Grown Up Gossip & Internet Villainy
At the 2011 Cannes Film Festival, Drive was loved so much that, when the movie finally finished, everyone leapt to their feet to give it a standing ovation. A film. A standing ovation.
One can only assume that this ovation must have been like the tears cried by a hostage when they receive a rare moment of kindness. That’s because Drive is one of the most overrated films on Earth right now.
Only a complete, dithering simpleton would dare disagree.
Right lets cut to the chase, Transformers: Dark of the Moon has a crap script and the acting is, for lack of a better word, shit. Sorry Michael, but bear with us because you come off good in the end?
It's still got those bloody parents in it, it's rife with dodgy racial stereotyping, the irritating shitty robots who do nothing but make lame jokes, penis references and Patrick Dempsey. Trust us – the list goes on!
Frankly it's difficult to understand why scriptwriter Ehren Kruger is even working on Transformers still, having failed so miserably with the last film. Worst still, despite getting rid of Megan Fox, director Michael Bay has seemingly opted for yet another hottie with zero acting skills in the form of Rosie Huntington-Whitley who seems to spend more time pouting and looking dead to the world than actually contributing to the bloody film. For a director with such a skill at creating visual feasts for the eyes, he sure is ignorant when it comes to the storytelling behind a film… but this is an brilliant film, right?
Britain’s had a rum old time when it comes to fictional alien invasions. They started early, with steampunk martians getting all up in our Victorian grills before idiotically sneezing themselves to their constituent pieces in War Of The Worlds.
We had a bit of respite in the ’50s as the fashion in the alien travel supplements was to take in the fabulous corn-filled vistas of mid-west America, do some light abducting, maybe probe a farmhand anus or two.
But then that Doctor fellow with the ever-changing, always-irritating face and voice and body and talking popped onto Saturday teatimes and suddenly Britain can’t move for psychopathic pepper grinders and shaggable supermodel siren doctorbots.
We hope you all enjoyed Easter. But if you had to sit through the massively dispiriting ?Hop? you probably haven’t.
We here at hecklerspray hate Russell Brand as much as the next man. We despise the huge gummy gap between his teeth and his top lip, we hate his misguided belief that ex-junkies are interesting (they aren't, no matter how much they go on about it, as they always do) and we hate his hair and the way he currently smells.
But what sickens us most is that he has lent his charmless presence to an Easter-themed film that this writer has been forced to watch.
Rumours. Where would we be without rumours? Well, not here obviously, given that this website is fuelled by the gabbing mouths of someone-or-another, spouting amusing stories of vague interest about that person you tell everyone you hate but you secretly admire.
Pathetic, aren’t they?
Easy A deals with rumours. And with being a dirty skank. Mainly about the rumours, though.
The internet is full of dicks (hecklerspray excluded, of course). Just take a look around: there's that kid over there, blogging about his pathetic existence; that tweeting celebrity, moaning about their insufferable riches; and what about Justin Bieber? Ergh.
The internet is a horrible cesspit of words and pictures, never more aptly demonstrated than in social hub Facebook.
It's also appropriate then that the story behind the invention of the 21st Century?s most dominating stalker tool, The Social Network, is as full of nauseating idiots as its millions of inhabitants.
Plenty of the rich and fabulous have been buried in recent memory: Diff’rent Strokes actor, Gary Coleman, stroking kids musician, Michael Jackson and one of those Corey kids from the ?80s.
Yet, it's hard to imagine anyone whose managed to do it in such a captivating way as Ryan Reynolds in the suffocating thriller, Buried.
Hitchcockian in its nature, Buried has a premise that can't help but intrigue, as one truck driver, Paul Conroy (Reynolds), finds himself waking up in a coffin buried six-feet under in the Iraqi desert. What ensures is a taut, gripping and, needless to say, claustrophobic film, that ensnares the audience up until its breathtaking climax.
Everyone knows who Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are right? You know, there the guys who beat the crap out of zombies with pool cues to Queen’s ?Don't stop me now? and then had a shootout in a supermarket with Timothy Dalton. You know, Timothy Dalton! Him out of that James Bo- nevermind.
Ahh, so now you remember. That's okay though we?ll forgive you, after all it's a pretty reasonable response given the pairs somewhat floundering careers since 2007’s pant-stainingly funny ‘Hot Fuzz’.
The only difference here however is that Edgar Wright, their long time chum and directorial muse is no where insight; replaced instead by that bloke who gave us Superbad and Adventureland (the one where Kristen Stewart isn't dying for a good vampire romp).
What is the point of Adam Sandler? Sure, there was a time when his mongrel-like face, annoying laugh and humour as subtle as getting diarrhoea in a library was kind-of-okay and sorta charming, but now he’s officially gone too far.
That manchild routine may have been acceptable in the ’90s, but it’s 2011 and mass audiences will not put up with his crap anymore.
OK that’s a lie; his films always gross an obscene amount of money which convince people to finance his future films and leave those with any sort of taste weeping in the corner while trying to understand why the world is such a depressing place.
In the genre of sport movies, the boxing movie is king, the undisputed champion. In fact nowhere are the recurring themes of sport movies more prevalent or integral. Boxing provides expression to the inarticulate, allows the underdog to achieve, invites relationship-fracturing obsession and is rife with politics- all essential ingredients of the genre.
David O Russell’s latest film does not shy away from these clich?s, it simply works within them as well as it possibly can.
Is this is a problem? Why should it be? Genre movies regularly achieve greatness. Westerns are strengthened by their confined narrative parameters so why not movies where the frontier is a pitch/ring/court?
