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Non-Review Review: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil

Tucker and Dale vs. Evil is probably the funniest movie I’ve seen in a long time. I’ll admit that I probably skew a little bit towards it, what with being a fan of cheesy horror movies and a sucker for a high concept comedy, but Eli Craig’s cinematic debut feature is a masterful comedic deconstruction of the conventional horror film, daring to turn genre conventions on their head and ask: why do we always side with the college students in these sorts of films?

What a waist...

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Non-Review Review: Paul

Paul is a charming little film. It’s not the most consistently hilarious comedy of the year, and it occasionally gets a little bit too hung up on a particular joke, but it does have a few chuckles and an affable quality that allows it go down easy. There’s a genuine sense of affection in the film, following two British nerds and the eponymous alien escapee on a road trip across America, but there’s also enough of a bite the film never wallows too much in sentimentality. It’s hard to find a single quality that Paul excels in, but it has a broad enough mesh of qualities that it makes for a pleasant enough viewing experience.

Ap-paul-ling behaviour...

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Pointing Eastwood: Clint Eastwood’s Moral Compass…

Clint Eastwood is a fascinating director. It’s hard to imagine, watching those early Spaghetti Westerns, that the badass cowboy would emerge as one of the great American directors. To be honest, while he wasn’t the first major actor to work behind the camera, I think that Eastwood really paved the way for established actors being taken seriously as directors. I’ve always been somewhat fascinated by Eastwood’s work, even when it isn’t necessarily completely satisfying as a viewing experience. I’ve still found something interesting and compelling in most of his films, even if they aren’t brilliant in and of themselves. I think that Eastwood manages a thematic consistency that’s very rare these days, and it’s possible to see a lot of the director’s moral philosophy in his work.

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Non-Review Review: My Cousin Vinny

My Cousin Vinny still works after all these years, I think, because it’s pretty broad and universal in its humour. It’s essentially two types of fish-out-of-water film blended together, simultaneously documenting a street-smart guy tangling with the red tape of legal bureaucracy, and offering a standard city-slickers adventure with “Noo Yawker” Vinny and his girlfriend adjusting to life in the Deep South. My Cousin Vinny is funny and frank, but never offensively so. It’s aware that it’s trading in caricatures and stereotypes, but never seems too mean in its portrayal of anybody.

Giving the legal system the fingers...

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Academy Awards 2012: The Insiders’ Oscars…

That was… underwhelming. I mean, I think I’m relatively happy with most of the nominees, and there’s very little I can vehemently object to as completely unworthy in yesterday’s Oscar nominations, but still… Yesterday’s Oscar nominations felt decidedly insular, as if the Academy had taken a complete U-turn on any of the amendments that had recently been made in an attempt to broaden the Academy’s horizons. The Oscars have always been a party thrown by the movie industry to celebrate themselves, but this year’s nominations feel increasingly isolated, with nominations and lists populated with the safest and most predictable choices. This is the first year in quite some time that there hasn’t been anything as pleasantly refreshing as the Best Picture nomination for District 9 or Toy Story 3.

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Absolute Crisis on Infinite Earths (Review/Retrospective)

This January, I’m going to take a look at some of DC’s biggest “events.” This week I’ll be taking at the event that started it all, Marv Wolfman and George Pérez’s Crisis on Infinite Earths, reprinted in DC’s oversized and slipcased Absolute line.

It’s interesting to reflect on Crisis on Infinite Earths, more than a quarter of a century after the twelve-issue maxi-series was published. In the time since, it seems like the editorial purpose driving the event – the desire to “simplify” DC’s tangled and messed continuity into one single and unified history by abolishing the myriad of alternate continuities – has been somewhat undone with the return of the multiverse in 52 and Final Crisis, but this arguably allows Wolfman and Pérez’s epic to be considered on its own merit. Although the series might not be as important as it once was in explaining the sometimes bizarre way that all of DC’s published line fit together, I think you can still see a huge influence of this crossover in the stories that the authors at DC are telling, and how they approach them.

Holding out for some heroes...

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Non-Review Review: Bruce Almighty

I like Bruce Almighty. I’ll concede that I might even like it more than any other of Jim Carrey’s madcap comedies. I think that it’s easily among the best of the comedies he produced after the millennium, doing well from a strong supporting cast and nice central moral. It isn’t deep or profound, and it’s unlikely to offer any more philosophical insight than anybody had going in, but it also manages to avoid being completely vacuous or empty. It’s remarkably satisfying for a light screwball comedy, even if it is a little on-the-nose.

All at sea...

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Perfectly Random: Channel Surfing In The Digital Age…

NetFlix have arrived in Ireland. Minor complaints about their selection of films aside, it’s time to rejoice as a film fan. Living here in Ireland, it can’t help but feel like we’re a bit behind the times when it comes to cinema. After all, our release schedule tends to lag behind that of our American cousins, with The Muppets only arriving on our shores next month. Still, as excited as I am at the prospect of having an entire universe of film and television at my very command, I can’t help but feel a slight sense of trepidation going forward. I know that this isn’t the end of the digital era of television, but it will undoubtedly affect the way I consume my films. And, while I’ll laud the amount of choice at my fingertips, I reckon I’ll miss the delightful randomness of channel-hopping in the digital age.

Getting on board with new media models...

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Non-Review Review: The Descendants

George Clooney’s work in The Descendants is being hailed as the actor’s greatest performance to date. Truth be told, I suspect that Clooney’s filmography has (generally speaking) been remarkably strong, so it’s difficult to really isolate the actor’s “best” performance. That said, I do think that The Descendants allows Clooney to play his most mature role to date, as Clooney finds the heart and the heartbreak in this darkly comic drama about a “part-time parent”who gets a major bump in responsibility following his wife’s near-fatal accident.

Hedging his bets...

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Announcing m0vie blog: the book!

And it’s official, I am a published author. My book, Pass the Popcorn: A Movie Memoir of 2011, went on-sale from Amazon.com last night, and can be purchased for the low-low price of $1.22 ($0.99 + tax) by clicking here. It’s basically a collection of essays and articles I wrote for the site, collected in one place, from 2011 and earlier. It’s really just an attempt to take some of my essays on film and bundle them up in a way to maybe raise the profile of the blog.

While I’ve drafted a new introduction and revised some of the pieces, all the articles can be found in some way, shape or form on the blog. Still, if you like it, tell a friend, pass it on. Get it as a gift for the film nerd in your life. If it’s successful, I’ll put together another collection next year. If it isn’t, well, at least it was worth a shot. Even after tax, you’re paying less than 1c for every 600 words, so what do you have to lose?

The blog has always been tremendously personal, a place for me to share my hastily-formed poorly-articulated thoughts on the movie issues of the day. Nothing was too big for me to share a random couple of thoughts about it, nor was anything too small. I’m happy with that, and that’s what the blog, hopefully, will continue to be. A place for me talk randomly about incredibly esoteric movie stuff.

Anyway, it’s been a tremendous year for the blog, in terms of readership and popularity. Since I won the Irish Blog Award back in March, things have taken off, and I’ve just been delighted with how everything’s gone. So I’d like to thank everyone for their support and encouragement, and even just for reading. It was a great 2011. I’d feel guilty asking for a better 2012, but hopefully it can be just as good. All I can hope is that I can continue to improve as a writer and eventually justify the run of good luck I’ve been having.

Cheers,
Darren.

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