The Sea Wolves

Entertaining WW2 yarn with Greg Peck and Rog Moore. Took a while to get into it but I got there eventually and enjoyed it in the end. Based on a true story, it's about a sneaky German transmitter on a boat in neutral Portugese waters that's passing on co-ordinates for shipping vessels and navy frigates to a U-boat that's blowing them to smithereens.

Being in neutral waters though means the Brits have to find an undercover way of taking the naughty transmitter out. Or they'll get really told off or something. Solution? Get a squad of deniable middle-aged old boys to sort it.

So the first two thirds of the film is Greg and Rog doing some spying secret squirrel stuff  to get the plan in motion and then you get the old boys on a mission routine as they sail into the harbour in a knackered old boat. Will they all make it out though?

For most of the film it feels very James Bond. Glamourous locations, Rog Moore doing eyebrows and ladies with gay abandon. That sort of thing. Peck is good value as the leader of the gang too, being frightfully proper and proper hard - "I'd be delighted to kill you" - whilst judo chopping and machine gunning like an especially angry headmaster.

Despite the rubbish models used for the special effects, it's the ending that makes the film. I definitely felt an urge to get nearer the edge of my seat. 'Come on old guys' I cheered in a quiet sort of way. You can't beat a good men on a mission film though. More please. Especially WW2 set films. There's got to be some more of these to be made.

So a rather random film to watch but a pleasant experience all the same. Look at the movie poster up there too. That's awesome. Don't think I've seen 'Wild Geese' but if this team is behind it then I probably should.

Taking Care Of Business

Horrible 1990 'comedy' about an uptight, worky bloke who loses his Filofax and a baseball loving, car thefty bloke who breaks out of prison and finds it and assumes worky's identity. Everything that happens from then on is just bloody annoying. I can't be bothered to explain why and you'll never watch it anyway so that's fine.

Has there ever been a James Belushi film where he doesn't just play James Belushi though? The Filofax itself ends up as the star of the show here. Organisational obsessives will love the close-ups of the lists and indexes and the way everyone whips their organiser out with a flourish in meetings and restaurants. It also gets a 'hero' moment when worky and thefty hang on to it to make a zip wire escape. God damn those things are well made. Which is more than can be said for the film itself.

Piranha

Teeth-me-do this must be be the most gratuitous film I've ever seen. Bad science results in nipple nibbles and flappy fleshy. Once the bad science has done its thing there's barely five minutes let up from lovely ladies jiggling and a-wiggling their bits or limbs, eyeballs and faces getting eviscerated or lovely ladies jiggling and a-wiggling their bits. Again. But it's not all sexist misogyny. Oh no - there's a bit of male genitalia floating around too. Snigger.

Great to see a proper 18 certificate film too. I can't remember seeing a more gory film for the last twenty years or so. Some of it is brutally realistic. The credits give a big thanks to the 'Association of Amputee Surfers' and it's obvious that those guys were very busy.

Surprisingly for a film this trashy, it's really well made and more clever than you'd think. There's also some nice nods to Jaws with the reverse-zoom and a cameo from Richard Dreyfuss. This is a movie that knows exactly what it's doing and its main selling point, the 3D, is particularly good - even if it is mostly used as an excuse to get a succession of performing breasts front and centre. There's oily breasts, skiing breasts, tequila breasts, dancing breasts, surfing breasts and much more. In fact they should have called it Piranha 3D DD. Which brings me to Kelly Brook.

I'll be honest, she's very, very well put together. But what Mother Nature gave with one hand, she took with the other. Here is a woman who should never be allowed to speak on screen or stage. That voice. The strange softy, shouty delivery. Arrgh! Quick - get her doing some bizarre nudey underwater ballet scene or something. Oh you have.....oh yes, that's much better thank you.

Away from the breast-fest though, my favourite moment of the film was the return to the big screen for Christopher Lloyd. He gets to play the usual manic professor type of course but his brief exposition heavy appearance was the icing on a very bloody, funny and enjoyable (fish)cake. Great Scott!

I'm Not There

I'm not the biggest Bob Dylan fan you'll find but I do have five or six of his albums and enjoy catching up with them every now and then. I definitely have to be in the right mood. So I approached this Freewheelin' look at his life with a mixture of interest and caution.

Seems I was in the right mood as for the most part I really enjoyed it. It's clearly going to find a happier home with Dylan obsessives but I knew enough about the man and his history to get drawn into this offbeat portrait of his varied psyches.

There's hero Dylan, inspiration Dylan, celebrity Dylan, wilderness Dylan, protest Dylan and, best of all, Cate Blanchett as villain Dylan. I think I've got all of those right. If not I'm at least due something for 'villain Dylan' because it sounds cool and rhymes.

Blanchett is bloody brilliant and electrifies the movie (that pun alone should win me some points eh Dylan geeks?). The rest of the cast are great too - really quirky and interesting in the best possible way. There were some scenes that caused my mind to wander elsewhere but it's not really the sort of film that you need to focus all your attention on - in fact the freeform style of it almost encourages you to drift off into something like a dreamy, bohemian haze. I don't know, I'm just pretending to be a cool beatnik.

One thing I do know though is that this film made me realise just how much I want to run alongside a goods train in the USA and jump into one of the cargo wagons. Yeah man.

Highlander

Saw this was on TV and intended to just watch 10 minutes or so before having an early night. Fat chance. If you're a movie geek of a certain age I defy you not to watch all of this once you've heard Connery's echoey voiceover at the start.

I've seen this loads of times and even though it somehow manages to get slightly more rubbish with each viewing, I still adore it. I realise that doesn't really make sense but who cares? Highlander is pretty much the perfect example of a 'guilty pleasure'. Here's some of the good/bad specialness that makes me love it so:

• The incredibly lame first fight between Kurgan and MacLeod. Like a couple of kids re-enacting a battle at a school play.
• MacLeod's cutesy-wutesy way with the ladies - "Aye blossom, the way you like it", "Aye, blossom I will".
• Director Mulcahy's overuse of the clever fades from one scene to the next. My favourite? Christopher Lambert's funny face merging into a massive wall mural of the Mona Lisa.
• Christopher Lambert's funny face in general.
• And his terrible, terrible acting.
• Garfield, the brilliantly antagonistic cop - "You cruisin for a piece of ass?"
• The moment MacLeod realises he's immortal. At the bottom of what is clearly a swimming pool pretending to be a loch with rubbish fake reeds.
• "You look like a woman you stupid haggis".
• The awful, collapsing foam walled castle with the crappy drawn background of the night sky.
• Tooled up vigilante guy - "Ok marine, this is for real".
• Rubbish autograph matching software on a computer that looks like a BBC micro.
• Bizarre animated monsters attacking MacLeod as he dangles on obvious wires whilst going through the orgasmic rush of the quickening.

I could go on and on and on. Like an immortal film reviewer or summink. It's just ones of those films where even the bad things about it are so endearing that they make you wub it even more.

At its heart though is a bloody good story. A group of individuals who (for reasons unexplained) are immortal and can only be killed by having their heads lopped off, are drawn to seek each other out in battle over many centuries - beheading away like whirling dervishes until one is left to collect 'the prize'. This rather brilliant concept provides the film with a canvas that includes vicious clans in 'Braveheart' style battles, a World War 2 flashback, a drunken 18th century duel and, um, a fight in a car park.

All of this is bloated out with some extravagantly hammy acting, an omnipresent soundtrack by Queen (seriously - everytime anyone puts the radio on its one of their songs) and a training montage. Every guilty pleasure has to have a training montage. Here you get Connery and Lambert having a right chuckle running after deers and insulting each other whilst their stunt doubles do swordy stuff on top of various cliff tops.

I should add, to make myself sound intelligent, that Highlander also raises some chinstroke-inducing questions on life and death in a couple of poignant scenes. Set to a Queen ballad naturally.

Highlander is a great film. Better than that, it's a great, rubbish film. A self-invented genre I have huge affection for and one that grew wonderfully out of control in the excess of the 1980's.

Oh and bonus points to anyone who can name two actors from Star Wars: The Phantom Menace that also pop up in this.

Law Abiding Citizen

Had a bit of a crappy week this week so seeing Gerard Butler raging against injustice felt like quite an appropriate way to see off a Friday night. What a very silly film this is. Don't get me wrong, I still really enjoyed it but you need to be able to disable your 'critic mode' to enjoy it to its best. It's an absolutely stupid film.

Basically in a nutty shell, nasty things happen to nice bloke's family and nice bloke become bastard and wreaks excessively violent revenge on everyone he thinks is responsible for nasty things. Even though he's banged up in prison and stuff. And strips naked when the coppers come to get him. I don't really know why he did that.

Watching the film was a bit of a stop and start affair as it was interrupted by phone calls, the DVD freezing and my need to keep getting more beers and finish a bottle of wine. I'm actually as drunk as I've been in a long time. Hahahaha.

I liked the "**** you and your pommes-frites" quote and the bit that made wifey cack herself when someone's head got surprisingly messed up.

Sorry, if you want a better review you should probably do a Google-me-do.

Love you

Salt

Mrs Fletch and I took our Dads to go and see this. She said we were doing our bit for 'care in the community'. Amusing age related insults aside, this is just the sort of film that should find quite a wide audience and deserves to do good business because it's great fun.

Angie Jolly is pretty. Oh. I meant to type she's pretty damn good as an action star but my mind wandered and the sentence ended where it did. She is pretty though. And Jesus H Pitt can she kick bottom. She barely stops running and climbing and punching and leaping and shooting the whole way through. She could do with eating some pies though.

This filmy film was originally written for Tom Tom Cruise but he couldn't be bothered so they rewrote it for Angie. I think they did a good job. It's more fun seeing a girly girl kick people all over the screen sometimes and it adds a bit more of a dramatical edge to it somehow. It's as daft as a brush but it's really good fun. It's perfect for a guess-me-do competition with your mates. See if you can predict what's going to happen. I smugly admit that I scored very highly on this and figured out a lot of the plot very early on.

I must be honest, I've had a bit to drink tonight and feel a bit wibbly, wobbly so that'll do you for this write up. I liked Salt. It's a good condiment for an entertaining evening.