Martin Cuff Consulting

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

I’m fascinated by the colonial experience. My particular interest is the lives (and mind set) of colonists. From Roanoke, to the First Fleet, to the Welsh in Patagonia, to Rhodesia, to the American West, I am astounded that men and women moved their families across continents to re-build their lives in hostile environments. What the hell were they thinking?!? The fact that a great many of those (uninvited) colonists took it upon themselves to dominate the political landscapes of their adoptive homes simply amazes me. Anyway, the reason I recount this is that my history-geek self sat myself down in front of The Alamo the other night, not because the event marks an integral part of America’s somewhat distorted and spin-happy vision of itself, but because of the quirky colonial Texican backstory.

Basically – as the movie painstakingly sets out – American colonists in Texas (then a part of Mexico) didn’t like the central government and revolted. A small group of folks – including Davy Crockett and Jim Bowie – were trapped at a fortified mission station and anihilated by the Mexican Army for their insurrection. It was only in the aftermath of the bloodbath that American forces from the north defeated the Mexicans and Texas joined the Union.

Criticism of the movie when it came out was scattershot – people loved it or hated it. It completely tanked at the box office. I thought the pacing was off, but otherwise it was solid enough. Billy Bob Thornton as Crocket is particularly nuanced, and Jordi Molla’s melancholic presence reiterates the fact that this wasn’t ever really an American struggle. Perhaps that’s why it tanked.

From a locations point of view, the producers actually constructed an accurate replica of the Alamo Mission – and the entire city of San Antonio de Behar – on Milton Reimers Ranch on the Pedernales River, just outside Austin. The good news for film tourism buffs is that the site was purchased with voter-approved bond funds in 2006, and is now part of the Travis Park system.

District 9 finally opened in South Africa. What a bizarre experience: watching a Hollywood movie play out with South African accents and attitudes and familiar locations. Even the movie’s star, Sharlto Copley, is a friend of mine, and though I can be accused of bias for saying so, he’s really astoundingly good in this. The film’s pretty remarkable too; what an imaginative youngster can do with $30 million.

District 9 begins twenty years ago, with first contact with a massive alien mother-ship that’s come grinding to a halt over Johannesburg, South Africa. The ship’s survivors are mostly the thought-challenged worker drones of a colony of insect-like bi-peds – the locals call them “Prawns” – who are forced into an apartheid-style squatter camp, fifth class citizens of a country still rather keen on group classifications. All expectation of sophisticated alien technology, advanced science, superior weaponry, has not materialised, and the government is left performing bland cruelties on the visitors – there’s real, casual, thoughtless violence in describing how the aliens’ eggs pop when they’re set alight. The tag-line: You are not welcome here. Competing for scarce resources with the poorest of the poor, it’s clear that the aliens must be evicted, and in apartheid-style, worthy Afrikaner bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe is charged with moving them on to a new, “improved” concentration camp. Which is when it all starts to go wrong…..

The movie’s title references the forced removals of District 6 in Cape Town, which still scars the city to this day, but there actually was a Region 9 in Johannesburg, an administrative district from 2000 to 2006. Situated in the south-eastern corner of of the city, to the north it met the Inner City along the Mining Belt and the M2. To the east and south, it formed the boundary of Johannesburg. Its neighbours to the west were Region 10, the Diepkloof/Meadowlands region of Soweto and Region 11, Ennerdale/Orange Farm. The region was abolished with a reorganistion of regions in 2006.

Doofus musician Peter (Jason Segel) has spent six years idolizing his girlfriend, television star Sarah Marshall. When she dumps him, he takes an impulsive trip to Oahu, Hawaii, where he is confronted by his worst nightmare: his ex and her hip new Rock Star boyfriend, Aldous, are staying at the same resort…..

Forgetting Sarah Marshall is one of those guy-rom-coms. The interesting thing is that all the characters are actually really nice. Even the dastardly Aldous – played with flair by Brit shock-jock Russell Brand – does his level-best to befriend Peter, and he’s only ever honest. Even Sarah Marshall, the ice queen bitch (Kristen Bell) is ultimately redeemable. Paul Rudd is also unrecognisably fantastic as the stoner surf-dude Chuck. But it’s Peter who stands out as a genuine decent human being trying to find his way back from the pain of a horrible relationship. And we’ve all been there. Jason Segel is Everyman; just taller. The Turtle Bay Resort on North Shore, Oahu – about 45 minutes out from Honolulu, gets something of a star billing too. I’d travel, now, if I could.

And PS – just to show that someone out there has brains as well as a sense of humour – here’s an NBC website for Crime Scene, Scene of the Crime, starring Sarah and that Baldwin brother.

I’ve mentioned before how I think Nicholas Cage is the great spawn of Satan, his hairplugs the horsemen of the Apocalypse. He’s as clunky and long-faced as a camel, and no director should ever, ever ask him to run and expect the audience to still take him seriously thereafter. But dammit, he still gets roles in the films I still hanker after seeing. (Aliens blow stuff up – I’m there.) So I knew it’d have to suck it up and take myself along to Knowing.

In this tale, a time capsule dug up from a high school yard includes a note that appears to give the dates, GPS coordinates and casualty rates of all major accidents over the last 50 years. Spooky. Old Nick becomes a bit obsessed by this, and tries to make sense of it all before the whole world implodes. But do you know what? the results are really not half bad. The special effects are engaging, with the kind of gasp-worthy violence you just don’t usually associate with this kind of movie, the supporting cast (including the astoundingly lovely Rose Byrne) are solid, and even Old Nick steps off the ham-gas for a moment and throws out a vaguely nuanced and interesting performance. Grudgingly I’ll capitulate; he’s good in this.

The movie is not without its flaws – some of the things these folks do are unaccountably dumb – and you’ll either love or hate the ending. But you know that’s not why I’m here. I loved the fact that Knowing has a real All-American feel about it, particularly the high school scenes, yet it was virtually all filmed in and around Melbourne, Australia. Not all Aussies loved that, of course – see this report in The Age; as the author notes, why not just set the film in Melbourne? It’s the perfect place to make a movie about the end of the world….

Who is the mysterious Half Blood Prince? What is a Half Blood Prince? Why Half Blood? Oh, and what is Ron Weasley wearing on his head? Yes, Ms. Rose is back from her holidays, so it’s back to a diet of kids’ movies and constant questions for me. And Harry Potter is back too, so that’s fortunate for all of us. The only trouble is I haven’t read the books and I haven’t seen a single HP movie since the very first one, so I’m not entirely sure what on Earth is going on…..

Anyway: is it a good film? Yes, but also no. All I can tell you is that the HP world – part English Heritage, part flight of fantasy – is incredibly well-realised, and the usual roll-out of Brit Thesps is impressive as ever. (Helena Bonham Carter plays herself, I believe….) However, the whole Boarding School thing still gives me chills, so that was kind of off-putting. And having once been a teenager myself, I believe there’s not a chance in hell that Harry and Hermione (both too pretty by far) wouldn’t have been snogging themselves silly, just to see. Hermione and that really ugly redhead? – not so much.  It also takes a while for the action to get going, so that by the time it does, you’re kind of mentally already heading for the exit.

JK Rowling – now as rich as Oprah of course, but apparently just as nice – notoriously insisted that this remarkable fantasy world be created only in England. So much for “Runaway Production.” Tour Operators the country over must be rubbing their hands with glee.