Thou Shalt Not Kill... Even If You're Jodie Foster

Posted on Monday October 1, 2007, 16:07 by Dan Jolin

Warning: minor plot spoilers ahead…

There’s a very good reason why Michael Winner’s Parting Shots is perched at the top of my list of worst films ever made. Well, there are MANY very good reasons (I’ll list them for anyone who asks), but above all the film’s extreme technical indelicacies is its purely, deeply, truly, madly offensive right-wing proposition that the actions of a murderous vigilante (in this case a photographer diagnosed with cancer who decides to kill everyone he blames for screwing up his life – played by, *cough*, Chris Rea) are not only justifiable, but heroic. Even more galling, it adds the erroneous suggestion that we all secretly would like to do what Rea’s character’s doing. (Winner, of course, has snuffled around this odious territory before in Death Wish and Dirty Weekend, so by Parting Shots – fittingly his last film – he’d pretty much honed all his worst tendencies.)
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Monster? Alien? Let's Call The Whole Thing Off...

Posted on Tuesday August 21, 2007, 10:42 by Dan Jolin

Casting my eyes over the film schedules of the not-too-distant future, as is my wont, I spotted an upcoming animated Paramount movie, due in July 2009, called Monsters Vs Aliens. My instant reaction, no doubt thrown out there by my still active inner child, was: Best. Title. Ever. But then I thought some more. What do they mean by ‘Monster’? What do they mean by ‘Alien’? Isn’t one very often the other?

Just think of some the greatest movie monsters: John Carpenter’s The Thing, the xenomorphs of the Alien franchise, the Rancor (for that matter, any one of a number of George Lucas’ creations), the bugs from Starship Troopers… They’re all extra-terrestrial. Sure, you’ve also got the likes of the Wolfman, Frankenstein’s original Monster, the Mummy, etc. And then there’s those aliens that clearly aren’t monstrous: Jeff Bridges in Starman, the Star Trek galaxy’s various pasty-faced, pointy-eared types. But were you to dr

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