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Truly great action films come along only once in a while – and in the 2000′s, even less often than that. You could list on the fingers of one hand the number of universally admired films in which driving stunts, gunplay and bloody violence are actually helpful to the story, or in any way universally appealing. Drive makes a welcome addition to the fingers on that hand, even if describing it as an Action Film is perhaps a little disingenuous on my part. Drive isn’t a typical Hollywood action movie, although there are moments of gut-wrenching action, helmed with close-up ferocity by Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn. It’s not really a deep dramatic piece either, with the characters atypically using glances, longing stares and nods of the head for the majority of their communication – often, it’s the unsaid that’s more important. As a thriller, you’d class it as a sleeper, the kind of thriller for intellectuals who enjoy a film less about cheap thrills than about intelligent screenwriting and storytelling. What I’d say is that Drive is a mix of all three, a very successful mix, if the critical reception this movie received originally is anything to go by. Current It Man, Ryan Gosling, who seems to be in every great film coming out at the moment, leads a great cast through this stylish genre piece with a performance easily described as “intense”, saying more in a twenty second kiss with Carey Mulligan than most actors do in an entire film. So, is Drive a film able to live up to the hype; is it able to resist the urge for those wondering what all the hype is about to dismiss it out of hand as just another Edge Of Darkness style thriller?

Click here to take a Drive.

Bob Anderson - 1922-2012

While he’s not a household name, everyone should know who Bob Anderson is. Anderson was the man working behind the scenes of some of cinemas great sword fights, from Star Wars, The Princess Bride, to The Lord Of The Rings and even Peter Jackson’s currently-in-production The Hobbit. Mr Anderson was the man under Vader’s mask whilst dueling with Obi Wan in the original Star Wars, Luke Skywalker in Empire Strikes Back and Return of The Jedi, as well as choreographing the sword fighting sequences in films as diverse as Highlander, Barry Lyndon (for Stanley Kubrick), The Three Musketeers (1993, with Charlie Sheen and Keifer Sutherland), both recent Zorro films, and even the fencing sequence in Die Another Day. He also worked with the legendary Errol Flynn, on the film The Master Of Ballantrae. Chick-flick fans across the globe also need to remember that it was Bob who designed the amazing fight choreography in The Princess Pride. Up until his passing he was continuing to work, returning to Middle Earth for the Hobbit production, designing more fight sequences.

Among his on-screen appearances, he played a small role in the Doctor Who serial Enemy Of The World, and an Imperial Officer in The Empire Strikes Back.

Mr Anderson was 90.

In the hundred or so years since film was invented and turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, plenty of ink has been spilled over lists and articles about just who has been the best – the best director, the best actor, the best musician – like humanity can’t get enough out of figuring out the most superior of our own self-importance. The Hollywood awards season seems to last the entire year, with a multitude of industry-based awards shows dominating the blogosphere and newsprint each and every month, culminating in the very pinnacle of cinematic artistic achievement, The Academy Awards. Each year, golden gongs are handed out to those folks judged by others folks to be the best in their category at what they’ve done that year. Whether those awards are warranted or not isn’t the point of this article; here, we’re going to spotlight the very best of the best – the best Actors and Actresses, the best Directors, the best Films, even the best cinematic advances of the Modern Age. What do I mean by Modern Age, you ask. Simple. Hollywood’s boom times of the 30′s and 40′s, at least prior to the War, are known today as the Golden Age, and the three decades after that could be termed the Bronze Age – with a shift into color film, multi-channel stereo and the re-invention of the Hollywood “blockbuster” away from biblical epics and sweeping melodramatic romance. The 80′s, however, when you look at films produced at that time in a reflective mood, represents a shift both artistically and stylistically in the medium of film to such a degree that I think a new “age” of Hollywood could be coined: the Modern Age. An epoch of cinema between 1980 and 2010, 30 years of both massive successes, and epic fails. The Greatest of the Modern Age attempts to distill the best of the Modern Age into a series of opinion-based lists, and we hope you enjoy (if not disagree with) our work.

While stars of the bygone era, names like Shirley Temple, Burt Lancaster, Clark Gable, Rita Hayworth and others may have faded from the forefront of our social conscience, due mainly to the passing of time and the innocence of youth, a youth more obsessed with Justin Bieber than James Dean, the stars of the modern era have, and can, reach a global audience unlike any in history before now. Whereas Hollywood of the 30′s seemed like a fairytale time by today’s standards, nowadays, stars run their own shows and have such a social presence thanks to online media and saturation TV coverage, it’s impossible to not see them every day. Which begs the question: if the stars of today had lived back in the heyday of Hollywood, alongside the greats of cinema, who would be the biggest and the best? It’s like equating apples and oranges, I know, but I wanted to take a chance and try and sift through the smorgasbord of superstars getting about today and put together a definitive list of the ten best actors and actresses living today. I realize it’s a mission fraught with danger and controversy, but here at fernbyfilms.com, we’re all about danger and controversy. Okay, perhaps not exactly all about it, but we don’t mind stoking the flames of fan passion from time to time.

Ergo, we’ve come up with a list of actors which we consider to be the greatest cinema legends since 1980.The criteria for inclusion isn’t that stringent: each actor must have performed in a minimum 5 films since 1980, been nominated for and/or won an Oscar, and have a substantial following from the general public. The majority of their major work must be post-1980.

The Modern Age. The Facebook Age. Call it what you will, it’s a Top 10 list and it’s gonna kick up some mud!

Click here to reveal who our choices for the ten best actors of the modern age are!!!

Happy New Year folks, welcome to the first day of 2012; the year in which, according to those who believe in the soon-to-be-defunct ancient Mayan calendar, the world will end/change.

Here at fernbyfilms.com, we don’t believe much will happen on December 21 this year, but just in case the planet Earth does suffer some terrible cataclysm, we’ll be preparing for this event with some timely final words and summations on cinema as a whole. Just in case aliens unearth our remains in the millennia to come, we want to make sure they know the truth about our world, about our culture, as we step forth into the new epoch of human civilization, be that a post-Roland Emmerich-esque upheaval or meteor strike or nuclear holocaust – whatever version of fate humanity has in store, we wanted to get our ducks in a row.

Each month, we’ll be presenting a special series of Top 10 Lists, under the headline banner of “Greatest of the Modern Age“, trawling through various films of the last 30-odd years (since 1980, to be precise), with such lists as the Greatest Actors, Greatest Films, Greatest Film Scenes and other similarly titled things to keep you entertained. Tomorrow, we present our first, The Top 10 Greatest Actors Of The Modern Age, representing the best acting talent from the last 30 years. I know some of these lists will produce some controversy, so I invite anybody with a different opinion to voice it in the comments section!

Also this year, we have a special last-gasp blow-out planned for Septembers Worst Film Week event (since we went and skipped it in 2011), as well as a number of other events planned through the course of the year – most of which I haven’t come up with as I write this. No doubt I’ll sort something out later.

So welcome to2012 folks: sit back and enjoy the ride, why dontcha!

Rodney T – EIC, fernbyfilms.com

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It truly does take a brave viewer to watch a Christmas film and actually feel good about it. Most Christmas films end up being saccharine-infested Holiday cheer-heavy schmaltz-fests, or dull, stupidly conceived and ill-executed “Christmas-comedies”  in the vein of crap like Four Christmases, Christmas With The Kranks, or Fred Claus, to name only three off the top of my head. The Santa Clause managed to deliver a Christmas movie that balanced the schmaltz and actual emotional content with extraordinary success – even more surprising considering the film came out in the 90′s, a decade in which films became increasingly marketed towards big-budgets and shitty-stories. The inevitable sequel to The Santa Clause came out a few years later, with the original cast returning and adding in a few new surprises, and to everyone’s complete shock, it too wasn’t that bad a film, even for a sequel. Tim Allen’s best film franchise ever actually improved on the original, surpassing the aww-shucks cutesy whimsy of film 1 and building on the magical, fantastical elements that made that film so good.

Click here to jingle all the way to the Mrs Clause!

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There’s something charming about stop-motion animation, isn’t there? Particularly the kind where an entire film is made with it, just like The Nightmare Before Christmas. Long before Wallace & Gromit took on the Were-Rabbit, Jack Skellington took on the Christmas season and owned it for about fifteen minutes. Skellington, of course, being the king of Halloween, the most un-Christmassy holiday ever devised. From a story by Tim Burton, Hollywood’s weirdest mainstream director, and directed by Burton understudy Henry Salick (who’s debut stop-motion film James & The Giant Peach was a standout!), Nightmare Before Christmas is a whimsical, lyrical, visual delight. The characters are strange, in the most manic Tim Burton way, and the world they inhabit is equally kooky: but the Halloween-styled Christmas riffs elevate this above simple animated mockery to actual art. Jack Skellington, the depressed and anorexic king of Halloweentown, is fed up with the holiday he’s ruler of. Halloween has lost its charm, so when he sees how happy folks are over Christmas, he decides to steal the holiday for himself. Capturing Santa, devising his own set of Christmassy-halloween versions of the holiday seasons cliches, and proclaiming himself the new “Sandy Claws”, Jack becomes a victim of his own covetousness.

Wanna read more about the Nightmare? Click here!!!

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Shakespeare blah blah Romeo and Juliet blah blah animated films blah blah star casting blah blah. You know, most reviews of major animated films these days tend to focus on two things: the casting, and the story. What do you write about then, when the story is one of the greatest ever written, and the cast is made up of almost entirely legendary cinema icons both young and old?At least the animation is cool. Gnomeo & Juliet is based on Shakespeare’s classic tale of Romeo and Juliet, told from the point of view of – and here’s the weird part – garden gnomes. And Elton John songs. Two gardens, both alike in looks, in fair London, were this film is set, bear an ancient grudge to which we’re never privy to the origins, where civil blood makes civil hands unclean – the owners of two joined houses in suburban London have an enmity which has spread to even their back gardens, gardens populated by gnomes which come alive when their owners are out. One the one side, the Reds, and on the other, the Blues, both battle each other over a cause unknown. Thus begins the tale of Gnomeo and Juliet.

Click here for gnomic comedy gold….

Morning folks! Well, we’ve almost made it to the end of another year, with Christmas just under a week away. Now is the time for celebrating the holiday season, spending time with family and relaxing after spending the last 12 months or so slogging away at whatever job it is you do – me, I’m off to my parents’ farm for a bit of R&R over the break, so with that in mind I thought now might be a good opportunity to get a few housekeeping items out of the way.

First, I’d like to extend a massive “thank-you” to all those folks who contributed and commented on fernbyfilms.com over the last 12 months. Special mention to Al over at the dry-zone that is The Bar None, and Dan Stephens at Top 10 Films, as well as regular back-patters Dan O, Vik, Rory, Castor, Sam, Fitz, Matt S, Scotty S, and a fellow Aussie, Tom Clift, all of whom have become regulars around here.

Second, and this almost goes without saying, I’d like to thank my good wife, the gorgeous Lisa T, and my daughter Mikayla, for allowing me to watch films and write about them here for you all to read – if they said no, I’d be gone, so be thankful they said yes! On another note, I’m also happy to announce that midway through 2012, Lisa and I are expecting to welcome a new member to our family, so wish us luck with that! No, not a puppy – a new baby!

Thirdly, I’m happy to report that a few months ago we re-registered fernbyfilms.com for another 3 years, meaning you’re all going to have to put up with us being an online presence for a while longer! Yay! Thanks to Mick Kubler, our magnificent back-room administrator, for keeping us ticking along.

Speaking of online presence, keen eyed observers of this site would have noticed that a few months ago we passed our 1,000,000th visitor to the site – a massive thanks to all those who’ve read our stuff over the years, and those regulars who keep coming back for more. 1 million hits is a pretty big number for a small site like ours, and we’re pretty darn impressed with all those zeros ticking over like that! By the time sunset hits the last day of 2011, we’ll have posted 95 official movie reviews in the last 12 months, six Top Ten lists, and, sadly, more than a few obituaries – and we have plenty of new material already planned for next year. I can say that with a fair degree of certainty too, because as you read this we’re working on reviews which will be published here around mid-May, that’s how far in advance we work. I know what’s coming, and it’s gonna be cool! (Let’s just say, the Millennium Trilogy is going to make May an awesome month, that’s for sure!).

Finally, I’d like to let you know that as of tomorrow, I’m going to be taking some well-deserved time away from the site for a couple of weeks, so until just after New Year’s the site’s gonna be on auto-pilot. If you don’t get a response from me about something, that’s why. Okay?

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Now, on to 2012. As many of you know, 2012 is apparently the year in which the world will end or some other such nonsense – at least, the Mayan calendar runs out and we’re going to find ourselves watching December 21st very closely. That’s the day everything will change – apparently. [Mind you, the same was said with Y2K too, when planes were gonna drop from the sky and nuclear missiles would self-launch... and look where that got us!] With that in mind, and with the endless hype this date is no doubt going to bring, we’re jumping on the bandwagon (not really, just figuratively) and have something huge planned that will run throughout 2012 – I’ll tell you more about that very soon. Let’s just say, we hope it’ll be a spark for some massive conversations about film. I must also mention the regrettable lack of a Worst Film Week this year, something we simply ran out of time to organize and achieve. Hopefully it’ll be back in 2012, bigger and better worse than ever!

Before we get to the new year, however, we have to muster the courage to get through Christmas – eating has never been so much fun! This week, a couple of Christmas-themed film reviews pop up for you, beginning with Tim Burton’s classic Nightmare Before Christmas, and the second Santa Clause film, both of which I think suit the holiday season ever so nicely. Tomorrow, however, comes our last regular review for the year, on the delightful animated film Gnomeo & Juliet. It’s a cracker! There will be no reviews here between Christmas and NYE, and we’ll be back here come January 1st with an update and the kick-off for the new year.

So, I wish you all the very best for the New Year, a very merry Christmas, and lots of fun watching plenty of films across the holiday season. Stay safe, stay strange, and we’ll see you in 2012!

Rodney T – EIC, fernbyfilms.com

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In what can only be described as horrific, The Cove brings to light Japan’s shocking attempts to cover-up their annual dolphin slaughter near the tiny costal town of Taiji, on the southern edge of that country. This documentary, directed by Oceanic Preservation Society co-founder Louie Psihoyos, shows the quest by former dolphin trainer Ric O’Barry to end the annual slaughter of thousands of innocent marine mammals, using hidden cameras, stealth technology, deep-diving champions, and a disregard for personal safety. The Cove won the Oscar for best Documentary Feature at the 82^nd Academy Awards (held in 2010), and perhaps rightly so. It’s confronting, wrenching and entirely terrible to witness the slaughter of hundreds upon hundreds of dolphins, all carved up to feed the masses and potentially create a new problem for Japan to endure. More on this in a moment.

Click here to delve deeper into The Cove…