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Feb 15 2014
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Matthew McConaughey as Ron Woodroof in Dallas Buyers Club (2013)

Review: Dallas Buyers Club and Blue Is the Warmest Colour

By Cinema, Reviews

Dallas Buyers Club posterWhen we meet Texan man’s man Ron Woodroof (Matthew McConaughey) at the begin­ning of Dallas Buyers Club he is a mess – a shock­ing, dis­rep­ut­able, selfish com­bin­a­tion of drunk, thief, woman­iser and gam­bler. He doesn’t look so hot either. Soon after that, dur­ing a routine hos­pit­al check – routine for Ron is the equi­val­ent of an emer­gency for the rest of us – we dis­cov­er why: he has AIDS and, because it is only 1985 he has very little time left to live.

But because the word “ornery” was inven­ted in Texas, Woodroof has no inten­tion of suc­cumb­ing quietly, even steal­ing the exper­i­ment­al drug AZT from the hos­pit­al stores until he dis­cov­ers that it is even more tox­ic than the dis­ease he is afflic­ted by. A last chance stoned drive to Mexico intro­duces him to a struck-off doc­tor (Griffin Dunne) and a cock­tail of drugs that could extend his life – and mil­lions of oth­ers – if only he could get at them.

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Jan 11 2014
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Beyond the Edge poster

Review: Beyond the Edge, Thor- The Dark World, Inch’Allah, Valley of Saints, Thanks for Sharing and The Counselor

By Cinema, Reviews

Tim Robbins and Mark Ruffalo in Thanks for Sharing (2013)

It’s one of those rare sunny Saturday after­noons in Wellington and I have work to do. But I’m not going to do that work because it does­n’t look like much fun and – for once – writ­ing tiny film reviews seems like the bet­ter option.

Beyond the Edge posterLeanne Pooley made New Zealand’s most suc­cess­ful doc­u­ment­ary ever in 2009 – The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls – and now turns her eye towards a mountain-sized Kiwi icon, Sir Ed Hillary and his ascent of Everest in 1953. Beyond the Edge is a limp title for the greatest adven­ture ever under­taken by a New Zealander and the film some­times seems a bit blood­less too. The 3D recre­ations of Himalayan scenes – filling in the gaps in the archive of avail­able still and mov­ing pic­ture ele­ments – are thrill­ing though, espe­cially if heights get your heart racing faster as they do I.

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Jan 03 2014
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Alan Partridge: Alpha Papa poster

Review: Alan Partridge- Alpha Papa

By Cinema, Reviews

still-of-steve-coogan-in-alan-partridge--alpha-papa-(2013)-large-picture

Most big films get a spe­cial level of pro­mo­tion before they are unleashed on the gen­er­al pub­lic – they get what we call a ‘radio preview’.

This is where a couple of hun­dred ran­dom cit­izens turn up at a cinema hav­ing won tick­ets to a film they can’t remem­ber the name of, get jol­lied along by a couple of minor loc­al celebrit­ies in branded appar­el (best known for get­ting up early and talk­ing into micro­phones), get asked col­lect­ively wheth­er they feel “alright” (and answer col­lect­ively in the affirm­at­ive), then have bags of con­fec­tion­ery thrown at them in exchange for answer­ing trivia questions.

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Dec 23 2013
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The Turning poster

Review: The Turning, Twenty Feet from Stardom and The Butler

By Cinema, Reviews

Hugo Weaving in Tim Winton's The Turning (2013)

The Turning posterI went into The Turning in the dark and in some ways I wish I hadn’t and in oth­ers I’m glad I did. I’ll see if I can explain.

The film is a col­lec­tion of related shorts, each based on a single story from Tim Winton’s acclaimed col­lec­tion of the same name. That much I knew. As story after story rolled through, each pro­duced by a dif­fer­ent Australian cre­at­ive team, each tak­ing a unique and ori­gin­al approach to storytelling, I star­ted to see con­nec­tions between them. Many of these con­nec­tions were visu­al – the recur­rence of rusty aban­doned cars, people liv­ing in cara­vans. Some were geo­graph­ic – a Western Australian min­ing com­munity sur­roun­ded on one side by red dirt and on the oth­er by the ocean. Damaged, cor­roded and cor­rup­ted mas­culin­ity. Redheads. The name “Vic”.

Afterwards I read a copy of the glossy souven­ir book­let that view­ers get to take away with them when they buy a tick­et for this “spe­cial cine­mat­ic event” and those con­nec­tions became clear­er. In Winton’s book all of the stor­ies inter-connect – char­ac­ters re-occur (often at dif­fer­ent stages of their lives) and events we see in one story might be referred to obliquely in another.

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Dec 04 2013
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Captain Phillips poster

Review: Diana, Runner Runner, Camille Claudel 1915, Prisoners, Austenland, About Time and Captain Phillips

By Cinema, Reviews

Apart from the ines­cap­able need to carve out a mea­gre liv­ing from an uncar­ing world, one of the reas­ons why these weekly updates have been some­thing less than, well, weekly recently has been that most of the fare on offer at the pic­tures has been so uninspiring.

Diana posterTake Oliver Hirschbiegel’s Diana for example. It’s not a bad movie, per se. It’s cer­tainly not the train­wreck that the British media would have you believe. It’s just so … ines­sen­tial. Hirschbiegel’s desire to be respect­ful to Diana’s chil­dren, and to oth­er play­ers in the story who are still liv­ing, simply sucks all of the drama out of the thing, leav­ing you with a frus­trat­ing non-love story between two frus­trat­ingly inar­tic­u­late people. There are occa­sion­al hints of the com­plex char­ac­ter she may have been but the fin­ished product is a kind of noth­ing. It really is too soon for this film to tell this story.

Runner Runner posterThen there’s the Justin Timberlake vehicle Runner Runner, in which the pop star turned act­or attempts to carry a film all by him­self and proves that he either is unable to do so, or can­’t pick a pro­ject that’s worth the attempt. He plays a former Wall St hot­shot with a tal­ent for cal­cu­lat­ing risk who trades Princeton for the high life of run­ning an online gambling busi­ness in sunny (and shady) Costa Rica. Not one word of this dis­mal little film betrays a breath of authen­ti­city, either in its storytelling or char­ac­ter. Screenwriters Koppelman and Levien once wrote Ocean’s 13 (and The Girlfriend Experience) for Steven Soderbergh. At least they were meant to be fantasy.

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