Atonement

Atonement starts off as an average period piece drama, with the well to do Tallis family living the highlife despite the looming spectre of a war with Germany. Thrown in the mix is garden hand and semi adopted son, Robbie, who incidently, is in love with the eldest Tallis daughter, Cecilia.

Trouble is, the younger Tallis daughter, Briony, has a childish crush on Robbie, and doesn’t understand why her older sister should be the one to receive his love.

To get revenge on Robbie for loving her sister she blames a heinous crime on him, not realising what the outcome would be, and the budding relations ship between Robbie and Cecilia is brought to a grinding halt as Robbie is taken away and put in prison. [more]

Conversations With My Gardener

Going to a media screening at the Rialto is always a treat, you know that for a change you’re going to see a movie whose characters and storyline drive the experience and not the special effects budget. Conversations With My Gardener is no different.

A successful Parisian artist secedes to take time out from his hectic lifestyle and a marriage that is on the rocks by retreating to the home of his childhood. With his parents having died a few years ago, there is much work to do but he has little energy to do it. So the artist advertises for a gardener.

The gardener who takes the job turns out to be an old school buddy – back in the day they were best mates, but things didn’t work out when they got expelled at that was the last they saw of each other.

There lives took radically different paths, the artist finding success and experiences, the gardener finding contentment in the simple things of life. [more]

The Simpsons Movie

Because of my role with FilmGuide I've been able to attend a number of media screenings of movies, the most recent of which was The Simpsons Movie.

The Simpsons Movie was an absolute ball, the funniest movie I have seen for some time. It starts off brilliantly, and keeps the odd ball laughs going for the entire movie, even throughout the closing credits. Yes, throughout. This isn't a lame movie like POTC that adds a cheesy scene at the end to 'reward' people who watch credits, it's a movie that continues through the entire credits. Go watch it today, and read Josh's review over at FilmGuide.

The down side with my working for FilmGuide of course is that I don't have as much time for this blog, but I promise to start regular posting again!

A Mighty Heart

Rating:
Duration: 100 mins.
Genre: Drama.
Actors: Angelina Jolie, Dan Futterman, Archie Panjabi, Will Patton, Irfan Khan, Sajid Hasan, Aly Khan, Denis O'Hare.
Director: Michael Winterbottom.
Release Date: Selected dates during the NZFF, general release 18 October 2007.

Synopsis
On January 23, 2002, Mariane Pearl's world changed forever. Her husband Daniel, South Asia bureau chief for the Wall Street Journal, was researching a story on shoe bomber Richard Reid. The story drew them to Karachi where a go-between had promised access to an elusive source. As Danny left for the meeting, he told Mariane he might be late for dinner. He never returned…

The Reality
Being the opening film for the 2007 New Zealand Film Festival, A Mighty Heart was never going to be an action spectacular, despite the lead role going to Hollywood darling, Angelina Jolie.

Rather it’s a taught drama, paced brilliantly by both Winterbottom’s directing and Jolie’s grasp on her characters strengths, stamina and emotional character.

In fact one could possibly say it’s Angelina Jolie’s best performance to date.

Of course without the story line and the ensemble of supporting cast Jolie’s acting would have been for nought.

Frustratingly confusing at times, the storyline becomes a jumble of flash backs, imaginations and repetitive actions by the Pakistani police, but rather than inhibit the story telling, it illuminates perfectly the tangled web of lies, confusion, pride and inability that plagued the various groups represented, in their dire attempts to find out who has kidnapped Daniel Pearl.

Visually the movie is a mishmash of authentic news footage, home video style flashbacks and on the run, shoot-from-the-hip filming. In any other movie, this would be jarringly unacceptable, but in A Mighty Heart it only adds to the realness and frustrations felt by Mariane Pearl as she struggles to keep her head above water.

A brilliant, powerful, through provoking movie.

Food for thought
In reality, it all boils down to religious conviction, if we got rid of religion, the world would be at peace, right?

Bridge to Terabithia

Bridge to Terabithia

Rating: PG.
Duration: 95 mins.
Genre: Adventure, Family, Fantasy.
Actors: Josh Hutcherson, AnnaSophia Robb, Zooey Deschanel, Robert Patrick.
Director: Gabor Csupo.
Release Date: 14 June 2007.

Synopsis
Bullied school kid Jesse Aaron befriends new girl Leslie Burke. An attraction between outsiders, their friendship feeds on her words and his pictures; together they create an imaginary kingdom in the woods behind their homes …

The Reality
Bridge to Terabithia is based on the Katherine Paterson book. Filmed in Auckland with special effects by Weta Workshop, it’s certainly a children’s classic that should find a home in the hearts of many kiwis.

But a children’s movie it is, and going to children’s movies always fills me with the dread of bad acting and cheesy scripts. Fortunately Terabithia turned out to be an enjoyable, engrossing movie experience for my entire family.

Sure, it’s got a swag load of predictability and clichés, but the casting was great, acting believable and the special effects, well, they were done by Weta, what more needs to be said?

Terabithia’s strength is in that of children’s imaginations, and the film actively encourages the viewer to embrace that, which can only be found in dreams. In short it encourages kids to be kids. In one scene Leslie tells her teacher that she doesn’t have a television at home because her father believes that TV only makes you dumb. In lieu of television, Leslie has grown up having to rely on her own fantasy world to entertain herself.

So if you want an infusion of imagination into your life, take the family to the land of Terabithia, you won’t look back!

Food for thought
Imagination is a gift, if we don’t use it, we insult the giver of the gift.

Spiderman 3

Rating: M - Strong Fantasy Violence.
Duration: 139 mins.
Genre: Action, Adventure.
Actors: Kirsten Dunst, Tobey Maguire, James Franco, Dylan Baker, Topher Grace.
Director: Sam Raimi.
Release Date: 3 May 2007.

Spiderman 2 was one of the best sequels ever to grace the big screen. In fact the odds are that sequels are destined to be a let down. So when Spiderman 3 brought a new level of personal struggle to the character of Peter Parker, it brought a great sigh of relief.

So sitting in the theatre getting ready to experience the latest in the Spiderman Franchise I was genuinely on the edge of my seat waiting to see what would unfold.
Now the overall package of Spiderman 3 resulting in two and half hours of high impact action, spectacular effects and a collection of characters that balanced the story well. The thought of three villains in one movie kind of overpowers the imagination, but as the story unfolds we see the context for all three. Each has a story of what made them turn to the darkside... [more]

It's Raining '300' Men

It's funny when people can mock a movie in such a great way...

Oscar, The Chosen Few

Best Picture:
The Departed
Babel
Letters From Iwo Jima
Little Miss Sunshine
The Queen

Director:
Martin Scorsese, The Departed
Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Babel
Clint Eastwood, Letters From Iwo Jima
Stephen Frears, The Queen
Paul Greengrass, United 93

Actor:
Forest Whitaker, The Last King of Scotland
Leonardo DiCaprio, Blood Diamond
Ryan Gosling, Half Nelson
Peter O'Toole, Venus
Will Smith, The Pursuit of Happyness

Actress
Helen Mirren, The Queen
Penelope Cruz, Volver
Judi Dench, Notes on a Scandal
Meryl Streep, The Devil Wears Prada
Kate Winslet, Little Children

Film Editing:
The Departed
Babel
Blood Diamond
Children of Men
United 93

Original Song:
I Need to Wake Up from An Inconvenient Truth, Melissa Etheridge
Listen from Dreamgirls, Henry Krieger, Scott Cutler and Anne Preven
Love You I Do from Dreamgirls, Henry Krieger and Siedah Garrett
Our Town from Cars, Randy Newman
Patience from Dreamgirls, Henry Krieger and Willie Reale

Original Screenplay:
Michael Arndt, Little Miss Sunshine
Guillermo Arriaga, Babel
Iris Yamashita and Paul Haggis, Letters From Iwo Jima
Guillermo del Toro, Pan's Labyrinth
Peter Morgan, The Queen

Original Score:
Babel, Gustavo Santaolalla
The Good German, Thomas Newman
Notes on a Scandal, Philip Glass
Pan's Labyrinth, Javier Navarrete
The Queen, Alexandre Desplat

Documentary Feature:
An Inconvenient Truth
Deliver Us From Evil
Iraq in Fragments
Jesus Camp
My Country, My Country

Documentary (short subject):
The Blood of Yingzhou District
Recycled Life
Rehearsing a Dream
Two Hands

Supporting Actress:
Jennifer Hudson, Dreamgirls
Adriana Barraza, Babel
Cate Blanchett, Notes on a Scandal
Abigail Breslin, Little Miss Sunshine
Rinko Kikuchi, Babel

Foreign Language Film:
The Lives of Others, Germany
After the Wedding, Denmark
Days of Glory (Indigenes), Algeria
Pan's Labyrinth, Mexico
Water, Canada

Visual Effects:
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
Poseidon
Superman Returns

Cinematography:
Pan's Labyrinth
The Black Dahlia
Children of Men
The Illusionist
The Prestige

Costume:
Marie Antoinette
Curse of the Golden Flower
The Devil Wears Prada
Dreamgirls
The Queen

Adapted Screenplay:
William Monahan, The Departed
Sacha Baron Cohen and Anthony Hines and Peter Baynham and Dan Mazer and Todd Phillips, Borat Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan
Alfonso Cuaron and Timothy J Sexton and David Arata and Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, Children of Men
Todd Field and Tom Perrotta, Little Children
Patrick Marber, Notes on a Scandal

Animated Feature Film:
Happy Feet
Cars
Monster House

Supporting Actor:
Alan Arkin, Little Miss Sunshine
Jackie Earle Haley, Little Children
Djimon Hounsou, Blood Diamond
Eddie Murphy, Dreamgirls
Mark Wahlberg, The Departed

Sound Mixing:
Dreamgirls
Apocalypto
Blood Diamond
Flags of Our Fathers
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Sound Editing:
Letters From Iwo Jima
Apocalypto
Blood Diamond
Flags of Our Fathers
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest

Live Action Short Film:
West Bank Story
Binta and the Great Idea (Binta Y La Gran Idea)
Eramos Pocos (One Too Many)
Helmer & Son
The Saviour

Animated Short Film:
The Danish Poet
Lifted
The Little Matchgirl
Maestro
No Time for Nuts

Makeup:
Pan's Labyrinth
Apocalypto
Click

Art Direction:
Pan's Labyrinth
Dreamgirls
The Good Shepherd
Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest
The Prestige

Oscar, Apparently...

The stars have started to trickle down the red carpet at the Kodak Theater, and pretty soon the awards will start to be given out, followed by big, boring speeches.

I'll try and keep y'all updated, but don't hold your breath, I'll probably go home before any of the big ones are announced and forget all about Oscar until I read about it tomorrow...

Happy Feet: Best Animated Feature Film.

Pan's Labyrinth: Best Art Direction and Best Make-up.

Alan Arkin: Best Supporting Actor for Little Miss Sunshine.

Letters from Iwo Jima: Best Sound Editing.

Dreamgirls: Best Sound Mixing.

West Bank Story: Best Live Action Short Film.

The Danish Poet: Best Animated Short Film.

And that's all folks, as I'm heading off home!

Top Grossing Movies of 2006 (US)

1. Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest — $423,315,812
2. Cars – $244,082,982
3. X-Men: The Last Stand — $234,362,462
4. The Da Vinci Code — $217,536,138
5. Superman Returns — $200,081,192
6. Ice Age: The Meltdown — $195,330,621
7. Happy Feet — $178,017,000
8. Casino Royale — $155,415,000
9. Over the Hedge — $155,019,340
10. Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby — $148,213,377

Bond Bashes Borat

Well, at least at the NZ box office he did!

01 Casino Royale
02 Borat
03 Flushed Away
04 The Departed
05 The Holiday
06 Santa Claus 3
07 The Nativity Story
08 Crank
09 Children of Men
10 Unaccompaned Minors

Apple Gives Movies A Face Lift

Deep inside an industrial building in Burbank, California, stands the Great Wall of Macintosh - a humming barrier of 700 Apple Power Mac G5s, all meticulously stacked, one atop the other, in a U shape 8 feet high and 100 feet long. Alongside sits an equally imposing server bay, which stores a staggering 700 terabytes of data. Upstairs in a hypersanitized, temperature-controlled chamber, a technician wearing white silk scrubs hovers over two mammoth, $300,000 digital film scanners.
Wired Test

This monumental collection of gear provides the mathematical brawn behind DTS Digital Images, the world's premier image-processing and -restoration house. This is where Hollywood films come for a face lift - where torn, faded, dirty or otherwise imperfect footage gets surgically enhanced, whether for the archives, a DVD release or a blockbuster opening weekend.

The human brain behind the operation is John Lowry, a bespectacled, auburn-haired man who, at 74, doesn't look a day older than 60. Over the years, Lowry has become known as the film industry's Mr. Fix-It. The movies he has rescued range from the 1933 Boris Karloff vehicle The Ghoul (in which nitrate film base decay had caused excessive flicker and image distortion) to Michael Mann's recent adaptation of Miami Vice (in which a few shots suffered from low light). Even George Lucas sought out Lowry's expertise for the re-release of the Star Wars trilogy ("Lucas hates grain," Lowry says). And MGM hired Lowry to restore all 20 James Bond films for its new set of DVDs.

Many specialists go about restoration manually, cleaning each frame by hand. But as those 700 G5s suggest, Lowry works with computers, faster and more accurately.

"We started out as software developers, but with a very clear direction: to make pictures better," Lowry says as he clicks around the desktop of a Linux machine, picking and choosing from the 50 or so examples stored on his hard drive to show off the technology. "Since each film has its own unique set of problems, it took us about 60 movies to get comfortable."

Today, DTS is a well-oiled machine. As Lowry whirls through a series of before-and-after clips, the differences are obvious. While Sean Connery looks youthfully limber in You Only Live Twice, the 1967 film stock has been ravaged by time, resulting in dirty, jaundiced footage. After a run through Lowry's digital rehab, however, the images are artifact-free: Colors are deeper, detail is better and the images look as fresh as anything shot today.

While Lowry isn't inclined to give up his trade secrets, he admits: "Most of what we do, in the broad sense, is track frame-to-frame differences." Essentially, technicians scan the original film stock onto the server, then proprietary algorithms figure out what shouldn't be onscreen - scratches, discolorations, dirt, mold - and digitally remove it, frame by frame. Think of it as an automatic, high-speed Photoshop retoucher.

But Lowry was doing this long before Photoshop came along. He pioneered image enhancement in the '70s when he processed the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 moon footage. "Because we'd taken the noise out of the pictures," he says, "the geologists were seeing stuff in the rocks that they'd never seen before."

That sounds like a slightly higher calling than Miami Vice. When asked how he landed here, Lowry's expression turns serious. "I have dyslexia," he says. "I didn't read my first book until I was 30." He pauses, and then smiles. "I'm a picture person."

Source Wired

NZ Top Ten Movies

01 Borat
02 The Departed
03 Crank
04 Children of Men
05 Santa Clause 3
06 The Nativity Story
07 Deck the Halls
08 Unaccompaned Minors
09 Dhoom 2
10 A Good Year

Casino Royale

Rating: M - Medium Level Violence.
Duration: 144 mins.
Genre: Action, Adventure.
Actors: Judi Dench, Daniel Craig.
Director: Martin Campbell.
Release Date: On Now.

Kiwi boy Martin Campbell gets his second chance at Directing Bond, but this time with a much more capable lead actor, and a great modern take on Fleming’s classic Casino Royale.

Though the story has been change considerably, the spirit of Fleming’s story is captured precise, and we get to see James Bond in his formative first real mission.

Daniel Craig with his icy blue eyes is perfect for the role, traditionalists who claim Bond shouldn’t be blond with blue eyes have their heads in the sand, and have obviously not seen Craig in action before.

And those who say the new Bond is more an action movie than a Bond movie need to re-address exactly what they ever liked about Bond. For me, and a kid, growing up with Bond, it was the excitement and action that started from the get go. The preliminary action scene that bought you to the title credits and let you know that Bond was all about action, was as much a part of band, and the hinted sexuality in the silhouetted ladies in the same title sequence, which for once was peculiarly absent in Casino Royale.

So, gritty and cold, the new Bond is a full on action movie that rarely slows down, which is a big ask seeing as it clocks in at a massive 144 minutes. And Daniel Craig brings his mongrel pedigree and puts some credibility back into the franchise after Timothy Dalton and Pierce Brosnan almost destroyed the double ‘O’ concept.

With huge set action pieces, plenty of heroes and villains, and more plots twists than you can shake a martini at, the thundering pace keeps you glued to the screen, whilst the audio and visual onslaught puts your brain on overdrive.

Perfect this movie isn’t, but the best Bond movie ever it is. Even Judy Dench as M seems to have found her groove, trying to rein in the loose cannon that is Daniel Craig’s Bond.

The other thing that puts this Bond above all the others is what made On Her Majesty’s Secret Service so damned good – and that is the love interest.

So if you want to be wowed and entertained, and you love guns and explosions, Casino Royale is your thing. If you’re a die-hard Connery fan, go buy Dr. No. on DVD.