While I’m recommending films, I notice that The Amateurs [aka The Moguls] is being advertised on the Apple trailer site as on theatrical release in the States. This is odd because I’ve already seen it cheaply in the UK via Amazon’s DVDs-by-post service. Perhaps it went straight to video here because it had stinking reviews. It didn’t deserve them. It’s a sweet, gentle movie that made me laugh out loud a lot. The cast is amazing: not so much big names as familiar US character actors known for their talent. How they were persuaded to work for peanuts and allow themselves to be uglified and humiliated I don’t know.

In many ways it’s un-American, being about a bunch of losers and doing some dreadful things to them, and saying things about race (amongst other subjects) that you’re not allowed to say in a mainstream production; but its coyness about sex—it’s a film about small town people trying to make a porn movie that takes euphemism just a bit too far—is, I suppose, what many people would call typical. If it had been made in France with Gérard Depardieu as the washed-up middle-aged lead instead of Jeff Bridges then psuedy film critics would probably have hailed it as a comedy classic—but I’d have worried that a French director would be tempted by a script like this to resort to snail-paced, gnat-brained slapstick so I probably wouldn’t have rented it anyway.

Whaddya know? Also further to my guy movie / chick flick comparison yesterday, here’s a zombie love story. Even (un)dead people can find somebody to (not) be with.