Martin Cuff Consulting

Here’s something I believe fiercely: there is no monopoly on suffering. Show me how your forefathers struggled under the yoke of cruel brutality, and I’ll show you how mine struggled more. But perhaps more importantly, whilst the stuff my ancestors did to yours appalls me, the stuff my ancestors did to each other leaves me [...]

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 [...]

I’ve mentioned before how I think Nicholas Cage is the great spawn of Satan, his hairplugs the horsemen of the Apocalypse. He’s as clunky and long-faced as a camel, and no director should ever, ever ask him to run and expect the audience to still take him seriously thereafter. But dammit, he still gets roles [...]

And so to the other big location pic of 2008/9: Australia. I finally caught it on the very small screen – on the way back from Locations Trade Show 09. And what can I tell you about it? Well, I can see why so many people hated it, why the critics whipped themselves into a [...]

The Ruins starts with the typical premise of standard slasher-horror-fayre; a group of nice, naive, corn-fed American tourists wander off the beaten track and into the arms of particularly gruesome and bloody danger. The difference though is that the predatory threat here is not a mad-eyed axemurderer, but a land-locked island of mobile, talkative, carnivorous plants. It [...]

Due for release in November of this Year, Baz Luhrmann’s latest opus Australia is set in north of that country just before World War II. It revolves around an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who inherits a cattle station the size of a small European nation. When rival cattle barons plot to annex her land, she [...]

Someone up there was making a point; after the local release of the excellent Iron Man movie last week, the MNET Sunday night feature was Ghost Rider, another Marvel Comics superhero, this time starring Nicholas Cage. The story’s set mostly in Texas, though it was filmed in Australia at the Melbourne Docklands film studios and in a [...]