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Reviews
Wedding Belles (2007)
One hit wonder strikes again!
Irvine Welsh. Where would he be without Trainspotting? No-where. He'd be an unpublished writer working in a bar. This awful attempt to write female roles is so clichéd and embarrassing that Mr Welsh should do the literary world a huge favour and go away.
Of course he's not the only writer credited for this inept script, but it has Welsh's grubby fingerprints all over it - unfunny farce, 'Allo-Allo style erotica, clichéd misanthropy, and his trademark nowhere-to-go ending! The fact that this has come out on DVD the day after being screened on TV is blind & ludicrous by the powers that be at CH4 who sanctioned this drivel in the first place. Who is going to buy this? If you watched it, you would never consider buying it. If you haven't seen it, surely you'll wait for the endless repeats on More4 or E4 - and then switch off within the hour. I'm not even going to talk about the plot-less plot. This is about Welsh. A one-hit wonder who has made enough money to respect his loyal audience and stop inflicting this unfunny lazy work upon them. 1 out of 10 for the hapless actresses who try & fail.
America Brown (2004)
Dull like Brown water
OK, maybe that's a bit harsh to compare this to brown (toilet) water, but this really is a tedious little film masquerading as serious Americana/Indie movie-making. It doesn't contain one memorable image or one memorable piece of dialogue. In fact, it is instantly forgettable.
America Brown (sic) is a stetson wearing Texan boy who charms in a Jon Voigt-Lite way as he runs away from his ranch home to the Big Apple in search of his hero, an ex-football star from college and to find the answers to his brother's recent death (ooh, wonder how that happened???). His hero is now a priest hiding an illicit affair with Elodie Bouchez who gets to say things like 'Quoi' and 'Bon Chance' because she's French you know (yawn) but unfortunately she's as wooden as a stale baguette. Brown then falls for the scary charms of vampiric waitress Natasha Lyonne, all white skin, garish red lips and ginger hair. How many times are filmmakers going to write about drifters coming into a new town and instantly finding a girlfriend at their first port of call.
Like I said, its all very dull, shot with zero-flair like a TV Soap and edited with annoying and deeply dated jump-cuts to raise the slightest tension. Director Paul Black apparently took the best part of a decade to write this. That doesn't tell us that he's dedicated, it tells us that this man cannot write, because there is nothing taxing here that could not be knocked out in 6 weeks. By its end, you don't care about any of the characters. And you forget about them in a heartbeat.
2 out of 10 - 1 for Natasha Lyonne who is always watchable and 1 for Karen Black because she once used to work on scripts like Five Easy Pieces and she must despair getting something like this now.
The Quiet (2005)
Why?
A tedious bore! This film doesn't know what it's trying to be. Serious drama or psycho-sexual hokum? Even the poster is confused as it looks like a lesbian vampire flick! So...Mute 'geek' girl moves in with dysfunctional family (God only knows why Edie Falco & Martin Donovan agreed to do this tripe) and uncovers the underbelly of darkness within the household while retaining her own (instantly figured out) secrets. Much like a bad teen-comedy, geek-mute girl becomes popular and even has the most fancied boy at school after her who asks her to 'the dance' (yes he really does!) and secrets are revealed and shared and...who cares! Rubbish. The kind only America loves to make with the premise that if they stick Elisha Cuthbert and Camille Belle as the gals - giving promise to adolescent boys that they may get their kit off (they don't!) the bucks will roll in. They probably have. Don't be one to bankroll this any further. 1 for Edie Falco, 1 for Martin Donovan = 2 out of 10 (very generous at that!)
Six Ways to Sunday (1997)
Wants to be a pop video
It's one of those films you start watching and after 10 minutes you think its really interesting and innovative and dazzling and then after 11 minutes till the end you realise it's annoying. I'm sure the director's intentions were true in trying to make a slick looking piece of cinema, but the tedious batman-style camera tilts, the endless flashbacks, the fizzy editing and cheap effects leave little to chew on as its all been seen and done a lot better in any MTV video and that's the root of the problem as this film strives to attain those 'heights'! Go back to film school and learn about the greats - Ozu & Tarkovsky & Visconti - if you want to discover dazzling cinematography without resorting to gimmicks. So...Kid with violent blackouts handles himself nicely as a heavy for a mob boss, betraying his best mate in the process (a laughable Adrien Brody) whilst struggling with his Oedipul relationship with mad-mom (Debbie Harry) and his flowering romance with limping geek-maid (Elina Lowenson). What else? Don't know. Gave up after an hour. 3 out of 10 for the promise of something interesting - even though it really isn't.