With the big budget Hollywood remake already in production (starring Rusty Crowe), Anything for Her looked like it might have had some entertainment potential but I’m sad to report that it never gets up to speed.
The blissful lives of school teacher Julien (Vincent Lindon) and Lisa (Diane Kruger) are, as they say, shattered when Lisa is wrongly convicted of murder. With no possibility of legal redress, and a rapidly deteriorating mental state, it looks like Diane won’t be able to stand 20 years in the big house and Julien has to act to save her and the family – the two of them plus cute little Oscar played by the wonderfully named Lancelot Roch.
Somewhat implausibly, Julien hatches a plan to boost his Mrs from jail and escape the country to somewhere with no extradition. Despite no previous criminal experience, Julien obsesses over all the details until his plan comes together. Advice from a local criminal turned author (“don’t improvise if you don’t have the criminal mindset”) has to be ignored when circumstances change suddenly.
I can see this working with Crowe (and Elizabeth Banks and Liam Neeson). These sorts of tales told by Hollywood are always barely a step away from pure fantasy and it’s much easier to get carried along by the hokum. The French version is so grounded in a recognisable reality that the plot and characters don’t make any sense at all. Lindon is a great actor. He’s soulful, ruggedly good looking, and deeply intense but, paradoxically, the more real he tries to make the character the less you can believe what’s going on. Because it’s preposterous.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 28 April, 2010.
This morning I sloped up to Radio New Zealand to review Richard Boock’s new biography of Bert Sutcliffe: “The Last Everyday Hero”. Kathryn’s a cricket fan so, even though she hadn’t got to reading the book, we had plenty to talk about. Including an unexpected diversion into the subject of Fleetwood Mac.
Listen here or download from the link below:
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Of Tone Magazine’s 50 “must own” blu-rays 13 are not actually available in New Zealand legally, or won’t play on NZ purchased players due to region coding. Which is a bit of a waste of time, don’t you think? They also manage to spell Criterion incorrectly right the way through article which adds insult to injury.
Here’s the list (the article itself is not online):
The Third Man (only available on Criterion blu-ray therefore US only — Criterion have lost the rights and it is listed as out of print there so good luck finding it until a Canal+ version finds it’s way here next year)
Spirited Away (I’ve just spent half an hour trying to find Spirited Away on blu-ray and the thing does not appear to exist — not even in a Japanese-only release. So, how Tone Magazine can recommend a blu-ray that has never been released I don’t know. Perhaps they found it at this site, which also seems to recommend blu-rays that don’t exist)
So, of the 50 blu-rays that Tone Magazine say you must own, one doesn’t exist yet, two haven’t been released yet, ten you can only watch if you have a very expensive region-free blu-ray player and one more you can’t get through normal retail channels.
I’m saving up for the Oppo universal player as I certainly do want to take advantage of all those Criterion discs at least but the article demonstrates a) the paucity of local releases so far and b) a very poor effort on the part of Tone.
And anyone who rates Ratatouille over WALL•E must be some kind of moron.
Update 24 Aug 2010: Reader BrynG points out in the comments that the European region coded blu-rays are compatible with New Zealand but the discs themselves still require importing. My wider point remains, though. No one should be recommending Criterion blu-rays to unsuspecting New Zealand consumers.
Update 26 Aug 2010: Gary Steel at Witchdoctor.co.nz (“New Zealand’s technology authority”) has kindly linked to this blog with some comments of his own. I wonder if he is the same Gary Steel who used to edit Tone Magazine.
I am sick of vampires. Sick to death. As a great philosopher once said, “What is point, vampires?” and I have to concur. They’re everywhere you seem to turn thses days and the most boring of the lot (the Twilight mob) are back in June to bore us all to death once again.
So, my heart sank a little when I saw the trailers for Daybreakers, an Aussie horror about a world controlled by vampires, hunting and farming the remaining humans for their plasma. One of the pleasures of this gig is when the surprises are pleasant and Daybreakers definitely turned into one of those. Tightly wound and (for the most part) logically sound, the tyres have been well and truly kicked on the premise before the cameras (and digital compositors and Weta mask makers) got involved.
Ethan Hawke plays the Chief Blood Scientist for the big corporation that provides most of the world’s supply. Ten years earlier, an infected bat caused an epidemic which rendered most of the population undead — a few, like CEO Sam Neill went willingly when faced with the offer of immortality. Hawke is working on a substitute — he’s vegetarian in a human blood kind of way — and supplies for everyone are running low. When a renegade bunch of humans (led by Willem Dafoe) tell him about a possible cure he is forced to choose between his boss, his human-hunter brother and what’s left of his humanity.
While filling in for Graeme Tuckett on Radio New Zealand’s Nine to Noon film slot last Thursday, I casually mentioned that Daniel Craig had been cast as journalist Mikael Blomkvist in David Fincher’s forthcoming remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. With the collapse of Sam Mendes’ new Bond picture, Mr Craig has a franchise-sized gap in his schedule and I think he’s ideal casting to play the craggy crusader (originated by Michael Nyqvist in the Swedish films and a six part television series).
Thanks to @hybridmovies, I can direct you to the Financial Times article that tells the whole sorry story of the deterioration of MGM and the mismanagement that has pushed it to the brink:
Harry Sloan, a media entrepreneur who once made $200m when a Scandinavian broadcasting business he was managing was taken public, was brought in as chairman of the studio. Sloan set about the substance of his work with enthusiasm, but he was also noted for his quirky habits. He arranged his office in the MGM building according to feng-shui principles and kept a selection of crystals in the screening room to improve energy flows – he even had his office telephone number changed, replacing all the fours with eights, a lucky number in China.
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer and broadcaster. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Why Funerals & Snakes? In Jean-Luc Godard’s Contempt (Le Mépris; 1963), Fritz Lang said of CinemaScope: “It’s only good for funerals and snakes.”
With the big budget Hollywood remake already in production (starring Rusty Crowe), Anything for Her looked like it might have had some entertainment potential but I’m sad to report that it never gets up to speed.
