Martin Cuff Consulting

I know I’m supposed to love Pedro Almodovar, and I’m meant to have a man-crush on Penelope Cruth. But with Broken Embraces, honestly, I just can bring myself to. It is of course a beautifully made masterpiece of happy beginnings that implode erratically, of loves and jealousies and secrets and simmering Spanish passions in a film that is, typically, passion-less; here blind filmmaker Mateo Blanco revisits the story behind the loss of his sight, and his tangled love-triangle with an actress and a Chilean gazillionaire.

Yet even the Almodovar touch and the Cruth delivery can’t save it from being choppy, uneven and frankly a bit boring. Some of the “action” takes place on the black sands of Lanzarote.

The political awakening of my teenage years coincided with growing pushback against Nuclear Weapons in Britain. Greenham Common, CND, Fred and Hilda Bloggs in When the Wind Blows, that horrific documentary about radiation sickness: these were all vivid, naked fears, and Nuclear Winter was an oft-imagined dread.

Although it doesn’t ever express what’s actually happened, Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, nevertheless reveals a scarily familiar landscape of post-apocalyptic horror. Scraggy Viggo and his boy child are struggling across country, away from vicious cold and yet more vicious humans. Everything has collapsed; society, agriculture, humanity. It’s dystopian, tragic and (I felt) hopeless – in spite of the small act of kindness in the closing scenes. I’m not sure, really, what value such a movie brings – well made and faithful adaptation though it is.

Anyway: so where do you go when you want to film society’s total disintegration? Pittsburgh, apparently (ah, the mysteries of Pittsburgh….) “It’s a beautiful place in fall with the colors changing, but in winter, it can be very bleak. There are city blocks that are abandoned. The woods can be brutal,” said Director John Hillcoat of his choice of location. Filmmakers also shot scenes in parts of New Orleans that had been ravaged by Hurricane Katrina and on Mount St. Helens in Washington, which of course was flattened and burned by the deadliest and most catastrophic volcanic eruption yet on American soil. The Road itself is the Abandoned Pennsylvania Turnpike – 13 kilometres of bypassed roadway.

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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Legion starts off with such promise: a small group of mismatched (but well cast) strangers gather in a run down (but carefully art designed) desert truck stop. An unusually massive storm is rolling in from all sides, and suddenly the TV, the radio and telephonic contact is cut. They’re completely isolated. This is all painted so broodingly and so ominously, it’s almost Stephen King….

But then, then, Legion goes badly wrong. Like off-the-rails-head-on-speeding-train-smash wrong. It doesn’t help that after laying such interesting foundations, the unfolding plot is complete baloney – snitty God sending Legions of Angels to wreak an apocalypse on hopeless humans. (Legions are associated with Demons, surely, and Demons, not Angels, have the bad attitudes and the pointy, rippy incisors? – there’s only so much myth-revisionism you can swallow before the ability to suspend disbelief is choked.) It also doesn’t help that much of the action unfolds at night, and it’s all so badly lit that you just can’t tell what’s going on. But by this stage, neither do you care.

Incidentally, the deserted truck stop was purpose built for the movie in a place called Galisteo in New Mexico – one of those really-small-town-USA’s which has a stonking great population of 265. The filmmakers were searching for a location that looked like an iconic truck stop in the Mojave Desert, so they built it in New Mexico. “This was one of the first locations I saw,” says the Director. “And I knew that this was the spot. It had great vistas in all directions and a physical concavity that suited the situation. If you filled this area with water, it would pool at the diner and that’s kind of what happened to our characters.”

More on the Making of Legion at the SciFiTVZone.

I knew someone once who was a prolific and inventive liar. When he came to South Africa to visit, he was so busy dishing out the whoppers about his relationship with a certain Royal that the whole story ran away with itself for a while. I didn’t follow the fall out – I’d drifted away in embarrassment by then – but all I can say is that I didn’t find being press-ganged as an enabler of someone else’s fantasy life very amusing at all. I added no exclamation mark whatsoever to that experience….

All this is probably why I found The Informant! so troubling. Matt Damon plays chubby Mark Whittacre, a bumbling, haphazard, self-destructive senior manager at a food production plant who seems to lie for the hell of it. He becomes a snitch about the company’s humungous price fixing tactics, but at the same time he’s ditching dirt to the FBI, he’s simultaneously defrauding the business of millions of dollars on his own count. All very uncomfortable.

The movie shot in Decatur, Illinois – the actual location of the true-life drama. It also filmed at Whitacre’s own family “compound” just outside the village of nearby Moweaqua (pop. 1923).

It pains me to say it, but Killers, starring Katherine Heigl and a buff Ashton Kutcher, feels like Mr. & Mrs. Smith Lite. It’s about a spy whose past catches up to him, much to the chagrin of his nerdy wife and her omnipresent parents. The Hollywood Reporter was withering, calling it “an action comedy that nearly renders the term an oxymoron.” That’s perhaps a tad harsh. But whilst it’s fun enough, the action scenes are good enough, the dialogue is sparkling enough, Catherine O’Hara is scene-stealing enough, it still feels like something’s missing. I fell asleep in the middle, which should perhaps be a clue.

Location-wise, the opening scenes take place in Nice in the south of France – a beautiful and underrated city that was once the site of my very own Blonde Ambition World Tour. (I shall not kiss and tell about this, so don’t ask.) Nice is still high on my “emigration planning” shortlist and it appears in movies nowhere near often enough. The rest is shot in that Southern movie debutante now well and truly established in society, Georgia. The town of Douglasville – allegedly “where Atlanta keeps its charm” – served for exteriors. And here’s a little known factoid; the same Douglasville was originally known as Skint Chestnut. Gotta love the naming habits of the semi-literate – though few can compete with SA’s very own desert town, Hotazel.

For a while I thought Roller Derby was a made-up sport, like Dodgeball, or Extreme Ping-Pong. Turns out there really is a competition where girls in short-shorts pummel the hell out of each while skooting round an indoor bike track on rollerskates. Who knew?! And the girls take on such rockin’ names too -  my favourite: Smashley Simpson. All this – the rules, the myths, the bruises – is marvellously evoked in Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut “Whip It!”

“Whip It” (so named after a killer move that’ll get the protagonist four valuable points on the scoreboard) stars the can-do-no-wrong Ellen Page as Bliss, a grunge-leaning teenager unhappily stuck in Bodeen, Texas, with a part-time job in the say-no-more Oink Joint, a postal mom (literally) who’s obsessed with beauty pageants and deportment, and a sweet-n-savvy best friend who’ll be on the first bus out after graduation. One fortuitous day Bliss stumbles upon Roller Derby and her life’s turned upside down. Sweet, funny and laden with friendship, it’s like a coming of age movie, but on wheels.

In spite of the strong Texas location, the production actually filmed in Detroit, no doubt taking advantage of Michigan tax breaks and the fact that warehouse space can be bought for a dollar an acre now there’s a recession.  To support the all-star cast of grrrrl-power, (Kirsten Wiig, Zoe Bell, Eve – awesome!), real roller girls were selected from local Michigan teams such as The Detroit Derby Girls, and The Grand Raggidy Roller Girls.

Here’s a Paramount Pictures map from 1927 showing which Californian filming locations could double for elsewhere? Can anyone say “Runaway Production?”

In Prince of Persia, Jake Gyllenhaal pulls off the tremendous feat of becoming at once both more butch and more femme. Shot in Morocco, the plot revolves around a regicidal Royal who – eschewing more time-tested methods of removing his royal rivals (eg poison, gutting, beheading etc.) – devises a really outraegously convoluted plot whereby he’ll declare war on an innocent country, steal a magical dagger from a princess, and turn back time to a pivotal moment when (boo hoo!) he should have been the future king. Jake sets out to stop him.

So: Ben Kingsley, as the baddie, eats the furniture, and Ms. Fields once again revives her recurring role as an undercover English princess – though quite how she ends up in that desert beneath that duvet is beyond me. But it’s Prince-Charmingly-haired Jake who’s the most perplexing: doe eyed and recently buffed, very early on in the film, those Deliverance words sprang unbidden into my mind: “He got a real purdy mouth ain’t he?”

After that, I couldn’t really concentrate.

Locations – or at least places – play a big part in Zombieland. Not least the fact that the characters are named after their all-American home towns, now lost to the Zombie apocalypse. The movie’s mostly a cross-country jaunt by a group of mis-matched travel companions, riding out the disaster and heading for Playland amusement park in Los Angeles where the youngest traveller had once had happier times.

I was interested to read though that the movie didn’t ever get as far as California; Playland actually filmed at the Valdosta, Georgia Wild Adventures Water & Theme Park. I also chuckled at the idea that the movie star mansion that features so grandly in the film, is not only NOT a Hollywood home – it’s an Atlanta mcMansion – it’s also for sale. Go ahead, gawk.

As for the movie – and taking into account my generally low-brow tastes when it comes to Zombie horror – I thought it rocked. Emma Stone exhibits a notable combination of beauty, vulnerability and grit, Woody Harrelson works his 501s quite nicely thank-you-very-much, and Jesse Eisenberg carries the film’s core role like a geeky super-hero. The plot is handled with aplomb and, on reflection, there’s an interesting subtext of loss that you don’t normally see in this kind of film. Especially a film this fun. Superior.