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 [...]
I went to both these screenings with high expectations, roundly dashed: Jay Parini’s novelization of Tolstoy’s weird last days, The Last Station, was favourably reviewed and I always regretted not reading it. But the film of the same name, directed by Michael Hoffman, is a sanitized, over-earnest failure. Fine acting by Christopher Plummer, Helen Mirren [...]
Two films of the ‘absurd and existential’ variety, both of which could easily have been classified as science fiction: Sophie Barthes’s Cold Souls offers the absurdist conceit of an actor (Paul Giamatti brilliantly playing himself), overburdened by his on-stage character, temporarily storing his soul in a locker and then struggling to get it back. The script [...]
Two vastly different ‘snitch’ films: Even when his films miss the mark, as half of them seem to, Steven Soderbergh never fails to sizzle. The Informant takes what is apparently a true story of a 1990s whistleblower in a chemical corporation, and hams it up almost outrageously with a restless plot and excellent acting from Matt [...]
The Nuclear Threat Initiative, that valuable organization striving to reduce the dangers of nuclear war, has made a doco, Nuclear Tipping Point, covering four pollies, Kissinger, Bill Perry, George Shultz and Sam Nunn, who have publicly appealed for ridding the world of nukes. Given the prior involvement of most of the four in cooking up the Cold [...]