Spring Part 1: Just Like Me

The days grow longer and brighter as the green buds burst and the sneezes splash the air. It's spring and our thoughts turn to attraction ... to the difficult and irresistible ones in our lives, the ones we can neither live with or without, who'll be the death of us and to whom we are always extending one last chance. So, don't get too blithe with the sprigs and puffy eyes: summer's on the way and spring is smirking and saying, "that's just like me."

Season trailer

A New Leaf (USA 1971, Elaine May)

One of the funniest rom coms ever from the dark, satirical mind of Elaine May. Walter Matthau's upper crust bachelor must marry or forego a fortune so plans to find a future victim of a planned honeymoon accident. She is the klutzy Henrietta, played by May herself. For all the toughness of its social satire it yet retains a strange goodness of nature. From the year that brought us the obscure gem Little Murders and the deathless classic Harold and Maude.

Diary (Hong Kong 2006, Pang Brothers)

The Pang brothers output has appeared uneven but really they've just been trying different things and they are to be applauded for straying from the expectation that they should just keep remaking The Eye. Diary is the tale of a young woman grieving from rejection meets the object of her obsession's doppelganger and they start their own romance. But what is really going on? The mystery intensifies so much that the film has to begin all over, the second part having it's own opening credits. Not fun but deep and dark and worth your while.

Dead Ringers  (Canada 1988, David Cronenberg)

As with The Dead Zone David Cronenberg showed he was happy to broaden out from his trademark body horror into terror more psychological. Dead Ringers' tale of the intimidating intimacy of a pair of twins who use their societal clout to get what they want and their knowledge of each other to keep things interesting ... and disturbing. Jeremy Irons thanked David Cronenberg in his Oscar victory speech years after this film, adding that some of us would know why. "Why" was being lifted from the talent-obscuring aristocrat roles that he had been getting that promised a career of blandness. Cronenberg clearly saw much more in him and the results are anything but bland.

The Innocents (U.K. 1960, Jack Clayton)

Spooky go at the oft adapted Turn of the Screw has proven the most durable due to casting and some very canny depictions of the weird. You want ghosts? Ditch the mist and bedsheet look and show them how the were in life. There are scenes in this film that can still go right through you. And that's before you get to the brooding psychological undercurrent which, depending on how you flip it, can lead to even more disturbing images. A must.

The Ugly (New Zealand, 1997, Scott Reynolds)

A nightmarish mental hospital on a dark and stormy night. A young hot shot psyche visits a troubling patient, a serial killer with the demeanour of a quiet young bloke who doesn't always understand his crimes. The shrink wants a career-making triumph, an expose and cure of the monster's disorder. But it just isn't going to go that way. That goes for us. We think we have this film pegged from the urban gothic opening but we're going to need some presence of mind as those on screen seem destined for perdition. An extraordinary genre-warping entry into the 1990's fascination with serial killers on screen The Ugly is unjustly little seen. Let's change that.

Eyes Wide Shut (U.K./U.S.A, 1999, Stanley Kubrick)

Often dismissed as a transitional effort for Kubrick on his way to A.I., his final film has both substance and depth. The cinemaster is having some winking fun with the casting of the golden couple of Cruise and Kidman but his examination of the double standard at the centre of the story is rigorous. The ad campaign led to expectations of debauchery when Kubrick had made elegance. And eloquence: the final word of the film and his screen career might well have been his own last words.

Apologies for the lateness of this season. Life catches up and gets in the way. But it's here. Have fun finding some of these and enjoy everyone. Sooner than I would have wanted, spring part 2 will be up. So, take your antihistamines and buckle in.

Review: ANIMALS

Laura and Tyler are BFFs. They party all night, every night and crawl by day through hangovers to jobs they don't care about. As Tyler says, all days are the same forever which is why we need nights to divide them. Laura has been failing to write a novel for ten years which is as long as she's known Tyler. Family and friends ask her about it but by now it's as earnest a query as "how are you?" One night she picks up hunky young pianist Jim who is perfect. Things are about to change.

This is a film about friendship, real friendship, solid intimacy, the kind of friendship where memories of it are created every day. The film begins with Tyler asking Laura how they met. The dialogue is constructed of impressions without context; the speakers know what they mean and we can imagine. That kind of friendship. But it's also about the kind of friendship where the closeness means knowledge of weakness and temptation and what happens when its triggers are left untouched, even for a moment.

Under the images and the words and the music and the fun there runs a current which proves (without spoilers) to be the central journey. It does have to do with friendship but it also has to do with the recognition of its boundaries, how a lifestyle of fun as an expression of life has become a yolk. Laura really might have that novel in her but it won't get written until the present stops looking so much like the past. That dialogue about their first meeting appears twice in the film but never in real time; we hear the conversation but see the women who spoke it or are yet to speak it in vignettes of their shared experience. The arc is Laura's. These are her memories. For all the bracing declamation Tyler performs, the more stagy the more pertinent, it is the novelist Laura tuning her memory into prose.

There are many montages of the women partying and at first it feels repetitive. But there are so many the it soon becomes recognisable as part of the film's weave. With a lot of the sequences we hear dialogue between them in voice over. It's not just economical filmmaking it's quite accurate in that it indicates the difference between the words we use to construct memories and the images that appear to us more immediately are distinct. And we begin to understand that this is Laura's experience replaying, from the first frenetic and boisterous montage early on to the magnificent celebration towards the end. It is a cinematic realisation of a writer playing her capital of experience and eventually discovering her own voice.

Holliday Grainger gives us a Laura who is struggling against the wasting time but still resentful of what is expected of her as a young, bright woman. What we see most in her is doubt and even in the most gut chugging scenes of interminable boozing and snorting she brings a barely controlled self-loathing at yet another occasion where she has buckled rather than take control. One moment is told with intimidating truth: she surmises infidelity and flees the scene to privacy in a cubicle as her insides seem to be dissolving; she knows the worst is true and has no power to reverse it. It's exactly how that feels.

Alia Shawkat, whose team has included me since Search Party, takes a little more effort to fit into the more showy and declaiming Tyler. To be fair some of her rants (lifted by the source novelist) are more fashioned than natural but she does smooth it out and adds depth with some subtle pathos. If anything, her role is driven by denial and its friction with inevitability. A little stagy? Sure but she's just like that. Laura begins with a foundation whereas Tyler is on 11 from the start. It's a hard gig but Shawkat gives enough self-realisation to let us in before she turns into a pillar of caricature.

Fra Fee shows more than meets the eye and adds presence by (this will read like faint praise) being believably nice. Dermot Murphy as as the dark 'n' charismatic poet Marty has fun with his seducer-in-chief, offering clear allure and queasy danger.

This film has been called Withnail and I for girls. Hmm. Couple of things. Withnail and I was released in the '80s but set in the '60s. The two men face the prospect of having to grow up while the "greatest decade in the history of mankind" comes to a shambling, exhausted close. It's not entirely nostalgia; the '70s await with hard times and if these boys are actors they are going to have to start acting. That theme of youth's shelf life is common to both films but Laura and Tyler are lodged deeply into a social environment that is not about to reject them, those own-bootstraps are going to take a lot more pulling. Absent from the friendship of Tyler and Laura is the male reserve that prevents declaration of it: they love each other enough never to need to utter the "as friends" qualification. This, tellingly, is clearest when they are bickering which they do increasingly and with increasing stakes. Withnail and I is a deserved modern classic, effortlessly quotable and always enjoyable on a re-watch. Animals is a different case, using the language of cinema more delicately and getting in closer. The comparison doesn't hurt either film but is unhelpful.

I was hungover at the Nova (rhyme! well, in an Australian accent) and the sight of all that drinking was making me wince so perhaps I was well placed to sweep the infection of the fun from the slide and look more closely at the story of the women and how they were going to cope with that scission that must affect every relationship that starts in youth and continues to maturity. Also, I had a guilty recognition watching Laura tinker at her writing and frequently feeling like an impostor. Did that for a little over a decade with about the same to show for it. It was really meant to be something to start with  but in time it turned into a social introduction. And I was younger and rallying around with the same kind of fun folk. A drink always sounded better than editing. It had a painful resonance.

Pain and resonance are real flavours in the mix here but so are so much else. Animals is neither the jolly japes of young bohemians larking about as laddish ladies but nor is it a chick flick. Just as the greatest children's cinema works because everyone who watches it is or has been a child, everyone who knows the fear of leaving youth will find something here. I personally maintain that we are far better able to deal with accounts of our own lives if we dispense with nostalgia and recall the instruction of the years, for good and ill (this can be easier said than done, though). This story involves a lot of weakness but it is a tale of strength.

Review: THE NIGHTINGALE

Clare, a young wife, mother and ex-convict in Van Diemen's Land is legally bound to a young psycho in a uniform who delays letting her go with a ticket of leave. Lieutenant Hawkins likes to show her off to the mess hall as a singer ("our little nightingale") and later violate her as a rapist of an evening. After her husband in a rage breaches the line by assaulting Hawkins the latter seeks drunken revenge which escalates into murder, even more rape and then infanticide. The next day, Lt. Hawkins decamps for Launceston (pronounced Lonston, as well it might have been) cutting through the wilderness with a small expedition. He's not escaping guilt, he feels none and his position puts him outside of retribution anyway. He's chasing a promotion and a ticket out of the backwater he oversees. Clare, lone survivor of an atrocity that will leave you shaking to watch, swears revenge, picks up a local tracker and goes in pursuit.

So far this is a revenge western (or southern). The constant stand off between Clare and Billy will inevitably soften or be forced into trust and a bond will ensue. The baddy toy soldier will get some bullets for lunch and the credits will roll. But the best revenge plots put their enraged protagonists through an ethical wringer and end unpredictably. Even John Wayne's Ethan in The Searchers had to stand back from his primeval hatred and take some serious stock. After the opening of this story we have no greater wish than for nasty, lingering deaths for Hawkins and his crew. Until a big and almost eerie spoil-able moment, we expect that very thing will be happening if we just sit tight and wait.

But this is a Jennifer Kent film. Her first feature, The Babadook, showed us grief, survivor guilt and depression as a monster movie where the monster was just a thought made manifest but grew into terrifying power. It remains one of my favourite films of the decade and one of the best ever made in this country. When I heard that her second would not be horror but revenge I was nothing but intrigued. She'd only made one feature film but I was eager to see her take on the subject. It was worth the wait.

There's a lot going on here. First, the setting. Van Diemen's Land, the most brutal of the Australian penal colonies. While there is little direct depiction of convict life Clare and her family are convict caste and we are in no doubt as to where they sit in the social order. They are also Irish which puts them into near untouchable status: it wasn't just bodies that got transported to the southern colonies.

Billy, an indigenous man living where the most complete exercise of Australian genocide was enacted. During the second act he learns that all of his people have been exterminated by the British. So, it's not just the rape, the murder and the child killing, but the violation of most of the people on the island. From the off, we are looking at a hunt we know to be bigger than its parts and one that we, against ourselves, want to end in retributive violence ... in some of the most breathtakingly beautiful country on the planet.

This is shot in 4 x 3 which keeps us all close together in the bush which looks tall rather than scenic and gives a strong sense of lowered visibility. It's this rather than an affectation for the classic cinema shot before widescreen formats that its plot might suggest. That's another thing, there is no cuteness in this film. Even in The Babadook we got quite a lot of winks from classic and obscure horror movies showing on tvs in the house. It wasn't intrusive but it gave the film a slight distraction it suffered from. Here, we are in a place at a time and that's it. Well, of course it isn't, it does have a great deal to say to any time but within that tight 1.37:1 frame it's 1825.

And then there's reconciliation. Clare's lower caste state and Billy's even lower one fuel the beginnings of an understanding between them. But Kent knows, as do we, that she cannot deliver what hasn't happened unless it is through fantasy. Never say never, perhaps, but it won't be happening here where the violence is so easy to get away with and where few, if any, care to change that. That is the world we are in right up to the end credits.

And then there's the central driver which at first just looked like revenge but increasingly just looks like damage. Both Clare and Billy are bound by their trauma and whether it has been administered personally or through military invasion it can be hard for them to discern the difference between retribution and relief. We have been asking exactly what she has in mind in chasing seasoned soldiers through difficult terrain, outnumbered and outskilled. A pivotal moment sees Clare confronted with the very question of what she should do and it is life or death. She is fresh from an act of like-for-like brutality which tells us she is capable but when we see her in this (no spoilers) moment her and our most frantic thought is for survival, not justice. Billy couldn't just say a thing or two about that he has been. What was a serviceable vengeance plot now has a scary depth to it.

Irish actor Ainsling Franciosi holds the centre of the screen, in fury here and shivering vulnerability there bearing almost visible weight in her every move. Baykali Ganambarr keeps his gravity against Clare's tempest with a passivity that feels practised from the experience of pummelling authority. When he breaks from it the sense of his freedom can draw tears. Surrounded by bush that can variously soothe the eye but scream like a lost soul at night and settlers and cruelty-driven convicts on the way a kind of balance is struck but it's delicate and ready at the slightest touch to topple and kill.

Jennifer Kent has made another film of great depth that stretches out from its closest genre to shock us into thought. Reports of walkouts during early festival screenings are understandable but create their own questions. The violence is rough and hard to watch but its real ugliness comes from motivation rather than gore (though there is some of that). If what you've heard worries you I wish I knew how to assure you that the tougher parts of this ride are part of something transcendent that is worth every minute of screen time. Mind you, I sat through the entire end credits if only to feel soothed by the Irish lament that played over them. If you do see this film and don't feel an overwhelming urge to go forth and do something good for someone then you really have some hard questions for yourself.

Review: ONCE UPON A TIME ... IN HOLLYWOOD

Ageing actor Rick Dalton spends down time with his stunt double Cliff Booth and as they smoke leisurely cigarettes, drive around, plough into Margaritas and watch their old movies, time soaks in letting them know, through the gentle anaesthetic that their time has past on this path. There are other paths but they feel like admissions. Meanwhile a young solar beauty Sharon Tate strolls through a day off and happens on a cinema showing her latest goofy action comedy, introduces herself and watches, absorbing the appreciation of the audience in the anonymous dark. Meanwhile, a group of hippy teenagers roam the sunlit streets and dive the dumpsters for food singing is clear girlish voices chants like, "all is one." It's Los Angeles, 1969. They might as well be singing Helter Skelter.

Rick gets a get-out-of-obscurity card from a well placed admirer but it's so radically different to his path that he considers is a kind of resignation. A later scene has him receive wisdom from an eight year old colleague who learns of his plight through fiction: he summarises the Western novel he's reading and realises it's about himself. His stunt double plays out a Western for real which takes him into the heart of darkness and violence. Margot Robbie watches rapt as her character takes pratfalls on screen, played by the real Sharon Tate as the people around her fill her ears with the joy of cinema and flashbacks to her martial arts training with someone playing Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee as a character has already had his arse handed to him by Cliff in a needlessly controversial scene in a backlot. This is a Quentin Tarantino film and all of this forms the same cosmos. But an indication of why I think this is the first Tarantino film I've cared much about since Jackie Brown is that as part of the Manson murder timeline we see Charlie once and very briefly. That's not a spoiler but saying more would be. My point is that, despite the sensory overload of imagery and the near three hour running time, this film feels tight and restrained in all the right places. That's not something I'd say of anything from Kill Bill to The Hateful 8.

Some authorial marks appear early (Rick's old tv show will be mentioned and you live through a few sequences of it that could easily have been referred to in dialogue, a character mentions seeing a film at home on 35 mm and we see the projector loaded and working) and made me shift in my seat. Has QT gone so far as to provide self-parody as part of his auteurism? These do settle down, though. Later iterations are meaningful as they do fill narrative gaps with massive style. Otherwise, we get some of his better traits. Process, as in Rick learning his lines with a reel to reel tape machine, Cliff driving smoothly through the streets or Roman Polanski as a character driving his hot MG like he's in a race. Cliff picks up a hitchhiker and its playful progress is undercut by a mounting dread. Sharon picks up a woman hitcher who could be a Manson girl but its friendly and fits with her Disney princess exploration of the streets and lanes. Rick might call for lines during a scene but he learns them and works on his performance. Cliff gets home to his trailer, behind a drive-in screen and beside an oil derrick, feeds his well-trained dog, makes up some instant mac and cheese, and lounges in front of the tv. If we didn't understand they were Manson's followers, the dumpster diving girls play at their tasks like teenagers, laughing and larking. Around all of this day to day the gentle sunlight of an old time reminds us that it's about to be bruised by crime, shattered by industrial cataclysm and drawn irrevocably away from its Beach Boys harmony pleasure. This is not the love letter to old genre cinema that Kill Bill was, there are real things happening on screen, I mean real emotionally and culturally and historically. There really is a purpose in what we are shown.

On that, the contested fight scene between Cliff and Bruce Lee does have resonance in later moments as we see him instruct others professionally. Does it misrepresent Lee as an arrogant windbag who could be beaten by a much older man? Maybe, but that's a charge for a documentary (I know how tired that is as a joke but I'm not joking). The scene has far more to do with the passing of batons and the hubris of an older hand not ready to give up his place. The man he doubles for is going through his own career comeuppance, it's just one that feels the effects of alcohol and personal perdition rather than fists and throws. This is at the thematic centre of the film and expresses it variously with blunt force and subtlety but does express it. The content that I had trouble with was the flashback to Cliff's past which features an incident left open. Personally, I think it's up to your ethics whether you indulge the wink from the film itself or assume the lack of definition is supported by the potential redemptive violence later. It's troubling either way.

Troubling in a warmer way is Tarantino's fluid presentation of film production. We've already seen him digitally replace Steve McQueen with Leonardo DiCaprio in a scene from The Great Escape and mock up a 60s style war movie for Rick Dalton (though it's far more stylish than it would have been if genuine). But in scenes of Rick performing in his bad guy role in the tv show we are given the kind of cheat that used to be standard in movies about movies from the days o' yore. As Rick plays the scene in the saloon it is presented as assembled from different takes with seamless audio right up to the point where he calls for his line. I wasn't counting setups but that isn't how it's done. A later scene involving a stand-off does the same. The most annoying case of this is in the 1980 film The Stunt Man where a fugitive turned film actor is put through a kind of performance rollercoaster made of hundreds of shots as though he's playing it and getting roughed up for real in one pass. In this film there is no apology for the conceit, we're meant to believe it and empathise with how rattled the actor is. It's done that way for the plot but it still feels contemptuous. When Tarantino does it here it's because he knows you know (and it speeds the plot point and it is more fun to watch); it's a point of celebration for the film's title with its cross of Disney and cynical studio industry.

This reminds me not so much of the retrograde art direction that helped make Tarantino famous, a kind of perennial cool mixed with nostalgia, as it does a more recent outing by another standalone figure in contemporary cinema, Sion Sonno. Sonno's Why Don't You Play in Hell is a kind of farewell to the cinema of film stock, attended projection, and plucky filmmakers. In a plot Tarantino would love, a gang of aspirant moviemakers inadvertently get caught up in a Yakuza war and solve it by making both sides finance a movie made which will feature both in the ascendant. There is a mass of Japanese cinema history on the screen but also an increasing sad smile at its passing. Tarantino celebrates what we now call (but no longer watch) appointment tv as well as the movies of money men with a chapter close both satisfying in its violence and heavy-hearted in its signature.

I was worried about the length of this movie as the past month's film festival had given me lower back pain (retro cinema seating, indeed! ... argh it's something I've had since my twenties) and the thought of sitting still for two hours forty-five was bidding me wait until I felt better. But as the movie took flight I recalled something. When I was a kid I used to love going down to the Strand, having a lime milkshake and a burger at the Ozone Cafe, and going and playing with the old train engine and canon on the lawn by the beach. There was a stretch of parking shaded permanently by big shaggy banyan trees and, for a while, weekend after weekend, I would marvel at the sight of a jet black E-Type Jaguar parked there among the dowdy Holdens and Fords. There was such alluring mystery to it. I imagined a James Bond or The Saint (the stick figure from that title sequence was graffiti-ed on the side of nearby Castle Hill). The big sleek shark-like car really got into me, so much that I knew that seeing the owner would just be another Townsvillite plonker like me. I never found out and never will. The thing is that now I leave the warmth of that in the childhood file and only get it back out of the dust when something as exciting happens, something like this movie. Both of these are memories with falsehood (i.e. nostalgia) and it's what we can read in the space between the plain event and the fantasy. It can rend your heart. It can exhilarate you. It didn't last but I got out of my seat as the lights came up without any pain at all.

Review: PALM BEACH

Members of a one hit wonder band from the '70s who have kept in touch gather for the birthday of their old manager. Everyone's married, had kids, known big highs and lows, and moved on. Or have they? This is a reunion comedy like The Big Chill or Peter's Friends and it does what it says on the tin. Buried emotional corpses are exhumed, young adult children are compared with parents who are having a very hard time coping with being older then they were when they were famous. You need to laugh and you need to cry and finally you need to feel the warm 'n' fuzzies wrap around you like the finest fake fur coat.

Well, all of that happens and is enacted by a cast of mighty actors from home and away like Bryan Brown, Greta Scacchi, Richard E. Grant, Sam Neill and fine newcomers like Claire Van Der Boom among many others. Everyone gets a scene to themselves and their defining issue and everyone does well with what they get. That is the problem: most of the trouble that emerges is given so little weight by the progress of the film that reactions to it almost always feel overdone. They appear suddenly by people who seem too well prepared to supply a turn. I don't mean that the truth of the situation is so strong that we're witnessing people who know each other too well. I mean that the writing seems too often to play placeholder scenes as final drafts. The actors are a lot better than their material.

There is one scene towards the end involving a taxi and it's perfectly written, performed and directed, going from bitterness and pathos to effortless comedy. It sticks out and shows up pretty much every other scene. There's a lot on show as far as performance goes, the delivery of wit, physical comedy, youth vs age but when one character's taunt to the birthday boy about a blot on the otherwise magnificent view, the last straw seems like nothing so the latter's acting makes him look like a drama queen having a coronary. There are some serious issues but they're so smoothed over that nothing really seems to be at stake. Even the physical comedy scenes lack power as they are of acts that might be funny if they happened in real life but not on screen. Again, the actors feel like they're over-reacting as though they're in a drama class.

It's not the fault of this film alone but of the genre that the darker aspects of ageing never get a look in. Mortality and personal power drain, resentment of youth could be worth exploring over fart jokes and wistful musings on what they used to be. There is just nothing unpredictable about these people. Reunions should be fraught with danger. There should be envy, ridicule, repeat bullying, pecking order reinstatement; all sorts of massive bullshit. If they were just nice no one would go to them.

Review: THE KEEPER

Bert Trautmann is a German soldier captured at the end of WWII and imprisoned in a British camp. It's not quite a meet cute (it's not a rom com) but Margaret, the daughter of a local grocer supplying the camp, sees Bert showing expert skills as a goal keeper as the prisoners play soccer. He is considered trustworthy enough to work at the grocery while the grocer keeps an eye on his skills with a mind to enriching the local soccer team. After some stark resistance, Bert goes to the net and wins  the day and before we know it is playing for Man City to massive crowds. But not all is well.

After a tastefully handled romance between Bert and Margaret we see them married and we are aware that there is an event in Bert's military past that is beginning to fester in him as he struggles with the prejudice of football fans who see him as a scapegoat for Nazism. An initial division between Bert and Margaret ends with an intriguing question posed by his that we strongly suspect has the wartime incident at its centre.

There are the two themes of this film and their convergence into conflict drives a tale of reconciliation and its difficulties. So as Bert's career courses into triumph this grain of conscience grows until present day tragedy forces it into confession. The good thing about this film is that that moment does not end up with smiles or hugs and the thousand and one strings of the Lancashire Fiddlers. There is a heart rending emptiness that does far more to convey the gravity.

David Kross keeps Bert's cards close to his chest with a face like a Christmas elf, all baby blues, golden fringe and wide lipped smile. This is important because we are just as ready to reject him as the Brits. When it comes to the revelation of his wartime moment the elf is, like the reports of many soldiers faced with atrocity, screamingly out of his depth. It also gives him a passport to charm in the warmer moments. Freya Mavor finds her way to the moral centre, going from cheeky northern girl to barely restrained victim of grief, carrying time and deed on her shoulders. The cast at large will be recognisable to anyone who has been enjoying recent U.K. cinema of the last decade as it's quiet rise has taken place.

The sport scenes move with a solid muscularity but the action on the stadium lawn really lifts when the responses from fans and narrative players activate and take wing. The moment when Bert insists on closing the gap Margaret has challenged him with about the merits of sport vs dance. It is genuinely charming.

This film could have given in to the numerous opportunities for cuteness that peppered its early scenes (and there are a few) but kept to the seriousness of its later weightier moments so that they do not feel forced (calling Wes Anderson and his irritating  tacked-on 3rd act crises!) and instead give us much to ponder and a pallet both evocative of era and easy on the eye to help. There are a few what-happened-to titles but they are left as text over action and not allowed to descend into the photo gallery of the real life characters.

MIFF 2019 Roundup

Intro
This year I did something unlike me and went back through the old programs to make lists of what I'd seen in MIFFs going back as far as I could. My real job came in handy here as it gave me immediate access to MIFF websites going back to 1998. While it was a chore going through the entire program for each year it did let me pick up a lot of movies that had been on short lists that I still haven't got around to. Another thing was that for each screening that I could remember (most of them) I added a few notes which included whether I saw it alone or with friends. The overall picture was that some fests were very social and others were almost solo. Then, when I thought about it a little deeper, I came away from the solo (or mostly solo) fests with much more intense and profound impressions. So, this year, while I did let a few friends in on my schedule I did nothing to chase anyone up and let it happen as it would. I even exchanged sessions that had orange dots by them (selling fast) red ones (sold out) or red triangles (standby)  for more obscure and less buzzy choices. These included films I knew I wouldn't be able to interest many others in seeing. Also, I sit at the front by preference which means that I almost never have to queue as that area is the least preferred. I am the only one of the people I know with this preference so if I'm meeting someone there it means standing in queues to get a middle-of-the-road seat. Oh, and out of preference, almost all my sessions were morning or early afternoon on week days which might tell you where I was leaning.  The result was that while I don't recall the joy and the fun and the seasons in the sun of some of them the movie experience feels richer. I might well be telling myself a few things there but I can say that at this stage they are not unpleasant ones. So, while it felt more like work than fun I really enjoyed the hell out of this year's MIFF. First, the movies ...

High

In Fabric in which Peter Strickland delivers the best of everything he's already given and pumps it up and out even further. A curious and wonderful mix of absurdist comedy, kitchen sink realism and genuine eeriness. Rare.

Something Else gave us a credible relationship study turned monster movie turned rom com in a piece that proudly bore its indy cred but fought its way well out of that paper bag with depth and real surprise.

The Day Shall Come showed that Chris Morris could develop from his uneasy blend of goofy knockabout humour with dark politics to deliver a sublime weave of light satirical political humour to a hard gut punch of a conclusion.

The Swallows of Kabul might have dealt its social criticism with a heavy hand but its sheer conviction won through, supported by a winsome animation style.

Friedkin Uncut is how you do an interview movie. A great raconteur supported by a gallery of peers and clips lift it above the dvd extra that a lot of these feel like.

Middle

Happy New Year, Colin Burstead delighted with Ben Wheatley in Mike Leigh territory and loving it. I love how in the explosive family environment the climactic moment is so slight and yet decisive. I just don't know how much I enjoyed it.

The Unknown Saint was a very appealing folky fable of cunning and greed. Never felt like more but didn't really need to.

The Orphanage expressed a bitter wish from decades past, a kind of if only rather than what if. Almost perfectly realised.

Vivarium had the courage to keep going with its severe absurdism but kept losing its way and then delivered what felt like an undercooked finish.

I wanted to like Monos more than I did but it never broke free of feeling like a short film left out in the rain. The breathtaking cinematography and audio + score did a lot of work and made me wish for more at the centre.

Share stood up to sexual assault in the social media maelstrom and made some strong points about the social microcosm and added some frightening thoughts about apparent virtue as manipulation but kept falling too short of the mark.

Low

The Tomorrow Man might well have done something worthy of its great ending if it had wound back the normality it was using to throw us off with the cute old people in a rom com hijinks. A missed opportunity and near waste of a great cast.

The Lodge showed that the makers of a contemporary classic horror film (Ich Sehe Ich Sehe) can bungle their next for the same reason that made their first work: icy aloofness that bred dread there only alienates us from people we need to care about here.

Website and App

Again, I didn't need the paper guide at all as I was able to fill up a minipass over a couple of sessions using the website alone. The calendar view of the wishlist is really invaluable here. The app updated itself smoothly and was ready to use straight away. I didn't notice any new features but all the thing has to do is work which it does.

One gripe is that when you're checking on the selling fast/standby lists it opens on day one. Considering how many sessions per day for over a fortnight you have to scroll through to check something in the second week renders the feature all but useless. I prefer avoiding overcrowded sessions and exchanged tickets several times this festival to avoid them (in some cases the substitutes were better than I was expecting the original choice would be. Happily, the normal schedule opens  with the current day so it's better to check that way.

The site had some glitchy navigation in the calendar view by which if you chose a date from the dropdown you could return to the default (Friday Aug 2) but then it stopped working until you refreshed the page. If you exchanged tickets the old bookings stayed on your wishlist, crowding it up with abandoned entries. Not so bad on a browser but annoying on a phone.

For some reason drilling down to your ticket on the (at least Android) app while waiting to show it to the ushers for scanning it could shift from portrait to landscape (even if you had this turned off on your phone) and the QR code vanished, even when returning to portrait view. You had to back out of it and choose it again. Not a major glitch and easily fixed each time but it probably caused staff more than a few winces as they explained it to the punters. Why not fix the view to portrait. Who's really going to need landscape on a phone or even tablet to go through the guide?

The Venues

The Forum
The central experience of the festival for me and always feels like a great return home. Pity the festival club wasn't there this year. That last bit was one of the reasons why I didn't bother seeking out session mates this year. You had to travel to the Capitol to get a festival congregation/vibe after movie drink. I saw the Forum downstairs being used with lantern jawed security staff at the doors a few times. Folks, re-open the Forum as a bar, cafe. It's a beautiful space and feels special. I didn't even bother to try the one at the Capitol.

The Capitol
Welcome return of a beautiful cinema but for one thing: the seats (apparently refurbished) are among the most spine damaging I've tried. They are far worse than the antiques in the Comedy Theatre. Despite the beauty of the interior I will  choose against going to screenings at the Cap at future events and will not go to any ACMI-associated ones until they're back at ACMI next year (unless they get the same lunkhead who designed the seating at the Capitol).

Sofitel
I've been to this one only once before and a while ago. It's small and functional, about the same as going to a Kino auditorium. The sound system was deafening for the ads and pre-screening music but settled easily for the screening itself.

Exhibition Centre
Massive auditorium allows for an easy second from front seat for In Fabric and a pleasantly strange entrance through the endless hallway which itself is quite cinematic.

Hoyts
Guaranteed preferred seating and comfortable at this well set up cinema which always has good projection and audio. There is a triple row at the front which backs onto a walkway meaning that no one who sits like a squid out of water can reach the back of your seat with their feet.

I didn't end up going to any Kino sessions.

Audiences
People are getting worse. Well, they probably aren't. I never saw anyone keep their phone on while the movie was playing. The worst thing is still people who think their voices are inaudible or don't care if they aren't. They are followed by the physio patients of the future who don't understand that if you sit in chairs as designed it is much better for your back (except at the Capitol whose seats seem designed for those very squid monsters) and knee or kick the back of your seat. YOU SHOULD NEVER HAVE TO COME IN CONTACT WITH THE SEAT IN FRONT OF YOU AT A CINEMA. That includes putting your footpath soiled shoes in the vicinity of anyone breathing close by. Your personal sovereignty ends when you start affecting that of other people. There is no exception to that. There was an adult family group at Monos who did take hints given to them and eventually shut up. In that case I just beamed at how punishing that film would have been to a drunkard's attention span. Knowing the contemporary cinemagoer's arrogance, I exchanged tickets from every standby session I'd booked: one or two entitled Neanderthals can be dealt with but a whole auditorium. Also, latecomers who extend their contempt for their fellow humans by talking or using what have to be prosthetic leg extensions  to make life hell for hours at a time tend to join me at the front. Not fun.

ADs
I mention these mainly because they are on before every screening so the dull ones are lived through and the irritating ones just get worse. There was a trailer this year and it was fine, simply stringing memorable images from the movies to music which gave it a sense of event. This wasn't one before screenings but put on YouTube and perhaps tv (no longer watch commercial tv so I wouldn't know). And then there was the put-your-phone-away one set in a bar in the after life. Shakespeare asks everyone how they died and among the famous and infamous there's an ordinary bloke who confesses he was texting while driving which brings the activity to a sudden halt. Most of this was actually quite funny. I won't go into the mangling of Elizabethan English as it was so bad it felt like part of the joke. The Ned Kelly confession made me wince every time as it went for too long and didn't observe its own rules. He mimes a shootout and hanging with vocal sound effects and then says Kelly's last words ("such is life") eloquently. And then in the final scene when they are at a cinema they repeat an earlier joke about his helmet which defuses the first one because when you see it again (and you will be seeing it again) the first one reminds you that the second one is coming. The first four confessions, though, are genuinely funny. But then over the end card we get Shakespeare quoting famous Brando line and feel like he does when he says it.

Eiplogue
When a low key senior rom com with a great ending and a competent if unremarkable horror movie are the worst things I can say about a whole festival then it must rate pretty highly. For reasons mentioned o'erhead this was a very comfortable fortnight o' films in good venues with mostly tolerable audiences and some real standout movies. I wouldn't want to take my misanthropic method into strict practice and might well loosen up next year and go in more groups but for this year at least going to movies by myself socialising outside the cinema was a far pleasanter experience than having to do all that organising. Anyway, for now, this is your happily exhausted correspondent from the shadows signing off MIFF for 2019.

One of the many snaps I took from the extraordinary sunset
following my final screening, heading off to a little treat
shopping and then a nice hot bath with some smoked salmon
and a Manhattan. Bye bye MIFF.