Trance (2013) - Danny Boyle

Oh dear. I wanted to like Trance, I really did. And for the first ten minutes or so I did. The art heist that kicks the film off and sets the story in motion is a thrilling piece of cinema. Typical Danny Boyle, looks gorgeous, booming soundtrack and very very fast paced. But then for some reason the voice over narration disappears (always a bad sign), if you’re going to use something like that (voice over) then at least have the grace to have it throughout the film, otherwise it feels like what it is - tacked on to explain things to the audience, information that a director of Boyle’s stature should be able to convey via images. But the voice over being given the heave-ho is the least of Trance’s problems. Where to begin?

Well let’s start with that wonderful beginning. Danny Boyle films have always had a strong start, think about how Trainspotting and Shallow Grave sucked you into the film straight away. Then consider probably his most audacious opening, that of 28 Days Later. Which is still just mouth open, jaw on the floor, how the fuck did they do that astounding. When it comes to endings Boyle isn’t quite so strong, he tends to slap a huge anthem on the soundtrack and over-egg everything a bit, not always but sometimes. Sunshine started well but around the halfway mark became something entirely different, same with 28 Days Later. Trance suffers the same fate but almost from the start of the film.

Simon (James McAvoy) is an art auctioneer with a gambling problem, Franck (Vincent Cassel) is a heavy type who is going to steal a Goya painting from the auction house that Simon works at, with Simon’s help. So far, so ordinary. Except Simon manages to swipe the picture before giving it to Franck and thanks to a bump on the head, can’t remember what he’s done with said painting. Deep sigh, it get’s worse. Enter Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson) a hypnotherapist who is hired to find out just what the hell is going on by talking softly to Simon. Now apparently she can not only make him remember things, but also make him forget other things, oh and shuffle around his memories. Cough, cough. By this point you’re already being asked to suspend an awfully large amount of disbelief. This isn’t the Inception world of Science-Fiction, this is supposedly set in the here and now of London. Basically things get weirder, and initial opinions about characters change as the film progresses, as does the whole tone of the film. There are huge chunks of the running time where you will not have a clue what’s going on, is he hypnotized now, or is this actually happening sort of stuff. And that’s all well and good, but you need a damn good ending to explain away everything that’s happened. Trance doesn’t have that ending. Everything (well almost everything) is rattled off in a monologue towards the end of the film, and it doesn’t work. It’s too insane, too far out to make any sort of sense. And after all that Boyle has the nerve to try the Inception spinning top ending. Sorry Danny but you haven't earnt that mate.

Trance is a film that demands to be watched multiple times, so that when you know the story you’ll be able to sit back and nod as it all unfolds second or third time around. Unfortunately it’s simply not a good enough film to ever want to watch again. The three main leads are all perfectly fine, like all of Boyle’s films it’s well edited and looks impressive (Anthony Dod Mantle is still on DoP duties so no huge surprise there). It’s well directed too, there’s lots of glass and reflections underscoring the theme of duality, and it’s got a nice huge electronic score (by Underworld’s Rick Smith). But the story is just too silly, and by the time it’s over you’ll be thinking about how Breaking Bad's going to end or what to have for dinner, anything but the nonsense you've just finished watching.

At the end of the day I still love Danny Boyle, I love him for trying things, for never getting stuck in the rut of making the same film over and over, for not being scared of being British and embracing the American glossiness that most British directors do so badly. I love that his films are pure entertainment, for someone that claims Alan Clarke and Nic Roeg as two of his biggest influences he couldn’t make films any further away from their output if he tried. Boyle makes films to be watched on a Saturday night when your plans have fallen through, and you’d still rather be out. For all his faults, his films are watchable and fun and always interesting. There’s no deep message, like Tarantino it’s all surface, and there’s nowt wrong with that. It’s just that Trance is the worst film he has made in a long time. And I haven’t even mentioned Rosario Dawson’s totally out of place full frontal scene, and the way it’s explained away in such a pathetic way. Please don’t fuck up Porno Danny. Please.

The Satan Bug (1965) - John Sturges

I love a good cold war conspiracy style thriller, especially when there’s a chance that whole populations could be wiped out due to some evil genius. The 60s was full of these sort of things particularly after the ’62 Cuba missile crisis and the rise of a certain Mr. Bond. So with all that in mind I thought The Satan Bug would be right up my street. It is after all the film John Sturges decided to make straight after The Great Escape, which is a film that I have watched at least once a year or so for as long as I can remember. So it couldn’t be bad could it?

Well surprisingly for a film that would describe itself as a thriller it lacks quite a bit in the thrills department. In fact I’d go one further and say it was actually dull. A bit on the boring side. It has it’s moments, but could have done with being trimmed a little to bring the running time down to a lean 90 minutes, rather than the flabby two hours it is now. The thing is there’s a good film in there but for some reason it just didn’t find its way onto the screen.

The plot is quite simple, a deadly man made virus (The Satan Bug) is stolen from a secret American military base and our hero Lee Barrett (George Maharis) has to figure out the who, the why and the how and get the germ weapon back before it is used to wipe out the entire planet! Will he manage it? Will he figure everything out? Of course he will since this is from the time before that golden Hollywood era of downbeat endings, Vietnam hadn’t really hit Americans as a huge catastrophe yet and Nixon was still a few years off of souring Americans on politics forever. So why doesn’t it work then?

Well for starters there is a really uncomfortable mix between really drab sets, all muted colours and no set dressing and the gorgeous location footage from the Californian deserts. Which clashes like an episode of Columbo and a John Ford western. The acting matches the sets, drab and by the numbers, the lines are spoken but they never convinced me they were being uttered by humans. Worse than that though is the total lack of any sort of tension. It’s explained to us just how deadly this virus is, but at no point does it ever feel like anything other than a clear liquid in a bottle. People bark orders to each other down phones, cars tail other cars, heads are scratched and questions answered but it all just feels so pedestrian. It’s also a fairly confusing plot, with characters previously thought dead turning out to be not quite ready to be buried, and then there’s a 'Clay Shaw is Clay Bertrand' bit of subterfuge that makes you feel like you might have to rewatch the film again from the start, just to see if you could spot what was coming. Except like I said earlier it’s far too dull for that.

Which is odd since Sturges is one of the great journeyman directors of this period, he made good solid E X C I T I N G films. It’s like his heart just wasn’t in this. Which is a shame. The Jerry Goldsmith score is a gem though, sounding like a precursor to his Planet of the Apes score but with added synth blasts. It’s almost watching the film for this alone. Almost.

Escape From L.A. (1996) - John Carpenter

The eight year old me was obsessed with Han Solo, so much so that all I wanted to do when I grew up was hang with a Wookie and say cool things like 'boring conversation anyway' and 'droids don't pull people's arms out of their sockets when they lose.' Punk may well have changed the cultural landscape for the kids aged fourteen and over in '77, but for us pre-teens the watershed moment was catching George Lucas' third feature film at the cinema. There’d be no more playing war in the school playground after that, for the next decade it was Star Wars and Star Wars only. There were always grumblings about who would play what character and so forth, but ultimately whoever I was supposed to be playing would immediately fade as soon as we started. I was Han Solo, as I suspect were loads of other kids that had been told to be a stormtrooper instead of the guy who’d made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.

That all changed one morning at Upminster train station back in the summer of ’81. As I ascended the stairs towards the exit I caught sight of a poster for Escape From New York. Kurt Russell’s head was floating above the New York skyline with helicopters flying all about it. It was at that exact moment that my loyalties towards Han fell away and my new obsession with the unknown fizzog in front of me began. Han may well have had a cape and thought Tauntaun’s smelt bad on the outside, but this new fella had an eyepatch and the best grimace on his face I’d ever seen. Plus he was called Snake Plissken. How fucking cool was that? Snake. Plissken.

I was way too young to actually go to the cinema and see Escape From New York though, and it would be years before I managed to rent a VHS copy of it. Despite the fact that over the years I'd built up massive expectations for it, it didn’t disappoint. From that opening synth line of the score all the way through to Snake’s kiss off at the end, for the teenage me it was total perfection. Writer/director John Carpenter was at the top of his game back then and his films with Kurt Russell were amongst the best things he ever did. The Russell & Carpenter partnership is up there for me with those great actor/director teams like Eastwood & Siegel or Mifune & Kurosawa. So with all that rambling prologue in mind you can imagine how excited I was when it turned out that Kurt and John were going to make another film together, and not just any film but a sequel to Escape From New York.

I saw Escape From L.A. on it’s opening week. I was disappointed. It was shit. I never watched it again… Until now. Me and a couple of John Carpenter fans were nattering away about some new pictures of John and Kurt posted on Facebook, and the conversation turned to Escape From L.A., and for the first time since ’96 I had a huge hankering to watch it. It couldn’t be that bad, could it? Maybe I’d had such high expectations first time ‘round that I’d been too harsh on it? Possibly? Maybe?

Well as it turns out Escape From L.A. is still an absolutely abysmal film. Shockingly so at times. The bulk of the problem has to be laid at John Carpenter’s feet, since the biggest stumbling block with the film is that it all just feels so damn lazy. Just like all the worst sequels this basically rehashes the plot of the original. So we get the ticking time bomb plot device, Snake having to retrieve something from no mans land and all the rest of it. The thing is Escape from L.A. was made fifteen years after the original, and if you’re going to wait that long to follow up your film you’d better have a damn good reason for doing so in the first place. Don't make something that feels like a cheapo thrown together straight to DVD release. The effects in this film are probably the worst I’ve seen in a major studio film from this period, worse than original Playstation graphics with multiple shots that look unfinished and then some. Maybe the money ran out? It sure looks that way.

On the plus side Kurt Russell is on top form and does the business as Snake, it’s a character that he can easily breathe life into and his growly sub Harry Callahan delivery always works. The rest of the cast range from okay (Stacy Keach, Cliff Robertson) to miscast (Steve Buscemi) to downright shite. Yes Pam Grier and Peter Fonda I’m talking about you. Fonda in particular is wince inducingly awful, cranking up his old hippie dude persona to nauseating effect. Most of the major touchstones of the original are present but in a lesser form, for example the fight to the death arena scene now involves shooting hoops on a basketball court. I kid you not. That’s how bad this is. The only thing that redeems Escape from L.A. a little for me are its last ten minutes which are as good as the original film.

So as far as I’m concerned I’ll hopefully never have the urge to watch this again. It’s awful, and made even worse by the fact that John Carpenter has it in him to put things together on screen in a way that few others can manage. I still hold out some hope that someone will knock up a script that will bring Carpenter and Russell back together, Carpenter would make an ideal choice for a decent comic book adaptaion for instance and Kurt Russell can do no wrong (don't mention Soldier that wasn't his fault all right). Let’s face it, they could never make anything worse than Escape From L.A. Could they?

Made in U.S.A (1966) - Jean-Luc Godard

Of all the feted directors of yesteryear, it’s Jean-Luc Godard that I just don’t get. I quite like a few of his earlier efforts (Bande à part and Le mépris), but the majority of his mid to late sixties films just leave me cold, and Made in U.S.A (no full stop after the A for some reason, a deep political reason I’m sure) is one of those films. It’s not that it’s impenetrable, since I can deal with that. It’s more that there is nothing within the film for me to hold onto, so despite the short running time (85 minutes), I found myself checking to see how long was left of the film every fifteen minutes or so. Which can’t be good can it?

So plot wise we have Paula Nelson (Anna Karina) trying to find out how her boyfriend (?) died. Maybe. Or maybe not. She wanders from scene to scene spouting a kind of cut and paste dialogue, bits of a pulp novel here (the film is supposedly based very very loosely on Richard Stark’s novel The Jugger), some philosophy there. After a while I found my brain was just unwilling to try and process any of what was being said. To add insult to injury the audience is bombarded with the distorted voice of Godard ranting on about various Maoist theories via a reel to reel tape machine. Characters are named after political figures and film stars/directors. Can you hear that? That’s me clapping really slowly in an empty room. Just. For. J-L G.

Now whereas certain films by David Lynch or Luis Buñuel require a degree of decoding by the viewer, it feels worthwhile and at least the directors give their audience some sort of story to hang onto while they try and figure out just what's going on. Godard meanwhile is very heavy-handed with his messages, which are firmly rooted in the times and subsequently dated and of no consequence to anyone now. Vietnam, the state of sixties France blah blah blah, I couldn’t care less.

Still on the plus side we get Marianne Faithful singing an a cappella version of As Tears Go By, and the playfulness with the format that you associate with Godard is still present, he always manages to do things that are at the very least interesting, but it’s not enough. The real hero of the film for me is cinematographer Raoul Coutard who makes the whole shebang a sumptuous viewing experience. His colour palette is made up of vivid blues and reds against warm yellows and oranges. His camerawork is second to none and goes a long way to explaining why he was the most in demand cameraman of this period in France.

Maybe the thing I hated most though was the dedication at the start of the film to Nicolas Ray and Samuel Fuller. Godard looks up to these two legends as teachers, and yet by slapping that dedication at the start of this film shows that he hasn’t learnt a thing, since neither of them would ever make a film as arse numbingly dull or as self-absorbed as this piece of trash.

Waterpark (2012) - Evan Prosofsky

I have a lot of time for documentaries, well actually that's an understatement - I adore documentaries. I also have a lot of time for people that make that all important leap from talking about doing something to actually going out and actually creating something.

Waterpark is Evan Prosofsky's first shot at making a documentary, his day job finds him working as a cinematographer, mainly for music videos. This doc first came to my attention when when I received a frantic phone call form my wife informing me that Dirty Beaches (a Canadian musician whom I'm head over heels about), was playing in our town. He's played here a few times in the past but for various reasons I haven't managed to catch his shows. It turns out that this time he'd be playing live accompaniment to a Canadian documentary about a huge shopping mall, a shopping mall that's so big it also houses a waterpark. Crazy, huh?

So that's how I came to be sitting in an art gallery last Friday watching this. Evan was there to introduce his film, and he explained that Edmonton, Canada (where he is from) is home to this bizarre shopping mall, we were informed that the winters there were incredibly harsh, yet people would spend their time at the mall, swimming, hanging out and generally enjoying a break from the harsh reality that was happening outside.

So not only do you have the juxtaposition of arctic winter conditions and tropical beach locale, but also shopping rubbing up against leisure. More than enough there for a decent documentary I thought. Mr Dirty Beaches (or Alex Zhang Hungtai to you and me) was ready behind his analogue Korg synth, the lights dimmed and we were off.

Waterpark kicks off with an infomercial about said waterpark and then for the next fifteen minutes or so consists off people swimming, walking around, bungee jumping, swimming some more and erm, that's your lot really. Empty is the word that kept coming to mind as I watched it. Vacuous. What is the point, I kept thinking. I looked over at my wife (who I'd dragged along) about five minutes in, and saw she was thinking the same thing as me. After fifteen minutes it was all over, and of course being a special screening with the director present, the crowd applauded long and loud.

Evan Prosofsky fielded questions from the audience afterwards, but they dried up quickly simply because there was nothing of substance to ask any questions about. I had to fight the urge to ask him why he'd bothered to make Waterpark in the first place, since Evan looked so happy. I just couldn't be the one to rain on his parade. We left as soon as it was politely possible to do so, and talked about nothing else all the way home. We came to the conclusion that if this was on YouTube no one would be able to sit through it without skimming through to the end after a few minutes. On the plus side I did get to see Dirty Beaches though.

Storage 24 (2012) - Johannes Roberts

We Brits have a long history with that often maligned film genre - Science Fiction. Don't laugh it's true. From the crew on the original Star Wars films (and director of Return of the Jedi), through to classics such as The Man Who Fell to Earth, Alien, Blade Runner, 2001, Brazil and Things to Come we've always had a strong pedigree for intelligent Sci-Fi. Lately we've had Danny Boyle knocking out a half decent effort with Sunshine, and Joe Cornish writing and directing one of last years best films - Attack the Block. Let's just leave Prometheus out of this for now shall we?

So it's always interesting for me when a new Brit Sci-Fi flick hits the multiplexes, and I almost always end up giving them a whirl. Storage 24 was written by and stars Noel Clarke, who let's not forget wrote the still excellent Kidulthood. A plane crashes in central London, causing half of London to be locked down (oh yes I know my military jargon). Meanwhile Charlie (Noel Clarke) and best mate Mark are on their way to the titular storage facility to pick up Charlie's possessions after his recent split with girlfriend Shelley (Antonia Campbell-Hughes). Upon arriving it turns out Shelley is also there along with two friends (Nikki and Chris). Sparks fly and conversations get heated but they all need to learn to get along since (drum roll, here comes the high concept bit), they are locked in the warehouse with… an alien. And said alien is a bit miffed.

It's a reworking (or direct steal depending on how nice you're being) of Alien. Except without the defined characters, twists, stunning cinematography, genuine hands over the face scares or any of the other things that make Alien the landmark film that it is. What they have managed to half inch is the idea of being trapped in a confined space with an extra terrestrial, and having a set that consists of lots of corridors. Corridors that you can get your cast to run up and down for most of the films duration in fact.

I wasn't impressed I have to say. The script is one of those scribbled on a fag packet jobs, it's full of holes and is also just so bloody unoriginal. The effects were nasty in the wrong way, the cast felt like they were waiting for the lunch bell and the direction was both uninspired and flat. All in all well worth giving a miss, go and see Dredd instead. You'll thank me in the long run I promise.

Prehistoric Women (1967) - Michael Carreras

Thursday 9th June 2011.

Now it's not often I struggle to watch a film, but this just takes the biscuit. It's Hammer at it's absolute nadir, some old rubbish about tribes of women in darkest Africa that can talk English perfectly. Karl (our hero) stumbles into their world and manages to get himself mixed up in an uprising. You see the blondes are the slaves of the brunettes, and a little further down the ladder are the menfolk. Laughable stuff really, and you know it's all going pear shaped when early on Karl witness's a tribal dance and then has a natter to the tribesmen in (you've guessed it) English. They explain that they are going to have to kill him. 'Is there nothing I can do to change your mind?' yawns the bored sounding Karl, blah blah blah. Then a huge white plastic rhino shoots out of a wall, Karl grips it's horn and the tribesmen are frozen just as they are about to spear him. Jesus wept.

On the one hand you want to believe this is an attempt at showing how women have been oppressed throughout time, but of course it really isn't that. It's just an excuse to have huge stacks of women flesh packed into animal skin bathing suits. Woeful is too positive a word for this. I'm actually writing this while the film is still on, that's how tragic it is. Totally studio bound, with the cheapest of cheap jungle sets, if the camera work was any more static it would be considered still photography. The only thing it has going for it is Steven Berkoff, but even that's not enough to make me smile. I can't even bring myself to waste more time by writing this, which I see more as a warning than a review, since I'll never get the 90 minutes I spent watching this back. So if you ever get the chance to see this, just say no. You've been warned.

The Eagle (2011) - Kevin Macdonald

Oh dear. Kevin Macdonald was one of those directors that I trusted, if his name was after the directed by credit then I'd watch it. Not any more though. One Day in September and Touching the Void were both such riveting and well told documentaries, that when he shifted his focus over to the world of feature films with Last King of Scotland, I couldn't help but feel a little disappointed. However almost like that crappy thing that the father of the bride always says - 'rather than losing a documentary film maker we gained a great new director'. Well for a while at least anyway.

That's all changed now since The Eagle is yet another tale of Romans trying to tame the savage Celts that dwell north of Hadrian's Wall. This time it's Channing Tatum as the fresh faced young chappie whose father plodded off into Scotland with a legion of men never to return. The Eagle of the title being the lost legions emblem, cue loads of waffle about honour and men and honour and all that. Now when Tatum finds himself with the chance to be behind enemy lines and obviously regaining his father's lost honour, he grabs at it. Heard it all before? Well it's not all that surprising since it's kind of the same as Neil Marshall's over the top madfest Centurion.

Now I didn't expect much from Marshall's film (which was actually pretty good), but as I said earlier Macdonald is one of those watch anything he does types, so expectations were running high for me. Everything was deflated quite early on when it became apparent that our Kev had decided to have the Romans blather with thick American accents. That's kind of a big hurdle to overcome especially when he has cast great British actors like Mark Strong, who then have to put on woeful accents. Piss poor.

And sadly from there it's all down hill, you see the Celts are subtitled (a wonderful brave move), but they also look like leftovers from Last of the Mohicans, and of course this being post Braveheart the fuckers are blue from head to toe. Throw in Jamie Bell as a slave who will help our hero on his quest (or will he?), and you that's your lot. Lots of trudging through the most beautiful landscape on earth overlapped with dialogue that you would never want to recall, and those accents.

It could have been better, so much better. The story is pretty decent, it's the execution that's bad, the look of the film is fine but you find yourself wishing the ground would open up for the actors. Stuck with clunky language and rubber accents they do their best, but I don't imagine many having this on their CV in ten years time. As it is though it's worth a watch if you like seeing bare man legs running away from giant smurfs. Otherwise probably better off watching the aforementioned Centurion since at least that doesn't take itself half as serious as this pile of filmwrong.

Mr. Nice (2010) - Bernard Rose

Utter rubbish. Let's get one thing straight from the get go, I don't like Howard Marks (whose life this film is portraying). Drug smugglers tend to have that effect on me. Usually I have very little time for them, and when they start acting as if they're doing a public service I just end up liking them even less. Howard Marks was a drug smuggler, he wasn't a Robin Hood figure, he wasn't some sort of small time villain that loved his mum and was a bit naughty. He smuggled huge quantities of marijuana into both the States and Britain. He made loads of money, he spent loads of money, he got caught, he went to prison. Hero? Total fucking wanger more like. I really don't like the guy at all. I have nothing against people smoking weed, in fact I'm well up for it being legalized. Marks managed to involve himself with the IRA in order to get gear into England. The sort of person that would hook up with murderers in order to make a quick profit, isn't the sort of person I'm willing to give the benefit of the doubt too.

So there you go that's Howard Marks and me in a nutshell. Despite what I wrote above I still went into this film with the hope that it could be something fantastic, or at the very least engaging. After all I don't have much time for that Hitler bloke either, but still thought Downfall was a diamond. Mr. Nice though is tosh from start to finish, Marks himself is treated as an average bloke who saw his chance and took it, and good for him type of thing. A quote early on in the film kind of sums the whole thing up for me;- 'A dealer is someone who buys more dope than he can smoke'. Is he? Not too sure about that one Howard. Even if this film is approached as a slice of fantasy it still doesn't work. Why? Well I'm glad you asked.

For a start the central relationship between Howard and Judy Marks is too flimsy, they smoke a bit of dope, make like the beast with two backs, have a few kids and that's about it. You'd think there would be drama gold to be mined there, after all Judy is played by Chloë Sevigny, one of the better actresses out there. Not that you'd guess that from this performance, her accent was impossible to place. I'm presuming it was supposed to British and since I'm fond of her I'll leave it at that. Rhys Ifans was actually pretty good in such a thankless role, I think he did quite well acting under a series of wigs that looked like leftovers from a Shane Meadows short. Little bit of trivia for you while we're talking about Ifans, he was once the singer with Super Furry Animals, who used Marks' image on the front of their debut album. Small world, eh? See I'm not just here to moan about films you know.

Bernard Rose has had a go at doing a bit of a Forrest Gump on a shoestring type thing, by placing Ifans in seventies London, shooting him against a backdrop of archive footage. It's a tricky thing to do well, and Rose just doesn't have the chops to manage it, it looks embarrassing and obviously doesn't work. The film starts in black and white, and only once Howard discovers the joy of marijuana does the film become colour. Tacky doesn't even begin to cover it. For some reason Marks' time inside is hardly touched upon, which is a shame since this was one of the few areas in his book that really showed just how tragic his life had become. Other things that were awful? Well how about Saleem Makik's jacket staying exactly the same despite the fact that the film has moved on several years? What happened to Jim McCann (Thewlis)? Last we saw of him he was there surrounded by armed police, then somehow he let's off a smoke bomb, and then? Well your guess is as good as mine. Shoddy things like this pepper the film, which is a shame since it could have been so much better. Worse than all of this though is how can Crispin Glover and David Thewlis be in a film together and have it end up being so bloody crappy? Steer clear and watch the far superior Blow instead.

Born to Fight (2004) - Panna Rittikrai

Me and my friend Neil Queen have started this thing of suggesting one film a month to each other, it has to be a film that each thinks the other should have seen, but hasn't. We kicked off as we meant to go on by starting with two titles each. Be bold we thought, after all life isn't worth living if you don't live on the edge is it? My two for him were The Red Shoes & Le Trou, for me he chose Enter the Void and this. After watching this I'm starting to feel like maybe I got the short straw.

To say this film is daft would be an understatement. But we'll get back to that in a mo, first let's have a run through just what this hour and a half is about. Well let's see, Born to Fight is a Thai film which kicks off with a massive action scene as two undercover cops try to bring down a drug lord called General Yang. All they really manage to do though is hurt loads of stuntmen and destroy a rather unconvincing shanty town. If you've seen Police Story, or even to a lesser extent Bad Boys 2 then you've seen this set piece filmed better. It's one of those action films that owes a huge debt to the over the top madness of Reagan era action fluff, mixed with a huge dollop of Jackie Chan. This opening scene for example, our two cops are chasing two huge lorries through some deserted wasteland, now for some reason one of the cops (Daew) decides that it would be best for him to clamber over the top of one of these speeding trucks. Don't ask me why, since like so much in this film there is no logic, other than the chance to film a few bone breaking stunts. So there he is on top of the trailer when all of a sudden there are loads of Thai baddies shooting at him. Where did they come from, and how did they know he was up there? As I said logic and this film weren't really getting along too well during filming. I shudder to think just how many injuries were caused during the shooting of this scene.

Anyway back to our story, Daew manages to arrest Yang but not before Yang blows up Daew's partner. Oh do keep up. So Daew is more than a little miffed about said partner dying, so what does he do? Turn to alcohol, bit of Clancy Eccles and some doobage, throw himself into his work? No of course not, he goes off to some poor village in the middle of nowhere, with his sister and some athletes to distribute soft toys and blankets to the needy. Well you do don't you? But hang on what happens next? Well it turns out that by pure coincidence General Yang's men have decided to take the very same village hostage, demanding their evil genius's release by the following morning or there'll be hell to pay. As far as storylines go it is pretty fucking bad. Think Die Hard in a crappy village set, with smaller action and loads of old women running around screaming. To be honest it's not even as good as that. Oh yeah and there is a nuke aimed at Bangkok, for the life of me I can't remember why, and for most of the film it is forgotten about. It's only when you think the film is about to wrap itself up and you can go and make a cup of tea and maybe rescue the day by watching something decent, that the nuke turns up again. Will it get launched? Of course it won't, except after a mad bit of kicking and punching (this film's one saving grace are some of the fight scenes) it does get launched. Don't worry though for some unexplained reason it goes through Bangkok and then explodes out at sea. So that's alright then.

As I said some of the fight scenes were good, and who could ever not want to see a one legged man giving it some to a bad guy? There were a few moments that had me laughing enough to worry my cats, an old man running worse than Roger Moore straight towards the camera, some chap spending the last third of the film running through action scene after action scene in slow motion with a Thai flag. Little girl beating up nasty man, that never fails does it? What else? Well there are loads and loads of plot holes, but to be honest it's not the sort of film where you should be too worried about things like that. The same goes for the direction and look of the film, I don't know maybe I take this stuff too seriously but I always wonder why the camera moves when it does. For instance why start with the camera on the ground and then rapidly have it crane up to the heavens only to cut away to a shot at eye level, back to the crane shot on it's way down now, then a close up of someones face then, well you get the picture. It's a mess, it wants to be Michael Bay but ends up being a cheapo version of McG. Oh God I hated this film, it was alright for a while, but I tire of things quickly if they fail to grab my attention. Whenever I've seen something I always ask myself if I would watch it again, or if I saw it on DVD for a ching (that's a fiver to you and me) would I buy it? See if you can guess what my answers to those questions are for this film. Enter the Void had better be good.

Green Zone (2010) - Paul Greengrass

So the star and director of the Bourne series team up yet again, this time for a romp around Iraq. 'It won't be like Bourne' swore Greengrass during the filming of this, 'people will be disappointed if they expect a Bourne type actioner', he claimed. Now the thing is the very idea of making some crappy action film about real life events, especially real life events that are going on now, and where people are you know actually dying makes me sick to my bones. But Paul Greengrass swore that wasn't the film I was sitting down to watch, and guess what?

The fucker lied. This ended up being the last film I saw in 2010. I'm kind of sad to say that I turned it off with only twenty minutes left of the running time, that's how poor it was. In fact I only turned it off after I realised that I was on line checking out and ordering Miles Davis box sets. Woeful. Basically Matt Damon is one of those good American soldiers that 'liberated' the Iraqi people. You know butter wouldn't melt in his mouth, the Iraqi's though are a right bunch of bastards, they keep shooting at the Americans and everything. It's enough to make you scream, it really is.

What little story there is revolves around an address book that shows all the safe houses that Saddam's generals use. There are some bad army people trying to cover stuff up (see it's not just the Iraqi's that are bad, some of the Americans are too), weapons of mass destruction, blah blah sodding blah. Lots of Greengrass' shaky cam, running around and shouting and all the usual hoi polloi that we've come to associate with these films is employed. It just doesn't work though. There is a sympathetic Iraqi character that helps Matt Damon, the rest of them though are treated like dirt. I find it shameful that films like this are taken seriously. The only interesting thing about them is that in fifteen years time, when everyone realises that the whole 'war' was about America creating a military base in the Middle East, these films will be looked back on as total propaganda. Nothing more.

It doesn't surprise me that I didn't like this, since when everyone wet themselves over The Hurt Locker, I was one of the few that stood up and shouted as loud as I could that it was a piece of shit. Only one film so far has managed to convince me that it was worthy of being made about this subject, and that was Nick Broomfield's Battle for Haditha. That at least made the effort to humanize the Iraqi people, after all if some nation trundled into your country tomorrow, what would you do? Anyway this isn't worth wasting almost two hours of your life on. Go listen to some early 70's Miles Davis instead, you'll feel much better for it.

Boo (1932) - Albert DeMond

Oh dear, some of the rubbish I watch does amaze me sometimes. Other times I feel like hanging my head in shame. In this instance I guess it falls somewhere in between. Boo is cobbled together using footage from Nosferatu, The Cat Creeps and Frankenstein. Over this DeMond has seen fit to add what he obviously thinks are witty remarks, which are narrated by one Morton Lowry (his only claim to fame as far as moving pictures go). It's like an early version of What's Up, Tiger Lily?, but without the laughs. Not big, not clever, not good. Even at 9 minutes long it's best avoided.