Thomas Schlamme directs Mike Myers, Mike Myers and Nancy Travis in this dark romantic comedy where a beat poet begins to suspect his fiancée might have killed all her previous husbands.

Myers is working very hard in dual roles as the smarmy lead and his obnoxious Scottish dad. But Nancy Travis is a hollow foil. They should have also let Sharon Stone play dual roles like she wanted. There’s a better film here lost in a script that just doesn’t gel.

5

Perfect Double Bill: Clean Slate (1994)

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‘The Cyber Issue’ Starring Sarah Michelle Gellar. Big Movies Reviewed are Requiem For a Dream and Nurse Betty. Packed full of fag adverts plus Ask Jeeves also gets a promo push. Most home retail releases can’t decide whether VHS or DVD should be the adverts focus.

An article on auteurs who moonlight making commercials. Tim Burton and Doug Liman are less surprising than The Coens and Kevin Smith.

Cameron Crowe’s beloved Almost Famous is devoted the most ink. The only telling revelation is they only had Philip Seymour Hoffman for 4 days of shooting and he spent a lot of that time hiding in his trailer “with flu”. Riggghhht! Check out that Sony DVD player ad where the couple get horny watching Wild Things…

A gore piece about Mike Myers and Universal Studios suing each other after an aborted attempt to turn his SNL character Dieter into the next Wayne’s World or Austin Powers. Gets really nasty and candid about Myers’ controlling nature on set and accusations of anti-semitism to destroy his standing in Hollywood.

Björk profile for Lar Von Trier’s Dancer In The Dark where the interviewer seems utterly baffled by the Swedish art popstar’s inability to play the promo game.

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/

Orson Welles directs himself, Oja Kodar and Elmyr de Hory in this documentary about forgers and flim-flam.

6 parts -we hung out with these two infamous con men. 4 parts – look how hot my current bird is. This is easily the most fun Welles flick ever. A collage and kaleidoscope of incomplete footage and teasing narration, the editing is very experimental. Both art forger Elmyr de Hory and his bullshitting biographer Clifford Irving are top class characters but there’s not nearly enough definitive meat in the parties and interviews Welles has filmed. So he reassembles a distracted jigsaw, does a bit of close-up magic and lenses his new girlfriend in narrative glamour shots. It works. It is daft. And it is art.

Watched at the NFT Southbank!

Perfect Double Bill: Exit Through The Gift Shop (2010)

8

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Lee Isaac Chung directs Daisy Edgar-Jones, Glen Powell and Anthony Ramos in this requel where tornado chasers keep putting themselves in the way of big, swirly destructive weather.

Pretty much a rerun of everything good and everything a bit naff about the mid nineties blockbuster. Powell is all handsome swagger but I’m not sure Edgar-Jones adds much… and the narrative focus is on her. Like Jan De Bont’s relentless original, this is ultimately just a delivery system for watching cute people surviving hurricanes from a series of different angles. It does that pretty well with no new tricks. I’d say the mix of CGI and practical FX from 1996 holds up a little better than some the murky swells here but that is just one of my regular gripes.

Watched at the Vue Omni Centre.

6

Perfect Double Bill: Twister (1996)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/

Eugenio Martín directs Christopher Lee, Peter Cushing and Telly Savalas in this horror where a Victorian palaeontologist sneaks aboard a killer creature onto a Trans-Siberian railway journey.

Camp gothic imperialism with paint red blood and a cult cast. Not particularly scary but pretty far reaching in terms of its monster’s origins and abilities. Helga Liné and Silvia Tortosa provide some post-Hammer classy totty but no one can outsex Savalas’ short lived Cossack Captain. He gatecrashes the proceedings just when things start to get stuck in a rut and thrusts us into a neat all-action finale.

6

Perfect Double Bill: Rasputin: The Mad Monk (1966)

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Mike Cheslik directs Ryland Brickson Cole Tews, Olivia Graves
and Wes Tank in this dialogue free black and white comedy where a drunken applejack salesman becomes a fur trapper by defeating hundreds of beavers in this 19th century supernatural winter epic.

Clearly a labour of love. Too idiosyncratic to be a calling card, yet too crowd pleasing for Hollywood not to take notice. A love letter to silent comedy where an inept dude does battle with wilderness creatures to survive. Don’t worry zero critters were harmed in the production of this laugh packed onslaught. Half a dozen dudes in mascot costumes make up the menagerie of beasts. There’s as much Max Fleischer and Looney Tunes here as Buster Keaton and Chaplin. The DIY cheapo FX are part of the charm. They come so thick and fast that the ingenuity and craft outweigh the budget limitations. The gal who our hero has his heart set on is a homicidal tease – very sexy. It can all get quite repetitive, yet that is the very nature of this beast. I would have reduced it down to a neat 80 minutes in the edit. But which gags to kill? They’re pretty much all winners. Hearing a cinema laugh through a whole movie rather than nod and howl gormlessly at fan service Easter Eggs feels like a rarity these days. This is easily the funniest release since No Hard Feelings.

Watched at The Prince Charles Cinema!

8

Perfect Double Bill: The Saddest Music In The World (2004)

I write regular features about live comedy for British Comedy Guide here https://www.comedy.co.uk/people/bobby_carroll/features/