Non-special delivery

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 jailed killer, and an incongruous black English assistant in tow.

The latter, as played by David Olewayo as an absurdly petulant super-prick, somehow doesn’t immediately get punched in the face by everyone and becomes an object of lust. That’s not unusual though, as everyone here seems to fancy everyone else. Daniels has excelled himself in a way, dicking around with the camera to create an authentic exploitation feel and marinating the screen in layers of sleaze until you feel as grimy and sweaty as the onscreen South Florida locale. Seriously, aren’t Odeon seats uncomfortable enough already?

The director also appears to have had a whale of a time prodding his actors into ever more outrageous situations. Nicole Kidman in particular gets to piss on Zac Efron and engage in some mutual visiting room self-pleasuring with John Cusack. The cast are all game for this - Cusack gives it the full-on slack-jawed hick, Matthew McConaughey languidly drawls his way through his progressively uglier scenes. All the more of a shame then that these characters range from grimly unpleasant to paper-thin to simply dull.

Efron’s troubled twentysomething and Macy Gray’s maid are the only two vaguely sympathetic presences, but their awkward friendship-crossing-the-race-divide storyline never amounts to much of substance and certainly isn’t enough to balance out either the total the lack of plot or the tawdry shock tactics on display elsewhere.

In other words, The Paperboy fails to (brace yourself) deliver on any level. However, if you really want to see a darkly funny, squirm-inducing, McConaughey-starring southern noir then go watch last year’s Killer Joe, which does this stuff properly. And thank me later.

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I also went to a Future Cinema screening of Casablanca a couple of weekends back. For readers unfamiliar with this concept, FC present an “experience”, hiring actors and designers to create a kind of multisensory audience participation environment as an extention of the film before they get around to actually screening it.

I will confess to being apprehensive about all this before kick-off. Did I really have to join hundreds of other middle-class folks ironically dressed up in vaguely 1940s garb to walk through one of the bleaker areas of East London in the middle of a recession?

Well yes, as my other half had kindly bought us tickets to see what is my joint-favourite film as a Valentine’s treat, and therefore I needed to stop being a cynical sod and make an effort as - heaven forbid - I might even enjoy it.

Once we’d negotiated the queue and the possibility of getting frisked up by pretend Germans against a nearby wall, we entered the Troxy (oh ok, “Rick’s Cafe”) itself and it was decked out splendidly. A full band playing period tunes, food and booze aplenty, actors roaming around as characters from the film (the diminutive bloke playing Signor Ferrari looked nothing like the hefty Sydney Greenstreet, but never mind) and periodically playing out scenes from the movie... yeah alright, it was actually pretty good fun I suppose, and we got to have a dance, watch what is clearly The Best Movie Ever Made (joint titleholder with Pulp Fiction, obvs) and even boo some Germans and sing the Marseilleise at them.

Having said all that, whether I would go to another of these would rather depend on the film in question. Not necessarily in terms of how good it was, but it’s worth bearing in mind that FC’s Shawshank Redemption involved arriving at “court”, getting sent down and shipped off in a bus to “prison”, then being herded around with people shouting at you amongst other forms of humiliation. Not quite a decadent 1940s cocktail bar ambience is it?

I’d pay good money to be wined and dined again, as long as I didn’t have to dress up too much. But if they ever end up advertising an "authentic" Hostel screening, then don't say you weren't warned...