We Need To Talk About Kevin is one of those films where everybody says they loved it for its gritty portrayal of a mother coming to terms with the fact her misunderstood son killed a load of people at school for no apparent reason, making everyone throw their hands in the air and scream ‘WHY GOD??’, even those who haven’t seen the bloody film.

The truth is that it’s as tedious as a GCSE drama piece about growing up in North Wales.

The translucent skinned, Tilda Swinton, was the only woman that could have played the part of Eva, Kevin’s mother, as she plodded about town looking like somebody with Dutch Elm disease.

It’s a film filled with terrible and obviously dumbed down metaphors. The trailer, of course, gives none of this away. It portrays it as a tense thriller, nay horror, which goes something like this:

There’s a boy. He looks a bit shifty. His hair is so emo it probably cuts itself. He doesn’t do what his mum tells him. He kills his schoolmates. HORROR ENSUES!!!!

And, no, it doesn’t. The only part where the audience actually gasped at such horror was the scene where Tilda Swinton was seen wearing make-up, and even then, you still wouldn’t.

There are three Kevin’s in this film. Toddler Kevin, played by Rock Duer, a kid with the most evil stare in history (we’ll probably end up seeing him on the news having strangled his entire family with a pair of Huggies pull-ups soon); Jasper Newell, the child Kevin (if only they’d have called in Super Nanny, all this death would have been avoided); and Ezra Miller, who plays the teenage Kevin (Twilight written all over his pale, stupid face).

The film trudges through on apparent shock scenes where a toddler won’t do what he’s told, a small boy refuses to eat his greens, and teenage onanism. All of which can be seen in the hecklerspray flea-pit on a day-to-day basis… and you don’t see us massacring everybody.

If you’ve read the book, then you will know that it’s supposed to all be written as letters to the estranged father, played by John C. Reilly. A man who does not appear to be in any way estranged throughout the entire film. Unless ‘estranged’ actually means ‘there throughout the entire film’.

The tedium is the theme. In one, long scene involving red paint removal, the audience is left wondering why Mum didn’t just use Dulux One Coat and have done with it… but of course it’s all about the bloody metaphor isn’t it? She struggles. WE GET IT! STRUGGLES WITH DECORATING!

This film is, however, beautifully shot. It’s like director, Lynne Ramsay, has seen every episode of Grand Designs and molded it into a nearly two hour-long jerkathon for anybody that likes-that-sort-of-thing. Like Kevin McCloud, everything about this film feels incredibly forced. Like a bad Crimewatch reconstruction. Only sponsored by Barker and Stonehouse.

Tilda Swinton will probably get an Oscar for her performance. But nobody will know why.

This was a guest article by Jamie Rothwell who looks like crap warmed up

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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.

If you haven’t seen Drive, what’s it about? Well, the short answer is ‘nothing‘. The long answer is ‘absolutely nothing. For ages.‘

The film is so insultingly pedestrian that it makes the woeful Eyes Wide Shut look like a high-octane caper.

Remember that Athena poster which showed a shirtless muscle man holding a baby? Imagine staring at that for nine hours while someone projects a particularly nice screensaver of night-time Los Angeles over the top of it while playing nauseating cod-80s music at you.

Imagine that, and just that. Long, sighing metres of film, containing the same shots… over… and over… and over… and over…

THEN SOME ULTRA-VIOLENCE.

Then nothing. Nothing at all. Coupled with a script that must’ve been two sides of A4, delivered by Ryan Gosling, a man who looks like Guy Smiley from Sesame Street. Only less alive.

It’s as if someone sat down and watched Vanishing Point and Bullit and thought “I know! I’m going to merge those films with the quiet, lingering boredom you get when you’re stood in an Apple Genius Bar while Air’s ‘Moon Safari’ is playing… quietly!” Throw in a whole load of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City (played by someone who doesn’t want to do any of the challenges, rather, simply drive around for hours toggling the camera angles) and you’re there.

THEN SOME ULTRA-VIOLENCE.

And nothing, nothing, nothing. So much nothing that, frequently, it feels like you’re watching the rushes of something that, with a huge amount of editing, could be an excellent 20 minute film.

It’s a real case of style-over-substance which will thrill the kind of people who say they really ‘get’ films, when really, they just enjoy hollow releases that think that substituting emotion for some vaguely nice cinematography is a good thing. Why bother with a story when you can sit there being preened at by a handsome object of vacancy?

It’s just one big polished Zen turd.

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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?

See, this is Michael Bay. By his very definition he’s inherently dumb-downed, misogynistic and crass. He’s been doing it for years and we’ve been lapping it up from the very moment Bad Boys came out. Honestly, after all the hype, photos, trailers and feature articles before Transformers release you’d think that just one person might have cottoned onto the fact he was going to do the same god damn thing he always does.

Yet even now critics are already lining up to lament Transformers for not delivering something we should all know full well by now that Bay can’t deliver, let alone when the main characters are robots with laser cannons for arms.

So just this once, let us say bollocks to scripts, acting and the character development, because if that’s your thing then bugger off and go rent a James MacAvoy film.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon is spectacle cinema at its very finest. You’re not meant to sit up and pay attention, you’re meant to put banality aside and let the sheer ridiculousness of the mayhem and carnage wash over you.

Sure, as we’ve mentioned the script is crap, but admittedly it has its plus points too, with far more audience laughs than personal groans.

Equally the film manages to bring on board more Transformer characters than ever before and give a good account of them, where other blockbusters have failed seemingly failed (See Spiderman 3, Iron Man 2, et al.). If, as many would have you believe, this is to be the final film in the series, it sure is a hell of a way to round off the trilogy and, as always, with some breathtaking action set pieces.

Those wondering whether or not to opt in for the 3D experience definitely should. Unlike the sad gimmicky trash demonstrated in Pirates of the Caribbean or Alice in Wonderland, Transformers instead goes for more of an Avatar based use of 3D technology, providing more of an immersive layered effect (no goofy swords or pikes sticking out the screen here).

Additionally, if none of that made sense, then just stop being cheapskate and pay the extra few quid and you’ll thank us later because it’s one of the few times we’re going to endorse the cash cow that is 3D cinema.

The film isn’t perfect and anyone expecting it to be might as well sling their hook now. Transformers aimed to be bigger, bolder and more explosive than it’s predecessors and it accomplished it in spades… but if you can’t get past the fact Michael Bay is a crap storyteller, then you might as well not buy a ticket in the first place.

Dumb. Furious. Things go bang. Ace.

This review was a guest post by James Wright who, after watching Transformers 3, decided to graft metal appendages about his person in an attempt to look like Rodimus Prime. He’s now considered ‘stable’ in the toxic poisoning ward and accepting grapes and bongo mags.

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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.

Yes. We had to watch a kid’s film predominately voiced by Russell bloody Brand and, ‘Hop’ is, do not misunderstand us on this one, probably the worst film ever made.

Whilst Pixar sit about effortlessly passing 24-carat gold ageless entertainment from their sphincters without even noticing, Dreamworks labour on, churning out the loveless Shrek films (he’s not really loveable! ROFL!) and the inexplicably popular Despicable Me. Which was basically a straight-to-DVD Incredibles.

And now they have come up with the biggest focus-group pleasing, seasonal-cash-in, exploiting new-personality shit-fest they possibly could by producing a film your children will be hugely disappointed in and will result in them probably hating you forever just for making them watch it.

If you are unfortunate enough to ever see this film you will:

1) Discover that SEEING Russell Brand is not all you need to do to hate him. HEARING him voice a tremendously poorly-rendered CGI rabbit is also sufficient.

2) Also hate the previously-unhateable Hugh Laurie (unless he’s on ‘Later With Jools Holland’ playing his bloody banjo or whatever and being unconvincingly ‘blues’. He’s a Cambridge graduate for God’s sake) voicing an impossibly even-less convincing CGI rabbit for God’s dake.

3) Hear your 6-year old son nudge you after a mere thirty minutes and utter the words “Can we just go?” in the most deadpan manner possible.

4) Lose the will to live.

It’s a bad film is what we’re saying. If a 6-year old can’t be doing with it, it shouldn’t have been made.

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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 21^st Century’s most dominating stalker tool, The Social Network, is as full of nauseating idiots as its millions of inhabitants.

Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg) is rich. This is a fact that he lets us know almost immediately as the non-linear nature of the film flitters to the Facebook creator’s later court cases surrounding the site. Yet, his ascension from mumbling genius to curly-haired billionaire isn’t about the money; it’s about notoriety.

It’s an interesting contrast to the virtual, faceless nature of electronic communication that Zuckerberg’s fascination with gaining access to exclusive university clubs and his reputation are the only measures of success he requires.

However, it’s not always Mark at the centre of the drama.

Facebook co-founder, Eduardo Saverin (Andrew Garfield), open wallet to Zuckerberg at Facebook’s inception, feels as if he’s being pushed out of the business he helped to build, when Sean Parker (Justin Timberlake – proving his acting chops) enters the frame. Parker, co-creator of Napster, is everything Zuckerberg wants to be: effortlessly hip, attractive and the inventor of technology that changed how we live our life – he’s probably got a big penis as well. Clearly, he’s important.

However, this isn’t just a simple tale on Facebook’s invention. While Saverin sues Mark for his mistreatment, frat-boy rich kids, the Winklevoss twins and their cohort, Divya Narendra, also jump on the legal bandwagon, suing Zuckerberg claiming to be the originators of Facebook. Nothing is clear-cut, as the film doesn’t concern itself with taking sides, instead allowing for each performance to speak for itself.

Eisenberg and Garfield are the standouts, with the former latching onto quirks, quick witticisms and vomiting intellectual babble with impressive momentum. Praise also has to be shouldered on the insufferably likeable Timberlake and the impressively named Armie Hammer, the latter playing both twins with some cunning technological wizardry.

Director David Fincher has a masterful handle on the storytelling, jumping between the early days of Facebook and the ensuing court cases. It’s all helped by a fantastic script by Aaron Sorkin, former West Wing scribe, here transferring his talents onto a story people in the UK give a shit about. He takes his time to make each character resonate and sympathetic in each of their own struggles.

The Social Network is one of the finest contemporary dramas ever and will probably get marked as one of the defining films of the generation. It might even frighten some people to know that it’s not even about Facebook at all but a story about interaction. Friendship, romance, business, they’re all analysed through the invention of that cursed online portal.

It doesn’t matter whose side you’re on by the movie’s end, what you’ll walk away with in one of the most brilliantly told true stories of today.

If you don’t like it, we’re going to unfriend you.

‘spray rating: 5/5

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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.

It’s hard to imagine any film to enthral when confined within the inches of a deathbed for its duration, so it falls to Reynold’s performance to propel the film through a lot of not much happening. Reynolds – whose CV previously sported rubber-faced buffoonery, crappy comedies and snarky wit – plays a relatively straight role here but his undeniable charisma and familiarity that an unknown couldn’t muster is exactly what propels this film beyond its showboating conceit.

Reynold’s completely convinces of as a blue-collar truck driver in an unenviable situation. With just a mobile phone and a lighter (there’s no point hiring a pretty face if we can’t see it), he struggles to reach out for help as a man who has no idea where he is, trapped underground with just the worms and the thoughts of his encroaching death keeping him company.

It’s not exactly easy cinema, often bold and not afraid to pull punches.

It’s within the pacing and script that director Rodrigo Cortés manages to balance the action, unravelling each beat methodically, managing to heighten the tension of each phone call and every creak of Paul’s wooden box. It rarely falters and even when it does – a brief visit from a less-than-friendly snake appears nothing but filler – it still proves nail-biting stuff.

Technically, if we’re to indulge in such things, the setting doesn’t impound the direction. The camera moves inventively in and outside of the box, without substituting the constant sense of constraint. Cortés continually pours further bitter ingredients into the mix, whether trickling sand or insufferable bureaucrats on the end of the phone,  every new flavour adding to the dry dirt filling that is Buried’s sandwich – by closing credits, it can all get rather hard to swallow.

However, Buried is a brave film. On paper, it sounds as boring as…well paper. Reynold’s delivers the performance of his career in an action movie set inside a box. It can get a little preachy at times but Buried proves that war is hell, even if it’s only seen from inside a box.

‘spray rating: 4/5

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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).

Pegg & Frost are back as a double act once again, like a crime fighting duo that disbanded and realized afterwards they were crap without their counterparts.

The pair play British sci-fi geeks Graeme (Pegg) and Clive (Frost) who are visiting Comic Con before setting off on a road trip to visit all the best UFO hot spots across New Mexico.

This may sound a little dull and that, in truth, is because it is. The opening 15 minutes lack spark and this period of the film is reduced largely to only a handful of geeky in-jokes and a rather tame stab at a homosexual undercurrent between the pair.

Yawn.

Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz excelled thanks to the intense friction between Pegg and Frost’s characters, but in Paul the polite relationship of Graeme and Clive is pedestrian, verging on boring and lacks any intrigue or insight.

Cue the Marmite loving, reggae dancing, bad mouthing, pot smoking alien Paul.

However, this isn’t to say that Seth Rogen who provides the voice of Paul saves the day, far from it; besides we wouldn’t want to give his already abnormally large head anymore reason to grow beyond the confines of (what we imagine is) his plush home.

That being said however, the introduction of Paul provides that all important catalyst for proceedings to get a little bit more racy and genuinely humorous – even if it’s talking about anal probes.

From here on out the film takes on a whole new dynamic, switching from a rather camp road trip to the thrilling chase movie, as Agent Zoil (Jason Bateman) tracks down our little green friend on behalf of the refreshingly badass boss played by Sigourney Weaver. There is a slight wobble midway through the film due to the forced inclusion of Graeme’s bible-bashing love interest Ruth Buggs (Kristen Wiig), but thankfully this isn’t enough to knock the film of its impressive momentum.

All-in-all, this love letter to Spielberg is far from perfect. The uneasy mishmash of both American and British humour, while undeniably broader and more accessible to audiences, clearly hinders the comedy duo who lack the potency of their previous collaborations. However, this shouldn’t detract audiences from a film with more than enough quality to warrant watching, for one outing at the very least.

This was a guest post from a chap called James Wright and, quite frankly, he’s a disgusting human being who should be locked away in a very, very dark, damp place. But we love him all the same. He may be a freak, but he’s our freak.

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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.

But before we get to how stupid everyone is for paying to see this sort of crap, lets talk about Just Go With It, Sandler’s newest romcom, which already has the distinction of being just as dreadful as Kate Hudson’s last cinematic abortion.

The film starts in the ’80s (and you know that because everyone has bad hair and big shoulderpads and clothes that looks like a sequin monster vomited all over them) when cardiologist Danny Maccabee (Sandler) finds out his fiance is only marrying him for his money.

Broken hearted, he sulks in a bar and whines about his problem to an exceedingly hot woman who wouldn’t spit on him were he on fire. She, SOMEHOW, is touched by his story and turned on by his ring that she takes him home for awful, awful sex.

This causes a little lightbulb to go off over his idiotic head and he switches to plastic surgery, gets himself a new schnoz and starts using his wedding ring (cue hideously lazy and completely out of date Gollum joke) to lure young, stupid girls into his bed.

Yes, this is our hero, the man we’re supposed root for, a man who basically uses his ring as rohypnol.

At a party thrown by a man who can’t control his face because he’s had so much work done (HAHAHAHAHAHA!) he meets, shags, then falls in love with Palmer (Brooklyn Decker), a school teacher who absolutely doesn’t look like a school teacher. But uh-oh, she finds his ring and because she’s so utterly perfect she refuses to date a married man and Danny has to come up with a scheme to justify his wedding ring.

Have you lost the will to live yet?

Luckily, he has a lovely assistant named Katherine (Jennifer Aniston) who agrees to play the part should he buy her some expensive shoes and get her a haircut because as a single mother to two annoying little shits, she doesn’t have time to make sure she looks sub-human before leaving the house. It’s at this point it’s made explicitly clear that expensive clothes make you more beautiful because Katherine gets hot overnight simply by taking off her glasses and lab coat.

She accidentally slips about the two brats she owns and now they have to pretend to be his kids too. As if it couldn’t get any worse, they decide to go on a big holiday to Hawaii. Honestly why even go on? Just grab whatever might be a little bit sharp and start scratching away at your limbs.

So, just so we’re clear, these are all the things that have happened so far:

• Danny is supposed to be loveable when in fact he’s a lying cunt who preys on young women with self-esteem so low they’d let him put his penis wherever he likes.
• Palmer is a holier-than-thou school teacher who doesn’t believe in infidelity but will gladly sleep with a man she just met and parade around with her jugs spilling out.
• Jennifer Aniston pretends to be dowdy by having her hair in a ponytail and pimps out her children for some shoes.
• We’re expected to believe that after one night Danny and Palmer are in love and she’s prepared to put up with this crap even though they have NOTHING in common.

The action goes to Hawaii for no reason other than to have Aniston and Decker walk around in bikinis in slow motion. Honestly, it would’ve been less obvious for placards to appear on screen saying “YOU WILL NEVER BE AS BEAUTIFUL AS THESE PEOPLE”. Let’s not talk about the idiot they rope in to be Katherine’s partner or the daughter who insists on speaking in a cockney accent or the fact that it’s impossible to care about any of these people because they are all so dreadful.

Nicole Kidman rocks up to provide a few laughs but as soon as a man (who turns out to be gay) picks up a coconut with his arse it all gets upsetting again. Sandler, enough of this. The greatness of The Wedding Singer cannot erase crap like this and it’s time to leave the industry of making films forever!

Avoid Just Go With It like the plague. In fact, getting the plague and using your last days to pick scabs off would be much more fun that this soulless tripe created to make rich people richer.

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Sometimes it’s hard to be a woman. There’s all that mucking about with howling at the moon once a month, either unsupported or badly scorched boobs, the constant struggle to be heard within an oppresive patriarchal society, and to quote Bernard Black, oh, the dancing!

But then again, sometimes it’s hard to be a thunderously self-obsessed, overpriveleged jackanape as well. So you’ve really got to feel for poor old Julia Roberts in Eat Pray Love, drowning prettily in an exotic blend of both of these maladies. My goodness, it’s a wonder she can move her puny bones under the weight of her first world problems. So, is it worth 140 minutes of our time watching her fret and eat and ponder and pray and laugh and love?

Seriously? Eat Pray Love? Well, let us put it this way. Puke Scream Die.

The based-on-a-true story is this: Liz Gilbert, woman, jackanape, inexplicably successful godawful writer of tortured “love is a drug” metaphors and broadsheet travel tosspieces, is dissatisfied with her life. Sure, she’s got the big house and the amazing career, but her husband wants to better himself, the selfish bastard, and there’s so many places in the world she wants to go (you know, apart from all the places she’s already been paid to go to in no small amount of luxury). Plus, it’s raining and her hardwood floors make her look fat.

So she does what all of us would do when battered with such outrageous misfortune; tries to summon God like He’s her own personal concierge to rub her feet and tell her she’s wonderful. And when that doesn’t work, God presumably being too busy not existing/helping American popstars write their albums, she dumps her blameless husband with no explanation and effs off round the world for a year to, and take a deep calming breath before you read the next bit, find herself.

More’s the pity, she didn’t subsequently leave herself there, so the book of her experiences has become the film of the book and we’ve all got to sit here and deal with it. And what horrendous wonders the film encompasses! An omni-patronising global gallop around the most picturesque bits of Italy, India and Bali; an old episode of Holiday with Julia Roberts looking pensive in tastefully ethnic-appropriate clothing photoshopped over Judith Chalmers and her “radioactive mum at C&A” ensembles.

In Italy, Liz eats pasta like it’s a sexually explicit act and simpers at stereotypical nuns eating stereotypical ice-cream and stereotypical young men on stereotypical Vespas honking at passing women like stereotypical imaginary neanderthals. In India, Liz joins a spiritual retreat to meditate and find it in her heart to forgive her husband for his incredibly selfish act of being left by her. In Bali, hecklerspray had already been watching for two solid hours and could no longer make out the screen through the white-hot sheen engulfing all our senses, the result of our frontal cortex shutting down in a desperate act of self-preservation, but we think it was something to do with Javier Bardem being dashing with his enormous Easter Island face.

It’s hard to know what the most offensive thing is about Puke Scream Die. There’s the fact that every single person in it is an awful, awful bastard. Utterly self-involved, of the impression that the whole planet has been conjured into existence solely for their own personal fulfilment. The sort of person who follows gurus because they’re “hot”, or plonks themselves in a church and sneers “Go on then, deity. Impress me with your little tricks.” The sort of person who goes to a spiritual retreat in India, complains that it’s boring and hot and doesn’t specifically cater to their personal needs, before announcing they’ve found God and by a staggering coincidence, His plan for them is to be EXACTLY AS SELF-REGARDING AND TEDIOUS AS THEY ARE. The kind of person who should be forced to do one, just one, honest day’s work in their stupid, vapid lives. Or at least write an article about Muse and spend ten minutes dealing with the furious hordes and their burning bile.

People, if you cut us, we bleed. We bleed more bad words about Muse. You’ve only got yourselves to blame.

Maybe the most offensive thing about Puke Scream Die is its constant insistence that Julia Roberts is so brave, so courageous, for her year-long flit from the daily drudgery of normal human responsibilities. Oh, the bravery, to have so much disposable income you can move to a foreign country with nary a care and immediately fall into a circle of English-speaking Eurosycophants who are just as pleased with every numbskull utterance that falls from their blubbering lips as your self-satisfied New York friends! Oh, no. You’re not getting away with that one, Julia Roberts. hecklerspray stopped going to work so we could concentrate on getting in touch with our inner self once. No-one said we were brave. In fact, they mostly said “For the last time, stop rummaging around in my bins.” To put it another way, here are three things that need more bravery than pissing off to Bali on an expense account to condescend the local pensioners: 1. Eating a kumquat. 2. Tying your shoelaces whilst on a moving train. 3. Watching this video.

Basically, Eat Pray Love is balderdash. But worse than that, it’s long, deeply tedious, over-serious balderdash that fuels the ridiculous notion that self-fulfilment is something to strive for no matter how many faces you trample on to achieve it.

Oh, and that there’s no way you can be happy unless you’re massively, massively rich, which is nonsense, because Tesco Value Cider is only a quid for two litres. It’s Valentine’s Day soon; any hecklersprayers pondering a cosy, romantic movie for the evening would do well to choose Eat Pray Love, as it’s so horrific that your chosen companion would probably acquiesce to the most depraved activities rather than watch past the half-hour mark. But everyone else, avoid like the plague, eat some Heinz spaghetti on toast and pray that this garbage never darkens your door. Oh, and remember…love yourself.

But not like THAT! You filthmongers.

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Oh no! Here comes another Hollywood hack remaking a classic that doesn’t need to be made. Whatever happened to the original stories that used to litter our cinemas? John Wayne must be rolling in his grave blah blah blah…etc etc.

If this is the dim view you take on The Coen Brothers’ adaptation of Charles Portis’ 1968 novel of the same name, congratulations, you are an idiot. And not just any idiot, the kind of idiot who’s looking forward to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, and that’s some thundering idiothole.

Anyway, True Grit stars 14 year old Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie Ross on a mission to hunt, find and kill Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin), the man who double crossed her father before kicking him off. Her mother is crippled by grief and the burden of looking after her young children so the wheelings and dealings are left to the scarily headstrong and efficient Mattie. She enquires about who can help her track down the elusive Chaney and chooses the gruff, drunken, awesomely named and not at all hygienic Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges) from a short list.

Cogburn understandably refutes her and while staying at a boarding house with a loud as hell old lady, she bumps into Texas ranger LaBoeuf (Matt Damon) who is also trailing Chaney for a big payday.

Who will land Chaney first? Will Cogburn finally give into Ross’ demands and take the job? Will Hailee Steinfeld become a Jodie Foster/Natalie Portman or a Lindsay Lohan/early Drew Barrymore?

Only time will tell.

Thanks to the recent flurry of Oscar nods and it’s huge success at the US box office, True Grit hits our shores with an appropriate amount of fanfare, and rightly so.

For the most part this doesn’t feel like a Coen Brothers film as they’ve removed their usual style in order to stay true to the source material but that shouldn’t be taken as a negative.

Everything from the script to cinematography to costume design and acting is finely tuned and expertly paced. Steinfeld steals the show and provides a surprising amount of comedy when her quick witted ways that is followed through with Bridges doing a pretty good impression of a park-based drunk and Damon being an oh-so-slightly loveable idiot.

The laughs were not expected but were very well received.

So yes, True Grit is actually, and unsurprisingly, very good which is hugely annoying as everyone loves slagging off a remake.

Oh well, at least Yogi Bear is coming out soon.

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Early on in Winter’s Bone, the heroine Ree is asked by one of her two younger siblings for whom she is responsible whether she is going to beg their neighbour for some meat. She replies you should “never ask for what ought to be offered”, but where meat is offered easily, information is harder to come by.

The plot of Debra Granik’s movie revolves around Ree searching for her father who, having put the family house and land up for his bail, doesn’t turn up to court for a methamphetamine-related crime (“It looks like he’s cooking again”).

Ree, faced with the prospect of losing everything, and with no help from an emotionally-distant post-breakdown mother, must travel from one ramshackle house to another asking all her lawless neighbours for help. The film’s strength is its atmosphere- derived from a world rarely seen in cinema. Set in the poverty-stricken rural South, the landscape is all earth-tones, from the ground to the clothes to the livestock, whilst the land is laden with old cars and junk. The locations are far more immersive than anything evoked by James Cameron’s parlour tricks.

The characters in Ree’s world are laconic rednecks who speak in threats both implied and plainly stated: “I already said shut up once with my mouth” mutters Ree’s uncle Teardrop in one of many similar warnings heard throughout. These yokels aren’t of the stereotypically naïve or stupid variety though. They adhere to two codes of honour; an omerta protecting their secrets, and a family loyalty to this resourceful girl.

Ree faces mortal danger when her persistent enquiries cause these codes to conflict.

Jennifer Lawrence is being rightfully praised for her performance as the film’s central character but equally noteworthy is a finely-nuanced turn by John Hawkes as the troubled and troubling Teardrop.

The film is soundtracked by a wonderful mix of minimalist fiddle and banjo and ambient noise. On the subject of sound there is also a bluegrass hoedown in one of the local houses that we could have listened to for much longer.

Winter’s Bone is a unique work of redneck noir. It’s bleak without being depressing and slow-paced without being boring. It is an engaging, wonderfully executed piece of work but not one without flaws. The early walls of silence she encounters with her neighbours, whilst attempting to show the frustration that occurs from each meeting start to get a little repetitive.

There is also a needless slight twist to what was already a satisfying denouement but these are small complaints for a film so rich in atmosphere and performance. This is an independent American film with more than just a smart-mouth and a quirky sensibility, and like so many of the best independent movies it hasn’t just made the most of a small budget, it’s been liberated by it.

Winter’s Bone is still showing in UK cinemas, but you may have to go to a slightly more arty cinema. So you’re a bit fucked if you don’t live near a city.

Sorry, you may as well give up any hope of being cultured, but at least you’ve got trees and horses and stuff.

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The Killer Inside Me, the latest genre excursion from filmmaker Michael Winterbottom, opens with a huge red herring. A jaunty, stylish credits sequence ushers the film in to the tune of Little Willie John’s version of ‘Fever’. ‘Fever”s a bit of an aural signpost.

Putting it over the opening credits of a film is like saying “What follows will be sexy. You will basically be able to smell it”.

The fact that The Killer Inside Me won’t give you a fever that’s hard to bear, however, is the least of its problems.

Casey Affleck stars as Deputy Sheriff Lou Ford, tasked with running prostitute Joyce Lakeland (Jessica Alba) out of town at the behest of a local property tycoon (Ned Beatty in a stetson, always a pleasure), whose son has designs on eloping with her. Deputy Ford and Joyce fall in love, conspire to dupe Beatty out of some money and skip town. Ford decides to take the plan in a wholly different direction and has good old-fashioned moider in mind.

Tonally weird – not in a good way – and largely inconsequential – despite a final act attempt at ladling on profundity – The Killer Inside Me, adapted from Jim Thompson’s darkest noir, just kind of hangs there, as a film, pissing off those, like me, who really wanted it to be great and using a certain kind of shock tactic to bait those who probably wouldn’t have given the film a second look otherwise. This is the film where Jessica Alba gets punched in the face.

Repeatedly.

For a good few minutes.

Yes, it’s difficult to skirt around the violence in The Killer Inside Me. Thompson’s prose goes pretty hard, but translated to pictures… well, it’s hard to lie here, it’s pretty repugnant. And we’re gorehounds.

Part of the reason for this is Winterbottom’s failure to convey the love between Ford and Joyce, which gives the ensuing violence a tasteless nihilistic tinge. It feels low-stakes and exploitative, when it shouldn’t have (yes there’s a place for low-stakes, exploitative, nihilistic violence, but the lack of feeling is a minus here).

It’s a shame as the impressive cast all do good work, most notably Kate Hudson who – as Ford’s put-upon girlfriend, Amy – is as good as she’s ever been. Affleck is dependably excellent and chilling and Elias Koteas and Brent Briscoe do well with small roles.

Winterbottom’s prolific nature is really starting to tell, however, and his films are suffering as a by-product. Yeah, okay we know you like to knock out at least a film a year but maybe taking a little more time on some of them might elevate them from merely ‘good’ to ‘great’ status. There’s yet to be a dislikeable Winterbottom feature (yes, you can even manage to enjoy the reviled ‘NME Goes Grumble’ of 9 Songs for what it is), but it’s hard to love any of them. They all, to a film, stop short of greatness and The Killer Inside Me is no exception.

It does have a lot to recommend – the performances, as mentioned, the arid Texan-noir atmosphere and a barmy epilogue that’s pretty faithful to the book – but the overall impression left by The Killer Inside Me, in spite of the amount of times Alba’s face gets pounded, is that of a trifle when it should have cut deeper.

The Killer Inside Me is released on Blu-Ray & DVD on Monday September 27th.

Remember The Sixth Sense? That guessing game of creepy corpses, perceptive little children who don’t see the Sun enough and a plot twist that kept viewers guessing ‘til the closing credits.

Now just imagine that but with Christina Ricci’s nipples. That was fun, wasn’t it?

That’s the kind of Hollywood mindset that gets twisted tales like After.Life told, which involve cold morticians chatting to the recently deceased body of Anna Taylor (Christina Ricci)…but is she really dead?

Probably.

Actually, probably not.

We don’t really want to spoil the fish-slap finish to this particularly overwrought story, but suffice to say that it’s more concerned with building the levels of intrigue to a near hemorrhage inducing state.

Things get off to a bumpy start, with Anna acting withdrawn and constantly bickering with her boyfriend, Paul (half geek, half hunk, all Justin Long), whose logical response is to propose marriage, quite bafflingly. Anna seems to be popping pills like Pez and seeing all manner of hallucinations.

It’s after one particularly ferocious argument with Paul that she makes the mistake of being in a car accident. What a daft git. The accident only goes and kills her…or does it?

Probably.

Maybe.

What’s for dinner?

This is the main crux of the movie and where menacing nose-face Liam Neeson turns up as Eliot Deacon, claiming to be able to communicate with the recently snuffed.

He’s actually the big advantage of the film, with the once Qui-Gon-Schindlers-Big-Bollocks proving to be a sinister sod. He says that he is able to help the deceased move on to the other side…or can he?

Meh.

The rest of the film balances between Anna’s being dead. Or not. While her strange connection with some morbidly obsessed child may hold the answers, her boyfriend Paul ponders grief. It’s a dramatic change for the usually comedic Long, finding much emotional depth, more so than when he got a spanner to the balls in Dodgeball.

Ricci is also perfectly adequate playing the confuddled Anna, trying to work out what death means to her, not knowing whether she even had a life at all. It’s also a role that pretty much has her in the buff for the vast majority of the picture.

It’s not a complaint, but it’s just sort of…odd.

The film meanders on through its running time, throwing more nudity and gore (and for those inclined, sometimes simultaneously), while the resolution to Anna’s predicament and Eliot’s motivation are dragged out. The formula adds so many turns that by the end it begins to run stale.

The ending itself doesn’t quite pack the punch that you’d hope but the story itself is acted out with such conviction by the stellar three leads, that it’s sometimes just satisfying enough to watch everything play out. It’s a creepy tale, not one bursting with full-on horror, but if you’ve got a thing for corpses, blood and naked women, then this is probably for you.

Or you’re mental. Either way we want you to stay away from us…or do we?

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A title sure to attract Goths, gore-hounds and repetitive strain injury victims across the country.

Lesbian Vampire Killers is a title is so audacious, so in your face, so silly, it should probably be less of a surprise that the film can’t live up to its promise.

Thrusting current ‘it’ boys from the vastly overrated Gavin and Stacey, Mathew Horne and James Corden play the two best buds Jimmy and Fletch. Jimmy (Horne, recently-dumped) and Fletch (Corden, craving adventure), decide to take a scenic camping trip to some generic creepy village. Problem is, it only features one house, a pub, an endless forest and obviously the aforementioned lesbian vampires.

If that set-up doesn’t sound contrived enough, then add to that a director who starts off like an ADHD victim on ecstasy, who inexplicably goes cold turkey half way through the film. He aims for Edgar Wright but comes off more Edgar Shite. He could have at least stuck to his convictions.

It’s then down to Horne and Corden to supply the buddy-banter comedy. Scrap that – it’s down to Corden. Horne’s Jimmy does little more than stand around screaming, moaning and looking slightly feminine. Corden brings the funny, but for a clearly talented man he is reduced to spouting out a barrage of knob jokes.

The ladies of the film do nothing to add to the proceeding. Not that we went in looking for it, but when a film clearly advertises a film about lesbian vampires we would at least expect something towards titillation. Hell, we would’ve settled for some titters at all from the 90-minutes.

Trying to make sense of the mess is hard work. At one point one very non-lesbian vampire character obtains some sort of magical powers for a brief moment, which left us slightly perplexed. But needless to say this is the least of the film’s worries. With hap-handled plot, romance, action and comedy elements, there really isn’t much to be seen here from two of the UK’s biggest rising stars.

Lesbian Vampire Killers is a film that should do exactly what it says on the tin but barely could be called Bi-curious Bat Beaters. Horne and Corden do their best to enjoy the material but we seriously think there is a complaint to be made here to the trading standards commission.

[story by David Scarborough]

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