home Alone 2: Lost in New York and Babe: Pig In The City.

In all those films, indigenous, naive characters are taken out of their usual environments and thrust into the (typically American) city for hokey comic effect. And so if you ever wanted to sadistically slap some sense into the sickly sweet, sugar-coated 'happy ever after' fairytale princess from Disney, and place her in the mean, competitive clutches of the 'real' world, then look no further than Disney's own Enchanted.  

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