Unappreciated actors: Mark Ruffalo

By Brady Oltmans, Guest Columnist


February 15th, 2012

In this modern age of cinema there are very few truly breakthrough performances. Jean Dujardin’s performance in The Artist is not one of them. While his performance is one to commit to memory, he is already a very accomplished French actor. While Rooney Mara commanded the screen with ease in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, she already showed promise with her limited, yet fantastic performance in The Social Network. Performances like that make you wonder if they are great performers or just great performances. The longevity of an actor or actress is proven with what they do after their initial landmark role. “Breakout” actors and actresses rarely see prolonged success.

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The (darkly) funny side of losing your wife

The Descendants

By Jonathan Fisher, February 8th, 2012

Alexander Payne's The Descendants is, as we'd expect from him, about as dead-on a character study as you are going to get. George Clooney collaborates with the independent American film-maker, and it's a logical fit. Clooney has a remarkable ability -- particularly for a megastar -- to look completely normal. Matt King, the character he plays in The Descendants is one of Alexander Payne's classic everyman heroes (everymen?): witty, honourable, but also quite flawed. It's one of his best performances, and even though we all know that the Oscars are irrelevant, boy would it be nice to see him win for this.

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The Best Films of 2012

10. Rango – This dandy of an animated film by Gore Verbinski about a loner lizard (voiced by Johnny Depp) bursts with creativity and nuance. The world created in the town of Dirt is partly inspired by the weirdness of Terry Gilliam films and partly inspired by, of all films, Chinatown. I loved this film for its offbeat sense of humour and impeccable animation. I just love the mariachi band that constantly reminds us that Rango will, in fact, die.

9. Source Code – I’m not sure that Source Code is a movie of much aesthetic or philosophical significance (actually, I’m sure it’s not), but it’s one hell of a fun ride. A white-knuckle thriller directed by Duncan “Zowie Bowie” Jones (of Moon fame), Source Code sees a marine played by Jake Gyllenhaal forced to relive the final 8 minutes of a doomed train’s journey, in an effort to identify and prevent a greater terrorist attack. Source Code is slickly made, and while it doesn’t consist of the most hefty of subject matter, it’s all one can ask of a science fiction thriller. I loved it.

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A Muppet of a Movie

The Muppets

By Jonathan Fisher, January 20, 2012

The Muppets have always held a bizarre place in the public psyche. A little too twisted to be entirely for children, and a little too PG to be directly targeted at adults, the Muppets have managed to gain a faithful, loving following in both demographics. They've also been inordinately successful in attracting celebrities to their cause -- The Muppet Show was all about having a special celebrity guest each week, and their other productions often turned out some fine work from the best thespians around. A Muppet Christmas Carol is, oddly enough, one of the best adaptations of the Dickens novel yet produced, and Michael Caine is possibly the best Scrooge we've seen. So this element of celebrity collaboration and name-dropping remains in The Muppets, which features so many blink-and-you'll-miss it cameos from notable actors that it's the least the film-makers can do to insert a Rolodex joke.

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Changes a-comin'/Hugo and Sherlock 2

It's been dead quiet round these here parts for the last few weeks. There are a number of reasons for this -- the primary one is that I'm still overseas and in between boosting my Heathrow injection with Christmas and New Year food and drink, I've also been travelling around the lovely UK country side. I'm planning to get back into reviewing and podcasting from January 13, and hopefully by the end of the month there will be some quite big news about the site. I may as well provide SOME kind of movie criticism while I'm here. In the last few weeks I've seen Hugo and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. In short, loved the former, a bit indifferent about the latter. Hugo is a wonderful heart-warmer, with Dickensian flourishes and a massive appreciation for the beauty and power of the history and medium of cinema. As for Sherlock -- it was a bit of a much of a muchness for me. I was a marginal fan of the first one, thinking that Robert Downey's performance was just about worth the price of admission. This new instalment is just an extension foe the first film, and as such many of the same observations can be made about it -- hip, whimsical execution, a fun soundtrack, and a nicely recreated London of old. Moriarty, Sherlock's arch-nemesis, is the primary villain here. I didn't find him that menacing. As for the rest of the story, it's a bit convoluted. I didn't think it was really worth caring all that much about. Alright, this is the best I can do sitting on a couch in the Cotswolds, typing on an awkward iPad keyboard. I'll go into more depth in the next few weeks.

RIP Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

"I know what's coming, I know no one beats these odds. It's a matter of getting used to that, growing up and realising that you're expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way. And try not to do anything dastardly to your fellow creatures."

Christopher Hitchens said that absolutely plastered, on the side of a road, recorded by a fan of his on a camera phone. It takes a very special intellect to come up with quite a worthy life's mantra in such a state. Hitch was/is a great influence on my writing, my thinking, and my perspective on the Universe. I'll miss him greatly.

Five Innovative Features

This is an article by guest-writer Leanne Miller on five of the most innovative films of modern times. If you'd like to get in touch with Leanne about her writing, reach her at leanne.miller82@gmail.com.

The world of cinema is continuously growing and fans are constantly dazzled by the lengths producers will go to create a truly impressive movie.

Special effects, computer animation and clever cinematographic techniques are all the rage these days, so to celebrate this timeless art form, let’s take a look at 5 of the most innovative movies of modern times.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

The brain child of Nick Park, Wallace & Gromit are a loveable duo created using clever stop-motion animation. The first feature-length movie,Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [2005] brought the duo to the big screen for the first time, and quickly became one of the most popular “clay-mation” movies of all time.

Using a laborious but rewarding procedure, the film was created by moving each plasticine character a bit at a time and filming each frame. Every frame was then played back in quick succession to create the illusion of movement. Each character also had to be duplicated in different poses and in a multitude of costumes depending on each scene. The final product beams with the ingenuity of its creators.

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