Shopping for a meaning to life - latest video reviews

Late Night Shopping: In a city that sleeps, some people have to work. Four friends hang out in a caff during their night shift, lost in limbo, hating their jobs.

“Do you ever get the feeling we’re missing out on something?”

“Yeah, all the time.”

Saul Metzstein’s first film, brilliantly scripted by Jack Lothian, has the confidence of a true original.

Lothian’s characters do not rely on charm. They are unapologetically themselves, flawed, afraid, angry, confused. Intimacy and commitment seems beyond their reach.

Sean (Luke de Woolfson) is a hospital porter, who is uncertain whether his girlfriend still lives with him. Vincent (James Lance) stacks shelves in a supermarket. The job bores him rigid, but provides enough spending money to indulge his true vocation, picking up girls.

Lenny sits in front of a computer in a room filled with similar robotic figures, answering calls to directory enquiries.

Jody is sacked from the electronics factory, which only inflates her feeling of insecurity. Of all of them, she is the most grounded, staring into the abyss without blinking. Only she knows why they hang out in the caff.

“There’s nothing better to do.”

“That’s the single most depressing thing I have ever heard,” Sean says, probably because it’s true.

As an insight into the hidden world of low maintenance ambition, Late Night Shopping is a landmark in positive nihilism. The actors excel and appear to have genuine rapport. Metzstein’s style is individual, with touches of inspiration that can be surprising and funny.

Lothian’s writing scrapes cliché off the sole of the sitcom, creating a disparate group of losers, who make you care about the educated underclass and worry about their welfare.

Comedy, 15. **

K-Pax begins with a man called Prot (Kevin Spacey), who appears in a train station and claims to have come from the planet K-Pax. Naturally, the police detain him and send him to a mental hospital.

Having no success after subjecting Prot to drugs, the flustered staff refer him to seasoned psychiatrist, Dr Mark Powell (Jeff Bridges), who initially considers Prot a yet another convincing delusional. But as their sessions continue, he gradually suspects that Prot may be more than he seems and seeks to discover the man’s truth.

K-Pax explores a similar theme as Starman (1984) and Don Juan DeMarco (1995), in that a person of ambiguous identity affects those around him. But unlike his predecessors Jeff Bridges in Starman and Johnny Depp in Don Juan who coaxed us into a willing suspension of our disbelief, Kevin Spacey’s Prot utterly fails to convince. He is smug and patronising and but also an example of the cliched Hollywood alien — the kind who is not out to take over Earth but here to teach us to how to become better people.

It becomes clear as the film progresses that the mystery of Prot’s identity is not a central concern. In this film, people tend to, figuratively, shrug their shoulders and gloss over the fact that Prot’s alien-ness may be suspect. Hasn’t it occurred to them to check? We expect Dr Powell to bring his psychiatric expertise to bear on Prot’s case. And what does he do? He discredits his profession by embracing the very definition of charlatanism. He used hypnotism. This film tantalises us with an interesting mystery, and then drops us off a precipice into a muddle of insipid moralising and melodrama.

K-Pax may have been better suited as a television drama since it is undemanding, inoffensive and preaches family values. Some may enjoy it but others may just find it an exercise in mediocrity. Suffice to say, Kevin Spacey, Jeff Bridges, even director Iain Softley have all done better work before.

SF/Drama, 12 **