Past Programs
Director - 2008
Interview with Matthew Newton writer-director, 'Three Blind Mice'
21/08/2008
Matthew Newton is an actor turned screenwriter and director. Three Blind Mice is actually his second feature film—he did make a little-seen earlier film, Right Here Right Now, in 2004.
Essentially, it's the story of three naval officers on the town, celebrating one last night of shore leave before they go back to the Middle East. Harry, played by Newton, is the one who wants to play. Toby Schmitz as Dean wants to meet up with his fiancé and their parents: he has ambitions; he has a life plan beyond this tour of duty.
And then there's Sam, played by Ewan Lesley. It's clear from the opening scenes that something has gone very, very wrong; only later do we begin to understand why Sam is actually thinking of going AWOL. Gracie Otto, who edited the film, also stars as Emma, a girl Sam meets along the way and takes home to meet his gran.
The film is still without a distributor. According to Matthew Newton, he's negotiating still, but wants a decent deal. It has been independently financed.
I caught up with Matthew Newton at the Brisbane International Film Festival.
Trash and Treasure: David Caesar on 'Sympathy for Lady Vengeance' ('Chinjeolhan geumjassi')
14/08/2008
This 2005 film is the third in a trilogy on revenge by Korean director Park Chan-Wook. The second, Old Boy, won the Jury Prize at Cannes.
Australian film director David Caesar is a big fan. In Sympathy for Lady Vengeance, Korean actress Lee Yeong-ae -- tall, willowy and determined -- leaves prison after 13 years and sets out to hunt down the man who framed her for the murder of a six-year-old boy. She is aided in this by various friends she made in prison.
One can imagine Charlize Theron, who wants to re-make the film, doing this role. But frankly, it would be hard to better Lee Yeong-ae's performance.
Interview with Roy Andersson, writer-director, You, the Living (Du levande)
14/08/2008
Roy Andersson has made four feature films in forty years. He made a big splash in l970 with a film called A Swedish Love Story. His second film, five years later, was harshly criticised. So he went off and made commercials for 25 years.
Then at the turn of the century he made a very savage, funny bleak film -- a kind of ode to the Millennium -- called Songs From The Second Floor. In it, the good burghers of Sweden are trying to flee as the world around them collapses and the economy fails. At one stage town officials start to sacrifice virgins.
I'd never seen anything quite like this film.
And various critics have reached for odd comparisons to describe Andersson's vision. He's been compared to David Lynch; to Ingmar Bergman crossed with the surrealists; to Terry Gilliam. I don't think his world view is surreal so much as hyper-real, and absurdly gloomy.
His latest film, You, The Living (in release in Sydney and Melbourne, other states to follow) is a series of linked vignettes, some of them dreams. Indeed it takes its title from a poem by Goethe, about the fleetness of life and the imminence of death.
Interview with Morgan Spurlock, director, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
07/08/2008
Morgan Spurlock has been out here to present his new documentary at the Brisbane and Melbourne Film festivals.
Spurlock made his name by living on MacDonalds and nothing but for a month, in the documentary Super Size Me. He became obese, and his liver was in very bad shape. MacDonalds hated the movie, but they did cut supersize serves off their menus.
Since then Spurlock has made a reality television series, and then a second documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden - a rather faux search for the US public enemy number one, which took him to a number of middle eastern countries, talking to supporters of Islam from various walks of life. Surpise suprise...most of them weren't too impressed with Osama Bin Laden either. Though to one or two, he was a hero.
Did Spurlock ,em>really expect to find Bin Laden? Did he really expect us to go along with the idea?
Well, we may have, should there have been much in the way of new in formation. But mostly, we get to meet a bunch of fairly nice people, who are, gee, folks just like us.
Is this a documentary or a travelogue? Aimed at whom, exactly?
One thing I discovered whatever the question, Morgan Spurlock remains relentlessly affable.
Trash and Treasure: Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan on 'Knightriders'
07/08/2008
Today George Romero's 1981 film Knightriders—in which Ed Harris leads a band of medieval performers on motorbikes across small town America. It's the pick of US based Italian film scholar Giulia D'Agnolo Vallan, co-curator of the Romero retrospective at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival and writer of a book on Romero.
Trash and Treasure: Michelle Carey on 'Fox and His Friends'
31/07/2008
This week Melbourne international senior programmer Michelle Carey on Fox and His Friends ('Faustrecht der Freiheit'), the 1975 German film written, directed and starring Rainer Werner Fassbinder. It's about a working class gay man who wins the lottery and starts a relationship with a rich dandy whose family owns a factory. But as Fox climbs the social ladder, he is out of his element and it becomes clear his new friends are only after his money.
Interview with Serge Bozon, director, La France
31/07/2008
Jason Di Rosso spoke to French filmmaker Serge Bozon, director of La France, which is screening at the Melbourne International Film festival.
It's about a group of French soldiers in World War I, wandering the countryside near the front lines. We don't know at first where they're headed, what they're mission is -- but they're joined by a young woman, disguised as a boy, whose objective is clear: she's trying to reach her husband's regiment and find out why he doesn't want to receive her letters anymore. It's like a road movie set in fields and forests, crossed with a musical as the soldiers break into wistful love songs composed in a sixties pop style (director Serge Bozon is a great fan of that decade). The result is a highly original, poetic war movie -- up there with the best in the genre.
Interview with George Romero
31/07/2008
George Romero is the man who triggered the rebirth of the American horror film.
He grew up in the Bronx, where his father, a Cuban American commercial artist, gave him a super 8 movie camera. When he left university he supported himself making commercials and industrial films in Pittsburgh. There, in l968, he and some friends scraped together a budget to make a zombie film called Night of The Living Dead. Shot in black and white, it was powerful cinema but also a striking metaphor for the race riots and civil disturbances then tearing America apart. Indeed most of Romero's Dead series -- Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and most recently Diary of the Dead -- can be read as litmus papers for contemporary American social ills: racism, consumerism, militarism, corporate greed.
Does the political metaphor come first when Romero is writing a film? Jason Di Rosso put this and other questions to him in Melbourne last week.
Interview with Chris Cooper, actor: Married Life
24/07/2008
Chris Cooper is a very fine actor whose slightly crumpled face and excellent work onscreen will be familiar to many of you.
He first made an impression in the eighties, as the union organiser in John Sayles Matewan. He also played the sheriff a decade later in another Sayles film, Lone Star.
But you may remember him as the roughneck Creole orchid thief, playing opposite Meryl Streep's lady journalist in the film Adaptation. At one stage, Charlie Kaufman's despairing screenwriter has him wrestle an alligator.
For my money, one of Cooper's finest performances was as the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen in last year's chilling true spy film Breach.
Now Cooper is here again in a very mannered melodrama from Ira Sachs, Married Life.
Interview with Benjamin Gilmour, director - 'Son of a Lion'
17/07/2008
Every now and then an outsider comes along who confounds all accepted wisdom about filmmaking by picking up a camera and doing it very well indeed.
Benjamin Gilmour is one of these. He trained as a paramedic and had worked as a nurse on a few film sets in the UK. But it was travelling with his girlfriend in the Pashtun tribal areas of remote northeast Pakistan that decided him. Son of a Lion is made with the villagers of Dohat and Darra Adam Khel in Pakistan. And it's about a boy.
The film has screened now to great acclaim at festivals in Berlin, in Sydney and elsewhere.
Our colleague Amber Ma, associate producer from ABC TV's At The Movies, caught it back in January at the Marrakesh Film Festival in Morocco.
The film screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on July 27 and the Brisbane International Film Festival on August 7.
It releases nationally later in August and we'll review it then.
Interview with Mark Hartley and Richard Sowada, co-curators - Focus on Ozploitation
10/07/2008
The Melbourne International film festival releases its program tomorrow, and tickets go on sale. I've spoken already on this show about the varied program this year, which includes strands on New Romanian Cinema and a retrospective on George Romero, and we'll continue covering the festival in upcoming weeks.
This week we're talking about a strand on Australian genre movies from the 70s and 80s. Films screening include Bruce Beresford's 1974 ocker satire Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, the horror shocker Razorback from 1984 about a rogue giant pig, and Roadgames, the serial-killer-thriller set on the Nullarbor starring Stacy Keachand and Jamie Lee Curtis.
What the films have in common, apart from their embracing of genre, is that they are part of an Australian cinematic heritage which hasn't enjoyed mainstream recognition in this country -- especially when compared with the arguably more serious art films of the period like Breaker Morant or Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The strand is called 'Focus on Ozploitation' and is co-curated by Australian Centre for the Moviing Image chief Richard Sowada and filmmaker Mark Hartley, whose documentary about Australian genre movies, Not quite Hollywood, screens in the festival.
Interview with Darren Dale and Pauline Clague, Message Sticks Film Festival
10/07/2008
This week saw the launch in Sydney of the Message Sticks film festival, the annual celebration of Indigenous films curated this year by Darren Dale and Rachel Perkins of Blackfella films. It's a rich program of shorts and documentaries and, to mark the occasion, I invited in to the studio Darren Dale and producer Pauline Clague, who appears in one of the films, When Colin Met Joyce, a one-hour documentary directed by Rima Tamou that Pauline produced. It focuses on Pauline's activist parents: her mother Joyce, an Aboriginal elder stateswoman and her father Colin, a white man with strong Christian convictions for social justice. Another of the films that really struck me was River of No Return, also a one-hour doco, directed by Darlene Johnson, about actor Francis Djulibing and her struggle to get in to acting school in the wake of her successful role in Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes.
The festival will tour the country:
Canberra at the NSFA July 12 and 19;
Brisbane-GOMA July 17 - 23;
Perth Cinema Paradiso July 24 - 26;
Melbourne Bunjilaka/Age Theatre August 1 - 3;
Adelaide Tandanya August 7 - 10;
Darwin Deckchair Cinema August 21 - 22;
Mt Gambier Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre August 28 - 30
Interview with Brendan Cowell, Anthony Hayes: Ten Empty
03/07/2008
Ten Empty was co-written by actor Brendan Cowell and director Anthony Hayes. It's a film about a father-son relationship they say they had to make to get on with their lives.
Interview with Mike Leigh, director, Happy-Go-Lucky
26/06/2008
Jason Di Rosso spoke to the British director about his new-found interest in happiness.
Interview with actor William McInnes and director Peter Duncan: Unfinished Sky
19/06/2008
Julie Rigg spoke to Peter and William after the film's premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival.
Interview with Steve McQueen, director, Hunger
19/06/2008
British director Steve McQueen talked with Julie Rigg at the Sydney Film Festival. His film Hunger won the inaugural Sydney Film Festival prize this week.
Interview with Carlos Reygadas, director, Silent Light
12/06/2008
Mexican director Carlos Reygadas talked with Julie Rigg at the Sydney Film Festival. His film Silent Light is in competition for the inaugural Sydney Film Festival prize.
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.
Interview with Julian Schnabel, director - 'Lou Reed's Berlin'
05/06/2008
Julian Schnabel's latest film is a concert movie filmed during Lou Reed's recent tour of his 1973 concept album Berlin. The film plays at this year's Sydney Film Festival - and Julie Rigg met with Schnabel at a round table press call at the Venice Film Festival last year.
Interviews with Sydney Pollack and Phillip Noyce
29/05/2008
Two interviews make up our tribute to American director, actor and producer Sydney Pollack, who died this week aged 73. One is with the man himself from 2001, the other is with Australian director Phillip Noyce, a long time friend of Pollack's.
Interview with Stephanie Bunbury from Cannes
22/05/2008
Julie Rigg speaks to Stephanie about what's hot at the Cannes Film Festival.
Interview with Tony Rogers, writer-director, 'Rats and Cats'
15/05/2008
Director Tony Rogers reckons there's a lot to learn from his film's lead character Darren McWarren - a former Australian star of television soaps who had to flee Melbourne because of, well, indiscretions...
Interview with Stefan Ruzowitzky, writer-director, The Counterfeiters
08/05/2008
Back in March, when The Counterfeiters won the Academy Award for best foreign language film, Austria went a little crazy.
The media was full of it. The film, which had come and gone in art house cinemas, was re-released, and there was general media hoo-ha.
An Austrian film had never before won an Oscar, you see. The country has a strong, often provocative tradition of cinema, but it's usually overshadowed by the Germans.
Two months later, writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky is still pondering how to deal with the aftermath.
Interview with Jasmine Yuen Carrucan and Bryan Brown, 'Cactus'
01/05/2008
Written and directed by Jasmin Yuen-Carrucan, with cinematography by her partner Florian Emmerich, Cactus is essentially a two handed road movie.
Bryan Brown has a well drawn cameo role in the film, and he also produced it.
Interview with Lee Cataldi, critic, on 'No Country for Old Men'
10/04/2008
No Country for Old Men looks set to be one of the Coen Brothers' most widely seen films, thanks to good word of mouth, good reviews and those Oscars. And like some of the late best work of Robert Altman (Short Cuts springs to mind), it's a note perfect adaptation of someone else's story -- the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Now you either like McCarthy or your don't. I think he is a magnificent wordsmith. But there's no doubt his is a bleak world view.
When No Country for Old Men appeared a few years back, the literary critics praised it with faint damns. 'Nowhere near his best,' many sniffed.
I thought it was a small gem. But I also think Joel and Ethan Coen brought a particular sensibility to it: their own humour; their own ear for the West Texas vernacular (much of which was there in the novel) and their own finely honed instincts for telling a story redolent with suggestion, but with nothing to spare.
But what, finally, are the Coens, or for that matter McCarthy, saying in this wry, melancholic and extremely violent tale about three men, a stash of money, and the old sheriff Ed Bob (Tommy Lee Jones) who's trying to catch up and avert more bloodshed in his corner of the country.
The title, by the way, comes from the WB Yeats's poem 'Sailing to Byzantium'. It begins, 'That is no country for old men,' and it seems to prefigure some of the complaints of Ed Bob.
What does the murderous enigmatic villain, Anton Chigurh -- who goes around killing people with bolts from a compressed air cylinder -- stand for? He does seem to obey his own rules.
Various critical attempts to deal with Chigurh and the larger parable of the film have fallen in a heap.
So let me introduce Lee Cataldi. She's a critic, a linguist and an award winning poet. These days she runs a sheep property in South Australia, but on Good Friday I got a call from Lee. She had just hurled the Times Literary Supplement across the room because the review of No Country for Old Men got it so wrong.
Interview with Thierry L'Hermitte, actor, The Dinner Guest (L'invité)
03/04/2008
Thierry L'Hermitte has been one of those familiar faces in French cinema for decades. With Daniel Autieul, he's the other leading man, the one who was in such films as The Indian in the Closet, The Divorce, The Dinner Game.
In fact he's out there right now in yet another comedy, The Dinner Guest, this time playing opposite Daniel Autieul and Valerie Lemerciar. This one is another comedy of manners, about a homely executive and his wife who have to entertain the boss to clinch a new job. L'Hermitte plays the suave upstairs neighbour who gives them a complete makeover with unanticipated results.
It's a pretty standard French middle class comedy -- sixty per cent of French films I discovered are comedies. But when I met Thierry L'Hermitte a few months ago, I discovered he was a cultured, multi-talented man who also writes and produces. And it all started in May 1968, during the turbulent times of the French cultural revolution.
Interview with Sidney Lumet, director: Before The Devil Knows You're Dead
27/03/2008
Sidney Lumet is the American director who gave us such benchmark films as 12 Angry Men, The Pawnbroker, Network, The Hill, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and now...Before The Devil Knows You're Dead.
This new film is I think up there with his best. And like most of his best, it's a New York story. Indeed Sidney Lumet's films have come to define a kind of gritty urban tale. Which is not surprising when you know his background.
Lumet came from a show business family. Both his parents were actors in the Yiddish theatre which flourished in New York at the turn of the century. And eighty years ago, he made his show business debut. He was four years old.
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.
The Year After (L'année suivante)
13/03/2008
This is story about the effect of the loss of a parent in a young woman's life. Seventeen-year-old Manu (Anais Dumustier) is close to her father, but he is dying. She visits him in hospital, more faithfully in fact than her busy mother (played by the iconic French actress Arianne Ascaride). She is an intelligent, sensible girl, the kind everyone assumes is coping, without actually asking her.
When her father dies, Manu is unable to talk about him. Then she is shocked to discover her mother planning to sell the apartment, and move on to live with a lover.
In the year after, with no-one to notice her loss, we see Manu's life chances slowly slip away, one by one.
First-time director Isabelle Czajka (Zha-ka) has made a perceptive, understated film, reminding us all about the vulnerability of teenagers, and how easy it is for them to lose their way.
Death Defying Acts
13/03/2008
Here are some thing about Harry Houdini you may not know.
His real name was Erich Weisch and he was born in Hungary in l874. His dad was a Rabbi, and they emigrated from Budapest to Brooklyn when Erich was four.
He made a professional debut as a trapeze artist aged ten. He took the stage name Houdini because of his admiration for the French magician Jean Eugene Robert-Houdin.
He loved his mother.
He had a brother, Hardeen, who was also an escape artist competing on the same circuit.
He completed the first successful powered flight in Australia in l910 on March 18, at Diggers Rest, Victoria. He was flying a French Voisin biplane he had bought the previous year. After his Australian tour, Houdini put the plane in storage in England and never flew again.
He starred in a number of movies, and formed his own film production company. He was an accomplished magician and confirmed sceptic, who waged a long campaign to expose as frauds psychics and those who claimed to communicate with the dead.
Now not many of the above facts are in Gillian Armstrong's new film Death Defying Acts, apart from Houdini's devotion to his mother, and his scepticism about psychics and spiritualism.
Which makes for a confusing portrait. Clearly his mother's death, and his feelings about her, are related to his scepticism about spiritualism, and communications from beyond the grave -- loss and desire in conflict with modernity and rationality. Houdini indeed established a tradition of scientific scepticism which many distinguished stage magicians continue to this day.
The Houdini we meet in this film, played by Guy Pearce, is at the height of his fame. He is well known as a sceptic, and his offer of ten thousand dollars to anyone who could successfully demonstrate supernatural abilities is a magnet for every fairground gull and shill, as well as the would-be psychics.
Including one Mary McGarvie, played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who with her daughter Benjie as an accomplice, works the Scottish fairgrounds to fleece the gullible by claiming to comunicate with their dead. Often she dresses Benjie as a boy.
Now Mary is portrayed, quite sympathetically, as a determined single mother, fighting to keep her daughter and herself. The prize offers them a chance of a much better life. Her daughter is played by the remarkable young Irish actor Saoirse Ronan, (whom we met recently in Atonement. Mary sends her daughter to spy on Houdini's stage act, and infiltrate his dressing room, where she is discovered by an amused Houdini.
Enter Mary and, for her next trick: captivate the celebrity magician.
So far an intriguing set-up. But soon, boundaries start to shift. Houdini the sceptic and Mary the charlatan disappear into an unconvincing romance. His shrewdness and her opportunism simply melt away. The characters are not drawn with enough complexity for us to see them as both sceptic and yearning believer, lover and charlatan all at once. And Zeta-Jones's Mary, in fact, is way more interesting as a charlatan than she is as a lover. There is not much chemistry between Zeta-Jones and Guy Pearce. Worse than the loss of URST, or Unresolved Sexual Tension, for the the drama is the loss of Unresolved Scientific Tension. I felt cheated.
Ronan, Zeta-Jones and Guy Pearce performed as well as the script allows. Better, in the case of Ronan. A pity about the story. It's pretty, but no cigar.
And for those interested in Houdini the movie star: next month Kino International will release a DVD box set of Houdini's surviving silent movies. The set will include The Master Mystery, Terror Island, The Man From Beyond, Haldane of the Secret Service, and five minutes of The Grim Game. The set will also include newsreel footage of Houdini's escapes from 1907 to 1923. Death Defying Acts is screening nationally, and is rated PG.
Anna M
13/03/2008
This is a disturbing portrait of obsession. A young woman, Anna (Isabelle Carre), is treated in casualty for a suicide attempt. She becomes enamoured of the doctor, played by Gilbert Melki, who treats her; she is convinced he returns her affections, and begins to pursue him, interpreting his every gesture, including brusque rejection, and silence, as a sign of his passion. And the events escalate to near tragedy.
In English we would call her a stalker; but this French drama takes us inside the mind of Anna, so that we understand we are dealing with a special kind of madness, both neurotic and cunning: a case history of full blown erotomania.
Isabelle Carre is brilliant as Anna, holding the screen in almost every scene, while writer-director Michel Spinosa keeps the focus tight and claustrophobic. Only at the end does he open the story to place Anna in green story-book Swiss pastures, leaving us with an ambivalent ending as uneasy as anything by Michael Haneke. A profound, original film.
The Other Boleyn Girl
13/03/2008
This film draws on a bestselling novel by Philippa Gregory which upset many historians, but which also provided fascinating insights into the place of women in the power games of Tudor England.
Natalie Portman plays Anne Boleyn, and Scarlett Johansson her elder sister Mary, who did indeed become Henry VIII's lover, was exiled and bore a bastard son who may indeed have been Henry's. With a screenplay by Peter Morgan (The Queen, and The Last King of Scotland), it should have been another fascinating tale of regal power games. But in the hands of director Justin Chadwick the bite and depth is lost and it becomes a glamorous soap.
Sandy Powell, probably the best costume designer in the business, has so far excelled herself here that I became riveted by the giant sleeves worn by Eric Bana as Henry VIII: more like leg of elephant than leg of mutton. It's true the Tudors invented power dressing -- just think of the Holbien portraits -- but these costumes upstage the actors. See it as escapism, sumptuous but shallow.
Water Lilies (Naissance des pieuvres)
13/03/2008
A very accomplished directorial debut from Celine Sciamma, Waterlilies is a study of the dawning sexuality, desires and jealousies among a group of sixteen-year-old schoolgirls. It's summer, and the girls are engrossed with practising in the town swimming pool for a synchronised swimming troupe. Some are chosen, and one is not, but she hangs around. The scenes of the girls in the pool, shot underwater, provide the metaphor of opening female sexuality; the scenes in the dressing rooms, the bedrooms and the teenage parties are an arena for envy, and schoolgirl cruelty as well as passion. Some girls, like Floriane (Adele Haenele), know how to manipulate others with their sexuality. Others, like Marie (Louise Blachere) have no illusions, but are prepared to be manipulated because they have a desperate crush. It's a film which cuts straight to some of the most difficult moments of female adolescence, unromantically, but with a cinematic eye.
The Secret of the Grain (La graine et le mulet)
13/03/2008
Tunisian-born Abdellatif Kechiche grew up in the South of France, where his family settled when he was six. He has made three feature films, each in their way exploring the lives of Franco-Arabic families.
The Secret of the Grain introduces us to various members of a large Franco-Arab family, working out what is important in their lives. The father, Slimane, played by the veteran Tunisian actor Habib Boufares, is about to retire from the French shipyard where he has worked for more than thirty years.
He is estranged from his family but continues to visit his ex-wife, Soud, who every Sunday prepares a huge meal for their grown children, and their grandchildren. He lives in a small hotel near the port run by his lover Latifa (Hatika Karaoui) with her daughter Rym (a vibrant Hasia Herzi).
In contrast to his children, Slimane seems estranged from the life around him. His sons urge him to take his redundancy pay and return to the old house in Tunisia. Instead, he shocks the entire family by investing it in a run-down boat, almost a wreck, in which he plans, with their help, to open a couscous restaurant.
Kechiche takes his time to tell this story, introducing us by turn to various family members in scenes which underline their different attitudes to work, family and French society. Both the professional and first-time actors are seamless in their roles: Habib Boufares is as impressive as Gian-Maria Volonte at his best, while Hafsia Herzi, as Rym, lights up the screen even before the stuning finale.
The title in French was La graine et le mulet -- literally the grain and the mullet, or fish couscous. Food, its preparation and ritual consumption, is a part of this film, but it is more than a family symbol. And so is the bellydance which is part of the film's stunning conclusion.
It's a rich, absorbing film which provides rare insights into the experiences of first and second generation Arab immigrants in France. Kechiche acheives what he set out to do: restore two Western cliches about Arab culture to the status of art.
Interview with Elissa Down, writer-director, 'The Black Balloon'
06/03/2008
Writer-director Elissa Down has a lot of confidence about her film making. She's made four shiort films before this, but always knew this film, based on her own experiences of growing up with two autistic brothers, should be engaging and funny.
Sleuth
06/03/2008
Anthony Schaffer's stage play dates back to 1970, and there was a 1972 film in which the young Michael Caine played a working class hairdresser named Milo Tindle against Sir Larry Olivier's crime novelist Andrew Wyke.
So I guess there's some interest in seeing the role-switch, as Caine in this version plays the cranky, very successful elderly man who has a duel of wits with a young upstart (Jude Law) who had the gall to seduce his wife.
But this is directed by Kenneth Brannagh, who I think is a great producer and a director with all the subtlety of a brass band. He's set this film in a high, high tech house, where every move is measured, temperature controlled, recorded and manipulated, and Caine's very nasty character has the remote.
There are some nice impersonations going on here with Law in a series of wigs and disguises but Brannagh can't resist odd flourishing camera angles and technical trickery, and it sort of all becomes like a rather tedious attention seeking kid performing an endless series of pointless party tricks. This remake has some curiosity value but it doesn't last the distance.
Paranoid Park
06/03/2008
He likes those Botticelli boys, does Gus Van Sant. The independent filmmaker who made My Own Private Idaho, To Die For, Mala Noche and Drug Store Cowboys had one big break-out success with Good Will Hunting. He made a couple of smaller studio films which did less well, and for the last eight years or so has concentrated on making smaller, more poetic films where he can pursue his own sensibility.
But throughout, he has maintained an affinity with troubled teenagers.
Sixteen-year-old Alex, played by Gabe Nevins, has one of these faces Van Sant loves to study. It could be the face of a page from a Renaissance fresco. Alex lives for skateboarding. He and his best friend often slip away from wherever their parents think they are to go and hang out at an unofficial skateboard scene known as Paranoid Park. Alex isn't up there with the big guys. He watches their effortless bravura turns, and the risks they take, and his heart is hammering. We see these boarders as Alex sees them: their swoops, banks and pirouettes are captured in dream-like sequences, some of them shot on Super-8 by Australian cinematographer Christopher Doyle.
Alex is changing, and so are the kids around him. His best friend is preoccupied with his own rising hormones. Alex knows there are other rites of passage ahead, and when Jennifer, a girl at school, puts out the word she's keen on him, he dates her. But their clunmsy first time leaves him feeling nothing.
One night he goes again to Paranoid Park, where one of the big cool guys speaks to him, and asks him does he want to check out the yards. And there someothing happens. A security guard is killed. Is it an accident? We never know. But we know that Alex saw it, that he is weighed down with guilt and confusion, and soon the cops are at his school, and he is pulled out of class for questioning. Only the most unlikely person, a young punk girl, Macey, played by Lauren McKinney senses Alex's burden. He can't bring himself to talk about it, and she suggests he write it down.
Those who want a film with good old fashioned storytelling, where the good live happily and the wicked come to a bad end, should not go see this film.
Van Sant uses Alex's voiceover from the diary to anchor us entirely within the consciousness of this stricken, beautiful kid, and then flashes backwards and forwards with his memories and anxieties. Christopher Doyle's superb cinematography, mixing 35mm with super-8, is as inventive as his best work with Wong Kar-Wai. And Lesley Schatz uses wonderfully non naturalistic sound design to heighten our involvement with Alex's inner world. Check out the shower scene, as one example. It's so good it should atone for Van Sant's and Doyle's remake of Psycho.
Since Gus Van Sant gave up on studio films and went back to pursuing his own vision, his explorations of troubled adolescents have divided audiences.
Elephant was a relentless, elliptical tracking of two troubled teenagers through the maze of high school corridors; circling and back-tracking, and crossing tracks until the time when they take mail order guns into a classroom, and start shooting. It was an attempt to raise questions in the wake of the Columbine High School massacre, an attempt -- I think -- to ask the questions those around them asked: how could they get mail order guns so easily? Why did nobody stop them? Why did nobody notice the elephant in the room?
I don't think it worked sufficiently. Perhaps Van Sant invested it with an anguished empathy he was sure audiences would share, and I didn't. Not enough information.
But his next film, Last Days, exploring the events leading up to the death of a rock singer not unlike Kurt Cobain, I found mesmerising. Some fellow critics hated it -- Sandra Hall put it on her list of worst films of the year -- but all I can say is that I watched it again and again on DVD, and when a friend came in the room, halfway through she glanced, stopped, sat down and stayed absorbed, then ask to watch it again from the beginning.
Paranoid Park I think is the most satisfying, clearly focused of Van Sant's new trilogy. It is about feeling, a combination of sounds and images, of faces and some few words, which can transcend mere storytelling. It's not drama, it's poetry, and at the same time a way into the mind of one frozen, desperate, locked-in boy.
The Black Balloon
06/03/2008
Thomas (Rhys Wakefield) is sixteen, seen as a bit of a nerd at school, and struggling in the swimming pool to get his bronze medallion. There's Jackie (Gemma Ward) a girl at school who likes him but Thomas is paralysed by what she might think of him if she ever meets his family.
His dad Simon is an army officer, a pretty balanced bloke with one or two odd habits, like talking to a teddy bear. His mum, Maggie, is salt of the earth, but perennially harried. And the entire family is focused on looking after Thomas's elder brother Charlie, who is autistic. He is also very engaging, but extremely wilful.
This is a coming-of-age story with a difference. Toni Collette has played a string of amazing screen mothers: in The Sixth Sense and About a Boy and Little Miss Sunshine. They should give her a Mothers Day medal.
But she's in top form here, unglamorous but entirely human, a woman on a mission, and she's beautifully matched with Erik Thomson as husband Simon. Both Rhys Wakefield and Luke Ford are marvellous as the brothers: Charlie emerges as a very present, very human family member. Though I did wonder, later, how faithful a representation of autism it was, since it's a condition usually characterised by a lack of social affect.
The film, a first feature from writer-director Elissa Down, is written very nicely indeed, something I can't often say about Australian films. It carries you along on a great emotional balance between laughter and the odd tear.
We Own The Night
28/02/2008
Thirteen years ago, New York film-maker James Gray made a film about Russians in New York called Little Odessa. Then he made another powerful New York drama, The Yards, in which Mark Wahlberg starred as the son in a family where blue collar loyalties in the railway yards crossed over into rackets. It was fine drama, and hugely evocative of a place, a time, and a community.
Now Gray is back with another film exploring a particular New York locale. This is a policier, set back in the 80s. Robert Duval plays a police superintendant, Wahlberg his son Joe who has followed him into the force. Joaquin Phoenix plays Bobby, the son who walks on the wild side, running a nightclub where drugs are pushed and members of the Russian mafia hang out. When one brother is shot, the other has to decide where his loyalty lies.
The script is nowhere near as complex and sensitive as that of The Yards. But the film is beautifully shot, and features a couple of outstanding action scenes, including one of the best car chases since The French Connection.
In The Valley of Elah
28/02/2008
The Valley of Elah is where David, son of Jesse, servant of King Saul of the Israelites, confronted Gath, or Goliath, the giant warrior of the Philistines, and brought him down with five smooth stones and his slingshot.
It's a fairly bloodthirsty story, as are many Old Testament tales, (Both David and Gath threatened to strip the flesh from each other's bones, and when he felled the giant, David took his head and hauled it about behind Israelite lines.) When I was at Sunday school it was taught to inspire courage in the face of apparently overwhelming odds, and I cannot for the life of me understand why Paul Haggis needed to wrap his new film in this particular biblical mantle.
In it, Tommy Lee Jones plays Hank Deerfield, a retired army sergeant who gets a call to tell him that his son Mike, just back from Iraq with his unit, has gone missing from his base. He has a quick conference with his wife, (Susan Sarandon), jumps in his pickup and heads south.
There he clashes with Detective Emily Sanders, played by Charlize Theron. And of course, you know that he's going to keep asking questions. When the military clams up, he and the detective become allies to discover what really happened to his son. And it begins to point back to what Mike Deerfield and his platoon experienced in Iraq. Some of which, finally, we see in some of those harrowing pieces of amateur footage captured by soldiers on their cellphone cameras.
Haggis, who has written many scripts including Million Dollar Baby, based this screenplay on the case of Richard Davis, an Iraq war veteran who disappeared from his army base on his return from Iraq in 2003. Davis's father, an ex military cop, mounted his own investigation in the face of an army cover-up. It's strong stuff, and there is drama aplenty in the bones of the story.
But I am very much torn over this film. On the one hand, there is the powerful performance of Tommy Lee Jones, who brings to his role such a towering presence, and such a single minded focus that it draws us in, and makes a father's grief and rage palpable.
On the other hand, the heavy-handedness of Paul Haggis's screenplay is extremely annoying. Why try to wrap the film in this biblical reference? Why attempt to stack the sympathy cards by making Charlize Theron's character a struggling single mother, confronting sexism at work as well as parenting issues at home? It's simply irrelevant to the story.
Haggis is a writer who learned his trade in television. Now there is some very good dramatic writing in television these days, but some pretty simplistic writing also.
In my view Haggis consistently underestimates the intelligence of his audience, in the way he tries to manipulate their sympathies. His Oscar winning film Crash was glib in just this sense, I believe. And like many in the Hollywood left, he appears to be petrified lest any critique of the Iraq war is seen as an attack on American soldiers.
But we do not need some of the ugly truths about Iraq, and some of the things the Coalition forces have done there, to be sugar-coated to protect the sensibilities of soldiers and their families. We know that the harsh and surreal conditions there are imposing huge strains on the health of those serving there, beyond the physical wounds. The scandal is not so much the military cover-up of non-combat deaths of returned and serving soldiers, but the ongoing physical and psychological damage to those who do return. They need to be supported, not patronised.
There is a fine drama in this story, if you can strip away the writer-director's clumsy manipulations. As a thriller, it is slow to ignite, but it is well worth seeing for Tommy Lee Jones's magnificent performance, as a man who harnesses his anger and grief to a search for truth. This actor simply gets better and better, and he makes the film way more powerful than its screenplay deserved.
Talk To Me
21/02/2008
Don Cheadle plays Petey Greene, who left prison and got a radio gig in Washington DC in the sixties, having discovered he could talk the talk as a DJ on the prison radio. Black music stations were owned by white men in those days, and managed in this case by a buttoned-down black executive (Chiwetel Ejiofor), who hates everything the loud-mouthed Petey stands for.
The film is extremely entertaining, as Petey cons and scams his way into a job as a DJ on station WOL, and is caught up in some of the radical events of the times. Cheadle is a brilliant loudmouth, and it evokes the era well. Sadly, actress-turned-writer-director Kasi Lemmons forces the story into a standard biopic career saga, playing off the manager's ambitions against Petey's discomfort away from the streets. If Lemons had left the legend right there at the time of Greene's role in the Washington riots, it could have been a memorable film. It's still well worth a look for Cheadle's cheeky performance.
Trash and Treasure: Lester Francois on 'Five Graves to Cairo'
07/02/2008
Today the latest in our series with recent film school graduates. We thought it might be interesting to find films which have influenced or delighted some of our newest film-makers.
This week Lester Francois, fresh from the Victorian College of the Arts, is here to talk about Billy Wilder's 1943 war film Five Graves to Cairo. It's the story of a British tank driver stranded behind enemy lines who must pretend to be a waiter in a small North African hotel commandeered by Field Marshall Rommel and his advancing Afrika Corps. It stars Erich von Stroheim as Rommell, Franchot Tone as the soldier, and Anne Baxter, bless her, as a feisty chambermaid.
