March, 2010

Jackie Chan was once Asian cinema’s greatest special effect: a one man fireball of high octane chopsocky action – all rapid fists, scissor legs and spinning body parts. Now 55, the old gray mare, as they say, just ain’t what she used to be. Those famously elastic limbs don’t move so fast no more and [...]

The latest delightfully screwy French film to be lacquered with the flaky aesthetic finesse we’ve come to expect from director Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Delicatessen, The City of Lost Children, Amélie) is a loopy take on a league of heroes story, driven by a character who has a bullet lodged in his brain and can die at [...]

My good mate Action Dan (a nickname he has earned for his tremendously entertaining high octane personality) has a special talent. Actually the man has a great many special talents, but for the purpose of this post I shall focus on just one. Give Dan the name of any well known Hollywood movie and he [...]

James Cameron has pledged to haul Titanic back to the big screen in a remastered 3D format. Inspired by the unprecedented success of Avatar, the “game changing” blockbustepic that has elevated 3D cinema to the next level of popular appreciation, Cameron will re-jig his 1997 sinking ship spectacular, which gobbled up more than $2 billion [...]

The title of Kevin Smith’s latest slacker comedy, Cop Out, is exactly that. It was going to be known by a more appropriate name – A Couple of Dicks – but pressure from studio executives put an end to that. Cop Out marks the first time Smith, a veteran yoof-speak writer/director, has directed a screenplay [...]

“Wanna become a vampire?” Larten (John C. Reilly) asks his soon-to-be apprentice Darren (Chris Massoglia), a clean-cut teen who sneaks out of his house one fateful evening to see a travelling freak show and ends up growing fangs and napping in coffins because of it. “It’s a lonely life, but there’s lots of it.” Indeed; [...]

Adapted from the first instalment of one of the most popular Swedish book series of all time, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is a long, windy and impossible to figure out whodunit with a sadistic sting in its tail. Common consensus seems to be that author Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy books are the biggest [...]

Almost a quarter of a century after Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas) bought his way into the chambers of elite corporate screen villainy comes the slippery character’s belated return in Oliver Stone’s Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps. Stone will use the global economic downturn as a storytelling backdrop, in turn exploring a topic virtually untouched by [...]

In The Men Who Stare at Goats, George Clooney, Jeff Bridges and Kevin Spacey play fearless Jedi warriors who use the force – though they never actually call it that – to control minds, run through walls and telepathically murder animals. But SCI-FI geeks ought to note that this film has absolutely nothing to do [...]

In an interview published this week in the LA Times director Christopher Nolan shed some light on the future of his brooding reimagining of the Batman franchise, which began with 2005’s Batman Begins and roared into gear in 2008’s The Dark Knight. The British filmmaker says he plans one more instalment, which will round the [...]

Another 80s heartthrob has gone to that big B movie in the sky. Actor Corey Haim, most famous for his role as Sam in Joel Schumacher’s schlocky vampire hit The Lost Boys (1987), has died from a rumoured drug overdose. He was 38. Haim is often associated with fellow 80s star and best friend Corey [...]

The latest woozily edited action flick from Bourne director Paul Greengrass is The Green Zone, an on-the-ground Iraq war movie that strings together an exhaustive conga line of action scenes in service of an ultimately simple hypothesis: that the existence of WMDs was a lie concocted by American “intelligence” and used by the U.S. government [...]

The following “review” is actually a direct transcription of a conversation that took place between myself and my ever-reliable neighbourhood GP, the inimitable Dr Shonk (the Crikey legal department insisted his name be changed due to privacy concerns). I brought to our appointment my Dictaphone pen and a peculiar sickness of which no medical dictionary [...]

Director Tim Burton, who is currently receiving a right royal rogering from roughly half the critical populace (according to Rotten Tomatoes) for his characteristically dark interpretation of Alice in Wonderland, is set to produce a biopic of sorts about Abraham Lincoln. The operative words in that sentence are of sorts, and that’s being fairly generous [...]

A reminder, dear readers, that tomorrow is Oscars day and I will be live blogging the ceremony from 12pm onwards. Simply head over to the Crikey homepage to join myself, the Crikey team and The Enthusiast’s Mel Campbell for an afternoon of hilariously droll Academy Awards commentary. Woot, as they say, woot.