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hilary swank

Review: New Year’s Eve, The First Grader, Red State and Courageous

By Cinema, Reviews

For years now I’ve been fight­ing a single-handed defence of the later career of Robert De Niro (no defence, of course, being neces­sary for the early career which fea­tured Mean Streets, Taxi Driver and The Deer Hunter). This defence has sev­er­al argu­ments. Firstly, his decline hasn’t been nearly as pro­nounced – or as strange – as Al Pacino’s. Secondly, he was mak­ing some unusu­al decisions even dur­ing the eighties and, frankly, one Harry Tuttle – the reneg­ade cent­ral heat­ing engin­eer in Brazil – or foul-mouthed bail bonds­man Jack Walsh (Midnight Run) will get you a free pass for an awful lot of We’re No Angels.

In the nineties, too, he would make choices that fans of Raging Bull and King of Comedy would think were beneath him – Mad Dog and Glory, Frankenstein – but also pull out Wag the Dog and Jackie Brown. It’s been clear for a while now that De Niro is some­thing of a work­ahol­ic – and an act­or who waits for pro­jects as good as Goodfellas is an act­or who doesn’t work all that often.

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Review: Under the Mountain, Amelia and Planet 51

By Cinema, Reviews

Under the Mountain posterAs the recent fuss over The Vintner’s Luck demon­strated, film­makers adapt­ing beloved New Zealand books open them­selves up to all sorts of poten­tial cri­ti­cism, so when Jonathan King and Matthew Grainger announced that their next pro­ject was going to be a ver­sion of Maurice Gee’s Under the Mountain there were a great many excited people (mostly around my age it seemed) thrilled that their favour­ite child­hood book was going to get the all-action big screen treatment.

And yet, as a story pitched at older kids and young adults, it was going to have to be brought out of the ori­gin­al 70s con­text (and updated from its early 80s TV incarn­a­tion) or nobody would come. It’s a fine bal­ance and for mine I think King and Grainger have done a good job – even if the rest­less crowd at Readings on Saturday after­noon might sug­gest otherwise.

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Review: Love Birds, Tamara Drewe, Wagner & Me, Conviction, The Last Exorcism and Curry Munchers

By Cinema, Reviews

Love Birds posterFollowing the sur­prise suc­cess of Second Hand Wedding in 2008, screen­writer Nick Ward and dir­ect­or Paul Murphy have been giv­en a vastly improved budget and access to two inter­na­tion­al stars and told to make light­ning strike twice.

The stars of Love Birds just hap­pen to be the two fussi­est act­ors in the world, Sally Hawkins (Golden Globe win­ner for Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky) and TV com­ic Rhys Darby, and when the two of them start fid­get­ing and stam­mer­ing it feels like you are in for a long night. Luckily, both have their still-er moments and at those times you can see that Darby has real poten­tial as a big screen romantic lead.

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Review: P.S., I Love You, Molière and Lady Chatterley

By Cinema, Reviews

PS I Love You posterHilary Swank’s new twin-hanky romance P.S., I Love You is a remark­able achieve­ment. In all my years of cinema-going I don’t think I have ever seen a film get more wrong. From the clunky premise to the ghastly cos­tume design; through awk­ward reverses in tone plus no small amount of self-indulgence on the part of Swank; it is as if every­one involved (when faced with a choice between the right way and the wrong way) simply flipped a coin and it came up “wrong” every time.

Swank plays New York wid­ow Holly Kennedy, whose Irish hus­band Gerry (300s Gerard Butler) dies of a brain tumour fol­low­ing a scene demon­strat­ing how power­ful and tem­pes­tu­ous their romance is. Shortly after the wake, Holly starts receiv­ing let­ters from Gerry, writ­ten before he died in order to coach her through the grief and help her start again. As if.

One of the let­ters includes tick­ets to Ireland for Holly and her best friends so she can revis­it the scene of their first meet­ing (prompt­ing an intol­er­ably banal flash­back scene). Meanwhile sup­port­ing cast Gina Gershon and Lisa Kudrow can enjoy the nat­ives tooraloo-ing in that way that only the Hollywood Irish can.

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