Martin Cuff Consulting

In Cowboys and Aliens, it’s 1873 and a skinny, craggy Daniel Craig awakes in the Arizona desert with no recollection of who he is nor how he got there, and with a strange, beeping, modern metal bangle strapped to his wrist. When he arrives at the nearest town, it’s attacked by aliens with vastly superior [...]

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 [...]

Oh I so so so nearly loved Paul. Nearly, but not quite. It’s about two harmless British sci-fi geeks who’re attending Comic Con in San Diego (actually Albuquerque Convention Center) and then heading off on a road trip to some of the American South-West’s most iconic sci-fi sights and sites. Heading towards Roswell, New Mexico [...]

Thor was a nice film. Entertaining enough. I liked Kat Dennings channelling Justin Bartha as the dry Riley Poole sidekick. I like Chris Hemsworth better without the hair. I love (of course) Natalie Portman. But it felt like watching a tv show. Nothing wrong with that per se, but I don’t see it being a [...]

Oh, I really, really wanted to enjoy Let Me In. As you know, I loved the originals: the book – Let The Right One In – and the Swedish movie of the same name. And I even relished the idea of the story reinvented the Mountain States (though I wish Colorado’s incentives had won it [...]

Clearly I have developed Tourettes: since last night’s movie Did You Hear About The Morgans?, I’ve been blurting out all kinds of ill-advised and off-colour swear words at inopportune moments. The Morgans starts on tricky ground for a comedy – an estranged NooYoyk couple, her wounded, him pleading – witness a murder and are whisked [...]

In The Book of Eli, Denzel Washington plays a mysterious stranger moving through a shattered post-apocalyptic landscape of dessicated ghost towns and cannibalistic marauders carrying the only surviving copy of the King James Bible. This magical book possesses the power to save mankind and must be protected at all costs. Think Pale Rider meets The [...]

A couple of random things. 1.) A couple of years back, I took a road trip through New Mexico. I thought it looked like the Klein Karoo. 2.) I read a short story book about Zombies while in LA. And 3.) I also just finished reading Cormac McCarthy’s bleak (and a little pointless?) book The [...]

Three movies and a tv series later – all of which, remember, were about actually stopping Skynet and the nuclear war – and the Robots of Terminator Salvation have indeed taken over the world. The grown-up John Connor, method-acted into snarly oblivion by the increasingly unpleasant Christian Bale, is now some sort of post-apocalyptic messiah, [...]

GQ magazine is running a feature on road trip essentials that directs you to Taos, New Mexico (a remarkable arts colony in the middle of nowhere that I was lucky enough to visit en route back from the Santa Fe Cineposium last year.) Legendary scary-person Dennis Hopper lived in Taos—physically, anyway—in the sixties and seventies, [...]