The Ghost (2010)

Political thriller directed by Roman Polanski and adapted from a novel by Robert Harris. Ewan McGregor stars as a ghostwriter employed to help an ex-prime minister (Pierce Brosnan) complete his memoirs. That’s because the previous ghostwriter died in mysterious circumstances that soon threaten McGregor as well. 

It’s extremely odd. Parts of it are unintentionally funny. McGregor has a cockney accent and at times sounds like a young Michael Caine, but beyond that isn’t given any personality at all. Brosnan also speaks oddly, and his usual natural quality is absent. The two women in the ex-PM’s life (Kim Cattrall as Olivia Williams) are both played in a hammy, overwrought fashion. Cattrall has few lines and little to do. The set is also strange: a peculiar designer house on an island just off the US mainland. The Martha's Vineyard area is meant to be attractive – sought after by a wealthy elite – but it looks like a remote, unloved stretch of the Suffolk coastline. You think the fancy "Bond villain" house is going to have a significance, but that never arrives, so the flashy location ends up being a distraction that has nothing whatsoever to do with the story.

The Ghost isn’t very exciting, either. Even the mugging and car chase scenes are lacklustre and strangely flat. Badly mocked up photos shown countless times. Important parts of the story don’t add up.

Crossroads (2002)

A predictable “star vehicle”. Lucy (Britney Spears) and two other young women from Georgia take off on a road trip. One wants to go to an audition in Los Angeles, one wants to visit her fiancé and one wants to meet her estranged mother in Tucson, Arizona. In the process of taking the trip, they inevitably “find themselves” and rekindle their own childhood friendship. 

It’s formulaic in the extreme. Britney seems natural enough as an actor, but the script has no sparkle and the plot offers no surprises. I hoped they’d rob a bank or encounter a zombie apocalypse or something, but no such excitement occurs. Also, her dreary companions Kit (Zoe Saldana) and Mimi (Taryn Manning) are presumably there to make her look better. Her parents are played by Kim Cattrall and Dan Aykroyd, but it’s a struggle to believe they are the actual mum and dad of Ms. Spears. 

Crossroads tries to deal with issues such as teen pregnancy, the pressures of gender roles and the value of family, but the abundance of cliché means that it does so only superficially. It’s designed as fan fodder (you can almost hear the focus groups behind it), and in that sense it achieves everything it sets out to.

Mannequin (1987)

Ludicrous romantic comedy about an enterprising young man in Philadelphia who discovers he has a gift for window-dressing, then falls in love with a shop mannequin...who just happens to be a reincarnated beauty from Ancient Egypt. The main couple (Andrew McCarthy and Kim Cattrall) are entertaining and the impossible fairytale romance has a certain charm – as in Splash. However, the bit-part actors including James Spader, are uniformly appalling, with poor lines and a complete lack of comic flair. Entire scenes fall flat, many of them involving the pathetic security guard and his dog. As with The Secret of My Success, from the same year and which I had watched the day before, it’s very much a film about upward mobility, such were the prevailing values of the time. And yet, despite its awfulness, there are some entertaining and even heartwarming moments. The soundtrack is utterly of its time and when “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” by Starship begins playing, it’s not remotely surprising. I don’t regret watching it, but I probably don’t ever need to see it again.