Past Programs
Action - 2008
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Eagle Eye
25/09/2008
The first thing to know about Eagle Eye is that the cold war lasted a lot longer in cinemas than it did on the ground. The black and white scenario perfectly suited the action-spy genre, but now we've got the hot war, and every second Hollywood film seems to open in a rugged desert, somewhere in the Middle East, or Afghanistan. And all of the spying is done by this high-tech world wide web of eavesdroppers apparently watching you and me right now. Paranoia about high tech surveillance is at the heart of this thriller.
It's directed by JD Caruso, who's made a lot of television and also, recently, Disturbia; it's made for Dreamworks, and it stars the young 'it' people of the moment: Shia LaBeouf who actually does a bit more acting in this than he did in Indiana Jones, and Michelle Monaghan, who can really act. Which is nice. These two find themselves caught up in what turns out to be a bit if a cross between 2001 Space Odyssey and The Bourne Ultimatum. It's a tad long, and it doesn't always add up, but the action sequences are pretty visceral and genuinely exciting. If you're riveted by the US presidential race currently, Eagle Eye has some suggestions as to how to rid the world of a lame duck president which you might well enjoy.
Not Quite Hollywood
28/08/2008
Here's a confession: the first ever film review I wrote was for Double J Radio in l976. It was of a film called Fantasm, billed as an inquiry into the ten most common forms of female sexual fantasy. An attempt to ride on the box office popularity of Alvin Purple, it was more of the tubes and bouncing boobs variety, and I thought it was on the nose. I went storming back to the Double J newsroom and wrote a piece about filmmakers with hungry wallets and limp imaginations. I stand by that verdict.
Now this was co-written by Anthony Ginnane, who also produced it. I'm glad it rates a mention in Mark Hartley's exuberant documentary about Australia's lusty heritage of exploitation cinema, because it was a benchmark of sorts, a low water mark. Though probably not quite as low as Turkey Shoot.
Fantasm I think also marked a kind of turning point in popular taste. Alvin Purple had been hugely popular; its sequel less so. But a lot of things had happened between the sexual revolution of the sixties, the censorship wars fought and won, mainly by the intellectuals in the publishing and film communities -- and the mid to late 70s.
One of the things which happened was women's liberation. It arose directly out of a realisation by women activists in those earlier liberation movements that they were being screwed metaphorically as well as literally.
Which may be why Australia's exploitation films had to widen their appeal: to horror; and to cars.
The bouncing boobs and flashing pubes of the first section of Not Quite Hollywood have a historical appeal: we don't usually get to see such cheerful and abundantly fleshy sex scenes in cinemas thse days. But I think the film really hits its stride once it starts to look at the horror films, and the action films, Australians were making.
And here one of Quentin Tarantino's enthusiastic claims makes sense:
'Nobody shoots a car the way Aussies do,' he enthuses.
Tarantino by the way is the patron saint of this film. His enthusiasm for Australian exploitation cinema started Hartley on his odyssey to make the documentary.
Here Quent looks like a character from one of the films he's espousing. He's filmed seated in the front row of a screening room, maybe his own. He's gaunt, clad in black and wearing a beanie so that only his bony face, shot from below in scary blue-green, looms out of the darkness.
What he says, beautifully illustrated by Hartley with clips from a whole host of films, makes sense. Australian men back then had much less difficulty expressing affection for their cars than for Australian women. They could admire them, discuss them, stroke them, reward them, adorn them, compare them, flaunt their merits. It was a syndrome widely discussed. The artist Margaret Dodds, I do recall, had a great show called A Woman Is Not a Car, featuring numbers of cute ceramic FJ Holdens, some in bridal headdress, others in curlers.
Tarantino gleefully acknowledges the car fetishism of Australian films of the period. Mad Max, it's clear, did not come out of nowhere, though George Miller gave it a visual class, and a subtext lacking from other petrolhead films. And of course, a charismatic hero in Mel Gibson.
Hartley has interviewed just about everybody for his film: from the cinematographers such as John Seale to the actors, producers and critics.
Respect has to be paid. And so the film does celebrate, for example, the work of Australian stuntman Grant Page, and some of his most daring exploits. It celebrates the early work of Russell Mulcahey, stylistically way ahead of his time, on such films as Razorback. And it celebrates the late Richard Franklin who, in partnership with writer Everett de Roche, brought real finesse and devotion based on a devotion to the ideas and techniques of Hitchcock to such films as Patrick.
I could have done with much more of Richard onscreen. Which brings me to one of my issues with Not Quite Hollywood. It's edited at such a furious pace, crammed with so many short clips and grabs of interview that it becomes a breathless panorama, and loses a chance for any depth of analysis to test some of its claims.
It becomes, rather, a kind of monolinear film history; one which could overstate its case. Rather like Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbaro's 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, which employed a similar rapid-cut technique and wound up vastly overstating the cultural impact of that film on attitudes to censorship. With all that, it's enormous fun this film, and we owe Hartley a debt of gratitude.
Among the many reasons to enjoy this film has to be the footage of Dennis Hopper on Mad Dog Morgan. If you thought Hopper was out of his skull in Apocalypse Now, this you have to see. The survivor of the shoot, director Philippe Mora, producer Richard Brennan et al, have some fine tales to tell. These days of course, Hopper is addicted to art rather than booze or drugs.
Time tames us all, and while Okker exploitation films have made their mark on some Australian directors today, it feels like a lot of the glee has gone out of the bottom end of the business. I guess we can't lose our innocence twice.
Stop-Loss
07/08/2008
Almost a decade after Boys Don't Cry, director Kimberly Peirce is back with a film which focuses, with sensitivity, on the damage the Iraq war is doing to American soldiers and their families. Ryan Phillipe plays a platoon commander who has made it through and, on his last day of service, is 'stop-lossed' -- ordered to return for another tour of duty to make up for troop losses. It's a particularly cruel form of draft and more than 60,000 have been sent back since 2004. When he decides to go AWOL, his childhood friend (Abbie Cornish) is one of the few who help.
This is mostly set in the USA, and the picture it paints of attrition among the returnees is not pretty, but it is well handled. Peirce is also one of the few women to have directed war scenes, and she does well.
This is a film well worth seeing, though to me it cops out at the end. What do you think?
The Bank Job
31/07/2008
Directed by Roger Donaldson, this film is, we're told, based on a true story about a bank robbery which netted more than the Great Train Robbery; around three million pounds, a lot of dosh back in l971.
Jason Statham plays Terry, a small-time London lad who operates a car dealership. Saffron Burrows plays old school pal Martine, who comes to him with a story about a bank whose security has been turned off for a week or so while it's updated. She wants him to get together a group of villains, tunnel in and rob it.
But Martine is actually being fed the info by a guy from MI5, or possibly six, who is very interested in the contents of one particular safety deposit box. It may, we are led to believe, contain sexually compromising photographs of a royal personage.
Other people are interested too, including a Soho porn king, and a man calling himself Michael X -- a West Indian who talks the black power but runs a string of prostitutes.
All of which makes for a very interesting, and extremely entertaining heist film. How much of this story is true, I don't know, but it is true that press reporting of the 1971 robbery of Lloyds bank in Baker Street was supressed by a government D notice. And eventually the law did catch up with Michael X.
The Square
31/07/2008
A petty thug comes home with a bag of cash, and his two-timing wife sees it as a ticket out, to a new life with her lover. But when a low-rent crim is hired to burn down the house after the subsequent robbery, the plan goes horribly wrong on a chance hiccup.
Directed by Nash Edgerton and co-written by his brother Joel, who also plays the arsonist, The Square is a spectacular suburban thriller. I just wish the Edgertons had spent more time developing the characters and drawing out the tension before lighting the fireworks. I found the motivations hard to believe, and the chance events pushing the plot along at key moments unsatisfying. What does this young woman (Claire Van der Boom) see in her much older lover (played fairly insipidly by David Roberts)? And why does a film set in the building industry in outer Sydney have such a white-bred feel? For all its polish, The Square misses its mark.
Hancock
03/07/2008
You can see why Will Smith liked the idea of this lighthearted spoof to signal a detour from heavier roles. Hancock is a dysfunctional, sorry-arsed African-American superhero brother, so out of touch with his powers that whenever he swoops in to save someone, he usually wreaks havoc—causing multi-car pileups, knocking buildings down, uprooting roads. The people of Los Angeles are fed up and want a new superhero. Enter idealistic image consultant Ray (Jason Batemen), who thinks he can fix it for Hancock. Not if his wife, played by Charlize Theron can help it. As for the rest—it's too stupid to recount. Will Smith is very likeable, but a lightweight when all is said and done. And Hancock is quite the let-down...
Trash and Treasure: Ray Argall on 'Two-Lane Blacktop'
05/06/2008
Strap yourselves in for Monte Helman's 1971 rev head road movie Two-Lane Blacktop, the choice of filmmaker and current Australian Directors' Guild president Ray Argall. The film stars two non actors: musicians James Taylor and Dennis Wilson as two drifters who wander the country in a hotted-up Chevvy making money in drag races. They meet Warren Oates, a big talker with a shiny new Pontiac who wants to race them across the country. Among the testosterone, Laurie Bird is the hitchhiker who takes a ride in both cars. Ray Argall reckons it's a deceptively simple film that runs deep.
Never Back Down
27/03/2008
In a Florida high school where the hottest trend is an underground fight club in which students beat the bejesus out of each other on a Saturday night, a new student arrives with a reputation, thanks to a YouTube clip of a football fight. Jake (Sean Faris) has had a short fuse since his father died, but he's no match for the school bully and fight club champ Ryan (Cam Gigandet). The two clash over a girl and Jake gets beaten senseless, so he seeks out a martial arts mentor Jean (Djimon Hounsou) to learn how to dish out some serious ass whuppin'. Problem is, Jake must promise he'll never use his skills in anger. Formulaic and shot like a music video with a wailing Emo soundtrack -- this is all flex, no grit: like those infomercials selling 'perfect abs'.
Vantage Point
13/03/2008
A gimmicky film where the assassination of the US president (William Hurt) is replayed through the vantage points of several characters, with the clues as to who's behind the plot coming together in the final reel. Actors include Matthew Fox and Dennis Quaid as secret service agents, Forrest Whitaker as a tourist who gets a glimpse of a gunman on his handicam and the swarthy French star Said Taghmaoui as, well, a mysterious looking Arab guy who doesn't seem right. Set in Salamanca, Spain at what's supposed to be an international conference on terrorism, the pictures are lovely, but the layers of intrigue are pretty thin and seeing the same event over and over again becomes tedious.
Meet The Spartans
28/02/2008
Meet The Spartans is a spoof on last year's historical action epic 300. It's a comedy for the YouTube generation -- sight gags, short skits and bodily fluids -- peppered with homosexual innuendo and soaked with pop culture references. Not all of it works, but I loved the take on the pit of death scene when King Leonidis (Sean Macguire) kicks not just the Persian emissaries down the hole but Britney Spears (with baby) and the judges from American Idol. If that doesn't sound like a laugh-out-loud moment for you, you've been warned.
Rambo
21/02/2008
Even in a quiet corner of Thailand where he works in semi retirement as a snake catcher, John Rambo can't get any peace. Just days after he ferries some missionaries up-river into Burma on his put-put boat (a journey that has echoes of Apocalypse Now), he has to return with a group of mercenaries to rescue them from the clutches of the Burmese army.
Putting aside the film's gross oversimplification of regional politics and Asian culture, Rambo is great fun in both a cheesy and spectacularly gory way. But Stallone's real talent shines in the moments when he manages to inject a feeling of great inner turmoil into his monosyllabic killer, not to mention that sensation of dirt under the fingernails that the previous film in this franchise lacked. The man with the thousand-yard stare and bandanna is back. I welcome his return.
Fool's Gold
07/02/2008
This romp stars Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson as a just-divorced pair of treasure hunters brought together for one last quest: to find the booty of a sunken 18th century ship, somewhere off the coast of Florida. They're bankrolled by a fruity old millionaire played by Donald Sutherland, but they have to compete with Ray Winstone's rival operation -- and he's working for a vicious local gangster. It's in the mould of Romancing the Stone, with the sexual tension between the lead pair smouldering away beneath the gags and the action, but it isn't as effervescent as it wants to be. Fair but not great.
The Mist
07/02/2008
This is a 'lifeboat movie' -- the kind where a group of characters are flung together by chance to face a great peril. Here there's a group of shoppers trapped in a small-town supermarket with a pea-soup mist and bloodthirsty monsters lurking outside. Based on a 1980 Stephen King novella, it plays as a good metaphor for contemporary America. As the characters freak out they divide into two groups -- religious doomsayers and humanists -- and they end up fighting each other as much as the monsters.
An acid-tongued, born-again Christian (Marcia Gay Harden) whips her lot into a frenzy, claiming the day of judgment has come, while on the other side Thomas Jane leads a group who believe they can nut out the problem and find a way to escape. This is director Frank Darabont's third Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and I liked it a lot. Except for the beasties. What I imagined lurked in the mist was much more terrifying than what the CGI wizards came up with.
