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james mcavoy

Review: Trance, Eternity, The Whale and The Perks of Being a Wallflower

By Cinema and Reviews

Danny Boyle is one of my favour­ite dir­ect­ors. From Shallow Grave in 1994 to 127 Hours in 2010, his work has stim­u­lated and inspired me. I re-watched Trainspotting the oth­er day and it still made everything else I saw that week seem old-fashioned. Everything, that is, except Trance which just hap­pens to be Boyle’s new film, a return to cinemas after dir­ect­ing the biggest theatre show of all time – the Olympic Games open­ing cere­mony which was seen by an audi­ence of – ooh – about 900 mil­lion people.

Trance returns Boyle to his $20m budget com­fort zone and his new light­weight digit­al film­mak­ing style. It also reunites him with screen­writer John Hodge (Trainspotting) so it should be all sys­tems go, yes?

Not quite. In Trance, James McAvoy plays an art expert with a prob­lem. Instead of help­ing a gang of thugs steal a very expens­ive paint­ing from his auc­tion house he actu­ally tries to steal it him­self, get­ting a whack on the head for his trouble. Now he can’t remem­ber where he left the paint­ing and the gang are try­ing everything from fingernail-pulling to hyp­no­ther­apy to help him remem­ber where it is.

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Review: Arthur Christmas, Immortals, When a City Falls, Rest for the Wicked and Submarine

By Cinema and Reviews

I believe that it should be illeg­al to even men­tion the word Christmas in any month oth­er than December. Yup, illeg­al. No one should be allowed to even breathe it, let alone have parades, dis­play mince pies in super­mar­kets or throw staff parties. If, as a once-great nation, we can restrict fire­work sales to three days before Guy Fawkes I’m sure we can man­age to pull our col­lect­ive yuletide-obsessed heads in for a few weeks and focus all that atten­tion on only one month a year.

At least that’s what I thought until last Friday. That was when I saw the new pic­ture from England’s Aardman Animation, Arthur Christmas. I was pre­pared, based on my afore­men­tioned bah-humbuggery – and some unpre­pos­sess­ing trail­ers – to be scorn­ful and yet I was won over. Won over to the extent that I might as well be wrapped in tin­sel with a fairy on top. Arthur Christmas made me believe in Christmas a week before I was ready.

This film is digit­al 3D rather than the stop-motion clay mod­els that made Aardman fam­ous, but the inven­tion, wit, pace, struc­ture and com­mit­ment to theme are all securely in place, brought to life by an awe­some UK voice cast (Jim Broadbent and Bill Nighy both do out­stand­ing work) and some bril­liantly clev­er visuals.

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Review: X-Men: First Class, Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides

By Cinema and Reviews

We’re at that time of year when the big stu­di­os role out block­buster after block­buster so that Americans look­ing to escape the stifling heat will choose to find com­fort in cinema air-conditioning and we in New Zealand hope that the cinemas are warm­er than our lounge rooms.

Apart from the Spielberg/Abrams col­lab­or­a­tion Super 8 (next week, folks) all of the big­gies this sea­son are either sequels or com­ic book adapt­a­tions, demon­strat­ing that des­pite all indic­a­tions the bot­tom of the bar­rel hasn’t quite been scraped yet.

X-Men: Furst Class posterAfter three X‑Men films and a hor­rendous Wolverine spin-off Marvel/Fox have gone back to the begin­ning in the now tra­di­tion­al fran­chise re-boot strategy per­fec­ted by Batman and stuffed up com­pletely by Bryan Singer with Superman Returns.

It’s 1962 and the Cold War is heat­ing up. In Oxford a smarmy super-intelligent booze-hound (James McAvoy) is scor­ing with girls thanks to his abil­ity to read minds. The CIA asks him for some help unrav­el­ling the mys­tery of some unex­plained phe­nom­ena in Las Vegas and is per­turbed to dis­cov­er they get his freaky mind con­trol powers as well as his ana­lys­is – and his “sis­ter” Raven (Jennifer Lawrence from Winter’s Bone) who has the abil­ity to change shape at will.

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Review: Get Him to the Greek, The Last Station and Amreeka

By Cinema and Reviews

Get Him to the Greek posterForgetting Sarah Marshall was one of the sur­prise pleas­ures of 2008. An Apatow com­edy that was rel­at­ively mod­est about it’s ambi­tions it fea­tured a break-out per­form­ance from English comedi­an Russell Brand, play­ing a ver­sion of his own louche stage persona.

As it so often goes with sur­prise hits, a spinoff was rushed into pro­duc­tion and we now get to see wheth­er Mr Brand’s brand of humour can carry an entire film. Get Him to the Greek sees Brand’s English rock star Aldous Snow on the comeback trail after a failed sev­en year attempt at sobri­ety. Unlikely LA A&R man Jonah Hill (Knocked Up, Funny People) sells his record label boss, Sean “P Diddy” Combs, on a 10th anniversary con­cert fea­tur­ing Snow and his band Infant Sorrow at the Greek Theatre of the title.

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Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Wanted and two more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Star Wars: The Clone Wars posterFrom the first bars of John Williams’ fam­ous fan­fare, played on a 1000 kazoos, you know The Clone Wars is going to be a cheap and cheer­ful, Saturday morn­ing car­toon level, rip-off of the Star Wars uni­verse and so it proves. Without par­ti­cip­a­tion of any of the ori­gin­al stars (except for game old Chris Lee as Dooku) and George Lucas’ involve­ment lim­ited to insist­ing that one char­ac­ter has the voice of Truman Capote, a minor epis­ode gets spun out well bey­ond it’s abil­ity to engage and enter­tain but it is quite amus­ing to be reminded that all the clones look like Tem Morrison. The tone is basic­ally “All Jar-Jar, all the time” but even your aver­age eight year old might won­der why it has to be so repetitive.

Wanted posterWhile it should­n’t be any great sur­prise to be intel­lec­tu­ally insul­ted by The Clone Wars, I was amazed to actu­ally be per­son­ally insul­ted by the cre­at­ors of comic-book action flick Wanted, dur­ing the summing-up voice-over at the end. Gentlemen, I am far from pathet­ic and the oppos­ite of ordin­ary and if your idea of a val­id per­son­al philo­sophy is to murder strangers because a magic loom told you to, then I’m pretty happy here on my side of that fence. Director Timur Bekmambetov proved with Night Watch and Day Watch that he has a thrill­ing per­son­al style but not much in the way of storytelling abil­ity which he con­firms with his first Hollywood stu­dio pro­duc­tion. Mr Tumnus, James McAvoy, plays nerdy accounts clerk Wesley who finds out he is the son and heir of the world’s best assas­sin. Aided by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman he learns to shoot round corners and dis­cov­er an object­iv­ist sense of pur­pose that puts his own per­son­al free­dom and des­tiny above the lives of (for example) hun­dreds of inno­cent people on a train. Vile.

Death Defying Acts posterHarry Houdini was one of the 20th cen­tury’s legendary enter­tain­ers and in Death Defying Acts Guy Pearce renders him com­pletely without cha­risma which is a remark­able achieve­ment. The first great scep­tic, Houdini offers $10,000 to any­one who can tell him his beloved mother­’s final words. Stage mind-reader Catherine Zeta Jones sees a way out of poverty but finds her­self fall­ing in love instead. The lack of elec­tri­city (real or ima­gined) between the two leads hampers things some­what but the cam­era loves Saoirse Ronan (Atonement and the forth­com­ing Lovely Bones) so it isn’t a com­plete waste of time.

Up The Yangtze posterWhile China is front and centre of world atten­tion at the moment, the arrival in cinemas of Yung Chang’s excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary Up the Yangtze could­n’t be bet­ter timed. Taking us on a lux­ury cruise up a Yangtze river being slowly trans­formed by the epic (Mao-inspired) Three Gorges Dam pro­ject, the film man­ages to get more of China into it’s clev­erly layered 90 minutes than seems pos­sible. Teenage Yu dreams of going to University and becom­ing an engin­eer but her par­ents are illit­er­ate and dirt poor and have missed out on the com­pens­a­tion that would move them from their shack beside the river. So, against her will, she is sent to work on the cruise ship where she is giv­en the English name Candy and instruc­ted in the ways of mod­ern domest­ic ser­vice. Meanwhile, her par­ents struggle to find a new place to live and the river inex­or­ably rises.

When dis­cuss­ing glob­al warm­ing and car­bon emis­sions, we are often told that China opens a new coal powered power sta­tion every week which is evid­ently a bad thing. But, iron­ic­ally, when they build a renew­able hydro-electric scheme the West gets pretty snooty about that too. The pres­sures on China from all dir­ec­tions are keenly felt in this film, which will tell you more about that part of the world than three weeks of Olympic Games.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 20 August, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: Star Wars: The Clone Wars was viewed at one of those excru­ci­at­ing radio sta­tion pre­views on Wednesday, 13 August (Readings). Wanted and Death Defying Acts were at Empire pub­lic screen­ings and Up the Yangtze was a pre­view screen­er DVD. I wish I had seen it at the Festival, though. I’m sure it would have looked very fine at the Embassy.

Review: The Devil Dared Me To, Atonement, A Mighty Heart, The Brave One and Conversations With My Gardener

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

I fully inten­ded to bring some intel­lec­tu­al acu­ity back to film com­ment­ary this week; maybe toss around terms like Mise-en-scène and cog­nit­ive dis­son­ance; maybe name drop Bresson and his them­at­ic aus­ter­ity and form­al rigour. Then I saw little Kiwi bat­tler, The Devil Dared Me To, a hand-made low-brow enter­tain­ment from the vodka and Becks-fuelled ima­gin­a­tions of Back of the Y’s Chris Stapp and Matt Heath, and I real­ised that high-falutin’ cinema the­ory was destined for the back burn­er for anoth­er week.

Stapp plays wan­nabe stunt hero Randy Campbell and Heath is his malevol­ent ment­or Dick Johansonson. The Timaru Hellriders are about to col­lapse under the weight of invi­di­ous OSH atten­tion and Dick’s lost nerve. Oily pro­moter Sheldon Snake (Dominic Bowden) bails them out so they can take on the North Island and get Campbell closer to his dream of being the first man to jump Cook Strait in a rock­et car. Wildly uneven but often very, very, funny The Devil Dared Me To con­tains pos­sibly the worst act­ing (and worst spelling) of any recent New Zealand film.

It’s entirely appro­pri­ate that The Devil has come out while we are cel­eb­rat­ing the 30th anniversary of Roger Donaldson’s Sleeping Dogs; anoth­er back yard, oily rag fea­ture with a sim­il­ar lar­rikin approach towards the pro­duc­tion process.

2007 has been a great year for good films but a poor year for great films; very little of what I’ve seen in 2007 belongs in the very top ech­el­on. The most ser­i­ous con­tender so far is Atonement, adap­ted from Ian McEwan’s nov­el about a lie told in inno­cence that has far reach­ing and ter­rible consequences.

In a bliss­fully beau­ti­ful British coun­try house in the sum­mer of 1935, pre­co­cious 13-year-old Briony Tallis (lumin­ous Saoirse Ronan) is jeal­ous of the atten­tion her older sis­ter Cecilia (Keira Knightley) is get­ting from hand­some Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) and impuls­ively accuses him of a ter­rible crime. The accus­a­tion tears the young lov­ers apart and leaves Briony con­sumed by a griev­ous guilt that she takes a life­time to come to terms with. Virtually faultless.

A Mighty Heart is an arms-length ver­sion of the true story of the Karachi kid­nap­ping and murder of American journ­al­ist Daniel Pearl in the after­math of 9/11. Actually, arms-length isn’t a ter­ribly fair descrip­tion: it starts that way but slowly reels you in thanks to assured dir­ec­tion from Michael Winterbottom and good per­form­ances from an ensemble cast led by Angelina Jolie.

I really wanted to give The Brave One the bene­fit of the doubt until its absurdity and con­sist­ently poor nar­rat­ive choices over­came my res­ist­ance and I simply had to hate it. Jodie Foster plays mild-mannered Erica Bain, a radio pro­du­cer in New York, engaged to hand­some doc­tor Naveen Andrews from Lost. Walking the dog late one night the couple are bru­tally attacked by thugs leav­ing her badly beaten and the boy­friend dead. Overcome by fear and grief she buys a gun for pro­tec­tion but finds her­self tak­ing on a much more malevol­ent role. Terrence Howard is the good cop on her trail.

There’s noth­ing so objec­tion­able on offer in Conversations With My Gardener, a French charm­er star­ring the ubi­quit­ous Daniel Auteuil as an artist return­ing to his fam­ily home in the coun­try while his divorce goes through. He employs wily loc­al Jean-Pierre Darroussin to knock him up a veget­able garden and, over the sum­mer, the two embark on a friend­ship that involves (as is the way of things in French films) the simple loc­al giv­ing life les­sons to the soph­ist­ic­ated townie.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 17 October, 2007.

Full dis­clos­ure: I have known Ant Timpson (pro­du­cer of The Devil Dared Me To) since 1994 when I did pub­li­city for the first Incredibly Strange Film Festival and I look after the Wellington leg of the 48 Hours Furious Filmmaking Challenge which Ant has run since 2003. The 1st AD on Devil was Jeremy Anderson, who has been a very close friend and Black Caps fan for nearly 18 years. He is a top man and I’m stoked to see his work on the big screen. If you need a 1st, give him a call.