Fool’s Gold wants to be an adventure-cum-romantic comedy yarn about a Caribbean hunt for buried treasure that rekindles the romance of a mismatched husband and wife. Problem is, the plot is somewhat plodding, the romance is so-so and the comedy is mostly made up of pratfalls and funny voices (they are accompanied on their journey by a supporting cast of characters inexplicably using accents that are almost entirely not their own.)

My biggest problem of course is the male lead - Matthew McConaughey. Some wag proposed that McConaughey has a contract that insists he spends at least 51% of any movie shirtless. I don’t think it’s contractual; I think he’s an arrogant schmuck who rather fancies himself. Odd, considering the wet look poodle perm, which was not a good look in New Cross Gate in 1986 and, frankly, still isn’t now.

In contrast - and somewhat surprisingly, it’s Kate Hudson (in my humble opinion a largely over-rated flake who has really grated on me in the past) who is the movie’s main redeeming feature; her comic timing is really very good and she looks cute and she’s about the only one you vaguely believe in or care for.

For what it’s worth, the movie barely set foot in the Caribbean during filming - it was mostly shot on location on the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia with Port Douglas doing stand-in for Key West. Apparently the director didn’t want the schedule disrupted by hurricanes, which makes sense, I guess. Other QL locations included Hamilton Island, Lizard Island (eek) and Hervey Bay. There’s a quaint local story on the cast’s encounters with Australia’s notoriously gruesome wildlife at Stuff.

There’s nothing specifically wrong with Fool’s Gold, but there’s nothing really right with it either. Nevertheless, if you want a good giggle, check out a whole range of priceless journalistic disdain at the movie’s Wikipedia entry.

88 Minutes is about a serial killer put away on the evidence of a celebrity psychiatrist. Said killer may be innocent OR he may be trying to frame the good doctor before he’s executed. There’s a death threat in there too, somewhere.

So let’s start by saying “It’s an Al Pacino film.” In alternative universes “It’s an Al Pacino film” still suggests a degree of cachet - which is probably how the all(most)-star cast were persuaded to get involved with this mess in the first place. In 88 Minutes, LeeLee Sobieski, Sybil’s Red-headed Daughter, (Judging) Amy Brenneman, Neal McDonough and Deborah Kara Unger sadly flare and die in a plot that turns more poorly executed circles than an episode of “So You Think You Can Dance?”. They’re all significantly taller than Pacino too - which has apparently been dealt with by giving his hair a life of its own - it rises and falls at will and without reason. (No, continuity is not this film’s strong point.) And if you’re expecting a real-time, 24-esque, race-for-the-finish-line, you will be disappointed. Quite bitterly in fact. It’s 106 minutes long in fact; enough said? What else? 88 Minutes is set in Seattle but it’s filmed in Vancouver, so it rains. A lot.

Honestly? I gave up and went to bed.

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 just snatched is the only child of a former CIA agent. With 96 hours before she vanishes for good, he undertakes to track her down sharpish, slaying multiple bad guys along the way.

To be honest, there’s not much more to the movie than the tag line - though that’s not to say it’s not well constructed and delivered production.  Sordid subject matter aside, Taken is a rollercoaster ride, and Liam Neeson as the Dad-on-Fire brings unassuming normalness to his viciously accurate karate chops. I love that he shoots his old friend’s wife when he’s suddenly implicated in the plot. I also love the fact that there are no “witty wisecracks” in the script and there’s no dumb-ass sidekick for levity. It handles its relentlessness seriously, and that’s a boon.

On the down side, 25 year old Maggie Grace as his 17 year old daughter is really pushing the limits of disbelief, and clearly neither Grace nor the French director really remember what it was like to be a Californian teenager. Pony or home karaoke machine? Those are things I’d argue over with my ten year old. 

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 ludicrous, it is ludicrous, but The Ruins is saved by the utter conviction with which the four American leads - including the wonderful Jena Malone and angular Jonathan Tucker - carry out their roles. Their collective descent from drunken frivolity through nagging unease (sharpened by tequila hangovers) to shock to panic to absolute fear and ultimately madness is believably handled, and the choices they make (leg-chopping aside) feel honest, even if their characters are only lightly sketched by the script.

It’s a beautifully lit film - the cinematography is all bleached and intense. The plant is pretty scary, but that’s matched by the apparently blank inhumanity of the Mayan villagers who won’t let them leave. I also liked the fact that movie’s violence / horror (again, leg-chopping aside) happens so quickly, so violently and so horrifically, that you are left gasping. The Ruins does those flickers of nastiness - “did I really see that?” - really well.

Interestingly, The Ruins was filmed on the Gold Coast in Australia, though you’d probably never tell.

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 maybe it’s because the comedy rollicks along so briskly, there isn’t time to let it all sink in?

The movie’s premise is simple; during the filming of a big-budget Vietnam war movie, several over-primped and self-obsessed movie stars are dropped in the middle of the jungle and forced to make their way home without personal assistants, TIVO or little bankies of cocaine. Along the way they fall foul of the Flaming Dragon drug cartel ruled by a vicious pre-teen thug with a bamboo whip and a penchant for a particular soppy Hollywood drama…..

Yes; no matter what you’ve heard, Tropic Thunder is not a throwaway, third grade-schoolyard style bullying of disabled folk but rather a sharp skewering of the vanity, vapidity and insincerity of Hollywood. And that’s a good thing, right? The cast is great - I have fondest memories of Steve Coogan as the hapless Brit director trying to contain the team of divas before - whump! - he steps on a mine, and a semi-naked, drug-addled, bleach blonde Jack Black strapped to a tree. Or the back of a buffalo. (Off set, the buffalo had a calf during filming they called “Little Jack” - I kid you not.) Downey Jnr would have been even better if he hadn’t lost me up front with a dreadfully fake Australian accent and Stiller of course is always Derek Zoolander - something for which he is still, just, forgiven.

I also secretly believe that Tom Cruise in reallife actually is just like foul-mouthed, fat-fingered Les Grossman; the fact that Tom in a fat-suit is a dead ringer for someone I once worked with made it all the more unnerving.

For a movie about fakes, it’s not surprising the team chose a fake Vietnam; the movie was shot on Kauai, where Stiller has a home. Locations included the movie’s two major set pieces, the Hot LZ and Flaming Dragon Compound. The Hot LZ - location for the tumultous opening “war scene” - was situated on an expansive valley of tropical land, part of the privately-owned 40,000-acre Grove Farm property. TheFlaming Dragon Compound where the movie’s final action sequence takes place was filmed a few miles inland, on set that was constructed over several months at the edge of Mount Waialeale. Mount Waialeale gets 350 rainy days per year - more rain than any other place in the world.

Wsbradio has some interesting production notes on the film; the Hot LZ explosion was apparently created with a 450 foot-long row of explosive pots filled with 1100 gallons of a 90/10 gasoline/diesel mix that were arranged across a field lined with coconut palm trees. In one take and at the flick of a switch, 11 cameras captured the controlled explosion that created a mushroom cloud fireball reaching 350 feet in the air. The entire staggered explosion consisted of 12 separate explosions, the full run of which was completed in 1.25 seconds.

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 Baranski plays one of the more subdued characters). Blame Meryl Streep for completely stealing the show (how can you not just grin when you watch her sixty-something frame joyously bouncing on her big old bed, singing Dancing Queen at the top of her lungs?) Julie Walters is just dotty. Pierce Brosnan sings! And Greece has itself another glorious destination marketing product that’ll have the tourists clamouring.

A lot of the action was shot on the island of Skopelos - including the remarkable Agios Ioannis Prodromos Monastery that served as the wedding chapel (I thought for a while it had to be a set; I just hoped it really was an actual place). The beach at Kastani, a tiny bay on the west coast bay served as the film’s main external location site. Says the UK Telegraph

The producers built a beach bar and jetty but removed them when they left. Swimming offshore, you look back on a bay so symmetrical it might be an amphitheatre, and so extravagantly green that it might have been painted by a set hand.

The whole production may have been a breathy, high-paced shambles, but who cares? I’m packing as I type.

I’m a crime novel junkie. I’ve read every Michael Connelly, every Harlan Coben, every Jeffrey Deaver and every James Lee Burke novel there is. Lee Burke’s main character is Detective Dave Robicheaux of New Iberia Parish in Louisiana, and you can virtually smell the bayou and the grilled crawfish and the pimples of sweat on the necks of characters and beer bottles. Michael Connelly has Detective Harry Bosch whose turf is LA; every time Bosch steps out, you almost need to squint in the SoCal sunshine, and the smog sticks viscerally to the back of your throat. Great writing.

James Elroy is another crime author who’s made LA his beat - and the vividness of his settings have translated well to movies - think of the remarkable LA Confidential, or Dark Blue, or the creepy and kind of sick Black Dahlia. Elroy also wrote the novel of Street Kings, and he also wrote the script of the film that bears the same title.

Street Kings is again a convoluted and twisting tale of trust and betrayal in and around the LA Police Department. Basically Keanu Reaves - somewhat fleshier, wearier and evidently ageing (occasionally the camera angles aren’t kind) - is a drink-addled, hot-head vigilante-style cop whose boss (Forest Whitaker) is always getting him out of scrapes. When Reaves learns that his ex-partner has gone to Internal Affairs, he thinks he’s been set up. However, things are not quite what they seem. I say ”not quite” because - inspite of a great supporting cast that includes Hugh Laurie and Chris Evans (beauty-and-the-geek) - it takes about three and a half minutes to realise what the twist is going to be. Shame, really.  

Where Street Kings works though is its atmospheric portrayal of LA in all it’s scuzzy, sprawling, chaotic grunge. As the Channel 4 review says:

To acknowledge Street Kings’s one major bonus first, Ayer’s insistence on ensconcing his film in LA’s less salubrious, violent heartlands reaps its rewards, adding an irreplaceable scuffed authenticity to the tale. Unfortunately movies, unlike housing, aren’t all location, location, location. 

Love this: IFC has a list of the top ten “disturbingly powerful” fictional film corporations.

They don’t mention Resident Evil’s Umbrella Corporation though - which is pretty damn scary if you ask me….. 

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 overwhelming of the London Thames Barrier by a high tide-cum-storm surge, it was partly filmed in South Africa. Which isn’t actually the reason it is so awful; that’d mostly be the fault of the plot/script. Thomas Sutcliffe cannot contain his derision in the UK Independent.

Though the storm surge was powerful enough to flick juggernauts aside like bits of popcorn, it was also sufficiently placid to allow Robert Carlyle to go duck-diving in the Thames to look for a lifeboat. Absolutely nothing made sense: in one shot, the city streets were gripped by mass panic and gridlock, in the next, Joanne Whalley’s daughters appeared to have been able to hail themselves a taxi, something that can be tricky even in light drizzle.

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) imagine a future South Africa as a horribly failed state where corpulent, corrupt, vicious officials casually oversee a weakened and disease-ravaged populace, and where unfettered crime and violence have driven white Africans either to flee to Australia or (for those without the European passports) to barren and arid farmsteads out in the waterless bush.

I wonder if my South African alertness to the potential that ordered little life may suddenly take a very different track means that I am particularly receptive to the chilling alternatives offered by Danny Boyle’s movies 28 Days Later and 28 Weeks Later. The first is set in the immediate aftermath of an outbreak of a plague-like cataclysm that turns its victims into soulless flesh-eaters that can chase you really really fast. The second - which I caught on tv the other night - takes place once the virus has been contained (with no one left to kill, the zombies starved - nice) and a mission, lead by the American military, has begun to repopulate Britain.

Both movies have remarkable, mesmerising images of a hastily-deserted London - Cillian Murphy’s solo walk through the deathly quiet streets of Westminster in 28 Days is a complete wondrous thrill to anyone who’s ever been nearly flattened by a big red bus, or (worse) by a gaggle of Italian language students in brightly-coloured backpacks. 28 Weeks Later though trumps even that imagery; beautiful, shiny, devastatingly, hauntingly empty, it films London a lot from the air (which adds to the queasy sense of dislocation.)

Says producer Allon Reich on the FilmLondon website: ”The unique selling point with the 28 idea is London, it really is a character in the film. Without London, the film would be something else entirely.”

Locations include Canary Wharf (massively expanded since I lived in London), Charing Cross tube station, CityPoint, Greenwich foot tunnel, Hyde Park, Wembley Stadium, the Millennium Stadium, Parliament Square, and Shaftesbury Avenue - and it’sno mean feat that the film makers make this overcrowded megapolis seem entirely desolate. Incidentally, the escape from the cottage that opens the film was filmed at Stokers Farm, south of Rickmansworth; the waterway that Robert Carlyle’s character escapes along is actually the main line of the Grand Union Canal.

Like 28 Days, 28 Weeks Later works well - in parts. The zombies are rip-roaringly scary and the action is driven by a nerve-jarring soundtrack and the kind of grim lighting that makes you feel part of the action. Yet in this movie too, there’s that dumb child cliche again; the only two kids allowed back in Britain decide to break out of the secure compound (why?), unleashing the raging havoc all over again. It’s almost criminal that they’re the only two allowed to survive.