Skip to main content
Tag

greg kinnear

Review: Mt. Zion, Hitchcock, Movie 43, Step Up to the Plate, You Will Be My Son, On Air and Flight

By Cinema and Reviews

Kiwi crowd-pleasers don’t come much more crowd-pleasing than Tearepa Kahi’s Mt. Zion, fea­tur­ing TV tal­ent quester Stan Walker in a star-making per­form­ance as a work­ing class kid with a dream. Slogging his unwill­ing guts out pick­ing pota­toes in the mar­ket gar­dens of 1979 Pukekohe, nervously mak­ing the first steps in a music career that seems impossible and fan­tas­ising about meet­ing the great Bob Marley, Walker’s Turei is out of step with his hard work­ing fath­er (Temuera Morrison) and the back-breaking work.

When a loc­al pro­moter announces a com­pet­i­tion to be the sup­port act for the reg­gae legend’s forth­com­ing con­cert at Western Springs, Turei tests the bound­ar­ies of fam­ily and friend­ship to get a shot at the big time. The bones of the story are famil­i­ar, of course, but there’s meat on the bones too – a slice of New Zealand social his­tory with eco­nom­ic changes mak­ing life harder for a people who don’t own the land that they work. Production design (by Savage) and authentic-looking 16mm pho­to­graphy all help give Mt. Zion a look of its own and the music – though not nor­mally to my taste – is agree­able enough.

Read More

Review: Anonymous, The Debt, Beautiful Lies, The Thing, Conan the Barbarian and I Don’t Know How She Does It

By Cinema and Reviews

Economically speak­ing, theatres are a com­plete waste of space. I mean, take a look at the St James or the Embassy and try and ima­gine how many cubicles and desks you could fit in to those huge pieces of prime real estate. Or even bet­ter, how many cars could you park inside them? (Car parks require lower ceil­ings there­fore more floors for the same build­ing height) What kind of fool thinks of con­struct­ing a big empty build­ing simply to shine a light through the middle of it?

Anonymous posterThis kind of non­sense has been going on for cen­tur­ies though as Anonymous, Roland Emmerich’s new piece of spec­u­lat­ive fic­tion, demon­strates. Stretching credu­lity almost as far as Star Trek requir­ing us to believe in faster-than-light speed, Anonymous asks its audi­ence to assume that barely-literate act­or Will Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) was not the author of all those plays and son­nets but instead they were penned by Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford (Rhys Ifans) and used as a tool to rile the popu­lace and pro­voke polit­ic­al unrest.

Read More

Review: Tropic Thunder, Baby Mama and Paris

By Cinema and Reviews

Tropic Thunder posterYou can for­get all talk of an Oscar for Heath Ledger’s Joker. If any­one is going to win an Academy Award for wear­ing some dodgy make-up in a noisy block­buster no one is get­ting in the way of Robert Downey Jr. for Tropic Thunder. Totally believ­able, every second, as Kirk Lazarus, the Australian meth­od act­or (and multi-Oscar win­ner him­self) who under­goes a rad­ic­al skin re-pigmentation in order to por­tray tough-as-nails African-American Sgt. Osiris in the eponym­ous Vietnam epic, Downey Jr’s per­form­ance is a thing of won­der: A mas­ter­piece of tech­nique, tim­ing, self-belief and dare I say it, soul. I’m still chuck­ling days later.

Lazarus is one of a hand­ful of pampered Hollywood stars on loc­a­tion to recre­ate the last great untold Vietnam story – the suicide-mission res­cue of “Four Leaf” Tayback dur­ing the legendary “Wet” Offensive of ’69. Under pres­sure from the stu­dio to get back on sched­ule (and from hand­less “Four “Leaf” him­self, Nick Nolte, to toughen the pencil-kneck panty-waists up a bit) dir­ect­or Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) goes ver­ité. With the help of hid­den cam­er­as, spe­cial effects and some heav­ily armed South East Asian drug lords, Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) and Alpa Chino (rel­at­ive new­comer Brandon T. Jackson) find them­selves up to their eye­balls in real­ity. Comedy real­ity, which is the best kind. One of my favour­ite films of the year so far, and I haven’t even men­tioned Tom Cruise’s dancing.

Baby Mama posterCompared to the fero­cious energy of Tropic Thunder, Tina Fey’s Baby Mama seems like a com­edy from a dif­fer­ent era. Fey plays über-clucky Kate Holbrook – suc­cess­ful middle-manager in Steve Martin’s organ­ic pro­duce com­pany. Desperate for pro­geny (yet strangely single), her T shaped tubes make her a poor bet for IVF and the wait­ing list for adop­tion is years long. Surrogacy is her only solu­tion and she barely bats an eye­lid at the $100k price tag (she must share John McCain’s account­ant). Despite the amount of money chan­ging hands it is the sur­rog­ate that inter­views the, what’s the word, sur­rog­atee and she suc­cess­fully passes the aura test posed by white trash “host” Amy Poehler (Blades of Glory).

The lively Poehler kick-starts every scene she is in while better-known stars like Martin, Greg Kinnear and Sigourney Weaver phone in their per­form­ances. Meanwhile Fey (“30 Rock”) is like­able enough, although the char­ac­ter seems to be in a world of her own most of the time, and Romany Malco from The Love Guru plays the token black char­ac­ter – a ser­vant. Baby Mama is fun­ni­er, the more pregnancy-specific it gets. When it goes gen­er­ic (speech-impediments, Martin’s new age schtick) it misses even the biggest tar­gets by miles.

Paris movie posterParis is both the sub­ject and the object of Cédric Klapisch’s ensemble drama about a cross-section of mod­ern Parisian soci­ety. Romain Duris and Juliette Binoche are sib­lings, single, on the cusp of 40 and ali­en­ated from their par­ents. Duris is told his heart con­di­tion may fin­ish him off soon­er rather than later and mopes around the apart­ment, feel­ing sorry for him­self while Binoche (like women every­where) puts her own life on hold to care for him and her three chil­dren. Meanwhile, hang­dog aca­dem­ic Fabrice Luchini (Intimate Strangers) has a crush on his beau­ti­ful stu­dent Mélanie Laurent, his archi­tect broth­er is about to become a fath­er but can­’t stop cry­ing. At street level, the mar­ket stall­hold­ers are also look­ing for love in the big city but have a more dir­ect way of going about find­ing it.

I’ve made it seem a lot more con­trived than it actu­ally plays out. The dir­ec­tion is subtle and the per­form­ances are involving. It does suf­fer from the usu­al French cine­mat­ic philo­sophy, that work­ing class exper­i­ence is some­how more real than the self-absorbed bour­geois middle classes, but actu­ally argues its case pretty well.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 28 August, 2008.

Review: Unknown, Stephanie Daley, Rush Hour 3, La Vie En Rose and Deep Water

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Unknown posterAs recoun­ted by cel­eb­rated neur­o­lo­gist Oliver Sacks in a recent New Yorker, amne­sia is a fas­cin­at­ing con­di­tion. In the art­icle he tells the story of clas­sic­al musi­cian Clive Wearing who, due to enchaphal­it­is more than 20 years ago, can retain new memor­ies for no longer than a few seconds. The dev­ast­a­tion of his case is tran­scen­ded by two things: the love of his wife (which he is aware of even though he sees her as if for the first time every day) and his music­al abil­ity which remains complete.

In Hollywood, amne­sia (like oth­er dis­orders) is rarely por­trayed as a tra­gic con­di­tion with ser­i­ous and fas­cin­at­ing psy­cho­lo­gic­al impacts but instead is usu­ally just a plot device. New thrill­er Unknown, star­ring Jim Caviezel, Greg Kinnear and Barry Pepper, tries a little bit of both.

In a remote aban­doned chem­ic­al ware­house five men wake up with no memor­ies of who they are or how they got there. Two of the group have been kid­napped, the oth­ers are the gang. But who?

While all the evid­ence points to Caviezel being one of the kid­nap­pers (he was­n’t tied up at the begin­ning for a start) he does­n’t feel like one and, des­pite the shift­ing alle­gi­ances and Lord of the Flies power-plays, he attempts to bind the group togeth­er so they can all escape before the ringlead­er returns with the ransom. It’s an inter­est­ing exist­en­tial­ist pro­voca­tion although, in the end, fur­ther psy­cho­lo­gic­al insight is sac­ri­ficed in favour of yet anoth­er plot twist.

Stephanie Daley posterInsight is what forensic psy­cho­lo­gist Tilda Swinton is after in Stephanie Daley. Heavily preg­nant, and still mourn­ing the loss of a pre­vi­ous unborn child, she is asked to inter­view the eponym­ous school­girl (Amber Tamblyn) who is accused of con­ceal­ing her own preg­nancy and then mur­der­ing the new-born baby. Her exam­in­a­tion will decide the fate of the tim­id young Christian girl who may indeed be too inno­cent to real­ize what a drunk­en date-rape can lead to. Stephanie Daley is a well acted drama with a fine sense of place, loc­ated in snowy upstate New York, and a lot going on under the surface.

Rush Hour 3 posterBack at the mul­ti­plex, Rush Hour 3 is one of the poorest excuses for enter­tain­ment it is been my mis­for­tune to wit­ness. And to think that part-timer Chris Tucker was paid $25m to star in it (a fee which evid­ently did not require any time at the gym to pre­pare). Jackie Chan is show­ing his age too. Abject.

La Vie En Rose posterI spent most of the time watch­ing La Vie En Rose think­ing that I’d seen the film some­where before. A beau­ti­fully art dir­ec­ted recre­ation of the life of a troubled artist from the wrong side of the tracks, dev­ast­ated by drug addic­tion and guilt, it could have been Ray or Walk The Line except for the fact that little Edith Piaf did­n’t have time for the redemp­tion and tri­umph that the Hollywood biop­ics demand.

Piaf was an extraordin­ary char­ac­ter, a huge and vibrant voice in a frail and tiny frame. Writer-director Olivier Dahan makes con­sist­ently inter­est­ing choices (par­tic­u­larly a death-bed mont­age at the end which amaz­ingly con­tains noth­ing that we have seen before) and Marion Cotillard plays Piaf with all the fierce and demen­ted self-destructive energy she can sum­mon up. She’s a force of nature and it is one of the per­form­ances of the year.

Deep Water posterFinally, superb doc­u­ment­ary Deep Water finally gets the prom­ised com­mer­cial release and I urge you not to miss it. And, if you already saw it at the Festival check it out again as it’s quite a dif­fer­ent film second time around.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 3 October, 2007.

Full dis­clos­ure: Unknown is dis­trib­uted in New Zealand by Arkles Entertainment who pay me money to do stuff for them from time to time.

Review: Children of Men and more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Children of Men posterI grew up under the high-heeled jack­boot of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, when post-apocalyptic vis­ions of futur­ist­ic fas­cist dic­tat­or­ships seemed to turn up as reg­u­larly as London buses. Back then we all felt that the world was at risk from the insane plans of a men­tally defi­cient, war-mongering, US pres­id­ent cap­tured by the military-industrial com­plex. Of course, now things are com­pletely dif­fer­ent (ahem) but Children of Men still seems like the product of a bygone era.

20 years into a grey British future: the pop­u­la­tion is sterile and extinc­tion of the human race is inev­it­able. Alcoholic pub­lic ser­vant Clive Owen is per­suaded by ex-girlfriend and freedom-fighter Julianne Moore to trans­port some pre­cious cargo to the coast but her plan (and her team) is soon shred­ded by the forces of reac­tion and Owen is forced to go it alone. There are sev­er­al abso­lutely jaw-dropping set-pieces and I won­der wheth­er the people of Bexhill real­ised what sort of mess was going to be made of their quiet little sea­side town. Never lend any­thing to a film crew!

Read More