3D
Adam Sweeting
Already shouldering the new Harry Potter off the top of the US box-office charts, this latest arrival from Marvel Studios harks back to a simpler America where the hero wraps himself in the stars and stripes and the bad guys speak with ridiculous German accents. It’s 1941, the Nazis are trampling Western civilisation underfoot, and gung-ho American kids are flocking to join up.But it’s bad news for 98lb weakling Steve Rogers (Chris Evans), a rickety, asthmatic youth from Brooklyn who’s desperate to pull on an army uniform and head for war-torn Europe, but hasn’t a hope of passing a medical Read more ...
Jasper Rees
So. That’s it then. It’s taken just shy of 20 hours to work through the lot, a gestation spread across a decade. Every British actor in the firmament has visited the Leavesden set to chew on some of the computer-generated furniture. Several trillion techie hours have been racked up on achieving SFX which wouldn’t have been even a twinkle in a geek’s eye when JK Rowling first conceived the seven-part tale of a boy wizard. And a trio of young actors cast before puberty have missed out on a decade’s worth of regular schooling. Instead they’ve been boarding at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Last March’s Japanese earthquakes and tsunami, as we know, brought devastation to hundreds of thousands of Japanese. But it also caused a crisis in the 3D film industry, just as it is attempting to be born. The most important 3D tape stock finishing factory in the world was swept away by the waters.In the burgeoning 3D film world this caused consternation, and for no one more than the producers of the 3D version of Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake that was just about to be shot at Sadler’s Wells by Leopard Films. It caused a terrifying lurch in price for the making of what has to be seen as a Read more ...
Nick Hasted
The appeal of fat, foolish, good-hearted panda Po (Jack Black) as a cartoon action hero is predictably diluted in this sequel. A fully trained and socially accepted martial arts master by the original’s end, he offers Kung Fu Panda 2 less pathos and originality. It compensates with spectacular 3D set pieces, cute and ferocious animals and gentle humour finely tuned to children’s tastes.Po is this time stunned to discover the kindly goose who raised him isn’t his real dad. Jack Black bravely resists the temptation to reprise Steve Martin’s similarly naïve adoptee in The Jerk (“You mean… I’m Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Once more unto the beach, dear friends. Pirates of the Caribbean is back for a fourth raid of the world’s wallet. This time it’s in 3D. As in Dumb, Dumberer and Depp. Film scholars may also wish to note that Pirates 4 was actually shot 6000 miles away in Hawaii. Among those places closer to Barbados are Zimbabwe, Syria, Greenland and Antarctica.If one weren’t slightly wise by now to the jaw-dropping cynicism of Tinseltown’s service providers, the film which calls itself On Stranger Tides would take the breath away. The latest instalment comes courtesy of the following rationale from Jerry Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Were the great Diaghilev alive today, surely he’d be working in the imaginative possibilities of electronic technology - this was the opinion given me by the arts panjandrum, the late Sir John Drummond. And given the developments of 3D, who knows? Would it be this manipulation of our perceptions that fascinated him? 3D is certainly everywhere in dance now, though the challenge is to leap the judgment of it as merely a gimmick. I reckon while Wim Wenders’ film Pina 3D achieved that, the version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring by Klaus Obermaier doesn’t.Part of the Southbank Centre’s Read more ...
james.woodall
Wim Wenders (b 1945) is one of the great travellers of contemporary cinema. Multi-disciplinary and theme-driven, his work often asks questions about memory and identity, and pulsates with the strong spirit of very particular places. The worldwide success of Paris, Texas (1984), winner of the Palme d’Or at Cannes, made him a bankable director in the transatlantic movie business, but he’s always remained very European, if not necessarily in topic and location, then certainly in sensibility: sombre, quite slow, metaphysical on occasion – the latter displayed no better than in his famous portrait Read more ...
Ismene Brown
Pina Bausch decided: “Words can’t do more than just evoke things - that’s where dance comes in.” Well, up to a point, Lord Copper. Only if they’re bad words and good dance - bad writhing instead of, say, Shakespeare’s words isn’t much of a swap. But with Bausch, people tended to hang on every word, probably because so much of her dance was indeed pretty damn good, and it’s so difficult to put into words just why that was.Part of it was that it was a theatrical expression of adult instincts that we all share, rather than a school of dance that you had to know standards to access. Wim Wenders Read more ...
Russ Coffey
If you just knew him from the pop and world-music part of his career you might struggle to believe that Peter Gabriel was once considered to be synonymous with everything that was white and stiff in music. His Genesis work, all public-school poetry and am-dram costumes, not only practically invented prog rock, but also spawned its most infamous practitioner, Marillion. By “Sledgehammer” and “Steam”, however, Gabriel had fully switched sides of his brain. That was, however, until last year when he revisited prog by replacing his touring band with an orchestra. Not everyone was impressed.The Read more ...
alexandra.coghlan
Tainted by its origins and association with the pulp cinema of the 1950s (classics like Bwana Devil, It Came from Outer Space and House of Wax were pioneers of stereoscopic technology), 3D cinema has remained the province of entertainment cinema, a novelty no art-house auteur would touch. Spin The Hurt Locker’s shock Oscar win in 2010 any way you want, it made an emphatic statement about the value the cinematic academy placed on technological advancement. For that was surely the terminal problem with Avatar. A thrilling visual spectacle, it harnessed its innovations to a recycled plot Read more ...
anne.billson
2010 will go down as the year I fell out of love with Johnny Depp. And not just because of his cringe-making Mad Hatter in Alice in Wonderland, an over-produced farrago which reduced Lewis Carroll's dark Victorian whimsy to a dull computer gamelike chase-rescue-showdown scenario. The Deppster sealed the Double Whammy of Dreadfulness with his uncanny impression of naff comedian Rob Schneider in The Tourist, a would-be rom-com thriller that somehow sacrificed the romantic, comedic and thriller elements of its remit to fawning close-ups of the increasingly prognathic Angelina Jolie. If only it Read more ...
Veronica Lee
The fourth and last instalment of the ogre animation is a belter. It’s in 3D for one thing and, while the pop culture and film references have been toned down in Josh Klausner and Darren Lemke’s screenplay (directed by Mike Mitchell), in order to tell a gentle morality tale, it takes as its inspiration Frank Capra’s It’s a Wonderful Life. And that’s a very good starting point for any movie.Shrek (voiced by Mike Myers), now living in connubial bliss with his beloved Princess Fiona (Cameron Diaz) and their three babies - a trio of burping, farting little green ogres - is in a rut. He may be a Read more ...