August, 2011

Jim Carrey has embarked on what appears to be a kind of real-life Truman Show: an online video diary stacked full of clips of his personal life, spanning the surreal to the mundane. The head-scratching debut vid on Jim Carrey Tru Life, Jim Carrey’s Message to Emma Stone, could easily be interpreted as a creepy [...]

The first good look at director Bruce Robinson’s adaptation of The Rum Diary, which has been eagerly anticipated by Hunter S Thompson devotees for a few years now, is finally upon us, with the release of the film’s first theatrical trailer this week (you can watch it below). Thompson’s terrific book, penned in 1959 when [...]

Around this time last year I became embroiled in a heated censorship debate that began after I wrote a story about an illegal Melbourne Underground Film Festival screening of director Bruce LaBruce’s LA Zombie, which was slapped with an RC (Refused Classification) rating by the Australian Classification Board. Under the headline ‘Cops didn’t show, but [...]

Its retina-burning visual makeup and gaudy SFX instantly made Tron the stuff of cinematic legend, but is Disney’s 1982 cyber SCI-FI deserving of its status as a classic? The special effects have held up over time about as well as the original version of Pong looks juxtaposed alongside the latest 3D television. Tron’s dated look [...]

Director Will Gluck’s Friends With Benefits, starring Justin Timberlake and Mila Kunis as two hanky panky buddy protags, is a frothy old-skool-with-a-modern-twist rom-com that taps into a deep vein of Hollywood romance-making spanning Preston Sturges’s screwball heart slappers from the 40′s to Nora Ephron’s fatty fried coms of the 80′, 90′s and 00′s. Two recently dumped [...]

It’s true in cinema, as it is in real life: sometimes we look back through the haze of nostalgia and remember things to be better than they actually were. Conversely, sometimes we look back and — jaded by age, muddled by circumstance, or justified by something as simple as “not in the mood” — we [...]

It’s the cross-genre hybrid nobody was waiting for but fanboys who never knew they were fanboys will be giddily anticipating courtesy of the hype synonymous with producers Ron Howard and Steven Spielberg and the manic video game appeal of watching the anachronistic combo articulated in the title: Cowboys and Aliens. In Eastwood/Leone style, Daniel Craig [...]

In the genre of intergalactic world-at-stake superhero movies featuring purple aliens, talking fish and monsters that look like tangled wigs it is very hard to out-dumb the competition, but director Martin Campbell and star Ryan Reynolds give it an almighty crack in this mangled, scattershot adaptation of DC’s The Green Lantern comic book series. Reynolds [...]

47-year actor Andy Serkis, who I have previously described as “the greatest invisible actor in motion picture history,” made some interesting remarks earlier this week in a BBC interview about the recognition or lack thereof associated with screen performers who work extensively with CGI “make-up.” Serkis has played iconic characters in some of the biggest [...]

Part SCI-FI disaster pic, part creature feature, part invasion movie and part cross-species psychological thriller, director Rupert Wyatt’s hybrid Rise of the Planet of the Apes arrives burdened by the last four words of its title. They hang like an albatross around the film’s neck, drawing strongly negative low art connotations that began around the [...]

Note: this blog post is not a strictly accurate account of the last moments of the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, for reasons that will become clear once/if you read it… In the early hours of Sunday morning, the final day of screenings for the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, I woke up from a [...]

Director Kriv Stender’s all ages ode to the power and personality of a great pooch trots a fine line between sentiment and sop and consistently lands on the right side of the border. Inspired by the story of a stray kelpie in the 70′s who became an adored member of the small town mining community [...]

On Saturday August 6, the official closing night of the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, MIFF Artistic Director Michelle Carey addressed a champagne and truffle popcorn infused crowd in the main cinema of the Greater Union complex, rolling out a sincere set of thank you’s to many of the people associated with the prestigious festival’s [...]

In KIll List UK director Ben Wheatley creates a paradoxically astounding achievement: a film that is both one of the most intensely realistic and one of the most intensely surreal assassin thrillers you will ever see, period. Wheatley’s screenplay asks a now familiar question: what if an assassin/serial killer had a kid, a wife, a best [...]

And here it is. After two and a bit weeks, innumerable hours sitting in the dark and an accumulation of mental and physical defects, we finally arrive at the big number: 60. Turns out I didn’t need the full 17 days to watch and review 60 films. I did it in 16 days and one [...]

Just when I thought my Melbourne International Film Festival experience couldn’t get any weirder…it got weirder. I wrote a detailed post late last night about what happened to me yesterday after a screening of UK director Ben Wheatley’s assassin thriller Kill List. Let’s just say it involves Colonel Sanders and the long flabby arm of [...]