GOON

I neither know nor care about ice hockey, but I loved GOON!  It's a wonderfully warm-hearted, foul-mouthed comedy, apparently based on the true story of a polite, sweet kid who couldn't really skate but could really fuck people up with fists.  This is apparently a totally acknowledged and accepted part of hockey -  a sport which is, according to this flick, as much to do with taking a pounding as mad skills with a stick and puck.  If only 10% of the violence on screen happens in real matches, I have new found respect for the mad bastards playing it.  Our particular mad bastard - the goon of the title - is Doug Glatt (Seann William Scott aka Stifler).  Patronised by his college-educated family, Doug stumbles into minor league hockey and discovers that, for once, he's needed and praised for doing what he does best. To be sure, he needs to come to terms with the fact that his parents will never really get it, and conquer the anger of his burnt out, mad-skilled room-mate, Laflamme (Marc-Andre Grondin), not to mention beat the crap out of retiring Goon Emeritus, Ross Rhea (Liev Schrieber).  But through it all, he remains the same sweet lunk he always was.

I love the script for its perfect balance of insane violence and right-on liberal intolerance for fag jokes. I love the way the sweet romance is balanced by plenty of gritty observations about life in working-class snow-bound towns and piss-stained tour buses.  Most of all, I love the counter-casting in almost every role.  Jay Baruchel, typically the sweet geek, becomes the wise-cracking, R-rated best friend.  Seann William Scott, typically the R-rated best friend, becomes the sweet-hearted hero.  Liev Schrieber - I mean, serious thespian Liev Schreiber - becomes the muscle-headed retiree.  And best of all, we have Alison Pill - who invests so much messed-up good-hearted flakiness into her role as Eva, that we can't but help routing for her and Doug.

Kudos to director Michael Dowse (IT'S ALL GONE PETE TONG) and screenwriters Jay Baruchel (TROPIC THUNDER) and Evan Goldberg (50/50, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS).  This movies was totally unexpectedly hilarious and heart-warming!

GOON played Toronto 2011 and is currently on release in the UK and Ireland. It goes on release in Canada on January 24th.  It is available on VOD in the US on February 24th and goes on limited released on March 30th.

PLANET 51 - harmless, disposable fun

PLANET 51 is the Meg Ryan of kids animation. It's not flashy, ground-breaking or breath-taking. Rather, it's harmless, banal, and mildy amusing in parts. As Christmas entertainment for bored kids, you could fare worse, but this is no TOY STORY.

The concept is clever. Instead of aliens invading earth, with all the predictable genre-defining consequences, earthlings invade an alien planet. Or rather, a narcissistic astronaut (voiced by Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson) lands on a planet of little green men and women. The kicker is that the aliens are just as versed in pop culture and B-movies, and are just as petrified of the "alien" as we would be. In fact, one of the most memorable and endearing things about this film is the beautiful and witty translation of the look of late 1950s/early 1960s small-town America to the alien planet.

Unfortunately, the story doesn't really live up to the concept, because there really isn't one. The astronaut lands, gets separated from his ship, hides out with our alien teen hero (Justin Long) and then tries to get back to his ship. On the way, his robot (a dead ringer for Wall-E) tries to hook up with him and his alien helper tries to hook up with a hot alien chick (Jessica Biel). The problem is that the guy we're meant to empathise with as our hero is pretty whiny and dull, and the other person we might empathise with, the astronaut, is an insufferable bore. It's never good when the little robot has more personality than the hero. (As a sidenote, I also don't get why Dwayne Johnson couldn't have voiced a coloured astronaut?)

So, where does that leave us? PLANET 51 works well as a namecheck of alien invasion classics, and adults will get a certain kick out of that. There's probably enough slapstick humour, not to mention the cute robot, and that'll keep the kids happy. Happy, but in a sort of disposable, single-serving way.

PLANET 51 was released in November in the US, Malaysia, Peru, Russia, Ukraine, Canada, Italy, Argentina, Georgia, Greece, Kazakhstan, Brazil, Cyprus, Mexico and Spain. It opened earlier in December in the Philippines, Germany, Kuwait, Portugal, Iceland, the UK, Australia, Israel, New Zealand, Singapore, Bulgaria, Panama and Venezuela. It opens tomorrow in Turkey and on December 31st in Slovenia. It opens in Finland on January 1st, in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and Sweden on January 14th. It opens in France on February 3rd and in Belgium and the Netherlands on February 10th.

ROLE MODELS - genuinely, laugh-out-loud funny

ROLE MODELS is funnier than PINEAPPLE EXPRESS (though I laughed my ass off watching that flick). Funnier than TROPIC THUNDER. Way funnier than FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL and KNOCKED UP. It's the kind of movie that has fast-paced verbal wit that is genuinely driven by the situation that the characters are in. It also has beautiful little touches of physical humour. So much so that I can't wait to see it again and catch up on all the little asides that I missed the first time round.

The plot is simple and definitely contrived. Two feckless thirty-somethings screw up at their job (using the guise of anti-drug talks in schools to push energy drinks) and are sentenced to 150 hours community service. They end up mentoring two kids - one a geeky medieval role-playing game fanatic - the other a foul-mouthed kid full of attitude. That's pretty much it! But from this simpled meet-not-so-cute, writers Paul Rudd, David Wain, Ken Marino and Timothy Dowling carve a movie so funny, and in a way, so true-to-life, it's brilliant.

Take Paul Rudd's character Danny. He's painfully recognisable. He's the kind of guy who gets to 35 and realises he has a crap job and no direction and that his being smart hasn't really gotten him anywhere. He acts out by picking people up on things like putting words in quotation marks or using phrases like "asap" or "fyi". But this pernickety superiority merely serves to make him even more angry, and to alienate his long-suffering girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks). I'm guessing that a lot of people are going to relate to his character.

It's Danny who ends up having a mini-breakdown that land him and his friend and co-worker Wheeler (Seann William Scott in the kind of role - cocksure, none too smart side-kick, that he excels at) into community service. Danny and Wheeler - both work the verbal comedy route brilliantly, but they're acted off the screen by Jane Lynch as the creepy ex-crack whore, Gayle, who runs the mentoring programme ("Me and the judge have a special relationship... I don't wanna get too graphic but I sucked his dick for drugs." and Bobb'e J Thompson who plays Wheeler's mentee, Ronnie ("Suck it, "Reindeer Games"!") As the movie progresses, Wheeler and Ronnie form a bond over their common love of boobies.

Danny takes longer to bond with his geeky mentee Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) but in the end the feel-good factor and character development comes from this storyline. Danny learns to actually be positive and try something that seems weird, joining Augie in his medieval role-playing games. Danny defends Augie's weirdness to his truly awful parents, and in the process ires the RPG King Argotron (Ken Jeong) who banishes Augie. (In fact, you could make a case for Ken Jeong as the best actor in the movie with his subtle physical ticks - watch him finger Paul Rudd's face as Danny kisses King Argotron's hand. Pure Comedy Gold!) The final scenes centre heavily on how far Danny and Wheeler come to accept their responsibility as mentors, and how far they'll go to stand by their kids.

What more can I say? ROLE MODELS may sound contrived but it contains grains of human truth. Better still, it contains the funniest lines and delivery since PINEAPPLE EXPRESS. I can't wait to watch it again!

ROLE MODELS is on release in the US, Australia and the UK. It opens on January 1th in Croatia; on January 23rd in Iceland and Norway; in Spain on January 30th; in France on February 4th; in Estonia on February 6th; in Germany on February 26th; in the Netherlands on March 12th; in Finland and Sweden on March 20th; in Brazil on March 27th and in Italy on May 22nd.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - SOUTHLAND TALES

SOUTHLAND TALES is Richard Kelly's satire on post 9-11 US society. It's a paranoid fantasy about a USA destroyed by the four things: terrorism; the government's anti-liberal response to it; the vulgarity of popular culture; and environment degradation. Sadly, Kelly isn't up to synthesising all these concerns into a definitive take on contemporary angst. Rather, he has created an ambitious, fleetingly interesting, but overwhelmingly baggy, messy and pretentious film.

The movie is a rag-bag of inter-twining stories all played out in Kelly's alternate USA in 2008. A terrorist nuclear attack has wiped out Texas and prompted the US government to turn the US into a police state. Meanwhile, the energy crisis has been solved by a company that harnesses wave power to produce energy, the side-effect of which is to slow down the rotation of the earth and cause a warp in the space-time continuum. Against this back-drop we focus on three characters. The Rock plays a Schwarzenegger-like actor suffering from amnesia, trying to make sense of it all. He's being exploited by a porn star turned cultural commentator, Krysta Now (Sarah Michelle Gellar). Meanwhile, Seann William Scott plays a police officer, on the trail of Marxist radicals and his alternate self. All these characters are being messed up warps in the space-time continuum caused by environmental degradation.

The resulting film is a mess. And not in the way that Terry Gilliam's BRAZIL is a mess, but touched by genius, and therefore a cult film. SOUTHLAND TALES is misconceived. "State of the nation" content is better suited to the format of the novel. Novels like THE BONFIRE OF THE VANITIES or VANITY FAIR can take their time and build up a coherent narrative. My proposition is that the feature film is fundamentally unsuited to this kind of artistic endeavour.

SOUTHLAND TALES played Cannes 2006 to a disastrous reception. It was then put on extremely limited release in the UK and US in winter 2007. It is available on DVD in the theatrical release cut.

MR WOODCOCK is a big shiny formica coffee-table of nothingness

MR WOODCOCK is a really mediocre comedy. Note that it's not actively piss-poor. It doesn't try hard enough to fail that spectacularly. It's all shiny surfaces and slick production and low on genuine belly-laughs. Billy Bob Thornton does his usual schtick as the eponymous mean, angry sonofabitch. Back in the day, he tortured a kid called John Farley. Years later Farley (Seann William Scott) is a successful author of self-help books and returns home to pick up a prestigious prize. Much to his horror, not only is the bullying Woodcock being feted as the "Educator of the Year", he's also dating Farley's mum. Farley and his best mate (Ethan Suplee) try to frame Woodcock as an adulterous bastard, but basically the son and the lover have to agree to disagree and keep Susan Sarandon's long-suffering Mrs F sweet. Billy Bob is on auto-pilot. Sarandon and Suplee are way too good for this nonsense. And Seann William Scott needs to graduate to proper rom-com roles. This movie, sadly, is too obviously filmed and written by newbies who have yet to get a clue.

MR WOODCOCK is on release in the UK and USA. It inflicts itself upon Singapore on October 11th; on Iceland on November 2nd; on Finland on November 30th; on Turkey on December 28th; on Argentina on January 3rd and on the Netherlands on February 14th.