Latest Spielberg/Hanks collaboration is final film to be inspired by T'Pau album

The next Steven Spielberg film to hit cinema screens will be the Tom Hanks-starring Cold War espionage thriller Bridge Of Spies, according to reports. Due for release in October, the film marks the fourth collaboration between the two Hollywood titans, but more importantly it's also the fifth and final film to be inspired by the discography of '80s power balladeers T'Pau, who famously had that song that time.

The movies' obsession with Flame-Haired Carol Decker and her band of generic bemulleted nobodies has been a defining feature of 21st century cinema, so in the absence of anyone else wasting their time writing about it, I decided to put my - heh - heart and soul into investigating further.

Bridge Of Spies

 

T'Pau's first and best album (i.e. it's the only one anyone remembers) is, ironically, the last to give its title to a movie. Released in 1987 and immediately launching Flame-Haired Carol Decker into everyone's faces, it contained such era-defining classic tracks as Heart And Soul and China In Your Hand. "I am walking / over the bridge of spies today / freedom is only one more step away / you only have to hold me," warbled Decker on the title track: words which composer John Williams looks forward to setting against his lush strings as Tom Hanks clambers over the bodies of deceased secret agents in order to cross a river while clutching a teacup. Made of china. In his hand.

Rage 

 

Released just a year after Bridge Of Spies, T'Pau's second album Rage somehow reached number four in the UK album charts despite nobody actually buying it. The LP is now the scourge of charity shops everywhere, which, with a pleasing symmetry, is almost certainly the destiny of the movie adaptation starring Nicolas Cage. Cage plays a furious Flame-Haired Carol Decker, whose anger at being beaten by Shakin' Stevens (Channing Tatum) in the final of ITV's pop dinosaur party Hit Me Baby One More Time results in the live, on-air disembowelling of host Vernon Kay (Eric Roberts).

The Promise

Following a three-year silence which nobody noticed, T'Pau stormed back in 1991 with their third album, The Promise. The record's performance ensured that Decker and her pals would go their separate ways once it dropped out of the Top 40's arse, and the tragedy of the band's situation was so moving that respected Chinese director Chen Kaige took it upon himself to tell their story in a 2005 film. Cecilia Chung plays Qingcheng (Chinese for "Flame-Haired Carol Decker") and Jang Dong-gun essays the role of rhythm guitarist Ronnie Rogers, with whom Decker enjoyed an alarmingly hirsute relationship.

Red

Seven years passed before, contrary to popular demand, Flame-Haired Carol Decker reformed T'Pau and released Red, the cover of which featured Decker pointing at her vagina and looking unimpressed. When it came time for the movie version, the obvious choice to play Decker was Bruce Willis, who reformed his own band of past-it has-beens in order to take on an apparently corrupt US administration (a thinly-veiled metaphor for the British music industry). Nobody expected that either the album or the film would get a follow-up, but fate had other plans.

Pleasure And/Or Pain

In a futile attempt to drag this feature out beyond its blatantly limited capacity, T'Pau re-returned early this year with their eagerly unawaited comeback album Pleasure & Pain, which is so brilliant it doesn't even have its own Wikipedia page. The cunning twist in the tale is that the album is a musical version of erotica-peddling director Zalman King's 2013 smutsplosion Pleasure Or Pain, in which - according to IMDb - a young woman (portrayed in song by Flame-Haired Carol Decker) is shown "a world of decadence and debauchery that pushes her sexual limits to the brink". As literally no human ears have heard the album, its faithfulness to the film cannot be verified. When asked about the discrepancy between the two titles, which somewhat defeats the object of this feature, the author feigned a heart attack before running away cackling like a loon.

Merely the first ten idiotic things that occurred to me about Jupiter Ascending

Jupiter Ascending is shit, there are lots of reasons why, here are ten. Oh you wanted a better introduction? Well I wanted a better film. Hey ho.

1. Mila Kunis plays a cleaner called Jupiter, who cleans toilets. It is impossible to accept that Jupiter has ever come within sniffing distance of a bottle of Cillit Bang; Mila Kunis and toilets go together like Denise Richards and nuclear physics.

Just an ordinary, staggeringly beautiful, ravishingly lit and made up toilet cleaner

2. Eddie Redmayne plays a character who, in early scenes, is set up as the film's antagonist. He is then more or less ignored for about eighty minutes while his brother and sister perform deeds of low-level dastardliness for reasons which are neither entirely clear nor remotely interesting. Also their scenes end so abruptly that I am suspicious that the script was ever finished. Also they all live on Naboo.

"Wait wait wait. Tell me again how you did the Stephen Hawking robot voice?"

3. Channing Tatum plays a creature whose DNA has been "spliced", and he is part human, part wolf. Sean Bean, similarly, is part human, part bee. I'm not even joking, although I did need the bee thing pointed out to me after the film because it's explained in about four words of dialogue through which I may have sighed too loudly to hear. The extent to which all this cabbage makes an impact on the story is that Tatum has pointy ears and growls once, while Bean lives in a house with lots of bees. He doesn't even have stripes or a sting in his bottom or anything. Oh no wait hang on his name is Stinger KILL ME

4. At one point it is explained that Tatum's character once bit out the throat of an "Entitled", of which Redmayne's character is one. Redmayne whispers and wheezes like Baron Greenback off of Danger Mouse and wears high-cut gowns which conceal his throat, suggesting that it is he who was on the receiving end of the Tatum choppers. However the incident is never referred to again, leading me to suspect that somebody forgot to write that page too.

"Minions! My golden platter of Strepsils! I have a motherfucker of a sore throat"

5. Channing Tatum performs an entire fight scene with his shirt off for no other reason than he is Channing Tatum.

It's because he has muscles all over his front

6. Jupiter Ascending features lots of alien creatures whose design has been so haphazardly thought out that they just look like humans with slightly altered features. One lady has ears like Dumbo, which is hilarious. She can't hear better or fly or anything, she just looks like fucking Dumbo. Also there is a pilot who resembles an actual elephant; he gets maybe three close ups, in each of which he makes a funny noise.

This guy is an absolute hoot

7. Obviously because this is a big-budget sci-fi there must be enormously OTT space battles in which it is impossible to understand what the fuck is going on. Why can nobody design simple spacecraft these days? Everything has to have a million flappy bits hanging off it or spikes sticking out everywhere or other pointless paraphernalia. All I ask is to know whether I'm looking at good guys or bad guys, instead of having my retinas eviscerated by billions of pixels exploding in my face in glorious 3D.

Fuck off.

8. The whole film is so quackingly silly that with an intelligent tweak it could have been a camp classic; this generation's Flash Gordon. Instead the Wachowskis play everything so straight that for a film which features Channing Tatum as a pointy-eared dog-man with a Mugatu beard who skates through space on hover boots, the tone remains resolutely, painfully humourless. I mean, would it hurt to have Tatum sniff Mila Kunis' anus when he first meets her? I don't think so.

"Oh cool, I was wondering where I left my lipstick WOAH JESUS"

9. Actually there is one scene in the middle of the film which knows it's meant to be funny: an odyssey through the labyrinth of some kind of space bureaucracy, in which Kunis is passed from one department to another with increasing frustration. The scene, which features a sly Terry Gilliam cameo, feels like it's fallen out of an early draft of The Hitch-hiker's Guide To The Galaxy and doesn't quite know how it ended up in a space opera staged by children on cocaine.

You're right, Tel. You do deserve better.

10. At one point about two-thirds through I realised I hadn't laughed, smiled, frowned or indeed registered any emotion on my face since the film started. In order to prevent facial muscular atrophy I shouted obscenities at the screen but nobody could hear me over the sound of millions of dollars being flushed down the shitter.

Literally can not remember what this person does or why

Six films I'll be giving a shit about in

JUPITER ASCENDING

There is no middle ground here: Jupiter Ascending will either be the most bonkersly brilliant film this year or an absolutely colossal, catastrophic cacksplosion which will bring an end to filmmaking for good. Either way it'll be something to talk about on Twitter. (6th)

SELMA

I love civil rights, me. Ruddy love 'em. Give me those civil rights and give them to me now, I need a great big civil rights hit right in my kisser. I don't know why I'm saying this. Selma looks good though. (6th)

COHERENCE

I vaguely recall, months ago, reading something somewhere that said Coherence was worth watching for a very specific reason. Annoyingly I can't remember the reason, or where I read it, but I do remember the title Coherence, and on that basis I'm giving a shit about it. I suppose I could always watch the screener that's in the drawer under my telly, but then I'd have to get up and we all know that ain't happening. (13th)

THE DUKE OF BURGUNDY

The best-smelling film from last year's LFF. Features some excellent undercrackers too. Here's a review if you like reviews about sweet-smelling films about excellent undercrackers. (20th)

IT FOLLOWS

I don't like horror films because I am a massive baby, but I am also a sheep, so when lots of people said It Follows was good I took my massive baby sheep self to see it. They were right. (27th)

WHITE GOD

I did give a shit about this at one time, but then I saw it and I'm afraid to say it's not as shit-giving-worthy as I'd hoped. It is quite mad though so feel free to give it a go. Here's a review I wrote which contains lots of awful dog jokes because I was bored. (27th)

LFF 2014:Foxcatcher

There's still no sign of the long-awaited Big Daddy vs Giant Haystacks film powerslamming into cinemas any time soon, so in the meantime wrestling fans are going to have to make do with Foxcatcher, a true story even more alarming than that of a 26-stone man called Shirley who wore a leotard for a living. In this tale, Channing Tatum and Mark Ruffalo play Mark and Dave Schultz, two past-their-prime Olympian brothers recruited by billionaire oddball John du Pont (Steve Carell) to bring prestige to his latest vanity project: his own wrestling team.

And that, essentially, is it. For the best part of 130 minutes, we watch these three men repeatedly come together and drift apart, their relationships with each other rippling and shifting like Big Daddy's mantits. If you know the true story of du Pont and the Schultzes, you'll know there's a little more to it, but if you don't, good. Keep it that way. Because Foxcatcher's appeal lies in its woozy fug of unease; the sense that somehow, somewhere, something's not quite right, and waiting for it to show itself is half the fun.

Quarter of the fun is in watching Tatum and Ruffalo nailing the brothers' mildly antagonistic relationship with apparently minimal effort: their first scene together, a practice session at older brother Dave (Ruffles)'s run-down, sweat-stained gym, is a complete and thorough portrait of a frayed fraternal bond told completely wordlessly. Wrestling holds become awkward hugs, and the physicality of the sport provides an excuse for barely-concealed feelings to bubble violently to the surface. The remaining 25% of the fun is trying to gauge which bits of Steve Carell's face are real and which are rubber.

The eyeballs are definitely rubber.

Foxcatcher is not a thrilling film. It isn't punctuated by electrifying, Raging Bull-esque fights, and its moments of high drama are few and far between. And frankly that would be a huge problem, were it not for its immensely watchable leads. Tatum, Carell and Ruffalo are incredible here: before long you forget Carell's prosthetic conk and his history of patchy comedies, while Tatum's cauliflower ears, Don Corleone jaw and permanently furrowed brow tell you all you need to know about his character. Ruffles, in a less showy role, is the champ though: slouching through the film like an avuncular ape and sporting a remarkable hairpiece, he's barely recognisable, and convincingly sells the elder Schultz's woes and concerns about his younger brother's new life with du Pont.

Familial connections, both real and manufactured, are at Foxcatcher's dark heart. A spoilt child with severe Mommy issues, John du Pont attempts to buy himself a better family just like his overbearing mother bought his childhood friends. His efforts to become a father figure to Mark Schultz are painfully awkward: the one time du Pont calls Schultz "son", in front of an audience of cash-stuffed associates, is a pointedly graceless episode. And there's no such thing as a happy family, even when you pay for it, as everybody eventually discovers. These are the themes that lend a tragic air to proceedings; air that grows heavy with the threat of an inevitable thunderstorm.

Slow-burning and brooding with an indistinct menace, Foxcatcher takes its sweet time telling its story. Whether the payoff is worth the time director Bennett Miller spends on the buildup will be hotly debated, but don't be mistaken: Foxcatcher is all about the buildup. If that sounds like a slog, then the performances alone are enough to recommend it. And if we can lock Tatum and Ruffalo down for Daddy and Haystacks, then everything will have been worthwhile.

22 Jump Street: Maximum Broverdrive

Remember 21 Jump Street? No? What's wrong with you? Jesus, it was only two years ago. You make me sick, you and your puny memory. This is why you never remember my birthday. Anyway, it's lucky for you that remembering 21 Jump Street is not high on the list of essential requirements for enjoying the sequel, because 91% of 22 Jump Street happens exactly like last time. EXACTLY LIKE LAST TIME. And while that's a problem for comedies like, say, Home Alone 2, it doesn't matter a jot here because it never, ever lets you forget it. Although you probably will because you forget everything.

I bet you don't even remember who these guys are. Ugh I hate you.

22 Jump Street kicks off with immediate nods to Bad Boys and Beverly Hills Cop, so it should be absolutely no surprise whatsoever that originality is not the order of the day. That said, being funny as fuck is very much the order of the day, and at this 22 Jump Street succeeds enormously. The idea of an entire first act spent pointing out its own deficiency sounds excruciating, but screenwriter Michael Bacall and directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller squeeze the joke so hard that it's impossible not to go with the flow.

Channing Tatum and Jonah Hill return as Jenko and Schmidt, obviously, and one of them is very funny and likeable while the other is Jonah Hill. Tatum's comedy chops are coming along nicely and, while his bromance with Hill is undeniably chuckleable, he's impressively capable of carrying his own scenes. He pitches Jenko's stupidity with the laser precision of a far more seasoned comic and handles the action triumphantly; check out the mid-air slo-mo pouting or the Cate Blanchett gag for proof. Hill, meanwhile, does a lot of unfunny improvisation and spends an entire scene shouting because the louder you are the funnier you are, AM I RIGHT?!?! Actually that's not very fair, Jonah Hill is quite funny sometimes but it's hard to like him because as a person he appears to be an unpleasant homophone.

It's a little too long and there's another pointless oops-we've-accidentally-taken-mind-bending-drugs-time-for-a-wacky-trip sequence, but by and large 22 Jump Street is a ruddy good laugh providing you're in a packed cinema. Its crowning glory, however, is avoiding the easy option of sticking outtakes at the end to make you go home thinking you had more fun than you did, instead deploying something way more appropriate, ingenious and frankly amazing for the credits sequence. I'll be honest: I wasn't looking forward to this film, but it pleasantly surprised my black, mirthless soul, and now I find myself in the odd position of awaiting the twenty-threequel with something approaching anticipation. I must be getting soft in my old age.