Film Guide

The official website for Universal’s board-game based movie, BATTLESHIP, directed by Peter Berg has been launched and apparently it’s got a countdown clock that will reveal something Wednesday (US time?). It’ll probably be the film’s teaser trailer. I say apparently because the website requires you to download adobe flashplayer which apparently is not compatible with my operating system. Weird.

Neither the concept or the poster (above via comingsoon.net) have me excited about this film, so hopefully the trailer will be something worth watching.

Comic book movies are a dime a dozen these days, and as Chris Evans recently said, it’s good to have films focussing on an American view rather than a global view popular once again. Yes Chris, that’s all fine and dandy if you’re an American. Last time I checked however, most of the earth’s population isn’t American. What does this have to do with Captain America: The First Avenger you may well be asking? Well it helps to be a flag waving, history altering America if you want to really enjoy this film.

Or a fan of the comic books.

A friend who I took along to the media screening grew up with the comic books and according to him, the film was a pitch perfect adaptation. Film technology he said, has finally caught up with our imagination.  Read the rest of this entry »

My final film at this years New Zealand Film Festival was the restored classic Taxi Driver. It certainly was a popular pick, with the might Civic fairly packed for the screening.

Taxi Driver is a film that I’ve been meaning to get round to watching for some time, but never did, so it was an easy decision to jump at the chance to see it on the big screen.

For the most part however, Taxi Driver was a disappointment. Martin Scorsese who annoyed the crap out of me with Shutter Island used the same techniques that he would use many years later on Shutter Island in Taxi Driver, mainly the over dramatic music seemingly used to create a sense of drama in an otherwise uneventful script.

This is a tale of an unstable Vietnam war veteran whose inability to sleep at night gives him the impetus to become a nighttime taxi driver, a job that might suit his insomniac tendencies, but does nothing for his mental health. Spending the nights driving around a city that is flooded with what he sees as decadence and sleaze only adds fuel to his violent inner demons, who want nothing more that to be allowed to emerge pass a violent and bloody justice on the city.  Read the rest of this entry »

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It has to be said that Anton Chekhov’s The Duel was one of the weirdest films I saw at the New Zealand Film Festival, probably because it is a close adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s 1891 Russian novella, but filmed in English. The combination of the spoken English word, with the retention of Russian names, set in a seaside resort in the Caucasus and acted by English and Irish actors made for a bizarre and unsettling experience even before Chekov’s weird tale began to slowly dissolve my brain.

The film’s main character Laevsky is in a bit of a rut and finds himself in a bit of a predicament. He’s just received a letter informing him that the husband of the women he seduced and is currently living with, Nadya, has died, opening the way for marriage. The problem is he doesn’t think he loves this woman any more. In fact, he ays as much that he never loved her. So the possibility of marriage isn’t something he wants on the table.  Read the rest of this entry »

Snowtown is the most disturbing of the films I saw at the New Zealand Film Festival, and centers around the events of the infamous Snowtown murders in Australia in the 90′s. The film is gritty and raw, with the opening scenes showing a poor, rundown community where a disturbing form of vigilante justice is about to be born.

When the separated mother of teenage boys discovers that her ex has been taking naked picture of them, she finds a sympathetic ear in the charismatic John Bunting, who manages to work his way into the family and gets the community rallied around to help expel the father through increasingly morbid acts of vandalism.  Read the rest of this entry »

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Underage sex seemed to the the unintentional thread that connected most of the films I was able to catch at this years New Zealand Film Festival. The first of these films was a documentary: Sons of Perdition. Whilst the documentary didn’t really have anything to do with the aforementioned subject, you can’t really produce a documentary about the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints without at least referencing Warren Jeffs an what he was arrested for.

But Sons of Perdition isn’t so much about Jeffs or his extreme FLDS sect. It isn’t even about the polygamous community that he he created and still tightly controls, even from the confines of his prison cell. Though Jeffs and his strictly enforced ideals are responsible for the subject matter of this revealing documentary that takes a look at the seldom discussed products of a closed polygamous community, the teenage boys that either escape or are expelled for not following the rules (or just because a polygamous sect cannot exist with a surplus of eligible boys, soon to become men).  Read the rest of this entry »

There is one thing i do love about the New Zealand Film Festival.. You are always going to come out of it finding cinematic gems. Something Ventured was a documentary that could quite possibly have slotted into that category. Read the rest of this entry »

Mention the name Bobby Fischer to the general public today and you might be lucky to find someone who knows how significant this name is.

But mention this to a chess fan and immediately you enter a world of celebrity. Bobby Fischer is regarded by a lot of experts as the greatest chess player in the world.  His career resume is astonishing; Spotted as a legendary player at age 13 he went on to challenge the top United States players at 14  to end up the youngest grandmaster by 15.

Bobby Fischer Against the World is a documentary that traces the rise and rise and fall of Bobby Fischer. The story traces back to his earliest adventures with chess to his single minded fascination with the game which leads him to becoming a world champion in 1972.  Read the rest of this entry »