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The Bourne Legacy – Tony Gilroy Keep taking the little blue, and green pills

Tweet      The Bourne Legacy – Tony Gilroy Fast, furious and slick. Gilroy’s extends the Bourne franchise neatly with enough narrative linkage to the absent Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) and the ending of The Bourne Ultimatum to carry credibility and engage us in the exploits of Aaron Cross (Jeremy Renner) number 5 operative in […]

Prometheus – Ridley Scott – Breach of Prometh

Tweet      Prometheus – Ridley Scott When did the octopus first become the template for space-monsters? I get why: they carry all the repulsiveness of the snake – multiplied by 8; and they are very what we might call grapho-genic. Wave the arms about a lot and our imagination comfortably believes in flying octopi […]

Apocalypse – When self-destructive personalities come into their own

Tweet  Melancholia – Lars Von Trier Bookend Malik’s Tree of Life with Melancholia and you’ve got the world covered: from beginning to end. Malik’s conception makes more sense, for having brilliantly conjured a representation of the creation of the world, then his narrative has somewhere to go. Von Trier’s film if not Maliks’ graphic equal, is none the less […]

Super 8 – ET with attitude and the dogs leg it

Tweet  Super 8 – J.J.Abrams  A Starbucks movie: all the ingredients; efficiently served hot; looks good; tastes ok in an anonymous kind of way; guaranteed quality; and absolutely predictable – it just tastes nothing like real coffee. Sacrilegious though it may be: is Spielberg a good enough director to warrant this kind of derivative homage? Ok […]

Elegaic, thoughtful, moving and provoking

Tweet Never Let Me Go – Mark Romanek Ilie Nastase, after he had been overwhelmed by an impossibly young Bjorn Borg (20) in the 1976 Wimbledon final, was asked why he had lost. Ruefully Nastase replied, “We’re all playing tennis out there – I don’t know what he’s playing.” Carey Mulligan’s fellow actors could be […]

Sci-Fa Not Sci-Fi: Science farce not science fiction

Tweet Skyline – Colin and Greg Stausse Sci-Fa not Sci-Fi: science farce not science fiction. Final score: Latex 10 – Literacy 0. Graphic designers Colin and Greg Strausse (Avatar, Iron Man2, 2012 etc) should have stuck to their day job. As directors, well where should one start? Everything in this movie is derivative and deeply […]

Avatar – Bambification of Aboriginal narrative

TweetFilm, performance, screenplay, art Technical, Effects, Art direction Avatar – James Cameron Avatar sucks: the bambification of an aboriginal narrative. A sentimentalised pastiche of a Native American stereotype. The Na’vi sound like Hollywindians and worship an Earth-mother who looks like a fibre-optic willow tree spiritually reified by tinsellated dandelion-seed-like Christmas tree baubles that slo-mo around […]

Dawn of the forlorn Prawn

Tweet District 9 – Neill Blomkamp The science is risible: the fiction banal. District 9 is a good B movie with pretensions; and like all good B movies, it rattles along at a pace fast enough for you to almost forgive the cheap n’ cheerful costumes, make-up, special effects and frequently clunky dialogue. A docu-drama, […]

The Day The Earth Stood Still – you say Klaatu, I say Keanu, let’s call the whole thing off

Tweet The Day The Earth Stood Still – Scott Derrickson Keanu Reeves is an Alien: it’s not often you get to write a sentence with three different meanings that is true whichever of them you apply. As a description of Keanu’s role in this re-make of the 50’s Sci-Fi classic it is factually true; as […]

The Island – give the brain cells a night off – pure Hollywood

Tweet The Island – Director Michael Bay Pure Hollywood. With all that means. Good and bad. A good idea, pared down to the bare essentials; razor-sharp editing, some of the best choreographed action sequences to date; and good performances. May knows how to make a satisfying commercial product. Thankfully this is more The Rock than […]