Whip It Good, Lullaby Of Birdman and Up Jupiter.

A double whammy of 'Fifty Shades of Gray' and half term have pretty much made the cinema a no-go zone this week. Fortunately I've got a backlog of films to write up. I'm not going to labour it because of other commitments but here we go.

Drum roll please......

First up is 'Whiplash'

You've probably heard great things about 'Whiplash' and read all the rave reviews. It's better than that.

'Whiplash' is without a doubt a masterpiece. It's tight, tense and totally absorbing. A sadistic music tutor pushes his students to the limits and beyond. Who knew a film about jazz drumming could be so thrilling and so dramatic?

All sentimentality is stripped away. Instead we see the bruising dedication and sacrifice needed to excel in any field.....and it isn't pretty.

The opening scene should be taught on every screenwriting course. Everything we need to know about the two principle characters, their motivation, their goals and the major themes are all revealed within a couple of minutes in one location. It's a masterclass. The final scene is probably the best closing ten minutes of any film so far this decade. All points in between aren't bad either. Acting, editing, direction and sound are all top notch.

'Whiplash', then, a great film about the near impossibility of achieving anything great.

'Birdman' (or 'Being Michael Keaton" as I like to call it) on the other hand is a nearly great film about the impossibility of achieving anything great. It is good and deserves the plaudits that it has had thrown at it but I do have reservations. It's exactly three scenes too long. Three scenes that do nothing other than build to a shaggy dog story punchline. Three scenes that stretch your patience and goodwill just a little too far. There's also some unnecessary magical realism, way too much camera trickery (dazzling long takes are the cinematic equivalent of an extended guitar solo), a lesbian seduction apropos of nothing and the sense that this is little more than a "fuck you" to the audience and the critics. Apart from that I liked it.

Keaton is twitchy but never annoying. Ed Norton reminds you that he's a damn fine actor. Emma Stone is great and Naomi Watts and Angela Riseborough somehow make the best of their roles; not an easy task considering this film hasn't got a clue what to do with its female characters.

I see 'Birdman' as an extended skit exploring one terrible day where an actors' worst nightmares come together. On that level it is a thoroughly enjoyable black comedy. Oscar worthy? Yes. Better than 'Whiplash'? Nah.

"Great film" and "great art" are two things that are never going to said of 'Jupiter Ascending'. I was kind of looking forward to this in a perverse sort of way. I fully expected it to be this year's 'John Carter' a much maligned, misunderstood, future cult classic. It's not. It's a terrible movie. Terrible but not awful. It has some interesting ideas but it needs a better springboard for them.

It's from the Wachowskis, who gave us 'The Matrix' trilogy and 'Cloud Atlas'. As you might expect it features lots of running around in cool outfits and some hippy trippy cod philosophy. Instead of Neo we have Jupiter Jones (Mila Kunis) transcending her dull, boring life (she cleans toilets - that's right - Mila Kunis cleans toilets) to fulfil her greater destiny as "the one". Instead of Trinity we have Channing Tatum with mascara as a pixie-eared Wolfman warrior flying around in roller blade styled rocket boots (I'm not making this shit up - I've seen it). Instead of unknowingly enslaved humans being harvested as batteries we have unknowingly enslaved humans being enslaved as....clocks....or something.

The plot as far as I understand it is basically Mila Kunis' face trying to save the Earth from Eddie Redmayne's face. Beyond that I don't really have much of a clue as to what was going on and frankly I don't care. I just couldn't buy in to any of it at all. At least with 'The Matrix' the Wachowskis were ripping off Grant Morrison. At least with 'Cloud Atlas' they had the  authorial voice of David Mitchell to contend with. Here they are just ripping off themselves and it's a right old mess. It just can't settle on the right tone to adopt. At times it is high camp like 'The Fifth Element' or 'Flash Gordon' but then at other times it is as po-faced and serious as the first ten minutes of 'Man Of Steel' or the senate debates of 'The Phantom Menace'. Just as you think it wants to be  'Guardians Of The Galaxy' it grinds everything to hold to engage us with a supposedly "hilarious" bureaucratic red tape sequence that is presumably inspired by Terry Gilliam and Douglas Adams. It falls completely flat. The design is 'Dune' by way of 'Chronicles Of Riddick'.  It's like Disney trying to do a fairy tale in space and then neglecting to put any wonder into it. And Sean Bean is in it.

And fuck only knows what Eddie Redmayne thought he was doing. If he wins an oscar for 'The Theory Of Everything' it should be instantly taken away from him for mincing around in this. What is he doing with that voice? That comedy voice? A hoarse whisper that is even more laughable and unendurable than Tom Hardy's Bane. And that's going some.

There's no chemistry between any of the actors, no spark to the action, too many tedious sub plots and apart from the occasional visual flourish every ten minutes not much spectacle. You can also tell it was designed as a big 3D movie because there are those irritating glowing embers flowing around the screen all the time. It barely passes as one dimensional. It's bound to end up as a late night staple on ITV4 in years to come. I Look forward to that.

Turning rebellion into money. 'The Hunger Games: Mockingjay Part 1'

So I waited until the final showing, on the final day, of its run at my local multiplex before venturing out to see "Mockingjay Part 1'.  That should give you some idea of how motivated I was to cross it off my "must see" list. Here's why - despite having enjoyed the first two films  I just kind of presumed it would be a stodgy, turgid, bore of a movie; the middle part of a pudding that you no longer want to eat; an elongated bit of a filler before the final act; deliberately and obviously designed to stretch out the franchise in order to make the maximum dollar from teenage girls.

It's worse than that.

It is without a doubt one of the slowest, most aggravating and pointless films I've ever had the mis-pleasure of sitting through. It's not a bad film in terms of craftsmanship. But in terms of intent; in terms of enjoyment it's fucking awful. Seriously, if I'd have had a Mockingjay pin on me I would have been grinding it into my palm like Harry Palmer in 'The Ipcress File', just in case I lost all sense of my self to the ongoing torture of it all.

I don't mind that it doesn't work as a film in its own right and plays like an episode of a tv show that you've resumed watching after a year's break and now really don't care about. I expected that. I do mind that it has little plot structure - it is all middle -  but I can live with it. What I really didn't expect was that it would be so mind numbingly dull. It surely has to be the talkiest film ever marketed at teens. But it's just blah, blah exposition talk all the way through. Show, don't tell is the mantra of screenplay writing. This is all tell, tell, tell until you get sick of hearing it.

"Katniss isn't ready to lead the revolution", Katniss witnesses a war atrocity,  "Katniss is now ready to lead the revolution", the revolution gets under way but is almost suppressed, Katniss is determined to save Peeta's life, Peeta is rescued, Peeta attacks Katniss. There you are - seven scenes that could be whizzed through in a half hour; fifty minutes tops. But no, what you get is people standing around in front of video screens saying stuff like - "we are now going to disable their shields and block their broadcast" like it's a bad episode of Knight Rider or something.

Look, I think Jennifer Lawrence is a great actress but here she spends most of her time looking bewildered. Now, you could say that this is a clever and evocative portrayal of post traumatic stress disorder....and.....you could say that it is the definitive depiction of a sullen, gormless, teenager....or...you could say that it looks like she just doesn't know where her character is emotionally from scene to scene. Here, she has two expressions - mouth open and mouth closed. I blame it on the director. His (because why would you choose a female director for something that has connected with teen girls across the globe) CV  includes Britney Spears and Jennifer Lopez videos before moving on to the dizzy heights of everyone's favourite movies - 'I Am Legend' and 'Constantine'. Showing her face in big close up for the entire running time is the approach he takes and by the end it's so overdone you could despair. He can't even coax any interesting moments from Donald Sutherland, Woody Harrelson or Julianne Moore and worst of all (made sour for being one of his last roles) Philip Seymour Hoffman looks old, looks ill and looks completely out of it. His eyelids still do more than anyone else in this film.

But here's the real kicker, the thing I really hated about this film was that underneath all of this slow burning drudgery, is that there is still a lot of really strong, interesting ideas waiting to be explored. The series as a whole has the theme of rebellion against an autocratic centre and the cost of that on a personal level. This part of the saga should be exploring how rebellion is promoted, propagated and, mythologised whilst  showing the pros and cons of constructing a legend around a central figure. Instead, here's Jennifer Lawrence staring into the distance, or walking down a corridor, or looking really, really sad. For a film about unconformity it is tediously, distressingly conformist in all the worst ways.

Can't wait for Part 2 !