are the themes of the delightful films I've been watching recently . I'll take them in the order of the title. Caught ...tick... tick... tick... on sky, it's a run of the mill racism movie starring American Football legend Jim Brown as the new sherriff in town who faces lots of problems from the local people. For the majority of the film a lot of the characters are mainly 2-Dimensional but the writing does flesh things out satisfactorily by the end. Brown is fine and is ably supported by seasoned veterans like George Kennedy (as the former sherriff)and Fredric March (as the mayor). At times has a cheesy hack/exploitation feel to it and some of it is far too simplistic, but the entertainment value alone in the third act makes it worth watching.

As for the torture, well, that was what was inflicted on me in trying to watch An American Crime. It was so unrelentingly atrocious I gave up after half an hour. I love Catherine Keener and conversely hate Ellen Page, but neither did anything here. The script was waifer thin on character and completely exploitative of the lurid subject matter. It was literally unwatchable.

Almost as bad was the Jim Carrey film The Number 23, which I only watched for 2 reasons - a/ I was bored beyond belief and b/ I gave Sideways a rewatch the other week and I had Virginia Madsen on the brain. The script just screams "first time writer" as it is so centric to a high-concept idea which the script is built around. The direction is all over the shop, Carrey sleepwalks through his role, the writing gets tired, lazy and condescending and the payoff doesn't compensate the almost interminably dull wait before.

What else was it? Oh yes, the surgery, in the form of Matt Damon and Greg Kinnear playing conjoined twins in Stuck on You. I'd tried to watch this years ago but I was in my Matt Damon-hating period then and couldn't get past the opening 15 minutes. This is far from a great film, but it's very watchable and they get a fair amount of mileage out of the set up (being that Damon and Kinnear are conjoined twins and what happens when one wants to become an actor). The best parts of the film are the cameos, Streep in particular, but also Cher playing themselves. It's consistently amusing, fairly predictable, but has a couple of cracking one-liners and a great finish. Best of a bad collective bunch. They don't deserve a picture in this blog entry