Hard Candy - 28th June 2006

This film was, as expected, rather disturbing but never really rang true.

It was a tale of a teenage girl taking vengeance on a paedophile for his past actions. But of course it was not as simple as that. Hayley presents herself as a young girl and therefore the Victim. She is then absolved of all wrongdoing since she is avenging the heinous crimes of this adult Jeff.

However, these roles were not so clear cut. Hayley had planned the whole incident meticulously and reacts unfeelingly to any of Jeff's pleas. Where Hayley is the cold, calm, logical adult, Jeff is as a child, whose crime was capitulating to his primal instincts. It is slightly worrying to hear how Hayley relishes the punishment she is meting out, also that we are never sure whether Jeff was guilty of these crimes or not.

This blurring of roles is interesting but I think the tone of the film was not consistent. Relating to the point above; Hayley acts as an adult and she is simply not believable as a 14 year old girl. This was despite (or because of) some fantastic acting - it was a bit like Dawson's Creek where actors deliver lines more suited to people thirty years their senior.

It worked well as a low-key affair; the occasional bursts of Action!, like struggling for the gun/knife, spoilt the whole atmosphere of it. I think I suffered from reading too much about the film - most of it was waiting in terror for the castration part, at which the whole audience let out a collective whimper.

The effects were noticeable: the blurring and the use of stark colours, often as the background to head shots; these tied in to the whole photography thing but I think it was a bit needless. Would it have benefited from a more 'realistic' style of photography (grainy film, hand-held camera etc)? Not sure.

One more thing. As far as I'm concerned a pedophile is someone who is rather fond of feet. 5

Thank You For Smoking - 21st June 2006

I thought this film was refreshingly different to most other stuff. It presented the life of a tobacco lobbyist (widely regarded as spawn of the devil) in rather a light-hearted way and without making any real moral judgements.

I don't really have much to say about it. It was constantly engaging and in some places very funny. There were enough slightly surrealist touches to stop the film ever taking itself too seriously. The sections with his son could have been a bit of a cliche but importantly he remained unrepentant throughout the whole film and he did seem like quite a nice guy.

I was pleasantly surprised: 7

Mission: Impossible III - 14th June 2006

This film has had some bad reviews by many people, although an old Irish man on the tram told me it was very good. I have to side with the Irish man on this one.

Maybe it's because prolonged exposure to Big Brother has permanently killed off any brain cells I had left, but I really enjoyed the film. It was everything you would expect from a film of this kind: completely implausible plot, cheesy dialogue and ridiculous action.

It was great! I especially enjoyed the 'heist' aspects: the attack on the factory in Berlin and the Vatican City coup. For comedy value they didn't even bother to show what happened inside the building in Shanghai.

The plot didn't make any sense. Even after someone explained it to me, slowly, I still didn't get it. I couldn't understand who had set whom up (but enjoyed the thing that it was to make money for the US gvt or something.) Whatever, the "plot" was completely incidental to the rest of the film.

And it just looked really good, unashamedly so. Everyone was ridiculously beautiful. There was lots of cool technology (eg the portable mask-fabricator - coming soon to an Innovations catalogue near you.) and it was all coated in a thick layer of kick-ass. Take the scene where, after just kidnapping Truman Capote, the four of them are sailing down the river in a speedboat looking cool as fuck. For no reason whatsoever. And that just sums up the whole film: Style 1 Substance 0.


There was some rather clever direction going on, Simon Pegg got to be genuinely rather funny and there was a scene in which Tom Cruise tried to bring someone back to life being shot at in a helicopter navigating a field of windmills.

It can't really get a higher score than X-Men just because it was so superficial. Also I was disappointed because I had been led to believe this film had been shot entirely in Berlin (there were rumours they were going to film inside the Reichstag). But instead they showed a scummy factory somewhere near Potsdam for 5 seconds.

Anyway, M:i:III gets III stars out of V

Down In The Valley - 7th June 2006

This film was so incredibly boring I can't be bothered to write a review of it. I was actively trying to fall asleep in the cinema but failed miserably. Nothing happened of any interest and none of the characters were remotely likeable. I suppose what happened towards the end after the shooting could have been interesting but it was just so slow. And by that time I was so bored I couldn't have given a toss if they all lived happily after or died an horrific death or if they turned into Moomintrolls and flew to Neptune. This film gets 2. Only because there was some attempt at character.

X-Men 3: The Last Stand - 1st June

Although most reviews were claiming the 'final' instalment of the X-Men trilogy was a bit weaker than the other two, I thought it was still fairly kick-arse. It was an extremely successful Marvel film and I enjoyed it loads.

Visually, the film was very pretty from the crisp, clean tones of the Xavier Insitute to the dilapidated New York church everything was lifted almost straight off the pages of the comic book.

Thematically, the X-Men comics have always been a bit more intelligent than the average comic book. The interesting thing is that these super-heroes are always presented as flawed characters (Wolverine is not your typical holier-than-thou hero for example). And the issues dealt with within the comics are never black and white, everything is always shades of grey.
And so is it with this film - the ethical question of the mutant 'cure' finds parallels in the questionable actions of Professor X's interfering with Jean Grey's subconscious. And of course there are no easy answers.

As the final part in the trilogy anything could happen: the bold decision was made to kill off certain major characters. This felt a little strange - it was quite near to the beginning and perhaps not enough time or importance was given to the deaths. Now, Jean Grey dies on average once every 6 months but it is not usually the same for the rest of the X-Men.

One of the problems I had with this was it did feel rushed. Not enough time was given to explore new characters - for example Callisto (who I don't even think was given a name) and in particular Angel. So much more could have been made of his relationship with his father, seeing as it was the catalyst for this whole 'cure' business. Also - Angel was one of the five original X-Men; it was nice to see the Beast finally making an appearance but no time at all was given to Angel.

One more thing which made this film fantastic was the superb performance of Ian McKellen. He can bring credibility and gravitas to any role (as his brief soap career shows) and so every scene featuring Magneto was a joy to watch.

The fight scenes were excellent (really violent, but dealt with well), and there was some terribly cheesy dialogue, but this was all in the spirit of the comics and so was allowed. The only other complaints I could have would be the differences between the backstory of the films and the comics but that would make me a big big nerd so I won't list them all here.

Now, I can't really rate this in comparison to other films I've seen here. I thought as a Blockbuster summer action movie it was fab, but maybe shouldn't be compared to other, more worthy, films I've seen this year. So I'll give it Four stars out of Five ****