The trailer for Joss Whedon’s Avengers: Age of Ultron has arrived. Check it out below!
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: age of ultron, avengers, Comics, films, marvel, Movies, ultron | 2 Comments »
Non-Review Review: Book of Life
Posted on October 19, 2014 by Darren
Book of Life bristles with energy – almost too much energy at times.
Book of Life is a sumptuous feast for the eyes, dynamic and beautiful, elegantly crafted and lovingly staged. It is packed with eye-popping visuals and an electric energy. In many ways, these help to compensate for a script that is simultaneously under-plotted and hyperactive. The basic plot arc of Book of Life – and the trajectory of all the featured characters – can be mapped from the opening scenes, while the movie is over-stuffed with pop culture references and snappy asides.
Book of Life is exhausting and exhilarating in equal measure, almost perfectly calibrated for its ninety-minute runtime. The result is a stylish and suave animated film that pops out of the screen, even if it doesn’t lodge in the memory. There’s little here that hasn’t been done before, but rarely has it been done so stylishly.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: book of life, films, Movies, non-review review, review, reviews | Leave a comment »
Non-Review Review: Gone Girl
Posted on October 2, 2014 by Darren
The stories that people tell.
In many respects, Gone Girl is a story about narratives. It is a film about how we construct and manage our own narratives, and the narratives of those around us. Facts are malleable, reality is arbitrary. Everything that happens exists as a detail to be woven into some sort of story. Inevitably, stories differ, narratives conflict. The story that Nick Dunne tells about the disappearance of his wife differs from the version of events presented in her diary; the narrative that the public and the press construct is rather distinct from that constructed by those inside the story.
Gone Girl itself plays with this idea, playing with the audience. It starts out as a very familiar and almost cliché story. Nick Dunne was trapped in a loveless marriage. His wife disappears. People begin to suspect that perhaps Dunne had something to do in the disappearance. Even the audience isn’t entirely sure what to make of Nick as the details add up against him. The closer we look, the more flaws begin to appear, the more the evidence seems to mount.
And then, the story changes. Gone Girl pulls the rug out for underneath the audience, becoming something radically different and almost surreal. It’s a dazzling, brilliant, crazy, ambitious and ingenious. Gone Girl is a startlingly confident twisty film that plays with the audience with a macabre glee that is contagious.
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: amazing amy, amy, ben affleck, david fincher, films, gone girl, Movies, nick dunne, non-review review, review, Rosamund Pike, twist | 9 Comments »
Non-Review Review: Maps to the Stars
Posted on September 3, 2014 by Darren
It is a cliché to suggest that Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood.
Sure, quite often these are celebratory meditations on how great Tinseltown is – Argo was the story of how Hollywood saved the lives of Americans caught up in the Iranian Revolution; Hitchcock celebrated the making of Psycho. Sometimes these are more cynical and jaded explorations of how Hollywood works, seeking to expose the community’s seedy underbelly to the world – Robert Altman’s The Player remains the definitive example, but films like What Just Happened probably count as well.
These stock Hollywood-story-about-Hollywood are the weakest aspects of Maps to the Stars. The movie often feels like it’s trying too hard to add a surface gloss of what people expect from a film about Hollywood, on top of a much more interesting and compelling tale of dysfunction and decay. Maps to the Stars is held together by a rake of terrific performances and a wonderfully creepy central metaphor, but it feels let down by the more superficial elements of the script.
We’re all in the gutter…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: celebrity, cronenberg, david cronenberg, film, hollywood, horror, john cusack, Julianne Moore, maps to the stars, Mia Wasikowska, Movies, non-review review, review | 4 Comments »
Star Trek – Debt of Honour (Review)
Posted on July 4, 2014 by Darren
This June, we’re taking a look at some classic Star Trek movie tie-ins and other interesting objects. Check back daily for the latest reviews and retrospectives.
By all accounts, Debt of Honour should be an unqualified success.
It’s a prestige graphic novel from DC comics, produced around the twenty-fifth anniversary of Star Trek and the release of Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country. It is written by celebrated comic book scribe Chris Claremont, fresh off his career-defining stint on Uncanny X-Men. An avowed Star Trek fan and comic book veteran, this should be in his wheel house. The art is provided by Adam Hughes, one of the most celebrated and respected artists of his time.
Talk about kicking off a comic…
By any measure, Debt of Honour should count as some sort of hallmark for DC Comics’ Star Trek tie-ins. Unfortunately, that isn’t quite the case. A rather muddled storyline that is hopelessly devoted to Star Trek continuity while awkward interfacing with it, Debt of Honour is just packed a little too tight. Charting a story from the earliest days of Kirk’s career to the aftermath of Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Claremont bites off more than he can chew.
Over the course of Debt of Honour, Claremont introduces a vague alien threat that has apparently been haunting Kirk for his entire career, a new arch-foe or love interest for Kirk, and even a supporting role for Kor. Along the way, he packs in cameos and shout-outs to various parts of Star Trek lore. He even explains why Klingons suddenly had ridges around the time of Star Trek: The Motion Picture. Ultimately, Debt of Honour is ambitious, but a little over-stuffed and quite over-cooked.
Warp speed ahead!
Filed under: Comics, The Original Series | Tagged: adam hughes, chris claremont, continuity, dc comics, debt of honour, kirk, klingon foreheads, klingons, kor, Movies, obsession, romulans, star trek, the doomsday machine, the ultimate computer | Leave a comment »
Non-Review Review: Jersey Boys
Posted on June 18, 2014 by Darren
Jersey Boys looks and feels pretty much exactly how you might expect a musical directed by Clint Eastwood to look and feel.
Adapted from the Tony-Award winning hit musical, it is awash with nostalgia. Jersey Boys provides an account of the career of Frankie Valli from his early days in the local neighbourhood through to induction in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in the nineties. The film is shockingly traditional in terms of construction, adhering rigidly to the formula for a successful musical bio-pic, from the early grifting to the eventual discord to the heart-felt reunion epilogue, complete with questionable old-age make-up for the cast.
Jersey Boys hits all the expected notes, but never quite brings the house down.
Sign of the times…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: Clint Eastwood, film, four seasons, frankie valli, frankie valli and the four seasons, jersey boys, Movies, musical, non-review review, review, tonys | 2 Comments »
Hill Street at Irish Cinemas on 23rd May!
Posted on May 15, 2014 by Darren
The Irish skateboarding documentary Hill Street is opening next week in Irish cinemas. The documentary has had a long road to distribution, premiering at the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival in 2012 to great word of mouth. Looking at the history skating scene, focusing on the eponymous street, it promises a fascinating glimpse at a piece of Irish pop culture that is often overlooked or forgotten.
Check some footage from the documentary below, and catch it in cinemas from next week.
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: dublin, hill street, Ireland, Movies, skating, wildcard distribution | Leave a comment »
Top Picks from the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, 2014
Posted on January 20, 2014 by Darren
All right, it’s that time of the year again, when your humble host looks at the tea leaves and points to some of the highlights of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival, when the movies take over Dublin city for ten days between the 13th and 23rd of February. The schedule was unveiled today, and although I’ve yet to actually see any of these, I have picked out some of the more interesting and intriguing selections for the festival.
Tickets go on sale at 10am tomorrow morning, so consider this an attempt to point those Irish cinephiles in the right direction.
Calvary
Filed under: Movies | Tagged: calvary, dublin, films, jameson, jameson dublin international film festival, jameson dublin international film festival 2014, jaws, jdiff, Movies, Richard Dreyfuss, terry gilliam, the zero theorem, under the skin, zero theorem | Leave a comment »
Non-Review Review: The Wolf of Wall Street
Posted on January 19, 2014 by Darren
In 1987, Oliver Stone’s Wall Street was arguably too subtle in its criticisms of the Wall Street mentality – the philosophy that “greed, for lack of a better word, is good” or that enough can never really enough. After all, the film apparently inspired a whole generation of stock brokers and investment managers, with quite a few aspiring to be their generation’s Gordon Gekko – when the movie’s central point was that Gekko was hardly an idol to worship.
This would seem to explain the rationale of Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street, a film that makes Stone’s brutal evisceration of Wall Street excess seem positively mild-mannered. Indeed, the film all but directly acknowledges this fact in an early scene where a “hatchet job” of an article from Forbes (the same article that would lend Belfort his sobriquet “Wolfie!”) prompts a massive upsurge in job applications for Belfort’s Stratton Oakmont.
The money shot…
So, understanding the need to go a bit bigger and larger, The Wolf of Wall Street introduces us to its protagonist, Jordan Belfort, snorting cocaine out of the bodily orifices of a prostitute, and yet somehow descends deeper and deeper into acts of debauchery and excess. It’s an unrelenting and energetic film, that is exhausting and exhilarating. It’s less of a structured story and more a three-hour laundry-list of depravity.
While the last hour of the film (the inevitable “it all comes tumbling down… or does it?” act) can’t maintain the forward moment that make the first two so exhilarating, The Wolf of Wall Street remains proof that Scorsese is an incredible film maker with an almost impossible vigour and enthusiasm for the medium.
Drinking it in…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: corruption, decay, drugs, film, films, jordan belford, Jordan Belfort, leo, Leonardo diCaprio, martin scorsese, Matthew McConaughey, money, Movie, Movies, non-review review, review, sex, vice, Wall Street, Wolf of Wall Street, wolfie | 6 Comments »
Non-Review Review: Delivery Man
Posted on January 8, 2014 by Darren
Delivery Man works surprisingly well. Like something of a throwback to the nineties “overgrown manchild” comedy about slackers honestly trying to pull their lives together, Vince Vaughn’s latest effort is disarmingly sincere. It isn’t plotted particularly well, and there are points where Delivery Man threatens to unspool if you think about it too much, but this adaptation of Canadian comedy Starbuck has its heart in the right place and manages to deliver a nice sentimental comedy without every becoming overwrought or overly earnest.
Cue a tonne of “who’s your daddy?” jokes…
Filed under: Non-Review Reviews | Tagged: comedy, delivery man, fatherhood, films, Movies, non-review review, paternity, review, Vince Vaughn | 6 Comments »
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