Eat Pray Love

This is a film in 4 parts. The first is where Julia Roberts, having made a balls of two relationships at home ("home" being somewhere both American and cosmopolitan, the first in a string of giveaways that this is a work of fiction) decides that she's taking off for her gap year. We don't really know why she made a balls of them, possibly something to do with getting up in the middle of the night to pray to her own personal buddha. We do really know that she's too old to be taking a gap year though.

She starts in Italy, which is an annoying part of the film designed to go quickly until we get to the spiritual awakening rubbish later on. The giveaway is a South Park-esque montage which couldn't be any more a parody of itself if it tried. By the end she is fluent in Italian, comfortable in her new skin (she's fat from all the pasta and pizza, see?) and itching for something else.

So she moves to India. Although not really. She moves to an ashram, which is like a clean pocket of India where you everybody does yoga and meditates in saris all day. She does venture out a couple of times as a device to show us how peaceful her own private India is. Anyone who has been to India knows that it's about as peaceful as Temple Bar at closing time and 14 million times busier. I once met a girl - Una from Sligo - who had meditated her way down the east coast of India from ashram to ashram for 4 months. She stopped short of saying the country would be great if it wasn't for the locals, but the sentiment was there. This is a similar feeling you get from this section of the movie. It is crass beyond reckoning, and is only rescued from being the worst part of the movie by what comes next.

She leaves unfulfilled, and heads to Bali (she rhymes it with Wall-E, instead of being about to follow it with "haunis"). She gleefully rides her bike around Ubud with a smile on her that would swallow a tanker. Pure fiction, as anyone who has cycled a bike around Ubud knows that you get about three minutes before meeting the type of hill which requires any combination of siesta, balinese massage and half a dozen Bintangs to recover from. Here she meets a sleazy spaniard, who turns out to be Javier Bardem hiding from his promising film career. He completes her, after rescuing her from some shirtless Australian in what we assume is meant to be a commentary on Kuta, and now she can meditate properly. Vomit. It goes well, but then she's afraid of boats, or the water, or going on a boat with a sleazy spaniard, so they have a big row on the beach with phrases like "all i wanted was…" and "how will you know unless you let go…" She storms off but realises the error of her ways and then they go for a snorkelling trip together.

Verdict: She did eat a lot in Italy but then stopped for the rest of the film. I'm not sure that she did much praying in India, more she did whinging and moping. Then she shagged Javier Bardem. I suppose "Eat Whinge Shag" probably wouldn't have sold as many books, despite the improvement in titular accuracy. Anyone who has been to Ubud since the film came out will be tripping over the army of French and American middle aged ladies looking for Javier (all of whom look nothing like Julia, and all of whom end up settling for some local 15 year old boy). Watch it on someone else's small screen on a plane, with no sound.

The Expendables

Stroke victim Sylvester Stallone takes his buddies on a boys' weekend to an island in the Caribbean, with hilarious, and occasionally violent consequences.

Verdict: Bring earmuffs.

Salt

There's a scene in the trailer where a female silhouette frolics with a mostly unseen - and patently unimportant - male one. The point - I guess - is to highlight Angelina's body as a legitimate character in its own right. Pay to see this movie and you get Angelina the actor, as well as Angelina's body, the object of desire. One hopes she is getting paid twice. In the scene, The Body writhes and dances, barely clothed in some wonderfuly skimpy underwear, making us fear and want in equal measure. Definitely not sporting concealed weapons, she is undoubtedly about to pummel someone to death with her toes. Someone who probably thought he was about to get very very lucky. The big tool. Still, at least he'll die happy. It's an intoxicating four seconds in a noisy mish mash of explosions and bloody noses.

It's not in the film. Not a sniff of it. No lace bra'ed death by misadventure. No shadow puppet neck-break. No close-up of a standing lock-jawed Angelina drained from strangulation exertions followed by a gratuitous slow-motion tracking shot down to the inert body at her feet. Okay, for the rest of the movie she kicks, punches, chops, shoots and grenades the unholy shit out of everybody with gusto, but i can't help but feel this is a false advertising class action waiting to happen.

It's fun though. And silly. She's a spy you see. Maybe. She's an American, or a Russian. Or both. Or neither. So is everybody else. There is a plot of sorts, where everybody double-crosses everybody else, and then Ange double-crosses them back. A couple of people survive. Like a poorman's David Mamet screenplay without the clever dialogue, it's a bit predictable. Of course she's a good guy, of course she'll get through it all, hurry up and show her getting freaky with some footsoldier with a short life-expectancy.

Verdict: No matter how much of a beating she takes, she still looks nice. Except when she is disguised as a man, then she looks like one of the Team America marionettes. The Rent-a-Slav father-figure fluffs his lines in spectacular fashion. It all clearly goes to pot when he is in charge, leaving you merely to speculate how much better the Dismantle-America-By-Using-Its-Bombs-Against-The-Muslims-And-Then-Sitting-Back-And-Watching-Them-Attack plan would have gone if Brendan Glesson were in charge. Presumably they couldn't find a brave enough accent coach.

Inception

DiCaprio has a thousand-yard stare that even a reformed, contrite, I-remember-everything Jason Bourne would beat the stuffing out of him for. Probably with an eggcup. You would too if you spent a good portion of time dreaming that you were dreaming that you were dreaming. Have a thousand-yard stare that is, not beat up DiCaprio with an eggcup.

There is no real plot. Well, okay there is. There are 4 plots (maybe more if you wrap yourself around some of the chatter in the twittoblogosphweb). Each one seems relatively simple by itself. Tying them all together without any recreational drugs is a tall order. It's confusing as a Fifa world cup draw, but slightly more violent. The sheer, nose-bleeding savagery of the thing is hidden behind a veneer of psychobabble delivered with nonchalance by a suberb cast.

Along the way we learn that Juno is very small, that you don't really need to make Paris fold over on itself to get lost in it, and that  a real estate regeneration scheme is required if Limbo is to become the new Gold Coast. But we are also presented with more questions than answers. Where exactly did Cillian Murphy learn to ski? Can she really be that small? Why wasn't she French? Why don't films come with a guarantee of 2nd admission if you just didn't understand it the first time?

Verdict: Bonus MattDamons for almost getting away with making me think it was an intellectual movie. You can't but get the feeling that things might have gone smoother if Brendan Gleeson were in charge, but he was probably too busy making sure the real world was a better place. Go see it. Twice.

Green Zone

You would expect a movie with Matt Damon in it to earn big MattDamons. Likewise, a movie with Brendan Gleeson in it should get a big BrendanGleesons score. Putting the two of them in the same movie could cause this ranking system to break on the first attempt. 

Fortunately, Damon disappoints, steadfastly refusing to beat the crap out of any annoying Eye-Rackees, and resorting instead to shooting them. With a gun. The big wuss. Beyonce could probably bring in a high ranking ex-Saddam stooge if she had a stolen AK-47, and all his guards were defended him with was a packet of chickpeas. Matt figures out that the Americans have no intelligence, and that he's being lied to. In the end a sometimes-good Iraqi shoots another sometimes-good Iraqi and the American People (God bless them) don't get to find out that there were no WMDs. It's an allegory, see. Lies to Matt as a metaphor for lies to the public. Very laboured. And oil doesn't get mentioned. Not once. Like a Bollywood movie without any musical numbers. Or any Indians.

Redemption comes swift and unbending however, in the - clearly true - assertion that the war in Iraq would have been over years ago (2003 to be exact, about an hour before Dubya actually declared it over) if only somebody had thought to put Brendan Gleeson in charge.

Verdict: Watching this you might be confused into thinking that not all Americans Soldiers are mindless automatons, that apart from the ruined buildings, Iraq seems like quite a nice place to visit, and that Mr. Gleeson's accent coach will find work again.