Resolve

Well that didn’t last long did it? Honestly, I had the best of intentions this past week to blog regularly and instead I found myself doing anything but. Just one post in and I am already behind on the content I promised.

However, the last seven days have not been a complete loss. A friend of mine has recently found the impetus to write and shoot a few sketches and share the same on YouTube. He’s been slowly and steadily acquiring all the necessary equipment to do this and he’s now in a position to pull the trigger on the writing. That’s where I was supposed to come in. Unfortunately I had to go on a last minute press trip with my significant other the weekend we were all supposed to be brainstorming and so my contribution was limited to an outline of five sketches that could be read out to the group.

Although I was disappointed to miss out on the writing session, it was nonetheless great fun to try and come up with a few decent sketches (none of mine got taken up so they obviously weren’t that decent). When I was much younger – about fifteen years ago – a few friends and I were inspired to write sketches taking our cues from whatever alternative comedy we could get our hands on (mine were predominantly Lee & Herring, Bill Hicks and The Kids In The Hall which today probably reads like quite a cliched list of inspirations but back then was pretty alternative for a 15 year old). I ended up keeping a huge list. Naively this list amounted to little more than a series of titles and didn’t bother containing any kind of outline that might be useful, say, fifteen years later. Decoding my shorthand took a long time but it was a nice trip down memory lane even if virtually all of those sketches weren’t ready for prime time.

So I started using this nearly two decades old list to write my sketches for this new venture and I really have forgotten how to do anything that is quite instinctively funny without being stupidly dark. Rather than try and adopt some of the spirit that pervaded the stuff I was writing at university (I cannot lie and say I did occasionally try and work a talking foetus in there somewhere), I just lapsed like a recovering crack addict – in retrospect, it was quite easy to see why nothing got picked up. Still, I’m going to be involved in some of the script editing and filming which is quite exciting as this is something I’ve always wanted to do. Alas, the tale of Sarah Chip, an imaginary first girlfriend made of potato that I killed and buried in Aberdeen (a grave to which I would periodically return but was unfortunately inaccessible to anyone but myself) thus to explain why none of my friends had ever met her will have to wait for another day. My 15 year old self would be mortified.

(The Tale of Sarah Chip was not one of the sketches I submitted, incidentally. I’m not completely stupid)

Return

And so I am back again, just over a year later, to try and make blogging work again. I do not think I will ever return to the size and sheer volume of my posts from 2002 (when I clearly had too much time on my hands) but it makes little sense not to try and use this site more productively, if anything as a means to getting over an writer’s block I might be suffering. A few websites have concerned themselves of late with the topic of blogging and its place on the internet. I’ve simply neither the intellectual capacity or time to debate it at length but the general consensus seemed to be that blogging is due a renaissance and while I cannot guarantee this renewed enthusiasm will last any longer than a month, it’s probably worth giving it a go.

Granted, no-one else is reading this anymore but come on – when has that ever stopped me? You’ll also notice a few changes around the site. This is for your own good.

Dart

Is there an echo in here? It’s been some time my friends. I got so far behind with my reviews, I’m in the middle of preparing a list of all the movies I saw last year and just ranking them. Sitting on my hard drive are unfinished pieces on STAR TREK, WATCHMEN and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE. What do you care now? You’ve probably already seen them. I’m going to try and blog here more in 2010 but it’s hard to resist Twitter and the liberating constraint of posting just 140 characters on a film I’ve just seen.

Anyway, let’s start off on the right foot with my Top 10 Films of 2009. While 2008 felt like something akin to a cinematic void, 2009 contained within it an abundance of riches which made coming up with the final ten all the more difficult.

Anyway, here they are:

1. Let The Right One In

2. The Wrestler

3. Mesrine: L’instinct de mort / L’ennemi public No. 1 (Killer Instinct/Public Enemy No.1)

4. The Hurt Locker

5. In The Loop

6. Revolutionary Road

7. Zombieland

8. Star Trek

9. (500) Days of Summer

10. Doubt

Just outside: Moon, District 9 and Frost/Nixon.

Worst of the Year: X-Men: Origins – Wolverine

Let The Right One In was an easy choice for the top spot. A beautifully-shot ghost story, it successfully mixed understated elegance with brutal horror. The news that this film is being remade for American audiences by the director of Cloverfield chills me to the bone, it will only end in tears (probably mine).

Of the remainder of the list, Revolutionary Road is something of a controversial choice given that it is essentially American Beauty Redux but both Winslet and DiCaprio turn in stunning performances (and when did you ever think you’d hear that about DiCaprio after Titanic? If you say The Departed, so help me god, I will hunt you down and beat you to death with a copy of Infernal Affairs). It was, quite simply, a film that got to me.

Propping up the list are a few crowd-pleasers (well, except for Doubt but you know). Star Trek was the best blockbuster of the Summer by a country mile, bringing an ailing franchise back to life while Zombieland was smart, self-referential fun dressed up in guns and gore.

The Worst Film of the Year was a tough one. The hysterics of Bay’s robot sequel, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen or the cataclysmic mess of Jackman’s attempt to revive his career? In the end, both suffered from the creative asphyxiation of too much money being thrown at too many ideas. However, I’ve still got plenty of love for transforming robots and Bay didn’t get everything wrong. There was a lot to loathe (abandoning rhyme and reason so early on was perhaps not the smartest move) but it was difficult not to get a little giddy seeing seven robots combine to become one. Wolverine, on the other hand, was crippled from the off, a hideous botch that reeked of studio interference and actor vanity. Transformers may have been an intellectual violation but at least it was a vaguely entertaining one. Anyone sitting through Wolverine needed a helpline to recover from the trauma.

Swig

Ah. Well, content is long overdue. I’ve had a quick look at my hit stats and this blog has effectively flatlined. I’m sure a mention of Michael Jackson or THE DARK KNIGHT will get things cooking again.

I am basically most of the way through all my pending reviews, they all basically need a conclusion (every time I seem to get going, I manage to get interrupted at the climax of the piece and prevented from finishing up) and I will then be caught up. Who knows, you might actually get them by the end of 2008.

However, some films also override my penchant for abandoning ship early. Here’s a big one. It’s first draft as always, just how you like them.

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN
Directed by Michael Bay
Cast: Shia LeBeouf, Megan Fox, John Tuturro, Peter Cullen, Hugo Weaving

As I left the press screening for Michael Bay’s first foray into the toy market, I noticed four nerds walking out in single-file, each loudly decrying Bay’s bombastic robot epic as ‘The worst film I have ever seen’. I knew at that point that 1) Michael Bay had done something right; and 2) TRANSFORMERS was going to make an awful lot of money.

And lo, the latter came to pass. With a worldwide gross of some $700 million, Paramount had clearly struck gold and the inevitable sequel was greenlit. More of the same, please. And what made the original so successful both critically and commercially? Simple. Bay and his crack team of writers took a leaf from the Bryan Singer book of genre adaptations and stayed true to the inherent core of the franchise knowing that if you do that, you can do pretty much anything you like. And so they did, jettisoning decades of continuity and streamlining an origin story that let everyone in on the ground floor. The result? An accessible, fun Summer event that delighted in giving its audience sensory overload while also managing to pay faithful homage to what had come before.

And if you thought Bay’s first try was an aneurysm waiting to happen, your eyes are going to bleed when they feast on the explosion of metal and colour that permeates virtually every single frame. That trailer footage of the construction site Decepticon playing havoc in Shanghai? It looked like an amazing finale. Wrong: it’s the first scene, the camera drifting slow and wide across a fairly innocuous excavation vehicle encircled by the US military and a few familiar Autobots. Bay plays the moment to perfection, an eerie silence being allowed to settle for just seconds before cogs whirl and a 2 hour 27 minute orgy of Making Things Explode Loudly kicks off. You’ve not seen anything like this before.

Unfortunately, bigger and louder does not necessarily mean better. Tenuously-held together as the first film was, there was at least some semblance of a plot to latch on to. Exposition is ultra-thin on the ground in REVENGE OF THE FALLEN, with plot points dished out in tiny morsels before an explanation comes two-thirds of the way through. Except by this point it’s hard to care because all you’re gagging for is the next fight between two titanic gladiators all of whom like to posture a bit before going for the other’s throat.

It’s also a disappointment to find so many Autobots sidelined, no doubt because they cost too much to animate but also because most of them don’t sell as much merchandise. Much like X-Men 2 got rid of anyone who wasn’t Wolverine, so the Transformers sequel relegates Ironhide and Ratchet to nothing more than cameos while Sideswipe shows up as the Hot New Car (about the only one, GM cars aren’t on the whole known for being exotic. But that’s the fickle world of the movie tie-in for you) but then spends most of his time parked up or lost in the swooping camera work which is so kinetic that a lot of the visual impact is lost as you recover from your last dizzy spell. Instead, the film focuses on Bumblebee (y’know, for the kids) and two annoying newcomers, Skids and Mudflap who belong in the Jar Jar Binks Hall of Shame. Yes, they’re that bad and yes, the film spends far too much time with these vaguely racist stereotypes. What about Optimus Prime? Don’t get too attached to Big Blue and Red.

Fortunately the Decepticons get a little more time to shine (when they’re not being blown up) and it’s nice to see a little verbal interplay even if it is Megatron and Starscream just doing a little turn in the name of fan-service. Overarching nemesis The Fallen is a spindly creation who never really appears too threatening even in the final reel (he’s basically just something for Prime et al to smash so they can say they’ve won). The real plaudits are reserved for Devastator, the Constructicon gestalt made up of six individual robots who appears only for the sake of topping everything that’s gone before him. And he does with aplomb, every last penny is up on screen animating this goliath. Industrial Light & Magic should just go ahead and accept the Oscar now – if anything else pinches the golden statuette, it’s a fix. These are benchmark-raising effects.

Perhaps the most damning criticism one can lay at the door of REVENGE OF THE FALLEN is that, whisper it quietly, it’s just not as cool as the first. While it’s easily up there as one of the great Summer thrill rides, any of the élan that the first film had has gone, sucked up in a balletic hurricane of testosterone and metal. There’s nothing that comes close to the giddy glee you got from the Bumblebee/Barricade chase in the original save for a rumble between Optimus and three ‘Cons that finally gives Prime a chance to shine. As you leave the cinema, it soon dawns on you that for a film about a bunch of aliens named Transformers, there’s not a great deal of transforming. Bay and co. have bet the farm on your automatic investment in the characters without realising what made them so appealing in the first place. Instead the audience is handed just a series of mind-boggling explosions punctuated by the occasional pretty picture and asked to accept it. And accept it you will, because the film barely leaves you any time to think and that’s probably just as well.

So, what are we left with? If you’ve come for Citizen Kane, the exit is right behind you. It’s difficult to bring standards to a movie like this when its chief protagonists are Big Fucking Robots. It’s bold and bright and wicked fun but ultimately the most vacuous thing you will see all year, there’s scarcely anything keeping it tethered to the ground. What we have is pure popcorn escapism, nothing more, nothing less and sometimes, that’s really all you need.

* * *

Tax

The advent of supposed nu-media social networking sites like Twitter (which doesn’t really feel that nu-media anyway, it’s been around for so long and only really started being useful) means that blogging feels like such a chore. No good for you then if you want to know just what I think of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE; FROST/NIXON; WATCHMEN and IN THE LOOP. You’ll have to wait a little bit longer and accept that I’ll be providing vastly truncated reviews until I can get on top of things again.

As I’ve said before, Twitter is everything good about Facebook (the status updates) minus all of the bad (everything else). I’ve really taken a shine to it and have managed to inexplicably assemble a list of people worth following, shy of all the numerous celebrities and minor cult heroes littering the twittergeist with short 140 word reminders that you’re at work and they’re not. Every time I tap my TwitterFon button on my iPhone, I get all of the news that’s fit to print from a cabal of twenty-or-so like-minded thinkers. It’s where I’ve been, what I’m doing, where I’m going. I’ve always been a sucker for that, I like being in contact with my friends even when they’re not around.

Excuses, excuses, I know.

Another excuse then. When I was younger and had much more free time, I used to love the old writers’ adage that they would find the time to write no matter what. It was a romantic ideal, something I used to trot out to myself at 3.30am sitting in student halls waiting for the dustbin men to begin their rounds outside. I had other commitments, sure but I could always write. And then came work. Or specifically, the world of work and the cavalcade of trials and tribulations that it entails. And all of a sudden that romantic ideal fast disappeared in favour of spending a few precious hours away from a computer screen and allowing my eyes to recover from an onslaught of Citrix systems and court documents. I think we can safely chalk The Novel up as a casualty of this.

I have managed some writing though. As always, for The Void, the entertainment webgramme I remain a Contributing Editor for. So here then, a review of The Apprentice UK: Best of Series 1 – 4. I can nearly always rely on Canning to drag my penchant for the pen out of the doldrums. He’s a crafty news-guinea. I owe him more words, I don’t think anything’s changed in the last eight years.

I also wrote a review of something close to my heart: Street Fighter IV. This piece is a little controversial since I originally turned in two versions of the same piece. I’m not sure what made it up there in the end but I hope that the passion I have for the game shines through regardless of which copy finally made it.

In another minor-project update, I’ve storyboarded the first fifteen minutes of an old idea in the vain hope of getting all the beats lined up in a typical three-act structure so I can just sit down and write a pilot with everything cued up ready to go. Now all I need is the time.

Chill

Okay, so I freely admit it’s been awhile. For more regular gratification come and follow me on Twitter. I seem to produce far more there! 140 characters is slightly more manageable. I owe you reviews – still – of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE; FROST/NIXON and now WATCHMEN. I suspect the first two will be somewhat truncated. What of THE WRESTLER? You can find that below.

In the meantime I’ve been scouring the internet for inspiration for a new project. It’ll come to nothing like all the others but hey. The novel sits unwritten – it’s particularly frustrating having all that material from 2006/7 and just not using it. Anyway, that’s not what you’re here for. And come to think of it, neither is the review if you were honest (first draft as always).

THE WRESTLER
Directed by Darren Afronsky
Cast: Mickey Rourke; Marisa Tomei; Evan Rachel Wood

For the vast majority of people, a film set in the world of professional wrestling – or sports entertainment as it has been successfully rebranded by one organisation – is far from being the most compelling proposition. Stymied by the general myth that all wrestling is fake, the supposition that there isn’t any pain or athleticism involved in what is essentially the alpha-male equivalent of a soap opera brutally underplays the effort that these performers put in night-after-night.

And it’s not all main-events and pyrotechnics. General preconceptions about wrestling grossly overlook the hoards of town-hall promotions inhabited by small crowds, all expecting the same level of carnage and work-rate that they would get from anything they could watch on television.

Darren Afronsky’s follow-up to the overblown effects-fest of The Fountain is as far removed from the hyper-concept of the latter. Mickey Rourke plays Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson, an 80s main-event superstar whose matches with The Ayatollah headlined huge pay-per-view spectaculars. Time hasn’t been kind to The Ram and his star has faded to the point that he’s now living hand-to-mouth in a trailer park (when he can afford his rent) and putting his aging body on the line each night he pulls on the tights to play to small town crowds. After yet another gruelling night in the ring, Randy suffers a heart attack that threatens to jeopardise his livelihood. With the offer of an anniversary rematch against The Ayatollah, The Ram must decide whether to risk it all the in ring or finally admit defeat.

Much has been made of Rourke’s mesmerising performance but it’s a role that thoroughly deserves every last plaudit. Both the man and the role have experienced similar trajectories, and sometimes it is hard to tell where Rourke ends and The Ram begins. Randy shuffles on-screen every inch the burnt out husk that keeps on fighting because that’s all he’s ever known how to do. It’s a thoroughly involving performance that rightly dominates the film simply because without such an anchor it would be all too easy to use professional wrestling as a crutch to dismiss the film outright. Towards the climax of the film, Randy delivers an emotional tribute to his fans as he gets ready to hang up his spandex but it may as well be Rourke breaking the fourth wall and talking to the audience directly.

Elsewhere, Marisa Tomei and Evan Rachel Wood play small understated pieces of the puzzle as the object of Randy’s affections and his estranged daughter respectively. Both relationships are as complicated as any hurricanrana Randy might pull off in the ring. Tomei plays Wendy, a stripper that Randy develops a fragile bond with over the lap dances he buys with his fight purse. She represents his only hope of salvation but fails to clock his attachment to her until it is perhaps too late.

It will come as no surprise to find that life on the road leaves little time for life at home and Randy’s heart attack forces into perspective the things he’s neglected over the decades. Wood’s role is small but nonetheless crucial to Randy’s own misguided path to redemption as he attempts to reconnect with his daughter one last time. Ultimately this remains Rourke’s films and the supporting cast are there to facilitate his performance and provide us with more emotional touchstones for his own battered ego.

But it’s not the case of the performance reducing everything else to a footnote. The Wrestler is steeped in authenticity and shows the harsh underbelly to professional wrestling that the smaller promotions represent away from the glitz and glamour of the big dance. It’s all in there: the vicious chairshots; the sparsely attended autograph shows; the razor secreted in the wrist-tape so the wrestlers can bleed on command and the faded concrete show halls and school gyms where these titans eek out a living doing what they love. The wrestling scenes provide valuable context, uncomfortably dispelling the preconceived notions most people have about this unique brand of theatre.

Afronsky couldn’t have picked a more polar opposite project following his foray into the world of science-fiction. The camera picks out every last ounce of grit on show, leaving Randy’s world as a cold, embittered place as he struggles to fit back into society. It’s easy to draw a parallel with institutionalised servicemen who find it difficult to adjust to life outside of the army. The ring is Randy’s true home and his real family are the fans. He’s just waiting for the next match so he can feel alive again.

* * * * *

Crash

I am very much behind on anything remotely creative. I still have reviews of SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, THE WRESTLER and FROST/NIXON to write up, I have not even managed to crank out so much as one word on the novel (and it’s almost the middle of February) and any kind of comedic enterprise has slipped by the wayside. I managed the first two pages of NINE TO FIVE, my no-doubt ill-fated comic idea and sent it to the artist but I haven’t heard anything back from her. In fact, I think I want to re-write the two pages anyway and one of those was a splash so what excuses do I really have?

In the meantime, I am now tweeting full-time in an attempt to wean myself off of Facebook which has long since frustrated me with the information overload it represents. Twitter manages to take all of the good bits of Facebook (i.e. the status updates) and leave behind the bad (i.e. the rest of it) to make a more involving and far less time-consuming social networking experience. I’m on there as ‘Davvers’ so feel free to add me and revel in my glorious mediocrity and the banality of someone going nowhere fast.

Oh, and I’ve given up on KNIGHT RIDER. I know, it’s not been so long since I was posting how much I was going to stick with it but I’ve seen the KARR episode now and that’s really all I ever wanted to see: the doppelganger. KARR’s appearance is just as disastrous as one might expect. There’s a hint of KITT’s opposite, complete with his yellow scanner but it takes just five seconds of Peter Cullen’s voiceover before KARR is transforming into a giant robot, quelle surprise. The finale, KITT turbo-boosting through KARR’s exo-skeleton chest, is a nice homage to the original KITT vs KARR episode from the 80s but seriously, the entire budget is blown on animating the robot leaving precious little money for the rest of the episode. The result? KARR appears and disappears in all of six minutes or so. Epic fail. Heart broken.

Hand

I know, I know. I should post more. I’m far behind on my views: I’ve recently seen THE WRESTLER and SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE, a situation made worse by the release of FROST/NIXON this weekend and REVOLUTIONARY ROAD the next. Somewhere in there is RACHEL GETTING MARRIED too. It’s a good time to be at the movies.

I have been watching a lot of NBC’s KNIGHT RIDER revamp. I’m a sucker for anything with a man and his talking car even if the original concept has now been twisted so far, the 2008 version is just shy of TEAM KNIGHT RIDER, the awful 90s spin-off that involved a whole group of aesthetically disastrous Ford vehicles. Somebody, somewhere, didn’t get the memo that the car – singular – has to be cool. They’ve almost got there with KNIGHT RIDER ’08, a modified Ford Mustang GT500KR, decked out in black and with two scanners at the front. Two because they had to switch it up a notch.

After the mediocre backdoor pilot, Gary Scott Thompson of THE FAST & THE FURIOUS fame was brought in to show-run and at that point, the series lost its collective marbles. There’s clearly been some studio interference but also some hilarious creative mismanagement. The show can’t have been focus group tested. It can’t. It doesn’t tick so many boxes, I imagine there’s a whole legion of biros sitting unused at NBC. Case in point: KITT’s new Attack Mode. A homage to the 80s ‘Super Pursuit Mode’ (itself a bat-crazy way of trying to save the series by having the original Trans-Am turn into an ugly road-going bastard stealth fighter), the new Attack Mode on paper is quite clearly an attempt to sell some toys and up the cool quotient beyond the hilarious anodyne ‘babes’ littering the show every week. Instead, it boasts a design plucked from the mind of a man-mental. It couldn’t be less ‘cool’ if it tried. In fact, the new KNIGHT RIDER can’t seem to do anything.

And yet I still watch. Like I said – a man and his car (even if the man is surrounded by a gaggle of vastly inept government agents and pre-school computer geniuses).

And lastly to SKINS which premiered on E4 tonight. Don’t tell anyone but I watched the whole thing. Series 2 started doing something interesting with the teen drama format and its episode-spanning narratives had me vaguely interested (not enough to watch them all, I might add). It also took the bold decision to make its vastly unlikeable anti-hero (who made Series 1 so unwatchable) a vegetable for the first few episodes which allowed all the other characters time to breathe.

Series 3 unfortunately takes a lot of what was right about Series 2 and puts it through a machine that takes any semblance of spark out of the material to be replaced with one aching cliche after another. It has, in effect, taken the hopeless imitation thousands of its audience have become and put them on-screen. I won’t be watching next week.

Promise (unless one of the cast gets a talking car).

Dirty

CHANGELING
Directed by Clint Eastwood
Cast: Angelina Jolia; John Malkovich; Jeffrey Donovan; Amy Ryan

In his next outing as director prior to the release of GRAN TORINO, Clint Eastwood’s mercurial talent is turned to the true life tale of Christine Collins (a haunted Angelina Jolie) a young mother in 1920s L.A. who returns home from work one day to find her young son Walter, missing. Months later the boy is returned but he is clearly not Christine’s son, something the brutally corrupt LAPD are keen to cover-up. The picture follows Christine’s fight against a system determined to silence her, abetted in her struggle by the charismatic Rev. Gustav Briegleb (an understated John Malkovich) who is determined to expose the sleaze and bring those accountable to justice.

Based on a script by the prolific J. Michael Straczynski, who examined around 6000 documents on the case to ensure its accuracy, the attention to detail in the screenplay is reflected in the period finery that slivers over every frame. Jolie’s performance is just shy of astonishing, her emaciated figure and cut-glass cheekbones denying a degree of realism until her character begins to suffer under the enormous weight of her fight. As lush as everything looks, this is not a film that dwells on nuance or subtlety – it is what it is, there’s nothing hidden away there at the back.

The film’s real success is in deftly switching its attention halfway through, just before it becomes nothing more than a well-made TV Movie of the Week. Nonetheless, while your attention is keenly held by the subplots being brought to the fore without you even noticing CHANGELING is still nothing to lose yourself in.

* * *

Same

What can I say? I meant to post this on the cusp of 2008 but somehow the trials and tribulations of the festive season got in the way. Any old excuse to stop me writing. The priority this year is to find more time to write and then write anything in that time, otherwise I think I’ll go insane.

Anyway, here’s the list you were waiting for. All of the films on this list were released in a UK cinema in 2008. Unfortunately my screenings dried up at the tail end of 2007 so I am about a year behind my American friends.

Top 10 Films of 2008

1. There Will Be Blood

2. Iron Man

3. The Boy In The Striped Pyjamas

4. The Dark Knight

5. Man On Wire

6. Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead

7. Burn After Reading

8. Wall-E

9. The Orphanage

10. No Country For Old Men

It was a close fought contest between There Will Be Blood and Iron Man. I know, I know, you preferred the man dressed up as a giant bat but I warrant you’ve also overlooked the huge flaws that the year’s biggest film also carried with it, chiefly that laborious run time and the lack of focus too much money allowed it to have. Iron Man was smooth and sleek and had no down time. It hit all the notes perfectly, knew exactly what it was and set a new standard that The Dark Knight narrowly failed to beat. In the end, Daniel Day-Lewis’s towering performance in There Will Be Blood meant Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic was my film of 2008.

There was no clear winner for my worst film of the year – I managed to loathe Hancock, Indiana Jones & The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull and The Happening in fairly equal measure. While The Happening came in from a critical lambasting from virtually everyone, I did see the occasional glimmer of merit that reminded me what M. Night Shyamalan is capable of when he’s not given total creative freedom to do what he wants.

If you’re still here, my ones to watch in January are The Reader; Slumdog Millionaire; Frost/Nixon and Revolutionary Road. That should see you right into February. In retrospect I don’t think 2008 was a vintage year for film, I didn’t rush right out to see so much and the gems felt few and far between.

Here’s to 2009 (and TRANSFORMERS 2).

Leave me alone.