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Jun 26 2012
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Review: American Reunion, Titanic 3D and The Pirates! Band of Misfits

By Cinema and Reviews

American Reunion posterIn one of these columns back in 2007 I said, “Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.” Those were the days, eh? Now you can’t get away from it. This week nos­tal­gia is every­where – get­ting up your nose and on your shoes – and the prime cul­prits are young whip­per­snap­pers who should know bet­ter – yearn­ing for their High School years in that innocent-yet-filthy time before Y2K and 9/11 changed everything.

The first American Pie was a well-executed imple­ment­a­tion of that noble genre, the teen sex com­edy. Four sequels (two direct-to-video) leeched whatever good­will there might have remained out of the pro­ject but – as the careers of Jason Biggs, Seann Williamm Scott and Chris Klein have stuttered – the Hollywood eco­nomy will even­tu­ally demand its trib­ute. American Reunion is the result.

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Oct 27 2011
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Review: The Trip, Pina and Paranormal Activity 3

By Cinema and Reviews

Michael Winterbottom’s The Trip is the best pic­ture about middle-aged male angst since Sideways, and it’s pos­sibly even bet­ter than that fine film. Two priv­ileged English celebrit­ies spend a week driv­ing around the North of England from one fine res­taur­ant to anoth­er, eat­ing and drink­ing them­selves silly on someone else’s dime. And yet, some­thing dark­er is up.

Self-absorbed “Steve Coogan” (Steve Coogan) is sep­ar­ated from his girl­friend, dis­tanced from his chil­dren, des­per­ate for recog­ni­tion as a ser­i­ous act­or but all too often wel­comed by strangers with a warm-hearted but annoy­ing repe­ti­tion of his great TV catch­phrase (Alan Partridge’s “Ah-ha”). On the sur­face, “Rob Brydon” (Rob Brydon) is a hap­pily mar­ried man with a young child, a mod­er­ately suc­cess­ful TV and stand-up career but, as Coogan points out in a pathos-ridden trip the ruined Bolton Abbey, there’s some­thing about Brydon’s nev­erend­ing celebrity impres­sions and forced bon­homie that sug­gests he hasn’t quite got to grips with the real world.

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Jun 21 2010
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Review: The Road, Green Zone, The Bounty Hunter, This Way of Life & Admiral

By Cinema and Reviews

The Road posterMost films go in one eye and out the oth­er but some stick in your brain and won’t leave – for bet­ter or worse. John Hillcoat’s adapt­a­tion of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize win­ning nov­el “The Road” is one of those. Set in a depress­ing, grey, rainy, post-apocalyptic North American future (remind­ing me of noth­ing so much as this past Wellington sum­mer) where noth­ing grows and the few remain­ing human beings for­age for food – and most often find it in each oth­er – dogged and decent Viggo Mortensen trudges through the wil­der­ness with his young son, look­ing for some­thing, any­thing, that might keep them alive.

The Road is about how we try and sur­vive in the face of insur­mount­able odds, and how that phys­ic­al sur­viv­al might mean the loss of our own human­ity. Mortensen’s wife (Charlize Theron) walks out into the lonely night, mak­ing what she thinks is a sac­ri­fice but which he, clearly, thinks is little more than giv­ing up. His son may well be the last repos­it­ory of human kind­ness but that kind­ness might get them killed.

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Mar 24 2010
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Review: Shutter Island, Bright Star, Did You Hear About the Morgans?, Masquerades, Toy Story 3D and Crazy Heart

By Cinema, Reviews and Screenwriting

There’s some­thing very odd about the open­ing scenes in Shutter Island and it takes the entire film for you to put your fin­ger on it. Shots don’t match between cuts, there’s a stil­ted qual­ity to the dia­logue (too much expos­i­tion for a Martin Scorsese movie) and the pacing is off. For a while I found myself won­der­ing wheth­er Marty had lost the immense influ­ence of his great edit­or Thelma Schoonmaker, but there she is, still in the cred­its, as she has been for Scorsese since Raging Bull.

Several years ago, Scorsese played a prac­tic­al joke on me (per­son­ally, it felt like at the time) when an entire reel of The Aviator was treated to look like faded 1930s Technicolor – I went to the Embassy counter to com­plain and felt very sheep­ish to be told by Oscar, the pro­jec­tion­ist, that the dir­ect­or meant it that way. So, this time around I decided to trust the maes­tro and roll with the strange­ness and was rewar­ded with one of the best (and cleverest) psy­cho­lo­gic­al thrillers in many a year.

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Oct 13 2009
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(500) Days of Summer poster

Review: (500) Days of Summer, Samson and Delilah and In the Loop

By Cinema and Reviews

The romantic com­edy is moribund. The first traces of its demise can be dated to the turn of the mil­leni­um, when Hugh Grant decided that he didn’t really want to be the floppy-haired object of middle-class women’s affec­tions. Since then, the genre has been a reli­able pro­du­cer of tired and cyn­ic­al “battles of the sexes” or grown-up fables in which a self-centred man-child dis­cov­ers unlikely love via a woman who is palp­ably too good for him. Earlier this year The Ugly Truth scraped the bot­tom of that bar­rel by try­ing to merge both forms and has yet to be sur­passed as worst film of the year.

(500) Days of Summer posterSo, if ever there was a genre ripe for reboot (like Star Trek earli­er this year) it is the romantic com­edy and, because nature abhors a vacu­um, we now get one. It’s called (500) Days of Summer and it may well be one of the best films of the year.

The time is present day Los Angeles (a street-level Los Angeles not a mil­lion miles away from the charm­ing In Search of a Midnight Kiss earli­er this year) and our hero (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is a young vis­ion­ary who no longer believes in him­self: an archi­tect stuck in a dead-end job writ­ing greet­ing cards. He meets his boss’s beau­ti­ful new assist­ant Summer (Zooey Deschanel) and they bond over The Smiths. He is besot­ted. She, not so much, but they start an affair.

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Mar 29 2009
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Review: Duplicity, Adoration, The Spirit of the Marathon, The Merchant of Venice and Confessions of a Shopaholic

By Cinema and Reviews

Duplicity posterYou’ll often find me rail­ing against the Hollywood machine in these pages – the life­less and cyn­ic­al, the focus-grouped and beta-tested, the band­wag­on jump­ing and the shark jump­ing – so it makes a pleas­ant change to loudly praise a film whose strengths are a pure expres­sion of old-fashioned Hollywood virtues.

Duplicity is a star-driven caper movie, fea­tur­ing ter­rif­ic easy-going per­form­ances by Julia Roberts and Clive Owen – play­ing two former spies now in the cor­por­ate secur­ity busi­ness. They team up to play their two cli­ents off against each oth­er for a secret for­mula that will change the world, and dis­cov­er that big busi­ness plays for keeps.

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