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Co-written by Luc Besson (The Professional) and Robert Kamen (The Transporter), this film lives up to its pedigree as an edge-of-your-seat action thriller. Bryan (Liam Neeson) has had his daughter taken from him twice. The first time he was too busy working for the government (he coyly puts it that he was stopping bad people from doing bad things) to notice that his marriage was falling apart. The second time his seventeen year old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace) was kidnapped on holiday in Paris with her friend, whilst speaking to him on the phone to him. It’s not a plot-spoiler to tell you that she was adducted by a group of Albanians who subdue their captives with drugs and sell them as prostitutes - the more pure, the more money they can get for them. (more…)

Marjane Satrap grew up in Tehran where she attended a French high school. At the age of fourteen, she was sent to boarding school in Vienna, where she discovered the joy of shopping but was also terribly homesick. One day she went to the airport with the intention of returning home, but she just spent the whole day there, crying and watching the planes take off. This is the opening scene to the animated film, produced in the ‘traditional’ way rather than using computer graphics. It is based on the three graphic novels she has written about her life. She tells of the precocious nine-year-old growing up in Iran and how her life changed after the overthrow of the Shah and the outbreak of the war with Iraq. Marjane was fourteen when her parents, worried about her outspokenness as fundamentalists took power, sent her to school in Austria. (more…)

Most of us are familiar with the art-house films that were the result of the seventies revival of filmmaking in Australia - Picnic at Hanging Rock, My Brilliant Career, Caddie, The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith, Newsfront. What most people wouldn’t be aware of is that the ‘coarse vulgar rubbish’ made at the same time, such as Alvin Purple, Adventures of Barry McKenzie and Stork, actually made much more money at the box office. Then there were the low budget B-grade films that were disgusting, degrading and explicit, and that was the whole point. Although most Australians have never heard of them, they were well known in many other parts of the world. Marc Hartley’s documentary has created a homage to the fast cheap films made by ‘ocker’ blokes who took chances. (more…)

Writer/director Garth Jennings has been busy with video clips and commercials since his debut film based on Douglas Adam’s Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy in 1999. Being in the first generation of video age kids, Jennings remembers his fearless childhood antics with a video camera. He also remembers seeing a pirate video copy of Rambo - the hero who could ‘leap from cliffs, sew up a cut in his own arm and take on a whole army just by using bits of the forest around him’. His hilarious, nostalgic celebration of childhood exuberance takes the audience back to the long summer days of 1982, when school corridors were endless and French exchange students seemed like they were from a different planet. (more…)

Mates and Lovers: A History of Gay New Zealand
Chris Brickell
Random House

**** ½

It would be difficult to piece together a history of something that was not spoken about for most of its existence. Chris Brickell, who lectures in Gender Studies at Otago University, has written 400-page book, crammed with illustrations, on gay life in New Zealand. In his analysis of relationships between men in the early days of British colonisation, Brickell points out that he has had to reread old photographs with the knowledge that it was not always possible to distinguish between friendships and romantic liaisons. (more…)

You Staying Young
Dr Michael Roizen and Dr Mehmet Oz
Harper Collins

****

As the old saying goes, youth is wasted on the young. We tend to grow older, sicker and sadder as the years advance by such small amounts that we fail to register that we are losing (or abandoning) the things we took for granted in our youth. You Staying Young is an owner’s manual for “adding serious years to your life - and life to your years”. It challenges our perceptions of aging and looks at the defenses we can build in our first five decades against things that may occur in later life. (more…)

40 Days as a City Caveman
Michael Jarosky and Annie Clark
www.citycavemanfitness.com

*** ½

Just before a milestone birthday, Michael Jarosky stood in front of a mirror and decided that the SOFA (shirt over fat arse) move wasn’t working any more and he needed to make serious changes to his lifestyle. With the help of psychologist and personal trainer Annie Clark, he formulated a plan based on a ’simple’ and ‘fresh’ approach to both food and exercise. I love the chapter “How Did I Get This Way” which lists all the excuses to remaining a couch potato. (more…)

With the immensely scary and gory vampire thrillers Night Watch (2004) and Day Watch (2006) to his credit, it is no surprise that Russian director Timur Bekmambeton’s first English-language film is off the scale in intensity. So much so, that it has departed from other films based on comic series and earned itself a ‘R’ rating. There’s plenty of violence and destruction in this exciting thriller with a killer twist, but there’s also a story about refusing to live in fear and seizing control of your life. (more…)

Working as a manager on a construction site with a concrete square as its centrepiece, Ray (David Roberts) finds out that life is full of temptations. First there is the steamy affair with young Carla (Claire Van Der Boom) whose husband Greg (Anthony Hayes) dabbles with criminal enterprises. Then there is the bag of cash that Carla finds in the roof of her house. It is too easy for Ray to hire small time arsonist Billy (Joel Edgerton) to burn down her house so that he and Carla can leave their loveless marriages with a heap of cash, but a tragic turn of events puts his life into overdrive. (more…)

Tom McCarthy’s first feature film, The Station Agent, was memorable. A man who feels alienated by society takes up residence in an abandoned railway station, but there’s two people who persist in barging into his solitude and making him enjoy life once again. In his new film, The Visitor, McCarthy has again brought together disparate people in the middle of nowhere, even though this time it is a New York apartment. There are four strangers struggling to deal with a changing world - the dispirited old man, the young couple from other parts of the world and a sophisticated older woman. (more…)