Martin Cuff Consulting

When I say As it is in Heaven is a Scandinavian Sister Act, I mean no disrespect to either movie. Both films feature a wild-haired, fish-out-of-water protagonist who unwillingly becomes involved in teaching harmony to a characterful, cacophanous choir, thereby allowing both choristers and choirmaster to discover joy and music, independence and community, redemption and love. There’s even a [...]

Strangely enough, I wasn’t really looking forward to Quantum of Solace, the 22nd Bond offering. In South Africa, movie critics roundly labelled the movie as dull, muttering that the artsy German director couldn’t “do” action, and they hinted darkly that the demise in standards marked the end of the Bond franchise globally.  So to be honest, [...]

Ok, now that the movie’s finally out, it’s probably finally safe to talk about this….. Although Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull features all sorts of Cold War triple agent spy-jinks and McCarthy-esque witch-hunts for hidden Reds, it would appear that most feared were those who might have tried to steal the movie’s secrets. The final [...]

Caught Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel on tv again last night – a beautiful, gut wrenching and entirely appalling exposition of the confusions and mistakes and misunderstandings that separate us. In light of the xenophobic wrath unfolding in Johannesburg right now, it’s a timely reminder of umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu – our humanity connects us, a person [...]

The sister of our very fabulous friend Di lives in Winnipeg in Canada. Why any sensible, sun-drenched South African should make a life in a city where the average temperature is minus three, and it’s dark for nine months of the year (ok, it isn’t really, it just seems that it is) is beyond comprehension. [...]

In the greater scheme of things, how an interfering official in the State of South Carolina dealt with the filming of the new Jessica Biel, James Marsden, Jake Gyllenhaal movie Nailed is a lesson on how not to engage with the film industry. In Nailed, Biel’s character Alice is a sweet, small-town waitress who gets a nail lodged in [...]

Anyone whining about the lack of success of the South African film industry need only to look at a movie like Pieces of April to understand what we’re doing wrong. Written and directed by Peter Hedges, April is a small, personal film, well told.  It stars Katie Holmes (post-Dawson and pre-Tom and therefore appealing) as an [...]

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 [...]

Based upon Marvel’s iconic Super Hero, Iron Man tells the story of Tony Stark (Robert Downey Jr.), a billionaire industrialist and genius inventor who is kidnapped by the Bad Guys and forced to build a devastating weapon for them. Instead, Tony builds a high-tech suit of armour and escapes captivity. Upon his return home, Tony [...]

I’ve mentioned before that I’m something of a Tudor history buff; I didn’t perhaps mention why. I grew up in a remote part of rural England, in a small village that happened to be near the birthplace of the infamous Anne Boleyn. Anne is the first historical figure I ever really became aware of, and my entire [...]