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Review: Killing Them Softly, The Angels’ Share, Safety Not Guaranteed, Frankenweenie, Paranormal Activity 4 and God Bless America

By Cinema and Reviews

Andrew Dominik was born in Wellington but shipped out at the age of two for Australia. We really need to claim him back as he’s one of the most intriguing dir­ect­ors cur­rently work­ing. Perhaps that should be “rarely work­ing” as his latest, Killing Them Softly, is only his third fea­ture cred­it in 12 years. Chopper turned heads in 2000 and got him to Hollywood. The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford was an ele­gi­ac adapt­a­tion of a great nov­el, the screen ver­sion echo­ing great late-period west­erns like Heaven’s Gate and The Long Riders.

In Killing Them Softly, Dominik remains in genre ter­rit­ory but again he is tran­scend­ing and sub­vert­ing it. It’s a gang­ster flick fea­tur­ing a bunch of famil­i­ar fig­ures – James Gandolfini (The Sopranos), Ray Liotta (Goodfellas), Ben Mendelsohn (Animal Kingdom). You see those names on the cast list and you think you know what you’re going to get, but here they stretch out in supris­ing dir­ec­tions, reveal­ing lay­ers of human­ity no less ugly than the clichéd bang-bang we are used to, but truer, sad­der and ulti­mately more trenchant.

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(500) Days of Summer poster

Review: (500) Days of Summer, Samson and Delilah and In the Loop

By Cinema and Reviews

The romantic com­edy is moribund. The first traces of its demise can be dated to the turn of the mil­leni­um, when Hugh Grant decided that he didn’t really want to be the floppy-haired object of middle-class women’s affec­tions. Since then, the genre has been a reli­able pro­du­cer of tired and cyn­ic­al “battles of the sexes” or grown-up fables in which a self-centred man-child dis­cov­ers unlikely love via a woman who is palp­ably too good for him. Earlier this year The Ugly Truth scraped the bot­tom of that bar­rel by try­ing to merge both forms and has yet to be sur­passed as worst film of the year.

(500) Days of Summer posterSo, if ever there was a genre ripe for reboot (like Star Trek earli­er this year) it is the romantic com­edy and, because nature abhors a vacu­um, we now get one. It’s called (500) Days of Summer and it may well be one of the best films of the year.

The time is present day Los Angeles (a street-level Los Angeles not a mil­lion miles away from the charm­ing In Search of a Midnight Kiss earli­er this year) and our hero (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young vis­ion­ary who no longer believes in him­self: an archi­tect stuck in a dead-end job writ­ing greet­ing cards. He meets his boss’s beau­ti­ful new assist­ant Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and they bond over The Smiths. He is besot­ted. She, not so much, but they start an affair.

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Review: The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, I Love You, Beth Cooper and four more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 posterOne of the Film Society high­lights in recent years was the spe­cial screen­ing (on lus­trous 35mm) of the 70s clas­sic thrill­er The Taking of Pelham One Two Three about the hijack­ing of a New York sub­way train. It was a won­der­ful exper­i­ence for many dif­fer­ent reas­ons – a cyn­ic­al love let­ter to a decrep­it, bank­rupt and graffiti-covered city; an ordin­ary guy hero that audi­ences these days would nev­er be allowed to accept (played by grizzled old Walter Matthau) and Robert Shaw (from Jaws and The Sting) chew­ing the scenery as the vil­lain hold­ing a city to ransom.

Thus my heart sank when the remake was announced, par­tic­u­larly the choice of styl­ist (over sub­stance) Tony Scott as dir­ect­or. His recent films like Domino and Déjà Vu have been full of music video fan­ci­ness, giv­ing his act­ors no room to breathe – he’s the Scott you get when you can’t have his broth­er Ridley.

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