Mephisto-24

An uneven attempt to satirize romcoms, which ends up being a better romance than it is a comedy. There are just enough good jokes that aren't also in the trailer that you may be able to put up with Brandon Scott. Jones's over-the-top portrayal of Donny, the romcom cliche gay best friend... but not so many of them that I won't blame you if you bail.

The screenwriters completely dropped the ball here. How does a 6-episode mini-series manage to include so much LESS of the grimly funny material from the book it was based on than the 1970 2-hour movie? The attempt to simplify the story by making it linear is only part of the problem, and suggests that the writers didn't try to work out the order in which events occur in the book (which is internally consistent). A much greater issue is that the miniseries is toothless and cowardly, soft-pedaling on the politics, barely even criticizing the profiteering that leads Milo to order the bombing and strafing of his own airbase and to Snowden's death, and avoiding most of the black comedy. The scenes that are taken from the book seem to have been chosen at random by sticking pins in it, and the writers don't even seem to have read the ending, much less understood it. The 1970 film, written by Buck Henry and Mike Nicholls, is far from perfect despite a stellar cast, but as a demonstration of the fine line between comedy and horror it rivals Pulp Fiction, and the scene of Milo (John Voight) explaining to Yossarian (Alan Arkin) what will happen to Nately's 'share' in the business of the war is utterly chilling and should be seen by everyone. This mini-series, however, is not only not a substitute for reading the novel, it ruins it.

'Standing Still' begins so slowly it took us nearly half an hour to decide that the movie was possibly intended as a comedy rather than a very long cigarette ad. There are also a few chunks of angst thrown in, and one painfully melodramatic reminiscence scene which might have worked if we cared more about the characters. The music is too loud, and the 'twist' at the ending was obvious about five minutes in.

On the plus side, the women are easy on the eye, most of the performances are pretty good, and there are some genuinely funny moments in the last half of the film. It's not half bad... but it's not all the way up to half good, either.

There is a wonderful moment in 'Superman II' where General Zod sees the Fortress of Solitude and remarks, "Scruffy. So morbid. A sentimental replica of a planet long since vanished. No style at all!" It would be unfair to say that 'Superman Returns' has no style at all; the cinematography is magnificent, locations are used extremely well, Singer's action scenes are brilliant composed, and special effects have improved enormously in 25 years. Also on the plus side, Kevin Spacey is an excellent Lex Luthor (and gets most of the best lines), and his henchmen in this film are much more interesting and believable than Ned Beatty's Otis. In fact, most of the new material in this film is excellent, particularly the exploration of the relationship between Superman and a (bizarrely young-looking) Lois. The weakest elements come from the sentimental replication of 'Superman: the Movie'.

Recycling the soundtrack... okay. Recycling the title sequence... unnecessarily sentimental. Recycling the late Marlon Brando's overpriced and ponderous Jor-El... been there, slept through that. But a Christopher Reeve lookalike who doesn't display a fraction of Reeve's talent (Reeve's Clark and Superman actually seemed like different people; all Routh manages is a different hairstyle)... bad decision.

Worst of all, though, is the attempt to re-use the silliest parts of the script of 'Superman: The Movie' - Luthor's plan to create a real estate empire, and a solution to this problem which, while not as unbelievable as spinning the Earth backwards to change the past, totally defies the film's tenuous internal logic.

That said (and despite its sometimes heavy-handed religious iconography), 'Superman Returns' is still more entertaining than the original it tries too hard to emulate, and nowhere near as awful as 'Superman IV'. (If I'd been blamed for that one, I probably would have wanted to leave the planet for five years, too.) It's not as much fun as 'Superman II', but now that the filmmakers have gotten the homage out of their system, maybe we can look forward to 'Superman II Returns'.

What might have been an excellent detective thriller turns to unwatchable slush halfway through because of an utterly ludicrous romance plot.

Burton plays Clare Blake, a policewoman promoted to the top of her profession, despite being so lacking in judgment and self-control that she risks destroying her own career by jumping into bed with a convicted killer who is under investigation for another two murders, then conducting an affair with him in full view of her colleagues, the press, and the public. When a junior officer remarks "I can't believe she'd be so stupid!", my wife and I could only nod our heads in agreement.

The villain, by contrast, is shown as so brilliantly adept at manipulating people that we could only wonder how the prosecutors ever found a jury that would convict him.

We kept watching this farce lurch from plot hole to plot hole while Burton did her best to lend it some undeserved dignity, but by the end we would have needed a forklift to keep suspending our disbelief. Unless you desperately need to see Amanda Burton in her underwear, avoid this one at all costs.

If Lara Croft: Tomb Raider was "the first post-content movie", as director Simon West claimed, then this must count as post-post-content. The script is as thin as Lara's wetsuit, but with nothing remotely as interesting inside.

Just as there is no reason to keep watching the first film after the shootout in the garage, there is almost no reason to keep watching this one after she punches the shark. There are no good jokes, the CGI is mostly of video-game quality, the fight scenes are copied from better movies, and the only thing it has to offer as compensation are some impressive monsters, a bundle of cool gadgets, and some pretty scenery - and I don't mean Angelina. Once you've seen her in the bikini and the wetsuit, to quote a much better movie, "you got all you gonna get".

SPOILER WARNING!!!



While this film has some good moments and strong performances from Samuel Jackson and Tommy Lee Jones (and a disappointing one from Ben Kingsley), I couldn't help but remember the "Chewbacca Defence" from South Park while watching the courtroom scenes: "This makes no sense!".

A marine colonel claims he gave the order to fire on a crowd, killing 83 people and wounding more than 100, ALL of whom were supposedly firing at his people with sub-machine guns and pistols - yet NOBODY else saw these weapons, not even the other marines who were returning fire (except, possibly, the three who died). Supposedly, none of them saw the weapons even AFTER the crowd was mown down.

The Yemenis then supposedly came in and removed every weapon, every spent cartridge, and - and this is REALLY ridiculous - every bullet and bullet-hole (the defence lawyer is told that all the shots came from snipers with rifles, and photographs a few bullet holes, but finds nothing to contradict this, throwing grave doubt on the colonel's judgement that the crowd was more dangerous than the snipers).

A videotape (destroyed by the National Security Advisor) shows the crowd shooting, but not one slug from any of those weapons is ever discovered. Were they all firing blanks? And why would the NSA and the ambassador (whose life was saved by the colonel) rather see a war hero executed than an aging ambassador lose his job and the Yemeni government embarrassed? (Maybe if it was Saudi Arabia, or Iraq in the 1980s, but Yemen?)

The court-martial then decides to believe that a videotape that they haven't seen, the existence of which can not be proven, vindicates their officer. Despite the glaring lack of any evidence to support his story and a mass that contradicts it, they acquit him. To believe this, you have to believe that the military will believe EVERYTHING they're told by one of their own, or protect them from the consequences even if they don't. The NSA and the ambassador are then blamed (okay, that's believeable if there was a change of government in between. They're political appointees, after all).

If this had been told RASHOMON style, without us seeing the videotape (or if the tape had been inconclusive), we could choose who to believe. Or if Jones's character had uncovered ANY evidence that supported the colonel's story or contradicted the official version, rather than making it a matter of faith. Instead, it's impossible to believe the film at all.

If you haven't seen THE MATRIX, see it before you see THE MATRIX RELOADED, because they don't explain anything and otherwise the movie would make no sense. Actually, it doesn't make any sense anyway, but at least you'll get to see a watchable action flick before having your intelligence insulted by the worst screenplay I can remember. Ever. Worse than TOMB RAIDER, worse than CHARLIE'S ANGELS, worse than THE AVENGERS. It really is that bad.

The film's fight scenes and car chase make for a pretty good video game, but these highlights are interspersed with ponderous monologues that are more boring than an economics lecture by Stephen Hawking. Add to this Keanu Reeves displaying less acting talent than his sunglasses, and all you have left is spectacular CGI and stunt-work, some nice sets, and lots of fetish wear. Erase your mind beforehand and just enjoy the pretty pictures.

Hackers is too lightweight to be a good thriller, but it works well if you see it as the hackers do - a series of games. The bet between Crash vs. Burn (ultra-hot Angelina Jolie) isn't very different from the competition between Plague and the younger hackers, except for the stakes. If you ignore the flashy and mostly meaningless computer graphics, you may notice some good in-jokes and a remarkable chemistry between many of the characters – Crash and Plague, Lord Nikon and Cereal Killer, and especially Crash and Burn. Apart from Lorraine Bracco, who seems completely lost, everyone seems to be having an enormous amount of fun: grab a can of Jolt, forget everything you know about programming, and join in the game.

A masterwork of exploitation and grave robbery worthy of the late Edward D. Wood Jr. Approximately 11 minutes of footage of the late Bruce Lee, including film of his funeral and his body in his coffin, are used to sell a movie about a supposedly dead actor avenging himself after being ‘killed' for not paying protection to organised crime. There's an uncomfortable echo of the death of Brandon Lee when Lee's character ‘dies' after someone replaces a blank in the gun that shoots him for a stunt sequence with a real bullet. If they'd used all the real footage of Lee either before or after this, the film would have made much more sense: instead, they used alleged look-alikes, their faces sometimes hidden by false beards or motorcycle helmets, intercut with close-ups of the real Lee. If you're a martial arts fan, fast-forward to the climactic fight scenes; if you're not, the only possible reasons to see this movie are (i) Colleen Camp's cleavage and (ii) the sheer ghoulish awfulness of this barely animated corpse.

To quote my film tutor, this would have gone on the top of his list of the ten worst Australian films ever made if only he could have think of nine others bad enough to accompany it. It's a ploddingly literal-minded of a symbolism-heavy literary piece by Patrick White, with actors of widely varying levels of talent struggling gamely to deliver unspeakable lines. The result should have been left in the trash can next to the embryo in the last scene.

If you're thinking of seeing this alleged comedy because of Amy Yip, prepare to be disappointed. You don't see enough of her - in either the chronological or the anatomical sense - to justify the sitting through the tedious stretches between the few good visual jokes. If you consider 'Sex and Zen' and 'Erotic Ghost Story' the peaks of Hong Kong movie making, this one is barely more than a molehill.

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE is the funniest documentary I've seen since the brilliant THE ATOMIC CAFE, but it's much more than that. Though we get some moments of black comedy worthy of DR STRANGELOVE (including Moore opening an account at a bank where new subscribers are given free rifles), Moore keeps reminding us that the real issue here is deadly serious - thousands of deaths every year.

Though Moore teams up with Columbine survivors to ask K-mart to stop selling handgun ammunition, this is about more than gun control: it's about the culture of paranoia that the US media fosters and that the NRA and many US politicians are so willing to exploit.

When I first saw this, the only thing louder than the laughter was the audience applause at the end. It's that good.

BLACK HAWK DOWN is visually spectacular with good performances from some fine actors, but the superficial script lets it down badly. By athletically avoiding the politics of the conflict, it treats the Somalis as motiveless monsters, so the movie feels more like ALIENS or a video game than a serious film. The implicit racism is highlighted by the depiction of the Pakistanis, who are depicted as comedy relief rather than rescuers. Much of the dialogue seems to have been cut-and-pasted from old war movies and recruiting ads, and characterisation almost disappears amid the explosions, helicopter shots, and showers of spent cartridges. All that's left in the end is yet another siege movie with new hardware - a rather routine depiction of courage under fire, without the courage to examine other issues.

THE OTHERS is a superbly scary film. Its intelligent script rivals that of THE STONE TAPE or THE SIXTH SENSE, and the performances and production values are even better than in Robert Wise's THE HAUNTING. Chilling and suspenseful without even a hint of gore, it may well be the finest haunted house movie ever made.

This is probably the most gratuitously revolting film I've ever seen, with most of the make-up and effects budget obviously going on fake blood (though there's also a lot of yellow custard thrown in for good measure). It would have been even worse if the lighting and camerawork were up to par, but fortunately, they're unusually bad. The script uses the same premise as PREDATOR, but without the humour, special effects, or any intellectual content. Even Jack Palance and Martin Landau couldn't save this, though I doubt they were trying very hard. This is definitely a film for avoiding. You have now been warned.

The first scene in this remake of The Haunting is remarkably faithful to Shirley Jackson's subtle psychological chiller, but beyond that, any resemblance is almost purely coincidental. Jan de Bont's film is a gratuitous CGI-fest, visually spectacular but utterly inane. It owes more to television's Munsters and The Addams Family (both of which are mentioned) than to Robert Wise's eerie film or Jackson's novel, but unfortunately it is no more funny than it is frightening: any episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer would beat it on both counts. Lili Taylor performs well as Eleanor, and Bruce Dern has a nice cameo, but Neeson is wooden, Wilson is miscast, Zeta-Jones might as well be a shop mannequin, and the computer-generated ghosts overact atrociously. It's passable drive-in fare, and would make a cute ride at Disneyland, but it's a clear case of too many phantoms and not enough menace.

A group of fine actors play utterly egocentric monsters in a testosterone-scented shared house where women are mere sex toys (with the occasional banal line of dialogue when a string is pulled). Spacey's character is the most sympathetic, possibly because we're used to seeing him as a villain, but Chazz Palminteri was much more likeable in the Usual Suspects. The closest this gets to comedy is when Eddie (Sean Penn) character tries to read some significance into Phil's (Palminteri) death. Apart from a few scenes in cars, it looks and feels like a stage play, and sounds more like a two-hour whine with occasional pieces of rant.

Probably the worst movie ever inspired by or blamed on Arthurian myth, this features some talented actors struggling valiantly with terrible miscasting (only Dyan Cannon as an American tourist seems comfortable in her role) and an awful script. The sets look cheap and stagey, and the only entertaining thing about the whole film is how laughably bad the special effects are. This is so utterly without redeeming features that I can't recommend this to anyone - fantasy fans, fans of any of the actors, not even lovers of bad movies.

A $200m+ budget, 2000+ passengers on the Titanic, 3 hours plus of film, and what do we get for it? Two - count 'em, two! - fictitious stock romantic characters (three if you're feeling generous and count Cal), plus a few walk-ons. Even the Titanic itself isn't much more than an extra; another writer/director could have told the same story on a real ship in half the time at a hundredth of the cost. It's all told as a flash-back, so there are no surprises in the 'plot', and I spent most of the last twenty minutes muttering, "Just hurry up and die, will you?"

I'm not saying it's a bad film; it's merely overlong and overrated. There are some very good moments, especially after the Titanic begins sinking and we get to meet some other characters: good special effects, generally good performances (I particularly liked David Warner), a good musical score, and wonderful sets. I suspect, though, that eventually someone will make a tighter, more interesting film set on the Titanic, and this one will sink without trace.

The Big Easy is a fairly straightforward thriller about police corruption - a little predictable, but with occasional clever touches - but the apparent chemistry between Quaid and Barkin is outstanding, making this one of the steamiest movies I've ever seen (much hotter than 9 1/2 weeks, and with the benefit of a plot and sympathetic characters). Accents aside (I'm only an occasional visitor to New Orleans, and not qualified to judge), the other performances are also excellent, especially Beatty and Goodman as corrupt cops, and there are also some gut-bustingly funny moments and a wonderful soundtrack. The film may not do justice to modern New Orleans, but then, what movie ever did?

With all the fuss that has been made about it, you could be forgiven for thinking that "Showgirls" was somehow ground-breaking, but the only things that distinguish it from a myriad of earlier sexploitation movies are the big budget, the publicity, the glossy look, and the overpaid writer. The acting, dialogue and plot are even less convincing than in many of the porn movies I've seen, and putting a rape scene in a skinflick isn't new: it was commonplace in the 70s and earlier. If you want to see bare breasts and satire of American culture in the same film, watch a Russ Meyer movie instead of this sleazy rehash.

Based on a true story, this Australian mini-series is one of the few police dramas I've ever seen which conveys how complicated, frustrating and slow the process of solving a murder can be... and yet manages to be a gripping drama. As an added bonus, it features one of the best depictions of real (sane!) scientists ever put on television - a husband-and-wife team of forensic experts who manage to retain their integrity as scientists despite the political demands of the job. It also boasts an excellent soundtrack, as well as strong performances from all of the cast. Catch it if you can.

Terry Jones, Oxford history graduate and former member of the Monty Python team, helms an unromantic and sometimes irreverent look at the political, economic and religious machinations behind the Crusades, with a particular emphasis on the absurdities and atrocities. Travelling along the crusader trail, he uses interviews with historians and traditional weapon-makers, translations of Arab folk tales and medieval letters, clips from old movies and some startling visual effects to create an unforgettable documentary.

Vampira (also known as 'Old Dracula', presumably in the hope that someone would confuse it with the excellent 'Young Frankenstein', released in the same year) is a feeble spoof of vampire films for those who don't like either (a) vampires or (b) laughing. An aging Dracula attempts to revive his beloved Vampira with transfusions from Playboy bunnies, but the wrong blood sample somehow transforms her into Teresa Graves, so he goes to London to get more white blood cells. Niven lends some dignity to this mildly offensive nonsense, but it's tragically short on good jokes: 'Love at First Bite' did it much better, and even 'Dracula: Dead and Loving It' has more laughs.