Reviews

"Are there somewhere places...?" If you could get past the appalling (and relentlessly repeated) signature song by the deservedly obscure Meal Ticket, you'd be entering a place that truly had travelled in time. This timeslip drama unaccountably has 1980 stamped on the base. You remember 1980? Yep, it was nothing like the society depicted here, of vaguely-political, pint-glugging, chirpy Notting-Hillers. Ferchrissakes, setting it in Portobello says it all.The place was a living museum to the early '70s back then and has only recently dragged itself into the,ooh, early '90s. Dominic Hide's's naif rapidly loses his charm and his stoner persona combined with the look, attitudes and stylings of the supporting cast had me in mind of the early '70s, certainly not the hard-nosed era of Thatcher and 3 million unemployed! Truly just how irksome is Firth and how inexplicable that even 200 years hence such a hippy-dippy twerp could be charged with such an important task as travelling back in time (and potentially upsetting history). Once there he predictably starts messing around and his canoodling with Langrishe whilst happily spliced in his own time (without seemingly much in the way of moral dilemmas) might ring true when seen through the prism of those long-gone late '60s/early '70s mores (free-love, "if it feels good do it" etc) but it should have struck a dull note to a reasonably progressive 1980s audience and by 2007 seems utterly anachronistic. And this feller's from the 22nd century,remember! I'll let you into a secret here - I saw this on telly on its first repeat in the early 1980s and loved it. I was an incurable romantic back then and I guess that on rewatching it today,I was hoping to be swept back to happier times. But I found I just could not buy its sloppy idealism. To compound matters I began watching the 1982 sequel but at the point where the (male) babysitter entered the story, looking like the bloke from The Joy of Sex and with all the patchouli-scented charm of Sher's History Man, nausea overcame me and then when an even sillier time-traveller (Pyrus Bonnington) began flirting with the Spanish au-pair, Alice was duly summoned with the sick-bag. Just how has this tripe acquired the status of a classic?? Or am I simply an old curmudgeon?

As with that film we follow the implausible if always engaging adventures of the 2 lead characters. But whilst C + J eschew sex for a girly trip back into childhood, this pair revel in their carnality even to the point of exploring homoeroticism. Most of the sex they acquire from grudging or unwilling partners and yet, despite their deeply un-PC behaviour, everyone emerges smiling. Like C + G, through it all they remain innocents at heart, rebels against the quotidien, the bourgeois, the restrictive. As someone else has commented, I wouldn't want to know these 2 and it's a minor miracle that their trip brings scenes of mostly comedy and very little tragedy (and what there is of that cannot be laid at their door) and thus for that reason, it left me beguiled but with a sweet taste in the mouth. Dare I say that only the French can get away with films like this. And that is part of their genius.

Many of you out there might been repelled at the idea of apparently sane and decent folks rootling through sacks of rubbish in search of collectables,but it does go on,or it did leastways. I know cos I went out and did it myself at the local tip near where I used to live in Welwyn Garden City circa the late 1970s! I was dragged along y'see by a local antiques dealer who knew all about the hidden treasures hiding in those innocent-looking skips. So the nostalgia aspect made this episode even more of a delight. Chief amongst the great things in this story though is Warren Clarke's fantastic portrayal of head "duster" Brian Nunn. By turns he's a malevolent rogue, a solid mate of Lovejoy's and a cordon bleu chef. Why oh why wasn't he featured in more stories? In fact we could ask this of many of the terrific figures who pop up in various episodes. Some wonderful character actors took these roles and really should've been "recycled" later in the run. Anyways,if you haven't seen this one or it was long enough ago that you've forgotten it - dive in and enjoy a rattling good Lovejoy yarn!

I actually gave up on this film right after the laughable scene in Alec Baldwin's wine cellar. The sight of Willis tossing off his party piece wise-cracking followed by that gratuitous wine trashing was just too much for my delicate stomach. Baldwin seemed to be merely reprising his scenery-chewing role from Glengarry Glen Ross only with now murderous malevolence. Why I wasted a good hour on this abysmal movie is a mystery to elude even the NSA's code breakers. Where does one start with the insults to our cinematic intelligence? Just how many times could that assassin wave his piece around in public without getting just a hint of interest from law enforcement? Oh,I forgot,the NSA are so powerful that they can suborn any branch of government, can't they. But one can of course easily find their assassins on a computer database using only a grainy morsel of CCTV footage to go on. Look,I'm partial to a bit of consp/theo myself but this was just absurd. The very fundamentals of this film are awry. For instance, why not, instead of wasting the kid, his parents, Uncle Tom Cobley and all,not just give Simon and co. say a million out of those billions budgeted on "Mercury" (yeah,as someone else here has said,where DID all that money go?) to go live out the rest of their lives in obscurity in the boondocks somewhere, well away from puzzle magazine vendors or indeed any temptations whatsoever to do code-breaking for those nefarious "Enemies of America"?. Dumb films like this,whatever their budget, are classically peppered with glaring plot holes, if you're not too beaten down by the end to keep counting them. The plots only survive on implausibility and coincidence in fact. "Why did they do this instead of simply doing that?" is my tedious but insistent refrain. Can it really be so hard to put together an action thriller where the action if not plausible at least conforms to what we know about how people and organisations behave in real life? Nope but if you keep it plausible you can't throw in,every 15m a gratuitous violence scene/chase/bit of rumpy-pumpy and so on. The makers just hope you're either too stupid or else too mentally deadened after a while to object. I'd be aggrieved if I'd seen this to the end. I don't care what happened but I can easily imagine. I still feel bad about the bottles of vintage French red that WERE harmed during the making of this movie though!

I approached this movie for the 1st time with few preconceptions. The title was vaguely familiar and I'd recently seen Paris Nous Appartient which at least set me up for Rivette's obscure and allusive style of film-making. That was a film which I admired for its atmosphere and direction rather than its now-dated cold war paranoia schtick. The chief drawback for me is its treatment of the lead characters, none of whom one can really feel any engagement with or interest in. When the action peters out, one is left intrigued but ultimately rather empty. Perhaps that was Rivette's commentary on the blankness of the society of the time - the grim late '50s. It's evident that with certain directors, a "macro" perspective of their movies serves one better than attention to matters of plot and character. It's certainly true of Celine et Julie vont en bateau. Don't look for a tight narrative, plot exposition or credible character motivation, you'll find all that in dime-a-dozen movies that will be forgotten before the popcorn's been cleared away. Celine and Julie is a child's adventure, enjoyed by two adult (and rather beauteous) women. It's not a lesbian love story although the intimacy of the characters would normally suggest this. Indeed sexuality is noticeably eschewed and even scorned here. Naturally, because it has no place in the imaginative world of the child which requires freedom not the slavery of innate bodily desires. I found it a pure delight - original (ok,but for dollops of Lewis Carroll), human, engaging and fresh with only a vague taint of early 1970s whimsy despite its age.

As with many of the other posters here, watching this movie was a revelation, like the first time you taste a really good wine or hear Nick Drake. And after 3 and a half hours of patience you feel so glad you didn't get served a typical denouement and that you have, like the main characters, been treated to such a wonderful,wonderful experience. Never mind that all of it is illusory. After all,what else is a movie but an escapist jaunt around another's imagination. Undoubtedly the film's principal theme is childhood innocence and how the child's imagination transforms mundane reality. Inherent in Rivette's treatment is an understanding though that the imagination and reality cannot co-exist for long. One is essentially the enemy of the other and C and J become progressively removed from reality, ending up closseted in their darkened room with their transforming psychedelic boiled sweets and magick potions. Their mission is to save the young girl in the mansion from harm but this is surely heavily symbolic, really they are intent on preserving their own "inner child", their innocent separatism from an evil and unattractive "adult" world (peopled with sleazy club impresarios and Julie's "bandes de maquereaux"). Feeding one's imagination thus (even a deux) is basically masturbatory however, it has no life of its own and the reality it feeds on soon sickens and dies, just as visibly do the 3 characters in the ghostly love-triangle who have become grey and mute by the end of the film. C and J's gauche and unpractised interventions in saving the imperilled young girl remind us that we cannot enter our own dreams without seeing their fundamental flimsiness, they are our creation but are less sophisticated than us - simplified and unreal. The blue-remembered hills are much greyer when seen close-up. The joyous finale tells us that, nevertheless, another adventure always beckons, even if it does simply recycle old elements for new. I'm not sure if Rivette's is a sad or an uplifting message - what do you think?

I too remember this from the early 1970s. The dreamy idyll that it portrayed now seems indistinguishable from that of my own long-gone childhood. I was obsessed by the series,as I recall,in the same way I was by Dr Who and other escapist entertainments made primarily for kids. But this one had a different frisson,it was set in a foreign country,with cypresses and crickets and that kind of sun that you just don't see in England and which exerts a strange fascination upon us as a result. I still have the book which came out at the same time with a picture from the TV programme on the cover. It was never repeated on TV and in those pre-VCR days this gives it a magical kind of status for me!I notice it can be obtained on DVD now but I dare not rewatch it for fear of spoiling the beautiful if dim memories it still holds for me.

If you like hackneyed,inspiration-free plots straight out of best-forgotten children's fiction featuring a gaggle of unlovely,shrieking,white-bread American Kids boasting all the charm of a waterspout at a sewage farm, this is surely the film for you. Me,I'd rather watch somebody else watch paint dry. Everything that repels me about Spielberg is in this repugnant waste of celluloid - the cutesy sentimentalised, middle-American vision of childhood, the corny "humour", the utter predictability, but more than anything the incessant screaming and shrieking by the fat-faced,horrid,horrid little kids,who,in a more enlightened age would've been slaughtered at birth. Anyone who really appreciates cinema - both populist AND serious should rightly reject cynical junk like this.

People seem unsettled by this film because it treats a historical event with some poetic licence and also imbues it with a strong anti-war sentiment. But I ask them,how could one present a so-called "balanced" appraisal of such an unnecessary and cack-handed war? One might as well require any film on the Holocaust to "show both sides of the argument"-the Jews AND the Nazis! The absurd slaughter of the Charge itself is presented as just a grotesque symptom of a military run,as was British society at the time,on the basis of privilege,class and preferment. The waste and injustice that follow are unimportant,at least to the ruling classes. For example, mark what becomes of the anti-war protesters,who are harried by Cardigan and his mounted thugs. Those who oppose war are shouted down and denounced as traitors. We haven't come very far in 150 years have we,Dubya? One further point which no-one else has made-the music in this movie is some of the most evocative and haunting of any I've seen. I first saw the film at 7 years old and the airs that accompany some of the scenes (especially those with Redgrave and Hemmings) stay with me to this day. Equally no-one should disregard the impressive and innovative animated sequences that punctuate the film. Yes,the film is a hybrid-not an action film,not a comedy,not pure polemic,not a character study; it even boasts an inconclusive romantic subplot. So,like life,it's multi-dimensional,complex and at times frustrating. And for that reason,I cherish it. Films which pose questions but don't offer easy answers or neat denouements are to be applauded,not carped at.

...and so if you didn't like that,you'll probably not like this-it's typically post-modernist slapstick stuff shot through with anarchic knowing humour and a fair smidgen of satire..and nary a weak performance in sight. Just forget the recent dire Comic Strip revivals on Channel 4,no,the spirit of The Young Ones,A Fistful of Travellers Cheques et al is alive and well and benefiting greatly from a movie budget in this wee gem of a movie. What a cast too-the veritable cream of UK comedy talent past and present,all very much on form and clearly enjoying the ride. And no,that is assuredly not a bad sign! It's clear that many of the best lines in the film were improvised and that connotes a cast sympathetic to the intentions and approach of the director. Harry Enfield,for one,revels in his ability to inhabit characters and free-form lines and as the befuddled King George is priceless,but then he's made portraying eccentric aristos his speciality in his career. Neve Campbell copes brilliantly with the requirements of adopting Her Maj's clipped nasal English accent (cripes there are plenty of us Brits who can't master THAT voice!)and adds real class to the proceedings. No doubt she was chosen to sell the film in the States,but for once this does not prejudice the film,she fits perfectly. Mr Slater,playing the eponymous hero,is clearly a fan of British humour and judges his character perfectly-loads of Yank bombast with just a little twinkle in the eye! Perhaps the star of the entire kit and caboodle though is Leslie Phillips-a Brit comedy legend dating from the 1950s and now 81 years old. What a master of the sly look,the throwaway gesture and the lugubrious statement! Check his expressions when the car he's driving Hitler around in fails to start at the airfield,if you don't believe me-sheer genius. His character has the permanent air of a knave who's got in far too deep (well,as somebody attempting to wed Adolf Hitler to the future Queen of England you would really) and is expecting to be dispensed with at any moment. I could go on-honest guv'nor the blooming' film is crammed with delicious comic moments that you could blink and miss (an "Abbey Road" tube station and in the EAST END,anyone?) and naturally being "Hollywood" it all comes to a satisfying romantic end,no little thanks due to Tony Blair (well,even he has to get it right SOME time)! Ignore the curmudgeons who've dissed this,what we have here is possibly the best British comedy film we've seen in 20 years and,speaking personally for a moment,has cleansed my palate after the odious fare of more celebrated recent comedies such as "Wedding Crashers" and "Dodgeball". Try it yourself!

The ghost of Agatha hangs over this far-fetched yarn. The plot's full of implausible twists and turns which are all later revealed as plotted moves by the malign chess-player who's behind the mystery. One things that puzzles me is how come these arch-plotters can always stage-manage everything without the inevitable human cock-ups that afflict the rest of us? The psychological justifications behind this Machiavellianism are scarcely touched-the makers would prefer us to treat the movie as an old-fashioned revenge murder mystery,but set in the glorious surroundings of Hawaii. At the end of it all,the deranged baddie gets his desserts. One thing still puzzling me-the old friend of Jonathan's-Frank. Was he in on it? Why did he leave the drugged Harts in their room at the end? Why was he murdered? Was he an accomplice who needed to be silenced? And why oh why am I bothering to write this drivel about a Wednesday afternoon Channel 5 TV movie? The answers to all these questions are now out there for the rest of you lot to solve!