Skip to main content
Tag

the lovely bones

Review: Senna, Hanna, Footrot Flats - The Dog’s Tale, Final Destination 5 and The Double Hour

By Cinema and Reviews

Despite my pos­it­ive review for TT3D last week, I’m not a huge motor­s­port fan. In 1996 I worked on the last Nissan Mobil 500 race around the water­front and couldn’t see the appeal of watch­ing cars go belt­ing around the same corner over and over again. In that race you couldn’t even tell who was win­ning, it was all such a blur. In fact, the only time I’ve ever watched Formula 1 was when I chan­nel surfed on to some late night cov­er­age one Sunday night in 1994 just before going to bed. Two corners (about 30 seconds) later, Ayrton Senna was dead. It was pretty freaky, let me tell you.

So, I knew (as all audi­ences must) that Asif Kapadia’s bril­liant doc­u­ment­ary Senna was going to end in tragedy. What I didn’t know was how riv­et­ing it was going to be from begin­ning to end. Senna works because it is first and fore­most a por­trait of a com­pel­ling char­ac­ter – a cha­ris­mat­ic, con­fid­ent but humble young man who under­stood the risks he took and fought to bal­ance those risks with his innate desire to race and race hard – but when the polit­ics of Formula 1 took the con­trol of those risks out of his hands there you could see there was only going to be one result.

Read More

Review: Summer Holiday 09-10 Summary

By Cinema and Reviews

While hunt­ing the site for some links to add to the just pos­ted Winter’s Bone etc. review, I dis­covered that my Summer Holiday spe­cial had­n’t made it here. So, for com­plete­ness’ sake, here it is. Pretty sure, this is an early draft too but there’s no sign of an email sub­mit­ting it.

What a lovely Summer we’ve been hav­ing – for watch­ing movies. While the Avatar jug­ger­naut rolls inex­or­ably on there has plenty of oth­er options for a ded­ic­ated seeker of shel­ter from the storm.

Released at any oth­er time of year, Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones would be get­ting a decent length eval­u­ation (and the head­line) here but with fif­teen films dis­cuss we’ll have to live with the bul­let point eval­u­ation: not un-moving. My com­pan­ion and I spent a about an hour after watch­ing TLB dis­cuss­ing it’s flaws and yet both ended up agree­ing that we’d actu­ally enjoyed the film a lot, des­pite the problems.

Personally, I think Jackson’s tend­ency towards occa­sion­al whim­sic­al in-jokery typ­i­fied the uncer­tainty of tone (I’m think­ing of his unne­ces­sary cam­era shop cameo as an example) but the fun­da­ment­al mes­sage – that the people left behind after a tragedy are more import­ant than the vic­tims – was clearly and quite bravely artic­u­lated. And when I saw the film at a crowded Embassy ses­sion, dur­ing the pivotal scene where the sis­ter dis­cov­ers the evid­ence to catch the killer, I could only hear one per­son breath­ing around me – and it wasn’t me.

Read More

Review: District 9, Sunshine Cleaning, The Man in the Hat, The Rocket Post and Case 39

By Cinema and Reviews

It’s going to be a massive few months for Wellywood – District 9 seems to have come out of nowhere to take the world by storm (Currently #35 in the IMDb All Time list, just below Citizen Kane. I kid you not) and The Lovely Bones trail­er is whet­ting everyone’s appet­ite at just the right time. This Friday, Wellington audi­ences are the first in the world to see a fif­teen minute sampler of the loc­ally shot Avatar (Readings from 11.45am, free of charge) and three more Film Commission fea­tures are due for release between now and Christmas: The Strength of Water, Under the Mountain and The Vintner’s Luck, all of which have a sig­ni­fic­ant Wellington com­pon­ent to them.

District 9 posterAnd if the Hollywood big cheeses were wor­ried about The Lord of the Rings shift­ing the tec­ton­ic plates of enter­tain­ment industry power they ought to be ter­ri­fied by District 9, a new world demon­stra­tion of the SANZAR spir­it (minus the Australians) that achieves in spades everything that this year’s big-budget tent-pole fea­tures like Transformers and Terminator failed to do. It works thrill­ingly as pure enter­tain­ment and yet at the same time it’s a little bit more.

Aliens have arrived on earth but unlike in the 70s and 80s they aren’t here to tell us how to con­nect with the uni­verse and expand our con­scious­ness. And it isn’t like the 90s when they arrived to car­a­mel­ize us with their death rays. These ali­ens have arrived for remark­ably 21st cen­tury reas­ons – their ship is crippled and with no way home they are destined to become refugees, out­casts, mis­un­der­stood second-class citizens.

Read More

Review: Star Wars: The Clone Wars, Wanted and two more ...

By Cinema and Reviews

Star Wars: The Clone Wars posterFrom the first bars of John Williams’ fam­ous fan­fare, played on a 1000 kazoos, you know The Clone Wars is going to be a cheap and cheer­ful, Saturday morn­ing car­toon level, rip-off of the Star Wars uni­verse and so it proves. Without par­ti­cip­a­tion of any of the ori­gin­al stars (except for game old Chris Lee as Dooku) and George Lucas’ involve­ment lim­ited to insist­ing that one char­ac­ter has the voice of Truman Capote, a minor epis­ode gets spun out well bey­ond it’s abil­ity to engage and enter­tain but it is quite amus­ing to be reminded that all the clones look like Tem Morrison. The tone is basic­ally “All Jar-Jar, all the time” but even your aver­age eight year old might won­der why it has to be so repetitive.

Wanted posterWhile it should­n’t be any great sur­prise to be intel­lec­tu­ally insul­ted by The Clone Wars, I was amazed to actu­ally be per­son­ally insul­ted by the cre­at­ors of comic-book action flick Wanted, dur­ing the summing-up voice-over at the end. Gentlemen, I am far from pathet­ic and the oppos­ite of ordin­ary and if your idea of a val­id per­son­al philo­sophy is to murder strangers because a magic loom told you to, then I’m pretty happy here on my side of that fence. Director Timur Bekmambetov proved with Night Watch and Day Watch that he has a thrill­ing per­son­al style but not much in the way of storytelling abil­ity which he con­firms with his first Hollywood stu­dio pro­duc­tion. Mr Tumnus, James McAvoy, plays nerdy accounts clerk Wesley who finds out he is the son and heir of the world’s best assas­sin. Aided by Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman he learns to shoot round corners and dis­cov­er an object­iv­ist sense of pur­pose that puts his own per­son­al free­dom and des­tiny above the lives of (for example) hun­dreds of inno­cent people on a train. Vile.

Death Defying Acts posterHarry Houdini was one of the 20th cen­tury’s legendary enter­tain­ers and in Death Defying Acts Guy Pearce renders him com­pletely without cha­risma which is a remark­able achieve­ment. The first great scep­tic, Houdini offers $10,000 to any­one who can tell him his beloved mother­’s final words. Stage mind-reader Catherine Zeta Jones sees a way out of poverty but finds her­self fall­ing in love instead. The lack of elec­tri­city (real or ima­gined) between the two leads hampers things some­what but the cam­era loves Saoirse Ronan (Atonement and the forth­com­ing Lovely Bones) so it isn’t a com­plete waste of time.

Up The Yangtze posterWhile China is front and centre of world atten­tion at the moment, the arrival in cinemas of Yung Chang’s excel­lent doc­u­ment­ary Up the Yangtze could­n’t be bet­ter timed. Taking us on a lux­ury cruise up a Yangtze river being slowly trans­formed by the epic (Mao-inspired) Three Gorges Dam pro­ject, the film man­ages to get more of China into it’s clev­erly layered 90 minutes than seems pos­sible. Teenage Yu dreams of going to University and becom­ing an engin­eer but her par­ents are illit­er­ate and dirt poor and have missed out on the com­pens­a­tion that would move them from their shack beside the river. So, against her will, she is sent to work on the cruise ship where she is giv­en the English name Candy and instruc­ted in the ways of mod­ern domest­ic ser­vice. Meanwhile, her par­ents struggle to find a new place to live and the river inex­or­ably rises.

When dis­cuss­ing glob­al warm­ing and car­bon emis­sions, we are often told that China opens a new coal powered power sta­tion every week which is evid­ently a bad thing. But, iron­ic­ally, when they build a renew­able hydro-electric scheme the West gets pretty snooty about that too. The pres­sures on China from all dir­ec­tions are keenly felt in this film, which will tell you more about that part of the world than three weeks of Olympic Games.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 20 August, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: Star Wars: The Clone Wars was viewed at one of those excru­ci­at­ing radio sta­tion pre­views on Wednesday, 13 August (Readings). Wanted and Death Defying Acts were at Empire pub­lic screen­ings and Up the Yangtze was a pre­view screen­er DVD. I wish I had seen it at the Festival, though. I’m sure it would have looked very fine at the Embassy.

Review: Black Book, The Kingdom, The Nanny Diaries and Half Nelson

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

Black Book posterPaul Verhoeven is one of those dir­ect­ors that has no hand-brake, regard­less of the sub­ject mat­ter. For ice-pick wield­ing mur­der­ers (Basic Instinct) or giant ali­en bugs (Starship Troopers) this damn-the-torpedos atti­tude is per­fect; when we’re talk­ing about Dutch jews being betrayed by cor­rupt mem­bers of the res­ist­ance in WWII – not so much.

Black Book is Verhoeven’s first film in sev­en years, and his first film back home in Holland since Flesh + Blood back in 1985. Carice van Houten plays Rachel Stein, a nightclub sing­er before the war, now on the run from the Nazis. When her fam­ily is murdered on the brink of escape she dyes her hair blonde and joins the res­ist­ance, going under­cov­er and then fall­ing in love with the good German played by Sebastian Koch from The Lives of Others (you know he’s going to be a good German because he col­lects stamps and does­n’t have a scar on his cheek).

Read More