catholiclefty

Cloud Nine, or 'the movie with old people having sex', is unfortunately little other than 'the movie with old people having sex'. If it were about young people having sex, the movie would be pointless, mostly plotless, and be highly tedious. The people making this film seem to believe that old people having sex is novelty enough to not require a sensible plot to drive the story along. Well, they're wrong, and the film is slow and dull and fails entirely to grip, with a slight and unengaging plot and an ever-more-tedious set of scenes of old people putting their clothes on and taking them off. It's like The Reader (my review), though without the reasonable charms of Kate Winslet, and it annoyed me there too, but at least The Reader was trying to tell a story around the continual sex and nudity. And before I come in for criticism at calling this 'the old people having sex' movie, this has been explicitly marketed as such, and you can see why - there's little if anything to the film besides this. Ought this to be a novelty or should it have been an intrinsic part of some major storyline? Clearly, I think the latter would have been significantly preferable, but here we are.

The acting is variable, and while there are a few decent-looking scenes a lot of the film goes on in drab apartments, which isn't entirely enticing. There's some underlying theme to do with trains too, but it never gets properly developed.

A movie that seemingly goes out to say that sex isn't just for 20-somethings, this doesn't really work because there is nothing to the film other than the 'novelty' of seeing older people doing it on screen. As such, this quickly gets dull and repetitive and gets remembered for nothing but that novelty, which doesn't exactly seem the point that was intended. 4 out of 10.

A small, odd, Irish film about two young runaways, Kisses doesn't seem entirely sure what it is trying to say or what it is trying to achieve, and instead ends up a slight if occasionally endearing mess. These two kids have far more adventures in one night than is remotely feasible - they encounter love, death, prostitutes, homeless people, people trying to help homeless people, a surprisingly helpful guy driving some sort of barge, a Bob Dylan impersonator (!) who gives them beer (!), and probably the most incompetent child abductors seen in film history (!). The idea seems to be that they see beyond their own miserable lives to see some other miserable lives, though I'm not sure that's such a good idea for a film, or that it is executed well. There's some verging-on-the-pretentious use of colour/black-and-white to compare the streets of Dublin with the colourless existence of their daily lives, which is an acceptable idea but seems too gimmicky here.

Kelly O'Neill makes the picture, more or less - she brings a decent amount of depth to a character who in other hands could have been a cookie-cutter character with little of consequence to do. She manages to combine a childish outlook with a world-weary defensiveness that works rather well. Shane Curry suffers in comparison, having a rather more cookie-cutter part and not really rising above it. But they do work ok together, which is fortunate as the film would be awful if they didn't.

It's ok, but nothing special. The title refers to a single rather out-of-place conversation that doesn't fit into the rest of the film, and the whole thing feels like it isn't entirely sure whether it wants to be a gritty slice-of-life or someone of a childhood fantasy - as such, it fails to quite manage either. Kelly O'Neill has a good screen presence though, and makes the film watchable even through the wildly uneven tone. 5 out of 10.

They should probably have called The Informers 'the film where Amber Heard spends most of her screentime naked' - which would be true, much more relevant to the film than the actual title, and immediately draws attention to pretty much the only good thing about it. More people would have been likely to see it, at least.

Set in the early 80s in Los Angeles, a center of debauchery and useless, feckless people, with the looming shadow of AIDS beginning to take its toll, this film is one of those that follows various characters and in the end you find out that they are all linked somehow. Here, however, the linkages are very loose. almost to the stage of not needing to exist at all, and we're left with very small slices of life that usually don't really tell us anything. There's a set of scenes in Hawaii, for example, that are almost entirely divorced from the rest of the film. There's a side-plot about some child abductors which is very peripheral to the other stories. And some scenes don't seem to have any purpose at all (notably, the newsreader in the cafe laughed at, for no good reason, by a support band. What was that all about?) The few things that are vaguely interesting (the movie being made with an alien giant tomato, so silly it is actually enlivening) don't really finish up anywhere either.

Pretty much every character is so useless and so self-absorbed that we don't care less about them, and when they end up in a more miserable situation than they started with we don't really mind. Dreadful people have dreadful things happen to them, yeah, ok, whatever.

Amber Heard plays one of the vaguely tolerable characters in the film, though her character is using her beauty to coast by in life and isn't exactly achieving, so she's far from a moral paragon either. There is something quite poignant about her being the one to succumb first to AIDS though, given the far more dreadful people around her. Certainly she gives a better performance - clothed and not clothed - than most of the cast surrounding her.

Billy Bob Thornton is ok but doesn't exactly have a gripping storyline - all he has to do is try to navigate a tedious affair and his tedious children. Kim Basinger fares worse - all she has to do is look concerned or annoyed at various points. Winona Ryder also has little to do bar look mousey, and sit in a cafe in the pointless scene mentioned above. Special Agent Chester Desmond... err, ok, Chris Isaak is in the pointless Hawaii interlude - he's ok, but his mannerisms are the same as ever and it doesn't seem he's needing to do a lot of actual acting. Mickey Rourke is wasted as a loser child-abductor - he exudes menace, but little else. The late Brad Renfro is ok as a vaguely neurotic character who he manages to avoid being deeply irritating, which isn't a bad achievement. Then there are lots and lots of various interchangable young men, one of whom is ostensibly the lead, but none of them make much of an impression except in the regular outbursts of stilted or downright poor acting.

As a final note - this was based on a book, which apparently had vampires in it. Yes, vampires. If you're unfamiliar with the book, you can have a bit of fun watching this and trying to work out where you'd insert vampires, and what they'd do. Combine that with Amber's plentiful nudity, and you probably won't be too bored watching this film, though not for exactly the right reasons!

It has star power and a naked Amber Heard. It also has quite a lot of bad acting, an aimless and unstructured plot, and far too many characters you mostly don't give two hoots about. Sadly, the negatives rather outweigh the positives. 3.5 out of 10.