Movie Review:The Ides of March – Clooney provides us with a flick that sizzles, satisfy’s & tantalises our political taste buds!

This one is George Clooney’s 4^th outing as a Director and I really did enjoy pretty much every minute of it. There are some lovely twists and with a truly stellar cast it packs a wonderful political punch.

In this film we don’t dwell on the big speeches and the public announcements too much, what we are provided with here is more of the behind the scenes look into the campaign. What all the guys and girls running round like headless chickens are up to on the senators behalf, with the small seedy hotel rooms, the back street bars & empty office rooms, where 'the real decisions are made' I found it pretty riveting stuff.

Our story follows Steven Myers (Ryan Gosling) an idealistic campaign spokesman for Presidential hopeful Mike Morris (George Clooney) and working alongside chain smoking Campaign Manager Paul Zara (Phillip Seymour Hoffman) as they fight, squabble & debate their way through the day to day offerings of the campaign.

Morris is the perfect candidate, cool, charming & quick lipped, with a near shoe in for the Presidency. Myers appears to be a political boy genius with Paul Zara forever slowly slapping him back down to earth, and when Myers gets a call from the opposition spokesperson Tom Duffy (Paul Giamatti) to come over to their side the story really kicks in with Myers finding himself fanning fires from several directions, including an affair he gets tangled up in with an Intern on the campaign (the lovely Evan Rachel Wood).

Gosling I'm convinced has it written into his contract this simple statement: 'Must end up in bed with really hot chick or will not do movie'.

Anyway! You aren’t bored here with political mumbo jumbo, the story flows well and the focus is much more around the characters (especially Myers) journey & interaction with each other which keeps this film very engaging.

I’ve also decided that I’m a little starved of good films of late I must admit. So this was a welcomed addition to the year. It certainly doesn’t break any boundaries in this particular genre. 

But it floated my northern boat none the less.

7 Northern Thumbs Out of 10.

http://www.imdb.com/video/imdb/vi1103731737/

Movie Review: Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy - a rather brilliant, but slightly confusing piece of espionage!

I’d been massively looking forward to this re-make from a 1970’s classic TV series starring Alec Guinness. With its rather stellar British cast and with the wonderful glimpse into the cold war period, spies, espionage and all that. It had to be pretty juicy stuff! 

Directed by Swedish filmmaker Tomas Alfredson (Vampire film ‘Let the Right One In’) we are catapulted back to a time of extreme uncertainty, paranoia & ‘it’s time to pick a side’ mentality.

Our film mainly follows semi retired M16 agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) in his quest to track down a Soviet sympathiser (the correct term being a ‘mole’) in the ranks.

The whole M16 operation is called ‘the Circus’ and when Control (John Hurt) narrows down their suspects to five likely lads within the organisation, George sets about digging into the world with which they have all been a part in an attempt to smoke the bugger out!

Mr Oldman is sensational, subtle, and cool; he crafts this role into a performance that will most certainly have him up for an Oscar. His supporting cast, John Hurt, Mark Strong, Cathy Burke, Tom Hardy & Colin Firth all play wonderful parts in making this an intriguing wonderfully told piece of filmmaking.

Tom Hardy is also worth mentioning as such a bloody great actor. He plays a more rogue agent who goes AWOL, but once tracked down by Oldman gives some vital clues to who the mole could be, they almost have a bit of an ‘act off’ together at one point which is totally captivating stuff!

The plot twists and turns throughout this picture (which at times) makes us work rather hard as an audience. You will (or at the very least I did anyway!) get a little lost at certain points. There is a great deal to follow here and I came out thinking I will almost certainly need to see this again, at the very least just to pick up on a view areas I wasn't 100% clear on.

The era is captured really well, from the smoky corridors of M16 to the grim and grotty back streets of London & Istanbul. You are taken on a journey here that takes it’s time, explores it’s characters and depicts our time and place with a beautiful accuracy that I’m sure any boring historian would blow his load over.

Go the Brits, The Circus and the Swedes.

8 Northern Thumbs out of 10.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aco15ScXCwA

OutPost – The world’s graffiti community gets together to put on a show. Cockatoo island style!

I could think of worse ways to spend my sunny Saturdays. And even worse ways to head to the newly opened Graffiti exhibit on Cockatoo Island via ferry.

Last time I headed to the island of Cockatoo, I went to the Biennale exhibition which had loads of awesome installations, mind blowing some of them actually! That was certainly going to be a hard one to beat.

This time around though the artistry is only part of what the island has to offer - with DJ’s, entertainment, badge making?! (not sure about that one), skateboarding and a couple of snazzy bars with the Sydney backdrop at your feet - you do feel rather at home pretty quickly.

You can camp over night here which is also pretty cool - on the boat over I nearly had my head taken off a few times, or my footing misplaced for fear of some little bastard kid carrying around camping gear for his mother and father. I'm all for dog collars and leads on these little people. 

The cool kids are here too sipping on sparkling wine with the odd Corona staring out towards the harbour from what they’ve decided to call the island bar.

Back to the art though - it’s nothing special. Don’t get me wrong, there really is some impressive work here! But once you’ve been into one area and the next, you tend to get the picture people.

Art though is a subjective little thing and I’m sure you could end up perusing the various warehouses full of work for hours, not I though thank you.

Some Banksy work is also here though. Handed over by a collector for the duration of the show, which is always nice to look at. In comparison to all the other works you can certainly see why the man is as popular as he is!

Overall though, nice atmosphere, a few pretty pictures & on a nice day you can smash a few beers on the grass while the barman persistently switched tracks on the sound system because he can’t make his mind up whether he wants Marvin Gaye or the Red Hot Chilli Peppers on. 

 

 http://outpost.cockatooisland.gov.au/

Movie Review: Drive – a very super cool slick flick that almost doesn’t deliver the goodies.

Certainly not the kind of film that I expected, at first glance from the trailer and posters that surrounded my local cinema you would think this was a 'fast paced action packed guy gets the girl' kind of affair.

You couldn’t be more wrong.

What we are delivered here is a paced, even thoughtful perhaps, dark noir style kind of film which takes its time over every scene, line & performance, delivering a pretty wonderful (at times tense) overall mood.

We are introduced to our protagonist, the driver (Ryan Gosling), getaway driver by night, the best in town, and by day a stunt car driver. He also helps out in a local garage headed up by nice man / crook Shannon (Bryan Cranston, from Malcolm in the Middle fame).

For our opening scene we are given an arial shot of the vast beautiful sights of Los Angeles (and continue to throughout the film), while our driver is currently in the midst of one of his robberies. Cool as a cucumber he navigates his way round the city avoiding police cars and helicopters with total ease.

He meets Irene (Carey Mulligan) who lives next door to him, a friendship blooms and when her husband returns from jail, still mixed up in a lot of nastiness, our driver offers a helping hand only for it all to go pear shaped (and standard mob stuff ensues).

At this point the film changes direction getting more gruesome, with some incredibly bloody moments that had me crying out, ‘ooh, ah. Shit me that looks painful!’ soon the driver is fighting fires from all directions and doing a damn good job of it too.

I really can’t make my bloody mind up about this one though! On the one hand its uber cool look and feel sucked me in as well as some stellar acting, and I know this is going to sound a bit strange, but there's some cracking violence too. 

But on the other I had trouble believing certain aspects of the story be honest, there certainly felt like there were a few holes. As the critic in the Guardian http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2011/sep/22/drive-ryan-gosling-film-review explains (in regards to just one of the holes) as part of his 'drivers rule' he will only hang around for 5 mins once the robbery kicks off, when this 5 mins is up he’s off no matter what state the job is in! What is the point of a getaway driver that buggers off after 5mins?? No matter what a dab hand he is.

I don't suppose people will give two hoots though, certainly if you've got Mr Gosling behind your wheel.

7 northern thumbs out of ten (just),

Young Adult - Miss Theron doing another movie that could win her that 2nd Oscar.

And why not 'ay! 

She's done bugger all for a while really.

From Director Jason Reitman (Juno, Up in the Air), comes this new comedy starring Charlize Theron as Mavis Gary, a writer of teen literature who returns to her small hometown to relive her glory days and attempt to reclaim her happily married high school sweetheart (Patrick Wilson). 

Certainly looks promising I reckon - see what you think though.

Trailer: https://rcpt.yousendit.com/1258647532/e465fda5d655b11e5afea251de161000

Aus Release date- 19^th January 2012

Paranormal Activity 3 Clips For You To Feast Your Eyes Upon.

Paranormal Activity 3 Official Australian Clip 1:

Embed - http://www.youtube.com/embed/PpLIod2umxg
 

Link - http://youtu.be/PpLIod2umxg
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Paranormal Activity 3 Official Australian Clip 2:

Embed - http://www.youtube.com/embed/ZMDfsXy5qWU

Link - http://youtu.be/ZMDfsXy5qWU
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Paranormal Activity 3 Official Australian Clip 3:

 Embed - http://www.youtube.com/embed/qwPrvTQi76I

Link - http://youtu.be/qwPrvTQi76I

Crazy Stupid Love –A fat dollop of comedy a twist of romance followed by several lashings of light drama.

 At first glance you could be lead into a false sense that this film is nothing more than you’re standard romantic dram-edy. But this film really turned out to be a lot smarter than first thought and with a great cast some good twists and turns; this film carried me along quite nicely.

In short, we are thrust into the lives of an LA couple Cal (Steve Carrel) & Emily (Julian Moore) Weaver who appear to have reached the end the road in their relationship. When Emily announces that she wants a divorce, Cal would rather throw himself out of a moving car than save his marriage (fair enough I guess).

He then commits himself to the local bar where he spends most of his time ploughing through vodka and cranberries while being rather vocal about his marital issues. The local male slag, Jacob (Ryan Gosling) then steps in after listening to Cal’s constant wails of grief and assumes the role of coaching him on how to re-discover his man hood (no easy task it seems). The two end up on various pulling sprees which eventually result in Cal taking a few lovely ladies home, including one slightly insane harlot played by Marisa Tomei.

Randomly we are also introduced to Hannah (Emma Stone), a promising law student who early on runs into Jacob and fends off his rather crap advances (how and why do fellas think that kind of routine works?!). We do seem to dip in and out of this story line leading us to wondering how this somehow connects to everything else.

The film escalates, the story thickens, and without going into too much detail we have several lives in crisis all interconnected - which makes for some engaging viewing.

Overall this really was a pretty funny flick; it had me cackling in the aisles. It was perhaps a tad on the long side though - I’d decided to drink beer throughout the film and the last 10 minutes had me dreaming sweet nothings around large ‘Niagara’ waterfalls and the rather deafening sound of running water. So my mind was elsewhere I must admit!

But I always enjoy the unexpected & although this still had the very typical frame work of that genre, the performances & direction steared it clear enough that I came out thinking I hadn't wasted nearly 2 hours of my life on some average Rom Com.

Even if I was in some discomfort for the remaining 10. 

7 Northern thumbs out of ten.