Cane Toad Warrior

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

2012-01-30T03:27:00.000-08:00

After eight big movies and seven even bigger books, the Harry Potter franchise finally draws to a close with this epic destroyer of a film. No one is safe in this installment, major characters die all over the place, Hogwarts is nearly obliterated, and even Harry seems destined for the chop. Director David Yates pulls out all the stops to make this one count, everything he held back from in the past (such as the muted climax of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince) gets let loose in this grand finale. As much as I felt let down by film seven, I have to say that Yates really delivers on the final film - Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 is a worthy finish to the series.

The mystical and atmospheric beginning is more than a little remniscent of The Lord of the Rings. I think I'll let it slide though, the pomp and seriousness of it seems justified in the wrapping up of eight big films.
The main set piece that I've been hanging out for since I read the book is the raid on Gringotts Bank. The shackled dragon is awesome realised, even better than I imagined, and I'm glad they got across how sad its predicament was.
Helena Bonham-Carter does a terrific job of playing Hermione-playing-Bellatrix (for the scene where Hermione uses transmogrification to turn into Bellatrix). You can tell she's taken great care to mimic both Emma Watson and the idea of Emma Watson trying to mimic her. Complicated but cool!
However, while we're on the subject of transmogrification, why is it that no one ever suspects Harry, Ron and Hermione of not being who they appear to be? The amount of times that they use transmogrification throughout the series suggests that it's fairly easy to do, so why does no one in the wizarding world ever expect it?
The return to Hogwarts is very welcome. It feels like such a familiar place, and as a fan of the films it's hard not to get attached to it. I also enjoyed the wartime feel they gave to the place, with the clandestine radio broadcasts and Snape's reign of oppression.
It's also great to see McGonagall back, her scenes during the re-taking of Hogwarts are quite stirring and Maggie Smith steals these moments and seems to be having a lot of fun doing it. It was also strange yet satisfying to see her interact with Harry as an equal.
Also, hooray for Neville Longbottom, the true hero of Harry Potter. After his small appearances in the last few films it's a relief to see him have more than a few moments of glory.
I was surprised to see Sprout appear as she hasn't been seen since since Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. It would've been nice if they'd gotten John Cleese back as well, but I guess we can't be too picky about this kind of stuff. I'm amazed that Timothy Spall hung around for all the films as Wormtail, he only really got some decent lines in Prisoner of Azkaban and Goblet of Fire, after that he was just in the background a lot.
Aberforth Dumbledore should've been played by someone more famous. Dumbledore was such a big character in the series (arguably the 'biggest' adult character), and so many of the supporting characters in Harry Potter were played by well-known and respected British character actors. It seems a shame to miss an opportunity like this, they could've cast any number of ageing British thespians in the role.
Of course, the real reason to watch the last Harry Potter film is to see the final stand at Hogwarts. This is a full scale battle, unlike anything else we've seen in any of the other Harry Potter films, and it goes for about half the entire film (if not longer). It's a real spectacle. Top notch stuff.

It's hard to concieve that something as jolly and fun as Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone could lead to the 'end of days' seen in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, but such is the course of these films. It's quite gory and disturbing in parts (such as the blood-covered Voldemort-baby, looking for all the world like a living abortion), and I definitely wouldn't let young kids watch it. It's a real journey too, watching Harry, Ron and Hermione grow from these little squirts into fully-realised adults, embarking on a range of exhilerating adventures involving all manner of monsters and magical maladies. Much like The Lord of the Rings, I think it's the best possible translation they could've made for the big screen. Sure, there are a few little things that could've been done better (mainly in the first two films), but the level of quality between the later films is pretty hard to fault. Bravo, and bring on the remake in ten to fifteen years time.

DIRECTOR: David Yates
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alan Rickman, David Bradley, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Helen McCrory, Nick Moran, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, David Thewlis, Natalie Tena, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Clemence Poesy, John Hurt, Evanna Lynch, Ciarin Hinds, Emma Thompson, Gary Oldman

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1.
- After Potter... Emma Watson appeared in My Week With Marilyn and The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Daniel Radcliffe made The Woman in Black, and Ruper Grint appeared in Into the White. Director David Yates followed up his four-film Potter stint with a WWII drama called St. Nazaire.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Art Direction, Best Makeup and Best Visual Effects.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Make-Up, Best Sound, Best Production Design and Best Special Visual Effects.

Moneyball

2012-01-29T01:42:00.000-08:00

Ah, America... the land of free enterprise, where money prevails over sportsmanship and fair play. A country where salary caps in sport are considered downright unAmerican. So, if you have a two-bit baseball club with about as much cash as an online businessman, how can you beat that? Moneyball tells the amazing true story of a small fry baseball club who dared to think outside the box in order to compete with the big boys. You don't need to be a sportsfan to appreciate Moneyball, in a way it's more about the talent in recognising groundbreaking ideas and the basic inequity that underlies the Great American Dream. It's also about the unexpected impact of information technology on something that's defiantly rigged in favour of the successful, making the film feel a bit like Jerry Maguire meets The Social Network.

Billy (Brad Pitt) is a team manager lumbered with the Oakland A's, a low budget team with a long history of underperforming. Frustration leads Billy to begin looking at the bigger underlying problem - the disparity between team budgets in America's first grade baseball comp, which causes some friction between himself and the rest of the club's administration. Quite by chance, Billy crosses paths with Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), a college economics graduate who has devised a way to to beat the system by using computers and statistics. Together they try to overcome the resistance of the old guard and, as expected, it's quite a struggle.

I know it sounds mildly cliched in the way that all sports films do, but there are a few points of difference in Moneyball. These two guys (Billy and Peter) get together and make these great new ideas happen, and who isn't on board with that? Who doesn't like to see that? Sometimes having a great idea isn't enough on its own, you also need someone who can recognise a talented individual and give them the chance to shake things up. This carries on through to every aspect of the film, it's a movie about embracing change. The Oakdale A's change the way they play the game, Billy even changes the way he personally deals with people by allowing himself to get closer to them, daring to change his own rules to give himself that chance at success. It sounds dorky I know, but this film is a winning piece of motivational propaganda without the drawback of it being obviously motivational.

That aside, I don't know if it's exactly Oscar-winning material. This film... it's not a fillet mignon or a delicate lobster dish, it's more like roast beef and potatoes. You'll feel really good eating it, but it's not something that will be remembered for a long time. There's a certain satisfaction that comes when the naysayers in this film are essentially proven wrong, but I don't know if Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill really do anything intense or different enough to vindicate their Oscar nominations. Hill seems to just be getting by on the novelty of not playing an asshole for once, and with Pitt there's always that little bit of distance in his performance that he never seems to be able to shake with leading roles. He doesn't quite connect emotionally with the audience (at least not with this viewer) and I'd argue that he was a lot better recently in The Tree of Life. In Moneyball he seems to be setting himself up as a inveterate workaholic; a man who always eats on the run. I counted at least six scenes where Pitt eats something while participating in a non-eating related activity (like chowing down on something while having meetings with other characters). It's a pretty strange acting choice, but a quick piece of research turned up this page here, revealing that Brad Pitt tries to work eating-related scenes into all of his films!

DIRECTOR: Bennett Miller
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Aaron Sorkin, Steven Zaillian and Stan Chervin. Based on a book by Michael Lewis, which was based on real events.
KEY ACTORS: Brad Pitt, Jonah Hill, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Robin Wright, Chris Pratt, Jack McGee.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The non-fiction book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis.
- Director Bennett Miller previously came to prominence with the film Capote, which also featured Philip Seymour Hoffman.
- Of the sports films I've seen, I think The Damned United is the most similar film to Moneyball. Some other sports films that might also apply (depending on your taste) include: The Blind Side, Invictus, Warrior, Bull Durham, We Are Marshall, Any Given Sunday and Rudy.

AWARDS
This section will be amended after the Oscars have aired

Small Town Murder Songs

2012-01-26T03:55:00.001-08:00

A hidden indie gem with a great central performance from Peter Stormare, if you're interested in small town crime fiction or slightly-creepy drama then you should get some enjoyment out of this. Stormare is one of those character actors who usually gets cast in weird supporting roles (you might know him from Fargo, Jurassic Park 2 or even his turn as an angry chef in Season 6 of Weeds) so I went into this thinking he would be hamming it up or underplaying it in a desperate attempt to take it seriously. He's actually really good though, completely different to anything I've seen him do before, and it makes me wish he got meatier parts like this more often.

Stormare plays Walter, a small town born-again Christian cop with a dark past. When a dead body turns up in town he finds himself shadowed by FBI agents as he attempts to work his way back into the world he turned his back on, and he must overcome both his troubled past and the prejudices of the townsfolk in this fishbowl of a place. It's a small story, and one primarily informed by character, and some viewers will inevitably draw comparisons with Fargo in the way it combines a quirky self-contained story of murder with folksiness. Small Town Murder Songs does its own thing though, it's more serious, and uses Christian themes and a gospel motif to strike a unique tone of redeption and isolation.

The single best thing about the film is the amazing soundtrack of modern indie gospel songs. They combine with the subject matter to create a gothic/folksy edge, making it feel like a film version of the songs Everything's Turning to White by Paul Kelly and Where the Wild Roses by Nick Cave and Kylie Minogue. And that can't be a bad thing, we need more films like this. I saw Walter's slow-burn resistance to cracking as being similar to Klaus Kinski in the classic Herzog film Woyzeck. For anyone worried about watching a 'Christian' film, it isn't really like that... the Christian stuff is just there to add some colour, it could be any religion or any small faith-based community. It's like a serious snapshot, or a hick-tinged film noir. It's just a good, underrated film.

DIRECTOR: Ed Gass-Donelly
WRITER/SOURCE: Ed Gass-Donnelly
KEY ACTORS: Peter Stormare, Martha Plimpton, Jill Hennessey, Aaron Poole, Amy Rutherford, Jessica Clement, Jackie Burroughs, Stephen Eric McIntyre

RELATED TEXTS:
- Canadian writer-director Ed Gass-Donnelly previously made the Toronto-set film This Beautiful City.
- Other folk film noirs/crime dramas... Frozen River, Fargo, Winter's Bone, Blood Simple and Badlands.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1

2012-01-25T03:43:00.000-08:00

So, this is the beginning of the end. There was some degree of excitement from Harry Potter fans when it was announced that the seventh and final novel in the series would be adapted into not one but two films. Seven books, eight films. That's a pretty good deal, huh? The official reasoning behind it was that very little from the book could be cut out as it had the job of tying up all of the previous six films. The unofficial reasoning was probably that they just wanted to squeeze as much money as possible out of the franchise before finisihing it. I know, I know... I'm a cynic. Apparently you can't make four hour films anymore because they're just not profitable enough.

This is it, the epic to end them all, so just to remind us of this the film kicks off with a death or two - including the offscreen demise of at least one major supporting character. It's all very dark and grim.
Say what you like about J. K. Rowling, but it's pretty clear her series was extremely well-planned from start to finish. The emergence of the backstories of both Voldemort and Dumbledore begin to tie certain things together in a very satisfying way. Some answers are provided to questions that I hadn't even initially though to ask. Maybe the writers of Lost should've read Harry Potter.
It feels strange for the main characters to be away from Hogwarts (one of the byproducts of the book being split into two films means that they're away from the school for the entirety of this film). Instead they go out and have 'adventures' in the real world, and it feels more dangerous than ever. There's a certain heightened realism as a result. The scenes set in the countryside have an authenticity that feels almost alien to the Harry Potter franchise... for example, the sequence where Harry and Hermione dance together in their tent feels more like it's out of an indie coming-of-age film.
This realism is also reflected by the fact that Ron, Hermione and Harry have all become young adults now. The time for goofy cameraderie has gone, and there are one or two moments (such as Ron hallucinating about the coupling of Harry and Hermione) that tap into darker ideas relating to maturity and insecurity.
Someone's cottoned on that cartoonish CGI just doesn't cut it in a film of this calibre - the visual effects are lot more seamless after the last few films.
There's a moving scene near the beginning where Hermione uses the obliviate spell to erase the minds of her parents in order to protect them. It's nice that we get to see this, as it's not really featured in the book (simply because the books take place purely from the perspective of Harry). It's a shame that we don't get to see more scenes of Hermione and Ron without Harry, as they're generally more interesting (and believable) than our man Potter.
Daniel Radcliffe suffers from cute kid/awkward-looking adult syndrome. He has an odd shaped head and a bit of a touch of the Elijah Woods about him.
There's a couple of new characters portrayed by Bill Nighy and Rhys Ifans but they don't really get much screentime so neither actor gets a chance to make much of a impact. I was impressed more by Helena Bonham-Carter and Jason Isaacs in the ways they pushed their characters a bit more to the wire. In contrast to his cold portrayal in previous films, Isaacs is surprisingly effective in garnering some sympathy as the cowering Lucius Malfoy.
There's a brilliant and unexpected part of the film that uses traditional shadow puppet-inspired animation to portray the story of the three brothers and the deathly hallows, as narrated by Emma Watson. It's actually the highlight of this particular movie, and shows a level of creativity not encountered elsewhere in the series.

Unfortunately, as much as I would enjoy watching these characters do anything, David Yates just isn't able to sustain prolonged action and momentum in the same way that some of the other directors in the series have. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 suffers too much from feeling like half of a film. I'm not sure it was the best idea to split the story into two parts as the first part feels too much like it's stalling before the big finish of the second part. It's structured less like a self-contained film and more like a prequel or a chapter in a much bigger story. Having said that though, there are a few crowning moments of glory (such as the animated sequence and the growing maturity of the teenage performers). Some of the camera work is more mature too, such as the use of shaky high-definition handheld cameras to capture chase sequences in the woods... it feels visceral and adrenalin-packed, a real far cry from the cartoonish theatrics of the earliest films.

DIRECTOR: David Yates
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Steve Kloves, based on the book by J. K. Rowling.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alan Rickman, David Bradley, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Rhys Ifans, Helen McCrory, Bill Nighy, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, David Thewlis, Natalie Tena, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Clemence Poesy, John Hurt, Toby Jones

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Art Direction and Best Visual Effects.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Make-Up and Best Special Visual Effects.

Academy Awards Nominations 2012

2012-01-24T05:19:00.000-08:00

Well, here are the nominees for the 2011/2012 Academy Awards. Another year gone and another batch of exciting new films to seek out or catch up on. Here are the major nominees...

BEST FILM
War Horse, Moneyball, Hugo, The Descendents, The Tree of Life, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Help, Midnight in Paris, The Artist

So only nine films appear to have been nominated this year. Can't say I'm extremely pleased with this list... it's good to see Hugo getting the attention it deserves after most of the other Awards ceremonies missed it out, but all in all this is a pretty boring list. The last couple of Oscars have shown some contemporary spark by nominating genre films like Avatar, District 9, Inception, Winter's Bone, etc, but this year it's pretty much back to basics. The entire list upsets me in general due to the lack of recognition for Drive. I mean, would it have killed them to make it the tenth film in this list? And what's with Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close getting nominated? It looks terrible and it has been getting absolutely panned in some quarters, I'm kind of embarrassed for the Academy.

BEST ACTOR
Brad Pitt (Moneyball), Jean Dujardin (The Artist), Demian Bichir (A Better Life), George Clooney (The Descendents), Gary Oldman (Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy)

A few surprises here, I don't think anyone really guessed that Demian Bichir would get nominated - especially when there was a lot of buzz around Michael Fassbender. I'm relieved that Oldman got his nomination, it was beginning to look like his last chance to finally get nominated. But, looking at this list, I don't know what they really bother - it's obvious that the voters are going to look at this pool of nominees and then just hand the Oscar over to Clooney or Pitt. As much as I like Brad Pitt, there is nothing about his serviceable and underplayed performance in Moneyball that is deserving of this kind of attention. Man, what does Ryan Gosling have to do to get nominated anyway? He has given three knockout performances this year, and did similarly brilliant work last year as well, but he just can't get in there.

BEST ACTRESS
Glenn Close (Albert Nobbs), Viola Davis (The Help), Meryl Streep (Iron Lady), Rooney Mara (The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), Michelle Williams (My Week With Marilyn)

It'll be Streep. She's been nominated a few times in recent years but none of those performances gathered the kind of steam that her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher has been gathering. If she wins it'll make her only the fifth actor in history to win three Oscars. I'm glad Close got nominated, and any other year she might win, but there's no fighting the Streep machine in full flight. I was surprised to see Rooney Mara get in there, I guess I'll have to watch The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo now...

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Kenneth Brannagh (My Week with Marilyn), Nick Nolte (Warrior), Jonah Hill (Moneyball), Christopher Plummer (Beginners), Max Von Sydow (Extremely Close and Incredibly Loud)

The battle of the veterans! Nolte has a strong chance because he's one of only two Americans amongst the nominees, and his performance is actually a real against-the-grain, career standout. I don't see why Hill has been nominated... as great as Moneyball is, the acting in it just isn't anything special, and the difference in Hill's performance is pretty much just the fact that he's not acting like an arsehole for once. I'm seriously miffed that Albert Brooks didn't get the nod for Drive.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Berenice Bejo (The Artist), Jessica Chaistain (The Help), Janet McTeer (Albert Nobbs), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids), Octavio Spencer (The Help)

No surprises with the two girls from The Help being nominated. I thought they might've cast the net a bit wider than that, but the only shock here is Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids. I'm amazed she got nominated but it's definitely deserved, she stole that movie completely and I would absoluely love for her to win, though I'm fairly confident that Octavia Spencer (the favourite) will take home the gong.

BEST DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese (Hugo), Michel Hazanavicius (The Artist), Terrence Malick (The Tree of Life), Woody Allen (Midnight in Paris), Alexander Payne (The Descendents)

I know Scorsese got his long-overdue Oscar for The Departed only a few years ago, but Hugo is so amazing that he simply deserves it again. I'll reserve full judgment until I see all the films of course, but at the moment I'm predicting that Hazanavicius will get the nod as a consolation prize for The Artist not winning Best Film.

Ender's Game

2012-01-23T14:33:00.000-08:00

Ender's Game is an award-winning science fiction novel by Orson Scott Card. It won both the Hugo and the Nebula awards back in the '80s, two of the most prestigious genre awards a sci-fi novel can win, and I'm thinking there'll soon be an increased interest in this novel again now that a film is in production. Most of the novel concerns war games played by child geniuses in a space station against a backdrop of futuristic Cold War-inspired intrigue and an interplanetary war with a race of aliens referred to only as 'the buggers', which I guess will translate fairly well into a big budget movie. This movie will star Harrison Ford and Asa Butterfield, so it will probably be on everyone's radars when it eventually gets released, and I'm assuming the studios are hoping it's a hit so they can turn it into a multi-movie franchise (Card has written around 9 follow-up novels).

So, with all that now said, I want to get in early before the film gets made and say that the whole thing is a horrible joke. Putting aside the silliness of imagining Harrison Ford in a fat suit (his character gets fatter as the book goes on, something I can't really see Ford agreeing to), the novel is a hotbed of conservative wet dreams underscored with bigotry relating to race, gender and sexual orientation. I'm amazed it got the awards it did, though I guess the novel did get released right in the middle of Reagan and Thatcher's '80s. Anyway, before I go too far down that road, I'll break it down into the good, the bad, and the ugly.

The Good
As hackneyed as the writing style may be, it somehow works and never gets boring. The book is a real breeze to read in spite of it's many, many flaws. There's also an interesting suggestion that the war between humanity and the buggers escalates so badly simply because it's physically impossible for either side to communicate with the other. The best aspect of the novel is the way it demonstrates leadership styles and strategy in clear and easily understood terms.

The Bad
All the main characters are so smart that they can guess what each other are thinking, which would be tedious if the book didn't fly by so quickly. I don't imagine I could stand to read another nine books along such lines though. None of the characters really ever seem like children... I know they're meant to be geniuses but they're still kids, right? The entire book is kind of pulpish, which I'm thinking may just be a sympton of the poor literary standards of the sci-fi genre in the '80s.

The Ugly
Okay. There's so much in this book to be offended by, so I just singled out a few examples. The biggest offence is probably just how disturbingly right wing the whole thing is - this book is downright fascism in its purest form. Card plays out concepts of service vs. freedom throughout, and seems to be promoting the idea that individual freedom is selfish and counterproductive. Anyways, here we go...

Page 24 -A character makes mention of girls not usually going to Battle School because they have years of evolution against them. I could handle this if he'd said years of history, but the word 'evolution' implies that Card believes females to be physiologically inferior to males. It also doesn't help that Battle School turns out to be more reliant on strategy than physical activity, which further implies that Card thinks female brains just aren't up to scratch!

Page 48 - Card makes reference to the 'arrogant' French. He explains that they're arrogant in this vision of the future because they insisted on retaining political independence. This plays into his idea that a globalised, homogenised world culture is better than individual countries. It shouldn't come as a surprise that this homogenic culture happens to be very Americanised... I can't help but wonder if Card would be as much a fan of the idea if the world's globalised culture was based on another nation's ideas. It's also somewhat telling that Card uses France as an example of 'arrogant' independence in his scenario, as it's pretty stereotypical and could just as much refer to American views of France in the '80s.

50 - Casual homohobia with characters jokingly bullying each other with the phrase "Cover your butt".

68, 69 - The first black character introduced is meant to be a genius but yet he still speaks in a pidgin-like ghetto slang, EG. "I the sweetest friend you got" and "maybe they in a hurry to teach you everything". Card later explains that this future slang is something that all the kids use, but it's still unfortunate that the first time we hear it it comes from a black character.

69, 70 - Card has the gall to introduce a subtext that makes it pretty clear he thinks religious suppression is bad. So, Mr. Card, homophobia, racism and sexism is okay but religious suppression isn't?

85 - It starts to become clear in Ender's Game that hard maneuvers in the battle games require team work, often at the expense of the individual. This is one of the core themes of the book, that one must give up needs relating to individuality in order to achieve higher goals (which is very fascist indeed!)

100 - Oh look, a random and disturbing rant about Jews unfairly getting into positions of power and the 'false' ways they use claims of anti-semitism to reinforce their 'Jewness' and Jew-related power.

212 - "If you can't kill then you are subject to the power of those who can". I don't think I really need to analyse that one too closely.

312 - "Welcome to the human race, no one controls their own life". The crowning jewel in Card's anti-freedom subtext. He goes on to say "The best you can do is choose the roles given to you by people who love you", which stinks of high religion to me.

So, as enthralling as this novel may be, at the end of the day it's pulpish Nazi doctrine of the worst kind. Orson Scott Card is actually a devout Mormon who actively campaigns against the teaching of evolution in American schools, and also has a history of calling for homosexuality to be illegal (!) and has even suggested that homosexuality breeds pedophilia. What a great guy!

Hugo

2012-01-22T04:28:00.000-08:00

There's some awards buzz surrounding The Artist at the moment, most of which holds the film up as a glowing tribute to the days of silent cinema. I don't think it would be fair to say that Hugo hasn't also had its fair share of critical acclaim, but I do like to think of it as the other tribute to silent cinema released in 2012. Martin Scorsese has a long and distinguished career as a groundbreaking director with a self-preserving reverence for cinema history. His films have mostly been of a decidedly adult nature (murderous gangsters, child prostitutes, dark obsessions) but his ability to both innovate on and revisit the techniques of cinematic storytelling have ensured him a place as one of the most iconic directors of his age. It's this sense of historical expertise that combines with the more family-friendly story of Hugo to create a truly wonderful experience that should appeal to anyone with even the slightest love of cinema. It's not a silent film, you don't need to be a fan of silent films to enjoy it, and without spoiling Hugo I'll just say that it's simply spellbinding in the way it unravels and explains the origins of movie magic. You get caught up in it. It's beautiful.

Hugo concerns an orphaned boy named Hugo Cabret (Asa Butterfield) who literally lives in the clockwork of a 1930s Parisian railway station. He's on a mission to repair a clockwork man that his deceased father rescued from a museum, hoping that this automaton will reveal to him some kind of secret that will give his life purpose. Whilst stealing parts for this mission his path crosses with Papa Georges (Ben Kingsley), a grumbling toymaker with a shop in the station. Georges confiscates Hugo's precious notebook, forcing Hugo to join forces with George's ward, Isabella (Chloe Moretz), on an adventure to recover this item and to uncover the mystery of the automaton.

I've restricted a few plot details in the above summary as I really don't want to spoil this film. I'll just say that Hugo deals with themes of usefulness, fate, and fulfilling one's potential. There's an array of supporting characters that fill the film with a lot of life and humour - the highlight probably being Sacha Baron Cohen as the bumbling Station Inspector fixated on delivering lost children to a nearby orphanage. A lot of this comes down to the performances, but it's also due to the wonderful one-of-a-kind book that this film is based on, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a strikingly original children's novel that combined illustration and text in a unique way to tell a story that paid homage to the great yesteryears of the silent cinema. Scorsese is the perfect director to translate this to the screen, and here's why...

Not only does Scorsese show the pioneering special effects of the early days of film, he also shows us how they were created. Revealing a magician's secrets would normally deprive the magic of its punch, but in this case it's an illuminating process because it allows the audience (who are about 100 years removed from these early films) to discover the wonder in what we now take for granted.
Scorsese sneakily employs many techniques of the silent cinema well before their relevance is revealed to the audience. The opening introductory sequence takes place without any dialogue, though you barely notice it. Scorsese frequently allows events to unfold in a physical and organic manner without the presence of talking.
I was elated to see some stop-motion used in the bit where Hugo repairs a clockwork mouse... stop-motion is rarely used these days, so it was nice to see Scorsese find a place for it in this film. I was further startled some time after this though when Isabella falls over and it looks like she's going to be trampled underfoot, and Scorsese actually uses double-exposure to show this. It's an unusual technique in that it was almost purely used before the advent of the 'talkies', but somehow he manages to make it work here as a homage to these earlier days - a time when the cinema was in a creative state of flux and yet to be constrained by the hallowed rules of filmmaking.

The other part of Hugo that makes it a must-watch is the setting itself. Scorsese has created an enchanting world, if I didn't know better I would've believed that this giant railway station had been constructed as a 100% real place, rather than a collection of ambitious sets combined with CGI and modelwork. There are loads of overhead shots that show the schemata of the place as Hugo races behind walls and through scaffolding behind clockfaces. The film really showcases the environment, and it was breathtaking to see it on the big screen.

I need to watch this film again, and again, and again. It was a brilliant experience and it was everything I could hope for and more. It's the kind of film I think I'll watch whenever I feel my love of movies dwindling, so that it can reaffirm my passion. Let there be no doubt from anyone that Scorsese isn't a master of cinema, he has finally made a piece of art that's entertaining, meaninful and something that anyone of any age or background can enjoy.

DIRECTOR: Martin Scorsese
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by John Logan, based on the novel by Brian Selznick.
KEY ACTORS: Asa Butterfield, Chloe Moretz, Ben Kingsley, Sacha Baron Cohen, Helen McCrory, Christopher Lee, Richard Griffiths, Jude Law, Frances de la Tour, Ray Winstone, Emily Mortimer, Michael Stuhlbarg.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, who followed it up with a similarly structured book called Wonderstruck.
- Martin Scorsese's love for film history can be experience firsthand with the documentary A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Film.
- See also the films of Melies, such as A Trip to the Moon, Vanishing Lady, The Four Troublesome Heads, An Impossible Balancing Feat, Joan of Arc and The Merry Frolics of Satan.
- Other films referenced in Hugo include: Safety Last, Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat, The Great Train Robbery, The Thief of Bagdad and The General.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

2012-01-18T19:43:00.000-08:00

I know I've said things to this effect about the last two or three films, but I think Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the true beginning of the end for the franchise. The plot leads directly into the last two films, with the introduction of the Horcruxes and the rising up of Voldemort's Death-Eaters, so it starts to feel more like a continuous saga. This film also feels a little bit more like a regular school year at Hogwarts, it's a bit more slowly paced and takes the opportunity to let the characters breathe before everything changes so devastatingly at the climax.

The Warner Bros logo at the beginning keeps getting darker and darker with each film. I wonder if I'll even be able to see it when I get to Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II.

No Dursleys this time around, Harry starts out the film in metropolitan London instead. The film uses this modern setting to up the stakes a bit, reminding us that the evil of Voldemort will impact on regular folk as well as the wizarding world. It makes it all a bit more immediate and less like a far away world of the imaginary.

I like that this film doesn't forget that Harry is still a teenager. We see him picking up a girl in a cafe and fighting with Ron over a text book. They're just little moments, but it's touches like these that make the characters feel real and give Daniel Radcliffe some rare moments to act a bit more naturally (rather than doing that thing where he stares off into the distance and clenches his teeth).

There's a scene early on where Malfoy kicks Harry in the face. It's quite brutal actually, you can really feel that kick. This heightened level of viciousness foreshadows a lot of what's still yet to come, preparing the viewer for the increased violence of the later films that contrasts so sharply with the wide-eyed wonder of the earlier films.

It's weird seeing the kids all playing Quidditch again (something that hasn't been done since Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban), especially when it has very little to do with the plot!

I don't think they adequately explain what an 'auror' is. Readers of the books will be aware that Harry has ambitions of becoming an auror (a hunter of evil wizards), but it has barely even been touched on in the films so it feels odd for Harry to mention it now. A casual viewer wouldn't have a clue what he's talking about. There are a few other throwaway references or plot developments like this (such as the fact that Harry's now the captain of the Quidditch team( that needed to be made a little bit more clearer. Despite the more relaxed pace, I think Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the film that most relies on its viewers having read the books.

The main new cast member is Jim Broadbent as the elitist Professor Slughorn. He isn't how I imagined Slughorn to appear (I imagined him being a more like a fat old Marlon Brando or Richard Griffiths) but it's hard not to like Broadbent in such a role. Slughorn is generally a bit of an odd character, there's a lot of talk of him 'collecting' students that makes him sound a bit like a sex offender. Thankfully Broadbent keeps the character as innocent as possible!

Emma Watson shines in her scenes of unrequited love for Ron. Overall this film has a lot more shipping (which should please all the fans), with all the characters hooking up or wallowing in angst over not hooking up with their true loves.

The climax isn't as big and dramatic as I expected it to be, but I guess they're holding back for the next two films. Michael Gambon is almost great as Dumbledore (sorry, I still can't give him that much credit!), and the sequence with the creepy undead creatures in the underground lake played out exactly as I had imagined it in my mind. I also thought the wands-in-the-air tribute at the end was a nice touch too.

Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince actually turns out to be one of the funnier films in the series. The slower pace and the way it focuses more on the teenaged characters allows it to have some fun, and give some of the supporting players the chance to widen the dynamics of the film. Overall I think it might be a little too slow and overlong, but who can blame David Yates for indulging the fans a bit before the big finish of the last two films? This is one for the fans, and very enjoyably so. Now bring on the Deathly Hallows!

DIRECTOR: David Yates
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Steve Cloves, based on the book by J. K. Rowling.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Jim Broadbent, Alan Rickman, David Bradley, Ralph Fiennes, Jason Isaacs, Emma Thompson, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, David Thewlis, Natalie Tena, Katie Leung, William Melling, Devon Murray, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Dave Legano, Jessie Cave

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
- Prior to making this film Emma Watson voiced a character in The Tale of Despereaux. Daniel Radcliffe didn't get a chance to do any extra-curricular acting, but Rupert Grint was able to star in a British action-comedy called Wild Target.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Cinematography.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Production Design and Best Visual Special Effects.

Attack the Block

2012-01-18T15:12:00.001-08:00

"This has got nothing to do with gangs"
"Or drugs. Or rap music. Or violence in videogames".

There have been a few alien-invasion films over the last year or so, but none are as original as this British film from the producers of Shaun of the Dead. At first the 'heroes' of the film (a gang of estate hoodlums) seem completely unredeemable, but it eventually comes to pass that these kids are the sort of characters who are the best equipped to deal with an alien infestation. The action, dialogue and character-interplay all rings true and makes for an adrenalin-charged horror/sci-fi combo that holds the attention from start to finish.

I won't talk too much about the plot, it's the sort of film that gets straight into it and is all action and adventure and interesting characters. The chav bad boys at the centre of Attack the Block feel like unlikely leads in an alien invasion film, but really - they're the sort of resilient monsters who are realistically able to fight real monsters. These kids are all bravado and toughness, and the I guess the film's story arc is about them learning the hard way that actions can have devastating consequences. There's also a preppie teen supporting character who lives with his parents, and aside from being a source of ridicule/humour, his role is to remind the audience of the class concerns that fuel this British culture of housing estate aggression. Moses (John Boyega) and his friends are the kids at the bottom of the chain, and they even go as far as to excuse their behaviour as actual class warfare (see the scene where they realise that one of their victims, Sam [Jodie Whittaker], lives in the same building that they do and they tell her they wouldn't have robbed her if they'd known she was 'one of them').

The aliens are a truly inspired creation. They're a great, unique design - simple but also scary and effective. They look a bit like something out an Aphex Twin film clip, and the imagery of these ape-like creatures running amok in this urban wasteland is a big selling point for the film. It's iconic. Overall the film does for the British estate wasteland what District 9 did for the slums of South Africa, using a science fiction story to examine social issues and doing it with buckets of enthusiasm and energy. This is a great film that I could see myself watching more than a few times in the near future.

DIRECTOR: Joe Cornish
WRITER/SOURCE: Joe Cornish
KEY ACTORS: Jodie Whittaker, John Boyega, Alex Esmail, Leeon Jones, Luke Treadaway, Nick Frost

RELATED TEXTS:
- I guess there are some parallels to Shaun of the Dead, but by and large Attack the Block is very much a different kettle of fish.
- Other recent alien invasion films: Skyline, Battle: Los Angeles, The Darkest Hour and Cowboys and Aliens.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

2012-01-16T17:40:00.000-08:00

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was never one of my favourite Harry Potter books. It's the longest book in the series, yet so little seems to happen in the course of the story - a lot of its page count is given over to Harry at the height of his teenage angst years. I found it a bit of a hard slog at the time but I had to admit that this level of whining was a fairly realistic portrayal of adolescence, and it clears the deck for Harry to get down to more serious business for the next two books in the series. The film of Order of the Phoenix is actually the shortest in the franchise (despite the book being the longest), and it doesn't feel particularly condensed either, which I feel is proof of the book's padding.

I love the opening scene, where Harry and his cousin tussle in the urban landscape of the Dursleys' neighbourhood. It contrasts dramatically with the Dementors, who turn up and cast a pall over the setting.

This entry in the series could also be called Harry Potter and the Attack of Bureacracy. Hogwarts begins to take on a sinister tone as the Ministry of Magic increases their level of interference, and the use of doublespeak and the media is a nice way of examining the way the shifting of power to bureacrats can restrict and cowl a supposedly free society.

After the rock n roll stylings of the last film, it seems that someone decided to give all the kids haircuts. It reminds us that Harry and his friends are starting to approach adulthood, but unfortunately it also makes Ron and his twin brothers look a lot more dorky.

As mentioned, this story has less happening in it, so a lot of feels like the calm before the storm. There are lots of montages as the year passes, and there's a real sense of time passing throughout Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

In order to get this thick book down to under two hours, quite a lot of the subplots have been cut out altogether. As a result, there's no visit to the St Mungo's Hospital for Magical Maladies and Injuries (which would've seen a return appearance of Gilderoy Lockhart from Chamber of Secrets) and the House Elf stuff (which takes up a large portion of the novel) has been excised completely.

I still can't help but feel that the significance of some things would no doubt be lost on some viewers who have never read the novels. Ron's brother Percy turns up in one scene but virtually nothing is said about his role in the Ministry of Magic, and aside from his red hair and one throwaway reference in the first film there's nothing to suggest to casual viewers who this character even is. I'm guessing there came a point with the Harry Potter films where the production crew just decided that the bulk of the audience would be familiar enough with the novels to follow who all these background characters were.

After Prisoner of Azkaban, the special effects seem to have gone backwards.Once again there's an over-reliance on CGI... I guess some directors just feel it's quicker to let their visual effects crew do all the work!

The Death Eaters have been redesigned since their apperance in the last film. They now have a more original look (as opposed to the KKK meets Skeletor look).

The new major castmember is Imelda Staunton as the persnickety Ministry stooge Doloros Umbridge. She's pretty much perfect in the role, making it a good deal more memorable than the written version of the character comes across in the book, though I always imagined the character to look a bit more like Susan Boyle. I guess this can't be helped though!

Helena Bonham-Carter is also terrific as the deranged Death Eater Bellatrix. It's nice to see her in something that isn't directed by Tim Burton.

I found myself really choked up at the bit where silly old Trelawny was getting the punt from Umbridge. It's a great scene, and it's one of the few moments where Michael Gambon manages not to fail completely in his portrayal of Dumbledore.

I like this film a lot, mainly because it trims the fat from the rather bloated book and sets about telling a singular and strong story really well. David Yates takes over as director with this film, and I guess he must've been pretty effecient because he went on to direct the rest of the series as well. I can't really fault this decision, as the last four films have a uniformity to their (relatively) high quality and it's pretty smooth sailing from this point on in terms of entertainment value.

DIRECTOR: David Yates
WRITER/SOURCE: Michael Goldenberg, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, David Bradley, Ralph Fiennes, Imelda Staunton, Jason Isaacs, Emma Thompson, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Helena Bonham-Carter, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, Robert Hardy, Fiona Shaw, Richard Griffiths, David Thewlis, Natalie Tena, George Harris, Jessice Hynes, Gary Oldman, Miranda Richardson, Katie Leung, William Melling, Devon Murray, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Timothy Bateson

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
- All three of the leads took the opportunity after this film to appear in some other things. Rupert Grint put on his best Irish accent and starred in Cherrybomb, a movie about sex, drugs and juvenile deliquency. Daniel Radcliffe made the Australian film December Boys (where he did his best with an Aussie accent), and Emma Watson did a rather girly TV movie called Ballet Shoes.

AWARDS
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Production Design and Best Special Visual Effects.

Admit One

2012-01-16T04:08:00.000-08:00

I don't think I really ever reviewed a memoir before. At least, not one written by someone who wasn't so famous my voice would go up a couple of octaves upon meeting them. This rather slight and slender tome is the memoir of up-and-coming British actor Emmett James. I was approached via email by someone representing the book who had no doubt stumbled across this much esteemed blog (haw haw haw) and wanted to know if I was interested in reading this book. Taking it to be some kind of analysis of films or a fictional novel heavily influenced by film-geekdom I replied - yes, of course I am interested, please send it along and I will read and review.

I'll cut to the chase for those involved with the book's writing and publication (in the off-chance case they are reading this review); I didn't hate this book, but it did leave me scratching my head a little.

Basically, the book is divided up into short chapters - each one named after and loosely connected to one of the author's favourite films. Each chapter deals with a chapter in the author's life, the earlier ones dealing with his Croydon-based childhood and the later ones dealing with his forays into the world of film-acting. It's a fairly brief book, probably owing to the fact that the author is relatively young and is yet to become a household name.

It starts in quite a promising fashion, with suitable payouts levelled at Steven Seagal and a cheeky and well-educated wit carrying along the prose, but I have to say that I was a little disappointed to find that the connection between each chapter's story and the films that they were named after became very tenuous at best, and I really was expecting less in the way of an actual memoir and more in the way of film analysis. I can't dwell on that too much because it was pretty much just my expectation after reading the tagline "A journey into film". I guess this is kind of subjective, so: my bad.

There are several amusing anecdotes throughout the book, the most amusing probably being the thinly veiled story about the author's attempt to audition for the part of Robin in Batman Forever. I couldn't help but laugh at how little effort he went to in disguising Joel Schumacher's identity when writing about this. But what ended up confusing me about this whole book was that just when the story started heading somewhere (I assumed it was building up to the author's big breakthrough role or something else that warranted the hyperbole written in the 'about the author' section) the book just ended. Is that it? Is the highlight of this guy's career a bit part in Titanic? Maybe the book is marketed oddly or something, I could understand it if the book was packaged as 'how I tried to break into Hollywood and almost made it' or the 'trials and the tribulations of an up-and-comer' but during the course of reading the book I just felt like it was selling Emmett James to me as a big star recounting his early days. I know everyone's life is of equal value (in theory) but if I was to write a memoir of my childhood and how I came to work in a bookstore at the grand old age of 28 I can guarantee there would be more than a few readers prefacing their reviews with a big 'so what?'

Sorry, it was an entertaining read and I always feel bad about not giving a great review when someone goes to the effort of sending a book all the way from America or England to my home in suburban Australia, but I felt a little disappointed when I finished reading this. I think it would've been much more effective if it had been fictionalised to an extent, making the book a literary adventure closely based on the author's experiences or something like that.

Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

2012-01-15T04:24:00.001-08:00

I had intense worries when Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was adapted into a film back in 2005. The book was so much bigger than past installments of the series, it seemed impossible that it could be adapted into a satisfying film. There was initially talk that it would be adapted into two films, but director Mike Newell opted against this - confident that he could fit it all into one film. When I first saw Goblet of Fire at the cinema, I felt unsure about this. I felt unsure that someone who hadn't read the book would've been able to follow it... so much had been cut and condensed, and it was jam packed full of incident that it was hard to follow the finer details. Now, some time later, I found myself watching Goblet of Fire with no real recollection of the book, and it was a much more enjoyable experience. It does hold up and it does make sense, and the decision to compact it all into one film results in Goblet of Fire being perhaps the most relentlessly engaging and action-packed movie in the whole franchise.

We kick off with a minor version of the theme tune, reminding us of how 'dark' the series is now getting.
In a way, I think this film is the Empire Strikes Back of the Harry Potter series... it's the qualitive middle entry in the series that ends on a down note. Then again, you could say that about the next three Harry Potter films after this as well; films four to seven all end with the death of a major character. Granted, the character death in Goblet of Fire is that of a new supporting player, but Cedric's death marks the first point in the series where a character actually dies, and it isn't bloodless either - so it's quite a shock after the relatively happy shenanigans of the last three films.
The Dursleys don't make an appearance this time around, I guess they're one of the many neccessary casualties of a large novel getting adapted into a two and a half hour film.
An alternative title for this film could be Harry Potter and the Moody Teenage Years Part 1. The characters start to notice the opposite sex for the first time, which brings certain complications.
The film opens with the World Quidditch Cup, which throws the wizarding world wide open in terms of giving the viewer an impression of something that's a lot bigger than just Hogwarts.
This development also brings in the Death Eaters (Voldemort's evil followers). They're a combination of elements that call to mind the KKK, soccer hooligans, and terrorists all rolled into one.
The sets are a little bit different again, reflecting the input of another new director. The only real factor of consistency between all eight films are the actors and their characters, something that the fans should be grateful for. The success of the overall franchise owes a lot to the commitment of these actors.
There seems to have been a creative decision to have all the younger characters sport longer, rock 'n' roll type hair. Ron looks like a reject from the band Jet, and the twins look less dorky here than they do in later films.
One of my favourite comedy moments in the whole series is the bit where one of Ron's brothers asks a girl to the dance just by making a few hand gestures towards her, and then he turns to the date-less Ron and winks at him. It's perfectly played and it cracks me up every time.
As mentioned before, this film is all action from start to finish. It barely lets up, and makes the next couple of Harry Potter films feel slow in comparison.
The special effects aren't as good as they were in Prisoner of Azkaban, but they're still fairly good in comparison to the first two cartoony films.
It sucks that Mad-Eye Moody is so cool. I felt this as a massive betrayal when I read the books, the fact that they set this character up to be so awesome and inexplicably likeable and then J. K. Rowling takes that away from the reader at the end with a twist that negates the entire character's existence. It doesn't make sense! Having said that, Brendan Gleeson is great in the role. Gleeson is great in everything he does - seriously underrated actor.
Michael Gambon is just a bit too sprightly as Dumbledore, but he's a bit more acceptable in the role now that I'm more used to him. He's still a very poor second to Richard Harris.
For many fans the 'breakthrough' performance will be a pre-Twilight Rob Pattinson in the pivotal role of Cedric Diggory. Personal, I think he's adequate in what amounts to just a bit part, but I guess he has the easygoing assertiveness that lends itself to the character.
Voldemort finally makes an appearance after four films of buildup. I think it's hard for films like this to do something new with evil super villains, but Ralph Fiennes actually defies the odds and works with the character's design and description to create something that's nearly iconic (I guess time will tell). He's quite unnerving in the role, and doesn't fall into any big cliches... I especially like his interpretation of Voldemort's high-pitched voice, and his big introductory scene at the end of this movie is worth the wait.

Despite the fast pace, Mike Newell's direction in Goblet of Fire is quite lush and almost stately. He revels in details, pumping this up as the moment where Harry's battle truly begins, and a lot of the smaller characters start coming forward to involve themselves in the plot more. From here on in the franchise feels a lot more like one big story. After Prisoner of Azkaban, I think this is my second favourite film of the franchise. It has more energy than any of the other films and there's never a dull moment.

DIRECTOR: Mike Newell
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Alan Rickman, David Bradley, David Tenant, Roger Lloyd-Pack, Ralph Fiennes, Brendan Gleeson, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, Robert Hardy, Robert Pattinson, Stanislav Ianevski, Gary Oldman, Miranda Richardson, Katie Leung, William Melling, Devon Murray, Clemence Posey, Frances de la Tour, Predrag Bjelac, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Shirley Henderson

RELATED TEXTS- The novel Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
- Mike Newell has also directed the films Love in the Time of Cholera, Donnie Brasco, An Awfully Big Adventure, Four Weddings and a Funeral and Mona Lisa Smile.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Art Direction.
BAFTAs - won Best Production Design. Nominated for Best Special Effects and Best Make-Up.

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

2012-01-10T22:16:00.000-08:00

For myself (and possibly a few other Potter fans), Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban marks the point where both the book and film series first truly began gathering steam. In the case of the film franchise, this is partially due to the absence of Chris Columbus as director. With Columbus out of the picture it meant that Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron could be brought onboard, making Prisoner of Azkaban perhaps the greatest Harry Potter film of the entire series. Cuaron is arguably the most left-field director to be involved with Harry Potter, and I think it was a gamble that really paid off. It also helps that the story becomes decidedly darker and more 'adult' from this point onwards. So say goodbye to all those bright colours, awkwardly cartoonish special effects, and the emphasis on the superficial... this is Harry Potter as it appeared in my mind when I first read the books; dark and enigmatic and breathtaking.

Right from the outset, this is immediately a better-looking film than its predecessors. The sets and cinematography have a 'sheen' of higher quality.
Daniel Radcliffe is even more improved this time around, especially when he goes all Carrie on his relatives and gets to show a more assertive/angry side. Meanwhile, Rupert Grint tones his performance down a bit after all that gurning in Chamber of Secrets.
There are a lot more scenes of the kids just being regular kids, and Harry, Ron and Hermione have been modernised somewhat - they wear contemporary clothes more often and seem a lot more relaxed and less affected in their performances.
The camera work and blocking of scenes is a lot less obviously 'Hollywood'. Cuaron even seems to be using handheld cameras to get a more naturalistic feel, and he manages to engage the viewer deeper into the action with some genuinely exciting sequences (like the manic bus ride to Diagon Alley). There's also some inventiveness in the way he stages scenes, such as the Boggart scene where the camera zooms into a reflection, or the Quidditch match that starts with a rogue umbrella flapping about before the camera pans down to reveal some frighteningly stormy conditions. Cuaron's verve matches the magic of the story every step of the way.
The Quidditch sequence in general is the best Quidditch scene in the series. It's so much bigger in scope, that epic fall after Harry gets attacked by a Dementor is amazing.
The sets are a lot more detailed and less cartoonish/impressionistic. It's not just that everything's dirtier and more gothic - even the forest now looks like a real forest filled with ferns and other forest-y things (as opposed to the murky collection of evenly spaced-out trees seen in the last two films). As a result of this heightened realism the film is a lot more atmospheric and genuinely spooky. Some fans bemoaned the redesign of Hogwarts when the film first came out due to the fact that it messed up the continuity of the series, but why fight it if the new version is infinitely better?
The Dementors aren't for kids! Younger viewers would no doubt be suffering in their jocks at the sight of these soul-sucking ghasts.
The CGI and live action blends together a lot better in this film. In fact, compared to at least the next two films and their over-reliance on CGI, the visual effects in Prisoner of Azkaban seem to be the high point of the series.
All the regular characters get their moments. Hagrid is huge again in some scenes but regular-sized in others, which is a little frustrating. Confusingly, Warwick Davis' character (Professor Flitwick) seems to have been rebooted into a much younger and unnamed wizard who conducts the school choir.
As hard as I try to move past the fact that Richard Harris died, Michael Gambon is just too distant as Dumbledore. He lacks the hushed but commanding tones of Harris, he isn't tall enough, and he just doesn't seem to give a shit.
Emma Thompson is annoying as Professor Trelawny, but I suppose this isn't really her fault as it's an annoying character to begin with. Gary Oldman is perfect as Sirius Black, and David Thewlis does a good enough job as Lupin (Lupin is one of those characters in the books that I never really got a handle on, there isn't much more to him other than the fact that he's a werewolf).
I can't believe Cuaron got away with ending this film with a freeze-frame. Brilliant.

Look, it's like this... after the first two films, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban simply feels like a case of more effort being put in. When you add to this the fact that none of the other Harry Potter films have been directed with quite as much panache or originality it becomes quite clear that this film is probably the one that's responsible for the consolidated success of the series. The overall tone of the subsequent films owes a stylistic debt to Cuaron's effort, and it's a shame the director couldn't be gotten back to helm more installments.

DIRECTOR: Alfonso Cuaron
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Gary Oldman, David Thewlis, Emma Thompson, Timothy Spall, Michael Gambon, Warwick Davis, Maggie Smith, Richard Griffiths, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, David Bradley, Julie Walters, Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, Robert Hardy, James Phelps, Oliver Phelps, Lenny Henry, Dawn French

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
- Cuaron also directed the films And Your Mother Too, Children of Men, Great Expectations and the upcoming science fiction film Gravity.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Original Music and Best Visual Effects.
BAFTAs - won Audience Award and Best Children's Film. Also nominated for Best British Film, Best Visual Effects, Best Production Design and Best Make-Up.

Wild Swans

2012-01-10T22:10:00.000-08:00

Wild Swans is a biographical/autobiographical account of modern Chinese history. Author Jung Chang shows us the many changes, trials and tribulations that China faced in the 20th century, telling us the story in a very personal way through the eyes of her grandmother, her mother and then herself.

Chang starts the story with her grandmother, a Warlord's concubine in the early days of post-Imperial China. We're given an intensly re-created vision of early 20th century China and follow the rise of Communism and the supplanting of the near-feudal regimes that existed before it. From here the story follows Chang's mother, a Maoist who rose to a prominent position within the government before falling prey to the Cultural Revolution. Chang herself was also a Maoist devotee and member of the Communist Party, and the book's retelling of events takes us up to her own disallusionment with Communist China.

If you only have a passing familiarity with recent Chinese history then I could not reccommend this book more... Chang's vibrant and journalistic writing style ensures that boredom never sets in and everything is shown to the reader from scratch and from an easily identifiable and accessible point of view. By focusing on the women of her family Chang is able to show us the more familial aspects of Chinese culture and its errosion under the regime of Chairman Mao. Most heartbreaking of all, Chang's own family was consumed by the many insecure purges instigated by Mao in his desperate attempts to hold onto power. In light of this, some of the events that transpire in this book are horrific, which makes it all the more uplifting that Chang has such a strong will to tell this story.

If you already know a fair bit about Communist China than this book is still well worth reading for its informative biographical examination of the country's history as seen by three generations of women in the one family. Chang is an adept writer and her descriptions brought the various periods and locations in China alive in my mind. I never understood the horror of the Cultural Revolution until I saw it in this book.

Wild Swans won the prestigous NCR and British Book awards, is currently banned in China, and was critically acclaimed throughout the world upon its release. I read it in school and I maintain that this is the best book I ever read during my various English classes. Chang also followed this novel up with an incredibly in-depth biography of Chairman Mao.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

2012-01-09T17:02:00.000-08:00

I remember being a bit disappointed in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets when it first came out. I mean, I enjoyed the first film but the second film just felt like more of the same. It probably didn't help that Chris Columbus was directing again, giving the film the same childish enthusiasm and piecemeal pacing. On repeat viewings I've come to appreciate the film a little bit more, if only for the fact that it gives the characters a bit of room to breathe before a darker tone began to creep into the franchise with the third film. I'll just run my thoughts in points like my Philosopher's Stone review...

The kids are visibly much older. I know they're only actually a year older at most but Daniel Radcliffe in particular seems a lot more confident and gives a much stronger performance.
Hagrid definitely seems a little smaller after the last film... I'm starting to wonder how many inconcistencies crept by when I first watched the films. John Cleese still appears as Nearly-Headless Nick but he only has a few fleeting apperances... I think he disappears from the franchise after this.
Rupert Grint seems to have taken to heart all the positive reviews he got for his performance as Ron in Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone... his facial expressions in Chamber of Secrets are much crazier. I wouldn't call it overacting... well, it is overacting, but it doesn't feel out of place. It suits the character, and Grint is a likeable performer, but he's playing Ron's gormless worrying to the wire in this one.
I got a vague sense of Harry being a bit of a Luke Skywalker-figure this time around. His enthusiasm, his tragic past, the fact that he gets his hand seriously hurt, his facing off with a dark villain... maybe I'm overreaching, but some of the music in the Quidditch sequence is even Star Wars music.
I'm not a fan of the Tom Riddle plot in this film. It's not really Voldemort (strictly speaking, it's an attempt reboot of the character) so it feels like it doesn't really count. The idea of Voldemort as a schoolkid doesn't exactly inspire awe and fear either, especially when the audience is expected to think of the character as a scary supervillain.
Dobby is a fun character, and I think his depiction actually stands up as far as all-CG characters go. A lot of Dobby's success is also down to Toby Jones' voice, he does 'suspiciously obsequious' like no one else.
Richard Harris gets some great moments as Dumbledore, he feels like such a great fit for the character, which just makes me all the sadder to know that from after this point the character would be played by the decidedly uncharismatic Michael Gambon instead. I know there's not much you can do about it when an actor dies, but surely they could've replaced Harris with someone who had a bit more clout and screen presence?
The Quidditch sequence is a lot better this time around, the effects are still a bit cartoonish but overall it's a lot smoother, dramatically sound, and easier to follow.
Kenneth Brannagh is fantastic as Gilderoy Lockhart, he steals all his scenes. The other major new actor to feature is Jason Isaacs as Malfoy's dastardly dad, who strikes a fine balance between subtle and openly evil.

Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets benefits greatly from a more enunciated plot... after the episodic and introductory nature of the first film, this installment is a lot easier to understand due to the plot taking centrestage. I happen to not really like the plot all that much due to the aforementioned Tom Riddle stuff, but I guess that's just me. It feels like a bit of a stall before the real story starts. But who doesn't want to spend a year at Hogwarts with Harry, Hermione and Ron? How can I complain when it's just so fun and enjoyable?

DIRECTOR: Chris Columbus
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Steve Kloves, based on the novel by J. K. Rowling
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Robbie Coltrane, Richard Harris, Kenneth Brannagh, Toby Jones, Jason Isaacs, Warwick Davis, John Cleese, Maggie Smith, Richard Griffiths, Alan Rickman, Fiona Shaw, David Bradley, Julie Walters, Miriam Margoyles, Tom Felton, Bonnie Wright, Matthew Lewis, Mark Williams, Christian Coulson, Robert Hardy, Shirley Henderson, Leslie Phillips, Julian Glover

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets by J. K. Rowling
- The other films in this series are; Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
- Rupert Grint must've realised that the spotlight was on him after the first Harry Potter film. Out of the three main juvenile leads, he alone went out and made a film between the first two Harry Potter movies - the rather charming and blackly humourous Thunderpants.

AWARDS
BAFTAs - won Kid's Vote. Also nominated for Best Children's Film, Best Special Visual Effects, Best Production Design and Best Sound.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

2012-01-08T19:11:00.001-08:00

Firstly, I've read all of the Harry Potter books, so my reviews of the films are going to reflect that and I will talk about certain things in relation to the books. I'm not the sort of person who believes that a film adaptation of a book has to feature every single element of the book. Tom Bombodil can take a hike, especially if it makes for a better film. A good book doesn't automatically equal a good film, so if a director needs to make changes than more power to them. What does matter though is that the film should make sense... the worst book-to-film adaptations tend to feel like condensed versions of a book that would make zero sense to anyone who hadn't already read said book. A film needs to appeal to people who haven't (and don't want to) read the book. So I guess that's my main criteria here in relation to that.

Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone was a pretty big deal when it first came out... I personally think that this film had a big hand in boosting the popularity of the Harry Potter novels. The success of this movie also meant that a lot of rival studios started looking for their own children's fantasy books to adapt into a multi-gazillion dollar franchise. Very few of these attempts came even close to the success that Warner Brothers enjoyed with Harry Potter (see related texts at the bottom of this review).

The primary cast are all so small and little! You don't get a true appreciation of this until you go back after the franchise has run its course - they did well to keep all these kids onboard for all eight films.
Most of the child actors are fairly well cast, with the exception of Daniel Radcliffe as Harry Potter. He's easily the worst of the child actors, his fake mouse-like grin and inability to imbue his lines with any real feeling would have seriously hamstrung the whole film if the script, sets and surrounding cast hadn't been more than up to scratch. Thankfully Radcliffe would improve drastically by the time of the second film.
The real stars of course are Emma Watson as Hermione and Rupert Grint as Ron. They both play up to their characters' quirks perfectly.
The other standouts in the cast are Alan Rickman (so much so that I find it particularly impossible to divorce him from the character when I read the books), Richard Harris (the right mix of aloof and childish as Dumbledore), Robbie Coltrane (you just want to give him a big hug) and Richard Griffiths (one of the most undervalued character actors alive).
There are so many unanswered questions in this film, and considering that the books still hadn't all been written when this film was made, they did an outstanding job of foreshadowing the overall arc of the story.
Most of the CGI still holds up - the snake near the beginning is great, as are some of the other smaller touches. The more ambitious stuff like Harry sitting on the shoulders of the troll, and the all-CG centaur, are decidedly less successful in achieving a suitable level of realism but they kind of get away with it anyway.
The general feel and design of this film can be summed up as 'bright and Dickensian'. Philosopher's Stone is all about the awe and wonder of this magical world that comes to Harry and takes over his hardluck life.
The plot is somewhat episodic. As I just mentioned, this story is primarily about Harry and his introduction into the world of wizarding, so the main plot takes a bit of a backseat to characterisation and setting. This is fine, there'll be plenty of time for plot in the later films, so I think the viewer should just enjoy accompanying Harry on his first year at Hogwarts, and there's enough spectacle and incident to keep it interesting.
Having said that, the climactic quest at the end is a bit silly. Harry, Ron and Hermione are going gangbusters through a series of heroic tasks and then it all stops so they can have a game of chess. It's hardly the sort of thing that lends itself to the neccessarily fast pace of a film, and it's perhaps one of the things from the book that really could've been changed for the benefit of the film.
The only real difference between this film and the book it's based on (as far as I can tell) is the absence of the poltergeist Peeves (who was played by Rik Mayall and cut from the film).
It doesn't help that Chris Columbus' direction is occasionally amateurish either. There's a scene where Harry is inside an invisibility cloak and looking at Snape, and the camera angle is all wrong. It's a POV shot and they seem to be at the same height, yet Harry is a little kid and Snape is a fully grown man.
Jesus! How big is Hagrid in this film? The guy is half-giant, so it makes sense, but he doesn't seem that big in the later films at all. Likewise, John Cleese has a recurring cameo role as the ghost Nearly-Headless Nick, but I'm not sure if he continues to appear throughout the later films.

Overall, this is a really fun film. The tragic element of Harry's backstory is hinted at a few times but when it's coupled with Columbus' bright and cheery direction it feels very much in the tradition of Roald Dahl (as opposed to the near-Shakespearean heights of tragedy it reaches in later, darker installments).

TRIVIA: One piece of trivia for you... the kid who plays Lee Jordan (the quidditch commentator) in both this and the second Harry Potter film is also Magnitude from the TV series Community. Pop pop!

DIRECTOR: Chris Columbus
WRITER/SOURCE: Steve Kloves, based on the book by J. K. Rowling.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, Emma Watson, Richard Harris, Robbie Coltrane, Maggie Smith, Warwick Davis, Alan Rickman, Richard Griffiths, Fiona Shaw, John Cleese, John Hurt, Harry Melling, Tom Felton, Ian Hart, Julie Walters, Verne Troyer, Matthew Lewis, Zoe Wanamaker, Leslie Phillips.

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone by J. K. Rowling.
- This film was followed by seven sequels; Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.
- Of the three main juvenile leads, only Daniel Radcliffe had previously appeared in a film. This was The Tailor of Panama, an John Le Carre espionage film starring Geoffrey Rush and Pierce Brosnan.
- I mentioned earlier that the Harry Potter films 'influenced' a lot of studios to start developing their own children's fantasy franchises. Here are some of these attempts, for better or worse... A Series of Unfortunate Events, Eragon, Inkheart, The Spiderwick Chronicles, The Dark is Rising, The Golden Compass, The Lion The Witch and The Wardrobe, Bridge to Terabithia and Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief (which was also directed by Chris Columbus, funnily enough).
- The other major fantasy franchise-starter of 2001 was The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Score.
BAFTAs - nominated for Best British Film, Children's Award for Best Film, Best Special Visual Effects, Best Costume Design, Best Make-Up, Best Supporting Actor (Robbie Coltrane), Best Production Design and Best Sound.

Interview with Megan Griffiths

2012-01-04T22:38:00.000-08:00

A little while ago I reviewed an indie film called The Off Hours, which lays out a twilight crossroads for a young woman working a dead end night shift job. The film is beautifully shot, and puts a seldom-seen working place world into deep focus.

Anyway, I was lucky enough to be put into contact with writer-director Megan Griffiths, and she was kind enough to answer some questions about the film and her work as a director.

What inspired you to make a film about the world of the night shift worker?

I was working the night shift at a film lab in Seattle, and it started to get to me. I started to wonder what working in those in-between times would do to a person over the long term. There's such a loneliness to that existence. The hours creep by, but the years seem to accumulate very quickly and before you know it you've let a lot of your life pass you by. I wanted to paint an honest portrait of what could lead people to this place and what it might take to get them out.

How do you go about scripting such a thing? IE. What is the starting point for your script - theme, character, setting or something else?

It definitely started with the theme. The setting came next, and I chose a diner because I felt it would lend a rich palette and be a visually interesting place that would also allow for people of different worlds to interact. The central characters grew from the settings, and the supporting characters grew organically from there because every central character who lived in this diner world needed their stories rounded out by the other people in their life. This may be obvious, but this script was never outlined--the story was driven exclusively by the characters. The changes that take place may feel minor as they occur, but each individual character's world is inextricably changed by the final frame. I feel like this is how people end up where they end up in life, through many small choices made over time. Once you start noticing the cumulative effect of these choices, even the littlest decision becomes magnified.

The dialogue often seemed very organic and naturalistic, was any of it adlibbed?

It was generally scripted. The actors all responded very strongly to the script and didn't really want to stray too far from it. I was definitely always open to improvisation, and there are a few fantastic lines that came straight from the actors' brains. The one actor who improvised a lot was Bret Roberts. He gets bored quickly and usually won't say the same thing two takes in a row. It can be a challenge in the editing room, but he came up with some of the best lines in the film, so I wouldn't have it any other way.

How did you go about earning the Sustainable Style Foundation tag, was it very much a conscious decision? Is this something you'll do on all your film projects?

It was definitely a conscious choice. I started brainstorming in the very early stages of this project with Rebecca Luke (the film's costume designer and the co-founder of the Sustainable Style Foundation) about how to make more sustainable choices. It is important to both of us to try to reform the wasteful habits of the average film production, so we determined that The Off Hours should be the guinea pig for all these ideas. The producers of the film (Lacey Leavitt, Mischa Jakupcak and Joy Saez) were all very supportive of this and bent over backwards to create an environment on set where these choices were supported and encouraged. I definitely hope to keep it going on future projects--my new film Eden will also have an SSF Tag.

How did The Off Hours differ (production and budget-wise) from your first film, First Aid for Choking?

I made First Aid for Choking very early in my career. It was a very small film, but I was able to gather a fantastic team of people who I had met in film school and on other film projects. It was entirely self-funded and self-produced, which I determined that I should never attempt again. The Off Hours ended up being made for a higher budget than FAFC, but not much higher. My producers and I tried for many years to raise money to make the film in a more traditional way, but ultimately that didn't happen and we ended up making it for a micro-budget. The real difference between the two films was the amount of experience I'd gained and the connections I had been able to make in the Seattle community in the eight year lapse between films. I worked throughout that time in a variety of capacities and learned a lot and made great friends who ended up lending their skills to The Off Hours.

How does your current film, Eden, differ (production and budget-wise) from The Off Hours?

Eden was a script that came to me after The Off Hours played at Sundance. The budget was larger than The Off Hours--still not huge by Hollywood standards, but large enough that the cast and crew were paid union wages and we could afford to build a few sets from scratch. The crew is very similar between the two films--I was extremely happy to be able to bring back the people who had donated their time for The Off Hours and pay them for Eden. The two productions were actually pretty similar other than the dollars behind them. The subject matter is very different, as Eden delves into much darker territory than I did with The Off Hours.

How did Beau Bridges get involved with Eden?

It happened in a pretty traditional way--our casting director sent the script to his representatives. Beau responded to the character, we met and hit it off, and he signed on. He watched The Off Hours too and afterwards told me it made him feel like he was in good hands.

What else can you tell us about Eden?

It's the story of a young Korean-American girl who is abducted and held outside of Vegas at a human trafficking facility for over two years. Over this time she has to make a lot of difficult and complicated choices to ensure her own survival. It's based on a true story that is incredibly gripping and powerful. I was really honored to be able to interpret this woman's story for the film and I'm really proud of it.

Do you feel that your work as a writer-director has certain unifying themes or elements?

I'd say the common ground is probably a devotion to drawing authentic characters with a non-judgmental eye. I'm drawn to films about characters who have depth and flaws, and I always try to keep this in mind when I'm writing.

What are ten of your favourite films?

Always a tough question, but I'll give you the first ten that come to mind, in no particular order: You Can Count On Me, Rushmore, The Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Walking and Talking, Peewee's Big Adventure, Dead Man Walking, Being John Malkovich, Barton Fink, Midnight Run, Annie Hall.

Do you have any plans for your next film?

I have a project called Sadie that I'm working on getting funding for now and hoping to shoot in 2012. It's about a 13-year-old girl who is struggling with issues of morality at home while her father, who she adores, serves repeated tours in the Army in Afghanistan. I also have an untitled comedy script I'm currently writing with a friend.

Thanks for taking the time to answer these questions.

Thank you!

Hiroshima Mon Amour

2012-01-03T20:24:00.000-08:00

"Man's political intelligence is one hundred times less developed than his scientific intelligence"

Hiroshima Mon Amour is a film featured in both 1001 Movies You Should See Before You Die and They Shoot Pictures Don't They? Such is its influence that it has been called the "first modern film of sound cinema", and it was instrumental in kicking off the French New Wave of filmmaking. It's also quite a controversial film for its time, depicting an interracial sexual relationship between a Japanese man and a French woman (prior to this the few interracial relationships depicted on the screen had put the western/european character in the male position), and also features some disturbing documentary footage that shows the aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing.

The premise for this film grew out of Alain Resnais' attempt to make a documentary about the atomic bomb. Resnais had previously made the acclaimed Holocaust documentary Night and Fog, and he was commissioned to look at the impact of the atomic bomb in a similar fashion. Resnais felt that the films would've been too alike if he treated them in the same way, so he decided to incorporate the themes into a fictional film that saw a French actress (Emmanuelle Riva) and a Japanese politician (Eiji Okada) indulging in a holiday fling in post-war Hiroshima. The romance is fleeting, and soon intensifies as both characters relive the consequences of the war.

Together the couple discusses life, love, humanity, war, and Hiroshima itself. The French woman's past still haunts her, she had an affair with a Nazi soldier and was humiliated and ostracised by her fellow townspeople as a result. Meanwhile, the Japanese man was conscripted into the Japanese war effort just prior to the dropping of the bomb - meaning that he avoided the obliteration that took the rest of his family from the face of the Earth. Both are slowly healing from their respective traumas, bearing metaphors of their internal scarring (her hair was shorn off, whereas his numbness represents the physical loss of his family). In light of all this, the demise of their affair seems inevitable.

The reason why this film had such a huge historical impact is mainly via the way Resnais constructs his narrative. He employs a new kind of montage that uses short silent flashbacks cut together whilst a character narrates, it's a technique born in non-fiction filmmaking that he brought with him from his previous background as a documentarian. The documentary is a genre that neccessitates increased dynamics in storytelling, and Resnais brought the associated techniques over into the world of the fictional film text with Hiroshima Mon Amour. Aside from the use of montage, this also means unexpected fade outs, a highly-stylised backstory, and point-of-view shots that are used to evoke the power and processes of memory. The entire treatment is fresh and vibrant - making this quite simply completely unlike any other film that had come before it (and like very few films made since).

A word of warning that I probably could've used myself - the real footage of the Hiroshima aftermath that features near the film's beginning is incredibly graphic and horrific. I had to look away a few times because it was too much for me. A big part of Hiroshima Mon Amour is the theme of memory and the processes we use in remembering... this film is a crucial remembrance that accompanied the birth of the Cold War, an iteration of the boiling fears of nuclear armageddon that everyone was no doubt feeling at the time. Occasionally the dialogue in Hiroshima Mon Amour disappears up itself with an almost poetic use of repetition, and the narrative may feel overly artsy for anyone used to more traditional forms of filmmaking, but I think that if a film over sixty years old can still manage to make people feel uncomfortable or challenged then it's a sure sign of its status as a truly groundbreaking work.

DIRECTOR: Alain Resnais
WRITER/SOURCE: Marguerite Duras
KEY ACTORS: Emmanuelle Riva, Eiji Okada, Bernard Fresson

RELATED TEXTS
- The documentary Night and Fog, also by Alain Resnais.
- Resnais also continued his exploration of this style with the film Last Year at Marienbad.
- The film has been remade as H Story (2001, by a Japanese director) and re-imagined as Where or When (2003, by an Iranian director).
- Other early French New Wave films: The Handsome Serge, The 400 Blows and Breathless.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - won UN Award. Also nominated for Best Film and Best Foreign Actress (Emmenauelle Riva).
Cannes Film Festival - nominated for the Palmes d'Or.

The Sirens of Titan

2012-01-03T16:03:00.000-08:00

The Sirens of Titan is Kurt Vonnegut's second book. It is also the one book of his that is most definable as 'science-fiction' (rather than science fiction-like literature). It's a very enjoyable book and I'd recommend it to both sci-fi fans and people looking to get into Vonnegut's stuff. After his first book, the proto-satire Player Piano, this is probably the true start of his unique and famous writing style - with many of his recurring themes, styles and ideas appearing for the first time here.

The story concerns one Malachi Constant, a 22nd-century man who happens to be extraordinarily rich (apparently thanks to nothing more than luck). Constant finds himself manipulated by the Church of God the Utterly Indifferent into a series of interplanetary events... he is caught up in a war between Earth and Mars, and eventually travels to Titan to meet an alien traveller. Various interlinked forces are at work here, including some time travel-related jiggery-pokery known as chrono-synclastic infundibulum.

As far as the plot is concerned it's a fairly complex piece of work. It's more linear than Vonnegut's later work but it exhibits the kind of circular plotting (especially in it's use of time travel) that is central to most of his best novels. Notions of free will are explored in the cynical way that Vonnegut would go on to perfect, and he indulges in this with a healthy level of pathos and fatalism to keep things relatively grounded. The plot is surprisingly tight for all it's twistiness, and the book is probably more sound than a lot of his other work - at least in a superficial sense (ie. the plot).

This was actually the first Vonnegut book I ever read, and - obviously - I enjoyed it a lot. He's probably my favourite author, I'm now trying to pace myself as I read through his back catalogue. I didn't want to get to thirty and know that I'll never get to read a new Vonnegut novel again, so I'm still yet to read a few of his books. For all it's intricate plotting this is probably the most attention-grabbing and straight-forward book to reccomend to people looking to read some Vonnegut. It isn't as shot full of irony and cynicism as his later (and best) books, but it's still very clever and satisfying and is probably the best place to start (though I could just be saying that because it's where I started).

Top 15 Films of 2011

2012-01-02T18:54:00.001-08:00

These films are just the ones I liked the most out of all the 2011 releases I saw this year. I have by no means seen everything that came out this year, but I did manage to see quite a few films nonetheless. All I can say is, I loved these movies, and I recommend them. Click the title (where applicable) to be led to a more in-depth review...

15. Terri
This one sort of crept under the radar a bit. It's a coming-of-age film about this massive 15 year old named Terri... he isn't really picked on at school, but he doesn't really fit in either, mainly because he wears pyjamas all the time and lives with his brain-frozen uncle. The school's deputy principal (played by John C. Reilly, who's just an all-round awesome dude) decides to make Terri one of his 'pet projects' and the two become friends. Think Rushmore but not as intellectual or faux-arty.

14. The Inbetweeners Movie
It's not gonna set any awards ceremonies on fire, but this is one heck of an enjoyable comedy. I laughed ridiculously hard as the boys awkwardly embarked on the holiday of a lifetime, staying at the world's worst hotel and systematically ruining all of their chances to get laid. You don't need to have seen the TV series in order to enjoy this movie, just think of it as a British American Pie or The Hangover Part II. The experiences of the four main characters should be equally familiar to any Australian readers who had a traditionally misspent youth, and I think the tone is the perfect mix of realistic awkwardness and teenage tomfoolery.

13. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives
This is my obligatory foreign language film for 2011. It's a Thai film made by a gay Thai filmmaker who treads more on the arty side of things... normally these sorts of films don't really appeal to me all that much, but there's something about Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives that's so radically original and visually memorable. Uncle Boonmee is a orchard owner in a regional part of Thailand who is coming towards the end of his life. One day his sister-in-law comes to visit him and while they're sitting around the table some supernatural beings decide to join them. This includes Boonmee's long-lost son, who has become a scary-looking ape-creature. It's a strange, slow-paced, and dreamlike film. It's hard to explain it in any detail, but I can guarantee you that this is the only place where you will see a deformed Thai woman have sex with a talking catfish.

12. Super 8
Okay, so Super 8 practially falls over itself to try and be so much like a late '70s/early '80s Spielberg film that it barely ever qualifies as original, but for a child of the '80s like myself it's a heady treat of dark candy. This film made me want to revisit all those classic films from my childhood and it also managed to be a great, suspenseful adventure. A big part of its appeal is in its recreation of the late '70s midwest of America, and the cast of relative unknowns (child actors included) are uniformly excellent.

11. Win Win
Like Terri, this one also snuck up on me. Tom McCarthy (probably best known for playing the role of the dodgy journo in season 5 of The Wire) has slowly been cultivating a 'side' career as a director of exceptionally solid indie-dramas (his previous films, The Station Agent and The Visitor, helped elevate the careers of Peter Dinklage and Richard Jenkins respectively). Win Win is probably McCarthy's best film so far, a healthy dramedy about a stressed-out small town lawyer/wrestling coach (played by Paul Giamatti) who doctors some legal forms in order to scam money out of a senile retiree (Burt Young). Giamatti's already complicated life begins to get even more complicated when the retiree's grandson shows up and shows an aptitude for greco-roman wrestling. This is a feel-good flick that never feels manipulative, and plays like a cross between Little Miss Sunshine and Rocky.

10. Rango
I didn't expect much out of this, but I think it turned out to be the best animated feature film of the year. Mixing all kinds of plot points and tropes from a wide array of classic films and genres (most notably the film Chinatown and the Western genre), Rango has a lot of fun breaking the mould for CGI adventure movies. Decidedly unfriendly to children at some points, Rango treads a fine line between the comic and the morbid, and is a subverisve spaghetti western that will shock and entertain even the most 'adult' of viewers.

9. Our Idiot Brother
I think this comedy is hugely underrated, and it's easily Paul Rudd's best performance so far. Rudd plays Ned, a hapless free spirit who isn't quite an 'idiot', more just naive. Ned's problem is that he thinks the best of everyone and is ultimately too trusting for his own good. After serving a stint in prison for selling weed to a uniformed police officer, Ned comes out to find that his girlfriend has a new boyfriend and won't give him back his beloved dog (named 'Willie Nelson'). Ned's three self-absorbed sisters try to help him out, but it doesn't take long for Ned's positive outlook to interfere with their respective lives. This is a great character-based comedy that doesn't rely on adult or gross-out orientated humour, and is a film where you'll fall in love with the lead character.

8. Hesher
Speaking of best performances, you really have to see Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this film as Hesher. Hesher isn't really the main character in this movie, he's just this mysterious wandering metalhead who decides to start squatting with a family. The family consists of a young boy, a dad, and a grandma. The mum in this family has recently died, and the family is having a tough time dealing with it. Hesher is one of the funniest and most original characters to ever be put on film. Remember when Johnny Depp first played Captain Jack Sparrow back in 2003 and everyone went apeshit for it? Well, that's the reaction that Joseph Gordon-Levitt deserves for this movie. Hesher gets points for me simply for the fact that Gordon-Levitt based his character on Cliff Burton, the original bassplayer for the band Metallica. Who the heck bases a character on Cliff Burton? The answer to that is Joseph Gordon-Levitt, who is truly one actor to watch over the course of the next few years. This film also contains the greatest funeral eulogy you'll ever hear.

7. Hanna
On the surface Hanna looks like a typical bullshit assassin-thriller but it's so much more than that. Directed by the guy who's best known for the literary adaptation Atonement, Hanna is part Cold War spy thriller, part messed-up fairy tale. Cate Blanchett is the evil stepmother out to get the innocent princess (Hanna), and Eric Bana plays the Woodsman-figure. Featuring a brilliantly original score by the Chemical Brothers, and a creepy subtext about the dangers of home-schooling, this is the perfect antidote for the dozens of mindless actions films that Hollywood pumps out year after year.

6. Snowtown
Instead of a detail-heavy TV-esque true story plodder ala the various 'Underbellys', Snowtown is actually one of the most insidiously creepy Australian crime films to ever be put on the screen. Few films get as up close and personal with real life serial killers as Snowtown does. Whilst it is highly disturbing, don't watch this film expecting a horror gorefest... it's better than that. It's an unassuming documentary-like look at the welfare culture that gave birth to the horrendous mystery of the snowtown acid-barrel murders, and a study in sociopathic manipulation. The Snowtown gang's ringleader John Bunting is one scary dude, an effect achieved primarily by actor Daniel Henshall's understatedly smug performance.

5. Attack the Block
There have been a few alien-invasion films over the last year or so, but none are as original as this British film from the producers of Shaun of the Dead. At first the 'heroes' of the film (a gang of estate hoodlums) seem completely unredeemable, but it eventually comes to pass that these kids are the sort of characters who are the best equipped to deal with an alien infestation. The aliens are a great, unique design too - simple but scary and effective. The action, dialogue and character-interplay all rings true and makes for an adrenalin-charged horror/sci-fi combo that holds the attention from start to finish. A great film that I can see myself watching more than a few times in the near future!

4. Submarine
Indie coming-of-age comedy Welsh-style. Submarine is dazzlingly inventive, witty, and sparkles with the enthusiasm of youth... Oliver Tate is the kind of creative and sensitive arsehole that should be more than familiar to a few viewers, and his hapless misadventures in a Welsh coastal village make this cinematic diary an instant classic. Features some quirky supporting turns from some underrated character actors in the 'adult' roles, and the director more than occasionally pushes it into brilliant music video territory.

3. Super
Imagine if the hero of Kick-Ass had been a pathetic middle-aged man suffering from some kind of unspecified mental illness and you should have some idea of what this film is like. I was expecting this movie to be a retread of the standard comic book material, but it's a lot more than that. Super wades into the kind of truly weird moral grey area that films like Kick-Ass and Watchmen were too cowardly to touch, and its impact on me was every bit as heavy as the violent swing of Rainn Wilson's boltcutters. Watch out for Ellen Page, who gives an unexpectedly deranged performance as the hero's feisty sidekick.

2. Bridesmaids
I can hear your groans from here. I know I've ranked this one quite highly, but I just can't fault my enjoyment of it! I know it doesn't do a whole lot to break the bromance/event comedy formula of many recent Apatow or Todd Haynes flicks, but this was hands down the funniest film I've seen in a very long time. Key to its success is the breakout performance of the too-long-unsung Kristen Wiig. Female 'orientated' comedies are too often dominated by comedic vacuums like Katherine Heigl or Julia Roberts (actresses who get cast because they're famous rather than funny). Bridesmaids bucks this tradition, and is also standout hilarious because it hits all its balls into the outfield.

1. Drive
Hands down the best film I've seen in years. I can't explain it, you just have to watch it. Ryan Gosling is the new king of cool. That stillness, that soundtrack, that scene in the elevator! This is a Goodfellas, Taxi Driver or Reservoir Dogs for a whole new generation. It reaffirms my faith in great filmmaking and proves that original and awesome films are still getting made today.

Some honourable mentions...
I also enjoyed these films a lot too: Moneyball, The Guard, X-Men: First Class, Thor, The Way Back and Beginners.

Hesher

2012-01-01T21:28:00.001-08:00

"Life is like walking in the rain... you can hide and take cover, or you can walk and just get wet"

There just aren't enough movies about badass heavy metal dudes. Heavy metal in film has long been a source of ridicule (see This is Spinal Tap), and yeah, the character of Hesher is a funny guy, but most of the time we're laughing with him. That's pretty unusual. Heck, it's unusual for a film to even make any reference to thrash metal at all... usually the kind of metal music featured in movies is closer to the operatics of Iron Maiden or watered down metal that's more akin to hard rock (Tenacious D and the Pick of Destiny) or glam (Rock Star). This movie, Hesher, isn't really about heavy metal, but the eponymous character is 100% pure early '90s Metallica fan. He's so similar to the westie headbangers I grew up around that it was bizarre to see such a character interacting with Natalie Portman in a movie.

It's kind of hard to describe Hesher. We come into the story around the point where a troubled young boy named T.J. (Devin Brochu) accidentally crosses paths with Hesher (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), but the story really goes back further than this. The boy and his dad (Rainn Wilson) are eking out a pathetic existence with grandma (Piper Laurie) in this increasingly rundown house. Hesher takes exception to T.J.'s encroachment on his own life, and so he decides to just move into T.J.'s house and start squatting there. The dad is so deeply depressed that he barely notices, and grandma is in a world of her own, so it's up to T.J. to try and get rid of Hesher. Things get worse for T.J. when he and Hesher also both start competing for the affection of a local supermarket cashier (Natalie Portman).

The above description doesn't do this film justice. Nearly all of this film's originality is fuelled on Joseph Gordon-Levitt's hilariously downplayed performance as Hesher. Despite the film's name, he isn't even really the main character, and his unpredictability in the role is every bit as deserving of the kind of praise that Johnny Depp got when he first played Captain Jack Sparrow in the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie, so it's a shame that this film (and Gordon-Levitt's performance) isn't more widely recognised.

On one level this is a dark film about people who are having trouble coping with a personal and very real tragedy, but on another level it features this guy named Hesher. He doesn't care about shit, he's reckless, lawless, irresponsible, destructive, stupid... he's smokin' bongs with grandma, and he's pretty much unique when viewed as a catalyst for change in terms of plot mechanics in movies. He also gives pretty much the best end of movie speech ever. I can't recommend Hesher enough, so check it out.

DIRECTOR: Spencer Susser
WRITER/SOURCE: Spencer Susser, David Michod and Brian Charles Frank.
KEY ACTORS: Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Devin Brochu, Natalie Portman, Rainn Wilson, Piper Laurie, Brendan Hill, John Carroll Lynch, Audrey Wasilewski

RELATED TEXTS
- Writer-director Spencer Susser previously made the short film I Love Sarah Jane, which he is currently developing into his second feature film.
- Other indie flicks about unlikely pairings of characters: The Good Heart, Adam, Is Anybody There?, The Station Agent, About a Boy, The Visitor and Ghost World.
- Films that showcase Joseph Gordon-Levitt's range and talent: Brick, Mysterious Skin, (500) Days of Summer, Stop-Loss and 50/50.

AWARDS
Sundance Film Festival - nominated for Grand Jury prize.

Stalingrad

2011-12-29T03:41:00.001-08:00

"We'll get the Iron Cross for this. It'll look great in my coffin".

Sometimes it's a big ask to sit down and watch a film like Stalingrad. If, like me, you have the faintest whiff of knowledge about this rather decisive and infamous point in WWII, you'll know that any film about it will about as joyful as a Mormon lingerie party. Interestingly, this film about the battle and siege of Stalingrad is made from a German perspective, which also filled me with some degree of dread. I imagined it would be filled with anchronistic revisionism, guilty self-analysis, and a dirge-like willingness to draw the film out for as long as possible.

Haha, I know. I tend to make a lot of assumptions sometimes... I'm my own worst enemy. I'm not going to say that this film is free of any of the above criticisms, but I will say that it actually turned out to be an illuminating and decidedly humanistic homemade effort from the Germans. Stalingrad takes great care to portray its grunts with all the camaraderie and gallows humour that modern audiences come to expect from war films. There's a scene quite early on where a soldier accidentally shoots and kills his own friend, and he's beside himself with grief. Another soldier interrupts his hysterics and casually says, "I did the same once. It's normal in close combat", and that's that. Anyway, I'm getting ahead of myself, but I just thought it was a good scene because it subverts certain cliches of war whilst remaining realistic. This film strikes this interesting tone right through to the end.

Stalingrad follows a German company of stormtroopers who've just returned from a successful campaign in El Alamein. These men are tired and battered, but they're also optimistic about moving on to the eastern front after their recent victory. This is the 'normal' soldier's experience during a war; the idea that a successful campaign can only reinforce a soldier's resilience, and it serves as a contrast to the harrowing time the men are yet to face in Russia. This film suggests that the battle of Stalingrad, and it's protracted aftermath, is something else entirely when compared to regular combat in WWII. The soldiers are portrayed as a group of regular guys (there's even the requisite scene where each character talks about his job back in the 'real' world) who are more than unprepared for the Russian winter and the hell they're about to enter.

So what should you expect from this film if you should settle yourself in for the duration? A horribly realistic (and unique) view of what the Germans put themselves through in Hitler's doomed campaign to conquer Russia. The cautious M.A.S.H.-like mockery of war is fun at first, but soon this degenerates into bitterness and contempt... the madness, chaos and senselessness of the Battle of Stalingrad provides the perfect framework to explore all that goes wrong for the losing side in a war like this. There's misery, disenfranchisement, demoralisation, mutiny, and a clash of philosophies over 'contact' with the enemy.

I have to admit that I'm a little sceptical when it comes to German films about WWII. There's a lot of cultural pressure put on losing parties like Germany when it comes to depictions of their own experiences in war (and arguably, the general experiences of the 'honest' German citizen is going to be a lot worse than anyone on the 'winning' team). If a film is made about WWII from the German perspective then international audiences expect certain concessions to be made. It isn't enough that they lost the war, there's a certain degree of ritual humiliation where said losing side is encouraged (or bullied) into writing up a version of history that justifies their defeat. As a result Stalingrad features disturbing scenes of the Nazis shooting their own wounded for being traitors, and German soldiers deserting while talking critically about Nazism and the social forces that allowed it to happen. Historical hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I'm not saying that any of this anti-Nazi stuff is false, but I am saying that it feels disingenuous for Stalingrad to glorify its low-ranking protagonists by morally seperating them from the tragedies being committed. It feels inaccurate to claim that these characters had the same historical awareness as the contemporary audience watching the film. It's a rare thing to see a German-made WWII film that just portrays the events of the war as they happened, with ordinary people getting ground up by the war machine just like any other war. I guess I'm just saying that I think that politics can sometimes get in the way of truth when it comes to making a film like this.

Anyway, Stalingrad is an interesting take on WWII. There's a pall of doom that falls over the soldiers around the halfway mark where it becomes clear that whatever path they choose - whether it's following orders or refusing to follow orders - it will inevitably lead to an untimely death. It's a sad situation, and Stalingrad makes it painfully real through its cast of regular soldiers and detailed recreation of the stages this brutal battle shuddered its death throes upon.

DIRECTOR: Joseph Vilsmaier
WRITER/SOURCE: Joseph Vilsmaier, Jurgen Buscher and Johannes Heide.
KEY ACTORS: Thomas Kretschmann, Dominique Horwitz, Jochen Nickel, Dana Vavrova, Martin Benrath

RELATED TEXTS:
- Other films made about the war on the eastern front... Dogs Do You Want to Live Forever?, Stalingrad (a two part film made in 1989), Enemy at the Gate and Cross of Iron.
- There was also a television series made in 2003, also called Stalingrad.
- Also made the same year as this film was Steven Spielberg's first WWII opus, Schindler's List.
- Two other German films about WWII worth checking out - Downfall, Das Boot and The Tin Drum.

Grendel

2011-12-27T21:42:00.000-08:00

Beowulf is a famous anglo-saxon poem from around the 9th century about a warrior (Beowulf) who slays three monsters - Grendel, Grendel's Mother, and a Dragon. This book by John Gardner is a retelling of the first part of the story from Grendel's point of view.

It's said that you need to have read Beowulf, or be familiar with it, to be able to follow this book. The writer certainly intends this, but I think only a passing familiarity is really neccessary. The above paragraph of this very review would probably be all the prior information you would need, I never really knew all that much about the poem/myth before reading this book - and I don't think it hindered my enjoyment in any way whatsoever!

Now... let me just say this: Grendel is one of my most favourite novels ever.

It's a fairly slight book, almost a novella, but it's by no means a simple work. It's a very dense and complex book that uses the basics of a medieval myth to deconstruct humanity and some of the philosophies that power the very essence of our civilisation.

Grendel is a brutish and crude figure... he is cruel and ugly and every bit the monster he is portrayed to be in other versions of the tale Beowulf. Gardner has gone to great lengths to keep his protagonist monstrous in both appearance and personality. Grendel by no means stupid though, he is confused by his own existence and angered by the differences between himself and everyone around him. His own mother is a depraved and loathsome creature that he is unable to communicate with, the local Dragon is all-knowing but nihilistic and does little to help Grendel reconcile his point of view with the world, and the village of humans that Grendel spends twelve years of his life observing, molesting, taunting and waging war on are so far removed from his own understanding of life that they fuel his confusion to the point of outright fury.

The 'hero' Beowulf himself doesn't turn up until the last sequences of the book and remains unnamed. Grendel's confrontation with the village's saviour is so ambivilent that it makes my head spin. Grendel is a miserable and bored creature, neither superior or inferior to the little people he torments... he's the original anti-hero, and this book really pulls apart the foundations of concepts like 'heroes' and 'villains' in a big way.

I can't really put my finger on why I like this book so much other than that. Grendel's detached interpretation of the village's growth and advancement likens humans to a parasitic and stupid species, and his prime motivation for wreaking so much havoc amongst them is boredom and curiosity. How can you not like that?

Anyway, like I said, it's a fairly dense book. A lot of it is made up of Grendel's stream-of-consciousness and it's written mostly in present tense (something I found very impressive when I first read it, I'd never read anything in present tense before that I'd actually liked - I didn't think it could even be done without seeming like wank, but this book proved my preconceptions wrong). Aside from these technical achievements, it's also very entertaining, amusing and sometimes even tragic. I'm yet to find another book even remotely like it.

Pee-wee's Big Adventure

2011-12-27T03:02:00.001-08:00

I'm a bit of a Pee-wee Herman novice. Maybe I wasn't the right age, but I never watched him when I was a kid and I didn't understand the appeal. My partner Nicole is a big fan of him, so we sat down to watch this movie together. She was in it for the nostalgia (having watched his films and TV show when she was a kid) and I was in it because it's a Tim Burton film. About fifteen minutes into it, and Pee-wee is riding his bike around while being obnoxious, and I turn to Nicole.

"Is there a point to this film? I don't get it".

She was laughing at Pee-wee's antics, and didn't understand the fact that I didn't get it. I just didn't understand Paul Reubens' schtick, nor did I understand where the film was going. As he stopped and talked to another man-child named Francis (Mark Holton) I asked tentatively,

"Are they meant to be children?"

I was starting to get a grasp on the character, but it still just seemed to be a bunch of random stuff happening.

That is, until Pee-wee's beloved bike got stolen.

I was outraged.

Pee-wee travels across America, meeting the oddest assortment of oddball midwest characters you could imagine (I was reminded a little bit of the more recent comedy, Paul). I laughed as he met each one with his own exagerrated brand of immaturity. Soon I was even doing the 'haHA!' laugh that he does (much to Nicole's annoyance). I cheered him on as he got closer and closer to his bike, and I loved the 'Hollywood' version of Pee-wee's adventure that ended the film.

It was exactly the mix of goofy hilariousous and dark, offbeat strangeness that I expected from an early Tim Burton film. It had a bouyant inventiveness that his latest films have lacked, and I can totally see how he managed to launch his career as a big name director from this movie.

Most of all though, it's Paul Reubens' film. I know Reubens has a bad wrap for his 1991 indiscretions at an adult movie theatre (it's amazing how many people jump to the incorrect assumption that he's a pedophile), but his performance as Pee-wee Herman is so oddly unique that I could quite easily see the character making a successful comeback for his fans (provided Reubens doesn't get too old in the meantime). Yes, it took me more than 20 years to get the joke, but I get it now and sometimes it takes that long to develop a true appreciation of what we don't initially understand.

DIRECTOR: Tim Burton
WRITER/SOURCE: Paul Reubens, Phil Hartman and Michael Varhol. Based on the character and TV show created by Paul Reubens.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Reubens, Elizabeth Daily, Mark Holton, Diane Salinger, Judd Omen, James Brolin, Alice Nunn, Morgan Fairchild

RELATED TEXTS:
- The early '80s TV show The Pee-wee Herman Show.
- After the success of the Tim Burton film, Reubens spun the character off into a children's TV show, Pee-wee's Playhouse. This was followed up by another film, Big Top Pee-wee.
- Sometimes I used to find Pee-wee a little remniscent of the (more toned down) Australian metafictional character Norman Gunston, who had his own TV show in the '70s, The Norman Gunston Show.
- Tim Burton's next couple of films after this were Beetlejuice, Batman and Edward Scissorhands.
- For other films about bicycles being stolen, see The Bicycle Thief and #omgimtrending.

Ali: Fear Eats the Soul

2011-12-26T14:07:00.001-08:00

"Arabs not human in Germany"

In the opening scene of Ali: Fear Eats the Soul, a lonely old cleaning lady named Emmi (Brigitte Mira) comes in out of the Berlin rain to an Arabic bar. The camera dramatically zooms in on her from far away, and then does the same for Ali (El Hedi ben Salem), a Moroccan migrant-worker about twenty years her junior. Thus starts one of the more improbable romances to be put on film, a tale of forbidden love that flies in the face of 1970s German society. Director Rainer Werner Fassbinder was one of the proponents of 'New German Cinema', a realism-influenced movement of filmmaking where younger directors took inspiration from the French New Wave to re-vitalise their country's film industry with the use of low budget and open-minded filmmaking. Here Fassbinder draws on the influence of Hollywood's golden era king of romantic melodrama, Douglas Sirk, to pass comment on contemporary Germany in an unlikely fable.

Emmi is a widow seemingly unaware of racial prejudice, everything about Ali and his culture is a wonder to her. Ali is a put-upon migrant worker who lives a meaningless life of work and drink. In each other they find companionship and unexpected love but Emmi is unprepared for the discrimination and ostracisation they will face and she impulsively decides to marry him. Soon her children disown her, shops won't serve them, her friends shun her and her neighbours tell her she has to clean the communal stairway because her new husband is 'dirty'. Ali is impassive to such familiar racism, and he retreats into his culture (represented by the Arabic bar) if it gets too much for him. A strain begins to appear in their idyllic marriage in due course, and the relationship seems quite doomed from this point.

There's an initial lightness to Fassbinder's film that makes it quite an enjoyable piece of enlightening storytelling. Ali is the minority in Germany, but Emmi is the outsider in his Arabic bar... and her initial alienation there foreshadows society's reaction to their marriage, a reflection of Germany's resentful attitude towards these new migrants in the '60s and '70s. The film's last act seems almost farcial in its strangeness, examining fundamental differences in Emmi and Ali that seem irreconcilable. By this point the society that discriminated so badly against them has done a bizarre about-face - a narrative twist that represents the needs of white society to adapt to the influx of multiculturalism. It's telling that the only outright positive attitudes towards their racial mixing are Emmi's landlord and the police; both are authoritarian figures, and indicate Germany's official position on discrimination - that they're at odds with the way the rest of society reacts is symbolic of the gap between the law and the attitudes of the public. The scene where Ali and Emmi eat in a restaurant that's famous for being Hitler's eating spot is pure irony, but it's also demonstrative of the way modern Germany in the '70s continued to struggle with its troubled past regarding attitudes to race.

What makes Ali: Fear Eats the Soul a real standout is the way it follows Ali and Emmi's relationship beyond simple discrimination and prejudice to look at more complex issues such as assimilation and stress through passive resistance. The film becomes a genuine dialogue about racism and the dawning of a new era in Germany, and that it also manages to be an entertaining love story is a welcome bonus. Some other films from the New German Cinema movement tend to be slowly-paced or overtly artsy (such as Werner Herzog's earliest films), but Fassbinder's film is nothing of the sort and should more than an idle curiosity for any fan of great storytelling and thoughtful cinema.

DIRECTOR: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
WRITER/SOURCE: Rainer Werner Fassbinder
KEY ACTORS: Brigitte Mira, El Hedi ben Salem, Barbera Valentin, Irm Hermann, Marquard Bohm, Walter Sedlmayr

RELATED TEXTS:
- This film was influenced directly by the Douglas Sirk films All That Heaven Allows and Imitation of Life. Both Sirk's films and Fassbinder's film went on to influence the Todd Haynes film Far From Heaven.
- Fassbinder's other most well-known films are The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, The Merchant of Four Seasons, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Berlin Alexanderplatz.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won FIPRESCI Prize and Prize of the Ecumenical Jury. Also nominated for the Palme d'Or.

Knight and Day

2011-12-25T05:25:00.001-08:00

"No one follows us or I'll kill myself and then her"

I'm fully aware that I'm in some kind of critical minority here, but I think Tom Cruise is fantastic. I've said it before but in terms of iconic stardom he's the modern day equivalent of John Wayne, playing variations on a strictly defined screen persona and mining the same vein over and over to find nuance in his performance. Here he gently pokes fun at his action persona, a slightly campy take that says more about his confidence as an actor than any amount of 'tell-all' interviews. He plays a cheerfully paranoid superspy with an Ace Rimmer-ish skill for charming people; the sort of role that Cruise can make effortlessly entertaining.

Everything in Knight and Day is positioned from the point of view of June Havens (Cameron Diaz), and the best aspect of the script is the fact that she ducks in and out of this bigger story and the ways she gets re-introduced to it at each point. But, with this in mind, this means that it feels wrong when the film suddenly switches to Cruise's point of view towards the end. It breaks the bubble.

I won't bother getting into the plot, it's pretty standard stuff and plays a Hitchcock-lite game of is-he-or-isn't-he-crazy? It's basically The Tourist, but more tonally focused and aware of what it's doing (which is ironic because Cruise was meant to be in The Tourist but ultimately pulled out before it went into production). In the '90s Knight and Day would've been considered new, sharp and dynamic (ala True Lies) but now, well, it's fun enough, but it also isn't anything special. Apparently it was considered a box office bomb in the U.S. despite the fact that it made a big profit in the international market. All I can say is, just check your expectations at the door and you'll enjoy it.

DIRECTOR: James Mangold
WRITER/SOURCE: Patrick O'Neill
KEY ACTORS: Cameron Diaz, Tom Cruise, Paul Dano, Peter Sarsgaard, Maggie Grace, Mark Blucas, Viola Davis,

RELATED TEXTS:
- See also The Tourist, with which this film shares more than a few similarities (including a poor reception from the critics).
- The corrupt-CIA agent plot is just about in every modern American action thriller in this increasingly cynical post-9/11 world, other examples include: The Expendables, Red, The A-Team and The Losers.
- Tom Cruise action films... Mission: Impossible, Mission: Impossible II, Mission: Impossible III, Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Top Gun, Minority Report, War of the Worlds and Collateral.
- Cruise and Diaz previously starred together in Vanilla Sky.

Life of Pi

2011-12-21T21:06:00.000-08:00

The Life of Pi is a wonderful, fantastic and intense novel that won the Booker Prize in 2003. Part coming-of-age, part-survivor story, part-folktale adventure and part-examination of multiple religions, this is a very complex book told in a simple and engaging manner.

Piscine 'Pi' Patel is the son of a zookeeper in India. The first third of the book deals with Pi's early life and his exploration of Christian, Hindu and Islamic faith. He decides to adopt the facets he likes of each religion, much to the chagrin of his local religious leaders. This faith in a self-made form of faith belies a strength of character in the slight and unassuming Pi that foreshadows the traumatic journey that is to come.

Pi's father decides to sell his zoo and relocate the family to Canada. En route, the ship sinks. Pi finds himself on a lifeboat with some animals from the zoo... a hyena, a zebra, an orang-utan and a Tiger named Richard Parker. A battle of wills ensue between the various animals, with Pi desperately trying to stay alive amongst them. Eventually it is only himself and the tiger left, and he realises he must keep this animal healthy and happy in order to survive.

For a story so odd it's told fairly realistically up until this point, but after a fashion it veers into a different kind of territory. Pi and Richard Parker reach a very bizarre island inhabited by Meerkats and the events that transpire here will test your suspension of disbelief.

This is a brilliant book. Various animal behaviour theories are employed by both Pi and the author, to help keep both the book and the boat afloat respectively. The dark and disturbing undercurrent that colours some of the book is an achievement in subtlety, and the lack of anthropomorphism is impressive as well.

The events are told in flashback by Pi to the author (Yann Martel), and at the book's end we are given two scenarios for what may or may not have happened on the boat for the 227 days that Pi survived at sea. What version of events you choose to believe no doubt reflects on the sort of person you are. I choose to believe in the fantastic adventure shared by Pi and the tiger.

Run Lola Run

2011-12-21T04:06:00.000-08:00

Run Lola Run is a one-of-a-kind film that looks at a do-or-die scenario and plays it through three times to show a variety of outcomes. Manni (Moritz Bleibtreu) is a bagman for some bad gangsters and he (mainly through his own stupidity) manages to lose a significant sum of mob money. He rings his girlfriend Lola (Franka Potente) and tells her she has twenty minutes to help him find 100 000 deustch marks, otherwise he's going to rob a supermarket to get the money himself. The scenario plays out three times, and each time a variation occurs quite early on that influences the way events will play out. It's an interesting way to look at themes of free will and determinism, but the biggest aspect of its appeal is the dynamic way it tells its story(s). So, as I know this is a Higher School Certificate text in Australia, rather than write a standard review I'm just going to look at the techniques this film uses... the 'distinctively visual' ways in which it presents a story.

Section 1

Black and white cinematography is used to denote a flashback, in this case the scene where Manni leaves the money behind on the train. The earliest films were in black and white, so black and white is now often used to connotate something that has happened in the past. If a filmmaker makes a conscious decision to shoot his or her film in black and white (EG. Schindler's List, Raging Bull) it's usually to help evoke a bygone era. In Run Lola Run it becomes shorthand for events that have happened before the main narrative of the film.
A series of flashes (quick cuts to another scene) are used to show the process of Manni remembering/realising he left the bag behind. These flashes start out as quick and short to represent flashes of memory, and slow down to represent the process of a memory coming to the forefront of Manni's mind as he realises what he's just done.
Repetition of the phrase "The bag" is used to highlight its importance.
The homeless man's thoughts are rendered in colour, to represent the fact that these thoughts aren't memories but imagined possibilities. They are bright and vibrant because the bag of money means excitement and a positive future for this dejected individual.
Still photos are used to depict flash-forwards for minor characters, this differentiates these future micro-narratives from the larger present day narrative. The use of photographs suggests a documented history, showing the viewer that this is a future history for a particular character.
Lola's red hair is a conscious decision on the director's part (a piece of trivia: Potente couldn't wash her hair for six weeks because she had to ensure her hair stayed bright red). It ensures that Lola stands out at all times, and might also be representative of other things (such as the idea that red cars go faster... maybe?)
- Split screens are used to show things that are happening at the same time. Another way to show this would be to intercut the scenes (cross cutting), but Run Lola Run is a fast and kinetic film, and favours getting this information to us in half the amount of time by showing things concurrently.
Scenes featuring Lola and Manni are shot on film, whereas scenes featuring tertiary characters are shot on video. The use of video suggests an artificiality, whereas using film to depict the two protagonists shows their importance - they're at the centre of the film.
Slow motion is used for the end of this section of the film, rendering Lola's death as extra-dramatic, and demonstrating the way our impression of time can change in such dramatic instances.
The fade to red (rather than the traditional fade to black) denotes the end of the first segment, and also highlights the emotional intensity felt by the two lead characters.

Section 2

Animation is used to depict the crucial scene where Lola starts her run. Each time this sequence is shown there is one significant difference that affects the course of events.
The red filter is used for the scene of Lola and Manni lying together on the bed. This clarifies this scene as being outside of the main narrative, it's most likely an earlier time (though it could even represent something else, like a scene set inside Lola or Manni's head). Red is also a colour often associated with love, a theme that links in with the intimacy of this scene.
There's a brief moment where Lola is running and she passes a homeless man, and the camera swings back to show this man running away after she accidentally bumps into him. The camera, much like the viewer, is doing a double-take as we realise that this is the same homeless man who took the money at the beginning of the film. In films, the camera only ever shows us things that are significant. The camera doesn't show us anything that the director doesn't want us to see, and this moment is a prime example of this.
Interestingly, because Lola is delayed by the fact that her leg is hurt, it means that her father reacts badly to the news his mistress gives him - suggesting that his disappointment with Lola in the first section influenced his choice in that same section of the film.
The safety catch on the gun is interesting too - we saw in the previous segment that Lola had to be told to take the safety catch off her gun. In this scenario she already knows how to use a gun, suggesting that she has either somehow learned from the last scenario or that she knew how to use a gun all along.
An overhead shot is used to show Lola running past the ambulance after it goes through the glass sheet. The point of this overhead shot is show the layout of the environment in the aftermath of this accident (it's almost like a crime scene, or a topographical photograph).

Section 3

Another red scene is used as a transitional device between the second and third sections of the film.
This time an overhead shot is used to show Lola running in the third section, showing the viewer that this is literally a new perspective on events.
It should be noted that the camera is almost always moving, a technique that helps create and maintain the film's sense of momentum and pace.
There are more shots of a slower nature in this last segment, suggesting that this is the section that will be different to the other two... it's the one that's not like the others, this is the scenario that will allow Lola to slow down and stop running.
The gambling allows Lola and Manni to double their prize... in the other two scenarios they only ever manage to get 100 000 marks. As they gamble it means they come out with twice this amount, a pertinent comment on the themes of free will and fate.
Freeze frame ending: everything finally stops. This is the end of the story, we don't see anything more after this, it's final!

DIRECTOR: Tom Twyker
WRITER/SOURCE: Tom Twyker
KEY ACTORS: Franka Potente, Moritz Bleibtreu, Herbert Knaup, Armin Rohde, Joachim Krol

RELATED TEXTS:
- Twyker followed up Ron Lola Run with another German film, The Princess and the Warrior, which featured some of the same cast.
- Run Lola Run can be seen as a 'puzzle film' (films from the '90s onwards that focused on increasingly complicated plots, often in a non-linear fashion). Other examples include Pulp Fiction, Memento, the Infernal Affairs trilogy, 11:14, 21 Grams, 12 Monkeys and Go.

AWARDS
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Foreign Language Film.
Independent Spirit - won Best Foreign Film.
Sundance Film Festival - won World Cinema Audience Award
Venice Film Festival - nominated for Golden Lion.

Brief Encounter

2011-12-20T00:19:00.000-08:00

"How odd of you to notice you were living with a stranger in the house"

David Lean caused a bit of a stir with this film back in the mid-'40s. He'd already made a couple of films in the early '40s, but none had previously achieved the impact that Brief Encounter had. With it's underlying themes of middle class values and taboos, Brief Encounter fights a quiet battle between appealing to a predominantly middle-class British audience and daring to address the ironclad value system that kept this same class insolvent. Lean takes a one-act play as the basis for this small scale film, and pours all his youth and energy into making it as dynamic as possible - utilising conversational second person narration, extreme close ups, off-kilter camera angles, and non-linear storytelling. In a way, it's his Reservoir Dogs.

Laura (Celia Johnson) is a middle class married woman whose chance encounter with a dashing, erudite doctor (Trevor Howard) leads to an awakening of passion that sends her into a spiral of depression and panic. Her moral foundations are shaken to the core, causing her a great deal of distress as she imaginarily relates the tale to her unwitting, good-natured and unadventurous husband (Cyril Raymond). Laura is a woman standing on the cusp of transgression, she and her doctor fall in love but are yet to act on it, and Brief Encounter famously relates the tale in flashback - wistful, despondant, guilty, and sad. It's a story in vignettes, gathering context like a train gathering speed, and lending weight to Laura's social treachery.

"(We) crept out of the theatre, as though we were commiting a crime"

I had to catch myself a few times, I almost thought that Laura was actually commiting a crime in the legal definition of the term - such is the uptight 1940s context of this film and the society that created it. The inherent repression of the English middle class was so widespread and ingrained in British culture in the 1940s that even daring to admit the possibility of extra-marital love was quite scandalous. This was an era in film that forbade unpunished adultery on the screen (this was even enforced in America by the Hays Code), so it's quite surprising for this film to not depict Laura and Dr. Alec as villains.

It probably also helps that the film is brilliantly conceived, structured and edited. The combination of Lean and Noel Coward with the train station setting and all that steam and smoke is simply iconic. The steam is symbolic of the fog of immorality that descends upon the characters, or a metaphor for Laura's judgement becoming clouded. Lean also heightens the sense of scandal by cutting away the first few times the secretive couple kiss, and offers us a ghost of a devilish smile on Laura's face - which is tellingly shown only via her reflection in the train window, thus representing the intangible possibilities that are just out of her grasp. It's all these masterful little touches that build such a vivid picture of the characters.

I have to say that I didn't much like Celia Johnson's performance as Laura, but maybe I just generally wasn't a fan of the character's constant self-loathing (which can seem a little melodramatic when viewed from a more modern context). In general this film becomes something less than the some of its parts when viewed outside of the context of 1940s England, and the main reason it stays afloat beyond this era is that it happens to be a little atmospheric snapper that demonstrates all of David Lean's visually iconic inventiveness.

DIRECTOR: David Lean
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by David Lean, Anthony Havelock-Allan and Ronald Neame. Based on a play by Noel Coward.
KEY ACTORS: Celia Johnson, Trevor Howard, Stanley Holloway, Joyce Carey, Cyril Raymond, Everley Gregg, Valentine Dyall

RELATED TEXTS:
- The one-act play Still Life, written by Noel Coward in 1936. This was part of a cycle of plays written by Coward called Tonight at 8:30.
- The film was re-adapted as the play Brief Encounter in 2008, and as an opera of the same name in 2009.
- Brief Encounter; a TV remake of the film in the '70s that starred Richard Burton and Sophia Loren.
- The '80s film Falling in Love is very much a modernised American version of the same story (even down to the inclusion of trains).

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Celia Johnson), Best Director and Best Screenplay.
Cannes Film Festival - won Grand Prize of the Festival.

The Off Hours

2011-12-19T03:45:00.000-08:00

"When did you get so sad?"

The Off Hours is a low-budget independently-made film that seeks to explore the twilight world of a night shift waitress at a truck stop. Indie stalwart Amy Seimetz (The Myth of the American Sleepover, Wristcutters: A Love Story) plays said waitress Francine, an aimless twenty-something who finds herself treading water in one of life's cul-de-sacs (sorry, bit of a mixed metaphor there). When she isn't earning a minimal wage in her depressingly low-key job she's hanging out with a band of no-hopers, but a budding relationship with an unlikely truck driver starts to challenge her status quo, and she begins to come to a realisation that her life is going nowhere.

Writer-director Megan Griffiths helms this digi-indie mumblecore effort with an unshowy confidence. She uses the 'world of the night shift' to explore ideas relating to people who've become out of sync with the waking world, and what this could do to a person in both the long and short term. At Francine's highway diner there are a collection of disparate characters all searching for direction; the curmudgeonly owner/short-order cook, the surly slavic woman, the truck driver who used to be a banker, Francine's slacker friends... these people are in the midst of awkwardly trying to feel each other out and discovering the boundaries of the space in which they operate. It's all a bit sombre and slightly melodramatic, but it's also understated enough to maintain a certain edge of realism that 'bigger' films would give their left nut to achieve.

According to wikipedia and some of the spin around The Off Hours, this is the first film to recieve an SSF tag. This doesn't really reflect on the quality of the film, but I think it can be seen as an extension of where it's coming from. The use of prefabricated (secondhand) materials could be viewed to be as much a stylistic decision as it is an environmentally-conscious one, as it links in with the aforementioned realism. I will say that this isn't a fast-paced film, it might even be fair to say that it doesn't have any pacing at all as the film isn't concerned with plot. The Off Hours is about character and environment. The quiet slowness of the film perfectly captures the tone of the small hours experienced in the world of the night shift worker, it's not really the sort of thing that films normally get made about, so I appreciated the way it achieves a very particular atmosphere and uses this to look at wider questions relating to the human condition.

DIRECTOR: Megan Griffiths
WRITER/SOURCE: Megan Griffiths
KEY ACTORS: Amy Seitmetz, Ross Partridge, Tony Doupe, Scoot McNairy, Gergana Mellin

RELATED TEXTS:
- Megan Griffiths previously wrote and directed First Aid for Choking, and is currently finishing off the film Eden. She also made the short films Eros and Moving.
- I found some stylistic similarity with the film Frozen River (mainly in the camera work). See also other indie films such Wendy and Lucy, Cold Weather and Hannah Takes the Stairs.

Snowtown

2011-12-18T02:28:00.000-08:00

"You don't have to worry mate, they're nobody. No one gives a shit".

Take a look at that poster. This image is synonymous with the film's central relationship, that between convicted serial killers John (Daniel Henshall) and Jamie (Lucas Pittaway). John looks over James' shoulder like a puppet master, and it's a dynamic that made some of these horrific events possible if we're to believe that the film flies that closely to the truth. For the uninitiated, Snowtown tells the story of one of Australia's most horrific crimes, the brutal murder of some eleven known individuals by an informal gang led by John Bunting in the South Australian town of Snowtown. The victims were infamously stored in barrels of acid hidden away in a disused bank vault, the full extent of these crimes remained unrevealed to the Australian public until the release of this very film. Director Justin Kurzel was given unprecedented access to police files on the Snowtown murders, and what he's done with this shocking true story is actually quite astonishing. Rather than pinning out the events in exhaustive detail like some Pay-TV telemovie, Kurzel has created a naturalistic recreation of the context of these crimes, a vividly real character study that somehow gives the illusion of a complete lack of artifice in constructing scripted scenes - making it feel almost like a documentary. Scarily so.

Snowtown is a socio-economic lowspot in South Australia, a welfare-supported area of incisive suburban boredom where Jamie Vlassakis has grown up with his brothers and single mother Elizabeth (Louise Harris). Snowtown shows us lazy glimpses of this life, Jamie's encounters with sexual abuse and the wider interaction of the town's community as they deal with their own issues outside of the view of the police (who barely figure in this forgotten corner of rundown housing). Into Jamie's life comes John, his mother's charismatic new boyfriend. After dealing with his bullying older brother and a sexually abusive former step father, Jamie is more than receptive to a strong new father figure in his life. John more than occupies this role, he eventually controls Jamie on some very subtle and insidious levels... he's a man with delusions of godhood, getting pleasure through controlling others. Jamie is a young man who doesn't know any better, he doesn't have any aggressive tendencies and after getting picked on for so long he's ready to comply with John's suggestion to 'grow some balls'. John begins remaking Jamie in his own image, and soon the boy is inducted into an inner circle under John's tutelage - an accessory to the murder of suspected pedophiles in a community that is both intolerant of police interference and has a perception that the system has failed them. It eventually becomes apparent that John's motives go beyond vigilantism and encompass more sinister undertones.

The journey from talk to action is a big part of Snowtown's muted narrative. John starts out using homophobia and hatred of pedophiles as an excuse for sadism but his real motivation is that he simply likes playing games with people. The scene where he and Jamie cut up a kangaroo to put it into a bucket to be thrown onto a man's porch chillingly foreshadows the barrel-work to come, and the tension that arises from what the audience knows is ahead renders certain scenes incredibly hard to watch (witness the scene where John asks Jamie to shoot his dog). When the murders start there's this concept of those who 'deserve' it (pedophiles, junkies) but somewhere along the line John doesn't even bother trying to justify it anymore, and none of the other characters even comment on this - outlining the darkness that fuels much of the film. Basically the film is saying (though there's nothing basic about this film) that John Bunting was a sociopath, and the absence of law and order in this godforsaken community gave him the freedom to escalate this deficiency into horrifying action, and Jamie's role initially seems to be to bear witness to this sociopathy, though the scene where he eventually joins in is fraught with conflicted emotions (another one of those hard to watch scenes).

Most (but not all) of the violence is implied, so anyone looking for a gorefest will be sorely disappointed. The film isn't about that, and Kurzel made the right decision not to revel in the violence so that the film wouldn't be about that. In a way the film is similar to Animal Kingdom and The Boys in its focus on the truths behind the criminal underclass, it's an Australian counterpart to the American film Winter's Bone in that it offers an unflinching view of our own white underclass shackeld by their poverty. But, having said that, in this film no concession is made at all to traditional crime film narratives... it's a naturalistic snapshot of the psychology and culture behind the killings. There is a certain assumption implicit in the film that the audience will know the essence of what happened with the Snowtown murders, so a lot of the details aren't really made clear and the film therefore remains primarily a mood piece. It's like an in-depth essay where you have to choose to talk about just one thing, and Kurzel chose to talk about why John and Jamie did what they did, rather than the how and what.

In light of this, certain details get glossed over or excised. Details regarding the social security fraud aspect are left out but it's not as if the film is saying this didn't happen, it just doesn't give up its time to discuss it. Also, Robert Wagner's role in the murders isn't really examined in any capacity... the character is present but little insight into his role is given to the audience. The problem is, the closer we get to the details behind these heinous crimes the less logic or sense there is to it. John Bunting had a hatred of homosexuality, and one of his first victims was Robert Wagner's boyfriend, yet John didn't want to kill Robert and Robert was happy to be his accomplice. It doesn't make any sense, yet these are the facts, and the film glosses over some of these things in favour of not confusing the audience or losing its way. Suffice to say, the full extent of these crimes are probably too much for one film to deal with sufficiently... I mean, and this is something else never mentioned in the film, in reality Wagner even ate some of their last victim!

One more thing before I finish, Daniel Henshall's performance in Snowtown is instrumental in the film's effectiveness. He's spot-on in capturing the uneasy confidence and smirking calmness of a real sociopath, he never overplays it but he's also never less than magnetic. It's a tour-de-force.

DIRECTOR: Justin Kurzel
WRITER/SOURCE: Justin Kurzel and Shaun Grant. Based on the real life Snowtown murders.
KEY ACTORS: Daniel Hensell, Lucas Pittaway, Louise Harris, Richard Green, Aaron Viergever, Bob Adriaens, Frank Cwiertniak

RELATED TEXTS
- Snowtown: The Bodies in Barrels Murders, a non-fiction true crime book by Jeremy Pudney.
- For more on realistic looks at Australian crime in film, see Animal Kingdom, Little Fish, The Boys and The Combination.
- As mentioned, the American film Winter's Bone looks at a similar white underclass and its endemic crime.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won FIPRESCI prize (special mention).

American Comedies of the 21st Century Part 5

2011-12-14T21:05:00.000-08:00

This continues on from Part 1, Part 2, Part 3 and Part 4.

Bridesmaids
It isn't very often that a female-orientated comedy actually manages to be funny (or funny enough for a male audience) and I think a big part of Bridesmaids' success is down to the casting of Kristen Wiig, a genuinely funny actress. All too often 'female' comedies (IE. Chick flicks and romantic comedies) are dominated by comedic vacuums like Katherine Heigl or Julia Roberts - they get cast because they're famous, not because they're funny. Bridesmaids bucks this tradition, and is standout hilarious from start to finish as a result. Wiig takes her chance to shine and throws herself into it with a gutso that Ms. Roberts would probably find undignified. Sure, a lot of the film's success hinges on set pieces like the dress-fitting and plane scenes, making it feel like a bit like a female version of The Hangover, but for my money it's a better film than any other comedy in 2011 because everything is perfectly pitched and there are absolutely no weak points in the script or cast.

DIRECTOR: Paul Feig
WRITER/SOURCE: Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo.
KEY ACTORS: Kristen Wiig, Maya Rudolph, Rose Byrne, Melissa McCarthy, Chris O'Dowd, Jill Clayburgh, John Hamm, Rebel Wilson, Matt Lucas, Wendy McLendon-Covey, Ellie Kemper, Terry Crews
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Just Go With It
Geez, Sandler just really phones it in for a paycheck sometimes, doesn't he? In this (loose) remake of The Cactus Flower, Sandler gives the same performance he gives in all his 'normal' comedies as layer after layer of half-arsed farce unfolds in the holiday location of Hawaii. Leaving aside the many holes in the plot, this film is elevated slightly by a much better supporting cast than Sandler's last paypacket Grown Ups (which was quite easily the laziest film Sandler has ever made). Aniston and Sandler have a good chemistry together, and it was surprising to see Nicole Kidman doing a comedic variation on her ice queen routine, but I could've done without the 'cute' actress-kid and Sandler's ridiculous cousin (played by Nick Swardson). The fake identities aspect of the film is a tired concept that really only weighs the film down, and I kinda think Sandler and Aniston might've done better to make a more straight-forward romcom (or at least attenmpted something original).

DIRECTOR: Denis Dugan
WRITER/SOURCE: Allan Loeb and Timothy Dowling
KEY ACTORS: Adam Sandler, Jennifer Aniston, Nick Swardson, Nicole Kidman, Dan Patrick, Brooklyn Decker, Dave Matthews, Bailee Madison, Griffin Gluck, Kevin Nealon
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Arthur
Russell Brand mines his wildchild image further with this remake of the 'classic' Dudley Moore hit comedy. I can't say I was ever a huge fan of the original Arthur, so I don't really feel an attachment to any particular elements this remake may have trodden on in the quest for fresh laughs. Brand treads an easy line between drunken space-waster and charming clown (I dare say the acting involved was fairly minimal), and I guess one's opinion of the film will depend on how they feel about Brand himself. I like Brand, and I found this film to be an unexpected delight. Helen Mirren and Greta Gerwig are endearing (in very different ways) in their supporting roles, and the whole thing is quite funny in the freewheeling, self-indulgent kind of way that a lot of films are afraid to embrace. Top notch. A glorious orgy of wit and comedic spectacle.

DIRECTOR: Jason Winer
WRITER/SOURCE: Peter Baynham. Based on the 1981 film by Steve Gordon.
KEY ACTORS: Russell Brand, Helen Mirren, Greta Gerwig, Jennifer Garner, Luis Guzman, Geraldine James, Nick Nolte, Evander Holyfield
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30 Minutes or Less
This movie is about what it would be like if one of those half-baked bank robbery plans that every 20 year old stoner comes up with was actually put into action. Jesse Eisenberg plays a pizza-delivering slacker who gets manipulated by a silver-spoon redneck (Danny McBride) into robbing a bank. Aziz Ansari co-stars as Eisenberg's partner-in-crime, and the film gets big points from me just for having Ansari in it as it's great to see him doing his hilarious schtick in a film. Eisenberg is trying to break away from awkward Michael Cera-territory but I don't think his nerdy/intellectual WASPness really suits this laidback Seth Rogen-esque kind of role. The film also cheats a bit, it doesn't really end properly - a lot of the plot is left unresolved, which I think is a big no-no when it comes to 'everything goes wrong' comedies (Date Night, Pineapple Express). Part of the fun ise seeing how the hopeless characters get out of the impossible situation, something that 30 Minutes or Less glosses over. That aside though, the film is still a whole tonne of fun... funny and unpredictable in the right places, and Ansari and McBride are always good comedic value.

DIRECTOR: Ruben Fleischer
WRITER/SOURCE: Michael Diliberti
KEY ACTORS: Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansair, Danny McBride, Nick Swardson, Michael Pena, Fred Ward, Dilshad Vadsaria
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Your Highness
The idea of James Franco and Danny McBride going on a medieval fantasy quest whilst toking up and chasing women sounds great in theory (and looked great in the trailer), but the balance between comedy and serious fantasy in Your Highness is largely misjudged. Franco is too much of a straight man and the jokes (whilst funny) are offset by too much in the way of serious fantasy questing. I think some comparison could be made to Will Ferrell's adventure film Land of the Lost, though in this case the adventure element just didn't really do it for me. McBride has been gettinfg stronger as a comic actor since his success with Eastbound and Down, but it's a shame that this wasn't capitalised more by pushing the film away from expensive CGI-laden fight scenes and more towards hilariously offensive silliness. Natalie Portman isn't really all that funny either, and more should have been done with Zooey Deschanel's character instead as she had a lot more potential for solid laughs.

DIRECTOR: David Gordon Green
WRITER/SOURCE: Danny McBride and Ben Best
KEY ACTORS: Danny McBride, James Franco, Natalie Portman, Zooey Deschanel, Toby Jones, Justin Theroux, Charles Dance
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Paul
A couple of hapless and socially awkward sci-fi geeks tour America's UFO hotspots and have their dreams come true when they meet a fugitive alien named Paul (Seth Rogen). It's Starman meets Fanboys, a sweet-natured but foul-mouthed road movie and a throwback to a non-cynical form of comedy-adventure that isn't afraid to do things that feel good (much like Paul himself). Simon Pegg and Nick Frost seem a little watered down in comparison to their Edgar Wright-directed films, but this is probably a necessity as it allows their characters to contrast effectively with the laidback alien. Jason Bateman stands out in a stock-standard Man in Black role due to his increasingly assured sense of rhythm as a big screen comedic actor, and also watch out for a gazillion references to famous sci-fi/adventure films from the 1970s and 80s. This is a really fun film that will apppeal to a certain geek-savvy audience, and is most definitely not for kids (despite the 'cute' CGI alien).

DIRECTOR: Greg Mottola
WRITER/SOURCE: Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.
KEY ACTORS: Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Seth Rogen, Kristen Wiig, Jason Bateman, Bill Hader, Blythe Danner, Jo Lo Truglio, Sigourney Weaver, Jane Lynch, David Koechner, John Carroll Lynch, Jeffrey Tambor
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Horrible Bosses
I'm sad to say that this film noir-inspired comedy is hugely overrated. This makes me sad because I expected big things from it due to its dream cast. I guess this is one of those cases where the film's trailer just gave too many of the good jokes away... Colin Farrell barely features, and I think they would've done well to streamline the cast a little bit by getting rid of Jason Sudeikis. Charlie Day, despite being the least well-known cast member, easily gives the standout performance as a sex-offending dental assistant. Okay, so Day pretty much just reprises his character from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but it's so great to see him on the big screen interacting with A-listers like Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Aniston. Horrible Bosses is actually quite plot-heavy, borrowing from the Hitchcock classic Strangers on a Train to create one big frustrating mess of Things Going Wrong. It's not a terrible film, but it's also not the gutbuster that the trailer suggests it is, and I didn't find myself laughing all that much.

DIRECTOR: Seth Gordon
WRITER/SOURCE: Michael Markowitz, John Francis Daley and Jonathan Goldstein.
KEY ACTORS: Jason Bateman, Charlie Day, Jason Sudeikis, Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, Jamie Foxx, Donald Sutherland
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Bad Teacher
Cameron Diaz has a shaky relationship with comedy (she's good at it, but the projects where she tries to showcase it, such as The Sweetest Thing, aren't always that great) so it was nice to see her headline a sharp bad taste comedy in the mode of Bad Santa. There isn't a whole lot to this film, it's pretty much a ripoff of the first season of Eastbound and Down (even with the character of Lynn standing in for Eastbound and Down's Stevie), and sometimes I felt that the bad taste could've been taken a bit further. The characters and plotting are basic at best, but there are more than a few solid laughs that make the film a fun and pleasant experience. Also, Justin Timberlake's character doesn't really make a whole lot of sense, but it is nice to finally see Jason Segel playing someone who doesn't have any loserish tendencies.

DIRECTOR: Jake Kasdan
WRITER/SOURCE: Lee Eisenberg and Gene Stupnitsky.
KEY ACTORS: Cameron Diaz, Justin Timberlake, Jason Segel, Lucy Punch, Phyllis Smith, John Michael Higgins, Molly Shannon, Thomas Lennon
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Gulliver's Travels
If you ever feel like losing a couple of braincells in exchange for zero entertainment, then I heartily recommend Gulliver's Travels - a 'sassy' update of the classic novel that re-imagines Gulliver as a modern day slacker played by Jack Black. Remember when Jack Black was hip and funny? Well, if you do, this movie will erase that memory once and for all. This is lowest common denominator comedy aimed at undemanding family audiences. Black's one-note brand of comedy wears thinner than ever within several minutes, and a talented cast of transatlantic comedians go to waste in this bombastic and incredibly unfunny fantasy-drama. The plot is tired and tedious, and Black seems bissfully unaware that the varnish of his particular brand of humour has completely worn off.

DIRECTOR: Rob Letterman
WRITER/SOURCE: Joe Stillman and Nicholas Stoller. Loosely based on the novel by Jonathan Swift.
KEY ACTORS: Jack Black, Jason Segel, Emily Blunt, Amanda Peet, Billy Connelly, Catherine Tate, James Corden, Chris O'Dowd, T. J. Miller
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Crazy Stupid Love
This film sees directors Glenn Ficarra and James Requa follow up their underappreciated gem I Love You Philip Morris with a more crowd-pleasing comedy. It feels like they've deliberately mined some less offensive material than usual in order to appeal to a more mainstream audience. Normally this would feel cynical to me but the heart of their work as filmmakers isn't reliant on this sort of thing, and Crazy Stupid Love never feels less than meaningful, nor does it take easy pathways through its themes. Steve Carrell plays an alternate version to his character from Date Night, surviving through a scenario where his marriage wasn't saved. He's forced to go out and learn how to be single again with the help of a young uber-lothario played by Ryan Gosling (a character so confident it seems like a talking version of his character from Drive). Carrell and Gosling are surprisingly good together, and the humour is on the dark side but always realistic. This is a film about real life, a romantic comedy that uses sentiment sparingly btu effectively. It's not the boring film it sounds like, and watch out for a great twist about two thirds in!

DIRECTOR: Glenn Ficarra and James Requa.
WRITER/SOURCE: Dan Fogelman
KEY ACTORS: Steve Carrell, Ryan Gosling, Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, John Carroll Lynch, Marisa Tomei, Kevin Bacon, Analeigh Tipton, Josh Groban

The Infinitive of Go

2011-12-14T03:17:00.000-08:00

The Infinitive of Go is the kind of old school hardcore science-fiction that isn't really all that popular anymore. It's pulpish, but in a good way, and slots right into an era of genre-writing that has pretty much disappeared. The author, John Brunner, was a prolific writer who churned out these wild, speculative novellas that raised more questions than they answered and splashed a mighty rainbow out into the void of the undiscovered. The science might be a little dated at times, but it's still a heck of a lot of fun.

Our story here concerns the invention of a teleportation device. The first volunteer for a live 'posting' (transportation from one point to another) arrives safely, but he demands various passwords and classified information before detonating a suicide bomb. It's assumed that something went wrong and he went crazy, but the explanation turns out to be something more bizarre. Our hero, Dr. Justin Williams (the inventor of the teleportation devices) decides to post himself before allowing the project to be shutdown. On arrival he discovers that he has shifted into a reality slightly different to his own. It appears that 'posting' actually transports the subject to a parallel universe.

From here the events spiral out of control... with no way of returning to the original universe the book starts in, the book instead focuses on a much bigger picture. Along with Dr. Williams we explore parallel universe theories and the way the passenger can affect where he ends up when he is posted. The book does a kind of u-turn (or throws a curveball, whatever metaphor you prefer) when an injured astronaut must be posted down to Earth in order to be saved. Of course, he'll end up in another reality, but hey - at least he'll be safe. What comes down to Earth in his place though doesn't appear to be human. And this is where things get really weird.

I can't go into it too much because it would spoil the book. It's only a short book - around 150 pages or something like that, and everytime you think you've figured out where it's heading it decides to switch things up a bit. The ending is a little oblique and mysterious, but I think this is part of the book's charm. 2001 has a weird ending (well, the movie does anyway - can't comment on the book, haven't read it) but I think this is part of what makes it so great. It's just a cool sci-fi thing, to leave things open-ended and up for interpretation.

Anyway, if you're after this book a good place to look for it would probably be Amazon or any 2nd-hand bookstores - they're often filled with stacks of these kinds of books.

A Woman is a Woman

2011-12-12T18:58:00.000-08:00

"The truth should look different to a lie"

Jean-Luc Godard's output in the 1960s really is quite startling, in a way he's like the Beatles of filmmaking... directing and writing fifteen films in just seven years, making them quickly and effeciently with little fuss and yet also pioneeringt many breakthroughs in his treatment of the film medium - doing for film what the Beatles did for pop music in the same short yet prolific amount of time. He methodically subverted or reinvented each genre, exemplifying the gleeful anarchism of youth in his deliberate disregard or breaking of the rules. A Woman is a Woman is a musical without songs, a Dadaist and anti-realist work where the presence of the camera is acknowledged and the role of the viewer becomes an active part of film's narrative structure. With this in mind, it's a little bit difficult to unpack in traditional film-review terms, so I'll break it down piece by piece instead.

The Plot: Anna Karina plays Angela, the central character of the film and the genesis of all its plot mechanics. She's a stripper in an absolute dive of a club, but this doesn't get her down. She wants a baby with her boyfriend Emile (Jean-Claude Brialy) so that he'll marry her, but he is more than resistant to the idea. Emile's best friend, Alfred (Jean-Paul Belmondo), is in love with Angela, so she starts playing the two men off against each other by manipulating their affections for her, in the hope that this will get her what she wants - marriage and a baby.

"Is this a tragedy or a comedy"
"With woman, you never know"

Dialogue: The dialogue between Emile and Angela (and sometimes others) is highly trivial and extra-referential (as opposed to intra-referential), despite the underlying themes of commitment and family. In a way, these themes aren't really all that important. It's a traditional story given a self-consciously post-modern treatment which makes it more about the relationship between the film and the viewer as it positions the viewer in a more active and critical position. By making the plot so seemingly irrelevant and disconnected from the characters (achieved through the aforementioned trivial dialogue, or through scenes like the one where Angela and Emile carry out an argument solely by showing each other book titles), Godard forces the viewer out of a passive position.

Editing: This is also why Godard plays with traditional narrative by disrupting it with unconventional editing. He calls attention to the artifice of the film so that the viewer is jolted from their default position of just sitting there and watching events unfold, they will instead suddenly be aware of their own relationship to the film and their part in interpreting it to create meaning. Of course, this could manifest itself in the form of annoyance or dislike towards the film, especially if the viewer is unaccustomed to watching films in an active fashion. The adoption of tropes associated with the musical genre links into this as well, Godard plays with sound and music to explicitly demonstrate how these elements should, can or do work... a technique that also represents the film's leaning towards Dadaism.

Dadaism: This was a movement from the early 20th century that employed exagerration and the ridiculous to subvert traditional ideologies in art. Specifically, it worked to destroy aesthetics through offending sensibilities that respected traditions associated with art. Some examples in A Woman is a Woman...

The romantic swell of music heard as Angela reads about contraception.
The scene where Belmondo and another guy discuss a debt owed and begin exchanging insults accompanied by over the top musical cues.
Angela performs a song in the strip bar, but the music abruptly drops out each time she sings.
The contrast between bright, vivid colours (symbolic of traditional set and costume design in the musical genre) and the squalid nature of the Parisian streets.

The cast: Anna Karina is a real find. As Angela she's adorably cheeky, a demonstrates a youthful self-confidence in her peformance that's actually quite rare. Her exuberance is completely at odds with the manipulative and lowly nature of the character (more evidence of Dadaism in the film). Jean-Paul Belmondo has only a supporting role, but he's very much a counter-culture hero - witness his flippantly serious refusal to make good on a debt: (Other man) "Are you going to pay?" (Belmondo) "No, never", and then he walks off!

The French New Wave: Godard's body of work from 1960 to 1967 referred and paid tribute to specific aspects of cinema history. In A Woman is a Woman there are hints of reflexivity that he would follow up more comprehensively with the film Contempt. When Karina first appears as Angela she looks directly at the camera and smiles, a fleeting moment of conspiratorial knowing that's integral both to her performance and to the viewer's relationship with the wider film. When she performs in her dark and depressing striip bar there are only two ro three unenthusiastic punters, but really - she's performing for the camera. This is a film that knows it's a film. She later deliberately flubs her lines and seems to accidentally drop an egg (prompting crying) and it blurs our comprehension of what is happening... how much of this is scripted?

A crucial part of the French new wave (and auteur theory) was the belief that interpretation should be put into the hands of the spectator. The director's personal beliefs should be represented in the film, but their control over the meanings inn the text would be relinquished in favour of objective realism (rather than the more traditional ways that cinema manipulates and recreates reality for the benefit of an easily assimilated narrative). It's a movement that called attention to itself, and was (and is) more about the processes of storytelling than about the stories being told.

DIRECTOR: Jean-Luc Godard
WRITER/SOURCE: Jean-Luc Godard
KEY ACTORS: Anna Karina, Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean-Claude Brialy

RELATED TEXTS:
- See Godard's later film, Contempt, for more about the relationship between film and viewer.
- Godard's other films from this '60s period are Breathless, The Little Soldier, My Life to Live, The Carabineers, Band of Outsiders, A Married Woman, Alphaville, Pierrot le Fou, Masculine Feminine, Made in USA, Two of Three Things I Know About Her, La Chinoise and Weekend.

My Darling Clementine

2011-12-12T04:26:00.000-08:00

"What kinda town is this anyway? Selling liquor to indians!"

There have been many film versions of the Wyatt Earp-Clanton gunfight in Tombstone, but I dare say that John Ford's take, My Darling Clementine, is the definitive account (despite deviating from historical fact quite liberally). Featuring Henry Fonda in one of his iconically all-American performances as Earp, this film shows what can be done by a Western master directing an acting legend at the height of their respective careers in a story that represents one of the cornerstones of Western mythology. It's the stuff of golden eras, and no self-respecting film or Western fan can live their life without having seen it. Okay, maybe that's overkill, but trust me - it's a good'un.

Wyatt Earp and his brothers are cattlemen passing through Tombstone in the 1880s. They're naive to the roughness of the area and cross paths with the Clanton family, who steal the cattle and murder one of Wyatt's brothers. Earp, a former sheriff from Dodge City, decides to take on the post of Marshall in the lawless town of Tombstone in order to seek vengeance for the death of his brother. A feud begins simmering between the Clantons and the Earps, and Wyatt strikes up an uneasy alliance with the town's charismatically reckless dentist Doc Holliday (Victor Mature).

At the heart of Ford's version of the story (and most other versions seen since) is a character study of the relationship between Earp and Holliday. Fonda's idealistic screen persona is used to good effect as the fair-minded, moralistic and sheepishly sincere lawkeeper - an unassuminfg contrast to the more complex Holliday, a cultured man of hidden depths who's fighting a losing battle with consumption. When the two characters first meet, Wyatt keeps his cool while Holliday flexes his alpha muscles, a precarious exchange of intimidation and restraint where each man sizes the other up and judges their capability. A sense of unlikely respect grows between the two, and they're united by their strength of character. So, with such an emphasis on this bromance, it doesn't come as too much surprise when Earp's big 'romantic' moment with the girl climaxes only with a boyish kiss on the cheek and an unrequited hope for something more. The viewer doesn't really mind this either because there has already been closure for his relationship with Holliday, which is totally the main relationship in the film.

Ford has such a great eye for grand visual compositions, making this a masterfully crafted depiction of a familiar tale. It's superbly cast, with Walter Brennan also playing against type as the villainous Old Man Clanton. The scene where he shotguns a character in the back without any warning is unusually shocking for a '40s western, and Brennan plays it ice cold. Anyway, this is pretty much the archetypal Western, as seen painted across the mythologised landscape of the west by the genre's filmic god.

DIRECTOR: John Ford
WRITER/SOURCE: Samuel G. Engel and Winston Miller.
KEY ACTORS: Henry Fonda, Victor Mature, Linda Darnell, Walter Brennan, Tim Holt, Ward Bond, John Ireland, Jane Darwell

RELATED TEXTS:
- Other film versions of the infamous gunfight at Tombstone include Tombstone the Town Too Tough to Die, Gunfight at the O.K. Corral, Frontier Marshal, Wyatt Earp and Tombstone. It was also featured in the 1960s Doctor Who serial, The Gunfighters.
- See also Dodge City and Hour of the Gun.
- Ford and Fonda also collaborated on the films Young Mr. Lincoln, Drums Along the Mohawk, The Grapes of Wrath, The Battle of Midway, The Fugitive, Fort Apache, Mister Roberts and How the West Was Won.

The Inbetweeners Movie

2011-12-11T19:02:00.001-08:00

I have to confess that I am a huge fan of the TV show of which this film is a continuation. Whilst it's often crass or vulgar (or perhaps because of this) I feel that it captures the modern teenage life of boys so perfectly... we all know a Jay or a Neil or a Will, and so much of The Inbetweeners is recognisable to me that the jokes resonate all the more, evoking a feeling of nostalgia for my not-too-distant younger days. The way these characters interact is 100% spot on - that mix of constant faux-antagonism, shared social awkwardness, and the occasional (rare) glimpses of genuine friendship - it all rings true for the teenage experience. I was sad when the TV show finished, so the prospect of a film that followed up the post-school adventures of these characters made me quite happy.

Neil, Will, Jay and Simon have just finished high school. Dubbing themselves the 'Pussay Patrol', they decide to go on a holiday to the hedonistic Greek islands - determined to party hard and have copious amounts of sex. Upon arrival they find that their hotel is a horrible dive; the proprieter is fishing a dead dog out of the communal well and warns them that shitting on the floor of their room will result in a $50 fine. Each time. The boys go out on the town, and their attempts to get fresh with 'the ladies' seem just as depressing as the hotel. That is, at least until they meet four British girls in a particularly empty bar.

The first thing that I should say is that you don't need to have seen the TV show to appreciate this film. No back story is required, it's basically just a British version of American Pie or The Hangover. For those who have seen the TV show, a familiarity with the characters will only deepen the appeal. Every minor character from the TV series shows up in some capacity (even Fat John), and the exploits of the boys go much further than the constraints of television ever allowed. Some parts of the film won't be for the faint of heart (or stomach) but my sides literally hurt from laughing too hard and frequently. It's not exactly new ground for comedy or unpredictably plotted, but the half-cocked charm of the four leads ensures that the material is approached with buckets of enthusiasm and energy, and the comedy is of a realistic kind that should seem familiar to anyone who had a traditionally mispent youth.

DIRECTOR: Ben Palmer
WRITER/SOURCE: Damon Beesley and Iain Morris, based on the television series of the same name.
KEY ACTORS: Simon Bird, Joe Thomas, James Buckley, Blake Harrison, Emily Head, Anthony Head, Laura Haddock, Tamla Kari

RELATED TEXTS:
- The British sitcom The Inbetweeners.
- Other films about mediterranean party spots for the young and British: It's All Gone Pete Tong, Kevin and Perry Go Large and Welcome to Ibiza.
- Some of the film's subject matter should be familiar to people who've seen the likes of American Pie, The Hangover, Porky's, Old School or Superbad.

Boudu Saved From Drowning

2011-12-08T03:45:00.001-08:00

When I hear the words 'French', 'comedy' and '1930s' used together I tend to have certain preconceptions in my mind; namely the idea that I'm not going to find it funny or enjoy it very much. Boudu Saved From Drowning smashed all such preconceptions, not only is it incredibly funny but it also features the sort of uniquely hilarious central performance that ranks as iconic. Michel Simon has gone down in film history as one of the more fascinating actors on and off the screen, and his performance here as the Parisian hobo Boudu must rank as one of the alltime greatest cinematic creations. Not only is Boudu the reason for most of the film's entertainment value, he's also the embodiment of its thematic core. Boudu Saved From Drowning is a comedy of classism, highlighting the fundamental and irreconcilable differences between the bourgeoisie and the free spirited.

Boudu is a homeless drunk living in a park with his dog. When his dog goes missing he begins asking people to help him look for it... the reactions he gets from the more class-bound citizens are, as expected, uniformly negative. A cop even threatens to throw Boudu in gaol when he asks for help! And to highlight this hypocrisy further, when a rich lady asks for this cop to help search for her dog, himself and three other men practically fall over themselves to help her. Anyway, Boudu then becomes despondent and decides to throw himself in the river... his suicide attempt draws the attention of Edouard (Charles Granval), an incurable romantic and an ageing man of ideals who jumps in to save Boudu and takes the homeless man in to try and get him 'back on his feet'. Boudu is uninterested in being 'saved' though, he isn't the grateful houseguest that Eduoard and his wife expect. At first he's angry that he's been saved, then he's tactless, rude and demanding, and asks a lot of impertinent questions. The family tries to transform him into an upstanding citizen by buying him clothes and bathing him, but Boudu remains defiantly hobo-ish every step of the way.

Boudu is a bum in every way, but he's also a man who can surprise us. The audience's expectation is for his initial appearance to be decieving, for him to break free of his shackles of poverty and to prove that people of all walks of life are capable of operating in the higher classes, but Boudu is a bum by choice - which is something else altogether. It eventuates that he's a very unpleasant houseguest, and will take advantage at every opportunity... this is class war, he'll take no prisoners and offer no quarter in the face of all this upper class guilt and nicery because he rejects everything they stand for at a more fundamental level. It's not something that Eduoard and his wife will ever understand, and it also makes for a great unexpected climax (and perhaps the biggest surprise here isn't the choice he makes but the fact that he can swim! Someting that makes his earlier suicide attempt decidedly unsuicidal). Simon is fantastic in the role, his drunken scenes are a little remniscent of Charlie Chaplin's work, and the film's sense of comedy has a timelessness that has more in common with the anti-authoritarian streak of comedy in the silent era. I imagine that if Chaplin's Little Tramp could talk he would've sounded a bit like Boudu.

There are other threads relating to social hypocrisy that run through the film as well, such as the scene where Eduoard jumps in to save Boudu while everyone else just watches. His fellow French admire Eduoard's gallantry and heroism in saving Boudu, but it's only the ideal they admire. All of Eduoard's temporary allies disappear once Boudu is revived, none of them are actually prepared to physically lend a hand. There are so many great moments that arise from Boudu's interaction with those around him, especially as he apes and mocks the habits of the upperclass. He's a man who doesn't care what other people think, a supreme agent of the impulse and an anti-establishment hero who will continue to live on through the power of cinema.

DIRECTOR: Jean Renoir
WRITER/SOURCE: Jean Renoir, based on the play by Rene Fauchois.
KEY ACTORS: Michel Simon, Charles Granval, Marcelle Hainia, Jean Gehret, Max Dalban

RELATED TEXTS:
- Boudu Saved From Drowning, a 1919 play by Rene Fauchois.
- Remade twice, the first time in America as Down and Out in Beverly Hills in 1986, starring Nick Nolte and Richard Dreyfuss, and again in France in 2005 as Boudu, starring Gerard Depardieu.
- The American film spawned a short-lived sitcom, also called Down and Out in Beverly Hills.
- Michel Simon and Jean Renoir worked together on the films The Bitch and On Purge Bebe.
- Jean Renoir most renowned comedy is the film The Rules of the Game.

Photographs

2011-12-07T12:07:00.000-08:00

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

Quite easily the standout of the festival, this ultra-short animated film manages to do so much in its five minutes that the impact it made on me felt somewhat magnified as a result. It feels almost unfair to the other films (especially the fellow animated film, Sharfik) that they had to compete against Photographs, as everything about this film is completely self-assured and high in artistic quality. I'd be very interested to see what director/animators Brendan Clogher and Christina Manrique do next.

The premise of the Photographs is simple enough, an old woman wanders a desolate and ruined city, taking photographs of herself in specific poses about the landscape. There's a style to the design of this character that makes her feel like a real person, it's a little remniscent of the old man from Up, she's such a living character that it doesn't take more than a few seconds to invest yourself in her movements and facial expressions. I think design is more than half the battle in winning an audience over when it comes to animation.

The barren, ruined landscape is very much a symbol for the old woman's ageing body, and the photographs become echoes of her memories. It's so sad, simple and perfect... perfectly executed, and the music, angles, direction, whatever, all contribute to this wonderful and poignant ending. I guess I'm probably overselling it, it's really only a five minute sketch, but I think the heart and soul that's apparent in this piece can't be underestimated. None of the other short films in this competition come close to evoking such a strong emotional response, despite their intentions to do so with more traditional visions of what constitutes a 'tragedy'.

DIRECTOR: Brendan Clogher
WRITER/SOURCE: Brendan Clogher, Christina Manrique

RELATED TEXTS:
- Clogher worked as a storyboard artist on the animated direct-to-DVD release Batman: Year One.
- As mentioned, the design and tone is a little remniscent of Up.

Crocodile Dundee II

2011-12-06T03:14:00.001-08:00

The success of Crocodile Dundee in America has become such a cultural oddity that even the idea of Crocodile Dundee sequels is now regarded as joke (see season 6 of How I Met Your Mother for an extended reference to Crocodile Dundee 3). With this in mind, revisiting Crocodile Dundee II filled me with rather low expectations, none of which were really exceeded. Paul Hogan and co. attempted to recapture the magic of the first film by reversing the formula (a common feature of sequels) Surprisingly, Crocodile Dundee II it was actually a financial success at the time of its release - coming quite hot on the heels of the original film - but it doesn't hold up more than two decades later.

The film picks up almost immediately after the first film, with Mick Dundee living in New York with his girlfriend Sue (Linda Kozlowski). Dundee is sort of, but not really, looking for a job but he's forced to put this on hold when Sue is kidnapped by Colombian druglords (yes, really) and he enlists the help of a New York gang to rescue her. The druglords aren't happy about this, and they follow Dundee and his girl back to Australia, where they play a deadly game of cat-and-mouse in the outback wilderness.

A lot of the humour from the first film relied on Dundee being a fish-out-of-water. Crocodile Dundee II tries hard to keep this element alive by setting the sequel directly after the first film, with Dundee still very much naive to the ways of New York City. The reversal of the formula comes by then having Dundee and his antagonists travel from America back to Australia. The flaw in this is that Dundee's antagonists aren't even from the U.S., so the cultural juxtapositions become less effective, and the formula that involves Dundee unwittingly thumbing his nose at big city America's social mores gets somewhat lost in the mix during the second half of the film.

The other major issue is that this film isn't even the same genre as the original film, with director John Cornell exchanging romance for action in an attempt to make his own bastardisation of Lethal Weapon. Dundee becomes a bog-standard action hero, the film may as well be called Crocodile Dundee vs. Drugs... he's like a wisecracking ocker Rambo facing off against sinister bad guys and picking them off one-by-one. It's like a parallel dimension compared to the first film; imagine if someone made a sequel to Uncle Buck and all of a sudden John Candy's character was fighting South African mercenaries. It just doesn't make a whole lot of sense... it's cartoonish and it doesn't hold up against the original.

DIRECTOR: John Cornell
WRITER/SOURCE: Paul Hogan and Brett Hogan.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Hogan, Linda Kozlowski, John Meillon, Juan Fernandez, Hechtor Ubarry, Stephen Root, Luis Guzman, Ernie Dingo, Charles S. Dutton, Gus Mercurio

RELATED TEXTS:
- The first film, Crocodile Dundee, and the second sequel, Crocodile Dundee in Los Angeles.
- As mentioned in the review, this film has more in common with Lethal Weapon and First Blood than it does with standard fish-out-of-water comedies and romances.

Movies - Short

2011-12-06T00:50:00.001-08:00

Smiling Madame Beudet, The (1923), Andalusian Dog, An (1929)

Lover's Jump (2010), It's Natural to Be Afraid (2010), Sharfik (2010), Two Ambassadors (2010), Chase in Prose (2011), After Ever After (2011), #omgimtrending (2011), Photographs (2011)

Tokyo Story

2011-12-05T03:33:00.000-08:00

"One cannot save one's parents from beyond the grave"

Yasujuri Ozu's famous film stands the test of time as a beautiful, melancholy story about the widening gap between the modern world and the importance of family. Like a great work of literature, Ozu's film addresses various complex themes in a deceptively simple fashion... on the surface it's an elegant and minimalist portrait of life in post-war Japan but Ozu's approach uses stillness and attention to detail to show the way things are with a depth that suggests realism and truth. It's a Japanese film about life, and as much as I might prefer movies about samurais and judo, I accept that not all Japanese films can be about these things! There's more to the culture than that, and it's illuminating to be able to see a dramatised version of the domestic society Japan had in the 1950s.

Tokyo Story is about Shukichi (Chishu Ryu) and Tomi (Chieko Higashiyama), an elderly Japanese couple who travel to Tokyo to visit their children and grandchildren. The visit fills the couple with excitement, they're happy at the prospect of seeing their family again after the quiet solitude of their autumnal years. However, once the initial flurry of enthusiasm at their arrival dies down, their grown up children try to fob them off onto a hotel. Shige (Haruko Sugimura), their daughter, doesn't want to spend money or waste food on her parents, and Koichi (So Yamamura), their son, is too busy and doesn't have the time to take them anywhere. Shukichi and Tomi become a bother to everyone, but they remain upbeat. Their family tries to send them out to see the city, but they aren't there to see Tokyo they're there to see the people they love! It's a heartbreaking process to watch this elderly couple treated so poorly by their big city kids, and the film takes a dramatic turn towards the end to really twist the knife and make the viewer understand its points completely. By the end of the film my emotional investment had rendered me completely dejected, the selfishness of the children (and their refusal to take responsibility for this behaviour in any way, shape or form) felt like a real defeat. It's a truth that can't be overturned, though we know it to be wrong.

So much of Tokyo Story is still relevant today in how we treat our elder family members and the ways in which we struggle to balance work and life. This film is about the sad truths that we already know but dare not voice... the way the world has changed, leaving the old behind because they don't change with it. It's a process that leaves little common ground between generations other than a shared history. Ozu manages to evoke this via dialogue, capturing the way that people are able to talk about nothing with a deceptive effortless that makes the film feel almost documentarian at times. The camera almost never moves, it's always aimed at a low height, a technique of Ozu's that required all his sets to be specially built with ceilings.

Shukichi reminisces about pre-war Japan in a bar at one point and how things have changed. It's a rare moment of perceptiveness from an otherwise impenetrable character, and one that reveals the expectations parents place on their children and the way this process shapes their lives. Through this scene we also see how Tokyo has become industrialised alongside the Western world - a city of competitive industry where time has become a precious commodity. It's not the most important scene in the film but probably my favourite.

Tokyo Story is a film that really sneaks up on you... an unshowy film, gentle and matter-of-fact in its facsimile of life. It resonates through the way it touches on a common familiarity... it doesn't wallow in audience manipulation or pulls any unlikely dramatic punches. It's understated, but this only serves to make it feel more real, and I teared up at the end when Shukichi thanked his kindly daughter-in-law - it's a small morsel of action given to the audience, but it was just enough to tip the scales and break the emotional barrier between myself and the filmic illusion. In that one near-final moment it became real to me in a way that few films are able to. The tranquil singing of children is heard in the last scene, only to be abruptly and violently drowned out by the roar of a train that's also shown in close-up - a final word from the film about the active encroachment of modernism into the lives of our families.

DIRECTOR: Yasujiro Ozu
WRITER/SOURCE: Kogo Noda and Yasujiro Ozu
KEY ACTORS: Chishu Rya, Chieko Higashiyama, Kyoko Kagawa, So Yamamura, Haruko Sugimara, Setsuko Hara

RELATED TEXTS
- Ozu's other most famous films are Floating Weeds and I Was Born But...
- Tokyo Story is the third film in a trilogy that featured the character of Noriko (played by Setsuko Hara). The first two films are Late Spring and Early Summer.
- The division between modernity and family put me in mind of the 19th century novel Pere Goriot by Balzac, especially in regards to the selfishness of children.
- Other films about generations of families interrelating: The Joy Luck Club, On Golden Pond and The Trip to Bountiful.

Repo Men

2011-12-04T02:12:00.001-08:00

"Hey dad, why did Romans stone people to death?"
"Because they didn't have any guns"

The above exchange is delivered as a serious conversation between father and son, intended to reflect how the world has changed in Miguel Sapochnik's slightly noirish view of the near future. The quote demonstrates that this is a world grown callous, where characters don't have the facility to understand anything other than 'might is right'. It's meant to strike a slightly facetious chord with the audience, but it also (unintentionally) references the idiocy of the entire film. Repo Men wants to be a new wave Blade Runner, and has a plot that sounds like Logan's Run, but it comes nowhere near either of these two sci-fi classics due to a preoccupation with dumb, relentless action sequences and a serious lack of ambition when it comes to depicting the future. Aside from a few odd pop culture choices (such as the use of jazz, lounge music and traditional ska), and some flashy guns, there isn't really much to indicate that this is the future at all. I guess that's fine if you're going for a certain scary realism ala Children of Men or A Clockwork Orange, but in this case there's precious little else of interest so it just makes for a boring film.

In this not-too-distant future, Remy (Jude Law) is a 'repo man', a kind of bounty hunter used by a medical cybernetics company to repossess expensive artificial organs straight out of the bodies of those who can't keep up with their payments. It's a messy business but Remy goes about it in a fairly cheerful, working class manner, aided and abetted by his friend and partner Jake (Forest Whitaker). Predictably, things go belly up for Remy and he's forced to take on one of these artificial organs after a repo goes wrong. Soon he can't keep up with the payments, and Jake is sent after him to 'collect'. There isn't really much more to it than that, Remy finds an underclass of people who resist the company's tyranny, and there are endless excuses for some rather garden variety fight scenes based around the Filipino martial art of Kali. It's filmed in Toronto and feels like it's set in a post-war London of the future, but it's hard to tell where it's meant to be because there only the most cursory of historical details are given to establish setting.

Whitaker and Law are actually quite good together, especially in their use of gallows humour. Whitaker's character once repo'd his own grandad, and goes about the film with a you-have-to-laugh mentality as a result. Law's character is basically an 'onest-tommy wideboy thug, unwittingly callous and blockheaded. He's later revealed to be a writer, but this character detail makes no sense whatsoever in light of Law's performance and the working class nature of the character. It's a well-made and well-pitched film... the perfect sized story to look at themes of commercialised murder and GFC-esque debt, but it's not really all that exciting as far as sci-fi goes. Not enough explanation goes into how this world came about and how a bank can have so much control over life and death. There's no context given to show us how this degree of power got into their hands. And then there's the weird, goofy and anticlimactic ending - a really stupid twist that negates a good 40 minutes of the film... it boggles my mind that big budget filmmakers would ever think they could get away with a twist like this without seriously pissing off their audience.

LOWPOINT: For some reason there's a 'homage' to the famous hammer scene out of Oldboy. I put 'homage' in inverted commas because it's really just a rip off of an iconic scene, used by a western filmmaker who (probably rightly) assumes that the majority of a mainstream audience will be unfamiliar with the Korean film he's stolen it from.

DIRECTOR: Miguel Spochnik
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Eric Garcia and Garrett Lerner. Based on a novel by Eric Garcia.
KEY ACTORS: Jude Law, Forest Whitaker, Liev Schrieber, Alice Braga, Carice Van Houten, RZA, Yvette Nicole Brown

RELATED TEXTS:
- The novel Repossession Mambo, on which the film is based.
- Not to be confused with the '80s cult film Repo Man.
- For similar (and ultimately better) sci-fi films set in the future, see Logan's Run, Children of Men, Minority Report, eXistenZ, Strange Days, Johnny Mnemonic, In Time and Surrogates.
- Eric Garcia also wrote the sci-fi novel Anonymous Rex, which was adapted into an even more poorly-recieved film than Repo Men.

The PR Strikes Back

2011-12-02T14:16:00.000-08:00

The PR Strikes Back is a tell-all book by publicist extraordinaire Keith Altham - an ex-journalist and well-renowned spin doctor who hobnobbed with the cream of the British music industry for around three or four decades.

Old Keithy has many an anecdote to share with his reader, and he does this in the rather clever form of mock letters. He writes a letter to each celebrity he wants to talk about and 'relives' old times with them... sometimes blasting them for their rampant and out of control egos, sometimes expressing confusion at their eccentricity, and sometimes lamenting the way they were treated by a world that wasn't ready for them.

Altham isn't afraid to let us know what he really thinks... he attacks Mick Jagger (half in jest) and Rod Stewart (not so much in jest) in much detail, laying out the extent of their egos blow-by-blow for us to see in all their petty, small-minded glory. It's all done in good humour and Altham makes some very witty, tongue-in-cheek and astute observations of the crazy world of music showbiz. It's very entertaining.

He has some terribly nice things to say about Jimi Hendrix and Eddy Grant, and also talks about Sting (single-minded but straight-up), Eric Burdon (a real survivor), Van Morrison (wtf!), Joan Armatrading (he tried to hug her once but she 'dyked' off at him), Donovan, Phil Collins, Spandau Ballet, Status Quo and Leo Sayer, as well as a whole range of other one-hit wonders and forgotten artists that he had the 'pleasure' of working for. He has a very wry and amusing style of writing, especially when he talks about no-hit bands like Uriah Heap.

Anyway, it's all a good bunch of fun and it'd be great to see more insiders write up their anecdotes in this fashion. Good one Keith.

Wake in Fright

2011-11-30T21:41:00.000-08:00

"What's the matter with you people, uh? You sponge off you, you burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child... that's alright. Don't have a drink with you, don't have a flaming bloody drink with you - that's a criminal offence. The end of the bloody world!"

Quite possibly the greatest film ever made about Australia, Wake in Fright won't sit well with the average Aussie viewer. In fact, upon it's release it was shunned by sectors of the Australian film-consuming community and didn't quite make the impact it should've, perhaps due to the fact that it cut a little close to the bone. It's my firm belief that this is a film that should be studied in schools, both in the context of what it says directly about the Australian character and what our reaction to it says about the Australian character. Wake in Fright was more or less the first film to put modern Australia on the silver screen as it truly was... prior to this the Australian film industry was basically non-existent. Up until the '40s it had acted as a satellite film industry to England, depicting Australians who were for all intents and purposes displaced British citizens. There were a sprinkling of Hollywood productions made on Australian soil in the late '50s, but it wasn't until the British-financed Wake in Fright that it suddenly seemed possibly for Australia to have a self-sufficient industry of its own. Wake in Fright's importance and impact was so big that it spawned two parallel lines of cinema in the '70s and beyond - the artistically-inclined Australian New Wave (spearheaded by Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Bruce Beresford) and the crowd-pleasingly low brow films that have come to be known as the Ozploitation movement. Wake in Fright has elements of both these waves of filmmaking, and is just a damn fine film to boot.

John (Gary Bond) is an upper class schoolteacher serving his time in the isolated outback town of Tiboonda. He resents being stationed so far from what he deems to be civilisation, and when the school holidays come around he aims to return to Sydney for a reprieve. Along his journey he comes to Bundanyabba (AKA "the Yabba"'), an outback town where he stops to rest and have a quiet drink. Some locals at the Yabba introduce him to an underground two-up ring, where he gets a taste for gambling. John sees a chance to make enough money to free him from his outback teaching post, but he ends up losing everything instead. As a result he's stranded in the Yabba, without a dollar to his name and unable to even get to the next town. He falls in with some 'friendly' locals, and they initiate him into their way of life... a kind of hell from which there seems to be no escape.

Wake in Fright's biggest weapon is its subtle use of irony to examine the widening gap between intellectualism and the working class in Australia, perhaps most immediately evident in the contrast between the gentle music that plays throughout the opening credits and the first line of dialogue; an abrupt 'Shut up!' that foreshadows the barely restrained tension that bubbles under the affable manner of the average Australian country character. As John travels out of Tiboonda he finds himself invited to drink with a group of drunken locals on the train, which he politely declines in favour of sitting by himself. It's this aloofness that is his only really defence, and dropping it will be his undoing. An interesting side note of this early train-set scene full of 'friendly' Aussies is that there's also an aboriginal man sitting by himself - a keen visual reminder of the seperatist reality of Australian culture. This simple truth gets blown up to magnificent proportions throughout the course of the film, almost to a point where it's literally too hard to look at.

In a film full of contrasts - such as the juxtaposition of the jovial nature of the Australian character with the desolated, sand-blasted environment - it's perhaps the contrast between the intellectual teacher and the working class rural Australians that is most dangerous. The Yabba townsfolk don't take too kindly to John's resentment of their habitat and culture. His arrogance leads him to unashamedly label two-up as a "simple-minded game". Nearly everything he says and does makes it obvious that he looks down on the Yabba, he even casts the 'fair go' temperement of the locals as the "arrogance of stupid people". The flipside of this is what comes to be termed as the "aggressive hospitality" of the rural Australian, a subtle and cunning strategy the Yabba folk employ to trap their prey. It's never made explicit or said outright, all this stuff happens just under the surface through the narrowing of eyes and some deceptively friendly phases. John may be an unsympathetic protagonist when the film begins, but by the end the balance of power has tipped well out of his favour and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him despite his deficiencies. The Yabba men toy with him, for all his cleverness they're always in control of his life. They take his money, destroy his concept of time, and degrade him completely. To them he's uneducated because he has no understanding of their lifestyle. When they take him shooting he wants to claim his kill, but they tell him there's no point because all the foxes are mangy in the outback, and he realises the pointlessness of his assimilation. By this point it's also too late, a kind of stockholm syndrome has taken hold of him - leading to a disturbingly barbaric roo-shooting sequence. By the end of his transformation he even throws his beloved books away, all the civilisation is washed out of him, and escape becomes nothing more than a fantasy.

Of the actors it's probably Chips Rafferty and Donald Pleasance that stand out the most. Rafferty (in his last film) has an important supporting role as the local representative of the law, and Pleasance (with a perfect Australian accent) plays an alcoholic doctor. The 'good' doctor admits that his 'disease' (alcoholism) prevents him from practicing in Sydney but that in the Yabba this affliction is barely noticeable. It's a sadly acute observation that all but labels Australia's propensity for drinking as an outright blight on our national character. Along with a talent for beerswilling, the Australian character is further represented by several other tropes - a reverence for the ANZACs, two up, mateship, and pokermachines as a 'healthy' tradition. Add to this a friendliness that only really exists as long as you fit the unspoken rules of the friendly atmosphere, and the aforementioned "aggressive hospitality", and you have an image of the Australian that fits a little too uncomfortably. There's also the suggestion that an Australian man must be masculine in order to be a 'true Australian'; an idea that also feeds into the divide between intellectualism and the working class. John finds that he actually has more in common with the reserved daughter of one of his new 'friends' than he does with any of the males he meets, further highlighting his 'unaustralian-ness' in comparison to the Yabba blokes.

I'm sure quite a lot could be written about this film, such as its use of visual motifs like blinding lights to represent the sun and heat of the outback, or the way it passes its comments with minimal judgement for either side of the aforementioned divides. It's actually quite a serious piece of anthropology under all the mindless drinking, punching and humiliation, the dark flipside to films like Dimboola and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

TRIVIA: The film was internationally known as Outback at the time of it's initial release.

DIRECTOR: Ted Kotcheff
WRITER/SOURCE: Evan Jones, based on a book by Kenneth Cook.
KEY ACTORS: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, John Meillon, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Dawn Lake

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1961 novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook.
- The other big early '70s Australian film of artistic note is Walkabout.
- Some other '70s films that examine the Australian character were Dimboola, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don's Party, Last of the Knucklemen, Sunday Too Far Away and Stork.
- Director Ted Kotcheff's most famous film is probably First Blood.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - nominated for the Palme d'Or.

#omgimtrending

2011-11-29T20:47:00.000-08:00

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

As you might gather from the title, this film is so current and up-to-date in terms of social networking trends and youth culture that it can't help but adopt a mode of tongue-in-cheek humour. As a result it's a comically dense but superficial odyssey, surprisingly epic despite it's short length and seeking to encompass as many aspects of contemporary pop culture as possible (vampires, zombies and unicorns all feature). Think of it as part Juno, part Terry Gilliam and part Scott Pilgrim.

The script is very clever in the way it satirises social networking, and the comedic timing of all involved is great. Fletch Finn (Patrick Alan Davis) embarks on a life-changing journey through this distorted version of reality, encountering supernatural beings and ex-girlfriends in his search for a beloved pushbike, but it's all a little too hip for its own good. It's weird that I feel so neutral about this because I kinda enjoyed it on a surface level, but I found the tone and idealogy to be inherently annoying and quite self-destructive. The hipsterism in this film is absolutely rampant, the cast is filled with hipster stereotypes but it's so annoyingly hip that it's ironic, and this irony in turn makes it even more annoyingly hip. I wasn't sure if the stereotypes were a criticism of hipsters, or if this was an ironically-vain hipster attempt at self-appraisal. Either way, I found the film as effortlessly hateable as hipsters themselves, with both employing an vapid subversiveness that deliberately invites scorn. This phenomenon makes post-ironic works like #omgimtrending inherently hard to like, despite their obvious entertainment value.

So, whilst the film is, on one level, enjoyable to watch and very well put together, I just found everything about it on an ideological level to be too much of a turn off. Whether it's shallow or a supreme work of mockery ceases to matter if each resembles the other so closely that they're completely indistinguishable.

DIRECTOR: Jorge Enrique Ponce
WRITER/SOURCE: Jorge Enrique Ponce
KEY ACTORS: Patrick Alan Davis, Olivia Harewood, Rya Meyers, Lizzy Davis, Sterling Price, Tony Calle

RELATED TEXTS
- Jorge Enrique Ponce has also made the following short films... Meatshake: A Musical, The Awakening of Spring and My Boy.
- For more hipster-orientated films, see also Juno and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World .

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

2011-11-28T21:45:00.000-08:00

Pretty much exactly what the title says... a man and his monkey crashland on Mars in this sci-fi adaptation of the famous novel of survival. It's probably for the best if you go into this film with low expectations regarding scientific accuracy... it was already known in the 1950s that Mars was quite cold, and that it didn't have a breathable atmosphere, but if you pretend this is another completely unknown planet then you'll be fine. The film plays by its own rules very strictly, it sets up boundaries and then sticks to them religiously, so regardless of any issues of real world authenticity it's actually quite a smart film and I really got into it the high adventure of it all. There's something about survival stories, about a man against the elements with only his wits to rely on, that just makes for great watching and reading. There's no need to get hung up on character development or a real world context, it's just about a guy trying to survive - and I think that's a really universal theme and should appeal to a wide range of people.

Robinson Crusoe On Mars starts out in space, with things like zero gravity and tubes filled with food used to remind the audience that this is a serious sci-fi film (rather than the hokey stuff usually marketed as sci-fi in the '50s). Once Commander Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) is marooned on Mars the first major challenge for him is the thin atmosphere. His oxygen tank only has enough air in it for 60 hours, and he needs to find shelter and heat as well. The next step after this is the quest for food and water, and after this he begins to combat isolation and loneliness. One subsequent part of this film that really stood out for me was the image of Kit playing his invented musical instrument as he marches across a barren landscape with his monkey in tow, a stark composition that combines elements of humour and tragedy to remind the viewer of the basic human need of companionship. The rest of the film is part exploration, part survival, with Kit eventually meeting his Man Friday (Victor Lundin) - an escaped alien slave who, for all intents and purposes, may as well be a Native American (even his language sounds Native American).

Friday is reluctant to learn English and talk, and I had to laugh at this unexpected piece of dialogue from Kit; "Listen retard, I don't know what you're trying to tell me but we're not budging from this spot until you some words, A-OK?" I was kind of disappointed at the introduction of the slaver aliens, represented only by superfast spaceships equipped with deathrays, but I guess some extra jeopardy was needed to up the stakes once Kit had gotten relatively comfortable. The other odd element was the floating fireball seen at the film's beginning... this phenomenon is not seen or heard from again, nor are they explained.

The special effects are generally of a high standard, I just love the matte work they used in sci-fi films from the '40s, '50s and '60s... a really good matte painting is pretty much timeless, and evokes a nostalgic form of alien-ness for me. Anyway, a great movie!

DIRECTOR: Byron Haskin
WRITER/SOURCE: John C. Higgins and Ip Melchior. Based on a novel by Daniel Defoe.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, Adam West

RELATED TEXTS
- Robinson Crusoe, the first English language novel ever written.
- Director Byron Haskin also directed several episodes of the science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits. His other sci-fi films include: The War of the Worlds, From the Earth to the Moon, Conquest of Space and The Power.
- Other film adaptations of the novel: Robinson Crusoe (a silent film from 1927), Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (directed by Luis Bunuel), Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (a modern Disney version) and Robinson Crusoe (starring Pierce Brosnan).
- See also Cast Away, 127 Hours and Alive for more tales of survival against the odds.

Terri

2011-11-27T20:21:00.000-08:00

"Life's a mess dude, we're all just doing the best we can"

Terri is one of those sleeper indie flicks that fly under the radar. A film firmly about 'The teenage years' in all their awkwardness and comic tragedy, Terri tells the story of a social outsider (played by Jacob Wysocki) who gets befriended by his school pincipal (John C. Reilly). It's about the kids who get treated like monsters because they're that little bit different, and the teacher who wants to help them by teaching them self-esteem and self-respect. It's a bit like Rushmore, only the unlikely friendship between student and teacher isn't built on any veins of intellectualism. Terri is a large but gentle boy who lives with his mentally ill uncle and wears pyjamas to school, and John C. Reilly is less the urbane and burnt out teacher and more a working class man with genuinely good intentions (despite his own personal issues).

This isn't really a coming-of-age film in the typical sense, as Terri's story isn't really a point of viewer identification. Terri is about school life for the different, with all the elements of bullying and freedom of choice thrown in for good measure. It's very much a film of happy sadness, striking a carefully negotiated tone that evokes some degree of awkward nostalgia and realistic comedy. Terri is an observer with no real agency, and his journey is primarily about getting him to a point where he can think and act independently with confidence.

The highlight of the film is quite easily John C. Reilly as Mr. Fitzgerald. Reilly just does his usual thing, which is entertainment in itself, but it makes for a great teacher and it's quite easy to imagine Reilly as a real-life teacher. In a way Terri is really a film about Mr. Fitzgerald, a real life hero just doing his job in helping the disenfranchised. Anyway, this is a great and underrated film that hasn't garnered the attention it deserves, both genuinely funny and genuinely moving. It doesn't have any real edge that makes it unique, it's just a really well made film that doesn't fall into cliches.

DIRECTOR: Azazel Jacobs
WRITER/SOURCE: Patrick DeWitt
KEY ACTORS: John C. Reilly, Jacob Wysocki, Bridger Zadina, Creed Batton, Olivia Crocicchia

RELATED TEXTS:
- Azazel Jacobs has made three other feature length films; Nobody Needs to Know, The GoodTimes Kid and Momma's Man, all of which were low budget and independently made.
- See also the TV series Freaks and Geeks, and other films about teenage awkwardness and independence such as Rushmore, Precious, Angus, Local Color, Thumbsucker and Motel.

AWARDS
Sundance Film Festival - nominated for Grand Jury Prize.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2011-11-27T02:36:00.000-08:00

*mild spoilers ahead*

As a gay Thai man living in Thailand, I can't help but think that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has a rather unique voice in cinema. His identity and artistic skills mean that he has things to say, and ways to say them, that no one else in the world might have previously considered. With this in mind, I urge you to check out this unique film. Perhaps even calling this a 'film' is to do it a disservice, as it's more like a piece of art to experience. The narrative doesn't fit into the conventions of Western cinema, and perhaps the idea that it even has a narrative is counter-productive to the film's purpose. Suffice to say, it's a beautiful and mysterious cinematic accomplishment.

It's hard to describe the 'plot' of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is a fruit farmer who is getting closer to the end of his life. He has poor kidneys and needs to use a dialysis machine regularly, and believes that this illness is a result of bad karma due to his role in killing communists back in 1965. His sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) comes to visit him, and at dinner one night they are visited by supernatural beings from their past - the ghost of Boonmee's wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), and his son Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhon), a man who has transformed into an otherworldy ape-like creature after obsessively tracking monkey ghosts in the forest for many years. It's like the tragedies of their past have been brought back to them by Boonmee's imminent death and his closeness to the 'next world'. At certain points in this story the film shifts to other stories that seem to have no direct connection to the main narrative, such as a scene set far into the past where a woman meets a talking catfish.

Despite the elements of fantasy this is a rather sombre and thoughtful film, evoking a funereal tone of regret and strange mystery as it explores the otherwordliness of Thailand's Isan district and its distinct culture. There are things in this film that you will see only here and nowhere else, such as a deformed woman having sex with a talking catfish, but these things aren't put across in a shocking or illicit way. It pushes the boundaries of film narrative in order to give a literal representation of Thai folk beliefs in the modern world; communion with animals and communion with the dead are taken for granted and depicted as such. It's very much a Thai film about Thailand that has been made for an international audience, but it can't all be understood and I sense that trying to fit it all together is probably to miss the point - it's a piece of art that should be experienced more than once, open to multiple interpretations, and passing comment on ideas relating to the power of memory and the ending of a life.

In a way the film is about humanity and the things and relationships we build in order to lighten our burdens. Weerasethakul has also said that his film is also about the death of cinema itself in the wake of the digital age, and he utilises different styles of filmmaking to create something that approaches a 21st century multimedia experience - mixing static tableuxs with documentary-style camera work, and genre-hopping from realism to fantasy to historical costume drama. There's a brilliant scene a little way into the film where Boonmee and Jen are sitting at the dinner table on their outdoor verandah and the spirit of his wife just slowly melts into existence next to them. It's a genuinely shocking moment, gently executed but absolutely heartstopping, and Weerasethakul uses these slow double exposures on several occasions to give the film an etherel, dreamlike elegance. It's all very strange and enigmatic, but Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives contains some of the most unshowy yet visually striking imagery I've ever seen put to screen. It's truly memorable, and left me thinking about the film for a long time afterwards.

DIRECTOR: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
WRITER/SOURCE: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
KEY ACTORS: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjiri Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jeerasak Kulhong, Kanokporn Thongparan, Natthakarn Aphaiwong

RELATED TEXTS
- The film started out as a pair of short films, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
- Very loosely based (0r inspired) by the 1983 memoir of a real life man named Boonmee, called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
- Other films by Weerasethakul: Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, The Adventures of Iron Pussy, Blissfully Yours and Mysterious Object at Noon.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won Palme d'Or.
Independent Spirit Awards - nominated for Best Foreign Film.

Can I Ask You a Personal Question?

2011-11-24T21:38:00.000-08:00

Books and parties aren't exactly synonymous. In fact, you might even say they were exact opposites... but sometimes a handy little book with a good gimmick can help break the ice.

Can I Ask You a Personal Question? (subtitled "how to REALLY get to know your friends") by Jonny Steele is this exact book. It can be useful for grilling your partner, some friends, or getting a few laughs from a large group of people. It contains 1000 pertinent questions that can be asked of anyone, and - so long as nobody lies - it can be a lot of fun. The back of the book says of these questions, "Many are amusing, others are thought-provoking or even a little embarrassing. All will help you get to know yourself, your friends and your lover better".

Here are some random sample questions so you can get an idea of what sort of questions this book might ask you...

"Can you name a sexy scene in a film?"
"When do you wish you hadn't cried?"
"Have you ever shoplifted?"
"What's been playing on your mind today?"
"Who do you know who smells?"
"Can you shoot a gun?"
"When did you last go out with your parents?"
"What's the largest amount of money you would bet on a horse race?"
"How do your reject the offer of a date?"
"Do you have a pet name for your private parts?"

All good stuff, as you can see... some of the answers you get (or even answer yourself) might surprise you. That's the object of the book - I played this with a large group of people and it was hysterical and eye-opening. Sometimes people would struggle to answer truthfully, but that's partof the fun.

It can be a bit tricky to find in bookstores, so here is the barcode number is 9780143002710 to help you find it. Have fun!

The Lost World

2011-11-24T02:27:00.000-08:00

I have to admit that I don't really like The Lost World all that much. I think the film's music pretty much sums it up, swapping the trumpet-laden awe and wonder of Jurassic Park's score for attention-getting tribal drums and tension. Spielberg isn't afraid to branch out when it comes to sequels (see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) so he goes more for all-out action in this big adventure. The theme is still very much about the evils of messing with nature, represented by the villains' attempts to control nature through capturing and imprisoning dinosaurs. It's up to Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, returning from the first film) and his wayward girlfriend, Dr Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore, as a character who just so happens to be a paleontologist), to save the day after being lured onto a new dinosaur-ridden island.

I guess the major problem with The Lost World is that, instead of a simple story of characters trying to escape dinosaurs, this sequel has to come up with some rather convoluted ideas just to get some 'good guys' interacting with dinosaurs. Several new characters are introduced, including Vince Vaughn as some kind of dino-freedom fighter and Goldblum's African-American daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester). Kelly serves no real function in the plot whatsoever and I still don't really know why she's in the film. Perhaps the worst piece of characterisation of all is Goldblum's return as Malcolm, here the mathematician is a jittery worrywort who has more in common with Goldblum's character from Independence Day than the rock star-ish character the actor played in Jurassic Park. On the flipside, we get the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite as a great white hunter-type, though he doesn't feature in the film anywhere near as much as I would've liked.

Overall I think there's too much action, too many characters (a lot of whom are barely developed), and the dinosaurs don't seem as real due to an increased reliance on CGI. It's a lot gorier than the first movie, and the whilst the rampaging T-rex ending is a lot of fun it's also morally unfair - we're expected to sympathise with the dinosaurs due to the fact that they're depicted as animals rather than monsters, and yet the T-rex is shown brutally eating innocent people back in LA! I guess it was always going to be hard to do a sequel to a film that had a heavy reliance on the audience being shown something they'd never seen before, and perhaps Spielberg was wise not to attempt a retread of this. There are some great set pieces to watch out for (the T-rexes attacking the caravan, and the Compsognathuses menacing and attacking Peter Stormare's character), but that's all they are: set pieces. Leftover sequences that could be shoehorned into any of the Jurassic Park films (this is a phenomenon that would continue into the third film as well), suggesting that a narratively-sound sequel might be a relative impossibility.

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novel by Michael Crichton.
KEY ACTORS: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vince Vaughn, Vanessa Lee Chester, Peter Stormare, Thomas F. Duffy

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel The Lost World by Michael Crichton, sequel to his original novel: Jurassic Park.
- This film is the sequel to the film Jurassic Park, and is followed by a third film, Jurassic Park III.
- For more rampaging dinosaurs, see Godzilla and The Valley of Gwangi.
- The title and concept of this film alludes to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Visual Effects.

Sharfik

2011-11-22T20:09:00.000-08:00

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

I was initially eager to get stuck into this animated short as I usually automatically assume that a fair bit of time and enthusiasm has gone into animated projects, and that the filmmakers will have something different to say (or a different way to say the usual things). Unfortunately, Sharfik kind of disappointed me. The short is a dialogue-free depiction of one family slowly falling apart during the WWII seige of Stalingrad, and focuses on the family's youngest son as he struggles to survive ( though he doesn't really have any understanding of what's happening).

There's a universalness to this sort of subject, and I guess that's why it's completely free of dialogue. The use of a child's perspective is obviously designed to push the viewer's emotional buttons in a big way... it seems to be very much influenced by the depressing anime opus Grave of the Fireflies (if only Grave of the Fireflies had been this short!) Alas, Sharfik isn't up to scratch in terms of that film's quality, with the animation and camera movements seeming amateurish and a little too close to Adobe Flash for my tastes.

I think I would've liked more context to the story rather than long, empty stretches of suffering. I can see what the filmmakers were aiming for but I guess I'm just numb and cynical towards the message due to overexposure to the subject matter and the film's unexciting execution.

DIRECTOR: Karina Gazizova
WRITER/SOURCE: Karina Gazizova

RELATED TEXTS
- See Grave of the Fireflies for a similar story told in almost the exact same way, only much better.
- Karina Gazizova previously worked as an animator on the TV series Good Vibes and the TV children's game show BrainSurge.

An Andalusian Dog

2011-11-22T03:27:00.000-08:00

This short silent film is (in)famous for a gutchurningly realistic image of a woman's eyeball being sliced open by a razor. It comes near the beginning of the film as a way of getting the viewer's attention, and the film holds this attention for the remainder of its 16 minutes despite the apparent absence of any real plot or characters. Spanish director Luis Bunuel (in his directorial debut) collaborated with famed artist Salvador Dali for this piece, and the two create a delightfully surrealistic series of scenes that act as a cinematic counterpart to certain techniques being pioneered in modernist literature during the 1920s. More specifically, it's a dreamlike sense of free association that sees the film tumble across unconnected scenes like a stream of consciousness.

It's actually quite accessible to modern viewers as it plays like the world's first MTV music video, and the way An Andalusian Dog fluidly segues from, say, an apartment to a beach feels like the precursor to pop music videos that would be created some 50-60 years later. It's a very strange experience, dissolving into new and unpredictable images and gleefully revelling in sex and violence to establish a riveting and distinctly visual tableux. One particular aspect that sheds some light on what the film might be trying to say (though this is really anybody's guess) is the predominance of body horror - the eye scene, a shot of ants crawling from a wound in a man's palm, a disembodied hand, etc. What it's supposed to be about isn't really all that important though, the emphasis is on using the developing scope of cinema in a new and artistically original way.

DIRECTOR: Luis Bunuel
WRITER/SOURCE: Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali
KEY ACTORS: Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali

RELATED TEXTS
- Bunuel followed up his debut with a longer surrealist film, The Age of Gold, in 1930. Some of his later surrealist films are The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.
- Other famous surrealist films: The Smiling Madame Beudet, The Seashell and the Clergyman, Rose Hobart, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Eraserhead and Videodrome.

The Stunt Man

2011-11-21T02:47:00.001-08:00

"All they care about is story"

You've got to admire any film that opens on a dog licking its own balls. The Stunt Man is a hilarious and blackly cynical satire on relationships of power in filmmaking. Unlike a lot of other Hollywood films about filmmaking the emphasis here is very much on character, giving the film a certain timelessness that a relatively trivial film like What Just Happened is unable to match. The other big selling point for The Stunt Man that seperates it from lesser films is a great Oscar-nominated performance from Peter O'Toole. Coming from 1980, the film operates in a twilight between the golden new wave of American filmmaking of the '70s and the more entertainment-orientated pieces of quirk found in the thick of the '80s.

Cameron (Steve Railsbeck) is a disenfranchised Vietnam veteran on the run from the law. Eli (Peter O'Toole) is a megalomaniacal film director who's just covered up the death of a stunt man on his film. When the two meet, Eli strikes up an amicable deal - Cameron will assume the identity of the dead stunt man in order to hide from local law enforcement. At first it seems like a good deal, with Cameron getting to mingle with big name stars on the set of a movie, but Eli will stop at nothing to create the film he wants to make - a process that involves him manipulating both Cameron and the leading lady, Nina (Barbara Hershey), through external means. And as Cameron is off the radar this places him in a pretty dangerous position, and soon his sanity is hanging by a thread.

As I mentioned before, the characterisation is the key to this film's success in an arena where a lot of other films fail. The film's opening credits feature a motif that highlights the relationship between animal and master... dogs doing tricks, dogs trained to only like their owner, a buzzard shoed off a telegraph pole and fatally driven into the path of a helicopter. Cameron is very much the dog to Eli's master... as a soldier he's already predispossed to following orders, and his first appearance in the film has him looking very much like a stray mongrel. He also isn't too bright, and operates mostly on instinct, so his intellectual defences against Eli are fairly minimal. By contrast, Hershey's character is a method actor parody, but it's played realistically enough and with enough charm to not feel like an overt joke. The layers of method to her character actually serve a function in the script as well, providing enough enigma to intrigue and confuse Cameron.

And then there's Eli, played by O'Toole with that wonderfully aristocratic voice. O'Toole apparently based the character on David Lean (who famously directed O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), creating a satirical devil of a man referred to by his cast and crew as 'Eli the Terrible'. When he says, "This film is my child", it's 100% believable, with that maniacal gleam in his eye and a creative confidence that puts an easy smile on his face while he literally calls the shots. As the film spirals out of control and gets more insanely ridiculous, so too do Eli's mindgames with Cameron and Nina. It echoes the folly of infamous projects like Heaven's Gate (also made in 1980) and One From the Heart, where acclaimed directors went off the rails when given too much power. Eli's film within this film reflects the director's creative dilemma when tackling controversial subjects; he wanted to make an anti-war picture during the Vietnam War but wasn't allowed to, and now that he can there's no longer a war to criticise.

The power struggle between Eli and Cameron cleverly balances between comedy and tragedy, never once tipping too far in either direction. I can see at least one major reason for this sublime tone, being that it keeps the audience on edge - we don't quite know what to expect, and the film doesn't let us know if it's a comedy or tragedy until the very last couple of minutes. The Stunt Man gets right to the core of the magic of movies by continuously playing with the viewer's perception of what's happening. It segues between real stuntwork to Railsbeck pretending to perform this stuntwork, and then shows us these stunts being faked in-film, though we also know that outside of the film's narrative the stunts are being performed by real stuntmen. On top of this, there are also questions regarding the safety of these stunts in the context of the film's story - we don't know for sure just how safe Cameron is in the hands of Eli. It's all very meta and clever. A real gem of a film.

DIRECTOR: Richard Rush
WRITER/SOURCE: Richard Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus. Based on a novel by Paul Brodeur.
KEY ACTORS: Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsbeck, Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield, Alex Rocco, Sharon Farrell

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1970 novel The Stunt Man by Paul Brodeur.
- The only other film Richard Rush made after this was Colour of Night, which also played with ideas relating to perception.
- A documentary was made in 2001, The Sinister Saga of Making 'The Stunt Man'.
- Films about stunt work; The Devil Dared Me To, Stunt Rock and Stunts.
- Films about filmmaking; What Just Happened, The Bad and the Beautiful, Mistress, Special Effects, Swimming With Sharks and The Player.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Peter O'Toole) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Golden Globes - won Best Original Score. Nominated for Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Actor - Drama (Peter O'Toole), Best Screenplay and Best New Star (Steve Railsbeck)

Green Lantern

2011-11-19T23:09:00.000-08:00

After so many recent, great popcorn comic films (Thor, Captain America, Kick Ass) I guess it had to happen that one of these big event movies would be a disappointment. Green Lantern has the makings of a fun adventure, and there are one or two zing moments, but overall it's a tonal mishmash that just doesn't work. It also suffers from that old chestnut of a problem that often plagues comic book movies: too many villains, characters and subplots. When will these Hollywood chumps learn to ignore the fans and just make a solid movie with a solid plot?

A brief outline of the story for any noobs... Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot who wants to be like his dad (a test pilot killed in a freak accident when Hal was young). Hal is fearless, but this also gets him into trouble when he destroys a new fighter jet in some simulated war games and embarrasses the American government. Enter the Green Lantern Corps - an intergalactic police force that uses a mystical green power fuelled by willpower. When a Green Lantern named Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) is fatally wounded he flies his ship to Earth to seek out a replacement, and finds Hal. Hal is inducted into the Green Lantern Corps and finds himself learning how to use his new powers whilst defending the Earth against an all-powerful entity named Parallax (Clancy Brown), an alien-infected mad scientist named Hector (Peter Sarsgaard), and a rival faction of the Corps seeking to use a dangerous yellow power source fuelled by fear.

It sounds like a mess, doesn't it? It is. Ryan Reynolds does his best to bring a light, angst-free touch to a fun story, but he isn't given a whole lot of room to breathe. They really should've started the film with Hal rather than all the space-myth stuff. By starting in space with all the big concepts it's like the film is showing its hand too early, and it also misses a trick in setting Hal up as the audience's identification figure. On top of all this the film also tries to explore the impact of father-child relationships through the three main human characters (Hal, Hector, and the love interest Carol) but it doesn't actually say anything of interest about this theme because there's so much else going on.

So what did I like? I liked the way it occasionally subverted the rules of the superhero genre... Hal thinks no one will recognise him when he dons the Green Lantern's eyemask, and I had to laugh when Carol sees right through it straight away. I also loved Peter Sarsgaard's performance as Hector, he's such a brilliant and underrated actor, and it was a shame that he couldn't be the sole villain in the film.

With its three villains Green Lantern just tries to do too much. It's stuff like this and Iron Man 2 that bums me out on superhero movies... the directors and writers are so caught up in ticking off all the boxes for the fans that they fail to tell a decent story. Green Lantern just needed to be a bit more focused. It also doesn't help that the film is kind of silly too... it tries to have this big, serious, dramatic end-of-the-world plot but the nature of Green Lantern's power means that Hal creates glowing green items from his imagination, and it's inherently goofy - like giant glowing green cars and stupid stuff like that. The ring itself and the power of 'will' is also fairly dated as far as ideas go... I mean, it's not something a modern writer would ever expect to get away with in a modern film, you just know it's something that was thought up in the '40s. Maybe what I'm trying to say is; was it really neccessary for this film adaptation to have even been made in the first place? It just seems nuts to try and sell this idea to modern audiences, and I suspect this is a big part of why the film ultimately failed both critically and commercially.

DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Based on the characters created by John Broome and Gil Kane.
KEY ACTORS: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett, Temeura Morrison, Taika Waititi, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Clancy Brown

RELATED TEXTS
- Green Lantern, a DC comics title that has been running since 1940, and was 'rebooted' with Hal Jordan as the protagonist in the '60s.
- DC comics haven't been as successful as Marvel in the film stakes lately, but they do still retain the two big superstars of the comic world - Superman and Batman. The last Superman film was Superman Returns, and Batman was recently rebooted with great success in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Both are due to hit the screen again in a big way with The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel.
- The other most recent DC films were Watchmen and Jonah Hex.
- Ryan Reynolds previously dabbled with playing comic book characters in Blade Trinity and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Bicycle Thieves

2011-11-17T03:42:00.001-08:00

"There's a cure for anything... except death"

A tale of tenacity and desperation in the downtrodden streets of post-war Italy, Bicycle Thieves is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. In this humble film, one man and his son spend a day searching for their stolen bike, an object that represents gainful employment in a poverty-stricken city. The mode is one of realism, and Vittorio De Sica's film is a highly influential entry in the Italian neo-realist movement - a post-war period of cinema started by the director Roberto Rosselini a few years earlier, where cinema shifted focus to and themes of social justice and the concerns and plights of the common man. The point of this new cinema was to eschew the glamour and artiface of Hollywood-style movie-making in favour of increased naturalism.

De Sica achieves this naturalism with several techniques. Foremost amongst these is perhaps the casting of non-actors in the main roles... De Sica originally contemplated Cary Grant or Henry Fonda for the role of Antonio before deciding on using amateurs. I don't think it would've been anywhere near as effective with stars of that calibre, the key to De Sica's illusion of realism is the suspension of disbelief, somethingthat would've been much harder to attain with the involvement of recognisable actors.

Another effective technique is the director's attention to detail... for instance, the roads remain wet after a period of rain, and the location-filming features hundreds of extras all going about their business as if this were a documentary about Rome in the 1940s. There are also long sections of the film that take place in real time, making the it feel like it isn't working off a script with constructed scenes - a lot of the time it's more a case of the camera just unintrusively following these characters.

Bicycle Thieves looks deceptively simple on the surface. True, the film is just about one man searching for his stolen bike as time runs out for him to claim a job (a precious commodity in this era of Europe's history; where Italy has been sucked dry by the war to end all wars), but it's also a story of social injustice and the value of things. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) puts his son through poor weather and exposes him to various dangers in his myopic quest, and is even reduced to hitting the boy as the bike becomes an overriding symbol in his mind. These two characters are really put through the ringer, with Antonio beginning to question his perspective and only holding the most tenuous grip on his status as a responsible citizen. The film is, inevitably, about his transformation from the lowest part of the working class to criminal... in a strictly Catholic nation like Italy it must've been shocking for Italian audiences to see Antonio acting so disrespectfully inside a church, grilling an old man relentlessly for information about his bike while the clergy try to deliver their mass for the poor. Soon he resorts to vigilante justice, placing himself outside of the law, and it's only a small step from here for him to turn into the same kind of villain he himself has spent the best part of the film hunting.

When Antonio finds his thief it shouldn't, by this point, come as a surprise that the criminal is worse off than he is. Antonio has tried to do the right thing but the system and society is against him, the inequality of wealth in this society has created a criminal class. Poverty begets crime, and it becomes less a question of morality and more a point of giving in to one's survival instinct. The point where Antonio steals a bike for himself (only to be promptly caught) is a devastating payoff to a slow and meaningful construction of a detailed picture. It's both horrible and englightening, and as a lesson in reality and the mechanics of criminal origins, it couldn't be more convincing. If only all education could be administered with such emotional punch!

DIRECTOR: Vittorio De Sica
WRITER/SOURCE: Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Gerardo Guerrieri, Oreste Biancholi and Adolfo Franci. Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini.
KEY ACTORS: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Bicycle Thieves by painter, poet and writer Luigi Bartolini.
- Bicycle Thieves has inspired several other films in world cinema about poverty: Beijing Bicycle, Pather Panchali, Two Acres of Land, Polladhavan,
- The Italian neorealism movement started with the film Rome: Open City. Other early examples include Shoeshine, Paisa and Germany: Year Zero.
- Neorealism was partially satirised in the '80s film The Icicle Thief.
- For more on poverty in the big city, see Umberto D, The Crowd, Messenger, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Killer of Sheep.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Honorary Award. Nominated for Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - won Best Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Film.

North Country

2011-11-16T03:42:00.001-08:00

"What do you do when the ones with all the power are hurting those with none?"

What do you do when you're a nobody and you win an Oscar and you're suddenly famous? Well, you make another Oscar-baiting film to prove that you're worthy of the prize you just won. This is what Charlize Theron did not too long after winning the Best Actress Oscar for Monster, driving this based-on-a-true-story vehicle about working class civil rights and delivering the kind of emotive and button-pushing performance needed to incite the audience's sympathetic anger. It's hard to tell just how much of this story is really true, I suspect that some elements of it have been tweaked in the interest of making a 'good' film, and I guess at the end of the day authenticity only matters if this is the only criteria on which you're judging the film. The simple fact of the matter is that it tells of a great injustice that did happen, and whatever button-pushing has been used to get the audience on side is probably vindicated by a need to tell these kinds of stories and to ensure such injustice is named and shamed. In short, as far as companies like Eveleth Taconite go: screw these guys.

Theron plays Josey, a single mother seeking a second chance at life and trying to make something of herself. She moves back to her home town in Minesota and throws herself into the family tradition: working for the town's mining company. Recent sexual equality laws have opened up the company for female employees, something that the company and its workforce accepts only begrudgingly. Once Josie and her female co-workers are hired they find themselves subject to systemic discrimination and harassment. Furthermore, the higher echelons are deaf to any complaints and Josie soon finds herself ousted from the company for 'causing trouble' when she decides to push the issue, and this leads to ostracisation in the wider community.

There aren't a great deal of films that actively deal with working class 'work life', and those that do (Silkwood, Norma Rae) inevitably deal with inequality in the work place or conspiracies. North Country is not really any different to these films - it's largely based on a landmark 1988 court case that changed workplace policy and practices forever (the first sexual harrassment class action that brought the hidden world of industrial power relations into the open). A big part of North Country's appeal is the left-wing political subtext that it willingly embraces - from the film's poster, which markets the film like a piece of optimistic socialist propaganda, to the use of Bob Dylan songs in the soundtrack, suggesting a direct kinship to the civil rights movement of the '60s. It's not all beer and skittles though, another part of the film's strength is that it also shines a light on the true nature of unionism and elitism in tight-knit working class communities - it's the sort of thing that usually gets lionised in pop culture, but North Country gets to the ugly truth and demonstrates that these arenas aren't always pretty.

The cast is exceptional too, here's my thoughts on the principle players:

Charlize Theron is believable with her working class mullet, and doesn't overdo it.
Jeremy Renner is suitably despicable and cocky, foreshadowing his work in films like The Hurt Locker and The Town.
Frances McDormand is good and understated in what could've been a really over-the-top role.
Sissy Spacek's role is quite small but she suits her character to a T and even uses the Minesota accent.
Richard Jenkins is great in the disgruntled father role. He really pushes it but this is also the key to him providing one of the film's biggest emotional moments.
Sean Bean turns up in an important role, and is good value as always. It's weird to hear him without his usual accent.
Also look out for Woody Harrelson in a large-ish but rather thankless role. This film is the beginning of Woody's renaissance as a celebrated character actor (carried on through films like A Scanner Darkly, Defendor, Zombieland).

I really enjoyed this film a lot, it's the kind of bread-and-butter tale of injustice that I just can't help but get swept up in. I've always been a sucker for films like this, and North Country is a film about bigotry and assumption that's very much in the tradition of In The Name of The Father or A Time To Kill, two films that have always been able to really suck me in. I felt like some aspects of North Country (such as the rape subplot) were a step or two away from the truth of the real court case... I can't be sure, but some of these story elements may have been included to tweak audience sympathy even further. I didn't really mind. The film takes a structure that uses the court case as a framing device for the narrative... I wasn't a fan of this at first, as it starts without a context and the reasons for the court case and its tone don't really become clear until much later on. But who am I to argue when the last half hour is such a gutting and emotionally overwhelming tour-de-force? Everything falls into place and it hit me in a big way. I know it's all constructed to get this sort of reaction out of me, but I like having this reaction to a film - it's passionate, and I don't mind being manipulated in that kind of way, so I guess it depends on your personal taste or what kind of viewer you are.

DIRECTOR: Niki Caro
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Michael Seitzman, based on a non-fiction book that chronicled the case of Jenson vs. Eveleth Taconite Company.
KEY ACTORS: Charlize Theron, Thomas Curtis, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Renner, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, Rusty Schwimmer, Amber Heard

RELATED TEXTS
- The non-fiction book Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler.
- Hostile Advances is a 1996 telemovie that's also based on a landmark case about sexual harrassment.
- Director Niki Caro previously made the critically acclaimed Whale Rider.
- Other films about unionism, whistle-blowing and the working class: Silkwood, Norma Rae, The Angry Silence, Blue Collar, Michael Clayton, The Insider, Made in Dagenham, Billy Elliot, Bread and Roses, F.I.S.T., On the Waterfront and Man of Iron.
- See also Erin Brockavich and The Accused, which also focus on court cases and injustice.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Charlize Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (Frances McDormand).
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Actress (Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (McDormand).
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Actress - Drama (Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (McDormand).

After Ever After

2011-11-15T03:53:00.001-08:00

"Love can't be defined. It can only be experienced"

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

After Ever After is, like fellow Beneath the Earth nominee Chase In Prose, a seemingly semi-autobiographical effort where the director/writer makes a short film about something he knows. In this case it's the process of loss and healing that a man goes through after coming out of a long relationship. The film is presented to the viewer in stages - 1) Grass is Greener, 2) Alone With Your Thoughts, 3) Reality, and 4) Accepting It. The film is actually mostly wordless, full of arresting and inventive imagery, and just lets all the action and editing do the speaking. There's some really clever use of repetition in the way it all hangs together, and Jeff Pinilla has made quite a solid film, and I applaud him for making a film about a guy falling out of love that doesn't end with said guy hooking up with a new girl.

So yeah, I thought this was quite well done, full of great and unique imagery, but I do have to say that it fell just short of greatness for me because it lagged in the middle... a good 17 minutes of the 28 minute runtime was just this one guy moping in silence. It's technically excellent, and quite dazzling in a really professional way, but I think it could've been just that little bit shorter and sharper. One of my three favourites of the competition though, and a very deserving winner of the festival's Audience Award.

DIRECTOR: Jeff Pinilla
WRITER/SOURCE: Jeff Pinilla, Dan Owens
KEY ACTORS: Michael Furlong, Dan Owens, Sara Cicilian, Sanam Erfani

RELATED TEXTS
- Jeff Pinilla previously wrote and directed the short film Dulcet Conversation.
- Pinilla also worked as an editor on the US-Ecuadorian film Bushwick.