Shadows Contactless: Friday 25 9 pm, Netflix Party: SORRY TO BOTHER YOU

Cassius is out of luck and debt ridden and stumbles one step further down towards rock bottom. So, he gets a job in a call centre selling ... whatever crap he has to. It's tough at first but the old timer next to him tells him to use his white voice. Skeptical, Cassius tries it and starts raking in the sales. Soon he gets the invite from management into the deluxe realm in the upper floors he's been noticing, with the golden elevator peopled by the ostentatiously confident. 

It's good but some things aren't.  He's made friends back in the sweatshop who are chasing industrial action and he's now on the wrong side of them. His performance artist girlfriend is getting restless, politically and romantically, and the vibe he's getting from management is getting sinister. All the while people are being invited to leave their cares at the door in a kind of industrial slavery and it's working. The most popular show on TV is called I Got the Shit Kicked Out of Me.

Boots Riley's full scale assault on contemporary exploitation, race relations, the gig economy and savage capitalism is the kind of movie that can make you laugh out loud when recalling a scene or line. It's dark and brutal but lifted at all times by a disarming comedic timing and constant wit, like Fight Club directed by Michel Gondry. At its centre, LaKeith Stanfield plays a contemporary Candide, going along with the good but never quite thinking it through. You will not expect the final act.

OK, we're changing at least for this one by going back to Netflix Party. I understand that this might lose me some regulars but I need to seriously rethink how to get us connected for shared screenings independent of platform. Meantime, here's how to get it.

You'll need to use the Chrome browser.

Find your way to Extensions (through settings) and search for Netflix Party and add it to the browser. A logo with the red letters NP will appear among the icons beside your address bar.

I will pick the movie and create a Netflix Party with a chatroom and post the link on the SHADOWS group page in Facebook. Click on that as the start time (I'll post it) approaches and you should end up in the Netflix chatroom (you will have an avatar and will be able to choose you own name for the chat). You'll notice that the movie has not started yet. 

If you don't see the chatroom and the movie starts playing you are in the wrong place. NB - you can only do this with a browser which might well mean you need to watch it on a computer. I get a laptop and connect it to my tv with an HDMI cable. This is the bit where we start losing people. You might also be able to use Chromecast (don't have that so can't try it).

When the time comes I'll start the movie and every one will see the same thing at the same time.

So, join me, won't you?

Shadows Contactless: Friday 11 September 9pm: SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE UNKNOWN GIRL

 

A young doctor in her first senior job prevents a trainee from answering an after hours call at the clinic as she judges it not to be an emergency. The next day police officers arrive to request the surveillance tape from the door. It shows one of the last actions of a woman who was murdered that night as she sought refuge at the clinic. Sounds like the start of a thriller. It is, kind of. This 2016 film from les freres Dardenne concentrates on character, the character of the doctor who seeks to know the deceased woman posthumously. Still sounds like a thriller.

Well, it is and it isn't. The Dardenne brothers have for decades been serving up the grimmest of social realism for decades from their base in Belgium and here they stretch out to genre to see what they can find out about their characters. The good news is that it works. We do get a hefty load of realist gravity but we also get a kind of lightening effect from the performances and an openness to cinema beyond the indignant eye of the usual fare. It is grim but it's also entertaining.

The Dardennes always cast perfectly and they place at the centre of the intrigue the luminous and compelling Adele Haenel who keeps the centre heavy but vital. (Actually, if you like the central perofrmance of this film I'll just slyly direct you to Portrait of a Lady on Fire which you can see on Stan. It's an extraordinary two hander which topped my favourite films of last year.)

If you like your verite don't worry about the thriller aspects, they're kept in rein. If you like your thrillers, don't worry, you'll enjoy getting to know the lady in the centre of the frame.

Join me.

Shadows Contactless: Friday September 4 9pm SBS on Demand and Facebook Messenger: WADJDA

Wadjda is a schoolgirl. She wants her own bike. To do this she enters a competition that could get her there. She has to be careful about this. Her mother isn't keen for her to go riding a bike around town as one wrong prang might break the girl's hymen. Wadjda is ten years old and lives in Saudi Arabia.

You might get a couple of impressions from that description that you are in for either a grim tale of oppression or a knockabout comedy of innuendo but this is neither of those things. There is a lot to be said for the position of women in this particular society and expectations of them and Wadjda's growing awareness of the kind of hurdles she will be facing in the not too distant future. But this film does something that many of its kind don't do, it remembers she's a kid and how kids pursue their things of great import. This prevents the film from preaching or being too sentimental and I can safely promise that you will be neither bored nor lectured and right up to the final gesture before the end credits you might well be charmed.

See you on the couch.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 28 9 pm SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE DEATH OF STALIN

After a final act of negative influence, a kind of accidental bullying, the great leader and teacher of all the Russias and peoples of the greater Soviet metropolitan area dies. A few localised fumbles later and the party cogs roll into the room and try to work out what to do while watching what they say because they don't know who's listening but they also know who they are talking to. And that's the top people.

Armando Iannucci's hard satire swings between gallows humour and the real gallows as the fallout from the death of Stalin hurtles downward through the ranks. Why bother doing this now? Couldn't someone have come up with it in the '50s when it was a fresher story? Political muscling, whether self avowed or not, doesn't easily regenerate without a contest of people near the top who want themselves to be where the boss was. You can extend that to the bizarre state of information bending and bullet dodging of elected officials here and now. Stalin and his crew set themselves to reality redefinition as though it were Sunday lunch and everyone knew what happened to anyone who might cry: "but you said...!"

The mind who gave us Veep, The Thick of It, and In the loop knows that there are times when satire need only be applied as a thin sheen over reality. With the event of the title of this film Ianucci has, if anything, only to restrain himself until the emergent truth of its chaos appears. The Stalin story is particularly poignant as it brought up the confusion that occurs when succession raises its head after the death of an autocrat. Who goes next? The party light or the relative? Did this roll the sequence from Tsar a full circle to a replacing autocrat?

In the end, after all the brutality and paranoia, Ianucci delivers us from gut punch to belly laugh without ever having to err into cuteness or over-earnestness. That along with a dream cast and some great comic timing, gets us here to where the lampoon meets the wall.

Join me, won't you?

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 21 2020 SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE CONVERSATION

You remember the song Torn Between Two Lovers? An MOR hit by Coloradan Mary McGregor way back in 1976. Well, this is the same thing except that it's more Caught Between Two Godfathers. Yep, Francis Ford Coppola was riding high on the breakthrough success of The Godfather and was only a year away from the equally celebrated sequel when he found the time to get a lot grittier, recall his indy roots and tell this tale of a man burdened with a secret.

Harry Caul (whose name sounds like a beard mask if you have an American accent) knows one thing more than anything else and that's surveillance. His pre-chic industrial digs are an impenetrable fortress against prying attention as he is the embodiment of such stealthy invasion. One of the best in the business he records a conversation between two lovers that sounds like a murder plot. He's been there before and let it happen. Does he break his professionalism or give himself another lifelong sack of rocks to haul uphill.

Gene Hackman gives his intense best, here, containing chain reactions behind his sober, knowing face. And he's just one. If you know your New Hollywood movies (and you should) most of this cast will feel like old friends. With everything so served up these days, especially in lockdown, it's easy to forget how the intention behind this work is the thing that hasn't changed: it's just got easier to do.

Join me, as I'll know if you don't.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 14 9pm SBS on Demand and Messenger: TIME BANDITS

Ok, been saving this one for a while now and now's the time. I have been covering this plague since March and now that the virtual MIFF is here, I need at least a week off (that's official, btw, applied for and received). So, I felt like revisiting this one which I've only ever seen once. For me, at least, it will have the feel of the kind of retro screening I'd often pick just so I can see an old favourite in a cinema.

Terry Gilliam was to have the spectre of his old team, Monty Python, follow him around right up to the film where he jettisoned it (Brazil). Not only did he hop back into the chair for Meaning of Life a few years later, he had few problems presenting the kind of high adventure he liked within the absurdist mood of the Pythons. The thing about Time Bandits that gets me is how hard he is working to tear himself free: there are plenty of loopy scenes like John Cleese as a kind of Tory candidate version of Robin Hood or the timid lovers whose personal problem follows them through centuries of recurrent moments but the overall arc of the boy and the bandits is stronger and clearer than even the most articulate Python outing (Life of Brian)

So, decades after watching a knock-off VHS with muddy audio, will I like it as much? Will that strange ending feel better earned that it did the first time? Will Ian Holm as Napoleon be as funny as I remember him? All to be seen in a film meant to be seen.

Come with me.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday August 7 9pm: COLD WAR

This couldn't have happened better. As I was mulching over which of my short list to program next SBS came to save the day. Remember Ida, that quiet but powerful tale of complicated identity following disaster? Well, Pawel Pawlikowski's follow up has appeared on SBS on Demand. And it has demanded that I screen it as the next Shadows. Cold War was one of my favourites from MIFF 2018 and remains a strong recollection of that festival.

A couple meet in post war Poland as they travel the countryside seeking authentic Polish singers to promote the brave new submission to the Soviet giant. Their careers lift and take wing which flies them to the hot spot Berlin. They have to defect, of course. Now's their chance. You can probably predict the next move but I won't tell you which goes and which stays. But it doesn't end there as these soul mates are compelled to each other through the ranging alterations to life in Europe in the fifties and sixties. Their paths just keep crossing. This can be a tricky business punishable by Soviet retribution. Will there be a solution? How will it leave them?

Sounds dour? Some of it is. But it's also funny, thought provoking and always compelling. Telling his tale again in t rich deep black and white, Pawlikowski takes us back to his parents' epoque of big politics and even bigger music and sculpts an epic love story into less than ninety minutes.

With me? Let's go!

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday July 31 9pm on SBS and Messenger: THE HOST

A laboratory slip-up delivers a starter culture for a big bad life form that appears years later. Like everyone else strolling by the river in Seoul on that sunny afternoon, the Park family are directly affected by the massive mutant beast that bounds up from the water and takes what it wants along the bank. Stunned, the remainder of the family have to deal.

But that's the point of this modern monster movie and many before it. Only part of the fun is in the great beast on the rampage. Most of it is about family. The dysfunctional unit has long been stretching into malaise for a generation and there's nothing like a crisis to being it together. But then there's nothing like bringing it together to foment more crisis.

Director Bong Joon Ho's greatness is that he is indifferent to the genre he's working in as long as he can forge a strong theme about the human animal and especially how it works (or doesn't) in community. His contemporary fable about families and privilege Parasite made it clear that the title didn't just refer to the obvious move. Similarly, The Host asks you where you think the monstrosity is. It is always a monster movie. It is always a family saga. It is frequently an irresistible comedy without ever having to stoop to the cheapness of lampooning the genre it's in. Such is the hand of a master of cinema.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday 24 July 9 pm SBS + Messenger: IN A WORLD

In a world where the barriers are determined by gender one woman struggles to break through and reach for the crest. Well, that's the way it should go. To Carol, who knows all about gravel voiced movie trailers from being a Hollywood vocal coach and the daughter of a prominent voice over man, it means a nice career fulfilment. The king of the voiceovers has died and there is room at the top. Can she do it?

Lake Bell's frustration film is kept nice through quirky humour and a light touch to allow the serious themes through. The scramble to take the top spot on what seems to us as the edge of the periphery of the film industry might seem trivial but the competition's ferocity reveals the darker side of tinseltown. No one doubts Carol's vocal prowess or professionalism but also no one considers her a candidate if only because the words of the title are never uttered by any but the most testosteronic tonsils to ever approach a mic.And just when you think she's broken through, Carol gets a reality check from a surprise corner.

You might say that Bell's film is a subversion in itself by its very existence but that might only serve to illustrate how far artists like her still have to go. The easy flow and warmth of character add up to something feelgood and that's what we get but we're also thinking.

SHADOWS Contactless: 9 PM Friday July 17 SBS on Demand and Messenger: THE GAMBLER

Axel Freed has more than most in his social percentile. Literate and middle class, he's a popular teacher of literature, still young and sexy but is constantly haunted by the thrill of risking everything. He loses in freefall, rises with a break and deep dives into debt, inviting the mob into his daily life. But this is not just the usual riches to rags morality tale. Axel is constantly on the lookout for a hustle, no matter how small the thrill, same as any addict, but his other hook is in his social currency. Despite all the bluster and dealing and bourgeois machismo he still wants the love that keeps on giving. But look what happens when the stakes are the highest and take the most he's ever given to build and play? Will he still own himself and where can he go if he does win?

An early casting choice for the lead in this film was Warren Beatty and you'll see why. Beatty's instant charm mixed with the sleaze he was able to inject made him perfect for Axel. Instead, James Caan, still fresh from The Godfather, brings a tougher New York sass to the role. Grittier than Steve McQueen but rougher than Beatty (who'd go to his own masterclass the following year in Shampoo), Caan allowed the film as a whole to breathe around him rather than own too much of its centre. Lauren Hutton as his girlfriend Billie offers her own toughness and pushback, allowing a fluidity to their standoff.

The Gambler is a '70s film the same way that Taxi Driver or The French Connection are '70s films: it flies low enough to the street level to look verite but keeps its cine-art ... arty. Czech born Karel Reisz had already made a visible presence as a filmmaker in the UK but here adapts himself easily to US conditions, going straight to the new Hollywood table with the confidence to know that his sense of classic Hollywood could take care of itself.

SHADOWS contactless: 9 PM Friday July 10 SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE ENDLESS

Ever heard of mumble core? That's because it pretty much faded before it could find a hand hold back in the 2000s. The idea was "millennial understatement meets..." It had its own bona fide auteurs and festival darlings. But now it's only part of an approach to indie movies, a kind of exotic touch to the cocktail. What happens, though, when you get that and smash it against the cosmic horror of HP Lovecraft? The answer is Benson and Moorhead, one of the oddest teams of filmmaking from the past three decades.

Justin Benson and Aaron Moorhead  play brothers Justin and Aaron who, having escaped from a cult while young have been sent an alluring VHS tape welcoming them back for a visit. One wants to go back just one more time and the other brother wants to keep clear. Nag nag nag, the older brother agreess but for ONE DAY ONLY! Old UFO death cult where the significant members don't seem to have aged a day in the last decade, what could go wrong?

The Endless is a new form of fantastical cinema. It does have the deadpan humour of mumble core, where self aware players tell each other how culty the thing the other said was. But it also does the homework and puts genuine chilly mindwarp moments in. This is really not just laughing at the new age hippies, it's the shock of finding that they really might have a point. And then there seems to be something spreading out and getting comfortable in the lake.

Join me for a trek through some dizzying mind games and earthy day-to-day observations of same. It's Benson and Moorhead and they're the future ...  in a sense.

SHADOWS Contactless: 9PM Friday July 3 SBS on Demand + Messenger: IDA (2013)

A quiet film about a quiet novitiate nun might not spell party time but Ida's tale of a young Polish woman's confrontation with the past is compelling. 1962. Anna, on the verge of taking holy orders, must contact her only living relative as a means of completing her farewell to the secular world. Her aunt Wanda tells her that her real name is Ida which revelation is followed by a string of others that leaves Anna/Ida needing to reset her identity. Like everyone else her story emerged from the recent world war with scars which she only now can see. Wanda, defiantly bohemian, invites her niece into the pleasures and conflicts of life outside. Ida has some decisions to make.

Pawel Pawlikowski's career entered the international realm with Ida, transcending the festival circuit to get cinema releases the world over. Shot in deep and frozen monochrome within an old fashioned 1:37 frame, this film might remind you of middle European films from the time of the setting of this one like Closely Observed Trains or Larks on a String. Pawlikowski followed it with an even deeper dive into the post war era with the powerful Cold War. Like that film Ida benefits from its director's expert touch, unflinching in the presence of difficult morality but light enough to avoid fatigue. All of this and it's still only one hour and twenty minutes long.

Join me.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday June 26, SBS on Demand + Messenger 9.00 pm: A MATTER OF LIFE AND DEATH

 The wartime team of Powell and Pressburger made British films like no one else. They might have had a touch of the nice or the jolly here and there in step with their times but there was always something extra, new, and daring about them. The Red Shoes takes us through the internal politics of a dance company but also into some surprisingly gothic moments. Powell's solo career included the disturbing Peeping Tom which effectively exiled him to Australia to make lighter fare. But at the peak of the duo's works is this curio, a what-if fantasy that takes in the worth of a single life against a backdrop of the big dark world war just over.

David Niven begins his journey as an intrepid RAF flyboy but in the strange event at the beginning of the story must find courage beyond the show of it and bargain for his own worth against everything he has known. Is he in the afterlife, a kind of purgatory where he might burn his bad side off, or is he only just plunging into delirium as his Lancaster Bomber plummets into the sea? Under the Powell and Pressburger helm this fantasy steers clear of the saccharine possibilities by keeping a weather eye on the darkness only a small reach away. The electric Kim Hunter shows she was more than the few B-movie roles she'd started with.

Join me for this unjustly obscure wonder and marvel at its sumptuous imagination. It's in black and white and colour so I had to pick something from each.

SHADOWS Contactless Friday 19 June 9.00 pm: SBS + Messenger: LET THE RIGHT ONE IN

This is a horror film. Like all good horror films it uses the machinery of the scary movie to move a tale of something universal and shed the kind of light that tension and dread can shine. In Dark Water it's the bond between parent and child threatened by an angry ghost. In The Haunting it's a lonely woman's desperate search for belonging. In Let the Right One In it's friendship. Oskar and Eli find each other in a frigid urban landscape and recognise each other's difference and ostracism. Oskar's bullied at school. Eli is ... peculiar.

Thomas Alfredson's adaptation of John Ajvide Lindquist's novel trims much from the book, producing a lean and driven story of the difficulties of friendship under pressure. But it's not just friendship. There's a figure threading through the story of a darker stripe than Eli or any of the monstrous bullyboys. An indiscretion here and a slip there and the problem he embodies breaks out .... well, like a virus.

There is suspense, ethical and emotional darkness, some gore and violent action in this film but I wonder, if you see it, will you leave the experience even thinking you've seen a horror movie.

Join me and note the new start time of 9 p.m. I'm trying that out as some of our regs have had some trouble starting at the earlier time through work commitments etc.  Let me know it if works for you. 

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday June 12 8.30 PM SBS on Demand + Messenger: THE DRAUGHTSMAN'S CONTRACT

Let's take a plunge back into the realm of '80s Arthouse with this cult favourite from Peter Greenaway. One of the least likely hits of any scale, this formal and talky series of living tableaux radiates a constant charm which is an odd thing to say about what is essentially, a murder mystery.

At the height of England's Glorious Revolution the landed family Herbert is, like the royal William and Mary, in need of an heir. While Mr Herbert is away on business Mrs Herbert contracts a draughtsman to produce a number of drawings of their land and wealth as a gift for her husband. Sounds a little too rustic for a Friday night? Well, the young and horny Mr Neville writes a number of hedonistic clauses into the contract which are countered by Mrs Herbert's own and the mice are set to play in the absence of the cat. And then Mrs Herbert's adult (and childless) daughter gets in on the action with her own contract. As Mr Neville plies his trade in the sunshine of the country things are about to get .... intrigued.

Far from the sex romp that might suggest The Draughtsman's Contract is, between the pillars of formality and observance of the days at the estate, a story of upstarts and their place and the lengths that privilege will go when its continuance is threatened. A superb UK cast handle perfectly the ceaselessly witty dialogue which is archaic enough to give us a feel for the setting but never less than accessible. The candlelit interiors in sumptuous rooms or the wild rustic beauty of the estate that Mr Neville sees through the grid of his optical aids invite us to make our own observations and find our own details.

Michael Nyman's exemplary score (which is worth having in its own right) does a kind of resampling of Purcell by manuscript paper and ink with lush orchestrations that travel from brilliance to growling darkness. It serves to both stiffen the formality of the aristocratic stage and welcome us in under its curious modernity. Greenaway would be close to the independent cinema throne for the next two decades, often in close collaboration with Nyman. He might have gone more baroque in structure and more ambitious in intent but never as warmly or plainly enjoyable as he was here.

SHADOWS Contactless: Friday June 5 8.30 SBS on Demand: ELECTION

Not only did 1999 produce a higher proportion of game changing movies but did so with a blurring of the divide between mainstream and arthouse. Fight Club was made as a tough tale with a lavish budget and became a cult film. The Blair Witch Project was conceived as a zero budget straight to video title but ended up a worldwide hit that changed its genre. And a cheeky political satire by an independent director got the backing of youth media giant MTV. That's Election.

Agressively overachieving student Tracey Flick looks like she will sail into the presidency of the student body unopposed. Jim McAlister, one of her teachers, channels everything he resents about his own life into his resentment of Tracey's ambitions and calls for a wider election field triggering something more like a real political campaign, complete with a "gate" scandal. Tracey's severe ambition is counterweighted by sport star Paul's goofy populism and, at least for the speeches, Tammy's hilariously angry outsider tirading. It's on.

Alexander Payne's tight satire has been poignantly proposed as a kind of inverted Ferris Bueller's Day Off, right down to the casting of Matthew Broderick in an authority figure role. If you, as I did, considered Ferris less a cute winner than a manipulative sociopath then here is the proof done with a simple perspective shift. Reese Witherspoon's Tracey Flick is not just drive and punch but the vulnerability those qualities mask. However, what the student body in general sees is about the same as what we get to see of our politicians at election time. The America that flocked to this was yet to find out about the Bush years, 911, the Patriot Act and the school massacres that seemed to become seasonal events. The thing is that none of that later perspective changes a note of this film. Like Network or Bob Roberts it keeps fresh best without refrigeration.

SHADOWS Contactless Friday May 29 8.30 SBS on Demand and Messenger: 99 HOMES

"America doesn't bail out losers. America bails out winners!" Ok, a tough fable about the U.S. housing crash might not get you fired up against the cold at the end of the week but this tale of seduction and economic violence brings it.

The bank swallows Dennis Nash's home in one gulp and he and his mother move into a ratty motel peopled by others in the same predicament. One thing they all have in common is the efforts of real estate bucaneer Rick Carver who makes his living causing this. When I say living I mean fortune. Dennis is facing an increasingly tight corner until, offered a job by the force of darkness, gives in and chooses gain.

This might just be another angry tract by one of the dispossessed but for a writing hand equally at ease with a feather quill or a sledgehammer. And then there's the casting. Young Anglo-American actor Andrew Garfield brings an innocence begging for the flavours of corruption and the mighty Michael Shannon whose thunderous voice and monumental presence delivers hard truth and silky seduction to the ingenue. But mention must be made of Laura Dern as Dennis' mother, a buoy of pragmatism in this tempest of masculinity.

99 Homes is a story from our own front lines, a film that pleads against the lightless contempt of the possessors for the dispossessed. We're seeing it now because it never goes away. This is an opportunity to do some decent shouting at the screen.

Come, then, a cough drop for each of you and your best enraged bellow. This masterclass in modern bluster ends, as it must, with a silent exchange that will dig into you and stay there.

Your couch!

SHADOWS Contactless Friday 22 2020 8.30 SBS on Demand + Messenger: ALFIE (1966)

When I was running Shadows at the ABC Gallery one of the regulars, a much older man, often complained to me about the more obscure films I showed. He accepted that that was part of my brief but said that he would show titles from the great trove of cinema classics that were easily available. I replied that my purpose was provide a kind of stand-in for the recently deceased Melbourne arthouse scene and show a mix of old and new that were difficult to access. Some of those might well be classics but probably wouldn't include Breakfast at Tiffany's or Casablanca. Good films, of course, but if you only show classics you never get to statements that the classics overshadowed, the cries from the margins and the fog beyond the mainstream. So, why the bloody 'ell am I showin' Alfie?

Well, it does look like one of those auld cinema classics with a '60s birthdate and a cast that includes Michael Caine and a host of other great UK players. But I'm putting it on as the two times I've seen it I had different responses. As a young cinema student ripe with cultural snobbery and political righteousness (and a very small handful of life experiences) I found myself looking around what I diagnosed as Alfie's misogyny and nihilism. Decades later, I saw it again and recognised through the laddish fourth wall confessions a growing sadness beneath the cockiness.

If you don't have a similar history with this title you might simply enjoy the slightly hard edge given to swinging London that the pop group movies left out. It's from a time when working class people could realise plans careers and affluence. Keith Richards famously remarked that the better money and end of enforced military service gave rise to the greatness of British youth culture in the '60s. Into this success they carried the impetuousness of an extended adolescence and an exuberance that probably seemed endless at the time. Caine brings to Alfie a harder face than today's Mockneys and would today be depicted with a kind of knowing affectation. Here, at least, it feels real.

So , let's watch Alfie.

SHADOWS Contactless: May 8, 8.30 SBS on Demand: THE MAN WHO KILLED DON QUIXOTE

After decades of struggle and massive setbacks, Terry Gilliam finally made his film about Don Quixote. The production troubles made for such a compelling tale that the documentary (made as a dvd extra) became a film in its own right. That film, Lost in La Mancha, is highly recommended and, if it were better available, I'd set it as homework. Gilliam didn't quite shrug but got back up and made what was easier to make but still within his preferred vision. And then finally this most recent resurrection of his lost project emerged, recast and reshot. And few seemed to notice.

That's a shame as it works perfectly well. Does it match the massive epic put in mind by all the legend about it? Nothing could. It does, however, present a lean and cleverly told tale of confounded hubris which some might well observe feels autobiographical. But all this is meta business. The film stands on its own without crutches of pity or worthiness. It's strong and it's fun.

Adam Driver is arguably a superior choice to the more famously cast Johnny Depp. Jonathan Pryce reunites with Gilliam from the days of Brazil and proved reliable. If you watch Lost in La Mancha you'll understand why that's important.

If this seems all a touch too convoluted and self-clever recall only how much of a struggle it was to get to the screen and how each peak and plummet might have affected its creator and forced him to reflect on where he has come from and why he still must fight for each new project. It's about past and present at every turn, how we are forgiving of ourselves in retrospect but disappointed at the way we have turned out now. This is a story of careers and so is the story of how we have lived. Gilliam went through windmills of disappointment bringing it us and has more than earned our attention.

SHADOWS Contactless: 8.30pm Friday May 1: ANTIVIRAL (SBS on Demand)

Syd is embezzling from his employer. So what? Normal enough crime drama stuff. Well, it's what he's stealing. He works at Lucas Clinic, a company that sells the illnesses of the rich and famous to the poor and aspirant. And he sneaks samples past the industrial security to sell for himself. The death of the star he took it from dies and Syd becomes a target.



This is not a horror film. If it were paced more tightly it might be a thriller but its interest does not lie there either. With superfans not only buying copyrighted viruses with installed digital rights management, there is a grey market in meat grown from the stars' DNA we are in the realm of heavy satire. And we must recall or be informed that satire isn't always funny.

There is elephant DNA in this film. It was written and directed by the son of someone whose surname has become an adjective in cinema history. You might think Brandon Cronenberg, if he chose to become a filmmaker at all (rather than a sand sculptor or a bud driver) would elect to prove himself an individual by not making such a ... Cronenbergian piece. Why not a sprightly rom com or a fashionable live musical? Because he had an idea and pursued it. If you look at it beyond the synopsis you will see the work of a young writer/director toiling seriously to bring his story to the screen. Besides, times being themselves, we might be in dire need of another Cronenberg walking amongst us.

Then again, cheap shoot as you will, this film does work. It feels like there's a new wow concept every five minutes in the first act and, though the second settles a little too comfortably into development and the intrigue sets in, there is a real punch waiting in the final act, served up with an image that will stay with you. This is a debut film from a young filmmaker with big shoes to fill who would not be lightly forgiven for the slightest flub. Damn me if he doesn't get away with it.

This is the first diversion from the Netflix Party format as it is available through SBS on Demand. This will take discipline and coordination. We'll use Messenger for comments. I'll leave a guide in a post on the Facebook page.