Jim Griffin Reviews

Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace (1999)

Give it a chance! (spoilers)

[8/10 · 30 July 2004]

The Star Wars trilogy is such a holy of holies among film fans that George Lucas must have had nerves of steel to go ahead with his long-held plans for the prequel trilogy. The news that a new chapter was on the way was ridiculously exciting, even to an on-again/off-again casual non-fan like me, but the immense build-up that came before it was followed by a crushing disappointment as I sat through two hours of nothing-much and a gibberish-spouting lizard-fish pratting around like Sylvester McCoy. I saw it again a week later in the hope anticipation had crippled its chances, and second time around it challenged Return of the Jedi for third place in the franchise.

Set 32 years before A New Hope, The Phantom Menace details a young Anakin Skywalker's entry into the Jedi as a trade federation controlled by Darth Sidious attacks the peaceful planet of Naboo. Here we find a young Obi-Wan Kenobi and his master, Qui-Gon Jinn, despatched to reach a settlement and protect Naboo's elected Queen, Padmé Amidala.

It sees a return to directing for George Lucas, a hugely under-rated director. Twice nominated by the Academy for his direction, twice nominated for his writing, he may not inspire the greatest performances from his cast but his films look beautiful. Every shot here is beautifully framed, beautifully photographed. And while dialogue has never been his strong point, The Phantom Menace is superbly plotted; we have the re-emergence of the Sith, the crippling of the Galactic Republic, the defeat of Chancellor Valorum, Senator Palpatine's ascension to the Chancellorship, Anakin Skywalker's entry into the Jedi under Obi-Wan, the first meeting of Anakin and Amidala, of Threepio and Artoo, and the grotesque Jabba giving the Hutts a presence across all six films.

The Star Wars universe succeeds because of its detail; the lightsabres, the Tie Fighters, the Imperial Walkers, and The Phantom Menace introduces some of its greatest assets. The Battle Droids are my favourite element of all the films, Darth Maul's make-up is astonishing, his double-edged light sabre pant-wettingly exciting and, of course, the character names are as great as ever. The new hardwear fits well with the original trilogy, the clean lines and bright colours of the Naboo starfighters and cruisers contrasting with the beat-up ships of the rebel alliance. With the exception of the midichlorians, everything it adds to the established universe fits perfectly. A notable highlight is the depiction of the Jedi, here in their prime as keepers of the peace. The lightsabre fights in the original trilogy come from an old guy past his best and a young Jedi wannabe on work experience. Here we have two knights at their peak fighting an agile Sith who makes Darth Vader seem like he had his shoelaces tied together.

It's hard to review The Phantom Menace without addressing the criticism it's attracted. Despite being the highest-grossing of all the Star Wars films – and ticket sales at least suggest popularity if not quality – it's assumed that everyone hates it. It deserves to be defended against criticism that is mostly unfair, often uninformed. A lot of the criticism comes from people lacking the foresight Lucas has for his empire. When Episode III is released and the audience no longer has to join the dots, The Phantom Menace will stand a better chance of being seen as a slow-boiling first act that sets up the epic story with considerable skill.

The dialogue is wince-inducing in places, but is grand and broadly mythic; certainly no worse than in the Lord of the Rings films. At times the CGI looks less than real, the fields of Naboo impossibly green, the skies impossibly blue - but impossible only to our polluted frame of reference. For the most part the effects are remarkable and deserved to take the Oscar from the one-trick-pony that was The Matrix.

The much-criticised title fits nicely with the B-movie hokum of The Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi. The weakest title in the franchise is easily A New Hope, an uninspired and now uncharacteristic addition. I do agree, however, that the finale is underwhelming; a small-scale repeat of the assault on the Death Star, victory relies on a kid making a mistake and Jar Jar Binks falling over.

Mr Binks is, of course, the biggest problem. He undermines every scene he's in and destroys much of the darker tone that creeps into the second half of the film. But let's at least remember that people initially hated Threepio in A New Hope and the Ewoks in Return of the Jedi; it's only our collective rose-tinted nostalgia that remembers otherwise.

What frustrates me is that much of the criticism levelled at The Phantom Menace belongs equally to the original trilogy. Think Ewan McGregor's bland as Obi-Wan? Try Mark Hamill. The dialogue's awful? Harrison Ford said of the first film, 'George, you can type this but you sure can't say it.' Natalie Portman's just there to look pretty? Think Carrie Fisher's gold bikini. Daul Maul is underused? Think Boba Fett. We've seen the finale before? Return of Jedi resorts to a second Death Star! Let's lose the idea that the original trilogy is perfect. Before The Phantom Menace was released people considered Jedi to be a weak finish and the Ewoks an annoying marketing tool. Now suddenly it's as perfect as New Hope and Empire! I won't buy into that kind of revisionism just to better criticise the prequels.

For all its faults, The Phantom Menace remains a remarkable achievement. Four films into the franchise, 22 years after the first film, George Lucas is still showing us new worlds and finding surprises in a story we all know inside out. When the prequels are finished and all six films tied together, I hope The Phantom Menace gets the re-evaluation it deserves. In the meantime I'll enjoy it alongside the original films, happy that I can see the prequels as their equals.

Great Guns (1941)

The beginning of the end...

[30 July 2004]

Under the watchful eye of producer Hal Roach, Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy moved from silent shorts in the 1920s to feature length talkies in the 1930s to become one of the world's best loved comedy double acts. At Roach's studios Laurel in particular was given the freedom he needed to refine the duo's act, working as writer and producer on a number of films. By the end of the decade, with scores of classic shorts and features behind them, relations between the double act and Roach were strained beyond breaking point, and Laurel and Hardy left the studio - and their glory days - behind them.

Great Guns was the first proper film of the post-Roach era, The Flying Deuces with RKO something of a one-off. The move to Twentieth Century Fox in 1941 brought down these giants of comedy in four short years, assigning them to the B unit where little care was taken and little interest shown in what was being made. Their talent wasted by the talentless men who surrounded them, the Laurel and Hardy we loved were dismantled, simplified and bastardised.

In Great Guns we find them as gardener and chauffeur to a sickly rich kid drafted in spite of being allergic to everything. When the army medical proves there's nothing wrong with him he eagerly jumps into uniform, with Stan and Ollie joining him to make sure their master is well looked after.

The change in the duo is jarring, Fox's fumble immediately noticeable. Here we see not the gentle troublemakers we remember, nor the ambitious under-achievers content in their delusion that they can better themselves. As gardener and chauffeur they are servile, loyal, self-sacrificing. They know their place, and that there they belong; none of Ollie's arrogance here, no petty one-upmanship with exasperated authority figures. Gone are the childlike, naïve little strugglers, our charming anarchists replaced by simple idiots. This wasn't just a botched attempt to move them on; it was a fundamental misunderstanding of their appeal.

This isn't Laurel and Hardy. Look at how Ollie's size is now handled; with joke after joke about his waistline, we see him compared to a blimp and a weather balloon as people queue up to tell him how fat he is. In their glory days the joke was Ollie's agility in spite of his girth, his delicate finger taps and tie waving. Now the joke is his girth. He's fat. We get it. The same subtle treatment is extended to Stan's simple-mindedness. He was always in a world of his own but before all we needed was one of Ollie's withering looks to tell us so. Here people just call him an idiot, name-calling a poor substitute for punchlines. It makes their act too blatant, as if Fox wanted to assure us they understood what the boys were all about.

The Flying Deuces showed that the duo could work well enough without Hal Roach, but to do so they had to have solid writing and directing, with input from Stan Laurel. At Fox they were just actors, and actors saddled with poor scripts and no creative control. Simon Louvish's biography tells how Oliver Hardy would sit at home going over the Fox scripts, shaking his head in disbelief as his character was betrayed; a terribly sad picture to imagine. Beyond its poorly handled characterisation, Great Guns just isn't funny, with Penelope the crow an obvious example. Consider, too, the drippy romantic subplot that keeps the boys on the sidelines for scene after scene.

We don't care about it. There's no reason to.

One of the biggest problems with the boys' wartime output was the war itself. Stan and Ollie don't belong in a world with Nazism. They'd been in the army countless times before, but those were more innocent times. Here our heroes were confronted by such a unique evil that they were horribly out of place. They should be struggling with a piano and a flight of stairs, or fighting with James Finlayson because he won't buy a Christmas tree. Seeing them in the same world as Pearl Harbor and the holocaust is uncomfortable.

Given their reputation it's surprising to learn that the first few Fox pictures were modest successes, but it's easy enough to understand. In an age before television repeats, re-issues and re-mastering, the only chance to see the much-loved duo was in their new films, and even a below-par Laurel and Hardy were better than none at all. Today, when a short from the '20s is as available to us as the feature-length dross from the '40s, there's less reason to be so charitable. In Great Guns we can see the beginning of the end and that, however sad the end was, it was inevitable with material of this quality.

Dawn of the Dead (2004)

Pointless (spoilers)

[29 April 2004]

The history of cinema is littered with missed opportunities. A great idea is let down by too small a budget. A literate script is rewritten for popcorn-swilling idiots. A poor cast wastes its good dialogue. With an endless supply of films crying out for a second chance it's frustrating that Hollywood is determined to only remake its successes. They may talk about retelling a story for a new generation, but cinema is eternal and its stories are forever available to every generation, so we know they're only interested in remaking the original film's money.

Here we have Dawn of the Dead, an entirely pointless remake of a film regarded as a genre classic. As the dead rise and develop a taste for scrummy live flesh, nondescript humans with as much character as the gormless corpses take shelter in a shopping mall. Here they fend off fatal attacks of the munchies and take a few swipes at our culture of consumerism. At least, they did in the original. In the remake they hang out at a coffee place and chat.

There is a staggering lack of atmosphere. Here we find ourselves surrounded by death, by walking corpses wanting to tear us apart, and there is no tension, no eeriness, no suspense. If it weren't for the gallons of blood you'd have no idea you were watching a horror film at all. Shot as an action movie, played as if you adjust to a plague of zombies after ten minutes, it's astounding that a film with this much gore and this strong an idea can be so dull.

Its characters are three-dimensional, realistic and well rounded in some kind of mirror universe where hot snow falls up. In ours they're pitifully underwritten. One guy is Surly, one is Sarcastic, one is Pretty Decent. The others are Nothing At All. They apparently have names. Mekhi Phifer, a natural charmer and one of the few good points of ER's shark-jumping later seasons, is wasted here in a nothing role and a silly and predictable subplot. Character development only comes in the form of montage. I slipped out of the cinema to the bathroom, and when I came back the mean guy was nice and most of the cast had paired off! The idea that we're supposed to care about these nobodies, hope they don't get munched on and make it to the end credits alive is ridiculous. It's like trying to be emotionally attached to a chair or a bucket.

The original film had a degree of intelligence not often found in horror films, and it's certainly nowhere to be found in its remake. The shots of zombies stumbling around a shopping mall while muzak and taped announcements play unheard were priceless. The lead characters' gluttony and gradual loss of interest in living a meaningful life in place of their consumer paradise was an interesting (if over-praised) point. In this remake the satire is lost. Of course it's lost. The mall is just a location, a background on which blood will splatter, and your brain won't have to worry about thinking anything beyond `That looks cool.' There might be an attempt at satire in the brief scene where a security guard gormlessly plonks himself down in front of a TV instead of taking care of the zombie problem, but if that makes any point at all it was probably just an accident. The film's irrelevance and poor sense of social commentary is further exposed when you realise that a mysterious virus is killing people all over the country - possibly all over the world - and the word `terrorism' isn't spoken once, even to dismiss the idea. In The Day the Earth Stood Still there is a conversation where an American family wonder if the little green men are actually big, Red and earthbound. It's a throwaway moment that points to the paranoia of the time. No such intelligence here.

The only areas in which the remake surpasses the original are the visual effects and the zombies themselves. Here they are animalistic, predatory, consistent in their strength and speed, and actually able to run. These changes make for more formidable opponents, but the increased threat is not matched by increased tension. And it's strange that, despite Mr Computer giving us shots of cities on fire and thousands of zombies lining the streets, there is a lesser sense of apocalypse than in the small-scale original.

This isn't a film that needed to be made. It adds precisely nothing to the legacy of the franchise. It won't be remembered. The history of cinema will be no richer for it. And meanwhile more opportunities are being missed. More good ideas are being cut by a low budget, more scripts are being dumbed-down, more dialogue is being wasted, and no second chance will come for these films because remaking them won't guarantee a good opening weekend.

The Paradine Case (1947)

Deserves to be better remembered (spoilers)

[28 April 2004]

Alfred Hitchcock is a director too well known by his trademarks. His career, spanning five decades, has been summarised and typified and broken down and examined so often by so many that we have drawn a caricature of his style. We know precisely what we want from a Hitchcock film. We want an innocent accused and on the run, we want a playful camera, a streak of black humour, a gimmicky set-up, a McGuffin, an ice-cold tease. Any combination of these trademarks adds up to Hitchcock. Any combination used by another director adds up to Hitchcockian.

With such a fixed and narrow idea of what makes a Hitchcock film, it's no surprise to see many complain The Paradine Case is a disappointment. We don't want him to explore new territory. We want what we want. That the film lacks many of his trademarks should not be a criticism. It should instead come as a pleasant surprise that one of cinema's greatest directors was far more versatile than our caricature admits.

In The Paradine Case, Gregory Peck is Anthony Keane, a brilliant lawyer making a name for himself in England's green and pleasant courtrooms. He's married to a woman who worships him, envied by lawyers everywhere, on his way to the top. Life is good. It gets more complicated when he is hired by Mrs Paradine, a cold but beautiful woman accused of murdering her husband. Keane finds himself falling for her, obsessed with her, his judgment impaired by his infatuation. That's the plot explained pretty much in its entirety, a wafer-thin story that sometimes has trouble filling its running time. But while this is some way below classic Hitchcock (with or without the trademarks) it's a worthwhile film, one that deserves a better reputation.

Its first half is a little weak. Not much happens beyond Peck looking vaguely troubled, but what we have here is real emotion and its consequences - rare indeed for Hitchcock. If we can approach this as a drama and not a thriller, the threat of romantic fantasy on a practical marriage is quite engaging. The second half of the film picks up the pace as it turns into a courtroom drama. Here we see how blinded Peck has been, that his concentration has been focused on what Paradine feels for him and every other man in her life, that he has betrayed her by ignoring the needs of his client.

There are some fine performances that elevate the film further. Peck is typically restrained and moral as Keane, his English accent convincing but troubled by vowels. Charles Laughton impresses as a sleazy, biased judge. Alida Valli is suitably frosty as Paradine, but in its female characters the film is very much of its time. The four main women represent four stereotypes loved by Hollywood. In Mrs Paradine we have a cold-hearted temptress, able to ruin a man with a single pout. In Peck's wife we have an adoring child loyal to the point of stupidity, forgiving her husband's roving eye. In her friend, the daughter of Peck's colleague, we have the inappropriately intelligent and feisty young woman. Naturally, she's unmarried. In Laughton's wife we have the submissive, downtrodden creature controlled by weak emotions. They are uncomfortable clichés, but avoiding them would mean avoiding anything made before the 1970s so we'll just have to let them go.

There is more to enjoy if you're a fan of invented subtext and the psychobabble that has Hitchcock lusting after his leading ladies. The Paradine Case comes from a novel by Robert Hichens and was adapted by Hitchcock's wife, Alma Reville. Here we can see Hitchcock as Keane, Paradine as any number of leading ladies, and Reville as Keane's forgiving but wounded wife. If you want to imagine more subtext you could have fun with the fact Keane's wife is called Gay. But we'll leave that for the film students determined to read anything into everything.

The Paradine Case is a solid effort but it's easy to see why it's not better remembered. There's no crop duster, no challenge, no kicker of an idea, no black humour and only one stand-out shot. Perhaps your opinion of it depends on what expectations you bring to it. If you're only after Hitchcock's trademarks you'll be disappointed. If, instead, you're prepared to see him as a more versatile director (who naturally returned to familiar themes through his fifty year career) maybe you'll appreciate this more. It's below-average Hitchcock but an above-average film, and had there been another name attached its reputation would be quite different.

Cop Land (1997)

Stallone's best - but that's not much of a compliment

[10 April 2004]

Much was made of Cop Land on its release. Here was Sylvester Stallone turning his back on lobotomised action films, moving (or returning, depending on your sympathies) to an ensemble character piece. With 40 pounds of pancakes puffing him up to a flabby everyman, his Freddy Heflin is a lifetime loser. Deaf in one ear, kept off the NYPD, working as a lowly sheriff, he's got wood for some girl he played hero to years ago. She married a real cop; he's busy cheating on her. Heflin is irrelevant to just about everyone, a child to the adults on the job. It's some distance from the one-dimensional cartoon characters that have dominated Stallone's career.

It's widely held that Cop Land came to him after a string of poor choices in the early 90s, but that only really counts if you're talking about money or if you like his early work. The lean years of The Specialist, Assassins, Daylight and Judge Dredd are only lean if you consider the load of boxing movies and generic actioners that came before them worthwhile. For me, Cop Land provides less a return to form, more a new form entirely. But I've always liked Stallone, even if I've never much liked his movies, and it's pleasing to see him in something of this quality. He brings a surprising quality himself, his Heflin a likeable, lonely, disappointed man wondering what might have been had his heroism not lost him his hearing. He holds his own among an ensemble cast that includes Robert DeNiro, Harvey Keitel, Ray Liotta, Janeane Garofalo, Robert Patrick, Cathy Moriarty and Annabella Sciorra. That takes some doing.

Heflin's town is Garrison, New Jersey. Actually, it's everyone's town but his: A bunch of cops wanting out of New York found a way around the rule that keeps them living in the city. They bought a chunk of New Jersey, filled its houses with cops and lived happily ever after. Heflin, who years ago rescued Sciorra from a car on its way to the bottom of a river, was hired as sheriff and expected to turn a blind eye to just about everything. In a town full of cops, where cops can break the law because they're cops, there's no law to be enforced, and time is better spent returning lost toys to toddlers and breaking up fights between school kids. Such is Heflin's lot in life.

But maybe there are some things he can't overlook. One of Garrison's favourite sons, Murray 'Superboy' Babitch, is driving drunk when his car is rammed by another on the GW bridge. Its passenger opens fire on Babitch, his tyre explodes, he empties his gun into the back of the car before crashing into it. When the NYPD show up, they fail to find a gun on either of the two bodies. Turns out the passenger was just holding a steering wheel lock and Babitch's tyre blew at the wrong time. Robert Patrick plants a gun to help the kid out but is seen by a do-gooder paramedic who throws it into the river, neatly screwing up these dirty cops' good work. So here's Superboy: driving drunk, killing two unarmed men. Nothing left to do but dive off the bridge while no one but Harvey Keitel is looking.

Nothing much seems to happen for the next hour. Maybe too much happens, none of it fully explored. Heflin thinks maybe Superboy is alive, which means the men on the bridge aided and abetted but he can't let himself believe it. He seems troubled but too used to apathy to do anything, too insecure to challenge the real cops that surround him. He suspects his friend is a coke user and insurance fraudster but does little to prove or disprove his fears. He thinks maybe he's got a shot with married damsel-in-distress Sciorra but doesn't make much progress. There are so many things going on that each element is denied the time it deserves. There's a fine line between letting things stay unresolved and letting things go by undeveloped, and it's hard to say on which side of the line Cop Land sits. Given the brief running time and how many things are left open it's good news that a director's cut is on the way. Given that the director went on to make the naïve Girl Interrupted and the silly Identity, maybe it's not good news after all.

So where exactly are we with Cop Land? An outstanding cast that turns in solid but not outstanding performances. A story that only simmers for most of its running time, its threads left hanging either deliberately or through poor writing and impossible to guess which. A generic ending that puts Garrison in the Wild West and sees violence as redemption. If this sounds indecisive it's because there are an equal number of things for which to admire and criticise Cop Land. Considerably less than the sum of its parts, it's a solid but slight film. Hardly the masterpiece its cast promises.

It's by far the best Stallone film, but for most of the cast it doesn't represent a high point. Is it among the best DeNiro movies? The best Keitel movies? Nope. Cathy Moriarty has Raging Bull. Ray Liotta has Goodfellas. Robert Patrick has Terminator 2. Stallone will have only Cop Land. His career since - the unpopular remake of Get Carter, the Playstation-influenced Driven, the mind-numbing D-Tox and the abysmal Spy Kids 3D - makes Cop Land a sore thumb, a teasing glimpse of what might have been had Stallone made this kind of choice more often. He deserves better material but probably won't get it, not taken seriously by the people who matter. So while Rocky and Rambo will always be his signature roles, Stallone now seems to have more in common with Freddy Heflin.

Arlington Road (1999)

Simple-minded, po-faced (spoilers)

[11 March 2004]

Arlington Road is a silly film. It tries to be intelligent, informed and political but its lofty ambitions add up to delusions of grandeur. It wears a dunce's hat and wants us to think it's a crown.

Michael Faraday (Jeff Bridges) is having trouble coming to terms with the loss of his wife, an FBI agent killed some years earlier in a botched raid. He's banging one of his graduate students but his heart's not in it. He teaches American history, specifically the history of American terrorism, and begins to suspect his neighbour is a terrorist. It's quite a coincidence. It's the first of many.

Tim Robbins and Joan Cusack play Your Next Door Neighbours. They're blandly suburban, they have barbecues and dinner parties, their kids play Little League baseball. You can bet they own Tupperware. They're supposed to make us question what lies beneath the surface of the people with whom we share our streets. Every serial killer, every rapist, every burglar and insurance fraudster lives somewhere, lives next to someone. And there's something fishy about these people. Their kid blew up his hand playing with fireworks. Robbins says he's an architect working on a mall but has blueprints for an office building. And he calls himself Lang but has been getting letters addressed to a Mr Fenimore. Are these people really terrorists, or are Faraday's grief and expertise leading him to paranoid delusions?

In most thrillers we'd be given some signs of ambiguity, clues that lead nowhere, red herrings that frustrate us. But this is a strangely one-sided film that leaves little doubt in our minds. After all, if Bridges were wrong what would be the finale? Him taking a basket of fruit over the road and saying `My mistake!'

The film flirts with serious issues, plays with politics and extremism but seems uninterested in their depths. It needs to find a way of teaching us about terrorism and does so by literally teaching us about terrorism! We sit in on the rambling lectures given by Faraday, we're told facts here and there – most of them invented – but learn little. We're given statistics, profiles of terrorists, conspiracy theories that add up to precisely nothing. We're not told anything about the motivations of anti-government groups. We don't discuss their beliefs; we just condemn their actions. The film's interest in terrorism is superficial, just a hook on which to hang a limp thriller. It flirts with issues, certainly, but only because they'll take us to a car chase and a fight scene.

Beyond its one-sided are-they/aren't-they/of-course-they-are plotting and its dunderheaded struggles with politics, the film lacks credibility because of its reliance on coincidence. It's a big enough coincidence having a terrorist living across the road from a professor of terrorism but worse is yet to come. Faraday searches through old newspapers to get background on his neighbour, while his neighbour sneaks up behind him in the background. Faraday's girlfriend parks her car and sees her neighbour in the same car park trading briefcases and vehicles with a stranger. She follows him, finds a payphone and calls Faraday to report what she's seen, turns around and is face to face with the neighbour's wife. These people get everywhere! They're not the Langs, they're Mr and Mrs Droopy!

There is a twist towards the end of the film that goes some way to explaining the coincidences and contrivances that come before it, but it rubbishes everything that follows. You look at the film one way and it doesn't make much sense. You look at it another way and see just a different kind of nonsense. Somehow it pulls a great finale out of nowhere, one that makes you think better of the film until you remember that, actually, it wasn't out of nowhere – it was from The Parallax View.

It's a strange film. It's not awful, its cast is as good as you'd expect and the direction is fine. Had it shown more modesty it could have been a solid (if disposable) movie but it wants things that are beyond its reach and ends up looking... silly. It's just a silly film.

Bamboozled (2000)

Great ideas, flawed film

[5 March 2004]

I want to like Spike Lee. He's an important film-maker whose work refuses to let us forget our past or ignore the present it's created. His career has been devoted to asking questions no one wants to answer, and such courage – rare in Hollywood - is something to value. What frustrates me is that his films rarely live up to the ideas behind them, and Bamboozled is no exception.

It presents his most interesting idea and biggest disappointment to date. Harvard-educated screenwriter Pierre Delacroix (Damon Wayans) is frustrated. The sole black writer at his network, his ideas for shows featuring the black middle class are rejected one after the other. His white station manager wants something more real – real meaning poor, undereducated and armed, the kind of `real' we see in gangsta rap videos. In reply, Delacroix creates The New Millennium Minstrel Show, a black-face variety show that will fail so badly and outrage so many he'll be freed from his contract. Hosted by Mantan and Sleep ‘n' Eat, the show is set in a plantation‘s watermelon patch, filled with sketches where the duo steal chickens from their overseer's coop. The pilot is a hit and suddenly Delacroix finds his creation out of his control.

Bamboozled was a hard film to finance and its struggle points to its importance, but despite its wealth of ideas the execution is poor and reeks of an opportunity missed. Much of its failure comes from the central performance by Wayans, a frankly bizarre turn that irritates from the first word. His Delacroix, uncomfortable in his skin, has changed his name and much of his accent. What remains is an impression of an upper-class white man which is just that – an impression. It's a superficial performance, a pantomime out of place among the more subtle performances that surround it. I appreciate its point, that Delacroix is ashamed of his origins, but it misses the target and does nothing but grate.

Beyond that, Bamboozled is underwritten and feels under-rehearsed. The character development is sloppy, huge changes in personality coming without warning and with little credibility. Add to that a clichéd friendship-not-surviving-success subplot and big ideas apparently lifted from The Producers and Network, and there seems little left to praise.

But while it fails on many levels, the good ideas remain and allow Lee to explore two main themes – the past degradation of black performers and the position they hold today. We learn that black artists in minstrel shows or movies had little choice but to degrade themselves if they wished to pursue a career in entertainment. They were only allowed to be greedy, lazy, bug-eyed buffoons, stripped of their dignity so white audiences could enjoy them without addressing their prejudices. Willie Best, an actor from the 1930s who himself performed under the name Sleep ‘n' Eat once asked 'What's an actor going to do? Either you do it or get out."

Addressing the status of today's black performers in a number of interviews, Lee has accused gangsta rap of being `the 21st century minstrel show'. It's an interesting argument, seeing that its lyrics and videos give overwhelmingly negative images of contemporary black culture that are lapped up by young white audiences. Theft, drug use and abuse, violence against women, murder as entertainment; these are the means by which the rappers degrade themselves for their listeners. The Mau-Maus, the gangsta rappers in the film who take issue with the New Millennium Minstrel Show represent these ideas, though how well they do so is questionable. On the subject of blacks in film, Lee has condemned the use of `Super Magical Niggers' in the likes of The Green Mile and The Legend of Bagger Vance, men who `use magic to help white people but can't help themselves.' Hollywood is still limiting the kinds of black films they'll make, choosing mostly gangsta, hip-hop shoot-em-ups or lowbrow comedy. The same is true of TV, where `about 95% of blacks on television now are working on sit-coms.' Where are the all-black dramas? With gangsta rap, the dominance of lowbrow comedy on TV, and simplified fairytale roles or drug-centred grit in cinema, it seems that black entertainment in the white world still relies on degradation, stereotype or cheap laughs. And although much of Lee's argument can be countered by a number of positive roles or by seeing gangsta rap as only a small part of the black music that dominates the charts, these are the things Bamboozled wants to make us think about. Unfortunately, Lee's interviews that publicised the films are far more interesting, persuasive and thoughtful than the film itself.

Perhaps that's the problem. He's an interesting thinker but seems to have difficulty in wrapping his arguments around plot, pace and character. The finest moments in Bamboozled come when he's not weighed down by those burdens. The last few minutes feature a fantastic montage of film and TV's shameful past. We see the obvious clips from Birth of a Nation and The Jazz Singer but are surprised to see Judy Garland, Mickey Rooney and Bing Crosby applying blackface. When these films are shown on US television these moments are edited out – Lee even came across a cartoon of Bugs Bunny in blackface that Warner Brothers wouldn't allow him to include. The end credits house an equally shocking montage of racist memorabilia such as `The Hungry Nigger Bank' from Lee's own collection. Had Bamboozled boasted that intensity throughout, had it not been let down by a script that fails to make its points, by Damon Wayan's superficial take on the lead role, and its betrayal of supporting characters for its finale, it would have been a fascinating film. As it is, the message is powerful; the film is not.

But when his films work and when they don't, Spike Lee is at least consistent in one thing; he makes you think long after the credits have rolled. That's a responsibility and an opportunity that too many filmmakers are afraid to take on.

Shrek (2001)

Vastly over-rated

[5 September 2003]

The 1990s was a strange decade for the Disney corporation, one which saw huge commercial success in its first half, and creative bankruptcy in its second. Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and the Lion King were a hat-trick of classics that matched critical success with financial reward, but what followed was a series of repetitive features which proved the winning formula was being so streamlined that nothing else remained. In Pocahontas, Hercules and Tarzan, we saw only a misfit who dreamt of being understood and a sidekick or two ready to chip in with the one-liners. Even the more satisfying efforts, The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Mulan, were burdened with the same old formula. The theme of the underdog and his sidekick had long been a staple of Disney's output, but there had always been something more, something that elevated it above its repetition. Now the bare bones were being presented as the living, breathing whole, and the feeling of déjà vu was becoming increasingly irritating.

With Disney's offerings looking as stale as one of Lincoln's home made baps, and with the arrival of computer-generated animation, its rivals had their best chance yet at defeating the sleeping giant. But somehow the opportunity was not matched with films of sufficient quality; The Pebble and the Penguin, Anastasia, Antz, Titan AE and The Road to El Dorado did little to fill the potential gap in the market. If the response to Disney's stagnation was slow it can be easily understood given that animated features take three or four years to produce, but, still, an opportunity was being missed.

In the Spring of 2001, patience was rewarded with Shrek, a CG animation from DreamWorks which wooed the critics, busted blocks and snatched the first ever Best Animated Feature Oscar from under Disney's noses, leaving poor old Walt spinning in his grave faster than a bottle at a pre-teen sleep-over. It was with great anticipation that I sat down to watch it, ready to embrace the cynicism and subversive humour that had been praised so highly.

The story of an irritable green ogre sent to rescue a post-feminist Princess began well enough, starting, as so many Disney movies have started, with a book of fairytales being opened and narrated in a non-threatening tone. Suddenly, Shrek, voiced by Mike Myers, tore a page from the book and wiped his butt with it - a promising start. Unfortunately, it hinted more at its level of humour than at its subversive nature; the jokes begin in the toilet, and there they remain. The jokes about belching were outnumbered only by the jokes about farting, both of which were abandoned only once, for the high-class humour of seeing Shrek being hit in the groin.

Further disappointment came in its feeble attempts to ridicule Disney's monopolistic use of fairytale clichés. If a film is going to rubbish its predecessors it has to be smarter than the ones it attacks, but Shrek should have a dunce's hat plonked on its big, dumb, empty head. Like Scream and Galaxy Quest, it comes across as being ill-informed, pointing out some clichés while blindly serving up others with a short memory and a straight face. Beyond that, the same old Disney sentiment it spends the first forty minutes rubbishing comes on thick and fast in the second half, where we learn that beauty is only skin deep, that friendships should be valued, and that blah blah bliddy blah.

Beyond fairytale cliché, Shrek suffers terribly from a mammoth helping of movie cliché. Jobbing writers Ted Elliott and Terry Rossio serve up a story of complete conventionality, making us endure such lines as `It's quiet... too quiet' and having their wafer-thin plot hinge on a half-overheard conversation, a plot device so old it was invited to God's christening.

Its various faults add up to a missed opportunity, its subversive streak as unconvincing as Mike Myers' Scottish accent. Disney has its faults - now more than ever - and it deserves to be ridiculed, but it has to be done by something altogether smarter than this. After all, Shrek is the misfit who dreams of being understood, Eddie Murphy's Donkey is the sidekick on hand to chip in with the one-liners, the Princess teaches us that beauty is only skin deep, and nothing is more Disney than that.

The Time Machine (2002)

Awful. (Spoilers)

[26 July 2002]

Problems with my health have meant that for almost five years I wasn't able to read books properly. I used to love reading, but eventually I had to accept that it was something I'd have to leave behind, and I found instead a passion for film. Earlier this year my health improved enough to get back into reading, and The Time Machine by HG Wells was the first book I managed to get through. For that reason it's a special book for me, one that I'd recommend to everyone and defend against anyone who has a bad word to say about it. Beyond what it means to me, it's a masterpiece of science fiction from one of the genre's founding fathers. For those reasons, sitting through this adaptation was one of the most miserable experiences of my life. I can't begin to express the utter contempt I have for this piece of garbage.

Set in nineteenth-century New York, in the days before accents had been standardised, this inane and inept adaptation takes Wells's genius and flushes it well and truly down the Hollywood bog. It sees Dr Alexander Hartdegen tormented by a pointless back-story, and driven to find a way of undoing the recent tragedy that only he cares about. He invents a time machine, powered by a dynamo attached to Wells's spinning corpse, but finds he is unable to change the terrible past. Helpfully mumbling exposition to himself, he comes to realise that the only way to understand why the past can't be changed is to travel 800,000 years into the future. It was at that point that Mr Logic ran out of the cinema, knowing he wouldn't be needed for the rest of the film. I wish I'd followed him.

Arriving in our distant future, Hartdegen finds that the human race has evolved into two distinct species; the peaceful, beautiful Eloi and the evil, subterranean Morlocks, whose skin had long-ago turned into rather obvious latex. Lazily – I mean, luckily – the English language has survived 800,000 years mostly intact, and after a quick chat with one of the Eloi, Hartdegen turns action-hero as he tries to free her people from the clutches of the Morlocks.

This is a thoroughly useless adaptation, one that leads me to believe that the screenwriter has never bothered to read the book, but had instead just glanced at the plot summary on its back cover, had a quick lobotomy, and set to work on his screenplay. Everything that made the novel so powerful has been lost. The anonymity of the time-traveller has been replaced by a dithering scientist with a name and a back-story; his parental affection for little Weena has been replaced with him wanting to do Mara; the Eloi's laziness and lack of intelligence has been replaced with a paradoxical inventive and resourceful nature, which throws up unanswered questions as to why they've failed to rebuild their society; the Morlocks, freed from the moral ambiguity that the novel had put forward, are reduced to nothing but supernatural, superhuman, hissable baddies. It was just horrifying to see a work of such genius simplified, dumbed-down and turned implausible, and lapped up by an audience of idiots, including my own brother! Adaptations don't have to be loyal, and I understand that there are certain things that work in a novel that wouldn't work on screen, but if things have to be added or removed, the changes should at least be equal to the ideas they replaced. That just isn't the case here.

And it's so Hollywood that the pursuit of science isn't enough; Hartdegen can't invent a time machine simply out of the scientific curiosity, it has to be motivated instead by a lost love. And look at the difference between the book and the film, in terms of imagination and invention: The book created a machine that could travel through time; the movie has a holographic museum curator to dispense exposition. The book was a powerful critique on the British class system; the movie has a running joke about bowler hats.

Even if you can see this as a film in itself rather than as an adaptation of another story, it still fails. It's ridden with plot-holes, crippled by the absence of logic, and has a pay-off that's so lazy it's a miracle it even bothered to turn up on time. And while we see travel in the fourth dimension, we only see characterisation in the first. The leads are allocated one adjective each, and accents that could be kindly described as `well-travelled'. The only real successes are the sweeping score by Klaus Badelt, and the often stunning effects by the always-reliable ILM and Digital Domain. Both were wasted in a movie that was heart-breakingly bad.

I've never been so upset by a film. I've never spent so long with my head in my hands. I'm sorry they did this to you, Mr Wells.

The Seven Year Itch (1955)

A so-so comedy that's just not for me.

[23 April 2002]

Something that irritates me about the IMBD is that if you criticise a movie that was made before 1980, a truckload of idiots send you messages telling you how much you hate old movies. Let me say right away, I don't. I like films from pretty much every era of cinema that I've had the chance to see, but, having had common sense recently installed, I've come to realise that age doesn't automatically make a movie great, just as modernity doesn't automatically make a movie bad.

So bearing in mind that I'm talking about this one movie, and not every movie made in the 1950s, The Seven Year Itch is as average as they come. The minimal plot sees Tom Ewell's `summer bachelor' trying to resist the charms of neighbour Marilyn Monroe while his wife and son are shipped off for the season. Very obviously adapted from a play, there are few characters, few sets, and even fewer laughs. That it succeeds at all is due to the charm of the leads and the occasional good joke that sneaks its way into the script.

The film's main problem comes in how it tells its story. First, it depends on Ewell constantly talking to himself, babbling on endlessly about what he's doing, what he might do, what he's never done, and what other people will think he's doing, done and about to do. Secondly, he is constantly daydreaming, the film constantly dissolving into one of his fantasies that are unfortunately no funnier than reality. If you find this storytelling approach irritating, as I did, the film's potential is lost immediately.

You'll no doubt be shocked to learn that in this film Marilyn Monroe is cast as a dumb blonde. Most people in the world seem to immediately pitch a trouser tent at the thought of Norma Jean, but I can't say I count myself among them. The problem with a dumb blonde is that she's dumb, so to find her attractive, you have to be attracted to stupidity. I'm not, so it doesn't matter how much she pouts, or how often we're treated to shots of her hourglass figure; she's as thick as a lobotomised footballer and therefore unattractive. She's basically got the personality and intelligence of a six year old, and, not being Gary Glitter, I can't say that appeals to me.

A comedy with few laughs, a sex symbol who doesn't float my boat, and a classic that just doesn't do it for me. I guess there's another bunch of snide messages coming my way.

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

A solid, intelligent film. (Possible spoilers)

[21 April 2002]

Hollywood isn't as liberal as it likes to think. Too often its message movies are behind the times they condemn, trailing behind the trailblazers who have the nerve to speak out when it matters. In The Heat of the Night is something of an exception. Beyond that, it's simply a great film.

Principally a detective story, the murder of a wealthy businessman in small-town Mississippi is, for the most part, only a framework around which the real story can be told. This is a battle-of-wills between Detective Tibbs and Chief Gillespie, a struggle for power between black and white, a contest for acting honours between Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger. While there is no doubt as to which character is the victor, and which race is the most shamed, the actors are absolute equals. Both give superb, layered performances. Steiger's Gillespie is racist, proud, but lets us feel a degree of pity; Poitier's Tibbs is intelligent, thoughtful, but shows a degree of arrogance. These are not simply characters, but people.

Some have complained that its message is far from subtle, that the lines are too clearly defined, that the racism is too overt. Such criticism comes from those with little understanding of history and little appreciation for context. This was 1967, this was the south; this was how it was. Remember, this film came only four years after Martin Luther King told us his dream, only three years after amendments to The Civil Rights Bill were passed, only two years after the murder of Malcolm X, and only one year before the murder of Dr King. Its message certainly was not subtle, it had no need to be. Its delivery, however, is subtle enough that even today's audience can appreciate it.

Beyond the superb performances, and the dignified message they contain, there are details that give the film a greater depth. When Poitier is being frisked by Officer Wood, he's told to spread his fingers apart, so that he can `see all ten'. Poitier doesn't move them; they're apart enough already. That non-reaction is a great moment, showing that he's been here before, that he knows the drill, that'll he'll tolerate it because for now he has to, but that he won't take orders without reason.

There is so much to praise here. The slow pace of the film should kill its tension, but instead it reflects the sticky heat and the leisurely pace of life in the town. Never is it too slow. The scene where Steiger would rather condemn one of his own officers than lose another point to Poitier's big-city detective skills is a high point, as is the gentle yet vicious racism from Endicott. The conversation between the leads in Steiger's house is surprisingly touching; its brief moment of bonding never seems patronising or contrived, and is expertly ruined by the crudeness of Steiger's racism. The characters' growth is slight, uneven, and without any real payoff. And that's by no means a criticism.

In the Heat of the Night is a film that simply has to be seen, one that soars despite all that could have brought it down. It should be preachy but it isn't; it should have dated but it hasn't; its slow pace should be leaden but it's perfect. This is a rare kind of a film, and one that after a run of terrible movies has helped to remind me why I love cinema in the first place. I'm grateful for that.

Planes, Trains & Automobiles (1987)

My favourite comedy! (Possible spoilers)

[19 April 2002]

It's not often I see a movie I really love, and much less so a comedy, so this is one I really value and really want to recommend.

Set a few days before Thanksgiving, Planes, Trains and Automobiles follows Steve Martin's uptight city worker and John Candy's laid-back shower-curtain-ring salesman as they struggle to get home for the holidays. But to see this as just a road movie, or as another take on The Odd Couple is to miss its uniqueness. What we have here is a near-perfect comedy, one that has characters you actually care about, characters who grow through the movie, and a depth that is rare among its peers.

It's just so consistently, relentlessly funny, and so varied in its humour; sight gags follow one-liners, which follow absurd moments, which follow closely-observed character stuff. Writer/director John Hughes was really at his absolute peak, writing more great jokes for this film than for all his others combined. His teen movies don't interest me, and since this film he's mostly sucked, with a few Home Alone movies and some lame remakes filling out his résumé, but God bless him for this! There're so many quotable lines that I nicked most of them and used them to pass myself off as funny before I discovered the joys of self-made-sarcasm. It's an absolute gem, I wish it was held in higher regard.

Steve Martin and John Candy make a great double-act, and it's a shame they didn't work together more. There's a real warmth between them, and their initial irritation and then growing fondness for each other is touching and genuine. Steve Martin is probably at his peak, with this performance sandwiched between his earlier, offbeat movies and his later, often duller work, and John Candy is at his most loveable. It always makes me sad to watch the movie because his character has so much hidden unhappiness, and the final, lingering shot on his smile is painful to watch now.

The ending always gets me, and elevates the film further. Until then it's just hilarious; in the closing minutes it becomes touching and deep and real. And it always gets me angry, too, because John Candy was so undervalued and so underused. He made too many forgettable movies, either because he had bad taste in scripts or because he wasn't offered the quality he deserved. He should be remembered as one of the greats. His timing is superb, and his charm is exceptional. He's so funny here, in so many ways, and so loveable. He was such a talented, under-rated comic actor, and I'm glad he starred in at least this one perfect movie.

Whether you like John Hughes's work or not, you simply have to see Planes, Trains and Automobiles, if only to understand why the line `Those aren't pillows' is an absolute classic!

Day of the Dead (1985)

Good ideas buried under layers of cack. (Spoilers)

[25 January 2002]

There's a noticeable similarity between George Romero's Dead trilogy and the later Alien franchise. Both series start with tense, claustrophobic films that quietly scare the audience with a degree of subtlety; both expand on their ideas for their first sequels, placing the same principles in a warlike setting and upping the action considerably; and, sadly, the pattern continues into the third instalments, because, like Alien 3, Day of the Dead is a hefty anti-climax.

As the movie opens, the living dead are still munching their way through a thinning crop of humans, and this instalment is the most desolate, with its small group of characters speculating as to whether or not they are the last survivors on earth. It's a promising start that raises hopes that Dawn of the Dead's apocalyptic atmosphere will be continued, and further hope is found in the basic plot that sees scientists in an underground bunker attempting to find a solution to the zombie problem. It's a shame that these fresh ideas and fresh perspectives, which could have made a classic movie and a classic trilogy, are wasted on a film that lacks the intelligence, class and logic of its predecessors.

It's a real disappointment. I'm not often impressed by horror, and I'm put off by the genre's tendency to churn out needless and endless sequels, so it was great to discover the intelligence and invention of the first two movies in the series. But Day of the Dead falls into the horror pitfalls that its predecessors had wisely avoided. Where there was invention there is now cliché, where there were solid characters there are now cardboard cut-outs, and where there was tension there is now boredom and twiddling of thumbs.

While the acting in the first two movies was nothing to write to the Academy about, here it nosedives past the quality found in TV movies, plummets beneath am-dram, and lands a few hundred miles below amateur porn. Joseph Pilato's performance in particular is so hammy that, if he followed the De Niro school of method acting, he must have spent months being salted, smoked and cured in preparation for the part.

At best, Pilato's co-stars manage to make their underwritten and over-clichéd characters look two dimensional. From the gung-ho military men to the crazy scientist, from the drunk Irishman to the platitude-spouting West-Indian who wants nothing from life but to lie on a beach, they have none of the complexities you would expect from having seen their predecessors. To add insult to these critical injuries, the dialogue they're saddled with is repetitive and banal.

A great strength of the first two films was their moral ambiguity, but here it's ignored in favour of outright stupidity. When I watched this instalment, it was introduced by critic Mark Kermode, who discussed its ambiguity at length, insisting it allowed the audience to choose whether to be disgusted by the scientists or the military or the living dead, seeing that each was evil in their own way. Unless he's travelled to a mirrored universe where reality is inverted and this movie has a goatee, I'll have to say he's talking out rubbish. There is no doubt as to who we should be cheering for. The bad guys are ridiculously bad, managing to be sexist, racist and murderous, and the worst suffers by far the most grisly death.

Strangely, it's the gore of the death scenes that comes out as the highlight of the movie. Night of the Living Dead had scared us without showing much, and it was to its credit, but here Romero takes the opposite approach without betraying his earlier work. Sadly, it's the only part of the film for which that can be said, but the effects are remarkable and worthy of the highest praise. Unfortunately, these scenes also show up a flaw that the first two movies had mostly managed to escape; the inconsistent strength of the zombies, that sees them struggling to push through a chain-link fence one minute, and happily ripping a body apart the next.

Day of the Dead is a huge anti-climax, and in every sense a wasted opportunity. There are great ideas here, and great potential for an old idea to take off in a new direction, but they are lost in a film that has too little in the way of imagination and too much in the way of running time. If Night of the Living Dead was the fine starter, and Dawn of the Dead the filling main course, Day of the Dead is the turd Romero squeezed out the morning after.

Dawn of the Dead (1978)

A great sequel that surpasses the first film. (Spoilers)

[24 January 2002]

I've never been convinced by the law of diminishing returns which insists that sequels are, by their very nature, inferior to their predecessors. If a TV programme can run to a few hundred or few thousand episodes without accusations of growing stale, it seems miserly to automatically assume that a second film in a series will be a disappointment. A franchise that dares to progress and change can be richly rewarding, and its familiarity can often be a strength rather than a weakness. While far from a perfect film, Dawn of the Dead is perhaps the perfect sequel. Like Aliens and Terminator 2, it builds on the spirit and ideas of the original while establishing an identity of its own.

As the dead rise to destroy the living, George Romero takes the first film's small-scale story and turns it into a full-scale war. From the first moment, as we join a SWAT team desperately trying to clear an apartment building of survivors, there is a genuine sense of apocalypse that the first movie had only hinted at. This feels like endgame, and somehow manages to set this tone without betraying the quiet understatement of the first film.

Against this backdrop, we focus on a small group of survivors who've taken a helicopter in the hope of building a new life in Canada. Finding an abandoned shopping mall, they stop for supplies and decide with everything they need right there, there's no point in moving on. Despite the wider scope, this setting allows a degree of isolation and claustrophobia, and works as a vehicle for some pointed, though rather obvious, satire.

Like its predecessor, Dawn of the Dead's great strength is its logic. The characters ask the questions we would ask and take the steps we would take, and without being predictable it manages to always choose the most sensible path. Killing the zombies to make the mall safe, storing the corpses in meat lockers to hide the smell, blocking up the doors to stop more getting in; all are necessary and logical steps that add to the film's realism. In a genre where common sense is typically the first casualty of a superhuman, supernatural slasher, Romero's reality check is refreshing.

The acting is a little wooden in parts, the make-up is often at the level of a six-year-old's Halloween party, and the scenes in the TV studio suffer the curse of supposedly-natural seventies dialogue and overloud background noise, but the film's invention and maturity make up for its flaws. The moral ambiguity in the scenes with the raiders, and the satire on the growing culture of consumerism bring a depth of intelligence not often found in the genre; the zombies being drawn to the mall without knowing why, and the PA system's pointless addresses to the living-dead shoppers, are among the highlights.

Where Night of the Living Dead had taken its opening scene from Psycho, Dawn of the Dead takes its final scene from The Birds, and refuses to leave us with a comfortable conclusion. It's a great end to a great movie that should leave you with hopes for a great franchise.

Night of the Living Dead (1968)

What a shocker - an intelligent horror!! (spoilers)

[23 January 2002]

Night of the Living Dead has been referenced, copied and spoofed so often that watching it for the first time was a little disorientating. As was the case when hearing the Great Escape theme in the actual movie, or seeing Psycho's shower scene in the context of the story, it was hard to escape the feeling that this was something big. Unfortunately, as was also the case with those examples, it was over-familiar before the opening credits had rolled. But it must be remembered that what is cliché now was original then, and it deserves better than to be marked down for the predictability hindsight has given it. Despite years of imitation and repetition, this is a king among a genre of plebs.

The strengths of the film's story come in its simplicity: a handful of strangers are gathered in a house in rural Pennsylvania that's gradually being surrounded by a mounting army of flesh-eating zombies. With the simplest of set-ups and the tiniest of budgets, George Romero and his co-writers relied on imagination and invention rather than flash and gore, and for the most part they succeed.

The opening scenes are gentle, as a bickering but charming brother and sister visit their dad's grave, but the tone is darkened as Romero pulls a Psycho on us by killing one of them off. Immediately, as was the case with Hitchcock's masterpiece, we know that no-one is safe. This is really the most important rule of horror; there's nothing less interesting than seeing people killed in the order you'd predicted, while the three most prominent characters survive unscathed.

From this promising beginning, the movie never loses its nerve or its black heart, and is all the better for it. We are given a sense of the wider picture through news footage of the country-wide phenomenon, but we stay with just our small group to experience it on an intimate, emotional level. The acting is often so wooden that the cast could have boarded up the house with themselves, but the actual characters are surprisingly well developed. It's pleasing to have an African-American as the most positive character in a movie from this era, and his cohabitants mostly manage to avoid becoming the stereotypes they could easily have been. As is rarely the case with horror, we at least care about whether or not these people make it through the night. This investment in the characters pays off in the cruel, ironic and perfect finale.

The film's realism - undoubtedly one of its strengths - extends beyond its documentary-style filming into the story, so the questions the audience asks to itself are answered, or at least discussed, onscreen. Arguments over whether to hide in the basement or in the boarded-up ground floor, whether to stay in the house or flee to a rescue station, to fight the zombies or wait for rescue, are all ones we would ask if we were in the situation ourselves, and their inclusion in the script brings an intelligence that elevates the film further from its B-movie origins.

Night of the Living Dead, while flawed and undoubtedly over-rated, is a good movie that rates as one of the best in a generally poor genre. Claustrophobic, tense, involving, inventive, realistic and true to its characters and mythology, it slaughters the easy, infantile, glossy shocks found in the likes of the Scream franchise, which thinks having someone jump out from behind a tree is enough to call itself horror.

Poltergeist (1982)

Grow up, Spielberg! (spoilers)

[22 January 2002]

Before seeing Poltergeist I had a hard time imagining how the teaming up of top sicko Tobe Hooper and saccharine merchant Steven Spielberg could work. Hooper's Texas Chain Saw Massacre is a horror giant, but since Jaws, Spielberg's been unable to stop wetting his pants at any movie rated above a PG; how these minds could collaborate successfully was a mystery to me. After seeing it, I realised it was a mystery to them too.

Poltergeist is an uncomfortable blend of Spielberg's happy-family obsession and Hooper's plan to make you leave a trail of vomit behind you on the way out of the cinema. Every time the horror element gets too scary, Spielberg steps in to show us the magic of suburbia and undermines the whole thing. Imagine taking The Exorcist, removing the tension, blasphemy and profanity, keeping the unconvincing effects, and filling up the gaping holes with Nutrasweet, and you've got yourself this half-hearted horror-free horror movie.

Set in beautiful Spielbergville, a new housing estate in the heart of Cloying County, the startlingly unoriginal plot sees a house invaded by a poltergeist. And then a bunch of dead people. And then the devil, who, for the sake of an audience-boosting PG rating, is referred to only as `The Beast'. I can't believe I just wasted four seconds of my life explaining the plot, when the title sums it up in its entirety. And there's a huge flaw right there, because while Spielberg's inability to write subversive horror is the biggest problem, a close second is the movie's inability to keep its secrets to itself.

This is a film called Poltergeist. The name of the movie tells us right away that it's about a poltergeist. There's no ambiguity in the title – this isn't `Could Be A Poltergeist', or `Maybe It's Related to The Storm', it's called Poltergeist. The secret's out. So while the first forty minutes of the movie are spent watching the (blissfully happy) family trying to understand why their youngest daughter has started talking to the TV, the audience remembers the title of the movie and starts twiddling its thumbs.

Where The Exorcist or the Chain Saw Massacre built tension based on the predictability their titles had given them, Poltergeist remembers how desperately it wants a PG rating, and simply kills time. In a humane way, obviously. The only build-up Spielberg allows is a sliding chair and a bendy knife and fork. It's hardly edge-of-the-seat stuff.

This non-tension is followed by a non-finale which takes place twenty minutes before the film's running time is up. Anyone who believes we'll spend the next twenty minutes seeing the family living happily ever after has obviously stolen Spielberg's rose-tinted glasses and doubled the thickness of their lenses. The predictability is just depressing, and the second finale is no more interesting than the first.

This is a useless horror that ignores the concepts of tension, gore, realism, logic, and horror itself. After watching this weedy offering, even The Waltons would tell Spielberg to drop his loveable-family theme and get some cynicism.

Plan 9 from Outer Space (1957)

Pants, but hardly the worst film ever made! (Spoilers)

[13 January 2002]

After seeing Tim Burton's loving biopic of Ed Wood, criticising this movie is a little hard on the conscience. Johnny Depp's performance was so endearing that insulting the real Ed Wood is on about the same level as punching a sleeping baby in the face. But that's not going to stop me from stating the obvious; that Plan 9 is a big piece of crap.

As bad as it is, there are loads of movies that better deserve the reputation of being the worst ever made. Batman Forever is far worse, and less excusable not just because it had a huge budget and actors who could actually act, but because it managed to kill the credibility that Tim Burton had brought with his two perfect movies. Independence Day is insultingly dumb and wasted every one of its actors, and Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is British mockney cinema at its worst, and houses the lamest performance in the history of film. These big budget, widely-distributed, well-cast, money-making turds are far worse than something like Plan 9 because they had more potential; it doesn't come as anything of a surprise to discover that a B-movie from the 50s isn't a work of genius.

But what separates these and other stinkers from Plan 9 is that it isn't just bad, it's painfully inept. It's one of the few movies that is genuinely beyond spoof. There's no way to parody a film that opens with the line, `We are all interested in the future, for that is where you and I are going to spend the rest of our lives.' Criswell's narration is by far the worst (and therefore best) thing in the film, providing such gems as, `The ever-beautiful flowers she had planted with her own hands became nothing more than the lost roses of her cheeks." It's such a shame that Wood actually thought this had some kind of depth, or even some kind of meaning!

The stupidity of the narration is matched by most of the dialogue, and seeing the same shot of Bela Lugosi three times and then his obvious body double brings the film closer to its reputation. But while these bits are so bad they're good, the rest of the film is just bad. It's never fun to watch a boring movie, and the dull patches throughout stop its cack-handedness from being fully enjoyable.

Poor old Ed Wood. He couldn't even make a bad movie consistently bad enough to be good! But you at least have to admire his ambition, however misplaced it may have been. He was a bad writer, a bad director and a bad producer; truly a multi-talentless man.

The Jungle Book (1967)

Ignore the cynics - this is classic Disney

[28 December 2001]

The last time I watched The Jungle Book, I thought for about half a second that King Louie was a rather uncomfortable stereotype. Given that white racists love the phrase `Get back to the jungle' and make comparisons to monkeys, a scatting orang-utan who desperately wants to be like a man seemed like either a dated character who'd never heard of political correctness, or a deliberately racist one who sat rather awkwardly among the otherwise saccharine sentiments. But after reversing my lobotomy, I realised just how much I was talking out of my a**e, because Mowgli, who this awful, shameful black stereotype sings to, isn't white. There's that theory shot to pieces. Add to that the fact that Baloo the bear scats alongside Louie, and that bears haven't been given the racist association that monkeys have been saddled with, and it becomes pretty obvious that people are reading into Louie a perversion that simply isn't there. After all, if Louie is a racist character, then every British viewer should be disgusted to find that the villainous, murderous, savage Sher Khan is given an English accent despite living in a jungle in the middle of India. My point being: shut up.

The same point goes for people who've complained that the female character who attracts Mowgli is desperately sexist because her song shows that her only ambitions are to be a wife to a handsome man and a cook to her children. That argument ignores not only that this was a movie made in the 1960s, where a career girl was still far from the norm, but that it wasn't set in the present day anyway! If Mowgli had spotted a girl on her way to the office where she'd compete with the best male executives on an equal salary, the movie would have entered a fantasy land less realistic than the one in which a bear can sing.

In truth, The Jungle Book boasts the kind of charm and innocence and magic that we used to associate with Disney ourselves, before the company began telling us about its charm and innocence and magic in every advert for every video it rams down our throats. It's this genuine Disneyism that makes The Jungle Book a classic despite its wafer-thin plot. Mowgli, a man-cub raised in the jungle by a family of wolves, is to be returned to the man-village to keep him safe from Sher Khan, a tiger whose fear of man's gun and fire, and whose links with the notorious Combat 18, make him a dangerous addition to the local population. From there, the movie spends the remainder of its running time wandering around the jungle rather aimlessly, and its episodic structure means the movie sags at times while soaring at others.

Every scene with Baloo is a winner, and the King Louie episode is perhaps the most entertaining, but these are dragged down slightly by two rather repetitive scenes with Kaa the Snake, whose career hit its nadir with his infamous appearance with Britney Spears at the MTV Awards. Your enjoyment of the two scenes with the Dawn Patrol depends entirely on how funny you find a forgetful elephant, and on how well you can forgive Colonel Hathi's crypto-fascist, militaristic obsession. The lowest point is the sequence with the Beatles-lookalike vultures, managing to include the poorest characterisations, the least memorable song, and the most half-assed of ideas. The vultures are clearly a nod to the Fab Four, but only one speaks with a Liverpudlian accent, and when they break into song, it's in the style of a barbershop quartet and not a rock and roll group. The homage is therefore compromised and becomes pointless.

But The Jungle Book is more than the sum of its parts. Its highlights may be unevenly distributed, but nothing can argue with the fact that I didn't stop smiling through the whole thing. Baloo is the absolute star of the film, one of the great Disney characters that ranks alongside Pinocchio's Jiminy Cricket and Mulan's Mushu, and it's his presence that accounts for most of the film's immense charm. He has the best song, the best lines, and the best scenes, and his loveable slobbiness can't be praised highly enough. Even his entrance, where he strolls onto screen singing `Well it's a doo-be-de-doo, yes it's a doo-be-de-doo' is inexplicably hilarious! I know it's not the greatest line of dialogue in the history of cinema, but it makes me laugh every time I hear it.

This is simply classic Disney. Great characters, great songs, stunning animation, and a heart to shame most of the vacuous 90s output this generation has had to suffer.

Coyote Ugly (2000)

Hollywood at its worst (big, big spoilers!)

[5 October 2001]

The Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer partnership, which had spawned such corkers as Crimson Tide and The Rock and such crap as Top Gun and Days of Thunder, was disrupted somewhat by the untimely death of Simpson in 1996. But aside from the company logo, nothing has changed on-screen since then. If proof of their soulless, mass-production technique was needed, this is surely it; with one half of the team dead, the artistic content hasn't changed in the slightest!

Coyote Ugly, though a Bruckheimer solo project, has the worst features of the brainless 80s fantasies that were the team's trademark. It is a film so banal, so puerile and so immature, that it could have been written by its teenage target audience. Only a 13-year-old could be convinced by its glossy tale of hardship, only a 13-year-old could be surprised by its ending, or interested in anything that comes before it.

The constantly pouting Piper Perabo plays Violet Sanford, a small-town gal who wants to make it in New York as a musician. Her dad doesn't want her to go because it's a scary place, but she moves anyway and finds success isn't as easy to come by as she'd imagined. It's genius, isn't it? You can imagine the writer suddenly being hit by inspiration, jumping for joy as the idea forms in her mind, realising this is a story that has never been seen before and simply has to be brought to life on the big screen, then waiting six hundred years for cinema to be invented.

I've honestly never seen a movie so wholly dependent on cliché. There is literally nothing original in this film. That's not sarcasm, it's not petty sniping or an exaggeration; literally, actually, undeniably, nothing. Every last moment is predictable. Anyone surprised to find Perabo's apartment small and badly decorated has never seen a film before. Anyone amazed by the burglary or disappointed by her lack of success in the first few minutes is as stupid as people who think `Baby on Board' stickers actually prevent car accidents.

For the pre-pubescent girls in the audience there is a love story shallow enough for them to relate to. The supposedly-charming Adam Garcia is the love interest, and the will-they won't-they tension that surrounds the fledgling couple is diminished slightly by him being the only man in the city she actually talks to! We should probably assume the script said there was chemistry between the two leads, but it never made it past the page - they are both gorgeous, and that seems to be enough to convince us they're a good couple that we should be rooting for. But this is a romance so infantile that when Perabo first meets Garcia, he follows her through the dark streets of New York at night, says he's staring at her ass, and she finds it charming!

There are attempts at gritty realism and at showing the hardship and heartbreak of having your ambitions frustrated, but these don't last beyond the second reel. This is Bruckheimer, and realism was never on the agenda. The few scenes that show us the bad breaks in the big city are followed by a cheesy ending and a happily-ever-after for the lead characters that render them insincere. It follows the three-act structure precisely, giving us first the ambition, then the hard times, then the triumph. I yawned my way through all three.

This movie should be held up as the example of everything that is wrong with Hollywood. It's cynically unoriginal, painfully infantile, constantly banal, and so vacuous it could suck the audience out of their seats and into the screen. There are so many reasons to hate this stodgy turd. Seeing Garcia buy rare Spiderman comics in a diner is one of them; seeing the character whose soul purpose is to ask what Coyote Ugly means is another; and suffering the shameless cameo of LeAnn Rimes singing the crappy theme song is the most irritating. I hate this movie, I resent it wasting a hundred minutes of my life, and the only thing more annoying than a film so ruthlessly efficient, so pointless and so banal, are the preteen idiots who actually like it.

Crimson Tide (1995)

A near perfect thriller (spoilers)

[14 September 2001]

The ending of the Cold War presented something of a problem for jingoistic film-makers and cinemagoers. For years it had been a convenient framework within which hackneyed stories of good and evil could be told. The lines were rarely blurred, and the heroic West could watch itself defeat the Commies from the safety of its cinema seat.

With that framework no longer in place, Hollywood has had to look elsewhere for its villains, but Crimson Tide doesn't bother. Ignore the details of civil war and maniacal rebels and this is Us against Them as much as it ever was. It's an irritating flaw in an otherwise great movie, and it's a shame that writers Michael Schiffer and Richard Henrick couldn't find a more original set-up.

That aside, this is by far the most intelligent of the Don Simpson/Jerry Bruckheimer productions. The crappy 80s cheese of Top Gun and Days of Thunder was replaced in the mid-90s by an overblown slickness that brought the classic action movies Con Air and The Rock, but even these had flaws in their levels of testosterone. Fortunately, Crimson Tide finds the Simpson/Bruckheimer excesses reigned in by an actual plot.

When nuclear missiles come under the control of Russian rebels, the USS Alabama is ordered to fire its own in a pre-emptive strike. A second, unconfirmed, message that could countermand the last order is interrupted when communications are lost, and the Captain and his Ex-O are thrown on two sides of a dilemma. Gene Hackman's Captain demands that the missile launch go ahead, while Denzel Washington's second-in-command insists they wait until communications can be re-established and the second message confirmed.

With the cheesy opening as the exception, the script is excellent, although the uncredited inserts by Quentin Tarantino stand out more obviously than a twelve year old's shorts in a mixed-sex gym class. The tension is built gradually and skillfully, and never seems contrived. The strength of the script comes it its willingness to blur the lines, in giving no simple choices for the audience when taking sides. Washington's Ex-O is likely to provoke the most sympathy in his attempts to prevent a nuclear holocaust, but in doing so he ignores the regulations that have been put in place for such incidents. Hackman's Captain is more dedicated to regulations and the chain of command, but he is not an unfeeling warmonger, rather an experienced officer trying to protect his country. While the ending is rather predictable, either officer could have been right, and the ambiguity does much to elevate the film's credibility.

The performances of Washington and Hackman are impressive, managing to rise above the two-dimensional characterisations usually found in action-thrillers. Both men are flawed, and it is through their faults that the tension becomes genuine and the lines become blurred. Indeed, the whole cast is top quality, and fans of The Sopranos and later seasons of NYPD Blue will be pleasantly surprised to find James Gandolfini and Rick Schroder in minor roles.

A number of reviews have pointed out the errors and inaccuracies in terms of Naval regulations and on-board behaviour, but to us regular folks in the audience these are points of pedantry. This is not a historical recreation or a biopic; it's a hypothetical situation which is tense, involving and claustrophobic, and one of the best action-thrillers of all time.

His Girl Friday (1940)

A real rarity - a comedy that's actually funny!

[10 September 2001]

There really aren't any good comedies around at the moment. Within the past five years or so, there have been only two that have really stood out; There's Something About Mary, and The Castle. If you don't like Jim Carrey, lazy spoofs, or the gross-out 80s teen revival, you're not going to find many laughs in the cinema.

There seems to be an increasing reliance on cross-genre films, that describe themselves as comedy-drama to excuse their lack of laughs. One good joke every half hour is the usual average, and the TV sitcom has overtaken cinema as the most reliable joke-teller. It's frustrating that there are a few laughs every minute in a 22 minute episode of Seinfeld or Roseanne, but a movie sets its sights so low that you're lucky to find one memorable line in the whole thing.

It's refreshing, then, to go back to when comedies were actually funny, and funny for their intelligent dialogue as opposed to second rate sarcasm, and funny for their inventive slapstick as opposed to someone just slipping on a puddle of vomit and falling on his arse. The speed and intelligence of His Girl Friday puts modern comedies to shame.

Every Cary Grant movie has charm just from his being cast, and he is matched here by Rosalind Russell. They combine to bring one of the funniest partnerships in film, and their extraordinary chemistry lends credibility to the obvious ending. It's predictability comes not from being such a clichéd plot device, but from their attraction being obvious and genuine from the outset. The venomous insults from Russell and the devious flirting from Grant are just perfect.

The pace of the film is mentioned in every review, and it has to be mentioned again here. It's simply breathtaking, and shows supreme confidence in getting more jokes out in one scene than most movies manage in their entire running time. There are moments when it gets frustrating because laughter from one joke drowns out the next, and without the rewind button half the script would go unheard. The quality and concentration of the jokes guarantee that this is one to watch over and over.

Beyond the manic pace and endless one-liners, there are serious points that give the film a greater depth. It has much to say about career politicians, who care only for their ambitions, and the role of the press, who care only about their story. There is a surprising cynicism that translates perfectly to a modern audience, and Grant's idea that `divorce doesn't mean anything nowadays' is wonderfully cutting and more relevant now than back then. It is equally modern in its presentation of Russell, who is acknowledged as the best of the reporters. Surprising for a film of such age, her character is never patronised, and never treated as a gimmick. Indeed, the only things that date it at all are the few references to Hitler and the `European War'.

It's hard to write a review that does justice to such a great comedy without quoting half of it, but the jokes deserve to be seen in context and delivered by the cast itself. But I have to mention the great in-jokes, of Cary Grant describing Russell's fiancé as looking `like that actor Ralph Bellamy', and then making a quick reference to Archie Leach.

His Girl Friday is one of the funniest, fastest comedies ever made, and when you next come back from the cinema in a bad mood after seeing the latest non-comedy, stop by a video store and rent this to remind yourself that some films can actually make you laugh.

King Kong (1933)

Over-rated (big surprise) but has its moments. (spoilers)

[1 August 2001]

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** I've noticed a pattern forming in my reviews, where I complain that a classic film's reputation bears no relation to its worth. The Exorcist, Planet of the Apes, Singin' in the Rain - to me, these are at best only good movies, and at worst suffocating bores. It's frustrating to make the same point time and time again, but unfortunately, I can't break the routine for King Kong. It is not a masterpiece, it is not flawless, and it is not one of the greatest movies the world has ever seen, but beyond its reputation and the disappointment it brings, it's an enjoyable, scary and occasionally great film.

The set-up is flawed by its laziness and is painfully contrived. Film-maker Carl Denham goes looking for the star of his new movie the night before setting sail to its location, and luckily finds a beautiful young actress in a café. After a quick feed and a bunch of compliments she's on the boat and they're off to an unknown island. To be fair, there is a scene that explains that every actress in town has been warned off the picture because of its potential danger, but to find a leading lady just by wandering the streets smacks of desperation on the part of the writers.

Once aboard, we are witness to an unconvincing and vaguely unsettling love story. The young actress, played by Fay Wray, falls for the first mate, not discouraged by his constant insults and apparent phobia of women. Again, this is clunky and badly executed, and only seems to be there at all because it'll come in handy later in the movie.

With the poor set-up out of the way, the film begins to hit its stride. As we near the island there is a genuine sense of fear at the unknown, and it was a wise decision to not show Kong for the first half of the movie. It adds to the suspense and the build-up, and must have been particularly effective when first shown. Little Stevie Spielberg was paying attention, as he used the trick in Jaws and again in Jurassic Park to great effect, the big cheater!

After a failed attempt to make nice with the island's inhabitants, Wray is kidnapped and offered to Kong as a sacrifice, setting the rest of the crew on a rescue mission. The sense of mystery as they enter the jungle is great, and this scene brings the first classic moments, but there is a terrible under-reaction to a stegosaurus that almost undermines the whole thing. Admittedly, these guys have witnessed some strange stuff on the island already, but finding a prehistoric creature deserves better than `Say, look at that!'

This pattern of great-bit/crap-bit stays throughout the film and becomes increasingly frustrating. There is a terrific moment where Kong tries to kill his pursuers, tipping them off a log bridge and letting them fall to their deaths. A particularly tense moment comes when one of the crew hides in a small cave and Kong tries to grab him, and this is followed by a great battle between Kong and another of the island's huge creatures. But then the cack sets in, as the same scene is repeated over and over again; Kong gets jumped by a monster, Kong puts Wray down, Kong fights monster, Kong wins, Kong picks up Wray and carries on walking, Kong gets jumped... It undermines the first such scene, and shows that there is very little that can happen between the kidnap and rescue.

Luckily, the film moves on by reversing the situation as Kong is defeated then taken back to America to be put on show, but logic takes a bathroom break again as it takes only one gas bomb to take him down, while the steg took three. Inevitably, Kong breaks free and goes on a rampage through the city in search of Wray, and again the movie gets its arse in gear. His attack on the train is stunning, as is the moment when he plucks a woman out of her apartment, then drops her carelessly to the ground as he realises she is not the woman he wants. There is a nice similarity, too, between Kong's curiosity in the city, and man's curiosity in the jungle. The ending is surprisingly sad, and our sympathy is with Kong rather than the people he's accidentally terrorising, but even here there's pap to be found; for the hundredth time we're given a line about beauty and the beast. We get the point, thanks, you can shut up now.

So that's King Kong. It has great moments that deserve to be remembered, it has lapses of logic that are increasingly frustrating, and it has poor set-up and a number of repetitive moments. How people can see past those problems is beyond me, but if they want to call it flawless they can go right ahead. For me, it's just a good movie with great moments that I'll probably watch a couple more times before I die. That's not a great recommendation, is it?

Went the Day Well? (1942)

An intelligent propaganda film that deserves to be seen (spoilers)

[25 July 2001]

Went The Day Well is a British propaganda piece from the Second World War that manages to find depth beyond it message. The plot is inventive and, for the most part, chillingly convincing. Beginning at an unknown time in its future, the film starts with a quaint talking-to-camera moment as the audience is welcomed to the village of Bramley End. From there, we are taken back to a wartime Whit Sunday, as a troop of soldiers come to the village to set up their defences. We soon realise that the soldiers are not English, but German, and with the co-operation of a respected member of the community are preparing to take the village as the first step of a country-wide invasion. With fifty years of hindsight and no first-hand experience of life on the home front, the danger can hardly be imagined, and the fear it must have inspired in the contemporary audience cannot be reproduced. But while its power is no doubt diminished, it still works as a tense and involving thriller.

There are a few weak points that undermine its credibility; the Germans' English is probably too perfect and they seem too familiar with colloquialisms, and having a radio operator who can barely understand English wasn't the brightest idea, but these are minor complaints against a film that is plausible throughout.

Given its release date, it is rather daring in its depiction of the Nazi soldiers, showing them as evil but not sadistic. It could easily have gone down the route of having them rape and murder the villagers for their own amusement, but it shows restraint in having them kill only those who are seen as immediate threats to their plan. Indeed, there is a cutting reference to the exaggerated propaganda that shows Nazis happily sticking babies on pitchforks. There is balance, too, in its depiction of the French. While two characters discuss their early surrender we are given both points of view; first condemnation for their perceived cowardice, then sympathy at the realisation that they are now living under Nazi rule, a fate deserved by no one. To find such balance in a mid-war movie is refreshing.

The characters are warm and convincing, if a little clichéd, and there is a genuine sense of community within the village that helps us to feel sorrow for the few that are murdered. Here, again, the film shows a degree of courage in killing off the best characters without hesitation. A particularly touching moment comes when one of the villagers realises the man she loves is the traitor, and knows she has to stop him herself. Without the depth of characterisation, this would have meant nothing.

Cynicism would tell us to laugh at how it champions the courage of normal people, but such thoughts should be ignored and replaced with respect for those who lived through a horror we can barely imagine. To its generation, Went the Day Well was a warning to be ever vigilant; to ours it is a tense thriller that reminds us how lucky we are. It can hardly be called a classic, but it seems a shame that, at the time of writing, there are no other comments or reviews on the database. It is inventive, thoughtful, tense, funny, and charming, and deserves to be held in higher regard.

Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001)

Mind-numbing! (Huge, huge spoilers!!)

[18 July 2001]

***SPOILERS*** ***SPOILERS*** I've never played any of the Tomb Raider games so I can't say how the film works as an adaptation, but it sounds so ridiculous to talk about how a game can be adapted into a film I wouldn't want to bother anyway. A game is a game, a film is a film - they have nothing in common and they work on completely different levels. It would be like making a movie based on MTV, or writing a novel that was inspired by a pack of crisps. I just don't understand the genre in the first place.

For Tomb Raider to work as a movie, the production team needed to flesh out the characters, they needed to show us interesting locations and give us a plot that could fill the running time, and above all they had to make it more interesting than hitting buttons on a joypad. That they failed to do any of this was less surprising than seeing Woody Allen give himself all the best lines in his last movie.

Director Simon West has something of a muddled record, having made the great Con Air and the cack General's Daughter, and here he flushes his potential further down the toilet with an absolute stinker. He tries to inject the movie with a manic energy, but instead gives it A.D.D., directing most of the action scenes blindfold.

The plot is so stupid that if it were a person it would walk into glass doors thinking they were open. In case you had trouble figuring it out yourself, the basic outline... is all there is. But the basic outline is that Lara Croft, played by Angelina Jolie's boobs, has to find a couple of pieces of a triangle which, when joined, give the power to control time. It must take a hell of a nerve to have a story that's already been spoofed in Hudson Hawk and deliver it straight-faced. That they can spend 90 minutes looking for pieces of a mystical object that, when joined, release a powerful and dangerous force, and think the audience would find it even remotely original or entertaining suggests the writer has only seen about seven films in his life. My guess is those were the first few Police Academies, and a couple of Ernest movies. There is not a single moment of originality, not a single departure from banality, not a single surprise or unexpected twist.

Angelina Jolie gives a performance so forgettable you'll worry you have Altzeimers, and her continual pout is ridiculous and irritating. Angelina Jolie's boobs give the only performance necessary - they be boobies. That's all the executives were asking for, and that's all the pubescent audience is asking for. That there was no obvious product placement for Kleenex was a welcome point of subtlety. Jolie's Lara Croft is best described as a big-titted Bruce Wayne, and is so smug that you'd root for the bad guys if it didn't mean first having to care. The attempts to develop character outside her bra fall flat, and are not helped by their lack of originality. Lara has real feelings, you see - she misses her daddy. That's pretty much it. This is a character so shallow, if you jumped in you'd break your legs on the bottom.

The most irritating aspect is that she's completely indestructible. When a couple dozen soldiers, all dressed in black, all armed with machine guns, break into her house while she dangles on a bungee rope in a bright white outfit, she manages to dodge every bullet and kill them all. It's just ridiculous, and an action movie cliché that was subverted at least thirteen years ago by a guy in a dirty white vest. That it's resurrected here shows not just the stupidity of the writers, but the perceived stupidity of the audience. Worse still, it takes any tension out of the scenes that follow; we realise that the bullets will bounce off Croft and the worst injury she'll suffer will be back strain from carrying round that huge chest of hers.

Aside from the invincibility, Croft is apparently psychic. This is a useful trait that saves effort with the exposition. Two days after discovering the clock that kicks off the plot, she is a master of the subject, outsmarting the bad guys with no effort and driving the movie on with no mystery. There are countless examples; while her geeky sidekick (presumably intended as a `comedy' sidekick) is carefully examining the clock, she takes a hammer to it and finds the key she was looking for; while the bad guys think they've found where to use the key, she tells them they're wrong and shows them what they should really be doing; when the bad guy fails to fit the two halves of the triangle together, she knows that a grain of sand hidden within the clock will seal them, and that if she throws the clock at some poor CGI it will be carefully pulled apart so she can pluck the sand from the air. This is insultingly bad.

Tomb Raider is a film that will be remembered as a major event in the history of cinema in the same terms as Fred Savage's directorial debut. I know I'm being snobby, I know I'm expecting too much, and I know I'm over-analysing a movie that was always meant to be disposable. I know it's like looking for emotion in a Westlife song, or flavour in cinema popcorn, but it's depressing to think that this is the same medium that gave us The Shawshank Redemption or Twelve Angry Men or Pulp Fiction. Until the next film of that calibre comes along, I'll try not to get too depressed by cack like this, and go join the queue for Tetris: The Movie.

Singin' in the Rain (1952)

A good movie but no classic.

[27 June 2001]

If you closed your eyes and threw a potato into a crowded street, you'd be guaranteed to hit someone who loves this movie. Everyone loves this movie. Just looking at the other reviews here, it's hard to find anyone who thinks it's anything less than a masterpiece. I guess I'll just have to be Billy No-Mates, because I found it to be significantly less than that.

Whether you've seen it or not, you've at least heard of it and been made aware of its reputation, but as is so often the case, its reputation overstates its virtues. But while it may have been a fair distance from the five-star masterpiece I was expecting, it was still a good, and sometimes great, movie.

The first thing that struck me was Gene Kelly's smile. Cheesier than a statue of Celine Dion carved in Gorgonzola, it simply refused to leave his face. He seemed incapable of frowning, and typified the mood of the movie. Its relentless cheer and optimism was infectious, and it is easy to understand why so many people describe it as a feelgood film. No one could be miserable watching this.

There is an unavoidable quaintness in the film. Set in the 1920s, as silent movies gave way to talkies, it both celebrates and gently mocks a legendary era in Hollywood history. But the movie itself is now part of another legendary era in Hollywood history, and this double-nostalgia works only in its favour and adds to its immense charm.

The cast is excellent without exception. Gene Kelly is great, and Donald O'Connor is just hilarious. He seems to be having the greatest time in the world making this movie and making ‘em laugh. His face-pulling scene is undoubtedly one of the funniest moments the film has to offer. Jean Hagan is perfect as Lina Lamont, and gives us a truly original character. The scene where her terrible voice is revealed was lessened somewhat by having seen a similar joke in The Man with Two Brains, but this deserves the laughs having got there thirty years earlier. Her stupidity is at its funniest when she insists she and Kelly are an item because she was told so by the gossip columns, and she is blessed with perhaps the funniest line of the film: `Why, I make more money than... than... than Calvin Coolidge, put together!'

It may be stating the obvious, but the dancing was just mesmerising. Kelly and O'Connor move as if on ice, and their energy is just stunning. To see real talent like theirs, and then switch to the jerky, simplified arm-waving that appears in every video on MTV, emphasises their genius. The songs, however, were something of a disappointment. With the exception of the title track and Make ‘Em Laugh, they are nothing special. There were times when they felt forced into the story rather awkwardly, with Good Morning being the most irritating example.

I can understand why so many people love this film, but I have no love for it myself. It was fun, and there were a load of great moments, but it didn't come close to being a masterpiece. I know I'm in the minority. For most people, it's a flawless classic. Like most of Cher, it will live forever, and that's fair enough. There is a long list of classic movies which have all disappointed me, and this was by no means the worst offender. I just wish I could have liked it more.