Leofwine_draca I admit to being a huge geek when it comes to UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE. I've been watching the TV quiz show for years and try not to miss a single episode. You could say that I'm addicted to it. This is why STARTER FOR 10, a film widely advertised as being about a young man's emotional development and his participation in the longest-running TV quiz show in the UK, appealed to me.Having just watched it, I can report this is a crushing disappointment, quite simply because it's a dreadful film. The story is nothing more than a very typical romantic comedy with a love triangle basis. I despise these kinds of film and their attempts at warmth and humour and STARTER FOR 10 is no exception. James McAvoy stars in an early role and is quite unconvincing here, but then it doesn't help that he plays a thoroughly unlikeable character.Elements of the film dealing with UNIVERSITY CHALLENGE are limited to about 20 minutes screen time max, most of it at the fumbled climax which abruptly ends with no follow-up or fall-out to the events we've just witnessed. It's a cheat, in other words. Elsewhere, we get the usual leftie political subtext (railing against Thatcherism, etc.) as well as the somewhat worrying message that it's okay to beat up Tories if they annoy you.Some of the supporting cast members are interesting (Benedict Cumberbatch, Dominic Cooper, and Rebecca Hall are all fine given their parts) while others are so bad that you wonder how they were cast (James Corden and Catherine Tate are the offenders here). I was very sad to see that old-timers Lindsay Duncan and Charles Dance are brought in just to shoehorn in an embarrassing nude joke ripped off from AUSTIN POWERS. It's that kind of film.

Jackson Booth-Millard From what I knew or presumed about the potential plot line and the cast involved, I was certainly going to give this very British film a go. Basically it is 1985, during the Thatcherism era, Brian Jackson (James McAvoy) from Essex has enrolled in the Bristol University with a love of knowledge, since childhood where he would watch college quiz show "University Challenge". He hears about a Challenege team trying to get on the TV show, and there he meets and is smitten by lovely blonde with a big sexual past Alice Harbinson (Alice Eve). He manages to hurt the feelings of Rebecca Epstein (Rebecca Hall), but he has to try and concentrate for the Challenge finale coming up, and he with fellow teammates Patrick Watts (Benedict Cumberbatch) and Lucy Chang (Elaine Tan). So it comes to the quiz show recording, and even with cuts and bruises on their faces (a disagreement), they are determined to beat the other team playing. They start slow, but do catch up with more correct answers, it is only when Brian answers the final question before it was asked - because he looked at the question book before the game started - that he ruins the whole thing. Also starring Catherine Tate as Julie Jackson, Mamma Mia's Dominic Cooper as Spencer, James Corden as Tone, Mark Gatiss as Bamber Gascoigne, Charles Dance as Michael Harbinson, Lindsay Duncan as Rose Harbinson and Simon Woods as Josh. If you are British, you will of course appreciate the good performances, but more than anything you will enjoy the distinctive nostalgia and warmth the humour this British film provides, a good old-fashioned period romantic comedy drama. Very good!

mike-578-24677 Alright I confess that I don't see or understand the charms of Mr McEvoy but putting my prejudices on one side I have to say I've had more fun with a rectal exam.This film takes dullness to new levels. It's excruciating even if you have your observers book of Brit-film clichés with you and are intent on crossing a few hundred of them off.Imagine, if you will, a love child fathered by Four Weddings on the blushing maiden known as The Holiday and you get an idea of how bad this film is.Everyone involved should be thoroughly ashamed - apart from Mark Gatiss.

Roland E. Zwick "Starter for 10" is a charming coming-of-age comedy set in the Thatcher-era Britain of the mid 1980s. Brian Jackson ("Atonement"'s James McAvoy) is a brainy lad with an insatiable appetite for facts who leaves his home in Essex to attend university in Bristol. Almost immediately, he becomes a member of the school's academic quiz team, falls madly in love with his drop-dead gorgeous teammate, Alice, and catches the eye of an earthy social crusader by the name of Rebecca. Meanwhile, the team prepares for a trivia bowl competition to be broadcast on nationwide TV.Adapted by David Nicholls from his novel and directed by Tom Vaughan, "Starter for 10" has all the drollery, dryness and wit we've come to expect from the best of British humor. McAvoy exudes a great deal of charisma as the intelligent young man who finds that shedding his lower-class origins and proving his smarts in a university setting is not going to be quite as easy as he thought it would be; and Dominic Cooper, Rebecca Epstein, Alice Eve and Benedict Cumberbatch match him in likability and appeal. The movie also playfully captures the sights and sounds of the era in which it is set, with crowds of placard-waving young people dressed in "Flashdance" and New Wave-inspired attire protesting everything from apartheid to pollution to nuclear proliferation while synthesizer-laden music pounds away in the background.But it is as a hilarious and insightful human comedy that the film earns our real attention and affection. And that '80s-infused soundtrack (featuring The Cure and The Psychedelic Furs, among others) may just be the inspiration you need to finally ferret out those long-discarded leg warmers and head bands from the back of your closet.