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I recently endured While You Were Sleeping, a 1995 romantic comedy starring Sandra Bullock. Sandy B. Bullock works at a toll booth at a grey Chicago train station; she is very lonely, and wears beanies because she is sad. Her day is brightened by the smile of an attractive businessman (Peter Gallagher, whom we now recognize as yummy daddy Sandy from The OC). One freezing Christmas morning, Bullock and Yummy Daddy have the station to themselves, until two muggers arrive. In awesomely incongruent Jersey accents (I do believe this film is set in Chicago): Mugger 1 taunts, “Noice Jaaaaket.” Mugger 2 corroborates, “Meeeeehhhry Krysmussss.” Yummy daddy falls on the tracks! Bullock saves Yummy Daddy’s life by rolling him out of the way of the oncoming train.
Some micro-festivals to sink your teeth into this week: Madman’s Reel Anime festival (including Summer Wars – which we reviewed here - and the first 2 Evangelion films) begins Thursday while the Singapore Film Festival runs from Saturday 4th to Wednesday 8th.
The doco William S. Burroughs: A Man Within screens at ACMI Thursday through Sunday. Features interviews with Allen Ginsberg, John Waters, Patti Smith, Iggy Pop, Gus Van Sant, Genesis Breyer P-Orridge, Sonic Youth, Laurie Anderson, Amiri Baraka, Jello Biafra,…
Walking through the little streets of Melbourne – trying impossibly to find the location of a poorly signed club from a hastily scrawled map – while ever wondering if the night’s film will even make it to the screen, one cannot help but be reminded – in the heat of this excitement – of that astute observation once made by Georges Bataille: that “the successful transgression…maintains the prohibition in order to benefit by it”.
As Mad Men kicks into its fourth season, Zora Sanders keeps up with the latest happenings on Madison Avenue circa 1964.
Hmm… So many films opening this week that YOU MUST WATCH! (Not really.) Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me is a Controversial Movie! MUST WATCH! Avatar Special Edition has a sexy Na’vi sex scene! MUST WATCH! Piranha 3D is an ironic meme-friendly B-movie pastiche! MUST WATCH! (By the way, Saige Walton called Piranha 3D the new Showgirls but it doesn’t look that good.)
On Friday 27th, the Melbourne Writers Festival begins, which has a number of film/televisiony events listed here. Not…
Inception operates at the cutting edge of contemporary narrative comprehension, spectatorial skill and processing speed: a position that will diminish, without fail, over time. But for now, raising this bar is a film that incites as much contempt (or at least, misunderstanding) as devotion.
Only a couple of weeks after the end of MIFF, and another barrage of potentially-somewhat-interesting film events is upon us.
Conall Cash reviews two of the major films of the festival, by veteran auteurs Manoel de Oliveira and Koji Wakamatsu, while Maggie Scott looks at MIFF’s closing night film and Ali Brown investigates Patricio Guzman’s Nostalgia For The Light.
So, we’ve made it through the film festival (even if Screen Machine’s own excavation of MIFF 2010 is still going, and will continue in the coming days), and it’s back to normal life. Those of us who’ve been waiting til post-MIFF to see new, widely released films like the inescapable Inception, Roman Polanski’s The Ghost Writer and Noah Baumbach’s Greenberg will now have our chance.
Alifeleti Brown encounters the travails of American drovers in the documentary Sweetgrass while Whitney Monaghan sees the workings of class relations in the animation My Dog Tulip.
Brad Nguyen explores the trouble with gay identity politics in I Love You Phillip Morris, Lauren Bliss finds a familiar story of corrupted youth in Robert Glinski’s Piggies, and Maggie Scott ponders the relationship between food and war in Cooking History.
Emma McNicol explores the middle class nightmare of Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Conall Cash attempts to come to terms with Abbas Kiarostami’s surprising new film, and Jessie Scott wonders what is really going on when a group of comedians attempt to satirize the North Korean dictatorship, in The Red Chapel.
Brad Nguyen reviews Mamoru Hosoda’s Summer Wars, and Conall Cash looks at how the smoking ban in Hong Kong is affecting workplace romance, in Love In A Puff.
Yeah so this film festival is still happening at the moment. You might have heard about it? Also, there’s a film called Still Walking by this pretty happening guy called Hirokazu Koreeda which is showing at ACMI this Saturday/Sunday/Monday.
If you want some light entertainment outside of MIFF, The Special Relationship opens this week. Michael Sheen plays Tony Blair like he did in The Queen except this time he finds out Darth Vader is his father. If you want something meatier,…
Alifeleti Brown provides analysis of the orangutan doco Nénette, Lauren Jayne Bliss champions the short doco Rabbits à la Berlin and Eloise Ross surrenders to the contemplative Honey.
Conall Cash explores R.W. Fassbinder’s restored 1973 telefilm, World on a Wire, Yoshua Wakeham enters the childhood world of Joe Dante’s Matinee, and Sam Chater looks at the cult of Berlusconi in Videocracy.
Brad Nguyen keeps track of Todd Solondz’s movements in his latest addition to a mediocre career, Life During Wartime.
Whitney Monaghan explores the odd experience of seeing one of Bresson’s masterpieces at MIFF, Lauren Jayne Bliss attempts to make some sense of Gaspar Noé’s “spectacular failure” Enter The Void, and Jessie Scott traces the rise of the greatest Islamic punk band in America, in Taqwacore.
Conall Cash explores the ’slowness’ of a new Vietnamese film, and Maggie Scott reviews the Australian “women’s film,” Little Sparrows.
Conall Cash sheds light on Wiseman’s 1974 doco on animal research, Alifeleti Brown reviews a transvestite drama and Jessie Scott is unimpressed by the second programme of Cities on Speed.
We were thinking this column would be unnecessary this week because, y’know, we’re BANG IN THE MIDDLE OF MIFF RIGHT NOW, but this weekend ACMI is screening Still Walking by Hirokazu Koreeda, whose Air Doll [our review here] is showing at the film festival right now. We listed Still Walking among our top films of last year here. Matinee screenings on Saturday, Sunday and Monday.
Now if you’re wondering what to check out at the festival, well you have the benefit…
Conall Cash reviews Korean auteur Hong Sang-soo’s latest, Alifeleti Brown sees a border conflict drama, Samantha Chater writes on the latest mumblecore film from Andrew Bujalski and Eloise Ross compares 2 parts from the Cities on Speed program.
A film festival is a curious time for the cinephile. The event (particularly in this cinematically dry city) is the most anticipated occasion of the calendar year. When it comes, life is put on hold for two full weeks – the highest priority is to absorb the audiovisual delights from the international film community. I find it a strange experience to anticipate pleasure; the hope of feeling repeatedly entranced by the moving image usually puts me in a weird mental…
Alifeleti Brown encounters a quiet Korean film about mortality and poetry and Samantha Chater reviews a doco on the underground New York film scene of the late 1970s and early 80s.
Guest contributor Adrian Martin writes about the “terrorist family melodrama” The Day Will Come, Yoshua Wakeham reviews a doco on an eccentric Japanese inventor and Alifeleti Brown reflects on Godard’s latest.
Samantha Chater on Francis Ford Coppola’s latest, Peter Jacobsen on Romero’s most recent zombie film, and Jessie Scott on docos concerning the architect Norman Foster and environmental devestation in Western Canada.
Every cinephile is excited by the prospect of a film festival, whether it is Cannes, Venice, Rotterdam or the Kino OTOK festival in Slovenia: the coming together of movie lovers and a diverse group of films is a highlight of the calendar year. The first taste we get of the festival, in any case, is the festival program, the official guide to the event. Reading such a guide is like being a child again, poring over that tantalising showbag lift-out…
Yoshua Wakeham reviews Sylvain Chomet’s animated homage to Jacques Tati, Lauren Jayne Bliss reviews the sci-fi horror of Splice and Brad Nguyen reviews the sex-doll-come-to-life fable Air Doll from Hirokazu Koreeda.
This year’s rapidly approaching (i.e., by the time you read this, IT WILL HAVE ALREADY STARTED!!) Melbourne International Film Festival is important to Screen Machine for all sorts of reasons. In a mediocre year for that puzzling entity called commercial cinema, we are more excited than ever to encounter new works by some of the old masters (Jean-Luc Godard’s Film Socialisme, Manoel de Oliveira’s Strange Case of Angelica, Jacques Rivette’s Around a Small Mountain, Abbas Kiarostami’s Certified Copy, George Romero’s Survival of the Dead, Francis Ford Coppola’s Tetro, Frederick Wiseman’s La Danse), important new films from major young directors (Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall his Past Lives, Harmony Korine’s Trash Humpers, Hong Sangsoo’s Ha Ha Ha, Andrew Bujalski’s Beeswax, Gaspar Noé’s Enter the Void, Hirokazu Koreeda’s Air Doll), intriguing films that we know next to nothing about (Samantha Morton’s The Unloved, Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, Pang Ho-cheung’s Love in a Puff, Michael Rowe’s Leap Year) and older films that have been revived, resuscitated, brought back to us at the time we need them most (R.W. Fassbinder’s World on a Wire, Wiseman’s Primate, Robert Bresson’s Au Hasard Balthazar, Kim Ki-young’s The Housemaid).
The best way I can locate this evasive film is as opera – the classic tragedy, the remoteness of this fabulous stage spectacle, and my feeling that I didn’t really ‘get it’.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 22nd
Opening night of the 59th Melbourne International Film Festival.
Inception, the highly anticipated film from Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight), opens.
Greenberg, Noah Baumbach’s (The Squid and the Whale) tale of mid-life crisis starring Ben Stiller, opens. Features a soundtrack by LCD Soundsystem.
Skin opens. Set during apartheid in South Africa, this film tells the…
In Cremaster, Barney has woven the most intricate narrative from a post-modern melange of contemporary and ancient, obvious and opaque, brutal and divine symbols.
The creators of Toy Story 3 evince no interest in “play” as a radical, creative and open-ended activity, instead obsessed with constructing notions of “appropriateness”.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 15th
The Runaways, the biopic of the rock group of the same name starring Dakota Fanning as Cherie Currie and Kristen Stewart as Joan Jett, opens.
Knight and Day, an action comedy in which Tom Cruise recruits a beautiful woman (Cameron Diaz) as his beard while the world questions his mental stability, opens. The film tanked…
The central tension in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is between slow adolescent velocities and opposing vectors that press upon the female protagonist’s desires.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 8th
The Hedgehog opens. About a precocious 11 year old who spouts philosophy who befriends a frumpy concierge who hides her immense knowledge of culture for fear of losing her job. Together they meet up with the wise-cracking child from (500) Days of Summer and the math genius janitor from Good Will Hunting and the world…
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 1st
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, French provacteur Catherine Breillat’s confronting and explicit exploration of female desire, opens.
Matthew Barney: No Restraint is a doco following the creation of Matthew Barney and Björk’s mythical Japanese love story, Drawing Restraint 9. Only showing today and the next Thursday.
The Karate Kid opens. It’s a remake relocated to China and with some…
Ridley Scott’s claims of historical authenticity in this latest iteration of the Robin Hood myth is not as interesting as it is a marketing ploy or ego-maniacal delusion.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 24th
The Tim Burton exhibition begins at ACMI. Experience first hand how an auteur’s singular aesthetic over decades became stale and commodified! Tim Burton is also giving a masterclass which is sold out. If you missed out on tickets, NO MATTER, there’s this great FACTUAL documentary on Tim Burton’s creative process at College Humor here.
Toy Story 3, the (almost)…
So Sex and the City 2 is a “bad” film, sure. Yet there was something disturbing about the excessive vitriol aimed at the film by reviewers, bloggers, Twitter users, Facebook group administrators and whatnot. What disturbed me was not its connection to an old familiar phenomenon, latent misogyny (though that was undoubtedly one element of the vitriol), but its connection to a newer phenomenon: meme addiction. The Internet may have brought us a proliferation of independent voices offering their individual points of view, but it has also brought a certain homogenisation of discourse. There is less energy exerted in pursuing individual interests and more energy exerted in pulling out tired ironic witticisms on the lolcat du jour, the most happening video of Mr. T, the latest hilarious right-wing pundit on Q and A. The Internet pulled out all the stops to condemn Sex and the City 2 but much of this energy was not so much a case of genuinely wanting to critique culture in any serious kind of way, as it was a case of people wanting to be seen to be hating the right thing at the right time, to get that much lusted-after object of desire – the @reply – and, in doing so, to feel alive.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 17th
Gone With the Pope, the recently restored grindhouse movie, gets its Australian premiere at the Nova.
Shrek Forever After, Get Him to the Greek, Mother and Child and Lou open.
Exit Through the Gift Shop finishes at ACMI this Monday (21st).
The Blues Brothers (1980) at the Astor.
FRIDAY 18th
The Wolf Man (1941) at ACMI.
SATURDAY 19th
World Cup Australia vs Ghana match is screening…
There is often a distinct vibe or unsaid theme at academic conferences. In the case of this symposium, celebrating three decades of Indigenous community film and video, the undeniable theme was death.
Aside from Jake Gyllenhaal’s chiselled abs and cheeky grin, Prince of Persia really has nothing at all on Aladdin.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 10th June
The A-Team, Stan Brakhage’s 20-minute schizophrenic montage of various close-up shots of Bradley Cooper’s abdominal muscles, opens wide.
Exit Through the Gift Shop, the debut of infamous conceptual street artist Banksy, continues its extended season at ACMI, finshing up on June 21. Zora’s review is here.
The Sentimental Engine Slayer, debut of Omar Rodriguez Lopez (of Mars Volta and At…
At the end of episode three of Treme, a group of Mardi Gras Indians gather in the Lower Ninth Ward of New Orleans to pay their respects to one of their members who died in the flood. As they perform a traditional chant, a Katrina Tour Bus pulls up with a gaggle of tourists inside, excited to stumble across an example of “authentic” New Orleans culture. The Indian chief, played by Clarke Peters (Lester Freamon from The Wire) orders them away with righteous fury. The bus driver, embarrassed at this trespass, respects his wishes and drives the bus away. It’s a moment that forces the viewer to consider their own position as something of a televisual tourist. The televisual tourist trade is booming with such films as Slumdog Millionaire, District 9 and Sin Nombre utilising their exotically impoverished locations to find success in award ceremonies and at the box office. Yet with the television show Treme, creator David Simon proves himself (as he did with The Wire) adept at transcending such fare. And he does this by taking seriously the responsibility of representing the reality of the milieu that is Treme’s setting: the various suburbs of New Orleans, some months after the catastrophe of 2005.
Exit Through The Gift Shop, the first film outing from Banksy, mercifully doesn’t get bogged down in self consciously asking the question, “What Is Art?”. Rather, the film is full of the addictive thrill of making art that is public, dangerous and of course illegal.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY
Exit Through the Gift Shop, the debut film of infamous conceptual street artist Banksy, begins a two week season at ACMI. Zora’s review is here.
Animal Kingdom, the highly anticipated Australian crime film, opens. It won the jury prize for not-American films at Sundance. Maggie gave it a glowing review here.
45365, the indie documentary on the small town of Sidney, Ohio, plays…
Any film which attempts to provoke the sensibilities of a conservative audience has my vote. Unfortunately, what is really shocking about A Loving Friend is its lack of aesthetic value.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 27th May
StreetDance, a 3D film about street dancing featuring noted MILF Charlotte Rampling (?), opens.
Prince of Persia: The Sands Of Time, celebrated filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard’s gripping documentary about Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s race to win the annual Iranian Bodybuilding Championship, opens.
Fish Tank, the Cannes prize-winning film from Andrea Arnold about a troubled teenager living in a British council estate, opens.
The Secret in Their Eyes,…
Despite Australia’s ongoing fascination with the crime genre, this film is not just another installment of ‘bogans with guns’. Michôd’s film is a profound portrayal of extreme family dysfunction and its role in the making of a criminal.
Haneke’s The White Ribbon poses narrative questions the filmmaker refuses to answer directly, using these ellipses to convince the audience of the film’s “ambiguity” when in actuality, the film is anything but.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 20th May
Goemon, the ninja-romance-fantasy-action-revenge epic from Japan, continues its extended season at ACMI, ending May 30th.
Harry Brown opens. It’s a thriller starring Michael Caine as an old ex-marine who beats the shit out of some no-good youngsters which is basically what Bruce Ruxton does every Friday night for kicks.
Food Inc., Robert Kenner’s expose of the American food industry, opens.
The Next…
Like Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy, 45365 is driven not so much by dialogue or plot but by a desire to capture a sense of place.
The party-happy vibe that Favreau brings to this sequel to Iron Man results in a film that feels inconsequential and empty. Yet what he does succeed in is bringing style back to the superhero film. Thus, moment to moment, Iron Man 2 is genuinely fun.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 13th
New York, I Love You, from the producers of Paris je t’aime, opens. It’s the same concept except with a different city and crappier directors. Seriously- Brett Ratner?
Love, Lust and Lies, a documentary from Gillian Armstrong in the same vein as Michael Apted’s Seven Up! series, opens. We reviewed it here.
Robin Hood, re-envisioned by Ridley Scott with Russell Crowe in the lead and Cate…
The newest installment in Gillian Armstrong’s documentary series centered on the lives of three working class Adelaide women reflects Armstrong’s pervading interest in femininity. But by conforming to the preconceived notion of the documentary, Armstrong has produced a film which is largely non-cinematic, conformist and dull.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 6th
The White Ribbon, Michael Haneke’s provocative tale of a series of mysterious violent occurences in a village just prior to World War I, opens.
Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench plays at ACMI as part of their Jazz on Film programme. A contemporary combination of mumblecore and MGM musicals, the film recalls such filmmakers as Cassavetes, Godard and Demy.…
Matthew Vaughn’s latest film posits a “real” world, one without “superheroes,” but then proceeds to fill that world with the exact same kind of superheroics that populate every other superhero film.
The art direction of this debut film from the director of The Mighty Boosh is a joy to behold. Unfortunately, the visual style serves no purpose other than to make the film quirky and beautiful looking.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 29th
Iron Man 2, the superhero popcorn flick from Jon Favreau starring Robert Downey Jr., opens.
Blind Company, a drama about family disfunction or something from Australian auteur Alkinos Tsilimidos, opens. Prominently features dreary weather and violence.
Amos Oz, a documentary on the Israeli writer, opens.
The Concert, a comedy about Andrei Filipov, the once celebrated conductor of the Bolshoi Orchestra, since relegated to janitorial duties…
In a previous generation it took the genius of a Fassbinder to reveal, in all its banal horror, the role of love as an instrument of capital; but for us today it seems to have required a couple of fools like writers Sean Anders and John Morris to demonstrate that, at our stage in late capitalism, love even as a function of state power has become dangerous and insufficiently controllable, and must be ruthlessly regimented in such a way that its auratic value is thoroughly ground down.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY
The Bunny and the Bull, a comedic road movie from Paul King (director of The Mighty Boosh), opens exclusively at Nova. Actually set entirely inside the characters’ flat, the film is more a surreal recreation of a past roadtrip resulting in some amazing Gondry-esque visuals.
Hot Tub Time Machine, starring John Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson, Clark Duke and Crispin Glover (!!!) is about a…
Sin Nombre follows a similar trend to other mainstream films on the third world such as Slumdog Millionnaire and District 9, whereby its poverty-stricken milieu is a mere trope to appeal to liberal audiences’ sympathies with no kind of in-depth exploration, while the narrative is primarily concerned with repeating the familiar thrills of Hollywood.
Click the links for trailers. The rest of the week and venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 15th
Coco and Igor, detailing the relationship between Coco Chanel and Igor Stravinsky following the landmark performance of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring”, opens. Will this film shock the audience’s bourgeois sensibilities and cause a riot like Stravinsky’s work did? (Hint: It’s a rhetorical question.)
The Book of Eli, a post-apocalyptic action film The Hughes Brothers (From Hell) and starring Denzel Washington, Mila Kunis and Gary…
Bong Joon-ho’s Mother, the story of the frenetic attempts of a woman to exonerate her simple, sweet son of the brutal murder of a teenage girl, may present less immediately engaging or obvious thematic subtext than the law and order and institutional indictments of The Host and Memories of Murder, but it also proves Bong to be an effortless manipulator of his audience.
Unlike other comedian cum documentarians like Michael Moore or Bill Maher, Chris Rock doesn’t take a hard-nosed political stance, or use the format to ‘out’ and humiliate in order to prove his point. His latest film Good Hair, about African-American culture’s obsession with straight hair, is all the more enjoyable because it takes the subjective experiences of real people so much into account in its narrative.
THURSDAY
Mother, the excellent Hitchcockian crime film (and Screen Machine favourite of 2009) from Bong Joon-ho (Memories of Murder, The Host) opens at Nova. We reviewed it last year when it screened at MIFF.
Kick Ass, the film based on Mark Millar and John Romita Jr.’s comic book series, opens.
Date Night, starring Tina Fey, Steve Carell, Mark Wahlberg, Mark Ruffalo, James Franco, Common, Kristen Wiig, and Blair from Gossip Girl, opens.
Two of the most interesting films at this year’s La Mirada festival…
You must be wondering (dear reader) what I, a PhD student in film studies, am doing coveting the world of a teen pop star. Am I not meant to be analysing (and enjoying) only the serious, critically worthy cinematic efforts that capture the attention of likeminded intellectuals? *Yawn* I like Miley Cyrus, I escape with her into the great, glossy teen queen world she inhabits. That she exposes her sexual maturation and undeveloped teenage psyche only furthers my interest.
In the aftermath of Avatar, we can most surely say that we are in the midst of a stereoscopic renaissance. Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland 3D made a bucket-load at the box-office breaking the record for biggest March opening ever in the United States. And there seems to be no slowing up of 3-D releases in the near future with Shrek Forever After, Toy Story 3 and Tron Legacy on the horizon. However, the technology has not fared well with film critics. And admittedly there is good reason for this: Most films released in 3-D are simply not good films. But what is surprising is how critics have gone beyond their usual practice of calling out bad films to vehemently campaigning against the 3-D technology itself that is being adopted by filmmakers. The real problem, as I see it, is not that 3-D has nothing substantial to contribute to cinema. It’s that critics have not yet found the language to talk about the expressive qualities and the potential of 3-D.
Is The Blind Side brave for depicting the sometimes-racist attitudes that undeniably exist in American society? Or does it shamelessly adopt that same rhetoric to sell tickets to the very demographic (white southern Republicans — “red staters” if you must) that seems most often to have such attitudes? One can’t help but wonder at the subtle — and sometimes not-so-subtle — racial undertones that underscore the film’s very premise.
Click the links for trailers. Venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 1st
Micmacs, a fantastical satire on the world arms trade from Jean-Pierre Jeunet (Amelie, A Very Long Engagement) opens.
Welcome, the story of a Kurdish refugee in Europe from Philippe Lioret which won Berlin’s Ecumenical Jury Prize, opens.
The Last Station, the Tolstoy biopic from Michael Hoffman (One Fine Day) starring Christopher Plummer, James McAvoy and Hellen Mirren, opens.
La Mirada Film Festival, co-programmed by Pedro Almodovar with guest curators Martin Scorsese and Stephen…
As a child, the idea of a pair of shoes that force a girl to dance to her early grave was frightening on a primal level, as fairytales can be. Now, as a feminist who tends to intellectualise fairytales, I am more inclined to see the red ballet shoes as symbols of patriarchal binding and control of female talent and creativity.
Judging by Jacques Audiard’s most recent film, French prison is no joke. Or if it is, it’s not the funny-ha-ha kind and the punch line is probably ‘dead babies’.
Click the links for trailers. Venue information after the jump.
THURSDAY 25th
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, the Swedish thriller based on the best-selling novel, opens.
The Melbourne Queer Film Festival finishes up this Sunday.
The Red Shoes, the 1948 dance drama from Powell and Pressburger (Black Narcissus), continues its extended season at Astor.
Labyrinth, the classic 1986 Jim Henson fantasy starring David Bowie, at Rooftop.
In the Zone, Blaine Cooper’s two channel video work and installation finishes its run at Rearview Gallery this Saturday
SATURDAY…
Kathryn Bigelow’s Oscar-winning (and Screen Machine list-making) film explores the narcotic effect of war on a soldier and the narcotic effect of films on the audience.
This tale of incest and abuse suffers from inconsistent filmmaking but is saved by a monumental performance by Gabourey Sidibe.
Andrew Kidman and Aaron Curnow’s Last Hope is a feature length collection of short subjects inspired by the ocean, showing exclusively at the new venue Speakeasy Cinema. Kidman, a noted Australian surfing filmmaker and musician-photographer-writer-hyphenate, collected a posse of directors to make one or two short films each, all set to music from Curnow’s label Spunk – including tracks by such excellent artists as Sufjan Stevens, Dirty Three, and Bonnie ‘Prince’ Billy.
The end result is something like a Fantasia for surfing, with each film providing a seductive, and occasionally surprising, accompaniment to its chosen song – although the film itself is less like a concert-hall program than a really well structured mix-tape. I spoke with Andrew Kidman about the creation of the project, its distribution, and the life of an independent artist.
Click the links for trailers.
THURSDAY
Brothers, the war drama from Jim Sheridan (In the Name of the Father, Get Rich or Die Tryin’) starring Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman.
Cop Out, the buddy comedy from Kevin Smith (Clerks, Zack and Miri Make a Porno) starring Bruce Willis and Tracy Morgan.
The 20th Melbourne Queer Film Festival begins.
The City of Lost Children, the dystopian fantasy from Caro and Jeunet (Delicatessen) at ACMI.
The Darjeeling Limited, the India roadtrip dramedy from Wes Anderson, at…
Tim Burton’s latest marries the director’s trademark fantastical imagery with a narrative that is tediously by-the-numbers. Is this the fault of Burton or the fault of Disney, the film’s distributor?
Crazy Heart (which won its lead actor Jeff Bridges an Oscar just recently) gets pretty much everything wrong, including a falsely optimistic ending, offering its audience nothing but cheap humanism.
THURSDAY
The Green Zone, an Iraq war film starring Matt Damon and directed by Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) opens.
The new film from veteran auteur Claude Chabrol, Bellamy (starring Gérard Depardieu) screens at the Como at 9:15 as part of the French Film Festival.
The Day Before: Jean-Paul Gaultier, a documentary about the designer directed by Loic Prigent, screens at ACMI at 7:30.
FRIDAY
Tony Gatlif’s Korkoro screens as part of the French Film Festival at the Kino at 6:15.
Jean-Pierre Jeunet and…
I write on Martin Scorsese’s new film Shutter Island mostly as an excuse to cross reference it to one of my favourite quotes I’ve encountered in my time spent reading film criticism. The author in question is NY Press’s noted contrarian Armond White, who wrote of Brian DePalma’s maligned 2000 sci-fi flop Mission to Mars that “It can be said with certainty that any reviewer who pans it does not understand movies, let alone like them”. As declarations go it’s…
Click on the links for trailers.
THURSDAY
Alice in Wonderland (3D), Tim Burton’s re-imagining of Lewis Carroll’s world, opens.
The Men Who Stare at Goats, Grant Heslov’s film about the US military’s “psychic spies” (starring George Clooney) opens.
Dear John, the latest Nicholas Sparks adaptation (starring Channing Tatum SQUEAL!), directed by Lasse Halstrom, opens.
Hadewijch, Bruno Dumont’s divisive film about a young woman grappling with faith, mysticism and religious fundamentalism, opens at ACMI and plays until Sunday.
Ricky, the baby horror film from Francois Ozon, plays…
There seems to be a debate as to what kind of film Tommy Wiseau originally intended The Room to be. In my mind, there is no doubt that in 2003 he released a melodrama that he hoped would hit the big time. Instead, the film found more success in recent years after being discovered by a cult audience, and is now viewed as both a riotous comedy and the worst movie ever made. Kudos to Wiseau – who funded, produced, wrote, directed and starred in the film – for cheerfully running with this drastic change in marketing.
I went to see a late-night session of The Room at the Nova a few weekends ago. Plastic spoons were distributed outside and the atmosphere was bustling. But nothing quite prepared me for the phenomenon of cinematic hysteria that followed. The host of the evening said the Nova hadn’t ever experienced anything as loud as The Room audiences in their hallowed halls. It was an infectious night of whooping, spoon throwing, ball tossing and booing. Maybe I’m out of the loop, but I haven’t seen a cult film audience interact so rabidly with a movie since the mid-90s.
Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man, published in 1964, is a major work of twentieth century gay literature, and a challenging book to make a film out of. If Isherwood is today rather less widely recognized than his contemporary Truman Capote – upon whom a brief, mean joke is played at one point in this film – one suspects that director Tom Ford intends with his adaptation of A Single Man to re-establish Isherwood’s place in the popular consciousness, much as…
THURSDAY
A Single Man, the debut film of designer Tom Ford, opens.
Ricky, François Ozon’s baby horror film (described as Cronenberg meets the Dardenne Brothers) opens at ACMI exclusively and plays until March 10.
Triple R presents Sympathy for the Devil (Jean-luc Godard, 1968) at Rooftop.
The Blind Side, the Oscar-nominated(wtf!) film starring Sandra Bullock, opens.
The Leopard (1963), Visconti’s epic period drama, plays at ACMI tonight and Sunday.
Grindhouse (Tarantino and Rodriguez, 2007) at Astor.
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (Jim Sharman, 1975) at Moonlight.
FRIDAY
8 1/2…
“The world sees Rome the way you invented it,” Sophia Loren tells Daniel Day-Lewis in Nine. This is the power that a director has when he makes intelligent, affecting films. And from the way he is depicted, it seems that director Guido Contini (Day-Lewis) has achieved such splendour. Emphasising the control that films have over their spectators, declaring that they are indeed not modest, director Rob Marshall is more paying respects to Federico Fellini (from whose 8 1/2 the musical…
THURSDAY
Kathryn Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker (a Best Picture Oscar nominee and Screen Machine favourite of 2009) opens.
Martin Scorsese’s thriller Shutter Island (with Leonardo DiCaprio) opens.
Celine: Through the Eyes of the World opens.
Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart (with Oscar-nominated performances from Jeff Bridges and Maggie Gyllenhaal) opens.
FRIDAY
ACMI begins a season focusing on actress Claudia Cardinale, star of 1960s Italian cinema, with Visconti’s Sandra (1965) and Herzog’s Fitzcarraldo (1982).
Freaky Fridays presents last year’s blacksploitation kitsch Black Dynamite at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Mike Nichols’ The Graduate…
I. I hate Don’s life but I want his suit.
In The Reality of the Virtual, Slavoj Zizek makes what at first seems an absurd claim: that the Sound of Music is a racist film. But, when put under analysis, his argument is hard to deny. Basically, Zizek makes a distinction between the narrative reality of the film (i.e. Mary Poppins and the seven dwarfs must escape the fascist Nazis) which only seems to appeal to an anti-fascist sensibility, and the…
The Road tells the story of a father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) wandering through a post-apocalyptic landscape where humans have been reduced to their basest survival instincts. The relationship between father and son represents the ability of humanity to endure in inhuman situations. Thus against a backdrop of hopelessness and cruelty, the father exorts his son to survive in order to “carry the fire”. One might describe the film as both beautiful and unremittingly bleak, yet these qualities,…
THURSDAY
Cannes Grand Jury Prize-winner and Oscar nominee this year for best foreign film, Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet opens.
From director Joe Johnston (Jumanji), The Wolfman starring Benicio Del Toro and Anthony Hopkins opens.
Marco Ferreri’s controversial take on late sixties alienation, Dillinger is Dead (1969) plays at ACMI until Sunday.
Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill (Vols. 1 & 2) at the Astor or Pulp Fiction at Moonlight.
FRIDAY
Twilight and Twilight: New Moon at the Astor. We wrote about New Moon here.
Freaky Fridays presents…
If there is one scene in Clint Eastwood’s Invictus that is sure to provoke derisive laughter from cynical viewers, it is that which occurs just before the film’s long climactic sequence detailing the events of the 1995 Rugby World Cup final between South Africa and New Zealand. In this scene, President Mandela (Morgan Freeman) touches down in a helicopter on the Springboks’ training field, while they are going through their final drills the evening before the big match. As the…
(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda’s film “Daguerreotypes” screens on March 24.)
This Wednesday, February 10, the Melbourne Cinémathèque will begin its 2010 season with a screening of two films by Max Ophüls, at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image cinemas. The program for the year, which can be found at the Cinémathèque website and in paper form at ACMI and the other usual outlets, features…
THURSDAY
Lee Daniels’ Sundance Grand Jury Prize-winning Precious (with Mo’Nique and Mariah Carey) opens.
Elia Suleiman’s semi-autobiographical The Time That Remains plays at ACMI until Sunday.
The Spierig Brothers’ vampire movie Daybreakers opens.
Alan Parker’s blue collar soul movie The Committments (1991) at Moonlight.
Ridley Scott’s dystopian sci-fi noir Bladerunner (1982) at Rooftop.
FRIDAY
Sidney Lumet’s 1978 Motown-styled Wizard of Oz remake The Wiz (starring Michael Jackson and Diana Ross) at ACMI today and Sunday.
Cinema Fiasco present Dr. Goldfoot and the Bikini Machine (1965) starring Vincent…
I was at the Telluride Film Festival back in September, when Up in the Air had its premiere there (as often happens, the film had its first public screening at Telluride, shortly before its “official” premiere at Toronto). I didn’t see it then, but the people I knew who did were very enthusiastic, speaking not at all about its relationship to director Jason Reitman’s previous hit film, Juno, but all about the film as a statement on the economic crisis…
THURSDAY
John Hillcoat’s The Road (based on the Cormac McCarthy novel) opens.
Warwick Thornton’s Samson and Delilah (listed on our Top 20 of 2009) at the Astor.
Stephen Soderbergh’s The Informant at Moonlight Cinema.
Richard Lowenstein’s doco on Melbourne post-punk scene in the 1970s We’re Living on Dog Food at Rooftop.
FRIDAY
Katsuhiro Otomo’s cyberpunk dystopian anime classic Akira (1988) at the Astor.
Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) at Moonlight Cinema.
Freaky Fridays presents cult sci-fi western The American Astronaut (Cory McAbee, 2001) at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Olivier Assayas’ Summer Hours…
Fantastic Mr. Fox marks two departures for Wes Anderson: It’s his first animated feature and also his first adaptation. Yet the film still fits comfortably within Anderson’s filmography, exhibiting that peculiar quality of immaculate off-handedness that films such as Rushmore and The Life Aquatic share. Any fan of the original Roald Dahl book might be afraid that Anderson’s immediately recognisable aesthetic might overwhelm the spirit of the source material, but to the contrary, Fantastic Mr. Fox reveals Dahl and Anderson…
THURSDAY
Armando Iannucci’s foul-mouthed political comedy In The Loop opens. (The film made Screen Machine’s Best of 2009 List.)
Rob Marshall’s musical reimagining of 8 1/2 (*sigh*) Nine opens.
Clint Eastwood’s Invictus opens.
Toy Story 1 and 2 (presented in 3D) open.
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) at Rooftop.
FRIDAY
Freaky Fridays presents Cory McAbee’s sci-fi musical western Stingray Sam at ACMI.
SATURDAY
Lee “Scratch” Perry documentary The Upsetter plays at ACMI as part of Yard!Dub and Reggae on Film.
Spike Jonze’s Where the Wild Things Are at the…
THURSDAY
Rachel Perkins’ Bran Nue Dae opens.
Jason Reitman’s Up In the Air opens.
Anvil! The story of Anvil at Rooftop.
FRIDAY
Cult musical space western Stingray Sam (2009) plays at ACMI with a post-screening Q & A with director Cory McAbee.
SATURDAY
Screen Machine 2009 list-maker (!) A Serious Man from the Coen Brothers at Astor. (We wrote about it here.)
Michael Curtiz’s Casablanca (1942) at Rooftop.
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Red Shoes 1948 at ACMI today until Monday.
SUNDAY
Tape Projects presents Occult Uses for Video,…
If Avatar is an environmentalist fable, then it is a failure. And if you want to read it as such – a liberal allegory pleading for humans to respect nature and the indigenous peoples who live in a symbiotic relationship with it – then, sure, I can see how Avatar is a “bad” film. I can see how the journey of protagonist Jake Sully is a narrative badly cribbed from Dances With Wolves. I can see how the representation of…
THURSDAY
Duncan Jones’ Moon, a Screen Machine favourite of 2009, is screening at the Astor.
Dennis Hopper’s Easy Rider (1969) is screening at ACMI until Sunday 10th January.
Michael Lehmann’s Heathers (1988) at Rooftop.
SATURDAY
Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1998) at Rooftop.
SUNDAY
Kathryn Bigelow’s Point Break (1991) at Rooftop.
MONDAY
Ron Fricke’s Koyaanisquatsi (1983) and Powaqqatsi (1988) at the Astor.
TUESDAY
Ben Stiller’s Zoolander (2001) at Rooftop.
Happy new year! Hope you spent a merry Kwanzaa eggnogging yourself into oblivion. 2010 marks Screen Machine’s second year in operation and what better way for a website to celebrate such an occasion than with a list! Here are the Top 20 Films of 2009 as chosen by the Screen Machine staff. Chosen from films that were released in Melbourne cinemas in 2009 or were given a festival screening here, we’ve tried to create a list that is more intriguing…
