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Oct 04 2009
Love0

Review: The Strength of Water, Séraphine, The Cove, Taking Woodstock, Orphan and The Ugly Truth

By Cinema and Reviews

Festival titles are return­ing to cinemas at such a rate that it seems like pre-Festival cinem­a­goer cyn­icism was well-placed. 50% of this week’s new releases were screen­ing loc­ally only a month ago but as they are eas­ily the best half of the arrange­ment I’m inclined to be forgiving.

Armagan Ballantyne’s debut NZ fea­ture The Strength of Water is a strik­ingly mature piece of work and one of the most affect­ing films I’ve seen this year. In a remote Hokianga vil­lage a pair of twins (excel­lent first-timers Melanie Mayall-Nahi and Hato Paparoa) share a spe­cial bond that tragedy can’t eas­ily break. A mys­ter­i­ous young stranger (Isaac Barber) arrives on the scene, escap­ing from troubles of his own and… and then I really can’t say any more.

Full of sur­prises from the very first frame The Strength of Water shows that qual­ity devel­op­ment time (includ­ing the sup­port of the Sundance Institute) really can make a good script great. Ballantyne and writer Briar Grace-Smith offer us lay­ers of fas­cin­a­tion along with deep psy­cho­lo­gic­al truth and gritty Loach-ian real­ism. The mix is com­pel­ling and the end product is tremendous.

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Sep 19 2009
Love0

Review: Public Enemies, Faintheart, Coraline and Battle in Seattle

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Public Enemies posterOf all dir­ect­ors cur­rently work­ing in the Hollywood main­stream Michael Mann is argu­ably the greatest styl­ist. No one at the mul­ti­plex has more con­trol of the pure aes­thet­ics of film­mak­ing, from col­our bal­ance and com­pos­i­tion through edit­ing and sound, Mann’s films (from Thief in 1981 to the mis­guided rework­ing of Miami Vice in 2006) have had a European visu­al sens­ib­il­ity while remain­ing heav­ily embed­ded in the seamy world of crime and punishment.

Now Mann has turned back the clock and made a peri­od crime film, set dur­ing the last great depres­sion. Based on the true story of the legendary bank rob­ber John Dillinger, whose gang cut a swathe across the Midwest in 1933 and 1934, Mann’s Public Enemies is a styl­ish and superbly craf­ted tale of a doomed hero pur­sued by a dogged law­man. Dillinger is por­trayed by Johnny Depp with his usu­al swag­ger and his nemes­is is the now sadly ubi­quit­ous Christian Bale.

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Aug 29 2009
Love0

Review: My Life in Ruins, Stone of Destiny and Drag Me to Hell

By Cinema and Reviews

While the Film Festival con­tin­ues to deliv­er untold pleas­ures to Wellington cinephiles, the com­mer­cial dis­trib­ut­ors dump (shall we say) less-heralded product at our cur­rently very quiet mul­ti­plexes and arthouses.

My Life in Ruins posterMy Life in Ruins is a belated follow-up to the inter­na­tion­al smash hit My Big Fat Greek Wedding. That film was pro­duced by Tom Hanks and his wife Rita Wilson as a favour to their friend Nia Vardalos and, to the sur­prise of every­one, it went on to make squil­lions at the box office and prom­ised to make comedi­enne Vardalos a romantic com­edy star. Things did­n’t quite work out like that and it’s taken sev­en years for a follow-up to hit the screens, also sup­por­ted by Hanks and Wilson.

Sadly, My Life in Ruins is likely to dis­ap­point those that remem­ber MBFGW fondly – the warmth and good humour of that film has been replaced by cheap laughs at the expense of inter­na­tion­al ste­reo­types and there’s a flat­ness to the exe­cu­tion that Vardalos’ mug­ging can­’t hide.

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Aug 05 2009
Love0

Review: Hannah Montana: The Movie and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs

By Cinema and Reviews

I dis­covered a lovely Hollywood stu­dio phrase the oth­er day: exe­cu­tion depend­ent. It means a script that won’t make money unless good people are involved. This week’s films are the oppos­ite: films that sell regard­less of whichever tal­ent­less hack is in charge; two films that will con­tin­ue to make money for the machine for months, if not years, after this review is decom­pos­ing in some aban­doned corner of the Internet.

Hannah Montana: The Movie posterFirst up, the phe­nomen­on that is Hannah Montana. For an etern­ity (or three years depend­ing on your point of view) Miley Cyrus has been chew­ing up the tv screen as the pop sing­er lead­ing a double-life on the Disney Channel. After the suc­cess of High School Musical on the big screen (and a digit­al 3D con­cert of her own that screened in Wellington last year), Miley and Hannah have hit the big time and, even though it took me a while to come around, I can sort of see the appeal.

For those com­ing to this par­tic­u­lar party late the premise is this: Miley Cyrus plays a kid called Miley who dreams of being a pop star but her dad (Achy Breaky Heart’s Billy Ray Cyrus) won’t let her unless she pre­tends to be someone else and keeps her home life as nor­mal as pos­sible. As the film begins, Miley has let her Hannah char­ac­ter go to her head – to the extent that she would prefer the New York Music Awards to her grandmother’s birth­day in Tennessee – so Billy Ray diverts the private jet to sleepy little Crowley Corners to try and bring her to her senses. Meanwhile, a dast­ardly tabloid hack (Peter Gunn) is sniff­ing out the truth and a developer (Barry Bostwick) wants to turn Crowley Corners into a giant shop­ping mall.

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Jun 25 2009
Love0

Review: Angels & Demons, Knowing, Night at the Museum, Lesbian Vampire Killers, A Film With Me In It and I’ve Loved You So Long

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Angels & Demons posterRon Howard’s Angels & Demons, sequel to the block­buster Da Vinci Code from 2006, is what you might call an equal oppor­tun­ity annoy­ance – hap­pily mis­rep­res­ent­ing theo­logy and science.

Tom Hanks returns as Harvard schol­ar Robert Langdon, this time summoned to Rome by mys­ter­i­ous Vatican secur­ity to invest­ig­ate the kid­nap­ping of four Cardinals on the eve of the elec­tion of a new Pope. A clue (help­fully read­ing “illu­minati”) leads him to believe that a the secret soci­ety of sci­ent­ists and truth-tellers have come to take revenge for their 17th cen­tury pur­ging. The Large Hadron Collider (actu­ally work­ing in this piece of fic­tion) cre­ates a macguffin that could change the shape of Rome as we know it – if not the world.

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Apr 25 2009
Love0

Review: 17 Again, Fast & Furious, Ong-bak and Sniper

By Cinema and Reviews

I’ve been grumpy all week for all sorts of reas­ons and the last thing I needed was a week­end of crappy films but that’s what I got. I mean, I’m spend­ing longer writ­ing this review than the writers of Fast & Furious or 17 Again spent on their scripts – put togeth­er, probably.

17 Again posterThe improb­ably named Burr Steers is the dir­ect­or of 17 Again but that’s where the fun stops. Matthew Perry plays a 37-year-old former high school bas­ket­ball star who chose the love of his preg­nant girl­friend instead of a col­lege schol­ar­ship and dug him­self deep into a dowdy life of fail­ure and regret. A mys­ter­i­ous bearded jan­it­or, a bridge (a frankly insult­ing homage to It’s a Wonderful Life) and an unspe­cified magic­al event put him back in his buff 17-year-old body which he uses to re-engage with his chil­dren and get to know his wife again.

I’ve got some time for the tele­vi­sion ver­sion of Matthew Perry (did you see “Studio 60”?), and des­pite his tra­gic cinema career choices he remains a com­ic act­or who is unafraid of (or unable to sup­press) the sad­ness behind his eyes. Unfortunately, he dis­ap­pears after 15 minutes to be replaced by High School Musical ’s Zac Efron, a smug pretty-boy with some dance moves and no cha­risma and it is he who car­ries the film to its des­ol­ate conclusion.

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