Martin Cuff Consulting

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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It doesn’t happen quite so much these days, but there was a time when you mentioned living in Africa and people thought there were giraffes in the street. I did live in Zimbabwe for a while and I remember startling a zebra once, when out on a morning run (the run being more unusual than the equine, quite frankly). I also can vividly recall the moment, out canoeing on the Zambezi, when I realised that log-shapes in the the water all around me were crocodiles. Good times.

Anyway, I recount this because I caught Rogue on DSTV – a great little Australian movie about a monster croc that’s chewing its way through the good folks of the Northern Territory. It stars Radha Mitchell and Michael Vartan, but there’s also Sam Worthington – pre, but very much on his way to, meteoric fame. In short; there’s a tour boat, it sinks, the ill-assorted survivors struggle to an island, but the island’s going to be below water by nightfall….. And guess who comes out to eat at night?

So what can I tell you? Well to be honest, there’s very little to fault. The characters, though familiar, are well acted and their psychologies feel real enough given the limited amount of time we spend getting to know them. The animatronic croc is great, the scenes are tense and the Kakadu National Park in Northern Territory stands out as a completely gorgeous but utterly ruthless backdrop. (Me, I’d be freaking about the snakes.) Interestingly though, the nocturnal scenes were not shot in the Northern Territory; the director used a specially built island in the midst of a lake in the Yarra Valley in Victoria.

OK, I’m back in the saddle after a marvellously lazy Christmas break; the grand total of my efforts being 1. opening the wine (thank heavens for screwtops) 2. rolling to the pool 3. nope, that’s about it.

So since the spectacular Avatar, I’ve not seen any movies except a few Almodovar oldies on dvd – but I’ve been reading books; Going Dutch, about the military invasion of Britain in 1688 that’s since been spun as the Glorious Revolution, Nathaniel’s Nutmeg by Giles Milton, about the Spice Wars of the 1600’s and the unlikely land swop (Manhattan for the tiny island of Run – say what??), the latest Kathy Reichs, a Swedish zombie novel, a dreadful, dreadful Scarpetta (I will read no more Patricia Cornwell, and I just don’t care that Lucy’s a goddam lesbian) as well as a History of the Balkans. I’ve a few movies in mind for the weeks ahead though.

As for 2010 itself, it promises to be a busy one again – back to Serbia in Feb, Locations Trade Show in LA in April, Cannes in May, FIFA Soccer World Cup in June & July, England in August, Serbia in September again…….. So, happy New Year.

2012 is from Roland Emmerich, so you know it’s going to start with a lone scientist with his mouth open, staring at a flickering monitor going “Oh My God”. You also know there’ll be some quasi science and a bit of cultural history – here the link to the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. There’ll be some cliched stereotypes entirely interchangeable with previous films – the divorced family, the cute kids, the alienated nutjob, the skeptic, the snarky Jew, the radio host. And then there’ll be some special effects…….

And how!! In 2012, Emmerich revisits the CGI images of his previous end-of-days melodramas and pumps them chockablock full of disco biscuits. It’s not just the White House that’s destroyed, it’s the whole of the East Coast. Los Angeles? Pah! The whole of California slips and slides into the sea. New York flooded? Try the whole planet!!

And I suppose that’s my only problem with this rollercoaster film: the special effects are so spectacular, so astounding, so vast, so entertaining, that they’re impossible to take in. Fortunately a decision was clearly made to cast good actors, so the human interest is maintained. But it’s difficult to take too seriously a story arch that wipes out India and then expects you to be moved over the rescue of a small, flat faced dog.

I’d still say it’s a must see, if only for the ride. And Cape Town survives, which has to be a good thing, right?

Steven Soderberg goes all Casablanca on us, with a black and white, forties-style film noir, The Good German. George Clooney plays Jake Geismar, a war correspondent in Potsdam, Germany, for the Post Armistice conference held by the victorious Allies. It starts as a murder mystery, when his venal, vicious snotrag of a driver is pulled out of a river, but it switches into something altogether more intriguing: the search for the sole witness to the war crimes of a Nazi Scientist. The Americans want the Scientist for their own rocket programme, but they can’t have him if he’s uncloaked as a bad German…..

So, though it falls far short of being a thriller, The Good German is nevertheless a solid yarn that’s not only well told and well acted, but is finely crafted with the tools of Forties’ Hollywood. It shot largely on sound stages in LA, but a lot of the footage is actual Russian archive that’s been spliced into the whole.

Of all the made-on-location movies I’ve seen this year, I think Knowing, staring the original child of evil, Mr. N. Cage, was probably the most surprising; I really had no idea it filmed in Melbourne. And with no little irony, another movie about Satan’s progeny also intrigued me. Set in Seattle, Whisper actually filmed in Whitehorse, Yukon. The only thing I know about Whitehorse is that Tahmoh Penikett’s from there. Don’t ask how I’d know that. I just do.

Whisper’s the chilly tale of a kidnapping that goes badly wrong. Hired by an absent mastermind, a gang of misfits snatch a creepy eight year old boy from a Christmas party and retreat to a snow-bound cabin in the woods to wait for further instructions. But the boy – the son of one of the state’s wealthiest women – is not as innocent as he seems, and he begins whispering evil little suggestions to each of the gang members that make them turn on each other, and on themselves. Clearly a corker of a B movie, but it’s not without some entertainment value.

Tarantino brings World War II to an explosive and entirely non-historic end with The Inglourious Basterds. Basically it’s a double story thread – a group of American Jews are behind enemy lines, killing (and scalping – a real yeuch) Nazis. And a Jew who runs a Paris cinema gets a chance to revenge the murder of her family. Neither thread meets or even has an inkling what the other is doing, and only the Nazis themselves provide the common link.

All I can say is check out the performance of Austrian actor Christoph Waltz as the Jew Hunter – a chilling portrayal of how the most civilised country in Europe could produce such urbane brutality. His multi-lingual performance is awesome. Diane Kruger is also extremely good and looks the part, magnificently. Brad Pitt reminded me of George Bush, which is not so good.

A lot of the production took place on the set at Babelsberg Film Studios in Germany – a location allegedly used to create the kind of Nazi propaganda that appears in the film. (Cool thing: you can even order a Tarantino crew jacket here) External scenes were however shot in the town of Bad Schandau in Saxony, a spa town on the Elbe, just 6kms from the Czech border.

By the way, having sat through Tarantino’s (gross, captivating, entertaining) revision of history, I’ve just been reading a George RR Martin short story about time travel and mind-reading in the time of nuclear war that’s set in the Swedish stronghold of Sveaborg during the Finnish war of 1808. Now that’s eclectic.

I love Sandra Bullock. I love her because she’s funny and beautiful and self-deprecating, but mainly because she reminds me of my scouser friend Helen, with whom I lived and studied and worked for too many years to recount. Watching Sandra Bullock is like they stuck a hidden camera in our living room and stole our lives.

The Proposal – Ms. Bullock’s latest outing – is a predictable, nice enough rom com. Here she plays a career bitch Canadian who’s threatened with deportation to Toronto. To save herself, she conjures up a plan to marry her sweet, put-upon, eye-candy assistant, Ryan Reynolds, and as part of the deception, she joins him for a weekend with his family in Alaska. Cue lots of tottering power heels on soggy grassy lawns. Done to death as a concept, but still carried off well enough.

On the negative sides, Mr. Reynolds spends nowhere near enough time shirtless, which would seem to me to be a bit of a waste. Also, I don’t mean to be nasty, but ( – and unlike Helen, I might add, who remains gorgeous – ) Sandra’s a little long in the tooth for too many more romantic lead roles; she’s looking a wee bit taut. Interestingly also, in spite of a lot being made of the Sitka, Alaska, location – and the locations do indeed look like Sitka – the movie shot almost entirely in Massachussets, with the snowy peaks etched in on green screen.