Several friends have been at me for ages to watch Last Ride, the road movie of a violent father fleeing across the vast expanse of Australia with his ten-year-old son, but somehow I’ve felt the need to be in a certain mood to finally rent the DVD. (Far better would have been to see it [...]
I’m in a backlash frame of mind, keen after focusing on the high and mighty to indulge in my great genre loves, crime and sci-fi. Luckily the science fiction scene keeps throwing up wonderments to latch onto. None speaks louder than Christopher Nolan’s over-the-top futuristic thriller Inception. What a brilliant concept, straight from the pen [...]
Predators opens with a rush: battle-hardened men and women plummeting towards ground, desperately opening parachutes, snatched from separate lives across the globe. The underlying sci-fi concept – of warriors teleported to become the sport on an alien game reserve – is as old (and, I must say, as satisfying) as sci-fi itself. I haven’t seen the [...]
One approaches franchise books and films gingerly: ‘massively popular’ often indeed means ‘crap’. But instant franchise books can signal an artistic creation that has seized the public imagination because it is brilliant, at least in some aspects. Take Harry Potter – it succeeds because it deserves to. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is another example. The [...]
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Two thirds of the way through The Concert, the exuberant romp by Romanian-born filmmaker Radu Mihaileanu set in Moscow and Paris, during a serious restaurant scene, I realized the film was just an exotic version of The Mighty Ducks. The Concert has the same ludicrous premise: a team of mismatched, completely ill-equipped ordinary folks aspires [...]
Michael Lewis’s The Blind Side thrilled me. All his books have. But the book is only partly a feel-good tale of a homeless black youth in Memphis being taken in by a Republican, rich white family and turned into a prospective American football star. Lewis also provides fascinating insights into the maths of football and [...]
Something had to give and it’s my love of film; this month’s visual menu is slim: Food, Inc. finally hits Aussie screens Fresh from its Oscar, The Secret in Their Eyes A comedy set in modern Russia, The Concert The DVD of Where the Wild Things Are Although I’m sick of vigilante flicks, hopefully Michael [...]
Two war movies in one month, what has come over me? Robert Connolly is an intriguing Australian filmmaker, tackling varied genres and styles. In Balibo he takes on a controversial dark event from the 70s, the murder of five journalists in East Timor at the start of the Indonesian invasion. Much of the never-ending furore over [...]
A mix of quirky and serious films to be seen on the big screen, plus some newies onto DVD: I’ve only read the second volume in Stieg Larsson’s trilogy but still want to see the Swedish filmic version of the first book, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo The trailer of Micmacs suggests this will [...]
Enjoyment comes in many forms: A week before his wedding, a bridegroom drives to Las Vegas with two mismatched buddies and an odd soon-to-be brother-in-law. The next morning, the groom is missing and the other three remember nothing. A recipe for a frat-boy comedy dud, surely? Yet the script of The Hangover, directed by Todd [...]