Film Alert

It's Time

2011-06-02T22:12:00.000-07:00

The Australian Film Institute announced that it is moving to establish an Australian Academy for the purpose of expanding and improving what are now known as the AFI Awards. The announcement is a tacit admission that the AFI’s only remaining real purpose has devolved down into managing and presenting its annual awards. Its claim to be Australia’s foremost screen culture organisation no longer has any validity and the announcement regarding the establishment of an Academy simply recognises this fact. For most of the last couple of decades the AFI has been slowly gutted and shredded of any of the duties undertaken by other national film institutes. Government funding for these activities has over time been callously, ruthlessly and in some cases ridiculously withdrawn. But it is now where it is.

The AFI was at one time an organisation which provided research facilities for scholars, managed a library of independent Australian and foreign films, exhibited cutting edge other stuff in its own cinemas, published material on film culture, history and production, managed a national cinematheque and ran the AFI Awards. Drip by drip the activities dried up and now only the awards remain though a check of its website indicates some other small and probably inconsequential activities are undertaken. Even the status of the Awards is under challenge with the emergence of the IF Awards as a rival for public funding and attention.

At present AFI members and film industry professionals vote for the AFI Awards in a complicated system that does not require those voting to see all the entries. Whether this produces the best result rarely matters. It usually produces the only result ever likely. Our good films are so few that egregious mistakes rarely occur. So…where are we now.

1. The AFI has lost its authority and its prestige. It is fighting for attention and relevance and has only its Awards with which to fight. It will get no extra help from the Federal Government funding body. (That body is now operating at such a level of philistinism as to produce despair. If this needs examples you need look only as far as the withdrawal of funding from Real Time and from the world’s greatest internet film site, Senses of Cinema).

2. We need a prestigious and valued Awards system to recognise and promote excellence

3. The models are those of the American and British Academies as well as those national arrangements that hand out the Cesars, the Davids and the Goyas.

4. The people who make up the industry have to become intimately involved and in particular those who are the high achievers have to put body and soul into the transformative effort.

If the AFI is to get this done it will no doubt be over a few bodies who nostalgically long for the return of days when the AFI did all he things mentioned above. It may also be over the bodies of the general members who no doubt still enjoy attending the AFI Award screenings. But an Academy made up of the industry’s long time best and brightest, if that’s what’s envisaged, does not have a place for them.

In creating an Academy, which I would expect would need to be followed by a name change to reflect this sole task, the AFI and those nostalgic for what once was should feel no guilt. Times have changed and the work the AFI once did and the things it once sold memberships for is being done by such institutions as the AFTRS and university film and media departments, continuing education, ACMI, GOMA, the NFSA, the Media Resources Centre of SA, the National Cinematheque (notwithstanding its total absence from the biggest city in Australia), the myriad of festivals, the expansion of film circulation via DVD, cable, online downloads and the coming national broadband network. When you think back to even thirty years ago most of those didn’t even exist.

The AFI played a major role in bringing many of them into existence but that role is over and if it is to achieve anything in the future it will be by massively expanding the profile and prestige of a national awards system whose voting is respected by the public and whose activity (sole) is the source of national interest. Good luck Al Finney. ….and maybe under this regime the now late Cecil Holmes might even gain the recognition that has long been denied him by the current system!

Suburban snow job

2011-05-23T23:49:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert. Some of the key plot elements of Snowtown are discussed here.

Success comes in the most unlikely places. I saw Snowtown just after it got a rave review in the Adelaide Advertiser and was announced as the winner of the audience popularity award at the Adelaide Film Festival. Wiser heads from outside the jurisdiction told me to ignore this home town bias. So as the film about the bodies in the barrels in the bank screened in a Sydney preview theatre, I squirmed with the rest of the audience during its slow revelations of paedophilia, murder and a few other unpopular human activities and felt distinctly uncomfortable in its most brutal sequence, a long torture/killing during which the young man at the centre of the film finally joins in the mayhem. I kept wondering who would want to put themselves through the unedifying ordeal of watching this movie and indeed paying to be put through it.

I found it interesting that the film-makers were concerned to show their social and community concern and the press book, which a friend passed on to me, set out in detail not merely how the production had been informed by consultations with the community to ensure respect but also by casting locals in many of the parts including key roles. The mother and the son were both amateurs who were spotted somewhere in the vicinity. Earnestness of intention was manifest.

Added to that, there are two sequences during the film where the locals sit around drinking, swearing and discussing things and they focus on what should be done to homosexuals, paedophiles and other social undesirables to rid the community of them once and for all. In the second of these discussions the smiling visage of the protagonist serial killer is a smirking, slightly superior presence, goading and provoking those in attendance to be ever more explicit about their desires to take revenge and inflict physical punishment on perceived miscreants. They are scenes where the roots of frustration, ignorance and a predilection for violent solutions are unearthed among the working and under classes of the suburbs. They are I suppose also an explanation as to why there was no great community outrage at any mysterious or unexplained disappearance of gays and others from that local community. I suspect that any locals seeing the film might take exception to this portrayal of callousness and indifference arising from their homophobia.

It’s a rich mix as they say and not without its detractors. I saw one tirade against the film delivered by some fresh-faced ranting know all on morning television. The know all did make one point however in wondering why the film had not been classified R. I thought that it warranted that as well though I have for decades been told that I am a fuddy duddy where it comes to matters like watching a few fingernails prised from their sockets.

But the surprise to me is that Snowtown has opened to very good business indeed. This may be partly explained by the mostly very supportive reviews it has received and its prize at Cannes, described in a press release by the film’s publicist as the “President of the Jury Special Award Grand Prix 2011 Critics' Week”. The first weekend screen averages on its 16 screens were over $10 grand. It might rake in a million or more if it keeps going at that rate.

Sidney Lumet - New Yorker

2011-04-12T22:27:00.000-07:00

Way back in 2004 I fronted up to a screening in one of those high quality but low comfort repertory cinemas in Paris where the then editor of Cahiers du Cinema, Emmanuel Burdeau, introduced a revival of Sidney Lumet’s The Fugitive Kind. Made in 1959, based on a play by Tennessee Williams and starring Marlon Brando and Anna Magnani, it was a film that had taken on interest in the forty plus years since its release and subsequent plunge into near-oblivion. If its authorship was placed anywhere it would have been with Williams and no doubt the studio which made it was hoping for a repeat of the success of the earlier Brando/Williams movie A Streetcar Named Desire. Lumet, explained Burdeau, was not a director in whom Cahiers nor most other of the ‘serious’ critics had any interest back in the late fifties and early sixties. His first films were literary and/or theatrical in their origin and Lumet himself appeared to be just another of those technicians who had graduated from live New York television, a place where earnestness, importance and left-liberal sensibilities were predominant. At least that’s the picture we got, not having any opportunity to see any of the so-called legendary live presentations by the likes of directors as dissimilar as Arthur Penn, John Frankenheimer and Lumet. Andrew Sarris lumped him into the ‘Strained Seriousness’ level in his seminal tome and it took a while for there to be any disagreement about that. Notwithstanding this somewhat neutral to negative view he was regarded as a good director of actors and over the course of a long career, from start to finish, I think he was one of those directors who when Sidney came calling, actors would say what time do you want me there rather than how much are you offering. After dealing with Williams, Arthur Miller and Eugene O’Neil, Lumet had the misfortune to make the earnest Fail Safe (1963) at the same time as Kubrick made Dr Strangelove. But his career was into full stride and during the decade of the 60s he seemed to be a reliable director with a broad range of subjects, most of them with a violent edge. Notable successes were The Pawnbroker (1965), The Hill, a heavyweight expose of military prisons during WW2 starring Sean Connery as a prisoner and a sadistic Harry Andrews, an adaptation of the Mary McCarthy’s literary sensation The Group and the second Le Carre adaptation and the first on-screen George Smiley (James Mason), The Deadly Affair. It was hard to escape the idea that he was a director for hire with a good sense of quality material, a metteur-en-scene of some skill but not an authorial figure. What began to emerge in the 70s was Lumet’s ability to tell robust and exotic stories of life in the various strata of New York society. He never relocated to Los Angeles, preferring to live his life in Manhattan and his familiarity with the quirks of that city started to feed into a line of his work that marked out his territory. Starting with the crime story The Anderson Tapes (1971) again starring Connery as an ex-con who embarks on an elaborate robbery without understanding that the art of surveillance has dramatically increased and improved since he went up the river, Lumet managed to make a small group of his forty four films about police and criminal life on the streets of New York. That group will forever be the work that underscores his reputation. Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Prince of the City (1981), The Verdict (1982), Family Business (1989), Q & A (1990), Night Falls on Manhattan (1997) and, in one of those astonishing bits of bravura with which just occasionally old directors finish off their careers, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2007). There are more than a couple of masterpieces in that group and Lumet seemed to be able to bring to this his specialty subject an eye for the various milieu of New York that opened up the city to scrutiny from a perspective that suggested a unique fondness and amiable love for the place and all its foibles. What diminished Lumet’s standing over the course of his long career was his preparedness to take on other things no doubt on a whatever comes along basis that the director for hire must take to keep the wolf from the door. What else can explain his willingness to get involved in such mediocre projects as The Wiz, Guilty as Sin, The Appointment, Murder on the Orient Express, A Stranger Among Us (an amazing misfire given its New York setting, but what can one expect of a movie with Melanie Griffith cast as a hard-boiled cop!) and several others. There were of course a couple of big time triumphs as well, most notably the Oscar-winning Network, a film which still strikes a chord, notwithstanding its rabble-rousing sensibility which one might have thought otherwise anathema to Lumet’s liberal outlook. The other triumph is his less well-known contribution as writer and producer to the TV series 100 Centre Street (2001 & 2002) in which Alan Arkin stars as an agonising liberal judge trying to deal humanely with the flotsam that comes before him each day. This is brilliant television, as good in its day and its way as The Wire would also be later in the decade. Here, in his quintessential New York setting, Lumet and his collaborators were able to put on the screen a parade of the quotidian reality of his beloved city and he did it without fanfare in a quiet and clearly generous way. Sidney Lumet died in his Manhattan home on Saturday 9 April aged 86.

Spy Games

2010-11-14T21:45:00.000-08:00

Spoiler alert. Do not read this if you dont want know the main plot twist in The American. You have been warned.

When I sit down to write my personal history of spy fiction I shall digress only for a moment to consider where the genre incorporated elements of crime fiction and elements of intellectual authors at play (often under pseudonyms) to hide a paucity of observation. In the Le Carre world, spy fiction has always provided the opportunity to expansively examine other matters in which the author’s real interests are exposed – the futility of cold war politics was superseded in Le Carre’s world by adventures and explorations of colonialism, pharmaceutical conspiracies, American imperialism, Russian adventurism and so on.

But for those seeking only to write something generic the cheapest plot device was always the trope of the lonely agent/hitman whose task, unbeknown to him, is to arrange for and participate in his own assassination. It was a trope of the cheapest order and one which was and is fallen upon with monotonous regularity. At some point the avid spy fiction reader could pick it coming, often far too early.

I don’t think George Clooney is an avid reader of spy fiction. How else to explain his decision to make The American and for this hoary old chestnut of a device to be wheeled out yet again and presented as if it were new. There’s even the same ludicrous ending of many a tatty tale where the would be assassin of the professional assassin is assassinated by another who then tries to kill the professional assassin. Like duh!

From the credits on the movie George didn’t have that far to go from the comforts of his palatial quarters near Lake Como to make the movie. He also didn’t bring any mates to help him do it. But I guess a good time was had by all during the course of production. Aside from George, there’s not a major name anywhere on the acting or technical credits of anybody known beyond Anton Corbijn the tyro director of rock clips and movies about rock stars. Who sold what to whom about the project is mysterious to those of us without access to the great man (still the most handsome leading man since Alain Delon, notwithstanding the pepper and salt beard in the early scenes; still the most charismatic and watchable American star since Clark Gable) but I guess its not important.

The shots of the village, the countryside, the cafes, the meals prepared by the priest (Italian glug) and that swish restaurant with that rather out of character waiter (surely more old-style French than modern Italian) create a deep wistfulness and nostalgia for days and trips gone by.

And it would be nice to think you can now go in to an Italian post office and be served immediately.

Arthur Penn

2010-10-15T17:03:00.000-07:00

I heard of Penn’s passing just as I headed out the door so no time then to contemplate the career of a director who for cinephiles at least had a very hot streak from The Left-Handed Gun (1958), through The Miracle Worker, Mickey One, The Chase, Bonnie and Clyde; Alice’s Restaurant, Little Big Man, Night Moves and The Missouri Breaks (1976). That’s close to a couple of decades of remarkable film-making, all of them in some way peering under the skin of American history and society and finding a lot of pent-up lawlessness and violence.

Back in those long lost 60s when discovering new directors was the game and we awaited solitary events like the Melbourne Film Festival for our first glimpse of the directors that cahiers and Sight & Sound were praising, coming across an American director like Arthur Penn at the very start of their career and then watching in quick succession a run of increasingly assured films was then, still is I suppose, quite a rarity. But nowadays when maybe ten thousand new films are made each year and you have access to thousands more of them very quickly, the discovery doesn't have quite the uniqueness it had then. Penn was in that tradition of Losey, Aldrich, Siegel, Fuller, Anthony Mann, Nicolas Ray, Raoul Walsh and no doubt many others of lesser ability and reputation who did their best work on violent subjects, or maybe subjects where America's peculiar closeness to guns, brutality and death was most nakedly and simply on display.

In retrospect the fact that the run seemed to end with what on paper must have looked like a sure fire success, a western with Marlon Brando and Jack Nicholson. But it turned off critics and the public alike, one of those ironies of the business. Bonnie and Clyde will preserve his reputation for ever and the line in Night Moves comparing watching a Rohmer movie with watching paint drying probably made it into all the obituaries.

We never saw any of the ‘live television’ which first made Penn’s name in the 50s That pre-historical part of his career may yet come to light but not so far. We did see The Left-Handed Gun, Penn’s film of Gore Vidal’s television play about Billy the Kid and it became apparent there that Penn had a sense of adventure. The long static shot simulating the taking of a photograph was repeated countless times by others, the shot directly into the sun which allows Billy to appear as a ghostly presence before he blasts one of his enemies into oblivion, these became signs of a director wanting to experiment within the confines of Hollywood film-making. When he got the chance, after his second film The Miracle Worker won a bagful of Oscars, Penn took the opportunity, with Warren Beatty, to attempt to be an American Fellini, with Mickey One. That film remains a fascinating artefact of its time. The Chase and especially Little Big Man were fine westerns. The former has one of Marlon Brando’s very finest performances in amongst its story of over-wrought Texas oilmen and its sub-text of the forces that led to the Kennedy and subsequent Lee Harvey Oswald assassinations.

In the end Penn just faded away. Towards the end he even made a movie with the magicians Penn and Teller but nobody I asked has ever seen it. Since I mentioned it David Stratton has been in touch to say he's seen it and has passed on his noted about what he saw. Not something to write home about. Still the memory of the films from that hot streak period will live on and his place in the Expressive Esoterica section of the Pantheon, I think, is secure and something to be admired.

Eastern Promises

2010-10-13T17:05:00.000-07:00

Vancouver’s special niche in the world film calendar has evolved, over two decades, from a small hometown event into one of the key portals for new films out of East Asia. Programmed by Tony Rayns and Shelley Kraicer, the Dragons and Tigers selection of 43 new feature films and 20 shorts, draws on productions big and small from 14 countries. The range is huge. Prestigious films from the major production centres Japan, China and South Korea, most previously premiered at earlier competitive events in Europe, repeatedly filled the festival’s biggest cinemas. At the other end of the spectrum, the eight film Dragons and Tigers competition for first time directors presented in the luxurious intimacy of VIFF’s own Vancity Theatre, again drew hardcore cinephiles and adventurous viewers. Neither element disappointed. Between these two groups were another set of movies having their international or North American premiere.

But first to the competition and the big shock. The jury comprised three of the biggest names around – Bong Joon-Ho, (the continent’s hottest director and one whose next film is currently the subject of much speculation even in the pages of the latest Film Comment which reports a rumour, not true says Bong, that he is teaming with JJ Abrams), supported by French-Canadian Denis Cote, a recent double prize-winner at Locarno, and Chinese master Jia Zhangke. They gave the prize, and the cash from local arts patrons Brad Birarda and Robert Sali, to Hirohara Saturo’s Good Morning to the World, a smart and beautifully directed story about a loner schoolboy searching for answers about a dead man he finds in the street. Honourable mentions went to Xu Ruotao’s Rumination, a very playful, neo-Godardian, portrait of China during the years of the Cultural Revolution played out in a desolate abandoned industrial estate by a troupe of actors summing up Chinese history in gestures and mime and to Phan Dang Bi’s Don’t Be Afraid, Bi!, a surprisingly frank examination of Vietnamese sexual desires.

The shock however was that the judges completely ignored Jo Sung-Hee’s End of Animal which might just be the most remarkable debut film from Asia since well, let’s make it personal, Jia Zhangke’s Xiao Wu back in 1997 or Bong Joon-Ho’s Barking Dogs Don’t Bite in 2000. A broke down by the side of the road movie which might have been made by a young David Lynch, End of Animal is replete with enigmatic characters with psychic powers, last minute plot swoops, violent unexplained events, dark secrets, mysterious flashbacks and some blackly humorous collisions of all of the above. The assurance of its direction is extraordinary and it is aided immeasurably by the performance of young star Park Hae-Il’s performance as the mysterious stranger who knows all. Park, a star in the making with a couple of standout performances already under his belt was so impressed by the script that he agreed to do the movie for nothing. The film is next being screened in the London Film Festival so maybe its time will come in that neck of the woods.

While big names Miike Takashi (13 Assassins), Apichatpong Weerasethakul (Uncle Boonmee who Can Recall his Past Lives), Sono Shion (Cold Fish), Lee Chang-Dong (Poetry), Jia Zhangke (I Wish I Knew), Hong Sang-Soo (Hahaha and Oki’s Movie) and Feng Xiaogang (Aftershock) expectedly delivered for their audiences, VIFF’s usual capacity to spring suprises was also on show with several international premieres. Imaizumi Koichi’s The Family Complete will make its name because of the seriously sexually explicit material it contains. A former gay porn star, Imaizumi’s third feature apparently continues his exploration of gay sexuality, this time around an SF plot involving a family struck down with a mysterious virus which firstly traps them into never aging but, more hilariously, produces sexual desire which causes all family members to only seek satisfaction with their own grandfather. Imaizumi, somewhat heroically given the context and the requirements of the plot, plays the grandfather himself, while his film riffs off Ozu and all the other Shockiku home dramas of Japanese cinema history. Very droll indeed but, as we were warned, only for the broadminded and maybe a tad too explicit for a nation which recently refused a local festival permission to screen Bruce La Bruce’s LA Zombie, a film which drew happy midnight screening crowds in straight-laced and innocent Vancouver.

Zhu Wen’s Thomas Mao is a droll two part exposition of the relationship between the esteemed painter Mao Yan and his long time friend the German art curator ‘Thomas’. Where the fiction begins and the documentary ends is the jokey sub-text to a movie which sets out to describe the friendship in two parts – the first in the wilds of Inner Mongolia and the second in Mao Yan’s studio where the painter makes yet another portrait of his fetish subject. Shades of Apichatpong.

Finally, leaving the intellectual world for a moment and the best for last, to a film that, literally I kid you not, caused among its large audience of young Korean women, gasps of pleasure, shrieks in fact, especially at the moment when its star Won Bin, last seen playing the son in Bong’s Mother, took off his shirt. He revealed both a bullet wound and torso of such honed and rippling musculature that the audience seemed to collectively swoon. But that was barely part of the excitement. Lee Jeong-Beom’s The Man from Nowhere, a huge domestic hit, posited a story of an ex-CIA (South Korean branch) hitman/agent, now passing his days in anonymity as a pawnshop proprietor, coming to the rescue of a drug addled neighbour and her child. Jokes abound, especially with the drug dealing community longing for a return to the certainties of military dictatorship, but it’s Won Bin’s magnetism and Lee’s breakneck pace direction and superslick editing that keep you on the edge throughout. There is enough plot for three movies but some seriousness as well in the background milieu of child prostitution and organ harvesting. You would like to think that the film’s reward might be as a sure fire international hit and something that might even attract the attention of American remakers.

For the record, Australia was represented at VIFF by Julie Bertucelli’s The Tree, a handful of docos and two shorts included in a compilation under the rubric ‘High School Stories/Teenage Hell – Felix Thompson’s (an expat) Bedford Park Boulevard and Alexander von Hofmann’s Tinglewood....unless of course you think we should claim Michael Rowe and his enigmatic Leap Year as one of our own.

Walsh St Wager

2010-05-28T01:27:00.000-07:00

The bet that Animal Kingdom makes is that audiences wont be sated by the extravagant vulgarity of Underbelly and will be prepared to come out to the movies to see something resembling a film a clef about another notorious piece of Melbourne’s criminal past. It shares one interesting element with The Wire. The most odious characters are neither the criminals nor the police but the lawyers. In The Wire the character who most makes your blood boil as he efficiently, and for high fees, frees his criminal clients from jail, turns a blind eye to gangland executions and exploits every loophole is the egregious lawyer who cheerfully gets his clients off a host of major violent crimes. In Animal Kingdom we accept gangland executions, revenge killings of and by police, the murder of a child, but we find really disgusting the amoral behaviour of the solicitor Ezra White, portrayed as a man of straightforward, nothing surprises me, efficiency by Dan Wyllie and, even worse, the smiling female criminal barrister who get their clients off. It’s an interesting turn of events. Somehow the notion of watching criminals do what they do has always been fascinating and touches something in us that admires slippery behaviour even when it’s violent. Watching lawyers go about their legitimate business of defending the interests of their crooked and violent clients is stomach turning.

The character of Pope (Ben Mendelsohn) also has some elements of interest. In a couple of scenes his psychopathic side gets a run through. The murder of the girl/child of course is one but at other times such as the scene where he meets his brother in the supermarket or harasses his brother Darren with questions as to whether he’s gay you get just a touch of a sense of the obsessive. The questions to the ‘gay’ brother are done in an outwardly friendly way along the lines of I don’t mind one way or the other but I just want to know but, like all psychopathic behaviour, Pope doesn’t know when to stop. But the scene ends with a whimper. It’s hard to know just how much Ben Mendelsohn’s performance throttles this aspect of Pope’s behaviour. Mendelsohn is not the sort of actor you cast when you are looking for someone whose mere demeanour can convey threat or menace. David Wenham has dibs on that trope but he’s already been there and much more effectively.

The best Oz feature film to delve into the domestic lives of the criminal underclass remains Rowan Wood’s The Boys. That was a film where the sons, at least all bar John Polson’s wimp, could turn violent at a moment’s notice and you believed it. Fuelled by drugs and life choices, they were far more animalistic than the relatively ‘sane’ family here where only one mad dog, Craig, stands in for the uncontrolled and impulsive. Michod actually seems to want to emphasise the ‘nice’ suburban nature of the family, carefully setting his action in houses set among quiet tree lined streets.

The image we have of the criminal and police classes in the noughts is physical similarity. The crims, at least the Williams and Morans who appear in the paper are all overweight as if they have too much time to sit around at home eating or in cafes drinking cappuccinos. Policemen today, especially detectives in suits, are rotund and have round bald heads as if they have been over fed on too many late night Chinese noshups. (Even Mel Gibson in Edge of Darkness has a paunch.) Or maybe with the cops at least somewhere there’s my memory trace of watching sixty hours of The Wire and seeing the police team dominated by guys like Bunk or the Sergeant or even McNulty who just eat and drink too much. (Except of course for the magnificent musculature of Lance Reddick as Daniels who gets to show off his pecs and abs at regular intervals, especially after he leaves his ambitious wife and takes up with the ambitious prosecutor.) In Animal Kingdom the ultra wiry Guy Pearce’s only nod to cop normality is a poorly cultivated moustache.

The one character/performance that is note perfect is that of James Frecheville as Josh. He captures perfectly male teenage hesitancy, insecurity, inarticulacy, diffidence and an ability to bottle up all the emotion. His hunching of his shoulders and downcast look has an exactitude about it that one hopes springs from great acting. In one so young it is remarkable to see.

Otherwise David Michod’s mise-en-scene is fairly lacklustre in giving his quite engrossing script any extra oomph. The scene where Josh runs away from Pope, begs a lift and, just as we think he might be getting away, has the car slammed, is done as near to blandly as you’ll ever see from a director who presumably has misspent his youth, like all others of his generation, watching Scorsese and David Lynch pictures. You have to wonder whether TV shooting styles, fear, good taste or simple reticence produced such a damp squib moment. It just moves the story along rather than giving some rawness and visceral excitement of the kind you find in the French Mesrine diptych for instance. Which I guess is about where the film mostly lands.

Rescued from the Waters - Fritz Lang's House by the River

2010-05-21T18:20:00.000-07:00

Fritz Lang may be among the best-served directors for DVD extras which open up his films and enlighten audiences in ways that criticism on the written page rarely contemplates. Almost everything he ever made seems to have been released, including his silent films, and the range of extras, commentaries, special essays and so on seems to be bigger than for anyone else. The DVD of his 1950 film House by the River provides one such most enlightening extra – a forty minute plus recitation by Pierre Rissient as to the how the film was lost and then found.

When Pierre first came to Australia back in the 1970s he enquired then as to any likely interest in obtaining the Australian rights to the film. When I asked him how it was that he was able to offer them he went into one of his man of mystery modes and would only say not to worry they were legitimately in his keeping. Eventually I think he sold a print of the film to the National Library’s Film Lending Collection. The copy should now be held in the National Film and Sound Archive.

The film was made by Lang at Republic Studios. It was the only time that Lang made an American film that was not distributed by one of the majors of the day. Lang claims it was “offered to him” though it is easy to see why he would be attracted to the story of murder and the astonishing effect it has on those involved. The killer is liberated and believes himself to be a superman above the law. His brother is inadvisedly implicated and assumes all the guilt. But it had no stars who might sell a ticket.

Pierre Rissient recounts the tale of how the film fell through the distribution cracks in post-war France, notwithstanding that a legion of cinephiles, including all the famous later film directors, were keen to see it. He took it upon himself to track down the film and investigate the situation regarding the rights. The story of this effort, of many years, is recounted in the recitation that is an added extra for the DVD which is released in the US on the estimable Kino label. I recently bought a copy in Spain released under the exclusive label issued by the FNAC chain. The only drawback to the Spanish release is that the Spanish subtitles, while inserted electronically, are not removable so they have to be viewed as well.

The film was made for a studio that would normally fall into the poverty row classification. But, as Louis Hayward says when confronted by the facts of his disreputable life, “sometimes cheap perfume can be very exciting.” The script, the staging, the photography and the music score by the highly regarded George Antheil bespeak of a determined effort by Republic to do something of value. Antheil started as an experimentalist writing music to accompany Fernand Leger’s Ballet Mecanique (1924) and had a separate concert hall career all the while. He composed music for De Mille, Ben Hecht and Nicholas Ray among others but his film credits are small by comparison with many others who worked for over thirty years in movies. The photography by Edward Cronjager is similarly superior and its use of shadows and darkness deserves comparison, as Pierre mentions, with the work of John Alton. The photography stands up very well especially when compared with the work that was done for Lang on other later films. A number of those films, but especially, Human Desire (1954), Beyond a Reasonable Doubt (1956) and The Thousand Eyes of Dr Mabuse (1961) all have a cheap look about them as if their budgets prevented them being made with anything other than the flattest glare. House by the River stands this test of comparison very well.

For anyone interested in Lang’s work House by the River is essential viewing, not perhaps among his handful of very greatest films but surely one which explores the director’s themes with some subtlety. The DVD is even more essential because it sets down the effort that was made by Pierre Rissient, acting alone, to save the film from oblivion. The recounting of the story is fascinating in itself. We have a lot of reasons to be grateful that it’s now all there for us, a couple of mouse clicks and a credit card away.

Who's to Bless and who's to Blame

2010-05-17T15:10:00.000-07:00

And so the the Salo saga ends….for the moment. For close to thirty five years Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo has been occupying the minds of Australia’s film censorship authorities and a lot of others. If you would like to get the full blow by blow details and many more besides you can go here to a splendid website devoted to many mind-boggling concerns with film and other censorship
http://www.refused-classification.com/Films_Salo.htm

What’s interesting and has attracted little recent attention over those 35 years is to note just who was in charge at the time. I think I've got this right.

In March 1976 when the film was initially banned those who did so had been appointed by the Whitlam Government. In 1992 when an attempt was again made to import it the film was initially banned by appointees of the Hawke Government. A successful appeal was upheld by the Review Board chaired by another appointee of the Hawke Government, Evan Williams, still currently the Australian’s film critic.

In 1998 when the film was re-banned, the decisions were taken by appointees of both the Keating Government, most notably the Convenor of the Board Barbara Biggins, who had been put there by Attorney-General Michael Lavarch to replace Evan Williams, and by the Howard Government. Ms Biggins was quick to fire off a salvo to the press when the latest un-banning occurred.

In 2010 when the film was passed for DVD release, the decision, and the subsequent appeal which also ended in favour of releasing he film, was made by still serving appointees of the Howard Government. The Classification Board is chaired by long time John Howard friend, confidante and former ABC Chair Donald McDonald who himself apparently voted in favour of releasing the film.

For most of the last twenty years, the politician who has shown most interest, indeed a dogged interest, in the matter is one time National Party and now Liberal Party Senator Julian McGauran. To gain an understanding of the degree of debate McGauran has indulged in the website above refers to much of his efforts in the Parliament. McGauran's most recent responses have included the following: (Salo) “is a handbook for deviants and could trigger crazed minds”…. “Salo is not another pornographic movie with consenting adults but a movie that depicts children.”…” Our chief censors have just made the job of vice squads around the country harder.” …” The lifting of the ban is detached from community standards and leaves no line in the sand – sending our censorship laws into outer space.”

Right… we get the idea, although I’m not sure we even still have vice squads and, yes, I guess its hard to have a line in the sand in outer space….enough already but perhaps its worth reminding ourselves of an earlier remark by McGauran when the film was re-banned in 1998: "I'm actually over the moon that the artists have been pulled back into line ... You must remember I'm National Party - artistic merit doesn't mean much to me. The Sydney-style view ... doesn't amount to a row of beans."

So there… prepare to read reports of just how disgusting the film is all over again when the DVD reviewers get to work…and remember it was a mate of John Howard who did it, or at the very least, was one of those who did.

Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap

2010-04-18T01:07:00.000-07:00

Just when you think you’ve got a handle on a Federal Government led by a Prime Minister who alerts the media as to the whereabouts of his church attendance each Sunday you get another small and unwanted shock. This is an additional shock to that associated with the Government’s pandering to the religious right involved in the almost certainly futile attempts to censor the internet. These efforts on the internet are being led by of all people, the almost cartoonish political pygmy Stephen Conroy. Watching or listening to Conroy trying to explain or justify any policy decision is wince-inducing. How simple does the brief have to be before he remembers the details in reasonable order one is forced to wonder. Never mind for the moment, for out of the blue, we have a new entrant in the beat Tony Abbott at his own game stakes, the Minister for Home Affairs, who has fired in yet another appeal against yet another decision to allow Pasolini’s Salo to be screened, this time on DVD. The Minister, the suspiciously named Brendan O’Connor (who he you may well ask), has asked the Classifications Review Board to take yet another look at Pasolini’s little nature study of the end of fascism, thus drawing attention yet again to a movie which for reasons that escape normal human intelligence politicians simply cant leave alone.

For the record I myself was once a member of this Review body. I am pleased to advise that while I was frequently accused of worrying too much about what children might get frightened of, like that great space-age spider in something called An Ewok Adventure or some such, we never actually banned anything in my time. In one special case that was tested when we faced considerable pressure to take action over a dire flick (in my view anyway) called I Spit on your Grave. The film had been referred to the Board, despite being in video circulation for years. Some cheapjack lawyer down in Tasmania had discovered his clients were getting a lot of sympathy from judges in that backwater when the lawyer mentioned that his clients’ criminal behaviour had resulted from a viewing of the aforementioned movie. Banning it would apparently cause violence towards women to cease instantly down there among the apple pickers. A narrow majority thought the film didn’t deserve to be verballed in this way and wouldn’t play along. Nothing more was heard about any further outbreaks of serial criminal behaviour resulting from seeing the film. Or, if it was, nothing more was reported to we members.

But back to Pasolini and bear with me. After my tenure was not renewed my services were availed of on a number of occasions to write submissions on behalf of distributors who thought a crummy classification decision had been made about their investments. One such was a distributor and exhibitor of Hong Kong movies who had paid a fair bit upfront to acquire the rights to a film called The Man Behind the Sun, an earnest, vulgar and extremely graphic account of the activities of the infamous Japanese medical experiments carried out on Chinese slaves during the 1939-45 War. One of the encyclopaedists has since described the film as a ‘revoltingly explicit dramatization of the war crimes Japanese soldiers and scientists perpetrated on their Chinese captives.’ Too true.

Notwithstanding the unedifying content, the distributor had paid his money upfront and didn’t have a chance of getting it back if the film were banned. The Appeals Board, which included my old friend the late Keith Connolly let the film through and the distributor did quite nicely out of it, screening it to a mostly Chinese clientele in a Chinatown cinema. The film didn’t travel well however. Electric Shadows Cinema in Canberra, noting this success, put it on to dismal business and yanked it after a week. About the only attention it attracted was from the RSPCA who rang to say that they heard there was a scene in it when live rats were set on fire. This is so said the cinema management, explaining that rats were used by the Japanese to develop anthrax spores. The RSPCA advised that they would be contacting the Canberra Times and organising a protest outside the cinema if the film were not taken off. The cinema management asked what time they proposed to be there so that he could ensure that the rest of the media were also alerted. The RSPCA then thought better of it and allowed the film to disappear quietly.

But back to Pasolini and Salo. The film was banned in the early 70s. There was a memorable screening of stills from the film at the Sydney Film Festival presented by that critical old stager Gideon Bachman. But the film stayed banned until the early 90s when it was passed with an R (Restricted) classification limiting the audience to those over the age of 18. Just before the rights were due to expire, some five years later, somebody, probably with a nod from the Howard Government, fired in a request for a review and the Appeals Board, which Howard and his henchmen hadn’t had to stack with dogmatic and religious types because that had already been done by the previous Labor Attorney-General Michael Lavarch, duly banned it. The distributor actually consulted me about what might be said in the film’s defence but was otherwise utterly undisturbed I suspect. Attempts have since been sporadically made to import the film legitimately again. (Copies of the film have been clandestinely circulating in video stores for decades.) But to no avail. One attempt was even made, I believe, by the redoubtable Melbourne Underground Film Festival. But no.

Recently however it appears that the film has been passed for DVD distribution and yet again the Federal Minister, this time from the Rudd Government (see above), has promptly moved to prevent this. The aforementioned O’Connor has asked the Review Board to again ‘review’ the matter. We will shortly know whether the Board remains the bastion of conservatism that Lavarch established and Howard maintained it or has been allowed to assume a degree of liberalism.

But….will the farce surrounding this film ever end. Please…. it just isn’t worth that much effort and worry….leave it alone….get on with doing something useful…Like the internet, Salo is out there and if the ‘review’ overturns the decision you can still find it in DVD rental stores if you ask or you could still just order it on Amazon and import it through the mail. I doubt the slightest attention will be paid...

Oscar Washup

2010-03-13T15:01:00.000-08:00

Oscar 2010 – Last words
“There was no joy for the Australian nominees…The closest thing to a win for an Australian, was an Austrian, Christoph Waltz, claiming best supporting actor for playing a scheming Nazi in Inglourious Basterds.” Gary Maddox in the Sydney Morning Herald reporting, from deep in the bowels of Pyrmont, on the Oscar ceremony. For a rather more droll, Brit-take-the-piss report try here http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/2010/mar/08/oscars-2010-highs-and-lows

The SMH is one of those papers with a schizoid view of the Oscars. Its writers relentlessly rubbish them while its editors are no doubt happy to publish endless column inches about them. Even by the end of the week, commentator David Dale couldn't resist further notes: “The biggest winner The Hurt Locker (weekly box office up 12% - ed) will go on to even bigger earnings. Precious probably wont be assisted by its wins. A low-budget tale of squalor and child abuse sounds too much like a typical Australian film to attract Australian audiences.” That squelch was in The Tribal Mind, SMH 13-14 March…Meanwhile writer Louis Nowra, making a new reputation for himself these days as Demolition Man after recent jobs on David Williamson, Bob Ellis and Germaine Greer in various intellectual publications, surfaced again to remind everyone of his brush with Kathryn Bigelow fame, by reminding the SMH gossip columnist that he “wrote the screenplay” for Bigelow’s K-19:The Widowmaker. Nowra’s other claims about the film were that he never saw it, that Harrison Ford got paid a million a day for 20 days work and the film broke even at the box office. Louis added what he called “a little known Hollywood fact. No movie that has ever featured a submarine has ever lost money.” Not sure if all those things are true. Any assistance with information about box office flops featuring submarines would be welcome…. Louis has had other brushes with Hollywood, most notably with the Weinsteins in their Miramax period when his play Cosi was adapted into a movie in 1996 directed by Mark Joffe. At the time, Louis apparently acquiesced quietly, as far as is publicly known, when a happy ending was substituted for the play’s downbeat finale.

I saw The Hurt Locker yesterday. Mmmmmmixed feelings. I suspect its not as good as Generation Kill, the seven hour mini-series made for HBO by the creators of The Wire, of which I've only watched one ep thus far. Very gruelling but covers similar stuff, right down to the wrestling and fighting in the barracks. ...and the lead guy in The Hurt Locker is a psychopath who spends much time placing not just himself but his mates in danger. For that he gots socked once and has an angry speech of ten seconds duration delivered at him by the wounded buddy. but filmed with great skill in the I'm going to make you feel you're there style. Yet again its a film for the political moment that pinches the prize.

John Dankworth

2010-02-11T16:41:00.000-08:00

Many years ago MUFS screened the first ever Joseph Losey film that I associated with the director. It was a low budget Brit crime story made in 1960 for peanuts at the Merton Park Studios. Till then, and resuming immediately thereafter, Merton Park was a home for B features like the Scotland Yard series. The Concrete Jungle as it was first known here in a version that had been cut for American release but was later better known by its original title The Criminal, was a knockout movie, full of raw violence in both its criminal demi-monde and within the British prison system. It contained some ferocious verbal and visual asides about British class systems. Everyone had their place you see and those who transgressed by seeking to go elsewhere were punished. John Bannion, the ambitious crook played by Stanley Baker was always a doomed man, a thieving boy who created misery for those around him by seeking independence. Among the people involved along with Losey were the great actors Stanley Baker, Sam Wanamaker and Patrick Magee, all of whom I think I was seeing onscreen for the first time. The Australian Kenneth J Warren who played the pyschopathic thug Clobber had a terrific part as well. On the soundtrack, it was the first time I heard the voice of Cleo Laine. She sang the lament reprised throughout the film “all my sadness, all my joy, came from loving a thieving boy”. The music for the film was written and played by another then unknown, John Dankworth. It all came flooding back when I heard of Dankworth’s death this week, another of the titans gone

Eric Rohmer 1920-2010

2010-01-19T20:41:00.000-08:00

In 1978 when we were visiting Paris for just the second time we found ourselves sitting in a plush private theatre next to a young woman who had also been invited along to a screening of Alan Rudolph’s Remember My Name by our mutual friend Pierre Rissient. The producer of the film Robert Altman was in attendance.

At the end of the screening Pierre was invited by Altman to join him for dinner and we three of us found ourselves looking for somewhere to eat. Since then Mary Stephen, Karen and I have remained firm friends, our paths crossing in all sorts of places, Paris mostly, but others as well. Mary went on to make films herself, including her beautiful second feature Justocoeur (1980) which I invited to the 1981 Melbourne Film Festival and more recently she has crossed continents in her career as a film editor.

Mary has had little luck in getting her many film-making projects going but not long after arriving in Paris she did have the good fortune to meet Eric Rohmer and he cast her in one of his films,The Aviator’s Wife/La femme de l’aviateur (1980), and gave her employment as assistant to his Chief Editor Cécile Décugis. (Among other things, Cécile had edited Godard’s classic Breathless/A bout de souffle.) The acquaintance made became, as with many of Rohmer’s collaborators, a firm and lasting friendship and in the early 90s, after Cécile’s retirement, Rohmer asked Mary to edit his film Conte d’hiver/A WinterTale She continued to be his editor until his last short film.

Most of Rohmer’s features were produced by the formidable Margaret Meneghoz, the head of the production and distribution company Les Films du Losange which Rohmer himself had founded with Barbet Schroder in the early 60s. However, his last three films The Lady and the Duke (2001), Triple agent (2005) and The Story of Astrée and Céladon (2007) and some shorts made in the intervening years were produced by the indefatigable Francoise Etchegaray through the smaller Compagnie Eric Rohmer. (For The Lady and the Duke, Francoise enlisted the support of Pierre Rissient and obtained finance from Pathe. Pierre Cottrell who had produced some of Rohmer’s early films was the Associate Producer.)

Eric, Françoise and Mary formed powerful bonds and it was somehow poetic that Rohmer died on Mary’s birthday thus, as she says, linking them forever. Rohmer’s bonds with Mary extended beyond her editing. As a classically trained musician she was integral in incorporating the music in Rohmer’s films and for a number of them she and Rohmer took a joint credit as composers of the score under the pseudonym of Sebastien Erms.

Before embarking on his film-making career, Rohmer was editor of Cahiers du Cinema during the years when it lead the world towards new perspectives on the American cinema and, by virtue of the fact that its key critics Rivette, Godard, Truffaut and Chabrol all went on to become and remain major figures in French film-making. Rohmer also established another name for himself as well, as the co-author with Claude Chabrol, of one of the first book length studies of a major film-maker. Their study of Hitchcock is still quoted today and was a key step in taking consideration of Hitchcock’s work far beyond that of a mere master of suspense.

For many long time cinephiles the first experience of Rohmer’s cinema came in his Ma Nuit Chez Maud/My Night at Maud’s in 1969. Set in Clermont-Ferrand, the city closest to the exact centre of France, it told of a bachelor who commits himself to one beautiful girl, unbeknown to her, but is then tempted by the exotic free spirited Maud. After a long night of talk and tease and tantalising moments he drives away. For some it seemed the epitome of the kind of cerebral and sophisticated French cinema for which film festivals and art houses were invented.

Before his breakthrough with My Night at Maud’s, Rohmer had made two features and two dramatic shorts in the series of “Six moral tales” and an uncountable number of educational documentaries. On the latter he learned the craft of his film-making, absorbing the one shot/one meaning narrative methods of Fritz Lang and Alfred Hitchcock, thus seeming to arrive in the late fifties as a fully prepared film-maker.

After My Night at Maud’s Rohmer completed his series of Moral Tales with the similarly successful Claire’s Knee (1970) and Love In The Afternoon (1972). In each of the tales, and in most of Rohmer’s work, there is a focus on an array of women who are strong, smart, beautiful, ever-fascinating, eternally tempting and eternally wise. To play these characters Rohmer discovered a host of extraordinary actresses, all of them beautiful in ways beyond classical good looks, all expressive, aware, lively and capable of delivering conversation about moral matters with an exactitude and conviction that produced a seeming instant truth. For all his films’ apparent simplicities, Rohmer’s characters always rang true and his women were an eternal life force. The actresses Beatrice Romand, Arielle Dombasle, Marie Riviere and Anne Tesseydre among many (David Thomson estimates thirty to forty) have assumed luminous places in the memory thanks to Rohmer’s cinema.

In the mid-70s Rohmer embarked on a planned series of adaptations of classical literature, but after two films Die Marquise von O (1976) and Perceval le Gallois (1978), both of which flopped, Rohmer returned to his metier with two more series, the first being ‘Comedies and Proverbes” made between 1980 and 1987 and then what seems his finest work, the four films which comprise the Tales of the Four Seasons. Much of the focus of all of them was on the misunderstandings of young people in love. The contradictions between the mind the heart were never so clearly, often painfully, revealed. By this time in his life, Rohmer felt little need to travel outside Paris and rarely attended festival screenings or even the openings of his films. He preferred to hang out at near home, taking pleasure in the company of the many young Parisians who idolised his work.

Rohmer took the best part of a decade to complete the Tales of the Four Seasons. During that time he didn’t allow the grass to grow making any number of short films which allowed him, and his crew to experiment with new technologies and equipment. Many of the shorts were assembled into feature length films, most notably the delightful Les Rendez-vous de Paris (1995). This experimentation bore its finest fruit in Rohmer’s first digitally filmed feature The Lady and the Duke, a film set during the French Revolution in which all the backgrounds were taken from paintings by Jean-Baptiste Marot based on the etchings of the period and digitally edited to produce a picture of Paris of quite astounding exactitude.

We were in Paris at the time when Triple Agent premiered and its release was accompanied by an astonishing burst of activity – the cover stories of both Cahiers and Positif, lengthy interviews in both, a retrospective of almost superhuman completeness at the Cinematheque (it included most of the aforementioned educational documentaries and several sessions devoted to discussion of his art and craft) and adulatory reviews everywhere. Given this attention I was later astonished that most of the major Australian film festivals weren’t interested in screening that film, nor his last feature, but it’s never too late.

For those who might want to track down Rohmer on screen I can advise that a couple of years ago I was attending a film festival where Jacques Rivette’s 12 hour television series Out One was being screened. For various reasons I only managed to sample one episode. In it the actor Jean-Pierre Leaud was playing a man unable to speak who was conducting an interview with an expert on the novelist Honore de Balzac. The questions were being put by handwriting them on cards. Undeterred, the expert extemporised at great and sometimes droll length on Balzac’s themes and style. It was a performance to treasure and, as far as I recall, the only time I saw Eric Rohmer in a dramatic role on film. He made cameo appearances in many other movies, including Mary’s Justocoeur, but otherwise there is a wonderful edition of the French TV series Cineastes de Notre Temps directed by Janine Bazin and Andre S Labarthe devoted, with much love, to Rohmer and his work. Subtitled copies of it on DVD are in private circulation so it’s a matter of asking around among the cinephiles and collectors if you want to see it.

Eric Rohmer is not merely a key figure in the cinema, providing a rich legacy for review and contemplation. His work is also a testament to the uniqueness of French production which gives its key film-makers the freedom to make their own way and seek out new and personal ways of telling tales. Many follow in his footsteps though none has his unique combination of grace, serenity, affection for beautiful women, bemusement at love’s foibles and elegant simplicity of filming.

Eric Rohmer was born Maurice Scherer in 1920 and died aged 89 in Paris on January 11. For an intimate appreciation of him can I suggest that you look at the tributes on Mary’s Facebook page in which her sadness is lyrically expressed.

DVD Dialogue - You Only Live Once (Fritz Lang, USA, 1936)

2010-01-05T16:45:00.000-08:00

So why this film to kick off a new series?

A series? Hmm. We’ll see how far the enthusiasm of the new year lasts.

As a DVD it does several things brilliantly. The copy is superb. The film is a Walter Wanger production and without knowing exactly what’s happened there seem to a lot of Wanger’s productions being circulated in very poor copies. The bootleggers have had a field day issuing his films in cheap editions using very poor material. For years there were copies of Algiers and Scarlet Street being offered cheap but the copies were terrible. Even SBS played a copies of those films that were very poor indeed. I think Wanger’s productions may have gone out of copyright and anyone could put them out. The only problem was that the material available, which needless to say wasn’t being supplied by the legitimate heirs and successors of Wanger’s immensely high quality output, was in very poor shape. So it’s a pleasure to see that Universal has been putting Wanger’s productions out on DVD using material clearly close to the original negative.

As well the single extra on the film is magnificent. So credit where it’s due.

Was it a Wanger project or Fritz Lang’s?

Well according to David Thomson, it arose when Wanger and Sylvia Sidney bumped into Theodore Dreiser who said he was writing a piece about Bonnie and Clyde. Dreiser said it would make a great movie and Sylvia a great Bonnie Parker. After they had a script, Sidney suggested Lang. She had just been in his first American film Fury (1936) and no doubt saw him as perfect for the task of making a movie about a guy hit with the full force of the law for something he hadn’t done. The Bonnie and Clyde aspects got played right down. Henry Fonda, always brilliant playing troubled, virtuous men, is an ex-con trying to go straight but defeated at every turn. A decision, prompted by an excited new wife, to go house-hunting instead of turning up for work on time proves a fateful moment. Then there is the long elaboration of a robbery and its aftermath for which Fonda’s Eddie Taylor gets the blame. The sequence involving a pair of eyes looking through a gap in a car windshield in pouring rain, the attack using tear gas, the single unknown man who drives the armoured car away and the heard but not seen accident, is magnificent.

One of Lang’s best films?

Absolutely.

What about this single extra?

It’s a piece in which Claude Chabrol, all of 70+ plus, looks at the film on a viewer and analyses Lang’s film-making skills with quite remarkable perception. Chabrol is also interviewed and these sequences and bits and pieces of illustrative material from the film are incorporated into a very fine piece of film criticism. Whatever you thought you knew about You Only Live Once you know a whole lot more after seeing this. Chabrol has this fascination with Lang’s staging that enables you to get much additional meaning and much greater appreciation of Lang’s skills. This would not have been an expensive film. Most of it, even the outdoor post robbery and flight sequences are done in the studio or with back projection.

Chabrol’s analysis is most acute. There is even one lateral tracking shot, when Eddie is being escorted towards Death Row and is flanked by a guard and by the kindly priest Father Dolan where Chabrol notes how the camera loses the characters from the middle of the frame. He is perplexed as to why the shot is there in this fashion as he doesn’t concede that the clumsy look is intentional. This is film criticism of a very high order and, as I guess as I have been saying for ever, the opportunity that DVD has opened up for new methods and techniques of criticism has added immensely to the sum of our knowledge and broadened the way we can actually dissect films.

Chabrol was once a critic and has no doubt retained these skills.

Yes. Mind you very few film-makers outside that small coterie of French critics cum film-makers, mostly from the fifties and sixties, have ever had these dual skills capable of closely-argued and rigorous analysis and fine film-making. Maybe Lindsay Anderson and Peter Bogdanovich qualify. Hasn’t been anyone else who has come to film-making from these roots for decades.

Chabrol actually made a film that seemed to be a homage to Lang’s Mabuse character?

Indeed. I think it was called Doctor M. I may be one of the few in the world to have seen, it at a market screening at a festival in the early 90s. The less said the better I’m afraid. Chabrol is a true inheritor of Lang’s legacy. As an imitator he failed.

Solrun Hoaas

2009-12-14T02:59:00.000-08:00

Our friend the film-maker and, more recently, print maker Solrun Hoaas died last Friday 11 December, aged 66, after what might be described as a short illness. Karen and I have gathered some thoughts together and I have attached some additional thoughts offered by Andrew Pike and Merrilyn Pike. I hope they will remind you of Solrun’s life and her achievements and, if you are hearing of her for the first time then you may be curious enough to check out a couple of websites which have more biographical and filmographical information about her here. http://www.innersense.com.au/mif/hoaas.html and http://www.roninfilms.com.au/person/350.html

Solrun was born on 15 August 1943 in Trondheim, Norway to missionary parents who had been in China before the war. She was the only girl and had three brothers. After the war the Hoaas family returned to China, but the revolution in 1949 saw them move to Hong Kong for a year, then to Kobe, Japan, where they lived throughout the ‘50s and part of the ‘60s. The home was a Lutheran church school in the Aotani district of the city. After attending the Norwegian primary school in Shiotaki near Kobe Solrun went to the Canadian Academy, an international school in that city. Upon graduation from its high school she spent a year in the United States, then travelled to Norway where she enrolled at the University of Oslo, majoring in socila anthropolgy. In 1969 she received a Japanese Ministry of Education scholarship to do graduate studies at Kyoto University and that is where she met Roger Pulvers. They were married in February 1970 in Kyoto and divorced in 1982.

Karen and I met Solrun and Roger when they arrived in Canberra in the early 70s. They both threw themselves enthusiastically into the local theatre scene, Roger as a writer and director, Solrun as a designer. We knew that they had met and married in Japan, a country where Solrun had also spent much of her childhood and adolescence as the daughter of Christian missionaries.

As it happened Karen and I came back to Melbourne in 1980, the same year that Roger was appointed to a job with the Playbox Theatre. When Solrun arrived she was admitted to the post-graduate course in film production at Swinburne College. We kept in touch. Solrun was a prolific film-maker and one of her films went on at my 1981 Melbourne Film Festival. It was her graduation film for Swinburne In Search of the Japanese, a satiric study of Australian incomprehension of Japanese/Australian relations.

We came back to Canberra in 1985 but we were close friends by this stage and our years in Melbourne saw us sharing each other’s company frequently, especially at Christmas. In one memorable Christmas a boat load of Solrun’s relatives were visiting. Her niece Guro-Marte was doing a part of her medical degree at an Australian hospital and the family descended to join her. All told another ten people or so from Norway joined us around the Christmas table for an especially festive occasion.

Her films, which she continued to make prolifically, by now were being distributed by Andrew Pike’s Canberra company Ronin Films and she had ambitions to make dramatic features. Before that could happen she with Karen as co-producer and some funds from Andrew Pike had got funding from Film Victoria, for an hour long documentary on Japanese war brides. This was to become Green Tea and Cherry Ripe. It was filmed in Melbourne and post-produced in Canberra. For six months or so Solrun lived in Canberra again, the office next to mine in the deepest reaches of the backstage of the Canberra Theatre became an editing suite, the editor Stewart Young lived in our house in Narrabundah (Heights), and the film took shape. Eventually it went out on national TV and I imagine the odd copy is still purchased from the Ronin Films back catalogue. It’s a touching documentary about a group of women that Solrun located and with whom she maintained friendships thereafter

Solrun then got funding for a script she had written for a dramatic feature about a Japanese War bride living in Australia in the 50s. Part of the funds derived from the direct investment in the project by a major Japanese distributor which Solrun negotiated personally. Karen had to decide whether to join the film production or stay with the Electric Shadows Bookshop she had opened. She stayed with the bookshop and Denise Patience came on board as Producer. Aya starred Nicholas Eadie and the Japanese actress Eri Ishida. Regrettably it didn’t click with the Australian public and Solrun never got another chance to do another feature film.

This wasn’t for lack of trying or lack of enthusiasm. She wrote a large number of scripts, many of them dealing with themes involving Australia and Japan, but they were not received sympathetically. Undeterred she continued to travel to Japan and also accepted invitations to visit South Korea. As was Solrun’s wont, she pushed the authorities until she got a visa to North Korea as well and, seizing the moment and using the new digital technology, put together a remarkable little film about her travels. This was Pyongyang Diary one of the first films to show anything of what life is like in this odd and very secretive society. It earned her more than a little money, some festival screenings and an ASIO interview. She followed this film with another documentary about North and South Korean relations, Rushing to Sunshine which also had some international success.

In recent years Solrun had devoted much of her time to studying and practising print making. She was an inveterate student, constantly enrolling in classes to study new technologies, and latterly getting herself very involved in print-making classes. Much of the visual material she used for her prints derived from stills of her own films which she reworked and recoloured into quite remarkable pieces of art. In the last year or so she had been represented in a number of group shows and had solo exhibitions at Gasworks Arts Precinct, the Joshua McClelland Print Room, the Benalla Gallery and the Albion Street Gallery in Sydney.

It’s only a couple of weeks ago that Solrun rang to say that she had been diagnosed with a cancer. There was some hope that it might be operated upon but further tests would determine that. Last Friday she went to hospital for a scan, suffered a heart attack and went into a coma. Only a matter of hours later it was decided that the life support systems should be turned off. It was shockingly sudden.

We are left with extraordinary memories of a wonderful person. Our walls at home are decorated with a number of her prints and they will serve as a constant reminder of the life and work of a great and loyal friend with whom, for the first time in a couple of decades, we wont be sharing Christmas. We will miss her.

Geoff Gardner & Karen Foley

Andrew Pike writes

Filmmakers often make much of the fact that their second features are harder to “get up” than their first, and that’s certainly true of Solrun. After her first feature, AYA, the components never really came together for a second film, though she kept working away at screenplays. Some of these scripts were superb works and maybe they can now be published, or even better produced posthumously. Two stand out in my memory. THE OKINAWAN DAUGHTER was a large-scale piece about an Australian retiree who travels back to Okinawa to look for the Okinawan woman with whom he’d had an affair during the Allied occupation of Japan. It’s a screenplay rich in romance and drama and action, and it would have been a perfect vehicle for Bill Hunter or Tony Barry, but sadly it never found the right producer. On a more personal level, MISSIONARY KID was a reflective autobiographical “essay” film about Solrun’s experience growing up as the child of Christian missionaries in Japan: it was a very moving and beautifully crafted work that was so unconventional that it never really had a chance of finding production funding. Ronin put some money into another documentary project to be called something like IN SEARCH OF MIYOSHI UMEKI, attempting to trace (or reconstruct) the life story of the Japanese actress and singer, Miyoshi Umeki, after she had won an Oscar for her role in SAYONARA and had done a few other films and a stint on TV before disappearing from public view.
Solrun had some loyal supporters at Film Victoria and the Australian Film Commission although the wider Australian film industry often ignored her work. While this caused her much frustration, she never gave up developing brilliantly original and distinctive treatments and screenplays that were works of art in themselves, and all of which remained determinedly idiosyncratic and pure to her own vision. She never sought to sacrifice her artistic ideals or aspirations for simple financial gain. All of the projects that she developed reflected her superb use of language and her rich cultural background in Australian and Japanese literature and history. The characters and stories and ideas that she created were strong and hauntingly beautiful. Nothing she did was tentative. As a writer she could have easily adapted her screenplays into novels or short stories but she never seemed to want to do that, as though that would mean giving up on them as films.Solrun’s completed works remain a great tribute to her persistence in the face of quite severe odds. Her Hatoma series, which she filmed by herself, with no assistant, and with minimal funding on a remote island in southern Okinawa, were an extraordinary achievement: the films were shot on 16mm without synch sound, over a period of many months, and often under very difficult conditions. They still screen today in Japan.Her film on Judith Wright, AT EDGE, is an experimental work rather than a conventional documentary, with sound that moved deliberately in and out of synch, much to the confusion of librarians who would sometimes ring to say there was a problem with their video or DVD. Regardless, it still circulates quite widely.Her other documentaries have reached wide audiences. GREEN TEA AND CHERRY RIPE on Japanese war brides in Australia, still has enthusiastic viewers and hasn’t dated at all. And the first of her two Korean films, PYONGYANG DIARIES sold well to TV internationally and to the ABC here in Australia.It was fascinating to see her work her way through the production and completion of AYA, another film in which Ronin invested a considerable sum. The final film was very true to the script, and she took confident command of every stage of the process, working closely with producer Denise Patience. I remember especially her enthusiasm for the music (released on a 45rpm disc, still boxed in bulk in the depths of my garage) – both the original compositions by Roger Mason and the 1950s Japanese pop songs which she had found and cleared for the film. The editor of AYA, Stewart Young, remembers Solrun as being well-organised and well-prepared, and that she always knew what she wanted, more so than most first-time directors. That was very much our impression too as her backer and distributor. Her confidence and cultural sophistication made her an excellent teacher and she taught many short courses and gave lectures for AFTRS and other institutions. She often helped filmmakers and artists in other fields find their way in Japan. She certainly helped me a great deal with contacts and to enrich my first deep immersion in Japanese culture. I remember vividly trekking with her into remote mountain villages to Japan to attend traditional festivals which she would film often under very daunting conditions which never seemed to bother her.Personally, she was a loyal and stimulating friend. Many years ago she frequently baby sat my daughters, Harriet and Georgia, and much later took an active interest in what they were doing. We were often given amazing masks to “store” indefinitely because she didn’t have room for them in her little Melbourne flat. As her distributor, she could often be exacting about how she’d like things done, but she was never wrong and never unreasonable. We all admired and respected her work and her professionalism and above all the quality of what she was wanting to do. She was open to all forms of art and always embraced the artistic endeavours of other people and could be very supportive and encouraging to us all as our projects developed. We will miss her keenly.
From Merrilyn Pike: I saw Solrun as the genuine article, in terms of her absolute commitment to following her sense of living for the art, whichever it was she was engaged with, and whatever it cost her. And it cost her a lot, though in the end she has such a fine body of work as a legacy.My feeling of connection with Solrun comes partly from a shared feeling for Japanese culture and aesthetics, with which she was imbued, and I always valued that she could bring such a broad culture, including a deep knowledge of European drama and literature as well as her Japanese background, not only to her art but to her everyday conversation. These conversations were always stimulating, and I am sorry there will not be any more of them.

Delayed Reactions

2009-11-26T18:40:00.000-08:00

When I recently left for Vancouver I had a short list of books to buy that haven’t been published or distributed here. (We have much to thank the British publishing cartel that runs things here.) They included four of Donald Westlake’s Dortmunder novels, a highly praised novel based on Frank Lloyd Wright’s love life, “Loving Frank” by Nancy Horan and the new George Pelecanos, ‘The Turnaround’. I headed into the excellent Chapters bookshop in downtown Vancouver and gathered them all up, and more, including an unnoticed Elmore Leonard and a wonderful surprise, a book titled “The Easiest Thing in the World’, the unpublished fiction of the late George V Higgins.

Higgins essentially started a new stream of American crime fiction some forty years or so ago with “The Friends of Eddie Coyle’. He wrote books about his local crime milieu, mixing in the elements of local politics, corrupt churches, even more corrupt government officials, and focussing especially on the low life. His narratives moved along via their characters’ speech and his ear for dialogue and criminal argot was marvellous. His criminals were mostly a newly described form of the urban poor, living in cheap housing, making ends meet with cheap jobs, never knowing when the law would catch them. They did things like supplied guns or set buildings on fire or manhandled recalcitrants. None of it was high-paying. Donald Westlake’s urban gang, was a later comic variation on this form of criminal behaviour. (The gang leader Dortmunder’s wife worked a day job in a supermarket and stole stuff so that the couple could eat.) Higgins’s (and Westlake’s) criminals probably would have made more money, and had less aggravation, if they had worked a steady job. Higgins was largely devoid of humour if not of irony but his influence now spreads far and wide, well into mainstream fiction. His successors write gritty fiction set in the regions outside New York and LA, often located in the criminal heartlands where police don’t go and murders, robberies and drug trafficking are the order of the day.

George Pelecanos is one of the most notable of Higgins successors. He writes razor sharp stories of Washington DC low life and the police who battle to keep a modicum of control and laces his narratives with an encyclopaedic knowledge of rock music. No scene takes place where you don’t get a sentence telling you what’s playing on the car radio or drifting out from an open window. On the cover of The Turnaround there is a photo of the author with the inscription that he is producer and writer for The Wire. Now I had heard of this US TV series but, like The Sopranos and The West Wing, haven’t seen a single episode. Watching these things on commercial TV is out of my bailiwick. The pain of 17 minutes of ads per episode is beyond torture. But I’ve frequently been urged by Rod Bishop and Bob Gardini and others to give in and buy or rent the DVDs.

But a day after finishing Pelecanos splendid new book, a dark tale of youthful stupidity that crosses the racial divide and twists around to eventual redemption, there at JB Hi-Fi are the first four seasons of The Wire for $19.98 each. “Boy are these selling” says the singleted and ear, nose and lip pierced youth behind the counter and so I start. Needless to say the story is that I am a now an officially registered addict. The first series takes the old Howard Hawks/Rio Bravo trope of gathering together misfits, drunks and social incompetents into a crack team to take on the drug lords of Baltimore. Their individual and eccentric skills complement each other perfectly of course, after the usual comic misunderstandings. But the story, as in the best of American crime fiction, gets down into the back blocks where the police are barely competent, sexist, prejudiced, venal and mostly just potter along. They are trying to maintain order in a city where there is a gun murder most days of the week.

The second series is more ambitious, a look at Baltimore’s ailing port and docks. The longshoremen’s union is down to a hundred or so members because the work has disappeared. The union leader, a good/bad guy has hatched a cunning plan to get more state investment but needs money to grease the palms of politicians who will make the decision. He is pursued relentlessly by a senior police (as they call themselves) because he got in first to donate a window to the local Polish Catholic Church. The union leader funds his campaign by facilitating large scale theft and smuggling on the docks but things go wrong when a container full of Russian whores being smuggled in is opened to reveal 13 dead bodies. The complex interaction of black and white politics, the ever present drug scene, prison and street milieus is, well, even more addictive.

George Pelecanos wrote the scripts of a couple of episodes in the first two series but in the third series he has been promoted to producer and you assume it was he who brought in some additional celebrity talent to write some of the episodes. Richard Price and Dennis Lehane among others get credits for an episode each. So, I’m half way through series three. It’s working its magic all over and the box with series four is awaiting. All this for $19.98 each for 12 hours or so of prime viewing per carton. Heavenly really.

Revolution in the air

2009-10-17T17:21:00.000-07:00

Who can tell a moment when the human heart is moved. In Bruce Beresford’s Mao’s Last Dancer young ballet student Li Cunxin, enduring the agonies of classical ballet training during China’s years of Cultural Revolution, watches an ‘illegal’ videotape of Mikhail Baryshnikov, gently soaring the air in a series of solo steps and leaps so simple, graceful and beautiful that he, and we, are in emotionally wrought awe.

The dynamic trajectory of the film changes instantly. Li can no longer be just a dancer seeking his 'freedom'. He has to be a great dancer. He has to produce a similar awe as that produced by Baryshnikov all those years ago in a dorm at ballet school.

To Beresford’s credit, as we start to see more of Li as a mature dancer stunning American audiences in his adopted country, the director does something unusual. At least these days it's unusual. He lets us see it. The camera placement for the dance sequences is absolutely precise, classical one might say. Beresford’s remark that before embarking on filming he went back and watched a host of Fred Astaire pictures is something we ought to take seriously. Maybe he saw Yolanda and the Thief or The Bandwagon or Funny Face or Silk Stockings, all by acknowledged Hollywood masters with the luxury of a big studio support and budgets to match.

Whatever the inspiration, the film, almost suddenly, moves up a few notches. We become more intensely involved with the characters and their dilemmas. But mostly we want to see more of Li Cunxin’s dancing and we are grateful that Beresford decided to show as much as he did. By the end, I was rather hoping that we would see, in the fashion of some of the great Metro masterpieces, the whole of Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring, rather than just some edited highlights. Like Oliver Twist, we wanted more. Sadly not to be.

For a director who has routinely coarsened his subject matter, and it was quite an achievement to coarsen the already vulgar Barry McKenzie comic strip as well as those two David Williamson adaptations, frequently encouraged over-ripe acting turns and only ever seemed to half edit his films, I have to say I was astonished at how good and emotionally satisfying Mao’s Last Dancer was. The second half in particular is probably as good as anything Beresford has done before. Who would have thunk it.

So, having got this far why not go further and say how much such filming differs from others once on offer or shortly to be on offer. It serves as a sharp reminder of just how easy it is to ignore the classical principles of telling a story with music or dance on film. I fear that the descent has been largely caused by those who make video clips for MTV, a source of reference that needs to be deeply discouraged. Baz Luhrman’s photography and editing on Moulin Rouge was so deeply inefficient in showing the actual dance, as opposed to vague colour and movement scenes was the worst recent example.

The forthcoming Bran Nue Dae, which premiered recently at the Melbourne International Film Festival follows another tack and seems to have decided early on in the film-making process to seek to appropriate the look of happy and enthusiastic amateurism that made the stage original such a heart-warming and unique piece of theatre. The producer of the film was even so bold as to say, and I paraphrase from memory, that nobody involved in the movie knew how to make a musical and they just made it up as they went along. The happy enthusiasm doesn’t stand up to the rigorous scrutiny of the camera and the musical and dance sequences, the raison d’etre of the piece, are simply one mess after another. That’s a pity.

Direct Speech

2009-09-07T15:12:00.000-07:00

A long, long time ago, back in the sixties and into the seventies, the British director Peter Watkins established a certain reputation for himself with his first film, made for TV, Culloden (1964). Thereafter he made The War Game for the BBC. The films were made as if they were newsreels of the time. An unseen interviewer observed momentous events and directly questioned participants in the Battle of Culloden and survivors of a nuclear explosion. They became Watkins themes, anti-militarism, anti-state authority and anti-nuclear politics and his technique in telling his stories remained rather uniquely his for some time at least.

Watkins was seeking a new immediacy, a direct confrontation, head to head, face to face, between people on the screen and people in the audience. He wanted the barrier of the theatre's wall to be broken down. It was very effective and shocking to some. The BBC refused to show The War Game on TV but allowed it to be screened in theatres. It was feared that people might confuse it with the real thing if they tuned in without any foreknowledge of what the director was up to. Memories of Orson Welles famous War of the Worlds radio broadcast were invoked.

Watkins went on to apply his technique to other less directly confronting subjects, the mystery of pop idolatry and its use by the authorities to keep the population quiet in Privilege and the life of the Norwegian painter in Edward Munch. The methods in my view wore out their welcome and seemed affected, predictable and precious by the mid seventies, which was about the time that Watkins stopped finding money for his work and went into other fields. Since then I've seen two of his works, a personally presented slideshow about nuclear weapons installations in Europe full of forebodings about nuclear war and a long piece done for TV, recorded digitally in a factory with litle pretence at realistic settings, about the Paris Commune which BIFF showed some years ago. The latter again uses the technique of actors speaking directly to camera as if being interviewed by an unseen reporter.

By now the technique is no longer, may never have been, something unique to Watkins work. It's been deployed by low-budget film-makers everywhere. The employment is not even frequently used for political analysis or highly ambitious subject matter. Australian films as diverse as the pooh joke movie Kenny and the low budget horror story Lake Mungo give it nods. But it seems to be back most notably and for greatest effect in Neill Blonenkamp's District 9, a science- fiction movie filled with spaceships and aliens set in a state battling to contain citizen hysteria at the invasion of the Earth by a bunch of downtrodden and rather bedraggled refugees.

The refugees, a million or so of them cowering in a junked and broken down spacecraft hovering over Johannesburg, are allowed entry under strict conditions and promptly tossed into a Soweto like camp where they are allowed to eke out livings, scavenge for food, become increasingly lawless, accumulate illegal weapons and involve themselves with shady criminals exploiting their status and breed in massive numbers. They are repulsive in every sense to those seeking a quiet well-ordered existence and repulsive as well in their looks. They are dubbed prawns and they move with astonishing speed and strength but show little other signs of wishing to bring down the established order.

But the established order, fearing them, wants them moved to safer conditions where a better eye can be kept on them and thus the entry is paved for Wykus van der Merwe, a venerable South African name, once the surname of the country's cricket captain among other achievements. Wykus being where he is is the result of nepotism but the slow thinking dill throws himself into the task with huge energy and when inevitably betrayed by politicians with surprising resilience. He first knows what he wants to do - read the prawns their rights, confiscate their weapons and move them to a concentration camp. I need say no more, the parallels with South African politics, the plight of refugees everywhere, state indifference, fear and hatred of strangers come bursting out. When he discovers what it feels like to become such a person he rises up in protest.

District 9 is the best commercial entertainment of the year thus far and it was made by a bunch of unknown South Africans and Peter Jackson and his intrepid CGI masters at Wing Nut Productions in New Zealand. Its galling really that Jackson can do this but it proves once again that an ounce of real talent is much better than a ton of government intervention, script conferences, mentoring, fresh drafts, and layers of bureaucracy. The money follows Jackson because he has skills and visions that nobody else has. (I wish he hadn't bothered to apply those skills to Tolkien, but that's another story.)

But I cant help wondering just how much the way of telling the story in District 9 owes just a bit to the techniique and political fervour of the long ago and now sadly overlooked Peter Watkins and the lonely course he pursued around the world seeking to present a new form of political discourse about the threat of the state.

Donald Westlake

2009-08-22T18:35:00.000-07:00

Someone emailed about my earlier blog on Westlake that was prompted by a viewing of the Costa-Gavras film The Axe. I mentioned that in one very funny Westlake gave over some time to spoofing and ridiculing Australian tabloid journalists. The book was Trust Me on This (1988)and it spawned a sequel Baby Would I Lie (1994) which had the added joy of spoofing and ridiculing the country and western music scene. The latter had the great joke about Elvis Presley suddenly materialising in a box at a theatre and saying he had to dash because he had just spotted Glenn Miller at a local supermarket!

The Tremor of Forgery

2009-06-18T21:03:00.000-07:00

Looking back I think I may have first become fascinated with forgery as a pre-teenager reading those novels and memoirs of derring do in World War 2. Books like The Great Escape, The Wooden Horse, The Colditz Story and so on were filled with information about forged passports and identity papers which stood up to scrutiny and caused the Germans to be outwitted by supersmart Brits, Aussies and Yanks so unfairly incarcerated. Later spy fiction made a contribution and then in 1967 or ‘68 there was the line uttered by Orson Welles in Michael Winner’s I’ll Never Forget Whats ‘is name when he says of a painting something like: “It’s one of sixteen Vermeers in the world, thirty three of which are in America”. Later on, the most thrilling ongoing character in modern literature, Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley, introduced us to his skills at forgery in the first book of the series and went on to have a continuing relationship with the painter Derwatt, whose paintings he sold at high prices on the market, notwithstanding suspicions they were forged. Derwatt was supposed to have died you see, but in fact, in a cunning career move, he had faked his death in order to drive up his prices and was happily alive and out of harm’s way in New York, gleefully painting previously unknown Derwatts which Tom was slipping into the market at premium prices. I hope you got that. Wim Wenders made a movie of the first Ripley/Derwatt story, one of his best, called The American Friend. Nicholas Ray, by then sick, old and crotchety played Derwatt most memorably

I once met Highsmith and she told me how she loved writing about Ripley because she could let him get away with just about anything including murder. Her readers wanted it that way and she was happy to oblige. It satisfied a lot of her own darker impulses to be able to write about a character with so many unredeeming features, make him attractive and allow him to manipulate other people’s propensities towards illegality when tested.

I also once met the film-maker Errol Morris. It was early in his career when he had brought his second film Vernon, Florida to the 1981 London Film Festival. He was a nice guy and he sent his film out to Australia the next year. After that he gradually made for himself a very significant reputation as a documentarist able to extract truth from situations and people where it’s not readily apparent or always on offer. Thus my attention was caught recently noticing on the New York Times website that Errol Morris had posted a series of pieces on the subject of a forger on a blog under the series heading Bamboozling Us. Heading straight for it as fast as the nation’s intolerably slow download speeds will allow, I read a fascintating account of the life and career of one Han van Meegeren and his forging of a Vermeer that he sold to Herman Goring and which for some time was regarded by leading art experts as authentic.

I suspect Errol wanted, or maybe still wants, to turn this into a movie, though I can see how the subject would lack the visual punch that are a feature of the director’s work. None of the active participants are alive and Goring even blew up his mansion where the painting was displayed to stop the Russians getting their hands on his legacy. The big Nazi gave the painting to a servant near the end of the war suggesting she could live comfortably off the proceeds for the rest of her life. She handed it in. It’s a fascinating story with a lot of resonating moments for those who follow a thread that in my case at least runs from Colditz to Welles (himself fascinated by forgery and whose F for Fake studies another high ego practitioner of the art, Elmyr de Hory) to Highsmith, Ripley, Rene Clement, Alain Delon, Wim Wenders, Denis Hopper, Bruno Ganz, Nicholas Ray, then much later the book and the film of The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and all the way through to Errol Morris (ignoring if possible Liliana Cavani’s godawful remake of the Highsmith novel with John Malkovich, hopelessly miscast once again, as Ripley). Morris indeed takes it full circle as his interest is in a forger from the Nazi era who was called to account for activities at the end of WW2. Van Meegeren faked eleven Vermeers including the one he sold to Goring. Morris’s interest is not just in how the forger and his forgery work but also on whether this forger was a Nazi himself and thus used his skills to ingratiate.himself into the Nazi inner sanctums. These and a whole host of other big and small ideas are explored in the seven part series that Morris posted here at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/category/bamboozling-ourselves/

It has obviously drawn a lot of interest as Errol’s most recent post notes that there have been more than seven hundred responses published since it started to appear. The latest post this week at
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/06/17/more-bamboozling/?th&emc=th
contains additional information so the series may not yet be over. For myself, the fascination remains lingering but awful for in this age of Bernie Madoff I still seem to at least half-admire people with skills sufficient to bamboozle the wealthy into believing anything you tell them or sell them.

Simple as that

2009-05-20T17:56:00.000-07:00

Recent events have been enlivened by a Popcorn Taxi screening of Bert Deling’s Pure S, an evening organised to coincide with the film’s three disc DVD release. For those who don’t know I’ll be brief. Pure S was made for $28,000 back in 1975. Bert Deling had previously made Dalmas a film which ran off the rails,perhaps intentionally, and which was also a record of that running off. Dalmas had a bit of notoriety, was given a few weeks in a couple of art cinemas and then faded out of sight.

Bert Deling was a legendary cinephile, first surfacing at Melbourne University and later shifting to Sydney. He was imperious and supersmart and as he made his journey he attracted followers, some bemused, some utterly committed. Pure S was to be a film about drug addiction and part of its funding and much of its scripting emanated from contact with the Buoyancy Foundation, a drug rehabilitation charity with some unorthodox, out of mainstream, views about treatment. This was a time when heroin usage was small, unstructured and not in the hands of the mafia and the police forces.

The film was intended as an antidote to the standard views about junkie life and focused on a day or so as four addicts in search of hits went about acquiring their fixes by any means that occurred to them – buying, stealing, begging all featured. Deling used some actors who were involved in Melbourne’s alternative theatre scene at La Mama and the Pram Factory. Those living on the theatre’s premises in the Tower were both models and participants. The lead was played by the hyper-energetic Gary Waddell as a foul-mouthed stop at nothing junky. Waddell was an actor then and still is. He was also then an addict.

The producers and director wanted to call the film Pure Shit but the exigencies of censorship, newspaper advertising and popular taste caused it to be shortened to Pure S. Everyone knew what it meant anyway. The film then had the good fortune to be described as “The most evil film that I’ve ever seen” by the Melbourne Herald’s then film critic Andrew McKay. Watching the package of extras I wondered what happened to him. Bert Deling, not gracious towards more than a few people on the extras, says at one point, with glee, “we track(ed) this guy down. His story was that he was an alcoholic whose partner had said to him you either give up me or you give up the alcohol. He chose to give away the alcohol but he had not reached the organic point where you do give it up. So he was at that point a kind of frozen addict to his own addiction and he got hot hot and he thought everyone else would get hot (seeing Pure S). Andrew McKay is not one of the many interviewed on Disc 2 of the DVD pack but it would have been fun to track him down.

With this view swirling around the Commonwealth Film Censor banned the film for public screening. Due to some determined efforts and some legal smarts eventually the film was unbanned, and producer Bob Weis hired the tiny Melbourne cinema, the Playbox and put it on himself. There had been since rough cut stage when more money was sought from the Government to complete it, a total lack of enthusiasm for the project even from those in the bureaucracy who had provided some funding for production. Oz films were then already tending towards good taste, historical subjects and literary adaptations.

A film which wanted to sound like His Girl Friday in the speed of dialogue delivery and look like a slice of American maverick indy in your face realism wasn’t what the authorities thought the government should be hurling money at. Slowly it faded from view. It wasn’t rescued by overseas festival or critical appreciation either. There’s some suggestion it wasn’t even screened publicly outside the country but this, like a lot of the stories that surround the film’s pre-production, production, post-production and public reception is now so bound up into myth and legend, some of it quite possibly the result of drug-addled memory, may never be really settled. Deling for instance impugns Peter Weir on the DVD by referring to a Government funded anti-drug movie. In fact the film, No Roses for Michael was directed by Chris McGill. Weir made another, somewhat autobiographical film called Michael, some years earlier.

But…cut to the present. The Popcorn Taxi and other screenings around the capital cities of the new print have been cause for much rejoicing, nostalgia, score settling, and reminiscence. The key figures involved in the film – Deling, Waddell, photographer Tom Cowan, editor John Scott and composer Martin Armiger all seemed happy, healthy blokes when they sat around and answered questions, got a few things off their chest, made people laugh and generally enjoyed the limelight. Deling did resort, as he looked at the packed theatre, to the old one of “Where were you when I needed you” attributing its first utterance to Josef von Sternberg, though von Sternberg’s autobiography attributes it to D W Griffith.

The new 16mm print itself was to be projected but the projector broke down and a switch was made to DVD. The NFSA restoration probably had very little to work with. The low budget and all the haste always contributed to something that had lots of flaws. Subtle lighting, particularly in the dark interiors of rooms and cars at night was not one of its hallmarks. Still its all back there on screen as best they could do in the circumstances. Neil Foley at Beyond Home Entertainment has put in a prodigious amount of work to get it done.

The extras on disc 2, consist of much reminiscing are interesting without being revelatory in any way. There are some very pleasurable moments however. John Flaus compares Pure S to Ozu in its compassion. Bob Ellis, ever the curmudgeon seems to spout a view that comprises a mixture of hatred, envy and wonder and cant resist the grandiloquent demand: “I do want to see the roll call of the dead who star in this film, who have died of drugs since being rather excited by the experience of their publicity in this film. And I want Bert to perhaps stand on a lawn in Canberra and offer an apology like the PM for those he has damaged. In brief “Fuck him”.

Yet the boys seemed to have survived the events intact and questions at the Popcorn Taxi screening seemed to indicate that everyone was alive and well. It’s hard to say. No women are interviewed on the DVD and it would have been nice to here something from Helen Garner or Carol Porter, whose performances are frequently given high praise throughout. Instead there are more acolytes and followers on show, including Richard Lowenstein who happily admits now about his own later contribution to what he calls “the micro-genre of the good time junky film”. I knew all about that one at the time, being a member of the Films Board of Review who resolutely refused to alter the R Certificate awarded to it for just that reason.

Another great pleasure is to have an audio CD of the fabulous songs composed by Armiger and others from some of the legendary Melbourne bands and musicians of the day – The Toads, Spodeeodee, Armiger, Red Symons, Jane Clifton, Paul Dixon especially. There is a note by Armiger in the accompanying booklet giving some additional detail and, for the first time, all the music credits are included on the film along with all the production credits. At the time it went out without any credits and was preceded by seven minutes or so of music played while black leader unspooled before the title card. Those seven minutes have been cut.

So it’s back and its on the shelves and I’m standing in Readings Bookshop last Friday, no more than a hundred metres from the old Pram Factory site and a man with long curly hair walks in and says “Pure Shit…Pure Shit.” “Yes” says the salesperson, “over here”. “Jesus, 34.95!” exclaims the curly haired one. “Yes it has lots of extra”. He takes a copy and walks to cash desk and I’m standing behind him with a copy of Wajda’s Maids of Wilko (having bought a copy of Pure S at the screening). The man’s phone rings. “Yes….yes…this is the Snowman….how do you know….you’ll just have to take my word that I’m the Snowman.” And he exits onto Lygon Street.

This is the Oz DVD of the year – a paean to enthusiasm, a tribute to an amazing one off, a revival of a time when there was more than a bit of subversion in the air and adventure in our cinema.

Friends have already started emailing me and no doubt others will after having sat through the mammoth amount of material assembled. Rod Bishop, a leading figure in the fight to get the film shown at the Perth Film Festival, writes after going through the whole box “Fiona and I can’t get enough of it. We’ve almost finished the Extras. It’s brought back a whole time and place – you can almost smell the Back Theatre and The Tower at the Pram. The memories and recollections of those interviewed are by and large priceless. Sooner or later, we’ll get around to watching the re-master, but at the moment it’s the least interesting bit. Neil’s done a fantastic job – a real labour of love.. Brilliant stuff. DVD Box Set of the Year."

Bruce Hodsdon also writes: “The attention Samson and Delilah has been getting aided by the Australian's headlining of it as our finest film (and DJS's 5 star rating which I cant remember when it was last bestowed) is not to be begrudged. My first reaction to what appeared to be a piece of over hype nevertheless led naturally to "well, what is our "finest film?" In that context it doesn't seem so much of an overstatement. A recent reviewing of the pristine new print of Pure Shit just about convinces me that, taking everything into account, it deserves that accolade. It was screened in Brisbane last Friday night with Bert and Gary Waddell in attendance as part of a tour around the country to promote the dvd release of PS - a truly excellent package of three disks worth the price alone for a disc of the complete rock numbers composed for the film (but necessarily used only in part). There are a range of interviews and reunions with cast and crew and endorsements and appraisals of others including Flaus. The standout is Bert himself speaking of PS, Dalmas, the drug scene then and now, the oz industry as he sees and has experienced it and a lot more. Bert's older and wiser but still charismatic.

That’s a view shared by more than a few and it may spread as this extraordinary DVD, a mixture of loving archaeology, disjuncted memory and complete affection starts to circulate.

On that suggestive note, let me urge you to rush out and buy. It’s $29.95 at JB Hi Fi and $34.95 everywhere else.

Dubya done and dusted

2009-02-28T23:29:00.000-08:00

I assumed that Oliver Stone would engage in much speculation about George W. Bush in W. his portrait of the President. I was indeed looking forward to them as no one else really goes where Stone goes when he decides to chance his arm with a portrait of the well-known. Since the middle of 1999 when it became clear that Bush would be the Republican candidate, throughout the rest of that year as Al Gore crashed and burned, then as Republican judicial appointees contrived to award him the verdict notwithstanding the popular vote nor the obvious intent of the citizens of Florida, I’ve cordially despised the 43rd President of the United States and nothing he did in his Presidency eviced an iota of sympathy for him. This even manifested itself in my participating in marches for the first time in decades when he took the US and its acolyte John Howard’s Australia off to a foolhardy and vainglorious war. I settled in to Stone’s speculations and representations very comfortably.

Do we otherwise know that Colin Powell snaped back at Dick Cheney along the lines “Don’t talk to me like that Mr Five Deferments”. If it never happened then we have to be grateful to Stone for creating the legend. There are similarly brilliant moments scattered throughout. When Richard Dreyfuss’s marvellously reedy rendition of Dick Cheney launches into a tirade of choked up vengeance, a presentation that reeks of homage to Dr Strangelove, in which he proposes how America will use the Iraq war to solve its long term energy supply problems, you get a mesmerising glimpse of pure evil. It may be satirical but you believe every second of it, especially the contempt and the malice that lurk therein. When George W. goes to bed and dreams of his father provoking him into an Oval Office fist fight you get an an Oliver Stone piledriver image of the weak bastard who spent his life pissed off that his father doesn’t like or admire him.

(It’s mildly amusing that Stone adopts an almost hagiographical stance about Bush Sr, a nondescript President that no one recalls with any warmth and one who was belted by Bill Clinton in the only real contest he ever fought. )

There are other incidental pleasures as well and no doubt more than a few conform with other long held prejudices. Thandie Newton plays Condoleeza Rice as the befuddled intellectually inadequate loyalist she undoubtedly is. Toby Jones, last seen playing the odious Swifty Lazar in Frost/Nixon plays Karl Rove as the smartest kid on the block, the only one of the male entourage to actually like Bush the man and the one who can see the political potential for someone with an extraordinary y and probably unique mix of laziness, street smarts, smooth talk, ambition, hatred, envy, fear of failure and a knowledge that any inadequacy can be overcome by hard work when it matters. Stone evinces sympathy when he focuses on Bush’s legendary fitness campaign, his three miles a day, probably the only thing that stood between him and complete disintegration in the face of disaster all round. Without it he may well have lapsed back to drinking or worse just as Nixon did in his dark days.

Josh Brolin’s performance seems note perfect. If you want to see Bush portrayed as the man out of his depth, here’s the opportunity. Maybe the Academy was too frightened to even contemplate nominating Brolin for his work. When you consider that the contest for best actor came down to a couple of actors working on our nostalgia quotient in different ways you can see why. Maybe, in the way of these things he’ll get something for something less worthy at some other, safer time.

So, what’s the best film of the moment with all these Oscar nominees and Berlin launches floating round the multiplexes. I surprise even myself by saying that its Oliver Stone’s W.

Screened Out

2008-12-28T17:31:00.000-08:00

I have been musing away reading the the obituaries for Harold Pinter which have concentrated almost exclusively on his contribution to the theatre. A single para, even a mere few words, were generally all that his substantial contribution to the cinema apparently warranted.

There were however a number of fine film adaptations of his work that ultimately via TV and now DVD would have probably have been seen by many more people than ever attended a production of his work. But there they lie, almost completely ignored, filmed adaptations, mostly of the early plays to add to a long string of script credits including most especially a fruitful series of collaborations with Joseph Losey that, in the 60s and 70s substantially enhanced the reputations of both the writer and the director.

Losey’s career was merely muddling along before the collaboration started. He was making mostly low budget films in Britain where and when he could. He had just made perhaps his greatest film, The Criminal at the very low rent Merton Park Studios. The Damned (1962) had been made for Hammer Studios. Blind Date (1959) was a low budget detective story and Eva (1962) despite its big budget, was an international disaster. They were however, films which addressed some tough issues and attracted some positive reviews as well as high quality actors and writers into the director’s orbit. Notwithstanding that, none of those films were box office successes. Yet somehow or other the money for The Servant (1963) was conjured up by producer Norman Priggen. Losey, Pinter and Dirk Bogarde then combined to make an off beat, baroque, and highly erotic movie from Robin Maugham’s very short novella and together, with gusto, they peeled back the skin of the British class system to do some revelling in personal weakness and corruption. It was a breakthrough work for all three and their films both together and separately, were treated very differently following its success

The three collaborated again in 1967 with Accident, an adaptation of LP Hartley’s solid British novel and Pinter adapted Hartley again for Losey's The Go Between a Cannes prize-winner in 1970 and a huge success around the world. One amazingly ambitious project never came to pass, an adaptation of Proust’s Remembrance of Thing’s Past, though Pinter’s six hour script was apparently once performed or read at the National Theatre in London.

Beyond these highlights Pinter seemed ever ready to do adaptations of just about anything. He ranged from domestic dramas to a common or garden spy story and in each, the so-called Pinteresque dialogue which the obituaries have laboured over, was always somewhere present. Alec Guinness proved particularly adroit at delivering those short, clipped lines and pregnant pauses for the otherwise unremarkable The Quiller Memorandum (Adam Hall/Michael Anderson, 1966).

The range of this element of his work is noteworthy and most authors were well-served by Pinter’s transformations. His filmed scripts included The Pumpkin Eater (Penelope Mortimer/Jack Clayton, 1964), The Last Tycoon (F. Scott Fitzgerald/Elia Kazan (1976), The French Lieutenant’s Woman (John Fowles/Karel Reisz, 1981), Turtle Diary (Russell Hoban/John Irvin, 1985), Reunion (Fred Uhlman/Jerry Schatzberg, 1989), The Handmaid’s Tale (Margaret Atwod/Volker Schlondorff, 1990), The Comfort of Strangers (Ian McEwan/Paul Schrader, 1990) and the remake of Sleuth (Peter Shaffer/?, 2007)

Pinter also directed a film adaptation of Simon Gray’s Butley done as part of the American Film Theatre series of film versions of modern drama in 1974. Pinter’s own The Homecoming was also done as a part of this series by Tony Richardson. He also directed several TV films.
The film adaptations of Pinter’s plays were all high quality movies though none were very successful with filmgoers. They began with Clive Donner’s version of The Caretaker (1963) and this was quickly followed by William Friedkin’s version of The Birthday Party (1965).

Pinter also seemed to enjoy the social life of making movies and appeared in quite a few small roles including in both The Servant and Accident. He had a very funny part as Uncle Benny in John Boorman’s Le Carre adaptation The Tailor of Panama (2001) and small roles in movies as oddly diverse as Mansfield Park (Patricia Rozema, 1999), The Tamarind Seed (Blake Edwards, 1974) and The Rise and Rise of Michael Rimmer (Kevin Billington,1970).

A couple of years ago a major season of Pinter’s work for the cinema was presented in New York. It was a rare tribute for a writer in the director or thematically-oriented world of film cultural programming. Pinter was a most deserving case for such attention. As a writer of original scripts, adaptations of his own and other work, most notably modern British writers, as a director and even as an actor his contribution was unique. His work in film was in many ways a seamless continuation of his original work for the theatre which is the basis of what will be an enduring reputation and it shouldn’t be near completely overlooked in any assessment of the man’s life and work.

There have been a huge number of TV adaptations done of his own plays in all parts of the world and as well there have been a seemingly limitless number of profiles, interviews, reviews, discussions and colloquia devoted to his work. He seemed to freely participate in all of these, perhaps mindful that the theatre is a public art and relies on the electronic media for endless amounts of publicity. But he was much more than a practitioner of the high art of the theatre and there are instant reminders of his work everywhere. He took on with great gusto the duties of the artist to discuss, expose, crusade, engage and enrage. If you want a quick reminder you can find it on the shelves where The Servant, Accident, The Go Between, The Comfort of Strangers and The Last Tycoon are freely there for all to see. Maybe soon someone will add The Pumpkin Eater and Jerry Schatzberg's very under-rated Reunion to that list to serve as further reminders that Pinter practiced a craft within the film industry as well as the art of the theatre.

An update on the history of magic

2008-12-07T05:06:00.000-08:00

James Galea bounds out onto the stage of the Sydney Theatre after the screen behind him has run what amounts to an ad for his brilliance. We shall see. One of the endorsements was from one of the tastemakers on The Footy Show. He soon has the audience involved via a trick where everyone has to clasp their hands together and then get their thumbs pointing back upright the way he demonstrates. Nobody knows how. Then he’s prowling along the front row asking for thoughts as to what a magic show might contain. He asks a guy in the middle of the front row to hold a post parcel box on his knees. Finally we get ‘rabbits’ and he launches a rant that there wont be any in his act. His show is called "I Hate Rabbits" and a rabbit with a red line through it is part of the back projection. He’s still prowling, asking people would they like to double their money and he hits on an audience member who says he has a $50 bill in his pocket.

It’s moi!

I’m up on stage and James gets me to write my name with a big felt pen and put a secret sign on the note. Suddenly he folds it and folds it and folds it and then it’s gone. He produces something and unfolds it. A $5 bill. He takes my watch off me and drops it into a bag which has two slits. Suddenly he flaps the bag and the watch is gone and I’m asked to take my seat. No point in arguing.

James is a card prestidigitator without peer. He dazzles us with tricks involving a card which keeps returning from impossible places, especially his back pocket. The tricks are so delicate that most of the audience have to watch them on the big screen behind him. He plays a pea and thimble game with amazing dexterity. If you counter-intuit you can win on your guesses but the sleight of hand is remarkable. He brings up another audience member and guesses a word she has chosen from three books he offered her and he brings up another to do an elaborate trick with an upside down bottle inside a tube. This audience dummy takes so long to follow instructions the impact is lost.

Then it’s back to me. I’m again on stage as he stands in front of stand containing a towel and an orange. I suspect nothing and he slices open the orange to produce my signed $50 bill, dripping with juice. He wipes it down with the towel and throws the towel away. I was going to borrow it to mop sweat from my brow but he beat me to the punch. No one wants scene stealers. I then have to retrieve the box from the lap of the punter in the first row. He cuts the sticky tape off the box and produces another box. I’m invited to remove the bow and the wrapping paper. Inside the box is a brown wooden box and inside that box is a can of Heinz tomato puree. He opens the can with a can opener and out pops my watch. Or so I and the audience believe. Its high fives all round between us and he whispers “thanks mate, you were good”. Much better than the time on the boat on the river in Shanghai, I think.

He makes a woman’s wedding ring disappear and turn up on his own key chain buried deep in his pocket. Finally, there’s time for another incredibly elaborate card trick which involves him memorising the entire order of the pack and then some, the pack then being cut several times by strangers.

Then it’s over. The exhilaration of the hour long show is extraordinary. James high fives his assistant as he exits the stage. He’s happy and so were we.

Australia Fair

2008-11-29T22:00:00.000-08:00

First I have some questions about well, an amazing movie. Clunky start, finish like some old time John Ford picture. Only Baz does close-ups as big as those or does someone else? Did Mandy Walker also photograph Tracey Moffat's Bedevil? Some of the shots look the same, particularly the studio interiors. David Wenham doing his whining act would be good if he hadn't done it before most notably in that movie where he appears as a witness at a Royal Commission. No chemistry between Hugh and Nick. Nick starting to look old but trying to hide it. Was all the stuff about Aborigines being warned that the film refers to dead people and the roller title at beginning and end about the stolen generations in the version the Oz critics saw? Are Aborigines now requiring that a fictional film referring to dead non-existent Aborigines requires a warning? Must ask Bordwell what his shot clock comes up with for average length of shot. 2.7 million feet of film and according to an ad in Inside film never less than six cameras running. Really?

"That was good" said an old lady nearby. "Not them again" said another old dear when we held the script about the The Stolen Generations for a moment. Interesting demographic emerging. Is it people closer to forty than twenty who will go to it. If so it defies all box office activity these days. Was there a scene with a pedophile priest shot or contemplated.

He's never dull but Snowy River made me more tearful, and was probably about as manipulative.

Ageless

2008-11-29T21:58:00.000-08:00

Tucked away at the Chauvel is Youth Without Youth, the first film by Frances Ford Coppola for over a decade. It brings him full circle. His first official film the no-budget horror flick Dementia 13 was also barely in the public gaze, or at least the critical gaze. Yet I found it quite remarkable, the only film all year with enough plot and mystery and intrigue and ideas to make me want to see it again as soon as possible. The great man is so far out of the loop these days that he’s getting his money from smallish French and Italian producers and distributors, shooting in cheap foreign locations and minimising costs by film on HD. It might have been sad indeed, as such circumstances have been for many as they attempted to keep going in the face of general indifference. But Coppola’s rigorous methods and intelligence are on full show. Coppola has adapted a story, or is it a novel, by a Rumanian writer Mircea Eliade. The book was given to him by an old friend, a linguistics professor at the University of Chicago. I think the story posits the idea of a man who at the moment of his death is hurled back in time to relive the events of his life. This gives him an opportunity to be somewhat reflexive, and reflective, about things and he conducts his life again through a conversation with an all-knowing double. Coppola films it with a classical camera style. There are according to the director, only two occasions when the camera moves. The energy is generated in the editing and staging and not by an application of the current fad for unruly hand-held camerawork. Youth Without Youth wasn’t something I expected and it turned out to be the most involving experience I’ve sat through in a long time.

Phenomenal

2008-11-25T01:38:00.000-08:00

Not having seen Australia I am at a disadvantage to thousands of others who have been herded into previews and advance screenings. I am aware however of two interesting emerging phenomena. The film seems to have been summed up in five critical words; “good but not great” and “long”. The most interesting response was in, of all places, R. Murdoch’s very own Sunday Telegraph. I read the piece by a young woman columnist sitting in a café at Berry. I expected to find it online but its not there so I cant tell you her name and my recall wont necessarily be perfect. This is what I took to be the gravamen of the piece from less than perfect memory. 1. Baz wanted to make a film about aboriginal dispossession. 2. This is a no-no. It would be regarded as dark and depressing (note those words) so to do. 3. That story has already been told anyway and no one went to see it. It was called Rabbit Proof Fence. 4. Baz thus made a love story involving whitefellas from different classes and embedded within his story set in the outback the 'real' story. 5. The ‘real’ central character is the young Aboriginal who goes through all the horrors that whitefellas have inflicted on blackfellas over a couple of hundred years. 6. Baz’s minders did not want journalists to ask Baz questions about this element of the subject for fear it might turn the punters off. There was a lot more including digs at the campus post-modernists and how they say you can tell stories. That I thought was interesting and I’ll take it with me into the movie.

The second interesting phenomenon is more to be expected. The opportunity has been taken to hop into the rest of the recent, i.e, the last decade or so, Australian film production and, in passing, attack David Stratton for being too generous towards Oyster Farmer in particular and other unspecified films in general. That Oyster Famer review seems to have assumed the status of the single defining event that caused Australian audiences to turn off going to Australian films. The latest right wing mavens to take up this challenge, after Michael Duffy and that ratbag Andrew Bolt (as my late dad always referred to him), were Greg Sheridan in his secondary guise as editorialist on The Australian and the ludicrous Miranda Devine. I say only one thing. The fact that they all obsessively return to this minor matter, scatering their vitriol and insults along the way is amazing to behold. Sheridan insults the intelligence further by gratuitously slagging off Ivan Sen’s wonderful and prize-winning Beneath Clouds as well. I was always convinced that John Howard's press office ke[t an eye on Stratton's opinions. A ;little too pinko for their taste and when the opportunity presented itself Sheridan stuck the boot in. It seems that the demise of the Howard office with its endlessly updated clipping service for selected warriors is sorely missed.

The warriors seem to have collectively decided that apart from Australia (with its themes of aboriginal dispossession, the nation’s unpreparedness for military attack and its setting in a harsh, uncompromising landscape notwithstanding), the rest of our recent cinema is ‘dark and depressing’ as noted above. Occasionally someone remembers Happy Feet and Kenny in this context even though the latter got depressingly dull towards its end. Maybe this isn't the same as depressing. Nobody, except maybe Philip Adams, apparently thinks Mad Max is either dark or depressing. Maybe it’s when the film has both characteristics that it causes a problem.

Someone who continues to feed this into the debate is Brian Rosen, the now film industry feather duster, who continues to find a sympathetic ear with a couple of journalists, most notably Michael Bodey and Gary Maddox. Rosen apparently absolves himself from any responsibility for this state of affairs notwithstanding that he was the head of the Film Finance Corporation for half of the Howard years and decided where the money would be spent. That has given offence to some and you can read one response to it, and to The Australian’s editorial, by Rod Bishop, former and much admired head of the Australian Film, Television and Radio School here at Urban Cinefile. http://urbancinefile.com.au/home/view.asp?a=15116&s=Forum

National Pride

2008-11-10T18:34:00.000-08:00

We all have our prejudices. Some say that the reason that the Coen Bros Burn After Reading was a dud at the domestic box-office, after a strong opening week, is that it is viciously anti-American. It proposes a US intelligence establishment full of vain, selfish, pompous dunderheads, chronically incapable of understanding even the simplest fact or comprehending the most obvious event. They are contemptuous of husbands, wives, colleagues and rivals. (“Shall I inform the FBI?” “Oh God no. Don’t bring those idiots in on this!” …or something like that, says one.)* The working class stiffs, toiling away for a low hourly rate at a gym, who move the plot along when they stumble on what they think are state secrets, are also vain, stupid egocentric and selfish.

The actors called upon to deliver this raucousness are brilliant at portraying such vanity. In fact, making the movie must have been a hoot for all those Hollywood liberals involved. Even the usually abysmal John Malkovich is perfectly cast as an alcoholic analyst shafted in a bit of bureaucratic byplay. Never in fact has such fun been had from a Coen Bros movie, despite a lot of attempts. Even the editor of Sight & Sound, not renowned for a sense of humour, found the movie affecting enough to describe it as “a minor Coens comedy with major stars goofing off”. Very kind.

Notwithstanding, Americans apparently, and American critics especially, though they get the joke, don’t like it. Australians on the other hand are going to it in such numbers that it is defying all attempts to knock it off the box office leadership charts.

But Australians are not immune to this syndrome. The only time I went to Cannes, along with the world’s film critics, I had the misfortune to suffer through Werner Herzog’s Where the Green Ants Dream, a film which played fast, loose and inventively with Aboriginal mythology. Needless to say the white guys were the bad guys. The rest of the world judged it largely as another of Herzog’s badly directed japes at civilisation but the Australians went apoplectic at the thought that the world might believe Herzog’s inventions were, rather like Bruce Chatwin’s in his novel “The Songlines”, the product of documentary reportage.

Philip Adams, then Chair of the AFC, was so enraged as to write a “Dear Werner you are a complete idiot” open letter published gleefully in the Cannes daily press. If there had been an organisation called Handwringers Anonymous we would all have been forced to join, such was the collective dismay.

The poor sods who try and control the cinema in China also have to suffer such indignity frequently as well. Each year a bunch of tyros with digital cameras go into the streets, back alleys and byways of far flung outposts of the celestial empire, usually without troubling even the local authorities for permission, and make movies like Xiao Wu, Blind Shaft, Blind Mountain and Little Moth to name just some. At Vancouver this year there was Sweet Food City among others. All of them are portraits of how the underclasses, the left behinds, the forgotten and the misbegotten go about their daily lives in tough times. Blatant misrepresentations no doubt abound, but as the Coens and Herzog know, these only serve to make the movies smarter, more pointed, more accessible and, frankly, more interesting to the wider world. Those whose sensitivities are affected, like genteel critics, po-faced officials, censors and rabid nationalists wont be given more than scant regard. So be it always.

*That may be why a film like Traitor, is so boring and, after its main twist is revealed, predictable, in its attempts to be fair to all sides. In so doing it employs a principled and highly ‘moral’ FBI agent as a key protagonist. Who can believe that? Americans I guess.

Young masters and untamed youth - Vancouver in Autumn

2008-10-07T14:32:00.000-07:00

Vancouver is off the beaten film festival track. It's not a mega event withhundreds of world premieres fighting for the attention of thousands ofcritics, buyers and festival programmers. Its main program collectstogether the usual hundred or so suspects for international art houseattention and it presents a broad based focus on new Canadian cinema.Its distinguishing mark is a focus on new, and 'young', cinema from EastAsia. It's a program which attracts a small but hardy band of scholars andfestival advisors if not directors, and has been developed over twodecades of complete devotion first by Tony Rayns and now by Rayns andChinese film expert Shelly Kraicer. It has succeeded in launching a dozenmajor film-makers into the west and continues to unearth new talent throughthe annual Dragons and Tigers competition with its prize of $10,000provided by local arts patron Brad Birarda.

This year the selection ran to close to fifty new films and again it wasbookended by full house screenings of two Korean hits. The opener was KimJie-woon's The Good The Bad The Weird a playful action-packed homage toSergio Leone set in the war zone of Manchuria in the 30s. The closer wasYim Phil-sung's fairy tale for adults Hansel and Gretel a film whichchocolate box colors that might have been designed for Jacques Demy with a tale straight out of Angela Carter to concoct pure contrived pleasure.Otherwise though it was the Japanese, both their quality commercialfilm-makers and their aspirational and very youthful debutantes, who shookthe place up. The best film on show was yet again a new film by Kore-eda Hirokazu. The director's first feature Maborosi was an early winner of the D&T prize andhe has sent each of his five succeeding films to the festival as they comealong every couple of years. Last time it was his period samurai flick Hana which knocked us about and caused people to compare him with Jean Renoir.This time it's Still Walking a family drama which evokes the work of themaster Yasujiro Ozu. The generations come together for a reunion on the date of the accidental death of one son. They're quietly respectful buteach cant stand one or more of the people in the room and each has theirown unresolved issues with others. A few of those matters get a little better, some get a little worse and everyone goes home. Kore-eda has a knack for masterful simplicity and there's no doubt that the festival invitations toscreen the film are going to flood in from around the world.

There is one peripheral matter of some astonishment about this film. Both Cannes and Venice rejected it for inclusion in their competitions, decisions which utterly baffled those who saw the film here where it was the hit of the week.

Hashiguchi Ryosuke's All Around Us has a similar quiet focus on a familybut this time its just a couple working their way through eight years ofmarriage. The relationship started offhandedly and endures some harshpsychopathology before it finally achieves some sort of serenity. Long andcontemplative but very moving.Elsewhere Kitano Takeshi's Achilles and the Tortoise amused intermittently and Miike Takashi demonstrated yet again why he ought to be the permanentoverseer of the James Bond franchise. Miike still makes several films ayear, his total being over a hundred by now and could easily fit in Bond's slam bang action sequences on his schedule. His God's Puzzle cheerfullymixes a story about quantum physics (!) with his trademark jokey action andnone do it better than he, especially where the action takes place in therain-soaking open air. Among other new work by established directors a word should also be put infor Service another low-budget and very raunchy peek at the Filipino underbelly by the prolific Brillante Mendoza. Its subject is a dysfunctional family who operate a rundown cinema named ‘Family” somewhat ironically, that mostly serves as a pickup joint (to put it politely) for the local gay community.

The D&T competition for eight young directors remains at the heart of Vancouver's engagement with Asia. This year, for probably the first time inany film competition, half the entrants were made by women. My own favorite among them was Sode Yukiko's Mime Mime, a supersmart story of a young bored teenager, a mild rebel with bad attitude and a risky sex life involving office visits to her middle-aged former school teacher. He's mostly bemusedby her infatuation but more than happy to be the complacent recipient ofher experiments. The jury gave prizes to two others of the women. Emily Tang's Perfect Life won the $10k. It's enigmatic but very assured, much influenced you suspectby the work of its co-producer Jia Zhangke. The story has parallelnarratives about two young women, one trying to disengage from her familyand the other, thousands of miles away, whose husband has peremptorilydisengaged from her and their two kids. Both of them live in the world ofChina's economic miracle but, as In Jia's work, Tang wants to look at justwho wins and loses in the orgy of 'progress'. Do the stories connect? Forjust a revelatory instant. More temperamental was Yokohama Sutoko's German + Rain another story abouta temperamental and rebellious young girl but this time one almost outsidethe borders of polite Japanese society.The other prizewinner was Gao Wendong's grim but fascinating Sweet Food City symbolically set in a model metropolis built a mere fifteen years agobut now a slum inhabited by thieves, pimps and prostitutes among others,all trying to live in buildings that are literally being scavenged and pillagedfor their bricks even as people squat within them. Gao's camera prowlsaround the architecture, to shoot in places where the image ofdeconstruction is astonishing. His story of a prostitute and her man has anarrative that's a bit messy and requires you to fill in some gaps yourselfbut you cant beat a good Chinese indie film (last year's Little Moth wasanother) when they decide to show us a good hard peek at the people beingleft behind.

Finally a word should be said for what was perhaps the most unusual movieof all, this year at least. Seo Won-tae's Synching Blue is a formal contemplation of solitariness and contemporary alienation.. A young Asian man spends his time alone in a large house and resorts to what young menoften resort too in such circumstances. He has some connection with a young American woman who works as a swimming pool attendant. Most of the activityat the pool is taken up by a mixed gender team of synchronised swimmers. Seasoned observers could not recall any previous work of art which thus asked its audience to even contemplate the possible connection between that amusing 'sport’ and the gentle practice of onanism. If you came looking for the unusual or for young people to give us something naughty Seo's film,completely free of dialogue, supplied it. So did several others. Vancouver in the autumn when uninhibited youth comes out is quite a place to be. Thecrowds that come out testify to that.

Bureaucracy rampant when direct Ministerial intervention is what's needed

2008-09-16T04:05:00.000-07:00

After my last post, see below, I had a look at what's happening at Screen Australia. Is there to be any end of the bureaucratic bullsh-t going on which seems quite contrary to the plans for direct selection and investment set out in the previous post? First of all, the Minister, the Bald Eagle aka Peter Garrett, released his Statement of Expectations at to what Screen Australia will get up to. This to a statutory authority, a status which once upon a time a time conferred independence of judgement and freedom not merely from Ministers but also from the apparatchiks that increasingly crowd out Ministers’ offices and stultify any smart thoughts. Screen Australia has now released its draft Statement of Intent (SOI) for 2008/09, in response to that Statement of Expectations. Screen Australia advises that these “SOIs are formal commitments by Screen Australia to meet the expectations of Government.” Can you believe an alleged arts/industrial organisation participating sensibly in such nonsense. If you do then you will believe that huge box office successes, Oscars and Cannes entrants are a matter of weeks away and the tooth fairy will squire Nick and Russell down the red carpet on Oscar night. Who dreamed this up? Please step forward and identify yourself so that the nation can laugh at you. Screen Australia says its draft sets out preliminary thinking within the organisation on the shape of its future programs. And that it “will use the directions articulated in the SOI as the basis for developing the suite of programs to be offered in 2009. A second round of industry consultation regarding guidelines and programs will take place in October”. Those meetings should be, as the old mate Counihan used to say, a real hoot but, sufficiently prolonged, the process could take the Government and its befuddled film bureaucrats through to the next election without a single movie being made to reflect either expectations or intentions or even the achievement of KPIs or any other bit of new management jargon designed to ensure nothing really happens. The process will also have the benefit of allowing bureaucrats to hide fear of failure or acknowledge failure itself. I’ll bet some consultancy firm has been hired to handle all this if not dream it up. That company would have a chortling bank manager and in eighteen months or so it will be favourite, based on its experience, to supervise a whole new round of announcements and consultations as to how Screen Australia, under its new Chief Executive Officer, plans to refocus, restructure and concentrate on achieving commercial and other success. …

The debate about quality Australian film

2008-09-16T03:58:00.000-07:00

The Sydney Film Festival recently made an interesting contribution to the discussion about how to get our best film-makers working. Here's what they published in their online site. I'm surprised that nobody took the matter up further

Question 5SFF: Federal Arts Minister Peter Garrett recently announced that he will be giving direct grants of $10 million each to twelve currently unemployed filmmakers. Informed sources have suggested recipients may include Ivan Sen, Jane Campion, John Ruane, Richard Lowenstein, Ray Argall, Jocelyn Moorshouse, Leo Berkeley, Scott Murray, Shirley Barrett, Rowan Woods, Albie Thoms and Brian McKenzie. If you were handing out the money, who would you pick - excluding yourself, of course?
Randall Wood (Rare Chicken Rescue): "Ivan Sen - He's got a big heart and that shines through in his films - He's a wonderful storyteller (but I don't think he's unemployed)."
Tony Radevski (Ephemeral): "Ivan Sen."
Lisa Matthews (Ten Pound Poms): "The majority of those above are mostly not unemployed. If such a welcome magic money wand was to appear - I would like to see the following filmmakers realise their next film: Curtis Levy, James Middleton, Lawrence Johnston, Jessica Hobbs, Samantha Lang, Ivan Sen, Jocelyn Moorhouse, Jeremy Simms, Andrew Dominik, Stavros Kazantzidis, Matthew Saville and Andrew Lancaster."
Michael Mier (The Sound of CRY): "Filmmaking is such a hard process I really couldn't decide who should get grants. It seems those that are determined always find a way to make their films and I really love helping others realise their projects so it would be too hard to select ten names."
Glen Hunwick (Mutt): "Lisa Hunwick, Jake Hunwick, and Taylor Hunwick, (no relation of course)."
John Evagora (296 Smith Street): "Rowan Woods - The Boys is still one of my favourite Australian films."
Stefan Moore (The Cars That Ate China):"I would pick Dennis O'Rourke and Susan Lambert (who is admittedly my wife) but unless any of the suggested recipients are proposing to use the grant to make a very good film or films, I would say that this is a shocking waste of money."
Tali Gal-on (Lucille): "Sarah Watt - because I love Look Both Ways, and I can't wait to see what she does next. Dee McLachlan - The Jammed was a horrifyingly powerful film. And some up and coming directors that I met at the VCA: Daniel Agdag, Rosalie Osman and Sam Bryant."
Alex Holmes (Ali and the Ball): "Emerging filmmakers... excluding myself, of course."
Keri Light (Wanderlust/Wonderlost): "Because he is talented, because he has been my mentor and because he is now one of my best friends, I shall say Richard Lowenstein. That's one. But if there is a conflict of interest in picking one's mentors and friends, I shall nominate Michael Cody so that we can make our film...which may be even more of a conflict of interest... hmm. Maybe Minister Garrett should do as is stated in the question and give $10 million to each of the 12 directors listed or $5 million to 24 directors. How very cool. How sweetly divine. Brilliant."

Sean Kruck (Summer Breaks): "It would depend on the project. I would look at established filmmakers but also take a punt and mix it up with some fresh blood. Australian films generally don't seem to make much money so why not take bigger risks on the filmmakers and the style of films?"

Good thinking in there and a ringing endorsement of direct ministrial intervention in an ailing industry!

A Short Note about the Best Australian Film of the Year

2008-08-29T01:28:00.000-07:00

Nash Edgerton's rather fine debut The Square, initially took me by surprise for precisely the reason that it eschews the cheap shock tactics of the films on display in Not Quite Hollywood a film which to my eye and ear has attracted far more undeserving attention than any in recent years. I got the impression that the Edgerton brothers, Nash the director and Joel the actor/writer, have worked out rather well just what a crime story needs to get its audience engrossed – believably drawn characters, some sly satire (especially in the male hairdos), a sense of absorption of the lessons of some of the great moments in noir, most notably Double Indemnity. The film twists its way sinuously throughbthe sleepy suburban streets of Sydney's outer suburbs and peels back bits and pieces of iconic lifestyle along the way. The joke about the dog and the shark was so brilliantly irrelevantly unexpected I roared with delight. Regrettably it seems that my enthusiasm isn't shared by many and the film has flopped badly. Perhaps in a decade or three someone will make a doco about the flops of the two thousand and noughties

Romulus Returns

2008-08-29T01:24:00.000-07:00

Romulus Films
No doubt stung by criticism that its late night roster of the complete J Arthur Rank film library was starting to show the strain of repetition, after some 20 plus years of faithful service, the ABC has gone out and acquired some more old British films. It appears now to be the proud owner of the Alexander Korda/London Films library and, more recently, has also been screening what would appear to be the entire output of the independent production and distribution company Romulus Films. In other contexts, presenting the entire out put of a significant producer like Romulus might be quite noteworthy. But then again there is nothing in the publicity material which suggests that we should treat this as a bit of a cinematheque moment as the titles are run through. And the copies are plain old pan and scan a distinctly ordinary effort which suggests that its all been acquired o.n the cheap

Romulus was founded by James and John Woolf. They were the sons of pioneer producer C. M Woolf who co-founded the J. Arthur Rank production empire. In 1949 the Woolf brothers set up a production company and the initial modus operandi was to attract Hollywod stars and directors to Britain to make quality pictures. The first is often claimed to be Albert Lewin's exotic Pandora and the Flying Dutchman with James Mason and Ava Gardner but the official lists indicate two films before it, The Late Edwina Black (Gordon Parry) and I'll Get You for This (Joseph M Newman). Romulus then had a couple of big hits directed by John Huston, The African Queen and Moulin Rouge, and kept trying intermittently with Hollywood casting in Beat the Devil, The Iron Petticoat and I Am A Camera. When the so-called British new wave came along in the late fifties Romulus produced a number of films that fitted into the category of working class drama, most notably the ground breaking Room at the Top, The L-Shaped Room, and Term of Trial. One of the brothers, John, was the discoverer of Laurence Harvey he of the finely chiselled cheekbones and the sporter of that alarming quiff of hair that seemed to stand up for several feet in front of his face. He was the first Leningrad Cowboy. Harvey appeared in more than a few of the Romulus films, most notably The Good Die Young, I am a Camera, Three men in a Boat, Women of Twilight (in which he has a cameo which requires him to sing in a deep baritone voice clearly not his own) and of course his defining part as Joe Lampton in Room at the Top.

The sad news for all those enthralled with this information is that the ABC has already screened most of the films mentioned above and is unlikely to screen them again for a year or so. The good news is that there are still, if the Corporation has indeed acquired the company's complete output, more than a few films remaining to be screened. They may or may not include some of the company's later productions which were done with major studios, most notably The Pumpkin Eater, Jack Clayton's best film. The ABC may also have acquired Clayton's first film, a short adaptation of Pushkin's The Bespoke Overcoat, a film which I've never managed to catch

Manny Farber

2008-08-29T01:21:00.000-07:00

It wont mean much to many but the saddest news of the week came on learning of the death on 19 August of Manny Farber one of the lions of film criticism and one of the most independent voices ever to turn his attention to serious analysis of the art of the film. Long ago, way back in the sixties, Farber wrote his still iconic piece “White Elephant Art vs Termite Art. It appeared in a 1962 Film Culture and I think I still have a copy somewhere. Back in the mid 60s, this piece turned us all around. It was as significant in its day as Andrew Sarris’s “Notes on the Auteur Theory” which also appeared in that very same issue of Film Culture. I’m going to cheat in my appreciation here by quoting at length from a piece by Jim Hoberman which was reprinted in last week’s Village Voice as part of Hoberman’s eulogy for the great man. Hoberman writes: “Farber's contribution, "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art," is the snappiest jeremiad I've ever read. Its target is films that are inflated, over-wrought, precious, "tied to the realm of celebrity and affluence" – white elephant stuff, in which the artist tries "to pin the viewer to the wall and slug him with wet towels of artiness and significance." Against this beast (personified by Antonioni, Truffaut, and the then modish Tony Richardson) Farber raises the red flag of termite art, a mysterious form that flourishes in dark corners where "the spotlight of culture is nowhere in evidence." Farber's termites include journalists, pulp writers, B-movie directors, and comic-strip artists – intuitive, unself-conscious professionals who have "no ambitions towards gilt culture but are involved in a kind of squandering-beaverish endeavor that isn't anywhere or for anything." Farber’s enthusiasms played into the hands of buffs, enthusiasts, auteurists and others who were seeking out byways of American film history and discovering the delights of noir and westerns. Farber directed us towards Don Siegel, Budd Boetticher, Anthony Mann and Raoul Walsh and they became the gods whose work was to be found nestling in ‘ranch nights’ at suburban revival houses, the programs of MUFS and SUFS and at independent cinemas like the Carlton Moviehouse where the proprietor would run all sorts of stuff if you just asked him to put it on. In his later years Farber became a highly regarded painter, as indicated in Hoberman’s note, and was able to forego the pleasures of meeting deadlines. Regrettably for Australians, his work appeared in all sorts of difficult to find magazines and I’m not sure, beyond the one book "negative Space", whether it has been collected in the same way that that the work of others like Sarris and Pauline Kael has. That’s a pity but maybe his death, in his nineties, will prompt a resurrection of some of the best writing ever on film….For a much better appreciation try here
http://www.villagevoice.com/2008-08-19/film/manny-farber-1917-2008/ …

Dino Risi

2008-07-14T16:31:00.000-07:00

I learned of the death of Dino Risi via the obituary published in the latest Cahiers du Cinema. Long time critic Luc Moullet devoted two pages to a eulogy on Risi and its career. It brought back some memories and made me ponder on just how many of Risi's films remain unseen.
Risi died on 7 June at 90 years of age and it seems to have passed unnoticed, at least in the mainstream English language press. His was a name that had largely fallen off the radar in recent years. Yet at his peak he directed a number of the most popular Italian films ever made, worked with some of Italy’s finest actors and had at least one of Hollywood’s accolades accorded to him, a remake of one of his greatest successes.

Risi was born in 1917 and trained as a psychologist. He got into the film industry as an assistant in the early forties and later took classes under Jacques Feyder while still interned in Switzerland during the war. He made documentaries and in the early fifties gave up his psychology practice and established himself as a feature film director. He specialized in the light comedies beloved of Italian audiences. The roots of these films trace back to neo-realism and the settings especially were always quite meticulous in their detail of everyday life. Few of them were exported for viewing by art house audiences around the world but in the 50s and 60s in Australia you could see them at the inner suburban cinemas which catered to the vast pool of recent Italian immigrants. Many, though not all, however were screened in copies without subtitles and it was hit or miss for the dedicated followers who lapped up the pleasures offered by Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni long before they achieved international success.

In the early 60s Risi became something of an art house treasure. His Il Sorpasso/The Easy Life (1961) was a huge hit with cinemagoers who appreciated its sly humour. Risi tapped into studies of that peculiarly Italian combination of traits - sophistication, street cunning, and a blithe disregard for the law. Few will ever forget the moment Vittorio Gassman blithely steals someone else’s parking ticket before placing it on his own car which in a flash establishes Gassman’s character. Gassman’s riotous sentimental education of the young and repressed Jean-Louis Trintignant in the ways of the world set the world laughing.

Risi’s other big critical success, and international hit, was Profumo di Donna/Scent of a Woman, made in 1973. Again it starred Gassman, one more of the sixteen very fruitful collaborations between the actor and director. The part of a blind man with a chip on his shoulder, a giant libido and an extraordinary nose for female scent was dangerous but riotous. Hollywood remade it with Al Pacino in 1992. Martin Brest’s film, incredibly long for a dramatic comedy at some 156 minutes, was also a critical and popular success. As usual however the original was a better movie.

As per usual with European films, the distribution of Risi’s work outside his home country was sporadic. Some of it popped up dubbed. Much of it was ignored. That hardly seems to have mattered to a director who kept working until well into his seventies. Today very little of his work is available. A check of the Time Out Film Guide doesn’t have a single Risi title listed as being available for TV or DVD in Britain and you suspect that the same would apply in Australia.

If his death causes anyone anywhere a tingle of nostalgia then it would be nice if someone got out a selection of his best and assembled them for an international tour. SBS could help with the subtitling for over the years the keen eyed viewer had the chance to see more than a little of his best work on that channel. (Alas no more those golden years have passed). One film especially would be welcome, the drama he made with Alberto Sordi in 1960, A Difficult Life. Whether it has ever been screened here is beyond me but in the European obituaries it is singled out for high praise. Otherwise I’d just be happy to see all sixteen of those films he made with the extraordinary Gassman, collectively probably the actor’s best work when his characteristic jauntiness, suavity, brilliant comic timing and unassailable ability to deliver dialogue at machine gun pace were on full display. Throw in the early Sophia Loren pictures as well and a bit of the cinema’s heaven would be there for all to see.

Risi’s two sons Marco and Claudio have followed him into the film business

Wajda roars back with "Katyn"

2008-07-09T15:11:00.000-07:00

Every so often a film comes along which doesn’t merely intend to change the world’s political and social perceptions but actually succeeds in doing so. The numbers in the first group are large enough but the numbers in the second are small. I dont believe I'm over-exaggerating when I suggest we think of the effect that Rossellini’s Rome Open City or Resnais’s Hiroshima, Mon Amour, Pasolini’s Salo Oshima’s In the Realm of the Senses or Chen Kaige’s Yellow Earth had on society, on their own national cinemas and the cinema itself. You can go all the way back to the silent era and D W Griffith’s Birth of a Nation or Eisenstein’s Strike and Battleship Potemkin, to find yet other films which shook the world or at least the part of it that stood to be deeply affected by such radicalism.

It may just be that the latest such transformative film might have been made by Polish master Andrzej Wajda. You might have thought Wajda’s battles, lasting forty years or so, against authoritarianism and Soviet communism had all been won. He had spent most of his adult life as a film-maker trying to bring the truth of the modern Polish nation to his own people and to the world. He had done it in an environment of suppression, censorship and fear. He had stood resolutely against the oppressing forces and Poland recognized his work sufficiently to give him latitude.

Using that latitude Wajda, like all of his colleagues, still had to develop strategies to outflank and out think the forces of a state dedicated to strait jackets of thought. Poland, like all of the satellites of the USSR developed a highly repressive police state structure. However, its people, especially its artists, spent much of their time seeking to undermine this apparatus, questioning its legitimacy and supporting dissent. The strategies that Wajda and the film industry used frequently involved the use of historical parallels or personal issues that reflected current political reality.

Wajda was fortunate enough to start his career by making a trilogy of master works, A Generation, Ashes and Diamonds and Kanal, that still live on not just as films but as political documents produced by a society which has spent centuries involved in doomed attempts to repel invaders, and whose history is littered with failed national causes and disastrous revolts against tyranny. That history provided rich resources for a fearless film-maker and for those who followed in his footsteps. In the bleak cold war years Wajda and his acolytes and followers produced film after film that peeled back layers to show the true feelings of the Polish people. Communism slowly withered. Wajda and the film industry were at the forefront of its demise, especially by supporting the Solidarity movement. Wajda documented the progress towards democracy with two of his greatest films Man of Iron and Man of Marble. He also chronicled those issues more obliquely in his Polish/French co-production Danton. Since then Wajda has made half a dozen films, most of which don’t seem to have traveled beyond Polish borders.

It’s something of a surprise that, 25 years after Danton and at the age of 80 he has come roaring back into public, and political, prominence with one of his most ferocious and controversial films. The premiere of Katyn in Poland took place on September 17, 2007, the 68th anniversary of the Soviet invasion of Poland in 1939. It took place at the National Opera Theatre in Warsaw, was attended by the elite of Poland’s state and church and covered live by the major Polish television networks. Two million Poles saw the film within a month of its release. In an article in The New York Review of Books, Anne Applebaum reported that ‘for a few weeks almost every cinema in the country was showing the film, sometimes a dozen times a day.’ Its release started a national debate again and brought long-simmering issues out into the open. To some surprise, it has even re-opened debate about the Kaytn massacre in Russia as well. Almost two decades earlier, in 1990, Mikhail Gorbachev had acknowledged Soviet guilt about the events. Later Boris Yeltsin had ordered the Soviet archives to be opened, allowing research to be freely undertaken. A number of books were published in Russian and other languages which made plain the Soviet Union’s guilt and complicity. Notwithstanding this, in Putin’s Russia, nationalism has re-emerged and one major newspaper suggested that Soviet responsibility was ‘not obvious’. Such a view added to the continuing furore in Poland.

So, how should those for whom the Katyn massacre is an unknown byway of history approach the movie. There should be several things to consider. First there is the depiction of the massacre itself. It was a gruesome occurrence, endless cold blooded murders of the flower of Polish youth. Ruthlessness predominates as the anonymous, hardly noticed Soviet foot soldiers go methodically about the business of executing and then burying the dead in mass graves. No detail is spared.

More importantly Wajda leads us to the climax with a fresco of characters and incidents that fill in the details of Poland in 1939. In his statement accompanying the premiere, Wajda saw the film as “about individual suffering, which evokes images of much greater emotional content than naked historical facts. A film that shows the terrible truth that hurts, whose characters are not the murdered officers but women who wait their return every day, every hour, suffering inhuman uncertainty.” It takes him more than two enthralling hours to tell the tale and he starts by ensuring that we realize that it wasn’t just Soviet tyranny that was intent on destroying the intelligentsia of Poland. Early in the film we see the shocking round up by the Germans of the faculty at Jagellonian University in Cracow. Poland, its clear, is a nation jammed between two great powers. Faced with occupation there is resignation and rebellion. There is also stupidity and reckless courage. Small vignettes of Polish pre-war life finally build a composite image of a nation whose entire history has sadly been subject to constant invasion and repression by outside forces. That produces a quite aching sadness. Katyn is a film in which the great and powerful crush the small and weak.

For those outside Poland, Wajda has told the story of one of the worst crimes of the twentieth century. His own father was one of the victims. Has he made a film just to settle accounts, to bring one of the key moments of Polish history still unresolved to the forefront? “Wajda himself says: “Let it spin a tale about the suffering and drama of many Katyn families. About the Katyn lie that triumphs over the grave of Joesph Vissarionovich Stalin which forced into silence about it for half a century the then allies, the western ones of the USSR in the war against Hitler, Great Britain and the United States.” Once again, perhaps for the final time, he has used the cinema to remind us that tyranny, oppression and evil have to be resisted at every step.

(NB. Some of the information in this article is drawn from “A Movie That Matters” by Anne Applebaum, The New York Review of Books, February 14 2008. Katyn had its international premiere at the Berlin Film Festival in January. It is being screened at both the forthcoming Melbourne and Brisbane International Film Festivals. Dont miss it.)

Sydney Pollack

2008-05-30T16:19:00.000-07:00

Sydney Pollack
Sydney Pollack seemed to have a good life making movies. His career as a director spanned more than forty years during which he made twenty feature films . He also produced a quite large number of others and, later in his life, made a number of appearances as an actor in roles which suggested he simply enjoyed the camaraderie of film-making and production enormously. From the start of his career with the low budget two hander The Slender Thread, in which Sidney Poitier played the telephone counselor trying to stop Anne Bancroft from suiciding, Pollack routinely attracted Hollywood’s best technicians and its best actors. The consequent consumnate craftsmanship was always there on display and attracted industry awards, most notably a Best Picture Oscar for Out of Africa in 1985. He was attracted to adaptations and his sources were varied. He did everything from Tennessee Williams (This Property is Condemned), through William Eastlake (Castle Keep), Kraren Blixen (Out of Africa) to John Grisham (The Firm). His chief relationship with an actor was with Robert Redford. They made half a dozen movies together ending, somewhat unfortunately with their riff on Casablanca, Havana (1990), a rather sad and underwhelming piece that showed how easy it is to misfire. But the odd dud notwithstanding Pollack’s was a career with a lot of hits and highlights. The first big one was They Shoot Horses Don’t They in 1969 and the box office also went gangbusters for The Way We Were (1973) and the film that he’ll probably be best remembered for Tootsie (1982). Both got a lot of Oscar action. If I seem a bit reserved it’s because his films, while workmanlike and highly polished, never quite got me excited enough to want to watch them over and over again. He was no Kubrick, Cronenberg, Peckinpah or Polanski. He made more money than those peers but he tended to make safe commercial films that discussed things and told stories in an eminently sensible way - cool, polished, funny where they had to be. In some very few cases he got to be genuinely romantic though all his films had love stories entwined within them. Out of Africa was one such and some make great claims for the merits of Bobby Deerfield¸ a love story between a racing car driver and a young dying woman which meditates over death and loss. I cant say I found its elaborate story telling very affecting. If I have guilty pleasures I confess a fondness for Castle Keep and for his somewhat bizarre The Yakuza, made from a Paul and Leonard Schrader script clearly derived from watching countless Japanese movies on the subject. Robert Mitchum brought all his gravitas to the lead role of the American interloper blundering into the mysterious ways of the Japanese underworld. Pollack seems to have been very generous to his colleagues over the years. He took a producer’s role on a dozen or more films, most in his later years, by talented directors including Jerry Schatzberg’s zingy country and western flick Honeysuckle Rose, Steve Kloves wonderful sibling rivalry story The Fabulous Baker Boys and a couple of Anthony Minghella's recent movies. Finally there’s his work as an actor. This was how he started his career before moving into TV production and then onto the movies. His screen acting in his later years always routinely seemed to draw praise, most especially in Tootsie and then in Husbands and Wives (Woody Allen) and Eyes Wide Shut (Stanley Kubrick). Most recently he was in Daniele Thompson’s Orchestra Stalls playing an American producer in Paris looking to cast his next movie. He must have had fun doing them all. However for the life of me I could never work out why such a clunky and unconvincing deliverer of dialogue should ever have got those roles and in each I thought his presence and speech patterns served to make you think you were momentarily watching some amateur night moments. Still, sitting around on the set with Stanley or Woody or in Paris making a frothy comedy must have hardly seemed like work. He had a good life right to the end and he was making films until very recently including his final work a fascinating and clearly heartfelt documentary portrait of the architect Frank Gehry. Pollack was born in Lafayette, Indiana in 1934 and died in Los Angeles this week.

Ten Thoughts on Asian movies at the Sydney Film Festival*

2008-05-30T16:13:00.000-07:00

1. There are some areas where Asian film-makers have cornered the world market. Animated films featuring sex, bloody and extreme violence, carnage and subversive thoughts about society have become the hallmark of Japanese cinema. At first, maybe around the time of Akira this was a product of the nation’s fascination with the graphic novel or manga but now it’s full-fledged international industrial phenomena. The SFF’s offering, Shinji Aramaki’s Appleseed Saga:Ex Machina gives aficionados a fix on the future with nods to John Woo.
2. China is a gobbler upper. Since Hong Kong lost it’s ‘independence’ in 1997, film-making in the former colony has slowed and increasingly integrated itself into mainstream Chinese production. The creaking and archaic Chinese studio system has been invigorated to a degree by foreign investment and the relocation of key production figures like Tsui Hark to Beijing. This has meant that commercial production is belting along and even key independent film-makers like Jia Zhangke can find a niche within the system. It can at least now cope with his tales of alienation and loneliness. Jia’s Useless is a documentary meditation on change and the loss of ‘Chinese values’.
3. Resourcefulness is at a premium. Some Chinese film-makers still don’t always trouble the authorities with meaningless and bureaucratic applications for permission to make their films, export their films or screen them at overseas film festivals. They take the inevitable rap on the knuckles. This usually takes the form of a request to pay a visit to some harassed and fearful official at a ‘Bureau’ somewhere to ‘explain’ how these things came about. They then get on with the job of making another movie. Peng Tao’s Little Moth which delves into the shameful trade in disabled children, using them as begging bait on the streets, has all the aching humanity as any film by the Dardenne brothers or, to make a probably too grand claim, the Bresson of Balthazar and Mouchette. Authorities don’t necessarily appreciate humanity on screen.
4. Reourcefulness is everywhere. Philipino cinema has given us a bright new star. His name is Brillante Mendoza and. With the speed and facility of Fassbinder he has made five films in three years, a pace unparalleled in today’s production climate and we have to scramble to keep up. His last two, Foster Child and Slingshot, both have a sense of documentary immediacy, using actors in real-life settings. Slingshot in particular has drawn comparisons with the work of Robert Altman with its network narrative set among a poverty stricken community living in a tenement in a down at heel part of Manila.
5. The skill to do network narratives isn’t confined to Hollywood. Mendoza’s Slingshot is just one smart movie juggling characters and plots with gusto. Taiwanese tyro Singing Chen, whose first film Bundled featured at an earlier SFF, has come up with the smart, droll and surprising God Man Dog, featuring a pop singer, her spiritualist husband, a guy with a truck transporting Buddhist statues and a petty thief. Their individual stories are all meshed together in what Shelly Kraicer calls “a small miracle (which) keeps all those balls in the air, crisscrossing in delightfully unexpected ways, creating image after image of astonishing beauty and building to a series of climaxes whose magic seems gracefully easy, completely earned and uncannily rhapsodic.”
6. South Korea is the powerhouse. Just as its industrial production elbowed Japan out of the way, South Korean cinema has shaken and stirred the Asian melting pot. More of its films get remade, more of its high end quality film-makers get foreign funding, more of its films routinely win prizes. Its producers back mavericks like Jang Sun-Woo, action men like Ryoo Seung-wan, smart and sassy genre masters like Bong Joon-ho and Ozu acolytes like Hur Jin-ho. Then there is the case of Hong Sang-soo. He has spent over a decade meditating on the battle of sexes, making movies that with titles like The Woman on the Beach and The Virgin Stripped Bare by her Bachelors, which are redolent with references to western art. But Hong strides through this with stories that deflate male egos, sympathetically show female wile and, in the end, reveal mutual incomprehension. His films crackle with sexual tension and, in some cases, are as about as explicit as you can get. This year’s is Night and Day
7. Masters and Apprentices. Taiwan’s cinema has a great tradition by which its major figures actually devote time to developing other talent more broadly. A couple of decades ago two titans emerged, Hou Hsiao-hsien and Edward Yang. They were intimately involved in each other’s work, Hou acting and producing Yang’s early masterpiece Taipei Story. Hou has continued to involve himself with others. So too has the third titan Tsai Ming-liang,. Tsai’s fetish lead actor Lee Kang-sheng has turned to film-making himself and has now made two features. Help Me Eros seems so small scale that it’s hard to get a grip on. The lead, played by Lee, is living through a quick descent into poverty. His human contact is a girl in a call centre and a sassy cigarette seller who dispenses betelnut to good customers and is being harassed by the club owner she works for. Then the surprises start and include a scene with an eel in a bathtub that does have more than its share of sexual drollery.
8. The hardest thing is getting on board early. We’ve already mentioned Brillante Mendoza but what to say about Miike Takashi. His western spoof Sukiyaki Western Django and his noirish take on teenage violence Crows:Episode 0, introduce SFF audiences to a director who has made gangster pictures, horror movies, a kid’s film, comedies with bite and historical and contemporary action pictures. Be warned. The director can be a major addiction. You will have approximately 75 films to catch up with, made at a furious pace and dating back only to the early 90s when Miike first got a start making low-budget gangster flicks with brio and gusto that went straight to video. Those early pictures are now revered and of course are very difficult to track down. But don’t delay. Next year Miike will make another five or six pictures. Some wont be so good, some will be ripoffs of whatever else is fashionable. But there will be something among them to make the blood curdle, the hairs on the back of the neck stand up in outrage or sheer admiration. Miike’s movies remind you that enthusiasm and an ability to make something whip-crack sharp and up to the minute takes a smart film-maker a long way.
9. Japan’s classical tradition remains largely unknown but someone’s working on it. We still haven’t seen any, or maybe its only most of Naruse, Shimizu and others. That’s hardly the fault of the SFF, just an observation of how Japan itself has only opened very narrow portals that allow us a look at it’s vast output, especially the incredibly vibrant pre-World War 2 cinema. It’s just a fact that there are certified masterpieces laying round the archives which may never see the light of a projector in a subtitled copy. However, a single spark can start a forest fire and the screening of Kinugasa Teinosuke’s A Page of Madness is a cause for genuine celebration especially as it will be screened in the vastness of the State Theatre with a live performance of Phillip Johnston’s specially commissioned score.
10. Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore and Indonesia are new frontiers. They are not rich countries. They have not consciously set out to conquer the world of the cinema and take over from others who went before. They have just made quite an impact. Their film-makers are winning invitations to the major film competitions, attracting the attention of quality oriented producers/investors in Europe and elsewhere. They win prizes and create buzzes that ought to make Australia, its producers, its film bureaucrats and anybody else wishing to see us get back to the once-attained highwater marks of world cinema have a good hard look at themselves….enough.
* I wrote this piece at the request of the Sydney Film Festival and am a member of the Festival’s Film Advisory Panel

Absence and a fond heart

2008-04-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

Just in case you thought this blog might have died I want to assure you that force majeure was in operation and prevented anyone getting the benefit of my thoughts. However, I haven't been idle and you can get ready for more soon now that some commitments are cleared. in the meantime just a couple of links might be of interest. In this week's Urban Cinefile I've sent in a short obituary about one of my favourite actors Richard Widmark, a man who played everything from thugs like Tommy Udo in his Oscar-nominated debut role in Henry Hathaway's Kiss of Death to US Presidents, cavalry soldiers, and even an American Indian, notwithstanding his blonde main. You can find that at www.urbancinefile.com.au.

You can also find details of a couple of film history courses I'm giving at the Eastern Suburbs Community College if you Google the college's name and hit the link for film.

More coming soon

Shooting Mr Howard

2007-11-06T15:33:00.000-08:00

It’s interesting to speculate on what movies Andrew Dominik might have cast an eye over before embarking on his 160+ minute movie The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. There have been more than a few that have ruminated over the Jesse James story. The title of the film suggests it might be trying to hew close to the known facts even though it’s based on a novel by Ron Hansen. But there’s not a lot of background. James career as a member of Quantrill’s Raiders is not featured prominently though his continuing aggravation at the outcome of the Civil War and the losses suffered by his family are plain. In an interesting piece in the New York Times which coincided with the US release of the new version Terence Rafferty mentions T J Stiles “excellent 2002 biography Jesse James:Last Rebel of the Civil War and it may be that you have to go the literature to find a complete portrait of an enigmatic figure whose reputation and legend is such that there are almost an infinite variety of representations. In Philip Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid where the focus is actually on Cole Younger played as a jolly but cunning simpleton by Cliff Robertson, Jesse (Robert Duvall) is reduced to almost cameo staus and at one point acts so oddly for the suggestion to be made by one of the gang that he might be gay.

The background has indeed been portrayed very fancifully over time. In Henry King’s Jesse James, the lead is played by a fresh-faced Tyrone Power whose life of crime is provoked after his mother is ripped off her land by the advancing railroad. In that film most of Jesse’s criminal activity focuses on him taking revenge on the railroad company itself. Nicholas Ray’s The True Story of Jesse James starts with the bungled bank robbery in Northfield Minnesota and presents a series of flashback recollections by third parties before the fateful moment when Jesse has his back to Ford while he adjusts an off-kilter picture on the wall. In a couple of instances the ‘picture’ is in fact one of those embroidered mottos. In Samuel Fuller’s I Shot Jesse James the picture is a portrait of some unknown person. In that film, and in Dominik’s, we are also given the information that Ford made a living for awhile by recreating the assassination on the stage and presenting it over and over again before wide-eyed audiences.

My friend Bruce Hodsdon remarked to me after seeing Dominik’s film that he thought the Fuller offers more ideas and, for its time, stylistic revision of classic Hollywood narrative (right from the start Fuller was creating his own genre) than Dominik does in these post-Malick times. Dominik’s film takes twice the viewing time and somewhere between 50 -100 times the budget (in real terms). To Bruce it seemed that Dominik is seeking to elevate ambiguity into an Art form which certainly has its limits and the whole is less than the sum of its parts. Bruce found the new film a trip not without interest though and thought it may be a suitable requiem for the James legend in the cinema.

It’s doubtful if this is the last word. There is probably already another film-maker out there who has just put his own script in a bottom drawer but may impatiently wait a decade or so before the story is successfully pitched to another money man. Some of those pitches in the past have been most imaginative. Perhaps the most conceited was Walter Hill’s version of the story The Long Riders which had various sets of acting brothers, Keachs, Carradines, Quaids and Guests playing the James, Youngers Millers and Fords who formed the gang that had that ill-fated crack at the Northfield Minnesota bank. The Carradines in fact have a long history with the James legend. John Carradine played Robert Ford in the Henry King version and re-appeared again in the Nicholas Ray film. And if imitation is the sincerest form of flattery then you have to think that Philip Kaufman studied the Nicholas Ray version very hard indeed. The staging of the robbery in Kaufman’s The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid is eerily familiar to the way it’s handled in the Ray film.

One element that runs through the Fuller film, the Ray film and the Dominik film is the use of the traditional ballad. I have remembered since my first viewing of the Ray film the lines about the “dirty little coward who shot Mr Howard”. In Fuller's film the song is sing by a bar-room balladeer to Ford hilself and in Dominik's film Nick Cave has a similar duty and sings the whole song before a drunken Ford interrupts the proceedings in a New York tavern. I saw the Ray film again just recently on the American DVD and until then I was unaware that the famous scene in which Jesse and Frank ride their horses off a cliff top into a river to escape the chasing posse lifted the footage of that moment that was shot for the Henry King version way back in 1939.

But back to the present and Dominik’s film. After making a legend of Chopper Read in what was the best Australian film of its year, it’s taken him another seven years to get a second movie going. I presume it was his choice to attempt to deconstruct both the James and Ford legends. I must confess that young directors who wait out these sorts of periods don’t always do themselves a favour when they could be honing their craft if not their art on stuff that is less ambitious and less expensive. But I have no idea how Dominik has been spending his time and so shouldn’t be too prescriptive. As it is, he’s decided to pack a lot in to the 160 minutes he’s taken to tell the story. Part of that length may be related to the fact that commerce requires him to give as much attention to Brad Pitt as Jesse as it does to the far more interesting story of Casey Affleck as Robert Ford. Thus after the assassination we then get a lengthy time devoted to Ford’s activities, his love life and how he did or didn’t cope with his celebrity and notoriety. The story is brilliantly told segment by segment. Each has some wonderful staging especially the scenes of Ford doing his theatre performances. Maybe however you just want to find a key to why Jesse was as he was rather than another incomplete and thus unsatisfactory interpretation of his short life.

John and Adam and Rudy and Baz

2007-10-13T17:21:00.000-07:00

Coincidences are everywhere and context is everything. On the day when I finally saw Rudolph Nureyev’s and Robert Helpmann’s film version of the ballet Don Quixote, I also saw Adam Shankman’s Hairspray, a major box office hit which needs no recommendation from me.

Nureyev’s dancing was not recorded in many films. Notwithstanding this he still has his devoted band of followers. In Paris a society dedicated to keeping his name alive presents an annual program at the Ciematheque. We attended it’s 2004 screening where an Austrian film version of Swan Lake was the centerpiece. The evening was memorable in various ways. I’d never before seen Nureyev dance in any extended fashion and when you see him in the film you realize how extraordinary he was. His leaps, his athleticism, his grace – it was sheer overpowering animal skill. The film knew what the audience wanted – an obsessive need to see the great man’s art. The film version of Don Quixote was no different. It’s hard to follow any narrative. There’s a Spanish village and a handsome young man played by Nureyev. He seems to flirt with most of the young women but one, danced by the wonderful Lucette Aldous, spends most of her time fighting the others off him. Then Don Quixote played by Robert Helpmann comes into the village and spots the young woman. He converts her into various dream like apparitions, discovers her in flagrante with Rudolph and then moves on. The film was shot in an aircraft hangar at Essendon Airport using the Australian Ballet for all the other roles. Aldous was the star of the day, of a decade or so in fact. Helpmann was co-artistic director of the Ballet in those days. Nureyev is credited with the choreography “after Petipa’. The camera doesn’t miss a beat in keeping you fully informed about the dancing.

Which brings me to Hairspray. I don’t know if Adam Shankman has made anything else. Here he’s credited with the direction and the choreography. His ability to direct his own dance numbers is much less than his choreographic skills. In fact the direction of the ensemble numbers seems to be taken straight from the Baz Luhrman/Moulin Rouge school whereby the dancers’ feet are resolutely kept out of frame and the editing reduces the numbers to shapeless messes. Why this method should be chosen is beyond me but as always with Baz he’s always starting things which have a malign effect when others try to use them. It is quite ruinous in many of what should be exhilarating moments of a film which otherwise has a sweet and positive message about tolerance and racial integration in suburban Baltimore of the sixties. My viewing of it came only a couple of days after enduring our current Prime Minister’s recent set of weasel words about Aboriginal reconciliation and the comparison only served to remind of odiousness and sanctimony wherever it rears its ugly head. Hairspray has some great comedy, some lovely songs, engaging character types played with enthusiasm and some really great musical moments especially with the black kids who seem to be dancing their lives away on permanent detention. But the filming and editing of those ensemble dance numbers really left a lot to be desired.

Hairspray also reminded me that still out there are at least three great shows adapted from movies and transformed into wonderful stage musicals. Why no one has ever got them back onto celluloid is a mystery. It’s also a mystery as to why no one has ever bothered to produce them on stage in Australia. The first is Stephen Sondheim's Passion, adapted from the wonderful Scola film Passione D'Amore. Then there is the fabulous Kander and Ebb version of Kiss of the Spiderwoman which I saw on my one trip to Broadway lo many years ago and which still electrifies the memory and then, much less well-known I admit, is Douglas Cohen’s adaptation of No Way to Treat a Lady a small scale show for four actors and a small band which really has some of the very smartest songs ever written and a great ‘book’. As with the Sodheim I’ve only ever heard the show on CD and even in that form its terrific. An actor acquaintance Ito whom once lent the CD of No Way to Treat a Lady suggested that nowadays people are a bit sensitive about doing shows about serial killers and muderers who top their female victims on stage and that might be the cause of any reluctance to put the before today's audiences. Political correctness rears its head. I dont see it myself so could someone pull the finger out either here or there.

Grapple Tackled

2007-09-20T23:14:00.000-07:00

I’m beginning to feel like a misanthrope and a curmudgeon. When did I notice I hear you say. The good new movies just aren’t coming at the moment through though the good old ones are. A recent unexpected DVD viewing of Victor Erice’s The Spirit of the Beehive reminded me of just how precious is the work of some of those artists whose output consists of just a few small infrequent jewels. The current art house rave After the Wedding comes wrapped in the sort of kudos that indicate a likely certifiable hit. It has won nominations and prizes everywhere including the audience award at the Sydney Film Festival for most popular film. Yet I cant help feeling that what I got from it was a rather large dose of manipulation by virtue of a script whose method seems to be to introduce, at near frenetic pace for such an intimate enterprise, coincidental and/or choreographed script developments designed to cause a shock or surprise at each turn. (At this point be warned I’m not going to bother concealing plot developments). Jacob is working as a schoolteacher in an Indian orphanage. The Director, Mrs Shaw, says a Danish would-be benefactor wants Jacob to go to Copenhagen and explain what the place is up to before a bucket of money will be tipped in to save the orphanage from closure. He heads off reluctantly and has a cursory meeting with the benefactor Jorgen, a big time businessman/property developer, loving husband and good father of young twins and a marriage age daughter. He invites Jacob to the daughter’s wedding the next day and Jacob suddenly sees his old flame who abandoned him in India, not being able to compete with the freely available drugs and promiscuous sex that Jacob enjoyed. We then realize that Jacob is the daughter’s biological father. The new marriage quickly descends into chaos as the daughter works out what’s going on and goes further into instant farce via an episode of philandering, (foreshadowed by some early flirting by the groom when he first meets Jacob). When this is tucked away, Jorgen admits he’s got cancer and very soon dies. But before that he need to settle accounts, as does everyone else. On and on the script goes, working us over, trying to wrench the emotions on ever more flimsily created occasions. Now that I think back to the director’s previous Open Hearts I see the same powers of contrivance beginning to get to work. That film did have some emotional punch and you didn’t get the feeling you were being constantly set up. The Dogma tradition which this film tags along on, is actually rather replete with such methods when you come to think about. And yet the critics and reviewers find this stuff ‘emotional and engaging” and “a captivating, precision-executed relationships drama” and best of all from some stoneheart on the Wall Street Journal, "a thrilling and beautiful celebration of the unpredictability of life." One man's unpredictability is another's script contrivance I fear. Needless to say the film has the sort of ‘happy ending” that apparently sends crowds out into the night with a warm inner glow. I thought, however, I’d been the subject of an artistic grapple tackle and had only just escaped.

Cult Following

2007-09-08T19:40:00.000-07:00

The Final Winter has sprung from nowhere. Financed privately, it was a last-minute inclusion in the Sydney Film Festival and has found a (I assume) Sydney based distributor who has put up the money for a dozen or more prints and a good ad campaign to go out mostly through the art houses. It lists, in two groups, seven executive producers, followed by two producers, a director, Jane Forrest, and a co-director. The auteur of the movie is its writer/lead actor and former Rugby League player Matt Nable. Set in the 80s when Rugby League was the cult game that dominated Sydney and Brisbane sport it’s subject is a brutish player Mike Henderson, nickname Grub, who plays for one of the impoverished, underperforming inner suburban teams headed for extinction. Off the field he’s a nice guy who doesn’t cheat on his wife and two kids, but is prone to drink too much and erupt with the same kind of violence he’s known for on the field. (The representation of football’s beer culture is one of its very best elements). His more skilful brother has left the club behind and is playing for one of the fancy teams. The president of the club is trying to woo the brother back to get a ‘marquee player’ for the club to boost its status. (That’s not a phrase I recall from the 80s but there you are). For the first bit of the film there is a long sequence where all the casual brutality of Rugby League, then and now, is on display. It then covers a week in Grub’s life after he assaults his brother on the field, spends much time agonizing as to whether he’ll be suspended, charts his fragile domestic relationship (“I want back the man I married. I want Mike Henderson not Grub!”) examines the future of the team given the President’s ambitions involve a clean-out of the staff and has a sad/happy ending when Grub accepts his life and fate. TV melodramatics abound. They aren’t helped by some of the actors delivering clunky lines without much skill and by some actors going over the top. John Jarratt (or as he’s referred to in the Dendy’s ads John Jarrat, or as he’s referred to in the Palace ads John Jarret) seems to be still under the influence of his role in Wolf Creek and mugs endlessly. Much of the ground was trod once before in Bruce Beresford’s rather slipshod version of David Williamson’s The Club. That film too succumbed to footy nostalgia with lots of cameos by once big names now balding and rotund.

I remain intrigued however as to why Sydney people keep investing in films about Rugby League. This minor cult sport, nowadays played at frequently near empty stadiums for the benefit of large numbers of TV viewers in the two northern states, is an impenetrable mystery to most outside those areas. Despite millions of Rupert’s money being spent on a Melbourne team the matches there are still played in phone booths to almost complete disdain and shown on TV in the early hours of the morning. They don’t play it at all in the west or the south. Listening to Matt Nable on radio yesterday he was no doubt on message when he spoke of its universal values and that this is a film for all sports fans. Hmm. Sports fans actually like going to or watching sport. But this is the second Rugby League film in a year. The last one, Khoa Do’s Footy Legends had buckets of taxpayer funding from the Sydney-based authorities and was without doubt the worst Australian film of the year. That one opened in over a hundred cinemas nationwide and closed after the minimum statutory terms were reached, grossing around half a million. This one is less ambitious but I doubt it will have any greater impact though some will praise its honesty, truth etc and its performances, especially Nable's. I note that the ads are already mentioning three four star ratings given to it.

I sat alone in Hoyts George Street Cinema 3 to watch. Admittedly it was APEC Saturday and the city was deserted thanks to endless police warnings of imminent violent behavior. The only such behavior I saw was the unsavory late tackles, punch ups, all-ins, head highs, coat-hangers, Liverpool kisses and bar-room brawls that characterise Rugby League even after its move from the inner suburbs to the (empty) stadiums.. Now its up mainly to the denizens of the art houses to make or break it. That will be interesting.

Selling Out

2007-08-27T15:49:00.000-07:00

It would be nice to think that all the attention that SBS is getting is only its just desserts for its wholesale introduction of crassness into a service that was once a stand out cultural beacon in the wasteland of free to air television. There was once nothing like it in the world. During those golden decades when David Stratton was presenting both new films of the highest quality and, in parallel, an unrivalled collection drawn from the greatest films of the past, the station represented something unique and precious. It owned soccer and cycling, its documentaries were as the program called them “Cutting Edge”, it gave us international news reporting each night of the highest order and set new standards for subtitling (see below). Then the management let both the key people and the high standards slip away. They thought they knew best but it’s plain to see of course they really have very little idea. I didn’t mind the channel showing commercials between programs but clearly the advertisers did and the old thin edge of the wedge finally destroyed the channel’s credibility for those of us who welcomed its presentation of the world's best movies.

It has taken a simple dummy spit from a newsreader (who apparently from the news reports alleges breach of contract because she wasn’t given enough prominence or wasn’t treated with sufficient gravitas) to start the process which just may bring the whole edifice down around the shambling buffoons now running the place. They claim success by having raising the ratings from an average of 6% to 7.5%. (one article suggested that they had raised the ratings by 25%, an assertion of innumeracy if nothing else.) This group includes Board Members like former Packer operative Gerald Stone and former Howard acolyte Christopher Pearson. Pearson once assured the readers of his column in a Murdoch rag that SBS would not be placing ads in the middle of movies. I haven’t seen, nor had reported to me, any recantation so maybe he still believes that’s the case.

Now SBS is on the back foot. Its newsreader is having meetings with senior management about exit or, most unlikely, re-entry arrangements and its senior management is drawing headlines like “Mary Kostakidis’ walkout highlights how SBS has been hijacked by deluded management” (SMH, 25/26 August). An ominous note from contrarian Paul Sheehan headed “SBS an indulgence we don’t need” (SMH 27 August) should give us all the shivers. What hope is there for it to revert to its more modest ambitions and its unique programming? Probably not much but there might just be a small moment at hand for someone in the political class to rise up and say enough is enough, that management and the governing board have failed and that they all need to move on and take their failure with them.

I mentioned above the work that David Stratton did in presenting the riches of the world’s film heritage for over twenty years. The program was generally called Cinema Classics and I estimate that David screened more than a thousand films in that time. It was a program replete with everything from curiosities like the Mexican Bunuels (just now re-screened at BIFF) to virtually every film made by Akira Kurosawa. If you made a copy of each you would have a library of unsurpassed breadth and quality. Of course we all forgot the films were on and forgot to set the recorder and went out drinking or whatever. But you have the right to expect that SBS would have retained the unique subtitles that it created for each of these works. (Often those subtitles were the first ever to be done of some films. I’m told there are copies of these films circulating, illegally, in quality US video rental stores. Piracy is a crime but cinephilia trucks no such restrictions.) But has SBS preserved this unique material or have its managers, amongst all the other mayhem they've committed, let this resource be lost or destroyed? It’s a question that needs an answer by somebody competent to examine the channel’s activities in recent years.

Action Men

2007-08-13T21:36:00.000-07:00

The multiplexes have suddenly delivered a small set of films about men in action that provide some interesting turns. Kevin Costner, Anthony Hopkins, Bruce Willis and Tommy Turgoose all give us some variations on men being violent. Costner's Mr Brooks has so much plot and so many characters it takes an eternity to tell its tale of a nice well-mannered serial killer whose alter ego is the real villain. Thus Costner can be a nice guy, mostly, and its left to William Hurt sitting in the back seat to say, or put in front of us, all those nasty guilt ridden things that schizophrenic serial killers may or may not endure. The conception is cute and if it had been made back in the glory days of RKO it may have been genuinely disturning because Jacques Tourneur and De Witt Bodeen may have worked out a way to keep us guessing as to whether Mr Brook's shadowy accomplice is real or imagined. Much may have been made of the alter ego's impotence perhaps. It has only one moment that one might call Hitchcockian when Costner agaonises as to whether he should save his daughter from prison by devising a murder that will get her out of the suspicions of the police. It doesn't last long. Fracture has a similar Hitchcockian moment, better done and with a bit of oomph when Ryan Gosling as the young lawyer tryinjg to nail ultra smart murderer Anthony Hopkins has to decide whether to abandon his integrity and 'frame' the man we clearly know committed the murder for the murder. It doesn't last that long but the film's plot at least has you wondering how the moral dilemma is going to be resolved and what twists and turns it will take to do so. Otherwise Fracture is just a detective story with tricks aplenty, not dissimilar to a John Grisham story. It is entirely devoid of any sensibility that might suggest that it inhabits anything other than a fairy tale world of good guys and bad guys and princesses who's hand is to be won or rejected.

The difference between both of these films and a genuine crime story is the palpable difference where you get involved in the downj and dirty details of the locales and all the people. Admittedly lawyer's offices aren't conducive to such details. To put it bluntly these two are modern film's equivalents of Agatha Christie and what we, at least I, really desire is the modern film equivalent of Carl Hiaasen or George P Pelecanos. Unfortunately the cinema's one attempt to do Hiaasen, Striptease, was a travesty and as far as I know nobody has even attempted to do Pelecanos. I can see why. The details of their stories, the backgrounds, the encyclopaedic knowledge of locale and local custom are too hard to render in a movie where the main action involves getting you from point A to point AA quickly and with a modicum of violence on the way.

That's why the Die Hard franchise is so effective. It does what it does without any great pretension and is far more inventive about the details of its background than the other films. Of course it's all invented and you wonder how on earth a villain could finance the elaborate scheme devised to destroy America's computer networks. Actually you only wonder that afterwards because while it's happening you get a mountain of often ugly CGI effects showing much near incendiary and visceral violence. The Asian bad girl is a terrific villainess and the kung fu kicking she gives Bruce Willis is very good indeed. You actually dont have much sympathy for him at all while it's happening.

And Tommy Turgoose. Well he operates as a sort of mascot to a group of skinheads in the North of England. The group divides into two - one racist, the other not. The other however still thinks that having a good time destroying derelict aprtment buildings is a good thing and quite forgivable. Through Tommy's eyes he discovers the sub-culture that formed as Thatcher thrashed her way through the Fallkands and bands I've never heard of play something the ads called 80s classics on the soundtrack. It's funny to get a piece about this subject which seems to serve only as nostalgia though the moment when Combo and his racist gang, lead by young Shaun stride out in Leone-esque slow motion has a deal of droll fun to it.

Ingmar Bergman

2007-07-30T16:52:00.000-07:00

As I sat down to write a Film Alert I switched on the radio and heard news of the death of Ingmar Bergman. News Radio was running a report from the BBC’s Arts Correspondent who gave a quick rundown on a career that lasted over fifty years making almost sixty feature films. For cinephiles I suspect that their individual discovery of Bergman, particularly if that occurred in the fifties, was a moment that opened eyes and minds to ideas far beyond what had previously been regarded as the norms of narrative cinema. Bergman’s stories were different and so were his methods of telling them.

A teacher at my high school gave me a copy of four Bergman scripts published in a single volume. I read Wild Strawberries and confessed my puzzlement at its mysterious combination of flashbacks and dreams. It was patiently explained to me but it was a year or so later, at a MUFS screening, before I saw the film and ‘understood’ Victor Sjostrom’s journey. That was followed by Smiles of a Summer Night, dripping with sex but as well with entirely uninhibited behaviour. There was the quite intense The Face a k a The Magician and then The Seventh Seal. That last seemed to be the most profound film ever made, grappling with death and God’s vengeance in an almost fearful way. His actors and his technicians, especially the photographer Gunnar Fischer, seemed to be in a different league to everyone else.

Yet fashions changed and we sated ourselves on directors like Frank Tashlin, Budd Boetticher and Anthony Mann. Bergman seemed to be too po-faced, too serious. His comedies like The Devil’s Eye and Let’s Talk About Women weren’t funny. Not like Frank Tashlin’s anyway. Bergman became an occasional controversialist, only making a splash with films like The Silence which was deliberately obscurantist but heavily into carnal sex. We didn’t get to see such films in their entirety anyway. It took me years to ascertain for sure whether the rumour about the couple having ‘actual’ sex in the cinema was true or not. It wasn’t.

Bergman’s mature years seemed to be his greatest. The trilogy of Persona, Hour of the Wolf and Shame, made between 1966 and 1968 remains a landmark and probably will be his most enduring work. He was fifty when he completed those films and went on to make almost twenty more films including some of his most popular. He won Oscars. I thought he won for Cries and Whispers but the SMH today only mentions for Fanny and Alexander.

His last film Saraband was made for TV in 2003. It featured Liv Ullmann and Erland Josephson and picked up on the characters from the earlier Scenes from a Marriage taking both of them through to a quieter, more contemplative time in their lives. As with all of his work however, it’s the woman who has gained a sense of repose, the man is still in a modest state of turmoil. It’s Josephson whom Bergman makes to bare not only his soul but his rather gnarled and knobby body. Ullmann provided Bergman with a continuous, near miraculous, portrait of woman in all her glory and you imagine that the director contemplated her beauty, her resolve and her strength with continual fascination over thity years or so. There is a sense about his films with Ullmann that no matter how often he did contemplate this Galatea he could never quite fathom all her mysteries.

In recent years the magic of DVD distribution has allowed almost all of Bergman’s work to be revealed again. This has included all the films made before 1955, the year that he made Smiles of a Summer Night. Those films are generally more straightforward, more melodramatic and, possibly for budgetary reasons, much more constrained in their locations and range of characters. They are still eternally fascinating and they include magnificent works like Sawdust and Tinsel, Secrets of Women and A Lesson in Love.

It’s hard to say that Bergman has been ‘an influence’. Perhaps the dark foreboding of much Scandinavian cinema owes something to him but really his stories were so much his own that they were never really absorbed into the mainstream method. Only Woody Allen, whom I’ve also heard paying tribute as I write this, seemed to want to go so far as both parodying and imitating him. The rest of the film world finally just stood back in awe at his continued exploration of his themes and his continued fascination with death, decay and the possibility that we might have to account for ourselves to a maker. His talent was unique and I suspect that for a long time to come his films will feature in all those lists of Ten Bests and Persona in particular will forever be regarded as one of the very few finest works of art produced for the cinema.

Oz Comedy

2007-07-29T22:17:00.000-07:00

My thanks to the reader who rang to say that Clubland is the best Oz comedy since Muriel's Wedding. Indeed it is so I thought I'd share that with you.

Digital goodies

2007-07-29T16:48:00.001-07:00

Mention of Jia Zhangke in Paul Martin's comment on the piece on Clubland makes me put up a quick note about him and his film which still has a screening at the Brisbane festival to come to complete its trip around the Australian festival circuit. Still Life is indeed a masterpiece, as are almost all of Jia's films. Since it premiered at Venice last year and initially got generally bagged or worse dismissed by a stupefied press contingent forced to watch it at midnight, it has gone on to great critical success. It has also been sold for commercial distribution in 66 countries. Jia Zhangke also produced a film, directed by Han Jie, a member of his production company, titled Walking on the Wild Side which I was enthralled by when I saw it last year at Vancouver. It's a ripping story of a trio of juvenile delinquents playing up big time in China's backblocks. I think only the Brisbane Festival has been smart enough to pick that one up and it screens there next week as well.

At Clubland I saw the future and started to fear

2007-07-25T20:45:00.000-07:00

This note follows on from an earlier post about digital projection, which actually drew a few responses and you can find it below somewhwere if your curiosity is piqued. But start at the start. The Ulladulla Arcadia is a nice name for a cinema of the future and if you wanted to see Transformers or the latest Harry Potter or a couple of others you would have been served with a picture provided by a nice warm, comforting 35mm print. If however you choose to see Clubland you pay your money to see murky grey green yellow images, entirely lacking in definition or clarity, drained of color and with lines occasionally rippling up the screen. The image is far worse than you would have ever seen by hiring a VHS video of the film and playing it on a twenty year old TV set. That image was provided by some digital device or other and there was a screen announcement that it would be screened that way an instant before the film started. I feared the worst.

This was somewhat a pity largely because the film seems to be a very bright sparky comedy with lots of very knowing things to say about how young people start their sex lives, the sort of pressures they place on themselves, the fake mature analysis they put themselves through and, towering above some of them, the mothers from hell who can manipulate, manipulate, manipulate and manipulate and when they've finished manipulating start manipulating again. Brenda Blethyn does this act with scrupulous and hilarious intensity. Its quite amazing to see a Brit pro do this sort of performance and do it every inch and every second of the show. It's hard to see her being beaten for the AFI best Female Actor award. Similarly it's hard to go past the performances of the two kids for sheer winning qualities as well. Emma Booth as Jill is simply gorgeous as well as brilliant and she delivers a lot of those lines where she has to race through dialogue about her self-esteem, her image and her standing in her girl friend's eyes with great technical skill. Ultimately its's very funny indeed. Keith Thompson's script may well be the most funny ha ha script written here in a decade or more. Off the top of my head I cant think of anything that surpasses it. But.....

Back to the image. Truly you have to wonder why it is that such a shoddy thing was shown at all. An enquiry to the very charming young manager, who asked as we left had we enjoyed the show, led to the following points being made. and I quote as near to verbatim as my memory permits: "Yes it was a very poor image indeed but this was the only film they were screening in digital. It was supplied by a "little distributor" and the cinema, deep on the mid-South Coast, could only expect to get digital copies from that source. More generally digital copies were supplied by one of two labs. One lab usually provided good copies. the other usually provided mediocre copies. This one came from the other. Yes, there were ripples, yes the color did bleed and spray out, yes the blues had turned to yellow on occasion. Sorry about that. Come back and see something else on 35mm."

Given the experience you have to wonder whether you might be wary of such future presentations. You also have to wonder whether equipping cinemas with digital projectors is worth the money. If patrons begin to instinctively sniff that certain films might be digitally projected and if those films include the best or near-best Australian film made this year then the expansion of access to these films via cheap digital copies may, thanks to distributor parsimony I suspect, turn counter-productive for those people, especially those in the backblocks who will only see the films under these conditions. People who sit through such images may eventually choose to wait for the DVD or worse, not bother to watch it all.

Book of Numbers

2007-07-18T03:41:00.000-07:00

Black Book is Paul Verhoeven’s first Dutch film for over two decades. The half dozen films he made before he went stateside in the late 80s to shock the international bourgeoisie with Robocop, Total Recall, Basic Instinct, Showgirls, Starship Troopers and Hollow Man were the work of a consummate vulgarian. He was, like Miike Takashi, a director whose vulgarities I prefer, utterly unafraid to show sex and violence in graphic detail. He reveled in and relished it. The best film of his earlier Dutch career Spetters, a film about unadorned teenage sex and casual violence, was, I thought, gut wrenching. After one more film, the carefully choreographed The Fourth Man Hollywood beckoned and he gave a lot of oomph to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s career with Total Recall and Sharon Stone’s reputation with Basic Instinct. Showgirls, a film much derided in its day, and probably the most consummate of his consummate vulgarities, still has its admirers, most notably, here anyway, Adrian Martin and David of ‘Margaret and David At the Movies’.

I suspect that Verhoeven had lofty ambitions for Black Book but first let me digress into a little biography. An Australian soldier taken prisoner of war in Crete once confessed to me his dislike of the Dutch. ‘They would not fight the Germans” he said, and as well “They only organized a Resistance when it was clear Hitler was going to lose”. Verhoeven’s view of the Dutch Resistance has the same sour outlook. It was, he proposes, venal, self-serving, anti-Semitic and duplicitous. It’s key organizers walked both sides of the street and had an unhealthy interest in getting a share of Nazi treasure. The heroine of Black Book is a Jewish woman whose principles are put to the test and whose bravery is never questioned. She is asked to ingratiate herself into the affection of the head of the Gestapo, starts sleeping with him and falls in love. Nevertheless she never betrays those principles, even those exercised in the bedroom with her handsome Nzi lover, has a higher purpose. She is one of the few lead characters about whom this can be said. While for a long stretch you think this is a Boys Own adventure about outsmarting the Nazis in fact the Dutch 'Resistance' gets a right going over and the film ends with much bitterness and a very sour taste.

In Verhoeven’s usual fashion the violence is fairly explicit and there’s much female flesh on show. I wish I could remember the phrase someone recently told me about Verhoeven’s interests in displaying female breasts but I cant so I content myself simply with noting the frequency with which the female lead Carice Van Houten is required to take off her top is probably a record for a mainstream feature made in the prim years of the first decade of the 21st century.

But, notwithstanding the interesting subject and the sex and the violence, the film still plays too much like one of those derring –do Brit movies of the fifties rather than something has been made just last year. Maybe my taste now means that it needs a Ken Loach and Paul Laverty or a Paul Greengrass to give it gravitas and depth. It seemed to me just that bit mechanical and that everything was being done by the numbers. Maybe if Verhoeven had sought recapture the full frontal attack mode he used for Spetters or Turkish Delight it would have gripped me more.

The Death of Edward Yang (1947-2007)

2007-07-08T06:13:00.000-07:00

The Taiwanese film-maker Edward Yang made only seven films between 1983 and 2000. Such was his reputation from those films that the tributes to him have flooded in since it was announced that he had died on June 29 after a long battle with colon cancer. I never saw his first film That Day, On the Beach (1983) but it’s appearance was enough for people to cause comparisons with the work of Michaelangelo Antonioni. His next film Taipei Story (1985) remains one of my personal favorites indeed It’s included in my top ten of all time as recorded on the Senses of Cinema website. That film starred Yang’s friend and colleague Hou Hsiao-hsien and together they formed the backbone of a new Taiwanese cinema that has continued to entrance international, if not domestic, audiences to this day. Hou and Yang are key figures of the cinema in the last two decades of the 20th century.

Yang’s output over that time was quite small, a mere seven features since his debut. Hou has been more prolific but Yang also spent much time as a teacher and he worked on a number of projects with his own students. Nevertheless the small number of films he made in the 90s were quite extraordinary beginning with a masterpiece A Brighter Summer Day (1991) , continuing with A Confucian Confusion (1994), Mahjong (1996) and capping iall off with Yi Yi /A One and a Two… (2000). Some have been shown on SBS but the last-mentioned film, which won him the Best Director prize at Cannes that year, is regrettably, I feel certain in saying, the only one of his films available on DVD in Australia. Its story of a family in present day Taipei delves into so many of the cross-currents and contradictions of modern Chinese society as each family member comes to the forefront in the broad canvas laid before us.

When Yi Yi was screened at the Brisbane Film Festival Tony Rayns’ program note said: “Directed with a formal precision that never masks the warmth of its feelings for the characters, the film suggests that the ways in which we deal with our problems change very little over the years, even if the problems themselves do change. Yang marshals a dozen major characters and nearly as many strands of storyline…with apparently effortless clarity. Yi Yi offers a wordly and very wise vision of the way we live now.”

Which sums up quite a lot about Yang’s achievement in one small para. I never met him and as far as I know he never visited Australia, at least not to present any of his films to a public audience. A pity really because he was someone special and his small output is likely to be reshown, revived and discussed for a long time to come. If you want to know just how deep and wide the reverence for him is then just google his name and you’ll find tributes by Variety, the New York Times, the Guardian and The Independent very prominent among the dozens of other references. The obit in The Independent was written by Tony Rayns and tells more of the man himself than most of the others and describes him as ‘a committed independent whose movies spoke eloquently for his wry detachment from the political and economic chaos around him.” A full scale retro is called for to celebrate a major film-maker who died, at the age of 59, far too young.

Bee warned

2007-07-03T15:51:00.000-07:00

Marina Prior enters the stage from the theatre itself. Blonde bewigged, she struts across the mocked up high school auditorium, adjusts her décolletage, pouts at the audience and starts ‘The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee”. Already the audience, especially the non-subscription seat holders up the back and on the second tier of the Sydney Theatre, are whooping and whistling with pleasure. We’re in for a happy, easily pleased night. Magda Szubanski’s entrance has much the same effect. She mugs her way onto the stage, her squat bulk only partly concealed beneath a boy’s school uniform. Her character is named William Barfee, ‘pronounced Barfay’ she constantly reminds others, perhaps an echo of WC Field’s Egbert Souse,’with a grave’.

This musical by William Finn and Rachel Sheinkin has a lot of bite and much to say about parental and youthful ambition. It has some funny lines and seems to allow Prior and her co-judge Tyler Coppin to improvise more than a bit. It’s staging owes more than a little to old-fashioned panto with much audience participation, including four who are called up to join in the spelling competition and encouraged to act up more than a bit. On the night we saw the show one audience inductee couldn’t spell ‘Jihad’ and was ejected early. One kept spelling words correctly that clearly she was not expected to, causing consternation, cracking up and behind the hand smirking from the professional cast. At least that was the way it was played that night. Maybe it’s like Siegfried and Roy’s show where even the apparently aleatory moments are completely planned.

Prior did her star turn beautifully. It’s been more than a decade since I last saw her as Maria in Ian Judge's great production of West Side Story and she can still bring the audience in and send them home happy. For one moment she and the rest of the cast were outclassed by a kid called Josie Lane who sings ‘I Speak Six Languages”, a song about ambition and expectations. Lane sings it so brilliantly you wonder whether you were present when a star was born. Her bio indicates this may be about the first time she’s ever been paid to perform.

Finally the show has one unusual moment you wont find in Rodgers and Hammerstein. Jamie McGregor sings ‘My Unfortunate Erection’, a matter not normally the subject of a song and dance show. This is the second of Finn’s musicals to be done here, after Falsettos a decade or so ago. They are, as Bruce McAvaney is prone to say, a bit special.

Salt of the Earth

2007-06-26T05:13:00.000-07:00

I saw a couple of dozen films at the Sydney Film Festival and had seen a dozen or so already in Adelaide or Vancouver. (The latter included Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Hana and Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach, all great films, and most of the New Crowned Hope films. You can check out what I liked in a couple of pieces I contributed at www.sensesofcinema.com.) At the SFF there was one further standout, Flanders directed by Bruno Dumont. It seems to have been entirely ignored in the modest post-festival wraps that have appeared so here goes a paean of praise for this is the kind of film that justifies any Festival’s existence.

After four features, now it’s clear that Dumont is already one of the major European film-makers, as distinctive in his voice and approach as any of the best half dozen French film-makers of the last three decades. I don’t know which of Dumont’s films, if any, have already been screened in Sydney. The festival catalogue was pretty skimpy with any information about directors’ bios or any previous films screened here. Whether or not he’s had exposure it was apparent that the morning audience was ready to sit still and be put through Dumont’s personal griller.

Flanders heads back to his native soil, the harsh and rude country of the north. It also heads back, after his unfortunate digression to California for an exploration of the lives of shiftless sophisticates in 29 Palms, to salt of the earth working people. His characters again seem to live in a permanent melancholy that pervaded L’Humanite and The Life of Jesus. They have relationships that are perfunctory and wary. The sex that takes place between them is equally perfunctory. Young characters head into the fields or the barns and get off quickly. The females are rarely satisfied. The sex between Barbe, the promiscuous female lead and her neighbor Demester and that between Barbe and another farm worker she fucks while Demester and another lover Blondel are away on military service is as joyless as it gets. We never actually see her making love to Blondel. It’s his death that devastates her and sends her into an asylum.

Dumont takes this biological microcosm a step further by removing his rural working class lads from their environment and sending them off to fight a war in one of France’s African colonies. It might be anywhere and any war. The boys embark on ajourney into the unknown on horseback, splitting away from an armoured unit to head into the hills. At this point the film is at it’s most Brechtain and you have to wonder whether Dumont might see his characters as the descendants of the bewildered buffoons who went of to war on the promise of treasure in Godard’s Les Carabiniers.

Only one of Barbe’s lovers, Demester, returns. He abandoned Blondel to his fate when chased by nameless African insurgents but does feel remorse and guilt. Finally Demester is able to confess his love for Barbe, a love that he had denied expressing and which thus contributed to her promiscuity and her breakdown.

This is bleak. No question. But it has a ring of truth about human experience and the limits, especially, of male expression. It’s a theme that Dumont has pursued through all his work and I guess we cant expect him to change. His rural France is a world away from Parisian sophistication.

To the accusation of misogyny I can only say that showing misogynists at their coldest and most brutal doesn’t endorse them nor even seek pity for them. His denizens of rural France are as they are. This is an unvarnished truth told in a manner that sets the camera just far enough away to ensure that we bring our curiosity, don’t abandon our sympathy, but see people in a manner that shows the truth of their lives.

Finally given the programming placement, to see this film a day in proximity to Jacques Rivette’s Don’t Touch the Axe serves to emphasize the difference between someone young engaging with society and someone old withdrawing from it.

Evening's empire returns into sand

2007-06-22T15:23:00.000-07:00

Geoffrey Rush strides straight through the performance space at the Belvoir Theatre, the epitome of military hauteur. He returns a short time later, an aging monarch overseeing the last remaining days of his tattered regime. Flunkies flunk and wives fuss, imperiousness is everywhere and his personal physician has given up hope. The set shows struts holding up the crumbling palace walls. My second Ionesco play comes forty years after the first , a production of The Chairs starring Max Gillies in my first week at University. We’re all getting old so this arrives just in time for a quick morale boost. Everything is connected.

Rush and Neil Armfield have been working on their translation of Ionesco’s Exit The King for years we are led to believe. Whatever the length of its genesis, its timing in a full-throttle production at Belvoir is exquisite, coming as it does as we enter the last dark days of our own tatty ruling elite. Given the timing it’s almost impossible not to see the play through the prism of John Howard’s coming downfall. It’s all there in the first half of the play, the much better half, (before the elevated thespian histrionics take over and there is a somewhat sluggish prolonged, attempt at gravitas.)

Before intermission we are treated to a cruelly funny depiction of the tyrant fading away – the fits, the temper, the expressions of wonderment that everyone could be so ungrateful. It all has a familiar ring and makes the jokes just that much more thrilling. Rush knows it. He plays up for all he’s worth and he has this brilliant set of supports – Bille Brown, Gillian Jones and the divine Rebecca Massey.

The theatre was full on a Tuesday night and they clapped and cheered and laughed endlessly. Deservedly so, for it was a wonderful night that did much to reinforce every prejudice, or insight, about petty tyrants and their blubbing ways as the end draws nigh.

More on the SFF

2007-06-18T18:17:00.001-07:00

I sat through my first theatre emptier last night. It was an austere Korean film called The Last Dining Table. It had a dedication to the Swedish director Roy Andersson and a friend says that provides an interesting entry into the sense that might be made of it. Little by little, with digressions and diversions, it builds a small portrait of life for just a few of Seoul's residents. Some of the behaviour is quite funny and it has some very curious sex scenes including one quite unique moment involving an old woman buying the services of a handsome cabaret performer. That isn't a scene I recall having any parallels elsewhere....Andre Techine's The Witnesses plays with a moment in (gay) history when the AIDS epidemic started and there was panic in both the medical profession and the gay community about just what was happening and what could be done about it. This is reflected mostly through the character of a gay doctor who sees it all up close and personal. Techine moves the story along at an almost breakneck speed as he charts the progress of the disease and the course of various relationships affected by the outbreak. I dont recall a film being made about this element of the epidemic at the time though some of the matters it charts were also the subject of Philadelphia....when I first saw Nuri Bilge Ceylan's Climates last year I was particularly repelled by what I adjudged to be a scene of violent rape. It occurs when the lead man Isa breaks up from his wife and starts prowling round his former girl friend mostly looking for sex. There's a lot of ambiguity. Does she let him into her flat or does he have a key. He's just there in a flash. Does she lead him on with knowing looks about what's coming? Why doesn't she scream? Is this all, as Manohla Dargis suggested in the New York Times, 'very frisky sex'. Some say yes but I'm not completely convinced but I'm told I'm going against what the director himself intended to convey. Moving past that the story of an older man and the younger wife who realises the relationship is impossible, notwithstanding all the hurt to herself the decision involves, is very good. The film however is not as good as the director's earlier Uzak/Distant or Clouds of May. In those films you think there is something more to get involved with than a portrait of a supreme male egotist. No doubt the portrait of the egotist is something intended to cut to the quick of Turkish male hegemony but watching a lying creep on screen isn't always the most edifying experience no matter how smart the film-making. I also didn't think Ceylan was as good an actor as the actor who took the lead in the other two films. His performance had a little too much of a mannered attempt to be audience friendly....the print of The 5000 Fingers of Dr T was yet another tribute to the art of restoration. A beautiful new 35 mm copy was on show. It had been done for Sony Classics after earlier material had so deteroriated that the film was often screened on TV in black and white. The wonderful number when the instrument playsers do an ensemble dance in the dungeon brought a spontaneous round of applause from the packed house in the State...having now seen Bahman Ghobadi's Half Moon I can now say I've managed to catch all seven of the New Crowned Hope films commissioned or supported by Peter Sellars to celebrate Mozart's 250th anniversary. The enterprise provides more shocks and surprises than might have seemed possible and the fact that Sellars and his Executive Producers Simon Field and Keith Griffith went entirely to the Third World with their commissions is a tribute to their daring and courage and the capacuity to think outside the loop. The immediate thought of anyone but Sellars and his colleagues would no doubt have been to ask the world's most famous directors to do something and a list headed by, well you can nominate your top half dozen. Of course all would have submitted budgets that probably, for each film, would have consumed the funds expended on all seven that were eventually made. Not all did hit my buttons and one, Paraguayan Hammock tries the patience to an unbearable degree. It emptied the theatre pretty early on. Ghobadi's film is uplifting, joyous, a constant surprise and very musical even though we have to wait awhile for the full force of it all. In the meantime the story of a man and his sons travelling to Iraq to dramatise the liberation of the country from Saddam just constantly involves you in a way that several of the other more cerebral films in the series dont..... More later

Border Incident

2007-06-17T20:24:00.000-07:00

I cant claim to be an aficionado of the documentary or, as they have somehow come to be called 'docs'. I think I'd rather read an article about the subject than go through the whole atrchive footage, talking heads, cuurent day, talking heads format. Somehow or other though I found myself in the smaller of the Greater Union George Street cinemasfor a most interesting, indeed even entertaining (not always the same), doco called Crossing the Line about an American soldier who defected to North Korea in 1962 and became, among other things a movie star whose villainous characters were always played by Arthur Cockstud, in the many films he made.

The protagonist is James Joseph Dresnok, a young and almost uneducated man, abused as a child by foster parents (his childhood is like the old joke "my parents moved house six times when I was a kid and I found them five times" ) who jouins the army and finds himself guarding the DMZ in South Korea. He's jacked off with it all and heads across the border. There he comes under the tender ministrations of the North Korean authorities who use him as a battering ram for the rest of his life. He's the one who can tell visitors of the virtues of Kim Il-sung and so on.

He marries twice and has kids but doesn't marry Korean women. His kids speak a fractured form of English but are privileged students at the Foreign languages school from whence the diplomatic corp is selected. There are three others like him. They all appear as Americans in anti-American movies. Two die quite young and then the only remaining one wants out. He tells a story thast Dresnok abused him and is reunited with his Japanese wife. He eventually gets oiut, is sntneced to 30 days in the brig and makes the cover of Time. This above all must have prompted the North Koreans to let Dresnok tell his story. It's fascination never ceases.

This is a BBC doco, made with all the sort of polish that can be applied but it does seem to have had fantastic and unusual access. What remains is for someone to create a season of Arthur Cockstud movies. That would be even more fascinating.

The film has its second screening on Saturday 23 June.

The Axe that chopped off the Head of Charles I

2007-06-16T22:41:00.000-07:00

Jacques Rivette’s Don’t Touch the Axe is having its two SFF screenings on Friday 22 June, a mere few hours apart. Having had a glimpse of the film already I thought I might try and help fill the house with this note. Be warned. I don’t think the film is ‘lavish’ or ‘witty’ and I didn’t discern much ‘mischievous joy’. It is the product of an ascetic film-maker who has always ploughed a sometimes uncompromising, occasionally unpromising road.

Honore de Balzac and Jacques Rivette could hardly be more different as men or as artists. Balzac was a huge figure given to massive over consumption and prodigious bursts of energy that produced prose that bursts off the page. Some belittled him and his claim to be the greatest French novelsist of all time. Rivette is an aesthete, a film-maker as refined as can be found. He has spent his life involved in politics and plotting and some claim he still pulls the strings behind the scenes at Cahiers du Cinema, even though his name no longer appears on the editorial list.

Balzac lived merely fifty one years but finished 95 works and left many more unfinished. Rivette is almost eighty and has made a couple of dozen films, all meticulously complete although the extreme length of a couple caused them to be re-issued in shorter versions. His films are an acquired taste and only a small number have been seen much outside France. His previous two films, the vampire tale The Story of Marie and Julien (2004) and Va Savoir (2000) both came out on DVD in Australia. (I have written some short notes about Marie and Julien on the website mentioned at the side.) As far as I know, of Rivette’s other films only Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974), La Belle Noiseuse (1991) and Hurlevent (1986) had any screenings at all here.

Yet it might be that both of these major figures in their nation’s cultural life of their times are rounded up by a passage from Balzac’s ‘La muse du departement’:

“There is no great talent without great willpower. These twin forces are need to build the huge monument of an individual glory. Superior men keep their brains in a productive state, just like the knights of old kept their weapons in perfect condition. They conquer laziness, they deny themselves all debilitating pleasures…Willpower can and should be a just cause for pride, much more than talent, whereas talent developsd from the cultivation of a gift, willpower is a victory constantly won again over instincts, over inclinations that must be disciplined and repressed, over whims and all kinds of obstacles, over difficulties heroically surmounted.” (quoted in an article by Simon Leys in the New York Review of Books,12 January 1995)

In Paris Nous Appartient (1960), set in the then present, the characters sought to comprehend a political conspiracy that had vague derivations, particularly from ‘Ferragus’, from parts of Balzac’s ‘LHistoire des Treize’ a trilogy of stories about modern Parisian life. Rivette returned to that source again in an episode of his mammoth, made for TV but never shown there, Out One (1971). There, Eric Rohmer plays a professor of literature who is asked questions by Jean-Pierre Leaud. But Leaud is feigning mutness and has to write his questions onto pieces of paper that Rohmer has to decipher. It’s very drole and I assume that Rohmer was able to ad lib his way through the banalities posed to him by Leaud. In 1991 Rivette adapted Balzac’s ‘The Unknown Masterpiece’ into La Belle Noiseuse, the story of a painter whose meeting with a young girl causes him to recommence work on his masterpiece. Now the film-maker has formally adapted ‘The Duchess of Langeais’ for Don’t Touch the Axe setting the film in its time, 1834. Again the source is one of the three stories from ‘L’Histoire des Treize’

The story is done as plainly as can be. There is no attempt to create Balzac’s extravagant prose or heated drama. With the exception of a couple of scenes set at Parisian society’s nightly ball, the attention is almost entirely upon the mature but coquettish Duchess (Jeanne Balibar) and her ‘love’ for the besotted Marquis de Montriveau (Guillaume Depardieu). But her mannered distance isn’t enough for Montriveau and he sets out, brutally, to bring her to heel, to make her grovel …. Other people hover in the background of both characters but the attention is entirely on the two.

As always with Rivette, the sequences invariably take place in real time. The director has again eliminated those elements that might create some artificial sense of drama, most notably by refusing to use any music beyond those few bars played by the orchestras at the balls. Its effect is to intensify the words, the looks, the objects. The grim game being played out by the ‘lovers’ can have no distractions.

A few initial reactions at the SFF

2007-06-11T18:06:00.000-07:00

The opening night film was one of those big budget French productions Piaf, directed by Olivier Dahan, from the genre of French equivalents of the English heritage movie. Thus a star turn by a largely, till now unknown actor, covers a French institution with wonderful technical precision while displaying a fair amount of courage in rendering herself ugly for much of the movie. Piaf has had a fascination for me for a long time and her records get played still on the car stereo. In Australia her memory was kept alive and her reputation enhanced especially, a couple of decades ago now, by Jeannie Lewis doing first some concerts and then later a very good turn in a full scale musical drama of her life. That was a show that packed them in for quite awhile.

The structure of the new film was its own worst enemy and I cant resist quoting from A O Scott's otherwise quite supportive piece in the New York Times in which he describes the shifting time stuctures:
" La Vie en Rose, .... has an intricate structure, which is a polite way of saying that it’s a complete mess. Resisting the habit of starting at the end and flashing back to the beginning, it begins at the late middle, goes back to the beginning, comes back to the near-end, jumps around in the early and middle middle and then noodles around between a bunch of almost-ends and the really absolutely final end, with a quick, baffling detour into an earlier part of the early middle. Clear enough?"

I must say that I was a little surprised at the near complete eleimination from the film of Theo Sarapo, Piaf's last husband. he was decades younger than her but the relationship lasted quite a few years until her death. He gets a solitary mention. Those who absorb useless information or who may be curious to see the young Sarapo at the time he was married to Piaf can track him down by watching Franju's Judex in which he had quite a large role.

The Walker has a great subject, a gay guy who makes a living squiring women round the Washington society circles. Woody Harrelson's sassy southern boy is note perfect in his combination of malice, corrupt behaviour, contempt and care for his victims/asssociates. The film cools down into just another crime story in the American fashion with the inevitable deep dark secret at its heart but on the way it's very funny indeed as well as very smart. Its early mindset is so vicious that I got the impression, on later reflection, that it might have once tried to, or wanted to, say a lot more about the interwining of sex and politics and the hearts of darkness that live in the Bush administration but that's not for me to know and all you can judge is what's on the screen. The scandals that have recently emerged about hookers and hypocrisy may have come too late for the film and its writer/director to take the next step deeper into the underbelly of a society that reeks from the clash of politeness and surface civility with deeply inlaid hypocrisy and personal betrayal.

The Digital Age descends on your local

2007-06-10T23:09:00.000-07:00

Following my little excursion to attempt to see The Italian a Melbourne cinephile has filed a 'you aint seen nothin' riposte'. He writes

Three out of the last four visits to Palace cinemas revealed digital projection of varying levels of unacceptability. COPYING BEETHOVEN, ORCHESTRA STALLS and AS IT IS IN HEAVEN (just why Sydney-siders crossed the street let alone the harbour to see this is another minor miracle for the industry). All digital at Westgarth and Como. Unannounced in the press. A friend sent me an email picture of the little hard drive sent out to one cinema. Plug it into some PC and download the images. Apparently they project as images albeit jerkily.I don't mind digital projection of very high quality. Certainly some digitally produced films turn into great film print experiences. STILL LIFE seen projected digitally looked great. But these other efforts are like watching DVDs on a large home cinema screen. Well, not that large at times. Drained colour, no depth of image, subtitles so huge because they are in proportion to the size of a TV image.Maybe in Sydney you get the one and only film print of some of these great attractions.

I would not know the ins and outs of digital projection but this is something that it is going to agitate us a lot into the future. The projectionists maynot mrely be missing but completely disappeared in the Argentinian fashion, never to be seen again and only their mothers and cinephiles to carry on a lonley vigil.

Have you ever seen The Bicycle Thief?

2007-06-03T05:44:00.000-07:00

Cinephilia can be fraught with the unexpected. Now that the Valhalla is gone and the programming of the Chauvel has been taken over by those with mysterious powers to select next to nothing of interest, those seeking the small art house movie that was once the preserve of those venues seem to have keep their eye out on cross-harbour venues like the Cremorne Orpheum. That’s the place where As it is in Heaven has taken the lion’s share of the million bucks the film has grossed at the Oz box-office. It’s not huge by a lot of standards, after all, The Lives of Others has already taken double that amount. But no matter there are now small art house movies which are headed exclusively or near exclusively to Cremorne and its satellites. Finding a place for such movies at the Palace or Dendy Cinemas in the city, the east or the west is apparently difficult. The most recent film to go this route is The Italian which has garnered high praise but is also having a very limited release, which does not include the mainstream art houses, if I may use what might be an oxymoron. With The Italian the distributors have managed to find one south of the harbour venue, Hoyts Paris Cinema in the heart of Fox Studios, or as its now called the Entertainment Quarter.

I headed there for my usual Saturday morning treat session yesterday and after walking seeming miles from Oxford Street arrived breathless just as the feature was due to start. As I was entering somebody emerged from the cinema to say the screen was “just black”. The ticket-seller got onto her walkie talkie and summoned somebody. A couple of minutes later, the somebody walked into the auditorium and announced that the film would start in a couple of minutes. It didn’t.

As time passed one fairly loud conversation started up between two oldish couples sitting near each other. Oldish? Well the first words were: “Did you read the write-up in the paper.” (‘Write-up’ is a word another, older generation uses.) “No. I read the short bit in the Metro” “Oh”. “Do you know what it’s about?” “An Italian kid gets adopted by a Russian family”. “Oh”. ….I may have discovered Generation O, a group even older than Generation A.

At this point one member of the participating couples has to repeat this to her until now silent male companion. “IT’S ABOUT AN ITALIAN KID WHO GETS ADOPTED BY RUSSIANS”. “O…..(very long pause) DID YOU EVER SEE THE BICYCLE THIEF” says the aging male partner…………..(very long pause). “O, what’s that?”

Somewhere near this point we’re told that the problem can’t be fixed. Having looked at the projection box for signs of activity every now and then during the fifteen minutes or so that has passed, I realize that there are no projectionists at all in the building. The person making the announcements is the young, under 25, manager. She has exhausted her bag of options and has to call up help. She offers us a comp and as well we can go watch another movie which is shortly to start. This is Orchestra Stalls, a French comedy directed by Daniele Thompson which I avoided in the recent French Film Week.

The original decision to avoid the movie was the correct one. From the start it piles on ridiculous amounts of cloying sentiment. A young woman visits her aging aunt in a nursing home in Macon. Somehow or other, inspired by the aunt’s tales of life at the Ritz, she decides to head for Paris and emerges from the Metro near the Avenue Montaigne. The rest of the action takes place in that street as the young woman gets a job in a café and thus gets to deliver coffee to the performers, musical and theatrical, at the nearby Theatre Des Champs-Elysees, engage in other little adventures and come in contact with the next door auction rooms. We also get lots of nice shots of the also nearby Eiffel Tower and the Pont d’Iena. Couples and singles play out little romances, breakups and coincidental meetings. Everything ends happily. Some of the contrivances are more ludicrous than others. Chief among these contrivances is the casting of the world’s worst actor, Sydney Pollack, as an American film director who is in Paris to make a bio-pic of Simone De Beauvoir. Why it is that other directors keep casting Pollack in these roles is something that eludes me. I would have thought that after his mind-numbingly unconvincing performance in Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut the game would have been over. But no, here he is again lumbering his way through English and, worse, French dialogue in a voice that carries neither an ounce of modulation or a skerrick of conviction. Sydney has one line in the movie, which he delivers to his putative De Beauvoir “Never do anything for free”. Am I correct in assuming that this line especially reflects Sydney’s own deep and heartfelt thoughts? It seemed to have the most convincing delivery.

I’m still yet to see The Italian and with the Sydney Film Festival approaching it’s dropping down the priority list already. When I emerged from Orchestra Stalls I was told the problem had been fixed and a session of the film was starting at that very moment. I passed. ...But I probably was the only other person in the room who had seen The Bicycle Thief.

When your gravity fails

2007-05-22T17:41:00.000-07:00

Filmmakers who try to make a film about their obsession or even their personal fascination run the risk of being so fascinated that they fail to notice they are boring the pants off everybody else. Such is the case with Curtis hanson's Lucky You.

There are more than a few things that dont ring true in this ode to Texas Hold'Em, a game now so huge they play it at my local pub every Monday. (So huge in fact that even James Bond gave up his beloved baccarat in Casino Royale to play it.) But back to the clangers. There's Eric Bana's golf swing and putting stroke as the most obvious. No way he could shoot 78 off the stick around a tough course. There's the grossly sentimental ending as well.

The film has one redeeming feature but you have to wait until the film is over before it comes on. Over the credits there's a new Bob Dylan song "Huck's Song" beautifully crooned by the old maestro himself. Dylan's product placement people also did well out of the movie. His name appears on a taxi's billboard and later there are a few bars of "Like a Rolling Stone" playing to suggest he's appearing in some nearby showroom. Nice, but not enough to redeem an incredibly dull picture.

Correction

2007-05-16T20:45:00.000-07:00

In the post labelled Creep Shows, I took some quotes from Crikey attributing words to Chris Corrigan. Apparently there has now been a correction and the words were in fact uttered by Greg Combet. Today's Australian reports that Mr Combet had told The Daily Telegraph newspaper in Sydney on Monday that he thought the program let the Howard Government "off very lightly, given that they concocted the whole scheme and John Howard personally signed off on it". Sorry about that. Cant help the mistakes of others.

Creep Shows

2007-05-15T22:57:00.000-07:00

In Perfect Stranger, a tick the boxes thriller made by James Foley, the otherwise routine events taking place are enlivened by the array of male characters that Halle Berry, as a crusading tabloid reporter, has to deal with. She starts by exposing a family values Senator as a closet gay with a penchant for importuning the late adolescent interns that work in his office. Next is her associate at the paper, a techno wiz whose talent for busting into computer systems is used to move the plot along at a rapid clip. He’s a self-pitying alcoholic with unrequited lust in his heart for Halle and a general contempt for humanity as well as the law. Then there’s the key subject, Bruce Willis a rich womanizer with a team of harridans around him he’s obliged to outwit if he wishes to pursue his extra-marital amours. There is a spineless newspaper editor who is warned off the story about the Senator. Finally, there is an ex-boyfriend trying to ingratiate himself back into Halle’s favors while continuing to cheat. The only person with any moral compass is a female cop. The writer of the film was, however, a male.

Shooter also has its fair share of creeps, those prepared to betray their friends for what they think is the national good. It’s predicated on the idea that a Senator from Montana is controlling a rogue element within the CIA and that element is orchestrating what at first seems is a plan to foil a Presidential assassination but turns out, naturally, to be something else. Mark Wahlberg, seen at the start undertaking covert and violent military action inside a sovereign foreign nation, gets the chance to say a few speeches which are of the a plague on all their political houses kind before embarking on revenge soaked mayhem worthy of Takeshi Kitano. One point of great interest is that the great Levon Helm, master musician from the long lamented The Band, has a cameo as an arms expert, the second such appearance, after his terrific little contribution to The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, It’s a scene which snaps the brain back to full attention.

Far better than both is Matthew Saville’s Noise, which may be just about the best crime picture ever made in Australia. Young cop Graham already has an attitude problem when he gets consigned to sit in a caravan sited in a shopping centre way out in the bleak western suburbs of Melbourne. He’s there in the hope a local will come forward with information about a mass killer on the loose. Graham admits he’s fairly dumb but he has got down pat, and its brilliantly rendered by Brendan Cowell in a performance that ought to street the opposition in the AFI Awards, the young cop’s ability to be nasty, cynical, offensive and intimidating all at once. Graham’s girl friend is also a cop but she plays in the police band. Together they smoke a little dope and bicker. She thinks he's keeping secret from her that he's got cancer. But the plot is driven along by having Graham suffer not from cancer but from tinnitus. Shades of Insomnia here. Graham sees it as an escape into being a compo case. It’s immediate effect is to cause his judgment to go astray at key moments and for his supervisor to take a dim view of his work. The slow build-up, the creation of an authentic milieu and sheer blinding accuracy of the portrait of the dumb cop at the centre of it all is brilliant. My admiration for it grows because the film, unlike too many others of its current ilk, owes nothing to the odious example or methods of Quentin Tarantino, the current fashion-plate for crime movies. This is deadly serious stuff and it eschews all flashy violence in favor of a slow burn that maybe suggests David Fincher and Seven in particular may have been a very worthy model for making such an intense and involving piece of work.

Finally there were a lot of creeps on show in Bastard Boys, but not anywhere near enough. Surprisingly given the general level of caricature that others have graced with that ugly word docudrama, I actually felt a little sympathy for Chris Corrigan. Not for what he did but for the way he was represented as this rather pathetic nerd - friendless, cold, greedy, impatient and utterly lacking in political judgment. But the real creeps were almost entirely absent. The film-makers were either not interested in, or too frightened of delving into, just what role the odious Peter Reith and John Howard had in it all. Reith is portrayed as pretty much an innocent bystander. Anybody who has dealt with Reith never has any trouble in saying how he was prepared to lie and deceive at the drop of a hat. “Born to plot” he once said of himself! Leaving him out and concentrating on the workers and unionists only told part of the story. As Chris Corrigan told Crikey and The Daily Telegraph: “I think the Government gets off very lightly, given that they concocted the whole scheme and John Howard personally signed off on it. We have the cabinet documents, and he signed off on the sacking of the entire workforce. The producers originally told me they weren’t making a boring tale of class warfare but the production serves it up in spades...I will be surprised if anyone other than welded on members of the industrial left can survive four hours of this tedium.” Well over 900,000+ watched on both nights so one's tedium is another man's rivetting drama.

The scriptwriter claimed in a piece in the SMH that she was being fair and objective to all. She said nobody would be interested in a polemic. Dont know where she got either of those ideas. Not from watching Ken Loach's masterly Days of Hope.

Still, in an election year it’s good to know that the ABC and it’s current management will now have managed to be consigned away with all the other voodoo dolls that will have pins stuck into them for the next six months or so by an increasingly rattled government smelling of defeat. Hopefully Labor will show its gratitude following a Rudd election victory and enable the Corporation to commission more interesting left wing drama. With a bit of practice we may even discover in our midst our very own Loach.

Apologies

2007-05-14T18:54:00.000-07:00

I've been struck down with a lethargy inducing rhume of some kind. My sparks have however been rekindled by watching the caricatures in Bastard Boys, a DVD viewing of Claude Cahbrol's The Bridesmaid and by contemplating what the Government has done with the klatest film policy announcements. I'll be back on deck to give the entire world the benefit of my views asap.

Irresistible

2007-05-05T19:17:00.000-07:00

The little trip to NZ produced some interesting insights. One was that the newspaper scene in NZ, which seems not to be in a stranglehold from the evil Murdoch empire, is bright, diverse and lively. It lacks anything like the bad taste , downright vulgarity, arrogance and slef-righteousness that most of our newspapers feature. Over the course of a week or so there were more than a shore of pearls, including a reprint of a piece written by former Senator George McGovern which did a demolition job on the odious Dick Cheney that is worth memorising. Whether it appeared anywhere heare I dont know. I cant imagine any of the Murdoch publications touching it. Such truth is anathema to them. My favourite little moment was from 'Mountain Scene' a weekly published in Queenstown NZ. Its from the backpage of the 26 April issue and the author is known only as Ferris. Under a heading "The Killing Fields of Africa' it told of Auckland's Rugby woes. Strangely enough the Kiwis dont despise Australian Rugby they just sort of alugh and produce a bit of mock pity when it's mentioned. Their real hatred is directed towards the South Africans. Here's the para.

"The Aucklanders are in that zone no self-respecting, rugby-playing, barbecues only Kiwi wants to be - their fate in the hands of South Africans. Four South African teams to be precise - and a fifth if you regard Western Force as merely an outcrop of the republic due to the number of arrogant Jaapie pricks who have migrated to Perth."

Ferris was right to worry. The South Africans somehow pulled off last round victories thanks to inept Australian teams that got them the two top spots in the Super 14 and guaranteed home semi-finals.

Let George Do It

2007-05-01T03:26:00.000-07:00

Its a week before Federal Budget night so let's do a little speculating and have a ramble about what might be in store for the film industry. Last year, at 6.01 pm on 16 December to be precise, I put up a post on http://filmalert.blogspot.com/ speculating about future decisions the Federal Government may make about the film industry. I said then that ‘next year we can probably expect somebody to come up with some rejigged bureaucratic arrangements, probably putting parts of the AFC into the FFC and leaving the residue of the AFC to run the National Film and Sound Archive and the cultural activities stuff like grants for festivals. ....’. I turn my back on the country for a week, (pondering while I’m away mysterious headlines like “Campion to don gloves and follow Betham” Dunedin Sunday Star Times, (I think ) and come back to find a piece by John Garnaut and Gary Maddox in the SMH, (a version of which you may still find if you look around at at http://www.smh.com.au)

It reported that in fact the Government proposes to throw everything film related into one large melting pot and that the FFC, the AFC (and apparently all the attendant AFC functions like the National Film and Sound Archive) will come under one big roof. If that’s true then maybe one of the anonymous bureaucrats who conducted the recent behind closed doors review of the film industry has been attracted by the model of the French CNC which has as its principal missions to regulate the industry, sustain it economically, promote it across all audiences, including internationally, and conserve it. We could do worse.

We’ll probably never know the thinking went into any proposals for future arrangements. The Review process was completely opaque. Any interrogation or interlocution, that is if indeed there was any, was also conducted out of the public eye. Any consultation and the submissions that went to the Minister and the Cabinet Submission itself were naturally conducted with the usual surrounding secrecy one associates with the high level control freakery practised by the Howard Government and the ‘modern’ Federal bureaucracy.

No matter, according to Garnaut and Maddox, no doubt after information was supplied to them by someone close to the Government, we will have something that might come to appear like a Federal Film Commissiariat (FFC). It’s possible that given the proximity to the election, and the need to bed the arrangements down quickly, Brian Rosen will become pro tem the Federal Film Commissar, taking ultimate responsibility for everything from development, cultural policy, marketing, promotion and preservation. I may be wrong there of course. The Government may already have someone else in mind for the Commissar’s job, perhaps Donald McDonald’s name might mysteriously emerge again if they cant get him up as Chief Censor. But I digress into the realms of paranoid fantasy….. surely….Whoever it is, they will probably also have the task of winnowing out a number of public servants whose jobs will be seen as unnecessary, duplicatory or capable of amalgamation. That’s always messy and it takes a hard person to get it right for the longer term…Perhaps Max Moore-Wilton could be brought back. He’s a cultured sort of guy…but I digress into paranoia again…surely….

Apparently the unions are happy and maybe have already committed to saying so on Budget night when the full details are known and a mountain of positive press releases from interested parties, not just the film industry, extolling the Howard Government’s brilliance and generosity can be expected to fall into the press boxes in Parliament House and out onto the wire services. They will then be quoted from extensively as the Government takes the cudgels to Kevin Rudd in Question Time the day after. The Australian Screen Directors’ Association already is reported by the SMH as being supportive. ASDA’s concern for new money and new subsidy arrangements arises from its view that only $360 million was invested in film production last year, not enough apparently. ASDA wants transparency and for all the money invested to be spent on film-making not on lawyers’ and bankers’ clip fees. That's a laudable object. Still, when you add in the amounts spent on and by the various film bureaucracies, Federal and state, and such bodies as the NFSA and the Australian Film Television and Radio School it would be fairly easy to get the total amount, public and private, already devoted to film and its attendant activities well up over the half a billion dollar mark each year. That’s reached without any additional large scale foreign investment on projects like Superman et al that use the studio facilities built and/or subsidised by the states.
The problem for me remains the same however as it has for a number of years. Nobody of course yet knows if these arrangements will improve the quality of our films and lift our international standing, or even return it to its once much higher levels. I’d like to think that when the announcements are made there might be some focus on this element of our film production for the fact is we currently make too few films of very high quality. This year, with two of the three major European competitive festivals already past or upon us we have still not managed to make a film good enough to be adjudged worthy of entry into those elite competitions. (One of our films has of course won an Oscar) But generally, the films that are made with the support of the agencies still seem to be regarded as mediocre by international standards and are not really making much impact locally either critically or at the box office. Let me ask you if you think the most admired films of the last two years (Wolf Creek, Little Fish, Look Both Ways, Kenny, Jindabyne, Ten Canoes and Happy Feet) really stand up against the best we’ve done in long gone years.I don’t think I’m being nostalgic in being just a little circumspect about where we are at right now.
So, what would I like George Brandis to say and do on Budget night? I’d like him to say that the new arrangements will allow the sole agency to radically rethink the attention given to the process of scriptwriting, the funding of writer/auteurs and the relationships that exist between writers, producers and directors in the Australian film industry. As well, he could say that he wants a strong, forthright and full commitment on behalf of all (Federal and State) funding and investment bodies to ensure that our best film-makers, those whose work has been internationally or locally recognized and rewarded, and our best writers, are working more fruitfully and more often. I’m not holding out much hope that he will.

I also doubt that Peter Garrett will offer any similar sentiments on behalf of the Labor Party either. He’s probably happy enough to go with the rebates idea that is at the core of the new additional funding arrangements. It would make his life as Arts spokesman easier. I’m sure he’ll have been encouraged to agree by the unions and others. Garrett is a brilliant spokesman on environmental issues but in his job as Arts spokesman I think he’s a bit of a dud. I suspect he thinks that if he doesn’t have to dream up his own film scheme to placate a vociferous, demanding and well-organised lobby group he wont be unhappy. That’s one more sleeping dog to let lie in the run-up to the election.

But, if Brandis, or even Garrett, were to take a leap and make those commitments however we might just be taking the first small step towards getting back our once-held status as a nation producing films of the highest international standards and reap the rewards, psyche and financial, for so doing.

The Week That Was - Three

2007-04-14T17:43:00.000-07:00

Everybody’s a film buff – even the Chanticleer columnist in the Australian Financial Review who opened his Friday piece with the “The banks lending Airline Partners Australia the money to buy Qantas Airways shares have, as they might say in a spaghetti western, cojones the size of the Sydney Opera House”…. while saying nothing of the Spanish vocabulary, it’s doubtful ‘they’ would have ever said that…Jane Campion is making a comeback to feature films with Bright Star, starring Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne the fiancée of John Keats…a page three article in the SMH informed us that the surprise art house hit of the year, As it is in Heaven, has now completed nineteen weeks and grossed over $600,000 mainly at the Cremorne Orpheum…Bra Boys is fading fast from local screens but not before one punter asked the director in a Q&A about the absence of women from the movie and ended with ‘Are you guys gay?’…the Chaser did Bra Boys over in a way that inevitably drew crude attention to the first of the two words of the title….Dave Kehr in the New York Times gave us the first review of the new releases on Criterion’s new budget label, Eclipse. It’s a five film early Bergman package selling for a third less than the usual Criterion releases. To come we are promised packages of films by Louis Malle, Yasujiro Ozu, and Raymond Bernard, the last being a near forgotten French film-maker of the thirties…. Donald McDonald, a man well-known as a close friend of the Prime Minister, and a member of the PM’s cheer squad during the last election campaign, has been put forward by the odious Philip Ruddock as the next Chief Film Censor. What a sad way to finish a career, going from being the head of two of Australia’s great cultural institutions, the ABC and the Australian Opera, to being the nation’s cultural copper. The SMH reported that Ruddock unilaterally decided to overrule formal advice from his Department recommending another person. He took McDonald’s name to the regular meeting of state and commonwealth Attorneys-General and got a bagging for his trouble. A corrupt process said the NSW Attorney, a sentiment echoed by the Victorian A-G who said, according to the SMH, that the proposed appointment ‘had a stench about it that really smacks of a decaying government in Canberra’. Ruddock was at pains to say that Mr Howard did not participate in the consideration of the matter by Cabinet. I suppose that neatly confirms that a mate is getting the nod…

The Week That Was - Two

2007-04-09T16:24:00.000-07:00

A delegation of film-makers went to Canberra, led by George Miller, to, according to the SMH, thank the Government for supporting Australian film. George showed Peter Costello his Oscar….The AFC announced that it threw a hugely successful Parliamentary Reception…the new Arts Minister George Brandis continues to hint that an extra $60 million is heading in the direction of Australian film production in next month’s Federal Budget….Premiere magazine announced that the April issue will be the last that goes to print before it becomes exclusively an online publication…Greater Union Theatres resumed advertising in the Sydney Morning Herald…Bra Boys became the highest grossing Australian doco ever. What remains unexplained for some of those who have chosen not to buy a ticket is how a film with such an odious and self-aggrandising trailer could have attracted anybody let alone record numbers. Russell Crowe has apparently taken the subject material off to Brian Glazer with a view to re-making it as a feature…The Australian Financial Review published a three page review of two new books on Orson Welles. Those making a living from picking over the master’s bones continue to prosper. Sanford Schwartz’s note didn’t have much good to say about the biographies and studies authored by Simon Callow or Joseph McBride, nor the earlier David Thomson opus. It did say some approving things about James Naremore’s similarly earlier study and went to some length to make a somewhat less than convincing case for Welles as a surrealist. Grist to the mill in the great man’s aura…Universal Pictures announced its first release slate since the UIP conglomerate was broken up…. Globalisation and its discontents were apparent when the SMH Spectrum gave over three pages (nicluding the cover) to a story reprinted from The Independent about the wondrous Catherine Deneuve and her fifty years in film. Author John Lichfield went to Paris and found there, a couple of Frenchmen prepared to speak off the record (“One industry insider says Deneuve has a reputation for being not too bright…”) and John Baxter who claims that ‘unlike say a Jeanne Moreau she has been unwilling to try riskier, more demanding roles as she has got older.” The article asserts that Deneuve ‘makes a few films a year, none of which have been worthy of her for years’. The journo seems to think she hasn’t made anything of interest since she got her Oscar nomination for Regis Wargnier’s ponderous Indo-Chine in 1992. But I’d be willing to bet the journo hasn’t seen most of the stuff she’s made since then. Since 1992 she’s worked for Raul Ruiz, Phillipe Garrel, Leos Carax, Andre Techine, Manoel De Oliveira, Nicole Garcia, Lars Von Trier and Wargnier again among others. For some there has been more than one movie. (Since 1992 Moreau has worked for Vincent Ward, Waris Hussein, Jean-Jacques Annaud, Peter Handke, Charles Sturridge, Wim Wenders & Michaelangelo Antonioni, Gavin Miller, Marvin J Chomsky, Ismail Merchant and made a number of films for Josee Dayan among others.) According to Lichfeld, Deneuve’s ‘memorable screen appearances can be counted on one hand, perhaps two’. A side article in the SMH nominated The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, Repulsion, Belle de Jour, Indochine and Dancer in the Dark as ‘five of her finest roles’. Which is the fingers of one hand. To get past the second handful, and on, you could add Vice and Virtue, La Vie de Chateau, Les Creatures, The Young Girls of Rochefort, Mississippi Mermaid, Peau D’Ane, Un Flic, Tristana, The Last Metro, The Hunger and something from the large number of films she’s made for Techine in particular. That’s without even considering the post-1992 films, especially those she did for Ruiz, Garrel and de Oliveira mentioned above, many of which apparently haven’t traveled beyond French shores. Why, well I guess her critics would say because she’s not a great actress whose work is always worth seeing. I think it may be more complicated than that, especially given she’s not always the star of those films. French production still hovers around 250 films a year and international distribution of all European films has slowed to a trickle in the relentless rise of Hollywood and its satellite independents. Whatever, it’s a sign of the SMh’s current standards when cover articles consist of a reprint of a report of some pom journalist in Paris, his conversation with an Australian once upon a time cinephile (who I dont think actually goes the movies much, if at all, anymore) and the snide bagging of a goddess. Very ordinary stuff.

62 year old white man's Burdon

2007-04-07T18:42:00.000-07:00

I went to an Eric Burdon and the Animals concert in the late 60s at the old Festival Hall in Melbourne. He was on a double bill with Roy Orbison. The Big O came out and did a beautiful set and brought the house down with ‘Leah’. Those in the crowd who were there for Orbison were ecstatic. “Better than the record!” screamed one fan behind me, a cheer I have myself very occasionally since used at other concerts, usually to the general bewilderment of those nearby. The interval between the two groups dragged out. Then on came Burdon and the Animals until someone noticed that the drummer was missing. Off went Burdon and the Animals and about ten minutes later, a sheepish, apparently stoned, drummer appeared along with the rest of the group and the show went on. Burdon tried valiantly to salvage something from the shambles and by the time he got to ‘House of the Rising Sun’ the crowd was in a forgiving mood. By that time the original Animals had mostly all departed, notably Alan Price who was off writing music and becoming a star composer/performer in his own right, later contributing famously to the soundtrack of Lindsay Anderson’s O Lucky Man. The original group got back together once only for a very fine album ‘Before We Were so Rudely Interrupted’ which has the best ever version, known to this man, of Dylan’s “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue’.

One thing the original group never managed was a film of its own. Lots of Brit rock groups of the sixties did so but not the Animals - too dour probably and too unlike a pop group. I seem to recall that they did make an appearance in the background of a Raquel Welch picture called The Biggest Bundle of them All. But, memory plays tricks, and it seems, if it in fact happened, that it is an appearance so modest and so distant that they don’t even get credited for it in the IMDB. So Burdon has been left largely to his own devices and for four decades or so he has toured the world giving pretty much the same show each time. He was at the Basement last week and the crowd was mostly blokes and mostly blokes at or near Burdon’s age of 65.

By now the show starts on time and by now the once diminutive Burdon has filled out quite a bit. He’s almost gnomish in his figure - short, squat, hiding behind shades, pudgy little fingers pointing at the band in playful mock recognition as he comes on and launches into the slowest ever version of one of his big hits Horace Ott’s classic ‘Don’t Let Me Be Misunderstood’. But the slowness has a purpose. It seems to take an eternity to reach the karaoke moment when he can climb up off his stool and begin the

I’m Just a Soul Whose Intentions are Good…

And allow the blokes, finally, to come back with the reply

OH LORD! …PLEASE DON’T BE MISUNDERSTOOD

He had us in the palm of his hand and there we stayed for the best part of an hour and three quarters including a couple of great encores finishing with Tina Turner’s ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. There were two more numbers allowing for audience participation, “It’s My Life’ and ‘We Gotta Get Outta This Place’. But not ‘House of the Rising Sun’. That belonged to Eric. The Animals had taken it over. Bob Dylan used to sing it at his early pre-electric concerts until the Burdon/Animals version became definitive. Dylan had to stop singing it because then people thought he was copying Burdon or wanting to be a rock star. Burdon even did a new number ‘The Secret’ which he said was on his new record published by Bush Records. Hmmm. It was nice.

The great man’s voice is still in pretty good shape. He has a band which appears to like him, especially the cute young bass guitarist. The piano player seems as old as Burdon and just as adroit. The others are kids. It’s apparently hard to remember all the song lyrics. Occasionally Burdon resorted to glancing at a book containing the words of the songs in very large type. Nothing like Frank Sinatra in his last days standing there with all the lyrics coming up from a screen below him, but a sign that it aint easy doing a couple of hundred nights a year on the road as you head towards your seventies. The Basement was a great venue for the night. Close, warm, heady. …just right for aging rockers and their aging coterie of fans.

Taking an Ax to Westlake

2007-04-05T07:37:00.000-07:00

Donald Westlake’s books don’t even get published by English or Australian publishers these days. Try and find him even at that fountain of US imports Borders and you come up blank, at least at Bondi Junction. Then again for completists he’s a little hard to keep up with. For starters he has a dizzying array of aliases and nom de plumes including, according to the IMDB, Curt Clark , Tucker Coe, Timothy J. Culver, J. Morgan Cunningham, Samuel Holt and Richard Stark. The last of course has achieved fame as the novelist who provided the basis for, among others, Point Blank and its infamously inept remake, Payback. Tracking down the movies based on his work is thus fraught with difficulty. He’s been a favourite of the French and other Europeans for some time and they change the titles and the names of the characters at will. Even Jean-Luc Godard once got hold of him. Made in USA should apparently have a credit to a Westlake/Richard Stark novel as it source material but in the way of the master, the credits on that movie consist of a couple of perfunctory cards with a few people’s initials contained thereon. One novel Two Much was first made into a film in France, titled Le Jumeau before being done again in the USA. One Jimmy the Kid has been filmed in both the USA and Germany. Westlake has also written scripts, most notably that for The Grifters Stephen Frears classy film of the Jim Thompson novel, for which he received an Oscar nomination. Westlake dedicated his novel Don’t Ask to Robert Redford, George C Scott, Paul le Mat and Christopher Lambert “Dortmunders all”. Dortmunder and his crew are almost the essence of Westlake’s attraction. They are a motley crew of street smart criminals who just try and make a modest dishonest living. They don’t kill people but they do think up ingenious ways to rob them. It’s very New York as well. Each of the gang members brings a special expertise in the city to whatever caper they are involved in. Kelp can get through any door. Stan Murch and his mother can drive you from point A to point B anywhere in New York in the quickest possible time. Dortmunder’s wife is a wondrous picture of the light-fingered but eternally optimistic supermarket employee. To those actors names now can be added Martin Lawrence and Herbert Knaup. The former appeared as the Dortmunder character in the travesty What’s The Worst That Could Happen? and the latter starred in a German version of Jimmy the Kid (the book in which the smart kid is asked a quiz question about naming a number of Australian States and includes the Northern Territory without getting gonged!).

Westlake’s expertise lies in deadpan humour, extravagant plots, bizarre crimes and, on occasion, brutal murder. He has satirised a lot of things including country and western music and rampaging Australian journalists. He is also a bit of a lefty which brings me to Le Couperet/The Ax Costa Gavras’s film of one of Westlake’s most recent novels. The subject, or rather the very finely drawn background, is globalisation and its effect on highly educated people in first world countries who lose their jobs to rationalisation, relocation, competition or call it whatever manifestation of maximising shareholder value you care to name. Westlake has invented a serial killer who takes to murder solely for the purpose of getting a job in a time when fifty year old men are being thrown on the scrap heap of the modern post-industrial state. He located his story in the slowly dying manufacturing areas of the US North East. Costa-Gavras has transposed it to the Franco-Belgian border area without missing a beat. The adaptation is so precisely close to Westlake’s that fans might begin to worry about what bits might be left out. Almost nothing. It is, in my view, the best Westlake adaptation put on the screen and makes all those puny attempts to do Dortmunder and others rather weak by comparison. (I make the point that it’s a Westlake adaptation, not a Richard Stark.) Gavras has captured the icy amorality of it all.
What audiences who don’t have any advantage of knowing the sly tricks Westlake gets up to made of it I don’t know. How much of the naturalist look of the film suggests to audiences that this is to be taken for real is not something I can answer. I should mention that the only divergence from Westlake’s narrative seems to be the ending. In my memory Westlake got his man off scot free. Gavras seems to have opted for a bit of enigma and for the life of me I cant work out what’s happening or why. Maybe the director’s well-known conscience got to him and suggested that his hero might have gone too far and we should leave a question mark as to whether he’s been rumbled. Rene Clement did the same thing long ago when he had Ripley caught at the end of Plein Soleil. Patricia Highsmith had let him off in her novel. But all in all, Le Couperet is immensely enjoyable and I cant ask for more than that from a Westlake source. The aforementioned deadpan humour, extravagance, and delight in the mechanics of murder have thus far eluded most of those who have attempted to put his work on the screen. One final curious note, the Dardenne Brothers, hard-edged chroniclers of the Belgian downtrodden, oppressed and petty criminal classes, have a credit among those listed as producers of the film.

The Week that Was - One

2007-04-03T05:31:00.000-07:00

Sorry to be out of contact. I could claim that I have been in mourning for Freddie Francis who died recently and whose obituary was included in the Sydney Morning Herald, again republished from the Guardian. Freddie may not have appreciated the headline ‘Even his bad films were good’ but would have appreciated the glowing tribute to his work as a cinematographer which garnered him Oscars for Sons and Lovers in 1960 and Glory in 1989. Freddie may have been amused to know that the couple of dozen cheap horror flicks he also directed are now regarded as ‘always stylish and usually successful’. He may have been even more amused to know that ‘several have become cult classics such as Paranoiac(1963), The Evil of Frankenstein (1964), The Skull (1965), Dr Terror’s House of Horrors (1965) Torture Garden (1967) Dracula Has Risen from the Grave (1968) and Legend of the Werewolf (1975). I didn’t know that. Stuart Rosenberg also died after a long career of mostly modest success. But he did contribute a now iconic moment in Cool Hand Luke with the resonating line “What we have got here is a failure of communication”…. The Film Finance Corporation announced its final funding approvals for the 2006/07 financial year. It has now approved funding for 15 feature films. More than likely in this new age of low budget digital film-making there will be double that number made with funds obtained from such sources as the state film bodies, friends and relatives, credit card debts, and new fountains like the Adelaide and Melbourne Film Festivals, each of which now has a small bin full of money to hand out to projects which will premiere at their events. The FFC funded films should all have the privilege of having a distributor on board and thus will be the ones that get a shot at success in the cinemas. The others will try to find a way through festival screenings, one offs and whatever else the producers can think of to get them before the punters. It’s possible that one or two may just find their way through to a wider audience. After all as far as I’m aware Kenny had no FFC funding and it went on to do better than any other movie of the last year. The problem used to be getting your film made. Now its getting your film shown. Maybe the Cinemtheque has to take some steps in this regard. Surely it has the capacity to put new films as well as old on the screen and put film-makers before at least one audience. With all these movies being made there is going to be some very pent-up supply and it will emphasise just how laggard our film exhibition has become. … ABC Radio’s Australia Talks Movies devoted an hour or so to a discussion of the so called ‘French Film Festival’ now touring the country and tried to tease out some lessons for Australia from France’s unique film production output and its unique methods of funding it. The discussion included comment from the curator, a diplomat at the French Embassy, who spoke English with an accent that made Maurice Chevalier sound like he’d been to Oxford, and from the ubiquitous James Hewison who mentioned inter alia that in France film is referred to as the 7th art, that when the Nazis occupied France they took over the French film studios and that it was Charles De Gaulle who had introduced the still extant ticket levy which caused all cinema patrons to pay for those continuing handsome levels of production. Also aired were a couple of phoners who rang in to say how much they had once enjoyed such treasures as M Hulot’s Holiday and Les Enfants du Paradis. Julie Rigg’s absence through indisposition was sadly felt as presenter Paul Barclay tried to keep things going. Nobody actually got to the same nub I mentioned before. With ana avergae of five French films a week opening in Paris, its distribution and exhibition hell for all but the most robust and no end of support from the quality French press saves important films by important film-makers from tanking and then being shot out the door. Back in 2004 during our stay in France Eric Rohmer's Triple Agent opened and closed within a couple of weeks. The investors who backed the film's success in cinemas, the distributors and exhbitors got burned. On the other hand, theatrical success is an ever more dubious measure of a film's worth even with the public. In a paper that Bruce Hodsdon and I submitted to the Federal Government's review we made this point quite strongly. Needless to say our thoughts were ignored and I wouldn't hold out any hope that any future government might have any major rethink on such matters either. You can read the paper by going to the website mentioned on the side of the blog…The Sydney Film Festival has launched its new website for the 2007 festival at http://www.sydneyfilmfestival.org/and alerted us early to the prospect of seeing Jia Zhangke’s Still Life, Manoel De Oliverira’s Belle Toujours and Andre Techine’s The Witnesses among others. ...In the meantime the box office is being dazzled by, of all things Bra Boys.... says a lotin a small number of letters.

Hidden Surprises

2007-03-02T21:09:00.000-08:00

The Good Shepherd hardly seems to have created a ripple of attention. Sandra Hall in the SMH even labeled it excruciatingly dull. Maybe it’s a guy thing. I admit it’s long and that’s always a drawback with the reviewers. It’s almost devoid of the so-called action associated even with quality spy stories. It presents its tale while meandering in and out of contemporary military and espionage history and fullest appreciation requires some background knowledge about such events as the Cuban Missile Crisis, the Bay of Pigs invasion and Guy Burgess. Probably knowledge of more than a few other incidental details which escaped me would add even more appreciation. It’s told in a totally quiet way. The only shouting takes place in a couple of scenes of marital dysfunction between Wilson (Matt Damon) and his generally estranged wife Margaret (Angelina Jolie). Even the last execution is handled with only music on the soundtrack. For the rest the action takes place mostly in darkened rooms and offices, tidy homes and a few parties conducted by Yale’s Skull and Bones Society, a secret organization of which, as we all know, George W Bush is a member. But the story of Wilson’s life in these shadowy confines is brilliantly told and I can’t recall a moment of longueur. I guess it helps to be fascinated by the subject matter. If I can find any equivalent for the method of its story telling it’s something similar to those quiet spy novels about the Second World War written by the American Alan Furst. He’s also an acquired taste, admired by those who appreciate the evocation of the atmosphere of the time while wandering through narratives in which almost nothing, except occasionally eventful journeys, takes place though there are always a few incidental assassinations and friends will betray each other or descend into venality. In The Good Shepherd Wilson, the morally upright, albeit flawed spy at the centre of it all walks his slow and sedate path through the world of counter-intelligence. By the end his body seems hunched into itself, having absorbed a lifetime of deception and mistrust from friends and enemies alike. He has ceased to smile and never had a sense of humor. His life has been about absorbing disappointment.

I must confess that I didn’t think Robert De Niro, one of the very greatest actors of his generation, could direct a film as well as he has done here. His couple of earlier films were altogether simpler and more straightforward. Maybe the greatest credit belongs to the scriptwriter Eric Roth who has written something of quite extraordinary literacy and imagination. It integrates characters into events superbly. I’m happy to concede it may not be to everyone taste or fall into everyone’s sphere of interest. But it hit right on mine.

Hey, we could hire a barn and my uncle could lend us a piano

2007-02-19T03:51:00.000-08:00

Urban Cinefile(www.urbancinefile.com.au) is a web film site that reports on the Australian film scene at great length and in a constantly lively way. It gives you reviews, interviews, box office stats and much more. It’s produced by Andrew Urban and Louise Keller with a little help from others and you have to buy a subscription to get its full service. It’s now been going ten years and Andrew and Louise had a party to celebrate at the Chauvel Cinema on 19 February. They invited lots of industry heavyweights and made some sing for their supper by participating in a forum to discuss ‘The Future of Movies’. Lined up across the top table were George Miller, Zareh Nalbandian, Kim Williams, Simon Van Wyk, Chris Fitchett, and Peter Giles. I could give the designations of those attending so you’d know who was there on behalf of whom but it doesn’t matter because I only want to ponder on what George Miller and Kim Williams, the CEO of the only national cable/subscription TV service, said.

The evening was heavy with talk about the possibilities of new technology. There seemed to be some consensus that it was here to stay but there was also a consensus that no matter what technology was available nothing was going to replace what Kim Williams frequently referred to as the compelling story. It was a little surprising that the Hollywood model was front and centre though moderator Urban repeatedly mentioned the place for everyone, down to the mobile phone film makers, that the internet represented.

Australian films and film-making didn’t get much of a mention for quite a while. Even Peter Giles, described as the Film and Television School’s ‘new media guru’ seemed to want to concentrate on the possibilities of spin offs and other synergies associated with movies and computer games, blockbuster territory. Not something that a quality Australian film-maker seeking an entrée into the world’s great film competitions and arenas ought to give a bugger about. Which is where I keep coming back to but... Sorry I digress…..

Towards the end Andrew did focus on where this left the Australian film-maker. For George Miller the answer was rather breathtaking. Australia, he said, is a young country and doesn’t have much narrative to tell. In fact we have already used up our cultural heritage and regurgitated it through our cinema. George says a country with only 200 years of history, though he nodded towards the excellence of Ten Canoes, noting how it goes beyond that 200 years, makes life difficult for a film-maker because you ‘cant get any more juice out of it’. According to George, in the 70s, when the film-making revival got going, we quickly caught up with our history, George did a lot of that catching up personally, especially when Kennedy Miller got the franchise to produce all of Channel Ten’s drama and knocked out The Dismissal, Body Line, Cowra Breakout, The Bangkok Hilton and so on. “Our whole history was covered.” Interesting, and I suspect at least partly a heartfelt response/routine George has slowly perfected as more and more people ask him why he doesn’t make ‘Australian’ movies.

There was a little discussion about distribution and delivery of Australian films Andrew Urban's dichotomy of the blockbuster going into hundreds of multiplexes or even stadiums and the little films you might see on the internet didn’t really come to grips at all with the fates of the several dozen feature films, minimum, likely to be made each year as the new cheap ways of getting a movie produced kick in.

In this little debate, Kim Williams was rather let off the hook for he runs a company which could, on its own, or even supported by those mostly uselessly expended AFC marketing funds, provide a platform for the hundreds (not tens) of Australian films made each year that otherwise limp through a few festival screenings and then disappear. These are the films that get submitted to the short film festivals, the docos that screen only at the capital city film festivals, the low budget digital features the festivals might or might not show or the movies that might have a night in the glare at venues like ACMI.

A Foxtel digital channel devoted exclusively to such Australian films could run like the AFL Footy Channel, every film gets to be replayed just like every match goes on. There could even be panel discussions, (a TV camera stuck in front of Paul Harris and the Film Buffs Forecast crew would be a good start), interviews, introductions, seasons and classic revivals. The equivalent of the 1977 AFL Grand Final could be endlessly replayed at key ratings moments and you wouldn’t need to pay Wayne Carey salary levels. Film-makers would probablybe pathetically grateful for the attention.

It wont happen of course. It’s too simple. For a couple of million bucks the whole circulation of Australia’s film heritage would be taken care of and it would be another reason for the nation to leap aboard subscription TV. But, it wont happen for it would involve taking pork barrel funds out of the hands of bureaucrats that they are handing out as largesse to country electorates by paying to fit out country cinemas for digital screenings. That is the apparent alternative and Kim Williams and John Porter must shake their heads at its inefficacy when they see the AFC spending ludicrous amounts of money fitting out country cinemas to take digital screenings of Australian films that will offer some hours a week or a month. Who knows how many but it wont be much. In the meantime, as the future looms the recipients will have the facility available to go looking for digital versions of the latest American blockbusters. National Party electorates will be grateful, even pathetically grateful, but I doubt it will add much to the sum of Australian film awareness.

(According to Chris Fitchett 700 people came out in Singleton to see the Tropfest hoopla. Wait till they offer The Ister or a Tom Zubrycki doco or the like and see how much enthusiasm is manifest.)

I suspect that Kim Williams despairs of how pea-brained and regulatory the Australian film industry is and always has been. In fact he said as much in his quiet way. Bureaucrats focus interminably on things they can control. (Like scripts. To segue back to another oft-repeated point, our writers come first in any discussion. At the forum Stephan Elliott announced he’s given up being a ‘film-maker’ and now describes himself as a writer. That’s smart. He continues to eat that way. )

But Stephan’s gripes at selling projects didn’t get to the nub of what’s happening. Notwithstanding where the AFC might be trying to lead us, the next emerging problem will be to get all the movies we make into the public arena. That is going to be the key problem to be addressed and it's hard to see digitally equipped cinemas in Yarram or Devonport rushing into screen Call Me Mum. A smaller and smaller percentage of feature length films will get into theatres for starters. If we make forty five or so films a year, as Chris Fitchett hopes, it will mean that ever more films are condemned to maybe three or four public screenings at some festival or event somewhere before they disappear forever. If you manage to make a movie you deserve better and so do the poor sods who put their time effort and money into it. The answer lies in a digital satation all of their own. Who knows, people may even statrt to watch it.

As I said... I digress ....and I rant. Thanks Andrew and Louise. That was a stimulating evening and please stick around for at least another decade.

The Fascination of Tyrants

2007-02-02T05:04:00.000-08:00

The Last King of Scotland reveals yet again the fascination we have for tyrants and the way their brains work. Let me quickly pass by Forest Whitaker’s fine performance, apparently already a shoo-in for the Best Actor Oscar, which I assume has a lot of note perfect imitation of the dictator’s public face. The jokey press conference towards the end is probably readily available as a research material and would allow a skilled actor with some technique to replicate it exactly. The private Amin remained an enigma until now when we have Whitaker’s impersonation of him to fill in the gap. It’s the same trick that Bruno Ganz was called upon to do in Downfall and Issey Ogata did in The Sun. The telemovie Archangel, based on Robert Harris’s novel about a revival of Stalinism that might arise if some hidden progeny were unearthed, takes this a step further. Its trick is to invent a plot to reinstate Stalin’s son and heir and hence his methods of managing the Russian state. The suspense is in how, not if, it will be foiled. This is all endlessly fascinating and, as Harris’s novel shows, isn’t confined to the movies.

More generally, the representation of the modern tyrant will show his love for children, at least his own or those close to him, his superstitions, any odd eating habits and his weaknesses. Amin’s shame as his flatulence is cured is the perfect embodiment of the necessary moment of personal weakness. The film uses the Scottish doctor Nicholas Carrigan and his impetuous and often weak decisions as a surrogate for us all. We are easily seduced by forceful charm. We are easily frightened by the mildest threat. It takes a lot of violence before the citizen stands up.

In the meantime, the story always has this horrible fascination because the dictator himself must be made an attractive figure, full of personal charm, endlessly caring for his immediate loved ones, always ready with a little speech or homily about doing good for the country and its people. Kevin McDonald’s movie gets all this right. The young Dr Carrigan is easily seduced into a life of luxury and lust. The latter particularly which almost leads to his end when he seduces an out-of-favour Amin wife. The portrait of a Uganda sinking into an ever deeper economic and social mess is far less clearly done. The sense of documentary which is conveyed by the photography stops well short of that though the moment when we discover that Amin has resorted to the use of a double no doubt intends to reminds us of the evils of Saddam Hussein as well as that of the Ugandan himself.

The film ends rather abruptly. Carrigan tries to escape, is caught and then we experience the gruesome method by which it is proposed to kill the doctor, and which commences before our very eyes. It bears comparison only with a similar moment in Miike’s Ichi the Killer. Before that rush to the end Carrigan’s inevitable speech about Africa being different and needing a strong hand is a gentle reminder of how easy it is to tolerate the intolerable. All told, a fascinating film.

Low-rent

2007-01-29T05:21:00.000-08:00

Breaking and Entering is the first film to be made from an original script by Anthony Minghella since his debut feature Truly Madly Deeply. Since then he has assiduously adapted famous and important novels. There’s nothing wrong with adaptations but they do cause you to ask why go down so literal a path. I have to say however that I found that while his versions of Cold Mountain and The English Patient hewed along the familiar literary path, his version of Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley took a lot of liberties. Ripley was made explicitly gay and for some reason the film was set in 1959 almost ten years after the book but forty years before the more logical present. It was all part of a feast of period glamour that the film sought to invoke. I thought those decisions unforgivable.

Breaking and Entering starts out as an attempt by Minghella to do his own version of Highsmith but it soon shows yet again just how hard that trick is to pull off, (even when trying for literal adaptations of the great woman’s work).

Patricia Highsmith liked to write books which examined the effect of guilt on her characters and she often used a schema of doubling, putting one person into the shoes or shadown of another. Violence ensued. Minghella’s schema involves putting Will, a smart young architect with a wife named Liv and a child named Bea (yeah right) in the path of another woman, a beautiful Bosnian refugee with an errant, anti-social son. Both women in fact are beautiful. Like any Highsmith plot, small lies and deceptions come back to haunt the man, make him decide to do stupid things, generate a sense of panic and moral slippage until it all careers out of control. It takes some time to tell. Somehwere beyond forty minutes elapse before Will has actually met the Bosnian. In between there’s an elaborate sub-plot with a Russian prostitute, a character employed largely to cause Will to tell even more lies. Her presence does give him one telling moment when her presents her with a bottle of his wife’s perfume so that the wife wont again pick up the foreign scent. She's furious.

Finally however, as we move towards a climax where Will’s lies have caused mayhem and all the characters appear doomed, someone has deemed that the film has to end well. Minghella’s schematics suddenly collapse into some sort of happy ending, two happy endings in fact, though the second has absolutely no emotional conviction at all. Yah, boo, sucks. Will was a creep and no Highsmith creep ever escaped scot free or was so easily forgiven.

I suspect, without knowing anything of course, that the forgiveness is the product of script intervention by those intellectual giants, the Weinstein Bros. Their odious fingerprints are all over the film’s ending. They’ve done it often enough to have plenty of form. Even some Australian producers have suffered their ministrations. If my suspicions are true then we can say that at some point someone decided to remove what little merit the film otherwise had by not allowing it to be true to its characters and their modern dilemmas. Notwithstanding all this intervention I doubt it will save the film from box office oblivion.

Mr Jolly - Tony Blair and HRH

2007-01-13T15:59:00.000-08:00

The Queen has a lot of things to intrigue. There is for a start the delicious sense that we are going to be privy to secrets of one of the world’s most famous, and famously dysfunctional, families. These are not to be secrets of the speculative kind or romantic notions. The writer Peter Morgan has sought to create an exactitude of detail about one of the famous narratives of recent history and claims to have succeeded. No one has rung him up to say that he’s got it wrong. Then again they wouldn’t would they. Engaging in a public argument with a mere meretricious observer is hardly the stuff of Royal life. The quiet seethe is their last, largely only, resort. And when Diana was killed it set off a lot of quiet seething.

Then there are the impersonations themselves. They vary in detail. Helen Mirren’s is the key. Without her doing a lookalike, soundalike job the whole enterprise would fall apart in its own lack of credibility. People worry about those sort of things. (I still remember some dill at an early performance of The Boy from Oz I attended yelling out about Todd McKenney's impersonation of Peter Allen: “Doesn’t look anything like him!"). Michael Sheen as Tony Blair seems to be note and gesture perfect but his slightly rotund appearance is at odds with Blair’s rather skeletal look. James Cromwell’s Philip gives all the arrogance full reign. He also has the best line. (“Have you seen the guest list?.... No…. Well don’t look. Its full of soap stars and homosexuals”).

A couple of points in the story were quite revelatory. The Queen having been forced back to Buckingham Palace by public outrage stops to inspect the mass of flowers at the gate. The camera lingers on one hateful message after another. HRH simply purses her lips. It had never occurred to me that so many of the messages could have been so viciously anti-House of Windsor. The film is generally fairly positive about Elizabeth and gives her a moment of respite in the incident with the little girl and the flowers.

You also know there have to be villains in this chamber opera. There are viciously nasty and probably well-deserved portraits of Cherie Blair, Alistair Campbell and, in absentia and momentarily, Princess Margaret. Some of the plot elements like the killing of the stag and the Queen’s reaction to it are brilliant interventions. Whether the Queen is capable of such a one-liner as“Well we wont hold that against him” which occurs early on is doubtful to me.

Which brings me to ask a question. What has happened to the hour long drama Frears made for Channel 4 about the rivalry between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown. It was made in 2003 and is titled The Deal. Michael Sheen also played Blair in that one. It’s time for one of the festivals to rescue that from its current oblivion especially as, according to a piece in the October Sight and Sound, the writer Peter Morgan is now working on a third episode about Blair and his relations with Bush and Clinton. Blair’s reputation for brilliant political management on show in The Queen would have to take a battering in any narrative about his relationship with the Texan buffoon. So when/if it happens one hopes that Frears is also on board and that he remembers he can be a consummate vulgarian when the need arises. Anyone who has seen his 80s TV film Mr Jolly Lives Next Door with Adrian Edmondson and Rik Mayall will know what I mean.

Or maybe someone should gather up all the director's TV stuff, virtually none of it ever screened in Australia and give us a real treat.

Another chapter in the history of magic

2007-01-10T20:13:00.000-08:00

My personal history of magic took another quantum leap when we attended last night's performance of La Clique at the Famous Spiegeltent in Hyde Park. Before we went in we heard myserious words about an act involving a red handkerchief. Then amid all the acrobatics, an elegantly dressed woman, in a costume resembling that of an air hostess comes out and stuffs a small red handkerchief inside her fist and makes it disappear. She finds it in a coat pocket, removes the coat and then makes the handkerchief disappear. It is found in her skirt, then in her bra, then in her G-string. She removes them all until she is stark naked whereupon she makes the handkerchief disappear and finds it one last time. The audience sits in a state of surprise, nay disbelief. I was told it was an act that had started in ‘German porno cabarets’ whatever they are. Truly a milestone. The magician was Ursula Martinez. She came back later and sang a very bawdy song in Spanish before we were informed that she was from Croydon in England. All performances of La Clique have sold out. It was close to two hours of very scintillating stuff.

Kenny on DVD

2007-01-10T20:09:00.000-08:00

Like maybe a million others I watched Kenny on DVD at Christmas. Somehow or other three copies of it were exchanged around our Christmas tree. I actually wanted to clear up a couple of things. When I saw it in the cinema I noted that a few of the audience members left precisely at the moment when Kenny says he cant make a decision about leaving his hands on job for an executive post until after the Melbourne Cup. Projections of the drunken behaviour soon to be on show were enough to convince some they’d had enough. “Oh not, not the Melbourne Cup’ they probably thought, having already endured rock festivals and the Bob Jane speedway. My memory said that moment occurred somewhere about the 70 minute mark and that the film dragged on for another half hour or so. In fact it occurs at the 86 minute mark and the film only lasts another twelve minutes. Maybe the closing sequences are a bit like the perception you get in a car accident when time slows down. Otherwise the best jokes remains smart on a second viewing and the line with Kenny’s view of marriage as something where you could cut out the middleman, just find someone you hate and give them a house, remains the funniest of the year.

The extras on the DVD are interesting. There are a dozen deleted scenes all of which were best left out. The Jacobsen bros clearly aren’t dummies as to what works best. It seems the film took a couple of years to make and they took lots of advice. The many thanks to offered at the end include mentions to James Hewitson of the Melbourne Film Festival and to film buff himself Paul Harris. The commentary track is the real dud. Clayton Jacobsen opens up and then introduces “Kenny” himself and Shane tries to keep the faux-naif joke going. After ten minutes of unfunny un-enlightenment I switched it off.

Road to Guantanamo

2006-12-20T17:21:00.000-08:00

I was invited to see Road to Guantamo before it opened and managed to catch it the day it closed. There are films that make you seethe with anger and this is one of them. In Australia it has to be seen through the prism of the continuing ill-treatment of David Hicks, a man abandoned by his country, its elected officials and those who are paid by taxpayers to look after our interests as citizens. Thus the seething contempt you feel is not just directed at the buffoon Bush and his cohorts but at those who interrogate the Tipton Three, lying to them, presenting them with false or faked evidence, sitting uncomprehending. They are the real knaves, utterly lacking in affect, indoctrinated themselves into believing they are doing ‘good’ and defending the world for freedom. One assumes they can sleep at night though what they must have gone through in their pitiful professional lives to get themselves to such a position beggars belief. The best part of the film is of course the fact that the prison guards and the interrogators, the lying diplomats and the so-called intelligence officials will go on living their brutish lives knowing the three triumphed over them. It will be the same for Hicks when eventually he is released no doubt without even any trumped up conviction or probably without any charge ever being tested. The gruesome Phillip Ruddock looks as if the lies he has to tell have caused a cancer in his soul. Not so the Prime Minister or Alexander Downer. They are as chipper every day as those who pathetically still try to wring confessions out of the innocent.

Unfinished Business

2006-12-16T18:01:00.000-08:00

I think that the Howard Government has probably drawn the curtain on any more policy decisions for the year. The Prime Minister has last been seen skulking away from a press conference where he might have had to answer questions about the army mislaying some of its weapons of modest destruction. So we can assume that the future bureaucratic arrangements for supporting the Australian film industry are in limbo for another couple of months. All those acting in positions within the bureaucracy can breathe easy for awhile at least and shortly we'll start getting the announcements of new production investments and the hope that next year's crop will be 'audience focussed', targetted at key box-office demographics and all the other management speak that passes for discussion from the financing bodies. What will be done finally when the Government gets round to doing something. (That starts to look now like something for the 2007-2008 Budget. My guess is that the current tax incentives will pretty much remain, or be tweaked just a little perhaps. I doubt there's anyone associated with the Government or its advisors who could dream up a new incentive scheme designed to create a production environment where all of a sudden we start producing great, internationally admired films that are all, or mostly, stunning successes at the local box office. Such success has largely been left to George Miller, and the producers of Kenny both of whom didn't want, or need, any Government intervention at all.

So next year we can probably expect somebody to come up with some rejigged bureaucratic arrangements, probably putting parts of the AFC into the FFC and leaving the residue of the AFC to run the National Film and Sound Archive and the cultural activities stuff like grants for festivals. ....But then again who knows the Government may have been convinced its all in perfect working order already.

In the meantime we have more time to ponder on the figures Gary Maddox produced in the SMH with the box office takes of all the Australian releases. Most disappointing, at least to its prodcuers though hardly surprising to any one who saw it was that for the co-production Like Minds. A film which cost $13m to make grossed the rather modst amount of $35,000 at the box office. It would have found about 3,500 paying punters on that basis. Still box office numbers cant be the be all and end all of the discussion. Just to remind you, Bruce Hodsdon and myself put in a submission to the Government review which recommended a few things about these matters. I dont expect anybody will have taken the slightest notice of what we said but it was nice to get it off our chests. Here's what we recommended

. there should be a clear recognition that the comparative box office performance of Australian films has been unfairly denigrated by the use of inappropriate comparisons;

. the focus of assessment criteria to judge success should be shifted from percentage return on investment and market share to comparative subsidy per consumer. This shifts the conceptual emphasis from a film as a product to a film as a work with intrinsic cultural value with an enduring outreach across national boundaries;

. Australia’s film agencies need to radically rethink the attention given to the process of scriptwriting, the funding of writer/auteurs and the relationships that exist between writers, producers and directors in the Australian film industry; and
there needs to be a strong, forthright and full commitment on behalf of all funding and investment bodies to ensure that our best film-makers, those whose work has been internationally or locally recognized and rewarded, and our best writers, are working more fruitfully and more often.

In the meantime, as a breathless film world awaits these decisions, I wonder whether it's time to ask the question about whether the ABC is in fact setting up some some equivalent of SBS Independent to handle the additional money for drama that it got in last year's Federal Budget. Or has the money just passed through to whomever is doing the commissioning now? That would be nice to know.

Borat and Bazza

2006-12-13T13:28:00.000-08:00

Borat, has plenty of historical precedents. Australians especially have long embraced the notion of the innocent abroad to poke fun at pomposity, stupidity and alleged general incomprehension of other cultures. Sacha Baron Cohen’s best trick is to take the elements and be really outrageous, most notably in the casual anti-semitism and anti-Romany poses he adopts. But we have precedents for that as well, most particularly in the comic strip version of Barry McKenzie when it appeared in Private Eye. The film version severely toned down the anti-semitic element of the McKenzie character. Sacha Baron Cohen’s trick also rather resembles that of Garry McDonald’s with his Norman Gunston character who ran rampant in the 70s. Gunston’s best moments were ambushes, no more so than his attendance at Warren Beatty’s press conference when he arrived at Sydney Airport to promote Shampoo. “Have you made it with any Australian chicks yet, Mr Beatty?” Gunston politely enquired. Beatty turns to see who has asked this question and spots a buffoon in a lame jacket with pieces of cigarette paper stuck to his face to cover his shaving cuts. “Who are you?” says the great man. “Norman Gunston, ABC Tonight Show”. “You….have a Tonight Show? At least that’s the way I remember it. Barry McKenzie was, in Philip Adams words, a little nature study of what a naïf found when he arrived in Britain. Not a pretty picture and the world has hardly moved on far. Barry was confronted by feminists, Borat confronts them even more directly. Borat also skewers politicians and really makes them squirm. I’d love to know just how much the speech about supporting Bush’s war on terror was set up and staged and how much the actor managed to wring from the crowd. Borat is good simple fun. You cant but help admire the sang-froid of an actor/creator attempting such a confrontation and bringing it off so successfully.

A Short History of Magic

2006-12-08T17:06:00.000-08:00

A Short History of Magic

I saw Ross Skiffington once at a dive up in King’s Cross. He was playing to about twenty people and I was called up to assist with a card trick. At a given moment I heard a slight engine whirr and the designated card popped up. Not much of a trick, I thought, from my vantage point. But he is a brilliant prestidigitator who can confound with all sorts of dazzling exercises. His name keeps popping up as a technical advisor in theatre pieces calling on one of the cast to display a magician’s skills. This year alone he has advised Pamela Rabe in the STC’s production of The Cherry Orchard and Paula Arundell and Socratis Otto in the Ensemble’s production of Are You There?

More alarming was a call up on a boat doing a desultory trip down to the mouth of the Yangtze from Shanghai. The return journey featured a cabaret show and the inevitable magician. Chinese magicians are quite brilliant and an incident/hommage in Christopher Nolan’s The Prestige shows one at his best. The magician on the boat was working very close to the crowd and he produced a small guillotine and promptly sliced a carrot in half. Then I was instructed to stick my finger in the gap and the crowd eagerly awaited the moment when it might be hacked off. I didn’t. Just as the magician was about to slip the mechanism I heard a click but still pulled my finger out before the blade did or didn’t come down. This caused hoots of laughter. We tried again. By this time I’m contorting my face in fear. Again I heard the click and pulled my finger out. The crowd is reduced to hysterics. Finally click, finger, blade falls, finger intact. Triumph. Buckets of applause. Back at the hotel a stranger accosts me in the foyer and calls my ‘act’, deliciously extending the suspense of the moment, the funniest thing he has ever seen on a stage.

In Las Vegas I went to see Siegfried and Roy. Buying my ticket only a few hours before the show ($99, price includes two drinks) I get put on the side. “Where are you from? says the attractive usherette. “Australia’. ‘Gee that’s a long way to come. Maybe we could find you a better seat’. At that moment, I learned later I was supposed to say ‘Gee, could you?’ and slip her ten bucks. I didn’t, so she didn’t. But the show was astonishing right down to one elaborate sequence where they claim they are going to show you a trick from behind so that you can see how it’s done. They don’t of course, just dazzle you even more. I learned later that one woman who got called up for a trick and, for a seeming eternity, then doesn’t notice a white tiger about a foot away from her is all part of the show. Most people never pay the $99 (includes two drinks) so they don’t realize the whole show is a clockwork apparatus and things like calling up random strangers from the audience is a definite no-no. That’s an aspect of magic acts that is discussed in The Prestige as well. Magicians practicing the catching the bullet in their teeth act will never forgive the film-makers.

The movie spends quite some time explaining much of the magician’s armory of distracting devices, especially bits and pieces about concealed bottoms, trap doors and fake locks. The fanciful element of the story is in the involvement of the genius Nicola Tesla, Edison’s rival in developing uses for electricity, and his invention of a means of de-materialising matter and transporting it elsewhere. That was the gravamen of the quite thrilling narrative written by Christopher Priest, a novelist who trades in the mysterious and the unsettling.

The central plot trick itself stares at you and it seemed to me that I picked it up too early. Earlier than the film-maker intended anyway. That doesn’t distract that much from the story. What does distract is that you don’t get the full sense of Danton’s obsession. It becomes a by the numbers retelling and the bland face and even blander accent of Hugh Jackman doesn’t serve it well. Strange too that Jackman doesn’t even attempt any sort of English accent and you cant quite work out the origins of his character. Christian Bale is called on to do Cockney and mostly succeeds but you have to wonder why these two actors had to be chosen over other Brit stars. Robert Carlyle might have been astounding in the Danton part and someone uglier and more menacing would have done better than Bale. That would have given the film a darker edge, a meaner tone, something that reacts better with Michael Caine’s role as a master manipulator. And I have to wish that people would stop casting Scarlett Johansson in unsuitable roles as well. After this one and The Black Dahlia she’s in danger of getting herself lost in so-called prestige (oops) productions which cause her to lose credibility. Lana Turner would never have taken this role. Still the story itself remains great. Nolan’s rendering of it is mediocre. He seems like the boy who got called up from the audience and flubbed the trick, much to the real magician’s consternation.

Oz Film's Big Day

2006-12-06T16:17:00.000-08:00

Oz film notes
The AFI Awards are on this weekend and one prominent scribe has let it be known privately that Kenny is a certainty for Best Picture. Maybe, though I find it hard to believe that the serious Jindabyne or the humanely wise Ten Canoes wont fight it out. In the lead-up Gary Maddox of the SMH managed to get the local distributors to divulge the box office grosses of all the Oz films released this year. The gravamen of Maddox’s report was that the bunching of releases that occurs because of the need to get ready for Cannes then Toronto then the AFI’s is the reason for the less than spectacular performances of many of the titles. The list however is fascinating; Heading it is Kenny ($7.3m) followed by Jindabyne ($5.3 m) and Ten Canoes ($3.3m). Boytown and Kokoda also took over $3m. Candy was the only other film to pass $1m. At the other end were Like Minds ($35,000) and Opal Dream ($64,000). My favourite filmic voodoo doll Khoa Do’s Footy Legends tapped punters for the grand total of $557,000 after opening on over 100 screens. I’d love to know how much of that came from markets outside New South Wales.

Film and Numbers

2006-12-06T01:45:00.000-08:00

It’s been a week for big numbers. Twelve new films opened and most of them went un-reviewed by the Sydney Morning Herald. The only paper which meticulously lists and describes each film, no matter how modest the opening or the venue is the Daily Telegraph. It’s also the only paper which carries ads for the Greater Union cinemas including my local around the corner. I cant bring myself to buy the paper under any circumstances but, for at least giving the new films due deference, it’s clear the Tele beats the SMH hands down.

The other big number I noticed was on the credits on Brian De Palma’s The Black Dahlia. The opening titles list some fifteen people as Associate, Co-Executive, Executive or straight up Producers. The closing titles list four more who probably still want to know how come they missed out being listed at the start. One name stood out among them all. James B Harris got a solo credit as Executive Producer. There’s a name to conjure with. Harris first came to prominence in the fifties when he produced three of Stanley Kubrick’s best films The Killing, Paths of Glory and Lolita. He became a director himself, starting with the nuclear thriller The Bedford Incident. He made at least four other films himself, the last I can find listed (without going to IMDB) being in 1988. He’s now approaching eighty years of age but still seems to be a player. I heard at one time he was interested in producing an adaptation of one of Alan Furst’s wonderful wartime espionage novels but nothing seems to have come of that. Whatever, The Black Dahlia is, as most of the reviewers have said, a major disappointment. De Palma had a few burdens to carry into the project beyond the nineteen producers. For starters James Ellroy tells his stories in oblique ways that keep you off-centre. He often changes the viewpoint of the narrative from chapter to chapter and keeps you guessing as to what is occurring and what its relationship is to other things that happen. The script deals with this in a very muddy fashion. Scenes never seem to relate to each other. Finally it’s all resolved but you cant look back on the narrative very clearly. Then there is the abysmal casting of the far too young Scarlett Johansson and Josh Hartnett. Johansson is supposed to be some mature, experienced Lana Turner type but still looks like a juvenile lead dressing up.

I think I’ll keep a record of all these Executive Producer driven films. I suspect that there will be a clearly diminishing correlation between numbers and quality.

Finally people seem to be dying in numbers. This week alone the estimable Ronald Bergan of the Guardian, who seems to have the market cornered on SMH obituaries, noted the deaths of Philippe Noiret, Claude Jade,Truffaut’s wonderful discovery as the lover and wife of the 'mature' Antoine Doinel, and the adorable Betty Comden. Comden thrilled me a few years ago when she and Adolph Green took part as narrators and occasional singers in a telecast of a concert version of On the Town conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas. It, and she, and they, were fabulous. The show thrilled me more, I have to opine, than the Donen Kelly movie.

If you'd like to read the rest of the week's note about what's been overlooked on Australian TV, including Michell's The Mother, Johnnie To's Left Turn, Right Turn, Michael Powell's The Fireraisers and Sofia Coppola's The Virgin Sucides then email geoffkaren@ozemail.com.au and I'll add you to the email alert list

Cheers

Film Alertist online

2006-12-03T17:04:00.000-08:00

Hi everyone

I've created this blog so that you might check on things on my site more easily and be aware of updates. If you want to subscribe to my weekly email about movies coming up on TV (down here in Australia) you can contact me at geoffkaren@ozemail.com.au and I'll put you on that list so that something arrives in your inbox each week. Or most weeks anyway. If you want to know what's on the website you can check it out here http://www.members.optusnet.com.au/prgardner/geoffweb/geoff.htm

Most recently I assembled all the notes I've done on a few dozen J Arthur Rank titles over the last couple of years.

Enjoy

Geoff Gardner