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100 years of evil 2010
Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand".
What proof do we really have of Hitler’s demise? His body never recovered, supposedly burned after suicide, isn’t it possible that he might somehow have survived the war and lived on long after? That’s the silly supposition at the heart of Erik Eger and Magnus Oliv’s unyieldingly tongue-in-cheek mockumentary One Hundred Years of Evil, an increasingly absurd and delightfully deadpan emulation of conspiracy theory documentaries that traces the dictator through his…
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11-11-11 2011
“From the director of Saw II, III & IV” boasts the poster for 11-11-11, a horror thriller that, despite its director’s previous genre credentials, never manages to be anything more than a limp conspiracy story with very little ability to shock or scare. A bestselling author whose wife and son were recently killed in a fire started by a crazed fan, Joseph travels to Barcelona to visit his dying father and wheelchair-bound brother. An atheist in the face of his family’s…
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16 to Life 2010
Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand".
Clearly riffing on Clerks in the constitution of its narrative structure, 16 to Life restricts itself to the confines of a single workday at an Iowan fast food stand, centring primarily on Kate as she celebrates her sixteenth birthday and laments her non-existent love life while meddling in that of her co-workers. Adherent to formula with very few exceptions, it’s a decidedly unremarkable but undeniably charming story, writer/director Becky Smith graduating…
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2010 1984
Considering how even making a sequel to 2001 sort of shows a complete lack of understanding as to its purpose, this really isn't nearly as bad as it could have been. Hyams knows he's going to be unfavourably compared to Kubrick left right and centre, so does his best to create something quite different that still respects the marvellous mythology established in the previous film. A great cast supports things splendidly, dodgy Russian accents notwithstanding, giving us a good deal…
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21 Jump Street 2012
The December Project: Film #79
A pleasant treat, far funnier than even the positive feedback had me expecting. I've never liked Jonah Hill, but here he works with a sharp enough script and strong enough support in Channing Tatum to be not just tolerable, but positively fine. The handful of smart self-aware gags are where 21 Jump Street's at its best, lampooning its own existence in a very amusing early scene. As funny as it is—I burst out laughing quite…
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21 Up 1977
The December Project: Film #95
In just three films, this the only of them lasting longer than an hour, I feel already so close to these fourteen people. Already the superlatives often thrown about in relation to this series seem justified: the comfort these people have in speaking to Apted about their lives facilitates a subtle yet sharply incisive consideration of the human condition. As too does the discomfort: there are those of the group who are reluctantly honest, slowly…
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28 Days Later... 2003
Utterly amazing on a technical level—I mean that in terms of it being something of a watershed moment for digital cinematography—but, for all its innovation on that front, the same old shit where narrative is concerned. I must confess to a certain smidgeon of disappointment with a film that, the aghast responses I received every time I told people I'd not yet seen it, seems to have quite the reputation. It's certainly not bad: there are thrills and kills aplenty…
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28 Up 1985
There's not much I can say about 28 Up that I haven't already said about its predecessors and successors: they together represent the ultimate truth that the drama of everyday life is just as gripping as the greatest story concocted by the greatest imagination. We don't realise it day to day, but it's easy to see across the course of seven years that our existences are the most poignant cosmic dramas, finely balanced between hope and disappointment, happiness and depression, healthiness and death. This series doesn't just chronicle life; it is life.
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2 Days in New York 2012
Review from my VOD column "This Week on Demand".
Clearly inspired by the winning formula of Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and Before Sunset—and no doubt aided by sharing one of the pair’s writers—Julie Delpy’s 2007 2 Days in Paris was a mostly pleasant emulation of those films’ naturalistic style of romantic comedy. She returns to the role of Marion for 2 Days in New York, transplanting the character and her socially inappropriate family to the United States, where they have…
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2 Days in New York 2012
Delpy's 2 Days in Paris sequel is disappointingly identical to its predecessor, copying just about everything that worked last time. Do they not have the law of diminishing returns in France? Full review at Next Projection.
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2 Days In Paris 2007
It's a little difficult not to compare Julie Delpy's dialogue-heavy, Paris-set romantic comedy to Linklater's Before movies, a tough categorisation for any film to have to deal with. What's interesting is that we come to this particular couple two years into their relationship, when they've had time to develop something Jesse and Céline never did in their brief hours together: disdain. Delpy creates two characters with a believably romantic relationship also defined by its difficulties: there's no doubt that these…
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33 Postcards 2013
Review from Next Projection
There’s a terrifically ironic plot point in The Good Man, an otherwise misguided Irish film that premiered last year, where the affluent banker antihero uses his charity sponsorship of an African child to clear his own conscience, blissfully unaware that the very deals he is hatching are those whose consequences only exacerbate the need for financial aid. Such moralistic greed, even in charity, is typical of the Western world, and forms the bedrock of Pauline Chan’s…
