All about the cinema

Monthly Archives: March 2010

The Spy Next Door movie review: Jackie Chan – Hollywood’s preeminent kung fool

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 [...]

Win a double pass to Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood

Cinetology readers have the chance to win one of five double passes to attend the Dennis Hopper & the New Hollywood exhibition, which runs at Melbourne’s Australian Centre of the Moving Image (ACMI) headquarters until April 24. Here’s the official description: When Dennis Hopper’s radical road movie Easy Rider was released in 1969, it signalled [...]

MICMACS movie review: a crowd pleasing French gem with laughs and smarts

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 [...]

The top 5 yet to be made movie remakes

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 [...]

Titanic to return in 2.8D

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 [...]

Cop Out movie review: Kevin Smith’s screwy salute to buddy cop comedy

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 [...]

Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant movie review: been-there-done-that vampiric mishmash

“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; [...]

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo movie review: windy, gnarly, exhausting Swedish thriller

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 [...]

Trailer Watch: Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps

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 [...]

The Men Who Stare at Goats movie review: amusing it-might-be-real WTF? entertainment

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 [...]

Christopher Nolan discusses third Batman movie

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 [...]

Corey Haim dies, age 38

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 Green Zone movie review: feeble, fatigued war flick

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 [...]

Dear John movie review: prescription necessary

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 [...]

2010 Academy Awards results

What looked like it was going to be one of the most predictable Oscars ceremonies in living memory shaped up to be…one of the most predictable Oscars ceremonies in living memory. It was a night (well, day in Australia) in which the odds-on favourites prevailed in virtually every category. Mo’Nique won for Precious, Christoph Waltz [...]