Monday 29 October 2012

The Inbetweeners USA 1.11 - Spa Time

At the school's car wash, Simon moves in on Carli by stepping up to give her a lift when her boyfriend claims to be too busy and Samantha tells Will she'll sleep with him after he loses his virginity. Then, they go to a spa. Jay spends his time looking for the spa whore for Will, Simon takes Carli home and ruins her surprise party and Will meets another girl who tells him she'll sleep with him if he loses his virginity first. As usual, the other one does nothing of consequence.

Painfully, embarrassingly bad. Whether it's Simon's pathetic fawning over Carli and panicking over whether he's late to pick her up or Will's excruciating demonstration of "clinginess", it's not an enjoyable experience on any level. It's easy to see what they're going for: humiliate the boys and make us laugh at their expenses. Swing and a miss. It's not crude enough to be funny like the original series and it's not clever enough to be funny like The Office. They go for "gross-out" jokes and then bleep every swear word. They go for physical humour and the best they can manage is wrapping up Simon like a tortilla. They try and copy the original series and fuck it up. They try something new and all they can manage is, Neil thinks he's died and gone to heaven. I'm honestly surprised they didn't make any racist jokes when Simon was covered in mud from head to toe. Remove the bikini car wash and this episode would get a zero.

2 out of 10.

Tuesday 23 October 2012

The Inbetweeners USA 1.10 - Reading Gives You Wings

Will meets another girl, Samantha (Marie Avgeropoulos), the library is turned into a Red Bull bar and it turns out that Simon's girlfriend likes stealing things. She gets caught stealing and dumps Simon and Will's plan to protest the "library" goes up in smoke when he decides that he likes Samantha more than reading.

How ironic, the library is sponsored by Red Bull and becomes a hollow shell of its former self, stripped of all its contents and replaced by a mockery of what it once was that exists only to peddle fizzy, sugary pigswill. It's a perfect analogy for the way the original series has been treated.

I watch it so you don't have to.

0 out of 10.

Tuesday 16 October 2012

The Inbetweeners USA 1.9 - Fire!

For some reason, Will is both blamed for starting a fire and credited with putting it out. Given a week to clear his name or... he'll get a medal, he questions everyone. It's boring. Meanwhile, the lads go to a party. On the way, they pick up Lauren (Avery Camp), Simon's new girlfriend, and the 12-year-old that Jay obsessed over in the last episode. With Simon's parents away for the night, it turns out that the party is at... Simon's house and hosted by Simon's younger brother. Going to a party with a load of twelve-year-olds is as funny as it sounds.

If they were going to make jokes about paedophilia, they could at least have told funny ones. It's the story of the series, nothing they do or say is funny. Why should it change now? Even Hulk Hogan's cameo at the end is lame.

0 out of 10.

Tuesday 9 October 2012

The Inbetweeners USA 1.8 - The Field Trip

The remaking of random episodes continues as the first episode of the second series is re-told this week as the lads go to a budget school trip to an American Civil War site. Keeping up the tradition of ruining the supporting characters, there's no Mr. "Paedo" Kennedy. Instead, there's a couple of Southern hicks trying to sell stuff from their gift shop. Will and Simon pursue the same girl, Lauren (Avery Camp) and Neil learns about the Civil War.

Well, this was really, really, really boring. It's strange to say that a twenty-one minute show dragged but this episode really did. Nothing was even mildly amusing. Not Jay's pursuit of a twelve-year-old girl, not Neil learning that Abraham Lincoln died at the end of the Civil War, not Will throwing up on himself in the toilet and emerging naked but for his pants and especially not the boring Civil War re-enactment scenes.

Yawn, yawn, yawn.

0 out of 10.

Wednesday 3 October 2012

Looper (2012)

Hype can be a dangerous thing. The posters and trailers for Looper were covered in lashings of quotes about how brilliant it is and studded with stars in clusters of four and five. One critic's hyperbolic review even suggested that it was "the new Matrix". With a build-up like that, how could the film possibly disappoint me!

In hindsight, perhaps it was always going to disappoint me. That's not to say that the film's bad, it's certainly not. It's good. But that's all it is: good.

Joe (Joseph-Gordon-Levitt) is an eponymous Looper: an assassin hired by criminals living in the future to kill people they send back in time and then dispose of their bodies. He lives in Kansas in 2044. They live in 2074 when time travel has been invented and, according to his boss Abe (Jeff Daniels), who has moved permanently from the future to run the looper operation, it is apparently advantageous to know Mandarin. Loopers are paid in silver bars strapped to the people that are sent back in time for them to kill, except for when they are released from their service and gold bars are strapped to their future selves. After killing themselves, they have a few decades to live as they please before their future self is abducted and sent back in time for their past self to kill. Failure to kill your future self is punishable by death and is brutally enforced. Everything's going fine until a mysterious figure in the future called "the Rainman" decides to start having all of the loopers kill themselves off. After Joe fails to kill his future self (Bruce Willis), the two go on the run from Abe's goons whilst trying to solve the mystery of who the Rainmaker is and why he is shutting the looper programme down.

The film, to its credit, doesn't get into complex metaphysical discussions of the inner workings of time travel and give us a conversation we've already seen and had many times before. In a scene in a diner, Future Joe tells Present Joe that it makes his head hurt and the younger man drops the subject. It also presents an interesting argument: that if your future self came back in time and told you to change your actions, you'd probably carry on and do what you thought was right anyway. Still, for pleasing moments like those, there are some very dumb ones as well. Particularly, the fact that in the future time travel has been banned and is operated only by crime lords who use it to dispose of their victims. Joe gives us some reason about people in the future being "chipped" and the film brushes it off, but it's not a satisfying explanation and makes you really wonder what's going on with these gangs that possess incredibly complex and illegal technology like time travel, but haven't mastered the art of surgically removing tracking chips or throwing bodies in the ocean à la Dexter Morgan. Furthermore, requiring loopers to kill themselves presents myriad problems and results in both Joe and a looper friend of his (Paul Dano) failing to kill themselves. The much simpler idea of loopers at the end of their contract receiving a pile of gold bars and their future self being sent to a different looper to be killed apparently went over the heads of the criminals from the future.

After the two Joes meet, the younger man fails to kill himself. They later meet in a diner and Future Joe tells Present Joe that someone called "the Rainmaker" is killing off the loopers and he's going to find out who he is and kill him as a child. After the diner they're meeting at is attacked by Abe's men, Present Joe nearly gets caught and ends up hiding at a farm owned by Sara (Emily Blunt), who lives with her young son, Cid (Pierce Gagnon).

Some parts of the film may feel superfluous but turn out to play a necessary part in the film, namely Joe's stripper friend and lover Suzie (Piper Perabo) and the mutation that affects one tenth of the world's population and gives them the power to make small objects like coins and cigarette lighters levitate. Both of these feel like pointless plot additions when they come up but don't pass them off as such. Instead, there are plenty of other pointless characters - Kid Blue (Noah Segan), an incompetent employee of Abe who more than outstays his welcome and Future Joe's wife (Xu Qing), who serves only to highlight that the film has serious problems with plot holes. Additionally, the main problem is that the film pretty much comes to a grinding halt just over half way through. When Present Joe arrives at Sara's farm, he decides to hide there while Future Joe does his thing and spends most of the rest of the film hiding and talking to Sara and her son and, quite frankly, it's a bit boring.

In contrast with a fantastic first act full of action, great visuals and effective storytelling, the second act sees the film going round in circles, like Present Joe lost in Sara's corn field. It apes The Terminator as Future Joe tries to change the world and Present Joe hides out with a woman and develops feelings for her. If you've seen that film, you should be able to see the "twist" that arrives in this one. When the third act rolls around, director Rian Johnson throws in a couple of shootouts and tries to cobble things together but the damage has already been done. The resolution is different but still feels unsatisfying. I'd like to see if there's an alternate ending provided with the DVD release.

Plot holes, logical inconsistencies and a rambling middle section detract from interesting ideas and good performances. Jeff Bridges in particular is very good and Joseph Gordon-Levitt does a decent Bruce Willis impression. It's just a pity the two share so little screen time after their meeting in the diner.

It's not the new Matrix but it's better than both of that film's sequels put together. An infuriating case of what might have been.

7 out of 10.

Tuesday 2 October 2012

The Inbetweeners USA 1.7 - Crystal Springs

So, we're back to shamelessly ripping off original episodes. This time, it's the fifth episode of the first series, when the lads go to a Caravan Club. It's all pretty much the same: Jay lies about pulling loads of girls there and sets Simon up with someone, Will decides to slide across the floor instead of making out with a hot girl and Neil gets with her instead.

Jokes-wise, the "highlights" are Jay and Neil adding "with my dong" to the end of everything and Neil squirting a ketchup bottle as Jay's dad squirts out a runny shit on the toilet while they're eating. Jay's dad still puts down his son but it's not funny. In the original series, we feel for Jay. Yeah, he makes shit up but he doesn't deserve the ribbing his dad gives him. We sympathise with him because he's a character with depth. In the remake, none of it feels genuine: not Jay's dad's teasing, not Jay's reaction, not any of it. Will's turning down of the hot girl in the original series is borne from his nerves about his lack of experience. In this series... who knows? Will's not relatable in any way, he's just a twat in a sweater vest. Think Rick Santorum without the charm and charisma.

When Jay getting hit in the face by a condom is the most original thing all episode, you know things are bad. Although, it did at least draw the first genuine laugh from me. Congrats guys, it's only taken you seven episodes.

2 out of 10.