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It’s the most wonderful time of the year. The time when we willingly succumb to mass-hallucination, and for one brief shining period we believe in the enduring strength of the human spirit. Concepts like peace and goodwill no longer seem like political rhetoric, but instead compel us to regain a mythologised compassion for our fellow man. Despite the fleeting nature of this illusion, for a few weeks in December we can believe it to be so. We can also believe…
THURSDAY (I.E. TODAY)
James Cameron’s Avatar opens.
Pedro Almodovar’s Broken Embraces opens.
The Muppet Christmas Carol (1992) is playing at ACMI at 1pm every day until Christmas Eve.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s The Holy Mountain (1973) at ACMI.
Miyazaki’s Ponyo at Moonlight. (We wrote about it here.)
SATURDAY
Arnaud Desplechin’s A Christmas Tale (Un conte de Noel) is showing at ACMI until December 28. Featuring Mathieu Amalric and Catherine Deneuve.
John Hughes’ Weird Science (1985) at Rooftop.
Special advance screening of Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox at Moonlight.
SUNDAY
The…
Within the first five minutes of Where the Wild Things Are the protagonist Max is caught in a freeze frame, a moment of reckless, furious playfulness suspended in time. Perhaps a reference to the shot that closes François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, it’s a telling detail that indicates what a remarkable film Wild Things is, audacious even for a mainstream American film with a budget in the hundreds of millions of dollars. Certainly I can’t think of a Hollywood film…
The Storm Warriors is the anticipated sequel to the 1998 Hong Kong film by Andrew Lau The Storm Riders. I haven’t seen the original film, but going by the trailer below the sequel looks like a heady cross between The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and Dragon Ball Z. It looks insane.
We have five in-season double passes to give away to Screen Machine readers. All you need to do is email your name and address to screenmachinetv@gmail.com with STORM…
THURSDAY
Sam Mendes’ Away We Go (written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida opens).
Bill Maher’s atheist doco Religulous (directed by Larry Charles) opens.
Shane Acker’s animated post-apocalypse tale 9 opens.
The Pang brothers’ wuxia epic The Storm Warriors opens.
Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse (2007) at Astor.
Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In (2008) at Rooftop.
Vincente Minnelli’s Meet Me in St Louis (1944) plays at ACMI until Wednesday.
ACMI’s Focus on Hopper’s America is running until Sunday.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1971) at ACMI.
Cinema…
Andrew Denton: ‘The Boy’. What’s it about?
Germaine Greer: The Boy is the male person who is no longer a child, but not yet a man.
AD: Mm-hm. And what… You admire this form very greatly. What is it that you admire?
GG: Well, no, the Boy has a kind of beauty which is not accessible to females or to younger or older men. There is a moment in a boy’s life when he is transcendentally beautiful.
The most striking thing about Twilight: New…
THURSDAY
Spike Jonze’s Where The Wild Things Are opens.
Steven Soderbergh’s comedy The Informant (starring Matt Damon) opens.
Paranormal Activity opens.
Zombieland (starring Jesse Eisenberg) opens.
Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time In the West (1968) is playing at the Astor until Saturday.
Japanese Film Festival is running until Tuesday.
ACMI presents a Focus on Hopper’s America which runs until December 13.
Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985) at Rooftop.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Alejandro Jodorowsky’s El Topo (1971) at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Stanley Kramer’s On the Beach (from 1959 and starring Gregory Peck,…
There’s a line in Down and Out in Paris and London where Orwell describes a friend of his as “the sort of atheist who does not so much disbelieve in God as personally dislike him”. I think the Coen brothers would like that a lot. (Incidentally, there’s an interesting debate out there about whether or not Orwell was an anti-Semite. Consensus seems to be heading towards, yes, probably, a bit.)
Not that A Serious Man is atheistic exactly. You get the…
With the release of Roland Emmerich’s 2012 this month, the film industry’s (and society’s) fascination with destruction becomes ever more pertinent. Not to mention depressing. Margaret Pomeranz was on to something when she criticized 2012 for glorifying the end of the world, and for making it seem less-bad that thousands of people were dying as long as the hero survives. Guy Debord labelled the modern world a ’showbiz society’, and this is expressed without a doubt in Emmerich’s film. Everything…
THURSDAY
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist opens. We wrote about it here.
Abbas Kiarostami’s Shirin is playing at ACMI until Sunday.
Ricky Gervais and Matthew Robinson’s The Invention of Lying opens.
Astor is still running a mini-season of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the West (1968).
James Clavell’s To Sir, With Love (from 1967 and starring Sidney Poitier) at Rooftop.
Digital postcard exhibition Canvas Found at Loop.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut (2001)
SATURDAY
Electrundra 2009 Audio-Visual Festival at Loop.
Ivan Reitman’s Ghostbusters (1984) at Rooftop.
SUNDAY
Stanley…
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus is the latest film from Terry Gilliam since Tideland. It’s about a travelling performing troupe that invites people to enter into a magic mirror and explore their imaginations. We learn that the reason they do this is part of a bet that the troupe’s leader, Doctor Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) made with the Devil (Tom Waits). Parnassus is to collect a certain number of souls, failing which, he must give up his daughter (Lily Cole). This…
THURSDAY
The Coen Brothers’ A Serious Man opens.
Twilight Saga: New Moon opens.
Erick Zonca’s Julia featuring Tilda Swinton premieres at ACMI and plays until Sunday.
Feedback Loop Media present The Mackenzie Portfolio at Loop.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Gus Van Sant’s Drugstore Cowboy (1989) at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Miyazaki double: Ponyo on the Cliff By the Sea (which we wrote about here) and Howl’s Moving Castle (2004) at Astor.
Electrundra 2009 Audio-Visual Festival at Loop.
SUNDAY
Astor begins a mini-season of Sergio Leone’s Once Upon a Time in the…
THURSDAY
Rian Johnson’s The Brothers Bloom opens.
Roland Emmerich’s 2012 opens.
Palestinian Film Festival opens today and runs until Sunday 15th November.
Hilariously, Festival of Jewish Cinema opens the same day and runs until Sunday 29th November.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents noted horror film, Gus Van Sant’s My Own Private Idaho (1991) at ACMI.
SUNDAY
Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979) at Astor.
MONDAY
Kenneth Branagh’s four-hour version of Hamlet (1997) at Astor.
TUESDAY
Catacomb Carousel Cinematheque at Glitch.
WEDNESDAY
Cinematheque presents Frank Borzage’s Lazy Bones (1925)
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THURSDAY
Michael Winterbottom’s Genova (starring Colin Firth and Catherine Keener) opens.
Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story opens.
Robert Zemeckis’ A Christmas Carol (starring Jim Carrey in 3D) opens.
The Time Traveller’s Wife (based on the novel) opens.
Scott Hicks is at Nova to discuss his forthcoming The Boys Are Back.
David Caesar and Ben Mendelsohn are at Nova to discuss the forthcoming Prime Mover.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents William Castle’s The Tingler (from 1959 and starring Vincent Price) at ACMI.
Beautiful Losers (a doco on the DIY subculture…
When Kanye West, at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, grabbed Taylor Swift’s microphone during her acceptance speech for Best Video of the Year by a Female Artist, and pronounced the now infamous words – “Yo Taylor, I’m real happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time, OF ALL TIME!!” – there was immediate shock and astonishment, from both initial viewers and those who caught the outburst later on…
THURSDAY
Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, starring Heath Ledger, opens.
Richard Kelly’s The Box opens.
Music doco It Might Get Loud (with The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White) opens.
Michael Jackson concert doco This Is It is playing for 2 weeks only.
East Germany’s first sci-fi The Silent Star (1960) screens as part of ACMI’s Focus on East German Cinema.
FRIDAY
[UPDATE! The new Speakeasy Cinema is having its opening party at 1000 £ Bend, showing the documentary Beautiful Losers (featuring artists such as…
Woody Allen has never had a problem with the idea of himself in a relationship with a significantly younger woman, either on screen (Manhattan) or in real life. Yet his latest film, Whatever Works, might be the first of his films in which Woody Allen actively defends his position, that is, he addresses his ideas on intergenerational love relationships by satirising wider society’s uptight sexual morality.
Larry David (Curb Your Enthusiasm) plays Boris Yelnikoff, a former nuclear physicist who, following an…
THURSDAY
Femlink presents a collage of short videos on the theme “Male” at Loop.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays features William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964) featuring Joan Crawford
SUNDAY
Gone With the Wind (1939) and Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop (1988) at Astor.
MONDAY
As part of the Hello Darkness Horror Film Festival, Paranormal Activity at ACMI.
WEDNESDAY
Cinematheque presents Chris Marker’s If I Had Four Camels (CANCELLED. Replaced with Remembrance of Things to Come) and Letter From Siberia (1958) at ACMI.
What I am about to say is not a defence of Polanski. I will, however, say that there is a good moral argument for why Polanski should not go to jail. My argument may be considered a feminist stance. But mostly, it is a humanist stance. But first, let’s make some definitive statements:
In 1977 Roman Polanski raped a 13-year-old girl.
There is no moral justification for this act.
Roman Polanski’s artistic achievements do not exonerate Polanski.
All that said, I am unwilling to…
THURSDAY
Woody Allen’s Whatever Works starring Larry David opens.
Yojiro Takita’s Oscar-winning Departures opens.
Lone Scherfig’s An Education opens.
The Final Destination 3D opens.
“Kimchi western” The Good, The Bad, The Weird is playing at ACMI is playing until 20th October.
Agnes Varda’s Lions Love (1969) plays at ACMI today and Sunday.
FRIDAY
John Landis’ The Blues Brothers (1980) at Astor.
Freaky Fridays presents William Castle’s Strait-Jacket (1964) starring Joan Crawford.
SATURDAY
Miyazaki double feature at Astor: Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea and Nausicaa of the Valley of the…
When I saw that Suroosh Alvi, co-founder of Vice Magazine, co-directed Heavy metal in Baghdad, I admit I cringed. He squanders as little emotion as possible as he secures his bullet-proof vest and talks to the camera wearing aviator shades, telling us the enormity of the mission that he and fellow Vice media magnate, Eddy Moretti, are about to undertake when they enter Baghdad to track down one of the only heavy metal bands in Iraq:
This is risky, it’s dangerous,…
THURSDAY
Duncan Jones’ Moon opens.
Nora Ephron’s Julia & Julia opens.
Gustave de Kervern & Benoit Delepine’s Louise-Michel (winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance) opens.
Peter Billingsley’s Couples Retreat opens.
Drew Barrymore’s directorial debut Whip It opens.
Seniors’ Film Festival has a retrospective of Terence Davies’ films.
South Korean homage to the spaghetti western The Good, The Bad and The Weird is at ACMI until October 20.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Michael Crichton’s Westworld (1973) at ACMI.
SUNDAY
Alan Crosland’s The Jazz Singer (1927) at Astor (preceded by an…
I have glimpsed hipster utopia. And I don’t mean that as an ironic statement.
So-called “hipster” or “indie” culture is often hard to embrace because to participate almost always feels like becoming part of a solipsistic, cynical marketing demographic. 5oo Days of Summer, American Apparel, Pitchfork: these are the icons of the culture within which I operate and I can only engage in this stuff by maintaining some critical distance, lest I become another mindless consumer. But it’s so damn tiring.…
THURSDAY
Marc Webb’s (500) Days of Summer opens.
Tatia Rosenthal’s $9.99 opens.
Matt Tyrnauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor opens.
FRIDAY
Todd Phillips’ The Hangover and Greg Mottola’s Adventureland play as a double bill at Astor.
Bert Deling’s Pure Shit (1975) at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah and Sam Mendes’ Revolutionary Road at Astor.
SUNDAY
James Bond double bill: You Only Live Twice (1967) and Diamonds Are Forever (1971) at Astor.
Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris (1951) at ACMI.
Alex Proyas’ Dark City (1998) at ACMI.
MONDAY
Sidney Lumet’s Dog Day Afternoon…
The thing about Tarantino is that there is no subtext to him. I don’t say this to diminish what he does. He’s quite clearly an accomplished filmmaker. He writes engaging dialogue, directs actors well, shoots scenes well, has good taste in music and throws a million cinematic references into every film that you will never fully understand. But what you see is what you get. There is never anything more. Take the requisite violence that you find in a Tarantino…
THURSDAY
Judd Apatow’s Funny People opens.
Werner Herzog’s Encounters at the End of the World opens.
Ana Kokkinos’ Blessed opens.
Sacha Gervasi’s Anvil! The Story of Anvil opens.
Vittorio De Sica’s The Bicycle Thief (1948) is playing until Tuesday at ACMI.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Turkey Shoot (1982) at ACMI.
SUNDAY
Great Italian double bill at Astor: Vittorio De Sica’s The Garden of the Finzi Continis (1970) and Bernardo Bertolucci’s The Conformist (1970).
MONDAY
Eighties nostalgia double bill at Astor: Richard Donner’s The Goonies (1985) and Frank Oz’s Little…
Remember the first time you saw the now ubiquitous (and roundly loathed) iPod ad?
Remember how sharp, how snapped together the image and sound seemed, how simple and obvious, and yet totally new and now it was? The irony being that the building blocks which enabled motion graphics designers to put that together on their iMacs in the noughties, were first laid over 70 years ago by a New Zealand film maker working on an ad for the British Post Office.
Sometimes…
THURSDAY
Soderbergh’s The Girlfriend Experience opens.
Pete Docter and Bob Peterson’s Up opens.
FRIDAY
Scorsese’s Mean Streets (1973) at ACMI.
Cinema Fiasco presents Jeremy Jameson’s The Bat People (1974) at the Astor.
MONDAY
Michael Mann’s Heat (1995) at the Astor.
WEDNESDAY
Marguerite Duras double feature: India Song (1975) and Les Enfants (1984). At the Cinematheque.
Miyazaki is more than he appears. Because his films are generally so positive, charming and cute I feel like he gets written off as a lightweight. Indeed some have written about Miyazaki’s latest film Ponyo as just for kids, pointing out the film narrative’s seeming disregard for cause and effect. But to watch Ponyo and insist on cold adult logic is to really miss the complexity of Miyazaki’s vision.
Take the theme of ecology which you find comes up a lot…
THURSDAY
Miyazaki’s Ponyo opens.
Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock opens.
Tony Scott’s Taking of Pelham 123 opens.
Anna May Wong retrospective at ACMI starts and plays until Sunday.
FRIDAY
Tarantino and Rodriguez’s Grindhouse at Astor.
Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut at Freaky Fridays.
SATURDAY
Meet the stars and makers of Anvil! The story of Anvil! (Rob Robb Reiner, Steve “Lips” Kudlow, Sacha Gervasi) at Nova.
A season of films focusing on designer Marc Jacobs starts at ACMI and plays until Sunday 6 September.
SUNDAY
Ana Kokkinos Q&A for her film Blessed at Nova.
John…
District 9 is seemingly many things: a thrilling science fiction adventure film, an awkward mockumentary, an innovative blend of cutting edge special effects with cinéma vérité aesthetics. But to me, District 9 is the tale of a tourist. I’m using the word “tourist” the way Jarvis Cocker used the word to describe that rich girl from “Common People” who had a thirst for knowledge and studied sculpture at St. Martin’s college.
You see, at the same time as you felt that…
THURSDAY
Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds opens.
Aspberger’s romantic comedy Adam opens.
Michael Jackson’s Moonwalker opens for 1 week only.
FRIDAY
The Duplass Brothers’ “Mumblecore” horror film Baghead at Freaky Fridays.
SATURDAY
Author of The Reader, Bernhard Schlink, presents the film at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.
SUNDAY
Paul Verhoeven’s Robocop at the Astor.
MONDAY
Ron Fricke’s Baraka at the Astor.
TUESDAY
Visconti’s The Leopard at the Melbourne Writer’s Festival.
Antonioni’s Blow-Up at Melbourne Filmoteca.
WEDNESDAY
Rossellini’s Voyage to Italy and Paisà at the Cinematheque.
With Thirst, Park Chan-wook, best known for the excellent Vengeance Trilogy of the past few years (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) takes a welcome step into full on Grand Guignol horror melodrama; only it takes him a bit too long to get there. Park’s best films, particularly Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, are models of dramatic construction; beginning with a simple set-up that slowly, inexorably, spirals down into violence. You come out feeling like you’ve been…
I think with Mother, his fourth feature length work, Bong Joon-ho cements his place as my favourite working director of any nationality. I’ve seen him compared (on the basis of his two previous works; The Host, and Memories of Murder) with Spielberg and Hitchcock, and unlike most such analogies this description manages to be both utterly foolish and somewhat apt. It’s easy to scramble for such names when discussing Bong’s work for two reasons. First, because despite defying most generic…
Post by Conall Cash
I hope to write a more essayistic piece on my experience of the festival in the coming weeks, but for now, a general roundup of what struck me as the most significant things about this year’s MIFF. The best new films I saw, listed in the order in which I saw them, were
À L’Aventure (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Paper Soldier (Alexei German Jr.)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)
A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux)
Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel…
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a shock to the system even when you know beforehand that the film involves cliterectomies and bloody ejaculations and graphic sex involving Willem Dafoe. But, like his previous films, Antichrist is intellectually stimulating even as it repels you, shifting from cute Lynchian surrealism in the first half to Bataillesque perversions in the second.
The film opens with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple having wild animalistic sex while their child climbs out of his…
This short (64-minute), rather slight film, directed by the 100-year old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, is one of the best things I’ve seen at MIFF this year. One particularly lovely scene actually brought some tears to my eyes – an increasingly rare kind of emotional response to be had in the environment of this festival where quick, authoritative judgements are the name of the game. My tears were inexplicable – brought on not by any tragic occurrence in the…
The third feature directed by Philippe Grandrieux, A Lake is an astonishing, almost unbearably passionate film; it is unlike anything I have ever seen. The film alienated most of the audience that ventured into the small cinema at ACMI last night – roughly a quarter walked out during the screening, and afterwards I heard at least three groups of viewers express anger, confusion, resentment and dismissal. Such responses are understandable, particularly from the uninitiated, for Grandrieux’s film offers nothing at…
Katalin Varga marks the feature film debut of British director Peter Strickland. At 35, Strickland is not particularly young for a newcomer, and so perhaps it is no surprise to learn, as one does from just watching the first few minutes of the film, that he has already learnt his craft extremely well. What is surprising, and which only becomes apparent gradually through watching the film, is that Strickland is not just extremely …
I’m always up in arms about empty film references but what distinguishes Jim Jarmusch from, say, a Quentin Tarantino, is how he uses his film references as a jumping off point to make something new and meaningful. The point of the exercise is not in ‘getting’ the reference but in where he takes it. In The Limits of Control, as in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch is riffing off Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai but reconfigures it to…
A group of friends go on a holiday by the sea, and after a while one member of the group, a young woman, disappears; the rest of the film chronicles the friends’ attempts to deal with this disappearance. If this description of the plot of Asghar Faradi’s About Elly might give the impression that Faradi is gunning for the position of ‘the Iranian Antonioni’ (as Abbas Kiarostami might be called the Iranian Rossellini, Jafar Panahi the Iranian De Sica, etc.),…
When I first heard about this movie, a couple of months ago, I quickly skimmed the review and got the impression that it was a kind of uplifting documentary about a resilient guy living in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile who uses his love of disco to overcome oppression and fully express his individuality. Fortunately, a day or two before it was due to screen at MIFF, I decided to read about it more closely to see if it’d be worth…
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A film whose soundtrack I’ve known for a long time but which I never expected to get a chance to see, watching Anna at MIFF was a real treat. A little bit Funny Face and a little bit Blowup, as anarchic as Godard but also as loving an ode to the movie musical form as Demy, I guess Anna, which was made for French TV in 1967 and directed by Pierre Koralnik, could most succinctly be…
A friend once remarked to me that, whenever he sees an advertisement for MIFF, he accidentally misreads it as ‘MILF.’ Upon entering the Festival Lounge for the conversation with Anna Karina today, one could have been forgiven for thinking that David Stratton, her interviewer, and many members of the audience had made a similar error. A weird, not terribly satisfactory, and occasionally rather sexist event, the conversation with Ms. Karina offered her a kind of adoration, but an adoration so…
Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A fun idea for a documentary, Our City Dreams follows five female artists of different ages who have moved to New York City from a variety of locales, and made their lives and their careers there. Attempting to offer impressions of the personality, artistic sensibility and personal history of five different contemporary artists in the space of about ninety minutes, the film is not exactly Rivette’s Belle Noiseuse, but it’s impressive how much it manages to…
Post by Brad Nguyen
TUESDAY 21st: Ang Lee is speaking via satellite at a very early screening of TAKING WOODSTOCK. [Cinema Nova] The cooler kids will be at the PHILOS-o-FACE launch. PHILOS-o-FACE usually makes images of philosophers’ faces into brooches (I have the Deleuze one) but they are making a special batch of directors’ faces for MIFF. At Kids in Berlin, 472 Victoria Street. [PHILOS-o-FACE]
THURSDAY 23rd: Some exciting new releases this week: Legendary action director John Woo tries on his wuxia…
The comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen traffics in causing conservative outrage yet time and time again he courts criticism from what might be badly defined as the Liberal Media. SBC’s latest film, Bruno, in which he plays a flamboyant Austrian fashion journalist on a quest for celebrity stardom in America, is designed to make fun of American homophobia but critics are still calling Bruno a homophobic film. Are they right?
WEDNESDAY 8th: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno opens wide. Following the mixture of mockumentary and real-life pranks of Borat but replacing the misogynist/antisemitic Kazakhstani reporter with an uber-camp fashion reporter from Austria, the film is bound to offend, I dunno, rednecks and gays without a sense of humour.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAGpmNb2xfQ]
THURSDAY 9th: Style Wars, a doco on the birth of hip-hop culture plays at the ACMI until Sunday 12th. Shot in NYC in the early 1980s, Tony Silver’s groundbreaking film documented the new language…
It’s really not a bad likeness. There are some new photos from the upcoming biopic of Serge Gainsbourg. Hopefully coming next year. [The Playlist]
Who would have thought that racial stereotypes would actually become en vogue? First there was Sing Song, the bumbling Asian and the magical negroes of Australia! Very recently we’ve had the jive-talking illiterate black robots of Revenge of the Fallen. Now we have the upcoming Princess and the Frog to look forward to. Princess represents Disney’s return…
Review by Brad Nguyen
Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a fairly perfect encapsulation of the Hollywood summer blockbuster: Big on spectacle, be it two giant robots battling one another or Megan Fox’s ass; and light on coherent plot. And as easy as it would be for me to dismiss the movie, I would be lying if I were to say that the film wasn’t an entertaining and, yes, a fascinating experience
Having established the general ineptness of Australian movie marketing, it’s kind of exciting when a film does something right in getting us interested in the film. I’m talking here about the forthcoming sci-fi film Exit. The film’s writer Martyn Pedler (a local media jack-of-all-trades) has posted some images from the production of Exit on his website. This is a great move, taking a page out of the whole ‘production diary’ phenomenon exemplified by the Lord of the Rings website and…
TONIGHT: Woody Allen double at the Astor: 1973’s Sleeper (about a man who is frozen after an ulcer operation and wakes up in the future 200 years later) screens with Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex from 1972. [Astor]
WEDNESDAY 1st: Cinematheque opens its retrospective of the work of Polish director Jerzy Skolimowski. This weeks double is Four Nights With Anna (2008), a stylised film on obsessive love and Deep End (1971) a black comedy about an adolescent boy’s…
Review by Brad Nguyen
The synopsis for Adventureland sounds familiar enough, but writer/director Greg Mottola is not so much concerned with cliches as he is concerned with pop mythology. Adventureland is a film that has been filtered through a million Beach Boys songs, a million coming-of-age movies, a million Catchers in the Rye, a million OCs and Freaks and Geeks. I’m talking about the mythology of the teenager, or in Adventureland’s case, the early-twenties post-adolescent. While the idea of the teen…
[Observe and Report trailer here.]
Review by James Douglas
With Observe and Report, director Jody Hill cements his place as my new favorite American satirist. Previously known for micro-budgeted indie The Foot Fist Way, and HBO comedy series Eastbound and Down, Observe finds Hill with an increasingly sure grasp of the complex tonalities that marked his previous work, and a high budget, studio-sanctioned playground in which he can let them loose. There’s something excitingly transgressive about watching such subversive, disturbing material delivered…
Screener has been moving along nicely for a while now and has suddenly found itself among a bunch of other Melbourne-based film blogs, which to my mind is a great thing. The Internet can be a great space to build a community of film appreciation. But in order to distinguish itself from the crowd, or rather, to better define Screener’s identity, perhaps it is time to set out Screener’s mission statement, its raison d’etre, its manifesto, its Dogme 09 if…
After a five-minute standing ovation at Cannes and hyperbolic praise from almost every Australian reviewer, Samson and Delilah (along with Mary and Max) is renewing hope in many that Australians can make great cinema. In truth, Samson and Delilah is by no means perfect, but it is certainly a striking feature debut for Warwick Thornton, both visually eloquent and emotionally vital.
The film is a love story between Samson, a petrol-sniffing teenager with a mischievous streak, and Delilah who is more…
You know that upcoming movie Precious, the one about the obese illiterate black female teenager who gets raped by her father and abused by her mother? The one that stars Mariah Carey?! It now has a gnarly poster and trailer. [The Black Snob]
Life just gets worse and worse for the kids from Slumdog Millionnaire who are apparently set for life due to trust funds hastily set up by the film’s producers. There’s some joke to be made here about the…
[Synecdoche, New York trailer here.]
Having seen Charlie Kaufman’s directorial debut only the once, I am conscious more than ever that I can’t really convey the complex experience of seeing a film in the space of a review. Synecdoche, New York is Kaufman’s most complex, cerebral and self-reflexive work yet. The film is dense with visual puns, wordplay, symbolism, shifting timeframes, doppelgangers and leitmotifs. But it is also profoundly moving in an immediate, emotional sense and certainly a rewarding experience. So…
[X-Men Origins: Wolverine trailer here.]
I enjoy a blockbuster film as much as anyone else. Hell, I’d defend Pirates of the Caribbean 3 if you pushed me on it. X-Men Origins: Wolverine, however, is so comprehensively awful that it is indefensible, a giant turd of a film crushing the credibility of all involved in the production and those who would argue its virtues. The film’s flaws have been pointed out already by many a film critic – plot holes, pathetic special…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2yrdEe95Hs0]
Tonight (Mon 4th): Seminal precursors to Baraka, the first two of Godfrey Reggio’s Quatsi Trilogy, Koyaanisqatsi: Life Out of Balance and Powaqqatsi: Life in Transformation screen at Astor. Must be seen on the big screen. Baraka will screen next Monday. [Astor]
Wed 6th: A double feature of silent Danish films at Cinematheque. Benjamin Christensen’s trippy film Häxan: Witchcraft Through the Ages and The Master of the House by Carl Dreyer about the breakdown of a marriage. [Cinematheque] Meanwhile Melbourne Spiritual Cinema…
I like Natalie Portman and Joseph Gordon-Levitt a lot and Rainn Wilson is OK I guess but this ‘indie dramedy’ they’re starring in sounds horrible: In ‘Hesher’, Gordon-Levitt is a loser twenty-something (aren’t we all?) who invades the life of an awkward 13-year-old who lives with a pill-popping father (Wilson) and grandmother. The kid falls in love with a supermarket worker (Portman) who protects him from bullies. In the bin! [THR]
Rian Johnson (Brick) has announced his next film ‘Looper‘, a…
[Terms of Endearment trailer here.]
I fear that admitting to liking James L Brooks’ directorial debut Terms of Endearment is akin to professing admiration for Beaches: A film spanning the lifelong friendship between a mother and daughter ending with an emotional finale involving cancer sounds incredibly sappy, but if I could attempt to make this film cooler I would say that it’s blend of comedy and insightful character development is the logical conclusion to what Judd Apatow is doing with his…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIizh6nYnTU]
Tonight (Mon 27th): The Who double at Astor: Documentary The Kids Are Alright followed by the Who-scored drama Quadrophenia featuring the movie debut of Sting. [Astor]
Tue 28th: The Chet Baker documentary Let’s Get Lost plays as part of ACMI’s ‘Jazz on Film’ series (Sunday 26th April-Saturday 2nd May). Other films featured during the festival include Jazz on a Summer’s Day, Charlie Haden Rambling Boy, Sun Ra: Space is the Place and Touch of Evil [Jazz on Film] Nova is also…
Demetri Martin is like totally a serious actor now. First this whimsical Ang Lee hipster film and now news that he’ll star with Brad Pitt in Stephen Soderbergh’s Moneyball. Martin (he’s like Lawrence Leung only better looking, more talented and he came first) plays a Harvard grad who uses his statistical skills for a baseball team to scout out the best players for the cheapest prices. [Variety]
All I can gather from this still released of Peter Jackson’s The Lovely Bones…
[MONSTERS VS ALIENS trailer here.]
Monsters vs Aliens is actually pretty cool in concept: An attempt to reinvent classic monsters from movies of the 1950s in order to celebrate their Otherness, this film is what happens when Todd Hayne’s Far From Heaven gets mashed together with a Saturday morning cartoon.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPH68JalqxM]
Tue 21st: The adventurous and out-of-pocket may consider the experimental films being shown at Glitch by Catacomb Carousel Cinematheque [Glitch] or the short amateur documentary on African child soldiers INVISIBLE CHILDREN being shown at Loop. [Loop] Otherwise CineCult is screening Abel Ferrara’s DRILLER KILLER at Bar 303 along with ATTACK OF THE KILLER TOMATOES. [303]
Wed 22nd: Cinematheque continues its incredible retrospective of Louis Malle films. This week is THE LOVERS and LE FEU FOLLET. [Cinematheque]
Thu 23rd: Australian director Warwick Thornton…
Fairly adorable director Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) is video-blogging the making of his new film Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World, a slacker/romantic comedy/action film/musical?, based on the comics. Featured: Michael Cera playfighting with a feisty asian chick. Does Charlyne Yi know about this?! The soundtrack sounds potentially interesting: Nigel Godrich, Sloan, Metric, Broken Social Scene.
Contemporary horror films are generally boring and moronic. But with Lars von Trier attached (he’s obviously not interested in that Dogme 95…
[MARY AND MAX trailer here.]
Before having even made a feature length film, Adam Elliot had already proven himself as one of Australia’s truly great auteurs. Mary and Max is certainly a great achievement but despite mostly staying true to the spirit of his previous short films, Elliot’s first feature suffers only so very slightly from a mild case of Hollywood-itis.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yCj8sPCWfUw]
Tonight (Mon 13th): Woody Allen’s HANNAH AND HER SISTERS plays with Ridley Scott’s THELMA AND LOUISE at Astor. [Astor]
Tue 14th: Is Not Magazine is screening the comically awful THE ROOM (from this century’s answer to Ed Wood, Tommy Wiseau) at Loop Bar. You are tearing me apart Lisa! [ThreeThousand]
Wed 15th: Cinematheque starts a season of French director Louis Malle’s films with LIFT TO THE SCAFFOLD (1957) and LACOMBE, LUCIEN (1974). [Cinematheque]
Thu 16th: Tarantino and Rodriguez’s GRINDHOUSE at Astor. [Astor] Also,…
David Bowie’s son has directed a sci-fi art film (with a trailer) à la Solaris. This makes complete sense.
Michel Gondry is self-releasing a second compilation of his videos via his website on April 14.
Jim Jarmsuch confirmed that Melville influence on his upcoming The Limits of Control that we identified earlier, plus a bunch of other cool references.
Did you know that the guy from My Chemical Romance wrote comics? And that they’re being made into films? Do you even care?
[SUMMER HOURS trailer here.]
Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours is the second in a series of films to be sponsored by the Musée d’Orsay and following Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s Flight of the Red Balloon, it indicates that the Parisian museum is kicking ass at curating films by some of the world’s most outstanding and edgiest filmmakers even if they are not the most famous auteurs.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iO0LYcCoeJY]
Tonight (Mon 6th): Johnny Depp double-bill at the Astor – WHAT’S EATING GILBERT GRAPE and ED WOOD. [Astor]
Tue 7th: ACMI is running an exclusive season of SOUL POWER documenting the concert preceding the 1974 Ali v. Foreman fight featuring James Brown, Bill Withers and B. B. King among others. Ends May 24th. [ACMI]
Wed 8th: Cinematheque shows films of influential Australian documentarian John Heyer. [Cinematheque]
Thu 9th: Dylan Moran is giving a Q&A at Nova for his new film we know nothing…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-wZOio0tDQ]
One of the difficulties of marketing Australian films is that we don’t really have an auteur culture. A fair amount of Australian films get released every year but a lot of them come from first-time directors whom nobody knows. For the kind of cinephile audience that will actually think about seeing an Australian film, the phrase “from the Director of quality film X” in the marketing campaign probably has more chance of convincing them of seeing a film than having…
Filmmaking team Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s last film Half Nelson was kind of a rip-off of David Gordon Green’s short film Physical Pinball but at least it showed they have good taste. They’re making a couple more films including baseball film Sugar which has a trailer and poster.
Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno got the kiss of death from the MPAA rating body. This means we’ll probably have to wait until the Special Edition DVD for all the butt-sex footage.
I’m not…
[WENDY AND LUCY trailer here.]
With Wendy and Lucy, Kelly Reichardt has positioned herself as a major voice of a particular strand of American independent cinema represented by directors such as Todd Rohal (The Guatemalan Handshake) and David Gordon Green (George Washington, All the Real Girls). I massively urge you to the cinema to catch Wendy and Lucy because it’s mighty impressive stuff.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oXHMPOMv_FI]
Tonight (Mon 30th): Jean-Luc Godard’s documentary about sixties Western counter culture SYMPATHY FOR THE DEVIL features the Rolling Stones heavily and shows at The Astor. [Astor]
Wed 1st: Cinematheque shows some old comedies: Ernst Lubitsch’s SHOP AROUND THE CORNER from 1940 and 1920’s EROTIKON. [Cinematheque] Arthouse doco double at the Astor – GONZO: THE LIFE AND WORK OF DR. HUNTER S. THOMPSON and Guy Maddin’s MY WINNIPEG. [Astor]
Thu 2nd: The oh-my-god it’s brilliant SUMMER HOURS from Olivier Assayas opens at select…
The internet has responded to the trailer for Where the Wild Things Are with almost universal love. But it’s the more cynical reactions which have caught my attention. Richard from Gawker is “a little wary of just how hip it seems” while Mel Campbell of The Enthusiast complains that “what really ruins this trailer is its surfeit of hipster whimsy.” Are the reservations legitimate or has the hipster witch-hunt gone too far?
There are two competing Allen Ginsberg biopics coming out: Howl (from the makers of The Celluloid Closet and starring James Franco as Ginsberg; and Kill Your Darlings (starring Jesse Eisenberg from The Squid and the Whale). Since the latter also stars Chris Evans of Not Another Teen Movie fame, I’m guessing it’s the Franco version which will actually be good.
Jackie Chan is still making movies? I’m guessing he’ll eventually end up dying of a heart-attack in mid-air flying kick.
Apparently they…
[LET THE RIGHT ONE IN trailer here.]
Fanboys tend to go crazy over horror films that take seriously their fantastic elements. For example, a much cited boon for Shaun of the Dead was that the film’s zombies posed a serious, legitimate threat to the characters. Let the Right One In is certainly a “serious” vampire movie, shot in the stark desolate landscape of a snowy Swedish suburb. It might also be just about the most overrated film of the year.
According to Hollywood Insider, the remake of Footloose will continue through to production without the star-wattage of Zac Efron:
As for Efron, who spent more than a year and a half attached to the project, sources say the High School Musical phenom had been advised to hold off on doing another musical until he’d established more versatility in a variety of genres.
Translation: Zac Efron is DEFINITELY going to make a gay comedic Gus Van Sant art film about pizza boys produced…
South Korean director Bong Joon-ho is writing a script for Transperceneige, an adaptation of a French novel about a train loaded with the survivors of a devestating Ice Age. From Korea.net:
This train has enraptured me. I believe everyone has a fantasy about trains giving off chugs and puffs, and landscapes viewed from the window.
What you can see from the window in this story, however, is only the world icebound, with minus 80 degrees outside. Survivors live in the train, but…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTNBwIAY9Zo]
The previous teaser only showed us one scene from Year One, but this new trailer shows a whole lot more of the movie. What can I say?
I love love love David Gordon Green the young, adventurous filmmaker behind George Washington, All the Real Girls, Undertow and Snow Angels. And I’m glad that he found some strange mainstream success as the helmer of a Judd Apatow stoner-comedy, especially after the heartache which must have come after making a film as good as Snow Angels and seeing its release fall on its ass with the demise of Warner Indepedent. Pineapple Express gave David Gordon Green his only commercial…
Criterion has built a reputation for itself as a DVD distributor dedicated to quality arthouse cinema. But according to Reuters, they will soon be releasing The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Does this mean they have sold out?
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BHp5c5_srTc]
Wed 25th: MARY AND MAX has its Melbourne premiere at the Nova with filmmakers Adam Elliot and Melanie Coombs in attendance for a Q&A. [Cinema Nova]
Thu 26th: Viggo Mortensen will be at the Nova to fulfil his contractual promotional obligations for Nazi flick GOOD. [Cinema Nova] Also, Kelly Reichardt’s WENDY & LUCY opens today. [wendyandlucy.com]
Sat 28th: The MQFF finishes on Sunday. It probably says a lot about the festival that my most anticipated film is Madonna’s directorial debut FILTH &…
Why won’t Australian audiences see shitty Australian films over shitty American films? Because the marketing of Australian films is by and large grossly incompetent. The boxing drama Two Fists One Heart came out yesterday and you’ll probably choose not to see it. Here’s why:
The Big Steal is a rarity in Australian cinema: A well-directed and entertaining teen film that holds up next to any John Hughes film yet feels uniquely Australian. Should this film be a model for the Australian film industry?
There’s this curious moment in Gus Van Sant’s interview of James Franco where Gus very deliberately brings up the subject of Zac Efron out of nowhere and then suggests to Franco that they all make a movie together with Judd Apatow:
GVS: Yeah. He is really nice. We should all do a Judd Apatow movie. You and Zac and me.
JF: Yeah. You should do a movie that Judd produces, and we’ll do it with Zac. What do you think?
GVS: Keep your…
[NOTORIOUS trailer here.]
At the end of Notorious, there is a scene where the mother of Christopher Wallace (a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, a.k.a Notorious B.I.G.) is mourning the death of her son. In the scene her despair is transformed by the bittersweet knowledge that her son will be remembered through his music even though he failed in so many other aspects of his life. The curious thing about the scene is that the movie never really establishes why Biggie’s (Jamal Woolard) music…
[JCVD trailer here.]
If the idea of a postmodern film about the nature of celebrity in which Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself as a pathetic aging action star who is caught up in a real life heist situation interests you in the least, you should watch this film before it ends its run at ACMI this Wednesday. It is worth the effort.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_HM_hN6uDvk]
Tuesday 17th: CineCult is showing a colourful crime double at Bar 303: LOVE IS COLDER THAN DEATH (Fassbinder, 1969) and JUDEX (Georges Franju, 1963). [303]
Wednesday 18th: Last night of the JCVD season at ACMI. [ACMI] For something completely different, the Melbourne Queer Film Festival is kicking off at the Astor with WERE THE WORLD MINE, a gay(er than usual) musical. [MQFF]
The dastardly editors of The Age this week assigned Jake Wilson the task of reviewing Eric Bana’s film about how awesome Eric Bana is, Love the Beast, and horror movie retread, Friday the 13th; two mundane films hardly worthy of J-Dub’s particular brand of lofty, baroque rhetoric. Not the sort to be disheartened, J-Dub heroicly mined Eric Bana’s vanity project to deliver at least one nonsensical diamond in the rough:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4z_6UfkQ-c0]
Wednesday 11th: Find out why Ingmar Bergman is overrated at the Cinematheque with his 1982 opus FANNY & ALEXANDER. [Cinematheque]
Thursday 12th: Don’t forget that JCVD, the postmodern action film in which Jean-Claude Van Damme plays himself (!) is playing a limited run at ACMI only until the 18th. [ACMI]
The Jerry Bruckheimer-produced videogame adaptation Prince of Persia isn’t the sort of film that normally gets me excited but that’s before these pictures appeared on Huffington Post that seem to indicate that the Bruckmeister has creatively reimagined the titular “Prince” as a doe-eyed Jake Gyllenhaal rather than the middle eastern ethnic that would have been cast if common sense and cultural sensitivity had dictated.
[WATCHMEN trailer here.]
Zack Snyder’s film adaptation of Alan Moore’s seminal graphic novel Watchmen retains an incredible amount of content from its sprawling source material and is overwhelmingly detailed in its recreation of the book’s panels. And yet, the film is a dismal failure transforming a politically provocative piece of literature into a Sin City-esque adolescent fantasy.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zWIMy0nzJY]
Jim Jarmusch’s next film appears to be more in the Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai vein than his recent conversation driven films, Broken Flowers and Coffee and Cigarettes. Once again, the film centres on a professional criminal, alienated from society much like the characters of a film by Jean-Pierre Melville, a director who Jarmusch obviously regards highly without merely imitating his style.
Ah, Jake Wilson the rookie film reviewer of The Age, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways: (1) You actually care about the politics of cinema even though you have a tendency to hate on films that don’t share your particular viewpoint. (2) You co-edited Senses of Cinema? You obviously have an educated background. That’s pretty cool with us. (3) You love words. You love words so unconditionally that you’ll add in flowery sentences into reviews regardless…
[THE READER trailer here.]
I suppose everyone’s fairly cynical about Holocaust films at this point. The most literary-minded people will cite Theodor Adorno’s famous quote that poetry after Auschwitz is an act of barbarism. Other’s will cite Kate Winslet’s famous observation in Extras that Holocaust movies all have Oscars coming out their asses. What’s kind of frustrating about The Reader is that it is such an intelligent and fresh take on the Holocaust told with a filmic style that screams Oscar-bait.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNi59-LNQ4w&eurl=http://www.astor-theatre.com/calendar/reviews/reviewsE/empire-of-the-ants-cf.html&feature=player_embedded]
Tonight: Over the next three Mondays, Astor is playing the GODFATHER trilogy. Tonight, the first installment. [Astor]
Tomorrow (Tuesday): Eric Bana will be at Cinema Nova to present his film LOVE THE BEAST, a documentary about how much he loves his car. It’s sold out so just turn up to protest Eric Bana’s carbon footprint outside. [Cinema Nova]
Wednesday: Cinematheque starts its season of Bergman films with THE SEVENTH SEAL (1957) and THE SILENCE (1963). [Cinematheque] Less highbrow people, go watch the…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuhaU-wzdyI]
While we love director Greg Mottola for bringing us Superbad and a handful of episodes of Arrested Development and Undeclared (plus, the supposedly great 1996’s The Daytrippers which we haven’t seen and can’t comment on), and while we are very much looking forward to the upcoming Adventureland (hitting Australia in June), there is one big problem with this new red band trailer:
[CADDYSHACK trailer here.]
It’s not a stretch to call 1980’s Caddyshack a satire of class relations in contemporary America. For those unaware of the plot (and until 2 days ago that included me) the film follows Danny, the son of a large blue-collar family who aspires to go to college but has neither the funds nor the grades. He has a job at Bushwood Country Club, a golf club for the superwealthy, as part of the caddy underclass. When the caddies…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-fXiuFG0soU]
Almodovar + Penelope Cruz = Masterpiece. No word yet as far as I can tell on whether this film has an Australian distributor. It is a no-brainer for Hopscotch though. Can’t wait.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lCmCveWATHg]
What to make of the new trailer for Judd Apatow’s Funny People due here in September? All the death and crying seems to indicate that the Comedy Czar responsible for producing movies bringing full frontal nudity, period blood and poo jokes back into mainstream cinema is in his movies is, in his own movies, ramping up the melodrama:laughs ratio. We love Leslie Mann’s bad Eric Bana impersonation and Jonah Hill toning down his JonahHillness (He was hands down the worst…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsAhmNYkD6M]
Tonight: Fellini’s 1983 film AND THE SHIP SAILS ON about the events on board a luxury liner filled with the friends of a deceased opera singer. Includes the wacky, bravura musical sequence above. [ACMI]
Saturday: Wrangler presents the best rock videos of all time. [Rooftop]
Sunday: Go film noir with THE BIG SLEEP (Howard Hawks, 1946) and THE MALTESE FALCON (John Huston, 1941) at The Astor or revisit your childhood with THE NEVERENDING STORY at Rooftop. [Astor] [Rooftop]
Monday: Watch the Oscars on…
[GHOST TOWN trailer here.]
It has been a Ricky Gervais mantra that he would not act in a film for the sake of it; that there was no point being in a film if the work was not interesting. Certainly, the small and finite amount of episodes planned for his TV shows The Office and Extras suggest that his career plan is for low output and high quality. How then to explain his appearance in TV show Alias and Ben Stiller’s…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zqXpmM3n6AM]
Tonight: The classic Jamaican crime film THE HARDER THEY COME starring reggae singer Jimmy Cliff screens at the Astor. [Astor]
Tuesday: CineCult returns screening a sexuality-themed double bill: The Czechoslovakian surrealist work VALERIE AND HER WEEK OF WONDERS (Jaromil Jires, 1970) and THE BEAST (Walerian Borowczyk, 1975), a monster-movie-meets-Jane-Austen-meets-porn film. [303]
Wednesday: Cinematheque screens LÉON MORIN, PRÊTRE (Jean-Pierre Melvile, 1961) and the seminal French New Wave classic BREATHLESS (Jean-Luc Godard, 1960). [Cinematheque]
Thursday: Grant Gee’s music doco JOY DIVISION at Rooftop. [Rooftop]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUqoRaSnYDI]
Remember the catastrophe of 2001? You know, when Mariah Carey suffered a mental breakdown just before the release of the widely-panned star vehicle Glitter, a vanity project that seemed to prove that Mariah had finally reached a level of celebrity insanity that was rivalled only by Michael Jackson or Tom Cruise? Well… Mariah’s celebrity narrative is becoming a combination of the “Britney Spears Comeback” and the “Cameron Diaz/Charlize Theron Getting Cred Thru Deglamorfication” and it actually has me excited about…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9TadvFY3rA8]
You know that Neil Young lyric “It’s better to burn out than to fade away”? Tarantino obviously thinks it’s better to fade away by making increasingly irrelevant, stupid pastiche movies. I mean, I suppose you could say he’s been doing that since Reservoir Dogs but the trailer for his next film Inglorious Basterds looks offensively bad.
[RACHEL GETTING MARRIED trailer here.]
The trailer link is only here as a matter of stylistic consistency but I actually recommend not clicking on the link. Or, if you do, watch the extended clip instead of the trailer. One of my pet hates is trailers that misrepresent the film they are promoting and if I had made a decision on whether to see Rachel Getting Married based purely on the trailer I would have opted for nay based on the assumption…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EWFUFb-9I3c]
Wednesday: The Melbourne Cinematheque is back in business this week and showing 1950s classics BIGGER THAN LIFE (Nicholas Ray, 1955) and SOME CAME RUNNING (Vincent Minnelli, 1958). [Melb Cinematheque]
Thursday: Astor plays a great doco double bill – the Oscar-nominated MAN ON WIRE about crazy French people conducting a crazy illegal stunt and also PATTI SMITH: DREAM OF LIFE [Astor]
Friday: THE PARTY with Peter Sellers plays the Rooftop. [Rooftop]
Saturday: Astor plays the yellow-face minstrel show BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S and ROMAN HOLIDAY…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DQ_5K59S2k]
Jody Hill’s debut comedy The Foot Fist Way didn’t make it to Australian shores and I badly wish that it had based on the good word of mouth on the internet (including from Will Ferrell) and the fact that it starred Danny McBride who was so great in Screener fave David Gordon Green’s All the Real Girls. (Danny McBride has also hit big in the mainstream with roles in Pineapple Express and Tropic Thunder). Reasons to be excited about this…
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=si7Z2WL5oaU]
Tonight: Cronenberg’s Shivers is screening at 10pm at ACMI as part of Evolution: The Festival. [ACMI]
Tonight and Saturday: Cinema Nova is showing sneak previews of Jonathan Demme’s latest, Rachel Getting Married. [Cinema Nova]
Sunday: A Fritz Lang double bill – Metropolis and Dr. Mabuse the Gambler – plays at the Astor. [Astor Theatre]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n5WsciSNVS0]
The “vintage” news footage that the Watchmen team have been creating for their viral marketing campaign is actually OK. This is more like it Zack “300″ Snyder. Consider my anticipation for this movie back at neutral.
You might like one of the tracks by itself (KC & the Sunshine Band!) but as a whole, this CD soundtrack is a big mess. Consider my anticipation for this film to be lukewarm. Wait a minute–is the one contemporary song by My Chemical Romance? Fail.
[Amazon link here.]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rhWLFW3te-k]
Can someone make sure that this film has distribution in Australia?
[Apple trailer is here.]
[GRAN TORINO trailer here.]
I suppose The Age is supposed to be to Melbourne as the NY Times is to New York. You know, our paper of record. But The Age just took another plunge into moronic writing when rookie film reviewer Jake Wilson summed up Clint Eastwood’s new film as a “slow burn drama“:
Interpreted by another director, Nick Schenk’s script might have been merely a sentimental fable of a grinch redeemed. But this is a late-period Eastwood film: the cracks…
[MILK trailer here]
Gus Van Sant’s latest film might on its surface appear to be the work of an experimental genius who has thrown in their indie towel to make a crowd-pleasing feature but it really isn’t that at all. Van Sant’s Milk is this year’s Pineapple Express – that is, a mainstream work that remains infused with its director’s unique experimental traits without alienating the wider audience.
