Past Programs
Crime - 2008
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Waltz With Bashir
11/09/2008
Ari Folman's brilliant, animated documentary is based on true stories: the memories of himself and fellow 20-year-old conscripts serving with the Israeli army in Lebanon in l982.
It begins with a dream, a nightmare one of them has, decades later, of being pursued by 26 slavering hounds. Folman himself remembers very little of his military service. He begins to talk with his old comrades to fill in the gaps. Slowly, in a collage of memories and nightmares and heightened imagery, some questions return about the night the Israeli army stood by and fired flares while Christian phalangists invaded Palestinian refugee camps at Sabra and Shatilla in Beirut, and massacred inhabitants in revenge for the assassination of their leader, Gemayal Bashir.
This is disturbing, original film-making, which explores the troubled psyche rather than putting perpetrators and collaborators on trial. It raises universal questions, in a form which will trouble all our dreams. One of the best films this year.
Punishment
04/09/2008
Pineapple Express
07/08/2008
A comedy buddy movie in which two potheads (James Franco, Seth Rogen) are on the run from gangsters after one of them witnesses a murder. They bumble through the suburbs encountering a gallery of crims in cheap sportswear, having funny stoner conversations and dodging bullets. It's from the same team who bought you Superbad and Knocked Up, so hidden amongst the ganja and gun smoke is a familiar moral tale about young men growing up and taking responsibility. Not hilarious, but it has its moments.
Wanted
31/07/2008
Rusian director Timur Bekmambetov (Nightwatch, Daywatch) is one of the great action fantasy visionaries. This is his first Hollywood film, based on the comic books by Mark Millar and JG Jones, about a loser in a boring office job who's inducted into an ancient sect of elite assassins. James McAvoy plays the deadbeat, Angelina Jolie is his mentor, while Morgan Freeman and Terence Stamp are brooding and mysterious. But they're all upstaged by Bekmambetov's psychedelic colours, CGI hallucinations and head spinning action. A delight.
Trash and Treasure: Florian Emmerich on 'Angel-A'
24/07/2008
A small-time con artist, in over his head with debts to the Parisian mob, is saved by a leggy blonde from heaven in this 2005 film by Luc Besson. Shot in black and white, it's an unusual romantic pairing with the diminutive Jamel Debbouze cast opposite the statuesque Danish actress Rie Rasmussen (as the Angel). It's the choice of German trained cinematographer Florian Emmerich, who shot the recent Australian film Cactus.
The Dark Knight
17/07/2008
In a season of cinema cluttered with comic book characters, mostly pitched to audiences with a mental age in single digits, it's startling to come across a movie which has intelligence as well as flair. Even more so to discover a charismatic character which way transcends its comic strip origins.
The Joker was one of the most ingenious DC comics creations in the Batman series—a master criminal who does crime for his own amusement.
But nothing had quite prepared me for Heath Ledger's Joker. Not the advance word, nor the reputation of British director Christopher Nolan for wanting to invest his Batman series with some psychological depth.
If anything, Batman, The Beginning, in which Nolan launched Christopher Bale as the guilt-driven superhero, actually overdid the psychodrama, I thought. It was a little too much about origins, a bit too psychologically claustrophobic, and that's a pity because Christian Bale, for my money, is a star with considerable talent. There is actually an intelligent and witty person behind the chiselled face. More could have been made.
The Dark Knight explores more interesting territory. It is, if you like, a dark night of the soul. The battle being waged is between Bruce Wayne—weary of his Batman persona, ready to retire and hand the crime stopper role to a bright and shiny new district attorney, Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart—and The Joker: the ultimate hit man, called in by the Gotham City mob to off the caped crusader.
Now previously memorable incarnations of the Joker, including that of Jack Nicholson, have conjured mayhem with a merry twinkle.
Ledger's take is different. His Joker is seriously disturbed. He is not in it for the money, but because he is full of rage, and engaged in some kind of cosmic battle with the universe.
His lumpy white face smeared with lipstick like a demented clown, his voice both clipped and wheedling, Ledger's Joker is charismatic in a way we haven't seen since Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter.
This Joker is witty. He has a real sense of play. His delight at finding Batman is palpable. 'You complete me,' he purrs. This Joker uses a knife, as his preferred way to 'put a smile on your face.'
And he has many different versions, all chilling, of how his own father used a knife to carve a smile on his.
The battle the Joker wages with Batman is around one of the most fundamental questions: are human beings altruistic, or basically selfish? Do we act for the good of others, or put ourselves first?
It's an age-old moral question and a very current political one—witness the debate on Australia's response to climate change. The Dark Knight dramatises this dilemma nicely.
And if Ledger's Joker dominates the screen, he has strong support from Aaron Eckhardt and Gary Oldman, who is happily liberated from the gothic for once, playing the good cop James Gordon. Somehow it takes thee guys and Batman to outflank the Joker.
There are some charismatic actors—think Harvey Keitel, for example, or Robert de Niro—who bring onscreen various versions of their own personas.
Heath Ledger, in his short screen life, never did that. Here, in a comic strip morality play, we are watching a chilling creation, a rage filled sociopath who plays dice with the universe. Unforgettable.
Trash and Treasure: Rod Webb on 'Katerina Izmailova'
15/05/2008
Today's guest is Eastern European Cinema expert Rod Webb, a former Sydney Film Festival director and SBS programmer who now works at Network Australia. He's chosen the 1966 Mikhail Shapiro film of the 1932 Dimitri Shostakovich opera Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District, which was banned by Stalin in 1936. It tells of the affair between a merchant's wife and her husband's labourer, and how the couple commit murder to stay together, though ultimately they're doomed.
Untraceable
24/04/2008
Diane Lane is an FBI internet detective trying to find out who's behind a snuff website that streams live, where the more people log on to watch the victim squirm, the sooner the execution occurs. The killer is making a statement on our voyeuristic society, but it's the film's message that really had me concerned.
While I love rainy Portland as a rich noir backdrop and the pacing is excellent, the portrayal of the internet is alarmist hyperbole; a place of immoral chaos where snuff sites and pirated films are on the same slippery slope. Diane Lane and her folksy, dedicated FBI team are really Big Brother, watching us anonymously, sending in SWAT teams to knock down our doors. It's unquestioning and jingoistic -- a pity.
Gone Baby, Gone
17/04/2008
The faces are the first shock in Gone Baby, Gone. Well, maybe they don't exactly shock but they do disconcert. Police have been called to a South Boston neighbourhood because a young child has gone missing from her home. While they confer, the neighbours come out on the street to gawk. The camera roams across their faces. They are seamed faces, marked by life, and by poverty. They are not faces we normally see on extras in movies.
On these opening scenes Ben Affleck has put his stamp as a director, signalling a seriousness in a film set in the city in which he and brother Casey grew up.
But it's more than just a pair of brothers filming in the neighbourhood. There are three Boston boys involved, the first among equals being Dennis Lehane, a writer who has set his thrillers among the close family ties, the neighbourhoods and the people of Boston's South Side.
Lehane is a crime writer of considerable power. Many of his stories are about children: as victims, abducted, preyed upon. But his stories are about children in other ways. The adults who people his South Boston novels know each other. Their ties go back to childhood, to playground feuds and loyalties. Some grow up to be criminals, some get out of the neighbourhood, and some stay on the right side of the law. In Lehane's world, those childhood loyalties define their adult lives.
Film people are just discovering his dark, evocative works. The first was Clint Eastwood, who filmed a much admired adaptation of Mystic River.
Gone baby Gone is the second adaptation, but we will see more. This one is from a series he wrote about two PIs who work in South Boston.
Casey Affleck plays a private detective, Patrick Kenzie. Michelle Monoghan plays his partner Angie Genarro. They make their living chasing up people who default on car or alimony payments. Their network will sometimes get them answers not available to officialdom.
When a middle-aged woman called Bea McCready and her husband Lionel call in Patrick and Angie to help locate their missing four-year-old niece Amanda, Angie is apprehensive.
'We have a nice life,' she tells Patrick. 'Odds are we will find ourselves looking into a dumpster and it will not be easy to walk away. I'm not sure I want to go there.'
The local detectives, led by Ed Harris's Remy Bressart, are already on it. Remy's boss Jack Doyle heads the child protection unit, and for once Morgan Freeman is not sleepwalking here.
They have questioned Amanda's feckless, junkie mother Helene to no avail. Then Patrick and Angie ask questions around the neighbourhood, and bring the cops their first lead.
There are many twists and turns in Gone Baby Gone. Affleck and co-writer Aaron Stockard have brought it to the screen in a way which doesn't signal a single plot move, and which retains the grim neighbourhood flavour, and the moral dilemnas which mark Lehane's fiction, which confront law enforcers and law breakers alike in this blighted neighbourhood.
Some of the richness of the film lies in the vividness of all the characters, starting with Helene, the missing girl's mother. Amy Ryan plays her as evasive, equivocal, opportunistic and entirely human. And a completely unfit mother. But when she breaks down and pleads with Patrick to find her baby, it would be inhuman to turn away.
And the two investigators? at first I wondered about Casey Affleck as Patrick Kenzie. His youthful looks, distinctive light, squeaky voice and drawl, which he deployed so superbly as Robert Ford in the Asassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, didn't quite fit my image of the streetsmart Patrick... Till a moment, quite early on, when someone challenges him. And he challenges right back with such authority they step aside. And I relaxed.
In Lehane's fiction, Angie Genaro is a contradiction. She's the granddaughter of a big mafia family, but one who has turned her back on their business. Her relationship with Patrick is equivocal. Michelle Monaghan gives it her best shot in this film, but she's written down as a character. She's the sidekick, rather than the leader. Pity, that.
Those who like intelligent crime fiction will like this film. I look forward to more films written and directed by Affleck. Maybe he has learned a thing or two watching the Baltimore based series The Wire. But there's a passion there as well, a care for people in the neighbourhood. Like the best thrillers, this comes with a distinct sense of place.
Trash and Treasure; Denson Baker on 'Strange Days'
17/04/2008
Today cinematographer Denson Baker, whose most recent film is The Black Balloon. His pick, Strange Days (1995), is set on the eve of the millenium in LA where the newest illicit rush is a virtual reality technology known as the 'squid clip', which lets you experience recorded moments from other people's lives. Ralph Fienes is Lenny Nero, a squid dealer, addicted to clips of his ex, Juliette Lewis, a nightclub singer who's now with a sleazy promoter (Michael Wincott). The film opens when one of the promoter's top artists, a black rapper, is murdered - and there's a clip floating around that implicates some pretty powerful people.
Trash and Treasure: Marian Macgowan on At Close Range
10/04/2008
This week our guest is Marian McGowan, producer of the hit Australian film Two Hands, and more recently Death Defying Acts. She's chosen a 1986 film staring Sean Penn, his brother Christopher Penn and Christopher Walken. Fascinating to watch them all before life aged their faces.
At Close Range is a drama based on a true story about a troubled teen growing up in rural America, Brad Whitewood Jr (Sean Penn), who wants to join his estranged father's criminal gang. The dad's played by Christopher Walken, a portrait of seductive evil. The problem is, once Brad Jr's in, he falls in love with Terry (Mary Stuart Masterson) and he wants out. But it's not easy to turn your back on a dad like this.
Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
20/03/2008
'May you be in heaven half an hour,' goes the Irish toast, 'Before the Devil knows you're dead.'
When I think too hard about it, I'm not really sure what this means. I think it means 'may you get away with your sins'. At any rate, as they say in the Gaelic, 'Slainte'.
But Before The Devil Knows You're Dead opens with that glimpse of heaven. A couple, in bed, going at it. Hard. He is Andy Hanson, played by Philip Seymour Hoffman, she is Gina, played by Marisa Tomei. She's his wife, and, we discover, they haven't felt like this for quite a while. Not since their honeymoon in Rio. But there's no reason, they decide, in a haze of post coital bliss, that they should not live every day as if they were in Rio.
Then we flash forward, to glimpse a robbery in a suburban jewelry store which goes wrong. Very wrong. There are shots. The stickup man dies, the elderly store owner lies bleeding, and a getaway car, driven by a panicky Ethan Hawke, careers around s suburban carpark and lurches off.
How did a moment of bliss engender such a mess? We track back a few weeks earlier, to meet two brothers. Ethan Hawke plays Hank, a real stuff-up, a stoner endlessly behind with his child support payments, targeted viciously by his ex-wife, living in a pretty crummy apartment, and scrounging. But even this can't raise him the money for his daughter's school excursion. She's joining her mother in the scorn she shows him.
He turns to his big brother: Andy, the successful one -- an accountant with a house, a gorgeous wife, the posh car, the big job in a real estate firm. Andy's not good for another loan. Later we'll find out why. What he is good at is manipulating his drug-fuddled younger brother. It's always been the way.
And this time, he has a doozy of an idea. One robbery, to pay off both their debts and fund a new start for them both. Just one. An easy mark: their own parents' jewellery store. Hit it first thing, while there's just a casual employee there to open up. They know how to disarm the security. The insurance company will pay, right? And no-one gets hurt.
This scene alone between Seymour Hoffman and Hawke is brilliant, worth the price of the ticket. They are such crumbbags, both of them. The sleazy, opportunist big brother, the snivelling, self-pitying younger brother always looking to others to bail him out. This, it is clear, is the pattern of their relationship.
Yet each has secrets from the other, and they are so not pretty either.
This scene in Andy's office is one that director Sidney Lumet will revisit in the course of the film, and we will see it again, informed by hindsight.
The bungled robbery is only the start of a disaster which will crush an entire family. And Sidney Lumet tells the story like the master he is, unfolding it like the tragedy it is. We are watching absolutely classic drama here. It could be Eugene O'Neill -- a playwright Lumet often put on stage and screen. It could be Aeschelus, or Sophocles. Kelly Masterson wrote the screenplay. Sidney Lumet, the man who made Twelve Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and many other great films, has come back with his best film for decades. This stands alongside his other greats.
it was his idea, I've read, to make Hank and Andy brothers. It adds a biting undertone to the film, as we see family relationships unravel in the aftermath of the bungled robbery. Lumet's casting is impeccable: Rosemary Harris is the mother, Albert Finney is magnificent as the gruff father, who rises from his hospital bed and starts asking questions. Too many questions.
This is not a story about crime and justice. It is something much deeper; about the existence of evil, and where it festers, in the poisonous crannies and pockets of family relationships, places never explored until things come apart.
It's a devastating film. And a great one.
Rendition
14/02/2008
A bomb explodes in a crowded square in Cairo, killing many people. In Brazil, a businessman receives an unexpected call. In America we meet a very pregnant wife (Reese Witherspoon) playing football with her young son, and on the phone to her Egyptian-American husband who's about to board a plane to bring him home.
But he doesn't come through the arrivals gate at the airport. Instead, he's been taken aside, handcuffed and spirited out of the country again to a grim prison where he will be interrogated, using brutal waterboarding techniques, by an operator in Egyptian security. Watching is a young CIA man, (Jake Gyllenhaal), an analyst thrown into the field agent job when his boss is killed in the bombing.
'This is my first torture,' he explains.
This film means well. There is some drama as Witherspoon haunts congressional corridors to get someone to admit what has happened to her husband, while in Cairo the daughter of the Egyptian interrogator defies her father (Ygal Naor), to see a young Islamist student. But despite some fine performances the film is a fairy story. A fable. It pulls its punches -- and not because it fails to show us torture -- the waterboarding scenes are harrowing and detailed but the resolution is unconvincing. It's an earnest script which gives Witherspoon and Gyllenhaal little to do, and a disappointing second film from Gavin Hood, who directed Tsotsi. With such a critically important subject, I wish it had been better.
