Sweet Nothings

Way back when, it was possible to derive pleasure from a game where you simply rode your bike down a street each morning, delivering papers and avoiding loads of tyres/dogs/balls jumping/rolling/flying out at you. Happy days. Sadly The Paperboy is the new film from Lee (Precious) Daniels and not a better-late-than-never adaptation of the classic video game. If only it had anything resembling a coherent structure. “Now this is where things get complicated”, says the narrator (Macy Gray) at one point, the patronising cow. But she’s kind of right, because no sooner does the film starts to develop something approaching a plot, it gets bored of that, pumps up the sleaze levels and just throws stuff at the screen, intending to provoke as much as entertain or tell a proper story. The setup can be summarized thus: journalist returns to Florida hometown to investigate a possible miscarriage of justice, with his younger brother, a local bimbo who’s been flirting by mail with the ja...

I came away from Zero Dark Thirty  with my mind curiously un-blown. This was partly a case of media coverage reaching saturation point long before I got to see the thing, and partly a structural issue (of which more later). Neither of which are entirely the filmmakers' fault, unless of course you fall into the "anti" camp, for whom the film represents at best the CIA's manipulation of Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal into making them a two-hour recruitment ad, and at worst an outrageous endorsement of America's vile imperialism brought to you by a modern-day Leni Riefenstahl. Frankly I'd become bored with the back-and-forth arguments from both sides of this particular fence way before Zero Dark was released here. The rant that was teased at the end of my last post is not going to materialize, since I can't see there being anything new to add to the debate and nothing I say could possibly change anybody's mind. (Yep, I've been reduced to bait-...

"Whip" Whitaker (an Oscar-nominated Denzel Washington) is not bad at this aeroplane piloting lark, managing to flip a nosediving plane upside down in order to land it relatively safely in a bonkers and gripping sequence at the beginning of Flight . Unfortunately Whip is also rather fond of the sauce, amongst other substances. As the airline's lawyer (Don Cheadle) coolly informs him, America is the most generous country in the world regarding blood alcohol levels and he was still three times over the limit - and that's for driving a car . This film must rank as one of the best anti-drink drive ads of all time. (Except that Whip appears to fly well because of the drink and drugs rather than despite them, but we'll ignore that.) Needless to say, after the accident the twin pressures of sudden celebrity and potential lawsuits begin to take their toll, and Washington holds a slightly patchy movie together with a measured performance. The script gives more scope fo...

It’s that time of year again when we can pretend to be distracted from the grimness of the post-Christmas and New Year but pre-holiday freezing wilderness by the glut of awards-bait filling up our cinemas. There are still some movies coming out which aren’t up for any sort of baubles though - Gangster Squad is one of them, although it feels like a project that was commissioned with at least a vague hope of bagging a nomination or two. The trailer promises a glamorously gritty gangster piece, studded with moral ambiguity (the titular squad operating outside the law in an attempt to take down Sean Penn’s kingpin by any means necessary), a starry cast and - better yet - a supposedly true story as its inspiration. So what went wrong? Well, you never really feel pulled in. Characters rarely stray beyond the generic, the squad including a clever-but-weedy type, a grizzled old-timer, a black guy and a token hispanic. Ryan Gosling, as a smooth young cop who doesn’t seem to give a da...