My recovery continues to go well and I was able to make it to the cinema twice last week – once for this column and once for my rostered appearance on RNZ’s Culture 101 next Sunday. In the meantime, more titles move from the ‘new releases’ column to the ‘must catch them when they turn up online’ column (or, in the case of Reminders of Him, the ‘maybe its ok that they just passed me by’ column).
Cold Storage is one of those films we used to see in cinemas regularly in the 80s and 90s – a nice and tidy bit of genre engineering featuring a veteran actor and some new faces battling special effects in order to save the world. This version is written by A-List screenwriter David Koepp (Indiana Jones, Jurassic World and last year, two Soderberghs – Presence and Black Bag) and it’s largely his craft that keeps things to a tight and satisfying 90+ minutes. The big moments are courtesy of British TV director Jonny Campbell.
When the first manned space station Skylab crashed back down to Earth in 1979, it was supposed to burn up on reentry, incinerating its contents at the same time. However, for the purposes of Cold Storage, at least one of the science experiments on board made it the surface intact – a virulent and fast moving green fungus with the ability to take control of its host’s brainstem and violently reproduce itself throughout the immediate environment.
Back in 2007, military bioterror expert Robert Quinn (Liam Neeson) and his off-sider Trini Romano (Lesley Manville, a long way from Mike Leigh) manage to contain an outbreak in Western Australia and bury the offending test tube several hundred feet underground in a refrigerated Kansas military bunker.
In the present day the installation has been sold off to a self storage company and global warming has compromised the cooling system. Our little green friend is on the loose and if it makes it into the water supply we might as well turn off the lights then and there. The two night security guards – Georgina Campbell and Joe Keery – take a break from flirting long enough to realise the danger and call the authorities who in turn bring old Mr. Neeson out of retirement for one last nuclear powered job.
Campbell and Keery have great chemistry and Keery is one of those actors I often call a talented newcomer until I realise that he’s been one of the biggest stars on TV for the last six years. When I say he reminds me of Brendan Fraser at his Mummy peak, that’s high praise indeed. Another high point is the unexpected presence of legend Vanessa Redgrave (89) who manages to wield a firearm convincingly in her brief cameo.
I wish the effects in Cold Storage had been more physical and less digital but that’s a moderate criticism at the end of the day when everything else works so well.
Premiering on DocPlay last week was an interesting story about a group of New England artists who, in the early 200s, discover a vacant space in the roof of their brand spanking new local mall and realise that it’s big enough for them to live in. In Secret Mall Apartment, the group discover that by simply brazening things out, they can avoid the attention of security and management and move furniture and their PlayStation into the space. They even build a cinder block wall and install a door with a lock – you wouldn’t want the space you are illegally occupying to be itself illegally occupied, would you?
At first the film is about all the cloak and dagger of how they pulled the scam off but it soon diverges into a story about the perils of gentrification and also the portrait of an artist – the group leader Michael Townsend – who finds the line between art and life impossible to draw. One of the many ironies is that the film about the rebellion against consumerism in fact became one of the few reasons why Rhode Islanders would actually visit the Providence Place Mall in recent years. Down on its uppers, the mall multiplex played this documentary for over a year.
Further reading
My profile of the producer and director Mark DeFriest has been posted at NZ On Screen. This was an epic piece of work, pushing the boundaries of permitted length, and taking almost nine months from commissioning to publishing.
With over 800 hours of television credits across a nearly four-decade career, California-born producer and director Mark DeFriest freely credits his time in New Zealand as the apprenticeship that gave him his career. Arriving at Lower Hutt’s Avalon Studios in 1977 to helm twice-weekly drama Close to Home, he became the youngest director in New Zealand television at the age of only 26.
I loved talking to Mark (over Zoom from his home in Western Australia), so much so that we did two interview sessions and the transcript came out to over 27,000 words. There are so many stories that we had to leave out. My favourite might be the day this Yankee expat faced up to Kiwi cricket legend Lance Cairns during the lunch break on an episode of Jocko in 1982. If you are familiar with your NZ cricket history you’ll know that Cairns was at his finest that summer and Mark managed to last three deliveries without laying a bat on any of them.
Further listening
I talked about both of the above films in my regular slot on RNZ Nights last Friday, talking to relieving host Susana Lei’ataua. You can hear the whole thing here.
