This franchise has been dragging itself around like an alsatian whose back legs have gone for ELEVEN FUCKING YEARS now. In the third entry in the Big Momma's House saga, Brandon T. Jackson (the real black guy from Tropic Thunder) joins forces with Martin Lawrence's irrepressible large mother as the pair go undercover in a girls-only art school. Why? Because that's the only sensible place to hide after you've witnessed a gangland murder, obviously. Cue "hilarious" genital abuse, almost-topical pop cultural references and about 700% of your RDA of sass. "More like Mary J. Bulge" indeed.
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It's easy to see why people piss their pants over three-star nonsense like Kick-Ass when mainstream superhero movies have started taking themselves more seriously than a nu-metaller losing his virginity. Ever since Chrissy Nolan made the Batman franchise into porn for the "serious comic book enthusiast", it's become a mortal sin for superheroes to waiver even momentarily from being totally deep and emotional and shit, lest it upset grown men who don't want to admit to themselves that cartoons are just cartoons and not post-Aesop morality tales for the modern man to navigate his life by.
Released on Valentine's Day to ensure that every single member of its target audience would definitely have the night free, Paul is so obviously aimed at your average Comic-Con attendee that's it a wonder they didn't just show it once there and retire with a 100% approval rating. Sorry to rip, comic book fans. Beneath the endless sci-fi references lies a film that it is unavoidably enjoyable. Just don't be one of those dicks who claps at the end.
The Boston Globe has described Inside Job, a new documentary about the 2008 financial crisis, as "scarier than anything Wes Craven and John Carpenter have ever made". It's not, though, because it's a documentary about some guys whose job it is to make a lot of money not making as much money as they'd hoped to featuring a voiceover by Matt Damon. Jus' sayin'.
It seems pointless hurling yellow snowballs at at this movie when it's already buried beneath a global avalanche of hatred and abuse, but it's hard to ignore the monumental cynicism of implying that J-Bieb's success is some kind of written in the stars rags-to-riches triumph over adversity. Suburban Canada, pre-teen YouTube stardom, multi-million dollar bidding wars – it's not exactly 8 Mile, is it?
The worst thing about the BAFTAs isn't that it invariably rewards the British film industry more than it should do, or that it's an indulgent celebration of wealthy movie stars, or that they're not the Oscars. It's that they turn everyone in Britain into a boring cunt who can't wait to slum it on a "comedic" level where the parroting of popular complaints is as tedious and predictable as Charlie Brooker being angry at politicians for money on that new Channel 4 program about dull people reading the news.