Latest screening: Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs

Fun! That really is the best word to describe Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs.

This year has been a stunning year for animation. Coraline was dark, beautiful and exciting – showing the genius Henry Selick take stop-motion animation to a new level. Pixar’s Up was simply one of the best films of the year – hilarious and heart-breaking in equal measure. After a shaky second film Ice Age: Dawn Of The Dinosaurs delivered a really entertaining, enjoyable romp for all the family. Hell, even Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol wasn’t bad. I’m seeing maestro Miyazaki’s latest, Ponyo, this weekend. It really has been a strong year. But something Sony Pictures Animation’s Meatballs (as I’m reducing its title to from hereon in) provides is an unashamedly fun-for-kids movie.

Don’t get me wrong, adults can enjoy it to, but this one feels made for kids first. Up, like all Pixar films, felt made primarily for discerning adults. Coraline was too disturbing for little kids but easy for adults to love and admire. Ice Age worked great for kids but had a lot of adult humour. Meatballs combines a daft story with bigger-than-life characters, simple design and bright, almost day-glo colours to please every child everywhere. Giant food falling from the sky. A comic-relief monkey. A colour palette that even puts Up to shame. This screams “kids will love this” to me.

I kind of feel like the adult appeal here comes from the voice cast. It is headed by the likeable, but unusual, pairing of Bill Hader and Anna Faris. These are hardly names that immediately make you think “kids movie”, yet there child-like glee and enthusiasm – actually often seen in their live action characters, especially Faris’ – fit perfectly. But the real manner-from-heaven is in the support cast. How often do you get a combo the likes of James Caan, Bruce Campbell, Neil Patrick Harris, Benjamin Bratt and Mr T (yes, MR T!!!) in an animated movie support cast? This is such a brilliant support cast it can deliver Harris as a talking monkey with only a few words of (oft repeated) dialogue. Caan is brilliant. This may bizarrely be the best use of Caan since 1990’s Misery! Mr T is so spot on you can’t believe no-one’s used him this way before.

It is not a great film. It’s not Up, it’s not Coraline, no it’s not even Ice Age 3 but it is very entertaining. That the film can raise sustained and deserved laughs from a reunion that uses only names (most notably from the monkey) is impressive. The film will have you laughing from the get-go – from design elements like Caan’s character, to situational comedy, to one-liners – and almost all of it will work for kids, not going over their heads.

The concept does lose momentum in the middle act and the villain of the piece is not nearly maniacal enough. Plus there is at least one too many false ending.

However despite these flaws it’s a very worthy watch. Sony animated films (Monster House, Surf’s Up) frequently turn out to be little treats hidden behind slightly unappealing marketing and consistently warrant watching. Meatballs adds to this reputation. This one may not trouble the awards lists (at least not when animation categories only have 3 entries, although the Oscars and Globes do have 5 this year) but it does provide a fun 90 minutes of daft amusement. Time well spent in the kids movie world.

Latest screening: Glorious 39

There are two things that have to be said up front about Glorious 39. Firstly it is best seen knowing nothing, and I mean nothing about the story. Don’t read reviews, don’t read synopses, nothing. Total blackout. Just go!

Secondly see it at a cinema if possible to make this more achievable but you must, MUST watch this film straight through in one sitting. No toilet breaks, no taking phone calls, no making a snack. Otherwise the impact will be lost. This is slow burn. At times early on you are not sure where it’s going or indeed if it is that interesting but you need this build to pay off later, and boy does it pay off.

This (while nothing like it in storyline terms and obviously not on the same level of utter genius) is like There Will Be Blood in its necessity to be experienced as a straight sitting film. Everyone I know who couldn’t see beyond the grandiose DDL performance in There Will Be Blood to the carefully constructed majesty of that film where people that saw it on DVD rather than in the cinema. In other words they saw in piece-meal and so the impact was dissipated. That was a film that should leave you reeling, leave you breathless, speechless, stunned. Glorious 39, while not at the heights of There Will Be Blood relies on the same one-sitting requirement in order to have the desired impact.

Don’t short-change it, see it this way (with no story knowledge – I literally knew nothing about it going in other than the cast, director and that it was set in 1939 England) and I am sure you’ll be blown away as I was.

Because of the above I obviously can’t talk about the plot and characters in this review so I will just leave it with my assurance that this turned out to be, after sticking with it, one of the most intriguing, exciting, and stunning films I’ve seen this year. It left me stunned. It is rare than cinema can surprise me in the way this did. It is sadly all to rare to find writing this brilliant any more.

Garai has never been better than she is here. She completely convinces as her character goes from wide-eyed enthusiasm, to paranoid conspiracy theorist, to numbed shock, to battling heroine. A superb performance that I believe can’t be denied regardless of your thoughts on the film. Garai has promised much since taking centre stage in I Capture The Castle some 7 years ago but never has her promise been better realized than here. For me she's a definite Best Actress contender for the BAFTAs.

The film is not without its problems. The slow pace and seeming lack of events in the first hour, while key to later story, may prove insurmountable for many – which is why I insist on the single sitting viewing. The film also takes a misstep in book-ending the film with present day scenes that provide the way into the story in a “tale told” approach that is wholly unnecessary and, in the case of the ending, irritating. The final couple of minutes serves no useful purpose and derails the impact of the film somewhat. A shame when excising these brief scenes would not only not have harmed the picture but would likely have benefitted it – not to mention dropped 5-10 minutes off the run time.

Even so I found this another fine addition to the exciting roster of British films this year. Usually I am a Brit film cynic, always ready (and expectant) to dislike them. But with Looking For Eric, An Education, Moon, Harry Brown, etc the British films actual seem to be the best this year. One of the few I’d rate as high that isn’t British is A Single Man and that boasts both multiple English actors and two British lead characters! A banner year indeed for our little Isle.

Hell, even The Men Who Stare At Goats had the omnipresent BBC Films behind it! They seem to be behind every other movie this year. Possible Brit-awards season contenders from them include also An Education, Bright Star, Fish Tank, The Damned United, Creation, Glorious 39, The Boys Are Back, In The Loop!

Latest screening: The Men Who Stare At Goats

After Up In The Air here we have that other George Clooney – the daft comedy George that can either hit (O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, Intolerable Cruelty – yes, whatever the negatives of that less successful Coen film George wasn’t one of them) and miss (Leatherheads). It should perhaps be noted that daft George has always worked under the assured hands of the Coen Brothers. Oh for their touch here.

The Men Who Stare At Goats is no disaster. It’s probably in an Intolerable Cruelty ballpark in terms of quality, but it feels like it could have been so much better.

There’s fun to be had. There are some dynamite gags and great performances all round but too often it either goes to well too many times on a particular gag, running it into the ground, or just ambles aimlessly along with no purpose and drags.

After a fun start that introduces us to Ewan McGregor’s hapless, hopeless journalist, and the story of a psychic special forces group including Jeff Bridges, Clooney and Kevin Spacey (seen in flashbacks) expanded on during an Iraqi road-trip with Clooney and McGregor you soon realize that the flashbacks are all the meat this story has. The present day stuff is on a road-trip to nowhere.

Clooney is good as always and McGregor holds his own and is game for some very funny Star Wars references – though again these go too far. A couple of references to Jedi warriors raise smiles and McGregor’s quip about a farm boy is gold, but the script goers back to these referential gags time and again and they quickly become tired and irritating.

Oddly Bridges is less than great. He is entertaining enough doing a kind of ‘Dude joins the army’ thing but he isn’t pushed here at all. The Dude in The Big Lebowski was a fully formed character. Bill Django here never feels like he is. I don’t think this is Bridges’ fault. He has clearly been hired to be The Dude in a different setting and he brings it, and he does get laughs – but these are more out of a love of Bridges in general than really from anything he is given to do here. This is best seen in his delivery on a hackneyed joke so old and obvious that you feel like his heart just isn’t in it and it just kind of sits there (it’s in the courtroom scene).

Spacey on the other hand has virtually nothing to do but delivers on every front, mining his brief role for some of the best one-liners in the film. In contrast to Bridges he handles an equally old and obvious gag (in a wedding scene) with such expert timing that he drags freshness kicking and screaming into it. Essentially he is set up as the villain of the piece but he is never given a great villainous role to get his teeth into and this is a shame. A film that had the sense to make more of Spacey (and asked anything of Bridges) would have been 10 times better. Unfortunately the filmmakers seem happy to focus all their attention on Clooney and McGregor. While the two work well together and they give there all their story alone is simply not enough to sustain the picture.

So yet again we are left with a great idea in search of a much better script. The film sadly wastes the usually unfaultable genius of Jeff Bridges and underuses a dynamite form Kevin Spacey. Often fun but ultimately disappointing. I've read that Overture in the US were hoping for awards attention on this but i can't possibly fathom where, there is just nothing here on any level that deserves awards attention.

Latest screening: Precious

A very good film with a stunning central performance (and some excellent supporting ones too) Precious could well be the "little" movie that makes it big this awards season. It seems almost certain that newcomer Gabourey Sidibe will be nominated for Best Actress - the performance demands it - and also that Mo'Nique will pick up a Best Supporting Actress nod (she's currently considered the favourite, though i'm still giving it to Julianne Moore for A Single Man), but this could easily find itself seriously conpeting in Adapted Screenplay, Director and even Picture categories.

It's not an easy film but curiously it stands out this year in a lighter-weight line-up amongst the strongest contenders. Even those that are dramatic (like A Single Man) don't feel so gruelling, like last year's line-up where even the so called "feel good" film was the often tough going Slumdog Millionaire!

Precious tackles the abuse, both physical and mental, heaped upon an teenager who when given an opportunity in life will try her hardest to improve her situation but approaches most situations with a resigned gloom and a hard attitude because that is what she needs to survive. The film doesn't pull its punches either (well, my understanding of the what's in the book suggests it does a little but then it would likely be unwatchable). There are several brutal scenes that go beyond discomfort for the audience. So not a Sunday-afternoon crowd pleaser then, but a must-see none the less.

Gabourey Sidibe, in her first film, is simply tremendous as Precious. It could be tempting (since it is her first role and so viewers can't be sure) to think, oh well she knows it, she is it, it's not acting it's casting. Having been to a Q&A screening let me assure you it is acting of the best calibre. Sidibe in person is a sunny, smart girl with little seeming in common with the on-screen character. That she so inhabits the character with no training demonstrates how good a performance this is.

Much has been made of Mo'Nique's role as the abusive mother, and she is impressive. But i can't help feeling firstly that this is partly that people expected her casting is such a role and such a film to be stunt-casting (as with the cast's fellow players Mariah Carey and Lenny Kravitz) and were expecting her to be all wrong in the role. That she is so good (as is Carey for that matter, though Kravitz, while fine, has little to do) almost makes the performance seem even better. Secondly this is one of those gift roles. A superbly written monster. You feel the character created in the writing, the set-ups and shocking dialogue the script provides. I take little away from Mo'Nique, she does deliver the goods, but i feel this is one of those brilliantly written roles that a dozen actresses could have done just as well without missing a beat - much like Viola Davis' role in Doubt last year; a barn-storming scene-stealer that stays with you after the film, but really is it completely the performance or is it mostly the character?

Sidibe brings so much to her role she feels irreplacable. In comparison to Mo'Nique my vote for Supporting Actress this year (Julianne Moore in A Single Man) brings such a depth of character you can palpably feel beyond what's being presented you get a fully formed character that lives and breathes beyond her scenes and, indeed, beyond the story. Mo'Nique is giving her all to what is on the page, there's no doubt, but i get no sense of anything more. Of course the Oscars love a big shouty, unsubtle performance and favour them over delicacy and true character embodiment year after year so Moore will probably lose out (again!) but she shouldn't.

Paula Preston adds some much needed light to the film. She has little to really do beyond empathise and try to help Precious but once she is in the film it becomes more bearable. It doesn't hurt either that Preston much have a pretty good claim on "world's most beautiful woman", she simply is stunning.

Lee Daniels has delivered a thought-provoking and often harrowing film but it goes beyond strong performances and a tough story, Precious is a genuinely compelling film to watch. So often these kinds of films are lost behind a single strong performance (Monster) or get bogged down in their world (A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints) or feel like stunt-casting for a famous face known for alternate fare (Havoc), or are simply too full on to be really watchable (Johnny Mad Dog) - films are to some degree entertainment after all - but Precious, while often difficult to watch, is not a film you regret watching, or feel you wouldn't watch again, and what stays with you from it is so much more than the gruelling abuse episodes.

Precious is every bit as good as last year's Slumdog Millionaire (i would say easily better) and would deserve a Best Picture slot even if we were still done to 5 not 10. The test will be if Daniels can make the five directors. On the strength of what i've seen so far (most everything significant except Nine and Invictus) he deserves it.

Latest screening: 2012

The world is ending, which can only mean Roland Emmerich has once again been let out to play in his CG sand-box. But there's little to complain about here. This is Emmerich's third entry into a well-worn genre - the disaster movie - that had staples long before he started and few people that see this can have plausible deniability if they come out complaining it wasn't what they expected.

Arguably better - because frankly it's just more fun - than the solid The Day After Tomorrow but not as good as the ludicrous, but ludicrously entertaining Independence Day, 2012 does a Ron Seal. It does "exactly what it says on the tin".

In other words a menagerie of well-known faces (John Cusack, Oliver Platt, Thandie Newton, Chiwetel Egiofor, Danny Glover, Amanda Peet, Tom McCarthy, Jimi Mistry, Woody Harrelson, etc) and many less well known who we can therefore consider cannon-fodder attempt to escape and survive the disaster movie to end all disaster movies. Yes, without help from outer-space - be it in the form of aliens of giant comets - the world is going to end. This is the day after The Day After Tomorrow!

Of course all the reliable cliches are in check. We have the self-absorbed dad (Cusack) who neglects his kids, one of whom hates him and prefers his mum's new boyfriend. Where could this storyline go? Hmmm, i wonder. We have the bratty rich kids of Russian billionaire and the trophy girlfriend - and, of course, her cure dog! We have the ridiculously honorable wise widower US President (Glover). We have the smart humanitarian scientist (Egiofor) who always knows what's best. We have the selfish, ass-hole political aide (presumably the White House chief-of-staff though if this is ever stated i missed it) (Platt). We have the conspiracist kook who, naturally, has been right all along (Harrelson, doing his best Randy Quaid).

On the plus side it does dispense with the usual disaster movie cliche of the scientist who knows what's going to happen but whom everyone dismisses until its (nearly) too late. For once the opening gambit of science-babble designed to make audiences think the writer may have done some research (ha!) and get all the necessary exposition out of the way in the first 5 minutes so that stuff can get on with blowing up, is actually listened to be political administrations. So that's something at least. And Emmerich also (perhaps unintentionally, but i'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt after destroying the world 3 times) plays some of the cliches so way over the top that it's all the more amusing. The expexted dog-in-peril moment isn't groan-worthy here because it's so audacious and comical that you have to tip your hate to a man that either really knows how to entertain or is genuinely the cornyist filmmaker ever to touch celluloid. Either way this sort of boldness should be cherished.

What we really come to see though is the world getting all kinds of crap kicked out of it and stuff blowing up. Aliens and Will Smith were all well and good but it was well marketed images of the White House and the Empire State Building being obliterated that drew huge crowds to Independence Day and Emmerich doesn't skimp on the spectacle in 2012. Super-volcanoes erupting, ash-clouds enveloping cities, massive rifts in the Earth's crust, supermarkets cleved in two, California falling into the sea, tidal-waves engulfing the Earth, an aircraft carrier flattening the White House - it's all here and it does look fantastic. I couldn't fault the effects (unlike Day After Tomorrow) it does all look great. The man knows he has to go all out here and boy does he.

Of course the characters are almost incidental but it helps to have an actor as damn likeable as the ever engaging Cusack to anchor the piece. Cusack can simply do no wrong, his laconic everyman is the more palatable version of a Will Smith. He can be heroic but you know its a begrudging heroism and that wonderfully relatable. You can put Cusack at the centre of the most preposterous story (Con Air anyone) and it becomes instantly more enjoyable.

Like The Day After Tomorrow is can tend to be a little serious and could use a bit more humour, but there are (unintentional - or not, eh, Roland) laughs to be had and while not cracking one-liners Cusack is such a laid-back kind of actor that you almost feel like he's being funny. Ironically the most sought after laughs - visual gags of California's governator at a press conference, The Queen getting to safety - are unnecessary and feel overplayed.

A slight negative is the film does seem to overdo the "plane in peril" shots, almost as if unable to do one in Day After Tomorrow and aware this may have to be his last disaster epic Emmerich decided to cram in as many as humanly possible.

Of course you could also argue a lack of characterisation beyond surfaces, the cliched roster of characters and the requisite cheese-ridden dialogue are negatives, but like i said at the outset, if you don't know what you're getting into when you buy the ticket then you probably only have yourself to blame.

This really is the disaster movie to end all disaster movies, though perhaps Emmerich has inadvertently ended his career in the process. Where does 'the disaster movie man' go from here? He'll have to destroy the solar system next.

Regardless 2012 is the kind of ridiculous entertainment that is a welcome diversion amongst the heavy roster of awards-baiting dramas currently battling for my attention and if you can't have daft fun spectaculars like this on the cinema screen then what's really the point?

Latest screening: Amelia

It's hard to see who, except possibly Hilary Swank's ego, this film was made for. A ponderous, unengaging traipse through the life of US aeronautical grand-dame Amelia Earhart.

As anyone who has seen Vanity Fair or The Namesake can attest director Mira Nair has a stunning ability to make a potentially interesting subject as boring as watching paint dry and here she wants to have her cake and eat it as the film tries both to tell us about Earhart whhile simultaneously assuming we already know her whole story. Though i'd be willing to bet that your average person - even Americans - know she was the first woman to fly across the Atlantic single-handed and the manor in which she died, and that's about it.

The film lacks any real sense of purpose. It seems to want us to see Amelia as a great pioneer, and that's fine i guess, but isn't she already kind of seen that way? That's Amelia the myth. If you're doing a biopic you look behind the myth, you show the woman at the heart of the story - the person noone knew. The problem here is either that Earhart just wasn't all that interesting beyond the legend or that Swank (who serving as a producer clearly we have to thank for what feels like a classic vanity project) and Nair were simply unwilling to tarnish their subject in even the most benign way. Probably a bit of both. Certainly the filmmakers must be to blame for only half-heartedly covering her affair and couching the heartlessness with with she treats Richard Gere's character. The affair feels thrown in out of a necessity not to be accused of avoiding any negative angles but is more implied than stated and then brushed over before it even seems to have started.

Swank shows none of the subtlety she excelled at in Boy's Don't Cry and Million Dollar Baby and instead brings the overplaying version of herself seen in films like The Black Dahlia. Could she be turning into Al Pacino? You do spend half of Amelia expecting her to cry "Hoo-haa!" and it wouldn't seem out of place.

Ewan McGregor is terribly miscast as Gene (?) Vidal (father of Gore - an overplayed aside) and Christopher Eccleston is wasted as Earhart's alcoholic navigator on her ill-fated round-the-world voyage.

Gere fares slightly better though. He is an actor people love to hate but i frequently find myself liking him and he is the best part of this, but not enough to make it a worthwhile watch.

Overall there is nothing here to engage an audience looking for anything other than hero worship and that it just a waste of everybody's time.

Latest screening: A Christmas Carol

Firstly kudos to the whomever designed this German poster (left) for the new Robert Zemeckis film, far better than the overly cartoonish ones we have in the UK.

Okay, first up i'm going to tackle the style before i tackle the film because the style is the film these days for Robert Zemeckis. I have never made any secret of the fact i hate Zemeckis' style of motion capture animation with its dead eyes and waxen skin. It's ugly, unrealistic and unpleasant to watch.

Now mo-cap can be used brilliantly, especially when placing a single mo-cap character into a more substantive world - Gollum in Lord Of The Rings or King Kong for example - but in each of Zemeckis' all mo-cap films (The Polar Express, Beowulf and now this) the style simply doesn't work. The characters have no weight for starters. A man walking, a dog running, a horse galloping - none look like they are subject to the laws of gravity in these films; like they are floating just above the surface.

On most characters, where Zemeckis has tried to achieve a "realistic" look (the kids in Polar Express, the humans in Beowulf, Fred (Colin Firth), Bob Cratchit (Gary Oldman), Fezziwig (Bob Hoskins) etc in A Christmas Carol) the facial features are awkward and waxen with eyes that show no light, no soul. It is like the living dead. Perhaps Zemeckis should team with George Romero on the next Living Dead film, because he certainly has found the right technology for it!

Curiously though A Christmas Carol does feature the first instances of Zemeckis getting it right, achieving characters that work in the mo-cap and don't look like horror film rejects, and this is because in these two instances he hasn't gone for a "realistic" human look but played up the cartoonish quality of each character - namely Scrooge (Jim Carrey) and Marley (Gary Oldman). Even the eyes work for Scrooge, which is a marvel and makes you wonder why Zemeckis and his team can't spot the difference and didn't strive to achieve with the other characters (or least the other lead characters) what they did with Ebenezer. The eyes are still glazed on Marley but as a ghost it works for him. Both faces are very exaggerated and cartoony and somehow fit more naturally to the form than other attempts.

The film itself is patchy. Carrey as Scrooge (baring more than a passing resemblance to his character in Lemony Snicket's A Series Of Unfortunate Events) is fantastic. He hams up the right amount to overplay the character in the manner Dickens wrote it and yet is believable both as the vicious, mean-spirited Scrooge we are introduced to and the frightened, humbled Scrooge we get along the way. Many film and theatre Scrooges (and i've seen many on film and in the theatre, as well as reading the book every year) fail to convince somewhere along the line - after all Scrooge does go through major character transformations through what is a short story set over a very short period of time. Carrey should be commended here and for once (for the first time) he isn't let down by the rendering into Zemeckis' animation.

The ghosts are sadly less successful. There is a nice, and slightly different from the common form, take on the Ghost of Christmas Future, but Carrey plays the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present with, respectively, a bizarre Irish lilt and a kind-of Liverpudlian tinge that makes the latter sound like the Ghost of Christmas Beatles!

Oldman is let down by the rendering of Bob Cratchit (and hiderous man-child Tiny Tim!) but does his best. He is great as Marley's Ghost though and again, for once, the style doesn't interfere.

Firth's Fred, Scrooge's nephew, is terrible on every level. He looks awful for a start. This may be the worst rendered character in one of these Zemeckis films - with the possible exception of Steven Tyler's elf in Polar Express! But Firth doesn't help matters. Tonally he is all off. His reading often comes off as angry or irritated when Fred, as Dickens wrote him, is unassailable in his joviality when dealing with Scrooge. He is the beacon of light. In this version you can frankly see why Scrooge wouldn't want to spend Christmas with him and that's just all wrong! In his jovial moments he also doesn't sound jolly so much as slightly tipsy speaking with a frantic squeak that sounds bizarre. A terrible piece of bad casting.

Hoskins is fine for Fezziwig but is again let down by the animation.

For the most part the story is fairly close to the book, excising a few moments but actually featuring elements that rarely make it into film adaptations - most notably the presence of the child-incarnations of want and ignorance that dwell beneath the cloak of the Ghost of Christmas Past. I'm not sure i can recall them ever making it off the page before.

Unfortunately there are a couple of poor choices. A completely unnecessary spectral-horse action sequence to add "a bit of excitement" for the ADD youth of today is a real shame and the changing of one of the books most famous lines is unforgivable (at least he didn't change the "God bless us, everyone").

Much of the film works and the shame, as always with this type of animation - and especially given that Carrey's look here is so similar to what has been achieved with make-up before - it that Zemeckis continues to insist to making his films with motion-capture technology rather than making a proper film. Zemeckis once made great films like Back To The Future, Romancing The Stone, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? and I believe that The Polar Express and his A Christmas Carol might have stood a chance to being up near those greats it he'd made them as real films. The mo-cap just isn't working Bob, give it up. Please.

Latest screening: Taking Woodstock

Some have argued that Taking Woodstock seems a strange film for Ang Lee to take on. I don't prescribe to this view. How a man that has made a period action epic like Crouching Toger Hidden Dragon, a politically-charged 70s-set family saga like The Ice Storm, a western like Ride With The Devil, a ground-breaking same sex love story in Brokeback Mountain and a comic-book superhero movie in Hulk can be said to have a "type" of film that he makes is beyond me. One thing you can't do is pigeon-hole Ang Lee.

That said, it doesn't mean that every film works and here he comes unstuck. Taking Woodstock is not a bad film, indeed, had it not been made by Lee reviews would no doubt be kinder, but it is very much a film of two halves.

The film starts well and the set up is well handled. Here we have a frustratingly quiet town for prpotagonist Elliot, who wants to be a good son to his domineering mother and put-upon father, but longs, silently, to escape. He sees a chance to help his parents get out from under financial problems and free himself in the process when an opportunity comes his way to use a license he has to host a musical festival (which traditionally consists of his playing records on his lawn) to attract an adrift massive music festival to his town.

So far so good and for about an hour things are ticking along nicely. Elliot and the other characters are well set up and believable, with the possible exception of Emile Hirsch who simply doesn't convince the viewer that he has seen real combat - a problem since his character is a disturbed soldier, recently returned from Vietnam.

The early scenes have a wealth of humour, from a town-council meeting that is gently mocking of small town bureaucrats; to the overwhelming cheapness of Elliot's mum (a brilliant Imelda Staunton); to the arrival of cross-dresser Liev Schreiber looking for a security job; and the general escalation of the festival.

Small turns from the likes of Eugene Levy and Jeffrey Dean Morgan provide real characters despite little screen time, but Lee establishes the world with his usual skill and eye for character and observational humour.

Unfortunately he then abandons it all as the film loses its way wallowing in the experiences common to a coming-of-age film and expected in a film set in this era - as Elliot discovers his sexuality, drugs and an independence he hadn't sought. The problem here is that's the end of the story. Threads about towns folk unhappy with millions of teenagers descending on the town, local muscle men looking for a slice of the pie, his mother's secret, selfish hoard, etc are all abandoned and character development goes out the window. Early established characters like Eugene Levy's farmer and Jeffrey Dean Morgan's straight-laced but concerned brother to Hirsch's Billy completely disappear.

If the film were truly giving a sense of his experiences perhaps this could be forgiven, but it doesn't. Lee is too shy - perhaps after the criticism he got in some circles for the graphic imagery of Lust, Caution - to show a lot of the inferred events unfold and others, such as his parents experiencing the effects a hash brownies, are played too briefly purely for the comic effect and to remind us (or maybe Lee) that there are actually others characters in this world.

And then it kind of peters out!

It leaves you wondering why the set-up if its all going to be abandoned down the road. Either you are making a film about Elliot's experiences or a larger canvas, but this appears to start as one and becomes another. And unfortunately the second part, the experiences, are neither terribly original, revelatory or interesting. Watching someone else get high on film is like watching someone play a computer game - if you're not doing it yourself it's lost in translation!

A disappointing film, but one that does offer some entertaining humour in the first hour and a dynamite supporting performance from Staunton that will no doubt be lost in the general inanity of the film. Shame.

Latest screening: Whatever Works

I so wanted to like Whatever Works, a comedy that combines the great Woody Allen with the ascerbic genius of Larry David. Throw in Evan Rachel Wood (so great in last year's The Wrestler) and the ever brilliant Patricia Clarkson and surely we have lightning in a bottle? No?! Ah, well, but then maybe expectations were part of the problem.

I didn't dislike Whatever Works. It was no disaster like Cassandra's Dream or even a generally bad but occasionally amusing one like Curse Of The Jade Scorpion or Hollywood Ending. But it also wasn't reeeeeaaaaalllyy funny.

After Vicky Cristina Barcelona, which had me laughing like a drain throughout, i had high hopes for a comedy combining Allen's humour with David's personality. But unfortunately Whatever Works runs along constantly raising a smile but rarely gaining a full-on laugh. It is amusing and likeable but that's all - playing a bit like Anything Else. Of Allen's comedy output over the past decade i would place it behind Melinda & Melinda on a rough par with Small Time Crooks, but maybe not quite as good even as that. Better than Scoop.

This is a shame because David does work as a Woody substitute. In fact, he may be the best Woody substitute in that David has such a distinctive creative voice of his own that he is the first to truly have no trace of Woody in his portrayal. An impressive feat in itself. That said, he isn't really an actor. While the role of Larry David he plays on Curb Your Enthusiasm is an exaggeration, a perfect version of what he wishes he could be and do it has set up an idea of what Larry David is. Here he is playing a different character but it is a slightly more pathetic and needy version of the same Larry we know, and therefore other characters referring to him as Boris just never sounds or seems right. He is not playing a character, he's being Larry David in a Woody Allen film. This might have worked in a brilliantly post-modern way if somehow Woody and Larry had collaborated to make the exact story of Whatever Works with just a few minor tweaks at the beginning into a Curb Movie spin-off.

Evan Rachel Wood is endearingly oddball but never has much to do given her screentime. Clarkson makes an impact as best she can and Ed Begley Jr is dynamite in a briefish role but this is Larry's show. It's more about a single central character than any film Allen has made that he didn't star in.

Perhaps when revisited without the expectations i'll enjoy it more but i was disappointed. Not a disaster by any means but sadly just not really that funny given the talent involved.

Behold The A-Team

And damn if Liam Neeson doesn't look damn spot on as Hannibal!