Martin Cuff Consulting

And there was I, just yesterday, wondering whether I could phone the Advertising Standards Authority to complain about the “Call on the name of Jesus and be saved” billboard on the N1. I mean, quite patently I couldn’t make such a definitive claim about washing powder or motor oil or fat burners without being forced to prove it, so why the leniency for the god-squad?

Anyway, I only digress a little because last night I saw Henry Poole Is Here, starring Luke Wilson. He plays a man with a terminal disease who returns to confront his demons and die alone in a house in his old neighbourhood in Los Angeles. Quite miraculously (yes, that’s the point), a picture of Jesus appears in the stucco on the walls of his new home, and the interfering Latina next door thinks this is a sign. When it starts weeping blood and people start being cured of all sorts of ailments, then Luke is forced to rethink his Mr. Grumpy persona and reintegrate himself into the world.

So, it’s a film about faith in unlikely places. It’s about the tangible reality of belief for those who believe – though it’s hard to get beyond the fact that all that blind faith comes across as being completely deranged. It’s delivered with some great lighting and steady pacing, but to be really honest, I’m not sure I find movies about the insufferably self-righteous even vaguely worth the price of a movie ticket. Don’t get me wrong: I have no problem with religious people generally, as long as they don’t call for my death or weep (metaphorically) for my descent into hell for my fast living and wicked ways. The fact that they so often do leaves me pretty unentertained, frankly.

The nameless, faceless burb of tract homes and not-high-enough fences is the City of La Mirada, in Los Angeles, California. Astoundingly ranked 34 in CNN’s Money Magazine’s best places to live survey, it’s only saving grace in my book: Amber Riley, La Mirada Resident.

In Julie & Julia, Meryl Streep is joyful, resplendent, lovely as Julia Child, the woman who brought French cooking to servantless Americans. Amy Adams (sob!) is ghastly as Julie Powell, the grasping, strident, petty, whining, self-obsessed, miserable and really quite horrid (oh, ok, one day I’ll come down off the fence and tell you what I really thought about her….) housewife who blogged about her experience of cooking Julia’s recipes. Think Babette’s Feast meets Mommie Dearest. There’s a pivotal moment towards the end of the movie when we learn that Ms. Child thinks Ms. Powell’s efforts are disrespectful. We’re supposed to know, I think, from watching the movie that that’s not the case. Actually, in reality, the entire movie leads us to believe quite deeply that the Julie character is a kind of psycho bridezilla, and everything in Julie’s life is only about Julie, which does indeed come across like a slap in the face to the refined Julia. If I was Ms. Powell, I’d be asking for my money back.

I expect though that one of the benefits of being Meryl Streep is that you get to choose where you film, and in spite of the inimitable French-ness of the story line, most of the drama was actually shot in and around New York City and its boroughs. I thought Montreal, but no, aside from some establishing shots, New York it was. The ultimate rooftop celebration, where we finally get to kiss that narcissist Julie a less-than-fond farewell, shot at 12-17 38th Avenue, Queens, New York City.

Oh and one last gripe: what is it about filmmakers and food? In order to express the working man’s appreciation of fine cuisine, we’re subjected to scene after scene of him shovveling plate-loads of gunk into his slack-jawed mouth, whilst continuing lively conversation – like some marauding Viking who’s just sacked St. Bede’s. I have never seen Americans eat like this (and I was trapped in a waiting room at a Denver dog shelter during a Pit Bull amnesty where every man woman and child wore tats and a wife-beater and drank hard liquor from hipflasks so I’ve been around manners.) So why the celluloid sham? It’s off-putting. Just stop it.

For all the talk that the fifties and sixties were ‘simpler times’, I can show you Vietnam, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Suez Crisis, the Space Race, McCarthyism, Stonewall. But The Woodstock Festival, which crash-landed in a dairy field in New York State in the late 60′s, was to all intents and purposes, a giant pop-culture counterpoint to all that angst, a peaceful, joyous, somewhat psychedelic “coming out” of a million and a half people.

I was too young to know anything about Woodstock at the time, and having been raised in its aftermath as a preppy drone, I’d always assumed it was full of slap-able barefoot hippies going all hey-shoo-wow on us. I never thought for a moment that it might be something with which I would identify irrevocably – an anti-establishment explosion delivered without violence or polemic. That’s the true surprise of Ang Lee’s snapshot-of-the-times, Taking Woodstock, a quirky, thoughtful, intimate look at how the festival came about, and its impact on some of the people who were there.

I didn’t absolutely love the film (amongst other things, the soundtrack, of all things, is maddeningly understated) but I did love the idea of the film, and I relished the positive thoughts and the feelings it engendered about celebrating humanity and diversity and common goodness. Sadly, I’m probably the kind of guy that still wouldn’t have gone to Woodstock first time round, but at least there’s the consolation that I would have regretted that decision…..

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Super-Serb Milla Jovovich and chunky little Steve Zahn (that’s new, serious Steve Zahn, not the former doofus version) are ostensibly a pair of love-struck newly-weds on Honeymoon in Hawaii. It’s A Perfect Getaway. They take a hiking trail to a remote part of one of the islands, falling in with an Iraq war vet and his almost-fiancee plus a pair of somewhat scary hitchhikers along the way. And its the scary that does it. Because a man and a woman have reportedly viciously murdered another pair of newly-weds back in Honolulu…..we just don’t know who.

So, A Perfect Getaway is a perfectly serviceable little thriller, particularly if you haven’t seen the trailer and aren’t expecting any of the twists and turns. Milla’s pretty good, Steve Zahn has (somewhat unnervingly) become really rather, how can I say this? smokin’, in his old age, and it’s also got Chris Hemsworth AND Timmy Olyphant, so there’s eye candy galore. And as for the Hawaii locations…..

And again here’s a twist. Because for all the times that Hawaii has stood in for Vietnam, Costa Rica, the Pacific, Africa, yadda yadda yadda, here’s one where Puerto Rico stands in for Hawaii. The climactic beach scene was actually filmed at the enigmatic Aguadilla in Puerto Rico (though the cave is actually found in Jamaica.) Ah, the magic of the Movies.

Ooh ooh ooh ooh ooooooh! AND Emily Blunt. Ooh.

Rockin’. Literally.

When I was at school, we were always encouraged to preface each of our criticisms of a person or thing with two or three things about that person that were positive. Example: “I really liked your use of mime and dance, and your decision to focus on the physical comedy was interesting, but your performance of ‘Hamlet’ as both a one-woman kabuki show AND a reggae rock opera was perhaps lacking in consistency…..” So: I am schooled in measured politeness. Yet in spite of the above, and try as I might, I can’t find a single redeeming feature about the appalling abortive mess that is The Women.

Normally, I love love love Annette Benning, but she’s reduced to a catty caricature of Samantha from Sex and the City. Jada Pinkett Smith plays a lesbian, which means she’s encouraged to lounge against things a lot. Debra Messing is resumes the role of Grace, but Grace who’s now married and serial-pregnant and still frakkin neurotic. Bette Midler appears – for why, who can say? And poor Meg Ryan; she was very unwise to get her lips done. She’s really an awful actress who’s now completely unwatchable.

The script is dreadful and its appallingly acted. Oh: Candice Bergen’s in it. She’s nice. That’s one positive thing, right? But really, even that nod to good manners drummed in by a £100,000 education exhausts me. So don’t expect me to trawl to find out about locations; I could not give a flying….

In The Last House on the Left, a group of typical Hollywood villains stumble into the isolated lakeside property of a group of typical Hollywood good guys. What follows next is arguably an astute treatise on the universal immorality of violence, reinforcing a message that violence, even when wielded for the purposes of good, still cheapens and dehumanises the perpetrators. Alternatively The Last House on the Left is just an expensive Hollywood snuff movie – purely voyeuristic pain-porn – designed to make the target audience of young men aged 18-25 drool and cheer as the flesh is penetrated.

Needless to say, I found it the latter. In fact, I only watched it, finger on the fast forward button during the gross and utterly gratuitous bits, because it was filmed in South Africa (I got a heads up on this when I bumped into man-crush Tony Goldwyn down at the shops, which is always a bit of a give-away over here.) So although I disliked the casual brutality and teen-cruel mentality of the film itself, I have to say, that once again Film Afrika pulled off the trick of making the Helderberg Nature Reserve feel exactly like somewhere authentically North American.

Assumption, it’s been said, is the mother of all fuck-ups. And as if to prove this truisim, I offer you Martin Cuff and the avoidance of the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino. You see, I assumed that this was a film about Nascar – Days of Thunder meets Stallone in Driven. Scraggly old Clint posing in a jumpsuit. That kind of thing. So I’d avoided it entirely. Which, as it turns out, was a fuck-up of monumental proportions.

Gran Torino is in fact a compelling drama. It’s a unique polemic that touches on ageism and generational dissonance, the inevitable growing pains as white America transforms under the melting pot of immigration, of dysfunctional families, the scourge of gang violence, casually entrenched racism and sexism, and the dangerous disaffection of youth of all colours and creeds. It filmed in Detroit, Michigan – Walt’s home is on Rhode Island Street, east of Woodward in Highland Park – the decline of which has been written about extensively, and is kind of symbolic of the grand gut-wrenching social upheavals happening in and to the American heartlands. Art imitating life, then.

But Gran Torino is funny too; some cracking, gasp-worthy dialogue scours the mouths of the grumpy, tell-it-straight Pole (played by Eastwood) and his Hmong neighbours. The lippy, wise-ass, brutally candid daughter Sue – played by newcomer Ahney Her – is stand out.

So all in all, riveting is a word that comes to mind; it’s like watching an impending car crash at a familiar intersection. Which is a total red herring: the Gran Torino does not crash, in fact it doesn’t even race. It is a must-see though.

One of our tasks at University was to write and direct a one-man show. I chose one about an interrogation. Set in the Bush War and the dying days of white Rhodesia, and adapted from a Zimbabwean short story the name of which I can no longer remember, the play required the actress, as a white police officer, to prowl about an empty chair, barking a uni-directional questions at an imaginery black prisoner. The idea was that the poor sot in the torture seat was essentially silenced by the prejudices and assumptions of the interrogator….

It’s funny how one recalls these odd things, a quarter of a century later. But recall it I did after watching It’s Complicated starring Meryl Streep and Alex Baldwin. It’s Complicated is the wry and semi-sweet tale of a divorced couple’s clumsy attempt to revisit their discarded romance, much to the dismay of the almost-grown kids and the new partners of both adults.

The reason for being reminded of my Rhodesian torture scene – oh, bear with me here, it’s not that complicated – was NOT that the movie was particularly excruciating. (It isn’t – it’s not great but it’s not awful). It’s more that Alec Baldwin’s character might not have actually been missed if everyone had just worked around his empty chair. All he’s really given to do is look moon faced and wan and frankly stupid and mutter “Jane, Jane, Jane…” – which is a terribly waste of Jack Donaghy, in my books.

The film has a strong Santa Barbara, California setting – and Jane’s Spanish ranch-style home and lush garden are really a central cinematic tool of anchoring and rooting Jane’s family. Only problem is it didn’t film in Santa Barbara: the LA Times has absolutely the best article about this. In way of compensation though, Santa Barbara’s tourism folks have responded to this snub by creating a “Santa Barbara Experience” around the sights and sounds that are at least evoked by the movie….