DESPICABLE ME 3

DESPICABLE ME has become one of the most reliably inventive, funny and heart-warming of the children's animation franchises, and doesn't disappoint with this short, sharp three-quel.  

Steve Carrel reprises his role as the reformed ex-villian Gru and Kristen Wiig as his wife Lucy. As the movie opens both are fired from the Anti-Villain League for failing to apprehend Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker) - a delusional former child-star intent on revenge on Hollywood.  Gru sees a shot at still capturing Bratt when he meets his super-rich long-lost twin brother, Dru.  Of course, Dru is a useless super-hero but he does have lots of cool gadgets.  Meanwhile Lucy's story arc sees her try to become a mum to Gru's girls.  

The resulting film is fast-paced, full of great action set pieces and lots of genuinely funny physical comedy.  As usual, the movie works on a number of levels - with enough bright colours and silliness for the kids, and lots of 80s nostalgia for the grown ups. The use of 80s pop hits is particularly on point, and Corey Feldman must be suing for image rights!

DESPICABLE ME 3 is rated PG and has a running time of 89 minutes.

DOWNSIZING - BFI London Film Festival 2017 - Day 10

DOWNSIZING is a deeply patronising movie that pulls of the remarkable feat of being both annoying liberal and socially conscious AND offensively racist. There's probably a decent 45 minute episode of Black Mirror in there somewhere, but the surrounding 90 minutes of meandering, indulgent padding renders the whole work frustrating and meaningless.

The big concept of the film is that a bunch of Norwegian scientists have invented a way to miniaturise humans to 5 inches tall. And if humans can do this, they can leave a much lighter environmental impact, as well as use their current net wealth to live a deeply luxurious life. After all, you may not be able to afford a 10,000 sq ft mansion but you can probably afford one the size of a shoebox. This range of motives for "downsizing" reflects a parody of the cultures that DOWNSIZING deals with. So the liberal touchy feely hippie Scandies downsize to save the world and their mini-colony looks like The Shire. By contrast, Americans downsize to afford a luxury retirement in Disney like gated communities. 

Of course, this being (a piss-poor attempt at) sci-fi, none of the actual world-building makes sense. The downsized wouldn't survive rain or insects and there's an irony in the amount of energy being created in the downsizing probably making climate change worse. None of this would matter if the story was captivating and you cared about the characters. But the story is all over the place. Is this about an everyman recreating his life once his wife leaves him? Is it about finding yourself on a gap year trip to Norway? It is a piece of propaganda about climate change? Or is an undercover expose about illegal immigrant working conditions? It's like writer-director Alexander Payne through Big Ideas in the air like so much confetti and the result is a baggy, poorly scripted and edited mess that outstays its welcome. Worst of all, much of its comedy in the latter half of the film lies in taking the piss out of a Vietnamese woman's strong accent. In 2017. This is just flabbergastingly offensive on a Jar Jar Binks level. 

DOWNSIZING has a running time of 135 minutes. The film is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and sex references.  The movie played Venice, Toronto and London 2017 and will go on release in Spain and the USA on Dec 22nd, in Australia, New Zealand and France on Dec 26th, in Norway and Turkey on Jan 5th, in Argentina and Bulgaria on Jan 11th, and in the UK, Germany and Sweden on Jan 18th.

SAUSAGE PARTY

SAUSAGE PARTY is a very funny very smutty animated comedy by the team that brought you THE INTERVIEW and PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen make R rated comedies that contain a lot of truth and some things you just can't believe are being put on screen.  To wit, they have a Holocaust joke in the opening 3 minutes of this film, the first of many, liberal use of the C word, and a plot that basically hinges on a radical atheistic debunking of religion and breaking the fourth wall.

The conceit is that all the characters are foodstuffs being sold in a supermarket.  They believe that the Great Beyond lies on the other side of the supermarket doors, with benevolent Gods (humans) caring for them in paradise. The drama begins when a jar of mustard is returned and reveals the shocking truth that humans EAT food.  This prompts our hero and heroine, a sausage and a bun, to escape their trolley and go in search of the real story from a bottle of fire-water and his baked side-kicks.  Meanwhile, another hot dog is trying to find his way back to the store and stumbles onto some handy scientific knowledge from a Stephen Hawking-style piece of gum.

WELCOME TO ME

WELCOME TO ME is a truly unique, moving and darkly film from debut feature director Shira Piven and writer Eliot Laurence.  It stars Kristen Wiig as a bipolar woman called Alice Krieg who goes off her meds and uses her lottery winnings to fund a daytime talk show in the manner of her heroine, Oprah Winfrey. Except this show is an unfiltered expression of all of Alice's insecurities, obsessions and historic persecutions.  Despite the fact that she is clearly unhinged, a commercial production company takes her money and puts the show on air, to surprisingly decent growing ratings, until Alice suffers an emotional crisis and runs out of the necessary cash. Along the way, we come to admire her ever-loyal support network of parents, ex-husband and best friend Gina, and have some hopes that a nascent relationship with one of the show's producers might be sustainable.  We also come to have huge sympathy for Alice, despite her bouts of hurtful narcissism.  

The performances from the first-rate cast are superb.  Kristen Wiig allows herself to be utterly vulnerable and yet also manages a laconic deadpan humour that takes us through the movie's most awkward and disturbing moments. Linda Cardellini has the most to do as Alice's best friend and their final scene moved me to tears. It's also a pleasure to see Joan Cusack, James Marsden (as the show's producers), and Alan Tudyk (as the ex-husband) and Tim Robbins (as the psychiatrist) in smaller roles - all won over by Alice in the best way.  Only Jennifer Jason Leigh's producer stands in for those viewers put off by Alice's antics - or feels morally queasy by the fact that this entertainment is the result of mental illness.

A movie tackling the subject of mental illness that also purports to be an albeit very dark and dry comedy treads on this ice.  But the results here are provocative, assured, moving and unique.  This has to be one of the best films I've watched this year.

WELCOME TO ME has a running time of 87 minutes and is rated R. The movie played Toronto 2014 and was released in the USA and Canada last year. It is currently on release in the UK.

THE MARTIAN

Alfonso Cuaron's GRAVITY starts in media res, with a small space mission going drastically wrong leaving the sole survivor to find the technical skill to make it safely home. Most importantly, she has to overcome her psychological barriers to survival in a movie that asks profound questions about forgiveness and rebirth.  By contrast, Ridley Scott's THE MARTIAN, though starting from the same premise, is a far sunnier affair, in which everyone is basically good smart people trying their hardest to get Matt Damon's astronaut home. This isn't a criticism so much as a statement about the disposition of this film. It's a clever, cheerful dramedy that relies, much like Robert Downey Junior's IRON MAN, on the essential likability of its protagonist, and jauntily-scored science-problem montage sequences to get us through the two and a half hour run-time.  There's no existential angst here, and the movie's only real flaw, no real tension as to whether the gonzo engineered rescue mission is really going to work.

And so, in the words of jovial stranded astronaut Mark Watney, we get two hours of him "sciencing the shit" out of every problem he faces - from making food and water on a barren planet, to communicating with NASA, to travelling to the site where his rescue will take place.  The science-y detail is impressive and engrossing and speaks to the research done by novelist Andrew Weir.  Damon is just fine delivering his lines but basically his performance rests in being amiable. The supporting cast is vast and high quality and appropriately racially diverse. Ultimately I get the feeling that this is a really fun, uplifting movie that will prove quite disposable, except to those kids it inspires to study engineering and maths (which is a great thing in itself). There's no grit, no heft, but it's a pleasant way to pass a few hours.

THE MARTIAN has a running time of 144 minutes and is rated PG-13.  THE MARTIAN played Toronto 2015 and is on global release.

FRIENDS WITH KIDS

FRIENDS WITH KIDS, like FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS, is a movie that wants to seem transgressive and "real" but can't resist it's Hollywood rom-com ending.  The result in both cases is a rather banal 2 hour wait for the hero and heroine, so obviously in love with each other, to realise it at the same time, allowing a conventional loved up ending.

The opening is promising.  Jason (Adam Scott) and Julie (Jennifer Westfeldt) are two singletons in a group of friends that have had kids, and are blissfully smug about how their friends are just tired, frustrating kid-centric banalities.  Of course, this movie, written and directed by Jennifer Westfeldt, doesn't have the balls to really examine what would happen if you rejected that lifestyle, but instead decided to make the two singletons unite to have a baby, while trying to date independently.  Of course, as soon as the baby is born they both find what they might have previously thought was their Ideal 0 he gets the young hot chick (Megan Fox) and she gets the sensitive nice guy (Ed Burns). But because the movie can't end after an hour, Julie has to realise she's in love with Jason a few years before he reciprocates her feelings.  As if that were ever in doubt.

The movie is not without its delights.  There are a few scabrous and raucous scenes - typically involving John Hamm and Kristen Wiig as a deeply unhappy couple.  But the movie just isn't as transgressive as it thinks it is, and it's about as authentic as Chris O'Dowd's American accent.  The second hour really is a struggle too wade through.  In short, just another will-they-won't-they-oh-please-get-on-with-it rom-com.  I'm sad to say that Jennifer Westfeldt has form with this.  She pulled the same tease in KISSING JESSICA STEIN, a rom-com in which a girl thinks she's gay - which is a really interesting set up - but the movie then devolves into banality.  Not a director who's work I'll be seeking out in future. 

FRIENDS WITH KIDS played Toronto 2011 and was released earlier this year in the USA, Greece, Israel, Sweden, Russia, Mexico, Portugal, Brazil, Australia, Peru and Slovenia. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland, Finland and Serbia. It opens on July 5th in the Netherlands, July 12th in Argentina nad Bulgaria, August 1st in France, August 22nd in Belgium and Chile, on September 5th in Hong Kong and on November 9th in Turkey.

The film is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. 

iPad Round-Up 3 - PAUL

What is it about British comedians that they go to America, garner a little success, and then get the urge to mock the key difference between America and Britain - Christian fundamentalism. Don't get me wrong - people who believe in Intelligent Design give me the heebie-jeebies - but there does seem something rather odd, and pathological even - in these movies that delight in undermining religious belief. I speak here of Ricky Gervais' THE INVENTION OF LYING and, now, Nick Frost and Simon Pegg's new film, PAUL.

The plot is simple.  Frost and Pegg play two best friends and sci-fi geeks who attend a convention in the US. They pick up an alien who needs to get home, voiced by Seth Rogen, and so set up a comedy road-movie that could've been a clever satire on genre films, just in the same way that SHAUN OF THE DEAD brilliantly spiked zombie movies, or HOT FUZZ spiked cop films.  But  no, Frost and Pegg add a fourth character to their movie - a religious fundamentalist (Kristen Wiig) whose entire world-view is over-turned by her realisation that there is life on other planets.  

Of course this could've been as funny as anything in HOT FUZZ or SHAUN, but somehow - maybe the sensitivity of this material in the US, or maybe the real Hollywood money behind the picture - dulled their wit. (Or maybe it's that Frost and Pegg are without their usual collaborator - Edgar Wright?)  There are still flashes of the kind of ribald, laugh-out-loud comedy that we got in the earlier films, but overall this seems like a much tamer, and less memorable affair.  That unmistakeable damp squib sensation that settles in at about the hour mark isn't helped by a rather flat cameo by Jason Bateman as the spooky Fed, and can't be saved by a cameo from Sigourney Weaver. I also feel that Seth Rogen is straying into the territory occupied by Jack Black - that of always playing himself - even when voicing a CGI alien. 

PAUL was released earlier this year in the UK, Ireland, Belgium, France, Canada, the US, Belarus, Kazakhstan, Russia, the Ukraine, Australia, Croatia, Germany, the Netherlands, Estonia, Hungary, Malaysia, Singapore, Iceland, Italy, the Philippines, Denmark, Finland, Norway and Lithuania. It is currently on release in Sweden, Thailand and Turkey. It opens in Spain on July 22nd.

BRIDESMAIDS - chicks aside, pretty conservative

BRIDESMAIDS is getting massively hyped because, contra-vention, it's a bromance starring chicks and, shock, horror, chicks sometimes talk about sex! The reality is that, once you get over the shock of the all-female cast, BRIDESMAIDS is actually a deeply, boringly, conventional movie with a predictable plot, pedestrian direction, and over-written jokes. (Not to mention a random Irish cop - they try to make a joke about it - but seriously, why?) It all just makes me deeply depressed about how reactionary Hollywood is that such a simplistic gender-switcheroo can have everyone salivating.

Anyways, on to the plot, such as it is. Kristen Wiig plays Annie, a thirty something woman whose life is falling apart. Her business failed, she is divorced, her fuck-buddy treats her like shit, her house mates are kicking her out, and her boss is about to fire her. When her best friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph) becomes engaged and, despite picking Annie to be her Maid of Honour, seems to be gravitating toward her new glamorous friend Helen (Rose Byrne), Annie has a mini-breakdown. The pressures of the wedding combined with Annie's low self-esteem, lead to her pissing off everyone who cares for her, not least Lillian and Officer Rhodes - a sweet police-officer whose attentions she scorns. Still, this being Hollywood schmaltz, you just know that all this pain is leading toward a moment of self-revelation, a last minute reconciliation with Lilian, and a Happy Ever After with Rhodes.

I didn't have a totally bad time watching this flick. It was funny enough to get me through the two-hour run-time, although I didn't as many did, laugh at Kristen Wiig's physical comedy and the gross-out humour of the entire cast. Rather, I was kept in play by Jon Hamm's hilariously oleaginous turn as the fuck-buddy; by Matt Lucas and Rebel Wilson as Annie's fat flat-mates; and by the normally very pretty Melissa McCarthy ugly-ing up as the butch Megan. I also liked how Rose Byrne managed to transform Helen from an out-and-out baddy into a really sympathetic character, whose insecurity was far more pitiable than Annie's. After all, Annie gets Rhodes while Helen stays where she is. Take a look at Rose Byrne's subtle double-take as she sees Annie look at Rhodes for what she thinks is the last time. Now that's good acting.

BRIDESMAIDS is on release in the USA, Canada, Romania, Slovenia, Iceland, Australia, Hungary, Ireland, Kazakhstan, Russia, Norway and the UK. It opens on July 7th in Greece, Hong Kong, Malaysia, the Netherlands, Portugal, Singapore and Estonia. It opens on July 22nd in Germany, Finland, Lithuania and Sweden. It opens on July 29th in Poland. It opens on August 4th in Denmark; on August 10th in France; on August 10th in France; on August 19th in Italy; on August 25th in Thailand; on August 28th in Spain and on September 9th in Brazil.

Kids' flick round-up 1 - DESPICABLE ME

So I caught two kids' movies this week - both of which feature an Evil Mastermind who isn't as evil as he makes out to be. In both cases they have minions called Minion, and a Nemesis who out-evils them both. Both movies are set in the kind of juiced up day-glo world only animation can give us, and both try to have their cake and eat it - splicing cuddly feeeeeeelings with pop-culture banter and post-modern winking-at-the-audience in-jokes. And both feature all-star casts. I liked both, enjoyed both, but only one really moved me, and that's DESPICABLE ME.

In the old days, before the Berlin Wall fell, being Evil was easy. You leaved in a creeeepy Addams family house, you tortured people with medieval spiky things, and you affected an accent half-Soviet half Peter-Lorre. But poor anti-hero, Gru (Steve Carell), has been outpaced and outclassed by a young whipper-snapper called Vector (Jason Segel) who lives in a proper shiny evil lair complete with shark-tank and CCTV. Gru is evil, but hapless. Vector is evil, efficient, cocky and a royal pain in the ass.

Of course in our post-modern confessional culture no-one's really evil. Poor Gru had a mother straight out of developmental hell: nothing was ever good enough for her. And poor Vector was picked on at school. Really, these guys are just lovely, squeezy, fluffy little bunny rabbits on the inside.

So, when Gru adopts three cute cookie-selling orphan girls in order to use them to get access to Vector's layer, we know he's going to have his heart melted by them. And when he gets turned down by the Bank of Evil for the loan he needs to steal the moon, we know that his new kids and his minions, called Minions, are all gonna band together and build him a rocket ship anyways, MacGuyver styl-ee. Because, friends, we aren't in the world of Lemony Snicket, but little orphan Annie.

DESPICABLE ME is just, plain, no-nonsense cute. It tugs on the heart-strings. It's corn-dog cheese. But who doesn't love it when Gru does something selfless for the first time in his life and incinerates a fairground stall because the provincial dolt manning in has cheated his little girl out of a stuffed unicorn? And who doesn't cheer when Dr Nefario (Russell Brand) and the Minnions all band together to back Gru and build the rocket - pledging faith against all reason, all hope and all experience?

To be sure, Universal studios have tried to inject some adult-pleasing post-modern wit along the lines of movies such as SHREK and MADAGASCAR, but this is largely a distraction. Having a sign above the Bank of Evil saying "Formerly Lehman Brothers" is hardly Swiftian in its rapier-like subtlety. And having Gru use modern colloquial idiom just confuses his character with that of the ruthlessly teen-modern Vector. Nope. The strength of DESPICABLE ME is that we care about Gru and his girls, and we will him to succeed. And while this movie is no TOY STORY, it understands that underneath all the clever design and witty puns, ultimately, any movie, but especially a children's movie, succeeds in direct measure to how far its main characters elicit our sympathy.

DESPICABLE ME is on global release.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - DATE NIGHT

There's something almost impressive about the fact that director Shawn Levy has taken two of the funniest comedians working today - Steve Carell and Tina Fey - and create a romantic comedy so utterly joyless and inauthentic. I honestly would not have believed it possible. This movie misses the mark so badly it's like the PEARL HARBOUR of romantic-comedies. Fey and Carell play a happily married but tired couple whose regular date night turns into a caper movie when they are mistaken for a couple that's blackmailing a local politician. Chased by organised crime and some bent coppers, it just so handily happens that Mrs Suburbs was a realtor to a super-buff Mission Impossible type special agent. Whenever I get mistakenly chased down by gansters, I am definitely going to ensure that I too can call on my friendly neighbourhood James Bond type. Anyways, there are shenanigans, and the couple turn out to be far more plucky and ingenious than is plausible, and it all ends with Tina Fey in a strip club. The only reason you might possibly watch this flick is for the James Franco-Mila Kunis scene in which they show the grown-ups how to do it. Presumably you can just you-tube that clip.

DATE NIGHT was released in April 2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

Additional tags: Jimmi Simpson, Josh Klausner, Leighton Meester

Random DVD Round-Up - WHIP IT

WHIP IT is a pretty conventional, but charming, coming-of-age flick directed by Drew Barrymore and starring JUNO's Ellen Page. It feels old fashioned - in the way the sports movies and coming-of-age dramas used to be, before they got satirised in movies like DODGEBALL. The kitsch feel stems partly from the deliberately down-at-heel suburban production design, and from the fact that the heroine is torn between her mother's obsession with beauty pageants and her own attraction to Roller Derby - and both seem anachronistic. But it also stems a little from the straightforward narrative arc, the fact that the happy ending is never really in doubt and the rather simplistic shooting style. The fact that this is Barrymore's debut directorial feature shows in her rather unimaginative handling of the Roller Derby scenes in particular.

Ellen Page plays seventeen-year old, suburban, Bliss Cavendar. Her mother, seeing it as a route out of town, makes her enter beauty pageants where she has to extol traditional feminine virtues. But Bliss decides to rebel by lying about her age and joining a Roller Derby league. She meets tough women with real lives, learns to be aggressive, and gets her first boyfriend. But, as in the way of these three act coming of age flick (see WAYNE'S WORLD, even), Bliss ends up pissing off everyone who loves her - her best friend, her mum, her dad, and potentially her team. Of course, in the movies, as opposed to real life, when you have a bratty teen "coming of age", everyone is remarkably forgiving and loving.

So, all in all, you have to ask what really is the point of WHIP IT? A movie so familiar it feels like a US version of BEND IT LIKE BECKHAM subbing roller debry for soccer.

Additional tags: Robert Yeoman, Dylan Tichenor, The Section Quartet, Juliette Lewis, Andrew Wilson, Landon Pigg, Alia Shawkat, Zoe Bell, Ari Graynor, Carlo Alban, Daniel Stern, Shauna Cross

WHIP IT played Toronto 2009 and was released in 2009/2010. It is available on DVD and on iTunes.

London Film Fest Day 9 - EXTRACT

What is EXTRACT doing in the London Film Festival? It's not a high-brow art film looking for UK distribution. It's not the latest movie from an acknowledged auteur - Jarmusch, Egoyan, Haneke. And it's not a high profile glitzy premiere designed to lure the sponsors - a necessary evil. Nope. EXTRACT is an enjoyable but ultimately lightweight comedy from Mike Judge. Worse still, it's less conceptually interesting than IDIOCRACY, if better executed.

So, let's approach this as if it were just another Saturday night movie. Jason Bateman stars a successful businessman called Joel. On the surface he has it all: great house, great car, pretty wife, and his own business - a flavouring factory. But everything's going wrong for Joel. His staff are morons; his wife won't sleep with him; his neighbour's a creep; and he's falling for a con woman. Worst of all, his best friend (Ben Affleck) keeps advising him to do drugs and other crazy shit.

As the movie opens you think the con woman (Mila Kunis) is going to be the star but she drops off the radar. Then the movie almost becomes a bromance with Joel as Dante from CLERKS and Ben Affleck as his Randall. (Without the swearing and Star Wars jokes, of course.) It all feels a bit PG Kevin Smith. Stuff happens; Affleck, J K Simmons and the guy who plays Brad the gigolo are funny; a few laughs are had and it all winds up happily enough.

Not bad but nothing special either.

And will someone please give Mila Kunis a decent part?

EXTRACT was released in the US and Canada in September. It opens in Iceland on November 20th and in the Netherlands on April 29th 2010.

ADVENTURELAND - surprsingly sensitive

ADVENTURELAND is a quiet little drama focusing on the love-lives of a bunch of teenagers working in the eponymous lo-rent amusement park for a summer in the late 80s. Indeed, it's such a sweet, real film that it's hard to believe it was directed by the same guy who made the crass SUPERBAD. Jesse Eisenberg (THE SQUID AND THE WHALE) plays a nice kid, smart, with dreams of summer travelling through Europe. When his parents can't pony up the cash, he ends working in an amusement park. He falls for an emotionally distant girl called Em (Kristen Stewart), who despite her difficulties is also intelligent and sensitive. But, true to life, our hero is distracted by the standard-issue hot chick egged on by the guy (Ryan Reynolds) who Em is already seeing. I love this film because it feels real - anyone who's spent a summer working a shitty job, feeling that their life is on hold, feeling under-appreciated can relate. And anyone who's ever made a dumb decision in a relationship, knowingly, but unable to resist can relate to. Jesse Eisenberg impresses again, but it's Kristen Bell who really struck me as a good actress, in a nuanced performance so much more interesting than that TWILIGHT schtick.

ADVENTURELAND played Sundance 2009 and opened in the US, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Iceland, Argentina, South Africa, Estonia, Italy, Romania, Hungary, Ecuador and Germany earlier this year. It is currently on release in the UK and opens in Spain in two weeks time.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE BROTHERS SOLOMON

Bad taste alleged comedy in which two intelligent but infantile brothers (Wills Arnett and Forte) decide to shock their dad out of a coma by surrogate fathering a child. Yes yes. The result is as unfunny as the plot is plausible. Clunky direction, thin writing, forced humour make this straight to dustbin as opposed to straight to video.

THE BROTHERS SOLOMON was released in autumn 2007, promptly fell like a stone, and is available on DVD should you care to waste ninety minutes.

GHOST TOWN - surprisingly okay!

Ricky Gervais is a brilliant comedian but I had trouble imagining his brand of squirm-inducing humour working within the trite romantic-comedy genre. The good news is that David Koepp's new film, GHOST TOWN, somehow pulls it off. The strengh of GHOST TOWN is that it doesn't over-play it's hand. It knows that Ricky Gervais is the world's most unlikely rom-com hero, partly because of his looks and partly because his brand of humour is all about being obnoxious and off-putting. So they dial-down the romance. By the end of the film we know his character - an uptight dentist called Bertram Pincus - is on the edge of a relationship with Tea Leoni's archeologist. But all we've really seen is the establishment of trust and friendship.

The motor of the plot is that Pincus has died for seven minutes in the midst of a routine colonoscopy, and a result, can now see ghosts. These ghosts beg him to finish their unfinished business, but he's too selfish to help until Greg Kinnear's character asks Pincus to break up his former wife's new relationship. Once again, the film-makers don't push on the ghost stuff too hard. It's there and it's funny but they don't sacrifice the character development - the real meat of the story - to cheap gags.

So all in all, GHOST TOWN is a romantic-comedy that manages to be genuinely funny and involving despite the fact that it has, on paper, the corniest of stories. You should also watch for SNL's Kristen Wiig as Pincus' surgeon, in a scene-stealing cameo.

GHOST TOWN played Toronto 2008 and is currently on release in the US and UK. It opens on November 27th in Israel; on December 11th in Russia; on December 26th in Australia; on January 29th in Germany; on February 4th in France and on February 27th in Spain.