SHADOWS

Shadows 2009-2011: R.I.P.?

2012-01-24T15:20:00.001+11:00


Actually the last day of MIFF 2009, but I thought the pout matched my mood.

From autumn 2009 to summer 2011 I projected movies on to a wall and then a screen at a gallery in Collingwood. I had a conviction about the need for an alternative cinema experience somewhere between a dvd night and the long gone arthouses of this town. It was meant to be both relaxed and challenging. Going by the people I met while doing this, talking and drinking with them, I got the message that I was doing a pretty good job.

I screened my last at ABC Gallery in December 2011 with the understanding that if continued in the same venue in 2012 it would have to be on a night other than the usual Friday as mine host Milos needed the night to spend more time with his son. That outranked my film night so I began thinking of putting feelers out for a similar venue. If I'd been planning to try to talk Milos around to resuming on Fridays with a different frequency those plans were dashed with his plummeting fortunes in January 2012 when he suffered a stroke and was given two weeks notice to quit the gallery. (If you think I'm being frivolous about this issue, read the previous two posts.)

I made a tentative query to the folk at Long Play in North Fitzroy who were generous with their information and open to discussion. Their discouragement of Friday as a regular night was given with pragmatic reasons but were happy to discuss other nights of the week. They are kept in mind. There are other avenues and existing options that I will be investigating over the next few months. But things have changed for me, as well.

First, I have been working on my graphic novel The Monsoons for years now and I am using this hiatus from Shadows as an opportunity to finish it. My blog Monsoon Days, detailing the process and background, is also taking up both time and enthusiasm.

Second, I'll have to confess to some exhaustion where Shadows is concerned. This has nothing to do with my love of sharing these films. And I haven't run out of them. It does have to do with the fact that even in 2011, when my lowest numbers were higher than the average attendances of the previous years, I perceived a drop in the audience which was only indirectly related to its size. The drop I've been noticing is in the acceptance of the very material the night was established to offer.

I had one curatorial goal in mind with Shadows and that was the message that cinema is a blank canvas. It's just a medium. A painting doesn't have to resemble its subject literally. A poem doesn't have to rhyme. Music does not need melody. Cinema does not need narrative, even if it's fiction. So, if a movie plays fair by declaring itself in the first ten or so minutes to be outside of convention, don't judge it through convention. I'm sorry if that offends anyone but it's just common sense.

No one needs a degree to understand that something's out of the ordinary. And if you do understand that, isn't it better to ask why it took that different path rather than complain about it as though all films are an extension of the general service industry and should be made to a tiny set of standards? I began to receive so much intolerance of the diversity I was trying to celebrate that I had to concede that I'd failed. At best, I was providing entertainment in a homey environment. Nothing wrong with that, it's fun, it's just that my purpose had been knocked out of the ring. So while I still relish the idea of putting on adventures in movies, for the moment, in this breath, I also dread it.

I know, I know. It wasn't you. And it wasn't every night. I was frequently gratified to find some difficult pieces met with open arms. I also learned to include titles that would please rather than stimulate and there was more than a little resignation involved in this. See, I didn't want to establish some rarefied circle of connoisseurs, I wanted to take the kind of thing typically considered exclusive, and reach out with it, demonstrate that, for all its obscurity or idiosyncrasy, this or that film had real things to offer, "quality" and high culture be buggered.

This means that, however temporarily, I am back to doing the thing I wanted to extend rather than rely on, dvd nights in with friends. I love doing that but loved more the opportunity of using the current accessible technology to go beyond my circle of friends to any who could make it to the dark of the screenings to taste something new.

So, I might be back but if I am it won't be for months yet and I have no idea where. Meantime you could do worse than check out Screen Sect at Bar Open, Fitzroy, Cine Cult at 303 High St, Northcote and the ones who almost stole my title, Shadow Electric at the Abbotsford Convent. I know I will be.

That vented, I thank you, I thank you all: ye comers and bummers, cinematic gourmands and holiday makers in unfamiliar climes, ye textbook bashing guardians of form and cine-Pollyannas, ye scriveners and disciples of the sprocket and the perforation, ye slaves unto the image, ye spielers of the spool, ye custodians of cool, ye talkers, ye baulkers, ye seven-rule chalkers, ye teachers, preachers, screechers and beseechers of the flickered visage, ye tickled and ye soured, ye bored and snoring sailors of the rapid eye movement, ye bold invigorated, ye toe-testing newbies, ye architects of new sensation whose thrill-quest beats the scoobies, ye dogmagogues and spirit-chasers, ye dipsos of the framerate, ye critics and ye cynics and ye early-cab-sav mimics, ye mudrakers and champions, ye hedonites and scions, and all ye blazing grenadiers of the shadows who came to see and hear and yell and drink and laugh and silently consume the light before you and all the sounds around you in the spirit of the adventure of the Notion: thanks for coming.

PJ

This one IS from a Shadows night. Meg, Dean and Kate.

Milos on the mend: slow but sure

2012-01-23T00:08:00.000+11:00

Chris, Sonia and I went to visit Milos on Saturday afternoon. He's currently in the St George branch of St Vincents out in Kew. Having heard little of his developing condition I had only the vaguest notion of what to expect but when we got to his room we found him awake and pleased to have company, sitting in a motorised wheelchair. It had been reclined for his comfort. He looked like a suburban dad in it.

He launched straight into the story of how he came to be there, the morning when he woke dizzy and wobbly which degenerated into the stroke that got him. Very luckily, his co-tenant Alexander realised something was wrong and he was hospitalised within an hour of the attack. With strokes the sooner they are treated the better chances of recovery.

He came to in hospital, disorientated and unfocused, confusingly not in control of his movements or will. The days that followed brought details back to him in the form of memories returning as well as visitors. He says he remembers the visit that Miriam and I made but my own memory includes experience of his tact.

If I had worried that we would be staring around the room in silence for an hour I needn't have. Milos told us of the attack, the days in hospital and being brought here to Kew where he will be for perhaps another two months in recovery. What this means is that you have that time to pay him your own visit, if you can. He will greatly appreciate it.

He jokingly asked me when my next screening was on and while I left that at a smile, one thought led to another and Sonia suggested getting a portable dvd player. We went thirds in one just after the visit. I'd told him I had relabelled some of the old Shadows discs to make them more recognisable and put them in a satchel. I'll add a few more to the collection and we'll deliver the player and discs within the next week. (Could you part temporarily with a dvd or two while he's there?)

One thing that hasn't been affected by the stroke is the Milosian sense of daily comedy. He told us he'd been banned from operating the wheel chair as he kept hitting other patients while he was distracted by the pictures on the wall and the better looking nurses. So he's back to L plates.

Just after he had been relocated from St Vincents in Fitzroy to the Kew facility he waited in his room, examining the walls. A doctor came in to check his chart. She was Indian, and beautiful. An hour later a cleaner came in to set up the adjoining bathroom. She was Indian. Shortly after that a pair of nurses came to help him into bed. Both Indian and pleasing to the eye. Later in the afternoon a decidedly Anglo doctor came in and asked a question to test his sense of orientation: "Do you know where you are?" asked the doctor.

"India," said Milos flatly.

It was probably the first occasion when his temporary incapacity to smile fully served his humour faithfully.

A visit or series of them would help to exercise those facial muscles, methinks.

PJ

Room 2, Level 1

St Georges Rehabilitation Centre

283 Cotham Rd. Kew

98160444

Goodbye, ABC: Thank You, Thank You, Thank You, Milos

2012-01-15T14:00:00.001+11:00

Those of you who came to have such fun at the last Shadows Screening of 2011 and were there for my introduction will recall that I suggested that it would be the last screening for the year but perhaps also forever. Well, I'm glad you remember that as it will serve to cushion the blow I'm about to deliver. Actually, two blows and, considering the focus of this blog it's hard to know which to start with.

Actually, it isn't. The most important news is that Milos Manoljovic suffered a stroke last week. He's ok. He's as ok as people who have strokes can be. He can speak and move but will require continued treatment to get him back on his feet and walking amongst us. This might take months. He has been given two week's notice by the owner of the ABC Gallery who, again, has failed to put an application into this year's Nobel Peace Prize. No more Milos at the ABC.

As there is nothing I can do about that I'm going to spend a few paragraphs thinking about this.

I loved films at ABC. From the moment I walked into the Gallery in the winter of 2007 I was hooked. A friend of mine Dean, was showing one Japanese horror film I loved and another that I hadn't seen. I'd been to small time enthusiast's film nights over many years and knew what to expect: a ratting super-8 projector near the door of a small white room peopled by a lot of bereted students on cushions on the floor, their legs going numb from the cramped elegance enforced upon them, a pair of casks of red and white goon warming in the corner, some naff but fun old public service announcement shorts form the cold war about self-preservation in the event of a commie H-bomb going off in your neighbourhood, and maybe a Russ Meyer flick or two. Ok, I'll go along to one and say I've been. Well...

There was a bar, a real bar, and it had a real licence. And there was a digital projector which was busy casting a BIG picture on to the white wall at the other end of the large space. The walls between were crowded with canvases which had an intriguing ... lurk to them. The sound was crystal clear. All I had to do was choose a chair at one of the unmatched cafe style tables and watch the film.

The wall where the movie was moving was whitewashed brick. It had a texture. Here and there a nail or rivet or something stuck out form the surface creating its own miniature De Chirico shadow on the image. I couldn't have cared less. I was being treated to a Japanese horror film which I had no idea existed. Its title was Matango and I couldn't place its vintage. It was so thickly atmospheric and intriguing that I forgot all about the wall's bumps and spikes, sipped wine and relaxed into complete absorption.

Dean carries his own personal sharpness effortlessly, he has some good ideas. One of them was that a good cinema only needs a projected image and sound and a place to comfortably watch and listen. That achieved it could happen in an igloo. We had just lost our last major art house in Melbourne. Well, here it was, as fresh as a whim, right in front of me. Dean had thought it up and done it. What else could I want? More, that's all. More.

I got it. We all did. Time Capsules gave us unjustly forgotten whackfests like Nicholas Ray's Bigger than Life, more Japanese genre that I hadn't even scratched the surface of in my own wanderings, whole nights of blasting obscure and trippy animations from the world of history and the history of the world, Busby Berkley's cosmic Broadway rubbing shoulders with flavoursome delicacies and rare finds. Time Capsules was a tribute to free thought in the projected image and hooked my Thursday nights. After the film there were people to meet and argue with (in a good serious fun way) and there was whiskey, beer and wine. Somewhere between an arthouse cinema, cool bar and a dvd night with friends it often felt like a shared discovery and a celebration of it to follow.

This was the answer. It called out from the void left by the closure of the arthouses mid 2000s. People not only doing it for themselves but defying the unspoken directive to huddle indoors for dvd nights. It brought the crowd back, the strangers in the dark who are the best people to share an unseen film with. A bar and an attitude of the purest fuck-you to the assembly line of the mainstream. It was gold class arthouse.

I ran a few screenings with three others in 2008 when Dean scheduled some travel. I chose four titles, wrote them up on his blog, read about them and presented them. Dean had curated his screenings, taking care to read an introduction to each, priming his audience for the night's discovery. So did I. And if going to the screenings had been zappy putting them on was pure thrill. When the opportunity came for me to do my own I seized it.

This is where the mighty Milos really comes in. It was his place all along and he ran the bar with a saturnine humour, keeping the punters going with his tongue-in-cheek observations, opining from deep thought on the films just seen, lodging a log splitter into a tree stump, lifting it over his head and bringing it crashing down on to the concrete floor in a single motion and feeding the wood heater with the shattered remains. We needed heat. That's where we got it from.

It was Milos who encouraged the nights. He kept them going. With my varying fortunes in the first year of Shadows I decided to begin the new year with an unintentionally disastrous dual program which served by a schedule that no one could decipher. After the inevitable first few fizzers it was Milos who said: just go weekly again, we'll work it out. I did and slowly rebuilt. And patiently, Friday after Friday, he prepared the room, swung the tables and chairs into place, chopped the wood and stoked the fires, made sure there was ice and enough beer and wine. And even at my abject screenings, the ones that drew in a mighty four or five, he silenced my protests that I would really get people coming in for the next one, by saying: I like the night, anyway, people will come if they want to. He'd then pour me a wine and refuse my money.

The first year was not all gas and gaiters (what is, though, seriously? Sounds horrible, doesn't it, GAS and GAITERS) and my struggling effort was frequently interrupted by either a double booking or an invasive one. My earnest complaints about this had to be swept under the rug when I realised that I was still very lucky to be continuing with the thing when it was bringing in so few people and not fulfilling its promise or my amibitions for it. It would have been both justifiable and merciful for him to terminate Shadows and just host parties instead which would at least have paid his rent. But, no, after the interruption I just came back and he let me.

As things slowly improved at the screenings, attendances first stabilising and then, last year, swelling, I understood that I was only there because Milos enjoyed the idea of it. Not just because he got a crowd of people to meet on a Friday night or saw the occasional film that surprised or delighted him from the menu of great dirges I prefer to show the world. He let me because he liked what I was trying to do. It was important to him.

When I heard the news of his attack last week I went to visit him with friend and Shadows regular, Miriam, who'd told me the news. Hospitals make me feel frail but this was necessary. We got in early evening and found the ward. He was asleep, fathoms down into a profound slumber. We went for a stroll to chat and bide some time before trying again. This time he stirred. Miriam spoke to him but he was so woozed out by his condition and whatever they had given him to allow his landing some ease. He looked at Miriam and then at me, he didn't seem to hear us speak his name, he saw two strangers at his bedside. There was nothing we could do so we left quietly.

The heatwave had broken and the evening was bright and cool. I shuffled back home and then on to the thing I was going to, seeing nothing but those strange, uncomprehending blue eyes. It was haunting me. And then I remembered he didn't have his glasses on. He's virtually blind without them. We might as well have been Bert and Pattie Newton for all he knew.

Reports kept coming in. He was affected by the event but recovering. Miriam called after a later visit with a happier impression and suggested I hot foot it to St Vinnies before Milos got shipped out to Kew for months of physio. No definite date on it but I figured I could leave it till the next day. So I fronted up and found out from the pleasantest receptionist I've encountered in a long while that I'd missed him by about four hours. She offered to put me through to the Kew facility but I declined with thanks and left working out how I was going to get there in the coming weeks. It'll happen. It'll have to. It's too important not to.

So, and by now this other bit really does feel like the soft news story it is, no more Shadows at ABC. I'll look and ask around but I've had a pretty good run, had some fun and maybe even reached out and touched a few. For that, I have to thank Milos Manojlovic.

St Georges Health Service, Kew

Review: Melancholia

2012-01-04T11:45:00.001+11:00

Fade in. The gold and ice beauty of Kirsten Dunst. Her gaze is resigned. Objects fall through the unfocussed light behind her. They are birds plummeting to earth. Charlotte Gainsbourg carries a child and runs across a golf course, her feet sinking into the damp turf and leaving dark holes behind her. A black horse struggles to stand but collapses. A huge blue planet moves into earth like two movie stars' heads coming together for a screen kiss. The world is ending. This is how Melancholia begins.

The opening sequence seemed absurdly long until it dawned that I was watching an overture. I was listening to one, as well. The gigantic plaintive musical theme that I couldn't quite place was revealed with a little googling to be the overture from Wagner's Tristan and Isolde. Then, after we see the fate of everyone we are about to see in the film we get a chapter title with the name Justine.

And then we have comedy. An extreme high shot of a narrow winding country lane. Into this small scaled nature moves a huge white stretch limo that is not going to make it from the bottom of the frame to the top without a lot of trouble. Inside the car are newlyweds Justine and Mike (Kirsten Dunst and Aleksander Skarsgard, the Viggo Mortensen you have when you can't have Viggo, also known as Eric the Viking Vampire from True Blood). Both of them have fun trying to get the monster car through the tiny lane. When they finally get to the reception at the mansion owned by Justine's bro-in-law they are met by a frowning sister, Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) who reminds them that they are two hours late and the reception is now all but ruined.

The reception has cost Claire's husband John (Keifer Sutherland) so much money he never names the sum but continually introduces the topic into conversation. Justine's father (John Hurt) is a happy drunk whose sad resignation to his life's failure gives him a shambling dignity. His ex and Justine's mother Gaby (Charlotte Rampling) is an arid and bitter woman who is bursting to let everyone know what she thinks of marriage. Justine's boss (Stellan Skarsgard, Aleksander's father: not relevant but we're going through family relations so what the hell?) is still at work in his wedding tuxedo sending his bug eyed nephew after Justine to get a tag line for an ad.

Etc etc ... A complex sprawling told in more or less real time with use of shaky cam digital video. Sounds like blergh? Maybe but it proves compelling. The mass of inter-relations and microplotting that give this chapter its Pieter Breughel the Elder earthy grandeur is all backdrop, though. This isn't Festen nor is it attempting to be. At the centre of this happily chaotic celebration there lurks a dark spirit. Justine proceeds to alienate everyone present (everyone!). It takes her a while but she goes about it patiently and certainly. By the end she is alone.

Chapter 2 is Claire. Charlotte Gainsbourg talks to her husband Kiefer Sutherland about her fear that the big blue planet Melancholia is about to fly by the earth will really collide with it, rendering everything they are and know to space dust. He tries to reassure her that that won't happen and as an amateur astonomer is keenly looking forward to the event. In these doubting days the family takes delivery of Claire's half sister Justine who is so deeply into her affliction that she has to be coaxed to lift her foot to step into the bathtub. As Claire forages in every human corner for hope, Justine, in chilling resignation, tells her that there is no justifiable hope and that they must give up to the inevitable end of days.

There are directors who never seem to go out of fashion and whose whole body of work is labelled good in polite society. The Coens are in this group. There are others whose work features an exception either way. People who loathe David Lynch will usually give him Blue Velvet or Muholland Drive. And there are director's whose place at the top of conversants' admiration has long been cold and vacant, regardless of their output since. Lars von Trier lives here.

He has been generally out of favour since Breaking the Waves back in the mid 90s. And then there was Dogme 95 which kept him there. And then there was a series of foot in mouth gaffes at press conferences that had him virtually put a "kick me" sign on his own back. The most recent one of these was his rambling admiration for Hitler's architect Albert Speer which turned both weird and sour as Kirsten Dunst beside him quite visibly wished she was somewhere else (Youtube it!).

For me, I take von Triers' films one at a time. I don't hate any outright but some I don't care much about. What I do like is his steady hand at melodrama (see also Almodovar for this as a redeeming feature) his ease with experimentation and the warm and deep results of his direction of actors. I took some pains above to list some of the cast because it's a splendid one and unusual for such roll calls, not one is wasted nor allowed to phone it in.

I've enjoyed Kirsten Dunst as a screen presence since the Interview with the Vampire way back when and have found that she drives even indifferent vehicles well (Mona Lisa Smile). Along with the Gyllenhall siblings she is among the most compelling of her screen generation, lifting whole films with little effort. Even though she is in such fine company here and the playing is more ensemble than individual, her performance centres the whole two hours twenty minutes.

That is important to this film because, although it has been dismissively called Festen meets Armageddon, Melancholia is neither social realism nor sci fi. All told this film is not about a wedding gone wrong nor an interplanetary disaster it is about depression. The grinding black defeat of depression is present in every frame and its host is Kirsten Dunst's performance. Whether facing off the lens in the first shot with an unblinking gaze of certainty, swaying drunkenly by herself in the golden-hued crowd at the reception, chugging a great quantity of cognac straight from a bottle of Hennessy XO, suddenly crying into her favourite food at the dinner table or quietly preparing her sister and nephew for the end of the world, Dunst holds us with her glacial precision. There is no warmth in this embrace but we don't want to disengage, so powerful, so pitiable, so pure. This is a fable of depression and has at its heart the kind of simple message that all fables must carry. In this case a single word will do: Cope!

My 2011

2011-12-31T09:45:00.004+11:00

What kind of year was 2011 at the cinema for me? A slightly more active one than the previous five. Some Picks:

Disappointed that:

We Need to Talk About Kevin ventured no further than its virtuoso character and issue construction.

Sion Sonno moved back into conventional three-act territory after offering such bold and thrilling rides in pieces like Suicide Circle and Strange Circus. Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance played far more conventionally than they needed to and rest on lower rungs in the Sonno's ladder o' greatness as a result.

I Love You Phillip Morris could not survive the best attempts by its star to provide as true a portrayal of a rotter/cad/etc as he could muster. Love did not mitigate interpersonal atrocity for this bum on a seat.

Jane Eyre wasn't very interesting even though it succeeded in importing some freshness into the much filmed story.

Burning Man, having introduced a finely crafted time-shattering method of examining a serious situation too soon lost control of it.

Gratified that:

The Woman not only excelled at everything it attempted, provided real horror and provoked thought but broke its director out from a string of self-defeating "good ideas".

Black Swan declared its hand early but kept to its purpose so stubbornly that it transcended the tributary slide show it was initially and soared into high nutso greatness. Thank you Darren Arranofsky for not doing a Gus Van Sant on us and going all mainstream. Black Swan is a mainstream film by distribution and mood but retains the individuality of an auteur. Good job.

End of Animal kept to its odd brief, demonstrating again the need for a steady hand at the helm when daunting weather is ahead. Also, very good to see the continuation of South Korean cinema gem production.

A big thank you to:

Pedro Almodovar for surprising me with a film that chose against expected directions. The Skin I Live In is a treat. Don't be fooled by the spolier-avoiding trailer.

Nicholas Winding-Refn for giving us an action movie that was both old fashioned and new. The constantly effective Drive thrilled me despite a saggy final act.

Justin Kerzel for a crime thriller that examined the roots of atrocity, unflinchingly staring at the family values at the heart of this monstrosity. Snowtown was a triumph. Animal Kingdom team, this is how it's done.

Richard Lowenstein and Lynn-Maree Milburn for Autoluminescent: Rowland S. Howard which showed that a tribute to an artist can be sincere without being sucky. Martin Scorsese, you tried with the film about George but you couldn't get close (to either your subject or the Howard film).

Apichatpong Weerasethakul for showing us in Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives that a theme like death can be celebratory and that a whimsical touch can also carry great weight.

Film o' the year?

The Woman

Review: The Skin I Live In: Almodovar lives well

2011-12-29T23:58:00.001+11:00

There is something very strange going on at the Ledgard place. Roberto, a plastic surgeon is nurturing the care and recovery of a woman in a skin suit who possibly has crippling burns to most of her body. She lives from day to day being served food and reading material via a dumb waiter while she makes bizarre sculptures out of clay and torn clothes. The servants obey her but she is a prisoner.

Roberto comes home from a lecture in which he strongly hints that he has crossed the line in an experimental procedure involving synthesised skin. He turns on the giant screen in his den and luxuriates over the sight of his patient, an unwrinkled beauty turned away with all the glory of her posterior view on show. Noticing something, he rushes to her room and finds that she has slashed her wrists. Having an impeccably well equipped operating theatre at home he is able to stitch her up and lecture her, advising that the jugular is a better choice for those serious about their suicide.

Who is she? If not his dead wife is she someone he has saved from a similar fate (she burned to death in a car accident) and fashioned in the image of his beloved? Why? And why does all this just seem to coast?

Whoopsie! Six years earlier ...

No, this film is still in cinemas and it is so fragile against spoilers that I'm stopping here. I can say that the plot involves the most troubling act of revenge I have ever seen depicted on screen. Also, that if you go to this film expecting one of Almodovar's slightly off kilter melodramas keep thinking that and enjoy the ride. He has never gone so far into the realm of fable as he does here but this is no fairy tale. Also, if you feel that you've given it forty-five minutes of your time and it really isn't moving anywhere, sit tight, it moves.

If possible scenes of surgical violence turn you off be advised that you'll find NONE here. Aldmodovar has exercised great grace in removing any distracting gore from a tale that might be red with it in lesser hands. No, he is not concerned with violence. There's plenty of anger here, anger at the human race sinking into its own hell, anger at the anger and counter anger at that. And there is grief, grief that strains toward a naive kind of perfection which rewards its witnesses with a show of futility. (I'm reaaaaaally trying to avoid spoilers here.)

So what can I say about it? I can say that loss, a long standing theme for Almodovar, is here given the gravest treatment he's yet mustered. But, typically, it is given a setting both recognisable and fantastic. This helps any who approach to concentrate on the carefully constructed emotional maelstrom on screen.

Banderas, who came to the world through Almodovar's powerful but unglamorous roles, continues here with a performance that respects its author's care. He is pitiable and menacing by turns and, somehow, always caring. Beside him is the always wonderful Elena Anaya (see here for notes on the superb Hierro -- scroll down). There's one objection I have to her performance but it necessitates a spoiler but there is one scene, as old as folk tales, where she cannot reveal who she is to loved ones without a cataclysm: her decision grinds behind her eyes as her love and her pain fight to the death.

I'm on and off with this director. Sometimes his comedies wear (I think I'm the only person who has seen it who finds Women on the Verge a drag). And sometimes his melodramas bore. Mostly I find his great Rabelasian humanity a joy. But now and then, he'll leap from the shadows with something tough and beautiful at once, a new thing. That's what he's got here.

Bugger the new Mission Impossible in IMAX. Go for a thrill for your inner core. Go see this one.

Why Spider Baby is a better film than Schindler's List: a Xmas reflection

2011-12-25T10:21:00.000+11:00

Before going any further, please read this: I am not writing about the Holocaust. This blog post is concerned with a film that includes a representation of it. The event is rightly recalled with strong emotion ... but it's not what I'm talking about.

Anyway ...

Think about it:

A man responsible for a group of outsiders tries to keep the threat of the world away from them until he is forced to grave action.

A con artist exploits a group of outsiders until he is forced to feel for them and delivers a sickeningly self-serving speech about not doing enough.

Which one would you rather watch?

Spider Baby (the first description above) presents itself as an exploitation film. Family servant, Max is caretaker to a doomed family. The Merryes have a disease named after them. It's a form of galloping dementia which begins eroding their intellect in childhood. Enter city slicker cousins, unaffected by the condition who, with their shyster lawyer want to sell the property and live off the proceeds. The kids, with their ethical capacity disappearing but with young physiques, are dangerous (from the first scene on). Max tries to please everybody but understands that this is impossible. What he does is brutal but guided by nothing but despair at morality offering a better way.

Oskar Schindler is a spieler, going from table to table at nighclubs, making a big splash, putting himself about until he's noticed by the local movers and shakers and talks his way into manufacturing contracts. It's 1940s Europe and the movers and shakers wear swastikas and can offer free labour. Oskar has no problem with this and happily sets up his factory. Also setting up shop is Amon Goeth, another one of those darned Nazis who rolls into town and sets up the labour supply for Oskar's franchise. Amon has further orders than just keeping order and when Oskar witnesses one of Amon's massacres he begins to grow a conscience. After that he protects his workforce with ever cleverer schemes until they are effectively retarding the German war effort. So far this could be Hogan's Heroes.

But it isn't and for the very good reason that helming this venture is a director whose taste for bad guys is like a junkie's for junk. Scenes of Ralph Fiennes doing the kind of things that every bullied boy in the world daydreams about are the most magnetic in this film. At one point Goeth rises from his sexual bed to enjoyh a cigarette on the balcony and some idle target practice with a hunting rifle. He bends to the ledge and leaves his cigarette there, aims, fires, kills, swings around for another target and as he does, picks up the cigarette with his lower lip and aims again. The woman he's spent the night with complains about the noise of the rifle. He tells her to shut up.

When I saw this scene in the cinema when the film was new it trumped everything that had preceeded it and all that was to follow. It was a perfectly realised expression of male id, a man was doing what he felt like with no one to stop him. This is after the lower key but still remarkable entrance of the character whose first line is one of selfish profanity. However laddish and arch Schindler has been painted he has just been trumped. Thereafter something curious happens...

To give this weight I'll need to inform or remind my reader that Stephen Speilberg declared that he got in touch with his ancestral tradition in the making of this film. Where he had been raised outside of Judaism he now craved to identify with the victims of this atrocity. He declared that after this film he could no longer depict Nazis getting comically dispatched as they were in the Indiana Jones films. I'm not going to doubt his sincerity here.

But why, then, in a film that attempts to be the definitive mass for the victims of genocide, does the audience crave the screen presence of the perpetrators? Goeth is all charisma and depth. Schindler is a cardboard cutout who goes from cynical lines to idealistic ones and still seems like an unfolded mailing box. Liam Neeson does what he can with the role but ends up being playdough for Ben Kingsley's moral centre (admittedly given some interesting twists). But Fiennes' powerhouse performance as Goeth is something Stephen Spielberg cannot prevent himself from presenting: a really tasty villain.

In Jaws we watch a distant beach crawling with insect like humans as the awesome elegance of the shark glides through the water of the foreground. The good guys in that film have to be put through really really gruelling peril for us to identify with them when the great white terror is close by. Same with Amon Goeth.

So what? Doesn't that make him a talented filmmaker with the same quirk as Hitchcock? Yeah, it does. While I don't like his films very much I have to dips my lid to his sheer skill with light and sound. He is a cinemaster. The problem is not that he does it well but that he does it at the expense of his purpose.

Personally, I don't think that this has anything to do with his fealty to his ancestry. I think he just digs bad guys, understands them (deeply) and has a near compulsive need to fill his screens with them. In this case, as in Jaws, he finds a big threatening presence to scare his audience with and runs with it until he has to appease them with a happy ending. Meantime, we get to walk around the skull of a real live Nazi. Now, if you accept this, doesn't it smack of the kind of movie this was meant not to be? Doesn't this remind you of a cinema aestheic that never gets close to Oscar ceremonies? Isn't this an exploitation film?

Try it. Get your mental machete and bash your way through the big names on the marquee and the state-of-art production values and look at what you are left with: a spayed chiper and a centre of moral gravity (Itzhak Stern) whose film this really deserves to be and above them both a fetishised tyrant whose personal power is as thrilling as it is terrifying. This film should be beside Russ Meyer.

But Russ Meyer might not feel so honoured. What, by the way has happened to Spider Baby in all this? Well, nothing much needs to happen. It is a film whose fantastical introduction (delivered with all the solemnity of an Ed Wood epic) comes right out and tells you it's an exploitation film. It's happy at the drive in or the grindhouse. But there's more: it's also good.

Lon Chaney Jr, having begun his career freed from the shadow of his tyrannical father, coasted through roles in Hollywood until chosen to play the Wolfman in Universal's famous monster movie. He brought a sadness to the role of the man trapped by his destiny which still gives the factory genre film its distinction. Much of his subsequent career until the 60s when Spider Baby was made did little more than reprise this performance. But when Chaney plays Bruno it's as though he has seized the essence of the character and only adds weight throughout the film. That essence is a similar sadness that his job has brought him, to care for and love those who are unable to return either and the sadness in knowing that his charges are doomed. Doomed if left alone and doomed if brought into the light of the world.

Bruno needs neither cruelty nor force to assert his authority but is left bewildered when faced with the venal cynicism of the worldly cousins. As primitive and wanton as his wards are, their violence seems like play to them. The cousins' lack of concern for the pathos of this situation renders them monstrous by comparison. Yes, it's a campy overstated monstrosity but everything finds its balance in this film. If there were Nazis in this movie we probably wouldn't need reminding that they were bad guys.

Those who dislike Spider Baby in my experience dislike the difficulty they have in classifying it. Is it a campy romp, a straight exploitation shocker, a Meyer-like outrage, a satirical comedy, a deceptive horror film, a horror parody...? What? All and none. Whether intentional or not Spider Baby is a remarkable piece that can welcome derisive laughter and provoke thought alike. It should be next to Val Lewton.

So, why even write this post? Well, I can't think of anything more pointless than to provoke Spielberg fans. They walk the earth in armour. And it's not just to be contrary (pointless, again). It's that in three years of sharing treasures from the shadows of the great unbeatable mainstream with whomever would see them, championing the subtle and the small in preference to celebrating the box office triumph, of experiencing the idea beneath the signs of a low budget, of becoming familiar with alternatives to classical narrative (or even just narrative), I still get people who cannot accept alternatives.

There can be no perceptible fault to not knowing the marginal pieces when they are so effectively smothered by the mainstream. Previous posts here have lamented the loss of an active and self-promoting arthouse scene, one that is a visible part of the cultural and social scene. What I and a few others have tried to do recently in this burg is get people back in touch with why cinema is such a valuable art and how variable the approach to completing a film can be. Because the narrative element in mainstream cinema makes it feel native to the form alternatives or even acts of defiance against it are often met with outrage. No, I mean it. Outrage. I've seen regulars to Shadows fit to be tied over this film's anti-narrative or that one's innovative use of narrative. I've witnessed genuine offence.

I ask such folk if they are equally offended by Jackson Pollock paintings to be met with incredulity yet it's the same proposition that alternative cinema brings. If the Blue Poles is not trying to be Christina's World, aren't you left with dealing with the Blue Poles on its own terms? Put it in context, certainly, but in the end it's the picture before you that you should be responding to. And if you're going to rail against the symptoms of low budgets, or even just snicker at them, be fair and see what's left when you remove the big budgets from the blockbusters. Throw a few million at Spider Baby and you'd have Blue Velvet. Take the fortune away from the budget of Schindler's List and you have Ilsa: She-Wolf of the S.S.

'Cept I'd probably rather watch Ilsa.

2012?

2011-12-18T12:28:00.001+11:00

I made this trailer for the last SHADOWS of 2011.

I wanted to do two things with it: to suggest what might happen if I did come back and to remind my audience of what they might be missing if I can't.

Milos has parental concerns which outrank my film nights on Friday nights. He's happy to let me continue on another night. When Milos bumped me for a play in 2009 I went to Sunday for three weeks and it was terrible. I and the majority of the audience I draw work for a living and cannot commit to any night of the week but Friday. Saturday would be harder still. It's Friday or nowt for me.

I will approach Milos in the new year to see if circumstances have changed and try for either the same or a lesser frequency. The last time I did the latter I put the words LAST FRIDAY OF THE MONTH on every single notification I made public and still got people claiming they didn't know which Friday it was. This was not due to stupidity but the plain fact that an independent screening ranks very low on the attention of anyone with a life to lead, even a staid and uncomplicated life. Those who made that claim unanimously said that they preferred the idea of knowing that there would be something good on at the place every Friday. So, when I went back to weekly screenings the numbers dropped off. They liked the idea, just not enough to turn up.

Make it special and you lose, make it routine and you lose.

I feel no diminishment of my enthusiasm for holding these screenings. Without a working art house scene there is more need now than ever to offer an alternative to a mainstream that is growing increasingly homogeneous.

I just haven't worked out a way of making it work so that ... it works.

Curator's Report 2011: Thank Youse!

2011-12-16T09:27:00.000+11:00

The final shadow sermon blares

So ends another year @ SHADOWS, and we have plunged the Shadow edge deeper into the ankle of the year than ever before, garnered out highest attendances and brought great cinema from the murk to the shining dark of night for the delectation of friend and stranger.

Early birds

Last night I screened one of my favourite films, The Producers (yes, the 1968 one) to a good sized crowd who loved it. I have seen it at a cinema twice before and it was a thrill to feel the waves of laughter build in the dark again. I didn't bring a support short but after first smelling it in the air we found we had this:

I'd come to screen a film and ended up making one as well. The car was cremated but no one was injured. With all the plastic and rubber (ie. inadvertant napalm) burning away it looked hopeless without a fire engine. But two garden hoses did it and pretty quickly. Watch for the Firies asking for directions towards the end (swift response, though, they really were there in minutes).

After that ...

We saw the Producers, dug it, and I showed every trailer I'd made for Shadows. People were requesting replays. Nice.

The bar after the screening

2011 turned out to be the best year of the three and if it's the one I have to finish on then que sera sera. A lot of the screenings, particularly at the beginning were so well attended that when the inevitable winter slump set in I was getting cranky with numbers well above the previous years' average. But how can I complain about this? I shared a wealth of cinema with a range of persons known and unknown. That was the plan. Mission accomplished.

So, the year....

As usual, I'd like to start with what didn't work and offer some thoughts on why.

Will Shadows return? A matter for judgement

FAILURES

To crown my program of female protagonists I offered Juliet of the Spirits, Fellini's psychedelic valentine to his wife, Giullietta Massina. This is a difficult film that takes a lot of getting used to but does give riches. It was this year's Noriko's Dinner Table in that those who could not adapt to its plunges into surreality gave up trying and found it an interminable chore. The screening was disrupted by a mass late arrival which became a mass walkout ten minutes later. Not a film to come in at any time after the anchor points at the beginning have been established.

It's detractors after the screening attacked it from a mainstream sensibility which strategy I always find lazy-minded and said as much. But the wall was up, propped by both sides. It miffed me and I wrote a piece about the eccentric results of having a visible art house scene and the return of mainstream thinking of not having one. But that turned into this more pleasant piece. Once again, the question of whether I was wasting my and others' time with Shadows or just overreacting to what was, after all, a difference of perception.

I could not for the life of me sell the following: The Tin Drum, El Norte and Uncle Boonmee. All good examples of how magical realism can blend with edgy film making and emerge confidently owning itself. I don't know what turned people off about them but they were all screened during programs that were otherwise my most successful yet. After a lot of requests to screen Billy Liar after it was bumped last year, it drew less than ten folk.

See also The Spirit of the Beehive, a beautiful and eerie anti-nostalgic look at childhood subject of some particularly energetic requests by some folk who entirely failed to turn up for the screening. There are all sorts of reasons why people can't turn up for a film screening and I'm cool with all of them. But when people make a big thing of wanting to see something and then ignore it (not just staying away but saying nothing about that) it annoys the holy living fuck out of me. If you want to request something, honour its delivery. I keep getting signs that keeping this night free is keeping it devalued by its potential audience.

And then, almost at the end of the whole journey the biggest ever turnout was for Jacques Tati's highly experimental comedy Playtime. An almost standing room only audience met this comic genius' self-proclaimed masterpiece in almost perfect silence. This was a curious experience for me. This disappointing response originated in something that had never occurred to me about this film despite being a significant part of my pitch to audiences.

Tati shot it in the gigantic scene-stretching vistas of 70mm so he could break on through to the other side of comedy and let the audience decide what they wanted to laugh at. This results in an audience that can never quite settle due the anxious idea that no one is sharing their reaction. Comedies aimed at individuals rather than the whole audience are doomed. Tati, whose career up to that point had been one of resolute success, delighting his public with his signature character and an effortless talent at visual humour supported by an ear for soundtrack that David Lynch would envy.

And then his shot at a career-capping comedy revolution garnered him the least laughs he'd known from a piece; it almost destroyed his career. It took seeing it with a crowd for the centime to drop. That drop was heard by everyone in attendance.

Oh well....

Chris and Sonia Chringle

PUZZLES

I had no idea why The Ninth Configuration was not only well attended but well, well loved. This curio, a theological comedy thriller, which was really intended as a vehicle of writer Peter Blatty after his lingering dissatisfaction following the Exorcist. But there it was, delighting and thrilling by turns with its odd, uncontrolled exploration and typically sharp Blatty dialogue.

Valerie and Her Week of Wonders, Jamoril Jirez' extraordinary surrealistica not only attracted a full house (and more reads for a single screening blogpost before or since) but, for all its oddness and difficulty, virtually unanimous joyous praise. Gratifying, that.

The strange, severe fable from Greece Dogtooth, drew a small crowd but one that was left stunned in the best way possible.

Reg or semi-reg all equal in the eye of the Shadows

The most surprising one, though, was Diary. A recent entry from the innovative and always watchable Pang brothers from Hong Kong, this title has been allowed to fade in the shade after their internationally triumphant The Eye. I'd failed to be touched by their follow up, the stylish but harsh Abnormal Beauty, but seeing this compells me to give that one a second look. I watched this in hope that it would make a good bridge between the earnestness of Matador and the lightness of The Unbelievable Truth. Neither horror nor thriller, it's more a psychological study of morbid grief. When I screened it I saw it only for the second time. It was a revelation. I seemed to have seen a completely different film when I auditioned it. It had initially left me so flat that I had mentally struck it off the list while its credits were rolling. When I saw it with the Shadows audience I was moved almost to tears by its emotional compulsion and psychological depth. If uncertain, repeat.

David P, newbie, Miriam and Renn

One final note about failure and puzzling things. This year, even more than last, I consciously endeavoured to vary the tone of the programs so that an emotive range was not only present but clearly obvious. After polling what I claim as a public I was STILL getting people who thought I was showing too much horror or heavy mood pieces. A few real world conversations later revealed that this impression had more to do with time poverty than illiteracy; folk have to make increasingly superficial decisions on things distant from their immediate concerns. and an indy film night rightly ranks lower than a friend's birthday or other life event. But I was getting this from people who'd already supported me in spreading the tone of the line-ups, people who knew I was trying (ie not just the wearisome types who will work like Trojans to insert their dislike of a type of film into a conversation, however irrelevant the point).

I've come to the conclusion that if one (and I mean one) film of a particular genre displeases, then it colours the entire impression. So out of thirty-seven films screened this year, three could be called horror (and with each one of those that's still a stretch) and I had more than one speak of the night as a horror festival. Eleven were comedies and I had to put up with someone repeating to me (admittedly second hand) that the night needed to have "light and shade". What kind of maths is this? What the hell is up with it and why the hell should I tolerate it? Well, I don't always but I need to. Again, it's not stupidity, it's time and attention budgeting. The problem is not simply that these few have a warped impression which they won't reconsider but they convey this falsehood to others. Arrrgh!

Anyway...

Miriam and Renn

TRIUMPHS

From the word go!

The Fall had been my virtual callling card last summer as I did everything I could to spread the word about it. It was a risk to start the year of this obscure film night with something that was itself an obscurity but it drew my biggest crowd to that date and the most adoration. This magnificent unmarketable piece (then again, I managed to do it) is the sole example of audience members approaching me long afterwards to tell me they'd bought their own copies of the film. Satisfaction!

The first time I showed Dellamorte Dellamore was not at Shadows but as part of a series of screenings intended to fill the gap that Dean Mc left one year as he made travel plans. It was well attended but marred by an audience member who had an almost psychopathic disregard for her fellow audience and gossiped loudly through the entire film. No one could shut her up. I almost feared the same thing happening when I showed it this year, like a record with a jump, but it went down a storm.

6ixtynin9, an accelerating gangster tale from Thailand won its day, vindicating the choice to put more comedy in this year. It delighted and surprised its audience.

One of my all time favourites, Little Murders delighted in my second screening of it with a big appreciative audience. It was so good to be part of the constant shared laughter from Donald Sutherland's wedding speech. It would not have had many chances at a non tv audience since its initial flopping back in 1971 but it did the bizz here and made we wonder how many other late night gems would shine in the dark like it did. Then I showed The Offence, a tough, unlovable film from the same year which did more to divide audiences than anything else I've screened. It's tough but stagey, alienating but intelligent. It was loved and hated.

David B who took most of these photos

SO...

Despite the winter slump and slow return of audiences in spring I continued my own discovery by sharing these films. I take the responses of the punters seriously. I'll argue a point gruffly at times but I'll also shut up and listen when I'm genuinely surprised by an insight not before encountered. This, for me is the margin of reward for doing all this; to slap it up there on the wall and see how it works for those assembled in the dark before it. Best response was for The Fall for inspiring people to investigate it for themselves and also spread the word. Most weirdly gratifying was Pauline M's token appreciative slap to the cheek for Dogtooth.

Milos M. continued to show great tolerance and patience with my efforts. We were only bumped twice (and once with more than enough time to adjust the program). He continued to offer his studio for my cinema evangelism without complaint and with genuine support.

Thanks be to my lovely regulars who continued to encourage me to continue despite some crushing setbacks and temporary drain of general interest. You are valuable to the world.

Thanks in great gratitude also, to all who attended who were not of my acquaintance and swelled the numbers of this year's triumphs. I didn't get around to meeting nearly enough of you and wish I'd taken more trouble. If you read this, please keep reading.

Even if I don't return to ABC next year or just find the odds too much against I've had three years whose wins have thrilled and whose losses have instructed. That by itself has made me happy. Mean it. Happy.

So, thanks.

PJ

Two Faces of Love Part A: We Need to Talk About Kevin

2011-12-14T20:46:00.000+11:00

Lynne Ramsay knows cinema. She is expert in the use of sound and image to save pages of words.

Here's an example. We've already seen and heard how infant Kevin seems capable only of constant short screams. Tilda Swinton uses all her skill to convey a grinding restraint as she remembers she is holding a baby rather than a faulty ipod that she can throw to the floor and crush under her heel. At an early point in Kevin we see her standing outside as a jackhammer's din clogs the speakers. A passer by, just a blur in the glare behind her, gives her a look and moves on. Cut to a wide shot. She has paused with the pram that holds the constantly screaming baby at a place where he cannot be heard. The sound is monstrous but it's better than what she'd hear if it were silent. Swinton's eyes are closed and her expression is one of stolen bliss. This is beyond morality, it is animal, pure.

Here's another moment. It's the post atrocity world in which she is punished by her community for the mass sin of her son. She's driving trhough the streets of her smalltown part of the city. It's Halloween and the neighbourhood is out in costume. Ordinary citizens in monster masks taunt her at every crossing. Change the context and this would be charming. But Kevin, as he says so memorably in the trailer, IS the context. The interior of the car is soaked in the film's colour in chief: blood red. Buddy Holly's fragile, tinkling love chirp Every Day governs the soundtrack. Everyday, she gets this. She gets it in the sense that she receives it and that she understands it. Every bloody day.

Both of these moments are from the virtuoso first 30 minutes of this film. It would be counterproductive to list all the remarkably strong and strongly cinematic pieces of this jigsaw puzzle film: the first half hour contains nothing but virtuosity and you should go and see it for yourself anyway. There is no moment of tokenistic levity or warmth in this developing picture of the chasmic lack of love between mother and son. Kevin does need talking about. He's not right. But that's exactly what never happens to any useful extent. That's the central irony. Kevin is falling through the cracks of family, medicine, society, and what have you got? My Melbourne resident readers might be reminded of multiple murderer Peter Dupas.

But here's the problem. After that first half hour this film becomes a repeating slide show of the start with no significant development until crucial pieces of the jigsaw are provided. There is no surprise to them nor any further depth in Swinton's response and by the time the final line should be delivered to crush it's just more of the same. The hour and a half following that dazzling introduction is comprised of repetition with measured doses of unsurprising extra detail. Yet it doesn't have the momentum of a non narrative essay like Jean Luc Godard's Two or Three Things I Know About Her. This overall flatness of exposititon cannot add up to any character study. there are the trappings of drama but this is not a three act story.

Perhaps this is a symptom of the always difficult translation from page to screen. There are two comparatively minor acts of violence that the film covers with ellipses. Even the pivotal action falls short of visible action. A novelist would not scruple to provide detail. I haven't read the novel but tried to last year when I was lent a copy. I found its style indigestibly affected and couldn't get past the first unrealistically proportioned monolith of a letter (the novel is a series of letters) before my friend let me off the hook by taking it back and offering something readable. Kevin is a prize-winning, bestselling novel. The bad bits must really be good. They aren't in the film. They are perfunctory, never quite rising above placeholder status.

We never fear Kevin. He grows up and continues to be what he started being. If we are meant to be finding a place either side of the nature/nurture debate then it fails again. I found it too difficult to care either way. I remember thinking: get to the big bad bit and have done with it. It cruises over the big bad bit in the hope that you'll agree that the real one lies in the final line of dialogue. Of that, I thought, oh ok.

The early peaking of this film prevents any of its constituent parts from forming anything better than reiteration. When one of those constituents is an expert performance from Tilda Swinton, I have to ask: couldn't we have just sampled Kevin? Talking about him gets us nowhere.

Two Faces of Love Part B: I Love You Phillip Morris

2011-12-13T23:38:00.001+11:00

Steven Russell is a small town cop and happy with his job, wife, daughter and lifestyle until a series of life changing events assail him and he becomes flamboyantly gay. There's a problem: being outwardly out is costly. It's not a choice of the heart or central nervous system but one of personal taste, credit-card bloating personal taste. Falling back on his knowledge of policing, he becomes a pretty good conman. But, as the persistent other lesson of this film goes, if you do the crime....

In prison he meets the Phillip of the title (lest you should think the movie was about an adoration of big tobacco) and the pair fall hopelessly in love. Well, not so hopelessly. Phillip brings to the amorous table the conscience that Steven has long abandoned as the luxury of the honest. This is the film. Steven's love getting him into worse scrapes and Phillip getting increasingly implicated as Steven's lack of conscience opens to an increasingly wider void until he seemingly is incapable of distinguishing the love that motivated him from the thrill of the con.

This story stands or falls on how much you as a viewer are prepared to forgive Steven his trespasses. You will be asked to do a lot more forgiving than Phillip. Can you? Well, you decide. The light sheen that the movie maintains over the action and its moral crises needs a performance that bridges levity and gravity. Ok, so you get that with Jim Carrey in the kind of effortless performance that always has the public of funny men falling to their knees in tribute. Hey, the wacky guy can play it straight.

Carrey has, of course, already done this a few times (most successfully in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) so no one should be too surprised. But here he really is impressive as he must bear the movie's through some turbulent passages, holding back on the goofiness here, letting the frown spread there. And he does. So why is this film not better than ok?

As I see it, the problem lies in the perfection of the portrayal. We get so truly convinced that Steven Russell is losing himself behind his endless series of ruses that he sacrifices the self that we might love the way Phillip did. In very short time we have lost touch with him but the often elaborate machinations he designs are no substitute.

A mistake is made early on when Steven uses his influence in prison to fulfil a wish uttered by Phillip. The solution is humourlessly violent but is played for laughs anyway. It's not Carrey's fault but the writing and direction. It's a fault that leads to further ill-judged setups that should be either shenanigans or serious moral dilemmas but are always presented as loveable capers.

For once I can't blame an ego-bound movie star for wanting to act like an actor. Robin Williams has ruined how many movies with his apparent insistence on his directors' indulgence? Jennifer Jason Leigh's career stiffed early on when her quest for truth in movie acting fashioned some truly repellent characters whose place at the centre of their narratives killed each film in turn. Adam Sandler did Punch Drunk Love but then went back to being Adam Sandler.

Carrey has shown he can act and his goofy face-pulling days seem dim and distant now. If only he could find the director he needs (as well as Michel Gondry). Love might well find a way but there's none lost here between me and the screen.

THE PRODUCERS Friday 16th December 8 pm

2011-12-11T13:26:00.001+11:00

SHADOWS BREAK UP / XMAS PARTAY!

127 Campbell Street Collingwood

Friday December 16 8.30pm

Come one. Come all

Yup. The time has once more come for us to hang up our projectors and wander the world of the turn of the year with thoughts of presence and centre claws. It's xmas, folks, and what better carol than a rousing chorus of Springtime for Hitler. Be of best cheer and join us one last time.

Max is a fallen man. Once king of Broadway, he's reduced to romancing little old ladies to raise funds for plays that flop.When nebbish accountant Leo interrupts to inspect the books Max comes at him like a typhoon. Then Leo speaks a passing thought that more money could be made from a flop than a hit. Before he knows it he's an accomplice in one of the funniest cases of fraud to hit the big screen.

Max leads Leo through the Broadway machine, finding the worst director and cast to realise the worst play: (guaranteed to close on page four). But the best laid plans of mice and dethroned kings....

Mel Brooks assembled all his pro joke writing skills, experience as an assistant to a Broadway king, timing perfected in his already big hit Get Smart, and a cast made for their roles and delivered one of the most durable comedies in cinema history.

Zero Mostel thunders as Max Bialystock, a kind of Orson Welles on speed. Gene Wilder stepped into the role of Leo from a modest start as a serious stage actor to formulate the hysteria shtick that would serve him the rest of his career.

The opening scene of this film is a sustained personality clash that works almost like an explosive lab experiment and yet also manages to be witty in a literary sense. One notch below its tightness and you'd have an ok stage play. One notch too high on the frenetic nervous energy and it would be alienating. It is acted with precision and shot for the same precision in editing. It is perfectly judged.

Brooks had nursed both the idea of a memoir about his time as a Broadway producer's assistant and the notion of the worst play in the world for some time before it came together as Springtime for Hitler. By the time it went into production and the depiction of the stage show was getting pushed far beyond cuteness the sole compromise Brooks had to make was that title. The plainer one chosen became the perfect finishing touch.

Review: BURNING MAN

2011-11-27T16:55:00.001+11:00

A room lit brightly by indirect sunlight. A man is masturbating while standing up. He's having trouble. Suddenly a woman rises from a supine position and asks if he wants help. He declines. Suddenly,we're in the kitchen of a busy restaurant. The man from the previous scene is the chef. A middle aged woman enters the kitchen and angrily calls him a selfish arsehole. Suddenly, he's in a car, misjudges a turn and another car rams into his sending it into a spin, he revolves before our eyes pummelled by restaurant supplies, fruit, meat etc. All quite beautiful but what means it all?

Well that's the point for the next two or so hours. Incomplete and intentionally illfitting jigsaw puzzle pieces gradually forming a portrait of a man struggling with grief, self-medicating through anger and sex. Eventually, we are introduced to the cause of this grief and can, through a persistently sharded narrative, start following. And forgiving. Early scenes showing him (name of Tom) being arrogant, coldly suave and self serving invite us to dislike him before we know where he has come from but when we do, piece by piece, his inner maelstrom and outer freeze speak volumes and we can forgive him his trespasses. All that is right there on the cinema screen. So why don't I care about it more than sporadically?

It has good things going for it from the get go: a strong Australian cast put performances which, though fragmented by the structure, come through clearly; that fragmentation at first so uncompromising loosens up with an easy hand at the helm and is soon enough quite enjoyable; the theme of love and loss is constant, intimate and supported by a fundamentally cinematic heart. See, it's all good. But it isn't, really.

The good thing about asynchronous narrative is that it can push the theme, the issues, the more existential elements of a situation boldly out front for our examination while still retaining much of what we like in narrative cinema (performances, motivation etc) but the bad thing about it is how it also seems to encourage the nurture of secondary or even irrelevant elements. Burning Man hits its stride quite early on and, after a few surprises and sleight of hand moments, we are happy to take up its invitation. But soon enough after that the sheer weight of repetition, strains that fizzle and continue to fizzle, the feeling that the film will have no clear ending gets stronger. And then, after what feels like hours later we are given a climactic moment and an emotive coda. As that is happening I realise that I don't care at all about this character that I had begun warming to way back in the first shower of shards. I observe him emote. I do not share his emotion.

All I can think of is that I might have cared if I'd had to wade through about thirty less minutes of screen time. The tech is now too old to be universal but it's also irresistable as a figure: imagine taking a square of photo paper from the enlarger plate and sinking it into the developer, watching the image emerge in the dim light but noticing that every few seconds it erases and emerges again and again and again. That's what the last fortnight of this film feels like. An ongoing attempt at showing how gallows humour works seems forced the first time and then by the third or fourth becomes a strain.

I should like this film. I like grim films. I like a lot of unrelentingly grim films. I like films that challenge classical narrative or even dispense with it while remaining fiction (mid 60s Godard is a good place to start for this). I like films as essays that push their themes forward like stage mothers their unluckily talented children. But this grim, intentionally fractured character autopsy snatched my empathy and then even cold interest and left me at the point where those things started to feel like contempt. It is well made with good makings but god I wish it were better.

Rock on Film part 15: Living in the Material World vs Autoluminescent

2011-11-25T11:03:00.001+11:00

... OR: THE CORRECT USE OF GRAPHIC EQUALISATION

George vs Rowland

Big themes so let's start with a couple of lists:


Toy copy of George's "Rocky" Strat


Fender Jaguar similar to Rowland's

Similarities:

Both came to initial fame in influential bands.

Both were guitarists to one side of an impressive front package.

Neither was considered a guitar hero in any traditional sense.

Both died before old age of natural causes

Differences:

The ex-Birthday Party members continued to make music equal or superior to their work in the seminal outfit. The ex-Beatles' output continues to be dominated by grinding mediocrity.

The Beatles remain the biggest band in the known Universe. You have to find out about the Birthday Party.

George Harrison left drug experimentation behind for a committment to spirituality. Roland Howard's lifelong pessimism led to a kind of romanticism in which spirituality was never more than a handy notion.

Almost everyone who watches the Harrison documentary will do so across the great chasm of the subject's fame and their capacity to cope with the difference will determine their enjoyment of it. In the small cinema where I saw Autoluminescent I could almost guarantee that everyone in the half filled seating either knew or had met Roland Howard or any combination of the interviewees. That does change as soon as you place the screening outside of Melbourne but consider that the first proposition doesn't change wherever it's shown.

Equalisation:

The Beatles' magnitude demands that any attempt to render them identifiable to the great unwashed needs more than a little push to be believable. Rowland Howard's life story can tolerate a great deal more praise from pit and peer due to his relative obscurity. In both cases that's what happens. If you want to see it not happen that way go and watch the 1989 hagiography Imagine John Lennon.

ok...

GEORGE

As a second or third generation Beatles fan (ie one who turned teen in the 70s) I easily picked out Harrison's contributions for their distinct darkness of tone. His first composition on a fabs disc was the brooding sneer of Don't Bother Me. It's all odd percussion, great guitar tone (a Gretsch through a Vox amp, using its yummy tremolo) and a big putdown vocal. Then there's the lashing Taxman, cheeky Piggies and the big late night spookiness of Long Long Long (how else do you follow Helter Skelter?)

The story goes that against Lennon and McCartney he had to struggle hardest of all to get one of his songs on an album so they really had to shine. Well, for the most part they do. This doesn't make him a great songwriter but it does show his determination and individuality. And it gives him a great reason for quitting to move out by himself and fly free. He did. And then, like all the others whose initial albums had the strength of triumphant escapees, he settled down to a long determinedly alright graze thereafter.

Living in the Material World doesn't tell it like this. We follow an individual from plucky youth into a maturity of caring and sharing and then an untimely death. Veiled admissions from the likes of Paul McCartney and Eric Clapton provide a womanising side to the quiet one and there are a number of songwriting breaktroughs which are given the status of narrative sign posts by director Martin Scorsese. A clear sense of a teenager from a cheerful working family becoming a benign landed lord emerges but there is a significant amount of shade lost in the telling.

The pioneering Concert for Bangladesh was plunged into controversy as the proceeds were variously held up or mysteriously siphoned off (probably by everyone's favourite depspoiler of rock royalty, Allen Klein). The event is celebrated but its purpose was left ravaged by the greed it attempted to redress. While much is made of George's development as a songwriter and musician the music after the big early albums fades into silence in quiet admission of its decreasing quality. Handmade Films, the company Harrison established because he wanted to see Life of Brian, did some fine work but also would have altered Withnail and I into a goofy forgettable mainstream waste of time.

The reason I can go on about this is that Harrison's factsheet has been posted upon the wall of public memory so gigantically that any attempt to slip one by is doomed. It's why Imagine John Lennon is so winceable. We know Lennon wasn't just some nice bloke that all this happened to. Similarly, Harrison had to be as forcefully competitive to retain his position as any of his fellows. There is some hint of this in Scorsese's film but it's kept nice.

As far as the equalisation alluded to above goes in this film it arrives in the accounts of how Harrison behaved toward the women he loved. Pattie and Oliva Harrison both offer quiet and dignified testimony of a lover and husband. A gesture here and a word there depict someone you'd want to know regardless of how competitive he had to be otherwise. It is these moments (and his son's account of George as father) that have stayed with me. Apart from them, Living in the Material World is a very slight step above Imagine John Lennon.

ROWLAND

Rowland Howard has a lot of music with his name on it but all of it is over shadowed by one song: Shivers. He wrote it when he was 16 in response to the emotional turmoil he saw around him as he and his friends paired off and then split asunder again and again. The lyric is a sneer at the resultant over-emotion, even beginning with the line "I've been contemplating suicide though it really doesn't suit my style." If you made it through your adolescence without having that thought then you probably behaved yourself and I hope the pool extension is all you hoped it would be. The chorus begins with one of my favourite lines out of any song: "My baby's so vain she is almost a mirror". Who, capable of coming up with that at 16 along with perfectly fitting music, could not be destined for greatness?

Well, Rowland Howard, actually. Autoluminescent, though it might try to pull the other way, is a story of mounting defeat, showing a vulnerable individual continually beaten by a life against which his talent offered no protection. His is the story of every bedroom rockstar there ever was with the exception that he acted on his daydreams and pushed himself into a career. And it worked ... kind of.

His lean, high cheek-boned pallor allowed him effortless access into Melbourne's alternative scene which was morphing from punk to its posty form that allowed a greater range of expression. A series of talking head testimonies tell of this but nothing does it more eloquently than footage of Howard, Ollie Olsen 'n' co. slinking catlike down Fitzroy St in the late 70s. They stand out from the crowd through clear visual and personal style, aliens among the mud men.

But then something happened when Howard joined the Boys Next Door halfway through their only album. He brought a wild chaos to the sound that lifted it from good to original and he brought Shivers. The song he'd been performing with such cool sarcasm in his first band was taken by Nick Cave and turned into a straight emotionally wrought ballad. That's how I first heard it and it almost made me cry. I didn't have the Door Door album but I had the Shivers single with the creepy and compelling Dive Position on the B-side.

A lot of interviewees in the film have an opinion on the change in the song's mood. Cave himself who'd done the dirty deed concedes that Howard should have sung it which seems a pointless thing to say now. The fact is that Howard allowed the song to be so used and doing so allowed it in turn to enter history with its name on the door. A montage of alternative versions includes Marie Hoy's from the Dogs in Space movie which restores the sneer (actually more clearly than Howard's original).

The Birthday Party's career takes them from, to paraphrase Howard, massive fish in a tiny pond to frog spawn in a massive ocean. Penury, antipathy and heroin in London to localised celebrity in Berlin where their style and drug of choice changed the scene completely. Wim Wenders (a far better interviewee than a film maker, IMHO) offers some very useful witness here.

It was in Berlin that the Birthday Party ground to an end, with Howard being elbowed out over the widening chasm between his and their direction. Other groups formed from this, most durably Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds. It's at this point in the film where Howard's decline begins and continues on to his demise. It's also where the account gets both more guarded and more intense with Howards drug and health problems equalised low against the strength of his musical output.

And here we come to the crossroads of any biographical account: do you show everything? It leads to the question of what you're trying to say by telling someone's life. A friend of mine complained about Tim Burton's film Ed Wood, saying that it left out all the ugly seediness of his final years. Burton's purpose was to celebrate the act of filmmaking and chose an unusual but highly useful starting point: Wood might have produced laughably inept films but he'd had a genuine force of vision. That comes through easily. If the film had gone on to report it all it would have descended into the kind of earnest yawn that Oliver Stone so deteminedly gave us in the '80s and '90s.

So what's the big message of Autoluminescent that buries the bad bits under a few hints? Persistence. Howard kept going, kept finding collaborations and writing and recording and playing, regardless of how low his profile was to remain. His music was crucial to his life and while that could be said of other aspects of his days on earth his music remains. It stands the cool removal test (ie imagine if it had been created by someone you "shouldn't" like) and travels well beyond its makers' life.

SO, IN BALANCE...
Of the home/movie/slideshow/talking head rockumentary format, which is better? Autoluminescent is more of an a/v feast as there is a lot less mainstream reverence to get through before you see the subject in any kind of clarity. On the other hand Living in the Material World doesn't have Nick Cave reading a fairytale version of the story over brooding gothic imagery. George's son reads his fathers letters home which becomes emotionally very efficient.

Autoluminescent begins and ends with a fetishistic tracking shot of Rowland Howard's career-long choice of weapon, an Olympic White CBS era Fender Jaguar which he is seen playing almost exclusively throughout and it's there on the soundtrack, wall to wall. Not a word is said about it but it's there. George Harrison was the Beatle who did care about his guitars and amps and was always happy to discuss them. But the only time we see them is in vintage clips. Where are the close-ups of his beautiful old Gretsches, his iconic fireglo Rickenbacker 12 string, the cherry Les Paul or the rosewood Telecaster? Neither word nor sight up close. But there's the difference right there.

Material World is about a famous person whose music became apparently less and less important to who he was as wealth, fame and comfort took over. If you didn't know how he was and hunted his later music down as a result of this film (and it's lack of representation of it) you would probably experience it once, incompletely and put it quietly back where you found it. Rowland Howard slung his Fender Jag where he went and kept plugging it in right up to his final (and pretty damn good) album.

I am more a Beatle fan than one of the Birthday Party and its descendants. The fact of the Beatles is so impenetrably armored by their fame that I feel no lack in enjoying their music without caring even slightly about who they were as people. I was never likely to have met George Harrison and remain unbothered about it. While I cannot claim to have known him, I did meet Rowland Howard on a few occasions, and outside the musical context (ie not at gigs) and I'm glad I did. I found him witty, intelligent and personable.

Neither film alters those impressions but the one I'm grateful to have seen at a cinema is clear to me. Odd for me to write this but in this case at least, between Richard Lowenstein and Martin Scorsese, Scorsese loses.

Moustaches of the Silver Screen

2011-11-21T08:34:00.001+11:00

Since Movember's almost over and I have a week free from promoting SHADOWS screenings (as there isn't one on this week) I thought I might as well get a post about moustaches going in the very nick of time.So, here it is.

My theme will be ...

Give me a second...

Sublimation levels in the suggestion of testosteronic force as evidenced in the appearance of moustaches on leading men in narrative cinema ... through the ages.

To begin with we ought to bear in mind that cinema's emergence from the late nineteenth century featured moustachioed menfolk as a consequence of a century of intense facial creativity. The renactment below of classic Victorian sideboards is indicative:

Nevetheless, by the time cinema rolled around no one looked like that on screen. In fact the only people who did look like that were stalwarts of the industrious underclass attempting to prolong the industrial revolution through the fearless adoption of its style (evidenced below in this portrait of IK Brunel, which I -- quite seriously -- regard as the first modernist image):

Anyway, apart from melodrama villains the moustache was gone from the pre-war screen of dreams.

Then there was the war and the alphas all looked like this:

Kaiser Whilhelm anticipates his afterlife as a park statue

Not goth enough?

The stylised flying vulva atop the headdress attests to the complexity of this artist: he identifies with both egg and egg dispenser. I realise this caption is at odds with the light-entertainment mood of this piece but I am attempting some innovation here so will you please keep it down? Of course it might just be a golden coffee bean. They had colonised both Kenya and New Guinea at that stage, after all.

Anyway, after the great slaughter, the world-wide reaction followed all avantguardist movements by adopting the name of the previous one and adding the word post. The Post-War moustache was for a time absent in reaction to the wartime. What does this have to do with movies?


Ivor Novello: actor of his age in a VERY early draft of Bowie's Aladin Sane cover art

Even the alphas refrained from worrying their top lips:

Edward VIII after a shave.

Similarly, the alphamost of the top followed suit (and in suits):


Cary Grant who here knows something you don't know

And, by Cary's time in the spotlight, there was also a reaction to another famous moustache:


Re-enactment

Whose style was really only a cover version of a movie star. Gross Weltanschauung imitated art:


Ladies and gentlemen: the king of comedy!

And ...

Chaplin's companion and frequent co-star, Paulette Goddard. Seen here because she's insanely beautiful


Paulette again. Seen here because it's wrong not to include this still (also from Modern Times) when you've already put any other one up

Where was I.....?

Oh! If you can imagine Iggy Pop covering a Jet song you know the great weight in Chaplin's cover version of Hitler's cover version of the iconic lip grub here:


Irony? The best film of this icon of silent cinema is his first talkie (or shoutie, or preachie...): The Great Dictator

But then it was time to reconsider the lipgrub by making it distinctly non-Hitlerian:


Security means having your own floating nametag

After the war (Post-War II) the moustache was as popular as it had been after the first. There hadn't been a mo-ed president of the United States of A. since Teddy Roosevelt nor has there been since. Yea, through the great re-release of testosteronic overgrowth that was the 60s:

Robert Redford finds a name for his future film festival

... and the 70s:

"John Holmes And the Bawd of Censors"

... the 80s zipped back up and kept it clean:


Really, really, really clean

unless they were playing nostalgia:


This is from the Cotton Club, a highly entertaining take by Sofia Coppola's father on a lot of enduring social problems as encapsulated in the famous NYC night club. I couldn't just use the caption I wanted without this preface and the fact that the phrase that follows is the title from a real film of an earlier era starring Kirk Douglas: The Young Man With a Horn.

Which brings us pretty much up to date. The 90s revolution in facial hair generally incorporated some means of chin concealment and the lone mo was a thing o' the past. But there was this from 1991:

Two men in love with the same tiny cardboard cutout they call Zandalee.

So there you have it. ...... Look, it's Monday and I have a lot of uploading to do which leaves me a lot of time to tap this out between checks. And did you really expect this to be anything better than an extended plea for donations to my Movember effort? Come on!


Come aaaawwwwn!

It's true, though, you really can donate HERE.

Thank you, thank you for your kind attention.

PJ

Review: DRIVE

2011-11-01T12:29:00.001+11:00

An action movie is about order wresting itself from chaos, changed, stronger.

Action heroes don't always know they're good people. By the end they are aware of the cost of being good and how important it is to keep up the effort. A bad action movie will have all this but it will push the stunts and pyrotechnics so far forward that that simple moral discovery gets smothered. A good action movie provides a compelling case for the action before it can take place so that we in the audience must need it to happen. True Lies is a bullshit action movie. Drive is a very good one.

Ryan Gosling's nameless driver is a creature of great precision, doing stunt work by day and working as a getaway driver for the kicks as well as the money by night. The film opens with the latter kind of job as he picks up a pair of serious looking burglars and, after a very tight wait for their remergance from the job, and gets them out of danger with a series of impressive evasive manoeuvres. He loves his skill. A flat action star just looks good between lines (Keanu Reeves). A full blooded one shows you what he's thinking and his few lines are precious. Gosling is such an one. When he isn't speaking he's observing. I first saw him as a fuckup teacher in Half Nelson and then as the profoundly damaged loner in Lars and the Real Girl and each time his casting has lifted the film he's in. Same here. By the time you see him shyly notice his beautiful young neighbour in their apartment's lift you start looking forward to seeing how he thaws out for her. And you know it's going to take work.

Much of the attention of the rest of the cast has gone to Christina Hendricks. She does a fine job as an underworld utility but really the attention is related to her high profile role in Mad Men. It's Carey Mulligan who shines brightest here. I know her from the recent Never Let Me Go where she played the dowdy/sobering lead. Here, outfitted with an American accent and bottle blondness, she owns her every shot. A young mother with a husband in prison she shows clear personal strength but allows a fragility through the closer she gets to Gosling's character. Also, having all those qualities but the face of a fourteen year old and the body of a woman in her twenties she is utterly disconcerting on screen.

When the crunch comes for these two it is literal and silencing. Because of the work of establishing their characters has been so full there is a genuine moment of suspense following (no details, no spoilers) as to how this extreme shared experience will play out. It's just a moment but it's there. That's attention to detail for you.

I'm skimping on the plot details as there is just too much to potentially spoil and this is a plotty film. Suffice to say that the driver is taken from his accessory role in crime to a self-revalatory maelstrom that is as believable as it is violent. Rising action maestro from Copehagen Nicholas Winding Refn displays an effortless skill in judging when to turn the action tap on and off and how to soothe the impatient nervous system between times: rest and motion, rest and motion, wrestling and emotion. I will say that the third act felt draggy through an evenness of pacing but also that that appeared to be deliberate.

Also, thanks be for depicting gangsters who don't quote The Art of War or waffle through pages of dialogue before getting to the point. These mobsters are hard arse bastards. When points of vulnerability appear they are dealt with as they would be in life, with a swift and sure dismissal. Comedian Albert Brooks is frighteningly against type and his partner Ron Perlman also. Breaking Bad's Bryan Cranston crawls back from badass into pathos effectively. And the violence, the lifeblood of the middle and final acts of any action movie is tense and ugly, the worst of it kept offscreen to prevent it from bloating beyond its purpose.

Action movies find their morality in the fatefully unacknowledged monsters of heroes. There is a song throughout the film, used initially for scenes of the driver and Irene falling in love but then entering into more extreme fare. It's a heavily 80s influenced synth pop number with thunking bass and ethereal female vocal. The chorus goes" have you the strength to be a real human being and a real hero?" That should be as deadly as a choctop to a diabetic but it works and, blessedly, works without irony.

Go and see Drive. Now!

The Triumph of Goliath: David Shrugged

2011-10-30T19:00:00.000+11:00

Melbourne arthouse is dead. Born of wonder and raised against odds it thrived for decades in this city until the mid 2000s when its organs failed one by one and was left in the gutter to wheeze its last. The art of cinema is now held entirely in the mainstream plexes which tower o'er the cine landscape like Easter Island heads. And down on the level of pure competition - one/zero, presence/absence, win/loss - the right thing has happened.

It angers and saddens me but, try as I might, I cannot argue with it. For starters, however much I might revile the impersonal trough that is the supersize popcorn movies of the cinematic Goliath that is the mainstream, I can't blame it for killing off the little David with his feeble stone-loaded ging. The arthouse cinema took so little of the mainstream's audience that the giant never noticed the piffling stings of the stones even when they got near tender bits. No, the arthouse was allowed to die alone by its own flock. People just stopped going. Goliath won and David shrugged. Why?

It's not as though the content was so very different. For every Irreversible playing in a fleapit held together by love of form there was a crowd pleasing Ringu or goofy Boxing Helena. An autopsy of the most bloat budgeted rubbish made to pay for a Hollywood A-lister's home extension will reveal that art runs through its veins. The difference is not an easy one like civilisation vs brutality, taste vs entertainment or quality vs garbage.

The range alone of cultures and traditions that the arthouses used to supply left an effortless impression of freedom of expression that the mainstream would find suicidal. This diversity of approach, the continuing lesson that cinema is a blank canvas rather than a set of standards is the legacy of arthouses that leaves behind snobbery they might have engendered.

This article offers a range of reasons which I can't argue with. EXCEPT it sneaks in the phrase poor-quality films. Where does that come from? Here's another from the Age, also from the time of the Lumiere closure. One smug proprietor looking down his nose at the low end seating and heating. Really? That's why people who supported it for so long have now abandoned it, a fear of cold buttocks? In exchange for a cultural experience that might well be intellectually, politically, socially or even just aesthetically liberating the price of rugging up against fashion is too high? Really? Rea-fucking-lly?

Well it gets worse. Now that the small cinemas have gone the diversity has been forgotten and a new generation of filmgoers has emerged that neither knows nor cares about cinema beyond its function within the service economy. All we have left of cinema's extended possibilities flickers in the next room like a cupcake candle; individuals with modems and credit cards and a select fewer benefiting from the meagre light.

And that's it. A scattered few. An ageing scattered few.

So is it that? Cinephiles just getting old and ricketty and whose health cannot stand the torments of the fleapit shall nurture all their passion for alternative cinema in safety deposit boxes that are doomed to inaccessible dementia? Will none among their progeny or younger kin stand and demand a few stories from the barricades of when they fought the big one before Michael Bay bombed Pearl Harbour anew and did more damage to it than the Imperial Japanese Air Force ever did? All gone now?

I don't accept that. Alternative cinema has lost its community but the makings of that community or a new one are still out there. Attendances at Shadows are flexible and favour the warmer parts of the year (whaddaya gonna do?) but the people who come remain interested in these tales from under the hood and takes from off the wall. Showing the mighty Harold and Maude to a small number of mainly younger folk last year resulted in a new entry to a few more top ten film lists. No one had a problem with the wonkiness of the production values of It Happened Here as the audacity of its concept towered above that little pile of nuts and bolts. Ok, so Noriko's Dinner Table bored when it didn't baffle but the same director's Suicide Circle delighted. The spirit really is willing (even if the goosebump riddled flesh is weak).

Maybe all that's needed is a shift in the paradigm. Maybe we just need to drop the choc tops and remember Brecht's line about rapidly setting up his theatre. You don't have to give up the mainstream. I didn't. There's no need to. But there's everything to gain by accepting the diversity that shines through the difficulties of alternative cinema.

I am one of the ageing cinephiles I mentioned above but I'm not a sentimental one. I dinnae care a mere zot if the film I'm seeing is the result of light through celluloid or was born in a hive of ones and zeros. (I'm similarly unromantic about vinyl LPs which experience I'm happy to be rid of). Similarly I find concepts like perfect film or classic cinema to be unhelpful and near meaningless standards. A film is a film. How do you react to it? Don't know? Well, go and find out. Shadows isn't the only one. Go forage among the what's on schedules and see what's buzzing under the radar and start doing some of your own buzzing. Go on!

The late lamented Lumiere

SHADOWS Spring Part 2 : Popular Control

2011-10-17T16:22:00.000+11:00

Downloadable flier

Late Spring and thoughts turn naturally to population. Ok, they might more naturally turn to anti-histamines but I've been thinking about the movement of thought in populations, of Arab springs and beseiged coalition governments, of occupied Wall Streets, of mass fever and mass cures. We're down to a briefer than usual four for the last full season part of this year so my choice had to be a tougher one. The four had to fit the theme more or less directly, they had to be very different from each other for variety's sake, and they had to be ... enjoyable. A late change necessitated the substitution of two titles just when I was ready to click Publish. I think it's a stronger selection for all that, though. From unclassifiable dystopias from the psychedelic era through samurai warriors, Eastern bloc oppression, to the whimsy of a comic genuis, I think we've got the right mix. So, come in out of the pollinated breeze and enjoy these tales o' popular control.

Friday November 4th 8pm
PRIVILEGE
(Peter Watkins, UK 1967)

Stephen Shorter is popstar number one in the land of popstars, late 60s Britain. He's as clean as Cliff and as mean as Mick. The film begins with his latest stage setup which involves him singing from a cage, wearing cuffs and then getting beaten by cops. The girls go crazy!

So why waste all that influence just to sell little bits of plastic? A relatively benign tv commercial to help out British apple farmers works as expected. Next stop, get the kids off the streets and back into the churches and ballot booths to vote for their local Conservative.

So is this a what-if? It's more a left hook at the consumerism at the heart of rock music. The crowd might have been singing All You Need is Love at the nuclear disarmament rallies in London at the time but the counter culture also was sinking into politics-annihilating mysticism. Writer/director Peter Watkins isn't saying "watch out or they'll turn you into a tory" he's saying, "why are you wasting this opportunity for revolution?" (See also the hugely misunderstood One Plus One/Sympathy for the Devil by Jean Luc Godard.)

Watkins, a documentarian who frequently crossed the border into fiction, knew the power of mixing verity with fable. His imagined nuclear strike The War Game was banned in its time and can still reduce its audiences to silence. He removed the sentiment from a tall moment in British history in Culloden by reporting on it as a contemporary tv crew might have. For Privilege he used a real popstar, Paul Jones from contemporary mega hitmakers Manfred Mann who proves a natural choice. Shorter's Yoko before her time arrives in the form of supermodel Jean Shrimpton.

While the living parallel of flower power herding has long gone, Peter Watkins' fable of a Pied Piper with syndicated management still shows that he understood that rock music's primary force was mercenary rather than cultural. But for all the grimness of his usual fare (historical warfare reported as current news, the real effects of a nuclear strike on Britain) Privilege finds him more satirical, playful even.

This film has so many antecedents to the culture of its near future. Shorter is somewhere between Scott Walker and the Bowie of the Thin White Duke. The police brutality stage show could be from A Clockwork Orange. The stadium extravaganza was extensively dipped into for The Wall. But Watkins isn't trying to be a prophet here, he's just performing his customary incision on the culture he sees around him.

Oh ... and find me a better version of Jerusalem than the George Bean Group plays in this film.

Friday November 11th 8pm
YOJIMBO
(Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1961)

An aimless, down at heel samurai wanders into a town held between the forces of two rival gangs. At first, he finds some amusement and profit from playing them against each other but then it gets personal and he has to use all his wits to stay alive and stop the town from destroying itself.

Derived from American noir and westerns, Yojimbo sees the maestro Kurosawa once again in steady and serious pursuit of ideas that dwelt at the centre of his world: pacifism vs military self protection; the cold war's rampaging division; the frailty of human loyalty. There is even the surprise nod at the arms race which kicks the assumption that this is a medieval story right into the modern world. Tough violence rubs shoulders with philosophical dialogue and I'm sure I saw a kitchen sink in there somewhere. If Mifune had been justly celebrated as an actor in Japan this role took him to the world.

Friday November 18th 8pm
WHEN FATHER WAS AWAY ON BUSINESS
(Emir Kusturica Yugoslavia, 1985)

When his father goes off on yet another business trip and doesn't come back, Malik starts walking in his sleep. He doesn't know that the business this time is an indefinite sentence at a labour camp. It's Yugoslavia 1948 and Tito has just split with Stalin. Malik doesn't have all the details but he has every reason in the world to act out his anxiety.

Emir Kusturica had not yet begun to allow his whimsy to overcrowd his canvases when he made this film. The range of fears and joys from the everyday life of these villagers emerges organically from a strong cast and assured, purposeful writing and direction. This is why When Father was Away on Business turns out to be so warm and so unflinching. This is not the lead weight cinema that a Bela Tarr or Ellem Klimov can threaten us with but a lively and deeply examined look at a life whose every day routines, irks, gifts and joys might be under constant surveillance but still can demand a celebration.

Winner of the Palme D'or at Cannes in 1985. Come and see why.

Friday December 2nd 8pm
PLAYTIME
(Jacques Tati, France, 1967)

Jacques Tati gives his creation M. Hulot a single task: make contact with a particular person. Easy enough except that the baffling laboratory maze of the modern world separates the two parties. The old-world Hulot determinedly sets about his errand but is continually defeated by architecture and technology designed to render life easy.

Tati's own performance of the loping, constantly bemused Hulot provides a kind of Euro-Keaton against the sanitised space age modernity. There's more than a little digging at the American influence in all of this (always a welcome sport, ah they can take a heckle). Tati shot the film in French and English but really most of this film exists without dialogue. That's not to say it's silent. The sound mix in a JT film is usually so rich and purposed that it not only stands in for dialogue but just about qualifies for the musique concrete Hall of Fame. The fact that this cinecomedian in the tradition of the great silent directors (who yet pioneered well beyond their available scope) could be a visible and audible influence on David Lynch might give you an idea of depth and craft served up for your delectation. Come and enjoy. It's hard not to.

SHADOWS SPRING PART 1: Attraction

2011-08-24T12:37:00.000+10:00

Spring again.The warmth rises from the soil and the light of morning is polished to a crystalline sparkle. Once, in the bloom of youth I was a fresh red rose just waiting to be picked. Now I'm old and getting a cold and look more like a fresh red nose just waiting to be picked. Bees hum around the honeysuckle and the jasmine and the larvae of houseflies yet dream softly of the summer. And, och, if the snowdrops aren't already pushing through the earth and lifting their lilywhite heads o'er the tips o' the grass. Spring. And I'm sneezing like a bofors gun.

Your chair, cine-pilgrim, come in from the lingering chill, sit by the fire with a glass of good substance, and witness these six tales o' trouble and desire.

All they say is "kiss kiss kiss kiss kiss"
Emiliana Torrini, 2009

SEASON TRAILER

Check it!

Season flier to download and print pdf or click on the image for a full size jpg

THE SCREENINGS

Friday September 2 8 pm
MATADOR
(110 mins, Pedro Almodovar, 1986)

Roll credits. Beneath them hunky Diego is proactively relaxing in front of the tv as a Jes Franco horror flick plays and he thinks of his instructions to his matador students about making the perfect kill and as this happens a beautiful woman seduces and murders men in the same way, marking the point of incision with a red lipstick kiss to the back of the neck. Young, virginal, brought up hyper Catholic Angel asks Diego about seduction and then takes the older man's advice with ugly literalism, dragging the latter's lover into an alley. This is the start of Matador, Pedro Almovodar's show of red cape to Spain's conservatism.

This film is not about bullfighting but the culture that celebrates it, at the centre of which is a former star of the bullring (retired through injury) who has lost touch with any intimacy beyond its violence. And it ain't just him. Blend here those he influences as a teacher of bullfighting including the dangerously malleable Angel (a very young and achingly earnest Antonio Banderas), the clingy girlfriend whose passion seems for the image rather than the man, the ravishing lawyer whose interest in Angel's case deepens and corrupts, and the detective partners who work through a baffling case of perp-confessed rape that turns into what might be serial murder. At the centre of this is an attraction both vile and disturbingly beautiful which, at its consummation, seems nothing less than perfect.

Almovodar, famous for his excess and transgressive taunting, shows the kind of restraint he is alleged to have developed only in his maturity. For there beneath the sin writ large on screen beats a genuine heart.

Friday September 9th 8 pm
THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH
(90 mins + short)

Audry is young and beautiful and set for a life as a fashion model and future with her high school football star boyfriend. Then Josh comes to town. Strong and silent, he has returned to Long Island with a past. He's been in prison but no one can agree what he was put there for, though most assume it was murder. Audry's father is the only person in town who'll give him a job. It's said we covet what we see every day. If what we covet is a mystery as well then coveting pulses up to desiring. Bye bye, footballer.

Hal Hartley's first full go at his entwined themes of trouble and desire remains his rawest and so freshest. His comic touch is light but assured, transparent over more serious issues like trust and deception. Further sorties into this territory like Trust or Henry Fool might have been crafted with greater sophistication but they never felt more sincere than here. The trademark deadpan delivery of smart dialogue begins here and, though it can come across as stiffly contrived, it works. I don't care how false the circular exchange sounds between Josh and the waitress, it's just fun, like a good big dumb pop song. Adrienne Shelley lights up every frame she's in. Robert Burke shows real intellect through his tall dark stranger persona. Great dialogue, cast and characters, good story steered by a helmsman setting out on a voyage of discovery. What's not to love?

Friday September 16th 8 pm
DIARY
(85 mins, Pang Bros. 2006)

Since her baby left her Winnie passes her time in Lonely Towers, making dolls and keeping a diary. Writing to him and trying to contact him through his work continually fail. Then one day, going to his building she meets someone whose resemblance to him stops her dead. He is so like Mr Silent that she is compelled to approach him. Soon they're having coffee. Soon he's moving in. Next task? She needs to keep in touch with the difference between him and the dolls.

The Pang brothers who brought us the extraordinary The Eye and Ab-Normal Beauty have been in the genre bending business for most of the last decade, injecting cavernous character depth into what might otherwise have been above average horror tales. Here we go on a psychological dive in a bathysphere, all the way to the final line, delivered quietly for maximum gutpunch.

Friday September 23rd 8 pm
LAURA
(88 mins + short)

Detective Mark MacPherson, NYPD, has been in love with Laura Hunt from the moment he saw her. Trouble is she's as dead as a shotgun blast can make a dame. Following her troubling life from those who knew her he becomes increasingly fascinated with the woman.

Clifton Webb plays the queen bitch newspaper columnist as though his veins ran with nourishing strychnine. Vincent Price in an early, rare non-horror role, is an idle yankee aristocrat and proto metrosexual. Dana Andrews, pointedly at the other end of the class spectrum, hard boils smokily as the haunted detective. But it is Gene Tierney in flashback as Laura whose radiance and benign innocence give clear indication why she was able to rise from obscurity to society damehood without corruption.

A study in fascination by a master of the form.

Friday September 30th 8 pm
Mini Double Bill!

THE HOURS AND TIMES / MYSTERY FILM

Brian takes John on a trip to Barcelona in the hope that this occasion with the younger man away from his boisterous cronies might finally give a sign no matter how slight that there is more to their relationship. So what? Well Brian is Brian Epstein and John is John Lennon. This is a self-avowed speculation based on a genuine event that the straight world of Beatle fandom tends to skip. Whatever happened, the idea that the young Lennon might have found something in himself outside of the Beatlemania world that had already grown cage-like at this point is an intriguing one.

David Angus presents a suffering Epstein. Ian Hart gives us a seemingly note perfect Lennon, even chewing gum as a kind of conversational defence shield. This performance clearly gave him a taste for the character as he ressurected it two years later in Backbeat.

While this story is less about the Beatles than it is about love the fact of the historical place of the two men adds significance. There is the class divide that separates them and which both know as a struggle. And there is the divider of fame. A scene where Lennon's attempt at seducing a woman does not go as easily as he expected is powerful for all its underplaying and the suggestion that while soon he will never have to do that much work again he will have lost something by that.

The other part of this screening is the MYSTERY FILM. When I unlock the mystery I'll post it here. Now, I gotta post this blog as time is running out.

Friday October 7th 8 pm
DELLAMORTE DELLAMORE (CEMETERY MAN)
(105 mins Michele Soavi 1994)

The girl of his dreams is killed after their night o' magic so Franco falls into a wallow. Then he meets her again and the same thing happens. Maybe here I should point out that Franco is the keeper of the local cemetery whose duties include putting bullets into the brains of corpses who have dug their way out of their graves.

Rupert Everett brings a careworn aristocracy to Franco, dispatching zombies during a phone conversation as though brushing off a fly. The Quasimodo-like Naghy can solve complex puzzles but only speak in grunts. And into this gothic everyday floats the ethereally beautiful Anna Falchi ("She" in the credits), a femme fatale as Edgar Allen Poe might have imagined.

Far less a horror film than a romance with a setting that happens to be gothic, Dellamorte Dellamore refuses to cheapen the genres it appeals to with self reflection. There is comedy here but it rises from the overall arc (this from when Scream was corrupting the horror genre into harmlessness). It's fitting that journeyman of Italian horror, Michele Soavi chose this extension of genre as his graduation piece. There is a little showing off with reference to European art (Magritte's The Lovers, particularly) but the ossuary which looks like an overdressed set was, in fact, a real one. Soavi serves up all his elements in a big showy blend before slamming on the breaks for one of the genre's strangest endings.

MIFFdrawal session 5: Hanna

2011-08-13T20:31:00.000+10:00

A hunter's cottage deep in the snowy woods. The hunter spends the long winter nights teaching his daughter, Hanna, about the world. One night she interrupts him with the words: I'm ready. He stops, looks to one side in thought. The next day he goes into the woods and carefully paces a location. He digs and retrieves something very contemporary which he places on the cottage table when he returns. When Hanna asks what it is he replies that it's a tracking device that will tell Marissa where they are and their world will change. Hanna flips the switch. Then it's out the back for weapons training.

Dad cleans up to look more like Eric Bana than he did as a hairy hunter and makes his way toward their planned rendezvous in Berlin. Big military choppers swarm down on the cottage. The first assault ends in silence. A second team bash in to find the first few slaughtered on the floor. A slight blonde snow maiden looks down at them with a disturbing passivity.

Ok, so far that's a hunter and his daughter, a magic device and the powers of a wicked witch. Why is this any more than a fairy tale with assault weapons? Why the hell would you want it to be?

The themes here are genetic modification, wicked witchery, fathers keeping secrets and a babe out of the woods, pure of heart and powerful because of it. Magic and mayhem. But this film has sustained a lot of hate. A lot of paid critics I've read on this one complain about the heavy hand and others (like the ones on imdb) talk about plot holes.

To the first charge all I can say is that the references to Grimms fairy tales, however large they may be writ, work. Yes, I get Cate's witch emerging from the mouth of a huge wooden wolf, but I suspect I'm meant to get it. It's not failed cleverness, it's the film doing it's job. Fairy tales aren't just about princesses, witches and magic they are about strangers and dangers. The thing that I think looks hamfisted to some critics here is the film going beyond use of fairytale iconography for its premise and continuing to become a fairytale itself. Its constant mashup of naivete and worldly gravity (strongest at the Grimm-themed funpark and with the liberal English family Hanna hitches with) serves this end with no necessity to break free of the paradigm. Freeway is a film that does something very similar and, while having plenty of merits, it doesn't succeed to my mind half as well as Hanna.

Second, there is a good deal of inconsistency here, particularly in Hanna's skill set. Why does she freak out at the electricity in the hotel room when she's already experienced a truckload of it at the CIA base? How does she develop sudden skills with internet searching right at the moment when a quick Google would solve a lot of problems? Bumps. One imdb reviewer (I read them first as they are speaking through the experience of paying for the tickets and popcorn) found about eleven major voids in the plot of Hanna which, in his mounting anger, he tabled as evidence of narrative death. I can honestly say that I read all of them, considered them, agreed with most of his points, and didn't remember caring about any of them as I watched the movie. The poster's anger at these resembled that of any other critique of a mainstream film's narrative strength: it's as though they'd thought they were seeing a documentary whose unscrupulous creators delighted in nothing better than deceiving their audiences. Hanna is not only a fiction, it's a hyper-fiction, a story about stories, a fairytale about fairytales. It's really, really not going to be able to stand a lot of scrutiny.

I actually wasn't expecting to like this film. I'd read a lot of negative responses (mostly along the lines of the above paragraph) and others about it suffering from a surfeit of quirk. I'm the first to break out in hives at quirky indulgence on the cinema screen but made it through the screening with skin as smooth as it was while the ad slides were on. Instead, I found a very lean film that did more than its job by doing it with wit and style. Great end to a fun holiday.

MIFFdrawal session 3: Jane Eyre

2011-08-11T21:57:00.000+10:00

Charlotte Bronte's GothRom revisits the big screen again in subtle but hearty form. Mia Wasikovska (our own) plays a Jane plain but with a wandering eye and a frustration at the horizon seen from the window doing the same to her as her life: nix adventure. Jane is a furnace beneath her composure and Wasikovska portrays this through her coal black eyes that smoulder from her poise and cleanliness. Then, as this setup demands (of Bronte and any adaptation) all this control must be exposed to disassembling chaos.

Enter Mr Rochester, master of the castle, lands, goods, chattels and anything else in his ancestors' domesday book entry. Dark and sexy as a blue pointer shark he appears in a crash of violent movement as Jane unwittingly spooks his horse while walking through a fog in a forest (blame Charlotte Bronte!) From that point on it's Jane vs Rochester and the tall dark and sexy Michael Fassbender fills a role most memorably substantiated by Orson the Great many decades ago. He doesn't do Orson. He is far closer to the Rochester of Bronte: aristocratic ad hedonistic when not lightlessly gloomy.

He's a good Roch, she's a good Jane. Is it a good Jane Eyre? Yes, because it lets its strengths (undercurrent, unspoken dialogue, robust control over light and landscape to play the atmosphere like a pipe organ) work under their own momentum and forbids the suddenness of melodrama (Bronte's book is fraught but not bodice-ripping). No, it's not a good Jane because the element that might save it from being too plain , the novel's wafting but everpresent creepiness, is turned down so low that it never quite takes to the air. Without the spookiness Jane Eyre can only be a serious study in restrained power. Is it a middling Jane Eyre? No, because the central performances are so exact and never mannered. Maybe middling because the score is a by the numbers string section wash that while not fulsomely everpresent is always unwelcome to my ears and makes a potentially extraordinary film veer toward becoming a resolutely ordinary one.

So, contradictions. I won't rush to watch this again but I'm glad I took the effort.

Little else to say but this from my particular screening. There was an audio anomaly in the first reel or so (assuming reels were in use) which had the pitch wavering down a noticeable microtone every few minutes. This was only noticeable in the music score with its languid strings but it had the curious effect of sounding like 20th century modernism as though the composer, ashamed of his work's conventionality, was twiddling a pitch control in a last ditch effort to gain some edge. It was corrected about twenty minutes in and the problem didn't return. Made me wonder how it happened, though. That pitch waver takes a lot of work in the digital realm but might only be a dirty pinch roller on an analogue machine. That's why called the duration a reel above, by the way.

Now off to find something for tomorrow.....

MIFFdrawal session 2: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-10T17:08:00.000+10:00

When you make an action movie all you have to deliver is emotional engagement as constantly as possible but with a weather eye on its intensity. When you make an action movie with a sci-fi premise you need to deliver a message with the action payload: like a bomb dropped upon the blazing streets of Desden emblazoned with the words: HELLO HITLER!

You often get the action without the sci-fi and just as often the sci-fi without the action. Sometimes you get the sci-fi and the action without the message. Michael Bay has tried his hand at all of these and has become unassailable (his Independence Day - ID4 for anyone who couldn't spell Independence Day - set the bar for the latter). So, though it wasn't by Michael Bay, when I bought my ticket for Rise of the Planet of the Apes, I knew what I was going to get.

That's why when I say that the best actor in this film is a CGI ape I'm not trying get all narky and sarcy, just stating the facts, ma'am. The great swag of ones and zeros built around Andy Serkis' creates a convincing impression of the animal it is meant to be. Along with the others who are similarly cocktailed, this is the emotional focus of this film and makes sure it does what it says on the title.

The humans need not be anything more than fine looking and flavourless (enter James Franco and the vet he picks up, played by Freida Pinto), instructively pitiable (John Lithgow as the best human performance) or evil (the rest of the cast).

Then you need action which you get here by the truck load and it carries a lot of emotional engagement.

As a kid I saw the first Planet of the Apes and loved its freakiness. I saw two sequels but missed the last until I was too old to care about it. Not all of these films worked as well as the original but they made solid work of its claim. Through the series the rising sense of the disaster of human folly is brought closer to the centre of the screen until the final installment becomes a clear condemnation of racism. See, as diluted from the ancestor as it could get, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes still found a way to punch. Who knows, if Rise starts off a new series we might get some truly ok sci-fi action on our screens.

Tim Burton's ten year old failure needs very little mention here. I'll only say that my love for it does not extend beyond my love for his Batman movies (which I do not love at all).

Oh, there are a lot of "sly" tributes to the original series. I hate these things. Make your own movie. Everyone knows you know where it's come from just get on with it.

Oh, I said this was an action film with a sci-fi premise, didn't I? That might mean there's a message. Is there? Why yes, there is: Don't play God, there's a good chap.

Is this a lukewarm review? The numbers demand that some will be. But mainly it's lukewarm because the film is so on target with its objective. It's emotionally engaging, not emotionally memorable. I'll forget about this tomorrow until the first sequel emerges. I've seen Solaris once. Years ago. It's still with me and probably always shall be. Better? Worse? No, just different. Just different.

MIFFdrawal session 1: Snowtown

2011-08-09T21:23:00.000+10:00

Verdant farm paddocks fly by as a clanking rhythm track fades up. A young male voice recounts a dream the violence and strangeness of which make it feel genuine. Then it's off to an outer circle of what was once working class Australia but has now loosened down to life as the welfare belt. Folk here have nothing but the days and whatever they can to separate one from the next. In the kitchen of one dad, three boys are tucking in to some food around the table and the conversation is small talking but warm. Cut to the youngest boy taking directions to shift his position as he stands in another room. The camera pulls back to reveal he is only in his underwear. Same for the other two boys in turn, the last, eldest, having to remove all clothing. He turns, his face neither smiling nor traumatised, face numb as a dental patient's.

This is not the worst nor the end of it. It's life droning with atrocity of scale, appended but not relieved by church, the state distant and begrudging, socio-economically static. Into this, in a sudden introduction, comes John, a man who notices everything that is happening in a room and expert at evaluating relationships and personal power. We first see him in a vague approximation of a hero on a white horse (it's a motorbike and his white hat is a full face helmet but his retributive stare takes in our hero, Jamie (the last photo of the scene above). In the morning he is cooking everyone breakfast with a subtle but firm paternal joviality. By the end of it he's sussed them all, most of all Jamie.

The Snowtown murders are infamous and a wiki search will fill you in. The crimes shown here are in some cases compounded and there is no attempt to display the complete catalogue. This is not a film about murder but seduction. John Bunting is the centre of human gravity that everyone has known and followed at some point, whether a parent, teacher or any other figure who could make authority effortless by expert use of inclusion. The difference between him and those we have experienced benignly is that he has something on his mind that is not going to let go.

Daniel Henshall like the character he portrays is physically unremarkable, sufficiently overweight for it to be noticeable but not enough for him to be the Santa type, most of his face cloaked in dark beard, but his gaze works like the hands of a sculptor. Henshall is a terrifying screen presence and never more than when appearing to be reasonable and patient with anyone around him at the hate sessions he makes of every dinner, lunch or breakfast he's part of (there is a lot of eating in this film ... maybe that was the catering).

Demagogues don't speak of hate, they let others do that, they speak of love and family and they are never more successful as when one of their targets regards them with a smile that has come home. Such is on the face of Lucas Pittaway as he watches John ride his motorised stallion around the paddock. And that's only the start. From that point John takes and keeps Jamie, bringing the boy to the edge of life and then back from it, a changed and stronger life operative. This is a cinematic seduction which, unlike most, has not forgotten to include warmth. Yes, warmth. Most screen seductions go straight to the heat if they're sexual or rush to the afterchill if they're political. This is a seduction holus bolus, an absorption by one person of another, and is done with all the care of someone ensuring the quality and cleanliness of the igredients of the meal they are preparing for themselves.

There is no three act structure of any substance to this as much as the observation of this absorption. More formal structure would hamper this piece. This is greatly helped by a music score that, praise be to Melodia the Wise, is in perfect harmony with the film, providing a fullness to the package. There's a range of approaches but most of it is based on thick drones, garnished here and there with what to my mind (and experience) sound like distressed field recordings. There are also moments of perfectly tonal guitar based music, as well, but the main brief of the film, its gravity and weight is given solid foundation in the drone. While not directly reminiscent of the sounds, the effect of it reminded me of the beautiful and often frightening soundscapes Michael Gira and Jarboe assembled for the final Swans albums. Without an orchestral section in earshot, Snowtown's musical bed appears to have been made by itself. A look at the credits reveals the same surname shared by director and composer. If that's nepotism at its finest let's have more of it.

While I'll only mention one further cast member I'll just point out here that Justin Kerzel's direction of his cast reveals him to be what a lot of Australian directors are sadly not: good with his people. The remaining cast member to laud here is Louise Harris as Jamie's mother. Old beyond her years, careworn, she descends to a slow self-damnation with a sadness and anger that needs no spoken soliloquy. A thankless performance but a beauty.

This is the first of the however many I can fit in of post MIFF films that I'll be seeing in my last week of hols before I go back to work. I'm so glad it was still on a screen. I saw it at the Nova early afternoon in an otherwise empty cinema. Having variously missed and passed up several opportunities while it was a fresher release I savoured it minute by minute. Why? Because it's bloody good.

MIFF 2011 Summary

2011-08-07T18:22:00.000+10:00

That's it for 2011. It was a richer experience than the past few. Highlights? I've already reviewed each film I saw so I'll start with something phsyical and trivial. I all but gave up queueing this year. Over last few years I've obviated something that used to make me gnaw things. I sit at the front. Third from is best but if that's gone the very front row is fine, too. As long as it's central. At that short distance your position gets very important.

It took me years to realise and relax about the fact that most people choose the middle rows and many even prefer the back. Now I only have to count every occasion when I've lined up around the corner on Russell St for a film at the Forum, standing for forty-five minutes in the cold and rain only to get the exact seat I wanted. I never failed to get my ideal seat this year only this year I only queued for three films. The rest I was able to swan in close to the screening time and take up my post.

This means that the sole attraction of membership has now disappeared. On those few occasions when I stood in queues outside the Russell and saw the members gathered at ease around a blazing privilege I thought I probably should have .... but no... Also, this year there was a lot more avoiding long unmoving queues by allowing people in a little ahead of time.

I've read on other blogs and heard in conversation with fellow punters of some atrocities of scale among audiences. I'm happy to say I didn't witness any. Some vague growls at the behaviour of the kind of goose who cannot tell cinema from loungeroom, perhaps but nothing egregious. Oh, well there was that guy with the dark ages body odour which made me find another seat but apart from that not even feet on the backs of seats. Are people getting used to cinema etiquette again or is it just old and/or gentle people like me who sit at the front?

I should also point out here that crowd control has not only got more efficient this year but that they seem to be a much nicer bunch. I hope that whoever did the recruiting for the misanthropes of previous years had a chance to catch some flix at this years' turnout. Eyes open.

The range was good for me, including two new ones from a favourite director, an exhilarating gut punch of a horror film that might suggest that the country that both consolidated and castrated the genre can still produce serious and powerful examples of it. The Woman is my pick of the bunch with its unironic embrace of tough eviscerating horror. Anyone who knows me personally knows that I don't have to elaborate on that statement to suggest why it might be my best of the fest. Maybe the way o' the future? End of Animal delighted both with its courage of its central conceit and faith renewal in what South Korea has brought to the table of imaginative and grotesque cinema. A debut feature I'll be hunting down and then seeking further work from the same. Attenberg provided a quite beautiful last movement to the festival. Was it really from the same team that produced the scarifying Dogtooth?

Even the middling entries had some merit. I didn't hate anything outright though I was increasingly unamused at Morgan Spurlock's new self promotion and wince at the extra luggage Errol Morris added to his otherwise tight story of scandal and elusive truth, Tabloid. Innocent Saturday worked a street level view of a major disaster and made some sly points about the society that allowed the disaster to escalate. The Silence of Joan struck me as Kubrick's lessons learned and applied. Play, The Solitude of Prime Numbers and Once Upon a Time in Anatolia all show enough promise for me to follow the careers of their creators at least beyond the toe test. The urban folk of A Stoker passed easily, keeping within its welcome with a brief running time and plain rather than dull script.

Strange to see Sion Sono straightening up with two classical three act narratives. Both Cold Fish and Guilty of Romance played out in more or less linear fashion developing their themes efficiently along with their stories' momentum. Both good, engaging works but I was missing the weird flamboyant blend of grotesque and often anti narrative style of Strange Circus or Noriko's Dinner Table. I know, I should stop being such a fanboy, grow up and realise that every artist needs room to breathe and develop and this can often necessitate some relief time from the very thing that brought attention to them in the first place.

These two films reminded me of another occasion at a long gone MIFF when I was disappointed at Takeshi Miike's One Missed Call. I did my damnedest to imbue the film with great irony as the shock meister's take on J-horror. But really, it was just him trying it out. Good film but he came from and continued to better and more original. See also Kiyoshi Kurosawa and Loft and Doppelganger. Both disappointments I actually felt embarrrassed by. Gone was the singular grip on horror that he used on Kairo, Cure and Kourei and here were goofy winks that put distance between him and what had made his career.

A reversal of this directed my choice away from seeing Bela Tarr's The Turin Horse. Yes, I go on about how much I appreciate filmmakers who can reduce or abandon narrative structure and forge strong works of fiction. But it was seeing the water-treading Man From London a few years back and then the seven plus hours of his more acclaimed Satantango that had me finally nixing the new one as a choice (right up to the hour of its first, reportedly disastrous, screening). My somewhat uncharacteristic circuit breaker was a preemptive zombified boredom at two and a half hours of worthy nothing. I know better than this. Uncle Boonmee which does very similar things is a favourite of mine from the past few years and Tarr's Werckmeister Harmonies is one of my favourites from the last two decades. Both of those have what most of Tarr's films lack, and it ain't long takes and careful studies of landscape and human behaviour however still it can get (I love seeing that work); they have warmth and whimsy to enrich what is already rich but never fulsome. So, no Turin Horse for this bum on seat.

All up a fun fest, catching up with folk o'er a hot flick and quenching it with an ale at the Forum lounge (always a pleasure). Oh, kudos, too, to the makers of this year's festival promos which proved well conceived and actually funny (and after more than one viewing). For once I didn't dread the next iteration of the inspired by committee promo after the still ads. The MIFF Tales 60th anniversary vignettes were also good but usually screened when the audience was still gobbling and texting. I only heard the audio of these on about two occasions. Start times were pretty much observed (memories of being full-bladdered in the queue for INLAND EMPIRE while the previous session's Q&A dragged on ... then there was the three hour film to get through). I did notice the lack of shorts before features this year but if that means that screening times were easier to organise then I'll put up with that. Still...

I initially frowned at the uncharacteristically high number of US indies in the program but then remembered that without a real arthouse scene in this city even these will probably plummet into obscurity without festival support, as much as any Armenian noir or Peruvian ghost tale.

Joke of the festival goes to my friend Tatiana who texted from the mangled screening of The Turin Horse that the endless long takes were like "waiting for Godard". I'm ashamed to report that I, Godard fan, Beckett fan and mashup fan, didn't think of that myself.

MIFF session 13 (final): Attenberg

2011-08-07T16:59:00.000+10:00

A white wall. Seconds later the same white wall. Its texture of plaster pocks and flaking paint becomes interesting. Bela Tarr's idea about long takes and the creativity of the audience comes to the fore. Then, just as I was going to happily meditate on time and entropy two young women approach each other from each side of the screen. They stop short of an intimate space and gingerly crane their necks to bring their faces together in a kiss. But it is the kind of kiss two gekos might give each other. They are working out the process. Their dialogue has the naive lilt of absurdism. Unsuccessful, they assume the roles of fighting cats, snarling and clawing.

The blonde woman, Marina, waits at her father's side in hospital and at home, as he goes through treatment for a condition that, while undisclosed, appears to be terminal. Their continued dalogue soon becomes the focus of the film. What a relief it was to witness the examination of developing grief enacted in a perfectly functional father daughter bond. Their conversations touch on all that concerns them in the light of his impending death and are a realistic blend of grimness, fear and humour.

The third strain of this film is Marina's growing experimetation with sex and love. She works as a chauffeur for the local mining company and strikes up a relationship with a young visiting contractor. Step by step the awkward pair travel to their consumation which, though unerotic to the eye, is trauma free.

The first strain, which gives the film its title, develops into a series of odd dance duets which look like a mix of chrorus line routines and animal behaviour seen on David Attenborough documentaries (Bella, the brunette, misprononounces the name as Attenberg).

If all this sounds like Ingmar Bergman does Wes Anderson allow me to disabuse. The central relationship between father and daughter gathers a quiet but powerful momentum and while humour and whimsy trade time in their talk with the details of cremation (currently illegal in the film's native Greece necessitating complicated organisation to effect. The mounting gravity of this and its effect on Marina managed to bring me ust short of tears with its quiet and dignified intensity.

Marina's odd friendship with Bella, mostly the dances but also a number of dialogues that while funny reveal strong differences between the two. Quirky exchanges, often funny but never cloyingly cute, they place Marina in her self-limited social realm. This strain coalesces with a gentle power with the main, providing the finale with a reinforced sense of transition.

This is low-narrative filmmaking that prefers emtional movement over character motivation or the three acts. It is still fiction, though and yet more proof that fiction can play without narrative and still engage its audience. Because of this, Attenberg must take longer to settle into its rhythms and carefully guide its viewers away from the expectation of narrative and allow them to savour the work of a sturdy cast and some individualistic writing. Seldom has grief felt so light and yet so like grief.

An easy and fitting farewell to the festival.

MIFF session 12: Guilty of Romance

2011-08-05T00:30:00.000+10:00

Two detectives find a bizarrely arranged body in a rainy alley in Tokyo's red light district. What at first looks like the corpse of a murdered prostitute becomes sections of a woman's body with parts of a mannequin replacing what has been taken from the body. Another corpse, identically arranged is found in a nearby low rent apartment. The two complete a single body ... almost. The head, hands and genitalia have not been recovered.
Izumi is a young housewife who perfects the details of her husband's domestic life. Her constant rearrangement of his house slippers in the moments before his entrance looks like OCD at first but when he comes through the door and inserts his feet into them he congratulates her on their positioning. "You're improving," he tells her. She blushes and bows, delighted. The evening passes from the silence that accompanies his reading, through a sexless marriage bed, to the morning's parting ritual which will be reversed at the end of the day.

He is a writer of popular but trashy sex novels which we see him reading before adoring fans. She is allowed a career at the local supermarket pushing rubbish from the frozen goods section on to listless shoppers (you know her from your own supermarket whenever you politely refuse the satay chilli egg solutions sizzling on the grill as a host of cold ones lie scattered on a paper plate....anyway....) Here she is spotted by a pinku agent who coaxes her into a more lucrative career which occasions what seems to be her life's first orgasm.

Radient (everyone is saying so) with a new taste for the nasty and flavoursome she ventures into the realm of the Love Hotel and there meets a pimp who at first seems to be a street performer and, through him, Mitsuko, a wild and ageing beauty who promises an even more lucrative career than before. These two get on from the word go. Just as she had radiated admiration at her husband's readings she now does as much at her new mentor and friend's daytime work, lecturing in poetry at the local elite university.

The journey from here to the corpse of the opening is intriguing and pacey. As always with a Sion Sono film, for each splash of hedonism we get some extra depth as a counterweight. The everpresent theme of identity returns but here is given new faces as these two women's lives and wishes twine with increasing tightness. Central to this is the notion of women empowering themselves through sexual allure: is it buying in or playing strings?

Sono is often described as a transgressive filmmaker but I think that does him a disservice. As his control over his medium has visibly increased so has his power to metre his content. What once was shock value is now more firmly contextualised and so more powerful (the violence of this and Cold Fish bear witness). If he was a bad boy once his excesses have led him to become a wise man.

MIFF session 11: Innocent Saturday

2011-08-04T17:18:00.000+10:00

Dark blue night. Young Valery, an industrial trainer, walks nervously along a walkway in a gigantic industrial complex. He is recognised by someone in a passing car. They exchange urgent but fragmented information. Valery is taken through part of the interior of the complex by a colleague who warns him against panic. He stumbles into a meeting of men variously dressed industrially or in business suits. The talk is apocalyptic. One says it will be worse than Hiroshima. Another rejoins that what they need is another Nagasaki. Ukraine, spring 1986, welcome to Chernbobyl.

A particularly bullish apparatchik shouts his way into control of the talk and, seeing the lowly instructor, makes him swear an oath of silence. He is then free to go. He walks back to town as dawn breaks and is accosted by another colleague who seems to have been hit with the medieval martyr stick. He has been to the core, seen the great power slowly waking through exposure. It was so beautiful and humbling that he felt like diving in. Valery leaves him on the road. The inspired man starts coughing. We won't see him again.

A little later, Valery bustles his way into his girlfriend Vera's worker's dorm, pulling her by the elbow from the line of them as they file out. He explains the situation hurriedly and begs her to dress and go with him to the train station. Their run to the station, using shaky cam and it wayward focus is strong visualisation of a panic kept secret in a crowd. It's spring, labour day and everyone is happily in short sleeves in the sunshine. Only two people among them know that the sunshine and fresh air will soon turn to poison. They reach the station in time to see what will surely be the last train pull out and leave them there, sentenced to either cataclysm or decades of slow death. We linger on their faces. We need to.

What follows is a number of small circumstances that contrive to get Vera and Valery into a wedding party and keep them there. He fights through the rejoicing crowd the same way he might have to fight through another very soon. This drunken one is no better than the imaginable survivalist one as both are large groups of people continually colliding in celebration of life but condemned to death.

This party is where the majority of the film takes place and while it can drag the sense of hopelessness that its claustrophobia grinds soon becomes the central point of the film. These people have nowhere to go that will free them from their doom. This might be enough but as Valery rejoins his old cronies in the wedding band and plays part of their gig with them, another theme emerges which touches on the use made by the Soviet system of fear and personal gain achieved through betrayal. Valery, like the machine he's bolted himself into, uses his knowledge now the same way he once did. Much of the film sees him trying to undo the opportunism of his past through good works but he also knows, as one of his old bandmates points out, he might be executed for inciting a panic. The final sequence is a compression of freedom and despair and features an extraordinary fadeout device that should be in flimmaking textbooks for its simplicity and power.

We are then treated to a mercifuly few consequential titles of the fate of the people of Chernobyl which are less than necessary in light of the abstracted account of it we have just seen. If that fade had given to a few seconds silent blackness before the credits rolled, its power would have said more than the words on the screen. A small pick but a pick nonetheless.

MIFF session 10: Once Upon a Time In Anatolia

2011-08-03T20:29:00.000+10:00

A perfectly serviceable episode of Law and Order just directed by Andrei Tarkovsky. Three cars roll through a softly undulating landscape that by day would look verdant and lush but now at night looks like the setting for a nightmare. They stop and frogmarch a young bearded man to an ancient looking drinking fountain. Is it here, they ask him. No, he says, I was wrong the tree was rounder. Everybody back in. Again and again, eah wild goose chase taking about fifteen minutes. Finally they stop for the night at a local inn and take in a meal along with a huge dollop of local history. Morning. The next sortee to find the buried victim of the killer in their care hits paydirt. The next half hour is given to a real time field police report of the crime scene. And then on to.... you get the idea.

If you were playing the Tarkovsky drinking game with this one you would be a casualty by the end of the first thirty minutes. This extremely long police procedural goes at its own pace and will neither be hurried nor suffer the illusion of hurry through nervous editing. The body is located, examined. End.

No, you don't get out of it that easy. Throughout all the waiting you do with these characters (and there is more waiting than anything outside of a Bela Tarr film) a dialogue strikes up and develops between the doctor who needs to be present and the chief prosecutor. It is about the unfortunate death of a beautiful woman. The conversation, taken up and put down repeatedly, becomes the real story of what we are seeing and as soon as that is understood, you are watching an interesting film. A film too long, for certain, but an interesting film with good characters fleshed out well with fine performances.

But at 157 minutes this tests the patience of the blessed and the canonised. Beautiful lensing over landscapes that scream cinema, faces lingeredon which time has carved with lessons and hardship. A constant and believably serious underburn. But so long and so shiftless that the arrival of the subtle denoument plays like a moment of inspiration and the final and finally arriving, at last, please make it the last, amen of a funeral service. Strong effort and modest payout but curiously satisfying.

MIFF session 9: Pom Wonderful Presents the Greatest Movie Ever Sold

2011-08-02T21:24:00.000+10:00

See that title, see the movie. It does what it says on the tin. Morgan Spurlock sets his sights on nefarious comedy of product placement, financing a documentary about it which ... is about it.

A series of meetings with a spectrum of intimidatingly urbane whitecollars, self perjuring Hollywood high-fliers, social commentators and consumer guardians takes us through the concept of co-branding as the arc: we are seeing this film pre and post natally at the same time. Spurlock cuts deals, thrills at acceptance and sighs at rejection and gets his film made. Here's proof!

We watch the erosion of everyday variety into a focussed travel from one product to the next from those who have coughed up the most to dominate the film until we are getting full 30 second tv syle commercials right there in the middle of a feature documentary. Spurlock keeps it light but our eye is always on his central question about integrity.

This film is never boring. It can't be. It's targets are the same as ours and they are easy to shoot. Does what it says on the tin. But here's my problem:

It can't work.

Everybody knows about product placement and few in any of this film's audiences would be under any delusion about commercial cinema being .... commercial. Spurlock's films veer even closer to the flame of entertainment over veracity than Michael Moore's. He did get away with it once. Supersize Me had an agenda and, by aiming a home made ging at a corporate Goliath none would quibble over his popcorn sensibility.

He's good at what he does. There is a lot of information in every minute of this film and it is served in perfect bitesized portions. Who cares that it's information we either already know or can guess at from what we do know? It's fun. Who cares that making a infotainment such as this needs only the very slightest of veils of commentary to give its creator's sellout an ethical cool? Dig? Morgan Spurlock isn't selling out, he's buying in. Morgan Spurlock isn't six of one, he's half a dozen of another. And the lossless march of market-proof irony goes on.

But it can't, really. At the bottom of all of this jokey dance with the devil and self parodic lamentation about artistic integrity is the idea that there is an art so pure that the most ethereal breath of Mammon woud kill it on contact. Without this point the film is next to meaningless and yet it cannot stand the most casual scrutiny. It is surely beyond cynicism. (Have yet the hallowed halls of academe produced a concept so apt, so progressive, so superliminal and so ... dicky as post-cynicism? No? Time.)

This is a clever prank but like most pranks can only be clever. The statement about money owning art is as old as human settlement. Playing corporations by playing into their hands is ok but then the film was made and did look as it did. I can't damn this film, it's brief eighty-eight minutes are packed with amusing and sometimes thought-nurturing material but the choctop that I didn't bother getting beforehand would have been similiary sugary and flavoursome, packed with enough scooped ice cream to give the impression that it's a legit dessert. Yeah, it's entertaining but so are the blockbusters whose posters we see repeatedly throughout in the offices of movie moghuls and on walls and the sides of buses.

I'd leave it there but for one thing that ruined my tolerance. In his quest for possible backers, Spurlock is often seen lurking around the shelves of supermarkets. He picks one bottle from a shelf and can only share it with us through helpless laughter. It's a shampoo for use on both human and animal. This is funny until you realise...why shouldn't it be? Hair is hair. Shampoo cleans it. Shooting at name brands is shooting cheap. Shooting at nonbrands (wih an assault weapon) is bullying.

"Who breaks a butterfly upon a wheel?"

In the spirit of the neopostcynical environment let me be the first to say: Bullshit!

MIFF session 8: Play

2011-08-02T00:37:00.000+10:00

A gang of five black boys in a Stockholm shopping centre. Two snow pale Swedish boys stroll down a walkway, innocently flaunting their affluence. The gang take in every syllable and after a voting game make their move, crowding in on the white kids and conning them out of their mobile phone. Cut to two white kids with their Asian friend, being sent off by their parents on a spending trip. The gang moves in. This time we follow them from stalking to the move and far, far beyond. Bullying at its finest.

As frustrating and angering the gang's behaviour gets (I'm talking white knuckle fury in the auditorium, here) it soon becomes clear how deliberate it is. This is paramilitary bullying and it works a hair short of the Stockholm Syndrome (association intended by me and the filmmakers). This gang knows the power of its numbers and the effect its ethnicity has on its victims down to the youngest and most childlike member (the eldest couldn't be more than fifteen). It is this effortless calculation that carriesboth the narrative and our wish for its momentum. These boys are monstrous. Their victims are increasingly pliant. Where can this end?

But the gang is a group of boys. They defend themselves against a blustering but ineffectual attack by a group of men while on a tram but lift their feet at a train platform when the cleaner trying to mop the foor asks them. There is no contradiction here. Adults who act like adults carry authority for them, be they ever so humble. Adults who act like schoolyard brigands are met with force. But, again, it is the victims and their continued subserviance that creates a mounting anxiety. They aren't constantly compliant but the few acts of defiance they are capable of only lead them further into the gang's control.

This is presented in a series of long takes by someone who knows how to use them. This is not Bela Tarr or Tarkovsky whose still canvases absorb you into a new cosmos; the camera is set up to record variously with a roving eye or a stubbornly held stare, at all times delivering narrative information (yes, if you've seen it, the Native American busker shots, as well). The opening scene of the initial scam is a single shot from a camera mounted on a mezzanine, expertly taking us to whichever point of attention we need. This is not shaky cam it is a Kubrickian determination that requires an expert hand with the coreography of extras and speaking parts alike.

The colour palete is rich and the image has a sheen and depth that adds a shiver of veracity to us observing. Stanley Kubrick would have loved the Red Camera. From genteel innercity Stockholm, through industrial sites to the forests and wastes, we are shown a setting that seems to offer the victims less and less hope. If you go in knowing that the Swedish colours are blue and yellow you will see a lot of that combination. A running gag of a wooden cradle abandoned in a subruban train provides some light relief but also suggests a lack of care that might have created the central situation. The cradle comes into play later and poignantly.

I've been mentioning Kubrick a few times in this review even though I think his name is over-called whenever extraordinary cinema is discussed. I'm not a huge fan of him but admire much of his output and ideas. One of the latter is his notion that a film should be made up of six or so non-submersible units, blocks of the world through the screen where the events seemingly must happen, keeping well shy of stepping in himself to help out, leaving that to his audience. Well, that's what happens here. A few large blocks of this reality (including a kind of denoument that Michael Haneke or Gaspar Noe might approve of) and a coda.

A film's coda ought to both provide a final flourish of what we have seen but also add something mysterious or uncontrollable, a little wafer-thin mint on the pillow that tastes of salt and vinegar. Well, that happens here, too.

I pick MIFF films from the copy in the guide. Often I'll charge into a favourite director (there are two Sion Sono films this year!!!). I'll always try to find a film that I fear to see (eg The Woman from this year or Dream Home from last year). And then I'll go looking for outside chances. These simply have something in their descriptions that appeal to me, no depth needed, just enough salt or sugar in the presentation and they're on the list. These have the highest miss rate, almost destined to disappoint. Play didn't.

MIFF session 7: The Woman

2011-07-31T03:16:00.000+10:00

Chris is middle America. In his early 40s he has everything in the list David Byrne makes in Once in a Lifetime; clean cut and confidently in control of his life and those he is responsible for. He even has a woman he found in the woods tethered up in his cellar. Oh, the rest of the family know about it, too. They are going to civilise her. She's a family project.

That's the sum of the plot information I'm going to give. The rest of it is best experienced fresh and without peeping at the imdb. That might be hard to do for awhile if you don't see it at the festival but I urge you to wait until a cinema release (unlikely now our arthouse scene has been cremated) or on an optical format snared from o'erseas. If you have any genuine love for what cinema can achieve at its wildest and yet most intentional then you need to see this film. Simple as that.

I have seen gorier films and films more unrelentingly violent than this but not since Martyrs and Irreversible before it have I been so exhilarated by relinquishing my control over a film and letting it force its way into me like this.

I am unaware if director and co-writer Lucky Mckee has made any statement to this effect but this film, even more than Martyrs (for which the claim was made) this is an anti-torture-porn film. Where Martyrs takes a kind of Kubrick approach to the use of pain in art The Woman chooses a linear assault on its audience as brutal as the actions and motives of its characters. There is no luxuriating in the means of pain and, crucially, no path of identification with the perpetrator. The person who can empathise with Chris and his very scary son will require immediate and terrifying psychiatric attention. There is similarly no sleaze or covert invitation to fellow travel. We are meant to be appalled by what we are seeing. If the silence of the full house at the Russell this evening is anything to go by, I think we won't be hearing of any copycat cases any time soon in this neighbourhood.

The film's great strength is the shift in ethical position. An impossibly oppressive situation presented to the family reveals a range of responses that for the most part must be kept secret from the family autocrat. The results of dissent to the latter are horrifying. The real achievement of the film lies in its management of this complex interrelationship. The morality here is front and centre but also protean, self-preserving as well as righteous.

There is something else that impresses me about this film (note that I haven't even mentioned any performances yet: they are uniformly strong): the music. It starts out with a winceable reliance on the kind of American indy rock that parties like it's 1974 and punk is never going to happen, a robotic constant replay of old man's music presented as new. Then when things start getting very very serious it is temporarily binned in favour of some old style synthesiser grind that really does sound fresh by contrast. Why? Because its violence is entirely appropriate to the atrocity happening on screen. No coy, winking irony, no reprieving levity, just a big ugly noise that matches the pictures. Then it's back to the robot rock and the sense that this America is culturally on borrowed time. Morally, as well.

I should stop gushing and let you get on the case of tracking it down or booking yourself any session left.

Other things that occurred to me: rather than the resolutely ok Life During Wartime, this is exactly the kind of thing Todd Solondz should have developed from his masterful Happiness. Chris with his violence with a smile and unrestrained colonising of other human life reminded me of Dubbya and his delivery of US foreign policy in the 2000s. The power of the woman is solid and punishing in this tale that, while it might in fact preach, practices practices practices....

MIFF session 6: Cold Fish

2011-07-29T01:01:00.000+10:00

WOOO HOO! Now we're cookin'
"You think of the earth as a small blue dot. I think of it as a cluster of rocks"
So screams Murata San to Shamoto San as the former stands over the film's first murder victim who is still choking to death. Here endeth the lesson. Well, not quite.

(Shamoto, who runs a) LITTLE (tropical) FISH (shop) MEETS (Murata who runs a) BIG (tropical) FISH (emporium). Shamoto's life is small and low on function. His daughter is a tearaway and hates his new wife who has grown cold on him. Called in one night to a supermarket to represent the daughter who has been caught shoplifting, the couple are desolate and expect the worst in this latest of minor atrocities enacted by her. Then Mr Murata influences his way into the scene and charms the supermarket manager out of pressing charges. He then charms the unglued family to see his bigger and better shop. It's the big business version of their own dowdy place and they are humbled and excited by it. Mr Murata suggests giving Mitsuko (daughter) a job to keep her honest and start her earning.

Things already aren't looking quite right with the appearence of the burningly sexual Taiko (Murata's wife). Mitsuko goes to work in the Murata uniform and when her father goes to check on her and visit the family saviour he is treated to the scene I started with above. One step and he's an accomplice. The corpse is dismembered (in more senses than one, though it's offscreen) and rendered ...elemental and cast to nature. Mr Shamoto didn't know he was weak until he met Mr Murata. Now he does, how will he cope with the knowledge and what can he do about it?

This is a non-Yakuza gangster story based on a much smaller story from the news. Sono, as he did with Suicide Circle, Noriko's Dinner Table and Strange Circus, brings his own vision to the table. This outing is visually restrained (as Noriko was) by comparison. These are the deep waters of a character study and would only be muddied by the flamboyance of Suicide Circle or Strange Circus. Sono uses 35 mm filmstock and sticks with it, favouring a plain optical tone until the setpieces towards the climax demand more. As usual, he draws strong perfomances from his cast and takes his audience to the far side of crazy to the point where even those chortling nervously are equally in the spirit as those who gasp in horror. At some points the only response entirely individual. Seeing it at a packed Greater Union tonight, this phenomenon was both disconcerting and thrilling.
,
As with all his films, however far into gaspingly violent mayhem he can take us, Sono never loses sight of morality and doesn't mind showing how ghastly its face can get. This story of a weak man who finds his strength when forced is pushed far beyond the shadows on a multiplex screen, however strong they might be. Morality bends, warps and acts like it's on the same acid that Hendrix took at Woodstock but, unlike the Tarrantino or Ritchie gangster comedies, it never surrenders to nihilism, however close it comes. This is exhilarating cinema!

Screening note: I sat in my usual third from front row centre. At the point of the feature starting, as those around me cool talked into their moblies, saving seats and closing off anodyne chats, a huge guy sat a knight's move away from me. The moment he removed his jacket I caught a gust of the worst B.O. I've ever smelt outside of a friend of mine who went for weeks at a time claiming that nature was its own soap. A thick, almost staining acrid stench. He managed to clear a near perfect circle of seats around him and reminded me of photographs of the devastation of the forests at Tunguska.

MIFF session 5: Tabloid

2011-07-27T21:17:00.000+10:00

Joyce Mckinney, a poster girl for southern U.S. clean livin' tells the story of her life's great love and how she snatched him from the clutches of the Mormons who then snatched him right back. Between claim and counter reclaim is a tale of forced sex (she upon him) and cultism that ignited the gutter press and resulted in a police investigation and trial, forests fell for the next days' fish and chip paper.

As one tabloid got the exclusive rights first they followed her version of events. Its rival in chief dug for dirt and found a continent's worth of it. Far from the wronged southern belle her version held as essence, she was a thoroughly experienced sex worker, offering myriad services for the gentleman half of the great unwashed including, crucially, a lot of role play.

Ok ... if that's true why did she drag a licenced pilot and bodyguard to accompany her to the UK (where the Mormons had sent him), financing the entire jaunt. Publicity? She didn't want for clients back home. Doesn't gel unless the part of her story about her life's great love is actually true. Alright, call it psychotic obssession, her motives here are not entirely impure. There's more to come which you will NOT expect but for that you'll have to see the movie.

Errol Morris pioneered a technique whereby his subjects are lined up to look him and his camera in the eye, allowing for a conversational warmth and relaxation to pervade their testimony. This works here as it always has; the connection between the speaker and the auditorium a solid current.

Next, Morris injects two other tropes, a series of tabloid fonted statements which flash over the image like Fleet St headlines, adding irony to, often contradicting and now and then very cheekily correcting what is being claimed behind them.

The second device is the use of campy old footage from various sources to the same effect as the headlines. This can fall like a lump of granite through a frog pond but here the choice of material is so sharp and precisely timed that it serves to support the form AND luxiuriate in the embellishment and fabrication that we are experiencing. The central turth alluded to above, thus is rendered curiously inviolate, however little we can eventually credit the speaker.

This was an all but full house which roared along to its mastery. That's another reason why I love MIFF: I can wash and bash around in the cinematic equivalent of a mosh pit in front of films that I might otherwise quietly enjoy at home accompanied by few or all on my lonesome.

You could easily point to the timeliness of this project, given the current story of the stories, but what it damns and celebrates are timeless things: sin and human curiosity.

MIFF session 4: A Stoker

2011-07-26T16:14:00.000+10:00

Modern urban folktale about a humbled aged warrior who rises up against the evil he has seen around him when it gets personal. Ex-Major Ivan Skryabin stokes the furnaces in the basement where he works and lives and taps away at an old typewriter, telling a tale from the history of his Yakut people. Other ex-soldiers who are now gangsters regularly bring corpses in for informal cremation. Ivan's daughter is involved with one of them who is two timing with the gang boss' daughter. You see where it's going. And it does.

So, a lean 'n' mean crime story? No, it really is a folk tale dressed in post-Soviet garb. Action sequences, particularly kills, happen swiflty and decisively with an almost naive neatness. Ivan's realisation that leads to his vengeance is done quietly. We see his emotion but he never been in the habit of showing more than a hint of it. So, lean, at least? Well, no, apart from the kills we are presented with continual evidence that it takes a lot of time and effort to walk anywhere in St Petersberg. Add to that the four easy listening latin guitar tracks that are plastered end to end on high rotation until the climax, after which a new one is introduced. This at first looks sloppy and cheap but the repetition of the music is so unignorable and patterned that is clearly intentional; a kind of bullish muzak as authentically Russian as the Yakut furs are Yakut that Ivan's daughter sells in the shop where she works.

But through all this hard surface we can yet see the heart beating and it is that of Ivan and his lost tradition. A silent but narrated coda delivers the story he has been writing about a Russian's oafish assaults on a simple Yakut family.

If what we have seen seems naive or shallow we are best to remind ourselves that the account we have just been through is not meant to be sophisticated but a true and heartfelt rendering of events by a (mostly) gentle soul who could relate them in no other way.

This won't be my favourite from the fest ... but it's working its way in.

MIFF session 3: End of Animal

2011-07-26T10:39:00.000+10:00

A young woman is taking a cab form her flat in Seoul to her mother's house. She repeats in a whisper what would be mantra were it not a description of a preparation of pork. She is talking to her unborn baby. The cheery cab driver stops to pick up another fare on the lonely country road they have come to.The stranger quickly reveals a wealth of knowledge about the driver and the woman and then starts talking about a cataclysm that is about to take place within minutes. It does. A massive flash of light. The woman awakes in the back of the cab alone in the desolate landscape. A note from the driver explains that the car has broken down and he has gone to the rest area for help. She is to stay put and wait for his return.

As that is as good as seeing a sticker on a shop door saying "back in five minutes" she embarks on her own trek to the rest area. From this point she meets a small number of characters mostly unrelated to each other. Each encounter leaves her a little worse off until she is hobbling through the desolate landscape persistently failing to get to the rest area even when she has a map to follow. Weird animal voices rise, bellowing from the distance. The stranger from the opening scene occasionally contacts her through the sole electrical device that still works. He gives her survival advice that is not always timely in a manner that is both enigmatic and throwaway. Theft, bullying, attempted rape and a series of further interpersonal atrocities later, our pregnant heroine finally arrives at the troubling reason for everything she has been through which I shall not reveal.

Shot mostly in determinedly distressed video, a sickly amber tint dries every character into constant discomfort, the film uses its scant resources in a way with confidence rather than apology. A few hi-def sequences surprise with their clarity but also reassure by their control. At first the restlessness seems like a lack of overall direction but a little patience later, once it's clear that this is how this story will be told, like it or not, this film is here in front of you, resist it at your peril. We are in the hands of a filmmaker who knows what he wants to say and what he needs to say it AND NO MORE. This is a debut feature!

This extraordinary film is why I go to MIFF on a mini pass every year: the chance to see something
fresh and powerful and individual. 10/10 on all three counts. I'm loath to call this film post-apocalyptic as its purposes are more complex than that usually suggests. I initially compared this to The Quiet Earth, Geoff Murphy's extraordinary 80s entry but that's because this one is so difficult to compare that any point of similarity suggests itself as a relief. But I think End of Animal is happy enough to be out on its limb and stay there. Even if the rest of the sessions are middling to poor (unlikely with two Sion Sono films to come) I will consider this MIFF a hit because of this one film.

I this has been released, I'm hunting down my own copy.

PS -- I saw this with a hangover so I was constantly hydrating myself. By the time I got to the session my bladder started sending some very urgent pages which made me seriously check the exits and plan on a quick dash. I kept watching while scheming but within 20 minutes I was so aborbed by the film that the urgency subsided and I forgot all about it. The only more gruelling hold-in was another MIFF title from a ew years back: Inland Empire.

MIFF session 2 : The Solitude of Prime Numbers

2011-07-25T14:16:00.000+10:00

A surprise. The copy in the festival guide led me to expect a kind of Miranda July draught of fine warm quirk. The opening scenes don't disabuse this impression. A boy and girl in separate scenes coping with odd family life. A girl copes with a competitive father who wants to turn her into a competitive skier. A young boy copes patiently with his retarded twin sister. You know they will meet and it will be odd. What we need is style to support the oddness and some gravity to support the style. Well we get all of that.

The overall story plays out in three time zones, childhood, adolescence and adulthood (though this last is itself split up). Basic arc? A boy and girl, unrelated, start out in life as perfectly functioning beings until meeting with their own personal cataclysms which send them plummeting into withdrawal. But the arc is fractured. You get to know these two better as adults first and then when the time is judged right to reveal the shaping disastrous experiences we get to see those.

Between those experiences and the pitiable adulthood this pair attains we get quite a lot of the adolescent experience. Alice is cruelly bullied but her National Geographic Afgan Girl stare breaks through (subtly and credibly) to the bully in chief, Viola who then takes the frail outcast under her wing. At a party where the big kiss is meant to happen between Alice and the geeky Mattia this goes sour when Viola's gaze after her protege reveals a kiloton of homoeroticism and basis for near future self loathing. So, Alice either kisses Mattia or doesn't and will still go back to victimhood. The party sequence where this takes place could be from a Gaspar Noe film (acid lighting, eardrum shattering bass and human beauty in dirty colour.

I'm going to stop describing the plot now. Not for fear of spoiling it. I'll stop there because this film is less about plot than the revelation of important experiences and their often saddening results. This is a film about unhappiness but draws a lot of its audio visual inspiration from genres which feature little sadness, horror and giallo thrillers. Long slow tracks down school corridors, the Carrie-like bullying scenes, and Gaspar Noe's teen shindig all contribute to a film filtered through another type of film. The director and female lead were present at my screening and I was itching to ask about their effective use of Morricone's la-la girl voice music from The Bird with the Crystal Plumage but then saw that Mike Patton had been in charge of that (and someone else asked, anyway).

The strength of this film is in its performances. The players in each time zone go to the ends of their parts, convincing at every moment. Isabella Rosselini is particularly strong as Mattia's mother. The two adult leads, Luca Marinelli (Mattia) and Alba Rohrwacher (Alice) take us down into their pendulum pits with unflattering concentration. We follow because we are compelled by their bravery. Not fun. Not meant to be. But sincere without the apologetic cuteness. Not Miranda July, in other words.

PS-- the Q&A session after this screening was not heralded well enough to prevent the outflow of most of the audience. This was a pity as the interaction was pithy if brief and well worth the trouble. Alba Rohrwacher began answering a question in English (which was fine) and explained something humorous but took the responding laugh to be directed at her use of English. It would have been too awkward to have corrected this so she finished her answer in Italian. Pity.

MIFF session 1 : The Silence of Joan

2011-07-23T14:01:00.000+10:00

A young woman with a ponytail stands at the parapet of a castle wall. She asks for forgiveness and then lets herself fall. Oh ... she's Joan of Arc. We then see her on a stretcher being led to a cell where she is manacled to a bed. She takes an angry vow of silence. "Including you," she spits. It's 15th century France. When people address god they don't know they are talking to themselves.

The voices which led her and France to military victory over the hated English have also gone silent. If she has become reviled since the victories have dried up her own silence spooks her captors. What follows is a number of associations which illustrate a range of sanctification. Her prison physician sees her as a force of nature as essential to his life as the bees whose honey he delivers to his patient. The English captain charged with delivering her to his superiors bows to her as one warrior to another. Then, as the inevitable conclusion at the stake approaches we find two religious figures, a monk and a pilgrim, pragmatic and ethereal by turns failing to save her from the flames.

The sole needless material in the film is that which shows her treatment at the hands of the English. A number of informative titles appear throughout which provide minimal background to what we are seeing. What we are seeing is the very kind of thing Kubrick referred to as non-submersible units: sizeable scenes, even in weight and depth that give a sense of witness to an audience rather than more conventional emotional empathy. The scenes around the trial, the cruelty and mockery of the English are possibly there to contrast with the awe in the other units but they take a trip down biopic lane which feels like the lights going up at closing time. Still...

Clemence Poesy in the title role is continuously impressive. It took me half the film to work out why she was so familiar. She'd already compelled my eye by making a lot of the scanty role she had in Phillip Ridley's superb Heartless. As Joan she starts at the deep end by acting without words (and makes it look like real determination). As her physician delivers a eulogy of her victories her supine profile is like a sculpted Christ on a sepulchre come eerily to life. When the English captain gives her her first sight of the ocean, the peasant girl who has known the Boschian hell of mortal combat is shocked into white faced terror at this force she must compare to the god of her voices. Her delivery of the statement demanded by her English judges has an anger and sadness that has the cool quiet of the cloister but also the hiss of the flames that await her.

M. Night Shamylan's Signs was a strong thriller/family drama that pulled the plug on its own power by a screamingly oafish character reversal at the end. The Silence of Joan would not allow such a thing as it finds the notion of sanctity so fascinating (not just useful). In the end here, after the big event, are two moments of consecration, one earthly and compulsive but sweetened with ritual and the other bafflingly ascetic, performed using water from the same river. Roll credits. Beautiful.

Don't sit through the credits for the gag reel. Not worth it.

SHADOWS Winter Part 2: Spin Spin Sugar (Some Girls on Film)

2011-07-09T08:32:00.000+10:00

As the chill thickens and Milos shatters another chunk of combustibles, come in out of the fog, sit by the fire and thrill, ogle and wonder at these seven tales of humanity's better half. No agendas here beyond the fact that I've never put a program like this together until now. From irreverent political intrigue, through psychedelic melodrama and edgy gangster comedy to the ghostly silence after a war, we have something for ev- lots of people. I didn't choose a mother, a daughter, a freedom fighter etc, just made sure that a lass were front 'n' centre. Enjoy!

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July 15
THE NASTY GIRL
(Michael Verhoven, 1989, West Germany)
Sonja wins a highschool essay contest which only encourages her. When she announces that her next prizewinner will be about anti-nazi resistance in her Bavarian hometown she gets a lot of pats on the head. Then she starts finding things out.

At first she's met with a series of bureacratic stalls that would make Kafka blush if they hadn't actually happened. Then it's poison answering machine messages. Then it's the local neo-nazis whose insults blow doors off hinges and render whole floors of houses uninhabitable. By that time, Sonja is married with kids, under pressure from the living to forgive and forget the dead. But some of the wrong people aren't dead.

Sounds grim but this film about atrocity and community fear manages to be by turns, cheeky and hilarious as well as sobering. Michael Verhoven has a lot of fun exposing the problem of seeking the truth where it seems forbidden. He gleefully uses obvious back projection to stand in for the hallowed halls of officialdom and shows the effect of neighbourhood gossip by showing the family discussing it atop a double decker bus furnished like their loungeroom as it courses through the town for all to see and hear. The energetic Lena Stolze (a kind of young teutonic Sally Field) plays Sonja with a youthful electricity that yet allows gravity.

Who said political films had to be serious? This is one of the most enjoyable political movies I've ever seen. An odd call when you consider that its chief influences lie in the graver annals of new wave cinema. But even in his cloudiest hour Godard could still deliver a joke. And wasn't it Bert Brecht himself (very much in evidence here) who said that a theatre that can't be laughed in is a theatre to be laughed at?

Screens with Twilight Zone episode Mirror Image

July 22
CLEO FROM 5 TO 7
(Agnes Varda, 1962 France)

Cleo is a singer, young and beautiful, with a life that doesn't allow her a moment's slump. Then her doctor says she might have cancer. That's at 5 o'clock. Results at 7. D'accord! Two hours to kill ... or die in. Hmm.

Life's still dizzy but now it has an anchor chained to its ankle. But this is neither a gloom fest nor a whacky black comedy. Left Bank auteur Agnes Varda keeps Cleo real through a nonstop gauntlet of social and professional errands where, for all the glamour she imparts and is awarded, she must cope with the worst possibility. Then, an encounter with utterly unexpected side of death stops the merry-go-round. Suddenly the lightness of this film's style broadens into real philosophy, however plainly expressed, and the film delivers a punch both elegant and profound. Well, it's Paris 1960, how could it not be elegant and profound? Oh and there's a short silent movie in there featuring Jean Luc Godard and Anna Karina in the leads! Coolest doctor's appointment on film.

Screens with Daria episode Too Cute

July 29
HIERRO
(Gabe Ibanez, 2009, Spain)

Maria takes her young son for a holiday on the island of Hierro but loses him on the ferry. Yep, loses. Doesn't see him fall overboard. One minute he's there and the next he's nowhere. Holding on to what is left of her sanity, she returns home so wary of the experience's triggers that even taking a shower is a challenge.

Years later she is contacted by the police who want her to identify the body of a drowned boy of the right age. Despite their best efforts to convince her otherwise, she knows it isn't him on the slab. Crumbling, she tries to make a holiday of it but then thinks she sees him in a creepy caravan park. Her plan takes shape before she can articulate it. She begins to move toward the reunion with neither caution nor fear.

Elena Anaya (Talk to Her, Sex and Lucia) plays the mother with such single minded intensity that at first it's easy to think that she might allow us no further than the surface. But as the tale progresses and she begins to see what she's up against her constant concern shows the same range of nuance as Hitomi Kuroki in the motherhood thriller Dark Water. That this is set in the Canary Island paradise with a constant parade of natural beauty adds a slow burn of creepiness.

August 5
STRANGE CIRCUS
(Sion Sonno, 2006, Japan)

Forced to first witness her parents' S&M sessions and then share their bed, and then show up for school where her father is the headmaster, Mitsuko's life is ... twisted. When she causes the death of her mother she throws herself off a building and then comes to and finishes the chapter of her latest erotic thriller as a wheelchair-bound novellist.

But can fiction like this even exist ... in fiction? Is the act of imagining itself not just an anti-trauma screen for her? And who's imagining what? And what's with the circus of the title where the audience is invited to play themselves as a performance? With questions like this and a painter's pallette delivering imagery both breathtakingly beautiful and gaspingly horrible, this must be Sion Sono, master filmmaker who brought 2002's Suicide Circle to the screen.

The successful author writes with her agent hanging on every paragraph and a coterie of minions lounging about her psychogothic house. Among them is Yuji, new to the team and unimpressed with the fame and the specialness shown by the others. He has a driven interest in his boss' origins not only to expose their truth but his own.

Suicide Circle for all its flamboyance and confrontation was really a sombre essay in what Sono saw as Japan becoming a servile culture. The paraquel Noriko's Dinner Table took a cult's eye view of the same events to more challenging extents and suggested a glimmer of hope. Strange Circus takes the theme of identity further into the heart of darkness than he has ever gone. I can think of no one I'd rather trust with that helm.

August 12
THE SPIRIT OF THE BEEHIVE
(Victor Erice, 1973, Spain)

Spain late 1930s. Ana and her sister Isabel go to
the village town hall to see the movie Frankenstein. Ana is haunted by the scene where the monster first plays with the little girl and then throws her into the lake. Trying to sleep that night she is teased by her sister who tells her that the monster lives in an abandoned building on a nearby farm. So, Ana, five years old like the actor playing her, goes looking for him.

A film as quiet and patient as a child's concentration but with all the colour and wonder as well. Victor Erice's strange tale of childhood is set just after Franco came to power in Spain and made just before his death released the country from Fascism.

As with Little Murders, I showed this in my first season of SHADOWS in 2009 but have since been asked to screen it again. I didn't have a film in this series centred on girlhood. So here it is.

August 19
6ixtynin9
(2004, Thailand)

Tum is made redundant from her Bangkok bank and goes home to find a box full of money on her doorstep. Miracles? Luck? The 9 on her flat door has a habit of swinging upsidedown and looking like a 6. That's the title, there, by the way, in case you were thinking otherwise.

What happens next is a wicked, breathless comedy of morality and error that moves like a thoroughbred until an ending that is both oddly and fittingly sober. Comparisons with Tarrantino and his tribute band, Guy Ritchie, are understandable but this is not a cover version of a 90s cinefad. As dark and misanthropic as this tale gets it is never the just for yucks nihilism of that tradition. The Bhuddist saying spoken at the end really does seem to express the point of everything that has happened in the previous hundred minutes.

Lalita Panyopas breaks our impressions of her as young and fragile when she crosses her first early-delivered hurdle. Petite and pretty, yes, but this gal is ready for everything heaven and hell can hurl.

August 28
JULIET OF THE SPIRITS
(Federico Fellini, 1965, Italy)

Giulietta has reached middle age cushioned in an affluent marriage. Her discovery of her husband's infidelity at first frightens her but then, after a seance of all things, her fear opens doors. The spirits rush in through memory, confabulation and hallucination. We take a trip backwards to traumas of childhood, sidewards into a realm of womanhood of which she never dared dream and into a future unshackled by the guilt and fear. Fellini throws everything he knows about any art he's encountered and then hurls as much colour at the result as he can find.

Did I say trip? You bet I did. This is the film Fellini made after his first experience with LSD. Thus we get not mere colour but the colours of Ambrosia and not a celebration of a woman but a paen to all of them: earthly goddesses and heavenly frumps: the fempantheon, I decree! And then he came down from acid mountain, made this and it was better than that.

Boo! Guess Who

2011-06-25T19:09:00.000+10:00

TS Eliot's line that any revolution in poetry must be a return to the ordinary applies to many other things. Take the horror genre. At the end of the 90s mainstream had become so self-ironic, its characters so self aware that an extended shot of a tapeworm of celluloid being sucked into a camera's arsehole seemed like the only new direction it could take. Then came the Blair Witch Project.

The BWP stripped the elements back until all that was left was darkness and unknowing. A trio of film students venture into a huge wood in pursuit of a local supernatural legend. They get lost. After the frustration of this, panic and infighting, the mysterious abduction of one of them, and the unyielding threat of the forest and all it might hide, they meet their doom. Are they being herded to it by forces unseen? Are they just driven to self-destruction by their own exhausted psyches? No answer from the film's abrupt ending. It haunts me to this day.

Fast forward to 2009 and Paranormal Activity appears with the promise of salvation for the genre from point-missing remakes, anodyne Dark Castle showbiz, and the safe sleaze of torture porn. One location, constant point of view camera by the actors. Darkness and offscreen sound. Simple elements handled well. It works a treat...to a point.

Young couple in a new house buy a video camera to pick up what they can of undisclosed weirdness that has been happening to them lately. The woman has already been haunted by an entity which is supposed by a visiting psychic to be a demon rather than a ghost and is associated with her rather than the house (ie moving out won't fix it). Well, the entity is back in town and the more attention they give it the more powerful it gets, from the padding down the stairs and swishing the keys from the table (which my cat could do) to the heavy metal thuds of a determined force of evil at the end. All the while the relationship between the couple is increasingly strained as they fight this thing they seem to know less and less about the more it reveals itself. This is good spooky stuff.

And the execution is expert. The diurnal scenes and any night scenes when the pair are talking more rationally are given rich DV home movie colour and feel safe and familiar. The real deal, though, is the blue and white of the night vision camera as it records the couple sleeping as the entity makes its presence known. The lower right hand corner of the screen during these sequences plays an increasingly important role in the evidence given the viewer as the vision speeds through the uneventful parts and slows to normal when something is about to happen. This and a title on the footage numbering the night of recording instil a sense of real dread.

The diabolical acts are also well conceived. What makes a demon scary? A flame festooned costumed and a pair of joke shop horns? How about a series of tiny acts that might be the normal sounds of people in the house if we didn't know we were looking at the entire household and they're fast asleep? How about the sense that each of these unthreatening deeds are the work of an entity testing its strength in the dimension of the living, getting more and more skilled in the world of its intended victims? All that from a few off screen sounds and a view through the bedroom door to the undetailed murk beyond it. There are some more sophisticated effects and they, too, are kept under tight aesthetic control. The sense is strong that you might never see the demon doing this but one slight glance of it would draw a scream or a gasp. I got a lot of real shivers down the spine during this film. I began watching it on a night when the winds outside raged and the hundred tiny sounds of an old house took voice. I stopped at a safe point and watched the rest during the day.

So that's all good, isn't it? Well, it would be but then the film ended. Without spoilers, this film's ending, a sudden jab of action, negates the effectiveness of the rest of it. It went from a genuinely eerie haunter with the added bonus of substance from the downward development of the couple's relationship (including an intriguing convergence of the two). All solid stuff and then it throws all of that away with the same kind of bullshit with which creatively impoverished writing teams have been stuffing the assembly line horror movies of the past twenty years. This film that, for almost its entire length, stuck to its very confidently loaded guns and successfully straddled the mainstream and guerilla filmmaking threw that admirable achievement into the s-bend in its final ten seconds. It turns every shiver and chill of the previous eighty or so minutes into waterlogged cheese.

Well, the dvd featured an alternative ending which was better but not much. Yet another described in the director's commentary which was better still but overdrawn. The commentary revealed something else that was spookier than anything in the entire film and it had to do with the film's fortunes as an independent feature doing the market festival rounds in its first release cut. Some very big names saw it and immediately mentally recast it with big name stars and higher production values which would have made it little more than a brushed off retread of Poltergeist. Wisely, this was defeated by another very big name who recognised the obvious value of a pair of unknowns in a verite horror (ie he had seen the Blair Witch Project). So it went ahead....except for that ending. No, that had to change. No numbing slow fuse like the anti-conclusion of Blair Witch which haunts across the decades. No, for this genuinely creative entry into a weary genre we get a big loud BOO! Roll credits.

Who was this force, this big name that engineered this creative gelding? Stephen Bloody Spielberg, that's who; the man who had already pillowed the breath out of every one of his proteges in the 80s (does Poltergeist look like the Texas Chainsaw Massacre to you?) so that their every film looked and behaved like one of his; the man who made JG Ballard into a Disney matinee, drained each drop of Alice Walker's power and rendered the Holocaust cartoony, goofy, cute and then washed himself with a vat of tears bought from Walmart. The director of Paranormal Activity thanks Speilberg in the commentary for his suggested ending and it is the sound of someone taking Satan's voucher, good for one career in movies, no unsightly low spots, no bothersome originality to clean up. The great moloch man at the end of the Hollywood foodchain who can turn inspiration into bubblewrap has struck again. I hate Stephen Spielberg.

What's wrong with Broadcast News?

2011-06-14T09:19:00.000+10:00

Dramedy from the mid 80s now enjoying the reputation of rising above slurs aimed at it on first release that it was Network lite. So Amazon had a sale on some of its Criterion titles and I chucked that one in the cart along with the rest. First rainy day, I noted mentally.

So I did. Loose end, finished a short list for SHADOWS, I slip the ol' blu-ray disc into the OPPO.

So, Network lite or something with its own weight? Neither.

James Brooks is a competent if constrained filmmaker but the premise of a triangle of careerism and heart strings with Albert Brooks, Holly Hunter and William Hurt can't be that bad, surely. Well, it is and the problems with it are there in the first sentence of this par. This film plays satire then rom com then serious drama by turns but never twines the threads. If you were to take a handful of marbles and put them in a box and shook the box it would have more coherence than Broadcast News because for all the variations of pattern and size of the marbles they would all be making the same racket.

See that cast list up there? It's virtually madatory casting for the period. Brooks was branching out from his stand up and tv careers into cinema outings, eventually graduating to writing, directing and starring in them (Lost in America, for example, or Defending Your Life). Holly Hunter was taking her Texan drawell from heights in Coen movies to a real mainstream paypacket. William Hurt, post oscar was at that time in everything but a bath, spreading his earnest sensitive new age guy with a fine line in me generation psychobabble as far as it would stretch. Love 'em or hate 'em they were the team to beat.

And wasn't it time for a new Network, anyway? Masterpiece or not (it is) Network was all post-Nixon guilt and boardroom autocracy. Wasn't it time for some Reagenomics to hit the fan? Sure, maybe. Hurt's character of the charmer without stuffing sleazing his way to the top makes him perfectly cast as the very cipher the era nurtured. Brooks' smartarsed hard journalist was poised with wisecracks and effortless integrity to resist the Ron 'n' Nancy show. And Holly Hunter, workably quirky could demonstrate the woman's role in this, hammering at the glass ceiling, folding her neuroses into career-manageable bites. All good, so why doesn't any of this work?

Because none of the drama seems to come out of the interaction of these players but rather seems filled in like a cartoon background when required. Because the comedy is all wisecracks between people who find each other funnier than I could. Because there isn't a second of genuine connection between them. Because smugness and arrogance in their characters is standing in for charm or style or conviction. Because they don't have much of a chance at going for any of that as the film they are part of doesn't have any to begin with.

Holly Hunter bursts into uncontrollable tears after stress. Her colleagues are used to it. No history given nor any destination forthcoming. Just a quirk that a writer remembered. It's stuck on with gaffer tape. She delivers insufferably detailed directions to the drivers of every cab she gets in. Why the cabbies who could radio each other didn't see she ended up in the Potomac is beyond me.

William Hurt had recently won the Oscar for Kiss of the Spiderwoman and carries his character like a demon from Smug Hell, naturally and with palpable purpose. No problem there.

Albert Brooks once again proves that his small role in Taxi Driver was a fluke. He was funny the way office workers are funny with each other. He was also reined in by Martin Scorsese. Brooks is a comedy talent, really, but as a big screen romantic lead he is charmless, dowdy and queasily superior. His lines are witty and should be welcome but they are delivered so self-pleasingly that they are doomed at breath. His is an ugly presence which could never attract one of the opposite gender, even accounting for the hook of personal power doesn't work with him. Imagine being told grievous news by a messenger who smiles as he speaks and then sneers a remark about how much grief you should be showing. Well, that's what Albert Brooks is like in this film. And another thing: Brooks went on to write and direct several black comedies which should have worked a treat except that he cast himself as the lead in each one and had other characters laugh at his wisecracks.

But not even Brooks is chiefly responsible for Broadcast News' offence. Well, not that Brooks, anyway. It's James Brooks, writer and director, perpetrator of two hours of smugness so cloying that the packaging ought to include a toxicity warning. It is the smugness of a time when the attraction between three thoroughly repellent people could be covered by a lazy-minded pisstake on the media. It is the smugness that attempted to convince its audiences that the supposed ethical atrocity committed by one of the characters would turn another against them when the act in question was the very kind of thing the satire was aiming at. (Oh, but that's the rom com part, not the satire part. Bugger off!) It is the smugness that assumes automatic hilarity will ensue from mixing tv news title music with a Broadway musical style tune (and in an excruciatingly protracted scene which travels seven nautical miles beyond its own joke).

We're not smug like that anymore. We can't be. These days even our cynicism has a nervous edge to it when climate-change deniers are referred to as skeptics (and not equated with creationists as they deserve to be) and the apparent homogeneity of political partisanship is allowed a crushing inevitability. When broadcast media is both reviled for barrel-bottom-scraping and declared irrelevant. When a creepy, misty-eyed utopianism enters into what passes for worldiness then the scattergun smugness of Broadcast News looks obsolete, embarrassingly obsolete. It's a styrofoam cup. It's a plastic shopping bag.

So is it just poor time travel? Why is Robert Altman's M.A.S.H. cringeworthy but Catch 22 from the same year with a similar satirical brief still fresh? M.A.S.H. has a larky laddish misogyny that feels violent-minded now. In Catch 22 this attitude comes from within characters rather than from the film as a whole and it is not assumed that the audience will confuse it with anti-authority. Back home, Broadcast News fails where the full-decade-earlier Network continues to compel, draw big laughter and excite.

Network, for all its treasure trove of topical 70s references, is a timeless film whose hints at reality tv and the big, frightening, faceless business behind the ownership of the media. Network functions, despite its overliterate dialogue, because its cast performs at the top of its game and looks like it doesn't know the camera is in the room. Network, despite having some truly vile characters among its dramatis personae, absorbs its audience into its population, allowing time to see something of how each of the major players came by their shape.The newer film cannot compete with any of this. It fails on every point. It is made for its time rather than beyond it. Broadcast News is not Network lite, it's like Network never happened.

DVD review: LARS AND THE REAL GIRL : quirk that wirks

2011-06-06T11:31:00.000+10:00

Lars isn't just shy he's deep frozen. He looks young and hot (Ryan Gosling) but has to put gloves on to shake hands. His town seems to be in perpetual winter which suits him fine as he goes from work or church back home to the garage of the family home now occupied by his brother and wife.

A workmate shows Lars a website that sells a range of highly realistic sex dolls, out of curiosity, sniggering prurience and a deep, genuine interest. Lars is embarrassed and puts his head down. A few nights later he is in his garage smiling at the big wooden packing crate that has landed at his doorstep. Cut to him waking his brother in the main house with a shyly delighted confession that a girl he met on the net has arrived, is in a wheelchair and really could do with the spare room. Brother Gus and sister in law Karin are so overjoyed at this that they rush off to prepare the room. Cut to the pair of them in stunned silence staring at what we know the next shot will be: a life sized masturbation device in the shape of a girl.

Syllable by syllable the pair cope by playing along as Lars reels off a string of inventions rehearsed ever since he clicked on the BUY button. It's insane but they've never seen him so happy and given before. This leads where you think as person by person in the small town buys into the delusion until there needs to be a knock on the door of the medicine cabinet. The ever magnetic Patricia Clarkson treats the doll but really Lars and thus we get to know his troubled history. Does he find his way out? See it.

There is a lot of opportunity here for this film to forget its serious premise and surrender to the cuteness of least resistance the way that US indy films generically do: all too sudden revelations, character details from the blue, set pieces contrived to the point where they look like tableaux vivant and a range of gratingly obvious tropes designed to divert the viewer from the lack of creativity that they are witnessing. I loathe the Little Miss Sunshines, Savages, and Rushmores etc that serve as the inheritors of the Trusts, Smokes and Sex Lies and Videotapes o' the late 80s on. Not all of those earlier ones worked all the time, I'll admit (eg Hal Hartley's teetering output) but you could bet more confidently on them, sight unseen. Lars and the Real Girl is made in that spirit, its touch gentle rather than precious, its emotion digetic rather than gaffer taped on.

There's a scene in the vile Rushmore where Max is expelled and there's a shot of him in tears. It's shoved in there and passed over. Max, if he had the intellect he's depicted with, should have expected nothing less. His quixotic nature has led him there and Wes Anderson made a decision to try and render him pitiable rather than show yet another act of defiance. But there has been nothing genuinely pathetic in the character prior to this and there is nothing after. Anderson recognised an emotion that would cover a gap and shoved it in like a book into an overstuffed shelf. When Lars begins the slow process of what might be his recovery, using the latex Bianca, there is real pain and hazard on the screen. Nothing we see has come from anywhere we haven't already seen. This is a film that, for all its charm and quirks, is about pain and that, in the end lifts it from its indy ranks and to the level of cinema that doesn't need any claims at all to tell its tales.

In case you're wondering, there is a real girl in this story and she's worth discovering for yourself. Ironically, she is the least credible aspect of the story but even her fascination with Lars is given context and weight; it doesn't just happen.

I was sorry to have missed this at the cinemas a few years back. I'd been impressed with Gosling from his role in Half Nelson. When I did miss it I sour grapesed it by writing it off as a quirky indyfest. I was wrong ... very, very wrong. See.

SHADOWS WINTER PART 1 PROGRAM HERE. Next screening details below.

Review : How I Ended This Summer : the unloaded gun rule

2011-06-01T14:29:00.000+10:00

Two men, one young and one middle aged. Experience vs ennui. Duty vs drudge. Sense of purpose and appreciation of place in universe vs ... restlessness and boredom. They're alone on an Arctic island, running a weather station. Sergei thinks of his family while applying his hard won expertise. Pavel plays with the junk from the old missions and tests the radioactive sensor for the fun of it. He comes in from this one afternoon and reports the results excitedly to the old man. Sergei embarrasses him by finding out he'd left the shotgun unloaded. There are polar bears on the island. They can and have killed humans. Pavel has risked both their lives and the mission.

Later, because he's experienced and he can Sergei goes on an unauthorised fishing expedition on the other side of the island. Not a fishing trip, mind. He takes the speedboat and is considerably armed. Pavel is worried but here's his chance to do everything right. He covers for Sergei while making his routine report but the remote operator insists he bring Sergei to the radio. Fudging it, he takes a message. Sergei's family have been in an accident and are facing death in the emergency ward. Ummmmm ...

Sergei comes back in high spirits and ropes Pavel into preparing the fish for salting and curing. Pavel can't get a word in. Several missed opportunities to do so later he shrugs and figures the news will come out soon enough anyway and he has time to think up an excuse. This situation only expands until, when the news must burst out it is accompanied by gun fire.

It was appropriately Anton Chekov who formulated the loaded gun rule which goes like this: if you show a loaded gun early in a story it will need to be discharged before it's over. This one goes one further and extends the unloaded gun at the beginning to Pavel's disassembly as a member of the team. The one moment where he had relevant knowledge that Sergei didn't, he allowed to rot and ferment until it exploded. When Pavel flees to the relative safety of the bear-plagued wilderness he is forced to seek his own power to stay alive but even here his invention is dependent. He needs Sergei or mother earth to furnish him with the means to survive. Without a parent like either of those, he is lost; accepting their worked for bounty or perishing with an impotent curse at his circumstances. It's not just Chekov that this Russian tale evokes but the great demi god of ennui himself the mightless Oblomov who takes the first hundred pages of the novel that bears his name to get out of bed. What might as well be Oblomov's unloaded gun rule is brought to its survivalist end here.

This is a spoilable film and I'll go no further in describing the plot but what remains of it pits these characters against each other. Yes, they develop. It's subtle but it happens and when absorbed it is profound.

This film of misunderstood bonding, low on dialogue but big on thorough and muscular performance, is given such an extraordinary setting that the third character (the landscape now desolate now strikingly beautiful) seems to get all the good lines just by standing there. A powerful trio.

I missed this at last year's Russian Film Festival and am grateful to have been able to see it in a cinema, its natural environment, a place where the image is immersive and the spare plot absorbing. You know when the description of a film alone can make you like it before you see it? I'm a sucker for sea stories and remote settings like islands, jungle outposts or lighthouses. How I Ended This Summer couldn't have lost with me if it had starred J Lo. As it is it turned out to be a powerful thing. Bonus.

SHADOWS Winter Part 1 program HERE.

SHADOWS WINTER Part 1: Hurt

2011-05-27T15:16:00.000+10:00

Sage Nouvelle-Vaguer Jacques Froste walks the night with stately gait.The sparks and licks of flame get busy in the stove heater. Wine mulls and so should we with these six tales o' wounds and healing.

Click on image for a pdf of the flier for download, viewing and printing.

Friday June 3 8pm
ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD
(UK Tom Soppard 1989)

"Who'd have thought we were so important?"

So asks Rosencrantz of Guildenstern during the closing moments of this film. Or was it Guildenstern of Rosencrantz? Not even they are quite sure.

They are not sure of much at all which is why their dialogue is made up of questions. Summoned to spy on the crown prince of Denmark, the pair find themselves both bystanders and intriguers in a royal court gone mad. With nothing but their talent for rhetoric, they must find their way out of there, mission or no mission. Not easy when you're up against a philosopher prince (theatre's smartest) but well nigh impossible when reality itself seems to be fleeing at a rate of knots.

Tom Stoppard's exercise in crawling out of writer's block earned him his career's biggest hit to date. Why? Because for all its intellectual rigour (and there's plenty) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead is bloody funny. Whether it's the dizzying commentary on a series of coin flips, the incidental discoveries of aerodynamics and steam power, the rhetorical tennis match, or whenever the play of Hamlet itself interrupts the story the comedy goes from Pythonesque absurdity to straight out slapstick. We're talking money's worth, here.

But for all its tricksiness this might have fallen on its own big smug smile if it weren't for the cast. The leads are taken by two of the cinema's hottest properties from the time: Tim Roth and Gary Oldman. Not only do they relish these roles but are clearly delighted to be performing in their own London accents (which their famous roles forbade). The Player King, guide, tormentor and judge to the duo, is cooked to a flavoursome overperfection by Richard Dreyfus, obviously loving the fact that his role cannot be made too theatrical.

This might have been a play but here the film's the thing....

Friday June 10 8pm

TAXI DRIVER (USA Martin Scorsese 1976)

Travis is back from Vietnam but can't settle. The all night porn shows have become boring and walking it off doesn't help. He can't get any peace. Mostly, he drives around the streets of Manhattan which looks like one continuous gutter sticky with nauseating humanity. He might as well get paid for that so he gets his chauffeur's licence and signs on with the cabs. He goes anywhere, any time and anywhere. Well, there's a living in it but that's all that's changed. And then there's Betsy.

Betsy seems to walk on air through this Babylon, through streets thick with sleaze to her desk at the office of local liberal presidential hopeful Charles Palatine. Returning to life, he approaches her and, for a brief glorious moment, everything works and then it doesn't. She floats back up to her cloud and he's back down in the sewer. So, Travis gets his gun. Actually he gets a few and a lot more besides, and he realises that to get anything done properly he must aim low.

Martin Scorsese had already made a few powerful films but this one was for real money and he could pick his cast. Robert "you talkin' to me?" De Niro provided the world with the performance he is still judged by, God's Lonely Man, from awkward faux pas to the coal black sheen of a vigilante he delivers everything he has and then some. Narration had grown old by the mid 70s but De Niro's voice of Travis contained no kitsch and reintroduced it to the cinema as pure cool. Appropriate praise for the cast of this film would exceed readable column length but mention of Jodie Foster is mandatory. Foster came to the underage hooker role from a short life that had led from advertising and television to full stardom as Disney's poster girl. As Iris, she is unnervingly worldly but when the child's fear and anger shine through her exterior she owns a screen that includes Robert De Niro at his strongest. That's something.

What to say about this one? Do I continue by going on about influence (on Scorsese and everyone who sees this film)? No, I continue by commanding your presence in front of it so you can see it for yourself. First or millionth viewing will have the same impact. Guaranteed.

Friday June 17 8pm
DOGTOOTH
(Greece 2010)

Things are wrong from the first scene. A boy exercises to the sound of his mother reading out of whack definitions. The ocean is a large armchair. A zombie is a small yellow flower. With his sisters later he agrees to a harrowing endurance test that one of them proposes.

The trio live in big gleaming luxury, a huge house full of sunlight, Edenic garden with a swimming pool. The grounds are of aristocratic proportions and surrounded by a fence three metres tall.

This is the least of the barriers between the children and the outside world. The title refers to more parental misinformation: they can only leave the home when their canine teeth fall out. Until then it's more of the fable and less of the able. This would be forgivable if the kids were toddlers but they are all approaching adulthood with no sign that the coddling and lies have an end. Oh, on the adulthood business. The father, accepting his powers of retarding the childrens' development cannot change the physical reality of adolescence hires a female security guard from the factory he manages to come by and see to the boy's needs. This she does but also cannot unsee the situation she has walked into and attempts to nurture the seedlings of change. You will not believe how she does this.

This troubling fable of over protection and the futility of closed (a nominee at the last oscars for best foreign film) has been compared to Michael Hanneke. I'd add French filmmaker Bruno Dumont. There is sudden slight violence and bad violence (the worst is implied rather than shown) and hefty servings of unappetising sex. But neither of those filmmakers have ever gone this far into allegory as this film does and does defiantly. If such an unforgiving satirist as Jonathon Swift were alive today to see the European Community and its treatment of the junior partners, the revival of looney tunes religion, the olympian leap widening between have and have not or, more simply, the state of society in this tale's native Greece, he might have made this film exactly the same way. Be bold. Watch.

Friday June 24 8pm
Little Murders
(USA Alan Arkin 1971)

You like your comedy black, no sugar? Try this.

Alfred (Elliot Gould), an "apathist" photographer, allows his subjects to beat him up figuring that they'll just get tired of it and stop. He's saved from them by the high-powered Patsy who is so troubled by his philosophy that she can't let go of him. Hauling him to dinner at the family apartment brings him into close proximity with dad ("Don't call me Carrol!"), mum (who has so completely made her home that she can scarcely understand anything beyond it ) and little brother Kenny (seemingly too late to join the casting call for Spider Baby).

Patsy proposes to Alfred who accepts because he might as well. Hippy priest (Donald Sutherland) delivers one of the most gleefully anti marriage broadsides at the wedding, causing a riot in the church. Add to this Patsy's disastrous attempts to draw the feeling/living human out of Alfred, the mounting figures for random homicides, and a police force on the verge of hysteria and you have some concentrated satire that can thrill when it doesn't create laughter.

Angry cartoonist Jules Feiffer's play was too strong even for off-Broadway. His picture of a modern urban America is a scene of continual breakdown. The twin responses of surrender or struggle seem equally valid but placed side by side the mix is by turns creepy and hilarious. Mighty comic character actor Alan Arkin(see Catch 22 in the Autumn Part 2 program) is at the helm and also plays the desperate cop Lieutenant Practice at breaking pitch.

They don't make 'em as tough as this anymore but they should.

Friday July 1 8pm
THE OFFENCE
(UK Sidney Lumet 1972)

A cop brutally bashes a suspect during an interview. As he faces up to suspension and his own grilling his state of mind emerges and it is none too pretty.

Detective Sergeant Johnson has been worn skinless by his job and at the end of a gruelling investigation into recent missing girl cases he has been brought to nervous combustion. His own examination reveals things about himself that only lead further into darkness as he comes to understand how completely he has come to identify with the criminals who have increasingly disgusted him.

Sean Connery at the beginning of the 70s found himself in a seller's market and bargained with Universal to allow him some projects that interested him in exchange for another Bond movie. They got Diamonds Are Forever but anyone who saw the real actor under the glitz got The Offence.

This hard as nails psychological thriller was directed by the late great Sidney Lumet. Fresh from helming Serpico, and soon to bring Dog Day Afternoon and the mighty Network to the big screen, Lumet was firing on all cylinders and here rolls back what little Hollywood remained in that kind of work and acclimatises himself perfectly in the cold and damp of the British setting. And Connery is rolling his own star power back to find strength among such UK greats as Vivien Merchant and Trevor Howard. Anyone else brought up on the power of Brit TV in the 70s will recognise most of the cast. It feels like home, it feels like hell. It's also brilliant. Come and see.

Friday July 8 8pm
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Remember His Past Lives
(Thailand Apichatpong Weerasethakul 2010)

SHADOWS AUTUMN Part 2: Asunderlands

2011-04-04T12:13:00.000+10:00

The shadows lengthen as autumn creeps on. Come in from the chill and enjoy these six tales of breakdown and renewal by the fire. Stay to voice your thoughts with a glass of cheer and some nibbles.

Poster for download

Season trailer

THE SCREENINGS

April 15th 8pm

SANTA SANGRE
(Alejandro Jodorowsky Mexico 1989)

Fenix perches naked on a tree stump in his room at the local asylum and won't come down. When he is gently persuaded to eat some food by the doctor, and then dressed, he recalls what brought him there. The child of two circus performers, he grew up with a mix of wonder and worldliness, developing his own skills as a magician. One night ... Well the tattooed lady has a crush on his father which is seen at just the wrong time by his mother (leader of a cult of an armless local saint) who pursues immediate and certain revenge. As she reaps ... Fenix sees it all. Next stop a tree stump in a cell. And then more vengeance.

When Claudio Argento wanted his own slasher film, still popular in the 80s and long set in generic concrete by various franchises, he wanted it based on the hard reality of a true crime story from Mexico. So he asked the director of two of the strangest films in history if he'd like a job.Well, if he'd really wanted it done more trad he'd have asked his brother Dario, wouldn't he?

Jodorowsky brings the same punchy mix of surrealism, melodrama and time honoured theatrical chops to the project and makes it pretty unmistakably his own. Even his DNA is on screen as his sons play Fenix as a boy and young man (powerful genes those, both look like younger clones of him). Santa Sangre is both his most operatic and narratively disciplined feature, allowing him, through more conventional methods than he'd used till then, to examine some of the deeper themes in the material. Sounds lofty but it actually just adds up to fun. Strange thing to say about what is after all a tragedy but if this filmmaker had pursued convention only boring things would be said of it.

April 29th 8pm
PUTNEY SWOPE
(Robert Downey Snr USA 1969)

A Brother takes over the ad agency. This happens at the start but I don't want to spoil how.

Madison Avenue, late 60s: Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy have both fallen to assassins and Vietnam looks like it's never going to end. I'd add Nixon's in the Whitehouse but he isn't. Instead there's a dwarf into bondage (so maybe Nixon is in the Whitehouse). Enter Putney Swope, token African American on the board of a big advertising firm.

First order of business, rename the agency to Truth and Soul. Second, fire the board of directors, keeping one token white guy. Third, make ads so out of whack with convention that they slaughter the competition. But Putney's astuteness and force have bigger troubles than business rivals as everyone from the Panthers to the President wants a piece of him.

Robert Downey Sr's broadside against the advertising industry is as angry and funny as Network is against television and rightly ought to be recalled in the same thought. With the kind of pace and constant invention that would render so much American satire of the coming 70s classic, Downey pumps it full of prickly one liners and shoots in a cool verite black and white. The ads themselves are in rich technicolor and while hilarious in context, reach beyond their era to today.

This is how Mad Men should finish when it gets to the end of the 60s. If George Romero hadn't succeeded in his advertising career he might have made something very like this.

Screens with The Deal.

May 6th 8pm
THE NIGHT PORTER
(Lilliana Cavani Italy 1974)

Max's nights at the Vienna hotel where he works are quiet and easy. One night a woman he recognises appears in the crowd in the foyer. He tries to avoid her but their eyes inevitably meet. She recognises him as well and her smile falls from her face.

The flashbacks dress Max in the black uniform of the S.S. and the woman, Lucia, in the stripes of a prisoner. The closer we get to both the harder it is to tell victor from victim. When Lucia's initial panic and anger bring a confrontation centre stage more than expected gets dredged from the nightmare of the past and aspects of the weird bond emerge as powerful as they had been. The gang of shadowy ex war criminals Max is reluctantly part of are going to have their own ideas about this.

Liliana Cavani's Night Porter is about an abuse of power and its troubling reception by the victim. It is in no way an attempt to explain the holocaust or exploit it (Lucia is pointedly not identified as Jewish, for example). It's far more like Stockholm Syndrome. The swastika here stands more as an instantly recognisable power that is seemingly absolute and invincible. Here is the power exchange in any relationship taken to an extreme.

But none of this might have been apparent were it not for Cavani's steady vision of the costs in such a story, nor the power of the two leading performances by Dirk Bogarde and Charlotte Rampling. This story can be disturbing but is never a trail to watch. If you emerge from the experience troubled and thoughtful then you really have seen it. If this seems forbidding it shouldn't: The Night Porter is a transcendental film.

May 13th 8pm

CONFESSIONS
(Tetsuya Nakashima Japan 2010)

Yuko quits her teaching job. She tells this to her cheering class and explains that after the death of her small child she cannot continue in the profession. She tells them that she knows it was a murder rather than an accident and that the murderers are in the room. When she then tells them that her revenge has already begun she is not being figurative. Chaos ensues.

Well it would except that, after the intial shock there is a knid of erosion to the bullish social order of the class. Who are the killers and who was the stoolie who told? The group is revealed to have always been a collection of vulnerablities and threats.

If you are thinking Heathers meets Battle Royale keep thinking it but go further. If you are lucky enough to have seen the breathtaking poetic epic of bullying All About Lily Chou Chou you could stir that in there, as well. This vengeance tale tells of a retribution by pervasion, attacking the weeds from the roots which is where we are invited to witness it. Through the confessions of key players we learn a lot about the ambitions of the kids but also the barriers that prevent them. Competition and failure reign supreme.And never has nascent criminality looked so seductively beautiful as here.

Radiohead and The XX provide a score that goes with the glassy rain and grey skies and opera blares with the sunshine.

May 20th 8pm
EL NORTE
(Gregory Nava USA 1982)

Brother and sister Enrique and Rosa are getting through their youth in their small farming village. Enrique knows only the life he has and Rosa is looking forward to what might come of her admirer's admiration. Around the dinner table they feast as well as they are able and talk of the wonders of the north, gringo land with its cars and money and real flushing toilets in every house.

You work the crop and come home to a happy family, dream a little and get up to do it all again. Simple. Well, no. This is Guatemala and they are Mayan descended natives. The U.S. backed dictatorship installed decades before is still in place and still muscling in on the land and freedom. Ricki and Rosita's father is about to do something about this when the meeting he goes to turns into a massacre.

After the would be insurgents the militia turn their attention to all the natives and cart them away somewhere other than good. Rosa and Enrique barely escape and now must flee. Where though? No one likes an indian here. El Norte, of course, where everyone can be rich and happy. Oh boy......

El Norte was called the first independent epic and seldom has a two word combination so aptly described a film from conception to reception. There might be a few clunkers in the dialogue and sourced soundtrack music but the scope of the vision with its clear, underlying themes of the trickle-down misery bestowed by the land of the free, allow this story both the simple lines of folk art and the breadth of a saga. Moments of Latin magical realism appear almost in ambush, adding to the riches. And the two leads, playing their own ethnicity, evoke an easy empathy. David Villalpando (Enrique) said of the film "El Norte became a powerful fighting element, grew an audience, searched audiences, and left the theatres to tell its truth."

He was right.

May 27th 8pm
CATCH 22
(Mike Nichols USA 1970)

Yossarian flies in bombers. Bomber command keeps raising the bar on the number of missions he has to fly. He thinks of staging insanity to get sent home. But only a sane man would want to get out of extra duty. Catch 22.

And it's not just the war. Well, maybe it is as the business interests of the staff officers begin pervading all corners of life on the base and then beyond it, increasingly demanding loyalty above flag and nation. The war, borne of national and economic interest has created further interest. There is no such place as outside the system. Or is there?

Mike Nichols' punchy and funny interpretation of Joseph Heller's savage satire of warfare and duty keep the absurdity controlled to see it clearly enough to know it in the dark before letting it out of the gate to run free. Alan Arkin veers between hysteria and grounded sanity as Yossarian who must keep his wits against the increasingly wayward reality around him picks off its victims one by one. Speaking of actors, you want a cast? Try this: Tony Perkins and Martin Balsam together again for the first time since Psycho, a creepily suave Richard Benjamin, contemporary comics Bob Newhart and Charles Grodin, the mighty Orson Welles, and Angelina Jolie's dad (some guy called Jon Voight).

The dialogue is kept tough but open to changes in texture. Glimpses of surrealism blend seamlessly with the kind of hard and important look that American cinema of the 1970s would command. And for each moment of whimsy there is a counterbalanced horror: there's cute Nately but sobering Snowden.

Rock on Film Part 14: Nowhere Boy

2011-04-01T11:57:00.000+11:00

Always a risk, this retelling of the early life of John Lennon does something refreshing: it keeps focus on the central issue of the young Lennon's torn emotional life, being raised by his aunt and only finding out his mother lived locally when in his teens.

Aaron Johnson in the lead plays a young, cocky, charming and hot tempered teenager rather than a nascent rock star. His aunt Mimi runs her lower middle class home strictly but not coldly. Kristen Scott-Thomas presents a woman containing a tide of heartache and disappointment by providing her ward with a clean home that is welcoming if not always warm.

Anne Marie Duff plays Julia, Lennon's mother whom he hasn't seen since a traumatic day of his childhood. She's wild and warm and constant fun offering all the freedom in the world to her newly returned son as long as she doesn't have to take too much responsibility for him. Duff shows the danger in the fun, allowing a teetering instability into every scene she's in. And mention ought to be afforded David Morrisey for playing Julia's second husband, tolerant of the upheaval his young family suffers at the entrance of the intruder to the point of formlessness. His anger is palpable but so is his concern for her sanity. He's not soft, he's just good at walking on eggshells. It's a strong and thankless performance.

Just as the scouse accents are not overdone for these people between the proletariat and bourgeoisie who are attempting to step above mucky commonality, the Beatles content is so understated that when asked for a reminder of the group's name toward the end, John simply answers: "would you care?" No B word there. Similarly, there isn't a single instance of a title of a Beatle song nor any line from one inserted into the dialogue. Showing the gates of Strawberry Field or the Penny Lane street sign are blissfully permissable.

Lennon's epiphany on seeing Elvis on screen is believable, he doesn't explode but you can see he's riveted and calculating at the same time. When he gathers a gang of boys to light up in the loo at school, calling them to be his group, he's not so inspired as starting somewhere. The scene rings with schoolboy excitement and derision and, as with some later moments in the story illustrates something very accurate about bands forming and managing their membership: people are chosen by personality and fit over ability.

I've never been in a band nor ever observed one that recruited someone just because they played well. Come on, you're between 16 and about 25, you're playing some version of rock music; you are not going to get anyone who's too old or nerdy or straight or socially or culturally wrong, regardless of how well they play. There is nothing reprehensible about this, it's the way of the genre and it says less about rock being a musically clueless music but one that can easily be built from little: to this day I'd rather hear Jonathon Richman than Genesis for that very reason. When the significantly younger Paul McCartney plays a word and riff perfect version of 20 Flight Rock it's impressive but he's encouraged more for his pluck. He fits. It's a good scene as it goes against the grain of the rock bio without a breath of spite.

Scenes of the Quarrymen playing on stage are far slicker than they would have been but the point of them is to show Lennon's commitment and showmanship. Depicting the cold and uncomfortable reality of a rock gig at that level runs contrary to purpose of the film. The ones in Backbeat are a lot truer to experience (if heightened for fiction) because it *is* about the young Beatles. This is a film about a teenager fighting his way out of a damagingly confusing situation. One way he finds to do this is through a door he has little trouble opening.

You could say that this didn't have to be about Lennon at all but that it is is important. It has a curious effect of deconstructing the pop god. Soberingly it might remind viewer's of the turbulent mind that pointed a pistol at him in 1980 and squeezed its trigger.

Reccomended.

SHADOWS AUTUMN PART 2 PROGRAM HERE.

Rock on Film Part 13 : Dogs in Space

2011-03-31T21:47:00.000+11:00


Sam and Anna do it tough

Recently revisited this one on blu-ray. Seen it three times now. First at the cinema, cringed. Second, while sharing house with one of its participants, cooler. Last, soberest and strangest viewing of all. Here's what happened.

Back in 1986 I was hanging around with people who, like myself, were too young to have known the scene depicted in the film. All we had to go on was how embarrassed Michael Hutchence's performance made us feel. He lopes around the house dressed in a doona grunting like a farm animal, watching the tv from centimeters away as though he's metabolising the most incredible acid, and is otherwise as lively as a uncurled rollmop. It is a rock star who wants to show how actory he can be (see also David Bowie, Mick Jagger and Nick Cave) There are bits in his performance that do work: whenever he's declaiming into a mic: surprise surprise. The rest of the film, for us then, was looking around that selfconscious elephant and trying to see what else was going on. Didn't work. Whinged about it over goon and rollies afterwards.

Cut to 1990. Sharing a house with one of the people in the film but also one of the people responsible for the scene in the first place. It was on VHS and we were all in the lounge room, drinking and enjoying the proto-dvd commentary said participant was giving (not an entirely complimentary one, either). When I called this occasion cool, above, I didn't mean it was a desirable experience, I meant it was more aloof. The situation prevented both open derision and incautious praise. So, cool, not cool.

The most recent viewing came at the end of a long and tiring but productive day at work during which I'd picked up the blu-ray going cheap as I thought it might be worth a revisit and it included a documentary about the film and the times it depicted which I'd missed at the last MIFF (more of which in a minute). I watched the docco first and then the feature. Tech reaction first: looks and sounds splendid on blu-ray.

As a narrative film, this thing has no act structure beyond a vague one but that feels intentional. The sagging chaos that the way of life depicted herein is served by this, going from claustrophobic kitchen-at-party scene to listless hungover evenings in front of Countdown to very authentic feeling gigs at pub venues.

The central romance between Sam and Anna is deflated from the word go as we never see them meet and spark. They're just together at the beginning and that's that. If the amusing role reversal bit of Anna fighting off the yobbos while our hero ogles the middle distance is meant as their intro it should be funnier than it is, at least. But nah, nothing. By the time the central tragedy takes place I cared no more for the fate of the character than any other in the film. Not one of these characters is given any life beyond their appearence in their frames. Instead we get a big bag of quirks.

I'd cry BULLSHIT here and now were it not for the realisation that I was actually watching something creepily authentic. It had nothing to do with the narrative of the film beyond lending a kind of monsterisation of the central character. He is a grunting, lumbering, gawp-eyed, self-worshipping monstrosity who is yet capable of controlling the outward signs of his seething mucoid tempests of anxiety that he might not be as loved as he deserves to be, in order to appear personally powerful. Inshort: a cool person.

Whatever its intentions, a chronicle of a time of great creativity, a lament for the lost of the era, Dogs in Space is a celebration of an experience that everyone between school and the assumption of becoming a responsible voter has gone through: the share house. There isn't a soul who has lived in a shared house who hasn't got a country swag bulging with tales o' kerazey flatmates or about that time when .... and .... got on the roof and .... with a bottle full of detergent ... and ...WITH A MALLET? Dogs in Space is a Fiction film so this is all writ large. All manner of industrial strength whackiness takes place in the Richmond residence and by cracky if it don't beat all. Except that it ... don't.

Sure, you can have people having scripted sounding political arguments in party hallways, and university lesbians on the prowl in the name of the reclaimed night, some old bloke delivering a lecture about the beauty of his chainsaw, or, indeed, Michael Hutchence acting like a medicated schizophrenic but it will only ever add up to a loss of conceptual control on the part of the filmmakers. Someone somewhere got drunk enough with some others and made a list of everything they could remember about the bad old days o' the share house and not only kept the crumpled list but suited it up in a word processor (this is an 80s film) and did all the maths to see it through the logicistics and budgeting so that every single exaggeration appeared on screen as though it were a natural phenomenon.

The end result looks so carefully contrived it almost asks it audience for permission to proceed. The problem is not that it goes too far but charges gormlessly into it in the hope that the bravado alone will win cheers to stifle the loudest of glaring gaffs. It simply doesn't go far or deeply enough into a more controllable sample of the thing it seeks to describe. As one who has served over two decades before the communal fridge I can say that I recognise much of what I see on the screen in Dogs in Space but never so twee and overfed. As such, it serves best as a record of the era of its production rather than one of the time it purports to celebrate, the big fat coked out 80s, not the lean, dogfood-nourished 1978.

Real Sam and Play Sam. Can you tell the difference?

Compare and contrast the feature-length docco We're Living on Dogfood in which the assembled veterans of those who fought the big one back in the late 70s recall the times. There might be embellishments and outright lies but I care not. Oral history is almost better when it includes disputes. What you get from this piece is something far more informative and certainly more entertaining than Dogs in Space. A mix of preserved video and super 8 vitamised in with a series of talking head interviews (including those with Sam Sejavka and the late Michael Hutchence) and about one and a half hours later you've been for a compelling and fun ride through the living memory of others that makes you wish you'd been there. Poignantly, as the credits roll and some extra snippets of interviews fade in and out the final one is of the late Rowland S. Howard who briefly gazes at his interviewer in silence before fading to black.

PS: Don Letts take note: you might well have been part of the scene you're documenting but you don't have to get your stars to fawn over your participation. Richard Lowenstein was confident that his viewers knew who made this one.

SHADOWS AUTUMN PART 2 SCREENING PROGRAM HERE.

Mailing list

2011-03-07T08:13:00.000+11:00

Yo, kinderoons. A word in my ear at the last screening illuminated the worth of a more formal mailing list than I have been using. If you would like to be on the SHADOWS mailing list to get updates and information about the screenings etc let me know at my hotmail address. It's there at the top of the page but it would be absurd to omit it from this post.

As the girls from Dessert sang in Suicide Circle: Mailme.

Review: Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2011-02-28T10:20:00.000+11:00

Boonmee is a tamarind farmer in rural Thailand. He is dying of a disease of his remaining kidney. His sister in law has joined him for company for what might be his last days. He has a male nurse to see to his medical needs and a probably illegal Laotian personal servant. Were it not for the closeness of death life in this balmy, insect chorusing agrarian idyll would be perfect.

But death is not such a conversation killer here. Boonmee is deeply Buddhist and thinks of himself less as dying than about to leave his present body.

Talk at the dinner table is about the future, life after Boonmee and it's practical, unsentimental. So matter of fact, in fact, that we hardly notice the ghost of his wife slowly materialising on one of the chairs at the table. I thought she was a reflection until she was unignorably there which is very similar to the reaction of the other characters. Once established, though, they variously take it in their stride or witness it as their worry slowly gives way to acceptance. They then converse as though she's just dropped in for a visit.

Not enough? Footfalls on the stairwell makes everyone's head turn to see the laser-eyed apelike creature from the opening sequence walking up the stairs. It pauses at the sight of all the attention its appearence has engendered but then enters the room and identifies itself as Boonmee's son, missing for decades. He'd become obsessed with a photograph of a strange simian figure, took up photography himself in order to capture another one on film in the forest, and then mated with one and joined them, even taking on their physical appearance. Boonmee's servant enters and is incredulous and fearful until assuaged by Boonmee and the others that it's just a member of the family. Boonmees's sister in law asks the ape why he let his hair grow so long.

Do you see the problem I'm having? I've just spent paragraphs describing events on screen rather than just summing up the plot the film and going on to tell you what I thought of it. Uncle Boonmee resists such treatment. You know what else does? Solaris, Eraserhead, El Topo, Valerie and Her Week of Wonders. What? Are you comparing this 16 mm movie to those classics? Yes, and I don't care if they're classics, they all stand outside of conventional narrative cinema and all carry themes or ideas that compel their existence and override observance of the convention. So does Boonmee.

So why don't I just pack it in and cry pretentious? Well, for the very reason that I don't understand it and that I care that I don't understand. Pretension is unfulfilled promise and I cannot say if this film fulfils its promise or fails it. I don't know what this film's promise is.

I do know that it has been made with precision and what appears for all the world to be love.

I know, as well, that for all the otherworldliness of this film there isn't a syllable of dialogue that isn't straighforward and suitable to its context (even when it occurs between a talking catfish and a disfigured princess). I do know that the fact that little or nothing of Boonmee's past lives appear on screen does not let the title down, as some commentators have claimed (it just says he can, it doesn't say he does ;) although how else to explain the scene with the princess from what looks like a medieval period?). I know, too, that for all its sudden bizarreness there is nothing that is intended to be adorably cute or quirky. This film leaves questions and mysteries that are questions and mysteries not the frays of lazy writing. This film is nothing if not intentionally made. I know that anyone who sticks so stubbornly to 16 mm to make his feature films (the sole detail in this review that I outsourced) and makes it look so beautiful deserves accolades for cheek as well as achievement.

I know, also, that this film, unlike most of the films I've ever seen, delivers on at least one promise to perfection. The first thing we see is a bullock in silhouette. The camera is motionless, taking in the slight movements of the animal, savouring the beauty of the curve of its head and horns against the light. It's restless and tugs itself free of the rope binding it to a tree, wandering into the forest nearby, strolling through the new terrain, looking around and emitting odd little glottal chirps as if to say: hmm, what's this? It stops deep in the forest, the camera again lingering studiously on its clean dark beauty. A farm worker with a sickle arrives and gently coaxes it back through the forest. Then we see that all this has been observed. A tall dark figure in the forest turns to reveal itself as a kind of lithe yeti with a pair of glowing red eyes, staring with a human fascination at what it is seeing. Title sequence.

We've been promised a ride both rich and strange. We get it.

Screens at ACMI until March 14. Please go and see it.

SHADOWS starts up at ABC again this Friday. Here's the program with trailer and flier.

Blind Spots 4: Three cinematic phenomena that I don't care about

2011-02-25T00:16:00.000+11:00

This is not a list of overrated titles. Whether something holds an eminent place in popular culture seldom affects my opinion of it. This series is simply things that have consistently failed to touch me. Partly, it's an exercise. I surprised myself when writing of the Coen brothers that I really liked very, very little of their output, having always assumed I liked about half. I started another about Terry Gilliam and ended up having to split it into three posts to cope with what I was finding out about my own opinions. This is another. I'm trying to avoid big targets like Stephen Spielberg who I think should make something he really wants to make or just stop altogether (but I think it would be unwatchably violent: I think he's John Wayne Gacy without the murder). And I'm not fond of targets that are too easy like Wes Anderson who I think should be placed in care if he ever tries to make another film. This particular post pretty much sins against those stipulations. Whaddayagunnado?

TERMINATOR

This one takes a couple of looks for me because on the surface of it this title shouldn't be here. I really enjoy the film. It's big and goofy with enough mid-80s earnestness and neon lighting to be both a perfect sample of its cinematic era and a neatly wrapped treat. The thing I don't like is one of the things that sells it for many (perhaps most) of its fans: Arnold Schwarzenegger. Ok so if you're into Arnie you're into irony. It's like a club token you can flash. See, it's Arny: irony and my good self, we're like that. And he's part of what makes it so big and 80s.

So, if all that's true why do I shove it here? Because I made the mistake of watching a making of that revealed that the title role was initially designed for Lance Henrikson. He would have been an extremely low key figure, invisible in a crowd, unremarkable by design. The docco had storyboard art with Lance in the role, swinging off rails, falling through skylights etc. In that instant when I knew that, the big dumb 80s iconic hit movie became a sketch released in place of the real thing. The suits won and Arnie's career, instead of stiffing at Conan and body builder #1 roles became an action hero in a long rope of parts all called John something.

Terminator went from being a fine piece of 80s'orama to a sellout to the suits, yet another indication in the post Blade Runner scene that big 'n' dumb was going to triumph over intense and clever. In this and other instances, the strong, socially committed cinema of the 70s was given last rites, embalmed and buried. Taxi Driver would have starred Arnie if made in 1986 instead of ten years before. So would Logan's Run, Rollerball and The Parallax View. Terminator was a film which I liked as an original and a sequel. Now I don't like any of them.

Wim Wenders

I know. Wim's a genuine indy, why kick him if he's already down? Well, this post is not about public visibility nor it is about things being overrated. It's simply about me not caring about things I've been told I ought to care about.

One of the essential films to add to your shopping list in the late 80s was Paris, Texas. Then Wings of Desire came along and joined it. A little before that, as a film student, I was strongly urged to see The American Friend and Kings of the Road. The only one I haven't seen of those is the last one. That's because I saw all the others.

He's made other films and I haven't bothered to give them a fighting chance as everything I hear about them makes them sound like the ones I have seen. I'd write this exact post (so far) about Wes Anderson except that rather than not give a toss I actively loathe his films; Wenders just leaves me cold. Before you start mentally defending Herr W. against the charge of pretension be advised that I'm not going to bring one. "Pretentious" is one of the most abused terms in all of cultural criticism and you'll witness my use of it very, very sparely.

I don't think Wim Wenders is claiming more than he delivers I just cannot care about what he does deliver. I would care that a gang of angels want to retrieve one of their own whose rebelled by staying on earth if the tale of it were not so meandering and loose-threaded. I find the monologues of the actor and the circus performer stiflingly unengaging. It is not enough for me that they are angels. It isn't enough that they are rendered in sumptuous black and white (not trying to be funny there, I love black and white). And it is too much to put that goof Nick Cave on screen as though his pointless, affected badboy songs were going to add anything useful.

Paris, Texas has the advantage of being attached to a real writer, Sam Shepard. Additionally, the cast is superb. There is also some fine music that not only carries the scenes it's in more than they deserve but became one of THE soundtrack albums to make conspicuous in your collection. And then, snatching defeat from the jaws of certain victory, comes our mate Wim to suck all the vim out of the proceedings as fully as possible. Harry Dean Stanton, already long a careerist character actor, made a big public entrance in his central role in this film. And boy, is he good. He doesn't say a word for the first three weeks of screen time and when he does it's something endearingly trivial which brings him further into our hearts than we'd thought possible ... assuming we're still awake.

The problem with Paris, Texas for me is that its themes of perdition and redemption are good ones. Seeing the hobo errant attempt to repair the disaster area of his life as a brother, husband and father should make us want to talk to people at tram stops or fulfil requests of $2.75 from junkies who need to visit their mothers dying on hospital beds. Well they would make us want those things if Wim Wenders' idea of auteurism didn't have an 'e' and a 'u' and an 'r' too many. In the hands of a genuine cinematic master this hands-off approach might result in subtlety or understatement. With Wim at the helm it translates as gormlessness.

I have heard many impassioned pleas for the quality of this and Wings of Desire and I don't think any of the pleaders are in error or have bought into hype. I just can't join in.

STAR WARS

I am indifferent to the entire saga even though I've only ever seen the first one in it's entirety and a few of the others in little grabs.

Late 1977. I went to see this at the twin cinemas in Townsville (it was one building with two cinemas which bore different names, Forum and Odeon: multiplexing was yet to be perfected) with friend Wayne. The preceding short (the economy of plugging so much advertising into the pre-feature time at cinemas had yet to be perfected) was called To Protect and Serve and was made about, for and by the Queensland Police who, even to my cosseted middle class white boy sensibilities, bore the reputation of being a corrupt and violent wing of the state government. The resulting propaganda outing was so hilarious it put everyone into the most receptive mood imaginable for this film that was already hyped to the galaxies. There were two girls sitting in the row in front of us and one of them for reasons unwitnessed darted Wayne a poison look. As was his custom at the time he responded with a protracted: "faaaark off!" She turned back around and that was that except that I joked that he should take that one and I'd go for her brunette friend. He whispered loudly that he'd seen them in the foyeur earlier and they'd both resembled human Mack trucks which put paid to that endeavour. Anyway, the film...

There it was, bigger than life, the rolling prologue about the long long time before in a galaxy far far away and I settled into the gentle but real thrill of being present at a new and significant world event. It began by winning me pretty thoroughly. The opening sequence of action and intrigue seemed to have more substance than the usual sci fi fare and soon enough, the establishment of Luke's world was a revelation. No Star Trek standard valleys of styrofoam here but pure desert that by virtue of its being littered with alien technology felt like another world.

And when I say littered, I mean littered. The first really important thing I noted about the movie was the scrap spaceships. All it had taken was someone modifying the image of a car scrapyard but how impressive it was to see it taken through to this extent. None of these convincing craft ("spaceships with rust!" I gasped at the time) were intended to fly across the screen at any point in the film. They were there to suggest the world beyond the frame of the story. And then the story proper kicked off and my interest drained steadily until the end credits allowed me to exit with honour.

First I hated the naming of things which seemed lazy. Tattooine? Skywalker? Chewbacca? They could convince me that I was beholding an alien world but it was one whose names came from the kind of five minute creative thinking exercise that office workers are serially condemned to every few years in training workshops that their HR departments are obliged to outsource. This alone unlocked the mystery of the Star Wars Universe. It felt like they stopped caring after finishing a few dazzling bits.

By the time I got to the cantina scene started mentally scoffing everything I saw. This was meant to be a bar in a port like the ones in ol' Marseilles or Casablanca so there was meant to be a great range of different types in there mixing it up. There was a great range but that's all. I don't remember any groups of aliens just a room full of completely different life forms with no suggestion that any commerce had brought them there. Compare and contrast the same film's munchkiny beings, the Ewoks. Desert scavengers dealing in scrap. A good idea convincingly borne. Nothing like it in the cantina which looked like an animation of those books done by fans of aliens that are so beautifully rendered the viewer almost forgets to notice that they wouldn't be able to move without hydraulic assistance in the third dimension.

And there was the cuteness. The duo of droids, the poncey one and the little smartarse one who emitted little bips and bleeps which were obviously meant to be sarcasm. Alright that last detail was clever (saved them writing any real funny dialogue for the movie's chief wit, after all) but it grew tiresome very soon (please note that I didn't say "it grew old", I'm trying to write in the idiom of the time ... kinda). Lucas and co liked this so much that they did exactly the same in the cantina scene and with Chewbacca. The occasional dryness delivered by Carrie Fisher and Harrison Ford provide the movie with its sole gravitas (Alec Guinness notwithstanding) and when you say that of a film you know it's in trouble.

The final thing that turned my smile upsidedown about Star Wars was something I was noticing in blockbuster cinema in general at the time and was turning me away from it title by title. The film seemed to be constructed by such a gigantic premise and teensy plot that it really felt like a rip off. See also Superman: The Movie (and anything from the time whose title was appended with "The Movie"). Yes, it was dawning on me that big cinema extravaganze were not necessarily being made for their contribution to cinematic progress. But there's something else.

Two other things happened in 1977. First, the rock music version of Star Wars had already appeared on screens in the form of Led Zeppelin's concert movie The Song Remains the Same. The boys' own version seemed insigificant after that. Also, Never Mind the Bollocks Here's the Sex Pistols was finally released which was hype come true and wiped the table of cultural significance for me that year (including the Led Zep movie which by then looked like a delfated velociraptor-shaped balloon) and served to keep slick big mainstream culture at a distance and lead to the discovery of all such things hitherto obscured.

When I got back home after the screening my Dad asked me what I thought of the film and my shrugged, "alright" was for once not necessarily an adolescent knee jerk.

The first sequel was supposed to be the best one of the bunch. I've seen about twenty minutes of it and have no interest in extending the experience. Ditto The Phantom Menace and the more recent ones.

I was informed in a recent conversation that my aversion to Star Wars put me in the early Gen X bracket as though I was to be sentenced to a life bound by a cultural cordon which kept me from the delights to Back to the Future, The Goonies and Ferris Bueller. Thanks all the same, but I'll take Never Mind the Bollocks over that, then as now.

Rock on Film Part 12: A pot pourri of punk

2011-02-22T09:48:00.000+11:00

First, parameters. Long ago, I heard someone's opinion that there had only been three true punk songs. They were Anarchy in the UK, Helter Skelter and Rock Around the Clock. The opinion was reported rather than heard directly so I couldn't ask at the time what they'd meant by true punk. That kind of opinion was a typical pre dawn conversation topic when the party had dregged and nought but Fruity Lexia and Blackberry Nip were left to quaff: rhetoric, nectar and garbage all seem to find their own level. More recently there has been a trend to speak of punk rock as an American invention exported to a grateful UK. As to that I still like Lydon's comment about grunge: "Now they get it."

For purposes of this article my position is that punk was a British music that was born and died in the late 70s. Anything calling itself punk after that was nostalgia or laziness. I care not where or when or for whom the term was coined but as fine an album as it is Marquee Moon does not resemble Never Mind The Bollocks, Damned Damned Damned or The Clash in any useful way at all. Sorry, I'm old and that's my world.

The title of this post, by the way, is from a gig review in RAM magazine from the late 70s. I still find it funny.

Also, I'm omitting movies about the Sex Pistols as I've covered them here.

Punk in London

As flat a record of the good, the bad and the ugly of the scene in 1977 as you could hope to find. A few mumbled interviews and abortive manifestos pepper what is a series of live performances all done with a sole camera (probably a little Arriflex) from the audience. The image of a young (and still white toothed) Shane McGowan being a drunken bleached yobbo has become quite famous through its appearance in other documentaries. But, and you need to approach my vintage to care about this one, see if you can spot a very young Ian McCulloch later of Echo and the Bunnymen dancing in a crowd.

The real value of this footage, though, is precisely that it was taken at the time. All sorts of acts were included that wouldn't rate a mention in today's reminiscences not only appear but are highlighted. Slaughter and The Dogs, for example, look so try hard that it's hard to imagine what they had to do to share a stage with Siouxsie and the Banshees. Well, try-hard or not, they were part of the scene and muscled their way on to a stage or seven. This alone raises the archeological value of the piece. Of course it's great having the likes of Subway Sect and Chelsea playing through footage as untamed as the scene itself but the wannabes and neverwoulds complete the picture better than more extensive material from the major players might. All scenes have these fielders (I know, I was in a few of them in my own little corner of the Brisbane scene in the terrible winter of '82) and it is to Punk in London's inadvertent credit that it includes them.

As there is no commentary outside of the interviews this film's only essay comes from the rough cut footage itself. While this can get as tiresome as sitting through anyone's super 8 dreck from back in the day, the whole yet bears the weight of witness. As such it remains the truest of the accounts dealt with here. All the others are flavoured and spiced through hindsight.

Available as a twofer with the Clash-related Rude Boy on local DVD.

Punk:Attitude

All in the title. The idea is that punk is not a time bound phenomenon but a mode of expression. I shown this to people who have thought it a betrayal as it was made by a Brit who was there at the time but reaches back to US bands and scenes like the Stooges and the New York Dolls. I didn't get that from any of the viewings I've made. It's always seemed more a quest for chronological completeness.

The profound differences between the American and British scenes are made clear in the film. People who think as I do just tend to resent the American story being told on consecrated ground and I'll admit that it's easy to think that's what's happening in this film. The bigger problem in the presentation, for me, is that on the one hand Don Letts is saying here's a history of punk and on the other that punk doesn't have a history as it's an attitude that stands outside of time.

Outside of this Punk:Attitude is a strong quilt of accounts by players like Ari Up, Steve Jones, Siouxsie Sioux and Poly Styrene etc. Left as this and the video record the film is a delight. the problems start with the carriage of the attitude into the post punk era, the 80s, the 90s, the noughties and on where the examples get less and less convincing. As charming an interviewee as Henry Rollins is he cannot hide his ridicule of the more recent attempts on the American scene to keep the baton afoot. The scenes of sweaty cryptofascist gigs or the more mainstream versions like Blink 182 in front of massive outdoor crowds all just look like the kind of cutesy 50s revivalists of the 70s. The fact that their audiences manifestly clamour for this borrowed tradition (there, you go, "we're a trad punk band": I wonder if anyone has been funny enough to say that with a straight face) is a head shaking grimness.

So if the old stuff cannot be dressed up simply as the beginning of something that's good today why make a film like this? The real argument of this film comes late and briefly: if you've got the energy and the gear to get onstage and rant, don't: at best you'll be vacuumed up by a record company that no one buys from anymore and at worst you'll look like a busker from the 70s doing 60s protest songs. You got the 'tude get with the mude: Use the net, make a docco. The rock version is old (well, it was old in 1980 but let's not split hairs).

Punk:Attitude is a fine effort that makes the mistake of pandering to revisionists and irritating traditionalists and is not helped by the appalling attempt at suavely inserting its creator's role in the scene through interviews with the players (Letts was there and important but this is a sleazy way of making the point). See it for the great interview footage and ideas at the end.

Out locally.

Kill Your Idols

Self-threateningly uneven documentary about the nowave scene in New York in the late 70s and early 80s, useful for the reminiscences of highly articulate folk like Thurston Moore, Michael Gira, Lydia Lunch and Jim Thirlwell. And it's an interesting tale. After the storm of punk there seemed nothing left so that's where the artists that came after began. This and in the UK's post punk scene (to say nothing of a very rich vein right here in Australia which went even further by not giving itself a name) was where I see the real revolution, not in the charge of the light brigade of the terrible summer of '77. This was when the uniforms came off and the music mutinied.

The influence on later music was subtler but I think more profound and has more to inform today's highly affected indy scene than the last of the Mohawks. This is where Kill Your Idols both finally finds its argument and loses its power. About half way through the current New York band scene is examined. Everyone in it talks about how much they love the old stagers like Sonic Youth (the film's title is from their album Evol) and Swans and then proceed to make babbling idiots of themselves every time they open their mouths (the A.R.E. Weapons spokesperson talks like a World Wrestling Federation contender).

This begins to look increasingly like agressive editing done once the Eureka moment had struck the filmmakers and they locked on to the kill. Now I hate bands like The Yeah Yeah Yeahs who sound like record company designed punk from the early 80s (youtube Transvision Vamp and try to spot the difference) but is Karen O really as stupid as she sounds here? Britney Spears comes across as a Rhodes Scholar by comparison. O's interviews really look like a film school assignment in misrepresentative editing. It's almost too obvious to opine that today's fringe music sounds like yesterday's mainstream but the point of that has long passed its shelf life. No one cares and maybe no one should. Still, it's fun to listen to Michael Gira or Lydia Lunch rant against it.

Initially I liked this docco but the more I thought of it the more I had to admit how indigestibly smug it is once it has found its point (which takes a lot of screen time to reach). If No-Wave didn't care then why should anyone, least of all the scenesters o' today who seem happier to receive its mantle than they should.

I Swear I was There: The Gig that Changed the World

Hands down funniest title and freshest take on the history. This is the story of how two Mancunians got the Sex Pistols to play in their hometown and thus inadvertently ignited the fuse of the northern scene which informed the world of what would come after punk. The pair in question were Peter McNiesh and Howard Trafford who were far better known as Pete Shelley and Howard Devoto once their band The Buzzcocks emerged. They had dipped down to London, soaked in the scene there and saw the Pistols live and resolved to get them north.

This they did and the rest is hysteria. Through a quilt of interviews and contemporary footage the deals and logistics are revealed of a feat of epoch-making significance that, however plagued by turbulence, seems to have been achieved so simply. Shelley and Devoto really just went to London, asked and received. The resulting gig at the Free Trade Hall was the stuff of legend, germinating an ethos still influential today in music and pop culture. The attendant tv appearance on Tony Wilson's show So it Goes only cemented this and to witness, as this docco allows, the act the preceeded the Pistols on the show is to witness the most important guard change in British music history. The other act (whose name has fled from me but it was something like Gentleman) are energetic and forceful, a kind of Roxy Music for accountants, They vanish from memory as soon as the Pistols appear. Seriously, watching it, you even stop laughing at them when the familiar lines and colours of the So it Goes Pistols clip commence.

Lydon, the funniest loudmouth in the history of rock music from his time to now (apart, perhaps from the Fall's Mark E. Smith) is absent from the direct interviews in this account which is appropriate as it is best told by the events' architects. We are witness to a good idea that made history. It feels like it but (this is a British documentary) you get all the minor annoyances, long held slights and grudges (the surviving Slaughter and the Dogs are unintentionally hilarious here) and throwaway humour. As such I Swear I was There is purely bloody wonderful.

Possibly available on import.

SHADOWS recommences March 4 at 8pm. Program here.

Interzone vs Intern's Own: good and bad readings of books

2011-02-17T01:46:00.000+11:00

The Remington Roach: Interzone's finest.

There were a number of attempts to adapt William Burroughs' novel The Naked Lunch into a film but none reached the big screen until David Cronenberg's version in 1991. I was glad of this. Not only was any diluted attempt to present the novel literally now rendered needless the interpretation was now in the hands of someone who could be trusted to create an extension to the book rather than gaffer tape all the safer scenes together and call it macaroni.

That's important. The Naked Lunch is one of the most fiercely individual novels of its century. Its narrative swings a long slow arc above a canvas of set pieces as crowded as a Bosch painting. While a given passage is rendered in perfectly lucid prose (it was written before the cut up method) any group of them together could bewilder a Joycean scholar (especially this amateur one). Much of the descriptions were considered unfilmable because of their extreme violence or graphic sex which were often indistinguishable from each other. A faithful depiction of what was on the page would be condemned to the feared X rating; cinema death.

But Cronenberg knew his material and the halflit world of its birth among the leading heads of the beats in New York and the hallucinogenically alien realm of Tangier. He knew that Burroughs had made several kinds of journey writing it and had little trouble analogising reality and realising analogy. He'd even offered a bridge which he called interzone. Cronenberg took these concepts and ran. He thought like a filmmaker.

Beginning in New York with a title to inform his audience that we start on a recognisable Earth, we follow Bill Lee, his marriage and his career as an insect exterminator. His apartment is peopled by figures traceable to their biographical inspirations (a clear Joan Burroughs along with a Ginsberg and a Kerouac) who discuss the far out vibe-nations of the dharma ticket while shooting up Bill's bug powder. This life on the ocean page comes to a big loud wreck the afternoon that Bill plays William Tell with his wife's head and a whiskey tumbler. Goes badly.

So off he goes to Tangier. The zurnas wail and the air is filled with hash smoke. Expats speak to him telepathically and he gets a job as an agent reporting from interzone. His typewriters have been turning into insects that talk like Bowery bums. He has an affair with the wife of the American abroad in chief who is a reiteration of his own wife. They have steamy erotic encounters in which his typewriter metamorphoses into as many sex organs as it is possible to fit into the machine's size. It falls humping to the floor and crosses the room to the light.

The Ginsberg and the Kerouac pay a visit and the world of the film is revealed. When Bill is addressing them they are in sunlit Tangier. When they bear witness to his state they are in a garbage swashing slum less than a nautical mile from the initial action. Dig? This is interzone. One way of looking at it is to imagine Hell as a state of mind: you see one thing and everyone else sees its opposite. You know the No one believes you. Cassandra is queen.

That's Cronenberg's doing. He locked on to the only concept that could not only bridge historical reality with the tortured imagination of the writer but provide a bridge for us as well. The result is a constant scission which yet remains seamless. There's the book and there's the film; a perfect fit. That's how you do an interpretation.

George C. Looney: man bear goat.

In Jon Ronson's The Men Who Stare at Goats the man who did stare a goat to death did so by imagining a religious scene in which he is beckoned by Jesus to walk a path of golden light which gives him power. He then conjures an image of St Michael standing by the goat in the next room. St Michael plunges his sword into the goat's body and the goat in the room collapses.

In the film version of this George Clooney stares at a goat through a glass wall until it falls down.

Here's the problem. This book presents a series of fantastical anecdotes that are intentionally left unverified until the end notes. It is written as a journalistic account, not a novel but the author's skill encourages his readers' credulity as tale after mind boggling tale unfolds. While this does involve a lightness of touch to the prose it is administered with extra care to keep things just this side of implausible. Result: a highly entertaining book that presents some intriguing ideas that feel like the most enjoyable after dinner lies once you've finished reading.

So why does this movie feel like Midnight Run in camouflage? Why? Because it hangs its bum between two stools: here a kind of revisited Catch 22 satire using the book's more outrageous claims and there a limping self indulgent buddy movie with George C. Looney at his cutest and Ewen MacGregor as a foil to George. And along for the ride we also have a Kevin Spacey who gets a chance to consciously point to how smug his usual screen presence is and just ends up being smug again. Jeff Bridges acquits himself as the founding father of the First Earth Battalion but he always acquits himself.

Where's the book in all this? Well it wasn't that great a book to begin with, reading like a million of those pulp jobs from the seventies about UFO encounters or pyramid power. There is clear skill in its pages but the fact that it presents itself as pointing to the plain sight hiding place of the esoteric arms race pretty much disqualifies its credibility. From there you can, of course, say, "well, that's all part of the plan, isn't it?" at which point I run out of patience. It's not a fine book but doesn't care that it isn't. The film, on the other hand wants to be something phenomenal, a kind of cross of Oliver Stone and Robert Altman. But any film that has to resort to dosing the stiff neck character with LSD for ironic laughs has long lost its way.

There's a moment where Clooney tells MacGregor about killing the goat with his mind and how haunted he is by it. MacGregor slips in with, "the silence of the goats." The line hangs in the air and floats around the lighting for the rest of the scene, an ugly remnant of a late late night's brainstorming that wasn't erased before it hit the shooting script. MacGregor does get the surprisingly well crafted final moment but by then it is far too late. Read the book and leave it on a tramstop but use the ninety plus minutes you might have wasted on its film adaptation doing your taxes or really committing to watching that cinema classic you've been putting off every time you look at it on the shelf in your living room. Go on, you know you need to.

SHADOWS resumes March 4. Program here.