To complete my reviews of Comic Strip films, I sat down to watch Five Go To Rehab<\/em> with some trepidation. The first Comic Strip film, Five Go Mad In Dorset<\/em>, is as good as anything the team is capable of but the sequel, Five Go Mad On Mescalin<\/em>, produced just a year later, managed to tarnish the memory of the original, rather than add anything significant to the corpus. With the sole exception of Four Men In A Car, <\/em>everything from Red Rose of Courage<\/em> has ranged from disappointing (The Hunt for Tony Blair<\/em>) to ghastly (Wild Turkey<\/em>) but the idea of the Famous Five reunited in late-middle-age is a very good one, so I was prepared to enjoy this production for satellite station Gold.<\/p>\n Performances, in general, were great. All four leads look a little chunkier, a little puffier than before, but French and Saunders are as great as ever, Richardson essays a fine line in pop-eyed dementia and Edmondson, given the lion\u2019s share of the plot to shoulder, does a truly excellent job (although his character has been subject to even further revisions since Mescalin<\/em> when he already bore little resemblance to the person in Dorset<\/em>).<\/p>\n The execution, as ever, was the problem. The script seems very uncertain about where the comedy lies, alternately presenting fake adventures with real ones, and lazily making not one but two of the main characters secret alcoholics, holed up at the same bizarre rest home. While it\u2019s a pleasure to see Robbie Coltrane reprise his role, mere nostalgia isn\u2019t enough to sustain the running time when the plot is as ropey as this. The appearance of Daniel Peacock at the end re-energises the story considerably and the betrayal of his own children is a great ending, but leaving the Rik Mayall \/ Felix Dexter storyline dangling is lazy and pointless. Another minor misfire, although not without its incidental pleasures.<\/p>\n Looper<\/strong><\/p>\n One of the most eagerly-anticipated films of recent years, with a delicious high-concept premise fleshed out by two wonderful stars. Bruce Willis is Joseph Gordon-Levitt from the future and they\u2019re trying to kill each other. Who wouldn\u2019t want to watch that? Sadly, the end result is a somewhat of a mixed bag. I don\u2019t object to Rian Johnson\u2019s cheerfully inconsistent view of time-travel, especially when it produces scenes as heart-stoppingly gruesome and astonishing as Frank Brennan\u2019s horrible demise. Time travel never makes sense anyway, so complaining that it doesn\u2019t make sense in any specific way is slightly pointless, even if a movie is flagrantly breaking its own rules. What\u2019s less forgiveable is the way the movie abandons its delicious premise about half-way through for another movie entirely, one which is rather less interesting and lumbers the plot with double mumbo-jumbo<\/a>, albeit blessed with two lovely performances from Emily Blunt and six-year-old Pierce Gagnon, who is nothing short of miraculous.<\/p>\n What\u2019s even harder to forgive is the gigantic plot-hole which sits at the heart of this film and which seems to have been rather unremarked upon. As Gordon-Levitt\u2019s character explains via voice-over \u201cTime travel has not yet been invented. But thirty years from now, it will have been. It will be instantly outlawed, used only in secret by the largest criminal organizations. It\u2019s nearly impossible to dispose of a body in the future. I\u2019m told. Tagging techniques, whatnot. So when these future criminal organizations in the future need someone gone, they use specialized assassins in our present, called loopers.\u201d Okay fine, so characters like our hero Joe get instructions to lie in wait for a victim to be zapped back in time, bound and gagged with payment in silver strapped to them, and when they appear, blast them with a shotgun, take the body to a furnace and stash the silver for themselves.<\/p>\n When one of these assassins (\u201cLoopers\u201d) is retired, the future mob sends the old version of them back in time (\u201cclosing the loop\u201d). They get extra payment in gold and can retire from this brutal life. That\u2019s one niggle right there \u2013 why should not the killing of one\u2019s future self be the first<\/span> assassination? Why does it have to be the last? But anyway, in one of the film\u2019s most elegant narrative sequences, we see Young Joe fail to execute Old Joe who appears unbound and so escapes. We then apparently flash back to the same scene again, this time watching Young Joe blast Old Joe away when he appears, correctly trussed-up. In a long montage sequence we watch Young Joe celebrate his retirement, get bored, grow old, fall in love, and become Old Joe who eventually has a run-in with the mob who come for him, guns blazing, slaying his wife who is caught in the crossfire. Joe is taken to the warehouse where the time-travel machine is housed, and it becomes his only means of escape and thus, when he arrives in front of Young Joe, he is untied and ready to outwit his younger self. The whole of Old Joe\u2019s motivation from this point on is to prevent his future \u2013 the future in which his beloved wife is killed by the mob \u2013 from occurring.<\/p>\n But it seems almost inevitable that if you stick clever criminals in a time-machine and send them back twenty-five years that they will find a way of fucking-up whatever you have planned for them. If it is \u201cimpossible to dispose of a body\u201d as we are told, then a far better plan would be to shoot unwanted persons through the head and then send the dead body<\/em> back in time for disposal<\/span>. Bursting in to Old Joe\u2019s place, firing weapons with lethal force, demonstrates that actually the mob is perfectly happy to kill people in the future. They just prefer to send living bodies back in time, because \u2013 well because it makes for a better movie apparently.<\/p>\n Anyway, there\u2019s a lot to enjoy here, but movies that want to play with science fiction concepts like this need to be a bit more careful to deal with these kinds of inconsistencies. I\u2019m not saying it\u2019s Prometheus<\/em> bad \u2013 just a bit sloppy.<\/p>\n Argo<\/strong><\/p>\n In the hope of getting a jump on my Best Picture Nominees programme for 2013, I went to see Argo, the third film directed by Ben Affleck. Having greatly admired Gone Baby Gone<\/em> and thoroughly enjoyed The Town<\/em>, it was with very high hopes that I went to see this, and despite paying a premium to sit virtually around the corner from the television-sized screen, in the very back row of the smallest auditorium at my local Odeon (ugh!), Argo<\/em> made me smile a lot. Just like The King\u2019s Speech<\/em>, it\u2019s perfect Oscar fodder. Not a great film, perhaps, but a very, very good one, expertly balancing humour, suspense and character notes; blending a real-life story with a bit of Hollywood sparkle; and tackling big themes without confronting any deeply-held beliefs.<\/p>\n To its credit, the screenplay fearlessly plays fast-and-loose with the truth when it makes for a better film. The two major scenes on which the structure of the movie rests \u2013 one of the hostages declaring that the plan will never work, and that same hostage playing his role to the hilt when they are detained at the airport \u2013 are complete fiction. So are the most exciting and suspenseful scenes \u2013 the \u201clocation scout\u201d in the bazaar, the last-minute scramble for tickets and the final runway chase. And for that matter so is the most entertaining character \u2013 Alan Arkin\u2019s hard-bitten Hollywood producer.<\/p>\n But none of this matters when the attention to detail is so great and the forward momentum of the plot is maintained so effortlessly. Chris Terrio’s screenplay is brilliantly written and Affleck’s evocation of the period is breathtaking. And Argo<\/em> probably has the best supporting cast of the year, with John Goodman, Bryan Cranston, Richard Kind, Philip Baker Hall, Bob Gunton, Titus Welliver and any number of other familiar faces joining Affleck in his astonishingly accurate recreation of 1979-80. Marvellous entertainment and an amazing true (or at least true-ish) story of courage and ingenuity, it hardly puts a foot wrong, provided you aren\u2019t expecting a super-accurate history lesson.<\/p>\n Skyfall<\/strong><\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/12\/1162002_comic_strip.jpg\" "\\"1162002_comic_strip\\"")
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