Four days later....

...and I still can't find anything interesting at the cinema. That's the problem with the London Film Fest - you get through all the buzz movies for the next six months in a fortnight. I just can't quite bring myself to see SAW III or STEP UP. This weekend's a bit thin too. Satan vomits in my eiderdown with the UK release of DECK THE HALL. I won't be watching it as it falls foul of Bina007's first rule of Cinema but there's a proper review here. I have unabashedly prejudged this overtly "cheery" movie featuring Matthew Broderick's uptight suburban family man getting riled by Danny DeVito's vulgar neighbour's Christmas light display. Frankly, I find this picture of Danny Devito in a Santa hat vaguely sinister.

The only film I will be watching this weekend is LONDON TO BRIGHTON, despite the fact that it looks a bit like a cheap Lilya 4 Ever. Ironically, I am on the London to Brighton train tomorrow although I doubt we'll get any grungily filmed violence, more's the pity. It's been four days since I ventured inside a movie theatre, which is something of a record for me. I'm starting to get the shakes.

In other random news, they're filming David Cronenberg's new flick outside my office. It's called EASTERN PROMISE which sounds like a gift box of Turkish Delight. However, it's apparently about illegal immigrants and organised crime in London. Viggo Mortensen is playing a slimy East End gangster with slicked back hair and Naomi Watts is also in it. All East End gangsters have slicked back hair. It gives the rozzers a fighting chance. The whole movie set thing is less exciting than annoying - the huge equipment lorries blocking the road make it the devil to get a black cab.

Eheu, o me miserum

DHOOM 2 contains the most annoying character since Jar Jar Binks

The first DHOOM movie was a fantastic Bollywood popcorn flick. A charming buddy-cop movie in which Abhishek Bachchan's uptight policeman chases down John Abraham's motorcycle gang with the help of Uday Chopra's light-hearted buffoon-like street-kid. The movie combined some nice lo-fi motorcycle chase sequences, a pop soundtrack and some genuine chemistry between Abhishek and Uday. DHOOM 2 takes the basic ingredients for a successful franchise and amps them up to the point of stupidity. The feel-good charm of the original is lost in a sea of over-blown, poorly shot stunt sequences and slo-mo overload.

Unlike the original movie, DHOOM 2 has no narrative structure of character development. The producers clearly want us to judge it by the quality of the action and dance sequences. But even if we grant them this, the movie fails. The action sequences are a pastiche of John Wu meets The Matrix. They're edited to death - there is no fluidity or build-up of tension: the editing calls to much attention to itself. Moreover, even within the loose bounds of ridiculousness that we expect from stunt extravaganzas, the sequences have no internal logic. I *love* ridiculous stunts, but this movie was so absurd that even I couldn't suspend my disbelief. Worse still, every other shot is in slow motion! Seriously, if you just played this movie at normal speed it would be cut down from the over-long 3 hours to a more endurable 90 minute run-time. I half expected to see white doves taking flight. And don't even get me started on the quality of the Mission Impossible-style "wearing someone else's face" stuff....

Now back to plot and character or lack thereof. Actors are present to perform cool stunts and look buff to the point where Bollywood hero Hrithik Roshan has waxed his underarms. Sure, Hrithik and Bipasha look great and with this film, Hrithik has established himself as Bollywood's leading practicioner of Wire-fu and Hollywood-style stunt sequences. But you have to wonder at the self-respect of actors who exist merely as physical objects. Having seen Aish and Abhishek in UMRAO JAAN not two weeks ago and Bipasha Basu in OMKARA earlier this year, you can't help but feel that these actors are slumming it.

Aishwarya's character is especially annoying. She's meant to be a rebellious hip young MTV-watching kid. The writers achieve this by making her say, "like", after, like, every, word and like, making her, like, refer to herself, like, in the third person, like. Indeed, Aish's character may be the most annoying character since Jar Jar Binks. Abhishek Bachchan and Uday Chopra are cast into shadow by Hrithik. Of course they aren't helped by a script that turns their LETHAL WEAPON style sweet buddy-cop relationship into one of a grumpy critical superior and his idiot sidekick. And poor Rimi Sen gets about a nanosecond of screen time. It's obvious that the producers wanted to drop her for bigger female stars but couldn't quite write out the wife of the lead actor's character.

In the final analysis, DHOOM 2 is nothing more than a vulgar pastiche of MISSION IMPOSSIBLE 3. The producers have taken a promising franchise and skewered it with their vaulting ambition. Next time, let's hope that they funnel their attempts at Hollywood special effects and production values through a filter of plausibility and narrative structure.

DHOOM 2 is on release in the US, UK, India and the Netherlands.

FLUSHED AWAY - a very British comedy

For some strange reason, FLUSHED AWAY did terrible business in the US - at least relative to the huge budget. I say strange because Swedish Philip and I went to see it today and it was absolutely hysterical. I mean, laugh out loud funny throughout. I haven't had such a good time watching a comedy in ages, and it beats alleged adult fare like TENACIOUS D, and TALLADEGA NIGHTS hands down. That the movie is seriously funny comes as no surprise when you realise that, despite being CGI animated, it comes from the people who brought you WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE-RABBIT. So you get the characteristic physical comedy, classic movie references and proper old-fashioned plotting and characterisation. The visual comedy is so rich that I suspect you’d have to watch FLUSHED AWAY a number of times before you’d even begun to recognise it all.

However, it has to be said that the movie has a peculiarly English feel, which may explain its comparative failure in the US. (The root cause of the English-ness is easy to identify - the movie was co-written by Dick Clement and Ian LeFrenais – veteran script-writers for classic British TV comedies, The Likely Lads and Porridge.) The iconography of Zone One London is used to full effect – it’s all Piccadilly Circus & London Bridge. The fish-out-of-water plot plays off Cor Blimey Guv’nor sewer rats with a pampered pet mouse from The Royal Borough of Kensington. The movie features the regulation Knight of the Realm (Sir Ian McKellan) camping it up luvvie-stylee. A good dollop of the jokes are made at the expense of the cheese-eating surrender-monkey French; vulgar American tourists; grannies who throw their knickers at Tom Jones and the English football team.

In short, if you think football is a game played with twenty-two men and a round ball in which England lose on penalties to Germany in the final, I can almost guarantee you’ll have a good time watching FLUSHED AWAY. What's more this movie has everything that a certain Bond film lacked: exhilerating chases; a smooth hero in a dinner jacket; wicked gadgets; cheesy pick-up lines; an evil megalomaniac threatening humanity; and a ticking clock counting down to devestation before the hero saves the day!

FLUSHED AWAY has already opened in Israel, Singapore, the US, Belgium, France and the Netherlands. It opens in Hong Kong, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Spain, Sweden and the UK next weekend. It opens in Germany, Bulgaria, Estonia and Norway on December 8th, in Brazil, Mexico and Turkey on the 15th, in Australia, Slovenia, Italy and Latvia on the 22nd. It opens in Argentina in January and in Japan in March.

A short essay on vomit-inducing cinema

SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE should be prosecuted under the Competition laws for shamelessly exploiting a captive market of parents who have to take their kids to see a film over the festive season but aren't in one of the handful of towns showing THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D. I haven't seen it and I'm not going to for a couple of reasons. First, even the trailer - the so-called highlights - was painfully unfunny. Second, I've seen the first two and I'll never get those hours back. Third, the reviews have been so universally grim that I can't see what I would add. I really don't enjoy bad-mouthing a movie for the heck of it, and how could I top Mark Kermode's description of the movie as the cinematic equivalent of tertiary syphilis? Anyway, as I have said before, Christmas movies featuring jolly Santas make me heave. It's vomit-inducing cinema and not in a good way. Still, in case you're erring on the side of evil, you can read a proper review here.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO is a pointless movie to review, if it's a movie at all. It's basically a poorly shot string of skits just like in the infamous MTV TV show. Johnny Knoxville and his gang of extreme sports miscreants do things to themselves involving bodily fluids and explosives that are designed to cause pain and nausea in the viewer. To fans of such real-life gross-out humour, JACKASS NUMBER TWO is vomit-inducing in a good way, and as a fan of consumer choice I'm happy they have an opportunity to get their fix. It's not my cup of tea, so I won't be watching it, but I am reliably informed by my teenage cousins who fall squarely in the target demographic that the movie did what all good genre-movies should: it did exactly what is said on the tin. But if you want a proper review, you can click here.

SANTA CLAUSE 3 has already infected Germany, the US, the Philippines, Australia, Singapore, Iceland, Italy and the UK. Japan gets infected on December 2nd, Turkey on Dec 8th, Argentina on Dec 14th, Belgium on Dec 20th and Spain and Venezuela on Dec 22nd.

JACKASS NUMBER TWO is on release in the US, Netherlands, Russia, Iceland, Finland, Belgium, Denmark, Norway, Spain, Australia and the UK. It opens in Germany next week, in Sweden on December 8th, Estonia on December 29th and in Japan on January 13th. The Region 1 DVD is released on December 26th.

LOULOU - still compelling after 26 years

LOULOU is a 26 year old French movie starring a young Isabelle Huppert as Nelly, a frustrated bourgeouis woman married to Guy Marchand's André. At a disco, Nelly meets Loulou - a physically attractive working-class yob played by a shockingly young Gérard Depardieu. Nelly leaves her rich but boring husband for a life of sexual satisfaction. The film plots the consequences of this decision, not least her continued sado-masochistic emotional relationship André.

Loulou is a complete layabout. He is content to sponge off Nelly and even when she falls pregnant and her kindly brother offers to set him up in business he shows no inclination to work. But there is nothing malicious in this. Part of the magic of Depardieu's performance is that Loulou is so charming - so funny, so attractive - that the audience can forgive him his inability to plan for the future. And besides, Loulou is no idiot - when he does occasionally reflect on his situation he is very perceptive and objective about what Nelly wants from the relationship. As for Nelly, this is another classic Huppert role. Her relationship with her ex reminded me not a little of her more recent role in GABRIELLE. The interesting part of both films is how the wife continues to torment the husband after the act of betrayal, and how both husbands are still addicted to their wives.

But in style, this film could not be further from GABRIELLE. LOULOU is filmed in a relaxed, intimate documentary style that suits the material. The camera seems to take on Loulou's freewheeling style, moving fluidly between characters. The lighting is naturalistic and in some cases non-existent, giving us a lot of night scenes that are almost entirely black. This and the seemingly improvised nature of the dialogue in the some of the group scenes gives the movie a relaxed intimacy. It really is a pleasure to watch.

LOULOU was originally released in 1980. It is currently in an extended run at the National Film Theatre as part of their Isabelle Huppert season.

TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS 3D - gorgeous

In general, I believe Christmas movies suck. I will not, for instance, be reviewing the US hit movie, SANTA CLAUSE 3: THE ESCAPE CLAUSE. For all I know, it's a Christmas classic. But then, even as a young kid, Christmas movies always made me spew and brought out my meanest Bah-Humbug! spirit. This might be why I get such a kick out of movies like BAD SANTA and TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS - both movies that forego the saccharine gloopy Christmas goodness that infects the usual fare.

TIM BURTON'S THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS was originally released back in the early 1990s and has now been re-released in a new 3-D version. It's an absolutely cracking film and while there isn't much use made of the 3-D (unlike, say, MONSTER HOUSE) the kids I took to see this got a kick out of wearing the 3-D glasses anyhoo. So cutting to the chase, what we really have is a re-release of the original film, and even on those terms, it's well worth seeing.

The movie is a musical scored and largely sung by long-time Tim Burton collaborator Danny Elfman. It tells a sweetly ghoulish tale of an attenuated skeleton called Jack who lives in Halloween town. Every Halloween, Jack (Chris "Prince Humperdinck" Sarandon) and his vampires, witches, corpses and beasties keep the rest of the world entertained with tricks and mischief. But Jack is frustrated with the monotony of it all and wanders away from home. He stumbles upon Christmastown - a place he never knew existed! Dazzled at the lovely warm feeling he returns to Halloweentown convinced he can do a better job than Santa. So, with all best intentions, Jack and his friends set about making presents to deliver to all the kids but the presents can't help but turn out scary. The normal world of humans is scared silly and Christmas is cancelled until Jack saves the day. He may not be able to supplant Santa but he does at least get a beautiful re-animated Corpse Bride voiced by Catherine O'Hara.

The movie is astoundingly beautifully designed and is rendered in a technically impressive mix of stop-motion and cell animation with very very few CGI add-ins. For film geeks, it's great to see some fantastic double exposure special-effects, To that end, it has a more tactile "real" feel that most new CGI animated films. Like WALLACE AND GROMIT: CURSE OF THE WERE RABBIT, the movie benefits from having been lit and photographed as much like a live-action film as possible. What that means is that instead of having a super-bright Disney-like cartoon, NIGHTMARE looks more like a forties film-noir or THE NIGHT OF THE HUNTER(!). Halloweentown is morbidly drawn in a near black-and-white palette and filmed largely in shadow. Even in Christmas-town, which has a Dr Seuss feel - the colours are rich and dark and warm rather than day-glo bright.

Because of the series of ghoulish (though largely well-meaning characters) and the brooding photographic style, NIGHTMARE is one of those kids films, like MONSTER HOUSE, that is not for the faint-hearted kid. For instance, there's a scene where the evil Oogie Boogie's body disintegrates into a mass of creepy crawlies. You need to make a judgement about whether your kid will handle that. But to my mind, the director handles it just right - giving us a few quick frights before moving on to the love story or the funnier characters.

A lot of movies get tagged as "instant classics" but I reckon NIGHTMARE is one of the few to whom this description actually applies. It's a great family Christmas movie - providing adults with a richly imagined world rather than cheap pop-cultural gags - and treating kids with more respect that, say, your average Santa movie. Two enthusiastic thumbs-up!

TIM BURTON's THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS was originally released in the early 1990s. It's available on DVD but is also on re-release in the UK in 3D format.