Thursday 21 August 2014

VERONICA MARS

FOR $10 YOU CAN HAVE THIS REVIEW WITHOUT THE SPOILERS IT DOESN'T CONTAIN ANYWAY

Maybe it's just me being old fashioned and traditionalist, but I'm not entirely convinced by the idea of crowdfunding films. I am absolutely okay with it when it comes to people trying to get low budget horror movies off the ground, or very tiny small scale projects, but I honestly don't think this method of financing should be used for proper Hollywood movies with recognisable names involved. By all means use it as a method to get on the ladder, but it shouldn't be the ladder, and once you're up there you're in a position to raise the cash a proper way: you make the movie, I pay to see it.

Veronica Mars was a TV show that ran from 2004 to 2006, which I never saw and have no real interest in digging out. Apparently it was popular enough to suggest a film version might be on the cards, yet it wasn't popular enough for a big Hollywood studio to stump up the frankly pocket change budget (estimated $6m on the IMDb). So they got the money together with a Kickstarter campaign and the result is a perfectly decent piece of throwaway fluff that's certainly enjoyable enough while it's on but two days later you'll struggle to remember much about it. Veronica Mars (Kristen Bell) is on the point of finally getting out of her impossibly glamorous Californian backwater hellhole and making it in New York as a hotshot lawyer (cue a brief cameo by Jamie Lee Curtis) after some years as a private investigator. But then she hears that one of her high school friends has been murdered, and her ex boyfriend arrested...

Well it's all right, an amusing and insubstantial way of passing a couple of hours fairly painlessly. In the league of recent teen detective movies it's certainly better than Miley Cyrus' equally disposable So Undercover. The cast (most of whom reprise their roles from the TV show) are mostly pretty and hunksome, there's a smattering of funny one liners, and it's all quite jolly and trivial and everything works out nicely in the end. Forgive me, but that's really the meat and drink of Hollywood studio blandness, so you'd have thought they'd have leapt at it for the equivalent of coins dropped down the back of Joel Silver's sofa. If I were a rich Hollywood studio, I probably would have done. But I'm not: I'm just an ordinary punter on the other end of the industry and that's where I intend to stay.

**

Meh:

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