The Summer to end all Summers

So as I sit here in New Zealand, basking in the summer sun and Christmas is a mere two days away. I am away from my closest family and friends so I have taken stock in the small surprises that come my way knowing that physically I won't be receiving gifts or eating a classic Christmas dinner. So the past three days have dealt out three amazing presents for anyone who has a shred of taste when it comes to blockbuster movies.

I know I may be repeating what many of you have already been made aware of but you have to agree, these three contenders would have you running to the cinema even if you hadn't seen a trailer. All three have a lot to live up to, the pressure is on, and if each of these films pull off the monumental task of living up to expectations then we will be looking at some of the finest franchises to be committed to celluloid (or digitised to a projector these days, uuugggh it just doesn't have the same ring to it).

First up the undisputed heavy weight champion of comic book adaptations for the past 6 years. Christian Bale will once again growl through the cowl of the Dark Knight and shit is going to blow up in massive IMAX resolutions. The final instalment of Christopher Nolans Batman trilogy, The Dark Knight Rises . . . .



With TDKR coming out in the summer (northern hemisphere) 2012 you can't help but think the next film is long way off. However if anyone who religiously went to the cinema for a certain film every Christmas between the years 2001 and 2003 will attest to, a mere one year wait for the first half of this next monumental picture should be a breeze. I came to New Zealand for many reasons, but one reason towers way above the others, and I made several pilgrimages to certain streets in Wellington and a farm just outside of Matamata to pay homage to my favourite films, The Lord Of The Rings. It took a long time but everything has fallen into place and Peter Jackson is once again in Tolkien mode and Directing the cinematic adaptation of The Hobbit, and splitting it into two mega films. The first of which got its trailer debut just yesterday, and here it is.




So yes as you can imagine I am very over excited about The Hobbit, it is looking and sounding amazing. I thought nothing could get much better than these two trailers coming out one after the other . . . well I was wrong. Now this next film may not be as deep in the public concious as the last two giants, but trust me this one is just as exciting as the last two. Today the eagerly anticipated trailer for Ridley Scotts new film was offered up to the internet. Now I hear the sighs already, another Gladiator style epic, god no! Well stop right there. I do love Ridley Scotts epic sword swinging films but I am obsessed and in awe of his earlier sci-fi creations Alien and Blade Runner. Well at long last he has gone back to sci-fi and not only that he is unearthing a back story as to what happened on LV-426 before Ripley and her crew landed on it in Alien! I love this trailer, it has such echoes of the original Alien trailer however it's not being sold on the back of the Alien franchise, it looks to be a very different kind of film, and it looks incredible.


and just to show how Ridely has pitched so similarly to his original Alien, below is the original trailer.



So yes I am very excited for the year of monster movies ahead and coincidently Alien is a film I watch every year at Christmas time, a weird tradition I know but for some reason it happened two years on the trot and it just stuck. However I have just realised I'm in New Zealand and I don't have a copy of it . . . a visit to the video store will be needed post haste. Have a great Christmas everyone and a Happy New Year.

Drive - Movie Review

Avoiding an advertisement for this film was like trying to avoid the sun on my drive down to Queenstown and as summer starts to hit, trust me, my right arm is significantly more tanned than my left! It's everywhere and critics couldn't be more impressed with Drive, it's apparently THE film to see this year. However judging from the people I know who saw this well before I did, it seems to be dividing peoples opinion. Now I have seen it I can definitely see why there is a great rift between critics and some audiences. Drive is a slick and stylish film with a great sense of minimalist but brutal action coupled with an intense and focused central character. It's a real slow boiler, the action is spread widely throughout the plot, the introduction being the crowning jewel, I have never seen a more intense and slickly edited car pursuit. Following the intro is a focused character building plot that see's Ryan Gosling exact tension and style with his almost mute performance as the driver. With no name, a focused attitude, a signature jacket and a style that echoes Clint Eastwood or Steve McQueen you can't help but become drawn into Ryan Goslings performance. He is the quintessential lone hero and even with the supporting cast putting in great performances of their own (especially Ron Perlman and Albert Brooks as the mob bosses not to be fucked with) this is Goslings film.

Drive looks modern because of its cast and the quality of the picture and score, yet the style has a real dirty 80's feel about it. Our central characters style sets this tone with the tooth pick in mouth and quilted white jacket, the opening credits have a Sixteen Candles look to them and the soundtrack is full of synth pop. The film earns its 18 cert thanks to the brutal and visceral violence that boils up towards the latter half of the plot with brutal murders following one another as the walls close in on the driver. I applaud the collisions of style and brutality, it's almost like something out of GTA: Vice City only not so camp and OTT.

Many people believed there weren't enough car chases, in fact there are only two major set pieces, but to add more would seriously be an insult to peoples intelligence. We understand what he does, the first scenes ticks all those boxes, and the plot never warrants for another until it's necessary. It would be unrealistic to have any of the mob bosses chase him down in a car (a route your average popcorn movie would take). Needless to say I am on the side of the critics with this one. Drive is a terrific film with a focused and powerful central narrative and character. It's a rare breed of film that creates an iconic character and no matter how you feel towards it, will have you talking about it afterwards.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Click for trailer

The Tides Of Change

So as Christmas comes rolling and the ad's start to play for all the latest 3D light and airy festive fun I realised that I have let my blog go for way too long. What started out as a positive attempt to flex my movie critiquing muscles quickly went out of the door like a fitness dvd at new years. In this relatively short space of time the game seems to be changing and my life also couldn't be more different.

I currently reside in New Zealand, and yes I have been geeking out on all sorts of Lord Of The Rings and Hobbit related escapades, one of which resulted in me spotting Sir Peter Jackson driving down Stone St in his big flashy Merc. Needless to say the country is incredible, with sights abounding that remind you of the infamous trilogy. I will be here until late next year (if the money and jobs hold out).

As my life has changed the landscape of cinema seems to be moving at albeit a slower pace. With 3D being touted by Mark Kermode as a passing phase I honestly thought that would be the case too . . . however with many major films by some serious heavyweight directors being shot in 3D you can't help but wonder if its really going to stick around. One film to rule them all will of course be the Hobbit which is being filmed right now in 3D in ways that are completely new to the medium. 3D could be made or (heaven forbid) broken by the two Hobbit movies, the first won't see the light of day until November/December 2012. But with the likes of Martin Scorcese in full support of 3D could we be in the middle of a revolution. In my opinion I don't think there's any winning or losing to be had here . . . films will always be shot in the traditional way, just as IMAX has captivated the globe, 3D will remain, but it will never be pasted over everything, just like IMAX only caters to certain types of films. In fact had I been writing reviews this year you would have seen that for once 3D actually enhanced a cinematic experience for me. If anyone saw Transformers: Dark Of The Moon, you know what I mean. A completely mind numbing experience, maybe not quite as barf inducing as the last outing, but still nuttier than a nut cake. However having been shot in 3D and being a balls out action movie with some fantastic CGI effects, I couldn't help but marvel at the depth of the images and way the 3D pulled you in to the action. There is some colour loss still there is motion blur but in a film like Transformers it's not exactly a huge hindrance. For all the nay sayers I really believe that 3D has found its place in films that go out to wow audiences with visuals, it just has had teething problems with dreaded retro fitting, prime example being the morbidly bad Clash Of The Titans which wasn't filmed in 3D yet got kitted out with it in cinemas, ugggh! James Cameron, Martin Scorcese, Peter Jackson and George Lucas appear to have nothing but faith in the future of 3D, and as the reissues of their films coupled with the release of future projects are birthed to the world we will just have to hold the final judgement of 3D until then. I neither applaud nor denounce the take over of 3D but like every new technology (it doesn't even feel that new any more) its further development may result in great things.

There's obviously lots more going on in the world of cinema, the development of motion capture which has me anticipating the release of Tintin (a film made in NZ but not released until Christmas meanwhile back home they can go and see it now!!). The power of the reboot, with Spiderman and Superman both hoping to do what Chris Nolan did for Batman (we'd like to see them try). And the development of retail technology that is giving gifted individuals the power to realise their cinematic potential, case in point Monsters which although it wasn't on the whole amazing, is more than made up by the fact it was a debut film that cost bugger all to make and was made on an at home set up.

Apologies for the very general post, especially on the well versed subject of 3D, but there's my 2 cents on the whole thing anyway. I promise for a review in the near future, its been far too long since I did one but being in New Zealand and exploring the country has kept me out of cinema for the most part. For all those shocked and not knowing the Hobbit was being shot in 3D, take a gander at the link below.

Hobbit Production Diary No.4

The Town - Quick Review

So to save on time and effort I'm putting up a short review for The Town as I saw it recently and it just got a DVD release.

The Town follows Doug Macray who commits a number of bank robberies with his Charlestown crew and falls in love with a woman who they take hostage and let go in the first heist of the narrative. He wants to break free from Boston and start life a fresh with his new found love, but with a persistent FBI agent hot on his tail and a crew who won't let him go lightly, Doug has the odds stacked up against his fight for freedom.

So its a brilliant follow on from Gone Baby Gone even though its a very different style of film. The Bostonian setting is once again realistic and effective with the script written very much with the city in mind. There are so many little gems of Bostonian language that scatter the various scenes with humour and sharp dialogue. The cast is superb with Affleck leading as well as Directing and managing to hold it all together brilliantly. Kudos to Jeremy Renner (Hurt Locker) who is unnerving and unpredictable as Dougs best friend and gang member James. This is also one of the last times we'll see Pete Postlethwaite perform since his recent passing, he is utterly brilliant and growls viciously as the Irish mob boss Fergus Colm. The drama is superb and really sets the tone of the film but is broken up with style by three superb heist scenes. Each better than the other with the final filling a lot of the third act and seeing tons of gun fire. The slick editing and shooting style, along with the way the gang orchestrate their plans really make the scenes memorable, and very much pivotal to the story. This is well written and entertaining drama coupled with sharp and exciting action. Ben Afflecks 'Heat' if you will.

I really recommend this for a night in, it will suit most tastes and is a film I would gladly revisit.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Click for trailer

BAFTA Show Down

So the BAFTA's have come and gone and the outcome is ridiculously predictable. The Kings Speech is amazingly acted, Social Network is perfectly scripted and directed and Inception looks and sounds amazing so you can probably tell who won what already. Colin Firth, Helena Bonham Carter and Geoffrey Rush all walked away with their acting nominations with Natalie Portman obviously winning best actress, if it went to anyone else it would be a sham. Sure enough Kings Speech won both the British film and overall film award (a little too much me thinks) but David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin got what they deserved winning best director and adapted screenplay for Social Network, a film I have now begun to laud over since getting a copy, its a supreme piece of work. Inception raked in the technical awards, a shame because I think it deserves more, but at least its been recognised. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo which was the first review I wrote on this blog took best foreign film totally deserved. My only real grievance was with best soundtrack, now its enough for a film to rake at the BAFTA's like Kings Speech, but the soundtrack although great doesn't stick in the memory nor have the impact that many of the others had. How To Train Your Dragon is a firm favourite of mine although no one can deny the impact of the Inception soundtrack, why either of these didn't get it is beyond me, I supposed it's justice enough for a nomination. Only one film was going to win best animation and rightly so Toy Story 3, one year there might actually be a case where the winner of this category might be hard to predict, but one can dream.  


Anyway the full list of winners is below, did they go the way you thought? who did you think was robbed? and is the Kings Speech reeeeally THAT good? Let me know. 


ORIGINAL MUSIC: Alexandre Desplat for The King's Speech

SHORT FILM: Until The River Runs Red

SHORT ANIMATION: The Eagleman Stag

SOUND: Inception

EDITING: The Social Network

MAKE UP & HAIR: Alice in Wonderland

FILM NOT IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE: The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

COSTUME DESIGN: Colleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland

PRODUCTION DESIGN: Inception

SPECIAL VISUAL EFFECTS: Inception

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Helena Bonham Carter for The King's Speech

OUTSTANDING DEBUT: Chris Morris for Four Lions

OUTSTANDING BRITISH FILM: The King's Speech

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Geoffrey Rush in The King's Speech

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: David Seidler for The King's Speech

OUTSTANDING BRITISH CONTRIBUTION: The Harry Potter Films

ANIMATED FILM: Toy Story 3

ORANGE WEDNESDAYS RISING STAR: Tom Hardy

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network

CINEMATOGRAPHY: Roger Deakins for True Grit

DIRECTOR: David Fincher for The Social Network

LEADING ACTRESS: Natalie Portman for Black Swan

LEADING ACTOR: Colin Firth

BEST FILM: The King's Speech

FELLOWSHIP: Christopher Lee  

The Fighter - Review

I love this time of year as directors and actors bring out the big guns and create well formed character piece movies, but for the life of me I can't remember a time when a fight has been so close to call as the bout for best film. Having seen nearly all of them now with just True Grit to go, each contender save for Toy Story has a strong and detailed focus on a powerful central protagonist, there's no glossing over the detail, there’s raw realism to each one of them and The Fighter is a shining example of this trend. It is a sports movie and the structure is typical but with a central character that you genuinely route for as his fights are fought not just in the ring but in his life outside it. With the type of gritty realism that reminds you of Ben Affleck’s Gone Baby Gone, the setting paints a pretty grim picture of 1980's Lowell Massachusetts where drugs are rife and hard times are plain to see. The community of Lowell supports and idolises boxing and their local hero Dick Eklund who long ago destroyed his career thanks to drugs. His brother Micky who also fights has the chance to prove himself as a boxer but is held back by his families damaging motives and deluded dreams. He finds a way to break free and achieve his potential thanks to his new girlfriend and the support of his trainers, but not without consequences.

The drama here is electric, especially amongst the family where Micky who should be receiving all the support he can, is side lined by the damaging lives and habits of his brother and the rest of his family. With his mother as a manager Micky is at the behest of his family including his six grown female siblings who would all seek to gain from any success their brothers have. Confrontations and snappy dialogue come thick and fast when Micky’s girlfriend Charlene (played brilliantly by Amy Adams) is thrown into the mix. Mark Wahlberg puts in an understated but brilliant performance as Micky; in fact this is probably his finest work even though his character is overshadowed at first by Christian Bales off the hook performance as his brother Dicky. It comes as no surprise that Bale has received a supporting actor nomination at the Oscars as he behaves like and embodies the character he is playing, but Wahlberg is the same, his character is just more level headed. But it’s like with everything, you always remember the wild ones more and although Bale looks like he might steal it from him, Wahlberg shows that this is his film. And if you doubt that some of Bales performance may be over acting the film makers make a point of showing just thirty seconds of the real brothers in the credits, in that brief time it’s plain to see that both Bale and Wahlberg really knocked this one out of the park.

The way the sport is depicted and filmed is crucial to a movie like this and The Fighter makes the boxing feel very real by presenting it in a TV broadcast manner but with focused close-ups at crucial points. The fights are intoxicating and as more come the more you route for Micky to make it through. The hard work on display here is undeniable, long and medium shots give the actors little room to fake and Wahlberg clearly has put in the training to make the fights look real and intense. The drama of these fights and the clashes that Micky deals with in-between them make this a film that never loses pace; none of the scenes feel unnecessary. This is a brilliantly directed piece of work and David O Russell’s best work since Three Kings and once again it doesn't surprise me that he’s up for best director at the Oscars.

I thoroughly enjoyed this, the story is so wide in its appeal and to know this is based on truth is bitter sweet, I loved the characters and I was on the edge of my seat for the final fight earnestly routing for Micky, I haven’t had an experience like that in a sports movie for some time. As a lot of critics have already penned this is Rocky for a new generation.  Go see it.   

★ ★ ★ ★ ★

Click for trailer

127 Hours - Review

So Danny Boyle tackles yet another genre, a real life fight for survival story with the tagline 'there is no force more powerful than the will to live'. It brings to mind one of my favourite films/documentaries 'Touching the Void', a true story about a man who has a climbing accident and through his own unstoppable determination manages to crawl for miles with a completely broken leg back to base camp. The story is endearing and powerful but it’s told in a documentary style with talking heads and superb dramatisations. Touching The Void is a triumph because it comes straight from the mouths of the people who actually went through it. 127 Hours is brave in taking a true story that is recent, can be well documented by the real Aron Ralston and instead dramatising it. With the story focusing solely on one person doing something daft, it's easy to see why this was given the feature film treatment, the film has one focus with James Franco playing the central role brilliantly, but for me it never reaches the heady heights of Touching the Voids honesty and compassion. A friend of mine watched an interview with Aron Ralston describing his escape before seeing the film and felt his experience at the cinema was enhanced due to this. After seeing the film for myself I couldn't help but feel that this kind of insight would have given the film more connection with the fact that this actually happened.

However this is not to say that 127 Hours is a bad film, far from it. To anyone not privy to the story of Aron Ralston this will be an inspiring and excruciating ride into a man’s psyche and his willingness to live. The performance and the way that it is captured through various experimental camera techniques are astonishing. It’s not a film for the faint of heart, when it was first shown people were given t-shirts shirts saying 'I kept my eyes open for all of 127 Hours' and in all fairness I did flinch a few times myself as Aron went about his escape. Even though the event that see's Aron free himself from his prison weighs heavily in the plot of the film, 127 Hours proves what The Kings Speech proved, that characters mean much more to the film than anything else. James Franco brings Aron Ralston to life and really goes hell for leather. He's totally believable as a free spirited and outgoing . . . tit, and as his characters pluckiness and foolishness is worn down by the struggle he's landed himself in and responds with a performance that doesn't feel forced or fake.

One of the main crux of the story are Arons flash backs and hallucinations that represent his thoughts, fears and dreams as he slowly deteriorates. For much of the film they help the audience to understand what is going through Arons head and why he eventually comes to this disturbing but inevitable conclusion. The images never spell their meaning but they don't have to as they ultimately serve in making Aron realise that his attitude and total lack of responsibility have lead him to this crack in the wilderness. It's a sour note especially one that paints the protagonist as a bit of an idiot, but this never becomes a sticking point in the enjoyment of the film. In fact it gives you better connection to the character, none of us are perfect, we all have our flaws and the best characters in movie history are flawed in their own unique way.  

To conclude 127 Hours is like nothing you've seen before, you've all seen survival movies and they do paint the same picture every time, not here. Like I say it’s not for the faint of heart, but for those who want to see real sacrifice and triumph in the face of impossible circumstances then this is what you’re after.

★ ★ ★ ★ ☆

Click here for trailer