January, 2012

Hollywood, to state the bleeding obvious, was not an industry founded on philanthropic values, and its most prized product – actors – are in the business of selling their famous faces. Screen performers need to make a living like the rest of us, and they bring home the bacon by cashing in their bodies and [...]

While growing up every person has at least one interminably uncool relative. The daggy uncle duded up in chest-high jeans. The aunty who distributes socks and hankies every year for Christmas. The father who sneaks in the occasional cheeky shandy. There are few things more transparently uncool, more kill-me-now-or-we’ll-all-die-from-embarrassment, then a perennial dag pretending they’re still [...]

“Stars bring a lot of memories along with them, and those memories can sometimes, at least in the first ten minutes of the movie, corrupt the story.” The above quote is from Steven Spielberg (Peter Biskend’s Easy Riders Raging Bulls) who, in more than 40 years in the business, has cast recognizable faces in virtually all of his [...]

Jake Wilson’s journey into the realm of professional criticism is a traditional one, in many senses: a talented writer and a bona fide film geek spends an inordinate amount of hours during high school planted in front of screens and some years later lands a job at a newspaper from a combination of skill, experience [...]

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced this year’s Oscar nominations Tuesday morning, LA time. The film widely tipped to collect the most — French silent feature The Artist (which will be released in Australia February 2) — was trumped by Martin Scorsese’s enchanting all-ages love letter to the cinema, Hugo, which leads the [...]

How did they make Leo, the MGM lion, roar? If this photograph doesn’t say it all, read more here.  

In Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Gary Oldman plays a disgraced British spy covertly rehired to weed out a secret service mole in early 70’s London, a time when the western world was ablaze with Cold War hysteria and a Swedish pop group known by a four letter palindrome began making the kind of noise that [...]

In the opening scene of The Darkest Hour, an air hostess politely asks a passenger to switch off his hand-held game console. The gamer, Sean, played by Emile Hirsch (who looks like a blend of Jack Black and Leonardo DiCaprio with a fratboy twist) playfully protests, arguing electronic devices could never disrupt an aeroplane, but [...]

Director Jon Singleton’s on-the-run no-brainer Abduction — an otherwise forgettable low-rent flick smashed by critics and largely ignored by the public — has crossed a significant milestone in the evolution of online distribution by becoming the first movie to be simultaneously released on DVD and Facebook in America. Distributors have previously dipped their toes in Zuckerberg’s [...]

Margaret Pomeranz, along with her equally famous television co-host David Stratton, is as close to film reviewing royalty as one finds in Australia. Her jangling earrings, funky fashion sense, endearing laugh and opened-minded approach to film criticism have become synonymous with cinema discussion Down Under since her impromptu debut on SBS’s The Movie Show in 1986. But [...]

Sourced from a dark, dense and twisty plot architected by the late Swedish novelist Stieg Larsson, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo arrives in cinemas as sharp and unwelcoming as the jagged cliff face of star Daniel Craig’s iris-slicing jawline. Craig will go down in history as the Mean Bond, the one for whom martini charisma [...]

Director Alexander Payne, best known for high school-set political satire Election (1999) and wine-swilling on the road dramegy Sideways (2004), is filling a void in Hollywood with an unprepossessing brand of art house multiplexia: quaint, deftly handled films, indie in essence and bottled to the public with the casting of a marquee name. Paul Giamiatti was the [...]

Japanese production house Studio Ghibli, home of manga mastermind Hayao Miyazaki, has arguably been at the forefront of hand drawn animation since it was founded in the mid 1980s. Now, at a point in time in which virtually every major studio has ditched oil and ink in favour of computer generated images — with Disney’s Pixar setting [...]

The primary criticism levelled at Steven Spielberg’s long-awaited adaptation of Hergé’s beloved Tintin graphic novels, The Adventures of Tintin, isn’t a lack of faithfulness but the motion capture technology used to bring the Beglian artist’s stories and characters to life. Motion capture has evolved little since it was employed to great fanfare in director Robert Zemeckis’s yuletide [...]

Those foam, fleece and fur made friendlies — the inimitable Muppets — have never gone out of vogue. Not after a smattering of movies and TV shows that seem to have lasted a millennium; not even after decades of countless spin-offs and merchandise tie-ins. But that didn’t stop co-writer/star Jason Segel from hooking the story [...]

The Women on the 6th Floor, veteran French writer/director Philippe Le Guay’s crowd-pleasing dramedy about a bourgeois man who breaks free of his upper-class constraints to join — locationally and emotionally — the maids living above him was a box office smash hit last year in France and Palace Films’ marquee summer release in Australia. Set [...]

January is traditionally a time for sun, beach, sandals, singlets and booze. What better way to enjoy fine weather — so the old school Aussie ethos goes — then to crack open a can, or a bottle, or a case of something alcoholic and soak up some rays? Therefore, now is as good a time [...]