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Jan 15 2010
Love0

2009 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

By Cinema

Welcome to the 2010 “cut out and keep” guide to video rent­ing (or down­load­ing or how­ever you con­sume your home enter­tain­ment these days). I sug­gest you clip this art­icle, fold it up, stick it in your wal­let or purse and refer to it whenev­er you are at the video shop, look­ing for some­thing to while away the long winter even­ings of 2010.

First up, the ones to buy – the Keepers. These are the films that (if you share my psy­cho­logy and some of my patho­lo­gies) you will cher­ish until you are old and the tech­no­logy to play them no longer exists. Best film of the year remains Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. Mashing togeth­er sev­er­al archetyp­al stor­ies with a vivid visu­al style and a per­cuss­ive energy, Slumdog may not rep­res­ent India as it actu­ally is but instead suc­cess­fully evoked what India feels like, which is argu­ably more import­ant. After Slumdog everything I saw seemed, you know, old-fashioned and noth­ing has been any­where nearly as thrill­ing since. There are films you respect, films you admire and films you love. Slumdog is a film you adore. “Who wants to be a … miy­on­aire?” indeed.

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Mar 05 2009
Love0

Review: Dean Spanley, Big Stan, Zack and Miri Make a Porno and Welcome to the Sticks

By Cinema and Reviews

My favour­ite post-Oscars quote came from David Thomson in The Guardian: “When the Slumdog mob – Europeans and Indians, adults and kids – took the stage to claim the best pic­ture Oscar, a land­mark was being estab­lished which dir­ectly reflects America’s reduced place in the world.” And as if to illus­trate that very point, this week Hollywood have offered us a piteous pris­on com­edy called Big Stan and Zack and Miri Make a Porno. It’s like they aren’t even try­ing anymore.

Big Stan posterBig Stan is the debut fea­ture by com­ic act­or Rob Schneider, best-known for a pair of ghastly adult com­ed­ies fea­tur­ing his hap­less male pros­ti­tute alter-ego Deuce Bigelow. Schneider amaz­ingly main­tains a sol­id career (largely via the pat­ron­age of his great friend Adam Sandler) but there’s no sat­is­fact­ory explan­a­tion for how he was let loose with a cam­era except that Hollywood is genu­inely out of ideas.

Schneider plays a real estate con man who is con­victed and sen­tenced to jail. Terrified at the pro­spect of immin­ent anal rape he enlists a mar­tial arts mas­ter (David Carradine) to make him, er, impreg­nable. Like being punched in the swing­ers by an angry dwarf for 90 minutes.

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