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I Am Love centers on wealthy Italian family, the Recchis, and especially on wife Emma (played by Tilda Swinton). Born in Russia, she gave up her identity by marrying into the Recchi family. However, once she discovers her daughter’s break from family’s expectations, it inspires her to escape also. Her pursuit of freedom unfortunately has its most devastating effect on the person you believe she most loves – her son Edoardo (played by Flavio Parenti).

Motives of the characters are not convincingly played out and it is hard to feel sorry for Emma and to believe she couldn’t ‘find herself’ in a way less damaging to her family. Her husband is not cruel, in fact in a key moment of the film he is overwhelmingly compassionate, only to reject her after she first rebuffs him with the ultimate marital insult – a declaration of love for someone else. This new relationship feels bound to fail and even an extended and erotically filmed sex scene cannot convince you that love truly exist in this form of escape.  Read the rest of this entry »

Fans of the modern vampire craze may find Cronos a little hard to swallow. There’s not an awful lot of bloodletting going on, and the action is almost not existent. Cronos you see isn’t some flight of fancy – well, it is in it’s own way – but rather an old school look at some eternal questions.

The film starts off with a voiced over introduction where we learn about an old alchemist who in 1535 invents a small device that gives him eternal life. Sadly – at least for the old alchemist – some 400 years later he’s killed by a collapsing building and the unfortunate piercing of this heart.

An old antiques dealer buys his estate seeing as there is no one left to inherit in, and accidentally finds the alchemist’s golden scarab like device that granted him the dream of (almost) eternal life and whilst fiddling with it accidentally activates it, causing the device to pierce his skin and thus giving him eternal life.  Read the rest of this entry »

In the 1980′s writer Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy) teamed up with Mark Carwardine and together they embarked on a groundbreaking expedition, travelling the world in search of the most endangered animals. Twenty years later comedian and Twitter fanatic Stephen Fry returns with Mark to see if the same species still exist. Their journey, following in Admas’ footsteps, uncover some of the weirdest, most remarkable and most endangered creatures on earth.

Mark is the essential member of the team, having made the original journey with the late Douglas Adams, and being a serious and knowledgeable environmentalist as well as a superb animal photographer. Stephen Fry on the other hand, other that being connected through being a friend of Adams’ is really only there for the pulling effect of star power, and rick to try and get more people to watch the series.  Read the rest of this entry »

Soul Kitchen is a quirky little German Drama/Comedy about Zino, a man who is passionate about food, but grounded in the reality of what his customers want. The one thing he’s not grounded in is the reality of what his girlfriend wants.

It’s a story that twists and turns, as does Zino’s luck.

When his girlfriend goes to China for a career move, she wants Zino to follow, but problems at his restaurant see him hanging back. Problems are generally easily solved, but seem to always create new ones, as does Zion’s love for his family, especially his jailbird brother.

Not a laugh out loud comedy, Soul Kitchen will warm your heart, makes you mad and chuckle along with the story as it weaves it’s merry way through Zino’s incomprehensible life.  Read the rest of this entry »

One word sums up Doph Lundgren’s Command Performance: epic. But it’s not epic in the way that Inception was epic, more in a cheesy 80′s action flick kind of a way. When I tell you that not only is Doph the star, but he’s also the writer and director you’re either going to groan or smile. This is a film for the smilers.

The plot is basic and could have been stolen from any 80′s action flick; armed terrorists storm a concert held in honor of Russian President Alexander Petrov and his two daughters. The terrorists think they’ve thought of everything, but they didn’t take into account Joe the Drummer (Doph).

As with any 80′s action flick Command Performance is a series of action scenes loosely connected by a flimsy story-line – this time set entirely in Russia – that exists only for one reason, to increase the body count until there’s only the main good guy and the main bad guy – then you have the standard one on one boss fight with each guy withstanding an inhuman amount of punishment before the good guy beats the bad guy.  Read the rest of this entry »

Hammond was made for a show like this, he ooze boyish charm as he gets excited about the geeky science of stuff that the human eye can’t see. It’s an infectious charm that gets the viewer equally excited and ultimately interested in the microscopic world around them.

The DVD is split into three chapters, each using state of the art imaging to make the invisible visible.

Naturally the first episode presented by the youngest (and fastest) Top Gear presenter it titled Speed Limits and utilizes high speed cameras to capture what the human eye can’t possible process including shock-waves sent rippling through the air as a by product of an explosion.

Episode two – Out of Sight – takes a look at the colour spectrum and how little of it our eyes can see. We take a look at electro-magnetic fields, X-ray imaging as well as the hidden patterns on common flowers that direct bees to the pollen.  Read the rest of this entry »

The original Wall Street not only gave Michael Douglas an Academy Award, but also garnered a cult following. I’m not sure why, because I’ve never seen the film. It was supposed to be a hard hitting film that attacked the money obsessed world of New York stock-exchange, but in reality the films star character Gordon Gekko became a hero to many.

It seems like Oliver Stone missed the mark with the film, even if it was a success.

A few years have gone by now and Stone really hasn’t been making much of himself, so it only makes sense for him to return to one of his better known films, and continue the story, especially in the current financial situation. It would be the prefect time to get his message right.

So the film opens with a long scene of a man being released from prison, but it’s shot in was as to not let you see who the person is. It’s as if Stone really believes he can create some high tension suspense, when every man and hiss dog already knows that its Gordon Gekko. Then, once this lengthy scene is complete, we get the ’8 years later’ treatment, negating the need to such a introductory shot. The fact that Gekko got released from prison at some stage would have been a given and if necessary, could have been weaved a lot more convincingly into the plot rather than being given it’s own scene.  Read the rest of this entry »

Neil Marshall’s quasi historical epic Centurion is more of a ‘what could have happened’ sandwiched between a very thin layer of historical facts and is based around the popular rumour surrounding the disappearance of Rome’s most feared 9th Legion. The popular version is that the 9th, at the time numbering some 4,000 men, was sent to vanquish the Picts of what is now known as Scotland, and were never seen or heard of again.

Marshall weaves an epic tale of politics, betrayal, revenge and more politics.

Quintus is a Roman Centurion and only survivor of a Roman outpost attacked by the Picts, managing to escape captivity, and in the process of being hunted down, is rescued by the legendary 9th Legion as they march to do battle with the Pict. The 9th’s General Virilus recognises Quintus history – which I’m not going into here – and because he has no other real option, instantly conscripts him into the 9th.  Read the rest of this entry »

Having not read John Marsden’s 1993 novel, Tomorrow, When The War Began I had nothing but the trailer to whet my appetite for this film, and the trailer was very reminiscent of the 1984 film Red Dawn, one of my favourite film of that year. So it was with some degree of anticipation that I slipped the BluRay into my PS3 and sat back to enjoy what I was thinking would be a modern day Australian Red Dawn.

Of course, in the same way that Red Dawn was nothing like Kevin Reynolds original script Ten Soldiers, so Tomorrow was nothing like Red Dawn. Sure there were similarities between the two, but rather than tell the whole story, Tomorrow seems content to set up the beginning of a great yarn. It is of course based on the first book of seven, so hopefully we’ll be seeing the rest of the series over the next few years.

Because this tale of a group of high school students who decide to go bush for a week, only to return to find out that their parents are missing and the town has been taken over by an invading force is only the set up for the series, it doesn’t contain as much action as I had been expecting. It’s a story more about the motley group of high school students who find themselves fighting a guerrilla war, than the war itself.  Read the rest of this entry »

Whilst on his daily task of collecting bottle tops at the beach, a seemingly insignificant boy finds an enormous, weird and totally lost creature. Even stranger than finding this miscellaneous abnormality is the fact that no one else on the beach seem to notice it. Or is it that they just don’t want to notice it?

The boy on figuring that no one wants this lost thing, decides to take it home, but his parents aren’t happy. It seems that no one wants to have anything to do with the boy’s new friend, so they set out on a short journey to find a place where the lost things belong.

And short it is, especially when you’re sitting down expecting a feature length animated tale only to discover that this short little gem clocks in at just under 20 minutes.

But it’s shortness is probably a good thing because it leaves you wanting for more rather than wondering when it will end.  Read the rest of this entry »