The other lesson that we can learn from the cinema is that any given US governmental body has a couple of corrupt bastards in it who bend the innocents to their whims. Naturally, only one man can right this wrong!
Paul Greengrass’s The Bourne Ultimatum never lets up. With no downtime, the ending sneaks up on you and bites your face off. Despite its lack of cinematic structure for comfort, this is still an exciting film. I’ve never held much stock in Matt Damon, but he’s more accomplished than I’ve given him credit for.
From all that I know and have seen on England in the eighties, I’m incredibly surprised that anyone lived to write or make films about it. This Is England is a movie about when lighthearted, victimless destruction takes a turn toward the dark heart of nationalism.
Fear not, gentle cinema goers! Paul Verhoeven has returned to Holland, and this is his first Dutch film since 1983. While almost all European international releases deal with the past, can one really blame the continent for having such a rich and terrible history? I’m not convinced that I’d seen a Dutch film before this one, and I’ve certainly never examined this part of Euro history: Holland’s occupation by Germany.
Black Book not only realises an infrequently examined aspect of European history, it does so in a distinctly unsanitary fashion. It feels like several movies all at once, but this makes it more real; in Black Book, one can see many things that they are unlikely ever to see elsewhere.
I’ve seen a lot of “educational” movies in the last couple of weeks. What all movies tell us is that it takes only one man to bring down a corrupt system. Wise men know that this man is John McClane, although some might argue that his name is John Rambo (those same people, I would argue, have faces paralysed by years of steroid abuse).
I don’t feel like I do a lot of action movies; they have to have something going for them. If every action movie starred Bruce Willis, maybe that would change. I felt pumped for Die Hard 4.0 (yeah, its working title was retained for Australia). My pumpedness was paid well in explosions, gunfire, crashing people into walls, and crashing people into walls which then proceed to explode. This movie has everything.
Well, actually, this is a remake of a 2001 German movie. Except it’s not a remake so much as it is “based on the original screenplay Mostly Martha by Sandra Nettelbeck”, which strikes me as an odd credit. At any rate, No Reservations is the brand of movie that, if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve seen the whole movie.
This isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, because the main cast is talented: the incredibly beautiful Catherine Zeta-Jones, charismatic Aaron Eckhart and thoroughly unannoying child actress Abigail Breslin raise the movie above being too shockingly twee. It strikes an okay balance, and makes for the perfect “Liz Movie”. (The definition of a Liz Movie is the sort of movie that I would only see with my friend Liz, and under no other circumstances).
Today I gave a presentation on Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. I present it to you below, with the ad-libs (for which many will hate me) presented in bold. The ensuing discussion actually led to something pretty interesting that I might be inspired to write later, about adaptation.
Discuss: The Magic of Film Undoes the Magic of Reading; or The Magic of Film Outdoes the Magic of Reading.
It’s a biopic that doesn’t chart a young genius’ stratospheric rise and meteoric downfall at the hands of drugs! I’m in! Amazing Grace is a fairly interesting film, but it’s yet another case of me already knowing that slavery is wrong: I don’t exactly need Horatio Hornblower to tell me as much.
Despite its lack of mainstream appeal, Amazing Grace has a great cast, to the point that it could have been called “Michael Apted Allstars”. Alas, it was not, but this woeful lack of suitable titling fails to detract from the finished product.
Nicolas Cage! What are you doing to me, man! On a morning that I felt all warm and fuzzy towards you thanks to Adaptation, I found out that you made Next:
Clearly, Jessica Biel is Hollywood’s new love interest … but who could love Nicolas Cage with that hair? This is a Phillip K. Dick vehicle, but we all know that guarantees nothing. For every Blade Runner there are a million Paychecks. For every A Scanner Darkly there’s a Total Recall (and how ambiguous is this statement?).
Much as I’ve grown to love Julianne Moore, she’s no guarantee of a quality movie. I mean, sure, she’s great and all … but Julianne Moore versus stupid hair Nicolas Cage? I’m not exactly in a hurry for that. No wonder there was a five month delay between the US and here.
On the other hand, Superbad, despite its tempting name, looks like it could be a fantastic comedic tour de force, even though it’s a teen sex comedy. Check out the “R Rated” trailer, which is totally not safe for work (but who uses YouTube at work? For shame):
I mean, come on! McLovin! Having a gun is like having two cocks … if one of your cocks could kill someone! So yeah, I don’t need to identify with the contents of a movie to enjoy it … unless you’re the pathetic friend of a Camero that creepily tries to get you to copulate with pretty girls on top of it. (That’s right, Michael Bay! You will never cease tasting my wrath!)
I can’t gauge whether Fracture is supposed to be big time or a backburner movie. The last backburner I saw, Breach, turned out very well. Fracture is less successful, if only for the fact that I spent a lot of my time watching it thinking about technique. This is a sign that you have rather too many aerial shots in your movie.
I saw Order of the Phoenix again last weekend and it led to an interesting discussion with my friend Ajay. He said that he was not sure of Michael Gambon’s performance as Dumbledore, because he seemed too “real”. Dumbledore, in Ajay’s mind, is supposed to be all powerful and somehow above everyone else.
I don’t quite agree. In fact, one might say that I entirely disagree and I like Gambon’s take on a character who, at least in the first three books (I didn’t get to re-read Goblet, Phoenix and Half-Blood before Deathly Hallows), had a fairly standard “walk on exposition” role.
Spoilers on the Inside – but really, if you care for Harry Potter and don’t know what happens yet … I posit that you don’t really care for Harry Potter.
