Celluloid Heroes

I thought you spies knew everything.

Only God knows everything. He works for Mossad.

When a film goes out of its way to portray an entire industry as the epitome of rapacious evil, barely two steps above drowning orphans in a river, you have to at least speculate that the filmmakers might be stacking the deck a little in favor of one side of the argument. Fortunately, The Constant Gardener works quite well on the level of a pure thriller, so you can accept for two hours that its heroes need their corrupt pharmaceutical companies like Luke Skywalker needed Darth Vader.

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Well, technically speaking, the operation is brain damage, but on a par with a night of heavy drinking.

When is a movie more like a concentrated dose of psychotropic drugs? I don’t know but chances are that Charlie Kaufman is somehow involved. In Eternal Sunshine, the reality-bending screenwriter behind Adaptation and Being John Malkovich has delivered a story that doesn’t bend reality as much as fold, spindle and mutilate it.

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I do not like the men on this spaceship. They are uncouth and fail to appreciate my better qualities.

Dark Star began life as a college film project by John Carpenter, who would go on to direct the influential horror film, Halloween. It succeeds despite its low-budget roots largely on the strength of its humor. This is a sly, anarchic film that seems to be 2001: A Space Odyssey for slackers.

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