MY RATING: 3 OUT OF 10

A few years back I joined the Cineworld Unlimited club, £13 a month and watch as many movies as you want. This means that over a month you get to see some great, and not so great new movies. Have You Heard About The Morgans is firmly in the later.

Romantic-comedy regulars Hugh Grant and Sarah Jessica Parker finally unite in this fish-out-of-water laugher. The actors play Paul and Meryl Morgan, a Manhattan couple whose marriage is in danger. But it turns out all they may need is a change of scenery: when the Morgans witness a murder and are sent by the government to small-town Wyoming to hide from the killers, their marriage shows signs of recovery. DID YOU HEAR ABOUT THE MORGANS? also stars Sam Elliott, Mary Steenburgen, and Elisabeth Moss.

Why Hugh signed up for this is the biggest mystery. A tired format whose only surprise was the fact there were none. Expect this to have a shot run at the cinema and a speedy DVD release. Not worth spending money to see on the big screen given the other great movies round at the moment

MY RATING: 7.5 OUT OF 10

Up in the Air is a drama worthy of director Jason Reitman’s name as he has once again delivered a cleverly written drama that has many layers of depth to keep viewers questioning its actual point.

As seen in other films by Reitman such as “Juno” and “Thank You for Smoking”, his humor shines through with a bit of ironic sarcasm and biting reality in situations that generally one should not be laughing about, but yet somehow can’t stop from cracking a grin.

Already showered with a sprinkling of Golden Glove nominations, Up in the Air the movie is based on a novel that was written by Walter Kim, which writers Sheldon Turner and Reitman turned into a clever movie with isolated characters who learn to deal with each other although their agendas are strict.

Of course, apart from the wonderful reality bites aside moments and human characters, a large part of the reason why it is so easy to engage and admire the film is because the star of the film is George Clooney who is simply hard to hate.

Clooney does not disappoint as he delivers a poignant role that is both provoking and memorable. He plays the part of Ryan Bingham who has spent his life flying all over the US to fire people to save CEOs from the trouble.

Of course, this lifestyle is not to last as a woman who changes up the procedure quickly changes the shape of his lifestyle and personality which is where the fun really starts to start in this cut and dry lovely movie.

Up in the Air opens this Friday

MY REVIEW: 3 out of 10
It’s not a fatal flaw for a film to start with a statement which is patently untrue. ‘Casablanca’ made the dubious claim that the North African city of the same name was a key point of departure for refugees from Nazi-occupied Europe, but it didn’t exactly hurt the movie.

And though this is the only time you’ll hear ‘Nativity’ mentioned alongside one of the greatest movies in Hollywood history, it’s not an enormous problem that this film is based on a premise which is similarly hard to swallow: that anyone other than the children taking part or their family members is that interested in a school Nativity play.

It’s not true, but it’s harmless enough. What’s wrong with the film is that it’s unconvincing and lazy on a much more fundamental level.

Admittedly it has a certain amount of charm built in thanks to the presence of some cute kids, and is astutely cast with a kind of ‘Who’s Who?’ of modern British comedy performers, all of whom deliver confident performances. But also familiar performances; none of them are called upon to do anything they haven’t done before.

However this overlong, shoddily-directed film saves the worst until last, with not just a taste of the Nativity entertainment that’s been in preparation but several whole numbers, all of them dreadful, and which I only wish were instantly forgettable. I haven’t enjoyed myself less at the cinema in years, and speaking as someone who loves Christmas, those songs almost put me right off it – for life.

MY RATING: 4.5 out of 10
The tagline for the film is “We were warned”, well I saw the trailer, saw it was 158 mins long, read the synopsis and buy should I have paid closer attention the tagline. Take a dollop of Deep Impact, a squeeze of Day After Tomorrow, the tail of Titanic, the heart of Armageddon, the tail of Posideon Adventure, throw it all in the blender and out it splurges in an inedible dollop. With that in mind let’s focus on the positives…..

The film follows mostly two groups of people who are dealing with the end of the world in the year 2012. We start off with Dr. Adrian Helmsley (Chiwetel Ejiofor) in 2009 learning that solar activity has caused the Earth’s core to heat up. We follow the next few years as he works with Chief of Staff Carl Anheuser (Oliver Platt) on researching the issue and finding a solution (it’s just as enigmatic in the movie as it is in my description). Eventually we make it to 2012, where Helmsley and crew realize that things are going to get worse a lot quicker than they thought.

Also in the title year, we meet Jackson Curtis (John Cusack), novelist and bad parent/husband, which explains why his wife lives with another man now. He takes his kids on a camping trip to Yellowstone, where he meets Mr. Charlie Frost. Frost is a self-proclaimed prophet who believes the world will end in 2012 because the Earth’s core will melt, leaving the crust to move around (”shift”), creating every known geological disaster at once. He also knows about a conspiracy in which spaceships are being built to save those with money to buy a seat. We soon realize he’s correct, and Jackson takes his family on wild ride to get to the ships.

I know everyone wants to know about the one thing you are really going to see the film for: the special effects. They were good, as to be expected, but they were mind-numbing at times. There was so much destruction going on that it was kind of hard to take it all in. Any scenes where people were involved in the destruction instantly became more interesting, and I thought as a whole they were done very well. Unfortunately, there were many less “Wow” moments that I would have thought to see in a film like this. I was simply underwhelmed.

That being said, the plot for the film bordered on absurd. Sure, the technology and the natural disasters we see are explained in a way that makes them seem reasonable (as if that mattered to us), but I found it convenient that Curtis and crew were always one step ahead of the destruction. The probability of them surviving the trip they made from Los Angeles to China is so small, that if I made a bet on it, I could afford multiple seats on one of the ships. There are so many “well, that’s convenient” moments that you start to roll your eyes after a while. The overall story is pretty thin, but there’s so much action that you almost don’t even notice it.

What you do notice, however, is the wide range in dialogue quality in the script. There are scenes (especially with Curtis’ kids), where they are very on the nose and almost Michael Bay-ish with the humor. However, there are some very touching moments between characters when they know one isn’t going to survive. Yes, at times the film is cheesy and unbelievable, but I have to admit that scenes like the one between Helmsley and his father definitely moved me.

I don’t want to give any spoilers, but I will say that one of the things that made me the most mad was the ending. Other than the fact that the end itself was very “and they all lived happily…”, the plot surrounding the climax was silly and of course one nation saved the world, again. The message was clear, but the results weren’t as satisfying as they made it seem.

All in all, when you see 2012, you are getting what you paid for: Tons of CGI destruction, an ensemble of characters that mirror characters you have seen before that come together at the end, Oh yeah, and cheesy humor and unbelievable luck.

MY RATING: 7 out of 10
Now first thing’s first, there is only one true version of Christmas Carol, and as people of my age will tell you, that’s The Muppets Christmas Carol…… “..after all there’s only one more sleep ’til christmas” and other such tunes. But enough reminiscing, let’s deal with this year’s festive version. You the know the story inside out by now, .. so what more can be squeezed out of this Dickens classic….

After directing The Polar Express in 2004, Robert Zemeckis vowed to only make 3D movies using motion-capture technology from then on, never to return to traditional live action films again. What? How could he? Moviegoers everywhere were bemused at how the bloke who gave us Forrest Gump, the Back to the Future trilogy, Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Contact and Cast Away could settle for some silly 3D business. Perhaps Zemeckis was smarter than us all though, his pledge to developing a decent 3D output coming half a decade earlier than most. It seems he was on to something.

It is credit to Zemeckis though that his use of 3D isn’t the drawcard for this wonderfully told fable, it purely enhances it. The opening title sequence is one of the most breathtaking of the year, as we soar over – and through – the old Victorian town in which Scrooge inhabits in only one shot. It doesn’t end there however, with no less than two more flying scenes and a splendid chase sequence on foot, which capably show what mo-cap and 3D are capable of. One small gripe, as was present with Up, the glasses still make everything darker and subsequently duller; especially as this picture is intentionally not well-lit to begin with.

We all know the famous Charles Dickens novel for which this is based on and Zemeckis stays faithfully close to it, unworried about making a family movie that has very few laughs. Let’s face it, the story of Scrooge isn’t meant to be a light-hearted laughfest. With demonic horses (complete with glaring red eyes), ghosts with broken jaws and men withering away to a skeleton, this is anything but a hoot. But is that a bad thing? Not at all. In fact it is a relief to see a movie for young (but not too young) and old that doesn’t shy away from evoking feelings of fear and regret rather than always sugar-coating them with funny moments. If dealt with rightly, emotions like these can be healthy and will have a longer lasting effect on you and your kids than something that only makes you laugh.

Providing the voice of Scrooge from childhood to old-age, along with the three Ghosts of Christmas, Carrey does a fine job, even with his normal over-the-top voicing toned down a few hundred decibels. He is barely recognisable in all his parts – a result that I’m sure Zemeckis would have been aiming for – which allows the characters to stand on their own two feet rather than be a typical Carrey product. The experienced supporting cast of Oldman, Hoskins, Firth, Elwes and Wright Penn add a nice level of class to the proceedings.

The dark and morose atmosphere might at first shock, but ultimately both children and adults will gain more from this experience than most family films. Do not wait for this to come out at home, see it on the big screen in breath taking 3D.

Not everything from the Pixar stables is perfect. Cars was pretty bland, and after its spellbinding first half hour, Wall-E went strictly downhill. But then, along comes a film like Up, a film so fantastically uplifting and so universal in it’s appeal that it’s hard not to be thankful for the joy of being a moviegoer in an age when this animation studio has produced a run of brilliant titles that compares with the golden era of late-1930s Disney.

Up actually begins in the 1930s. A wordless opening depicting the relationship between Carl and Ellie Fredricksen lasts barely five minutes but offers in compacted form more laughter, sorrow and breathtaking beauty than exists in most of the ouput from Hollywood
in any given year.

The characters are wonderfully developed; ther’s Carl, a dreamer and would-be wanderer, sitting in a movie theatre wearing aviator goggles and thrilling at the latest black-and-white newsreel adventures of Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), an action-hero in the mould of Indiana Jones who uses a giant airship to explore exotic lands and discover rare creatures, and whose catchphrase is “Adventure is out there!”

And there, suddenly, is Ellie, another youngster awe-struck by the distant worlds invoked by Muntz. Together they plot and scheme, fall in love, get married, buy a ramshackle home they work hard to fix up. They save every spare dime in a jar so that, one happy day, they can pay for a trip to the legendary Paradise Falls. But the bills mount, their funds dip, and, in a couple of heartbreaking shots, they’re shown dealing with the fact that they’ll never be able to have children.

Over time, their youthful dreams become just that: dreams. They console themselves with each other. Their marriage is tested,but they survive, take care of each other. Soon they sicken, get bent. One day, Ellie doesn’t get up. Carl, now 78 years old, is inconsolable.

It’s one of the most extraordinarily openings to a film, far less an animated film, ever to have been crafted. It dares to risk alienating the young children all the poster and ad campaigns would suggest it’s aimed at. Against the tendency of studios to appease older viewers with a stream of double-entendres and in-jokes, it deluges them with more heart-on-sleeve emotion than a romantic weepie. Most of all, it threatens to topload the drama so that everything that follows might seem a letdown.

The wonder of Up is that it’s loosely enough plotted to float and drift in new directions, to the extent that it’s almost two or three films in one. Nonetheless it never entirely abandons the memory of the sadness, difficult joy and blue-noted consolations of those early scenes.

What about the rest of Up? The central storyline revolves around Carl (Ed Asner), who has begun to curdle into square-jawed, cantankerous widowerdom, chafing against local real-estate developers. They want to pack him off to a nursing home and construct a ghastly development on the hallowed site he and Ellie built into reality.

In an act of truculent independence, and in a last ditch attempt to visit the mythical lost worlds of South America after which he lusted as an adolescent, he ties up thousands of balloons to the roof of his house and sails off into the bright blue beyond to fulfil that dream.

There’s one complication: an 8-year-old boy-scout-type called Russell (Jordan Nagai) happened to be on his porch when the building floated to the heavens. The cussed Spencer Tracey-lookalike and the alarmingly enthusiastic, high-pitched Asian American make for an oddly endearing double-act not so dissimilar from that of Clint Eastwood and Bee Vang in Gran Torino (2008).

Together they fly down to a magical realm full of dense forests and immense waterfalls. All the while, tethered to their portable house, the memories it embodies weighing them down, they’re looking for the spot Ellie had always wanted to go. Along the way, they’re accompanied by a rare 13-foot-tall, chocolate-chomping (female) bird nicknamed Kevin. They’re chased by savage dogs with squeaky voices. Muntz turns out to be different from the hero that Carl had once imagined him.

I approached this films having heard mixed reviews and wlaked out the cinema with a sense that I had seen something quite wonderful. 3D does seem to be back in fashion right now and the Digital Projectors make this a must see at the cinema. Home 3D, with those horrid green and magenta specs, is no comparison to the Real 3D presentation at the cinema. The 3D is a nice touch but the story is so touching, well written and absorbing that you even forget the 3D. This is one of my top 10 films of 2009. Catch it quick.

Tags: Grant Thomas, Movie Review, pixar, Up

It appears that a few companies have returned from their bucket and spade summer vacation with an appetite for a spending spree. Yesterday the massive US Kraft conglomerate made a £10bn bid for UK’s chocolate producer Cadbury’s and today a far more interesting alliance is announced today with T-mobile and Orange agreeing to merge from November.

The deal between Orange-owner France Telecom and Deutsche Telekom’s T-Mobile UK will create a business with sales of 9.4bn euros (£8.2bn; $13.5bn).The merged firm will have about 37% of the UK mobile market – overtaking the current leader, Telefonica’s O2.

How will this new market leader take on O2’s dominance of the hand-held internet market with it’s exclusivity with the Apple iphone? Both brands will remain separate for the first 18 months after the deal is completed while branding is reviewed. Interesting ideas on naming, possible Lancashire version T’orange, like T’internet?

Taking a broad feel of the market reports in the past two weeks there is a fair amount of optimism out there. No we are not in a steep growth curve and if this is a recovery, versus a small bounce before 2nd fall, then any this growth continue to be small.

Since first drafting this blog entry yesterday there is a definite uplift in optimism with consultancy KPMG reporting the first rise in permanent job positions in 17 months and plenty of press, radio and TV coverage claiming the recession is over. One other news story yesterday predicting that interest rates will remain low with no expected change to the Bank of England base rate when they publish their decision tomorrow lunchtime.

So are we out of recession? Are the bad times over?

My take / predictions; for the past half a century the UK economy has gone through a boom and bust cycle every 10 years. This mini recession has been deep and any return to growth will be slow, with a possible slip early 2010. Interest rates look like they will remain low through 2010 with some very competitive mortgage deals with the smaller lenders (big banks will still be profit taking to pay back the UK government). Job market will probably be less stable until middle of the year (or two quarters of consecutive growth), however housing market in the south east will continue the late summer price gains with demand outstripping supply.

What do you think? What are your predictions for 2010?

Across the gulf of space the Atlantic, slowly and surely they drew their plans against us. Well, not us, but everyone involved in the sale of practically anything you can’t eat, wear or drive. Best Buy are on their way to tackle the likes of Comet, Currys, John Lewis and PC World; the heavy artillery won’t start firing until next year but they’ve already started lobbing grenades:

The Best Buy UK website was launched this week; there’s nothing much to see, save for some quiet boasting (“although we’re the world’s largest consumer electronics retailer you probably won’t have heard of us”). They’re certainly in full recruitment drive however, with a dedicated job website for potential employees to submit their details through – perfect in case you’re needing a change of employer soon.

It’s been a week of contrasts; the British Summer delivering rain and sun, big profits and losses as the banks report their half-yearly results, and eye-watering financial loses with companies like ITV and NewsCorp. Yet the stock markets are surging and sterling is rallying against the dollar and the Euro. It’s a quiet news month for sure; the news story that ‘broke’ at 6am on Breakfast News is still the main headline at 10pm that night so trying to track the truffle or nugget of a news gem from the sea of nothingness can take some sifting.

The story that pricked my ears up this week was Rupert Murdoch’s plans to end free news. With the whiff of something that was less than coincidental, The Sunday Times published an article last Sunday attacking the BBC’s unfair advantage with it’s free news coverage and its potential to undermine journalism. News Corp owns the Times and Sun newspapers in the UK and the New York Post and Wall Street Journal in the US and reported a loss of $3.4bn (£2bn) in the year to June 2009. Main reason – plummeting advertising revenue

No surprises so far, what got me radar twitching was Rupert’s comments; “Quality journalism is not cheap, and an industry that gives away its content is simply cannibalising its ability to produce good reporting,” he said. I have enjoyed the spats between Murdoch and the BBC for the last 20 years, it’s like watching 2 siblings having a tiff in a sandpit, but what price would you pay for news? And more to the point how do you determine ‘quality’ when the underlying motive is profit?

News Corp is the media conglomerate that owns the TV outlets Sky TV in the UK and Fox News in the USA. To extend this idea of ‘paying for QUALITY content’ and the recent major media story, the death of Michael Jackson, how many people would have ‘paid’ to see the video of the ambulance leaving Michael Jackson’s home? What quality criteria would that be measured against versus the clamber to make a quick buck on a breaking news event?

In the USA this business model may re-fill some of the large revenue hole vacated by the retracting advertising revenue, but in the UK the BBC remains the fly in the ointment to Murdoch’s monopolisation strategy. Sky News is 20 years old this year and whilst it has seen many, many makeovers and format changes, in my opinion, continues to struggle in the quality measurement against the BBC. Not least when the channel already has advert breaks and the irritation of a certain airline ’sponsoring’ the weather?! I am sure that real time business and market content will continue to be a premium on some of the NewsCorp owned brands like the Financial Times, but what else could be cherry picked as desirable if this dash for cash goes ahead? Who would you trust for news, and would you pay for that?

Those regular followers of my musing will know the passionate belief in quality over quantity. With so many options in every aspect of consumerism how do you get to filter the truth from the fiction, the sell from the flaw. Where can you get balanced perspectives on current events and cultural perspectives?

In the UK we have been spoilt with the warmth and affection we lavish on the BBC, a purposeful protectionism against any slip in a morale standard so perilously high, that it should not be allowed to be degraded by the kind of advertising of another sofa sale in a nearby shopping warehouse.

To that degree in the UK we have come to love and cherish the BBC and whose kept correspondents we allow into our homes with a trust you rarely see in other global media organisations. It is therefore rare when these icons of news reporting get moved around but listing to Radio 4’s From Our Own Correspondent I learn that Justin Webb is coming back to lighty after 7 years in the USA. Taking his place is the BBC’s current Europe Correspondent Mark Mardell.

Ed Stourton replaced by Justin Webb on BBC Radio 4's Today programme

I really like Justin Webb’s reports; he has a wonderfully creative language and perspective that is simply inspiring. It’s been quite an eventful 7 years for Justin in the USA. Seven years where is has seen president Bush be re-elected, then Obama take his place, the tribulations of the Golf war as well as the personal experiences with the berth of his youngest child as an American citizen and then the difficult personal experiences of the much debated American health system with the diagnosis of type one diabetes for his oldest child.

And where is Webb’s destination, he’s coming back to replace Ed Stourton on the fabulous Radio 4 ‘Today’ breakfast programme. I personally can’t wait!

If you get ten minutes, kick of the shoes, grab a cup of your favourite hot beverage and delight in his final American report, it should be posted as an audio clip later today on the ‘From Our Own Correspondent’s’ web site:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/default.stm

In the mean time, here is the full transcript:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/programmes/from_our_own_correspondent/8176448.stm

Tags: BBC News, Justin Webb, Mark Mardell, Today