Category Archives: Movie Reviews

Movie Reviews

‘The Killer Inside Me’ – Movie Review

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I abhor real violence, but I generally like it on screen. Who doesn’t enjoy seeing the bad bastard cop it? It’s cathartic. Where else but in the movies do we have moral license to thrill to the grisly kill of some evil mother who had it comin’? Poetic justice sure as hell ain’t nowhere to be seen in life; it’s a comfort to see it enacted in fiction.

There doesn’t have to be a moral justification for screen violence, though. In horror movies and splatter flicks, for example, you expect slaughter of the innocents, and it’s delivered in full – but the gore is so over the top, so obviously gratuitous, it’s cartoon-like. Easily handled, easily dismissed. Continue reading ‘The Killer Inside Me’ – Movie Review →

Movie Reviews

‘Boy’ – Movie Review

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It is the 80s, and Michael Jackson’s Thriller album has infiltrated every corner of the globe, it seems, including the backwaters of New Zealand’s North Island. Boy (James Rolleston) is a Maori kid in early adolescence who idolises Jackson, inexpertly demonstrating his dance moves to underwhelmed peers at any opportunity. He lives in a dilapidated shack on a derelict farm with his gran, little brother Rocky (Te Aho Aho Eketone-Whitu), a clutch of cousins, and his pet goat and trusty confidante, Leif.

The two brothers are dreamers, but where Boy has created a comforting inner world populated by Thriller, escapist fantasies and an idealised vision of his father (who, in fact, is doing a lengthy stretch for armed robbery), Rocky’s is disturbed. Haunted by the knowledge that his mother died giving birth to him, he believes he has ‘powers’, which are cleverly depicted in animated drawings (and mostly destructive and vengeful in application). Continue reading ‘Boy’ – Movie Review →

Movie Reviews

‘Four Lions’ – Movie Review

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A friend once declared that the basis of Pommy humour is “putting on a silly hat and pulling faces.” I objected to this as reductive – he left out the ‘funny’ voice.

OK, not fair. The Brits gave us Fawlty Towers, The Young Ones and The Office, for which I will be ever grateful. But really, there IS a lot of slapstick and clowny stuff in their comedies – even the good ones.

I’m not immune to silly hat/face/voice humour. Black Adder was often chuckleworthy. Little Britain worked for me for a while. Ditto Ali G. But I have to confess to not getting the Goons. I found Monty Python less hit than miss and consider it vastly overrated. And to fast forward to the 21st Century and change tack from TV and radio to film, I found last year’s widely acclaimed political satire In The Loop profoundly unfunny and tedious. I haven’t been that unamused or bored in a movie since…that is, until Four Lions. Continue reading ‘Four Lions’ – Movie Review →