Q: Guy Richie's third proper film (not counting the God-awful "Swept Away" is a complex action thriller concerned with gambling, gangsters and chess. Fans of Richie's previous efforts will probably hate Revolver as much as I did, with its twists and turns. Richie stalwart Jason Statham plays Jake, a newly-released ex-con, out to wreak revenge on the ridiculously named Dorothy Macha (a superbly OTT Ray Liotta) but instead gets embroiled with a couple of other cons, (one of which is Andre 3000 from rap outfit Outkast) who throw him and us the audience, a number of red herrings throughout the film, all of which becomes extremely tedious. The high point of this mess of a movie is the bit in the restaurant, where the dialogue gets turned down in favour of a superbly shot, slow-mo shootout set to Beethoven's Moonlight Sonata. All in all, Revolver is a flawed work, not truly awful but far from Richie's best. That would still be Lock, Stock. If this film was a school homework assignment it would be graded 'must try harder!'
A: negative
Q: This is a fair little show about the paranormal although it feels as if Art Bell and his ilk figured out how to carve a career out of the attitude that Carl Kolchak exemplified. Of course there probably wouldn't be an X-Files if this show hadn't prepped this audience for it so well. Darren McGavin is not exactly the super-heroic type but he is a plausible(enough) guy to deliver heroic deeds. Check out his work on some of those old Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Here he is the main attraction, there doesn't seem to be a girlfriend or wife who's a distraction. In fact there isn't a whole lot of sex appeal to the show. Something I'm noticing as well is that the pacing isn't really suspenseful in a typical way. There's a lot of throwaway humor to this show. Sometimes its just pokey to get to the climax. There's a thread from this show coming all the way up to the present MAD MEN show in terms of style. Not that David Chase writes Mad Men but the people that worked under him on The Sopranos definitely have emulated and inherited his serio-comic tone.
A: negative
Q: What begins as a fairly clever farce about a somewhat shady security monitoring company turns, almost instantaneously, into an uninteresting and completely inane murder mystery. David Arquette and the great Stanley Tucci try mightily to make this train wreck watchable, but some things are just not humanly possible.

What, for instance, causes Gale to turn suddenly from a sweet motherly figure into a drunken shrew at Tommy's parents house? Why would Heinrich, although admittedly a sleezebag, want to destroy the business to which he devotes his life, by robbing and possibly murdering his customers? Why does the seemingly sensible Tommy believe that Heinrich could be a murderer (based almost entirely on a dream), and even if that were believable, why wouldn't he go to the police? And why didn't Gale activate the alarm when she got home, especially after scolding Howie about it being off? Of course, all of these events are necessary for the plot (and I use the term very, very loosely) to unfold. And it might be forgivable if it resulted in even the slightest bit of comedy. But everything, from Howie's description of his date rape, to the coroner's misidentification of Gale, to the final "joke" about Gale and Howie still being dead, is more tasteless and pathetic than anything else.

I checked the box indicating that my comments contained "spoilers", but there's nothing more I or anyone else could do to spoil this thing that already stinks to high heaven.
A: negative
Q: Franco Rossi's 1985 six-hour Italian mini-series of Quo Vadis is a very curious beast, creating an absolutely convincing ancient Roman world shot in matter of fact fashion (very few long shots, no big cityscapes), but playing the drama down so much in favour of allusions to classical literature and history that the story constantly gets lost in the background.

The shifting structure (much of episode one is played out via voice over letters) and lack of narrative urgency makes the full six-hour version simultaneously demanding and undemanding, and certainly far too often uninvolving, but it has something going for it. The two main strengths are the characterisation of Petronius (a thankfully dubbed Frederic Forrest, whose own voice would almost certainly flatten his dialogue) as a man whose spent so long looking for an astute angle to survive court life that he's become incapable of experiencing emotion, and Klaus Maria Brandauer's unique take on Nero as a wannabe actor whose every move and action is calculated on how his 'audience' will receive it. Elsewhere, Max Von Sydow briefly appears in a few episodes, being rewarded with the show's most impressive and genuinely moving scene here he encounters a child as he attempts to leave Rome. It's the kind of thing the show could do with more of, but it seems all too often to flatten every potentially emotional, inspiring or exciting moment under it's relentlessly low-key direction.

Unfortunately Francesco Quinn makes a staggeringly anonymous hero, blending in with the walls and coming over less as a Roman officer than that quiet, slightly gormless but inoffensive guy who works in the same office as you who never says much at office parties - you know, the one who you think is called Dave or something like that. The budgetary limitations are very visible once its Meet the Lions time for the Christians and Ursus battle with the bull is so determinedly low key that it just passes over you before the show just abruptly loses interest and suddenly ends.

Not a trip I can particularly recommend, I'm afraid, but if you do embark on it it's one not entirely without its small rewards.
A: negative