I admit Westerns are generally a genre I avoid, but this remake of a 1969 John Wayne film serves up perfectly entertaining fare. Possibly no more than that, but an amusing way to pass a couple of hours for sure.
The core of this film is Mattie Ross, the spunky 14-year-old played impressively well by Hailee Steinfeld, and her relationship with slurring drunkard bounty hunter Rooster Cogburn, delightfully portrayed by Jeff Bridges. She hires him to find and capture her father's killer - cue sweeping American landscapes, horses in sunset, and plenty of gunslinging.
For all their place as darlings of Hollywood's quirky fringe, this is the first time the CoenBrothers have managed to generate over $100 million at the US box office, so clearly it went down very well across the pond...
Boxing has generated a film genre all of its own. As a sport, only baseball has inspired more films. But there's something about boxing that is intrinsically cinematic: the build up and climax; the mano-a-mano face-off; the psychology; the brutality. The fact that one unguarded split second can be a reversal of fortunes that makes or breaks a career.
Any new boxing film has a grand legacy to live up to. Rocky, Raging Bull and Million Dollar Baby all feature in IMDb's Top 250, and indeed in the annals of silver screen legend.
So, does The Fighter compete?
Almost.
It's the true story of "Irish" Micky Ward's career, often held back by his autocratic mother-manager and his gregarious crack-addicted half-brother. Micky Ward was known for his fighting style rather than his winning record - his ability to take a relentless beating in the ring, without quitting, and then somehow summon up the power to fight back made him the most televised fighter in boxing history.
The core of this film is the relationship between the two brothers, played by Mark Wahlberg and Christian Bale. It's compelling stuff, with a satisfying climax. And then, just before the credits roll, we see a clip of the real Micky Ward and Dicky Eklund which is enough to believe that the actors have captured the characters perfectly.
I watched the UK trailer for Biutiful again the other day, and I've decided that I like it very much. I love a trailer that doesn't need to tell me the whole plot, and this one is really compelling with its unsettling snapshots, beguiling music and grittily poetic voiceover.
For me, the single most important feature of a great trailer is that after watching it, I don't know what's going to happen in the film - but I desperately want to find out.
Here are some more trailers that really got my juices flowing...
First, possibly my favourite film of all time. I was ridiculously excited by this trailer when I saw it in the cinema. I couldn't wait to find out what was happening in that train station with people disappearing everywhere. And I'd never heard Mr Blue Sky before - what a song.
In a way I think it's a shame that this film is cursed always to be compared to the graphic novel. As an independent endeavour, it's a film of remarkable scope and vision - and the trailer boldly announces it as such, to the apocalyptic strains of Smashing Pumpkins.
Who needs dialogue? This teaser does an extremely good job without any at all. The imagery is very creative; I remember particularly liking the wallpaper pattern shirt. And, once again, a great song - although the full trailer used an even greater song (albeit arguably to less effect), Such Great Heights by The Postal Service.
Tarantino gives good trailer. For a start, he knows how to choose a tune. The scene that made me want to watch this movie was the one where Uma Thurman's character raises her sword and the army of armed men encircling her all step back in fear.
Probably one of the first films I ever wanted to see based on the ads and trailer alone. Iggy, tits and that painfully cool Choose Life monologue that was plastered on every University student's wall for years afterwards.
Based on the posters, the title and the subject matter this film looked like a dud. But two things excited me about it. First, David Fincher in the director's chair. Second, this trailer.
Pixar need a mention for their generally brilliant teaser trailers, sometimes a year in advance of the film itself, showing the characters up to some amusing mischief that makes you crave to see more. I was so psyched about WALL·E that I consumed every clip, preview and behind-the-scenes sneak peek that Disney cared to release.
Truth is, I can't think of a tenth favourite trailer. So, for now at least, here's an honorable mention to all those high concept trailers that make you laugh and promise so much - but then the film itself fails to deliver. Coming full circle, this trailer features Mr Blue Sky again.
A fragile but technically brilliant dancer in a New York ballet company is selected for the lead role in a production of Swan Lake. As she rehearses, the pressures mount from all directions - from her sinister mentor, her overbearing mother, her jealous friends and her dismayingly carefree rival.
The main character, played heroically by Natalie Portman, teeters on the brink of nervous breakdown and a catastrophic fall from innocence. The upshot is an alarmingly effective psychological thriller that had me crying with empathy, cringing at the body horror, and squirming with anguish on her behalf.
Portman clearly poured her heart and soul into this role. She had previously trained in ballet (as a child), and resumed her training a year before filming began - so much of the dancing is genuinely her own performance (including the painful-looking en pointe). The role was obviously physically challenging; she suffered a dislocated rib and a concussion while filming the dance scenes. One can imagine that she brought some of the stress and strain of preparing for her demanding performance into the role itself.
Never have I had so much trouble getting tickets at my own local cinema; this film is proving immensely popular. No doubt partly due to the royal fervour stirred up by the imminent marriage of Prince William to Kate Middleton.
A hot tip for the Oscars, this movie appeals on three levels. First, as the compelling personal story of how King George VI - with the help of his speech therapist Lionel Logue - coped with having power thrust upon him when Edward VIII abdicated. The two lead roles are played brilliantly by Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush. The filmmakers had access to Logue's previously undiscovered diaries, so they had a first-hand account on which to base their portrayal of his relationship with the King.
Secondly, the film appeals as a period piece, full of glimpses of 1920s and 30s London shrouded in fog, when cars and wireless radios were a novelty and everybody of note spoke with impeccable RP. Nowhere are the charming traditions and antiquated strictures of interwar Britain more pronounced than in the halls of the monarchy.
And thirdly, for being set against a time of great crisis for the monarchy, for Britain and for the world, when tensions and attitudes built up to a flashpoint that culminated in the declaration of World War II - a war that marked the watershed between the British Empire and the modern world we know today.
The cinema audience clapped when the credits rolled, even though I doubt any of the makers were there to appreciate the gesture. I wouldn't be surprised if the same thing happens at many other screenings - there's just something about the pomp and ceremony of the film that rouses one to spontaneous applause.
Click here to hear the real King George VI's radio address to the nation on September 3rd 1939, the titular speech of the film. Listening to the King's halting words, it is easy to imagine Lionel Logue in the recording booth with him, gesturing and encouraging him to overcome his stammer.
I was looking today at the BFI's Ultimate Film Chart, the all-time top 100 films based on UK cinema admissions estimates. Quite a few unexpected entries on there. Like, did you know that the fifth most watched film in UK cinema history is Spring in Park Lane?
I got to wondering, is The Sound of Music's 30 million seats sold as impressive as the 28 million seats sold for Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, given that the UK population grew significantly in the 27 years between the latter film and the former? What proportion of the UK population attended these films?
So, I plotted seats sold and UK population on the same graph. The x axis is films (in chronological order), and the y axis is 000s of people and 000s of seats sold.
The three big peaks, in chronological order, are Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (59.1% of the population); Gone with the Wind (an impressive 73.2%); and The Sound of Music (55.5%). Of course, those proportions assume each person only attended once, which is plainly flawed, but still the trend is clear. In terms of proportional attendance, the golden age of cinema is far behind us.
Danny Boyle is a legend. He dares to be different, and his string of exceptional films has continually redefined the British film industry.
Many of us have seen a newspaper clipping and thought it would make a great story - Danny Boyle took Aron Ralston's visceral survival story and turned it into a film that is brilliantly conceived, excellently written and very stylishly directed.
The movie grabs your attention right from the off with Free Blood's Never Hear Surf Music Again (click the link for a free download), which sets the tone for a challenging and profound journey. The pace manages to keep you perched at the edge of your seat - with thrill, and then anguish - despite spending much of the screen time focussed at the bottom of one cavern.
For me, this is one to be experienced in a cinema rather than at home. Not for the beautiful scenery, but because I totally forgot I was sitting in the front row of Screen 3 of the Brixton Ritzy and I felt like I was there with him. That night, when I closed my eyes to go to sleep, images from the film ghosted before my eyelids.
James Franco's performance in the lead role is faultless. His reactions are often refreshingly unexpected, which adds to the realism and boosts the ruthlessly unsentimental treatment of the story.
Seeing the real Aron Ralston at the end made for an emotive finale, although a clip of the actual footage would have been the coup de grâce - a missed opportunity perhaps.
Ralston comments here on the authenticity of the movie: "They filmed in the actual canyon... the scenes in which I walk up to the spot where the accident happens were filmed there, then the actual accident – where the boulder tumbles – was shot on the sound stage, but from moment I am free they are back in the real canyon again. The rappelling scene is the actual place I rappelled, the pool I drink from is the real pool and the hike out of there is the same hike. The effort they went to bring all those details and that accuracy is incredible."
Dreamworks Animation has had nothing like the consistency of Pixar’s output, but has produced some great films along the way: Antz, Shrek, and its partnerships with Aardman Animations stand out in particular.
To those stand-out films, I would be tempted to add How To Train Your Dragon.
Set in a fictional world of dragon-besieged Vikings, the weedy protagonist discovers a revolutionary secret - the dragons aren't necessarily all that bad. The story that ensues, based on Cressida Cowell's book, is wonderfully inventive and action-packed, with some beautiful imagery. It would kick ass in 3D.
So, the deadline for the Terry Pratchett Prize was yesterday - and I just managed to meet it.
It was back on Friday 8 October that I decided to try and finish my science fiction novel in time to enter the competition, at which point 15,000 words were written.
I finally reached the end of the book on Tuesday 28 December (and then spent three more days on a quick edit). I wrote 70,000 words in 81 days - that's 864 words per day on average. My wife stuck a graph on the wall to help me keep track.
Now I know what it takes to get the words out; the next step is to get it published. Being shortlisted (or even winning!) the competition would be a dream come true; failing that, I'll make a go of it on my own. And, meanwhile, I'll get to work on the sequels. :)
It's been an ambition of mine to complete a publishable novel for nearly a decade. Mission complete. (And yet, only just begun...)
This film is critically acclaimed, particularly for faithfully depicting the last days of the Third Reich from a lesser-known perspective (inside the Führerbunker), and for breaking the taboo of having a German actor portraying Hitler. Indeed, Bruno Ganz's much parodied performance is exceptional.
Some controversy was stirred by the perception that this movie renders Hitler as a fallible human being rather than an inhuman psychopath - although I agree with the critics who argue that such an interpretation is probably more realistic (after all, he was sufficiently charismatic to seduce a nation into barbarism), and it certainly doesn't go so far as to inspire sympathy for the man.
But beyond these worthy features, this films feels basically like a dramatised feature-length BBC-style documentary. Granted, a high quality and involving documentary, but it's hard to shake the feeling that you're sitting through a rather interesting lecture instead of an epic historical film.
Bernd Eichinger's script relies on several historical sources including Traudl Junge's autobiography (the film includes archive footage of an elderly Junge herself speaking about her stint as Hitler's secretary in the bunker); and Director Oliver Hirschbiegel made efforts to accurately reconstruct the look and feel of the bunker. So, you can expect a good dose of historical accuracy, although there are also notable omissions such as the widespread rape of German women by Soviet soldiers after the capture of Berlin.
A disturbing bit of trivia from IMDb: The button that Adolf Hitler removes from his jacket and gives to Magda Goebbels is a Gold Nazi Party badge, awarded to high-ranking party members who had constant membership from 1925. Hitler gave himself Badge No. 1 in 1933, even though he was not the first party member. The Soviets found the badge in the bunker and it was stored in a vault at the Lubyanka, the KGB headquarters. In 2005 the FSB, the Russian Federation successor to the Soviet KGB, put the badge on display. In November that year, it was stolen in a brazen smash-and-grab raid. The burglar escaped even though he triggered the display alarms. So far, it has not yet been recovered.
I worry about the mindset of whoever has that on display in their living room.
This gloriously unconventional film gets its interest from politically incorrect black humour and extended sequences of subtle tension. It's a drama of consequences, occasionally contriving unlikely coincidences to make its point, but pulling it off with style in the end. Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson excel as the protagonists at the core of the film. With an emphasis on characters and quirkiness instead of action, these hit men with hearts deliver a crackingly entertaining story.
Irish-English writer-director Martin McDonagh had previously made a short film called Six Shooter, which I watched immediately afterwards. The short had all the quirkiness and darkness of his feature-length effort, but without the satisfying neatness. He's a playwright by trade, which perhaps comes through in his writing, and it's fascinating to watch his development as a filmmaker. He must have been pleased as punch with a BAFTA, an Oscar nomination, opening Sundance, and a worldwide box office of $30million. The Bruges Tourist Board must've been dead pleased too. I wonder what he'll do next?
Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis look like they're having a lot of fun wearing lacy frocks and high heels, and Marilyn Monroe steals the show with her boop-boop-a-doop style.
Some Like It Hot was released at the end of the repressive 1950s at a time when the advent of television was threatening, and the influence of the Production Code's censorship restrictions was weakening. Director-producer Billy Wilder challenged the system with this gender-bending comedy, filled with sexual innuendo, unembarrassed vulgarity, free love, spoofs of sexual stereotypes (bisexuality, transvestism, androgyny, homosexuality, transsexuality, lesbianism, and impotence), sexy costuming for the well-endowed, and a mix of serious themes including abuse, alcoholism, unemployment, gangsterism and murder.
Stories abound of Marilyn Monroe's erratic behaviour on set, often showing up several hours late and forgetting her lines. She suffered from stage fright and refused to leave her dressing room, or sometimes insisted numerous retakes of simple scenes until she was satisfied. She apparently required 47 takes to get "It's me, Sugar" correct. After take 30, Billy Wilder had the line written on a blackboard.
She disliked Tony Curtis after hearing that he had described their love scenes as "like kissing Hitler." In his 2008 autobiography, Curtis notes that he did make the statement to the film crew, but it was meant as a joke.
During filming, Monroe discovered that she was pregnant. She suffered another miscarriage in December 1958, as filming was completed. None of this troubled personal life comes through on screen, though; all we see is Marilyn's trademark sultry dumb-blonde magic.
I'm on day 34 of my mad challenge to write 1000 words a day and get my novel finished by the end of the year.
It generally takes me at least a couple of hours, and sometimes twice that, to come up with 1000 reasonable words - so fitting that in around my day job has been challenging.
I've recently been suffering from a touch of stir-crazy since realising that I'm still not even halfway through and I have barely spent any time with my wife (who, bless her, has been remarkably supportive), let alone my friends and my films, for over a month.
At least, during the month of November, I'm in good company. Thousands of wannabe writers are torturing themselves in a similar way for NaNoWriMo. They're aiming to write 50,000 words in 30 days (about 1,700 per day) - I've so far managed a piffling 27,000 in 34 days (about 800 per day).
Yes, that means I'm currently 7,000 words behind. Well, I've got the day off tomorrow, and there's still a couple of hours left before I conk out today...
I handed in my MA Creative Writing dissertation a couple of weeks ago, and I was intending to focus back on screenwriting - with a mission to write the next low-budget indy breakthrough hit.
But then I saw the Terry Pratchett Prize, for a debut novelist writing a time travel story set on Earth. I happen to be a quarter of the way through writing a comic science fiction novel about a time travelling janitor. Destiny?
So I've set myself a challenge to finish it by the deadline - that's 1000 words a day until 31 December. I've only been doing it a week and I'm already behind... to work!
In 1999, David Fincher captured the zeitgeist of a generation brimming with pre-millennial angst in Fight Club. Now, a decade later, he's done it again. The Social Network is today's zeitgeist, and this time it's a true story. An important story that needed to be told.
It's a completely different film to Fight Club, of course, but it displays just as much confidence, humour and darkness. The Social Network tells how brainiac Mark Zuckerberg went from nerding out in his Harvard dorm room to becoming the world's youngest billionaire, thanks to inventing Facebook.
Aaron Sorkin's screenplay is based on Ben Mezrich's book, which in turn is based mainly on the testimony of an embittered Eduardo Saverin, who had to sue Mark Zuckerberg to get his credit for co-founding Facebook. Unsurprisingly, Eduardo Saverin's character comes across the best in the film, if a little naïve. (Brave to make an unflattering film about real and very litigious people...)
The real Mark Zuckerberg refused to be involved in the production of either the book or the film. So it's hard to say how accurate the story really is, but it's damned entertaining. And, personally, I believe the ruthless, asocial, quiet, brainbox version of Mark Zuckerberg that is portrayed in this film. I'm willing to see him as a bad guy. After all, he is responsible for a website that allows such despicable activity as Holocaust denial groups to flourish, whilst irrecoverably removing accounts - without warning - such as my friend's just because his Facebook name was David IHateFacebookAldhouse.
And this man, Mark Zuckerberg, who is now 26 years old and worth $6.9billion, controls the personal details of over 500 million active members. That's one out of every fourteen people in existence. Scary.
At the time of writing, this film is scored 8.2/10 - more than enough to get it into the Top 250 if it had enough votes. That's my excuse for blogging it here, although to be honest I would have made up any excuse to talk about this exceptional film.
What makes it exceptional? It is set entirely in a coffin. Remember Phone Booth? That was a brave film (and so cool), daring to be set almost entirely in a phone booth, in real-time. Well, Buried is braver still.
Ryan Reynolds gives an intense performance as the only actor on screen. The film is claustrophobic and tense throughout.
Chris Sparling's script is a work of art - it reads like a breathless thriller, full of darkness and satisfying little twists. This is probably the best film that could have been made from it, managing to hold your attention for the full 95 minute running time with creative camera angles and only occasionally overbearing music.
Oh, and the Saul Bass-inspired posters for this film are beautiful.
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