A few initial reactions at the SFF

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

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?

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

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

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

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

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.