Arts

Joe Wright’s “Pan” fails to take off! Instead, it takes a plunging freefall. Have you ever seen a cake that looked so tasty you wanted to make love to it? Imagine three tiers of white, luscious, spongy goodness beckoning to you. Lovingly handcrafted marzipan petals pressed onto sweet fondant. Buttercream swirls piped onto the sides, spelling out ‘Eat me, you filthy animal’. You oblige. You sink your fork into the perfect layer of icing, and bring the heaping cake-pile to your mouth. You gag. It’s disgusting. It tastes like everything you hate about life: bills, screaming babies, and Trump running…

We have an instinctive distrust of any film that starts with a jump scare. Partly because it’s a cheap trick – mostly because we don’t enjoy sitting through a whole 94-minute flick with soiled pants. The main weapon of horror still scares this writer, much to his chagrin. The writer confesses he’s an extremely easy person to scare. Horror just isn’t our forte. The fact that the writer’s seat smelt faintly of vomit didn’t help at all to distract from the fear. Luckily, “Pay The Ghost” isn’t all horror. Nor is it much of a movie. Nicholas Cage is Mike…

What? Matt Damon is an astronaut again? This isn’t an “Interstellar” sequel right? Thankfully, Damon isn’t the bad guy this time and he’s thoroughly likeable. He’s also trapped 140 million miles from home. Oops. Mark Watney (Matt Damon) is a botanist and astronaut in an international team on a manned mission to Mars. But the mission is jeopardised when a Martian sandstorm comes a-calling, encroaching towards the team’s base of operations with skin-flaying force. Facing the insurmountable threat, the 6-man team is forced to leave. However, the trek towards the spaceship goes awry and Watney is walloped by a flying satellite dish…