All or Nothing

Leave it to Mike Leigh to bring you down with a beautifully spun story about people living in a nondescript apartment complex, with no rewards for there daily struggles, just barely making a living.

The family this film revolves around are couple Phil and Penny Bassett and their two overweight kids Rachel and Rory. Phil is a cab driver, accepting of his dreary life and never making a fuss about anything. His wife Penny works on a supermarket check-out and has to put up with Rory's insults. Rory himself just lies around on the couch all day, jobless and lazy. Rachel works as a cleaner at an nursing home.

Their neighbor's life's are no better. There is the single mother, getting lip from her daughter, who gets abused by her boyfriend and finds out she is pregnant. One of Phil's colleagues lives in the complex, as well. His wife is a drunk and the daughter wanders about making trouble.

There are no ups in their lives, only the occasional down. It is one particular tragedy that breaks open the small collectives of wounds of the Bassett family but makes Phil and Penny understand each other a little better.

from Roger Ebert's review: Watch carefully how it happens, and who reacts to it and how, and you will see that Leigh has made all of the neighbors into characters whose troubles help to define their response.

Sad and desperate, but also beautifully told and acted.

7/10

Gulliver's Travels

This film had me worried that Jack Black might go the way of Adam Sandler - appearing in films of constantly declining quality. He seems to have found his footing again (recently starring in the promising looking Bernie, which I will report on as soon as I have seen it), but Gulliver's Travels was one of his low points.

It starts off with Gulliver, who works in the mail room of a newspaper in NYC and is in love with the travel writer Darcy, handing in a sample of his 'writing'. Of course, he copied everything out of various guide books and websites. Anyway, he gets immediately sent off to a three week boat trip to Bermuda. And I mean immediately.

The infamous Bermuda Triangle takes you straight to Lilliput, apparently. There, being bigger than anyone else and coming from a (at least technically) more advanced society, he tells tall tales and beats off the villainous armada that repeatedly tries to kidnap the princess to become a lauded hero. He proceeds to behave like a giant tool and recreates time square plastered with billboards of himself (among other ridiculous, non-funny feats).

Of course, the guy the princess is supposed to marry does not buy a word Gulliver says (there is always that one non-believer in a comedy, isn't there). He goes over to the dark side and ends up blowing Gulliver's web of lies. Subsequently he gets shipped off to some mysterious, scary place, where he himself is suddenly the small person.

When Darcy - pissed off at having to do the Bermuda assignment herself now, despite her seasickness - is captured by the evil forces now running Lilliput, Gulliver's only friend comes to get him back and together they save kind and country.

Lame and painfully void of humor, which is doubly shameful as a shitload of money obviously went into this project.

<sad-headshake>

2/10