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lars von trier

Review: The Adventures of Tintin, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Alvin and the Chipmunks: Chipwrecked, The Muppets, The Salt of Life, The Iron Lady and Melancholia

By Cinema and Reviews

Like stu­dents swot­ting for exams New Zealand film dis­trib­ut­ors seem to have run out of year for all the films they have to release so there are some really big names being squeezed into the next two weeks. If you can’t find some­thing to watch on – the inev­it­ably wet – Boxing Day next Monday, then I sus­pect you don’t really like movies at all. And if that sounds like you, why are you still reading?

The biggest of the big names this Christmas has got to be The Adventures of Tintin. Despite Steven Spielberg’s name on the tin, it’s almost a loc­al pro­duc­tion when you con­sider the tech­no­logy and skills that went into its man­u­fac­ture, so we all have a small stake in its suc­cess. Luckily, Europe has embraced it so a second film has already been con­firmed – and will be made here.

But enough of the cheer­lead­ing – what did I think of it? It’s good, really good. The per­form­ance cap­ture and char­ac­ter design works bet­ter than ever before, Spielberg has embraced the free­dom from the laws of phys­ics that anim­a­tion allows and throws the cam­era around with gay aban­don – but always with pan­ache and not to the point of motion sick­ness. Many of the visu­al gags are ter­rif­ic and Andy Serkis as Haddock proves that there is no one bet­ter at act­ing under a lay­er of black dots and ping pong balls.

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2010 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

By Cinema

So, after trawl­ing through the many thou­sands of words writ­ten about cinema in these pages this year, I sup­pose you want me to come to some con­clu­sions? Do some “sum­ming up”? Help guide you through the great video store of life? Well, alright then. Here goes.

We don’t do Top Ten lists here at the Capital Times – they are reduct­ive, facile and, frankly, you have to leave too many titles out. I have taken to divid­ing my year’s view­ing up into cat­egor­ies: keep­ers are films I want to have in my home and watch whenev­er the mood takes me; renters are the films that I could hap­pily watch again; then there are the films that I enjoyed but am in no hurry to repeat, the films I might have mis­judged first time around, the films I can’t get out of my head (for bet­ter or worse), the films I am sup­posed to love but you know, meh, and most import­ant of all – the films you should avoid as if your very life depends upon it.

First, the keep­ers: a sur­prise for some will be Fantastic Mr. Fox which was released after my 2009 Year in Review was sub­mit­ted and the only film in the list that I already own. Animal Kingdom was the film I most recom­men­ded this year – a stun­ning, tense piece of work that gripped me totally.

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Review: The Blind Side, The Book of Eli, Antichrist & Letters to Juliet

By Cinema and Reviews

God is in the house this week. He turns up in the val­ues of a wealthy Tennessee fam­ily who adopt a poor black kid and turn him into a cham­pi­on, He fea­tures in a big leath­er book car­ried across a post-apocalyptic America by enig­mat­ic Denzel Washington, and He is not­able for His absence in a Lars von Trier shock­er that is unlike any­thing you will have seen before or see since.

First, the good ver­sion. Based on a best selling book by Michael Lewis, The Blind Side would not have made it New Zealand screens if it wasn’t for Sandra Bullock’s sur­prise Oscar win earli­er this year and it’s easy to see why dis­trib­ut­ors might have left it on the shelf. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t. My com­pan­ion had no know­ledge of, or affin­ity for, American Football or the com­plex and baff­ling col­lege sports struc­ture and was, there­fore, a bit left out of a story that man­aged to push all my but­tons fairly effortlessly.

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Review: There Will Be Blood, 27 Dresses, Rogue Assassin and Red Road

By Cinema and Reviews

There Will Be Blood posterLike the buses on Courtenay Place after 8 o’clock on a Sunday night, you can wait what seems like forever for a cinema mas­ter­piece and then two come along at once. Like No Country for Old Men, P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is an American clas­sic and you’d be hard-pushed to slip a play­ing card between them in terms of quality.

Dedicated to Anderson’s hero, Robert Altman, Blood is a beast of a dif­fer­ent col­our to Old Men: a heavy-weight Western-style epic pour­ing oil on the myth of the American dream and then drop­ping a match on it. The amaz­ing Daniel Day-Lewis plays inde­pend­ent pro­spect­or, oil man and mis­an­thrope Daniel Plainview. Determined to sep­ar­ate simple people from the oil under their feet he uses his adop­ted child in order to resemble an hon­est fam­ily man while he plots the down­fall of his enemies.

There Will Be Blood ruth­lessly dis­sects the two com­pet­ing powers of 20th Century American life: cap­it­al­ism and reli­gion, each as cyn­ic­al and cor­rupt as the oth­er. Paul Dano (the com­ic­ally mute son in Little Miss Sunshine) is a rev­el­a­tion as cha­ris­mat­ic pas­tor Eli Sunday, the only char­ac­ter strong enough to mer­it a battle of wills with Plainview – a battle to the finish.

27 Dresses posterListless rom-com 27 Dresses comes to life for one amus­ing mont­age of wed­dings and dresses (about half way in) but oth­er­wise this star-vehicle for Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up) seems under-powered. She’s joined in the film by James Marsden (Enchanted) (not nor­mally a cause for rejoicing, and so it proves once again here) and Malin Akerman (The Heartbreak Kid) who isn’t nearly as funny as she thinks she is. Heigl plays a sup­posedly plain, self-effacing, young woman who organ­ises the lives (and wed­dings) of all those around her while secretly pin­ing for a wed­ding of her own with Boss Ed Burns.

Rogue Assassin posterRogue Assassin is big and dumb and doesn’t even suc­ceed on it’s own lim­ited terms. Former mem­ber of the British Olympic Diving Team, Jason Statham (Crank) plays an inex­plic­ably English-accented FBI agent in the Asian Crime Unit. He’s on the trail of an ex-CIA hit­man named Rogue (Jet Li) who is engaged in a Yojimbo-like plot to des­troy San Francisco’s Yakuza and Triad gangs. Fans of Jet Li’s trade­mark bal­let­ic mar­tial arts will be dis­ap­poin­ted as any­thing more than stand­ing around look­ing stern seems to be bey­ond him now. The daft twist at the end will provide some much-needed amusement.

Red Road posterDanish pro­vocateur dir­ect­or Lars von Trier recently announced his retire­ment from film­mak­ing due to depres­sion. He hasn’t ceased involve­ment in film, though, as his com­pany Zentropa is still pro­du­cing some of the most unusu­al and chal­len­ging films around and Red Road is a per­fect example, the first release in a new pro­ject called The Advance Party. Zentropa pro­du­cers Lone Scherfig & Anders Thomas Jensen (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) cre­ated sev­er­al char­ac­ters and then gave those char­ac­ters (and a set of rules about how they should be used) to three writer-directors in the hope that the three films togeth­er would prove great­er than the sum of the parts.

The first film, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, isn’t just an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment, it’s actu­ally very good. Lonely Glasgow CCTV oper­at­or Jackie (Kate Dickie) is haunted by an unspe­cified tragedy from her past. When she sees an unex­pec­ted face on her mon­it­or she, in spite of her­self, is forced to con­front him and her own grief. The Red Road coun­cil estate, that gives the film it’s name, makes Newtown Park Flats look like the Isle of Capri, and the whole thing has a Loach-ian grit that is hap­pily well-balanced by some beau­ti­ful cine­ma­to­graphy. The film itself plays out slowly, but not inev­it­ably, and the sur­prise rev­el­a­tion at the end is less power­ful but some­how more mov­ing than you expect.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 20 February, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: There Will Be Blood screened at Rialto Wellington on Saturday after­noon. The image was incor­rectly masked so that the ver­tic­al cyan soundtrack along the left of the screen was clearly vis­ible through­out. The pro­jec­tion­ist was aler­ted but he shrugged his shoulders and said there was noth­ing he could do about it. We have about six more weeks of Rialto Wellington and I volun­teer to swing the first wrecking-ball.