Humour’s a funny thing (heh heh – sorry). So often I sit there po-faced in comedies while the rest of the cinema crowd rolls about, overcome with hilarity. A couple of weeks back watching The Other Guys, for example, I barely raised a smirk, yet all around young males (mostly) guffawed, stamped their feet, clapped their approval in the darkness even (never have seen the point of clapping at a movie screen, but there ya go). Is it an age thang? Maybe, in the case of The Other Guys. But I think not. After the movie I ran into someone I know who’s a much older fart than I who laughed all the way through it. Besides, I got the jokes – I just didn’t find them funny.
Same went for The Four Lions. Seriously, I thought that was shite. Dumber than the Three Stooges, but not remotely funny. That adds up to a stinker.
So, fronting up for The Infidel, I wasn’t optimistic. Well, you know what’s coming. Yep, I pissed myself in this one. And yet, some critics have been utterly damning: for example, Stuart McGurk, in the NME. Dunno what this McGurk burk’s got up his arse, but it ain’t pleasant.
New York’s the location for this ‘slice of life’ movie, although it could be any urban setting. There’s nothing particularly Noo Yawk about the characters, and unusually for films shot in the Big Apple, the city itself does not feature heavily.
A mistake, perhaps, for this movie needs something more than it delivers – a lot more. Slice-of-life comedy/dramas are a dime a dozen, and the problem with most of them, or at least the majority of the ones I’ve seen in recent years, is that the slices they offer, while ‘realistic’, are not very interesting. Such is the case with Please Give.Read the rest…
This low-budget Brit thriller opens ominously, with two blokes we come to know as Danny (Martin Compston) and Vic (Eddie Marsan) wordlessly soundproofing the back of a van and a room in an abandoned apartment block, and fitting both out with confinement gear. They operate with a sense of purpose and efficiency. Whatever they’re up to, you know it’s no good.
Of course, it can be safely assumed from the title of the movie that Alice Creed (Gemma Arterton) – whoever she is – will be their prey, but at this point you’re not sure why. Are they politically motivated, perhaps? Involved in some sort of espionage? Planning on incarcerating some hapless victim as a sex slave? Or just crims after a ransom? Read the rest…
Nic (Annette Bening) and Jules (Julianne Moore) are a married lesbian couple bringing up their teenage kids, 18 year old Joni (Mia Wasikowska) (named after Joni Mitchell) and 15 year old Laser (Josh Hutcherson), in a trendy LA neighbourhood. Unconventional though the family may be on the face of it, they’re going through all the usual stuff.
The ‘Momses’, as the kids refer to them, have evidently dosed themselves up on pop psychology and self-development hoo-hah and are dutifully applying modern parenting strategies – the kids are rolling their eyes. As well they might. This is an area crying out for satirical treatment, and in director/writer Lisa Cholodenko and co-scribe Stuart Blumberg the best of practitioners are in da house! Dippy self-development lingo and New Age tripe provide the material for many a wry chuckle as the Momses attempt to plot their kids’ futures and manipulate them away from perceived present dangers. Read the rest…
I abhor real violence, but I generally like it on screen. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing the bad bastard cop it? It’s cathartic. Where else but in the movies do we have moral license to thrill to the grisly kill of some evil mother who had it comin’? Poetic justice sure as hell ain’t nowhere to be seen in life; it’s a comfort to see it enacted in fiction.
There doesn’t have to be a moral justification for screen violence, though. In horror movies and splatter flicks, for example, you expect slaughter of the innocents, and it’s delivered in full – but the gore is so over the top, so obviously gratuitous, it’s cartoon-like. Easily handled, easily dismissed. Read the rest…
It is the 80s, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller album has infiltrated every corner of the globe, it seems, including the backwaters of New Zealand’s North Island. Boy (James Rolleston) is a Maori kid in early adolescence who idolises Jackson, inexpertly demonstrating his dance moves to underwhelmed peers at any opportunity. He lives in a dilapidated shack on a derelict farm with his gran, little brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu), a clutch of cousins, and his pet goat and trusty confidante, Leif.
The two brothers are dreamers, but where Boy has created a comforting inner world populated by Thriller, escapist fantasies and an idealised vision of his father (who, in fact, is doing a lengthy stretch for armed robbery), Rocky’s is disturbed. Haunted by the knowledge that his mother died giving birth to him, he believes he has ‘powers’, which are cleverly depicted in animated drawings (and mostly destructive and vengeful in application). Read the rest…
A friend once declared that the basis of Pommy humour is “putting on a silly hat and pulling faces.” I objected to this as reductive – he left out the ‘funny’ voice.
OK, not fair. The Brits gave us Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones and The Office, for which I will be ever grateful. But really, there IS a lot of slapstick and clowny stuff in their comedies – even the good ones.
I’m not immune to silly hat/face/voice humour. Black Adder was often chuckleworthy. Little Britainworked for me for a while. Ditto Ali G. But I have to confess to not getting the Goons. I found Monty Python less hit than miss and consider it vastly overrated. And to fast forward to the 21st Century and change tack from TV and radio to film, I found last year’s widely acclaimed political satire In The Loop profoundly unfunny and tedious. I haven’t been that unamused or bored in a movie since…that is, until Four Lions. Read the rest…
Skimming over the promo material, I have to admit to being less than enthused about this number. A coming-of-age period piece with Zac Efron as the romantic lead? I consoled myself with the hope that the Orson Welles character would add some interest…
Indeed, it all starts off pretty lame. Boy with thespian aspirations meets girl who dreams of being a writer… Okaaay. Warning lights a-flashin’: formulaic development surely ahead. Well, no. No, glorious no! The love tale that is set up in the opening scenes is not picked up again until the very end of the movie.
Instead, we are taken on an excursion into the bohemian heart of late 30s New York experimental theatre, and ne’er a dull moment there is. Read the rest…
South Solitary trailer and interview with writer-director Shirley Barrett
South Solitary is a tiny, remote island in the Southern Ocean pounded by the Roaring Forties, with a lighthouse plonked on its clifftops for the benefit of occasional sea traffic. It’s 1928. The population of the island has recently declined from 7 to 6, with the death of the head lighthouse keeper. Enter the deceased’s irascible and pedantic replacement, George Wadsworth (Barry Otto) and his niece, Meredith (Miranda Otto).
Meredith is an overgrown Orphan Annie; her disagreeable uncle is the only family she has – the only anyone she has, actually, after losing her fiancee in WW1. Rather Dickensian setup, if she wasn’t in her 30s. Thing is, she has a bright, bubbly personality and is physically attractive. It doesn’t make sense that she’s tagging along with her uncle to a lonely post on a godforsaken rock in the middle of the scowling sea.
The plausibility issues do not stop there. Read the rest…
Is it devaluing this movie to call it a dark-hued off-beat rom-com, I asked myself as I sat down and prepared to bang out this quick review. I decided I didn’t care enough to ponder the question at any length. And I mean any length. So let’s start again…
Ahem…
Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is a 40ish misfit who has a few balloons floating loose in the cranial sky. At least he did have – he’s recovering from a nervous breakdown, which necessitated his institutionalization. Rog has left his home and carpenting job in New York to look after his older and more successful bro’s home in L.A. while he and his family are away on holidays in Vietnam. The house-sitting opportunity has come at a good time. Greenberg is at a crossroads in his life, and is taking time out to ‘do nothing’ and hopefully find some direction. (Sound familiar?) Read the rest…
