The Ghost

Ewan McGregor is a ghost writer, i.e. a bloke who co-writes celebrity
autobiographies in order to render them semi-readable. His agent phones him to
try and get him to do a gig where the previous guy doing it just washed up dead
on a beach. Obviously, he's not keen, but silly sums of money are discussed.
The subject of the autobiography is Adam Lang, who *isn't* based on Tony Blair,
oh no, honest guv. He must be based on some other UK Prime Minister who
authorised an illegal war in Iraq.

So, he rolls up to some horrifically ugly modernist house on a remote island in
the US, where he's going to have to do the work for reasons of "this document
doesn't leave this room." There he meets Lang, played by Pierce Brosnan and his
wife played by Olivia Williams. So, regardless of however much crap about
illegal wars and rendition gets bandied about, the Blairs are going to have to
be feeling pretty flattered by now. Especially Cherie, she's come out if the
deal particularly well.

So, Ewan does a frankly pretty desultory and half-hearted bit of poking around,
and even this much reveals that there's something dodgy about Brosnan's
university years, which his predecessor was poking at immediately before
mysteriously falling off a car ferry and washing up on a beach exactly where he
couldn't possibly have done if he'd fallen off a car ferry. Ewan continues to
poke at the same stuff, so it should come as no surprise to you, me or him that
he's very soon on the run for his life. Fortunately for him, he has the new BMW
X5 which, with the amount of screen time it gets, ought to be getting at least
third billing over Olivia Williams. Given the satnav, I think it even gets more
lines than her.

Anyway, long story short, Brosnan has secrets that a mysterious cartel want
covered up, but which they've done so little work to actually do so, that
anyone with five minutes to spare and access to Google could put it together.
Given how close to the surface it is, in fact, it's implausible that it wasn't
already a well established internet conspiracy theory.

Anyway, it all wraps up neatly, and you totter off into the night, not
unentertained, but with a slight feeling that with the names involved
(author Robert Harris, director Roman Polanski), that you really ought to have
seen something rather more momentous than a pretty average conspiracy thriller.

Cemetery Junction

Essentially what we have here is a nostalgia piece. Three lads in their early
twenties live in a bucolic but tedious suburb of Reading. And because there's
nothing else to do-o-oo-o-oo, they basically just dance, drink and screw a lot.

One of them wants to better himself, and the best way he can think of to do
that is to work selling insurance rather than in the local factory with his
mates. In doing so, he meets the boss's daughter who he used to go out with
when he was twelve, and who is now engaged to an insufferable prick who also
works for her dad.

Another one of them is basically a Mick Jagger style Street Fightin' Man, who
takes nothing in his life seriously, despises his dad for letting his mum run
off with another man and doing nothing about it, and maintains that one day
he's going to leave.

The last one of them is their idiot mate, who's comic relief really.

And the whole thing then runs on the lines of working out what bettering
yourself really means, and whether a life of insurance sales is any better than
working in a factory.

I think this will be a bit of a nostalgia fest for anyone with a similar
upbringing. I know the feeling well; my hometown isn't the worst place on earth
to live, but when you're in your late teens to early twenties, you can't wait
to be out of the place. And it's an interesting view, that you don't
necessarily want to leave town because it's a bad place, just that it doesn't
feel like somewhere you can be yourself.

As it goes, the acting's really quite good, the script's very funny, and
Gervais and Merchant don't award themselves too much screen time (though I did
think Gervaise stuck out like a sore thumb while he was on.)

Overall, it's slight, but it's funny, and a bit interesting.

Clash Of The Titans (3D)

Oh dear lord, what a mess.

Basically, this film has no particular soul or charisma. It has sequences of
events, but it doesn't have a plot. It has people wandering around saying
things, but it doesn't have characters.

Basically, the King and Queen of Argos irritate the Gods, and so the Gods
unleash the Kraken to destroy it. Quite why the Greek Gods are so hard up for
natural disasters that they have to borrow sea monsters of the Norse isn't
explained. Still, having sat in uncomfortable chairs in Argos waiting for the
staff to get their fingers out and fetch my purchase from the stockroom, I'm
basically OK with that.

The gods represented in this by Rafe Fiennes, slumming it horribly as Hades.
The rest of the gods are sitting on their mountain being out of focus, while
Fiennes does his warm up in preparation for the major Movie Villain work he'll
be doing in Harry Potter later in the year. Lord Voldemort (for it is he) gives
them the option of sacrificing the princess rather than the entire city being
destroyed, which I thought was rather sporting of him.

The King decides to go for a third option, and dispatches Perseus to kill the
Kraken. How he knows that Perseus is a demigod is not clear - Perseus certainly
doesn't look like one, he's more like a second rate Aussie Soap actor. The hair
brained scheme is formed to go get the head of medusa to use on the Kraken, and
so a mob of Argos employees and the Aussie Soap actor are dispatched to do that
thing. They are all pretty much indistinguishable, and I'm pretty sure that on
the way more of them die than actually started out. This is what's wrong with
the film; it's a standard questing party movie, but you really don't to know
any of them very well before their inevitable demises. Some djinn, some giant
scorpions, and stuff are introduced on the way, but it's all by the by. Liam
Neeson turns up now and again as Zeus, but nobody seems to know if he's a good
guy, bad guy, or what.

I want to make a special point of being very rude about the 3D effects. This
film was apparently shot in 2D, and then postprocessed into 3D. What this means
is that each scene appears to consist of two or three 2D planes stacked in
front of each other, onto which different elements of the picture are
projected. This has the effect of making the film look incredibly artificial,
and has the opposite of the intended effect, being a constant reminder of the
2D nature of the film. Also, the film is incredibly murky, since no allowance
for the fact that you'll be wearing your 3d glasses has been made.

Hence, if you were going to see this film, I would suggest you see a 2D print.
But I'd much more strongly suggest that you go see something else, or failing
that, stay home.

Kick-Ass

Basically, this kid Dave is an average comic book nerd highschooler. One day he
wonders aloud why nobody ever trys to be a superhero. His nerdy mates point out
that you'd get killed if you tried. But Dave is a man with a dream, and gets
himself a super suit, and eventually gives it a go. Things do not go well. One
hospitalisation later, Dave has gained the semi-superpower of having very
little feeling left in his body, and a whole load of metal holding his skeleton
together. Eventually, he manages to have some sort of vague crimefighting
success and ends up on You-Tube, and thus Kick-Ass becomes a weblebrity, part
Spider-Man, part Tron-Guy.

Meanwhile, across town, ex-cop Nic Cage is waging a Punisher style war on a
local crime boss (Mark Strong), with the assistance of his 11 year old
daughter, who he has trained up to be an awesome ninja girl. Due to the
unfortunate timing of Kick-Ass becoming famous at the same time that the crime
boss's men start getting killed, Mark Strong assumes Kick-Ass is responsible.
Confusion and mayhem ensue.

What's really good about this film is that Aaron Johnson really hits the note
of making Dave a hapless fucking idiot. There really is no point at which you
think he's even vaguely going to get it together and get things right. He's a
study in wide-eyed awkwardness.

Also really good is Chloe Moretz as Hit Girl, the scary homicidal 11-year old.
She gets half the good lines of the movie, all the good stunts, and sometimes
you find yourself wondering why the film isn't called Hit-Girl. It's a good
performance indeed, when you consider she's playing a very precocious
character, and there's no point at which you want to throttle her.

Nic Cage goes some way towards redeeming himself for all the terrible, terrible
films he's been in of late. Being basically just as nerdy as Kick-Ass, although
perfectly competent, he pulls off an awesome Adam West impression in his
superhero identity of Big Daddy.

Compared to the comic, the film pulls quite a few punches. For instance, the
comic is rather more explicit that training your 11-year old up as a teen
sidekick is basically a form of child abuse that will fuck them up, rather than
a perfectly reasonable thing as comics have suggested since time immemorial.
Also, I don't want to spoiler either the film or the comic, but any time you
see Dave catch a break, get a bit of luck or show a bit of competence - that
didn't happen in the comic.

Overall, good insane knock-about fun, with an evil sense of humour, if not
quite evil *enough*.