Screen Machine

The Storm Warriors is the anticipated sequel to the 1998 Hong Kong film by Andrew Lau The Storm Riders. I haven’t seen the original film, but going by the trailer below the sequel looks like a heady cross between The Matrix, The Lord of the Rings and Dragon Ball Z. It looks insane.
We have five in-season double passes to give away to Screen Machine readers. All you need to do is email your name and address to screenmachinetv@gmail.com with STORM…

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…

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…

Katalin Varga marks the feature film debut of British director Peter Strickland. At 35, Strickland is not particularly young for a newcomer, and so perhaps it is no surprise to learn, as one does from just watching the first few minutes of the film, that he has already learnt his craft extremely well. What is surprising, and which only becomes apparent gradually through watching the film, is that Strickland is not just extremely …

I’m always up in arms about empty film references but what distinguishes Jim Jarmusch from, say, a Quentin Tarantino, is how he uses his film references as a jumping off point to make something new and meaningful. The point of the exercise is not in ‘getting’ the reference but in where he takes it. In The Limits of Control, as in Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, Jarmusch is riffing off Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai but reconfigures it to…

A group of friends go on a holiday by the sea, and after a while one member of the group, a young woman, disappears; the rest of the film chronicles the friends’ attempts to deal with this disappearance. If this description of the plot of Asghar Faradi’s About Elly might give the impression that Faradi is gunning for the position of ‘the Iranian Antonioni’ (as Abbas Kiarostami might be called the Iranian Rossellini, Jafar Panahi the Iranian De Sica, etc.),…

When I first heard about this movie, a couple of months ago, I quickly skimmed the review and got the impression that it was a kind of uplifting documentary about a resilient guy living in Augusto Pinochet’s Chile who uses his love of disco to overcome oppression and fully express his individuality. Fortunately, a day or two before it was due to screen at MIFF, I decided to read about it more closely to see if it’d be worth getting…

Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A film whose soundtrack I’ve known for a long time but which I never expected to get a chance to see, watching Anna at MIFF was a real treat. A little bit Funny Face and a little bit Blowup, as anarchic as Godard but also as loving an ode to the movie musical form as Demy, I guess Anna, which was made for French TV in 1967 and directed by Pierre Koralnik, could most succinctly be…

A friend once remarked to me that, whenever he sees an advertisement for MIFF, he accidentally misreads it as ‘MILF.’ Upon entering the Festival Lounge for the conversation with Anna Karina today, one could have been forgiven for thinking that David Stratton, her interviewer, and many members of the audience had made a similar error. A weird, not terribly satisfactory, and occasionally rather sexist event, the conversation with Ms. Karina offered her a kind of adoration, but an adoration so…

Review by Conall Cash (catabloguing.wordpress.com)
A fun idea for a documentary, Our City Dreams follows five female artists of different ages who have moved to New York City from a variety of locales, and made their lives and their careers there. Attempting to offer impressions of the personality, artistic sensibility and personal history of five different contemporary artists in the space of about ninety minutes, the film is not exactly Rivette’s Belle Noiseuse, but it’s impressive how much it manages to…

Post by Brad Nguyen

TUESDAY 21st: Ang Lee is speaking via satellite at a very early screening of TAKING WOODSTOCK. [Cinema Nova] The cooler kids will be at the PHILOS-o-FACE launch. PHILOS-o-FACE usually makes images of philosophers’ faces into brooches (I have the Deleuze one) but they are making a special batch of directors’ faces for MIFF. At Kids in Berlin, 472 Victoria Street. [PHILOS-o-FACE]
THURSDAY 23rd: Some exciting new releases this week: Legendary action director John Woo tries on his wuxia…

The comedy of Sacha Baron Cohen traffics in causing conservative outrage yet time and time again he courts criticism from what might be badly defined as the Liberal Media. SBC’s latest film, Bruno, in which he plays a flamboyant Austrian fashion journalist on a quest for celebrity stardom in America, is designed to make fun of American homophobia but critics are still calling Bruno a homophobic film. Are they right?

WEDNESDAY 8th: Sacha Baron Cohen’s Bruno opens wide. Following the mixture of mockumentary and real-life pranks of Borat but replacing the misogynist/antisemitic Kazakhstani reporter with an uber-camp fashion reporter from Austria, the film is bound to offend, I dunno, rednecks and gays without a sense of humour.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAGpmNb2xfQ]

THURSDAY 9th: Style Wars, a doco on the birth of hip-hop culture plays at the ACMI until Sunday 12th. Shot in NYC in the early 1980s, Tony Silver’s groundbreaking film documented the new language…

It’s really not a bad likeness. There are some new photos from the upcoming biopic of Serge Gainsbourg. Hopefully coming next year. [The Playlist]
Who would have thought that racial stereotypes would actually become en vogue? First there was Sing Song, the bumbling Asian and the magical negroes of Australia! Very recently we’ve had the jive-talking illiterate black robots of Revenge of the Fallen. Now we have the upcoming Princess and the Frog to look forward to. Princess represents Disney’s return…

Review by Brad Nguyen
Michael Bay’s Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is a fairly perfect encapsulation of the Hollywood summer blockbuster: Big on spectacle, be it two giant robots battling one another or Megan Fox’s ass; and light on coherent plot. And as easy as it would be for me to dismiss the movie, I would be lying if I were to say that the film wasn’t an entertaining and, yes, a fascinating experience

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…

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…

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…

[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…

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…