2009 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

by Dan on January 15, 2010

in Cinema and Culture

Wel­come to the 2010 “cut out and keep” guide to video rent­ing (or down­load­ing or how­ever you con­sume your home enter­tain­ment these days). I sug­gest you clip this art­icle, fold it up, stick it in your wal­let or purse and refer to it whenever you are at the video shop, look­ing for some­thing to while away the long winter even­ings of 2010.

Slumdog Millionaire posterFirst up, the ones to buy – the Keep­ers. These are the films that (if you share my psy­cho­logy and some of my patho­lo­gies) you will cher­ish until you are old and the tech­no­logy to play them no longer exists. Best film of the year remains Danny Boyle’s Slum­dog Mil­lion­aire. Mash­ing together sev­eral archetypal stor­ies with a vivid visual style and a per­cuss­ive energy, Slum­dog may not rep­res­ent India as it actu­ally is but instead suc­cess­fully evoked what India feels like, which is argu­ably more import­ant. After Slum­dog everything I saw seemed, you know, old-fashioned and noth­ing has been any­where nearly as thrill­ing since. There are films you respect, films you admire and films you love. Slum­dog is a film you adore. “Who wants to be a … miy­on­aire?” indeed.

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Review: Avatar, Five Minutes of Heaven, Bandslam & Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

by Dan on January 1, 2010

in Cinema, Culture and Reviews

Avatar posterThere have only been asked two ques­tions that any­body has been ask­ing me this week: “Have you seen Avatar?” and “Is it any good?” Thanks to the help­ful people at Read­ings I can say “Yes” to the first one and thanks to James Cameron I can say “Whoah” to the second.

Like many Wel­ling­to­ni­ans, I have been fol­low­ing Avatar’s pro­gress since pro­duc­tion star­ted in 2007 and it’s almost impossible to be genu­inely object­ive. It’s only nat­ural for loc­als to try and claim some own­er­ship of a pro­ject like this and we are all a tiny bit inves­ted in its suc­cess. The hype has cer­tainly been hard to avoid so I was slightly pleased when the fif­teen minute extract on “Avatar Day” didn’t fill me with delighted anti­cip­a­tion. I couldn’t quite my head around the char­ac­ter design of the Na’vi (the indi­gen­ous race peace­fully pop­u­lat­ing the beau­ti­ful but deadly planet of Pan­dora). The blue – the tails – the ears. I couldn’t for the life of me work out how these char­ac­ters were going to be cool and I thought that *cool* was going to be important.

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Decade in Review

December 30, 2009

Not by me.
Christ, I’m too busy with being on hol­i­day and pre­par­ing for my forth­com­ing return to the Wel­ling­ton stage to think about sum­ming up a dec­ade in cinema (par­tic­u­larly as I wasn’t watch­ing much film for the first half of it).
Luck­ily, Ant Timpson has done the work for me. Check out his two lists (Best of […]

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Review: Where the Wild Things Are, The Informant!, The Time Traveller’s Wife, Zombieland and The Cake Eaters

December 22, 2009
Where the Wild Things Are poster

Is it too early to sug­gest that we might be liv­ing in a golden age of cinema? Think of the film­makers work­ing in the com­mer­cial realm these days who have dis­tinct­ive voices, thrill­ing visual sens­ib­il­it­ies, solid intel­lec­tual (and often moral) found­a­tions, a pas­sion for com­bin­ing enter­tain­ment with some­thing more — along with an abid­ing love […]

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Review: The Invention of Lying, Jennifer’s Body, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs and four more …

December 6, 2009
The Invention of Lying poster

This past week may have been the most con­sist­ently sat­is­fy­ing week of cinema-going since I star­ted this jour­ney with you back in 2006: seven very dif­fer­ent films, all with some­thing to offer. And no tur­keys this week, so I’ll have to put the acid away until next week.
In com­pletely arbit­rary order (of view­ing in fact), let’s […]

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Review: A Serious Man, Adam, What Just Happened, Flame & Citron and The Twilight Saga: New Moon

December 6, 2009
A Serious Man poster

We’re born alone and we die alone and in between noth­ing goes accord­ing to plan and the people around us are mostly unre­li­able and occa­sion­ally malevol­ent. Mean­while, God either doesn’t exist or is indif­fer­ent to our suf­fer­ing. Either way, A Ser­i­ous Man, the new film by the prodi­giously gif­ted Coen Broth­ers, is a very serious […]

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It’s all gravy

November 30, 2009

May I dir­ect your atten­tion to the new series of “The Gravy”, a top notch art doc­u­ment­ary series from Wellington’s Sticky Pic­tures. There’s a heapin’ helpin’ of inter­est­ing con­tent lined up includ­ing a whole epis­ode on theatre-maker Jo Rander­son and her show Good Night — The End (Down­stage, Sep 2009). That’s S04E03, folks. Also of […]

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Review: 2012, The Vintner’s Luck, Away We Go and [REC]2

November 24, 2009
2012 poster

After nearly three and a half years of pro­du­cing this cinem­a­goers’ con­sumer guide, per­haps its time for a state­ment of intent. A mani­festo, if you will. Some­thing to place these mus­ings in per­spect­ive as you skim through them over Morn­ing Tea.
I try and find some­thing good and inter­est­ing in everything I see, and I see pretty […]

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Review: Two Lovers, My Sister’s Keeper, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus and A Christmas Carol

November 18, 2009
Two Lovers poster

At what point in a man’s life does he decide to become a dry cleaner? For Joa­quin Phoenix’s char­ac­ter, Leonard Krad­itor, in Two Lov­ers that day is never and yet he still finds him­self to be one. He’s a sens­it­ive soul whose men­tal health issues have res­ul­ted in sev­eral sui­cide attempts, a per­man­ent rela­tion­ship with […]

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Review: Michael Jackson’s This is It, My Year Without Sex, The Limits of Control and Black Ice

November 14, 2009
Thi is It poster

Full dis­clos­ure: I wrote a play about Michael Jack­son once (“Dirty Doris”, BATS 1995) so I’ll con­fess to always being inter­ested in the real char­ac­ter behind the tabloid and music video façade so the arrival of This is It (what some have described as a cheap cash-in flick) is of more than passing interest to me.
And […]

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