Martin Cuff Consulting

Scott Pilgrim is not actually vs the World – he’s surrounded by a rumbunctious crowd of band-mates, room-mates, budding romances and delightful family. What he is up against are the Seven Deadly Exes of his new love-interest, the rainbow-haired Ramona. These exes materialise at inopportune moments and transform the screen into some big-screen televised version of Tekken. Luckily Scott – delightfully sweet and nerdy Michael Pena – turns out to be a kickboxxy kind of fighter himself, and not unversed in some savvy fight strategy.

So it’s not high-brow, by any means, but I was impressed by how consistently the director realised his vision; the quirky, chirpy, comic-book feel is maintained from start to finish. Factor in some animation, good humour, a great ensemble cast, a hard rock sound track, a wry, hip (and suitably geeky) Toronto social setting, and Chris Evans in leathers, and you’ve got the makings of a really entertaining film-going experience.

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Just before World War I, Wilhelm Uhde, an uptight and somewhat prissy German art collector moves to the town of Senlis, just north of Paris. There he encounters a batty, wild-haired, down-trodden fifty-something cleaning lady called Seraphine. Seraphine is an outsider, virtually completely divorced from the real world. Mocked and disparaged by the villagers, she spends her free hours and rare free centimes trawling riverbeds, fields, and village streets and even raiding the local church collecting the tools of her trade. For beneath the almost autistic wackiness is a brilliant, intuitive artist: Seraphine is Seraphine Louis. But war is coming and the world’s own madness will become more debilitating than the private torments of either Wilhelm and Seraphine.

So Seraphine is a true story and it’s kind of depressing. But it is also one of those absolutely sumptuous, award-winning, French period films – like Horseman on the Roof – where every single scene is a perfect piece of art, every prop, every location, every loose strand of Seraphine’s hair, a perfect realisation of bygone France. The movie filmed in Crecy-la-Chapelle in Ile-de-France, which frankly is jaw-droppingly beautiful in and of itself. Plan your trip here.

Danny Boyle’s 127 Hours movie about Aron Ralston, that selfish fool who fell down a canyon and had to chop off his own hand with a pen-knife, is horrible-horrible-horrible – so much so that it’s almost unwatchable in places.

Yet it’s also quite brilliant. James Franco is absolutely spot on as the spoilt, thoughtless, resourceful Ralston and he completely carries the film; it’s got to have been hard turning one man’s solitary ordeal in a confined space into 90 minutes of big screen cinema, but Boyle and Franco manage it – via flash backs and dreams, hallucinations and nifty survival techniques – with panache. And the pace – again bear in mind that this is about a man who’s virtually immobile – moves along with balletic briskness. It may be viscerally unpleasant but it’s really worth seeing.

You’ve gathered I’m not much of an outdoorsy person myself – mostly because I’m both lazy and a huge wuss – but Bluejohn Canyon in Utah’s Canyon Country looks spectacularly beautiful (if spectacularly unforgiving.) The Telegraph has a really good piece on it here. And with Trek America you can even hike there yourself.

What a dog’s breakfast! And I don’t mean Sarah Jessica Parker. Or at least I don’t just mean her. The whole of Sex and the City 2 is a flagrant, farcical, wince-making attempt to cash in on the relative kudos of the previous film, and of course of the longer-running tv series.

This time round, under the flimsiest of pretexts, the spoilt, self-obsessed and increasingly unpleasant women head off to Abu Dhabi for a vacation of preening and falling about and whining and performing excruciatingly bad karaoke. In the process they do tremendous damage to the Emirate’s reputation as a tourism destination. And, like a fake Louis Vuitton bag – cheap, gaudy, inauthentic, dishonest and ugly – it wasn’t even filmed on location in the UAE. In spite of the efforts of the well-funded Abu Dhabi Film Commission, the production was wisely rejected by the censorship board and ultimately filmed in (an embarrassed and ashamed) Morocco instead.

The film’s utter lack of sincerity is literally gob-smacking and I found my mouth going “0″ on more than one occasion – though the gay wedding scene is particularly, excruciatingly stomach-churning. Honestly – and this is from someone who liked the first movie – this film is utter, unadulterated rubbish. It may actually be an affront to Islam, but quite frankly, it’s also an affront to common sense, basic human decency and to anyone who ever bought a movie ticket.

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….

I’ve tried writing this review for Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air a number of times, but it keeps coming back to this one singular fact: it’s really excellent.

George Clooney is Ryan Bingham, a cool, charming corporate axeman who flies from city to city firing people for a living. He’s very good at it, this firing business (and he’s surprisingly not entirely without compassion) but the very best part of the job is that it keeps him moving virtually year-round. This way he doesn’t have to deal with family, relationships or any other personal baggage. It all seems quite ideal. Yet his assumptions are challenged by a perky new co-worker, a sexy fellow-traveller and the obligations of a family wedding that just will not go away…..

So: imagine a movie where almost every one of the notes are hit with perfect pitch and clarity. A movie where the lead characters are perfectly painted and then shaken from the positions in which they have been established, almost without missing a beat. A movie where there is bleak sadness and significant humour, sunshine and snow, tenderness and brusque dismissal. It’s got George Clooney too, who must be the leading man of his entire generation. I loved it, and I can’t find a quip witty enough to do it justice.

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The thing about Sweden is that it’s supposed to be a polite little nanny state of clean-lined furniture and super-safe cars. It’s the country of Stefan Edberg, for god’s sake, and Abba, and Pippi Longstocking (though the latter is clearly a redhead and thus not to be entirely trusted…) Yet throughout the literary genre of Schwedenkrimski – best known from Stieg Larsson’s Milennium trilogy - we see a repressive society of racism, violent crime, sex trafficking, drugs, domestic abuse, oppression of women and Neo-nazism. It’s like a whole country we’d thought of as a snowy Cabot Cove has morphed into the kind of Crime Central that would make Jessica Fletcher kak herself.

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In the excellent 500 Days of Summer, boy loves girl, girl doesn’t love boy. Simple. And if you’ve ever felt unrequited, this is all played alarmingly, heart-feelingly real. And yet somehow the movie achieves this rawness via kooky animation, dance routines, non-linear narrative, the occasional split-screen, a disembodied voice and a really smashing sound track. It’s all thanks to the leads: Joseph Gordon Levitt is astounding; no really, just watch how the emotion flickers across his face (and note how you empathise.) Zooey Deschanel is also remarkable; I can only assume that Maggie Gyllenhaal gets cast in Hollywood because Zooey’s busy.

Location plays a huge part too; Hansen – who’s a lapsed architect – romances Summer on walking tours of downtown LA, and he describes Walker and Eisen’s 1927 Fine Arts Building as his favourite. But as Christopher Hawthorne in the LA Times notes: There’s a twist, though, to the picture’s emphasis on architecture: It has been carefully edited to excise virtually all shots of buildings finished after about 1950. Don’t expect to see Frank Gehry’s shimmering Walt Disney Concert Hall or the Department of Water and Power by A.C Martin. Or Thom Mayne’s Caltrans District 7 Headquarters, whose imposing, perforated-metal façade has made it a movie and car-commercial staple. Or Rafael Moneo’s Cathedral of Our Lady of the Angels….

But you know what, I don’t care. I loved this film and it’s not just the best of my year so far, but right up there in the best of the last decade. Yes, that good.

And while we’re still on the oldies, we’ve also been working our way through an Agatha Christie box set, which has been rather marvellous. Although I’ve never quite seen the glamour factor of the tween-War years (wet wool, no deodorant, the rise of fascism, hanging) the movies are all great little period pieces, all cocktails and devils-on-horseback and changing for dinner and the kinds of slappable, plummy public school accents that give me nightmares of childhood.

Evil Under the Sun, I think, is one of the better ones. Filmed in 1982, it’s got all the best Agatha elements; the secluded setting, the all-star cast of conniving, bitter upper class twits, the Object of Disaffection (in this case an oddly masculine Diana Rigg) and the various reasons each of the toffs hate her overheard by the oily Belgian Hercule Poirot (Peter Ustinov, surely the gold standard in Poirotism?) Some snappy dialogue, some seething resentments, the beach: lovely.

The book was (rather hopefully for a storyline that involved sunbathing) set in Devon, but the film relocated to the fictional Mediterranean country of Tyrania. In reality, the Spanish island of Majorca and its uninhabited satellite Sa Dragonera, were used for the external stuff. The most detailed info is actually on Wikipedia. In case you may want to visit, Daphne’s Cove and Hotel, at the time a private estate owned by a German, has since been bought by the Majorca Council and demolished to its foundations.

Mad Adrian doesn’t have quite the same ring as Mad Max, but there you go…… Sky News has a story on the barmy Yorkshireman called Adrian who’s set up a Mad Max museum in Silverton, New South Wales. Silverton, population 51, now attracts over 100,000 visitors a year – including filmmakers. Awesome.

PS. I see Sam Worthington is the latest actor pegged to replace the original drink-addled, Nazi hypocrite in Mad Max IV. Not holding my breath.