Film Shapes

A birthday treat. Lunch in Leederville with the good wife (not the bad one) and then a choc-bomb assisted screening of Ben Wheatley's  High-Rise . In the smallest cinema I've ever been in - screen 4 at the Luna Leederville. And it's quite a trip. I'm not a big fan of Wheatley, disliking  Down Terrace  and  Kill List  but on the basis of  High-Rise , I'll most likely check out his other work too. The story, based on the novel by J.G. Ballard, is nominally of class strata and ultimately class warfare, with Tom Hiddlestone pitching in as a kind of middle class cypher - to begin with. There are some potty scenes within the titular high-rise, including a kids' party that ends in the drowning of a dog (cardinal sin of film - killing a dog). It sets things up really well in the first hour - characters are introduced with little fuss and some aplomb (Luke Evans and Jeremy Irons among them). The sets (and the poster) are reminiscent of  A Clockwork Ora...

Belmont. Sunday morning. Long ticket queue. Even longer pocket-shafting snack bar queue (not required, thank you suckers). Bouncy castle for screaming kids in foyer. BUT $10 TICKETS!!! I'll suffer all that for a tenner, no mistake. To see Jason Bourne , the 4th film in the Matt Damon Bourne series. Let's gloss over the Bourne Legacy , just as director Paul Greengrass and the other writer, editor Christopher Rouse, did. Poor old, marginalised Jeremy Renner. He's got to be the richest "poor man's Matt Damon" going around. This 4th Bourne, coming nearly 10 years after Damon did one into a river, manages to track down our battered and bruising protagonist pretty easily. Lots of neat tech on display here. Damon himself looks grizzled and serious as ever. Cards on the table here. I'm a big fan of the Bourne films (again, leaving aside Legacy ) so I brought some positive baggage into the cinema, and I wasn't disappointed with Jason . It's excitin...

Hey you, don't watch that. Watch this! This is the heavy, heavy monster sound. The nutsiest sound around. It's Star Trek Beyoooooond ! Anybody else feel like getting up on a stage and dancing with some trumpets or whatever when they hear that title? Just me then. Still a good tune. So the film. Nothing new. Big ship gets decimated by some weeny bee ships. Nicely done but seen it before. Crew crash-land on a planet and are right up against it. Seen it. Meet a troubled individual who may just help them. Seen it. Bit of 'buddy buddy' stuff between captain and 1st officer. Seen it. Civilians running in peril on a big floating city. Seen it. The one barnstorming moment of using 'Sabotage' by the Beastie Boys when the swarm are all but about to buzzfuck the space station is rendered a bit twee by focusing on crew members toe-tapping and jiving along with it. Oh, and heard it. In the first reboot. [This kind of sequence was done with more panache ...

This was part of the Revelation Perth International Film Festival  and I caught it at the Luna Leederville last Saturday. It'd been quite a while since I'd been to that cinema but it hasn't changed a hell of a lot. Wide, fairly flat auditorium with a small screen and 'the best choc bombs in town' (with TM and thanks to Merv). Suburra was apparently the name for a suburb of ancient Rome, a crowded, red-light district. An apt name for this film as it throws together dirty politicians, junkies, mafiosi and even the papacy in a massive shit-fight. It's basically a rainy, modern-day Westeros with Sofia Coppola DJ-ing. The film places events around the time of the (fictional) Pope's resignation and one of many moments of turbulence in the Italian parliament (there's even a bunga-bunga episode that advances the plot). A waterfront land bill is moving ahead at the behest of 'the Southern families' and mafia money is greasing the political wheels...

So another cheap flick thanks to Reading cinemas in New Lynn. This one left me a little more satiated than the last. [Incidentally, I've since heard and read numerous scathing reviews of X-Men: Apocalypse. Some folk hated it. I felt more lethargy that hate]. The Nice Guys . Can't really suss out the title. In fact, it may be the worst thing about the film. I enjoyed this a lot. It put me in mind of a bunch of other films, such as The Big Lebowski , L.A. Confidential , even Chinatown a little but mostly Kiss Kiss Bang Bang , also by Shane Black. Actually, he's just gone and remade his earlier work, transplanting Crowe for Kilmer and Gozzle for Downey Jr. Remade 10 years later but RESET about 30 years earlier. Wuzzannhhh? Well, it's the same odd couple, buddy action comedy thingy but with a nice greasy spoon of 70's U.S. politics underwriting it all. It's set between the oil crises, birds are dying due to air pollution, hippies protest, killer bees appear i...

First film in a NZ cinema. Check. Good price at a tenner and no complaints with the premises (aside from an electrical ticking noise in my left ear and, in fairness, that may have only been in MY left ear). OK. X-Men: Apocalypse now. Honestly, I've seen so many of these kinds of films at the cinema in the past decade or so, that I'm feeling a bit jaded about writing this up. No reflection on the film itself, it's a perfectly fine super hero/mutant/special powers blockbuster type thingy. I don't know, maybe I need to watch something less....less....ostentatious? Less ubiquitous? I'll sort that out soonish. So, notes then, eh? And these are the notes I made right after watching the film (except for the last one). Possible spoilery notes, please beware. Psylocke big winner - slinks away not joining the victorious xmen. Nice way El Sabah Nur recruited - not magic, just promises of power and revenge. Of course, Jean Grey is the match winner using the Phoenix...

First film in Australia for a few years, so let me get this off my chest. Here are some things Japanese (multiplex) cinemas  don't  have that Australian ones do: Dirty screens. That seems to be the simplest thing to sort out. Clean the fucking stains off the screen or disable the cockends that are lobbing stuff at it.  Twats talking on their mobiles during the film. Same twats fiddling with their BRIGHT mobiles during the film. Little kids talking to mummy about scenes in the film. Loudly. Big kids showing off loudly (admittedly during the credits, but still, grow up fuck-knuckles). Pronto, onto the film proper. This is the third Captain America film by my reckoning but it actually operates as a pseudo-Avengers film. This isn't a bad thing. The first two C.A. films were quite dissimilar in my opinion; a boring, patriotic origin story, followed by a 1970s style, paranoia-filled thriller. You can guess which I preferred. A third o...

Short review, this one. For no real reason, other than I saw it more than a month ago and it's kind of drifted from the house of fog inside my brain. It has the distinction of being the last film I saw in Japan (possibly last in both senses of the word). I reckon I'll miss the Japanese cinema-going experience, but more of that in future entries. So, The Martian . Not brilliant, but comfortably watchable. Light and simple with some sombre moments. And some funny ones, mainly from Damon, who holds it together (and he has to as he's on screen for huge chunks of the running time). The procedural stuff on the planet and at NASA was quite cool. It lent a little faux authenticity (oxymoron?) to the film. There was one show-stopper. A great passage to Bowie's 'Starman' - basically a music video with a stonking budget and more than a little poignant coming so soon after his death. One more thing to note. The 'language of cinema' showed it's weary fe...