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Trance – Who’s Who and What’s What Mind games with Danny Boyle

Tweet    Trance – Danny Boyle Not all banknotes can be forgeries. A forgery can only be passed off as real against the background of a viable currency which requires that most notes in circulation are genuine. Much the same logical limitation applies to the central dramatic device that lies at the heart of the […]

To Rome With Love – Woody Allen

Tweet      To Rome With L0ve – Woody Allen Domestic disagreement on this one: my wife, who liked Midnight In Paris much more than I did was lukewarm about Woody Allen’s latest comedy of manners, mores and the absurdity of love and life. I am the opposite. To Rome With Love for me is […]

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 […]

Carnage: Roman Polanski – comedy of bourgeois manners and sensibilities

Tweet   Carnage – Roman Polanski Why? – must be the first question that comes to mind when adapting a work from another medium to film. The most obvious answer is the commercial hedge it represents to take a work with a proven track record of success. French dramatist Yasmina Reza’s play Le Dieu du Carnage was […]

Hugo (3D) – Scorcese’s dazzling FOF (Front Of Frame) technical tour de force

Tweet         Technical        Entertainment Hugo (3D) – Martin Scorcese A technical tour de force. It is fascinating to see major Directors of regular 2D films grappling with the possibilities and limitations of 3D stereoscopic filming. Fast on the heels of Spielberg’s performance capture 3D Tin Tin we have Scorcese taking a radically […]

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 […]

Sex And The Single (English)man – Fear And Loving in Greece

Tweet    The Inbetweeners – Ben Palmer Tragedy takes many forms but there can few things more acutely tragic than the sight of four basically decent English lads adrift on a sea of hormones, desperately trying to get laid.  The odds they face are truly frightening: their chronological equals of the fairer sex are light-years […]

Conflict: between a part as written and a part as played. Hathaway 1 – Nicholls 0

Tweet    One Day – Lone Scherfig Da-Da-Di-Da; Da-Da-Da-Di – Rachel Portman’s musical signature to this movie is so evocatively Lawrentian and infuriatingly unforgettable that you expect Anne Hathaway’s Emma to emerge round a corner on a camel rather than her rickety, baseketted ladies bike. This theme regularly surges in and out like the tide […]

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 […]

Larry Crowne – Rom-Com with too little ROM and not enough COM

Tweet    Larry Crowne – Tom Hanks For my money Julia Roberts is the best romantic comedy actress working today. Unfortunately this can be a 2-edged sword as she can flatter to deceive by adding a touch of class to relatively modest material and make it play.  She rarely gets the quality of writing in […]