Series 7: The Contenders (87 mins, 18) Directed by Daniel Minahan; starring Brooke Smith, Glenn Fitzgerald
101 Reykjavik (89 mins, 18) Directed by Baltasar Kormákur; starring Hilmir Snær Gudnason
Weak at Denise (86 mins, 18) Directed by Julian Nott; starring Bill Thomas, Chrissie Coterill
Croupier (89 mins, 15) Directed by Mike Hodges; starring Clive Owen, Gina McKee
The In Crowd (105 mins, 12) Directed by Mary Lambert; starring Susan Ward, Lori Heuring
Sometimes, with luck and judgment, a little movie hits the spot. Series 7: the Contenders (which cost one-140th the amount of Pearl Harbor ) scores exactly that direct hit. Sick of Survivor, bored with Big Brother, wishing Jerry Springer would spring a leak? Daniel Minahan's take on 'reality TV', four years in the gestating, may be just your ticket.
The contenders - six per series - are ordinary people, picked by lottery, and given their guns and their orders: the last one alive at the end wins.'The only prize is the only prize that counts: your life.' Brooke Smith has survived two jousts already. Now, eight months pregnant, she's back in her Connecticut home town for Series 7. One more mass slaughter and she gets to retire as undefeated champion.
But nothing comes easy. Some of the other contenders - a fat guy who hates his family and his asbestos removal job; a whiskery senior citizen; a born-again ER nurse and a teen cheerleader - may be standard blood sport. But there's also Glenn Fitzgerald, her first real love, just pegging out with testicular cancer.
It's not a totally original scenario. There was James Caan in Rollerball and Big Arnie in The Running Man and quite a few more, almost including The Truman Show. But Series 7 - at least for Britain - seizes the exact moment. (American audiences, interestingly, have found it either a little too close for comfort or not surprising enough for visceral satire). Here, we're betwixt and between - still waiting for the first couplings on Big Brother, still wanting to watch our randy Survivors' marriages to fall apart. We haven't got to the point where ex-lovers kill each other off screen. But we're getting there. Series 7 is just around the corner.
The wonder of Minahan is that, given a basic joke, he could have shotgunned it to death pretty quickly. No: he builds, piling great line and great situation inexhaustibly on top of each other. The teen queen has shriekingly controlling parents. Go out there and let him have it, honey! There are some belly laugh lines. 'She (Smith) came back for her sister's wedding, and she didn't even shave her armpits,' says mum. The digital camera flits from tortured face to tortured face. Our oleaginous commentor asks unerringly appalling questions. 'Has this gay, ex-pacifist the guts to become a real contender?'
Smith herself is a considerable actress (from Vanya on 42nd Street and much else). She gives a central spine and nervous system to the high jinks. We are interested in seeing whether she survives. We are drawn into the constant, inventive twisting and turning. Series 7 is repellent and fascinating, both. There's the real cutting edge. In a couple of years, perhaps, when Jerry Springer is tending his roses and all Survivors' divorces are history - buried like the Beeb's docusoaps - this will seem ancient history, a remnant of another age. But, for now, it's relentless, beady-eyed entertainment.
101 Reykjavik sounds like nobody's idea of the dish of the day. A comedy by Iceland's alleged answer to Almodóvar, starring the master's favourite Victoria Abril? Herring paella? In fact, it slips down wonderfully well. Hilmir Snær is Hylnur, a 28-year-old layabout who dosses around his mum's home watching porn videos, boozing and indulging in bored fornication with an adoring girlfriend he doesn't much like (Thrúdur Vilhjálmsdóttir). He probably wouldn't fancy a Gordon Brown work programme either. It is Christmas. His mother puts up her flamenco teacher, Lola, for the hols, then goes visiting for New Year. Abril, her brown back flexing with passion, has a day of rampant sex with Hylnur. But when mum comes back, he finally twigs that Lola's his new stepmother in a lesbian relationship - and will soon give him a little baby brother. Time to grow up.
It's a neatly anarchic scenario given an extra twist of the unexpected by Reykjavik itself, all snow flurries and bleak landscapes. Baltasar Kormákur's world is unfamiliar but entirely com prehensible: dark, freezing, riddled with alcohol and fornication. The black in the comedy comes naturally as its characters huddle in search of warmth.
You can quibble a bit, maybe. Snær is such a (literal) tosser that you sometimes want to chuck him in the nearest snow drift. But Abril and Hanna María Karlsdóttir's Berglind (a sensible, grounded mum) have a relationship which makes perverse sense - and the grinding awfulness of Icelandic life (endless drunken parties and starchy visits to the relatives) is brilliantly caught. Going out for a shag? No, I'll stay in bed and watch telly. Fresh faces, fresh settings, fresh perspectives. Kormákur's first film arrives impossible to dislike and very easy to love.
No such luck, alas, with the British off-white comedy of the week. It concerns a bald, extraordinarily non-charismatic council worker called Colin who falls for an old school flame, Denise. Thus the title: Weak at Denise. And when you've stopped rolling in the aisles at that, you can follow our hero through a variety of murderous scrapes to a familiarly happy, suburban ending. Bill Thomas and Chrissie Cotterill play it with fair enthusiasm, somewhere between sub-Mike Leigh and Carry On Round the Benefits Office: but to call it unpretentious gives pretentiousness a good name.
Groundhog day. Two years ago - almost to the Sunday - Mike Hodges's Croupier was my film of the week here. I said it was a 'lean, thoughtful thriller which actually thrills'. Bravo for Clive Owen, with a repose like the young Michael Caine, here moving through London's casino world and relationships with three women. Bravo for Gina McKee's 'gift for baffled warmth, Kate Hardie's bruised toughness, Alex Kingston's enigmatic manipulation' - and for a denouement which 'comes clean, vivid and packed with surprise'. Would it make money? I guessed not. It was 'too small, perhaps too intellectually chill for the multiplexes'.
Half right, half wrong. Croupier sank without trace in Britain, another victim of The Mummy '99. But, against all odds, it edged into US art houses, received the kiss of critical life, spread wider still and made a small fortune. Thus a second spin of the domestic wheel. God bless America, a land beyond Pearl Harbor. God bless Hodges's tragically underused talent. And, this time, gather ye groundhogs while ye may.
The In Crowd are young, beautiful, firm-fleshed and honours graduates of the Aaron Spelling Lip Gloss Academy. But worms eat the souls beneath these jiggling bosoms. What's the awful secret of the blonde (Lori Heuring) just out of psychiatric hospital? And the even more awful secret of the brunette (Susan Ward) just out of Sunset Beach? Are we talking boob jobs or bodies on the golf course? It's campy, meretricious, riddled with double entendres ('Spread your legs wider,' says the tennis coach) and dotty violence - all brought to you with cynical efficiency by the director of Pet Semetary (and indeed, Pet Semetary 2). Total trash. I rather enjoyed it.
