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Review: Moonrise Kingdom and The Expendables 2

By Cinema, Reviews

Moonrise Kingdom posterWes Anderson may be the cur­rently work­ing dir­ect­or least suited to using 3D. His scenes are often flat tableaux with his char­ac­ters spread out lat­er­ally across the screen. If he was telling the story of Moonrise Kingdom 1,000 years ago it would be a tapestry, like Bayeux, and I think he’d prob­ably be OK with that.

That visu­al style suited the pup­petry of the delight­ful Fantastic Mr Fox but this new film pop­u­lates the flat, the­at­ric­al, planes with liv­ing, breath­ing human act­ors – not just act­ors, movie stars (includ­ing Bruce Willis and Ed Norton).

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Review: Get Low, My Wedding and Other Secrets, Limitless, Battle Los Angeles, Force of Nature and Red Riding Hood

By Cinema, Reviews

Regular and attent­ive read­ers to this column will know that I heart­ily endorse mem­ber­ship of the Film Society as the best value cinema-going in town. For example, a few weeks ago this year mem­bers (and pro­spect­ive mem­bers) were treated to a sneak pre­view of a lovely little film not yet released to the gen­er­al public.

Get Low posterGet Low is the kind of film that gets made all too rarely these days: a thought­ful, detailed, slow paced med­it­a­tion on char­ac­ter and per­son­al his­tory. It’s a drama, but with plenty of amus­ing moments, and it’s a show­case for two great screen act­ors – two act­ors who spend far to much of their time these days repeat­ing old per­form­ances but here they prove that they’ve still got it when it counts.

Screen legend Robert Duvall (The Godfather, Apocalypse Now) plays Felix Bush, a lonely her­mit liv­ing in Tennessee in the 1930s. Unkempt and iras­cible, the loc­als steer well clear because of his dan­ger­ous repu­ta­tion and that’s just the way he seems to like it. But some­thing is eat­ing away at him and he decides to throw a party – a funer­al party for him­self so that people can tell their stor­ies about him to his face and, maybe, he can tell one or two of his own. He enlists the help of loc­al under­taker Bill Murray and, with the help of his assist­ant (Lucas Black), the old man gets a chance to set some records straight.

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Wellington Film Society - new season starts tonight

By Cinema, Wellington
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Wellington Film Society opens tonight? You don’t say!”

All over the world it is volun­teer organ­isa­tions like the Wellington Film Society that keep the flame of film art alive so that cinephili­acs like me can get a decent pal­ate cleanser every Monday night after a week­end of Hollywood tosh.

I can’t recom­mend Society mem­ber­ship highly enough. Your mem­ber­ship fee equates to around three bucks a screen­ing (33 Mondays!) and your mem­ber­ship gets you enough dis­counts (at the Film Festival and par­ti­cip­at­ing cinemas) that it doesn’t take long to pay for itself.

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