FILM REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

PLACE: 10:10, Hoyts Woden, Cinema 8.

PIC: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone.

PEOPLE: One, un, uno, ein.

If one is the only one in an enormous cinema, and one still sits in the allocated seat, should one give a damn?

The ads include the now-grating PillowTalk summer ad – we’ve been having single digit nights for a while here, and summer is probably over. Other highlights include Nepali food, sportspeople counselling against drinking and driving. Lexus. More previews than one could possibly absorb and enough to create some concern about what was about to appear. The Host (Stephenie Meyers and aliens or something), Iron-Man 3, GI Joe:Retaliation, Man of Steel*. And Scary Movie 5, which looks like the usual chundering of cliches, but this time with Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan**. How the potentially quite good have fallen!

And it was a decline from grace that we (well, I) saw in the feature. The small boy who became Burt Wonderstone (Steve Carell) was small, geeky and neglected in 1982 but found a love of magic and a friend, who became his side-kick/co-star Anton Marvelton (Steve Buscemi).

Years later, they strut the stage At Bally Casino in Las Vegas, delivering the same show every night for proprietor Doug Munny (James Gandolfini), while leading a life of prodigal luxury. The fall is fast, with the arrival of Steve Gray, the Brain Rapist (Jim Carrey), a magician whose work and persona are provocative, abrasive and disturbing. The team breaks up, and finds different grades of misery while Steve Gray goes from strength to strength and Burt finds counsel in the old magician Rance Holloway (well-played by Alan Arkin.)

So, will the boys get back together? Will they recover their old status? Will Steve Gray get a big smack in the face with a hubris pie? Will Burt get Jane (Olivia WIlde) the girl he really loves**? Is this an American movie?

This movie is pretty competent and fairly harmless, the latter of which is its main problem. Even the out-there stunts of Steve Gray are merely unpleasant rather than genuinely confronting. Probably safe for most audiences, like most big-stage magic acts. But there is, with respect, no magic in it.

Two skinny flat whites. Some kind of artificially-sweetened, gluten-free pretend biscuit.

FPB

* – yup, another Superman movie. This time, though, there seem to be some lovely shots of small-town America before the silliness starts.

** – he could have been a great actor, but remains my wished-for role model. She less so.

*** – he’s 50, she’s 32. Has my whole life been missing something?

Hitchcock – A Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

The local baseball club ad is really awful and I want to attack my eyes with a sharp object when I see it*. Previews for The Impossible (scarily real tsunami-stuff with Ewan McGregor and Naomi Watts playing roles occupied in real life by Spanish people) and Zero Dark Thirty (interrogators nearly as brutal and effective as parents, leading to the death of Osama Bin Laden).

[Corpulent old guy appears on screen similar to though better dressed than your scribe. Speaks fluidly as one would imagine an unfit beagle speaking, if it could, in a palimpsest of an East End accent.]  “Good evening, ladies and gentlemen. Tonight’s production tells the tale of a prolific director, no longer young, and his well-organised wife as they develop a new film for presentation to the public. There is also some ambiguity about the nature of their relationship, and you may notice some references to the work of the late Mr Hitchcock”.

What follows is a fine piece of work setting the context in which Alfred Hitchcock directed Psycho. Serious film historians can debate bits of the story – the extent of studio support, the extent of Alma Hitchcock’s control over the creation – but most of us will see it as sound storytelling. That story is of a self-centred auteur with a flock of personal demons and an unshakeable faith in his own specialised genius, who realises he needs to recover from some relative failures. He receives support from his long-suffering wife Alma, who manages what he cannot, and who acts as the mother figure which so troubled the director**. He fights the minions and titans of the corporate film world and outflanks the naysayers of censorship who inexplicably object to possible scenes of a naked woman being hacked to death with a knife. His most consistent ally is not always Alma, but the spirit of Ed Gein, the perpetrator of the macabre crimes which inspired the book and the film.

The performances are strong. While Anthony Hopkins (Hitchcock) and Helen Mirren (Alma) should receive most of the praise, they provide only a robust structure. There is sound work putting flesh on the bones by Scarlett Johansson (as Janet Leigh), Toni Collette (as Peggy Robertson, the assistant director), James D’Arcy (as Anthony Perkins) and Jessica Biel (as Vera Miles). The settings are limited, but attractive (the Hitchcock home being a semi-Gothic masterstroke). “In Hollywood, you are only as good as your last film”, Hitchcock at one point intones. Hitchcock’s last film, in real life, was Family Plot, a poor example of his work (I saw it in 1976 or 77, and do not want to repeat the experience. Ever). This is a much better memory.

Three flat whites and a babycino, with a 1960-style chocolate eclair.

FPB

* – no objection to baseball, for those who can’t understand cricket and don’t care about their duty as Australians.

** – look at Psycho, and at this film’s references to betrayal by actresses who preferred to be mothers and its depiction of Hitchcock’s direction of actresses.

Django Unchained - Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

11 am Hoyts for Django Unchained with a pretty blokey 30 or so viewers.

A new homewares ad and an appealingly funny one for being sane when one’s friends are drunk. A few previews – Hansel and Gretel: WItchhunters looks as stupid as one can imagine a film to be that is  based on a revenge theme, an unlikely buddy pairing and dialogue a couple of centuries wrong.  Then there was Zero Dark Thirty (dealing with Osama Bin Laden, for revenge) and, bizarrely, The Great Gatsby (Baz Luhrmann, anachronistic music, a spot of iconoclasm).  Would we be seeing a movie that involved a good deal of revenge but also featured unlikely buddies and a spot of time-shifting in attitudes and speech?

Of course we were!  All up something north of three hours of it.

The unlikely pairing is Schultz; a bounty hunter masquerading as a travelling dentist (Christoph Waltz) and Django (Jamie Foxx); a slave whom he liberates from a chain gang being marched across some of the less hospitable bits of Texas in 1858.  Schultz is German, so can get away with accented irony and a killer raised eyebrow.  They seek out and kill some routine criminals for reward* and then set out to rescue Mrs. Broomhilda Django (Kerry Washington) from the clutches of crazy Calvin Candie (Leonardo Di Caprio**), his Uncle Tom of a butler, Stephen (Samuel L Jackson***) and a number of supporting actors.  That’s pretty much it.

Stylish?  Certainly, though some of the music was bizarre and the casual dialogue from the 1970s.  The credits and the theme music were a genuflection to spaghetti westerns with a great deal of violence.  Violence of every sort – considered, unconsidered, generic and personal –  much of it in extreme and visceral detail****.   There is lots of swearing and a great deal of (presumably accurate in 1858) use of a despicable term for black people.  Did I mention the violence?

An Oz cameo towards the end by John Jarratt, and one by Tarantino using an accent that sounded like Dick van Dyke’s Mary Poppins cockney coached by a Korean who’s trying to sound South African.  A genuinely hilarious intervention by a forerunner of the Ku Klux Klan.  Oh, and the violence.

Did it mean anything apart from the obvious?  The obvious being that slavery is a Very Bad Thing, an appalling infliction of indignity and the cruel subjection to the whims of another because of the happenstance of race.  Not a contentious proposition. There’s an attempt to shoehorn meaning in by telling a truncated version of the German Brunnhilde story.  I was looking for a more contemporary political message to go with the dialogue but couldn’t really see much to support it.

Four flat whites.  I don’t think my stomach could keep a pastry down.  And real blokes don’t do sweet stuff anyway.

FPB

* – Schultz takes a pragmatic view of the “wanted: dead or alive” concept.  Dead men, presumably, challenge no warrants.  Plus they don’t try to escape and they don’t need to be fed.  They would, I suppose, start to smell after a day or so but most people stank in those days.  Django just seems to like shooting white people and it’s a bonus to be paid.

** – This is a really weird role and Di Caprio plays it straight.  Candie is simply an appalling human being of limited intellect and some beliefs that could be called eccentric.

*** – There are not many actors who could play Stephen and bring any subtlety to the role, but Jackson does so.  Some of his lines were painful for an ageing liberal white person to hear.

**** – Yes, it’s over the top in quantity and its graphic depiction.  Yes, it’s probably clever and ironic, Tarantino being one of the few cinematic geniuses.  But, if someone does not view realistic depictions of pain, humiliation and violence with equanimity, it’s probably a film better avoided.

Mental – Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

Ejected from my house by a tiler who needed to remove asbestos, where else to turn but the Dendy?  9:30 am, Cinema One, seven people (their very breaths echoing before the thing started).  Mental.

Lots of ads for coffee and coffee-appropriate food.  No fewer than four jewellers (including one touting a range of Paralympic promotional material) and an expensive menswear shop. If they spoke to anyone, it was not me.  I had already bathed in coffee, wear only Rivers clothes and (having been dumped*) have no need for jewellery.  The previews included the seriously woeful-looking Pitch Perfect. Also, Parental Guidance has Meryl Streep and Billy Crystal as an old-but-new couple trying to interact with her daughter and family.   Bring your own Quick-Eze and maybe a bucket.

The feature spends a bit of time cannibalising the soundtrack of The Sound of Music and the deeply affecting imagery of Lost in Space.  Setting is Dolphin Point somewhere on the northern NSW coast but maybe with bits elsewhere.  It’s the age old story of a father who is a small town king with no time for his family.  If his put-upon wife, her sanity leaking at the edges, had wanted fidelity she’d have bought a new sound system.  They live among the anally-tidy and repressed, and the poor mother is mocked wherever she goes.  The happy couple has five daughters, all of whom imagine themselves insane.  It is, of course, All Dad’s Fault.  Mum goes away for a while (we all know it’s not really to Wollongong) after a pretty good meltdown and Dad recruits a feral hitchhiker to care for his daughters so he can continue to neglect them. 

Meanwhile, the eldest daughter is falling for a surfie-dude who writes songs and plays them on an acoustic guitar and works at the same cheesy funpark she does.  The daughter has just been sent to work in the shark exhibit with a Steve Irwin-gone-gruff bloke called Trevor Blundell**.  Anyhow, we all know where things are going as the wacky outsider leads a pack of self-described losers.

I read that the story had some personal elements for PJ Hogan, the director.  Apart from the main story, there is a social inclusion theme, a hiss at McMansion world and some dredging of past pain.  There’s also a few outings for a previously taboo four letter word*** that would probably cause discomfort to some older folk.

It’s quite funny in parts, and it raises some serious issues.  But there’s not enough of either.

FPB

* – see previous reviews for earlier whines about this.

** – Liev Schreiber, doing a wonderful job with the Oz accent.  Really, he could say that a dingo took his baby and sound way more credible than La Streep.

*** – though I understand some feminists may see its use in general speech as a sign of empowerment or something.

To Rome With Love – Film Review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

Saturday evening at Dendy Cinema 5 for To Rome with Love. Lots of people, a date-related crowd rather than film buffs.

The usual aspirational Dendy ads: expensive menswear, coffee, restaurants, jewellery, designer homewares and salsa lessons.  Previews for The Sessions (a couple of repetitions of this one, especially William H Macy and I’m moving to a probable).  Less likely for The Hobbit (aka NZ’s desperate grab for tourism relevance, Mark IV*).  CGI and Martin Freeman, which is much the same thing.

Having watched Margaret and David do the soft-shoe-shuffle-with-Blunnies on it, I held out great hopes of being able to heap scorn on To Rome with Love.  And it deserves some chastisement for lack of imagination and for dispersing what imagination and energy there was over a couple too many story themes.  From the third row**, it looked an awful lot like tourism-by-the-numbers with Rome’s friendly citizens and well-managed traffic suggesting something less than complete objectivity.  A roundup of the usual ancient ruin suspects, plus Woody Allen. But there was a bit more wit and maybe even some love in the nods to Cinecitta, the 50’s and 60’s, the bookending with Volare, the opinions of knowing local narrators and the collection of short stories exploring some common theme.

The core plots of each explored the possibility of transformation over a brief time through experience in a place of ferment.  The ageing American opera director*** who cannot let go, and his spiky wife; their daughter and her fiancé; the fiancé’s parents, especially his talented but content father.  The older architect**** and the student, his girlfriend and the girlfriend’s best friend; the anonymous clerk who briefly becomes someone; the young honeymooning couple with a Penelope Cruz-shaped explosion in the midst of the straight-laced relatives. 

Some of this stuff could have been lost without any effect on the major narrative and maybe that would have allowed a little more depth.  On the other hand, that might have created a little less room to move the action and distract the viewer from seeing where the fabric was frayed or badly joined.  There are apparently poor people and ugly buildings in Rome but not in this version of it.

But the film’s Rome is beautiful and the movie will do no harm to any but the most sensitive of souls.  Yes, it’s safe for my mother or yours.

On to the Tongue and Groove for a Grolsch.  Then home before the young people started to take over Civic.

FPB

* – after the Lord of the Rings exercises in grandiosity.  No-one ever goes to the places where they filmed Once Were Warriors.  I wonder why.

** – I said there were lots of people.  Most of them seemed to be enjoying it immensely and at a considerable volume.

*** – Woody Allen, showing his remarkable dramatic range by playing an opinionated neurotic, a character he has tried only about a hundred times.  If he’s going to act, he should resume the style of his old, funny movies.

**** – Alec Baldwin, doing a fair job as a sort of Greek chorus though his support team just seems to disappear, raising a question of why they were there in the first place.

Lawless – Film Review

 REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

I’m one of a handful in the 10am audience at Hoyts. No previews screened that I had not previously seen – Dredd:3D, End of Watch, Seven Psychopaths,the third of which might be worth a look.  Ads for multi-coloured housewares, discount curtains and for flavoured milk.  I have no idea what this means, assuming it is meant to be a code for the people they think might be watching*.  Maybe Canberra is full of healthy cheapskates who redecorate.  Whatever.

And the Iron Chef ingredient this morning was bootleg whisky made of pretty well anything that may once have fallen within the vegetable class**.    Franklin County, Virginia, appears as beautiful as Virginia can be.  The Depression is not having so large an effect on people who have pretty well nothing anyway.  Prohibition is failing utterly to do anything useful except redistribute money and get people killed***. 

Three Bondurant brothers, the eldest reputedly immortal, engaged in the production of the local distilled product.  A tough girl on the run and a highly protected daughter of the local minister provide the love interests for two of the brothers, Forrest and Jack****.  They manage a stable, respectful, cooperative and corrupt relationship with the local law.

Cut to scenes of the carnage in Chicago.  Then the apple cart***** is overturned by changes in the larger world, wanting the rivers of corruption to flow a different way.  As a consequence another, human-sourced, fluid provides a comprehensive red spattering.  A new State Attorney with a Special Deputy who has more charm than scruples or mercy, has.  The feeling is apparent pretty quickly that no-one is playing for a win/win outcome.  The music is exceptional, varied within the types found in the region, and suggests that the soundtrack would be a smart choice for those who don’t fancy the violence.

Oz watchers note.  Guy Pearce as the Bad Cop******.  Mia Wasikowska as the virgin-with-religious-father.  Noah Taylor in a small role.  Nick Cave did the screenplay and gets a music credit.

* You know, the way some of the more bogan end of television is increasingly populated with ads for insurance products (specifically funeral insurance) and few questions asked personal finance.

**Pauses to bite yellow capsicum. Adopt supercilious smile.

***Speaking of which, the SBS series – currently placed just before Boardwalk Empire – is a beauty.

****The other brother, Howard, is a couple of steps above Mongo from Blazing Saddles.  (I saw that Alex Karras, the footballer/actor who played Mongo, died recently without having emulated OJ SImpson’s career).

***** Which would be empty, all the apples having been converted to something resembling calvados or palinka, except that it’s sold in jars like all the bars do now in Melbourne.

****** An inch, or an ounce, more and he’d be channelling every elegant but sadistic Nazi ever seen on screen.  “Acch! Herr Bigglesworth.  We have your friend Algy and plan to have our vicked vay vit him”  etc.  Nothing at all like Jack Irish.

The Words – Film Review

REVIEWED BY RESIDENT CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR

F.P. BLUCK

This is one I really wanted to see, and that I really wanted to be crunchingly good to the last mouthful. The usual weekday morning scatter of older folk, better dressed because this was, after all, Manuka. There were no choc tops.

The previews were about as much help as usual i.e. quite a lot. The Intouchables – rich but paralysed French bloke has his life turned around by a tough black carer and some of what one could call “the action” in The Words did, in fact, occur in France. Safety Not Guaranteed, an amusing-looking thing which seems to combine time travel and learning to be a writer. The Words had a bit of a time-ago thing and a disturbingly large amount of stuff about the Craft of Writing*.

Bradley Cooper plays Rory Jansen, a struggling young writer who is still parasiting off his old man for the rent while he tries manfully to produce the Great American Novel or somesuch in between hanging around New York like a ‘writer’. He describes himself at one inconsequential point as an angry young man which is sort of funny because anger would require a bit more acting. For heaven’s sake, his unbelievably tolerant girlfriend loves him because he is so serious all the time which probably says a fair bit about her and even more about Mr Cooper’s** dramatic stretch. He does, however, have intense eyes.

Without giving away more of the plot than the preview did, young Rory finds a beautifully crafted manuscript (so much better than his Great Work) in an old satchel and undertakes the heartbreaking task of putting it through the keyboard onto a screen. He becomes a literary superstar and is accosted by an angry*** old Jeremy Irons who claims to have written the thing. Uh-oh, Rory! Dennis Quaid ties it together nicely as a literary lion who has written about the thing****.

This could have had some cute tricks in it – but it didn’t. And that made it a little better than it was. Or it could have used its space and the minds of its audience to ask some really gristly questions about artistic ownership/borrowing/reflection/parody/tribute and maybe the possibility that we all steal from others every time we use a cliche or, indeed, use a word or a gesture we have learnt from another.

If it had jumped into the deeper water, it might have been a better movie.

*-the capitalisation is deliberate, sort of like the pace of the movie.
** – Breadley Cooper… Gary Cooper (famous for saying things like “yup, ma’am” with all the expression of something from Bunnings). Coincidence?
***– yes, he can do “angry”, and resignation and pathos and, pretty well, whatever is needed.
****– OMG! Quade/Quaid and Cooper. Cue the X-Files music and the weird green lights.

Arrested Development: Possible Prequel  -   Arbitrage review

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

And so to the 10 am session of Arbitrage.  Sparse attendance, despite this being public sector superannuation payday.  Lamented, with the ticket person the disappearance of Last Will before I was able to see it.  Not a young crowd, and definitely about half would have been there to check out the current state of Richard Gere.  I can safely report that he does a suit almost as well as Clooney but when looking harried and drawn, takes on an unnerving resemblance to Bryan Cranston*.

The previews – as ever – tell us much about what the chain (in this case Event) thinks about the movie and its audience.  The Words with Jeremy Irons needing rehydration where Bradley Cooper playing an expressionless guy**;  Skyfall, a James Bond starring Daniel Craig as a man with few signs of personality; a film with a very high shooting quotient; Argo which might be ok but for the sneaking feeling all the good lines have been used in the preview***;  The Intouchables is an endearing-looking French confection about a wealthy paralysed bloke and his way-tough carer. In other words, the previews suggested that (a) Arbitrage was unlikely to require a wide repertoire of expressions from Mr Gere and (b) the plot and script might be a bit intelligent.  We also had two ads for Foxtel.

The Geremeister plays Robert Miller, a lion of Wall Street, a sleek but ageing king of a jungle. He has survived for years and is a purveyor of confidence mostly in himself.  Susan Sarandon is his wife, limited to doing charitable things.  There is a possibly thick-headed son and a disconcertingly clever daughter.  He’s in well-dressed flunkie heaven with many young retainers and some old hanging on his oracular status.  The … ahem …. girlfriend with a cute French accent and an art gallery propped up by his “investment”.  All the signs of success are there but the throne is on hollow legs and the whole palace may be on quicksand.

The film deals with the period when additional excrement is added to the quicksand and the whole is transported by an air-conditioning medium into Gere’s immediate vicinity so that, for the first time, he may have to face the consequences of his actions****.

Solid performances from Gere, Sarandon, Britt Marling, Tim Roth (as a dogged NY cop this time) and Nate Parker.  A script that shows rather than tells and a plotline that recognises that what is screened has a before and an after.  Some recognisable traces – a bit of Bonfire of the Vanities here, a little Margin Call there, some Woody Allen-lite NY affection – but it’s a world most of us don’t know.

This is well worth time and effort.  It’s not perfect but it’s pretty good.

* – don’t pretend you don’t know.  Malcolm in the Middle and Breaking Bad, plus a couple of strange roles in movies including the unlamented Total Recoil.

** – something he seems to do quite well.

*** – oh, and it’s got Bryan Cranston.

***** – yes, he can act.  Although his character operated as a projection of the information he was processing much of the time, rather than as a whole person.

****** – I’m not giving away more of the plot.

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

To the cavernous pit that is Cinema One.  The handful of us sitting there were like leaves blowing around with nowhere to go.  Meanwhile, substantial numbers had lined up for the Madagascar movie, the adults with dutiful looks.  For it was still school holidays in the ACT and the day was bleak.

Previews for The Words, which is definitely worth a look, with Bradley Cooper (the current go-to man for many things) and Dennis Quaid* appearing to do fine things.  And a French movie, not The Intouchables this time, about the struggle of a disregarded son to follow the winemaking footprints of his father.  Yawn, shrug (Gallically).

I was after darker fare and found it in Lore, (that’s pronounced Law-ray, by the way, an abbreviation of the fine German name Hannelore).  Before commenting briefly, it is prudent to observe that few would disagree that the Nazis were the most appalling people ever to walk the planet although a few have tried to emulate them.  Nothing should ever get in the way of that truth.

Anyhow, the less than magical Reich that was Nazi Germany is in collapse as the film opens.  The loyal Nazi family of an SS officer collect their belongings in a truck and head for the Black Forest, leaving Dad behind.  After a time of growing desperation, the mother** tells their teenage daughter, Lore, to take the other children to their grandmother’s house near Hamburg.  The two girls, two little boys and a baby set off on a long trip through a hell that is made even more punishing by the beautiful summer weather.  They are exploited and frightened, and receive kindness only from Thomas, a resourceful if callous young man who may or may not be Jewish.  His motive is unclear until the end.

See it for the snapshot of life and attitudes at a time and place when certainty was dissolving into grief and blame and everyone lied rather than admit the truth.  See it for the wonderful sense of place, from the shaded forests to the open farmlands and then to the mudflats of Schleswig-Holstein.  See it for performances that are more real than young actors should know how to offer.  And see it for the reflection it offers on how the Nazis worked, through deceit and degradation of anyone they opposed.

The film is a German/Australian production and probably cost less than the coconut water and white omelette budget for Total Recoil.

* – not Randy Quald or Quade Cooper, either of whom would have looked ridiculous.

** – who demonstrates some of the personality characteristics that made the Nazis so popular.

THE WATCH

REVIEWED BY CRITIC, FILM BUFF & BEER CONNOISSEUR F.P. BLUCK

Nearly 10 am, I noticed that the painters hadn’t turned up. So I texted them and made a hurried bolt up to Hoyts, specifically to see The Watch because I doubt many people I know would want to.

As noted previously, the previews provide a reasonably reliable guide to the flavour of what is to come. I may have missed one, and that might be critical. We had Bachelorette (like an updated Porky’s with chicks),  an Australian “comedy” called Mental about a family where the mother is in a psych ward and something called Taken2. The last had Liam Neeson and some sobbingly lovely shots of Istanbul. But it also had lots of shooty bits and seemed posited on the right of Americans to shoot people in exotic places. What happens outside the USA, stays outside the USA or something.

If it had been named in the spirit of Snakes on a Plane and Cowboys and Aliens, the feature could be called Aliens in a Costco (although that would have given away the ending) or, more accurately, Unfunny Stuff about Rude Words for Bodily Parts and Functions. Ben Stiller plays a Good Citizen, which is a change from his classic “laid back once and future dopehead”. Vince Vaughn plays a crude person lacking in insight, which is pretty much his range. Jonah Hill is the creepy, angry, fat little guy and, again, is not stretched. Richard Ayoade, who played a weird bloke with a mass of pubic hair on his head in The IT Crowd also sticks to type, and managed to keep his accent for reasons that made even less sense as the thing rolled out its very long 90 minutes or so.

Arrogant, incompetent and dismissive cops with drunken, stroppy, sex-crazed teenagers. Weird, male neighbour who may or may not be trying to hit on the sort of happily married Stiller. Aliens – the closeup ones looked like extras from the Alien movies or maybe Tony Abbott with green goo, though the victims were all male. We all know how it’s going to end, so I won’t bother. Some gross bits, but the shocks were cliches, telegraphed from what seemed an eon before but was probably only another joke about semen or something.

Someone was laughing in Cinema 8 and it wasn’t me (which leaves the old bloke up the back, the bloke who was obviously waiting for his car to be fixed and the two teenagers). It was so bad I had no problem with a 15 minute wait in Medibank Private, where (a) one staff member was acting as concierge, directing people to chairs and asking questions about what they wanted at a volume that made me glad all I needed was to adjust the rebate level, (b) two staff members dealt with people at desks while the concierge swanned around and did very little and (c) one bloke occupied a vast amount of time due to his disbelief that if he joined today, Medibank Private would not cover stuff he had done earlier in the week or the surgery he had been told he would need.

Bring on the aliens, even if they’re not convincing.