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Film - 2008
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The Week in Film
02/10/2008
Appropos Paul Newman, who died this week aged 83
I once heard it said that it was easier for the beautiful to be good than for the rest of us. The logic being that the beautiful receive more attention and affection than the rest of us, and so, bathed in emotional sunshine, can spread warmth and cheer.
Now it ain't necessarily so on my observation, but the remarkable thing about Paul Newman is that he was, for one so physically favoured, never a narcissist onscreen. The extent of his goodness we only truly discover on his death.
The actor with the chiselled jaw, the crinkly grin and those arresting blue eyes was a huge part of the cinema of my teens. Indeed I think I spent my first date, aged fifteen, in the Woy Woy picture theatre distractedly watching Newman, the outsider, the drifter with the shady past, juggle amour with both Joanne Woodward and Lee Remick. This was in the Long Hot Summer, and it was an awkward occasion. I was wearing a condom on my thumb in the mistaken belief that it was something else. But that's another story. Someone enlightened me, at interval.
The fifties though were like that at the movies. Sex meant small southern towns and repressed sons and daughters chafing under the tyranny of big daddies, played by Burl Ives or Orson Welles, and scripts based on stories by William Faulkner or Eugene O'Neill. Perhaps it was all a metaphor for the kind of oedipal explosion post war America was cooking up: within half a decade the sons and daughters were repudiating all the big daddies, bigtime.
Meanwhile there was Paul Newman, always the dangerous outsider, even when, as in Hud, he was the son of the ranch. He was beyond sexy. He had that dangerous air of independence, standing a little back and to one side, sizing up the scene and making up his own mind. It was blindingly attractive.
Of today's stars, only Daniel Craig possesses the same blend of willpower and sexiness amplified by intelligence.
Face it, George and Brad are too easy going. Along with Matt Damon, they do good philanthropic things, and they stand up for their beliefs as Newman and Joanne Woodward did for theirs. But they are, all three, nice guys.
Paul Newman wasn't nice. He was good, which is a far harder, rarer thing to be. He was good onscreen, where he didn't demand scripts which made him a celluloid hero. He was willing to play scramblers, and losers -- look at him with Joanne Woodward in Mister and Mrs Bridge, or his last role, in The Road to Perdition. He never displayed the narcissism of his screen partner, the Sundance Kid, in his choice of roles, and he aged far better.
He was good off screen: a good husband and father, according to his kids, and a philanthropist. Just how good he was, how many sick children and small community organisations benefited, we are only now discovering.
And the man could cook! What more could any thinking woman want?
Black Balloon nominations
And in other film news this week, first time director Elissa Down is leading the field as the Australian film awards season gets under way.
Her fellow directors awarded her best director for the feature film The Black Balloon last weekend at the Australian Directors Guild awards. The Black Balloon then received ten nominations for the If awards, including another for Melissa as director. And now it's also been nominated as best feature film for children in the prestigious Asia Pacific Screen Awards.
Scott Hicks; Tony Ayres
In Adelaide Scott Hicks has begun shooting on his first Australian film since Shine a dozen years ago. Called The Boys Are Back in Town, it stars Clive Owen as a sportswriter who has to learn to be a father to two sons.
And Tony Ayres is slated to direct a film based on the James Bulger murder case, one of a dozen looking for investors at the upcoming Screen Producers Conference of Australia.
Interview with Alan Ball, director, Towelhead
02/10/2008
Alan Ball walked off with an Oscar for his screenplay for American Beauty. That was back in 2000 and he followed this by creating the gloriously wacky and insightful TV series Six Feet Under.
Now with credits like these, Alan Ball could call his own shots. And what he chose to do was to adapt a daring novel by Alicia Erian told by a thirteen-year-old girl, Jasira, who has to deal with her own blossoming sexuality in the kind of red-neck Texan town where people fly flags on their front lawn.
It's the time of the first Gulf war, and Jasira's mother is worried because her live-in boyfriend is developing eyes for her daughter. So she ships her off to her self-absorbed, Lebanese-American father, who is equally ill equipped to parent a teenage girl. Only the next door neighbour, a hyper-patriotic army reservist, seems to actually like Jasira...and maybe in the wrong way.
Because of the Gulf war, around that time anyone from the Middle East copped epitaphs like 'Sand Monkey', and 'Towelhead'. Yet when the film was released in America, the distributors got cold feet. They called it Nothing is Private.
At least, in Australia it will open under its original title.
The Week in Film
25/09/2008
Spielberg's Dreamworks divorced from Paramount
After a lot of bitter wrangling, Stacey Snider, Spielberg and David Geffen are free to go it alone, with huge backing from the Indian studio Reliance to the tune of about 500 million US dollars.
The deal was announced back in May at the Cannes Film Festival, but the divorce has been ugly. Paramount didn't want custody of any of the executives but got very tough about assets, hanging on to just about all Dreamworks' development slate, except projects going to cost a big lot of money. Among these, according to Variety's Anne Thompson, is Tintin, the film Spielberg is planning with Peter Jackson about the Belgian comic strip adventurer who looks like Kevin Rudd.
Spielberg had approached Universal studios to finance it, but the price was too steep. Now Paramount has counter-offered to fully finance the film -- another in 3D -- and Spielberg and Jackson are considering the offer.
Now Dreamworks has to find another big studio-type distributor. We do live in interesting times.
Screen Australia
Staunchly ignoring all this manoeuvring, as hedge funds flee the film business, Screen Australia goes in search of a mandate. Australian screen directors meet for their annual conference this weekend, to talk about collaboration. Editors, sound designers, composers, cinematographers and other specialists will take the podium with directors to tell tales of collaborations that work, and maybe some that don't.
The Guild will announce its annual awards for best director in a variety of categories, and animator Bruce Petty will receive a career achievement award. Rowan Woods, the Australian director who made The Boys, and Little Fish, will be there with his first American feature film to show his colleagues. Winged Creatures, it's called, it has among others Forest Whitaker, Kate Beckinsale, and Dakota Fanning -- and I hear it looks pretty good.
Interview with Eric Guirado, The Grocer's Son
25/09/2008
Time to take a quiet trip in the French countryside, I think. We're trundling around the South of France on the back rounds, 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 sullen, thirtysomething young man called Antoine, 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, to show him what the customers want. And they are pretty feisty customers. Their knees may be gone but boy, do they have attitude!
The Grocer's Son is by Eric Guirado, and it's a world away from the trendy nostalgia of city folk for country ways which has figured in recent French comedies.
The Week in Film
18/09/2008
Disgrace triumphs in Toronto
Disgrace, the Australian film based on JM Coetzee's bleak South African novel, has won a special award from international film critics at the Toronto Film festival. It stars John Malcovich, was adapted from the Coetzee novel by Anna Maria Monticelli, and directed by Steve Jacobs. It won one of two FIPRESCI awards from a jury headed by eminent American critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. ICON film will release Disgrace in the New Year.
Screen Australia mission statement
Screen Australia has released a statement of intent in response to a request from Arts and Environment minister Peter Garrett. A kind of mission statement, if you like, a set of principles to be fleshed out by a more comprehensive review towards the end of the year.
Among the principles, now being discussed in a lightning round of industry consultation, are a commitment to Australian films developing distribution and marketing strategies early in the production process; a proposal to encourage successful filmmakers behind small or medium films with bonuses; and an emphasis on developing sustainable film production businesses rather than supporting one-off film projects.
This last is not exactly new. It's been the aim of most Australian film support packages since the Gonski review a dozen years ago. The idea of bonuses is new, though, but details have yet to emerge.
Matt Damon Haiti appeal
And finally, Matt Damon went to hurricane-ravaged Haiti last week with Haitian born singer Wyclef Jean, to hand out food relief and encourage people to donate to the United Nations relief appeal. More than 800,000 people have been left homeless on the impoverished island after it was hit by four hurricanes in a month. The UN needs to raise a hundred million dollars. We'll put the link on our website.
Interview with Bruce Beresford
18/09/2008
Bruce Beresford's memoir Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This: True Stories From A Life In The Screen Trade was published last year. It had some very funny stories but what impressed me reading it recently was the man's tenacity in the face of all these projects which haven't happened.
How could you keep going as a filmmaker, just keep hanging in there with so many projects which haven't happened?
Bruce Beresford is now happily finishing post production on Mao's Last Dancer, his first Australian film since Paradise Road, ten years ago.
But he's gone into print again this weekend with a short essay on the Australian film industry which takes issue with some received wisdom, particularly about the early days of Australian cinema. It's one of a series of anniversary essays in The Australian's weekend magazine. I had a sneak preview, and I talked to him at the post production house where he's editing.
Interview with Kumar Shahani
11/09/2008
Now it's time to meet one of the intellectuals -- and great storytellers -- of Indian cinema: Kumar Shahani. I'm not talking Bollywood here but what's called in India 'Parallel Cinema'.
Shahani's l972 film Maya Darpan, also known as Mirror of Illusion, is credited as the first Indian 'formalist' film. His work belongs firmly in the avant-garde, and is informed by studies across cultures and art forms.
Kumar Shahani was born in Pakistan, and settled in India after Partition. He had polio as a boy, and time at home to read, study and dream. After university in India, he went to Paris and assisted Robert Bresson on Une femme deuce. He also participated in the May 1968 events, and was influenced by the debates on cinema at that time.
Kumar Shahani was a visiting artist at the Asia Pacific Triennale in Brisbane in 2006, which is where I met him. The cinematheque there has since acquired his 2000 film The Bamboo Flute, a fascinating work which uses images to mirror and stand for the rhythms, and the breath, of one of the oldest elements in Indian civilisation.
The Week in Film
11/09/2008
Aranofsky, Rourke woo Venice
The big surprise this last week was the winning film at the Venice Film Festival; Darren Aranofsky, who hit a wall when he took that ponderous CGI clunker The Fountain to Venice two years ago, went back for more this year with a very different film called The Wrestler, starring Mickey Rourke, a man who's been in more clunkers than most.
And hey, they won the Golden Lion. Talk about comebacks. Critics are raving. Variety's Tod McCarthy, for example, called Rourke's ageing wrestler 'one of the great, iconic screen performances'.
It must have been a godsend for the Venice jury. Critics this year have been united. It was one of the most dismal festivals in a decade. 'Godawful' The Guardian called it. So bad were so many movies there was a major desertion -- even empty hotel rooms in the Lido's Hotel des Bains.
Icon sold
Meanwhile, another Australian distributor of indie films has gone west...been sold that is.
Mel Gibson and Bruce Davey's Icon, which bought Dendy Films as well as its cinemas last year, has sold its distribution arm to UK's Stewart Till, former CEO of United International Pictures, and currently chair of the UK Screen Council.
Till is building a global sales and distribution company under the banner 'Stadium'.
Icon will remain a production company, and will also keep the Dendy cinemas. But it does mean the field of little Aussie battlers distributing indie and small films has shrunk again. Or maybe reshaped itself.
The Australian arm of Icon has a number of films still on its slate to release, with diminishing expertise.
Mind you, it's been a rough time for distributors of independent films. There's been a huge glut, largely because of a surge of hedge funds with cash swashing into the business a few years back. Five or six years ago there were four hundred plus independent films released in America. This year, there were six hundred.
Now the hedge fund billions have disappeared, the industry is changing fast I think, and Davey saw the writing on the wall.
Vale Michael Pate
04/09/2008
Michael Pate was a writer, director, producer and, of course, actor, whose career in show business spanned seventy years.
It took him to Hollywood, where the boy from Drummoyne in Sydney was in hot demand as an Indian who could ride, shoot, project, and usually die convincingly in westerns. Pate reckoned he had died in sixteen of them, by the late fifties.
He was the Apache Chief in Hondo, he wrote the original screenplay for Escape from Fort Bravo and he also played in The Court Jester with Danny Kaye, in Julius Caesar, and in The Desert Rats.
In Hollywood, Pate was able to earn a comfortable living as a consummately professional support actor, without ever cracking stardom. And when television began thriving he worked regularly on the westerns The Rifleman, Rawhide and Wagon Train.
But he returned regularly to Australia, where he contributed much. He was associate producer of The Age of Consent, the delightful film in which Helen Mirren frolicked naked for the first time on screen. He worked for Channel Seven, including such stand-bys as Matlock Police.
He produced The Mango Tree with his son Christopher, and later adapted, directed and produced Tim, from the Colleen McCullough novel, starring the young Mel Gibson.
Michael Pate actually began his show business life in the ABC, in the late thirties, as a writer and interviewer. The sort of stuff we do here. But he soon drifted into little theatre, with people such as Doris Fitton.
His first film job was in l940 on Charles Chauvel's Forty Thousand Light Horsemen.
Michael Pate. An unmistakeable presence in Australian cultural life. He stayed engaged till the end. A consummate professional... and a good bloke.
The Week in Film
04/09/2008
Vale Don LaFontaine
In a world where many people talk in deep gravelly voices, few have had the impact of Don LaFontaine. The man who voiced more than 5,000 movie trailers died this week, aged 68, of complications from what was described as 'an ongoing lung related illness'. Hmm...
He was a former editor and sound mixer. Then one day, he voiced a part of a trailer. Then more. Soon film trailers and commercials became his life.
His death leaves the American studios, already coping with a movie shortage as a result of this year's writers' strike, with an additional problem. How will they market the films they have this season? And for the election spin-doctors, who will voice the key political advertisements in the presidential campaign?
Two Los Angeles casting agencies have begun searching for men with extremely deep, gravelly voices and a belief that the end of the world is nigh. Or at least, nigh-ish.
Venice latest
From Venice, where the 65th Film Festival is now winding up on the Lido, the news is not so good. There's been a wave of moaning and grumbling from critics and film journalists at this year's festival about the standard of the films -- particularly those in competition. Director Marco Mueller, who won praise for upping the standard during his first four years, has conceded that a number of films he had hoped to screen were not finished because of the writers strike.
But few competing films seem to have found favour with the media. One exception is the Hayao Miyazaki animation Ponyo On the Cliff by the Sea. Another is Birdwatchers, a film about the decimation of Guarani-Kaowa people in the Amazonian rainforest. But there have been few standout films, and new films from directors Barbet Schroeder and Ferzan Ozpetek have not found favour. We'll see.
Correction
I have to thank all those listeners who phoned and emailed last week to point out that I committed a further howler about Alexander the Great, while attempting to apologise for my original mistake.
So...not only did he not build Persepolis, he also died in 323 BC not 300 AD!
The week in film
28/08/2008
Ginnane new SPAA boss
By the most amazing piece of synchronism, the week that Not Quite Hollywood opens, with its array of culprits and survivors of 70s and 80s exploitation films, one of the grand masters has made a comeback in another form.
Anthony Ginnane, a man whom no-one ever accused of caring about culture, a man who styles himself the Australian Roger Corman, a man who produced such shockers as Turkey Shoot and Fantasm Comes Again, as well as cult films such as Screamers and Patrick -- Anthony Ginnane has been elected president of the Screen Producers Association of Australia. Just at the time the new tax offset system swings into action.
It was, unusually, a three-way contest. Ginnane stood against the incumbent president, Trish Lake, and producer Michael Bouchier, producer of Napoleon and Lucky Miles. It was the first time the position had been contested for a decade.
In a statement circulated to members, Ginnane pushed his experience as one who had lived through every different funding regime since the 70s. He is certainly one who knew how to operate the 10BA tax regime.
These days he runs a film distribution business, with a Los Angeles base, handling mainly direct-to-video titles.
It will be an interesting first year for the industry, as Screen Australia beds in under Dr Ruth Harley, and the tax offset -- one of the few in the world with a cultural remit -- beds down. It looks from here like an interesting divide between Australian films with social and aesthetic values or down and basic, even dirty genre pics that get the punters in.
Actually either kind of success would do right now.
Interview with Gal Zaid, writer-actor, 'Foul Gesture'
28/08/2008
In the last few years we've begun to see some very interesting Israeli films here, films in a range of styles and genres, often embodying a critique of prevailing government policies.
Any of you will have seen the delightful comedy of a few months ago The Band's Visit. Coming up is a very powerful film from Ari Folman, an animated documentary called Waltzing With Bashir.
In fact there has been a blossoming of Israeli cinema, and there are some strong offerings screening in the 2008 Israeli Film Festival, sponsored by an organisation called Australian Israel Cultural Exchange.
Here for the festival is Gal Zaid, a very well known actor turned screenwriter and director. He's co-written and stars in one of the films in the festival, called Foul Gesture -- which I think is a rather too polite title...
Interview with Matthew Newton writer-director, 'Three Blind Mice'
21/08/2008
Matthew Newton is an actor turned screenwriter and director. Three Blind Mice is actually his second feature film—he did make a little-seen earlier film, Right Here Right Now, in 2004.
Essentially, it's the story of three naval officers on the town, celebrating one last night of shore leave before they go back to the Middle East. Harry, played by Newton, is the one who wants to play. Toby Schmitz as Dean wants to meet up with his fiancé and their parents: he has ambitions; he has a life plan beyond this tour of duty.
And then there's Sam, played by Ewan Lesley. It's clear from the opening scenes that something has gone very, very wrong; only later do we begin to understand why Sam is actually thinking of going AWOL. Gracie Otto, who edited the film, also stars as Emma, a girl Sam meets along the way and takes home to meet his gran.
The film is still without a distributor. According to Matthew Newton, he's negotiating still, but wants a decent deal. It has been independently financed.
I caught up with Matthew Newton at the Brisbane International Film Festival.
The week in film
21/08/2008
Screen Australia gets boss
Finally there is a CEO appointed to head up Screen Australia, the giant screen agency which since July has combined Film Australia, the FFC and the AFC.
If you were listening to ABC Radio National's Media Report this week you will have met her. She is Dr Ruth Harley who has been head of the New Zealand Film Commission since l997. Before that she worked for Saatchi and Saatchi, and New Zealand on air.
It's fair to say that the appointment surprised many people. Arts minister Peter Garret announced it within a day or so of a report in The Australian Financial Review, which voiced industry criticism of the delay in announcing the appointment. The report canvassed possible appointees including former head of the Australia Council, Michael Lynch, now winding up a stint as CEO of London's South Bank Centre.
There has also been mounting concern about the way the mega quango Screen Australia has been taking shape without input from the CEO. Merging three existing film agencies was never going to be easy, especially as the Labor Party promised pre-election that no jobs would be lost.
But the new organisation structure, as revealed some weeks ago, has directors of three key divisions already appointed. The online industry journal Screenhub, which published a draft diagram of the structure, compared it to the former Soviet film agency MOSFILM.
And this week Brian Rosen, former CEO of the FFC and a self-described far from disappointed applicant for the job Harley got, claimed that the minister and the Department for the Arts had 'effed up the merger' and missed an opportunity to create a lean and creative agency.
In an interview, Rosen criticised the decision to make most jobs standard public service appointments, instead of a contract system which rotated people in and out. It was going to cost the government millions, he said.
Rosen has said he wishes Harley well.
New Babylon to get orchestra screening
The SBS Youth Orchestra is to give a once only performance of Shostakovich's score for New Babylon, a masterpiece of Russian silent expressionist cinema.
It was Shostakovich's first film score, and will be a highlight of the Russian Resurrection Film Festival which these days, interestingly, is sponsored by BHP Billiton.
The festival is national, but sadly this is a one-off screening and performance.
The week in film
14/08/2008
Disabled groups protest Stiller film
Ben Stiller's latest comedy Tropic Thunder has run into trouble with disability groups in Los Angeles who are picketing it for its use of the word 'retard' as a term of abuse.
The comedy has Stiller, Robert Downey Jr and Jack Black as actors in a war movie who find themselves in the middle of the real thing. Stiller plays Tug Speedman, a pumped-up, simple-minded, extremely vain action star. Jack Black plays a comedian who farts a lot and likes fat-suits. And Robert Downey Jr plays an Australian actor prepared to wear blackface to get a part in an American war film. Tom Cruise plays a crass studio executive. The target of the film is Hollywood and its values.
But this week about fifty protesters picketed the film's premiere in Los Angeles with placards saying, 'Ban the movie, ban the word' and 'Eliminate the R word'.
Australians will be able to judge for themselves when the film opens next week. Just a reminder, folks...context is all.
Tilda's festival
Just about every country, city, small town and suburb has its own film festival these days. Now Tilda Swinton has her own personal festival. The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams will be held in a rented ballroom in her home town of Nairn in northern Scotland at the end of August. Swinton decided to create (and pay for) a festival that would, 'run eight and a half days, that would be a six out of ten on the grunge scale, that would serve home-made cakes and fish finger sandwiches. It will screen Tilda's and her friends' favourite films'.
BIFF awards
At the Brisbane International Film Festival last week, audiences named Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's animated drama about a young girl growing up in Iran, as their favourite film. The critics' choice, awarded by the Fipresci jury of international film critics, was Good Cats, a sharply observed drama about corruption and disaffection in urban China. This is a third feature from Ying Liang, one of the new generation of Chinese film-makers empowered by DVCam.
Interview with Roy Andersson, writer-director, You, the Living (Du levande)
14/08/2008
Roy Andersson has made four feature films in forty years. He made a big splash in l970 with a film called A Swedish Love Story. His second film, five years later, was harshly criticised. So he went off and made commercials for 25 years.
Then at the turn of the century he made a very savage, funny bleak film -- a kind of ode to the Millennium -- called Songs From The Second Floor. In it, the good burghers of Sweden are trying to flee as the world around them collapses and the economy fails. At one stage town officials start to sacrifice virgins.
I'd never seen anything quite like this film.
And various critics have reached for odd comparisons to describe Andersson's vision. He's been compared to David Lynch; to Ingmar Bergman crossed with the surrealists; to Terry Gilliam. I don't think his world view is surreal so much as hyper-real, and absurdly gloomy.
His latest film, You, The Living (in release in Sydney and Melbourne, other states to follow) is a series of linked vignettes, some of them dreams. Indeed it takes its title from a poem by Goethe, about the fleetness of life and the imminence of death.
The week in film
07/08/2008
Eric Bana directs
This week we learned that Eric Bana has made a documentary: that is, written and directed one, as well as appearing in it. Love the Beast it's called, and it's a rather emotional film about Bana's 25-year-old relationship with a 1974 Ford Falcon coupe. It's in post production now in Melbourne, and Madman films will release it in October.
Film delay good for Rusty
The Los Angeles Times has reported on why the Ridley Scott Robyn Hood drama Nottingham has been put on hold again. Russell Crowe is to play Nottingham and the film is to put a rather positive, let's say revisionist spin, on the character of the Sheriff. But Crowe's good friend Ridley Scott is still dissatisfied with the script, already worked over by ace screenwriter Brian Helgeland; and has called in British playwright Paul Webb for a third version.
According to Universal Studios chairman Marc Shmuger, the delay will also help Russell Crowe get back into shape as an action hero. The studio is sending a top Los Angeles trainer, Joe Abenassar, to Australia to help Crowe lose weight and get back into fighting shape. Go Rusty, go.
Directors awards
The Australian Directors' Guild is to award cartoonist and animator Bruce Petty its outstanding achievement award for 2008. Previous recipients have been Fred Schepisi; Peter Weir and Gillian Armstrong. Tom Zubrykzki received the Cecil Holmes award for mentoring other filmmakers and Kate
Woods received the outstanding achievement in television direction award.
Screen Australia latest
The online industry journal Screenhub this week got its hands on, and published, a series of charts of the organisational structure of the new giant Screen Australia. Editor David Tiley commented that it looks like Mosfilm. In other words: big, complicated, and scary. If simplicity was the aim of merging three Australian government screen agencies, it ain't happening so far.
There are four divisions to this structure and maybe 200 positions. Interestingly, I've been browsing through the diagrams, the yet-to-be appointed CEO appears to directly head only two divisions. Chris Fitchett, ex AFC, heads a division called Production Support and Investment. Tait Brady, formerly of the FFC and before that Palace Films, heads one called Marketing Support and Promotion.
And Fiona Cameron, who jumped directly to a job as executive director of Strategy and Operations at the new agency after just two months at the Sydney Film Festival, heads a mega structure called Strategy and Operations.
Now this is a work in progress. But we note that Screen Australia still has to announce its CEO. And that the Labor government somewhere along the line made a commitment that this merger would take place without anyone losing jobs. A decision which may well defeat aspirations for a slimmer, faster, more adventurous agency.
Interview with Morgan Spurlock, director, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
07/08/2008
Morgan Spurlock has been out here to present his new documentary at the Brisbane and Melbourne Film festivals.
Spurlock made his name by living on MacDonalds and nothing but for a month, in the documentary Super Size Me. He became obese, and his liver was in very bad shape. MacDonalds hated the movie, but they did cut supersize serves off their menus.
Since then Spurlock has made a reality television series, and then a second documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden - a rather faux search for the US public enemy number one, which took him to a number of middle eastern countries, talking to supporters of Islam from various walks of life. Surpise suprise...most of them weren't too impressed with Osama Bin Laden either. Though to one or two, he was a hero.
Did Spurlock ,em>really expect to find Bin Laden? Did he really expect us to go along with the idea?
Well, we may have, should there have been much in the way of new in formation. But mostly, we get to meet a bunch of fairly nice people, who are, gee, folks just like us.
Is this a documentary or a travelogue? Aimed at whom, exactly?
One thing I discovered whatever the question, Morgan Spurlock remains relentlessly affable.
The week in film
31/07/2008
Vale Youssef Chahine
Egyptian master filmmaker Youssef Chahine, one of the towering figures of Arab cinema, died this week. He was 82, and suffered a brain haemorrhage a month ago.
Chahine, who made his first film in l950, constantly confronted such issues as religious and state authoritarianism. Some of his films were banned or censored by the Egyptian government, but he continued to work. He had studied in California, adored Hollywood cinema, particularly its musicals, but was a critic of American policy in the Middle East, as he was of successive Egyptian governments.
Chahine's filmmaking style was exuberantly eclectic: he would mix tones, moods and genres in his films with delight. Born in the once great cosmopolitan city of Alexandria, he made his own tribute to the city in four films late in his career: his Alexandrian quartet, you could say.
Youssef Chahine was honoured with a lifetime achievement award at the Cannes Film Festival a decade ago. In Venice this week, director Marco Muller announced that this year's Venice Film Festival would be dedicated to Chahine, whose last film This is Chaos, finished with the help of associates, screened there last year.
Still going strong...
One of the world's oldest filmmakers, Portugal's Manoel de Oliveira, will once again have a film screening at this year's Venice Film Festival. This time it's a short, Do Visivel o Invisivel. De Oliveira, who is still making feature films, will turn one hundred in December. He is currently working on his forty-ninth production.
Brisbane to honour Ledger
The Brisbane International Film Festival, which opens this coming week, will honour the late Heath Ledger with the Chauvel award. It's bestowed each year to someone who has made a significant contribution to Australian cinema, and it has been awarded previously to Geoffrey Rush and to Bryan Brown.
Interview with Serge Bozon, director, La France
31/07/2008
Jason Di Rosso spoke to French filmmaker Serge Bozon, director of La France, which is screening at the Melbourne International Film festival.
It's about a group of French soldiers in World War I, wandering the countryside near the front lines. We don't know at first where they're headed, what they're mission is -- but they're joined by a young woman, disguised as a boy, whose objective is clear: she's trying to reach her husband's regiment and find out why he doesn't want to receive her letters anymore. It's like a road movie set in fields and forests, crossed with a musical as the soldiers break into wistful love songs composed in a sixties pop style (director Serge Bozon is a great fan of that decade). The result is a highly original, poetic war movie -- up there with the best in the genre.
Interview with George Romero
31/07/2008
George Romero is the man who triggered the rebirth of the American horror film.
He grew up in the Bronx, where his father, a Cuban American commercial artist, gave him a super 8 movie camera. When he left university he supported himself making commercials and industrial films in Pittsburgh. There, in l968, he and some friends scraped together a budget to make a zombie film called Night of The Living Dead. Shot in black and white, it was powerful cinema but also a striking metaphor for the race riots and civil disturbances then tearing America apart. Indeed most of Romero's Dead series -- Dawn of the Dead, Day of the Dead, Land of the Dead, and most recently Diary of the Dead -- can be read as litmus papers for contemporary American social ills: racism, consumerism, militarism, corporate greed.
Does the political metaphor come first when Romero is writing a film? Jason Di Rosso put this and other questions to him in Melbourne last week.
Interview with Chris Cooper, actor: Married Life
24/07/2008
Chris Cooper is a very fine actor whose slightly crumpled face and excellent work onscreen will be familiar to many of you.
He first made an impression in the eighties, as the union organiser in John Sayles Matewan. He also played the sheriff a decade later in another Sayles film, Lone Star.
But you may remember him as the roughneck Creole orchid thief, playing opposite Meryl Streep's lady journalist in the film Adaptation. At one stage, Charlie Kaufman's despairing screenwriter has him wrestle an alligator.
For my money, one of Cooper's finest performances was as the FBI traitor Robert Hanssen in last year's chilling true spy film Breach.
Now Cooper is here again in a very mannered melodrama from Ira Sachs, Married Life.
The week in film
17/07/2008
Actors holding out
The Screen Actors' Guild (what a dreary acronym, SAG, for a group of workers whose job it is to project energy on screen) is still holding out against the studios on the new contract negotiations.
Nobody wants another strike—everyone from George Clooney to Governor Arnie have stepped up to try to avert one—but still the actors' biggest union is holding out for a better deal than their primarily radio and TV employed colleagues got last month.
At issue are DVD residuals, and residuals on net-based content. Talks continued this week, but they are 'unofficial'.
Indiewood woes
There has been some real heart-burning in the film industry, from Hollywood to Wellington and Sydney, about where it's headed as home-based digital entertainment grows. There have been huge numbers of small movies out there, and very few have made money. And DVD sales, long the backup for producers whose films barely blipped on the radar in cinemas, have also been declining.
On top of this, with America teetering on the brink of a recession, the loose money from hedge funds and other non-Hollywood investors—which have bankrolled an explosion in small feature films—has disappeared.
Time for a new business model. But this week, a slight, paradoxical blip on the horizon. DVD rentals and sales, which have been in marked decline the past few years, have actually risen slightly in the past six months.
In previous recessions people still went to the cinema. They wanted good cheap entertainment. This time around, are they opting to save on petrol and stay in with a movie? We shall see...
Bad remake
And finally, a remake which should absolutely not happen. One of Abel Ferrara's darkest, funniest and most notorious films The Bad Lieutenant, starring Harvey Keitel, is to be remade. Producer Edward R Pressman is set to do the deed, with Werner Herzog directing and—oh groan! Nicholas Cage playing the out-of-control cop Keitel made so memorably his own.
Abel Ferrara is reportedly furious. As am I. I still remember the stunned silence which greeted an early critics screening of the film back in '92...we'd simply seen nothing like it.
Do your bit to protest. Get online and tell us what you think. And if you've never seen this movie, get yourself to a video store now, and take a peek.
Interview with Benjamin Gilmour, director - 'Son of a Lion'
17/07/2008
Every now and then an outsider comes along who confounds all accepted wisdom about filmmaking by picking up a camera and doing it very well indeed.
Benjamin Gilmour is one of these. He trained as a paramedic and had worked as a nurse on a few film sets in the UK. But it was travelling with his girlfriend in the Pashtun tribal areas of remote northeast Pakistan that decided him. Son of a Lion is made with the villagers of Dohat and Darra Adam Khel in Pakistan. And it's about a boy.
The film has screened now to great acclaim at festivals in Berlin, in Sydney and elsewhere.
Our colleague Amber Ma, associate producer from ABC TV's At The Movies, caught it back in January at the Marrakesh Film Festival in Morocco.
The film screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival on July 27 and the Brisbane International Film Festival on August 7.
It releases nationally later in August and we'll review it then.
Interview with Mark Hartley and Richard Sowada, co-curators - Focus on Ozploitation
10/07/2008
The Melbourne International film festival releases its program tomorrow, and tickets go on sale. I've spoken already on this show about the varied program this year, which includes strands on New Romanian Cinema and a retrospective on George Romero, and we'll continue covering the festival in upcoming weeks.
This week we're talking about a strand on Australian genre movies from the 70s and 80s. Films screening include Bruce Beresford's 1974 ocker satire Barry McKenzie Holds His Own, the horror shocker Razorback from 1984 about a rogue giant pig, and Roadgames, the serial-killer-thriller set on the Nullarbor starring Stacy Keachand and Jamie Lee Curtis.
What the films have in common, apart from their embracing of genre, is that they are part of an Australian cinematic heritage which hasn't enjoyed mainstream recognition in this country -- especially when compared with the arguably more serious art films of the period like Breaker Morant or Picnic at Hanging Rock.
The strand is called 'Focus on Ozploitation' and is co-curated by Australian Centre for the Moviing Image chief Richard Sowada and filmmaker Mark Hartley, whose documentary about Australian genre movies, Not quite Hollywood, screens in the festival.
Interview with Darren Dale and Pauline Clague, Message Sticks Film Festival
10/07/2008
This week saw the launch in Sydney of the Message Sticks film festival, the annual celebration of Indigenous films curated this year by Darren Dale and Rachel Perkins of Blackfella films. It's a rich program of shorts and documentaries and, to mark the occasion, I invited in to the studio Darren Dale and producer Pauline Clague, who appears in one of the films, When Colin Met Joyce, a one-hour documentary directed by Rima Tamou that Pauline produced. It focuses on Pauline's activist parents: her mother Joyce, an Aboriginal elder stateswoman and her father Colin, a white man with strong Christian convictions for social justice. Another of the films that really struck me was River of No Return, also a one-hour doco, directed by Darlene Johnson, about actor Francis Djulibing and her struggle to get in to acting school in the wake of her successful role in Rolf De Heer's Ten Canoes.
The festival will tour the country:
Canberra at the NSFA July 12 and 19;
Brisbane-GOMA July 17 - 23;
Perth Cinema Paradiso July 24 - 26;
Melbourne Bunjilaka/Age Theatre August 1 - 3;
Adelaide Tandanya August 7 - 10;
Darwin Deckchair Cinema August 21 - 22;
Mt Gambier Sir Robert Helpmann Theatre August 28 - 30
Interview with Brendan Cowell, Anthony Hayes: Ten Empty
03/07/2008
Ten Empty was co-written by actor Brendan Cowell and director Anthony Hayes. It's a film about a father-son relationship they say they had to make to get on with their lives.
The week in film
03/07/2008
Actors holding out for better deal
There could be another strike in Hollywood - this time with the actors who may down tools if an agreement over a new pay contract isn't reached. The producers put their final offer on the table this week, but the Screen Actors Guild, which numbers about 120 000, wants to hold out for a better deal that beefs up new media and dvd royalties. Sound familiar? Well, despite looming storm clouds, most trade papers point to a general lack of appetite for another strike, with Hollywood still licking its wounds from the disruption caused by the writers's walking out last year. The current stalemate is set to last until next Tuesday, when the Screen Actors rival guild, AFTRA, announce their position on a similar deal. AFTRA has 70 000 members that work in radio and tv, all of whom are voting on their deal. How emphatically and which way the AFTRA vote comes down -will strongly influence what the Screen Actors Guild does from here. Interesting to note that in the lead up to next week's decision, the Screen Actors have launched three rounds of automated phone calls to AFTRA members. The last one was on Wednesday with Sean Penn, no doubt using his polite phone voice, urging colleagues to vote no and describing the deal as corporate appeasement.
Aussie Bollywood latest
After reporting last week about a new Indian entertainment conglomerate, Reliance, financing Hollywood films - further proof this week of how a cashed up Bollywood is making inroads into our own industry.
The latest Aussie Bollywood movie is Love Story 2050 which releases this week on ten screens locally. It's the most recent in a series of
Co-productions with Australian funding bodies, trade, and tourism commisions. This one's a sci fi romance dealing in time travel and reincarnation - set between Adelaide and India.
Recent Aussie Bollywood flics include Heyy Baby, a Three Men and a Baby type film shot in sydney, which fell pretty flat and the Melbourne based Salaam Namaste (which was really quite good) and Chak De! India which won best picture at the Bollywood Oscars this year.
It's estimated that investment in Aussie Bollywood films is currently worth around $100million. And producers like Love Story 2050's Anupam Sharma, who's based in Sydney, says it's only set to increase - with the 40% tax offset for producers set to attract and no doubt further Australianise, more Aussie Bollywood product.
The week in film
26/06/2008
Screen Australia board announced
Just days before the new super funding body Screen Australia sets up shop on July 1, arts minister Peter Garrett has unveiled the board -- headed by industry outsider and IBM exec, Glen Boreham.
He comes with a reputation for advocating change, sometimes for change's sake, if we're to believe quotes attributed to him in the press this week.
Boardmembers are entertainment lawyer Ian Robertson; Network Ten's head of documentary and children's TV, Cherrie Bottger; Austar exec Deanne Weir; filmmakers Rachel Perkins and Robert Connolly; and director of public affairs at Animal Logic, Greg Smith.
There's been no huge reaction to the board -- which is considered to be quite compact. The Screenhub newsletter says Boreham's independent point of view should be an advantage, but notes that independent doco and TV drama people may feel overlooked by the appointments. There'll no doubt be more reactions when the announcement of the CEO is made in the upcoming period.
Bollywood goes Hollywood
A new Indian conglomerate, Reliance Entertainment, is reported to be negotiating a deal to finance Dreamworks, the studio founded by Steven Spielberg, Jeffrey Katzenberg and David Geffen, to the tune of $US600 million. A win-win deal, it would allow Dreamworks to break free from Viacom's Paramount Pictures, a relationship that's been stormy from the get-go since the Viacom took over Dreamworks in 2006 -- while Indian investors who are cashed up get a chance to move beyond their domestic market. It's not the only rumour doing the rounds relating to Dreamworks, but it follows announcements at Cannes this year where Reliance, owned by India's second richest man Anil Ambani, signed deals with the production companies of Nicolas Cage, Jim Carrey, George Clooney, Tom Hanks, Brad Pitt and film-makers Chris Columbus and Jay Roach.
With the US economy spluttering and looking like it may head into recession, this is surely a shot in the arm for the American industry. But what will the product be like? Will there be any Indian flavour? Bollywood's turnover is still only a tenth of Hollywood's, and even though it's expected to double within five years, you'd think Reliance won't be messing with American formulas too much. Still, these details are unclear. Interesting times ahead.
Interview with Mike Leigh, director, Happy-Go-Lucky
26/06/2008
Jason Di Rosso spoke to the British director about his new-found interest in happiness.
Interview with actor William McInnes and director Peter Duncan: Unfinished Sky
19/06/2008
Julie Rigg spoke to Peter and William after the film's premiere at the Brisbane International Film Festival.
The week in film
19/06/2008
SFF winds down, MIFF winds up
British artist and filmmaker Steve McQueen's Hunger, about IRA hunger striker Bobby Sands, has won the Sydney Film Festival prize. Two other films in competition received special commendations from the jury, headed by Gillian Armstrong: Silent Light by Mexican director Carlos Reygadas and the Australian film Three Blind Mice, written, directed and starring Matthew Newton. Congratulations to all.
Meanwhile, down the Hume, the Melbourne International Film Festival has been getting busy releasing more details of its program -- the opening night film on July 25 will be Not Quite Hollywood, a doco (partly funded by MIFF's own Premiere fund) about Australian genre movies of the 70s and 80s -- what's known as Ozploitation cinema. It's part of what's being billed as a kind of coming-in-from-the-cold for an often ignored and sometimes even derided side of the Aussie industry. Following the doco is a whole strand on Ozploitation -- as well as a not unrelated retrospective on American horror maestro George Romero. But if V8s, gore and very tight jeans doesn't sound like your thing, or if you're just after a bit of variety, it's shaping up to be a particularly diverse mix this year with new strands on Romanian cinema, a focus on Israel and Palestine, and a retrospective on one of the leading lights of the Taiwanese New Wave, Edward Yang, who died last year.
We'll keep you up to date as more details are released from what looks like another bold MIFF.
Interview with Steve McQueen, director, Hunger
19/06/2008
British director Steve McQueen talked with Julie Rigg at the Sydney Film Festival. His film Hunger won the inaugural Sydney Film Festival prize this week.
The Incredible Hulk
12/06/2008
The Hulk, the unjolly green giant of Marvel comic superheroes is back: five years after a not entirely successful incarnation in a dark and psychologically fascinating version crafted by Ang Lee, with Eric Bana playing Bruce Banner, the scientist exposed to gamma radiation who finds that stress or emotion will cause him to mutate and burst his trousers.
The trouble with The Hulk on screen is that the CGI giant is very hard for viewers to relate to: there's just too much of a visual and emotional gulf between the troubled scientist and the cartoonish supermonster.
This time round Edward Norton, in trainers, baseball hat and backpack, plays the scientist on the run from the military monsters who want to haul him back as their superweapon. Liv Tyler is his cell biologist girlfriend and sex is out -- too emotional, he might burst his trousers.
This version does a slightly better job of bridging the gap between Norton's scientist and the mutating monster. But only slightly. The credibility gap is still there.
It's efficiently made action entertainment, with William Hurt giving a strong one-note performance as the mad American general, and Tim Roth as the special operations man who gets hold of some monster juice of his own. Humans three stars; monsters one.
Interview with Carlos Reygadas, director, Silent Light
12/06/2008
Mexican director Carlos Reygadas talked with Julie Rigg at the Sydney Film Festival. His film Silent Light is in competition for the inaugural Sydney Film Festival prize.
The week in film
12/06/2008
Oz Festivals wrap
While the newly amped-up Sydney Film Festival was in full swing, Melbourne Film Festival director Richard Moore came north to propose that this year MIFF will have more films straight from Cannes than ever before.
And that's true -- the good, the bad and the ugly -- the films which succeeded in Cannes, as well as a number which were panned, are there in MIFF's program. There is considerable interest in new films from Italy, where a new surge of tough-minded film-making has produced such films as Gomorrah, based on Roberto Saviano's book on the Mafia. It won the Grand Prix from the Cannes jury.
But Sydney did get Steve McQueen's Hunger and Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata, also in competition and straight from Cannes. And both festivals will have the much admired film from the Dardenne Brothers, Lorna's Silence.
Is there rivalry between Australian film festivals? Together, festival directors present a smiling, supportive, united front. Behind the scenes, of course, there is rivalry. But with a much bigger vision, and government funds to ramp up a bigger, splashier, more city-wide festival, Sydney under Clare Stewart now looks like giving the well endowed MIFF a run for its money.
Interview with Julian Schnabel, director - 'Lou Reed's Berlin'
05/06/2008
Julian Schnabel's latest film is a concert movie filmed during Lou Reed's recent tour of his 1973 concept album Berlin. The film plays at this year's Sydney Film Festival - and Julie Rigg met with Schnabel at a round table press call at the Venice Film Festival last year.
The week in film
05/06/2008
Sydney Film Festival kicks off
The Sydney Film Festival kicked off this week with a gala screening of Mike Leigh's Happy-Go-Lucky. Festival director Clare Stewart finally announced the remaing two members of the five person jury who will be judging 12 competition films for the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize. Joining jury president Gillian Armstrong, Iranian director Majid Majidi and Hong Kong producer Nansun Shi, are Australian actress Essie Davis and American film critic Scott Foundas. Interesting to note the Film festival launch was accompanied with appropriate film festival weather -- wet and grey. I call it a good omen -- there's no better place to be when it's cold outside than in a nice warm cinema.
Paramount disbands indie wing
Paramount has disbanded its indie wing, Vantage, amalgamating it back into the main studio. Vantage had been a backer of such recent films as Into the Wild, There will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men.
The news follows similar developments recently at Time Warner, which closed two of its art-house labels, Picturehouse and Warner Independent Pictures.
These developments reflect the increased competition in the so-called indie market, where marketing costs and production budgets have been on the rise.
Does this mean bleak times ahead for big, quality 'indie' film product in the US? Well in Paramount's case, the moves are all said to be in the name of efficiency and the consolidation of marketing and production resources under one umbrella. The proof will be on screen.
Cecchi Gori arrested
Oscar winning producer Vittorio Cecchi Gori has been arrested in Rome. It's alleged that the exhibition arm of his Cecchi Gori group has run up debts of 25 million euros, deliberately, in order to cook the books of other companies in the group. Cecchi Gori has been quoted in the press as saying he's the victim of a misunderstanding.
The week in film
29/05/2008
Cannes wrap
Young Australian filmmaker Julius Avery's short film Jerrycan, about a young boy growing in rural Victoria, won the Jury Prize -- it'll be screening at this year's Melbourne Film festival.
Unfortunately there were no feature length Australian films in competition this year, but it was an interesting edition of the festival, with a jury led by Sean Penn, that will be remembered for its political and socially critical films.
The Palme D'Or winner was French filmmaker Laurent Cantet. The Class depicts the multicultural reality and tensions of a Paris classroom. Second and third prizes -- the Grand Prix and the Jury awards -- went to two films from Italy, both depicting profound malaise. Matteo Garrone's Gomorrah is based on the bestseller of the same name, a reportage on the Naples Mafia by writer-journalist Roberto Saviano, who is now under 24 hour police protection. And Paolo Sorrentino's Il Divo is a bio pic on the Italian Christian Democrat stalwart and former prime minister Giulio Andreotti, someone, it has been alleged, who is also no stranger to the mafia. Italian newspapers report he's seen it and he hates it.
But there were many others, including Soderbergh's 4-hour epic on Che Guevara titled simply Che, which received mixed reviews and might be recut before coming to our screens, and Hunger -- British artist Steve McQueen's first film about Bobby Sands which won the Camera d'or and is screening in competition at next week's Sydney Film Festival (and later at the Melbourne Festival too).
The Dardenne brothers were back with, by all reports, another searing film -- taking in the topic of illegal migration in Lorna's Silence -- it won best screenplay and is on wider release here later in the year. And interestingly a film with a huge buzz that didn't win anything was Waltz With Bashir -- the autobiographical doco animation from Israel about a soldier who witnesses the massacre of Palestinian civilians in 1982. It's been sold to Sony, which should mean we get to see it sometime this year.
Vale Sydney Pollack
Film lovers were saddened by news this week of the passing of Sydney Pollack at 73. He was renowned in Hollywood as a generous man with a fierce intellect and strong political convictions.
His work on the screen began with an extended technical formation as a television director, after which he hit the big screen making his mark with distinctive, humanistic movies that grappled the big ticket issues of politics, race, class and sexuality through idiosyncratic, heartfelt stories.
Examples include the 1969 Depression era film about a dancing marathon They Shoot Horses Don't They? that said so much about the dark side of American optimism; The Way We Were (1973) starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand -- a romance set against the backdrop of McCarthyism and the Cold War. Then there was Out Of Africa (1985), set among Danish and English colonials with Meryl Streep and Robert Redford again that won him Oscars for best director and best picture. He was respected as a director until the last -- with the United Nations thriller The Interpreter starring Nicole Kidman and his doco on architect and friend Frank Gehry Sketches of Frank Gehry, both from 2005.
He was an actor, too, in fact he'd started out as one. He had a kind of presence that didn't need big gestures or huge shows of emotion; his creased, fleshy face, the narrow eyes and rich, sandy voice were however capable of great nuance and warmth. He wasn't restricted in the work he did --- he acted across a range of genres and formats from films of the quality of Michael Clayton and Husbands and Wives, to television sitcoms. Work never seemed to dry up for him.
It was as a producer of other people's work that perhaps his generous spirit really shone. He amassed almost fifty credits as an executive producer -- films like The Talented Mr Ripley that his friend the late Anthony Minghella directed, or The Quiet American, a project he'd worked on for years before Australian Phil Noyce, another good friend, came on board to direct.
Interviews with Sydney Pollack and Phillip Noyce
29/05/2008
Two interviews make up our tribute to American director, actor and producer Sydney Pollack, who died this week aged 73. One is with the man himself from 2001, the other is with Australian director Phillip Noyce, a long time friend of Pollack's.
Interview with Dean Semler, cinematographer
29/05/2008
Dean Semler is currently in Sydney for the 50th anniversary celebrations of the Australian Cinematographers Society so we thought we'd invite him into the studio. He's a pioneer of the Australian film industry - having started at Film Australia, then lensed such iconic Australian films as Mad Max 2 and Dead Calm, before going on to work in Hollywood on big budget films that are too many to mention, but include Dances With Wolves, The Bone Collector and Apocalypto. His upcoming work includes Get Smart and Appaloosa.
The week in film
22/05/2008
Oz fests announce juries at Cannes
Sydney Film festival director Clare Stewart unveiled three of the five jurors for her festival's inaugural competition this year -- Gillian Armstrong will be jury president, joined by Iranian filmmaker Majid Majidi and Hong Kong producer Nansun Shi. The two remaining spots, for one Australian and one international film industry figure, will be announced in the lead-up to the festival.
Meanwhile Asia Pacific Screen Awards chairman Des Power was also in Cannes to announce that the 2nd annual Gold Coast based Awards jury will be headed by director Bruce Beresford.
He'll be forming a jury in time for the Awards in November -- meanwhile he's currently listed as being still in production on his next film, Mao's Last Dancer.
The week in film
15/05/2008
Cannes
The Cannes Film Festival kicks off pretty well as we go to air this week with a competition program this year oriented to cinephiles. Very few big American names, but some newcomers to Cannes. The opening night film, for example. Blindness is a Brazilian film shot in Canada by Fernando Meirelles about an apocalyptic epidemic of blindness. He's the man who made the Oscar winning City of God five years ago.
Eight thousand film industry professionals and almost as many journalists descend on Cannes this year. Among them is Stephanie Bunbury, who is an old hand.
We're going to talk to Stephanie on next week's show, when she has more than a few films under her belt. But you should watch for her print on the Hollywood big spectacle movie at Cannes -- Stephen Spielberg's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.
Even the artiest, most auteur driven festivals love these sorts of movies because they bring stars such as Cate Blanchett to the red carpet. Doesn't necessarily mean it's a good movie, so we're hanging fire until it opens here next week -- I'll review it then.
Oz film research and policy
And in the Budget this week, the funding for the big new all-in-one agency Screen Australia was pretty much the shape and size expected.
One small piece of business was settled, though, a line or two in the Budget confirmed the research and policy arm section of the Australian Film Commission will go to Screen Australia -- and not the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
There is an interesting history to this. The previous federal government objected to the independent research and policy advice produced from the Australian Film Commission, especially when its reports and proposals contradicted the government's own policy decisions. When negotiations were underway to roll the various agencies into one big screen authority, the government did not see the need for the screen authority to have such a function.
A compromise was created -- a home for this at the Australian Film Television and Radio School.
But the new government has quietly put the research branch back into Screen Australia, along with most of the rest of the Australian Film Commission.
And it has once more made the National Film and Sound Archive an independent entity with enhanced responsibility for cultural programs.
The week in film
08/05/2008
Sydney Film Festival announces line-up
The festival season is well and truly on. Cannes next week, followed rapidly by...Sydney, Australia.
Well, not quite the same scale, but there's no doubt the Sydney Film Festival has considerably upped the ante, in both star power and programming, in Clare Stewart's second year as artistic director.
This year sees the first year of the festival's international competition for new directions in feature film, with a $60,000 prize. Twelve films, including three Australian features, will compete. Among them are American director Kimberley Pierce's Stop Loss; UK artist Steve McQueen's Hunger, about the fast-to-the-death of IRA supporter Bobby Sands; Mexican director Carlos Reygadas's Silent Light, a stunning tale of adultery in a Menonite community; the Japanese director Kiyoshi Kurosawa's Tokyo Sonata; quirky Canadian Guy Maddin's Winnipeg; Matthew Newton's Three Blind Mice, and Nash Edgerton's suburban noir The Square. Each of the twelve films will be given gala red-carpet screenings. Opening the competition, and indeed the festival, will be Mike Leigh's much anticipated Happy Go Lucky, a rare film from that director: a non ironic inquiry into happiness.
Mike Leigh himself will be there on opening night, along with star Sally Hawkins. Other competition directors and producers will be guests, and as a bonus: Jack Black is to drop by for a gala screening of the new animation, Kung Fu Panda. He'll be on the red carpet with Dreamworks's Mighty Mouse, Jeffrey Katzenberg.
The jurors? Well, Clare Stewart is to announce these during the Cannes Film festival.
Outside the competition, there is a range of choice in specialist strands.
One Australian premiere I'm looking forward to is a musical, The Eternity Man, about the legendary Arthur Stace. From a score by Richard Mills and libretto by poet Dorothy Porter, the film is written, directed and shot on the streets of Sydney by renowned British director Julian Temple, who made The Filth and the Fury, and Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten.
There is a program of tough documentaries about Iraq, including Brian de Palma's Redacted and the Australian produced, Oscar-winning documentary Taxi to the Dark Side.
World Cinema includes such gems as You, The Living, the much admired new film from Roy Andersson, the reclusive Swedish director who made Songs from the Seventh Floor. Andersson directs commercials for a living; makes a film every decade or so, and has an offbeat humour even wilder than that of Aki Kurismaki.
The festival is striking out in other directions; this year it will feature a beefed up Industry section, with its own industry lounge, to encourage more filmmakers to Sydney.
And in a move which will probably provoke reaction from the leather-jacketed old guard, it has invited the head of the Motion Picture Association of America—yes, the big American studios'lobbying arm—to deliver the Hector McPherson Memorial lecture.
His name is Bob Pisano and, well, it wasn't too many decades ago that Australian filmmakers were picketing his predecessor, the extraordinary Jack Valenti. But times change, and so do movies. It will be interesting to hear the Amercian studios' take on what's happening now.
And finally, much to the relief of punters, the festival has found a way to bypass queues. Not only can you book your seats online these days, you can print your own tickets and head straight to the cinema door.
Yeeha! I'll bring you my own festival picks closer to the date.
The week in film
01/05/2008
Awards news from around the globe
The Cannes Film festival announced its line-up in official competition, and other sections. Not a huge number of familiar auteur names among the directors competing with their films, but Steven Soderberg will be there with his two-part, four-hour epic on Che Guevara and Clint Eastwood there as well with a film called The Changeling.
In fact eight of the dozen films in competition will be from directors not selected before -- a shake-up from the Cannes tradition of screening new works from venerated auteurs.
Woody Allen, though, will be there with his latest film: Vicky Cristina Barcelona, screening, as usual, out of competition. Interesting. His last film screened like this to the usual fanfare in Venice last August and it's now gone straight to DVD here.
Two Australian shorts are screening in competition: My Rabbit Hoppy, written and directed by Anthony Lucas; and Jerrycan, written and directed by Julius Avery. Congratulations to both, though it does seem a while since an Australian feature has made the cut.
But documentary maker Anna Broinowski came back from the Middle East last week with a big smile and a big statue; her feature documentary Forbidden Lies won gold at the fourth AlJazeera documentary film festival.
Congratulations to Anna.
And lastly on the awards front, The Edge of Heaven, Fatih Akim's film set between Germany and Turkey cleaned up big at Germany's national film awards last week. It won four Golden Lolas, as they are called. Including best film.
On the same day, Akim was presented with the Charles Medal for his film, for its services to cross-cultural understanding in Europe. He shared the award with Abdellatif Kechiche for The Secret of the Grain.
Alert listeners may have noticed that these films and these filmmakers both featured in our Radio National film screenings, and in our Australia Talks Movies discussions.
We bring you nothing but the best here on Radio National!
The week in film
24/04/2008
Isabella goes mobile
Isabella Rossellini, who wore drag to take various roles in her delightful short film My Father is a Hundred years Old, is now impersonating variously a firefly, a spider and a dragonfly in a series of short films called Green Porno, made for mobile phones, the so-called fourth screen. There's a very witty interview with her in the New York Times this week.
Rupert Grint, straight-shooter
Those who always preferred Ron Weasley to young Harry in the Harry Potter movies might be entertained by Rupert Grint's comments in a recent interview. While his school chum Daniel Radcliffe makes a smooth transition to teen star, Redheaded Rupert, at 19, isn't so sure he wants to head for Hollywood. Here's what he blurted in a recent interview, when asked about Lindsay Lohan.
'I met Lindsay last summer and she talked about herself a lot. She said she was going to win an Oscar before she turns 25. I just kept thinking, "But you can't act". I haven't met Paris and don't want to either. She and Lindsay are the type of girls you need to stay away from.'
Oh Rupert. How uncool, and how lovely. Keep away from those mean girls, and stay as sweet as you are. Promise me!
The week in film
17/04/2008
A surfeit of Cate
Cate Blanchett and Andrew Upton have had a third child, another son, and this week. Welcome Ignatius. The divine Miss B, who is in the running for some sort of ubiquity award, will go on nonetheless to chair the arts and creativity section at the 2020 summit this weekend. Julieanne Schultz, editor of the Griffith Review, will co-chair.
And following complaints this week in the Sydney Morning Herald about constant Cate news, we are hereby declaring the week in film a Blanchett-free zone till the next movie. Every new mother deserves a bit of a rest. And so do we.
Oz film tensions
Just when Australian filmmakers should be moving constantly into a new era with the advent of Screen Australia, and a new tax system, some major bickering has broken out.
The Australian Writers Guild has walked away from the industry lobby group the Screen Council of Australia, leaving it to founder after differences with the Australian Directors' Guild.
Meanwhile a paper written by director Robert Connelly, with proposals to rethink the way we make films here, is dividing readers. Some of the stuff is pretty technical, some uncontroversial (he suggests too much time and money go to lawyers getting Austration films off the ground) and some run counter to current thinking. Connelly thinks we should be making more films per year with lower average budgets.
And to fan the flames, there is also a microdoc clip circulating on YouTube of various industry people talking in pretty bleak tones about the state of Australian film. It's a trailer for a longer documentary.
The week in film
10/04/2008
Vale Charlton Heston
Another pillar of American cinema died this week. Charlton Heston, probably our last remaining link to the days when American cinema meant Cecil B DeMille type spectacle. Often, though not always, biblical.
I think The Greatest Show on Earth was the first DeMille film I saw Heston in. I liked Betty Hutton and Cornel Wilde more, but there is no doubt even then Heston brought authority to the role.
As many of the obituaries have remarked it was that statuesque physique, the chiselled profile and the rich voice which made him a natural DeMille hero and embodied the values in films such as Ben Hur, and The Ten Commandments.
There always seemed something slightly stiff about Heston onscreen, nonetheless. Maybe after Moses it's downhill all the way.
But it was a quality Orson Welles used beautifully when he cast him as the Mexican detective in A Touch of Evil.
And then there's his last great role, brandishing an antique musket and shouting 'from my cold dead hands', at a National Rifle Association rally.
Well, it's hard to keep an actor down with an audience that size, I say. Especially with the temptation of a line like that.
Let's remember him instead in his toga. Few wore it as well.
Lars and the Real Girl
03/04/2008
There are people in life who are so painfully shy they can barely cope with quite everyday encounters. But you rarely see their dilemmas explored on the screen. I think the last time I saw such a person was in Jane Campion's realisation of Janet Frame's autobiography An Angel At My Table.
Lars Lindstrom, played by Ryan Gosling, is one such pathologically shy person. He lives in a garage at the back of the frame house occupied by his older brother and sister-in-law, avoiding every overture from them to get him to come to dinner. He has a white-collar job where he can hunch over a computer and keep his interaction with fellow employees to a minimum. In conversations he can't avoid he hangs his head and wears a painful set smile while he edges away to safety. He works, he shops, he drives, he goes to church and, apart from that, just wants to be left alone. There is something very disturbing and distressing for him in social contact.
Then, one day, a huge package is delivered, a life-sized sex doll. His brother and sister-in-law (Paul Schneider and Emily Mortimer) are staggered to find Lars on their doorstep, hair slicked down, asking may he bring his friend Bianca to dinner to meet them?
Bianca is half Brazilian, he tells them. And an archaeologist, now studying to be a missionary. She's not feeling too well at the moment. Her bags have been stolen. Could Karin lend her some clothes? Could she sleep in the bedroom in the big house?
The astonishing thing about this small film is its air of genuine sweetness. There is not a smutty line, not a note out of place. It ventures across perilous dramatic ground on a tightrope and miraculously makes it to the other side, without a false step. Lars is clearly delusional. But his reluctant big-guy brother and his already concerned sister are able to get Lars to take Bianca to see the town doctor (Patricia Clarkson), who is also a psychological counsellor. She very quickly twigs that Bianca is completely real to Lars. They cannot argue him out of this belief, so they had better go along with it.
In Bianca's company Lars is more talkative and outgoing than the townsfolk have ever seen him. He blossoms. One by one and group by group, the people in this small community begin to go along with Lars'a delusion.
There are some wonderfully observed scenes here, played absolutely straight. Screenwriter Nancy Oliver won her stripes writing for the television series Six Feet Under. There was considerable psychological insight in that series, and even more in this film, as we learn, little by little, about why Lars is how he is, and what he is reclaiming in the relationship with Bianca.
But the truly delightful thing about this film is its view of human nature, as the townspeople in this community, which could be somewhere in Minnesota not too far from Lake Woebegone, take on Bianca, and Lars. Is it a mass delusion?
No, not quite, but there is a considerable grip on what the Buddhists would call loving kindness in this town. Even in the church group.
You could talk about other stories in which men have fallen in love with their own creation: Pygmalion, Faust, My Fair Lady. Bianca isn't quite that. To my mind she's pretty bland, though she becomes more interesting as more and more townspeople befriend her.
Unlikely as it sounds, the most endearing quality about this film about a man and his sex doll is its winning combination of shrewdness, sadness, and innocence.
The week in film
03/04/2008
Vale Jules Dassin
Farewell to the admirable Jules Dassin, who died a few days ago, aged 96.
Dassin made many memorable films: including Rififi, Topkapi, Never on Sunday, and He Who Must Die. The interesting thing is that he made them after he was blacklisted in Hollywood for his communist loyalties. The Connecticut born filmmaker, who had learned his trade assisting such directors as Alfred Hitchcock, and made some classic noir thrillers such as Night and the City, left for Europe after the McCarthy blacklists made him unemployable in America.
He directed Rififi as a jobbing director in Paris in l953, contributing a memorable 35-minute heist scene which became a byword for suspense. Similarly the jewel heist in Topkapi became a sequence emulated by many subsequent filmmakers, including Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible.
It was in Greece where Mr Dassin found a second home and brought considerable style to Greek cinema. Never On Sunday, with Melina Mercouri as the prostitute with the heart of gold, became a popular hit. Dassin actually appears in that film, as an American academic, the innocent abroad.
Jules Dassin later married Melina Mercouri. He never renounced his radical politics, went into exile with Mercouri during the junta years, and when she returned and stood for parliament and became Minister for Culture in l980, he took on her campaign for the return to Greece of the Acropolis marbles looted by Lord Elgin and held in the British museum.
Vale Jules Dassin, and on behalf of many filmgoers, thanks for the pleasure you gave us.
Almodovar blog
Spanish filmmaker Pedro Almodovar has taken to the net. Indeed he's become a blogger, and set up a site where we can follow progress on his new film Broken Embraces. It's a handsome site with the blog translated from Spanish into English and French versions with photographs, videos, notes on the script he's writing and so forth. And, touchingly, a tribute to the wonderful Deborah Kerr, who died 'not knowing who she was'. Let no-one doubt Almodovar knows his cinema, and its grand dames. See the link below.
Kit Denton award
In Australia the writers' guild is calling now for entries to the $2,5000 Kit Denton award, established by Andrew Denton in memory of his father. It's for writing for performance, it seeks to celebrate tenacity and courage, and the inaugural award was given, fittingly, to Ian David, author of Jo's Jury and Blue Murder. Ian worked for years on a script on the politics of East Timor. It was commissioned by the ABC but never made. Interesting to think what effect it might have had if production had proceeded in a timely fashion.
'Justice League' setback
Meanwhile, Time Warner, backers of the Justice League script George Miller has been tapdancing very hard to persuade authorities here it is an Australian project worthy of a forty per cent tax offset, has received another blow. A federal court judge ruled last week that the mega company was not the sole owner of Superman's copyright in the United States.
The heirs of Jerome Siegel -- who 70 years ago sold the rights to the action hero he created with Joseph Shuster to Detective Comics for $130 -- were entitled to claim a share of the US copyright of the character, says the court. Warner retains international copyright however. And will no doubt appeal.
I guess that's another good reason for Doctor George to change the film's name from Justice League of America.
The week in film
27/03/2008
Election film row
When is a movie a paid electoral ad?
The American Supreme Court has kyboshed an attempt by a conservative group called Citizens United to release a film called Hillary: The Movie without fulfilling the requirements for political advertising.
The group attempted to appeal to the Supreme Court after three High Court judges ruled in January that the film can only be designed to "inform the electorate that senator Linton is unfit for office, that the United States would be a dangerous place in a President Hillary Clinton world, and that viewers should vote against her."
Election laws now require political advertising to include a disclaimer, and disclosure of those paying for it. But the Supreme Court has refused to hear the case.
Citizens United is now promoting the film and selling DVDs online, and has said it plans to make a Obama: The Movie as well. When I checked the trailer for Hillary: The Movie online it did not appear to be meeting electoral advertising requirements. A link to the Citizens United web page said the group had decided to take their issue to a district court.
Darth Weinstein Vs fans
The famously cantankerous Weinstein Brothers have gone head to head with another famously cantankerous group: the Star Wars fans. And guess what? The fans won.
The fans have been railing against Harvey Weinstein's decision to cut a film called Fanboys - about (guess what?) Star Wars fans who break into George Lucas' studio to see an advance screening of The Phantom Menace. In the original version, one of the group has cancer. Harvey Weinstein's version cut this out, inflaming fans who have been running a boycott campaign from websites like http://stopdarthweinstein.chris-marquette.com/ among others.
Nowthe Weinsteins are going to release two versions. With and without cancer. Oh sob.
I must say I do not understand your average Star Wars fan. I've met them but I don't understand them. Most seem to me to be suffering an obsession deserving its own category in psychiatry's diagnostic handbooks, an obsession which has made George Lucas a very rich man. But hey, I guess it keeps them off the streets, glued to their computers.
Maybe Bob Weinstein could make a horror movie about what enraged fans do to someone who messes with their inner worlds? Oh? Someone's already done that? Yeah. It was a Steven King novella made into a film called Misery.
Trash and Treasure: Jane Mills on Breakfast at Tiffany's
27/03/2008
This week's guest is film scholar and critic Jane Mills, who takes on an iconic film - Breakfast at Tiffany's.
Trash and Treasure is our way of exploring the entire film heritage. Each week we invite a guest to revisit a film which they believe may be underappreciated, or perhaps over-hyped. And usually, guests choose to revisit a neglected favourite. But occasionally, some do choose to revisit a well known film they believe does not deserve the accolades. Which is fine by us.
One person's trash is another person's treasure, here at Movietime.
Breakfast at Tiffany's, adapted by George Axelrod from a novella by Truman Capote, appeared in l961. It starred Audrey Hepburn as Holly Golightly, and when we think of the film it is that image of Audrey Hepburn, doe eyed, in her little sleeveless black dress, wielding an enormous cigarette holder, that we remember. But how well does the film itself stand up? Not very, according to Jane Mills. She says parts of it are downright embarrassing.
Watch Flash video and subscribe to enhanced podcast (mp4) here
St Trinian's
27/03/2008
Long before Chrissy Amphlett strode out in her school tunic, cartoonist Ronald Searle invented the wicked schoolgirls. Then the British comedies of the sixties added sex, and a wondrous headmistress, Miss Fritton, played by Alastair Sim in drag.
How will the girls of St Trinian's play in a blasé new century where 12-year-olds do drink cocktails and every schoolgirl wears her tunic hoiked?
This remake, co-directed by Oliver Parker and Duncan Thompson, is slapdash, over art-directed, and slow to warm up. But once the hockey sticks start flying it becomes entertaining, largely due to the efforts of Rupert Everett as Miss Fritton, and Colin Firth as a pompous politician. Don't miss their final duet, 'Love is in the Air'. It's over the end credits.
Catherine Deneuve in Australia
20/03/2008
When Catherine Deneuve, the reigning queen of French cinema, arrived in Australia last weekend, things did not go smoothly. She came down with flu on her way here, and arrived feeling lousy. A doctor was sent. A masseur was sent. A delegate from Alliance Francais, which invited Ms Deneuve to Australia to present her new film at the current French Film festival, was sent.
And downstairs, thirty-odd journalists and photographers summoned for a press conference, waited.
Now Catherine Deneuve is a legend. She appeared in her first film at the age of 13, and has since appeared in more than a hundred. At 64, she is the face of France: her profile appeared on the French franc while France had one; and she's still cast in bronze as Marianne, the spirit of France, hovering outside scores of French town halls.
She's modelled for Yves Saint Laurent, and been the face of L'Oreal. But she is also a cineaste: she has worked with, and learned from, some of the great directors: Jacques Demy, Andre Techine, Louis Bunuel, Roman Polanski, Francois Truffaut. She's taken a punt on outrageous younger directors such as Lars Von Trier.
And the films have been stunning: Repulsion with Polanski; Belle du Jour and Tristana with Bunuel; The Last Metro with Truffaut; many years later in Regis Warnier's epic Indocine.
Deneuve's latest film is written and directed by Gael Morel, a young actor turned director. After Him it's called (Apres luis), and she plays a mother so unhinged by her son's death in a car accident she turns to his best friend, who happened to be driving.
It's an unsettling film, and a gutsy role for her to take on. I'll review it next week. What we'll hear today are excerpts from the press conference, which I was chairing, and a more relaxed conversation afterwards. And while it was clear she was suffering from a very bad flu -- she was also very sharp, and very much in control.
The week in film
20/03/2008
Vale Anthony Minghella
The news this week that Anthony Minghella had died suddenly, unexpectedly of a massive haemorrhage after an operation for throat cancer has knocked many people for a loop. Minghella was 54, widely loved and respected, had made distinguished films including The English Patient and The Talented Mister Ripley and was about to launch a BBC television film version of the much loved novel The Number One Ladies Detective Agency.
Australian journalist Sandy George, who reports for Screen International, went on location in Botswana with Minghella during that shoot late last year. The novels are of course set in Botswana, and Minghella had fought to film there rather than in South Africa.
The film premieres on BBC Television this weekend, and reportedly the television series will now go ahead.
Miller finance row
If you've been listening to Radio National Breakfast this week you will have heard the running battle between Doctor George Miller and critics in the film industry over his claim to have the Marvell comic film The Justice League Mortal deemed eligible for the forty per cent producer offset under Australia's new film finance legislation. The FFC has reportedly advised George that 'Justice League' is not eligible. Simon Whipp, who heads the equity division of the Media Entertainment and Arts Alliance, has pointed out that 'Justice League' is eligible for not one but two other offsets, of fifteen per cent each: a location offset, and a digital post-production offset.
It's a battle of titans.
Screen Australia boss
Meanwhile, quietly this week, Peter Garrett announced a new acting CEO for the giant agency Screen Australia, into which the FFC the AFC and Film Australia will be rolled from July 1.
She's Lyn Maddock, an economist who has been acting chair of the Australian Communications and Media Authority. I wonder if Doctor George will appeal to the new board?
The week in film
13/03/2008
Australia lags on digital
Kodak is fitting up a number of suburban multiplexes for digital distribution and exhibition, including a number of screens in Hoyts cinemas.
But Australia is lagging way behind in converting cinemas for digital distribution and exhibition, according to Stephen Basil-Jones, who heads Sony Pictures Releasing in Australia and New Zealand.
He told ShoWest, the big American conference for exhibitors and distributors this week, that only one per cent of Australia's 1,900 cinema screens are currently fitted for digital, compared with 7.6 per cent in the UK, almost 10 per cent in America, and 16 per cent in Singapore.
But, he said, Australia ranks second only to China in the number of pirated films seized on disk, with 675 raids last year capturing 2.6 million disks.
And, said Basil-Jones, Australian films accounted for eight per cent of releases here but only four per cent of the box office. With an average of six films releasing here each week, cinema screens were increasingly crowded. He warned that rising print and advertising costs in Australia made it 'unviable and unprofitable' to release films in the US$ 25-50 million budget range.
Since most Australian films cost way less than that, this is not good news.
Filmink Awards
The most irreverent of Australian film awards have announced their best hair, best nude scene, best chase scene and Aussie bum best sort awards for 2008: the latter going to Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up. John Travolta won best hair for, wouldn't you know it, Hairspray. The Bourne Ultimatum won best chase scene. And best nude scene was awarded to The Simpsons Movie. Pikers.
The week in film
06/03/2008
US Actors to strike?
Having survived the writers' strike, American filmmakers are now nervously looking towards June 30, when the actors' contracts expire. Insurance companies and completion guarantors are not backing films which can't guarantee to be finished by June 15. Already a number of small films, and some big ones, have been put on hold.
The Screen Actors Guild, or SAG, the bigger of the two unions which cover film actors, was militant in supporting the Writers' Guild during their strike. There are about ten thousand members of the Writers' Guild; while there are 120,000 actors, many of them earning only a few thousand dollars a year from their profession. To make matters more complicated, there is a smaller, rival union, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. Many leading actors are members of both guilds. Talks between the two unions to broker a common approach to negotiations with the studios have so far not produced results.
Many in the industry fear another strike. George Clooney and Tom Hanks took out an advertisement recently urging the unions to start background negotiations early. Meanwhile, Steven Spielberg has put his film about the Chicago seven, which was scheduled to start next month, on hold till at least June.
New Line's demise
The 700-odd employees of New Line studios, the company which underwrote The Lord of the Rings, are waiting for letters in the mail: as predicted here some weeks ago Warner Brothers has folded New Line back into the parent company, and layoffs are widely tipped.
New Line, which used to produce genre flicks such as the Nightmare on Elm Street series, went mega when it gambled, and won, underwriting Peter Jackson's Lord Of The Rings series. But it's since been bedevilled by lawsuits -- first from Jackson saying New Line held out on the profits from spin-offs from the trilogy -- and is still being sued by various others including the Tolkien Estate's Trust. Warner Brothers will keep the logo and company shell for possible future low budget releases but New Line's founders Bob Shaye and Michael Lyne are out. It would be fascinating to see some real accounting on the firm's losses and profits since the 'Rings', but sadly many accounting documents were improperly destroyed before Jackson could get to court, according to a judge who presided over early hearings.
Cotillard's retreat
The Oscar winning French actress Marion Cotillard has been in retreat since a French newspaper dug up an interview she gave some years ago casting doubt on the ideas that terrorists blew up the Twin Towers, or indeed that the Americans landed on the moon. She is now issuing statements through her lawyer saying she never intended to question or doubt the attacks which took place on September 11, 2001, and regrets that her remarks from years ago were taken out of context. I guess she won't be offered roles in any big American political thrillers soon.
Indie budgets up
Now here's a fascinating statistic, from the big studios' lobby, the MPAA. The speciality division of the major studios last year spent as much or more on their films as the studios spent on their blockbusters.
The average cost of a speciality film from such firms as Fox Searchlight, New Line etc rose sixty per cent last year to more than seventy million. The average big studio release cost a few million less. That figure includes production costs of forty-nine million, and prints and advertising costs of twenty million. That's US dollars.
What is wrong with that picture?
What's not included are financing deals from independent equity sources -- the hedge funds who have been putting money into movies.
Nor is it looking at the budgets of the truly independent production houses, some of whom have also been chasing wall street for independent finance. It will be interesting to see what happens to that finance now that recession is starting to bite banks and hedge funds.
A tale of two queens
Catherine Deneuve, La reine of French cinema, and Catherine Zeta Jones, one of Hollywood's reigning matriarchs, will both be in Australia next week to present new films. Zeta-Jones will join Gillian Armstrong and Guy Pearce for the premiere of Death Defying Acts, Armstrong's film about Harry Houdini. The visit of La Deneuve was announced by the president of Alliance Francaise at the opening night of the French Film Festival in Sydney on Wednesday. She has been invited to present her new film, Apres Luis ('After Him') at screenings in Sydney, Melbourne and Canberra. I'll bring you my picks of this year's French Film Festival this time next week.
Interview with Elissa Down, writer-director, 'The Black Balloon'
06/03/2008
Writer-director Elissa Down has a lot of confidence about her film making. She's made four shiort films before this, but always knew this film, based on her own experiences of growing up with two autistic brothers, should be engaging and funny.
Interview with Nicole Kidman, actor, 'Margot At The Wedding'
21/02/2008
One of the most interesting phenomena of recent Hollywood has been the blossoming of Nicole Kidman's career since she and Tom Cruise separated. She was the one who persuaded him to work with Stanley Kubrick, and in the past decade she's made a series of small but fascinating films working with directors she admires: Alejandro Amenabar, for example. Jonathan Glazer for Birth, Lars Von Trier for Dogville. And now, Noah Baumbach.
Maybe she has a better feeling for drama than for comedy. Bewitched, and The Stepford Wives were not exactly high points.
But this is a smart woman, who can do the blockbusters (her Mrs Coulter in The Golden Compass was alluringly ruthless) while seeking out the smaller and riskier films.
But why, exactly, Margot at the Wedding?
The week in film
21/02/2008
Oz film wins at Berlin
In Berlin this week, director Elissa Down and her cast were celebrating after their film The Black Balloon, based on her own experiences of growing up with two autistic brothers, was awarded the Crystal Bear. It screened in a section the Berlin Festival calls 'Generation 14 plus', and it's not for also-rans. Last year's crystal bear winner, Shane Meadows's This is England, went on to win Best British Film at the Baftas a few weeks ago.
The Black Balloon, which releases here next month, tells the story of Thomas, who is often embarrassed by his autistic brother Charlie. Toni Collette and Erik Thompson play the parents in this chaotic and sometimes eccentric family, and Gemma Ward is Thomas's girlfriend. I've seen it, it's a warm and funny film with a great heart.
Film bodies merger
Arts Minister Peter Garret put the legislation to merge the Australian Film Commission, the Film Finance Corporation and Film Australia into one body, Screen Australia, out for public and industry comment and then closed the window. Just four days were given for feedback. It was introduced before parliament this week. It is one of two bills relevant to the film industry, the other being to re-establish the Australian Screen and Sound Archive as an autonomous body, after a prolonged protest campaign when it was folded into the Australian Film Commission some years ago.
Smaller films vie for Oscars
It's notable that all the films in contention for best film at this year's Oscars: No Country For Old Men; There Will Be Blood; Atonement; Juno and Michael Clayton -- are independent films, albeit some with big studio distribution.
But big studio blockbusters are invisible in the nominations. Which means I guess that many people in the industry are earning a living from films they're not particularly proud of. Meanwhile, a couple of the worst films I've seen for some time -- including Cloverfield and Jumper -- are doing brisk business at the box office. I guess it reflects the increasing schizophrenia of the film world, where small- and medium-budget films jostle each other in and out of boutique cinemas, while industrially crafted blockbusters dominate the multiplexes. And despite consumer protests of a few years ago, when cinema audiences dropped in most parts of the world, the kids have gone back to the big screens. All that's different is that many of the formulaic-effects-driven films have become cheaper -- and nastier.
Interview with Mathieu Amalric, actor, 'The Diving Bell and the Butterfly'
14/02/2008
You may well recognise Mathieu Amalric when you see The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. Well known to French film goers, Amalric played the son of the terrorist godfather figure in Munich. In life, as on screen, he exudes great energy. Which is maybe why he is now playing the main villain opposite Daniel Craig in the next Bond movie.
But this man, with more than 60 acting roles to his credit, insists he's only an accidental actor. He set out to be a film maker, and has written and directed four films. The fifth, as we'll hear, is ready to go. I met him last October in Paris.
The week in film
14/02/2008
Writers claim strike victory
Ten and a half thousand American screenwriters went back to their computers this week, ending their three-month strike over profits from work streamed on the internet.
The new contract, which union leaders negotiated directly with studio heads from Fox and Disney, gives them jurisdiction over new media, doubles residuals payments for DVDs, and gives studios a pretty good run with shows streamed over the net for the first two years. At the last minute the writers had a breakthrough. In the third year of any content being streamed they are getting two per cent of the gross.
In other words the writers are betting on the so-called long tail -- that in the new digital world products can be around for a very long time, bringing in profits. From little things, big things grow.
In this, the recalcitrant writers did better than the screen directors, who settled for a contract without points.
Initially the directors were congratulated for being moderate and reasonable in their demands, leading to one of the better jokes on the picket lines. 'It's the auteur theory of industrial relations,' said one writer. 'We do the work and they get the credit.'
Now it looks a little different. The writers stopped production on sixty television shows and a handful of films, trimmed twenty per cent off network ratings, and I guess showed that writers do matter.
Now, some of them have just eleven days to write all those Oscar jokes.
Passion writer sues Mel
Meanwhile, the co-writer of Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is suing Mel this week for a bigger slice of the profits. Ben Fitzgerald's suit claims Gibson told him the film had a budget of between five and seven million dollars, and that he was paid a mere $75,000. The film grossed 600 million worldwide.
Warner to close New Line?
Warner Brothers is talking about folding back New Line, the little studio which made the Lord of the Rings trilogy.
This may or may not be unconnected with the fact that having seen Peter Jackson successfully sue New Line for withholding a share of profits from the Rings films, the big W is now looking at a suit from the Tolkien estate claiming similar withholding. The estate claims under-reporting of home video revenue and other irregularities, including destruction of documents which would allow a proper audit of profits.
The publisher Harper Collins has joined the Tolkien estate, run by JRR Tolkien's elderly children, in the suit. The Tolkien Trust supports a number of charities including the Save the Children Fund and the Darfur Appeal. So far it has received nothing.
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.
The week in film
07/02/2008
US strike ... rumblings of a deal
There may, at last, be a deal. The negotiators for the American screenwriters are to meet with the union membership in New York and Los Angeles this weekend, to put to them the terms of a deal they've roughed out with the screen producers. And it's been widely reported that they've got better terms from the producers than the Directors Guild, who signed their contract a couple of weeks back.
The Oscars will be on, in some form, but Vanity Fair has cancelled its giant Oscars party, which has become the key social event of Oscars night. The magazine has cited solidarity with writers and others hurting in the industry.
Well, that's the spin. Though I guess with the American economy heading towards recession, it's a nice cost saving move for the magazine, as well as a political gesture. And their CEO says they will be back next year.
Heath Ledger's death 'accidental'
New York's medical examiner has confirmed that Heath Ledger died of an accidental overdose of prescription drugs, none of them in themselves lethal and all of them properly prescribed. So please now can we lay the rumours to rest and mourn the actor, and the man?
Interview with Lawrence Johnston, director, 'Night'
07/02/2008
Australian director Lawrence Johnston made a big impression in the nineties with his documentary Eternity, telling the story of Arthur Stace, a man who spent his nights chalking the word in beautiful flowing script on Sydney pavements. It was a gentle, contemplative film which left room for reverie on the back of his beautiful images.
After a stint as a film bureaucrat, and some intriguing short films, Lawrence has returned with another feature documentary: this one exploring what night means to a collection of Australians.
The week in film
31/01/2008
Strike hits ratings
In Hollywood this week, no news is good news. The screenwriters continued negotiations with the producers under a total media blackout -- a far cry from the media slanging match before Christmas. The strike is now in its twelfth week but the mood in town is reportedly optimistic.
Meanwhile, ratings this week showed that American television networks are really bleeding because of the strike: all network audiences are down between 20 and 25 per cent. The worry is that viewers won't come back!
Writers head on-line
On the internet, new mini dramas have surfaced, starring A-list actors such as Maggie Gyllenhaal, Brian Cox, and Jennifer Jason Leigh. They are witty and way cool -- an initiative of writer-director George Hickenlooper and writer Alan Sereboff. Eleven have been posted since mid January. I love the one with Jason Leigh as a forties noir Hollywood reporter. Click on the link to 'Speechless Without Writers' below to check them out.
New Oz distributor
In Australia, Richard Payten and Andrew Mackie, the heads of Dendy Films, have left to start their own distribution company, Transmission. They've gone into partnership with Paramount Pictures to invest and distribute independent films in Australia and New Zealand.
Dendy, which has been flying high as Australia's major arthouse distributors, was the victim of a bungled deal by its owners, the Becker group, which tried to split the television and cinema ends of the business and then buy back the cinema part. When the deal was challenged, the takeover review board said 'naughty' and so Dendy wound up in the hands of a regional television company, Prime, with no interest in, or experience with, film distribution.
Good luck, everybody. We need indie film distributors who know what they are doing in these interesting times.
Interview with James Mangold, director, 3:10 to Yuma
31/01/2008
James Mangold has made some interesting movies. He made Copland back a decade ago, followed by Girl Interrupted. Remember this raw little tale about the rebellion of two young women in a psych ward? Angelina Jolie absolutely stole it from Winona Ryder. It was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, without the skittishness.
A couple of near misses followed and then, two years ago, the music biopic Walk The Line. Mangold, with Reese Witherspoon, made it work.
And now 3:10 to Yuma. But why remake a classic?
Interview with Heath Ledger from 2006
24/01/2008
When Heath Ledger was in Sydney two years ago this summer to launch Brokeback Mountain he was on top of his game. His partner Michelle Williams was with him, their daughter Matilda had been born three months before and he was relishing parenthood. He's never been entirely comfortable with the media round. But somehow, we connected.
Interview with producer Marian Macgowan on Heath Ledger
24/01/2008
Marian Macgowan produced Two Hands, which was Heath Ledger's breakout hit of 1999. Until then he was an amiable presence in soaps such as Roar and Sweat, and films such as Black Rock. But Two Hands was something more. Marian Macgowan shares her memories of this extraordinary talent.
The week in film
24/01/2008
Two Aussies get Oscar Noms
You will have already read of Cate Blanchett's two nominations: She's up for best actress for her role in Elizabeth: the Golden Age; and for Best Supporting Actress for her turn as Jude, the Bob-Dylan-in-his-middle-period character in Tod Haynes's I'm Not There.
I think she's a shoo-in for the supporting actress role. For best actress, Cate is up against Julie Christie in Away From Her, Ellen Page for her great performance in Juno, and Marion Cottiyard for her performance as Edith Piaf in La Vie en Rose. My money's on Julie Christie.
But there's another Australian also nominated: producer Eva Orner, now based in America, who with director Alex Gibney made the feature documentary Taxi To The Dark Side, about an Afghani taxi driver shot by American soldiers. It's up there with a nomination for best feature documentary.
Daniel Day-Lewis leads the best actor nominations for his role as the oil man Daniel Plainview in the saga There Will Be Blood. It's a towering performance, in a film drenched with blood and oil. He's up against Tommy Lee Jones in In The Valley of Elah; George Clooney in Michael Clayton and Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd.
It should be Lewis right out ahead of the field, but who knows these things?
For best picture, blood and oil go head to head. The Coen Brothers' blood soaked frontier thriller No Country For Old Men is up against the oil drenched There Will Be Blood, which tackles America's two favourite obsessions: money and religion. And I'm delighted to see Julian Schnabel with a best director nomination for The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. It's an impressive film, releasing here next month.
Hope on strike front
On the strike front, the writers and the producers are back negotiating after the Directors' Guild reached an agreement with the producers over a new contract this week, including terms for DVDs, television downloads and internet content. The Directors' Guild negotiators included long time Academy Awards director Gil Cates.
Many from both side of the fence in Hollywood have been hoping the directors' agreement would act as some kind of template for the writers, though both the writers and the Screen Actors' Guild, whose contract also comes up soon, have warned members they will not necessarily settle for the directors' terms.
However the writers have made nice by withdrawing two additional claims opposed by the studios from the negotiations. These were claims to represent writers of animation and reality television shows. So Hollywood is holding its breath.
Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story
24/01/2008
This is a film I thought I would love. Jud Apatow and Jake Kasdan collaborated to write this satire on the musical biopic starring John C. Reilly as Dewey Cox. Reilly can actually sing -- he was really good in Chicago and we get a fair range here. But the film is a letdown: there are few funny moments and many more disappointing ones when it lapses from satire into simple pastiche. I liked Dewey in his Bob Dylan period, though. It will be worth a look when it comes on television, is all.
Interview with Diablo Cody, scriptwriter, Juno
17/01/2008
Juno's freshness in dialogue and storytelling is due to the screenplay by Diablo Cody, who has in past lives worked for an advertising agency, and then as a stripper. She wrote a blog called Pussy Ranch about her adventures in the strip trade, and it became a bestselling book.
Juno was her first go at a screenplay. When it came across his desk, Jason Reitman, who made the hit film Thank You For Smoking, promptly put aside the follow-up film he was writing to direct Cody's.
Now she's been nominated for all kinds of screenwriting awards and has a deal for a TV series for Stephen Spielberg.
But right now she's on strike. Which is maybe why we got to talk.
The week in film
17/01/2008
Dr George Miller's superhero film, The Justice League is the first big Australian casualty of the screenwriters' strike.
Warner Brothers pulled the plug on the production yesterday. It has been gearing up to start shooting soon at Fox Studios in Sydney.
Two reasons were given. One was that the studio had not had an official response to its application for tax offsets. The second was that the script still needed more work. Which it can't get while writers are striking.
There is some talk that the film, another Marvell Comics spin-off, may go into production in the second half of this year. But nothing is certain. Meanwhile in Hollywood, while striking screenwriters and producers stayed deadlocked, two things happened.
Four studios terminated contracts with a range of production companies, citing 'force majeure' clauses. This undoubtedly added to the pressure. About sixty deals, mostly television, and mostly of series not yet in production, or scheduled, were terminated.
Meanwhile, Hollywood directors began contract negotiations with producers over a similar range of issues...including residual rights for films, and shows screened via the internet. Directors' and producers' representatives have been negotiating since Monday, after a fortnight of informal meetings with studio heads such as Peter Chernin of News Corp and Robert Iger of Disney, to map out the ground.
Directors Guild President Michael Apted issued a statement on Monday that these informal meetings left him hopeful that an agreement with producers was within striking distance. Interestingly, the Directors' negotiating committee is headed by Gil Cates, who produces and directs the Oscars. They're under a big threat, so he has a lot of incentive.
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