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Review: Drive, In Time, One Day, Fright Night and The Inbetweeners Movie

By Cinema, Reviews

Expat Kiwi auteur Andrew Niccol (Gattaca) some­how always man­ages to tap in to the zeit­geist and with new sci-fi thrill­er In Time his own tim­ing is almost spook­ily per­fect. A par­able about the mod­ern polit­ic­al eco­nomy, In Time isn’t a par­tic­u­larly soph­ist­ic­ated ana­lys­is but while protest­ors occupy Wall Street, St Paul’s in London and the City to Sea Bridge here in Wellington, it seems almost per­fectly cal­cu­lated to pro­voke a big Fuck You! to the bankers, spec­u­lat­ors and hoarders who are rap­idly becom­ing the Hollywood vil­lains we love to hate.

In Niccol’s world, sev­er­al dec­ades into the future, time is lit­er­ally money: human beings have been genet­ic­ally mod­i­fied to stop (phys­ic­ally) age­ing at 25. Which would be lovely apart from the fact that a clock on your writst then starts count­ing down the one year you have left to live and the time on your wrist becomes cur­rency. You can earn more by work­ing, trans­fer it to oth­ers by shak­ing hands, bor­row more from banks and loan sharks or you can spend it on booze to blot out the hor­ror of your pathet­ic little life.

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“This will carry me twenty-five years.”

By Asides, Cinema

Grouch Marx (inter­viewed by Roger Ebert) tells of a vis­it to W.C. Fields’ house:

He invited me over to his house, he had his girl­friend there. I think her name was Carlotta Monti. Car-lot-ta MON-ti! That’s the kind of name a girl of Fields would have. He had a lad­der lead­ing up to his attic. Without exag­ger­a­tion, there was fifty thou­sand dol­lars in liquor up there. Crated up like a wharf. I’m stand­ing there and Fields is stand­ing there, and nobody says any­thing. The silence is oppress­ive. Finally, he speaks: This will carry me twenty-five years.

Quote of the day.