Martin Cuff Consulting

On the plus side, Anonymous offers enough of a dynamic, vividly realized world of late Elizabethan England to make my inner geek backflip. Shot in Babelsberg Studios in Germany, the movie presents a pretty pungent portrait of muddy streets, stylised court life, and most excitingly, the immediacy of the Globe Theatre where theatre-goers are close [...]

In Children of Men, it’s the near-future and society has collapsed following the startling infertility of the entire human race. Duck-footed Clive Owen plays Theo, an unambitious academic who becomes embroigled unwillingly in the idealistic plans of his terrorist ex-wife. It is one of the most visually striking, thought-provoking films of recent years, with some [...]

And now for something completely different. Along with my fine colleagues from the USAID Serbia Competitiveness Project, I’m attending World Travel Market in London. According to the blurb, “World Travel Market is a must-attend four-day business-to-business event where the global travel trade meets, networks, negotiates and conducts business under one roof.” Last year, 187 countries [...]

Green Zone takes place in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Saddam and the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction in Baghdad. Of course, it turns out that WMDs – on which, you’ll recall, the case for war was made – are notable only by their absence. But rather than continuing just to ask [...]

A silver dollar moon, flanked by wild, apocalyptic, Dali-esque clouds emerged over Sarajevo Film Festival’s famous outdoor cinema yesterday; an apt counter-point to Woody Allen’s more mundane, kitchen-sink comedy “You Will Meet A Tall Dark Stranger” appearing on the massive screen. It’s an ensemble piece about a group of disgruntled Londoners. These are all glass-half-full [...]

Brash, bold, chaotic – and that’s just the location…… Guy Ritchie’s latest film RocknRolla, feels like it’s the third part in a trilogy of cockney-esque crime capers (see. Lock, Stock etc.) – and that’s no faint praise. Back in London again, the Wild Bunch – a loose group of small time conmen handsomely lead by [...]

The only thing I can actually remember about the Seventies are the electricity blackouts (no homework!), the shooting down of the Viscount Hunyani and ABBA. Evidently I missed the joy of Afros, Swinging, Toffs, Cockney Gangsters and espionage. Fortunately the Bank Job movie starring Jason Statham and an unusually plausible Saffron Burrows recreates the whole [...]

As if day-to-day reality wasn’t quite scary enough, a lot of South African literature focuses on the what-ifs? of a post-apocalyptic Azania. By that, I don’t mean post-nuclear apocalypse as it might normarily apply to you good folks in the rest of the world. I mean post-liberation, post-independence, post-ANC apocalypse. Time and again, books (though rarely movies, which rely on government funding) [...]