May, 2008

This morning, I’ve mown down three pedestrians, stolen a car, torched it, beaten a policeman to death and nicked his gun. Then, I got into a taxi and rode halfway across town before getting out and refusing to pay the fare. The violent exchange which ensued ended with the driver sitting in a slowly growing pool of his own blood. As the feds closed in, I managed to accidentally explode and scatter myself across the pavement with my own rocket launcher, aimed as it was a hair too close to the car I was crouching behind for cover.

Then I jumped in the shower and got ready for work. The above paragraph is not some Patrick Bateman-esque flight of fancy, but a description of a ten-minute early morning blast on Rockstar North’s seminal Grand Theft Auto IV…
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Perhaps the ultimate Girl’s Night In movie has arrived on cinema screens, following Monday night’s premiere at the Odeon West End in Leicester Square here in London – of course we’re flattered that Carrie and the girls chose to unveil their first big screen performance here in the UK, but we can’t help feeling that perhaps their native New York would have been a more fitting choice.

At the end of the day, this isn’t a movie about geography, it’s about the two ‘L’s – Labels and Love. The girls are back with a bang four years on since the series wrapped and it doesn’t seem that much has changed. Sarah Jessica Parker has once again stepped into the Manalos of Carrie Bradshaw, Noo Yoik writer on a quest for true love – “real love… ridiculous, inconvenient, consuming, can’t-live-without-each-other love…” – armed with a passion for fashion, Cosmopolitans and internal monologue. Maneater Samantha has relocated to the west coast, having shacked up with aspiring movie star Smith in LA, Miranda is having problems juggling her professional, domestic and social life, whilst Charlotte, seems to be the only one enjoying marital bliss.

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The soon to be released Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, the fourth instalment of the Indiana Jones franchise blindsided everyone when it crawled out of development hell last year.

Those who had already written off Harrison Ford as being too old to step into Indy’s dusty boots had clearly forgotten that he drunk from the Holy Grail in Last Crusade, which means he’s immortal, and therefore ‘too old’ doesn’t come into the equation.

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Whilst its title appears to allude to an almighty bust-up between some tin-skinned aliens over instant mashed potato, Super Smash Bros. Brawl is, of course, the latest instalment in the massively popular Smash Bros. series that first appeared back on the N64 in 1999.

Smash Bros, essentially a light-hearted beat-em-up affair, is something of an exercise in nostalgia; characters from across the Nintendo canon, including A-listers such as Mario, Pikachu and Link, rub shoulders with less well-known heroes and heroines including Ness from Earthbound (a title which never saw the light of day in Europe) and Samus Aran from the Metroid series.
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Control is the beautifully shot biopic of Ian Curtis - the frontman for the short-lived but immeasurably influential post-punk group Joy Division - the screenplay of which is loosely based upon the widowed Deborah Curtis’ memoir Touching from a Distance.

As such, the film documents the slow-burning rise of Joy Division, playing numerous toilet venues before being lined up for a two-week American tour, which is inversely paralleled by Curtis growing illness, withdrawal from his surroundings and eventual death.

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Bit of film fact trivia known to every Star Wars fan worth their spice; Blue Harvest was the codename for Return of the Jedi used by the production team when filming in order to avoid excessive attention from members of the press and fans alike – the cover was eventually blown despite numerous t-shirts and baseball caps being made help support the ruse.

And so, in order to celebrate the 30th Anniversary of one the best loved movie franchises of the 20th Century (the last two do not count) Seth MacFarlane and the Family Guy team created their own hour-long retelling of A New Hope, which in the traditional Family Guy style takes pot shots at everything from Robot Chicken which stars both of the Seths, (Green and MacFarlane) in their own Star Wars Special, Pimp My Ride (with a souped-up TIE fighter) and the War on Terror, by way of having the Death Star blow up a planet suspected of hoarding WMDs.

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