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Only God Forgives poster

Review: Pain & Gain, Only God Forgives, The Wolverine, The Way Way Back, The Conjuring & Byzantium

By Cinema, Reviews

Ryan Gosling in Only God Forgives (2013).

Still Mine posterStill hov­er­ing around some loc­al cinemas – and the longest-delayed of all my out­stand­ing reviews – Still Mine is a sur­pris­ingly effect­ive Canadian drama about an eld­erly man (James Cromwell, 73 but play­ing a fit 89) determ­ined to build a new house for his wife (Geneviéve Bujold) before her memory deserts her com­pletely. Cromwell gives his char­ac­ter a soft­ness which belies the usu­al ornery old dude clichés, even if his stub­born refus­al to sub­mit to the build­ing code is the device on which the story hinges. Contains lots of shots of Cromwell’s hero­ic pro­file star­ing off into the New Brunswick distance.

Ping Pong posterOlder people are, para­dox­ic­ally, the only grow­ing seg­ment of the film audi­ence in New Zealand so there’s often high qual­ity fare around the tempt them. One of the best is the doc­u­ment­ary Ping Pong, about com­pet­it­ors (genu­ine com­pet­it­ors at that) in the World Over 80s Table Tennis Championship in Inner Mongolia. Like any good doc­u­ment­ary it assembles a great cast of char­ac­ters and like all good sports movies it makes full use of the built-in drama of a knock-out tour­na­ment. Not just about the res­tor­at­ive power of exer­cise, it’s also about friend­ship and adven­ture. Inspiring, so help me.

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

By Cinema, 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.

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Review: Twilight- Breaking Dawn part 1, Project Nim, The Whistleblower and Snow Flower and the Secret Fan

By Cinema, Reviews

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn posterThere are now four films in the Twilight “saga” which means I’ve spent 493 minutes in the Twilight uni­verse, at least 492 of them wish­ing I was some­where else. The latest epis­ode, Breaking Dawn Part 1 fol­lows the Harry Potter strategy of not sep­ar­at­ing uncom­plain­ing fools from their money once when you can do so twice, and thank­fully is the least rot­ten of the four films.

All of the “will they, won’t they” non­sense has been lead­ing to this so – at least nar­rat­ively speak­ing – they are finally get­ting on with it. After the longest wed­ding scene in cinema his­tory – of films that don’t have the word ‘wed­ding’ in the title – Bella (Kristen Stewart) and Edward (Robert Pattinson) head off to a remote Brazilian island to play chess on the beach and con­sumate their relationship.

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Review: Spy Kids 4D, The Smurfs, Johnny English Reborn, Real Steel, Footloose, The Orator, Norwegian Wood and the 2011 Italian Film Festival

By Cinema, Reviews

While thou­sands of protest­ors gath­er in Manhattan to “Occupy Wall St”, the European eco­nomy teeters on the brink of col­lapse, unem­ploy­ment across the developed world grows and sev­er­al Pacific island nations report short­ages of drink­ing water due to cli­mate change, here in New Zealand we con­tin­ue to party like it’s 1987 and at the pic­tures for the school hol­i­days we have the most blatant and des­per­ate examples of cor­por­at­ist “enter­tain­ment” I’ve ever seen lined up togeth­er. Is this the cinema equi­val­ent of fid­dling while Rome burns?

In The Smurfs the mega-sized Sony cor­por­a­tion makes sure that its name and products are nev­er very far from the centre of the screen, ren­der­ing the lumpy end product utterly charm­less. In Real Steel the product place­ment is more like product bom­bard­ment. Nothing goes without a logo – from Hugh Jackman’s sunglasses to HP (or are they still known as Hewlett-Packard?) spend­ing thou­sands of dol­lars to pro­mote products they don’t even make any­more. Meanwhile, the spies in Spy Kids 4 all use Apple products – although for the most part they are pre­tend­ing to be some­thing oth­er than com­puters and iPads.

Johnny English Reborn even goes so far as to make a joke out of its depend­ency on the rap­idly declin­ing cor­por­ate dol­lar – English’s beloved MI7 has changed it’s name to Toshiba MI7 while he was on an enforced sab­bat­ic­al. Whether the pres­ence of a sen­su­ously pho­to­graphed (and glow­ingly described) Rolls Royce will prompt the aver­age audi­ence mem­ber to trade in their fifteen-year-old Mazdas is neither here nor there. The fact remains that if you send your kids to the pic­tures this hol­i­days they will be indoc­trin­ated more than any gen­er­a­tion before them.

Spy Kids 4 posterBut are the films any good? Actually, yes, a couple of them are OK. I’m a big fan of Robert Rodriguez and his abil­ity to altern­ately churn out grown-up pulp like Machete and family-friendly fare like Shorts. His Troublemaker Studios in Austin knows how to make things look good (enough) on mod­est budgets and Rodriguez’ relent­lessly invent­ive ima­gin­a­tion keeps everything lively and fun. I thought Spy Kids 4 was endear­ing and it man­aged to deliv­er a good mes­sage along with the thrills and spills.

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Review: Iron Maiden: Flight 666, X-Men Origins: Wolverine and a few more ...

By Cinema, Reviews

One of the first films I reviewed when I star­ted here was an charm­ing doc­u­ment­ary called Metal: A Headbanger’s Journey in which Canadian fans Sam Dunn and Scot McFadyen trav­elled the world talk­ing to oth­er fans (and the stars they wor­ship) about what it is that makes met­al great. In that film they inter­viewed Iron Maiden’s vocal­ist Bruce Dickinson and they must have made a decent impres­sion as Maiden (and EMI) have giv­en them a decent budget and loads of access for them to doc­u­ment their Somewhere Back in Time tour (around the world last year).

And what a wheeze the tour turned out to be. Chartering a 757 from Dickinson’s oth­er employ­er, tak­ing half the seats out so the gear and set could fit, fly­ing the whole show between gigs with Dickinson pilot­ing the whole time – a bunch of pasty middle-aged English lads hav­ing the time of their lives across half the world. The only real drama comes when drum­mer Nicko McBrain gets hit on the wrist by a golf ball, but it doesn’t mat­ter because the joy of see­ing a band really mov­ing audi­ences (in places like Mumbai and Costa Rica) is the reas­on for this film to exist. And this film rises above above oth­er recent great rock movies like U2-3D and Shine a Light – because it’s about the fans as well as the band and it recog­nises the com­plex inter­de­pend­ence of the relationship.

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