| MovieSteve

Friends with Money

2023-10-312013-05-15 by Steve

Having struggled to escape the long shadow of Friends, Jennifer Aniston ends up in a film with Friends in the title, playing the singleton with three married couples as chums. Nicole Holofcener’s follow-up to 2001’s Lovely & Amazing walks the same line – it’s a gentle comedy exploring human foibles. Then, families were the subject, here it’s rich people with first world problems, metrosexual tastes and lives obsessively focused on themselves. It is quite a cast – with Jennifer Aniston at its centre, playing the only one of this gang with no wealth and no love life, the only one who has to do shitty jobs for a living, including working as a … Read more

Brick

2023-10-312013-05-15 by Steve

Careful use of Spanish-flavoured old LA locations, low-slung camera angles and a devotion to hard-boiled dialogue, often maddeningly mumbled, make director Rian Johnson’s debut one of the most authentic nu-school noirs for some time. All the genre types are there – the honourable loner (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), the femme fatale (Nora Zehetner), the urbane crime lord (Lukas Haas), the thick-as-pigshit muscle (Noah Fleiss). The plot too is the real deal – brain-strainingly complicated and/or pointless, you’re never sure which. The twist is – there isn’t a person in the movie over high school age. Which serves to put a shiny new coat on the old genre. And shows that, if nothing else, Johnson knows how … Read more

Mutual Appreciation

2023-10-312013-05-13 by Steve

A micro-budget black-and-white indie drama, written and directed by one of its co-stars, Andrew Bujalski, who plays the college lecturer graciously helping out old school friend and budding rock musician Alan (Justin Rice) after he relocates to New York. Failing to commit, being vaguely rubbish, avoiding maturity, just sort of drifting about, that’s the over-riding atmosphere delivered by Bujalski’s bittersweet second film, after the highly influential Funny Ha Ha. His inspiration would appear to be the naturalism of early Jim Jarmusch, the awkwardness of Woody Allen, and Bujalski is keen on situations where what is not said is twice as powerful as what is. Embarrassment looms large too, inevitably, so anyone who’s ever … Read more

eXistenZ

2024-04-082013-05-13 by Steve

Combining two fields of interest of director David Cronenberg – the mediated-reality musings of Videodrome and the body horror of almost everything else he’s done – eXistenZ is about a video game designer dropping into the gamesworld she’s created, accompanied by a good-looking marketing trainee, to work out if it still all works after an assassination attempt on its creator. Jude Law is handsome and chiselled and pretty much perfect as the slightly blank computer-game virgin and Jennifer Jason Leigh also scores high as the programmer who’s developed a gaming environment so realistic that it makes real life look lacklustre. This parallel reality where industrial and organic coalesce (a gun that shoots human … Read more

TMNT

2023-10-312013-05-12 by Steve

Can the sewer-dwelling Mutant Ninja Turtles dudes named after renaissance painters really still be teenagers? Just one of the many questions raised by the latest animated iteration of the once popular franchise that can trace its origins back to a comicbook spoof of the early 1980s. Foremost of those questions must be “Why?” Feeling a lot longer than its 87 minutes, TMNT is a franchise reboot that follows the familiar pattern – hence the “getting the gang back together” element which needs to be got out of the way before the real plot (a tech-industrial magnate, voiced by silky Patrick Stewart, wants to destroy the world) can be embarked on. The look is … Read more

Wild Hogs

2023-10-312013-05-11 by Steve

Martin Lawrence, John Travolta, Tim Allen and William H Macy

Four suburban guys, all losers in different ways, go on a cross country trip on their Hogs – that’s Harley Davidsons to the uninitiated. The guys are John Travolta, Tim Allen, Martin Lawrence and William H. Macy. En route to wherever they get mistaken for gays, find themselves on the wrong side of a group of real, hairy assed bikers (led by Ray Liotta) and one of them even finds love with a waitress (Marisa Tomei in a cheerleader-ish succession of “I’m hot” poses). Tim Allen and Martin Lawrence as buddies? Yes, it’s a stretch, but no more than imagining William H Macy and John Travolta cracking open a couple of beers after … Read more

Zizek!

2023-10-312013-05-10 by Steve

The media’s love-in with “the wild man of theory”, the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek, continues with this documentary about the bear/clown himself. Starting with Zizek’s rhetorical question, “What would be my spontaneous attitude towards the Universe”, Astra Taylor’s film continues in a playful vein through a US lecture tour and ends up back in Zizek’s Ljubljana home, where he waxes philosophical from the bedroom, the kitchen, even the bathroom on whatever pops into his wildly fermenting head – Hitchcock, plastic water bottles, the state of toilets in the US. This sort of photogenic posturing explains why Zizek has become the pin-up philosopher of our time – he’s not only the most media-friendly thinker, … Read more

Reno 911!: Miami

2023-10-312013-05-10 by Steve

A feature length version of the Comedy Central TV show. And, obeying a law that stretches back at least to the dawn of TV comedy, the format goes on holiday. To Miami, as the title suggests, where Reno’s precinct of variously useless cops suddenly find themselves the only police in town with a drug lord to contain called Ethan the Drug Lord (played by Paul Rudd) and day-to-day policing duties to carry out. Obeying another law, there’s the odd guest cameo – Danny DeVito in this case (his Jersey Films outfit are bankrolling the movie so it makes sense). But who cares about guests or the plot – no one involved seems to – … Read more

Midnight Movies: From the Margin to the Mainstream

2022-11-262013-05-09 by Steve

Dressed to kill: Divine in Pink Flamingos

Or how six films screened in graveyard slots between 1970 and 1977 changed the way movies are watched and made. The six are: El Topo, Alejandro Jodorowsky’s mad freakish spaghetti western, the Man with No Name drops acid. Night of the Living Dead, George Romero’s splattersome zombie motherlode which even now Romero is rubbing his hands about. Pink Flamingos – John Waters broke through with this excursion into camp sleaze, and how happy Waters is with the idea that almost single-handedly he dragged Hollywood along with him into the world of bad taste. The Harder They Come, the reggae film by Perry Henzell that filled a need created by Bob Marley for Jamaican … Read more

Meet the Robinsons

2023-10-312013-05-09 by Steve

Disney remind us of their legacy as animation innovators with this busy busy busy story about a young inventor genius and orphan (big aah) called Lewis who is zipped into the future by his new pal Wilbur Robinson. There Wilbur hopes Lewis will help him defeat a snarling, moustachioed villain called Bowler Hat Guy (who’s not a thousand light years removed from Dick Dastardly) and Lewis hopes Wilbur will help him recover his latest whizzy gadget, the Memory Scanner, from Bowler Hat Guy’s felonious grasp. This will enable Lewis to probe his own mind, in a desperate attempt to remember who his mother was (even bigger aah). On the way Lewis meets Wilbur’s … Read more