The World's End

Early on in ‘The World’s End’, the fictitious town of Newton Haven – the kind of depressingly generic English small town that’s not quaint or rural enough to be a village, nor close enough to the urban sprawl to consider itself a district of a city – is identified as being famous for having the first roundabout in Britain. (For the benefit of my non-UK based readers, that’s roundabout as in intersection, not the children’s ride.) It’s a curious thing...

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Despicable Me 2

At some point – probably while it was still playing in cinemas – someone took a look at the returns for ‘Despicable Me’ and gave the sequel the green light. At some point – probably after attending a kids’ party – someone sent out a one-word memo: “minions”. And thus ‘Despicable Me 2’ could easily have been “The Minion Show”. To certain degree, the epithet’s fair: the loony yellow thingies enjoy waaaaaaay more screen time in this outing, and they...

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Despicable Me

Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud’s out-of-nowhere hit starts with some horribly blocky animation and a handful of brilliant concepts. The horribly blocky animation depicts a vulgar American family on holiday in Egypt, the prototypically overweight scion of which accidentally discovers that the Great Pyramid of Giza is an inflatable replicable. The original has been stolen. The thief, who seems to have got clean away with it, is hailed in the media...

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THE AGITATION OF THE SMALL SCREEN: Steptoe and Son – Series 1

With the caveat that Dick Clement and Ian la Frenais’s ‘Porridge’ runs a very close second, it’s my humble opinion that Ray Simpson and Alan Galton’s ‘Steptoe and Son’ is the greatest sitcom in the history of British television. And the remarkable thing is that very often it isn’t funny at all. Very often, it’s cruel and embittered and almost painfully sad. Pathos and bathos have seldom been so enmeshed on the small screen.Simpson and Galton never...

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In brief: The Bling Ring

About a third of the way into 'The Bling Ring' - maybe less; it's a mercifully short film - a couple of over privileged teens decide to break into Paris Hilton's palatial LA residence. Entry is effected thanks to the cat-walk strutting heiress leaving a key under the door mat. The majority of viewers at the screening I attended groaned or face-palmed. Someone muttered, loudly, "No fucking way." Reading up on the background - yup, we're in "based...

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My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?

There’s an elephant in the room when it comes to ‘My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done?’. It’s a big elephant with floppy ears and a trunk like a fire hose and somebody’s painted on the side of it, in garish pink letters, “this is, y’know, that Werner Herzog film produced by David Lynch that looks more like a David Lynch film than a Werner Herzog film”. If someone would be so kind as to take the elephant outside and pass me my elephant gun, maybe we...

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This is the End

Okay. Imagine that Tarkovsky’s ‘The Sacrifice’ took place not in a remote dacha but a couple of miles from the Hollywood sign, that its protagonists were not a group of moody cerebral eastern Europeans but a cluster of egomaniacal actors, and that its coming apocalypse was signalled not by portentous reports on the radio but by the arrival of a Godzilla-sized demon with a penis of fire …I’m not selling you on this, am I?Okay. Remember when one of...

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