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Jan 01 2011
Love0

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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Nov 30 2010
Love0

“... a fine British tradition of plucky, have-a-go heroes.”

By Asides, Cinema

It’s award sea­son every­where but I have to con­fess some admir­a­tion for the Irina Palm d’Or:

For crit­ics, such films have now become a fact of life, the lumpen low-budget yang to the sprightly, ingeni­ous yin of, say, Nick Whitfield’s Skeletons and Gareth Edwards’s forth­com­ing Monsters. Barber con­fesses to a cer­tain admir­a­tion for the prizewin­ners thus far: “We’ve all heard how dif­fi­cult it is to get a film made in Britain, so when you see one that seems like a ter­rible idea on every level, you do have a weird kind of respect for who­ever got it up there on the screen. Irina-makers belong to a fine British tra­di­tion of plucky, have-a-go heroes.”

[From The Irina Palm d’Or: And the loser is … | Film | guardian.co.uk]

For what it’s worth I did­n’t seem to mind Irina Palm.

Nov 24 2010
Love0

Review: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1, Monsters and Lebanon

By Cinema, Reviews

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt 1 posterHarry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1 is the sev­enth film in the series but only the third that I’ve had to review in these pages. Sadly, my con­clu­sions are almost always the same – and almost always irrel­ev­ant. These films are increas­ingly made for Potter fans only and there are so many of them that box office suc­cess is guar­an­teed regard­less of churls like me.

And, of course, the Potter films are as import­ant to the British film industry as The Hobbit is to ours – hence why the final book in the saga has been, in a breath­tak­ing act of com­mer­cial cyn­icism, been split in to two block­buster films. If you were expect­ing any kind of con­clu­sion (sat­is­fact­ory or not) then you’ll have to wait until June. Maybe.

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