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December 2010

Dec 30 2010
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Review: Shrek Forever After, Cemetery Junction & Gentlemen Broncos

By Cinema, Reviews

Shrek Forever After posterLovable ogre Shrek (Mike Myers) is hav­ing a bad day. Instead of being a ter­ri­fy­ing bring­er of fear and bad smells, he is a mild-mannered fath­er of triplets and pil­lar of the Far, Far Away com­munity and it’s get­ting him down. After one par­tic­u­larly stress­ful morn­ing involving birth­day cakes, fan requests (“Do the roar!”) and oth­er assor­ted minor niggles prompts him to sug­gest that he might’ve been bet­ter off not res­cuing the lovely Fiona (Cameron Diaz) from the tower all those years ago.

This is over­heard by the most dan­ger­ous leg­al mind in the area, Rumpelstiltskin, who imme­di­ately draws up a dodgy con­tract to give Shrek exactly what he wants. Shrek’s day is about to go from being a bad one to being his last one.

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Dec 30 2010
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“freakish hypervictorian ornamentation”

By Architecture, Asides

Thanks to @gtiso’s Best Blog Posts of 2010 I have been intro­duced to Owen Hatherley on Architecture:

Jonathan Meades has an inter­est­ing archi­tec­tur­al the­ory of dic­tat­ori­al longev­ity – that the more a régime embraces kitsch, the more it will be entrenched in power. The Nazis, with their middlebrow neo­clas­si­cism, their Kingsnorthian moun­tain retreats, did­n’t get long – Stalin, mean­while, died of old age, his régime gil­ded by gold leaf and freak­ish hyper­victori­an ornamentation.

[From sit down man, you’re a bloody tragedy: Red Gates]

I think you should check it out, too.

Dec 29 2010
Love0

Review: Soul Kitchen, Step Up 3, Killers and a couple more ...

By Cinema, Reviews

Soul Kitchen posterTurkish-German dir­ect­or Fatih Akin has long been an art­house favour­ite around these parts. Head-On (2004) and The Edge of Heaven (2007) were Festival suc­cesses so it was odd to see his new film Soul Kitchen skip this year’s event and go straight to gen­er­al release. On view­ing it’s easy to see why. Akin has gone com­mer­cial and Soul Kitchen is as broad a com­edy as you’ll find out­side the big chains – sadly I have to report that Akin’s film doesn’t sit com­fort­ably in that territory.

Zinos (Adam Bousdoukos) runs a greasy spoon café called the Soul Kitchen in a run­down part of old Hamburg. He’s not much of a cook or a busi­ness­man but his loy­al cus­tom­ers seem to like it. Thrown into a tizzy by a com­bin­a­tion of his girlfriend’s move to China, a very bad back, the tax depart­ment, his dead­beat broth­er (Moritz Bleibtreu) on day release from pris­on and an old school friend with an eye on his real estate, Zinos tries to nav­ig­ate his way through a rap­idly deteri­or­at­ing situ­ation with only a geni­us new chef and some loy­al but eas­ily dis­trac­ted staff.

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Dec 27 2010
Love0

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

By Cinema, 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.

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Dec 26 2010
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Review: Boy, The Boys Are Back, How to Train Your Dragon & The Men Who Stare at Goats

By Cinema, Reviews

Taika Waititi’s Boy may well be the sad­dest com­edy I’ve ever seen. Hmn, maybe I should put that anoth­er way: For a com­edy, Boy might be the sad­dest film I’ve ever seen.

Consistently hil­ari­ous through­out, Boy steers a very care­ful course once it becomes clear that there is a very real heartache behind the laughter. A less con­fid­ent film­maker wouldn’t have even tried to per­form that con­jur­ing trick but Waititi turns out to have the tal­ent to pull it off.

It’s 1984 and in the tiny East Cape vil­lage of Waihau Bay 11-year-old Boy (born as Alamein, after his fath­er) has been left in charge of the whanau while his Nana goes to Wellington for a tangi. His little broth­er Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu) and his young cous­ins are look­ing to him for some par­ent­ing but the unex­pec­ted arrival of Alamein (Taika Waititi) sends all those plans packing.

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Dec 21 2010
Love0

Review: Predicament, The White Ribbon & Piranha 3D

By Cinema, Reviews

The unhappy bard of Hawera, Ronald Hugh Morrieson, died in the sure and cer­tain know­ledge of his own fail­ure. Only one of his four nov­els had been pub­lished (and only in Australia) and the oth­ers lan­guished in obscur­ity. He wasn’t to know that his Taranaki-gothic vis­ions would prove per­fectly adapt­able to the big screen and that no less a Hollywood legend than John Carradine would appear in the first of them, The Scarecrow in 1982. Came a Hot Friday (1985) fol­lowed to huge box office suc­cess but then the Morrieson curse struck again and, due to the vagar­ies of the inter­na­tion­al movie busi­ness, Pallet on the Floor wouldn’t even make it in to cinemas in New Zealand.

Predicament posterHis oth­er nov­el, “Predicament”, has finally made it to the big screen and, I’m sorry to report, that Morrieson him­self might prefer that it hadn’t. It’s Hawera, 1933. A socially repressed New Zealand small town, pleas­ant and pla­cid on the sur­face but teem­ing with petty crims and sly-groggers under­neath. When gawky teen­ager Cedric Williamson’s moth­er died his fath­er (Tim Finn) suffered a break­down and is silently build­ing a huge wooden tower in his front yard.

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