When a film has as wonderfully eloquent and skillful a writer as the New York Times' Manohla Dargis labelling her own written reaction in the opening lines of a review of it as "pathetic" and contemplating that she "might as well pack it in now", then what hope is there for a non-professional reviewer in tackling it? I had grave reservations about doing an entry here containing my thoughts on Synecdoche, New York, but for very different reasons; unsure whether to do my usual kind of review, limit it to a paragraph in a round-up, skip it completely or simply cut and paste the whole of Hans Christian Andersen's The Emperor's New Clothes (which should give you more than a hint as to my reaction to it). Like Ms Dargis though I will attempt it and I fear that if her enthusiastically positive review of it had me skipping paragraphs to get to the end (which I simply *never* normally do with her whether I agree with her sentiments or not as the writing always keeps me hooked) then the uncompromisingly negative one I'm embarking on now will probably have the literally *tens* of people who read this () doing the same. Enough with the pre-amble though, on with it .

Over the last decade Charlie Kaufman has become one of the most original and interesting screenwriters working in world cinema. His scripts are high on intelligence, quirk and invention and have made him to the writing profession what Christopher Doyle is to cinematographers: a name as big as the directors and an integral part of how the public view the creative input into the "authorship" of the films he is involved in. Ron Harwood writes damn fine scripts but nobody goes to the cinema to see a Ron Harwood film. Charlie Kaufman, for better or worse, is a whole other animal and a major selling point so it seemed a natural progression for him to eventually direct one of his scripts and give us a real "Charlie Kaufman film".

That film is Synecdoche, New York, which premiered at the Cannes film festival last year before bombing at the box office in a haze of atrocious distribution and mixed reviews. There's no coincidence that the best films made from Kaufman screenplays in the past were directed by men whose backgrounds were in music videos. If nothing else Kaufman is someone who creates scripts heavily reliant on "ideas", and it takes men with the visual flair and imagination to match those qualities in his writing to create a happy balance in the medium of film. Kaufman the director though sadly lacks what Michel Gondry and Spike Jonze do and his no-nonsence, understated style belie his abilities on the page and don't serve the material as well as other approaches have done before. This is not to say though that his script for this film is in the same class as the likes of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation. and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and it is far more grand in scale and ambitious in scope thematically, but his slow, ponderous visual style merely takes the portentious aspects of the film and renders them stilted and overstuffed (and the film as a result dull and turgid).

Given his reputation as a screenwriter and the anticipation for his directorial debut Kaufman was able to assemble a ridiculously talented ensemble cast to work with. Philip Seymour Hoffman plays a local theatre director who, following his artist wife leaving him, receives a "genius grant" and uses it to spend the rest of his life working on a theatre project on a massive scale, never fit for audience consumption as it is a replica of his life which keeps on gestating before impacting on and taking over his actual life. The women in film are a who's who of contemporary American independent cinema (in Catherine Keener, Samantha Morton, Michelle Williams, Hope Davis, Emily Watson and Jennifer Jason Leigh) but like Hoffman's central performance it all recalls something like Savage Grace: the cast all do what's required of them but what they're being asked to do is part and parcel of the problem and as a result no matter how good they are or not, they cannot elevate the material.

The film is a mess, deliberately surreal throughout yet always jarringly so, there's no sense of time and characterisation is unbelievably sketchy outside of Hoffman's Caden, which makes the relationships throughout beyond questionable. This is a major problem because Kaufman has baulked at the idea that he's being weird for the hell of it, declaring that any weirdness in the film is there to create an emotional resonance, yet if the characters and relationships are so thin then that is probably why the weirdness feels tacked on as there's nothing to get emotionally involved in so he defeats the purpose. A contributing factor to this is the underlying misogyny rampant throughout the film, after Keener leaves him the women in his life are characterless shells who all morph into each other and are there to give him a conveyerbelt of women to "fuck". There have always been suspicious hints at this in his previous films (Adaptation. has Nic Cage's version of Charlie sexualising *every* female character and in Eternal Sunshine... the worst thing Kaufman has Winslet say about Carrey is that he's boring whereas the unbalanced retort is that "her sex is unmotivated" ) but having him horrified, watching his daughter having become of all things a stripper is emblematic of the distasteful undercurrent running through the film and actively prevents the emotional resonance he claims to be striving for from taking hold.

What is left then is a very ambitious effort (which is by no means a bad thing), but it fails on multiple levels. It drags, it is overlong, the acting is fine but doesn't make the film any more watchable and cannot fill in the blanks in the characterisation (or lack thereof) from the screenplay. There are lots of ideas thrown around and Kaufman actively refrains from explaining things because he wants the audience to get whatever they get out of it. This would be fine if he didn't throw in surreal aspects or ideas (amongst others that Hoffman may be dead) fleetingly, not expand on them at all and have no intention of ever answering the question. That makes the film a monumental conceit and quite literally pretentious as it takes these huge themes about life and death and everything inbetween but then shows this in a simultaneously sombre tone but with emptily flippant presentation that it is a claim of great importance, which in this case is certainly unwarranted. To label it "disappointing" would be an understatement greater than any of the considerable flaws in this almost unwatchable film, which does nothing but highlight that on this occasion Emperor Kaufman might well be naked after all, and it's far from a pretty sight.

The film industry has got to the point now where it seems that every major American animated film is released in 3D. Reasons for this appear to range from (depending on your level of cynicism) the embracing of new technology, a gimmick to increase interest, or an excuse for the cinemas to charge an extra amount for the glasses included in the price of the ticket whether you already have a pair or not. Watching Henry Selick (the man who directed The Nightmare Before Christmas, that's right, it wasn't Tim Burton )'s latest film it appears that none of those possibilities are mutually exclusive.

Based on a Neil Gaiman novella, Coraline makes for a very unusual film as it seems aimed more at the older generations than the kids, being far too scary for younger children and at a very sedate pace. We begin the film seeing Coraline (whose name is continuously mistaken for Caroline by various characters throughout the film) and her parents move from their home in Michigan into an old house in Oregon. A local lad gives Coraline a doll which looks just like her (replete with the same boots and blue hair that make her so distinctive) and before long she discovers a small door which at night houses a doorway into an alternate reality where her "other" parents are much more attentive and give her everything she wants, even if they do have buttons for eyes.

The 3D aspects of the film generally add to rather than hinder the storytelling, while the showiest aspect of the medium is when objects are coming directly to the screen (and hence "at" the audience) this film shows off the layering it allows as when objects are in the foreground it accentuates the perspective. Occasionally it can distract and take you out of the moment but this is a film that tends more to use the technology to increase what's there rather than rely on it to retain an interest. The best compliment that Coraline can be paid is that for long stretches it isn't even that obvious it's being told in 3D as it tends to blend a lot.

The same can be said of the vocal performances, this isn't a film like Ratatouille with a God-like performance from Peter O'Toole, but in the best of ways in that even though famous people are providing the voices of the bulk of the main characters they are the characters and not "x celebrity being x celebrity". Overall it's a very cute little film, visually arresting and interesting up to a point. If there were to be a criticism it is that even being a fantasy film where the suspension of disbelief is even more mandatory than in other genres, aspects of the nuts-and-bolts set up of the fantasy world aren't as clearly and fully explained as they could have been (and were in other Gaiman-adaptations like Stardust). There are pacing problems too as it does feel ten or fifteen minutes overlong at its runtime of 100 minutes and the target younger audience may not quite have the patience for it. Definitely worth checking out as while not up to the quality of most Pixars or a Wallace and Gromit, it's certainly in that next tier down of very good animated films like Corpse Bride (and that's probably the closest thing to this one in tone as well).

Chéri is one of those films that you can automatically hear the pitch for. "We'll get the director, writer and star of Dangerous Liaisons back together for another French-set, erotic, costume drama, period romp", and so they have, casting Michelle Pfeiffer in a Christopher Hampton-penned adaptation of a French novel, directed by Stephen Frears. Sadly that's about as far as the comparisons go as this is nowhere near the quality of the film which made Frears' reputation in America over twenty years ago.

Pfeiffer stars as a retiring courtesan named Lea who begins an affair with Rupert Friend, the eponymous son of her friend and former-rival played by Kathy Bates. The acting is a bit of a mixed bag, Pfeiffer does well with what she has in a very committed turn but the characterisation and central relationship drawn is fairly shallow and undermines her efforts. This doesn't help Friend either, who is asked to play someone without a character, but his performance is so ineptly wooden and vapid on top of that that he fails to elevate the material or do anything interesting at all with it. Bates is very stagey and her conversations with Pfeiffer bring out the worst in Michelle as neither's conversation feels natural. They also utterly waste Felicity Jones in a nothing role as Friend's wife, which takes away everything about her as an actress that makes her appealing.

The basic story is that she's getting old and he's very young, they are lovers for six years before Chéri's mother marries him off. He wants to have his cake and eat it but she won't have it and from then on they're both rather miserable. One of the main problems here is that if you skip over the initial six years and just show the briefest of beginnings then the downfall and draw his character so shallowly coupled with her being so superficial, then all you have is two people who like the way the other look and want to have sex with each other. There's no depth to it, nothing about the characterisation or the way their relationship is drawn is sympathetic, passionate or compelling and as such it falls flat as a love story.

Voiceovers are seldom used correctly but the one employed here is particularly emblematic of how lazy a device it can be for screenwriters. Here, a narrator starts off for the first 5 minutes filling the audience in on everything then disappears for the majority of the film then comes back distractingly out of the blue towards the end of the film, which is a limp and unsatisfying conclusion dramatically. The sets and costumes are to die for and ensure it's always nice to look at inbetween soft-core sex scenes where the only joy is watching the logistics of hiding the main actresses' most private parts play out.

It's very surprising that it was shot by Darius Khondji, his photography, like Frears' approach to the direction is low key and uninspired, but unendingly competent. Alexandre Desplat's score is overused and intrusive, it seems there to constantly fill in the blanks rather than add to what is there. Overall a good central performance from Pfeiffer, which cancels out the terrible one from Friend, and a luscious environment to gloss over the empty nature of the story and characters. Just about watchable, but as deep as a puddle and about as emotional as a pencil sharpener.

Adaptations and remakes have been around in Hollywood as long as Hollywood has been around. If there's a beloved book or a even a successful film, people who are out to make money through films will seize any opportunity to create another successful film. The easiest way to do this is to take a film which has made a lot of money and simply have a sequel. Another, as is the case with Kevin Macdonald's latest film, State of Play, is to take something that worked in one medium (in this case a miniseries for television) and make a film out of it. Would the filmmakers think they could, in two hours, tell the story any "better" than had originally been done in (as it was in this case) six? Probably not, but then that didn't stop feature length films of classic literature such as Brideshead Revisited or Pride and Prejudice being made despite being done impeccably and necessarily more deeply before on television. The challenge is to take a story that should by all accounts make the basis of a good film and tell it as well as possibly in a "reasonable" timeframe.

Here the story is that two people die on the same day, a young man is shot (along with a passing witness to the shooting) by a hitman and a woman falls in front of a train. Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is a journalist reporting the shooting and his former college roommate is Congressman Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who was having an affair with the woman, his research assistant, who died at the station. It soon becomes clear that there are links between the two deaths and we follow McAffrey and his fellow reporters discovering the "story" and how it effects the Collins' personal and professional life, coupled with his relationship with Cal.

This is the type of film that is much more easily defined by what it isn't than what it is, but overall it's a solid effort all round. The acting is nothing special but fine (only Helen Mirren as Crowe's editor really comes to play) and the direction is rather strange as Macdonald seems to have stripped away most of what makes him an interesting filmmaker and gone very low key as a result. The editing, usually such a calling card and bedrock of his storytelling, occasionally stymies the film as it has all these people talking the plot forward and then an action scene devoid of tension can be thrown which does nothing other than drag it down.

Relationships are underdrawn and skated over and some subplots (especially one involving Collins' wife, played by Robin Wright Penn with no hope of being able to stretch herself) only serve to muddy the water but the basic drip-feeding of information is enough to ensure an inherent interest is maintained for the majority of the run-time. It's a testement to the quality of the source material that despite questionable casting, writing and directorial choices being made, State of Play is still rather watchable. It's not a great film, it's not taut enough for a thriller and it's far too lightweight to be taken seriously as a political statement like the 70s films such as All the President's Men it almost certainly attempts to emulate. A decent film, far from a waste of time, but substantially below its potential all things considered.

Alright, a lot to catch up on so I'll plough through them. Over a year ago I caught the last 40 mins of a 2 hour Garbo programme on the biography channel and at the weekend I saw it all apart from the opening 20 mins. Anyway, that led me to remember that I'd found and downloaded over a VERY long time all of her version of The Painted Veil, which I saw the first hour or so of again, about a year ago. I described it then as "a great screenplay, very quotable and Garbo is just divine" and that's certainly the case.

It's rather difficult to take it on its own merits, having being done recently with Naomi Watts and Ed Norton, but it certainly hits all the right notes as a vehicle for Garbo. The balance of this version is very much on the side of the love triangle rather than the couple's relationship once they go "inland". I always enjoy Herbert Marshall and he's spot on as the reserved Somerset Maugham leading man, George Brent is a very solid actor too, but it's the Garbo show. The tone is so light and playful, the score is wonderfully silly but Garbo does her traditional economical most with the least. To compare the two leading performances in this and the remake is impossible because they require completely different things from the actresses, but Garbo gives the kind of turn where you're watching it and aware how good she is, whereas Naomi is the kind who gets under your skin and it's only the next day when doing something random that you realise that she was brilliant. That said though, the 30s version is far more entertaining and given a choice between the two *films*, I'd watch that one of the two.

Okay, that's two paragraphs and I've only done one, I'll blast through this. Staying with the recent tv movie theme, in a fit of boredom I saw A Killing in a Small Town, solely because it had Barbara Hershey in it and she is an actress I like. This wasn't a very good offering, the acting was fine but the director (Stephen Gyllenhaal) sometimes totally loses the plot tone-wise and has these massive emotions come out from nowhere. Out of morbid curiosity I also saw Spy Hard, Leslie Nielsen "comedy" (I beg to differ ) take on the James Bond films. Given how consistently it falls flat if I hadn't seen Austin Powers, I'd be convinced this just wasn't a genre you could lampoon. Very shoddy effort, much more in the vein of Dracula: Dead and Loving It, than The Naked Gun, poor stuff.

I had a rewatch (for the first time in about 10 years) of Chaplin which was more watchable now having seen his films although at times it did seem a puff piece of apologetics for the joys of shagging jailbait. I also tried to watch Carmen Jones, I'm not the biggest fan of the music and I wasn't keen on the words or the setting. After about an hour I had an invitation to go to the pub and I gladly accepted it as neither Dorothy Dandridge nor Harry Belafonte were doing anywhere near enough acting-wise to retain my interest. I did though catch most of Gunfight at the O.K. Corral tonight with Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster. Lancaster was in snooze mode as Wyatt Earp, but Douglas stole the show and was very fun as Doc Holliday. Very nice to see Rhonda Fleming in support, not a wonderful film, but a more than solid one which I enjoyed.

Right I'll take these in the order that I saw them rather than the order of the title. Carrying on from the last entry where I'd seen a US TV movie on Sky Movies Premiere, I caught another one in the form of Sweet Nothing in My Ear. This is a treatise on the pros and cons of giving a deaf child a cochlear implant, with Marlee Matlin as the deaf mother against the idea, and Jeff Daniels as the hearing father who wants this for his son. Nothing revelatory here, it cuts between a court case for custody of the child and the downfall of the relationship when the father becomes aware of the advances in medicine.

Daniels is the pick of the bunch, very believable, very natural. Matlin sleepwalks through it though and there are only glimpses of the natural talent she showed 20 years earlier in winning her oscar for Children of a Lesser God. Overall, this is an issue-movie, which does exactly what it says on the tin. It's a decent watch and a solidly made film, but nothing out of the ordinary or something which would have been worth actively going out of my way to find.

After that I had a mooch through one of my favourite uploaders on youtube's profiles and found The Dawns Here Are Quiet. It's a war film about a Russian soldier during the second world war who finds himself in command of a group of all-female anti-aircraft gunners. The most startling thing about this film is the job the director did, there are scenes of fantasy/memory/dreaming which many characters have and they are all shot (in colour) in a very surrealistic style and it gels together with the (black and white) realistic bulk of the film very nicely. The contrast of reality and the internal mind is starkly drawn and it works on multiple levels.

The basic plot is that two German soldiers are seen in the woods nearby and the man in charge takes five of the women out with him to capture them. What then ensues is what is described as "a small, local fight" and that the Russians themselves put it in those terms when you've seen the characters for a couple of hours puts everything into perspective wonderfully. If there is a flaw with this film it's that about three-quarters of the way through they start to portray the Germans as sub-human and the overt propaganda purposes of the film shine through. That said though it is a very stylish, surprisingly moving, beautifully made film I'd more than recommend seeing any way possible: cracking stuff.

Lastly, having been a fan of E.R. since pretty much day 1, I decided to check out Parminder Nagra's TV movie with Ray Winstone, Compulsion, on ITV's new ITVplayer online service. Firstly, purely technically, ITV are way behind the BBC and Channel Four with their showing of thier content online. The player itself was terrible, continually pausing and buffering which you just don't get on the iPlayer or Channel 4's Freeview.

The film itself, well, I made 6 notes on a newspaper that was on my desk as I was watching it - "Simplistic, 2D, Trashy, FREQUENTLY unintentionally funny, Condescending exposition of themes, RIDICULOUS finish" and that pretty much sums it up. It's a story about a girl who, returning from University, resorts to a devil's bargain with her father's chauffeur in order to escape a potential arranged marriage. The material is beneath both performers, who I enjoy greatly, but somehow in spite of itself it was watchable in that "so bad it's entertaining" kind of way. An awful script with some truly laughable lines (how Parminder kept a straight face whilst uttering the words "I can't do this anymore ... I need you inside me" I'll never know), it's just pure trash which only shocks in the knowledge that they got the people involved that they did.

One of the drawbacks of checking which films to talk about here by using my vote history on imdb is that I don't vote on that site for tv movies, so one that I saw the other week I haven't talked about before. It was called The Russell Girl, it was on Sky Premiere and I didn't know it was a tv movie until I went on imdb afterwards (although due to the plot it was rather obvious it would have been). The set up is that a girl (Amber Tamblyn) is diagnosed with leukemia and goes home to tell her parents. Before she can she gets accepted into college and they're so happy about that she doesn't tell them. All this is set against the backdrop that there is a past with the family over the road which the woman (Jennifer Ehle) is still very angry about.

Obviously I watched this because a/ it was on and b/ it had Ehle in it, she's absolutely superb in it and is becoming increasingly reminscent, physically, of Meryl Streep. There are some nice supporting turns by Henry Czerny as Ehle's husband and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as Tamblyn's mother. Tamblyn is fine, she does a solid job and holds it together when Ehle's not around. A subplot involving Tamblyn and her high-school sweetheart is rather limp, but the nuts and bolts of the story showing Tamblyn's guilt about the past and confronting her present situation is handled well and is rather affecting. Very nicely shot and a good soundtrack, far better than this kind of thing usually is and that's mainly down to Ehle.

Also on Sky, I caught a classic the other day, the Raoul Walsh version of Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck. Given the time it was made, the casting of Peck is absolute perfection. It's one of those performances where he doesn't do an accent, he's always Gregory Peck, but his Peckness fits in with Hornblower so well it doesn't matter at all: the perfect synthesis of character and the actor's persona. One big surprise with this film was just how well done the action sequences were. In recent years we've been spoiled with the likes of Master and Commander, but the action, though over 50 years old, really worked. Virginia Mayo didn't have much to do and the film ends faster than the average episode of Scooby Doo, but this is a very watchable, fun little film.

There was one more to write about, what was it ... *checks* ah yes, Flawless. Have wanted to see this for a few years now, being intrigued by Philip Seymour Hoffman's Screen Actors Guild nomination years before his oscar recognition came. It's a story about a retired, homophobic cop (Robert De Niro) who, following a stroke, gets speech therapy from Hoffman's drag queen in the form of singing lessons. The tone from Joel Schumacher is all over the place, it's fairly uneven and chops and changes between thriller, farce and gentle drama. What remains though is an extremely solid turn from De Niro, which allows Hoffman to disappear completely beneath all the camp mannersims and steal the show. It's one of those rare performances which is very over the top, but in terms of character rather than actor. Big Phil nails it and delivers one of the finest performances in 1999 in the process. Not a great film, but a good one, with lots going for it.

It's not often you get a big Danish film as they are usually hyper-low budget Dogme-fests. Despite being tiny in Hollywood terms, the scale of Flame and Citron (a film about Danish resistance fighters in the second world war), in perspective is refreshingly grand. It stars Thure Lindhardt and Mads Mikkelsen as the eponymous underground figures who progress from killing Danes who are collaberating with the Nazis to going after the Germans themselves.

There are a couple of very interesting aspects of this film, the first is that the two men have no idea who to trust, even the people giving them orders come in for suspicion as well as their comrades. This stops it being the bog-standard good vs. evil thing and adds a lot of grey area. The second very fine part of this film is the character of Flame - he consistently gets talked round by his perspective victims and his characterisation is both consistent and interesting. Sadly the same cannot be said of Mikkelsen's Citron, there are leaps in his character which aren't adequately explained but it doesn't derail the film.

The problems the film faces stem from the writing, certain plot strands are left in the air, the characterisation in general isn't water-tight, but there's more than enough there for everyone involved to get their teeth into. The score is very nice, atmospheric and brooding, it's shot well in an anti-Wong Kar-Wai kind of way but it doesn't move particularly freely. That said though it is a very good watch. Lindhardt has the best character and really takes the ball and runs with it, Mads is very bland in comparison but he has much less to work with. A subplot with Stine Stengade (who has a touch of the Helena Christensens) again jumps forward too quickly to be truly satisfactory but it does work with the mood and feel of the piece.

A lot of films are recalled by this one, it reminded me of everything from Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid to Reconstruction to La señal and White Heat in terms of the relationships between the characters and the setting. It may not be the most accurate historically (certain things just *feel* like the filmmakers are playing fast and loose with the truth) but it is extremely interesting because it's not a topic that is incredibly well known outside of its native region. There are a lot of potential traps a film like this could possibly fall into given the subject matter but it's more the nuts and bolts of the storytelling and characterisation that stop it being a great film rather than the usual types of things that bring this kind of film down. Tiny release, more than worth checking out if war/resistance films are your kind of thing though.

Right, I've been to the cinema (finally ) so I'll be talking about that in the next entry but I have just about enough to squeeze out an entry here on everything else, involving some very salacious subjects . Just after easter I blind bought (and forgot to include in my last round-up) Richard's Things because I was searching for Liv Ullmann dvds, saw this one and her winning best actress at the Venice Film Festival for it coupled with Anthony "The Lion in Winter" Harvey directing and a not-outrageous price was enough to tempt me. Of course it was only when I received the dvd in the post and looked on the back and found the words "...controversial (at the time) for its frank depiction of a lesbian relationship...", which amused me a great deal. This was not because I'd possibly unwittingly bought something kinky, but more that I immediately assumed the "controversial at the time" translated to "completely tame by today's standards" .

I was right, this is not a film to watch for any voyeurism or perviness, the "lesbian content" () is restricted to two or three really deep hugs (), it's no way to "sell" the film. It is though, a very well acted study of the relationship between a woman who, following her husband's death, becomes involved with his mistress. The most amazing thing about this film is that it was Amanda Redman's debut ... and Liv doesn't act her off the screen. She hangs very well with Liv and both give very different but equally fine performances. It's not a great film, it doesn't delve fully in to the situation and some of the characterisation is a tad spotty but it's well made and acted enough to always retain an inherent interest. Only truly worth going out of your way to find if you're a fan of the people involved, but if an opportunity arises to see this very obscure film, I'd recommend taking it.

Over the last week or so I've been watching the 4th series of Weeds online. I zoned out during the 3rd season and forced myself to finish it, and was pleasantly surprised to see the show take a completely different direction in this one. Wasn't mad-keen on Albert Brooks being brought in as Mary-Louise Parker's father-in-law, but it's always nice to see Julie Bowen getting work (even as a "dirty old woman" ). It's very strange this show, in general anyway because it's a comedy that *needs* 60-90 seconds catch-up before every show as it's a continuous storyline and the episodes aren't self-contained. However, on top of that to uproot the whole show from Parker being a dope-dealer moving up the chain, to suddenly having her not do any of that and alter the whole balance of the show, it's very bold and fresh and I liked it a lot. I don't think the acting is as impressive as it has been in the past (although Kevin Nealon and Justin Kirk are still sceners) but overall it's the series of this show I've got the most out of. Can't wait for August to roll around.

Lastly a blast from the past which I don't usually talk about here, but I saw it and barely remembered anything from my previous viewings, so that combined with a need to pad this out means I'll take it here. It's always interesting when you see a film you watched a lot as a child because some (like Back to the Future and the Indiana Jones films) hold up and others (like Teen Wolf and, say, the Police Academy films) don't. I saw Mannequin on Sky due to a lethal combination of boredom and nostalgic curiosity and ... it's definitely in the latter category. I can't believe how much kinky stuff they actually put in there with Andrew McCarthy being in love with Kim Cattrall's mannequin who can only move when it's just him seeing her, but I guess that's the only way to get the comedy out of it. This is a really definitive example of commercial 80s Hollywood cinema, hideously dated and cheesy, but somehow it just about drags you through. A ridiculous film, even within its own internal logic it makes zero sense, but if nothing else it proves that G.W. Bailey is much better off now on The Closer and Cattrall had very little natural talent and it's actually impressive that she's had a consistent career spanning as long as it has in spite of that.