Good old reliable Robin Hood. You can always count on him for a rollicking adventure. Whether it’s Errol Flynn or that Yank from Prince of Thieves or that fat bastard from the recent BBC series, he always tries his best to entertain. Sure he may not always succeed but at least he has a go.

Oh wait, who’s this coming round the corner? Why it’s Russell Crowe and Ridley Scott, riding a pair of steeds like constipated badgers. Ah look at them; so serious, so earnest, so dull. They’re like a married couple that’s sucked the life out of one another. Sure it was fun at the start but now they’re far too comfortable in each other’s company. Gladiator seems like another life ago.

This is the fifth collaboration between Scott and Crowe, and with the exception of Gladiator, none of their films have set the world on fire. Yet they still insist on making movies together. Maybe it’s the irresistible urge of two curmudgeons getting to eat bagels, smoke cigars and admire one another’s beards for a few months, or maybe it’s the allure of churning out another mediocre flick. This pair really doesn’t bring the best out of each other.

The concept for this iteration of Robin Hood originally focused on the Sheriff of Nottingham. Apparently it painted him in a more sympathetic light and Robin Hood was something of a wanker. Had the filmmakers had the balls to stick with that concept, they might have produced an interesting film. Instead they decided to produce this mish-mash of crap. It’s not faithful to the story we know, but it’s not different enough to shake things up. As a result it straddles an uncomfortable middle ground, making certain choices seem more than a little puzzling.

For instance, Maid Marian. In this film she’s Lady Marian. She was married for a few days and then her husband went off to the Crusades where he promptly died (well, on the way back). Is the idea of a forty-year old maid too horrible to consider (although I think the character is actually supposed to be younger)? Would it make everyone queasy to see Robin Hood de-flowering a spinster? Are people really that delicate?

In reality, the decision to have Maid Marian become Lady Marian is to support the ill-thought out plot. Robin witnesses the murder of Marian’s husband Robert Loxley at the hands of the evil traitor Sir Godfrey and then assumes the identity of Marian’s husband so that he can sneak back into England. He then enters into an arrangement with Loxley’s father Sir Walter to continue impersonating Loxley so that Sir Walter doesn’t lose his land. Okay, I can understand the thinking behind this plan, but this ends up being queasier than having Marian be a virgin. Sure the old man isn’t literally pimping his daughter-in-law out, but he is making her pretend to be in love with a complete stranger - this guy could be capable of anything. Dirty old man.

There’s also a really stupid decision to have Marian take part in the final battle. Really, is this the only way to show that the character has strength - to have her literally battle the French with sword in hand? Of course, Scott also tries to show Marian’s strength in other ways. There’s a scene where some French soldiers are going to burn some English villagers (fucking Frogs!). Marian leads the effort to free them. But these big moments do nothing to hide the fact that the character is painted in broad, spazzy strokes.

Speaking of the final battle, there’s another moment that makes it even more risible. Not only do we have Marian taking part in the fight, but we also see Friar Tuck kicking arse. Nothing else in the film suggests that he would excel in battle. After all, he’s a fat inebriate who cares more about honey than people. But no, there he is, running through Frenchies with his sword. Love a duck.

Even more criminal than all of this, though, is how colourless the villains are. Mark Strong as Sir Godfrey is a shocking non-entity. He doesn’t exude any menace or danger. And King John is just a petulant retch. He’s like a child who’s never heard the word ‘no’ and therefore feels free to double cross his loyal subjects and lounge all day in bed with his French slut.

Then you have the Sheriff of Nottingham, surely one of the most memorable characters in the Robin Hood legend. Here, though, he’s only in a few scenes and comes across as nothing more than a buffoon. It was also a shockingly poor decision to have him played by Matthew Macfadyen, who must possibly be one of the blandest actors working today. He doesn’t have an objectionable screen presence but that’s only because you rarely notice that he’s there. He’s kind of like the lettuce in a burger. He looks okay but he adds absolutely nothing to the experience - he’s screen garnish.

Doubtless Ridley Scott envisaged an amazing character arc from the Sheriff but it’s unlikely that a sequel will get made for this festering piece of poo. I mean, there’s nothing wrong with telling a story that will span more than one film, but at least make each film entertaining. Robin Hood fails miserably on that score and ends up feeling rather cynical - yeah, let’s stretch this story out and milk the public for all their worth; oh fuck, we forgot to make the film watchable.

Something else that depressed me was the visuals. Usually you can count on Ridley for some nice photography. But no, everything was dark and dingy - it was like a layer of sludge had been smeared across the lens. Despite this, I’ve heard people praise the photography, which leads me to wonder if I received a bum copy. Or maybe studios now are being complete wankers and are purposely making ordinary DVDs look like shit so that they can hawk more Blu-Rays. Anyone have any ideas? But certainly the unrelenting dinginess of the print has made me wonder.

But really, don’t waste your time on this film. Watch the one with the mullets instead. Somehow I find the soppy American more endearing than the Aussie who tries to talk and act like Michael Parkinson. I mean, Robin Hood isn’t supposed to be a gruff dullard. If you wanted that you should have just got Ridley Scott to play the part.

It seems like a hell of a long time since Mark Romanek directed his last feature film, One Hour Photo. One of my favourite films of the last ten years, the bar was set high for his follow-up, Never Let Me Go. Based on the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro, the movie has a fine pedigree but it falls short of expectations.

The main issue for me is that a lot of it feels lifeless. It’s a story that doesn’t have any action but it has lots of emotions to contend with. It should be bubbling with energy. Instead it feels cold and detached. It’s far too clinical. It’s only at the end that it sparks into life.

The opening section of the film revolves around Halisham public school. The children in this school are told how special there are. They’re also told that if they venture beyond the perimeter of the property that they’re going to get murderised by ne’er-do-wells. Hmm. This is a bit weird - aggressive fear-mongering from teachers. And why do the kids have electronic tags? Prisoners should be wearing those kinds of things, not children.

If you’ve read the book and already know the premise of the film there’s a lot of fun to be had noting the small details. For instance, there’s a scene where the teachers make a big deal about finding some cigarettes and they lecture the children on the health issues - their precious lungs could be damaged if they smoke the nasty fags. Then you have the fastidious way that bottles of milk are lined up for all the kids to drink. Sure enough this isn’t too odd - I used to have milk at school. But the kids also have a batch of pills to take. Yep, got to keep the little ones healthy. Got to keep those lungs clear and got to make sure that they have proper nutrition. Wouldn’t want them to develop any nasty diseases. After all, what would they do with those lovely organs?

One of the most disappointing things for me in the opening sequence was the way that one of the major scenes was fluffed. There’s a budding romance between a couple of the Halisham children - Tommy and Kathy - and in one scene Tommy buys Kathy a cassette tape. The song that Kathy listens to is called ‘Never Let Me Go’. It should be a huge moment in the film but instead it passes by with barely a whimper.

I was also disappointed with Sally Hawkins’ performance as the kids teacher. I don’t know why but she seems to be getting worse and worse as an actor. She’s developed a jarring range of tics that she’s begun repeating in each role. Her performances don’t feel natural - they feel artificial and mannered. She was even less believable here than she was in Happy Go Lucky and I was mentally shooing her off the screen every time she turned up.

Thankfully Hawkins disappears from the film early on. She makes the mistake of having a conscience and tells the children that they’re clones and that they’re going to have their organs harvested later in life. Again this is another scene that doesn’t really work. The children sit there quietly alarmed and Hawkins overacts like crazy, trying too hard to convey her horror. In order for a scene like this to work you need to believe that there is some inner life to the characters - that under the surface, things are happening. Instead the scene is icily detached.

The second part of the film is dedicated to the characters’ life in The Cottages. Here the characters finally have some sort of interaction with society. However, it’s very limited. There’s one amusing scene where they all go to a cafe and none of them know how to order food. So they all end up ordering the same thing - sausage and chips (yummy!).

A relationship also begins between Tommy and Ruth (played by Keira Knightley). Ruth had stolen Tommy away from Kathy while they were still at Halisham and the springs of their bed get a good pounding - Ruth is fucking Tommy pretty much just to spite Kathy; that and the fact she can’t tolerate the idea that a boy would like anyone more than her. The relationship is very immature but this is entirely appropriate considering the character’s sheltered existence. It’s almost like they’re playing at being adults - they don’t quite understand what it’s all about.

One of the most crushing things about the film is the passivity of the characters. They put up no resistance and like children they put their faith in whispers and gossip - there are rumours that any clones that prove that they’re in love will have their donations deferred for a while. Instead of actually doing anything - running away, attacking those that kill them - they go along with everything like lambs to the slaughter.

The strongest scenes are the ones at the end. Tommy leaves Ruth and finally begins a relationship with Kathy, his one true love. Buoyed by the rumour that couples in love will have their donations deferred, they try and prove their feelings for one another - Tommy takes some of his artwork to the mysterious Madame (a woman who used to visit Halisham to judge the children’s artwork to see if it was good enough to be displayed at ‘The Gallery’). Upon visiting the woman they also encounter their former headmistress. They’re very coldly informed that there are no deferrals and that The Gallery was a failed attempt to prove that clones have souls. One of the women then calls them poor creatures.

The lack of feeling is quite brutal. And considering that it’s heavily implied that the Madam and the headmistress are in a same sex relationship, it’s even more amazing that they’re quick to dismiss people as less than human. As people who are part of a group that’s faced a lot of prejudice, you’d like to assume that their thinking would be a little more enlightened. Surely it’s more than clear that these kids have souls - they think, they feel, they love; they’re human. What does it matter how they came to be on this planet? Is a ‘test tube’ child less human than one that was ‘naturally’ conceived? Instead they’re coldly dismissed as trash. It’s a horrible echo of modern society - in the not too distant wake of civil rights abuses, it’s chilling that so many ethnic minorities can march against gay marriage and gay rights.

The most powerful scene in the film is the one where Tommy finally realises he has no hope and collapses on the ground, screaming. Could anyone doubt that anyone who reacts in such a way doesn’t have a soul? Tommy realises how precious life is and all that he’ll lose - this isn’t the reaction of an animal or a piece of meat.

In the end we get to see Tommy give his last donation and ‘complete’. Speaking to a friend of mine about the scene, we both agreed that the most disturbing thing was the way that Tommy is mistreated once the anaesthesia kicks in. While he’s conscious, he’s treated with respect but once he’s asleep he’s treated like cattle - his head is roughly grabbed and his body is pulled about. Even in a situation as shitty as this, you’d hope the medical staff would have the humanity to treat their subject with respect - they’re professionals after all. Instead Tommy has to suffer one final indignity.

I think the film missed a trick in not ending the film with the song ‘Never Let Me Go’. In its place the film ends with a piece from the rather unremarkable score. I think the song would have given the ending another layer of emotion - it’s our destiny that we’ll lose our loved ones, but we shouldn’t have to let them go prematurely.

Facebook: a presence so pervasive that even I’ve jumped on the bandwagon, dropped my kecks and presented myself to all and sundry. Yeah, look to the right of this page. Look at the purity of my site obliterated by my massive Facebook widget (and my Amazon links and my Twitter feed and my sad, desperate plea for money - give me some money you ungrateful fuckers!). Like me. Please like me. Only thirteen people like me at the moment. How pathetic is that? Add to my numbers. Add to my glory! I’m a whore.

I guess lots of great ideas have been driven by ego or revenge or the need to impress girls. The creation of Facebook seems to follow all of these lines. As told in The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg is a talented but friendless loser. Yes he’s a smart bastard and yes he’s studying at Harvard, but if success is judged by the amount of people you know and the number of friends you have, and in lots of circles it is, then Zuckerberg is at the bottom of the heap. He has one friend and he loses his girlfriend in the opening scene.

To show how clueless Zuckerberg is when it comes to inter-personal relationships you just have to watch the film’s opening exchange. Boastful and dismissive of his girlfriend, he pisses her off to the extent that she leaves him. He’s not too concerned until he realises that she’s serious. Only then does he apologise and he does it with a complete lack of sincerity. He knows that these are the words that he’s supposed to say and the script he’s supposed to follow but there’s no feeling at all - even the biggest idiot would know that he’s not really sorry; he just desperately wants to cling onto this ornament, this decoration that shows that he’s not as big a loser as he seems. But it doesn’t work. His girlfriend still leaves him.

Subsequent to this, Zuckerberg, in a fit of drunken pique, creates a website called Facemash. It features every girl at Harvard and has them lined up in a ‘Hot or Not’-style women-as-meat contest. It successfully degrades every woman on campus and briefly entertains the male half of the university - it gets so many hits that it brings the school network to its knees. Revenge successfully achieved, Mark then has to face the music. But at his hearing Zuckerberg doesn’t display any remorse. He feels that he’s provided the university with a useful lesson - he’s highlighted the flaws in their security.

With Facemash as his first success, Zuckerberg then uses his petulant streak to achieve even greater notoriety. Hired by the Winklevoss twins (who are seamlessly portrayed by one actor) to create a kind of Harvard dating site, Mark decides to plunder their idea and create The Facebook (as it’s known then). As he’s working on it, he manages to avoid meeting his bosses by sending them texts and emails with various excuses. He gives them the runaround for six weeks before finally revealing The Facebook. The Winklevoss’ are understandably pissed off.

One of the many things I like about The Social Network is the ambiguity. It’s never made entirely clear why Zuckerberg decides to screw over the Winklevoss twins. They’re a few of the only people on campus that will actually speak to him and they give him a decent opportunity. But for many reasons Zuckerberg decides to take the offer the wrong way.

The first reason is the fact that the Winklevoss’s only allow him into the bike room of the Porcellian Club (the final club they’re a member of). The Winklevoss’s think they’re being incredibly generous by allowing Zuckerberg on such hallowed ground, but Zuckerberg takes it as a slight. He’s well aware that Jews are still treated like second class citizens in such places and his limited admittance only confirms his suspicions. Secondly, the Winklevoss’s are exactly the kind of people he wishes he could be - rich, good-looking, physically fit; they’re almost Aryan. Mark, on the other hand, is a misfit - a social reject, which makes it beautifully ironic that he goes on to create the most successful social networking site in the world. Thirdly, Mark does it because he thinks that he’s better than everyone else (an arrogance that is interestingly at odds with his inferiority complex). He doesn’t want to be an employee. He wants to be a boss. He won’t tolerate being bottom of the food chain. So Mark’s creation of The Facebook is also an inspired act of petulance. He wants to prove that he can make something on his own - he doesn’t need to be part of special clubs or have powerful friends. While most people of his age would resort to writing bad poetry or indulge in chronic masturbation, he uses his anger to begin the process of making himself a billionaire.

The process has its casualties, though. Zuckerberg hires his best friend (his only friend really) Eduardo Saverin as his business manager. Saverin gives his heart and soul to the business as well as quite a bit of money, but Zuckerberg’s head is turned by Sean Parker (played by Justin Timberlake), founder of Napster. Again, Parker is the kind of person that Zuckerberg wishes he could be - good looking, confident, good with women. But unlike the Winklevoss’s, Parker will take Mark all the way.

Timberlake is excellent as Parker, even though he’s basically just playing an extension of himself. He’s a cocky superstar - the kind of guy that men want to be and women want to be with. So the part isn’t exactly a stretch for Timberlake, but he still brings lots of charm and charisma to the role.

Parker’s seduction of Zuckerberg is the saddest thing about the film. Because of Parker, Zuckerberg ruins the one real friendship he has. This element of the film actually nicely encapsulates the problem with Facebook. Facebook allows us to have the illusion of friendship without having to deal with all the complications. We can friend someone but not really have to see them or talk to them on the phone or write them long emails or letters. We can stay in touch by occasionally looking at their wall or commenting on their status. Everything is a lot more shallow - it’s all less real. And that’s what Zuckerberg chooses. He chooses a shallow friendship over one with any real meaning.

One of the best scenes in the film is when Saverin visits Facebook in its swanky new offices (they’re about to celebrate the one millionth user). He thinks he’s there to celebrate but he’s there to sign papers because his 30% share of the business has been reduced to 0.03% due to restructuring. To make matters worse, all the other main players in Facebook still have a decent share of the business - Parker even has 7%. It’s the equivalent of being defriended and Saverin is understandably pissed off. He smashes Zuckerberg’s computer and says that he’s going to sue him. The coward that he is, Zuckerberg can only tremble. Parker, though, is over the moon - he verbally attacks Saverin. Well, until Saverin pretends that he’s going to punch him - at this point, Parker almost shits himself. But after Saverin’s left, Zuckerberg tells Parker that he was too rough on him. So Zuckerberg obviously still has feelings for his ex-friend, but he’s too much of a coward to stand up for him.

Again this accurately reflects current life, where conflict is avoided at all costs. We’d rather quietly defriend someone or ease them out of our lives than actually speak our minds. We don’t even have the option of a dislike button. Facebook and other social networking sites were supposed to bring us together but if anything they’ve driven us further apart.

But while the film is very timely, is it the all-conquering masterpiece that some people think it is? I wouldn’t go that far. It’s certainly one of the best films of the year, but that isn’t really saying that much, as it’s been a very lean year for cinema so far. However, it’s nice to see David Fincher returning to form after the disappointment that was The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. That was a film that I sorely wanted to like but it fell way short of expectations. Thankfully, though, The Social Network is a film of subtle pleasures. As great as Fincher is, he sometimes gets carried away with the technique of making a film - the worst case being the unnecessarily flashy shots in Panic Room (flying through locks and such). Here he allows the film to speak for itself while still retaining his magnificent eye for visuals. The opening shots as Zuckerberg runs through Harvard are wonderful, as is the boat race at Henley (a scene that initially seems self-indulgent until you realise that it’s cleverly showing you that the Winklevoss’s are second best at everything). And the film also has an excellent score by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross (going back to the boat race, the score and the slow motion makes it feel like something out of A Clockwork Orange).

The final scene has Zuckerberg using Facebook to try and friend his ex-girlfriend. After sending the friend request, he refreshes the page every few seconds to see if his request has been accepted. Maybe he’s finally trying to make up for his mistakes or maybe he’s still a slave to his impulses. We don’t know. You can only hope that he’s learnt his lesson and that he understands that all the success and all the money in the world are meaningless if you don’t have any deep, lasting attachments.

Having said all that, go back to the top of the page and click on ‘like’ in my Facebook widget. And after that, donate me some money. It’ll do my self-esteem wonders and I promise that I’ll only use the money to bring you more reviews. I won’t use it on booze or whores. You have my word. I’ll be refreshing Facebook until you like me. Thanks in advance. :)

Albert Pierrepoint was one of the Britain’s last hangmen and was responsible for the executions of hundreds of convicted felons. The end titles of the film say that he killed 608 individuals but other sources say that he killed around 400. Either way it’s a hell of a lot of people to take to the gallows.

Pierrepoint begins with its protagonist attending training for his new profession. He’s shown the procedures and he’s quizzed on some of the finer points of the job (in order to break the neck cleanly, one has to adjust the length of the noose according to the person’s height, weight and build - otherwise the executioner runs the risk of decapitating the felon). The film doesn’t go into great detail about why he chooses this job. He just says that he has something in him.

Part of the reason that he has something in him is because his father was a hangman. An uncle also did the same job. Therefore you could say that it’s the family business. However, the film isn’t particularly interested in Pierrepoint’s past - it’s more interested in showing how this profession changes and twists him. The only meaningful reference to the past is when Pierrepoint speaks to his mother - she says that she wants to hear nothing about his new profession; she wouldn’t talk to Albert’s father about his job and she’s going to do the same with her son.

During his first execution, Pierrepoint is just an assistant, but the hangman he’s assisting loses his nerve and Albert has to take charge. He’s calm under pressure and the pleading of the prisoner doesn’t seem to affect him. He’s able to make the disconnect that the other guy can’t. There’s no emotional engagement in the killing.

A lack of emotion might suggest a lack of feeling, but that certainly isn’t the case with Pierrepoint. When he carries out an execution, he’s merely following orders. He doesn’t do it because he gets any pleasure out of killing a fellow human being. His pride comes from doing things professionally; from making things easy for everyone. And this professionalism means that he has respect for the condemned. As he says himself, they’ve paid the price - in death they become innocent once more. Indeed, he even cleans the bodies himself after he’s hung them, thinking that the morticians wouldn’t treat the executed properly.

There’s almost an erotic element in one of the scenes as he cleans the body of a woman. Given his rather passionless marriage, you can’t help but feel that this is the closest he gets to another human being. Getting to hold them, to clean them and to make sure that they’re treated with dignity, he achieves the intimacy he lacks with his wife - he only has an illusion of closeness with his spouse.

At first everything seems fine between Pierrepoint and his wife, but the marriage quickly turns into a sham. There’s one horrible point where she can’t even bear to be touched by him. She knows that these hands have touched the dead and she doesn’t want the stain on her.

Yet she does want his money. She’s the one who makes the plans and she’s the one who convinces him to buy a pub. It’s also her idea to capitalise on his celebrity and to use it to sell more booze. It’s a cold, distant marriage.

However, what’s so great about the film is how subtly this is done. On the outside they seem like the perfect team. He has the charm, she has the brains. And on first glimpses they seem to get along fine. But then you begin to see the contempt that his wife has for Albert. He repulses her. She looks in his book, the book where he lists all of his executions, and she can only think of the hundreds he’s killed. The only way she can get past it is to focus on the money - at more than one point she nags him about some money he’s owed for an execution he wasn’t allowed to carry out.

Things only come to a head because Albert is called to execute a friend of his. This particular development would be too ridiculous to accept if the film were fictitious, but it actually happened. A regular at Albert’s pub, a man who was a friendly acquittance of Pierrepoint, killed his lover and was then condemned to death. Not knowing his real name (Pierrepoint only knows his nickname), Albert has no idea he’s been called to execute a friend. This sequence is one of the most powerful in the film. Albert’s friend is scared that Pierrepoint won’t acknowledge him during the execution, but knowing that this would be an act of cruelty, Albert does acknowledge him and does everything to make his friend’s experience as painless as possible. The only problem is that the whole ordeal causes Albert a huge amount of anguish. Prior to this, the executions had a professional separation - here his private life and his professional life have become horribly blurred.

What makes the experience even more unbearable is that Albert’s wife doesn’t want to hear anything about it. Even when he’s sitting on the floor, bawling his eyes out, she can’t tell him that he’s not a bad man. She has exactly the same attitude as his mother and she refuses to give him any emotional support. This burden is his and his alone.

But although the execution of his friend is when Pierrepoint reaches his professional nadir, the rot begins long before this. At the end of the Second World War, Pierrepoint is called to Germany to execute Nazi POWs. In one day alone he’s called to kill fourteen people. Even for a professional like Pierrepoint, this is too much. The experience is too long and too intense. It also brings him unwanted celebrity. He can no longer leave Albert at the door as the condemned now know who Albert is - they even plead to him by name.

The film leaves you with an overwhelming amount of sadness for Pierrepoint. Here’s a man who brings dignity and professionalism to his job and who is then punished because of his competency for it. He never wants to be solely recognised as an executioner but even his wife can’t look past it. He takes the burden and then is rewarded for it with contempt and loneliness. It’s an emotional execution that is the polar opposite of the ones he carried out - it’s long, painful and cruel.

Isn’t going to work every day wonderful? Getting up early in the morning, squashing yourself into a train full of flatulent commuters and then spending most of the day answering badly written, poorly thought-out emails. But things were even worse in the 80s. Back then you had to write letters and back then you didn’t have the consolation of an ipod on your trip home - your shuffles were only 60 minutes long, you had to switch sides halfway through and Westlife had yet to record an album. Those were dark days.

Despite this, Wall Street begins in a very jaunty fashion. Frank Sinatra plays on the soundtrack and the trials and tribulations of the morning routine are filmed with gentle exasperation - the opening seems to exude the American belief that if you work hard enough you’ll attain a comfortable level of prickdom and will no longer have to tolerate this daily abasement.

A believer in this extremely deluded conviction is Bud Fox, played by Charlie Sheen. He begins the film as a low-grade stockbroker, but he thinks that if he works hard enough, if he makes enough connections and kisses enough arse, he too will have a part of the American Dream. And even though most people would receive only a handful a scraps for humiliating themselves in this fashion (a minuscule pay rise, perhaps 10 days annual paid vacation instead of 5, or if they’re really good, their own cupboard-sized office), Fox actually gets some sizeable rewards for his toadying.

Fox goes from cold-calling old fogies in a loud, sweaty office to hobnobbing with the rich and powerful. And how does he do this? He does it by selling out his father.

Bud’s dad, played by Martin Sheen, works for an airline. He’s a blue-collar guy who likes to unwind after an honest, hard day’s work with a smoke and some beer. He’s the complete opposite of his white-collar son who likes nothing more than making his own pasta in his pretentious apartment with his vacuous girlfriend.

The temptation in this film is Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas). He’s the Lucifer-type figure that tempts the innocent Fox to stray from the path of decency. He teaches Fox to love nothing but money and to indulge in the mindless pursuit of it. He also throws a woman his way and very quickly Fox becomes Gekko’s loyal lapdog.

Some of the funniest scenes in the film revolve around Fox’s attempts to modernise his apartment. He and his girlfriend staple some fake brickwork to a wall and then paint it to make it look rough and ready - like the plaster is peeling off the walls and exposing the brickwork underneath. It’s some of the most pretentious design I’ve ever seen but it’s presented here as desirable and cutting edge. There’s also a hilarious exchange where Daryl Hannah, who produces a performance so stunningly flat that it seems like consciousness is a foreign concept to her, says that she wants to do for furniture what Laura Ashley did for fabrics. You mean, produce horribly bland, middlebrow vomit? Yeah, fuck you.

And so it’s for these very meagre pleasures that Fox decides to sell out his father’s company and turn them over to the shark Gekko - a pretentious apartment and some vacant poontang.

It’s at this point that you realise that the film is nothing more than a blindingly obvious morality tale. What’s more important, family or money? Anyone with half a brain should know that family comes first. I mean, sure you can sell everyone out and become Donald Trump with a bowlful of Shredded Wheat on your head hawking crappy mattresses, but what kind of comfort does money provide? Well, aside from innumerable blow jobs and an endless supply of cocaine, not much.

Daddy Fox immediately sees through Gekko’s bullshit and knows that he only gives a fuck about money. Bud is a white collar prick who doesn’t know his arse from his elbow, while daddy is a pure, unclouded, blue collar saint who can see the world for what it really is.

Seeing as Bud’s father is played by Martin Sheen, Charlie’s real life father, you’d think that their scenes would have some authenticity about them. You’d be thinking wrong. There’s a particularly risible scene after his father has a heart attack where Charlie can only express his emotional distress by blinking. Clearly talent skips a generation.

Still, it’s fun watching Sheen’s performance and realising that Christian Bale stole lots of Bud’s inflections for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho.

The most fun thing about Wall Street is Gekko. Some of the crap he spews is priceless. My favourite line is, ‘If you want a friend, get a dog.’ Basically he wants people with no feelings. He’s a horrible, preposterous man, but he’s easily the most interesting thing in the film. His stupid, mindless pursuit of money represents everything that is wrong about America - the lack of feeling, the lack of compassion, the knuckleheaded belief that consumption is more important than understanding. It’s no wonder that he’s been the subject of endless parodies (Del Boy’s yuppie phase in Only Fools and Horses being the best by far).

A particularly hilarious Gekko moment is when he calls Bud early one morning to tell him how beautiful the sunrise looks from his beach. He says that no painting has ever been able to capture its beauty. His pomposity is off the chart. But what takes the scene to whole new level is that Bud seems to be having an orgasm on the other line - just look at his face; he’s lapping this crap up and spunking in his boxers.

More crap comes during Gekko’s ‘greed is good’ speech. He claims that he’s a liberator of companies. He claims that he’s rescuing them from bad management. He certainly has a point that managers are the bane of corporate life. Too many of them do too little for too much money. But Gekko is not a liberator. He’s an executioner. He’s there to cut everything up and take the spoils. He’s part of the destructive force of capitalism - he’s a leach that sucks the blood out of the economy; he doesn’t actually produce anything, he’s just a carpetbagger in a suit.

So the fact that Bud sees all of this but still looks up to Gekko for so long just shows what a stupid character he is. And when he finally does realise what’s going on, the film illustrates his mental anguish in the lamest way possible - Bud wakes surrounded by empty pizza boxes and wonky venetian blinds. Yeah, he’s seriously gone off the rails there.

Perhaps realising that it’s straining to come to a satisfying conclusion, the film ends with a silly fight in Central Park and then shows that Bud has set-up Gekko for prosecution (he’s been wearing a wire while Gekko makes incriminating statements). Yes, occasionally a Gekko or a Madoff gets prosecuted, but some things never change. Money never sleeps and shit always smells. (To my eternal disappointment, the title Wall Street: Shit Always Smells was rejected for the upcoming sequel.)

In Withnail and I, Bruce Robinson made one of the funniest films there is. Therefore it was always going to be hard for him to make anything that would equal his debut. However, in How to Get Ahead in Advertising he comes mighty close.

The reason why Robinson's second film fails to match Withnail and I is because it’s far too preachy. There are some great speeches in the film; some wonderful digs at consumerism, but occasionally it descends into uninteresting ranting. Yeah consumerism can turn us into unthinking automatons, and yeah big business is greedy, but you don't really need to point it out so blatantly. We already know this. The film works much better when it illustrates the BS or when it jabs at it. It doesn't need to get on its high horse.

One of my favourite bits is when Bagley (Richard E. Grant) – a cocky advertising executive who suddenly loses his magic touch of selling absolute crap when he has to hawk some boil cream – is listening to a bunch of idiots talking about a newspaper article. As a person who makes a living out of lying, he's appalled that they believe what the press tells them. They then begin to argue (there's a great bit when an Irish priest insists that a woman in a vice den had peanut butter smeared across her tits; it was in the paper so it must be true) and the conversation quickly turns to the boil cream that Bagley has become obsessed with. "They're incurable, all of them. I know that and so does everybody else. Until they get one. Then the rules suddenly change." And then he has a dig at the priest. "They want to believe something works. He knows that, which is why he gets a good look-in with the dying." It's a great scene; it's funny as hell and it also has a good point to make. People consume less out of desire and more out of a desperate sort of hope, or even fear; they hope this product or that product will fill the hole in their lives. They hope it will be the answer to all their problems. And thankfully this scene refrains from the preaching that affects the latter stages.

It’s also a devilish idea to have Bagley become obsessed with boils and boil cream. He himself is a boil – as an advertising executive he’s an ugly pimple and highly resistant to any attempts at removal.

But my favourite scene is the one with the psychiatrist – Bagley has quit his job and developed a hideous boil of his own, one that talks to him and one that has grown a face. He's talking to the quack with a big bandage on his shoulder. He rants for a while about the way advertisers have ruined television, and then all of a sudden, after a silence, the boil speaks. The way it's presented in the film, the boil (at first) has a separate voice to Bagley's. He's not portrayed as Gollum with a satanic pimple; he's not talking to himself – the boil is a separate entity. But at the same time you're never really sure whether you're seeing things from Bagley's perspective. He's gone totally crazy, so he may very well be the one saying all this crap. Plus the boil only speaks when Bagley's not looking the other person in the face. But what I love about the scene is the filth the boil speaks and Grant's reactions. His hysteria is hilarious (there's another magnificent bit of hysteria in the film – when the boil first 'speaks', Bagley is so shocked that he runs to the kitchen, shaking and spazzing like he's got St Vitus' dance. Grant is amazing at working himself up into a lather). And then the boil asks Bagley to tell the shrink about his grandfather. "My grandfather was caught molesting a wallaby in a private zoo in 1919." "A wallaby?" "It may have been a kangaroo. I'm not sure." "You mean sexually?" "I suppose so. He had his hand in its pouch." I haven't heard dialogue that funny in a long time.

I also love the scene when Bagley is admitted to hospital to have the boil lanced. By now he's completely raving. He's going on and on about the evils of consumerism. So then the boil says, "You commies don't half talk a lot of shit." Magnificent! It's the sort of argument a Daily Mail reader would give. Criticise capitalism and you must be a Red. However, I can see where the boil is coming from. There are certainly times when Robinson is too militant. Like I said before, he really doesn't need to stand so high on his soapbox. But at the same time the film makes some excellent points. It's just that the film works better when it does it through comedy rather than rhetoric.

Another great scene, one that takes a poke at society's hypocrisy, is when Bagley argues with a feminist who thinks men should bleed. "And I think you're a vegan who eats meat in secret. You see, she doesn't deny it. She's a vegan who eats meat in secret!" "I do not eat meat!" "But you'll eat fish, you'll eat fish until the cows come home." "Fish is allowed!" Of course, this enrages Bagley.

But although hypocritical lefties get a kicking too, the film, early on, raises an interesting point. If you're anti-consumerism, how do you spread your message without advertising? It's a bit of a kick in the teeth, that.

However, Robinson is smart enough to know that consumerism is here to stay. The film doesn't end with any hope. All we can look forward to is more advertising, more spending and more products. The world is one magnificent shop indeed.

Here’s a weird piece of information. My uncle thought that dolphins were aliens from another planet. He thought that they were smarter than humans. Now bear in mind, this is a man that every Christmas would pass out in our armchair, drooling Carlsberg Special Brew from the corner of his mouth as he respired loudly while wearing a silly paper hat. I’m not saying that alcohol may have prejudiced his thinking, but...

Regardless of whether you think dolphins are Flippers from Mars or not, you have to admit that they’re pretty cool. They swim in the ocean, they protect sailors from sharks and Krakens, they make sick children and fat Floridians smile, they jump through hoops, they help the Navy. Is there anything dolphins can’t do?

Well, aside from writing literature and running the 100m, it seems like dolphins’ greatest failure is not escaping the clutches of the Japanese.

Ah, the Japanese. They’ve given us so many great things over the years – quality electronics, cars and videogames, and of course Kurosawa, Mishima, Ozu and Maru. But on the opposite end of the spectrum they’ve given us humiliation TV and lots of depraved porn; sickening stuff that’s so ashamed of itself that the cocks have spontaneously self-pixelated. Honestly, if I were a cute young girl on a Japanese train wearing an innocent little blouse and plaid skirt, I’d be worried that the very second that the doors closed a hundred blurry penises would be thrust in my face.

Japan’s also a nation that seems determined to eat and kill everything in sight. They harpoon whales and slaughter horses with reckless abandon. And then for a real good laugh, they spear some dolphins.

It takes a while to get to it, but the final part of The Cove packs a fair wallop. After lots of bullshit from various people (there’s talk about being able to scientifically kill the dolphins – apparently they can be killed with a single blow), we see how it really happens. Men in boats with spears methodically stab the dolphins. There’s no science to it. There’s no method. Men just hack and stab at the water until everything stops moving. But it takes a long time to achieve this. The water turns red and dolphins thrash in the water. It seems like the stupidest, most barbaric, most inefficient way to kill something.

The only reason that this footage is captured is because of the work of a group of individuals who decide to expose the killing that is taking place – the slaughter occurs out of sight and anyone who tries to take a look is either intimidated or encounters physical violence. It takes an undercover operation to bring it to light.

The surveillance operation feels like part spy thriller, part heist movie. There’s lots of night-vision and there’s more than one close call. In one scene, as the guys and girls bug the cove, some guards come along to intercept them. The way it’s filmed, you’re never quite sure how close the guards get, but the scene certainly gets the pulse racing. After all, this is a country that legally allows its police officers to torture suspects, so you can more than understand their rush to get out of Dodge.

One reason why the movie feels so much like a spy thriller is because the movie industry actually gets involved with the operation – a number of the team are special effects guys. So they deploy all kinds of cool ways of bugging the cove. My favourite are the cameras that are hidden in fake rocks that are planted in the cliffs.

But the real hero of the picture is Ric O’Barry. Formerly a dolphin capturer and trainer, and largely responsible for the success of the TV show Flipper, he’s turned his life around and now works to free captive dolphins. Largely responsible for this transformation is his belief that one of the real life Flippers committed suicide in his arms – unlike humans, dolphins have to consciously choose to breathe and the one in question just decided to stop. Understandably, this devastated him and he’s been a changed man since.

When we first see Ric O’Barry, he seems crazy. He wears masks over his face, he’s paranoid about cars following him and he’s constantly shifting back and forth. But it quickly becomes clear that this paranoia is justified. Harassed at every turn by policemen and angry fishermen, he survives through a sheer act of will. It’s truly impressive to see a man that is this dedicated to his cause. O’Barry won’t be intimidated and he won’t be swayed. Time after time men try and provoke him into reacting against them so that they can get him locked up, but he stays strong. And in some parts it even becomes amusing. For the hundredth time some cops decide to have a chat with him. They want to know whether he’s working with anyone to expose the activity in the cove but instead he starts talking about mercury levels. It’s obvious that they’ve heard this hundreds of times before and rather than listen to him again they quickly make their excuses and leave. It’s a brilliant piece of chess from O’Barry – he plays up to his image as a crackpot in order to protect everyone else.

But the mercury point is a big issue. Dolphin meat contains large levels of mercury and is poisonous to humans. And yet a Japanese school feeds its children dolphin meat and packets and packets of the stuff finds its way onto supermarket shelves. Anyone who eats it is slowly being killed.

The majority of the populace seems to be unaware of the dolphin killing practice but the politicians jealously protect it. They claim that it’s a form of pest control. In reality, it’s because the activity makes money – any dolphin that can be trained can fetch up to $150,000 and the rest can be slaughtered and sold for meat. And Japan gets away with it because they buy votes at the International Whaling Commission and because they don’t listen to what anyone else says.

The bubble is burst, though, when O’Barry bursts into a meeting with a video screen strapped to his chest. The video shows footage of the slaughter and O’Barry makes sure that everyone sees it. It brilliantly cuts through the bullshit and it rams the point of the movie home. There’s no ambiguity or objectivity here. This practice is fucking wrong.

Here’s a question for you. How does a man get transported to an alien planet where he’s hunted for sport and still manage to put on weight? It seems to me that being a human fox in a place that has a total absence of Popeyes and Wendy’s would be a recipe for weight loss, not weight gain. But then I guess I hadn’t figured on the gluttony of Laurence Fishburne. Apparently nothing will get in the way of him and his stomach.

Fishburne plays an Air Cavalry veteran who was kidnapped by the Predators and now hides in an abandoned spacecraft. He’s been stuck there for years and has lost his mind. Well, as you would if you were being hunted daily by giant aliens with dreadlocks and you faced the dire future of never visiting Tops Diner again for their wonderful Top of the World Burger. But Fishburne’s madness isn’t exactly subtle. He has crazy eyes and talks to himself. Presumably he spends all day trying to order a Double Down with no success.

Considering the fame of the actor and his prominence in the marketing campaign, I thought that Fishburne was going to be a main character, but no sooner does he turn up than he gets killed. However, there is an amusing scene where he tries to kill the humans that he’s harbouring in his spacecraft. He says to himself that he can’t feed all these mouths (yes, there is nothing a fat bloater fears more than the prospect of precious food entering a skinny fuck’s undeserving gut) and then tries to smoke them to death. Yeah, you heard me right. He tries to smoke them to death. No burning. No bashing. No blasting. I guess he’s trying to cook them. After all, if you’re in space with no Baconaise or Donut Burgers, what better treat than some human flesh? It must make a welcome change after eating nothing but bits of spacecraft and your own poo.

On the other hand, there are Predator Dogs that he could eat. But these creatures don’t look especially tasty. They’re full of giant tusks that would gouge your eyes out and rip your nose off if you decided to be overly zealous and ate one without having a hacksaw handy. Hell, now that I think about it, how the fuck do the Predator Dogs eat their prey? How are you supposed to get something’s flesh in your mouth when you have a giant tusk blocking your gob? Complete design nonsense.

Not that the action scene featuring the Predator Dogs is anything to write home about. A bunch of these poorly rendered beasts chase the antagonists (a motley assortment of the world’s best killers) and then get killed by machine gun fire. But what makes the scene laughable is in the way that the dogs get killed. There’s a bit where a Russian with a mini-gun shoots at one of the animals for like five seconds and doesn’t even hit a dog running straight at him. These guys are worse shots than the A-Team.

To be honest, none of the action is particularly spectacular. It ranges from ho-hum gun battles to ponderous Predator fisticuffs to silly sword fights. Yep, there’s one scene where a Yakuza fights a Predator with a katana. It’s as ridiculous as it sounds and it even takes place in a field of barley. Or should that be, Predator barley? Regardless, the scene is preposterous and not at all exciting. And it also seems to me that the Predators have become significantly easier to kill, as the Yakuza guy manages to slay his bigger, stronger foe in one-on-one combat. Fair enough, the Yakuza guy also dies, but the Predators no longer seem to be so fearsome.

Hell, even Adrien Brody manages to decapitate one of the dreadlocked aliens. Although having said this, Brody is no longer the skinny bastard he once was. He has now become uber diesel. It’s quite a sight to behold once we see him without his shirt on. He stands there caked in mud, doing his best Arnie impression, and then proceeds to beat the living shit out of a Predator before eventually decapitating it. It actually ends up being quite awesome, especially as this is an Oscar winning character actor. What next, Paul Giamatti in the next Alien film, slaying xenomorphs with a GShG-7.62 machine gun?

But I don’t know why the film is so coy to show us Brody’s muscles. He obviously worked pretty hard to get them. So why deny us the modern equivalent of the awesome, muscle-bulging Dillon/Dutch handshake? Or the totally over the top but necessary gratuitous jungle-trap-building-scene where the cast ripped their shirts off so that we could have close-ups of bulging muscles as they sweated under the sun? That shit was dope! – as my friend King D would say.

But no, this is a modern film and avoids homoeroticism like the plague (bastards!). So we have a film that is pretty much played straight down the middle. There are no glorious puns, no over the top violence and not a hint of gayness. As such the film is pretty charmless. True, I wasn’t trying to gouge my eyes out like I did when I tried to watch the Aliens vs. Predator films, but it’s nowhere near as fun as the original movie. And it’s probably not even as fun as the second one. Fuck, that film had Gary Busey in it! What does this film have? Topher Grace? And Topher Grace as a serial killer. The less said about that, the better...

Some people argue that Jaws ruined cinema. It was the first massive summer blockbuster and it paved the way for the nonsense that followed - high concept, big budget, fast food movies for people with short attention spans and less than discerning taste. It completely changed the landscape of the movie industry.

Whether you think this change is a good thing or bad thing depends on if you’re a drooling fanboy or someone with a modicum of intelligence. I know there are people who jizz in their pants at every big movie release. They watch the trailers, they read the news on excitable blogs and they go to the opening weekends, crying inside as they realise that the latest future movie classic starring Ryan Reynolds and Scarlett Johansson isn’t The Godfather. Hell, it isn’t even The Poseidon Adventure. But despite this they’ll still try and convince themselves and others that it is. They’ll artificially inflate the score on IMDb and they’ll nod in agreement with that fuckwit Harry Knowles. Yes The Dark Time Traveling Matrix of Wonderland was really a life changing experience.

For other folk, summer movie season is a time for despair. A time when nothing decent seems to be showing. But even though Jaws helped usher this in, we shouldn’t think less of the film. Jaws is fantastic entertainment and proof that it’s hard to make a big mainstream flick. Producers these days seem to think that there’s a magic formula, but there isn’t. The vast majority of them aren’t going to make anything that comes anywhere near close to the genius of Jaws.

One of the things that helped Jaws was that the special effects were rubbish. This meant that the filmmakers had to be a little more imaginative about the way that they filmed the shark sequences. They couldn’t just show the rubber Great White right from the beginning; the suspense would have been ruined. Instead we see lots of point of view shots and we get to see the results of the carnage.

Had Jaws been filmed today, we probably would have seen the shark in the very first reel, even if Spielberg had been director. Drunk with the possibilities of CGI, the focus would have been on pointless money shots instead of suspense.

But is CGI even better than the effects we have here? Sure, towards the end, as the shark performs increasingly outrageous acts, the effects look dodgy. Just take the mechanical gnashing as he eats Quint or the shark torpedo as he crashes into the sinking boat in order to eat Brody. The effects don’t look remotely real. But did the effects in Deep Blue Sea look real either? Not at all. And at least here there are one or two amazing shots of the shark. Easily the most effective is the first reveal. The attacks at the beginning are unseen, but during the 4th July celebrations we get our first glimpse of the monster. We see it from above as it goes to attack a man in a small rowing boat. The water is dirty and the shark doesn’t perform any acrobatics, but in this one shot it looks completely real. And it makes the scene quite chilling. The thought that there’s this monster in the water, waiting to eat you, has certainly made me more reluctant to dip my feet in the ocean. That there is a sign of an effective film.

As mentioned before, later scenes with the shark aren’t quite as powerful. For instance, the moment when the shark reveals itself to Brody. Yes it’s a big surprise, but the shark, chomping thin air, kind of looks like it has Bell’s Palsy. Far scarier are the scenes where we don’t actually see the shark but feel its presence. For instance, the scene where Quint talks about the Indianapolis. Now the scene is amazing for many reasons. One of the many reasons I love it is because of the scar contest that the characters have - you can feel the characters bonding and this of course makes you care more about them. But it’s also a great scene because of the sense of dread it fills you with. Quint talks about his ship being sunk after delivering the H-Bomb - trapped in the Pacific waters with rescue a long way away, sharks feed on the men. It conveys far more terror than any of the action scenes and gives all of the characters an added layer of depth. Before this they’re all kind of one note (stuck up policeman, crazy seadog and cynical oceanographer) but after this they all kind of change - they finally realise what they’re up against and you’re more invested in them as people.

Other scenes are a bit more mechanical in the scares they create. A prime example is the scene where Brody and Hooper search for the shark at night. As they travel through the waters they stumble upon the boat of a fisherman. Of course, Hooper decides he has to investigate and dives into the water to check the hull of the boat. As he’s checking it, the dead body of the fisherman leers out. It’s a blatant, shameless attempt to make you jump (Spielberg actually tinkered with it, knowing that he still had one big scare left in the film) but it works like gangbusters.

Something that’s easy to forget when talking about Jaws is how funny it is. The dialogue is incredibly pithy and it helps give the film lots of life and energy. I also like the politics of the film - Brody is helpless in the face of a stupid Mayor who will put money before people. But even though he could be a simple villain, even the stupid Mayor has a little depth to him. He just wants his town and its people to prosper and as such ends up putting lives on the line. In one particularly amusing scene, during the 4th July as the fearful beachgoers remain safely on the sand, he encourages a family to enter the water - it kind of reminded me of when a British politician made his child eat a burger to prove that British beef was safe and that we wouldn’t all get Mad Cow’s Disease. He’s just trying to make sure that the celebrations proceed as normal and that the town has a good holiday season, but his recklessness ends up costing lives.

Another scene that gives me a laugh is the introduction of Quint. In the middle of a typically silly and short-sighted town meeting, he runs his fingers down a blackboard and says that for a sizeable sum of money, he’ll catch the shark –he’s the guy who knows exactly what the problem is and how to solve it. Of course, seeing as the town is run by a shyster who likes to cut corners, his offer isn’t taken up. Once again the Mayor puts money before people.

But Quint is by far the most interesting character in the film. And watching the film for the first time in years, it’s kind of remarkable that he’s only really in the final half of the film. It just goes to show how strong his presence is that he’s the first thing I remember when I think of Jaws.

What makes Quint such a likeable character is how much fun Robert Shaw seems to be having. But this doesn’t mean that Shaw is overacting or playing the buffoon. Quint feels legitimately coarse and dangerous. But at the same time, he also has a nurturing side to him. He helps Brody and even comes to like Hooper (thanks largely to the Indianapolis scene).

Speaking of Hooper and Quint, there’s an excellent class war between the two. Quint represents the working class, learn things through experience ethos, and Hooper represents technology and book learning. Neither of them are wrong, but initially they clash. There’s even an amusing bit where Quint downs a beer in one go and then crushes his can. In response, Hooper downs a paper cup and also crushes it. In some ways, the relationship is even like father and son. Hooper constantly feels the need to prove himself and only after much effort does he gain the respect of the old man.

But like I said earlier, neither of their approaches are wrong. Both experience and technology should be embraced. And Quint eventually learns this. Too bad, though, that he only learns it minutes before disappearing down the gullet of a Great White.

The ending of the film, with Brody literally blowing the shark up, should be completely laughable and preposterous, but somehow the young Spielberg has a way of making even the silliest things both plausible and enjoyable. We shouldn’t root for the destruction of sharks, but you can’t help but clutch the air as this fish explodes into a bloody mess. Somehow man manages to triumph against nature. But man shouldn’t let this success go to his head. The key to our survival is education and intelligence. Although a big gun and a gas tank also come in handy sometimes...

Christopher Nolan is riding the crest of a wave. Revered in indie circles for Memento and adored by the masses for The Dark Knight, he’s quickly becoming a superstar director. Needless to say, people were literally wetting themselves at the prospect of his latest film, Inception. Complete with flying actors, trains rolling down streets and a booming soundtrack, the trailer was a sight to behold. Had I been a little less jaded and wankerish, I might have wet myself too.

Sadly these stunning visuals are the best thing about the film. The story is bogged down with mind-numbing exposition and the emotional arc is melodramatic to say the least.

Loosely resembling both a James Bond film and The Matrix, Inception concerns a group of thieves who travel into people’s dreams in order to extract valuable information. But an important Japanese businessman called Saito (Ken Watanabe) asks them to do much more than this. He doesn’t just want Leonardo DiCaprio’s merry gang to steal information; he wants them to go into someone’s mind and plant an idea – an operation called inception.

The target is Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy). He’s the heir to a lucrative energy monopoly and Saito wants DiCaprio’s gang to plant the idea that Fischer, upon his father’s death, should break it up. The rationale is that the energy monopoly is bad for everyone but the reality is that Saito doesn’t want to go out of business and would like the opportunity to take over.

Reading the basic premise, the film sounds interesting, but the reality doesn’t necessarily synch with the concept. Most of the problem with the film is that Nolan is incapable of setting up the world in an interesting way. It’s kind of the antithesis of The Matrix where everything was done with ease (too bad they fucked up royally with the sequels). All the talk of dreams within dreams and kicks and totems and projections feel remarkably laboured and clunky. The film can honestly be split into two halves – it’s awesome when people aren’t speaking but it’s a drag when they are.

One of the main offending scenes is when DiCaprio is showing Ellen Page’s character the dream world. Again I feel compelled to draw comparisons with the Wachowskis’ film. When Morpheus is showing Neo around the matrix, everything is presented simply and clearly – you get the idea instantly. With Inception, though, it feels awkward and ill-conceived. A good film doesn’t have to waste lots of time on endless exposition. Everything should unfold simply and clearly. This never happens with Nolan’s film.

I get particularly annoyed when films seem to be making things up as they go along. It’s a cheap way of getting around problems with the narrative and it’s a way of papering over cracks. This feeling of things being made up as they go along is particularly apparent in Inception. First of all you have the idea that individuals can go into other people’s dreams – fair enough, this is a cool idea. Then you find out that you can have dreams within dreams and then equally out of nowhere we find out that if you go really deep into someone’s dreams you can go to limbo. All of these concepts are fine but the construction of the story is lacklustre; you never feel that the filmmakers have a firm grasp of the rules of this world. You feel like they’ll bend and change them to serve themselves rather than the story.

Another lacklustre aspect of Inception is the emotional arc. DiCaprio and his wife fool around with this dream world and end up in limbo. DiCaprio eventually ends up discovering that he’s living a dream but his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard) won’t accept it. In order to get them to return to reality, DiCaprio performs inception and plants the idea in Mal’s head that she’s not living in the real world: by killing themselves while in limbo, they’ll return to reality. The only problem is that DiCaprio’s idea has stuck and the awoken Mal refuses to believe the reality of her existence. Again, writing this down, it sounds like an interesting idea, but once again the execution is lacking.

One key problem is the lack of chemistry between Leonardo DiCaprio and Marion Cotillard. They never feel like a convincing couple. But more damning than this is the ludicrous melodrama that forms the basis of many of their scenes. I was particularly amused by Mal’s idea for her and her husband to commit suicide together. She goes to all the effort of booking hotel rooms that face one another. This way she and her hubby can jump out of the window at the same time in glorious synchronised suicide. But it just seems like such a convoluted way of doing it. You have to find a hotel that has facing rooms and which both look down into a vertiginous drop. Why not just buy a gun or sit in a bathtub and drop a toaster into the water? I guess those options just aren’t romantic enough…

I also had to laugh when DiCaprio visited his dream world and we got to see what he has locked in the basement. Again it’s the hotel room where his wife killed herself and sure enough Mal is down there. But while the beginning of the scene is very well done (it has a creepy Shining vibe), it’s spoiled by melodrama. Mal goes crazy and then DiCaprio escapes into an elevator and keeps his wife locked down below. Yes I understand the symbolism but the execution of the scene is lacking and had me giggling like a girl. Yeah, keep your wo-man locked in the basement where she belongs!

Another laugh came when Leonardo DiCaprio gets stuck in the gap between buildings while trying to escape some bad guys. Yes this is the kind of thing that often happens in dreams (although the sequence is meant to take place in reality) but I couldn’t help but feel it was a jab at DiCaprio’s puffy physique. Got wedged between some buildings, you fat bastard!

Okay, so I’ve spent quite a bit of time bitching about the film but it certainly does have lots of things going for it. The action is often amazing and the visuals are stunning too. One of my favourite visuals is that of a train rampaging through some city streets. It’s an unusual juxtaposition but it’s filmed in such a matter of fact way that it’s only after a few seconds that you realise that a huge train should not be in this environment.

I also love some of the imagery in the opening sequence – especially the water bursting through the walls. And it’s also quite amazing how much the opening few minutes feel like a James Bond movie. For some reason I couldn’t help but think it felt like a modern You Only Live Twice. And speaking of James Bond, the snow sequence near the end of the movie has a huge Bond vibe. However, this sequence is less effective – by this point I was getting serious action fatigue.

The best scene, though, is the zero gravity fight. It wipes the floor with anything that The Matrix could come up with and I was constantly asking myself how they filmed it. It’s an amazing sequence.

Something else that I liked was how immoral the story is. Cillian Murphy’s character is being conned into breaking up his company, so therefore the heroes are behaving like massive pricks. Saito might pretend that this mission is to help everyone and break up a monopoly but its aim is to really set up another one.

But in the end, these pluses aren’t anywhere near enough to convince me that the film is some kind of modern masterpiece. The film is flawed as fuck. Hell, I think I might even prefer Insomnia...

If you were a child of the 80s, there's a good chance that at school you were lent a copy of The Running Man. And there's also a pretty good chance that you thought it was the dog's bollocks. But now that the decade of excess homoeroticism has been left behind, and now that easily pleased children have grown up, it's clear that The Running Man is pretty, well, crap.

The Running Man's most obvious shortcoming is its production values. Runners run around in quilted suits that resemble mattresses, glass lollipops serve as the ominous warning beacons that mark the point of no return for prisoners who don't want to have their heads blown off, Dynamo drives about in a car that appears to be made of Lego, fascist soldiers capture criminals with the terror that is a small red net, the wasteland that is the game quadrant appears to repeat itself Hanna-Barbera style and the opening crawl looks like it was typed on a BBC Micro. It's a cheap, cheap film.

However, despite the fact that it's cheap, despite the fact that it looks like sludge was smeared over the lenses, despite the fact that it was filmed by Detective Dave Starsky and despite the fact that the film repeats the words 'uplink', 'relay', 'network', 'interface', 'satellite' and 'resistance' so many times that I want to remove them from the dictionary Newspeak-style, there's still plenty to enjoy. The film's the epitome of a guilty pleasure.

What you most expect from an 80s Arnie film is homoeroticism, and in that regard the film certainly delivers. The first shot of Arnie (post Bakersfield massacre) is of him carrying a massive steel girder on his shoulder (it's a repeat of the shot in Commando where you're introduced to Schwarzenegger with the visual of him carrying a huge log). Sure he's probably got a micropenis, but let us buy into the fantasy - this man is hung like a shire horse and you viewer are nothing but a pathetic girly man who would wither and die when faced with the awesomeness of the Austrian Oak. And just to prove how virile Arnie is, no sooner has the film started than he's grabbing men by their privates and smoking unfeasibly large cigars.

All of this is certainly very stimulating for Killian, the Bobby Heenan-style game show presenter who hosts The Running Man. When he first sees Arnie, running in dreamy slow-motion with muscles-a-bulging, he says, "Hello gorgeous." And in the course of this scene he also says, "Isn't he beautiful?" and shouts, "I want him!" I bet he's got a steel girder in his pants. But when he first meets Arnie face to face he coos, "Hi, cutie pie." I think I'm getting a steel girder too.

But as log-friendly as this banter is, it's amateur league punk stuff when you compare it to the Captain Freedom workout. Jesse Ventura appears on the screen, shouting, "Are you ready for pain? Are you ready for suffering? If the answer is yes, then you're ready for Captain Freedom's workout." Sure there are some women in the background that you're supposed to be gently ogling, but they're clearly just window dressing. Jesse is the main course and his is the body that the camera lingers on. Hell, the scene might as well have have flashing lights and sirens, 'Butt sex is a painful but glorious workout!'

Another great detail is Arnie's disguise when he's on the run from the law. He walks around with a thick beard, a gym t-shirt (which is ripped to show as much of his neck and biceps as possible) and a yellow builder's hat. Maybe he ransacked the local YMCA.

But the film also delivers in terms of amusing deaths. Of course, the most obvious are the stalker deaths. You've got Fireball exploding, Sub-Zero wearing a barbed wire necktie, Dynamo being electrocuted (mid-rape) in his saggy kecks, and, best of all, Buzzsaw getting castrated – I love his falsetto scream. But you've also got a prisoner having his head blown off (while his body keeps running), and, my personal favourite, Killian going through a sign in that toboggan thing. But what makes the Killian death my favourite is the way the sign explodes when Killian goes through it. It's totally unnecessary but that's what makes it great.

Just as unnecessary are Arnie's atrocious puns. But their awfulness is what makes them so brilliant. "He had to split." "What a hot head." "Yeah, he was a pain in the neck." Even Roger Moore would be proud. But Arnie's best piece of dialogue is considerably more subtle. After Yaphet Kotto dies, and after he's made an offer by Killian to become a stalker, Arnie grabs a camera and yells, "I live to see you eat that contract, but I hope you leave enough room for my fist because I'm going to ram it into your stomach and break your goddamn spine!" Poetry.

Not quite as poetic, though, is the final shoot-out. Basically Arnie and a bunch of soldiers who look like members of Culture Club invade the studio and reveal the truth regarding this fascistic society. It's a dull action scene (although I like the way that Arnie, like Charles Bronson, can avoid bullets simply by ducking). Plus Arnie, for some reason, spares the bloodthirsty mob. Surely I can't be the only one that was hoping he'd open fire on the crowd – especially on that old granny – and establish a Ben Richards dictatorship? But no, in a typically un-Republican way, Arnie wants freedom. And he also gets the girl and walks off with her to the sound of some abysmal 80s power ballad. Personally, I think it would have been more convincing if he'd walked off arm-in-arm with Killian's bodyguard, Sven.

>The Road didn’t seem to make any impact when it was released in theatres. It was given a very small release and then a few weeks later it was gone. I suppose the studio was hoping that it would generate some Oscar buzz and that it would slowly gain wider distribution. Unfortunately, though, it was never really a contender for the Academy Awards and it quickly disappeared off the radar.

I can understand why this happened, but it’s still a shame. The Road lacks the poetry and emotional power of the novel and it’s certainly not a crowd pleaser, but it’s still a worthy film. And as far as the Academy Awards go, it’s leagues ahead of stuff like Avatar and Up in the Air.

Although my problems with the film are few, I do think that the movie is too keen to give away key elements of the story. In the novel there’s a slow build up to the horrors. McCarthy is very methodical and takes his time. The film, though, perhaps sensing that film audiences are impatient Neanderthals, almost immediately informs you that there are cannibals in this post apocalyptic world. And then to make it explicit, within the first fifteen minutes there’s a scene where a father and son encounter one of the ‘bad guys’. The man is like something out of Deliverance and tries to tell the father that he can help him and his son out. The father’s not having any of it and points a gun at him. The father then asks what the man is eating. ‘Anything we can find,’ answers the man, who then looks at the boy and almost licks his lips. The scene is well done but it’s too early in the film. We’re only just getting to know the characters and so the peril isn’t as keenly felt. Had they placed it later on, the stakes would have been higher and it would have had more of an impact. But the filmmakers are overly eager to explain what is exactly going on in this world and as a consequence they ruin the surprise element.

One of the most shocking things in the book is not the cannibalism itself but the form that the cannibalism has taken. There’s a sequence where the father and son break into a house and then discover people in the basement – people who are being harvested for food. When I read the scene, it took me aback. In the film, though, because the cannibalism is addressed so quickly and clearly, it doesn’t have the same power.

But again the scene is well filmed. The basement dwellers look almost zombie-like but they still have the humanity to ask for help. And this captures one of the story’s moral dilemmas. The characters say that they’re ‘carrying the fire’ and they’re adamant that they’re good guys in a world gone crazy, but how can you truly be a good guy when you condemn others to death? This is what happens in The Road. The father and son, knowing that there’s nothing they can do, lock the basement and run off before they too are killed. Sometimes, in order to save yourself, you have to pass judgement on others. It’s not something that’s easy to live with, but what would be the point of killing yourself in a futile attempt to save others?

Another example of the difficult decisions that have to be made in a world this tough comes in the scene where the father and son have all of their possessions stolen by another survivor. They eventually catch up to the man and the father makes the man give all the stuff back. But on top of this, he makes the man strip naked, almost certainly condemning him to death. It’s a harsh, almost Old Testament style punishment, but you can see why the father does it. In this world, your supplies are the difference between life and death. So when someone steals your possessions you have to take appropriate measures. However, the father probably goes too far – the other man is also fighting and clawing to survive in this world. So while the father is judge, jury and executioner, his son is his conscience – the boy convinces his father to go back and return the man’s clothes. It’s this compassion, this concern for others that lets you know that he’s the one truly carrying the fire – the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes is what makes you human and it’s what makes us unique amongst the species.

The fire that the characters are carrying is also illustrated in a scene where the father and son find a bunker full of supplies. They gorge themselves on food, they groom themselves for the first time in god knows how long and they have fun. This is what life is supposed to be like. We should have evolved past the life and death dilemmas we used to face – we should be able to sit back and enjoy ourselves, free from the fear of impending oblivion. But instead the threat is still there. We still have to scavenge to survive. Life at the moment might not be like it is in The Road, but with the economic crisis that has hit us we’re still struggling to keep our heads above water.

Indeed, if you so wished, you could look at the story of The Road as a metaphor for life in America today. So many people walk a tightrope between survival and disaster that it’s hardly surprising that people will trample over each other in order to get what they need – in The Road it’s literally a dog eat dog world. With help so sorely lacking from external sources such as the government, people have to rely on charity, family and random generosity. The boy here is one of those people that will do anything to help others – when he and his father encounter an old man, he wants to hold his hand and feed him. Maybe America can learn from this boy. People shouldn’t be cut adrift and left to fend for themselves. We should all look out for each other.

The main fear for the boy in this film is that his father will die. His father is the one person who is looking out for him and who he can rely on. And indeed, at the end, his nightmare comes true – the father passes away. Thus he is cast into a harsh, uncaring world. It’s only by chance that some ‘good guys’ come along to help the boy out.

The main disappointment of the film is that the father’s death lacks the emotional punch of the novel. In the book, the death scene is shattering. Here it falls slightly flat. It’s like the actors and the director couldn’t quite get in the groove the day they were filming it.

On the flip side, the main success of the movie is its magnificent score. Composed by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, it’s further proof that they’re making some of the best film scores today. It doesn’t quite reach the dizzying heights of their work on The Assassination of Jesse James, but it comes mighty close. If only the movie’s final scene could capture the same emotion.

It’s quite amazing that Moon was shot on such a small budget (about $5 million). It has a scale and a scope that would suggest it’s an incredibly expensive production. It just shows what you can do when you have a bit of imagination and when you don’t have massive stars demanding outrageous salaries.

One of the interesting things about Moon’s effects work is that they actually used models for lots of it. This flies in the face of modern filmmaking when even the most mundane things are produced entirely from a computer. So in this day and age it’s unusual to see effects that actually have a weight and tangibility about them. It harks back to films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running and Alien where you actually felt like you could reach in and touch the world that was flashing across the screen.

Something else that is pleasing about Moon is how low-key it is. This isn’t a monster production with a huge cast and loads of explosions. It revolves around one guy doing some tedious work on the surface of the moon.

Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell) is an employee for Lunar Industries who lives alone on the surface of the moon. His job is to oversee a bunch of robotic lunar harvesters that are gathering Helium 3, a source of fuel that has solved the energy crisis on Earth. It’s mind numbing work and work that he does on his own. He only has a robot called GERTY for company and his contract is three years long. Therefore it’s not surprising that his mental well being has deteriorated considerably.

As Sam’s contract gets closer and closer to expiring, he begins to see things. At one point he sees a girl sitting in his favourite chair. And then later he imagines he’s making love to his wife. At this point the film kind of feels like Solaris.

Adding to the weirdness is the fact that Sam crashes his lunar rover into one of the harvesters and is then rescued by…himself. At this point the film could really feel like Solaris but a solid explanation is quickly given. The Sam who crashed and the Sam who woke up in the base and then rescued the first Sam, are both clones.

And so what you have is a kind of spin on the mysterious company that featured in the Alien films. You have a company that lies and kills to increase profits. And what better place to cheat and steal than on the Moon? Who’s ever going to know?

The conspiracy to keep the truth from Sam, that he’s a clone of a real person, extends to keeping a satellite link permanently broken. This means that Sam never has any live interaction with anyone on Earth. It also means that he never gets to talk to his wife – he only gets video messages from her. And so therefore, as you can imagine, it’s a bit of a pisser when he eventually finds out that his wife is dead and that the real Sam Bell is alive and well on Earth.

One of the strengths and weaknesses of Moon is Sam Rockwell. As the first Sam, a clone that is slowly falling apart both mentally and physically, he occasionally falls into Rockwell’s familiar tics – wild-eyed mania. But as the second clone, he exudes strength and arrogance. There aren’t any of the usual Rockwell theatrics.

But even though Rockwell does occasionally tread familiar ground with some of his rants, it’s impressive that he manages to hold the film together on his own, because aside from GERTY (who’s voiced by Kevin Spacey), he’s the only performer in this film. Everything rests on his shoulders. If only he could express anger and mental instability without resorting to his Chuck Barris shtick, it would show considerable growth as an actor.

The film’s only other weakness is the ending. You see, both of the Sams find out that they’re clones with a three year lifespan and that they’ll never get a chance to go home. They have no home. It’s all a lie. They also find out that a ‘rescue’ team is arriving soon to supposedly repair a broken harvester. But in reality it’s an execution squad. Despite this, the second Sam puts himself into a pod that is used to send Helium 3 back to Earth and fires himself back to the blue planet. We then find out that because this clone has suddenly landed, LUNAR’s dodgy business practises have been revealed and their share price has fallen. Somehow this is just a little too neat for me. I mean, I know most companies are comprised of colossal fuck ups that couldn’t keep a secret if they tried, but I don’t have faith that the little man will eventually triumph over the corporations. And so I think the ending is an unrealistic ray of light in a believably bleak movie.

But despite this, Moon is a marvellous film. It’s an old fashioned science fiction film that shows that man’s biggest conflict will always be with himself. And there’s also man’s relationship with technology. In the recent past we worried that robots or computers would make us obsolete. These days the concern is that we’ll be used for spare parts or engineered to someone’s specifications.

A small detail that I loved was that Sam’s alarm clock woke him up with Chesney Hawke’s ‘The One and Only’. Despite the obvious amusement factor of this man using a bemoled teenage heartthrob with helmet hair as his wake up call, it’s also pleasantly subversive. This man isn’t the one and only. He’s company product. And that’s what we’ll need to avoid if we’re hold on to our humanity.

Quentin Tarantino is trying his hardest to be Sergio Leone. However, he's not always succeeding.

Case in point: the scene where the beautiful heroine gets killed by a Nazi war hero/movie star/stud muffin. It has Ennio Morricone on the soundtrack, it has two senseless deaths and it’s exquisitely filmed. But it doesn't pull the heart strings - it doesn't have the power to illicit emotion like Leone's films did. Instead it reeks of someone trying hard to pay homage to a master and coming close to equalling them but just falling short.

The problem is that the relationship between the two characters isn't deserving of such an operatic sequence. Here we have a Nazi soldier who develops a fondness for a French Jew (he doesn't know that she's a Jew). What results are a few scenes of him pestering the poor girl. We never really get the impression that she has any fondness for the man. In fact, she seems to hate him. After all, her family was slaughtered by Nazis. So everything comes to a head during the final sequence at a Nazi film premiere. The war hero wants to see the girl and literally won’t take no for an answer - he breaks into the projection booth. The girl then makes out that she's interested in fucking him and shoots him in the back. Okay, one less Nazi in the world - excellent. But then the girl watches the film that is playing in the cinema - a film that both stars and is about the war hero's exploits in Italy (alone in a sniper's nest, he killed more than three hundred men). For some reason she seems moved by his ordeal and goes to comfort him. He then shoots her and kills her as Morricone blasts on the soundtrack. Had there been more complexity in relationship or had there been any chemistry between the two or even if the Nazi hadn't been a prick and tried to break into the projection booth so that he could fuck the girl, I would have enjoyed the scene more. But instead, emotionally, it falls completely flat. Yes it’s well filmed and choreographed, but that's not enough. Tarantino still doesn't quite have the skill to engage the emotions.

Tarantino is far better suited to suspense sequences and action scenes. The opening is an excellent example of what Tarantino does best. Yes it has its nods to Leone and spaghetti westerns with the slow arrival of the main villain and the Morricone that pounds on the soundtrack, but once the characters begin talking it’s distinctly QT. A Nazi Colonel called Hans Landa, a man nicknamed ‘The Jew Hunter’, talks with a French farmer. He very politely inquires after some local Jews – he’s been charged with hunting them down. The farmer says he doesn’t know where they are. What makes the scene so engrossing is how overly cordial it is. The Nazi Colonel doesn’t scream and shout. He doesn’t threaten the man. He’s actually charming. And using this charm he manages to get the farmer to confess that he’s hiding the Jews under the floorboards. We then have a brief burst of violence as some Stormtroopers enter the property so that they can shoot through the floorboards and kill the cowering Jews.

It’s this duality that makes Landa such an entertaining character – he’s charming but horrible; he’s funny but disgusting. Summing this up is a scene where he talks to Shosanna, the lone survivor of the massacre that opens the film. Landa isn’t aware of who she is, so he’s very friendly, very charming; his French is impeccable. But at the same time there’s something off about him. For one he’s very insistent that she must eat some strudel. Secondly, once he’s sated, he sticks his cigarette into his food. It’s the smallest hint of his true nature – that he isn’t the charming sophisticate he purports to be.

A favourite Landa moment of mine is when he confronts a German actress at a Nazi film premiere. He’s just discovered that she’s defected to the Allies and that she was involved in a gun battle – she got shot in her leg. Therefore he’s highly amused when she tries to convince him that she got her injury in a mountain climbing accident. His laughter is so over the top and hysterical that even she knows that he knows that she’s lying. It’s a very amusing moment but it’s promptly followed by his grisly murder of her. He takes her to his office and strangles her to death. Again humour and violence queasily co-exist with one another.

The end of the film sees the height of the film’s comedy. However, it also illustrates one of the film’s problems. You see, Landa decides to defect to the Allies. It’s never fully explained why he does this. Maybe he sees the writing on the wall for the Nazi party and decides to get out while he can. Who knows? But as he’s negotiating he suddenly exclaims, in a very camp, childlike way, ‘That’s a bingo!’ It’s a moment that had me howling with laughter but I’m not sure whether it really helps the movie. Yeah the film is amusing but sometimes the humour works against the film as a whole – it makes the characters more cartoonish and reduces the amount of tension.

Another example of this is when the ‘Basterds’ sneak into the Nazi premiere. Their German speaking members have been killed and so Brad Pitt’s Aldo Raine says that he and another couple of soldiers will attend the premiere as Italian filmmakers, and seeing as Raine can speak the best Italian, he’ll do most of the talking. Cue Brad Pitt saying ‘grazie’ in a redneck accent. Yes it’s very, very funny, but it kind of makes Raine look buffoonish. Suddenly he doesn’t seem like a dangerous platoon leader – he’s a clown.

The same goes for the other Basterds who attend the premiere. One of them is a fearsome soldier who kills Nazis with a baseball bat. But at the end he also becomes a buffoonish figure speaking stereotypical ‘I-talian’.

That being said, he does redeem himself at the very end by pretending to be a waiter and glassing a Nazi soldier. He then breaks into an opera box and kills Hitler. The wish-fulfilment here is fantastic and he even shoots Hitler repeatedly in the face as his dead body lies on the floor – Tarantino is rewriting history for us and making it considerably more satisfying.

The final action scene, though, brought another film to mind. As the Basterds dispatched Nazis in a suicidal attack I couldn’t help but think of the machine gun scene in The Wild Bunch. The scene here isn’t anywhere close to that piece of genius but it does the job – you get to see the most important people in the Nazi party get shot, burnt and blown to bits. You’d have to be a fascist or the most insane bleeding heart liberal not to get a kick out of it.

The end of the film has Aldo Raine proclaiming that this might be his masterpiece. I wonder whether Tarantino thinks the same way. If he does, he’s mistaken. As hugely enjoyable as the film is, there are too many things working against it for it to be considered truly great. The buffoonish humour, the sometimes strange character motivations and the unsuccessful attempts to produce emotion all work against it. As does the incredibly strange casting of Mike Myers as a British officer. His scene is one of the worst in the film, as he’s basically playing a toffee-nosed Austin Powers. Thankfully though, he’s on and off the screen in no time.