Drive (2011)

DRIVE (2011)

Drive. I want to say this movie is oozing with style and awesomeness. Or rather I think the film wants me to say that. The score and the opening credits have a real eighties feel to them, the hot pink text and the sexy synth make you feel like your Tommy Vercetti rollin' through Vice City in a Diablo, machine-gunning Cubans. 

Then you notice it. I think a coked up colour grading technician's deadline snuck up behind him, causing him to scream 'OH FUCK TEN MINUTES TO GO, JUST MAKE EVERYTHING BLUE AND ORANGE'. Blue and orange is the go to for so many films nowadays, because your average actor's skin tone is in the orange spectrum, and at the other end of the colour wheel is a bluey teal colour. And putting opposite colours against each other make the colour at the front really 'pop'. So the actors be popping without too much effort. More about this here. 

Despite the orange and blue over saturation, Drive is pretty sexy. Nothing is overdone. For a car movie, the car porn is pretty minimal. There is an awesome Bullitt/French Connection style car chase, with the music score replaced by engines roaring, that works real good. The violent scenes are never overdone, the camera lingers just long enough to tell the audience what has happened, but also lets your imagination do most of the work. The dialogue is minimal, there's no cheesy one liners or verbal genre crutches. And of course Ryan Gosling is sexy and cool as fuck in a totally straight way. He is possibly the only mainstream actor who's band is actually pretty awesome. Listen.  

Drive can sometimes be a bit too subtle, predictable, and the characters don't really make the connection. But I think the style, the action and the mis-en-scene make Drive absolutely worth seeing.  

The Hunger Games

The main issue with books that are turned into films, are that more often than not the films struggle to stand alone, without relying on the audience having some prior knowledge of the story elements. The Hunger Games is no different. I imagine the books were such cash cows that the producers of the film did not want to mess with the formula. For example, when the main girl, Catness or whatever her silly name is, is running around looking for her blonde muscle boy, she just picks up on a spot of blood and finds him dressed up as a rock and lying on the ground in a river bed. Maybe there was some inner monologue in the book that explains how she found her little blonde muscle boy in this giant state forest, why the fuck he had taken the time to paint himself as a rock rather than just hiding behind one, where he had gotten the paint, etc. No explanation in the film, just shut up and watch them kiss, woo-hoo porn for tweens.

Then there is the scene where the little nigglet girl dies. She's in the film for about two minutes before she gets topped, but then the scene with Catness crying and arranging flowers around her goes for about ten minutes. Why was I supposed to give so many fucks about this character who had about two lines of mediocre dialogue before she stupidly gets killed? Just because she's a child? Because of her big brown eyes? The whole scene was really hokey, even for a film aimed at teens.

The actress who plays Catness has usurped Kristen Stewart as the queen of numb faced bitches who seem to have a phobia of showing emotions other than "I'm a serious girl, take me serious, but also a little bit sad." I actually don't have a huge problem with these actresses as role models, I'd rather teenage girls sit in the corner with a stern face than all that other crap they get up to, cyber bullying and shooting bath salts or whatever those dang kids are doing these days.

The film had its good sides. The suspense worked, the sets and costumes were top notch, many other boxes were ticked that a movie with this kind of budget should be ticking. Clearly, I am not the target demographic for this film, but still. The whole thing felt rushed and relied way too much on the audience having read the book.

Tricky Business - a review of the ad, not the show.

Dear Channel 9,

Wow! This show looks amazingly shit. You have really outdone yourselves!

Muster up all your imaginative powers and think of a modern, successful show. Just for example, I'll go with Breaking Bad. The catch is a cancer ridden high school teacher starts cooking meth to pay his hospital bills. Awesome right?

What exactly is the catch of this 'Tricky Business' series? A 'disfunctional' family? Shit.
A couple that break up a lot? A daughter that wants attention? This is 2012 you fuckheads, these 'catches' are not even close to being interesting. How old are you writers, ninety?

ALSO the ambiguous name 'Tricky Business' isn't fooling anyone (well its probably fooling most people but fuck you anyway). You come up with these shitty non-specific names, because you know you have made a terrible show and by using a non specific name (as opposed to the name of a character, or family, or something that would make the show look retarded-even for Australian standards- if they changed it completely - like The Simpsons not having the Simpsons in it anymore) you can kill off all your terrible characters and themes when the audience starts telling you how shit you are or an aboriginal gets offended.

 Like all great essays (hah) I shall finish in a quote, from the late and great Bill Hicks.

Yes replace marketing/advertising dicks with 'creators of 'Tricky Business'' and you get the message. Because when it comes down to it, you are just marketing scumbags, not writers/directors/artists/mimes. You have made another polluting, lowest common denominator product that you will chop and change and huck to the dumbest bidder. Eat a massive dick.