I made the mistake of watching The Dark Knight Rises twice last week. The first time was entertaining enough, I suppose. The opening set-piece — in which a CIA renditions plane is hijacked in mid-air by it’s own cargo — is brilliantly conceived but pointless, Anne Hathaway’s Catwoman is a breath of fresh air and …
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Expat Kiwi auteur Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) somehow always manages to tap in to the zeitgeist and with new sci-fi thriller In Time his own timing is almost spookily perfect. A parable about the modern political economy, In Time isn’t a particularly sophisticated analysis but while protestors occupy Wall Street, St Paul’s in London and the …
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This year the summer holidays seemed to have been owned by the unlikely figure of T.J. Miller, deadpan comedian, supporting actor and eerily familiar background figure. In Yogi Bear he was the ambitious but dim deputy park ranger easily duped by Andrew Daly’s smarmy Mayor into helping him sell out Jellystone to corporate logging interests, […]
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J.J. Abrams reinvention of Star Trek is as thrilling a ride as we have seen anywhere this year. The franchise has been re-booted (as the saying goes) and re-started from before the beginning of The Original Series as Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc go on their first voyage together and take on their first universe-threatening mad […]
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Clint Eastwood has been on our screens for over 50 years and at 78 years old he has decided to call it a day and his valedictory performance in Gran Torino is completely worthy of the man. Eastwood plays Walt Kowalski, a working class widower living on a suburban Detroit street, one of the few …
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This week’s Capital Times cinema review: The Devil Wears Prada (Directed by Dravid Frankel); The Guardian (directed by Andrew Davis); Gridiron Gang (directed by Phil Joanou); Renaissance (directed by Christian Volckman); C.R.A.Z.Y. (directed by Jean-Marc Vallée); Who Killed The Electric Car? (directed by Chris Paine)
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He was cinema reviewer for the Capital Times weekly newspaper from September 2006 until its demise in April 2013, seeing and reviewing every film commercially released in Wellington in that time (except, for some reason, Flicka or Beverly Hills Chihuahua).
Dan is a regular contributor to Radio New Zealand National’s Nine to Noon programme and produces and co-hosts the weekly movie podcast, Cinematica.
In addition to being the finest swordsman in all France, he is also the meanest hombre west of the Pecos. He tweets here.
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.”