Popcorn filler for a busy week...

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Cinema 2011 #83: The Inbetweeners Movie

Bar changing the location to the clubber’s holiday paradise of Malia, Crete, there’s nothing particularly original going on in the big screen adaptation of Iain Morris and Damon Beesley’s teenage odyssey. Those looking for an epic tale that thrusts four boys out of an in-between state of adolescence into fully-fledged manhood may as well go and watch Stand by Me again, The Inbetweeners Movie is not a contemplative study on growing up and growing apart. Instead, the writers, director Ben Palmer (who helmed the entire second season of the E4 sitcom) and the series regulars do what they’ve always done best; mercilessly ripping the piss out of each other, the way only best friends can, and making the audience laugh with the finest British gross-out comedy to date. 

Cinema 2011 #82: Glee: The 3D Concert

While there is simply no denying the Glee gang’s infectious charm for rebranding classic soft rock, contemporary pop and big-ballad show tunes into a flashy up-tempo package, for many viewers the main attraction remains Jane Lynch’s acerbic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. This makes her absence from the 3D concert movie all the greater, with a purveying sense that all that’s on offer here is some very upscale karaoke attempting to cash in on fan favour and residual interest in the concert shenanigans of Cyrus, Bieber and Jonas, Inc.

The cast of the show, a hodgepodge ethnic mix of Ohioan high-schoolers united by a love of music and some serious vocal talent, come together here, some contractually bound, to perform as McKinley High’s New Directions Glee Club, performing a number of popular songs and dance routines from the first two seasons of creator Ryan Murphy’s contemporary twist on the Fame formula. And who better to take the helm from Murphy on directing duties than Kevin Tancharoen, the man behind the 2009 reboot of the leg-warmer antics of the New York Academy of Performing Arts. 

Cinema 2011 #81: Fright Night

“The kids today,” complains Roddy McDowall in the 1985 original version of Fright Night, “don’t have the patience for vampires. They want to see some mad slasher running around and chopping off heads.”

Well, 26 years later and it’s a somewhat different market. The slashers need to slice your skin off in a series of increasingly elaborate traps and vampires have never been more in vogue, with seemingly every single channel showing some sporty Scandinavian sucking Sookie’s sanguine assets, while on the silver screen Edward gets busy with the body glitter and pre-marital chastity. It makes director Craig (Lars and the Real Girl) Gillespie’s remake all the more ironic, really, given that the running joke behind the Tom Holland original was that vampires weren’t all that cool anymore, so nobody would believe you when you told them that one was your neighbour. These days, if there were Cullens in the cul de sac, it would presumably increase the market value of your home. 

New Directions on the other side...

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Cinema 2011 #80: Cowboys & Aliens

Summer 2011 has really been out of this world for producer Steven Spielberg. Although the most powerful filmmaker on the planet hasn’t deigned to sit in the director’s chair himself, that Spielberg sheen has dominated our movie screens nonetheless, with three collaborations with other directors, and a slight sense that the chap is running out of ideas. We’ve had automobile aliens fighting off the onslaught of vehicular villains in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Then we had some good old-fashioned Goony-fun as a mysterious monster from beyond the stars rips a town to shreds in J.J. Abrams’ Super 8. And now, taking the Ronseal approach to film titles, Spielberg produces director Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, which is, unsurprisingly, about cowboys and aliens.

But to say that this is Spielberg’s show is a tad unfair, as Favreau’s style dominates the film, and the Iron Man man clearly stamps his sense of dry humour and gritty emotion onto this loose interpretation of a 2006 graphic novel of the same name. 

Cinema 2011 #79: The Devil's Double

Where did it all go wrong for Lee Tamahori? With his 1994 Once were Warriors, the Kiwi received worldwide acclaim for his brutal portrayal of contemporary Maori culture, but since then has struggled to reach the same heights with contrived genre-flicks (xXx , its sequel XXX: State of the Union, the Nicholas Cage vehicle Next) and effectively brought about the death of Bond as we new him with the dire Die Another Day. Tamahori’s private life also hit headlines, when it was revealed that in 2006, whilst dressed in drag, he was caught by an uncover LAPD officer allegedly soliciting oral sex, resurfacing old rumours about his somewhat saucy double life.

This is perhaps what attracted him to The Devil’s Double, the story of Latif Yahia, a man forced to become the body double of Saddam Hussein’s psychotic son Uday, with British actor Dominic Cooper in the lead as both men.

While serving at the front in the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s, Latif is pulled away from combat by the secret service and brought back to Baghdad. There he is reintroduced to Uday Hussein, with whom he had gone to school and always shared a similar appearance, so much so, that Uday claims him as his new brother and has Latif surgically altered to make the resemblance uncanny. Now forced into sharing in the decadence of Uday’s life, with cars, drugs, clothes and women thrust upon him, Latif struggles to cope with the heavy weight of losing his identity and living at the beck and call of an increasingly unstable and violent man.