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February 2008

Feb 18 2008
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Recommended Reading: Jane Campion on Janet Frame

By Asides, Cinema, Literature, NZ

A little late, but still recom­men­ded, Jane Campion remem­bers Janet Frame and mak­ing An Angel at My Table, in The Guardian:

Each room and even parts of rooms were ded­ic­ated to a dif­fer­ent book in pro­gress. Here and there she had hung cur­tains to divide up the rooms like they do in hos­pit­al wards to give the patients pri­vacy. On the desk where she had last been work­ing was a pair of earmuffs.

“I can­’t bear any sound,” she explained. “The double bricks haven’t worked. I think I will have to move.”

Feb 13 2008
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Review: Fool’s Gold, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story and Air Guitar Nation

By Cinema, Reviews

Fool's Gold posterIn 2003 the paper-thin romantic com­edy How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days paired Matthew McConaughey with Kate Hudson and made over 100 mil­lion dol­lars. The rules of Hollywood eco­nom­ics, plus the over­whelm­ing dic­tates of focus groups and research­ers, meant they would have to be reunited. So, as soon as Hudson’s baby-body was fit to be seen in a tiny bikini, they were off to the Bahamas to make Fool’s Gold, a bur­ied treas­ure adven­ture set among the rich and beautiful.

McConaughey plays “Finn” Finnegan, a treas­ure hunter, and Hudson his soon-to-be ex-wife. She’s divor­cing him because she’s a tight-ass and wants to fin­ish her PhD. He is hope­lessly in debt to hip-hop super­star Bigg Bunny who has been fund­ing his search for lost Spanish gold. When he dis­cov­ers a din­ner plate sized clue he suck­ers Hudson and super yacht own­er Donald Sutherland into join­ing the search, des­pite the viol­ent atten­tions of Mr Bunny and com­pet­i­tion from dodgy accen­ted Ray Winstone.

Matthew McConaughey isn’t the lazi­est of our male Hollywood stars (Nic Cage takes that prize) but he has coas­ted for an enorm­ous amount of time on what some might see as charm alone. Fool’s Gold doesn’t change that approach and your enjoy­ment will depend entirely on how much you appre­ci­ate McConaughey’s cha­risma as there isn’t much else to enjoy. Despite the Caribbean set­ting all the black char­ac­ters are either vil­lains or buf­foons or both, Bigg Bunny (Kevin Hart) alone man­ages to sup­ply two objec­tion­able ste­reo­types at once. I hope that isn’t the res­ult of a Hollywood focus group.

Walk Hard posterWalk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story tells a heart-rending, and repair­ing, story of tragedy and redemp­tion in the music busi­ness. Inspired by classy bio-pics like Walk the Line and Ray (and even La Vie En Rose, prob­ably), Walk Hard stars per­en­ni­al sidekick John C. Reilly as the eponym­ous Dewey, dumber than a sack of ham­mers but with a heart of lead, as he over­comes the tra­gic death of his broth­er in a machete acci­dent (“the wrong kid died”, says his stone-faced fath­er at every oppor­tun­ity), the loss of his sense of smell and addic­tion to every sub­stance on the plan­et short of cinnamon.

Films like Walk Hard are always hit and miss affairs and this one runs about 50–50. The tar­gets are pretty soft, how­ever, and I’d hoped that a writ­ing team that includes Judd (Knocked Up) Apatow might have aimed a little high­er. The best things in the film are the songs, well sung by the tal­en­ted Reilly: my favour­ite is the 60s pro-midget protest song “Let Me Hold You, Little Man”.

Air Guitar Nation posterIt’s very hard to focus on a film when you spend most of it shak­ing your head in dis­be­lief. Air Guitar Nation is a doc­u­ment­ary fol­low­ing the first two American con­tenders in the well-established World Air Guitar Championship in Finland. The Yanks may have inven­ted Rock but they have come second to the Air Guitar party, strug­gling with the more high-level con­cepts (“You can­’t hold a gun, if you’ve got an air gui­tar in your hand”) and the ser­i­ous intent of the Northern Europeans. But they do have old-fashioned show­man­ship on their side. Diverting.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 13 February, 2008.

Feb 06 2008
Love0

Review: No Country for Old Men, Michael Clayton, 30 Days of Night, The 11th Hour and Talk to Me

By Cinema, Reviews

No Country for Old Men posterNo Country for Old Men is essen­tial cinema in two senses of the word. First and fore­most you must see it, prob­ably more than once. But it is also cinema reduced to its essence. Everything con­trib­utes: Cormac McCarthy’s respect­fully adap­ted ori­gin­al nov­el; beau­ti­fully com­posed images superbly pho­to­graphed by Roger Deakins (the only cre­at­ive on the pro­ject not named Coen); edit­ing that could be a film school in a box. The stand­ard music­al soundtrack is replaced by the music of the every­day: foot­steps, cof­fee pots, car engines, gun fire.

A hunter (Josh Brolin) stumbles across a wil­der­ness drug deal gone wrong: many corpses, a flat­bed full of drugs and briefcase full of money. He takes the money hop­ing to start a new life away from the West Texas trail­er park he inhab­its with Trainspotting’s Kelly MacDonald. But instead of a win­ning lot­tery tick­et he has unleashed the epi­tome of cinema badass-ery: Javier Bardem as an angel of ven­geance determ­ined to retrieve the cash by any means necessary.

All the per­form­ances are won­der­ful but the heart of the film is Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Ed Bell. Always (aggrav­at­ingly) a couple of steps behind he is a good man ill-at-ease with the sheer, inex­plic­able, evil he is con­fron­ted with. A masterpiece.

30 Days of Night posterJosh Hartnett plays anoth­er small town sher­iff, out-gunned and out-matched, in 30 Days of Night. He runs Barrow, the northern-most town in Alaska, so far north that one month of the year is spent in dark­ness. This is the per­fect setup for a smart vam­pire to take advant­age of: 30 days of feed­ing with no enforced hiberna­tion and a bunch of unsa­voury char­ac­ters (well-led by Danny Huston) cer­tainly go to town. Entertaining and styl­ish, 30 Days goes about its work (with­in its genre lim­it­a­tions) respect­ably enough.

Michael Clayton posterI’m begin­ning to think that George Clooney is so good that his pres­ence has actu­ally made some films seem much bet­ter than they actu­ally are: Syriana would be an example. This the­ory comes in to focus when dis­cuss­ing Michael Clayton, anoth­er Oscar con­tender from first-time dir­ect­or Tony Gilroy. Clooney plays the eponym­ous leg­al fix­er, a middle-aged man los­ing his bear­ings: his mor­al com­pass is as adrift as the mal­func­tion­ing sat­nav in his Merc. He is try­ing to fix a rap­idly unrav­el­ling case defend­ing a dodgy agri-chemical com­pany when he real­ises that he is prob­ably on the wrong side but his tenu­ous per­son­al situ­ation doesn’t give him the free­dom to do the right thing. He is con­flic­ted, in oth­er words, and Clooney plays that con­flict superbly. But, while George is act­ing his heart out, the rest of the film doesn’t quite meas­ure up. Performances mis­step and the plot weighs the themes down more heav­ily than it needs to. A good film but not a great one.

The 11th Hour posterLeonardo DiCaprio for the Nobel Peace Prize? Following in the foot­steps of Al Gore’s act­iv­ist phe­nomen­on An Inconvenient Truth in 2006, DiCaprio stakes his own claim with a doc­u­ment­ary about envir­on­ment­al destruc­tion and the urgent need for change: The 11th Hour. Sadly for the earn­est DiCaprio, there’s noth­ing here we haven’t seen or heard before and (des­pite his star power) he is an uncon­vin­cing presenter. Perhaps he should have stayed behind the cam­era and paid Morgan Freeman to front it – he is God after all.

Talk to Me posterTalk to Me is an enter­tain­ing and mov­ing little film, destined to be over­whelmed by the heavy­weight Oscar con­tenders open­ing all around it. Oblivion would­n’t be a fair out­come though and if you find your­self with the time and inclin­a­tion to give it a try you won’t be dis­ap­poin­ted. Always reli­able Don Cheadle (Hotel Rwanda) plays real-life Washington DC radio star and act­iv­ist Ralph Waldo “Petey” Green and the excel­lent Chiwetel Ejiofer (Dirty Pretty Things and American Gangster) is his best friend and Programme Director Dewey Hughes. The racial powder­keg that is DC in the 60’s is well recre­ated on a lim­ited budget but it is the rela­tion­ship between these two very dif­fer­ent men that works best.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 6 February, 2008.

Special thanks to D at the Embassy for let­ting me go back to see No Country a second time before deadline.

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