LOVE HAPPENS - undeserved

LOVE HAPPENS is the excruciatingly dull and self-important debut feature from writer-director Brandon Camp. It features Aaron Eckhart as a self-help guru who coaches grieving Americans on how to reclaim their lives. Irony being that he has yet to confront the death of his own wife. He will do this through his nascent romance with an earnest florist (Jennifer Aniston in a beanie hat and pigtails, which is how we know she's earnest and tree-hugging)....

SHUTTER ISLAND - the auteur's B-movie

SHUTTER ISLAND is a psychological horror film directed by Martin Scorsese and based on the popular 2003 novel by Denis Lehane. This faithful adaptation is a self-consciously old-fashioned sort of an enterprise, set in a maximum security prison for the criminally insane, in 1950s America. It deals very deeply in notions of personal and national guilt – denial and repression. The protagonist is a veteran soldier turned Federal Marshall called Teddy...

PERCY JACKSON AND THE LIGHTNING THIEF - also not entirely unwatchable

Another movie that’s easy to deride is PERCY JACKSON AND THE LIGHTNING THIEF. The similarity of the source material and the fact that it shares the same director as the first two HARRY POTTER films have led many reviewers to call it “Harry Potter lite” or a Harry Potter rip-off. Certainly, you can see their argument. Percy Jackson is a boy who is “special” and that being “special” relates to his now absent father. His being special leads him to...

Fantasy (Kunio Kato, 2003)

While watching this short animation, which Kunio Katō (加藤久仁生) released on the web in 2003 I realized just how romantic Katō is as an artist. I don’t mean romantic in the Jdorama sense of the word, rather in the sense of sentimental and idealistic. While there may be some dark themes running through his films (the strange events of The Apple Incident, or the melancholy of Tsumiki no ie), on the...

Japanese Oscar Winners 3: Ryuichi Sakamoto

Ryūichi Sakamoto (坂本 龍一, b.1952)Sakamoto, Cong Su, and David Byrne won the Academy Award for Best Original Score in 1987 for Berardo Bertolucci’s The Last Emperor (a sample of Sakamoto's contribution is here). Sakamoto is a prolific composer and performer whose work has won many awards over the years. My own personal favourite work by Sakamoto is the soundtrack to Nagisa Oshima’s Merry Christmas,...

VALENTINE'S DAY - not entirely unwatchable

VALENTINE’S DAY is a romantic comedy along the lines of LOVE ACTUALLY – in which we follow a number of characters, all loosely connected, living in contemporary LA on Valentine’s Day. We have everything from a teenager trying to lose her virginity (Emma Roberts); to a serving officer home on leave (Julia Roberts); from a cynical “player” sports journalist (Jamie Foxx) to an old-romantic florist (Ashton Kutcher) and many many more besides. It is...

Japanese Oscar Winners 2: Takuo Miyagishima

Takuo Miyagishima / 宮城島卓夫 (aka Tak Miyagishima, b. 1928 in Gardena, CA)In 2005, Miyagishima won the Gordon E. Sawyer Award at the Oscars. This award is given out semi-annually "an individual in the motion picture industry whose technological contributions have brought credit to the industry.” The award is voted upon by the Scientific and Technical Awards Committee of the Academy. It is named after...

Osamu Tezuka: Self Portrait (1988)

David Ehrlich’s Animated Self Portraits (1989), as I mentioned in the previous post, features 19 artists from 5 countries exploring their identities as artists through the medium of animation. With the entire film reportedly being only 8 minutes in length, one wonders how Ehrlich managed to fit all the artists in when Kihachirō Kawamoto’s contribution comes in at approximately a minute in length...

Kihachiro Kawamoto: Self Portrait (1988)

Some background informationIn 1987, American animation artist David Ehrlich, an active member of ASIFA (Association Internationale du Film d'Animation), came up with the idea of assembling a collection of very short self portraits by ASIFA members. The resulting 8 minute film opened a window into the minds of the animators and how they view the creative process. In addition to his own contribution,...

THE LAST STATION - patronising and superficial

THE LAST STATION is a lavishly produced but patronising biopic of Leo Tolstoy's last years - when he was the world's most famous author, but had turned his back on literary fame to pursue a life as a natural philosopher and advocate of interior spirituality and an austere life of renunciation. The movie is written and directed by Michael Hoffman - a director with a somewhat patchy history. In the early 1990s, he directed the scabrous network TV...

Japanese Oscar Winners 1: Best Costume Design

Japan had a great year at the Oscars last year thanks to Yōjirō Takita’s Departures (おくりびと , 2008) and Kunio Katō’s La maison en petits cubes (つみきのいえ, 2008). In fact, compared with other non-English-speaking countries, Japan has actually won many Oscars over the years rivaled only by Italy, France, Germany and Sweden. Although no Japanese films are in the running for the big awards this year, despite...

SOLOMON KANE - a near perfect piece of pulp entertainment

I love the CONAN films, and pretty much all Arnold Schwarzenegger flicks from the eighties in general. But CONAN is special. There's something deliciously disturbing about a woman like me (quasi-feminist, post-modern, intellectual snob) liking something so, well, unreconstructed in its full-on appreciation for strong men swinging swords in a battle for cosmic stakes painted in simplistic terms. Good and evil are tangible in the world of Robert E....

THE WOLFMAN - anaemic

Joe Johnston, hack director of such memorable fare as HIDALGO, JURASSIC PARK III and THE ROCKETEER (oh yes!) creates another cine-clunker with his ill-conceived remake of the Curt Siodomak classic, THE WOLF MAN. The story is simple. Innocent Lawrence Talbot is bitten by a werewolf on Blackmoor while investigating his brother's savage death. He has to fight to stop the beast, while battling with his own lycophagia, all the time being hounded by the...

THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG - the best of both worlds

Watching THE PRINCESS AND THE FROG is a deeply nostalgic experience. It reminds you of how wonderful the old Disney classics were, and the simple delights and warmth of hand-drawn animation. Just as in the good old days, this movie doesn't depend on post-modern pop-cultural references or 3-D gimmicks. Nope. Here we have a lovely story, charming characters, true love and some sweet songs. A charmingly earnest, hard-working waitress called Tiana...

Overlooked DVD of the month - PONTYPOOL

Okay. So the first thing you have to do is banish thoughts of a Welsh town. This Pobtypool is a town in Canada. And this film, PONTYPOOL, is a superbly claustrophobic, chilling little lo-budget horror flick from Canadian director Bruce McDonald. Based on the book by Tony Burgess, the movie takes place almost entirely within a small-town radio station, where a grizzled old DJ, Grant Mazzy, is stuck with his producer and studio manager on Valentine's...

INVICTUS - A Sports film by Basil Exposition

INVICTUS is a superficial, schmaltzy, by-the-numbers sports movie in which Clint Eastwood dumbs down the social and political history of South Africa, and completely fails to capture the excitement and brilliance of the 1995 Rugby World Cup. As you can tell, I'm pretty pissed off at having to have sat through two hours and fifteen minutes of this earnest but ham-fisted bilge. I will do my best to...

Justifiably overlooked DVD of the month - I LOVE YOU, BETH COOPER

Truly execrable vehicle for HEROES' Hayden Panettiere in which High School nerd Denis confesses his love for hottie Beth Cooper in his valedictorian speech. As a direct result, Beth Cooper turns up at his house that night and the polar opposites end up spending time together. This movie is meant to be like THE BREAKFAST CLUB or CAN'T HARDLY WAIT - where disparate schoolkids ends up realising that there is more to each other than they thought before...

DVD Release - ONG BAK 2 - THE BEGINNING

ONG BAK 2 is the much anticipated follow-up to the 2003 break-out film for Thai martial arts actor Tony Jaa, who went on to star in the ridonkulous flick THE WARRIOR, memorable principally for the fact that what inspired all the craziness was a stolen elephant. The original ONG BAK film followed rural teen Ting on his quest to modern Bangkok to recover a stolen bust of Buddha. The narrative was pretty weak but there was awesome Muay Thai kickboxing...

ASTRO BOY - clever but lacking wit

I can't say I'd ever heard of ASTROBOY before watching this film but apparently he is an insanely famous Manga character created by Tezuka Osamu in the 1950s. Apparently the original stories have already inspired a 1960s TV series. In that series, Astroboy started life as the young son of a famous scientist, Dr Tenma. When young Toby is killed in a car accident, Dr Tenma resurrects his memory in a robot, CAPRICA stylee. But tragically, Tenma is...

My Neighbours the Yamadas (ホーホケキョとなりの山田くん, 1999)

Joyful laughter breaks the silence of an autumn eve – BashōIt is a rare film that interweaves classical poetry with tales of modern life, but Isao Takahata (高畑 勲, b. 1935) manages it successfully in his 1999 feature length animation My Neighbours the Yamadas (ホーホケキョとなりの山田くん / Hōhokekyo Tonari no Yamada-kun). The haiku poems that punctuate the narrative vignettes work surprisingly well on a number...