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.

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.

I realized again this week that no-one in my family and only a few in my circle of friends actually has much of a clue what I do for a living. This video on the making of The Hobbit in New Zealand I think offers a first class insight into the requirements of filming on location. Now film commissions don’t actually organize the logistics of on location filming themselves – that’s the production’s job. What a film commission does, on behalf of the local community, is to promote their specific locations as a great place to film, and then ensure that it actually IS a great place to film – by coordinating and promoting available crews and equipment and services and labor and permit issuing bodies, so that filming is easy and the maximum amount of money is spent in local area. And at the AFCI, I now coordinate between all of the governments in the world who offer this unique service to the film industry – we also provide the definitive training for Film Commissioners, and we host an annual event in LA where film commissions gather to market their destinations to Hollywood.

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.)

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.

So I’m sitting here imagining an alternative marketing push for the movie Melancholia…… “It’s about this huge meteor, right, that’s heading straight for earth, right, so it’s a race against time coz its gonna kill, like, everyone, right? And it’s got Kiefer Sutherland from 24 in it, and also that Swedish dude who’s the vampire in True Blood, and it’s got Kirsten Dunst, right? and she gets her whole kit off….”

Oh yes, how easily things can be spun. Melancholia is indeed a film about the end of Planet Earth – and Melancholia is also the huge planet that’s about to slam into our little blue marble. Kirsten Dunst plays a woman suffering from both depression and a truly frazzled and fucked-up family. But the thing about depression is, when shit falls apart, you remain entirely cool and collected, and as Melancholia approaches, Kirsten’s weepy dead-beat becomes the only one in the family who holds it all together.

So the worst thing about the film (aside from director von Trier’s Nazi jokes) is that it is extremely slow. The absolute best thing about Melancholia (aside from KiKiDee, who rocks) is the graceful, atmospheric Swedish estate of Tjoloholm Slott where it was filmed. It’s the kind of elegant place the Vanger’s wished they had the class and refinement to inhabit.

In Abduction, teenager Taylor Lautner discovers his face on an abducted kids website. But the site is a scam, the front for an evil Serbian mastermind who wants to……oh hell, I really don’t know why I’m bothering to tell you all this. Because, sad to say, Abduction is awful.

See, on the surface, everything about Abduction starts off pretty peachy. The buff up-and-coming post-tween star, the thrilling plot of espionage, electronic surveillance and stolen identities, all at a run – even some really kind of A-list stars chalking up some screen time. But then it all goes wrong.

It’s not that it’s badly made or badly acted particularly; it’s just that no-one behaves with any emotional authenticity whatsoever. Your life’s in danger? Buy a soda. Your folks are murdered? Meh. Your cover’s been blown? Hang out in the kitchen. You’ve reached a place of safety? Make a phone call. Honestly, there’s narry a single character in the whole 90 minutes who behaves in any way like a normal human being, and it ultimately (or actually pretty quickly) derails the entire experience. It’s like watching someone else play Sims.

Abduction filmed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania – for tax credit reasons, apparently. Hampton High School, where Nathan is schooled is actually a real school in Hampton Township, just north of Pittsburgh. The school’s name and mascot, the Talbot, appear in the film, as well as real students, cheerleaders, and the marching band.

PS and am I the only one who thinks TL is a dead ringer for that sulky chess prodigy Magnus Carlson?…..

I read something recently that disturbed me. The scurrilous Daily Beast article suggested that we only love Emma Stone because she’s the convenient cutsey redheaded replacement for Lindsay Lohan. I’d like to respond to that idea most vigorously and most sincerely: that’s just not true. I love Emma Stone because she’s bright and funny and quirky and she’s got that husky voice and that expressive face and she’s got absolutely perfect comic timing. Also, she’s not a selfish drug-addled thieving minx. I would pay to see Emma Stone in just about anything. I would not pay to see Lindsay Lohan in anything, except prison overalls.

Take the snappy, smile-worthy Easy A for instance. Emma plays Olive, a highschooler who tells a little lie which gets completely out of control and ends with her (quite unfairly) being tarnished as the school slag. Can you imagine being outraged if Lindsay had been so besmirched? I thought not.

So, I loved the film, I thought it was heart-warming (serious!) and I laughed out loud too. Easy A filmed entirely on location in the California town of Ojai. filming90201.locations has a photo spread of the choice ones. I’d actually never heard of Ojai until later that very same day when, spookily enough, I happened to read it was where Reese Witherspoon got married. So now you know.