Deborah Ross

OK, here we have a fantasy film and I absolutely hate fantasy films. They bore me to hell and back, plus what if one day I don’t actually make it back? What if I end up stuck for all eternity in some place where, for example, everyone insists on speaking Elvish and having three-day message-board conversations about the story arc of Blake’s 7 or the nuances of Quidditch before going back to work on the helpdesk at the library? I accept this is probably my limitation; that my imagination is a dried, shrivelled-up husk of a thing, which does makes it simpatico with my face but does not make it simpatico with this particular genre. But there you have it and there I have always had it.

3:10 to Yuma has everything you might want from a western apart from anything original or interesting, and as for Russell Crowe, he’s actually pretty crap. Obviously, I can’t say what the director, James Mangold (Walk the Line), who apparently fought hard to make this project, was thinking of. What shopping to get in on his way home? Do we need milk? Cat food? But the result is both dull and deeply unnecessary; a stinker.

Don’t care about Harry Potter. Don’t care about the children who love him. Don’t care about the middle-aged weirdos who read the books on the Tube. (Some muggles are too dumb for shame, even.) Don’t care about J.K. Rowling, although I will ask this about her: why does she always look so miserable? If you were worth £600 million would you look so miserable? Maybe she just pretends to look miserable, so we don’t feel more envious than we already are. Perhaps once she closes her front door behind her she dances down the hall exclaiming, ‘I’m so rich it’s unbelievable; I’m so rich it’s unbelievable’, before snacking on ground-diamond toasties and bathing in champagne.

Edmond 18, Key Cities Edmond Burke (William H. Macy) is middle-aged, middle-American, dully employed, dully married. One evening, on his way home from work, a quasi-mystical whim leads him to consult a fortune-teller who tells him, ‘You are not where you belong.’ The consequences of this are felt later that evening when he says to his wife, ‘I’m going.’ ‘For cigarettes?’ she queries. ‘For ever,’ he replies. He flees. He flees first to a bar where he cries, plaintively, ‘I want to feel like a man.’ Then it’s to Palm Beach where he buys a condo, starts a vegetable garden, plays boules, does yoga, lives happily ever after.

Oh, for heaven’s sake, now they’ve gone and ruined Shrek, and I hate them for it. Indeed, may those responsible be damned to the eternal fires of hell. Failing that, may they at least wake up one day with their feet on the wrong way round and an elbow for an ear. How dare they? How could they? I so loved Shrek: noisome, lousy, foul-breathed Shrek. Shrek of the bottom-fumes so noxious they could wilt flowers. Not too far removed from your average bloke, then, but wasn’t Shrek kind of lovable, too? And cute and funny? And didn't you love Donkey? ‘Parfait, parfait, everybody loves parfait.’ That’s Donkey from the first movie and it still makes me laugh even though I couldn’t tell you why or what parfait is exactly.

Water opens with a beautiful little Indian girl sitting on the back of a cart joyously chewing on sugar cane. She has luscious hair, pinchable cheeks, dark eyes, a nose-ring and tinkling silver anklets. (So cute; Madonna would kill for her.) A middle-aged man is on the cart, too, lying on his back and groaning. He is her husband and he dies. We don’t know how long she has been married for, or even if she’s had time to register that she is actually married, but now she is a widow and, as her father tells her, she must now lead a widow’s life. ‘For how long?’ she asks. She is eight years old. She has no idea that she is about to be cast off into the most excruciating, lifelong limbo.

I Want Candy is a British sex comedy, which should already sound alarm bells, but I will plough on heroically, as is my nature. It’s about two lads from Leatherhead — wannabe producer Joe (Tom Riley) and earnest auteur Baggy (Tom Burke) — who are still at film school yet are desperate to break into the big time. Frustrated by their arty film teacher (Mackenzie Crook) they head to London to sell their script, Love Storm. Eventually, they encounter a porn producer (Eddie Marsan) who says, OK, I’ll give you the money so long as you up the hard-core element and get porn queen Candy Fiveways (Carmen Electra) for the starring role, which, amazingly, they duly do. They then proceed to film Love Storm in Joe’s suburban house while his mum and dad are at work. Funny?

The Illusionist is one of those films that gains points for trying to be clever and different and ingenious but then promptly loses them all for being not clever or different or ingenious enough. It’s frustrating, really, because you can feel the good film trying to get out — ‘let me out, let me out!’ — but a banal script, some woeful miscasting and a rather desperate plot ‘twist’ simply won’t let it. I put the ‘twist’ in quotation marks because you’ll figure it out way before the characters, and will spend at least an hour of this film wishing they’d figure it out so we can all call it a day and get home for whatever it is we like to do at home. Personally, I like to nap and eat cheese.