celticman's blog

Adventureland (2009) written and directed by Greg Mottola has a simple premise: a middle-class boy, (Jesse Eisenberg) and preColumbian grad has to go and work in his local amusement park and mix with the natives. I actually worked at the shows in Butlins for a year so I can tell you this film is brilliant. Most rides look complicated, but, hey you just press a button. The live in staff know all the scams and how they are worked. Everything is...

Horrible Bosses (2009) written by Michael Markowitz et al and directed by Seth Gordon is a film with a stellar cast of Hollywood stars including Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Anniston as horrible bosses. The Sun described it as jaw achingly funny and it made a respectable profit. My question would be why? I’m old enough to remember 9 to 5, which had jaw aching song by Dolly Parton who also let her hair and breasts act in it. Three women decide they...

The Informers (2009) written by Bret Eaton Ellis and staring just about everybody in Hollywood is a story about the rock band ‘The Informers’ World tour of 1983, which reaches Los Angeles (City of Angels)and branches off into other people’s stories. There’s Billy Bob Thornton, a studio boss who is going to produce something, a film with a giant tomato as lead, and starring The Informers. There’s Billy Bob’s wife, Kim Bassinger, who he is bit...

Beowulf (2007). What do you do if you’ve got an old English/Germanic epic poem, which nobody reads, celebrating the legendary Scandinavian hero Beowulf? The answer is obvious turn it into an animated action moved, using real actors such as Ray Winstone, Angelia Jolie, turned back into animation, which, not surprisingly is entirely life-like. The next step is to cut out the human element, but that’s boring, and if we are going to see a simulacrum...

Cold Moutain (2003) written and directed by Anthony Minghella and based on a book by Charles Fraser. I’ve read the book and seen the film before, but in my usual way couldn’t remember either. I could remember Nicole Kidman, who can be plain and pretty and beautiful all at the same time, but I couldn’t remember Jude Law. So there it is. One goes to war, in this case The American Civil War and one waits. I’ll not spoil it by telling you which is...

Monsters (2010) written by Gareth Edwards and starring Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. I’m not sure with names like that which one is the girl and which the non girl, but whatever one it is she is hot, in a messed up Gweneth Paltrow kind of way. Yeh, I know, my age is showing with the term ‘hot.’ I suppose that maybe because she has blond hair, but there is always something sexy about someone that is blond and can speak another language, in this...

Star Trek has got a bit like Star Wars trading on nostagia rather than storyline, but the former goes back further and was there at the start of the telly universe. Star Trek (2009) I grew up with Star Trek. It was one of the highlights of my week, which just goes to show what kind of deprived childhood I had. An extra edge was given to it by knowing or not knowing whether we would be able to watch it. My brothers and sisters weren’t as addicted...

Tamara Drewe BBC2, directed by Stephen Frears, screenplay by Moiri Buffini. Tamara Drewe (Gemma Arterton) returns as a successful journalist to the small Dorset village she grew up in. Her one claim to fame is she had a nose-job, when she made it into the big time and she made that part of the story of her success. I don’t usually like flashbacks, but these were very funny. A young Tamara, for example, asking Andy, her old boyfriend, why he was...

The end of ‘The Killing 2’. The original Killing was a mammoth investement in time. The Killing 2 is about half that, or is it, I just can’t remember? Anyway, in both series somebody gets killed. I suppose that’s axiomatic, whatever that means. But in the Killing 2 people get killed more regularly. There is not the same depth and it wanders away from Denmark and out to Afghanistan, as if it’s run out of ideas and a trip abroad might just be the...

Film 4: Knowing (2009) directed by Alex Proyas and starting Nicolas as Nicolas Cage. Does he ever play anyone else? Well, sometimes he’s an astrophysicist, and why does he have to be an astrophysicist? Well, he needs to be a character that asks his students about why we’re all here, what’s it all about and say things like did you know if it was a few degrees higher or lower, or if the gravitational pull of the sun, blah, blah, and back to what’s...