THE ANOMALY

THE ANOMALY sees actor-director Noel Clarke (STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS) return to our screens with an ambitious sci-fi thriller that pulls off a stylish look on a low budget but is ultimately the victim of weak script and two-dimensional characters, not to mention gratuitous female nudity.

Clarke stars as a soldier suffering from PTSD who keeps waking up in a future world for just 10 minutes before zapped back.  He realises that he's being used to battle with an evil baddie called Agent Harkin played by Ian Somerhalder and his only ally is a hooker with a heart of gold. The whole thing drips with references to other, better, bigger-budgeted films such as THE MATRIX and SOURCE CODE.  And I'd feel better classing this as an honourable failure it it weren't for its retrograde sexual politics. I'd like to say that after ADULTHOOD and 4.3.2.1. Noel Clarke was developing his own directorial style but he really isn't. This is a film made by a guy obsessed with mimicking the films he love, but without changing them, improving them or melding them in the way. 

THE ANOMALY has a running time of 94 minutes and is rated 15 for strong language, violence, sex and nudity. The movie is on release in the UK and Ireland and opens later this month in Vietnam. It opens in January 2015 in Japan and in March 2015 in Brazil.

PITCH PERFECT

Do yourself a favour and watch THE BREAKFAST CLUB instead.

PITCH PERFECT is a movie made possible by the massive commercial success of the TV show GLEE, and BRIDESMAIDS. It combines a female centred gross-out humour and bonding comedy with remixed and mashed up show tunes, all with a day-glo tongue-in-cheek sensibility.  It's a movie that both mocks and loves GLEE and all its antecedents.  This was going to make it a tough sell for me. I love musicals as much as the next man, but I don't get on with GLEE. I don't like that hyper-pop-music style of singing or the caricature characters. But I *did* like BRIDESMAIDS, so I went into PITCH PERFECT with high hopes.

My viewing experience. I could see characters and lines and pratfalls that were making everyone else laugh, and an intellectual sense, I could vaguely admire them, but I just wasn't laughing. Maybe it was that I couldn't buy Anna Kendrick - the sweetest, most wholesome actress working in cinema today - as an emo rebellious teen?  Maybe I didn't really care about the thinly manufactured rivalry between the all-male victorious campus glee club and our gang of uptight, old-fashioned female acapella singers?  I knew that as much as Kendrick's Beca claimed she was too cool for school, she was eventually going to alienate and then re-woo her sweet boyfriend Jesse (Skylar Astin). And, OF COURSE, we were cueing up for a final showdown where the girls get it together, mash up monster pop hits and take the prize.  In between all that predictability, the vomit jokes and the fat jokes weren't floating my boat.  And are we really okay with some of the racially tinged jokes about Asians?

In fact, the only real joy I got from this movie were Elizabeth Banks and John Michael Higgins as the scabrous glee contest commentators - genuinely edgy and unpredictable!  That, and the fact that it prompted me to go back and watch THE BREAKFAST CLUB, which is to this mush as Adele is to Lea Michele.

PITCH PERFECT opened earlier this year in the USA, Canada, New Zealand, Taiwan, the Philippines, Cambodia, Slovenia, Iceland, Singapore and Portugal. It is currently on release in Australia, Israel and Brazil. It opens this weekend in the UK, Ireland, Germany and the Czech Republic. It opens on December 26th in Belgium; on January 3rd in the Netherlands; on February 1st in Spain; on February 7th in Argentina and Sweden; on February 21st in Denmark and Lithuania; on March 22nd in Norway and on May 8th in France.