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Dec 31 2008
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2008 comes to an end

By Cinema

Compelled once again by Christmas dead­lines to sum up the year in cinema, I have been think­ing a lot about how some movies stay with you and some don’t, how some movies have got aver­age reviews from me this year but have grown in my affec­tions, and how there are some films you want to see again and some you’re not so bothered about – even when you admire them.

So I’m going to divide my year up in to the fol­low­ing cat­egor­ies: Keepers are films I want to own and live with. Films I can expect to watch once a year – or force upon guests when I dis­cov­er they haven’t already been seen. Repeats are films I would­n’t mind see­ing again – rent­ing or bor­row­ing or stum­bling across on tv. Enjoyed are films I enjoyed (obvi­ously) and respec­ted but am in no hurry to watch again.

No Country for Old Men posterThe “keep­ers” won’t come as any great sur­prise: The Coen’s No Country for Old Men and PT Anderson’s There Will Be Blood were both stone-cold American mas­ter­pieces. NCFOM just about shades it as film of the year but only because I haven’t yet watched TWBB a second time. Vincent Ward’s Rain of the Children was the best New Zealand film for a very long time, an emo­tion­al epic. Apollo doco In the Shadow of the Moon moved and inspired me and I want to give it a chance to con­tin­ue to do so by keep­ing it in my house. Finally, two supremely sat­is­fy­ing music films: I could listen to Todd Haynes’ Dylan biop­ic I’m Not There. again and again, and watch­ing it was was much fun­ni­er than I expec­ted. Not mind­ing the music of U2, I did­n’t have a big hump to get over watch­ing their 3D con­cert movie, but what a blast it was! Immersive and involving, it was the first truly great digit­al 3D exper­i­ence. For the time being you can­’t recre­ate the 3D exper­i­ence at home so I hold out for a giant cinema screen of my own to watch it on.

Next lay­er down are the films I would­n’t mind watch­ing again, either because I sus­pect there are hid­den pleas­ures to be revealed or because a second view­ing will con­firm or deny sus­pec­ted great­ness. Gritty Romanian mas­ter­piece 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days has stayed with me since I saw it in March. Be Kind Rewind was rich enough (and good-hearted enough) to deserve anoth­er look. Martin McDonagh’s bizarre hit­man fantasy In Bruges rocked along at such a decent clip I need to see it again to make sure I did­n’t miss any of it’s eccent­ric pleas­ures. I liked and respec­ted the Coen’s oth­er 2008 entry Burn After Reading more than every oth­er crit­ic so a second view­ing would be use­ful, if only to con­firm that I appre­ci­ated it bet­ter than every­one else did… Or not.

Tropic Thunder posterIf I could just clip the Robert Downey Jr. bits from Tropic Thunder it would be a keep­er, instead I look for­ward to see­ing it again over Christmas. The same goes for the entire first act of WALL•E which I could watch over and over again. Sadly the film lost some of that magic when it got in to space (though it remains a stun­ning achieve­ment all the same).

Into the “Enjoy” cat­egory: Of the doc­u­ment­ar­ies released to cinemas this year, three stood out. The affec­tion­ate por­trait of Auckland theatre-maker Warwick Broadhead, Rubbings From a Live Man, was mov­ing and its strange­ness was per­fectly appro­pri­ate. Up the Yangtze showed us a China we could­n’t see via the Olympics jug­ger­naut and Young at Heart is still play­ing and should­n’t be missed.

The Edge of Heaven posterI made plenty of suc­cess­ful vis­its to the art­house this year. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly was awe­some; The Edge of Heaven quietly enthralling; Irina Palm was sur­pris­ing. My review says I liked After the Wedding but I hardly remem­ber a thing about it. Also get­ting the art­house tick from me: The Counterfeiters, The Band’s Visit, the delight­ful hymn to tol­er­ance Grow Your Own and the glossy romance The Painted Veil.

Worthy indies that gave me faith in the future of US cinema included Ben Affleck’s Boston-thriller Gone Baby Gone; Ryan Gosling in love with a sex toy (Lars and the Real Girl); twee little Juno; nasty (in a good way) Choke; heart­warm­ing The Visitor and Frozen River (which was the best of the lot).

Space Chimps posterMainstream Hollywood was­n’t a com­plete waste of space this year (although the ghastly cyn­ic­al rom-coms 27 Dresses and Made of Honour would have you believe oth­er­wise). Ghost Town was the best romantic com­edy of the year; The Dark Knight and Iron Man were enter­tain­ing enough; I got car­ried away by Mamma Mia and the showstop­ping per­form­ance by Meryl Streep; Taken was ener­get­ic Euro-pulp; Horton Hears a Who! and Madagascar 2 held up the kid-friendly end of the deal (plus a shout-out for the under-appreciated Space Chimps) and, of course, Babylon A.D. (just kid­ding, but I did enjoy it’s campy insanity).

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 31 December, 2008.

Note that I delib­er­ately avoid choos­ing Festival-only films as dir­ect­ing people towards films they can­’t eas­ily see is just cruel.

Oct 31 2008
Love0

Review: Young @ Heart, Max Payne, Rise of the Footsoldier, A Journey of Dmitri Shostakovich, Brideshead Revisited and Irina Palm

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Young at Heart posterThe most purely emo­tion­al exper­i­ence I have had in a cinema this year was watch­ing the delight­ful doc­u­ment­ary Young @ Heart dur­ing the Film Festival. It’s a life-affirming (and by its very nature death-affirming too) por­trait of a group of Massachusetts seni­or cit­izen chor­is­ters who tour the world with a pro­gramme of (often con­sciously iron­ic) rock and pop clas­sics and it starts out like the quirky British tv pro­gramme it was ori­gin­ally inten­ded to be. But then these remark­able, love­able, buoy­ant char­ac­ters take con­trol and by the time they get to Dylan’s Forever Young, I may as well have been a puddle on the floor of the cinema. Young at Heart is so suc­cess­ful I even fell in love with Coldplay for about five minutes. It’s that good.

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Jun 19 2008
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Review: The Incredible Hulk, In the Valley of Elah, The Happening, Outsourced and You Don’t Mess With the Zohan

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

The Incredible Hulk posterI think we can safely call a halt to these semi-annual Hulk movies now – the new one is good enough that we can all move on (Ant-Man is evid­ently next). The Incredible Hulk is Marvel’s attempt to wrestle back the fran­chise that got away from them under Ang Lee in 2003 and even­tu­ally re-unify the Marvel uni­verse under the suave, unstop­pable box office force of Robert Downey Jr’s Iron Man. To retrieve The Hulk, Marvel cast Hollywood’s weedi­est lead­ing man, Edward Norton (Fight Club), not real­ising that Norton also has a repu­ta­tion as a bit of a med­dler who then re-wrote the script and sat in on the editing.

The res­ult, as you might expect, is a bit of a noisy mess, but far from dis­astrous. After a splen­didly con­densed open­ing title sequence which takes us through the back-story of the ori­gin­al exper­i­ments that Gamma-ized poor Bruce Banner, we meet him on the run in Brazil, labour­ing in a bot­tling plant, tak­ing anger man­age­ment classes and col­lab­or­at­ing online with a mys­ter­i­ous sci­ent­ist who may hold the key to a cure. Unfortunately for him, the General (a suit­ably comic-book per­form­ance by William Hurt) arrives with a squad to take him home. This makes him angry, of course, and unleashes the green beast within.

If any­thing, it is more respect­ful of the TV series than the com­ic book, fea­tur­ing cameos from ori­gin­al Hulk Lou Ferrigno and a clunky posthum­ous cameo from TV Banner Bill Bixby. In fact, look­ing back on it the film spends more time hon­our­ing the past than it does driv­ing into the future, often fall­ing prey to cutesy touches like hav­ing Norton Anti-Virus fire up when Banner logs on to a com­puter. Chief Villain Tim Roth looks like Chelsea own­er Roman Abramovich, which makes his char­ac­ter name, The Abomination, per­fectly apt.

In the Valley of Elah posterPaul Haggis cre­ated the Oscar-winning Crash back in 2004 and, after help­ing rein­vent Bond in Casino Royale, has gone back to the polit­ic­al well with the heart­felt In the Valley of Elah, star­ring Tommy Lee Jones. Jones plays former Army invest­ig­at­or Hank Deerfield. His son has just returned from Iraq but imme­di­ately gone AWOL so Hank travels across Texas to find him. What he dis­cov­ers shakes his faith in his coun­try and the mil­it­ary and (I’m guess­ing) is sup­posed to have some meta­phor­ic weight about the state of the nation and the world and it prob­ably does. I was one of many who found Crash to be appalling, un-watchable, rub­bish but Elah (per­haps because it does­n’t try and do so much) is better.

While Haggis wears his heart on his sleeve, what he really needs is a copy edit­or on his shoulder. Someone needs to tell him that when you cast someone as soul­ful as Tommy Lee Jones you can just let him tell the audi­ence what is going on with his eyes – you don’t then have to then verb­al­ise it in the next shot. Probably an easy mis­take to make when you are a writer first and a dir­ect­or second…

The Happening posterIf Haggis needs a copy edit­or then M. Night Shyamalan needs a secur­ity guard on the door of his office, hold­ing the keys to his type­writer. The Happening is an eco-thriller about a mys­ter­i­ous “event” that causes people across the North East of America to lose their minds and then do away with them­selves. Among those caught up in the mess is high school sci­ence teach­er Mark Wahlberg who thinks the mys­ter­i­ous dis­ap­pear­ance of America’s bee pop­u­la­tion might have some­thing to do with it.

Shyamalan has obvi­ous tal­ent as a dir­ect­or: he has an eye for an arrest­ing image and has seen enough Hitchcock to con­struct effect­ive set-pieces but he can­’t write dia­logue that human beings can actu­ally say which con­tinu­ally drops the audi­ence out of the moment. Luckily, whenev­er I lost con­nec­tion to the story, there was Zooey Deschanel (as Wahlberg’s wife), whose elec­tric blue eyes should be cat­egor­ised as an altern­at­ive fuel source.

Outsourced posterOutsourced is return­ing to cinemas after a brief turn at the World Cinema Showcase. It’s a beguil­ing tale of a Seattle call centre man­ager (Josh Hamilton) who has to go to India to train his replace­ment when the nov­elty com­pany he works for relo­cates “ful­fil­ment” to Gwaripur. The usu­al cross-cultural mis­un­der­stand­ings occur but the char­ac­ters all grow on you, much like India grows on our hero.

You Don't Mess With The Zohan posterFinally, legendary social com­ment­at­or Adam Sandler takes on anoth­er press­ing polit­ic­al issue (after gay mar­riage in I Now Pronounce You Chuck & Larry) and helps solve the con­flict in the Middle East with You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, a hit and miss com­edy that is mostly hit for a change. Sandler is the Zohan, num­ber one Israeli counter-terrorist oper­at­ive, who is tired of the end­less con­flict and yearns to emu­late his hero (Paul Mitchell), cut hair in New York and make everything “silky smooth”. So he fakes his own death and smuggles his way in to America where the only job he can get is in a Palestinian salon. His unortho­dox meth­ods with the ladies soon make him very pop­u­lar indeed but the con­flict is nev­er far away.

There are plenty of jokes per minute and the relent­less teas­ing of Israelis for their love of fizzy drinks, hum­mus, disco and hacky-sack is pretty entertaining.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 18 June 2008.

Nature of con­flict: Outsourced is dis­trib­uted in New Zealand by Arkles Entertainment who I do a little work for now and then.

May 08 2008
Love0

Review: I’m Not There., Iron Man, Made of Honor, Dan in Real Life and How About You

By Cinema, Reviews and Wellington

I'm Not There. posterMany years ago English comedi­an Ben Elton cracked a joke about Bob Dylan: “For all you young people in the audi­ence he was the one who could­n’t sing on the end of the We Are The World video.” Nowadays we have to explain to young people what We Are The World was and Dylan has trav­elled even fur­ther away from rel­ev­ance. So why is I’m Not There. (the full stop is part of the title) such essen­tial view­ing if Dylan seems so irrelevant?

Because unlike every oth­er 20th Century icon Dylan nev­er cared what you think – he just fol­lowed his instincts and his interests and the film is an end­lessly fas­cin­at­ing por­trait of that battle to avoid becom­ing what his audi­ence and his industry wanted him to become. Portrayed by six dif­fer­ent act­ors includ­ing Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger, Dylan’s many per­so­nas still keep you at arms length. I think the key to Dylan is that he is less com­plic­ated (and at the same time more com­plex) than the world would have you believe and he fully deserves a work of art as fine as this one in his name.

I should also point out that I was lucky enough to see I’m not There. in that most music­al of loc­a­tions, the Paramount and it soun­ded superb. A keeper.

Iron Man posterRobert Downey Jr. is one of those movie brats who seems to have been born in front of a cam­era (check out his almost per­fect per­form­ance as Chaplin for Richard Attenborough in 1992). He has­n’t been get­ting the lead roles he deserves (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was the last one) but Iron Man is surely going to change that. Downey Jr.‘s effort­less screen cha­risma is the found­a­tion of a highly enter­tain­ing action movie that is only let down by a not-quite-big-enough set-piece at the end. Billionaire and play­boy arms man­u­fac­turer Tony Stark has his eyes opened to the evils his products enable when he is kid­napped in Afghanistan. After escap­ing, he decides to use his tech­no­logy for good (while still hav­ing as much fun as pos­sible). A good sup­port­ing cast (includ­ing Jeff Bridges look­ing like Daddy Warbucks) keeps things moving.

Made of Honor posterThe fun­ni­est thing about Patrick Dempsey rom-com Made of Honour is that it was made by a com­pany called Original Film. As if! Dempsey plays Tom, super-rich invent­or of the cof­fee col­lar and serial-bedder of beau­ti­ful women. Too late he real­ises that he is actu­ally in love with his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan, this year’s Sandra Bullock) just as she is about to get mar­ried to Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd in a Scottish castle. Pretty much all the char­ac­ters are deeply shal­low and pretty unlike­able which I’m sure was­n’t the inten­tion and, most annoy­ing of all, dir­ect­or Paul Weiland gives him­self the auteur cred­it of “A Film By”. In your dreams, pal.

Dan in Real LifeMuch more suc­cess­ful, and not coin­cid­ent­ally pop­u­lated with much nicer people, is Dan in Real Life star­ring Steve Carell as author of a pop­u­lar news­pa­per par­ent­ing tips column who has much more dif­fi­culty par­ent­ing his actu­al chil­dren (alone, due to that all-too-common con­ceit of a widow-hood). So far, so un-promising, but Dan in Real Life really wins you over with smart writ­ing and lovely, under­stated per­form­ances from a ter­rif­ic ensemble. Lonely Dan is tak­ing his brood of daugh­ters to a multi-generational fam­ily get togeth­er in rugged Rhode Island. He meets beau­ti­ful and allur­ing Juliette Binoche and they fall in love, just before find­ing out that she is his brother­’s new girl­friend. Testing times around the din­ner table ensue, mostly com­ic but nev­er far away from deeply heart­felt. Frankly, more films should be like this.

How About You stillHow About You is one of those films where, I con­fess, my taste and the taste of main­stream New Zealanders diverges some­what. Ellie, played by Hayley Atwell (star of the unne­ces­sar­ily forth­com­ing new ver­sion of Brideshead Revisited), is forced by cir­cum­stance to help her sis­ter care for a group of unruly cli­ents (a dream cast includ­ing Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker and Joss Ackland) in an Irish eld­erly res­id­en­tial home so beau­ti­ful it makes Malvina Major look like Alcatraz. Left alone with them at Christmas, she man­ages to trans­form all of them into saintly par­agons of matur­ity via alco­hol and non-prescribed drugs. I barely tol­er­ated this but if you are over 70 you might get a kick out of it – the people behind me who talked all the way through cer­tainly did.

Human Rights Film Festival posterThe Human Rights Film Festival kicks off it’s 2008 sea­son at the Paramount on Thursday even­ing. While most of these films don’t really qual­i­fy as cinema per se, this is still an import­ant oppor­tun­ity to see the world as it is abso­lutely not por­trayed through the com­mer­cial media. Highlights for me include Occupation 101, a crystal-clear exam­in­a­tion of the real­ity of life in occu­pied Palestine, and Now The People Have Awoken, anoth­er per­spect­ive on Chavez’s Venezuela which will be of par­tic­u­lar interest if you have seen Pilger’s War on Democracy. There are sev­en short­er items on the pro­gramme too: I’m look­ing for­ward to see­ing Bowling for Zimbabwe about a young boy who needs a crick­et­ing schol­ar­ship in order to escape the man-made atro­city of Mugabe’s grind­ing poverty.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 7 May, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: I already men­tioned how good I’m Not There. soun­ded at the Paramount dur­ing the Showcase. I don’t know wheth­er it is the shape of the room or the PA speak­ers behind the screen but music cinema has always soun­ded sen­sa­tion­al in there. Iron Man was, like Transformers last year, at a busy pub­lic screen­ing at the Embassy which looked and soun­ded great. Standing ova­tion from a few fan­boys, too. Made of Honour looked per­fectly accept­able at the Empire. I am not allowed to tell you where I saw Dan in Real Life as they made me sign an NDA before they would let me in there. No shit! But it was amaz­ing. The print had seen bet­ter days but had been giv­en a spruce up by our hosts. How About You was ruined by it being a not very good film but the incess­ant talk­ing by the old bid­dies behind me and the annoy­ing hair in the gate fin­ished me off. Penthouse.

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