It’s over a week since the last time I published a Cinematica podcast update and we’ve recorded and released two episodes since then.
Last week we spoke to Gerard Smyth, director of When a City Falls about his documentary and life in shuddery Christchurch. You can listen to that episode here:
In that show we also eviscerate Twilight but talk up Project Nim.
Last night Kailey, Simon and I reviewed Arthur Christmas, Immortals, Tomboy and Rest for the Wicked. We had able assistance from NZ actor John Leigh (Stickmen, We’re Here to Help, The Two Towers). It was fun.
Feel free to subscribe via iTunes (or if you are an Apple agnostic there’s a Feedburner subscription option), leave us feedback or ratings. There’s even a Facebook page where you can commune with other Cinematica fans — see the link to the right.
I believe that it should be illegal to even mention the word Christmas in any month other than December. Yup, illegal. No one should be allowed to even breathe it, let alone have parades, display mince pies in supermarkets or throw staff parties. If, as a once-great nation, we can restrict firework sales to three days before Guy Fawkes I’m sure we can manage to pull our collective yuletide-obsessed heads in for a few weeks and focus all that attention on only one month a year.
At least that’s what I thought until last Friday. That was when I saw the new picture from England’s Aardman Animation, Arthur Christmas. I was prepared, based on my aforementioned bah-humbuggery — and some unprepossessing trailers — to be scornful and yet I was won over. Won over to the extent that I might as well be wrapped in tinsel with a fairy on top. Arthur Christmas made me believe in Christmas a week before I was ready.
This film is digital 3D rather than the stop-motion clay models that made Aardman famous, but the invention, wit, pace, structure and commitment to theme are all securely in place, brought to life by an awesome UK voice cast (Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy both do outstanding work) and some brilliantly clever visuals.
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I really don’t want much. It’s simple. All I ask is for someone with talent to take some of their life experience and merge it with that talent in the hope that the resulting work of art might help illuminate some aspect of my life. That’s all. And yet it rarely happens. Which means I’m very grateful that with Beginners, Mike Mills has done exactly that and produced a terrific film that is intensely personal — both to him and to me.
Ewan McGregor plays a gloomy Los Angelean illustrator: lonesome, introspective, self-sabotaging; all lessons learnt growing up an only child in a household where his father was a closeted gay and his mother lived a constrained and lonely life of imagination. When she dies of cancer, McGregor’s father (Christopher Plummer) is freed from the bonds of marriage, comes out at the age of 75 and throws himself whole-heartedly into the the LA gay scene — including posting revealing personal ads and starting a relationship with a budding pyrotechnician named Andy (Goran Visnjic). And then he gets cancer.
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Last night Kailey, Simon and I recorded Episode 4 of the new Cinematica podcast. In it we argue about The Debt, Anonymous and basically agree on The Thing and I Don’t Know How She Does It. I was the only poor bugger who saw Conan the Barbarian. There’s news and banter in there too.
Here it is.
I recommend you head along to iTunes and subscribe so that you never miss an episode. And in a few weeks we’ll be broadcasting each episode live so keep an ear out for that.
It’s over a week since the last time I published a Cinematica podcast update and we’ve recorded and released two episodes since then.
