Screen Machine

We can imagine an alternate ending to Cowboys and Aliens: The film would end with the alien proleteriat revolting against their masters and cooperating with the Apaches to throw the white men off their land.

I am writing this post a couple of days after the Melbourne International Film Festival for 2011 has ended. It has been a pretty good festival all in all but as with other years, I ended up an exhausted husk of a man in those final few days. This is a problem facing all cinephiles in Melbourne: 50 weeks of general mediocrity and when the film festival finally comes around, film-watching becomes something of a 2-week endurance test. The mania of a film festival doesn’t leave a lot of time for reflection which is kind of a crucial thing for the films that tend to be shown only at film festivals. The importance of reflection has made itself even more evident to me having this year committed myself to watching 60 films in 17 days and writing about them as part of the MIFF blogathon. Here’s one thing about filmgoing that no-one talks about much: A lot of cinephilia involves not seeing films. One also needs to think about films, read about films, talk about films and the time taken to watch films can actually get in the way of these other activities.

Now seems just as good a time as any to bring up again the issue of “slow cinema” or “contemplative cinema”. (Conall Cash made mention of it at last year’s MIFF.) For those not up to speed with the debate that happened last year amongst critics online, Sight and Sound editor Nick James started by citing his apprehension towards slow cinema — there are good and bad examples of it, but if you admit to boredom, you risk the danger of unwarranted accusations of philistinism. Harry Tuttle accused James of anti-intellectualism and argued for slow cinema as a “new narrative mode, a different angle in storytelling” that should not be judged by the norms of mainstream cinema. Steven Shaviro sided more with James arguing that slowness is the least interesting aspect of today’s contemplative cinema — it either lacks the provocation of an Antonioni or Chantal Akerman film or otherwise the main interest lies in the ways the film departs from slow cinema norms.

Love it. Hate it. Just make sure you rate it!

Thus are festival-goers implored to give a rating of 1-5 stars to the films they encounter during the Melbourne International Film Festival. It’s a win-win situation for the festival, MUBI.com and Sony for whom this operates as a handy cross promotion. For a film critic, nothing could be more abominable!

It’s abominable because the star-rating system is the antithesis of the work that critics do. The star system represents the commodification of films, the reduction of the cacophony of signs that is a movie to an arbitrary numerical value. Criticism is on the side of meaning, working out how sounds and images produce meaning. Criticism enters into a dialogue with a film and it is only through this conversation that the film lives as art. A star-rating designates the moment we pronounce a film as dead.

Yesterday two friends independently told me about people they know who make it their business to watch only documentaries at the Melbourne International Film Festival and ignore the fiction films. This seems a bizarre idea for me because I find that the documentaries end up being some of the worst things about the festival, often coasting on the topicality of their subject matter with an often mediocre approach to film form.

What is the difference between fiction films and documentaries? Should we apply different standards of judgement to the two? My tentative idea on this is that we should not judge fiction films differently from documentaries and that values we hold about cinema specific to one or the other will uncover interesting questions about how we watch films. Take, for example, the importance placed on aesthetic beauty. With documentaries, it is not often that one is denounced for having ugly cinematography but with fiction films it is often a point of fixation. We could say this suggests that beautiful cinematography is overvalued in our appreciation of fiction films but we could also say that light and composition are under-analysed in documentaries. The main point I’m putting forth here is that our appreciation of one form will enrich our appreciation of the other.

It is sometimes hilarious how seriously some people take a film festival. In my diary entry for days 5 and 6 of the Melbourne International Film Festival I mentioned my experience with a man who was very vocally annoyed with all this sound I was making with my friend, chatting during the commercials. I can only imagine his reaction to the screening of Zhang Yimou’s Under the Hawthorn Tree which saw a couple of busloads of high school children piling into ACMI Cinema 2 to have a good old go at world cinema appreciation. As it turned out, their presence there was the best thing about the session as the film ended up another dud from Zhang Yimou, a director fallen from grace for, amongst other things, selling out to direct the Olympic opening ceremony. Zhang Yimou specialises in a kind of dog whistle cinema that plays with the sympathies of liberal-minded people naturally concerned for the lives of individuals oppressed under authoritarian rule without actually being a social critique of that authoritarianism. Under the Hawthorn Tree is no exception. The story of two young people falling in love during China’s Cultural Revolution, one can see that this film would have been unthinkable during Maoist China when films exhibiting a reactionary ideology of individualism were suppressed — In order to convince his lady love to take a break from hard labour to swim in the river, Lao San tells her, “Chairman Mao says one shouldn’t fear hardship or death. I say you should learn to have some fun!” But this tension is never really explored. Instead, the characters express a sunny optimism that the Party will change its policies and when the star-crossed lovers eventually part, it is not due to the Party but due to cancer, that old favourite of screenwriters looking to add a dumb tragic ending to a film. Zhang Yimou has said, “To create art, one must always remember that the subject of people in misery has the deepest meaning, the deepest resonance”. I can’t add much more to that.

One has to wonder to what extent Miranda July exists not as a real person but as a fantasy figure, a kind of Frankie Magazine fever dream made flesh. In two films now—Me and You and Everyone We Know and this year’s The Future—Miranda July has cast herself playing for all intents and purposes a constructed version of her real-life persona. How should we put it: A twee, whimsical hipster? If Miranda July really does exists as some aspirational fantasy (and I’m willing to concede this is up for debate) then one has to wonder about the ideals of her demographic. The Miranda July Type is spontaneous (contemptuous of the virtues of routine), childlike and politically naive (lacking in ethical convictions) and paradoxically affected and unaffected at the same time (to keep at bay one’s fear of being on the outside while maintaining the moral high ground of being on the outside). These are apparently the virtues of Generation Y and judging by the squeals of delight every time Miranda July did some spontaneous interpretive dance in her lounge room, they resonated with more than a few people in the audience at MIFF. The Future is both worse and better than her debut feature — It unfortunately doubles down on the magical whimsy (hello talking cat) but is thankfully less trying to be the Statement About American Suburbia that every second American indie film aspires to be.

In Ozu’s final film An Autumn Afternoon, a character says with good-humoured resignation, “Solitary, sad — after all, man is alone,” and the film with similarly good-humoured resignation bears out the truth of his words. But of course the film carries its melancholic attitude with a warmth, humour and grace characteristic of all Ozu’s work.

Man may be alone, but one sometimes gets the feeling at the Melbourne International Film Festival that some punters would much rather prefer to be alone. Before a screening of Post Mortem, an old man sitting next to me crossly told the person in front of him to turn off his phone and then told me off for talking with my friend, all during the advertisements! I could partially sympathise with him though. I too get irritated by people talking in the cinema but it’s not immediately before the film starts but rather immediately after the film ends. It’s at this point while I’m still sifting through the complexities of the images and sounds I’ve just experienced that hearing people give their judgements so quickly seems so overbearing to me.

As it turned out, all the films I saw these last two days paid tribute to our ultimately lonely existences.

Last week I referred to the Straub-Huillet film Class Relations as a relatable film. However, this idea of “relatability” troubled me yesterday after seeing the terrific film Norwegian Wood, an adaptation of Murakami’s novel by the director Tran Anh Hung. Outside the Greater Union cinemas on Russell Street, I heard two filmgoers dismissing the film (about a 19-year-old’s fraught relationship with two women, something like a Japanese Some Came Running) as a 50-year-old’s attitude to life projected onto a teenager. It brought to mind fellow blogger Thomas Caldwell’s recent negative comments about the film:

“I’m not sure whether Norwegian Wood was too weighed down by its literary origins or if Tran was too self-consciously trying to make a worthy art-house film, but I lost interest after the first hour… [T]he long running time and lack of empathetic characters make it increasingly laboured for me.”

Here is the question raised by this comment: Are empathetic characters a prerequisite to a good film? In my opinion they are not. In fact, the very idea of “relatability”, our desire for “empathetic” characters always contains a cultural bias. The presumption is that what happens on screen needs to conform to our understanding of the world.

Though the duo of Jean-Marie Straub and Danièle Huillet are best known as intellectual filmmakers beloved by a small group of similarly intellectual cinephiles, their 1984 film Class Relations—an adaptation Franz Kafka’s unfinished novel “Amerika”—is perhaps the most relatable film I’ve seen at this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival, at least to those who know the special indignities of being an employed person. Its scenes of workers being hauled into managers’ offices and raked across the coals with absurd accusations and questions hit close to home in the most painfully funny way possible.

Another very relatable moment happens late in the film when the young protagonist is talking to a student who spends all day working at a store and all night reading books. When asked at what point he fits in sleep, the student replies that at least until he finishes his studies, he will simply be drinking coffee. Coffee gets a bad wrap these days what with the fun we make of latte-sipping yuppies. What we need to do is reclaim coffee as the beverage of the working classes! For it is caffeine which fuels the long shifts and late nights that drive our society. It is blessed caffeine that is fuelling me through the festival as I trudge along to that 60-film mark!

Slap me for passing judgement on the motivations of other filmgoers if you like but I do have to take issue with fellow MIFF blogger Glenn Dunks who recently commented (on Cerise Howard’s blog A Little Lie Down) about how he came to choose the films he booked for the festival:

“A lot of the 60 films I have chosen to see will be indeed released in some variety after the festival, but so many of those that don’t have distribution don’t have distribution for a very good reason. They just don’t sound all that interesting so I don’t feel too bad.”

Maybe the most wrong-headed idea out of all this is the idea that film distributors generally do things “for a very good reason”. While the individuals who work in film distribution may see themselves as doing the work of spreading “good film culture”, the reality is that the decisions of film distributors, from your giant companies to smaller art house outfits, are determined by the same thing: profit motive. Thus, distributors don’t pass over films because they aren’t interesting or good. They pass over films because they don’t fit what distributors calculate to be consumers’ tastes. Anyone with good sense knows of course that there is no strict correlation between consumers’ tastes and good art.

The question raised by Dunks’ comment is: If distributors can be trusted to sort out the “good” films from the “bad” films, then why the hell do we need a film festival? What does a film festival offer us?

Here we are at the start of another Melbourne International Film Festival and isn’t it exciting? No, it’s terrifying! At least for me it is, because I’ve decided to participate in this new MIFF initiative, the “60 Films in 17 Days Blog-A-Thon” in which I will watch a mind-melting 60 films during the course of the festival and be expected to process that experience into actual thoughts and then write something semi-coherent and useful about it to publish in this exciting new media format called Myspace or something.

So what is usually one of my favourite times of the year is starting to sound like a lot of hard work! That’s true of a lot of things in life though. (I love Christmas and that’s no walk in the park either.) But what’s equally true is that alcohol helps the medicine go down, which is why I present to you the official Screen Machine Drinking Game for the Melbourne International Film Festival which, if you’re over-indulging in cinematic madness like me, will hopefully mellow you out throughout the whole blurriness of these next seventeen days.

You may have noticed a kind of critical debate going on at the moment about whether The Tree of Life is a masterpiece or a piece of pretentious wank. The real question is: Have we been able to talk about The Tree of Life in a constructive way such that it might be termed a “work of art”?

This latest Apatovian comedy is of an old comedy tradition – the tradition of Tati’s Monsieur Hulot, Chaplin’s Tramp and even Rowan Atkinson’s Mr Bean – that uses the figure of the “fool” to articulate the rules and customs of a particular space.

In his role as Osama bin Laden in the imaginary film Terror in the Shadows, the actor Vincent Gallo asked his director at a pivotal moment in production that question oft-asked by actors: “What’s my motivation here?” Gallo’s director, George W. Bush replied, “You hate freedom”. Thus was a cinematic tendency spawned in which terrorists were assigned character motivations of the most dubious credibility: Hence The Dark Knight’s Joker (“Some men just want to watch the world burn.”) or Derek Frost in the more recent Source Code. The motives of terrorism need not be so obscure but there is a good reason for them to remain so. By keeping the motives of terrorists obscure, one avoids the danger of implicating the terrorised. You can’t talk seriously about the Weather Underground without also talking about the American government killing innocents in Vietnam. You can’t talk seriously about the National Liberation Front of Algeria without talking about the violence of French colonialism. I’m not, of course, implying that victims of terrorism deserve what they get. But motivations and interests do count for something.

Thankfully Reichardt resists any vulgar humanisation of the Indian. We are given neither the conservative certainty of the Indian as savage nor the politically correct version of the Indian as peaceful conduit to the spirit world. Instead we are given the Indian as the question mark that must nevertheless be treated as a full stop.

Atheism is probably the philosophy least comfortable with the cinematic form. How to denigrate the faith of others when cinema itself is always, in a sense, an act of faith? How to cry at a film, feel anger or joy without acknowledging the beauty of an illusion?

Hall Pass inhabits the world of the R-Rated Comedy, that contemporary genre in which anything, it seems, is possible – No joke is off bounds. Anything goes no matter how scatological or smutty. But like so many other films of its ilk, its air of anarchy belies a highly conservative attitude towards the family institution.

As contemporary popular culture demands ever more shocking sexual spectacles, the contradiction in Black Swan becomes apparent: the film advocates for a liberated art but this can only be achieved by obeying the demands of the super-ego (embodied in Vincent Cassel’s domineering choreographer).

With Uncle Boonmee, Weerasethakul once again reminds us that one can make a true break with the known into the unknown, a break that is key to our redemption.

If the superhero genre is mainly concerned with how to tell the same basic story over and over again while finding endless superficial variations on its generic components, there is one thing that generally never varies: the moral authority of the paternal figure. Batman, Superman, Spider-man, Iron Man – their drive to do good in the world is always somehow premised on the saint-like qualities of their fathers (or sometimes uncles as is the case with Spider-man, whose Uncle Ben’s mantra “with great power comes great responsibility” echoes through each new installment of the franchise). Even a post-modern iteration of the superhero film like Kick Ass has its Big Daddy. One recent exception to this series is The Green Hornet, the critically maligned and somewhat under-rated addition to the superhero genre from Michel Gondry and starring Seth Rogen. What is the first order of business for the Green Hornet and his sidekick Kato when they first team up as crime-fighters? They visit the memorial statue of the Green Hornet’s recently deceased father – newspaper editor James Reid – and cut off its head.

Despite being in the minority when it comes to superhero films, The Green Hornet is indicative of a wider trend developing in popular film: an increasing obsession with the symbolic death of the paternal figure. In Tron: Legacy, a son is reunited with his long-estranged father only to be confronted with the reality of his father’s impotence; in The King’s Speech, the paternal figure is reduced to a neurotic with a speech impediment; in Inception, the heir to a huge energy empire hates his deceased father who failed in his paternal duties, having held nothing but contempt for his son’s perceived weakness. (Note the fall of the authoritarian father figure in countries like Egypt, Tunisia, Iran and Bahrain for some real-life counterparts.) But the father’s death is not the whole story of course, for just as surely as the Green Hornet and Kato cut off the head of the father’s statue at the beginning of the movie, at the end they are shown soldering the head back to the body. Herein lies the full narrative pattern arising in popular cinema: the death of the father, followed by his swift symbolic restoration.

Claire Denis’ latest film is dialectically split between the blindness of Western complacency and a crystal clear perception of white absurdity, providing a provocative look at the aftereffects of colonialism in an African nation split by civil war.

If nothing else, this year’s list confirms that we at Screen Machine are big Jesse Eisenberg fans (but then who isn’t?). It perhaps shows other continuities from our 2009 list, indicating some of the approaches and prejudices we have as film critics and spectators. We hope that the pieces we’ve written on each of the twenty films that appear here are of greater use and interest to readers than the mock-suspense of learning what finishes in which position. Returning to these films now allows us to say things about them that we couldn’t when they first appeared, and we think that these reflective pieces on the films of 2010 will offer plenty to discuss as we begin the new year.

The final part of Brad’s report from FILMeX with notes on films by Hirokazu Kore-eda, Minoru Shibuya, Keisuke Kinoshita, Sion Sono, Amos Gitai and Chang-dong Lee.

Brad reports from Tokyo’s premier film festival with notes on films from Apichatpong Weerasethakul, Jia Zhang-ke, Zhu Wen and Abbas Kiarostami, and retrospectives of the work of Minoru Shibuya and Keisuke Kinoshita.

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”.

The central tension in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is between slow adolescent velocities and opposing vectors that press upon the female protagonist’s desires.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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,…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.

[FROST/NIXON trailer here.]
It is almost pointless calling Frost/Nixon a Ron Howard film. After The Da Vinci Code, Cinderella Man, A Beautiful Mind and The Grinch (sigh) “Ron Howard” has come to stand for workman-like MOR Oscar-bait: hardly the makings of a distinctive auteur. Frost/Nixon is really the work of Peter Morgan, the writer of the film’s screenplay and the original stageplay on which the film was based.

Directed by Kenny Ortega

[High School Musical 3: Senior Year trailer here]
A Disney-produced teen movie which is also a musical whose numbers resemble contemporary pop music videos rather than traditional Broadway tunes. It’s hardly the most sophisticated concept. In fact, it’s this initial idea that will likely turn most hardened cinema-goers off from forking over $15. But to see such a perverse idea pulled of in such spectacular style is why this film was so surprisingly and ridiculously entertaining for me.

Directed by Nanette Burnstein

[Trailer here]
It’s uncanny just how much the events that happen at the real life high school in Warsaw, Indiana in American Teen conform to the story elements of The Breakfast Club. American Teen has very obviously marketed itself as a documentary version of The Breakfast Club but I’m not sure that “documentary” is the best word to describe this film.

Directed by Baz Luhrmann

Australia is on its surface outraged at the historical injustices done in the name of cultural assimilation but underneath its glossy sheen is a cinematic white Australia policy. The film opens and closes with big important titles that spell out the tragedy of the Stolen Generations which is all well and good – I’m a fan of nations facing their historical guilt through cultural experience. There’s obviously a good intention here but Luhrmann’s ludicrous film ends up…

Directed by Jonathan Levine

If The Wackness signals the end of the eighties revival era, then I say give Jonathan Levine a freaking Nobel Prize or something because I thought the second eighties would never end. But it’s not the only reason to like this movie. In fact, after seeing the The Wackness I felt like someone had reached into my brain and found all my particular cultural fetishes and created something custom made for me:

Directed by Clark Gregg

Choke is another one of those fraudulent American indie films which pretends to be really “edgy” with Controversial Subject Matter but then turns out to be trite and sentimental. This one is about a sex-addict (Sam Rockwell) who pays the medical bills of his mother (Angelica Houston) who suffers from dymentia by working at a colonial theme park and pretending to choke in restaurants to gain the sympathies of the rich people who save him. He’s doing…

Directed by James Marsh

The French are serious about having fun. Americans, on the other hand, take fun way too seriously. Case in point: In 2001, The producers of Spider-Man released a trailer for their film in which the eponymous hero was shown creating a web across the World Trade Centre and capturing a bunch of villains in a helicopter. Then on September 11, tragedy occurred. When Spider-Man was released in 2002, all traces of the World Trade Centre action sequence…

Directed by Ethan Coen and Joel Coen

You can surely credit the Coen brothers for not playing safe. Their last film No Country For Old Men won them Oscar acclaim for what was in essence a grim genre exercise. It was guilty of what the Coen brothers are often criticised for: being style over substance. But the main thing was that it was “serious” style and done impeccably well so it was easy to give that film the rubber stamp of…

Directed by Alan Ball

Alan Ball has made a big name for himself as the writer of American Beauty and the creator of HBO’s Six Feet Under. And in this film, his feature film directing debut, he offers up much of what we have come to expect from his work: biting satire of suburbia, doses of humour and surrealism and a penchant for pushing Controversial hot button topics.
Adapted from Alicia Erian’s novel, Towelhead is about a 13-year old Arab-American girl called…

Directed by Ari Folman

Director Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir is a bold reinvention of the documentary. Completely animated, the film is an exploration of war, memory and guilt. It’s also a masterclass in how a filmmaker can help a nation deal with the shame of war atrocities.
The atrocity at the heart of Waltz for Bashir for much of the running time is shrouded in mystery. The film opens with a friend of Ari Folman recounting to him a recurring nightmare…

Directed by Andrew Stanton

WALL-E is proof that Pixar Studios houses some of the most interesting mainstream filmmakers working today. Each film they make shows an effort to push the boundaries of animation in technology, in storytelling and thematically. WALL-E is a relatively ambitious film tackling the way consumerism takes away our ability to engage in the world. The question is: How well can a $180 million film work as a capitalist critique?
The film opens with an earth that has become…

Directed by Wong Kar-wai

My Blueberry Nights is both a step forward for Wong Kar-wai and revisitation of the past. A step forward because it is his first feature in the English language and a step into the past because in spirit this film resembles his early work such as Chungking Express. This is definitely not In The Mood for Love. When critics praised In the Mood for Love they made it sound like an Ang Lee film with different clothes.…

Directed by Michael Haneke

I actually hadn’t seen the original Funny Games before I saw this film at the Melbourne International Film Festival but the only thing that critics seem to care about is that Michael Haneke has made an almost shot for shot remake of his 1997 original, this time in English. He hasn’t revised his ideas and neither is this film a commentary on auteur theory and remakes like Gus Van Sant’s remake of Psycho. This is a film…

Directed by Garth Jennings

Garth Jennings is a destined for greatness but he just hasn’t quite got there yet. As part of the creative duo, Hammer and Tongs, he’s been responsible for such brilliant clips as R.E.M’s ‘Imitation of Life’, Blur’s ‘Coffee and TV’, Travis’ ‘Driftwood’ and Vampire Weekend’s ‘A-Punk’. His first feature was Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy which was ultimately a disappointment but had occasional moments of coolness: the opening musical number, the casting, the puppets. The problem was…

Directed by Guillermo Del Toro

Debate gay marriage with a dumb bigot (hey it’s one of my favourite past-times) and the bigot will often argue that if you let a man marry another man, you might as well let a man marry an animal. There is a moment in Hellboy II where you realise that Guillermo Del Toro is saying, well why the hell not let man marry an animal? Because that is essentially what the romance between Hellboy (Ron Perlman)…

I’m afraid I’ve bitten off more than I can chew. Anyways, here continues my summary of my MIFF experience…
NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (dir. George A Romero)
Trailer here.
This played as part of the George Romero retrospective and Romero himself was in attendance. I loved that he is still bemused by the critical attention given to this film. Despite what he thinks, it is pretty great if only for the scene in which the main protagonist bitchslaps the annoying chick who…

And so continues my ultra-concise commentary on the films I saw at the Melbourne Film Festival. The header picture I’m using in this series of posts should give you an indication of my favourite films of the festival. Anyone, continuing in the order in which I saw them…
FUNNY GAMES (dir. Michael Haneke)
Trailer here.
This is Michael Haneke remaking one of his films shot for shot. If you speak English and not German, why not see this one? It’s about two teenagers…

Another year, another MIFF. It’s a week out and more than anything I’m surprised that I managed to see more than fifty films in 2 weeks. Now is as good a time as any to do an overview of my experience at this year’s MIFF. I’m going to get through all the films I saw and finish with a top ten of highlights and duds.
NOT QUITE HOLLYWOOD (dir. Mark Hartley)
Trailer here.
Frenetically edited doco on Australian exploitation films ranging from ocker…

Directed by Christopher Nolan
2008

Heath Ledger’s Joker is most probably the greatest comic-book villain we’ve seen on the big screen. He’s downright scary to the extent that I breathed a sigh of relief every moment that the Joker is not onscreen. Yet he is a lot of fun to watch. Everyone seems to want to talk about whether Heath Ledger will get an Oscar, and to tell you the truth, I’m not sure he would be getting one if he was…

Directed by Anthony Hayes
2008

When certain themes crop up time and time again in a nation’s cinema, should we look at this repetition of themes from a sociological point of view or should we dismiss them as simply cliches? In Australia we seem to be stuck time and time again with stories about outsiders visiting country towns or outer suburbs and discovering them to be vortexes of desperation and struggle. This person is either a complete outsider (like in, say Somersault)…

Directed by Errol Morris
2008

Errol Morris is always searching for the truth and he gets closer to it than most by showing just how elusive it really is. Standard Operating Procedure is about the images that came out of Abu Ghraib and challenges the assumptions that we originally held about what the photos really reveal. While most think of the photos in terms of uncovering a human rights scandal, Errol Morris reveals that the photos were able to be used to…

Directed by Eran Kolirin
2007

The Band’s Visit is designed to warm your heart. It’s a quietly humourous fish-out-of-water comedy where people spontaneously burst into a group singalong of Gershwin’s “Summertime” over the dinnertable. The only thing stopping The Band’s Visit from successfully warming your heart is that it’s not believable. In fact, when you summarise the movie after seeing it you realise just how trite the whole affair is.
The plot: An Egyptian band arrives in Israel to play at the inaugural…