Sam Fuller, Maggie's Plan, and Buster Keaton on the skids - Reviews #235

And nothing else.



The Big Red One: The Reconstruction (Samuel Fuller 1980/2004)

What doesn't this war movie have?

- Big speeches
- Monologues about 'back home'
- Emotional death scenes
- Acts of heroism
- Anyone with special skills besides a few words of German or Italian

Sam Fuller's masterpiece, released in butchered form in 1980 then 'reconstructed' 24 years later according to his original shooting script, is a war movie like no other: the episodic, wryly fatalistic story of four dogfaces, dubbed 'the four horsemen of the apocalypse' who fight the battles that the writer-director had in World War Two: in North Africa, France, Belgium, Germany and Czechslovakia, under the wing of a taciturn, decent and unsentimental sergeant (Lee Marvin, himself a veteran of the conflict). Fuller himself is immortalised as 'Zab' (played by Robert Carradine), a cigar-chomping wannabe writer with a smart mouth, though his daughter Samantha says she could see him in all four of the horsemen, including the initially cowardly Griff, the most notable non-Luke part that Mark Hamill played during the first Star Wars run.

The Big Red One, named after the 1st Infantry Division of the American army, is a series of brilliant suspense sequences, alternated with poetic, poignant vignettes bearing the mark of memory, that seems to reach an essential truth about war that almost no other film has managed: it's just about survival. There are a couple of incidental flaws − foreigners talking English to one another with foreign accents (a now outdated device) as well as a scene in a castle near the close, which I just don't see the point of − but I found the experience completely and utterly overwhelming, in turn bloody, brutal and enrapturingly beautiful, with moments of tabloid ghoulishness and yet passages of almost Bresson-like humanism. It places you in the centre of battle like nothing else, but has no interest in glorifying its country, characters or the conflict in which they find themselves. It's simply the best war movie I've ever seen. (4)

***



CINEMA: Maggie's Plan (Rebecca Miller, 2015) - The only previous film I've seen from Rebecca Miller was Personal Velocity: Three Portraits, an extremely earnest slice of arthouse feminism that didn't quite come off. This film could hardly be more different: light, funny and accessible, a bit like a Lubitsch movie (it's thematically similar to both Angel and his classic, still contemporary comedy, That Uncertain Feeling) transplanted to the literate middle-class world of Woody Allen and Noah Baumbach.

The story concerns Maggie (Greta Gerwig), who works in arts marketing, sidelines as a complete control freak, and falls in love with a self-obsessed anthropologist and wannabe novelist (Ethan Hawke), bringing her into conflict with his terrifying wife (Julianne Moore). It's an odd combination of competing and probably contradictory ideas, but what it does really well initially is treating these characters as real, really flawed people, and allowing that − rather than Hollywood convention − to determine what happens next.

It also takes them seriously: Hawke nicely plays on his established persona as a sensitive intellectual, Moore seems too broad at first, playing Danish and with a soft 'r', but it's actually a really rounded performance, merely with a couple of quirks, while Gerwig is just magnificent. Again. She reminds me a bit of Jean Arthur, one of my favourite actresses, in that she has a screwball sensibility but roots it in the real. There's a vulnerability, an appealing hesitancy and a melancholia in her heroines, always just beneath the surface, that brings pathos to her comedy. But also her timing is impeccable. Over the past five years, the roles she's been given have mostly been within certain clearly-defined parameters (even stylistically: their outfits are broadly identical), but she never repeats herself: you could put her characters from Frances Ha, Mistress America, >Damsels in Distress, While We're Young (a rare misfire) and Maggie's Plan on screen together, and pick out each one in an instant. Finally, there's one of the best kids' performances I've seen in an age: so natural and unaffected that they must have simply left little Ida Rohatyn to it.

My problem with this movie, though, is highlighted by the ending. I really enjoyed watching Maggie's Plan: it made me laugh, and feel, and even think a little, despite a little flabbiness in the script and the occasional bum note, but the pay-off is just too conventional and convenient; so much so, that it feels like an affront to the rest of the movie. Then I realised that actually that didn't come out of the blue, I just hadn't picked up on the film's thematic failings because I was having too much fun, and because its narrative keeps you guessing through a succession of little twists. While it's dressed in the clothes of contemporary feminism, with a couple of strong female characters and a general disgust at the idea of Gerwig having to support her husband as the breadwinner, its message (if there is one) is actually pretty muddled, while it's very happy to employ worn old rom-com scenarios, including the snowed-in-lovers fallback used in innumerable '30s and '40s romances (especially comedies), from And So They Were Married and Sun Valley Serenade to My Reputation and the Garbo career apocalypse that was Two-Faced Woman, even if it does them very well.

What I love about Frances Ha isn't just its sumptuous monochrome photography and off-kilter humour, it's that it's about something: a relatable portrait of late 20s aimlessness. I'm not really sure what Maggie's Plan is about, beyond its immediate story, and when you think it's about to go somewhere exciting and novel in its final reel, it serves up a piece of wish-fulfilment that really disappointed me. So I'm in an odd position: as a film this is vastly superior to Personal Velocity, which often bored the pants off me as well as leaning on stylistic clichés like freeze-frames, but yet it doesn't feel an authentic statement of any kind, just a highly entertaining, extremely well-acted film that'll keep you laughing and interested for close to two hours. That's plenty, it's often what I feel like, but next to Gerwig's big artistic statements, and from a writer like Miller, I expected something different, and possibly something more. (3)

***

Buster Keaton shorts:



Keaton's heyday was the 1920s, an astonishing period of creativity largely unmatched in the annals of American film, with every single movie he made extraordinary in one way or another. He made the biggest mistake of his year in 1928, signing with MGM, who robbed him off his autonomy, stunted his creativity and then kicked him out the door in '34, by which time he'd become a hopeless alcoholic. Attempting to get back his mojo, he made 16 films at a so-called Poverty Row studio (a film factory with miniscule budgets), Educational Pictures. They're an incredibly mixed mag: some of them are utterly and irredeemably dreadful - embarrassing, depressing dirge bereft of imagination - but there's one genuine classic, Grand Slam Opera, which I reviewed here, and a handful of the others are really good fun. The problem is that it's almost impossible to guess which film will fit into which bracket, so I watched the lot. The final 10 are here:



The E-Flat Man (Charles Lamont, 1935) - This gentle spoof of Frank Capra's massively successful It Happened One Night - which sees Buster eloping incompetently with regular co-star Dorothea Kent - might not have cheered me before I started my Educational expedition, but viewed alongside some of the most upsetting comedy shorts I've ever seen, it's a welcome interpolation. The film starts badly but picks up, with a few strong gags and stunts that hark back to his silent classics Cops (that horizontal escape from the frame), Neighbours (as he's lifted onto a rooftop), The Scarecrow (a famous bit directly lifted from the 1920 movie) and The General (as he sits on the outside of a train before it unexpectedly sets off). Buster's persona in these shorts isn't very attractive: he's clumsy, finickity and frightened, light years from the energetic, era-defining young man who streaked like a comet across the sky of twenties cinema, and is now saggy, glum and more interested in slightly re-arranging items he's dislodged, like a proto-Hulot. He's also offered no thought into how you translate silent comedy to the sound era: so there's merely action without dialogue or the rhythmic, mood-enhancing narration of a score. In that damaging, alienating context, at least here there are some proper jokes, delivered with a hint of the elan that made him a superstar. (2)

The Timid Young Man (Mack Sennett, 1935) - Dire Keaton short incorporating the talents of washed-up Keystone Kops director Mack Sennett and former Laurel and Hardy heavy Tiny Sandford to absolutely no effect. Buster is Milton, the timid young man of the title, who flees a prospective wedding to bad-tempered Kitty McHugh (sister of then ubiquitous character actors Frank and Matt), picks up man-hating hitchhiker Lona Andre and gets into a spat with hulking bully boy Sandford, after inexplicably ramming his car off a cliff. Andre is appealing, the final shot is great and there are a couple of halfway-decent ideas somewhere in there, but they're drowned out by atrocious writing, painful running jokes and a succession of large continuity errors. (1)

Three on a Limb (Charles Lamont, 1936) - Buster romances a woman with two tough boyfriends in this weak short. A couple of the gags are funny - particularly the hero volunteering to a traffic cop that he also went through a red light - and womanising hard nut Grant Withers (later Ike Clanton in Ford's My Darling Clementine) gives the film a shot in the arm when he arrives, leading to an agreeably frenetic if rather botched ending, but most of it's just incredibly obvious and uninspired, the star's reunion with his nemesis from College and The Cameraman, Harold Goodwin, another pale shadow of past glories. (1.5)

Tars and Stripes (Charles Lamont, 1935) - Keaton's "in the Navy now" short is incredibly embarrassing and completely demoralising: painfully unfunny garbage with barely an ounce of ingenuity (and what there is restricted to the final two minutes). He's a hapless sailor perpetually in trouble with a superior (Vernon Dent) who keeps falling in the sea. Seeing Buster playing with a cannon calls to mind his Civil War masterpiece - The General - made eight years (and an entire lifetime) earlier, which serves only to make it even more upsetting. It looks like the studio, Educational, was so excited about the chance to film at a naval base that they rushed in without actually coming up with any material. The results are horrid. (1)



Blue Blazes (Raymond Kane, 1936) - Keaton's follow-up to Grand Slam Opera is a funny short with the star as a fireman, following that successful old formula in which he goes from patronised zero to celebrated hero. This one starts inauspiciously but the second half is great value, with three huge laughs. Buster's makeshift fire engine is such a great gag. (2.5)

The Chemist (Al Christie, 1936) - Another one that starts slowly but is really motoring by the end. Here he's a scientist working on various revolutionary powders, which make creatures multiply in size, women fall in love or things go bang. When he's illustrating these during a laughless sequence in the first reel, all you can think is: at this time, Chaplin was working on Modern Times. But by 1936 Keaton had got over his drink problem and got his confidence back, and from the time he's abducted by gangster Donald McBride (later a ubiquitous character comic, who looks a lot like Butch from Tom and Jerry) the good gags come thick and fast, leading to an un-PC closer that I really didn't see coming. (2.5)

Mixed Magic (Raymond Kane, 1936) - A good idea that really doesn't work, with Keaton as a hapless assistant to a tyrannical magician. There's barely a snicker, though you learn how a few magic tricks work and the star's Arabian outfit is cool. (1.5)



Jail Bait (Charles Lamont, 1937) - A fun little film, with Buster framing himself for murder, so his best mate can investigate the real crime. Again, the establishing of the plot is tedious, but the sequence in which he's trying to get arrested by a disinterested cop is genuinely hilarious, and there are some great ideas in here, including an outfit that's half convict-half guard, so his character can survive a prison break (Buster re-used the joke as a gag-writer on A Southern Yankee, a remake of The General starring the abominable Red Skelton), as well as a basic premise essentially reworked in the Fritz Lang thriller, Beyond a Reasonable Doubt. The sign in the window of the jeweller's, incidentally, is a lift from Keaton's early silent classic, The Goat. (2.5)

Ditto (Charles Lamont, 1937) - An incredibly tired farce, with unfortunate echoes of Keaton's gobsmacking technical achievement, The Play House, which also concerned itself with twins − while taking the premise rather further! The opening gag is poignant, the rest is just shit. (1)

Love Nest on Wheels (Charles Lamont, 1937) - The last of Buster's 16 films at Educational is a lousy, predictable short that lifts most of its better moments from The Bell Boy, which he'd made with Fatty Arbuckle, 19 years earlier. It's fun to see his family acting alongside him, especially his mum Myra chewing on a corn pipe, but the material is very weak. (1.5)

Here's the overall ranking for the series (with links to the other six reviews):



Grand Slam Opera (3.5)
Hayseed Romance (3)
Jail Bait (2.5)
The Gold Ghost
Blue Blazes
One Run Elmer
The Chemist
The E-Flat Man (2)
Allez-Oop
Three on a Limb (1.5)
Mixed Magic
Love Nest on Wheels
The Timid Young Man (1)
Tars and Stripes
Ditto
Palooka from Paducah

My conclusion is that Buster simply hadn't devised a coherent way of translating the essence of his silent successes to the sound era. Even when his imagination is firing and there are brief passages of brilliance, you know that his vision will be thwarted by a lack of money or a lack of clarity, that his momentum is liable to be stopped dead by a stilted, awkward dialogue scene at any moment, and that whatever rare genius was crackling through him in his heyday has now departed. After a similarly problematic period at Columbia Pictures, the star abandoned attempts to revive his solo film career and settled into character parts. Occasionally these were poignant and beautiful (as in the barely-seen San Diego, I Love You, Billy Wilder's sensational Sunset Blvd. and Chaplin's Limelight), but more often they showed a man betrayed by the studio system and his own demons, carrying on as best he could, because there was nothing else to do. There was a happy ending, though: as he went back to his stage roots, dried out and inspired anew by his third wife, he became a hit in Paris. Then the critical and popular renaissance of his 1920s work (tied to the rehabilitation of silent movies as a respected artform, rather than a laughing stock) saw him lauded across the globe as a cinematic pioneer and a true original. Finally, in 1965 (a year before his death), he returned to silent film itself, travelling across Canada for the gentle, self-homaging film, The Railrodder, a fitting finale with nods to many of his early classics.



If you want to see the Educational films and make your own mind up, they're on this DVD, 'Lost Keaton'.

The movie stills are from busterkeaton.com.

***

Thanks for reading.

Buster Keaton odds 'n' ends - Reviews #109

... in which I grab a few of the Buster DVDs on the floor of my room, watch them and then write about them. Featuring a lesser early short, two cheapo efforts, a TV drama and what would have been a perfect swansong, had he not then done a few other things.

FRAGMENTS OF AN EARLY SHORT



The Frozen North (Buster Keaton and Eddie Cline, 1922) - The least of Buster's early shorts, I suppose, if only because around six minutes of the film are missing - apparently the six minutes needed to understand what on earth is going on. There are good moments (particularly the two-men-fishing bit) and some amusing spoofery - of Nanook of the North, of Erich von Stroheim and apparently of William S. Hart, though I've never seen more than snippets of his work - while the nice closing gag prefigures Sherlock, Jr., but it's hard to get a handle on the story, while Buster's brutish, selfish character is at odds with the put-upon, stoic little guy we all know and love. (2.5)

***

IT'S BEEN EDUCATIONAL...

... in which Buster pitches up at Poverty Row studio Educational Pictures, having been sacked by MGM. I've reviewed his personal favourite of his 16 films there already - Grand Slam Opera. Coming up are reviews of his first two shorts at the studio:


Phwoarr.

The Gold Ghost (Charles Lamont, 1934) – Buster pitches up in a ghost town – becoming a Ghost Buster? – where he proves himself as a man by taking on some claim jumpers. His first short at Educational is a lively Western spoof. There’s too much of him walking into things and then holding the afflicted body part, but he has fun trying out a lolloping Western walk, there’s a wonderful bit with a fantasy shoot-out and the action climax is nice, even if you’re willing him to do something truly Buster-ish. The closest we get is a neat, two-footed jump on a seesaw, to disarm a gunman. But my favourite bit is a reference to Buster's most famous stunt: a neat, tiny double-take he does when it looks for a second like the front of a building may be about to fall on top of him. (2.5)

Buster's second outing, Allez-Oop (Charles Lamont, 1934), is strangely melodramatic and a little threadbare, as his watch-repairer tries to woo customer Dorothy Sebastian – his sometime real-life girlfriend and the star of his last silent feature, Spite Marriage. There’s a super gag at the start where Sebastian’s face is distorted by an eyeglass, and the last minute is good (does anyone know if that’s Buster on the trapeze?), but what’s in between doesn’t quite cut it. When it becomes clear that Buster Keaton – yes, that Buster Keaton – is off to the circus, you expect more than him just asking the guy next to him to pass some refreshments and a cushion. And as unexpectedly nifty as the tenement climax is, it unfortunately calls to mind his 1921 short Neighbors, to which most things would pale in comparison. (2)

***

BUSTER AS BUSTER. SORT OF


One of those passable flashbacks.

TV: The Silent Partner (George Marshall, 1955) - A forgotten silent comic (Buster Keaton) has a quiet beer in a Hollywood bar, while next door at the Oscars a legendary movie producer (Joe E. Brown) dedicates a lifetime achievement award to the absent stoneface with whom he made his name. The Silent Partner is a moving, fascinating TV drama from the Screen Directors Playhouse series - made by Hal Roach Studios, a key player in pre-talkie days - with an amazing dramatic performance from Buster, interspersed with reasonable comic moments, and a cast that includes Greed grasper ZaSu Pitts, fellow silent players 'Snub' Pollard, Heinie Conklin and Spec O'Donnell, Western regular Jack Elam and regular Oscars host Bob Hope, whose sequences were shot especially. It does a slight disservice to the brilliance of silent comedians - there are none of Buster's surreal leanings, meticulous set-ups or dazzling stunts in the flashbacks, it's all ladders, pratfalls and being kicked up the arse - and he isn't portraying a genius in slap shoes, but an unwitting clown a la Marion Davies's character in Show People. (It's also worth pointing out, if this is supposed to be a thinly-veiled account of the star's own demise, that it wasn't really the talkies that put the skids on Buster's career, it was MGM and alcoholism.) But this 25-minute drama is a lovely piece of work, with fantastic framing scenes where his middling delivery contrasts with a facial expressiveness that's a thing of utter wonder and beauty. The moment where he silently, almost imperceptibly, raises a glass to his old comrade is a real choker. (3)

***

... AND A NOSTALGIC TREAT (WITH ADDED CANADA)



SHORT: The Railrodder (Gerald Potterton, 1965) - Buster's warm, funny tribute to his own silent films of the '20s was funded by the National Film Board of Canada in a bid to attract more moviemakers to the country. It's a charming little colour comedy - dialogue-free, but with cartoonish sound effects - that sees our hero zipping around the country's railroads on a little orange contraption, seeing the splendid panoramas and the shipyards, cooking lunch aboard and trying vainly to shoot geese after covering his 'train' in leaves. There are at least three big laughs - the absurd opening, in which he decides on a whim to visit Canada, jumping off a bridge and swimming there, and a couple of cleverly-timed tunnel gags - along with many amusing comic touches, and nods to The General (the premise), Sherlock, Jr. (some near-misses with vehicles and a water-tower), My Wife's Relations (the old-time camera) and The High Sign (Buster being overwhelmed by an improbably large sheet of folded paper). This is a man in touch with his own mythology, as evidenced by the glorious moment in which he fishes a porkpie hat out a bottomless compartment, pops it on his head and sits back (see above). There's little stuntwork, of course, and some of the material is a little samey, but it's a valuable and welcome nostalgic treat, with ample evidence that Buster's comic imagination was still firing, a year before his death. (3)

***

Still yearning for more?



For some reason I haven't reviewed Buster's features for the blog (aside from a bit on The Cameraman here as well as The Goat and The Boat), but there's a piece about some of his early shorts here, some things about his even earlier shorts here, and reviews of Cops, My Wife's Relations, Grand Slam Opera via those different coloured words there.

Summer round-up 2011 - Part Two - Reviews #78

Get off the beach at once and go and watch some movies.

Since you've been so good this year (at least so far), here's the rest of the summer round-up, including a strongman, a midget, four clones and a mad scientist. They're all in the same film.

Elsewhere, I heap praise on DreamWorks' latest, go all gooey over a Steve Carell comedy-drama and quickly tire of Bulldog Drummond, the world's worst detective. He makes Inspector Clouseau look like Charlie Chan.

Actually, Neil Simon made Inspector Clouseau (or at least Peter Sellers) look like Charlie Chan. In Murder by Death. Not a good film, the wonderful Eileen Brennan aside.

Ready? I was born ready, myself...



CINEMA: Kung Fu Panda 2 3D (Jennifer Yuh Nelson, 2011) - This is a beast every bit as rare as a panda that can do kung fu: a superior sequel. A mix of heart, humour and action, the first outing raked in $600m at the box-office, so here’s a follow-up, helmed by first-time director Jennifer Yuh Nelson, who devised the original’s striking opening sequence. Po, voiced by Jack Black, is the Dragon Warrior - a kung fu master and perpetually hungry panda. When a villainous peacock (Gary Oldman) looks to wrestle control of his valley via a dock-off cannon, our hero is sent to face him down, accompanied by his trusted cohorts, the Furious Five. The first thing to say is that the film looks incredible, packed with sumptuous landscapes dominated by vast mountains, dappling rivers and towering pagodas. Its 3D is rarely used to fling props at the audience, but rather to provide depth to its vividly-realised world, allowing the viewer to wallow in that sheer opulence. Few modern movies have realised the possibilities of the big screen in such an assured, ambitious manner.

Perhaps even more importantly, the film boasts an engrossing, engaging and affecting story that’s never worthy or, ahem, po-faced, and reveals just why Po was raised by a goose. Its humour is rich, intelligent and unpretentious, epitomised by a terrific set-piece in which a ceremonial dragon filled with our brave warriors consumes and dispels a series of baddies; the most heightened display of toilet humour you’ll ever see. And the other action sequences are similarly superb: vastly superior to those in the first outing, with tremendous variety and imagination. There’s a fight to save a village that throbs with energy and invention, a breathless, hilarious rickshaw chase and a quietly destructive cannonball climax. Such wizardry is augmented by effective voicework, a lovely score from Hans Zimmer and John Powell, and an unashamedly sentimental punch-the-air slo-mo moment in which Po turns to his buddies and simply yells: “I love you guuuuuuuys!” Fast, funny and fleshing out its story with emotional wallops, Kung Fu Panda 2 is a total triumph - and knocks even its predecessor into a conical hat. (3.5)

Just to refresh your memory:



Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne and John Stevenson, 2008) - A rotund, clumsy panda (Jack Black), obsessed with martial arts, is selected to be the mythical Dragon Warrior, setting him on a collision course with a psychotic, power-hungry snow leopard (Ian MacShane) who's planning to lay waste to his valley and see off his former father figure, Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman). The film begins in striking fashion with a manga-ish dream sequence, stutters for a while, then judders back into life around the half-hour mark, courtesy of an intensely moving flashback. After that it never looks back. It isn't perfect, but it's a fun mix of gags, fight scenes and pathos with an impressive visual sense and a very strong second half. (3)

***



Dan in Real Life (Peter Hedges, 2007) – There’s a lovely feel to this offbeat picture, which mixes family comedy, human drama and broad farce to unexpectedly effective, affecting ends. Steve Carell is a newspaper columnist, widower and father-of-three who visits his parents for the holidays and falls for a girl (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore – only realising later it’s his brother’s new love. As he struggles to contain his feelings, he awaits news of possible syndication and faces the slings and arrows of outrageous daughters, who want to drive, date boys or just have his attention for a moment. The jumble of elements gels surprisingly well, thanks to neat scriping, Carell’s excellent performance and a fine ensemble that includes John Mahoney and Dianne Wiest. It’s an extremely satisfying movie. (3.5)

***



The Cheyenne Social Club (Gene Kelly, 1970) – Cowboy Jimmy Stewart arrives in town to collect his inheritance and finds his brother has left him a brothel, in this very funny Western comedy. The picture’s a little stagy in its mid-section and there’s the odd joke that misses the mark (a couple just don't make any sense at all), but the story is involving and amusing, there are a dozen big laughs and the chemistry between Stewart and tactless, chatty pal Henry Fonda is a joy to behold, old pros and real life best buds that they are. Elements of tension, action and human drama are also incorporated quite elegantly. After all, what would a Western be without a gunfight or two? (3)

***



Give a Girl a Break (Stanley Donen, 1953) – Three girls compete for the chance to headline a Broadway show in this trim, straightforward MGM musical. The simple story is just something to be diverted from – and the frequent numbers are a treat, particularly two each pairing Marge and Gower Champion, and Debbie Reynolds and Bob Fosse. The latter pair made The Affairs of Dobie Gillis the same year, which is a minor classic. (3)

See also: Did I mention that I met Debbie Reynolds? Yes I did, several times. MGM had a plan to remake all of Fred and Ginger's films, starring Marge and Gower Champion. They only managed one, turning Roberta into Lovely to Look At.

***



Run, Fatboy, Run (David Schwimmer, 2007) works as far as it does - and that's a lot further than you might think - on the strength of Simon Pegg's performance. He's excellent as a hopeless schlub trying in vain to ingratiate himself with the heavily-pregnant fiancee he left at the altar five years ago. His solution: to tackle the marathon her new fella is about to take on. The plot is overly formulaic - though the race is cleverly conceived - the material variable and the product-placement excessive, but Pegg is a brilliant comic actor, wringing laughs out of almost every situation. (3)

***



Shallow Hal (Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 2001) is the ultimate in high-concept romcom shenanigans (yep, I said shenanigans), as superficial skirt-chaser Jack Black's perception of the laydeez (yep, I said laydeez) becomes based entirely on their inner self, causing him to fall heels-over-head for morbidly obese charity worker Gwyneth Paltrow, whom he sees as a slimline hottie. The film's a little confused in places, relying on fat jokes whilst peddling its "appearances aren't everything" message, but its heart is in the right place and it's frequently both sweet and funny. At least until the Farrellys indulge their old bodyshock fetish with all that stuff about a tail. The film's main virtue is Black's sparring with similarly misguided buddy Jason Alexander, which works really nicely. Alexander's timelessly juvenile one-liner may be my favourite of the year so far (I am really sorry): "You're right. l'm probably more immature than you, but at least l have a bigger willy." (3)

*I.e. a film based on a one-line premise; "high-concept" makes it sound clever and admirable, which it rarely is.

***



The City of Lost Children (Mark Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1995) – A gaggle of misfits – a brain, a midget, four clones and a mad scientist – take to stealing children in order to experience the one thing their creator could never give them: dreams. On their trail is good-hearted, taciturn circus strongman One (Ron Perlman), who’s looking for the perpetually-hungry little brother they swiped from his caravan. The big guy is accompanied by Miette (Judith Vittet), a streetwise orphan who’s fallen in love with him. This fantasy is disjointed, muddled and almost self-consciously peculiar, but worth seeing for a knockout opening sequence, a couple of very special performances from Perlman and Vittet, and an astonishing visual sense. (2.5)

***



Catch-22 (Mike Nichols, 1970) – As an attempt to film an unimpeachable, untouchable, unfilmable book, it’s OK: a meeting of the sublime and the ridiculously useless in both scene and characterisation, with a passage of utter dullness to offset each sequence that works, and a lot of yelling to contrast with every bit of spot-on comic anguish. Alan Arkin is superb as Yossarian and Jon Voight makes a suitable Milo, but Martin Balsam is all kinds of shouty wrong as Col. Cathcart. (2.5)

***



Bulldog Drummond Escapes (James P. Hogan, 1937) – Lively entry in the comedy-adventure series, with a slightly manic Ray Milland (in his only appearance as Drummond) looking to rescue damsel in distress Heather Angel from beardy villain Porter Hall, who’s got the young heiress locked up and drugged. The plot’s nothing new and the staging can be a little static, but the young Milland’s eager, slightly over-ripe characterisation keeps proceedings buoyant and there’s fun support from series regulars Reginald Denny and E. E. Clive. Kudos also to the writers for creating a bolshy love interest who’s not averse to whacking someone over the head. Sometimes even the right person. (2.5)


A film so poor that even J. Carroll Naish is bad in it. He's still impressibly unidentifiable, though.

Bulldog Drummond Comes Back (Louis King, 1937) – The first Drummond entry starring John Howard starts off terrifically, with vengeful crooks swiping his girl and promising a series of riddles he must complete to save her life. Sadly they’re incredibly tedious and not even the great John Barrymore, whose role consists of trying on some fake noses and pretending to be Scottish, can save this one. (1.5)


You see how this isn't very good?

Bulldog Drummond’s Bride (James P. Hogan, 1939) – As a devotee of '30s and '40s mystery-comedies, I've been pretty unimpressed by this series, even while acknowledging that it's a serial-like affair placing the accent on adventure. This entry is poorly-written, with misguided comedy interludes and a one-note performance from Reginald Denny, while Drummond (John Howard) is a simply awful detective, boasting the sole virtue of persistence. (1.5)

See also: To see how this sort of thing is really done, check out the Michael Shayne series. The last film in the series was Time to Kill.

***



Shorts (Robert Rodriguez, 2009) looks like it was made by kids, as well as for kids, with plenty of elements that will appeal to the nine-year-old in your life, but a shaky grasp of narrative and a staggeringly misguided chapter about a giant, murderous bogie. Perhaps realising his story wasn’t up to scratch, Rodriguez split it into sections and shuffled them, so it’s essentially like Pulp Fiction, if Pulp Fiction was a disappointing film about a magic rock. There are crocodiles that run on their hind legs, tiny, destructive aliens and a contraption that makes the iPhone look like a calculator watch, but the lacklustre plotting, heavy-handed moralising and sometimes wooden acting mean it’s a bit of a letdown. The best gag, with the aliens and that much-maligned bogie, is saved for the credits. (2)

See also: Rodriguez used to make great kids' films, like Spy Kids and Spy Kids 2. I'm afraid he also made Spy Kids 3. He also makes kids for grown-ups. You can read about his Mexico Trilogy here.

***



Happy Feet (George Miller, Warren Coleman and Judy Morris - let's name and shame them, 2006) - It's as if March of the Penguins had been remade by Satan. This is an embarrassingly ill-conceived animation about a community of singing penguins and the travails of one plucky little member (his plumage like an evening suit, his face and voice reminiscent of Elijah Wood), who's tone deaf but can dance. The makers seem to have no concept of storytelling, the visuals are dull and undistinctive, and without wanting to sound like Mary Whitehouse (a sure sign that I'm about to), a lot of the material is just incredibly inappropriate for kids. Would you pay someone to stand in front of your beloved, toddling offspring and talk about booty and - well - sexing? Because I probably wouldn't. The Amigo Penguins are pretty funny and the first chase sequence is exciting, but the rest of this is just absolutely excruciating. (1.5)