feeling listless

Music I am Uatu. From my throne on the moon I look out across your world and multitudinous others, an infinity of realities. I can see things you people wouldn’t believe, and see fates you couldn’t even conceive. Today, I bring a story so unbelievable as to be terribly believable. I give you ‘What If the actress Kate Winslet has been a West End Singer?’

[Actually if The Watcher doesn’t mind me butting in, I can answer that. ‘What If’ is a superior power ballad from yet another animated version of ‘A Christmas Carol’, and because she’s an actress Winslet renders it with some level of emotional integrity (in other words, not the Celine Dion method of vocally banging the crap out of it). I like it (and I hate power ballads) and on the strength of it would consider buying the soundtrack album. It’ll never be a hit (what airplay?) but at least its something newish. And kudos to Kate for giving her royalties to the NSPCC.]

Film Review Ripper: Letter from Hell (2001) On a recent episode of ‘I Love 1990s’, Kelly Brook was featured as the ‘it’ girl of the year. One of the pundits (I forget which) commented that it’s ironic that ‘The Big Breakfast’, the morning television programme which led to the vilification of the girl has seen itself sliding in the ratings, whilst Brook’s career is on the up. That pundit obviously hadn’t sat through the straight to DVD slasher ‘film’ ‘Ripper’ in which the model plays the initial knife fodder of the serial killer. It shouldn’t be too much of a shock that the film is awful, opening with a re-run of the equally terrible ‘I Still Know What You Did Last Summer’ and continuing into a cross-fertilisation of the angsty bits of ‘The Faculty’ and ‘Seven’. We are talking about a film so obvious, it’s set in a school for serial killer profilers (I’ll get my application form straight away). What is interesting is why the former-presenter would choose this film to show off her acting talents, especially if she read the script.

Her character features in only two key scenes. The first is post credits. For fifteen minutes we listen into a lecture about profiling (one of those all purpose movie lectures which covers the entirety of the subject in about fifteen minutes – I wish my university course had been like that – would have saved three years of my life). We are introduced to the characters, and it’s clear that Kelly’s entire place in the film is to titivate, her few lines innuendo, her delivery the monotone estuary familiar to anyone who visited upon her tenure sitting next to Johnny Vaughn. Her legs and lap are on screen longer that her face. And the death scene. Yep, it’s that simple. Here we see Brook dance a bit, before being led into the women’s toilets were, to a club soundtrack and inter-cutting with other characters being meaningful we see Kelly being – I’m trying to put this delicately – sexed in the posterior (did I get away with that) by a man in a cloak and white mask (its that derivative). A horrific scene, badly filmed and edited. From here we get Kelly’s one bit of acting (is she crying because she just got her jolly’s that way or because she is racked with self-loathing? Do we care?) and its off the roof for a long drawn out stabbing by the killer. And that’s it.

It’s obvious Brook wants to build a career as an actress – but why would she choose this as almost her first time? She couldn’t possibly have thought this would be the next ‘Scream’. Could she even have hoped it would get a theatrical release. It’s a quickie exploitation flick with no heart and a dearth of creativity.

I think the shorthand of that last paragraph probably covers what anyone would hope to gain from this. It’s low budget, so a spirit of Dunkirk no doubt ensued as everyone put up with the same bad conditions, giving any trainee actress time to learn a bit about this industry. She must have paid quite well -- certainly as much as for a GQ or Playboy shoot. It is a film set, so at least there is the experience of working within that kind of an environment. This thing will ultimately be seen by few people so there is less chance of the kind of embarrassment which ensued from her presenting work – and less chance of the bad reviews which would have happened from a higher profile film. So actually not an entirely stupid move appearing in this stupid garbage. After all, it is still a movie – and how many of us can say we’ve been in one of those?

Well me actually, but that’s a story for another time.

And no I don’t know who the killer was. There’s only so much of garbage like this one can take. I’m not sure even beer would have made this watchable. There is commentary track on the DVD and the director himself even sounds bored watching his own film….