Skip to main content
search
Tag

the collector

Mar 10 2011
Love0

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.

Read More

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.

Read More

Dec 27 2010
Love0

Review: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, The Collector, Skin & I, Don Giovanni

By Cinema and Reviews

Scott Pilgrim vs. the World posterYour 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 film, the heav­ily pro­moted com­ic book adapt­a­tion Scott Pilgrim vs. the World which opened world­wide this week. And I really wanted to like it. No, strike that. I did like it. I just didn’t love it the way the film so des­per­ately wants to be loved.

Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera from Juno) is a young Toronto slack­er who plays bass in a ter­rible band and has just begun dat­ing a high school girl. If he seems without much in the way of ambi­tion that may be because he is still griev­ing after being dumped a year ago, or it may be that he simply lacks ambition.

Read More

Close Menu