The world adores matt hayward

Luckily I was invited to a premiere of this movie last night. It must’ve been one of the first screenings. Because everybodie’s mobile phone was minded for us outside the cinema.

If you haven’t heard anything about this movie, it’s by the ‘40 Year Old Virgin’ and ‘Knocked Up’ crew, although a bit of a departure from their usually ribald, innuendo based stuff. This is more of an attempt at a mature broken heart comedy.

The plot basically goes like this. Sarah Marshall is an A list Hollywood celeb who stars in a TV crime drama that’s a parody of Alias. She dates the composer Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) from that show who’s a bit of a lay about stoner kind of guy who’s totally content with their relationship. It all goes pear shaped when she drops him and his life is thrown into some adolescent like turmoil.

Desperate to move on, his half brother (played by Bill Hader) persuades him to take a holiday to Hawaii. Sadly Sarah has taken her new beau English rock star Aldous to exactly the same Hawaiian resort. Clearly he’s on a crash course for Rock bottom, but finds a compassionate confidant, played by the gorgeous Mila Kunis.

What unfolds is a comedy of romantic mishaps which involves other guests at the hotel, uncomfortable couple situations and holiday experiences. But despite having all the right talent (especially in regards to Mila!), this movie lacks a certain rythym. It’s funny in bits but is strung along poorly and is just too idyllic to be believable.

Aldous (who’s played by UK stand up commedian Russell Brand) saves the day and the promiscuous and audacious rock star. Especially with a ridiculous parody of music video at the start of the movie. But you somehow get the feeling that’s just being himself and the whole movie would’ve collapsed in on itself, like a cake that didn’t rise, if it wasn’t for his impromptu moments of British wit. It does have funny moments, but it’s just not laugh out loud and doesn’t have the strength in the story of movies like ‘Knocked Up’.

2.5 out of 5.

Man I have been overdosing lately on crazy docos. And this one is by far the most bizarre. Have you ever seen two nerds in high school take each other to task in a presentation. Ripping each other to pieces with bane minutia, footnotes and factoids to try and find wholes in the other’s argument? The teacher shirked, gives both students an A and you can hear the girls’ legs close forever for the two learned nerds who will now have to take their virginity well into university (or college for you yanks!). Pathetic isn’t it.

Well picture that scenario with video games. That’s what The King of Kong - a Fistful of Quarters is all about. Picture high school nerds trying to set the world record on the 1980s Donkey Kong arcade game.

One bloke Billy Mitchell is a nerd that learnt how to play the game. Sure he had the joystick skills, but he got himself the stick on smile, pearly white teeth and the all American boy image, complete with a USA flag tie. Oh yeah, and he’s craftier than a shit house rat.

That doesn’t make Billy different to any other leading character. He’s forged himself a reputation and set his record in the eighties in front of an adoring live audience. But decades have passed and no one has come close till now. Enter Steve Weibe, the David in the Goliath equation. He’s a relatively good bloke that actually has a life, instead of several cats in an small apartment and his mum on speed dial. He’s just clearly obsessive compulsive, but keeps it together.

So the trouble starts when Weibe sends in a video tape of a Donkey Kong high score that blew Mitchell’s score into the water. The tape goes to a high score moderator that is clearly an old boys club that looks after its own. This is where things start getting weird. Suddenly people are accusing Weibe of machine tampering, hanging out with the wrong crowd and demanding a showdown with their beloved hero Mitchell.

By this stage, Revenge of the Nerds is looking like Beverly Hills 90210 by comparison. A bevvy of meddling nerds like Brian Kuh, who has held the second highest Donkey Kong score, enter the fray all loyal to Mitchell. Kuh is clearly a successful but tragic man. He’s retired at thirty, but instead of letting his hair down in a yacht and a Porsche, he sets up a showdown for Weibe in Florida somewhere. Following Weibe around everywhere, monitoring his every score and bowel movement over the mobile to Mitchell.

Despite the great not showing up to the showdown, Weibe plays on and exceeds all expectations, setting an unprecedented high score in front of an indisputable audience.  The look on Kuh’s face is priceless, as well as some other baldy guy who looks like Red Green from the Red Green Show. Clearly this wasn’t meant to happen and the king throws a spanner in the works via his many henchmen. A nerd melee ensues erupting in a showdown with a Guinness Book of Records attempt to up the ante.

What this doco is all about is asking whether being the better man and giving in better than having questionable personal hygiene and a world title. It also proves that money can never take the nerd out of a man, or give him valour. Frankly, this is a hilarious glimpse into a very esoteric nerdy world and the social wet blankets that made it for themselves. How some blokes will have to the best at something ANYTHING at all costs. All in all, the strength of character and perseverance of individuals that make this movie interesting. Not the nerds. Your more laughing at them, not with them.

Four out of five.

I’ll keep this short and sweet. COAS is an absolute corker. They follow around 4 semi professional actors that impersonate super heroes on Hollywood boulevard, taking photos with tourists for a living. One is a compulsive and dedicated Superman; one a Clooney lookalike with a dirty past and a worse temper; one the perfect cheerleader dressed as Wonder Woman; finally a former homeless black guy dressing up has the hulk.

Capturing a moment in time when these ‘characters’ were being chastised by the police for harassing the public, COAS takes a very human look at all of these four characters.  It’s exceptionally well produced and flows seamlessly from start to finish. You really find yourself anticipating with baited breath what’s going to happen to each person next. Almost like they’re acting in their own life.

There’s plenty of highs and lows as they each chisel away each day at their dream of being a bona fide actor. Brilliant production and direction aside, what makes this doco so good is the humanity of it: it’s uncontrived, and at times brutally honest. In a sense, it’s reality TV at its finest.

Without doubt this is one of my favourite docos in a long time. And not in a Michael Moore ‘A Current Affair’ sense, a true doc. 5 out of 5.

Finally a doco that jumps off the shelves at you saying ‘buy me, buy me!’ With the graffitied uzi on the cover it delivers its fair share of gung ho violence. What it doesn’t truly delivery is the first class raconteuring the production company claim they excel at.

Firstly a bit of background. This is a doco about the so called warlords of cocaine in Miami in the mid 70s to late 80s. Primarily the American pilots and the ruthless Colombians that fought perilously for their share. So far so good.

In fact the first half of Cocaine Cowboys is a veritable ‘everything you ever wanted to know about smuggling cocaine in the seventies’ style affair, which is genuinely compelling. Two convicted transporters, or pilots, talk in depth about how they communicated with drug cartels, what air and sea craft was used and other methods of drug transportation. There’s also a bit said about the Medellin Cartel, and how Pablo Escobar was not the numero uno he’s potrayed to be. A bit of a narcotics Mythbusters if you will.

To some extent, it’s a history lesson in how sleepy Miami was in the early seventies. Also how hifalutin cocaine still was to the masses, until everyone really got organised. Then came the bloodshed.

From this moment on, the Scarface style Latino gang bosses come into the picture. Primarily one such felon interviewed in prison who was the head bodyguard for one such gang boss. At this point, it’s hard to maintain the interest. There’s a constant pastiche of Latino thugs, money and violence. The felon must’ve talked for about 45 minutes. It should be far more compelling, but sadly it just doesn’t flow well enough. Although worth the price of admission alone to find out that the most brutal, feared gang boss in town was in fact a Latina!

Towards the end though the movie takes a turn into the subjective. Here claiming that Republican presidents Reagan and George HW Bush played an instrumental role in cleaning up Miami. While this may be true, the drug problem in the US is clearly still of epidemic proportions.

Ending on a positive, the subjects claim that the drug money of the eighties made the glitzy Miami of today. Which is all believable but for the fact that if you look at Top Gear’s American episode and Aussie Francis Gittoes documentary Rampage, some things never change. There are some truly bad areas in Miami to this day.

Brownie points go to the production crew for finding classic TV news footage of Steven Tyler coked off of his nut talking about the ‘new’ post coke wars Miami. That is as funny as hell. But it falls short of a truly awesome doco by getting too stuck into the accounts from one prisoner.

3 out of 5.

Brilliantly honest, suburban and quirky, Juno is the next arthouse flick from the middle of nowhere. Juno is a sixteen year old high school girl that falls pregnant to her best friend, a dorky athletics champ played by Michael Cera from the great Arrested Development. Having too much heart to deal with abortion, she decides adoption is the best option.

Far from the some uber conservative right wing reaction TV would have you expect, Juno’s parents take her pregnancy in their stride and support her in the adoption. Juno in the mean time looks for the perfect middle class family who can give her baby the support structure she can’t. While reading home maker magazines, she finds a classified ad seeking a baby, placed the perfect bourgeois yuppie couple. Here’s another highlight for Arrested Development fan, because the candidate dad is played by Jason Bateman.

Suddenly it’s all too idyllic. The wanting adoptive couple and the troubled teen seem a perfect match. But Juno quickly develops a friendship with the Bateman’s character Garner. This is when things get a bit pear shaped. Alison Janney, the prospective mother becomes enamored with childbirth, Bateman longs for his adolescence. Suddenly Juno is forced to reassess everything and take stock of what matters in her life.

Saying much more than that would wreck the whole thing. But if you liked Napoleon Dynamite or are a die hard Arrested Development fan like myself, Juno’s worth a crack. Michael Cera is brilliant in his role as the gawky boyfriend of Juno. Although you can’t help but feel he’s been a bit typecast as the indecisive dork. Equally brilliant is the girl who plays Juno, as a total ‘dude’ teenager that’s equally full of chutzpah as she is vulnerable.

Juno is a genuinely good movie which can’t be faulted. Whether it’s brilliant though I’m not so sure. I reckon it’s three and a bit stars out of five, but if quirky middle American comedy is your thing, give it a crack.

The problem with that big box with the silver screen in the living room is it doesn’t have a keyboard. It’s dumb. It can’t tell you the weather. It has no idea that there’s a far more useful box upstairs called, the computer. Seldom the domain of the female of the species, the computer connects to something called the internet and can access a plethora of movies, videos and christ knows what else! So if one fines what’s on the dumb silver screen uninteresting, chances are, they’re upstairs on the computer trying to find something interesting. And so the female of the species complains. Bugger. If only there were a way to combine the two . . .

Well bugger me dead, there is! It’s called a Phillips Streamium SLM5500. It provides a wifi link between your computer and your TV. So now anything on your PC can be watched the way it was intended. Rather than all cramped up on your desk in the study. And let me tell you, it’s bloody brilliant. It’s a box no bigger than a lunchbox with an aerial out the back. But the best thing is that the box blends in perfectly with the stupid silver screen. It doesn’t look like a computer at all! Nor does it make a stupid whirring noise.

To set it up, you plug it in, and after about 40 mins of setup (it’s fiddly, but it’s not that difficult. Not nerd difficult, but not iPod easy). There’s also some software you have to setup on your PC. It tells the streamer what directories you want to share out. From here on in, it’s driven by a very simple, quality remote control. All the menus on your TV screen are simple, clear and easily usable. No complex navigation.

At this point your probably asking, ‘does it have a hard drive?’. The simple answer is I don’t know! Does it run an operating system? Dunno. Frankly, it works and I don’t care. There are more complicated media gates out there. But I dare say there not as living room, or female friendly as this one. And besides, you don’t necessarily want to save everything to your media gate. I don’t. I’m quite happy to stream them. It’s a living room, not a laboratory.

Load time for movies is OK. It takes about 3 seconds to buffer the file you want to watch. And get this, I accidentally left it on for about 12 hours. I came home from work and it hadn’t stopped. It paused for about 20 seconds AFTER 12 HOURS OF CONTINUOUS PLAYBACK, and then just kept truckin’. No dramas at all. So far it hasn’t overheated, reset or shat itself in anyway. One thing is though, when you turn it on, it does take almost a minute to load and get on the network. But who cares, it looks good!

So there you have it, If you can find one they’re cheap, relatively simple and they make your TV useful again. My suggestion is bloody well buy one now. It easily plays files of your PC, there’s no FTP, no Linux, no shared drives and very little stuffing around. What more do you want?

Holy Crap this movie is out there. I mean after all, it’s meant to be based on one guy’s real life story and if ANYONE has lived this life, they deserve a Nobel Peace Prize!

If it sounds like some tame Weird Al Jankovic comedy thing, you’re way off. It’s a hip, period drama set in the mid 70s about a young effeminite boys painful childhood. His narcissistic mum is obsessed with becoming a famed poet. But let’s face it what poets are famous in their life time, let alone rich or admired? As his mum slips further into her psyhosis, her relationship with her alcholic husband detereorates. At a tender young age when a boy needs at least one strong role model, his family is falling apart.

They seek marriage counselling, with a psychiatrist. Which soon lapses into treatment of the mother. Eventually they divorce, but as the mum becomes junked up on the valium of the time, our main man is forced to move in with his mum’s pyschiatrist. His dad completely abandons him. He’s barely a teenager.

His pychiatrist pseudo parent lives in a psychedelic trash pile of a mansion that looked like The Greatful Dead partied there with the Manson Family. The only constant is total and utter dysfunction. The psychiatrist is a nearly retired mirror image of Freud, who’s tremendously caring, but verging on insane. He’s adopted three other patient’s kids, one of whom is played by Gwenyth Paltrow, range from the sublimely cool to the ridiculously neurotic.

Life only gets more twisted through the main character’s teens. He becomes gay, after starting a relationship with his skitzophrenic step-brother. Also finding out that his other siblings have equally been dumped by their parents. His mum becomes a lesbian and slips further into complete and utter insanity, till the point that she’s institutionalised.

Somehow, despite everything, both the main character lives through it all, and the movie has laugh out loud moments. Annette Benning put in a stellar performance as the insane mum. She starts out as the beautiful, hip 70s supermum that rapidly looses her mind, progressively becoming more disceveled as the movie goes on. For kitsch fans, you will love this movie, because the seventiesness is piled on in spades!

It is however a bizarre, at times frightening movie, not for the faint hearted. There’s genuine psycosis on display, suicide, rage and people being institutionalised against their will. At times it’s a harrowing reminder that for the mentally ill, you can be treated, but you never get well. You just stay a little more sane.

Four out of five stars :).

What a weekend for warts and all cinema. First of all we had Shortbus. A little sexual epic/human drama and at times acrobatic triumph of a movie! I would say more about the acrobatics, but let’s just say there’s some ‘interesting’ masturbation scenes and i’ll leave the rest to your imagination.  You will know within the first 10 minutes whether you’re cut out for Shortbus or not. If you liked Hedwig and the Angry Inch (the director’s previous work), no doubt you will have some idea what to expect. But whether you can stomach the broad gamut of sexuality on display is another story. I must admit during the more homo erotic scenes, I was looking away!

Shortbus is a bit of a symbiosis, because you couldn’t have the porno aspect without the drama and vice versa. Of the 3 main characters in the movie, a gay couple looking to ’see other people’; a sex therapist whose never had an orgasm and; a dominatrix who desperately wants to become an artist. All the characters meet up at this bizarre Andy Warholesque club named Shortbus, which offers anything and everything.  The journey these characters take is both massively erotic and intensely emotional. There are some really human moments in this movie through which people find themselves through somewhat shared experiences.

No doubt, some will argue that this movie is just trite porn, but it really is far too complex and arty to pass off something like that. But let me tell you something boys, if you think you’re going to get a lot of all girl action, um guess again. This might not be for you champ! Thankfully I can say this movie really gets under your skin. And although repeat viewing mightn’t be a necessesity, you come out so glad you’ve seen it. Adult drama doesn’t get much better than this.  4.5 out of 5.

Fast Food Nation

On the other hand, Fast Food Nation doesn’t have any gory sex scenes. Just gory kill floor scenes in abbatoirs! This documentary-come-drama is not a pro vegetarian manifest. It’s more about the drama of some illegal Mexican immigrants who come to America to work in a meat packing plant. The primary customer of the plant is a fast food chain.

The movie starts with a marketing ace from the restaurant chain, who’s sent to Colorado to find out why a scientific test found so much foecal matter in their burger patties. His investigation parallels our ‘guest workers’ adaptation to both American life and the harsh realities of their work.

For both, some stark realities are discovered and they have to ‘cop it sweet’ to keep their jobs and keep their so-called lifestyle. For the marketing guy, he discovers that he’s pretty much blackmailed into keeping business the way it is, because too many powerful people are making money. Our Mexican meat packing workers find too that they have to take a whole lot of shit if they want to make US bucks.

Suffice it to say, there are some real moments of symapthy for the Mexican workers who sort of live under the surface of American culture. At best they’re only equal in society as consumers, but never as workers or citizens.

Unfortunately the movie does get into factoids and more political stuff, as our Fast Food worker Amber joins the uni set and gets into activism. Enter Avril Lavigne as pretty girl uni student vegetarian activist. Only here does it loose your interest and you can start to see the movie’s documentary origins. Thankfully Bruce Willis and Kris Kristoffersen make up for this by actually acting!

Ultimately this movie has a few dead bits thanks to the factoids and is a little long. If you’re hoping for the mockumentary thing, there’s none of that. Very little humour or irony as well. But in the potrayal of the true human suffering, let alone animal suffering, this movie has succeeded. In being entertaining, maybe not. 3.5 out of 5.

A mate from Canadia came by this little pearler in the states a few months ago. Thankfully, it’s everything an Adam Sandler movie should be. Why do I mention Sandler you ask? Because a cursory look at the credits and you’ll see that the movie is by Happy Gilmour productions. And it’s all the better for it.

Grandma’s Boy is like some sort of modern day American Graffiti, Happy Days, or Detroit Rock City kind of thing. Basically replace the greaser haircuts, motorbikes or your heavy metal for a controller, a bong and an X Box and you’re starting to get the picture. Grandma’s house is all about the pot and the games!

Your plot is basically set around Alex who’s a Quality Assurance tester in the video games industry. His job is to ‘clear’ all levels in video games and identify all the bugs. Life is good until his house mate defaults on the rent and he’s evicted. With only a bunch of neer do well, socially inept buddies, he soon has nowhere else to stay but with his grandmother. She lives in a kind of grandma share house with a mentally disturbed woman with a tackle box of pills and a silver haired nymphomanic.

From hereon in, Alex tries to get the right mix of nanny pampering and stoner gaming. More often than not, he’s too knackered from his ‘chores’, that he’s asleep at his desk at work. As you can tell things get pretty pear shaped and the situational comedy comes on thick and thin.

It has to be said that their adaptation of a games development company seems pretty realistic. Most of the general testers and tragically-geeky-but well adjusted guys. But definitely more so in the two characters that run the joint. The general manager is a complete vegan, hippy freak. But he can’t hold a soy candle to the lead developer, who thinks he’s both a robot living The Matrix dream. It’s with these two nutters that the movie becomes totally believable! If you’ve known people in this industry, you’ll know what i’m talking about. It takes a special kind of insanity to make that kind of genius.

Of course being a Sandler flick, there are the obvious cliches. Linda Cardellini who plays the project manager for the latest game is as achingly perfect and she is beautiful. It just makes you sick what a great chick her character is. Oh and Alex (Allan Covert) bears an uncanny resemblance to Mel Gibson in the early 80s. And of course, what’s his face, Rob Schneider makes a token appearance as the evicting landlord.

No doubt, this will become a modern day stoner epic, in the vein of The Big Lebowsky and Half Baked with a hearty dose of wholesome Adam Sandlerism. I’m glad to say deservedly so. You will laugh, you will cry, you will probably pass the bong . . . I say rock on. 4/5.

For those of you that came in late, The Departed is a remake of Honkywood movie, Infernal Affair starring Andy Lau. Infernal was released circa 2000 was a stellar thriller. Fortunately The Departed has done it justice. Like the original it’s a twisted, sordid thriller of good disguised as bad, bad corrupting the good and so feeds the rich tapestry of life!

In the original, The Hong Kong Triads place a member in the Hong Kong police force and vice versa. This time around, the villians are the Irish Mafia in Boston Massachussets. So most characters (especially Matt Damon’s) talk like Peter Griffin from The Family Guy! Jack Nicholson plays the Irish godfather figure, at the epicentre of both both crime and corruption. Matt Damon plays the cop who rats to the mafia, whilst his nemesis is Leonardo DiCaprio, a straight-edged cop who goes as far as jail time to make himself believable as a mafia henchman.

How this movie differs from the original is in its potrayal of the police. Mark Whalberg (aka Marky Mark) plays one of the grittiest roles of his career, slipping out some choice off colour language as the Police Saraent in the thick of it all. It has to be said he does a damned fine job in playing such a real character. Jack Nicolson, whilst great, is just plain inimitable Jack. I don’t think anyone else could’ve played the mafia boss as well as him. He’s just plain snaky yet likable.

Worthy of praise if the reproduction of virtually all the pivotal scenes and moments of the original. Particularly a rooftop scene, which would be a plot spoiler if I said any more! DiCaprio almost acts out Andy Lau’s original character better than Lau did. 

In summary, this is a movie well worth checking out. For once, an American studio has little to apologise for in reproducing a modern classic. The remake has been rumoured for a while, but thankfully I think they’ve done the original proud. Hopefully it will open a few more people’s eyes to Asian cinema!

5 out of 5. Go Scorcese!