Saturday, September 24, 2011

So it seems I focus mainly on the one that pays...


Can be found over here.

Cinema 2011 # : Drive




Drive is an auteur’s action flick, a fiercely violent fairy-tale in which Ryan Gosling’s unnamed protagonist oscillates between hero and villain at breakneck speed and effortless cool. Directed by Danish filmmaker Nicolas Winding Refn, renowned for his edgy and dramatically flourished biopic Bronson and layered Viking project Valhalla Rising, the film was originally earmarked as a vehicle for British B-movie behemoth Neil Marshall and Hugh Jackman, before stalling into lapsed developmental hell. Based on James Sallis’ 158-page neo-noir novella of the same name, Gosling became attached to the project in early 2010, and chose Refn to helm this LA noir, scaling back Hossein Amini’s script into a taught, brutal and stylised masterpiece.  

For the most part dressed in leather driving-gloves and white satin jacket in a clear reference to Steve McQueen’s iconic role in 1971’s Le Mans, Gosling plays the driver, a Hollywood stunt-driver who moonlights as a getaway-man for the seedy criminal underbelly of contemporary Los Angeles. Offering nothing more than his superior skills in the driving seat and a five-minute window to render his services, the film opens with the driver helping two thieves evade the LAPD in a sequence that shows off not only his Stig-like expertise behind a steering wheel, but also the brilliant strategic cunning going on as he plots a route to safety in a cat and mouse game with a police helicopter. 

Tuesday, September 13, 2011

Cinema 2011 #85: Jane Eyre



Cary Fukunaga, the Hollywood Wunderkind best known for his 2009 breakthrough with the central American family drama Sin Nombre, here adapts Charlotte Brontë’s paean to plain girls everywhere, lending Jane Eyre a distinctly handsome feel. The production, starring two of contemporary cinema’s ones to watch with Mia Wasikowska as the titular governess and ubiquitous Irishman Michael Fassbender as the roguish Mr. Rochester, is a beautifully crafted period drama, with a fine eye for detail and costume, and more moors than Heathcliff could hope to mope around.

But for all its finery, there is an undeniable lack of dramatic tension to proceedings. The stewing romance between Jane, a mousy waif whose keen intellect belies a life of strict educational reform courtesy of a hard-hearted aunt (Sally Hawkins, playing keenly against type), and Rochester gets suddenly thrust upon the audience without so much as a coy smile or hanky’s wave. In their place, we get some supposedly pithy banter that mostly feels like two adults, a misanthropic bastard and a petticoated outcast who clings to her sense of ordinariness like some sort of spite-driven shield to fight off would-be naysayers, who suddenly decide one day that they both enjoy hating everybody else, so why not spend the rest of their days despising the dolts around them together? 

Thursday, September 8, 2011

Cinema 2011 #84 : Friends with Benefits


Sometimes, standing in the ticket queue at your local cinema is like standing at a bus stop; you’re waiting ages for one to come along, when two come bombing over the horizon at the same time. Movie theatres follow the same attendant logic, with the Hollywood assumption being: give the chumps even more of what they’re already waiting for – the multiplex double-dip. Such examples include Antz and A Bug’s Life, Finding Nemo and Shark Tale, and The Illusionist and The Prestige. Deep Impact and Armageddon came shooting across our screens together, making the Earth move with their meteor mayhem, while Dante’s Peak and Volcano blew their respective tops within two months of each other.

And so it is, more double dipping, with Will Gluck’s latest raunchy romcom, Friends with Benefits, starring Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake. These friends are late to the party, though, arriving a few months after Natalie Portman and Ashton Kutcher’s rather similarly themed No Strings Attached* graced our screens to a luke-warm reception. And while Gluck’s film is not a complete disaster, it certainly moves more Earth, and blows a lot harder, than its fellow double-decker friends. 
Timberlake plays Dylan, an art director working on a political website in LA, and the target of New York corporate recruiter Jamie (Kunis), who thinks he’s just the perfect fit for a big position at GQ. Tempted by Jamie’s spirited tour of the city as much as the job (though the idea that a flashmob is unheard of to someone under 30 working for a website is preposterous), Dylan leaves behind his west coast roots and moves to the big apple, where he and Jamie become bestest best friends, swapping clichéd pleasantries and, quite often, hilarious barbs while they’re at it. Then one night, after confessing how much they miss the physical part of a relationship while watching a fictional romcom (Jason Segel and Rachida Jones on fine uncredited-cameo form), the two decide to play “tennis”, their coital code word for steamy hot lovin’ sans strings. Will it be a carefree set of New balls, please, or will Jamie and Dylan realise that every game of “tennis” starts at love all? 

Tuesday, September 6, 2011

So... I've been busy...

Can be found here.

In other news, I haven't blogged in ages, due to unforeseen employment and living arrangement changes. In short, I work and live somewhere entirely different to three weeks ago. And the blogging took a back seat.

Working on it...

I promise.

Saturday, August 27, 2011

Cinema 2011 #83: The Inbetweeners Movie


Bar changing the location to the clubber’s holiday paradise of Malia, Crete, there’s nothing particularly original going on in the big screen adaptation of Iain Morris and Damon Beesley’s teenage odyssey. Those looking for an epic tale that thrusts four boys out of an in-between state of adolescence into fully-fledged manhood may as well go and watch Stand by Me again, The Inbetweeners Movie is not a contemplative study on growing up and growing apart. Instead, the writers, director Ben Palmer (who helmed the entire second season of the E4 sitcom) and the series regulars do what they’ve always done best; mercilessly ripping the piss out of each other, the way only best friends can, and making the audience laugh with the finest British gross-out comedy to date. 

Sunday, August 21, 2011

Cinema 2011 #82: Glee: The 3D Concert



While there is simply no denying the Glee gang’s infectious charm for rebranding classic soft rock, contemporary pop and big-ballad show tunes into a flashy up-tempo package, for many viewers the main attraction remains Jane Lynch’s acerbic cheerleading coach Sue Sylvester. This makes her absence from the 3D concert movie all the greater, with a purveying sense that all that’s on offer here is some very upscale karaoke attempting to cash in on fan favour and residual interest in the concert shenanigans of Cyrus, Bieber and Jonas, Inc.

The cast of the show, a hodgepodge ethnic mix of Ohioan high-schoolers united by a love of music and some serious vocal talent, come together here, some contractually bound, to perform as McKinley High’s New Directions Glee Club, performing a number of popular songs and dance routines from the first two seasons of creator Ryan Murphy’s contemporary twist on the Fame formula. And who better to take the helm from Murphy on directing duties than Kevin Tancharoen, the man behind the 2009 reboot of the leg-warmer antics of the New York Academy of Performing Arts. 

Friday, August 19, 2011

Cinema 2011 #81: Fright Night


The kids today,” complains Roddy McDowall in the 1985 original version of Fright Night, “don’t have the patience for vampires. They want to see some mad slasher running around and chopping off heads.

Well, 26 years later and it’s a somewhat different market. The slashers need to slice your skin off in a series of increasingly elaborate traps and vampires have never been more in vogue, with seemingly every single channel showing some sporty Scandinavian sucking Sookie’s sanguine assets, while on the silver screen Edward gets busy with the body glitter and pre-marital chastity. It makes director Craig (Lars and the Real Girl) Gillespie’s remake all the more ironic, really, given that the running joke behind the Tom Holland original was that vampires weren’t all that cool anymore, so nobody would believe you when you told them that one was your neighbour. These days, if there were Cullens in the cul de sac, it would presumably increase the market value of your home. 

New Directions on the other side...


Check it out here.

Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Cinema 2011 #80: Cowboys & Aliens



Summer 2011 has really been out of this world for producer Steven Spielberg. Although the most powerful filmmaker on the planet hasn’t deigned to sit in the director’s chair himself, that Spielberg sheen has dominated our movie screens nonetheless, with three collaborations with other directors, and a slight sense that the chap is running out of ideas. We’ve had automobile aliens fighting off the onslaught of vehicular villains in Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Then we had some good old-fashioned Goony-fun as a mysterious monster from beyond the stars rips a town to shreds in J.J. Abrams’ Super 8. And now, taking the Ronseal approach to film titles, Spielberg produces director Jon Favreau’s Cowboys & Aliens, which is, unsurprisingly, about cowboys and aliens.

But to say that this is Spielberg’s show is a tad unfair, as Favreau’s style dominates the film, and the Iron Man man clearly stamps his sense of dry humour and gritty emotion onto this loose interpretation of a 2006 graphic novel of the same name. 

Sunday, August 14, 2011

Cinema 2011 #79: The Devil's Double



Where did it all go wrong for Lee Tamahori? With his 1994 Once were Warriors, the Kiwi received worldwide acclaim for his brutal portrayal of contemporary Maori culture, but since then has struggled to reach the same heights with contrived genre-flicks (xXx , its sequel XXX: State of the Union, the Nicholas Cage vehicle Next) and effectively brought about the death of Bond as we new him with the dire Die Another Day. Tamahori’s private life also hit headlines, when it was revealed that in 2006, whilst dressed in drag, he was caught by an uncover LAPD officer allegedly soliciting oral sex, resurfacing old rumours about his somewhat saucy double life.

This is perhaps what attracted him to The Devil’s Double, the story of Latif Yahia, a man forced to become the body double of Saddam Hussein’s psychotic son Uday, with British actor Dominic Cooper in the lead as both men.

While serving at the front in the Iran-Iraq war in the late 1980s, Latif is pulled away from combat by the secret service and brought back to Baghdad. There he is reintroduced to Uday Hussein, with whom he had gone to school and always shared a similar appearance, so much so, that Uday claims him as his new brother and has Latif surgically altered to make the resemblance uncanny. Now forced into sharing in the decadence of Uday’s life, with cars, drugs, clothes and women thrust upon him, Latif struggles to cope with the heavy weight of losing his identity and living at the beck and call of an increasingly unstable and violent man. 

Wednesday, August 10, 2011

Cinema 2011 #78: Super 8




J.J. Abrams has always been something of a collaborative filmmaker, with his back catalogue of hits and critical successes consistently feeling like a genuinely cumulative effort. Whether it’s big budget remakes of classic anorak-favourite television shows steeped in years of constructed history and expectations (Star Trek, Mission: Impossible III), or cherished high-concept cult, in the broadest sense, television shows of his own invention (Alias, Lost, Fringe), there’s always a sense that the man is open to ideas and input from everybody and anybody on set, and ready to lend an ear to the rising talent he, and his production company Bad Robot, surrounds himself with.

While this generally works out for the best, there is also no denying that Abrams’ pet projects can sometimes suffer from an unnecessary fussiness that pulls away from clever and concise to grandiose and tangled. When his twists and thrills become the story, rather than adding to it, the audience loses the affection earned at the beginning, their enthusiasm for shocks and awes ebbing as his stories reach their convoluted coda and get, ahem, Lost in their own grandeur.

As such, it is important that Abrams chooses wisely whom to work with, and here, with Super 8, a nostalgic sci-fi romp that rekindles memories of summer favourites of yesteryear, he’s gone right to the source of the summer blockbuster itself, Steven Spielberg. And it almost works perfectly.

Cinema 2011 #77: Rise of the Planet of the Apes


While Tim Burton’s 2001 reimagining of the simian sci-fi saga Planet of the Apes managed to greatly revamp the make-up and prosthetics work that had won the original 1968 film an honorary Oscar, in many ways the Mark Wahlberg starrer lacked the searingly bleak intelligence and dark heart of its Charlton Heston ancestor. In short, while the primates looked and sounded prime, Burton’s baboons just weren’t damned dirty enough to appeal to fans old and new. With Rise of the Planet of the Apes, itself something of a spiritual reimagining of 1972’s Conquest of the etc., director Rupert Wyatt offers audiences a long awaited prequel to the Heston Planet, telling the story of one genetically altered chimpanzee named Caesar, who like his namesake, rises to power to create a new world order.

In a near future San Francisco laboratory, scientist Will Rodman (James Franco), is struggling to concoct a viral cure for Alzheimer’s disease, of which his father, John Lithgow, is a patient. Will’s ALZ 112 formula seems to be the Holy Grail for banjaxed brains, but an unfortunately timed bout of monkey business results in corporate suit Jacobs (David Oyelowo) shutting down the project and pulling the plug on the test chimps. Rodman chances upon an infant primate, a brilliant mo-cap performance by mo-cap maestro (King Kong, Gollum) Andy Serkis, and adopts the little scamp, taking him in to share his home with his worsening father.

A number of years later and Caesar has developed far beyond the intellectual capabilities of either his species or human children of the same age. Able to communicate by sign language with his de facto family (suck it, Chomsky), Caesar offers Will the chance to rebuild his scientific career as well as save his father from the degenerative effects of the disease claiming his life. Together with veterinarian Freida Pinto, Caesar lives a carefree life, solving puzzles and leaping lithely from every nook and cranny of his attic, with a knowing sparkle in his CGI eyes.

Tuesday, August 9, 2011

Cinema 2011 #76: Beautiful Lies


French-Corsican director Pierre Salvadori is something akin to the Nora Ephron of the Hexagon, having carved out an unlikely career in the intense and emotionally charged arena of French cinema through the medium of the romcom. Best known for Cible émouvante (remade as Wild Target with Emily Blunt and Bill Nighy last year) and the wonderful Hors de prix/Pricelesshere he reunites with Priceless star Audrey Tautou in his latest love letter to the comédie romantique. 

Saturday, August 6, 2011

The other side of the fence...


Mirror mirror on the wall... where's the bloody link?

Here.

Cinema 2011 #75: Beginners



Beginners, the story of a man finding new beginnings in his life after unexpected changes, bereavement and new love, is the second feature from director Mike Mills, a man so unattainably hip that the French band Air, for whom he’s directed numerous music videos, named a track on one of their albums after him.

Mills’ film is a semi-autobiographical story revolving around Ewan McGregor’s Oliver, weighed down by grief following the death of his father Hal (Christopher Plummer), from lung cancer at 80 years of age, five years after Hal revealed himself to be gay. Still bereft and caring for his father’s Jack Russell terrier, who poses subtitled questions throughout, Oliver may just find solace in the shape of French actress Anna, herself no stranger to daddy issues. But this relationship forces him to confront deeper issues concerning the very nature of love, from his parent’s marriage in the 1970s through to his father’s short-lived experiences in the gay community and his romance with Goran Visnjic’s Andy. 

Friday, August 5, 2011

Cinema 2011 #74: Horrible Bosses



A really great premise – 9 to 5 meets (a name-checked) Strangers on a Train – and some decent comedic performances get squandered in director Seth Gordon’s homicidal workplace comedy that simply isn’t wicked enough to be truly deadly.

Three put upon drones (Jason Bateman, Charlie Day and Jason Sudeikis) working in Los Angeles really hate their bosses, and not without reason; Bateman’s corporate dogsbody Nick is devotedly on the leash of all round business bastard Dave Harken, a Kevin Spacey treading water in a watered down version of his Swimming with Sharks Svengali, in the hope of getting a promotion. Day’s dental nurse Dale, unemployable anywhere else, is subjected daily to hostile sexual harassment courtesy of nympho cougar Jenifer Aniston’s diabolical dentist.  While Sudeikis’ sex-addicted accountant Kurt, unwilling to let his workplace go to the dogs, suffers from the paranoiac whims of Colin Farrell’s coke-addicted heir to the chemical plant Donald Sutherland’s cameo death leaves behind. 

Tuesday, August 2, 2011

For the land of the free, and the home of the delayed...


Okay, so some things went awry with this one, and then I went to Berlin for the Wochenende. But should you choose to follow the weekly ones, it can be found here.

Also, reviews coming very soon: Horrible Bosses, Beginners, Super 8, Friends with Benefits.

Aim is to have them all done by Friday.

"Too much," you protest, "Your pithy reviews of fizzling critique and brazen bons mots require more time."

Yes, well... I got made redundant today. So... yeah... time.

Thursday, July 28, 2011

Cinema 2011 #73: Arrietty



With Arrietty, the latest animated feature from Studio Ghibli, perhaps the last great animation house still working in the laborious realm of hand-drawn features, the Japanese studio finally realises the 40 year-old dream of founder Hayao Miyazaki to bring Mary Horton's much loved children's novel The Borrowers to the screen in their distinctive animé aesthetic. Directed by the youngest ever director in Ghibli history, 36 year-old Hiromasa Yonebayashi takes the helm after rising through the ranks having worked on such classic Ghibli gems as Princess Mononoke, My Neighbours the Yamadas and Howl’s Moving Castle, to here present a joyfully sweet and artistically assured mediation on nature and man’s impact on endangered species.

The film is a visual masterpiece, with Arrietty’s miniaturised world a triumph of finding the beauty in the small scale. Indeed, the design and animation of these 10-cm critters’ world is the film’s biggest success, with protracted scenes in the garden playing out like a hazy dream when accompanied by Cecile Corbel’s Breton-influenced score (just don’t mention the sickeningly sweet Arrietty’s Song from the opening credits). Anyone doubting Yonebayashi direction need only look at the set-piece in the kitchen to witness his masterful use of animation. Playing brilliantly as it does with ideas of scale and distance, Arrietty, voiced in the UK dubbing by Irish star Saoirse Ronan, and her father Pod (Mark Strong) try to nab a sugar-lump in a suburban Tokyo kitchen that looks like something akin to the Grand Canyon in terms of its dangerously vast empty space. 

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

Cinema 2011 #72: Captain America: The First Avenger



The Irish summertime was designed for a movie like Captain America: The First Avenger, a genuine summer blockbuster that wards off the chills and unseasonal rain with shamelessly fun entertainment and way-to-go-little-guy glee. This is popcorn escapism and big budget action that is pitched perfectly as the superhero movie that brings a bit of colour back into the comic strip fold.

The film, directed by Joe Johnston of Jumanji fame, is the final piece in the assembly line leading up towards next year’s Avengers, the superhero team-up epic single-handedly keeping the spandex industry afloat by combining Marvel’s cavalcade of comic-book champions into a dream-team of box-office smashing proportions. But the focus here in on this all-American hero, played by two-time superpower alumnus Chris Evans, whose Captain America is stars and stripes success, and feels so fresh for one simple reason: he’s rather old fashioned. 

Tuesday, July 26, 2011

Cinema 2011 #71: Cars 2



Much has already been made of the efforts by Pixar Animation Studios’ 2006 feature Cars, the only dent in the perfectly polished fender of arguably the finest working studio in America today, which was rather unfortunately parallel parked into the gaping space between their near perfect The Incredibles and melt your heart love letter to dreamers everywhere, Ratatouille. The story of a bunch of autothromorphic vehicles living in a Capra-esque dragsville off of Route 66, hotshot racing-car Lightning McQueen’s dalliance with the dandy shoop-shooping sedans of Radiator Springs and learning to appreciate life by slowing down is not regarded as classic Pixar. Instead, its behemoth merchandising tie-ins and director John Lasseter’s love affair with classic cars are the driving force behind this sequel, that combines the better parts of the bookending films that everyone, but particularly the critics, preferred.

To wit, Cars 2 now finds tow-truck Mater, voiced by Larry the Cable Guy, propelled into poll position as an incredibly bumbling spy in romanticised global locations such as a rat-free Paris, a wonderfully camp and visually popping Tokyo, jolly London and sunny Italian Riviera, as McQueen and team take part in a Global Grand Prix to find the world’s fastest car and promote renewable fuel Allinol. Abominable autos and gas-guzzling goons, jalopies self-identifying as Lemons, plot the demise of the racers in a richly played-out espionage plot, but help is just around the bend from British superspy Finn McMissile (Michael Caine), a suped-up Aston Martin DB5, and rookie analyst Holley Shiftwell (Emily Mortimer), whose shapely curves may well set Mater’s pistons a-pumping. 

Monday, July 25, 2011

Cinema 2011 #70: Cell 211



Cell 211 is an extremely tense and uncomfortably violent film. Opening with a distressingly visceral wrist slitting with a shiv in the dank and miserable titular prison cell, writer-director Daniel Monzón here brings together a twisting and dangerous film that makes for compelling, if occasionally overwrought, viewing. A winner of eight Goya Awards in its native Spain, the movie is based a simple yet endlessly surprising plot device, and makes extremely good use of its limits in budget and scale to construct a dark and frightening study of how far a man is willing to go to survive extraordinary circumstances, and how far those circumstances will wrench him from the man he is.

The story centres around newly employed prison guard Juan Oliver (Alberto Ammann), whose aw-shucks-everyman qualities don’t seem to be particularly suited for his new gig in a high security prison. Taking the job to help support his heavily pregnant wife Elena (Marta Etura), Juan decides to make a good impression and tour the big house the day before he’s supposed to start. One ill-timed prison riot and a nasty bump to the head later, and Juan awakens to find himself slap bang in the middle of the inmates’ insurgency, and makes the split-second decision to pretend to be a prisoner who’s just as convicted in rabblerousing in order to hide his true identity and save his life.

Sunday, July 24, 2011

Cinema 2011 #69: Bobby Fischer Against the World


1972, Reykjavik. A media storm descended upon the Icelandic capital, with two world stars about to take part in one of the fiercest sporting battles of the Cold War.  Their contest would last months, played out against the clock, with the eyes of the world scrutinising every move. The power of democracy was aiming to crack the dominance of communism, pressure was intense, and conspiracy theories still abound in the results of the contest. In the red corner, the reigning world champion, Boris Spassky. In the blue corner, a 29-year old enigmatic American by the name of Bobby Fischer. Their game: chess. 

Oh look, another one...


Available here.

Monday, July 18, 2011

Cinema 2011 #68: The Guard



He’s good. He’s bad. He’s also kind of ugly. But Most of all, Brendan Gleeson is slyly brilliant in John Michael McDonagh’s feature film debut, The Guard. Something of a comedic contemporary Western, albeit taking place amid the dry stone walls of Connemara on the wesht coast of Ireland, Gleeson is Sergeant Gerry Boyle, a Garda officer dealing with the looming threat of an international drugs cartel, a pencil-pushing FBI Agent (Don Cheadle) flown over to solve the case, and the crushing apathy of his own professional ennui.

Shrewdly perceptive of the criminal underbelly, cruelly dismissive of his fellow officers, Boyle concentrates his detective skills on finding money in murder victim’s wallets, ordering prostitutes from the big city, and deliberately undermining his superiors for his own amusement. Gleeson is dryly arresting and dominates every scene he’s in as Boyle, layering this country Garda with enough sharp intelligence and underhanded charm to win the audience over to a man who’s so comfortable in his public service job that he won’t consider cancelling his day off in the middle of a full-scale international investigation. His Boyle is enigmatic, annoyingly brilliant and with surprising integrity and balls in the big blast ending. 

Thursday, July 14, 2011

Cinema 2011 #67: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II



So here it is, the final chapter. Ten years in the making, millions of dollars spent, billions of dollars reaped. The most successful film franchise in the history of cinema, a decade-long gravy train that comes chugging up to Platform 9¾ for the last time. It’s all led up to this, this moment, this ending. A battle between the forces of good and evil, a choice between what is easy and what is necessary. There will be tears and deaths, breath-taking battles and the resolution to some long awaited romances, one you didn’t know was coming. There’s even a bad word. Harry Potter, a superstar in his world and in ours. The boy who lived. Can he possibly defeat Lord Voldemort, a wizard so infatuated by cheating death that he’s split his very soul apart? Or will the answer to this Riddle prove impossible to overcome?

Come on, it’s not 2007. You know exactly how it ends.

Indeed, that’s been the problem that’s plagued Mr. Potter all along, just how could the boy who lived live up to expectations of millions of fans who know him inside and out? For the most part, he hasn’t, with the opening movies bogged down by a constant need to razzle-dazzle audiences with quaint magical puns and protracted origin stories for every piece of bedazzled brickabrack found on Diagon Alley. This Bertie Bott colourfulness required a complete tonal shift round about number three, where they turned down the saturation and learnt that the series would need to get some edge before it could pack a critical punch. Their solution, make each subsequent movie darker, both thematically and literally, than the one that came before. And again, mixed results. 

Monday, July 11, 2011

Cinema 2011 #66: The Conspirator



The Conspirator, directed by Hollywood’s legendary golden boy Robert Redford, is the first feature film from The American Film Company, a production studio aiming to push aside the vagaries of fiction and make movies about American history that are historically accurate. The failure to change the title to the more accurate conspiratrix aside, Redford’s film, with a big-name cast made up of James McAvoy, Robin Wright, Tom Wilkinson, Kevin Kline, Evan Rachel Wood, and many more, does a fine job at factually detailing the precision behind the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, as well as the political injustices carried out against Mary Surratt, the only woman to be tried as part of the plot.

Sunday, July 10, 2011

Cinema 2011 #65: The Tree of Life



Don’t bring a large popcorn and coke in with you – it’s not that kind of movie.

With The Tree of Life, reclusive director Terrence Malick here presents his long awaited treatise on the nature of life, love, death, religion and the very origins of the universe. A series of interconnected and non-linear fragments of the innocence of childhood, and its loss in adulthood, the film is a singular work, a piece of art unlike anything else you’ve ever seen. A mosaic of short cut scenes, detailing the very minutiae of prehistoric cellular mitosis to the sharp glass architecture of contemporary cityscapes, and the transience of life in between, the film poses many questions, offering few answers. There are no big reveals and twists. There is no orderly plot nor rational conclusions to derive. What you do get for the price of your admission ticket is a representation of life on the screen, in its spiritual and twisted forms, and it is beautiful to behold. 

Cinema 2011 #64: Transformers: Dark of the Moon



Transformers: Dark of the Moon is blockbuster cinema at its worst. It’s a lifeless film with a convoluted plot laboured for a punishingly tedious runtime, populated by forgettable characters whose names you won’t remember and a convoy of alien robotic cars that are, for the most part, entirely indistinguishable. It’s a film in which its director, Michael Bay, believes that any scene can be improved with the presence of large explosions or large breasts, and who takes racial stereotyping to near uncomfortable levels for the sake of a laugh. It is so poorly edited that in spite of the sterling work completed by its visual effects team, it is nearly impossible to actually separate the swaying mass of pixels into identifiable characters. It’s just awful.

It’s made about half a billion dollars in a week.

The story, insofar as any Transformers film has been driven by a coherent plot, revolves once again around Shia LaBeouf’s Sam Witwicky, by now an unemployed post-crash college grad bumming around Washington DC with his British girlfriend Carly (Rosie Huntington-Whiteley). Sam’s grown tired of living the civilian life, and pines for the days when he and his friends the Autobots, along with their leader Optimus Prime, could just keep on truckin’. Instead, he finds himself driving a floptimus prime jalopy and at the bottom of the career ladder in the mailroom of a corporation that may prove to be important to the plot.

Tuesday, July 5, 2011

Cinema 2011 #63: Bad Teacher



There’s a scene, about halfway through Jake Kasdan’s Bad Teacher, in which John Michael Higgins’ Principal Snur is sitting on a toilet in the gents while a fellow teacher evacuates his bowels like a percussionist on the last night of the Proms. Therein lies the problem with Bad Teacher, a film that’s far too broad to be the sly little black comedy it could have been.

The material sounds promising, with Cameron Diaz playing the carefree Elizabeth Halsey, a 7th Grade teacher in an American Middle School and who has absolutely no interest in being there. It’s somewhat refreshing, after years and years of inspiring dramas about the power a teacher can hold in the classroom and how they too can learn to grow, blah blah blah, to come across an educator who’s waiting for the school bell just so she can go out to her car a smoke a joint. After being dumped by her loaded fiancé, Halsey sets her sights on substitute and grade-A doofus Mr. Gettis (played by Diaz’s former flame Justin Timberlake in a solid, if disappointing C-grade performance), whose interest and family wealth will only be piqued by the medium of large boobs. And so, Halsey swindles and rips off everyone she can in order to gain the cup-size advantage over fellow teacher and love rival Miss Squirrel (Lucy Punch).
The battle for that one really twisty Twisty Fry was on

It’s all a shame that the script doesn’t live up to its premise, as Diaz is devilishly fun as the teacher who couldn’t care less. Jason Segel is underused as a jaded gym teacher, and surely more could have been made of the class of oddballs Halsey inherits over the summer holidays. Diaz is consistent, and doesn’t go through a moralising U-turn as the film fades to black, it’s just a shame the black side of this comedy couldn’t have been more consistent too.

Could do better.

2 ½ Likes


Cinema 2011 #62: Bridesmaids


After sitting down and mulling over Bridesmaids, easily the best comedy so far this year with a star-making performance from its writer Kristen Wiig, I got to wondering just why this female ensemble of funny girls, dressed in couture, and talking about love, life and sex worked, when their New York neighbours failed so spectacularly, and twice, to carry over small screen critical success to the cinema? It’s because Bridesmaids, for all its projectile vomiting and food poisoning incontinence, is clever. It’s a brilliantly funny script that speaks volumes on the petty nature of competition and jealousy, on the value of deep-rooted friendship and connects better with a generation who can believe the self-destructive flaws of a woman who’s life post-boom means a dead-end job and moving back in with her mother. Sex and the City 2, on the other hand, had its star walk down a private beach in Dubai while her Indian servant carried a parasol.

Bridesmaids is the story of Annie (Kristen Wiig), and her attempt be the perfect maid of honour to friend Lillian (Maya Rudolph), but whose efforts are hampered by circumstance, her own self-destructive tendencies and a fierce rivalry with other bridesmaid Helen, a wealthy society wife played by Rose Byrne, who knows she can do a better job. There will be an itinerary of events to plan and enjoy, from dress shopping to the bachelorette party in Vegas, but will Annie be able to cope with the financial and emotional strain of the wedding while she tries to piece her life back together after the foreclosure of her bakery business in downtown Milwaukee?

Monday, July 4, 2011

Cinema 2011 #61: The Beaver


Mad Mel, beyond Blunderdome. Where’d it all go wrong, eh? From charming A-list movie star and multi-award winning director of challenging historical epics to anti-Semitic alcoholic sexist who allegedly beats up his girlfriend.

Perhaps that’s why his performance in The Beaver, a dramedy about a man’s struggles with marionettes and melancholia, directed by long time friend Jodie Foster, is all the more poignant. Opening with a sweeping prelude through the life of Walter Black, a depressed toy company CEO having tried every method from drumming to medication to self-flagellation to ease his emotional burdens, we see Mel Gibson, a man with all the weight of the world on his shoulders, floating silently in a swimming pool, arms outstretched in Christ-like anguish. A cockney voice, later revealed to be the Beaver himself, tells us of his troubles, how he doesn’t want to be like this, how his family can no longer cope, how he’s become a joke professionally, how alcohol offers his only respite. It’s hard to draw the lines between fact and fiction. Well, at least until Walter starts communicating solely through the medium of a plush puppet on his left arm.

Saturday, July 2, 2011

Cinema 2011 #60: Green Lantern



Those poor Warner Bros. With their annual profits courtesy of the Daily Prophet and its scar-faced subscriber about to come to an end, and with the competition suiting up a cavalcade of costumed heroes to near endless critical praise and packed out theatres, the brothers eyes have been turning green. It seemed only logical to option out another comic book character, some flashy guy with cosmic powers and a tacky sovereign on his right hand. Do it right and they’re talking a trilogy, at least. Isn’t he even part of some sort of team, as well? Some sort of unionised superhero book club, or something? That could make money. Just throw lots of money at it, you have to spend it to make it, right? Why not make the whole thing CGI while they’re at it, 3D too, obviously, and throw a handful of plot threads and a host of characters at the screen and just see what sticks, yeah? Green Lantern, that’s his name, right? This could work… this could work… Right? Right?!

No, boys, it didn’t. It really really didn’t.