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Review: For Your Consideration, The Good Shepherd, The Cave of the Yellow Dog, The Fountain and Music & Lyrics

By Cinema and Reviews

For Your Consideration posterThere was a time when a new improv com­edy from Christopher Guest and his reg­u­lar cast of inspired com­ics would be eagerly awaited but as time goes by the returns are prov­ing mea­ger. For Your Consideration could have been the cream of the crop – after all Hollywood, the sub­ject mat­ter, is closest to the cre­at­ors real lives and the tar­gets are big and soft. Maybe that’s the problem.

Catherine O’Hara, Harry Shearer and Parker Posey play act­ors shoot­ing the per­fectly awful Home For Purim when an inter­net gos­sip starts a rumour that their work might be Oscar mater­i­al. The sad thing is that that Catherine O’Hara’s per­form­ance as tra­gic Marilyn Hack might actu­ally have been worthy of Oscar con­sid­er­a­tion if it had been in a bet­ter film.

The Good Shepherd posterMatt Damon and Angelina Jolie star in The Good Shepherd, a worthy American coun­ter­point to the clas­sic Le Carré spy stor­ies of the 70’s and 80’s – “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy”, etc. – where the spies of both sides have more in com­mon with each oth­er than they do with their friends or their fam­il­ies. Despite the form­a­tion of the CIA as back­ground, and a couple of telling illus­tra­tions of their revolution-toppling, despot-installing meth­ods, it isn’t a par­tic­u­larly polit­ic­al film, but a por­trait of a dam­aged but bril­liant young man turn­ing into an even more dam­aged middle-aged one.

An excel­lent cast not­ably Joe Pesci, Michael Gambon and William Hurt are well-served by Robert De Niro’s exper­i­enced, actor-friendly dir­ec­tion. He really does know what he’s doing behind the cam­era as well as in front.

The Cave of the Yellow Dog posterI can recom­mend The Cave of the Yellow Dog as a rest­ful and benign coun­ter­point to the angry, noisy, non­sense depic­ted in so many films these days. In Mongolia, the six ‑year-old daugh­ter of a her­der finds a stray dog and wants to keep it but fath­er wor­ries that it will bring bring wolves. It’s a clas­sic story told in a relaxed doc­u­ment­ary style; it prob­ably should have been called “Lhassi”.

The Fountain posterScience-fiction; fantasy; romance; oil paint­ing: The Fountain is like no film I’ve ever seen before and seems to have been made for those people who thought that the “Star Child” sequence of 2001: A Space Odyssey was the best bit. I am not one of those people. Hugh Jackman plays Dr Tom Creo whose wife Izzy (Rachel Weisz) is dying of a brain tumour. Tom will do any­thing to keep her alive includ­ing exper­i­ment­al treat­ments from the bark of a mys­ter­i­ous South American tree. The Fountain is a film to watch more than listen to – quite beau­ti­ful and quite barmy.

Music and Lyrics posterThe con­tin­ued exist­ence of the motion pic­ture eco­nomy is depend­ent on the appear­ance of a Hugh Grant romantic com­edy once a year wheth­er he feels like it or not, and in Music and Lyrics he seems to be enjoy­ing him­self a little more than usu­al. Perhaps the slop­pi­ness of Marc Lawrence’s dir­ec­tion meant that he was­n’t required to exert him­self bey­ond a couple of takes. He plays Alex Fletcher, has-been star of 80s band Pop! who gets the chance to renew his lease on fame by writ­ing a song for new sen­sa­tion Cora. The only prob­lem is he does­n’t write lyr­ics. Luckily, his plant water­er (Drew Barrymore) wrote tur­gid poetry at col­lege and the rest is thor­oughly pre­dict­able. Not a com­plete waste of time, the faux-80s music is right on the money.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on 21 February, 2007.

Review: Rocky Balboa and more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

This week Wellington gets a chance to farewell one of the titans of world cinema, an inspir­a­tion to many, derided by a few; an icon who walked his own idio­syn­crat­ic path. I am, of course, talk­ing about Rocky Balboa, kind-hearted dim-bulb and pos­sessor of one of the great loves in cinema: his ador­a­tion of Adrian (Talia Shire) remains undi­min­ished even though her can­cer left him a wid­ower a few years between Rocky V and this new one.

Rocky Balboa posterThe Rocky of I and II was always a great char­ac­ter, led astray dur­ing the block­buster years, and Rocky Balboa gives him back to us. It’s well writ­ten and self-aware and, as a bonus, there’s hardly any box­ing in it.

A Prairie Home CompanionRobert Altman’s A Prairie Home Companion is too nice a film to divide people the way that it does. Having said that, if you are one of those people who switches off National Radio whenev­er gen­i­al racon­teur Garrison Keiller Keillor intro­duces his legendary live radio show then you will find the film ver­sion an awful tri­al. Thrown togeth­er in typically-Altman, ram­shackle, style and shot, it appears, with no more than half an eye on the fin­ished product, APHC is a delight­ful, wist­ful, appre­ci­ation of com­munity, nos­tal­gia and the passing of time, the final­ity of things if you will. It’s only fit­ting that Altman’s final film, shot while he was riddled with the can­cer that would kill him, should be about let­ting go. I loved it, but then I was prob­ably always going to.

HollywoodlandIn Hollywoodland Ben Affleck is per­fect as wooden act­or George Reeves who found fame as tele­vi­sion’s first, portly, Superman in the 1950s but who ended up dead of appar­ently self-inflicted gun­shot wounds after a failed attempt at a comeback. The film brings life to the per­sist­ent rumours that Reeves’ death was the res­ult of foul play – cour­tesy of a jeal­ous hus­band with friends in Hollywood high places.

Adrien Brody plays a fic­tion­al gum­shoe on the trail of the mys­tery and the film tries hard to ride the coat-tails of clas­sics like Chinatown but is too darn slow to keep up, even though it looks the part.

Stranger than Fiction posterWill Ferrell plays a slightly less demen­ted ver­sion of his usu­al emotionally-retarded man-child in Stranger Than Fiction, a slender but like­able fantasy about a man who dis­cov­ers he is a char­ac­ter in a nov­el being writ­ten by Emma Thompson. It’s her voice in his head, nar­rat­ing his life, and no one else can hear it. This is annoy­ing and inex­plic­able at first, but gets ser­i­ous when he dis­cov­ers she wants to kill him off. Chicago looks great (and so does Maggie Gyllenhaal).

Squeegee Bandit posterRaucous kiwi doc­u­ment­ary Squeegee Bandit fol­lows Auckland street-corner win­dow wash­er “Starfish” around for a few months, get­ting to know him, his trans­it­ory life and his turf. There’s some inter­est­ing meat bur­ied inside this film but the MTV edit­ing, both­er­some soundtrack and gen­er­al noise levels make it harder than it should be to get at. It’s an inter­est­ing doc­u­ment­ary but dif­fi­cult to recom­mend as entertainment.

The Last King of Scotland posterThe Last King of Scotland is a fic­tion­al­ised por­trait of Idi Amin, dic­tat­or of Uganda from 1971 to 1979 and self-appointed “Excellency President for Life, Field Marshal Al Hadji Doctor Idi Amin, VC, DSO, MC, Lord of All the Beasts of the Earth and Fishes of the Sea, and Conqueror of the British Empire in Africa in General and Uganda in Particular”. To fully appre­ci­ate Forest Whitaker’s superb per­form­ance check out the real Idi’s eyes in the archive foot­age at the end of the film and you can see the genu­ine bat-shit insane para­noia of the man.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 14 February, 2007.

Eagle vs. Shark clip

By Cinema and NZ

… can be found here. Warning: Music from The Phoenix Foundation plays on this page and there does­n’t seem to be a way of turn­ing it off. Grrr.
Also, the first reviews from Sundance have star­ted to appear.

On a related mat­ter, the trail­er for Black Sheep was play­ing ahead of Rocky Balboa on Thursday and I thought it was a bit dark. Not ‘dark’ as in depress­ing but ‘dark’ as in ‘absence of light’. Printed that way deliberately?

And, while research­ing this aside I see that a trail­er for The Devil Dared Me To is online here. With any luck we’ll see it in cinemas soon, there may be some over­seas sales, and the par­ti­cipants might get paid what they are worth.

Devil Dared Me To

Review: The Pursuit of Happyness and more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Pursuit of Happyness posterThe always watch­able Will Smith returns to our screens this week in a more than decent drama called The Pursuit of Happyness. Smith plays solo dad Chris Gardner who struggles to find a way out of the poverty trap (through an unpaid intern­ship at stock­broker Dean Witter) while bad luck, and life itself, con­spire against him. Happyness is a well-made remind­er that it can be flip­pin’ expens­ive being poor and it suc­cess­fully wrung sev­er­al salty tears from these cal­loused eyes.

Incidentally, Smith’s son Christopher is played by Smith’s real-life son Jaden, prov­ing that the apple really does­n’t fall very far from the tree.

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Film Society Programme 2007

By Cinema and Wellington

The pro­gramme for 2007 has been announced and lis­ted on the Society web­site. I’ll do a prop­er pre­view in a few days (for Capital Times and for here) but you can go ahead and invest­ig­ate now.

Featured dir­ect­ors this year are François Truffaut and Sam Fuller and there are sea­sons of films from Brazil and France.

Like last year, I have entered all the screen­ings into Google Calendar and you can have a look or sub­scribe to the feed by click­ing the but­ton below:

Funerals & Snakes heart­ily recom­mends mem­ber­ship of the Film Society, and if you use that mem­ber­ship to get all the avail­able dis­counts around town it’ll hardly cost you a bean.