We talk with ‘Fame’ director Kevin Tancharoen about the pressures of remaking a classic and making a musical drama in the wake of ‘High School Musical’.
The protagonists in Pixar’s Up are not toys, fish, cars, rats or robots. Instead, they’re people, and I daresay one of the hardest things to get right in animation is realistically personifying a person. They pulled it off once before in 2004’s The Incredibles, but what Up achieves is something truly remarkable. In a short montage that chronicles the life and marriage of Carl and Ellie Fredericksen, Pixar capture the essence of humanity so profoundly, it’s one of the most touching piece of cinema I’ve seen all year. Academy, get you’re Oscars at the ready. A-gain….
If something ever goes wrong, just do what Hollywood does and blame it all on the Nazis. Seriously, if Paul McGuigan’s sci-fi thriller Push is anything to go by, they’re responsible for everything. In a ridiculously overloaded voice-over, Dakota Fanning’s character explains how Nazi experiments resulted in a breed of artificially enhanced humans with paranormal abilities. No, this not an episode of Heroes, but it might as well be; there are those who can use telekinesis, ‘Movers’, those who can draw the future, ‘Watchers’, and those who can control minds, ‘Pushers’. But that’s only the beginning; there are also ‘Sniffs’, ‘Stitchers’, ‘Wipers’, ‘Shadows’ and whole range of talents. You’re going to want to bring along a pen and some paper to this one, folks.
It’s odd that The Soloist is playing quietly into cinemas during the early days of September, as if deliberately out of earshot of the upcoming awards season. It looked set to be a sure-fire Oscar contender; not only does it star two of Hollywood’s finest actors, Robert Downy Jr. And Jamie Foxx, it’s also based on a true story that deals with mental illness, poverty and the human spirit. How could the Academy resist?
Three things to know about Paul Hogan before watching this: 1 – He’s repaid all his debts to the taxman. 2 – As a painter before acting, he helped paint the Sydney Harbour Bridge. 3 – His voice is just as ocker as it’s always been. These explain his allowance to film in Australia, the post-credits blooper and, well, that this is an Aussie comedy. But Hogan’s not the hero in this father-son bonding journey as we see a road-trip yet again the story centrepiece. Australian films use this regularly (see Thunderstruck) but Charlie & Boots maintains enough decent humour with an entertaining duo to create an engaging story.
We talk with Shane “Kenny” Jacobson about his new film ‘Charlie & Boots’, co-starring Paul “Crocodile Dundee” Hogan.
In The Taking of Pelham 123, Tony Scott’s camera zips around like paranoid fly, orbiting his cast like it hasn’t got anything better to do. It appears Scott grows restless because he desperately wants to make a 90 minute long music video, but has been told by his producers he must make a film about a heated phone conversation instead. Mind you, it hasn’t stopped him from trying; Pelham is packed with enough rap music, nauseating jerks, speed shifts and freeze frames to almost, so nearly, convince us something actually interesting is occurring on screen.
Ah, the age-old mystery… trying to work out the meaning of life brings purpose to some and scepticism to others – Bart Simpson has a book on it, and the Monty Python team satirised it. But let’s get serious and face the fact that life isn’t all peachy, and accept that we always try to rid ourselves of the pain for want of happiness. The fickle thing about the meaning of life is that there’s never one straight answer, and everyone’s interpretations best suit their personal situation. Stories that tackle this agenda face the risk of opening themselves up to criticism if they don’t entirely believe in what they’re saying… $9.99 does, but it struggles to reveal exactly what it wants to convey.
