Nancy Drew - By James Ellaby

I've never read any Nancy Drew books, having been more of a Hardy Boys kind of child growing up, but you don't need to know much about her universe to understand the concept of this film. Nancy is a teenage sleuth who goes around solving mysteries, and it's all very sweet and wholesome, not very connected to the modern world. So, to make this film a success, the makers clearly had to update it somehow, and they've wisely chosen to do it by making it a bit of a fish out of water teen movie. Nancy and her world are just like in the books, right down to her little blue convertible, and she lives in a quaint small town populated by dumb and unthreatening bad guys and dumb and grateful cops. However, she's soon taken out of there and dumped into a modern Los Angeles school full of all the usual colourful weirdos that you'd expect in an American high school movie. They're all modern and cool and all that stuff, and Nancy is stuck in the 40s with her clothes and her sweet innocence. The only person who seems to like her is bizarre little fat kid Corky, who is too young to be a threat to Nancy's 'boyfriend if only she'd realise it' Ned. She's gone to LA with her lawyer Dad and they've rented a house that used to belong to an old movie star who turned up dead, creating an unsolved mystery that Nancy is eager to solve. She has to do it whilst dealing with a world where she doesn't fit and bad guys who are trying to kill her. Emma Roberts - niece of Julia - is very likeable as Nancy and the rest of the cast are fun, particularly Josh Flitter as Corky, who just about manages to stay on the right side of annoying. The plot is fairly generic of course, but what makes the film likeable is that it doesn't take itself seriously and the way it gently subverts all of the cliches of the Nancy Drew stories is mostly very well done, particularly the way it makes jokes out of Nancy's innate ability to be perfect at everything. It's far from a perfect film, but it does what it does with plenty of humour, charm and fairly safe levels of 'mild peril', making it an excellent family movie that can be enjoyed by its target audience and their parents too.

Cocaine Cowboys - By James Ellaby

Whether through Miami Vice or Scarface or even Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, the world of the Miami drug wars is one that has been presented to us in various degrees of glamourisation. So, the interest in Billy Corben's documentary Cocaine Cowboys is in seeing what that whole time was really like. Was it all coke-fuelled immigrants spraying bullets and splashing the cash? Well, yes. The world of Cocaine Cowboys is probably even more extreme than it seems in Scarface, with murders galore and people getting chopped up with chainsaws and dumped by the side of the freeways. Corben sensibly avoids the usual documentary approach of having a narrator, letting the story be entirely told through the testimonies of drug dealers, journalists, police and government officials, with a cut-and-paste approach to it using clips from contemporary news programmes and tourism videos making it seem at times like something you'd find on a Public Enemy album. The danger of this and the flashy editing of the visuals is that it can make what is a serious subject seem a bit too frivolous and, well, fun. Getting the guy who wrote the Miami Vice theme tune, Jan Hammer, to provide the score has the same effect, but you have to say that it's a genius idea by Corben as it marks this documentary as something that is squarely aimed at people who've watched that show or Scarface or played GTA: VC. And the way it's been made certainly will appeal to that audience and keep them hooked on what is happening. Not that you need any of that to make this story compelling, from the early days of fun and frolics in the sun for the drug dealers to the all-out carnage of the Cuban and Colombian wars. If anything, what was going on in the real Miami was more incredible than what you'd see in any of these fictional accounts, particularly whether the 'Godmother' Griselda Blanco was involved. She was a downright evil woman who was the head of a powerful and ruthless Colombian drug family, and who called her youngest son Michael Corleone Blanco. The things she and her family got up to were just horrific, leaving a trail of corpses all over Florida, and Cocaine Cowboys doesn't flinch away from showing these bodies, making for some rather harrowing viewing, particularly when it comes to a three-year-old boy caught up in the crossfire. The fact that the story is largely told from the perspectives of the criminals does leave it open to accusations of being a bit morally bankrupt as well as making it sometimes a little difficult to completely believe that everything they are saying is true and not just machismo from men recalling their 'glory days'. But what you can't deny is that Cocaine Cowboys has an incredible story to tell about the dark and bloody times of one of the world's most popular tourist destinations and the clear inspiration for so many films, not many of which live up to what was really happening...

Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip - The Complete Series - By James Ellaby

After his departure from The West Wing, Aaron Sorkin started to work on a new TV show, which was always going to have sky-high expectations after what he achieved at the fictional White House. That his old show stumbled along without him before coming to a rather muted and unsatisfactory end only reinforced the belief that Sorkin should never have been kicked out. So, when he returned with Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip, all of us who fell in love with his awesome style of writing dialogue were delighted that it was coming back, even if the idea of a TV show about a TV show seemed to lack the gravitas and drama of one set in the most powerful house in the world. Having familiar faces from The West Wing like Bradley Whitford, Timothy Busfield and Matthew Perry (yes, he's from Friends, but did very well with a brief role in TWW) also boded well. However, by the time Studio 60 made it over here, it had already been cancelled after just one series, so what went wrong? Well, as this DVD - which contains the whole series - demonstrates, not much really went wrong in terms of the quality of the show. It's no West Wing, for sure, but the writing still crackles and is delivered with real quality by the two leads, Whitford and Perry as writers on a fictional version of a Saturday Night Live comedy show. They are backed up by an excellent cast and there's plenty of laughs to be had. However, the setting does bring its problems, not least because of the feeling that Studio 60 is just a little too autobiographical for its own good, with Sorkin putting more of himself and his personal life into it. An example is the character of Harriet, a star of the fictional show who also happens to be a devout Christian, as was Sorkin's one-time girlfriend (and West Wing actress) Kristen Chenoweth, and both of them were also recording artists who controversially performed on Christian TV show The 700 Club. There's also the feeling that some of Sorkin's bitterness over the way he left The West Wing and the state of TV in America in general, which certainly comes out right at the very start of the pilot episode, where the writer in charge of Studio 60 has an on-air rant that costs him his job. Despite this, he is on fine form here, as is director Thomas Schlamme (also from TWW) and there's some awesome episodes, not least a two-parter featuring John Goodman (also from TWW...) as a judge in Nevada, while Alison Janney (ditto) cameos as herself in a hilarious slapstick episode where the stagehands who deal with props and cue-cards go on strike just before the live show goes on air. Things rather crawl to a halt at the end of the series with a four-part (!) story, but Studio 60 On The Sunset Strip was still head and shoulders above so much of what else is on American (and English) TV, so it's a real shame it wasn't given another series at least to develop. However, for Sorkin fans, this DVD is an essential purchase.