Sydney Film Happenings

Rotterdam p1: ANNA (dir. Alberto Grifi, Massimo Sarchielli)

2012-01-27T03:43:00.000-08:00

It’s customary for me at festivals to have certain phrases of a program guide description floating through my head, mantra-like, while watching the film. For the recently unearthed Italian doco Anna – focusing on a teenage, pregnant homeless girl’s recovery under the wings of two opportunistic filmmakers – the program sez “they film her slow recovery from feral homeless person to human being”.

Aside from the unfortunate phrasing, it also points to what Anna is (quite perversely) not; ie, a streamlined story of a young woman following any arc let alone a triumphant one. It’s a digressive, unwieldy time capsule, shot in an early video that makes its human subjects – a whole range of characters, many not even related to the titular one – look like fuzzy ghosts, or a degraded VHS copy of Warhol screen tests.

If there’s one film it evokes, it’s Robert Kramer’s similarly sprawling, doco-fiction hybrid Milestones, also from the same year. Anna, like Kramer’s film, jumps between the micro and macro, only on a much smaller scale than Kramer's panoramic depiction of US post-Vietnam disillusion. In Anna, intimate, even voyeuristic details (lice being cleaned from Anna's pubes) are juxtaposed with a snapshot of the broader social context (eg, feminist groups beaten by police). Much of it is comprised of closeups of faces, and in its countless scenes of café table political debates between (mostly) hippies, it becomes concerned with the way ideology is stymied by the messiness of human affairs.

Anna is sloppy filmmaking, by design; implicitly positing that capturing a historical moment must come at the expense of ‘good form’. And once the filmmakers’ treatment and exploitation of Anna becomes an issue, it only gets more digressive, bringing in ‘flashbacks’ that don’t really add much except for adding another shambolic layer. Ultimately though, the scattershot approach, combined with the often excruciating blocks of spent in the company of some fairly repugnant people works to the film’s advantage, transforming it into a lament for an impotent hippie culture that no one would want to bring a child into.

ROTTERDAMAGE.

2012-01-24T01:02:00.000-08:00

Due to the combination of snagging cheap flight tix last year, the increasingly dismal state of film distribution/exhibition in Sydney, and likely some other personal factors that warrant a longer post, I'm going to be at the Rotterdam Film Festival for the next 10 days. Despite the fest's nearly-uncontested rep as the most adventurous major film festival in the world, I have my worries; namely that an onslaught of wan, opportunistic pseudo-contemplative amateur-hours will dominate the new films, that Michelle Carey'll end up snagging the good stuff for MIFF anyway, that I'll catch a cold, that I'll blow all my money on records and booze and overpriced fast food, etc etc. That's of course just the worst case scenario, to have in my head like a mantra so that I'll be pleasantly surprised.

My tentative schedule is here. The films I'm most anticipating based on pedigree/reviews are The Return (Nathaniel Dorsky), Two Years at Sea (Ben Rivers), Century of Birthing (Lav Diaz), small roads (James Benning), Miss Bala (Gerardo Naranjo), The Loneliest Planet (Julia Loktev). Among those I'm most intrigued about based on the program descriptions are:

Shock Head Soul: A mixture of documentary and fiction film about Daniel Paul Schreber, who wrote a famous autobiography about his psychiatric past, Denkwürdigkeiten eines Nervenkranken (1903). Pummel interlaced book fragments with animation and interviews with modern psychoanalysts to produce a cinematic approximation of a psychosis.

Dernière séance: The lonely, taciturn Sylvain is a projectionist in an old local cinema. The place has to close because it doesn’t get enough customers, but the film lover Sylvain doggedly keeps screening films. At night he has a very different, macabre obsession. A cinematic thriller that plays with the conventions of the genre.

Anna: In the early 1970s, two Italian filmmakers met pregnant, 16-year-old Anna, a junky, on the Piazza Navone in Rome. One of them took her under his wing, partly out of pity, partly due to opportunism - thinking ‘there’s a great film in this’. They film her slow recovery from feral homeless person to human being, initially using a film camera and later on video - which, at the time, was a novelty. Alberto Grifi turned the 11 hours of material shot by the duo into a four-hour film and transferred the video onto 16mm film.

The Empire of Desire/Sensual Anarchy: the first Brazilian film to be designated by the loosening military censors as 'pornographic spectacle' and released in cinemas freely as such, setting an important precedent for 1980s Brazilian film culture. Originally programmed by Hubert Bals for the IFFR in the mid-1980s, the film never showed up due to various complications. Unavailable and nearly forgotten for 30 years, the festival presents Sensual Anarchy in a brand new 35mm print.

Eight Deadly Shots: The real-life story on which the film is informally based happened in 1969. In a moment of sheer hopelessness, a certain Tauno Veikko Pasanen shoots four police officers. Tauno is called Pasi here and played by scenario-writer Niskanen himself. Pasi ekes out a meagre living for himself and his family. Times grow increasingly harder. One thing slowly leads to another. In the end, there's blood. A raw, grim, uncompromising, unrelenting, unforgiving and non-consoling masterpiece which will be shown in its five-hour-plus original version. A very, very rare opportunity!

Reviews, of at least a few of them, will follow. If there's anything you're particularly keen to hear thoughts on, just ask and I'll make note of it.

2011: The Year in Film.

2012-01-09T19:42:00.000-08:00

I contributed this following list & comment for Matt Riviera's annual Sydney Film Critics poll.

BEST RELEASED:

The Tree Of Life
Certified Copy
Le Quattro Volte
Drive
Melancholia
Another Year
We Need To Talk About Kevin
The Skin I Live In
Snowtown
13 Assassins

BEST UNRELEASED:

The Turin Horse
Martha Marcy May Marlene
The Kid With A Bike
Mysteries of Lisbon
Hail
Terri
Resurrect Dead: The Mystery of the Toynbee Tiles
Policeman
Good Bye
Once Upon a Time in Anatolia

An unusually strong year for Aussie theatrical releases, so I’ll rattle off some runners-up that could’ve easily made the top ten depending on mood: Take Shelter, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, Meek’s Cutoff, Rise of the Planet of the Apes, This is Not a Film. Other film-related highlight: Peter Tscherkassky retrospective & masterclass at MIFF, not just for the quality of his films or his animated discussion with audience members – his work’s bracing (and fun!) engagement with the materiality of film itself felt like the most poignant eulogy for 35mm in a year rife with (often dopey) written ruminations on the transition to digital production/projection. Worst of 2011: The Iron Lady, OFLC, Jim Schembri’s Scream 4 review/spoiler gaffe.

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And a bonus: the best older films I saw for the first time in 2011:

1. The Act of Seeing With One's Own Eyes (Brakhage, 1971)

2. The Heiress (Wyler, 1949)

3. Cold Water (Assayas, 1994)

4. The Last Laugh (Murnau, 1924)

5. The Docks of New York (von Sternberg, 1928)

6. The Prowler (Losey, 1951)

7. Le révélateur (Garrel, 1968)

8. Light is Waiting (Robinson, 2007)

9. Landscape Suicide (Benning, 1986)

10. Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)

And some very honorable mentions:

Damnation (Tarr, 1987)

Cœur fidèle (Epstein, 1923)

The Cremator (Huerz, 1968)

World on a Wire (Fassbinder, 1974)

A Time to Live and a Time to Die (Hou, 1985)

A Grin Without a Cat (Marker, 1977)

Sorcerer (Friedkin, 1977)

Head (Rafelson, 1968)

Who Can Kill a Child? (Serrador, 1976)

Day of the Outlaw (De Toth, 1959)

Saló (Pasolini, 1975)

Our Beloved Month of August (Gomes, 2008)

Mes petites amoureuses (Eustache, 1974)

The GoodTimesKid (Jacobs, 2005)

City of Pirates (Ruiz, 1983)

Minnie & Moskowitz (Cassavetes, 1971)

Where is the Friend's Home? (Kiarostami, 1987)

The Mirror (Panahi, 1997)

Dying at Grace (King, 2003)

In Vanda's Room (Costa, 2000)

Remember My Name (Rudolph, 1978)

Class Relations (Straub & Huillet, 1984)

Southern Comfort (Hill, 1981)

Love in the Afternoon (Rohmer, 1972)

The Profound Desires of the Gods (Imamura, 1968)

A Tale of Cinema (Hong, 2005)

Notable shorts:

Cicada (Courtin-Wilson, 2009)

Happy-End (Tscherkassky, 1996)

Dream Work (Tscherkassky, 2002)

Instructions for a Sound & Light Machine (Tscherkassky, 2005)

Dottie Gets Spanked (Haynes, 1993)

December Drum Media reviews: WASTE LAND, WE HAVE A POPE, MELANCHOLIA, THE IRON LADY, THE SKIN I LIVE IN

2012-01-09T19:40:00.000-08:00

On the outskirts of Rio De Janeiro rests a site known as Jardim Gramacho, the world’s largest garbage dump, home to growing towers of waste from all ends of the class spectrum. From afar the site registers as pure, undulating waves of debris, not unlike the action scenes in a Transformers sequel. Among these remnants are the catadores (‘pickers’), who scavenge for recyclable material. It’s a meagre existence upon first glance, with obvious health risks, and their earnings unsafe from raids by thieves, although preferable from the alternatives of drug dealing and prostitution – or what one unfazed worker posits as the “dirty shame” of upper class guilt.

Waste Land documents this area and its people through the perspective of Vik Muniz, a Brazilian-born, Brooklyn-based artist intent on shining a light on this disenfranchised community via a large-scale art project that recreates photo-portraits of the pickers using a palette of the waste itself. And just as Muniz aestheticises this unlikely milieu, director Lucy Walker doesn’t have to work overtime in finding an eerie beauty in Gramacho’s post-apocalyptic-like environs.

The film itself has two main strands – one detailing the motivation for Muniz’s project and its subsequent creation, the other based around interviews conducted within and around the grounds of the dump. While the culmination of the former strand packs an obvious emotional punch, it’s the latter strand that’s truly fascinating, and I could help but wish Walker and co. stayed there longer with its inhabitants. Minor misgivings aside, Waste Land is potent stuff; and one of the few recent docos that merits a big screen viewing, dealing in two kinds of large-scale spectacle captured in glorious 35mm; a medium itself on it’s way out.

With a setup that plays like the clerical equivalent of The King’s Speech, Nanni Moretti’s We Have a Pope is a shoulder-shrug of a film, in which the great Michel Piccoli plays the title role, as a pope suffering from a nervous breakdown on the eve of his election. Moretti himself, as ever, has a starring role, here as a psychiatrist called in to examine the pope as he’s reduced to an insecure, quivering mess. The latter descriptor somewhat applies to the film itself, as it awkwardly alternates between sombreness and broad-strokes comedy.

We Have a Pope has a minor, featherweight surface, and that’s not a knock against it – Moretti’s Caro Diario (1994) was casually profound, using its notebook structure to great advantage. But his new film is merely lopsided, limiting its Catholic Church critique to a sight gag involving a old cardinal falling over, and neither Moretti’s psychiatrist nor Piccoli’s pope emerge with enough depth for one to care about their respective neuroses. Moretti’s an appealing screen presence, but his insistence on casting himself in major roles is particularly detrimental here – an extended scene of him refereeing a game of volleyball between the clergymen particularly overstays its welcome.

The film at least ends resonantly, offering a nicely ironic depiction of personal catharsis doubling as national malady, but until then, Moretti fails to give weight to his Pope’s stage fright and thwarted theatrical ambitions. That Piccoli is such a compelling, expressive actor certainly helps – his tremulous visage does practically all of the film’s dramatic heavy-lifting – but this is a very flimsy vehicle for him.

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia begins with an awakening; an extreme closeup of Kirsten Dunst’s face, her closed eyes opening in ultra-slow-motion. It’s the first in a tableau of painterly, Wagner-accompanied slo-mo shots that depict the apocalypse; horses falling, a woman desperately carrying her child across a golf course, and finally, a planet-sized comet crashing into the Earth’s surface. This dreamy flash-forward overture casts a doomy sense of inevitability over the proceedings, which take place at the wedding of Dunst’s Justine, before she awakens to the relative irrelevance of the human life surrounding her.

Trier opts to shoot the wedding with his infamous shaky-cam, which here feels less like a naturalism device than a tool in rendering human activity fleeting, ephemeral; compounded by repeated images of fragility – flimsy wedding dress fabric, diminutive golf buggies, mini hot-air balloons set aflight in celebration. Likewise, many of the people who orbit around Justine are less rounded characters than avatars for vice and venality (most memorably Keifer Sutherland’s arrogant, capitalist brother-in-law), driving her further into a funk.

Trier has gone on record about writing the film during a period of depression, and though it can hardly be called cheery, it at least shows signs of having felt through it – indeed, its first half is practically a black comedy. At the midway point, the action shifts from Justine to her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg), who responds to the impending doomsday with fear and anxiety for the lives of her and her family. By evenly splitting the film between the two characters, von Trier seems sympathetic to both of their attitudes (aided by Dunst and Gainsbourg’s deeply-felt performances), and it’s this ambivalence that makes the film so resonant – and to this writer, Trier’s best film to date.

In theatres this Boxing Day is The Iron Lady, an uproarious parody of everything awful about Oscar-baiting biopics, starring an unrecognisable Amy Poehler as former UK prime-minister Margaret Thatcher. The film nails all the cliches with devastating accuracy: the flashback narrative set in motion by items of household ephemera, the awkward attempts at containing an entire, wayward life into a rigid three-act structure, the crassly manipulative music score, the garish overacting, the makeup department showboating… it’s all accounted for. There’re times when The Iron Lady could easily be mistaken for the real deal.

Which, sadly, it is. This vehicle for Meryl Streep’s impersonation prowess is so stiflingly unimaginative in its dutiful box-ticking, that one can only decide that the creative team (multiple parking meters?) behind it are taking the piss. Or after some kind of mimetic strategy; depicting the infamous leader of UK’s right-wing government with storytelling that’s similarly conservative to the point of loathsomeness. If one wanted to be generous, you could laud the film for being non-judgemental: but if it’s portrayal of Thatcher is balanced, it’s only a by-product of the stock-standard sentimentality that comes with this subgenre, mixed with the damning facts of Maggie T’s reign. Call it ambivalence via non-committal-ness.

The Iron Lady ultimately proves as stimulating as watching Thatcher’s Wikipedia page scroll up a cinema screen for two hours. Fleeting pleasures are limited to some punk rock tunes over the many newsreel montages, and the impressive-in-a-vacuous-way nature of Streep’s transformation. Otherwise, this exercise in Academy-voter pandering only proves, beyond all doubt, that the awards-season ‘arthouse’ releases can be as soulless and cynical as their Hollywood Blockbuster counterparts.

The Skin I Live In is a uber-macabre, unabashedly melodramatic tale of obsession made by one of modern cinema’s most renowned obsessives; Pedro Almodovar. It focuses on the relationship between mastermind surgeon Robert (Antonio Banderas) and his mysterious relationship with a captive, kidnapped woman (Elena Anaya) who, we learn early on, is his guinea pig for the creation of a synthetic damage-proof skin. The people around Robert seem strangely tolerant to his experiment, including his elderly female housekeeper, but nothing in this scenario is as it seems.

This is a tricky one to synopsise for the uninitiated, since its mid-film plot twist is the kind of bombshell that would be cruel to even hint at. Hitchcock famously mandated that theatre owners not let latecomers to Psycho into the theatre until the next showing, and that could just as well apply here as well. Suffice to say that Almodovar – taking his cue from another Hitchcock Vertigo – fashions a frighteningly absurdist vision of a world where humans are malleable screens for projection, ripe for remodeling at the whims of their dominators.

Similarly, the film’s narrative structure plays upon our own assumptions and ingrained viewing practices, confounding expectations at every turn. The aptly opaque performances from Banderas and Anaya complement the themes, and though the tone remains steadfastly detached and precise through (credit Almodovar and cinematographer José Luis Alcaine’s improbably gorgeous/clinical visuals), the ideas carry ample emotional weight. The ads for David Fincher’s upcoming Girl With a Dragon Tattoo trumpet itself as ‘the feel-bad movie of the season’ – for my money, it’ll be hard to top this twisted, twisty delight.

November Drum Media reviews: OUR IDIOT BROTHER, BURNING MAN, WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, THIS IS NOT A FILM

2012-01-09T19:27:00.000-08:00

Our Idiot Brother ticks all the boxes as far as studio-indie comedies go, whose crossover appeal seems to be the work of a dedicated focus group. Dysfunctional family! Popular comedic actor in lead role, sporting a beard and Cosby sweater! Zooey Deschanel and cast members of Parks & Recreation and The Office in supporting roles! Adorable moppet kid who drops f-bombs! Sentimental subplot involving an equally adorable golden retriever! Nonstop wistful indie-folk over the soundtrack! Numerous emotional predicaments solved by montages accompanied to aforementioned music! Meet-cute final scene!

Fortunately, the indomitable Paul Rudd is in the lead, as the titular sibling who turns his sisters’ lives upside-down after serving a 9-month prison stint for selling weed to a uniformed police officer. Rudd’s combination of bland handsomeness, likeable goofiness and discordant comic timing has constantly made him one today’s most welcome screen presences, and he singlehandedly masks some of the film’s most glaring shortcomings; namely that the film’s central irony – that such a loveable goof has the ability to bring out the worst in everyone around him – is all but repeatedly printed on intertitles.

Indeed, Our Idiot Brother amounts to little more than a feature-length sitcom episode, but on a scene-by-scene basis, it’s constantly amiable, mostly due to Rudd’s inventive delivery and alchemic ability to the revitalise even the most stale scenarios. He’s helped in no small part by the equally appealing (and uniformly attractive) supporting cast – Deschanel, Elizabeth Banks and Emily Mortimer as the sisters, as well as Rashida Jones, Adam Scott, Steve Coogan and many others. As an in-flight movie, it’s probably a masterpiece.

Aussie film Burning Man opens with a closeup of its protagonist’s buttocks shaking as he masturbates. It’s an unflattering image to begin any film on, let alone one with obvious aspirations towards Art – it all but announces the film to follow as being a big wank. And surely enough, writer/director Jonathan Teplinzky delivers on this promise. Jumping back and forth through time to evoke the haphazard memory recollection of Tom (unevenly played by Matthew Goode), in a life-flashing-before-his-eyes moment as he lies fatally wounded in his upturned car after collision, Burning Man resembles less a memoir than a generic disease-of-the-week weepie edited with a chainsaw.

The film’s fatal flaw is that neither the fragmented, non-linear construction nor the scenes themselves evoke memories, or the process of remembering. Much of the early scenes involve Tom engaged in Xtreme cooking at his chic Bondi restaurant workplace, or sex with a variety of women, and Lepitzky teases us with details about the mysteries of Tom’s situation before eventually revealing all. But this narrative sleight-of-hand is at odds with the recreation of his subjectivity, turning what should be an emotional experience into a sterile puzzle-film. The freely associative editing likewise tends toward the prosaic; a scene involving a breast cancer examination intercut with the same woman’s breasts being fondled during sex in pervy closeup is a sure sign you’re not watching a masterpiece.

A slickly and aggressively bombastic, non-intimate visual style doesn’t help, and after a while the film starts to resemble what Michael Bay’s take on Tree of Life might’ve looked like – which makes it sound more interesting that it actually is. ‘Seize the day’, sez Burning Man once its pieces fall into place; i.e. don’t watch it.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is being sold as a worthy prestige pic; an Oscar vehicle for Tilda Swinton that takes a sobering look at guilt and tragedy within a family. It certainly is these things, but Lynne Ramsay’s adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestseller is best approached as belonging to that most unworthy of genres; ie, the horror film. On those terms, it’s a stunning piece of cinema; a harrowing immersion into primal, subjective emotional states, where simplistic characterisations and the whiff of exploitation – that would sink a more naturalistic take on the subject – here emerge as resounding strengths.

Swinton’s Eva is the core of the film, and it traces the psychological warfare between her and her spawn-of-Satan son, culminating in him committing a high-school massacre. If that description of his character sounds glib, it’s only because that’s how he’s written and acted by Ezra Miller – a dead-eyed androgyne straight out of the Larry Clark/Gus Van Sant filmography. But a nuanced characterisation isn’t what’s required here; what Ramsay is going for is a kaleidoscopic representation of Eva’s fractured psyche, jumping back-and-forth in time with remarkable fluidity, capturing her motherhood as a prolonged nightmare.

Again cementing her position as modern cinema’s reigning arthouse superstar, Swinton is a force, her face constantly and palpably registering the title’s unspoken demand. But this is Lynne Ramsay’s show all the way; in lesser hands, this could’ve been boilerplate stuff. But her uniquely slippery style, carried over from her 1999 debut Ratcatcher and 2002 follow-up Morvern Callar – perched somewhere between Kubrick’s precision and compositional rigor, and Claire Denis’ eye for ephemeral, allusive details – it all feels completely and utterly wrenched from the subconscious, and bleeding onscreen.

In Jafar Panahi’s 1997 film The Mirror, the young lead actress decides, mid-scene, that she doesn’t want to act any longer, and takes her headscarf off before running home. All of a sudden, the fictional film we’ve been watching opens up into a non-fictional one, documenting Panahi and his crew searching for her in the busy Tehran streets. This spontaneous, offscreen drama, as Panahi implicitly argues, is more revealing and valuable than the fictional thread; the young girl’s removal of her orthodox dress code functioning as a metaphor for a broader, collective frustration with Iran’s repressive, totalitarian regime.

For This Is Not a Film – which makes memorable use of footage from the aforementioned film – Panahi was presented with a higher hurdle to jump; depressingly, he received a 6-year jail sentence for making anti-regime films, and an additional 20-year filmmaking ban. This ‘effort’ (as Panahi and co-director Mojbata Mirtahmasb slyly credit it) was Panahi’s response to his incrimination, shot within the confines of his apartment under house arrest, as he waits for the response to his appeal. Despite the title and mode of production (shot on video, smuggled out in USB in a cake), it’s as much a film as any of Godard’s cine-essays, or even Paranormal Activity. And given the circumstances surrounding its making, the latter might as well be an alternate title.

What This is Not a Film most bracingly displays is a portrait of dignity and resilience, not to mention a pretty great lesson in filmmaking to boot, with Panahi putting theory into practice by revisiting his own filmography and applying lessons learned to his ‘Not-a-Film’ at hand. The final, extended shot alone is particularly ripe for film theory class debates for years to come. For these reasons, it’s as much a must-see as a must-read-about-and-admire-conceptually.

Drum Media reviews, October p2: THE THREE MUSKETEERS, MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, DRIVE

2011-11-10T19:35:00.000-08:00

The creative team behind this latest take on The Three Musketeers doesn’t merely take liberties with Alexander Dumas’ text, so much as dig up his rotting corpse and play urine-swordfights over it. It’s the kind of blockbuster spectacle in which everyone involved has together decided ‘Screw It!’; in regards to trivial things like faithfulness to source material, historical accuracy, narrative cohesion… even to the idea of bringing gravity to the sight of celebrities in period dress. All that’s missing is a Justin Bieber song over the end credits. And frankly, it’s a lot of fun for exactly those reasons.

Shown in surprisingly tolerable 3D, the film’s inconsequential plot provides a loose framework for a barrage of lame quips and lots of swashbuckling action scenes, edited frequently in hilarious Matrix-style slo-mo by director Paul ‘Adamantly Not Thomas’ Anderson. The cast play all this silliness admirably straight-faced; Inglorious Basterds’ Oscar-winner Christoph Waltz takes the dubious honour of top acting prizes here, while Orlando Bloom proves infinitely more enjoyable as a Tim Curry-esque slimeball than the bland heartthrob of thePirates of the Caribbean and Lord of the Rings films.

Meanwhile, Anderson generously affords a never-more-lush Milla Jovovich as Milady the kind of kickarsery that she mastered from their Resident Evil movies (try not giggling during the scene where she acrobatically defeats a wire-trapped room). It’s all unmistakably Hollywood hackwork, but it also has a crucial element lacking in so many franchise kickstarts/cash grabs – notably that lumbering latest installment of the Pirates series – and that’s joy. And really, who doesn’t prefer anarchic liberty to slavish fidelity?

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If you’ve ever taken pleasure in imagining your windshield as a cinema-scope frame whilst driving at night (preferably to synth-pop), Drive is the film for you. A largely dialogue-shorn adaptation of James Sallis’ well-regarded novel of the same title, its center is a nameless Hollywood-stunt-driver (Ryan Gosling) who moonlights as a getaway driver for criminals of the LA underworld, and the violent fallout of a job performed seflessly for his neighbour-crush (Carey Mulligan). It’s a film that self-consciously aims for a brand of 80’s retro-chic cool, and improbably succeeds; achieving a kind of purity that reminds you why its clichés and archetypes of choice have endured.

Its director is Danish maverick Nicolas Winding Refn, a talented stylist frequently let down by projects bereft of actual ideas (cf. Bronson and Valhalla Rising). With a potently pared-down template to work from, Drive emerges a textbook example of style-as-substance; the ethereally rendered Los Angeles acting as a romantic dreamscape counterpoint to the cool-headed professionalism and practicality (and eventually brutality) of its protagonist. Refn favors moody languor over the quick-cutting and incoherent spatiality so detrimental to many a modern suspense film, and in Gosling, he has a soulful lead presence whose all-in-the-eyes sense of internal conflict energises the many brooding stretches.

Simultaneously reminiscent of a billion films (from Le Samourai to Punch-Drunk Love to every LA neo-noir of the 70’s and 80’s) yet unmistakably its own unique concoction, Drive is the closest genre filmmaking gets to inducing a narcotic state, and in the process, ensures ‘postmodern’ doesn’t have to be a dirty word.

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Woody Allen’s recent Euro-travelogue instincts come out in full force for Midnight in Paris, in which Owen Wilson joins the long line of actors saddled with the task of Allen-mimicry playing Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter and aspiring novelist holidaying in Paris, with his fiancee Inez (Rachel McAdams). Being a woman in a Woody Allen film, Inez is a gorgeous but unpleasant shrew, written with no redeeming qualities aside from the ability to deliver the occasional Allen-zinger, so Gil strolls the Parisian streets at night while she hangs out with her friends.

The film picks up considerable steam when the clock strikes midnight during Gil’s stroll, and he’s magically transported back to the Paris of the 1920’s, where the bespectacled Wilson is greeted to the likes of the Fitzgeralds, Picasso, Dali, Bunuel, and many others. All are impersonated to perfection, with Corey Stoll’s mercurial take on Hemingway being a particular showstopper. Gil – and by extension, Allen – questions both his talent as a novelist and his nostalgia for a bygone era he was never a part of, and it’s through these historical digressions that the film becomes a very on-the-nose rumination on what it means to look back.

Indeed, the ultimate theme is delivered in a monologue that counts as a spoiler of the ending, which really just shows how filmsy the whole thing is as a narrative. But then, context is everything: I suspect the disproportionate praise for Midnight in Paris has to do with the poignancy of seeing Allen, among the most antiquates of filmmakers, finally delivering a critique of his own nostalgic tendencies (a critique undermined by the sense that the story could be taking place any time in the last 50 years, excoriation of Tea Party republicans nonwithstanding). See it for the featherweight charms, and look elsewhere for true insights.

Drum Media reviews, October p1: RED STATE, TABLOID, TAKE SHELTER

2011-11-10T19:28:00.000-08:00

The ads for Red State have been upfront about the fact that writer/director Kevin Smith is an unlikely candidate for a gritty, ultraviolent genre film; the hangover of the 90’s indie film boom is noted for his indifference to cinema as a visual medium (self-confessed; I’m not being mean) and reliance on ‘witty’, pop-culture-reference-heavy dialogue that always calls attention to its ‘wittiness’ (OK, I’m being mean there). The film’s opening portion, which follows a group of sex-obsessed teens, displays Smith at his most grating and tin-eared as writer of speech – there’s the constant sense that we’re watching placeholders for his lovingly written vulgar banter, rather than flesh-and-blood characters whose fates we’re supposed to care about.

But then, maybe we’re not. There’s a constant sense of remove throughout Red State – especially its larky, willfully anticlimactic ending – and it’s what makes the film Smith’s most interesting work to date, even if it’s altogether unsatisfying. You can’t fault him for not trying to engage with hotbed political and religious topics, but just as his 1999 Dogma traded sincere religious critique with preaching to the converted, so too does Red State collapse under the weight of its pandering, and a lack of trust in his audience. Smith pretentiously divides the cast into three distinct sectors: ‘sex’, ‘religion’ and ‘politics’; it’s telling of his myopia that in a film which strives for contemporary resonance, ‘politics’ is represented by a very bald invocation of the infamous Waco siege of 1993, as an ATF Agent (John Goodman, in top form) is called upon to perform a full-scale raid on the Church where the film’s action takes place in. In this respect, it’s merely lazy and apathetic – or rather, another Kevin Smith joint after all.

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Has Errol Morris’ moment passed? It’s a thought that came to mind while watching Tabloid, his thoroughly entertaining and thoroughly hollow screen treatment of the notorious “Mormon sex in chains case” of 1977. A textbook tabloid story, it involved the exploits of Joyce McKinney, a former Miss Wyoming who kidnapped a Mormon missionary, chained him to a bed in a British cottage, and eventually raped him. The salacious and bizarre appeal of the case remains undiminished, but that seems to be the only reason for Morris to dust it off for a new generation; for this reason the film would seem an empty exercise from any other filmmaker, let alone one whose The Thin Blue Line (1988) led to the re-opening of a Texas murder case and subsequently the reversal a man’s death sentence.

Morris’ goal for the film is to one-up the British rags who milked the story dry in its day. Built around a long interview with the fascinating McKinney, he accentuates the wacky contours of the story to a giddy hilt – rapid-fire montages of headlines and photographs are present throughout – all while letting his subject bare her soul in a way that the tabloids of the day couldn’t allow for. Even then, the bid for pathos in the film’s final stretch feels too little and too late; an obligation in contrast with the revelry displayed beforehand. More worryingly, Tabloid casts into relief a latent tendency for tabloid sensationalism that has been in Morris’ filmmaking starting from his 1978 debut Gates of Heaven, which examined a small clan of kooky owners of deceased pets, to his unilluminating 2006 Abu Ghraib doco Standard Operating Procedure. Had Rupert Murdoch’s name appeared in Tabloid’s ‘thank you’ section of the credits, I wouldn’t have batted an eye.

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Michael Shannon… goddamn. The actor has been a consummate scene-stealer in a number of recent films, including manic turns as Kim Fowley in The Runaways and Dicaprio and Winslet’s unhinged neighbor in Revolutionary Road, the latter of which he earned him an Oscar nomination. Take Shelter marks Shannon’s second collaboration with writer/director Jeff Nichols after 2007’s underseen Shotgun Stories, and is an even more potent vehicle for the actor’s unique mixture of cagey stillness and live-wire energy.

Here he plays a family man plagued with nightmares and hallucinations of an oncoming apocalypse in his Texan hometown – tornados, storms, swarms of birds, and an unearthly petrol-colored rain that turns man and animal alike into creatures of violence. Shannon’s performance forms a totemic depiction of American anxiety and masculinity in crisis, and as his conflicted wife, Jessica Chastain makes her predicament as deeply felt as her counterpart. Together, they make the film a terrifying and sad tale of mental illness’s toll on a family.

Take Shelter is ostensibly a psychological thriller, but it’s an unmistakably non-sensationalist one, whose genre conventions never comes at the expense of character nuance. Likewise, whereas many young American filmmakers seem hell-bent on announcing a trademark style in the form of a cavalcade of stylistic tics, Nichols’ approach to his material is skillfully plainspoken, creating CGI sequences that rarely call attention to their virtuosity. A close-up of a gas pump display’s gallons/dollars digits escalating at different speeds in separate windows encapsulates the film’s unshowy, grounded representation of a mind out of sync with the world around him – though it could just as well be the other way around.

Drum Media reviews, September: SUBMARINE + 13 ASSASSINS

2011-09-29T22:13:00.000-07:00

I should be up-front about my biases: I have an aversion to the Wes Anderson-esque. Which is to say, I’m more than OK with Anderson’s own filmography, but the world only needs one of him. Little Miss Sunshine, Juno, Napoleon Dynamite, et al… all pedal a brand of conveyor-belt quirk that grates my nerves rather than endears. They’re the cinematic equivalent of being choked to death by a friendship bracelet, despite the odd exception to the rule (esp. The Brothers Bloom, and Boy by Taika Waititi; whose Eagle vs. Shark ironically remains the most hideous of Anderson’s progeny).

Submarine, the hyper-self-referential directorial debut of It Crowd star Richard Ayoade, fortunately proves another exception – if only mildly. Carrying over his knowledge of comic timing to feature film direction, Ayoade lends it a sense of humour that comes from as much from the writing and acting as his obvious cinematic vocabulary. It tells of the coming-of-age (what else?) of 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) growing up in a small town in mid-80’s Wales, who throughout narrates his budding romance with classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige) in concurrence with his parents’ marital crisis.

Submarine endlessly cribs from Anderson and especially Rushmore; from Oliver’s Max Fisher-style attire, the lateral tracking shots and immaculate framing, the revolt-via-pranks, to the one-liners about handjobs. To be fair, Ayoade also borrows from Anderson’s own influences, including the playful 60’s mod-era comedies of Richard Lester and the entire French New Wave (particularly Truffaut’s The 400 Blows). It’s mostly pretty enjoyable and expert homage, and there’s some emotional gravity amidst the twee preciousness; Noah Taylor, in particular, brings a heartrending quiet dignity to his role as Oliver’s milquetoast dad. But the stylistic tics end up feeling like distractions for very well-trodden coming-of-age territory.

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There’s nothing else in recent cinema like the epic action set-piece that comprises the final 45-ish minutes of 13 Assassins; the latest old-school samurai saga from insanely prolific Japanese maverick Takashi Miike (who’s probably finished another three films by the time you finish reading this sentence). Miike is perhaps best know for 1999’s Audition, about a lonely Tokyo widower who holds an audition for women to be his new wife. That film began as low-key domestic drama in the vein of Yasujiro Ozu, only to switch gears for a climax that should traumatise any viewer who stumbles upon it on SBS unprepared.

Likewise, 13 Assassins is a coiled snake of a movie for the most part, with its first two acts concerning the recruitment of the titular posse to embark on a suicide mission to kill a power-mad warlord. These scenes consist mainly of discussions of samurai codes and formalities, but Miike’s idiosyncratic touches occasionally creep through the stern surface whenever things risk becoming too stately. For instance, the grotesque sight of a nakedly writhing, limbless female casualty of the evil lord is obviously something Kurosawa would never have shown in his heyday – and only Miike would foreshadow the climax’s ‘total massacre’ through the sight of a naked toddler peeing on the road in the village where the showdown occurs.

This finale is what the film has been cagily building toward, Jenga-style – an absurdly entertaining spectacle that’ll have you grinning and gawping at in astonishment. It’s frenetic, funny, very bloody, and always a hair away from being exhausting, but never crossing the line; there’s always something at stake, even if it’s the group rather than the individual that’s given definition.

Drum Media reviews, August: FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS + COWBOYS & ALIENS

2011-09-29T22:04:00.000-07:00

Friends With Benefits is annoying. Not just because it’s the 2^nd film this year – after the amiable-enough No Strings Attached – about a fuck-buddy relationship complicated by the conflicting emotional demands of each party. And not just because its two leads (Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake) both have voices of paint-stripping timbre, and are placed in roles that require a lot of yelling at each other; whether they have chemistry starts to matter less than the unpleasantly prolonged aural assault that their pairing offers.

No, Friends With Benefits is largely irritating because of its off-the-charts smugness. Early on there’s a scene in which Kunis and Timberlake sit together watching a fake romcom on TV and mocking its cliches; all but winking at the audience who’ve opted for the raunchier and allegedly more ‘real’ alternative. Does it constitute hypocrisy or lame irony that the film eventually adopts all those cliches? From the insta-pathos of Timberlake’s dementia-addled dad (poor Richard Jenkins), to Woody Harrelson as Timberlake’s gay co-worker and advice-man, to the obvious body doubles during sex scenes followed by post-coital L-shaped sheets, to the third-act dissolve-heavy montages of each lead on their lonesome accompanied to Iron & Wine tunes (or soundalikes), to the Really Good Talk with a parent that solves everything, etc etc…

All the aforementioned would be forgivable if the film was funny, but the screenplay’s attempts at rat-a-tat verbal ping-pong matches don’t recall His Girl Friday/Bringing Up Baby so much as a cast forced to speed-read from a snarky ‘love & relationships’ blog off of a nearby teleprompter in unison. Friendly, or beneficial, this film is not.

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Cowboys and Aliens: The title practically sneers at you for resisting the promise of a zany mashup of two matinee staples (even as wicka wicka Wild West West sounds off in the back of your head like a warning siren). It’s something like an acknowledgement that the mass appeal of any Hollywood product lies largely in the delivery of a few sure-fire ingredients for success; sorta like a hypothetical Transformers sequel titled Explosions and Tits. Which is to say that anyone buying a ticket to Cowboys & Aliens is expecting a smart-stupid, tongue-in-cheek, Snakes on a Plane-lite sorta thing.

So it’s perplexing that the film is actually such a drab slog, and completely devoid of Iron Man director Jon Favreau’s customary light touch. The problems start with the casting of Daniel Craig, playing a gunslinger who arrives as a memory-deprived mysterious stranger in a small county, only to gradually recall the abduction of his wife by the titular extraterrestrials. Craig is a fine actor in other things, but he offers as much levity here as a stampede, and his cowboy hat always manages to look crudely photoshopped above his head. In addition to that, he’s saddled with an underwritten love interest (Olivia Wilde), who together, generate all the chemistry of Madame Tussaud sculptures knocking into each other.

The irony of Cowboys & Aliens is that though it stagnates when the aliens arrive for a showdown, Favreau begins the film as a reasonably convincing straight-up western, with Harrison Ford doing a pretty decent audition for a gruff colonel in a more solemn, back-to-basics take on the genre. Mostly though, it vaporises while you watch it.

Drum Media reviews, July: THE BEAVER

2011-08-22T05:22:00.000-07:00

Look, I’m not one to say that there’s a ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ way to make a movie. But if you’re tackling the subject of depression through a premise that involves Mel Gibson being possessed by a sentient beaver puppet that compels the former to voice it in a cockney accent and turn his life around via that spectacle… well, it’s an uphill battle from there that director Jodie Foster (also playing Gibson’s wife) loses in making The Beaver a convincing exploration of its core themes.

But then, with Gibson in the starring role, the film is really about its lead actor. Opening with little context for his character’s depression, beyond an expository voiceover alluding to a job loss and midlife crisis, we’re asked to project our knowledge of its star – whose dirty laundry has been repeatedly hung up for the world to see – onto his vaguely-defined cipher role. Gibson’s performance itself is the finest he’s given in a while; the vulnerability he projects obviously comes from a deeply personal place, and it’s what almost holds this confused/confusing film together.

And yet, there’s something obnoxious about that in itself – The Beaver exists seemingly to convince the aghast public that Gibson is really a pretty complex dude, not to be judged for his publicized actions. Beyond that, it’s a tonal mess – playing like a maudlin remix of a hypothetical Adam Sandler comedy, with scenes like Gibson’s brawl with the titular puppet played for dramatic impact to unintentionally hilarious effect, and a cornball ending full of ‘seize the day’ platitudes attempting to give the illusion of normalcy to this bizarre curio. No such luck.

Drum Media reviews, June: SLEEPING BEAUTY, TREE OF LIFE

2011-08-22T05:17:00.000-07:00

New Sydney production Sleeping Beauty – the directorial debut of novelist Julia Leigh – was barely a blip on anyone’s radar until an announcement of its spot in Cannes’ exalted Official Competition and a knockout trailer got cinephile pulses racing a few months ago. Now the cat’s out of the bag, and it’s… well, the kind of dime-a-dozen slab of festival-circuit filler that’d pass by unnoticed if it didn’t star a frequently naked It-girl (Emily Browning, playing a young medical student inducted into the world of high-class prostitution).

With its exquisite tableau framing, and anti-naturalistic approach to performance that evokes masters of chilly exactitude (Kubrick, Greenway, Haneke et al), Sleeping Beauty is an immersive mood piece, and Browning gives it her all, often suggesting a life beyond the parameters of her cipher character. But Leigh’s elliptical storytelling eventually tips over from admirably un-spoonfed to lazy. It’s not an easy film by any means, and has been given some fairly glib dismissals since its Cannes premiere; a kneejerk reaction to its po-faced depiction of the subjugation of female bodies. But it’s understandable, considering that Leigh’s vision rarely strays beyond surface provocations and shopworn artistic gestures – conveying alienation, de-eroticising sex, implicating the audience as voyeurszzzzz…

The film opens with Browning’s gag reflex being tested during a medical operation, and it’s an image that embodies the Leigh’s dubious aspirations. In theory, I can commend getting the Richard Wilkinses of the world up in arms. But until Leigh sets her sights higher than showing withered elderly penises and having her actors theatrically enunciate dialogue like “make sure the lipstick matches your labia”, her status as a major new voice in Australian cinema remains in check.

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Terrence Malick’s sparse body of work – 5 languid, dreamy films dating from 1973’s Badlands to this latest – tends to inspire much obnoxiously hyperbolic praise from his many, fervent admirers. And since I consider myself among them, I’d suggest the uninitiated read elsewhere to avoid annoyance. The much-anticipated Tree of Life is a major, major achievement that, in its crazy ambition and cosmic, 2001-like scope, is enough to reduce every other film to cinders.

At its core lies a presumably autobiographical story of Malick’s childhood in Texas, as recalled by the briefly glimpsed middle-aged Jack (Sean Penn, his top-billing something of a red herring) in the present, mooning about an alien-looking Houston cityscape. It’s subtly established to be the anniversary of his brother’s death at 19, and Malick begins with the fragmented glimpses of mum and dad (Jessica Chastain & Brad Pitt, respectively) receiving the news, inter-cut with the present-day Jack. In a digression that’s sure to provoke bafflement and awe in equal measure, we cut right back to a 15-minute origins-of-time sequence: yes, Malick is audacious enough to include dinosaurs, the rings of Saturn and family melodrama in the same film.

However much of a stretch this passage seems, it’s nonetheless rooted in the characters’ psychology; who hasn’t balmed grief or alienation by contemplating themselves as mere blips in eternity? Likewise, Malick’s inimitable poetics (chiefly free-associative montage and ruminative voiceover), however experimental, make these universal existential questions readily accessible for anyone willing to jump in the deep end. Tree of Life emerges, miraculously, not as a work of hermetic pretension, but rather an open and probing invitation to reach alongside it. It’s really purty, too.

Drum Media reviews, May: RUBBER, PIRATES OF THE CARRIBEAN 4, OCEANS, SOURCE CODE, OF GODS AND MEN

2011-08-22T05:06:00.000-07:00

Rubber is a film about a sentient rubber tire, which roams the desert, exploding the heads of its victims with unexplained psychic powers. Miraculously, this isn’t a willfully bad movie ala Machete or Snakes on a Plane, but rather a kind of essay -film masquerading as a prank – or maybe it’s the other way around. It opens with a striking shot of a police car that drives down a desert road in a zig-zag toward the camera, strategically knocking over two rows of evenly-placed chairs en-route. A policeman then steps out, and begins a to-camera address, detailing the pervasive element of ‘no reason’ in films. When he rhetorically asks why the protagonist of Polanski’s The Pianist “has to hide and live like a bum when he plays the piano so well?”, you’ve got an inkling of the hyper-absurdist shenanigans to follow.

Rubber has been criticized elsewhere for, variously, hating its audience, being over-stretched short film material, and overall pointlessness (well… yeah). But the film, shot using the video function of a still camera, has too much surreal visual splendor and wit to be dismissed as a half-hearted ‘eff you’ to the paying viewer. And the dialogue – delivered by a police team on the tire’s trail, and a group of spectators watching the action transpire through binoculars, like a real-life drive-in feature – is frequently hilarious.

Its writer/director is Quentin Dupieux, the French house music producer best known under his alias Mr. Oizo. On the basis of this Dada-ist delight, he could very well become a surrealist force to be reckoned with.

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Near the end of Pirates of the Caribbean: Secret of the Mermaid’s Womb, Johnny Depp’s Jack Sparrow observes that he doesn’t know who’s fighting who or why. In a spryer and more fun film – the first instalment in the series, for one – such a knowing moment would be a bone thrown to the audience lost in the thicket of exposition; cluing us in that the story is negligible, so just sit back and enjoy what else is on offer.

Alas, in the case of Pirates of the Carribean: Legend of the Parrot Ghost, there’s little else to cling onto. The film plods and plods along, briskly but affectlessly. It plays a lot like an amusement park funhouse version of the series, only with the car set on double speed, so there’s nary a chance to actually process the succession of attractions. Even mermaid vampires are rendered dull. After a while, the film resembles a hungover recollection of itself: Depp’s shambling gait, silhouetted figures revealing themselves as famous actors in pirate garb, Penelope Cruz’s heaving cleavage, and piercing music cues, all merging into a miasmic blur.

Additionally, with its endless night scenes, Pirates of the Carribean: Sequel of the Sequelly Sequel has about as much business being shown in 3D as I do being elected leader of Siberia - it’s a friggin’ eyesore to look at. You’ll have more fun raising your glasses and playing a game of spot the difference. Occasionally something’ll hurtle toward the viewer - it might as well be the hand of a Hollywood mogul.

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Oceans contains a lot of elements that would kill most other documentaries. It features a pervasive, vacuous narration from Pierce Brosnan, who constantly offers nuggets like "to understand the ocean, you have to experience it" and "Maybe instead of asking what exactly is the ocean, we should be asking who exactly are we", among other groaners. Its eco-treastise late in the film feels too tacked-on and obligatory to register with any conviction. There's some fascinating behind-the-scenes footage during the end credits, but you’ll have to suffer through a duet between Demi Lovato & one of the Jonas Brothers on the soundtrack.

None of this really matters though, since the experience of the film – much like similar IMAX-destined nature docos – involves simply letting one’s guard down and surrendering to the natural beauty on rich display. Director Pierre and his heroic film crew get in astonishingly close to their environmental subjects, and create an experience that absolutely requires a theatre viewing to do it justice. For all the faults of the, Oceans – much like its brethren, including Perrin’s own Winged Migration – is an essential big screen experience.

So toke up, soak up, and you’ll be tempted to agree with Brosnan’s stoner-undergrad voiceover observation: "the ocean isn’t just a giant mass of water: it’s a state of mind" (OK, I made that one up).

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With his debut Moon, and now his latest sci-fi thriller Source Code, Duncan ‘David Bowie’s son’ Jones has carved out a distinctive niche: nifty, modestly-scaled sci-fi thrillers that favour ideas over action. What Source Code offers is an egghead riff on Freaky Friday and Groundhog Day, with Jake ‘aw shucks’ Gyllenhaal playing an ex-marine who wakes up in the body of another man, aboard a train that is set to explode in 8 minutes. After this intriguing abstract, he – and we – discover from some solemnly delivered pseudo-science from televised overlords that he is part of a military experiment, in which he has to relive these 8 minutes of someone else’s life to find a mad bomber ready to detonate an even bigger bomb in downtown Chicago, with 2 million lives at risk.

For its writer/director, Source Code represents a step forward in scale and ambition, as well as a step backward in its packaging of lofty ideas into a satisfying narrative. If Moon generated enough goodwill for one to forgive that it promised slightly more than it delivered, Source Code sadly pisses away all its potent intrigue in its final stretch. The ethical dilemma at the film’s centre eventually requires a great leap of faith to actually register as a dilemma, and the final combination of facile uplift, unanswered questions and moral confusion leaves a bad taste in the mouth.

Likewise, since the film argues for the validity of alternate realities, you could just as well groove on the heaps-fun first hour and a bit, and walk out 10 minutes before the end, and imagine a conclusion of your own choosing to greater reward.

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If you were to replace the Algerian-alps-dwelling Trappist monks in Of Gods and Men with cowboys, and the Islamic fundamentalists (holding them under siege) with Indians, you’d have the setup for a classic Hollywood western. Applying the shorthand of familiar genre conventions to a sobering, true-event story – the events leading up to the 1995 kidnapping and assassination of seven of the aforementioned monks – can be a reductive and even trivialising process. But director Xavier Beauvois’ use of classical western archetypes and genre tropes honors his subjects’ resolve, and the no-frills filmmaking lets his ensemble cast’s tremulous, expressive faces register their should-I-stay-or-should-I-go predicament with considerable force. Only several members really manage to emerge as fully-fleshed characters, but the sense of group dynamics is what counts here, and Beauvois sketches it beautifully.

Of Gods and Men is certainly slow-going in its depiction of an ascetic lifestyle, yet it derives its considerable empathy from this adherence to the Monks’ principles; a brisker pace would be the equivalent of sacrilege. When the film goes for baroque emotion in the final stages – impassioned hymns drowning out a helicopter roar, a teary dinner as the group listen to ‘Swan Lake’ on a stereo – it feels completely earned, like a finally-answered prayer. Beauvois maintains a rigorous attention to the specifics of religious doctrine, but it’s a broader message of love and perseverance that emerges, rather than strictly one of religious faith. It’s this aspect that makes the film as movingly humane as it is ‘important’ – think of it as a particularly tasty brussel sprout dish.

Drum Media reviews, April: SUCKER PUNCH, SNOWTOWN, SCREAM 4 INCENDIES, BRIGHTON ROCK

2011-08-22T04:53:00.000-07:00

As if to (over)compensate for the ‘visionary director’ tag that has been undeservedly bestowed upon him, for his career of mechanically made, embalmed graphic novel adaptations (300, Watchmen) and one remake (Dawn of the Dead; ironically his most striking and distinctive film to date), Zack Snyder has finally made a creation entirely of his own. Say what you will about Sucker Punch, but there’s no doubt that it comes directly ‘from the mind of Zack Snyder’, to borrow another promotional cliché.

The title might refer to the bait-and-switch Snyder plays on his target audience: Those coming for fantasy/action kicks and scantily-clad nubile hotties get what is ostensibly a women’s picture, with the flights of CGI fancy taking place in the imagination of our main character, Baby Doll (Emily Browning). She’s been recently committed to an insane asylum for the accidental murder of her sister, and there meets a host of nicknamed girls (Sweet Pea, Rocket, Blondie) who band together to plan an escape. In the meantime, the asylum doubles as a bordello of some sort, and it’s during her sexy dance routines that Baby Doll reverts to a fantastical reverie state.

This outlandish plot makes the film more interesting than most Hollywood blockbusters, but Sucker Punch is, alas, more fun to read about than to watch – an ass-ugly, narratively inept mishmash. Then there’s the matter of its alleged ‘female empowerment’: well, I guess Snyder does posit that women have every right to fantasise about killing dragons & trolls & Nazi zombies as much as men do. But there’s no mistaking this fetish-fest as anything other than a male fantasy, borne of its creator’s arrested development.

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Hands down the most eagerly (and nervously) anticipated Australian film of this year's Adelaide Film Festival was Snowtown, the fictionalised account of the exploits of serial killer John Bunting. Those dreading horror-film exploitation or overt psychological explication will be relieved by this powerful piece, which marks a stunning debut for director Justin Kurzel. In the place of either of the two aforementioned modes is a canny sense of physical and psychological place, and the creation of a plausible atmosphere where apathy turns into violence and back into apathy again.

The key to this sense of place is obviously the location shooting, where everything seems to be shot at night or in haze indistinguishable from dusk or dawn. But it’s also the casting that lends the film its authenticity; non-professionals populate a bulk of the cast, with only Daniel Renshall as Bunting being the sole pro. The dynamic between Renshall and his followers, and especially his protégé and our surrogate protagonist, impassive teen Jamie (Lucas Pittaway) is chillingly believable. And Renshall is simply astonishing as Bunting, rendering one of the most convincing screen psychopaths in quite some time.

Snowtown is confronting stuff, and will probably be too much for some. But it’s not gratuitously ugly, and the film takes dramatic license by eliding a number of the uglier aspects of the real events. By the film’s close, numbness has set in, with the murders taking place off screen, as if they have no visceral impact for the perpetrators any longer. All moral sense has been lost, and the numbness is more disturbing than any of the depicted violence for this reason. The film ends on a similar note to John Cassavetes’ A Woman Under the Influence, with a character simply closing a door that envelops the screen in darkness, shutting us off from the spectacle we’ve been voyeurs to. Kurzel and writer Shaun Grant have rendered the story vivid enough that it should continue in the debates and discussions it demands afterward.

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It’s only a few moments into Incendies that you know you’re in good hands. Scored to the plaintive strums of Radiohead’s “You and Whose Army”, we see a group of Arabic child soldiers gathered in a room, having their heads shaved. As the accompanying song reaches its crescendo, we zoom into the quietly enraged face of one of the boys. It’s an haunting overture for this uncommonly thrilling melodrama, which centres on the journey of two siblings who make a journey to war-torn Lebanon, as per their recently deceased mother’s last wish, for them to uncover their true familial identities.

Writer/director Denis Villeneuve has adapted the screenplay from a stage play of the same name, and the film has the distinction of being one of the least stage-y theatrical adaptations in recent memory – there’s strikingly little expository dialogue, and a focus on indelible, tactile imagery to drive the story. The film is blatantly contrived in places – especially its final twist – but the emotions it brings, for characters and viewers alike, are never less than deeply felt and complex. A late-film scene between brother and sister in a swimming pool is astonishing in its vulnerability, and testament to Villenueve’s attention to quiet moments as well as dramatic fireworks (of which there are plenty).

Admittedly, the very real backdrop of war-ravaged Middle East risks becoming a trivialised abstraction amongst the personal story that unfolds. But ultimately, Incendies’ asks you to go with your gut, and is as dramatically juicy as any film in recent memory; as well as a deserving Oscar nominee in a the often-wonky Best Foreign Language Film category.

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It’s been 11 years since everyone instantly forgot the 3^rd installment in the largely annoying meta-horror Scream series. But now, Wes Craven and co. are bringing that shit back to you! Yes, you, Generation facebook youtube skype twitter #rebeccablack #charliesheen! You, tech-obsessed, self-obsessed, self-recording, celeb-mongering whores! But mostly, Scream 4 has the self-cannibalising state of recent horror cinema in its crosshairs: a well-deserved target, which the film misses by being as equally feeble and tired.

After a cute film-within-a-film-within-a-film intro, in which stock characters complain about various horror movie clichés – including those of the Scream series, wink wink – we’re introduced to the old players and some newbies. Neve Campbell continues to perpetually squint in disbelief at the news of another series of murders among her small town of Woodsboro, and the ensuing media shitstorm. David Arquette and Courtney Cox also dutifully reprise their roles, as cop and star reporter, respectively. Elsewhere, a fresh new batch of teens await their fates, and keep in step with the shifting conventions of the genre (‘the unexpected is the new cliché’, etc) in an effort to stay alive.

Scream 4, moreso than its predecessors, is a film for those who have discovered the term ‘postmodern’ for the first time and feel a buzz of intellect upon seeing the concept in practice. There are some witty moments, but it is largely self-referential/reflexive/aware in the most thuddingly obvious and dull ways. When Community’s Alison Brie appears to steal her every scene, it invites an unflattering comparison to that brilliant TV series; a reminder that you can be ‘meta’ without being a twat about it.

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Full disclosure: I’m unfamiliar with Graham Greene’s 1938 novel Brighton Rock and its well-regarded 1947 film adaptation. Conversely, this perhaps makes me an ideal audience member for its latest incarnation, moved from 1930’s to 60’s Britain, and the directorial debut for The American screenwriter Rowan Joffe. It recovers from a shaky start to become a fairly compelling and stylish portrayal of romantic projection and self-delusion, as gangster Pinkie (Sam Riley) courts innocent waitress Rose (Andrea Riseborough) so she doesn’t testify against him for a recent murder; the latter believing his love is for real.

“I’m bad and you’re good – we’re made for each other!” is the film’s biggest groaner of a line, but there is a grain of truth to it. Neither Pinkie nor Rose are terribly appealing or interesting characters on their own, but as soon as they meet, it’s easy to see why Rose keeps convincing herself (and others) into thinking there’s something beneath his blank exterior. Sam Riley, still carrying the fragile aura of his Ian Curtis rendition from Control, initially seems like an ill-fit as Pinkie, a hard-assed street hoodlum (you half expect him to have a seizure at any moment). But he grows on you, and his stoic demeanour eventually becomes hypnotic in a ‘when’s he gonna break’ way.

Being unfamiliar with the original text, it’s hard to know who to give credit for with the film’s chief virtues – including its haunting final scene. Still, there’s enough good here that it succeeds as both a ‘read the book!’ tribute, and a satisfying piece of cinema in its own right.

Drum Media reviews, March: BIUTIFUL, DOGTOOTH, A TOWN CALLED PANIC, THE MECHANIC, HOW I ENDED THIS SUMMER

2011-08-22T04:40:00.000-07:00

Biutiful - Yes, that’s how the title’s spelt – it refers to a scene in the film involving a child’s misspelling of the word. Obviously a metaphor, but for what? The fleeting innocence that’s stripped away from us early on, before we’re plunged into a life of misery and sin? Probably. It’s also a mashup of the words ‘beautiful’ and ‘pitiful’; an apt description for this latest slice of bloated, self-serious, over-aestheticised wank from Alejandro González Iñárritu, which manages the feat of making his prior Babel look like a model of lightness and modesty by comparison.

Biutiful follows Uxbal (Javier Bardem), a single father of two, who makes a living in Barcelona trafficking in the labor of illegal immigrants. He’s also a medium, early seen communicating with a recently deceased child, and he’s about to come face his impending mortality, via a terminal illness. This is roughly the extent of the film’s plot – much of the 2.5 hour runtime is devoted to montages of urban squalor, scored to plaintive acoustic guitar strumming.

Ironically, for a film that nominally takes on human exploitation as one of its core themes, there’s something faintly exploitative in the manner that Iñárritu doles out these ‘big issues’ as glib, token signifiers of his seriousness of purpose. With its muted colours (every interior looks like a Redfern public toilet), and dour, humourless tone, Biutiful feels like the work of a filmmaker afraid that his audience will mistake it for anything less than a Masterpiece. Sure, Bardem suffers affectingly, but if the film resonates as a ‘meditation on mortality’, it’s mostly because its end credits feel like the sweet release of death.

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One of the more stunning films to emerge from the festival circuit in recent years is Dogtooth, a Greek film that’s finally seeing a local DVD release. Winner of the Un Certain Regard prize at 2009’s Cannes, it’s since gained enough traction and plaudits to nab an unexpected Oscar nomination for best foreign film. “Unexpected”, because this is the kind of transgressive, terminally weird provocation that the Academy Awardsä usually pass over in favour of more conservative fare.

Dogtooth centres on a middle-class family whose elders have kept their two daughters and one son, now presumably 20-somethings adults, in the confines of their household for fear of outside contamination. The parents have infantalised them with a number of lies about the outside world, including a revised vocabulary of deliberately ill-defined words (zombie = flower, to name one). The title refers to the arbitrary rule that allows them admission to the great yonder – when their dogtooth falls out. Writer/director Yorgos Lanthimos leaves many of the specifics of the story ambiguous, particularly the reasons for the childrens’ imprisonment, and it could be read as anything from a home-schooling satire to a political/religious parable, depending on one’s vantage point.

Many will cite the influence of Michael Haneke on the film’s icily controlled imagery, but this is no knockoff. Haneke’s compositions tend to entomologically pin down his characters, whereas Lanthimos lets his subjects wander around the static frames, sometimes letting their heads protrude out of vision during conversation, mirroring the collapse of the rigid system imposed upon. And unlike Haneke’s filmography, Dogtooth is goddamn hilarious much of its time, even at its most sadistic, and an all-round a triumph of originality and command of tone.

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A poker game atop a falling boulder. A giant robot penguin designed to throw snowballs at animals. A horse figurine given a cap for its birthday, complete with flaps that blast synthesized Mozart into each ear. Any review of A Town Called Panic, a nutty stop-motion animation from Belgium, would be better off simply listing the film’s numerous surrealist scenarios. Based on a short-lived TV series, it’s a truly manic delight: kinda like a lo-fi, dada-ist Toy Story, or what the Monty Python animated interludes would look like if done by the Aardman folks.

Set in a small provincial town, we open with a Cowboy, Indian and Horse figurine (each named after those descriptors) going about their antic morning household routine, with the mood turning increasingly antic when Horse announces that it’s his birthday. Cowboy and Indian’s impulse decision to make a barbeque as a present is upset by a succession of additional ‘0’s to the online order of 50 bricks. This sets in motion a chain of nonsensical events that suggests a 6-year-old child took over in the film’s writing stage. This is, of course, a good thing.

A Town Called Panic is viscerally funny stuff, and gets its laughs out of inexplicably funny nuances of motion and sound as much as any actual jokes, and manages to give ‘quirk’ a good name again. Many animated films aim to please children and adults alike – A Town Called Panic is the rare film that should please both parties for the exact same reasons.

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Early in The Mechanic, Jaw-son Statham is seen riding a speedboat, accompanied to the forlorn twangs of an electric guitar; an image seemingly ripped straight out of an 80’s cop show. It embodies the strangely anachronistic vibe of the film, which has all the flash and body-count of any modern straight-to-DVD actioner, but also the lean moodiness of vintage Don Siegel or Walter Hill – it is, after all, a remake of a largely forgotten 1972 Charles Bronson flick.

Statham may or may not be one of our finest thespians, but the dude has star quality. Like a modern-day Randolph Scott, he turns up, does little more than glower, but you somehow root for him. It also helps that he plays a soulless killing machine here, making his hits look like accidents, including that of his aging, wheelchaired mentor (Donald Sutherland), whose death he fixes to look like an anonymous carjacking. Wracked with guilt, he takes on the man’s son (Ben Foster) as his protégé, teaching him to sublimate his rage into his profession, rather than taking revenge on random carjackers.

When films are this formulaic, it’s the grace notes that count. And though Simon West’s (Con Air) direction is strictly functional, the dynamic between twitchmeister Foster and Madame-Tussaud’s-ready Statham has a certain spark that energises much of the film, carrying it through some admittedly incoherent passages (Most Random. Boardwalk Showdown. Ever). The Mechanic is merely serviceable, but with the recent Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson vehicle Faster paying explicit homage to Hill’s 1978 classic The Driver, I’m hoping this is the beginning of a stripped-down/no-bullshit action film mini-renaissance.

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The term ‘existential thriller’ is bandied about with such recklessness, that seemingly any film about a hitman staring into space qualifies as an archetypal example of the subgenre. How I Ended This Summer, on the other hand, genuinely embodies the label. It’s a film whose suspense and apocalyptic sense of dread is generated by the unpredictability of its characters’ motivations and actions when literally left alone in the wilderness, at the end of the world.

The wilderness in question is the barren surroundings of a Russian Arctic meteorological station, run by two men: Pavel (Grigory Dobrygin), a 20something young turk learning the ropes of radiology under the guidance of grizzled, gruff Sergei (Sergei Puskepalis). They’re worlds apart, in age and experience in their profession, as well as their overall temperment; Pavel’s playful streak, established by the opening scenes as he runs atop a walls of barrels with his discman on full blast, puts him at odds with Sergei’s rigor and focus. When a key piece of news for Sergei from back home is withheld by Pavel (uncertain of how he should break it), the stakes slowly become life-or-death based on the consequences of his inaction.

This is a film that really lets you feel the pull that its physical environment exerts over the characters, and once you do, the ensuing duel is hypnotic (‘landscape as character’ is another oft-abused cliché that writer/director Alexsei Popogrebsky grandly reinvigorates). There’s surely an old/new Russia allegory present in the conflict between Pavel and Sergei, but the nuanced, emotionally precise performances from both actors keep both characters beyond mere avatar status. Even the slight fizzle of an ending can’t detract from the masterful buildup that’s preceded it; the journey here is absolutely more important than the destination.

MIFF 2011 dispatch 1: CLASS RELATIONS (1984) & MICHAEL

2011-07-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

CLASS RELATIONS (dir. Jean-Marie Straub & Danièle Huillet, 1984)

This was my intro to the cinema of Jean-Marie Straub & Daniele Huillet; the notoriously hard-assed, ascetic husband & wife duo whose alleged extremes of modernist austerity have always piqued my curiosity as someone who naturally vacillates to the unyielding. Much has been made of the way that the duo deny their audiences any semblance of narrative pleasure through their Brechtian approach (Bresson is the key reference point here, only without the kinetic montage or heightened sound design), but while watching Class Relations, it becomes apparent that the denial of pleasure combined with the consummate rigor of the filmmaking is a means of casting the pleasures inherent in the image and sound, free of diegetic tethering, into sharp relief (a scene set on the edge of a forest, in particular, is eerily beautiful). The purpose of this ascetism is also (as per Bresson) to let the text speak for itself, in this case Kafka’s Amerika (I’m only familiar it with via the short story it’s based on, The Stoker), and it’s perhaps the relative accessibility of the text that has led some to deem Class Relations an accessible entry point to S&H’s work, for all its severity. The approach and fairly blatant themes sync up in some obvious but undeniably effective ways, with the grade-school-play stiltedness of the performances and blocking establishing a world where capitalism’s reach has everyone knowing their place and uncomfortably going through the motions based. Certain portions were watched through bleary eyes after a sleepless overnight Greyhound trip (this was probably the worst possible film to watch after immediately arriving in town in this condition), but overall the experience was one of entering a strange and alien environment that I want more of, which is really all I ask for from any intro to an auteur’s work.

MICHAEL (dir. Markus Schleinzer, 2011)

Compared to the complete assurance and conviction of Straubs’ precision, this debut feature by Markus Schleinzer is pure Haneke-lite; rigorous in the laziest and most non-committal way. Schleinzer, unsurprisingly worked with Haneke as the casting director on a number of his films, and he’s certainly found an actor who fits the bill for the eponymous pedo, though the lead actor’s resemblance to Arrested Development’s Buster Bluth is only one of the things that makes this glib exercise in ‘the banality of evil’ hard to take seriously. Alternating between the mundane details of Michael’s boring life as a corporate drone and his (heavily implied) activities with the kidnapped young boy locked in his basement, Schleinzer sticks to a formula of non-sensationalist filmmaking that, as Mike D’Angelo astutely noted, feels like an easy way out. Even then, Michael even fails its claims to being ‘non-judgmental’ with its vaguely moralistic ending, and if you haven’t predicted which image the film’ll do an abrupt cut-to-black on as soon as it’s a possibility, you really haven’t attended enough film festivals in the past decade. Neither provocative, challenging, engaging, or anything really, Michael makes the prospect of a hypothetical European film about a sex offender who lives in a backwoods cabin, dressed in convict clothes, luring kids in with giants lollipops seem like a radical alternative.

MELBOURNE FILM FESTIVAL 2011 PREVIEW: THE STUFF I'VE SEEN

2011-07-09T02:57:00.000-07:00

I've been an especially rabid festival-goer over the last year, so here are my absolute highlights of this year's MIFF from my viewings at Toronto, Adelaide, Sydney and elsewhere, followed by everything else I've seen ranked in tiers of quality/recommendation.

THE TURIN HORSE (Bela Tarr)

A monumental statement - and a final one for its auteur, at that - of futility & desolation, at once grueling and very darkly comic. This is Tarr's Jeanne Dielman, charting tweaks in a daily routine that turns into a death march. Possibly the most beautiful b&w cinematography I’ve seen; windswept hair has never looked better.

PASTOURELLE (Nathaniel Dorsky)

I wasn’t going to include shorts, but I’ll make an exception for Dorsky. It’d be nice if his entire tripych (that I saw in TIFF) played, but even a small sampling will do. Dorksy describes his work as ‘films for 10-year-olds’ and that pretty much sums of the childlike awe of his gorgeous, fragile miniatures – even if ‘avant-garde’ normally makes you run a mile, you’d be hard-pressed not to be taken with it. Plays with the Experimental Shorts 1 program, which also has Ben Rivers and Ben Russell’s latest.

PETER TSCHERKASSKY SIDEBAR (2 programs + a masterclass)

More ‘accessible avant-garde’, at least not for epileptics. I’ve only seen Outer Space (Program 1), Instructions for a Sound and Light Machine and Coming Attractions (Program 2) but each are the kind of thing you’ll regret missing on a big screen (again, provided you’re not seizure-prone).

13 ASSASSINS (Takashi Miike)

Miike goes for an old-school samurai saga, and the results are glorious: a hypnotically assembled Jenga tower of formality, that proceeds to giddily collapse into a cloud of blood, limbs, mud, dust & flaming oxen. Chances of seeing a more entertaining film at the fest are slim.

MARTHA MARCY MAY MARLENE (Sean Durkin)

Scarily assured for a debut feature, this transcends its subject matter (scary backwoods cults) in the sense that it's really about being torn between a false sense of belonging & being completely alien in the world where you’re expected to belong. Masterful handling of an elliptical narrative, formally exquisite in the chilly Haneke/Kubrick mold (but without being slavishly indebted to either), and superbly acted by all. It's been touted as 'this year's Winter's Bone' but I think it'll be more passionately embraced by its supporters - I had a very personal, emotional response to it that was hard to shake off afterwards, and I wasn't alone based on conversations with others after its SFF screening.

MYSTERIES OF LISBON (Raul Ruiz)

I’ll confess that I can’t recall a whole lot of the myriad characters and narrative specifics in this 4.5 hour period drama from prolific Chilean auteur Raul Ruiz. Nonetheless, it’s a dizzying smorsgasbord of storytelling pleasures, evoking a prolonged liminal state despite remaining ostensibly classical throughout.

TERRI (Azazel Jacobs)

This is how a teen comedy should be done; subtle, warm, humane, quirky in the most palatable way. Michael Sicinski aptly described Azazel Jacobs (whose TheGoodTimesKid remains one of the standout microbudget US indies of the new century, and Momma’s Man isn’t too far behind) as “the rare American realist independent who still communicates through mise-en-scène as much as characterization”, which explains this film’s reinvigoration of familiar tropes through a deft directorial touch (not to ignore Patrick DeWitt's smart script). It’s hard to remember the last time a comedy was as artfully made; it helps that it's damn funny, too.

Also very strong:

KILL LIST (Ben Wheatley)

CURLING (Denis Cote)

END OF ANIMAL (Sung-Hee Jo)

ATTENBERG (Athina Rachel Tsangari)

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN (Jason Eisener)

POST MORTEM (Pablo Larrain)

BOXING GYM (Frederick Wiseman)

TUESDAY, AFTER CHRISTMAS (Radu Muntean)

PROJECT NIM (James Marsh)

Flawed, but with plenty to recommend:

HERE (Braden King)
TROLL HUNTER (André Øvredal)

SILENT SOULS (Aleksei Fedorchenko)

SLEEPING SICKNESS (Ulrich Kohler)

A USEFUL LIFE (Federico Veiroj)

SHUT UP LITTLE MAN! AN AUDIO MISADVENTURE (Matthew Bate)

TYRANNOSAUR (Paddy Considine)

RUHR (James Benning) - not exactly 'flawed', just recommended to those with a high minimalism threshold. Severe even by Benning's standards, albeit rewarding.

Disappointments from filmmakers I admire, though fans should still see 'em:

ESSENTIAL KILLING (Jerzy Skolimowski)

OKI'S MOVIE (Hong Sang-Soo)

I WISH I KNEW (Jia Zhang-ke)

COLD FISH (Sion Sono)

SURVIVING LIFE (Jan Svankmajer)

DREILEBEN - BEATS BEING DEAD (Christian Petzold)

TABLOID (Errol Morris)

Blah:

TOOMELAH (Ivan Sen)

Gah:

THE FUTURE (Miranda July)

Drum Media reviews: THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU and WAGNER & ME

2011-03-01T16:24:00.000-08:00

THE ADJUSTMENT BUREAU

The Adjustment Bureau is, like Next and Paycheck (unflattering title alert!), another Philip K Dick adaptation that renders PKD’s nifty ideas bracingly un-nifty; the kind of film that feels like it stars latter-day Nicolas Cage even though it doesn’t. It imagines a world in which our protagonist’s (Maatt Daammonn) every move is controlled by a sharply dressed, fedora’d bureaucracy (incl. Terence Stamp and Mad Men’s John Slattery) who exist in a parallel universe but have members who operate in the real world, and who occasionally fuck up like people in the real world, like one dude who falls asleep at the wheel and misses his cue to deliberately-accidentally spill coffee on Maatt Daammonn’s shirt, which allows Maatt Daammonn to reunite with the girl of his dreams (ravishing Emily Blunt) but also means he has to let go of her, thus restoring order to the universe.

Or something like that. Fortunately, the members of this adjustment bureau are able to regularly the explain the rules of this world, Inception-style, to Maatt Daammonn & us. This takes place in time-out sessions that could be replaced with text scrolling down a blank screen, in no way to lesser effect.

The film has all the makings of a wry bureaucracy satire, ala Brazil, but first-time director George Nolfi opts for bland solemnity, turning the thing into another Time Traveller’s Wife/Lake House-style sci-fi romance, where we discover whether or not love can transcend this heightened vision of fate. More interesting is the meta-fictional aspect: what adjustments were made so the final product would appeal to the date-night demographic?

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1049, p61 (Flipbook)

WAGNER & ME

Wagner & Me is a personal journey through the life and times of legendary composer Richard Wagner, by the delightful Stephen Fry. Fry visits an itinerary of important European locations in Wagner’s life, and proves to be a formidable tour guide, displaying a contagious enthusiasm for his subject’s art. Fans of Wagner and Fry are likely to appreciate this doco more than the casual viewer; its sole reason for a theatrical release is seemingly the opportunity for fans to hear Wagner in theatre surround sound. And to a lesser extent, for Stephen Fry fans to bask in the sight and sound of a king-size Stephen Fry.

The key area of conflict, amidst a film that’ll leave Wagner’s non-fans in the dark, is provided by the tack of Wagner’s anti-semitism, and accordingly, the utilisation of his music for Nazi purposes. Fry – a man of Jewish heritage –repeatedly concludes that however much one appreciates Wagner’s art, it’s inextricably linked its historical baggage, and on a more insidious level, Wagner’s own personal ideology. These ideas are introduced early on but never really expanded upon, adding to the padded-out feel of the film.

Aptly enough, Wagner’s elephantine compositions were once uncharitably described by Italian composer Gioachino Rossini as containing “great moments , but dull quarter hours”. The same could be said of this film, which is amiable and engrossing in fits and starts, but numbingly repetitive in its insights and structure. Unless you’re a diehard – or you’re in need of a big-screen European travelogue – wait for its inevitable ABC premiere.

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1049, p61 (Flipbook)

Drum Media reviews: Certified Copy & Inside Job

2011-02-17T22:43:00.000-08:00

CERTIFIED COPY

It would be easy – an unfortunate – to mistake Certified Copy as an emission from the pits of coffee-table arthouse hell. Yes, it stars Juliette Binoche as a Tuscany-dwelling antique dealer, and an opera singer (William Shimmell) making his acting debut as a British author, in town for a lecture on his book of the same title as the film, which questions the value of artistic ‘originality’. And yes, it prominently features the two of them walking around picturesque Tuscan locations, engaged in an extended discussion of marital woes and questions of artistic authenticity.

But then, this is also a film by Abbas Kiarostami, the Iranian maverick who has for his extraordinary 40-year career created grand artistic expressions using the simplest means. As such, Certified Copy begins as a standard-issue entry into the highbrow talkfest genre, in the vein of My Dinner With Andre or Linklater’s Before Sunrise/Sunset diptych, before morphing into a story of gamesmanship, as Binoche and Shimmell discuss the subject of the latter’s lecture. Putting his ideas about the ‘value of the fake’ into practice, the two begin playing out scenes from a marriage – their own, or are they making it up on the spot? And does it matter to the spectator, i.e, us?

From thereon the film becomes rich with emotional resonance, as questions of art and the power structures of relationships are conflated. Only occasionally does the dialogue creak – a common casualty of a filmmaker working outside their native tongue. Otherwise, it’s an uncommonly powerful film; beguiling to watch in its visual splendour and stimulating to contemplate, both before and long after the frame-within-frame final shot.

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1047, p64 (Flipbook here)

INSIDE JOB

Many consider Charles Ferguson’s 2006 documentary No End in Sight to be the definitive film account of the Iraq war. Likewise, his latest doco, Inside Job, will be hard to beat for its meticulous account of the events leading up to America’s great financial crisis of 2008, a wholly avoidable economic meltdown in which millions of Americans were put out of employment as result of the careless, vain and criminal activity of a handful of Wall Street elites – none of whom have since faced imprisonment. The human toll is limited to only a few glimpses of poverty (the images of a Floridan ‘tent city’ are especially sobering), but even under Ferguson’s rational, largely unmanipulative approach, it all registers as an epic horror film.

Narrated by Matt Damon, the we begin in Iceland with an abstract outlining the former prime minister’s neglect of the economy. It serves to distinguish the culpability as not being limited to American leaders alone, and it’s with this foreknowledge that Ferguson universalises his subject. Rigorously structured into linear chapters, it’s also lucid in its presentation of a flood of banking terminology.

Of course, it’s this complexity and level-headedness – a few questionable interview tactics aside – that will likely deter those after the entertaining agitprop of a Michael Moore film. And the end-credit sequence of last year’s Will Ferrell vehicle The Other Guys (detailing the statistics of corporate crime related to the crisis) will be sufficient movie treatment for many viewers. But those seeking a thorough cinematic investigation should rush to see this masterfully assembled, infuriating and altogether riveting tome.

Originally published Drum Media Issue 1047, p64 (Flipbook here)

Drum Media reviews: 127 HOURS and HOW DO YOU KNOW

2011-02-08T20:24:00.000-08:00

127 HOURS

This is the kind of tough-sell project that feels natural for Danny Boyle to tackle after his Slumdog Millionaire cleaned up at the box office and won a bajillion academy awards. As the film’s baffling trailer works overtime to conceal, 127 Hours details the gruelling 2003 true story of Aaron Ralston (James Franco), an Xtreme sports bro who finds his arm trapped under a massive boulder during a mountaineering accident. With his phone left at home, he is left to his own devices – literally – to find his own way to freedom and write his inspirational autobiography (A Rock and Hard Place, which the film is based on).

The greatest strength of Boyle’s treatment of this minimal story is the marriage of his more-is-more approach to an unlikely subject. Using multiple flashbacks, hallucinations, and myriad video and film textures, Boyle goes for broke in attempting to evoke Ralston’s restless subjectivity in his physical confinement. It feels exactly like the film its reckless, jocular subject would have made out of his experiences; when I describe it as the longest, most punishing Gatorade commercial ever filmed, I mean that as praise; especially Gatorade actually appears in one of Ralston’s reveries.

If anything, Boyle might’ve veered too far in the opposite direction of the narrative’s inherent monotony. Though there’s never any doubt about the film’s stylistic audacity, the flourishes often flirt with obnoxiousness, and threaten to overwhelm the human centre provided by Franco’s alternately funny and emotionally draining performance. 127 Hours’ greatest achievement is also its weakness; it’s never boring, but a little more formal discipline could’ve helped it resonate more.

Originally Published Drum Media issue 1046, p61 (Flipbook)

HOW DO YOU KNOW

Writer/director James L Brooks has a latent taste for the unwieldy. Terms of Endearment and Broadcast News were prototypical crowdpleasing 80’s dramedies – whatever their flaws, missing the mark wasn’t among them. His 1994 flop I’ll Do Anything, however, was a victim of poor test screenings that led to the removal of its numerous Prince-written musical sequences(!). The original musical version of that film is yet to see the light of day, but its alleged messiness and erratic shape is something that distinguishes How Do You Know, Brooks’ latest romantic comedy.

On paper, however, it couldn’t be more generic; perennial human chipmunk Reese Witherspoon, here a softball player recently cut from her team, finds herself romantically entangled with a baseball-playing goofball (Owen Wilson) and a corporate goofball (Paul Rudd). Over the course of the film’s unwarranted 2+ hour runtime, the film goes off the rails with its slight plot, but it’s frequently funny and goofily charming on a scene-by-scene basis. A scene involving a heartfelt marriage proposal whose mood sours when it’s revealed that Rudd hadn’t hit [rec] as instructed, is particularly sharp, and of a piece with the film’s heightened look at people constantly standing outside themselves.

Admittedly, How Do You Know is a lacklustre rom-com; Rudd and Wilson are frequently hilarious on their own, but there’s no chemistry between Witherspoon and either of them, and the characters are all neurotic to point of autism. The glaring faults don’t end there – the music score is a ghastly drone of whimsy, and a late-film subplot involving corporate crime goes nowhere. But, but… the film survives thanks to its distinctively oddball sensibility. In the realm of this most cookie-cutter of genres, that counts as progress.

Originally Published Drum Media issue 1045, p58 (Flipbook)

Street Press reviews: ANOTHER YEAR and SOMEWHERE

2011-01-11T19:17:00.000-08:00

ANOTHER YEAR

If you’re gonna make the same film repeatedly, make it a good one. Ozu knew it, Woody Allen once knew it, and Mike Leigh knows it too, provided you’re not of the mind that he condescends to his characters and/or lets his actors veer into caricature. Another Year is Leigh’s latest slice of working class life, and as the title suggests, it’s as slice-of-life-ish as ever. It’s also one of his best and most emotionally panoramic films. Seasonal chapters may seem like a hoary device, but they’re perfectly apt here.

As usual for Leigh, character interaction dictates the plot, with long-married couple Gerri (Ruth Sheen) and Tom (Jim Broadbent) providing a loose centre of which other characters orbit around. Among them are their son Joe (Oliver Maltman), Tom’s lifelong friend Ken (Peter Wight), and most memorably, twice-divorced, self-proclaimed free spirit Mary (Lesley Manville), a work colleage and frequent visitor of Gerri’s. As with Secrets and Lies’ Brenda Blethyn and Happy-Go-Lucky’s Sally Hawkins, Manville’s high-strung turn is sure to be one of those polarising performances/characters, that’ll rivet some viewers and strike others as an actor’s workshop experiment gone berserk, but either way, she’s impossible to forget.

It’s perhaps easy to ascribe a certain conversatism to the contrast between Mary’s loneliness and Tom and Gerri’s relatively blissful marriage. But an early scene featuring Imelda Staunton as the world’s most miserable housewife looms over the proceedings as if to refute such a thesis. As such, Another Year is ultimately a catalogue of moods and behaviour more than a Message Movie. It won’t win over Leigh’s detractors, but for those who’ve found his films powerfully reflective experiences in the past, it’s unmissable.

Originally published in 3D WORLD Issue 1042

SOMEWHERE

Sofia Coppola’s Somewhere begins with an image that emblemizes the film’s strengths and weaknesses right off the bat. For roughly a minute, we’re presented with a static shot observing a segment of a racing circuit, occupied by a Ferrari zooming in and out of frame. It’s an image that’s at once strange and bold in its duration, as well as thuddingly obvious as a metaphor for its central character’s stasis. Likewise, Coppola’s film alternates between grace and crassness throughout, unfortunately edging more toward the latter.

Stephen Dorff play Johnny Marco, owner of the aforementioned Ferrari and a vacuous party boy actor, seen spending much of his time moping about LA’s Chateau Marmont hotel, picking up loose women, and doing press junkets for movies that look like real Stephen Dorff projects. Immediate comparisons will be made with Bill Murray’s burnout actor from Lost in Translation, and when Elle Fanning arrives on the scene as Dorff’s estranged daughter Cleo, Somewhere evokes the tentative connection that Murray and Scarlett Johansson made in the prior film. In that light, Somewhere might be its spiritual prequel, albeit one that no one asked for.

For all that formal risks that Coppola takes, Somewhere is ultimately undone by straying outside the ‘less is more’ parameters she sets up. As soon as you’re on the film’s patient, uninflected wavelength, there’s misjudged gags involved Johnny being served by a naked male masseuse, or falling asleep during cunnilingis to snap you out. And the final bids for emotional catharsis feel awfully strained compared to what’s come before. Finally, that Ferrari going in circles seems less a metaphor for Johnny’s stasis that Coppola’s own.

Originally published in Drum Media, Issue 1042, p59 (Flipbook)

2010 IN REVIEW!

2011-01-01T18:17:00.001-08:00

No diagnostics, no common trends, just a personal journey through my viewings. Here's the 2010 list(s) and grouchy comment I submitted for Matt Ravier's annual Sydney Film Critics poll.

BEST RELEASED:

Fantastic Mr Fox
A Prophet (Un Prophete)
Inception
The Social Network
Father Of My Children
The White Ribbon
Buried
Blue Valentine
The Other Guys
La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet

UNRELEASED:

Alamar
Meek's Cutoff
Compline (Nathaniel Dorsky, USA)
Leap Year
Another Year
Wild Grass
Carlos
The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
Let Each One Go Where He May

There was a distinct lack of Australian theatrical releases this year that truly reminded me of why I fell in love with film in the first place. With so little artistry, ambition, and pleasure on offer in mainstream and arthouse releases alike, watching the human subjects of Frederick Wiseman's La Danse almost made me wanna tear up my imaginary Movie Lover card and regularly invest my funds in the ballet instead. Then again, a list of the year’s best Australian theatrical releases is hardly any kind of definitive representation of what’s truly exciting in cinema today. As with every other year in film, the real heroes of 2010 are the valiant folk – programmers, journalists, bloggers, etc – who ventured outside their comfort zone to deliver a semblance of that representation to filmgoers; not the armchair critics whinging that it was a lousy year for movies based on their multiplex viewings.

AWARDS FOR THE YEAR IN FILM!

Best rom-com: Wild Grass

Probably the only PG-rated French trifle in which the aging protagonist fantasises about brutalising scantily-clad teen girls. Resnais has either retained his iconoclasm at 86, gone hopelessly senile, or both; whatever the case, his latest candy-coloured opus, in its indelible melange of cutesy cliché (adorable kids, May/December pairings), creepy pathology, and other bouts of inexplicable weirdness (that ending!!!) is one of the truest cinematic portraits

of obsessive love and its myriad textures.

Best scene in an otherwise lousy movie: Plaster mask, Somewhere

Sofia Coppola’s latest exercise in wheel-spinning amount to little more than a torpid series of vignettes that hammer home the same point about its protagonist’s ennui with crass metaphors, as well as outlining how less is often less. But occasionally, there’s a stray moment that’ll capture that ennui with genuine acuity, best exemplified by the scene in which Johnny Marco's (Stephen Dorff) face is coated in a plaster mould that he has to let set for a while. The scene is little more than a slow zoom into his plaster-covered face, scored only to the rhythm of his inhaling/exhaling through his nostrils. The shot’s held long enough that the thought of this vacuous celebrity being alone with his thoughts (and lack thereof) is almost terrifying, and enough to built some momentary empathy. Then it’s back to a tired rehash of Lost in Translation with one of the most staggeringly lame final scenes in the history of all time.

Best acting that’ll never be recognised by the Academy: Jerry O’Connell, Piranha

I didn’t see this in 3D at the movies, so I missed out on the luminous sensations of spring breaker puke and severed penises and whatnot. But in any medium, Jerry O’Connell’s sublimely obnoxious turn as a fratboy pornographer is a joy to behold. Hunched over, screaming his slimeball dialogue to the point of hoarseness, with his red rubbery punchable face filmed in mocking closeup, O’Connell plays his character to a loathsome hilt, constantly sentient of the fact that the paying audience want to see him gruesomely die. And he does… twice!

Most underrated overrated movie: Inception

No, the dreams don't resemble dreams, but the implicit argument is that being absorbed in no-frills storytelling offers a kind of liminal state of its own. I can buy that. It's hardly the 'new 2001', nor is it a shallow puzzle... but it's great fun and very heartfelt in its own dorky, shorthanded way. Let's find some middle-ground here, guys.

Worst film of 2010: Love & Other Drugs

Just a giant, gaping black hole of grating smugness & phoniness, with corporate endorsement as the rotten cherry on top of the steaming shit sundae. It's a film whose complete reliance on the worst cliches of sex comedies, romcoms and disease-of-the-week weepies is abrasive and unpleasant enough to make one wish for one of the later reels of The Human Centipede slipped in for some relief. I haven't loved any 2010 release as much as I hated this one. Congrats, Edward Zwick!

BEST OLDER FILMS SEEN FOR THE FIRST TIME IN 2010

1. Make Way For Tomorrow (Leo McCarey, 1937)

2. Dillinger is Dead (Marco Ferreri, 1969)

3. Fury (Fritz Lang, 1936)

4. Los Angeles Plays Itself (Thom Andersen, 2003)

5. La Libertad (Lisandro Alonso, 2001)

6. He Who Gets Slapped (Sjostrom, 1924)

7. To Parfisal (Bruce Baillie, 1963)

8. Man of the West (Anthony Mann, 1958)

9. Graduate First (Maurice Pialat, 1979)

10. Hausu (Nobuhiko Obayashi, 1977

I didn't want to end up with two Criterion releases at the top of the list, as if to confirm their monopoly on all that is great about the moving image... but what the hell. McCarey's masterpiece more than lived up to expectations as the most plaintive and wrenching depiction of ageing ever put on film. And reports of the singularity Dillinger is Dead were not exaggerated. I can't think of another film that so cannily encapsulates the absurdity of life itself - and more specifically, the fascination that meaningless process holds for the individual in the face of such absurdity. Kind of like the flipside to McCarey's film; it remains truthful despite neglecting to portray a single emotion or character behaviour that is credible in any conventional sense.

RU's: 23rd Psalm Branch (Brakhage), California Split (Altman), The Land of Silence and Darkness (Herzog), Street of Shame (Mizoguchi), The Verdict (Lumet), A Real Young Girl (Breillat), Side Street (A. Mann), Hospital (Wiseman), Welfare (Wiseman), The French Connection II (Frankenheimer), A Day in the Country (Renoir), Pure Shit (Deling)

Prosperity for 2011!

Good Evil vs. Shyamalan Evil (Drum Media reviews for DEVIL & THE LAST EXORCISM

2010-12-01T22:51:00.000-08:00

‘From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan’, reads the unfortunate title in the trailer of the new film Devil, in which five strangers are trapped in an elevator, and one isn’t who they appear to be (Cue theramin). In actuality, Shyamalan – the fallen-from-grace writer/director of The Sixth Sense and The Happening – is only credited with the story, so he can’t be held entirely responsible for why the film's scant 80 minutes feel so protracted.

One of the pitfalls of the supernatural thriller genre, which Devil falls victim to, is that with omnipresent forces as antagonists, there tends to be little at stake. Assaulting the audience with all sorts of freaky stuff comes at the expense of internal logic and narrative coherence. Accordingly, the film begins to feel like being trapped in an elevator with a bunch of unpleasant people. Saving it from being a total wash is Tak Fujimoto’s (Badlands) cinematography. Even as the film eventually reveals itself as a risible Sunday School fable, it’s easy to zone out and groove on the nifty camera acrobatics instead.

Arriving hot on the heels of the similarly claustophobic thriller Buried, the shortcomings of Devil are cast into even sharper relief. The latter maintained suspense without leaving the confines of a coffin, whereas the latter struggles to do so, even with an ample prologue and time spent with the authorities scratching their heads from the outside. And speaking of coffins, Devil is another nail in the proverbial one of Shyamalan’s career.

Review originally published Drum Media Issue 10/36, p74 (Flipbook here)

First off, the bad news: The Last Exorcism is one of those faux-found-footage scarefests (ala Blair Witch/Paranormal Activity); the kind of which are gonna keep getting made until their collective profits dwindle. The good news is that it’s good stuff, wisely assuming the form of a straight-up mockumentary rather than attempting to create the illusion of watching home movies made by self-obsessed assholes.

Additonally, the mock-doco format – a collection of gimmicky tics masquerading as gospel – turns out to be apt for its central subject. Wonderfully named Cotton Marcus (a stellar performance from Patrick Fabian) is an evangelical minister, but no longer of the faith, and only continuing in the profession to raise health insurance funds for his deaf son. Now he’s on a mission – armed with a documentary crew, he sets out for the film’s titular job, in an effort to expose exorcisms for the dirty sham that they are. But it’s a dilapidated backwoods Deep South home that Marcus arrives at – so, no such luck. From thereon, the spooky occurrences increase, the Southern Gothic atmosphere thickens, and viewers scarred by The Exorcist at an early age should feel pangs of queasy nostalgia.

It’s only until the third act that the eternal question of ‘why on earth is someone still filming this’ arises, especially when the cameraman has already expressed doubts about continuing. And the less said about certain decisions made by key characters during the climax, the better. Still, with its efficient slow-burning preceding, The Last Exorcism builds up enough audience goodwill that such missteps can be forgiven. For a moment, the future of ass-ugly, shakycam horror flicks looks a little bright.

Review originally published Drum Media Issue 1037 (Flipbook here)

Iraq War twofer: FAIR GAME & THE MESSENGER

2010-11-24T21:55:00.000-08:00

Fair Game

(Originally published in Drum Media, Issue 1036, 23/11/2010. Flipbook here, p71 http://streetpress.com.au/online_mags/DM/DM_1036/)

If you primarily go to the movies to: a) read wikipedia, and b) have your liberal leanings confirmed by Important Movie Stars, then Fair Game is the film for you. It’s a dutiful recap of the saga of CIA agent Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), detailing her vengeful outing by White House officials, after her husband (Joe Wilson, played by Sean Penn) leaked details of the Bush Administration’s fabrication of details about WMD’s to justify the war on Iraq.

Truth be told (ha!), Fair Game isn’t terrible, and for the first half, it offers a reasonably engaging accumulation of various facts related to the case, with Watts giving her usual steely turn as Plame. If nothing else, it’s a gratifyingly strong female role in a Hollywood climate lacking in them. Unfortunately, director Doug Liman (of zippy entertainments like Go and Swingers) adopts a sloppy, tired docudrama aesthetic that makes one yearn for the formal precision of All the President’s Men - which this film poses no threat toward in the pantheon of fact-based political thrillers. This unimaginative filmmaking approach manages to diffuse much of the righteous anger that the story naturally provokes.

In the second half, the focus turns toward the strain that the fiasco places on Wilson/Plame’s marriage. But with little prior development of them as people, things turn dramatically DOA. Then Penn glowers wistfully at the Whitehouse (Oh, What Once Was!), gets up on his soapbox for a final spiel, and the muted colour scheme brightens up, ensuring everything will end up fine. There’s no doubt that Fair Game was made with the best of intentions, but ultimately its argument for a just and ethical US government is that there’ll be less films like Fair Game.

The Messenger

(Originally published in Drum Media, Issue 1035 16/11/2010. Flipbook here, p70: http://streetpress.com.au/online_mags/DM/DM_1035/_

The subject of the Iraq War has recently made for a number of great documentaries and TV series, and very few great – or even good – fictional feature films. A cynic could make the case for a good deal of The Hurt Locker’s hosannas being an overreaction in relation to preachy dreck like Lions For Lambs or Home of the Brave. Enter The Messenger, a account of the human toll of the war, to buck the trend.

On a military base in New Jersey, recently injured soldier Will (Ben Foster) is assigned to the Casualty Notification Team under the guidance of the older and more experienced Tony (Woody Harrelson), who shows him the ropes. After several harrowing experiences on the job, Will becomes intrigued by the curiously muted reaction of Olivia to the news of her husband’s passing, and a tentative relationship begins between her and Will that effects all three players in unpredictable ways.

That such an engaging, and unexpectedly entertaining film emerges from a premise based on what is often considered the least desirable job in the military, is largely a testament to Harrelson’s performance. As the motormouthed, tough-shelled career soldier, he undergoes a fairly standard arc; his cocky bravado eventually dissipating to reveal a broken man (cue waterworks-in-private scene). But he’s magnetic enough that his character’s familiarity is kept at bay.

Foster too, is a revelation, dialling down his usual bug-eyed scenery-chewing for a unexpectedly tender turn, and Samantha Morton is Samantha Morton, ie. incapable of a false moment as ever. A long, mid-film interaction between the two, played out in a single fluid take, is one of the best-acted scenes in recent memory. What could’ve been frustratingly opaque characters are given immense clarity in moments like this one.

The Messenger is ultimately an unabashed male weepie, and engagement with the film will depend on one’s threshold for wounded machismo. Indeed, it’d be roughly 30 minutes shorter without all the scenes of Foster drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, alone in his room with metal pumping in the background. But for fans of the ‘actor’s showcase’, it’ll be harder to find more flawlessly embodied grief and angst at the movies this year. It’s also a must for Steve Buscemi completists – his brief performance is one of his best.

TIFF epic wrap up

2010-09-20T18:33:00.000-07:00

Dear city of Toronto,

I would like to issue a formal apology for originally dismissing you as a shithole, wherein the only redeeming facet is making the dark of the movie theater more inviting, and thus a perfect, no-extraneous-distractions location for a film festival. This wrongheaded belief originated at the age of 9, in which I was briefly separated from my parents downtown, and in my callow age was unable to appreciate the virtues of a ‘cultural melting pot’, so to speak. That aspect, along with the ultra-convenient public transport, amazing range of secondhand stores, cheap halal food and street-vendor hotdogs, and several bars visited playing Simply Saucer, have made my last 10 days awesome, and that’s not even counting the movies. I greatly wish to again inhabit your environs in the near future.

Yours truly,

Ian

PS: If there is any way I can reimburse you, please send a sign. Otherwise, I will empty my fat coin pouch of pennies into a nearby sewer.

Aptly enough, the theme of reassessing long-held beliefs and prejudices is central to Meek’s Cutoff, the new film from Kelly Reichardt and probably the best film I’ve seen at the festival. Reichardt brings her spare, minimalist (drink once for every variation on those adjectives from hereon) approach to a period western set on the Oregon trail in 1845, as the members of a wagon team become increasingly wary of their leader’s directions and motives – Michelle Williams plays one of three wives of the men travelling, and the first to consider the possible guidance offered by a captive Indian along the way, as Meek’s promises prove increasingly empty.

Needless to say, this isn’t Dances With Wolves territory, and as pal Matt Ravier said, Reichardt’s is cinema is one of “asking the right questions rather than providing easy answers”. The ambiguities aren’t a lazy way of asking the audience to do the heavy lifting, but rather a perfect example of whittling the story down to its bone in order to enrich the core themes. In this case, it’s the importance of questioning conventional wisdom, and the choice of filming the plains in the boxy, 4:3 aspect ratio is the first immediate sign of counterintuitive thinking, undermining the traditional metaphysical connotations of the western vista and bringing the basic elements of the terrain – earth, sky, people – into sharper relief; perfect for the struggle for survival endured by the characters.

It’s as visually gorgeous as any classic Hollywood western, with Reichardt’s eye for the minute details of labor, and an ability to find ineffable poetry in the growing desperation looming large over the narratively spare proceedings. As the film reaches its haunting culmination of words and images, I found it impossible to shake off the doubts and predicaments of its characters, vocalised and unspoken – and it’s a testament to the strength of Reichardt and her cast that both are articulated equally effectively.

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Wonky leaders also figure in The Autobiography of Nicolae Ceausescu, a 3hr essay montage of largely context-free archival footage of the former Romanian Communist dictator, which I fully expected going in to be the cinematic equivalent of a raw dish of brussel sprouts. On the contrary, it’s enthrallingly propulsive throughout, and offers an excitingly fresh approach to documenting political history. Using the raw materials of this footage from newsreels and home movies, filmmaker Andrei Ujica fashions a sprawling and deeply subjective account where we see how Ceausescu saw himself during his reign. Through the absurdly endless focus on political pageantry, industry and blustery but ultimately inconsequential speeches, an epic scale portrait of hypocrisy and delusion emerges, and though it perhaps benefits from a more than cursory foreknowledge of the era’s history, even I the mugwump was in awe of the ingenuity of Ujica’s achievement.

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It feels necessary to talk about Leap Year and Curling together, since they’re both the kind of Minimalist Art Film About Alienation (MAFAA?) that are a dime a dozen at any major festival, the kind that almost make it too easy for festival programmers, and the kind that have experienced a wave of backlash started by Nick James’ recent ‘slow cinema’ scourge in Sight and Sound magazine (a backlash that found its own backlash in some corners). But hey, I’m a loner who eats that shit up, and both films are stellar examples of the paradigm; deeply felt and empathetic enough to immediately fend off charges of laziness or fraudulence that are often leveled toward the less sacred practitioners of this type of cinema (Reygadas and Ceylan, in particular).

Leap Year, a Mexican production directed by Aussie ex-pat Michael Rowe immediately brings to mind Chantal Akerman’s seminal 70’s studies of feminine solitude in Je, tu, ille, elle and Jeanne Dielman; Rowe adopts a fixed frame approach nearly identical to the latter to examine the loneliness of a woman holed up in her apartment, using increasingly aberrant carnal relationships with anonymous men as the only relief from the tedium and loneliness of her daily routine. Rowe’s concerns are more explicitly humanist than Akerman’s politicised formalism, and the film is both deeply sad and admirably non-exploitative in its frank and explicit depiction of sexuality. It’s miraculously never maudlin either, with the stationary long-takes allowing scenes to organically teeter from misery to wry comedy without any feeling of tonal whiplash. It’s altogether a remarkable balancing act, and one of the most assured first features in recent memory.

Quebec’s Denis Côte has a reputation as one of Canada’s most adventurous and challenging auteurs, and the fact that Curling is his ‘warm and accessible’ breakthrough speaks a lot to that status. Early on, when a certain plot mystery was introduced, I knew that the film was going to leave it hanging, and found myself at odds with the film. But gradually Côte’s interest with the interpersonal relationships of the people inhabiting his bleakly anonymous spaces (real life father and daughter play the same here) become apparent, and any cynical feeling of a filmmaker playing into the hands of a coterie disappeared by the ending’s hard-earned note of hope.

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Disappointments of the festival came from the Asian contingent of my viewing slate. Sion Sono’s Love Exposure was one of my favorites of last year, announcing him as the kind of special-case filmmaker who I always want to get behind – punk-ish, steadfastly disregarding conventions and past traditions, and in no way out to win approval from cultural tastemakers. Cold Fish, his latest, seems to exist to offend every sensibility imaginable, but manages to only be tediously abrasive. The film’s treatment of women seems more pointed than on first glance – Like the Crank films, Sono seems to be amping up the objectification and violence towards women to a satirically unpleasant degree. But Neveldine & Taylor’s abrasiveness came at the expense of Hollywood action films, while Sono seems to be going for something closer to the capitalist critique and common-man plight of Fassbinder’s The Merchant of Four Seasons. But he’s no R.W.F., and anything resembling incisive commentary is drowned out by the shrill unpleasantness and ridiculous overlength (2.5 hours!).

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Also underwhelming was Hong Sang-Soo’s Oki’s Movie, which despite a semi-intriguing structural play, might represent the moment where his concerns (mainly boorish, shitfaced men and the women that elude them), no longer concern me. And I’ll trust that the clumsily didactic and dramatically inert The Ditch, a fictional recreation of a little-known chapter in recent Chinese history involving the mistreatments of miners, is in no way representative of the quality acclaimed documentarian Wang Bing’s prior work. His visual sense is undeniable, and the tactile depiction of physical suffering is vivid, but the effect is just spoiled by any time a ‘character’ opens their mouth.

I’m a big fan of the small sampling Jerzy Skolimowski’s filmography I’ve been privy to, but Essential Killing is a clumsy attempt at telling the story of an escaped Taliban prisoner (Vincent Gallo (!!) while avoiding sermonising and/or polemics. It’s the ‘physical over the political’ (ala Hunger, to name a recent example), but the presence of cartoon US military types and generic Islam flashbacks undermine the film’s attempt at prolonged experiential immersion, though an acceptably tense action-survival flick lies at the film’s core.

Gallo won the best actor prize at Venice for his dialogue-free performance, which is impressive enough once you get over the innate problem of his miscasting (Galloban?). His third outing as director, also hot from Venice (where it was roundly panned), Promises Written in Water evokes something like a Philippe Garrel movie starring irritable monosyllabic simpletons, but like his prior two features, it’s all somehow incredibly touching in a dumb, embarrassingly private sort of way. Gallo is after honest feelings at all costs, which informs the formal choices in some exciting ways; the use of a rehearsal footage of repeated line readings results in one of the most weirdly funny scenes in recently memory. Best of all is the cartoon gangster type that shows up midfilm without context for one brief scene and never again, offering one last job that Gallo quickly refuses. It’s hard not to think of the scene as his own wry eff-you to the legions of placeholder Tarantino/Ritchie knockoffs that Gallo’s films have stood in stark opposition toward since Buffalo ’66 in ‘98.

TIFF: John Carpenter's THE WARD and James Wan's INSIDIOUS at Midnight Madness

2010-09-16T10:26:00.000-07:00

Midnight Madness, from y'all not in the know, is TIFF's section for films that deliver genre kicks, best appreciated with a rowdy audience of fanboys and drunks and/or both. Cheers at every death, scare, gory moment, shotgun-loading-montage-followed-by-badass-quip, Bruce Campbell cameo, etc etc. This is the where I should post a photo of said crowd, but I don't take photos, so here're two quick takes on the films I've seen so far from the program (both of which, judging from a trawl through the twitter-verse, seem to be minority opinions, yay!).

Getting things out of the way: yes, The Ward suffers from being released the same year as Shutter Island, and even if it didn’t, it’s not like the latter didn’t have problems that we’re all aware of, of which Carpenter has taken the most significant and multiplied it. And yes, The Ward goes overboard with its liberal use of jump scares that would’ve sufficed without piercing musical accompaniment. On the plus side, despite the absence of a catchy rock score of his own, this is the first Carpenter film in ages in which his presence can be felt, not least in the precise, elegant compositions and fluidly moving camerawork – a slow track into a group of girls dancing to a pop tune on the radio is most lingering, and a late-film asylum escape is tense almost purely due to the spatial coherence with which its directed and edited. Plus, it’s surprisingly well-acted, with Amber Heard making a fine scream queen babe in the lead and a bevy of other babes as her inmate pals who aren't who they appear to be. Perhaps the sheer elation of seeing a good Carpenter film has led me to overrate this, but it’s all executed with such charming, old-school loyalty - rather than subservience - to genre convention, and it feels anachronistic in the best sense as result, and though Shutter Island might be the more accomplished and dramatically satisfying film (it feels weird typing that), the Val Lewton-isms come to Carpenter much more naturally.

Another throwback; James Wan’s Insidious fashions itself as a loving and perhaps compensatory homage to the atmospheric, gore-free haunted house movies that Wan’s own Saw and its legacy sought to suppress. The mood is announced in the title, but the whole film’s obvious from the get-go, single-mindedly and crudely dedicated to freaking you out on the most visceral, immediate way imaginable at the expense of everything else. For the first act, the anything-goes approach works like gangbusters, with Exorcisty demon faces, giggling zombie-Oliver!, Freddy Krueger-silhouettes, and the grown-up twins from The Shining among others all thrown at Rose Byrne’s matriarch with reckless abandon. Then Wan & writer Leigh Whannell (the latter also featuring as ghostbuster in the film’s second half, sporting the worst onscreen US accent since his own turn in Saw; it's supposed to be funny but Please Make Him Stop) realise that they have a story to tell, so all the evil creepy shit introduced in the first half comes back for an abysmal monster-mash ending that seems to anticipate what Tommy Wiseau’s upcoming foray into the evil-house genre will be like. And then there’s a matter of the dialogue; “You’re son’s in a place called The Further. A place with no clocks, no measurements…” … …

TIFF - days 3 & 4 (or rather, my days 1 & 2)

2010-09-13T12:02:00.000-07:00

So, in case you haven’t gauged from Facebook or my twitter (and I don’t know how else you could be reading this), I’m on holiday for my very first Toronto International Film Festival.

I kicked off the fest, still fighting jetlag (and Greyhound-lag), with Boxing Gym, the latest from prolific cinema-verite pioneer Frederick Wiseman. It might be a minor film from him, in its subject and swift runtime, but it nevertheless features his strengths on full display, not least the ability to abstract the myriad workout routines on display into a symphony of rhythm. The inspiration allegedly came from his desire to make another film about a form of state-sanctioned violence, but the tone is nevertheless genial throughout, and the film is altogether curiously and mysteriously motivated, but in the best and most lingering sense of the term.

The main draw of the festival for me was the Wavelengths program, dedicated to avant-garde and experimental cinema; not because I'm an avant-nut (avant-n00b is more accurate) but mostly because these films are least likely to arrive on Aussie shores. The first was James Benning’s Ruhr, another of his landscape surveys, this time of the titular German industrial region rather than anywhere in the US. Ostensibly, the film is 6 shots: the first 5 (chronologically: an auto tunnel, a sky through forest, a pipe factory, a mosque, graffiti removal) comprising the first hour, and then an ENTIRE HOUR OMG devoted to a coke plant framed against a skyline, with a billowing cloud of smoke providing much the bulk of visual interest. A kneejerk criticism would be that such a shot is better suited to gallery installation rather than being asked to sit down and watch it in its entirety, but my remaining jetlag had got the better of me earlier on, so I konked out early and the thing became an inadvertent installation anyway. I doubt a fully-conscious viewing would've been more fruitful, though a spot of lively online debate has made me more appreciative of Benning’s project, and the auto tunnel shot I stayed entirely awake for (pic'd above) is a tour-de-force of various forms of off-screen space.

The next Wavelengths program was entirely my bag: I’ve long wanted to see Nathaniel Dorsky’s work, and the triptych of films screened (Compline, Audabe and Pastourelle) were revelatory in every sense. One knockout of image after another in complete silence, the cumulative effect enough to make one weep. Rustling, jostling plants and flora seem to dominate a bulk of Dorsky’s gleanings, but the level of instinctual, abstract, patterning is so powerful that a café shot with the protusions of a woman’s jacket bobbing in and out of frame registers with the same poetic force as the nature imagery. Words can only do this stuff injustice; as one tweep nailed it, “This guy's an avant-garde rock star”.

On a completely different note, I picked Griff the Invisible as my token Aussie flick & mood-leaving fluff among my viewing slate. Australian films that borrow from Hollywood genres tend to have an unwelcome air of kids-playing-dressup, so I approached this Sydney-bound superhero romcom from actor-turned-director Leon Ford with a little bit of trepidation. Fortunately, it’s not too long that the film starts showing a visual wit of its own, and the immensely appealing lead performances from Ryan Kwanten – so good at playing dumb in True Blood, and similarly effective at toning down his heartthrob persona here – and especially Maeve Dermody, in a potentially deadly role as the manic pixie dream girl, elevate what could have been a conveyor-belt quirky misfit romance. The earnest/angsty final act is a bit of a vibekill, and the package is a little too cloying and winsome for a miserable sod like me to wholeheartedly go for, but there’s a lot of fun to be had and the audience I was with clearly ate it up.

ENTER

2010-08-05T07:39:00.001-07:00

Cuppla MIFF capsule reviews

2010-07-25T01:12:00.000-07:00

CARLOS (dir. Olivier Assayas)

One of the film events of the year doesn’t disappoint. A great big, sexy, richly detailed, 5.5 hour feast of history, moving by at a lightning pace; Assayas’ musical editing rhythms (frequently cut to bouncy punk tunes, but always coasting on similar energies) make the final stretch, detailing Carlos’ final years in Sudan just as propulsive as some of the more dramatically meaty and action-packed segments earlier in the saga. If the film maintains an obligatory ‘ambivalent’ stance toward terrorist activity, it’s not in the programmatic way that most narrative films on the subject do; Assayas keeps the historical context rooted in Carlos’ restless subjectivity, with the attention to tactilely rendered spaces in lieu of psychology (as such, the elliptical handling of the relationship between Magdalena and Carlos makes the former’s trajectory all the more moving). Accordingly, the film’s soundtrack choices are as audacious and inspired as ever; 80’s post-punk from The Feelies and Wire for Carlos’ idealistic early years, with each music cue becoming decreasingly anachronistic in correspondence with his decline.

AIR DOLL (dir. Hirokuza Kore-eda)

Hey, it’s Bicentennial Man meets In a Year of 13 Moons! Sadly not as fun as that sounds, Kore-eda’s latest film takes a premise best suited to an undergrad project (sex doll miraculously becomes human) and strains for the melancholy and poetry that usually comes to his films naturally. It’s pretty in a vapid way for a while, but after two hours of plotless cutesy tweeness, soft piano keys, nuggets like “not having a heart is heartbreaking”, and a billion different endings - each one more maudlin than the last - I was ready to puncture my arteries.

VILLALOBOS (dir. a fan)

This portrait of minimal house maestro Ricardo Villalobos makes no concessions to the unconverted, but even as a convert I’m a little disappointed to see the formal potential of a doco on the man squandered in favour of such a predictable non-approach. There’s a fine line between willfully austere and youtube-ready chunks assembled in a slapdash fashion, and it’s only a squiz at the filmmaker's IMDb page revealing 25 years of doco experience that edges me toward giving this film the benefit of a doubt.

POETRY (dir. Lee Chang-Dong)

Lee’s Oasis shook me to the core; his new film – focusing on an Alzheimer’s stricken women who impulsively takes poetry classes – is an eerily quiet, airy one that accrues its power from the accumulation of intimations and suggestions rather than overt gestures and statements. It’s a vaporous, free-floating blank-canvas kind of a film; despite Lee’s obvious empathy for the forgotten women in the film, the anti-feminist reading suggested by my viewing cohort doesn’t seem like all that much of a stretch. All this isn’t necessarily a bad thing; the sleepy rhythms and allusive, meandering narrative is easy to get lost in and project upon, but I just couldn’t make enough intuitive sense of it all, not the least in the sense that the connection between a poet's writers-block and Korean social malaise seems both tenuous and strained at once. I prefer Lee the heartbreaker.

LE DONK AND SCOR-ZAY-ZEE (dir Shane Meadows)

Paddy Considine flaunts his considerable comedic abilities saying ‘fuck’ a lot and making a right mug of himself as a roadie & talentless wannabe-emcee; amiable enough to sustain 70 minutes, and an acceptable breather in between the fest’s weightier fare.

Some Sydney Film Festival reviews.

2010-06-22T20:38:00.000-07:00

With 20-ish films seen, you can check through my twitter and look and my contribution to the Sydney Critics scoreboard for my general impressions on all the films. Here are thoughts on a few of the Official Competition entries...

HEARTBEATS (dir. Xavier Dolan, 2010)

It seems no review for this film (or Dolan’s previous I Killed My Mother, which I have yet to see) can’t discuss it without taking its maker’s 21 years of age into account, and to be fair, all its strengths and flaws can be attributed to Dolan’s specifically callow point of view. So while its evocations of first love are all swoony and ecstatic as they come (those knives against cutting boards!), there’s an unfortunate prosaic side of the film, especially the shoehorned interviews with random people, who all spout off banal truisms passed off as revelations worthy of digression from the film’s central characters/narrative. And while I’m fine with ‘love letters to cinema’, Dolan’s list of influences are almost exclusively failsafe canonical touchstones (Annie Hall, French New Wave, Wong Kar-Wai, zzzz), so much that I kept waiting for the characters to reenact scenes from Midnight Run to break the homage monotony. But hey, I enjoyed this more than Jules and Jim, so I ‘spose the kid’s doing something right. Let’s just wait a few years before we start giving him major prizes.

LIFE DURING WARTIME (dir. Todd Solondz, 2009)

There’s a scene in Todd Solondz’s new film in which a poster of I’m Not There appears on the wall of the college student son of Ciarin Hinds’ paedophile (originally played by Dylan Baker in Happiness, of which LDW in a loose sequel to) during a particularly tense confrontation in the former’s dorm room, shortly after the latter’s release from prison. The scene is probably the film’s emotional centerpiece, but I just couldn’t stop thinking about what that poster was doing there, in such prominence during a key scene in the film. My initial impression was that the it was just an incidental part of the ‘what a hipster’s dorm looks like’ mise-en-scene, but it’s given so much space in the frame during the scene, and I ended up flashing back to Solondz’s own Palindromes’ & the similar use of different actors playing the same characters shared by I’m Not There and decided this was no coincidence, and that the film I’m watching right now is about forgiveness for past mistakes, and I began to suspect that Solondz was literally holding up Haynes’ alleged plagiarism on display for our collective consideration. And then I wondered that if this really was Solondz’s intention, is he ignorant enough to not have seen That Obscure Object of Desire, Bunuel’s 1976 film in which two actresses play the same woman? It’s very well possible that he hasn’t, since his visual style and grasp of cinematic language is rudimentary at best; displaying no awareness of past traditions beyond Woody Allen and maybe Blue Velvet and… wait, where am I?

Such distractions of mine are understandable, there’s not much new that Solondz brings to the table with this serving of sloppy seconds; a fine cast + expectedly sharp dialogue + general watchability aside, it’s difficult to escape the 90’s-hangover quality of the whole affair.

WASTED ON THE YOUNG (dir. Ben C. Lucas, 2010)

There are films that stumble upon something universal through a rigorous concentration on the specificities of their milieu. And then there are films that take a milieu, gloss over its particularities and idiosyncrasies, and attempt to impose a universal statement over the bland, neutered surface. Ben C. Lucas’ admittedly competent-in-most-areas debut is such a film, and might’ve been enjoyable (albeit still offensive and irresponsible in its treatment of school shootings) as a martyrdom fantasy had it been played as camp. Instead, it’s plagued by hamfisted attempts at critical commentary on life in our technology-dominated era, with text messages actually superimposed over the film’s physical spaces, comments from some anonymous social networking site acting like a Greek chorus (complete with like/dislike options!), and a generally over-inflated sense of the elusive ‘zeitgeist’ being captured, that makes Up in the Air look humble by comparison.

It also seems that after years of strictly televisual offerings, the current Aussie cinema has to compensate with an overkill of stylistic bombast (cf. the otherwise excellent Animal Kingdom); rather than being cinematic, this film has the look and feel of an extended anti-binge drinking commercial, authorizedbytheaustraliangovernmentcanberra. I have no doubt that Lucas is a smart guy, and I wish him and his fine cast success with future projects. This film, however, is misbegotten. Ian dislikes this.

UNCLE BOONMEE WHO CAN RECALL HIS PAST LIVES (dir. Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2010)

Upon having my mind gently blown by Syndromes and a Century several years ago, I wondered if it would’ve been as enveloping if I didn’t come in with the foreknowledge that it was based on Apichatpong’s ruminations of how his own parents met. Accordingly, I kept wondering if my initially slightly-less-than-transported experience of Joe’s latest would’ve benefited from knowing beforehand of how sincere his beliefs in reincarnation are. I read a Cannes press interview with him afterwards, and was particularly struck by his admissions of reincarnation as a metaphysical device for the film, one that has correlation with the process of cinema-watching itself, whereby life is ‘preserved’ and in effect reborn before our own eyes. Fleeting references to the political violence and repression of Thailand’s past and present seem to emphasise the need for reverie as a means of redeeming dire circumstances, and the focus on reincarnation could easily represent the need for reform as well.

Reports from Cannes (where the film won the Palme D'or, probably due to Tim Burton picking the 'talking catfish & monkey spirit movie' by default) have emphasised the film's relative accessibility within Weerasethakul's filmography, and this is possibly due to its relatively straightforward progression of events, as well as the fact that the reveries are this time loosely motivated by plot and character (rather than Syndromes or Tropical Malady, where the ruptures occur completely out of the blue). Taken on its own terms, Uncle Boonmee is thoroughly hypnotic if – in my eyes – even more perplexing than Joe’s previous three films (all of which are personal all-time faves). But I’ve found the film more and more moving as I look back on it, without taking the spiritual aspects of the film too literally. In particular, the film’s coda and final scene feels absolutely perfect in the culmination of ideas and motifs introduced earlier, clarifying ‘rebirth’ as something that also occurs moment-to-moment in addition to life-to-life. It can’t be a coincidence that the film ends with three characters watching images on a TV set – continuing a process of regeneration. Or maybe this is all grasping at straws. Uncle Boonmee is another gem from an artist dedicated to capturing the ineffable, so much that words fails me. I shall lick its palm instead.

Hadewijch (dir. Bruno Dumont, 2009)

2010-06-11T07:35:00.000-07:00

One of the most commonly recognised virtues of film festivals is the ability to see heaps of films that will likely never be seen in your town again. The flipside is that, if you’re like me, watching 3-4 films a day can really bring out the fickleness in you. There’s less room for the considered attention and/or reflection that some of the more demanding films deserve (many of which won’t be seen even on inner city arthouse screens), and thus it’s the snap judgement that rules the day. All of which is a convoluted way of saying that after a weekend of thought, I’m disappointed that I initially tore a meager 2/5 rating on my voting slip of Bruno Dumont’s Hadewijch, when after reflection it’s closer to a 3.5. It’s a curiously motivated, slightly cumbersome, but finally haunting film about young Catholic girl Celine, whose fall-in with two young Islamic Arab men after being expelled from her convent for her extreme displays of faith (“you confuse abstinence with martyrdom”, a nun tells her).

Dumont, for the record, is one of the most renowned provocateurs in contemporary world cinema, and has at made one of my favorite films ever with The Life of Jesus, a deeply moving portrait of inextricably linked ennui and racial prejudice amongst the youth of a small French town. Nothing he’s made since has had impressed me nearly as much (including controversial 1999 Palme D’or winner L’Humanite), although Twentynine Palms at least won me over with its sheer nutty audacity. His new film initially struck me as being glib, excessively humorless and abstruse will little purpose, despite Dumont’s expectedly painterly visual prowess and ability to find beauty in the mundane. But after a week of nearly a dozen films seen, it’s the one I’ve been least able to shake off*.

Whether Dumont has anything particularly insightful to say about religious fundamentalism now strikes me as irrelevant. What the film does best is reconciling opposite extremes, and finding parallels in the central united-by-faith relationship between Celine and Nassir. For instance, the interiors of the house of an affluent Parisian family are presented as alien-like as the Arab-populated outskirts of Paris, while two long musical sequences in which the Celine watches a rowdy outdoor rock show at night followed by a Chamber piece at church the next day, are afforded with the same reverence. It’s these repetitions and contrasts that accrue to give Hadewijch a surprising power, that culminates in a daring narrative turn.

After the relationship between Nassir and Celine is taken to its extremes, the film finally ends with an initially perplexing passage, which (if I’m interpreting it correctly) requires not so much a stretch of credibility but rather a leap of faith from the viewer, to snap us out of the passive state of watching a crisis of faith and make us actually experience that crisis, in our engagement with the film itself. Though I’m not entirely convinced with Hadewijch beyond its visual beauty and boldness, it’s a work of deeply sincere idiosyncrasy that clarifies a lot of what I ask for from cinema, more than most resoundingly successful films.

*I wrote this prior to seeing Uncle Boonmee, which I’ll review soon.

Sydney Film Festival

2010-05-25T22:50:00.000-07:00

You're probably already aware of this if your follow me on Facebook or twitter (or, *gasp*, have met me in person), but a few weeks ago I began my duties as a guest blogger for the Sydney Film Festival. Hurrah, my big break! I'll be posting reviews, interviews and other things there over the coming weeks (and some at this blog), but for the meantime here are the posts I've already made:

An interview with Ben C. Lucas on his new film Wasted on the Young

A rundown of the Cinema Visionaries sidebar and Scorsese's film foundation

5 most anticipated films of the festival

Sydney screenings - now 'til the end of May

2010-04-24T21:10:00.000-07:00

Feels like a while since this blog served it's original purpose, huh? Here are a bunch of screenings throughout May that I deem worthy of notice. Lemme know if I've forgetten any!

All at the Chauvel cinematheque: Tod ‘Freaks’ Browning’s The Unholy Three (May 31^st); the Sjostrom/Lon Chaney Jr. flick He Who Gets Slapped (pictured above, 24^th May) which aside from having one of the best titles ever, is also allegedly awesome and impossible to find anywhere; The Penalty (May 17^th), a 1920 silent with this eye-catching plot summary:

A man, who as a boy had his legs needlessly amputated, swears revenge on the surgeon. He has become the master of the San Francisco underworld and contrives to take the surgeon's daughter as hostage in order to force him to graft on new legs - the legs of her fiancée.

…and Rossellini’s Rome, Open City (3^rd May) + the still-not-on-R4 Germany Year Zero (10^th May), arguably the Italian neorealism’s most despairing outcry.

Also at the Chauvel, a self-explanatory series called 80’s Memories, for all yr misbegotten nostalgic cravings. The Return of the Living Dead (”Send… more… cops”) and Breakin’ double bill (30^th Apr, 7pm) being my personal pick of the bunch.

Last and least/most for the Chauvel, The Room is getting a run, every Saturday 10pm until the 29^th of May. Arguably the most nakedly personal movie ever made, for better/worse.

So, Nashville still hasn’t been released on DVD (or VHS!) in this country. Whether you think the film is Altman’s master statement or a quaint, hokey time capsule, this is an appalling fact. Fortunately, it’s screening in 35mm at AGNSW’s Archibald Prize series on 19^th of May (2pm & 7:15pm) and then again on Sun 23^rd of May (2pm). Also part of the series: A 35mm print of Sunset Blvd. on the 26^thand 30^th (same times), and some other readily available titles in the link. And they’re all FREE.

On now and continuing til the 2^nd of May is the German Film Festival (my pix: Haneke’s The White Ribbon & Fatih Akin’s Soul Kitchen, although both get a general release in May... so I say Akin's hard-to-find 1997 feature Short Sharp Shock is a must-see) & the Spanish Film Festival (intriguing-sounding stalker/janitor flick Gigante, and a new Julio Medem flick for the pervs).

Belated update

2010-04-03T04:33:00.000-07:00

Since I've been slacking with updates since my laptop died (right after I promised to update regularly), here're some capsule reviews of a random selection of new films that I've seen since I last posted (not everything I've seen... I heartily recommend FANTASTIC MR. FOX and the soon-to-be-released French Film Festival selection THE FATHER OF MY CHILDREN, but couldn't think of anything to write about them). Here we are:

A SINGLE MAN – Fussily and schematically aestheticised to the max, as one would expect from A Tom Ford Film (framed behind bar-like patterns = HE’S TRAPPED! Sepia-to-regular tones = EMOSHUNAL CONNEKTIONZ!!!) but never less than heartfelt, like a good torch song spoiled by excessive autotune. Also, as suggested by Skins, Nicholas Hoult has evolved from the About a Boy cherub to a horrendous actor, almost cancelling out Firth’s justly-lauded revelation of a performance.

CRAZY HEART – Lovely opening scenes, full of nice spots of visual humor and room from Jeff Bridges to breathe and be his usual awesome self. Then Maggie Gyllenhaal turns up as ‘love interest’, Colin Farrel as ‘all-show-no-soul rival’, then Robert Duvall as ‘Robert Duvall’, and then a bunch of lame subplots, and finally Bridges singing ‘this ain’t no place for the weary kind…’ and dammit he got that right.

UP IN THE AIR - Expectedly watchable but entirely mediocre. A script full of insurance commercial platitudes, family values as a shorthand for ‘finding yourself’, and the misguided belief that there's no narrative dilemma a wistful Elliott Smith montage can't solve. Snoooooore. A few good scenes, mostly involving Clooney & Kendrick - the latter's character was all too recognisable for me, though her resolution was of a piece with the film's neatness and predictability.

PRECIOUS: BASED ON THE NOVEL WITH A LESS OBNOXIOUS TITLE - For all this film's garishness, crassness, sordidness, and awkwardness of tone, I found it a fairly effective immersion into a damaged psyche. Granted, it often flails about queasily trying to achieve that, but I'll take its messiness and lack of good taste over what currently passes for Oscar-friendly filmmaking (in that regard, I'm surprised it's been embraced so warmly). The titular heroine is too flawed and specific a character to allow for audiences to project themselves onto, the ending isn’t so much a note of tacked on uplift as one of well-earned catharsis for her, and the scenes between Precious and her classmates are a spot-on in their depiction of rehabilitation through camaraderie. Deeply flawed, but not the vile work of manipulation that its detractors would lead one to believe.

SHUTTER ISLAND - Works best at literalising the trauma of Dicaprio's character in the form of floridly expressionist B-movie tropes, and the overt artificiality of the whole thing makes the rug-puller ending - which could've been a groaner in another context... perhaps the novel, anyone? - easier to swallow, even somewhat poignant. Many arresting images, enjoyably hammy performances from all, and I think it might even benefit from repeat viewings. Minor Scorsese but (hypothetically) major De Palma.

WILD GRASS - The subject of obsessive romantic love tends to bring out the most erratic sensibilities in major auteurs, and for Resnais this is no exception, as it seems to take place entirely in the same dimension as the dreamscape of Mulholland Drive; a garishly gleaming netherworld of impulsive behaviour and infinite possibility. A folly of a film that makes 99% of other films seem stiff and inert. Part of the French Film Festival, no release date, but apparently it has Australian distribution... I'm guessing because on the surface it resembles an Amelie-esque souffle, when it's actually as playfully weird as some of Resnais' own 60's landmarks like Last Year at Marienbad or Muriel.

ORPHAN - A complete trashterpiece; totally idiotic material played with epic conviction across the board and a keen sense of nightmare logic. Vera Farmiga is much better here than in her inexplicably Oscar-nominated Up in the Air turn. Gonna be keeping an eye on this Jaume Collet-Serra dude, whose sure hand also made the foredoomed House of Wax remake occasionally sublime.

BROKEN EMBRACES –Given my overall indifference to Almodovar (I know, soz), I was pleasantly surprised to find this end up being my favorite of his behind Talk to Her. Never felt the long-ish running time, full of exquisite scenes (Cruz lip-syncing the silent footage of herself, esp.), and its portrait of people living fuller lives through their art is surprisingly haunting.

DEAR JOHN – I will never see this movie.

Best films of 2009

2010-01-01T03:35:00.000-08:00

Last week I submitted a top ten for the Sydney Film Critics poll conducted by Matt Ravier, published here at his blog, along with a few miscellaneous personal highlights and lowlights as an Aussie cinephile. Here's the annotated version of my list, with a few blurbs and links to reviews where applicable.

TOP TEN AUSTRALIAN THEATRICAL PREMIERES:

A Serious Man (Joel Coen, Ethan Coen, USA)

There’s a lot to admire in principle about the Coens’ latest. It’s their most baldly existential film to date, it stars a cast of no-name theatre actors as opposed to bankable stars, it’s set in a milieu rarely seen in cinema (60's midwestern Jewish suburbia; where the bros' were raised), and it features an open-ending that makes No Country For Old Men’s look positively conventional. All the hallmarks of an uncompromising, uncommercial cinema, then. But it’s the particulars that really stick in the mind, from its perfectly judged moments of pathos (the poolside scene ranks alongside the legendary “look into your heart” scene from Miller’s Crossing), Michael Stulhbarg’s exquisitely detailed and phenomenally empathetic lead performance, and a spine-tingling stretch that scores Hendrix’s “Machine Gun” to a rabbi’s anecdote of a dentist finding mysterious Hebrew engravings in the back of a gentile patient’s teeth. The formal brilliance we’ve come to expect from the Coens is here in spades, but it’s the probing discussion of What It All Means that makes A Serious Man a revelation.

Accident (Pou-soi Cheang, Hong Kong)

Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, Sweden)

A masterclass in economic, image-driven storytelling, and the most emotionally charged vampire film since George Romero’s Martin. Still not quite as scary as the thought of what the forthcoming Hollywood remake is going to be like.

The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, USA)

Shamelessly opaque, pretentious & masturbatory? Filled with far too many cute meta-moments? Maybe, but I couldn’t care less, hypnotised as I was by Jarmusch’s immaculate, uhh, control of images (Christopher Doyle should shoot EVERY movie) and music (Boris should score EVERY movie). And really, that’s exactly what the film is a paean to; the pleasures of pure cinema, untainted by the artifice of plot contrivance. Just thinking about it almost makes me wanna walk into the nearest café, and lecture a stranger about narrative being a capitalist construct. Almost.

Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, USA)

Christoph Waltz blah blah blah Not your daddy’s WW2 movie blah blah blah anachronism blah blah blah postmoderism blah blah blah revisionism blah blah blah foot fetishism blah blah blah blah blah blah marry me Melanie Laurent blah blah blah etc etc etc.

Two Lovers (James Gray, USA)

James Gray re-confirms himself as contemporary Hollywood’s answer to Nicholas Ray (no wonder he’s idolized in France more than anywhere else), bringing emotional urgency to his third film in a row to feature Joaquin Phoenix (doing career-best work) as a Brooklyn boy who can't escape his family-designated destiny, with the most depressing ‘happy’ ending since Ray’s Bigger Than Life.

Three Blind Mice (Matthew Newton, Australia)

That actor Matthew Newton’s freewheeling, energetic and wholly entertaining debut as writer/director – for my money, the strongest Aussie film in a strong year for Aussie films – failed to find the audience it deserved, was one of last year’s gravest cinematic injustices. Terrific performances, endlessly likeable, and captures Sydney’s nightlife better than any other film I can think of. Positively begging to find a following on DVD.

Adventureland (Greg Mottola, USA)

The cinematic equivalent of the Replacements’ albums Tim (whose songs feature heavily in the soundtrack), only without the duff tracks. A funny, sincere and poignant film about growing up in 1987, that’s both specific to it’s era and any era.

The Box (Richard Kelly, USA)

Following the calculated cult trainwreck that was Southland Tales, Richard Kelly bites off more than he can chew again, but this time the result is a sci-fi thriller that does a better job at capturing the primal storytelling and kitschy/portentous atmosphere of vintage Twilight Zone better than any other film I can think of. The best kind of mess; resulting from an overdose of ideas and a reckless willingness to risk being risible, in pursuit of the sublime.

Of Time and the City (Terence Davies, UK)

Get past the pomposity of Davies’ narration, and you’ll find a highly effective combination of reverie and history in this maverick filmmaker’s first documentary about life as a Liverpudlian. Scathing, funny, and moving stuff.

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BEST UNRELEASED FILMS

Everyone Else (Maren Ade, Germany)

It's a seemingly slight subject on paper - the perils of doggedly basing your relationships on superficial unconventionalities of behaviour and interaction - but the genius of Maren Ade's screenplay lies in its incisive specificity. It's for this reason that the film doesn't feel Rohmer-esque or Woody Allen-esque or anything-esque, but rather zeroes in on an aspect of human connection that feels fresh to cinematic representation. In fact, saying it's about the 'perils' of a certain kind of behaviour sounds hopelessly reductive. More generally, it's about the difficulties for two people to establish a solid basis or language for their connection, and in turns asks whether a successful relationship needs - or can survive - this sort of reflection. Ade doesn't have her actors conform to a thesis, however; the ever-shifting themes and ideas of the film are conveyed through even their slightest gestures as much as the writing.

Dogtooth (Giorgos Lanthimos, Greece)
Love Exposure (Shion Sono, Japan)
35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, France)
The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, Austria / Germany)
Jerichow (Christian Petzold, Germany)
Julia (Eric Zonka, France)
Face (Tsai Ming-Liang, Taiwan / France)
Katalin Varga (Peter Strickland, Romania / UK)
Martyrs (Pascal Laugier, France / Canada)

PS: Happy new year y'all!

Julia, Martyrs, Somer's Town

2009-12-17T01:24:00.000-08:00

I'll be posting another list soon, this time of the best Aussie threatical releases of 2009. In the meantime, here's a few blurbs on some strong recent straight-to-DVD titles I've seen.

"I don't want anyone to imitate me" John Cassavetes once said, but Erick Zonca apparently didn't listen... and we're all better for it. Zonca's long-awaited follow-up to 1998 arthouse favorite The Dreamlife of Angels isn't another low-key chamber drama, but rather a live-wire response to Cassavetes' 1980 film Gloria - the indie maverick's rare critical and commercial success of his career, maybe in large part because he didn't have as much creative control it over the film as he did with landmark works like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence. I'll admit to not having seen Gloria, but there's nothing in Julia that suggests the alleged commercial calculation of its predecessor; it feels as if Zonca's taking the premise in the more prickly and potentially alienating direction that Cassavates would - or should - have, had he that kind of freedom. As result, the film is an unlikely yet successful Cassavetes pastiche, as Zonca appropriates his master's woozy verite formal style and hypernaturalistic approach to directing actors, with the usually poised Tilda Swinton getting her Gena-Rowlands-freak on, playing her scheming and kidnapping - but unfortunately scatterbrained and perpetually knackered - titular character with the feral desperation of an ritalin-deprived child learning to play a videogame by bashing the controls until he wins out of luck. It's a flailing mess of a film, but completely of a piece with its self-destructive and wildly impulsive subject - it begins with a study of her drunken face in closeup, and the end credits seems to roll the split-second that it seems she's arrived at a point of self-realisation, as if such clarity is too much for the film itself to bear. All this combines for a film whose fascination is strictly of the slow-motion trainwreck variety... but it's fascinating nonetheless.
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Part of the new wave of French extreme horror films (moratorium on 'torture porn', plz?) Martyrs is an utterly deranged film, not only for its boundary-pushing screen violence, but also for its deadly serious rendering of ideas that are so ridiculous, that the film almost edges toward the sublime (Film Freak Central's Walter Chaw suggested it could've been made by a cenobite). I can't say that I took the thing as seriously as it's makers evidently did, but I admire its ballsiness in attempting to depict such a level of torture and suffering, and then asking us to get past our kneejerk moral reactions (ie, that the film indulges in exactly what it sets out to admonish, etc), and - much like the torture process depicted - to work stage by stage until we've reached a state of contemplative awe at the suffering on display. So, OK, if that is the film's raison d'etre then maybe that's not really enough to make it a truly great film rather than simply a provocative one, and certainly for much of the film I was wondering 'do I really need to be watching this?'. But unlike, say, Haneke's Funny Games (another film that almost resists qualification), Laughier respects his audience enough to trust that our cine-bloodlust might come from a deeper place than just excessive uncritical media consumption (no matter how innately retarded the finale's bid for spiritual heft might be), and unlike Haneke's film, you absolutely have to squirm til the very end for its message to register. It's also pretty much first-rate in just about every formal area, and the two young actresses are superb.
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When I saw Shane Meadows' Somer's Town at the Sydney Film Festival a few years ago, I predicted its running time (a scant 68 minutes) would mean it'd probably just turn up as a DVD extra on Meadows' next 'major' film, but for my money it's his best work to date; simply for the reason that he resists forcing any semblance of narrative contrivance and concentrates his eye on naturalistic, beautifully observed and often hilarious scenes of quiet character interaction. Maybe British cinema has already seen one too many testaments to the hopes and dreams of the working class, but when they're this funny and bittersweet, I'm not complaining. Thomas Turgoose also proves This is England wasn't the fluke of a young non-professional; he's an astonishingly natural comic actor with range, in the Simon Pegg mode.

'COS EVERYONE'S DOIN' IT

2009-12-10T20:34:00.000-08:00

Gonna kickstart this blog for the summer with a top 100 of the decade list. Have asterisked stuff that isn't available on R4 DVD (save for films that had a theatrical release here recently and haven't made it to DVD yet).

1. Mulholland Dr. (David Lynch, 2001)
2. The Son (Dardenne bros, 2002)
3. Punch-Drunk Love (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2002)
4. Blissfully Yours (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2002)*
5. Eureka (Shinji Aoyama, 2000)*
6. Zodiac (David Fincher, 2007)
7. Oasis (Lee Chang-Dong, 2002)*
8. Reflections of Evil (Damon Packard, 2002)*
9. Cache (Michael Haneke, 2005)
10. Last Days (Gus Van Sant, 2005)
11. All or Nothing (Mike Leigh, 2002)
12. The New World (Terrence Malick, 2005)
13. Yi Yi (Edward Yang, 2000)
14. A.I. (Steven Spielberg, 2001)
15. Tokyo Sonata (Kiyoshi Kurosawa, 2008)*
16. Memories of Murder (Joon-ho Bong, 2003)
17. Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003)
18. Distant (Nuri Bilge Ceylan, 2003)*
19. Before Sunset (Richard Linklater, 2004)
20. I Don’t Want to Sleep Alone (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2006)
21. There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson, 2007)
22. Tropical Malady (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2004)
23. In the Mood For Love (Wong Kar-wai, 2000)
24. George Washington (David Gordon Green, 2000)
25. Talk to Her (Pedro Almodovar, 2002)
26. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu, 2005)
27. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry, 2004)
28. Love Exposure (Sion Sono, 2008)*
29. Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)*
30. Let the Right One In (Tomas Alfredson, 2008)
31. Import Export (Ulrich Seidl, 2007)
32. Accident (Pou-Soi Cheang, 2009)*
33. Hunger (Steve McQueen, 2008)
34. Friday Night (Claire Denis, 2002)*
35. The Limits of Control (Jim Jarmusch, 2009)
36. Spirited Away (Hayao Miyazaki, 2001)
37. Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003)
38. The Man Without a Past (Aki Kaurismaki, 2002)
39. Femme Fatale (Brian De Palma, 2002)
40. Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron, 2006)
41. WALL-E (Andrew Stanton, 2008)
42. A Serious Man (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2009)
43. Dogtooth (Yorgos Lanthimos, 2009)*
44. Head-On (Fatih Akin, 2004)
45. Dumplings (Fruit Chan, 2004)
46. Code Unknown (Michael Haneke, 2000)
47. Regular Lovers (Philippe Garrel, 2005)*
48. The Wayward Cloud (Tsai Ming-Liang, 2005)*
49. Mutual Appreciation (Andrew Bujalski, 2005)
50. Syndromes and a Century (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, 2006)*
51. No Country For Old Men (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2007)
52. The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson, 2001)
53. L’intrus (Claire Denis, 2004)*
54. Flight of the Red Balloon (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2007)
55. Ballast (Lance Hammer, 2008)*
56. Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001)
57. Inglourious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino, 2009)
58. My Winnipeg (Guy Maddin, 2007)
59. Spider (David Cronenberg, 2002)
60. Gerry (Gus Van Sant, 2002)
61. 35 Shots of Rum (Claire Denis, 2008)*
62. Morvern Callar (Lynne Ramsay, 2002)
63. Forbidden Lies (Anna Broinowski, 2007)
64. Somer’s Town (Shane Meadows, 2008)
65. Kung-fu Hustle (Stephen Chow, 2004)
66. Café Lumiére (Hou Hsiao-hsien, 2003)*
67. The Day I Became a Woman (Marzieh Makhmalbaf, 2000)*
68. Little Otik (Jan Svankmajer, 2000)
69. Millennium Actress (Satoshi Kon, 2001)
70. Hot Rod (Akiva Schaffer, 2007)
71. You Can Count on Me (Kenneth Lonergan, 2000)
72. Revanche (Gotz Spielmann, 2008)
73. The White Ribbon (Michael Haneke, 2009)
74. Final Destination 2 (David R. Ellis, 2003)
75. Old Joy (Kelly Reichhardt, 2006)
76. Minority Report (Steven Spielberg, 2002)
77. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki, 2004)
78. The Man Who Wasn’t There (Joel & Ethan Coen, 2001)
79. The House of Mirth (Terence Davies, 2000)
80. Sparrow (Johnnie To, 2008)*
81. 24 Hour Party People (Michael Winterbottom, 2002)
82. Superbad (Greg Motolla, 2007)
83. Takeshis’ (Takeshi Kitano, 2005)
84. The White Diamond (Werner Herzog, 2004)
85. Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten (Julien Temple, 2007)
86. Adventureland (Greg Motolla, 2009)
87. Two Lovers (James Gray, 2008)
88. Dead Man’s Shoes (Shane Meadows, 2004)
89. The Sun (Alexander Sokurov, 2005)*
90. Lady Chatterley (Pascale Ferran, 2006)
91. A Guide to Recognising Your Saints (Dito Montiel, 2006)
92. Chopper (Andrew Dominik, 2000)
93. Into the Wild (Sean Penn, 2007)
94. Gone Baby Gone (Ben Affleck, 2007)
95. Monsters, inc. (Pete Docter, 2001)
96. The Holy Girl (Lucretia Martel, 2004)*
97. A History of Violence (David Cronenberg, 2005)
98. Wolf Creek (Greg McLean, 2005)
99. Grizzly Man (Werner Herzog, 2005)
100. 2046 (Wong Kar-wai, 2004)

REVIEW: 'Accident' (dir. Soi Cheang, 2009)

2009-09-30T00:18:00.000-07:00

Accident has a premise that’s fairly irresistible; in short, it’s The Conversation meets the Final Destination series, where the melancholic alienation of the former is mixed with the gleefully sadistic absurdity of the latter. Concerning a ragtag bunch of hitmen who stage deaths to look like accidents, it focuses on the fallout of one member (Louis Koo), still grieving over the loss of his wife in a car accident, and driven into a manic state of delusion and paranoia that someone’s trying to bring their group down, after one of their own staged-accidents goes awry and kills one of their own. It’s a testament to director Soi Cheang’s skill that Accident posits the idea that an actual human being(s) could perpetrate the kind of elaborate, Mousetrap™-style accidental deaths played for lulz in the aforementioned series, while still remaining an utterly dignified and even moving piece of work.

It’s best not to read Accident too literally; Cheang stages his several main set-pieces so elaborately, with such a rigorous orchestration of movement, image, color, sound and music that the instrinsic ridiculousness of these scenes only becomes apparent upon later contemplation (nonwithstanding an instance poor CGI during an otherwise stunning final scene). This is - to indulge in some possible hyperbole - the most cinematically accomplished and stylish genre exercise since Brian De Palma’s 70’s/80’s heyday, and perhaps even taken as a purely non-narrative, formalist piece, it still works like gangbusters. This isn’t to suggest that Accident is a vacuous exercise in style; though the plotting is basic, the film nonetheless becomes a poignant metaphor for the struggle to impose order upon an order-less existence, as our antihero tries to play god and enact his own personal revenge on the forces he can’t control.

In its distillation of the professional-criminal-loner archetype, Accident brings to mind Jim Jarmusch’s recent, much-loathed The Limits of Control. But as much as I admire Jarmusch’s film, Accident never breaks a sweat in its efforts to be About Something; it’s an existential crime flick that, like its protagonist, stays rigorously loyal to the codes and conventions of the genre, and accrues its depth almost by… accident.

Accident is still playing at Hoyts Broadway and Mandarin Centre, so hop to it!

PSYCHOTRONIC ALERT! 'Reflections of Evil', more Kuchar bros, Russ Meyer

2009-09-14T04:51:00.000-07:00

Maybe I should just this retitle this blog to 'Sydney Cult Film Happenings'? Hopefully we'll be back to (relatively) normal next week.

Mu Meson archives, Wednesday the 16th: For those who have seen/will see It Came From Kuchar (see two posts below), check out the Kuchar brothers shorts and enjoy a night of some of the most hysterical, adorable, creative and uncalculated works of pop-art that the cinema has produced.

Chauvel Cinematheque, Monday the 21st: My personal most anticipated film event of the year: Damon Packard's Reflections of Evil. Having yet to be mind-raped by this notorious underground epic, I'll just post a link to Packard's Dawn of an Evil Millennium, and let you know what you're getting into with this excerpt from Bill Gibron's ecstatic review:

"If you don't understand the lines and forms in a Pollack painting, if you fail to grasp the connections and themes in free-form jazz, if David Lynch's short films leave you perplexed and pained, you will not embrace this movie's entertainment value. Packard is playing on an irritated ethereal plane unlike any other. His brilliance is in the ability to recall the past perfectly, while making it mesh within a post-modern isolation and anger. Certain phrases that have come to define our modern life ("I will kill you," "You don't want to f*ck with me") are repeated incessantly, spoken by gang members, hobos, cops, and everyday citizens. Packard's character is on the verge of an all-encompassing breakdown, a man battling for a stake in his own sanity. Some of the material here is darkly disturbing. Other parts are ludicrous and hilarious. Between Bob's battles with his abusive grandmother (who refers to her overweight grandson as "disgusting" so often you think she's suffering from some manner of mental vapor lock), and his confrontation with the hostile populace of L.A., you don't know whether to laugh, cry, or just shut the goddamn DVD player off."

Chauvel General: Russ Meyer season kicked last Friday at the Chauvel with Beneath the Valley of the Ultravixens. An anamoly in his career, Ultravixens is notable for its sobering look at the harsher realities of 'liberated' America in the 1970's. LOL! Made you look. Vixen (1968) is up this Friday, with three more every week on that day for the next month (.)(.) (.)(.) (.)(.)

Birth of a Nation, Sydney Underground Film Festival & AGNSW's Silk Ikats Road program

2009-09-06T23:32:00.000-07:00

D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation plays at the Chauvel Cinematheque next Monday, 6:30pm. Maybe I'll finally get around to it this time. Maybe...

A festival so cool that it has an NSFW program, the annual Sydney Undergound Film Festival kicks off on Thursday night and ends Sunday night with a party and awards ceremony and all sorts of cool shit. I already wrote about the excellent It Came From Kuchar below, but there's a few other highlights, including a revival screening of John Waters' Pink Flamingos, complete with the scratch'n'sniff odorama cards for the full sensory experience as Waters intended, Sundance hit Anywhere USA, as well as a cavalcade of shorts and more oddball goodies. Site here

For history buffs and fans of sepia-toned Russian langour alike, the Scorsese-presented and largely unseen Genhis Khan saga The Fall of Otrar plays as part of the Art Gallery of NSW's Silk Ikats Road program on Wednesday the 16th at 2pm and 7:15pm, as well as on the 20th at 2pm. Much good ink has been spilt about this behemoth of a film, but the most striking endorsement I could find came from a metacritic comments section of all places, courtesy of a one 'Yoon Min C.':

"Even hailing this epic masterpiece as one of the greastest historical films doesn't do it justice. The film is like an archaeological find in central asia coming to life, as though cracked and crumbling artifacts, exposed again to sweepng wind and lit by the sun, are unleashing the spirits of the past. It's beyond authentic, it's near documentary in depicting a bygone era and lost civilization. Gritty, ferocious, awesome, and booming as spectacle; and complex and fascinating in its re-creation and speculations about medieval diplomacy and politics. A movie that drags us thru the mud of battle and defeat to the high heavens of almighty power of the Khan, there's nothing else like it. Try to imagine Andrei Rublev crossed with 13th Warrior and you might get an inkling, but only an inkling."

More details about the program, which runs until October 11th, here.

MUST-SEE SYDNEY SCREENINGS: 'Dogtooth' and 'It Came From Kuchar'

2009-08-31T06:56:00.000-07:00

"Watching "Dogtooth" was one of the strangest experiences I've ever had. I have honestly never seen any other film like it. Sometimes hysterical, sometimes shockingly intense. It is a hypnotic trip that displays brilliant originality and borderlines pure insanity. In my humble opinion, it is a film that should be watched by every single person, for the experience alone."

"Please trust me on this: I am not a prude, I am not easily shocked, and I enjoy a "mind workout" when seeing festival films. But put simply, this movie should not have been made."

-IMDb user comments

It’s been a month since Dogtooth blew my mind at the Melbourne International Film Festival, and scenes and images from it have been replaying endlessly in my head in that time. For that reason alone I say it’s essential viewing, and that you should check it out when it screens at 9pm on Tuesday the 15th as part of the Greek Film Festival program at Palace Norton St. – it might get picked up by an adventurous Aussie distributor, but I wouldn’t count on it. As a few reviews I've read have noted, it’s best to go in cold and cease reading beyond this first paragraph, although I’d warn cat-lovers and those offended by explicit sex to stay the hell away. This is a first-class provocation, and in a year where Michael Haneke has made the closest thing to a middlebrow period piece he could possibly muster (while still remaining Michael Haneke), and Lars von Trier’s riling skills have transformed into to eyeroll-worthy self-parody, Yorgos Lanthimos has more than picked up the slack.

The film concerns a family’s parents playing a cruel and unusual game of big brother on their children, who have lasted until their adult years confined exclusively within the walls of their home, under a system of control that eventually proves fatal. The opening shot is of a tape recorder, reading out a series of misleading word definitions to said adult-children: “excursion” now means something to the effect of ‘solid property’, and so forth. The bizarrely modified language is supposed to pre-emptively quell their curiosity about a world worth exploring beyond the walls of their house, as well as eradicate any possible fears that may complicate the sanitised view of the world they’ve been indoctrinated with. However, the father’s decision to bring home a woman to satisfy the son’s sexual urges sets off a chain of events that upsets the order in the family, in increasingly queasy and absurdly funny ways.

Heightening the tension is Lanthimos’ stellar use of fixed-frame compositions (ala Tsai Ming-Liang or Roy Andersson); of course, there’s nothing new about this as a visual strategy for depicting detached zombified characters, or as a source of deadpan humour, but these seemingly arbitrary compositions not only establish a suitably off-kilter visual language for the film’s utterly singular world, but this simultenously heightened yet unemphatic visual banality generates near-unbearable suspense as well as stasis. And it must be said that this film is frickin’ hilarious if you’re a little sick in the head like I am.

The only thing holding me back from lurving Dogtooth is the quibble that arises from any cinematic provocation; that is, the question of whether there’s anything going on beneath the bluster. For one, the entire scenario is extremely far-fetched, and – with its nameless characters and unexplained histories – is best read allegorically, but do we really need another ‘climate of fear’ parable after the last ten years of cinema has more than exhausted that theme? More fascinating is that, for all its grotesquerie and sadism, the film contains an unmistakably humanistic undercurrent: in the early stages there is an act of utterly clinical prostitution, but the film ends with one of tender mutual affection, and the message of the film might as well be reduced to something as corny as ‘love is the only thing that can’t be un-learned’. But it’s the imaginatively effed-up ways it arrives on that note which makes it register so indelibly.

TRAILER

And some more weirdness, but this time more digestible. Two fascinating and loveable characters (avant-camp filmmakers Mike and George Kuchar, best known for their riotous dissection of artistic ambition Hold Me While I’m Naked) in a doco that wisely lets the assortment of interviewees (Atom Egoyan, Guy Maddin, and, natch, John Waters among the devoted) and film clips speak for itself. Both filmmakers were big names from the 60’s avant-garde, but their worship of OTT camp and melodrama, displayed in hundreds of DIY-to-the-maxx shorts and a few feature films, separated them from the more high-minded likes of Brakhage, Snow, Frampton, et al. Rather than camp with an experimental sensibility, their films are more like camp that’s pushed to such a ridiculous extreme that it can only qualify under the blanket term of ‘avant-garde’. Not a revelatory doco like Crumb - but in the same ballpark of studies about American fringe art, and just oodles of fun to watch.

Screening as both part of QueerDoc (Dendy Newtown, 7pm Tues 15th) and The Sydney Underground Film Festival (Factory Theatre, Marrickville, 6:30pm Sun 13th)

Jeanne Dielman, 23 Quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (Chantal Akerman, 1975)

2009-08-23T22:01:00.000-07:00

In the early stages of Jeanne Dielman, we see a light flickering from an unspecified source on the walls of the titular character’s apartment. At first glance, it could be the headlights of a car passing outside the window, but the longer we spend time in this space, and the longer the pattern of flickering persists, it becomes clear that it’s the light of a sign outside – an altogether less human source, that will become part of the environment of routine, triviality and inevitability that leads to Jeanne’s psychological deterioration over the course of the hypnotically gruelling 3+ hours we spend with her.

The first words of dialogue uttered by her are an order: to her teenage son, she asks him not read at the dinner table. The discipline she imposes on herself carries over to him as well. The two are – to borrow a chestnut – far away, yet close; most touchingly displayed when they converse guilelessly but distantly about topics like sex and their family’s history before bed. Their dinners involve them eating mechanically together, each collecting and consuming their spoonfuls of food in a comically staccato fashion that recalls separate pistons of train wheels joining in motion momentarily, before spinning again out of sync. Her encounters with her clients as a prostitute take place offscreen, transpiring in the time between a jump cut from the corridor in the afternoon daylight to evening darkness. Art cinema has a history of actively unerotic sex scenes as an illustration of human incompatibility, but Akerman upstages that device by simply not showing them at all, as if Jeanne’s mundane routines register more vividly. Though ostensibly a feminist film, the men in the film are not vilified – Akerman is not creating a polemic so much as intense empathy with the quietly oppressed women that Jeanne serves as an avatar for.

Akerman’s greatest coup is reinvigorating all the dubious virtues that are traditionally associated with minimalist cinema, as well as adding a few of her own. A sudsy dish appearing on the drying rack, Jeanne dropping the shoe polisher while scrubbing, leaving the lid of the cash dish off, and other blips in the various routines perform as substitutes for the hoarier shorthands of horror that we associate with narrative cinema. Akerman not only succeeds in lulling us into a state of hypnosis before unnerving us with the slightest tweak of Jeanne’s routine, but also in developing an intense alertness in the viewer that stays long after the film finishes.

Though the film flirts with familiarity at time, alternately recalling Polanski's Repulsion and Antonioni's Red Desert, it is a singular experience that never feels like a Warhol-ian formalist stunt (which is sounds like on paper). There is a perverse sensual pleasure to be had from the accumulation of repetitions and differences that are presented to us. Akerman understands the concept of routine as alternately a thing of comfort as well as resignation from life’s more edifying-if-risky endeavors (Jeanne explains to her son that she never wants to adjust to a new man after the death of her husband), and for a while the film is something of a game of ‘spot the difference’, before it becomes harrowing.

For all of Akerman’s formal rigor/precision, there is also a great deal of willful sloppiness in her filmmaking. Boom mic errors abound, cameras are reflected in the myriad of shiny surfaces (kettles, cabinet glasses, etc) on display, while passer-by’s can be seen in the street scenes looking distractingly into the camera. The easiest defense of such uncharacteristic errors is that it’s a Brechtian distancing tactic, but Akerman has already replaced drama with experiential empathy, so there is nothing to be distanced from. Rather, by having no pretense toward separating the ontological world from the film’s diegesis, Akerman creates the sense of Jeanne moving through her routines defiantly as well as delusionally, a performer going through the motions in every sense.

It could be said that Akerman shows a relative lack of imagination by having Jeanne resort to murder as the logical outcome of her psychological deterioration. But this thudding inevitability is part of the point. By the time we see a blood-stained Jeanne in the film’s final shot, as she collects herself at the dinner table. Seyrig open and closes her eyes, bobs her head up and down as if in a voodoo trance, and we are similarly left reeling, contemplating her actions in relation to the preceding, and held in suspense as we wait for something (a doorbell ring?) to awake her from her state of mania… needless to say, it never happens.

Til 30/8

2009-08-23T21:36:00.001-07:00

Been a bit busy recently, so I haven't updated, but here's a few free-to-air TV screenings to look out for:

On ABC, one that gets played a lot but I always seem to miss: Richard Fleischer's hour-long suspenser Follow Me Quietly (1949), which has this as its plot summary: "A mysterious killer, known only as The Judge, kills anyone he considers worthless." And then on Sunday (Monday morning); Mark Robson's 1943 RKO occult-goth-noir The Seventh Victim (pictured above), which I've seen numerous times and gets creepier each time - it's the kind of film that can seem utterly banal if you aren't on its wavelength... a real one-off classic horror film that ranks alongside Carnival of Souls and Let's Scare Jessica to Death for its inimitable mood of antique creepiness.

Chauvel Cinematheque, AGNSW, Ophuls finally on DVD, TV

2009-08-14T19:54:00.000-07:00

Monday's 6:30pm Chauvel C inematheque screening is of Kurosawa's whatdoesitalladdupto classic Ikiru; a perfect opportunity for you stragglers to discover it, and for me to post that above poster.

The Art Gallery of NSW's Intensely Dutch Films program goes out on a bang with one of my absolute favorite films ever; George Sluizer's 1988 cerebral suspense classic Spoorloos [The Vanishing] (not to be confused with the Bridges/Bullock remake that Sluizer made in '93). It's free, so if you haven't seen this most thoughtful and haunting of modern thrillers, then you owe it to yourself to check it out when it screens on Wednesday the 19th at 2pm and 7:15pm, and a repeat on Sunday the 23rd at 2:15pm.

Great DVD news: Madman's heroic Director's Suite label has released the first Ophuls film(s) to get a R4 release: Madame De... and Le Plaisir, as well as two lesser-known Godard's; 1964's Une Femme Mariée and 1968's Le Gai Savoir (The Joy of Learning). All come with Adrian Martin commentaries - ensuring that I'll be doing the unimaginable - watching an entry from Godard's post-1967 twice in a row.

On SBS, Tuesday night at 10pm - a great double bill of Forbidden Lie$ followed by Jun Ichikawa's adaptation of Haruki Murakami's Tony Takitani at midnite.

Canadian/Russian fests

2009-08-14T19:02:00.000-07:00

The annual Russian Resurrection begins on Friday the 21st at the Chauvel, with it's usual equal devotion to new films and a grab-bag retrospective of older films with no apparent theme. Have to admit I drew a blank when reading through the list of films screened, but I'll probably make it to the Kazakh steppes-set Wild Field (inevitably 'this year's Tulpan!') after a glowing write-up in the latest issue of Real Time, but mostly because OMG THOSE GORGEOUS GORGEOUS PLATEAUS.

Going back to mah roots (Halifax FTW). On Sunday the 22rd at Dendy Opera Quays and a few other venues, the ever-sexy Possible Worlds Canadian Film Festival begins a 4 day run, screening a short but diverse lineup of films, including Atom Egoyan's alleged return-to-form Adoration, street-philosophy doco Examined Life (feat. Slavoj Zizek, Cornel West, Judith Butler and others), WW1 flick Passchendaele, and other mini-events - including something called Darryl's Hard Liquor and Porn Festival.

The Milk of Sorrow, Aug 9th, 3pm

2009-08-08T06:37:00.000-07:00

Probably a bit late with this, but I should've mentioned that the Berlin Golden Bear winner of this year - The Milk of Sorrow (dir. Claudia Llosa) is getting a one-off screening at the Chauvel tomorrow. I missed it on my recent trip to the Melbourne Film fest, but it's reportedly a must-see, and should deserve far better than its designation as 'the potato-vagina movie', which makes it sound batshit-insane, when it's actually an "incisive, carefully observed" film, and that "As potentially sensational as the film's subject matter may be, Llosa treats the material with an appropriate restraint" (Andrew Schenker, Slant Magazine).

More details here.

til 16/8 (Mu Meson / AGNSW additions)

2009-08-08T00:51:00.000-07:00

In my previous post, I asked where would Sydneysiders go to see bizarro obscurities after Brett Garten was relieved of his duties as the curator of the Chauvel's cinematheque; a question that was far more rhetorical than it should've been. It reminded me of how often I take Annandale's Mu Meson archives for granted, probably considering they play something every few nights and frequently repeat their programs... I haven't seen any of the films this week, but showing tonight is "a rare screening of Kim Jong Il's amazing giant monster movie "Pulgasari" - commissioned by the glorious leader himself using a kidnapped director and lead actress", and on the 16th is a double bill of evil cat movies, which should require no further endorsement for the psychotronically inclined.

At the Art Gallery of NSW, the 'Intensely Dutch Films' program is on its last stretch, with children's film Little Maria screening on Sunday the 9th at 2pm, but the main attraction is Alex van Warmerdam's acclaimed surreal black comedy De Noordelingen (Northerners), screening at both 2pm and 7:15pm on Wednesday the 12th and again on Sunday the 16th at 2pm. All Gallery screenings are free.

'til 16/08/09

2009-08-07T07:24:00.000-07:00

NIGHT OF THE DEMON (Jacques Torneur, 1957) – Chauvel Cinematheque, Mon 10th Aug, 6:30PM
NIGHT OF THE HUNTER / THE HUNGER – Chauvel, Fri 14th Aug, 7:PM
COME DRINK WITH ME (King Hu, 1967) – SBS, Sat 15th Aug, 1:05AM
THE BAMBOO BLONDE (Anthony Mann, 1946) – ABC, Fri 14th Aug, 2:15AM

There was a lot of commotion earlier this year when Brett Garten was told his duties as the curator of Chauvel’s cinematheque were no longer needed – where else would Sydneysiders go to see loony 50’s educational films, paranoid UFO documentaries, as well as genre obscurities and lost auteur classics? It seemed for a moment that the Chauvel had sold out or something, but Samuel Fielder has been doing a bang-up job at picking up the slack. Leaning more towards the canonical (Dreyer, Bresson, Fassbinder, Herzog and other have already been represented so far) rather than Garten’s proclivity for zany dust-gatherers, Fielder is nonetheless no highbrow purist, as some of his upcoming selections should attest. This week’s screening is of Jacques Torneur’s Night of the Demon is a must; it’s often regarded as Torneur’s best among his illustrious horror efforts (Cat People, I Walked With a Zombie and The Leopard Man among them), and the film has never had a DVD or VHS release in this country. With Torneur’s unbeatable noir Out of the Past fresh in the memories of Cinematheque attendees after being screened on Monday, Night of the Demon should hold up as an interesting point of comparison and proof of the malleability of Torneur’s expressionistic mastery across different genres. Don't forget to watch Chris Fujiwara's video essay on the film afterwards.

On Friday at the Chauvel is a double header as part of the ‘Savage Psychedelic Nights’ series: one of the scant justifications for Tony Scott’s existence, 1983’s The Hunger, followed by Charles Laughton’s towering Night of the Hunter. The latter usually invites snickers from cynical modern audiences, so be ready with something to throw at ‘em.

TV

On SBS, don’t miss King Hu’s wildly entertaining Come Drink With Me (1:05am, Fri/Sat)– a classic of the wuxia genre, with spry pacing, a strong – nay, badass – female lead, and the requisite virtuoso martial arts scenes, as one would expect from Hu (or at least, you should expect now).

On the ol’ ABC, Anthony Mann’s largely unseen screwball comedy The Bamboo Blonde is showing at 2:15AM Thursday/Friday. From the ABC TV guide synopsis: “A nightclub singer is promoted when a likeness of her face is painted on a WWII bomber that goes on to sink Japanese battleships and down several enemy planes”.

Intro.

2009-08-07T05:10:00.001-07:00

Greetings, non-existent readership! My name's Ian Barr. I'm a loyal cinephile based in Sydney, currently disillusioned by the oxymoronic dimensions which the term 'film culture' takes on in my city. I won't claim to be the #1 authority on all cinematic matters (Matt Ravier & Lynden Barber are doing a fine job at that, to name a few), but this blog should hopefully serve as a guide to what's on - Sydney cinema screenings/fests/exhibitions, as well as DVD releases and even a TV guide for the free-to-air gems - late night ABC, in particular, is something of a haven for fans of vintage auteur Hollywood, with little-seen Ray, Ophuls, Preminger, De Toth and others popping up regularly in late night slots. It'll be tailored mostly to what I perceive as essential notices for cinephiles rather than simply what I'm interested in; so even if I have no need to see 2001 again on the big screen, or if I'm not keen enough on Truffaut to see a rare one at the Chauvel, I'll still report it. On the other hand, I don't think I'll need to let y'all know that Inglorious Basterds is coming out soon, so notices of mainstream releases will be kept to a minimum. Email me if you see anything worthy of attention - I sure as hell won't leave out underground/gallery exhibitions.

I might post the occasional review as well. Who knows. This could even be the last post here. Fingers crossed that it ain't!

-ian