Buried

Ryan Reynolds acts his heart out alone on-screen for 90 minutes in this real-time thriller but a weak script fails to match his efforts…

Reynolds plays Paul Conroy, a civilian truck-driver in Iraq who wakes up after his convoy is ambushed to find that he’s been buried alive with only 90 minutes of oxygen left. He’s been left a phone with dodgy reception and a fading battery, and he fruitlessly calls his wife’s voicemail, a preposterously annoying neighbour, and various American agencies before the kidnapper rings to instruct Conroy to record and send his own ransom video. Comparisons to Tarantino’s CSI: LV special ‘Grave Danger’, which placed Nick Stokes in a coffin with only 12 hours for Grissom and his team to find him before the oxygen ran out, are inevitable. There are superficial similarities; the presence of a deadly weapon in the coffin, the intrusion of menacing fauna, the desperation that alternates between despair and panic; but also a shameless riff on Tarantino’s wonderful “Are you a terrorist?” “Well I guess that depends. Are you terrified?” But director Rodrigo Cortes is no Tarantino…

Cortes never leaves the coffin for the duration of the movie. This isn’t as Hitchcockian as he’d like because A Single Man cinematographer Eduard Grau’s six-minute takes include a ridiculous tracking shot around the coffin that makes it feel larger than some bed-sits. Reynolds displays considerable dramatic chops along with some nice comedic touches but his performance is better than Chris Sparling’s script. There are high-points in the writing like Stephen Tobolowsky as a HR man using legal chicanery to backslide on an insurance pay-out, while Robert Patterson’s crisp British voice is marvellous casting for Dan Brenner, the SAS type in charge of tracking down Conroy’s location, but mostly by staging conversations in the dark Cortes remove the visual field of reference to such an extent that this becomes a radio-play.

That fact focuses far too much attention onto the script, and it doesn’t take experience in screenwriting to realise just how few routes this story can take. Conroy frustratingly sits on vital information – for no reason, and there is an outrageous Chekhov’s Rifle of a detail that is left hanging before paying off as part of ‘the very oldest trick in the book’ – used in the deeply frustrating ending. Buried wants, structurally, to have its cake and eat it, and this only underscores its lack of profundity. In the end this is just needlessly nasty (Reynolds is forced to cut off his finger, pointlessly), perhaps in the wrong medium, and lacks the emotional power and depth to match Reynolds’ performance.

Reynolds fans will appreciate a fine turn that is a master-class in creating empathy out of thin air, but fans of suspense or drama would do well to avoid a film that can’t deliver on its promises.

2/5

Cinema in a Good Cause

A very special film festival will take place at Cineworld from Thursday the 7th to Saturday the 10th of October with all proceeds raising going to Action Breast Cancer. There is no set ticket price for any of the films, instead you’ll be asked to donate whatever you feel is appropriate.

The Cadbury Flake Film Festival organised by Cadbury and the Irish Cancer Society will showcase four iconic movies. If you’re booking seats you’ll be asked to make a donation to the Irish Cancer Society through dedicated fundraising pages on www.mycharity.ie while further information is available from www.cancer.ie or www.cadbury.ie. FlashForward star Joseph Fiennes, currently filming in Wicklow, is supporting the campaign saying: “I have been a supporter of Breakthrough Breast Cancer and other fundraisers for many years, after losing my mother to the disease. I prefer to be involved behind the scenes – working with major donors to generate funding or attending events and providing auction prizes. I am very happy to lend my support to Breast Cancer Awareness Month and the Cadbury Flake Film Festival in aid of Action Breast Cancer. I would like to thank all of those who continue to donate their time, money and energy for the benefit of those affected by cancer”.

As well as the film festival Cadbury will donate 5 cent for each Limited Edition Pink Flake for Breast Cancer Awareness Month sold, potentially raising €70,000 for Action Breast Cancer. Petra Ryan, Brand Manager for Cadbury Flake, said “We hope to raise significant funds from these initiatives so that Action Breast Cancer can continue to provide much needed care and support to everyone affected by breast cancer”, while Jim O’Malley, Partnership Manager for the Irish Cancer Society said “Women living in Ireland have a 1 in 10 chance of developing breast cancer in their lifetime so it is imperative that we continue to raise vital funds enabling Irish scientists to find new therapies to prevent breast cancer, better techniques to diagnose it accurately and ultimately new treatments which will cure it.” The charity web-pages are linked to below:

Casablanca: October 7th @ 8pm Tickets available: www.mycharity.ie/event/casablanca_cadbury_flake_film_festival

In a previous blog I dubbed this the film that summed up the 1940s. Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains and Paul Henreid star in one of the greatest films ever made. Quotable to a fault, this wartime tale of lost love and political intrigue still packs a hefty emotional punch. “Here’s looking at you kid.”

Dirty Dancing: October 8th @ 8pm Tickets available: www.mycharity.ie/event/dirty_dancing_cadbury_flake_film_festival

The female equivalent of Star Wars for a generation stars the late Patrick Swayze as the summer camp dance instructor who helps Jennifer Grey’s naive ‘Baby’ rebel against her stifling father (a pre-Law & Order Jerry Orbach). Altogether now: “Nobody puts baby in the corner…”

Pretty Woman: October 9th @ 6pm Tickets available: www.mycharity.ie/event/pretty_woman_cadbury_flake_film_festival

The film that catapulted 22 year old Julia Roberts onto the A-list remains the gold standard for modern rom-coms. Roberts’ unlikely hooker is hired by Richard Gere’s wealthy business man to be his escort for several business and social functions, but soon some My Fair Lady style transformations start to occur.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s: October 10th @ 6pm Tickets available: www.mycharity.ie/event/breakfast_at_tiffanys_cadbury_flake_film_festival

Audrey Hepburn’s most iconic poses and costumes feature in this adaptation of Truman Capote’s scandalous novella. Holly Golightly’s naive eccentricity bedazzles George Peppard’s struggling writer when he moves into her apartment building. Try to ignore Mickey Rooney’s outrageously racist Japanese character…

The Hole 3-D

Joe Dante, director of The Howling and Gremlins, helms a kid’s film as scary as most adult horror films…

Nietzsche’s “And remember, if you stare long into an abyss, the abyss also stares into you” is a more apt tag-line than “What are you so afraid of?” which implies a jokey approach to the material largely absent from the film. Sure, Dante inserts parodic “Ha! Made you jump…” moments where people unexpectedly pop out of nowhere to deliver their lines, but he’s such a good horror director that he’s achieved the jump in technique that Anne Radcliffe defined as the difference between horror, make an audience jump and groan with buckets of gore, and terror, the purer feeling induced by sheer dread, which is infinitely more disturbing for a young audience. Whether such pure gore-free scares are suitable for children at all is a very serious question and one which the Irish censor has answered with a definitive ‘No!’ courtesy of a 15s cert.

Sullen teenager Dane (Chris Massoglia) and his younger brother Lucas (Nathan Gamble) move into a new house, dragged 2,000 miles from their beloved Brooklyn by their flakey single mother (Teri Polo). It’s not all bad though as they quickly strike up a friendship with the cute bookworm next door (Haley Bennett). Exploring a mysterious hole in their new basement together, however, proves a very bad idea. Life-lesson: if you find something heavily secured with pad-locks for no apparent reason, for the love of God trust whoever put them on and lock them again when you’re finished gawking. As Bennett surmises “You have a gateway to hell in your basement”. Her next line “Cool” is quickly retracted when it unleashes a dead girl, dripping blood from one eye, who limps after her in unsettling digitally manipulated motion. Gamble meanwhile follows up playing Gordon’s son who was terrorised by Two-Face in The Dark Knight by being terrorised by a court-jester puppet – a mini-Joker. This puppet moves when he’s not looking, before winking, and eventually traps him in the basement and chuckles maliciously as it slowly walks towards him….

Impressive sound design makes the scenes where the unseen stalking puppet’s bells ring absolutely terrifying as they rattle all around and even behind you. By contrast the third dimension is as superfluous as always and lends an air of unreality to proceedings which only becomes interesting in the funhouse set at the end where the outsized and crazily twisted furniture leaping off the screen enhances the perilous mental state of the hero finally sucked into his worst nightmare. Massoglia’s endearingly mumbly hero leads an impressive central trio of performances by young actors who hold their own against Bruce Dern’s scenery-chewing cameo.

The Hole is a very well constructed Hallowe’en chiller that sadly falls between two target audiences by virtue of its own effectiveness.

3/5

The Psychological 10 Euro Mark

I was stunned to discover this week that Cineworld have broken through the psychological 10 euro mark for cinema tickets…

Obviously this is not news to most people as this is something that happened some time ago but I haven’t been to Cineworld at night for a very long time; I think the last movie I actually saw there was Mesrine: Killer Instinct in a cheap morning show; so it’s a fresh shock to my system. Not least because the cinemas which make up my usual venues – Savoy (9.00), the Screen (9.00), the IFI (9.20), Movies at Dundrum (9.90), the Ormonde (9.00), and the Lighthouse (9.00) – are all still selling their tickets under the 10 euro mark. I’m not sure exactly why Cineworld (10.50) have chosen to bust through it with such brio when all the other cinemas that I regularly venture out to from my suburban southside lair seem to regard it as a threshold to be passed over with great reluctance.

I think the reason why it’s such a psychological barrier is not purely to do with inflation or our newly re-found grasp of the concept of value for money; I can vividly remember when you could go to the Savoy on Saturday night and still have change for a nice junk-food meal in Supermacs from a 10 pound note. I think that the cinemas are just terrified at hitting the dreaded ‘two for the price of one’ figure. If you have to pay more than 10 euro for a film ticket you will start questioning more keenly not just the quality of the film in question but more generally whether it’s actually worth going out at all when you could pop into Chartbusters and pick up two new releases for 6 euro. Admittedly Chartbusters’ well publicised financial problems are the reason they’re so cheap at the moment but even Xtravision’s new releases get perilously close to 2 for 1 compared to a 10 euro plus film ticket.

The more paranoid interpretation is that cinemas are holding prices under the mark to make people less outraged than they should be over the premium charged for 3-D tickets. This premium has allowed Hollywood to make more money this year, with bad films in 3-D, than last year, where films were better attended but only in 2-D. Roger Ebert has cynically predicted that the premium on 3-D tickets, justified as necessary to pay the charges associated with conversion of cinemas to digital projectors, will in fact become embedded forever in the pricing structure long after every cinema is converted and all possible costs have been paid. In which case we could expect that the ‘two for the price of one’ figure would come into play in a new and interesting way as punters would weigh up with every trip to the cinema whether two 2-D films are worth the price of one 3-D film. If the answer to that question isn’t to Hollywood’s liking it may mean the end of gimmickry and a belated return to quality scripts as the answer to the problem of how to get people in theatres.

Meantime, I’ll be interested to see which of my regular haunts joins Cineworld in the brave new world of handing over a twenty-euro note to get change for one primetime film ticket…

The Runaways

Twilight co-stars Dakota Fanning and Kristen Stewart re-unite for a biopic of 1970s all-girl rawkers The Runaways featuring a number of classic songs, by other bands…

Writer/director Floria Sigismondi’s opening image of a drop of menstrual blood falling on the ground, as an unprepared Cherie Currie (Fanning) dashes to a toilet during her first period, promises an innovative feminist rock flick. Instead we cruise along the boulevard of rock cliché as singer Cherie finds booze and pills the only way to handle the sudden transition from miming Bowie at school talent shows to rocking Japan after she joins Joan Jett (Stewart) in The Runaways. Jett is the feminist, refusing her patronising teacher’s insistence that she remain unplugged and learn ‘On Top of Old Smoky’, “I know you play ‘Smoke on the Water’. Teach me that one!”, but both girls are barely characterised beyond facile pop-psychology about flakey fathers driving them to rock.

Fanning and Stewart wring substantial emotion from the weak material but against these blankly inarticulate girls, Whip It! star Alia Shawkat is literally silent as ‘the bassist’ for legal reasons, Michael Shannon has little trouble in stealing the film as their mentoring (and deranged) producer Kim Fowley. He even articulates the trangressiveness of Fanning’s performance by exclaiming “Jail-f******-bait, Jack-f******-pot!” on learning Cherie is 15. Just in case you didn’t get the in-camera apology Jett later complains that Cherie will ruin them on their Japanese tour by performing in a Cabaret style suspenders and corset outfit. Sigismondi frustratingly alternates between such sledgehammer subtlety and elliptical dreaminess. Lines like “Girls don’t play electric guitar” herald ‘This is a Man’s World’ on the soundtrack, while she hilariously literalises endless critical ramblings about the homoerotic attraction between singers and guitarists by having a dreamy love scene between Cherie and Jett soundtracked by The Stooges’ ‘I wanna be your Dog’. This incident is then never mentioned again as Cherie goes back to sleeping with their roadie.

Such inconsequential vagueness afflicts everything. The impression that Cherie quit mid-way through recording their debut album and that 8 months later the band imploded having only had fleeting success in Japan is totally wrong, but this is a film where you never see The Runaways hang out with The Sex Pistols at CBGB’s, you just see Joan spray-painting Sex Pistols on her t-shirt while their music plays. Sigismondi’s biggest problem is that while The Runaways paved the way for The Bangles and L7 their music has been justifiably forgotten. ‘Cherry-bomb’ is the only song they perform here which rises above being merely efficiently crunching mid-1970s hard rock and Jett plucking out the riff of her solo hit ‘I Love Rock and Roll’ only emphasises that. There is a trio of fine performances at the heart of this film but like the band this film may be classified ‘important’ rather than good.

2.5/5

Salvage Operation: Reign of Fire

2002’s failed blockbuster Reign of Fire is not a good film by any means, but it does contain at least one genuinely great idea which should be salvaged for posterity.

In a post-apocalyptic world caused by the accidental unleashing of dragons from underneath London Underground the world as we know it has ceased to exist. Christian Bale and some other survivors live in small pockets of human resistance to the fiery reign of the dragons. In one early scene we see Bale and another adult entertaining the surviving children of their group by re-enacting Star Wars. Bounding about a make-shift stage like giddy children themselves they make light-saber noises as they swing wooden swords, a wheezing sound between lines when playing Darth Vader, and the old hand up the sleeve trick for Luke losing his hand, before the children en masse gasp in shock and disbelief at the line “No Luke, I am your father”.

It is a hilarious and great scene in an uninspired film, not least because its idea is so telling. In the event of an apocalypse with only youngish men being left as the elders of a community it’s highly unlikely anyone would be able to remember all of The Odyssey, The Divine Comedy, Hamlet or Great Expectations but it is entirely (and disturbingly) plausible that a bunch of twentysomethings would between them remember most, if not all, of the dialogue and scenes of the original Star Wars trilogy. It’s not entirely dissimilar to Hurley writing the screenplay for Empire Strikes Back in LOST when he’s stuck on the island in the 1970s. It’s also entirely likely that the children they entertained with their physical theatre re-enactment would indeed lap it up. And furthermore while the notion that, in the event of an apocalypse, all of Western civilization and culture would be erased save for George Lucas is on the surface deeply troubling, on second thought it’s not so bad. Lucas after all was so heavily indebted to Joseph Campbell’s The Hero with a Thousand Faces in his initial drafts of his saga that saving Star Wars would in fact mean saving classic story-structures and archetypal characters with mythical resonance beyond the surface nonsensicality. And with resonant stories the past wouldn’t be lost…

And so Reign of Fire may in fact have contained one truly great idea amidst a sea of CGI dragon-fire and shirtless Matthew McConaughey. Who’d a thunk it?

NSFW Theatre

There’s a certain bizarre, maybe even troubling, trend at both of this year’s theatre festivals which nobody seems to be willing to talk about.

The press release for the international festival trumpeted the multi-cultural wonder of three Polish plays arriving to our shores, but the programme implies that Polish theatre is largely concerned with nudity and sex scenes to the exclusion of all else. There is of course a difficulty in discussing nudity in theatre as, with boring predictability, even noting it let alone questioning it will lead to shouts of prudery – as if that somehow constituted an argument let alone a discussion ending point. Do you remember the disastrous fiasco that was the Barbaric Comedies at the Abbey some years back? It was dripping with sex and nudity and to be sure audience members walked out, but many left not out of outrage but of sheer boredom, choosing the second interval in its interminable running time to execute a quick dash for the streets. There’s a certain element of that impression of nudity being a crude device to wake up the back-row of reluctant people who were dragged to a unfocused play in Factory 2 where you feel sure that the nudity in its 7 ½ hour running time will lead to nudges in the ribs to wake up the audience’s sleeping members.

Nudity in theatre is qualitatively different from nudity in film. Angelina Jolie is not actually present in a film, it’s her image from a shoot in a closed set the previous year, and the chances of you ever actually running into her to personally feel awkward are zero. In theatre the person appearing nude is very much present, and as for the chances of actually running into them later, the much vaunted Trilogy  (NSFW) features 50 local women dancing naked at the end of the play. Indeed the fringe this year seems obsessed with being racy. The Project has a dance production (NSFW) which uses as its webpage image a picture that to my mind has little relevance to the description of the show beside it and which makes booking a ticket for the show from that website an NSFW exercise that would get you blacklisted from most net-cafes and libraries. I’m deeply unsure where feminism is meant to stand on this.

Is it prudishness, or ‘just not getting it’ to suggest that these vanguard of feminism productions are missing something? If the meaning of a theatre performance is uniquely found, at least in part, through the audience’s reaction to it, then doesn’t that mean that the intentions of the performers can be reversed by an audience with the opposite motivations? The Gaiety staged Cabaret last year, working from the blueprint of Sam Mendes’ revival which made the play triumphantly queerer and more sexual, and featured nudity of a totally different order. At the end of both acts a group of naked actors stood with their backs to the audience and created first a Nazi image of glorious Aryans, and then, to end the play, the victims of the concentration camp showers. The effect of this nudity was incredibly chilling and its meaning could not possibly be altered. But, unless the organisers intend distributing questionnaires to ensure only those who know their Kate Millet will be admitted, couldn’t the meaning of the festival pieces be altered if unreconstructed chauvinists chose to treat them as mere pieces of titillation rather than the liberating feminist art intended.

Granted that one important intangible element of theatre isn’t this theatrical use, and especially promotional trumpeting, of nudity something we should be talking about?

They Call Me Mister Screen…

So, much to my surprise, my team again won the Screen Cinema Film Quiz and its prize of a free private screening in the cinema – but the film to be finished by 2pm.

I arrived back from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia at about 9:00am on the morning of the quiz and was battling the jet-lag of the damned when I staggered in to Doyle’s pub at 7:20pm (being 2:20am KL time which I was still on) to discover that Pete Moles had been replaced in the team by Emmet Ryan at the last minute as a result of a mishap with public transport. So 4/5ths of the line-up that won the quiz back in June was ready to fight again. Emmet brought to the table a deep love of bombastic action movies and sports movies, Paul Fennessy brought an encyclopaedic familiarity with art-house and foreign films, James Ward brought knowledge of the arcane lore of Shakespeare and The Lion King amidst other specialities, Dave Neary brought mental lists of Oscar nominations and foreign film titles, and I brought an extremely frazzled version of the fergalMDB. We sallied forth under the gloriously entertaining (to us at any rate) team-name Roland Emmerich’s DEATH in Venice, a remake that would make half the world’s critics kill themselves on general principles, and one which we exulted in coming up with insane plot-points for between rounds. Indeed James won two spot-prizes for his absurd/inspired doodling of promotional posters for this dream/nightmare project. All together now in that deep American trailer voice: “Godzilla is back, and he wants his 327,000 lbs of flesh”.

The quiz had not only changed venue from MacTurcaills but had also been re-imagined from the previous time with the purpose of thwarting our victory by ditching the rounds we had got perfect scores in last time: quotes from films, matching actors to roles and roles to actors, naming foreign films from their original titles. I was confident of getting trounced even before we started and ironically this feeling only increased when I noticed that Donald Clarke’s dream-team of film critics were absent. Hilariously enough though we scored perfectly respectably in the rom-com round designed to cripple us, instead suffering dismal failures in a movie music round and the cult film round where I somehow subconsciously remembered approximately how long Donnie Darko was told by Frank he had till the end of the world, but got it wrong by one frickin’ minute (It’s 28 days, 6 hours, and 42 minutes, not 28 days, 6 hours, and 43 minutes). But we triumphantly scored 17/18 in the brain-freezing round devised by the Sunday Business Post’s film critic John Maguire, who rendered 1940s films without vowels and then misleadingly spaced the consonants: The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp as ‘THLFNDDTHFCLNLBLMP’, and, yeah…

We started off around 6th place, but slowly crawled up the leader-board thanks to miracles like Dave remembering the name of the creator of the replicants in Blade Runner, the man who headed an eponymous corporation, he looks like Lou Reed and has his eyes gouged out by Rutger Hauer, and his name is, is, is…Tyrell! But there was an insurmountable gap between us and the leaders even as we somehow bludgeoned our way into second place. So we were cackling at the prospect of multiple free films comprising season tickets for either the second 1980s season or the first 1990s season, the prize for second place, when to our astonishment we weren’t named in third or second place. We were wondering what questions we could have blown in the final round to slip into fourth when to our genuine shock we discovered that we had won it again – tying with the leaders who imploded in the final round. So we jointly won, having never led at any point, and also took the trophy, bobble-headed Frodo, on a tie-breaker, and as successful defenders of our title.

Now let’s see which of us joint champions can retain the title next time…

Arcadia

Arcadia, Tom Stoppard’s 1993 masterpiece, received a towering treatment by the Gate theatre a couple of months ago.

Director Patrick Mason, as well as re-uniting with two of his stars from last summer’s Abbey production of The Rivals, Marty Rea and Aoibheann O’Hara, found roles for Gate regular Barry McGovern and the go-to girl for Stoppardian teenagers (after last year’s The Real Thing) Beth Cooke in his elegant production. At nearly three hours long the play unfurls a romantic comedy in two acts (set in two different centuries) that is really about chaos theory, bad academic scholarship, and the conflict between imagination and rationality. Stoppardian theatre is always just such a theatre of ideas, and duller critics dislike it for that reason because he makes them feel rightly stupid, but Stoppard has an unrivalled capacity to integrate abstract concepts into highly personal conflicts and to present complex ideas accurately but as high comedy.

Stoppard introduces us to two sets of characters inhabiting the same English stately home in 1809-1812 and 1993. In the 19th century sequences arrogant tutor Septimus Hodge (the superb Rea) tries to deflect his mathematically gifted student Thomasina Coverly (Cooke) from seeking a definition of ‘a carnal embrace’ by introducing her to Fermat’s Last Theorem. He is less successful in distracting Donna Dent’s imperious Lady Croom and visiting poet Ezra Chater (a wonderfully blustering Stephen Swift) from the said carnal embrace between Septimus and Mrs Chater. In 1993 Bernard Nightingale (patron saint of dodgy academics) arrives to investigate a possible visit by Lord Byron to the house just before he abruptly left England. He spars with Valentine Coverly (a delightful Hugh O’Connor), who is using statistics to map animal populations on the estate, and Hannah Jarvis (a spirited Ingrid Craigie), who is researching the history of the house in the Regency period for a book on the decline of the Enlightenment into mere feeling. Over their strenuous objections Nightingale speculates his way to absolute certainty that Byron killed Chater in a duel and fled the country, contrary to what we actually see transpire between Chater, Septimus and his unseen visiting friend Byron…

Stoppard’s celebrated wit is given full rein in numerous sparkling lines such as Lady Coverly’s put down of her brother; “As her tutor it is your duty to keep her in ignorance”, “Do not indulge in paradox Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit”; and Septimus’ “I will not kill one of the few poets England has produced for the sake of a woman whose honour could not be adequately defended by a platoon of musketry deployed by rota”. Septimus’ ingenious praise eventually leads Chater to emotionally convince himself that in fact his wife loved him so much that she slept with Septimus for the sake of a good review by Septimus in the ‘Piccadily Review’. She didn’t .

Joe Vanek’s unfussy set was dominated by a large table on which characters from both eras deposited props so that past and present blurred as the play proceeded towards a surprisingly emotional ending as a careless line by Hannah revealed the tragic fate of characters joyously alive in the earlier period as both times collapsed into the same physical space. The ensemble was impeccable but special mention must go to Andrew Whipp as Bernard Nightingale who, especially in his repeated rejoinder of “I don’t know, I wasn’t bloody there” to all requests for more detail on his conclusions and his exit line of “Oh just publish!” on being told by Hannah that she knows something but can’t prove it, mined pure comedic gold.

5/5

7 Reasons to love Scott Pilgrim

1. Whip-pan
Director Edgar Wright has progressed from a channel 4 sitcom to a low-budget British film, then a big-budget British film, and finally a big-budget American film without ever changing his style. All those delirious whip-pans between various locations for the sake of a character delivering one line in a continuing conversation are present and correct in Scott Pilgrim.

2. Bizarro
Brandon Routh dyes his hair blond and stomps all over his heroic Superman image (“I’m not afraid to punch a girl, I’m a rock-star!”) by hovering through the air with glowing laser-white eyes and psychic powers gained from his vegan diet. His incredibly dumb bassist is a nicely revelatory and oddly Bizarro turn by Routh as nonsensical comedian.

3. Metric
I’m not suggesting it’s actually Metric but it’s pleasing that Radiohead producer Nigel Godrich in composing the music for the film gave some variety to the styles of the different bands we hear and noticeably varied their quality even down to having the only song played by Scott’s ex-girlfriend and her successful band be actually kind of awesome…

4. Igby Goes Forth
Kieran Culkin must get work, and an awful lot of it, after his turn as Scott’s room-mate Wallace which is a joy from start to finish; whether it’s him texting Scott’s sister while he’s asleep, stealing her boyfriends when he’s awake, or helpfully, drunkenly, informing Scott after he’s already been ambushed what’s happening: “Scott! Ex! Fight!”

5. Chris Evans
Chris Evans, who actually did a better Face in The Losers than Bradley Cooper in The A-Team, drops his voice to a farcical rumbling growl to deliver nonsensically macho action-film one-liners, enters a scene by walking from his trailer in time to the Universal Fanfare, and generally Fassbenders his way through his supporting role as an A-lister.

6. No Sugar
This reprises one of my favourite elements of (500) Days of Summer. Characters break-up not because of dastardly secrets but because they’re bored, shallow or unfaithful. There is no sugar-coating of the cruelty and selfishness of the leads when it comes to their relationships, from Scott dumping Knives after two-timing her to Ramona’s endless fickleness with men.

7. It’s C.R.A.Z.Y.
Major studios don’t like risk, they like sure things, films that will make a healthy profit, hence re-makes, sequels, franchise re-boots, and adaptations of beloved TV shows. This is as crazy and original a big studio film as you’re likely to see this year, and unless you go see it Universal won’t be so daftly risk-taking again…