Films Are Short - GET A NEW BLADDER
Things I have never really understood.
a) Pies at football
b) People going to the toilet during a movie
Both of these are predicated on the same issue really. Football matches take less than two hours. They take place, usually, in the afternoon - cannily timed between usual meal times. And yet at half time there are queues for the pie stall you cannot believe. You would think they were knocking out tubs of Ambrosia (foor of gods not rice pudding) for the stampede for a piss poor Pukka. Can’t you wait or do you have to graze at every opportunity?*
Ditto, films are usually about two hours long. I was taught, post potty training, how to hold it in for at least that long. Perhaps you had a few beers beforehand, perhaps you are drinking a VAT of coke. Perhaps this will add strain but you only have yourself to blame. Nevertheless for NAMBY PAMBIES with peanut sized bladders there is now a useful i-Phone App. Introducing RunPee: an application that tells you the best time in a film to have a wee. HAS IT COME TO THIS? more »
Pete Baran • FT/ Film/ TMFD • 5 Comments
Drag Me To Hell has been hailed as a return to horror for Sam Raimi, a break from the relentlessness of the Spider-Man films (thankfully post the annoying SM3). A chance for Raimi to go back to his roots and entertain without being slavishly devotional to comics or special effects. And it is terrific fun. But its still runs like a comics adaptation, albeit an adaptation of some for ur-horror comic of the fifties. Drag Me To Hell is a EC Comic brought to life.
This summers hit comedy, The Hangover, is one big lie. Firstly, as hit comedies go, its not all that funny. For a shaggy dog stringing along of vaguely absurd scenarios it has a paucity of imagination about how absurd it can get. Whilst pitching as the height of madness the kidnapping of a tiger is pleasantly odd, having a shotgun wedding in Vegas is screenwriter 101. But for all of that it has a pleasing structure, which masks the loathsomeness of its protagonists which also provides needed momentum for the flick. But its odd when in a big comedy you exit with admiration for its structure over its actual gags.
As one of the few people who can speak confidently on higher mathematics AND popular trashy cinema, my heart always sinks whenever the lead in an action film is a maths academic. Its not that the ranks of professors and dons are not by nature action heroes, David Hilbert was a well known athletic rock climber and mountaineer after all. But the crossover between mathematics and action films is always so banal. Jeff Goldblum has essayed a number action mathmos, knocking out the aliens in Independence Day with a computer virus and working out the probability of things going wrong on Jurassic Park was VERY HIGH. Neither was a proper use of mathematics, neither swelled the ranks of undergraduate mathematics course.
It is unclear who the lead character is in Terminator Salvation. Is it Christian Bale’s grumpy John Connor, older, but less wise than when he was a kid in Terminator 2? Or is it death row inmate, and outpatient, Marcus who equally scowls his way through this post apocalyptic nightmare of a film (the film is the nightmare)? Or is it Skynet, aka Helena Bonham Carter who has one hairbrained scheme after enough to kill John Connor resembles the planning work of a Dick Dastardly (with Arnie as his Muttley)? Or is the real star the missing colon in the title? Terminator: Salvation, makes sense as a title, while Terminator Salvation would only make sense if it is the terminators who are gaining the salvation here. You would need to do some significant plot shifting to consider that to be the case with the end of this film where it appears no-one really gets any salvation at all. Lots of humans die, lots of Skynet is destroyed. War continues, nothing much happens and post-apocalyptic humankind is able to do complex heart surgery with no sterile operating theatres and not much in the way of training (their head doctor is a vet). It is a mess with massive plot holes and only just a couple of OK action sequences. And yet the thing that concerns me the most is not the slow death of an OK franchise, but rather a missing colon. That colon bugs me.
Anything For Her (- which seems a touch stronger than the French title Pour Elle) is an okay little prison break thriller. It does however share a with another French film of the last year a lack of ambition when it comes to its central theme. In I’ve Loved You So Long Kristen Scott Thomas gets out of prison for murdering her own child. The film whips along at an uncomfortable tick until, near the end, the film decides to explain the crime to the viewer. It makes the lead character more sympathetic, at the expense of the more interesting ambiguity about the rehabilitation of a long term prisoner. 
“If you don’t know what a prime number is, you should leave now” - it says at the start of Fermat’s Room, Spanish maths-me-up-thriller. Which is true, as prime numbers are the most complex idea you need to know to understand any of Fermat’s Room - the other ideas being pretty kindergarten level. I guess realising that being a mathematician is no bar to being batshit, and coming up with ridiculous murder plans. Or at least stealing a plot from Agatha Christie’s “Ten Little {insert offensive epithet here}”. Indeed the maths is a bit of a let down. The plot is simple. Four people in a room, they have to solve maths puzzles sent to them by PDA within a minute or else the walls start moving in to crush them. Nevermind the engineering involved to do this seems to completely forget that if you push four walls at the same time, the walls will break, it also forgets that mathematicians are actually supposed to be good at maths.
It is said that everyone has a book in them. BOOK, get with the times GRANDAD - everyone has got a film in them right*? What this misses out however is that these books, or films, may not actually be good ones. Take, for example and because it is the film I am actually talking about here, Bob Kearns. Bob Kearns invented the intermittent windscreen wiper. A small college science teacher and small time inventor he cracked the HOLY GRAIL of the car companies. Or so the film Flash Of Genius tells us, the invention of said windscreen wiper is up there with the invention of flight, or that act of petty larceny Prometheus committed.
There is something about super-bloated big budget action comedies which attract me like a Big Brother fan to a copy of Heat. I know I won’t like them, but I sort of kinda have to see them. So Night At The Museum 2 (aka Night At The Museum : Battle Of The Smithsonian) was always going to get my custom, if just to see if the Ben Stiller mugathon will be as inventive as either the original or the average peasant in the dark ages. It just about passes that muster to be fitfully more entertaining than the original without being in any way memorable like its predecessor. Which is possibly just as well because it spends its first ten minutes dispatching much of the previous film.
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