Martin Cuff Consulting

I’ll start right out by saying that He’s Just Not That Into You is set in Baltimore, and that’s perhaps the most interesting thing about it. A wry-ish look at the pitfalls and pratfalls of dating amongst an extended Chinese Whisper of friends and acquaintances, He’s Just was clearly conceived as some modern When Harry Met Sally – complete with mockumentary vignettes from completely unrelated people. Unfortunately it fails.

He’s Just Not Into You stars just about everybody except Cameron Diaz, but only Jennifer Aniston and that spunky little Irish-looking guy from Entourage come across as even vaguely authentic. I remember there was a lot said in the blogosphere about the heinous portrayal of the male gay best friends in the film but I didn’t find it at all troubling given that EVERYONE is a Twitter Update rather than a fully formed character. I’m not saying it’s not amusing. It’s just that there’s really nothing to work with, and nothing to hang the humour on except some really rather sorry social pathologies. I guess, I really just wasn’t into it.

And again smokin’ Bradley Cooper as an adulterer; I shall clearly have to have words.

I finally got around to seeing the Location Movie of the Year – The Hangover. Buying entirely into the mythology of “what happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas”, The Hangover features three friends who lose the groom at a riotous bachelor party involving drugs, strippers, hospitals, tigers and Mike Tyson. (not entirely sure which is scariest.) A lot of iconic Vegas locations appear – Caesars Palace, The Bellagio etc. And some other lesser known ones too. Location pics here.

But did I like it? Well, yes, sort of. I think I was a bit disappointed actually, given the hype surrounding the film. I was expecting fall-about belly-laughs, but ended with just smiling at most of the japes. I also think it’s partly because the main characters are actually all pretty unlikeable – one’s a dubious hen-pecked husband, one’s a scary pedophile who’s too close to the edge, one’s an adulterer. A very goodlooking, Bradley Cooper looking-smokin-in-every-scene-adulterer, but nasty nonetheless. Only Justin Bartha’s character emerges unscathed. So: funny, just not always funny ha-ha. Vegas will score some travellers though.

Oh God, the Eighties were execrable. It was an awful time to be a teenager; combine all that adolescent angst and hormones with atrocious clothes, dreary New Age music and really worthy self-absorption. I wonder how any of us ever survived it. Or survived it without being resoundingly slapped. I was reminded again of how ludicrous and cringe-worthy it all was with the delightful, quirky Brit movie Son of Rambow.

Set in a rural English private school – in real life the Ashlyn’s School in Berkhampstead – Rambow tells the story of Will Proudfoot, a sweet, imaginative young boy being raised by his widowed mother and the extended family of Good Christians (again, that oxymoron!) called The Brethren. Will is banned from music or television, so when he is exposed to his first home video – Rambo – his mind is blown wide open, and he joins forces with the cheeky school troublemaker Lee to make his own stunt-filled action movie.

I’m never quite sure what to make of Tim Burton’s movies. There’s always a bit of an ick factor that I can’t put my finger on – though the presence of the (and I don’t know how to say this kindly) repulsive Helena Bonham Carter probably has something to do with it. His movies always seems to have all the right ingredients, but they just don’t quite work together. So it was with some trepidation that I took Rose and Kazi to see Alice in Wonderland in 3D over the long weekend.

It’s a re-imagining of the Alice tale, so Alice is a decade or so older and about to be farmed off in marriage to some pale and chinless aristocrat. She’s a revisionist, grrl-powerish Alice, this one though, so she rebels against her fate and falls down the rabbit hole into Wonderland again. But Wonderland has changed for the worse in her absence; the Red Queen has won the throne, and enslaved the populace, and it appears that Alice is the only one who can stop her.

So Wonderland itself was a bit grim – it looked post-apocalyptic, and frankly the gloom of 3D specs didn’t help. Johnny Depp’s a shameless old hack too – The Hatter is Jack Sparrow before he went to sea. I did like the scope of the opening scenes that were shot on location however, when young Alice is being sold off like so much chattel for an alliance with a wealthy business partner; the elegant garden party looks completely beautiful. It was filmed at Antony House between the villages of Torpoint and Antony in Cornwall, England, a property managed by the National Trust but still lived in (by some cunning aristo plot) by the Carew Pole family. Some 250 extras from the villages appeared in the scene.

OK, so I’m jumping ahead of myself somewhat, but I’m back in Serbia for a couple of weeks of hoopla, including the first days of filming of Ralph Fiennes directorial debut Coriolanus.

Set in the early years of the Roman Republic, Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare’s most politically challenging examinations of the way power corrupts. Quite sharp then that the production aims to use actual tv footage of the mass demonstrations around the Serbian parliament building during the overthrow of Milosevic as an integral part of the production….

Now if only for a glimpse of Gerard Butler…..

Body of Lies is a strange film that’s handicapped to a degree by the fact that its two towering leads – diCaprio and Crowe – conduct most of their interactions telephonically.

DiCaprio plays Roger Ferris, a CIA operative in Iraq who’s distinguished from his fellow countrymen by actually liking the Middle East and Middle Easterners generally. But in spite of his fervour and relative decency, Ferris is continually undermined by his boss (Russell Crowe), a lard-ass cynic who observes and controls Ferris’ every move via real-time images from a high altitude spyplane. This way he also fucks up Ferris’ more sensitive relationships – budding girlfriend, Jordanian spy chief, Arab stoolpigeon, that kind of thing. The plot such as it is revolves around attempts to lure out a shady Bin Laden-ish recluse, mostly by prodding his ego via the creation of a fake rival terror outfit. Frankly they could have made a really good hour-and-a-half movie about that subplot alone.

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Silence on the film-watching front, mainly because I’ve been flat out on developing a Media and Legacy Centre for Africa’s biggest visitor drawcard – the V&A Waterfront in Cape Town.

Just a hop and a skip from the brand new Cape Town Stadium, the media centre will be offering a one-stop shop for premium media services, including:

• Press Conference venues and dedicated interview rooms
• Broadcast facilities including studios
• Dedicated camera positions throughout the V&A and at prime locations across Cape Town
• A media centre with hot desks, telephone lines, storage lockers, photocopy / fax etc.
• Video Production services
• Photographic Production services
• A/V and Photo Camera Rentals
• A/V and Photo Camera Repair
• A/V and Photographic Consumables & Equipment
• Photography Library
• Video Library
• Music Library
• Tourism services including flight bookings, accommodation, tours and transfers
• Concierge services
• Office Space for temporary Corporate HQs
• Conference and Meeting Rooms

Find out more at our swanky new website: www.waterfrontmediacentre.co.za

I don’t know why I do it to myself. I only watched the Hollywood remake of Bangkok Dangerous because we’re planning a trip to Thailand later this year and I was curious. It meant of course trying to set aside my qualms about Nicholas Cage, and sitting back to enjoy a panoply of exotic locations, from the Floating Markets to Buddhist Temples to the Red Light District. What’s not to like?

Um, everything, just about. Cage plays a gloomy assassin working in Bangkok for some shady thugs. He dies at the end. (There, I said it.) To be honest, I simply could never get beyond the truly appalling presence of the lumpen Mr. Cage himself. His face lift has made his skin as mobile as wax, his hairline is now somewhere back around the top of his shoulders, he’s got NO laugh lines, and that straggly fake hair sits on his scalp like a pair of crow’s wings that flap with a life of their own. It’s really bizarre, and it makes any scene he’s in completely unwatchable. The only salvation is his voice – which is grimly ironic given that the original Thai film featured a deaf hitman with no dialogue.

Bangkok looks fantastic though. According to ScreenDaily, Bangkok Dangerous brought in $5.8m (220m baht) to the Thai economy. Here’s a discussion page on some of the key locations.

The Redhead will be pleased; we finally watched Grace Kelly’s last film, High Society on pvr last night, and he insisted I blogged on its locations today. And look what glorious gossip I found: one of the main locations, Clarendon Court in Rhode Island, was later the place where the heinous Claus von Bulow allegedly topped his lovely lady wife Sunny. (she was found in an insulin coma on her bathroom floor and never recovered; his conviction was overturned and he was later found not guilty. blah.) And all in the house where Frank and Bing and Grace and Louis strutted their stuff. Imagine?

High Society itself was shot in 1956, and it’s always amazing to me just how much things have changed – in manners, in aesthetics, in class and race consciousness. But there’s as much in the film that’s still fresh, amusing and original; the marvellous Celeste Holm singing a line into a silver tureen still makes me smile. Grace Kelly too is beautiful and her performance here shows the kind of range, nuance and flair that we’ve all missed out on since she traded down her life with a very inconsequential European princeling. There’s no one really to match her today – Amy Adams perhaps, for talent, January Jones for looks?

The Mist, I’m pleased to report, is a fairly cracking little horror pic. Set in small town Maine (of course – it’s a Stephen King story) in the aftermath of a ferocious storm, the good townsfolk have hurried to the local store for supplies and repair materials. But across the lake, from the general direction of the top secret military base (of course – see above), comes a rolling mist that envelops the crowd of hapless shoppers. And then things turn bloody.

As a movie, The Mist works on so many different levels. There’s a great ensemble cast. The action, when it happens, is quick and brutal, the monsters are ferocious, implacable, otherworldly, the CGI is spare and beautiful, but there’s enough restraint to punctuate both action and dialogue with some terrific, pregnant silences. There’s never any real doubt that the humans inside are facing a dire and overwhelming threat. And yet The Mist is as much a lesson in group dynamics as anything, and Marcia Gay Harden’s Religious Crazy is as scary and pathological as any of the monsters that come out of the fog. And the end of the film – it’s SO not Hollywood. If you haven’t been short-changed by the trailer, I challenge you to guess which of the neat cross section of survivors are left standing.

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