On the couch

New Town
Killers
Directed by: Richard Jobson
Starring: Dougray Scott, Alastair Mackenzie, James Anthony Pearson
Dark, gritty and surprisingly disturbing, New Town Killers is a low budget Edinburgh-based chase movie that exceeds every single expectation one might have about “this sort of thing”.
The set up is simple: down on his luck Sean is broke and lives in a lousy part of Edinburgh with his sister. Sis is 12 grand in debt to some seriously dodgy sorts and, desperate to help her out, Sean grasps at an opportunity presented to him by some well-heeled types to make back that exact sum of money.
All he has to do is avoid them for 12 hours – like a big, creepy game of hide and seek.
But all is not as simple as a fast-paced scamper about town with a bit of parkour thrown in for excitement. To start with, our scrawny hero, Sean, isn’t some buffed-up parkour superhero. He’s clever, but not a genius; lucky but not freakshly. Mostly he’s just a tough little hoor who wants to do right by his sister.
Meanwhile the two slick city types aren’t the usual bland, faceless bad guys that normally occupy the hunter role in these sorts of things.
Dougray Scott plays the alpha of the pair, and reveals himself a deeply hate-filled misanthrope and, unlike his partner-in-crime, he has no intention of allowing the game of chase to end well.
There’s sufficient twisting and turning in this little game of deception to guarentee you’ll be perched precariously on the edge of your seat throughout the flick. Although the tension flags slightly in the middle, the nastiness and desperation that pervades the flick ensures the tension never really abates.
And, given, the size and and independence of the production, the ending is as satisfying as it is unnerving and unforseeable.

Year One
Directed by: Harold Ramis
Starring: Jack Black, Michael Cera, a cast of Biblical thousands
Oh what fertile land has been sown with salt and made barren! Lo the greatest of directors of These Sorts of Things™ and the cream of Hollywood’s slapstick merchants gather did maketh boring and woeful the fruits of what promised to be a fertile and blessed film.
In fact, Harold “Ghostbusters” Ramis’ whistlestop mikey-take tour of prehistory and the Old Testament is so lacking in vitality, hilarity and many other things ending in -ity that you might actually begin to doubt the existance of the Divine entirely.
Starring Jack Black and Michael Cera, two comic actors with very different but equally established personae, as cavemen hunter-gatherers Zed and Oh, Year One begins with the two lads, who occupy the bottom of the food chain in their tribe, being kicked out for breaking the rule about eating the forbidden fruit from the tree of knowledge.
Like a pair of prehistoric Laurel and Hardy wannabes they wander away from their tribe’s land and into Ramis’ abridged version of Biblical history, complete with a squabbling Cain and Able and a pirate-immitating Abraham on the cusp of some interesting personal hygiene revelations.
Sounds good, doesn’t it? Plenty of raw material to poke fun at, a talented director and a mouth-watering cast.
Unfortunately, due to a weak, lazy script heavy with childish toilet humour (not the funny, grown-up kind) all of these great opportunities are blown.
The only smirks and the handful of outright laughs come from Black and Cera just being their funny selves and occasionally bouncing off the likes of Paul Rudd, Oliver Platt and Hank Azaria.
But the mirth just underlines what might have been in this massive misfire of, yes, Biblical proportions.