Odds & Ends
Monday, August 20, 2007
Remember MIFF? (MIFF Report, Part II)
Apologies for the delays in getting further posts on the Melbourne International Film Festival up. There was always going to be limited opportunity to post during the festival, since so many of the films I was seeing were in the last few days, but things were made worse by difficulties at my day job which caused a few planned films on my schedule to bite the dust. Hopefully my previous plugs for Paul Martin's Melbourne Film Blog led anybody who was hankering for day-by-day coverage there; the boys over at Hoopla also managed to cover a reasonable number of films. One of the films I missed (El Topo) remains very much on my list to cover on the site. What I did see was generally pretty good, and I had a better time of it than last year. So here are some quick thoughts on what I did end up seeing. Manufacturing Dissent: Michael Moore and the Media (Debbie Melnyk, Rick Caine) This anti-Michael Moore documentary would make a good primer for anyone who thought Michael Moore was an ethically uncompromised documentary maker... if, that is, there were any such people left. I'd have thought that the world long ago split into those who find Moore's documentaries to be hopelessly biased propaganda, and those (like myself) who find him a really interesting filmmaker but who despair at his occasional lapses of ethics and judgment. However, Canadian documentary maker Debbie Melnyck feigns ignorance of Moore's sometimes dubious methods to spin a tale of her growing disillusionment with him, adopting many of his most infamous methods - most particularly, unannounced doorstops - and turning them against him. The points the documentary makes are sometimes very telling, but the adoption of the worst aspects of Moore's style is a double-edged sword. Yes, it exposes Moore as a hypocrite, in that he can be made to look bad using the same methods he uses on others. Yet because Melnyck only manages to reproduce Moore's worst, without managing to match the incisiveness of Moore at his best, she comes off looking a far inferior filmmaker. Having revisited most of Bowling for Columbine on TV the other night, I was reminded again how much better Moore's best work is; seeing a film like this take such a naive approach to debunking him (by, for example, professing shock at the way in which the gun collection in Columbine was staged for the camera) didn't really shake my view of Moore in any meaningful way. Billy the Kid (Jennifer Vendetti) This low key documentary about a sweet but socially maladjusted teenager living in a small town in the US is very entertaining, but left me with mixed feelings. So much of a documentary comes down to choice of subject, and you can't dismiss the role ofa filmmaker in making their own luck and spotting the good subjects that exist in everyday life. Yet reviewing a slice-of-life film like this veers dangerously close to reviewing the people themselves, as the qualities that make Billy the Kid worth seeing really all relate to Billy himself. Billy is an awkward misfit, but obviously very bright, and his relationship with his mother is touching: you get the feeling Billy could have been really troubled if he hadn't had such a supportive parent. Indeed, the principle reservation I have about the film follows from the protectiveness it makes you feel towards Billy, as you start to resent the filmmaker's interventions in his life. For example, the film centres on Billy's crush on a sweet girl who works at the local diner, and as Billy makes his first moves on her you suddenly feel the heavy weight of manipulation by the director. Billy's first big moments with the subject of his crush are shot with such close cameras and heavy coverage that there is simply no way that the two teens could have had a natural discussion. It's difficult not to feel that the course of Billy's budding relationship was drastically affected by the filmmakers, who may have unwittingly put their own interests ahead of Billy's. Monkey Grip (Ken Cameron) It's not hard to see why Ken Cameron's adaptation of Helen Garner's semi-autobiographical novel died at the box office back in 1982. For starters, the subject matter - the soap opera-ish interpersonal shenanigans of a group of inner-Melbourne intelligentsia and bohemians - could hardly be better misjudged to alienate a middle-suburban audience. And there's something really frustrating in watching Noni Hazlehurt's Nora take so long to come to terms with a pretty fundamental relationship lesson: there's no future with a junkie. What's more, the storyline is jumbled, with peripheral characters (like Chrissie Amphlett's Angela) being dragged onto centre stage for big relationship crises despite having been only fleetingly established earlier in the film: it's as if Cameron and Garner have forgotten that we don't know these characters as well as they do. Hazlehurst puts in a brave performance, but is miscast. She's too sunny and squeaky clean for what seems to be intended as a troubled and sexually adventurous character, and so the film ends up with something of a blank at its centre. Yet for all that, the intervening years have made the film's virtues that much stronger: it works really well as a time capsule of a particular period, location, and intellectual clique. The songs by Amphlett and the Divinyls are now standards, and Ken Cameron's direction holds up really well, with a good feel for location and strong performances right through the cast. Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi) This oddball comedy from New Zealand seems sure to become a big cult item. It's a simple tale of the relationship between two misfits: the shy but sensitive Lily (Loren Horsley), and the self-centered ubernerd Jarrod (Jemaine Clement), who is training for his revenge on the bully bully from his high school. It's very funny and it's good to see an upcoming New Zealand director make a splash with his first feature. Yet, while I definitely recommend it when it gets its commercial release, it is also going to be hurt by one serious problem: Jarrod's sheer awfulness. Clement does great work in the role, creating an amusing and unique character - nerds in movies tend to be portrayed as lovable and misunderstood underdogs, so it's interesting to see a social misfit who is actually just a jerk - but you can never warm up to him. The little redemption he gets in the film is so little and so late that it simply can't justify the faith that Lily puts in him all through the film. Yet that gripe aside, this is still a lot of fun. Labels: documentaries, miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 20.8.07 - 2 comments  
Monday, July 30, 2007
MIFF Report, Part I
A good start to MIFF this year, with two enjoyable sessions on the weekend. Before I get to my reports, though, it is worth noting that Paul Martin is keeping what looks to be a very helpful running list of films that are nearly sold out. The Best of Norman McLaren I had thought this retrospective of Canadian animator Norman McLaren might be the cinematic equivalent of eating my greens, but this was unexpectedly enjoyable. This selection of McLaren's films alternated between highly abstract animation and little comic skits done in a semi-animated style using human bodies. I'm not usually keen on abstract films, as the lack of any meaningful framework in which to assess the work leaves the artist completely unaccountable to the audience (who can ever say whether the work is of any merit?) Yet McLaren's work defied my expectations, especially surprising given that one long slog is hardly the way to appreciate this kind of film. The shorts are remarkable for the level of energy and inventiveness they achieve in an intrinsically painstaking artform: the earliest of the shorts, Stars and Stripes, felt so contemporary in its confrontational explosion of movement and colour that it was hard to believe it was from 1941 (some sources list it as 1940 or even 1939). Other highlights included Blinkety Blank and the jazzy Begone Dull Care, but the really startling film is the last, Pas de deux. It starts as a simple shot of a ballet dancer, with occasional freeze frames to give a Nude-Descending-A-Staircase kind of look, but becomes steadily more beautiful as it progresses. It left me seriously contemplating the Norman McLaren DVD set.   Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog) Werner Herzog's Rescue Dawn is one of his most mainstream efforts: a prisoner-of-war movie (from a true story) about US navy pilot Dieter Dengler's escape from a POW camp during the Vietnam War. It's pretty conventional material - even star Christian Bale has been here before, in Empire of the Sun - but it's very well done. The performances - from Bale, and also Steve Zahn and Jeremy Davies as fellow prisoners - are extremely solid, and Herzog's eye for the landscape is as good as you'd expect. (I'm just glad someone had the courage to let Herzog film in a jungle again after Fitzcarraldo). It falls a bit short of greatness, though: there are enough little moments of eccentricity that you can feel it's a Herzog film, but not enough of that really off-kilter sensibility to lift it to quite the level of his best work. Last year's MIFF offering from Herzog, The Wild Blue Yonder, was a much less successful film but showed more hints of something truly brilliant (and Herzog has been wonderful as recently as 2005's Grizzly Man). Still, it's well worth catching when it gets its mainstream release, and should be Herzog's first really successful fictional film in years. It screens again at MIFF on 4 August. Labels: animation, herzog, miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 30.7.07 - 1 comments
Saturday, July 21, 2007
MIFF Busting
The Melbourne International Film Festival starts next week. I'm hoping I'll have a better experience than last year, where the films I caught were a fairly mixed bag, and the film I enjoyed the most was a fairly unexceptional kung fu flick. (See here and here for my comments at the time). Things are already looking up this year: the experience of working out what I could see has been made much easier by the festival organisers finally listing session times in the main part of the program, with the description of the films. Once again I'll be getting a mini-pass, which gets me ten movies: work and other commitments don't allow me to get any more hardcore than that. The following list is my fairly random selection of what I'm going to see, unapologetically based upon my own interests, so you should treat it as such and not take it as a list of recommendations. A couple of other things things to note: I'm not one of those people who avoids movies that will be opening commercially; if anything, because of this page, I aim for those films because it means I can have a head start in covering them when they do come out (the two New Zealand features and the Herzog film are sure to get a local release, for example). And if you're after a wide sampling of world cinema, I'm not your man: I'm a genre-cinema freak and there's no use pretending otherwise. Check out the lists from Paul Martin, over at the Melbourne Film Blog (here), and Mathieu Ravier at Last Night With Riviera (here) if that's what you're after. So with those caveats, here's my very haphazardly chosen program: Rescue Dawn (Werner Herzog) I'm a big fan of Herzog, and it's been a while since he's had a high-profile fictional feature (it has been his documentaries, such as Grizzly Man, that have received most attention of late). While the plot - a POW story from the Vietnam war - isn't really my kind of thing, this has received good reviews from overseas and Herzog's name is enough to get me in the door. El Topo (Alejandro Jodorowsky) One of the classic midnight movies is getting a single 11:15pm screening. This one is going to test my commitment, because my hunch is this is going to try my patience the way no film since Last Year at Marienbad has. But anyone who has read Danny Peary's evisceration of this film in his book Cult Movies, or seen the much more positive coverage in the documentary Midnight Movies, will be curious to see this landmark of independent cinema. Monkey Grip (Ken Cameron) A chance to see a really important Australian film that I've never seen. Run, Rabbit Run (Bob Ellis) This is a film by Bob Ellis about Mike Rann. I'm seeing this just because Bob Ellis is such an interesting figure and because the political angle interests me, but I think this is a real roughie. Eagle vs Shark (Taika Waititi) This is a New Zealand film about awkward, nerdy romance; it's a recommendation of a colleague and is supposed to be very funny - although I was disappointed to find it isn't actually about an actual contest between an eagle and a shark. Black Sheep (Jonathan King) Another high-ish profile NZ release, this is a horror movie about killer sheep, and looks like being something of a guilty pleasure. Hopefully it won't be Baaaaaaa-d. The Best of Norman McLaren (Norman McLaren) A retrospective of the very important Canadian animator. I've read a lot about McLaren over the years but seen very little of his stuff, so this is an ideal chance to fill a gap. Manufacturing Dissent: Michael Moore and the Media (Debbie Melnyk, Rick Caine) I've written about the criticisms of Michael Moore before (here), and find the subject of truth and honesty in documentaries very interesting (so see also here, here, and here). I'll be interested to see if this is just the standard anti-Moore hack job or something a bit more nuanced. Billy the Kid (Jennifer Vendetti) A character study of an awkward teen, this forms party of my nerd program (with Eagle vs Shark). This is just a gamble based upon the interesting write-up in the program. These character study documentaries can be very good or very dull, so fingers crossed. Radiant City (Gary Burns) A Canadian documentary about suburban sprawl. This is indulging my urban planner interests. So that's my program, for what it's worth. I plan to repeat my pattern from last year of doing capsule reviews through the festival, if you're interested in hearing how I go. Hopefully there's nothing as bad as Tideland this time around. Incidentally, Nobody Knows is playing as part of the Hirokazu Kore-eda retrospective; I reviewed that on its original release (here). Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 21.7.07 - 1 comments
Thursday, August 17, 2006
MIFF Week Two
My second week at the Melbourne International Film Festival saw far fewer films. I was never planning too see as many in the second week, but a couple I had planned to see fell by the wayside. Haivng not been that impressed by The Pervert's Guide to Cinema, I couldn't get that interested in Zizek, a film about Lacanian theorist Slavoj Zizek (and besides, that was the night Essendon beat the Lions). However, I did regret that circumstances meant I missed The Host, a Korean creature feature that I had been looking forward to greatly. So in the end, week two amounted to a measly two films. A Prairie Home Companion (Robert Altman) The latest film from living legend Robert Altman is, aptly enough, an old man's Nashville. And that's fine. It's not great, but it's very enjoyable in a homely, self-indulgent kind of way. It covers the fictional final night of a real radio show, Garrison Keillor's folksy variety show A Prairie Home Companion. I imagine fans of the real show will get a lot out of this, and certainly by the end of the film I was interested in Keillor's show. Keillor has a deep, honey-coated voice, and you can hear how he has thrived on radio, but he turns out to be a natural on screen too, with a subdued hangdog manner that's effortlessly comical. There's a strange metaphysical subplot that didn't quite come off - only someone with Altman's cachet could have gotten away with it to the extent that he did - and the usual array of fantastic performances that you expect in an Altman film. Kevin Kline, in particular, steals the film as Guy Noir, a wannabe hard-boiled detective who seems to exist in his own time period, marked off from the others by his fantasy world. It's one of those great supporting parts that cries out for its own film (like Peter Sellers' Inspector Clouseau in the original Pink Panther). All in all it's a good way to warm up for the season of vintage Altman at ACMI in coming weeks. This Film is Not Yet Rated (Kirby Dick) Kirby Dick's documentary about the MPAA's ratings' board (which administers the highly unsatisfactory American ratings system) is very entertaining, but not very hard hitting. Dick - who is the spitting image of Ted Danson - talks to a lot of filmmakers who have run foul of the system, and makes some good points. His strongest ground is in attacking the secrecy in which the board operates (they don't reveal who their members are), and he gets some good cheap laughs by hiring private investigators to identify them. Yet this central, structuring stunt reveals the problem with his approach: sure, he finds the names, but he doesn't tell you anything meaningful about them. What are their backgrounds? Their other jobs (if any)? What social or political views do they bring to their work as raters? We learn nothing at all, really, about the members of the ratings board, and only at the very end get the names and other jobs of the appeals board (a separate group of people). We are left to ponder ourselves the implications of the fact that most of the latter work for theatre chains or distributors: a more serious-minded filmmaker would have explored this further. Labels: altman, festivals, miff Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 17.8.06 - 0 comments
Sunday, August 06, 2006
MIFF Week One
We're about halfway through the Melbourne International Film Festival now, and my own experience has been only average. This isn't a reflection on the festival: it's just the way the cards have fallen in the vast lucky dip that happens when you have to choose from a range of movies before the usual pre-release buzz. (It's a little frightening to realise how much you rely on distributors and the media to direct your viewing). My experience so far has been of several middling films, one good one, and one really wretched one. Which is probably a strike-rate reflecting the overall quality of any given sample of movies. But I do hope the second week throws me up something really excellent. But here's what I've seen so far. A Scanner Darkly (Richard Linklater) Linklater's sort-of animated film is an adaptation of a Phillip K Dick novel, about an undercover cop in near future California who comes off second best from his own addiction. I haven't read the source novel, but I've read enough of Dick to know that Linklater's film is a much more faithful adaptation of Dick's vision than the typical Hollywood takes on his work (Bladerunner, total Recall, Minority Report, etc). Which is both a strength and a weakness. It has the slightly alienating quality of Dick's writing down pat: lots of great ideas, but an off-putting disregard for character and narrative. The "animated" technique Linklater uses (which is actually little more than a really extreme cinematography, since we're seeing live-action actors disguised to look animated) is a bit of a needless gimmick. Not bad, but not great. The Pervert's Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes) I thought this presentation of Lacanian film theorist Slavoj Zizek's theories might be interesting. I've recently been reading Noel Carroll's great book Mystifying Movies, in which he comprehensively destroys old-school Lacanian film theory, so I was wondering whether an "academic rock star" who proclaims himself Lacanian might have moved into more interesting areas. Nope. Zizek's presentation is fun enough, but it's just the standard Lacanian melange of dubious psychoanalytical conceits applied haphazardly to various films, without any attempt to shape it into a theoretical model that is either useful or convincing. It's like listening to the most annoying person in your first year film studies course (the one who had read ahead into the psychonalytical film theory and absorbed it wholeale without ever critiquing it). Still, it is fun to watch the clips and see Zizek putter about Bodega Bay (from The Birds) in a motor boat. Incidentally, The MIFF organisers get a black mark for programming what seemed to be three episodes of a TV series into one 150 minute slog and trying to pretend it was an actual movie. Not good enough: it's not fair to the material, or the audience (if I'd known it wasn't intended as a feature I definitely would have seen something else). The Wild Blue Yonder (Werner Herzog) I was trying to think whether there is any director who is so esteemed as both a director of fiction and documentary as Werner Herzog: even allowing that it is a long time since his really highly regarded fictional work (Fitzcarraldo, Aguirre: The Wrath of God, etc) I couldn't come up with anyone. The Wild Blue Yonder blends both sides of his work, using an on-screen narrator (a wild-eyed Brad Dourif) to tell a science fiction story that is illustrated with various bits of out-of-context documentary footage. For a while it's really fun: some of Herzog's editorial choices are inspired and funny, and the segments with Dourif (particularly the visit to the alien's "city") show Herzog's eye for finding weird real world locations hasn't dulled since Stroszek. In its second half, however, Herzog pretty much just settles down to giving us documentary footage (of NASA astronauts and deep sea divers) with musical accompaniment. He's obviously trying to transform the footage into a 2001-esque mood piece, but at the end of the day it's still just footage with music over it. Fearless (Ronny Yu) My favorite bit of the Festival program is the spiel in very fine print on director Ronny Yu's career under the listing for Fearless: "His films include... Freddy vs Jason." Well, the new film from the director of Freddy vs Jason has got subtitles, so it must be art, right? Well, maybe. But it is fun. Fearless continues the post-Crouching Tiger trend of big-budget, prestige kung fu movies that are partially American backed and aiming for arthouse distribution in the west. Yu is no match for directors such as Ang Lee and Zhang Yimou who have directed previous efforts along these lines, but he does have Jet Li, who is in good form here as both a performer and a kung fu artist. I was attracted to this because the program offered a "return to the classic, stripped-back kung fu style typified by the early films of Jackie Chan and Jet Li." It isn't really that like early Chan - there's still a little bit of wire work and a few unnecessary bullet-time like camera moves - but it certainly is back to basics when compared to something like Kung Fu Hustle. The fights are pretty good, the story involving enough, and Yu manages to make the whole thing feel nice and epic, with attractive locations, sets, and production design. A lot of fun. Tidelands (Terry Gilliam) I really hated this movie. It isn't reprehensible, or stupid, or otherwise bad in any of the usual ways. It just doesn't work at all. It tells the story of small girl, the daughter of junkie parents, who ends up faring for herself in an empty farmhouse, eventually befriending a pair of eccentric neighbours. There's a really good idea in the way the film reflects her deteriorating mental health by exploring her inner life and showing her play becoming increasingly warped and unhealthy. Unfortunately, it's just about unwatchable despite beautiful cinematography and Gilliam's good eye. The first half, in which we watch the girl play and share in her elaborate fantasy world, has its grotesque elements but mixes them withy a syrupy whimsy that recalls Spielberg at his worst. It's slow and very dull. The second half livens up, but becomes increasingly difficult to watch as it delves into some really morbid humour and issues of inappropriate sexual relationships that it doesn't know how to resolve. It all adds up to a miserable experience. I can't see who the audience for this is, and find it difficult to imagine it getting a release. Labels: carroll, festivals, gilliam, herzog, miff, theory Posted by Stephen Rowley @ 6.8.06 - 0 comments
|
This page is for assorted musings and editorialising that don't fit elsewhere on Cinephobia. Stills Avery, Jones, Clampett The Other Jones Iron Man 2: Early Review Location, Location, Location The Casting of Tintin Round-Up of the Frivolous Things Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Quicktime Tra... Franchising December 2003 May 2004 December 2004 January 2005 February 2005 March 2005 April 2005 May 2005 June 2005 July 2005 August 2005 September 2005 October 2005 November 2005 December 2005 January 2006 February 2006 March 2006 April 2006 May 2006 June 2006 August 2006 September 2006 October 2006 December 2006 January 2007 February 2007 March 2007 April 2007 May 2007 June 2007 July 2007 August 2007 September 2007 October 2007 December 2007 January 2008 February 2008 March 2008 April 2008 May 2008 Want to contact me? 
|