March, 2011

After a brief discussion about alcoholic beverages — cocktails, beer, scotch and wine — I reviewed Adam Sandler’s new movie Just Go With It tonight (Thursday) on MTR with Luke Grant. Listen to the podcast.

The obvious question to ask of Mel Gibson’s new movie The Beaver, about a man who rediscovers the joys of life when he picks up a discarded hand puppet and starts carrying it with him everywhere — to work, in the shower, for a jog in the pack, etc — is whether this is the [...]

Just as the Twilight series took a grisly blood splattered genre and ran it through the Hollywood homogenizer, audience hands proverbially cupped to catch the sparkling blobs of cinematic cheese spat out of it, director Catherine Hardwicke’s Red Riding Hood takes a Brothers Grimm fairytale and turns it into a weirdly modernized version with a [...]

Did you think Avatar was a little long? Did you check your watch during Schindler’s List, shuffle in your seat during Dances With Wolves, wonder when Funny People would end or why Celine Deon’s heart had to go on and on and on in Titanic? Or perhaps you were one of an elite breed of [...]

Director Simon West’s The Mechanic is a briskly paced remake of a 1972 Charles Bronson film, with Jason Statham filling Bronson’s shoes. Statham has little to none of the weather-beaten grit that leaked from Bronson’s pores. Unlike Bronson he could slink seamlessly into the scenery of a Shampoo or Coca-Cola commercial, beach ball in hand, [...]

To mark the Australian theatrical release of acclaimed director Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Oscar nomiated film Biutiful, starring Jarvier Bardem, Cinetology gives readers the chance to win one of five in season double passes valid nationwide at participating cinemas from March 24. Here’s the official synopsis: Biutiful is a love story between a father and his [...]

What if Clark Kent was not actually Superman but a highly delusional nut case who could never fly and struggled to lift a coffee table? What if the movies we saw him in, the comic books and TV shows, were simply visual representations of his delirium? That isn’t precisely the premise of writer/director Leon Ford’s [...]

In a future obsessed with pill popping and designer drugs, think of the possibilities. Imagine if you could “learn” to fly a plane by swallowing a capsule. Imagine “reading” Dickens by taking a tablet. Want to speak fluent Spanish? Easy. Gulp down a couple of Spanadol and wait 2-3 hours. Adapted from a novel by [...]

No balanced cinematic diet is complete without the occasional burst of good ol’ fashion exorcising. The bar was raised early in the exorcism genre with William Friedken’s classic, The Exorcist (1973), and quality “power of Christ compels you!” ventures into cinematic sacrilege have since remained few and far between. In The Rite sceptical seminary student [...]

Inspired by grisly real life events in which a group of unfortunate friends found themselves stranded off the North Australian coast, helplessly bobbing in the water while a shark periodically visits them for a nibble, The Reef is a tense creature feature written and directed by Andrew Traucki. It confirms Traucki as the Australian film [...]

Comparisons between Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air (2009) and writer/director John Wells’ The Company Men are inevitable. Both revolve around the dark side of corporate life, where desperate people lose their jobs and their livelihood, but take starkly different approaches: the former a droll dramedy following a man who fires people for a living [...]

The title of writer/director George Nolfi’s SCI-FI action romance The Adjustment Bureau is one of the least enticing on the 2011 calendar. Those three uninspiring words do make sense in a story context, given they sound like a description of a government department and the film is more or less about one – though whether [...]

Veteran blockbuster director Steven Spielberg this week bought the rights to Guardian journalists David Leigh and Luke Harding’s book WikiLeaks: Inside Julian Assange’s War on Secrecy, kicking off a chain of events that will do doubt culminate in a Hollywood treatment of the notorious whistle blower’s story. It was always a question of when rather [...]

Ah, Bobby and Peter Farrelly. Those giants of gross out. Those titans of the toilet bowl. Those pharaohs of the fart joke. The world may have changed a fair whack since the brothers Farrelly began amusing and disgusting audiences in 1994’s Dumb & Dumber, but their trademark irreverence shows no sign of ageing. Their talent, [...]