Something 4 The Weekend by Paul Bullock

I'm getting too old for this, uhm, stuff!

Welcome ladies, gentlemen and film fans everywhere to entertainment manchester's weekly feature 'Something for the Weekend'. Every Friday, we deliver to you the best (and, in the interest of balance, worst) of this week's new cinematic releases. If, as Forrest Gump once might have said were he a film fan, cinema really is like a box of chocolates, then think of us as your mini-menu, steering you away from the coffee creams and towards the Turkish delights of the movie world.

The Big Picture

If three years of university education taught me anything - and trust me, they didn't really teach me much - it's about the questionable joys of postmodernism - hold on tight folks, this is gonna be quite a ride!

According to the big brains of the cultural world, Postmodernism is a reaction against Modernism, which often uses irony and pastiche, blending high and low culture and drawing attention to itself as a work of art in order to create a new collective identity. In other words, Wes Craven's Scream is a typical post-modern movie, revering the slasher genre but at the same time laughing at its excesses and under-cutting the reality of the film by deconstructing its own plot mechanics. To confuse you even further, the technical word for such a literary technique is meta-fiction: the act of analysing literature by pointing out how it works. Kinda like that moron who got kicked out of the Magic Circle for showing how magic tricks work...just without the funky mask.

Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang, the directorial debut from Lethal Weapon writer Shane Black, is the latest movie to implement post-modern meta-fiction. From the look of the trailers, it seems like it is fully aware of itself as a piece of cinema, wearing its influences proudly on its sleeve. Not only is it loaded with the look, characters and seedy neon lit locale of a classic film noir, but even the title is a double reference first up to the Japanese nickname for James Bond and secondly, rather cheekily, to uber-critic Pauline Kael's 1973 analytical text which accused action films of killing cinema by appealing to our base instincts: sex and violence.

Indeed, the film seems to be shot through with the kind of hot shot reckless abandon Black himself admits he lived through at the height of his fame. Taking place in a noirish Los Angeles, his plot follows Harry Lockhart (Robert Downey Jnr), a petty thief posing as an actor who during his time in the City of Angels finds himself dragged into a murder mystery along with high school crush Harmony Faith Lane (Michelle Monaghan) and a homosexual detective suitably enough called Gay Perry (Val Kilmer?!). Cue movie references galore and, presumably, loads of kiss kiss bang bang. Hooray!

Black rose to fame in 1987 with his script for Lethal Weapon which, if not giving birth to the modern day buddy movie, certainly gave it a violence-fuelled shot in the arm. Of course, after the movie hit box office gold and spawned a further three sequels, Black became hot Hollywood property with every studio under the sun wanting a slice of his quip laden, high octane scripts. He was still only 22 yet he could command ridiculous sums of money, receiving $125,000 simply for a brief contribution (and of course the conception of the characters) to Lethal Weapon 2.

Into the nineties, he was the screenwriting wunderkind in Hollywood, a veritable one-stop shop for anything action-oriented. In 1991, he was paid $1.75 million for The Last Boy Scout and five years later over $2million for the Geena Davis starring The Long Kiss Goodnight. Sadly it was directed by Rene Harlin and turned out to be woeful, despite another gleefully adrenaline pumping script.

Contributions to the post-modern box office bomb The Last Action Hero (Arnie's best film bar The Running Man) and, of course, further payments off the back of Lethal Weapons 3 and 4 have followed, but Long Kiss Goodnight remains his last full script with Black himself blaming burnout and contempt for the state of modern cinema for his long stay of absence. Indeed, this attitude seems to inform Kiss Kiss Bang Bang with its sly nods and wry satire towards the genre he resuscitated from the Schwarzenegger/Stallone bludgeoning it suffered in the early 80s.

Now, I'm no fan of action films. To be honest, their plots are simply constructed like a porn film's: as long as you can get from one money shot to the next without too many plot holes, you're okay. They are hardly a great test of a director’s talent, never mind a screenwriter’s and you only have to look at the likes of The Rock's David Weisberg and Face/Off's Mike Werb to see that their CVs are hardly filled with classic films (Darkman III: Die Darkman Die, anyone?). But Black is different. His scripts have always seemed a little more literate, his characters a little deeper and his plot a little more intricate than the others. Of course, a script is only as good as the man helming it or the actors breathing life into the characters, but even in some of his weaker films, you could always feel the class behind the crap.

The trailers certainly make Kiss Kiss Bang Bang look an awful lot of fun and even critics have embraced the film, some even calling it one of the films of the year; a point enforced by its showing at the usually high brow London Film Festival. Catch it from today...

Also Playing...

Now, here's a curious thing. Imagine the scene. You're a hot shot Hollywood producer with the option on Jennifer Weiner’s chick-lit best seller In Her Shoes. Cameron Diaz and Toni Collette are lined up to star with Shirley McClaine offering the support. But who do you get do direct the picture? Bridget Jones' Diary 2 helmer Beeban Kidron perhaps? No, she's a talentless hack. How about When Harry Met Sally writer and Bewitched director Nora Ephron? Nah, too obvious. Well what about Weiner herself? Pah, a writer? Don't be stupid! Wait, I’ve got it. Why not go all out on this one and get 8 Mile and LA Confidential director Curtis Hanson? Genius!

It may seem like the insane ramblings of a drugged up coke fiend producer, but this odd situation is the unusual step 20th Century Fox have made in bringing blockbuster novel In Her Shoes, about two squabbling sisters who eventually grow to love one another, to the big screen.

But perhaps the choice isn't so odd after all. Films like 8 Mile, LA Confidential and the underrated Wonder Boys may, on the surface at least, seem like tough, impenetrable and often distinctly male dramas. But beneath the sprawling, hard hitting exteriors, there are films with hidden depths. At their hearts these films are just about simple people trying to get by in life, be that through attempting to live a dream, rooting out corruption or simply editing a mammoth novel down into a readable size. In Her Shoes simply looks to be that ethos cunningly wrapped in the Malteser covered guise of a chick flick.

Indeed, Hanson began his career as a film journalist moving from set to set reporting for a magazine called, imaginatively enough, Cinema. This cine-literateness and close eye for human relations is key to all his films and should filter through to this one. The press have roundly embraced it, many even tipping it for Oscar success. But like Wonder Boys it could struggle to find an audience, looking too full on girly to attract the highbrow LA Confidential fans and a little too realistic for the Richard Curtis crowd – I know I'd certainly rather go and see Elizabethtown again. But you can judge for yourself when In Her Shoes is released from today.

Based on the book by John Le Carre, The Constant Gardner is Fernando Meirelles' follow up to his critically acclaimed debut City of God. The film follows the tale of low ranking British diplomat Justin Quayle (Ralph Fiennes) who refuses to accept that the brutal murder of his wife in the Kenyan Bush was just a simple savage attack and goes about trying to uncover the truth. Some things, though, are kept secret for a reason...

Okay, so the title doesn't sound like much. To be honest if we judged books by their covers, Constant Gardner sounds like an epic two hour film about man's struggle to trim back his rose bush and find the right consistency in his compost heap. But rest assured this isn't a film about a man trying to find a lawnmower that doesn't pack up after a year. La Carre is known for his vivid writing and realistic characterisation, all wrapped inside a great paranoid plot. This directed by the man whose frenetic camera work in City of God made critics weak at the knees is sure to add up to a cracking conspiracy thriller. Indeed, Meirelles must have faith in the source material as he put several other projects on the back burner to make the film, including an Earnest Hemmingway biopic, a globalisation study, Collateral (which was later made by Michael Mann) and even Bond 21. The press have embraced the film and The Constant Gardner is sure to be better than the rather sedate title suggests.

Finally, another odd title comes from Hustle and Flow which sounds like the name of one of those obnoxious dance machines shuffled to the back of the room by embarrassed arcade owners. But it is actually the title of an intriguing rap film. Tracking the tale of a down on his luck wannabe rapper and his two friends, it looks to be a rap Rocky, delivering an uplifting story attached to what I believe are called mad rhymes all without the embarrassing excesses the modern genre seems so happy to embrace.

And thank god for that. With Eminem having already made his big screen debut in the aforementioned 8 Mile and 50 Cent due to hit our screens in the delightfully titled Get Rich or Die Trying' in the coming months, rap is big news. But since its heyday in the 80s, the genre has fallen a long way. Betraying its counter cultural roots in the 80s, modern mainstream rap is too content to bash out repetitive, uninspired music and lie back in the splendour of their bling and 'hos'. The days of Chuck D and Public Enemy seem long gone, replaced by a world where rappers are so dumb they miss the blatant irony in Brain De Palma's rags to riches mobster classic Scarface and base their entire existence on Al Pacino's coke fuelled excesses. But thankfully, Craig Brewer's film seems different with Total Film calling it "rap without the pantomime". If Hustle and Flow can deliver on that promise, it is sure to be this week's sleeper hit.

Next week: Harry Potter returns from Azkaban to drink from The Goblet of Fire, the life of Rolling Stone Brian Jones is investigated in Stoned and Matt Dillon does very very little in Factotum. It'd be rude to miss it...