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jason statham

RN 2/18: “We’re mad, we are!”

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious, Reviews

Kailey and Dan are joined by Ben Woodward to talk about George Miller’s Mad Max: Fury Road and the remake of Poltergeist with diver­sions into A Royal Night Out and Spy plus anoth­er announce­ment from this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival.

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RN 1/10: A 30.48 metre journey to be precise

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious, Reviews

Liam Maguren from flicks.co.nz joins Dan and Kailey to review the cross-cultural korma that is The Hundred-Foot Journey (star­ring Helen Mirren and Om Puri) and the explos­ive nostalgia-fest of Sylvester Stallone’s The Expendables 3.

Listen for a chance to win Glenn Kenny’s book Robert De Niro: Anatomy of an Actor (Glenn was inter­viewed in last week’s epis­ode).

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2012 Wellington Cinema Year in Review

By Cinema

As usu­al, the vagar­ies of hol­i­day dead­lines mean that, just as you are arriv­ing back at work to glee­fully greet the New Year, here I am to tell you all about 2012. The best way to use this page is to clip it out, fold it up and put it in your pock­et ready for your next vis­it to the video shop – that way you won’t go wrong with your rent­ing. Trust me – I’m a professional.

But this year I have a prob­lem. Usually I man­age to restrict my annu­al picks to films that were com­mer­cially released to cinemas. I’ve always felt that it wasn’t fair to men­tion films that only screened in fest­ivals – it’s frus­trat­ing to be told about films that aren’t easy to see and it makes it dif­fi­cult for you to join in and share the love. This year, though, if I take out the festival-only films the great­ness is hard to spot among the only “good”.

As usu­al, I have eschewed a top ten in favour of my pat­en­ted cat­egor­ies: Keepers, Watch Again, Mentioned in Dispatches and Shun At All Costs. In 2012, only two of my nine Keepers (films I wish to have close to me forever) made it into com­mer­cial cinemas and one of them isn’t even really a film.

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Review: The Artist, El Bulli: Cooking in Progress; The Vow; Safe House; Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace 3D and Killer Elite

By Cinema, Reviews

Two of the big three Academy Award con­tenders this year are about look­ing back on the early days of cinema itself. While Scorsese’s Hugo uses the latest tech­nic­al whizz­bangs to bring to life the idea of early cinema and its nov­elty and excite­ment in The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius recre­ates the tech­niques of old Hollywood in search of pure nostalgia.

A painstak­ingly cre­ated silent movie with sev­er­al moments of love­li­ness, The Artist fol­lows the riches to rags story of screen hero George Valentin and the con­cur­rent rags to riches story of star­let Peppy Miller – who tries to catch him as he falls. The per­form­ances of Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo as the two leads are both splen­did, Dujardin in par­tic­u­lar dis­plays a tech­nic­al pre­ci­sion that most act­ors can only dream of.

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Review: The Expendables, Tomorrow When the War Began, It’s a Wonderful Afterlife, Going the Distance, Exit Through the Gift Shop, Joan Rivers- A Piece of Work, Beyond Ipanema and Jean Charles

By Cinema, Reviews

The Expendables posterAs the great 80s action her­oes passed their respect­ive peaks and drif­ted down the oth­er side towards irrel­ev­ancy (or ego-centric fool­ish­ness) those of us that cared about these things were on the lookout for the next gen­er­a­tion. Who was going to replace Stallone, Willis and Schwarzenegger (not to men­tion the subs bench: Van Damme, Seagal and Norris)? For a while I thought that The Rock was going to be a worthy bear­er of the chains of office but he changed his name back to Dwayne and star­ted mak­ing (fun) films for kids instead.

Now we get out answer. Stallone has gathered all his action hero mates togeth­er for one last hur­rah, anoin­ted his suc­cessor and the res­ult may sur­prise you. Yes, the torch has offi­cially been passed to former Olympic diver and gruff voiced cock­ney oik Jason Statham who plays Stallone’s num­ber two in The Expendables, a big noisy, old-fashioned, romp through explo­sions, wise­cracks, Latin American dic­tat­ors and bent CIA agents. No cliché is left out and The Expendables pro­vokes more nos­tal­gia than adrenaline.

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