Black & White Gold

Sullivan's Travels is a delightful Preston Sturgess movie about a Hollywood film maker who, bored with churning out frothy comedies, wants to change direction and adapt 'O Brother, Where Art Thou' a worthy, depression set drama. As he's never experienced poverty he decides to live like a hobo to gain some understanding (much to the consternation of his studio execs) and a light, rather lovely comedy roadtrip ensues. With a quick witted script and some fine acting from Veronica Lake and Joel McCrea as the pair of psuedo bums, Sturgess balances the laughs, a little romance and a few poignant lessons about life effortlessly into what is a thoroughly enjoyable film and probably one of the best films I've seen in ages.


Before The Third Man, Carol Reed & Graham Greene worked together to fashion a wonderfully poised thriller called The Fallen Idol released in 1948. The young son of an Ambassador is left in the company of the butler, Mr Baines, and his harsh housekeeper wife for a weekend and quickly becomes embroiled in a web of secrecy and witness to the eventual dissolution of their relationship. Beautifully shot and with taut, restrained performances from the adult cast the tension builds deliciously until the climax and a torrent of emotion is unleashed. This is an excellent thriller that's sadly over shadowed by the pairs subsequent success.

Lame Lessons

Juno Temple stars as the school bike in the 80's set, bittersweet comedy Dirty Girl. After getting busted down to remedial class, the louche protagonist befriends a chubby, closeted dweeb and the pair go on the lam with a bag of flour baby in vague search of her father. It's quite funny but it's the excellent performances from Temple, H. Macy and Jovovich that give it some depth and though the plot is remarkably predictable it develops an unexpected edge. Maybe with a new title, a couple more gags and a little more imagination with the plot this could've been great but as it is, it's just a moderately enjoyable peice of fluff.

Bad Teacher, unfortunately, has less laughs and fewer decent performances to lift it's humdrum plot beyond anything other than factory floor Hollywood dustbunny. Cameron Diaz does her best as a loafing high school teacher who decides to put some effort in to win an award so she can pay for a boob job and finds herself drawn to a new upbeat teacher played by empty eyed man-doll Justin Timberlake. It's not an awful premise but there's barely enough laughs for it to qualify as a comedy a shame as I suspect, originally, it had a darker, filthier tone that's been washed out the way.

Sporting Goods & Not So Goods

Paul Giamatti stars as a struggling lawyer/part time wrestling coach in the comedy Win Win from Thomas McCarthy, the director of The Station Agent. With his business on the verge of bankruptcy our protagonist decides to fleece an elderly client who's suffering from dementia and it looks like things are on the up when the clients grandson, on the run from a drunken mum, turns up and seems to be a wrestling prodigy. Much like his previous films there's an interesting, quiet blend of comedy and drama throughout and McCarthy's writing and direction continue to impress. The assembled cast are all on great form and though it's gentleness may not appeal to everyone it's has an intelligence and emotional maturity that's not that common in contemporary Amurican comedies.

And to emphasis my point take Goon for example a mildly amusing but thoroughly infantile comedy starring doofus for hire Sean Wilson Scott as a bouncer whose skill in punching faces lands him a place on the local ice hockey team. Cue a predictable rise to fame plot arc that's dutifully populated with thumbnail characters painted in fingerpaint colours by hamfisted actors. There's a couple of chuckles along the way I suppose and it's slapstick violence picks up some of the slack in the script (which veers between trite and knowing simplitude) but mostly this a basic, hollow shell of a film that hasn't enough laughs and even less plot or character. If you're looking for something dumb and mindless as the main character look no further.

Four Play

Marshole & other APOD wonders

An intriguing skylight on Mars.
Polar storm on TitanJupiter and her moons in the lee of our own Moon. Apparently not 'shopped.

Cashing In & Out

Ridley Scott's much anticipated return to science fiction and the Alien universe with Prometheus turns out to be a revealingly awful hodge podge of previous tropes and slabs of cheese. A couple of archaeologists uncover evidence of our extraterrestrial origins and jaunt through the stars on a billionaire's dime in an effort to meet the parents but it all rather inevitably ends up in a sticky mess. It looks lovely but the plot is so muddled, so riddled with plot holes and idiotic characters that any enjoyment is short lived and I ended up feeling a little sorry for the talented actors involved but few of them made much effort anyway and I'm not sure if it's worth making any to watch it either and I'm sadly left wondering whether Scott is a decent director at all and not just a glossy hack like his brother.

Rebooting Spiderman so soon after the successful trilogy was always going to be a tricky, if not redundant, exercise but The Amazing Spiderman turns out to be mildly entertaining superhero fluff that will no doubt rake in the cash. Managing to cram the always tedious origin portion into a tidy 20 mins it gets to the action swiftly as Parker finds himself battling with a mad scientist turned Croc monster. There's nothing at all here that justifies the reboot but at least it's competent film making with an occasionally wry script, some decent effects and two solid performances from Rhys Ifans and Andrew Garfield.

Prize Anglo Shorts

The Ebony Tower is an excellent collection of five short stories from the masterful pen of John Fowles. With ambiguous little tales featuring retired artists, missing mp's, criminals and strained families Fowles' playful style has ample, fertile ground to explore but as you might expect he still finds plenty of time for his usual ruminations about art, life and philosophy and of course the pages reek with the heady scent of desires, satisfied or otherwise. If you've never read any Fowles I'd say this is definitely the place to start as it most of the themes and symbolism evident here are explored deeper, more intensely in his more famous works like The Collector or The French Lieutenant's Woman.

I've never read any Daphne du Maurier before but I'm already looking for more after thoroughly enjoying Don't Look Now and Other Stories, another quintet of short stories. In comparison to Fowles this collection has a decidedly darker, almost sinister atmosphere spread thick over the assorted tales of psychics, mysterious Greek artifacts, pilgrims and deranged scientists and though they may be a little dated there's a marvellous tension within most of the characters with unexpressed emotions, longings and churning undercurrents all bubbling to the surface. It's no wonder Hitchcock was attracted to her work, adapting 3 of her works, but it's quite surprising there hasn't been more recent efforts to bring her work to the screen.

Wordsmith Protagonisms

John Cusack grumbles and stumbles around as the famous author and drunkard Edgar Allan Poe in serial killer thriller The Raven. When a couple of corpses turn up murdered in circumstances similar to Poe's stories the police reluctantly recruit him to help solve the case and he finds himself and his paramour in grave danger. Cusack is decent enough as the lead but his Poe is more convivial drunk that incurable souse and there's not much life in the script nor much ambition in the plotting so it all plays out as a fairly bog standard thriller. A shame that an author of such grisly, macabre horrors should receive such timid and unimaginative treatment.

H.G. Wells gets a shot as a hero in the romantic thriller Time After Time when one of his chums escapes to the 1970's after being exposed as Jack the Ripper. Acclimatising themselves to their new temporal surroundings both men indulge in their proclivities, ie free love and knifey slaughter, before continuing their clash of wit and will. Malcolm McDowell and David Warner add some heft to the charming script and though most of the film is spent on Wells' romancing of a bank clerk there's some genuine menace to the cold calculating Ripper which evens it all out nicely.