Spinning Man (2018)

One’s experience of guilt is a conditioned response which objective reasoning can  overcome… Evan Birch (Guy Pearce) is a family man and published professor of the philosophy of language at a distinguished university, where his charm and reputation have made his class very popular. When a female student named Joyce (Odeya Rush) goes missing, Evan’s previous extra-marital liaisons make his wife Ellen (Minnie Driver) question his alibi. Gruff but meticulous police Detective Malloy (Pierce Brosnan) has even more reason to be suspicious when crucial evidence makes Evan the prime suspect in the girl’s disappearance… Does his behaviour makes his arguments any less valid? George Harrar’s tricksy novel gets a taut adaptation by Matthew Aldrich but it’s oddly directed by Simon Kaijser who’s chosen to shoot everything through a ghastly and offputting green filter as though every shot were there to prove Pearce is a serial killer with several shots at hip-high angle which makes it even odder. However there are enough red herrings and details in the performances to make this a diverting mystery. The protagonist even spends time laying mousetraps which is a nice metaphor for his own predicament. And ours, in point of fact. We are being played with. Truth is relative, as Birch tells his students. You’ll probably figure this out before the conclusion but it’s a bit of fun getting there. Pearce is good as a highly suspect individual – a practised liar with memory issues who is catnip to female students and lusts after the girl in the hardware store.  It’s a role that has clear reminders of his breakout film Memento.  Brosnan meanwhile plays it close to his chest as the man on his tail who tells him they’re both in the business of proof.  I can’t move again:  Driver’s eyes betray a recent makeover. Sigh. Prove this chair exists/ What chair? 

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk (2016)

It’s sort of weird being honored for the worst day of your life. A young Iraq war combat veteran (Joe Alwyn) and his Bravo Squad comrades are honoured at halftime during a football game home in Texas approaching Thanksgiving in 2004 . Parallel flashbacks (to the incident being honoured;  to a previous homecoming?!) are intercut with the game. The high point of the event is a song performed by Destiny’s Child (in reality some stand-ins shot over the shoulder) and this is intercut with the assault in Iraq in which Billy rescues his hurt commanding officer, the mystically minded Shroom (Vin Diesel). His dad’s in a wheelchair, Mom doesn’t want politics discussed at dinner, his sister (Kristen Stewart) is the reason he volunteered after he injured her boyfriend following a car crash that left her with a scarred face. She wants him to get an honorable discharge because she feels guilty. A film so lacking in dramatic impetus as to be almost entirely inert with a lousy structure that drains the very lifeblood from the narrative. There’s some old faff about the soldiers’ story being put onscreen and the deal is welshed on by team owner Steve Martin who is clearly having a laugh in a straight role. Garrett Hedlund, as the head of the squad, is the only actor to attempt anything resembling a performance. Adapted by Jean-Christophe Castelli from a book by Ben Fountain and shot at pointlessly high speeds by director Ang Lee who probably did it that way to stay awake. Mystifying to the point you’ll feel like you have PTSD afterwards.

Superstar (1999)

I realise that not all SNL knockoffs are passable but this one makes me laugh like a drain. Molly Shannon is orphaned Irish-American Catholic high schooler Mary Katherine Gallagher, a bespectacled geek in love with Sky Corrigan (Will Ferrell), the dreamboat – wow! – and dreaming of, yup, superstardom. Mary’s the rewind girl in the video store and she’s obsessed with TV movies which provide a lot of her best lines – maybe the most apposite coming from Portrait of a Teenage Centerfold! (starring Lori Singer).[If this in fact exists…]  She’s relegated to the class for retards and befriends fellow loser Helen (Emmy Laybourne). She attracts the attention of Slater (Harland Williams) the mute rebel biker newcomer to the school which provides more backstory and permits her Id’s vision of Jesus to pay him a visit at this movie’s version of a crossroads. She tries to achieve her ambitions by competing in a talent show for VD (‘with an opportunity to appear as an extra in a Hollywood movie with Positive Moral Values’). Sky’s cheerleader girlfriend – the most beautiful, the most popular, the most bulimic – Evian Graham (Elaine Hendrix) is her main rival but wheelchair-bound Grandma (Glynis Johns) doesn’t want Mary to take part. The scene where she tells Mary the truth behind her parents’ death is screamingly funny – they weren’t eaten by sharks but stomped to death Riverdance-style. Reader, I howled. She and Sky both think The Boy in the Plastic Bubble is the 19th-best TVM and when he and Evian split she spots an opening…This high school movie parody is for that special person in your life – your irrepressible inner gummy child! The perfect comedic holiday comedown. Written by Steve Koren and directed by Bruce McCulloch. Shannon is great. In fact, she’s a Superstar!

You Again (2010)

High school is never over. And as we learned so eloquently from Buffy The Vampire Slayer, it’s Hell. Successful LA PR Marni (Kristen Bell,Veronica Mars take a bow!) is flying back up to Northern California for her brother’s wedding. En route she learns he’s getting hitched to the monstrous Joanna (fka cheerleader JJ) (Odette  Yustman) who bullied her for four years at Ridgefield High. Nobody can connect this latterday Meals on Wheels Mother Teresa act with the picture Marni paints of the years of bullying … until Marni’s mom Gail (Jamie Lee Curtis) meets Joanna’s aunt Mona (fka Ramona), her own high school nemesis and now a Forbes 100 hotel mogul. A series of pratfalls and slapstick sequences unfold including dance training with a go-to wedding planner (a very peppy Kristin Chenoweth) that lead to Marni looking exactly like she did at high school – a four-eyed acne-ridden geek who has to sleep on the couch of her childhood bedroom while Joanna takes over her family even wooing grandma Betty White. An extremely funny comedy of manners and you don’t have to have a sibling married to Satan’s spawn to enjoy it – but it helps. Stick around for the surprises in the final reel and the guest musical spot in the credits.Great fun. Written by Moe Jelline and directed by Andy Fickman.

Midnight Offerings (1981) (TVM)

Witching hour again! And this time it’s a witch-off between Little House on the Prairie‘s Mary Ingalls (Melissa Sue Anderson) and The Waltons‘ Erin (Mary Beth McDonough), a battle that has an incendiary ending.  Anderson is Vivian Sotherland, the spiteful Mean Girl at Ocean High CA who intimidates male teachers sexually and if they don’t succumb she murders them – we enter as she casts a spell that causes one to crash his car, saving her quarterback boyfriend Dave (Patrick Cassidy) from flunking and thereby keeping him on the team. New (motherless) girl Robin Prentiss  (McDonough) has read about his drunken misdemeanour in the local freebie paper but likes him despite her dad’s objections. They’ve moved from Connecticut following a series of unfortunate events – she has powers too, but no idea how to control them. Vivian can’t read her and starts to attack her dad and Dave and nearly kills Robin in a house fire. Dave is on to her scheme and brings Robin to Emily Moore (Marion Ross, Mom from Happy Days!) to help her ward off evil. Mrs Sotherland (Cathryn Damon) didn’t abort Vivian to stop breeding the 7th daughter of the 7th daughter and blames herself for allowing her to go off the rails so she must intervene before another murder occurs … This is clever, intelligent stuff, as you would expect from long-time Rockford Files writer/producer Juanita Bartlett, responsible for the screenplay. Anderson is very well off-cast in the lead but it’s McDonough who has the more expansive role and she is very good. A newly blonde Kym (Sound of Music‘s Gretl) Karath is the hobbled cheerleader and this is a point of interest – she made her debut in Spencer’s Mountain as a three year old, a film that was the first adaptation of Earl Hamner’s book that of course became … The Waltons. And look fast for Vanna White too. Excellent stuff, thanks to the Horror Channel for resurrecting it. Directed by veteran TV helmer Rod Holcomb.