The Emoji Movie (2017)

"Nobody leaves the phone! Delete them!"

Ok, let me make one thing clear from the outset; this film is pants. Oh, there are some films, such as Sausage Party, which seem at first as though they're going to be puerile and stupid but in fact turn out to be witty and clever. So I gave this film a chance. Don't make the same mistake; this film is half-arsed, boring and just plain bad.

It's hard to see whether the fundamental flaw is the concept or the execution. It's all set inside the phone of a kid called Alex, with emojis competing to be flavour of the month and the hero Gene, a "meh" emoji, gets into trouble for failing to always display a "meh" expression, only to save the day, predictably, for being in touch with the full range of his emotions and all that. Oh, and there's a token love story which, to be fair, has a genuine feminist subtext, and James Bloody Corden as the most annoying sidekick ever. We even get a deeply irritating dance scene purely for the purpose of letting Christina Aguilera do something.

The film is stupid, boring, feels over-long, and will inevitably look incredibly dated in not many years from now. And it gives rise yet again to that age-old question: why does America find James Corden funny?

Date Movie (2006)

"In fact, growing up on a farm, I once milked a cat."

Here we have one of Aaron Seltzer's many spoof movies, this time spoofing romantic comedies such as Meet the Parents. Like most of them, it's humour isn't particularly witty but it's amusing enough and Alyson Hannigan, always brilliant at comedy, is outstanding. Possibly more so than the material deserves.

Still, it's an amusing way to spend a couple of hours, much as I was never going to get many of the references. It's the signature Scary Movie style of humour, and at least this time it isn't doing a dumb spoof of what was already a comedy of a much wittier kind, as that film was.

Oh, and it may not have been as geek-friendly as, say, Superhero Movie, but I loved the honeymoon on Kong Island...