Hidden Surprises

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.