Not exactly an advert for tourism to the City of Light, Taken revolves around a human trafficking ring that’s kidnapping tourists newly arrived in Paris, and shipping them off to cruel sexual slavery. Unfortunately for one particular gang of Albanians (this year’s recipient of Most Vilified Nation in Hollywood Award…..  that’s right, Albanians), the girl they’ve […]

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The Ruins starts with the typical premise of standard slasher-horror-fayre; a group of nice, naive, corn-fed American tourists wander off the beaten track and into the arms of particularly gruesome and bloody danger. The difference though is that the predatory threat here is not a mad-eyed axemurderer, but a land-locked island of mobile, talkative, carnivorous plants.

It sounds […]

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I’m not quite sure what to make of Tropic Thunder - Ben Stiller’s raucous romp through Indochina (Zoolander meets Apocalypse Now). Some belly laughs (mostly covering my mouth going “Oh my god!”), some knowing smiles, a whole lot of “what now?”s. I got all of the jokes and everything; I just didn’t find them all that hilarious. Or […]

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Yes, Mamma Mia! is cheezy. Yes, it’s uneven and it’s unlikely and, if you look at it dispassionately, it’s all ridiculously silly. But the thing is, you simply cannot watch it dispassionately……
Blame those damn catchy tunes. Blame the fact that absolutely everyone seems to be having an absolute blast (you know it’s daft when career vamp Christine […]

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I saw another apocalyptic destruction of London over the weekend - the TV mini-series, Flood.

The only thing that kept me going was when my friend Victoria appeared carrying flowers from one side of the room to the other but (evidently) going nowhere very fast at all. You see, although the movie focuses on a fictional […]

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As if day-to-day reality wasn’t quite scary enough, a lot of South African literature focuses on the what-ifs? of a post-apocalyptic Azania. By that, I don’t mean post-nuclear apocalypse as it might normarily apply to you good folks in the rest of the world. I mean post-liberation, post-independence, post-ANC apocalypse. Time and again, books (though rarely movies, which rely on government funding) […]

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In Vantage Point, there’s an assassination attempt on the life of the President of the United States whilst he’s attending a big anti-terrorism summit in Salamanca, Spain. This chaotic exposition of bullet and bomb unfolds piece-by-piece, via six separate points-of-view, culminating in a car chase that features some of the best stunt driving action you’ll see in a […]

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I love Amy Adams. I loved her in Enchanted, I loved her in Talledega Nights, I loved her in Junebug and in Charlie Wilson’s War. The fact that she’s from small-town Colorado has something to do with it. The fact that she’s outrageously talented does too. I so love Amy Adams, I’d watch her in […]

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I find myself at that stage of life where I’m looking back a lot at the choices I made that brought me to this place. I’m still pissed, for instance, that I didn’t spend my twenties as a tennis pro, repeatedly winning the Australian Open - but that’s the bitter-sweet joy of retrospective dreaming; I gave up tennis when I was eleven. 
Anyway, […]

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O-M-G! I was heading for University at almost exactly the same time as Brian Jackson (an earlier, weedier incarnation of James McAvoy) in the Brit movie Starter for 10.
So I recognised the gauche awkwardness of the student parties, the worthiness of the constant political campaigning outside the Student Uni, the strangely inept sexual fumblings, the […]

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