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Drama - 2008

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Brideshead Revisited

23/10/2008
The 1981 television series Brideshead Revisited launched the career of a young and beautiful Jeremy Irons, and a teddy bear called Aloysius. So gorgeous was Granada television's evocation of golden pre-war days, and beautiful young men lounging about in punts, that it set a benchmark for lavish nostalgia in British television drama. Both Jeremy Irons and Aloysius became icons. Soon afterwards, beautiful young men took to carrying teddy bears. One year the Sydney gay Mardi Gras was knee-deep in them. My memory plays tricks. Irons did not in fact play Sebastian Flyte, the flamboyantly queer owner of the bear. He played the narrator, Charles Ryder, who meets Sebastian at Oxford, forms an intense romantic friendship with him but then falls in love with the family, the stately home, Brideshead, and, disastrously, with Sebastián's sister Julia. Who now remembers Anthony Andrews as Sebastian? Or for that matter Claire Bloom as Lady Marchmain -- even Laurence Olivier as Lord Marchmain? The teddy bear figures again in the new film version of Brideshead. At one stage Hayley Atwell as Julia bats it viciously from a chair. But this time round, it is Ben Whishaw, as beautiful doomed Sebastian, who steals the film. And Emma Thompson as Lady Marchmain, steel claws barely sheathed beneath her evening gloves, who plays his militantly religious mother -- a mother whose approval he can never earn, and whose love for his immortal soul he can never escape. Not even in the sleaziest den in Morocco. Till now, we've barely glimpsed Whishaw's talent onscreen. He was the charismatic serial killer in the very overheated, overblown Perfume. He was barely there, among the multiple Bob Dylans in I'm Not There, upstaged as they all were by Cate Blanchett and a small black boy. Here, elegant and unnervingly thin, his Oxford bags hanging from hips and draped across bony knees, his head bobbing like a strange flower on the slenderest of necks, he is arresting, seductive, petulant, and finally admirable: wasting away in a monastery garden, refusing to bow to matriarchal law. Whishaw and Thompson share very little screen time. But theirs is the key relationship in this film, and to the extent that it succeeds, it is because of two fine, strong performances from these actors. And because Andrew Davies's script, whatever its weaknesses, accords a central gravity to the Catholic faith of the Marchmains. While romance may sag, the film gives faith the strength of steel cable, and accords it both mystery and, in the hands of Lady Marchmain, the power to gnaw and fray and damage souls. It's an interesting reading of one of Evelyn Waugh's better novels, and one which almost compensates for other weaknesses in this film. One of these is Matthew Goode as Charles Ryder. Now I recall the television series better -- Jeremy Irons's wistfulness nicely captured the sense of an outsider, hovering, in love with the glamour of an entire family, their legend and their stately home. But Goode is simply too bland. Waugh's story makes him both besotted observer and secular conscience: the atheist who refuses to conform to Lady Marchmain's rigid Catholicism; the friend who refuses to act as a policeman to her son. These are fine moments, and while Goode rises to them, just; elsewhere he is simply devoid of passion, too passive by far. As Julia, Hayley Atwell does her damnedest yet there is simply insufficient here for her to grasp. In 1947, following the first overtures from Hollywood to make a film of Brideshead, Evelyn Waugh wrote the following note:

It is essential to the structure of the story that Julia's marriage to Rex should put her outside the Church. Otherwise Lady Marchmain's tragic sorrow would appear to be mainly snobbish. In the novel Rex had been married and divorced in Canada, but if it is felt by the producer that this is leading to a too intricate network of marriages and divorces, another device might be employed... It is absolutely essential that Julia, by her marriage, should deliberately put herself in a state of excommunication. Lady Marchmain dies with a sense of complete failure, and with her ends the first half of the story.

Davies's adaptation, directed by Julian Jarrold, ignores this. Mottram converts, and mother approves her daughter's marriage to an adventurer. The result is a film which starts promisingly, then limps in its second act, only to revive at the end. I found it impossible to watch this Brideshead Revisited without reading into it the contradictions of Waugh himself. He was by all contemporary accounts besotted by the aristocracy he satirised. He married twice into the same branch of a minor aristocratic family and relished the life this afforded. Like Sebastian, he drank heavily. He opposed modernity, Jews, and strictures against smoking. He converted to Roman Catholicism, in whose rites he saw a bulwark against the levelling rationality of the twentieth century. Waugh wrote Brideshead Revisited at the end of a war which produced one of the great levelling tides in British history. The strongest sense of him in this film is as we see Charles Ryder aghast at the deathbed of Lord Marchmain, defeated by beliefs more strange and powerful than his own. With all its failings, this is an intelligent, critical film about religious faith, and that in itself is a rare achievement.

The Women

23/10/2008
This is a remake of Clare Booth Luce's 1936 stage play about a group of wealthy women who try to support one of their number who loses her husband to a scheming young woman selling perfume at Saks. Booth Luce, who was a journalist and a feminist as well as marrying Time Life publisher Henry Luce, was satirising the lives of the wealthy ladies who lunch she saw around her. The play was notable for its bitchy dialogue, for its settings in beauty salons and restaurants, and for the fact that no men at all were seen, though discussion revolved around absent or straying husbands. It's been a great favourite down the years, revived many times on stage, and there's a sparkling l939 version directed by George Cukor as a screwball comedy. But I fear contemporary feminism has changed too many values, and the latest attempts to update the screenplay comes across as phoney and synthetic. Meg Ryan, lips so swollen with collagen she seems to have some kind of allergic affliction, plays Mary, a woman who is mother, wife and fashion designer. Annette Bening plays her career-driven best friend, Sylvie, and Eva Mendez plays Crystal, the perfume counter girl on the make. I'm afraid I could neither laugh at, nor take seriously, most of this movie. The exchanges which seemed sparkling back in l939 now seem just brittle, and don't seem to mesh with the women's magazine post-feminist updates about getting on with life, valuing yourself and bonding with your sisters. I must say, though, Eva Mendez is splendidly venal and voluptuous in a teddy. I guess she was in some other movie.

Towelhead

09/10/2008
The delightful thing about Alan Ball's television series Six Feet Under was that it created a space where all kinds of passionate, absurd and intransigent human behaviour could occur, at a time when life confronted death. It was beautifully observed, written and performed. And as with so many good television series, the characters could evolve and grow, from week to week. Which is maybe why so much good writing happens on television, rather than for cinema? Now Alan Ball has written for cinema before. He wrote the screenplay for American Beauty, about the same time as he was developing Six Feet Under. And he has written a beautiful screenplay for Towelhead, adapted from Alicia Erina's 2005 novel about a 13-year-old girl coming into puberty in Houston, Texas, around the start of the Gulf war. Jasira is well developed for her age. Her mother sends her to live with her father because her mother's boyfriend is developing a crush on Jasira. She does not know how to handle her own sexual feelings. Her father, a Lebanese Christian with some traditional Arab attitudes towards women -- and his own daughter -- has not the remotest idea how to help her resolve these teenage dilemmas, or even discuss them. Around them, in a neighbourhood where people fly American flags on their front lawns, there is heightened tension flowing from the first Gulf war. At school people first take Jasira for Latino, and when they discover she is part Lebanese, she is regularly abused as a 'sand jockey' and a 'towelhead'. His infuriates her father. He's equally infuriated by assumptions that he is a supporter of Sadaam Hussein, and apprehensive about what the American forces will do in the Middle East. About the only people who seem to like Jasira for herself are her next door neighbour Mister Vous who discovers her reading his stash of playboys while babysitting, and one classmate, Thomas. But when her father discovers Thomas is African American. He forbids Jasira to see him. Meanwhile Mister Vous is misinterpreting Jasira's interest in Playboy bigtime. Towelhead, then, is a gutsy, sometimes tragic, sometimes comic film about racist and sexist attitudes in middle America which have to be negotiated by a young teenage girl. It is like a field guide to adult hypocrisies, as seen with the fresh unjaundiced eye of a teenager. And this is one of its strengths, because we can surely all recall how we felt coming in to puberty, and the puzzling, often ludicrous, hypocritical attitudes struck by adults around us as our hormones raged. Another great strength, of both the novel and the film, is that Jasira is not a victim. She may be abused, but she survives. Neither are the men out-and-out bastards. Their shortcomings are clear, but they are also human, and we are unable to hate them. Indeed, Aaron Eckhart's portrait of Mister Vuoso may be one of the best bits of work he has done. The film has some shortcomings, I think. One of them is Summer Bisel as Jasira. She has an attractive presence on screen, and can certainly pass as a well developed 13-year-old. But she is too passive and plastic -- she simply does not have the emotional range as an actress to engage as the naïve but inquiring 13-year-old whose point of view this film represents. Jasira does, after all, encourage Mr Vuoso, not because she's a slut but because she is starved of emotional attention, and curious. And naïve. Another difficulty, I think, are the different registers the actors develop. Peter Macdissi as Jasira's father is tightly wound, near hysterical at times, and brilliantly funny without ever playing for laughs. Eckhart's Mr Vuoso is played much straighter. Maria Belo as Jasira's mother is downright ugly, as she alternates between pushing her daughter away and wanting to lean on her. And Toni Collette, pregnant again (are they ever going to let her out of that pregnancy suit in the movies?) is the next door neighbour every 13-year-old should have. I think it is Ball's inexperience which may have led to these discordancies, as well as a design and shooting style for the film which hammers the material rather than enhances it. But having said that, it's a far more interesting near miss than most other things in cinemas currently. There are lines here which will choke you, and glimpses of how teenagers really think which is a world away from Disney, Paris Hilton or Billy Ray Cyrus. A film to make you wince and laugh at the same time. I hope Ball comes back with another.

Lemon Tree (Etz limon)

09/10/2008
An Israeli defence minister moves next door to a Palestian widow, and orders her lemon grove, a dowry from her father, to be torn down as a security precaution. A battle of wills ensues when she challenges the order in court. Eran Riflis's film is both a metaphor for Israeli-Palestianian relations, including the so-called 'separation wall' and a drama about relationships between two women -- and their status within their own societies. There is a strong performance from Israeli-Palestianian actress Hiam Abbass as the widow.

The Grocer's Son (Le fils de l'épicier)

02/10/2008
in this film we spend a lot of time trundling around the back roads in the the Haute-Savoy region of the South of France, going from hamlet to tiny hamlet in one of those big, white anonymous-looking vans one sees everywhere in the European countryside. When it stops, the side lifts up and lo -- it's a grocer's shop, stuffed with delicacies and dangling hardware for the old folks who wait for it most days. The Grocer's Son is a gentle, calmly reflective story about a withdrawn thirty-something young man called Antoine (Nicolas Cazale) summoned back from Paris to help his mother when his father is hospitalised with a heart attack. He's back in the family home and business he fled ten years before. He takes on the van, but doesn't understand how to deal with the customers. It takes a friend from Paris, the charming, much more lighthearted Claire (Clotilde Hesme)to show him what the customers want. And they are pretty feisty customers. Their knees may be gone but boy, do they have attitude! This is very surehanded filmaking from Eric Guirado, and it's a world away from the trendy nostalgia of city folk for country ways in recent French comedies. At another level, this is a family drama. But the real joy of this film is the time spent on the road. Think of it as a road movie. Or a holiday in the country.

Make It Happen

04/09/2008
Lauryn (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) does the books in her brother's small-town garage, but she dreams of going to the city and becoming a dancer. When she fails her audition at a Chicago dance school, she's too proud to return home, so she starts work in a bar as a burlesque dancer. This film's limp retelling of the against-all-odds cliche just doesn't bump, grind or sweat enough to make it happen.

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.

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.

Ten Empty

03/07/2008
A lot of Ten Empty happens inside a two-storey brown-brick house in the Adelaide suburbs. It's so unremarkable, so common, it's almost invisible, but the main character, Elliot, who's just arrived home from Sydney for his nephew's christening, hesitates before stepping through the front door. For him the house looms, menacing. 'It doesn't bite,' his stepmother Diane tells him. He steps across the threshhold, but the sense of dread doesn't leave him, or us. Later, Elliot, played by Daniel Frederiksen, eats a lamb chop dinner with his father Ross (Geoff Morrell). They're so different: Elliot speaks in the measured tones of a city professional, but he's cautious, while Ross has a gruff, working-class accent, and he's authoritarian and grumpy. There's a tension between them as they discuss building an extension out the back— something called a 'Paradise Room'. Elliot offers to pitch in with some money, his father is offended instantly. We learn a lot by this early exchange, and as they sit at this big table in this sprawling, shadow-filled house, at loggerheads already on the first night, we realise how empty the place looks. Something is missing. The matriarch of the family, Elliot's mother, has been dead for a few years, and the family haven't recovered from the loss. The most obvious casualty is younger brother Brett (Tom Budge), who locks himself in his room, hardly ever comes out. His depression is a new thing, and it dawns on Elliot that while he's been in Sydney these past few years, making headway in a lucrative career, his family has unravelled. On an emotional level, Ten Empty tells its story with care and empathy. It's a considered reflection on grief and renewal, with unexpected shades of performance that are touching. Tristan Milani's cinematography, which at times evokes a gold and chocolate hued vision of the suburbs as Rembrandt might have painted them, is very good. And though the opening is bleak indeed, we soon realise the family has some guardian angels, of sorts. There's Bobby (Jack Thompson) a cheery publican at the local sports club—he keeps a respectful distance but he will choose a moment to intervene in this drama, and that's one of the best scenes of the film. There's Brendan Cowell's Shane Hackett, a brash rev-head in flannelette who's almost like a third son to Ross—the complete opposite to Elliot of course—and the timid but determined stepmother Diane, played by Lucy Bell, is a voice of wisdom. And yet for all its strengths, there are flaws in the film that can't be ignored. A slightly cluttered script with too many ideas, for starters; a mistake I think that comes down to the enthusiasm and inexperience of first-time writer-director Tony Hayes and co-writer Brendan Cowell. Take Diane's backstory: she's Elliot's aunt. Yes, his stepmother is his mother's sister. While this is dramatic and I understand the function it serves within the story, strangely, it just feels convoluted and it's overkill. There's also the anachronistic, almost nostalgic representation of Aussie men—well, all except Elliot, who's a kind of metrosexual archetype. Ross, Bobby and Shane are like blokes from They're a Weird Mob. They say 'eye tie' and baulk at the mention of Pinot Noir. I wasn't sure what the point was to this culturally isolated group of blokes. As an exploration of a crumbling, Anglo-Celt working class identity against the backdrop of new multiculturalism, it feels at least twenty years out of date and says little. I have a theory that filmmakers and actors are drawn to homecoming stories because so many of them do live far from their hometowns. It's a centralised industry, to really have a career you need to move to where the work is, but there's also the long hours and the location shoots that keep you away. Filmmakers, like sailors, know what it's like to come back and find things changed. Perhaps this is why Ten Empty works mostly quite well, but when it trips up, it succumbs to sentimentality and nostalgia.

Happy-Go-Lucky

26/06/2008

My Brother is an Only Child (Mio fratello e' figlio unico)

19/06/2008

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.

Un Secret

15/05/2008
This is a thoughtful, well made film from Claude Miller which crosses memoir with family drama, and touches on a very raw point: the deportation of French Jews by the Nazis. Francois (played by Valentin Vigourt, and Quentin Dubuis) always suspected he had a brother. At seven, he played with an imaginary brother; at fifteen he forces the truth from a family friend. Yes, there was a brother before him. What happened to this brother, and to his father's first wife, is part of the secret at the heart of a this post-war French family. There are terrific performances from Cecile de France and from Matthieu Amalric whom we saw in The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, from Ludivine Sagnier and from Julie Depardieu. Don't miss the postscript.

Then She Found Me

15/05/2008
April Epner is a 39-year-old kindergarten teacher desperate to have a baby. Her husband of a few months, a former best friend, is a bit of a baby himself: he needs a lot of emotional attention. But her biological clock is ticking. April, played by Helen Hunt, is on thermometer watch. Then quite a few big things happen at once. Her adoptive, sometimes annoying mother, dies. And her husband, the infuriating, baby-faced Matthew Broderick, decides he can't take the pressure; the marriage idea is a mistake and he's going home to his mother. And then her real mother bursts into her life. She's a kind of daytime television agony aunt, as played by Bette Midler she's pushy and unstoppable. It's a wonderful piece of casting. To complicate things, April finds herself seeing one of the dads she meets at her school; an irascible eccentric single parent, played by Colin Firth—another inspired piece of casting. Firth plays him as a quiet seether, prone to sudden outbursts. He has some of the funniest scenes in this film. Clearly there's a lot going on here, most of it to do with mothers and parenthood, and the truism that the kind of trust and emotional confidence we develop has a lot to do with the kind of parenting we ourselves experienced. While the film has comic moments, it's really an adult drama rather than a romantic comedy. It's also Helen Hunt's feature debut as writer and director. Maybe some people shouldn't direct themselves. Her April looks gaunt and worried most of the time. She's carrying anxieties and deep resentments but gee, what her character lacks is warmth. Firth brings humanity to his role as the irascible, deserted dad, but it's not until Bette Midler bursts on the scene as the mother from hell, the mother you hoped wouldn't find you, that energy levels lift and the film acquires real warmth. Back in 1997 Helen Hunt won my heart as the single mother and waitress being courted by an agoraphobic Jack Nicholson in As Good as It Gets. I've never forgotten that scene of her sitting at her kitchen table with a doctor who actually made a house call to visit her asthmatic son. It won her an Oscar. Hunt has made some odd film choices since then, but this project, based on a novel, is one she's embraced for more than a decade. She bought the rights, worked on various adaptations (writers Alice Arlen and Victor Levin are credited here) and cast it. Ultimately she decided to direct it herself. Maybe she was just too pushed, on a low budget shoot, to register that her performance of April is way more tense than those of the other actors. And I include Middler in that, because Middler is actually more subdued than I have seen her. Her Clarice Graves is a trumpet solo rather than a full brass section. It is a delightful performance, pitched to support April's intensity. Does April Epner find happiness? Clearly, she's one of those people who don't think they deserve to be happy. Do I care? Well, sort of. I just wanted her to let the people around her off the hook. It's a 'not quite', this movie—worth a look for some insight, and a few delicious moments. No doubt they have Colin Firth on Life Matters next, offering advice to other newly deserted fathers, while Middler will crop up as one of those visiting American agony aunts who've written a book.

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.

21

15/05/2008
This is a frat pack film about a maths lecturer, played by Kevin Spacey, who schools his brightest students on a memory assisted system of winning at blackjack...then takes them to raid various Las Vegas casinos. Jim Sturgess plays Ben Campbell, the shy, bright kid recruited to the group, who goes along to pay his medical school fees and becomes hooked. It's a coming-of-age story for him, and he makes the film's character likeable. But the rest I found plastic, and boring. There was no real tension, the signals about winning tables were so obvious the casino cat could have figured them out, and the pop music with which Robert Luketic has pasted the film together drove me nuts. I am so over zingy pop soundtracks. Maybe you like watching celebrity poker on television...a game which seems made for mental giants beside this one. I think as a director Luketik simplifies far, far too much.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day

08/05/2008
I went to see Miss Pettigrew Lives For a Day with high expectations because Frances McDormand, who plays the out-of-work governess Miss Pettigrew, has never let me down in a movie. Sadly, she is miscast in this 30s style comedy in which she is accidentally employed as social secretary (or what we would call life coach) to a ditzy starlet, Delyssia Lafosse, played by that extremely accomplished actress Amy Adams. In the course of a day Miss Pettigrew has to sort out Delyssia's three boyfriends, her career and her love life. It doesn't really jell, because the lead actors seem to be playing in different movies, and that's the fault of director Bharat Nalluri. It's a cozy DVD experience really but, heck, I enjoyed quite a lot of it, and I really wanted Miss Pettigrew to have her day, Watch for Shirley Henderson, the best British comic on the block.

The Counterfeiters

08/05/2008
In the Nazi concentration camp at Sachsenhausen, one cell block was set apart from the others. There the inmates got special treatment: linen on their beds, civilian clothing (often confiscated from dead Jews). And, incredibly, classical music played constantly as they worked. They were aware of what was going on in the rest of the camp, and others like it. Indeed, many were survivors from other camps, brought to Sachsenhausen because the Nazis needed their skills. They were artists, printers, engravers, chemists, engineers, and at least one master forger. They were there to forge documents for Nazi agents abroad. Their big task was to forge allied banknotes, starting with the British pound. This was Operation Bernhard, a pet project of Heinrich Himmler, and supervised by a former Austrian police officer from the counterfeit squad. They were supervised by a man called Sali, short for Salomon. In the film, he's Sali Sorowicz, in real life he had a different name. He was a master forger, an artist who found it more profitable to make money on the do-it-yourself principle. He's played, memorably, in this film by the Austrian actor Karl Markowics. We meet him first living it up in Vienna, then being arrested and sent to his first camp, where he survives by cultivating SS officers and drawing their portraits. Now Karl Markowics has a distinctive, gaunt face: a beaky nose, a long chin, a narrow, receding hairline. It's a face many of us may recognise because it's been on our Australian televisions for years. He's Stockinger, the sidekick to the Austrian police dog Inspector Rex. It took me a while to work out why the countenance of Sali Sorowicz was so hauntingly familiar as I watched this film, and thats a credit to Karl Markowics. His Sali has no lightness. He is often withdrawn, he offers little in the way of conversation or comment. Yet it is to him, in this drama, that the other prisoners turn. It is he who, from time to time, steps out of his role of meek kapo to deflect SS attention from other prisoners. They depend on his skills to please the Nazis and stay alive. Yet should their task be finished, should it be too successful, won't they be killed anyway? Sali's motto is surivival. Each day they live is another victory over the Nazis. His opponent, and friend in this camp, is a young political prisoner, Adolf Burger. It is he who argues that their duty is to sabotage. To succeed is to help the Nazis. These conflicting moral imperatives thread through the film. They are not resolved once and for all. They confront the prisoners over and over, as the war turns against Germany. Writer-director Stefan Ruzowitzky has made gripping, if sombre drama from this tale. It's a well paced film, with Markowics's Sali holding our attention. He is no Spielberg/Schindler, larger-than-life hero. Just a small man with a ratlike face and an ambiguous attitude to the law. He brings gravitas to the role which is compelling. Ruzowitzky is to be congratulated on a film which does not present easy answers to the hideous moral conflicts faced by the prisoners. It's an open-ended film, and it leaves a huge question mark for every viewer. What would you have done in these circumstances?

Smother

08/05/2008
Everything's going pear-shaped for 30-something Noah (Dax Shepard): he's just lost his job; his overbearing, loopy mother (Diane Keaton) has left his father and moved in; the wife (Liv Tyler) is on his case about having a child and her cousin, an aspiring sci-fi screenwriter (Mike White), is camped in their lounge with his iBook. It's a family disaster movie that's as cringeworthy as it is funny. At times the characterisation is very harsh (Diane Keaton's portrayal of a mother on the edge, in particular, is merciless), but ultimately the script plays fair and gives everyone a shot at explaining themselves. Warm hearted, without being sentimental.

The Edge of Heaven (Auf der anderen Seite)

24/04/2008
In the port city of Hamburg the prostitutes in the red light district sit in doors and windows, as they do in Amsterdam, so the customers can check them out. Ali, a wily Turkish man, finds a blonde he likes. She calls herself Jessy. But Ali, an elderly widower, detects a fellow countrywoman under the blond wig. He becomes a regular, then makes her an offer: come live with him, sleep only with him and he will support her. She refuses, but when she is threatened by two radical Islamists if she doesn't give up her 'immoral life', she changes her mind, and moves in with him. She also gets to know his grown son, who is the immigrant success story; a professor of German literature at a German university. He's a thoughtful man, very different from his blunt, lascivious father. Jessy's real name is Yetel, and she has a daughter, Ayteh, studying in Istanbul, who thinks her mother works in a shoe store. Yetel misses her. Then she dies. I am giving nothing away in telling you this because the first part of this magnificent, sprawling three-act film is called 'The Death of Yetel'. How she dies is important, and I will leave you to discover this. But Nejat, Ali's son, decides he must travel to Istanbul to find Ayteh and tell her of her mother's death. The second story in this film belongs to Ayteh, and to Lotte, a young German student who finds and shelters Ayteh when she in turn comes to Hamburg seeking her mother. They become lovers: but Lotte's mother, Susanne, disapproves of her sheltering a girl who is an illegal refugee. She has a complacent faith in the beneficence of the German state. And she fails to understand her daughter. All these stories come together in the third act of this film, in Istanbul. The long journey will take us to middle class Istanbul, and Hamburg, to bookshops and universities, to tourist hotels, inside bureaucratic offices, and refugee shelters and a Turkish prison, and to a tiny village where elderly Anatolians still till the soil. At the centre of this magnificent, sprawling drama are big questions about love, and death, and the relationships between parents and children. What do we, as adult children, owe our parents? What do we as parents owe our adult children? Where do loyalties lie? It's an ambitious film, and people are at the heart of it. Such a huge canvas, such daring shifts in time-frame and memory would not work at all if we did not believe in the people. But Akin succeeds where a more conventional filmmaker may have failed, because these people are not ciphers: they are real, and they are looking for love, and dealing with loss, making moral choices. His shrewd observations of two cultures or, indeed, many cultures within two societies provide a context that shape the choices of six people, but the characters are so much more. And the drama holds. Fatih Akin is an authentic talent: astonishingly, for a filmmaker just turned 35, he has now made five feature films; and found his own voice. It is a bold one, and a thoughtful one. There are no easy resolutions here. The German sociologist George Simmel famously observed that the stranger entering a society or a group sees what those who live there take for granted. Perhaps it is no accident that some of the best storytelling in our globalised world comes from those who traverse two cultures. It happened with literature first, now indeed it is happening in cinema, and Akin is one of its fine new voices.

Broken Sun

24/04/2008
It's 1944 in rural New South Wales, and a World War I veteran turned farmer (Jai Koutrae) finds a Japanese POW—one of a group just escaped from the nearby Cowra camp—on his remote property. At gunpoint he takes the man back to his tin shack and there they wait the night for an army patrol, striking up a stilted conversation. We see flashbacks to brutal battle scenes and we learn how both men are haunted by guilt and fallen comrades. Director Brad Haynes and screenwriter Dacre Timbs have created a strong statement about how war corrodes and corrupts. It's beautifully shot—sparse and atmospheric—but it often seems so preoccupied with the message, it forgets about creating drama. I enjoyed the ideas here, and the mood, but struggled to find a connection.

The Painted Veil

24/04/2008
Somerset Maugham's novel of adultery, guilt and redemption was first adapted for cinema in 1934, with Greta Garbo as Kitty, the lonely wife ignored by her research biologist husband in the British colony of 30s Shanghai. Edward Norton, who plays the husband in this second adaptation, also produced this film. Naomi Watts plays Kitty, who finds herself working alongside him in a cholera epidemic in rural China; Liev Schreiber plays her lover. All performers take this story very seriously, but I couldn't. It's beautifully shot, and in the second half becomes less predictable, but somehow Maugham's old fashioned melodrama of gin, cigarettes and adultery no longer seems relevant. They told stories differently then. Maybe these days we are just different people.

Paris

17/04/2008
A multi-strand portrait of Paris as cinema loves to depict it: with impossibly chic, centrally located apartments and narrow streets teeming with life and love. We meet Romain Duris, a dancer who needs a heart transplant, and the sister who cares for him (Juliette Binoche), a divorcee social worker with three young kids who's given up ever finding someone new. Then there's the warm-hearted stall owners down at the street market, an old fashioned community in the atomised metropolis, and the architect and academic brothers who are both negotiating some mid-life speed humps. The film touches briefly on more political issues, too, with glimpses into the world of high fashion and African immigration that offer insights into French racism and the class divide. But this isn't really a political film, it's Klapisch's love letter to Paris, well made and unashamedly sentimental. Ultimately he's juggling too many balls and doesn't tie up all the strands successfully, but his love for Paris is contageous.

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.

Brick Lane

20/03/2008
A drama about immigration. Nazneem (Tannishtha Chatterjee) goes as a young bride from the Bangladeshi village where she grew up with her sister, to marry a countryman in Britain. Her older husband, Chanu, an 'educated man', turns out to be a self-important clerk, but Nazneem bears him a son and two daughters. Screenwriter Laura Jones and first-time director Sarah Gavron have crunched most of the events of Monica Ali's fine novel, about an immigrant Muslim woman finding her own autonomy, into a single year, taking place just before and after the events of 9/11. It's a time when Nazneem begins an affair with Karim, a young man who delivers her piecework, and then must make a choice as the Muslim community is radicalised. The politics, and the depiction of the husband are handled very well. Chanu is pompous and self-deluding but not a figure of fun. He is played with dignity by Indian comic actor Satish Kausik. Tanishtha Chatterjee as Nazneem is fascinating to watch: she's passively beautiful, but she glows onscreen. The adaptation suffers, I think, in focusing so much on the romance between Nazneem and Karim that the depth of Nazneem's own bravery -- in taking those first small steps to autonomy, in even leaving the apartment in Brick Lane to cross the road and sit in a park -- are neglected. But the soft focus romance turns to something far more satisfying as events unfold. Recommended.

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.

Closing The Ring

06/03/2008
Recently widowed Ethel Ann (Shirley MacLaine) is contacted by a boy in Northern Ireland who's found her ring in the wreckage of a World War II plane. The phone call drags up memories of a lost love and we see flashbacks of a weepy, romantic wartime tragedy with Mischa Barton as the young Ethel. Telemovie fare from director Richard Attenborough.

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.

The Bucket List

21/02/2008
This is another one of those old codger comedies which presumably pay the bills for Jack Nicholson and in this case Morgan Freeman. Two men wind up side by side in a cancer ward. Nicholson plays a spoilt millionaire who's made bucketloads from his no frills private hospital chain (which is why he has to share a room in one of his own hospitals). Freeman is a garage mechanic who has put his kids through college, and settled for a disappointing marriage. They fight and bond their way through chemo and make a list of things they would really like to do before they die. The best thing, possibly the only worthwhile thing in this film are the chemo scenes, as Jack Nicholson staggers through. There are some things in life so awful, as a friend said to me recently, you have to laugh. And Jack here actually comes up with some original if gruelling comedy. The rest is entirely plastic, predictable and, as I said, shameless, down to the homilies. Bah humbug.

Margot At The Wedding

21/02/2008
Somewhere inside the lanky Australian actress with the porcelain doll features is a familiarity with discontent. I say this because I am more and more convinced that Nicole Kidman's best work is unfailingly in those roles in which she is neurotic -- or flaky, driven, or downright unhappy. Think To Die For. Think Dogville, The Hours, Birth, The Others. It's these characters we remember, rather than her romantic roles. Margot At The Wedding is another lacerating family drama from Noah Baumbach, who wrote that extremely perceptive film The Squid and the Whale, almost a diary of the disintegration of a family as two teenage sons watch their parents divorce. Now here's a second in Baumbach's Ibsenesque saga of disintegrating families and unhappy women. It's about a sibling rivalry so intense it's as though two sisters, in adult life, can only recognise themselves if one is annoying the other. Kidman's Margot is a New York writer of short stories whom we meet on a train, with her young teenage son Claude. They are on their way to her sister Pauline's wedding. 'I thought you and Pauline weren't speaking,' asks Claude. 'No.' Margot snaps. 'I wasn't speaking to her. But I am now.' This is a woman used to having the upper hand. We are forewarned when Margot looks at her son and sighs one of those discontented sighs. 'You used to be so much more graceful when you were younger,' she says. On arrival, her younger sister Pauline rushes from the house then stops, mid-lawn, bracing herself. How will this reunion go? It is clear the sisters are very attached. They have a shared past, they're in the family home together, and only they know the territory. And yet, almost from the arrival, Margot begins to undermine those around her. Particularly Pauline, whom she thinks is wasting herself in this marriage. She's met Pauline's fiance, Malcolm, a musician -- or is he a writer -- who has yet to establish himself. He's played, quite straight, by Jack Black, and he has Margot's number. But he's not the type to exert himself. For now, he stands back while the sisters wrestle. Pauline oscillates between an eager belief that she and her successful big sister can really be friends and outraged backlash. For years, it seems, she's protected herself against Margot's interfering by doing the opposite of whatever her sister suggests. Margot has other agendas. Recently separated from her husband Jim (John Tutorro), she doesn't want him at the wedding. But she does want to go to a local book signing, and catch up with a fellow writer with whom she has had a fling. Neither of the men in her life exactly oblige her wishes. Add to the mix a trio of teenagers in the house, and it's set for explosion. The dialogues are lacerating and funny at first, but the mood darkens as old wounds surface. The ending is tragedy on the brink of farce. Or perhaps the other way around. This is an original, and not always comfortable film. Noah Baumbach and his editor navigate the family conflicts by cutting briskly from drama to drama, sometimes almost in mid sentence. Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jack Black are in top form, and the teenagers behave like real, disconcerted teenagers. These days American independent cinema serves a constant diet of small films which are homilies on so-called dysfunctional families. This is a term derived from an outmoded social theory called functionalism constructed by the American sociologist Talcott Parsons, which argued that we all occupied roles and statuses in society. It's not much of a theory because it couldn't account for group or social change. Indeed, It's always reminded me of a demented housewife tidying up, chanting 'A place for everything and everything in its place.' But the annoying term has been taken over by popular culture, and by too many screenwriters, and become a kind of smothering blanket for every kind of unhappiness. Baumbach cuts much deeper, and much more precisely. We know these people. Maybe we recognise parts of ourselves. And Kidman is superb. You can add Margot to her gallery of memorably discontented divas. Afterwards, I ached for her.

Bella

21/02/2008
New York waitress Nina (Tammy Blanchard) gets fired for being late and as she walks off fuming the manager's brother and head chef Jose (played by Mexican heartthrob Eduardo Verástegui) calls out after her. He's the only person who wants to hear her side of the story and when she tells him she's pregnant and alone it strikes a chord. They continue walking and talking, like they're taking a mental health day from the office, but what starts as a cool New York indie slides into a sentimental tale of family and friendship with a pro life message. A cloying family dinner scene at his parents' place then a tearjerking backstory about how his promising soccer career was cut short set up a cheap paperback ending that's ridiculously contrived.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (Le scaphandre et le papillon)

14/02/2008
Julian Schnabel, a painter who makes movies, has now made three, all about artists. The first was about the graffitist Jean-Michel Basquiat, the second, a much, much better film, starred Javier Bardem as the Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas who defied Castro, escaped to new York and later died of AIDS. Now we have The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a much bigger project because the late Jean-Dominique Bauby's memoir was a huge bestseller. Ronald Harwood wrote the screenplay. Johnny Depp was supposed to star in it, but went off to play a pirate. But with Schnabel at the helm it became a far better film than it may otherwise have been. He made the right casting choices. He filmed it in the right language -- French. Anything else would have been a compromise. And he brought an artist's eye, creating a visual language to place us inside the experience of Jean-Dominique, known as Jean-Do. He was, at 43, a man flying high. The well-known editor of Elle magazine, he had position, status, power, and a beautiful woman on his arm. The film opens in a blur. We are seeing through the eyes of a man immobilised in a hospital room. Gradually we can make out turquoise walls, a curtain flapping in the breeze. Faces loom out of the blur, leaning over him speaking down to him. A doctor tells him briskly he has had a severe stroke. And that one eye is so damaged it will have to be occluded, surgically closed. But the other eye...can he move it? Blink once for yes, twice for no. 'Good,' says the doctor, briskly. 'Then there are things we can do.' For almost the first half of the film we do not see the paralysed Jean-Do directly. We see him as he was, in brief flashbacks, fragments of memory, moments of poetic fantasy. But in the present, in that hospital room we are with him and he is locked in, unable to communicate with those around, as he imagines a man imprisoned in a diving bell plunging to the depths, unable to make himself heard. So we see only what he sees in his little hospital room, we hear what he hears, and we hear his frank, often exasperated, sometimes cruel comments as others faces come and go, as he is handled, toileted, washed, fed, manipulated. They've brought him back to life, he's told. 'This is life?' he comments. With screenwriter Ronald Harwood, and the great cinematographer Janusz Kaminski, Schnabel has the camera become Jean-Do's one, rolling eye, usually focused in close-up. Seldom has a single point of view been deployed more effectively in cinema. And we stay with Jean-Do's point of view for almost half the film, interspersed with his memories of his life before, and with his fantasies. Into his life in that room come two helpers: a physiotherapist, and a speech therapist, Henriette, played by Marie-Josee Croze. It is she who will devise a way for Jean-Do to communicate, by chanting the French alphabet to him, in order of the most frequently used letters, while he blinks: one blink for yes, two for no. There is much drama in this situation, because Jean-Do is not a patient man. Only later does he realise that his imagination is still free. It's extremely difficult to make drama around an immobilised man. Hitchcock did it in Rear Window, many since have failed. But by combining this rigorous point of view shots in the hospital with wild poetic metaphors as Jean-Do's imagination kicks in, the film becomes much more than a weepy saga of rehabilitation. For a start, Jean-Do is not a very nice, empathetic man. He is (or was) a man of vigorous libido, and there is conflict between the women in his life: his devoted ex-wife, played by Emmanuelle Seigneur, whose visits irritate him and his lover, who lets him down...and the devotion of his therapists, particularly Henriette, a devotion mixed with religion and a barely repressed sexuality. As Jean-Do himself, Mathieu Amalric is exceptional. This sexy ugly French actor, who looks incredibly like Roman Polanski in mid life, is magnetic in flashback, then emerges finally midway through the film as the imprisoned Jean-Do, head slipping sideways, one eye rolling behind giant magnifying glasses, like a drowned Cyclops. But by then we know the man so well we are not repelled. And we are ready for the final stages of this journey. This is by no means a melancholy film, nor one about 'how I became a better person through suffering'. Probably he didn't. While it expands Jean-Do's memoir, it also cherishes every ironic line. Finally what it leaves one with is a profound respect for each human consciousness, and for language. The one creates the other. The Diving Bell and the Butterfly tells us this in a way which is pure cinema.

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.

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.

There Will Be Blood

07/02/2008
The opening of Paul Thomas Anderson's There Will Be Blood puts us down a hole. A shaft, dug by a sweating, whiskered man whose hands, boots, clothes, and whole body are grimed by dirt. The camera directs our gaze to the hardness of the rock the man is gouging, the dust, the strain on his muscles, the dour tenacity. He packs the hole, lights a fuse, hauls himself up a rickety ladder, slips. The fuse ignites. The man is splayed in the shaft, leg awry. And we watch every painful second as he dazedly recovers and hauls himself up the ladder once again, to lie gasping under the sky. Meet Daniel Plainview, prospector. Daniel Day-Lewis, one of the most gifted physical actors of a generation, a man who went and worked in a cobblers shop for months to learn a previous role, here joins Paul Thomas Anderson to present a film which, for its first fifteen minutes, has us riveted with the most extended close-up examination of physical toil we have seen for years. We will get to know this shaft, and others like it, intimately. When oil begins, for the first time, to ooze and gush in the bottom of these hard-scrabble shafts, we will feel the stuff oozing and mingling with dirt, sweat -- and more blood. Men will die in these primitive holes, and we will watch it happen, so that the black sticky fluid will enrich a man who registers his first claim lying on the dusty wooden floor of the mines office. Such a hymn to toil -- hard physical labour -- would no doubt have been appreciated by Upton Sinclair, the socialist writer whose 1927 novel Oil was the platform on which Anderson has sprung his film. Sinclair, a lifelong apostle for the working class, wrote nearly a hundred books, of which the most famous, Jungle, exposed the brutal working conditions in Chicago abattoirs. It led to legislation regulating both the products and the safety conditions in the industry, and eventually the Food and Drug Administration, which was not what Sinclair the Utopian socialist had in mind. He wanted the abolition of wage slavery and the exploitation of poor and often under-age workers. But there is quite a deal of Sinclair's fascination with American archetypes: the ruthless capitalists, impoverished farmers, and slyly opportunistic evangelists in Anderson's film. Lewis was inspired in part by a couple of scandals of the twenties: the so called Teapot Dome affair, in which Warren Harding's Secretary of the Interior was paid in no-interest loans for leasing out crown land to oil barons. He was also, it's said, inspired by some of the scandals surrounding the holy roller evangelist Aimee Semple MacPherson. Anderson has heightened these elements in Sinclair's sprawling novel. Much of the film's drama is a conflict which plays out between Paul Dano as the preacher Eli Sunday, a man with a grievance, a man Plainview first meets when he comes to persuade the poor, godfearing Sundays that he wants a lease on their farm so he can go quail hunting with his young son. He wants no such thing. He wants the oil he knows by then is under their hardscrabble dirt. And teenage Eli, a boy with a gift for preaching, wants royalties for a new church and a road to its doors. He will re-appear throughout this film to taunt and torment, and at one stage strike a devilish bargain with Daniel Plainview as the oilman builds his empire. The other character in this film is the son who Daniel thrusts forward as he presents himself to the hardworking, Christian farm families to persuade them to sell their leases. 'This is my son, HW,' he says. 'We have no secrets. I'm a plain man, a family man and I am building the business for him. I believe in plain speaking.' He believes in no such thing, and HW in fact is not his son. He was a baby in swaddling when his father died down Plainview's first shaft, and for reasons best known to himself, Plainview adopted him. He may even love him, as much as he can. But HW comes in mighty useful in these transactions with poor farmers. And when, later, the boy who has always modelled himself on his so-called father is in great need, Daniel has a choice between business and family. Guess which way the oil man jumps. In many ways this is an anachronism of a film, one which has way more in common with such great American social realist parables as John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath than it does with the oil men of Dallas or Dynasty. It's a vehicle for Anderson, a filmmaker interested in big ideas, to re-examine some of the foundation myths of California, a state in which oil, fundamentalist Christianity and cinema have all been historical engines. And he has said the parallels with current political themes in America made the film irresistible. With Day-Lewis driving the film, in one of the most towering, completely physical and compelling performances of his career, and with Anderson's attention to the blood and guts, to the ooze and sweat on which both wealth and ideologies were built, it should have been a masterpiece. But I found the endgame less satisfying than it should have been. It takes a very long time for HW as a man to find his way, and the closing scenes, audacious as they are, are somehow empty. Maybe this was the point. Magnificent poetry if flawed, explosive drama from two very material boys. After you've spent time on these oilfields, special effects explosions won't easily satisfy you.

3:10 To Yuma

31/01/2008
For those who grew up with the Western, as I did, there are certain tropes, key scenes and moments, after which we hanker. The racing stage coach trying to outpace the bandits. The gunslinger's dalliance with the dance hall girl. The showdown in the saloon. The shoot-out along the main street of the frontier town, with townsfolk scattering, with snipers on the roof. The barn burning. The hard-eyed railroadman wanting to foreclose on the struggling rancher. The horse that comes when its owner whistles. The true confessions over a flickering campfire. Indians, even... Ya! They are all there in 3:10 to Yuma, this finely calibrated and immensely satisfying remake of the 1957 classic directed by Delmer Daves. This version from James Mangold has been refashioned to add some things which weren't there in the black and white original. I'll come to those. The core story of 3:10 to Yuma is about a dialogue between a very bad man, who may yet have some good in him; and a good man who has to find his courage. In the original, Van Hefflin played the struggling rancher Dan Evans, and Glen Ford played the charismatic gunslinger Ben Wade, who is said to have killed 28 men. This time around, Russell Crowe -- all attitude, seductive baritone voice and needling curiosity -- is Ben Wade. And we have no doubt he is a murderer, because when we see him and his gang hold up the stage with the bullion on it he lets his deputy, the psychopathic Charlie Prince, do the killing -- but he's prepared to step in and execute one of his own gang who makes a mistake and leaves a Pinkerton man inside the coach with the bullion. He spares Byron McElroy though. McElroy, beautifully underplayed by Peter Fonda, is also a Pinkerton man, a very experienced bounty hunter, grizzled, laconic and as independent as Wade himself. They've crossed a few times, and we get the feeling Wade enjoys needling him. But the robbery is witnessed from the ridge by Dan Evans, the struggling rancher whose barn has just been burned by a stooge from the railroad company trying to squeeze him off his land. He's out with his two sons, trying to round up the cattle that stampeded when their barn burned. Christian Bale plays Evans, and he is as withdrawn as Ben Wade is loquacious, as cautious as Wade is a risk-taker. He's a civil war veteran, lame in one leg, devoted to his wife and kids, and near the end of his tether. His young son adores him, his 14-year-old son thinks he's a coward and can't understand why he doesn't go to town and demand restitution for the barn. His 14-year-old tends to read pulp fiction about the old west, and is fascinated with Ben Wade. He's very nicely played in this version by Logan Lerman. But the main dialogue is between Wade and Evans. And that is one of the great things about this screenplay: it manages to articulate and question many values held on the frontier then and maybe more universally now in this dialogue, which threads throughout the film, with smoky-voiced Wade needling and seducing, acting as devil's advocate, probing for his opponent's weak points. Crowe does this superbly well. Christian Bale is equally impressive, but his is a different kind of strength, a slow smouldering to ignite a kind of recklessness. And so it is that he comes to accept the money from his banker enemy, to escort a captured Wade to the railhead and put him on the prison train, the 3:10 to Yuma. The original film, scripted by Halstead Welles, was based on a story by Elmore Leonard. Mangold's version, scripted by Michael Brandt and Derek Hass, retains the structure and strength of the original screenplay, with its constant shifts in the balance of power, its switches as one dramatic event succeeds another. This is classic suspense, and Mangold's version indeed fleshes out the action: we see the building of the railway, with overseers pushing the Chinese labourers (now that's a piece of historical accuracy we didn't see in many original westerns). 3:10 to Yuma touches some great themes -- many of them quite contemporary. It's no accident Christian Bale's Dan Evans is a war veteran; indeed he joins a great line of different versions of this American archetype -- the alienated returned soldier, reluctant to talk about his war, disgusted by what he sees around him. A contemporary theme indeed. And there are other moments in this film which may reverberate with recent events. But mainly this is gripping entertainment and when the 3:10 to Yuma finally stands at the railhead in the town called 'Contention', listen to the film as carefully as you watch the story play out. You'll be listening to its heartbeat. We've seen some bold tries at reinterpreting the Western in recent years; two of them by Australians: The Proposition and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. This one has the drama they lacked. See it.

The Jane Austen Book Club

31/01/2008
Not so much a romantic drama as a relationship movie for ladies who read. Robin Swicord has adapted Karen Joy Fowler's novel about a group of California Ladies who start a book club devoted to re-reading Jane Austen's novels and find parallels with their own lives along the way. But as with most book clubs, there are some unlikely ring-ins. Kathy Baker plays the shrewd, six-times-married Bernadette; Maria Bello plays the very managing Jocelyn, Maggie Grace the sports-mad twentysomething, Emily Blunt the stitched-up French teacher, and young Hugh Dance the Californian tech-head who keeps trying to convert the group to Ursula Le Guin. It's more California than home counties, but Jane spotters will enjoy finding parallels with Austen's characters and their dilemmas. It's an entertaining Friday night movie.

Charlie Wilson's War

24/01/2008
Charlie Wilson, a former naval officer with a proud history of conduct demerits, became a Democratic member of Congress for the second district of Texas in l961. he was re-elected eleven times. He was known as a playboy congressman, but he also had an ability to charm people, to do and extract favours, and a strong interest in history. Charlie Wilson's War , based on George Crile's book of the same name, describes Charlie's entry into politics at the age of 13, at the time a neighbour poisoned his pet dog by putting ground glass in his food. The dog died in agony. Charlie notcied the neighbour was up for re-election for a city post. A farmer's son, at thirteen he was licensed to drive a car. On polling day he drove 96 black voters to the polls, and as he left them there told them he didn't want to influence their vote, but one of the incumbents had poisoned his dog. The neighbour lost his seat. The film begins with Hanks as Wilson sitting in a spa at a Las Vegas hotel with two strippers, his then girlfriend Crystal, and a producer. They are doing coke, and trying to get him to back a television show for Crystal. But his attention is distracted by a telecast from Afghanistan, with Afghani people pleading for help to resist the Soviet invasion. Charlie extricates himself gracefully from a cocaine party, flies back to Washington, calls up the congressional appropriations committee and asks them to double the CIA appropriation to Afghanistan. He had just been elected to the sub committee which handles appropriations for covert activities, And - this is one of the fascinating things this film reveals in its breezy scrutiny of Washington poeer broking and backdoor politics - congress as a whole NEVER gets to scrutinise these appropriations. They just vote for a single line. This was the beginning of a learning experience for Wilson. He's contacted by Joanne Herron, a very rich Texan who'se been saved by Jesus and sees it her mission to save Afghanistan from godless communism. It's a juicy role, and Julia Roberts , in one of the year's most extraordinary hairdos, just goes for it. Her Joanne Herring is manipulative, and relentless, but somehow likeable. She just happens to be in touch with her good friend General Zhia, in Paksitan. She wants Charlie to go meet him. He does, and makes a complete fool of himself. " You know you've reached rock bottom when you're told you have character flaws by a man who hanged his predecessor in a miliary coup" he says of that meeting. Its one of many delicious one liners infilm.But Wilson visits Afghani refugee camps, and comes away shaken. The third person in this trio is a rumpled, blunt CIA agent ,Gust Avrakotos, played by Phillip Seymour Hoffman. With a beer gut, a hairy moustache, and a penchant for speaking his mind, Gust is the antithesis of the Harvard Yale Wasp graduates then favoured by the CIA chiefs. And he resents the implied racism. But he shares Wilson's taste for single malt, and for risk taking. Mike Nichols, who has been making memorable films since his screen debut with Who's Afraid of irginia Wolf, has made a zinger with this one. It's briskly paced, and immensely entertaining , while giving real insights into Washinton power politics.Nichols was a cabaret comedian before he turned to movies. He knows how to pace comedy, and to entertain.The script, penned by West Wing's Aaron Sorkin, has enormous fun with congressional power games, and the manipulation employed. The breezy breezy irreverence makes the truths it has to tell very palatable. But how much of the truth does it tell? This after all is the nineteen eighties, so the word Taliban is not mentioned, not once. The film does however have a coda which is far from triumphal: having armed the mujahadeen, America then turned its back on the battered and ruined Afghanistan until after 9/11. In an odd way, Charlie Wilson's war may succeed in backgrounding some political debate better than the sombre and angry Iraq films we are seeing now. I hope so. Either way, it's a damn good movie.

Juno

17/01/2008
Months ago, I went to Juno dreading what I knew was an American comedy about a pregnant 16-year-old schoolgirl. I could just imagine the industrial strength teen jokes, the tears, the happy ending. Even though I knew it was directed by Jason Reitman, who made Thank You For Smoking, I was grinding my teeth. I was wrong. Juno is a delight. She's the sort of kid who wears flannel shirts, says sharp things and doesn't take easily to authority. There is at least one in every class of 16-year-olds. Here she's played by the young Canadian actress Ellen Page, who has a sure touch with timing and great emotional clarity. Juno is not at all a mixed up teen; she's likeable, well centred, and intellectually sharp ;maybe a bit of a know-it-all. She's just not quite emotionally ready for all this. Poor Juno. It was her first time. But she decides to have the baby. She finds the adoptive parents for it. Her own parents are supportive. She just has to get through the next nine months, right? Well actually she has to grow up. And in observing, getting close to the pair who will adopt her baby, (Jennifer Garner and Jason Bateman) Juno will grow up. It's a film which will take you to some unexpected places. And the jokes come thick and fast. Diablo Cody's screenplay is fresh and original. Treat yourself.

The Kite Runner

17/01/2008
Khaled Hosseini's novel about the different fates of two boyhood friends spanned three different eras in Afghanistan and America: Kabul before the Soviet invasion of l979; America in the 80s, and Kabul under the Taliban. David Benioff, who wrote the stinker Troy, as well as the highly original The 25th Hour, has worked carefully on this adaptation. And so has director Marc Forster, whose previous films include Monsters Ball, and Finding Neverland. Perhaps it was his gift for working with child actors that landed him this film...which flashes back, as does the novel, from a phone call to an adult Amir, an Afghan-born America writer, to his memories of his childhood in pre-invasion Kabul. And here I was once again hooked, as I was with the novel. It's a fascinating world, a mix of medieval ritual and obligation with educated modernism. Amir lives with his father, a wealthy, educated Afghani in a house in Kabul tended by Ali, his father's servant. Baba is Pashtun, a member of the ruling majority, but a highly educated secularist. Ali and his son are Hazara, an often persecuted minority group in Afghanistan. He has been with Almir's father since they were boys; his son, Hassan, is being raised as Amir's friend and servant. It's an idyllic, privileged life overshadowed by only one thing: Amir, whose mother is dead, longs for the approval of his father, and doesn't always win it. But the film brings us the great delights of the boys in that time: storytelling under the tree in the courtyard, and the thrill of the kite battles the boys wage over the city. In these contests, one needs not only skill in the air but partnership with a fleet footed kite runner, who must run all over the city to collect the vanquished fallen kites. Hassan is one of the best. But on the day of Amir's great victory, Hassan is waylaid by a gang of envious boys, and brutalised. Amir is a witness but shamefully he hides rather than help his friend. And later, still shamed, lies to discredit Hassan. The opening third of this film is richly textured, lyrical and horrifying by turns. The boys—young Amir is played by Zekeria Ebrahimi and Hassan most eloquently by Amir Khan Mahmidzada—are separated when Ali shocks his master by announcing he will take his son back to the village. And then the Soviets invade. Baba, Amir's father, manages to buy them a refugee passage out of Afghanistan. The mid-section of the film concerns Amir's battle between fidelity and desire as he grows up, becomes a writer, and enlists the aid of his by now ailing father to win the hand of Soraya, the daughter of an educated Pashtun general. I found this section one of the most moving in the film, and it is substantially because Baba is played with enormous depth and dignity by the Iranian actor Homayoun Hershadi. Hershadi is in fact a practising architect whom Abbas Kiarastami talked into playing the lead role in his memorable film A Taste of Cherry. He brings a delicacy as well as a fierce authority to his role here which illuminates the cultural difficulties exiles must surmount. The third part of the film picks up from that opening phone call. Ali is dead, but an old family friend insists he must return to Taliban held Afghanistan to rescue Ali's son. The Kite Runner is a film about guilt and honour, about relationships between sons and their fathers, and about a brutal theocratic regime. A film cannot of course bring alive all the detail which made Hosseini's novel so fascinating. But Marc Forster, shooting in China to double for Kabul, is able to evoke it, while handling the most brutal sequences of the story with tact. They are nonetheless horrifying: if anyone doubts the truthfulness of this fiction, let me say it is similar in tone and incident to the only feature film I know of made in Afghanistan for years: Siddiq Barmak's Osama, made in 2004. The Kite Runner is epic in scope, yet traditionally American in narrative, of a man searching for redemption. In this case, I was glad of it.

American Gangster

10/01/2008
American Gangster is a film which aches to be the great American metaphor. Since the gangster film took over from the Western as the movies' foundation myth, some very big boys indeed have found it a convenient fable. Coppola with Godfather, Scorsese with Goodfellas, Da Palma and Pacino with Scarface, Michael Mann with Heat, the Coen Brothers with Miller's Crossing. And the greatest of them all: Sergio Leone with Once Upon a Time in America. All of these films take place in a mythical landscape. We could call it Yellowstone, or Monument Valley, but let's just call it testosterone gulch. Ridley Scott has taken Steve Zaillian's screenplay about the rise and rise and ultimate fall of Frank Lucas—who rose in the 70s to become Harlem's heroin drug lord, beating the Italo-American mafia at their own game—and cast it as one great big metaphor for badass American capitalism. And he has cast Mr Gravitas himself, Denzel Washington, as Frank Lucas, the farm boy from Carolina who became a sober-suited, button-down businessman, a multimillionaire with multiple offshore bank accounts, a man given to lecturing his associates on such things as branding and customer loyalty. The brand was Blue Magic, 95 per cent pure heroin which the businessman imported directly from its source in Thailand...via Vietnam. Zaillian and Scott also try to make it a parable about racism. Neither the US attorney's office, nor the Italo-American good old boys at first take Lucas seriously. Because he's black. They think he must be working for someone else. The one who brings him down is a rumpled, obsessive cop called Richie Roberts, a man with a train wreck of a personal life, and habits which really annoy his colleagues...the biggest being his refusal to take kickbacks. It all comes to a head when Richie turns in a million dollars in unmarked bills he finds busting a gambling racketeer. Nobody much around the station will talk to him, so he quits to study law until he's hauled in to head up a special anti-drugs detail. Russell Crowe, grievously miscast as a romantic hero by his good friend Ridley Scott in A Good Year—and nobody, not even Ridley should photograph the flying chock wedge from the rear because it does nothing for those little sloping shoulders—Russell Crowe here does fine work. Much better work than Washington, in fact, whose special brand of moral gravitas sits uncomfortably in the role. It does not ignite the righteousness Washington can deliver. To ram home a point, Scott and Zaillin set Bumpy Johnson's homily about the old loyalty code which once served the made men inside the sterility of a new style franchise store. Whatever happened to good old fashioned service? Where is the place for the corner shop, for values of service and loyalty? For the honest entrepreneur? Lucas sets out to become his own boss—a fact, the film will repeatedly advise us, which makes him very difficult to catch. Who'd a thunk it? A black entrepreneur? This is not the first parable filmed in Testosterone Gulch which defers the confrontation between hero and anti-hero until damn near the end. Michael Mann did that with de Niro and Pacino in Heat. But having a narrative running on two parallel tracks that finally curve to intersect only near the end makes for a film which has an intrinsic problem mustering dramatic tension. Zaillin and Scott try to compensate in various ways: there are the shots settling the context of the period, Nixon lying on the television while bombing Vietnam, the phoney peace talks, the bodies coming home. It all falls short of a convincing metaphor. Nor do the sideways forays into the men's family lives help much. Time and again we are set up with the introduction of a new character—Lucas's wooing of a beauty queen, Miss Puerto Rica, is an example—only to have this contribute little to the story. In the end, craft skills, dazzling as Scott's are, don't help. It has a very nifty ending but at two hours thirty-seven minutes American Gangster is grossly inflated and, as a great American metaphor, it fizzles. It would have been much better if they'd just made a movie.

The Darjeeling Limited

03/01/2008
Wes Anderson first made a name with Rushmore, the l998 film about a precocious, smart-arse schoolboy who knew about everything except what was actually happening around him. It restarted Bill Murray's screen career, and brought to notice Jason Schwartzman, who played the 15-year-old lead. And Anderson went on to make such cult hits as The Royal Tenenbaums, and a bit of a miss, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. Anderson has, from the start, a style all his own. His artifice is up-front, and he moves his characters sometimes like puppets in a doll house which come alive and say funny, and unnervingly perceptive things in deadpan tones. Hence Bill Murray. If The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou was a tribute to the Fellini comedies all filmed on the sets of the great Roman film studios at Cinecitta, The Darjeeling Limited is an equally stylised love song to India. And to Indian trains. The train on which this film is set is a beauty, with its peacock blue wallpapers, its elaborate panelling and friezes, and its chandeliers. It somehow catches the colours of India. It made me want to jump on board immediately. Three brothers board a train, along with an enormous set of matched Louis Vuitton luggage, in mustard yellow leather embossed with red. The luggage is almost a train in itself, and I expected it to take on a life of its own, like The Luggage in Terry Pratchett novels which disappears frequently, savagely barks its owners' shins, and contains all sorts of unexpected objects its owners can't recall packing. But the brothers have other issues. Francis, the eldest, played by Owen Wilson, is wearing facial bandages and gives the vaguest explanations about how he smashed his face. Peter, played by Adrian Brody is, we learn, to become a father, and he's not sure he's ready. He and Francis engage in constant verbal scuffling. Jack, the youngest, has figured out how to disappear at key moments, and get his own way most of the time, including with their beautiful Indian stewardess. The brothers haven't met for a year, since their father's death. Francis has summoned him because he feels a spiritual journey in India would bring them together. Francis is used to making decisions for all three. Their mother, it seems, was a bit of a bolter. Still is. They think she's somewhere in India. Should they go find her? This is familiar Wes Anderson territory: the old ties and subliminal tensions of any suffocating nuclear family they play out once more on the train, along with lots of whimsical comedy, some of which flops. And other moments I found delicious. But the brothers do get off the train. And are caught up in a near drowning. India as a tourist backdrop becomes, suddenly, something else. Something much closer to emotional reality. And this is what saves the film, I think. I loved it. It not only looks totally gorgeous, it has a respect for the culture which wells up and surmounts Wes Anderson's unabashedly synthetic creation. Somewhere along the way the brothers stop being tourists and start to see the people around them. And yes, they do decide to go and find their mum...who is Angelica Huston, and who is not at all cosy. Wes Anderson is an acquired taste, I think. Some people find his fey humour a little too precious. Sometimes it does labour. You either get him or you don't. But be assured this is Anderson back on form. This film has all the discipline and tight storytelling The Life Aquatic lacked. Bill Murray is in there somewhere too. Along with the luggage.

I Am Legend

03/01/2008
I love a good post-apocalypse story, novel or film. I've enjoyed them for years. The first Angela Carter novel I ever read was a post-apocalypse tale called Heroes and Villains. Jolly good it was too. The latest was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which the great American tragedian takes a familiar scenario -- a man, a child, a blackened landscape; the will and ingenuity needed to survive -- and makes it art through total immersion in an imagined world, conjured in precise poetic prose. Then there are the great post-apocalyptic moments. In which Phillip K Dick novel, for example, did someone say: 'If you stand downwind, you can smell America burning'? I Am Legend is based on a l954 novel by Richard Matheson, who also invented The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was first adapted as a film The Omega Man, in l971. This time round the screenplay is by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman. We begin with a hunt. A man and his dog are stalking a deer through the deserted, overgrown streets and highrise buildings of Manhattan. Other game prowl and scatter. Packs of wild dogs, other deer, a tiger. It's a thrilling conceit, beautifully realised. The empty concrete canyons, the crumbling sidewalks, vines twining through abandoned cars. Tufts of weed, waist high, sprouting through cracked footpaths. Danny Boyle did it better earlier, using the empty streets of London as a set for his zombie film 28 Days Later. But it's still impressive; more so because of the detail. This is not a set; these are streets we know, if only from cinema. Our hunter is a man alone in Manhattan. Yes there are vicious feral dogs, and a pride of rampaging lions. There are store dummies. But our man, a very organised military scientist, has no-one to talk to except photographs of his wife and kids and a beautiful Alsatian dog, Sam, who rides with Neville in his sports car, hunts with him -- walks side by side with him on his own treadmill when it's time to exercise. Flashbacks explain some things. Neville is the only human survivor of a deadly genetically engineered virus originally developed as a vaccine against cancer. It mutated, turning human beings into raging, daylight-phobic zombies. It seems to have the same effect on dogs, though mysteriously deer, tigers and other wildlife are unaffected. Neville scavenges systematically by day and, in a laboratory, tries to find an anti-viral cure. He exercises, hunts, watches old movies and breakfast newscasts on DVD. At night he barricades his Manhattan apartment against those who prowl the dark. And he talks to his dog. As another dog-talker, I thought this was rather neat. It beats the hell out of Tom Hanks talking to his basketball in Castaway. But as a hardened dog-owning moviegoer, my heart was sinking. Hardened because while the night prowling mutants or zombies do provide some heart-stopping moments, we are not asked to care one zot when they are stopped in their tracks. They are just greyish, animated zombie matter. But the dog is different. At a certain stage we just know, by the rules of dramatic logic, that Sam is at risk. Can we stand it? Who will Robert Neville talk to now? Well...can't tell you that. But I can say that finally Neville is not alone. And after a gripping first hour, the film goes downhill in the last great battle against the greyish, computer-generated and basically pretty uninteresting zombies. Making the film an argument between science and religion doesn't help much either. It was during the zombie rampage that I began to ponder the following questions: Who is maintaining the power supplying Robert Neville's DVD player, treadmill, apartment and laboratory? Isn't the first law of post-apocalypse stories that after a certain time the lights go out? Why, if Neville is the sole survivor, is he trying to invent a vaccine or an anti-venine (the film isn't exactly clear which it is)? And is there or is there not a land beyond? You know, there is a happy land where the elect, that is the survivors, have been able to re-establish normality. The land beyond is a key idea in post-apocalypse stories, whether The Children of Men, or The Road. It's a constant subject of rumour, speculation, fantasy and desire for the struggling survivors. It's a Christian hymn: 'There is a happy land far away'. It's a gated community. It's an ideal. It's a boundary all must pass. The land beyond pops up again, unexplored and unexplained, in I Am Legend. It's so neat I was furious. But by then I had given up on the movie. I Am Legend is initially interesting entertainment. The first hour zips along but the finale makes it just another movie with snarling grey CGI zombies, and a simplistic lecture about religion good; science bad. Spare us. It's screening nationally and is rated M. Dog lovers beware.

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