Russell Baillie: Another bloody Valentine...

Oliver Driver and Tammy Davis play unlikely brothers in Sunny Skies. Photo / Supplied

Given the date, I had thought of writing something insightful along the lines of "What your St Valentine's Day movie choice says about the state of your relationship".

But I got a bit stuck after seeing what new titles are heading into the cinemas today.

There's Safe Haven, yet another Nicholas Sparks postcard-perfect melodrama, starring one of the humans from Transformers and this month's nominee for new American sweetheart, Julianne Hough.

There's This is 40, another Judd Apatow ode to married middle age and bodily functions. There's French rom-com - or comedie-romantique, so if you want to really impress your date, tell them it's a "com-rom" - Silence of Love.

There's also Guillotines 3D, a Chinese martial arts epic of much flying cutlery, so maybe it's really a marital movie in disguise.

And there is of course A Good Day to Die Hard, which is not about a man philosophically suffering a near fatal Viagra overdose, but the fifth in the Bruce-Willis-shoots-men-with-accents series which this time shifts to Moscow where just about everybody talks funny. Nyet! Bang! Got ya sucker!

Unfortunately, I haven't seen any as yet. So there will be no insight offered.

But some advice: Gentlemen, you are only allowed to suggest A Good Day to Die Hard as a Valentine's Day date if your first date was the original movie way in 1988. If so, congratulations to you and yours. Way to go. But just be sure your memory is entirely clear on this fact. Otherwise, it may be Guillotines 3D for you.

And now to something else ...

We who write reviews are often collectively described as "the critics" which can be nice because everyone needs to belong.

But sometimes we critics disagree in our criticising. Like now. I just don't agree with what everyone else with 500-word self-opinionated spaces to fill is saying about new Friday night comedy Sunny Skies.

I really quite like it. But then again, I spent plenty of my formative years in camping grounds not unlike the one portrayed.

But the chief criticisms from my esteemed colleagues seem to be its premise of mismatched long-lost brothers - played by Tammy Davis and Oliver Driver - is just stretching things a bit far. Well no, that will be the fictional element requiring a bit of just-go-with-it suspension of disbelief.

And that it's not funny enough. I'm not sure it's trying to be a gagfest, or anything but a fairly gentle pre-watershed comedy for a demographic that just isn't TV3 on a Friday night.

I'm sticking with it. If only to see if Davis and Driver ever see eye to eye, given the three-metre gap height difference.

On the other hand, The Radio, TV3's new post-7 Days offering starring the vertically well-matched Jeremy Corbett and Paul Ego as themselves as morning DJs, is a strange and dreadful thing. On first glance anyway.

Corbett and Ego might be so very good as two-thirds of the permanent front bench of 7 Days, but their verbal sparring on The Radio just feels like it needs a mystery man to come in and call the whole thing off early.

It might want to be a Ponsonby Rd retread of Steve Coogan's Alan Patridge from his Radio Norwich Days, but it feels more like they've inherited Billy T James' old DJ job and studio from that lacklustre sitcom that unfortunately marked his final years on our screens.

Yes, Jon Toogood was a good sport and fun as the "guest" in the first episode.

Maybe they could use him as a substitute on Seven Sharp some nights when the funny tweets just aren't rolling in.

- TimeOut