Amphetamine

Once upon a time there was a Mainland-born Hong Kong-raised Chinese-Australian who called himself Scud. On his return to Hong Kong, as a bought-out IT company founder with lots of cash, he decided to make a movie trilogy, as any egocentric with sufficient funds might think of doing.

Scud made a docu-fable about Hong Kong's almost invisible baseball team. He called it City Without Baseball, which Hong Kong is, and got many of the team's members to frolic and assume revelatory positions in the nude. Maybe they asked him to make a pretty film about their frolicking. Whatever, it was technically highly proficient, surely because writer-producer and self-proclaimed director Scud had the nous to get an experienced film-maker, Lawrence Lau, to enact his directorial ideas. Lots of smooth Chinese skin, discreet strokes, skinny dipping, lustful stares, side glances, intense embraces and conversations fraught with angst.

Scud's second script seemed much more personal, featuring an affluent bilingual gay returnee from Australia who falls in love with a neurotic hunk of Hong Kong handsomeness who's a straight with subconscious gay leanings. The frustrated central character is an IT whiz who has had some sort of affair with an Arab Israeli, has a gorgeous apartment with a rooftop gym and, what a coincidence, has made a film about Hong Kong baseball. As far as soft-porn gay movies go, Permanent Residence went quite far with its in-your-face nude scenes, admirable homosexual characters and first-class technical qualities.

Although the film's plot was overly complicated, melodramatic and over-romanticised, it was attractively OTT. Less acceptably, its ending was a morbid anti-climax in which the object of affection chose to solve his personality issues by riding his motorbike off the end of a pier in Surfers Paradise.

Scud clearly identified with the plot, as he's reprised it for his third movie, Amphetamine. This time, there's a returnee from Oz (Daniel, played by somewhat wooden Tom Price) who's a finance industry whiz kid constantly asserting that everything in life is a piece of cake. He meets a straightish drug-habituated swimming instructor called Kafka (yep, we are told a gweilo named him that) who's been raped by a trio of gangsters in a tunnel. Love and lust blossom for Daniel, but Kafka plays hard to get.

Of course, audiences aren't allowed to see how hard he (or anyone else in the movie) actually played, because Scud wanted to be sure that his soft-porn movie could be released with a Category III rating. The lead actors play soft, though Daniel is noticeably more reticent about full-frontal nudity than Kafka until their underwater scene at the end of the movie.

Fans of Scud will not be surprised that Kafka also notes that he'd appeared as a model in the photo book of a film that had been called something like Permanent Residence, but hadn't been in it. In reality, Byron Pang is a competent screen actor, small and almost perfectly formed. His character's three changes of hair-style display varying images of Hong Kong cuteness and may be designed to depict Kafka's progression from adult-looking facial-haired cynicism to short-cut juvenile dreaming.

Has Scud himself progessed? Yes, and no. The irrelevant overseas location work (Bangkok, the Dead Sea and Queensland) added nothing to Permanent Residence; this time the only non-Hong Kong setting is a mainland police station. Otherwise, there are many deja vu plot details, another party scene in which Scud can flaunt his lead character's wealth of possessions and loving colleagues, and, unforgivably, another morbid ending. Symbolism runs rampant again, most risibly in the bird's nest Kafka constructs on high, on a high.

Hong Kong viewers may be perturbed by one guest appearance. Anyone who's known of Paul Fonoroff as a knowledgeable Mandarin-speaking veteran American movie reviewer will cringe at his appearance as a rich swimming-pool customer seeking satisfaction from Kafka and grinning gleefully at being allowed to pay a fortune for very little.

Scud's playfulness (some might say, immaturity) is paraded in the opening titles. Who'd have thought of noticing that Amphetamine (our heroes' drug of choice) includes the words Am, He and Mine?

Citizen Ruth

Alexander Payne left calling cards on the indie movie circuit in 1996 with his debut movie, Citizen Ruth. The satirical overview of the abortion argument looked at each side with a blend of good-natured affection and cynicism, leaving the audience to cheer or despise the pregnant woman in the middle.

Her role is a tough acting burden for Laura Dern. Her character has to seem dim-witted, irresponsible, egocentric, incurably amoral and addicted to "huffing" chemicals, swigging booze and unplanned pregnancies (five of them). That's a tall order for an actress whose eyes and body language can't help being clear beacons of sharp intelligence.

Her supporting cast are an amusing collection of stereotypical pro-lifers ("Baby Savers") and pro-choicers held apart by the supposedly objective legal system. None of them over-emote and I suspect Christopher Guest would have let them do so to greater effect. Some cameo appearances add well-coiffed old-star names and little extra quality -- Burt Reynolds plays the suave politico running the anti-abortion team and Tippi Hendren arrives on the abortionists' scene in a helicopter.

Greek-American Payne progressed to greater glory and fortune with Election, Chuck and Larry, and Oscar-winning Sideways. Citizen Ruth was a good starting point for him. It's neither laugh-out-loud comical nor bitingly satirical, just a tale of an unpleasant woman who never has an admirable adult thought.

44 inch chest

If nothing else ensures the memorability of 44 Inch Chest, it will be its world-record usage of the word "cunt". It romped home ahead of "fuck".

Many Londoners, not just Cockneys, who were raised on the wrong side of the tracks, or need to convince their world that they were, love the cunt as a noun, adjective, sound and symbol. It's crude and guttural, a worthy word to describe supposedly macho males' attitude towards women.

It's the film's dominant linguistic gift to the quintet of top-flight Brit movie actors who play a gang of ageing London mates. Four of them have gathered in a boarded-up house to provide solace for poor old Colin, whose wife has fallen in love and bed with another man. Worse yet, he's just a waiter and he's French. So they've grabbed him, popped him in a wardrobe, and are discussing Colin's shattered ego, the wife's sin and the lover's imminent murder.

The plot potential shines. This could have been an edge-of-the-seat study of murderous foul-mouthed oddball gangster types, a la Mamet, Pinter or Tarentino. Moments of black comedy suggest the two screenwriters may have been influenced by Joe Orton too. Sadly, their best model should have been their own nastily clever Sexy Beast.

Ben Kingsley's psychopathic gangster made that menacing movie unforgettable. That time around, Ray Winstone was the good-hearted Costa Brava retiree trying to pull wool over the eyes of an evil godfather in London (Ian McShane). This time, Winstone is the central figure of manic emotions and McShane is a smarmy macho homosexual. Alongside them, John Hurt channels the ghost of Wilfred Brambell's Steptoe father, chewing the scenery as a bigoted old-timer with ill-fitting dentures. Stephen Dillane snarls viperishly as another pal, and the assembly of stereotypical characters is completed by Tom Wilkinson, who cares for his mum and nurses Colin's rage.

Unfortunately, Colin isn't credible either as a mentally-disturbed grieving husband (suffering from an overdose of flashback scenes with Joanne Whalley) or as a presumed leading gang figure. His character fluctuates from apoplexy to tears, from simple-mindedness to semi-philosophical self-doubt. Bearded and hollow-eyed, Winstone does his best for a very talkative movie that should have been a stage play.

The lead roles, and a cameo for arch-scene-stealer Stephen Berkoff, provide a sound-and-fury pageant of melodramatic acting techniques. They may not signify much as a drama, social study or commentary on male chauvinism, but the actors, their accents, eye-rolling and cuntly cusses are fun to behold and be heard.

Echoes of the rainbow

Good directors never let us know how manipulative they've been. Less good directors make it glaringly obvious that their scripts, casting, camera angles, music, editing, and all other tricks of the movie trade were designed to draw tears and cheers from audiences. Their movies are the cinematic equivalent of being force-fed an overdose of sugar.

When such a movie wins awards, I worry about the judges' capability to be objective observers of movie-makers. Echoes of the Rainbow, a 2009 Hong Kong movie, won the, take a breath ... Crystal Bear for Best Film in the Children's Jury "Generation Kplus" Category at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival. A cynic might suspect that it had little competition, or that the rest of the global movie industry didn't send any crates of sugar to Berlin, or that the Jury was indeed composed of children -- who merrily identified with the impertinent, inquisitive and thieving character of the younger son.

He lives in an urban community's back street, supposedly in Kowloon's Sham Shui Po but filmed on location in Hong Kong's only suitable surviving 1960s-style block, the Island's Wing Lee Street. It's a row of scruffy three-storey shop-houses that was scheduled to be redeveloped by Hong Kong's official Urban Renewal Authority.

Screenwriter and director Alex Law Kai-yui reportedly wanted to create a tribute to his older brother and hard-working parents. It is unimportant whether there was a grouchy soft-centred father who ran a shoe-making shop in the 1960s and if Laws's brother was a handsome musically-gifted prize student and champion athlete at the prestigious Diocesan Boys School.

Was his mother actually a broom-wielding soft-centred lady who wore neat make-up and cotton trouser suits? Did the brother develop a loving friendship with a super-rich girl who lived in a hillside mansion? Is the whole movie a fantasy?

Naturally. Only a movie family could experience so many attractive disasters and cliched situations (class differences, colonial-era corruption, typhoon, honourable Peking doctors, terminal leukemia, etc) in a collage of hackneyed movie settings (rain, blood-stained snow, stone corridors, running tracks, aquaria, frosted glass etc). Only a movie mother could name her new shoes Hard Times and Good Times, because one always follows the other, doesn't it? Aaah, you may sigh, but the plot gets stuffed even more a la pate de movie gras.

The quartet of lead actors do wonders with stilted dialogue and 1960s-style affectations. Simon Yam and Sandra Ng are admirable parental role models with hearts of gold, and each of them restrains their normal scenery-chewing personas. The first-timer child actor, Buzz Chung, plays the irritating younger brother well, with charm and fortissimo screams. And the new pop starlet making his screen debut as the older brother is handsomely pensive. Aarif Lee also sings, and co-wrote, the closing song. It's as OTT as the very non-1960s very short shorts which are draped around the tops of Lee's thighs whenever the script makes it decently possible.

Ironies marked this film's unexpected success in Berlin. Although the movie was more than enough of a heritage project in itself for the doomed Wing Lee Street, the Hong Kong Government performed its quickest-ever U-turn and forestalled any public pressure by declaring the lane a protected site of historical interest.

Consequently, the Urban Redevelopment folks must have been very displeased with colleagues in the Hong Kong Government Film Development Fund, which financed the film that frustrated their plans.

Third, several Hong Kong film directors provided guest appearances and may well feel twinges of professional envy that Law's sugary concoction has earned such rewards. Ann Hui shines as usual in her cameo, fleshing out the role of the school teacher scolding the mischievous boy.

Will the movie triumph at the next Hong Kong Film Awards? For the actors, probably. For Alex Law, it shouldn't. His basic plot was filmed, more sincerely and credibly, three decades ago in Allen Fong's first feature, Father & Son. That was part of the Hong Kong New Wave. It waved goodbye long ago. In the 21st Century, the local Film Fund should be financing innovativeness, not movie mothballs.

Edge of darkness

Although Edge of Darkness isn't on a par with Chinatown and other classic mystery thrillers, it's a gripping conspiracy tale focused on nuclear research, corporate intrigue and political activism. No big surprise there, but there may be one or two too many twists for some moviegoers to accept. Even so, the ending's as neatly tied up as a mummy's tomb.

There are interesting twists too in the movie's own story. First of all, it was a five-part BBC TV serial in 1985. Its screenplay and direction picked up BAFTA and other TV awards, and it remains one of the critics' all-time favourite TV dramas. Written by one of Britain's smartest TV dramatists, the late Troy Kennedy Martin, it was directed by a youngish New Zealander, Martin Campbell. His subsequent movie career included the first James Bond outings for both Pierce Brosnan and Daniel Craig, as well as the pair of Zorros.

Compressing its convoluted plot into less than 100 minutes for the remake must have seemed a mission impossible when Campbell was offered the chance to remake his movie. Much easier was casting the vengeful policeman whose daughter is assassinated in front of him. Mel Gibson has long personified anger and vengeance, from Mad Max to Braveheart and almost every other movie he's made. He could have been a contender to be Clint Eastwood's successor. In Edge of Darkness, he looks his age, acts it and is very credible.

His character needs to be, because elaborate plot lines, red herrings and twists are complicating his life menacingly. Danny Huston is once again the mesmerisingly hateful manifestation of menace. Another customary face of murderous intentions is Ray Winstone.

By a twist of the scenario to suit its Americanisation (from Yorkshire to Boston), Winstone plays his typically pugnacious role as a Cockney fixer. In the original drama, the outsider was an American agent (Joe Don Baker). Winstone and Gibson could become a strong double act, but not in any sequel for this movie, not unless they are transformed into avenging ghosts.

Clash of the titans

... ay, there's the question? Should the remake of Clash of the Titans have not been 3-Ded? The professional movie critics monitored by Rotten Tomatoes didn't think much of the end product, which garnered just 50 positive reviews and a resultant 31% rating. Maybe they should have seen it in 2D as well, to better appreciate what the production company had originally set out to achieve.

Their goal was big box-office sales built on word-of-mouth favour for big-screen special effects. That's what it should earn, because that's what most moviegoers want to see. The director, Louis Leterrier, gained cred for reviving The Incredible Hulk. He re-hired some of its technical talents and employed other SFX aces who'd worked on The Dark Knight.

Then he and Warner Brothers collated an international cast of acting talents. A few of them are now in danger of being typecast. Ralph Fiennes glares Voldemortally as Hades, while his brother, Zeus, is Aslan reincarnate (Liam Neeson). His son, Perseus, aka Sam Worthington, sprang sideways from Terminator Salvation en route to Avatar, only knowing that he was playing a different part because he was allowed to use his real Australian voice. The casting team had obviously seen the latest two Bond capers, and chose Io and Draco accordingly. Peter Postlethwaite is already fully typecast as the ancient mariner of Hollywood.

What about the story? You've already had enough clues, even if you've never seen the 1980s original movie that many critics preferred. I hadn't and gained a reminder of the ways in which Tolkien, JK Rowling, George Lucas, James Cameron etc concocted their multi-part fantasies. They'd raided Greek mythology. If proof were needed, this movie confirms it : the ancient Greeks didn't just have a word for everything, they'd also invented every Hollywood adventure epic plot line.

The Christian rightists may be getting alarmed. This week, they've already had to hear dragon-fighters invoking the names of Thor and Odin. Now they've got a Strine-accented Greek fisherman's son saving mankind by abjuring all the gods even though he's the bastard Son of the top dog. Gee, what blasphemies will Hollywood think up next week?

The movie's fun to watch, with fast-paced music, editing and sound effects creating cineplex fun. Io's explanatory introduction, which needed defter scripting, does slow down the opening, some of the dialogue is bathetic, there's probably not enough gore for the younger male market, and there's no sexual action. So this is Christian family fun for Easter and beyond, and the negro market will be delighted by the colour of Pegasus, who's the most beautiful horse Hollywood's ever special-effected.

Invictus

Invictus. How on Earth is a title like that expected to sell cinema seats? Why would movie producers ever think that an unrevealing Latin word would attract moviegoers to a true-life tale of a foreign country's black president and its white folks' national sport? Such a tale would need a lot of marketing help and Invictus sure ain't, is it?

I'd like to ask Morgan Freeman and Clint Eastwood. They were two of the movie's co-producers, Eastwood also directing it and Freeman starring as South Africa's President Nelson Mandela. Matt Damon co-stars as the Springboks' captain, leading his country to unexpected victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup.

The movie's based on a book, Fighting for the Enemy, and that looks a lot better on a billboard. As four other movies were using the word Fighting in their title in 2009, maybe Eastwood's team had no choice. They had to find another title but, hey why that one?

The good news is the constant quality of the body of work two very-old-timers are producing together. Freeman's impersonation of Mandela is close to perfect, lacking only the width of the president's grin. An Oscar nominee, did he deserve the award more than Jeff Bridges? Yes.

Did Eastwood deserve another Best Director nomination? No. Although it's a typically craftsman-like work of cinema from the grand old man of Hollywood, it's overlong, its script is too cliched and its repetitive juxtaposition of black and white extras and settings strain an audience's tolerance of PC-ness. Its ears ache too, after too many sound effects of rugby players scrumming, thumping and grunting.

Freeman, Damon and other non-South African actors (if there were any) assume convincing accents. The sporting recreations are convincing, though I must have dozed off if there was any explanation why this version of rugby didn't have touchdowns, only high kicks. The inter-racial animosity turns into camaraderie almost convincingly, some of the time. Most of the time, though, Eastwood and the script come too close to parodying the saintly reconciliation-seeking goals of Mandela.

Hachiko

Hachiko was a real-life Akita who belonged to a professor in Tokyo in the 1930s. When his master died suddenly, the dog spent the rest of its life -- seven years -- faithfully returning to the local railway station (Shibuya) every day to await its master's homecoming from work. Its canine loyalty, some might say pigheadness, is commemorated by a statue at the station.

I've seen a similar statue at Simonstown station in South Africa, and in Discovery Bay a neighbour's massive hound could be seen every weekday waiting on a slope above a bus stop. Like Hachiko, it also knew instinctively what time of day it should turn up, report for duty, show obeisance to the alpha animal or whatever primeval thought process it followed.

A movie about the dog was made in Japan in 1987 (Hachiko Monogatari). It was sentimental and tear-tugging. When Richard Gere decided to re-make it as Hachiko : A Dog's Story, starring himself as the dog-owning professor, he understandably Americanised the location. Inexplicably though, by having the young Hachi (meaning the lucky number of eight) shipped from a Japanese temple to a New England address that doesn't notice its non-arrival.

Showing his own version of Hollywood loyalty, Gere retained the Swedish director, Lasse Hallstrom, who'd worked with him on The Hoax, a critically-acclaimed film and box-office disaster. (Immature movie critics would want to remind readers that Gere could hardly pass over a director almost called Lassie whose breakthrough feature was My Life As A Dog, but I'm too mature to do that outside parentheses.)

Surprisingly, Gere kept the dog's breed. He should have known better, as he's worked in Japan and surely knows his shiatsus from his chihuahuas.

Akitas, the movie's simplistic script tells us, are mankind's longest-serving canine friend, for 4,000 years. It doesn't take that long for Gere's cuddly plump brown-haired puppy, found lost at the commuting professor's local station, to be happily accepted by the professor's wife (Joan Allen) and daughter. With a quick cut, the movie time-jumps the puppy into a fully-formed mostly white-haired dog whose ancient origins clearly lie in a handsome wolf pack.

There is one major problem for movie-makers working with an Akita in the lead role. The dog breed is as close to expressionless as man's best friend can be. This may have been totally acceptable in Japan, where a hero is supposed to be inscrutable, loyal unto death, and never distracted from his goals, even by a frisky female poodle.

Other than licking, staring intensely and looking handsome, Hachi doesn't do much to justify a 90-minute movie. (Parenthetically, an immature critic would note that this is also a dog that never does Number Ones or Twos, rubs against visitors, chases cats or causes human allergies. Okay, this is a fable about love, but touches of canine reality might have enriched it.) The one novelty is seeing scenes from the dog's viewpoint, which is apparently virtually monochrome, but the device doesn't increase perceptions of the dog's thoughts.

Hachi's crucial dramatic scene is the day it senses its master will die. Thus, believe it or not, which I found hard to do, it decides to bring a ball to him for the first time in order to try to keep him at home. Hachi is a deadpan character, but the human cameos stuck in the railway station and the professor's life are even less credible caricatures.

Even harder to believe is the apparent commercial nous of Gere's distributors in the USA. They haven't screened the movie publicly. It opened in Europe, and got a pun-ishing licking from the critics in London.

Road

In the supposedly good old 20th-century days of Bob Hope and Hollywood studio productions, "Road" movies either co-starred Bing Crosby or featured a couple of stars going somewhere together romantic-comically, usually in a car across the States. Such positive escapist fare is more than a century away from The Road, a grim grey-and-brown adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel. Welcome to another movie dish of negative escapism.

The world, ie the USA, is suffering the aftermath of an unexplained natural disaster. All animals are extinct, crops cannot grow, trees collapse and the few human survivors seek sanctuary from "bad guys" who became cannibal gangs.

It isn't explained either why Charlize Theron left her husband (Viggo Mortensen) and young son and walked off into the night to die, in one of the movie's more brightly lit flashbacks. The newcomer who plays the boy is good and either he or Theron were cast because his facial looks resembled hers (or vice versa).

Superb cinematography (wide-angle long shots galorious) and credibly devastated landscapes and urban scenery (courtesy of CGI) depict a harsh, desolate world in which a solitary father treks from one disaster area to the next to protect his boy and train him for a future death.

Morbid? Miserable? Yes, and many other M words in the book, including memorable. There's rarely an excess frame in the tightly-edited tale that's a noir thriller. Its Australian director, John Hillcoat, began his career at home in 2006 with The Proposition, another thriller in an unexpected setting. That 19th-century colonial epic starred Guy Pearce, who loyally supports Hillcoat with a small cameo at the end of his second movie.

Robert Duvall also contributes one of the cameos designed to illustrate the conflicted, paranoid character of Mortensen's father figure. His constant urging of his son to be on the hopeful look-out for "good guys" is revealed in a bitter new light in Pearce's movie-ending deus-ex-machina appearance. How will the boy know that he's ended up with "good guys"? Look out for the dog. There's a depressing final twist in its tale.

Yes, it was obviously an artfully constructed novel, as is the movie. Mortensen and the boy actor make it credible. But, why oh why, do film producers feel obliged to maintain book titles that do not help attract potential movie audiences?

Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

Terry Gilliam is a disturbingly imaginative film director, a true auteur. Yet I often feel that his movies need a brusque old-style studio chief to holler "Cut", "Explain" and "Don't be too daft". After doing his very own cartoon thing on Monty Python's Flying Circus TV series in the UK, Gilliam became a British citizen and sometimes flew back to the States to try and make his mark and find movie production funds there.

It matters not a jot to its audience whether a movie has been funded in Dubai or Brussels, filmed on location in Canada or Morocco, sound-recorded in Hungary and had its sets built in East London or a CGI laboratory. With highly individual directors such as Gilliam, a few minutes into the film an audience knows exactly how and where it was made. Inside the writer-director's imagination.

It's therefore tempting to see The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus as partly autobiographical in its elaborate fantasy about an ageing showman's gamble with the unageing Devil (Tom Waits, who appeared in The Fisher King). Every Gilliam feature, from Brazil to The Fisher King, The Brothers Grimm to Time Bandits, Twelve Monkeys to Baron Munchausen, is a fantasy illustrated through hallucinatory scenes and cinematic magic. This time, the central character, played with serene melancholy by Christopher (12 Monkeys) Plummer, trundles around London with a ragtag troupe of young and weird assistants in a horse-drawn fairground wagon.

Good actors clearly love to work for and with Gilliam. Three of them stepped into the breach left by the death of the movie's top star, Heath (Brothers Grimm) Ledger. His character is a happy-go-lucky conman seeking answers behind the magician's secret mirror into other worlds. That device enables Johnny (Don Quixote) Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law to assume differing aspects of Ledger's character. Each of them performs well, fitting merrily into cameos set amid Gilliam's wildly technicolored animations of dreamlands.

Junior actors and extras also have good reasons to feel Gilliam is a special auteur. His movies provide memorable small, often comic, roles, this time including lustful shoppers, Russian mafiosi and other figments of blackly comic imagination.

The title of the movie is yet another marketing calamity, and I don't care if there really was a famous written tale that Gilliam transformed into his cinematic reality. The title should have changed, and that might have changed Gilliam's latest run of bad luck at the box office. Might have; there are too many moments, some very long, when cineplex audiences will scratch their collective head, fidget on their collective bum, and have no idea that movie audiences expected to be stoned back in Gilliam's youth.

Twilight saga: new moon

It is too much to hope that The Twilight Saga might die a natural death soon. Alas, vampires and werewolves do not die. They are such very unhappy creatures, doomed to an endless eternity of red-irised eyes, gnashing teeth, vacant expressions and mercurial tempers.

Perhaps theirs is also the state of mind that afflicts teenagers and middle-aged teenagers-at-heart. But can that alone explain the phenomenal success of the book series that inspired the even more successful movies? The saga's second installment (2009), New Moon, has grossed US$300 million at the North American box office alone, its opening day's take broke all previous records, and its is the least expensive production to ever earn more than US$200 million.

It seemed fair, having ignored the debut movie, to see what all the fuss is about. As suspected, nothing much. It's a chick flick with enough violence to keep guys amused while they hold their chicks' hands over the popcorn bins.

A mediocre 20-year-old actress who looks 30-something is supposed to be 18 (Kristen Panic Room Stewart). She is moping mournfully because she'd apparently been abandoned by her first movie's vampire lover, a deadpan youngish (born 1986) British actor (Robert Pattinson). He first came to female moviegoers' attention in the Harry Potter films, in which his Cedric was an awfully nice prefect who was killed off.

For his second Twilight outing, Pattinson looks close to death, very ill and well over 30-something, and is shown to have lousy taste in red lipstick and skin whitener. He's getting chubby too. But Bella, the maternal sister-figure, still loves him. Until one of the best-developed 17-year-old bodies in the history of Hollywood reappears beside her. Do teenagers care if former child actor-cum-martial artist Taylor Lautner couldn't upgrade his unprepossessing face?

He rarely wears a shirt, sports the waistband of his one pair of blue undies, and is, naturally, a werewolf, the dreadful foe of vampires. He has a quartet of tribal blood brothers, none of whom matches his physical development although their ham acting of ham dialogue does have more vivacity than his.

When they get upset, they turn into excellent CGI representations of snarling werewolves. Less attractively, the vampires can only fly fast and furiously, smashing marble floors with their bare hands. Unfortunately for the stars, some of the vampires are portrayed by really talented actors able to project nasty thoughts even via red irises. The appearance fees must have been handsome for talents such as the UK's Martin Sheen and the US's Dakota Fanning to let casting directors seduce them.

Similar financial inducement must have persuaded Chris Weitz to employ his directorial skills on the woefully wooden script. Weitz did well (with his brother Paul) from creating the American Pie series, can be a credible actor (Chuck and Buck) and has retrieved his Hollywood cred after directing the Golden Compass flop. His New Moon has pleasant aerial shots, its SFX are top-notch, and he was probably ordered to stretch the slim plot into 121 minutes of popcorn sales.

A third director is at work on the third movie installment, Eclipse. All three former child-actor stars return. Everybody's earning lots of money. And lots of chicks will be happy again, pecking at their popcorn, dreaming of being ravished by a wolf with sharp teeth.

How to train your dragon

Once upon a time in the movie industry, boy met girl, lost her, met her again, and rode off into the sunset and end credits with her, unless he was a very lonesome cowboy. Nowadays, in the wonderful new era of CGI animation, boy meets a lovably ugly creature, rides it into a 3D sequel, and collects a girl on the way.

Sometimes, role reversal is allowed. A princess meets Shrek and a hula girl encounters Stich. Dreamworks and Disney, respectively, made them and specialise in sentimental tales with a higher saccharine level than pioneering Pixar, which mastered the higher art of drawing many levels into cartoon craftsmanship. It blends slightly bitter molasses, adult-friendly wit and child-unfriendly pensive spells in its products.

Dreamworks is showing new signs of trying to catch up with Pixar's multi-dimensional leadership. That's a damnation with faint praise. In my cineplex viewing of the dragon movie, children sometimes yawned and stretched their arms in imitation of what they see Daddy do every time they force him to watch Teletubbies with them. These reactions usually accompanied scenes where the nerdish Viking boy-hero and his very macho girlfriend are surrounded by gorgeously coloured skyscapes, marine scenery and jungle settings.

Much of How To Train Your Dragon looks like a trial run for Avatar. With a weaker plot and characterisations. This time, the destructive baddies are not bad, because the variety of dragons and their Viking enemies are actually all good guys, and all the adorably same inside except for a mega-dragon who lives in a secret island. Our young American-voiced nerd is, naturally, a latent pacifist who discovers uncanny abilities to befriend and train all dragons.

His dad is the burly blustery Viking chieftain, who will learn to love his misfit son, of course. The boy's best pal will be a wounded dragon, Toothless, for whom he will craft a tail wing. If thick-lipped Toothless reminds you of Stich, you'll realise they had the same two creative directors.

The audience's salvation, and it warrants big thanks to Dreamworks, is the inability of the dragons to speak any languages other than grunts of empathy and love. This lack of vocal unreality better enables adults to smile at the antics of the cutely ugly flying monsters. Aaaahh! So, it would be churlish to chastise Dreamworks for not providing an end-credits warning for potential visitors to Indonesia's isles of Komodo dragons.

But credits must go where they were designed to be rewarded by Oscar voters next spring. As animations go, Dreamworks has created a delightful tour de force of rich colour schemes, and dazzling images of water and fire, reflections and shadows, clouds and underwater scenes, smoke and emotive eyes. They have been the staples of animators' exhibitionism since Disney's first full-length feature.

CGI and 3D can showcase those traditional benchmarks well, and do this time round. The only obvious laggard in the Dreamworks' stable is the waving in the wind of individual hairs and fur. One other cost-cutting pointer is the movie's voices. Relative unknowns, several (including Craig Ferguson) seem to be real Scottish stand-ins for Scot-accented versions of Mike Myers or Robbie Coltrane pretending to be burly Vikings. One presumes that Scandinavian accents would be even less understood than Scottish ones in Peoria.

Young Victoria

Costumes designer Sandy Powell has eight Oscar nominations so far, and won three times -- most recently (2009) for The Young Victoria. She will never rival the record of Edith Head. It's unlikely that anyone else will collect 35 nominations, including an annual appearance on the lists for 19 consecutive years (1948-66), and win eight times.

That record is surely impregnable because the Academy used to award Best Costume Oscars for both B&W and Color until the end of the 1960s.

Head's physical appearance and loving bossiness seem to have inspired Brad Bird's fabulous design freak in The Incredibles. Powell's latest blase, supremely self-confident Oscar acceptance speech may prompt a similar tribute from Hollywood. A college dropout in London, keener to work (for avant-garde Derek Jarman) than learn, she had already proved herself by winning the award for The Aviator (one of three movies for Scorsese) and Shakespeare in Love.

Her latest award-winning movie outlines the youth of Britain's Queen Victoria, her arranged courtship by Prince Albert and their eventual marriage and early disputes. As played by Emily Blunt, the princess looks, speaks, sounds and wears costumes that are all far too lovely to suggest a disputatious self-assured piece of right royal arrogance.

We see her banish her mother (Miranda Richardson emoting gloriously as ever) and mum's nasty lover-adviser (Mark Strong also emoting attractively). She argues with her prime ministers, puts Albert in his place, and only finally finds her true love for him when he thwarts an attempt on her life. Emily Blunt had a tough task to make such a paragon of wilfulness credibly interesting, and she almost succeeds.

As period pieces go, and they do go on and on in the British movie industry, usually courtesy of the BBC, The Young Victoria is an above-average joy to behold, courtesy of Ms Powell and the movie's cinematography and court scenes.