I am one of those people: I loved Marie Antoinette. I've seen it three times and have taken something new from it each time. A lot of people hated Marie Antoinette. I can't imagine that they would like Somewhere any more than that.

Somewhere is a movie that might need to incubate inside me for a few days, because its appeal is not immediately apparent. On face value, this is simply an unrelatable movie in which very little to nothing happens. If you scratch beneath the surface, well … you would probably come to the same conclusion.

Tron: Legacy opens with a text crawl, but the words don’t tell us about the secret construction of an ultimate weapon, nor about the retirement of androids: instead, we are told that parts of the movie are presented in 2D because they were shot that way, but that we should keep our glasses on for the entirety regardless.

It’s the most inspiring crawl I’ve seen for a good many years.

Cancer kills more characters in Japanese movies than any other disease excepting that old standby "noble sacrifice through vehicular accident/drowning to save the life of a stupid child”, which is epidemic. Cancer can be omnipresent, it can develop alongside the plot, or it can creep up on you at the end and kill you off in a reconciliatory way.

This is a preamble to saying that the Japanese Film Festival has consistently had strong representation from characters with cancer across the years. Many movies will wear their cancer on their sleeve, while others will spring it on you in ways that can only be construed as ridiculous. About Her Brother presents itself as a "home drama” that the promo material promises will contain the spectre of terminal illness.

With that thought in the back of my mind, I eagerly waited for the titular character to be struck down. Fortunately he's a fictional character so I'm allowed to think this, but that doesn't mean I relished his demise.

Zombies. They're everywhere. They're coarse, they're rough, they're decaying and, like vampires and werewolves, they're here to stay … for now. The ironic proliferation of the virulent undead across our pop culture landscape has not gone unnoticed, but the latest entry in the zombie pantheon isn't a brainless cash-in. The Walking Dead is a TV adaptation of a comic that has been running since 2003. You probably already know this, but context never hurt anyone.

With three episodes – half of the first season – down, The Walking Dead has turned out to be more of a character dynamic mood piece rather than black and white panels made flesh. This is an interesting approach, and it makes for a significantly different experience. Frank Darabont is playing with character reactions to situations and drawing on source material only when he sees fit. It's possible that this is offending a lot of people, but it also means that The Walking Dead is perfectly capable of standing on its own.

Very mild spoilers within!

Cars is easily my least favourite Pixar film. Lassiter took his own dream and forced it on the children of the world. It was an intensely personal and heartfelt work, but it turned out that, when it comes to motors, Lassiter's heart is incredibly dull.

Apparently kids still liked it because they like cars and you can buy your own Lightning McQueen, but a marketable movie does not necessarily equal a good movie, as we all learned from the compromises that George Lucas made in Return of the Jedi and has been making ever since.

Cars did very well: certainly well enough to spawn a sequel. The first trailer was just released, and …

… Well, what the hell is this? It's You Only Live Twice with cars.

If Pixar wanted to make a spy movie, could they not have made a spy movie? The Incredibles expertly combined the not significantly different hallmarks of both superhero and spy genres, and it was good. You could easily make a sequel to The Incredibles if you wanted to make a spy movie without true dramatically damaging the integrity of the property.

Equally, though, I can say this: Cars has nowhere to go but up. A severe genre shakeup might do it some favours, and Michael Caine is generally a welcome addition to anything (for example, he was the only tolerable element of Goldmember), but the elevation of Mater to a major character is a cause for concern.

Cars 2 is lucky: I'm going to see it because I have to. You can't not see a Pixar movie, and maybe this one will be good against all odds?

Regardless of everything else, Cars 2 is keeping Larry the Cable Guy in work and for that Pixar should be ashamed.

Everyone knows that Frank West was anything but an intellectual, but he made do in a situation that he had no idea he was getting himself in to.

Sadly, Chuck Greene makes Frank look like a genius worthy of a Pulitzer. At the start of Case Zero, Chuck is already embroiled in a zombie outbreak, yet he leaves his truck unattended and, apparently, with the keys in the ignition. Is it any surprise that it is almost instantly stolen?

It’s hard to get a grasp on Chuck from Case Zero alone because it boils down to approximately three cut scenes where he says anything – which is very different to Dead Rising where it’s not very long before Frank says “Zombies, huh? Thought I might run into you …”

It’s DLC. But where Frank was a loveable and incredulous idiot who got himself in way over his head and was then expected to take care of everything almost singlehandedly, Chuck’s situation in Case Zero is at least partly of his own device.

As Case Zero progresses, we are very slowly drip-fed reasons to care about Chuck’s plight, at least the parts he isn’t responsible for. I know a lot of people don’t care for the Dead Rising story, but one of my video game specialities is ludo-narratology (let’s pretend this is a term) and I think that a story should give you the impetus to keep going.

Killing zombies isn’t enough for me. There has to be a reason for killing them. What lofty goal am I achieving on the backs of the innocent undead?

Dead Rising had its overarching story of Santa Cabeza, government conspiracy and thinly veiled “insatiable consumerism is the true villain” moral, but it also backed that up with nestled stories in the form of the optional survivor rescues, each of which had its own backstory: from Leah, the woman who watched, paralysed, as the zombies ate her baby; to Cliff, the man so traumatised by events that he began to relive Vietnam; to Dave, attacked by a crazed supermarket manager; and the truly out-there raincoat cult that operated out of the cinema.

One of the biggest problems with the survivor system was always that the characters don't exist in the mall until their story is cued. It's not like, say Majora's Mask, where everyone follows a schedule and can be found at x place at y time every day.

Case Zero works the same way: Darcie Blackrock doesn't exist until 7pm, a mere two game hours before you have to get the hell out of Still Creek. The town is so small (only three separate loading areas) that it's inconceivable that any of these characters are actually hiding somewhere that you can't see. Sharon, in particular, should have been in the Quarantine Area from the very first rather than materializing in a tent when the time is right.

Still, while in a perfect world all survivors would exist somewhere, it is understandable that the format of the Dead Rising franchise renders this impossible. You can only ever walk in on a story at a set point in the narrative. You were somewhere else when the rest of it was playing out, that has to be it!

The little stories in Case Zero are good enough: greedy pawnbroker stuck atop a car, a "stagette” gone horribly awry, a couple of motorcyclists whose bikes have apparently been eaten, and venal newlyweds, but none of them are particularly hard hitting and they singularly lack in pathos.

The theory of in media res story exposure works well enough until the token psychopath shows up, because where the hell was he while you were running around his office? If I'm going to be using your place as my safe house for twelve hours, show your damn face or attack me from the go, man. I understand the need for Case Zero to have a climax, but there is nothing I like more than logical story developments. Narrative expectation should only be met when it's well set up, and the presence of Jed is the weakest aspect of the otherwise strong-enough Case Zero.

What you're playing Case Zero for, apart from a quick fix of zombie whacking, is to find out what Chuck Greene is all about. Case Zero hints at the bigger themes of the story and the nobler motivations of Chuck, but this is not the time for me to go into them.

Case Zero was fun enough to play, but it wasn't until one of the last exchanges between Katey and Chuck that I was totally sold on the project. Chuck has something worth fighting for in Katey, even if she looks really weird. I'm going to be more than happy to pilot Chuck to victory in Dead Rising 2, just so long as he's acting out of necessity and not suffering the consequences of being a moron.

Fingers crossed.

"I don't care if it hurts”.

Clearly, this is the case with David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin. How else can you explain the existence of The Social Network, which looks to be the most vacuous movie of 2010 to come from an allegedly respectable writer and director?

Now, I'm no longer convinced of David Fincher's talent: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was bloated, the best part was Tilda Swinton and Cate Blanchett was frankly wasted.

Worse than that, of course, was the inexplicably lauded Zodiac, a film singularly lacking in tension or interest that placed guilt solely at the foot of a dead guy who can’t defend himself. It was anything but a triumph (and I was forced to see it instead of the far superior Half Nelson).

As for Aaron Sorkin – to be honest, I don’t think I’ve seen anything he’s done except for The American President. I guess that was good. Anyway, these are good names. But how can this be a good movie?

Just look at it.

A girls’ choir sings Radiohead’s “Creep” over shots of Jesse Eisenberg looking evil, people partying and "dramatic scenes of destruction”. Why is a girls’ choir singing a song about a man with crippling self-esteem issues who is fixated on a woman? Because it is a singularly bad idea. This is the only explanation.

I would say, “I don’t care that this movie is about Facebook”, but I guess I do. This trailer shows why this is the case, in that it exposes the culture that allowed Facebook to grow into the behemoth that it became. American popular culture really canonizes “college life” as the best thing ever, the only thing that anyone in America truly lives for.

“College life” of course means “keggers”, because nothing says higher education like conspicuous consumption of alcohol and possibly a bit of marijuana. (The legality of cannabis is literally the only political policy that matters to anyone – everything else is irrelevant).

Do we want a movie that shows this? What looks utterly repellent to me (upper class snoots drinking!) probably looks like the dream to a lot of people. Watching it again, I actually feel a little sick watching the bacchanalian exploits of these overstuffed youth. The tagline we’ve been given is “You don't get to 500 million friends without making a few enemies”. Deep.

We have kind of learned in recent times that Mark Zuckerberg, co-creator of Facebook, is kind of a dick. A twenty three year old billionaire is sure to get an inflated sense of self worth. He's paradoxically quite secretive and Ben Mezrich's book, which provided most of the "inspiration” for the book, was written more as a series of hyperbolic suppositions than anything approximating truth. Zuckerberg would not speak to him.

Here Jesse Eisenberg (some might say "the poor man's Michael Cera” … not me, oh no) plays a baby faced Satan. He’s like Shia LaBeouf in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, except not Shia LaBeouf and therefore not an automatic failing grade. Does he look compelling in the role? No. The Social Network is the cinematic definition of “privileged white people”. If white people bore you, they’re probably going to bore you here in ways that you never knew it was possible to be bored.

I think that the problem is likely that Facebook is now part of the furniture. I’m not going to bother criticising it here because people use it in different ways, but of course Zuckerberg has done a wonderful job of compromising the privacy of everyone who doesn’t consider the implications of what they have agreed to. For some people, Facebook is all there is to the internet. “Social Networking” is the currency for the youth of today, and that's not necessarily bad but it can lead to a myopic view of the online landscape.

My secret hope is that soon enough Facebook becomes as irrelevant as Myspace so that this movie becomes a weird curio, just as Kick-Ass was outdated before it even came out and just as Funny People was a bad idea before Adam Sandler was born.
Still, the movie has been made and there's nothing we can do about it now. We'll have to cope with Justin Timberlake (Justin Timberlake!) telling us "A million dollars isn't cool. You know what is cool? A billion dollars.” which serves only to prove that Sorkin is a master of dialogue and that he absolutely deserves your ticket money.

Eisenberg himself explains why he wants the attention of "the clubs”:

"They're exclusive. And fun. And they lead to a better life.”

I don't know what that means, but I want no part of it.