Only one film for review this week: Paul is the third feature to be written by and star Nick Frost and Simon Pegg, responsible for two of my favourite films of the last decade, Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. This time around they’re not joined by director Edgar Wright (busy with his own …
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Your correspondent is a big fan of young English director Edgar Wright. His first two features, in collaboration with Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, were the redoubtably entertaining Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. There’s a wonderful percussive energy to Wright’s filmmaking which brooks no boredom. So, I was looking forward to his latest […]
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Is it too early to suggest that we might be living in a golden age of cinema? Think of the filmmakers working in the commercial realm these days who have distinctive voices, thrilling visual sensibilities, solid intellectual (and often moral) foundations, a passion for combining entertainment with something more — along with an abiding love […]
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And not just any blogger. Hot Fuzz director Edgar Wright’s moving memorial to Edward Woodward was lifted without so much as a by-your-leave by The Times for it’s obituary page: They just lifted it from my blog without asking?…?I’m not talking about quotes. Am talking about the entire article. But with edits they made that make […]
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My normal, equable, approach to Hollywood blockbuster product has been upset this week by the news that, in a decision of quite breathtaking cynicism, Warner Bros. are going to split the final Harry Potter film (The Deathly Hallows due in 2010) in to two parts and thus, with a wave of a Potter-like wand, make …
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This week’s Capital Times film review featuring Hot Fuzz (Edgar Wright); The Marine (John Bonito); Wild Hogs (Walt Becker); The Science of Sleep (Michel Gondry); Brasileirinho (Mika Kaurismäki); Smokin’ Aces (Joe Carnahan). It got to 650 words and my limit is supposed to be 550 so I’m expecting to lose a film before it gets to print.
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Dan Slevin is a New Zealand-based writer, broadcaster and consultant. He has reviewed cinema for the Capital Times weekly newspaper since September 2006, 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.”