when it feels like i'm in the twilight zone and i just can't make it through

Review: Week ending Sunday 31 March 2013

This week: Compliance, Welcome to the Punch, Suede, Boris Johnson, Burt Wonderstone and a superb forgotten pop hit from the 1980s

At the moofies

I like Steve Carell. As well as playing those great comedy characters he also manages to add a lot to a more serious film, as he did brilliantly in the excellent Dan In Real Life and Crazy, Stupid Love. This time, though, he's back in comedy mode as a Penn and Teller-esque Las Vegas magician in The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

Everything about this film adds up: Carell as a famous magician, the brilliant Steve Buscemi as his childhood friend and assistant, Jim Carrey as the David Blaine rival and the scene-stealing Alan Arkin as a retired entertainer. The problem with Burt Wonderstone is simple, though: the writers forgot to put any jokes in.

While Burt Wonderstone is entertaining enough to watch, the gags and visual pranks that exist simply aren't good enough. It made me smile once or twice but at no point did it make me laugh. All in all, it means that The Incredible Burt Wonderstone is simply a waste of some excellent talent. The stars do a great job with what they are given, but what they have to work with is sadly pretty second rate. 5/10

Welcome To The Punch is a gritty British drama featuring almost every well-known British thesp you've ever heard of. James McAvoy (horribly miscast) plays a London policeman seeking out a well-known gangster with whom he has personal history. Twists and turns, police shadiness and a lot of shooting ensues.  

Welcome To The Punch has a few problems. Firstly, while it casts some brilliant actors, each of their characters is immediately identifiable by the actor chosen to play them. You know McAvoy is going to be 'by the book'. You know a police chief played by David Morrissey is going to be shifty and you've seen Mark Strong as a well spoken nutter dozens of times.

Director Eran Creevy does a magnificent job of making London look like a glittering, glassy city from the future but forgets to tell us anything about his characters. And, there is a large amount of utterly ludicrous shootout scenes where bad 'uns with automatic weapons destroy everything in sight but thankfully miss our heroes who then kill them by hitting them with a teaspoon.

All in all, Welcome To The Punch is a very average British crime thriller with a great cast. It's pretty much what DVDs were invented for. 6/10

Back in the 1960s, Stanley Milgram conducted a series of experiments in which subjects gave what they believed to be electric shocks to people in another room because someone in authority told them to. Compliance is a modern day version of the Milgram experiment, albeit based on a true story from the US.

Sandra is the manageress of a fast food restaurant, stressed by her workload and the loss of $1,500 worth of stock. When she receives a telephone call from Officer Daniels informing her that one of her workers has stolen some money from a purse, she naturally deals with the situation immediately. With the officer keeping Sandra on the phone, how far will she go to obey a supposedly authoritarian figure?

Compliance is a tough watch. Not in the sense that it is titillating or violent, but in that it holds up a mirror to some of those human traits we know we'd rather not see. Six people walked out of the showing I saw and the remainder were often heard laughing nervously as they were forced to deal with a pretty unpleasant series of events.

While it's a great study of human nature, I actually found Compliance simultaneously totally plausible and utterly ridiculous. Director Craig Zobel manages to up the ante so gradually that the next action is never disproportionate but at the same time every fibre of a right minded person's being must be wondering what on earth these people were thinking when they obeyed these commands. It's not a nice story but it's wonderfully told and there are some brilliant performances from Ann Dowd and Dreama Walker.

Even though it's based on true events I am afraid I still don't buy it. Only in America, perhaps? 8/10

Hollywood's current penchant for 21st century versions of ancient fairy tales is pretty unwelcome. From Red Riding Hood to Mirror, Mirror, every one of these daft reimaginings has been hopeless so far. So, what of the newest effort: Jack The Giant Slayer?

Well, while it's clearly not a contender for the greatest film I've seen this week, Jack the Giant Slayer is probably the best of a pretty rotten bunch of fairytale movies. This is partly helped by its largely British cast - as a massive Auf Wiedersehen, Pet fan, seeing Christopher Fairbank in anything is a joy - and a script which manages to bounce along pretty merrily.

There are problems with it - the giants are pretty poorly imagined and Ewan McGregor plays Obi-Wan Kenobi to the point where you really want him to die a horrible death - but the two leads are likeable enough and there's one or two nice action sequences. A word of warning, though: when I say it's the best of the fairy tale films, that's not saying much. 6/10

Music to work by

Mention that you like 1927's That's When I Think Of You to an Australian and it's a bit like saying that you like Livin' On A Prayer or Bohemian Rhapsody. It was a massive hit down under in the late 1980s but, surprisingly, never made the top 40 here in the UK. I have loved this record ever since I heard it on ITV's The Chart Show back in the day. Quite why it wasn't massive here, I am not sure, but as forgotten pop hits of that decade go, this is up with the best.

On this subject, how about some more amazing records that failed to trouble the UK Top 40 in the 1980s?

OMD - Dreaming
Julia Fordham - Woman of the 80s
Rita Coolidge - All Time High

Suede have long been one of my favourite bands and I finally got to see them live last week on their first visit to Nottingham since 1992. I still think their new album is patchy but some of the old stuff sounded amazing. Mike's review is here.

Best record in the top 10 right now: This. Brilliant.

The gogglebox

Sometimes, I think that Boris Johnson is exactly what this country needs. While I'm not a fan of his politics, electing someone who at least has a generally rosy outlook, has a pulse and is something of a personality might just be the kick up the backside our politics needs. Other times, however - and certainly after watching Boris Johnson: The Irresistible Rise - the idea of him in charge of anything frightens the life out of me.

There can rarely have been a politician that can maintain his popularity level despite a range of controversy ranging from extra-marital affairs to downright lying (Bill Clinton, maybe?) The career of any other public figure would be in tatters by now had they the same CV as Boris and still he's talked of as the country's next Prime Minister. At times I thought he got off pretty easily and, of course, Eddie Mair's infamous interview rather stole the limelight. Still, it was a diverting peek at the back story of one of the nation's most recognisable public figures.

Next week: Trance, The Croods and the return of Doctor Who