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2001 a space odyssey

Tone’s “50 blu-rays you must own” - UPDATED

By Cinema and Home Theatre

Tone Magazine - September coverOf Tone Magazine’s 50 “must own” blu-rays 13 are not actu­ally avail­able in New Zealand leg­ally, or won’t play on NZ pur­chased play­ers due to region cod­ing. Which is a bit of a waste of time, don’t you think? They also man­age to spell Criterion incor­rectly right the way through art­icle which adds insult to injury.

After the jump, the list (the art­icle itself is not online):

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Review: Moon, The September Issue, Funny People and Aliens in the Attic

By Cinema and Reviews

Moon looks like one of the coolest films of the year. Written and dir­ec­ted by David Bowie’s son Zowie (now known as Duncan Jones), star­ring the effort­lessly inter­est­ing Sam Rockwell and fea­tur­ing 2001-crossed-with-Alien pro­duc­tion design and a trippy plot that seems to require all your atten­tion, Moon was one of the hits of the Festival and is now back for a full cinema release.

Rockwell plays “Sam”, a solo miner super­vising oper­a­tions on the sur­face of the Moon. The com­pany he works for is dig­ging up a spe­cial min­er­al used to fuel the Earth’s fusion power sta­tions. He’s at the end of a three year gig and start­ing to go a bit stir crazy. His only com­pany is a Kevin Spacey-voiced ser­vice robot named GERTY – a cross between HAL 9000 and the cute drones from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. GERTY makes him tea, patches his wounds and pretty much does everything else around the place except go out­side and actu­ally fix machines.

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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.