Best movie of this year hands down!

The Age of Commercialism

As Good As It Gets

Great story, amazing characters, superb action, enthralling cinematography. Yes, this is something I am glad I spent money on.

Albert Finney is wonderful playing a nightclub comic in Liverpool, a fan of hard-boiled detective stories, who places an advertisement in the paper looking for work as a private eye; he is immediately handed a case involving a fat man, a college student, drugs, and gun-running. Directorial debut from Stephen Frears is consciously not a spoof or satire of American noirs, but rather an homage: an original detective story all its own (albeit one with an unfulfilled plot and supporting characters). Screenwriter Neville Smith's wisecracks work far better than the mystery Finney finds himself enmeshed in, and the pieces which do fall into place seem to happen off-screen. A nonchalant running joke with Finney talking in fast, curt one-liners--and everyone else responding to him in kind--is the film's most charming achievement. If only the story were not so convoluted (and yet wrapped up so unceremoniously), this might have been a minor gem. **1/2 from ****

"Exhilirated" was the way my father felt, as he emerged from the new Scala cinema in Kings Cross, after watching Albert Finney in Gumshoe sometime in the 1970s. He loves the writing of Raymond Chandler and Dashiel Hammett. The idea of a fellow aficionado so caught up in the idea of being Philip Marlowe that he places an advertisement in the local Liverpool paper offering his services in 1972 as though he were the fictional private eye in California of the 1940s and is then caught up in a case he doesn't understand but which he sets out to follow nonetheless as though he was the legendary hero of those mean streets completely captivated him. The fast talking repartee. The refusal to compromise. And the gun. It comes in at the beginning. It is undoubtedly real - in an England where there are no guns. Will Finney who carries it everywhere with him ever get to fire it? Prepare to enjoy a pacey, brilliantly written plot which refreshingly expects the audience to have the knowledge and intelligence to keep up and be swept away. Anyone who knows my father will know that this review was really written by him!

I didn't think much of this movie when I first saw it some years back. However it has certainly grown on me. As other comments say it is something of a CULT movie. Good cast of actors (national & local) An interesting facet for me is the locations in my hometown of Liverpool. The docks (looks like South end docks to me), Lime St station, Faulkner Square & Bedford Street (both in Toxteth) It shows how bleak the parts of Liverpool were back in the late sixties & early seventies. They bear no comparison to the areas today, which are fairly vibrant. I am sure the Night Club in this film was the Castaways club in Halebank Widnes, by the now defunct Ditton Junction station.

A Liverpool bingo caller of the 70's enlivens his dull life by taking on an old style private detective alter-ego. Complete with raincoat and accent! This is one of my favourite cult movies and this might be a good chance to try and look inside my own mind and find out why. Leading with the negatives, this film has a few ideas, but not enough to make a full film out of them. If you feel that some of the scenes are padding (quite a lot actually) then you are right! Finney fancies himself as a kind of Sam Spade let loose on a Liverpool of the 1970's (interesting to see it like it was in the 60's) and we enter the slightly seedy world of the working man's club. Something that those outside of the UK will find hard to grasp -- a kind of cheap private drinking hole meets low rent cabaret.The real problem is that the thing is weakened by non of the parties (especially the lead) seeming to be taking the case seriously, which means that while he is in limited danger we are more yawning than sitting on the edge of our seats.What makes it for me is the fast word play of Finney and the general irony of the script in going in to places that fashion says we shouldn't be going. It leads up to a giant feeling of so-what -- but I like to see movies that are a bit different and it always holds me in its strange faded and seedy grip. Maybe it has something to do with having been to these sorts of places myself.