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james mangold

Dec 30 2010
Love0

Review: The Karate Kid, Predators, My One and Only & Knight and Day

By Cinema and Reviews

The Karate Kid posterThe first thing to know about The Karate Kid is that there is no kar­ate in it. This remake of the eighties favour­ite sends twelve-year-old hero Jaden Smith to China where they hurt people with kung fu instead. It was ori­gin­ally going to be called The Kung Fu Kid until someone in mar­ket­ing real­ised cer­tain syn­er­gist­ic oppor­tun­it­ies might be missed by the less cred­u­lous tar­get mar­ket. So there we are.

I have mixed feel­ings about this film. I have no great love for the ori­gin­al (des­pite ador­ing my occa­sion­al nick­name “Daniel-san”) so am not much bothered about the updat­ing. Director Harald Zwart man­aged to get my pulse going a bit faster than nor­mal, which doesn’t hap­pen very often these days, and there are some nice scenes that take advant­age of some inter­est­ing Chinese loc­a­tions. But this is basic­ally a pre-teen Rocky with some pretty real­ist­ic smacks and I’m a little uncom­fort­able about that.

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Mar 27 2008
Love0

Review: 3:10 to Yuma, 2 Days in Paris, Love in the Time of Cholera and I Served the King of England

By Cinema and Reviews

3:10 to Yuma posterThe for­tunes of the Western rise with the tide of American cinema. During the 70’s indie renais­sance we got rugged clas­sics like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders, then in the 80’s and 90’s Clint Eastwood re-examined his own myth­ic West in Pale Rider and Unforgiven . (The less said about Young Guns 1 and 2 the better.)

The past 12 months have offered us two Westerns that are as good as any of the last 30 years: The Assassination of Jesse James and James Mangold’s homage to the clas­sic 3:10 to Yuma which opened in Wellington last week.

Yuma is a story (by Elmore Leonard) with great bones: poor, hon­est, ranch­er Christian Bale is suf­fer­ing because of the drought and for $200 takes on the des­per­ate task of escort­ing cap­tured out­law Russell Crowe to Contention City, where he will catch the eponym­ous train to the gallows.

But Crowe’s gang are on the way to lib­er­ate him and Bale’s sup­port is dwind­ling to noth­ing. The ten­sion rises as the clock ticks towards three o’clock.

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