Martin Cuff Consulting

I never thought I’d ever, ever, ever say this – especially not out loud – but in light of the field of creeps and loons running for President: I MISS SARAH PALIN.

Thanks to my beloved (twin) sister Emma, we are luxuriating in the second series of the flabbergastingly awesome Downton Abbey. The familiar characters are all growing up and moving on, this time completely dragged through the clothing mangler by the tumultuous events of World War I (which has just ended on our viewing schedule.) Most importantly for the Upstairs-Downstairs, social boundaries are collapsing, (hurrah!) and its almost inconceivable that anyone ever thought life would return to pre-war indolence. So what will this mean for Downton?

Well, Series 3, obviously – and the news that Shirley MacLaine is joining the cast as Lady Cora’s brash, Yankee mother (surely the casting coup of the decade?) will only add to the excitement. But interestingly there’s also been a lot of buzz around the location of Downton itself, the lush Highclere House outside Newbury, that was built by the same chap who built the Houses of Parliament. The LA Times again steps forward with a loving behind-the-scenes portrait of the house: 10 Facts About the Show’s Real Castle. You too can visit the house – the ancestral home of the family that discovered King Tut’s tomb – at a cool twelve hundred bucks a visit. You heard me right.

The Debt takes as its center-piece a fictional 1960′s era attempt by a trio of loyal Israelis to kidnap a hideously unrepentant Nazi war criminal out of East Germany and spirit him back to Jerusalem for trial. The attempt goes awry, and the three are forced into a series of course-changes and compromises that effectively up-end their collective futures.

But does The Debt work as a movie? Well yes, but also no. The movie is at its best in grimy sixties Berlin (of course, Budapest is the convenient stand-in) when Rachel, played with guts by it-girl Jessica Chastain, begins the operation in a series of extremely vulnerable positions. The botched kidnap and the final confrontation in a Ukrainian hospital are truly exciting. But generally I felt it hopped between the two time periods too clumsily and I came away feeling I’d been watching “Munich-lite.”

Holy crap, The River looks like an awesome television experience.

So here’s the plot of The Darkest Hour: Aliens blow shit up – score! They blow shit up in Russia – bonus! Gnome-y Emile Hirsch leads a bunch of hapless foreigners to salvation – good to go!

And yet, yet…. what an utterly numbing disappointment. Moscow looks awesome on film, but the plot, and worse, the characters, are completely hopeless, taking the most stupid, inane, unrealistic risks and generally acting like morons. The Russian characters are all cartoon-like stereotypes, and when the aliens finally appear on screen, they’re like angry Mars Attacks baddies: ludicrous. Max Minghella runs funny too – it’s like he’s wearing Charlie Chaplin shoes.

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.