Because Everybody Else Has One

Sometimes even messes can be fun.  And I'm sure that's not the first time I said that. This review is also up on Channel 24 What it's about When Harold Soyinka, a Nigerian immigrant to America, learns that he's about to be summarily fired from the job he worked tirelessly at and that his wife is about to leave him for another man, he decides to fake his own kidnapping in Mexico to fleece his duplicitous boss out his employee insurance. As is ever the case, though, a simple plan gets very complex very quickly and the usually upright and uptight Harold soon finds himself way in over his head. What we thought Gringo taps into a long tradition of crime caper comedies that is mostly about a normal schlub getting tied up in impossibly convoluted plots with shady, though often colourful, mobsters, hitmen, police, drug-dealers and eccentric locals, all coming to head in a way that brings all the plot threads together, sometimes in a jangled mess and some...

Dodgy accents, weird tonal inconsistencies and Die Antwoord: Chappie is Neil Blomkamp's most South African film yet. There is some good news, however... Playing out as a mix of Short Circuit and Robocop by way of District 9, Chappie is a glorious mess of a film that looks all the more bizarre to anyone even remotely aware of South African culture. Not only is it a film that is flawed on every technical and storytelling level imaginable, it's portrait of South Africa is so head-scratchingly wrong-headed, I'm surprised that the ministry of tourism hasn't outright banned it. Now, I know there's probably no such thing as the "ministry of tourism" but a) I can't help but think of government in Orwellian terms and b) this weird Bizarro-world South Africa presented in the film probably has one so why shouldn't we? To backtrack a little, the plot of Chappie is simple enough: something like three months in the future, Johannesburg is so utterly ove...

Houston, we have a problem. Boy, do we. This review is also up at Channel 24 . What it's about Sometime in the not too distant future, an international crew of astronauts embark on a mission to find life on one of Jupiter's moons. What we thought Films that deal with space travel and the dangers thereof have been around for a long, long time and include such seriously notable works as 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Alien, Moon and Gravity. Europa Report isn't so much a forgettable footnote of this illustrious genre, as it is a particularly ugly stain. The only good thing about it, in fact, is that I seriously doubt that anyone will remember it even exited once it has come and gone from our cinemas in what is guaranteed to be a mercifully short amount of time. What we have here is a science fiction film that is ceaselessly dull, underdeveloped, poorly written and blandly directed and fails entirely to engage on any level whatsoever. It has none of t...

No octopuses were harmed in the making of this movie... This review is also up at Channel 24 What it's about An amoral advertising executive is kidnapped and held in captivity for twenty years. When he is finally unceremoniously and unexpectedly released, he embarks on a trail of violence and vengeance to find out who kidnapped him and why. What we thought The original Oldboy, released way back in 2003, is a South Korean cult classic that took the psychological thriller in a bold and unprecedented demented new direction that made its American contemporaries look almost immediately tired and uninspired by comparison. Like the best cult movies, it isn't perfect and it alienated anyone who wasn't ready for anything quite so full on, but it was a smart, stylish and viscerally engrossing piece of work that may have been based on an already existing manga (Asian comic book) but always felt entirely fresh and original. It was also, quite easily, one of the decade'...

Neill Blomkamp is clearly a very talented director and he undoubtedly has at least one truly great film in him. Sadly, Elysium ain't it.. It's not just because of the sorry state of the rest of the South African film industry that South Africans - and the rest of the world - reacted so warmly to Neill Blomkamp's first feature film, District 9. It was, to be sure, a fairly flawed film but it wasn't only a well handled piece of science fiction and a smart allegory for apartheid - it also heralded a fresh new voice in genre filmmaking. Blomkamp and its star, Sharlto Copley, may be South African but bigger things clearly awaited them both. Sadly, bigger doesn't always mean better and Blomkamp and Copley's second film together may have a significantly bigger budget than its predecessor and a number of A-list Hollywood actors but it has little of District 9's charm, smarts and ingenuity. Again, Blomkamp turns his attention to allegorical science fiction but...