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.

A GUY THING - disposable rom-com

Disposable, bland, rom-com, that tries so hard for every character to be nice and earnest that no-one's interesting. Jason Lee is ironed out into a decent guy called Paul who just happens to sleep with his fiancee's cousin on his stag night. Except that he didn't really, because that's how nice he is: they just passed out. The lovely fiancee, Karen (Selma Blair), is always a hair's breath away from finding out the messy truth, but fate always lets Paul off the hook. All of which leads to a stagey denouement in which Paul has to summon the balls to tell Karen that he's really in love with kooky Becky (Julia Stiles, who really cannot play kooky). It's all very, very unfortunate.

A GUY THING was released in 2003 and is available on DVD and on iTunes.

GET SMART - mis-fire

GET SMART is a big-budget Hollywood remake of the old US TV series in which a clutz secret agent called Maxwell Smart was helped by his beautiful, competent, partner, Agent 99. In this new version, the writers decided to make Smart actually quite clever, and a decent, charming guy to boot. Agent 99 is also a little softer round the edges and despite the wide age difference between the actors - Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway - they actually have good chemistry. I like that Smart and Agent 99 are a better match for each other and bought into their relationship. Sadly, everything around that central relationship is pretty weak, ripping on Bond movies and ENTRAPMENT. The plot is thin, and aside from location work in Russia, it's all very pedestrian. Alan Arkin and Hiro from HEROES are wasted in small roles, and Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson needs to progress beyond this material. On the whole, one for DVD at best.

GET SMART was released in June in Bolivia, Chile, Greece, Peru, the Philippines, Singapore, South Korea, Thailand, Brazil, India, Panama, Taiwan, the US, Argentina, Indonesia, Australia, New Zealand, Puerto Rico, Colombia, Mexico, Uruguay and Venezuela. It was released in July in Italy, Kuwait, Estonia, Romania, Austria, Germany, Russia, Spain and Hong Kong. GET SMART is currently on release in Hong Kong, Portugal, Egypt, Iceland, Israel, the Netherlands, Hungary and the UK. It goes on release next weekend in Croatia, Denmark, Finland and Sweden. It opens in September in Belgium, Norway, France and Japan.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING - brilliantly biting satire

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING is a hysterical satire on corporate spin-doctors, political correctness and Hollywood. It is an intelligent, adult comedy and the funniest movie I have seen since GRIZZLY MAN. If you like your humour dark and twisted then this is the flick for you, for while it may teeter on the brink of saccharine in the final five, it manages to stay on the right side of the divide.

The concept is brilliant. Our hero is a corporate spin-doctor for Big Tobacco called Nick Naylor. Nick hangs out with his chums who defend Alcohol and Firearms respectively. He promotes cigarettes because he is good at it and he has a mortgage to pay. Okay, Nick may feel bad when he has to give the real-life Marlboro Man a cool million to shut up about his cancer, but at the end of the day, Nick still gets an adrenaline rush from knowing precisely which buttons to press to get him to keep the phat cash. The genius of the script is that our hero is not an amoral aberration but by far the most sane and endearing man in a system that is full of hypocrisy and grand-standing. From puffed-up Senators to professional campaigners to journalists - everyone is in it up to their eye-balls.

For example, a good chunk of the movie features Nick trying to broker a deal with a major Hollywood agent to get stars smoking on screen again. This is, for me, by far the funniest strand of the movie, and its clear that writer-director Jason Reitman knows whereof he takes the piss. I love the spoof of the Japanese-style office building. I loved Adam Brody as the hipper-than-hip, personal assistant, and I thought that casting Rob Lowe as the evil agent was a master-stroke. In fact, Rob Lowe could well replace Alec Baldwin as my all-time favourite sleazy cameo actor. But then this is a cast chock-full of brilliant actors: Aaron Eckhart,Maria Bello, David Koechner, William.H.Macy, Cameron Bright, Sam Elliott and Robert Duvall.

In fairness, this movie isn't perfect. Toward the end, there is a suspicion that it is slightly pulling its punches. But for political satire it's either this or TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE. And, to my mind, while TEAM AMERICA has the songs, THANK YOU FOR SMOKING has Katie Holmes suffering nationwide humiliation! Go see it.

THANK YOU FOR SMOKING showed at Toronto 2005 and was released in the US in April. It is currently on release in the UK and hits Austria on July 28th, Germany on August 31st and France on September 13th.

WAITING - More painful than picturing John Prescott shag his secretary

It's hard to say *definitively* if WAITING is the worst film of 2006. Not because I am afraid of pronouncing on such subjective matters as though I were the oracle of cinematic Objectivity. Rather, because I have not yet seen CASINO ROYALE. What I can say is that despite featuring all the hallmarks of a Binatastic Low Rent night out, WAITING sucked ass. I set the bar pretty low when it comes to gross-out humour. I'll take Ryan Reynolds injecting a chocolate eclair with dog sperm and laugh my ass off. But this movie is just terrible. The basic premise is that a bunch of losers work in a crappy restaurent. To add purpose to their meaningless lives they adulterate the food. That's it! There is no humour, be it verbal witticism or just a chick slipping on some spilled pudding. I just give up. I cannot articulate how devoid of any entertainment value this movie is. And no, it is not so bad it is good. And it's not so "straight to video" that it will earn a cult following. So do yourself a favour, and Just Say No.

WAITING was released in the US last October and Australia last December. It opened in the UK yesterday and, I would imagine, will go "straight to video" everywhere else.