Of all directors currently working in the Hollywood mainstream Michael Mann is arguably the greatest stylist. No one at the multiplex has more control of the pure aesthetics of filmmaking, from colour balance and composition through editing and sound, Mann’s films (from Thief in 1981 to the misguided reworking of Miami Vice in 2006) have …
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After hits like Bad Boys and The Rock, as well as failures like The Island and Pearl Harbor, we all know that Michael Bay is better than any director alive at blowing things up and in the motion picture business this not an ignoble pursuit. What he can’t pull off are other important things like […]
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I can just imagine the Monday morning when a development executive stumbled across the script of The Hangover. It wouldn’t have taken him long to realise that he’d discovered modern Hollywood’s holy grail — a perfectly realised men-behaving-badly movie, so well-written and cleverly structured that he wouldn’t need any big stars or a marquee director. […]
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Ron Howard’s Angels & Demons, sequel to the blockbuster Da Vinci Code from 2006, is what you might call an equal opportunity annoyance — happily misrepresenting theology and science. Tom Hanks returns as Harvard scholar Robert Langdon, this time summoned to Rome by mysterious Vatican security to investigate the kidnapping of four Cardinals on the eve […]
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A friend of mine auditioned for Underworld: Rise of the Lycans (produced in Auckland in 2006) and didn’t get a part. I was pleased to report to him yesterday that he had dodged a (silver) bullet there as this nonsensical prequel to the Kate Beckinsale leather-fetishists fantasy series was not going to do anyone’s career […]
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I don’t have much room this week and I want to spend most of it gushing over Slumdog Millionaire so let’s get started. Back in 2003, when the Incredibly Strange Film Festival was still its own bumptious stand-alone anarchic self, we opened the Festival with the summer camp spoof Wet Hot American Summer and goodness […]
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