Mad Max: Fury Road
Director: George Miller
Starring: Tom Hardy, Charlize Theron
Genre: Aggrieved Medium
It’s not necessarily saying much but Mad Max: Fury Road exceeded my expectations. Admittedly they were pretty low. I had no great expectation that character development or plot intricacies would feature highly. That certainly proved to be the case.
Jon Stewart is a hugely influential, highly successful and politically savvy comedian. Loved and loathed in equal measure, his Daily (4 times a week) Show is the standard bearer for left-wing commentary and causes in the USA.
I tried to keep my expectations low with Birdman, I really did. But it’s hard when everyone, including Margaret and David as their last hurrah, gives the film full marks. I’ve been burnt before, caught up in the hype and the promise of great insight and mind-blowing movie-making.
If I could travel in time I’d go about an hour into the future, find out how I introduced this review, then go back in time and write it. So, does the fact that I’m now writing the introduction mean that maybe I did travel in time and can’t remember it?
I’m going through a bit of a Scarlett Johansson phase at the moment. I’ve seen three of her films this year: Her (Johansson as the voice of a computer), Under the Skin (an alien) and, now, Lucy (a super human).
You know what you’re getting with Seth MacFarlane and that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Think Peter from Family Guy meets Ted in cowboy hats and you pretty much understand the entire film already. Even the woman introducing the film preview screening advised us to leave our maturity at the door.
It’s awards season in Hollywood and in the great tradition of Academy Award best picture nominations, the actor who best portrayed someone gay, sick, disabled or dying (or better still all four) is going to win. Think Tom Hanks in Philadelphia (1993) and Forrest Gump (1994), Nicolas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas (1995), Geoffrey Rush in Shine (1996), Jamie Foxx in Ray (2004), Sean Penn in Milk (2008) or Colin Firth in The King’s Speech (2010).
Could a human really fall in love with his or her operating system? Well if you watch enough SBS on Friday nights you’d know that humans can fall in love with anything (roller coasters is a particular fave).
Dirty Harry had no qualms when it came to vigilantism, while Garry Oldman’s DEA agent Stansfield in Leon (1994) was happy to knock off the family of the man who undercut his supply of cocaine.
Genius in filmmaking is about making an audience crave that for which they really know they shouldn’t. Trainspotting made heroin desirable. Easy Rider makes you want to rush out and buy a motor bike. The Hangover series makes you want a drink. And Rush makes you want to drive fast. Really fast. Formula One fast.
Films about porn are usually more interesting than porn films themselves. The production values, soundtrack and acting are all better for starters. Admittedly, there’s usually only one climax and you have to sit through an hour and a half or so to see it, but it tends to be more satisfying and longer lasting than the X-rated variety, or it should be if it’s any good.
Simon Pegg and Nick Frost are very funny people. To see them interviewed is a running gag fest, often at each other’s expense. But moviegoers expecting The World’s End to be a laugh-a-thon are going to be disappointed.
If you ignore the ridiculous plot, the nonsense scene segues, the overwrought emotion, the average acting, the perfect nuclear family, Brad Pitt’s never changing facial hair, the pointless attempt at making an environmental statement, the inconsistencies in how zombies are made, move and are motivated, the medical impossibilities, the unintentionally comic portrayal of zombies and the lack of blood, then World War Z isn’t too bad a film.
This is the first documentary I have reviewed for the South Sydney Herald and there’s a reason for that. Most documentaries aren’t created for their entertainment value, so I don’t bother seeing them.
The Croods are a family of pre-historic cave dwellers whose precarious existence is torn apart by continental drift featuring violent earthquakes and volcanoes. Now, as a geologist (really) this prehistoric understanding of plate tectonics made The Croods very difficult to watch. My 5 year old didn’t seem to mind though, indeed he quite enjoyed it.
How do you review a film where you know almost nothing about the core component of the film? Well, maybe that’s being a little harsh on myself, because while The Performance is of music, it’s not about music, it’s actually about relationships, and what is a string quartet if not a relationship? So while it’s true I know very little about music, I do know a thing or two about relationships, although even that’s questionable!
Disaster films are a staple of the film industry. Wikipedia lists hundreds of them, all nicely categorised into sub-headings such as monsters, aliens, volcanoes, earthquakes and much more. A cavalcade of death and destruction, and nearly each of them a tale of survival against the odds.
The Master set out to be the story of an intense relationship between a troubled returning naval soldier (Freddie Quill – Phoenix) and the leader of The Cause (Lancaster Dodd – Hoffman), a cult bearing a striking resemblance to Scientology in its early days. But instead of being a treatise on salvation, The Master proved to be an exercise in film making.
It wasn’t until walking out of the cinema after seeing Arbitrage that I realised I still had no idea what “arbitrage” was. The word is not used in the film. Was this a deliberate ploy to make me look it up and gain some glorious post-viewing insight into the film? Well, let me save you the trouble …
That Nick Cave is a genius and a legend of the Australian music scene is not in question. So talented is he that clearly he could have made a career just out of writing hard-edged, gritty, dusty and violent period pieces if he wanted to. Alas, he only has a short history as a writer of screenplays. Apart from Lawless his only other effort was 2005’s The Proposition (also directed by Australian John Hillcoat).
Joe Kazan (she’s a she), who wrote and stars in Ruby Sparks, has pulled off the incredible by turning a male fantasy into a date film. How else to describe a film with the basic premise of a writer afflicted with writer’s block (Dano) suddenly discovering that anything he writes about a girl he dreams about (Ruby Sparks – Kazan) comes true?
Up until watching On The Road I was sure that I had read Jack Kerouac’s ground-breaking novel about sex, drugs, booze, music and travel while doing likewise, backpacking in my 20s. Now I’m not so sure. On The Road may be a backpacker standard, but it either left no impression on me or I indulged too much to remember.
The argument goes that there are only five storylines and every film is a rehash of one of them. So it’s refreshing to see a film that is a genuinely different take on the age-old story of being different. Walking out of the State Theatre after a Sydney Film Festival screening, one cinemagoer was overheard ungrammatically calling it “the most unique film I’ve ever seen”.
If ever there was an appropriate film for readers of the South Sydney Herald then Not Suitable For Children is it. Filmed in and around Newtown, including right across the road from the Dendy where I saw the film, it’s an exercise in location spotting for anyone who’s ever shared a house in the suburb, attended a party there or just had a meal on King Street.
While Polisse is an intense and personal exploration of the lives of these detectives, the acting is, overall, excellent, and the scripting insightful, funny...
