We interview Kiwi filmmaker Gaylene Preston, ask whether Richard Gere is a genuine Oscar contender for Arbitrage, discuss Fresh Meat (starring Temuera Morrison as a cannibal who just happens to be Māori), plus Toni Collette in Mental.
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Andrew Dominik was born in Wellington but shipped out at the age of two for Australia. We really need to claim him back as he’s one of the most intriguing directors currently working. Perhaps that should be “rarely working” as his latest, Killing Them Softly, is only his third feature credit in 12 years. Chopper turned heads in 2000 and got him to Hollywood. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was an elegiac adaptation of a great novel, the screen version echoing great late-period westerns like Heaven’s Gate and The Long Riders.
In Killing Them Softly, Dominik remains in genre territory but again he is transcending and subverting it. It’s a gangster flick featuring a bunch of familiar figures – James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), Ray Liotta (Goodfellas), Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom). You see those names on the cast list and you think you know what you’re going to get, but here they stretch out in suprising directions, revealing layers of humanity no less ugly than the clichéd bang-bang we are used to, but truer, sadder and ultimately more trenchant.
Ben Affleck’s tense and funny Argo, Academy Award front-runner The Intouchables, Brad Pitt is a philosophical mob enforcer in Killing Them Softly plus Dean Hewison from the Kiwi peeping tom-romcom How to Meet Girls From a Distance.
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Liam Neeson gives the orders in Taken 2, time travel gets an indie twist in Safety Not Guaranteed, 76 year old Ken Loach does whisky in The Angels’ Share and Bradley Cooper cheats his way to another bestseller in The Words.
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After an intense weekend running from picture theatre to picture theatre between – and sometimes during – rain showers, I have now caught up on everything in current local release. Except Tinker Bell and the Secret of the Wings but a Twitter correspondent assures me: “Just FYI my 5 year old great niece loved it so much she stood up at the end clapping & dancing…you should go you’ll love it ;)” and that review might just have to do for now.
A little harder to track down than Tinker Bell, Madagascar 3 or Hotel Transylvania – but well worth the effort – is Arrietty, a Studio Ghibli animated adaptation of The Borrowers, Mary Norton’s famous children’s book about tiny people living under a house who are discovered by a frail young boy who needs a friend. Beautifully animated – as always – and told with emotion and simplicity, Arrietty is a fine alternative to those over-hyped Hollywood confections. The version playing in Wellington is the English voiced one featuring Saoirse Ronan, Olivia Colman and Mark Strong – much easier on the ears than the American voices and much easier to follow for the littlies than the original Japanese.
We catch up with the acapella comedy PITCH PERFECT (that we had to skip last week because of time), Karl Urban’s chin is the star of the new comic book adaptation DREDD 3D and we also go SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN.
