Viewing posts from category: Review
Matthew O’Shannessy speaks with the creator of the first narrative film put on the internet.
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.
International film festivals, for all their smug self-congratulation, still operate in a (sub)culture which takes the majority of its cues from the mainstream. To wit, barely anyone goes to see a German crime trilogy by three of the most shrewd directors operating in Europe today, but there’s a line snaking around the block for a middling documentary about a goddamn restaurant (El Bulli). The effects of the current fetishisation of food, chefs and restaurants, particularly as visual pleasure, are evident here—but so too is a longer-standing logic in the film market and film audience: Germans make films about their traumatic past which are worth seeing, anything else they make, is not. Basically.
Reviews of new films by Athina Rachel Tsangari and Jan Svankmajer, and two films about children in peril.
Reviews of films by James Benning, Ivan Sen and the Dardennes.
Reviews of three more MIFF films from Whitney Monaghan and Lauren Bliss
Reviews of Li Hongqi’s absurdist comedy, Vibeke Løkkeberg’s doco on the Israel-Palestine conflict and Takashi Miike’s crazed film of a dystopic Tokyo.
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”?
Vaughn demonstrates an innate understanding of the primal dynamics of action cinema, aided by a crack conductor’s sense of tempo and pacing.
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.
The film’s shiny exterior masks the absence of any real thematic, critical, or even personal substance. The film’s slickness -the efficiency with which it delivers a stock-standard, well-worn cinematic experience – is actually the scariest thing about it.
Norma Pearse’s experimental films express ideas about the tensions and mysteries between the spirit and the body.
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.
Somehow this kind of adaptation simultaneously translates and eviscerates the original text, resulting in an anaemic, vacuous experience.
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.
In denying that Ginsberg’s word is gospel, the filmmakers imbue Howl with a playful performativity, that is in fact faithful to its adapted source. The film has fun with Ginsberg’s words, as well as revising his immortalised cult status. As Franco convincingly reads personal admissions from original interview footage, his Ginsberg comes closer to us, and the distance of the cult icon slowly diminishes.
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.
Why is Mary unhappy? Her specific dissatisfactions are not convincing as explanations of her misery, because she’s obviously not committed to resolving them. There is the suggestion, I suppose, that past disappointments may have damaged her appetite for self-awareness and personal development, but I don’t think Leigh is all that concerned with the whys and wherefores of her situation. Quite simply, people like Mary exist, people who define themselves by what they don’t have.
The teenage narrator in The Virgin Suicides’ musings on the Lisbon girls could easily describe the parent-child reversal that occurs between Johnny and Cleo in Somewhere: “We knew the girls were really women in disguise; that they understood love, and even death, and that our job was merely to create the noise that seemed to fascinate them.”
This is not the Coens’ most personal film, but it’s the least permeated by that restless, cerebral energy which occasionally pitches their work over into empty cynicism.
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.
Sam checks out two films from this year’s Japanese Film Festival, currently running at ACMI.
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.
Despite revising the genre of the biopic by combining animation and puppetry with narrative cinema, Gainsbourg is ultimately a Great Man film of the classical Hollywood ilk – a form which, as Dennis Bingham notes, positions its subject as “a visionary with a pure, one of a kind talent or idea who must overcome opposition to his idea or even just to himself.”
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.
David Fincher’s The Social Network is by far the most interesting mainstream American film of this year. If the film ultimately feels like a disappointment, unable, despite its brilliance, to do to us what those depictions of obsession and monstrosity which are Fincher’s masterpieces did, this can’t be explained simply by the fact that those films were about serial killers and ultra-violence, while this is a film about Harvard computer nerds.
The verite aesthetics of Ben Affleck’s follow-up to Gone Baby Gone are undermined by a generic storyline, argues Jessie.
Sam wonders whether Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World really does offend her feminist sensibilities as much as critics say it should.
Jessie is inspired by a night of collaboration between video artists and their dialogue between analog and digital media.
Maggie finds this Australian blockbuster unwilling to confront the racism underlying its premise.
The final day of Whitney’s SUFF 2010 adventure includes an encounter with the much talked about Serbian film, Life and Death of a Porno Gang.
Whitney continues her coverage of this year’s SUFF, by all accounts a considerably more interesting festival than Melbourne’s equivalent.
Seeing as a variation on the above, unforgettable image from Un Chien Andalou is the logo for this year’s Sydney Underground Film Festival, it is fitting that the festival begins with Buñuel and Dali’s surrealist masterpiece. This is a festival that has delighted past attendees with films that literally offend the senses such as John Waters’ classic Pink Flamingos in full odourama (disgusting on so many levels!!).
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”.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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”.
The central tension in The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is between slow adolescent velocities and opposing vectors that press upon the female protagonist’s desires.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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’.
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.
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.
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…
“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
With Thirst, Park Chan-wook, best known for the excellent Vengeance Trilogy of the past few years (Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Oldboy, and Sympathy for Lady Vengeance) takes a welcome step into full on Grand Guignol horror melodrama; only it takes him a bit too long to get there. Park’s best films, particularly Mr Vengeance and Oldboy, are models of dramatic construction; beginning with a simple set-up that slowly, inexorably, spirals down into violence. You come out feeling like you’ve been…
I think with Mother, his fourth feature length work, Bong Joon-ho cements his place as my favourite working director of any nationality. I’ve seen him compared (on the basis of his two previous works; The Host, and Memories of Murder) with Spielberg and Hitchcock, and unlike most such analogies this description manages to be both utterly foolish and somewhat apt. It’s easy to scramble for such names when discussing Bong’s work for two reasons. First, because despite defying most generic…
Lars Von Trier’s Antichrist is a shock to the system even when you know beforehand that the film involves cliterectomies and bloody ejaculations and graphic sex involving Willem Dafoe. But, like his previous films, Antichrist is intellectually stimulating even as it repels you, shifting from cute Lynchian surrealism in the first half to Bataillesque perversions in the second.
The film opens with Willem Dafoe and Charlotte Gainsbourg as a couple having wild animalistic sex while their child climbs out of his…
This short (64-minute), rather slight film, directed by the 100-year old Portuguese master Manoel de Oliveira, is one of the best things I’ve seen at MIFF this year. One particularly lovely scene actually brought some tears to my eyes – an increasingly rare kind of emotional response to be had in the environment of this festival where quick, authoritative judgements are the name of the game. My tears were inexplicable – brought on not by any tragic occurrence in the…
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…
[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…
[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…
[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.
[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.
