The print advertisements qualify his words, describing this slight, charming and refreshingly candid little picture as “a story about love.” Which it is: a story about how love can be confusing, contingent and asymmetrical, and about how love can fail. Given all this, it’s somewhat remarkable that “(500) Days,” the feature directing debut of the music video auteur Marc Webb, is neither depressing nor French.
The governing commercial calculus these days seems to be that dudes want smut, ladies want weddings, and a picture (like “The Hangover,” say) that delivers both will make the audience happy and the studios rich.
So a winsome, accessible movie about more-or-less recognizable young people navigating the murky waters of post-sexual-revolutionary, midrecessionary heterosexual attraction has a novelty and a measure of bravery working in its favor, whatever its shortcomings.
Need a good reason to hate Iranians? by Nick van der Leek
Feminists will love this film, so will politicians bent on invading Iran on the premise of more weapons of mass destruction. The weapons of mass destruction is an interesting metaphor, because in 'SORAYA', those with the most sin, cast the most stones.
“The Stoning of Soraya M.,” a true story of religiously sanctioned misogyny and mob violence in an Iranian village, thoroughly blurs the line between high-minded outrage and lurid torture-porn.
On second thoughts if you've not watched a frame of this flick, that may not mean much to you. So here's a suggestion to get you into the ballpark. It's like an Iranian version of the crucifixion, and in this, Jesus is a woman, Soraya [sensitively portrayed by Mozhan Marnò]. The crucifixion - whether you think it's fiction or not - uses wood and nails. The 'SORAYA' story uses stones. For some reason the story transported me back to Gibson's PASSION OF THE CHRIST. The reason is unpleasant to dredge up, but I believe it is the troubling and absolute dehumanising of a human body by a community that these stories have in common. It's bloody and it is difficult to endure.
In a sense 'SORAYA' is an important film for South African audiences to see. One of its themes is male lust and misogyny, and while those terms may sound dull and politically loaded, the reality is that South Africa is rife with troubling levels of abuse against women, cover-ups, and stressed communities that are easily incited. Having said that, the film doesn't feel like a sermon in a church. It does that most vital public service which is that it reminds us what a community must be, and what we owe to each other to bring this about. And very simply, what we owe to one other is simply our honesty. And manners.
It's also importantto note that in Soraya almost all the men are wicked and controlling. STEPHEN HOLDEN again:
With the exception of the mayor (David Diaan), who has qualms about the execution, and Mr. Caviezel’s reporter, who appears only briefly at the beginning and end of the movie, the men are fiendishly villainous.
There are many stories out there about murder and death and dying, but few that give you a sense of the inescapable and painful inevitability of death. 'SORAYA' does that, and I noticed in the dark of the cinema, while I was watching, that other journalists and reviewers had their hands over their mouths. I did too. The actual stoning is particularly hard to watch. It is easy to like Soraya and to understand her frustration, her sense of helplessness and finally, her terrible but not self-pitying despair. It isn't sentimental, but it is realistic. It is difficult not to leave the cinema having borne witness to such an atrocity - based on true events - and have a sense of not wanting to add to the aches and pains that we have inflicted upon ourselves in this world.
'SORAYA' is a foreign film, with subtitles, and a foreign cast. There is a little English in the flick, thanks to the performance by an almost unrecognisable James Caviezel as Freidoune Sahebjam, a French-Iranian journalist. The Iranian scenes are a refreshing change from the usual Hollywood fare. Cyrus Nowrasteh the director has bases his story in the rocky, mournfully beautiful rural town setting of Kupayeh, in southwestern Iran. The actual filming is elsewhere, an unidentified location. While the actual event occurred in August 1986, stonings continue today, sanctioned by Islamic law.
The violence in 'SORAYA' is extreme, and people who generally enjoy gore are unlikely to enjoy this. The two sons of Soraya show the poignant change from theoretical violence as the reality of the process of what and who is involved in taking someones life. The corrupt relationship between the prison guard [Soraya's controlling husband] and the former prisoner, now mullah [an Iranian clergyman or priest, essentially a local leader of the community] is enlightening. It demonstrates to what extent power and religion can be used to manipulate simple people. For me, the most disturbing scene was the children collecting rocks for the stoning. Like murder, or killing, is a children's game in Iran. The town having a party after such blood-curdling activities asks us to probe our own conventions wherever we live.
It is perhaps no coincidence that Mr. Caviezel played Jesus in Passion of the Christ, since both stories evoke in such detail, the unspoken horrors of the human condition. Is it helpful to have this film come out in 2009? I wouldn't be surprised if this film stirs up powerful resentments against Islam, and Iran. Whether these resentments are deserved is a different question entirely. Because the shining star in this story, the Mary Magdalene, is the powerful performance of Zahra[Shohreh Aghdashloo]. It is in her that we see signs of hope and meaning for the human condition, and any chance of redemption.
Let us hope that people like her are the future of Iran, and that in our communities, there are enough Zahra's to maintain the white wedding gown fabric of honest cohesion, compassion and ultimately, common sense and common decency. 'The Stoning of Soraya M.' is a new release to the national cinema circuit in South Africa.
Johannesburg, October 27th, 2009:- Nu Metro Cinemas, South Africa’s premium cinema exhibitor, has announced today that its pre-bookings for The Twilight Saga: New Moon have officially overtaken Michael Jackson’s This is It, with just over a month before the former releases on cinema screens in South Africa.
According to Mark Harris, Content and Marketing Head for Nu Metro Cinemas, “More than 8 000 people have already booked for the second instalment of The Twilight Saga, which stars Kristen Stewart, Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner. What is even more impressive is that more than 60% of the bookings have been for exclusive midnight screenings that Nu Metro Cinemas is hosting on the evening of the 20th November nationwide.”
“In addition to the midnight screenings, The Twilight Saga: New Moon will also screen from Sunday 22nd November until Thursday 26th November at select Nu Metro Cinemas at 5:30pm daily. The film then releases nationally on Friday 27th November,” adds Harris.
For the die hard ‘Twi-Fans,’ there is also the re-release of the first instalment from Friday 13th November until Thursday 19th November at select Nu Metro Cinemas. Customers who attend these screenings of Twilight will be given a collectible poster from a unique four-character poster set of The Twilight Saga: New Moon.
To get full details on all the Twilight special offers and to book, visit www.numetro.co.za / mobi.numetro.co.za or call 0861-CINEMA (0861-246362)
It's a B-grade, make that a C-grade ALIEN, without the alien
Two astronauts awaken from hyper-sleep, unable to remember anything. They're disoriented in the dark. Payton [Dennis Quaid] stays behind in a functional hyper-sleep chamber. It's functional in the sense that it's outfitted with a console that can pretty much access most of the ship. Meanwhile Bower, an in-form Ben Foster [3:10 to Yuma, Alpha Dog] ventures into the bowels of the ship on a mission to restore power to the ship and to make sense of everything else. The name of this flick elicits 'paranoia' and 'pandemonium', and possibly 'Pandora's Box'. It's supposed to be a horror movie, set in space. Certainly some of the themes are horrific. Earth has been destroyed, and one space ship, the Elysium, is floating towards the edge of space, to a planet called Tanis, carrying a massive inventory of life. It's a one way trip.
In theory, survival is crucial so that our species can continue to exist. Problem is, you don't know which main character to back initially, and if you did, you wouldn't be sure why.
Although Pandorum is too confusing to have the suspense of ALIEN it does irk and scare occasionally with jabs of light and loud-noise in the dark. It's disturbing because you can't figure out the puzzle of what's going on for vast fragments of this flick. So what does it deliver?
Early on Bower discovers their spaceship is overrun by, well, orcs. And I guess that is the essence of the film. It's a mixture of 'Event Horizon' and 'Resident Evil', and will probably make a great game platform. If you don't like that, you won't like this flick.
Personally, I love sci-fi, but orcs are a stretch. Give me aliens or a virus, or intergalactic war, but there is something patently inauthentic about humanoid zombie-like creatures. Perhaps we're just too familiar with the sallow-skinned, black blooded, incomprehensible savage. It's that, but the people who come out of the woodwork, one by one, are also savage and almost as unrelatable as the apparently mindless cretins. And are we to believe humans evolved in stasis into creatures unable to talk?
The half-baked screenplay by Travis Milloy is partly to blame. The filmmaker - Christian Alvart - is an amateur when it comes to fight sequences. They are so badly done that I ended up asking myself, mid-movie: "Why is it that movies tend to resolve philosophical questions [who are they? what are they doing here? what is their mission?] with blood, sweat and spears. Why is the amount of reasoning, the strategic, logical approach, such a distant second to the near constant physical brutality?" If you're asking questions like that, you know the movie doesn't hit the spot.
From the New York Times: Without schematics to show the ship’s layout, neither we nor the characters have any idea where they are in relation to one another. (When the beastie in “Alien” was headed toward you, you knew it.) So when Bower tumbles into a vast slurry of rotting body parts — perhaps a mass grave, perhaps the mutants’ stock pot — its location is as much a mystery as its ingredients.
There are a few positives to report to the bridge. Germany's Lara Croft, Antje Traue as Nadia, is worth a second look. Richard Bridgland’s set designs are powerfully evocative. The spaceship, from the outside, is something we haven't seen before. The innards, built in Berlin, are Nostromo-ish, but at turns it feels like someone's basement, alternating with a credibly advanced 2174 A.D. console. There's beautiful use - on this apparently high-tech vessel - of wind-up alternatives to powering up everything from weapons, to reactors, to computer consoles. The moments that are authentic are powerful, and well rendered, but too few.
The focus on 'Pandorum'[a sickness associated with being in space too long] is the weakness of the flick. Think about it. Which movie have you seen that renders insanity effectively? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? A Beautiful Mind? The problem is you have to be very smart, you have to be a gifted story-teller to show the descent into madness, and you have to care about the characters when you see this happening. In 'Pandorum' there is a twist, but it doesn't really reinforce, instead it adds to a sense of opaque overload.
This is a pity, because on paper this flick has a lot going for it. The concept of human beings losing their home planet [or even just their homes], and the importance for survival, are fairly prominent, if subliminal themes in contemporary society. The idea of people forming bands to ward off other violent mobs [us versus them] is also closer to home than we might fully realise. While insanity may be tough to render, being confused about reality is troubling enough, and Alvart could have satisfied himself with pursuing just that, rather than adding 'crazy' to his on-screen palette. 'Pandorum' can't decide whether to be modern or industrial, heroic or horrible, dystopian or enlightening, sane or mad. And what about scary? It's about as scary as looking at your monthly phone bill. 'Pandorum' says a lot about our current troubled confusion towards the world, the claustrophobia and unreality of reality, where the walls move in and the substrate on which we live is decaying life. These are important issues, but unfortunately 'Pandorum' isn't easy to watch. It's a B-grade, make that a C-grade ALIEN, without the alien. It's just too much muddling about in the dark.
Gamer has bullshit smeared across it - by Nick van der Leek
Gamer is a great example of a current BULLSHIT movie. It's not credible, it's not creative, it has no story, it makes no sense, and as such, it's not worth caring about. It does seem to be a flick intended for audiences on LSD. It gets a 4/10.
"It's like someone threw a camera in a toilet and flushed it. It's just a bunch of crazy shit flying around."
The premise is simple. What if the avatars one uses in games could be real people? On the other hand, what if you were the avatar, unable to control your fate. Killing people thanks to the whims of others, or, in a different game platform, having sex with people. There is some Matrix theology here, rage against the machine, revolution against a system of control. It is probably aimed at 17 year olds, but I doubt whether they are going to care. They've tried to sex it up by throwing in a lot of lurid girl on girl kissing. Naked breasts wobbly unsexily throughout the picture. The flick might be trying to make an intelligent point about the overindulgences of society - from violence, to sex, to everything that entertains us. The problem is the flick itself is incredibly dumb. Everyone knows in real gaming that the avatar dies hundreds of times. The idea of this avatar beating the odds is very far fetched. It doesn't work.
What the flick does prove is to what extent the future is both not worth caring about, and something we seem unable to even imagine coherently.
The lighter side of greed is still dark, and painfully relevant – by Nick van der Leek
What is the exclamation mark for, you ask?Well, The Informant! isn’t The Interpreter. Instead of Nicole Kidman, Matt Damon is the heavy hitter [and he’s about 15kg heavier than you’ve ever seen him before], and instead of the UN, there’s a company called ADM. It’s funny, but dark, and bleak, and at times, dull.
Look, it’s a comedy, but based on a true story authored by Kurt Eichenwald. Whitacre [Damon] plays the highest-ranking corporate whistleblower in US history. But what’s it about? To quote a line from the flick:
“Everyone in this country is a victim of corporate crime by the time they finish breakfast.”
Initially it looks to be about embezzlement, collusion and corporate espionage. But there’s something kookoo about Whitacre.He talks a lot. And what he says doesn’t make a whole lot of sense. Well, it does and it doesn’t.For example:
‘Polar bears cover their noses before they pounce on a seal. How do polar bears know their noses are black? Did they look in the water one day, see their reflection and say, "Man, I'd be invisible if it wasn't for that thing."’
Damon describes it as ‘a great story and a really incredible character…You start with a certain set of assumptions and then realise you can’t assume anything as the situation becomes utterly ridiculous.’
There is a lot of voiceover in this flick, an idea screenwriter Scott Burns proposed right off the bat to director Soderbergh. The voiceover becomes so mixed-in with what is happening, that sometimes Whitacre provides in-screen voice-over to his wire while he walks through his office, loudly introducing his secretary and other big shots to his chest-level microphone. During a company meeting, a recorder in his briefcase jams, and in virtually full view of everyone, opens the briefcase and attempts to fix it.
And there are plenty more jaw droppers after that.
Soderbergh chose Damon for his ‘inherent believability’, the ‘nice young man’ quality. There is not a trace of Bourne here, just a pompous, over-analytical stuffed suit. When he says, ‘That’s it, I’ve told you everything,’ you believe him.
About Whitacre Damon says: ‘[He] was also bald and wore a hairpiece, but the hairpiece was so good that no one knew he didn’t have hair. It’s actually a great metaphor for the character.It was right there in front of everybody and nobody ever figured it out.’
‘I’ve always thought when this is over there’d still be a place for me at ADM. I’ve still got a lot of friends there.’
My impressions of the flick? A lot if it looked and felt like burnt paper. You know, lots of tobacco yellow tones, burnt hues, Vaseline light. I didn’t like the color; it seemed too old and out of focus. A lot of the action happens in office space; ordinary spaces that most people want to get away from, and forget about when they go to the movies.It’s boring.It’s about the messy business of lies, lies and cover ups. It’s about as inspiring as reading your local newspaper.The dialogue, and Damon-on-too-much-coffee lifts it, but not enough.
On the plus side, it probably sketches the archetype of the type of person that becomes a ponzi schemer, and the schmucks that get caught out.It demonstrates how a big mess becomes a giant, god awful fiasco.Soderbergh might think that is funny. It is darkly funny, but it’s also tragic. A judge in the flick labels Whitacre as ‘garden variety greed’. Damon steals the show [his character steals just about everything else], but it’s still a tragicomedy that’s all too real to really laugh off. And that’s what makes it so disturbing.It’s painfully relevant for right now.
Johannesburg, September 29th, 2009:- The untimely death of Patrick Swayze has strengthened the resolve of many to continue the fight against cancer, and for Nu Metro Cinemas this means an inspired Girls’ Night Out with the theme 'Dirty Dancing' in honour of Swayze’s brave battle with the disease.
To assist the Cancer Association of South Africa in its work, Nu Metro will donate all proceeds to the association. “We salute the brave fight that Patrick fought as a cancer survivor. He reminds us all of the need to educate the public of the importance of early cancer detection and treatment, which is vital to prevent unnecessary deaths from this disease”, says Lucy Balona, CANSA’s Head of Marketing and Communication.
By taking part in the Girls’ Night Out, ladies can assist CANSA to continue to provide essential services to meet the needs of individuals and families facing one of the most difficult experiences of their lives.
Girls' Night Out (ladies only) will take place at Nu Metro Bedfordview, Canal Walk, Clearwater Mall, Loch Logan, Menlyn Park, Montecasino, Mountain Mill, N1 City, The Pavilion, Riverside, The Glen, V&A Waterfront and Walmer Park at 8:00pm on Thursday, 8 October. Mark Harris, Nu Metro Cinemas Content and Marketing Head, confirmed that all proceeds will be donated to CANSA.
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