Martin Cuff Consulting

In Limitless, Bradley Cooper plays Eddie Morra, a grungy, feckless, kind-of-despicable no-hoper, whose life is completely transformed on consumption of a teensie leettle pill. Said pill is engineered to activate the bits of brain that normally go unused – that’s quite a bit of brain for Mr. Morra – thus turning Bradley from homeless-looking dude (incl. ghastly frizzy ponytail!) to the smokin’ hot King of Awesomeness we secretly know for certain that he is.

There are complications of course – there’s a plot involving a number of corrupt businessmen and their lawyers, a zippy Russian mobster (stand-out performance – the actor’s Welsh for God’s sake), some rather deadly side-effects and a sweet-faced girlfriend, but I can’t tell you too much about that. Because once Bradley’s cleaned himself up a bit and is working the hand-tailored Italian suits, I kind of lost interest in everything else. Actually, that’s unfair; I thought it was pretty entertaining, and it’s visually interesting too.

Although there are a handful of establishing scenes in New York – most notably the Wollman Ice Rink in Central Park, site of a pivotal chase scene for the much-abused girlfriend – Limitless mostly filmed on soundstages in, wait for it, Philadelphia (of all places….) I thought it felt authentic. It also filmed a bit in Mexico – there’s a nifty racing scene through Puerta Vallarta involving a very product-placed Maserati: (more…)

In Cowboys and Aliens, it’s 1873 and a skinny, craggy Daniel Craig awakes in the Arizona desert with no recollection of who he is nor how he got there, and with a strange, beeping, modern metal bangle strapped to his wrist. When he arrives at the nearest town, it’s attacked by aliens with vastly superior fire power, and Daniel joins a posse alongside a surly rancher (Harrison Ford) to track them down and rescue the girl.

That’s it in a nutshell. It’s not a deep plot, all things considered. The Western part of the mash-up is very well done though – everything from the horses to the dust to the costumes feels stylish and authentic. (It also filmed in Plaza Bianca just outside Santa Fe in New Mexico, where we hosted Cineposium a few years back). The aliens bit of the mash-up is less well done however, which is a bit disappointing really. The best thing about Cowboys and Aliens – apart from Daniel Craig in chaps, of course – is that the movie is played completely straight. Not a witty quip from a mouthy African-American side-kick in sight.

There’s a bomb on a commuter train heading for Chicago. We know this because, in Source Code, we see it explode. And then we see it explode again. And again. And again. And each time, an army pilot Colter Stevens (doe-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal) who’s working for a secretive new military time-travel program, is sent back in eight minute chunks, to try and find the bomber and change the course of the future….

So it’s a doomsday-ish sci-fi thriller – think Twelve Monkeys meets Murder on the Orient Express – and Jake is really rather good in it. He is of course acted off the damn screen by the inestimable Vera Farmiga, who plays his cool but conflicted operator. We mostly see her seated, looking directly into camera, and the emotions flickering across her face are remarkably subtle and nuanced. Jeffrey Wright too is excellent as the slimy inventor of the Source Code. Michelle Monaghan as the sappy saccharine-sweet love interest, I frankly just don’t get. Anyway, Ms. Monahan aside, it’s worth taking out on dvd.

As for locations, well there’s only so much you can do with a railway carriage and the inside of a military lab. Without giving away too much of the plot, there is one image in Jake’s flashbacks that stand out: of the Cloud Gate in Chicago’s Millenium Park. Cloud Gate – known to locals as “The Bean”, for obvious but somewhat unimaginative reasons – is a public sculpture by British-Indian artist Anish Kapoor that looks like a giant shiny mirrored drop of liquid mercury. There’s a bit of an a-ha moment about this when the whole thing wraps.

The Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a glossy re-imagining of how the world of the seventies Sci-Fi tv series – where talking chimps rule the world and humans are dumb slave labor – comes about. This time, a crumply scientist (James Franco) tries to cure Alzheimers and creates a brain potion that’s tested on chimps in a slick, impersonal animal testing facility. This new potion heals chimps with damaged brains, but does even more remarkable stuff to apes with healthy brains, advancing their intelligence and reasoning exponentially. And when one of the test subjects begins to object to his cruel and unusual treatment at the hands of impersonal scientists and sadistic welfare workers alike, it’s the dramatic turning point in simian-human relations….

The film is set in San Franscisco, and several city landmarks, notably the zoo and the Golden Gate Bridge, are front-and-center visual icons in the film. However, the film mostly filmed in Canada – the domed roof of the chimp rehabilitation facility is actually the Pacific National Exhibition Center sports facility.

But is it any good? Well, yes, actually – it’s compelling and entertaining and engaging, mostly due to the efforts of CGI-enhanced performance of Andy Serkis as Caesar the chimp. Rise in fact pulls off quite a remarkable feat; for the first time I can ever remember, the movie concludes at the threshold of the humiliation of vicious, kak-handedly brutal and thoughtless mankind, and it feels completely right and proper to celebrate the end of the world as we know it. Having created such sympathy for Caesar, it will be interesting to see how future films (and believe me, there will be more films) turn these apes into the human-like monsters of the original series.

Fast Five is the latest in a series of shoot-em-up actioners staring Vin Diesel and Paul Walker. The films seem to be about a gang of honorable car thieves, from what I can tell. (No, I haven’t seen any of the earlier ones, but I’ve seen enough trailers to have a bit of an idea of what’s going on.)

By the time of Fast Five, the ridiculously good-looking team (well, not Ludacris, obviously, but just about EVERYBODY else is drop-dead) has assembled in Rio. Against this atmospheric backdrop, they cross paths and swords with a crime boss who wants them dead, and an elite squad of the FBI who wants them behind bars (cue man-mountain Dwayne Johnson) and all sorts of shenanigans follow. A roof top chase through (or rather over) the shanties is particularly energized; the grand finale car chase through the streets is literally gravity-defying. So it’s all a bit silly really, but a more than entertaining-enough way to spend a flight, if you ask me.

I remember a few years back, being quite astonished that Paul Walker – something of a charisma-bypassed nobody – was demanding (and getting) $10 million a movie. And let’s face it, at that time, the high point of his career was that truly awful adaptation of Michael Crichton’s Timeline. Well, ten years later he’s still here, and strangely, I think, his earlier woodenness has morphed instead into what passes for commendable acting restraint. Here, I thought, he was worth every cent.

Super 8 is cracking entertainment – tense, stylish, snappy and extremely loud. Produced by Spielberg and directed by JJ Abrams, it’s a cinematic mash-up, pitching the kids from Stand by Me onto the set of Cloverfield. Set in small town Ohio in the early seventies, a group of nerdy kids shooting their own zombie movie witness a horrific train crash. Then, in the aftermath, as deadpan military folk start picking through the debris, things start disappearing from town – metal, dogs, the sheriff – and the kids realize they’ve captured something pretty astounding in the lens of their Super 8 camera.

Super 8 actually filmed in Weirton, West Virginia, and the State’s film office (hello Pam) has done a bang-up job of pulling together a behind-the-scenes site about the filming on location, with official pics, interviews with the crew, and photos showing the transformation of Weirton back to 1973.

So: setting aside the schmaltz of the dead-mom-estranged-dad-lonely-kid scenario, the movie is just about pitch perfect throughout and the kids, yes even the Fanning, yes perhaps especially the Fanning, are really great. It’s probably my must-see movie of the year.

Aliens arrive. They blow shit up. Skyline is just my kind of movie. Except it’s not, really. It’s sort of Cloverfield-in-LA, but way less atmospheric. Everyone tries hard enough (scream!) and the sfx are really quite chilling at times, but it kind of goes nowhere and it left me all a bit meh. If I tell you Skyline was made by the same folks who brought you the truly godawful Alien vs Predator – Requiem, you’ll kind of know what you’re in for.

Strange thing: I don’t know why it bothers me, but in these films I get distracted by the physiognomy of the aliens. How did they evolve? And if they all evolved from the same single celled organism over billenia, then why are they all so ridiculously different. (eg in Avatar, why did the horses have 6 limbs but the Na’avi just 4.) It’s sloppy thinking and it doesn’t make sense.)

Anyway, I digress. Skyline is set in Marina del Rey / Venice, and you can actually stay at the Cove Condominiums at 13650 Marina Pointe Drive, where the movie is set – if you’ve got $5 grand a month to drop on rent.

In February 2002, then US Defense Secretary, the charmless sociopath Donald Rumsfeld said of Iraq: “We know there are known knowns: there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns: that is to say we know there are things we know we don’t know. But there are also unknown unknowns — the ones we don’t know we don’t know.” That Donald Rumsfeld, he was a moron.

Unknown, starring that unlikely action hero of the moment, Liam Neeson, is certainly more entertaining than the hunt for WMDs, (as well as a lot less costly in terms of both human life and financial capital.) In it, Neeson plays a Doctor who’s just arrived in Berlin with his frosty wife in order to give a speech at some bio-tech convention. However, he’s in a car crash, and he comes to a few days later suffering with amnesia. But not only has he forgotten much of his own life, his wife also seems to have forgotten him. No, really; she’s married to someone else. Smell a rat? Well so does Dr. Liam, and he heads off through the Berlin underworld to try to regain his identity and prove he’s not completely frakkin mad.

So, good film? Yeah, I enjoyed it. It’s more B than A movie, in spite of its aspirations. The car chases are good. January Jones isn’t. Think Taken, with a twist or two for luck. Berlin as a setting looks cold and miserable. (Emanuel Levy has good stuff on the filming.) German Diane Kruger perplexingly appears as a Bosnian (what?) And the bridge that caused all the trouble is the Oberbaumbrücke, which crosses the Spree river and was once a border crossing between east and west. So now you know.

Late in the day, two extremely cute boys, and some arbitrary chick scam a free pass on a chairlift at a ski resort. Through a cruel twist of fate, the lift stops with them dangling high above the snow, and then the lights go off, and the temperature drops, and the resort staff go home – not just for the night, mind, but for the week. What would you do? With the drop? The hungry wolf pack? The frostbite? That whining girl?

Frozen doesn’t, as it has been billed, “do for skiing what Jaws did for swimming.” But still, it all sort of works. Did I mention the extremely cute boys? There. That’s my last word on the matter. Frozen filmed in Snowbasin, Utah, the oldest continuously operating ski resort in the US, and one of the main venues of the Utah Winter Olypiad. Fact sheet here.

I caught Across the Universe on tv the other day. It’s the Julie Taymor-directed piece that flung Jim Sturgess into the spotlight, using Beatles songs to move the story forward. (Each of the six leads sing their little lungs out on screen – and jolly well too, it must be said.) At first this conceit struck me as a little bit formulaic and copy-catty – riding on the bandwagon of the whopping success of shows such as Glee and movies such as Mama Mia!- until I realised it was released in 2007 and thus predated both sing-a-long phenomenons by quite a bit. Without the cultural framework of the later productions though, I can see how this one falls flat(ish).

It’s the story of a chap called Jude who travels to the US to find his war-time father, and falls in with a wealthy drop-out called Max and his beautiful sister Lucy (Evan Rachel Wood – on top of everything, she even sings, dammit.) The storyboard of their lives is punctuated by Vietnam, the draft, hippy culture, the Detroit riots (not sure how that slipped in), and the anti-war movement – all to Beatles tracks rearranged and belted out anew.

Two iconic locations appear in the film: Liverpool’s famous Cavern Club ( a great pastiche at the opening of the film, highlighting the radical differences between Scouser Jude and the debutante Lucy) and Princeton, where Jude’s real Dad works as a janitor. Anyway, I must admit I mostly enjoyed it until it got a bit trippy and cartoony (a nod to Yellow Submarine?) and by then it had been too long and too irritating. You can see why Julie Taymor keeps getting the gigs though, even if she doesn’t quite pull it off.