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Movies Reviews

‘Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen’ is bigger, not better

ORG XMIT: NYET593 In this film publicity image released by Paramount Pictures, Megan Fox, left, and Shia LaBeouf are shown in a scene from "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen." (AP Photo/Paramount Pictures, Jaimie Trueblood) ** NO SALES **

Amid a blurred frenzy of helicopter gunships, airborne cars, cluster bombs, barked military orders, missiles, scattered brick and mortar, tanks, frantic shouting, the wanton destruction of ancient landmarks, that patriotic American music, and giant robots auditioning for the WWE, somewhere in the Egyptian desert, balding, overweight 50-something suburban dad Ron Witwicky runs for his life.

“I don’t know what’s going on!” he gasps.

Don’t worry, man, nor do we. And don’t even bother asking the director.

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Movies Reviews

‘The Hangover’ keeps the party going

Hangovers suck. Your eyeballs raped by sunlight. The shagpile-carpet tongue. The squash court inside your skull. That urge to gulp all the water in the toilet bowl. The acid whirlpool spiralling in your belly. The urgent need to die.

Still, it’s nothing a greasy breakfast, another bottle of vodka, or Romanian tripe soup can’t fix.

Less easy to deal with: waking up in a trashed Las Vegas hotel room, a tiger in the loo, unknown baby in the closet, a friend disappeared, no recollection of the wild night before, and help from Gil Grisom’s CSI team strangely unforthcoming.

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Music Reviews

Depeche Mode find the ‘Sounds Of The Universe’

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Depeche Mode, reasons driving force Martin Gore, are “a subversive pop band, able to get away with anything”. Theirs have always been twisted songs of faith and devotion, sex and death. Musically not much has changed either, the past decade spent trying to reach the heights of best work ‘Violator’ and ‘Songs Of Faith And Devotion’.

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Movies Reviews

‘Star Trek’ set to stun

They’ve split infinitives to boldly go where no man has gone before. They’ve battled aliens more plasticky than Michael Jackson. They’ve single-handedly kept the polyester industry in business. They’ve pranced about on worlds of paper mache and polystyrene. They’ve even saved the bloody whales.

But never before have the crew of USS Enterprise punched as hard, kicked as fast, warped as far, and blown up as much as they do now.

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Music Reviews

U2 look to the horizon

Larry Mullen pounds away like the Eveready Bunny on speed. Adam Clayton’s fingers stampede up and down his bass guitar’s fretboard. With his amp dialled up to 11, The Edge fires off savage riffs of mass destruction. U2’s misfiring ‘Get On Your Boots’ certainly relies on a shock and awe approach. And yet what hits hardest is an almost throwaway line from Bono: “I don’t want to talk about wars between nations.”

And, for most of the band’s 12th studio album, the man who never shuts up about poverty, Aids, third world debt and wars between nations actually keeps his word. The Big Themes are edged out by character studies of ordinary people, himself (“Napoleon in high heels”), and, clearly unable to ditch the political entirely, an Afghan man wounded in a bomb blast.

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Music Reviews

Springsteen still ‘Working On A Dream’

Something’s wrong with Bruce Springsteen.

“Is there anybody alive out there?” he recently demanded on ‘Radio Nowhere’; now it’s a repeated “Can you hear me?” on ‘Outlaw Pete’.

The man must be going deaf, because it’s sure as hell not insecurity. Within two years of the chest-thumping ‘Magic’ he’s released the even ballsier ‘Working On A Dream’ which, despite its title, is no boring state of the nation address set to pomp and circumstance. Instead, The Boss’ 16th studio album is a muscular rock record that sidesteps politics to bask simply in the hope of the ‘yes we can’ generation.

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Movies Reviews

Benjamin Button breaks your heart

Don’t have the three hours to sit through an epic tale spanning eight decades, three continents, two world wars, and one enduring love? Here’s the gist: youth is wasted on the young.

Look beyond the larger-than-life presentation, get your head around the central premise – dude ages in reverse – and, yes, there’s not really much to ‘The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button’. But don’t let that put you off. This is compelling storytelling, plain and simple. Whimsical fantasy and genuine heartbreak collide in a delicate fairytale, lovingly and intimately told.

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Movies Reviews

Angelina Jolie is the real ‘Changeling’

Computer hacker, coke-head supermodel, cyborg, collector of bones, sociopathic mental patient, the world’s hottest archaeologist (with pout), mail-order bride, humanitarian aid worker, Colin Farrell’s mom, and professional assassin (twice) — her roles have been diverse but today none could be more appropriate for Angelina Jolie than that of mother.

In ‘Changeling’, the serial collector of children plays single mom Christine Collins. She dotes on her son, Walter, but the demands of her job mean the nine-year-old has developed quite an independent streak. So when she’s unexpectedly called in to work on a weekend, she thinks little of leaving him home alone. It is quiet, suburban Los Angeles in 1929, after all.

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Movies Reviews

‘The Wrestler’ gets real

Christian Bale lost 28kg in four months, dropping to 54kg by eating a can of tuna or an apple per day. Daniel Day Lewis studied Czech, broke two ribs by hunching over for weeks, learned to live off the land, and took lessons as an apprentice butcher. And Robert DeNiro worked as a New York taxi driver for three months, boxed competitively, and gained a third of his body weight.

Amateurs.

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Music Reviews

340ml are sorry for the delay

There’s something undeniably depressing about the bleak apartheid architecture – the tatty Regent’s Park Hotel; Triompf’s faceless flats; Parktown’s cold concrete constructions – that comprises the artwork of ‘Sorry For The Delay’. And yet, in Ross Garrett’s striking photographs, the gloomy buildings have a haunting beauty.

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