There are big changes afoot in the world of Rancho Notorious as Dan accepts an offer to go and work for Radio New Zealand. All will be explained in this episode.
Kailey and Dan also summarise lots of recent releases at the New Zealand cinema including Trainwreck, The Man From U.N.C.L.E., Southpaw, Vacation, Last Cab to Darwin, Me and Earl and the Dying Girl and many more.
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It’s A Good to Die Hard, we get romantic with the Nicholas Sparks adaptation Safe Haven, Judd Apatow tells us that This is 40 and Simon and Dan interview Quartet producer Finola Dwyer.
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The first thing you need to understand about A Good Day to Die Hard is that it isn’t really a Die Hard movie. In the same way that instant coffee and espresso coffee share a name but are in fact entirely different beverages, you’d be wise to go to a Good Day screening with modest expectations – expectations that would already have been lowered if you’d seen 2007’s dismal Die Hard 4.0 (aka Live Free and Die Hard).
Bruce Willis plays Detective John McClane for the fifth time since 1988 but this time there’s no smirk, no glint in his eye and none of the recognisable human frailties that made the original character so appealing. Instead, he’s just what everybody always said he was – an asshole. When his son is arrested by Moscow authorities for what looks like a mob hit, McClane heads to Eastern Europe to try and save a boy he hardly knows. As usual, McClane becomes “the fly in the ointment, the monkey in the wrench” and he immediately lands in the middle of a CIA operation to extract a rebel oligarch hiding information that could bring down the government, his untimely intervention destroying most of Moscow’s traffic in the process.
This year the summer holidays seemed to have been owned by the unlikely figure of T.J. Miller, deadpan comedian, supporting actor and eerily familiar background figure. In Yogi Bear he was the ambitious but dim deputy park ranger easily duped by Andrew Daly’s smarmy Mayor into helping him sell out Jellystone to corporate logging interests, in Gulliver’s Travels he was the ambitious but as it turns out dim mail room supervisor who provokes Jack Black into plagiarising his way into a fateful travel writing gig and in Unstoppable he’s the slightly less dim (and certainly less ambitious) mate of the doofus who leaves the handbrake on and then watches his enormous freight train full of toxic waste roll away.
So, a good summer for T.J. Miller then, what about the rest of us?
Forgetting 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.
Moon looks like one of the coolest films of the year. Written and directed by David Bowie’s son Zowie (now known as Duncan Jones), starring the effortlessly interesting Sam Rockwell and featuring 2001-crossed-with-Alien production design and a trippy plot that seems to require all your attention, Moon was one of the hits of the Festival and is now back for a full cinema release.
Rockwell plays “Sam”, a solo miner supervising operations on the surface of the Moon. The company he works for is digging up a special mineral used to fuel the Earth’s fusion power stations. He’s at the end of a three year gig and starting to go a bit stir crazy. His only company is a Kevin Spacey-voiced service robot named GERTY – a cross between HAL 9000 and the cute drones from Douglas Trumbull’s Silent Running. GERTY makes him tea, patches his wounds and pretty much does everything else around the place except go outside and actually fix machines.
