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	<title>Screen Machine &#187; Conall Cash</title>
	<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv</link>
	<description>Long live the new flesh</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Thu, 29 Jul 2010 08:16:14 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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	<item>
		<title>She&#8217;s Out of My League</title>
		<description><![CDATA[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.]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/04/24/shes-out-of-my-league/</link>
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		<title>A Single Man</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Christopher Isherwood&#8217;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 &#8211; upon whom a brief, mean joke is played at one point in this film &#8211; one suspects that director Tom Ford intends with his adaptation of A Single Man to re-establish Isherwood&#8217;s place in the popular consciousness, much as Bennett Miller&#8217;s Capote did for that author in 2005.
But the popularity Ford wants to claim for his film and his version of Isherwood is, of course, a popularity amongst only the right people &#8211; people of feeling (as Colin Firth&#8217;s George remarks during the film, &#8220;a world without sentiment is not a world I want to live in&#8221;), people of intelligence, and most importantly, people of taste. As every review of A Single Man has pointed out, Ford is a well-known fashion designer and first-time film director, and his attention to &#8216;matters of taste&#8217; -  fashion style, costuming and set design &#8211; often comes at the expense of the &#8216;bread and butter&#8217; elements of narrative cinema, like character and plot. Set in Los Angeles in 1962, the film&#8217;s lavishly detailed mise-en-scène and soundtrack establish an impeccably tasteful simulacrum of that world, in a manner that bears the influence of such loving reconstitutions of early-sixties style and cool as Wong Kar-wai&#8217;s In The Mood For Love and Hou Hsiao-hsien&#8217;s Three Times.
In&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/02/27/a-single-man/</link>
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		<title>Invictus</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
If there is one scene in Clint Eastwood&#8217;s Invictus that is sure to provoke derisive laughter from cynical viewers, it is that which occurs just before the film&#8217;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&#8217; training field, while they are going through their final drills the evening before the big match. As the President makes his descent, a simpering American pop ballad (by some band with the imbecilic name of Overtone) spells out the film&#8217;s themes of racial reconciliation and the unifying power of sport in thuddingly unsubtle terms: &#8220;It&#8217;s not just a game, you can&#8217;t throw me away / I&#8217;ve put all I had on the line&#8230; I&#8217;m colourblind.&#8221; Eastwood here once again shows his total unconcern for any possible accusations of hokiness, much as he did on last year&#8217;s Gran Torino when he chose to play his own half-sung, half-croaked rendition of the title song over the closing credits.
But the cynic&#8217;s scoffs at this moment may prevent him from hearing the crucial sound that persists throughout the rest of the scene, after Overtone&#8217;s dreadful song has melted away: this sound is the whirring of the propeller of Mandela&#8217;s helicopter, as it gradually slows down after landing. This loud, irritating whirring forces Mandela and his main interlocutor, the Springboks captain Francois Pienaar (Matt Damon), to speak loudly, and we ourselves find we&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/02/08/review-invictus/</link>
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		<title>MELBOURNE CINÉMATHÈQUE 2010: An Interview with Michael Koller</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
(Jacques Demy, right, with his wife Agnès Varda. A Demy retrospective will screen at the Melbourne Cinémathèque in April. Varda&#8217;s film &#8220;Daguerreotypes&#8221; 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 a weekly program of international cinema running until December. As always, the Cinémathèque program will be a major fixture in Melbourne film culture for 2010. This week I spoke to Michael Koller, one of the Cinémathèque’s programmers, about the year ahead.

This year the Cinémathèque is running several retrospective programs on some familiar heavyweights of world cinema – Federico Fellini (in March), Jacques Demy (April), Akira Kurosawa (May) and Milos Forman (June) – alongside programs on experimental (“Figuring Landscapes,” in March-April) and documentary cinema (a retrospective on the films of Raymond Depardon, in October). I asked Michael about how this balance between different kinds of cinema is maintained across the year-long program. “We do try to achieve some sort of a balance,” he says, “between the more commercial or accessible portion of the program, [and] the new rising stars, as well as those forgotten in the race to go elsewhere. There is always a balance of the populist &#8211; Kurosawa, Fellini, Godard, Tarkovsky&#8230; But,” he is quick to point out, “one&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/02/05/melbourne-cinematheque-2010-an-interview-with-michael-koller/</link>
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		<title>Up in the Air</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
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 &#8220;official&#8221; premiere at Toronto). I didn&#8217;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&#8217;s previous hit film, Juno, but all about the film as a statement on the economic crisis that was affecting so many Americans at that time, as it continues to do.
Telluride is a funny town. Located in a staggeringly beautiful area of mountainous Colorado, today a great part of the land around it is owned by Ralph Lauren; houses in Telluride sell for millions of dollars. A lot of young people live there, mostly college graduates who&#8217;ve come in from elsewhere to work for a year or so. One of the people I stayed with, who lived in a nice, big house with a group of twentysomethings, was working as a labourer during the days, and spent a lot of time hiking, cooking very healthy food and reading books about environmentalism and financial catastrophe; it was from him that I first heard the enthusiastic word about Up in the Air and its incisive view on the contemporary economic climate.
Seeing Up in the Air now, we can see what exactly it has to say or to show us about the economic depression and massive job losses in the&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2010/01/29/review-up-in-the-air/</link>
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		<title>Real happy for you: A conversation around Taylor Swift</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
When Kanye West, at the recent MTV Video Music Awards, grabbed Taylor Swift’s microphone during her acceptance speech for Best Video of the Year by a Female Artist, and pronounced the now infamous words – “Yo Taylor, I’m real happy for you and I’mma let you finish, but Beyonce had one of the best videos of all time, OF ALL TIME!!” – there was immediate shock and astonishment, from both initial viewers and those who caught the outburst later on entertainment news and as it went viral on the internet. This shock was of course fed by the entertainment media, always so desperate to invest the bland narcissism of celebrity culture with the veneer of drama that they must have received this shockingly genuine moment of tension and excitement as a godsend. At the same time, the controversy (dubbed, inevitably, “Kanyegate”) inspired an outrageously popular internet meme, playing upon the absurd logic of West’s outburst by placing it in ever more ridiculous contexts.
Between the hypocritical outrage of the entertainment media and the withering irony of amateur satirists; between terror and pathos – this of course is the position Kanye West has for years occupied in the popular consciousness, a position further reinforced by the Kanyegate episode. For West is not so much a tragic figure as he is a pathetic imitation of one: calling upon a whole Hollywood mythology of unhappy, uncomfortable stars, who shine both because and in spite of this supposed, persistently iterated gap between the conformist demands&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/10/30/real-happy-for-you-a-conversation-around-taylor-swift/</link>
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		<title>It&#8217;s been 3 days since MIFF. Time to reminisce.</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
Post by Conall Cash
I hope to write a more essayistic piece on my experience of the festival in the coming weeks, but for now, a general roundup of what struck me as the most significant things about this year’s MIFF. The best new films I saw, listed in the order in which I saw them, were

À L’Aventure (Jean-Claude Brisseau)
Still Walking (Hirokazu Kore-eda)
Paper Soldier (Alexei German Jr.)
Love Exposure (Sion Sono)
A Lake (Philippe Grandrieux)
Nymph (Pen-ek Ratanaruang)
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl (Manoel de Oliveira)
Blue Beard (Catherine Breillat)

Two other films that screened at MIFF – Claire Denis’ 35 Shots of Rum and Agnès Varda’s The Beaches of Agnès – I saw a couple of months ago at the Sydney Film Festival, so I haven’t included them in the above list. Both are wonderful films, and the former is certainly among the very best things that screened this year.

Of the three retrospective showcases that ran, the Anna Karina season was by far the most interesting, I thought. Some quite rare films, such as Pierre Koralnik’s Anna and Michel Deville’s Tonight or Never, turned out to be far more than curious (which was about all I was expecting them to be) but seriously interesting films in their own right. I only went to one of the Godard sessions, because during MIFF there’s just too much stuff to see to be trying to catch up with old favourites at the same time, but I’m glad I went to that one – it was great to see&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/12/its-been-three-days-since-miff/</link>
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		<title>MIFF09 review: ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLOND HAIR GIRL (dir. Manoel de Oliveira)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[
This short (64-minute), rather slight film, directed by the 100-year old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, is one of the best things I&#8217;ve seen at MIFF this year. One particularly lovely scene actually brought some tears to my eyes &#8211; an increasingly rare kind of emotional response to be had in the environment of this festival where quick, authoritative judgements are the name of the game. My tears were inexplicable &#8211; brought on not by any tragic occurrence in the narrative but by the simple juxtaposition of a slowly tracking camera through the rooms of a house with a man&#8217;s voice reading from an old Portuguese text &#8211; and indeed so is the overall impact of the film. 
Eccentricities of a Blond Hair Girl tells the story of Macario&#8217;s love for a young woman, Luisa, who he sees from his window; his attempts to raise enough money to wed her; and the eventual failure of his passion to remake the world as he hopes it will. The world in which the story takes place is simultaneously our own &#8211; it features probably the most honest, unpretentious investigation of today&#8217;s economic climate of any film I&#8217;ve seen, as when Macario remarks that he can&#8217;t find work because &#8220;commerce hates a sentimental accountant&#8221; &#8211; and a much older one, the 19th-century world of Eca de Queiros, upon whose original story the film is loosely based. The film is both utterly unbelievable as a representation of our world and at the same time&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/07/miff09-review-eccentricities-of-a-blond-hair-girl-dir-manoel-de-oliveira/</link>
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		<title>MIFF09 review: A LAKE (dir. Philippe Grandrieux)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

The third feature directed by Philippe Grandrieux, A Lake is an astonishing, almost unbearably passionate film; it is unlike anything I have ever seen. The film alienated most of the audience that ventured into the small cinema at ACMI last night – roughly a quarter walked out during the screening, and afterwards I heard at least three groups of viewers express anger, confusion, resentment and dismissal. Such responses are understandable, particularly from the uninitiated, for Grandrieux’s film offers nothing at the level of what commonly goes for ‘cinematic appreciation’: utterly unapproachable in terms of characterization, narrative development or ‘good directing’ (well-constructed scenes made up of a sequence of artfully designed shots, with the elements of the scene and their relation to the positioning of the camera reflecting or emphasizing the nature of the narrative situation or the psychology of the characters), A Lake strives for an elementality not heard of in the cinema since F.W. Murnau’s 1927 masterpiece, Sunrise.

It would be ludicrous to judge the film in terms of whether or not it succeeds in this endeavour (inevitably, it does and it does not), rather what it requires, what it asks of its viewer is a kind of accession to the incredible passion with which the attempt is made – or what another, very dissimilar film I saw yesterday would call “love exposure”. This is a difficult thing to ask for and, as was made apparent by the response yesterday, a difficult thing for a viewer to say yes to.&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/03/miff09-review-a-lake-dir-philippe-grandrieux/</link>
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		<title>MIFF09 review: STILL WALKING (dir. Hirokazu Kore-eda)</title>
		<description><![CDATA[

Lately it seems like every year a new film shows up that either proclaims itself or is proclaimed by the most audible voices in criticism as an hommage to the films of Yasujiro Ozu. The latest is Still Walking, by Hirokazu Kore-eda, but already in that act of naming its director we notice something that immediately distinguishes this film from the crowd. Ozu adoration takes on many forms, produces very different effects – sublimity in Hou Hsaio-hsien; devastating pathos in Aki Kaurismaki; mysticist mediocrity in Wim Wenders; inert banality in Vincent Gallo – but it is almost never, interestingly, to be seen in the work of a Japanese filmmaker. Ozu’s body of work is so fundamental to the history of Japanese cinema that inevitably it has been ‘internalized’; just as no Hollywood director can entirely evade the influence of John Ford or Howard Hawks, no Japanese filmmaker can make a film that is not ‘after Ozu,’ inflected by his influence upon how cinema is made in Japan. What this typically means is that, unlike foreign directors who respond to particular, individual attributes of Ozu’s cinema – his unmoving, low-to-the-floor camera setups; his expression of the passing of time and of the generations through the visual motif of the changing seasons; or his achievement of meaning through indirection, with complex and painful emotions and ideas conveyed through mundane everyday conversation – a Japanese filmmaker is unlikely to consider these as isolatable, individually definable elements, but rather as constitutive of the very&#8230;]]></description>
		<link>http://www.screenmachine.tv/2009/08/03/miff09-review-still-walking-dir-hirokazu-kore-eda/</link>
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