Review: GODZILLA

Dinosaurs emerge from the sea and fight.

The reason I bought a ticket (and to the 3D screening) was the name Gareth Edwards. The young UK writer/director came to the world's notice through his 2010 film Monsters. Shot on a Canon 5D with effects done on a bedsit computer, Monsters moved well beyond its romance-with-added-aliens to give us an allegory about difference ... and be thoroughly entertaining all the way through ... and betraying none of its zero cost origins. It is a compelling romance but it is still very much sci fi. Gareth Edwards equalled resourcefulness as much as Shane Carruth had a few years earlier for Primer. I needed to see what Edwards would make of so familiar and often ridiculed fare.

So, dinosaurs emerge from the sea and fight.

Well yes and no.  All sci fi comes with a warning. The 1954 Gojira was a means to address the effect of the atomic bombs dropped on Japan in 1945 and the notion of scientific advancement for its own sake. Its eye-patched central scientist has created a weapon more devastating than those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He has been cast into a deep melancholy by his own invention and the knowledge that its discovery alone will guarantee its development and proliferation in the arms race. Even then, the first time out, this story was not just about a man in a rubber lizard suit.

Edwards not only knows this but wants you to know it as well. Toho, the studio that made the original, is given credit in the impressive history show of the title sequence. Ken Watanabe commands the scenes he's in with an unshakeable sadness. Through him (he's even addressed as Sensei or master/teacher) we are given the link between Hiroshima and Fukushima. Between the monsters and the planet's environment are the humans whose mess this is to clean.

As in all monster movies (especially ones with giant monsters) we don't get to see the title role until a fair way in. We do get to see the adversary early on (a kind of bat beast) and its effects and then the first fight begins the action that will focus the remainder of the film as appropriate. So, if this Edwards voter is so good at being all charactery and indy how does he handle all this?

The critics who thought they were being clever in calling Monsters a romance plus aliens missed both its sci fi and action elements. There's plenty in Monsters to tell you how destructive the aliens can be and, while done within a tiny budget, feels big and scary. That is the difference between directing by checklists and making cinema. Edwards simply knows his creature features and takes them seriously. Now that he has the budget to match his ambitions he has applied his fandom, his clear understanding and his respect and the result feels big but also nourishing. When we see a bridge torn by violence its two ends hang like exhausted bodies: we are being invited to linger over the destruction and feel something beyond wow.


Now to scale. The monsters are impressive even by Michael Bay clodfest standards. The bat like thing that first emerges from the nuclear mess in Japan is all claws and aerodynamics, tearing planes from the air and crawling through jungle like a monstrous overgrown insect. Godzilla's entrance happens in crisis as his mountain-rang back surfaces from the waves and he breaks land and then a lot of infrastructure. But the difference can be found in one moment on screen. As MUTO (the bat creature) moves through the waves of San Fransisco Bay jet fighters fall through the smoke and dust around it. Michael Bay would have made this a scene made of a million nansecond edits and massive cataclysmic noise. There is a lot of noise in this Godzilla but the fighters fall in silence like flocks of birds poisoned by smog. Edwards knows this could be more pyrotechnics and volume but knows the value of contrast and chooses instead to turn it down for this image so that instead of thrilling or jolting it haunts.

Ok, if the monsters are good how are the humans. I bet it's all mumblecore in sensurround. Well, yes and no. David Strathairn plays Admiral Horatio Exposition, delivering descriptions of action and its consequences in catch up dialogue. It's not a turnoff but it's noticeable. It is in one of his scenes that the name Gojira, spoken by Watanabe, gets assimilated into Standard American as Godzilla faster than Ringu became The Ring. Elizabeth Olsen is as solidly emotive as in her best performances but there's so little of her beyond giving Aaron Taylor Johnson a motivational arc. Aaron Taylor Johnson impressed me in Nowhere Boy, owning the role of a much loved universal figure, the startup superhero in Kickass and the creepy bully in Chatroom. Here he carries action with the same sense of active thought visible through his sculpted youthfulness. Bryan Cranston is fun and moving in his short role as ATJ's father. Why cast Juliette Binoche in a role that requires so little of what she can do? Edwards, for all his touches of innovation and insistence on adding depth, is making a big monster movie. Can you do that without obvious dialogue and cute animal moments? Yes, but if you want your second feature film to blast out on screens worldwide all at once rather than drip through the festivals over a couple of years then you do need a few familiar touches to get past the door bitch at the local plex.

Gareth Edwards has crossed into the mainstream with honour and I wonder if we'll be thinking of him in the same way as Christopher Nolan before too long. This is a good Godzilla. Oh yeah, no need to see it in 3D, it's just not shot with that in mind. Enjoy and maybe try some pepper or saffron on your popcorn just for the new.

Review: THE DOUBLE

My test with this one was to see if the critics have been right and that this film suffers from its influences. If I was annoyed at all the heavy lifting the film would fail. I can report that in this case it's the critics taking the fall. While The Double is not a complete success one thing it does very, very well is evoke its source material without any obsequies: writer/director Richard Ayaode has given us a kind of waking nightmare memory of something he has read. As any of us might fancy ourselves in a scene from a favourite novel while waiting for a tram.

The reason that this aspect of the film triumphed over any of its stylistic loans is a scene near the beginning where the protagonist is hauled away from sight of his workplace's patriarch and all he can think to say in his panic at the humiliation is: "It's not me. It's not me." That's before the double appears. It's straight out of the source material.

Dostoyevsky's novella Dvoynik (or, in English, The Double) is a stark and nightmarish approximation of what would come to be known (half a century later) as a psychotic episode. Mr Golyadkin, a lowly clerk in one of the many monstrous government bureaucracies of Tsarist Russia, fantasises impossibly above his station. He is so obsessed by his perceived injustice of his place in the rigid order that, after a series of crushing defeats by his own hand, he is confronted with a far more winsome version of himself who lives the life he fantasised for himself. At one point, during one of his crazy shopping sprees, Golyadkin's hire coach passes that of his Department's head, an unassailable military aristocrat who can see that the insect-like clerk is wagging work. Golyadkin presses his face against the carriage window and feebly intones: "It's not me. It's not me. It's someone strikingly like me."

That combination of horror, pathos and screaming comedy is what makes any Dostoyevsky novel worth the long journey from preface to last page. While there was a growing theme of preter-psychology in European literature in the nineteenth century, no culture concentrated on it with a more falconian eye than the Russians. There in the pages of Dostoyevsky, Gogol, Turgeniev, Chekov, Tolstoy and Goncharov among others, the patient reader will find some jawdroppingly accurate descriptions of extreme psychological states. This was helped in no small part by the social effect of westernisation which in Russia's case meant taking it from a feudal agrarian hell into an even more punishingly stratified urban hell, educating just enough of its citizens to give them a sense of privilege but no mobility to go with it. When Dostoyevsky added the subtitle A Poem of St Petersberg to The Double he wasn't evoking place the way Dickens might London or Diderot Paris, he was referring to a psyche.

Wait isn't this a film review? You're so right. I do beg your pardon. I seem to have wandered on to a hobby horse of mine. And er ... Richard Ayaode's film of this story is primarily told from its source. There is a lot of Dostoyevsky in this tale. It happens to be one of my favourites by that name among my favourite authors and I've long wished for a good screen adaptation. I always thought Martin Scorsese would get there first with his extraordinary skill at expressing the horrors of social interaction with an eye to edgy comedy but here it is told without the top hats and frock coats of its original setting, in concentrated form, allowed to spread into flavour.

So, Simon James works in a nameless office as a clerk among a lot of other clerks, wedged into a human battery cubicle. When a faceless commuter demands he give up his seat in an otherwise empty carriage, Simon does so as it's just easier. He's in unrequited love with the pixieish girl who works at the copy centre of his office but can never break through to talk to her. She lives within telescope sight of his flat's window, staying home at night idling away at home made arts and crafts, leaving red ink or blood fingerprints on the window.

Simon can never get straight into work. His electronic ID card is faulty and he has to go through an annoying sign-in routine that a guard who still doesn't recognise him after seven years compels him to do. Work is shapeless and futile. Only the golden Hannah from copying can change this. Simon's opportunity comes up after the two witness a suicide at their building, the aftermath of which establishes that there is an epidemic of them and a chance to have a coffee with Hannah. This goes well and they plan to meet up at the dowdy work ball the next night. The same kind of barrier he is plagued by every work morning prevents him from getting in as she is waiting for him sullenly by a pillar. A chance allows him entry but he is frogmarched out by security. On the way home he is startled to see someone identical to him walking up to an apartment opposite his building. The next day the cobwebby old clerks are called together to welcome a promising young man into the office. Simon sees his doppleganger and faints.

From this point the plot progresses in close approximation to the original with the initial mutually beneficial friendship between the two developing into earnest competition and on toward total breakdown. This can only work if the central dual performance can cut it. An early scene featuring Jesse Eisenberg as both Simon James and James Simon is simply the pair of them walking down a corridor. Their faces are what each might consider a blank expression but it's blank in-character and each is distinct from the other despite being dressed identically. While not necessarily a miracle of acting it is nevertheless an impressive show and indicative of the importances the performances have in this film that has been derided for being too kooky to relate to. While some spots (hello Chris Morris) are overcooked the acting across the board shifts between whimsy and grounded realism so constantly that it is the former that assumes the latter rather than the whackiness threatening the naturalism. The now ubiquitous Mia Wasikowska, who must hold her own against Eisenberg's actor's dream role, and come out an equal, gets a tellingly far greater range of character than Saorise Ronan's recent wasted presence in Grand Budapest Hotel (or, just quietly Dostoyevsky would have given her) and bears it with customary strength and lack of affect.

And this is where I'll mention Brazil. The interrupted electronics of Terry Gilliam's masterpiece are here in abundance. The bureacratic fantasia of the central figure's dusty office might also be invoked but really what Ayaode has done beyond a simple bow to the earlier film and appropriated its look and those things that influenced Gilliam for the pursuit of the tale. The incandescent breathlessness of the interiors, the eastern bloc dowdiness of the cafes and office parties, the battery-like towerblocks are not just Gilliam but an effective visual bridge between page and screen. Ayaode makes it difficult to place the action in a specific locale (the Japanese 60s pop songs, the odd quiltwork of clothing styles and technology) which is much more in line with Dostoyevsky's subtitle evokng the city that was really a state of mind. If you like, he is calling Gilliam to mind in the same way as Dostoyevsky emulated his stylistic forebear Nikolai Gogol, an influence he never shook (nor appeared to aspire to shake).

Ayaode moves the tale at a clip and alters the ending from the source in order to concentrate on the rivalry and self-combat he has already developed in divergence from Dostoyevsky. Some might find the final scenes a little hasty or pat but like the final lines of a good short story, its plain last words contain big echoes. Those echoes (you'll know them when you hear them) carry the reason for making this film at this time. That's more than I can say for most of what I see in a cinema ... at this time.

Review: ONLY LOVERS LEFT ALIVE

Adam is a centuries old vampire unliving in a gothic three-storey in the dying American city of Detroit. He's a musician, currently beloved of the hipster under-elite. He takes delighted delivery of various goods from a local music scene gopher. An early scene shows him sighing over a group of decidedly under-label electric guitars like an old Supro or Hagstrom. The biggest name axe of the bunch is a Gretsch. Later, we see him recording with a Fender Jaguar, playing an antique Gibson archtop acoustic, and there is a Tele conspicuously hanging on the wall. This is not just my guitar nerdery. There is a real point to this and it has to do with one's appreciation not of old obscure guitars but of the films of Jim Jarmusch.

I'm beginning there rather than sketch the plot as, more than most of Jarmusch films, this one casts shout-outs to every obscure or non-mainstream culture follower on the planet. The title is from a 1960s novel about a world ruled by teenagers. The Rolling Stones were up for starring in a movie based on the book. Nicholas Ray was mooted as director for a time. That's three whammies in one and we're just at the title. If you watch a Jarmusch movie for the scrapbook or post-midnight cafe rave then this is a feast.

If that annoys you you might miss out on the things that this piece does offer. Adam (Tom Hiddleston) is married to Eve (Tilda Swinton) who resides in Tangier (I'm sure there were a few marginal literary geniuses who set up house there ... hmmmm). Tom is depressed by the state of the world and has gone as far as to commission the fashioning of a single 38 bullet with a wooden tip from his gopher in order to end it all. Eve, worried, literally flies by night to save him. When she turns up he pretty much improves straight away. They drive around the once central ex-industrial city by night and talk, partly about Eve's dark and terrifying sister Ava who turns up but is really just a dizzy teenager (a really enjoyably bubbly Mia Wasikowska) who does some bad stuff and compels the couple to leave and return to Tangier to seek comfort and high grade blood from their mentor, Christopher Marlowe (an typically welcome John Hurt) and so on.

It sounds slight and if left to those points it would be but Jarmusch has the state of the world on his own mind and what the vampires cleverly call zombies are doing to it. The vampires' lives are unsustainable without violence. For all the jaded decadence of their style, they hold civilisation's knowledge from personal experience but cannot communicate it to the rest of us wasteful wasting living dead. That, told through the device of outcast monsters does deliver impact even if it often feels like the before cool/still pre-cool listings of hipsters. The sense of waste or the industrial, consumerist world's borrowed time is well staged in Detroit, once so much identified with the auto industry that it's nickname Motown became a whole pop genre and bands like the MC5 named themselves after it. The Detroit here is an airless ancient ruin. The eternal Tangier retains its lo-tech life in its close alleys that murmur with the drug trade. It's an odd staging of the eco-gospel but a staging of the eco-gospel it is.

If anything, Only Lovers Left Alive reminds me less of True Blood than 1994's Nadja by Michael Almereyda. As hiply grainy and monochrome as Stranger in Paradise, the film told of a group of vampires as an aristocratic dysfunctional family, casting Hal Hartley alumni and featuring MBV tracks specially remixed by Kevin Shields and a cameo by David Lynch as a mortuary clerk. High on style gothic and urban it lost its way early and turned innoffensive rather than bland, having virtually nothing to say. A non vampiric character describes the telepathy they enjoy as psychic faxing. Later when the title character receives such a message she describes it, unsmiling, as a psychic fax. We're the ones who are meant to giggle at that one. It's throwaway, atmosphere tarnishing and never meant to be more than a giggle and that's what we end up with. However...

If you are the type who visits someone whose house groans with bookshelves and rooms filled with vinyl LPs and finds your sense of wonder wane on hearing the seventeenth story about the real, lost culture of the good old days then you will get nothing from this film. What I get is partly a welcome-enough plea for planetary care but delivered with some genuinely curated style. Hipster maybe but Jarmusch has earned his stripes here.

Review: FADING GIGOLO

Murray talks his friend Fioravante into becoming a gigolo so they can both work out their troubled finances. It works; Fior's plain but urbane masculinity offers such a comforting mix of charm and effortless eroticism that he is soon the go to stud for the disaffected professional class women of Brooklyn.

Into this come Murray's family friend, the ultra-Jewish widow Avigal stultified by her own grief and devotion to her traditions. She has a problem with a back rub let alone the full body latte so Fior's progress with her is going to go even slower than the pacing down he relaxes his usual clients with. It veers hazardously close to love. Meanwhile, local keystone patrolman Dovi is struggling with the distant love he has felt for Avigal from the days of their childhood.

The makings here are for gentle farce and urban folktale but writer/director/lead actor John Tuturro keeps it more interesting by focusing on the pain. Firoavante's manly elegance and affectless appeal only very thinly conceal a deep wound. The chief benefit from his gigolo work seems to be therapy rather than hedonism and money. His job with the reticent Avigal feels more tutorial than amorous, though it's this thread that brings the story closest to love out of all of them. Their scenes, curtained off from the rest of the neighbourhood life have a stillness to them that feels respectful rather than slow.

What that means, though, is that the more comedic moments are affected by the seriousness of the core scenes so what comedy there is outside of the nice sized bag of one liners falls prey to dramatic gravity. The Hassidic tribunal that Woody Allen's Murray faces promises to get funny with every line but can't break through. When Avigal appears to face them it feels like the scene has been waiting for it rather than transformed by it.

If anything the flaw of this enjoyable film is that it doesn't balance the anger and darkness of some of the characters with the enlivening lightness of the funnier threads. Liev Schreiber's unrequited lifelong love saddens rather than comically frustrates as it should. Sharon Stone's embittered and vengeful rich woman with unloving husband is a compelling character and played pitch perfect but the seriousness of her thread which verges on Cronenberg territory is frayed by the lightness of its conclusion.

With such a stellar cast thriving on the direction of a good actor and a clear delectation in the sense of the city in autumn and the confidence of trusting the sexiness of standards like Sway in the original this piece might have benefited greatly by a stronger grip on its darker themes which are abundant and left the lighter moments to add warmth. While one of the most consistently pleasing films of the year so far this is also one of the slightest because of this.

Review: THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTEL: Shall I yet learn love?

Wha?

Everyone who knows me and has heard me ranting like a tramstop psycho about how much I hate Wes Anderson's films will be intoning Wha!? after their own fashion. More on that later.

Set in the fictitious country, Europe, east of centre, of Zubrowka, this is the tale of how legendary concierge Gustav H. who pampers the rich and wintry dowagers among his guests to a sexual extent and is rewarded after the death of one with a priceless painting from her collection. The remainder of her family are stirred to jealous action. A chase and fun ensue.

To his credit, Wes Anderson has crafted an enjoyable tale that moves at a clip and doesn't flab out in the third act while he struggles both resolution and attempts to smuggle great clanking deus ex machina moments past his audience. It's pretty good. Why am I being so nice? Why did I pay for a cinema ticket and choctop tax and sit in the dark with a lot of other people on a beautiful autumn day in Melbourne to watch what I expected, from the execrable trailer I endured for the past summer, to be dreck? Well, I suspected, from some varying reviews, that it would have its good points.

Here they are:

Ralph Fiennes. He plays a campy Ronald Coleman, the kind of Ronald Coleman we might have seen on screen if he'd been allowed more of himself there; intimidatingly urbane but equanimitous, an observer of strict protocol but no snob in real world situations. This would fail without Fiennes or someone from the very very few like him. Just as he made the bad guy in Schindler's List the most magnetic thing on screen he inhabits the solar centre here. This is because for all the literary quirks of the character, for all his fussiness here and resignation there his words and actions feel natural. Anderson has gone for the same kind of thing as the butler in Arthur (John Gielgud breaking his gravitas with blunt swearing) but Feinnes refuses to surrender to the cheapness of the ploy and plays his expletives the same way he played them as Amon Goeth, as though that's what he'd say anyway. What this loses in laughs it gains in sympathy and in a film so long on artificial charm and so short on the natural variety, this is a golden hen's tooth.

Narrative tropes: We begin the film by going through a series of spheres of narrative as a young literary pilgrim hangs a hotel key on to the monument to the writer of the book The Grand Budapest Hotel that glitters with them. She then sits on a bench nearby and reads that tome which has a cover of a pink we shall see again. As she reads we hear the voice of the middle aged author who turns into Tom Wilkinson attempting to film an introduction to it which gives way to his younger self, Jude Law, who is told the story of the film by the Hotel's owner, Zero Mustapha (F. Murray Abraham), of how he came to own the hotel. In this sphere, the narration goes beyond the conventional voiceover to sound like the written word. When a character says a line it is followed in Law's voice by something like, "he said."

See what I did there? I put the bit that describes the speech in quotes. I am clever. Well, I am reporting cleverness, he wrote.

This is a film as much about storytelling as it is about nostalgia and the passing of epochs. Perhaps because of this Anderson has reigned in his urges to destroy his own narratives with mishandled final acts and keeps the tale moving at a clip. This film, unlike any other of his, is never sluggish (fans would use the word lackadaisical there).

Cineform. Anderson represents the different eras or spheres of the tale with appropriate aspect ratio. For the 1930s it's the 4X3(ish) academy ratio. For the 1960s it's scope (2.35:1) and for the present day it's the more standard 1.85:1 (the majority of cinema releases but also, cleverly, the shape of contemporary tv screens). This kind of time/form mix has usually been highlighted by contrasts between black and white and colour and even different colour timing. Anderson keeps as much as he can centre screen and the changes are, remarkably for him, as unobtrusive as the reel-end cigarette burns were in the film projection aeon. Anderson presents one and only one scene in black and white and its well chosen (by recalling Schindler's list, apart from anything else).

 Evocation: Anderson has created a Europe that never could have existed but feels comfortable and so appealing that we are lulled into a kind of cinematic paralysis as we watch. This is in evocation of the kind of film Hollywood studios set in Europe in the 1930s, a filmic space to indulge in alien traditions of privilege and rebellion and to meet forces like fascism with cheekiness and win. It's strange but filtered through familiarity. The signs we read are in English. Zero's uniform cap bears the words Lobby Boy. Everyone speaks English in their own accents: Adrien Brody is a harsh NYC, Fiennes is a natural sounding uppercrust English, Tony Revolori is all LA as the young Zero but F. Murray Abraham is cultured Manhattan as the older Zero, and so on including, delightfully, Saorise Ronan in her native Irish lilt. This is Lubistch's Warsaw in To Be or Not to Be or Design for Living. It's Chaplin's Vienna in The Great Dictator. The evocations are pointed and, for once with this director, entirely appropriate. And they work.

And here's what bothered me:

While the calling of the old cinema to stand in for a sense of loss is poignant and effective, at the edges there's something else going on that made me wince. Every time I saw characters as cartoony silhouettes scurrying down steps against obvious backdrops or flagrant use of models or anything that pushed the vintage cart out a little further I recognised something I wish I hadn't. Each of those moments, and there are many, feels not like the innovation of a familiar scheme, a cineartiste improving on tradition, but a style lift from someone else whose profile is low enough for it not to be noticed. I just kept thinking of the name Guy Maddin.

Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin has been making feature films since the 1980s which blend the look of silent cinema expertly with an earthy worldliness which feels contemporary. The result is startling. A glittering ice nymph might emerge from a night sky made of black velvet and sequins, look around her and say: "well, fuck me." The thing is that in Maddin's realm that is not meant to draw a belly laugh, more a wry smile, and any serious themes will emerge as they need to through the weird stark kind of camp. They do emerge and in a setting as alien as Eraserhead still is, and we are visiting a strange new world. Everything in a Maddin film is as obssessively placed as anything out of an Anderson one and you are meant to notice and respond but Maddin's films end up feeling more rewarding because they feel truer. His cinema seems a happy coincidence between therapy for compulsion and real joyous expression. Anderson's feel like a beg for approval.


I've always thought the Pascal's wager of post-modernism (it works whether you get it or not just like this phrase) was a twee evasion. Wes Anderson's po-mo grated with me because it always felt try-hard. And, more immediately, his films played for me like the guy who finally hears the latest joke and tells it in its tatters as though it's fresh. His big jokey setups are so intent on impressing that you can hear the old collapsable telescope creaking. Yes, he knows his Nouvelle Vague and his Preston Sturges. Yes, he knows his British Invasion b-sides. Yes, he can arrange all of them into tableaux that drone with overarticulate dialogue. But what does it amount to beyond a few adolescent themes masked by good casting?

For me it amounts to wasted time, his and mine, as attention-deficit whining like Rushmore, Royal Tennenbaums or Life Aquatic push out their increasingly sludged up flows. Anderson isn't the Kubrick of quirk, as I heard one reviewer declare, he's its Michael Bay, delivering the mightest and most powerful form of tweeness since .... his last one. That's what I saw in the trailer that infuriated me so much but drove me to at least see if my hatred would endure. Would I be charmed by this critics' darling and mooted contemporary master?

Well, no. This film is mildly enjoyable but consistently so. The charms it offers are like the cakes and pastries in the little pink boxes that litter its screen, pretty, perfectly sugared and textured, impressive as artifacts, and utterly unpalatable to those without a sweet tooth. Ralph Fiennes' Ronald Coleman riff just makes me want to see a Ronald Coleman film. Grand Budapest Hotel makes me want to see any of the films it evokes rather than it ever again. It's enjoyable. No, it's the best Wes Anderson film yet but coming frmo me that only means I didn't find it infurating or wearisome three quarters of the way through. Faint praise? Faint film. Sometimes faint is what you want. Well, faint is what this is. Enjoyable. Faint. Oh, good, here's my tram.

Ghostlights That Failed: More Imaginative TV Fiction

A sci fi premise in the first episode was quickly discarded to become a show about little people evading big people.

90s paranoia premise in which a man's identity is erased. His pursuit by a mysterious malevolant group makes a FUGITIVE of him which means that, apart from a sprinkling of conspiracy tidbits, he's really just going to place to place lending a hand. The finale was apparently intriguing but dismissive programming by the network and a lack of strong continuity left me uninvolved.



Another in the wake of Twin Peaks begat X-Files, Dark Skies might fare better now on the coat-tails of Mad Men as it was Johnson-era USA. The alien invasion thread was a lot stronger than its 60s progenitor The Invaders but the thing soon flubs down into encounters with the famous (one of the co-leads meets the Beatles) and soon to be famous (Jim Morrison, student filmmaker who screens a potentially damning reel of film and then, when it ticks off, says "this is the end"). The presence of the late great character actor JT Walsh could not save this from disappointing.

Not only in the wake of the X-Files but from the same team. Chris Carter wanted something even darker than the murk Scully and Mulder moved through. They cast beautifully, including Lance Hendriksen in the lead as Frank Black and Terry O'Quinn as his chief contact with the vigilante Millennium Group and the mood was a pleasant sombreness. But there were problems.

First season was serial killer of the week during the final wave of that genre on cinema screens and, while there was a gloomy apocalyptic thread sewn throughout it didn't really amount to much. Second season concentrated on the approaching apocalypse and saw Frank turn from the Group and get pursued by it. This mixed jarringly with the continued serial killer theme and felt as patchwork and messy as the conspiracy arc in the X-Files. The finale was astouding and daringly ... final ... but ... the third and last season saw Frank go back to the FBI and bounce between an attempt to explain away the apocalypse of the last season as a local incident and get on with the now routine weirdo killer of the week.

Despite perhaps over half of the episodes approaching real greatness the reason I seldom recommend it to folk looking for something from the coffers of a dark 'n' troubling nature is that the consistency is just too low to expect them to wade through the lot. I can watch this for the atmosphere alone but the middling really does outweigh the good.

Made to cash in on the success of The Twilight Zone, this series ran for three years in the early 60s. Apart from a few impressive episodes from writers like Harlan Ellison that influenced 80s sci fi cinema The Outer Limits' default position had to do with evil aliens who were thinly veiled communists. This might lend an archeological thrill to current viewing but the pre-school level of allegory and insistence on a very few variations on a theme give it an exhausting air of diminishing returns.Twilight Zone rand for five seasons and changed its own game several times. Outer Limits never managed to consistently rise above its sponsors LCD requirements despite some fine talent involved.

An attempt to render the Twin Peaks scenario more accessible by applying generic horror fiction templates to a soap opera. If that sounds dismissive it's only because of the temporal context. If you made it today, scene for scene in 16:9 you'd have a season of American Horror Story. Some enjoyable characters like the little boy and his sister's ghost as well as bad guy in chief Sherrif Buck. After Twin Peaks' intrigue and during the X-Files much fresher approach to things like supernature American Gothic didn't stand a chance. We're a lot more eager now to add irony to what we don't get or might otherwise ridicule. Some very fine moments, though.

Great idea! Put a suave James Bond type in a western setting based on a train filled with gadgets that pushed the envelope of nineteenth century technology and have him fight supervillains. This steampunk scenario was cast in the 60s so it has a certain grooviness to boot. The leads and villains are well cast and there are babes falling from the scenery. So whats wrong? Hard to say exactly but it's as though the premise seemed enough for the writers so that they never seemed to go beyond the wow factor: hey Belle Epqoue torpedos! Beyond that it's really only babes fatales swooning o'er Dan West and panto villains in frock coats. For contrast, google some of the cp graphic novels around and pay some heed to the roll call of steampunk animes from Japan. That's how to do it. This first go does get a lot started, though. Pity it ventures so timidly beyond.

Winning theme of cold war fed paranoia of alien invasion glued to a Fugitive kind of wandering capable hominid. 60s style all over the place. What's wrong? It's the Fugitive with aliens. The assimilation of the latter is borrowed from almost every episode of The Outer Limits and is diverting enough but just never peaks. See also Dark Skies which was little more than an update.


Through a mumbled science explanation two scientists move around in time and find that the future is easier to change than the past. Several Twilight Zone episodes posed deeper questions with shorter screen time and lesser effects budgets.




Great idea! Vampires are real but a minority that faces the bigotry of the majority. They drink synthetic blood at bars and have their own night clubs. Vampire blood is a highly hallucinogenic aphrodisiac declared illegal but in use as a very black market item. All good stuff until you get into tight corners and start adding other creatures with any powers you want to save the day until the idea of the magic that separates human from humanoid-beast fades away and it chows down to the same soap as anything else. I gave up after the 3rd season, having failed to get through the opening shots of the following one.

Review: TRACKS: What Without Why

I remember this story from the time and how it felt, in however slight a way, that things were changing in the world. There was a little in the media about it but it didn't really come alive for me until the edition of National Geographic landed at the door of my subscriber family home. What I recall first from reading that was the golden hue of the cover and the impression that I was looking at a demi-god descended. What I don't recall was the reason this young woman trained for years to make a trek of thousands of kilometres through such hostile terrain. This film, as a narrative fiction ought to anchor itself on that very thing. Goody, closure!

Whether it is the sweep of the aerial photography of the terrible beauty of the land or that it is effectively personified in the subtle power of Mia Wasikowska's face what I saw was the same as the magazine story: the feat outranks the need. We get a good idea of the time and patience Davidson put in to do this mighty thing and there is a real sense of determination on screen but we just don't get why. Some scenes of childhood trauma are inserted and mount towards a confrontation that never quite happens. So, if it was a massive exercise in emotional analgesia it's still a mystery, by the end credits.

Peter Weir's Picnic at Hanging Rock was made only a few years before Davidson's feat and it used its setting to show the spooky effects of overdressed Edwardian stiffness confronting and perhaps being consumed by an alien nature. This film works best when it is showing us something similar, landscapes that could be from a planet simliar to ours but a slight kick further towards the star. But how effective can this be when we already know that Davidson who began life in rural hardship in western Queensland. The learning curve between the nature she was born into and this amped up version is a gentle one. The sense of conquest is only lessened by her own account.

The opportunity to extract herself from the chattering crowd seems reasonable but spending that much time and effort in her impatient mid twenties suggests a kind of sociopathy rather than hermit-like reclusion. The self administered secular baptism that we know is coming feels like much more than relief but, really, that's all we are privy to. We are given many signs of the magnitude of the physical journey but are left guessing about the personal one.

Mia Wasikowska has power as a screen presence and this performance does nothing to subtract from that. What she does give feels natural but it still falls short as she is simply not given enough to work with. This creates the same tension whenever we see an accomplished player in an undistinguished piece, a Michael Fassbender in Jane Eyre, an Ellen Page in Inception, a De Niro in  ...  anything since Goodfellas. Was director John Curran unable or perhaps unwilling to overegg the splendid visual pudding before us with character depth? Is Davidson herself a poker faced misanthropic thing of stone (well, she did famously have a fling with fatwa-bound and camera-shy Salman Rushdie but .. ok, apart from wowing at that when I read it, that really has no place here)?

There is a decided lack of moment at points that ought to shake with it. Finding a safe swimming hole. Reaching the coast (oh come on that is not a spoiler). The very hard thing she is forced to do along the way (which I won't spoil). None of these things feel that important (even the very hard thing). Similarly, the sense of the danger she frequently finds herself in is suspense-free. All this is strange considering it is the story of someone whose confrontations with nature form the essence of the tale. Without the provision of anything else, a more than sketchy commentary by Davidson as a character on her journey for example, we are left wondering "so what" at an endeavour that few in the comfort of their cinema seats would dream of undertaking. Whether she is or not it just feels as though she's pretty much ok for the whole trip. A few prickles in the grass here and there but she's essentially fine.

We might be thankful that the relationship with National Geographic photographer Rick Smoalan is not overblown into a burgeoning romance of life-affirming power that lures Robyn back from the emotional wilderness and into modern wellness. It's played out quite naturalistically with help from a believably socially awkward Adam Driver but soon begins to serve as an assurance that Davidson is never really going to be tested unto death in the wilderness. One international poster for the film features the pair in a kneeling embrace on desert sands. If anyone pays for a ticket to this thinking they're in for a love story then I hope the choctops are good that day.

Oh and, is it too hard to imagine beyond an off the rack orchestral score for something like this. The pan flutes in Picnic at Hanging Rock added something alien to both civilisation and nature which fuelled unease and a real spookiness throughout. An electronic score comprised of the sounds of the locations would, with a little imagination draw the eerie beauty of the land out from the slide show we get.

So, we still don't why this extraordinary thing was done by this extraordinary person. We do know that it was done. With a mechanism designed to extract the conflict and jeopardy from everyday life and deliver a concentrated dose of it for our emotional and philosophical well being how can we end up with this dilution? How can, in other words, this cinematic representation be less engaging than the lines around the photographs of a few pages of a magazine from the 70s? All I know is that it shouldn't. Why don't I read the book, then? After this feckless teaser the best I'll say is that maybe I shall.