Martin Cuff Consulting

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.)

It’s been a really odd year, with exhausting travel, moving house and even the advent of a full time job (gasp). So there’s not been as much movie-going as I would’ve liked. Nevertheless, here’s my top ten movie-watching experiences of the year:

10. The Conspirator- thought provoking

9. Bridesmaids – “Really?”

8. No Strings Attached – Sweet

7. The Rise of the Planet of the Apes – Eco-warrior

6. Easy A – Emma Stone

5. Morning Glory – Rachel McAdam

4. Meek’s Cutoff – Sunbonnets

3. Immortals – Henry Freakin’ Cavill

2. Fair Game – taut political thriller

1. Super 8 – ET meets Stand By Me.

Serbs, white South Africans and Colombians – they’re the kind of tripartite alliance of Hollywood bad guys. They’re the go-to nations for cartoon-ish stereotype, the people you portray when you can’t be bothered to create any characters with genuine emotions or motives or personality. Ah well. In Colombiana, the lithe, balletic Ms. Zoe Saldana plays a Colombian-born assassin who’s hell-bent on finding the evil drug lords who killed her parents. The bad guys (cue slick hair, gold chains, nasally accents) are actually being protected in the US by a corrupt CIA agent. Zoe has to force them into the open, which prompts much bizarrely-plotted violence that’s supposed to mark her as brilliant but actually seems contrived and, let’s face it, risky. (murder by shark? I mean, really.)

Colombiana is not a bad film, considering the confines of its genre. I actually quite like revenge flicks – at least there’s a nominal reason for the brutality – and Zoe is kind of the female Jason Statham, mesmerizingly athletic, but with bigger hair.

Colombiana filmed in New York and Chicago, with Mexico doing stand in for Bogota. Which begs the perennial Film Commission question: when you’ve got idiot film-makers making a mockery of your country and your people, do you encourage them to film in your location, take their money and work like hell to make them at least feel a little guilty about their quasi-racist assumptions? Or do you block filming, only for the movie to be shot elsewhere where you’ve got absolutely no influence, leaving you to watch from the sidelines as your homeland is trashed? There’s no easy answer to that.

Crazy Stupid Love takes no time with set up, it goes straight for the sucker-punch. Steve Carrell plays Cal, a middle-aged Dad whose life falls apart quite spectacularly when his wife asks for a divorce. He’s jarred from his melancholia by the friendship of a handsome young player called Jacob (a pitch-perfect turn by Ryan Gosling) who recognizes something of his late Dad in the bumbling Cal. And thus Jacob re-styles Cal, teaches him the finer points of dating, and sends him out into the world. He’s only side-tracked from this Samaritan’s mission by the arrival in his own life of the delightful, charming fire-cracker Hannah (Emma Stone – let’s hear it for Emma Stone!) who turns his own world upside down. Throw in a love-sick baby sitter, a couple of scenes with Marisa Tomei, a brilliant Asian sidekick with nowhere near enough screen time, a bit of Josh Groban, crackling chemistry, great pacing and a really funny script, and you’ve got what’s actually a pretty delightful grown-up rom-com.

It also filmed in LA – I recognized several of the stores and walkways at the Westfield Century City Mall, where Jacob takes Cal shopping (Jacob: “Are you the billionaire owner of Apple Computers?” Cal: “No”. Jacob: “Oh, ok. In that case, you’ve got no right to wear New Balance sneakers, ever.”) Westfield is very pro-film, and sponsored one of the strands at the Produced By Conference last year.