Comedy

Sex has become such an idol in modern times, and especially in Hollywood, it’s difficult to understand how a middle-aged man could have spent his life avoiding it. In one of his funniest movies to date, Judd Apatow, creator of such off-beat gems as Anchorman, Knocked Up and Pineapple Express, presents us with just such a creature.

Meet Andy Stitzer (Steve Carrell, who also co-wrote), the titular ante-hero who has spent years of bachelordom collecting action hero figurines and making egg mayonnaise sandwiches. Working in the stockroom of an electronics store by day and watching Survivor with his elderly neighbours by night (”I’ll bring the soda!”), Andy seems unlikely to ever woo a woman to bed - until three of his fellow workers stumble upon his secret.

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Acclaimed for his theatre work, writer/director Martin McDonagh now brings his brilliant mix of the absurd and macabre to the big screen in this exhilarating comic thriller.

Brendan Gleeson and Colin Farrell play two chalk-and-cheese Dublin hitmen who are sent to the medieval Belgian town of Bruges after a job in London goes horribly wrong. Ray (Farrell) is a hot-headed novice who has no thoughts for anywhere but Dublin. He rather shot himself in the foot when he accidentally killed a young child on his first hit along with the priest who was his target. Ken (Gleeson) is a kindly, avuncular figure, keen to make the most of a couple of days’ sightseeing in “the best-preserved medieval town in Belgium”.

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There’s so much wrong with The Accidental Husband you hardly know where to start. The jokes fall painfully flat, there’s almost zero chemistry between the characters, and the initial premise - that you can get someone else hitched with just a few clicks of a mouse - is so far-fetched, it’s a struggle to give your attention to its numerous ramifications.

Uma Thurman, who also produced, plays Emma, a self-titled ‘love doctor’ who has made a career for herself trying to sort out other people’s relationship woes, but despite a hit radio show and bestselling book on the subject, she has a few problems keeping her own love-life in check. She is engaged to Richard (Colin Firth), her well-off and eminently sensible fiancé, but things come a cropper when discovers that she is already listed as legally married when she goes to register at the City Hall.

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“I’m gonna tell you the story and I’m not telling you who your mum is, you have to figure that out for yourself. I’m gonna change all of the names and some of the facts…”

This is the way that advertising manager Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds) introduces his confused premarital history to his precocious ten-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin from Little Miss Sunshine), who has come home after a school class on the birds and the bees. And whilst Hayes presents his philanderings in the sweetest way possible, this is definitely no children’s fairy tale. As Maya puts it, “it’s like a love-story-mystery!”, and the poor girl is stuck in the middle, wondering whether she is nothing more than the result of a drunken party.

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A welcome addition to that sub-genre of films depicting dour north Europeans falling for Latino charm (c.f. Italian for Beginners), Mostly Martha is a German comedy from writer/director Sandra Nettleback about a workaholic chef who has to force herself out of her fixation and learn to live a bit.

Martha (Martina Gedeck) is head chef of a fancy Hamburg restaurant who has no problem with lecturing customers who object to the texture of her fois gras. Her obsessive attitude towards her work has kept her single and her colleagues at arm’s length. Because of her phenomenal culinary abilities (she is reputedly the second best chef in Hamburg) and dedication to her work, her boss, Frida (Sibylle Canonica), cuts Martha plenty of slack. In spite of regular appointments with a therapist, played by August Zirner, Martha finds it difficult to control her temper in and out of the kitchen. On one occasion she throws a raw slab of meat at a customer who complains that his steak is overdone. Even her kindly new neighbour Sam (Ulrich Thomsen), for whom she offers to cook, fails to remove the deep furrows from her brow.

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Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, which cleared up at the recent Golden Globe and Critics Choice Awards, is a winning ‘rags to Raja’ drama set in contemporary Mumbai.

Slumdog tells the story of Jamal Malik, chiefly played by Dev Patel (aka Anwar from Skins); an 18-year-old Muslim ‘chai wallah’ (tea boy) for a mobile phone call centre who is just one correct answer away from 20 million rupees on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? which apparently features exactly the same format, graphics, studio set up and theme tune as the good old British version.

During a pause in filming, Jamal is arrested and whisked away to a police cell on suspicion of cheating. How could a lowly chai wallah who came up from the slums of Mumbai possibly know all the answers?

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The slapstick tech support based sitcom written by Father Ted creator Graham Linehan returns to Channel 4 tomorrow night. If you’ve not seen The IT Crowd, now is the perfect time to get acquainted with Moss, Jen and Roy, who make up the entire IT department of the London-based Reynholm Industries, a company which once turned over “eighteen hundred billion billion,” in profits.

Moss and Roy are, in the words of Denholm Reynholm (the CEO, played by Chris Morris), just a pair of “standard nerds” who are outcast by the rest of the firm despite their reliance on their technical expertise.

The glamorous and ambitious Jen is appointed their manager after blagging her way into the job, even though it’s clear she knows next to squat about computers.

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After the successful fusion of uninhibited bawdiness and showbiz satire in The 40 Year Old Virgin and pregnancy-centric rom-com Knocked Up, current chieftain of Hollywood comedy Judd Apatow looks to have scored another hit with Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Once again he takes a situation that really shouldn’t be funny – in this case the break-down of a long-term relationship – and sucks from it every last drop of laughs.

When Peter Bretter (Jason Segel), a genial underachiever who composes incidental music for American TV shows, is dumped by his beautiful actress girlfriend, Sarah Marhall (Kristen Bell), he is devastated. Standing stark naked in his kitchen and weeping buckets, he begs her to stay, but to no avail – her success has outstripped his and she has bigger fish to fry. He seeks solace in one-night stands but is haunted by Sarah’s memory. Tired of womanising, he takes advice from his step-brother Brian (Bill Hader) and escapes to Hawaii, only to discover that Sarah and her rock star boyfriend Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) are staying in the same hotel. The set up is textbook farce. Fortunately, help is at hand in the form of Rachel (Mila Kunis), the pretty hotel receptionist with whom Peter strikes up a relationship.

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Like slipping into a pair of old shoes, 27 Dresses is the epitome of comforting predictability, following the rom-com rulebook to the letter.

Jane (Katherine Heigl) is a serial bridesmaid, with 27 gaudy hideous dresses hanging in her cupboard to prove it, who spends so much of her time caring for other people that she’s neglected to find a husband for herself. She is a wedding obsessive, subscribing to bridal magazines and cutting out wedding stories from newspapers in spite of the fact that she’s single. Jane is secretly pining after her dull boss, the obligatory romantic red-herring in the tale, who is cruelly snatched from her by her sexy younger sister. Meanwhile she remains oblivious to the attentions of Kevin, a dashing, cynical wedding reporter from the local rag, who has found himself a scoop with Jane’s story.

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Having been maligned by many reviewers upon its release a few weeks ago, the DVD Rental crew weren’t expecting much from Hancock, the latest Will Smith sci-fi action outing, but we left our local cinema pleasantly surprised.

Vigilante superhero crimefighter John Hancock (Smith) can fly, pick up cars, stop trains with an outstretched hand, is impervious to bullets, beatings, rocket propelled grenades, but is unloved by his public, who repeatedly refer to him as ‘asshole’, as his actions invariably cause more damage to his adopted hometown of LA than the criminals he sets out to apprehend – think the first five minutes of Team America: World Police and you’re kind of on the right lines. He is also an alcoholic smartarse.  ‘I can smell the liquor on your breath,’ snaps one irate rescuee. ‘Well, that’s ’cause I’ve been drinking, bitch.’

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