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Nicholas Cage is a guy who can see two minutes into the future, and see what's
going to happen to him next. And apparently has been living with this kind of
perception for his whole life, so by now can do some pretty funky things with
it. Effectively, he's a save weasel, to use the video game term, able to replay
a situation in his head until he works out the exact sequence of moves he needs
to make to win the fight, get the girl, evade the cops, and generally not die
in seemingly impossible situations.

The plot is quite slight; there's a nuclear threat, and the FBI are sure he can
help them. It's very 24 in that regard. The slenderness of the plot, however is
fine; the film's not about that, it's only there to showcase what the
seemingly limited superpower of 2 minute precognition could really do, and what
kind of person you'd be if you could do that.

Nicholas Cage has, alas, lost quite a lot of whatever matinee idol presence he
once had; he's not aged well, and his hair just looks odd. His love interest is
18 years younger than him, and boy, does it make him look like a perv.

Despite all that, there's some really nice scifi chinstrokey moments, coming as
it does from a Philip K Dick story, and for once, the sci-fi ideas aren't
overlaboured.

7.5/10 - Groundhog Day with guns and explosions.

The Day The Keanu Stood Silently Staring At People

And that's really all I have to say about him. Alien arrives, gets shot at by
idiots, is helped by beautiful scientist chick, learns the value of humanity,
and something. Oh and - Swirly Thing Alert!

Slow, ponderous, epic B Movie gets remade as slow, ponderous blockbuster. Sexy
new environmental message is tacked on, and we are forced, yet again, to endure
the message that the true meaning of humanity can be gleaned from the behaviour
of a whiny, irritating child.

The US military fails, on numerous occasions, to learn a lesson that should be
obvious - if a spacecraft is travelling at 0.1 of the speed of light and
decelerates to a pretty soft landing in the middle of a city, shooting at it
with your puny lead bullets that travel at substantially lower velocity than
that is just going to piss the aliens off. The point is made early on that it's
like when the aztecs met the conquistadors, but somehow that doesn't stop them
coming up with the strategy "wave our puny wooden spears at the men with
muskets."

It's not entirely awful, but I couldn't particularly tell you which bit wasn't.

Push

So. There's all these people who are born with special abilities. And there's
this shadowy agency who is out to control them all. Is it Heroes? X-Men? No,
it's Push.

Kicking off with an expositional voice over of mind numbing tedium, that will
be hauntingly familiar to anyone who has a fanboy mate who doesn't wash, who's
desperate to get you to start reading X-Men so he won't be SO VERY ALONE, we
are introduced to the basic rules of the various kinds of psychics who inhabit
this world. I'm pretty certain it was recorded at the behest of some studio
suit who hadn't understood the film. Anyone who's read or seen anything more
out-there than Eastenders will not need this introduction.

As it turns out, yeah, it's Heroes alright, but it's Heroes where you don't
spend weeks on end grinding your teeth hoping someone will BLOODY DO SOMETHING.
Instead, this is a jolly, superpower filled action chase around Hong Kong, with
the Good Guys, Bad guys and Third Party Gangsters are all after the Plot
Device. There's quite a clever "how to win if your opponent has a clairvoyant
telling him your moves" that doesn't quite come off, but at least shows that
someone out there was thinking about it.

With the minor plot concluded, the major plot is still to be resolved, and
we're open for a sequel. I hope that works out for them.

7/10 - It's very slight, and the plot will probably fall apart if you poke it
too hard, but it's quite enjoyable.

Frost/Nixon

In 1977, Nixon gave an interview to David Frost, during which he made some
startling admissions of guilt which he never fully lived down, and effectively
put the last nail in the coffin of his reputation, and cemented the suffix
-gate as a byword for crooked political shenanigans. At the time, however,
Frost was very much a star on the wane, with precious little journalistic
reputation. The film examines how this all came about.

What makes the story interesting is what it *isn't*. It is not the story of a
noble, crusading journalist taking down a crooked politician. It's the tale of
two egotistical, shallow men, both of whom *need* to win the confrontation in
order to salvage their careers; obscurity beckons for Frost if he loses, the
political wilderness for Nixon.

Frank Lagella paints a very human picture of Nixon, as a man whose ego and
temper brought him low, and continue to bring him low. Michael Sheen paints
Frost as a shallow mask of a man, a grin with very little substance behind it -
plenty of brains but practically no motives beyond his own comfort. If you
didn't know he was a good actor, you might easily think that it was his
performance that was at fault, rather than it being a pretty brutal assessment
of David Frost's shallowness.

Ultimately, I don't know that there's actually that much of a story to be told
here. The detail is interesting enough, but there's just a couple of really key
scenes here, and quite a bit of padding.

Underworld: Rise Of The Lycans.

Somewhere in the middle of the original1 Underworld movie, there was a five
minute flashback which told us why the Vampires and Lycans2 were locked in an
endless conflict. Someone evidently thought that it might be fun to expand that
five minute segment to the full ninety minutes. Oddly, they may have been
right.

There are few guilty pleasures as fun as watching quality actors slumming it in
some godawful bit of nonsense. And here we have Bill Nighy and Michael Sheen
taking it in turns to one-up each other in terms of pure unadulterated ham, in
one of the most nonsensical and unnecessary films ever made.

Set in Ye Olde Days Ofe Yore, the vampires create and enslave a new breed of
Lycan, one that retains its reason, and which can remain human. This is
allegedly for the purpose of having daytime protectors while they sleep, but
there's precious little evidence of this, or indeed, that the sun ever comes
up. It seems more likely that their motive is to have someone to sneer at and
hit with whips. Which is fine, I'm not going to judge them for that.

A seksi laydee vampire and a Lycan fall in love, the Lycan longs to be free,
the seksi laydee vampire's father would disapprove if he found out, and it all
gets very Romeo and Juliet, only with more blood, teeth and swords. Eventually
all the Lycans realise that you don't actually have to accept slavery and
oppression if you're an eight foot mass of claws and teeth, and it all kicks
off.

The entire plot of the movie really does fit into the five minute segment in
the original movie, so all that's new here is extra hamming it up and violence.
It should be a complete disaster, but this simplicity somehow works in its
favour, and it's just rollicking aimless fun. And that's worth a good 7/10 in
my book.
______
1 I'm being charitable here, obviously.
2 That is, werewolves, for those who have inexplicably allowed the Underworld
franchise to pass them by.

Doubt

Set in 1964, in a Catholic school, Philip Seymour Hoffman is a priest who's
abusing the boys in his care, and Meryl Streep is a nun, and the principal of
the school, who can't prove it, but is desperate to stop him. Or, Philip
Seymour Hoffman is a caring priest who's trying to help the boys, and Meryl
Streep is a nun who's irrationally convinced herself that he's abusing the kids
and sets out to frame and destroy him. And therein lies the doubt.

What follows is essentially a face off between the two. What's really good
about the film is that both performances are very well balanced. Hoffman's not
so creepy that you feel he must have done it, nor is he so obviously good and
innocent that feel he's definitely being wronged. Likewise, Streep's an
intolerant old battleaxe, and you feel she's quite possibly stringing the guy
up on what amounts to a hunch backed with personal dislike. On the other hand,
she clearly cares under the hard exterior, and seems to have good instincts for
people. You might come out of the film favoring one viewpoint over the other,
but you *will* have a doubt.

Cracking film, cracking perfomances.

JCVD

Odd little film. Jean-Claude Van Damme is a washed up action movie star, his
career is on the skids, he's out of cash after apparently having spent the last
of it fighting a custody battle for his daughter, who apparently doesn't
actually want to live with him, because he's an embarassment to her. He returns
to his native Belgium, and soon becomes embroiled in a post office siege, which
the police believe he's orchestrating. Just to make that clear - Jean Claude
Van Damme is playing Jean Claude Van Damme in this film.

So, the film runs along two lines, flashbacks to JCVD's pretty sad life which
led him to this place, and the present day, as he tries to navigate his way
safely out of the mess he finds himself in.

The film *appears* to be semi-autobiographical, what with Jean-Claude Van Damme
really having custody issues regarding his youngest son, and certainly seeming
prior to this film to be in career freefall and a complete laughing stock. I'm
not aware that he got involved in a Belgian post office siege, so it's not all
that autobiographical either.

It's a pretty good film. I don't know that he's a good enough actor to pull off
this kind of introspection and self-analysis, but on the other hand, its very
brave of him to do so, and the whole thing stands up as, if not a great film,
at the very least an interesting curiosity.

The most poignant thing about the whole thing, of course, is that despite being
an absolutely credible bit of European cinema, the presence of Jean Claude Van
Damme appears to have forced it into straight-to-DVD territory, and while I've
been keeping an eye on the listings of the local arthouse cinema for it, I
actually find it for ten quid on DVD in ASDA. The cover gives no suggestion
that it's anything other than a standard Van Damme movie, with lines like "WITH
A KILLER MIX OF ACTION, MURDER AND MAYHEM JCVD DELIVERS WITH THE IMPACT OF A
ROUNDHOUSE KICK TO THE FACE! VAN DAMME IS BACK AND THIS TIME HE'S TAKING NO
PRISONERS!" I don't know whether it's deliberate or not, but either way, it's a
supreme irony.

8/10. And the best thing Van Damme's ever done, bar none.