Bang, bang, bang, bang. Bang, bang, bang, bang, boom. Bang. That is the noise war makes, as reproduced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg in The Pacific.

The Pacific is a massive budget ($200m) 10 -part miniseries from HBO, shown by Sky Movies HD in the UK. What’s that? Why is Sky Movies showing a TV series? Good question. The big Sky Movies boss thinks this show is *so* cinematic, it is basically more of a film than actual films.

Each 45 minute episode contains approximately 17 minutes of footage, the rest is filled with opening and closing credits. Bear this fact in mind when deciding whether to Sky+ it or not.

The opening war-athon goes a bit like this. It is Christmas, 1941. America. Some Marines are being told how great they are by an older Marine. This is followed by the Marines patting themselves on the back. A few of them are singled out as the main characters. Even after watching two episodes on Europe’s largest screen, we still can’t tell them apart.

Without giving too much away, these naive super soldiers are about to embark on a trip to various islands in the Pacific (the title gave it away didn’t it?) to bring about the total, 100%, maximum destruction of the Japanese Empire. If you’re not a fan of racist slang, now would be a good point to end your The Pacific experience.

Fairly inane squaddie dialogue follows until the guns start firing and one of the main ones starts questioning the morality of the slaughter at their hands. It is from here that The Pacific gets interesting.

If the thought of brotherhood, camaraderie and sentimental drivel doesn’t make you nauseous, this is for you.

P-Day is 5th April, 9pm on Sky Movies HD.

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Honestly Ron Howard, talk about phoning it in. Yes, we all know how successful The Da Vinci Code was, but put some effort in.

Because its sequel Angels & Demons might be the top movie at the weekend box office this week, but have you ever considered what made The Da Vinci Code so popular in the first place? That’s right – Tom Hanks’ tatty old mullet.

But look at his Angels & Demons haircut, for crying out loud. It’s almost normal. Honestly, there had better be a deleted DVD scene where Tom Hanks gives himself a bubble perm, or there’ll be riots.
So Angels & Demons is the US weekend box office number one, and we’ll admit to being a little surprised. Because, you know, it’s an adaptation of a Dan Brown book, so everyone already knows what they’ll get – a drop of anti-Catholic rhetoric, some gormless cryptic clues, enough real-life locations to ensure that anywhere mentioned in the book will get overrun by fat Americans shouting at each other about McDonalds for the next decade and terrible, terrible haircuts.

The worst thing about Angels & Demons, though, is that we suspect we’re going to look back on its time at the top of the US weekend box office fondly purely because it isn’t an impenetrable film about robots punching each other. Such a shame. Here’s the US weekend box office top five…

1 - Angels & Demons (Ron Howard may argue that Angels & Demons isn’t an anti-Catholic film, but did you know that the working title of Dan Brown’s first draft was entitled The Pope Has A Bum Where His Face Should Be And He Poos Out Of His Face And Then He Eats It With His Bum Which Is Also His Face? True story. Well, true-ish) $48,000,000

2 - Star Trek (It’s a controversial admission, we know, but we couldn’t find much to like about Star Trek. Next time put Captain Kirk in a girdle and a wig like nature intended and we’ll think about revising our opinion) $43,000,000

3 - X-Men Origins: Wolverine (No wonder Wolverine looks so angry all the time. If you’d sent your entire upbringing dropping to your knees and howling “NOOOO!” to the heavens every three seconds you’d be pretty narked off too) $14,800,000

4 - Ghosts Of Girlfriends Past (Where Matthew McConaughey sets out to sexually defile the corpses of all of his dead girlfriends. We assume) $6,860,000

5 – Obsessed (The moral of this film is supposedly ‘be careful who you flirt with’ even though, in our considered opinion, it’s actually ‘don’t watch Obsessed’) $4,550,000

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Whenever Ron Howard adapts a Dan Brown book into a movie, three things are guaranteed to instantly happen.

Firstly, Tom Hanks will grow a terrible haircut. Secondly, reams of fat American tourists will start plodding around wherever it’s set loudly carping on about the Catholic church because they think that listening to a rubbishy airport book on audiotape once makes them the world’s sweatiest, most badly-dressed professors of theology.

And thirdly Ron Howard will wring his hands and unconvincingly claim that he doesn’t hate Catholics. Angels & Demons is released soon, so you’ll never guess what Ron Howard has done.

The Da Vinci Code. Now that was a good film. Probably. We haven’t actually watched it. But then again we didn’t really need to, on the basis that anyone who’s even been within 30 miles of Paris in the last five years already knows the entire plot front to back from overhearing the small army of simpletons who blunder round day after day shouting things like “Ooh, Mary Magdalene was the victim of a Catholic cover up,” and “Ooh, Opus Dei,” and “Ooh, blah blah blah blah wank.”

Anyway, now the movie adaptation of the sequel to The Da Vinci Code, Angels And Demons, is about to be released. It’s bound to have exactly the same effect as The Da Vinci Code, in that everyone is going to spout badly-informed nonsense about the Illuminati until we end up punching ourselves unconscious, the Large Hadron Collider is going to become a haven for fat tourists who secretly wish they were sitting by a swimming pool somewhere and all the Catholics in the world are going to throw a massive tizzy about it.

It happened with The Da Vinci Code – plus the film was banned in Pakistan and China – and now it pretty much looks like it’s going to happen with Angels & Demons, too. The Roman Diocese had already banned the movie from filming inside any of its churches, and last week the president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights wrote a newspaper article saying that Angels & Demons was a fat load of toilet and that Ron Howard was a ginger, Catholic-hating tosswhump. We’re paraphrasing.

But Ron Howard isn’t going down without a fight, so he’s written a response for the Huffington Post:

“Let me be clear: neither I nor Angels & Demons are anti-Catholic… After all, in Angels & Demons, Professor Robert Langdon teams up with the Catholic Church to thwart a vicious attack against the Vatican. What, exactly, is anti-Catholic about that?”

Now that both sides have had their say, it looks like we’re all invited to take sides. So who will you pick – the large, humourless organisation that believes an omniscient fairy will let you live on a cloud if you spend your entire life brown-nosing him, or the slightly annoying ginger man who’s made a bad film based on a worse book?

It’s a tricky one, isn’t it? So we’ve decided that we’re just going to tell you ending of Angels & Demons to save you the effort – apparently it was Jesus, in the drawing room, with his holy eye-lasers.

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All links suggested by hecklerspray’s Twitter followers, because we couldn’t be arsed to find any for once…

10 – Finally we understand what sheep are for. Unbelievable - Geekologie

9 - The fact alone that Dave Benson Phillips has a website is cool enough. The fact that it squelches is the cherry on the cake – Davebensonphillips

8 - A gay arts festival needs some writers and performers. They must have asked us because disgruntled illiterate Michael Jackson fans are apparently writers and performers now – Gfest

7 – Paxman Vs Sugar: who’d win? – Watch With Mothers

6 - Suggested by a reader who hates us and wants to further our terrifying Octopus phobia – Bofunk

5 - Bats in space: a true story – NASA

4 - Flying cars exist! The downside? They make truly horrible music – Boingboing

3 – TOM HANKS RAPPING! IS AMAZING! – Electricspectre

2 - Introducing MC KABBA G, the coolest rapping cabbage you will ever see – Welovevegetables

1 - If this exact scene had been in Seven Pounds, would it have done better? Yes…

Don’t you just hate it when, say, a blessed angel straight from heaven hands you a set of golden plates that describe a visit of Jesus to American Indians, and then expects you to make a religion out of it?

Yeah, life sure is funny. Well, sure enough, that is exactly what happened to Joseph Smith, the founder of the Mormon Church, in 1827.

So naturally, you ask, what might Tom Hanks have to say about all this? Well, as it turns out, plenty, or now nothing, or, hell, here it is…

During a recent L.A. premiere for his now ironically-named HBO series Big Love, producer Hanks blew a head valve over the ‘Un-American’ Prop-8 party-poopers who chose not to support the rights of gay Californians to roger each other up the wazoo:

“The truth is these people are some bizarre offshoot of the Mormon Church, and the truth is a lot of Mormons gave a lot of money to the church to make Prop-8 happen.”

Not cool, Tom. This is the age of Obama, remember?

Sensing that he had offended the thousands of movie-going yet vacant-eyed followers of Smith (a man who, by the way, spent much of his early years gazing at his ‘seer stone’ in the bottom of his white stovepipe hat in order to locate hidden treasures), Hanks, with his balls to the wall, quickly issued the following statement to People magazine:

“Last week, I labeled members of the Mormon church who supported California’s Proposition 8 as “un-American.” I believe Proposition 8 is counter to the promise of our Constitution; it is codified discrimination. But everyone has a right to vote their conscience – nothing could be more American. To say members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints who contributed to Proposition 8 are “un-American” creates more division when the time calls for respectful disagreement. No one should use “un- American” lightly or in haste. I did. I should not have.”

Tom Hanks. What an arsehat.

[story by McG]

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The problem with filming the devil’s movies is that if any of the scenes require the architecture of a church, the owners of said church, along with their serious-minded boards of directors, must pass off on it.

This is where Angels and Demons has recently run into trouble. There is a scene in the book where Tom Hanks & a hot German woman named Elsa (who’d only recently slept with his father) break through a church floor, follow some flowing gasoline through a gathered crowd of rats to an old dead knight with a clue on his shield.

Now they can’t film any of this on location – the Rome Diocese has banned it.

The location slack will reportedly be picked up by two Kingdom Halls and a Mormon stake center. This of course means not a single gargoyle will be shot on camera. It’s bad because they need a gargoyle that comes to life just in time to save Tom Hanks from the exploding jelly truck. It’s really a pinnacle scene.

Thanks a lot, Diocese.

When The Da Vinci Code burst on to movie screens just before the book based on it was released, thousands of people everywhere cheered because it had been advertised as a Harry Potter sequel. Then, of course, it wasn’t and people cut theater screens with pocket knives out of rage.

Those people should have listened to the Catholic church – they’d been warning since Paul’s first epistle to the Romans not to see that movie. After seeing it ourselves we think the reasoning may just have been the poor plot line.

Whatever the reason, now Dan Brown‘s prequel book Angels & Demons is in Italy getting filmed, and they needed some church locations to do so.

On this front all is not going well, as the New York Times will no doubt tell you:

“Two years after Vatican officials urged a boycott of the film “The Da Vinci Code,” based on Mr. Brown’s blockbuster novel, the Rome diocese said Monday that two churches had been declared off limits to film crews for “Angels & Demons,” the “Da Vinci Code” prequel, The Associated Press reported. Msgr. Marco Fibbi, a spokesman for the diocese, said that the film “does not conform to our views” and “treats religious issues in a way that contrasts with common religious sentiment.” Permission to film inside Santa Maria del Popolo, above, and Santa Maria della Vittoria, both in central Rome, was denied in 2007, but the situation did not become crucial until now because production of the movie was delayed by the writers’ strike.”

Luckily the ban only means the insides of the churches are off limits – the outsides are still a go. Maybe with a system of harnesses and a sideways camera the scenes could be shot with Tom Hanks walking along an outer wall as if it were an inner floor. CGI could be used to put in a ceiling and visually fix the gravitational pull on that bad wig.

We’re just throwing out options here.

The Razzies should include another category in their dishonourable awards ceremony – The Worst Screen Hairdo! It would target those performers who played characters with a seriously laudable case of cinematic mane.

Yes, like it or lump it, no one can avoid an occasional bad hair day once in a while, but when it's an actor's and it's plastered on screen, it's quite frankly irreversible, unless of course someone comes up with a little CGI jiggery-pokery to cover up the split ends.

But who would want to destroy the retrospective fun we can have here? So without further a do, let us present to you hecklerspray's Top 10 Worst Cinematic Hairdos…

10. Mark Hamill in Star Wars (1977)

In addition to the hairy pasties modelled by Leia, hideous 70s side-burns of Han Solo, hair-piece donned by Obi-Wan, 'walking-carpet' that is Chewbacca, and the 'out-of-bed-messy-look' that Luke Skywalker's hero favours here, there should be enough damaging evidence to justify a Death Star attack on the intergalactic hairdressers involved. At least Darth Vader had the sense to remain hidden under a mask, until his baldy scalp made an appearance in The Empire Strikes Back.

9. Christopher Lee in The Wicker Man (1973)

Not so much aimed at the 'boarding on a David Dickinson' mullet and sideburns that Lee sports for the majority of the film, but the courageously game 'Cher style' elongated black wig he throws on during the climatic carnival parade – frighteningly ghoulish and rip-roaring hilarious in equal measure!

8. Melanie Griffith & Joan Cusack in Working Girl (1988)

What was it with BIG hair in the 80s? Not content with the shoulder pads, power suits, hideous fake tans and clown-friendly makeup, women had to additionally don environmentally unfriendly hairstyles that must have required a dozen cans of hairspray to sculpt. Luckily, Griffith trims off her tyrannical tresses early on, but supporting sidekick Joan Cusack's equally dire mane is an unfortunate lasting reminder.

7. Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men (2007)

OK, so it does somehow lend an appropriately eerie and surreal resonance to Cormac McCarthy's emotionless psychopathic creation, but it's still appalling, deserving special mention here because it eerily recalls Richard 'Jaws' Kiel's real life hairstyle at a recent Bond convention.

6. Gary Oldman in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

If you thought Gerard Butler's 'Jeff Goldblum in The Fly' trim was bad enough in Dracula 2000 think again! Oldman's Count sports a beehive that pushes the boundaries in aesthetic respectability in addition to overshadowing even Bet Lynch's towering structure.

5. John Travolta in Battlefield Earth (2000)

Travolta's trite stab at a producer credit was nothing compared to the hulk of shit of a hairstyle he and (to a marginally lesser degree) his co-stars had to flaunt in this infamously bad sci-fi travesty. The result: like splicing together the bed-hair of a Klingon and adding mounds of tagliatelle but with extra nasal hair definition for startlingly effect.

4. Sigourney Weaver in Aliens (1986)

Rivalling the Deirdre Barlow perm, Weaver flaunts a hair incarnation that is even worse than her disastrous alternative longer locks in the original Alien film. However, this is still a worthy contender for worst intergalactic trim. Wisely, she completely shaved it all off for Alien 3, but perhaps she could have fared better with the aliens has it been intact, as those fleeting xenomorphic creatures were probably scarred shitless when originally confronted with that killer perm creation.

3. Natalie Portman in Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace (1999)

At least you find out the horrendous hairstyle origin is in the dodgy family genes. Princess Leia sticking two-ringed hairy donuts on the side of her head was nothing compared to what her young mother used to do when she was in power in the good old days: swanking around like a peacock flaunting an audacious array of incomprehensible hairstyles that are screaming out for a Nicky Clarke.

2. Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (1973)

The male perm was perhaps all the rage back in the 70s, but now, 35 years on, Sutherland's locks look more like something even a bird would hesitate to nest in. When it makes its first appearance it's almost as shockingly jarring as that climatic killer red dwarf attack, and is arguably the only thing that ages this otherwise flawless horror classic.

1. Tom Hanks in The Da Vinci Code (2006)

 
Hanks recently defended his comedic hair-do in this Ron Howard mystery thriller by likening it to U2 frontman Bono's trim. But, we're afraid that's a sorry miscalculation, rather like most of the other details that are maddening astray in the adaptation of Dan Brown's bestseller. In fact, it's difficult to take any of Hanks' murmurings in the film seriously when you're convinced his character, Robert Langdon, is stuck in a 80s hair-time warp, which appears harder to fathom than a Rubik cube.

[story by Oliver Pfeiffer]