Marley & Me

Ever had a dream in which everything is an exact replica of your daily routine? Boring, isn’t it? Well, Marley and Me is a little like that, except the dream is a nightmarish vision of your life’s descent into lukewarm banality as you crawl slowly towards middle age. Essentially, this is the celluloid equivalent of a trip to IKEA.
Even if you are the type of person who finds watching a dog being alternately cute and boisterous infinitely entertaining (in which case, you are a child and accidentally picked this up, thinking it was the Beano) this alone still won’t be enough to carry you through the achingly dull retelling of journalist John Grogan’s career and marriage. In fact, it’s around sixty minutes into the film that you’ll begin to hate both Grogan and his wife for pursuing their self-indulgent delusion that their story - of what is fundamentally just a badly-behaved pet – was of any interest to the general public.

You can probably guess from the trailers that the film is horrifically formulaic (couple get dog – unconventional dog makes couple happy – couple have problem – dog’s unconventionality resolves problem, making couple realise grand truths about life and love and God). The fact that the Hollywood execs have tried to disguise this utter lack of original thought by replacing the friendly retard or maverick teacher (see Rainman, I am Sam, Dangerous Minds) with an animal, doesn’t make the proceedings any less tedious.

It’s difficult to determine whether it’s the piece of shit script or poor casting that renders John and Jen Grogan one of the worst onscreen couples ever (even their names seem to reflect their middle-of-the-road uniformity). Jennifer Aniston’s portrayal of Grogan’s wife is nothing short of hateful, with her aggressive, almost maniacal desire to continually procreate, like some kind of massive, angry ovary.
Owen Wilson – a man whose voice is like a cross between a creaking car door and the sound of someone chewing their own face from the inside out – gives a decidedly average performance in the role of Owen Wilson, a disappointment given that he’s played this same part to perfection in many other projects.

One of the most jaw-droppingly shite moments of Marley & Me is when Aniston and Owen’s characters take a holiday in Ireland. Cue comedy fiddle-dee-diddle-dee music accompanying token shots of emerald green fields. They may as well have had the leprechaun from the Lucky Charms adverts dancing madly in the background. (“To be sure, we don’t have the old electricity here” is the reply to Aniston’s request for an electric blanket). As if it couldn’t get any worse, the holiday is the triggering factor in the conception of three kids, all with good, Oirish names like Shamrock, Potato Famine and Guinness.

One of the sole redeeming factors of the film are the outstanding performances of the eighteen dogs who took on the difficult role of Marley, a character who is by turns nihilistic, endearing and complex. A notable highlight is the scene in which Marley fucks Kathleen Turner’s leg, an episode which captures the character’s powerful, yet destructive sexuality. Further, Marley’s death scene constitutes one of the most captivating in cinematic history, if only because it lasts for an hour and by the end, you’ll be gripping the arms of your chair growling ‘DIE. JUST FUCKING DIE’ through gritted teeth.

Incidentally, as we leave the cinema, a small child skips past us singing ‘Marley’s dead, let’s celebrate’ to the tune of London Bridge is Falling Down, a sentiment which neatly condenses the feelings of every other cinema-goer and ultimately says more than any review ever could.

Skins: Series 3

Here's a modern-day phenomenon for you: the number of people I know with an all-consuming hatred of Skins runs in inverse proportion to the number of journalists that publicly claim to love it. This almost definitely isn't because the show's amazing and definitely is because no-one wants to have the crushing accusation levelled at them that they're just not down with the kids. Similarly, this'll explain why every respected British actor is falling over themselves to get a shitty bit-part as 'Pandora's Mum' or 'Uptight Teacher' (Sophie from Peepshow is so keen, in fact, she's went and got the same haircut as Naomi in a desperate bid to impress). It's a lot like that toilet roll ad, the one where the entire company's being run by a baby and all the adults shift about uncertainly before attending to his irrational demands.

I went on a date once with someone who appeared to be very, very normal. Except he kept making these noises. I don't mean sex noises; thankfully it never got that far. It was right in the middle of conversation he'd make this honking noise that was like a cross between a sheep and a duck. By the time they'd called last orders in the pub, The Noise had become intolerable, drowning out everything else. I tried to ignore it, blaming my own misanthropy for magnifying people's faults and all that, but there are only so many instances of pretending not to hear 'ERGH!' emitted mid-sentence.
The point of this analogy is that I'm reminded of that painful event every time I watch Skins, which is like my night with Sheep-Duck Boy in the sense that every time I think I can tolerate it, it comes out with some staggeringly bad dialogue ("You're just a cocaine-snorting, low-budget, corporate puppet" was a new low in Episode 5).

I've made up a game for watching Skins. It's called 'Spot the Amateur Screenwriter' where you try and discern the point at which the smug little shit writing has to stop because his hands are tired and the professionals take over. This is harder than it looks. Like, who creates the two-dimensional caricatures that constitute the 'grown-up' characters? And who comes up with the embarrassingly bad GCSE English attempts at symbolism? "You just skate around, Freddie, you just...skate around!" cries his dad (Ah, this is like a play on words, see? Cause he skateboards but like, it refers to his aimlessness in life too.)

There's not much of a difference between the ages of 15 and 21, you might think (and certainly not if you're Jerry Lee Lewis). Except in the case of Skins viewers, where the variance in appreciation is a gaping chasm. Despite watching almost every episode in a fit of masochism - I always end up clawing my face with my hands, screaming "mine eyeees", a bit like Oedipus - I continually fail to pick up on the multi-layered meanings of the script. My kid brother, on the other hand, once explained to me that a particular episode was actually “a dream sequence where Tony's, like, realising an aspect of the Self”, leaving me feeling a bit like someone was blowing one of those whistles that only dogs can hear.

And another thing: no matter how many times they say 'fuck', it's never going to distract me from the massively overblown sentimentality that worms its way into every scene. In The World According to Skins, no confession of undying love or moment of intense profundity is complete without the addition of a magical lake as the backdrop (see Episode 5: Freddie swims topless to declare love to Effie in Magical Lake; Episode 6: Token Lesbian declares love to Closet Lesbian beside Magical Lake). Which only results in feeling crap about the fact that most of the significant events of your adolescence took place in a bus shelter or outside the local Lidl.

The whole thing is as entertaining as listening to a description of someone else's LSD trip and in reality, Skins is as disaffected and edgy as an emo kid crying whilst masturbating in front of a mirror. All the sex and drugs in the world aren't going to change that.