Film Shapes

Here's an innocuous, simple tale of absent fathers and alienation from the Shaky Isles. Nell Fisher plays Mildred, a young clever clogs who is suddenly motherless for a time. From the other side of the world comes the father she's never met, Strawn Wise (Elijah Wood). Things are frosty for a while until he agrees to go camping with her to find the mysterious, and probably bollocks, Canterbury Panther. Video evidence of the big cat is worth $50,000 NZD, which Mildred and her mum could dearly use, because of handy plot contrivances. The main draw of this film (for adults, at least) is the wonderful NZ scenery. The mountains and lakes, shot by cinematographer Daniel Katz, look fantastic. But is this enough to sustain a feelgood family comedy/drama? Well, it depends who you speak to, but for me, the answer is no. Wood is charming as the comically unsure dad, though it's still very hard to see past his Frodo face, especially as, once you mentally exchange the panther for a certa...

The old Cygnet cinema in Como reopened, initially for the Strange Festival in July, but is now running films from a very wide range of genres and eras (as well as quality levels).  An exhaustive scan through the calendar turned up the seminal kids'  fantasy-comedy,  Gremlins  from 1984. Seeing an opportunity to show the kids some 80s style, we ventured south of the river for the fi r st time in ages. Now I hadn't seen this since about, hmmm, maybe 1986 (I'm pretty sure I was too young to see it at the cinema on release, so it must have been a TV screening). It's an oddity, in that it borders on horror, flirts with comedy and yet is, at its centre, a soppy heart-warmer from Spielberg's Amblin Entertainment, written by Chris Columbus. Apparently though, this film (as well as  Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom ) forced the MPAA to bring in the PG-13 rating, due to complaints about violent scenes. It starts with a slightly misplaced voice-over from an inventor/sa...

What an oddly brilliant film this is. The Northern Irish hip-hop trio, Kneecap, have a pretty unusual career. According to my brief research, they currently have two studio albums and one feature film to their credit. Not knowing about these lads, I was surprised to find out that they aren't actors - you wouldn't know by their performances, particularly Liam Ó Hannaidh (stage name, Mo Chara). He's a standout. The film gives us a presumably fudged version of the band's origins - Mo and best mate, Móglaí Bap (Naoise Ó Cairealláin) have known each other since they were choir boys but it didn't take long for them to embrace the Belfast rave and drug culture, as well as the strong anti-British, anti-RUC feeling among sections of the Catholic community in the north of Ireland. Northern Ireland! North of Ireland! Northern Ireland!  One night, Mo is arrested at a rave and refuses to speak English to the 'peelers' (police), so an interpreter is called in, high school...

Here's the seventh installment in the Alien franchise, if we can disregard the two Alien vs Predator efforts, and it fits in the timeline about 20 years after the original film (see graphic below). It kicks off with a hat tip to Ripley and co with a mission to recover some unmentionable. The film then jumps to a grimy mining colony called Jackson's Star, where we're introduced to Cailee Spaeny's Rain and David Jonsson's Andy. She's rebuffed by the authorities in her attempts to get off-planet, and so agrees to a hare-brained scheme to escape the working drudgery and likely death in the mines. Her accomplices, a similarly aged group of chancers, need Andy to get into an abandoned (hmmm) Weyland-Yutani spaceship that they've located floating above them. They need Andy because he's actually a company synthetic and should be compatible with the mystery ship's systems. Set-up over, time for the viscosity. This is director Fede Alvarez's fourth featu...

So, after years of teasing punters, Huge Action said yes to appearing alongside Deadpool, the result being this uneven, snarky bloodbath. It's very funny in parts, slow in others but it seems to have washed its face already, bringing in over $600 million worldwide to the evil Disney coffers. This is the third film in the Deadpool series, but the first since Marvel/Disney acquired FOX studios, a Hollywood business deal referred to way too often in this film - once or twice would be enough but I reckon most of the audience don't find these Pool asides as funny as the writers do. Speaking of writers, there's a veritable stable of them credited here - Ryan Reynolds himself; Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick from the first two Deadpool films; Zeb Wells; and director, Shawn Levy; not to mention the comic creators, Rob Liefeld and Fabian Nicieza. Many cooks, lots of broth. Plot-wise, there's a lot to get into here but I'm not sure that's really of concern - the 'sto...