We're doing the movie round up early today because obviously the Sun is going to devour the Earth sometime around 2pm. Someone should really send a team of scientists up there to sort that fiery thing out.
We try our best to be ahead of the pack and today we can put our feet up and skim read all the reviews of Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle with a very self-satisfied "Oh we saw that ages ago". We hope some of you did too as it was one of our recommendations on multiregional DVD back in March.
We're glad to see Peter Bradshaw in The Guardian following our lead on this one saying "You would have to be very po-faced and hard-hearted not to enjoy this knockabout adventure in surreal fun" Four flying stars there then. The Independent goes down in our estimation for not bothering to review it yet while po-faced, hard-hearted James Christopher over at The Times just doesn't seem to get it:
The result is a ghastly splurge of digital effects. There is none of the formality or rigour of dramas such as House of Flying Daggers. The manners are missing. The film sags with primitive melodrama. It laughs too heartily at its own jokes...
Comparing Kung Fu Hustle to House of Flying Daggers is like comparing Brotherhood of the Wolf to The Umbrellas of Cherbourg. We can't stand that kind of lazy reviewing so we'll add Mr Christopher to our List of Dicks until he learns not to compare two completely different movies to one another simply because they both happen to be subtitled.
Speaking of dicks... Ashton Kutcher is back, like a poorly thought out movie monster you just can't kill. This time out he's in generic 'Rom Com' mode (when we were teenagers we'd just call this kind of drivel 'Finger Flicks' and get it over with). Here's Mr Bradshaw then on A Lot Like Love:
Remove the word "Love" from the title, replace it with "When Harry Met Sally Only Completely Rubbish" and you'll have a pretty good idea
Pete, we were backing away as soon as we saw the word 'Kutcher'. Nothing again from the Indy (did they oversleep?), but Wendy Ide manages two stars - albeit with reservations:
Yet however much damage limitation the script crams in, these are still people who open their mouths to show each other the semi-masticated food inside (as if someone as thin as Peet would ever go near a convenience store pie anyway). So they'll finally get together and have lots of little halfwit children. And not only are we meant to care, we're supposed to celebrate?
Ahh Wendy, we've been saying that celebrities should be sterilised for years.
So what's left? Did the Independent see any films this week or did they just work on their tans? Well Anthony Quinn only saw two films, but still managed to stuff them together on the same page so we'll follow his lead and give you a very quick round up of In My Father's Den and Evil. 3 stars for the former ("the last 20 minutes careen off the road into melodrama") and a slightly better 4 stars for the latter ("Not since Tom Brown was persecuted by Flashman has there been such a torrid tale of school bullying as Mikael Hafstrom's splendid drama Evil"). James Christopher is with Quinn on In My Father's Den but Wendy is so-so over Evil - 3 stars each. The Guardian offers a different view with Bradshaw throwing a single star towards Evil ("the solemn anti-bullying message is undermined by its lip-smacking enthusiasm for face-smashing punch-ups") and only 2 stars for Den "in which touristy panoramas of the landscape are given ponderous emphasis and characters do sensitive things like hold a starfish up to the light and gaze at it"
That's your lot then. Go see Kung Fu Hustle in a nice air conditioned cinema and try not to be too mad at the Americans who get to go and see George Romero's Land of the Dead today. Bastards.
Trailer of the week? The Heart Is Deceitful Above All Things.
