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dir: James Bobin
Welcome back. Now go away
And now, from the sublime to the sublimely ridiculous. Having spent a fair few hours this summer in the cinemas with my angelic / demonic child, we’ve traversed the entire current cinematic experience as it exists for the children of this city. There have been ups, and downs, mostly downs, at least from my viewpoint, but there have been some hours spent in the illuminated gloom that were enjoyable for us both.

The most surprising, in that I can’t believe she enjoyed it considering how dated, self-referential, meta and ‘adult’ it is, is this flick, The Muppets.

What a deceptive title. I mean, there have been so many Muppets flicks, but I guess not for a while. Thing is, for her, being all of five, she’s never seen the Muppets tv show. She never saw perplexing cameos from Roger Moore, Twiggy, Vincent Price or Johnny Cash or Liberace, or wondered why these sometimes drunk people were chatting to these furry puppets like they were real people. She never saw the stack of flicks from the 80s, or heard the musical numbers, or owned any of the holy merchandise.

Nor did she know anything about the perverse love/hate insanely passionate relationship between Kermit the Frog and Miss Piggy. Nor should she.

She did, as every kid in the first and second but possibly not third world knew the infamous Mahna-Mahna song, which should replace every national anthem and religious hymn the world over. But to her, I guess puppets equal fun, so there’s that, at least.

dir: Spielbergo
Horse lover
It’s not much of a stretch to say that Spielbergo gets to make whatever films he wants in ways that most other directors couldn’t dream of.

It’s not his skills as a director that I’m referring to; it’s the fact that he’s Spielbergo: the most successful director in the medium and in the industry thus far in the last 110 years. He's someone who makes any movie with the understanding that the payment for his services is 30% of the gross box office earned by whatever film he puts out there.

Few people have that level of clout. Peter Jackson is the only other one I know of. Let’s not get bogged down into the merits of such a system, since all I wanted to point out, which, in retrospect, is pretty obvious, is that he gets to make whatever flick he wants to make in whatever way he wants to.

So if he wants to make a flick set during World War I about a lucky horse and the boy from Devon who loves him, and all the people whose lives are touched by the horse as he makes his journey through that despicable war, well, that’s what he does.

And that’s what the pretty literal title refers to: War Horse is about a horse that goes to war. How’s that for subtlety?

dir: Brad Bird
Look at poor Simon Pegg, way way back in the distance. He looks lonely
Sweet Zombie Jesus, if you’re going to make more of these monstrous Mission Impossible flicks, then continue getting Brad Bird to direct, because this one’s pretty amazing. From a pure action point of view, this is probably the best action flick I’ve seen in a long while, and I watch a lot of violent action flicks. Sure, a lot of them involve Chipmunks or are on the Nickelodeon channel, but my point still stands.

These lapdog American retreads of the James Bond espionage action genre have peaked right here, and it would probably be best if they just put it aside and backed away from the franchise. But they won’t, like we all know. Success breeds laziness, so Tom Cruise will probably be making these when he’s in his 80s and still puttering around looking like a 40-year-old thanks to foetal grindings and other secret Scientological super serums. I still find Cruise somewhat scary at the best and worst of times, but I can’t fault him for his work here. This flick exemplifies its own formula, excelling with the stuff that it’s known for, which is a bunch of incredibly orchestrated heists / break-ins, high-tech trickery, complicated impersonations, and saving the world at the very last second after travelling around it first.

The travelogue this time around requires visits to Russia, Dubai and finally Mumbai for their globe-trotting fix, before returning to that wretched den of scum and villainy, known as San Francisco. This isn’t some Eat Pray Love-type journey of self-discovery where they see the world, eat rich food for the first time in their lives and sleep with gorgeous Spanish men with bedroom eyes and washboard abs. They’re out to save the world from nuclear destruction, you sighing, overly romantic ninnies!

Brad Bird is probably best known for directing one of the best of a good bunch of films; they being Pixar films, and it being The Incredibles. This is his first non-animated flick, and he handles it very well. It’s pretty emotionally spare, it just flies along and doesn’t get bogged down by anything. It waits for no man or woman to catch up, and just keeps powering ahead whether you want it to or not. It’s not going to be mistaken for one of the Bourne flicks, but nor would you want it to be.

The team in question, being the team of agents? Operatives? Supergeniuses? I dunno, but they have to break someone out of a Russian prison. That’s our starting point. Although, when you start watching a flick that you know has Tom Cruise in it, and you don’t see him within the first five minutes, you start to get nervous. Where is he, when will he appear, is he okay, that sort of thing. And you also know that it would have to be him that they’re trying to rescue. Or else our minds will be blown.

There’s high tech guy Benji (Simon Pegg), and attractive agent Carter (Paula Patton), and that’s it. Sure, some guy died in Budapest, but I’m sure that had nothing to do with the rest of the story we’ll be watching unfold in Mother Russia.

Why would they do something so unkind to Ethan Hunt (Cruise)? I mean, that’s where the guy wants to be, in a Russian prison, having Russian things done to him. As some kind of punishment, I guess, they end up getting him out, and some other Russian guy as well. Two for the price of one.

dir: Steven Spielberg
Bloody Belgians
Spielbergo’s first foray in the field of fully animated films is not going to set the world alight. The fact that it’s in 3D isn’t going to dazzle the masses much either. Whether it makes its money back, or results in dozens of sequels, or honours the Hergé source material matters not to me. But I am interested in being entertained.

There I was, then, stupid glasses perched upon my nose. Entertain us, I whispered to the screen.

And he did. It did. I had a ball watching Tintin. I remember reading the books as a kid, but they never made that much of an impression upon me, in that these aren’t to me like what the comic-book faithful often moan like sad cows over when their treasured properties are rendered unto the big screen. I feel no ownership of the character or the stories. To me they’re artefacts of the old world, like polio, diaphragms and vinyl records, when racism was cool and colonialism rocked. It’s also a kind of adventure tale which we miss, since today these stories seem to be bogged down by setup, thematic bullshit, meaning, significance and purpose.

This is just straight-ahead Boy’s Own adventure with a capital A, or T in Tintin’s case, where the emphasis is on movement and buffoonery over character or message, to everyone’s relief. The Steven Spielbergo of thirty year’s ago, of the Raiders of the Lost Ark era, would have been perfect to direct this. Instead we have the current weighty titan of unsubtlety who beats us over the head with his ideas wrapped up as they are in the best cinematography or cinematic technology money can buy.

Still, the compromise is that it’s present-day Spielbergo helped out by Peter Jackson. You may have heard of the New Zealander, Peter Jackson? They named some cigarettes after him, I think. And there’s this suit shop in the city named after him, too. Other than that, he’s done a few films here or there. Wait, he did that engorged and colon rupturing King Kong film, didn’t he?

Boo, hiss. Fuck him and everyone he knows. Well, regardless of that, he knows how to work with the new technologies, and who better for Spielbergo to pretend to take advice from, eh? Honestly, if you were Spielbergo, would you be taking advice from anyone, let alone a jumped-up New Zealander? You’re the most successful director in the industry’s history, feted and rewarded beyond anything imagined and everyone else, and you’re going to take criticism or guidance from a bearded Kiwi?

I don’t fucking well think so. Still, they must have done something right, because instead of appalling me, they delighted me.

dir: Jonathan Levine
Now boys, getting cancer is no reason to become neo-nazi skinheads, okay?
Cancer is a hard sell. It’s okay for those four-hanky weepies they make for the abundance of chick channels on cable, but for a comedy drama with nice, liked actors in it, you have to think a lot of people apart from the creative ones involved would have been a bit leery or at least anxious.

“Who’s going to see this?” muttered one studio executive, tugging on his soul patch and massaging his shoulder where Consuela, his usual deep-tissue masseuse had failed to work out the knot that had been bugging him all week.

“I mean, it’s a bit of a bring-down, isn’t it? Can’t he have, like, a cold or something less depressing?”

“What about lupus?” said his female counterpart, fighting the urge to think about food denied to herself at least until daylight hours were over. “Lupus would play well to 27 to 39-year-old one legged lesbians who like blue blankets, at least that’s what our data shows. What about an earache? No, we don’t want to alienate the people with sore eyelids. How about AIDS? Everyone loves AIDS. That’ll get the, you knows, into the theatres.”

“They have so much disposable income, they’ll buy a hundred tickets each! And we’ll make it in 3D! Perfect! Francine?”, he bellows into the adjoining office at his assistant, “get these Seth Rogen and Will Reiser shmucks on the line, and tell ‘em to change the screenplay to say the main character’s got AIDS. Whaddya mean the person it’s about, Will Reiser, had cancer? If I tell him it’s AIDS he had, then it’s AIDS, or I’ll run his weedy ass outta town on a fuckin’ rail. And Seth Rogen doesn’t get to tell me what to do just because he lost some weight and went all Hollywood. Fuck that Canadian wheatgrass drinking derelict. I’ll send him back to Saskatoon if he doesn’t change the goddamn script…”

And so on, and so on. That’s my pained and convoluted way of saying that while studios put out a fair number of flicks dealing with illness and cancer, they generally err on the side of weepy or stupid, or often two for the price of one. Even the true stories get so mangled that they’re less a life-affirming example we can all relate to, and more an exercise in torment. Apropos of nothing I’m just going to scream really loudly that The Bucket List was a fucking terrible film about two guys with cancer.

Just so you know, that’s how I feel. And a lot of reviewing is about feelings. It’s not about mise en scene and diagetic sound, or thematic complexity and Tarkovskian scene composition. It’s just saying “this film worked for me, because it felt like they got it right.” And I really liked this film. It was touching and sweet, and affecting without being manipulative or treacly.

dir: John Madden
Wow, how misleading is this photo
Who would have thought a flick about three Mossad agents trying to hunt down a sadistic Nazi war criminal could be a depressing and unfulfilling trawl through the sewers of human weakness and failure?

Not me, proving how truly not bright I am, which is why I’m reviewing films instead of making them. But there’s nothing I can do about that now *sob*. So let’s just talk about the film then, shall we?

John Madden is, I’m sure he’ll be mortified to hear, not a director I’ve ever had much time for. The most famous thing he’s done is probably Shakespeare in Love, which has about as much to do with the actual Shakespeare as that recent hilarious flick Anonymous did, which argued that Shakespeare himself was too much of a bloody peasant to have ever written all those plays and sonnets, and so it had to have been the 17th Earl of Oxford, Edward De Vere. But even if he had something to do with Gwyneth Paltrow shooting forth like the poisonous, leprous star that she is, and she may have even won a goddamn Academy award, if I’m not mistaken, for her weepy performance, he obviously wishes that he was directing stuff that was taken a bit more seriously.

So, instead of following Gwyneth’s lead and popping out strangely-named children, he persists in making movies, much to our collective disinterest.

The Debt is about three characters in two timelines. In the 1960s, Stefan, David and Rachel are played by Marton Csokas, Australia’s Own Sam Worthington, and delectable redhead of the minute Jessica Chastain, respectively. Worthington is trying to make up for being in Avatar, and he assays the role nobly. Chastain doesn’t have to make up for anything, because she was great in Tree of Life, though possibly less so in The Help as the white trash Marilyn Monroe-lookalike. Csokas is always commanding and awesome no matter how terrible the flick he might be in, so he’s got nothing to apologise for either. Go on, breath a sigh of relief.

In the ‘present’, which is the 1990s, Stefan, David and Rachel are played by heavy-hitters David Wilkinson, Ciarin Hinds and Helen Mirren, sporting a wicked scar on her cheek that Lucky Luciano would have envied. As people age, I guess a lot of them lose, because of all the bad shit that happens, their capacity for happiness. Maybe that’s why the three of them are so glum all the time. They’re so glum, in fact, that the old version of David kills himself within minutes of the film beginning. And Rachel looks even more miserable than David does, if that’s possible.

dir: Gavin O’Connor
Sons of Brutality
Men. Manly Men. Beating the crap out of each other.

This is easily the most masculine film I’ve seen this year, in a lot of ways. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact it’s a very good thing.

This is also one of the best flicks I’ve seen this year. At the very least it’s one of the flicks I’ve enjoyed the most this year. There are only a few aspects that squandered the tremendous amount of goodwill and positive feelings I had about the film, and none of them have anything to do with the phenomenal performances put in by nearly all the actors involved.

And yet, it’s still a flick about a bunch of guys beating the absolute shit out of each other.

Soldiers fight for king, queen or country because they have to. Mercenaries fight for coin. Warriors fight because they live to fight. Warrior doesn’t really sit well as a good title for this flick, because the people fighting don’t necessarily want to fight.

But they have to.

There’s nothing new under the sun when it comes to fight flicks. It’s a genre of sports film so well-trodden that it’s virtually impossible to say anything new. It can be said in a more contemporary way, but the themes are ancient, as are the beats and rhythms of the screenplays.

So, that having been said, it’s still possible to enjoy a flick even when it’s constructed from every other flick of its type that has come before. Underdogs, unbeatable machine-like opponents, a worried wife crying in the distance, issues with a father figure, alcoholics eponymous, Marines grieving their fallen comrades through violence, sick children. Mostly I wasn’t thinking about the commonalities, but eventually they couldn’t help but be noticed.

But Tom Hardy, Nick Nolte and Joel Edgerton, yes, that Joel Edgerton, Australia’s Own Joel Edgerton, shine through even with this tired material.

dir: Miranda July
The future is not looking too bright
Do you ever wonder if you’re really as intelligent as you think/hope you are?

I mean, no-one really thinks they’re as dumb as they actually are, hence the essence of dumbness, but, for me, watching a flick like this, called The Future, it makes me think I’m nowhere near as bright as I think I am.

Miranda July is a performance artist, writer, director and probably cobbler in her spare time as well. Film is just another installation / exhibition to her, perhaps. I watched her first film Me, You and Everyone We Know, and enjoyed it as much as these kinds of flicks can be enjoyed. And I read her collection of short stories called No-one Belongs Here More Than You.

None of this has given me a window into her thinking, apart from knowing she’s a very odd person. And that’s cool. I’ve been watching a lot of formulaic Hollywood pap lately, and it’s good to have a cleanse now and then. This flick The Future couldn’t be more different from formulaic pap.

By the same token, that doesn’t mean I entirely get it, or that I enjoyed it that much.

The Future doesn’t seem so much to be about the future itself, but about paralysis in the present in contemplation of the ineffable ‘future’. As in, our protagonists, Sophie (Miranda July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), do some weird shit because of the ever-looming ‘future’. The future is embodied by a wounded cat they have picked up and taken to an animal shelter, with a damaged leg that needs a month to heal before they can bring him home. The cat patiently waits for them, and they re-examine their lives in respect to this oncoming responsibility.

Of course, since this involves Miranda July, the film plays out in ways which only David Lynch, or possibly schizophrenics could predict, or figure out. She is obsessed with recording videos of herself dancing, but whenever she’s supposed to start dancing, she gets distracted by whatever is in the room, or by her bangs, or by anything, really. She freezes. The looming prospect of The Future, in case it wasn’t obvious, causes her, at least momentarily, to be trapped within the ‘to be or not to be’ dilemma made famous by some Danish prince in a play a while back.

dir: Lee Tamahori
Golden boy
Jesus Christ, or maybe by the grace of Allah, this Uday Hussein was a sick fuck!

I remember the stories from back in the day, around the time of the first Iraqi Adventure, where the tales of Saddam’s sons being monsters were coming out, and I just thought, “Eh, they’re just being mean.”

And then the many and varied stories of what a demented sociopath he was, to the extent where he shamed his own tyrant of a father, slaughterer of innocents and torturer of people who disagreed with him, and there was little doubt.

Of the many controversies regarding the second Iraqi Adventure Part II in 2003, one of the only aspects that has never troubled me were the reports of the deaths of Uday and Qusay Hussein. See, in my limited knowledge and understanding of history, and especially history as it applies to people, the only monsters often worse than the despots and tyrants who seize power in bloody times and rule their people with an iron fist caked in shit, are their sons.

See, Saddam was as bad if not worse than everything ever said about him, obvious even to someone who’s village didn’t have nerve gas dropped on it. But he’s the one who seized power. He’s the one who maintained complicated social – tribal – regional ties intact in order to maintain his steely grip on power. He’s the one who earned the fear that his name invoked. He’s the one who sent people to Abu Ghraib to be tortured to death, who invaded Kuwait, who started the war with Iran and sent a millions souls to their doom. He earned the fear his name engendered.

Shitbirds like his sons, bored feckless fuckwits, got away with all their numerous, icky crimes against their own people, worked only on their sense of unique entitlement, and exhibited no control over their own impulses because their father’s power kept everyone else in check.

dir: Jesse Peretz
One man's idiot is another man's presidential hopeful
Ah, a finer adaptation of Dostoevsky’s The Idiot we’ll never get in our lifetimes. Even Akira Kurosawa’s version isn’t this good.

Yeah, I’m pulling your leg. I’m pulling the heck out of your leg. This isn’t a particularly good movie, but it’s not the worst flick ever made either.

Now that’s a ringing recommendation, isn’t it? The thing is, though, I really did enjoy this movie. I pretty much enjoyed it solely because of Paul Rudd’s performance as the likeable idiot of the title.

For much of the flick, the impression we’re meant to have is that whilst his family might see him as an idiot, he’s not an idiot. He might come across as naïve, or too trusting, but generally he’s just a happy-go-lucky guy surrounded by cynical, selfish, awful people.

And then he does some stuff that could only really be done by an idiot, or at least someone with strong idiotic tendencies. Sometimes, even when someone isn’t entirely something, they can sidle close enough up to it that they might as well ‘be’ the label they’d like to avoid.

Ned (Paul Rudd), who’s pretty much a hippy in the modern age, is so trusting that when a uniformed police officer asks him if he’s got some dope, considering what a difficult, stressful week the cop’s had, Ned believes him and gives him some dope.

That’s what he does: he believes people, believes the best of people. If they’re going to be pricks about it, like, if the cop actually arrests him and Ned gets jailed, well, that’s the cop’s fault and the cop’s problem.

Can you see the inevitable problem with this kind of thinking? Maybe not. Maybe you’re a fairly zen kind of person, and you believe in the kind of concept that the universe gives a damn about our actions, and rewards or punishes people because of their karma, man.

If so, then Ned’s going to seem like a fucking guru to you.

dir: Steven Soderbergh
Lot of people gonna die
As if germophobes and compulsive obsessives didn’t have it hard enough already.

Speaking as someone who has long been pathologically afraid of germs and contamination (the psych term used to be mysophobia, or, having too much time on one’s filthy, filthy hands), I don’t need flicks like this. I’m already freaked out enough by the prospect of infection that I am the person the scientists lament creating superbugs by using hand sanitiser and giving other neurotics a bad name.

I’m not at the mask or tinfoil hat stage just yet, but, you know, it’s only a matter of time.

Contagion does me no favours, does me no help. It’s almost as if it’s aimed specifically at people like me for whom the horrifying prospect of an epidemic like this, of evil germs finishing off many, many people, is almost too close to home to appreciate. It’s easy enough to handle zombie flicks, where the virus is transferred through biting. Hand washing and ethanol can’t do anything about that. But a bunker mentality and obsessive hygiene could, actually COULD help if this scenario came to pass. And that’s why it hits closer to home. It’s practically goading us with the propensities into indulging them further and falling even further down the rabbit hole.

Conversely, or perversely, actual epidemics that the media and World Health Organisation beat up don’t affect me at all. I’m no more afraid of the spectre of bird, swine or monkey flues than I am of meteorites or werewolves. But when they explicitly spell out in the flick (Kate Winslet’s character does so) the vectors of infection, and how basic they are, my skin crawled, and my stomach lurched multiple times.

Soderbergh does a tremendous job grounding this flick in reality. It’s a what if, but played out as a what if in the real world, rather than requiring sci-fi or genre horror concepts beyond the grim reality of what would happen if a percentage, even a small percentage, of the world’s population contracted such a virus.

The people that try to deal with this outbreak are the characters that are depicted here, albeit by very recognisable actors. It’s the heads of the Centre for Disease Control, the World Health Organisation’s epidemiologists, and the microbiologists whose expertise would, we hope, be our species’ saving grace.

Exploiting the situation are shitheads like an Australian blogger (Jude Law), and a lot of the American population, who seem to go batshit crazy like they’ve watched too many post-apocalyptic flicks. A flick like this, like lots of American flicks, contends that the general population, the great unwashed and nicely washed, are always a bee’s dick away from turning on each other. All it needs is a flu outbreak or a hurricane called Katrina, and the general American population that doesn’t have a panic room or an underground, fully stocked bunker is immediately going to start bashing in the skull of the person next to them in order to feast on the scooped-out goo.

dir: Paul W. S. Anderson
But there are four of them! I'm so confused
You might ask yourself: why would you voluntarily see a movie that you know can’t be good? You might specifically ask me: Why would you, a person of moderate intelligence who thinks every movie made by Paul W.S Anderson is shite of the highest order, see another flick made by him, especially one that seems like the dumbest thing since someone passed a law allowing children to legally own guns?

It would be a good question. It’s not one I have a satisfactory answer for. I’ve hated this shmuck’s flicks for decades, and his flicks are definitely not improving.

But an opportunity presented itself, and so I watched it.

Historians and philosophers, centuries from now, if there are people still around then, and let’s hope they’re not, will wonder if this is the dumbest version of the Three Musketeers story, or if it’s the awesomest. Rivalries will angry up the blood. Factions will form. Lines will be crossed. Feelings will be hurt.

It’s a prelude to the war to come, you see. The two sides will eventually meet in a war to expunge the earth of those they perceive as their blood enemies, without all realising the deepest, most saddening and salient fact: it doesn’t matter, because both sides are right and both sides are wrong, simultaneously.

The Three Musketeers might be an old story written by Alexandre Dumas centuries ago, but surely he, rolling around in his musty grave, was hanging for the moment whereby the story could be rendered in eye-popping 3D? Surely all he wanted was that a film version be made that demanded the 3D surcharge for those ill-fitting glasses that work about as well as a granite condom, and that finally has the technology to add CGI airships to his ye olde story of swordplay and derring-do?

dir: Woody Allen
Not the sequel to One Night in Paris, unfortunately
Woody Allen… Woody Fucking Allen…

Eh, let’s not go there. Let’s just focus on the fact that there is a film out, and I watched it, and here’s a review of it.

Midnight in Paris doesn’t have Woody Allen in it, so that’s already a plus. The late era renaissance continues for Allen, who is still making films that star famous people, and still get reviewed by people, almost incredulously. It boggles the mind.

Regardless, any film without Allen still has an Allen surrogate in it, and this flick’s surrogate is played by Owen Wilson. He’s a nice enough chap, and nowhere near as neurotic or painful as the usual Allen surrogate.

His problem, and there’s always a problem, is that he’s more focussed on the past than the present. There are probably lots of good reasons for this. The main reason is that his fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdams) is an awful harridan of a human being, so awful that she’s, like, worse than fifty fucking Hitlers.

Independent of his awful relationship with this person, it seems like being in Paris kindles all sorts of misgivings, regrets, passions and longings within him. It is the City of Lights, after all, with an infamous history, but a lot of it, all the same. As Gil is a writer, naturally his thoughts tend towards both the self-involved and the literary titans of the past who frequented Paris during its many heydays.

And, whodda thunkit? He gets to meet them.

The clock strikes midnight, he gets a bit drunk, and then Gil is hanging out with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Ernest Hemingway and every other non-French famous person you can possibly recall who might have been in Paris in the 1920s.

How? Does it matter? Why? Well, it’s for Gil’s (and our) amusement, and for his journey of discovery. See, Gil needs actors playing Gertrude Stein and Picasso and Dali and Luis Bunuel and Hemingway to convince him that his fiancée is a bitch and that he’s better off living in the present and focussing on the virtues of the present, rather than tripping down nostalgia lane for ever more.

dir: Craig Gillespie
Those dreamy eyes, that over-compensating axe...
I… I don’t know what to say. I’m almost ashamed of myself for saying this.

I enjoyed this remake of Fright Night.

I think it matters that about the only thing I really liked about the original was nothing. Well, almost nothing. I kinda liked Roddy McDowell’s performance, because he was always a camp delight to behold on any screen. But I found the flick way too silly to ever like it or be scared by it, even as a kid, watching it surreptitiously on video without parental consent or knowledge. Though, to be honest, I still get the heebie-jeebies from the poster.

No, it was just too silly. Chris Sarandon was just too odd and wacky to be scary, and I hated the guy who played Charley, and always did for ever more. Especially on Herman’s Head, which is a tv show and war crime the Hague should get around to prosecuting any day now.

This remake isn’t particularly great, groundbreaking or goddamn gothically grotesque either, but it’s definitely better than the original, and its even dumber sequel.

I’m not sure if Anton Yelchin is that great in the role either, but he’s a likeable chap. Even though he’s a total dweeb, or perhaps because of it, he plays the role in a relatable or even believable way.

Charley, in this version, has managed to caste-jump in high school, an almost impossible feat. As we all painfully know, and television continually keeps reminding us, whatever strata you were in at school was permanent and irrevocable, and completely dictated who you were and how people treated you. And it also basically dictated all that you would achieve for the rest of your life.

But Charley has achieved the unthinkable: he somehow jumped up two or maybe even three castes, so that he’s below the jocks, but above the intelligent and well-adjusted kids, which means attractive girls want to fuck him now. He even has an attractive girlfriend called Amy (the delightfully-named Imogen Poots), and life in the outskirts of Las Vegas could clearly not be better.