Martin Cuff Consulting

Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Chris O’Dowd, Jon Hamm – it’s a Bridesmaids reunion!

Made in Serbia.

Arriving at LAX yesterday, I was handed the keys to a bland 2011 Chevy Impala, a not-Jetta automobile that is apparently the most common car on the road in Southern California. However, it’s also the getaway vehicle for a fantastic opening scene in the movie Drive, so by now I’m feeling pretty damn fly behind the wheel…..

Because Drive is a really beautiful, thoughtfully-crafted-made movie, an action film that focuses on character rather than SFX, complex human relationships rather than shoot-em-up stunts. It stars Mousketeer Ryan Gosling as an enigmatic Hollywood stunt car driver who moonlights as an icy-cool getaway driver. A man without a name or a history, he begins a tentative relationship with a sweet neighbour – the lovely, always sympathetic Carey Mulligan – but is drawn into a fateful “one last job”.

It’s a methodical Film Noir – the kind of film we could’ve expected had Hollywood been colonized by Scandinavians – that’s nonetheless firmly placed in and bleached out by the California sun. It has a fantastic supporting cast too – Albert Brooks is standout playing against type. The LA Times has a great story on the actual locations, so I’ll just leave it at that.

So here’s what I understood from Fincher’s English-language re-telling of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo: James Bond (great titles by the way) has retired from the secret service and is now living and working in Sweden where he’s surrounded by perfectly cast Europeans with great accents. He is hired by a wealthy industrialist to find out who murdered his niece over thirty years ago. Now James Bond isn’t a sleuth, he’s a spy for god’s sake, so he doesn’t do a very good job of it until he hires a computer hacker who everyone seems to be fond of, in spite of her lack of eyebrows. Together, quicksticks, they solve a completely different set of crimes, and we never, ever again, hear the thumpingly good music of the opening sequence.

So: Great cast, did I mention? Great sound track. Great story, obviously. Let down somewhat by spotty pacing. But the Swedish locations completely rock; unlike just about everything else in the film, the filming locations look better and are more lovingly painted than in the original. I want to go there, though Swedes’re patently all quite nuts.

Oh god oh god oh god – The Darkest Hour looks fantastic. And with Moscow front and center, it’s the first big “location movie” of the year.

Here’s the trailer:

I realized again this week that no-one in my family and only a few in my circle of friends actually has much of a clue what I do for a living. This video on the making of The Hobbit in New Zealand I think offers a first class insight into the requirements of filming on location. Now film commissions don’t actually organize the logistics of on location filming themselves – that’s the production’s job. What a film commission does, on behalf of the local community, is to promote their specific locations as a great place to film, and then ensure that it actually IS a great place to film – by coordinating and promoting available crews and equipment and services and labor and permit issuing bodies, so that filming is easy and the maximum amount of money is spent in local area. And at the AFCI, I now coordinate between all of the governments in the world who offer this unique service to the film industry – we also provide the definitive training for Film Commissioners, and we host an annual event in LA where film commissions gather to market their destinations to Hollywood.

It’s pretty hard to write an update for an animated film on this locations-based blog, but with the Spielberg-directed, Peter Jackson-produced The Adventures of Tintin I’m going to try. Because the digital locations – from the Sahara to the historic Caribbean to muddy Belgium to the palaces and narrow streets of the Caliphate of Bugghar – are richly detailed and absolutely spectacular (we saw the movie in 2-D to avoid the horrid colour-deadening of the 3-D format). And vividly realistic too; that developments in this field will impact on the future of filming on location is entirely possible, I guess. The film’s fun too – an entertaining escapade and a couple of hours nostalgia thrown in.

Fee fi fo fum, I smell the blood of an English man.

It’s been said that Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol is the movie that can make you forget quite how icky Tom Cruise is. True. Revisiting the role of Ethan Hunt, he’s lithe and agile and handsome and tight-panted and surprisingly compelling – ok, he’s hot: there, I said it – especially considering he’s turning fifty next year. Plus there’s Paula Patton too, who is probably the most beautiful woman on the planet at this very moment (sorry my-first-true-love-Rosamund-Pike, but she is – if only only just). Jeremy Renner adds some edge, that Swedish Nyqvist dude is suitably villainous as the bad guy intent on destroying the world, and there are all sorts of masks and gadgets and disguises and awesome locations. But I have to admit it, it felt like there was something missing. Or perhaps that we’d seen it all before somewhere. Not a bad evening of entertainment by any means, but naggingly disappointing nonetheless. Except for Tom.

Key locations in the film include Mumbai (the parking garage was built specifically for the movie), Budapest, and the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. Yes, Tom did his own dare-devil climbing. (the ropes were removed in post.)