Because Everybody Else Has One

I haven't reviewed Me and Earl and the Dying Girl yet so I thought I'd team it up with this week's much tougher coming-of-age story. They certainly make for an interesting double bill. My review of The Diary of a Teenage Girl is up at Channel 24 , but first a couple of quick words on Me and Earl. In many respects, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl is the quirkier, more indie version of the Fault in Our Stars. Again, it's about teenagers dealing with a terminal disease and again there is still the irony of it also being about growing up. Our hero of the piece, Greg (Thomas Mann)  makes amateur parodies of classic films with his co-worker (really best friend) Earl and he spends his whole life trying to remain invisible in a school divided along arbitrary but rigid lines. When Greg befriends "the dying girl" Rachel (Olivia Cooke) though, who has just been diagnosed with a otentiallyp curable form of leukemia, he is forced to confront his aloof relationship ...

Not so much burnt as under-done. This review is also up at Chanel 24 What it's about A disgraced American chef, forced to leave Paris thanks to a destructive lifestyle of drugs and booze, sets out to redeem himself by being awarded the coveted “Michelin 3 stars” by becoming head chef of an old friend's respected restaurant. What we thought I'm not much of a foodie so excuse the cliched metaphor but, for all of its charms, Burnt is more hors d'oeuvre than entree. It's tasty enough and it's not badly prepared, but it ultimately leaves me hungry and wanting more. Much like the dainty gourmet dishes in the film itself, in fact. Bradley Cooper returns to a role not too dissimilar from one of his earlier performances as a chef in the short lived TV comedy, Kitchen Confidential, but he has obviously racked up quite the resume since. He is, as is now pretty typical for him, in good form here and he elevates some of the more mundane and wel...

Really, really not good enough... This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about Molly Moon is a smart, bookish and warmhearted orphan girl, living in a small orphanage in rural England, whose life takes a sudden and dramatic change when she finds a book on hypnosis at her local library. What we thought It's tempting to give the frankly fairly terrible Molly Moon and the Incredible Book of Hypnotism a pass just because it's a kids film, and a mostly harmless one at that, but there's something incredibly disingenuous, not to mention condescending, about accepting something this woefully below par just because it happens to be aimed at fairly young kids. In a world where Mary Poppins, School of Rock, Paddington and the Harry Potter series are readily available to rent, buy and/or download – and that's to say nothing of the countless brilliant animated kids films out there – there really is no excuse for something this lame and lazy. ...

Welcome back Mr Depp but this ain't exactly Goodfellas. This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about The true story of Jimmy “Whitey” Bulger, a small-time Boston gangster, who, by working with the FBI to take down Boston's major crime family, soon finds himself with free rein to become the most ruthless, most feared criminal in the city. What we thought Black Mass is a gangster movie that can perhaps be admired for how utterly unglamorously it portrays the casually violent gangster lifestyle (which makes for a particularly interesting contrast with Legend, the upcoming portrayal of the infamous Kray brothers) but it's a very hard to film to be invested in, let alone actually enjoy. Everything from the beige-and-tweed '70s fashion to the slow, downbeat direction to the utterly humourless script, adds up to an incredibly dour portrait of some of most spectacularly unlikable and unsympathetic low-life scum to hit our screen in quite s...

See, this is what happens when I review South African movies... This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about While looking for a place to launch their new video game, Eric Scott and Jason White stumble upon an abandoned warehouse containing a fully functional twenty-year-old artificial intelligence named XJ1. With that warehouse about to be destroyed, the two friends search for a new home for the AI, before settling on uploading “him” to their work network: the highly secure intelligence company named Sky Corp, which happens to be run by Jason's father. What could possibly go wrong? What we thought I've got to be honest: Reconnect is a total bitch of a film to review. Quite aside for the fact that it's always a bit difficult to give a negative review an earnest independent movie, made with the best of intentions – bashing cynical, corpulent product like Transformers 4 is one thing, bashing a highly personal local film is quite another – Reconn...

In which Kristen Stewart is the best thing about it... This review has already been up for a few days at Channel 24 , in case you missed it. What it's about Mike Howell (Jesse Eisenberg) seems to be your average twenty-something stoner, living a fairly ordinary life as an aspiring cartoonist stuck in a dead end convenience-store job but with a loving girlfriend at his side every step of the way. As it turns out though, Mike is not who or what he seems as he suddenly finds himself the target of the C.I.A. – but, lucky for him, he is also armed with a set of deadly skills; the origins of which, though, are a total mystery to him. What we thought With its not entirely original but still very promising premise, you would be forgiven for thinking that American Ultra would be, at the very least, a fun, funny thrill ride that makes good use of its quite idiosyncratic cast. Sadly, it's something of a misfire that has its share of decent moments but is mostly a ...

Another origin story that no one wanted... By this point, I think we can safely say that J.M Barrie's immortal fairy tale has been pretty well mined by the great Hollywood machine. Along with the classic Disney animated film from way back in 1953, we've had a silent adaptation in the early '20s, spin-offs in the form of the Tinkerbell series and sequels, including Stephen Spielberg's largely derided Hook. We've even had a look at the life of its author in the decent but underwhelming Finding Neverland - which itself came out just a year after P.J. Hogan's fairly straightforward adaptation. It's understandable, of course, as Peter Pan is that classic a story - and I haven't even gotten into the many, many reinterpretations on stage and TV and in novels and comic books, including my own favourite "cover", Peter David's wonderful novel, Tigerheart - but with so much baggage, it's hard not to come to a new version without at least so...

I can't remember the last Ridley Scott film to feel this assured. Well, okay, yes, I can, but that was American Gangster in 2007 and who the hell can remember that far back. Welcome back, Sir Ridley, it's been way too bloody long! The Martian tells the story of the first manned mission to mars (to be clear, the fictional story - but, um, you do know that, right?) and of the astronaut who is accidentally left for dead by his crewmembers and is forced to fend for himself on the inhospitable Red Planet until NASA send their next mission some four years hence. However, rather than going the more obvious route of a gritty, or at least more lonesome and meditative, survivalist story, it plays out like Apollo 13 on steroids - and it really is all the better for it. This means that though it does lack the depth of something like Duncan Jones' beautiful indie sci-fi flick, Moon, it more than makes up for it in terms of sheer, unfiltered enjoyment. And, frankly, after the un...