Past Programs
Family and Children - 2008
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Smart People
24/04/2008
Dennis Quaid plays Lawrence Wetherhold, a widowed professor whose approach to the world is sarcasm. Somehow he's raised his two teenagers, son James, a would-be poet who has fled to a college dormitory, and daughter Vanessa (Ellen Page) who copies her father's intellectual snobbery. When the Prof breaks his leg after a ludicrous accident his shambolical brother Chuck moves in to chauffeur him. And the doctor in casualty, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, turns out to be a former student to whom Quaid gave poor grades. Mysteriously though, she likes him.
I had some hopes for this film about the redemption of a curmudgeon, especially with the delightful Ellen Page (Juno) as the snobbish daughter, and warm, goofy Thomas Hayden Church (Sideways) as Chuck. But it's a second-rate script and it's directed with such a heavy hand by Noam Munro, a former commercials director, that most of the characters drove me nuts. Quaid is so arrogant and Page so snooty I wanted to slap them both; there is no way I could believe Sarah Jessica Parker's character could be attracted to Quaid. Only Thomas-Hayden Church's Chuck has any warmth.
Look, I am not silly enough to believe that the only worthwhile movies are about likeable people. Often the opposite is true. But there has to be some sort of insight, and this has none. I hope Noam Munro doesn't direct any more movies till he's worked out what makes a good one
Nim's Island
10/04/2008
This is a children's adventure story starring Abigal Breslin as a very confident young girl who lives on a South Pacific island with her scientist dad, and a lizard, a pelican and a sea lion for company.
They're not Robinson Crusoeing it -- they have internet and email. But when Dad goes off sailing for a few days to try to capture a rare bit of microscopic marine life, he's caught in a tropical monsoon, his yacht is demasted, and he's in trouble. Back on the island, Nim manages to get an email out to a swashbucking writer of adventure yarns, Alex Rover, who has been emailing her dad with questions about volcanoes.
But Alex is actually Alexandra (Jodie Foster) and she's a completely neurotic, agoraphobic writer too scared to step out her front door. Somehow she has to get to Nim. It's an interesting thing about Jodie Foster: so many of the projects this highly intelligent, former child star has taken on as an actor or producer are about overcoming fears.
Just think: The Silence of the Lambs, The Panic Room. This film has the same message. It's a good message for kids, I just wish the film had been directed without being so heavy handed.
Still, it's more interesting entertainment than most of the computer generated, monster-infested fare out there right now for children.
Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger
20/03/2008
A coming-of-age black comedy set in Adelaide about a 13-year-old Jewish nerd (Danielle Catanzariti) who experiences life beyond her exclusive private school cocoon when she befriends a rebel from a state school (Keisha Castle-Hughes) with a motorbike-riding mum (Toni Collette). This is in the mould of the sharpest American films about teens, like Rushmore or Heathers, but falls short. Esther's up-tight family -- replete with tense, stuffy meals, a brittle mother and a family shrink -- plays more like a cliche of middle class dysfunction than insightful satire. Even on a surface level the camera and art direction are overwhelmingly dull, taking away from Catanzariti's solid central performance. There's more verve in the title than the whole film.
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 Verįstegui) 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.
Definitely, Maybe
14/02/2008
A surprisingly entertaining romantic comedy in which Ryan Reynolds plays Will, an ad exec who decides to tell his young daughter the story of how he met mum, the same day he signs off on their divorce. But it's like a whodunnit, because we flash back to the nineties, and we see him dating three women, without any clue as to who is 'the one'.
What sets this film apart is the interesting subplot of Will's very Gen X journey, starting with him working as an idealistic staffer for Clinton in '92 and ending, many disappointments and compromises later, at the ad agency. I think Reynolds lacks the presence of a truly great romantic lead, but the three women (Rachel Weisz, Isla Fisher, Elizabeth Banks) make up for that.
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.
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 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.
