Like students swotting for exams New Zealand film distributors seem to have run out of year for all the films they have to release so there are some really big names being squeezed into the next two weeks. If you can’t find something to watch on – the inevitably wet – Boxing Day next Monday, then I suspect you don’t really like movies at all. And if that sounds like you, why are you still reading?
The biggest of the big names this Christmas has got to be The Advenures of Tintin. Despite Steven Spielberg’s name on the tin, it’s almost a local production when you consider the technology and skills that went into its manufacture, so we all have a small stake in its success. Luckily, Europe has embraced it so a second film has already been confirmed – and will be made here.
But enough of the cheerleading – what did I think of it? It’s good, really good. The performance capture and character design works better than ever before, Spielberg has embraced the freedom from the laws of physics that animation allows and throws the camera around with gay abandon – but always with panache and not to the point of motion sickness. Many of the visual gags are terrific and Andy Serkis as Haddock proves that there is no one better at acting under a layer of black dots and ping pong balls.
There are two mainstream comic book publishing houses, DC and Marvel, and choosing between them as a kid was a bit like choosing between The Beatles and the Stones. They had different styles and sensibilities (and philosophies) and after a little bit of experimentation you could find a fit with one or the other.
DC had Superman and Batman – big, bold and (dare I say it) one-dimensional characters with limited or opaque inner lives. When Stan Lee created Spider-Man, a teenage photographer with powers he neither asked for nor appreciated, he created a soap opera – a soap opera with aspirations to high art. As you might be able to tell, I was a Marvel kid.
God is in the house this week. He turns up in the values of a wealthy Tennessee family who adopt a poor black kid and turn him into a champion, He features in a big leather book carried across a post-apocalyptic America by enigmatic Denzel Washington, and He is notable for His absence in a Lars von Trier shocker that is unlike anything you will have seen before or see since.
First, the good version. Based on a best selling book by Michael Lewis, The Blind Side would not have made it New Zealand screens if it wasn’t for Sandra Bullock’s surprise Oscar win earlier this year and it’s easy to see why distributors might have left it on the shelf. Personally, I’m glad they didn’t. My companion had no knowledge of, or affinity for, American Football or the complex and baffling college sports structure and was, therefore, a bit left out of a story that managed to push all my buttons fairly effortlessly.
When your correspondent was a nipper back in the early 80s, two of the most prized pirate videos available were the legendary Porky’s and something called Lemon Popsicle – two films about horny teenagers in the 1950s – and illicit copies were precious currency. Now the modern generation gets its own fat Jewish kids trying to get laid in Superbad: a very funny, filthy, comedy spawned fully-formed from the dirty minds of two horny 14 year olds (writers Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg produced their first draft when they were, in fact, only 14).
High school kids Seth and Evan are desperate to get lucky so they’ll be able to go to college with “experience” and the only way they know to achieve that is to get chicks drunk. With the help of an extremely humorous fake Hawaiian ID and two hilariously easy-going local cops they get pretty close. As you might expect, the perfect audience for this film is about 14 years old, and considering the R16 rating it would only be fitting if they watched it on grainy VHS or wagged school to sneak into the flicks.
I Do is that rare beast: a romantic comedy that works better as a romance than a comedy, largely due to direction from Eric Lartigau that makes a horrible meal of the broad comedy moments and self-effacing performances from leads Charlotte Gainsbourg and Alain Chabat. Chabat plays hen-pecked metrosexual perfume designer Luis Costa, saddled with five sisters, seven nieces and a widowed mother, all of whom are desperate to see him married off. As seems to bethe way of things in French cinema recently Costa hires a stranger to pretend to be his fiancée so she can dump him at the alter and the family will get off his back. A matchless plan I’m sure you’ll agree.
Surely it can’t be a coincidence that this film is released in the same week as Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, another film about an emotionally stunted wonder-nose. Perfume is based on the well-loved Patrick Süsskind novel that many (including Stanley Kubrick) considered un-filmable and so it proves. Ben Wishaw plays Jean-Baptiste Grenouille: born into poverty in pre-revolutionary Paris he has a remarkable talent for discerning scent. Unfortunately, as a character he’s not much more than a monkey-boy with a nose and director Tom Tykwer fails to find a satisfactory cinematic representation for the sense of smell which defeats the point somewhat.
I won’t go as far as recommending avoidance as, unlike most films, it is full of memorable moments and will at least provoke a response – its just that mine was negative.
The likeable comedian Steve Carell takes the lead in Evan Almighty, sequel to un-likeable comedian Jim Carrey’s smash-hit Bruce Almighty from 2003. Carell plays politician Evan Baxter who is taught a lesson in humility and ethics by genial practical joker God (Morgan Freeman). Soft-headed, dim-witted but warm-hearted.
Punk came along at just the right time for Joe Strummer. As “Woody” Mellor (after folkie Woody Guthrie) he was a middle-class art school drop-out channelling his energy into women and pub rock until he heard the siren call of punk and made his mark as leader of The Clash. Julien Temple’s moving biography, The Future is Unwritten, is an excellent guide to the punk period but is even better on the personal and artistic resurrection of Strummer’s final years. Highly recommended.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 19 September, 2007.
It is, of course, completely brilliant. And loud. And while it’s not quite as perfect as predecessor (and cinema re-definer) Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz is as entertaining a night out as you’ll find anywhere.
Co-creator Simon Pegg plays PC Nicholas Angel, top cop, so good he’s making the rest of the Met look bad. He’s reassigned to the sleepy west country village of Sandford where, apart from a one-swan crime-spree, the peace is never breached. Of course, in a picturesque English village nothing is what it seems and Angel and partner Danny Butterman (Nick Frost) are going to bust this thing wide open, whatever “it” might actually be.
The biggest of the big names this Christmas has got to be The Advenures of Tintin. Despite Steven Spielberg’s name on the tin, it’s almost a local production when you consider the technology and skills that went into its manufacture, so we all have a small stake in its success. Luckily, Europe has embraced it so a second film has already been confirmed – and will be made here.
There are two mainstream comic book publishing houses, 
God is in the house this week. He turns up in the values of a wealthy Tennessee family who adopt a poor black kid and turn him into a champion, He features in a big leather book carried across a post-apocalyptic America by enigmatic Denzel Washington, and He is notable for His absence in a 
