I've Spotted An Obvious Flaw With This Book

Suggested alternate title: 1000 Movies You Must See Before You Die And One You Could Quite Happily Die Before You See Although As It's The Highest Grossing Film Of All Time It's Unlikely That It's Passed You By

The Bottom 10 Movie Events Of 2010

Before we sweep the worst year for movies, like, ever under the lounge rug like so much veruca trimmings and crispy dried snot (that's what's under everyone's lounge rug, right?), I thought it was worth reflecting on some of the crustiest bogies that befell the movie world in 2010. You may want a cute kitten video on standby for when it's all over; I recommend this one.

Development on the next James Bond

film was "suspended indefinitely"

Thanks to a small accounting oversight, MGM found themselves one hundred million billion trillion dollars in debt, meaning nobody could fork out for a new pair of titchy trunks for Daniel Craig's next outing as James Bond. Things seem to be getting back on track now, with Spyglass Entertainment running MGM and production moving forward on The Hobbit, but a new Bond is at least two years away and Craig may well "do a Dalton" in the meantime, leaving the field open for Shia LaBeouf. Speaking of which...

Shia LaBeouf continued to get work

The guy must be in the possession of some seriously incriminating photographs. That's the only way I can explain it.

Gentlemen Broncos went missing

A new film by the director of Napoleon Dynamite, starring Jemaine Clement and Sam Rockwell, spent about four minutes in UK cinemas and has so far failed to turn up on DVD. What up with that?

This... thing happened

Possibly the most unpleasant thing to happen anywhere ever, this documentary of the world's screechingest harpy's 2008-09 tour promised "the unique opportunity to follow Celine everywhere... this movie will show it all". Celine herself even said: "I let the cameras follow me everywhere. It's definitely the most intimate journey that I've ever shared with my fans." So basically if we don't see her pissing in the bath, inserting tampons and accidentally getting shit on her fingers when wiping her arse, we're being massively lied to here.

The next Batman film got a really shit name

There are two main problems with The Dark Knight Rises as a title:
1. It's boring. It sounds like Batman's just been woken by Alfred with a nice cup of tea and a hot buttered crumpet and he's just having a little stretch.
2. It sets off my OCD alarm. Why is he Batman for one film but The Dark Knight for two? Some of us demand continuity, dammit!
For what it's worth (less than nothing), here's what Nolan's Batrilogy should have been called:

I give myself bonus points for use of another Chris Nolan title, original use of punctuation and nice rhymez.

James Cameron announced two Avatar sequels

Announcing one sequel to one of the most indefensible wastes of time and money in the history of motion pictures would have been bad enough, but to announce two - one of which is set underwater for added tedium - is like being poked in both eyes with an angry wasp's backside. In 3D. Ooh that reminds me, did I mention how I feel about 3D?

Perfectly good old films are being

unnecessarily raped into another dimension

As if a CG Sy Snootles and Greedo shooting first weren't enough for George Lucas, the bearded bellend is now insisting that the original Star Wars - and Indiana Jones - films are to be retro-three-dimensionated in order to hoover up any cash James Cameron might have left on the table bring the magic to a whole new generation of walking wallets moviegoers.

Well fuck you done George.

Movie marketing discovered a
whole new level of misleading

Some personal heroes died

Martin Grace

Indiana Jones and James Bond stuntman

Dennis Hopper

Actor, writer and director

Tom Mankiewicz

Bond and Superman screenwriter

Leslie Nielsen

Actor and public sphincter-relaxer

Irvin Kershner

Director of The Empire Strikes Back

I spent a lot of time watching films like these

That's an extra 1,279 minutes I could have spent on my fruitless campaign to get an interview with Edgar Wright. Or watching

the latest version of Avatar.

So that was 2010. 2011 brings us Transformers 3, Smurfs and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never 3D, as well as the continued absence of a James Bond film, so come back this time next year to see if I've thrown myself under a train.

Cast Your Pods To The Wind

Well over a week ago, I recorded another podcast with the Paul and Barry Chuckle of movie piffle, Sam Clements and Simon Renshaw, at the Ritzy in Brixton. Shortly after recording, the podcastotron on which our voices were so carefully laid down exploded and had to be sent to a gleaming white room so it could be nursed back to health by worried looking men with tufts of white hair over their ears and spectacles perched precariously on the ends of their noses.

Following a week of convalescence, the podcast has now been released to an indifferent public who are no longer interested in the London Film Festival, Indiana Jones in 3D or the title of the next Batman film.

Still, as a museum piece it's of minor interest, so why not pour a glass of milk and see if you can make it come out of your nose when Sam bangs his head on the back of the seat?

Picturehouse Podcast 16: Raiders of the Lost Audio File by Picturehouses

The word I am desperately scrabbling in vain for at 18'15" is "Luddite". Yes, I'm referring to myself.

Incidentally, if you're a card-carrying masochist you can subscribe to Sam and Simon's pods on iTunes. Fortunately they don't all feature The Incredible Suit - you may also be entertained by such knowledgeable and delicious babble merchants as Limara from Your Turn Heather, Charlie from Ultra Culture, Catherine from Film 4 and Robbie Collin Not Collins from some newspaper or other and also this blog.

Edgar Wright did one too once but nobody's ever heard of him.

How To Shift More DVDs: Attach A Stupid Sticker

Apparently, people who buy DVDs know absolutely nothing about the film they're paying for. They just blindly stumble into shops, desperate to spend their cash on something, anything, armed with no information about the myriad films on offer. They need all the help they can get deciding what to buy, and this is why DVDs have little stickers attached to them to provide that extra nugget of incentive to pick one product over another in a competitive market.

I say, this "The Terminator" looks good - oh hang on, it's from the director of Avatar. The last thing I need is another twelve-hour festival of crap starring the Blue Man Group. Back on the shelf it goes. Ooh look, Hot Shots!

I don't know what this sticker's trying to tell me. "For Die Hard Fans Only"? Die hard fans of what? Cop Out? Bruce Willis? Tracy Morgan, whoever she is? Or do they mean "For fans of the film Die Hard only", in which case do I have to prove my love of Die Hard at the till along with my age? Oh hang on, it's £10.97. Back on the shelf it goes.

You know what, after the most awful week at work, all the terrible tragedies I've suffered lately and that traumatic experience with the ventriloquist's doll, I could really do with a good laugh. This looks ideal!

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Marketing Geniuses Do It Again

Well I don't know about you but The Incredible Suit really was in two minds whether or not to buy Spiral, newly released on DVD just three years after a smattering of showings at a few cinemas in the US. But then I saw this advert in this month's Empire magazine:

What's that? STARRING JOEL MOORE FROM AVATAR?! Hang on, which one was he again?

Oh yeah, I remember. Well if you didn't have me at "From the director of Hatchet", you've sure as hell got me now. Although, since Spiral was made before Avatar, we really should have been seeing this all over the world last December:

Sometimes there's just no justice.

So there are two very good reasons to buy Spiral. Another, which isn't part of the marketing material, is that according to IMDb it cost an estimated $1.5 million to make and grossed a grand total of $3,072. So buy your copy RIGHT NOW*. They need all the help they can get.

*Don't. It's obviously shit.

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The Incredible Suit's 30-Minute Freeze-Frame Challenge #9: Aliens

The 30-Minute Freeze-Frame Challenge is a futile, inane experiment which judges a film's merits entirely on how good it looks at 30-minute intervals according to arbitrary and indistinct criteria applied by The Incredible Suit. For previous challenges, click the links on the right.

This week's 30MFFC was suggested by The Incredible Suit viewers J Mac and Edward G Murrow, who mentioned it so long ago that they've probably long since stopped reading the blog and have grown old and hairy and maybe even died of old age. So in their memory, this is for them. It's Aliens, directed in 1986 by James Cameron when he knew how to mix a clever story with tension, terror, awe and various other emotions entirely absent from the smurf movie.

To be clear, these shots are taken from the 154-minute Special Edition, which is really the only version worth watching unless you've only got 137 minutes to live, in which case watch the original cut. But don't pause it because you'll die before the end.

0:30:00 This shot, as you should damn well know, is from the scene where Bishop does 'the thing with the knife'. I don't know if it's good enough to pass the Challenge, because despite being from an iconic scene, in and of itself it's not all that, is it?

1:00:00 I could stare at this picture for hours.

1:30:00 This one, not so much. I do like the lighting though. It's Ripley in literal and metaphorical Hell, innit.

2:00:00 I don't know about this one either. Again, in the context of the movie it's a great scene, but the image is a bit gloomy and I can't see Ripley's perfectly sculpted face clearly enough. What's an Incredible Suit to do?

Result:

I'm just not sure. The pressure's too much. I'm leaving it to you lot to decide if Aliens passes or fails the 30-Minute Freeze-Frame Challenge. The frustratingly vague rules are buried somewhere in this post if you need them, or you could just make it up based on your own guts. That's what I do.

Aliens: Pass or Fail? Vote here!

A Vacuous, Irrelevant Steamroller

At long last, the interminably tedious awards season has trundled to a halt like a vacuous, irrelevant steamroller running out of vacuous, irrelevant steam. Given that The Incredible Suit has its finger on the pulse of the movie world, I thought it might be interesting to cast a glance back at some of the award winners and see what I had to say about them at the time of their release:

The Golden Globe Award for Best Actor in a Musical or Comedy

The Irish Film And Television Award for Best International Actor

The Incredible Suit:
"I'm reasonably sure that Holmes wasn't American"

The Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture (Drama)

The Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Action Movie

The Incredible Suit: "Apocalyptically awful"

The Evening Standard British Film Award for Best Film

The BAFTA Award for Outstanding British Film

The British Independent Film Award for Best Director

The Cannes Film Festival Jury Prize

The London Critics Circle Film Award for British Film Of The Year

The Incredible Suit:
"It had, like, NO explosions, car chases, aliens or robots"

The Critics' Choice Movie Award for Best Adapted Screenplay

The BAFTA Award for Best Adapted Screenplay

The Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay

The LA Film Critics Association Award for Best Screenplay

The USA National Board of Review Award for Best Film

The Incredible Suit:
"In no way is it exceptional, extraordinary or otherwise notable"

The London Critics' Circle Award for Film Of The Year

The BAFTA Award for Best Film Not In The English Language

The Cannes Film Festival Grand Prize of the Jury

The London Film Festival Award for Best Film

The French Cesar Award for Best Film

The Incredible Suit: "A bit rubbish"

The Oscar for Best Film and Best Director

The BAFTA Award for Best Film and Best Director

The Broadcast Film Critics Association Award for Best Film & Best Director

The Directors Guild of America Award for Outstanding Director

The LA Film Critics Association Award for Best Picture and Best Director

The USA National Film Critics Award for Best Film and Best Director

The Incredible Suit:
"The kind of film the words 'six out of ten' were made for"

So now you know where to come in future for all your on-the-nose movie reviews.

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Cavalcade Of Cack

Right, so it's the Oscars on Sunday. As you are painfully aware by now, The Incredible Suit actively despises movie awards to the point of frenzied violence, and so should you. Nobody tells you what the best film of the year is except you (and, under certain circumstances, The Incredible Suit), so I recommend you all take as much interest in the Oscars as you would in a documentary on Radio 4 about the porridge mining industry in 13th century Peterborough.

However seeing as, come Monday morning, the entire planet will be either saying "Ooh, fancy that Avatar winning every single award, even the ones it wasn't nominated for" or "What's The Hurt Locker?", it would be churlish of me not to expend a small amount of energy blogulising about this cavalcade of cack. So for now I'll just pop down my predictions for the only awards that 99% of people care about, so that I can be insufferably smug about it / conveniently neglect to mention it on Monday:

Film

The Hurt Locker

Director

Kathryn Bigelow

Actor

Jeff Bridges

Actress

Sandra Bullock

Supporting Actor

Christoph Waltz

Supporting Actress

Mo'Nique

So there you go. Possibly the most hypocritical blog post ever written. To make up for it here's a short compilation of clips featuring Humphrey Bogart, winner of the Best Actor Oscar in 1952, and the lesser known Sour Apple Award for Least Co-Operative Actor in 1949. God damn it!

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Exclusive: World's First Avatar Review!*

I finally saw Avatar last week, a mere two months after its release. I realise that by now nobody gives a crusty snotrag what I thought about it, but it would be remiss of me not to at least comment. In fact this post may have the smallest target audience in The Incredible Suit's history, aimed as it is at people who haven't seen Avatar. So put your glasses on Mum, you're about to be educated.

Avatar is awful.

Inexplicably, shockingly, apocalyptically awful.

To take various awful elements and individually analyse their awfulness:

• The story is awful. It feels like it was written in the 1980s and left on a dusty shelf in a broom cupboard for 25 years while the rest of cinema evolved and improved its storytelling to the point where this kind of formulaic claptrap would be laughed out of Hollywood if The King Of The World hadn't written it.
 
• The script is awful. There's not an interesting, inspired line in its 162 minutes. The one-liners are as cheesy and flat as a Cheddar slice. I lost count of how many times a character appeared to be in mortal danger before predictably being rescued by another character, or by a herd of alien cows not seen since the first reel. By the time the hero delivered his rousing Braveheart speech I had my head in my hands, or I would have done if my 3D glasses hadn't got in the way.
 
• The characters are awful. The bad guy is the kind of tediously one-dimensional villain not seen since '80s 'classics' like Commando. I couldn't have cared less about any of the main characters if they'd been played by Shia LaBeouf.
 
• The music is awful. It's one thing to have all that jungle drums and wailing choirs nonsense but to have Leona Lewis squonking all over the credits is beyond a joke. I suppose it gets people out of the auditorium quickly so they can get on with the next fleecing - sorry, screening.
 
• The 3D is awful. Actually it's not awful, in some places it's quite good, but it's either in-your-face and therefore distracting, or subtle and therefore pointless. Also after about 15 minutes I felt like James Cameron himself had been pressing his thumbs into my eyeballs.

I could go on, but even my Mum will have lost the will to live by now. Let me just say that for all Avatar's technical innovations, Cameron seems to have completely forgotten how to tell a good story. Either that or he thought a few 'Ooh's and 'Aah's would do in lieu of an interesting, witty, intelligent story. And judging by the $849 squintillion he's trousered so far, he was right.

Final obvious, childish pun and submission for DVD cover quote:

* to use the phrase "crusty snotrag"

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An Album Of Clannad B-Sides

As the world continues to barrel inexorably towards the December release of Avatar, it’s full steam ahead for interweb types who need to write something – anything – about it more often than they need to do that breathing in and out thing.

This week my eyes have been assaulted with previews of James Horner’s soundtrack to the film, which seems to me to be taking things a bit too far. I mean, what next? An in-depth analysis of the end credits? “Those names just keep on rolling up the screen in a relentless vertical direction, reminding us all that what we have just witnessed is a bunch of people who worked on a film for a bit… breathtaking. Stupendous. James Cameron is a genius and should be cloned so he can make all films ever from now on until the end of time.”

Unsurprisingly, the soundtrack is apparently so unspeakably amazing that entire planets have stopped rotating in order to have a good listen. Well, The Incredible Suit has had a bit of a listen here, and can confirm that it sounds a lot like an album of Clannad B-sides. I tried to avoid reading the track titles because I’ve heard they’re a bit spoilerific, but I do know that one track is called ‘Becoming One Of “The People” Becoming One With Neytiri’. So not only is Cameron changing cinema as we know it but he’s also taking an axe to sentence construction and sensible use of the English language.

Furthermore, following in the turgid, ear-insulting footsteps of Celine Dion, Leona Lewis is singing the song for the end credits, the 30 seconds of which I could bear to withstand were some of the absolute worst noises my ear drums have ever tried to stop from reaching my brain.

Anyway, I don’t want to diss Avatar or its soundtrack too much* in case it all does turn out to be orgasmically astonishing, so I’ll halt there in order to point out some much more exciting soundtrack news: Alan Silvestri’s full score for Back To The Future has finally got a proper release, courtesy of Intrada. This is fantabulous news because a) it’s completely ace, b) it was only previously available in snippets on other soundtrack albums and c) it comes with a second CD of a score that Silvestri recorded before dumping in favour of the one we all know and love.

Have a listen to a few clips here and tell me that’s not better than Enya’s cast-offs.

*Too late

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Clever Words About Films And That

It’s been a while since I did something as uninspiring and pointless as put up a new trailer you can find anywhere, so here’s an uninspiring and pointless new trailer you can find anywhere:



However I couldn’t give a barrel of monkeys about Toy Story 3; obviously I’ll go and see it, duh, but I’m no more excited about it than I am about Avatar, which, on a scale of 1 to 10, is 'not very'.

What’s far more intriguing is this cheeky little tinker:



I don’t know much about Exam at all, except that it got some good press after showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival in June this year, and that it’s small, cheap and looks devilishly entertaining, like Fidgit from Time Bandits on a bungee rope.

There’s no point in me giving you a synopsis because it’s all in the trailer, but what I can and will give you is a solid gold guarantee that The Incredible Suit will be seeing Exam when it comes out on January 8th and sharing its thoughts with you, the viewers. I might even do something original and witty like give it a grade, you know, like ‘A’ or ‘C minus’ or something, what with it being called Exam and all.

The Incredible Suit: at the cutting edge of dead clever words about films and that.

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Even George Alagiah Got Aroused

What with all this London Film Festival nonsense and other assorted tedious toss, The Incredible Suit is ashamed to have been somewhat remiss in keeping up on blogworthy movie news to report back to you, the loyal viewer. I hope to put this right with a couple of typically belated and inane observations:

Firstly, you may recall that I was left wholly unmoved by the first trailer for Avatar, which even George Alagiah got aroused by on the BBC Six O’Clock News. If you’re an incurable insomniac you can read my previous witterings here.

Anyway, a second trailer has been squirted all over the interwebs, and it looks like this:

No doubt George required a complete change of underwear after that, but The Incredible Suit remains stubbornly flaccid. This film is not just going to have to be an incredible 3D experience to impress me but it'll have to dance a jig, remember my birthday and make me toast every day for a week before it even comes close to reaching the dizzy heights of astonishery that the rest of the world seem to think it's already attained.

Secondly, some time ago I posted a picture of the cast of The A-Team doing what appeared to be absolutely bog all:

Perhaps they were waiting for a plan to come together so they could love it, or maybe they were scouring the ground for a couple of sticks with which to make their own Large Hadron Collider.

Anyway, as The A-Team director Joe Carnahan is an avid viewer of The Incredible Suit*, he’s evidently realised that he’s taken the eye of the ball somewhat, and within seconds of my original post** he let rip with this slightly more interesting shot:

What’s most uncanny about this new picture is not that Bradley Cooper, as Face, has apparently been photoshopped by someone with the picture editing skills of a limbless orangutan, but that Liam Neeson, as Hannibal, looks almost exactly like my father-in-law.

See? Weird.

*I am 99% certain this is a lie, but you never know
**Approximately 1,209,600 seconds

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Subtitled F-Bombs

VIEWERS!

Were you DISAPPOINTED by the Avatar trailer?

Did you expect MORE from James “King Of The World” Cameron?

Are you a MAD fascist dictator?

If you answered “Yes I was/did/am, actually!” to one or more of these questions, YOU TOO could gain a quantum of solace from this GENUINE footage of someone with similar interests!

***WARNING: the following sensitive material contains

SUBTITLED F-BOMBS!***

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Tittypiddle

With frenzied fanboys frothing at the mouth and I dread to think what other orifices, the first trailer for James Cameron’s Avatar splurged onto the interwebs today in a spasm of colour (mostly blue), action and nonsense. There’s little point in me embedding it here because it’ll only be yanked off by Cameron’s legalbots within picoseconds, and quite rightly too. Imagine the damage I’ll do to the potential squillions Avatar will make at the box office by showing the three readers of The Incredible Suit the trailer. So, for the rest of this post to make any sense, click here to have your eyeballs frottled.

Well wasn’t that underwhelming? For a trailer event so momentous it even got a slot on BBC News (in which George Alagiah hilariously spoke the words “stereoscopic 3D” with the scepticism of a man describing a machine that records your dreams, predicts the lottery results and then gives you oral pleasure) it wasn’t a patch on the trailers for District 9 or Shutter Island. In fact it seemed ostensibly to be a series of scenes from the last Star Wars film which were deleted because George Lucas thought the main characters were a bit blue, and not very convincing. And if something’s so unconvincing even George Lucas won’t put it in his movie, it’s time to worry.

Actually, what’s more worrying is this comment from James Dyer of Empire Magazine from the BBC’s story:

“You’ll see this film in 3D, you’ll be so blown away by it that from then on you’ll want to see all films in 3D, and that a 2D experience is incredibly flat by comparison.”

Apart from Mr Dyer’s astute observation that 2D is flat (give that man a raise!), what a load of tittypiddle. Did he not have to study 1950s cinema to get a job on a film magazine? The world went 3D bonkers for about five minutes with films like Dial M For Murder, House Of Wax and It Came From Outer Space, and then decided that actually, it’s not all that, let’s go to the hop and get a shake instead, Daddio. And will we really want all films in 3D? Wartime dramas? Romantic weepies? Anything with Shia LaBeouf? Not me guv.

Maybe I’m wrong. It’s happened before. Maybe Avatar will change cinema forever, maybe everything will be in 3D from now on, maybe James Cameron will actually be crowned Grand Poobah of the Cosmos. But I doubt it. After all, it’s only a movie; just one with an extra dimension to be overrated in.

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Staggeringly-Bequiffed Legend

In 1973, Stanley Kubrick’s crackers, overlong work of ultraviolent mentalism, A Clockwork Orange, was banned by its own director because its ultraviolence proved to be a bit too ultra. It’s now Number 51 on the Internet Movie Database’s Top 250 films.

In 1986 The Exorcist was banned under the wacky and misguided Video Recordings Act. It’s now widely regarded as one of the most important horror films ever made, and staggeringly-bequiffed legend Mark Kermode believes it to be The Greatest Film, Like, Ever.

And now, in 2009, word reaches me of another distinguished work of art banned by an ultra-conservative society too afraid to face the harsh reality of a ruthless world. Yes, one of The Incredible Suit’s loyal viewers (hello Stu) informs me that the blog is no longer available to read by employees of Halfords Group PLC in their totalitarian state, oops, I mean, place of work. Presumably this is the price I must pay for my reputation as a vociferous opponent of affordable wing mirrors and Homer Simpson air fresheners. It may also be because all blogs are banned under Halfords’ oppressive internet censorship regime, but the former reason is more sensational so that’s what I’ll be going with when Amnesty International get in touch.

Well it’s their loss, because they’ll never know that The Incredible Suit viewers have warmed the deepest, darkest recesses of my dank, clammy gizzards by agreeing with me and voting Timothy Dalton The Greatest James Bond, Like, Ever in my weekly poll. Good for you, and especially those of you who made the journey from Debra Best’s Timothy Dalton Chat Group to vote. How you found out about this humble blog will remain a mystery to me until the day I finally log off. It certainly can’t have been anything to do with the shameless recruitment of Timothy Dalton fan site operators I undertook in a desperate attempt at vote nobbling.

This week’s poll will, I hope, remain as untainted and impartial as the Eurovision Song Contest. While the world remains blissfully unaware of the impending asteroid of Avatar-hype about to shatter it into its component atoms (see this post), The Incredible Suit asks: What’s The Greatest James Cameron Film, Like, Ever? I’m not including Piranha II: The Spawning for obvious reasons:



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Grand Poobah Of The Cosmos

Self-proclaimed King Of The World and crackpot genius James Cameron has announced that he's going to give us the chance to watch 15 minutes of his new film, Avatar, for free. Make no mistake, Avatar will be the most hyped movie of the year. Forget Bruno, forget Harry Potter, forget Satanic Sluts III: Scandalised; Avatar will be the film of 2009, because it's Cameron's first film for a decade, it'll have groundbreaking effects that'll make your eyes dribble out of your face and it'll cost 700 bajillion dollars and make a wazillion times that much back.

However, it's not out till December, and Cameron wants us to be eating, breathing and farting Avatar constantly until then. So he's taken this unprecedented step of, rather than a boring old trailer, granting us a free 15 minute fix of eye-heroin to tide us over until he can provide a full-on, heart-attack-inducing geeksplosion for Christmas. What's more, he's going to do it in IMAX and 3D cinemas just to be sure our brains totally liquify and trickle out of our bottoms.

I suppose it makes sense; Avatar's a massive science fiction extravagasm set on a planet populated entirely by bonkersness, so the last thing he wants is people watching clips on their phone in an office in Grimsby. If you ask me though, this exercise is fraught with danger. What if we don't like what we see? A three-minute trailer is rarely bad enough to put us off something we're probably going to see anyway, but a 15 minute taster could convince us that actually, this all looks a bit silly, I don't think I'll bother thanks. Cameron had better be sure what he's showing us is worth leaving the house for or he might be waving ta-ra to all that moolah come December.

What's more worrying is that I fear a new dawn in movie trailerage. Currently we have to endure 30 minutes of adverts and trailers before a film; if this idea takes off we'll be there for hours, and by the time the movie starts we'll have forgotten what we came to see. People will have to book two days' holiday and pack a change of underwear just to go to the pictures.

I'm looking forward to Avatar but I can't see myself watching 15 minutes of it four months in advance; that's like eating a roast potato for breakfast then having a full Sunday roast at teatime. Pointless. Also, Cameron has a long way to go to impress me. Aliens is fantastic, but T2 and True Lies sag in the middle like a badly cooked souffle, and Titanic, no matter how much cash it hoovered up, is just an enormous pant-pudding.

But what do I know? Avatar will probably be the greatest thing since sliced bacon and the 15 minute experiment will win Cameron a Nobel Peace Prize. As long as he doesn't proclaim himself to be Grand Poobah of the Cosmos when he collects it I don't care.

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