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 WARRIORS in the subject line. Easy!

About The Storm Warriors

Legendary heroes Wind & Cloud return in The Storm Warriors. Following Asian box office smash The Storm Riders, this highly anticipated sequel is set to be China’s biggest CGI martial-arts movie (“Wuxia”) to date. Written by the godfather of Hong Kong comics – Ma Wing-Shing – and directed by The Pang Brothers (The Eye, Re-Cycle, Bangkok Dangerous), The Storm Warriors has a simultaneous release in Australia and Asia on December 10, 2009.

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. But we are fortunate to be living at a time when a filmmaker is asking these questions, making these requests of us.

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 competent for a new filmmaker, but that he possesses an astonishingly assured, distinctive visual style and a sophisticated, occasionally devastating capacity with sound.

Filmed and set entirely in the rural wilds of Romania, Katalin Varga chronicles a journey taken by the title character and her son, Orban, after Katalin’s husband banishes them from their home following a scandalous discovery about his wife’s past. It doesn’t take long for the nature of this discovery, and the true nature of Katalin’s journey, to reveal themselves; once they do, the generic character of the film and the events to come is revealed just as quickly: this is to be a ‘rape-revenge’ film, a murderous voyage in search of two men who raped our heroine and thus annulled the possibility for her to ever achieve an innocent, pure union with her husband and child.

If one expects Strickland’s distinctive vision to be manifested through playing with the conventions of the rape-revenge genre, by making striking and disturbing additions or omissions or maneuvers, or by self-consciously ‘drawing attention’ to generic ‘devices,’ as so many textbook accounts of genre in contemporary cinema outline, one is likely to be disappointed. Strickland lets us know early on what kind of film this is, and dwells at great length on the particular moments that construct that generic identity, but he is less interested in genre in itself than in what genre can do, its capacity to construct archetypes and through them to explore, in a highly concentrated form, the ways in which human beings inhabit the world and interact. By announcing from the beginning roughly how its narrative is going to unfold, Katalin Varga invites us to delve intensely into the physical and psychological spaces its characters occupy, to think seriously about questions of motive, personhood, cause and effect in ways that neither generically ‘playful’ nor straightforwardly ‘realistic’ renditions of the same kind of story would allow.

Of course, it’s one thing to make a film that forces the audience to ‘slow down’ and pay attention to the physical environment and the psychological state its characters inhabit; quite another to do this in a way that is powerful and lasting. Strickland, with his restless but assured camera moving in an almost constant horizontal line and his sound palette rendering every crackling twig and every gurgling body of water in scenes that positively throb, achieves this intensity in spades. Because of this sensually rich, ‘affective’ formal quality, and because of Strickland’s fixation upon the darkest of human desires and emotions, the most immediate comparison I can find for his film is the work of Philippe Grandrieux. While Katalin Varga cannot be said to be an achievement of the order of Grandrieux’s first feature, Sombre, that comparison allows us to imagine an exciting path Strickland’s career may follow. A welcome riposte to the dreadful, morally ugly popular revenge films of recent years like Kill Bill and Oldboy, Katalin Varga marks Peter Strickland as a name to remember.

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 create his most overtly political film yet.

What Jarmusch takes from Le Samourai is its alienated assassin whose spartan life is defined by ritual. We meet the nameless assassin (Isaach De Bankolé) as he dons an immaculate suit in an airport toilet, meets a couple of men who give him cryptic instructions and follow him as he meets up with a disparate group of odd people, each with nonsensical instructions to further the assassin on his way. He lives his life by a strict code: no sex, no guns, two espressos in two cups. Like Alain Delon in Le Samourai, Issach De Bankolé is more or less expressionless and silent. But where Le Samourai’s assassin stood for the modern alienated man, the empty rituals of Jarmusch’s protagonist are symbolic of genre/Hollywood cinema.

The Limits of Control may on the surface level be about an assassin’s encounters with a series of spies, but the film might also be best described as being about a filmgoer’s encounters with a series of critics. The designated job of a film critic is to assign a value to a film but what they are really doing is making an argument to determine the way you experience a film. For example, when David Stratton says that The Bourne Ultimatum is ‘nauseating’, he is convincing you that a film with handheld camerawork should be judged as bad and unworthy of consumption. The spies that De Bankolé meets all attempt to engage him in a philosophical conversation – what they are doing is making an argument that he (and we the audience) open ourselves to the endless possibilities of life and cinema, that there is more to all this than just ‘going through the motions’ as capitalism requires. Tilda Swinton’s character tells him that she enjoys films where not much happens and two people are just talking, one of the more obvious points where a character is commenting on the film we are watching. So the film displays a tension between scenes of ‘going through the motions’ – i.e. the generic assassin plot – and scenes where the conventional narrative stops and the dead space allows us to experience the small idiosyncratic pleasures that Jarmusch has to offer: Tilda Swinton’s ridiculous outfit, John Hurt’s monologue on the roots of the word ‘bohemian’, the view from a train window of Spain’s landscapes, Paz de la Huerta’s ass. The point Jarmusch is making is that though the audience’s pleasure from cinema might be derived from ritual, as in, the strict adherence to formula, such modes of viewing deprive us of pleasure, just as Issach De Bankolé’s rituals deprive him of the pleasure of banging Paz de la Huerta. There are no universal referents for determining a ‘good film’: “everything is subjective”. There is so much more to gain from art when one learns to dispense with the capitalist imperative towards homogeneity.

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.), that turns out to not really be the case. Despite lifting its storyline straight from the art cinema classic L’Avventura, About Elly is very much a mainstream film with mainstream concerns; it has nothing in particular to do with the great Iranian cinema of Kiarostami, Mohsen Makmalbaf and others. Seen in this light, though, the film eventually reveals itself to be very good for what it is. Though I can’t say I exactly understand why both of its sessions at MIFF have been sold out days in advance – nor why, given this immense popularity of an Iranian film, the festival organizers couldn’t even bring themselves to program Kiarostami’s fascinating new work, Shirin (which screened at the Sydney Film Festival) – About Elly is certainly a sensitively acted, thought-provoking film.

Unlike Antonioni, Faradi uses the situation of the missing, probably drowned woman to make sharp observations about his society, particularly its treatment of women and marital relationships. One could sense that this was probably the point of interest for much of the audience, the reason for the film’s apparent buzz – the pointed laughter with which the crowd greeted every indication of sexism or religiosity from a male character became itself rather funnier and more sociologically revealing than the film we were watching. But About Elly, fortunately, is not as straightforward a depiction of ‘the state of things’ in Iran as some might want it to be. It leaves you with as many questions as answers, a sense that you have got to know a group of people and the social world in which they live, and a wish to live in that world a little longer – all things that good mainstream films should do.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y51412YuuD0]

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 to, and discovered that it was to be quite a different animal than I’d initially gathered. Both unrelentingly ‘realist’ in that gritty way of much ‘world cinema’ that gets currency on the festival circuit and at the same time offering itself and its central character, Raul, as a kind of social allegory of the Chile of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero is definitely not a documentary, and definitely not uplifting.

Raul is obsessed with Tony Manero, the character played by John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever. Every week he goes and sees the movie when it plays at a nearby cinema, and repeats every line that comes out of Travolta’s mouth in English that he has clearly learnt solely from watching this film. When anyone appears to get in the way of his determination to become ‘the Chilean Tony Manero,’ like when the projectionist at the cinema one week runs Grease instead of SNF, Raul does something horribly violent to them. The whole time he maintains the same dour expression, evincing neither joy while dancing nor violent lust while beating someone up nor desperate anxiety when the cops nearly spot him out after curfew one night. Eventually it begins to become apparent that, in his determined, illogical, joyless quest to become a perfect imitation of this American screen icon, Raul is representative of a Chile, under the brutal control of Pinochet and the economic policies of the ‘Chicago boys,’ that identifies with the glittery signifiers of American-style capitalism, without having any of the inner experience that can possibly make it meaningful, emotionally resonant or even comprehensible; a totally power-hungry, totally corrupt, totally dictatorial kind of capitalism, wherein personal expression only comes in the form of mindlessly mimicking the voice and the gestures of the master.

In its expectation that we regard its central character as both incredibly, viscerally ‘real,’ complex and unknowable, and at the same time as an allegorical figure, Tony Manero invites comparison with Paul Thomas Anderson’s recent There Will Be Blood. If Larrain is not nearly as formally accomplished a director as Anderson, his film is perhaps the more intellectually and politically ambiguous (and hence, in some sense, more engaging) of the two, because its allegorizing is not quite so neat and straightforward, leaving plenty for the viewer to ponder and debate over once the film’s over. I’m still not really sure how much I like the film, but the fact that I’m still trying to figure that out five hours after it finished is an indication of the mark it leaves upon your brain, if you allow it to.

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 described as an extremely successful combination of Nouvelle Vague stylings and Serge Gainsbourg/Yé-Yé style rock’n’roll. With music by Gainsbourg and a cast featuring, aside from the man himself, Anna Karina, Jean-Claude Brialy and Marianne Faithfull, the film is a zany, endlessly entertaining delight.

Brialy, as the fashion advertising executive (or something) who falls in love with the photograph of a girl that he finds in his company’s dark room (note the Funny Face reference), doesn’t so much play a character as enact a sequence of poses of lovesickness, as if he were doing a theatrical performance of the fragments that make up Roland Barthes’ A Lover’s Discourse. Karina, as the girl in the photograph who Brialy never recognizes as the same person because whenever he sees her she’s wearing a rather adorable pair of glasses, is also not really required to ‘act’ in any terribly dynamic way, but it’s to her credit that she manages not only to convey grace and loveliness, but to be genuinely convincing as a lonely, hopeful but often disappointed young woman, as her character is for the first part of the film. Gainsbourg of course has enough charm, wit and ‘screen presence,’ as they say, to steal the whole movie away from its two main stars, which is perhaps why he’s sensible enough to only show up for a couple of scenes. The musical sequences are brilliant not so much for their choreography as for their editing, which dispenses with continuity not for the sake of a Godardian ‘up yours’ to Hollywood, but because there’s just way too much fun stuff going on to bother with the conventions.

Anna Karina did another Q&A after this screening, which was rather more successful, as the immediacy of just having seen the film encouraged people to ask more direct and specific questions, and also because there was no David Stratton.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ODR77SCzn5U]

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 totally defined by an understanding of her as ‘muse’ to a series of great men – Jean-Luc Godard, Jacques Rivette, Serge Gainsbourg – that there wasn’t much for her to do besides tell some stories about these great men as the private individuals she knew. Ms. Karina was and still is a very charming woman, but with her limited English she wasn’t able to steer the conversation in more interesting directions, even on the rare occasions – in fact, there was only one, when a young woman in the audience asked her to talk about maintaining a sense of her own femininity in her (private and public) relationships with these men – at which the opportunity arose. Most of the time it was a kind of cozy lovefest, the weird thing being that the objects of this love were not entirely present: on the one hand, the various men Karina worked with in the early part of her career, who constituted the real interest for Stratton and much of the audience; and on the other, Karina’s younger self. Sadly, she couldn’t make it, and given the suffocatingly adoring atmosphere of this event, the Anna Karina of today didn’t have much of an opportunity to showcase the intelligence, the liveliness always tempered by a twinge of resignation, for which we all love her work. Just once did a flash of this come across, when she remarked, in a manner that indicated a simultaneous sense of excited recollection and slight sadness, that her relationship with Godard had been a lot like Shaw’s Pygmalion. Then everybody laughed, and moved onto another question about “Who was the best director you worked with and why?”

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 pack in given its limitations, without feeling at all cluttered. It helps that the filmmaker, Chiara Clemente, has chosen five immensely likable, interesting women as her subjects, so that even in the cases where we may not really have been offered much insight into the artist’s work, we feel as though we’ve got to know them so well that we’ll be sure to make a note to read up about their work afterwards. Ultimately, this motivation that the film leaves you with to go and find out more about each of the artists is far more significant than the overall structure with which Clemente surrounds the individual portraits; despite the traveling shots of various cityscapes that pop up between each segment, and the use of NY-centric music on the soundtrack (from cool Brooklyn bands like Japanther to Gershwin-style standards), not much of an impression of New York is really offered, beyond showing it to be a place where, if you’re successful, you can get a pretty big apartment and/or studio space to make your art in. Perhaps this flaw could be read as indicative of the sometimes-remarked lament that the contemporary New York art scene lacks a real sense of community and collaboration, but fortunately these five artists (particularly Marina Abramovic, who comes across both as the most well-spoken and the most artistically dynamic of the lot) are impressive and approachable enough to dispel any serious discontentment.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzw-LoEUiJw]

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 epic with Red Cliff, American independent director Jim Jarmusch tries on his existential art-noir with Limits of Control and Sam Raimi returns to his horror roots with Drag Me to Hell.

• FRIDAY 24th: Opening night of the Melbourne International Film Festival which is running until August 9. I, of course, will be blogging and tweeting from the festival and, in the event that you should want to stalk and kill me, I’ve written up my MIFF schedule as a note on my Facebook page. Despite the slightly depressing popularist vibe of MIFF’s marketing campaign and the fact that most of the films are really just preview screenings for films that are being released this year by local distributors, there is still some interesting films on offer. I’m personally excited about the new Hirokazu Kore-eda film Still Walking and watching Willem Dafoe ejaculate blood and talk to a fox in Antichrist but, you know, to each their own. [MIFF]

• SUNDAY: Really one of the best films of the year that no one is talking about, Summer Hours (dir. Olivier Assayas) is playing in a matinee session. [Astor]