Christain Bale is insane...and I LOVE IT!

More evidence that Christian Bale has lost his mind came up this week. After allegedly assaulting his mother last year, a four minute taped rant surfaced of Bales "antics" towards director of photography Shane Hurlbut during the filming of Terminator: Salvation. The rants has been said to have taken places a few days before his 2008 arrest. This says to me Bale was under a a shit load of stress. No excuse for chewing out the film crew...but hey....he's the goddamn Batman.

Anyway....

The reason why I love the fact that Bale is slowly going batshit insane is due to the fact that THE BEST ACTORS DO! From Brando to Kinski, all the great actors are mental, intense nutcases who are one coin flip away from killing someone. I expect that from actors, if your not...your not doing it right.

In fact in listening to the rant (until near the end where Christian is just fucking harsh) I understand what Bale is getting at. As angry as he is, the scene should have been finished before anything needs to be done. Also...alot of filming is waiting so long did the scene take to set up?How many takes were there before? How long were the actors waiting before the scene was ready? What time of day was it? While Bale and his rant was hilariously unprofessional, as an method actor who fully takes his role into himself (note he speaks in an American accent, he's welsh) so if he's in the zone and is hitting the right notes in the scene, I could see that being really annoying.

To add to this the reason I love it the most is.....Bale will more than likely deliver a kick ass performance because despite being mental he's that damn good. Also if he didn't go apeshit we wouldn't have been able to get this:




But as a counter point: Really? Leaving a film because a guy screwed up a couple of times? Get off your high horse you fucking diva, intense you may be but you ain't got no Oscars yet buddy, the guys just doing his job, i'm sure when you flubb a line people get pissed. Fucking prima donna.


Bet none of this shit happened on The Prestige:

Pictured above: A troubled man, happy with lights.

Don't care for superbowl....care for film ad spots though

While there's nothing I'd like to see less than a bunch of testosterone filled jocks hugging each other, Superbowl did not disappoint when it came to upcoming movies. Yes most were jumped up toy movies but that didn't take away the fact that most of them looked fun on the bun.

Lets start with the bad though...



Angels and Demons looks to be as long and boring as The Da Vinchi Code. I hope the film isn't too bad as it would cap off a great year for Ron Howard whose Frost/Nixon was pretty damn good.




Fast and Furious looks like it has a lot of teen masturbation imagery going for it (hot girls, Vin Diesel, fast motors) but now the franchise seems to have gone so far over the top that it misses the cheesy point break charm that made the original memorable (to me at least).


But the good....



Transformers: Revenge of the fallen looks set to be the robot movie to see. It's 30 sec T.V spot makes the film far more interesting to see than the whole trailer of T4. For me the first movie seemed to be a uneven mixture of fanboy nostalgia, story elements ripped off from Independence Day and action which varied from brilliant to blocky. ROTF however looks set to sort some of that shit out. Just one thing Mr Bay....please can we have a story this time? I'm sick of Micheal Bay movies that have 30 mins of story and plot within a 2 hour plus movie.




G.I. Joe: Rise of the cobra I was never a G.I Joe fan although I did have one 1985 manual once. The action in the T.V spot....looks pretty slick in my view although the film looks very likely to suck balls in the plot and acting department (looks like well known actors sleepwalking though lines again.




I'm now really looking forward to Star Trek. I've never given a shit about the program or films before until now. It looks like it could be a blast. (fuck the fanboys)




My favorite however will have to be UP by Disney Pixer....I have never seen a Pixer film that disappoints me and this looks to be business as usual.


Plus can someone tell me whats going on with Simon Pegg on the Star Trek trailer web page? seriously.....he looks fucking weird.

Review: Frost/Nixon

Year: 2008
Director: Ron Howard
Screenplay: Peter Morgan
Starring: Micheal Sheen. Frank Langella, Sam Rockwell, Oliver Platt, Kevin Bacon

So I got up today feeling like crap. I didn't sleep properly, it was raining outside, I missed the end of Sunday Supplement due to the girlfriend wishing to watch Buffy instead (she hates football, it's a tragedy) and apart from Sunday lunch, I didn't have nothing to look forward to. My Girlfriend suggest going to the cinema but I really couldn't be arsed, reason being? It's January and it's difficult to get into the mood to go to the cinema when the choice of movie seemed to fall into three categories: Depressing, Seen it, Nazis. I could be be up for a depressing Nazi movie tomorrow, but today nothing was biting.

I knew I wasn't going to get out of this so I asked my girlfriend to pick the movie. She picks Frost/Nixon. "It seemed the best out of a bad bunch." I thought to myself. Considering the material the film was based on, I couldn't see this being a "happy" film. So off to the cinema we go and after my other half yelling at traffic we manage to park up, get our ticket and go into the movie. After two hours my mood was relieved, reason being? Frost/Nixon was bloody brilliant.

The film is a fictionalized account of the build up and filming of the infamous interviews between Frost and Nixon. Despite being fictionalized, Howard does his best to blur the lines between the fact and fabrication and delivers a tense drama which shows how much television has affected politics. Also despite historical inaccuracies Howard delivers a film which helped me "discover" more about these two men. I knew them by name but I honestly didn't know very much about the interviews and lets be honest I feel there's a lot of people my age that probably don't. I personally feel my generation can be very ignorant when it comes to aspects of history, myself included. It's a testament to the filmmakers that after I watched Frost/Nixon i wished to know more about the scandal and the interviews. In face I wanted to read up more about Nixon than the film, so while the film isn't historically correct, it is insightful enough for viewers to become more interested in political history so they can search for the information themselves.

Credit must go to screenwriter Peter Morgan who once again delivers characters full of complexity and depth. None of the characters are strictly black and white, just shades of gray. He wants us as an audience to make up our mind. Did Frost "win"? was Nixon truly as sinister and devious as he was made out to be?

The beauty of the drama lies within the screenplay displaying every person as flawed human beings. At one moment we see Nixon as a political powerhouse, his presence and stature is almost regal. The more we see of him as the film goes on the more the vulnerability appears. We see the cracks in the veneer as we see the hints of guilt eating away at him. Frost on the other hand is full of charm and grins a man of much talk and very little action. The early stages of the film show a true David/Goliath mismatch as Frost first comes across as a car salesman more than a hard hitting presenter.

The script shows us the type of people both used for the interviews; Frost has a team filled with rabble rousers and a long suffering producer, while Nixon has a trusty team of right wing yes men. By the end of the first act I really wondered "is this the guy who does breakfast with frost?". Nixon looks like he could batter Frost away with a hand wave. How the script sets up the two titular characters make the outcome even more entertaining and with that said the script does not disappoint as the film takes hold with a vice grip and never releases the tension until the credits.

Ok ok babbling now. But I loved the screenplay. The only thing I liked better? The cast. Micheal Sheen and Frank Langella don't play the roles as charactures. They fully embody what made the men at the time. Sheen plays Frost as slickly as possible, full of cheeky grins and knowing winks. What makes him so watchable is the lack of knowledge about what he's taking on. It's this ignorance that makes Sheen so watchable in the later stages when he falls upon a moment of luck and seizes on it like a jackal. Langella makes sure his Nixon isn't all big cheeks and sweat and locks into a nobility that makes him extremely watchable. Howard does a great service of bringing some of the best working character actors for the support. Kevin Bacon puts in a solid effort as Jack Brennan it's a role so good that you could swear he was a Republican (if he is then brownie points taken away). I haven't seen Oliver Platt so good in a movie for ages while Rockwell is his reliable self again despite needing more to do in the movie. Kudos must also go to Matthew Macfadyen as Frost long suffering producer John Birt, his interaction with Sheen is brilliant.

Howard directs the film with a nail biting tension in nearly very scene but keeps the films pace swift throughout. I'm not the biggest fan of his films, so to see him bring out such an engrossing drama like this (haven't seen Apollo 13 yet i know, shame on me!) is great. Especially as his film before that was the dreary Di Vinci Code. He also (with the help of the screenplay) humanizes Nixon to a great extent, which to me is a great thing. In softening the former president, not only he makes him more accessible but also helps remind the audience that not only this President was a man but also one that wasn't all bad. We see the good as well as the bad in Nixon and while I don't condone what he did...I left the film with a larger amount of respect for him. Nixon was hated but compared to the one who just left...well the less said the better.

My review for Frost/Nixon is over long, rambling and muddled..however the film is not and it's entertaining to boot. Go see it.

Review: Bride Wars

Year: 2009
Director: Gary Winick
Screenplay: Greg DePaul, Casey Wilson, June Diane Raphael
Starring: Kate Hudson, Anne Hathaway

Plot: Two best friends become rivals when they schedule their respective weddings on the same day

Jean-Luc Godard on cinema: Truth twenty-four times a second. He really wasn't talking about a film like Bride Wars. A film which condescends to it's main audience that when it comes to the customs of marriage. Love doesn't matter, The men certainly don't matter, all that matters is the big day for the Bride, that's it. The filmmakers pretty much boil everything down to the bride looking perfect. This wouldn't be too much of a problem if the "comic" material used within the film is weaker than a third rate sitcom.

I know this film wasn't "made" for me but I dislike the idea that if I'm dragged out to watch a Rom-Com then i really don't want to see shallow, materialistic, bitchy women whose only purpose in life is to wear a white dress. I'm sick of women in powerful occupations (Kate Hudson's character is a lawyer) turn into dibbling mess as soon as a sight of a ring appears. I'm sick of the idea of marriage being dragged into the mud and generally being an all round joke. I'm also sick of Hollywood Rom-Com's giving off a unreachable "perfect" vision of Romance. With Divorce rate finally lowering, do you think it's a good idea showing these ridiculous visions of relationships? I may be going over the top with this but with the amount of people bitching and whining about the amount of sex and violence in movies i feel i can rant about this. Seriously, it's not just violent films that cause people to lose it.

Ok so I'm over reacting. But Bride Wars really is a jumped up T.V movie with A-list actors. I would forgive the unoriginality and cliche if it wasn't for the fact that Bride Wars isn't funny. If you've seen the trailer, not only have you seen all the comic set pieces within 2 and a half minutes, but if you didn't laugh then....it's every unlikely you'll laugh at the full thing. Jokes are constantly falling by the wayside (seriously not even titters from the audience at times) due to the lack of bite within the writing and most of all the lack of comic timing portrayed by the two leads. Both are extremely attractive and can put butts on seats, but they aren't aren't funny. I could be if they had ok material but unfortunately no.

I may be considered a slight hypocrite yes but there's a reason why Four Weddings and a Funeral made a shitload while this will be forgotten in an instant. And please...when am I going to see Kate Hudson in a kick ass role again? it's been 8 years.

Oscar Nominations are out....

So the Oscar Nominations are out and once again they do not surprise me. Many would have wished for The Dark Knight to win an award but please guys seriously, the academy hates fan boys. It was never going to happen. And so it shouldn't!

Why? Because the snubbed films are usually remembered more than the ones that win. Chicago, A Beautiful Mind, Ordinary People anyone? Remember them? People still argue more now about Pulp Fiction being the most definitive film of the 90's than Forrest Gump that film that oust it in 94. So to be fair I'm happier a film like The Dark Knight will be remembered more by it's record breaking audience than the stuffy academy.

I am happy however that Slumdog Millionaire has got a best picture nod. I remember coming out of an advanced screening and stating to a work colleague. I loved it, but no way is it getting anywhere near an Oscar. Sometimes it's nice to be wrong.

Because life sucks, we're only just getting a lot of the Nominated films in just now, and I will probably spend a lot of the next few weeks watching them to be up to date. However after seeing he Wrestler I hope Rourke blows everyone out of the water and claims the best actor award and right now until I see more I'm backing Slumdog for pretty much every thing else!

One thing though....I have seen Revolutionary Road (Review coming soon) and I'm not sure if I want Micheal Shannon to win Best Supporting Actor for his excellent turn as the troubled John Givings. While Ledger is probably favorite (and superb) in his role as the Joker, Shannon gives a brilliantly nuanced performance that made a dreary film worth watching (and he's only in two scenes!).

Well only time will tell and of course every film wanker will complain that the film/actor they wanted to win was robbed but lets hope that the whole event is a good one all together.