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Review: The Master, Gangster Squad, Whole Lotta Sole, ParaNorman and To Rome With Love

By Cinema and Reviews

Between its her­al­ded US release in September last year and its arrival in a (very) lim­ited num­ber of New Zealand cinemas this week­end, Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master seems to have been trans­formed from mas­ter­piece and annoin­ted Best Picture con­tender to also-ran, dis­ap­point­ing scores of loc­al PTA fans in the pro­cess, many of whom were crushed that we weren’t going to see the film in the director’s pre­ferred 70mm format. Turns out it was touch and go wheth­er we were going to see it on the big screen at all.

Anderson’s pre­vi­ous film, There Will Be Blood, was a close-run second to No Country For Old Men in my 2007 pick of the year, and his back cata­logue is as rich as any­one else of his gen­er­a­tion – Boogie Nights, Magnolia and even Adam Sandler in Punch-Drunk Love. Like Blood, The Master is painted on a big can­vas. Joaquin Phoenix plays Freddie Quell, an alco­hol­ic and self-hating WWII vet­er­an, stum­bling between mis­ad­ven­tures when he stows away on the San Francisco yacht com­manded by aca­dem­ic, author and mys­tic Lancaster Dodd (Philip Seymour Hoffman). Dodd com­bines rudi­ment­ary psy­cho­ther­apy with hyp­nosis to per­suade gull­ible fol­low­ers that their past lives can be used to trans­form their dis­ap­point­ing present.

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Review: WALL•E, Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D, The Hollow Men, Earth, Step Brothers, Angus, Thongs & Perfect Snogging and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days

By Cinema and Reviews

Back in the 70s, when I was about 8 years old, I watched a film on TV called Silent Running. In it Bruce Dern and three little robots ten­ded the remains of Earth’s plant life on a giant green­house space­ship float­ing some­where between Mars and Jupiter. I cried so much at the shock­ing end­ing (which had lonely robot Dewey, tend­ing the forest with a battered water­ing can while the last of Earth’s flora drif­ted toward the edge of the sol­ar sys­tem) that I don’t think I’ve ever been the same again. Last year, I ren­ted the DVD to see if it had the same effect more than 30 years later and, sure enough, I dis­solved on cue. Remarkable.

WALL•E posterPixar’s new anim­ated tri­umph WALL•E owes a great deal to Silent Running, not least it’s dystop­ic view of human-planet inter­ac­tion but also the faith in the heal­ing power of anthro­po­morph­ic cuboid robots. WALL•E is the last func­tion­ing main­ten­ance robot on an aban­doned Earth, tidy­ing up the enorm­ous moun­tains of garbage left behind 700 years pre­vi­ously by the cow­ardly human pop­u­la­tion who ran for the stars. Lonely, without really know­ing what lonely means, our hero meets EVE, a bril­liant (as in shiny) search robot look­ing for signs of organ­ic life. When she dis­cov­ers some, and leaves to report back, WALL•E hitches a ride and ulti­mately finds him­self sav­ing civilisation.

It was per­haps a little too long for the rest­less pre-schoolers I shared a screen­ing with, but for any­one and every­one else I whole-heartedly recom­mend it. And it won’t make you cry so much you throw up.

Journey to the Center of the Earth 3D posterRegular read­ers will know that I have been quite the cheer­lead­er for the new digit­al 3D tech­no­logy (the U2 con­cert was stun­ning). Sadly, the first “live action” film to be pro­duced using the pro­cess, Journey to the Centre of the Earth 3D, is still more of a side-show stunt than a test of the artist­ic poten­tial of the tech­no­logy. Brendan Fraser plays a geo­lo­gist whose broth­er was lost on an explor­a­tion in some Icelandic caves and when he dis­cov­ers secret coded notes in his brother’s dog-eared copy of the Jules Verne book, he decides to recre­ate the exped­i­tion, tak­ing his neph­ew (plus last week’s CT cov­er girl Anita Briem) along for the ride.

The Hollow Men posterAlister Barry is one of Wellington’s liv­ing treas­ures. His metic­u­lously researched doc­u­ment­ar­ies (includ­ing Someone Else’s Country and In a Land of Plenty) have suc­cess­fully shone a light on the polit­ic­al and eco­nom­ic changes in New Zealand since the ‘new right’ trans­form­a­tion of the mid-80s in a way that nobody in the main­stream media has even attemp­ted. His new film is based on Nicky Hager’s explos­ive exposé of shoddy National Party cam­paign­ing, The Hollow Men, and it’s inter­est­ing to me that the real-life foot­age of Don Brash presents a con­sid­er­ably less sym­path­et­ic por­trait of the man than Stephen Papps’ excel­lent per­form­ance in the stage ver­sion at BATS. The leaked emails from Hager’s book revealed so many shenanigans that it’s hard to keep the story straight but Barry does a good job of emphas­ising that it is essen­tially the same team run­ning National this time around.

Earth posterI was lucky enough to pre­view the gor­geous BBC nature doc­u­ment­ary, Earth, at the Embassy dur­ing the Festival and I’m pleased to see it return there for a short sea­son. Unlike the tedi­ous and repet­it­ive ice doco The White Planet, this film uses the whole plan­et as a can­vas for some mar­vel­lous images and, like WALL•E, the mes­sage is that we are stuff­ing it up at an alarm­ing rate. Only the cutest anim­als and most col­our­ful plants got through the audi­tions and Patrick Stewart plays the Morgan Freeman part as narrator.

Step Brothers posterAfter dis­mal exper­i­ences with Will Ferrell’s recent ice-skating and bas­ket­ball films I wasn’t look­ing for­ward to Step Brothers, a low brow reunite­ment (new word!) with Talladega Nights co-star John C. Reilly, but blow me down I really enjoyed it! Ferrell and Reilly play two 40-year-old men, liv­ing at home, whose solo par­ents meet and marry each oth­er, mak­ing them, you guessed it Step Brothers. It’s a 90 minute riff on one joke but you have to admire their total com­mit­ment to it.

Angus, Things & Perfect Snogging posterAngus, Thongs and Perfect Snogging was made for teen­age girls and I (des­pite my best efforts) am not one but, even though I lack the required cul­tur­al fil­ters, I can’t under­stand why teen­age girls would want to be por­trayed as such shal­low, tedi­ous, screech­ing harpies. Boys, make-up, boys, the right kind of under­wear, boys again. If these are our future lead­ers then I des­pair. Crikey, was Helen Clark like this when she was 14?

4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days posterAll the girls in Angus, Thongs should be sat down and shown the extraordin­ary Romanian film 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days so they can see what their single-minded obses­sion with boys and pop­ular­ity is likely to get them. I’m stoked that someone has decided to release this film (after screen­ings at the World Cinema Showcase in April) as it is undoubtedly a stone-cold mas­ter­piece, well-deserving the Palme D’Or it received at Cannes last year.

Profound, sens­it­ive, emo­tion­ally ardu­ous and per­fectly struc­tured, 4 Months fol­lows a day in the life of stu­dent Otilia (Anamaria Marinca) as she self­lessly tries to organ­ise an abor­tion for her light headed friend Gabita (Laura Vasiliu), while fend­ing off the atten­tions of fam­ily and boy­friend. As close to per­fect as makes no difference.

Printed (for the most part) in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 24 September, 2008. Except for Earth, Step Brothers, Angus, Thongs, etc. and 4 Months which were cut for space.

Review: Rain of the Children, The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor and several more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Rain of the Children posterArguably, the most import­ant film of the year so far opens this week: Rain of the Children restores Vincent Ward’s repu­ta­tion as a sin­gu­lar cinema artist, after the des­per­ate trav­ails of River Queen, and uses the essen­tial New Zealand story of Rua Kenana and the Tuhoe res­ist­ance as vivid back­ground to a uni­ver­sal story of par­ent­hood and loss.

In this film Ward returns to the sub­ject of his first doc­u­ment­ary, In Spring One Plants Alone, a film he made as a naïve 21 year old back in 1979. In that film we watched as 80 year old Puhi attemp­ted to care for her last child, the men­tally ill Niki. In Rain, Ward tells Puhi’s whole story – from her Urewera child­hood, mar­riage to the proph­et Rua’s son, and then the tra­gedies that bore down upon her until she (and the rest of her com­munity) con­sidered her­self cursed.

The full emo­tion­al impact took a while to register with me – long enough that the tears didn’t start until half way through the cred­its. I’d need to see it again before mak­ing the call about “mas­ter­piece” or not, but it cer­tainly felt like that, stand­ing numb in the Wellington rain after the Film Festival screening.

The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor posterI don’t know what I did to deserve the dubi­ous pleas­ure of two Brendan Fraser action flicks in two days, but I can’t say I’m all that grate­ful. Journey to the Centre of the Earth will get it’s review next week but as for The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor the less said the bet­ter. The dis­cov­ery of an aban­doned tomb full of rel­ics in west­ern China brings Fraser and Maria Bello (sub­bing for Rachel Weisz) out of retire­ment just in time for the magic­al Eye of Shangri-La to bring evil Emperor Han (Jet Li) back to life. Li has nev­er been the most express­ive of act­ors and, luck­ily for him, he spends most of the film under a computer-generated mask of stone. It’s what we used to call a romp and is so stuffed with ‘stuff’ that it’s hard to argue that you don’t get your money’s worth, even if it doesn’t amount to a hill of beans.

Taken posterTaken is highly effect­ive, first-rate pulp star­ring Liam Neeson in the kind of role that Charles Bronson or Lee Marvin might have played back in the day. Neeson isn’t as cool as Marvin, but that’s ok as, by choos­ing to play his char­ac­ters faults as well as his strengths, he gives the audi­ence some­thing to con­nect with (amidst all the viol­ence and may­hem). He plays a retired spy, try­ing to recon­nect with his fam­ily who have star­ted over without him. A bit like De Niro in the Fockers films, he’s over-protective, cyn­ic­al and para­noid but when his daugh­ter is kid­napped by white slavers about an hour after arriv­ing in Paris all his fears come true and only he can do the required rescuing.

Son of Rambow posterSon of Rambow pushes plenty of my 80s English nostalgia-buttons (”Screen Test”, cinemas split into smoking and non-smoking sec­tions, Space Dust & Coke cock­tails) but, des­pite that, I nev­er quite man­aged to fall in love with it. 10 year old Plymouth Brethren-ite, Will (Bill Milner) dis­cov­ers Stallone’s First Blood via pir­ate video and is per­suaded by school ter­ror Lee Carter (Will Poulter) to be the stunt­man in his VHS-cam trib­ute. Too reli­ant on the fatherless-child cliché for its drama, and car­toon whimsy for its com­edy, Son of Rambow nev­er quite reaches the heights prom­ised by its cent­ral idea.

Un Secret posterThere’s plenty of excel­lent drama still to be mined from the Holocaust, as Un Secret (from France) and Austrian Oscar win­ner The Counterfeiters prove. In the first film The Diving Bell and the Butterfly’s Mathieu Amalric searches Paris for his fath­er, while in flash­back, he searches his fam­ily his­tory for some­thing to explain his own life. There are plenty of secrets to choose from, and one of the pleas­ures of the film is try­ing to work out which one is the secret of the title.

The Counterfeiters posterWhile Un Secret focuses on a family’s attempts to stay out of the camps, The Counterfeiters locks us inside with the inmates of Sachsenhausen and it’s a hell of a thing. Karl Markovics plays pro­fes­sion­al for­ger Sally Sorowitsch, enlis­ted by the Nazis to provide expert assist­ance for their attempts to flood the Allied eco­nomy with fake bank­notes. Sally sees it as his oppor­tun­ity to avoid the gas cham­bers but not every­one on the team shares his single-minded devo­tion to sur­viv­al and he is forced to engage with his own lack of idealism.

Markovics’ remark­able cheekbones provide excel­lent archi­tec­ture to inspire Benedict Neuenfels’ superb high con­trast cine­ma­to­graphy and The Counterfeiters is grip­ping, mov­ing and pro­voc­at­ive throughout.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 17 September, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: For once, little to com­plain about. Rain of the Children as intim­ated in the body copy, was at a packed Film Festival mat­inée at the Embassy; The Mummy was also at the Embassy, although more recently, Taken was at Readings 2, cour­tesy of a pass from Fox, Son of Rambow (which was the cause of some con­sterna­tion last week) was a tor­rent; Un Secret was screened from a pre­view DVD from Hoyts Distribution (due to the already alluded to Penthouse prob­lems) and The Counterfeiters was in the big room at the Paramount where it was a little too quiet (not the end of the world with sub­titles) and the print had def­in­itely been around the block a few times.