Flashbacks Of A Fool

Without Craig D’s post Casino Royale bankability, this fool would almost certainly not have flashed, backwards or anywhere. The irony is he’s miscast, underdeveloped as a character and bare arse naked half the time.

Joe (Daniel Craig) is a famous actor, whose willful abuse of alcohol and high class hookers has reached addictive proportions. He lives alone in a cliff top Californian show home, waiting for his agent (Mark Strong) to call and being cleaned-up-after by a black maid (hip hop chanteuse Eve), the only genuine human being in his obit.

This is a man who, in the jargon, has “vibed out.” His extra curricular activities are no longer considered tittle by the tattlers, because no one gives a flying burrito. Offers have dried and producers turned towards younger talent. As a movie star, he’s as nouveau as Errol Flynn’s libido, which is why Craig hardly fits the bill, having leapt like Spider-Man into the A-list, thanks to James Bond. Also, for a hedonist on the slide, Joe’s in magnificent trim. Who says drink, drugs and dames are any worse than a personal trainer, a holistic dietician and organic carrot juice from Bugs & Co?

Joe isn’t what this is about, not the Hollywood has been, anyway. Teenage Joe (Harry Eden) and his rites of passage through a traumatic summer, somewhere on the English coast, flashbacked with soft focus nostalgia and Roxy Music, is where it’s at. Illicit sex, mutual masturbation, girls who go tits up and squirmable birthday parties with mouthy kids and stalwart women who hold it all together are as predictable as a Hovis ad. Even life-changing events are signalled so far ahead that tear ducts have withered by the time they explode.

Tinted memoirs, such as Cider With Rosie, give innocence a good name. Baillie Walsh’s film is about death, missed opportunities and wrong decisions. Fame, as those who suffer it will tell you, is a false god. Sex is a drug. Bloody Marys are bloody marvelous and the stay-at-homes who do nothing but cultivate their gardens have discovered the secret, that failure is in the mind of the masses and all you need is love.

Wow!