The Hunger Games.

Spotify? Thin Line by Jurassic 5. I’ll never call myself a hip hop aficionado, but these guys are great. I’ll sound cheesy now (fuck you) but Jurassic 5 really do have the sound of the streets.
LoveFilm? Sitting on my desk right now are The Zookeeper, which is going to be painfully bad. And Laputo – Castle In the Sky which, I’m predicting, will be painfully good. Pain, basically.
Amazon? So I finally did that thing I should have done YEARS ago, and read The Lion, The Witch & The Wardrobe. A measly 200 pages, but fun. Once I get done with this months’ Empire Magazine, it’s Jane Austen’s Emma. I’m hoping it’s less Little Women, and more Jane Eyre. Interesting, not wank, I mean.

*****

This is a short list of things people could say to put me off a movie: “This is the next Twilight!”. Okay, that’s the end of the list. I don’t have anything against that Twilight lot, but I’m not sold on it. So chances are I wouldn’t be sold on anything claiming it’s the next one. They said it about The Hunger Games though. Said it a lot.

For those of you haven’t read the novels, here’s a quick breakdown of the movie first: Katniss Everdeen (Jennifer Lawrence) lives in the slums of New York many years in the future, where the poor are very poor and the rich are very rich. Every year, the annual Hunger Games puts 24 slum-dwelling kids into a televised contest, watched by millions Big Brother-style. The rules are simple: kill everyone else, and you win. This year, Katniss is taking part, and winning is a matter of life and death. Literally.

So I’ll come clean: I really loved this movie. This was a very well-made, well-shot film with a great central concept and some great performances. To be honest, mentioning this as something similar to Twilight is an insult – Hunger Games excels over Twilight on every level.

What really impressed me about the movie was the grittiness of it all. Sure, it’s marketed mostly towards teenagers, but this isn’t exactly a date movie. This is literally young children beating and murdering other young children. Mercilessly, a lot of the time, and all for nothing. Rather than shots of gorgeous people in gorgeous places, we follow a battle-worn Katniss with shaky cams. We’re in a warzone, and director Gary Ross never lets us forget that.

But that’s the second half of the movie. The first half is impressive because of how allegorical it is. Comparisons can easily be made to the fantastic Battle Royale, but the two films differ in one aspect. While Battle Royale is an allegory on society too, it doesn’t touch on it nearly as enough as The Hunger Games does. It’s a fearlessly scathing attack on reality TV and the Big Brother world, and it works. Nothing could justify why these poor kids have to kill each other, especially when, beyond staying alive, the winner gains nothing. They just do it because people want to watch them do it. Ratings. Familiar?

But everything else aside, this is a good film simply because of Jennifer Lawrence. Fucking hell, she’s fantastic. She hasn’t been around very long, but has already succeeded in tough, meaty roles. This is one of them. Katniss Everdeen is not a girl’s girl: she is a fighter, a survivor, devoid of expressing herself, but still so vulnerable and fragile. Lawrence embodies all of that. You could argue that her performance here is a watered-down version of what she did in the brilliant Winter’s Bone. The film would live and die depending on her, and she rises to the occasion.

The rest of the cast are alright, but nobody else really jumps out. Elizabeth Banks and Woody Harrelson are good, but wasted. Donald Sutherland is good in a short, but menacing role. Everyone else does enough to not be hated, but they’re all just background players to Lawrence. It’s her movie all the way.

I’ve never read the books (I probably will end up reading them at some point) but you don’t need to be a fan to enjoy the movie. It succeeds all on its own. A sleeper success.

*****

I’m lying in bed right now, writing this. Once I finish writing I’ll, well, remain lying in bed. No better way to spend a Saturday night, I’d say. Oh, yeah, Plan B’s singing Stay Too Long right now. I like him, he ain’t bad. Not a great actor, but I’ve seen much worse.

Okay, shameless plug time. I do that thing they call Twitter - @writeofcentre – and I do that thing they call Facebook. I do other things too, but you’ll have to ask me about them. I might tell you.

Shall I go now? I’ll go now. Gone.

Professional Wrestling, Or Why I Shouldn't Really Hate Ballet

In roughly six hours, hundreds of thousands of men, women and children will pack a stadium to see men in spandex pretend to fight. Millions more will watch it across the world. I’ll be watching it too, just like I have for most of my life. I can’t still be deluded, surely?

“What was amazing to me was how similar the performers in both of these worlds are. They both make incredible use of their bodies to express themselves. They’re both performers.”

(Darren Aranofsky, writer/director)

Ballet is one of the most highly-respected art forms in the world. Dancers literally suffer for their art. Kids as young as four or five push beyond their threshold of pain to achieve that perfect step or perfect position. In return, they gain the admiration of the art world, selling out international theatres and achieving critical and creative acclaim. Only those within the industry can properly understand and appreciate why ballet is worth sacrificing your body and your mind.

That’s the world Darren Aranofsky referred to during interviews for his Oscar-winning movie Black Swan. The world he compared it to? Professional wrestling.

Now I fucking hate ballet, can’t stand it, but I fully respect it. Wrestling? Just say the word and people roll their eyes. If ballet is high-end, then wrestling is low-end; the lowest form of art and entertainment, if it’s even allowed to be called those things. It is to performance art what pornography is to cinema. Yet, even now, millions and millions of people around the world love and revere it, children and adults. This weekend, for example, the entire city of Miami, Florida is dedicated to promoting it. A whole city! How can something so universally popular still create so much derision?

Chances are that your exposure to wrestling, if any, will be to WWE/F, the biggest wrestling company in the world. And I’ll be honest, it’s not always great nowadays. At times, it can be downright awful. But just like you wouldn’t use Chris Brown to talk about the entire history of hip hop, you can’t use one company to discuss the entire wrestling industry. Professional wrestling in its current form has been around for over a century, and its origins go as far back as the gladiators of Ancient Rome. What you see today has been influenced by things like Jacobean theatre, circus carnivals, traditional pantomime, gymnastics and, yes, even ballet. Instead of being a niche art form, it’s an amalgamation of many other ‘respectable’ arts. Quite the accomplishment. Wrestling performers have spent decades perfecting the art of the spectacle, evolving with the times.

And yes, it’s a spectacle. It’s not real. Of course it’s not fucking real, we’re not stupid. Hamlet doesn’t really stab Polonius in the chest, y’know. Sam Worthington doesn’t really travel to a faraway place called Pandora. Hulk Hogan doesn’t actually get dropped on his head. Not real. But what is very, very real is the physicality. Like those dancers who live and breathe ballet every second of the day, so too do professional wrestlers.

Obviously, there are the wrestling matches themselves. A wrestling match is like a choreographed dance routine, except you’re falling and landing constantly on a concrete surface and everything is improvised. Very little is usually planned beforehand, it’s all done on the fly. When you know one missed step or wrong turn can cause horrific injuries, the decision to improvise like that has to be appreciated. And there have been horrific injuries; I’ve seen legs and necks broken, I’ve seen concussions, I’ve seen worse. Yet these brave performers continue to risk that, all the while continuing to entertain the crowd and staying in character. We all applaud those amazing actors who are able to remember and recite long Shakespearean soliloquys with the same intensity every night. Why should this be treated any differently?

But the physical toll on these guys doesn’t end there. Travelling is an integral part of the wrestling industry, borne out of the carnival lifestyle of the past. Yes, at the highest level, wrestlers can afford planes and tour buses and whatever else, but 90% of wrestlers don’t reach the highest level. In America alone, most wrestling performers have to drive everywhere, trips that can last days sometimes. Just as recent as thirty years ago, wrestlers would be on the road 300 out of 365 days in a year, away from their families and loved ones, moving from hotel room to hotel room, city to city, never getting proper rest. And all that just to perform in front of no more than a few hundred people, usually. All for the love of the industry. Some would say that the rock and roll lifestyle is what killed music greats like Elvis Presley, Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse. They are tragic deaths. Wrestlers have an almost identical lifestyle, but dying is seen as an eventuality, not a tragedy. Why?

Now the common and overused criticism – wrestlers all take drugs and steroids and that’s how they do what they do, and look how they look. Hey, a lot of them did. Some of them still do. I’m not saying I like it, but it’s an aspect of the industry that is fucking fascinating. You can’t talk about rock and roll without mentioning the drug culture. It’s probably worse in the music industry, but it’s still fun to research and talk about. If drug culture is the reason professional wrestling should be alienated and looked down upon, then so should the music industry. So should boxing and American football and athletics. I could name more.

I’ve probably started rambling now. But if you’ve managed to read this far, I hope you’ve got even a tiny bit more respect for an art form that is severely misunderstood. Wrestling has the spectacle of a music concert. It requires the same skill and ability as gymnastic. It is as physically demanding as ballet. It needs the same concentration as theatre. And it needs the same sacrifices to be made as every other art does.

And rightfully, it deserves the same respect.

The Raven.

Spotify? Right now, nothing. I’m a constant source of disappointment, I know.
LoveFilm? Well, I just finished watching The Goonies; and right now, as I type this, I’m watching a Denis Leary stand-up DVD called Lock & Load. I’m undecided on Leary yet.
Amazon? I’m literally two chapters away from finishing David Copperfield. About bloody time!

*****

The less said about this movie, the better, so I’ll just get on with it.

The story first: John Cusack is Edgar Allen Poe during the last few days of his life. A copycat killer has been committing murders taken straight out of the American writer’s stories, and now he’s taken Poe’s lover (Alice Eve) hostage too. With the help of Detective Fields (Luke Evans), Poe tries to find out who the killer is and, you know, stop the killings.

It’s not a bad story. Remotely interesting, I’d say. Nobody would be expecting an Oscar-winner, or something to change the way you view life. No. It sounds like your typical whodunnit mystery, complete with suspects, close shaves and occasional twist. It sounds like it, and that’s exactly what the film is. And it’s fucking boring. I really can’t explain to you just how bored I was. Usually, it pisses me off when people start using their brightly lit phones in the cinema; and today, I became one of those people. As shameful as it is to admit, it’s true.

The plot as a whole was dull, that’s the problem. All these people are getting murdered and I’m thinking, so what? Alice Eve gets kidnapped and, beyond the ‘wow, her boobs come out a lot’ fascination, I’m thinking, so what? And there are all these chases and gunfights, and there are police procedural moments. Again, so what? None of it was interesting enough.

But this is what really pissed me off: the eventual reveal of the killer. I’m not going to spoil anything, for those who might wanna watch it. But as soon as it happened, I sighed. Not a short sigh; a deep, ‘please let me hurt someone’ sort of sigh. The killer’s identity is out of left-field, I’ll give them that. But that is very, very faint praise. It made no sense, it didn’t shock me, it wasn’t satisfying. It wasn’t good.

The one decent thing about this movie, in my opinion, is John Cusack. Let me say first, though, that Cusack is well past his prime. He was very popular in the eighties and early nineties, and rightfully so. Some great films. But its 2012 now, and that isn’t fine anymore. He’s still a good actor, and he has some nice moments in this, but I just couldn’t invest. If you were expecting a performance to reignite his career, you won’t find it here. However, there are still hints of that comic timing and natural charm he always has. I wish there was more of it.

Also, this is the second film I’ve seen this year in which Brendan Gleeson is stupidly underused. First in Safe House, now this. The guy is such a good actor, but we don’t get to see very much of him. Luke Evans is the co-lead, more or less, and he’s alright. Nothing spectacular. Alice Eve is hot, and shows her cleavage a lot, so I’m not criticising her performance.

This is a boring film. If you’re a hardcore Poe fan, you might like it; might. I doubt it though. It’s not that there was anything awful about the film. It’s just boring. There just isn’t enough there to grip you and keep you entertained. A shame.

*****

Tonight is a bit of a DVD-fest. I got done with The Goonies; now I’m watching that stand-up DVD; and my intention is to watch Faster afterwards. Exactly how everyone wants to spend their Friday night.

Before you go, I’d like to redirect you to my Twitter - @writeofcentre – where you can follow me and love me and do other things to me. I’m easy like that. I also have Facebook, and all that shit. Do it, you know you want to.

I’m still watching the Denis Leary DVD, so I’m gonna get back to that now. He’s okay, I’m not blown away, to be honest. But you don’t really care, so I’ll sign off. Smell you later.

Safe House.

Spotify? ‘Let’s Spend The Night Together’ by Rolling Stones. I’m a Beatles man, but I can handle some Stones when need be.
LoveFilm? Three new DVDs arrived today. Disc 5 of 24 Season 1; some Jet Li movie called Warlords, no idea if it’s good or not; and, umm, uh, The Smurfs. Yeah. The Smurfs. Fuck you.
Amazon? Still reading David Copperfield. About three hundred pages to go.

*****

A lot of movies got released this weekend, but not really that many interesting ones. Rampart is probably the cream of the crop, but I’m seeing that on Monday, maybe. So for the sake of going to the cinema and feeding my habit, I arrived to watch Safe House. It’s the perfect example of a movie I had absolutely no expectations for, especially with the pretty ordinary trailer.

Here’s the story: Matt Weston (Ryan Reynolds) is a young CIA agent; his job is to look after a safe house and, right now, his ‘guest’ is notorious fugitive and former CIA agent Tobin Frost (Denzel Washington). But when the safe house is attacked, Weston ends up on the run with Frost. A lot of people want Frost dead, and it’s up to the inexperienced Weston to make sure Frost stays alive.

Okay, so here’s the biggest problem with this film. It’s bloody predictable. Too, too predictable. In fact, if you pay close enough attention to the trailer, you’ll know exactly what happens. I mean, it’s an action thriller, so there are twists along the way, but you could see them coming from a mile away. It’s very much a textbook action thriller, with everything moving along the typical way, and what you expect to happen, happening.

That being said, I actually enjoyed it, and that surprised me. I was looking forward to being very disappointed, and I wasn’t. Yes, I wish it was more unpredictable, but writer David Guggenheim stuck pretty rigidly to a formula that does work very well.

The highlight of the film, as always it seems, was Denzel Washington. He plays that typical Denzel character, though, which is starting to get very old. You know the one – he’s a badass, a kickass, he’s suave and always has a wisecrack to make. He’s so fucking good at it though, you can’t help liking it. He’s like that here, and we’re always drawn to him. Ryan Reynolds was quite good too; I’m not really a fan, but he’s good in this. The chemistry between the two reminds me of Ethan Hawke and Denzel in Training Day; the films are quite similar, in some ways. There are other, really good actors in the movie too, who I think aren’t really used well. Brendan Gleeson, Vera Farmiga, Robert Patrick – none of them are really given a proper time to shine.

Action-wise, the film is good. You get the usual guns and chases, all fast-paced and directed competently. But what I really enjoyed about the movie was the fight scenes. There are a couple of pretty brutal fistfights, all very fun to experience. Reynolds showed he can handle the tough action, after the debacle that was The Green Lantern.

I think you could do a lot worse than seeing Safe House. Take away the predictability, and the fact that we’ve seen the Denzel Washington character so many times before, and you’re left with a good old-fashioned action thriller. This won’t win any Oscars, but it’s great if you fancy some popcorn and don’t wanna think too much.

*****

I wrote this with a hangover, so it took ages! But I got there in the end, and I think it wasn’t too bad. Playing right now is the Mark Ronson version of ‘Oh My God’, the one with Lily Allen. Underrated cover, in my humble opinion. I have a Twitter!!! Follow me on it - @writeofcentre – and I’ll get you sweeties.

I’m gonna go back to complaining about my headache and vowing never to drink again in my life. You behave now.

A Dangerous Method.

Spotify? ‘Wolf Pack’ by The Vaccines. I wasn’t overly amazed by the album, but this track did stand out.
LoveFilm? I have Gainsbourg sitting on my desk, which I’ll probably watch once I finish with this.
Amazon? Still working through David Copperfield. Because I only read when I travel (and sometimes at work) progress is slow sometimes. Oh, and the new Empire arrived!! Very much looking forward to sink my teeth into that bad boy.

*****

I’m really easily enticed by a movie, I won’t lie. I see that there’s this such-and-such big actor starring alongside this such-and-such big actor, and I’m hooked. I start to get this sort of craving for it. It has to be seen, I need to see it. Because not watching it could be the worst mistake of my life. So I change my life to accommodate cinema times. That’s what I did today. Work started at 5, so off I went to my local World o’ Cine to watch A Dangerous Method, a movie that enticed me. Got well fucked over for that.

On paper, it’s pretty impressive, based on the real-life relationship between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and Sebastian Freud (Viggo Mortensen), two of the most important and respected psychiatrists in history. The film basically shows how psychoanalysis was created in the early twentieth century, as well as showing how the two guys – who respected each other massively – fell out. A big part of that was down to Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley), a patient and then mistress of Jung.

Like I say, very impressive on paper. On-screen? Bloody hell, I was bored. Some of you might know what Freud’s and Jung’s theories are, some might not, but this movie is basically a psychology lesson. And I hated that it was. Don’t get me wrong, I find the subject matter fascinating, but I didn’t want to be preached at. 75% of the movie is just people having very intelligent conversations. It’s great the first couple of times; then it just gets boring. Then, on top of that, there are these really cringe-inducing moments where one of them ‘predicts’ the future (“In 100 years, they’ll still disagree with us,” Freud says at one point), in some sort of wink to the audience. Annoying.

And the whole thing really pissed me off, because I wanted to love the film. Michael Fassbender! Viggo Mortensen! Keira Knightley! All three actors I really like (yes, even Keira), so I expected more. I will say this, though – they acted well. Very well, actually. There wasn’t a bad performance, really. The problem was that it was just boring in general.

Of the three, I’ll say that Knightley is the best, by a whisker. Perhaps I’m swayed by the fact that she has a Russian accent and has the most intense character (she does some freaky shit with her jaw), but I loved her the most. Vincent Cassel is in the film a bit too; not long. He’s good in it, but I had absolutely no idea what he was doing there. He moves the story along a bit, but I was confused by him.

Look, I didn’t like this film. But I think opinion on the movie will be divided. If you like your movies with a lot of talking and philosophising, you’ll have a blast. If you don’t mind the frustrating exposition, you’ll have a blast. I didn’t have a blast. Yes, I think I did learn a lot more about Freud and Jung, and would love to learn more. But I wanted to see a gripping movie, and I got Mastermind instead.

*****

Time to watch Gainsbourg now. Do me a favour and follow me on Twitter - @writeofcentre – and do me a bigger favour by following this blog. The bigger the favour, the bigger the place you’ll have in my heart. Fact. As I sign off, ‘Won’t Want For Love (Margaret In The Taiga)’ by The Decemberists starts to play. I fucking love this band.

Okay, bye! Love you!

The Woman In Black.

Spotify? ‘Velociraptor!’ by Kasabian. Album has the same name too, and it’s bloody good. Listen to it!
LoveFilm? Right now, I have The Green Hornet and Gainsbourg sitting on my desk (one of which I’ll watch tonight). Oh, and Disc 4 of 24 Season 1. The day’s almost over!!
Amazon? Just getting to halfway through Dickens’ David Copperfield. It’s an epic so far, really enjoying it.


*****

Dunno if you’ve seen the theatrical version of this; I have. Reviewed it actually, funnily enough, and I remember really enjoying it. It’s not easy to depict proper horror on stage, but the play does it brilliantly well. It’s genuinely scary and, with only two actors and a fake dog, that’s pretty impressive. We’re not here to talk about the play though, obviously, but it’s relevant in a way. Everyone goes on about book-to-film adaptations and how films always tend to butcher a perfectly a good novel, and this is somewhat similar.

The film is about a lawyer called Arthur Kipps (played by Harry Potter), who is still mourning for the wife he lost during childbirth. Kipps is sent to Eel Marsh House in North East England, to sort out the papers of a woman who has recently died. Easy enough, except none of the locals want him there and make it very clear they don’t want him there. Oh, and there’s a woman. And she’s dressed in black. And she’s not very nice.

Up until about two weeks ago, I had absolutely no idea that The Woman In Black was actually a novel written in the 80s. For me, it’s always just been the play, and so any comparison with the film I make, it’ll be with the play, not the novel. And here’s the first comparison: the film is just not scary enough.

This is the best way to break it down – the movie is about 90 minutes long. The first sixty minutes are solid, entertaining and scary. The last thirty minutes are boring and disappointing. And that’s sad because the movie had been doing so well up until that last third. Really underwhelming. See, the problem is that the movie was written so that there was a satisfying ending. To send the audience home happy, apparently, but that was a mistake. Now I like the writer, Jane Goldman (Mrs Jonathan Ross!). She co-wrote Kick-Ass and X-Men: First Class, both good films, so she’s talented, for sure. But she fucked it up at the end here. There’s a nice little twist at the very end, but it wasn’t enough.

Let’s talk about the first sixty minutes, quickly. I really enjoyed them. We were in a packed cinema, which was fun, especially during all the scary bits. The film is very chilling in that first hour, especially a roughly twenty-minute sequence where Harry Potter is alone in the house. The fear and the tension builds minute-by-minute, and every sound, every movement, gives you a bit of a jolt. Harry P- okay, I’ll stop calling him that now, but I found it funny. Daniel Radcliffe was very good, I thought. People complained that he looked too young for the part, but I think him looking young worked because we felt more worried for him. If there’s one thing he learnt well at Hogwarts, it was how to look scared. And he’s scared a lot in this, and never smiles, and I liked the performance. I’m sure I’ve seen Ciaran Hinds (who plays Kipps’ friend, Daily) act before, but I don’t remember. So as a sort of intro to him, I thought he was very good. The rest of the cast was just a lot of people looking scared and suspicious, but they did it well enough; and of course, the Woman herself, who screamed a lot.

In the end, though, a good story is spoiled by attempts to make it ‘cinematic’. The scene where Kipps confronts the Woman at the end, for examples, should have been fucking scary; instead, the scene lasted about two minutes, and involved a lot of screaming. Not good. I don’t know what the book’s like, or how it ends, but the play is great. And it ends well, ambiguously. Okay, yeah, the film ends ambiguously too, in some ways, but not in the good kind of the way. The disappointing way.

If you want my honest opinion, I’d say go and see it because there’s enough there for you to enjoy; and I bet that if you haven’t seen the play, you’ll like the movie much more. Good performances…scary scenes…a plainly dressed woman who screams a lot…you could do much worse. You’ll enjoy the first hour, at the very least.


*****  I’m not really sure what movie I’m gonna put on to watch tonight. I think Gainsbourg is subtitled, and I’m not really in a subtitles mood right now. Green Hornet it is then, I guess. Playing right now is ‘Epilogue’ by The Antlers. Not long before I see them live!

You know the drill by now, I hope. Follow me on Twitter - @writeofcentre – and Facebook. Follow this blog. And follow my life, why not?

The Descendants.

Spotify? ‘The Man Who Can’t Be Moved’ by The Script. Textbook pop band, but catchy and not bad for a listen.
LoveFilm? The Expendables will be arriving in the post tomorrow morning. About time I got a stiff injection of testosterone.
Amazon? I’m almost halfway through David Copperfield, and it’s fantastic so far. I’ll start to tackle The Chronicles Of Narnia next, but that’s a week or two away yet.

*****

It’s taken me a while to go and see The Descendants. Other stuff got in the way, other movies. I really wanted to make sure I saw it though, seeing as George Clooney is being tipped as shoe-in for the Best Actor Oscar. I needed to see it and judge it for myself. Was it all really worth the hype? Is Clooney really Oscar-winning good?

Oh, the story first. So George Clooney is middle-aged Matt King living in Hawaii, where his wife has slipped into a coma after a speedboat accident. He has to look after his two daughters alone, both unruly in their own ways, whilst also managing the multi-million-dollar sale of his family’s land. Then he finds out that his wife had been having an affair, and Matt now has to re-evaluate his priorities, whilst trying to cope with the idea of loss and inevitability of death.


I’ve gotta tell you, this is quite an interesting film. Usually, you know pretty quickly whether you like a film or not. You can see the brilliance (or shoddiness) of a movie immediately; but The Descendants sort of sneaks up on you. I sat there watching it, fully engaged, but I didn’t feel blown away. It was watchable and entertaining, that’s all. But as soon as it ended, I left with the feeling that I had seen something truly brilliant. I mean, there weren’t any sudden twists and turns, or extraordinary narrative shift – the story moves along at quite a quiet pace throughout – but it grew on me. In the climactic scenes, it’s very emotional, and I don’t think there was a dry eye in the cinema.

Obviously, a lot of that is because of Clooney. The movie is all built around him – he’s in every single scene, he is our eyes and ears, and he’s pretty damn good. But again, I go back to the whole thing about sneaking up on you. That’s what his performance does. Right from the very beginning, it’s a very restrained performance and, frankly, I wasn’t impressed at first. But as the story moves forward, and we see that restrained character progress, you learn to appreciate the quality of Clooney’s acting. It’s such an anti-Clooney role, too. There isn’t any of that charm or wit or slickness we tend to expect; this is a character unable to express himself properly, and Clooney captures that really well.


The rest of the cast is fantastic too. Shailene Woodley plays his oldest daughter Alexandra, and is really good. Apparently, she’s in some American teen show, but I’ve never seen her before. Great, though. So is ten-year old Amara Miller, who plays Scottie, the other daughter. I won’t tell you specifics, but the scene where she is getting talked to by a doctor is really heartbreaking, and she deserves props for it. Other characters pop up here and there, making memorable cameos, but you’re watching this movie for Clooney, really, and he delivers.

One thing that really stood out for me in the movie was the music. The only music in the movie is traditional Hawaiian stuff, and it’s gorgeous. The locations, too, are breathtaking. It’s as much an advertisement for Hawaii, as it is a movie. We can thank director Alexander Payne for that, obviously. He’s made other critically-acclaimed films like About Schmidt and Sideways (neither of which I’ve seen), and everyone says this is as good as they are. He doesn’t make films very often, but they’re successful films whenever he does.


Personally, I don’t think Clooney is favourite for the Oscar gong (Gary Oldman is, in my opinion), but I won’t be disappointed if he does win it. It’s a very brilliant, very un-George Clooney performance, and he does brilliantly well with it. The sign of a good movie is its ability to stir emotions, and a cinema full of teary-eyed people will vouch for that.

*****
And so ends another film review. As I leave you, ‘The Real Slim Shady’ by Eminem literally just starts to play. You can follow me - @writeofcentre – and perhaps follow my blog too, and tell all of your friends!

Okay, I’m sleepy now, so go away.