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. 

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? 

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? 

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.

Popcorn filler for a busy week...

Can be found here.

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.