Kevin Rodney Sullivan | 101 mins | TV | 12 / PG-13
Readers may remember that I opened my Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner review with a joke about how the film might be ruined if its premise was being made today. Cue reactions along the lines of ho ho ho, wouldn’t it be dreadful, thank God that’s not happened, etc.
Except, as was helpfully pointed out to me on Twitter, it has.
Here, the situation is reversed: nice black girl brings home white guy to meet parents. White guy isn’t Ben Stiller or Adam Sandler, as I suggested, but Ashton Kutcher, who more or less falls into the same category. The family being visited is still rich, albeit black, but rather than Sidney Poitier’s Surprisingly Respectable black man, Kutcher is a recently-jobless white man. I’m sure there’s some further table-turning to be read into this, but, look, it’s a film starring Bernie Mac and Ashton Kutcher — it’s not going to be a race relations paean, is it?
Indeed, Guess Who is pretty much what you’d expect it to be. The plot isn’t a direct copy of Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, preferring to take the gist of the concept and a few of the story beats and surround them with a bunch of Funny Situations. I won’t bother you with details; suffice to say, the film does manage the odd laugh or smile, increasingly so as it goes on (though this may be because I was getting increasingly inebriated, it’s a tough call). The ending is suitably lovey-dovey, sentimental, and, I think many would add, hogwash. Should you be a sucker for a (modern-style) rom-com it may well be up your street; most viewers need not apply.
Mac and Kutcher play the roles they always play— No, actually, in fairness, I can’t say that: I think I’ve only seen Mac in the three Ocean’s films and I can’t think of anything I’ve seen Kutcher in (was he in The Butterfly Effect, or was that someone else equally interchangeable?) So, they play the roles I’ve always assumed they play, which is at least as bad. Zoe Saldana, on the other hand, seems to have a magic ability to raise the quality of almost every scene she’s in — even Mac and, to a higher level, Kutcher benefit from her skills to inject some genuine emotion into a film otherwise dependent on familiar or predictable gags.
The race debate is cursory. Maybe that’s a good thing — one could argue it shouldn’t be allowed to be relevant today, even if it still is — but occasionally there’s the sense that the filmmakers are actually trying to do more with the issue. Suffice to say, they don’t succeed. The gap is filled with additional comic interludes and mishandled subplots — in the latter camp, Kutcher’s hunt for a new job, and issues with the father who abandoned him — but they do little to make up for it. They’re certainly not a direct replacement, but nor do they offer an adequate alternative, particularly as they go begging for any kind of relevant point.
One scene, in which Mac goads Kutcher into telling racist black jokes at the dinner table, comes close to tackling the awkwardness of the issue. It’s ceaselessly predictable, naturally, but it also makes overtures at the issue of whether these jokes are funny, racist, or both. Most of the rest, however, is “father doesn’t approve of daughter’s boyfriend” schtick that has nothing to do with race. 
It’s as recognisable from TV sitcoms — Friends did it with Bruce Willis, for just the first example that comes to mind — as it is from movies. Again, maybe ignoring the race factor here is a good thing; but if you’re going to foreground it in your concept and promotion, you ought to be dealing with it, not using it as a way in to familiar sequences.
Though it takes a while to settle in, Guess Who does seem to improve as it goes on. Even though it more or less abandons the race issue, and many of the setups are familiar, it has its moments. Still, it never hits comedic heights, and doesn’t even attempt serious dramatic ones, and it’s not even close to being a patch on the original. The pros aren’t enough to make the film worth your time, but at least they stop it being a total disaster.
Guess Who is on Film4 tomorrow, Friday 9th, at 6:55pm.
The inspiration for this, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, is on BBC Two tomorrow (Sunday 3rd August 2014) at 2:40pm.
Final Destination is a full decade old this year, which somehow seems too long — it can’t be so old, surely? On the other hand, it fits quite comfortably into that run of teen-centric horror films from the the mid- to late-’90s, like 
The most important part, all things considered, are the ways Death settles the score. No mysterious “natural causes” demises here — Final Destination is all about inventive executions. Even after a decade, in which some of the Great Big Shocks have been revealed in various Top 10s and “OMG do you remember the bit where…” conversations, some bits remain impressive and/or amusing. And it certainly has fun with a few of them, teasing the viewer with various means of dispatching the victim before they ultimately succumb to one. Or, alternatively, just surprising us with a sudden whack. Both are good. Only one bit — a fidgety-armed corpse — is a thoroughly gratuitous jump-scare.
but that one solitary shot confirms it must be some kind of entity with a very specific motive. And that’s a shame, because it’s not developed further — i.e. no Big Reveal of the nasty Death-thing — and would’ve been more interesting to play with that ambiguity — is Alex right that it’s all planned, or is it just a series of nasty coincidences?
It’s the end of the world, and Roland Emmerich feels fine. The “master of disaster (movies)”, as I’m sure someone (probably himself) has labelled him, here attempts the biggest disaster of them all — as I said, it’s the end of the world.
as the US President, but a couple of the cast members hold the screen well enough.
On the other hand, you do get more or less what you’d expect from the film. No one’s going into this thinking they’re getting a deep character piece — it’s great big spectacle all the way, and while it’s not the greatest big spectacle ever, it delivers something close enough to prevent it being the ultimate disaster of a movie — but it’s not the ultimate disaster movie either.
Not many people seem to like Knowing. Quit the opposite, in fact. I must confess, I’m not really sure why. I can read their reasons, of course, but I still thought it was a decent film. Solidly entertaining even, I’d say.
those numbers down, and other such technical queries, but that seems like needless nitpicking.
I will accept, however, that the very last shot is arguably a step too far and a little cheesy.
Shot in late 2006, originally scheduled for release in December 2007, ultimately pushed back twice and finally hit cinemas December 2008… what’s wrong with Inkheart?
A side effect of not establishing the central concept’s rules is that the film doesn’t play with it enough. What, if anything, happens if you just change the words while reading? How is it determined what comes out of the book, what goes in, and can these be influenced? What happens if two Silvertongues read the same text at once? There are other things it would be interesting to see, but those require a more detailed description of some of the few rules that can be discerned so I won’t trouble you with them now.
While everyone else is straightforward, predictable and/or pantomime, Dustfinger is torn back and forth between helping the heroes, his inherent selfishness, his fear of returning home, and his desire to see his family again. Brendan Fraser, the ostensible lead, is as adequate as ever but outshone by almost everyone else, not least Eliza Hope Bennett. She’s a minor find as Meggie (who I rather suspect is the main character in the book, but here is trumped by ‘star’ power), displaying more believability than most young teenage leads manage in films like this.
Tu£sday is a low-budget crime thriller, in which several groups of people all try to rob the same bank on the same day — hence the clever title. Unfortunately, the concept is much more interesting than the film writer/director Sacha Bennett has forced it into.
As the film barely scrapes up to a theatrical running time, there’s a suspicion that the final re-run genuinely was left untouched to keep the length up.
Unfortunately, it doesn’t go as all-out for the decade as 
The Condemned is an old-fashioned-ish action movie, produced by WWE Films — i.e. the people behind all the wrestling claptrap. I should very much like to point out that I don’t care one jot about WWE or any other form of wrestling, real or faked. So why watch this? Because it’s got nothing to do with WWE itself aside from one (or more, I don’t know) former wrestlers acting in it.
Indeed, in places it’s even satirical. Largely, though, the plot flatly commentates on society’s preoccupation with violent entertainment. Ironically, this is criticising not only organisations like WWE, who produced the film, but the genre of the film itself. It’s difficult to tell if director/co-writer Scott Wiper and his fellow filmmakers are aware of this irony/self-criticism, but if we give them the benefit of the doubt it becomes a nice layer.
The same can be said of the action. With ten people, nine of whom will die, it could just be a series of fights where the designated Good One emerges victorious. And yes, there are a couple of fights of this nature, but as Things Go Wrong the realistically sick side of the ‘game’ is revealed: one female is cut up and presumably raped, all streamed live, while another is tortured before eventually being burned alive. It’s disgusting but, crucially, the film agrees that it is. That might sound obvious, but one suspects certain entries in the torture porn genre would disagree. That it draws you in to the brainless action movie mindset — fights! deaths! yay! — before twisting it with a dose of nasty reality suggests a greater degree of thought to both its structure and social message than one might expect. Maybe this is only a serendipitous side effect of the story path the writers chose, but even if it was an accident the success of it is still present.
Something that amuses me is how many reviews call this “a brainless action movie” and make assertions like “the dialogue only serves to get from one action scene to the next”. Now, I’m not going to argue that The Condemned is actually some essayistic polemic on the evils of the media or modern violence-obsessed culture, but it has more to think about than the majority of action movies — meaning it’s neither brainless nor devoid of importance between action scenes. Perhaps you can enjoy this solely as a series of action scenes, but I have to wonder if those who do didn’t so much turn their brain off as have it removed (assuming there was one there in the first place) — the commentary on voyeurism and violence isn’t subtle and therefore certainly not accidental, so quite how it can be missed is beyond me.
Ah, the Coen Brothers! Those indie-mainstream praise-magnets that I’ve never particularly got on with. But then, perhaps I was just too young and under-read (or, rather, under-viewed) to get 
For the characters in the film, it’s a confusing mess of a situation they find themselves embroiled in — no one has the full picture, and most don’t properly comprehend the bit they do see. For the viewer, it’s a fun bit of nothing. Things have changed by the end, certainly — most notably, several people are dead — but the events that got us there are pretty quickly forgotten.
Before I come to write a review, I tend to check out the sort of scores it’s received at a few different sites. This isn’t to help form my opinion, but actually just a side effect of the fact I go to places to rate the films myself. What one usually encounters is some degree of discrepancy, be it as little as half a mark or as large as several. As you may have guessed, Ghost Town is going to prove the exception: on 
The high-concept at the film’s centre — that Ricky Gervais sees dead people and doesn’t want to — is neat enough. It largely sticks to its rules, it manages a few moments of humour, it doesn’t get too repetitive, it often plays the most obvious card (someone thinks Ricky’s talking to them when he’s actually talking to a ghost! Oh, my sides.) And Gervais, as you’re no doubt aware, plays himself. He doesn’t do characters but variations on a theme, and while this means he’ll never be a good actor per se, he can fulfil such characters very competently.
Public Enemies came out nearly a year ago now, and I remember two things about its release: firstly, that the first review I saw was Empire’s, which 
What it brings here is an unusual quality. It’s clearly fiction, of course, albeit fiction based on fact, and there are still plenty of extravagant angles and editing so that you’re never in danger of thinking Mann is trying to pass this off as a documentary. But couple the raw cinematography with a meticulous attention to period detail, with a sound mix that is consciously rough and real, and you get a sense that this is how it was — it’s not a glossified movie version, it’s a How It Was one. Public Enemies is to the old gangster film as 
The characters do and don’t lack depth. The relationship between Dillinger and Billie is a significant part of the film, receiving roughly equal attention to Dillinger’s criminal deeds — it’s his final words to her that close the film, not his death. Christian Bales’ G-man, Melvin Purvis, on the other hand, is less developed, but to say he lacks any character is to do Bale’s performance a disservice. Behind Purvis’ blunt dialogue and stolid manner, and in slight gaps and lapses around it, one gets a sense of the true man and his real thoughts. The postscript — that he resigned from the FBI a year later and ultimately took his own life — reinforces and confirms the subtleties Bale injects into the performance.
Mann does his best, cutting around Dillinger in the movie theatre, the bizarrely-apt film he’s watching (this isn’t dramatic licence — Dillinger really saw 
is largely well converted to a dramatic piece, if occasionally a little episodic (as is the way with all biopics) and overlong towards the end.
100Films.co.uk 