The Film Evangelist

Film: The Croods
Country: USA
Year of Release: 2013
Director: Kirk De Micco and Chris Sanders
Screenwriters: John Cleese, Chris Sanders and Kirk De Micco
Starring the voices of: Nicolas Cage, Emma Stone, Ryan Reynolds, Catherine Keener, Cloris Leachman
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥½

Sometimes a film doesn’t have to do very much in order to entertain. The new Dreamworks movie The Croods, which tells the story of a Neanderthal family emerging from the shadows of cave life into the bright possibilities of a world called tomorrow has a plot that is so thin and flimsy that it verges on non-existence. Yet, for once that’s okay. The film is so beautifully animated, and the continually shifting landscape which the Croods occupy in their journey from constrained survival to a world filled with nominal meaning so gorgeously rendered, that the surface of the film is sufficiently engaging without having to provide any depth at all.

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Film: The Last Stand
Country: USA
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Screenwriters: Andrew Knauer, Jeffrey Nachmanoff, George Nolfi
Starring: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Forest Whitaker, Jaimie Alexander, Harry Dean Stanton, Rodrigo Santoro, Johnny Knoxville
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥ 

Considering his extraordinarily narrow range, Arnold Schwarznegger has a remarkable on-screen presence, a presence that is barely suppressed by the increasingly wizened and wiry texture of his aging face and still very substantial body. Schwarzenegger, who can barely act, is nonetheless still capable of carrying the right kind of film on his not-exactly-neglible shoulders with little more than a strident posture, his strangely mesmerising fascist beauty and a clipped Austrian accent that is seldom given more than two sentences at a time. Continue reading →

Visiting the Berlin Film Festival for the first time involved a slew of remarkable highlights, not the least of which was the sheer number of world-class filmmakers, writers and actors in attendance.

But beyond this, and beyond the vast plethora of films available for viewing, most for the first time anywhere in the world, and beyond the star-studded parties and functions, something else struck me, something which in a way was more significant than anything else – and that was the sheer importance given to the act of film-viewing and the elevation of cinema as an art form in the city. Much has been written about cinema as a space of semi-religious devotion but attending films in Berlin gives a profound substance to the metaphor. For, unlike the very wonderful Durban International Film Festival, in which Durban’s cinephiles are given the rare chance to access a cross-section of global film, there was no sense at Berlin that the festival was catering to a minority or a subculture.   Continue reading →

I’ve written before in this column in defense of slow film, talking specifically about the need for surrender when we engage with art that is produced at a different pace and rhythm to that of our accelerated lives.

But the truth is that the films I’m defending – usually at the Durban International Film Festival, the only occasion when such films get much of a run in Durban – are, in relative terms, action-packed adventures compared to many of the films that are shown today on the global film festival circuit. At this year’s Rotterdam Film Festival, slowness was the order of the day, the word taking on a particularly glacial meaning as the daily activities of people from around the world were elevated to a position of significance that was not always justified. Continue reading →

Film: Django Unchained
Country: USA
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Quentin Tarantino
Screenwriter: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Jamie Foxx, Christoph Waltz, Leonardo DiCaprio, Samuel L Jacson, Kerry Washington
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥ 

There’s a moment in Django Unchained, the latest movie from Quentin Tarantino, when Dr King Schultz, one of the film’s two central protagonists, utters the words “I just can’t resist it”, before launching himself headfirst into the kind of graphically explicit over-the-top bloodbath that we’ve come to expect from Tarantino over the course of the last two decades. But those words, while fitting comfortably into the film’s narrative, may as well be coming straight from the mouth of Tarantino himself. He simply can’t resist the opportunity of taking a film that would in many ways benefit from being played fairly straight, and twisting and accelerating it into a production that is defiantly the work of a schlock master. Continue reading →

Film: The Perks of Being a Wallflower
Country: USA
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Stephen Chbosky
Screenwriter: Stephen Chbosky
Starring: Logan Lerman, Dylan McDermott, Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, Paul Rudd
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥

The Perks of Being a Wallflower is a charming, if somewhat uneven, coming-of-age tale that chronicles the experiences of an introverted and disturbed young man growing up in the mid 1980s who finds his place in life among a group of misfits and outsiders. Continue reading →

Film: Adventures in Zambezia
Country: South Africa
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Wayne Thornley
Screenwriters: Camilla Bubna-Kasteliz, Andrew Cook, Raffaella Delle Donne and others
Starring the voices of: Samuel L Jackson, Jeremy Suarez, Leonard Nimoy, Jeff Goldblum, Richard E Grant, Abigail Breslin
Review: Peter Machen
♥♥♥

Adventures in Zambezia is a locally produced 3D animation with the grandiose ambition of taking on the animation giants of Dreamworks and Pixar on the global stage. The product of Capetown-based animation studio Triggerfish, the film features an international cast of big-name voices, and succeeds to a moderate degree in its intentions, although its triumph is greater in narrative than in technical terms, something which shouldn’t come as a surprise given the massive resources of technical and artistic talent to which the two American monoliths have access. Nonetheless, Zambezia is more successful than could reasonably bw expected as a first-time outing and promises greater things to come from Triggerfish. Continue reading →

Film: Angel’s Share
Country: UK/France/Belgium/Italy
Year of Release: 2012
Director: Ken Loach
Screenwriter: Paul Laverty
Starring: Paul Brannigan, John Henshaw and Gary Maitland
Review: Peter
♥♥♥½

Angel’s Share, the latest film from stridently independent British filmmaker Ken Loach is an unusually sprightly affair from one of the masters of social realism. Telling the story of a young Glaswegian thug named Robbie (Paul Brannigan) who attempts against all odds to rise above the shackles of his violent past and uncontrollable temper, the film takes a leaf out of Hollywood’s book, following a familiar arc of challenge and redemption, but without giving into the pressure towards blandness that usually follows such an approach. Continue reading →