Top 10: 11/06/2012

Taxi Driver: A chronicle of loneliness and its effect on its professors' sense of justice. Still fresh. Still extraordinary.

The Tin Drum: Best literal adaptation of a novel for the screen ever. Casting of David Bennent in the lead seems like a once-off.

Eraserhead: With its depth of imagination and creation of unique world, this is my favourite film.










The Changeling: Great subtle ghost story with wonderfully blustery lead performance by George C. Scott.







The Innocents: Another great ghost tale that uses a simple technique to create shivers: the ghosts look like people who should not be where they are.

Peeping Tom: Film about fear and its uses in child rearing. Almost killed it's director's career.

Picnic at Hanging Rock: Little happens. Little needs to happen. Ethereal Euro girls meet the big mysterious wild and get swallowed up by it. Beautiful atmosphere and genuinely creepy.

Halloween: Like a manual for boogieman movies. Almost bloodless it still manages to create a mounting dread. One of the most evocative music scores for the suggestion of menace ever.

Trust: Because of my avowed hatred of Wes Anderson's movies I get called out if I mention this as a favourite. I can see apparent contradiction; both have quirky characters who say weighty things in monotone and a big helping of whimsy. I just think that Hal Hartley at his best cares more about his characters than Wes Anderson. Anyway, I love this strange nonromcom with its wounded characters and motion against the grain.

Woman in the Dunes: Insect collector gets collected. The development of his relationship with his new circumstances and the forces that put him there is both banal and absorbing.

Review: PROMETHEUS: Big doin's in Toy Town

What are you DOING, Dave?

Here's my problem with Prometheus: a character I'll call Victor does something very nasty to another character I'll call Victim. Victim started out in the film as a confident and likeable figure but soon undercuts his own appeal, largely through his constant baiting of Victor. At the climax of their antipathy there is only one person who emotes for Victim and they are not sitting in the auditorium.

This lack of empathy between the screen and its audience isn't always a problem; an action movie really only needs a drop of this so that the stress of the action can reach out. It is a problem here because the film sets out to show big questions pursued by small people. This isn't irony. They're serious. But put it all together and you get a quest for meaning carried out by spoiled brats.

My lack of religion does not prevent me from comprehending religious feeling in characters. I don't need to believe in demons to enjoy The Exorcist. When Michael Fassbender's character David is verbally separated from the rest of the team on the good spaceship Prometheus on the grounds that he does not have a soul he is visibly affected. The others note the difference, too. That's all fine for the narrative if it's used to make something. The most it amounts to at the end is a question of a single character's state of belief. The answer given is unsurprising and by that stage all but irrelevant to the promise of a new quest. It's not as though the religion is affirmed nor even seriously questioned. It's just there as it would be in a Mormon cooking program.

The reason I'm going on about this rather than talking about the plot or the performances is that I don't think either of those elements are given much weight against the confused scioreligion rendered so half-arsed by the always impressive action sequences and great CGI.  Michael Fassbender continues to demonstrate why he is on our big screens so much of late. Noomi Rapace is as good here as she was in the Dragon Tattoo films, if less interesting. Charlize Theron impresses in a tighly drawn and thankless role. Everyone else is all but monster fodder. Some early attempts at imputing life into them are good but dispensed with early and summarily. Game over. Well, that's what it feels like.

I'm not really a fanboy of anything anymore. I haven't needed to replace that with some blustery old notion of qualitah cinema, either. But watching the splendid blu-ray of Alien just after seeing this at the cinema brought something forward: after seeing Alien for the first time in 1980 I had a dark and stressful nightmare which included my guarding of a haunted house whose windows opened up like the alien's mouths; after seeing Prometheus I went and had a drink with my cinecompanion, chatted a little about the movie and moved on to other conversation.

This is Ridley Scott's world and he can do what he likes with it. He's planning a number of sequels to close the gap between this and Alien (oh, one thing: why does this story, set decades before Alien, feature superior technology?) which will either fulfil the promise made at the end of Prometheus (and render Alien nonsensical) or will fail at its quest and render itself pointless. I find this idea interesting while I type this sentence but probably won't as I start my next one.

Again, that's my beef with this piece: great action with beautifully imagined new toys and ingrained with a big question but I just couldn't care less about it.

Ten Films I Dislike: 05/06/12

This is not a bottom 10. Don't see the point in that. It's just a list of films I don't like. As I'm a tad too busy to go and see films to review and with Shadows all but a faded memory, most of what will appear here for a few weeks at least will be these lists. If I can think of an essay I'll put one here. Anyway, until then I'll supplement the top tens with these. Feel free to add your own in the comments.

Lost Highway: Yes, that's right, a big David Lynch fan dislikes a David Lynch movie. Well, I do. I watched this again recently to see if my wince at recalling it was still justified. The local blu-ray is superbly presented, great sound and vision but the big sagging blech in the middle (ie most) of this piece manages to snatch boredom from a potentially gripping neo-noir movie. There are some great ideas here. While they are held up by some impressive Lynchian visuals and sound mixing, it just doesn't warm up. I'll quote a fan from an old Usenet post (he was speaking in admiration): "It's a cold film about a bad man." So it is.

Anything by Wes Anderson. Sorry, I've tried but every time I try to watch something by this director all I get is how studiously contrived it is. Each one is a waste of good set design and stellar casts. It's as though he saw a few quirky 60s and 70s movies like Harold and Maude or  Barefoot in the Park and created a series of formulae on how they work and then ... applied the formulae with the precision of the autistic. None of it feels like someone's genuine vision.

M.A.S.H. When I was a kid and this was fresh I remembered loving it for the larks and the cynicism that my older siblings laughed at. When I was in my twenties I felt affronted by the misogyny and couldn't look past that. More recently I could look past that and see it as part of the satire but hated the unquestioned laddishness of it. I love a lot of Robert Altman films, probably most of them. But this one broke my feeling that I liked all of them. See also Lost Highway, above, it made me admit what I didn't like about one of my favourite directors.

Sexy Beast: Celebrated for Ben Kingsley's overboard guttermouthed psycho gangster and less so for Ray Winstone's more measured ex-gangster. I found it irksomely calculated and uninvolving.

Satantango: Bela Tarr's seven hour epic of post communist Hungarian life has some extraordinary passages, truly individual and spellbinding. It also includes passages which stretch a loooooooong time past their point. I tell new girlfriends early on in the piece that I like a lot of boring movies. It's true. I don't need thrill a minute narrative or even any narrative to keep me compelled but this one fails with me. By contrast the same director's Werckmeister Harmonies, which is over a third of the length of this and uses all the tropes that I find tiresome in this, I think of as a masterpiece.

Somersault: No wonder Abbie Cornish fled the country when she was getting sentenced to roles like this or the one in Candy. Heidi is cast out of home because her mother's boyfriend tries his luck with her (and she complies). Then she goes on a series of pointless adventures and then it ends.




The House of Sand and Fog: Are we to find Jennifer Connelly's imbecilic stubbornness as strength of character? Are we to assume that Ben Kingsley's character is so improved by the new humility of his circumstances that he forgives Jennifer Connelly for her interpersonal atrocities? Are we to care about the carelessly stacked disasters that clog the final act like a drain attached to a few houses of bricks and mortar whose plumbing has failed all at once?

Sullivan's Travels: I feel like appending "and anything else by Preston Sturges" but I've seen too few of his movies to cast that blanket. This film about a young buck movie director out to prove a point really ought to go off like a box of roman candles but it just turns cute and never turns back. I'd call this the Wes Anderson of its day except that too many fans would call that a compliment.

Broadcast News: Almost a cheat as I reviewed it unfavourably earlier here. A film of cutesy garbage masquerading as satire. Horrible.

Dead Poets Society: What was clearly intended to be an ode to individuality and personal freedom somehow ended up as support your local demagogue. Robin Williams typically cloying in a role that while initially dramatic allows him too much freedom so he pushes it out of proportion. I hate this movie. Wanna see a good film about the power of teaching? Try The Paper Chase, it doesn't even try to make the old master likeable. 

Top 10: 03/06/2012

Apocalypse Now. I think out of all the films I've watched more than once this one has had the most repeated viewings. Mythmaking like most war movies but took it on its own path. No Vietnam movie made after it lives up, IMHO, regardless of it being more historically accurate. Apocalypse is about truths other than literal history. That's why I can never tire of it.

The Eye. Begins as a cover version of the Sixth Sense but outclasses it and drives well beyond its initial premise to reveal a tale of punished difference. Some of the creepiest ghosts on film.

Network. Unbelievably witty dialogue only enhances this satirical fable from the 70s. Every gag still works.

Yojimbo. Gun for hire samurai film is the mid point between Kurosawa's John Ford influences which led to Sergio Leone's Kurosawa influences which then led to the new Western back in America. The samurai film was changed forever with this one.

Masculin/Feminin: Godard mid-turn from cine revolutionary to revolutionary cineaste. His Revolver album (released same year): before it it was fun, after it it was war.

Werckmeister Harmonies: Bela Tarr's masterpiece towers over the rest of his output for its break into warmth and humour to add to the usual closely studied misery.  Like a cinema verite folk tale in modern dress.

Eraserhead: When someone makes a film that gets to me more than this one I'll put that title in place of this one. Doubt it'll happen, though.

Martin: Is Martin a vampire or just playing? If he is a vampire, however old he is, he's still a mixed up teen. Extraordinary idea kept under Romero's tough grip. Works.

Suicide Circle/Suicide Club: First it's a J horror. Then it's a police procedural. Then it's a kind of creepy teen film. Suddenly it's a Ken Russell musical. Then it's like Kubrick on acid.

Audition: Masterpiece from one of the most prolific filmmakers on the planet, Takeshi Miike. Extraordinary tale of what might lie beneath beauty, poise and appeal. The twist keeps twisting. No one is innocent. No one gets off lightly.

Top 10: 28/05/2012

Irreversible: don't care if the backwards folding narrative had already been done the mounting sense of tragedy overcomes me with this one, through the hellish violence and threat of the main body of the film all the way up to its sublime and poignant finale/beginning.

Seconds: a bizarre and ultimately heart rending story of the impossibility of a second chance. Also, an eerie mask of star Rock Hudson's own life as a closeted gay hearthrob in Hollywood.
 

Being John Malkovich: the premise in the trailer alone made me laugh uncontrollably. The feature delivered on every promise.

Donnie Darko: is he a time traveller or just a schiz? Don't bother with the recut version as it tries to force the answer to that question.

Eraserhead: Unchallangeable.

The Fall: possibly Tarsem Singh's one and only shot at greatness is borrowed from another film but inolves such a startling evocation of a child's imagination that that aspect alone on repeated viewings even overtakes the jaw droppingly gorgeous visuals. A masterpiece. One is more than most people get out their careers.












Ringu: you can find the conventionality of this tale but to do so you need to lift layer after layer of innovation and careful craftsmanship. The film that saved the horror genre somewhat ironically by showing the dangers of copying without reading.

Casablanca: I don't care that Robert McKee calls this the best film ever made, I still like it. It was shown on tv in Brisbane in the early 80s and I remember hearing a people whistling As Time Goes By around the CBD the next day.









 
Blackbeard the Pirate: Robert Newton as the original arrrr, matey pirate king delivers the kind of blustering force of chaos who is both daunting and hilarious (intentionally). I saw it once while tucking into a still quite meaty cold leg of lamb I'd pinched from the fridge. A bite into that (oversalted) washed down with some fine Jamaican cola was like watching inside the screen. I need to get a copy of this.

Tale of Two Sisters: when South Korean horror films transcend their own genre as is their wont, they deliver treasure, like this wicked stepmother story that goes from continually unsettling (with only one conventional Asian horror scare) to outright crazy in the finale. Also manages to be sumptuously beautiful.

HRAFF Review

Mohamed Nasheed Q&A at festival finale.

Well that was my first Human Rights Arts and Film Festival and I've learned something. I love documentaries. I know, you're meant to love them the way you're meant to love going out and seeing live music when it can be one of the most humdrum nights out imaginable. But I've just seen four documentaries that have to varying degrees delighted me because they were good at being documentaries, not just films about things that interest me.

What do I mean by that?

Well, here's a contrast to start with. There were two doccos at the 2005 MIFF on the same subject street that left me hot and cold respectively: Punk: Attitude and Kill Yr Idols. The first was a powerhouse of jammed archive footage and great talking heads. The second was a wishy washy germ of an idea that festered rather than grew. I disagreed with a major premise of the first (the annoying crap of punk starting in America and getting exported to the UK: don't care about the timeline, find me the influence of Marquee Moon on Never Mind the Bollocks) but it was made to a perfect fit for its audiences and formed a good welcome to anyone on the outer. Kill Yr Idols, on the other hand, began as a celebration of New York's No wave scene of the late 70s and early 80s and provided a lot of information I only vaguely knew before. Then it went on to ridicule the current crop of New York bands as pale imitations. One the one hand it was very pleasant for me to see these new rockists take a hit: the new breed are happy to accept the mantle of the No Wave tradition but their "new" music sounds like old Top 40. On the other hand I was frustrated that it went from fawning on the old guard to a kind of daddy-pleasing ridicule of the new. I, too, laughed at Karen O. coming across as having approximately 2.5 brain cells but the better angles of my grinder bade me take that with a pinch of the sharp stuff. Kill Yr Idols can't make its case because it's too busy working out how to declare its great fat hammy fist. Punk: Attitude annoys me with its too many stretches and special pleas for me to regard it as a history but as a celebration it's tops. It's also a better documentary, however much I might bicker with its premises.

I only saw four of the eighteen full length documentaries on show at HRAFF but I picked four good 'uns. You can read my reviews below but the upshot is that I got something out of every one and was touched by some expert filmmaking that went from the glassy video-looking low means to the full force of major budgeted beef. The irrelevance of conventional production values stretches, for me, to fiction cinema and there my sole criterion for good vs bad cinema applies as it does with doccos: is there truth in it?

By truth I don't mean things that I hold absolute but moments on screen where all the other stuff, the earnestness, the comedy, the drama and the noise wash away and the central nerves of a film are visible. This happens a lot and most comfortably with fiction as we are happily surprised to find an individual's conviction laid bare. We probably rejoice in it less in a docco because the idea that documentaries should just report is so ingrained in us. But a documentary is just as potentially wonderful when it's an essay, an argument, rather than a slide show of events, people and places.

Planet of Snail delighted with its approach=equals subject poetics. An African Election satisfied with its meaty no nonsense hard journalism. Beer is Cheaper than Therapy and The Island President wore their hearts on their sleeves but didn't forget the facts 'n' figures. I saw all of this in one week and it felt nourishing. Which leads me to my main thought on the festival overall.

Not all the films presented were documentaries but the festival, angenda-ed by nature, has the opportunity to be this city's unofficial festival of the documentary. Unofficially, of course: if they were to try and sell it as a week of doccos they'd have an even tougher fight for attention in this festival-oversupplied city. But as the time of year when the doccos come out, from the beautiful to the challengingly ugly, the politicising and the soberly informative, that's what would drag me back. I don't suggest they lose the title that defines them but maybe just a little push towards donning a curatorial mantle, the convergence of purposes could be clarified to a bright and shining ticket sales chart. I'd bloody go.

HRAFF Review: THE ISLAND PRESIDENT

The Maldives, 2000 islands and 3000 years of human history, are being swallowed by the sea. The language-defyingly beautiful archipeligo is the resort of the elite among the haves, the holiday destination of the .01 %, the choice vacation for the drivers of the forces that push the ocean levels up in the court of King Caractacus and the Islands, like the tourists, are just passing by.


From thirty years of political stability (ie repressive dictatorship) came the bloodless coup of Mohamed Nasheed who reversed the oppression (that victimised him among many others) and began a campaign of climate change awareness, calling for political unity in a land which wasn't going to be a land much longer if political disunity was allowed to run wild. It's not just that the Maldives are more easily seen as the victims of climate change because they are islands, it's that, as low set islands, they are potentially the first country in the world to drown en masse. The Maldives sport the world's lowest highest point at 2.4 metres. You could cartwheel over that. Quite literally, it's sink or swim time. Well, there is another way...

Nasheed has been campaigning for reductions in carbon emissions since before his presidency. The Island President is his story but it is also the story of his drive to Copenhagen 2009 to gatecrash the big backslap with a personal plea to the devastators, or a well aimed ging stone in the eye of Goliath. If he can't get a commitment for the big emitters to calm it down to 350 ppm (parts per million) there might be no reversal of the damage possible (even if there isn't a stabilisation from compliance). In other words, first we take the Maldives and then Manhattan (where a lot of its tourists come from, island to island).

This film that makes a plea for unity is itself made from it; Nasheed's struggle is indistinguishable from The Maldives' and by extension the world's. If the spectrum of what a documentary can be goes from plain reportage to propaganda, it must be said that The Island President is firmly in the latter half. But this, too, presents a document, an argument for itself. As such it becomes something closer to primary historical source where a more even handed approach would weaken the signal. It's only dangerous if you expect your culture to do your thinking for you. If you apply the critical filter to this that you must to your own life events then you should find it invigorating.

Invigorating it is because Nasheed himself compels attention. He's a gift to a documentarian: good looking, driven, unignorably intelligent with an understated cheeky archness to his humour that somehow continually surprises. We have no trouble at all travelling with him from his repression as a political prisoner to tireless underdog to president to the humbler of giants because he gives us so much centre screen. Even his fellow players come in like injections of nutritious information on Nasheed's life and career, political history and climate science. And then there are the Maldives themselves. Phew!

Phew! Aerial shots of these islands set in the stippled jade sea move at a glacial pace but never seem long enough. Closer shots of that gem coloured water slinking up along the porches and roads like the most beautiful seamonster on earth and the great white explosions of the tide against rocks only just behind kids playing cricket bring this home ... home. In the first of his many funny assertions, Nasheed describes the Maldives as a cross between paradise and paradise. That's what's at stake. This beauty that almost makes you feel like a voyeur to gaze at is about to vanish forever. The ache of this, the sheer bloody ache of it is what makes this resolutely old fashioned documentary so strong. When you start to enjoy the manipulation you are experiencing, at least until it's over, you are in the presence of cinema. No, CINEMA.

If you see this film, don't forget your critical faculties (I don't mean the sad bullshit of climate skepticism, I mean the criticism that adds perspective). If you do, you'll be googling and wiki-ing until you know more. Documentary mission accomplished.