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mad men

Review: Saw VII (3D), Hall Pass, I Am Number Four and The Adjustment Bureau

By Cinema and Reviews

If ali­ens have been look­ing down on Earth, watch­ing us with love and amuse­ment over the last few mil­lion years (as so many movies have told us they are), they will surely be very wor­ried about recent devel­op­ments in our cul­ture and what it all means for us as a spe­cies. I know I am.

Saw 3D posterOn the sur­face, the cine­mat­ic trend towards “tor­ture porn” films like Hostel and Saw – and their even more dis­mal cous­in The Collector – betrays a weird human human abil­ity to take pleas­ure in the extreme pain of oth­ers that is at odds with how we most of us actu­ally live our lives. I’m curi­ous. What does it all mean?

This was the ques­tion I found myself ask­ing as I watched Kevin Greutart’s Saw VII on Saturday after­noon (I say “watched” as, per usu­al, I found myself star­ing at the cinema EXIT signs dur­ing the more grue­some pas­sages). On closer inspec­tion it’s clear that what we have here is an Old Testament-style mor­al­ity tale, updated for the attention-deficit, sensation-seeking, mod­ern generation.

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“I was on the bottom of everyone’s list.”

By Asides, Cinema and TV

Jon Hamm (“Mad Men”) describes the life of a not-very-successful Hollywood act­or in The Guardian:

And there’s this hideous thing they make you do when you go up for a tele­vi­sion show: they make you sign a con­tract before you walk into the final audi­tion. The last thing they want is for you to have every­one fall in love with you, and then you not have a deal in place. So you sign this thing – and I had no money; I was broke. You’re star­ing at the five-figure pay cheque you’ll get… if… If! A crazy amount of money for someone who has none. So I was think­ing: I’ll pay my loans off and do this and that and maybe get my car fixed… and by that time they’re call­ing you in, you’re like: ‘Shit! I have to do the scene! What the fuck are the lines?’ I would get hung up on that stuff and be an utter fail­ure in the room.”

Hamm dis­plays an admir­able amount of self-awareness in this inter­view, pro­mot­ing his new fea­ture film The Town (dir­ec­ted by Ben Affleck). Part of Hamm’s suc­cess as Don Draper is the tiny amount of “I can­’t quite believe this is hap­pen­ing to me” he man­ages to project.

Hat-tip to The Story Department.

Review: Julie & Julia, Food, Inc., Saw VI, Surrogates, Tyson, Monty Python- Almost the Truth and The Crimson Wing

By Cinema and Reviews

Back before the days of “Iron Chef”, “Masterchef” and “Hell’s Kitchen”, television’s top food expert was a very tall, slightly ungainly, woman who soun­ded a little drunk. She was Julia Child and in the 60s she taught America how to cook. In an era where tv din­ners, pre-prepared sauces and easy cake mixes were top of a busy housewife’s shop­ping list, Child pro­duced the almighty tome Mastering the Art of French Cooking which went on to sell mil­lions of cop­ies and make her a legend.

A little later on, 2002 in fact, New Yorker Julie Powell star­ted an online pro­ject to repro­duce every recipe in the fam­ous cook­book (over 500 of them) in a single year. Nora Ephron’s new film Julie & Julia skil­fully merges the two stor­ies, freely not­ing the par­al­lels between them, and man­aging to pro­duce a warm and witty film that hon­ours the remark­able Child.

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Review: Gran Torino, Beauty in Trouble, Revolutionary Road, Bride Wars, Hotel for Dogs, Bustin’ Down the Door, Female Agents and Man on Wire

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Gran Torino posterClint 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 ori­gin­al res­id­ents still around as the neigh­bour­hood fills up with Hmong immig­rants. In a gang ini­ti­ation his teen­age neigh­bour Thao tries to steal Walt’s beloved 1972 Gran Torino (a car he helped build on the Ford assembly line) and, as pen­ance, the kid is forced to work for Walt over the sum­mer. They get to know each oth­er – and the threat from the Hmong gang-bangers who now have an axe to grind with Walt as well as Thao and his family.

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Review: The Day the Earth Stood Still

By Cinema and Reviews

Finally, we have a week with only one new film in it: a chance for me to stretch my legs, extem­por­ise, riff a little, get my hands dirty. Yeah, I’ve been look­ing for­ward to this, to prove I can be a real film crit­ic and write eru­dite and cul­tured prose; place a film in its wider social, polit­ic­al and cul­tur­al con­text; dis­cuss mise-en-scène and die­get­ic register, all the while provid­ing a riv­et­ing (and undeni­ably “cor­rect”) per­spect­ive on the film’s mer­its and qual­it­ies. Cool.

The Day the Earth Stood Still posterUnfortunately, the film that stands alone this week is the Keanu Reeves remake of the 1951 clas­sic The Day the Earth Stood Still and frankly its hardly worth the both­er. The ori­gin­al film was a pulp par­able play­ing on the nuc­le­ar para­noia of “duck and cov­er” America: an ali­en lands in Central Park to tell us that he’s going to des­troy the human race because we don’t deserve to live (we are war­like, bru­tal and selfish creatures you see, and the earth is too pre­cious to be left in our care). But, the stern humanoid ali­en Klaatu softens on con­tact with a human child and real­ises that our capa­city for change makes us worth per­sever­ing with. Naïve but satisfying.

The new ver­sion keeps the guts of the story intact (eco­lo­gic­al doom and home­land secur­ity make up the new para­noia) while over­blow­ing everything else to giant size. Reeves dead­pans his way through as Klaatu (sens­ibly stay­ing well with­in the lim­its of his range) and he’s joined by the mid-market star power of Jennifer Connelly, “Mad Men“ ‘s ‘Don Draper’ him­self (the unfor­tu­nately named Jon Hamm), Kathy Bates and a mis­cast John Cleese. Kid duty is done by Will Smith’s little boy Jaden who made such an impres­sion in last year’s The Pursuit of Happyness.

I had high hopes for this, based on some evoc­at­ive trail­ers, but the real­ity is a dis­ap­point­ment. The plot­ting is messy and incon­clus­ive and the effects look murky and rushed. The whole thing looks like someone lost con­fid­ence half way through shoot­ing, then decided to cut the budget in half and hope for the best.

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

Simpsons meet Mad Men

By Asides, Humour and TV

In lieu of some­thing more sub­stant­ive, and just before I crash for the night:

[kml_flashembed movie="http://videogum.com/v/YfTNFhdejPlq6" width="448" height="356" wmode="transparent" /]

[from this year’s Treehouse of Horror, via Kottke and Videogum]