Film Guide

I generally don’t do period dramas, but I do like a little John Cusack in my life, and a period drama that promises horror scenes and violence does sound rather intriguing. The Raven brings the macabre tales of Edgar Allan Poe to life with a blood spattering vision that is part Saw and part Sherlock Holmes. This dark and brooding thriller aims to suggest a different take on the final days of Poe’s short and alcoholic life, by creating a serial killer who perpetrates horrific murders inspired by Poe’s stories.

The connection between the murders and Poe’s writing is first noticed by a Baltimore Police Detective who at first brings Poe in a for questioning, but later has him on his tam helping to track the killer from one gristly murder to the next.

Things escalate when the killer kidnaps Poe’s love interest, making the game of cat and mouse a rather personal vendetta for Poe.

Cusack brings a brooding depressed Poe to life, with a little humour and a large dose of self pity along with the baggage of inner demons. Brendon Gleeson adds interest with the role of Poe’s love interest’s father, who naturally hates Poe. The love interest in question is played by Alice Eve who for the most part is nothing more than eye candy, till she gets to take a turn at being Ryan Reynolds character Paul Conroy for a spell, where she manages to achieve more than Reynolds did, to some degree.  Read the rest of this entry »

The Shadow Line kicks off with the discovery of Harvey Wratten’s blood soaked body in the back seat of a car on a dark abandoned lot. Of the two cops who find it, one tries to tell the other it’s a robbery gone wrong. The other cop however, is closer to the truth in arguing that it’s a gangland execution.

What ever it is, we’re not going to find out for another seven hours. And to be honest, after the first hour, I’m not sure I can be bothered with watching another six episodes. The Shadow Line just hasn’t grabbed me.

Fortunately I decided to stick with it, and somewhere during the second episode, Hugo Blick’s dark, twisted drama grabs me and won’t let go. Written, produced and directed by Hugo, The Shadow Line starts off as a simple police drama, with a stella cast, but turns into a tour-de-force of British TV drama with many threads of different stories intersecting and combining to cumulate in one of the most unexpected endings you experience in any TV drama.

The murder at the beginning turns out to be a lot bigger than you think, and opens up a hornets nest of trouble, and introduces a variety of key players, each of whom seem to have their own interests in how things turn out.

Good cop with a shadowy past, DCI Jonah Gabriel (Chiwetel Ejiofor) seems to only want to uncover the truth, the dead mans business associate Joseph Bede (Christopher Eccleston) only wants to finish the deal and get out of the business, whilst the dead man’s psychotic nephew Jay Wratten (Rafe Spall) wants amongst other things, revenge. And then there is the puppet master, known as Gatehouse (Stephen Rea) who just seems to like being in control.  Read the rest of this entry »

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American underdog sports movies are far from a new concept, but rarely does one come together as well as Bennett Miller’s MONEYBALL. It’s something of a hard sell, given that the film more concerned with statistics and percentages than the game of baseball itself, yet writers Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin craft a surprisingly compelling story, and Miller’s understated, almost old-fashioned direction allows the beauty of the story to play out naturally, despite a slightly overlong runtime.

As previously mentioned, MONEYBALL is more of a business film than a sports film, telling the story of the under-funded Oakland Athletics’ 2002 Major League season, a season where general manager Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) and freshly graduated economics major Peter Brand (Jonah Hill) shook the game’s backroom strategy to the foundations. Brand’s radical approach (selecting a team based on statistics rather than individual performance) isn’t exactly the most cinematic of concepts, yet Zaillian’s excellent story construction coupled with the wonderful dialogue from Sorkin simplifies what could be a densely intimidating and complex subject, with breezy, relatable, and very entertaining results. Much like Sorkin’s Oscar-winning THE SOCIAL NETWORK screenplay, MONEYBALL uses the real-life events as a frame to hang much grander ideas on, and even for viewers unfamiliar or uninterested in the sport, there is much here to enjoy. Read the rest of this entry »

According to the cover, The Descendants is about a guy called Matt King (George Clooney) who is “an indifferent husband and father of two girls, who is forced to re-examine his past and embrace his future when his wife suffers a boating accident off of Waikiki”.

The problem is, for all his muttering, despondent and basically irritating behaviour, Clooney’s character never changes his outlook on life. He never grows any balls, he never even comes close to understanding why his wife and children were becoming increasingly distant. He basically plays a rich white dude with his head stuck up his arse, going through an emotional moment in his life.

As far as entertainment value goes, there is zero. The one character who might have offered some comedic relief, King’s elder daughter’s stoner boyfriend ends up being more of a distraction than the bikini wearing culture of the islands, and only manages to reinforce our idea that King doesn’t have a clue.  Read the rest of this entry »

There is one theme I will never tire with, Cold War Spy Sagas. In terms of classics you cant really go past Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, a film based on British novelist John le Carrie’s book of the same title. Arguably the best Spy novelist of our time, Le Carrie takes us on a journey of intrigue, misdirection, madness and misplaced loyalties. It’s a tale that really lifts the veil of a highly confident and organised intelligence service and exposes the frailties of a group of educated men and women who struggle with the transition from a traditional war front to one full of ambiguity and self doubt.

This is no James Bond, and this is a good thing. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy is a movie about real cold war espionage and the first generation of intelligence officials who, amongst their broken lives and personal struggles, fought an ambiguous game of cat and mouse with their Russian counterparts. The beauty of this story is its misleading storyline. Much like the misinformation these spies were dealing with, the viewer is often left questioning their own assumptions of who is the mole.

The cast is a veritable list of hard hitting British A Listers. The main character of George Smiley, played by the incredible Gary Oldman, is a reserved intelligence official who is part of the small group of leaders nick named the circus. Smiley is faced with the difficult proposition that the circus has been infiltrated with a Russian double agent. His task is to untangle the mess and discover who amongst his close friends is the culprit.

Supporting Oldman in this intriguing tale is Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds, John Hurt, Toby Jones, Mark Strong… The list literally goes on with each portraying their respective parts as classic 1970′s British spies with great precision. This tale is often less about the world of spying and more about the changing culture of the 1970′s with each personal story being deeply exposed with the incredible craft work of each of these talented actors. Read the rest of this entry »

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I don’t like Ray Liotta but I thought I did like Channing Tatum, but on reflection, and a quick look though his previous films I may have mistaken him for someone else. Of course the fact that he’s sporting a try hard stache should have set warning bells ringing in my head.

What can I say, you live and you (hopefully) learn.

Rule #1: Stay away from Ray Liotta.

Rule #2: Stay away from men who can’t grow a real stache.

So by now you should have a clear picture of what I thought of Son Of No One without me actually saying anything about the film. Read on if you want to, but I won’t be offended if you got watch this amazing claymation cat video remake of The Raid. Really, I won’t.

Son Of No One follows the seemingly downhill career of young cop Jonathan ‘Milk’ White, who gets reassigned to the working class neighborhood he grew up in. Just why he was reassigned if never explained. Through a series of flash backs we see that he had some involvement in a crime that took place when he was a kid growing up, but it’s remained an unsolved case. Just how much of an involvement Milk has in the crime is revealed over the course of the film until the past catches up to the present.  Read the rest of this entry »

I’m ecstatic, gutted and elated from this movie that played me like a banjo, plucking heart strings at will.

This for me is the family movie of the year and you will not regret watching it. While the movie’s key actors and accents give you a sense you’re in country America, the real story eminated from Plymouth, England where the tale of Benjamin Mee’s family buying and renovating the Dartmoor Zoo became a Guardian newspaper story in 2007. You can read the real background story here. The onscreen version of ‘Rosemoor Zoo’ reads differently to the script but with its own drama helps you understand where the motivation for the movie first began. I think Benjamin Mee’s own book will be on a few shopping lists in the coming weeks.

Now let’s step into the movie and Benjamin Mee’s (Matt Damon) shoes as Writer and Director, Cameron Crowe introduces you to the single dad raising the precocious 7yo Rosie (Maggie Elizabeth Jones) and 14yo Dylan (Colin Ford), a simmering young man asking ‘Why?’ He has good reason. The Mother they adored has died six months earlier. Their adventurer and writer Dad has hit the writers block equivalent of stalling the engine on life and there is a month’s worth of lasagne in the fridge from the do-gooders who simply don’t get it.

Matt Damon’s character shows a good man who wants to get a fresh start away from the coffee shops of the village life that remind him of his wife. He wants to remember and forget and thats about the size of it. After looking for a new home he stumbles across a complicated purchase that sees him taking on responisbility for a 33 acre zoo with eight staff and numerous species of animals. To make a profit he has to open in time for the holiday season. But that isn’t going to happen until he learns to jump through some new hoops to meet the animal welfare inspector’s electric rule.

Scarlett Johansson steps on the scene as Kelly Foster the Zoo Keeper. Untrained but passionate she leads the remnant of staff to rally behind Mee in his bid to make deadlines, overcome escaped animals and pick up by holding the hand of a man needing direction. Its a great script that gives enough of a romance edge to keep the story flowing while paying respect to a beautiful marriage and a family missing a key part of the jigsaw puzzle they once saw as a picture complete.

Being a Dad is the most rewarding role on the planet but lets not pretend being a father is easy. Its hard work with sometimes unseen results. Many times I don’t get it right and lets be honest the landscape for fatherhood has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. When I grew up there was one or two TV channels to review and filter and now we want to teach our kids about life before its delivered wrapped in a browser and called ‘online’. Some things we teach our kids through values but there are some lessons that come through experience. Losng a loved one and living a marriage are two of those examples. While Benjamin Mee has to find his own way one of the most engaging, heart wrenching scenes is when Father and Son come to grips with hurt and honesty and let it out. The clean slate is a platform for rebuilding and the story has a sense of rebirth from this point. Read the rest of this entry »

This was a movie we should have seen released in New Zealand a lot earlier. It wasn’t that long ago that the acronym GFC was sitting alone on the shelf without meaning. Then the Global Financial Crisis hit and banks paying out executives as the ship went down became the daily headline. Suddenly GFC had found life purpose and we wondered what would happen to the family mortgage. What I don’t understand is how a movie this good with award nominations and high screen ratings gets released nearly nine months after the US launch.

The work of writer and director J. C. Chandor has class written all over it. While the script is well paced to provide the tension and drama suited to a screen filled with ‘suits’, the depth of on screen talent is superb. While cast members like Simon Baker, Zachary Quinto and Demi Moore dance well together I love the return of Paul Bettany’s sardonic wit as we first experienced it in Knight’s Tale.

Our story joins the trading floor of a large Manhattan based institution on the day that two thirds of the floor will lose their positions in a cost-cutting exercise. While the young execs run for cover the floor’s head of risk management works on a problem he sees looming. A drop of Stanley Tucci never goes amiss and his role provides the key to the jigsaw puzzle. The surprise of the day is when Tucci’s character Eric Dale is lined up and led off the premises with other staff. No questions, no right of reply and if you contest the decision the chances are you will lose the last drop of benefits the company can offer. So out the door Eric goes only at the last minute to pass a USB drive of his project into the hands of young trader Peter Sullivan. It’s Quinto’s character Peter who then turns the key and finds the mounting disaster facing the trading floor.  Read the rest of this entry »