Newcastle Australia

It's summer in 2008 in the city of Newcastle, Australia, the world's largest coal port, and the surf's up on fine sand beaches flanked by massive coal ships and floating dockyards. Luckily, neither shades nor songs of Frankie Avalon or Cliff Richard mar the scene.

Writer-director Dan Castle revisited a genre with major appeal in Australia (and Japan, from which some production funds were obtained): surfing. His major variation on the usual scenario is the inclusion of a happily out gay teenager with purple hair streaks and fingernails, an amused mum and a not-so-accepting step-father.

The boy supplies side-plots through his hots for a tolerant surfing buddy, and his efforts to play the sport that obsesses his two straight older brothers. The oldest is a washed-out past champion, a boozer separated from a wife and kid, now an anti-social port labourer. The middle brother is 17, golden-curled, eager to be a touring pro surfie and subject to moody fits.

Add a trio of close buddies (one rich, one cheekily comic), and two sexy girls who join them all for a weekend beach party, and you've got the expected: a pair of hetero couplings in a tent, an uneventful chat about gay things like star formations, a death at sea, and success for the wannabee surfie. Just so the movie could offer an outing for the whole family, there's also a young-at-heart grandfather-figure (veteran Barry Otto, trying to smile painlessly).

Castle then went overboard with hand-held cinematography in the waves, rollers and murky depths, lingering shoreline shots capturing brilliant blue skyscapes and shimmering dunes, and a soundtrack that adds melodramatic ham to a bland salad of sun-toasted teens obliged by the Aussie-coded screenplay to frolic (only full-dorsally) on the beach cupping their genitalia.

As with any modern Australian movie, audiences will look for a new generation of budding Crowes, Ledgers or Pearces on the screen. The country has produced many excellent directors too, but Castle needs to prove his talent on different material. His previous work comprised The Visitor, a 30-minute 2002 surfing tale with a fully homosexual theme (and Barry Otto's name on the poster), Zona Rosa, a 2005 documentary ogling male strippers in Mexico City's gay nightclub district, and other gay short films.

Casting decisions inevitably hinged on actors' surfing abilities, and 18-year-old Lachlan Buchanan (younger brother of a busy Aussie TV actor) had them as well as good looks and physique (and is now chasing the dream in Los Angeles). The choice of the actor to play his supposedly younger brother was less effective: Xavier Samuel presents the character's gaiety credibly, but close-ups reveal his 24-year-oldness.

The film was the first for Ben Milliken, who's since done work in the US and on other surfie features (including the Blue Crush sequel). The one actor with a more interesting role (the non-surfing gawky group jester) and stronger, offbeat screen presence, Israel Cannan, hasn't had another film credit since this. The bad guy (the older surfie brother) was well played by Bosnian-Australian Reshad Strik, and he may be the best name for Crowe-hunters to watch.

Gasland

There is a fast-growing market in the USA for documentary features? There must be, because they are being turned out by an ever-expanding army of well-funded and/or profit-seeking film-makers. Assuming that very few of them will get commercial distribution, and that TV channels likely to screen them will pay pittances for the right to do so, could it be that many documentaries are a cinematic equivalent of vanity books? Convenient tax write-offs for finely-motivated backers or cash-laundering outfits? Or simply, as with 3D animated comedies, unwise investments in an overloaded bandwagon?

Gasland is a one-man show that cannot be scorned. It won a top award at Sundance 2010 (its production having been supported by Robert Redford's organisation), premiered on HBO, and was a nominee for the 2011 Oscar. Writer-director Josh Fox was his own producer, narrator and cinematographer, and he opens the movie by noting that the whole project began in his back yard when a natural gas company wanted to lease his land.

Fox's artfully amateur project accuses American power companies of inflicting a plague of natural-gas drilling sites, and creating unnatural disasters for the country's water supplies and environment. Their "fracking" (derived from hydraulic fracturing) involves the injection of complex chemicals into wells to tap shale rock. The exploitation rights are purchased for a few thousand dollars per acre, and clearly result in very profitable ventures that are pock-marking much of the country with eyesores and diseases, including national parklands.

Gasland begins with a wistful desire to interview Dick Cheney, the former Halliburton chief executive and US Vice-President. The two names are liberals' favourite betes noirs, so it wasn't too surprising to discover that Fox's previous, debut feature was a critically slammed amalgamation of a fictional Memorial Day bloodfest and real Abu Ghraib torture camp footage. Cheney was, and still is, a prime neo-con bogeyman, and his role in spurring the collapse of US prestige globally and democratic rights everywhere during the Bush-baby presidencies may well pre-occupy film school graduates for generations. In this example, Halliburton, the oil services giant (among other sins), is again linked to Cheney, the man who spearheaded the Energy Bill that freed Halliburton et al from government supervisions and legal liabilities.

Fox covers his own legal ass well, with captions identifying the names and locations of the ordinary US citizens whose tap-water can be ignited, whose health and livelihoods have been damaged, and whose willingness to tolerate official and corporate lies is bitterly exhausted. Reading his own script without histrionics, Fox cuts between shots of his amateur camera-work, car-rides and many interviewees, accompanying himself much of the time with aptly rustic bluegrass banjo music.

If he hadn't made Memorial Day, and previously been a member of a soap-opera-makers' cooperative, I'd have accepted his interviewees as they were described (including a convenient EPA "whistle-blower"). After The Blair Witch Project, other mockumentaries such as Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here and Banksy's graffiti promo, and recent stream of promotional and celebrity biopics, it's impossible to take a documentary at its face value.

The genre has become tarnished, as an entertainment first, a personal statement second, and very latterly as a dossier of filmed facts. In the end, though, it's impossible to dismiss Fox's reportage. Corporate America stinks, and so will a fracked world. In its effort to reduce its dependency on Middle East oil, the USA developed an uncontrolled technological monster. Cheney did his job; Congress closed its eyes and everyone opened their wallets.

Peepli [live]

Peepli [Live], a female Indian writer-director's debut feature, was criticised by some Indians for showing too much European influence. They might suspect that its tragi-comic satirical tone was inspired by post-Communist (especially Romanian) movies, but it would be unsurprising if Anusha Rizvi hadn't learned lessons from watching bitter-sweet European fables about oppressed people. There may not have been many equivalent stories produced in Bollywood for her to study.

Her concept is a well-detailed set of black-comic set pieces satirising India's politics, mass media, caste system and urbanisation. There's wit and slapstick, and only two on-screen singing scenes (both apropos), the handsome male lead and bewitching female star do not have a romance, and the ending is far from happy, all very non-Indian.

A bank is foreclosing on two boozy farming brothers, and seek a loan from local headmen. Instead, they are told that the government is donating the level of funds they need to the families of farmers who commit suicide. The lazy unmarried brother thinks it'll be best if his malleable, married and equally lazy hen-picked sibling with two children saves the family. Their bed-ridden harridan of a mother, whose medical costs helped achieve the financial ruin, blames the son's bitter shrew of a wife.

A local news stringer overhears the brothers' suicide plan and passes the story to an English-language TV news station, whose lead reader-reporter he worships. Meanwhile, a local politician is setting up a by-election in the village area (the Peepli of the title), which eventually involves a handful of different political campaigns and intrigues urging the confused would-be suicide to carry out his suicide, or not, to suit their electoral plans. If not, he'll be killed, and there'll be no government compensation for the family.

Simultaneously, a fleet of rival TV stations news teams have set up camp in the village, trying to get an exclusive interview with the suicidal bumpkin. Armed forces then have to be billeted, to protect the villager, which is only a problem because the farmer has a weak bladder, and major comic chaos caused when he gets the chance to have an unescorted crap. Only at that point did the screenplay lose its cool, in a scene when a TV station provides live commentary on the social condition of his faeces.

It's impossible to admire any of the well-acted characters. The rustic brothers are not presented as virtuous noble savages, but neither are the villains truly evil. The one kind soul in the whole story dies, like the villager who digs up earth for a living, trundles his bicycle through all the chaos, and dies at the bottom of his own pit - a bitter symbol of the whole political charade.

The movie, produced by actor and industry veteran Aamir Khan (Lagaan and much more), was India's entry for the 2011 Foreign Picture Oscar. It wasn't short-listed. It was nominated at Sundance (where it was the first invited Indian feature) and the Asian Film Awards, and deserves to win something significant, other than a good calling card for its creator.

Spider-man 3

At times, it is possible to feel empathy for Hollywood bean-counters. Let's suppose one works for Sony or Columbia Pictures and the initial trilogy of your Marvel Comics' Spider-Man has been and gone. You've happily banked squillions of dollars of profits, and your third film was the biggest grosser so far, and you naturally want a fourth bit of action, to be called The Amazing Spider-Man. But your star writer-director (Sam Raimi), along with his brother-writer (Ivan) has bowed out, as have your leading actors (Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst), and you'd already killed off your strong supporting actor (James Franco). What are the creative folks gonna do to save your franchise?

To their credit, they've probably done what Hollywood folks seem to do so well. They hire new talents, and you love them, because they're hungrier and cheaper.

Sony lined up Marc Webb to be the new director, on the strength of one acclaimed 2009 movie, his first and only feature, (500) Days of Summer. The new Spider-man is a young Anglo-American actor who attracted critical praise for his UK TV and film roles (Boy A, Imaginarium) and his Hollywood breakthrough (The Social Network). His female interest (a replacement Gwen Stacy) will be played by Emma Stone, who broke through with Superbad in 2007.

They were backed up with old troupers to match the first trilogy's strength of character roles. Rosemary Harris is replaced by Sally Field, Martin Sheen is a revivified Ben Parker, and Denis Leary joins the roll (and James Cromwell leaves), while Welshman Rhys Ifans appears as one of those typically bizarre Brit boffins born to be a Lizard. The role of JK Simmons' editor is gone.

Our bean-counter is still nervous, but his worries should have been eased by the new writing team. It's led by veteran Alvin Sargent, an Oscar-winner for Ordinary People and Julia who worked (exclusively, making no other features) on the screenplays of the second and third Spider-mans. His co-writers on Spider-man 3 were only the Raimis, adapting the comic book material of Stan Lee and Steve Ditko. His co-writer for the fourth instalment is Steve Kloves, newly-released from his masterful decade-long labour of love (and good fortune) on the Harry Potter franchise. Their named assistant is James Vanderbilt, a younger talent and six-time award nominee for Zodiac.

The third Spider-man outing is a vivid reminder how important screenplays are, even for action-driven SFX epics. I don't know how much credit should go to the original comic-book authors (with Stan Lee taking one of his now-customary on-screen speaking appearances, as a spectator in one scene) and how many of the cameo parts were created by the movie team. Chickens or eggs, the screenplay successes depend (apart from the actors and their director) on lines, moves and motivations being written with effect and originality.

On a re-sighting, this quality was evident in the small parts. The irascible newspaper editor was given vivid flesh and blood by JK Simmons, but his happily OTT cameo needed to have credible dialogue and pauses. The interplay with his secretary over blood pressure pills provided good comic relief. So did Spider-man's conversations with the heavily European-accented landlord and his passionately helpful daughter.

The hot and cold relationships Spider-man (Maguire) had with Harry (Franco) and Mary Jane (Dunst) gained credibility primarily because of the actors' eyes, but they depended on scene-setting by a screenplay that hid its coincidences and characters' inconsistencies. The villains of the piece were also written sensibly, to reveal human cravings and understandable flaws, giving Topher Grace a role (Venom) he clearly relished (the That 70's Show TV star not having yet made a big movie breakthrough) and letting Thomas Haden Church glower kindly (as Sandman). He has his 2005 Oscar nomination for Sideways to console him if no other juicy parts crop up.

Screenplays for action-adventures don't get the attention and praise they often deserve. If Spiderman 4 succeeds, credits will go to Webb and Garfield. Alvin Sargent (and the bean-counters) must be praying.

Client 9

Writer-director Alex Gibney's 2010 documentary, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer outlines the circumstances resulting in the forced resignation of an exceptional New York State Governor in 2008 after one year in office.

It's a natural topic for Gibney, who's covered Casino Jack Abramoff, Enron, Jimi Hendrix, sumo wrestling and the dead Afghan driver of the 2007 Oscar-winning Taxi to the Dark Side. Gibney thrives on controversial characters (next up, reportedly, is Julien Assange) and is the right man to ask how far Spitzer fell or whether he was pushed?

Was the pugnacious politico and successful graft-tackling NY Attorney-General (for eight years) a modern anti-hero, a classic case of hubris before the fall, or the target of his enemies? Spitzer himself compares his case to that of Icarus during his interviews with Gibney's team.

During its first half, with Spitzer sat calmly on a sofa and former colleagues praising his work, the documentary feels like an apologia that could have been commissioned. Spitzer clearly had been a ruthlessly effective campaigning "Sheriff of Wall Street" who'd tackled issues of dishonesty and corruption, such as overpaid CEOs and hedge fund abuses, that later re-magnified and led to system-shaking massive government bailouts.

In the second hour, when Spitzer's initial work as Governor in Albany is covered, Gibney illustrates the man's foolhardiness in simultaneously using prostitutes, declaring war on old-time Republican politicos, and trying to change by fiat and force a state's traditionally corrupt system of non-governance. The Democrat who'd won a record high percentage of voters and was identified as the future "first Jewish US president" was probably the victim of a conspiracy by the heads of AIG, New York State's Republican caucus, and other foes.

Many of them agreed to be interviewed and state their abhorrence of Spitzer, and they provide fascinating facets of the diabolical NY political, economic and social systems. It is a parade of nastiness, in which Spitzer's own belligerent style (behind a facade of intelligent charm) fitted so well.

Most of the names are key footnotes in modern US history: Blodget and Grubman (fraudulent stock analysts), Hulbert and Brener (escort agency pimps), Greenberg (AIG), Grasso (NYSE), Eddie Stern (Canary Fund), Langone (Home Depot boss and Republican big-shot), Joe Bruno (NY Senator, "the turd in Eliot's punchbowl"), Roger Stone (political operative sporting a Nixon tattoo on his back), and a vindictive NY radio host. Other characters are only noted in passing, as potential juicy acting cameos in a dramatisation of the events, from the Republican federal attorney-general (Michael Garcia) to the FBI agent (Katzman) who collected the data that blackened Spitzer's reputation.

By comparison, the bright young women who ran the escort agencies are delightfully open and well-balanced interviewees. They happily admit that they were profiting from Wall Street's bonanza of bonuses in a city that Gibney's narrative says is built on greed. Understandably, Spitzer's wife and three daughters did not participate in what might be a rehab exercise for Spitzer. By the end of the film, though, it's clear he committed the fatal crime for a well-meaning politician: he made too many enemies in the NY jungle. A rich-born member of "the lucky-sperm club", he lost his sense of perspective politically and personally, like so many other leaders with the folie de grandeur.

Catfish

"Reality" is reviewed with dramatic cunning by the documentary team that made Catfish, a movie that some might see as a scripted mockumentary, a Blair Witch project for the age of Facebook. It belongs in a fast-growing genre which might be called Faction Documentary, alongside Exit Through the Gift Shop and Joaquin Phoenix's I'm Still Here.

Once upon a movie-making time, NYC-based Ariel Schulman and his friend Henry Joost decided to keep a film record of the long-distance love story that was developing between Ariel's brother, Yaniv (Nev), and an amateur songwriter, Megan. He'd "met" her though his online friendship with her eight-year-old half-sister, child prodigy artist Melanie. She, via her mother Angela Wesselman, had sent Nev her painting of a photograph of his published in the NY Times.

The seemingly talented family lived in rural Michigan. Then the New Yorkers realised that the women had spun online lies, and they next decided to make a side-trip to confront the liars.

It's a clever storyline, involving online detective work, three handsome young men, a lovely young woman, and a precocious child. It develops into a wry tale of sad people, a social-networking tragi-comedy, that is so bizarre, so far beyond the imagination of the freakiest fantasist, that one feels obliges to accept that some of, perhaps most of it, was a really true story which the Schulman brothers (also occasional short-movie actors) re-constructed.

Their project could only succeed with the cooperation of mildly manic middle-aged Angela, and she's a good natural actress and mediocre amateur painter. Her reality is revealed to be harsh, her online escapism system intricate.

No one, even New York movie-makers, would dare to graft truly retarded teenage twin boys onto the story, so they are almost certainly real (and the subsequent death of one is noted in the end credits). All the charades, the film-makers' as well as Angela's, could only exist in the new world of social networking, the world of TwoFaceBook. Inevitably, in a land where many crave online friends and fantasies, and tote multiple cellphones for different aspects of their personalities, the Faction Documentary genre will expand. It's cheap to make and as entertaining as the best of reality TV.

Kung fu panda

In 2008 Jeffrey Katzenberg's Dreamworks Animation pulled off a brilliantly brazen Hollywood heist, one so in-your-face that the Weinstein brothers must have doffed their caps in salutation. The company bought sufficient voting memberships in the Animated Film Association to ensure that its Kung Fu Panda swept the board in Annie awards and completely shut out Pixar's Wall-E (which won that year's Oscar and Golden Globe). The rules have been changed since then, but Dreamworks did a cruel disservice to its charming animated feature. It can stand in its own right as a good animation film.

It has an attractive hand-drawn opening sequence, and the whole sequel has been entrusted to its acclaimed director, Jennifer Yuh Nelson. Her inspiration (other than the all-inspiring Fantasias, of course) was Chinese shadow puppetry, and the CGI in the main film are also clearly drawn from recent Chinese action-adventure martial-arts movies as well as the older generations of kung fu and wuxia classics. The foremost influence, for the comic tone, was Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle.

Jack Black voiced (inoffensively) the bumbling obese panda, Po, who works in the noodle cafe of his father, a goose (James Hong), and is a kung fu aficionado. Eager to watch the selection of the Dragon Warrior by the local temple master (a wise-headed old tortoise), Po lands up being chosen by ordained accident and sent to train with Master Shifu, a red panda (Dustin Hoffman, playing it straight).

Shifu already has a traditional team of trained Masters: Tigress (self-effacing Angelina Jolie), Golden Langur (Jackie Chan), Mantis (Seth Rogen), Green Tree Viper (Lucy Liu) and Crane (David Cross). His former protege, Tai Lung, a snow leopard (Ian McShane), had tried to be Dragon Warrior and ended up in chains, guarded by rhinocerosi (led by Michael Clarke Duncan). When he escapes and seeks revenge, Po must learn the secret ingredient of the Dragon Warrior's power, which proves to be a mirage just like his father's secret noodle recipe.

Being five very varied sizes and shapes, the five Masters cannot be given detailed characters, and much of the storyline and banter is borne by the tortoise and two pandas. The fast-paced energy of the film is provided by a barrage of animation effects that leave few moments of uneventful visuals during which audiences can notice the relative 2D flatness of the characters. The customary Hans Zimmer soundtrack completes the captivating cinematic package.

The usual mix of animation tricks is unusually rich, taking good advantage of Chinese motifs (lanterns, bamboo sticks, bowls, dumplings, noodles and more) while showing off many arts and crafts of special animation effects (water, smoke, mirrors, shadows, fire). Big-screen close-ups are effective too, and it will be interesting to see how the sequel incorporates the by-now obligatory 3D and IMAX systems.

Dreamworks is reuniting the chorus of well-paid voices for Kung Fu Panda 2, adding a quintet of extra star voices, including Gary Oldman as the new Brit-voiced bad guy. Guillermo del Toro is its executive producer (also his role for the studio's Puss in Boots spin-off), and the budget will be astronomical. So was the profit on the first film: no wonder six sequels have been talked of by Katzenberg.

Armadillo

Anyone who watches Restropo, the documentary chronicling the lives and work of US troops stuck in an Afghan outpost, needs to give themselves a double-feature DVD session, also viewing its contemporary Danish equivalent, Armadillo.

Both movies, composed of embedded cameramen's recordings, took the name of their unit's home base. Both focused on the grunts, not the generals. And each ended up confirming the obvious question: what are professional Western soldiers doing in the unwelcoming countryside of impoverished, undeveloped Afghanistan?

Each also helps to explain why soldiers stay with their chosen profession, and choose in many cases to accept re-postings to military arenas. Their daily lives in their bases are tedious; only in action and facing the threat of death do they find the "adventure", camaraderie and purpose they signed up for.

The Danish documentary crew landed up in a much more adventurous situation than Restropo's. Armadillo lay closer to Taliban guerrillas, under frequent attack in the small area of Helmand province they patrolled. The cameras capture a sweeping panorama of military life, including the mundane (cleaning weaponry), the hierarchical (briefings) and the deadly (close combat in farmland).

No commentary is needed: the passing time in the young men's 6-month tour of duty (their first in Afghanistan) is captioned, from their home farewells (the injured platoon commander temporarily returning to Copenhagen for surgery and rehab). Usage of telecoms messages, drone viewpoints and off-duty asides depicts the soldiers' harsh reality of invisible foes and crippling IEDs. One mesmerising battle scene is a war journalist's unwanted masterpiece: a soldier, shot in the shoulder during an action, his face and eyes a study in shock and dread.

The debut feature-length work from director Janus Metz Pedersen employed an experienced documentary cinematographer, editor, and composer of suitably modish mood music. The soundtrack of reality (gunfire, explosions, soldiers' curses and shouts, village noises) is striking (and confirms the audio-visual veracity of The Hurt Locker).

Most effectively, the film illustrates the futility of the occupying forces' efforts to win hearts and minds. They hand out snacks to the village children, and are subsequently hounded for goodies. They try to be friendly with village men, and are told they dare not cooperate. They bombard Taliban snipers and end up killing cows, ruining crops and destroying the homes of the villagers they supposedly defend. When they survive a skirmish and kill guerrillas, and a soldier later speaks unwisely to his mother on the phone, they are pilloried by the media.

What have their politicians got them into, and why? Movies made by embedded film-makers are no longer morale-boosting PR exercises; they are counter-productive, damning historical documents. When they are great cinema too, they are doubly admirable.

Of gods and men

There must be significance in the English translation of the French docudrama, Des hommes et des dieux. Why entitle it, in reverse order, Of Gods and Men? Do the rules of polite English-speaking movie-going society demand that gods must precede mortals? Maybe the rules of France, as an officially secular society, ordain the opposite?

This is not totally idle musing. The reality-based story of seven Trappist monks abducted and killed in 1996 during the Algerian civil war asks why the men chose to stay in their stark Atlas Mountains monastery, beside an impoverished Muslim community. Why stay, dispensing medicine, advice and prayers, rather than escape likely slaughter by encroaching fundamentalists who'd already massacred a Croat highway construction team nearby?

For such a simple and soul-searching narrative, the production had no choice but to proceed as slowly, quietly and thoughtfully as the monk's lives. It won the 2010 Cannes second prize (Grand Prix), losing out to Thailand's tedious cult fantasy (Uncle Boonmee). Clearly, there was no other "serious" competition at Cannes that year for cultists to appreciate, and the French entry may have been viewed by the judges as not tedious enough to deserve first prize.

The film did win three French 2011 Cesar awards: Best Film, supporting actor (veteran Michael Lonsdale, born 1931) and cinematography (Caroline Champetier, who'd worked for Beauvois on his award-winning Le Petit Lieutenant in 2005). Beauvois had won the Cannes Jury Prize in 1995, for Don't Forget You're Going to Die, and collected many awards for his debut feature, Nord (1991), which might explain why the 2011 Cesar voters apparently felt that Roman Polanski deserved the Best Director award more for The Ghost Writer. (I haven't yet seen a reason why that German-funded British political thriller set in Martha's Vineyard was given a slew of Cesar nominations. Surely not just because Polanski was born in Paris?)

Of Gods and Men ends up, after two hours, being half-an-hour too long, mainly because the screenplay runs out of ways to show the human natures and godly hearts of the ageing monks. They elected a scholarly, Koran-reading high-principled monk as their leader (Lambert Wilson) and he's remarkably quick to learn that the other men's views must be considered before he can decide whether or not the Algerian army should be allowed to occupy and protect their monastery. Later on they all consider the options of leaving, or staying with their "flock" of Muslim villagers.

At the end there's an almost credible unanimous decision to stay, and a very incredible "last supper" for which doctor-monk Lonsdale brings out two bottles of red wine and a cassette tape of Swan Lake. Maybe there was such a meal (two of the nine monks present did survive and may have told their tales), and maybe they did all exchange wordless happy smiles and teary eyes, but few directors would dare to spend so long focusing on weepy ageing men's faces.

When they are abducted, along with the medical supplies the rebels need, and led through a snowy forest into the distance and a slow fade, their fate is still not clear, forcing the end credits to begin with the news of their killing. Prior to that there have been politically and religiously correct monologues and conversations to suggest that not all rebels were murderous zealots, that Islam can be loving and inclusive, that monks desire to go to heaven and meet their god, and a few more Religion 101 thoughts.

By comparison, a Thai director's Buddhist-based fantasies must have looked excitingly special to the Cannes jury. In the real world, though, Of Gods and Men was a box-office triumph in France and a very profitable old-fashioned movie, costing 4 million Euros and grossing six times more.

8: the Mormon proposition

Reed Cowan, like many Mormons, had been a missionary. His documentary 8: The Mormon Proposition shows a similar zeal in its effort to charge the Mormon church with providing funds and organisation for a California state initiative to ban gay marriage. Disappointingly, Cowan's propaganda contains counter-productive bias, sentiment and self-defeating lack of perspective.

The writer-director's attack on the tax-exempt Utah-based church's US$22 million involvement in politics depends largely on one set of leaked Mormon documents obtained by a researcher, to prove that the church deliberately camouflaged its key role in the anti-gay campaign. The human repercussions of the fight to de-legitimise the California court's acceptance of same-sex marriage are largely illustrated through the words and actions of a photogenic, tearful couple of outcast gay Mormons.

One of them has a family tree sown by a Mormon pioneer, and his parents, very unusually, also abandoned the church in order to support their son (and gay daughter, whose story isn't included). The mother is a delightful real-life spitten image of the features and forthright goodness of the fictional Queer as Folk U.S. mum played so sympathetically by Sharon Gless.

The young couple are followed throughout the story, from their wedding day (on the first day of new and short-lived legality) and through the campaign. Their desire for exactly the same legal and civil rights as a heterosexual couple is expressed but not adequately justified.

Neither does Cowan give enough discredit to other churches and campaign backers: his whole beef is with the Mormon's underhanded spitefulness. That may be true, but doubters will not be convinced by a story that gives no details about the pro-gay organisations and individuals backing the counter campaign. What were they doing to beat the Mormon assault?

Where were the liberal voices in California? Why hadn't they realised that the Mormons' earlier successful anti-gay-marriage fight in Hawaii could be replicated? Where were all the gay community's supposed allies in Hollywood? If there wasn't an organised response, a why-not documentary is also worth making?

Too many questions aren't asked. Where did Romney, Huntsman and other mainstream Mormon politicians stand on the issue? What role did California's non-Mormon politicians and religious leaders play? Was the Catholic church knowingly duped by the Mormons? Why did San Francisco allow itself to be dominated by Utah?

There's even a positive angle that Cowan ignores. After all that multi-million-dollar TV advertising, misinformation and emotional blackmail, why did Prop 8 only gain 52% of the vote? Which constituencies do gay-marriage advocates have to woo better next time? Because a base of 48% is a very strong starting point for a counter-proposition. I hope Cowan's working on the topic, and paying less attention to his former religion.

Fair game

Few American moviegoers were interested in watching the fact-based political thriller based on the memoir written by outed CIA agent Valerie Plame, Fair Game. The book was subtitled My Life as a Spy, My Betrayal by the White House, and it's hard to imagine why any movie-maker thought its anti-Republican and anti-Iraq-war stances would resonate in the way that previous genre products (All The President's Men, especially) had done. A cynic would suspect that, after that saga, many Americans expect their government to lie, spin, and betray its employees.

A crucial mis-casting was expecting NZ-born Naomi Watts to carry a serious message and truly diabolical storyboard. She doesn't have the gravitas or charisma of a Streep or Jolie, and wore such fetching trouser suits and make-up that her claimed successes in the field for the CIA didn't look feasible. The real Plame (shown testifying to Congress during the end credits) looked a much tougher operative and Washington fighter.

Sean Penn is an active Hollywood radical fighter, taking a secondary starring role as Plame's self-opinionated husband, former career diplomat, French-speaking ambassador Joe Wilson, whose past postings in Africa led to his special assignment to investigate a supposed sale of uranium from Niger to Saddam's Iraq. His subsequent autobiography (The Politics of Truth) provided a complementary second source for the screenplay, written by British brothers Jeremy ("Jez") and John-Henry Butterworth.

Jez has won many awards for his Royal Court Theatre stage plays (including Mojo, filmed by him, and Jerusalem), but libel lawyers must have been vetting the scripts scrupulously to ensure that no one in Dick Cheney's offices or the CIA could sue. So Cheney is not given a role. Instead, bizarrely-named Scooter Libby, his chief of staff and fall guy (whom departing President George W Bush reportedly refused to pardon) is portrayed as an awesome Machiavellian politico, a plum character part for David Andrews.

There are many minor characters in Washington and in Iraq, where Plame was seeking answers to questions about Saddam's nuclear ambitions. The tale of one scientist's US-resident sister may all be true but it felt like a melodramatic device to bolster Plame's case that the White House's petty betrayal of her endangered many more agents than Plame herself.

The Cheney team's vindictive response to Wilson's refusal to support the Niger fiction is one proven historical footnote to the Iraq invasion (and a long-lasting slur on the reputation of the Washington Post). It is a symptomatic, microcosmic example of the determination of neo-cons (and other oil-avaricious war-mongers, including many outside the Republican regime) to confirm their self-interested delusions. It could have been a disturbing docudrama, but it falls flat, as a thriller, a study of marital stress, an insight into Washington's fears and failures, or a story of revenge (from Plame and her husband too).

Failure must be credited above all, even Watts, to director Doug Liman, best known as the director of the first film in the Bourne franchise (after which all concerned apparently agreed that Liman should stick to his day job as a producer). He also failed to make screen magic for Mr & Mrs Smith, despite having Pitt and Jolie (and their off-screen love life) to carry it into box offices globally. With Fair Game, its producers (including Zucker family members) possibly got him cheap, so they also let him amuse himself as cinematographer (for only the third time in his career, and the first time on a major feature). The end result includes far too much hand-held camera jerkiness and visual tedium.

Liman's production expertise may have helped to create a product that cost only US$22 million. It grossed less than half that in North America, and must be banking on good DVD sales. It doesn't warrant them, not for a characterless, scrappy, disjointed piece of real politic.

Patrik, age 1.5

The simplest concepts are often the best, even for gay-film-makers. What happens if a male gay married couple in Sweden get permission to adopt a 1.5-year-old boy, but a clerical error delivers a homophobic 15-year-old to them? That was the hard-to-believe idea in Michael Druker's 2008 play, Patrik, Age 1.5, quickly adapted for the screen by director Ella Lemhagen.

She's specialised in movies about children, and she cast the movie very well. Tom Ljungman, a TV actor from his early teens, is charmingly obnoxious orphan Patrik for a few scenes, then becomes a charmingly lovable involuntary house guest with green fingers in the garden and good technique on a skateboard.

His new two fathers are a charmingly typical couple welcomed into their new suburban home by charming neighbours. One wink-winks approval for the active spouse (the one with a beard and an amiable ex-wife, of course) to have fun with his houseboy like he does with his Polish maid, which upsets the divorced father. His Gothic daughter is still resentful of her daddy, a state of angst sure to vanish by the movie's end.

Meanwhile, the passive spouse (the one who decorated the baby's room and fusses over bric-a-brac, in case an audience may not be sure) starts his first job as a local doctor, supported by a cheery, motherly and tolerant middle-aged receptionist and a fierce-faced female colleague who will surely blossom into an understanding friend warmed by the doctor's charming smiles and manners.

Even the local police and social workers are charming characters, so how could Patrik do anything else but reject their well-meaning efforts to find him new heterosexual adopters? How could he not become a charming, trustful young boy helping his fathers get together again, keep him, and promise him a pet dog?

The pun is unavoidable: how could anything go wrong in a fairy story? The conclusion is inevitable: this was a play and film designed to humour the suburban gay market. It's as charming as an overdose of white sugar.

Pope Joan

As every moviegoer knows, the more outrageous a screenplay is the more likely it is to be based on historical data. Who could ever have dreamed up the idea of a 9th-Century woman cross-dressing in order to practise medicine, become Pope Joan (855-858) and die during childbirth?

The English-speaking 2009 German film has not attracted a single review from Rotten Tomatoes critics, and is not yet released in the USA. It's no worse than another recent bioepic about a high-placed woman (Agora), which starred Rachel Weisz, but Pope Joan was played by a German actress, Johanna Wokalek, known only in Europe (most recently for The Baader Meinhof Complex).

However, it did have John Goodman, happily hamming it up as Joan's predecessor and mentor, Pope Sergius. Portrayed as a cheerfully down-to-earth and divine character, he thought his medical miracle worker was "Johannes Anglicus", a child of a rigidly righteous English missionary (Iain Glen) saving pagan souls and disparaging women's rights in ninth-century Saxony.

When her older brother died, precocious quick-learning Joan took her younger brother's place at a Catholic school, and was boarded with a nobleman who became her lover (David Wenham). Meanwhile, the Holy Roman Empire was in turmoil, Joan almost died during a battle, and decided to bind up her breasts and find better safety as a male monk.

The whole semi-mythical tale (which the RC church does not endorse) was novelised by an American non-fiction writer, Donna Woolfolk Cross, in 1996. Soon after, German director Volker (Tin Drum) Schlondorff tried to set up a film project for it. It would have starred Franka Potente, a better-known actress outside Germany (for Run Lola Run and the Bourne trilogy), but the producers dropped Schlondorff and brought in Sonke Wortmann, a director with many awards in his native Germany (many for The Miracle in Bern, 2003), another little-known on the international scene.

He turned in a handsome sequence of medieval set-pieces with eye-catching costumes and battle scenes, but they can only be viewed as tableaux for a scarcely credible tale of an unconvincing transvestite. This Joan's body movements, demeanour and physique give away her game too often, undermining a viewer's willingness to suspend disbelief.

Get low

Senior citizens are a steady niche market. They may not be as profitable as teens (valued for their consumption of popcorn and soft drinks), but they do flock to old-timers having vicarious fun on a big screen. Robert Duvall is now a very old-timer (80), and Bill Murray (60) and Sissy Spacek (61) are looking their ages too, and their charming performances in Get Low should have attracted a bigger box office. Yet, despite costing only US$7 million, it earned loss-making gross takings of only US$9 million (and just 5% extra globally).

In 1938, in Tennessee, a real old backwoods hermit called Felix decided to hold his funeral before he died. From this semi-mythical personality, US TV screenwriters Chris (Mad Men) Provenzano and Gaby Mitchell crafted a wry vehicle for Duvall. They added co-starring roles for Murray (exploitative funeral director), Spacek (old flame), Lucas (Tokyo Drift) Black (Murray's young assistant) and a veteran black actor, Bill Cobbs (76), as a preacher.

The indie production signed cinematographer and TV (Murder One) director Aaron Schneider for his debut feature; he was already an Oscar-co-winner for the 40-minute Short Film (Live Action) adaptation of a William Faulkner story (Two Soldiers, 2003). Schneider edited the movie too, neatly, and the lush photography of woodlands, carpentry and period settings creates an appealing framework for a simple tale of an old man seeking forgiveness for a 40-year-old tragedy.

For much of the time, an intriguing air of mystery builds up, well supported by Duvall's bogeyman of seemingly ill-intentioned aloofness, Murray's manipulative wrinkled smiles and Spacek's loving goodness. The actors and the story appear deliberately restrained, with a comic edge worthy of the Coen brothers; surprises and twists are anticipated. Wrongly: when the final scenes of closure arrive, the promising story becomes a disappointing sequence of anti-climaxes and sentimental Hollywood cliches.

Budget-conscious modern senior citizens are possibly even more likely than teens to take notice of word-of-mouth and social network critiques for a movie. Maybe they'll rent the DVD.

Hereafter

British screenwriter Peter Morgan has two Oscar nominations, for an adaptation (of his own play Frost/Nixon) and an original movie script (The Queen, for which he won a Golden Globe). He has won BAFTAs and other awards for The Last King of Scotland, The Deal and Longford, and gained plaudits for The Damned United, The Special Relationship and The Other Boleyn Girl.

They were all based on historical personalities, whereas his latest, and least successful, screenplay was a fictional fantasy about three characters experiencing the Hereafter. Despite starring Matt Damon, being produced by Spielberg's Amblin and other Warner Brothers partners, and directed by Clint Eastwood, its chances of delivering a decent return on its US$50 million budget are slim. For his next venture (360), Morgan returns to the safer world of a BBC/European co-production with a line-up of Brit stars (Hopkins, Law, Reitz) for its multi-faceted tale of odd couples.

The three plots in Hereafter provide potentially interesting studies of the afterlife. Damon is a former successful psychic whom the dead can talk to, Cecile de France plays a Parisian TV journalist who saw the dead during her near-death experience in the Asian tsunami, and young British newcomers Frankie and George McLaren take the roles of communicating twin brothers, one alive and one dead. Their paths and fates will cross, of course, and Morgan's hard task was to make their meeting in London dramatically credible. Eastwood had to make it visually interesting, while Damon was required to drive it with star power. All of them failed.

Eastwood is a laid-back director, but this time he could have been asleep on the job, lulled by his own tinkly siesta-like musical soundtrack. Just in case the audience may not realise that scenes are set in San Francisco, Paris and London, it is given long establishing shots of a Port sign and the Towers of Eiffel and London. Commendably, for an art-house audience, the French segment is performed in French with English subtitles, which are an American mainstream market disaster: the production should have found a way to translate the French TV roles.

Three stories necessitate three sets of subsidiary characters, and Morgan fails to breathe life, let alone an afterlife, into any of the sketchy characterisations of Damon's wannabe clients, the journalist's working world and the twins' addicted single mother and drearily nice foster parents. The three focal figures do not connect dramatically or logically, and Derek Jacobi is stuck onto the shaky framework as a book fair's reciter of Charles Dickens (a favourite bedtime solace for Damon's character). There's also an Italian cookery teacher, amplifying the feeling that Morgan gathered a lot of scraps from his waste bin, threw them into a pot and then forgot to add spices and turn on the gas.

Fighter

How did Mark Wahlberg feel at the Oscar ritual in 2011? His male co-star (Christian Bale) was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, and won. His two female leads were nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Melissa Leo won, beating Amy Adams). Wahlberg wasn't nominated for his title role of The Fighter, but he will have been cheered up by the thought that he did share the Best Motion Picture nomination as a producer. He should be laughing all the way to the bank: his US$25 million boxing drama grossed five times as much globally by March 2011, with DVD income still to be added.

His credited co-producers included the film project's original director, Darren Aronofsky (also chasing fame and fortune the same year as director of Black Swan) and the ubiquitous Weinstein brothers (whose distribution/PR work for the more successful The King's Speech earned them even more).

Hollywood is a small world, and Wahlberg will have been glad that he ended up working a third time with director David O. Russell (following Three Kings in 1999, alongside George Clooney, and I Heart Huckabees in 2004). Russell gained an Oscar nomination, as did the movie's original screenplay (from a quartet of re-writers) and editing (Pamela Little Miss Sunshine Martin).

Wahlberg, playing world welterweight champion Micky Ward (a real-life Rocky) did earn a Golden Globe acting nomination, and shared several US movie critics associations' acting ensemble nominations (and some wins) with Bale (as Dicky Eklund, the fighter's elder half-brother and failed boxer), Adams (Ward's female interest) and Jack (TV's Rescue Me) McGee and Leo as Micky's Boston-Irish parents. It could also have included Mickey O'Keefe, playing himself in a convincingly understated way as the fighter's part-time trainer and real-time local policeman. Ward's mother was his monstrously egocentric manager, and the coven of seven daughters who backed her up look like a screenwriter's comic fantasy until you find out they really did exist in the fighter's manic family life.

As he did for The Mechanist and Rescue Dawn, Bale starved himself into an angular angsty character, adding the bulging-eyed facial tics and twitchy body mannerisms of a crack addict, to capture the gait and goofy character of Eklund. He dominates every scene he's in, and it's fascinating to imagine how Brad Pitt or Matt Damon would have played the role (for which they were Wahlberg's first and second signings).

Wahlberg, from a similar background as Ward, presents a nice-guy fighter who's too good to be true, too sweet to be a prize-fighter, too straightforward to have the same blood as his despicably trashy mother and siblings. One has to assume his niceness was passed down from his amenable father (as portrayed by McGee), whose willingness to stay with Leo's scenery-chewing domineering wife/mother-from-hell is hard to believe.

Before the end credits, Russell shows a few minutes of the real-life half-brothers in a farewell setting for the film crew, leaving his audience to admire the impersonations of reality conjured up by Wahlberg and Bale. Admirable too was Adams, putting on weight and stretching her acting range even further, as the fighter's spirited girlfriend. They and Leo should feel lucky that Russell is an actor's director. He eschewed visual flourishes, recreating decades-old HBO documentary styles and opting for brutal unromanticised fight sequences, above all letting his actors and their crisp dialogue tell the good old-fashioned story the best Hollywood way possible, in terms of ordinary people.

Men for sale

Hommes a louer, a 2009 French-Canadian documentary movie, comprises over two hours of edited interviews with 11 male prostitutes in Montreal. Its English translation of Men For Sale is doubly erroneous; better, both linguistically and conceptually, is Men For Rent: the interviews clearly indicate that none of the sex workers have sold themselves to sugar daddies. Instead, they rent out their bodies to satisfy their primary love: drug addiction, usually crack.

That depiction is inevitable: the documentary-maker, Rodrigue Jean, found his subjects at an addiction treatment and HIV awareness centre. They are hustlers on the homosexual sidewalk because that's the easiest place to earn the bucks needed to buy drugs. None of them need gay love or sexual release, some have girlfriends (some also on the game); all of them have troubled family backgrounds.

At the end of the movie, when Jean revisits some of the interviewees "few months later", one of them has found love and given up drugs, and it would have been a more positive footnote if his escape path had been described. The other subjects seemed to have wasted away even further, getting uglier and spottier, more addicted, less mentally balanced, doomed, providing a depressing conclusion to a disturbing report.

Technically, it's a competent set of head-shots, mostly filmed in the one of the clinic's sparse rooms. Maybe intending to demonstrate that all the subjects were voluntary and not actors, each was shown getting microphones (or medical gauges?) fixed to their chests. That used up screen time unnecessarily, as did night-time film of wintry Montreal streetscapes.

Sociologists and social workers may find interesting research data regarding the mores, incentives and tariffs for male prostitution. Few other people would see or hear anything worth remembering, and would be better recommended to re-watch Gus van Sant's My Own Private Idaho.

Jean had previously written and directed a pair of French-Canadian feature films, and a documentary about his native Acadia. This documentary (conducted in monthly interview sessions during almost a year) feels as if it was a personal investigation, and it may not be a coincidence that one of the interviewees proudly declares himself an easygoing Acadian.

Astro boy

One of the multi-million-dollar failures in the rush to produce CGI-animation 3D movies was 2009's Astro Boy. Maybe there'd recently been too many similar plotlines (e.g. Jimmy Neutron, A.I.), but why didn't such an action-packed sweetly-comic sci-fi morality tale gain a bigger audience, sequel and franchise potential?

Astro Boy, aka Mighty Atom, first appeared as a Japanese comic book (manga) action boy-hero in 1952, created by Osamu Tesuka. The do-good-feel-good character's first 1963 TV appearance marked the start of the anime genre of cartoon animation, and the bright-eyed baby-fatted hair-quiffed black-panted rocked-shod mighty little hero became a global children's favourite.

By the time American creative consultants had finished tweaking his representation for their home market, Astra Boy had gained a more Occidental face, trimmer body and shorts that weren't big Speedos. The project ended up with animators in Hong Kong and elsewhere, and the direction and major re-write were finally handed over to David Bowers, a British co-director of the Aardman-Dreamworks Flushed Away.

Astro Boy (voiced by Freddie Highmore) thinks he's Toby, the son of a top Metro City scientist (Nicolas Cage). He learns that he's really a Blue Core-powered robot clone designed by his father and another boffin (Bill Nighy) to replace the human boy who'd died in a battle with a robot packed with Red Core.

Rejected by his father after accidentally realising his unknown strengths, the robot boy lands up down on the scrap-world of Earth, along with all other redundant machines and unwanted children. A gang of them, including a lost girl (Kristen Bell), forage for their adopted Faginesque father-figure, Hamegg (Nathan Lane), who organises lethal Robot Games and welcomes Astro Boy's revitalisation of a century-old construction machine, Zog (Samuel L Jackson).

Meanwhile, the harsh vain ruler of Metro City (Donald Sutherland) needs to recapture Astro Boy's mighty Blue Core, while the plot's also amplified by other interesting characters (most cutely, Trashcan the belligerent robot dog and Mr Squeegee and Mr Squirt, ugly-fairy robot cleaners) and star voices (Charlize Theron, Eugene Levy, Matt Lucas). Most amusing (and amazing, for an American movie) are the comic trio of Robot Revolutionaries (Sparx, Robotsky and Mike the Fridge) waging fruitless war on Hamegg in defence of their exploited fellows.

All that plotting, and more, might have worked wonders if there had been a similar richness of visual gags, and if the star voices had been allowed to emote. Cage and Nighy are especially tediously muted, and there was clear indecision from the producers about the age, sexual awareness and girl-friendliness of Astro Boy. The Red Core foe is an imposing Transformer-like monster, but his final battle with Astro Boy mostly illustrates the flat 2D appearance of the sketchy cityscape of Metro City.

Astro Boy looks and feels like a rushed effort. As Pixar has proved year after year, a lot of time and effort - much more than in most movies - are needed to make CGI box-office bonanzas.

Illusionist

Sylvain Chomet created one of the wackiest and most wonderful animation movies, Les Triplettes de Belleville (2003), aka Belleville Rendez-vous in the UK, gaining Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature as well as Best Song. The Frenchman's debut, a delightful short film (La vieille dame et les pigeons, 1998), earned him his first Oscar nomination, and in 2011 he was up against the best of Hollywood again (Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon) with L'Illusioniste.

He couldn't win, of course, but the publicity should have helped attract more art-house attention and a better chance of getting a return on the 72-minute film's US$17 million budget. It's a charming small-scale animated presentation of an unproduced live-action scenario written by the French mime and comic actor, Jacques Tati. A love-letter to one of his daughters, the simple tale shows how an ageing French vaudeville magician meets a girl and finds his own peace of mind amid the naturally magic beauty of Edinburgh.

Chomet's brightly sketchy style of artwork looks as exquisitely old-fashioned as a Victorian book's illustrative drawings, and ideally suits the wispy storyline. Little happens in action terms, and much of any live film's impact would have depended on Tati's physical and facial antics. These are rendered well, without exaggeration, by the animated character, but the naive young woman's expression and character are less well articulated.

She doesn't realise she's exhausting the magician's funds by expecting him to produce all her clothing desires by magic. When the funds are gone, and work is no longer available in decrepit music halls or rowdy private parties, he tries to hide from her his work as a department store window attraction. His ventriloquist colleague has pawned his puppet and become a fulltime alcoholic; fearful for his own future, the magician resolves to leave the girl with her new boyfriend. He strides off, telling her there are no magicians, releasing his irritable rabbit.

Such a pensive tale can verge on the maudlin and melancholy (as did previous Oscar outsiders such as Australia's Mary & Max). Chomet avoids that danger, and keeps his audience's attention by always having one or more of animation's visual treats on display as a side-feature of the main action: clouds, lights, mirror and window reflections, shadows, water and smoke. Only the latter will have marred the movie's acceptance by many parents - the Tati character is depicted as a virtual chain-smoker.

A short and slightly-bitter-sweet movie, this is animation magic at its art-house best.

Hills have eyes, the

Wes Craven made a hit horror movie in the 1970s, The Hills Have Eyes. Three decades later, after watching a bandwagon of horror remakes making fortunes for other people, he jumped on it too, taking on board a duo of proven French horror-movie talents. Alexandre Aja and Gregory Levasseur had established their European reputation for writing-directing bloodthirstiness with Haute Tension in 2003, and no one doubted their ability to deliver a technically adroit remake and update.

Morocco provided the vast stark "New Mexico" desert in which a white family of four adults, two teens, a baby and a pair of Alsatians get lost, deliberately misdirected into the feeding grounds of a subterranean gang of genetically deformed nuclear test victims.

The cinematography is excellent, and the whole cast (even the manufactured freaks) are unusually acceptable actors for what is nothing more than a souped-up B-grade horror movie. Editing, music, and the striking special effects are also well above average, but the movie has been fairly damned as porno horror.

The deaths and ordeals of the characters, especially the women, do verge on the pornographic, but they lose the essential frisson of a true horror movie. Consequently I lost any interest in seeing what further creatively gory setpieces might have been devised by the movie-makers. By the time I switched off physically as well as mentally, the only mildly engaging aspect was wondering which character would be slaughtered next.

The Frenchmen may have found their niche with their more recent Piranha remake: incredibly corny and self-mocking humour allied with sensational SFX.

Burke & Hare

Old wine, old bottles, old brewers do not a vintage make. England's Ealing Studios (founded 1896) and American director John (Animal House) Landis used to be masters of the comic movie genre. In theory, any movie they created together should be a happy romp. More so if it was written by Nick Moorcroft and Piers Ashworth (who together had crafted Ealing's profitable revival of the St Trinian's franchise), and if its cast was headed by busy Simon (Mission Impossible, Star Trek) Pegg, who'd worked for and in Ealing on Shaun of the Dead.

Add a fashionable co-star, Andy Serkis (LOTR's Gollum, Little Dorrit, Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll) and give them plum black-comic roles as Burke and Hare, the historical purveyors of cadavers to Scotland's leading teacher of surgery, Dr Knox. Have him played by ubiquitous genius of British character acting, Tom Wilkinson.

What more could you want for a blood-and-thundering farce and 1820s period piece? More than you'd ever imagined, including comedian Bill Bailey as a droll on-screen commentator, Tim Curry as the rival surgeon, and Ronnie Corbett as a bumbling military officer of the law, all assuming so-bad-it's-almost-amusing Scottish accents.

Enough? Nah, not when you can stud your cast list with cameos from Christopher Lee, Jenny Agutter, Michael Winner, 90-year-old Ray Harryhausen (Hollywood SFX maestro), Stephen Merchant and Allan Corduner, to name just some of the wasted talents involved.

Ealing, Pegg et al must be asking themselves why they opted to bring Landis out of cinematic retirement and give him the director's chair. Kindly, it's assumed they assumed he had the Hollywood expertise they'd need to create an international success: he'd made An American Werewolf in London (1981, as a 30-year-old), Michael Jackson's videos for Thriller and Black or White, Trading Places and more award-winning movie and cable successes.

But, in 1992, he was nominated for his first Worst Director Razzie (most embarrassingly, for Oscar). He earned the undesirable moment of Hollywood infamy twice more, for Beverly Hills Cop III (1995) and The Stupids (1997). Susan's Plan (1998) was his disastrous last big-screen effort at writing-directing; he shifted to TV for 12 years. Then he went to Ealing, and has reportedly kept a base in London, attached to a projected screen adaptation of Sheridan's The Rivals.

His presentation of the Burke and Hare saga, a fabulous tale of primitive market forces at work, is well-paced and competent in all technical aspects. It isn't funny, though, or comically horrific. So I'll re-watch Tim Burton's Sweeney Todd, probably with enhanced respect.

Sherlock

Robert Downey Jr and Jude Law (following the leads of their director, Guy Ritchie) may have thought they'd redefined the roles of Sherlock Holmes and Dr John Watson in modern buddy-movie terms. Not for long. A 2010 BBC TV series redefined the duo in truly modern terms, Sherlock, and cast it well with Benedict Cumberbatch and Martin Freeman. The first series of three 90-minute adventures, costing a fraction of one SFX-ed Ritchie movie, is an entertaining set of TV detective thrillers.

Major credits go to creator-writers Mark Gattis and Steven Moffat, who'd worked together on the revived BBC TV franchise, Dr Who. Each had a successful track record, Gattis more publicly as a member of the offbeat comic League of Gentlemen quartet.

Their simple concept was to relocate Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's classic pedantic arrogant genius-detective and his stocky bumbling medico sidekick from 19th to 21st-century London. Hey presto, they had an odd couple of sleuths using IT (Watson's blog, Holmes' texting, mobile phone cameras), state-of-the art magnifying glasses and forensic science to solve devilish serial killings for Scotland Yard's baffled D.I. Lestrade (Rupert Graves) from old-fashioned bachelor lodgings in Baker Street.

The one-hour pilot episode was never screened, and the BBC and the production team shrewdly included it on their DVD for the first 3-episode "season". That ensured that the DVD could be cost-justified as a 2-disc set, a bigger earner visibly justifying the expensive decision to re-shoot most of the pilot after extending its plot by 50%. A particular consolation for Gattis must have been the chance to write himself a juicy role as Holmes' Home Office brother, Mycroft, in the first and third episodes.

In the short version of the first drama, A Study in Pink, the killer's identity was identified too quickly and Holmes' powers of logic were under-illustrated. A more detailed examination of each death, combined with a merry stew of red herrings and Holmesian references, enriched the plot and characters. Most important was extra directorial panache, tenser pacing and a more confident sense of humour from a fresh director, Paul (Gangster No.1, Lucky Slevin) McGuigan, a Scot with an award-winning film and TV track record since his debut with The Acid House.

Cumberbatch, a young Brit TV veteran (Hawking, Forty Something, The Last Enemy) and occasional movie actor (Amazing Grace), could be looking forward to a decade of potential seasonal fun with this franchise. His asexual, overly brainy, mildly psychopathic Holmes character is neatly balanced by Martin (The Office, Hitchhiker's Guide, Fuzz) Freeman's robuster, less dim-witted version of Dr Watson, who was quickly given a medical lady friend. Just as quickly, other characters' non-judgmental acceptance of their possible gay relationship was highlighted in order to be cast aside. Another self-consciously gratuitous PC touch was the deliberate inclusion of black actors as policewomen and victims; there are Chinese in the third tale, but they are playing real Chinese villains, so that's all right. The modern Moriarty is also mod: a mock-camp self-consciously cute and clever Celt who's a fun-filled challenge for Holmes.

Holmes devotees and history buffs can have extra fun looking out for updated period details. Comparing the two versions of the first episode, the deliberate down-playing of the character of Mrs Hudson, the duo's landlady (Una Stubbs), in her costume and manner made her less stereotypical, less Sweeney Toddish. I'm not sure why the production increased the size of the three nicotine patches that are the modern Holmes' meditational drug of choice (shared by Lestrade, so that's PC all right too). Maybe the first trio might have been overlooked by visually challenged viewers.

The good news for the two under-employed young male lead actors from the Harry Potter series is that they could audition for the Holmes franchise in the future. Rupert Grint can only hope to be as good an actor as Freeman, his older lookalike, is; Radcliffe will regret that HP didn't give him enough free time to follow Cumberbatch at Harrow.