Martin Cuff Consulting

I know. Matt Damon sunk low in a family tear-jearker about a widower who – guess what? – buys a run-down zoo. On the whole it’s completely dreadful – Elle Fanning plays home-schooled like she’s a a lobotomized moron, and Scarlett Johansson grins her way through the reflective bits with the glee of a complete [...]

I guess when you’re Steven Soderbergh, you’ve got your pick of A-listers prepared to do bit parts in your films. And I guess you also get to pretty much choose where you’re going to shoot. And I guess, therefore, when you’re Steven Soderbergh, and a script like Contagion lands in front of you, you get [...]

It’s Rugby World Cup time down-under, and the Springboks are once again attempting to bludgeon their rivals into submission. I never quite know who to support here, being English AND South African, or Irish-Welsh-Scottish ancestry, with dollops of emigration to Argentina, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and the United States along the way. And I even [...]

The Cohen Brothers’ remake of True Grit, starring Matt Damon and an incomprehensible Jeff Bridges, filmed in New Mexico – I’m guessing because of the incentives as much as for the pristine Old West landscapes. You all know the story of the prissy teenage girl who hires a bounty hunter to track her father’s killer [...]

The Adjustment Bureau takes on some pretty big themes; fate, faith, chance, luck – good and bad – predestination, God. None of that matters though, because all you want is for the damaged Matt Damon to find love and happiness with the effervescent Emily Blount…. Stubby Matt (no favours done by that ill-fitting suit) plays [...]

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 [...]

I knew someone once who was a prolific and inventive liar. When he came to South Africa to visit, he was so busy dishing out the whoppers about his relationship with a certain Royal that the whole story ran away with itself for a while. I didn’t follow the fall out – I’d drifted away [...]

Here’s the most ridiculous thing: the bad guy in the WWE franchise movie The Marine was originally written for Al Pacino. As we now know, Al Pacino has completely lost the plot recently and has displayed less-than-zippo integrity when it comes to his choice of movies. Yet even he, even Pacino, turned this ludicrous concoction [...]

To be really honest with you, I’ve always found Matt Damon a little bit ikky. I don’t know why. There’s something snub-nosed and stubby about him that’s kind of gross; thick ankles, no doubt. How unfair of me is that?!? Particularly since he’s turning into a pretty fine actor. In The Good Shepherd, Robert de [...]

Martin Scorsese’s excellent The Departed was on TV the other night. Set in Boston, the violent tale revolves around a gangster (played smarmy by local boy Matt Damon) who infiltrates the police department and a cop (aced flat and hard by Leonardo DiCaprio) who infiltrates the gangs. When it becomes clear that there’s a mole in each [...]