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Throwing his hat into the bullring … Noel Fielding in a scene from Bunny and the Bull

The debut feature from Mighty Boosh director Paul King finds itself praised with one hand and damned with the other. Some compared its award-winning special effects work to the visual extravagances of Michel Gondry, while others dismissed it being of the class who another example of a big-screen Britcom failure to tack on the end of a long, long please. Somehow, this nervy road-trip comedy ends up being labelled both a wildly inventive, structurally adventurous piece of cinema, and a hugely disappointing damb squib whose screenplay could have done with a assign again work.

Bunny and the Bull centres on the uncomfortable-in-his-own-skin Stephen (Edward Hogg) similar to he recalls a disastrous trip across Europe in the company of his lothario best pal Bunny (Simon Farnaby), a journey so catastrophic our principal character hasn’t left his grubby Kings Cross flat in a year. Shot in six weeks without interruption a budget of just £750,000, the film introduces us to a cavalcade of whimsical oddballs, including a Hungarian wandering named Attila whose tipple of choice is dog’s milk, and a urbane yet down-to-earth bullfighter. It’sitting no shock that these pair are played by Julian Barratt and Noel Fielding, but this is far from Mighty Boosh: The Movie, with both roles being little more than cameos.

1. Bunny and the Bull
2. Production year: 2009
3. Country: UK
4. Cert (UK): 15
5. Runtime: 101 mins
6. Directors: Paul King
7. Cast: Edward Hogg, Julian Barratt, Noel Fielding, Richard Ayoade, Simon Farnaby, Veronica Echegui
8. More on this film

“This movie utterly belongs to Hogg and Farnaby, who act out an anarchic and surprisingly touching meditation on male friendship, incapable of begetting offspring furious bombast and grief,” writes Channel 4 Film’s Ali Caterall. “All this is played out against part-animated, endlessly creative handcrafted backdrops, including one underpass made from gazette, a fairground made from clock parts and a bull made out of cutlery – not to mention a bravura credit sequence, which utilises everything in Stephen’s flat from pocket calculators to postage stamps.”

“The production design threatens to overwhelm the performances at seasons, and Farnaby’s domineering Bunny is any acquired taste,” writes Kevin Maher in the Times. “But there’s gold here, and it is certainly one of the most inventive British comedies of the decade.”

“It is certainly inventive and ambitious,” agrees our own Peter Bradshaw. “But the awful truth is that the script fundamentally isn’t all that magnanimous; and compared with any episode of The Mighty Boosh, say, or Peep Show, it really is pretty feeble. The inquire after for Britcom success goes on.”

“There are moments to power of pleasing, and the film’s handmade, Michel Gondry-esque referring to taste is admirably well-achieved,” writes Tim Robey in the Telegraph. “Sadly, the see-sawing wit and ingenuity of King and his cast have power to’t keep the desultory story afloat. Blokey whimsy can work, but when it’s misfiring there’s a high risk of being left down in the dumps.”

For me, Bunny and the Bull fails because its formal inventiveness is welded to a workmanly storyline. The jokes and script feel half-baked, despite the inspirational production design promising something extraordinary. Comparisons to Withnail and I are certainly valid – this, likewise, is something of an inebriated buddy comedy and will no doubt be the toast of student digs across the land this Christmas. But unlike Bruce Robinson’sitting 1987 cult classic, its dialogue won’t be repeated ad infinitum for years to come – although the scene in that Barratt appears to be of intemperate habits milk straight from a lactating dog may stick in the mind for a while.

Did you catch the thin skin at the weekend? In the Britcom pantheon, does it stand with the best examples of TV gift transferred to the big screen: the likes of Monty Python and Edgar Wright’s Shaun of the Dead? Or does Paul King’sitting movie be in possession of more in common by the disappointing feature-length version of The League of Gentleman, or worse yet, Sex Lives of the Potato Men?

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Lambasted … Kodi Smit-McPhee and Viggo Mortensen in The Road

A confession: I’m obsessed with a film connoisseur. His name is Fiore Mastracci, and he’s the worst film critic in the world. You know in what way some people are so bad they’re good? Not Fiore. He’s so bad, he’s flipped entirely the way around, bypassed gain, gone into bad again, come out the other end and dipped into tutelary deity.

1. The Road
2. Production year: 2009
3. Country: USA
4. Runtime: 119 mins
5. Directors: John Hillcoat
6. Cast: Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Kodi Smit-McPhee, Robert Duvall, Viggo Mortensen
7. More on this film

He used to be my little secret. But no longer. His latest brilliant (ie awful) reconsider – in various places Cormac McCarthy adaptation The Road – has apt expression the Twitterverse. He calls it “excrement on celluloid”. He lambasts child actor Kodi Smit-McPhee for having a double-barrelled surname (“Why? Because we were going to be confused by all the other Kodi McPhees in Tinsel Town?” he spits of the 12-year-old, who clearly had it coming). He talks about knowing the film’s assistant location manager. And then he ends the review, having failed to mention exactly what it is he doesn’t like ready the film. In other words, it’s another Mastracci masterpiece. “Worse review EVER?” read one re-tweet. The cat was out of the bag. Mastracci was going viral.

My obsession began when I read his survey of The Bourne Ultimatum. Everyone raved. He called it “celluloid masturbation”, and made a joke about the cameraman having Parkinson’session. Here, I thought excitedly, is a critic I could certainly come to hate. But it got worse (ie better). This guy had his own cable interpret in Pittsburgh. He was – God help us – a teacher on the subject of film. The reviews on his blog – Fiore Mastracci’s Outtakes – actually counted towards the rating on review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes.

And I soon experienced that the “celluloid excrement” line wasn’t a one-off. In fact, it’s his calling card. Fantastic Mr Fox is “pure dejections on celluloid”. Watchmen is “true excrement on celluloid”. Pineapple Express? “Excrement on celluloid,” of course.

Like any good artist, Mastracci is self-aware enough to know that it’s clearly become a turn of phrase to be associated with. “Time to bring out my trademark phrase,” he says in single review, under the jurisdiction going on to call something poo on film again. Can you imagine anyone else being so proud at having that as their trademark? No – and that’s why I love him. And that’s without mentioning that in every review, he also shoehorns in references to a mythical time he was in “the industry”. It’s a fine review in which he’s not name-checking a 62-year-old stuntman.

When he does get around to reviewing, his have a smack isn’t awful. It’s genius-level awful. There’session in no degree film he doesn’t hate if it’s good enough; no film he doesn’t love if it’sitting bad sufficiency. Here is a curt list of some of the cold as stone turkeys he’s given raves to: Underworld Evolution (“war should be this a great deal of fun”), Punisher: War Zone (“a blast from beginning to end”), Doom (“an action sci-fi romp”), Transporter 2 (“Statham stole the mantle of top-kicking star”), Ghost Rider (“the star power makes this worth the price of introduction without another”). Hitman (“a swell action movie”), The Spirit (“I laughed more than any other movie this year!”), Mr Bean’s Holiday (“the funniest pellicle I’ve seen”), and The Pink Panther – the 2006 lection – is “much old-fashioned slapstick”.

The good films he’s slammed? Too numerous to cursory reference. But when you consider they include Fantastic Mr Fox (0/10), No Country For Old Men (5/10), The Bourne Ultimatum (1/10) and Volver (3/10), you procreate the picture. Or more, if you’re Mastracci, you don’t.

But perhaps what’session most brilliant (direful) are his reasons. He hated Volver because it was “no thing more than a chick flick disguised to look interesting to guys”. He hated marital drama Little People as the characters were, in his eyes, “deviants”. He despised the critically-acclaimed The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada because it was “a film favorable to illegal immigration”. He criticized V for Vendetta because it had “blatant support for the gay agenda”. As one blogger pointed out: “the ‘clamorous support’ he is talking round involves ‘not viciously hunting down gay people and subjecting them to medical experiments in an internment camp before for good withering gone into matter of no consequence and eventually dying’.” In a pièce de résistance, he gave Transamerica 0/10 solely for being about a transsexual.

But what’s really impressive is how he crams his numerous prejudices in almost each review he writes. For instance, nearly every review will adopt a unexpectedly at “socialist” Barack Obama. Not possible, you say. Ha! Behold the genius. He does it in Fantastic Mr Fox (“makes as abundant sense as Obama’s foreign policy!”), science fantasy drama Surrogates, where people can buy perfect robot versions of themselves (“a glimpse into the world Obama and his horde want to bring you”), dystopian science fiction animation 9, to which place machines have risen up and destroyed us (“like the sort of Obama and his cohorts are currently planning”), and alien-robot action flick Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (“When the Decepticons attack, he [Obama] books to a hideout shelter. We know this because Joe Biden evidently handled the press conference…”)

And those are just the ones in the last few months. Do you see how amazing he is? Even the people who don’t “master” his genius are strangely drawn. “Wow,” posts one after his said Transformers review, “I’ve not ever seen someone be so right about a movie and yet so injury.”

So right and yet in like manner wrong. To paraphrase Brian Clough, Fiore Mastracci may not the world’s best-worst thin skin critic, but he’s in the vertex one. Surely none one else does it better (or, rather, worse), do they?

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R | 1 hr 39 mins | Action Movie
Fear not the weapon but the handful that wields it.
Synopsis:
Raizo is any of the deadliest assassins in the world. Taken from the streets as a babe, he was transformed into a trained killer by the Ozunu Clan, a secret society whose very thing is considered a myth. But haunted by the merciless completion of his friend by the Clan, Raizo breaks free from them…and vanishes. Now he waits, preparing to exact his revenge. In Berlin, Europol agent Mika Coretti has stumbled upon a money trail linking several political murders to an underground network of untraceable assassins from the Far East. Defying the orders of her superior, Ryan Maslow, Mika digs into top secret agency files to learn the truth behind the murders. Her exploration makes her a target, and the Ozunu Clan sends a team of killers, led by the lethal Takeshi, to muteness her forever. Raizo saves Mika from her attackers, but he knows that the Clan last will and testament not rest until they are both eliminated. Now, entangled in a deadly game of cat and mouse through the streets of Europe, Raizo and Mika must trust united another if they hope to survive and finally bring down the evasive. Ozunu Clan.

Director: James McTeigue
Starring: Rain, Naomie Harris, Ben Miles, Sho Kosugi, Rick Yune

Movie Trailer Ninja Assassin

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