The star of South Solitary, an Australian film by director Shirley Barrett that zapped across our cinema screens for scant weeks, is its setting, a lighthouse on a bleak, remote island. Cinematographer Anna Howard captures the austere scenery and interior of the evocative lighthouse with great aplomb; it helped that I’d recently seen one of the [...]
Oh to live in New York and see movies like Away We Go, directed by young Sam Mendesand powered by a Dave Eggers/Vendela Vida script, as they are released, in the glory of a cinema! Away We Go came out in 2009 but never made it into Australian multiplexes; only now, a year later, was [...]
Ricky Gervais is a hero to me, his brand of savage, ironic humour a lifeline to someone who rarely finds funny what others do. So I watched The Invention of Lying (Gervais co-wrote, co-directed and starred) as soon as it came to Australia on DVD (its cinema season was an eyeblink). Alas, this is a [...]
I didn’t borrow Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus because of its now universal tagline, ‘Heath Ledger’s last film,’ but because of some intriguing reviews read in retrospect. And I was in the mood for something visually arresting. Imaginarium proved to be wonderful eye candy, a lovely fable plot, and some fine ensemble acting. I [...]
My current hunger for sci-fi, in all its forms, led me to last year’s Surrogates. Casting Bruce Willis as lead automatically indicates a film that is less sci-fi and more mindless thriller, but, to his credit, in Surrogates he plays a restrained role. The plotline is pure Philip K. Dick (the second time I’ve written [...]
Movies based on comic books are almost always bad, ruined by sappiness beyond even what the original comic stretched to. Nonetheless I’m a sucker to try the ones I recall from a childhood spent nose in comic. Iron Man was in my second tier of action heroes, never original enough to really excite me but [...]
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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