Lupercali

Please bear in mind that it's over 30 years since I've seen this, and I was eleven at the time.

The series centers on a farm worker with unbelievable natural football (Australian rules) skills. A talent scout accidentally spots him kicking a bale of hay about 50 feet. He is quickly snapped up by a VFL team (which became the AFL, which is roughly the equivalent of the NFL in the US), and to be blunt, I don't remember much more than that, except that I thought it was great when I was eleven years old, and so did most of my mates.

This comes from a period of Australian comedy that produced other shows like 'Kingswood Country' (later to become 'Commodore Country') and saw the tail end of the Grahame Bond/Aunty Jack series, like 'Flash Nick from Jindavik' and 'Woolongong the Brave', and before Australian comedy deteriorated into tedious stand-up comedy shows.

I suspect this show will remain lost forever, which is a shame. It just might be as much fun as I remember.

I can't believe the rating this very ordinary Chuck Jones short has at the moment. Two starving castaways turn up on a desert island, already occupied by Bugs. A bunch or predictable, stupid jokes and not particularly outstanding animation ensues. Don't get me wrong, Warner were putting out some classic cartoons during this period, but Tex Avery had just stormed out the door, and frankly in 1943 he had it all over Chuck Jones, even if Jones was to perfect his craft and surpass Avery in the 1950's. I really can't understand how anyone but an animation buff could be more than passingly distracted by this completely ordinary and ever so predictable WB short. Plus it's yet another WB so-and-so wants to eat so-and-so cartoon. *yawn* Now watch the '0 out of 115 people found this helpful' stats pile up.

'Solo One' was a short-lived (one season) spin-off from the long-running and popular early 70's rural Australian cop drama 'Matlock Police'. In the series Paul Cronin reprised his role as Sen. Const. Gary Hogan from 'Matlock'. The show's signature motif was Cronin's police bike (which would probably have been a Honda 750, if memory serves). I remember enjoying while it was on, as Hogan had grown to be such a memorable character from 'Matlock' - however the show didn't last long before a sea-change came across Crawford Productions, which had produced a succession of cop dramas since 1964. This was one of their last forays into that genre, excepting the groundbreaking 'Cop Shop' (1977). Their next venture, 'The Sullivans', was an entirely different an enormously successful series; a period drama set in the 40's, and Cronin was recruited for the central role of patriarch of the Sullivans clan for the next seven years.

My recollection is that 'Solo One' was a decent show, but good luck finding it anywhere on TV now. Keep your eye on WIN in the early hours of the morning. They're presently repeating two other Crawford cop shows at 3 am.

'Steamboy' could, perhaps should have been a towering achievement in animation. For about the first 20 or 30 minutes I really thought it was going to be. The gorgeous recreation of 19th century Manchester, complete with accurate regional accents, the wonderful background artwork, the inoffensive blending of 3D and 2D animation, the obviously unique storyline, all seemed to bode very well. In fact I had the impression I was watching a sort of Mechano version of Miyazaki. Whereas Miyazaki's films have an undeniable feminine quality, 'Steamboy' is very 'Boys Own'. Additionally it avoided the pitfall of so much anime - utterly convoluted plot. It was sufficiently imaginative without being incomprehensible.

Somehow the charm started to tarnish a little as the movie continued and the action shifted to London though. The feeling I got was very similar to my first viewing of Miyazaki's 'Castle in the Sky', which I was convinced was going to be a masterpiece during the first 30 minutes, but which ended up being my least favourite of that director's films.

There is a great deal to admire about 'Steamboy', and a few minor gripes, but there is one complaint which for me spoiled the film, and it's not an unfamiliar one, because it's the same thing that spoiled 'Akira' for me fifteen years earlier. Namely, the climax lasts for the entire second half of the movie. The characters and plot become secondary to the spectacle of huge pieces of machinery, steam shooting everywhere, gigantic ponderous objects lurching about over London. At least, unlike 'Akira', it made sense, but it should still have been compressed into half the space, and if a two hour running time were still required, perhaps more could have been devoted to exploring the characters - particularly Scarlett, whose appearance in the film seems fairly pointless to me.

It's a must-see film for animation and anime fans, and many will be less critical, but no matter how brilliant it was in many regards, 'Steamboy' joins a growing list of animated films (particularly CGI animated films) which knock my socks off in the first half hour, and then slowly... lose steam.

I'm a huge fan of De Niro and Scorsese (at least of how they used to be), but I feel I have to inject a note of dissent here. Such that I can pretty much predict that "0 out of 8 people will find the following comment useful" (you ever notice that nobody ever finds it useful when you pan something?) I remember 'King of Comedy' being released. I was twenty. In the crowds I moved in at the time it was pretty much seen as a success: an audacious departure. And in many ways it comes very close to being that. But nearly a quarter century later, 'King of Comedy' seems to lack real satiric power, and despite some great acting from De Niro and Lewis, feels like it's lost its way.

De Niro plays Rupert... well, he complains that his name is often misspelled, so you'll excuse me if I don't try here... a delusional, aspiring but talentless fan of Jerry Lewis's 'comedy king' character. Abbetted by an even more deranged female accomplice Rupert kidnaps Jerry, as his only means of getting his break in showbiz.

Early on the movie has a relatively conventional feel. De Niro is genuinely chilling (as well as embarrassing) as the gormless Rupert. Lewis's stoic grumpiness is perfect, too. It's when you begin to become aware that the film is straying into black comedy and satire that things start to go a bit awry (for this viewer anyway). Of course it's difficult to get away with being critical of such a movie, because it's possible for anybody to argue that any sequence I see as a blunder is actually not meant to be taken seriously. Nevertheless, I don't feel that Sandra Bernhard's hysterical babbling in her scene alone with Jerry Lewis works either as drama OR comedy, and Rupert's comic abilities seem to improve dramatically overnight for no reason at all.

These aren't my major problems with 'King of Comedy' though. I'll admit it's actually quite riveting a lot of the time, and it's certainly nowhere near either Scorsese or De Niro's worst film (frankly, after the terrible 'Gangs of New York', and the 'Aviator', which could have been made by anyone, I wouldn't really mind if Scorsese chucked it in and stuck to 'directing' Larry David in CYE. And let's not even mention that Dreamworks cartoon.. urrrgh!) Err, yes. This review isn't going very well, is it. Maybe I should just stop now, like in a Monty Python sketch.

OK, my main problem is I don't really see what this movie 'getting at', or in what way it's controversial or audacious. It's black humour doesn't seem that black today, and whatever point it's trying to make about celebrity leaves me with a feeling of 'so what?' I'm sure this would have been more powerful and surprising back in 1983, but if you're looking for a black comedy/drama about TV, 'Network' knocks spots off this, and it's about seven years older (and don't tell me that wasn't a comedy-drama. There's nothing in 'King of Comedy' as funny as the black Marxist terrorists arguing with TV execs about syndication rates).

Oh hell, this review was a mess. I know, I know. 0 out of 8 of you are going to find it useful. That's if you even see it, seeing as how for some reason rave reviews get automatically bumped to the top in this weird system.

It's a decent film with good acting, and is certainly worth watching as a curiosity, but whatever it was trying to be, I just think it didn't quite cut it. In its favour, I can't quite think of anything to outright to compare it with, and it's worth seeing for that reason alone.

To be honest I don't think the rest of the film quite deserves 8 stars, but Dustin Hoffman's performance as Lenny Bruce is so extraordinary that it lifts the movie up to that rating.

Made in a fairly familiar quasi-documentary style, 'Lenny' begins with 'present day' (i.e. 1974) interviews with the surviving characters from Lenny's life, cut with flashbacks to his 1950's beginnings as a 'traditional' comic, and 'late' live performances in his post-drug-bust days. As the film progresses and the narrative catches up with the interviews, the gaps between these segments 'close'. Clever use is made of some of Lenny's material, cutting from keywords or phrases in his bits, to events in his life with inspired or correlated to them.

All the same there is something a little dry and disappointing in the film's structure: almost as if it could have used a more conventional, linear narrative, like Milos Forman's tribute to Andy Kauffman, 'Man on the Moon' would use to such great effect 25 years later.

Ironically though, such a structure might have deprived of us of seeing more of Hoffman doing Lenny's bits 'live' on stage - and for me these were the highlights, which I wish had lasted longer, rather than flashing back to some past event after 30 seconds. As a big Lenny Bruce fan, I can only say that Hoffman's portrayal is almost supernatural. It's like he's channeling the guy. He has his mannerisms and improvisational style down perfectly. You would swear you were seeing these improvisations for the first time if you hadn't heard them already. In fact, Hoffman possibly even improves on Lenny's delivery in one small respect. Lenny had a penchant for the 'conversation' that would erupt in the middle of one of his bits, between two or more characters. Hoffman probably puts a bit more distinction between the characters than Lenny often did (quite often they would all just sound like Lenny, which was part of the magic, but never mind.) Over 30 years on, it's quite amazing to me that this film has become a relative obscurity in Dustin Hoffman's filmography. Frankly, though Hoffman has blown me away on various occasions, I don't ever remember being more blown away than this. And if you were to pick easy people to imitate, I doubt Lenny Bruce on stage would be high on many people's lists.

The film as a whole is good, but to witness Hoffman channeling Bruce, it's a must-see.

This horror/thriller/(maybe)supernatural movie is nothing really remarkable, or anything that you haven't seen before, but it's quite watchable. After the suicide of his wife, Robert de Niro's psychologist character withdraws to an isolated rural location as therapy for his traumatised daughter. Things start to get creepy when she develops an imaginary friend who has a decidedly vicious streak.

I've been complaining for some years now that de Niro really needs to pay a bit more attention to the sort of parts he accepts: he's been in far too many stupid comedies. Here we finally see him in a dramatic role, and whereas he pulls it off professionally, it's not really an inspired performance, and you have to wonder where his next classic role is going to come from.

That aside, 'Hide and Seek' is a suitably creepy and dark movie. Its major fault, at least as far as I was concerned, is that its crucial 'secret' was obvious by about half an hour from the end. I still held out hopes that I was wrong, but I think anyone who's seen enough films of this sort would work it out by a process of elimination, and besides, the movie blows its own cover completely a good 10 or 15 minutes from the end, which leaves you with a rather disappointing and predictable run home.

The DVD includes four alternate endings, three of which the directors eventually decided were too 'dark', and that the audience deserved some kind of positive 'reward' after having sat through so much traumatic stuff. I disagree. At least two of the three 'dark alternate endings would have improved the film by giving it a sting in the tail. Good god, go through a mental list of great horror movies, and you won't find many that shy away from endings that are 'too dark'.

This was the film which effectively broke Oliver Stone as a director, to the wider public. In this period - back before he started messing around with ridiculous over-editing and changing film stock for every shot, and having baffling scenes from Ben Hur playing while football managers argue with each other - Stone churned out quality movies. 'Salvador', 'Platoon' and 'Wall Street' literally in the space of about 18 months. 'Salvador' is my favourite of the three.

The movie is sort of like 'Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas' crashing into 'Apocalypse Now'. It frequently lurches from horror to hilarity and back again in the space of a few seconds. James Woods, in one of his many borderline psychotic early roles, is absolutely rabid as the jaded, down and out reporter who makes a road trip down to El Salvador with his best mate - James Belushi, in an unsettling but perfectly cast role which teeters between comedy, self-destructive debauchery and redemption.

'Salvador' isn't huge on plot. It's a fairly chaotic mess, which really makes it a perfect newsreel of what was happening in El Salvador in 1980-81, as the US government threw military aid at a psychopathic right-wing government merely because they're 'not communists'.

The film, perhaps unavoidably, gets a tiny bit preachy at times, and there is one scene where Woods comes across just a little too hand-on-his-heart, but overall this was before Stone got it into his head that everything he made was some sort of definitive statement about the American consciousness; that he was the biographer of America's psyche or something.

Quite probably your political leanings will colour your reaction to this movie, and whatever the case, if you don't remember that period (which I barely do), a little homework might be in order before you watch it. What you'll see, in my view, is one of Stone's best films. A movie that is almost relentlessly gripping and constantly charged with a sense of impending horror. And through this maelstrom, James Woods' unforgettable, Oscar-nominated, performance, which at times is so frighteningly natural that it's easy to imagine them sedating him and locking him up in his trailer between takes.

Not a masterpiece, but still a must-see film - which you could say about so many Oliver Stone movies.

I recently bought a bunch of public domain DVD cartoon compilations, some of which didn't bother telling you which show you were watching episodes from. I eventually figured out I was watching 'Colonel Bleep'. Frankly I don't know what to say about this. I grew up on 60's HB animation, so missed out on this (albeit probably fairly narrowly. I can remember Crusader Rabbit). I was simply stunned at how utterly terrible CB is in every respect imaginable. Appalling animation, appalling stories, appalling narration. The only thing on any of the discs which actually beat it in the appallingness stakes was a 1960's ant-smoking cartoon from the Cancer Council of America. Sorry, but I don't have any sentimental attachment to this, and have to face it without rose tinted spectacles. Don't send me hate mail.

There's a reason that most stories have more or less linear narratives: because though memory is reconstructive and random-access, life as we live it is generally linear. Films that wish to explore the nature of memory and how we remember events - for instance, from the POV of the protagonist - are fine, but films that try to present events as we LIVE them, in a radically non-linear way are always going to be on thin ice.

There is a balancing act. The more work you give an audience to do in terms of wrestling with structure and chronology of events, the less capacity remains to comprehend the characters. That isn't to say every film should be like a soap opera, but if you want an audience to concentrate intently on one element of a film, you will inevitably have to give up their concentration on other elements. For me, '21 Grams' goes just a little too far in this regard, and at the end there is really no pay-off. There is no real reason why these events couldn't have been portrayed in a linear way, other than to impress us with the film's non-linearity. Or, dare I suggest, to cover up the fact that if you actually piece together the plot in a linear way, it turns out to be pretty insubstantial (as well as containing a coincidence so silly, that I was telling my TV "Please tell me that's not going to happen. That would just be too corny.") I wanted to like this film, and I came close. The acting is quite stellar. With every outing Sean Penn continues to persuade me that he is the best English language actor of his generation - or at least I can't think of someone else OTTOMH who would obviously deserve that accolade. And in this movie his performance doesn't even outshine th others. The whole cast is wonderful. But I'm sorry, call me a pleb, but this did seem a somewhat needlessly jumbled film, which ultimately doesn't reward us especially for sitting through two hours of very grim cinema. I wished the writers had backed off a little and given the actors a bit more room to shine without the distraction of trying to work out which timezone they're in at any given moment. To be honest, this kind of thing is just starting to get a little old.

What would the film have been like if it had been a little more conventional in structure? I don't know. As is stands, '21 Grams' impressed me in many ways, but I can't say I really enjoyed it. Perhaps it caught me on a bad day, and I was just after something stupid. No, wait - I watched something really stupid last night; I guess it must be something else. Hmm, this really wasn't a terribly good review, was it? Well, too late now. I had to sit thorugh the movie. This only took you 60 seconds. Maybe I should have written it backwards. Actually, yeah, jumble up the paragraphs. That ought to improve it.

Originally part of an 'issue' of 'Paramount Magazine' which consisted of Bobby Bumps in "Their Master's Voice" (by Earl Hurd), "Feline Follies" and Bud and Susie in "Down the Mississippi" (Frank Moser).

This is generally thought to be the first Felix cartoon, though he's called 'Master Tom' at this stage, and bears only a fairly tenuous resemblance to his later appearance. The story is pretty uninteresting. Tom heads off for a rendezvous with his girlfriend, some mice come out while he's away and cause havoc, and he cops hell when he gets back again. There's little of the wit or inventiveness of the later 20's Felix cartoons, though significantly we do see Tom do some trademark Felix things, like pluck question marks out of the air and turn them into go-cart wheels.

I find this cartoon interesting because to me it opens up the Messmer/Sullivan debate a little. It's more or less accepted now that Felix is Messmer's creation, but the fact that in this earliest supposed appearance he's called 'Tom' lends some credibility to the argument that Felix was a development of Sullivan's 'Thomas Kat' who debuted in 1917. I suspect the truth is that both guys deserve credit for Felix in one way or another, but what would I know? Anyway, a decent cartoon, and historically important, but not mind-altering.

The more I watch of 'Curb Your Enthusiasm' the more convinced I become that Larry David is the closest thing to a comic genius in modern television.

CYE airs at 2 AM on network TV in Australia, and being a hopeless insomniac who tends to have the TV going in the background without paying much attention to it, I looked up one night and said "What the - that's Larry David!" (I recognised him only from the extras features on the Seinfeld DVDs). I'd already formed the opinion that LD was the real genius behind Seinfeld, and so when I saw him wandering around in what appeared to be a poorly made sitcom using hand-held cameras, with people who talked over the top of each other, and in which nothing seemed to really happen, my first reaction was "Oh, Larry - how were you reduced to this? I mean, I know the Seinfeld actors can't get gigs now, but you're a writer and you're set for life - what do you care?" Then I caught another half of an episode, and whilst still not paying that much attention, became a little more used to the odd production values, which made it seem like a cross between a mockumentary, a sitcom and reality TV.

Then I randomly caught the part of the 'Nanny from Hell' episode where he turns up with the twelve sponge-cakes and gets inexplicably abused. That made me laugh out loud, and I decided to make a point of watching it the next week. After that, I saw, in order, 'The Spedial Section', 'The Bracelet', and 'Crazy-eyez Killa' (no, I have no idea why they were showing a season 1 ep in the middle of season 3). Anyway, suffice to say that by this time I was hooked, and had been reduced to tears a couple of times. Crazy-Eyes improv comment whilst giving LD a house tour "and we've got some floor-sh *t down here" struck me as the funniest line I had heard on TV in years. Not just the particular description itself, but the fact that he felt moved to attempt to describe the floor at all, and had to come up with some way of conveying that this was somehow a kind of special floor that they'd had specially put in or something.

Anyway by that time I was sold, and ordered the boxed sets that night.

When they arrived I found myself with the first sitcom in many years that I had to watch episodes of two or three times per night, because I hadn't laughed so hard in years, and needed a fix.

The guy from NZ who said that LD comes across as a cross between George Costanza, Basil Fawlty and Woody Allen has it nailed. He has George's neurotic, obsessive sense of moral outrage over utterly trivial things, but coupled with Basil Fawlty's withering sarcasm and intellect (though at other times he comes across as utterly naive, and unaware of the huge gaffs that he's creating). And whoever said that he is often a jerk, but a jerk who is ultimately punished far too much, by other people who are even bigger jerks than him - that nails it as well.

What really sets CYE in a class of its own though is the revolutionary approach to production. The episodes are usually magnificently plotted so that they click into place like a Rubrick's cube - even more so than many Seinfeld episodes - but the combination of this with the fact that the actors are given no scripts at all, just a point outline of the scenes - and furthermore that they don't even know how their scene fits into the rest of the story, because they're only given plot points for the scenes they're actually in - this gives CYE a riveting naturalness which I haven't seen in any other sitcom. I mean, they even leave in what would be normally considered bloopers. In the first episode, LD obviously cracks up twice at unexpected lines from other actors. In one instance the actor even steps out of character briefly and you can tell there is a moment of "God, is it alright that I actually said that to you?" Amazing stuff.

With its masterful, intricate plotting, its gleeful, almost sadistic swipes at every sacred cow in sight, its startling, improvised dialog and production methods, CYE is easily the finniest thing I've seen on TV this millennium. I only hope Larry David can keep this level of genius up for another 20 years, because at the moment he's up there at the sort of level that Woody Allen attained in his golden years.

Loopy de Loop was Hanna Barbera's one venture into cinematic shorts in the late 50's and early 60's. This one comes from around the middle of Loopy's run, in 1962. It's nothing special. Loopy encounters another wolf who is out chasing a rabbit, and tries to persuade him that this is morally wrong (in fact he tries to talk him into switching to soybeans sandwiches). This meets with no success at all, of course. The rabbits overhear it though, and thoroughly approve, encouraging Loopy. It soon turns out that he has more on his plate that he can handle though, as the rabbit turns out to have endless numbers of cousins, all of whom need protecting from the other wolf, who has a rather endearing way of saying "Aww, shutup!", as one of them is pleading for his life. It's nothing special. The only thing that makes it work really is that Loopy is a cool character, and his French-Canadian accent and general suave personality are lots of fun. As a theatrical short though, this is pretty ordinary.

In this clever wartime spoof, a mosquito attack on a human's butt is portrayed as an elaborate aerial military exercise. We are taken through preparations for the assault, from basic training, reconnaissance, and so forth. Mosquitos dodge obstacle courses of mechanical fly-swatters and so on. Eventually the assault is launched. Though the most obvious conclusion is that it's inspired by the D-Day landings (a phrase something like that is used), the cartoon was completed shortly after the war, and therefore manages to avoid being a propaganda exercise. The human isn't obviously portrayed as being foreign, nor are the mosquitoes of any particular nationality. It's more just a cartoon which people could easily relate to having come through the war years. It's obviously less funny to a modern audience, though still entertaining. What spoils it for me is the almost complete lack of 'closure' in the ending. It was more like 'well the seven minutes is up. Think of a sight-gag to finish with. Anything will do.' This seems to have been pretty common in WB's of this period though.

One of what seems an endless number of takes on the Little Red Riding Hood story from around this era, this one is cleverly presented in the form of a court trial with the Wolf as defendant. Part of the cartoon takes place in the courtroom, where the Wolf's untrustworthiness is obvious (early on he stands up and a hand grenade, knife and gun fall out of his coat). The other part consists of a film within a film based on the Wolf's recreation of the events, which has him lured to to Grandma's house - Grandma turns out to be a furrier and is after him for his coat. All of this works very well, but with quite a few Merrie Melodies I've seen from this period it rather falls in a heap with a sudden ending which seems hastily thought out and doesn't really tie in to the main theme of the cartoon satisfyingly. Still, good fun.

It's difficult to be too hard on any silent cartoons, but by this stage they'd been making Felix cartoons for years, and had made much better ones than this six or seven years earlier. Basically by this stage Felix was going off the boil. You can forgive a lot, but there's really no excuse for poor comic timing, and in this short, scenes and shots which are supposed to be amusing are allowed to drag on interminably, way past the point that any comic potential is exhausted. It doesn't help that the story is pretty uninteresting either; the attempt to have a picnic in fickle autumn weather. Chase this one down only if you're a completist. Most likely you'll find it on a disc containing other much superior Felix shorts.

In the opening sequence of 'Silent Running' the camera, in close focus, slowly pans over a woodland ground-scape featuring rocks, plants, frogs, and a turtle. Unfortunately this is possibly the highlight of the movie.

I mean no disrespect to fans of this film - and to prove that I am not some 14 year-old who can only name the latest Hollywood SFX blockbuster, let me say there are plenty of SF movies from the early 70's or even late 60's which I find very worthy and quite watchable today. The original 'Planet of the Apes' still works. '2001', needless to say, but more forgotten movies, too. 'Soylent Green' still actually packs a punch today, and even 'The Andromeda Strain', despite being incredibly dry and quite slow, is tension filled. And of course I love 'Dark Star', which in retrospect almost seems like a parody of this movie at certain times - but for the life of me I cannot understand how so many people can be so fond of 'Silent Running', which to me is almost completely awful.

I don't even know where to start listing its problems. The lead character, who I suspect is supposed to come across as some sort messianic environmentalist hero, is clearly unhinged even in the earliest scenes, and coupled with Dern's excruciating over-acting, it's hard to feel any sympathy for him as he rants and raves at his crewmates who race over his garden in a scene that looks like it was heavily influenced by The Banana Splits Show. Later he rants and raves whenever anyone basically mentions the word 'tree' or nature' or 'the', and you end up feeling sorry for his crewmates for having to put up with someone who is clearly a dangerous maniac.

Other than this, the movie proceeds at a terrible crawl - thank God it's less than 90 minutes long. There are silly waddling droids, which I gather actually contain real-life double amputees. The scenes involving them which are supposed to be touching and pathetic are - I'm sorry - borderline funny. Meanwhile Dern's character, apparently the world's foremost expert on botany, displays his expertise in the field by not realising that plants need sunlight to photosynthesize. In the meantime Joan Baez sings a couple of embarrassing nature ballads that might have worked on Sesame Street. Oh yes, and they have this futuristic 8-ball game where a gigantic, unwieldy robotic arm picks the balls up and racks them up in the frame. It takes about 30 seconds to do each ball. Why someone doesn't just knock it out of the way and do it themselves is anyone's guess.

Meanwhile the central character goes slowly madder, while he continues to do a series of completely uninteresting things.

I decided to watch this film partly because of h4 good reviews here. I want to do my part to try to make sure somebody else doesn't suffer the same fate as me.

I'll admit off the bat to being a Peter Sellers fan. Not a foaming at the mouth, rabid fanatic, but I've always liked his work - so perhaps there is some bias in my judgment of this film. I'd like to hope there's not too much, though.

The first impression I got, early on, was that for reasons unknown to me, the movie set itself out to be a character assassination of Sellers, and nothing that happened later did anything to change this opinion.

Even if you don't share that view, as most people seem not to, I would suggest to you that the movie is deeply flawed for a couple of very basic reasons. Firstly there is nothing better than a flawed character: I'm all for them, even if they were real people. The thing is that you have to develop the character and show us WHY he or she is flawed. 'Life and Death of PS' barely even attempts to explain why Sellers behaves the way he does. Skipping his early life entirely, and commencing basically just before his film career (we see a brief scene of The Goon Show at the start), the movie offers no explanation for Sellers' narcissism, callousness, womanizing, other than the quite unconvincing and endlessly repeated theme that he had a pushy, over-indulgent mother. And even if we accepted that this somehow led to his personality traits, we would have to take the writers' word for it, because there is no substantial causal link established. Sellers behaves like a demented prat virtually from the start. We never get to see how he got to be that way.

The second major flaw is implicit in two central premises of the movie: that Sellers was a deeply flawed personality, and that he actually had no personality. It shouldn't take a rocket scientist to deduce that a man with no character of his own can't have character flaws.

Finally there are times in this movie when the portrayal of Sellers is simply too absurd to be believable. How on earth somebody with such manifest comic genius, and who could be seemingly irresistibly charming at times (something which requires a certain amount of insight) - how such a person could behave at other times with complete and utter cluelessness about what people around him were thinking beggars belief. You would basically have to accept that the man was periodically out of his mind, yet the movie doesn't really seem to posit anything like mental derangement.

The only reason I can really think of for watching this movie is to see Geoffrey Rush expressing his own versatility as an actor, by tackling so many of Sellers' character roles. Despite an impressive performance, he is still so conspicuously inferior to Sellers himself though, that you might as well just go and rent the original Sellers movies.

I couldn't help feeling that this was a rather nasty little film, apart from a not particularly good one.

I first saw this movie at the cinema when I was a kid, and it blew me away, if you'll excuse the expression. Probably also started my lifelong interest in Tidal Waves, as I think it was the first time I'd ever heard of them. Watching it 35 years later was not, unfortunately, a particularly rewarding experience.

For a start, purely by coincidence, a couple of days before my online rental copy arrived in the mail, a local station played a documentary about the disaster, which despite being a slapped together TV production, made the documentary aspect of the film look outright pathetic. 'Krakatoa' won the special effects Oscar for 1969, and it's quite amazing how old and limited those effects actually seem, compared even with movies of a few years later, like 'The Poseidon Adventure'.

Probably what disappointed me most about 'East of Java' is that I had remembered it as focusing much more on the volcanic eruption than it actually does. The film is far more concerned with the adventure yarn about diving for pearls, and the romance between the two main characters. Krakatoa almost seems like just a backdrop sometimes. People rarely even refer to the fact that there's a mountain in the process of blowing itself into the stratosphere, a few hundred yards away. Maximilian Schell as the unflappable captain is particularly infuriating in this regard, as nothing the volcano throws up seems to phase him in the slightest. He barely seems interested in it, as if mountains explode during diving expeditions on a fairly regular basis.

The rest of the cast are all adequate, but nobody excels. There is a rather distasteful sequence where an admittedly laudanum-sozzled Brian Keith assaults a Japanese diving girl, and after he dries out by being suspended in a crate for a few hours, nobody seems to think it was a particularly noteworthy incident.

It's a decent adventure yarn, but there is little effort made to summon the sense of foreboding and dread which would have been appropriate given what was about to happen. I suppose the art of building tension in disaster movies wasn't really honed until the early to mid 70's.

Somehow I missed this movie when it was released, and I rented it recently from an online DVD store without knowing how old it was. I quickly surmised that it was mid 90's, but what I was startled at right from the outset was how incredibly DATED it seemed: the attitudes portrayed, the liberal guilt, and its attempted resolution through the courtroom heroics of the protagonist. This might have been a groundbreaking film a couple of decades earlier, but I guess the producers didn't notice we already have 'To Kill a Mockingbird', 'Twelve Angry Men' and umpteen other such things. Then it hit me, why all this incredibly old-fashioned moralising... but I'll get to that in a minute.

This alone may not have sunk the film, but lo, the movie suffers from the attack of every screen writing cliché in Hollywood. I mean, it's so predictable that I was actually able to hold my left hand in the air and let it fall at the exact moment that Matthew McConaughey's supposedly dead dog runs out of the bushes. Add to that the utter over-the-topness of it. We've got the Klux Klux Klan marching down the road outside the court in broad daylight for Heaven's sake, and the National Guard running about going 'Hut! Hut! Hut!', and armoured vehicles - in one scene the army has machine guns trained on the (completely inert) crowd outside the court. Heaven forbid they should just cordon off the area if they were expecting trouble. I'm sorry, but I actually laughed at a couple of these moments.

We've got a bunch of fine actors, almost none of whom are given anything to act with. Good evidence of this is that Kiefer Sutherland was in a movie with both his father and Kevin Spacey, and managed not to look conspicuously inferior. I don't think this was due to any great effort on KS's part. More that his character was about as one-dimensional as theirs.

I could have fun just listing the absurdities in this movie. Oh, and the plot-holes. Part of the reason we're supposed to accept that the revenge killing was justifiable in this case, is that one of the perps had signed a confession. If this was so, why was everybody expecting him to walk free the day he went into court? And did Morgan Freeman's character _know_ about this confession (this is the defense of the revenge killing; that the killer absolutely _knows_ the accused to be guilty.) And oh, yes, it just slipped the defense team's attention that their star psychiatrist was a convicted statutory rapist? Good God.

Now, if all of that isn't bad enough, we have the fact that the film is actually pretty offensive. We're supposed to come away from this feeling that this vigilante revenge killing was justified; either that or presumably get in our pickup with the Union flag on it and drive off swigging a bottle of Jack Daniels. Well, pardon me: I'm opposed to the death penalty, AND I would probably have done the same thing Freeman's characer did, like most guys would in that situation when they're half out of their minds, but this film did not convince me that I would have been right in so doing, and I don't like having my intelligence insulted by the supposition that I can't work it out for myself.

McConaughey tells the jury to imagine that the rape victim was white. The prosecuting attorney might have been given the opportunity to ask them to imagine if the two men Freeman shot had turned out to be innocent. Because ultimately that's what's on trial here: not this specific case, but the whole notion of the death penalty, whether dispensed by the courts or by a vigilante.

Oh yeah. The Magistrate is Judge Noose. That has to be either one of the worst attempts at humour in history, or the worst attempt at symbolism in history. I forgot about that.

Anyway, earlier I said I was baffled by why the film seemed so dated, so concerned with the race issue. Why Freeman's character could say something as dumb to his lawyer on the last day of the trial as "America is a war. You're on the other side." Then I remembered, this was only a few years after the Rodney King bashing and the LA riots. A film very much of its time, but that doesn't excuse how terribly ham-fisted and clichéd it is.

I'm giving it 5 simply because the production values were decent, the actors did what they could with a bad script, and there were actually two or three decent scenes (Bullock and McConaughey in the café arguing over the death penalty was one of the film's few good moments). But 5 is my bare minimum for a big budget modern movie simply going through the motions. This has nothing to lift it any higher, and I'm probably being a bit kind to it.

I suppose I should add that I live on an island halfway to Antarctica, so don't really have any overwhelming racial or political investment in the subject matter. It was just a stupid film. It would have been stupid if it had presented the opposite point of view as ineptly.

I find this movie guilty of being ridiculous, obnoxious, predictable, and occasionally funny.

I'm amazed that this film rates so well here. The re-make of 'The Bourne Identity' (which I actually only watched for the first time two days before this movie) was a decent thriller. This was a hopelessly weak, half-hearted, over-stylised and predictable bore of a movie.

The signs were there early on, when Jason reacts to a traumatic event with barely any emotion (nor at any time later in the movie). Events happen rapidly and confusingly, a blonde woman who talks very quickly is assigned to the case by the CIA, Bourne runs about the place using different passports, there are car chases. There is more editing in this film than in an Oliver Stone film on picture search. Honestly, there are fight sequences in which the shot changes so fast, so often, that you can't even work out who is hitting who. I actually sat down at one action sequence in the film and tried to time a camera shot that lasted for more than a second, and failed. This pointless stylisation is just really irritating and makes things difficult to follow.

More importantly though the movie just has no feeling. You can understand why Bourne would be motivated to behave the way he does, but he doesn't actually seem to be experiencing any such feelings, except the usual confusion and determined anger left over from the first film.

Honestly I just thought this was a weak, weak film. It didn't engage me emotionally, there was too much frivolous editing, the characters and plot were predictable, despite the best efforts of the director to render the plot hard to follow. It was just very obviously a case of "Well the first film made a lot of money, we'll have to make a sequel." If the ratings here are any judge, I suppose they'll have to make another one, but I can tell you now I'll be staying away from that.

Ike: Countdown to D-Day (Australian title) is a fine movie relating the 90 days prior to the Normandy landings from the point of view of Dwight D. Eisenhower. It's a film about the hardships of responsibility and leadership, about decisions which you know will cost the lives of perhaps tens of thousands of men. It's not blood and guts and explosions. It's weather reports, terse meetings, and agonising decisions.

There is no action at all in 'Ike'. It's very much a drama and a character study. The ensemble cast is uniformly superb, and none are better than Selleck, who turns in an unforgettable performance. It's ironic that for the longest time Selleck was relegated to B-movies and lightweight fare, his movie career never really managing to take off. It seemed his famous good looks were to consign him to a brief stint as a TV hunk, followed by a decline into obscurity.

In 'Ike', Selleck emerges reborn, balding, moustache long-gone, dour, sensitive and intense. If this movie doesn't finally kick-start his movie career and give him the sort of break that Travolta got with 'pulp Fiction', there is no justice.

'The Ruling Class', released in 1972, is a farce on the British aristocracy, and (at least from this distance), you have to wonder if it is much less relevant today than when it was made. There is still a House of Lords, and it has taken the intervening 32 years to have fox-hunting almost banned.

Briefly, the Earl of Guerney dies in a ridiculously fetishistic manner, and leaves his estate to his son, Jack, much to the outrage of his family, since Jack has been a voluntary mental patient for the past 8 years. A plan is hatched to marry him off, get a mail heir, and then through diverse intrigues, gain possession of the estate.

Unfortunately Jack books himself out and shows up. Jack, who believes himself to be God, is played by Peter O'Toole, resplendent in Jesus hairdo and varying hilariously between Biblical sounding pronouncements and schizophrenic word-salad nonsense. Generally he is entirely manic, except when he is sleeping on the huge wooden cross, in full view of anyone who walks into the manor.

This was made two or three years before O'Toole literally almost drank himself to death, and one gets the feeling that they didn't so much write this part for him as set him loose on the set and tell him 'Be yourself'. This isn't meant as an insult. O'Toole is utterly magnetic, whether making Shakespearean pronouncements, running madly about, or as his even more insane incarnation as Jack the Ripper after he is 'cured'.

The film lurches from hilarious satire to very dark humour, containing scenes which are genuinely alarming if not outright terrifying (again, mostly thanks to O'Toole). Other standouts include Arthur Lowe as the long-suffering Communist butler, and Alistair Sim as a hilariously doddering bishop.

The film itself is all over the shop. Even at the most unexpected moments, the cast is likely to suddenly break out into a musical number. Another schizophrenic patient is wheeled in who proclaims himself to be the 'High-Voltage God', and who can shoot 10 million volts from his fingertips (whether the lightning bolts crackling from his fingers are imaginary or real, who knows?). It can lurch from lunacy like this to genuinely chilling scenes including brutal violence and murder. Generally speaking the second half of the film, after Jack's 'cure' is much darker.

The flaws? Well, I think the second half is definitely unnecessary long. My VHS copy is 156 minutes, and if the current version is 141 minutes, that could be an improvement, if they carved some of the later scenes out. Basically it out-stays its welcome a little. Having made its point, it rather harps on it.

All the same, there is nothing really like this in British cinema (except perhaps the even more obscure, and even more mad, but rather less scalding 'Sir Henry at Rawlinson End'). The cast is uniformly terrific, some of the dialogue is priceless, and it has some of the funniest scenes from 70's British cinema. You do need to be able to roll along with the changing mood of the film though, because what for the most part is a hilarious satire develops into a very, very black comedy.

Pleasantly lightweight and silly comedy about a dimwitted musical genius from Arkansas who can compose brilliant songs - but only while asleep, never remembering them upon waking. He moves to the big smoke and is exploited by a ruthless duo of producers. This involves some pretty funny scenes of them trying to get him to fall asleep (once asleep he starts singing, and they feverishly write down the music and lyrics, and publish them themselves) - though perhaps this gag is overdone a bit in the scene where the bedroom gets filled with pigs and ducks and sheep.

Watch out for Ann Miller in an early scene, doing some dance steps which ought to be physically impossible.

No classic, but well worth a watch.

Ralph Bakshi, who boldly went no animator had gone before in the 1970's, settled into a long slump after the excellent 'Wizards' (1977), which included the awful 'Lord of the Rings', and his last feature in almost a decade, the equally awful 'Fire and Ice' (1983). After that, apart from doing what I'm told is some excellent TV work (particularly 'Mighty Mouse'), he wasn't heard from again by wider audiences until 'Cool World', which turned out to be an improvement, but still basically a dud. Then another hiatus, until these videos pop up with episodes of the Bakshi TV series 'Spicy City'. Well, I must say that although this is nowhere near in the same league as his best 70's stuff, it's undoubtedly the best stuff I've seen from him since then. It's all set in a sleazy Bladerunner meets Cyberpunk sort of future world, and whereas a lot of it is not particularly clever or funny, there are enough flashes of inspiration to make it worth watching, and make one hope that the guy maybe is still capable of delivering on the promise of his groundbreaking early work. You kind of doubt it, and doubt that he even would really want to, but this is the first think I've seen from him in 20 years that takes a step back from the mainstream/family market and dares to be a bit cheeky again.

Not great, but good to see there's still a spark there.

I suppose I can see how it might remind some people of 'Heavy Metal', but it never struck me that way (incidentally I thought 'Heavy Metal' was awful, even when I was 22 and wasted.)