DREAM SCENARIO****

Norwegian writer-director Kristoffer Borgli's DREAM SCENARIO is a film that feels as though it could have been made by a collective of Spike Jonze, Charlie Kauffman and Michel Gondry. This is a good thing. 

Nic Cage stars as a schlubby university professor who starts showing up in everyone's dreams. At first this leads to a wonderful surge in popularity - students actually turn up to his lectures and he gets a book deal. But when his dream avatar turns into a nightmare, the world turns on the real life professor. He and his family are shunned, and then subject to violence. The book deal morphs into a crass trashy occult-baiting book.  The poor man's entire life is upended.

The film has lots to say about the absurdity of the mob - whether in hyping someone up or tearing them down. The increasingly surreal dreams are beautifully executed. And through it all we have Cage's measured, disbelieving, horrified Professor. People are right when they say it's the most well-modulated performance Cage has given in years - playing against type - or rather the caricature that Cage sometimes puts forth of himself.

The resulting film is an intelligent and darkly absurd satire that entertains and provokes. Superb!

DREAM SCENARIO is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes.  It played Toronto 2023 and was released in the USA and UK last November.

GLORIA BELL

I absolutely loved everything about Sebastian Leilo's remake of his Chilean female-led drama, GLORIA. Julianne Moore give a characteristically strong, charismatic, nuanced performance in the titular role - playing a character rarely seen on screen - a middle-aged woman who is sex positive and living every inch of her life to its fullest. I applaud the messages of this film - that you can be a strong woman with a full life, who doesn't need but is open to a sexually and emotionally fulfilling relationship - and that it's better to walk away from something that is second best. And I am in admiration of both Moore and her lover, played by John Turturro, for being vulnerable enough to show what sex is actually like in one's middle-age, and the complications of relationships with grown children.  The talent behind the lens is just as impressive. Sebastian Leilo has a sure measure of pace, balancing lighter moments of expressive freedom with darker more intimate moments of sadness and self-doubt. The score, by Matthew Herbert, is stunning, combing traditionally orchestrated music with phenomenal electronic almost 80s sci-fi synth moments, let alone the wonderful disco music that Gloria loses herself too.  Finally, the cinematography from Natasha Braier is marvellous in capturing both with its use of colour, light and framing, the different moods that Gloria goes through - whether strong, suffering, free or constrained. This really is a tour de force and deserves to be seen as widely as possible. 

GLORIA BELL is rated R and has a running time of 102 minutes. The film played Toronto 2018 and was released earlier this year in the USA. It's just about still on release in the UK in cinemas and is available on streaming services. 

MOLLY'S GAME

Molly Bloom is a real life criminal who ran an illegal high stakes poker game in Hollywood and then New York. She raked the game, laundered money for the Russian mob, and if not illegally then unethically, exploited men with a gambling addiction to enrich herself. Eventually she was caught up in a Federal investigation into the mob and without spoiling the ending, this film sees her battling those charges while recounting her history.  

Bloom is played by a characteristically high class Jessica Chastain, more or less reprising her role in the superb MISS SLOANE. Her Bloom is smart, no-nonsense, and unsympathetic - a woman whose profession is clearly both illegal and unethical - and the game is to guess whether underneath all that selfishness they're a moral compass. Bloom's lawyer, played by Idris Elba, and the director/writer Aaron Sorkin, are convinced.  They give us a film in which Bloom is portrayed as a heroine who refused to sell out her players and ruin their lives by giving the Feds her records. This might be more convincing if played with some nuance - if we didn't have bombastic TWELVE ANGRY MEN speeches from Elba - and if it didn't contradict everything we see of Molly in the film. Yes, she might offer to get a player help with his addiction, but only after she's soaked him for days on end.  Sorkin shows us someone who is a predator on the weak - but he tells us that after all, she really cares about their families. We're also asked to believe that Bloom, as smart as she is, as rapier-fast and witty as her Sorkin dialogue is, didn't realise that when Russian mafiosi turned up with cash in satchels that they weren't money laundering - that she wasn't aiding and abetting pretty nasty crimes from happening. Sorry I'm just not buying it.  The other thing that jarred was Sorkin's trademark mansplaining. We get both the lawyer character and Bloom's father (Kevin Costner) try to explain to her and us why she did what she did. There Sorkin goes again - setting up a smart female character only to cut her off at the knees.

Thus, for all the brilliant acting and snappy dialogue, I just couldn't get into a film whose central character premise I didn't buy in to. I just didn't believe in Sorkin's version of Molly.  And that made the film a long - too long - dull slog through the legal machinations, and an ending that felt unearned. If you want to see Chastain playing a strong female character who actually owns her fate, doesn't need men to explain it to her, in a tightly paced, beautifully photographed movie, check out MISS SLOANE instead. 

MOLLY'S GAME has a running time of 140 minutes and is rated R. In the UK it is rated 15 for strong language, drug misuse and brief violence.

The film played Toronto 2016 and was released last year in Croatia, the Netherlands and the USA. It opened earlier this year in the UK, Ireland, France, Argentina, Greece, Hungary, Kuwait, Portugal, Singapore, Lithuania, Poland, Romania and the USA. It opens on January 11th in Russia, on Jan 19th in Sweden, on Jan 25th in Australia, on Jan 26th in Finland, on Jan 27th in Mexico, on Feb 2nd in Taiwan, on Feb 22nd in Brazil, Denmark, Thailand and Norway, on March 1st in Hong Kong and on March 8th in Germany.

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE

THE LEGO BATMAN MOVIE is a consistently hilarious, smart and actually rather moving animated comedy from the team that brought us THE LEGO MOVIE. It's easily the best DC movie in the current reboot, and that includes the gloomily nihilistic Nolan films that it spoofs. To be sure, to get the most out of the film if you're familiar with many many iterations of Batman on screen - from the early Adam West TV show, through Michael Keaton to Nolan and the Battfleck.  But you don't need to be a fanboy - just someone who's lived through the last decades of pop culture enough to understand the tropes that this film is ribbing - the idea of Batman as a hugely egotistical psychologically damaged billionaire whose very existence requires the very supervillains he wants to protect his city from.  

In this film, Will Arnett plays Lego Batman as a lonely douchebag obsessed with his own abs, reluctant to let anyone into his life for fear of losing them as he lost his parents years ago. His deliberate isolation is broken when adopts a son (Robin - played by Michael Cera) while distracted by the pretty new Commissioner Barbara Gordon (Rosario Dawson) and butler Alfred (Ralph Fiennes) forces their intimacy by revealing to Robin that one of his two dads is Batman.  The emotional arc of the story is thus whether Batman can admit that he likes having a family of sorts - Albert, Robin and Barbara.  And that he even likes having the Joker around. Meanwhile, the plot sees the Joker abandon his usual band of Batman villains to recruit an even scarier evil army of assorted fictional villains (everyone from King Kong to Sauron) to force Batman to acknowledge that he's his arch-enemy.

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.

THIS IS THE END

THIS IS THE END is a ludicrously indulgent comedy made by the folks who brought you PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, and less impressively, SUPERBAD. It basically features a group of real life Hollywood actors and comedians - Seth Rogen, James Franco, Jay Baruchel, Jonah Hill, Danny McBride and Craig Robinson - who are partying at Franco's house when the Apocalypse begins.  The movie sees them whole up in house while the world goes to shit, until they're forced out to face their final judgement.   The actors all play fictionalised versions of themselves, which allows screenwriters and directors Evan Goldberg and Rogen to satirise Hollywood excess and solipsism. I loved this opening act, with its sly in-jokes about the actors' box office failures and each actors' media persona.  James Franco is game, allowing references to rumours that he's gay, although I thought the depiction of Michael Cera as a coke-head was just bizarre rather than actually funny.  And even after they hole up in Franco's house, I liked the idea that these guys would have absolutely no survival skills, but would amuse themselves by Sweding a PINEAPPLE EXPRESS sequel.

The intellectual problem with THIS IS THE END is its hypocrisy.  It's a movie that satirises the naval-gazing self-indulgence of Hollywood, but is itself something of an indulgent vanity project.  One can only hope that the writers were aware of this, but I detected more self-congratulation that rapier-like wit in their puppyish joy at inflicting the Backstreet Boys on the audience.  The more basic problem with THIS IS THE END is the uneven pacing and narrative drift that settles in when, well, the main characters settle in to Fort Franco.  To be sure, the movie gets an adrenaline shot to the heart in a superbly executed cameos from a deranged Emma Watson (how much more piquant than the more obvious first casting choice of Mila Kunis!) and Channing Tatum in a gimp suit.  But once the crew are holed up, there's literally not much to do other than bitch about how Danny McBride is selfishly eating all the food, and drawing straws for expeditions to forage for food. Oh, and a momentarily amusing but basically weak-ass EXORCIST spoof. The screenwriters have to clumsily force the crew outside just to bring the movie to a close, and the quite literal deus ex machina feels very weak and forced.  For religious groups to be offended is laughable - it gives the film too much credit.  I was far less offended by the notion that there's weed in heaven, than by having to listen to the Backstreet Boys.

So, THIS IS THE END is no SUPERBAD or YOUR HIGHNESS - offensive and puerile - nor is it THE GUILT TRIP - quite simply unfunny and tedious.  It has its moments, and  I certainly laughed out loud more than once.   In fact, I still laugh out loud when I think of the word "gluten".  But this is no instant cult classic a la PINEAPPLE EXPRESS, I can't help but wish that instead of this uneven film we'd had a genuine EXPRESS sequel with a properly honed script, characters I could fall in love with, and real narrative tension.

THIS IS THE END is on release in the USA, Canada, Jamaica and New Zealand. It opens on June 8th in the UK, Ireland, Spain and Vietnam. It opens on July 5th in Iceland, Portugal and Estonia; on July 18th in Indonesia, the Philippines, Australia, the Dominican Republic, Italy, Malaysia, Singapore and Uruguay; on August 1st in Greece; on August 8th in Croatia and Ecuador; on August 16th in Colombia; on August 22nd in Hungary, Israel and Austria and on August 29th in Germany and the Netherlands. It opens on September 5th in Slovakia and Slovenia; on September 11th in Egypt, France and Switzerland, Bahrain, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Syria, the UAE, Latvia, Poland, Romania, South Africa and Turkey; on September 18th in Belgium, Argentina, the Czech Republic, Russia, Serbia, Taiwan, Thailand, the Ukraine, Kenya, Lithuania, and Nigeria; on September 27th in Hong Kong, South Korea, Brazil, Bulgaria, Finland, and Norway. It opens in India on October 4th; in Sweden on October 25th; in Denmark on November 14th; in Chile on November 28th; in Venezuela on November 29th and in Peru on December 5th.

THIS IS THE END is rated R in the USA and has a running time of 107 minutes.

SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD - Heart-stripped Part Deux

So, I want to state that I DO think I have a sense of humour and I'm not some kind of kill-joy. It's not that I hate all things comic book or gamer or hipster, although lately Michael Cera has started to annoy me with his one-note, "hey I'm so geeky, but in a sort of superior way to you", schtick. I think what gets me with these hipsters is the fact that they're all making so much damn mainstream money out of trying to be counter-cultural. Like you can be counter-culture when your interviewed in Interview magazine. Anyways, despite my hipster-fatigue, I was REALLY looking forward to SCOTT PILGRIM vs THE WORLD for the simple fact that I think its director and co-adapter, Edgar Wright, is some kind of comedy genius. This is the man who, with SHAUN OF THE DEAD and the absolutely amazing HOT FUZZ made movies that combined a post-modern, slippery playfulness take on genre-cinema with real heart. And, boys and girls, you gotta have heart. Without heart - without characters that we emotionally engage with - no movie, no matter how clever and witty and inventive, is worth my time. And SCOTT PILGRIM really wasn't worth my time.

This is the concept. Scott Pilgrim is a loser, hipster, geek who plays in a band. He has no money but he can still afford cool trainers. (See video above.) He's dating a psycho-stalker high school chick called Knives Chau who is NOT as cool as her name would suggest and definitely needs to get to a SLAA meeting. But he really wants to be dating a hipster chick called Ramona Flowers, who has outlandishly coloured hair and Seven Evil Ex-es. I have yet to fathom why either girl would want to date Scott - let alone his ex-es, band-mate Kim, and now-successful rock-star, Natalie/Envy. He's a scrawny, incompetent, infantile guy who looks pre-pubescent. I mean, I know some girls like unthreatening, but this is unreal. Anyway, back to the movie. By quasi-dating Ramona, Scott unleashes the Seven Evil Ex-es who he has to fight, video-game stylee, in order to be with her; or gain self-respect; or discover who he really wants to be with; or something. Honestly, by about fight number three I was seriously losing interest. A mock video-game fight HAS NO STAKES. If you lose you don't die - you just click for your second life. If you win, there's just another stupid fight around the corner. And who cares who these characters end up with anyways? Yes the visual tricks are fun - the little knowing comments editorialising the action - and yes, it IS funny to take the piss out of Vegans and pretentious record producers but COME ON! This movie is a one-trick pony. Clever for the first ten minutes, but then repetitive, trite and superficial. I want and expect more from Edgar Wright. I want to see real friendship on screen - friendship like that shared between Simon Pegg and Nick Frost in SHAUN and HOT FUZZ. Not this heart-stripped clever-clever nonsense.

Additional tags: Michael Bacall, Bryan Lee O'Malley, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Kieran Culkin, Anna Kendrick, Ben Lewis, Aubrey Plaza, Nigel Godrich

SCOTT PILGRIM vs. THE WORLD is currently on release in the US, Canada, New Zealand, Australia, Russia, Kazakhstan, Ireland, the UK and Iceland. It opens in late September in Croatia, Estonia, Sweden and Israel. It opens in October in Finland, Norway, Turkey, Greece, Brazil, Argentina and Singapore. It opens in November in Malaysia and Italy and in December in Greece and Spain. It opens in January 2011 in Germany and the Netherlands.

YOUTH IN REVOLT - affected nonsense

YOUTH IN REVOLT is an 89 minute quirky hipster comedy that felt like it last three hours, irritated me with its affectations, and didn't make me laugh. It stars Michael Cera as the same character he always plays - an unthreatening, horny teenage boy, desperately courting a cooler girl who stoops to conquer on account of his taste in films and music or whatever. It's the same schtick that was cute in JUNO, became less so in NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST, positively irritated in PAPER HEART, and really, really pissed me off here. He needs to stretch himself and try something different. Or at least deign to inflect his voice on occasion.

Anyways, in this particular film, Cera plays a kid called Nick Twisp, a sensitive loner who has good manners, likes Sinatra, and wants to travel the world. He meets the girl of his dreams and, hipsters being self-involved, she's his female double - an unthreatening hipster loner who dreams of a tall French boyfriend. Both of these kids speak like no-one you've ever heard of, and hatch up plots that are contrived and distancing, including getting expelled, trashing several cars, and drugging people. Of course, Nick Twisp doesn't really need a double to end his loneliness - he already has the voices in his head - his bad alter-ego, European play-boy Francois, and his feminine alter-ego Carlotta. Stop me if I'm freaking you out.

I think we're meant to find the incidental characters amusing - Ray Liotta as the sleezy cop; Zach Galifianakis as the loser boyfriend; Steve Buscemi as the dad; Fred Willard as the liberal neighbour; Justin Long as the doped up brother - but I found them to be under-used and unfunny. I can't disguise how tired I am of Cera. But I guess my real problem is with Gustin Nash's script based on C.D.Payne's novels. This film is too absurd to get emotionally involved in, but not stylised enough to be as good as, say, THE ROYAL TENENBAUMS.

YOUTH IN REVOLT played Toronto 2009 and is currently on release in the USA, Canada and the UK.

London Film Fest Day 4 - PAPER HEART

PAPER HEART is a new mockumentary from alleged US comedienne Charlyne Yi. It's meant to be about Yi's inability to fall in love and comes complete with interviews with happily married old folk and a staged romance with Michael Cera spoofing himself as the typically awkward lover.

The documentary is interminable largely because Charlyne Yi is intolerable. Her stage/screen persona as this infantile, carefully unwashed meant-to-be cute little sprite just pissed me off. If you think Zooey Deschanel lives at the extreme of Kooky think again. Yi's self-conscious Sundance retard lo-fi film-making is one step beyond. I mean, for crying out loud, she has fake super-six love-montages and things-to-make-and-do puppet scenes!

At a superficial level, PAPER HEART fails as a rom-com because the conceit of actors playing themselves works as a distancing device. At a secondary level, PAPER HEART fails as a spoof of documentary film-making (although the relationship with "Cera" does flounder as the "director" stages love scenes). The spoof fails because Yi's stage persona is already so contrived.

I left the movie dumbfounded at Yi's succes to date. She didn't demonstrate any skill as a decent stand-up. So I wiki'd her in the few moments before the 44 INCH CHEST premiere. I was delighted to discover that, apparently, SNL has already spoofed Yi. So, give it up girl. It's already been done.

PAPER HEART played Sundance and London 2009. It was released in the US and Canada in August. It is currently on release in Singapore and will be released in the UK on November 13th.

YEAR ONE - sporadically, funnier than I'd been led to believe

YEAR ONE had such a critical basting that I didn't bother watching at first. Good news is that it's really not as unwatchable as I'd been led to believe. Indeed, there were scenes I really liked. Maybe it's just a question of low expectations?

The movie is basically a puerile comedy vehicle for Jack Black and Michael Cera. They start of as a couple of Neanderthals, a hunter and a gatherer respectively. The best contextual and verbal humour is found in these early scenes, and I though Black and Cera worked well together. Both have crushes on girls they can't get so Black eats the forbidden apple from the tree of knowledge. This catapults them into a biblical epic, which the movie then tries to spoof. The Cain and Abel is pretty unfunny and underwritten, but the movie picks up when the protagonists end up Sodom. There's a brief skit by Hank Azaria as Abraham, but the real humour in this session comes from Oliver Platt as a libidinous High Priest.

Overall, I'd say the movie really is worth DVD and pizza night, if entirely forgettable. Still, you'd have hoped that actors of the profile of Jack Black and Michael Cera could find scripts that weren't essentially strung-together skits of variable quality.

YEAR ONE is on release in Australia, Iceland, the USA and the UK. t opens later in July in Finland, Sweden, Portugal, Denmark and Norway. It opens in August in Belgium, Egypt, France, Brazil, Bulgaria, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Germany, New Zealand and Singapore. It opens in September in the Czech Republic, Greece, Russia, Estonia, Hong Kong and the Netherlands. It opens in October in Italy, Mexico, and Romania.

London Film Festival Day 5 - NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST

NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST is a charming romantic comedy about two music geeks who fall for each other over a night running around New York City looking for a secret gig. Yes, they both have toxic ex-es, but finally they stop being cute and get down to it so that we can all go home, our cockles warmed and what-not. It's not unentertaining, although the laughs are thinner than they should be, way too dependent on gross-out toilet humour, and the romance is incredibly forced. Such are the pitfalls of the genre.

NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST is also a movie that, upon consideration, I think I despise. Everything about it is contrived to suck up whatever droplets of cool remain in the hipster movement and spit them out in bland commercial form for the mass market. I knew it was over for the indie rock movement when THE O.C. started merchandising mix CDs of Modest Mouse. This movie tries to ride the crest of the wave that combined the runaway success of JUNO and VAMPIRE WEEKEND but crashes on the roadblock of its own hypocrisy.

The movie opens with animated credits that are so desperate to be this year's JUNO it's painful to watch. And then we dive into the meet cute. Michael Cera plays the typical Michael Cera character - Nick - a nice guy geek who's being treated woefully by his domineering girlfriend (the disturbingly baby-faced Alexis Dziena). He makes her ueber-cool mix-CDs. She tosses them. Her friend Norah (Kat Dennings) picks them up. When Norah finally meets Nick his gay best friends put her in a wonderbra and wish her luck. We then get an hour of nonsense (but no actual discussion of cool bands, natch!) Clearly these characters are designed to be together and their ex'es are so godawful that there's no dramatic tension at all. When they do get together we get the most absurd sex scene in recent cinema. It takes place in a recording studio where Nick has the temerity to accuse Norah's dad of being a "hippie turned yuppie peddling...to the mass market."

I couldn't have said it better myself. Especially when you consider that the guy who directed this film started out making genuinely gritty indie movies like RAISING VICTOR VARGAS.

NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST played Toronto and London 20078. It is currently on release in the US and opens in Iceland on December 5th. It opens on January 22nd in Australia and Germany; it opens in the UK on January 30th; in opens on February 13th in Italy; on February 20th in Finland and Sweden; on February 27th in Denmark; on March 4th in Belgium, Egypt, Argentina and the Netherlands and on March 11th in France.

London Film Fest Day 15 - JUNO rocks my world

JUNO is another of those films that you feel wouldn’t have happened before Wes Anderson and Sundance took off and Napoleon Dynamite became a sleeper hit. You know what I mean. The faux-naif acoustic soundtrack featuring Kinks songs and Lou Reed. The quirky characters that say ever-so-slightly unrealistic things about life and love. The over-designed sets, crammed with bad-taste props and trashy clothes. The use of carefully designed credits with a hand-made feel – this time half-animated. The insistent campy visual motifs – in this case Michael Cera’s track-suit and the joggers who run across screen every now and then. I mean, Sweet Tap-Dancing Little Miss Sunshine, it even features a beat-up camper van.

For all that, JUNO remains a very smart, very witty and thoroughly engaging film. That’s largely down to a whip-smart script by new-comer, Diablo Cody, the good comic timing of director Jason Reitman (THANK YOU FOR SMOKING) and flawless dead-pan performances from Ellen Page (HARD CANDY), J K Simmons and Allison Janney. In addition, Michael Cera gives a stealth performance that is so quiet it’s easy to overlook how good he is.

Page plays an intelligent but, yes, fundamentally dumb, 16 year old girl called Juno, who gets knocked up by her best friend Paulie Bleeker (Cera). At first, she thinks she’ll just get a quick abortion but almost on impulse decides to give the baby up for adoption. Her parents (Simmons and Janney) are flummoxed but supportive, and while Juno gets odd looks at school she has enough moxy to front it out. The putative adoptive parents are played by Jason Bateman and Jennifer Garner. Bateman is suitably slippery as the cool older guy. There’s a lot of sexual tension between him and the much younger Page – and I suppose it doesn’t hurt that viewers will partially read Page’s precocious, flirtatious character from HARD CANDY onto her portrayal of Juno. Garner is also fantastic as a slightly snobbish but fundamentally decent yuppie who’s desperate for a kid. She makes what could have been a rather cliché’d annoying character sympathetic. There’s also a hysterical opening cameo from Rainn Wilson as a clerk.

Performances and big belly-laughs aside, the great thing about JUNO is that it’s a proper story with characters that develop and change and events that take us by surprise but also seem plausible and credible. Moreover, instead of letting this become some day-time TV serial cliffhanger about whether the adoption will go ahead, Reitman/Cody rejig the focus to the love story between Cera and Juno. All this adds up to a movie that’s funnier than the already decent THANK YOU FOR SMOKING but which has more narrative drive and a more satisfying emotional pay-off. Instead of drifting in the third act, JUNO actually gets better. And while JUNO doesn’t quite pip SON OF RAMBOW at the post for best comedy at London 2007, it gives it a damn good run for its money.

JUNO played Toronto and London 2007 and goes on release in the US on December 5th. It opens in Australia and Sweden in January 2008, in Finland, Italy, Spain, the UK, Belgium and the Netherlands in February and in Germany in March.

SUPERBAD - 'nuff said

I thought I was going to LOVE Superbad. Puerile humour, geek gags - it's my thing. But to my surprise I found this teen gross-out comedy deeply deeply unfunny, implausible and occasionally offensive. The basic plot is that three high school students need to get their hands on some booze in order to impress and therefore score with hot chicks at a party. This is all fine - it's practically the staple of the teen comedy - geeks desperate to score. But what irked me was that none of the lead characters was remotely likeable in the way that John Hughes leads were always sympathetic. Michael Cera's Evan is weak-willed and ineffectual. Jonah Hill's Seth is just a selfish vulgarian: Cartman without the redeeming humour. Christopher Mintz-Plasse's Fogell has neither the comic timing nor the capacity to inspire sympathy in the way that Anthony Michael Hall's geeks always did. I don't particularly mind all the swearing either, except that it is to no effect. Seth wears a Richard Pryor T-shirt early on in the film and it just served to remind me how when Pryor swore it was because he was really really angry! Not just whining. I also found the menstrual blood gag to be plain unfunny and borderline offensive. So what can I say? I just don't understand the hype about this film.

SUPERBAD is on release in Canada, the USA and the UK. It opens in Australia, Portugal, Denmark, Italy, Sweden, Israel and Iceland later in September. It opens in Germany, Russia, Latvia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Brazil, Hungary, Singapore, Estonia, Spain, Belgium and France in October. It opens in the Netherlands, Finland, Turkey, Argentina and Norway in November.