I always remember the story of the woman who understudied Lena Horne in some Broadway musical. And she was told she was going to go on that night because Lena had lost her voice. And the understudy said, “Oh, wonderful!” She said she just needed a certain kind of eye shadow she had to pick out herself. And she was going to go out to one of the drugstores on Eighth Avenue and she’d be right back. And she went to Philadelphia instead. Isn’t that a great story? And it’s true. I understand it perfectly. I love the fact that she went to Philadelphia. What a story. And that’s an example of Beckett’s unhappiness being the funniest thing in the world.

[via Gothamist]

Because unlike every other 20th Century icon Dylan never cared what you think - he just followed his instincts and his interests and the film is an endlessly fascinating portrait of that battle to avoid becoming what his audience and his industry wanted him to become. Portrayed by six different actors including Cate Blanchett and Heath Ledger, Dylan’s many personas still keep you at arms length. I think the key to Dylan is that he is less complicated (and at the same time more complex) than the world would have you believe and he fully deserves a work of art as fine as this one in his name.

I should also point out that I was lucky enough to see I’m not There. in that most musical of locations, the Paramount and it sounded superb. A keeper.

Robert Downey Jr. is one of those movie brats who seems to have been born in front of a camera (check out his almost perfect performance as Chaplin for Richard Attenborough in 1992). He hasn’t been getting the lead roles he deserves (Kiss Kiss Bang Bang was the last one) but Iron Man is surely going to change that. Downey Jr.’s effortless screen charisma is the foundation of a highly entertaining action movie that is only let down by a not-quite-big-enough set-piece at the end. Billionaire and playboy arms manufacturer Tony Stark has his eyes opened to the evils his products enable when he is kidnapped in Afghanistan. After escaping, he decides to use his technology for good (while still having as much fun as possible). A good supporting cast (including Jeff Bridges looking like Daddy Warbucks) keeps things moving.

The funniest thing about Patrick Dempsey rom-com Made of Honour is that it was made by a company called Original Film. As if! Dempsey plays Tom, super-rich inventor of the coffee collar and serial-bedder of beautiful women. Too late he realises that he is actually in love with his best friend Hannah (Michelle Monaghan, this year’s Sandra Bullock) just as she is about to get married to Trainspotting’s Kevin McKidd in a Scottish castle. Pretty much all the characters are deeply shallow and pretty unlikeable which I’m sure wasn’t the intention and, most annoying of all, director Paul Weiland gives himself the auteur credit of “A Film By”. In your dreams, pal.

Much more successful, and not coincidentally populated with much nicer people, is Dan in Real Life starring Steve Carell as author of a popular newspaper parenting tips column who has much more difficulty parenting his actual children (alone, due to that all-too-common conceit of a widow-hood). So far, so un-promising, but Dan in Real Life really wins you over with smart writing and lovely, understated performances from a terrific ensemble. Lonely Dan is taking his brood of daughters to a multi-generational family get together in rugged Rhode Island. He meets beautiful and alluring Juliette Binoche and they fall in love, just before finding out that she is his brother’s new girlfriend. Testing times around the dinner table ensue, mostly comic but never far away from deeply heartfelt. Frankly, more films should be like this.

How About You is one of those films where, I confess, my taste and the taste of mainstream New Zealanders diverges somewhat. Ellie, played by Hayley Atwell (star of the unnecessarily forthcoming new version of Brideshead Revisited), is forced by circumstance to help her sister care for a group of unruly clients (a dream cast including Vanessa Redgrave, Brenda Fricker and Joss Ackland) in an Irish elderly residential home so beautiful it makes Malvina Major look like Alcatraz. Left alone with them at Christmas, she manages to transform all of them into saintly paragons of maturity via alcohol and non-prescribed drugs. I barely tolerated this but if you are over 70 you might get a kick out of it - the people behind me who talked all the way through certainly did.

The Human Rights Film Festival kicks off it’s 2008 season at the Paramount on Thursday evening. While most of these films don’t really qualify as cinema per se, this is still an important opportunity to see the world as it is absolutely not portrayed through the commercial media. Highlights for me include Occupation 101, a crystal-clear examination of the reality of life in occupied Palestine, and Now The People Have Awoken, another perspective on Chavez’s Venezuela which will be of particular interest if you have seen Pilger’s War on Democracy. There are seven shorter items on the programme too: I’m looking forward to seeing Bowling for Zimbabwe about a young boy who needs a cricketing scholarship in order to escape the man-made atrocity of Mugabe’s grinding poverty.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 7 May, 2008.

Notes on screening conditions: I already mentioned how good I’m Not There. sounded at the Paramount during the Showcase. I don’t know whether it is the shape of the room or the PA speakers behind the screen but music cinema has always sounded sensational in there. Iron Man was, like Transformers last year, at a busy public screening at the Embassy which looked and sounded great. Standing ovation from a few fanboys, too. Made of Honour looked perfectly acceptable at the Empire. I am not allowed to tell you where I saw Dan in Real Life as they made me sign an NDA before they would let me in there. No shit! But it was amazing. The print had seen better days but had been given a spruce up by our hosts. How About You was ruined by it being a not very good film but the incessant talking by the old biddies behind me and the annoying hair in the gate finished me off. Penthouse.

At Churrascaria, diners signal their appetites with a dual-sided coaster resembling a poker chip: Green side up, more meat. Red side up, stop!

[From the New York Times]

It’s a very attractive shade of black and has a deeply impressive, heavy, manual which is all in English. It used to be manuals for video recorders were padded out with all sorts of European languages but now they need all those pages to explain the fiendishly complicated process of recording telly to a hard drive and then transferring the video to a DVD so you can lend it to your mates.

One thing that struck me just now as I opened up the box was a notice reading “THE REGION NUMBER FOR THIS DVD RECORDER IS REGION NO. 4″ and it occurred to me (at the same time as I realised that my Caps Lock button doesn’t appear to be working) that as this machine has come straight from Panasonic it won’t have been de-zoned. And then it further occurred to me that I didn’t even know whether the Sony DVD Recorder I bought last month was region-free or not. I just assumed it was and never thought to check. What’s more I don’t know if I even have a Region 1 disc here to test it.

Does this mean that that Region-Rebellion we were all so worried about is over? Is the selection in New Zealand now good enough that we don’t need to worry about buying from Amazon to get our fix of fine home entertainment?

Not entirely. I recently ordered two films from amazon.co.uk which are not available on DVD for rent or purchase here: Patrick Keiller’s wonderful, literate, films about Britain from 1994 and 1997, London and Robinson in Space. Which, I now discover are All Region encoded anyway so I don’t know exactly what that proves.

After loathing last year’s Meet the Spartans and cursing it’s predecessor Epic Movie, it was with a heavy heart that I took my seat for Superhero Movie, another parody pot-pourri. One name in the credits lifted my spirits a little (no, not Pamela Anderson): David Zucker, director of Top Secret!, Airplane and The Naked Gun. As it turns out the few funny moments in the film are gags that could have come straight from those earlier films (”Fruit cake?” “No, I’ve just never met the right woman”) but the rest is a repetitive waste of time. Why bother parodying films that are essentially only parodies themselves?

Talking of repetitive, I got an odd sense of déjà vu during Superhero Movie before I realised that Dragonfly’s love interest Jill Johnson was being played by someone called Sara Paxton who had also been the villain in Sydney White not two hours before. It’s an odd item, Sydney White: the Snow White fairy tale re-located to College and starring Amanda Bynes (She’s The Man) as a working class tomboy trying to get into a snooty sorority. Kicked out in disgrace, she has to shack up with the seven dorks next door (each dork is a re-imagining one of Disney’s original dwarfs - can you name them all?) and then bring the school together under an Obama-like banner of inclusiveness, at the same time finding her own Prince Charming (who even manages to wake her with a kiss). Strangely watchable.

Sadly, I couldn’t bring myself to believe in any of Four Minutes, from the unlikely teenage piano-prodigy / murderess combo (Hannah Herzprung) or the bitter old lesbian prison piano teacher (Monica Bleibtrau), or the opera loving but brutish prison guard (Sven Pippig). I wish I could have watched it with the subtitles turned off so that I could enjoy the music and art director Silke Buhr’s amazing sense of texture and architectural environment. Every location has an almost tactile quality, from the decaying brick prison to the gilt Opera House at the climax. I was particularly taken with a concrete neo-brutalist concert hall reminiscent of Wellington’s beloved Hannah Playhouse.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday April 30, 2008.

Nature of Conflict: Four Minutes is released in New Zealand by Arkles Entertainment who pay me to work for them on occasion.

“In our line of work, everything we do loses money,” Sobczak said. “It’s the nature of professional theater and nonprofits.” Or, as Lansberry puts it: “If theaters made money, they would be on every corner, like Starbucks.”

So the more theater you do, Sobczak said, “The more money you lose. Part of our expense equation is we’re losing more money by doing more.”

[Denver Post online]

It just goes to show how out of touch I am (my usual voracious movie-going is 100% subsidised by distributors and cinemas) but “Ouch”. How do normal civilians cope?

Please don’t get me wrong. I’m not complaining - I know first-hand what the costs are in running a cinema. I’m just surprised. And broke.

How to write film criticism? Stop reading it. — Karina Longworth, Spout Blog

Sad, but true. I used to read A. O. Scott et al for fun, I even subscribed to Sight & Sound. Now I can’t even listen to Simon Morris on National Radio, let alone read the international greats. And it’s not because I’m worried about my opinion being formed before I’ve seen a film – it’s the critical language that you pick up without realising. I need my responses to be my responses, and my expression to be my expression. For what that’s worth.

I hadn’t expected the new digital 3D medium to be used so expertly so soon but creators Catherine Owens and Mark Pellington have managed to make the entire stadium space manifest with floating cameras and intelligently layered digital cross-fading, giving you a concert (and cinema) experience that can not be imagined any other way. Even if you are not a U2 fan this film deserves to be seen as an example of the potential of 3D to transform the medium.

For the school holidays Nim’s Island is an unexpected bonus. Dependable Abigail Breslin (Definitely, Maybe) plays the target market, an 11-year-old girl stranded on her idyllic pacific island when oceanographer father (Gerard Butler) is lost at sea. With only her sea lion and pelican for company she reaches out to her hero, fictional adventurer Alex Rover, and instead gets Alex’s agoraphobic author played by Jodie Foster. Cook Islanders might be a little put out by their portrayal but Australians get it worse, all of them are fat and boorish oafs. I liked Nim’s Island and I know one person who is likely to get the DVD for Christmas.

The most interesting thing about violent renegade cop thriller Street Kings is the cast: Johnny Utah from Point Break is the pudgy anti-hero; Idi Amin is the big boss and jolly Bertie Wooster runs Internal Affairs. Apart from that there’s nothing you won’t have seen before and you’ll pick the plot apart some reels before Keanu does.

Some people would have you believe that British cinema is exemplified by David Lean epics like Lawrence of Arabia or Michael Powell’s The Red Shoes. Not so. The archetypal British cinema is found in those Carry On box sets at Whitcoulls, Confessions of a Taxi Driver , Hammer Horrors and Ealing Studios’ successful St Trinian’s series which spanned four films in the 50’s and 60’s. And now the gym-slipped young hellcats enter the 21st century, supported by reliable old stagers like Stephen Fry and Colin Firth. Rupert Everett takes on Alistair Sim’s dual roles of headmistress and brother and Russell Brand (a complete unknown in this country) plays Flash – a role originated by George Cole and (it would seem) written in this version for Ricky Gervais. Sadly, none of it works in the slightest and the latest version of St Trinian’s is a certifiable laugh-free zone.

College Road Trip is another entry in the list of films featuring black men screaming: this time the screamer-in-chief is Martin Lawrence, over-protective father of teenager Raven-Symoné who is about to go to college. The whole thing lacks pep and when the best thing about it is Donny Osmond you know you have a problem.

Earlier this year I said that delightful French rom-com Hunting & Gathering was “too good for the Penthouse”. I wish to unreservedly withdraw that frivolous wisecrack and apologise to the Penthouse as, by definition, it can’t be too good for them if they’re actually playing it. It’s heaps better than anything French they played last year, though.

Finally a quick word about the abundant documentaries around at the moment. Blindsight is the best: the story of a group of blind Tibetan students, taken into the Himalayas by Erik Weihenmayer, blind conqueror of Everest. There are several underlying stories also told, each of which deserves a documentary of it’s own.

I Have Never Forgotten You is a powerful and humanitarian biography of Nazi-hunter Simon Wiesenthal, told largely in his own words.

The Real Dirt on Farmer John is a study of a unique agrarian character, John Peterson: organic entrepreneur and showman. He seems never to have done anything without someone beside him with a motion picture camera which adds considerable visual flavour to an interesting life story.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 23 April, 2008 (minus St Trinian’s and College Road Trip which were cut for space).

Notes on screening conditions: U2 3D was, as you might have gathered, amazing in Readings Dolby Digital screen (6). I’ll be going back to that one, I suspect. Nim’s Island was at a Saturday matinée at the Empire. St Trinian’s was also in Island Bay, on a very dreary Friday morning. Street Kings was watched alongside Dominion Post reviewer Graeme Tuckett at Readings on Monday afternoon. College Road Trip was the film before (although Graeme wisely avoided that one). Hunting & Gathering was viewed on a DVD screener supplied by the World Cinema Showcase a few weeks ago. Blindsight was screened on Sunday evening at the soon to be late and unlamented Rialto (although the staff there are never less than friendly). I Have Not Forgotten You was in The Brooks at the Paramount, out of focus until I alerted the projectionist and with a smudge in the top right corner of the screen – either in the gate, on the lens or on the projection box glass. Very annoying. The Real Dirt on Farmer John was a digital presentation in the Vogue Lounge at the Penthouse: while the vintage Super 8 content looked beautiful the scenes originated on video were very washed out and lacking in contrast. Could do better.

Nature of conflict: Adam Clayton from U2 is a second cousin of mine (his Mum and my Dad are cousins). I don’t think that sways me at all, though.

And while we’ll never know exactly where all those bones disappeared, my specific theory is this: A lot of the money not spent on music in the twenty-first century is being used to pay off credit-card debt that was incurred during the nineties. In other words, not paying for In Rainbows today is helping people eliminate the balance they still owe for buying Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness when they were broke in 1995.

And, for no better reason than I want to try the “Add media” button in WP2.5, here’s Pinkard & Bowden’s amusing parody of “Islands in the Stream” (”Music Industry”) from 1985:

Pinkard & Bowden - Music Industry (1985)