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bradley cooper

Sep 12 2012
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Review: Hit and Run, The Watch and Hysteria

By Cinema, Reviews

Readers of last week’s column will know that I am cur­rently over­seas on a quest, a mis­sion – a pur­suit if you prefer – hop­ing to dis­cov­er a new kind of cinema. After a week at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado I am now in New York and have got a clear­er idea of what that vis­ion should look like.

I think I’ll name this new cinema good cinema and it’s main char­ac­ter­ist­ic will be the absence of films like Hit and Run and The Watch, two of this week’s new releases. Is it pos­sible to redefine rub­bish like this out of existence?

Hit and Run movie posterThe first is a Dax Shepard van­ity pro­ject about a man choos­ing to give up his place in a dull wit­ness pro­tec­tion pro­gramme so that his girl­friend (Kristen Bell) can get a job in the big city. In the space of a single day his pre­vi­ous iden­tity as a top get­away driver is revealed to her and his new iden­tity as a dreary small-town non-entity is revealed to the dim­wit­ted but single-minded hoods who he rat­ted out.

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Apr 04 2011
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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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Jan 01 2011
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Review: The A-Team and Micmacs

By Cinema, Reviews

The A-Team posterLast week your faith­ful cor­res­pond­ent reviewed a big budget Hollywood film, based on a beloved tele­vi­sion series, fea­tur­ing four friends who went to a for­eign land with no know­ledge or empathy for the inhab­it­ants and con­tin­ued to live their self-serving, smug, lives blind to the real­ity sur­round­ing them. This week, I’m going to do it all over again and the only dif­fer­ence is that I really hated Sex and the City 2 and actu­ally quite enjoyed The A‑Team.

Now this real­isa­tion is giv­ing me some pause. They are fun­da­ment­ally the same film. Why should I react so strongly against one and so… benignly to the oth­er? Is it just a mat­ter of gender? Am I hard-wired to enjoy the male-bonding, explo­sions and gags in the way that female view­ers are hard-wired to enjoy the shoes and frocks in SATC2? Christ, I hope not. I’d bet­ter find some good reas­ons for enjoy­ing The A‑Team before I out myself as a review­er who can’t rise above his gender or class and there’s enough of those around already.

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Jul 22 2009
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Review: The Hangover, Good, Elegy, Boy A, Land of the Lost and Forever Strong

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest, Reviews

The Hangover posterI can just ima­gine the Monday morn­ing when a devel­op­ment exec­ut­ive stumbled across the script of The Hangover. It wouldn’t have taken him long to real­ise that he’d dis­covered mod­ern Hollywood’s holy grail – a per­fectly real­ised men-behaving-badly movie, so well-written and clev­erly struc­tured that he wouldn’t need any big stars or a mar­quee dir­ect­or. By morn­ing tea he would have been gone for the day, safe in the know­ledge that his tar­gets for the year were going be met and (no doubt inspired by the script he’d just bought) he would be drop­ping a big bunch of cred­it card on hook­ers and blow. Probably.

The script is per­fect in its eleg­ant and stream­lined con­struc­tion (screenwriter-porn, no less): Four friends head to Vegas for a bach­el­or party. We leave them at the first Jägermeister shot, only to rejoin them at dawn as they emerge squint­ing into the light. They’ve gained a baby and tiger and lost a tooth – and a buddy. The film is all about put­ting the pieces of the night back togeth­er and it’s clev­er, filthy, loose and charm­ing. The Hangover is indeed the Citizen Kane of all getting-fucked-up-in-Vegas movies – so supremely pre-eminent that (let us hope) we nev­er have to watch anoth­er of its kind ever again. Of course, The Hangover 2 is already in pre-production.

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