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the bounty hunter

Review: Scream 4, Justin Bieber- Never Say Never and Just Go With It

By Cinema, Reviews

Anther snap­shot of Western cul­ture this week in cinemas – if the ali­ens who mon­it­or us are still watch­ing I’m sure this will res­ult in our urgent and viol­ent anni­hil­a­tion (if that isn’t one cliché too many).

I’ll con­fess that I haven’t seen any of the first three Scream films – the first was in 1996 and the most recent was num­ber three, elev­en years ago. So, taken as a stand alone pic­ture, how does Scream 4 hold up? Pretty well. The know­ing ref­er­ences to recent hor­ror cinema his­tory take up most of the space with what’s left over going to a resigned cyn­icism about mod­ern soci­ety – which is as it should be.

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Review: The Road, Green Zone, The Bounty Hunter, This Way of Life & Admiral

By Cinema, Reviews

The Road posterMost films go in one eye and out the oth­er but some stick in your brain and won’t leave – for bet­ter or worse. John Hillcoat’s adapt­a­tion of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize win­ning nov­el “The Road” is one of those. Set in a depress­ing, grey, rainy, post-apocalyptic North American future (remind­ing me of noth­ing so much as this past Wellington sum­mer) where noth­ing grows and the few remain­ing human beings for­age for food – and most often find it in each oth­er – dogged and decent Viggo Mortensen trudges through the wil­der­ness with his young son, look­ing for some­thing, any­thing, that might keep them alive.

The Road is about how we try and sur­vive in the face of insur­mount­able odds, and how that phys­ic­al sur­viv­al might mean the loss of our own human­ity. Mortensen’s wife (Charlize Theron) walks out into the lonely night, mak­ing what she thinks is a sac­ri­fice but which he, clearly, thinks is little more than giv­ing up. His son may well be the last repos­it­ory of human kind­ness but that kind­ness might get them killed.

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