Crank

Like Speed but with Jason Statham as Keanu Reeves and the bus all rolled into one. Whilst the premise promises to at least be action packed for the majority of the running time the film spectacularly fails to deliver. It starts out monolithically stupid, gets boring about 20 minutes in an never recovers. Very poor.

Interestingly whenever satellite or aerial photography are used we see copyright notices at the bottom of the screen which kind of typifies the general shoddiness of the whole production.

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High School Musical

Apparently this film is popular with young children esp. eight year old girls. It's easy to see why, it's very shiny, moves along at a good pace with every scene pushing the story forwards and has un-threatening boys. As E_ pointed out it's pretty much the same basic story as Grease; a couple meet on holiday but the social pressures of high school prevent them from getting it on. Actually, that's not the only thing preventing them from getting it on, in this film their desires are also hampered by twisted neo-christian morality of the film makers (in my mind the film is made by a room full of suited middle aged men, Disney executives with a spreadsheet full of statistics). In spite of the uncomfortable way that the ostensibly under-age characters are sexualized, actual sexual desire or action is totally denied a place in the film, the main characters conspicuously never kiss, not even a chaste peck on the cheek, nothing. This strange state of affairs coupled with the in-human, heavily pro-tooled vocal style which renders all the singers, male and female, all but indistinguishable from one another, leads to the uneasy feeling that you're watching a kind of Stepford high school of perfectly smooth teenagers, blank plastic where the sex organs should be and digital synthesisers instead of lungs.

It's the cinematic equivalent of empty calories, whilst it may shut them up for a couple of hours, children deserve better.


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Starter For 10

Starter for ZZzzz... more like. OK, that didn't really work. Suffice it to say that this film is the precise mid-point of the mediocrity in the middle of the, genreally failry mediocre anyway, British film industry. Actually some of it is bad though. The performances are OK (except for Rebeca Hall for whom I predict good things, or at least a role in a Richard Curtis film at some point. Oh, and Mark Gatiss' comedy Bamber Gascoigne is good too), though the lead is pretty unlikable. The story is faultlessly predicatable (guess what, the blonde one who wants to be famous is not the TRUE LOVE), the soundtrack is faultlessly nostalgic (in a kind of Q/Mojo/Uncut way), the cinematography, editing and direction are all competant. And that's about it for the mediocre.

For the bad: If you're going to set something in Bristol and film some of it there why don't you just film the rest of it there, why film some of it at UCL? Why film scenes of Manchester in Shepherds Bush? Why pretend you can drive from Bristol to Manchester in 2 hours? The tone of the film fluctuates queasily between gritty (well Brassed Off level gritty) scenes of THATCHERS BRITAIN and comedy clowning about. Also I have objections to do with the films ideas about the purpose of education that are too lengthy and dull to go into here and didn't really diminish my limited enjoyment of the film.

Basically whilst it's a decade out, the themes of coming of age, and negotiating British class structure are much better handled in last years TV adaptation The Rotters Club. A comparison that's impossible to avoid making because Alice Eve plays pretty much the same character in both (though the Starter For 10 version is a purely 2D version).

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