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vanity fair

Feb 16 2011
Love0

Review: 127 Hours, Gnomeo & Juliet, No Strings Attached and Fair Game

By Cinema, Reviews

Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire was my film of the year for 2009 – a potent and punchy roller-coaster ride of a film that made everything for months after­wards seem quaintly old-fashioned. His new film, 127 Hours, doesn’t break the mould to quite the same degree but does fea­ture sim­il­ar styl­ist­ic effects: mess­ing with time and struc­ture, split-screens, dom­in­eer­ing soundtrack, etc.

The new film is also an adapt­a­tion of pre­vi­ously exist­ing mater­i­al, Aron Ralston’s mem­oir “Between a Rock and a Hard Place”, and once again Boyle has col­lab­or­ated with screen­writer Simon Beaufoy (notori­ous in New Zealand for The Full Monty). Ralston (played by James Franco) was an engin­eer by trade but an out­doors­man by inclin­a­tion and he loved to roam the Utah canyons on bike and on foot. In 2003 he fall into a nar­row rav­ine and his right arm was trapped by a boulder. He was there for five days before real­ising that the only way he was going to walk out was if he left the arm behind.

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Feb 02 2011
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Review: Secretariat and Gainsbourg (plus French Film Festival preview)

By Cinema, Reviews

OK, so here’s how this is sup­posed to work. I watch a whole lot of films, give you a hope­fully spoiler-free run­down of what they’re about, offer you my impres­sions and then – based on what you’ve read of me in the past – you can decide wheth­er to drop some fold­ing on a night at the pic­tures, wait for a DVD to come out or (if you are a stu­dent with no mor­als) down­load some­thing to not watch later.

Now, my taste just so hap­pens to be impec­cable so you could do a lot worse than fol­low my every recom­mend­a­tion but this week I totally sur­prised myself and I’d be fas­cin­ated to see if many of you respond in quite the same way.

Secretariat posterSecretariat was a race­horse – a very suc­cess­ful race­horse. In 1973 it was the first horse for 25 years to win the Triple Crown (the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness and the Belmont) and is widely acknow­ledged to be the finest Thoroughbred that ever lived. I know next to noth­ing about racing – and could care even less – and yet I watched Randall Wallace’s biop­ic of the horse with tears in my eyes from start to fin­ish. I haven’t been milked like that since The Pursuit of Happyness back in 2007 and frankly Secretariat had no right to do that to me. I mean, it’s all been seen before and it’s cer­tainly not as if you don’t already know what’s going to hap­pen. And yet… and yet… I adored it.

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Sep 29 2010
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Review: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, The Last Airbender, Diary of a Wimpy Kid, Cats & Dogs- The Revenge of Kitty Galore and Charlie St. Cloud

By Cinema, Reviews

Ah, the school hol­i­days. The time when the big cinemas are more excited about the arrival of their jumbo pop­corn con­tain­ers than any of the films they are show­ing. Your cor­res­pond­ent spent the week­end sur­roun­ded by chomp­ing, rust­ling and slurp­ing fel­low cit­izens so he could bring you this report from the front­line. It was brutal.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid posterDiary of a Wimpy Kid pur­ports to be about middle school and how to sur­vive it but in fact it’s a rather charm­less mor­al­ity tale about being your­self. Little Greg Heffley (Zachary Gordon) thinks that to be pop­u­lar he has to be cool but everything he tries turns to dis­aster while his best friend Rowley (Robert Capron) effort­lessly tran­scends his own dork­i­ness to win over the school. Enough kids have already got a kick out of Diary’s astute mix of life-lessons and gross-out humour that a sequel has already been announced.

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Jul 05 2009
Love0

Online reading and listening tips

By Asides

Time to draw your atten­tion to a couple of bits of media that I’ve enjoyed recently, namely an excel­lent art­icle by William Langewiesche in Vanity Fair about Captain “Sully” Sullenberger and the ‘mira­cu­lous’ land­ing on the Hudson River back in January. Langewiesche tells the story of the spe­cif­ic flight adroitly but also man­ages to tie it to mod­ern air­craft man­u­fac­ture, pilot polit­ics and even has a hint of a Right Stuff “what makes a pilot” going on too. Superb and engrossing.

In a dif­fer­ent arena entirely, I can recom­mend you down­load and listen to Elvis Mitchell’s inter­view with Rusell Brand, a fam­ous West Ham fan and some­times annoy­ing pres­ence as an act­or who I had thought was inex­plic­ably pop­u­lar. Well, now, thanks to Elvis, it is explic’d. I get it. In the inter­view Brand is pro­mot­ing the US edi­tion of “My Booky Wook” and he is funny, supremely intel­li­gent, spir­ited and self-aware. And he talks at 100mph. Download the inter­view from the KCRW site here, or down­load to the reg­u­lar pod­cast via iTunes here. Mitchell is a former crit­ic for The New York Times and his pro­gramme The Treatment is the most con­sist­ently intel­li­gent half hour on cinema on the web.

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