Confetti (2006)

British comedy on TV has been in a pretty dire state for quite a long time now. There's Little Britain, which started off well but then fell into the trap of week-in, week-out, repeating the same 'joke' involving tired, endlessly repeated catchphrases. The Office was an intelligent, cerebral comedy. And Extra's seems to be garnering rave critical reviews, if not the viewing figures, for reasons I'd love to think were down to viewers realising that completely stealing old sketches and ideas from the likes of Seinfeld or Curb Your Enthusiasm really isn't very original OR that funny.

And now we have a 'comedy' movie, featuring most of the 'flavour of the month' TV comedians that are on our screens at present. Could a British film possibly achieve what the TV shows haven't - a rare belly chuckle or raucous laugh?

Sadly the answer is 'no'. Indeed Confetti failed to raise so much as a smile from this viewer. The cinematic equivalent of watching paint dry, this tired, improvised mess of a 90 minute 'reality show spoof' is the laziest, most self-indulgent piece of nonsense I've seen in a long, long time.

The central conceit of the film is that it's a 'fly on the wall' documentary about a magazine competition for a themed wedding, with the entrants being very quickly whittled down to three sets of contestants - an overly-competitive tennis-mad couple, a relatively normal (I wonder who'll win!) 'dance-themed' couple, and a naturist couple which inevitably means there's a lot of full-frontal nudity in the film. There's a lot of comedic potential in the basic plot, but none of it is realised. Even the naturist couple - who should surely be a veritable mine of funny, if rather obvious, gags - just bore, being too shouty, too irritating and just plain dull to cause even a wry little giggle.

Sometimes one has to be in the mood for a laugh of course, but when I followed this film with a first viewing of Charlie Chaplin's City Lights, a silent film made over 75 years ago, that film had me laughing out loud within minutes. It's not hard to see that it's the material - not the viewer - that's at fault in struggling to find anything even vaguely amusing here. Chaplin, you see, wrote jokes, where the cast of Confetti, normally used to delivering lines written by professional comedic writers, had to just make things up on the spot and are clearly not used to doing so.

Christopher Guest has proved that you can make good improvisational comedy, with movies like Best in Show or Spinal Tap, but he had a cast presumably well-versed in writing comedy. Confetti appears to have a bunch of people who THINK they can be funny, but, based on the evidence displayed here, can only deliver performances or lines that are as 'funny' as cancer or taxes.

Confetti is 90 minutes of my life I'll never get back, and for that I feel resentful. Please don't waste 90 minutes of YOUR life on it!

The transfer is a good one, as it should be given that it's a very recent release, but the picture quality is extremely soft throughout (the screencaps here have been reduced and then sharpened using a Photoshop 'sharpen' filter, so don't use them as a judge of the picture quality!) Whether this irritatingly soft focus is 'intentional' to reflect the low budget look of cheap TV 'reality' shows is a moot point, but suffice to say this really is a 'film' that is best seen on a small TV rather than the big screen.

Extra's include three alternate ending which show different scenarios at the competion end, together with a whole bunch of deleted scenes that according to some reviews are as long as the film itself. I'm afraid I didn't waste any time on them, given my aversion to the edited version of film.

Not a purchase then, and not even a rental. For the cost of a rental you can buy a joke book. It's a shame the makers of the film didn't think of that before putting this mess together!

Poseidon (2006)

Whenever Hollywood decides to remake a film already regarded as a classic the inevitable response is 'Why?!', followed by a general critical mauling in the press. Poseidon, a remake of 1972's The Poseidon Adventure, is no different, as evidenced by the appallingly low 'Rotten Tomatoes' critics rating shown on the left.

Sometimes though we see the past through rose-tinted spectacles and, having watched the new 'special edition' of that original movie, released here a month or so ago, it has to be said the original film hasn't stood the test of time as well as one would hope. The characters are paper, shouty stereotypes that will have you wanting to rip your own fingernails out before the film's less than half way through its running time, and the whole thing is far more campy and cheesy than a film referred to with such reverence, deserves to be.

The problem with this newer version is that, despite director Wolfgang Petersen's claims to the contrary in the accompanying featurette, this is really a pretty redundant carbon copy of the original. If you can deal with it on that level you're in for a fairly enjoyable ride, although the deaths seem more brutal this time around and leave a rather nastier taste in the mouth as a result. Subtlety has never been Petersen's strongpoint, as evidenced by the director's previous effort, the execrable Troy.

The doomed characters aren't quite as annoying as most of the original 'shouty' one-dimensional cast of the 1972 version were, but against that neither Kurt Russell nor Josh Lucas deliver anything like the strong performances Gene Hackman and Shelley Winters gave in the original. The real stars here are the special effects - and the water - and the effects have been very much updated, with that ridiculously large budget all pretty much evident on screen. Water is very much Petersen's medium of course, having previously made Das Boot and The Perfect Storm.

The new film, clocking in at just over 90 minutes, is shorter than the original, but felt just as long somehow, even though the pace never felt sluggish. If you're looking for strong character development and a great story this isn't for you. If you're looking for pretty brainless, but well executed eye candy hokum on a Saturday night the film's well worth a look.

The picture transfer is good, with excellent use of surround sound, as one would expect from a bug-budget disaster movie like this. Extra's wise, there's just a single 22 minute featurette and a trailer, although the featurette is not the usual marketing fluff and gives some interesting behind-the-scenes interviews and explanations of how the effects were achieved. With not much else out this week you could do worse than pick up a copy of this, particularly if you like to see special effects done the way only very big budget Hollywood movies can do them.

The Lake House (2006)

The Lake House doesn't fall into a genre I really appreciate: for some reason most rom-coms or 'chick flicks' just leave me stone cold. So I was pleasantly surprised that the film held my attention throughout, and although I wouldn't say it's a film I'd particulary want to see again, it's nowhere near as bad as some of the critical reviews had lead me to believe.

Probably more of a 'date movie', than a rom-com per se, the idea of taking the traditional 'boy and girl fall in love but seem destined never to meet' story (for the girls) and then introducing a sort of science fiction time-travel twist (for the boys) is quite a good one. If you swallow the central conceit, and can happily suspend disbelief from the get-go, you're in for quite an enjoyable ride, at least from the basic story point-of-view. Unfortunately the ending 'twist' does rely somewhat on you not spotting a clue in the first act (I didn't!) so I guess your closing judgement will depend on whether or not you've predicted the ending an hour before it arrives!

The cliched 'good looking but lonely' single guy and lonely single girl live alone in the lake house of the title, but separated by a two year time period. Through a device that's thankfully quickly explained and dismissed, they find themselves corresponding via a postal box that seems to transport their messages between the two time periods. To further bond the couple it seems they are both owners of the same dog. Yes, it's all very silly, but have you ever seen a rom-com that wasn't?!

What makes the film just about sufferable for guys is that some of the twists caused by the time travel are quite nicely done, and the movie doesn't take itself too seriously. Plus Keanu Reeves isn't quite as wooden and as hopeless an actor as he usually is!

Unfortunately the film does fall down somewhat because of a lack of chemistry between the two lead actors, the afore-mentioned Reeves and his partner from Speed, Sandra Bullock. Part of the problem is that they're physically separate for most of the film's running time, but even when they're together in the same time period there's a distinct lack of fizz between them. The 'madly in love' situation is made even more unbelievable because of the casting of Dylan Walsh (best known as the 'sensible' partner in Nip/Tuck) as Bulloch's boyfriend, who supposedly lacks the spark that she is looking for, but comes across as sexier, better looking and far more committed than Reeves ever does. The script really should have made him more of a heel, instead of relying on one night of him working late and a restaurant reservation that he didn't plan ahead enough to try and make the audience believe Bulloch's character will be better off choosing someone else. As it is, Walsh's handling of their affair over the two year period, particularly when he finds his girlfriend kissing a stranger she's only just met, makes him far more the 'hero' of the piece (and hence Bulloch's character the 'villain') than the author and directors can surely have intended.

As is becoming the norm where a DVD release is made within weeks of the original theatrical release, The Lake House is pretty much a vanilla release. There are five deleted scenes (one is actually an out-take) and a trailer and that's it. This is also one of those annoying releases where one has to scroll through pages of languages to find the United Kingdom, only to realise that all this really does is force that wretched 'anti piracy' trailer on you as reward.

It's good to see the rom-com formula given a new idea, and although The Lake House doesn't really exploit the idea as much as it should, it's an enjoyable enough 90 minutes. But it's definitely a 'rental' rather than a 'purchase'.

The 50th London Film Festival

The 50th London Film Festival kicks off in just a week or two's time. I've never really bothered with this before, but having just joined the British Film Institute I got a programme guide and it's hard to resist the many temptations on offer. One of the nice perks of BFI membership is you can book tickets before they go on sale to the mass public. Rather scarily I got all the tickets I asked for, even those for the big gala performance of Babel which I'm really looking forward to (together with the accompanying volume from the wonderful Taschen Books.

I just hope work doesn't interfere with my plans. Despite trying to rein in my enthusiasm for so many classic films, I've managed to end up with tickets for the following:

• Saturday 21st October, 1.30pm - Dustin Hoffman Screen Talk


• Sunday 22nd October, 6.30pm - Of Mice and Men


• Sunday 29th October, 4.00pm - For Your Consideration


• Monday 30th October, 8.30pm - Hollywoodland


• Thursday 2nd November, 7.00pm - Babel (Gala performance)

I would have liked to have booked The Last King of Scotland which is the opening Gala performance too, but it was all getting a bit expensive and weekdays are very hard to commit to with the work situation at the moment.

United 93 (2006)

We've had a spate of 9/11 documentaries on TV lately, and with World Trade Center hitting cinema's this week, there will probably be more to follow too. But it's hard to imagine anything equalling the powerful, harrowing United 93, released on DVD this week.

I approached this with some cynicism. We all know how the story ends, and most of what is believed to have happened before that end has been documented thousands of times in our national press. So just how intense or suprising a film could this be? A lot more than I expected, that's for sure. Told almost entirely in real time, the strength of the film is the way the documentary style pulls you into the 'story' from the get-go. Most of us have been in busy airports and can identify immediately with the activities that the passengers of that ill-fated United 93 flight had to go through, before the event that changed the world, and the lives of those passengers and their family and friends forever.

What's clever about the film is the way the director doesn't rely on cheap sentiment or emotions, letting the events that unfold speak for themselves, and based largely on the results of the 9/11 commission report of the events of that day. For example, a weaker director would have focused on the recipients of those last 'I love you' phone calls that the passengers made when they realised they were on a doomed flight. But there are no such sentimental shots here, with everything being kept to the claustrophobic confines of the ill-fated aeroplane to make the viewer feel as trapped as the doomed passengers. Shot in documentary style, with hand-held cameras, often held at waist level to give the viewpoint one typically has as a passenger strapped into a plane seat, the viewer is really made to feel like one of the other passengers.

There are no long back stories here, in fact there are no back stories at all. We barely know any of the people we meet on the plane through the duration of the film. The random snatches of conversation we would hear on any sort of flight are our only 'way in' to the characters we're seeing depicted. As a result most appear anonymous and remain so until the end of the film. According to convention this should alienate us, make us feel distant from the people we're watching, and leave us with nobody to really understand or root for. And yet we feel part of the action, one of those anonymous passengers ourselves - we feel we're on the plane alongside them, stunned into disbelief, as events unfold and the mad reality of that day and its events slowly become clear.

Director Paul Greengrass pitches the film perfectly, eschewing the use of any familiar faces amongst the actors, opting for a very low-key delicate music score that's used sparingly, and interspersing action on the plane with that of the various control centres around the U.S. The illusion of reality is strengthened by using many of the the army and flight tower professionals who were working that day rather than trained actors. Nor does the director attempt to take sides, showing events as they unfold in an impartial 'fly on the wall' manner, rather than attempting to force any kind of moral viewpoint on the audience through the use of invented or cliched dialogue.

United 93 is not easy viewing - indeed many will find it harrowing. But it's one of the most powerful films you'll see, deceptively simple in its execution. It's a film that shows the real tragedy (on all sides) of the current divide between the West and the more extreme Islamic movements. It's a film everybody should see!

It seems odd to be reviewing extra's, given the subject matter of the film, but one extra - the hour long United 93: The Families and The Film -deserves special mention since it serves as a powerful documentary in its own right. The stories of those passengers we've seen in the main feature, albeit briefly and without any real identification, get fleshed out as we meet the families of those who were killed - those people who in the real world were the recipients of those 'farewell' phone calls we have seen depicted earlier in the film. It's an incredibly moving documentary, albeit one that will have you fighting back the tears in a way the main feature didn't because the real damage and sense of loss of those left behind is still very real and very raw. Actors who meet the different families are greeted as if they were the dead passengers brought back to life, and break down in tears at the emotion on display and the responsibility they feel for the part they are playing. It's an extra that doesn't distract from the main feature in any way, but illuminates and puts a new perspective on it.

The only other extra is a commentary from the director. To be honest, it's a rather dull affair. The director speaks slowly and with a sense of reverence, clearly trying to maintain the right air of sincerity and without giving any offence to friends and family of those involved in the tragedy. Whilst there are some interesting observations about the approach taken when making the film, for the most part Greengrass opts for the option of 'stating the bleeding obvious' with regard to what's happening on screen to fill out what would otherise be long silences.

United 93 is probably not a 'must have' purchase, but it is a 'must see' rental. And if this doesn't get a nod come oscar time there's no justice in the world. United 93 is a remarkable film, and it's not hard to see why the families of those killed on that fateful day on the 11th September, whilst initially sceptical, have wholeheartedly endorsed the film. Highly recommended!