Archive for November, 2008
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Released 28th November 2008
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Every now and then something well-made, well-written, well-acted and well-directed comes along. This time it came in the form of a good old-fashioned crime caper, proving there’s still plenty of life in heist cinema.
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Released 26th November 2008
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Clint Eastwood is maturing into a master of filmmaking designed to line up the predicted Academy nominations with some quite moving cinematography. And the real-life story that his latest period drama, Changeling, is based on is so powerful and significantly influential that it’s surprising it has stayed buried in the depths of the dusty Los Angeles City Hall archives for so long. If it were not for a quick-thinking City Hall employee, this tale would have been lost to history. It sounds much like a melodrama in itself, but the story of one young single mother, Christine Collins’ fight to end police corruption in the city, after her son goes missing in 1920s’ America, is the stuff that movies are made of, so it’s thankful that someone with Eastwood’s on/off-camera experience and ex-journalist/scriptwriter J. Michael Straczynski’s press contacts has adoptedit and done it some credit.
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Released 26th November 2008
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Vince Vaughn is a bit like Marmite — you either love him or you hate him. You either get into his crazy ramblings from the start, or get lost, annoyed and switch off. So, depending on your frame of mind, you’ll either really love, or simply hate this festive fiasco, co-starring Hollywood’s ‘Darling of Comedy’, Reese Witherspoon. Thankfully, after last year’s cringeworthy ‘Vaughn Xmas turkey’, Fred Claus, Seth Gordon’s new comedy is like pure honey — s-w-e-e-t! And considering there are rumours that Vaughn and Witherspoon did not get on during filming, it’s rather surprising, as on-screen they simply shine and complement each other wonderfully.
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Released 28th November 2008
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Art Linson’s screenplay adaptation of his compelling, best-selling memoir of life as a high-powered Hollywood producer is weight enough behind an already solidly-grounded project. But add an amazing heavyweight cast of Robert De Niro, Sean Penn and Bruce Willis to a wonderfully sharp-witted satire, and it’s a recipe for success. Deliciously, darkly humorous, strikingly poignant, and incredibly frank in a pseudo-documentary style at times, this is as close an insight into the ever-intriguing Hollywood machine that us, mere mortals, will get. It’s the often dull, immensely ugly, and nerve-shreddingly thankless part of the whole movie business, behind the glitz and the glamour, that keeps the Hollywood wheels oiled and inflated egos in tact, and Linson and director Barry Levinson’s razor-sharp comedy expertly and, seemingly, effortlessly addresses this.
