Chubby Police Academy reject, Paul Blart, works as a Mall Cop at a nameless (and pretty faceless) New Jersey Mall.  In fact, semi-tragic sap that he is, the store has become his life; his friends all work there, and he’s even got a flourishing infatuation with the cute Amy, who runs one of the concessions. But one evening, the mall is taken over by dastardly robbers intent on scamming the credit card machines, and Paul Blart (Kevin James) is the only one who can stop them……

So the movie’s a bit like Home Alone for grown ups. Lots of cunning devices, prat falls and hapless bad guys. It’s no, by any means, a great movie, but it’s sweet enough in its predictability. And no one swears. At all. That’s got to be good, right?

What amused me though, was that the filmmakers had hoped to shoot in a place called Willowbrook Mall in Wayne, New Jersey. However, the brilliant Mall owners / managers denied permission. Maybe they thought the production would be too disruptive? Maybe they didn’t like the crime theme of the plot? Maybe, just maybe, they should have remembered the old adage that “there’s no such thing as bad publicity” and realised that a block buster movie could have driven foot traffic by the hundreds to their credit-crunched tenants? But they didn’t. What losers.

Principal shooting moved to the Burlington Mall in Burlington, Massachusetts, filming from late February until mid-April. The mall and its stores were decorated with Christmas decorations, and there was a large prop ball-pit in the main foyer, and a Santa’s Village at the opposite end. Interior filming took place mostly at night, to minimise disruption. And the result? As of May 17, 2009, Paul Blart: Mall Cop had grossed $177,031,353 at the US box office - that’s $177 million of advertising for Burlington, Massachusetts, and not New Jersey. I hope the Willowbrook managers are sufficiently chastened by their missed opportunity.

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Having trashed the lack of thought (and science) in Terminator Salvation, I was more than pleasantly surprised to come across this new South African SciFi movie District 9.

Based on a creepy short film called Alive in Joburg, it’s produced by Peter Jackson (yes, he of Lord of the Rings fame) and features a clever story about the arrival and integration of aliens in South Africa. In this case, these are non-human alien aliens - but there’s a lot of apartheid in there, and a lot about the disturbing attacks on refugees last year. It looks like it might - finally! - be the kind of South African story that works without a lot of messages and finger wagging and point scoring. Hurrah.

The movie itself doesn’t open until later this year, but viral campaign is running and the website’s gone live - offering a witty, multi-layered introduction to the origins, sociology, physiology and hardware/technology of the “non-human” aliens that are the focus of the film….. the kind of pre-production and respect for its audience that Terminator Salvation seemed to disdain.

Look out for signs reading “BUS BENCHES FOR HUMANS ONLY” at a bus stop near you……

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Three movies and a tv series later - all of which, remember, were about actually stopping Skynet and the nuclear war - and the Robots of Terminator Salvation have indeed taken over the world. The grown-up John Connor, method-acted into snarly oblivion by the increasingly unpleasant Christian Bale, is now some sort of post-apocalyptic messiah, coordinating the surviving humans against the all-knowing, and unstoppable robotic onslaught. Well, sort of.

SciFi is, I think, meant to include Science as well as Fiction - things have to be at least vaguely sensible. And this isn’t. For instance, whilst the robots are apparently able to pick up enemy movement at will, they miss the rebel base entirely and they completely fail to react to the torching of a whole forest by Connor and his crowd. Can anyone say “heat seeking missile”?

And whilst Sam Worthington looks pretty (and he certainly picks up a lot of the slack for the odiously one-dimensional Bale) what exactly is he there for? To raise questions about the blurring distinctions between man and machine? Perhaps. Because while the movie raises those questions, it doesn’t get around to answering them. All Very Perplexing.

For what it’s worth, Terminator Salvation filmed in New Mexico.  New Mexico Magazine offers advice on day trips to the locations in the film. And in case there was any doubt about how filming can involve the whole community, here’s a story about how two dogs from the local doggie day care won featured extras roles…..

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There’s a lot you’ll see in Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist that is somehow familiar. There are sweet and slightly awkward young adults, witty and erudite beyond their years. There’s romance, and fumbling. There’s a sound track - a very good sound track actually. And there’s a night-time location of bright lights and big noise and a city that never sleeps.

Yet hiding within the familiar clothes and propelled by the familiar story is a uniquely modern, thriving world of diversity. Norah is a Jewish girl in a Catholic school for instance, a fact that’s in fact portrayed as truly unremarkable. Nick by turn is the only straight member of a gay punk band. This does not mark him or his friends out for derision or personal violence - nor the grim traditional movie-fate of being sidelined as the sage sounding boards for the female lead. It does not mark them out for anything at all actually. The gross-out humour is perpetuated by one of the girls. This is all so unremarkable it’s noteworthy.

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What was Renee Zellweger thinking? I mean, this is the woman who brought us Ruby in Cold Mountain, Roxie in Chicago, even Bridget Jones - twice. I mean, she’s not Judy Dench or anything, but we’ve seen her stretch herself as an actress before, so why, oh why, oh why did she choose New in Town as a star vehicle? I can only think that Christina Applegate dropped out due to her chemo treatments - and she would have completely owned this part, turning it into something worthy (if not quite sublime.) But Renee? Give me a break.

The plot - such as it is - is that she’s a Miami-based career woman sent to wildest Minnesota in mid-winter to restructure a food processing plant. Of course she comes to love it and the townsfolk and the hairy trucker who’s the love interest. JK Simmons is in there too somewhere. Say wha???????

New In Town is not a bad film, per se, it’s just that it’s so utterly, perplexingly ordinary. Selkirk, Manitoba did stand in for New Ulm, Minnesota.

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June 2009 sees the completion of the Durban and KZN Film Industry review, which has been conducted by Martin Cuff Consulting on behalf of the eThekwini Municipality / Durban Film Office and Department of Economic Development of the Province of KZN. The six month review was intended to revisit the province’s performance as a film centre, and to look at innovative new business models that can take the region forward into the future. The resulting draft strategy will be undergoing stakeholder consultation in Durban throughout the month.

Martin Cuff Consulting has also been working in South Africa with the Eastern Cape Development Corporation, devising a broad-based sector growth strategy and promotional plan for the provincial film industry. The Sector Plan includes enterprise and crew development, a location and permit strategy and possible local incentives, including closer cooperation with the Eastern Cape Film office. The draft plan is also currently being tested with provincial stakeholders.

Further afield, Martin returns to Serbia on the 14th June, where he has been working on a USAid-funded initiative for the establishment of the Serbia Film Commission. Having created the framework for the establishment in January / February of this year, and advised on the international launch at the AFCI Locations Trade Show in April 09, the next tasks include driving the creation of the Film in Serbia Board, signing off on the business plan and moving towards legal registration of the organisation.

Also in Eastern Europe, Martin has been working with the Georgia National Film Center in Tbilisi, on the establishment of a film-friendliness programme for the Georgian government. Following meetings with several key ministers in the Georgian government, Martin’s draft of a government statement on film friendliness has now been signed as an official proclamation by the country’s President. At the invitation of the Minister of Culture, Martin was invited to present the country’s planned offerings at the Georgian presentation at the Cannes Film Festival in May this year. Martin returns to Georgia in the spring.

Additionally this month, Martin Cuff Consulting begins work on a feasibility study for a potential Film and Music Office in Nelson Mandela Bay Metro - a blogsite and survey have been set up at the following site.

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They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad. They don’t mean to, but they do. They fill you with the faults they had, And add some extra, just for you.

So sayeth the bard Philip Larkin, and he was surely talking about The Savages. Emotionally damaged, self-destructive and increasingly estranged, brother and sister Jon and Wendy Savage receive a call that their senile father has lost his home as well as his fragile mind. They now have to adjust to caring for a man who, if their stories can be gleaned from the snippets of information made available to us, wasn’t a particularly nice human being in the first place, and is even less amenable now he’s smearing his feces on the walls.

The story starts in the perky, up-beat perfection of Sun City, Arizona - which turns out to be a purpose built retirement village swathed in permanent sunshine, complete with golf-carts and cheerleaders and perfect, plastic trees (no, really, it is…..) Reminded me of Evelyn Waugh’s The Loved One. Only in America. It then moves to the utter misery of Buffalo, New York in winter. I mean, mental health institutions in Buffalo, New York. In winter. Hell.

Yet, in spite of the resoundingly All-American locations and a story-line that could so easily have teetered on the edges of sentimentality, (another writer-director may have cast Sally Field, for instance, which would have been its death knell) The Savages is not at all mawkish. It’s a true-to-life telling and Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney are painfully good to watch. It’s grim, embarrassing, wince-worthy, and touching, but wait til the end for the fat labrador, and you’ll know that all lives can find a road to redemption.

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Larry the hapless Museum Guard is now a successful inventor with little time for his waxy old pals back at the Museum. Which is why he’s more than a bit concerned when he learns they are all being packed away and moved to the Smithsonian Institute in DC . The mystical Egyptian tablet that brings EVERY exhibit to life is going too, which promises complete mayhem in what is - with 19 museums, 9 research centres and a zoo - the largest museum in the world. Cue Larry’s madcap attempt to rescue his friends and stop the tablet falling into the hands of some evil Pharoah chappy, assisted en route by the plucky Amelia Earhart, General Custer and a bunch of Tuskegee airmen…….

I watched this movie with two ten year olds and a precocious nine year old who all thought it was too fantastic. I enjoyed it as well - though in my mind, Amy Adams can simply do no wrong. Her presence in this film raises it above the simply entertaining.

What I do also admire is the way the Smithsonian grasped the economic import of what was being offered to them with this movie (Night 1 generated an additional 50,000 visitors - a 20% increase in numbers - for the American Museum of Natural History in New York) and worked with the filmmakers to offer unprecedented access to the Mall. There’s a great article about it here at the Chicago Tribune.

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Set in post-economic-collapse 2012, in a privately-operated prison, Death Race is about a whacko prison governor, an innocent man unfairly jailed, and a bloody, to-the-death car race around the grounds of a massive, decaying industrial complex that’s televised via the internet.

Now there’s a lot on line about the range of classic motor vehicles used in the car chases (Emmanuel Levy at his usual best) but very little in fact on the remarkable location of Terminal Island. As it turns out, filming took place in and around Silo #5 - an abandoned grain storage facility in the port of Montréal. (here’s a link to the Neighbourhood Notification sent out by the Production Company.)

A quarter of a mile long and over twenty storeys high, Silo #5 has a total capacity of five million bushels, or enough wheat to make 230 million loaves of bread. The building was constructed in several stages between 1903 and 1958. The newest part of the building was designed to last for generations, however due to changes in the global grain market and to the general trend of de-industrialization in North America at the end of the 20th century, the building became redundant less than forty years after its completion. It looks great on film though. As I always say: the bad guys never want to blow up the Nature Reserve.

As for the movie itself; so-so. Jason Statham again proves he’s the B-Movie hero of the era, and I’m wondering what exactly the fine Joan Allen thought she was doing by accepting this particular script. (I mean, it’s not like she’s chasing a fan base of pumped-up fifteen year olds…..) Anyway, Death Race is ok, but as an experience, it’s kind of like watching someone else play PlayStation; fun enough for a short while but in the end, pretty unexciting.

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GQ magazine is running a feature on road trip essentials that directs you to Taos, New Mexico (a remarkable arts colony in the middle of nowhere that I was lucky enough to visit en route back from the Santa Fe Cineposium last year.)

Legendary scary-person Dennis Hopper lived in Taos—physically, anyway—in the sixties and seventies, and Taos is shrewdly using the 40th anniversary of the Hopper-directed Easy Rider movie, (which partly filmed in the State) as an excuse for a series of events known as The Summer of Love.

There’ll be art exhibitions (including one curated by Hopper), throwback concerts (Country Joe re-creating his set at Woodstock), and (naturally) motorcycle rallies. Another local, Dean Stockwell is the Grand Marshal of the town’s hippie parade on June 6. (if you only know him from Blue Velvet—or worse, Quantum Leap—do yourself a favor and rent the 1968 film Psych-Out, which also features a healthy dose of early Nicholson…..)

And for another take on dysfunctional film-inspired road trips, here’s an article at the Sydney Morning Herald.

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