Past Programs
Horror - 2008
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Not Quite Hollywood
28/08/2008
Here's a confession: the first ever film review I wrote was for Double J Radio in l976. It was of a film called Fantasm, billed as an inquiry into the ten most common forms of female sexual fantasy. An attempt to ride on the box office popularity of Alvin Purple, it was more of the tubes and bouncing boobs variety, and I thought it was on the nose. I went storming back to the Double J newsroom and wrote a piece about filmmakers with hungry wallets and limp imaginations. I stand by that verdict.
Now this was co-written by Anthony Ginnane, who also produced it. I'm glad it rates a mention in Mark Hartley's exuberant documentary about Australia's lusty heritage of exploitation cinema, because it was a benchmark of sorts, a low water mark. Though probably not quite as low as Turkey Shoot.
Fantasm I think also marked a kind of turning point in popular taste. Alvin Purple had been hugely popular; its sequel less so. But a lot of things had happened between the sexual revolution of the sixties, the censorship wars fought and won, mainly by the intellectuals in the publishing and film communities -- and the mid to late 70s.
One of the things which happened was women's liberation. It arose directly out of a realisation by women activists in those earlier liberation movements that they were being screwed metaphorically as well as literally.
Which may be why Australia's exploitation films had to widen their appeal: to horror; and to cars.
The bouncing boobs and flashing pubes of the first section of Not Quite Hollywood have a historical appeal: we don't usually get to see such cheerful and abundantly fleshy sex scenes in cinemas thse days. But I think the film really hits its stride once it starts to look at the horror films, and the action films, Australians were making.
And here one of Quentin Tarantino's enthusiastic claims makes sense:
'Nobody shoots a car the way Aussies do,' he enthuses.
Tarantino by the way is the patron saint of this film. His enthusiasm for Australian exploitation cinema started Hartley on his odyssey to make the documentary.
Here Quent looks like a character from one of the films he's espousing. He's filmed seated in the front row of a screening room, maybe his own. He's gaunt, clad in black and wearing a beanie so that only his bony face, shot from below in scary blue-green, looms out of the darkness.
What he says, beautifully illustrated by Hartley with clips from a whole host of films, makes sense. Australian men back then had much less difficulty expressing affection for their cars than for Australian women. They could admire them, discuss them, stroke them, reward them, adorn them, compare them, flaunt their merits. It was a syndrome widely discussed. The artist Margaret Dodds, I do recall, had a great show called A Woman Is Not a Car, featuring numbers of cute ceramic FJ Holdens, some in bridal headdress, others in curlers.
Tarantino gleefully acknowledges the car fetishism of Australian films of the period. Mad Max, it's clear, did not come out of nowhere, though George Miller gave it a visual class, and a subtext lacking from other petrolhead films. And of course, a charismatic hero in Mel Gibson.
Hartley has interviewed just about everybody for his film: from the cinematographers such as John Seale to the actors, producers and critics.
Respect has to be paid. And so the film does celebrate, for example, the work of Australian stuntman Grant Page, and some of his most daring exploits. It celebrates the early work of Russell Mulcahey, stylistically way ahead of his time, on such films as Razorback. And it celebrates the late Richard Franklin who, in partnership with writer Everett de Roche, brought real finesse and devotion based on a devotion to the ideas and techniques of Hitchcock to such films as Patrick.
I could have done with much more of Richard onscreen. Which brings me to one of my issues with Not Quite Hollywood. It's edited at such a furious pace, crammed with so many short clips and grabs of interview that it becomes a breathless panorama, and loses a chance for any depth of analysis to test some of its claims.
It becomes, rather, a kind of monolinear film history; one which could overstate its case. Rather like Fenton Bailey and Randy Barbaro's 2005 documentary Inside Deep Throat, which employed a similar rapid-cut technique and wound up vastly overstating the cultural impact of that film on attitudes to censorship. With all that, it's enormous fun this film, and we owe Hartley a debt of gratitude.
Among the many reasons to enjoy this film has to be the footage of Dennis Hopper on Mad Dog Morgan. If you thought Hopper was out of his skull in Apocalypse Now, this you have to see. The survivor of the shoot, director Philippe Mora, producer Richard Brennan et al, have some fine tales to tell. These days of course, Hopper is addicted to art rather than booze or drugs.
Time tames us all, and while Okker exploitation films have made their mark on some Australian directors today, it feels like a lot of the glee has gone out of the bottom end of the business. I guess we can't lose our innocence twice.
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.
Interview with Roy Andersson, writer-director, You, the Living (Du levande)
14/08/2008
Roy Andersson has made four feature films in forty years. He made a big splash in l970 with a film called A Swedish Love Story. His second film, five years later, was harshly criticised. So he went off and made commercials for 25 years.
Then at the turn of the century he made a very savage, funny bleak film -- a kind of ode to the Millennium -- called Songs From The Second Floor. In it, the good burghers of Sweden are trying to flee as the world around them collapses and the economy fails. At one stage town officials start to sacrifice virgins.
I'd never seen anything quite like this film.
And various critics have reached for odd comparisons to describe Andersson's vision. He's been compared to David Lynch; to Ingmar Bergman crossed with the surrealists; to Terry Gilliam. I don't think his world view is surreal so much as hyper-real, and absurdly gloomy.
His latest film, You, The Living (in release in Sydney and Melbourne, other states to follow) is a series of linked vignettes, some of them dreams. Indeed it takes its title from a poem by Goethe, about the fleetness of life and the imminence of death.
Interview with Morgan Spurlock, director, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?
07/08/2008
Morgan Spurlock has been out here to present his new documentary at the Brisbane and Melbourne Film festivals.
Spurlock made his name by living on MacDonalds and nothing but for a month, in the documentary Super Size Me. He became obese, and his liver was in very bad shape. MacDonalds hated the movie, but they did cut supersize serves off their menus.
Since then Spurlock has made a reality television series, and then a second documentary, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden - a rather faux search for the US public enemy number one, which took him to a number of middle eastern countries, talking to supporters of Islam from various walks of life. Surpise suprise...most of them weren't too impressed with Osama Bin Laden either. Though to one or two, he was a hero.
Did Spurlock ,em>really expect to find Bin Laden? Did he really expect us to go along with the idea?
Well, we may have, should there have been much in the way of new in formation. But mostly, we get to meet a bunch of fairly nice people, who are, gee, folks just like us.
Is this a documentary or a travelogue? Aimed at whom, exactly?
One thing I discovered whatever the question, Morgan Spurlock remains relentlessly affable.
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 Dark Knight
17/07/2008
In a season of cinema cluttered with comic book characters, mostly pitched to audiences with a mental age in single digits, it's startling to come across a movie which has intelligence as well as flair. Even more so to discover a charismatic character which way transcends its comic strip origins.
The Joker was one of the most ingenious DC comics creations in the Batman series—a master criminal who does crime for his own amusement.
But nothing had quite prepared me for Heath Ledger's Joker. Not the advance word, nor the reputation of British director Christopher Nolan for wanting to invest his Batman series with some psychological depth.
If anything, Batman, The Beginning, in which Nolan launched Christopher Bale as the guilt-driven superhero, actually overdid the psychodrama, I thought. It was a little too much about origins, a bit too psychologically claustrophobic, and that's a pity because Christian Bale, for my money, is a star with considerable talent. There is actually an intelligent and witty person behind the chiselled face. More could have been made.
The Dark Knight explores more interesting territory. It is, if you like, a dark night of the soul. The battle being waged is between Bruce Wayne—weary of his Batman persona, ready to retire and hand the crime stopper role to a bright and shiny new district attorney, Harvey Dent, played by Aaron Eckhart—and The Joker: the ultimate hit man, called in by the Gotham City mob to off the caped crusader.
Now previously memorable incarnations of the Joker, including that of Jack Nicholson, have conjured mayhem with a merry twinkle.
Ledger's take is different. His Joker is seriously disturbed. He is not in it for the money, but because he is full of rage, and engaged in some kind of cosmic battle with the universe.
His lumpy white face smeared with lipstick like a demented clown, his voice both clipped and wheedling, Ledger's Joker is charismatic in a way we haven't seen since Hopkins's Hannibal Lecter.
This Joker is witty. He has a real sense of play. His delight at finding Batman is palpable. 'You complete me,' he purrs. This Joker uses a knife, as his preferred way to 'put a smile on your face.'
And he has many different versions, all chilling, of how his own father used a knife to carve a smile on his.
The battle the Joker wages with Batman is around one of the most fundamental questions: are human beings altruistic, or basically selfish? Do we act for the good of others, or put ourselves first?
It's an age-old moral question and a very current political one—witness the debate on Australia's response to climate change. The Dark Knight dramatises this dilemma nicely.
And if Ledger's Joker dominates the screen, he has strong support from Aaron Eckhardt and Gary Oldman, who is happily liberated from the gothic for once, playing the good cop James Gordon. Somehow it takes thee guys and Batman to outflank the Joker.
There are some charismatic actors—think Harvey Keitel, for example, or Robert de Niro—who bring onscreen various versions of their own personas.
Heath Ledger, in his short screen life, never did that. Here, in a comic strip morality play, we are watching a chilling creation, a rage filled sociopath who plays dice with the universe. Unforgettable.
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
The Eye
13/03/2008
Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise's company are behind this remake of the Hong Kong horror flic about a blind musician who gets a corneal transplant, then starts having ghostly visions. An excellent premise let down by Jessica Alba's two-dimensional performance as a classical violinist and some tired horror tricks that mainly involve ghosts popping up on screen in unexpected moments (which gets quite predictable). Hunky Alessandro Nivola's eye doctor isn't much better -- he helps Alba's character solve the riddle by tracking down the donor's family, an unlikely idea that I might've accepted in return for some sexual tension -- but alas...
Jumper
14/02/2008
Hayden Christianson stars in this brainless and messy adapation of a l992 sci-fi novel by Stephen Charles Gould, about a fifteen-year-old kid who finds he can jump from one place to another in a nano-second, right around the world.
Many great sci-fi writers, from Ray Bradbury on, have explored telekinesis and teleportation. But this film makes such dumb, obvious work of it, it's a waste. Aimed squarely at testosterone-driven teenage boys, it has a wildly underdeveloped plot (the jumpers are hunted by a group called Paladins, who have hunted them for hundreds of years and we never know why), dumb dialogue and editing like an endless car crash. Every interesting idea has been sacrificed to pumping testosterone and adrenalin. Diane Lane is bafflingly there as a peripatetic mother, and Samuel L Jackson looms up in bad knitwear, zapping people -- which should be warning enough.
This is, I fear, only part one of a trilogy. Have they no shame?
The Mist
07/02/2008
This is a 'lifeboat movie' -- the kind where a group of characters are flung together by chance to face a great peril. Here there's a group of shoppers trapped in a small-town supermarket with a pea-soup mist and bloodthirsty monsters lurking outside. Based on a 1980 Stephen King novella, it plays as a good metaphor for contemporary America. As the characters freak out they divide into two groups -- religious doomsayers and humanists -- and they end up fighting each other as much as the monsters.
An acid-tongued, born-again Christian (Marcia Gay Harden) whips her lot into a frenzy, claiming the day of judgment has come, while on the other side Thomas Jane leads a group who believe they can nut out the problem and find a way to escape. This is director Frank Darabont's third Stephen King adaptation after The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, and I liked it a lot. Except for the beasties. What I imagined lurked in the mist was much more terrifying than what the CGI wizards came up with.
I Am Legend
03/01/2008
I love a good post-apocalypse story, novel or film. I've enjoyed them for years. The first Angela Carter novel I ever read was a post-apocalypse tale called Heroes and Villains. Jolly good it was too.
The latest was Cormac McCarthy's The Road, in which the great American tragedian takes a familiar scenario -- a man, a child, a blackened landscape; the will and ingenuity needed to survive -- and makes it art through total immersion in an imagined world, conjured in precise poetic prose.
Then there are the great post-apocalyptic moments. In which Phillip K Dick novel, for example, did someone say: 'If you stand downwind, you can smell America burning'?
I Am Legend is based on a l954 novel by Richard Matheson, who also invented The Incredible Shrinking Man. It was first adapted as a film The Omega Man, in l971. This time round the screenplay is by Mark Protosevich and Akiva Goldsman.
We begin with a hunt. A man and his dog are stalking a deer through the deserted, overgrown streets and highrise buildings of Manhattan. Other game prowl and scatter. Packs of wild dogs, other deer, a tiger. It's a thrilling conceit, beautifully realised. The empty concrete canyons, the crumbling sidewalks, vines twining through abandoned cars. Tufts of weed, waist high, sprouting through cracked footpaths.
Danny Boyle did it better earlier, using the empty streets of London as a set for his zombie film 28 Days Later.
But it's still impressive; more so because of the detail. This is not a set; these are streets we know, if only from cinema.
Our hunter is a man alone in Manhattan. Yes there are vicious feral dogs, and a pride of rampaging lions. There are store dummies. But our man, a very organised military scientist, has no-one to talk to except photographs of his wife and kids and a beautiful Alsatian dog, Sam, who rides with Neville in his sports car, hunts with him -- walks side by side with him on his own treadmill when it's time to exercise.
Flashbacks explain some things. Neville is the only human survivor of a deadly genetically engineered virus originally developed as a vaccine against cancer. It mutated, turning human beings into raging, daylight-phobic zombies. It seems to have the same effect on dogs, though mysteriously deer, tigers and other wildlife are unaffected.
Neville scavenges systematically by day and, in a laboratory, tries to find an anti-viral cure. He exercises, hunts, watches old movies and breakfast newscasts on DVD. At night he barricades his Manhattan apartment against those who prowl the dark.
And he talks to his dog. As another dog-talker, I thought this was rather neat. It beats the hell out of Tom Hanks talking to his basketball in Castaway.
But as a hardened dog-owning moviegoer, my heart was sinking. Hardened because while the night prowling mutants or zombies do provide some heart-stopping moments, we are not asked to care one zot when they are stopped in their tracks. They are just greyish, animated zombie matter.
But the dog is different. At a certain stage we just know, by the rules of dramatic logic, that Sam is at risk.
Can we stand it? Who will Robert Neville talk to now?
Well...can't tell you that. But I can say that finally Neville is not alone. And after a gripping first hour, the film goes downhill in the last great battle against the greyish, computer-generated and basically pretty uninteresting zombies.
Making the film an argument between science and religion doesn't help much either.
It was during the zombie rampage that I began to ponder the following questions: Who is maintaining the power supplying Robert Neville's DVD player, treadmill, apartment and laboratory? Isn't the first law of post-apocalypse stories that after a certain time the lights go out?
Why, if Neville is the sole survivor, is he trying to invent a vaccine or an anti-venine (the film isn't exactly clear which it is)?
And is there or is there not a land beyond? You know, there is a happy land where the elect, that is the survivors, have been able to re-establish normality. The land beyond is a key idea in post-apocalypse stories, whether The Children of Men, or The Road. It's a constant subject of rumour, speculation, fantasy and desire for the struggling survivors. It's a Christian hymn: 'There is a happy land far away'. It's a gated community. It's an ideal. It's a boundary all must pass.
The land beyond pops up again, unexplored and unexplained, in I Am Legend. It's so neat I was furious. But by then I had given up on the movie.
I Am Legend is initially interesting entertainment. The first hour zips along but the finale makes it just another movie with snarling grey CGI zombies, and a simplistic lecture about religion good; science bad. Spare us.
It's screening nationally and is rated M. Dog lovers beware.
