I’ve always thought Gemma Arterton was completely over-rated. I figured that somewhere in her recent past there was a casting couch with her name on it. Because mostly, she always struck me as some middling East Enders actress who’d inexplicably hit the big time but was in fact more likely an Aladdin-in-panto-in-Croydon than a Bond…
Read moreTower Heist
In Tower Heist, Ben Stiller plays Josh, the manager of one of those opulent Trump Towers-y residential buildings in New York. He prides himself on running a slick and efficient team (all star cast here) that attends to the pampered needs of others. One of those others, the owner of the penthouse suite, is a…
Read moreHorsemen
Still on the Swedish theme, Horsemen is one of those straight-to-video crime movies that raises itself above the norm by the dramatic styling of it-boy Swedish music vid director Jonas Akerlund. Dennis Quaid plays a grumpy single dad trying to solve crimes and raise sons and becoming increasingly rumpled and wrinkled as he fails to…
Read moreSalt
Without giving too much of the plot away, in Salt, Angelina plays a CIA agent who’s accused of being a Russian sleeper-spy and is forced to go on the run both to clear her name and to save her husband. It’s a serviceable little Philip Noyce thriller, not No Way Out – i.m.h.o one of…
Read moreThe Back Up Plan
I’ve always thought that Jennifer Lopez was a kind of puertorriqueña Eva Peron. Behind that polished and fragrant exterior, I fear she’s grasping, focussed, ruthless, charmless, vindictive and utterly without mercy to those who stand in her way (or are foolish enough to paint her dressing room the wrong shade of white.) If you cross…
Read moreGran Torino
Assumption, it’s been said, is the mother of all fuck-ups. And as if to prove this truisim, I offer you Martin Cuff and the avoidance of the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. You see, I assumed that this was a film about Nascar – Days of Thunder meets Stallone in Driven. Scraggly old Clint posing…
Read moreLife in a Day
“Life in a Day” is the Ridley Scott-produced, Kevin MacDonald-directed doccie that’s shooting TODAY – 24th July 2010 – on location near you (and you, and you, and you…) I’m thinking The Qatsi trilogy meets A Day in the Life of…. series of coffee table books, only messier and more inspired. As the blurb says:…
Read moreZombieland
Locations – or at least places – play a big part in Zombieland. Not least the fact that the characters are named after their all-American home towns, now lost to the Zombie apocalypse. The movie’s mostly a cross-country jaunt by a group of mis-matched travel companions, riding out the disaster and heading for Playland amusement…
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