Films: The Ups and Downs

When you are battered over and over again about a killer disease, you want some escapism: And that's what '21 Bridges' gives you. The premise is simple: Two guys break into a drug storage facility, where they are there to steal 3kg worth of coke (to those not au fait with that sort of thing, that's a lot of blow). It turns out to be a lot more than that. Three cops show up to the reported break-in. A shoot-em-up happens, and then after more policemen are shot - bringing the total to 8 -, Andre Davis ('Black Panther''s Chadwick Boseman) and Frankie Burns (Sienna Miller) team up to find the killers before they escape Manhattan. Hence the name '21 Bridges' - the NYPD close up Manhattan. " We got twenty-one bridges in and out of Manhattan. Shut them down. Three rivers. Close them. Four tunnels. Block them. Stop every train and loop the subways. Then we flood the island with blue," says Boseman. We are immediately on the edge of our s...

"West Canaan. Sex and football. That's all there is...."  Varsity Blues is your typical football movie. High school quarterback. Comes from nowhere. Nasty coach. Team comes from the blue. Last-second heroics. Super-hot high school girls. Drinking. The town cares about nothing else. Texas. James Van Der Beek's Moxon, the quarterback who's come from nowhere to lead the team, on the back of former QB (the late Paul Walker)'s injury. All he really wants to do is sit on the sidelines, read novels behind playbooks, and revise to go to Brown University. He's got some friends, which include his idiot wide receiver friend Tweeter (Scott Caan), and most of all, his obese friend Billy Bob (the late Ron Lester), who spends most of his time chugging things, be it beer, whiskey and, er, maple syrup. If you've already seen this then read on....if you haven't....look away. THE GREAT BITS We loved Mox's brother, who's 'spiritual...

The last time I watched King Of New York was on skiing holiday in Austria. Maybe about 10 years ago, if not more. I watched the ultraviolence and drug-taking entralled. And not able to understand a damned thing: I watched in German. This time, in an effort to get away from all things virus-related, I decided to watch Christopher Walken as drug lord Frank White, who is released from jail to find out that all his cocaine business has been taken by other people. His mission is to wipe out the competition and give the proceeds to a poor hospital. We don't know if this is entirely magnanimous, or he's doing it for himself ("I want to be Mayor of New York.....he thinks I'm joking". Anyway, he's trying to raise $16 million for a hospital that's been cut because of budget cuts. His crew is the much-dancing Jimmy (Larry Fishburne) as well as Test Tube (Steve Buscemi in not a tiny (HINT: HE TESTS COCAINE)) as well as his motley crew of degenerates. ...

Going to the cinema to see a movie on your own is a beautiful affair. You can sit on your own: And own the two seats around you. One for the cap and coat and the other for the popcorn. You don’t have the troops of annoyances around you, be it the guys who went for a beer beforehand, the guy who checks his Facebook during the trailers (I mean: REALLY?), or the chatterboxes, be them kids or people lacking in the realisation that the cinema experience is about shutting up and watching, not chatting about the latest episode of Celebrity Kardashian Love Idol. Within that, there's the special genre: The horror crowd. For some reason people like to get together and make sure that somewhere in space, they will have heard you scream. Apparently, crapping yourself is not just an experience that a total deviant wants. Wind this forward about three quarters of an hour into ‘The Invisible Man’, and I wish that there was more of a horror cluster. Because quite frankly, I could have use...

THE CALL OF THE WILD Yes, we know Buck is a CGI dog. If you saw what Buck did out in the Yukon in the snow, the spring and the water, you'd understand that no dog could go through, and battle through, what Buck did. Basically, Buck's Superman. Or he's SuperDog. Anyway. But with Buck, you cry at the bad things to happen to him (there are quite a few of those incidents), and you cheer his bravery (there are quite a few of those incidents). It's pretty simple. At the start you work out that it's a CGI dog that's stealing food, being a general pain in the behind, and then getting kidnapped. And a little noise starts in your brain telling you: "HEY! WHY WATCH THIS? IT ISN'T EVEN A ****ING REAL DOG?" Then you follow him through the Yukon as he's leading the pack and the post, and then as he's by Harrison Ford's side, and then the rest of the cool stuff. You know that the world around him is generally CGI, but do you ...

When it came out, the new Star Wars movie: "The Rise of Skywalker", was roundly criticised. The fanboys hated it because it brownnosed too much to the audience. Some of the critics didn't like it because it felt too much like Return of The Jedi. The group who did like it was Disney, who made $1 billion and counting from it, as the punter ignored the frustrations of the cellar-dwellers and the self-styled Hollywood pen elite and got their butts on seats. Some of them multiple times. Today was my second watch, after the first one burnt joy and a headache into my skull after I watched it in IMAX (which was cool). If it's a second watch, some people like to think that this was the time to think critically . So I tried to. I tried to analyse the battle sequences, whether it was indeed an updated version of Return of The Jedi, and whether it was paying too much homage to the fans instead of following the darker trajectory that the last two films had promised. ...

If there were factions of lovers of characters in 'Gossip Girl', I was definitely Team Blake Lively. In that, Lively was a tall, kind, decent human being who could act a bit but certainly didn't hurt the eye. Well, she's married to Ryan Reynolds, has two children, lives in Bedford, New York (my cousins have seen her at a pizza place - disguised in caps and sunglasses to make sure that they aren't surrounded by 50-year multimillionaires just drooling for a selfie) and she's apparently  not gone the way of Gossip Girl The Series, where the whole cast was involved in different levels of debauchery. Anyhow..... the mind wonders......oh..... And now I'm in Houston, Texas, in a cinema, watching 'The Rhythm Section', her latest movie. No Chuck Bass, just her, Stephanie, a woman who's mourning her family after they died in a plane crash. A long way away from 5th Avenue, she's attracted a heroin habit ("I'm not an addict I...