Sunday, February 27, 2011

Does winning an Academy Award really mean anything?


This evening will mark the 83rd year that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has presented its coveted annual award, the Oscar. Standing 13.5 inches, weighing 8.5lb, this golden swordsman knights each victor in a swirling glow of glory and gushing emotional homilies. Oh yes, there’ll be tears, there’ll be smiles, there’ll be jokes, and Pixar will win. But, at the end of the day, this whole thing leaves me feeling particularly unenthused, an excuse for creating a ceremony for cronies to congratulate each other with self-interested back slapping and affiliated admiration. Call me Oscar the Grouch, but this whole thing’s beginning to look like rubbish.

Thursday, February 17, 2011

Intermission

Folks, few though you are, I am jetting off on my holidays tomorrow evening and thus won't have a post for a wee while.

Wednesday, February 16, 2011

Cinema 2011 #17: True Grit

True Grit started out as a 1968 Old West serial by the writer Charles Portis, and provides the bones from which Joel and Ethan Coen, the chieftains of American quirk, flesh out their latest slice of murky Americana. It tells the tail of Mattie Ross, a quick-witted and resourceful 14 year-old out to bring her father’s murderer to justice. To do this, she retains the services of a one-eyed, gun-totin’, whiskey swiggin’, crotchety rogue of a US Marshall, Rooster Cogburn, and a tawdry Texan Ranger by the name of LaBoeuf. The role of Cogburn gave John Wayne the only Oscar of his career in 1970, and his work is generally the main reason why the previous version is fondly remembered some 40 years on. This time round, however, the Dude himself, Jeff Bridges, dons the eye patch and the Coens claim their film is a sharper rendition of the source material, Truer Grit if you will.

Sunday, February 13, 2011

Cinema 2011 #16: Never Let Me Go


Ah, the future. If the cinema is to be believed, it’s not going to be a pretty picture. Fewer hover boards and 70s style unisex jumpsuits, a lot more death by aliens, death by natural apocalypse, death by ill-advised and worryingly self-aware technology not spurned by ctrl + alt + del, death by nuclear holocaust, death by religious fanatics, death by rampaging red-neck cannibals who can’t find a tin opener, death by zombies, but then coming back as zombies and causing more death. All in all, in the future, you’ll be dead. But when it comes to Never Let Me Go, you’ll get to live a little bit longer before you complete that final journey.

Cinema 2011 #15: Rabbit Hole


Much like Alice’s adventures, this Rabbit Hole takes you on a strange journey, and will surprise and charm you with its frank and sincere depiction of life, death and grief. John Cameron Mitchell’s feature version of the Pulitzer-winning play stars Nicole Kidman and Aaron Eckhart as Becca and Howie Corbett, an affluent couple coping with the accidental death of their 4 year-old son, 8 months after he was struck by a teenage driver. What could have been a turgid and drawn-out treatise on the pains of death and loss is actually an uplifting and life-affirming drama, with moments of tender sorrow balanced by brave laughs and a terrific ensemble cast.

Thursday, February 10, 2011

Cinema 2011 #14: The Fighter

David O. Russell’s The Fighter is a heavyweight drama that will leave you feeling punch drunk in its wake, an appropriately understated film that is as much about family as it is about boxing. It pieces together the story of Irish Mickey Ward, a welterweight brawler from Lowell, Massachusetts, and his progression towards a shot at a title fight. So far so so-so, another sporting flick about a guy on a Rocky road to achieve his competitive ambition. But it is the setting of Mickey’s bouts against the backdrop of his troubled relationships with his mother Alice and brother Dickie Eklund, himself a former fighter whose addiction to crack has ended his career, that lifts this film above the derivative sequels of Stallone’s eponymous slugger.

Tuesday, February 8, 2011

Cinema 2011 #13: Barney's Version


Ladies and gentile men, goys and girls, gather ye round and listen to the schmaltzy stale of the Montreal’s mightiest putz, it just won’t be the version you were hoping for. This marks the feature film debut of director Richard J. Lewis, and is an episodic schlep through the lifetime and memories of the titular character, Barney Panofsky. He’s a hard-drinking, cigar-chomping Canuck, with an eye for the ladies and a penchant for a hockey puck, and his story will range from love and loss, family and separation, to a rather unwelcome debilitating illness.

Sunday, February 6, 2011

Cinema 2011 #12: Tangled

Once upon a time there was a man named Walt who liked to draw pictures. No mere sketches, these doodles did wonders for Walt and friends, the public’s appetite for daubed dwarves belting out ballads and ditties and moral lessons for all to learn seemed endless. But, dear children, life is cyclical, and Walt’s eyes would have to open to a whole new world, one of pixels and tweening and layer definition. The moppets, once so mad for Mickey, struck dumb at the sight of Dumbo, got older.  Their own dumplings only wanted digital. The ballads were boring. The wisecracking toys are funny! Those insects are a riot, that forgetful fish so ironic, those superheroes so knowing, that robot’s so cute! That dog TALKS!!! What was Walt to do?

Well… buy them out, of course. And, when going solo, if you can’t beat them, then copy them. But… with ballads thrown in. Tangled is Disney’s 50th animated feature, a reworking of the Grimm fairytale Rapunzel, the princess with extensions to rival the gaudiest of gypsy weddings. She’s been locked into a tower, and the arrival of the caddish cat burglar Flynn Rider leads her on a journey to find herself amid numerous adventures.

Saturday, February 5, 2011

Cinema 2011 #11: Morning Glory

January 14th, 1952, the day that changed everything. It was on the frosty morning of this inauspicious day that it first happened. That we cast off the shackles of morning radio and first started turning on our tellies to wake up. 58 years and some 17,000 episodes later we’re still yawning. This is the day the Today Show first aired, the first early morning news and talk show in the history of television. This was the day that made breakfast bigger, with crispy flakes of current events and juicy morsels of weather. This is the day that gave us Morning Ireland. The day that gave us Mr. Motivator. The day that gave us Richard. The day that gave us Judy. 

Cinema 2011 #10: Black Swan


Those of us, and many we number, unfamiliar with the art of ballet may well be put off by the notion of watching a film about sinewy girls in silly skirts poncing around the stage like some sort of human gymkhana. Relief comes from the director of this pony show, Darren Aronofsky. This American has repeatedly shown himself capable of mining engrossing and gripping dramas from the most diverse of sources. From the down and dirty world of addiction, to mind-blowing intricacies of mathematics, care of an exquisite royal rumbling costume drama, his is a star on the rise, and this work is a graceful and distressing dance.

Cinema 2011 #9: Little Fockers

Cast your mind back to the dark and dreary winter days of 2000. Sonia was our Silver Surfer down under, Bush’s presidential hopes held tight with a new jam, Gore tight with the mic in the left hand, and the Celtic Tiger was purring on a sheepskin rug in front of a roaring fire. Oh, how we did chuckle and chortle at Ben Stiller’s foolhardy attempts to wow his prospective in-laws with tales of lactating feline nipples.

Fast forward a decade of decadent excess and installment number 3 of the Focker folktale has arrived, about as welcome as the latest banking bailout. 

Cinema 2011 #8: Blue Valentine

If it happens to be date night and you and your fancy fancy seeing a run of the mill cinematic chestnut of romance and will they/won’t they, with two leads garnering Golden Globe nominations for their performances, then waste your money on Love and Other Drugs. And make the most of sitting in the back row. Blue Valentine is not for you. It may be gentle and humble, but also honest and pathetic, and lives squarely up to its downcast title. 

Cinema 2011 #7: The Green Hornet

Should you choose to go and see the Green Hornet, splashing out about a tenner for its inflated and unimposing 3D rendering to boot, I’m sorry to inform you that you’ll be wasting your time. That’s not to say that the tale of Britt Reid, the eponymous WASP brat and side-kick to his side-kick, does not, at first, sound like rip roaring good fun on paper. In fact, it’s the failure of this film to add up to the sum of its parts that’ll leave you feeling stung. 

Cinema 2011 #6: 127 Hours


If you found yourself caught between a very real rock and a hard place, what lengths would you be willing to go to in order to save yourself? That’s the tough decision facing real-life mountain climber and canyoneering Aron Ralston, when he tumbles down a ravine wall in the Blue John Canyon of the Moab desert in Utah. Finding his right forearm pinned between the gorge’s wall and a large boulder, he spends the next 5 days trying to figure out how to save himself from his rocky restraint, hypothermia, starvation and dehydration.*SPOILER WARNING*



Cinema 2011 #5: It's Kind of a Funny Story


Ah, the perils of being upper-middle-class. Ever since Emma Bovary first looked indifferently upon the perfect household she’d painstakingly acquired and thought, “Nah… screw zis, where’s the cyanide?”, being a yuppie has positively become a death sentence. Couple this with the perilous pressure of cycling uphill on a fixie as a hipster teen and it’s obviously only going to be a quick hop, skip and jump to your death from the Brooklyn Bridge. And with such fears, 16-year old Craig Gilner (Keir Gilchrist) commits himself to a mental ward, little realising that the charming caboodle of crazies and crackpots he finds himself with will change his life forever…

Cinema 2011 #4: The King's Speech

Breaking news, Facebook had it first.

Cinema 2011 #3: Catfish

Playing catch-up to Facebook

Cinema 2011 #2: Gullivor's Travels

Playing catch-up to Facebook.

It all began like this... Cinema 2011 #1: Love and Other Drugs

I like the cinema. I really like the cinema. That doesn't mean I like the films though...

And that's why I find myself here, to chronicle and critique all the movies I see in 2011.

Now, don't get me wrong, I realise it's currently 36 days into the year. That means roughly 10% of the current solar circuit we so ephemerally cling to has already passed us by as we continue on this non-stop one-way trip to tomb town. But turn those musings-on-mortality-and-crippling-fears-of-the-finality-of-transient-existence frowns upside down, I'm here to help.

Perhaps I'm hopping on the January bandwagon of impulses to change my life through creative outlets a tad late. It's all Facebook's fault; there I was, happily listing all the movies I saw in a year in my About Me box, recording a rom-com here, charting a comedy there. And then those fascists changed the profile layout and low and behold the sweet square-inch of cinematic inventory disappeared under folds of data and code.

But the human spirit is brave, and this cinéaste got off his ass and changed his status. 04 January 14.44, Cinema 2011 #1: Love and Other Drugs.

04 January 14.49. "Any good?", she asked, that siren call to spill forth the opinions brimming up inside me, that movie meniscus that had always threatened to splash over into the unknown. And oh, how it splashed...