'Blue Jasmine', 'Rush', 'In A World...', 'The Great Beauty', 'About Time' and 'Riddick': review round-up

'Blue Jasmine' - Dir. Woody Allen (12A)

The words "a return to form" seem to have been ascribed to every Woody Allen film since the mid-90s to the point where I'm genuinely surprised any professional critic would actually use them in a review. But what that curious phenomenon seems to show is that however lacklustre some of his recent canon have been perceived as by many - including, from time to time, this reviewer - they've always managed to feature enough reliably great performances, some sharp lines of dialogue and often an ingenious central concept that means they're always somebody's "best since Manhattan" (or whatever the yardstick for Woody greatness is this month). In other words, every 'Curse of the Jade Scorpion' or 'Scoop' has something to recommend it and, to paraphrase Mark Twain, reports of Allen's decline have been greatly exaggerated.

I often wonder if, say, 'Melinda and Melinda' had been by a new filmmaker whether critics would have been much more impressed. We'll never know the answer to that one for sure, but it's difficult to argue against the idea that Woody is to some extent a victim of his own successes. That's not to say all of his movies have been golden (there are one or two I can't stand *cough* 'You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger' *cough*), just that we need to have a little perspective. He's a 77 year-old man who still manages to write and direct  a new feature every single year. I don't single out his advanced years to be patronising, but rather to point out that he's still vital, creative and seemingly just as concerned with pondering the human condition as he was in the 60s - at an age when most of us close ourselves off and become reactionary Daily Mail readers (huge generalisation, but you get my point). Anyway, I say all this to cover my ass before getting into his latest film.

I'm gambling that displaying an awareness of the critical discourse surrounding his movies will lend me a bit of credibility (or else let me off the hook) when I somewhat inevitably say: 'Blue Jasmine' is a triumphant return to form! Woody's best since 'Sweet and Lowdown'!

And it is. To my mind, it's his most perfect movie since 1999. Its closest contender for that accolade, 'Midnight in Paris', is easy-going, charming, inventive and often very funny - but 'Jasmine' vaults over it by virtue of genuine dramatic heft and, with Cate Blanchett in the title role, a lead performance for the ages. It's rare for a Woody Allen film - even a vintage 70s/80s one - to be so tragic, sad and consistently tense as this. It made me uncomfortable and anxious throughout, and the funny lines don't feel like jokes or witticisms in the Allen style, but are born of great characterisation. There's a lot of heart and feeling in this one and no easy answers about life's troubles, nor is there an Allen surrogate figure making sardonic wisecracks to soften the blow. It's a brave and disturbing movie, whilst still feeling like a Woody Allen film - unlike some of his previous attempts at prioritising drama over comedy, such as artistic misfires 'Match Point' and 'Cassandra's Dream'.

Blanchett gives a titanic performance as a force of nature who sweeps through the film delivers lines like "there’s only so many traumas a person can withstand until they take to the streets and start screaming" with an intensity that's nearly frightening. Her part is fantastically well-written to begin with, but she takes the material to another level and manages to make Jasmine a sympathetic character in spite of her selfishness and self-defeating attitude, probably because she really nails representation of the character's mental problems and crippling dependence on drink and pills. The supporting cast is also brilliant, with Sally Hawkins particularly good value as the sympathetic sister and comedian Andrew Dice Clay giving a surprisingly effective performance as her wounded ex-husband. It's a difficult film to find fault with, though I might have taken issue with Hawkins' beautiful San Francisco home (which can't be cheap) being dismissed so often as some kind of shameful hovel had the film not convinced me so thoroughly in every other respect.

No question, this is one of the year's best and it's safe to say we have a clear favourite for the Best Actress Oscar.

'Rush' - Dir. Ron Howard (15)

In keeping with Howard canon to date, this F1 racing biopic - which explores the 70s rivalry between brash, womanising Brit James Hunt (Chris Hemsworth) and clinical, cold Austrian Niki Lauda (Daniel Brühl) - is a polished, competently put together crowd pleaser that doesn't take any risks. A decent crop of actors, giving charismatic performances, in a "based on a true story" tale of man's triumph over adversity, the will to win and every other hackneyed sports movie cliché available. I'll say this for it: 'Rush' races by, no pun intended, and isn't at all boring, but it's very difficult for me to pinpoint why that is. Maybe it's because it's loud and there are lots of fast cars in it? Perhaps it's all the gratuitous female nudity that serves neither plot nor character? It's probably got the most to do with the pleasure of seeing Brühl's Lauda being relentlessly dickish to various people. Yeah, it's probably the last one.

Peter 'The Queen' Morgan's screenplay leaves nothing unexplained, with race commentators and track announcers enabling the writer to commit the cardinal sin and tell even as he's showing, more or less at all times. You'd expect a bit of hokey exposition in the race commentary, explaining the sport to those unfamiliar or establishing the context of various races in the drivers' careers, but Morgan and Howard go further - having an almost ever-present commentary that updates us helpfully on the simplest of things. I'm exaggerating slightly but the commentary at times says things like "here are the two rivals, the by-the-book Austrian Niki Lauda and his playboy British challenger James Hunt. Of course, they don't like each other all that much after the incident in the last scene you saw, but they both want to win here today, with points to prove on their various competing philosophies on life. One thing's for sure though: the duo have a grudging, mutual respect that will really come into the fore in the third act." And when the commentary isn't doing that the soundtrack is, notably as Bowie's "Fame" plays during a montage of Hunt being famous.

Everything is technically top-notch but there's no character or originality to the way this movie's been put together. You always get exactly what you've come to expect and no more. It is literally a longer version of the trailer. Stylistically it's a collage of bits you've seen (over)used elsewhere. Such as the obligatory bird's-eye shot of crowds holding umbrellas in the rain (because it's pretty) and the low-angle, over-exposed shaky-cam shots of Hunt drinking beer that show us he's on an out of control bender driven by despair. It's like every scene in the screenplay caused Howard to ask himself "now, how has this been done well before in other people's movies?"

'In A World...' - Dir. Lake Bell (15)

The promising directorial debut feature of writer and actress Lake Bell, 'In A World...' is a smart comedy about a vocal coach, Carol Solomon (Bell), who dreams of breaking into the male-dominated world of voice-over work - with no gig as prestigious as narration for the trailers of epic movies. It's a vocation her competitive and egotistical father, Sam Soto (Fred Melamed), is at the top of and - as a terrible sexist with no faith in his daughter - he's grooming another man, Gustav Warner (Ken Marino) to take his place in the industry. So Carol, with the help of a sound technician played by meek, niceguy comedian Demetri Martin, goes against the odds, and against her father's advice, to try and win the chance to say those famous words of the title over the teaser trailer for the film adaptation of a Hunger Games style teen-lit phenomenon.

The voice-over industry squabbling is pretty funny, but the film's trump card is the presence of Bell herself as a confident, likeable lead. Carol is the sort of silly, immature, wisecracking character women don't normally get to play in Hollywood - usually consigned to playing tutting shrews in comedies about 30-something man-babies and rarely getting the funniest lines. It appears Bell's answer to that particular imbalance has been to make her own damn film - and I'm glad she did. Especially as it means we have a female character whose relationships with her father and vague love interest (Martin) are demonstrably equally important as that with her sister (Michaela Watkins). In other words, she isn't defined exclusively by her relationship to male characters even if the film is about her relationship with a male-dominated industry.

Light and breezy, consistently funny and overflowing with charm, the film's only misstep is a final ten minutes in which too many moral lessons are learned and the film's female-empowerment message is spelled out in clunky fashion, when it was already implicitly clear from the synopsis. It's also jarring to see [SPOILER WARNING] the film let Carol's father off the hook in such spectacular fashion when he's spent the entire movie not only discouraging his daughter but actively placing obstacles in her way. Don't get me wrong, you expect some kind of father-daughter reconciliation, but Sam's speech - in which he expresses pride in his daughters' achievements - feels disingenuous after what precedes it, and therefore it doesn't quite pack the feel-good punch you feel the movie is going for.

'The Great Beauty' ('La belleza grande') - Dir. Paolo Sorrentino (15)

A total and utter cinematic treat from the supremely talented director of 'Il divo', Paolo Sorrentino, 'The Great Beauty' stars Toni Servillo as a once promising author who got sucked into the decadent Rome party scene after his one great success, 40 years prior, and is now deeply unfulfilled - his lifestyle lacking any real beauty or appeal. He's a man who, in his own reckoning, "wanted not just to be the king of parties, but the power to make them failures": and in that respect he has been a great success. A dominant presence amongst the city's fading intellectual class, all equally unhappy in secret - an isolated, self-loathing and hopelessly vain bunch who you feel have been playing out the same social gatherings for decades.

It's a beautifully sad film punctuated by a bouncy, euro-dance soundtrack, which perfectly encapsulates the gilded cage that Rome has become for its protagonist. And it's also capable of being extremely funny, and more than a little wise with some really pithy dialogue worthy of future quotation. As you might expect from Sorrentino, it's sharply observed and offers a stinging, satirical rebuke to aspects of contemporary Italian culture: from a conveyor-belt approach to cosmetic surgery to the empty pretension of Rome's young avant garde set. Yet it's also a tender and sincere piece in which sex, death and the Catholic church all play a part. And gosh is it pretty to look at.

'About Time' - Dir. Richard Curtis (12A)

It's difficult talking about Richard Curtis' latest twee, upper-class comedy 'About Time', because though I really didn't take much from it, didn't find it at all funny and found elements of it's central premise a little troubling - I'm reluctant to tear a strip off something so faultlessly kind. Yes: Curtis paints Britain as a strange fantasy world, supremely exportable to foreign cinema markets and alien to most people that actually live there, and he does (infamously) tend to whitewash what is - and has been for centuries, by the way - a multi-cultural country. What's more, the idea that only men in the film have the power of time travel is more than a little sexist, and in a peculiarly contrived sort of way - which literally robs female characters of agency during this story. However, I really do think he means well. I think he's overall a kind sort of person with broadly decent intentions, even if I don't seem to share his world-view, and whilst that doesn't make me like his films any more than I otherwise would, it does make me baulk at the idea of kicking them in the groin quite so hard as I might usually enjoy.

One of the peculiar features of 'About Time' is that there is really no conflict at any point... at all. Domhnall Gleason's character begins the film a decent chap and ends the film more or less an unchanged (if slightly older) man. When the plot presents him an opportunity to cheat on his luminescent girlfriend (Rachel McAdams) he wisely refuses it first time around. He's ultimately supposed to be imparting some lesson to us about not wasting what little time you have, punctuated here by his using time travel to get to spend more time with his dapper, wise old father (Bill Nighy) - yet Gleason's character always makes the most of his time with his father throughout what we see of his life. He is seemingly not a man with any regrets and, quite honestly, he's a pretty much the last person in all of fiction worthy of the gift of time travel, given that he pretty much just likes life the way it is. For a film ostensibly about time travel, there are incongruously long stretches where none takes place. Personally I find this lack of any antagonism or conflict refreshing: maybe there should be more films where people are basically decent and are allowed to like each other. But it isn't really the stuff of great drama or, it turns out, comedy.

Yet there's something genuinely sweet about a film where, during the inevitable wedding speech (as compulsory in a Curtis as the American girlfriend, kooky sister and well-meaning but mad old relative) the best accolade a father can bestow upon his son is that he is a kind man. Not a clever man or a wealthy man (though Gleason's character is shown to be both) but a kind one. You can (and should) find fault with many aspects of this film and of Curtis' wider filmography - certainly in his representations of social class and evident institutionalised sexism - but we could all do with a little more kindness and it be very churlish of me to spit from a great height upon something as painfully well-intentioned as this bit of old dross.

'Riddick' - Dir. David Twohy (15)

I'm going to start this one with the positive and then get on to the regrettable, regressive and wrong-headed sexual politics later on, because what 'Riddick' gets wrong it gets so catastrophically wrong that if my kinder comments followed they could seem in bad taste by association. OK? Let's go...

'Riddick' is the third entry in a series kept alive only by Vin Diesel's 'Fast and the Furious'-led star-power, as he attempts to ham-fistedly bludgeon his character from the well-received 2000 sci-fi/horror 'Pitch Black' into pop-culture significance. The logic seems to be that if night-vision afflicted convict-turned-anti-hero Richard B. Riddick(TM) appears in enough movies and video games, and is presented as a sufficient enough "badass", he is guaranteed to enter the pantheon of cult movie heroes, alongside Bond, Indy and the dog from 'Marley & Me'. It's an interesting theory, even if it doesn't seem to be panning out that way (there's no evidence people are any closer to caring). Regardless, Diesel has his fans and 'Riddick' does enough to satisfy that audience - even if it's destined to do next to nothing for anybody else.

That said, there's something strangely hypnotic about the film's opening 40 minutes in which a mostly-silent Riddick (a wise scripting choice, given Diesel's difficulty emoting and reading lines) stalks the arid wasteland of an anonymous alien world killing increasingly large CGI beasts. Birds, fish, dogs, giant scorpions: Riddick can best them all when it comes to punching and stabbing and running and grunting. Like a survivalist's wet dream, Riddick spends a significant chunk of the movie living in a cave, crafting weapons out of bits of bone. In all seriousness, it seems like it might be an attempt to chronicle ancient man's assent to the top of the food chain, as he's tormented by various creatures before becoming the area's main predator. At which point he sets his sights on greater quarry: man.

Then we get the slightly less compelling, but still oddly watchable second act in which Riddick is mostly absent and presented as some sort of horror movie monster (we occasionally see an outstretched hand), as he stalks two teams of bounty hunters who have been dispatched to the planet to capture him. One of them is a lady (Katee Sackhoff) and, as we learn through clunky and grotesque banter, she is a lesbian. This will be important later. In this section the film feels like a low-budget, over-lit, cheesy-as-fuck version of the original 'Alien', with Riddick filling in as the unknowable antagonist. Which is pretty jarring and unusual given it's a movie called Riddick and the third film in which this character has appeared, but I've got to admit I have a lot of admiration for this because it's so unexpected as to verge on brilliant.

A 'Wall-E' style first act in which our hero barely speaks and doesn't interact with any other humans, and then a second act in which he mostly disappears and the film shifts focus to being about a bunch of new characters. That's sort-of marvellous. Note: also of considerable joy to me, there's no more to the plot of this movie than the fact that Riddick is stuck on an alien world and wants to get off it. It's simple and doesn't waste time with an unnecessary, convoluted nonsense: the goal is clear and when it's reached [spoiler warning!] the movie ends. Right away. That sounds like a very simple thing to praise a movie for, but it's amazing how many modern films can't tell a simple story and don't know how to end without half an hour of various characters meeting to say goodbye. It's as if studios think we view every movie as some beloved relative and it's feared we all need sufficient closure before we can let go.

I've got to say, if that's all the film was - and if the last act was just Riddick punching mercs and monsters and stealing a spaceship - then 'Riddick' would probably get a mostly enthusiastic review from this critic. However (and it's a huge however), you run into difficulty when your edgy, amoral, loner anti-hero starts dispensing rape threats and it's not something the film can ever (read: should ever) expect to recover from. When Riddick is captured by mercs at the start of the third act, he grimly explains - in tedious and predictable fashion - how he's going to kill various male elements of the cast. But for Sackhoff's lesbian, tough-girl he has something else in mind: basically he says he's going to "go balls-deep" in her, and she's going to ask him to "real sweet-like". He also gloats that he saw her nipples earlier in the movie, perving whilst she was showering (in a gratuitous topless scene). This is just creepy. Not charming. Not funny. It's unpleasant and leaves a very bad taste. He is trying to intimidate (and simultaneously woo?) a woman by bragging about seeing her tits to room of her co-workers whilst she is present. That's literally what our hero is doing in that scene. She is defiant, at first. But... you know how the film ends, right? Of course you do.

Sackhoff's lesbian straddling Vin Diesel and asking him to fuck her is the film's sad, loserly idea of the ultimate display of masculinity for our hench male hero. He turns a lesbian whilst ascending into a spaceship from a battlefield strewn with the corpses of all the space aliens he killed. Teenage male empowerment fantasies simply don't come any less subtle or mature than this. It's the highest possible calibre of gross, macho bullshit. It spoils what is otherwise a pretty weird and (if not always for the intended reasons) entertaining movie.

Why I (Mostly) Quit Writing on the Internet: Hit-Baiting, Churnalism and Reactionary Bollocks

At the start of the year I said that, at some point in the future, I might write a post here about how I fell out of love with wanting to be a full-time movie critic/"journalist" and why I basically stopped maintaining this blog with anything like the frequency of the first two years. I hadn't bothered to do so to date because that's obviously a very self-indulgent thing to do, even by blogging standards, and - quite honestly - who cares about why I decide to do anything? Yet over the past couple of days, in the run-up to the (in gamer circles) highly anticipated release of Grand Theft Auto V, I've started receiving (not entirely unjustified) negative comments on Twitter and elsewhere about an article I wrote on the game for a reasonably widely-read pop-culture website nearly two years ago - which people are obviously coming across on Google now that the game is a hot topic once again.

Basically, I wrote a self-consciously inflammatory piece about the upcoming game long before any footage or screenshots of it had been released (a fairly douchey thing to do, I know), basically outlining a series of flimsy, uninformed and troll-baiting reasons why it would be terrible. I'll get around to explaining why in a moment, because that's sort of the most important part of this whole saga.

That article, which solicited (arguably deservedly, in this instance) typically morale-boosting comments like "wow. That's the worst article I've ever read", was not entirely motivated by snarky cynicism as I originally conceived it: at first I was genuinely interested in having a reasonable discussion about how I feared growing negative feeling about GTA IV, which (somewhat against the grain of fandom) I like and consider a huge step forward for the series, could lead to developer Rockstar taking a backwards step, just as their best-selling series had started to mature. I worried we'd see something more shallow, less focussed and a return to the kind of knock-about, irreverent shenanigans of earlier games in the series. This was me post-The Dark Knight but before The Dark Knight Rises: when the idea of something being dark and grounded had more currency for me than it does now, trite as it's become. But, if I'm honest, I always knew GTA V would turn out to be a polished, entertaining product and that it'd probably be a great game well worth looking forward to.

The finished game, out this month, may or may not have ended up like I feared, though I'm sure it's a lot of fun regardless. (To be honest, I don't really have time to play games to the extent that I used to and don't really care one way or the other about GTA V.) But the article could have been, in theory, a reasonable piece of commentary saying "I fear [X], but on the other hand [Y]". The troll-baiting snarkyness came from trying to be something I'm not: it came from pressure to attract those all-important "hits" that generate the ad revenue necessary for website owners to make money. Which had just become my problem for the first time.

You see in the run-up to writing that article I had gone from working for the site completely for free - as many young writers, hungry for opportunity are happy/compelled by a penny-pinching industry to do - to being made a sort of sub-editor told that I stood to make X-hundred numbers of pounds per week depending on the number of hits I attracted to the site. At first I attempted to meet this responsibility as I'd always naively imagined it: idealistically commissioning what (I thought) were "worthy" articles about film-making and wider pop-culture (as per the remit of the site). Mostly celebratory, labour-of-love stuff about the wide array of things the site's huge pool of (volunteer) writers were passionate about, from comic books to arthouse movies to sport.

Alas, these things weren't at all compatible with an economic model based around attracting hits via search engines and, for one miserable week, I was spending from 8am to 10pm hunched over the computer with little to show for it - creatively or fiscally. It was an uphill struggle to get good quality work on that site (from people working for free), not made any easier by the fact that new content arrived so fast it tended to push less popular items off the front page within an hour or so of publication - quickly dooming less bombastic pieces to the archive.

In short: "10 Reasons Why [X] Will Suck" is worth more to such a site than something more nuanced and reasonable. If you wonder why online discourse is frequently so antagonistic and perpetually ALL-CAPS shouty, the blame doesn't lie solely with angry readers, hatefully abusing their anonymity: editors encourage articles that solicit this response because they get people talking. Because people share them on Facebook and Tweet about them and thus attract more hits, bringing in more revenue. Navin R. Johnson came to a similar realisation in 'The Jerk'.

Hence the reasonable article I originally planned on never appeared. It didn't have a title that would work with Google or anything like enough punchy bullet-points to sustain the casual engagement of the imagined skim-reading public. To be clear: I'm not blaming this on the editor/site owner at all. The article was my idea. I pitched it and I ultimately made it sensationalist crap. But I did so because I was worried about getting enough hits to get paid. Volume of traffic is what counts and not the quality of it. To put it into context, so you don't assume I'm a money-grabbing-shyster who'd do anything for a quick buck, the sort of articles I like to write frequently attracted only a couple of hundred hits each.

These were, quite often, interviews with directors and actors which required hours of preparation, travel up to London, then several more hours transcribing words from a scratchy dictaphone (not fun at all), before then writing and formatting a finished article. And then you get a few hundred hits if you're lucky - at least on the site I wrote for (we're not talking The Guardian here), which was at that time dominated by share-friendly list articles proclaiming the "10 best this" and "100 worst that". In contrast my terrible article on GTA V currently has several hundred thousand views, over a hundred comments and lots of all-important "re-Tweets" and "shares". These are stats which make me sad about the state of online journalism and made me increasingly reluctant to want to devote much more of my life to it, because they actually highlight an existing disincentive to spending the time it takes producing work of quality.

Be honest: if your income was directly linked to how many hits you attracted, would you spend a considerable part of your working week posting an interview with Werner Herzog or Noah Baumbach that ten people care about, or would you spend the equivalent time bashing out a dozen terrible list articles that will each attract several hundred times that of an interview and take minimal time/brain power to write (at least when done badly by me)? It's that question I didn't want to have to answer any more, basically.

Now the circumstances leading up to the creation of my article, which was merely lazy and cynical rather than outright offensive, weren't the only reason I stopped wanting to write in this field on anything like a professional day-to-day basis. I also didn't appreciate being asked to effectively re-type other site's news stories, which - alongside lists - was part of that site's bread and butter in the absence of any actual investigative journalists. The embarrassing and ethically questionable practice I've seen described as "churnalism". Then there was the day, shortly before I left, that I received a mass e-mail asking for submissions from the writing pool for an article about the "top 100 babes" or something similar. Which is gross.

But probably the worst thing I came across was during the London riots. As they unfolded live on TV - as several decades of disenfranchisement of the inner-city poor and ethnic minorities created a sorry, pointlessly destructive spectacle of raw human ugliness - I was horrified (not a word I use here lightly) when one of the site's owners excitedly sent round an e-mail soliciting articles about the best weapons to use on rioters (I seem to remember tear gas was a suggestion), hoping to cash-in quickly on the turmoil. I can imagine the same guy suggesting an article with the title "10 Weapons We're Excited To See Dropped On Damascus!" That I didn't quit writing for them that instant remains a source of shame, but you're always reluctant to burn professional bridges when you're just starting out and I was grateful for many of the opportunities the site had given me in the past. I suppose I'm bridge-burning right now, though I've tried to do so without causing undue embarrassment or offence to anybody involved.

So yeah, I wrote a stupid article about something I didn't care that strongly about in an attempt to impress my boss, earn some money and subsidise dead-end articles about things I actually do care about. It's not something I'm proud of, but at least I stopped doing it very quickly and I haven't done it again since. Now you know why I fell out of love with doing this stuff. I hope it was worth your time! Thanks for reading.

'Upstream Color': review

In order to satisfy a verbal contract I've made with myself, I try to write something amounting to a "review" of every film I see at the cinema. For that reason I feel obliged to write a little bit about the universally acclaimed 'Upstream Color' - written and directed by its star Shane Carruth, who also provides the music. For what it's worth, it was a film I was really looking forward to. It's the story of [anybody's guess really, Google one of the many detailed descriptions if you're curious]. You probably gather by now that the film did nothing for me. In fact I'm willing to admit I didn't follow it very well at all, either on a plot level or as a metaphor, so oblique was it - hence my reluctance to spend much time talking about it. Apologies if you came here genuinely seeking some sort of proper analysis.

Friends of mine who did enjoy it have since directed me to pages devoted entirely to explanation of its themes and basic story, but I gain nothing from that, personally. For me, the film needs to speak for itself and needs to make me feel something. Or maybe it doesn't? Who's to say you can't make films catering to a very specific niche of people, and with little regard for or interest in a bulk of the audience? Perhaps there's a place for 'Upstream Color' and plenty of hardcore Thoreau fans out there to lap it up. Certainly lots of people I trust seem to think it's one of the best of the year. It's just not for me, I guess.

'The Way, Way Back', 'Elysium' and 'Planes' (sort of): review round-up

'The Way, Way Back' - Dir. Nat Faxon & Jim Rash (12A)

The words "Twentieth Century Fox Searchlight presents" or (better still) "from the makers of 'Little Miss Sunshine'" rarely herald something good. There's a certain quirksome, brightly coloured, ensemble cast-powered American Indie - usually with a sun-faded blue and yellow poster - that comes out every year bearing these stark promotional slogans (or warnings, as I call them). They usually have boring-straight-man-Steve-Carell in them somewhere ("I'm an actor!", these appearances seem to scream) and Alison Janney is never far away - though she's completely superfluous in the latest of these jangly guitar music laden monstrosities, 'The Way, Way Back', which adds to the feeling that a perfunctory box ticking exercise has informed some of the decision making from writers-turned-directors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash.

This one can be summed up as being about a kid (Liam "one expression" James) who is entirely miserable and unsympathetic in the face of constant, unearned kindness and compassion from almost everyone he meets. Sam Rockwell runs a water park and wants to be this kid's best friend, for... reasons, I guess. It's never clear why. He just starts following him around and smiling at him in a way that should register as creepy. Likewise, everyone at the water park - customers and employees - loves him. Amanda Peet wants to dance with him. Alison Janney is desperate for her son to be friends with him, while her daughter (the three first-name sporting AnnaSophia Robb) is equally desperate to be his summer girlfriend, hanging around looking longingly at him in spite of his clear lack of social graces and charisma.

The cherry on the cake here is that he hates his mother's (Toni Collette) new boyfriend (Carell), as children his age are liable to do. But whereas most kids in his position form an irrational hate they can't reasonably express about a person who's probably decent enough, this kid actually has sees first hand evidence that this guy is a douchebag and gets to shout about it at a garden party - re-framing the story from "angsty teen who needs to grow" to "crusader teen who knows better than the grown-ups about everything".

He should be a sympathetic character. We've all been awkward, moody teenagers. But this kid is his own worst enemy in a world that's throwing nothing but well-intentioned metaphors and sunshine in his direction for the most part... and he doesn't even really learn anything or change at all by the time the credits roll. He enters the film a moody, entitled little shit and exits the film in the same fashion. At the start Carell tells the kid he's a 3/10 and that he needs to put himself out there more and smile occasionally. Well, this is the story of a kid or goes from three to, charitably, a four and a half over an hour and forty minutes that will have you thinking "shit, even Sam Rockwell is bad in this" and "did these guys really write 'The Descendants'"?

'Elysium' - Dir. Neill Blomkamp (15)

It isn't 'District 9' but Neill Blomkamp's follow-up is as ambitious and imaginative as it is clunky. There's a lot of ham-fisted, panto-quality, over-acting involved - notably from Brazilian actor Wagner Moura as "Spider" and Jodie Foster, who seems to be playing a Disney villain in a film happening in her own imagination - while the childhood flashback sequences are a bit cheesy and obvious and, I'll concede, its movement between irreverent, splatter-gore comedy and cloying, string-music backed scenes of children on crutches in peril speak of a tonal mishmash. But it's also got some decent dystopian world building and spectacular design work, as well as some interesting politics for a mainstream blockbuster - with our hero, Matt Damon, framed as an insurgent against the robot drones, unhinged mercenaries and satellite surveillance footage of the film's privileged bad guys - white, wealthy elites living far above a shanty town and predominantly Hispanic Los Angeles in the shiny, clean space station paradise of the title.

The man who once nearly directed a Halo movie, based on the Microsoft video game, continues to borrow heavily from recent sci-fi hits of that medium - notably with elements of Mass Effect and Halo itself. There're some very video gamey future-weapons too, and the plot sees Damon effectively level-up into an augmented mech warrior for some hi-octane fight scenes against Sharlto Copley's crazed henchman that make me question whether I'd rather be playing 'Elysium' than watching it. But it's a solid and entertaining action movie with ideas and a high-concept, so overall I'm enthusiastic about it despite a great many shortcomings.

'Planes' - Dir. Klay Hall (U)

Now, I can only kind of review this - so take my opinion with a greater than usual pinch of salt - but I took my aviation-obsessed 2 1/2 year-old brother to see 'Planes' and he got bored after about 15 minutes, and we left the screening after 30. So I haven't seen the entire movie and usually wouldn't give too strong an opinion based on that. However, I wanted to note that this movie seemed to fail with its target audience: on a plane-mad toddler who will patiently watch actual YouTube footage of a helicopter take off with wide-eyed glee for a very uneventful ten minutes. Sadly, he just couldn't be bothered with the exploits of Dusty the Cropduster and I can't really blame him.

From my end I can only say it's very clear that the film was produced by Disney's straight-to-video people and not by Pixar. It's flat, not particularly detailed and the animation lacks finesse. And, on top of that, it's basically a re-make of the first 'Cars' with a less flawed, more bland central character. That's right: a re-make of 'Cars' made by less talented people. Shudder.

'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa': review

'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' - Dir. Declan Lowney (15)

It's a familiar story by now: the successful UK TV sitcom - usually a small-scale, charmingly parochial comedy of manners or subtle character study - gets blown up to epic proportions for cinema screens, in a way that can't help but detract from what made the series work in its original form. That's not to say many of these films aren't fun to watch, especially for fans deprived of fresh TV episodes, but this tried and tested formula rarely results in anything that holds a candle to the small-screen original.

'The Inbetweeners Movie' could be held up as a good example of this well-worn trope working well: that film taking its teenage cast on a summer holiday to Crete is completely in keeping with the characters and the result is something very much in the spirit of the show. Though perhaps Armando Iannucci's 'In the Loop' does the best job of maintaining the spirit of its source, BBC TV series The Thick of It, in spite of transporting the back-room dealings and ineffectual PR spin antics of its British cabinet minister to Washington, DC. So, on a first glance, it would seem a shame that another Iannucci TV creation would be catapulting themselves rights over the shark on their debut big-screen outing.

'Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa' - a new vehicle for Steve Coogan's long-running character co-created with Iannucci (among others) for radio comedy On the Hour, and the star of several TV series and specials since - sees the middling local radio DJ caught up in a hostage crisis and forced to become an unlikely negotiator between disgruntled, shotgun-toting DJ Pat Farrell (Colm Meaney) and the East Anglia police force. It seems like a set-up slightly off-kilter with the former chat show host's world, as gleaned over the years in shows like I'm Alan Partridge, but it doesn't play that way in practice. Happily this movie Partridge is as nuanced as ever and - though there are some broader moments to satisfy the film's wider audience - all the best moments stem from the character's trademark small-minded asides and from little character moments: for instance as he bemoans people who insist on keeping eggs in the fridge.

Fan favourite characters like troubled, ex-army Geordie Michael (Simon Greenall) and beleaguered, unappreciated personal assistant Lyn (Felicity Montagu) also benefit from nice, little bits of business which are simultaneously funny and which enhance these already rich characters - from Michael's revelation that he sleeps in a cupboard because "sometimes me brother wants the whole bed to himself" to Lyn's heartbreaking reaction to the fact that somebody is going to make a cup of coffee for her. For his part, as the nominal antagonist, Meaney's Pat is another subtle and surprisingly developed character, worthy of as much sympathy as derision - making him a fitting addition to the ensemble.

There are a few times when it falls a little flat in translation to a feature film format, with some gentle parody of Hollywood movies that comes off like B-Team 'Hot Fuzz', but for most of its length 'Alpha Papa' feels like a very good episode of the TV series. For some that might seem like an example of damning with faint praise but, as a fan of the character, nothing could be further from the truth. It's nice to spend an hour and a half with the infuriating, selfish, egotistical character that is Alan Partridge: rooting for him against our better judgement and sometimes even finding yourself touched by that ever-present, underlying sense that somewhere inside he's all too aware of his inadequacy. There's something very humane and humble about Coogan's Alan Partridge: on one level a figure of fun and a satirical assault on middle aged Top Gear viewers everywhere, but on another a strange testament to empathy and understanding of even the most wretched people.

'From Up On Poppy Hill', 'Only God Forgives' and 'Blackfish': review round-up

Not seen a lot of movies of late, but here's a round-up of some recent cinema trips. I won't review 'Red 2' (above) - because I only saw the first half - but thought I'd mention the fact that it was (from what I saw) so empty, lifeless and insipid that it was the catalyst for my second ever walk-out. Everyone, most especially Bruce Willis, was just going through the motions. Mary Louise Parker was watchable enough, but the constant misogynistic comments about her from Willis ("you don't give the girl a gun!" and "you don't bring the girl along on a mission!"), whose character talks about her to others constantly whilst she's standing right there, were grating to say the least. I'm sure Willis' character learns some valuable lesson about trust and/or sharing by the film's end, but I couldn't face another 45 minutes waiting for a grown-up to learn that women are people too. Anyway, it just wasn't funny, it was really slow, the action was deathly boring and at one point there was a lingering close-up of a tube of Pringles. There are obviously worse films, but very few are this lacklustre.

The first film I ever walked out of? Since you asked, I couldn't stomach Richard Curtis' interminable 'The Boat That Rocked' - even though I had been allowed to watch it whilst on the clock at a cinema. I was having such a bad time with that one that I left to go and Brasso some door handles instead. One major reason for this was that I'd just encountered a comic scene in which a man committed statutory rape - sneaking into bed with a woman in the dark, pretending to be her partner (which I felt was less "cheeky" than it was "creepy" and "sexual assaulty"). But the main reason was that I checked my watch, expecting to be halfway through this 135 minute epic, to find I'd been sat there for only half an hour. Just over an hour and a half left to go! No thanks, Curtis. No thanks.

'From Up On Poppy Hill' - Dir. Goro Miyazaki (U)

A colleague of mine aptly described this one as "minor Ghibli", and it certainly is one of the less significant entries in the Japanese animation house's filmography, but that's not to say it isn't entirely pleasant from start to finish. It's gentle, charming and life-affirming without being overly cheesy. It's also a damn sight better than director Goro Miyazaki's (son of Hayao) first attempt following his move from landscaping to filmmaking: the uncharacteristically dull and unpolished 'Tales From Earthsea' - sections of which felt like limited TV animation and a far cry from the finesse of 'Spirited Away' or 'My Neighbour Totoro'. The animation here is much better, though still not up there with the work Miyazaki senior or Isao Takahata, Ghibli's other master - responsible for the studio's most mature (less magical) works 'Only Yesterday' and 'Grave of the Fireflies'.

'Poppy Hill' - adapted from a 1980 manga by Tetsurō Sayama and Chizuru Takahashi - is a wistful and nostalgic 60s-set story about two school kids who fall in love only to find that they are likely brother and sister: both having the same sea-faring father, who perished during the Korean War. This small-scale character-driven plot runs against the backdrop of more typically active movie fare, as the kids try to organise the student body to persuade the authorities not to demolish the old clubhouse and replace it with a newer building, in a rapidly developing Japan looking to eradicate reminders of its recent history. The clubhouse - home to a myriad of wacky extra-curricular activities, all taken extremely seriously by the student body - is reminiscent of something out of Wes Anderson's 'Rushmore' and is as fun a place to be as that suggests.

Perhaps the story reaches an all-to-sudden and convenient conclusion in the last few minutes, but it's genuine and heartfelt and difficult to be too cynical about. Filler until the next big Miyazaki masterpiece, maybe, but there are less winsome ways to spend an hour and a half.

'Only God Forgives' - Dir. Nicolas Winding Refn (18)

Hmmmmmmmm. And there I was thinking the last collaboration between Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn and star Ryan Gosling was all style and no substance. Well, say what you will about the hipster-baiting self-styled "instant cult classic" 'Drive', but compared to 'Only God Forgives' it's a nuanced character study and a hi-octane crime thriller of the highest order. This one sees Gosling play an American living in Bangkok, who runs a boxing club and whose nose is put very slightly out of joint when a cop allows a victim's father to kill his murderous rapist brother. The main thing you need to know about this character is that he looks pretty good in a suit - choosing to fight whilst dressed like a particularly trendy barista.

At my weary, bored-to-tears best estimate, around 80% of 'Only God Forgives' consists of Gosling sitting in the semi-darkness, staring into the middle distance, somewhere off camera (a friend suggested somebody on-set was waving something colourful) emoting nothing at all. Ignoring the bit where he shouts at a prostitute in a slightly weedly and accidentally comic way, his acting range in this film goes between expressions of acute indifference all the way up to moderate contemplation. There's a method writers employ to assess whether their characters are fully formed which requires them to be able to describe any given character without mentioning the way they dress or what they do for a living. Try doing that here, with any of the characters, and get back to me if you manage it. And "has penis-envy of his brother and wants to fuck his mum" doesn't count, because the film just outright, explicitly tells us that (several times) via Kristen Scott-Thomas in her ground-breaking against-type role as middle-aged-women-who-says-cunt.

Vithaya Pansringarm plays a brutal cop that many are calling the highlight of the movie, but this is another non-character. Or at least it's a movie stock character: a walking cliché - the violent killer with a code, whose capacity for ultra-violence sits in contrast to a peculiar affectation and/or hobby (in this instance karaoke). This character has been in every Quentin Tarantino film ever made, for instance. Where the film appears to think it has something to say is in relation to the Oedipus complex: it's all tracking shots down red hallways, Gosling's disgustingly literal urge to return to the womb, his apparent lust for his mother and the detail that he apparently murdered his father. But what the film is saying about all this is beyond me. In 'The Man Who Wasn't There' ace lawyer Freddy Riedenschneider tries to bamboozle a jury by claiming they should not look at the facts but the meaning behind the facts, and that the facts have no meaning. He might as well have been reviewing 'Only God Forgives'.

As a visual/sensory exercise though, it's obviously a piece of world-class work - the stuff of a real virtuoso. As with 'Drive' and 'Bronson' (the one Refn film I uncomplicatedly like) before it, 'Only God Forgives' shows Refn as a supremely visual storyteller and a real stylist. I eagerly await the next time these qualities once again combine with the urge to tell an actual story of some substance.

'Blackfish' - Dir. Gabriela Cowperthwaite (15)

I write this every time I review a documentary, but it's difficult to separate what you think of the film's point of view from the quality of the film itself. Especially when said film is such a polemic, highlighting facts and cherry-picking interview subjects to arrive at a previously determined conclusion (however valid said conclusion might be). In this case, I overwhelmingly agree with the basic premise of and majority of the arguments in 'Blackfish': for what it's worth, I think the process of gathering cetaceans for commercial use is cruel and the evidence seems to suggest that life in captivity is detrimental to the animals' well-being.

That said, I don't think 'Blackfish' says anything that 2009's 'The Cove' didn't say far better and in a more slick and cinematic way that better delivers that point to an audience. 'The Cove' also looks at the subject in a much broader way - considering international whaling lobbyists, the anti-whaling movement and other things - whereas 'Blackfish' looks at SeaWorld very specifically. Aside from specific accounts of incidents at SeaWorld parks, involving the injury and death of employees working with orcas, I didn't find it particularly illuminating. It also takes a lot of things for granted and doesn't hold its subjects, mostly former SeaWorld employees, up to any amount of scrutiny. For instance, non-scientists make statements such as "scientists are reluctant to say whales have language but it's clear they have language" which go wholly unsubstantiated in the film and, at one point, one of the most vocal collaborators confesses "I know nothing about whales".

For those in the dark about the issues raised here, it may be a far better and more effective piece of filmmaking than I found it to be. It's a laudable and worthy film, for sure - and I hope a lot of people see it, as it could do some tangible good in the world (apparently it's already caused Pixar to re-write the end of their 'Finding Nemo' sequel) - it doesn't tell you anything you couldn't glean from skim-reading a couple of Wikipedia articles. However, it should perhaps be required viewing for those thinking of visiting a SeaWorld water park.

'The World's End' and 'The Wolverine': review round-up + Interview with 'Frances Ha' director Noah Baumbach

My laptop went and broke the other day, so that's why (or, should I say, the latest reason why) I haven't been updating. Got a quiz to write for tonight (if you're Brighton-based, and fancy a challenge, get to Dukes at Komedia for 6.30ish), so I'll keep this short.

First up, I did an interview with director Noah Baumbach a little while ago for What Culture. That's available to read online here. Next up, reviews:

'The World's End' - Dir. Edgar Wright (15)

Full disclosure: I didn't grow up with Spaced and have only ever rated 'Shaun of the Dead' and 'Hot Fuzz' as "alright", so take my opinion of this conclusion to Edgar Wright's "Cornetto Trilogy" with a larger than usual pinch of salt. This one takes on aspects of the sci-fi genre as a small town's inhabitants are slowly replaced with, what I'm going to call (to make it easier to explain in shorthand), robots - though in a way that feels like the zombie horde from 'Sean' meets the strange, rural-folk conspiracy stuff of 'Fuzz'. In 'The World's End', Simon Pegg plays Gary King, a middle-aged man who hasn't moved on since the greatest night of his life: attempting "the golden mile" - a 12 pub crawl across his home town - with his closest mates. However, decades later, everything has changed except for Gary.

The pubs themselves are now identikit chain pubs and all his mates have moved on with their lives and moved away from the small town of their youth. Many of them, including Nick Frost's Andy, actively hate Gary - making things all the more uncomfortable as he pathetically attempts to get the gang back together for one last crack at the mile. It doesn't go well and only gets worse when the robots turn up. That was originally meant as descriptive, but actually forms a pretty good anchor point to start my critique because, for me at least, the film was far more entertaining and engaging before the science fiction elements kicked in. The "former friends coming back together in their sad little home town for a pathetic pub crawl" story was actually really well worked for the first half-hour, with nuanced characters and genuine pathos for Gary: a complete prick, but one you feel crushingly sorry for nevertheless. With his mates played by Paddy Considine, Eddie Marsan, Martin Freeman and the ever-dependable Frost, the film trundled along very nicely for the first 30 minutes as a bitter-sweet comedy-drama.

And then the film gets lost in long (admittedly well choreographed) fight scenes, exposition about this alien/robot threat and all manner of other things that actually detract from what's really appealing and interesting about the film as was: the human drama and the character arc of Gary King - who, reservations about the overall film aside, I think is the year's best original character [more on that to follow at a later date, when I have time]. Gary's arc is maintained and still carries the film, of course, but it gets bogged down in everything else that's going on. It also doesn't help that the film - nominally a comedy - isn't really very funny. It has a few chuckles and it's never less than pleasant to watch, but it's uncharacteristically gag-light by the standards of the creative team. I will say this for it though: what this film has to say about friendship is far more mature and rewarding than pretty much ever other "bromance" movie. There are a lot of similarities between this and the summer's US comedy 'This is the End' - yet, whilst that film is far funnier, this one is the more interesting and emotionally affecting.

'The Wolverine' - Dir. James Mangold (12A)

It's the wrong side of the two-hour mark and goes by extremely slowly - with far more green tea-sipping than claw-knucked action - but 'The Wolverine' is watchable and oddly compelling if mainly because of Hugh Jackman's charisma as the title character. Loosely based on Chris Claremont and Frank Miller's celebrated and far-better-than-this-movie 1982 mini-series, which sees Logan on a solo adventure in Japan, the film takes the character out East where he becomes embroiled in the familial intrigue of a large corporation, a few fights with the Yakuza, and a punch-up with an unconvincing CGI robot samurai. There's a neat action sequence on a train and some nice moments for fans of the character (he even throws in a "bub" at one point), but James Mangold's film - strangely reliant on the maligned 'X-Men: The Last Stand' through extensive Jean Grey (Famke Janssen) dream sequences that might have been better left on the cutting room floor - requires prior investment in the character to be of any interest.

There are some odd cinematic allusions to great Japanese works, for instance one ninja fight sequence borrows imagery from Kurosawa's Macbeth adaptation 'Throne of Blood', and these might help explain the logic behind the film's mannered style and extremely slow pacing. This is probably the quietest blockbuster made this century - and that's admirable and makes for something weirdly fascinating, even if it doesn't really work as intended. It feels boring rather than intense or dramatic, but it's clear (and, again, admirable) that they were really trying to make a character-driven movie about regret and coming to terms with loss. I'm left wondering if they might have succeeded had Darren Aronofsky accepted the long-rumoured offer to direct, but - like his aborted 'Batman Begins' - it was sadly not to be. I will say this for 'The Wolverine' though: if modern superhero movies exist in large part as extended trailers for their inevitable sequels then the film did its job. Even before the post-credits scene, the film left me more excited about next summer's 'X-Men: Days of Future Past' than I was going in.