U-571 (M)
Director: Jonathan Mostow
Bugs: two out of five

They just don't make war movies like U-571 any more.
Except for U-571, of course.
U-571 is your typical Yank war movie, where a small but dedicated group of American servicemen, relying solely on their incredible bravery and an amazing amount of good luck, single handedly change the course of War That Came After The War to End All Wars.
It's April 1942 and Hitler's U-Boats dominate the Atlantic, sinking thousands of ships, their crews singing patriotic songs about the Nazi homeland in a harsh foreign tongue and often through beards that make them look even more sinister than they really are, if that's at all possible.
Yes, it's clear that the free world as we know it today will be wearing khaki and goose-stepping to and from work, school and play unless a hand-picked battle-weary group of brave American submariners can overpower one of the U boats and steal the Nazi coding machine that's got the Rhineland on the front foot, war wise.
Now, there are 10 fundamental features of a quality submarine war movie and U-571 carries them all off effortlessly.

1. An important support role yelling "Dive Dive Dive" just after that short, sharp siren has sounded three times.
In U-571, this is undertaken by veteran actor Harvey Keitel, who, it must be said, looks all at sea in this picture. Harvey doesn't do much else than yell "Dive! Dive! Dive!", so he can be excused for looking just a little smug about the whole adventure, seeing he's probably pocketing hundreds of thousands of greenbacks for each of those "Dive"s.

2. The new and experienced captain who has to earn the respect of his crew.
Well, you just know that Matthew McConaughey is going to get his boys home safely from the first reel, when his superior, Lt Commander Mike Dahlgren (Bill Paxton), overlooks him for promotion and a ship of his own. "There will come a time when you're gonna have to send young men to their deaths and show cinema patrons you can act really, really forcibly and I don't think you've got it in you," Dahlgren tells Lt Andrew Tyler, McConaughey's character. Being the strong silent type, Matty doesn't come straight back with "Oh, yeah, well look who's talking. Mr Excitability!" so you know he's going to be all right.

3. Never-ending scenes where depth charges explode outside a sub's hull and the crew always know which taps and nuts and bolts and things to turn with wrenches so the water flow always stops instantly. U-571 has more than its fair share of these.

4. An ear-piercing sound track. The end titles assure us that no base drums where hurt in the making of U-571, but they must have come perilously close.

5. The old oil slick decoy. U-571 does this plus more, even popping a corpse out with a heap of bilge oil to make doubly sure that the German destroyer captain will stop his boat just at the right spot, thus becoming a sitting duck for the good ol' Stars and Stripes. No wonder those Krauts lost the war.

6. Dropping well below the boat's pressure comfort zone . U-571 pops more valve glass fronts and pipe connections than any other sub in the history of submarine war movies.

7. The sub skipper yelling "Rig for silent running" in a bid to outfox the Germans on the surface. Hold on a minute! This does not happen in U-571!

Come to think about it, the skipper doesn't ..... 8. Turn his cap around every time he used the periscope either! Nor does the boat at any time 9. Scrap its way through a mine field or just over a submerged net and neither did 10. The crew say they'd follow the skipper through the gates of hell and beyond before ripping off one of those regulation salutes so the movie can fade out with the Stars and Stripes fluttering victoriously. In U-571, they refrain from saluting.
So, no wonder it's hard to get all that fussed about U-571!
The omission of several of the fundamental ingredients of a submarine war movie means that U-571 barely keeps its head above water.
Which is a tragedy seeing it could have been a wonderful tribute to all those Royal Navy sailors who were the first to capture the coding machines during WW2. Royal Navy? I say ..... weren't they British?

- Don Gordon-Brown

Galaxy Quest (PG)
Director: Dean P
Bugs: Three out of five

Sometimes, great ideas just don't have the legs to go the distance of a full-length movie treatment.
And the concept of a group of washed-up Star Trek style actors being mistaken by aliens for the real thing is a great idea.
Great idea because there's a ready market of Trekkies and other sci-fi nuts who'll gobble it all up. Great idea for some satire about the artificial nature of picture-making and the ephemeral celebrity of movie/television stars. Great idea for some marketable actors to have some fun away from their normal genres and roles. Great idea for some computer generated space action and monsters just to show George Lucas that being spaced out should always be fun.
The main problem with Galaxy Quest is that screenwriters David Howard and Robert Gordon baulked at - or were incapable - of milking this great idea for the jokes it offered as a parody of the Hollywood/television entertainment industries and their practictioners. Such gems could have been plucked endlessly from the Milky Way; instead we are treated to the occasional sparkle such as when a master of ceremonies at one of the faded actors' endless fan-fests calls for a big round of applause for Alan Rickman's character, actor Alexander Dane, because he's British. Okay, so you had to be there. But trust me, there are some good laughs to be had and some valid points to be made. As when the hung-over Jason Nesmith (Tim Allen) shouts at an obsessed fan who thinks he's still Commander Peter Quincy Taggart of the NSEA Protector to get a life – it was only a TV show!
Problem is that in the end, Galaxy Quest is really only another space adventure. Still, there are some fun monsters and above-par special effects, some dry Rickman bon-mots and the visual splendour of Sigourney Weaver looking particularly un-Ripley, believe it or not.
And any movie that takes the mickey out of Trekkies deserves our support, surely?

- Don Gordon-Brown

Mission to Mars (M)
Director: Brian De Palma
Bugs: One out of five

It's a pity, really, that Lost in Space had already been used for a space movie title, because it would have fitted this Brian de Palma monstrosity perfectly.
For make no mistake, Mission to Mars is still out there somewhere, drifting slowly through the recesses of deep space. Its fate? To be sucked into the black hole known as the $1 a week section of your local video store, with the cruel but totally deserved loss of all on board.
2000: A Space Oddity would at least have offered some connection with the Stanley Kubrick piece that De Palma was obviously trying to emulate in this sad and sorry story about a mission to rescue the survivors of a Mars station that has come off second best following a brief encounter of an alien kind.
But someone's got to tell De Palma that he's no Kubrick. But enough of the compliments. What someone didn't tell De Palma was that just because his rescue rocket was out in space, his direction didn't have to be spaced out to match. Mission to Mars drifts aimlessly through the void, with De Palma missing the difference between a vision of grandeur and just grand-standing vision. Painfully long shots of nothing much happening in space with the prime purpose of showing just what great camera angles can be generated by computer graphics, and lingering close-up helmet shots of astronaut Tim Robbins's face that suggest he's just realised farting in a spacesuit isn't the brightest of ideas, left the retro rockets unignited for this particular reviewer.
Mission to Mars lifts off slowly enough, with an old-fashioned feel to proceedings as the screenplay by Jim Thomas, John Thomas and Graham Yost tries to establish the characters of the astronauts, their wives and girlfriends on the eve of NASA's first mission to Mars. When some guy who's been overlooked for the mission (it may have been Gary Sinise's character, but who's counting down) presses his boot imprint into a kiddies' sandpit, that sinking feeling in the stomach is not so much from our heroes blasting off for the stars, but the film's rapidly downhill slide into silliness. After one short deep-space action sequence that's actually heart-pumping – and one far too long as we lose the Robbins character (you get the feeling he's more than happy to go out in a puff of astral dust) – Mission to Mars bogs down on the red planet with some second-rate sci-fi nonsense about an alien force that mothered the earth and now wants to create new life somewhere else.
It seems one of astronauts (it may have been Gary Sinise's character, but who's cares) passes the celestial test, so he's turned into an amphibian and shot off into the abyss to help colonise some brave new world.
"Have a good trip, tadpole!" they all shout as they wave Sinise goodbye. "We know we'll never see you – or any of us in a sequel to this crap for that matter – ever, ever again".

- Don Gordon-Brown

Stuart Little (PG)
Director:
Bugs: Two and a whisker out of five.

It's the mouse that roared – as clever computer nerds and a tired script department come together for a passable kiddies movie about a rodent adopted by a human family.
The mark is stuck at the pass because Stuart Little gets caught in no-rats-land: it hasn't quite got enough grown-up jokes and Geena Davis to keep adults bemused, and not nearly enough slapstick to keep the littlies from catching wriggly-bum, the worst of all cinema diseases.
Some of us older skeptics might call it a feature length Tom and Jerry cartoon created with a mouse, and ain't that the truth.

- Don Gordon-Brown

Erin Brockovich (M)
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Bugs: Two-and-a-cleavage out of five.

This is not so much Class Action as Ass Action, as Julia Roberts wriggles and heaves her way through another of those the-little-people-can-sometimes-take-on-and-beat-the-cruel-faceless-murderous-multinational yarns that are supposed to make us feel good about modern polite society.
Roberts plays the titular role – with a fair bit more tit than ular, mind – of Erin Brockovich, a brassy single mum who starts work as a researcher for the seedy lawyer who stuffed up her water-tight car accident compensation case.
How she convinces this mouldy lawyer with questionable legal practices and even less work ethic (Albert Finney) to risk his retirement nest egg to go after the local company that's poisoned the water of a local community is just one of the mysteries of Susannah Grant's script.
As Finney's exacerbated character keeps telling Erin's decolletage: the big legal suits are going to tie us up in red tape and litigation for years until we go under as happens in 99.999999999999999 percent of these cases and all sick residents will get nothing before they die of cancer and we'll never see this made into a film. Ever.
And Erin just flecks her pecks and flashes that smile that's wider than her face and Finney shrugs his shoulders, suspects there's a good chance of an Oscar nomination for supporting actor out of this, and says: "Let's get these bastards!"
Okay! Right-on! Whhhoooooaaa!
We're suckers for a feel-good story, aren't we? So let's hear three cheers for Erin and her bodacious ta-tas. Three more cheers for her boss's out-of-character dedication to such a noble, if unwinnable cause. Three hearty cheers for an expensive and corrupt American legal system for not being totally out of reach of the great unwashed masses, not just yet at least.
But the three biggest cheers of all – ready now? – must go to the smoking gun so vital to the success of such David v Goliath dramas.
Hip Hip Hoorray! Hip Hip Hoorray! Hip Hip Hoorray!
For at the heart of Erin Brockovich, just like in the superior Class Action, is the chance, fluke discovery of the smoking gun to shoot down the opposition when all seems lost.
In Erin Brockovich's case, it's the disgruntled worker who has refused to shred the only document likely to link the offending company with its parent multi-national with mega compensation payout potential.
There he is, now. On cue in the next-to-last reel. Smoking document in hand, God bless him, to make us realise what a just and fair world we live in after all.

- Don Gordon-Brown

Topsy-Turvy (M)
Director: Mike Leigh
Bugs: Three out of five.

A certain Bug columnist who shall remain shameless walked out of this flick after 10 minutes, declaring that anyone who could watch upper-class English twits engaged in mindless parlour prattle for any longer than that needs urgent psychiatric help.
To a certain extent, Simon Sandall has a point.
For the first half-hour of Topsy-Turvy, director Mike Leigh (Secrets and Lives, Naked) challenges you to care less about the kings of English operetta, Gilbert and Sullivan. The sets are opulent and the language flowery as Leigh's lens stays rooted to the spot for scenes that last longer than an English summer twilight. It's painful slow and pan-free as we discover that Gilbert was an idea-bereft librettist (that's a 19th century lyricist to you and I) wracked with self-doubt about his genius; the hedonistic Sullivan in no doubt at all about his own. Sullivan (Allan Corduner) wants to forsake the partnership for some serious classical writing. He thinks Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) is past it, and the lukewarm box office response to their latest effort, Princess Ida, suggests he's right. Both Sullivan and Gilbert's wife want something a little meatier from their partner, and Gilbert seems incapable of satisying either.
Stay longer than Simon Sandall and you will discover that Topsy-Turvy is largely about how Gilbert came to pen the words to one of the duo's greatest collaborations, The Mikado, and the trials and tribulations of bringing that operetta to the Savoy Theatre.
Perservere and be treated to some fine extracts from the show itself, and, courtesy of a stagedoor pass, travel through the bowels of the theatre or linger in the wings for a richly-textured portrayal of English theatre production. Smell the crowd, hear the roar of the greasepaint and enjoy not just the old-fashioned songs but an ensemble cast of fine actors who aren't immediately recognisable, if at all.
And when the chorus is in full song and those seemingly discordant strands come together in perfect harmony, enjoy the tingle down the spine as well.

- Don Gordon-Brown

Me Myself I (M)
Writer/Director: Pip Karmel
Bugs: Three out of five.

Movie classifications need to add a new category. G, PG, M, MA and R are fine, but we sorely need to add WD.
As in Writer-Director.
WD would give patrons some warning that the creative hand at the helm of the movie you're about to part the hard-earned with may have overstretched their talents. Please note the 'some' and 'may'.
If WD had been available before Holy Smoke hit our screens late last year, audiences around the country might have been saved from an excrutiatingly bad arse-number. And there are plenty of WDs about, often first-time WDs to compound matters.
That's not to say that Me Myself I (WD) isn't a good show. It is – and seeing it's Pip Karmel's first feature film, we welcome her to the growling list of talented Anzac film-makers. She can replace Jane Campion whose membership has been suspended indefinitely following Holy Shit.... we mean Smoke.
Like all classifications, WD could be misleading. Wasn't the excellent Two Hands rated WD? A FTWD in fact?
And as mentioned before, despite the WD rating, Me Myself I is very, very passable – in fact one of the better Aussie flicks of recent times. Not much of an accolade, really, is it?
Still, it's surprisingly devoid of excessive Aussie stereotypes and the marketable Rachel Griffiths romps professionally through her role as mid 30s, award-winning scribe, Pamela, whose biological clock is ticking the question "what if...." over the marriage proposal she turned down in her dim, distant 20s past.
A freak accident catapaults Pamela into the wife and three kids role she forsake, and Karmel and Ko have a lot of fun here with dirty nappies and old-fashioned contraceptive devices. Yes, if you haven't guessed already it's largely a chick flick, and the cinema your reviewer was in rattled with the sound of older chicks chortling as Pamela's attempts to insert a diaphragm go terribly awry on the whole. Me Myself I does drift at times, and how Karmel contrives to bring our heroine back to reality is quite unsatisfactory. Perhaps if the writing credits had been shared, Karmel the director might have been able to distance herself sufficiently from that chore to see the script's forgivable flaws. Then again, that didn't help Campion, did it?
But enough of the mild criticism. Just ponder for a wee while about how the Yanks would have made Me Myself I with that Shakespeare in Love wench – and cringe.

- Don Gordon-Brown