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Fox gets sexier in Transformers 2.
But SFX movie loses the plot with soulless story.
WELCOME to Toys R Bust as action maestro Michael Bay offers more well-staged mayhem in TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN (12: Paramount).
The director piles on epic explosions and heavy metal noise in this super-slick yet soulless sequel.
Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf) uncovers the secret history of the Transformers' presence on Earth, which leads him and his girlfriend (Megan Fox) on a mission to save mankind from an ancient threat – the first ever Decepticon.
But neither the daft, fragmented plot not the acting, which is no better than proficient, really matters.
The point here is battling giant robots turning into cars, planes and just about anything else you can think of in spectacular set-pieces.
Although the carnage provides some excitement and the movie is visually impressive, it still feels tiresomely synthetic and the barrage of fight scenes eventually tests the patience.
*Icons of French cinema and fashion meet to compelling effect as Audrey Tautou stars in the chronicle of Coco Chanel's formative years.
It's surprising to learn from COCO BEFORE CHANEL (12: Optimum) that the woman whose name became a byword for beautiful simplicity actually grew up in an orphanage.
Young Gabrielle Chanel is a seamstress at the back of a tailor's shop by day, while at night she's a cabaret performer with a weak voice who sings to an audience of drunken soldiers.
Middle-aged aristocrat Etienne Balsan offers her a safe haven as a courtesan among the idle and decadent of French society and she's reborn as Coco, a rebel with notions of liberating women from their laced-up corsets.
The emotional core of the story exposes the personal sacrifices Coco made along the road to success. She was determined to remain her own woman in a world shaped by wealthy men, including an English financier who ignited her passions.
Anne Fontaine's elegant film slightly falters in the final stages, yet its subtle insights are still worth celebrating.
*The ubiquitous Will Ferrell (eight films in the past three years, by my reckoning) seems to be losing the plot.
Anchorman: The Legend Of Ron Burgundy showed he can be very funny, but his latest DVD outing, LAND OF THE LOST (12: Universal), depending almost entirely on computer-generated imagery, could not have had a more appropriate title.
The humour is lame and more than a little smutty for a family film, while the story barely hangs together in an uncalled-for adaptation of a long-forgotten American TV series for kids.
Ferrell plays an eccentric "quantum palaeontologist" convinced that a different world exists beyond a time portal. He finds it, naturally, and ends up in a desert populated by dinosaurs and bug-eyed lizards.
A provocatively dressed Anna Friel tags along as his research assistant, seemingly the only person who still believes he's not a fraud, but essentially she's eye candy in a dud that calls for the cast to do little more than gaze upwards, slack-jawed in simulated horror.
*Dark comedy SUNSHINE CLEANING (15: Anchor Bay) has Amy Adams and Emily Blunt playing two sisters who could not be more different.
Admas is Rose, a single mum still in love with her married high school sweetheart, while Blunt is Norah, her grumpy slacker sibling.
To pay for the tuition for Rose's eccentric son to go to private school, the sisters set up a crime scene clean-up service, without a clue as to what it involves.
The interplay between the pair is amusing and unpredictable as they work their way through adversity.
Look out for Alan Arkin as their stubbornly optimistic father and Clifton Collins Jnr in a pivotal - and one-armed - role.
TOP TEN: 1 Night At The Museum 2; 2 X-Men Origins: Wolverine; 3 Fast & Furious; 4 Bruno; 5 Monsters Vs Aliens; 6 12 Rounds; 7 Public Enemies; 8 Drag Me To Hell; 9 Year One; 10 Angels & Demons. Chart from Blockbuster.
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Weather for Leighton Buzzard
Wednesday 23 May 2012
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