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RN 2/18: “We’re mad, we are!”

By Audio, Cinema, Rancho Notorious and 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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Review: Olympus Has Fallen, Evil Dead and Escape from Planet Earth

By Cinema and Reviews

While ori­gin­al Die Hard dir­ect­or John McTiernan lan­guishes in min­im­um secur­ity fed­er­al pris­on his heirs are keep­ing the action movie flame alive. Most recently, Antoine Fuqua’s Olympus Has Fallen might as well be called Die Hard at the White House as one man attempts to res­cue the host­ages held cap­tive in the impreg­nable bunker beneath the most fam­ous Palladian man­sion in the world. North Korean ter­ror­ists have man­aged to take con­trol of the build­ing and the President (Aaron Eckhart), Secretary of Defence (Melissa Leo) – and some extras play­ing the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs etc. – are all cable-tied to a rail­ing while acting-President Morgan Freeman and Chief of the Secret Service Angela Bassett are power­less at the Pentagon.

What the bad guys don’t know is that dis­graced former Secret Service (and Special Forces, natch) dude Gerard Butler heard the shoot­ing and crossed town from his low level secur­ity job at Treasury to sneak in to the build­ing before total lock­down. Now, he’s tak­ing out the trash one by one but can he res­cue the President’s son (Finley Jacobsen) and save the free world before every nuke in the American arsen­al goes “boom”.

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Review: Oz the Great and Powerful, Samsara, Cirque du Soleil Worlds Away, Great Expectations and The Sweeney

By Cinema, Reviews and Wellington

It’s a ques­tion that has been burn­ing away inside all of us for nearly 75 years – how did the Wizard (who wasn’t really a wiz­ard at all but a car­ni­val show­man with a knack for gad­gets) get to Oz in the first place? You neither, huh? Ah well, this least essen­tial ques­tion has now been answered by Spider-Man (and Evil Dead) dir­ect­or Sam Raimi and his team of pixel-wielding min­ions. As a pre­quel to the beloved 1939 film star­ring Judy Garland and a dog called Toto, Oz the Great and Powerful is not without risk. Other attempts to recre­ate L. Frank Baum’s magic­al world have been either com­mer­cial or artist­ic fail­ures – The Wiz, for example, or Return to Oz.

Casting the human smirk, James Franco, as the car­ni­val magi­cian trans­por­ted to the land of the yel­low brick road by a hot air bal­loon (via tor­nado) is also a risk but it even­tu­ally pays off, even though Franco’s boy­ish fea­tures are start­ing to look a bit ragged. Escaping vari­ous romantic and fin­an­cial pres­sures back home in black and white Kansas, Franco’s Oz finds him­self blown off course to a technicolor(ish) fant­ast­ic­al land where a proph­ecy sug­gests he will pro­tect the peace-loving cit­izens from wicked witches but also gain con­trol of the palace for­tune. Guess which one appeals more.

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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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