Gag gift for hunters

EL BONARESE Cert 15, 105 mins

FILMS set in police training college are usually low comedies stuffed with jokes about helmets and horse's bottoms. El Bonarese is not short on humour - it even contains an old gag on the phallic possibilities of the truncheon - but its uniformed characters would have ground up Steve Guttenberg, star of the original Police Academy movies, and sprinkled him over their doughnuts.

Part document of official veniality in his native Argentina, part road-to-ruin picture, Pablo Trapero's film is daring in its choice of hero.

Zapa (Jorge Roman) is a trainee policeman in Buenos Aires, a taciturn monobrow about whom there is little to know and even less to like.

When he is alone, he stares blankly into the middle-distance. When he's around other people, he complies with their wishes without argument.

He only sheds this passivity when he is having sweaty, aggressive sex with one of his teachers (Mimi Ardu).

During these scenes, you are given plenty of time to examine his peculiar body hair - which stops very suddenly at a kind of tidemark halfway up his buttocks - but few opportunities to guess at what might be going on inside his head.

When we first meet Zapa, he's a locksmith in a small town somewhere out in the sticks, who is collared by the police after using his skills to crack open a safe for a seedy criminal gang.

Instead of being charged with the robbery, he is despatched on a bus to the capital to take up a trainee position with the city's police force.

This isn't a fresh start. In fact, as the dishonesties and brutalities of his colleagues are slowly enumerated, it's revealed as something between a mildewed and putrefied one. A lot of crime is committed in El Bonarese - racketeering, extortion, murder, assault, theft, mugging - and most of it by men and women in blue serge uniforms.

When these police officers are depicted interacting with the public, they are demanding money with menaces, shooting them in the back of the head or kicking them as they lie handcuffed on the ground.

When they are celebrating at their Christmas party, they amplify the local firework display by filling the air with hot revolver bullets.

TRAPERO'S skill lies not in exploiting these incidents to outrage or appal his audience, but in conveying the workaday banality of his characters' corruptions. Zapa isn't tempted into sin, he is simply too morally and mentally lazy to conceive of any alternative.

And watching the film, you find yourself being eased into the same position: cruelty and greed flow by like a dirty river, Zapa watches its progress with a dull, animal stare, and the hope of redemption is conspicuous by its absence.

Sward-play and rumbles in the woods

BLACKBALL X Cert 15, 100 mins

TIM Firth, the writer of Calendar Girls, is also credited with the script of Blackball, an attempt to do for the whoosh of wood across manicured lawn what Strictly Ballroom did for the thump of pasa doble on parquet.

I can think of only two explanations for its comprehensive badness. Either the director, Mel Smith, went through the script, carefully excising all the funny lines, or Firth subcontracted the writing chores to his accountant.

The film stars Paul Kaye as a mouthy painter and decorator who causes a rumble in Torquay by winning a local bowls tournament - much to the annoyance of its regular constituency of stuffed poloshirts and anally-retentive driving instructors.

Johnny Vegas flounders about as Kaye's tumbledown best friend, Alice Evans does her best with the unenviable task of providing the romantic interest, and James Cromwell (the farmer from Babe) is madly miscast as her tyrannical father, the captain of the bowls club.

For someone who was supposedly born on a housing estate in Devon, his vowels are suspiciously transatlantic.

Only Vince Vaughan - looking as if he hasn't had a decent night's sleep since Psycho - manages to make something of the material, supplying a raucous turn as Kaye's unscrupulous American agent.

The film offers a handful of faintly amusing gags at the expense of the sport and its players. There is a cute moment, for instance, involving a tiny picket fence that forms a boundary to the club's VIP enclosure.

But the most energetic work seems to have gone into the product placement.

There's a touch of this in Calendar Girls,

in which a flight to LA becomes a shameless plug for Virgin Atlantic.

Here, however, Firth has allowed these moments to colonise his script: an entire scene forms an infomercial for the Savoy Hotel; a gag at the climax of the movie revolves around the triumphant production of a Nike shirt; several minutes are given over to the hero's participation in an advert for Coca-Cola.

Someone ought to tell him that the ads are supposed to be over once the film has started.

A chorus line of distinguished actors reveals all in a farce that loses its way

CALENDAR GIRLS Cert 12a, 108 mins

FROM the moment that their naked haunches launched a thousand "And finallys" on news bulletins across the globe, it was inevitable that movie treatment would be lavished upon those Daleswomen who modelled in the buff for a Women's Institute calendar. How could any self- respecting film producer resist such a plot? The characters are a gaggle ofmiddle-class, middle-aged Yorkshire ladies, the sort you might encounter at a whist drive in Wetwang.

Their mission is to memorialise the recently-departed husband of one of their number by securing a new sofa for the local cancer ward. But their chosen fundraising gimmick, a nudie calendar - soft focus, all tastefully done - is their real gift to the movie moguls.

The finished result gives a chorus line of distinguished British actors - Julie Walters, Helen Mirren, Annette Crosbie, Penelope Wilton, Celia Imrie - the opportunity to throw off their Damart flimsies and pose decorously behind cider presses and racks of cherry tarts.

Chris (Mirren) is the muscle behind the project, Annie ( Walters), the junior partner whose dying husband (John Alderton) provides their inspiration.

Crosbie, Wilton and Imrie are their collaborators and bosom pals, whose degrees of doubt and enthusiasm more or less mirror those of their male counterparts in The Full Monty. "No front bottoms," is Crosbie's principal condition.

Up to the point at which the skin shots are published, Calendar Girls is a total success: a well-upholstered British farce which manages to be emotionally engaging, full of good-natured smut, and satisfy any curiosity you might have had about the shape of Celia Imrie's breasts. (That's if you haven't witnessed her debut performance in the classic 1970s exploitation thriller, The House of Whipcord.) It handles its central death with admirable grace, even finding a note of acceptable sentiment in a riff about women being like sunflowers - saving the most beautiful phase of their bloom, apparently, until the last.

Most importantly for its market, the movie makes stripping off a matter of female solidarity and self-expression: a canny trick which will probably prevent the dozier members of the audience from seeing that it is about as feminist as 1960s naturist flicks such as Naked As Nature Intended or Take Off Your Clothes and Live!

It then starts to move in a more ambitious direction, which might have been the cause of further praise, had the director, Nigel Cole, kept his nerve to the final reel.

The Full Monty, you will recall, concluded with a coy freeze- frame that denied the payoff promised by the title - and left us with the bizarre impression that all the emotional and socio- economic woes under which its heroes were labouring had been instantly relieved by the synchronised removal of their Y-fronts.

Calendar Girls is brave enough to pursue its characters beyond this moment of elation, to the point at which their self-exposure becomes a source of anxious misery.

We see hacks and TV crews buzzing around them like desperate bargain-hunters at a bring-andbuy sale.

We watch the relationships between the central characters deteriorate under the pressure: Chris becomes increasingly intoxicatedby the media attention, losing-sight of her original motives; Annie grows sceptical about their progress into the headlines and chat-show studios, and begins to question her friend's priorities.

We are allowed to share in the moment when the majority of the group begins to feel besmirched and compromised by their fame - a realisation that comes when they are flown to Hollywood to lose their clothes in a tacky TV commercial for soap powder.

At this juncture, a more sophisticated and challenging film seems to be emerging from the thermal drawers of mainstream commercial comedy.