True Grit

By Will Tooke

Remakes are a tricky business.  Here in the glamorous, Soho based Film Don Inc. offices, we still argue about the relative merits of Let Me In, the American remake of the far superior Swedish Let The Right One In, that seemed to me at least to cater solely for American teenagers too lazy to read subtitles for two hours. Equally re-boots such as ‘Karate Kid’ and ‘The A-Team’ can cause a lot of heavy debate as to whether they ruined or improved the franchise.

Which brings us to the Coen Brother’s True Grit. Whilst not a remake of a foreign movie or a reboot of an 80’s classic, the comparison holds in that it is a remake of a much loved original, that garnered widespread critical acclaim upon its release in 1969, and finally won Marion Morrison (or John Wayne to you and me) a Best Actor Oscar for his swan song performance as Rooster Cogburn, the gruff, no nonsense US Marshal. The Coen’s have more than proved themselves when it comes to Westerns, having adapted and directed 2007s No Country For Old Men, but they also proved themselves to be wildly inconsistent filmmakers by following up No Country with Burn After Reading, a weird, unpleasant comedy that raises a few laughs (George Clooney’s dildo machine*, anyone?) but has dark streaks so broad that as a whole the film is uncomfortably discordant. So purists of the Western genre perhaps have a lot to be worried about. Especially since the last Coen remake was 2002’s The Ladykillers, starring Tom Hanks. There’s a reason why you probably haven’t heard of it.

Then again, the original True Grit has a lot wrong with it – and however sacrilegious this may sound; don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. The 1969 Henry Hathaway directed version screamed sixties Hollywood – if you can look past the poor quality special effects (shots of people falling off horses were sped up, a safer way for stuntmen to earn their living, but it has more than a little of the Benny Hill chase sequence about it), then its hard to look past how anaesthetised the Wild West looks. Clothes are new and clean, and saddles shine with the over care of a zealous props department. With modern additions to the genre like the much underrated, Kevin Costner directed Open Range, the TV show Deadwood, or even the sprawling epic videogame Red Dead Redemption audiences are used to seeing the Old West like it was. Violent, dark and dirty.  Pleasingly this is how the Coens have realized their version of the film. Which isn’t to say it doesn’t look beautiful, the grimy grey-brown palette periodically broken up by skylines stretching blue across the Midwestern horizons, or the spurting crimson of a fatal gunshot.

Another fault with the original was the casting. Surly Texas Ranger Labouef was played by country singer Glenn Campbell, who couldn’t act as well as he could sing, a piece of stunt casting thankfully not emulated by the Coen brothers- presumably 50 Cent was upset not to be asked to a reading, Matt Damon being a perfect fit for the role, much to Fiddy’s chagrin.  Jeff Bridges brings a gruff, whiskery authority to the one eyed Cogburn. Unlike Wayne’s incarnation, it’s easy to forget that you’re watching an actor and not a real cowboy. It’s unkind, but in truth Wayne played a gunslinger at the end of his career at the end of his career, whereas Bridges continues to go from strength to strength. He has made the role his own. John who? Wisely, Bridges channels hardly any of Wayne’s original performance, although it’s great to see the inclusion of the original’s most iconic scene – Cogburn galloping toward a posse of badguys, reins in his teeth, a six shooter in each hand, kill or be killed.

Despite Bridge’s stellar performance, the real tip of the ten gallon hat has to go to newcomer and spell check molester Hailee Steinfeld who is nothing short of astonishing in the roll of the young Maddie Ross, who hires Cogburn to track down her father’s murderer. Here – and in the original book – Maddie is only fourteen, whereas in 1969 she was played by Kim Darby, then in her early twenties, the character having been made sufficiently old enough to hint at a love interest with Cogburn, another bum note in the original. Steinfeld manages to bring the outwardly gutsy, bluntness of the character to the screen in tandem with her naivety and concealed sensitivity, a performance made all the more impressive considering she is acting alongside the likes of Damon and Bridges. That Best Supporting Actress Oscar nod is so well deserved, albeit a nomination that rather understates her role in True Grit, as she is arguably the central character – reflected in her BAFTA nomination for Best Actress. It is as much her film as it is Bridges’.

Aside from the top notch cast – bolstered by a subtle turn by Josh Brolin as the bad guy – the reason why the film really works is weirdly because it is one of the least Coen-y Coen Brother’s film. It has less of the cooky twists that seem to delight and irritate in equal measure, and is much less violent than a lot of their previous work (thus making it still pretty violent).  All in all it’s a carefully, understated film that is made all the stronger by its simple plot, letting strong character performances carry the compelling tale of revenge and justice.

*Coincidentally, a rather good name for a band.

Degree- First.

The best Western movie in years, and even ifgunslingers and horse

chases aren’t your thing– the strong performances are worth the price of admission alone.

The film to give The King’s Speech a run for its money when the

Oscars come round at the end of the month.

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)

Hereafter

By guest writer Will Tooke

Imagine yourself a film investor and one day, you are brought a new project, a script called ‘Hereafter’. It’s written by Peter Morgan, who wrote The Queen, Frost / Nixon and The Damned United, all of which are great films. Clint Eastwood is slated to direct, Matt Damon will star, and Steven Spielberg will produce. It’s a no brainer, right? It ticks every box. Sounds like a sure fire contender come awards season, right? You’d be stupid not to part with money to get this baby off the ground. So you sign the cheque on the dotted line, and contribute to the $50 million dollar budget.

Fast forward a year or so. You see the final cut of the film, and realise you’ve just made a massive mistake. It’s one of those films where you’re sat waiting for it to get good – but it just never does. If anything it gets worse. A lot worse.

Matt Damon plays George. In a particularly limp bit of exposition, we learn that an operation on his brainbox when he was a kiddywink left him psychic. So now whenever he touches people, he gets flashes of their dead loved ones, and can talk with them for a bit, before they bugger off into the mysterious ‘hereafter’.  Problem is, it means that he can’t ever get close to women, because inevitably that involves touching people. From this, I deduce that George is probably a virgin, because sex involves, you know, touching people. I mean imagine having to have a conversation with someone’s dead nan just as you’re getting it on with them. Nightmare. Of course, we feel sorry for George. He’s a nice guy. Whereas other mediums and psychics are charlatan snake oil merchants, George is the real deal. He doesn’t do it for the money. In fact, he doesn’t do it at all because as he will tell us at least twice in the script IT’S NOT A GIFT, IT’S A CURSE! In the meantime, his insensitive brother tries to persuade him to get rich using his talents. Poor bloke. Basically, George is an alright guy, but he’s really, really boring.  Will he be able to come to terms with his ability (did I mention that IT’S NOT A GIFT, IT’S A CURSE!?), and will he find love? Spoiler Alert: Yes, yes he will.

Meanwhile, half a world away in Paris, a generically plucky female journalist, Marie Lelay (Cécile De France) is investigating ‘the other side’. She does this because during the 2004 tsunami, she had a near death experience, glimpsing the great hereafter. Which looks shadowy and blurry and a bit crap, mainly because Eastwood splurged away most of the special effects budget recreating a Thai market getting swept away in a swirling torrent of bamboo and bodies. It’s the only bit of the film that made me sit up, and it was over in the first ten minutes. And even then, the CGI wasn’t all that great.

The third strand brings Marcus(played by twin brothers Frankie and George McLaren) a troubled cockerrnee waif of a lad whose twin brother Jason gets splatted by a white van man whilst running away from some hoodied youths. He later gets placed into care as his single mum is on heroin. Because this kid is basically the poster boy for Broken Britain, I was kind of surprised some knife crime wasn’t casually thrown into his story for good measure. In for a penny, in for a pound. Marcus misses his brother, and longs for a way to contact him. He tries psychics, but they are the bad kind of psychics who aren’t real psychics at all. Why, if only he could find a real psychic. Can you see what’s coming? Of course you bloody can, because the storyline has no subtlety whatsoever. It doesn’t so much signpost what’s to follow, as it does rip the signpost out of the narrative roadside and smack you round the head with it.

After Jason’s ghost saves his twin from the 7/7 tube bombings (no, really), the various plot strands sluggishly converge at a London book fair (no, really) where Lelay is promoting her new book about the other side, where George is attending a reading of his favourite author – Charles Dickens – and where Marcus’s well-meaning foster parents bring him for a reason that’s too earth shatteringly hackneyed to mention here. Come the end, you just won’t care anymore.

Damon manages to soldier on throughout, giving a solid performance as George – against the odds, given the script – but even if you’re a diehard fan of his, you might as well save some money and wait a few weeks to see him in True Grit, which is an exponentially better film. Eastwood, who has done great things as a director – particularly with Flags of our Fathers and Invictus, really drops the ball with Hereafter. We can only hope he gets it back together for next year’s promising sounding Dustin Lance Black penned J.Edgar Hoover biopic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio.

Black, like Morgan, is historically a great screenwriter, but if anything is to be learnt from Hereafter, it’s that films are won and lost largely on how good or bad the script is.  In the case of Hereafter, it never rises above being stunningly bad. The fleeting mention of a religious conspiracy somehow quashing scientific research into the hereafter is at least an interesting idea, but it never gets developed. But then that’s hardly a surprise seeing how the film never offers anything approaching answers to any of the questions it sets up. Where exactly are the people that George glimpses in the hereafter? Is it heaven? Is there a heaven? No answers are forthcoming, because all that’s like, well mysterious and stuff, yeah? The ‘mystery’ allows Peter Morgan to lazily scramble out the corner he wrote himself into. Perhaps the film makers kidded themselves into believing they are prompting the audience to think about the profound questions of death and the afterlife, but the only real question this film begs is how the hell did it get made in the first place?

 

I don’t think we’ll ever know.

Degree-Fail.

The first truly bad film of 2011, all the more inexcusable given the talent behind it.

With tedious dialogue and a poor storyline, this will surely be remembered as an embarrassing

career blip for all involved. Melodrama of the worst order.

You have been warned.

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)

Burke and Hare

reviewed by guest lecturer Will Tooke

When I was about 13, I went on a school trip to London. We did the usual sights –the Science Museum and a West End show, the then new Millennium Wheel (wow I feel old).  But I remember none of those things. What really stuck with me was the London Dungeon’s realistic recreation of the Jack the Ripper murders.  It was, I suppose, pretty unsuitable for kids: latex prostitutes scattered over the plaster cobbles of fake Whitechapel, rubber intestines strewn from gaping red abdominal cavities.  And the thing is, I wasn’t actually scared by all the gore. I wasn’t a squeamish kid, and I love a good gore fest if it’s done well. (Check out Peter Jackson’s riotous 1993 zom-com  Braindead) If not disgust, then what? It just all felt uncomfortably distasteful, even though the scenes before me then recreated events that occurred over a century previously.

I was worried then that Burke and Hare would be similarly opportunistic, it’s a pretty gory story about two evil men who line their pockets by killing the unsuspecting inhabitants of 1820s Edinburgh, to sell off their corpses to unscrupulous medical schools, where they were dissected for medical students and the curious public alike.  It would be all too easy for a film to be a modern version of such a grim spectacle, peddling the punters lopped up stiffs for lowbrow entertainment.

I realize already having dismissed the London Dungeon as distasteful, applauding Burke and Hare’s humour may seem like I’m having my cake and eating it. But if done seriously, such a film would be just nasty.  American TV movies seem to love making blandly serious biopics about more recent serial murderers, and why anyone would want to sit through them? What makes Burke and Hare palatable is the streak of black humour that runs thicker than blood throughout, owing more perhaps to Monty Python than to reality. It’s a pretty difficult line to walk, and make no mistake that in this film bones break, arteries squirt, and organs splatter, but somehow it gets away with it.

Firstly, it’s directed by American John Landis, who helmed such greats as An American Werewolf in London and The Blues Brothers, as well as the video to Michael Jackson’s Thriller, and his understanding of horror and comedy show are clearly visible.  Piers Ashworth and Nick Moorcroft’s script has some great dialogue and although they rightly take liberties with what actually happened (because you should never let the truth get in the way of a good story), a lot of the plot remains fairly true to reality. It may not be so authentic in terms of story, but in terms of set the film impresses in its recreation of the slums of the pre-industrial 19^th century Scotland, realized in shades of grimey gray and excrement brown, inhabited by dour, whiskery faces with dirty teeth. You know, a lot like Scotland today.

Also to the film’s strength is the excellent cast. The end credits are very much a who’s who of great British character actors: Christopher Lee, David Schofield, Tom Wilkinson, Jenny Agutter, Hugh Bonneville, Tim Curry (Dr Frank-N-Furter himself, lest we forget) and an almost unrecognisable Bill Bailey are all present, but the real stars of the show are undoubtedly Andy Serkis and Simon Pegg in their roles as the eponymous body snatchers. Serkis, whose ability as a great physical performer is indisputable after he brought Gollum to life in the Lord of the Rings trilogy, excels as the darker, more Machiavellian Hare, and Simon Pegg nicely contrast this with his weaker willed, more naïve Burke who lets greed get the better of him.  Whereas in my last review of RED I complained that jam packing the cast full of stars was distracting and felt simply like a way to generate buzz about a not very good film, here you get the impression that they actually wanted to do the movie because its clear that they all had a lot of fun making it. Landis even finds the time to fulfil the wishes of millions by bumping off snobby film director Michael Winner, more recently known for those awful ‘calm down dear’ insurance ads. It’s just a shame they couldn’t have found time to jab a stiletto into the ample gut of the Go Compare opera singer…  Amongst the supporting cast, the diminutive Ronnie Corbett stands out, very nearly stealing the show as Captain McLintock, the bumbling leader of the Edinburgh militia who nevertheless manages to capture Burke and Hare, evoking Shakespeare’s slapstick guardsmen Dogsberry and Verges from Much Ado About Nothing.

Shakespeare is actually an appropriate cultural comparison to make- the crushing inevitability of a less than happy ending, and the ambition for money and power corrupting conscience that both occur in Burke and Hare are equally present in much of Shakespeare’s best work – so too of course, was a sense of humour and a healthy smattering of blood of guts. If you ever struggled imagining what that famous description of Macbeth’s battlefield victim being ‘unseamed from the nave to the chops’ would actually look like, then rest assured that Burke and Hare will leave you in know doubt.

Macbeth, funnily enough, is also where the film itself becomes a little undone – a subplot about Burke deciding to finance an all female production of the Scottish Play just to get into the lacy knickers of aspiring actress Ginny (Isla Fisher) drags a little, and just isn’t as funny as it could have been. Small qualms aside, Burke and Hare is genuinely entertaining, and at 91 minutes doesn’t overstay its welcome, somehow managing to be a bright and breezy romp about, uh, period serial killers.  Perhaps then Fred and Rose West: The Musical could work, just not for another few hundred years.

2.1 – Not at all like what some reviews would have you believe,

Burke and Hare is a delicious slice of macabre comedy that definitely won’t

be to everyone’s taste, but has a lot to like. Bloody good fun.

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)

R.E.D

reviewed by guest lecturer Will Tooke

Another month brings out another comic book adaption. The playful, immersive odyssey of Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World and the subversive, ultra violent thrill ride of Kick-Ass are still fresh in my mind, I went to see RED with high hopes – after all, with an incredible cast of Bruce Willis, Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich and your Grans favourite, Helen Mirren, what could possibly go wrong? Err, well, quite a lot actually.

Based on the DC comic written by Warren Ellis and the unfortunately named Cully Hamner, this movie version of RED is similar in name only. A cursory Google (I hadn’t heard of RED before either…) revealed that the scriptwriters had changed quite a bit. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a purist – one of the greatest things about good movie adaptation of novels or books is how the screenwriter handles the source material. Think of 2001s About A Boy based on Nick Hornby’s novel. Gone – thank God – is the heavy handed, zeitgeisty sub-plot to do with Kurt Kobain’s death, a reason why it stands as an example where the film is better than the book. Of course, film adaptations don’t always work out for the best – 2009s Watchmen suffered terribly from an overlong script, and the fact that for some reason it never quite managed to live up to the spirit of the dystopian epic that is Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986 graphic novel. Yes, screenwriting – particularly adapting works – is a difficult game indeed, one that demands subtlety in approach if not content.

The fact then that screenwriters Jon and Erich Hoeber take great big blundering axe chops to the original is a bad sign. Bruce Willis’ character, ex-CIA agent Frank Moses, survives from the original lineup. The rest are all new additions. Whereas the comic is apparently a darker, straighter story of murky political intrigue and shady secret service dealings, on celluloid RED is a much lighter, family friendly affair. It is, after all a 12 A, and I can’t help wonder if somewhere in the ether floats a grittier, original script, more faithful to the original, before the studio talked it down from an 18 or a 15 to a 12 certificate. It’s a real shame actually, because the core idea is a good one – old spooks come out of retirement to kick some butt after someone or other tries to have them killed. The cheap and easy way to make this family friendly of course is to a) have curiously bloodless fight scenes and b) add some humour.

Oh sweet Jesus, the humour.

In a big loud dumb action movies, there is nothing wrong with a few jokes. Brucie’s own Die Hard quadrilogy is the stronger for them, and cheesy jokes and lazy innuendo pretty much substituted plot for much of Roger Moore’s stint as Bond. But in RED, the cheesy jokes are ladled on like fondue. And it just gets incredibly annoying, right up to a silly pre-credits scene that sees Brucie wheeling John Malkovich through a Moldovan minefield in a wheelbarrow, whilst the latter clutches a nuclear bomb. Typing that out, it sounds pretty funny, like something out of under rated Cold War farce Top Secret! (Seriously, you must see it before you die), but after a few hours of cutesy posturing, my sense of humour failure was borderline terminal.

And even if the awful jokes had been exorcised from RED, I’m not so sure it’d have worked, either. The plot has more flabby twists than Ann Widdecombe’s routines on Strictly Come Dancing: to the extent that it’s unforgivably hard to follow, which is why I haven’t mentioned what happens so much. ‘So wait, now that guy isn’t a baddie?’ one little boy sat near me in the cinema said out loud, to no one in particular. His guess is as good as mine, frankly.  The story circles around something about the covering up of something bad that the now Vice President of the United States (perhaps?) did in Guatemala in 1981 whilst he was in the army. Now bearing in mind said V.P is played by Nip Tuck’s Julian McMahon, this is particularly hard to swallow seeing as McMahon would have been 13 in 1981. Yup, that particular plot hole bugged me so much, I looked up an actor’s actual birthday, just to give me something else to complain about.

I suppose I should provide a bit of a balance by saying that parts of the film are OK – the sight of Helen Mirren firing a huge machine is funny for a bit, and the whole thing is filmed well, each shot framed like a comic book pane. Bruce Willis does his trusty trademark ‘McClane smirk’ – the same facial expression since the good old days of Die Hard, back when Brucey had hair. The same smirk Brucey has done in pretty much every film he’s been in since 1986. If Bella Lugosi was cinema’s Man of a Thousand Faces, then Willis has become cinema’s Man of Just One Smirk. I’m being harsh on Brucey, he does the hand-to-hand combat fights very well, and as a protagonist he’s hard not to like. It’s just I can’t remember the last time he was truly stretched in a role. Perhaps in The Sixth Sense? Which was also the last time M. Night Shyamalan made a decent film. And that was a long, long time ago. In any case, the few good points don’t make up for the whole – in the same way that the excellent German motorway system doesn’t excuse the regime that created them.

I suppose the biggest crime is that this is perhaps the greatest example of recent cinema of a truly brilliant cast who are truly wasted. In the opening credits, there is literally not one actors name that popped up that I didn’t recognize and who isn’t good. Alongside the main four stars are Brian Cox, Karl Urban – two veterans of the Bourne Trilogy, as well as James Remar from TVs Dexter, Mary-Louise Parker from Weeds, Richard Dreyfuss, and the 93 year old Ernest Borgnine. I can only presume they were very well paid or just don’t care anymore.

Degree-2.2 If you like your films with lots bullets that pass in slow motion making a

WOOOSH noise, explosions that seemingly compete with plot holes

to see which one can be the biggest, then you’ll love this.  Otherwise you should probably

just stay away.

It narrowly escaped a third solely because Helen Mirren fires a big loud machine gun.

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)

 

Life As We Know It

reviewed by guest lecturer Will Tooke

Full disclosure: this is not the sort of film I’d normally go and see. A cursory YouTube of the trailer (see below) confirmed my worst fears. The blonde chick from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ and that army dude from ‘Transformers’ inherit a one-year-old girl – the way you do – with amusing but ultimately touching results. My inbuilt rom-com alarm was flashing red, anticipating the need for a post-cinema insulin shot, given how sickly sweet the damn thing looked.

And so off I traipsed into the cinema, pen sharpened; ready to be profoundly irritated by gags about babies pooing and weeing and vomiting, a bodily-function-backdrop for the main characters to learn something new about each other and maybe themselves. Ugh. As predicted, director Greg Berlanti gets a lot of mileage out of nappies being changed, to the extent that you could well suspect some sort of underhand product placement deal with Pampers. And yet…and yet…I quite liked it.

There, I said it. My anticipated bile towards this new rom-com was perhaps due to the fact the last one I sat through was ‘Did You Hear About The Morgans?’, in which Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker charmlessly play two divorcees who have go on the run from the mob and learn to love each other again. To pass the time, I secretly wished that the mobster would get a move on and just shoot the pair in the head already; I imagine the scene with Sarah Jessica Parker would look like a horse getting put down. But I digress.

Yes, I quite liked ‘Life As We Know It’. After all, aforementioned blonde chick from ‘Grey’s Anatomy’ is Katherine Heigl, who proved her comedic credentials in 2008s ‘Knocked Up’, a film which holds the dual distinction of being hilarious and horrifying in equal measure (the latter mainly due to the fact I now know what ‘crowning’ is. Those who remain blissfully unaware: beware the urge to Google). Here, Heigl plays Holly, a thirty something who is impossible not to like. Similarly, whilst I view ‘Transformers’ with the level of hatred usually reserved only for the very worst war criminals, at least this film gives male lead Josh Duhamel the chance to act in his role as Eric, which must be nice for him, since running from and/or shooting at big space robots doesn’t really allow much range.

Absolutely, its by the numbers in terms of it’s rom-comminess, and the will-they won’t-they dynamic in the relationship never really works because the genre means you can see the ending coming about 5 minutes into the film. Set in the pleasant suburbs of Atlanta, the film begins with the two leads hating each other and 100 minutes later ends with that emotional dash to the airport – an ending, incidentally, I swear they used at least three times in Friends. Actually, in hindsight, the film is packed full of clichés. Holly is kind and runs her own cake shop, because, ya know, she’s a women, and women cook and have feelings and stuff. By contrast, Eric irritatingly insists that people call him by his surname, sleeps with a lot of women, and is a bit insensitive because, like, he’s a bloke. And just incase you weren’t one hundred and ten percent sure he’s a manly man, he even works for TV sports channel. Being a jock is literally his living. The only way the character could’ve been made anymore more masculine is if he had done push ups with his penis.

Naturally, a comedy fat neighbour – a slave driver to her own, poor husband – can’t resist having a jolly good perv on our Eric, but then neither can the Token Gay Couple™ (who live in socially conservative Georgia? Poor bastards…). Half way through the film, up crops a hunky doctor with a sexy southern accent, purely to add a dash of love triangle dynamic to the whole affair. Poor bugger, the audience know as soon as he appears that he is, of course, just a plot device; a dishy decoy and nothing more.

Speaking of plot, you could accuse me of giving away far too many spoilers, but then that is sort of the point of rom-coms, you know exactly what your getting before your bum even hits the seat on that second date. Be honest, if you knew nothing about this film other than its genre, you’d have a pretty decent stab at guessing the rough storyline. And once you understand and accept that this light, cliché ridden romp is basically all that rom-coms ever are, all that they ever can be, then its hard not to like Life As We Know It. But despite the film being so generic, strangely enough, the reason why this film isn’t as irritating as it should be – and why other critics haven’t been so kind to it – is because tonally it’s all over the place. But that’s actually to its strength, that it resists being quite so totally clichéd. So whilst there is the familiar rom-com fodder mentioned above, there is also a pretty subversive streak of humour running throughout – jokes about paedophile paediatricians, child killers and dropping babies provide a welcome piquancy to what would have otherwise been a singularly sweet cinematic offering.

After all is said and done, Life As We Know It is never going to win any Oscars. You know it, and I know it. But dear reader, crucially, the film knows that too. After all’s said and done, Life As We Know It is a pretty amiable way to spend a couple of hours, will raise a few genuine, unexpected laughs and doesn’t feature Sarah Jessica Parker. And what more than that, dear reader, could you want of a rom-com?

Degree: 2:1

As a rom com it’s a good film….not liking it for it’s cliches would be like not liking a bond film

because of the guns and girls; it’s part of the deal.

It’s well made, and raises some good laughs. I was as surprised as you are!

(If you are confused about the rating system please click on the ‘About This Blog Page’ which will explain it all)