It's behind youuuuu!

This is aces. Thanks to many of the movies in this video, I am actually permanently afraid of bathroom mirrors.

The House of the Devil (2009)

There's a lot of debate about The House of the Devil online: some people claim it's an arty, intelligent, slow-burning exercise in tension that goes a little awry at the end, while others claim it's so dull they fell asleep halfway through.

The second camp is right.

The House of the Devil starts out promisingly: it's a pitch perfect imitation of 80s horror movies, right down to the font used in the credits. It really does look great. There's been so much care and effort put into making the film look fantastic that, it seems, there was nothing left to make it, y'know, actually good.

The plot, such as it is, is familiar enough: Samantha is a poor student who urgently needs to find the means to move into her own apartment, and a babysitting job for the admittedly creepy Mr Ulman seems like a great way to generate some cash. There's something seriously off about his house when she arrives, and when it emerges that this isn't actually a babysitting job at all - there is no baby, only an elderly woman - Sam's ready to leave. But Ulman makes her an offer she can't refuse (an outrageously over-the-top $400 for an evening's work) and she agrees to stay. Naturally, it turns out that the elderly woman she's there to take care of is, well, some kind of scary mutated thing, and the Ulmans don't want a babysitter so much as a vessel for the devil.

It's tediously predictable, but many widely acknowledged horror classics don't offer much more than that. Suspiria, for example, doesn't have much more of a plot than that. But Suspiria had brilliant visuals and interesting set-pieces along the way, while The House of the Devil has, um, a scene where Samantha has a very long conversation with a pizza place, one in which she breaks and subsequently clears up a vase, and one in which she talks to a goldfish. Beyond that, nothing happens for the entire first 70 minutes of the film, and it's achingly boring.

If the payoff was worth it, I might have been able to forgive the film's utter inability to create a character with any depth, or a believeable situation to put her in, or any actual tension. But it isn't. For one shining moment, it looked like The House of the Devil might actually have some guts; like it might actually stray off the well-trodden path it had been mindlessly wandering along all the way through. In the film's final moments, after escaping from an uninspired Satanic ritual, Samantha realises that there's no way for her to win. Ulman chases her down in a nearby graveyard, and it becomes clear that it's too late for her now; she's thoroughly infected with evil. She turns the gun on herself and blows her brains out.

... Except that she doesn't. It would be better if she had; it's the first time she shows any kind of intelligence or strength of character or ... well, anything, really, and it was the first time the film got close to being shocking. It's not a happy ending, sure, but when you're battling the Devil, things don't often turn out rosy. Instead, the film went for a much more predictable ending, leaving a bandaged Samantha resting comfortably in a hospital bed, having somehow miraculously survived, with her devil-baby intact. It's a cop out, and worse, it's a predictable cop out, and even worse than that, it's a boring predictable cop out that thinks it's clever.

There is absolutely no depth to this movie. It has nothing to say, nothing to contribute to the genre, nothing to offer the viewer except some flickering lights to stare blankly at. The central female character is a complete blank canvas; the film is never scary because you can't invest in her, you can't believe in her, she's nothing but an actress walking around and saying words. She's offered dozens of ways out of the situation we're supposed to believe is hopeless, and she takes none of them. She doesn't trust her own instincts, or those of her friend who's trying desperately to get her to see that the babysitting job is creepy as all hell, but there's no sense of an inner struggle, any sense that she's doing this out of desperation, or anything other than ennui. Although even that would make more sense than what the film presents us with. This film is so dull that you'd almost want to find a Satanic cult to hook up with just to shake off the crushing boredom.

I've actually had the misfortune of watching -- or trying to watch -- another of Ti West's movies: Cabin Fever 2: Spring Fever. That one is unwatchable shit in a whole different way than The House of the Devil: it's lowest-common-denominator toilet humour, and I couldn't sit through it. I'm afraid I've just added another director to the list of filmmakers whose films I just won't watch. I value my time and sanity far too highly for that.

IMDB link

The Fourth Kind (2009)

The Fourth Kind is a prime example of the two most pernicious trends currently plaguing the film industry: it purports to be based on a true story, and it's being marketed as a real film when, in reality, it's a cheap, lazy, studenty pile of wank.

The movie opens with Milla Jovovich introducing herself as actress Milla Jovovich, and explaining that the film we're about to watch is based on real people and real events. In fact, she tells us, the filmmakers are so keen to emphasise that this is based on things that actually happened to people that actually exist that every scene in the movie can be backed up by archive footage or audio, or came from interviews with the people involved, and real footage and audio recordings have been threaded through the movie.

Milla's speech is cut off as she repeatedly interrupts herself, and even during this brief introduction, one of the biggest problems with the movie becomes apparent. The editing is appallingly amateurish. Beyond amateurish, actually; it feels like an exercise in learning to use Final Cut. Throughout the film, the supposedly real archive footage is sandwiched alongside the acknowledged recreations starring Jovovich, often using split screen techniques to underline just how rooted in fact the movie is. The film is rendered unwatchable as a result, particularly as the filmmakers insist on moving the line between the two different scenes. It's impossible to watch both versions of the same scene at once, and the dancing black line down the middle of the screen inevitably becomes the focus of your attention instead. In one particularly awful sequence, there are four different images on the screen at once, as two different perspectives of the same scene in both the "archive" footage and the "dramatised" footage play out at once. The thick black dividing lines move constantly throughout this scene, robbing every single version of the event of its impact and watchability. Instead of being moved by the tragic events unfolding onscreen, I felt a vague sense of motion sickness and an urgent need for the film to be over.

The thing is, instead of emphasising the truth of the story, what this bizarre conceit actually does is re-enforce the sense of falsehood, and prevent any suspension of disbelief. Milla Jovovich, despite the list of terrible films on her IMDB profile, is actually a pretty good actress, but when she's reading her lines at the same time as another actress who is supposedly the real version of the same character, you can't invest in her performance. She's right there on screen telling you that she's acting, and no matter how convincingly she cries or screams or begs or argues, the film won't allow you to forget for a moment that she's playing a character. The Fourth Kind is only 98 minutes long, and every single one of them outstays its welcome.

The worst part of all this is that The Fourth Kind actually has a pretty terrifying premise. Alien abduction is a great subject for a horror movie - how scary would it be if there were creatures out there who were so technologically advanced that they could run experiments on us without us ever even knowing they were here - and the owl/alien grey imagery in the trailer (noticeably absent from the film itself) looked promisingly frightening, and original. Unfortunately, the film totally failed to deliver on all fronts: it's dull and pretentious and, ultimately, insultingly stupid.

As is so often the case in horror movies with clever concepts, The Fourth Kind falls down particularly hard when it comes to dealing with the human drama aspects of the story. No-one in The Fourth Kind behaves like a real person would; the worst offender is probably the policeman who is, for no apparent reason, desperate to arrest Jovovich's character for murders it's overwhelmingly obvious she did not and could not have committed; who speaks in bizarrely stilted cliches and nonsenses; and who randomly takes it upon himself to smash her furniture and then confront her with photographs of her dead husband while she's lying paralysed in a hospital bed. It's gibberish.

I don't have any evidence to support this theory, but I suspect The Fourth Kind's fake documentary footage was originally a student production - a straightforward fake documentary about alien abduction. And then someone somewhere along the line suggested it'd sell if only they had a star involved, and so they hired Milla Jovovich for a week to bash together the "dramatised" sequences. It certainly doesn't feel like much more time or effort went into it than that, based on the awkward acting and abysmal editing.

The Fourth Kind is not a real movie. What it is, is a total waste of your time and money. Fuck this film. If the movie industry is in trouble, as it keeps telling us that it is, it's because it insists on peddling this kind of crap to unsuspecting cinemagoers.

IMDB link

A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)

It's not really fair to judge a movie without seeing it, I know. But - can we talk about the trailer for the Nightmare on Elm Street remake? Bluntly, it looks terrible.

The fact that it starts out with a mob of outraged parents chasing Freddy to his fiery death immediately suggests that this film is going to get everything all wrong. Fred Krueger, child murderer, is not what's interesting about the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise, and whenever the movies have previously tried to explain his origin story, it really hasn't worked. What makes the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise different from every other horror movie is the whole nightmare schtick; the clue's in the title, really. The idea that your nightmares might actually be dangerous is a brilliant one, and the franchise is always at its strongest when it finds interesting - and personalised - ways to off its victims. What's scary in a Nightmare on Elm Street movie is, obviously, Freddy, but also the contents of one's own subconscious. Dwelling on Fred Krueger pre-barbecuing seems like missing the point.

The aesthetic of the film also seems uninspired. Blue filters, way too much CGI, flashy quick-cutting... yawn. Aren't there enough films that look like that already?

I wanted to be open-minded about this remake. If I'm honest, as much as I love Robert Englund as Freddy and don't really want him to be replaced, the original Nighmare on Elm Street hasn't aged well. It's not a perfect film, and it's possible that someone could have made a great remake of it. But based on that trailer, it doesn't look like they have.

IMDB link

Gamer (2009)

What would it be like if your MMORPG character was a real person? What if, instead of customising your avatar to your tastes, you could pick a human being to dress up, pose, and respond to your every command? What would that do to your interaction with your character? What would it say about you -- and what would it do to them? Neveldine and Taylor's latest movie, Gamer, poses those questions, and while it's not entirely successful at answering them, it's nonetheless a startlingly original movie that makes an angry statement about pretty much everything about contemporary Western culture.

Set in the not-so-distant future, Gamer stars Gerard Butler as Kable, a (wrongly) convicted murderer who has become the star of the new gaming sensation, Slayers. In Slayers, prisoners on death row are given a chance to earn a reprieve by playing through a series of Call of Duty-style battles: their brains, implanted with nanotechnology, allow gamers to control their every move. No "i-con" has ever made it through more than 10 battles, but Kable has survived 27, and is coming dangerously close to achieving the 30 wins he needs to be set free. So far, so Running Man, but Kable - aka John Tilman, an ex-soldier with a wife and kid on the outside - is the least interesting character in the film, his story a straightforward revenge plot on which the rest of the insanity is hung.

See, Slayers isn't the first game in Gamer's world to use real people in place of computer generated avatars. Before Slayers came Society, a not-even-thinly-veiled take on Second Life. Attractive young actors turn over their bodies to players who dress them up in ridiculous costumes, give them explicit user handles, and control their every move, usually using them to fulfil bizarre sexual fantasies. Among the actors working in Society is Kable's wife, Angie, who is played by a grotesquely fat man confined to his chair, constantly slurping some unrecognisable junk food while feeding Angie crude dialogue and making her bend over so he can ogle her scantily-clad backside. From a short scene in some kind of government office, it's clear that working in Society is considered prostitution -- and due to both Angie's job and Kable's incarceration, their child has been removed from her custody and given to a foster family. Because this is a movie, it's not difficult to figure out who that foster family might be: the kid has been adopted by eccentric billionaire Ken Castle, the creator of both Society and Slayers.

Castle, played with relish by Michael C. Hall, isn't content just to have created the media sensation of the age and amassed billions and billions of dollars. His ultimate goal is to enslave the entire human race by having them implanted with the nanotechnology used to control the avatars in his games: the technology rebuilds brain cells, promising adopters a brain that will never succumb to age or illness, but it also turns them into cells in a network that can be used to broadcast information or to receive and respond to commands. Castle's own brain has been modified to turn it into the ultimate transmitter, theoretically putting him in control of everyone else, though it has a flaw that really needed to be further explored in the movie. As he puts it: "I think it, you do it," which isn't as powerful a scenario as it sounds when you realise how little control you sometimes have over your own thoughts, and how open to suggestion our minds are.

Opposing Castle is an organisation calling itself Humanz, a small group of cyberpunk hackers determined to expose Castle and alert the general public to the threat he poses. By contacting Kable's player, the geeky 17-year-old Simon, and convincing him that the only way to win the final battle is to sever the connection between Kable and his controls, allowing him full control of his own actions and freeing him from the "ping" lag between a command being issued and its execution, Humanz set Kable free. But Castle's got a lot invested in making sure Kable never does really walk free, and the rest of the movie is a madcap power struggle between Castle and Kable.

There's a lot to mull over in Gamer, and I suspect a second viewing will reveal even more ideas and details I didn't have time to catch the first time around. Its 95-minute runtime is absolutely jammed with ideas, and while that's refreshing when contrasted with all the dozens of movies coming out every week that don't have any ideas at all, it probably would have benefited from being pared down somewhat. There are several extended scenes set inside Slayers that don't serve much purpose, since we know Kable's always going to triumph. And sure, seeing an ultra-violent computer game made flesh and blood is shocking to begin with, but the way it's shot, all shakycam and rapid zooms, makes it difficult to really know what's going on. The idea of making people play games to earn their survival has been pretty thoroughly explored on film before, and perhaps the more interesting game is Society, which ventures into territory Joss Whedon's Dollhouse can only allude to. What happens when people hand over their free will to someone else? They've volunteered for this, consented to it, even, and yet they're still being forced to do things they'd never truly choose to do. How can the players bring themselves to subject people to the kinds of torture they force their Society avatars into? It's obviously a science-fiction scenario, and yet the way the actors are treated as less than human by their players isn't too far removed from the kind of exploitation that really does go on in the world, all the time.

Gamer also asks us to question the kinds of games we already play: sure, our onscreen avatars aren't really people, but does that mean we're entirely absolved of our actions when we're playing through them? When so much of our interaction with other people occurs online, can we really tell the difference between a person and a character? I'd argue that for the most part, yes, gamers are perfectly capable of telling fact from fiction, reality from fantasy, but Gamer captures some of the unease that surrounds the more sadistic or sexually explicit games out there at the moment.

Unfortunately, Gamer doesn't really have the time or scope to really get its teeth into any of the questions it raises. It comes across as an incredibly angry movie, railing against a lot of different things all at the same time, and while it's still a coherent film, it maybe isn't as powerful as it could be. Still, I don't think there are any other filmmakers out there producing anything even half as interesting and innovative as Neveldine and Taylor's films.

IMDB link

Bunny and the Bull (2009)

Bunny and the Bull is a deceptive film. Superficially, it looks like a gentle, surreal comedy in the vein of director Paul King's TV work: the quirky set design, including hand-drawn furniture, and the bizarre character and costume designs recall The Mighty Boosh. Actors Edward Hogg and Simon Farnaby even look remarkably like Noel Fielding and Julian Barratt.

Unfortunately, though, scratch that surface and you're looking at a British take on Apatovian bromance movie, complete with uncomfortable grossout scenes and a Manic Pixie Dreamgirl (or the "Because, ummm...? Girl, if you prefer). Described as a "road movie set entirely in a flat", Bunny and the Bull is about Stephen, an agoraphobic who hasn't left his house for nearly a year since something traumatic happened on a tour across Europe with his best friend, Bunny. Hallucinating wildly, Stephen relives the trip - handily for the audience, in chronological order, without much missed out - and, goaded on by an imaginary Bunny, by the end of the movie he manages to come to terms with what happened and move on. This might actually be the first movie about an imaginary/remembered bromance, rather than a current one, but it manages to show just as much disregard for women as human beings as the rest of the genre.

At the beginning of the film, Stephen is rejected by a woman because he's apparently passed into the "friend zone." His depression over this - typical "Nice Guy" angst - provides the impetus for the European jaunt, and the first part of the film takes care to spell out just how diametrically opposed Stephen and Bunny are. In spite of borrowing Noel Fielding's hair, Stephen is a socially inept nerd whose idea of fun is visiting every obscure European museum he can find; Bunny, meanwhile, is frivolous, stupid, addicted to gambling, and a complete womaniser. It's never clear why the two of them would ever spend any time together at all, and they don't really seem to even like one another very much. It's almost a buddy cop movie set-up, except the two of them aren't brought together by circumstance, they're supposed to actually be friends.

Anyway, Stephen and Bunny find themselves in a terrible chain seafood restaurant in Poland, where they meet Eloisa, a beautiful Spanish girl who, it is immediately established, is dating a complete asshole. Well, breaking up with him, anyway. Stephen's Nice Guy instincts kick in and he awkwardly strikes up conversation with her, only to discover that she's intending to head home to Spain. Bunny decides they should give her a lift, so they acquire a car and the three of them set off to have wacky adventures.

Predictably, on the way, despite being Stephen's best friend and knowing full well that he is attracted to Eloisa, despite the whole set-up being his idea with the express purpose of setting Stephen up with Eloisa, Bunny ends up having sex with her himself. (There's an excruciating scene in a bizarre hotel where Bunny hands Stephen his dirty underwear and then embraces him; a scene which only works if you assume a) that penises are inherently funny and b) hugging a naked dude is, like, totally gay and hilarious.) The rest of the film is about the sexual competition between the two men, something that's made explicit when Stephen finally beds Eloisa and she tells him his penis is far nicer than Bunny's, and the catastrophic consequences of letting a woman come between you and your dudebro best friend. Eloisa is barely even a character: she's an exotic foreigner with a sexy accent, weird customs and laughable beliefs who's sexually available to both men, and is eventually given as a prize to Stephen for, um, no reason at all, really. He doesn't even seem to like her very much, but she's beautiful, and he's a Nice Guy, and thus they end up together, because that's the way it works in movies.

Bunny and the Bull is far from the only film to revolve around exactly that idea, but unfortunately it's also chronically unfunny, which is a massive flaw in a comedy film. Virtually every joke is stale; most notably, when dedicated vegan Stephen goes on a rant about how a lucky rabbit's foot wasn't very lucky for the rabbit, which is just a total waste of two minutes, and a cringeworthy scene in which Stephen attempts to confess to Bunny that he has feelings for Eloisa and is so vague about it that Bunny interprets it as a come-on. The only funny moment is Richard Ayoade's brief cameo as a guide in a shoe museum, but even that's an Ayoade performance that you've seen before if you've ever seen him in anything else. Everything else comes off as humourless attempts to replicate the Mighty Boosh, but unfortunately neither Noel Fielding nor Julian Barratt manage to bring any of the charm of the early episodes of that show to the film when they appear. (Barratt's turn as a dog-loving - and I mean loving - tramp is particularly painful.)

The resolution of the film isn't even satisfying: there's nothing there you won't have worked out from the first 20 minutes or so, and Stephen's recovery is brought about by, basically, his decision that Bunny's death wasn't his fault after all. It doesn't really make sense that he'd hole up his flat for almost an entire year and then randomly, one day, decide to hallucinate that Bunny told him it wasn't his fault and immediately get better, but by that point it's difficult to care about anything beyond the overwhelming relief that it's nearly over. The only thing Bunny and the Bull has going for it is its aesthetic, but it's not as imaginative or colourful as The Mighty Boosh, and since you also have to endure 101 minutes of awfulness, it's not even worth it.

IMDB link

Babysitter Wanted (2008)

It's not easy to love horror, and it's especially difficult to admit to loving horror, especially now the genre has been flooded with endless Saw sequels and wannabes. I have to admit I'd become utterly disenchanted with it all: bored of watching the same tired tropes trotted out time and time again, sick of filmmakers assuming gore is more important than a decent script, and fed up with hearing about how yet another torture movie was boldly pushing the boundaries of bad taste. I was about ready to give up on horror entirely, but then two films changed my mind.

The first was [REC], and since I'm way too late to jump on that bandwagon now, I'll just say this: it's amazing, and if you haven't seen it yet, do so.

The second was Babysitter Wanted. It's not the most inspired title, granted: knowing nothing about it going in aside from the title, I was expecting cliched slasher nonsense akin to When A Stranger Calls. Instead, I got a genuinely well-crafted movie which put old ideas together in a way that made them seem fresh and interesting, with a heroine I could root for rather than roll my eyes at, and offered just enough gore to make me feel squeamish without being exploitative. It reminded me a lot of The Hamiltons; both films attempt to lead their audience into believing they're going to get a straightforward slasher movie before suddenly and completely changing direction.

I don't want to say too much more, because Babysitter Wanted is definitely worth tracking down, and I've already said too much for you to go in unspoiled. It's been a long time since I've felt anywhere near this enthusiastic about low budget horror, which probably means I'll approach the next one with far more optimism than it deserves. But this is why I'm hooked on horror: when it's bad, it's very, very bad, but when it's good, it's fantastic, and nothing beats the high of discovering a previously unknown gem like this.

IMDb link

Day of the Dead (2008)

What's in a name? Well, quite a lot, really. By appropriating the title of one of George Romero's seminal zombie movies, Day of the Dead (2008) will manage to sucker in more viewers than it would have if it just carried some generic zombie-related title. Throwing Ving Rhames into the mix - especially since he was in the Dawn of the Dead remake, albeit as a completely different character - just compounds the trickery. Because no matter what the filmmakers might claim, this isn't a remake, nor is it a sequel. It's barely even a film.

Okay, it's managed to lift a couple of elements from the 1985 classic: there are zombies, there are military personnel, and there's even a zombie who's sort of friendly, or at least not actively trying to kill people, called "Bud." Which is sort of close to "Bub." That's as far as the similarities go, and even they're half-assed. Basically, the film is set in a small Colorado town which, for some reason, has become overrun with zombies. The military is trying to contain the infection by quarantining the town, although they're not doing a very good job.

Mena Suvari, slumming it to an extent previously unheard of (seriously, didn't she used to be in real films?) plays Sarah, possibly a Corporal, who has some kind of issue with guns and thus doesn't carry a loaded one. Handily, too, she's actually from the town suffering the zombie infection, so she both knows her way around and also has plenty of local family members to get killed or threatened throughout. Other characters of note include Sarah's brother Trevor and his girlfriend; a dodgy scientist who engineered the zombie virus in the first place; a rubbish radio DJ; a vegetarian private named Bud; and another army guy of unknown rank named Salazar. Or, alternatively, person 1, person 2, person 3... any characterisation that sneaked in was incidental, since everyone's just there to up the body count.

Quite honestly, it feels like either this script was dashed out the night before filming started and no-one bothered to notice it was crap, or it made perfect sense but then the director dropped it in the bath and half the pages were too soggy to read, but they ploughed on with the production anyway. It's just gibberish. No-one acts like a human being; no-one talks like a human being. And it really would have helped if someone, somewhere along the line, had done some research into how the military operates and how they speak to one another. (Incidentally, Ving Rhames only shows up for one scene where he delivers a couple of lines woodenly and then wanders off. Later, his character re-appears as a zombie, but it seems unlikely it was actually Rhames under all that CGI. He was, clearly, cast only so that his name could appear on the box.)

But in spite of all the logical holes, the lack of characterisation, the completely shambolic portrayal of the army (be honest, guys - you just wrote dialogue and then decided to put the actors in uniform, right?) the worst offence the movie commits, by a long shot, is to do with its zombie special effects. The merits of running zombies over shambling ones can be argued until we're all blue in the face, but there can't be anyone on earth who'd argue that Day of the Dead took the right approach to zombies. For about the first half an hour of the film, I couldn't quite work out what was wrong - the zombies were running, but there was something unnatural about their too-fast, too-jerky gait. All suddenly became clear a few scenes later: the footage had been sped up. Many of the zombies were actually lurching about in the manner most people associate with zombies... it's just that the film's editors had sped the film up until they looked like they were running.

And it gets worse.

At one point, there is a blatantly CGI zombie that crawls up the wall, skitters across the ceiling for a bit before dropping back onto the ground. At another, we watch someone transform from a living, perfectly normal human being into a zombie - using liberal amounts of CGI, again, their eyes change colour and dodgy computer-generated welts open up on their skin. Did anyone involved with this movie even stop to consider why it is that zombies look like that? Here, I'll clue you in: it's because they're walking dead people, and since they're corpses, they rot. That's why they look like they're decomposing. It's not an instantaneous process.

At yet another point in the movie, our heroes are crawling along an air vent (presumably just because it was on the checklist of horror movie cliches) when a zombie leaps up, presses its face against the vent, and just hovers there. Later, dozens of zombies throw themselves through windows, fall several stories to the ground, and get up and start running. Or lurching. There's very little film that hasn't been sped up, and as a result it all looks awful. Everything's too sharp-edged, too hyper-real. But not in a deliberate, stylistic way - more in the manner of someone who's just learning to use their DVD editing software and pressed a button to see what would happen.

Even the type of masochistic horror fans who deliberately set out to watch films they know will be bad couldn't enjoy this. It's too cynical, too joyless; it's clearly been made in order to make money, as evidenced by the titling and the casting. No-one involved in this wanted to make a good movie, they just wanted to make a fast buck. It's pitiful. Do yourself a favour and watch something - anything! - else, other than this.

IMDB link

Definitely, Maybe (2008)

Definitely, Maybe plays like a film that's in the middle of being rewritten. You get the sense that there was an original version of the script, someone recommended a structural change, and the writer started to implement it, then time ran out and they just filmed what they had. It's messy.

The film's only saving grace is Ryan Reynolds, who is supremely watchable in just about anything. Which doesn't say much for Definitely, Maybe; Ryan Reynolds would probably be more entertaining if he were reading out a phone book than starring in this. Sadly, the DVD of Reynolds' rendition of The Yellow Pages hasn't been released yet, so Definitely, Maybe will have to do. Reynolds plays Will Hayes, a political consultant whose life didn't quite go the way he'd planned - he's getting divorced, and he isn't the president yet. Hoping to gain some insight into why her parents are splitting up, his 11-year-old daughter asks Will to tell her the story of how he met her mother, which launches him into a very, very long account of every relationship he's ever had. Including lots of intimate details and incriminating anecdotes of the kind you really would never tell a small child, particularly if they were your own offspring.

Essentially, then, we get to watch each of Will's relationships blossom and then fall apart, interspersed with brief moments of Will tucking his daughter into bed, making her a hot chocolate, or awkwardly answering her questions about what exactly a "threesome" might be. That's the main problem with the film, right there: it just doesn't make sense. The idea of a father explaining to his child how he fell in love with her mother and, in the process, gaining his own insight into what went wrong with his relationships and how to put them right could potentially work; playing around with subjectivity and the idea of the unreliable narrator shouldn't be too much of a stretch, either. But Definitely, Maybe is too stupid to play it off like that. Instead, Will apparently recounts every single thing that happened - every awkward bit of flirting, every alcoholic drink consumed and illicit cigarette smoked, and every tiny tiny detail of everyone's mannerisms and speech patterns. (Including every time his so-called friends make jokes about suicide whenever anything bad happens to him - hilarious, guys! Or, you know, really really fucking inconsiderate.)

As an added bonus, we get to watch as a young Will gradually becomes more and more disenchanted with politics, eventually abandoning his dream of becoming the President of the United States as he's disappointed with Bill Clinton, to the point where he calls his earlier ambitions stupid. But that's not the story he's supposed to be telling; it just doesn't make sense. What seems more likely is that the film was originally supposed to be just a straight account of Will's life and relationships, but somewhere along the line someone suggested having it be a story he's telling his child - but no-one saw fit to rewrite any of it. It's awkward. And it doesn't help that actually it's all quite boring; Will's daughter tells him off a couple of times for being a "slut", but in reality he's had two relationships with women, both of whom he's proposed to, and fallen in love with his best friend along the way. That makes the term "slut" not only offensive and outdated but also kind of nonsensical - are we just supposed to go "ah, kids - what do they know?" and laugh here, or what?

To add insult to injury, Definitely, Maybe isn't even a comedy, because it's not funny. With a less charismatic actor in the leading role, it would be virtually impossible to even get through to the end of this film; as it is, well, Reynolds deserves better.

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Nic Cage Appreciation Month: Snake Eyes (1998)

When Nic Cage plays sleazy, he really goes all out. In Snake Eyes, he's Rick Santoro, an Atlantic City police officer with a gambling habit, a wife and kids plus another woman on the side, and some rather, um, unusual methods. With a large amount of money riding on a big prize fight, he's angry when the champion appears to throw the match - but he soon has more important things to worry about, as the Secretary of Defence has been assassinated and there appears to be a conspiracy afoot...

Snake Eyes is kind of strange because Cage is definitely off the leash here - he orders martinis and makes an Elvis reference in the space of about 30 seconds, and I can't believe that outfit came from anywhere other than Cage's own wardrobe - yet because of the bizarre structure of the film and because there are so many other characters vying for attention, he doesn't completely steal the show. Which is really strange, because there are very few lines of dialogue he doesn't deliver by shouting them. It's a bit of a weird film, actually; it's really well put together technically and visually, with lots of long long long dynamic tracking shots and well-used musical score, and the structure of the narrative, which keeps revisiting the same events from different angles and from different subjective points of view, is really interesting, but it doesn't quite pay off properly. According to the IMDB, that's because originally the film was supposed to end with a tidal wave wiping out the casino, but for some reason this was cut in post-production. Thinking about it, that would really help tie up various loose ends - as it stands, the tropical storm raging outside doesn't really have anything to do with anything, so the subplot with the news reporter filming outside doesn't go anywhere, and Nic Cage's rambling final speech about dreaming about drowning is completely irrelevant. Which is a shame.

Snake Eyes isn't one of Nic Cage's really great films, and neither is it a really great or even particularly memorable Cage performance. Disappointing.

IMDB link