Preview - BOOGIE WOOGIE

BOOGIE WOOGIE is a highly enjoyable, acerbic satire on the contemporary art world, directed by debutant Duncan Ward and based on the novel by Danny Moynihan. Both are art-world insiders and the film has the feel of authentic anecdotes on speed. The film has a large cast and many sub-plots, but these all coalesce around the gallery of Art Linson - a Jay Jopling like art-dealer who stands at the centre of the London art scene. Art is played in trademark...

EDGE OF DARKNESS - Curiously flat

EDGE OF DARKNESS is a curiously anemic political thriller starring Mel Gibson as a straightlaced cop whose daughter is assassinated by her employer - a shadowy military defense contractor. While the police are distracted with the idea that the killer was really after the cop, the father begins his own investigation that takes him into the upper reaches of government and business. The marketing campaign for this film led me to believe that the film...

A PROPHET/UN PROPHET - Powerful, tense, exhilarating.

French writer-director Jacques Audiard's new film, UN PROPHET, is a devastatingly good film - even more searing than the already impressive 2005 flick THE BEAT THAT MY HEART SKIPPED. It's the kind of film that has you on the edge of your seat, wincing with unease throughout, and yet leaves you exhilarated and re-energised in your belief of what cinema, at its best, can be capable of. The movie opens with a teenage kid being admitted to prison. Malik...

DVD Review - BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA

BY THE PEOPLE: THE ELECTION OF BARACK OBAMA is a rather uninspired HBO-produced documentary following Barack Obama on the campaign trail through the Presidential primaries and the general election to the point of victory. The real coup for the film-makers was to have pitched the doc to the Obama camp and to the financiers as a documentary about a charismatic first-term senator who might have a shot at 2012, but to have found themselves actually...

OSS-117: LOST IN RIO - sporadically funny French spy spoof

The OSS-117 movies are French parodies of the early Bond movies, where Bond was a slick-haired, cock-sure spy in a flash car and a shiny suit, bedding women to cheesy 1960s background music. The latest release, RIO NE REPOND PLUS or LOST IN RIO, sees the hapless French spy Hubert Bonisseur de la Bath dispatched to Rio to purchase a microfilm containing the names of French collaborators from a Nazi colonel. On the way he teams up with a beautiful...

3 IDIOTS - The funniest Hindi comedy since Munnabhai

3 IDIOTS is one of the funniest Hindi movies I’ve seen since MUNNABHAI MBBS. So it comes as no surprise to find that it was written and directed by Rajkumar Hirani, the guy behind that smash-hit. 3 IDIOTS also has certain plot similarities to the first MUNNABHAI movie. Once again we find ourselves in an Indian university, with students under pressure from their adoring parents to do well and get a great job. Once again we have an iconoclastic rebel...

Douglas Sirk Retrospective 2 - ALL I DESIRE

We're a big disappointment to each other, aren't we? You've got a mother with no principles; I've got a daughter with no guts.Continuing with the Douglas Sirk retrospective, we have his 1953 melodrama, ALL I DESIRE. In a theme that Sirk would explore most famously in IMITATION OF LIFE, Sirk shows the price paid by a woman who sacrifices her family to her career, and who later is positioned as a rival to her daughter. Barbara Stanwyck stars as the...

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL - Spasticus Autisticus

SEX & DRUGS & ROCK & ROLL is a fast-paced, manically inter-cut biopic of Ian Dury, New Wave singer, genius wordsmith, ladies man and radical. Born working class, crippled by polio, trained by Peter Blake, married to a middle-class portrait painter, father to two kids, living in suburbia. That's how we meet Dury - a punk radical playing shitty pubs with a dodgy band, desperate for fame, and deeply at odds with his suburban home life....

DAYBREAKERS - Don't you want to get out of Cape Cod?

I really enjoyed DAYBREAKERS - the new vampire sci-fi flick from Aussie directors, Michael and Peter Spierig. The concept is clever, logically explored, the production design is imaginative and slick, and there's some genuinely cool gory special effects. I am shocked at just what a good job they did with such a low budget, and I can't wait to see what they do next.So, down to the details. The concept is cool. In the near future, vampires have turned...

IT'S COMPLICATED - fails to be subversive

IT'S COMPLICATED wants to be a romantic-comedy that subverts convention by giving us an old formerly married couple indulging in an affair. Whether or not you will like this film basically rests on whether you find the concept of Meryl Streep declaring, "turns out, I'm a bit of a slut" funny or not. Sadly, writer-director Nancy Meyers does not develop the humour beyond the initial concept. Oh, I forget, she has ex-husband and current lover Alec...

Political Kabuki

The Colbert ReportMon - Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30cDrag Me to Health - Ezra Klein & Linda Douglasswww.colbertnation.comColbert Report Full EpisodesPolitical HumorEconomySome semantic musings….While watching an interview with Washington Post blogger Ezra Klein on the Colbert Report, I was surprised to hear him use ‘kabuki’ as an adjective to describe the theatrics of live C-SPAN senate debate in the United States. The quote is about 4 minutes into...

RED RIDING - 1980 - Arguably the best of the trilogy

Peter Hunter: You don't like the police much, do you? Martin Laws: No love lost, no. Peter Hunter: So when someone kicks down your front door, kills the dog and rapes the wife, who you gonna call? Martin Laws: Well it certainly wouldn't be the West Yorkshire Police - they'd already *be* in there, wouldn't they.RED RIDING: 1980 is perhaps the best in the trilogy of Channel 4 films, in that it has both the best of the lead performances (Paddy Considine...

The best and worst of 2009

As the annual commercial hoop-la of award-season hoves into view, I thought I'd add my tuppence-worth with the conventional and more unconventional annual reviewsmoviebook Best of and Worst of list. And, given that award-givers typically reward melodrama rather than comedy, with start with the laughs. After all, as Sullivan found in that Preston Sturges masterpiece, there's nothing wrong with just trying to make people laugh, especially in a year...

RED RIDING - 1974 - Less slippery and subversive than the novel but well put together nonetheless

1974 is the first of three films produced for television by Britain's Channel 4, based on the "Yorkshire noir" novels of David Peace. Each of his four books, 1974, 1977, 1980 and 1983, is about the corruption of policeman, priests, politicians and businessmen who murder and extort for no reason other than that they can. There never seems to be much money or success to be had from it, other than protecting the status quo. These crimes are posited...

Douglas Sirk Retrospective 1 - HAS ANYBODY SEEN MY GAL (1952)

Douglas Sirk was a Danish boy raised in Germany, who was forced to leave his successful career in European cinema in 1937, eventual finding fame as the director of melodramas for Universal in the 1950s. His films raked in the phat cash - women loved the soupy romances with strong women triumphing over parochial social mores to find love and sometimes wealth. But, in contrast to fellow emmigres, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder, Sirk's films were...

NOWHERE BOY - suprisingly conventional Lennon biopic

NOWHERE BOY is a beautifully written, beautifully acted, sensitively directed biopic of the young John Lennon, directed by the reknowned British artist, Sam Taylor-Wood. Set in a perfectly rendered 1950s Liverpool, the film shows a 17 year old Lennon groping toward the truth of why he lives with his Aunt Mimi rather than with his mum and dad, not to mention taking his first steps toward becoming a Beatle. Aaron Johnson (THE THIEF LORD; ANGUS, THONGS...

Top Animated Shorts of the Decade

The first decade of the twenty-first century has been a rich one for art animation in Japan. There has been a veritable explosion of young animation talent in a broad range of animation styles including puppet animation (Murata), installation (Ishida, Kosemura, Tabaimo), charcoal (Tsuji, Yokosuka), and stop motion (Yonesho, Rinpa Eshidan, Takeuchi). Computer animation has developed considerably...