CINEMA: Timber Falls

Timber Falls is billed as, “an addition to the popular ‘survival horror’ genre”, which rather smacks of bandwagon-jumping, but that’s basically what the film does.

The plot is centred on an urban couple, Mike (Josh Randall) and Sheryl (Brianna Brown), who go hiking in the back of beyond to get away from it all. This paper-thin premise stretches the limits of credulity when they take the advice of “friendly” local woman Ida (Beth Broderick) and choose a hiking route which is off the beaten track but will apparently provide some great views. Don’t they know never to trust the scheming yokels in a horror movie? Predictably enough they encounter some more ill-educated hicks and are then captured by God-bothering maniacs who have hatched a plan to force the couple to carry a child for them.

Just about every slasher movie cliché in the book is wheeled out here, woodland chases (times three), check; accompanied by our heroes tripping over during the aforementioned chases (again, times three), check; implausibly good-looking couple going out into the wilderness, check; backward rednecks, check; disfigured slasher, check; and of course a storm is in there somewhere too. There’s also the obligatory “blonde heroine gets wet” scene, and her skinny dipping escapade is surely one which will please 15-year-old boys, which is the demographic this film may appeal to.

Echoes of Misery crossed with The Hills Have Eyes do not do any favours for this unoriginal mess, where it’s difficult to really care about the rather dumb and cringeworthy principal couple (what man remembers the exact date he bought his girlfriend a necklace?) partially because she comes across as a blubbering weakling, and he clearly has some anger issues to sort out, spending half the film just smashing up inanimate objects.

The cast do their best but are hamstrung by the ludicrous yet somehow stale plot, and a truly dire script which throws out gems such as, “You f**king people are f**king sick” and, “Now kiss the bride or he’ll take her lips off.”

The visceral gore is gratuitous but nothing that hasn’t been seen before in other, far better, films, and so any shock value is nullified. In fact, the comic redneck accents sported by the supporting cast are more worrying. It is quite hilarious in its ridiculousness though; if director Tony Giglio wanted to make a horror comedy then it was well done: it’s funnier than Shaun of the Dead. Sadly this was not intention though, in fact the film seems to take itself too seriously.

All in all, not a must-see movie by any means. One to leave for your teenage brother. Clare Nicholls

COMPETITION: Bee Movie

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Bee Movie welcomes Jerry Seinfeld back to the world of comedy as he voices graduating bee Barry B. Benson and his oft-told tale of “the little guy that could”. After completing Bee College Barry decides that becoming a mindless drone might not be the life for him, so decides to explore the world outside the hive. However, things do not go according to plan…

With amazing CGI and a stinging sense of humour, Bee Movie is a brilliant family film, and wouldn’t you just know it, we’ve got five copies of it on DVD to give away.

To win a copy, just answer this question:

Seinfeld co-creator Larry David went on to star in which sitcom?

Send your answers to competitions@the-void.co.uk by June 15.

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Bee Movie TM & © 2008 DreamWorks Animation LLC. All Rights Reserved

CINEMA: Heartbeat Detector

A word of warning if you go to see this film; this isn’t like watching paint dry, it is watching paint dry with numerous beautiful but extraneous shots that don’t push the narrative forward, and conversations of yawn-making banality.

That said, the basic premise of the movie is intriguing; are multinational corporations and the need to be the biggest, the richest and the best, turning us all into heartless insensitive brutes? Simon (Mathieu Amalric) is a psychiatrist working in the HR department of a German-Franco conglomerate. His usual tasks include psychometrically testing employees and having to tell people they are being ‘let go’.

One day, he’s brought in to ‘spy’ on his boss Mathias (Michel Lonsdale) as the powers that be think he may be going mad. But as Simon’s own life starts to unravel he’s forced to concede that maybe Mathias isn’t having a late-life crisis at all, it’s more that he’s having a change of heart and recognising the cut-throat world they exist in is actually damaging lives.

So far, so good, but as the characters embark on yet another metaphysical debate, the film becomes frustrating rather than intriguing and you just want it to get on and make its point and end. Which only goes to show (as any successful HR bod will tell you) if you’ve got something to say it’s better to say it once and get straight to the point, than go all round the houses and muddy the issue.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Outpost

This small, almost thrown-together British zombie horror flick isn’t exactly novel, but given the even more derivative nature of much of the recent batch of horror movies, it’s perfectly watchable.

We join the action as a group of mercenaries led by DC (Ray Stevenson of TV’s Rome fame) escort a secretive engineer (Julian Wadham) through a war torn Eastern European country. He tells them he’s looking for minerals, but when the soldiers discover an old bunker full of mutilated bodies, they begin to question what they are really doing there. When the bodies subsequently start to come back to life, they realise their own lives are at stake and if they don’t find some way of combating what prove to be revitalised Nazi stormtroopers, they too could become the living dead.

There’s a bleached out, grainy feel to the filming that nicely matches the mood of the story and even though the plot fails to capitalise on its potential (the ending is especially lame), the build up to the finale is good, while the dialogue is kept short and sharp. For more sensitive souls, the gore factor is actually quite low.       Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Caramel

Living in the relaxed, secular West, it’s sometimes surprising to see what hoops people have to jump through in other cultures in order to enjoy the level of freedom we have here. Watching the owner, employees and clients of a Beirut beauty parlour as they go about their daily lives, trying to express their emotions and needs in a society that often forbids them to, will make you realise just how lucky we all are to have the freedoms we do. That is why Caramel is by turns so uncomfortable and yet comforting.

Christian Layale (director and star Nadine Labaki) has a married lover, an absolute no-no in this devout country, and so even trying to arrange a clandestine meeting with him in a hotel room without producing a marriage license proves difficult. Meanwhile, muslim hairdresser Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri), is willing to undergo surgery rather than tell her fiancé she’s no virgin. But the biggest no-no of all is when one of the salon girls falls for a beautiful female client and they must sublimate their feelings for each other in the sensual act of hair washing and nothing more.

Labaki’s style is incredibly kinetic and naturalistic – nothing about this film seems posed or rehearsed, it simply happens. And watching these small windows into these women’s lives you can celebrate their strength, tenacity and ingenuity at getting around the restrictions imposed upon them, but boy, doesn’t it make you feel glad you were born in Britain.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: Smart People

There’s smart and there’s smart and then there’s just plain smartass, and unfortunately, that’s what the characters in this movie come across as. There’s the obviously brilliant but socially dysfunctional widowed university lecturer Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid), and his obnoxiously bright daughter (Ellen Page). Also not lacking in brains is doctor Janet (Sarah Jessica Parker), one of Lawrence’s ex-students who could be a potential new girlfriend, but then there’s Chuck (Thomas Haden Church). Chuck is Lawrence’s underachiever, slacker younger adopted brother, and when he comes to lodge at the Wetherhold house, Lawrence’s rigidly structured life starts to fall apart. Suddenly messy, uncomfortable emotions begin to rise to the surface and painful truths, which have been hidden for years, must be addressed.

So far, so predictable because there is nothing here you haven’t seen before, and to be honest this story was done better in Wonder Boys, with Michael Douglas as the pissed-off professor. The film’s main problem is it doesn’t know what tone to set. Although it aims to be pithy and acid, it’s actually unsophisticated, tepid and far too gentle. A good dose of proper venomous bile would have done it a wonder of good. The other problem is the pace; it’s so slow as to be almost somnambulant and three quarters of the way through you’ll be wishing for less cleverness and a few more zippy wisecracks.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: The Air I Breathe

In the last few years Crash has been the best exponent of the ‘separate strands’ storyline movie with an ensemble cast, where everything comes together in the last scene. Now we get The Air I Breathe, a movie with the all-encompassing ambitions of Crash, but without the depth or intelligent script.

Based on an Asian proverb, which breaks life down into the four emotions of happiness, sorrow, pleasure and love, we have the banker with gambling debts (Forest Whitaker) who is forced to turn to robbery to keep a crime boss (Andy Garcia) off his back; the boss’s enforcer (Brendan Fraser) who falls for a would-be pop starlet (Sarah Michelle Geller); and a doctor (Kevin Bacon) who falls in love with his best friend’s wife (Julie Delpy). All their stories come together in a not-quite-believable fashion simply because the links between them are tenuous in the extreme.

Of the actors it is Brendan Fraser as the world-weary, fatalistic enforcer who takes the honours and his sequence, which forms the film’s backbone, is definitely the best. But there is something very amateur about the film’s execution and the separate elements never feel harmonious. Maybe if director Jieho Lee had concentrated solely on Brendan Fraser’s story, the film would have had more integrity and cohesion.      Dee Pilgrim

DVD: Walk Hard

Producer Judd Apatow, who co-wrote this film, raises great expectations from previous work like 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up. This mock rockstar biopic, which is a sort of mixture of Walk The Line, Spinal Tap and Airplane, doesn’t quite meet those expectations but still it’s a lot of fun and has some really neat references to “serious” movies in the genre, for the purpose of which Dewey Cox (John C. Reilly) embraces virtually every musical genre in the course of his fictional career.

As in Ray, we first meet Dewey as a dirt-poor child, playing with his elder brother, who is the apple of his father’s eye. So when Dewey accidentally cuts his brother in half, Dewey has a suitable guilt trip to haunt him throughout his life. At 15, now played delightfully inappropriately by Reilly, he marries his child bride sweetheart, who bears him numerous children and becomes the clingy, whining wife whom he soon leaves for the love of his life, fellow singer Darlene (Jenna Fischer). Somewhere along the line, we’re told, he also sleeps with 409 other women in the course of his climb to fame. His story rolls along and we see Cox’s his decline as he battles with every drug known to man, personal demons, etc… eventually arriving at aged icon status.

The mockery of the various musical incarnations Dewey goes though are in the main very funny, particularly a take off with Darlene of Johnny Cash and June Carter, while a sequence of Dewey with The Beatles and their guru in India is a joy, particularly the bickering between Lennon and McCartney (great cameos from Paul Rudd and Jack Black). At one point Dewey goes though a mock “Bob Dylan taking himself very seriously” phase, which could almost be a send up of Cate Blanchett’s performance in I’m Not There. Reilly is a very good actor and he seizes his comic opportunities with relish. The songs, some of which were written by him, are good pastiche too.

Walk Hard is not as relentlessly hilarious as it needs to be, which means it does sag in places when it should be zapping along, but despite this it is still an entertaining movie.

Buy it here dawg.

CINEMA: Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden?

As a great fan of Morgan Spurlock’s Super Size Me, there were high hopes for this, his follow up, but it doesn’t even come near the heights of Spurlock’s previous efforts.

The basic problem is the idea behind the film: Spurlock decided he’d go and ‘look’ for Osama Bin Laden as no one else seems to be able to find him. So Spurlock travels to Israel, to Palestine, to Saudi Arabia and all over the Middle East asking people if they know where Bin Laden is. The problem is we know he’s never going to find him and so Spurlock’s efforts come over as a smug, self-satisfied exercise in globetrotting from a man who is no politician or military genius. He may meet some interesting people on the way, in fact most of them come across far better than Spurlock himself does, but this is television fodder at best and really cannot be classed as a documentary or a feature.      Dee Pilgrim

CINEMA: XXY

This small Argentinean film has an intriguing premise, but something doesn’t quite pan out right at the end – mainly because it doesn’t really have one, it just leaves the story, and its audience, hanging.

On a remote island hideaway Kraken (Ricardo Darin) and his wife Suli (Valeria Bertuccelli) are bringing up their tomboy daughter Alex (Ines Efron). They love her dearly but as she reaches puberty they worry about her indeterminate gender, although Alex herself seems unconcerned. Suli arranges for an old friend – who just happens to be a surgeon – to visit the island and assess whether gender corrective surgery is the way forward. With the surgeon comes his teenage son Alvaro (Martin Piroyansky) and his presence makes Alex question for the first time if she wants to be a boy, or a girl, or stay the ‘freak’ she has always been.

The movie is beautifully shot and young Ines Efron gives an amazing performance as the quite confrontational Alex, but the film seems to lose the courage of its convictions at the end and with no firm conclusions leaves a sense of disappointment, and of unfinished business. Dee Pilgrim