Martin Cuff Consulting

Another up-and-coming: Predators. Hawaii-Texas locations. Utterly crap trailer, but no, really, I cannot wait….

I didn’t say I’d been doing NO film watching…… in fact I’ve been glued to the small screen for all 22 servings of Glee. Call me a complete Big Girl’s Blouse, but Talent this good makes me weepy. Sorry: completely true.

OK, so clearly there’s not been an awful lot of movie-watching going on, what with the World Cup and all on our very doorstep. Hence another look at what’s coming at us down the pipe. Inception looks awesome.

Mind-shifting thriller. Tick. Ellen Page. Tick. Joseph Gordon Levitt. Tick. Music by Hans Zimmer. Tick. Christopher Nolan directs. Tick tick tick. Oh, I am so looking forward to this one….

Whilst on the subject of remakes, the US version of the creepy Swedish chiller “Let the Right One In” is also nearing our screens. Made by the same guy who made Cloverfield, it was originally slated to shoot in beloved Colorado, but ended instead in incentives-rich New Mexico. Clearly understanding the maxim that “No Publicity is Bad Publicity”, the host town of Los Alamos has even allowed itself to be named in a movie that features (if the original was anything to go by) alcoholism, child abuse, bullying, pedophilia, poverty and gangs – let alone the small problem of Vampires in their midst. In the spirit of July 4th, I shall be generous and allow that Americans may be able to pull off English language versions of good foreign movies (even if Death at a Funeral sometimes proves they don’t even get the English bit right). The trailer looks like it rocks.

Honestly, I’ve never paid much attention to the artist currently known as Snoop Dogg; I’ve always just sort of zoned him out as someone entirely crass and lacking in talent – a kind of incomprehensible, ubiquitous Paris Hilton, but black.

Sometimes though, he’s just impossible to ignore. Boombox reports that Mr. Dogg recently “directly approached the government of Liechtenstein with a request to use the whole nation as a video set. While Liechtenstein is indeed very small (about 61.7 square miles total), Snoop was only rejected because the country didn’t have enough time to properly get things in order to meet the rapper’s timetable.”

The full story here. That puts a whole new spin on “Making Your Jurisdiction Film-Friendly.” Word.

Little gets the Redhead into a froth, but news that HBO is creating a mini-series out of George R. R. Martin’s bestselling ‘A Song of Ice and Fire’ novels was met with barely disclosed excitement in the Evans-Cuff household. The novels, set in a fictional and mystical land of kings and mercenaries and soothsayers and madmen, are indeed a thrilling “must read” (which almost, almost converted me to Fantasy novels) – so I trust that “Game of Thrones” will live up to our domestic hype.

And yet: where would you choose to film a mythical, medieval world of machievellian machinations where winter is indeed coming? Not Northern Ireland, surely?? Yet Northern Ireland First Minister, that hapless cuckold Peter Robinson, has announced that’s exactly what’s going to happen, stating: “In June, HBO will begin filming Game of Thrones in the Paint Hall – a nine part television series that could potentially be worth £20m to the local economy.” Read the full article on the Belfast Telegraph site. Paint Hall is a former Belfast shipyard converted to a movie studio, and most notably the site of production of City of Ember which, serendipitously enough I actually watched for the first time last night….

The casting for the film is complete and mostly pretty spot on. Live for Films also reports that the N.I production is now looking for extras – especially male, horse-riding ones. Details here. I could relocate for a bit. Honestly. Giddyup.

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.