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Stardust movie review
Stardust is a fantasy movie which remembers that special effects do not tell a story.
Young Trisran Thorne lives in a little English village in the countryside. Bumbling and good natured, Tristran is desperately trying to win the hand of vain local beauty Victoria. When he sees a falling star he vows to retrieve it as an engagement gift.
Unfortunately for Tristran the star has fallen across the wall separating good olde England from a realm of magic and danger called Stormhold. Tritran himself is the product of his fathers visit to Stormhold years before and, thanks to a magical candle which was left in the basket with him, he is able to instantly travel to where the star landed.
Instead of a lump of cosmic metal Tristran finds a young woman at the bottom of the crater. Yvaine is the star and she just wants to get home, not accompany bumbling village boy home but he manages to compel her.
Tristran is not the only one seeking the star. The surviving sons of the King of Stormhold must find the star to claim the throne. An ancient witch also hunts for Yvaine. Lamia needs to carve out the stars heart o she can restore youth and beauty to her and her sisters.
As Yvaine and Tristran navigate these dangers and make their way across the land they find themselves becoming closer. The boy begins to become a man, one who may find his hearts desire is closer then he thinks.
Stardust is based on a novel by Neil Gaiman. Written as a ‘fairy-tale for all ages’, the book had romance, adventure, wry humour and a touch of darkness which gave this potentially trite tale poignancy. Director, and screenwriter, Matthew Vaughn has kept the adventure but lost the darkness and the story suffers as a result.
Danes and Cox are a little bland as the leads. But they do an adequate job of letting the story overtake them. They suffer in comparison to their co-stars who give outstanding character-driven performances. Pfeiffer plays it very straight as the hideous Lamia. She manages to convey the feeling subtle menace required by the character.
Robert De Niro enters the movie in its second half as sky-pirate Captain Shakespeare and almost makes off with the entire show. He camps it up as a swashbuckler-in-petticoats, cruel in front of his men and refined in private.
The deceased sons of the King of Stormhold add a deft touch of humor and the macabre to the film. They are like the chorus from an ancient Greek plays. Unseen by the people around them, they make observations and wry comments on the action.
Stardust could have been done a lot better, but it is not done badly. It manages to capture all the essential charm and beauty of a fairy tale without being juvenile. A skillful plot with great characters supported by an adequate cast makes this movie a must-see.
Footskating 101 review
I went to watch Footskating at midday on public holiday. The multiplex was packed, kids running around, long queues to get drinks and popcorn. When I sat down in the cinema it dawned on me that whatever movie everybody else had gone to see it wasn’t this one.
Vince Muldoon (Rob van Vuuren) is the son of a poor miner living in a dorp in the middle of nowhere. He harbours an ambition which burns brighter than his father’s (Andrew Buckland) hate of sport, to be a pro-skateboarder. Vince faces serious obstacles in that he is poor, and dumb, as dirt.
Vince’s father wants him to go work in the mine as the family is facing bankruptcy. Added to this are his granny’s failing lungs and an unstable mineral threatening to blow the dorp to hemel. Now Vince needs to come up with a way to get the R100 00 needed to save his family, save his granny and save his town.
Luckily there happens to be a skating competition with just enough prize money to save everybody. With no skateboard and oversized feet, Vince is forced to invent a new extreme sport of footskating, which is skateboarding with out a skateboard.
The good news about Footskating is that it easily surpasses writer-director-actor Brendan Jack’s previous movie, Straight Outta Benoni, however that is not a difficult accomplishment. Benoni felt like a slapdash movie with flat gags and little commercial success and Footskating is a definite improvement in terms of production.
Unfortunately the movie’s plot is a carbon copy of many American movie made in the same genre. Clichés from teen and sports movies are taken used relentlessly. From the dysfunctional team to the weird guru who takes the team under their wing. The jokes and setups in the movie might be South African but there is not a hint of originality in the entire plot. This is an ineffective satire at best.
This is a pity as the cast is a very talented bunch. Rob van Vuuren has made a name for himself playing one half of clown duo Corne and Twakkie. He is also an accomplished thespian and a regular at the Grahamstown Festival. Physical theatre stalwart Andrew Buckland makes the best of his role as Vince’s father but there is little he can do with the weak script.
Crotch-grabbing action on the ice
Blades of Glory is an absurd journey through the world of male figure-skating with two talented comedians who know how to get the best out of the material
Male figure-skating is dominated by two men, Chazz Michael Michaels (Will Ferrell) and Jimmy McElroy (Jon Heder); fierce rivals diametrically opposed in temperament and skating style. Michaels is all testosterone and leather to McElroy’s classically trained poise.
When the two skaters tie for gold in the figure-skating final at the Winter Olympics neither is happy with the result. During the medal ceremony the two begin to brawl, shocking fans in the stadium and around the world. Michaels and McElroy are banned from competitive figure-skating for the rest of their lives and they sink into anonynimity.
All seems lost for the pair until salvation arrives in the shape of McElroy’s former stalker (Nick Swardson). He finds a loophole in the rules that allows the pair to compete once more, as the first male-male figure skating team.
The movie takes off at this point. As skaters, Michaels and McElroy must work together to recapture their former fame and glory; and without the onscreen chemistry between Heder and Ferrell this movie could have fallen flat.
Heder’s prissy McElroy provides a perfect counterfoil to Ferrell’s boorish Michaels. Neither of the actors plays characters we are unfamiliar with but the fun comes from watching them interact in a new absurd setting.
The strength of the movie is that it does not attempt to be more then lowbrow comedy. The result is a fun, crude, romp through the world of figure-skating which makes you laugh without effort.
A minor fault with the movie is the extreme focus on Heder and Ferrell leaves the supporting cast little to work with. We see little of the figure-skating community and it would have been nice to watch more whacky skate routines and personalities.
Perfect to see with a couple of mates on a relaxed evening.
Spiderman 3 review
SEQUELS are dangerous. They are often rehashes of the original with a few new plot twists. Spider-man 2 avoided this by being bigger, brasher and better scripted.
It led to high hopes that the third movie would be the resolution of the series and also its pinnacle. It surpasses the first movie (which was to be expected) but it fails to move out of the shadow of its immediate predecessor.
It has been a trademark of the Spider-man movies to focus on plot as well as action. Spider-man 3 is no different. The action scenes are an explosion of the best effects of CGI animation.
The battles between Spider-man (Maguire) and the villains like Sandman (Thomas Haden Church), Venom (Topher Grace) and Green Goblin (James Franco) will keep any action fundi in his seat.
The plot is a continuation of the Peter, Mary-Jane, Harry Osborn triangle, with the added tension that in the last movie Harry discovered that Peter was Spider-man.
Peter’s life is about to get complicated. A meteor crashes to Earth bringing an alien symbiote that will lead to dramatic events for everyone connected to Spider-man. This, as well as new information about the death of Ben Parker, Peter’s beloved uncle, leads Peter down a darker path.
Things are not going so well with Mary-Jane (Dunst) either. Her desire for Broadway success causes tension in her relationship with Peter, who is on too much of an ego trip to be aware of what she is going through. The symbiote bonds with Peter altering and enhancing his spider powers. His familiar red and blue outfit is replaced with a darker suit, but it is not just his outfit that changes, Peter becomes more aggressive and begins to lose his inhibitions revealing a hidden desire to dance.
Peter’s walk on the dark side is one of the problems with his movie. Maguire does a poor job of making this darker Spider-man believable. When Superman went evil, in Superman III, he at least drowned his sorrows in a bar before taking a girl on a whirlwind flight around the Statue of Liberty. Maguire fails to effectively convey this internal change.
Maguire and Dunst look bored through most of the movie. Mary-Jane is whining and melodramatic and it is hard to be sympathetic towards her. She is not the object of desire she was in the previous movies.
The villains save the movie. Eddie Brock is the anti-Peter Parker, a smooth, young photographer set on replacing Peter as the Spider-man’s official photographer. Topher Grace does an effective job playing the unscrupulous Brock, though it would have been nice if his alter ego, the insidious Venom could have been given more screen time. Flashbacks reveal the Sandman to have played a role in major event in Peter’s past, providing more depth to their confrontation.
The interaction between Harry (Franco) and Peter is a focal point of the movie. Franco steals the show and is given the space to display an ability and depth unseen in the previous movies. A result is more sympathy for the psychotically troubled Harry than an emotionally conflicted Peter.
The movie provides a satisfying, though not outstanding, conclusion to the trilogy. There is a feeling that director Raimi was afraid that this would be his last Spider-man movie and so crams in as much plot as the movie can hold.
The movie feels bloated and does not have the wonder of the first Spider-man nor the mature and effective mix of story-telling and action the second one had. The villains are entertaining but only Franco approaches the powerful performance given by Alfred Molina as Dr Octopus in the previous movie.
