June, 2008

With hotly anticipated follow-up Adulthood now showing at UK cinemas, there’s never better time to get reacquainted with the cast of 2006′s Kidulthood, a rough and ready tale of bored British suburban youths, which catapulted Noel Clarke to stardom for his direction and his portrayal of bullying bad guy Sam in the film, became something of a word of mouth phenomenon, and a success story for independent homegrown film-making talent.

Labelled by some as a poster movie for happy slapping, Kidulthood principally revolves around three teenagers and their associates, who are given the day off school after the suicide of a fellow student; what follows is a relentless run through a hyperreal 24 hours covering sex, violence, drink, drugs, theft, betrayal, knifing, gun toting, pregnancy…

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Jennifer Marsh (Diana Lane) is a widowed FBI officer who spends her nights online tracking down identity thieves, fraudsters and cyber pervs. One night she stumbles across a website named killwithme.com where a cute kitten is being tortured to death. A disclaimer on the main page states that the more people who visit the site, the worse the killings will be – a few nights later the psychotic webmaster has moved onto humans.

Following the formula of Se7en, the killer is driven by a perverse moral agenda – to expose the people’s voyeuristic tendencies through ‘torture porn’. In one of the films many clichés, Marsh is caught between fighting crime and neglecting her daughter, who also becomes a target for the psychopath.

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Seasoned action man and all-round geezer Jason Statham (Collateral, Snatch) and Saffron Burrows (Frida, Deep Blue Sea) star in this comic thriller documenting the 1971 robbery of the Baker Street branch of Lloyds Bank. Oddly enough, the robbers’ walkie-talkie conversations were recorded by a radio ham, but when he reported the incident, no action was taken…

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Italian for beginners is a touching and enduring romantic comedy set in a dreary suburb of Copenhagen. It portrays the lives of six lonely thirty-somethings looking for love and a sense of purpose who enroll in a beginners’ class in Italian run by the local council. Written and directed by Lone Scherfig (On Our Own), the film follows the guidelines of Dogma 95, the ascetic filmmaking code advanced by Danish filmmakers Lars von Trier, Thomas Vinterberg and others which forbids expensive and spectacular special effects in order to focus on the purity of storyline and script.

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Set in former East Germany during the early eighties, The Lives of Others, debut of writer-director Florian Henckel Von Donnersmarck, is a far cry from the cheery Ostalgie nostalgic style of Goodbye Lenin and Sonnenallee. Rather it portrays a land controlled by the Stasi, the East German Secret Police, where no-one can trust their neighbour, or even their other half.  The film stars Ulrich Mühe, who as State Security Captain Gerd Wiesler is given the task of monitoring one of the country’s most prominent playwrights, Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) and his glamorous girlfriend Christa-Marie Sieland (Martina Gedeck), who plays the leading role in his current play.

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Recently, police in Japan arrested Tatsuko Horikawa, a 58-year old woman who had secretly moved into a man’s flat without him knowing; she had hidden in a cupboard and emerged during the daytime whilst the owner was at work. The 57-year-old man who owned the house became suspicious after food kept disappearing from his fridge, and so he set up a surveillance system, filming the woman as she walked around in his absence.

According to police, she had dragged a mattress into the small space and slept there for nearly a year. French news agency AFP quoted a local police spokesman as saying. “She told police that she had nowhere to live… She seems to have lived there for about a year, but not all the time.”

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Those of us who have fond gaming memories of the original PlayStation will certainly remember Metal Gear Solid, the title which arguably kick started the so-called ‘stealth ‘em up’ genre.  Hiding in cardboard boxes, snapping the necks of enemy soldiers, smoking, a labyrinthine plot, this game had it all.  Although the PlayStation 2 sequel, Sons of Liberty, is widely thought to be inferior, the series returned to form with Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater, with its emphasis on camouflage, laying traps in the jungle and hunting for food.  Now in glorious next generation, high definition graphics we have Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots and it’s definitely been worth the wait.

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The Sun, Britian’s biggest selling newspaper, has recently launched its own DVD rental service, and is offering a 2 month free trial on its DVD rental packages, which start from £3.99 a month. With over 40,000 titles to choose from, The Sun Movie Club covers a range of genres including horror, comedy, family films, sci-fi and TV drama. The service is operated through the website thesunmovieclub.co.uk.

Orders are sent out first class, and there is no limit on how long you can keep the DVDs at home. The £3.99 per month subscription entitles you to 2 movies a month. Avid movie watchers may well prefer the £12.49 package which allows you to rent an unlimited number of DVDs each month.

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The latest instalment in the Batman movie franchise is arriving on screens this month, and is shaping up to be one of the biggest movie titles this year, despite its release being both delayed by the WGA writer’s strike and overshadowed by the tragic passing of Heath Ledger, whose ragged and anarchic take on Bruce Wayne’s arch nemesis the Joker has already galvanised interest – his powdered face and lipstick-smeared mouth appeared over the internet like rash as part of a viral campaign last year.

The Dark Knight follows on from 2005′s Batman Begins, and is not, as was briefly suggested, a movie adaptation of Frank Miller’s successful The Dark Knight Returns graphic novel mini series.

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Last year saw the film adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel Persepolis scooping the Jury Prize at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival. The film has recently completed a run of cinemas here in the UK and is destined for both DVD and Blu Ray releases later this summer.

The story follows the life of ‘Marji’, growing up in Tehran during the deposition of the Shah, the Islamic Revolution and the subsequent war with Iraq. She grows up being inspired of tales of her courageous and rebellious uncle Anouche, who was imprisoned by the Shah for being a prominent Communist – she finally gets to meet him again after the overthrow of the regime, but their time together is painfully short.

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