ALSO SHOWING... Well, I guess that’s one way to resit your exams...
MY OLD School (15, 115min, ★★★★☆) is a gobsmacking impostor story, as amusing as it is barely conceivable.
The documentary, in cinemas now, investigates how a 30-year-old man, Brandon Lee, passed himself off as a 17-year-old schoolboy and returned to take his Higher exams at Bearsden Academy in Glasgow.
The news story was in 1993 but now director Jono McLeod, who was one of Lee’s 16year-old classmates at the time, gives the inside view. McLeod interviews his old friends, now middle-aged and full of dry wit, about how they and the teachers were duped. No one seems to hold a grudge, however, against the geeky, swotty Lee.
Using animation sequences to take us, Simpsons-style, back into the 1990s classroom, the film also has actor Alan Cumming voice Lee’s real words from a recent interview (Lee refused to have his face on screen, leaving you to wonder: where is he now?).
The film has further twists, but after getting five A-grade Highers and starring as the romantic lead in the school musical (South Pacific), Lee went off to study medicine at Dundee, where his double life was revealed by a newspaper. His real name was Brian MacKinnon. In the words of Mr Gunn, the physics teacher: ‘He wasn’t quite the fresh-faced youth we thought.’ THERE’S a fictional impostor story in cinemas this week, too: Orphan: First Kill (15, 99min, ★★☆☆☆) starring Isabelle Fuhrman as nine-year-old Esther, reunited with her loving American family after a four-year disappearance. But what the audience knows straightaway is that Esther is in fact a 31-year-old Estonian psychopath with a form of dwarfism that allows her to pass herself off as a kid. This makes the entire horror film unintentionally hilarious, with the added joy of a nutso performance by Julia Stiles. IF YOU fancy a nostalgic Trekkiefest, the 1979 blockbuster Star Trek: The Motion Picture is re-released in cinemas from today. It moves at a glacial pace, the special effects are Lego-like and the costumes reminiscent of big beige Babygros. But on the plus side, the original TV cast is back: William Shatner as Captain Kirk, Leonard Nimoy as Spock and Nichelle Nichols as Lieutenant Uhura. A guilty pleasure.