celluloid tongue.

Farewell, Blogger...

2011-01-05T17:20:00.003+11:00

...hello, WordPress!

Which is to say celluloid tongue has moved house. Please now find me online at celluloidtongue.wordpress.com. All future updates will be posted there. Hope you’ll join me!

- gerard.

Interview: Nathan Greno & Byron Howard, Directors of Tangled

2010-12-30T11:16:00.012+11:00

As promised, here’s the full transcript of my discussion with Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the directors of Disney’s Tangled. The short piece I wrote on the film for the last issue of Beat can be read online here.

G: This was quite a long production, wasn’t it? It went through a few iterations, with a different people at the reins. Were you guys involved from the word ‘go’ at different levels, or were you brought onboard after the restructuring?

B: The film had actually been at the Disney studio since the 1940s, in one form or another.

G: Obviously you weren’t involved with it then…

B: No! It hasn’t been going full force for that long. But it was on Walt’s desk on a list along with Cinderella and Peter Pan as films that they wanted to do. But it always got shoved off to the side because it’s a very small story, the original Grimm’s fairytale. It’s about a very passive young woman sitting in a room for the whole length of the story. Not very much real estate for a ninety minute film. So we really had to make her a dynamic character. We had to get her out of the tower, out into the world and make her a heroine for the 21st century. So we wanted to make her relatable, but not the noble princess that you might expect. She’s a real girl.

G: So how early were you involved with the version that became Tangled? Because Glen Keane was originally lined up to direct, right?

N: Right. What happened was we were working on Bolt and Byron was one of the directors and I was the head of story. When that movie was wrapping up John Lasseter had asked me if I wanted to direct a short for the Bolt blu-ray and of course – yes, I wanted that! That would be awesome! So I started doing that and it was John’s way of kind of taking me out for a test drive to see if I’m really director material for a feature film. So while I was doing that I started working with Byron, and Byron was helping me. I’d been at the studio – at that point I think it was 12, 13 years or something like that, and mostly I was always in the story department. There are all of these other departments. I didn’t know how they worked. So I started working with Byron. He’d just directed a film and he was showing me the ropes. He knew how the other departments worked. At the same time, Rapunzel was in development and like Byron said, it had been for a long time. Glen Keane was directing it, and it wasn’t in full force yet. Glen actually had a heart attack. And he’s doing fine now.

G: He is. I saw him speak here recently at the launch of ACMI’s Dreams Come True exhibition.

N: Yeah, cool! So anyway, there was a project that had a release date in two years that didn’t have any directors on it. They had asked me to go onto that movie when Glen was on it to help out on the story department. So with what was going on with the short and what I was doing in the story department there, Lasseter saw that and I think he thought I’d be a good fit for the movie. So he asked if I’d like to direct it. And I said, ‘Yes, of course!’ And then I asked for Byron, ‘cause he said, ‘Would you like to work with somebody else, ‘cause you have two years to make a movie where you’d usually have four.’ And John was like ‘You don’t have to answer right now, I’m just throwing it out there…’ And I’m like ‘No, no, no! I really want to work with Byron!’ So that’s how that all came together. And Glen eventually, he took some time, recovered, and then he worked with us on the film. Really, Glen’s involvement is why the animation is just so incredible.

G: Is this referring to the ‘Best of Both Worlds’ seminar of his I’ve read about?

N: It is, it is.

G: And that was all about blending traditional hand-drawn techniques with CG animation?

B: You’re exactly right. The fact we had Glen, who’s been the heart and soul of Disney hand-drawn animation for the last three decades… He’s an amazing teacher and mentor. He’s got this great passion for what he does. He loves art and he loves animation. He wants to bring young people into this industry, and really mentor them. What’s great, the CG animators we have on the film are all very young – most of them are in their early 20s and they’re very hungry to learn. They have that boundless energy. And Glen loves that. It’s this masterclass situation for them, working on the film. But Glen’s is this fluid, natural, very physical drawing style. Nathan and I would be in the room with the animators and we would get up in the front of the room and act out what we thought Flynn and Rapunzel should be doing. He’d be Flynn, I’d be Rapunzel, then we’d switch. Or he’d be the horse and I’d be Pascal. And other animators would get up too. But Glen would be there with an electronic tablet with the animator’s scene that they had started displayed on it. And he’d be watching us and he’d be watching our expressions, then he’d be drawing on it – he’d draw and draw and draw. He’s like this instant camera with a pencil. And then there’d you be you—as Rapunzel, or as Flynn—making the perfect expression and the perfect pose. Then the animator has this as a reference to take back to their desk. Even the poses on the poster are influenced by what Glen did. It really does bring something that’s really unique. And the end result is that the animation in the film is, we think, really beyond anything that’s been done – human-wise, especially.

G: Was Tangled always planned as Disney’s 50^th animated feature film, or did that come about due to the setbacks?

N: It wasn’t planned! But it’s so great the way it worked out, because Snow White was a Brothers Grimm story and so is this. It’s such a cool book-end. And we didn’t even know! We were six months into the movie when someone finally did the math and said ‘Hey, by the way, this is the 50^th animated feature!’ And there was already so much pressure! It’s so hard to make one of these movies. It’s so hard to tell a really compelling story that people are hopefully going to want to see over and over again – that’s the goal. And on top of it, working with John Lasseter—and I mean this in the best way—is difficult. John wants the best. He will not settle for anything less than the best. If you want that John Lasseter seal of approval, you have to work extremely hard to get it. And we wanted that seal of approval! So then when they said ‘And it’s also the 50^th animated feature!’ Okay! That’s enough pressure! Don’t put anything else on us! We can’t take any more!

G: The article the LA Times ran on the film last month claimed it was possibly the second most expensive film ever made when the entirety of production was encompassed. How weird is it knowing that not only have you made the 50^th Disney feature animation, but also the second most expensive film ever at this point in time?

B: The nice thing about this is that they don’t tell us exact numbers! And this again is part of John’s influence, but our job is making it the movie it needs to be. Nathan and I do like epic movies with a big scale to them, so we tried not to hold back. We don’t limit ourselves in the story room saying ‘Well, I don’t know if we can do this technologically, or if we can afford this.’ It’s more about ‘What’s going to make this movie great?’ And that’s what’s great for our crew. That challenges the crew. And the studio is great, because they’ll support you in any way they can. They’re expensive movies, because one animator working for an entire week will produce maybe three to five seconds of animation. It’s ridiculous. Once you do the math and figure that out for a 90 minute movie, the man hours involved are insane. When you factor in all of that, plus maybe seven years of research on the hair…

G: Seven years?!

B: Seven years! And when you think about all that, and the advertising… It does get pricey. But the thing is, these things last forever. People will watch these films over and over. And you’ll raise your kids on them, and you’ll see these things far beyond when we’re around, I think. That’s what we’re always thinking about. We want to make something that’s lasting. So we take extraordinary pains to make sure it’s going to last a long time.

G: Earlier this year I read you both saying you were still having doubts about the hair, even as late as March. What was the problem there?

N: The problem was, hair has never really been done like this in these films before. Whether it’s Pixar, or DreamWorks, or Sony, or whoever, if you look at any of their CG films, hair is usually to the shoulder maybe, or in a ponytail. It’s so complicated technically to get that free-flowing hair brushing against surfaces. And we were going to have seventy feet of it! They always say ‘Don’t have that hair touch anything! Don’t have characters touch hair!’ Meanwhile, we’re having her tie people up with it, and throw it up in the rafters and climb it, and use it as a bullwhip – all these crazy things. We were asking this impossible thing. And we kept having what we called ‘Bad Hair Days.’ It sounds funny now, but at the time it was the worst thing in the world! It was just going nuts in every scene. It looked like there were squirrels running through it or something. It would just randomly fly up out of nowhere, and we were watching this stuff going ‘This is a nightmare.’ We had to have a real talk – ‘Is this going to work?’

G: So how did you turn it around? It looks superb in the finished film.

N: We went to the crew and we said ‘Look: we have this release date in place, we have this great story. This has to work.’ Luckily, we work with incredibly smart people. They went away and they made it work. I think at first it was a little rough, but by the time we got to the end of it, they were just nailing it. I don’t know what they did, but luckily they’re smart enough to figure it out. But we were pretty tense for a while!

G: Is it too soon to discuss what you’re working on next?

B: No, we know. Nathan and I pitched our next film for John Lasseter about eight months ago, while we were still finishing Tangled. People were like ‘You guys want to take a break, right?’ And we do. And we are. But at the same time, there’s this strange feeling. It’s almost like a post-traumatic stress syndrome that happens after you finish one of these things, because you’re working in such a focused way for so long. So psychologically, it’s good for us to have something the future. It’s too early to talk about plot and characters—it’s such a broad idea right now—but the thing we always say about this is that it will have everything that people love about Tangled. It’ll have great characters, lots of emotion, it’s got a great scale—an epic scope to it—but a completely different type of movie.

G: Is that motivated by an existing tale, or, like Bolt, is it an original story?

B: No, it’s an original. Nathan and I are huge fans of movies in general, so we’ll go see The Social Network, or we’ll see Inception, or we’ll see a great old film that someone tells us about, and we’re kind of sponges, so we absorb all this stuff. And hopefully we put this into a great new package.

G: Will it be CG animated?

N: Yes. Whether it’s 2D or CG, those are all storytelling tools in your toolbox. We just have such a passion for CG. We love 2D as well.

G: You both have quite a lot of experience in traditional animation…

N: We both have that background, yeah. This next thing we’re doing, part of the reason we think it should be CG, is that it’s a huge action movie. We want to make it the biggest action movie anyone’s ever seen. So the things you can do with the camera in CG just feels like, for this next one, that would be the way to go. But we’re open-minded. It’s so cool to work at a studio where you have that option. I don’t know that there’s another studio that does both 2D and CG at the moment.

G: Are there any more 2D animated features on the cards at Disney?

B: Yeah. Ron [Clements] and Jon [Musker] who directed The Princess and the Frog are now directing a new 2D film. That’s one of the ones in development.

G: Are you able to shed any light on that one yet?

B: Again, it’s really too early. We have other stuff in the mix as well. It really is up to the director. If the choice of the story, you feel, needs to be told in 2D, they won’t argue with you. It really is up to us. We’ll look at a project or story and say ‘What do I need to tell this story? Do I need moving cameras and deep space, or is it better told in a more flat, graphic way?’

G: I think Tangled made such great use of its 3D. It’s one of the few 3D films I’ve seen which I felt genuinely justified the presentation.

N: Thank you! That’s really nice to hear. At this point, it truly feels like anyone you talk to has been to at least one 3D movie where you walk out of the movie and go ‘Why did I just pay the extra money for that? Why was that in 3D?’ Or sometimes these films go very gimmicky with the 3D. There’s just so much of it out there at the moment. So from the get-go, the studio had said, ‘It would be great if you could do this in 3D.’ And we were like, ‘Okay. If we’re going to do this in 3D, that 3D has to be there for a reason. If people are going to pay the extra money, we have to give them more bang for their buck.’ So every shot that we worked on, and every story point, we kept going back and saying ‘Okay, what will that look like in 3D?’ So there’s this extra amount of brain power that we had to put into everything. But at the end of the day, we feel it really worked out well. These movies are all about escapism and the way we’ve used 3D in this movie, you’re just more immersed in the story. But I don’t want to not sell the 2D version, because it does work that way!

G: Can you talk a little about working with Alan Menken on the music? Is that a very involved collaboration from your end?

B: Definitely. Alan was in there right from the start, and one of the great things that happened when he came in, he said, ‘I’ve done Disney films with music before. Let’s not repeat ourselves. Let’s not do the same thing.’ And that was exactly in line with what Nathan and I wanted to do. We had looked at older Disney films like Jungle Book and Pinocchio and Cinderella. And those films have songs in them, but they’re not necessarily a Broadway musical. We thought that that felt very good for this film. The story kind of tells you how much music it can hold. Alan said, ‘Great, let’s do that.’ And so the songs are in there and they propel the story. There’s no gratuitous songs. They’re always there for a reason. And Alan said ‘Well, instead of just having random, Broadway sounding music, or music typical of recent Disney films, why don’t we make Rapunzel’s music sound more like Joni Mitchell wrote them, or Cat Stevens?’ He kept playing ‘Chelsea Morning’ for us, which was a great Joni Mitchell song with open tuning. Very singer/songwriter. We thought that was a great match for Rapunzel, because this girl has been locked away in her room. You can just picture her sitting on her bed with a guitar, composing these songs. It felt more handmade. Contrast that to Gothel’s song, which was a more traditional stage musical number. It’s got a lot of stage presence and a lot of charisma and a lot of… Well, not over-acting, but Gothel is very flamboyant, whereas Rapunzel is more true. It’s a great contrast. And it does a lot for the story.

G: Which brings me to the final thing I wanted to touch on before we finish up: the staging of the musical numbers. Clearly, you have a lot of fun with them throughout, but Mother Gothel’s number in particular…

N: We haven’t seen too many instances of characters singing in these CG movies before. So we wanted to do something that really was different. What she’s doing in that song, she’s keeping Rapunzel in the dark. And so the song itself takes place in the dark, and later on during the reprise, she’s clouding her mind, and so there’s all of this fog that comes in. That was a really fun song. You can get away with things in these songs. Logic can go out the window a little bit. We had so much fun with that – she can pop in and out, and all the visual jokes we were able to come up with. That’s the power of having songs in your film. You’re able to creatively explore areas that you wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

Tangled releases on January 6^th.

Merry Xmas!

2010-12-25T10:30:00.000+11:00

Tangled Interview in Beat

2010-12-23T09:30:00.007+11:00

Pick up the new issue of Beat and turn to page 32 and you’ll find my interview with Nathan Greno and Byron Howard, the directors of Tangled. If the printed word’s not your thing (you Millennial, you), you can peruse the issue online using the digital flipbook found here, or simply read my piece here.

I’ll post the full transcript of our conversation soon. They were fun guys. Movie’s good too.

The Sound of Pictures Review @ Fancy Goods

2010-12-20T18:36:00.008+11:00

Last month I reviewed Andrew Ford’s The Sound of Pictures: Listening to the Movies, from Hitchcock to High Fidelity for the Summer 2010/11 issue of Bookseller+Publisher.

That review is now online at Fancy Goods, B+P’s excellent blog. Read it here.

As an aside, should anyone be on the market for a Christmas gift for that special cinephile who has everything, in addition to Ford’s book, might I suggest this? (Thank me later.)

The Tree of Life Trailer

2010-12-16T21:14:00.007+11:00

And just to think there’s dinosaurs yet to be seen!

Watch at Apple.

Review of Burton’s Oyster Boy @ LiteraryMinded

2010-12-14T18:42:00.004+11:00

I’ve revisited Tim Burton’s The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories for Ange over at LiteraryMinded. The book has been rather unctuously repackaged as a Christmas title and shoved back on shelves to catch last-minute shoppers on the market for a novelty gift. Stick with the standard edition.

Read my review here.

SEE: Me Hosting DiCE! READ: Excuses!

2010-12-13T21:46:00.018+11:00

FOREMOST: Apologies for my recent absence. Days have been full. (But you’re used to that, right?) I’m doing a few bits and pieces – and a few very cool bits and pieces at that – for the odd place here and there, and I’ll be able to point you in their direction before long. Unfortunately, this mandates that my attentions (that’s right: all of ‘em) must yet remain elsewhere. But I’ll be back. Eventually. How are you?

NOW: A few weeks ago the kind people of DiCE were generous enough to invite me to host their November event, which included a post-screening Q&A with the team behind Less Adolescent. Said Q&A session is now streamable as video online, and in it I manage to both speak very quickly and look very awkward whilst making do without a chair. (And just look at the size of that vein worming its way upside my skull. What’s that line from In the Loop? “You know what you look like? A squeezed dick.”) You can watch it below, or click through on the link below that to view it in higher resolution.

DiCE 2 - Less Adolescent from dice showcase on Vimeo.

DiCE’s December event showcases Simon Palomares’ documentary Kohonas and will be hosted by Genevieve Bailey. December 15^th, 1000 £ Bend, 7:30pm. All the info here.

(Thanks to Ange for snapping the pic at the head of this post.)

Have Seen. I Approve.

2010-12-13T09:36:00.001+11:00

Latter screens at ACMI Dec. 27^th – Jan. 3^rd.

And Everything is Going Fine Trailer

2010-12-03T19:31:00.012+11:00

Steven Soderbergh curates a fascinating portrait of actor/writer/monologist Spalding Gray in his assembled footage documentary, And Everything is Going Fine. I saw it this year at MIFF more or less as a Gray ignoramus, where the late artist’s life outlook and words left what’s proved to be a lasting effect on me. Now perched atop my ‘To Read’ pile is his Swimming to Cambodia. On my Christmas wish-list is everything else of his.

Soderbergh’s film is one of my favourites of the year. I laughed. Cried. I was galvanised. Humbled. Inspired. Edified. Moved.

Now, thanks to Apple, it has a trailer, which you can view here. Sadly no word on an Australian release yet, as far as I’ve been able to tell.

“We’d be havin’ a different conversation if you were dead.” Recently Viewed...

2010-12-02T18:34:00.016+11:00

…was Red Hill – a go-for-broke Aussie neo-Western, in which putative face of evil is both black and disfigured (see Tom E. Lewis as Jimmy Conway* above). (Also: I’ll flag this post with a SPOILER WARNING.)

But perhaps to lead with this is disingenuous.

After all, this is not an admonishment of MUFF alum Patrick Hughes’ stylish feature debut for fueling middle Australia’s Jungian dread of ‘the other.’ (It doesn’t**.) Rather, it’s a brief consideration of how such an immediately brash sight as a shotgun-wielding, flame-ravaged Lewis saps Hughes’ film of its dramatic interest. (It does.)

Red Hill sees young city cop Shane (Ryan Kwanten, True Blood) on his first day of duty in the rural Victorian town of the title. His wife (Claire Van Der Boom, The Square) is expecting again after a failed first pregnancy. The move to calmer surrounds has been doctor mandated. Upon fronting for duty, Shane discovers his superior is an ossified Steve Bisley, complete with Colonel Sanders goatee and the voice of an imminent earthquake, and whose saurian ways are so stubbornly set he’s practically encased in amber.

A TV news report tells it: an explosion at the high-security prison some six hours’ drive from town. Missing is one Jimmy Conway – former resident of Red Hill, expert tracker, crack-shot marksman... and cold-blooded murderer champing for vengeance against the entire force who put him away.

Conway’s first appearance is fittingly unnerving. First he’s not there, then he is. His sawn-off shotgun is leveled starkly at Kwanten’s rookie, and Hughes frames the reveal to fix the audience in the line of its amputated barrel too. “I wanted to create something quite confronting. The image of an Aboriginal man with a sawn-off shotgun is pretty confronting,” Hughes told Cinetology’s Luke Buckmaster in a recent interview. Of course, the sight of anyone with a half-seared face is at least briefly confronting, insofar as it forces us to acknowledge the infirmity of our own corporeal self. And hell, what’s more confronting to we middle-class plebs than the sudden appearance of a stranger with a gun?

But the implication of Hughes’ words is that Conway – disfigurement, firearm, aggressive intentions and all – is even more frightening for being of Aboriginal descent. It’s a fraught and unpalatable suggestion, but, in the case of many white Australians, at least, regrettably not one without accuracy. Put frankly, Conway’s Aboriginality holds potential to make him scarier to white audiences because they might presume anti-white sentiment from him. And the most terrifying thing about that? That deep down, white Australians feel they can’t really blame him, knowing responsibility for the social hardships still endured by the Indigenous population at large rests squarely at the feet of their forebears, as well as their government, who persist in failing to find ways to improve quality of life for many of the country’s Indigenous citizens.

All of which, as mentioned, makes Conway’s entrance the bracing cold thrill that’s intended. But once the sight of him is registered in full, the rational mind kicks in, and just like that, Red Hill nixes any chance of narrative interest. After all, there’s no way that in 2010 Film Victoria would bankroll a feature set in the present day whose villain is a gun-slinging Aborigine, least of all one hell-bent on gunning a swathe through a community of innocent white folk. And so we deduce, a mere instant after Conway’s arrival, that the real evil in the film will be unmasked as the band of small town cops who are made so anxious by his sudden return. Hughes’ script offers nothing unexpected for the remainder to throw us off the scent. From here, it’s an inexorable – albeit slickly executed – pitch to a conclusion we’ve had in sight since two acts prior.

Silent throughout save for a parting rasp, Conway navigates the depopulated town in the secret of shadow, and proves preternaturally gifted with a firearm. There’s an obvious effort to paint him as a force of nature; or, at the very least, a man terrifyingly freed from the inhibitive regard for his own life. In fact, had his earthly origins been left more ambiguous, à la Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) in the Coens’ No Country for Old Men (from which Hughes borrows liberally throughout), Red Hill might have come nearer the mix of grit-toothedness, mysticism and social thought-food for which it so clearly strives. In this telling, Conway might have been the unknowable manifestation of the justice of the land, rather than simply a wronged man who happens to be black***, out to sink to his tormentors’ level in the name of revenge. Instead, as a side figure (remember, this is Kwanten’s movie) he’s reduced to an ambiguous, ambulant symbol; an image so loaded his director isn’t quite sure how to wield him.

Which, in the end, and despite what I’m sure were good intentions, might actually make him a damaging representation of Aboriginality after all.

DIRECTOR: Patrick Hughes

SCREENWRITER: Patrick Hughes

CAST: Ryan Kwanten, Steve Bisley, Tom E. Lewis, Kevin Harrington, Claire Van Der Boom

RATING: MA15+

RUN TIME: 95 minutes

_________________________________________

*Exactly why Hughes takes Robert De Niro’s gangster from Goodfellas as the character’s namesake escaped me.

**Unless you’re of the mind that depiction itself, no matter its context, perpetuates damaging stereotypes, but that’s a discussion too grand and unwieldy for these humble surrounds. I think. To be honest, jury’s still out on this. As the hurried final paragraph of this post and its eleventh-hour non-committal about-face no doubt betrays.

***It’s unsure to what extent the crimes endured by Conway are directly motivated by his Aboriginality. Had a white man acted as he did, would the men of Red Hill have treated him just as disgracefully?

Four Frames: A Single Man

2010-12-02T10:55:00.003+11:00

Away…

2010-11-24T07:52:00.002+11:00

…but back by the weekend.

Whatcha watchin’?

“I do what I’m good at.” Recently Viewed...

2010-11-19T12:51:00.013+11:00

…was The American – the muted hitman flick which aims for the minimalism of Melville but winds up strangely vacant. The film is photographer-cum-filmmaker Anton Corbijn’s follow-up to the excellent Ian Curtis biopic, Control, which granted motion to the moody compositional stylings of his rock photography work to lasting, mesmeric effect. And yet, despite sharing with that film a fixed visual finesse and superior modulation of tone, The American proves as evanescent as a burst of pink mist. It’s most notable as a sustained exercise in tenor (displacement; quietude) and the cultivation of a sense of place, because the closing credits bring with them the deflating realisation that there’s been little else to latch onto throughout.

George Clooney stars, cast somewhat against type as the doleful professional assassin who answers to two names throughout: first Jack, and then later, Edward. In a striking pre-credits sequence set against the snow-draped wilds of Sweden, we witness the terrible price of keeping company with his coolly efficient killer. When his expertise as a maker of customised firearms sees him relocated to regional Italy for a job, a superior cautions him: “Don’t make any friends.” You see, the life of a career hitman is inevitably a lonely one. This is about as near to a point as The American ever really gets.

Corbijn opts for sustained stretches of silence to demonstrate Jack/Edward’s isolation, letting his lens do the talking for the most. So Clooney disassembles a rifle in a single taciturn take, and enacts his rigorous morning fitness regime just as soundlessly. He slips through the village with minimal contact with the locals, sitting in coffee shops and arranging his professional rendezvous’ with his beautiful client (Thekla Reuten) via phone booths. His only other human contact comes in the form of an absurdly comely prostitute (Violante Placido, who generously maintains a ‘European’ attitude to clothing) and the village priest (Paolo Bonacelli), who predictably serves as the movie’s moral mouthpiece. As he and Jack/Edward form amity over brandy and strolls in the park, he’s reduced to little more than the verbatim and ad nauseum voicing of the film’s rote subtext: that it’s never too late for a wayward soul to seek absolution.

The episodes of stillness are ruptured by fleet flare-ups of incident whenever we might find our sympathies drifting too absent-mindedly toward Jack/Edward. He’s a killer, after all – and a killer by choice. Yet the film is frustratingly ambivalent about this. On the one hand, these punctuations of violence remind us that despite being played by George Clooney, our eponymous tourist is a reprehensible fellow who’ll kill arbitrarily to save his own skin. On the other, the film’s finale, by way of an especially on-the-nose case of visual symbolism, expects us shed tears when tragedy inevitably befalls him. Morally indeterminate characters are the most interesting of all, so there’s no faulting The American for rendering its protagonist in arcane shades of grey. What’s disappointing here is the absence of any real sense of existential exploration. Instead of reflective, the film is merely aloof. It’s a damning distinction.

An interesting counterpoint is The Limits of Control – Jim Jarmusch’s equally glacially-paced hitman movie which mystified audiences last year. Jarmusch notoriously shot the two hour picture from a screenplay of just 25 pages, yet folded into the visuals and spare conversational exchanges a cornucopia of allusions and symbols. The film is teeming with meaning, but never once stoops to lecturing its audience. Contrast this with The American, which is adapted from a novel (A Very Private Gentleman, by Martin Booth), yet feels like 25 pages’ worth of ideas – narrative and thematic – wrung out to feature length.

Patronising reviews have accused the film’s detractors of presuming Bourne movie thrills, pinning their misgivings on a cut-and-dry case of mismatched expectations. The disappointment has nil to do with its being boring or slow (besides, the former is untrue, and the second often a virtue), but rather its being unsatisfactorily conventional and slight. For no matter how you chicly dress it, pulp is still pulp, and The American is self-loathing pulp in denial.

DIRECTOR: Anton Corbijn

SCREENWRITER: Rowan Joffe

CAST: George Clooney, Violante Placido, Thekla Reuten, Paolo Bonacelli, Johan Leyson

RATING: MA15+

RUN TIME: 105 minutes

David Michôd Interview @ Readings

2010-11-17T15:31:00.002+11:00

My brief Q&A with Animal Kingdom director David Michôd is now online at the Readings blog for your (hopeful) enjoyment.

Read it here.

Four Frames: Close Encounters of the Third Kind

2010-11-17T12:58:00.001+11:00

White Material @ ACMI

2010-11-17T12:43:00.003+11:00

ACMI has announced that Claire Denis’ White Material will have a long play season from Jan 14^th-Feb 2^nd 2011. I’ve managed to miss the film twice this year (at both the Alliance Française French Film and Sydney Film Festivals) so you can bet I’m going to get my act together to finally catch it here.

The film’s trailer recently went up at Apple. For session times, visit ACMI online.

DiCE November Update

2010-11-15T08:45:00.004+11:00

As previously mentioned, the good people of DiCE have invited me to host their November event. There’s been a slight change of line-up since I last posted about the evening. Now joining me in conversation after the screening of Less Adolescent will be director/producer Lee Galea, DoP Dan Farmer and actress Charlotte Usher.

More info here.

November 23^rd, 1000 £ Bend, 7:30pm. Hope to see you there.

RIP Dino De Laurentiis

2010-11-12T22:56:00.005+11:00

Thanks for:

...et al.

Blue Valentine Poster

2010-11-12T00:01:00.002+11:00

Yes, please:

From Yahoo! Movies.

Shaun Tan Interview @ Readings

2010-11-10T07:56:00.005+11:00

I’ve put some questions to the wonderful Shaun Tan about his animated short The Lost Thing, which is available now on DVD. The result can be found on the Readings website.

Give it a read?

The Illusionist Trailer

2010-11-09T08:01:00.002+11:00

The Road, I Am Love, The Social Network, Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives, and The Illusionist: my at-a-pinch, provisional, and arranged-in-no-particular-order top five favourite films I’ve seen so far in 2010. The latter is adapted from a previously unused script by Jacques Tati for animation by Sylvain Chomet, whose The Triplets of Belleville – charming though it may be – isn’t a patch on this newest outing, which I’d count as a masterpiece of sorts.

The Illusionist now has a trailer available at Apple. View it here.

Four Frames: Boogie Nights

2010-11-07T15:02:00.003+11:00

Interview: Winter’s Bone Director Debra Granik, Pt II

2010-11-05T12:14:00.001+11:00

Here’s part II of my discussion with Debra Granik, director of Winter’s Bone. Part I was posted yesterday and can be found here.

Jennifer Lawrence had only been in two films before this one, is that right?

Yeah, but they were two large films – meaty, meaty roles. One was Lori Petty’s film The Poker House, and the other was [Guillermo] Arriaga’s film The Burning Plain, which very much received international recognition. So she’d had these substantial roles. But luckily we didn’t know about that – we could just see her as any other young woman that walked in. Someone who’d read the script very carefully, someone who’d put her heart into it. She was one of the first people we believed. We felt like we were hearing the voice of Ree Dolly for the first time. That was exciting. And then she let us know that, truly, she was super motivated. It wasn’t just like some career move for her. She did let us know that she understood it would be arduous, and that she was down for it. She understood there would be low amenities, that we’d shoot on real locations. So once you know all of that from an actor, you’re free to get excited.

We’re nearing the end of our time, so one thing I’d like to ask you is: how difficult is it being a filmmaker with a strong social conscience today? There seems to be a lot of contradictions that come with the job. Even for a small film like Winter’s Bone, you’re still having to travel the world, shack up in places like this [Melbourne’s Sofitel]. And in making this film, you’ve spent time living with people who – on paper, at least – exist on or below the poverty line. Is that a difficult thing to resolve with yourself?

It’s very difficult. Very difficult. I’ve been telling the [Missouri locals] ‘Get a passport. We are taking you somewhere!’ One thing that’s been pleasurable, the [locals] who can travel have been going to the festivals and screenings and representing the film. They do the discussions. We’ve had one very treasured spokeswoman. She’s the featured vocalist in the film. Her name is Marideth Sisco and she’s a lifelong scholar of the region as well, and many journalists seek her out. Her and her colleagues made a soundtrack for the film and I think it will have a life of its own. It had been her life-long dream to record music. She’s always done it for ad hoc pleasure. She’s been in local festivals, but it’s been on a very humble basis. And she does not desire material gain from it. It would be awesome if she could sustain some of her pursuits – just get reimbursed. She was able to collaborate with someone from Bristol, England, who did the composition. His name is Dickon Hinchliffe, and he’s part of the group The Tindersticks. So they had a transatlantic MP3 dialogue where she sang into her internet recorder and would send him her vocals, and he would accompany her with a very romantic electric fiddle, send it back to her. So she was very thrilled with that. So some really rich things have come from it that I think are splashing back there in Southern Missouri in a really positive way.

So it’s about giving back what and when you’re able to. Even still, I can tell this side of things – the business, the press, the industry of it all – is something that doesn’t sit right with you.

You’re absolutely right. All of what you say is very, very true. The disparity of it all… [Sighs] This festival [MIFF] is actually really commendable and has its heart truly in the right place. But it is hard to stay in a luxury hotel. And to be asked to speak about a region that I don’t come from, at times, is very painful. That’s why it’s been extraordinarily helpful for me to say ‘If you want the skinny on that, talk to Marideth.’ When I did Q&As in New York, it was delightful to have her there. The audience really, really responded to her. She’s a very good public speaker, and uses a lot of humour. So that’s been a blessing – that people who were involved with the film can speak on it in addition to me. I was excited that some of the families who worked on the film were able to come to Sundance. Some had never flown on a plane; some had never used an escalator. So this was interesting and important to me. Obviously I don’t want to create a dog and pony show – more than these things already kind of can be – but at the same time, these wonderful local people are able to receive questions from an audience which they can answer as experts.

Which must have been really validating for them. I assume that’s why they took to it with such gusto – the chance to demonstrate themselves for who they are. I’ve read you speak on how the shadow of Deliverance still looms very long over these regions, even today. It feels rare to see a film set in one of these rural American communities which isn’t exaggerated to be one sort of grotesque depiction or another…

The hard thing is that you can’t put any caveats or disclaimers on a film, ever. The fact is, there’s some press I wouldn’t want them to see. Ashlee’s house is called a ‘hovel’ frequently, a ‘shack.’ I’m not trying to be all “correct” here, I’m just trying to say that that house is very solid to them. It’s not big enough, because the family does have a teenage son who needs privacy at this time, so they do need to find a way to make an addition. And the addition will be hand-built, and it most likely won’t be made from the same materials as the body of the house, but that contributes to the very intense texture that you find there. It makes it look, frankly, very out of the mainstream. In today’s America, not many people are building their own homes. Or they’re not taking a trailer and making it permanent, and adding maybe a tin roof awning, augmenting a humble dwelling and trying to make it sustainable over time. But that’s another qualifier. People in the region are statistically poor. That is a fact. If you were to look at where the United States draws the poverty line, they would all be living at or under that line. Primarily, they work in the service economy. And the wages you can reap from the service economy are usually at or below that line. The difference is I can’t say ‘Yes, people are financially “poor” but they’re not impoverished. They’ve got 130 years on that land, they’ve got the land, they know how to live from the land…’

It’s a completely different way of life. And so they don’t consider themselves to be quote unquote “poor”?

No, of course not. They’ve got music, their own language, their own sense of humour. The kids have four days off from school so that they can hunt. No-one’s going to starve. You can’t say that about any urban situation. Still to this day, there’s nothing I can say to make clear that being financially poor has nothing to do with being impoverished. I’ve read reviews which have accused the film of “dabbling in the porn of poverty,” and sometimes I just want to shake some American journalists. One guy said ‘Oh, they went to such great lengths to make her house look grimy’ – he just went on about the grime! – and I’m like, ‘Could you calm down? The Laysons don’t feel their house is “grimy.”’ The fact is, it hurts. This family trusted us. We put their house on screen, and then some very pejorative language did come back. So that is on us. The community didn’t know how the rest of the country would react, and some of that has been harsh. So that’s a dilemma I don’t know how to solve, even for the next project. The only way I’ve found to address it is to have the Laysons speak for themselves on the DVD. There’s space to put very multivalent definitions of ‘hillbilly’ by self-reporting “hillbillies” who are saying, ‘This is what it means to us, to our lives. And this is how we distinguish what you say about our lives to what we say about our lives.’ So hopefully that will be of interest to people.

___________________________________________

Winter’s Bone releases nationally on November 11^th. Learn more about the film at its official site. Find out more about Marideth Sisco at her website.

Four Frames: Broken Flowers

2010-11-05T09:37:00.001+11:00

Interview: Winter’s Bone Director Debra Granik, Part I

2010-11-04T16:47:00.011+11:00

After a series of successful appearances at film festivals worldwide, and now a surprise flurry of awards season speculation, Winter’s Bone is fast on its way to becoming 2010’s American indie that could. Being the story of 17-year-old Ree Dolly’s (Jennifer Lawrence) hunt for her missing father, a meth pusher within her family’s insular rural Missouri community, the film, directed by Debra Granik, maintains an admirably impartial stance while turning a torch on some uncomfortable truths about life on capitalist America’s back porch.

Granik, as I learnt when I spoke with her earlier this year, is a filmmaker in possession of a strong social conscience. While her film might ostensibly function as a modest backwater thriller (shades of Frozen River here), her motivations and ambitions for Winter’s Bone could hardly have struck me as more admirable.

I was fortunate enough to secure some time with her during her visit to Melbourne, where Winter’s Bone screened as part of the 2010 Melbourne International Film Festival. What follows is the first part of that conversation.

I think the first thing I noticed watching the film was how faithful it was to Daniel Woodrell’s source novel. Almost every line of dialogue comes straight from the page.

It was. It was a very, very, very, very faithful adaptation. We had to delete things. [Daniel Woodrell] could talk about Ree’s inner life and give a huge amount of back story about what her family was like before meth, but we chose to make the film very ‘present tense.’ You meet Ree as she’s being plunged into a very difficult situation, and also at a time when her family is already in distress. He was able to show more of her heritage. [The character of] Teardrop had really extensive monologues in the book, and they were beautiful, and John Hawkes – who plays Teardrop – loved them. Yet it’s interesting how little monologue can go into a film.

Something snaps, doesn’t it? Unless you’re opting for a Brechtian approach…

Exactly. Monologues are not the friend of films. They’re the friend of plays, and there’s very little space for them in filmmaking in the traditional sense. So while we were extremely faithful, we were going to be losing a lot of the context for Ree’s existence, and some of the regional context. And then some of the changes happened through circumstance. In the book she has two brothers, but we have a brother and a sister, and that came out of circumstance.

I was going to ask about that...

We wrote the script with two brothers. We were casting for two brothers. And we found one boy who lived down the road from the primary location where we were filming. But we couldn’t find the other brother. We were seeing a lot of actual brothers who’d been in larger school plays in Missouri. They were sort of being imported. And they looked imported. They weren’t familiar [with the region] and they couldn’t climb a tree…

So it became a question of authenticity.

That’s right. The girl who lived inside the house that was Ree’s on-screen house was named Ashlee, and she wound up playing Ree’s sister. The on-screen house is Ashlee’s real-life house. All the props and toys are hers. Every object that we ended up using was from Ashlee’s real daily life, so it became insane for us not to use Ashlee. She added a certain level of comfort for Jennifer Lawrence as well – this direct liaison to the property. On set and off set, Jennifer started to feel very comfortable because this little person was holding her hand and bringing her into this world.

I assumed it must have been a decision of yours, because changing things to give Ree a sister is very on-point thematically. Men are largely absent or ineffectual in Winter’s Bone. Women power this story – as they did your first film [2004’s Down to the Bone].

It was never a desire of ours to change it, but in the end we felt grateful because the chemistry was really working. And she really welcomed Isaiah, the boy from down the road who played the brother, and he felt better that she was there.

You worked with a local guide to ingratiate the production to the community. Was it difficult earning their trust?

He made the difference. He was held in high regard as a life-long member of the community, and he did the introductions. [The people of the community] had already been made very aware of the content of the book. We furthered that by asking them to read the book – that felt very important – and then there seemed to be a very big shift where people really wanted to help. People knew that we were outsiders and they knew we had a lot of questions, and they knew that they were the experts. So they saw a situation in which their expertise could make a really strong impact on the film and continually create its authenticity.

How did they take to the logistics of a film shoot? It must have felt very intrusive to some of them.

There came a stage where the mechanics of filmmaking became of great interest to them. They were very curious. There were a lot of tinkerers and engineers who knew how to fix things who’d not seen all of the infrastructure of filmmaking. And we had a very humble infrastructure. We kept telling them ‘Y’know, there’s much snazzier equipment than what we have here!’ But they were very impressed by the technicians on the film crew, so we had people who lingered by the production at all times. Which meant I had these advisors I could turn to at any time and say ‘Do you believe that? Was that an honest interaction?’ And this one woman in particular would often say to me ‘You know what? We don’t say it that way.’ So I’d change the script sometimes.

Was this mainly dialogue lifted straight from the book they’d dispute?

Right. A few things Daniel conserves in his book are from an older time, and he will cop to that. In some cases it was only slight contemporisation. There are instances where something from the book would be too formal, or too stiff to be verbalised, so the amendment would be to make it more conversational. As a result, there are quite a few additional dialogue credits. The [actor who plays the army] recruiter was the author of his own scene. He told me what questions would be germane. That scene was not in the book.

No, which is something else I was going to ask you about: was that an effort to externalise some of that information about Ree’s inner life you mentioned having to sacrifice earlier?

That’s exactly right. In the book it was planted that Ree was curious about the military – as many youth of the region are. Whether it could be an actual link to an income, a route of exit to show them a wider world, and help them send money back home. We chose to show that for the film. As we were touring the schools in the area, we were seeing that recruitment was a common practice. Therefore it felt very authentic that a Ree Dolly would aspire to find out whether she could get that bonus money, and what enlistment might mean to her.

So that performer was actually one of these recruiters?

Correct. So he could answer very precisely. He was given the facts of Ree’s life, he knew her age, what she was going to ask, and he would just answer her like he would answer anybody. Jennifer knew the scene very well, so she would keep things on-point. He just had to be authentic with her. He didn’t have to worry about us, or the fact he was appearing in a film.

Would you like to keep working like that?

I love working like that – with people who have life experience that no filmmaker could ever replicate or imitate. I do love that. I love that. It takes a very brave person to agree to do it, because it’s super unnerving to be transplanted to a place where all of a sudden it’s going to get very hushed, and the lens is going to be pointed at you, and you’re wondering whether you can do it, and there’s nothing I [as director] can say or do besides show a lot of care and support. When it works, it’s a gem. You have to be very humble about how you approach it because you can’t demand that from people. It’s a kind of lyrical gift when it happens.

It’s also a huge show of trust on your behalf. Surely that must go some way to assuaging any anxieties they might have about appearing in a film?

You just can’t predict when these things will work. But I do admire hugely neo-realist filmmakers from around the world – contemporary neo-realist and the originators. I feel like some really powerful examples of that have been done here in Australia and New Zealand. Especially in films that have involved interactions with the Aboriginal community. God, I still don’t even know what the real story was behind [Werner Herzog’s] Where the Green Ants Dream – I have no idea about how that really played out! But some of those films remind me that there’s a long, long tradition of filmmakers who are very curious about how they can get lived experience to be represented in a film. It’s a quest to know where those boundaries are and how to access that.

It’s especially interesting in the case of Winter’s Bone, which I’m sure you’ll agree is quite a genre piece. It’s great to see you using these methods at the service of a film like this, to have untested non-professionals colouring in the edges of this Southern gothic noir mystery. It brings authenticity somewhere you might not expect to find it, which, as you say, you wouldn’t get by casting professionals in every role.

Exactly. We had people from the region infusing it with their own accents, quality of voice… You can’t manufacture that. That has to be provided by someone with experience. I was very fortunate with the seasoned actors who were from out of state, as many of them actually hailed from surrounding states. Dale Dickey – who plays Merab – comes from Eastern Tennessee. She has aunts that she was able to conjure in her mind. [Lauren Sweetser], who plays Ree’s friend, comes from North Arkansas, born and bred. Jennifer Lawrence herself comes from Kentucky. Daniel’s script would have been very foreign to anybody cast from other places.

What about John Hawkes and Garret Dillahunt? Do they hail from neighbouring regions too?

Well, John Hawkes had to work in a way that was different. He comes from Minnesota, in the Far North, and the one thing that he did say that was very resonant was that he comes from a small town. A small town that’s embedded in a very large rural area, so he felt like that really was helpful to him. He understood the observations people might make, and the perceptions people would have. He had local people take him around, and because he’s not immediately recognisable, he’s able to go wherever he wants and just be there and observe. So he was taken to some off-the-beaten-track bars, and he was allowed to make these observations about body language, and how people sit, and order beers, and smoke their cigarettes. And he was able to take some of those notes and incorporate it into his work.

Was it difficult to get the film made on those terms – shooting that in that area, casting non-actors in supporting roles?

Yes. Very difficult! The first thing was ‘Oh, couldn’t you shoot some place that has a lot of economic incentives?’ and whatnot. And finally we were able to disabuse them of that. ‘Then why make Daniel Woodrell’s book? If you’re going to try to make it in Vancouver, Canada, or Mississippi, then pick another book!’ I sound hostile because by the end, we felt hostile. And the idea of having recognisable leads that were financeable was really appalling to us. The notion that we would just be airlifting these people…

Were you pushed towards anyone in particular?

Some really wonderful actresses were proposed to us. Abbie Cornish was someone that we had a real interest in as a performer, but we couldn’t stand the idea that at the time she was 28. Amazing as a 28 year-old – don’t take that from her! She’s 28 – a mature woman! A young, vivacious, mature woman. Don’t make her imitate a 17 year-old! That’s not right – that’s humiliating! So what happened was that we said ‘No. This film isn’t going to work via that financing scheme of having financeable stars.’ So we lost our financing on the West Coast completely, because they didn’t know any other way of doing it. They’re risk-averse, and they will never go back into this beautiful, lost tradition of introducing somebody.
___________________________________________

Winter’s Bone releases nationally on November 11^th. ~~Check back tomorrow for the remainder of this interview.~~ Part two of this interview can now be found here.

Happy Halloween!

2010-10-31T09:03:00.001+11:00

What are you watching?

Four Frames: Suspiria

2010-10-30T15:08:00.002+11:00

Your DiCE Host for November...

2010-10-30T15:00:00.003+11:00

...Is me.

Being showcased is Lee Galea’s Less Adolescent. I’ll be hosting a Q&A with Lee and lead actor Scott Middleton after the screening. November 23^rd is the night. 7:30pm is the time. 1000 £ Bend is the place.

More details and a trailer here. Hope to see you there.

The Loved Ones Giveaway

2010-10-29T08:25:00.001+11:00

Thanks to Madman and Contagious Communications, celluloid tongue has five in-season double passes for The Loved Ones to give away.

The film opens on November 4^th. From its official synopsis:

“The Loved Ones follows 17-year-old student Brent (played by Xavier Samuel) who is traumatised after the death of his father in a car accident for which he feels responsible. Wracked with guilt, Brent goes on a bender of pot smoking and loud heavy metal music in his attempt to block out the pain.

Six months later, Brent is asked out to the school prom by Lola Stone (chillingly portrayed by Robin McLeavy), the quietest girl in school. When he turns her down, the rejection enrages her and with the help of her Daddy, she kidnaps Brent and gives him a prom night he will never forget.”

Find out more at the official site.

Believe me when I say the film is good. Very, very good.

To enter, email me your name, postal address, and the answer to the following:

Name the Australian composer responsible for The Loved Ones’ atmospheric score.

The first five correct entrants will be notified by return email.

The tickets can be used Mondays to Fridays only, excluding public holidays, and are valid even with “no free tickets” listings.

Film Review - A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop

2010-10-24T19:39:00.007+11:00

Zhang Yimou is nowadays best known in the West for the wuxia spectacles Hero and House of Flying Daggers, but his early career was decidedly more interesting. The early 1990s saw the Chinese filmmaker shifting from the tragic romance of Ju Dou (co-directed with Yang Fengliang and Oscar-nominated for Best Foreign Language Film) to the anti-despotism allegory of Raise the Red Lantern. It was with these films that he established his now-celebrated command of colour and announced himself as a formalist force to be reckoned with.

On paper, A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Shop seems more aligned with these more bold appearances in the Zhang oeuvre than the ornamental works that have occupied him since the turn of the millennium. Not for any particular commitment to sociopolitical subtext (there’s precious little of that to be found here), but rather sheer cracked audacity – the film is a remake of the Coen brothers’ hugely idiosyncratic Tex-noir debut, Blood Simple.

As by now is well and truly his wont, Zhang sets his telling in an indefinite period of China’s feudal past. (It’s worth noting that the revisionist rationale seems determined by nothing other than its being a setting the director has favoured time and again throughout his career.) So the backwater dive bar of the Coens’ movie is replaced by the eatery of the title, while Blood Simple’s perspiring cowboy P.I, so memorably played by M. Emmet Walsh, is recast as a laconic member of the Chinese imperial police (Sun Honglei). Rusty six-shooters become bows and arrows and weather-beaten jalopies horse-drawn carts. Indeed, much of the film’s modest appeal comes from discovering how the most modern rudiments of the Coens’ twisty plot (doctored photographs; a mislaid cigarette lighter) have been accordingly retrograded.

This Zhang achieves with far greater grace than he does the transmutation of the Coens’ tar-black and absurd stylings into pantomime farce. With the notable exception of Sun, characterisations are broad and the cast grating. It’s a fact most damaging in the case of the film’s central adulterers (Shen-Yang Xiao and Yan Ni), with whose predicament we’re asked to sympathise at …Noodle Shop’s peril. Unlike John Getz’s cocksure-cum-not-so-sure alpha male lead in Blood Simple, Shen-Yang’s Li is an asexual man-child – replete with pink wardrobe – whose only conceivable allure to Yan’s comely honeytrap would seem to lie in his not being her abusive husband, Wang (Ni Dahong). Similarly Yan, in a role strangely credited only as ‘Wang’s Wife’, is so shrill in her more domineering variation of Frances McDormand’s first-ever screen performance that by the time she emerges as the story’s intended hero we’re practically rooting against her.

That Sun’s scenes are where Zhang’s adaptation sticks most to the Coens certainly stacks the deck in his favour. They’re the only sections where the incongruent sensibilities of Zhang and the brothers find any sort of accord and the film makes good on its improbable culture-mashing potential. These largely dialogue-free stretches, in which Sun’s corrupt policeman is left to go about his underhanded business alone on screen, don’t just afford the film its only genuine tension, but free Zhang to play to his own strengths as a visual storyteller. When his characters open their mouths, it’s hard not to wince – according to the subtitles of this Australian theatrical version, the script by Shi Jianquan and Shang Jing disappointingly shirks the challenge to approximate the wonderfully idiomatic patter swapped by the Coens’ players. Instead, the cast are left to wade through colourless tracts of expository dialogue which overexplains rather than entertains or elucidates.

With the Martian-red loam of the Chinese badlands as its backdrop, …Noodle Shop at least doesn’t want for striking imagery. But this is by now a given in any film directed by Zhang, and the film’s aesthetic appeal only carries it so far. It’s a shame that such a singular prospect as this (for when are we next likely to encounter a project of such atypical pedigree?) should ultimately boil down to little more than a curious witness to two obvious things: the pliability of genre storytelling, and the simple truth that certain things will perhaps always be unavoidably lost in translation.

It’s a cold sort of comfort to realise that Hollywood’s mangling of foreign favourites in actual fact goes both ways.

DIRECTOR: Zhang Yimou

SCREENWRITER: Shi Jianquan & Shang Jing

CAST: Sun Honglei, Shen-Yang Xiao, Yan Ni, Ni Dahong, Cheng Ye, Mao Mao, Zhao Benshan

RATING: M

RUN TIME: 95 minutes

[Cross-published at Desktop Magazine]

Four Frames: Blood Simple

2010-10-22T07:56:00.002+11:00

Still Here...

2010-10-20T13:55:00.023+11:00

Some weeks ago I commenced what soon became a characteristically unwieldy (foredoomed?) review/essay/whatever motivated by I’m Still Here, with the intent of cross-examining Joaquin Phoenix’s very public transformation for the purpose of that film with the inscrutable public life of Andy Kaufman – a personal hero of yours truly to this day. Needless to say, it wasn’t a priority, and has since been abandoned. Kaufman wasn’t exactly a film personality, but with these ‘prankumentaries’ – i.e. purported documentaries of dubious authenticity (cf. Exit Through the Gift Shop, Catfish) – gaining some serious traction this year, his unique, line-smearing brand of ‘performance’ certainly seems worthy of some renewed attention. Celebrity never sat easy with Kaufman. He revelled in dismantling his own reputation – and by proxy, celebrity itself – and Phoenix, it could be argued, is the closest we’ve seen to an heir to his mantle since the troubled performer took his mortal bow in 1984.

At any rate, I’ve been light on time for blogging of late, and with I’m Still Here still in theatres and Banksy’s superior Exit Through the Gift Shop newly available on DVD, I thought I’d share the intended beginning of that scrapped Phoenix/Kaufman piece. It’s nothing remarkable: simply a brisk retelling of one of my favourite Kaufman-related anecdotes, as originally narrated by Kaufman cohort, Bob Zmuda. (If you’re not familiar with Kaufman, Milos Forman’s excellent biopic Man on the Moon with Jim Carrey in the starring role serves as an excellent primer to the man and his career.)

----------------------------------------------------

In his book Andy Kaufman Revealed!, Bob Zmuda recounts a prank he and the enigmatic performance artist would carry out for kicks which began with Zmuda entering a restaurant with an attractive female companion. Midway through the meal, he would genuflect, produce a ring box from his pocket and make a public proposal to his ‘girlfriend.’ The woman would respond with an overjoyed Yes! before swallowing her relieved ‘fiancé’ in a passionate embrace. Their fellow diners would applaud, and the happy ‘couple’ would accept their congratulations with grace. Zmuda would then excuse himself for the bathroom.

Enter Kaufman.

At the height of his fame thanks to his role as the bumbling mechanic on Taxi, Kaufman – unlike his indistinctive co-conspirator Zmuda – was at the time a bona fide celebrity. His arrival would lull the restaurant into a state of hushed recognition. All eyes would turn to see which lucky table would find themselves dining beside the famous television star. Once satisfied his presence was established, Kaufman would ‘spot’ her – the lone beauty in the corner booth. He’d slide into the seat opposite her and, employing every jot of his Hollywood allure, promise her the night of a lifetime. I’m very flattered, she’d reply, but I’m dining with my fiancé tonight. In fact, we’ve just now become engaged. This Kaufman would dismiss with the flick of a wrist. I’m Andy fucking Kaufman! From TV! I’m rich! Leave with me right now and I’ll give you the world!

Forks would hover mid-scoop before static lips. The scraping of a plate would have knelled like a church bell. Okay, she’d consent after a moment’s grave deliberation. Then, with a grin: Let’s do it. Without wasting an instant, the star and his conquest would gallop hand-in-hand past a sea of shocked faces, scramble into his convertible – parked conspicuously out front – and disappear with a triumphant whoop into the night. Moments later Zmuda would return, still beaming, to find his new fiancé absconded, his dinner gone cold, and – if the play had really been timed right – a hefty cheque awaiting his attention.

Ben Buckingham of CineCult303 Interview @ Desktop

2010-10-17T08:21:00.003+11:00

Ben Buckingham is the founder of Melbourne’s CineCult303. I’ve put some questions to him about the monthly film event for Desktop Magazine ahead of Tuesday night’s Halloween screening of Hausu.

Read it here.

7:30pm, 303 High St Northcote, October 19^th. Hope to see you there.

Interview: Serge Bromberg, Co-Director of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

2010-10-15T08:51:00.015+11:00

It was a model occasion of life imitating art – too perfectly ordained, almost, to believe: an ambitious auteur spurred to mania by his own aspirations, and the monumental collapse thus incurred. The art echoed was Fellini’s 8½. And the life? That of Henri-Georges Clouzout.

In 1964, the exacting French filmmaker – director of such Swiss-watch suspense classics as The Wages of Fear and Diabolique – undertook an extensive series of experiments in colour and light at the service of his new screenplay, L’Enfer (Inferno). On the promise shown both by these rushes and the script itself, he was bestowed an open budget to produce the film – a proposed psychological epic that aimed to approximate the stifling intoxication of human jealousy. But the blessing proved mixed; the pressure to succeed, too great. With all he had at his disposal, Clouzot was convinced he could deliver nothing less than a masterpiece.

With the Nouvelle Vague well and truly en vogue in his homeland, Clouzot’s once considerable merit was dwindling. His genre-swollen oeuvre was deemed trivial by proponents of the French New Wave — a criticism he took deeply to heart. This was his chance to reassert not just his own cultural value, but that of classical cinematic form in general. Dazzled the year earlier by the technical ingenuity and luxuriant artifice of 8½, Clouzot took Fellini’s say-it-all magnum opus as a line in the sand, across which stood the Italian impresario, issuing a challenge: “Hey, Henri-Georges: beat this.”

It was a time of significant personal unrest for the filmmaker, who’d been in self-imposed sabbatical following the death of his wife, screenwriter and actress Véra Clouzot, four years prior. Nevertheless, he took up the challenge with vigour. A dazzling comeback, he believed, would prove just the galvanic force needed to brace not just his career, but his own ailing morale as well. Locations were set. A crème de la crème crew corralled. Leads were already secured: Serge Reggiani (Le doulos, La ronde) would be the jealous Marcel, and Romy Schneider (The Trial, Christine) his effervescent young bride.

It was the limitless budget that proved his undoing. All throughout production it loomed over him like a disapproving parent, goading him toward ever more drastic ends in an unwinnable quest for perfection. Clouzot worked his cast and crew to the point of exhaustion, and, after swallowing extravagant sums of money, time and effort, L’Enfer crumbled. It nearly killed Clouzot. He suffered a heart attack and, with fifteen hours of now-useless footage in the can, the production was finally abandoned.

In the documentary Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno, the whole sorry tale is poured over with the kind of clinical distance only ever afforded by hindsight. Co-directed by film historian Serge Bromberg and television director Ruxandra Medrea, the circumstances of its inception are every bit as serendipitous as those of L’Enfer’s collapse seem to have been bound. If fate spurned L’Enfer, it smiled on Bromberg and Medrea’s movie. Some stories, it seems, have to be told — be it in one way or another.

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno has screened in Australia at both the Melbourne and Sydney International Film Festivals (in 2009 and 2010, respectively). Co-director Serge Bromberg has answered a few questions about the film for celluloid tongue. Enjoy.

Opportunities like the circumstances which led to the making this film certainly don’t come around every day. How did you manage to convince Inès de Gonzalez to release the L’Enfer footage for the purpose of this documentary – did that all take place during your conversation with her in the elevator?

I actually had visited Mrs Clouzot about these cans of film, hardly knowing where they were by that time. She told me she had been speaking to hundreds of people about L’Enfer, but had decided she would never release her rights unless something special happened with someone.

Having been discouraged, she offered to see me to the first floor. We took the elevator... and got stuck for two hours in the elevator. We spoke, got acquainted in a very different way, and because she believed this juncture was something special enough, she agreed on discussing, and we made a deal one year later.

Can you talk a little about your own relationship with Clouzot’s work – have you always been a fan? If so, what is it about his work that appeals to you as both a viewer and a filmmaker?

I am an absolute admirer of Clouzot’s work. One of the 20 best directors ever in the world. And what’s so strong about his films is how he turns simple stories into a gallery of characters with such psychological depth. His style was unique, and so much stronger than Hitchcock…

With fifteen hours of found footage to sort through, how did you go about assembling the film?

Impossible to explain. This film is so special, and we moved forward, step by step, trying and changing our mind all the time. But our aim was clear: that we did want to make a feature film that would tell the story as it happened, and not spend too much time theorising about gossip. The story is here, the facts are here, and they are so strong that they carried us all the way.

It is also clear that there have been two key people without whom the film would not exist: Janice Jones, the editor, and Bruno Alexiu, who composed the unbelievable musical score.

How did the directorial collaboration with Ruxandra Medrea work?

Ruxandra had been working at Lobster (my production company) for five years as legal advisor and had directed a TV documentary the year before. I needed someone to rely on, whom I would trust. And although I am actually the one who started it all (I am also producer of the film) and always chose the options, she was the one by my side to challenge the final results and suggest new ideas. I must also admit that it was not always very easy, as some decisions were quite daring.

The documentary doesn’t explore Clouzot’s emotional state immediately prior to embarking on L’Enfer in 1964. He had been in a deep depression following the death of his first wife in 1960, and the initiation of the New Wave was causing him to doubt the validity of his work. Psychologically, he was hardly on the surest ground when production on L’Enfer commenced. Why not include this context in the documentary?

We didn’t want to take too much of the film to explain who Clouzot was, the story of the lost cans, what happened with the insurance after the shooting etc. We clearly decided to start when the production started, and end with the heart attack. It is a time capsule, and that’s what makes the film so strong (but we spend a few minutes in the beginning giving some contextual explanations). If scholars want to go into more detail, they are welcome.

I also wrote a book called Romy in Inferno, published by Albin Michel, which gives much more detail about all this.

What did you feel dramatising scenes from Clouzot’s original screenplay with new actors would bring to the documentary?

Our film tries to tell two stories: the storyline of the film on one hand, and Clouzot’s own tragedy. Those two stories are parallel and it is clearly two faces of the same drama. But because we have very little of what Clouzot wanted to shoot (3 weeks of outdoor sequences, not one sound or any dialogue, and none of the 14 weeks of shooting that did not happen in the studio), we decided to reenact some key scenes with actors (who read more than play), instead of having a voice over explaining what Clouzot wanted to do.

It is much more lively, and does not distract the audience from the film Clouzot wanted to do. It was hard to show a film that was never shot!

Was there anyone still living who’d been involved with the original production who you'd wished to interview but couldn’t gain access to?

Yes. Dany Carrel. She turned us down first, then explained she thought we were people who had bugged her a few years before, and made a mistake. But since then we could never arrange a meeting to shoot (believe me, we begged many times). I think she had health problems. Too bad, she was a key figure of the film, and an important actress in cinema at that time.

Clouzot’s widow is conspicuously absent from the film – as she appears to have been during the production of L’Enfer. How involved was she with the production of the documentary? Did she not wish to appear on screen?

She was interviewed, and we see her in the DVD extras. But she finally didn’t wish to be in the film, and that was right in a way, as we finally only interviewed actors or technicians who were on the set with Clouzot. But she was constantly with us, and she had the final cut on the film, so if she didn’t wish a thing to be in it, we would have had to remove it. She was always very helpful.

There must be hours of footage from Clouzot’s intensive cinematographic tests which aren’t even glimpsed in the finished documentary...

No actually, about everything we had is in the film or in the extras on the DVD. There were 185 cans, about 15 hours of film, but in the end, many duplicates, multiple takes, lab tests... We used everything we could in the feature film (but the film is 94 minutes, so we had to make some choices), and all we omitted is in the extras.

How do you feel about the version of L’Enfer Claude Chabrol shot from Clouzot’s original screenplay in 1994?

It is a completely different film. Of course, Clouzot’s screenplay is used. But the structure has changed (no more flash backs), and there is much less focus on the inner drama of Marcel. Actually, this is a very good drame bourgeois [“bourgeois drama” or “middle-class tragedy”] with great actors and a very clever director who missed the point of Clouzot’s idea: to film the madness from inside the brain of the madman. Very ambitious and unprecedented… and maybe impossible. We’ll never know.

Do you know what – if anything – will become of the original L’Enfer footage? Will additional excerpts be available as DVD extras?

We own these images, and have made them as available as possible. The feature film is for theatrical and TV presentation. The 52 extra minutes included more stories, more anecdotes, and more images. Cinema lovers will adore it.

Are there any plans to release the documentary in Australia?

I hope so. MK2 is a very strong distributor, and I am convinced the Australians would be as amazed by this film as anyone in the world. And the film is really a success everywhere (it has been sold in more than 25 countries!).

Finally, what are you working on at the moment?

Restoring the complete works of Charlie Chaplin in 1914 (along with the British Film Institute, London, and the Cineteca de Bologna, in Italy), preparing two magazines, restoring a handful of majors classic films of the past, working of the new Annecy International Animated Film Festival (I am artistic Director of this major event), touring around the world with silent films I play at the piano, and thinking of my future film. But it will be hard to have a better material than Inferno to work from...

Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno is available on Region 2 DVD at Amazon.co.uk.

Four Frames: La Belle et la Bête

2010-10-12T08:39:00.004+11:00

Monsters One-Sheet

2010-10-12T08:05:00.004+11:00

I saw this at MIFF and it’s grown on me majorly since. And I was quite fond of it then.

New poster via PopWatch.

Monsters releases locally on November 25^th.

Hausu @ CineCult@303

2010-10-09T08:56:00.008+11:00

I’ve never yet made it to one of CineCult’s free – that’s right, free! – monthly screenings of cinematic oddities and curios, but you can bet I’m going to get my act together to attend October’s event. In a very special Halloween coup, Nobuhiko Obayashi’s Hausu (soon to join the ranks of Criterion) will screen. If you don’t already know why this is a must-attend event, I suggest checking out the film’s trailer. And just look at that one-sheet!:

Full details of CineCult’s free Hausu screening here.

Four Frames: The Confidential Report

2010-10-08T10:37:00.002+11:00

The Tempest Trailer

2010-10-08T10:16:00.001+11:00

I’m a sucker for a visualist and Julie Taymor is up there with the best of them. Here’s hoping her take on Shakespeare’s The Tempest proves as singular as her handling of Titus.

Watch the film’s first trailer at Apple.

“Ever since he came back from Peru he’s been strange…” Recently Viewed...

2010-10-07T14:48:00.019+11:00

…was My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done, being the Herzog/Lynch collaboration ‘inspired by’ the true case of suburban psychopath Mark Yavorsky. Yavorsky – here renamed Brad McCallum and played with redoubtable intensity by Michael Shannon – was an amateur actor who, after returning from a time in the wilds of Peru, murdered his own mother with a sabre in their neighbours’ San Diego home in 1979. Lynch is executive producer and Herzog directs, with the latter admitting the history has been loosely handled – the script is about 70 percent fabrication, by his own reckoning.

It goes without saying that My Son should be odd. And it’s just that: odd. Not the terrifyingly amorphous kind of existential shadowplay one might expect from a hardcore Lynch pic, nor, in the vein of Herzog, an unsentimental portrayal of a madman/radical’s psychological collapse as consequence of an absurd and unyielding conviction of self. Existing in what I can only inelegantly describe as a self-reflexive, post-Lynchian cineverse (#critfail), My Son isn’t readily categorised, and any sort of appreciation will be contingent on an individual’s willingness to submit to the film’s rarefied wavelength – one which outwardly seems to invite dismissal open-armed (The digital cinematography looks lousy! Are the actors actually trying to be stilted? And what’s with all the friggin’ birds?).

My Son will no doubt prove most absorbing to existing fans of the filmmaker, who’ll find plenty to puzzle over in this latest spin on his subject of choice: those individuals who operate and exist beyond the margins of both “sanity” and society. (For the record, I count this as an intriguing, wryly comic curio which has only grown on me the more I’ve thought on it, but Ange found her first-ever encounter with Herzog lumbered by vacant quirk and in terminal want of a point.)

To be clear, this isn’t the story of McCallum’s descent into madness. We never meet Brad pre-flip, nor are we asked to sympathise with him or even understand his actions. Herzog simply presents the unlikely particulars surrounding the bizarre incident with a sense of detachment that only leaves his central figure seeming even more vexing and enigmatic.

The film plaits two narrative throughlines – one linear, one fragmentary – with the first being the post-murder hostage situation which finds Brad baled up in his dead mother’s flamingo-pink, flamingo-festooned and in fact flamingo-populated home. The second is the multi-perspective telling of Brad’s immediate history, dramatised in mosaic as recounted by his fiancée (Chloë Sevigny), the director under whom he’d been rehearsing a production of Elektra (Udo Kier), and the neighbour in whose home the slaying occured (Irma P. Hall). We know only what they know – that Brad returned from abroad a changed man, and that his conduct since has grown increasingly erratic – but his fiancée is privy to a few troubling details about Brad’s home life and time in Peru...

In continuing his flirtation with the scrambling of American crime procedurals after the equally quizzical Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, Herzog pitches for the same tonal ambit as the unknowable why? which circles the real-life Yavorsky case. To achieve this, he’s looked to Lynch for the film’s air of off-kilter affectation, as well as its lo-fi digi-vid aesthetic, which Lynch employed to magnetic effect on his own INLAND EMPIRE.

Seemingly galvanised by the spontaneity of shooting on digital, Herzog seizes every opportunity to perplex his audience. Some are more interesting than others. The appearance of a tuxedoed midget, for example, feels like an obligatory inclusion in a collaboration between the directors of Even Dwarfs Started Small and Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me. More curious is how undue attention is paid by Herzog’s camera to ostensibly insignificant detail, like – in an odd moment of ordinary beauty – the minor journey undertaken by a tin of oatmeal from McCallum’s garage to the curb.

Lynch’s influence is most visible in the way actors deliver cliché-dappled dialogue with straight-faced conviction. “It won’t work! You watch too much TV!” barks Willem Dafoe’s homicide detective after his partner (Michael Pena) has suggested a pizza demanded by McCallum be laced with sleeping pills. Intentionally left dangling, unaddressed, is the obvious matter of why not?, and interactions of this ilk prevail throughout. In fact, Herzog hardly skips an occasion to paint his law men as impotent, or irrational, or disproportionately taken with immaterial “evidence,” as if the placement of coffee cups on a crime scene table will disclose some critical insight into an incident bereft of both logic and reason – a swipe at the absurdity of a detective’s vocational imperative to rationalise, deduce and “know why.”

Most distinctive is the way certain scenes – seemingly arbitrarily selected – end in extended Simon-says-freeze tableau. Not freeze frame, mind – Herzog has his cast hold poses on-spot, freeing him to shift his camera across and around a single dot in time as if to say, “It’s moments exactly like these – some monumental, some mundane – which determine the course of a life.”

Late in the film and as told in flashback, Brad finds his own way to approximate this momentary calm by pacing in place on an escalator. It’s a moment just like any other – only for Brad, it’s not.

He’s left by his friends to absorb it alone.

DiCE @ 1000 £ Bend

2010-09-30T07:45:00.007+10:00

In just under a week, Melbourne’s 1000 £ Bend will play host to the opening night of DiCE. DiCE – short for Digital Independent Cinema Exhibition – aims to bring quality independent digital cinema to a home-turf audience via screenings at 1000 £ Bend’s Speakeasy Cinema.

The first film being showcased is Braille, an action/thriller which marks the feature debut of director Matthew Chuang. (Trailer here.) Local independent filmmakers with a completed feature who are seeking an initial audience can submit their films for DiCE consideration at the ‘submissions’ tab of the DiCE website.

Each DiCE event will close the gap between filmmakers and their audience through on-stage discussions with key figures from the night’s viewing after each screening. At the October 6^th opening event, the Braille team (including Chuang, producer Luke Graham and principal cast and stunt coordinator Zero Murray) will be joined in conversation by Peter Krausz, head of the AFCA.

With further events lined up for November 23^rd and December 22^nd, DiCE is set to become a permanent monthly fixture of the Melbourne film calendar.

Tickets for DiCE events can be purchased at the website, or at the venue on the night.

Four Frames: Murders in the Rue Morgue (1971)

2010-09-29T13:46:00.000+10:00

True Grit Teaser

2010-09-29T13:08:00.012+10:00

The last time Joel and Ethan Coen tried their hands at a remake, we wound up with The Ladykillers – the broadest and least successful film of their career. True Grit – being the brothers’ take on the Charlie Portis novel previously adapted for the screen in 1969 by Henry Hathaway – promises something else entirely.

There’s precious little disclosed in the film’s new teaser, but what’s on show seems both visually and thematically in-line with the latter day Coens canon – i.e. low on the wink-nudgery that defined much of their early genre jiggery-pokery; high on the seared landscapes and ominous existentialism of No Country for Old Men.

We see an eyepatched Jeff Bridges slinging six-shooters on horseback (thrillingly, this is a bona fide western – dusty desert vistas, spurred footwear and all), here inhabiting the role that saw John Wayne holster an Oscar for his performance in Hathaway’s original. But perhaps of greater interest than a Coens-Dude reunion is the casting of newcomer Hailee Steinfeld as young Mattie Ross, a headstrong tomboy who enlists the services of Bridges’ weathered US marshal – “a man of true grit” – in the cross-country hunt for her father’s killer. Hathaway’s film gave focus to Wayne, but the Coens have promised increased fidelity to Portis’ source by keeping Mattie front-and-centre, where she belongs.

Watch the trailer at Apple.

True Grit releases January 20^th 2011.

Holidayin’...

2010-09-22T14:05:00.002+10:00

Back Sunday.

“He longs – yearns – for the things which dissolve people…” Last Night’s Viewing…

2010-09-22T13:46:00.007+10:00

...was The Immortal Story – Orson Welles’ final completed work of screen fiction as director*. It was also, at just 58 minutes, the shortest feature film of his career. (Welles had intended the piece as the first half of a filmic portmanteau, but production on the would-have-been second installment was scuppered when Welles, ever the force to be reckoned with, became disenchanted with his crew.)

Commissioned for television broadcast in France with a theatrical release following both there and abroad, The Immortal Story is plainly televisual by Welles’ standards. A vocal dissenter of colour cinematography, he found himself contractually obliged to use the medium here, which might in part explain the film’s stark, unnatural application of lighting – its interiors often appear lit for black-and-white chiaroscuro, or are flatly blanched by saturating floodlight. (Point of interest: DP Willy Kurant would later go on to shoot the enduring Pink-Floyd-in-Pompeii concert documentary, Echoes.) Either way, The Immortal Story lacks the visual complexity of Welles’ black-and-white pictures, and it’s not hard to imagine the imposition of colour cinematography sitting ill with the contentious auteur. That’s not to say it’s at all amateurish (this is Orson Welles we’re talking about) – rather, its unassuming, almost quaint aesthetic lends it a certain antiquated charm. It’s a fitting look for what’s one of the simplest and least imposing entries in what I’ve seen of the Welles oeuvre.

Adapted from a lengthy short story by Isak Dinesen (pen name of Karen Blixen, author of Out of Africa), the narrative plumbs Welles’ fascination with the function of fiction. Looking as swollen and slovenly as he ever did – juddering jowls, scowl, enormous moustache and all – the director also stars as an aging member of Macao’s 19th-century idle rich, who obsesses with factualising a tale from the maritime apocrypha wherein a young man is enlisted to impregnate the wife of wealthy merchant. “I don’t like prophecies,” he grumbles throughout to his bookkeeper – a Clark Gregg type who’s prone to reciting passages from scripture. Welles’ Mr Clay – as sedentary in character as his name suggests – prefers his stories footed in actuality. In tugging this one tale from the spurious realms of myth and into authenticity by granting a single sailor the right to recount it with honesty, he feels he can assert some crucial modicum of control over a universe of chaos before he lumbers off this mortal coil.

Here I’ll issue a spoiler warning.

“Rosebud!,” Ange rasped as a sea shell swayed on the floor to mark Clay’s inevitable passing. It drew a laugh from me, but I think the parallel is intended by Welles – after all, isn’t invoking his most iconic performance (being CFK, obviously) a way to ensure its continued life? And in renewing its lease, isn’t Welles in effect achieving the impossible and imparting that same immortality unto himself?

*as far as I’ve been able to discern at a pinch. Happy to proven wrong by you more diligent scholars/googlers.

Four Frames: The Immortal Story

2010-09-20T08:14:00.003+10:00

“John Hughes did not direct my life.” Last Night’s Viewing…

2010-09-19T21:02:00.014+10:00

…was Easy A, in which the vivacious, enchanting and altogether already-outgrown-the-likes-of-this Emma Stone (Zombieland, Superbad) graduates to leading lady at long last. Like Clueless and 10 Things I Hate About You, Easy A is reaped from the pages of a literary classic. The work contemporised here is Nathaniel Hawthorne’s 17th-century-set The Scarlet Letter, with the Puritan mores of the book transposed with a modern culture of equally stifling sexual ideology and social stratification – that is, the American high school.

Seeming every fabulous inch the product of her 21 years, the casting of Stone as a retiring high school senior raises an eyebrow – two, once her character’s preternatural wit and intelligence emerge (which is early). It’s indicative of Hollywood’s tendency to retard the on-screen development of its young female players especially, who are habitually confined to the school yard to the point of preposterousness. (Think 34-year-old Stockard Channing as the 18-year-old Rizzo in Grease; 27-year-old Sissy Spacek as Carrie’s titular wallflower; and even 23-year-old Neve Campbell in Scream.)

The tendency of the script by Bert V. Royal (seriously) to invoke the catalogue of John Hughes strikes as counterintuitive too. In the first, because it breaks the cardinal filmmaker’s rule to never sample footage from a film that’s better than your own (Pretty in Pink, Sixteen Candles and The Breakfast Club are all excerpted herein), but more pertinently, because Easy A’s lead character, Olive, is a 17-year-old in 2010, making her a daughter of 1993. Her parents – winningly played by perennial saving graces Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci – are latter-day baby boomers, making them just north of the logical Hughes demographic themselves. So to credit Olive’s encyclopaedic familiarity with the Hughes canon to their influence doesn’t exactly make sense either. (Olive’s Hughes infatuation is never explained in the film.)

With generational nostalgia typically anchored to the prevalent pop cultural trends of childhood* (just take one look at Dangerfield’s shelves, then note the median age of its customers), surely the likes of the aforementioned Clueless (1995) and 10 Things... (1999) would have both made for more authentic cinematic touchstones, as well as added another layer to Easy A’s self-reflexivity? At the very least, it would have positioned the film – which, when all’s said and done, is breezily diverting, thanks in most to Stone – in a playing field in which it at least stands a chance. Instead, the comparisons it invites to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and The Breakfast Club only serve to stir the wish that Hughes had lived long enough to give Stone a star vehicle truly worthy of her considerable talent and charm. But then, he was hardly above casting adults as highschoolers himself...

*Note childhood, not adolescence. It’s as if during the final years of adolescence/early 20s, those prone to generational nostalgia begin to fixate on the fads they were present for but missed out on enjoying or understanding in full by virtue of being too young for them the first time around. Arrested development, protracted adolescence and all that...

Four Frames: The Wizard of Oz

2010-09-19T09:11:00.003+10:00

“I’ve been drinking. Now I need to drink some more.” Last Night’s Viewing…

2010-09-18T14:06:00.032+10:00

…was Paranoiac, a tenebrous Psycho riff loosed from the Hammer Studios in 1963 directed by cinematographer exemplar Freddie Francis. Francis shot both Scorsese’s Cape Fear and Lynch’s The Elephant Man, and any figments which amalgamate those two mood pieces go some way to suggesting the Gothic-steeped spectacles he here summons with the help of DP Arthur Grant. Francis commands a camera which sweeps into rooms, around corners, down bars and garden paths, and only comes to rest once it’s found his cast arranged in maximum-impact tableaux, which, more often than not, span multiple focal planes.

Perhaps worthy of greater note still is the young Oliver Reed as the eponymous swot of the unravelling sanity, whose coiffed ‘do and maelstrom-roiling-beneath-buttoned-down-tweed mien puts one in mind of an Ivy League Anton Chigurh. Reed – hamming heroically – is given ample opportunity to have his way with such contemptuous and deliciously British dialogue as: “By what right do you sit there and pontificate on what money I can and cannot have?” He even gets to perform two of my favourite-ever horror movie tropes – at the same time! – by dramatically pawing a pipe organ whilst soliloquising to a corpse. As if I wasn't already on board with this movie...

In contrast to the sloppy dance-out of my previous night’s entertainment, Despicable Me, Paranoiac employs what I like to call a hard finish, which was typical of films of its day but has largely been superseded by the protracted denouement in the modern cinema of the west. (My favourite example of a hard finish from recent years is the sunset slump of The Proposition.) The instant the plot is resolved and we don’t need to know any more, there’s a swell of the score and BAM! – A Hammer Studios Picture.

“Minions!”: Last Night’s Viewing…

2010-09-17T09:20:00.026+10:00

…was Despicable Me, a computer-animated comedy about a struggling supervillain who adopts a trio of young girls in a plot to reassert his significance, only to – of course – find his stony heart melted by the button-cute tykes.

The film’s character designers have some fun with proportion, most notably in the creation of Gru (voiced with brio by Steve Carrell), and I always enjoy spending time with a “hero” who possesses something of a misanthropic streak. (Gru’s proven a grinch early on when he consoles a child who’s dropped his ice cream cone with the flamboyant creation of a balloon poodle, only to prick the thing with wicked relish the very moment the kid’s smile has reached its limit.) But what’s stuck with me just as much as the great gags (of which there are plenty, with a three-second werewolf bit educing the heartiest belly laugh from yours truly) is the way Despicable Me perpetuates a maddening trend in modern family-slanted feature animation: the dance-montage-in-lieu-of-ending dribble into the closing credits.

I get the reasoning – these are films primarily aimed at children, whose receptiveness to subtlety might leave something to be desired. So what better way to convey that all’s right in the world than to have your cast kick up their collective cartoon heels and shake what their animators gave them? It makes sense, sure, but it’s no less disappointing for it. What’s more, this grating tendency isn’t even exclusive to your Madagascars and your Ice Ages – ie. movies where the innocuous familiarity of creative indolence has almost become a point of sale. Even inventive, lovingly crafted films I consider excellent are guilty of it – Toy Story 2 and Fantastic Mr Fox come to mind. Yet no matter the quality of what’s come before, the closing dance-out never fails to communicate the same lazy sentiment: “We weren’t quite sure exactly how to finish this…”

(Despicable Me was still fun, though.)

Mark Salisbury Interview @ ACMI Online

2010-09-16T11:35:00.004+10:00

A brief but insightful interview I conducted with reel world matters’ Mark Salisbury has been posted at the ACMI blog in support of Tim Burton: The Exhibition. Mark, for those not in the know, is a UK-based film critic, a former editor of Empire UK and the editor of Burton on Burton, as well as the author of ‘Making of’ books for Burton’s Corpse Bride, Sweeney Todd, Alice in Wonderland and Planet of the Apes.

Read it here.

Moved!

2010-09-16T11:24:00.002+10:00

Out of the old, into the new.

And now, back to your regularly scheduled programming.

(For the record, the above image is in no way intended as comment on my marvelous new living conditions. It’s just the most iconic movie house I could think of at a pinch.)

Film Review - Piranha 3D

2010-09-14T09:02:00.007+10:00

Prior to defecting to Hollywood and hawking himself as a rehash hack, French expat Alejandre Aja (The Hills Have Eyes, Mirrors) showed early promise as a peddler of terror with the savage femme survivalist slasher High Tension. There’s no trace of that film’s cardiac-throttling suspense to be found in Piranha 3D, Aja’s third horror remake in just four years. Rather, his latest retread – this time of the 1978 Jaws spoof that launched the solo career of Joe Dante – is a cartoon model of generic excess. There’s flesh-eating fish; Sam Raimi-style carnage; and busty, beach-bronzed babes who burst from the screen in hokily retrograded 3D. Trash is unabashedly the catch of the day, and Piranha 3D offers the movie equivalent of a late night Fillet-O-Fish.

It’s apt, considering the project’s pilfering pedigree, that things should open with a Jaws riff that will have genre junkies on-side from frame one. It’s a brisk manifesto of Aja’s approach to the whole: keep ‘em laughing and hope they don’t realise how crappy the thing really is. It’s enough to sustain 88 tawdry minutes in the company of an enthusiastic audience, but makes Piranha 3D an experience that will evaporate from memory the moment the house lights come up.

Heavy seismic activity has opened a primordial chasm beneath Lake Victoria, a spring break hot spot in an otherwise sleepy pocket of the American Midwest. Before you can plug cryptozoology into Google, the prehistoric predators are awakened, the party’s underway, and the feeding frenzy is set to commence.

And that’s all of the piece setting required. Plot and cast are noteworthy only for how noteworthy they’re not, and that’s just the way Aja wants it. After all, why clutter so perfectly absurd a set-up – nubile teens get minced by razor-fanged fish! – with such redundant trappings as drama and character? Actors – Elizabeth Shue, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames and Christopher Lloyd among them – were seemingly lured by the promise of a few breezy weeks in the sun and a spectacularly outlandish on-screen demise.

For those seeking the latter, Piranha 3D delivers. Extras and topliners alike are dispatched with wicked cruelty, the joke being that each kill is more savagely embellished than the last. Ever wished to see a disembodied penis spewed at the screen in three stomach-churning dimensions? Piranha 3D plugs that void. Not since Peter Jackson employed a lawnmower as a zombie deterrent has so much haemoglobin showered the screen to such willfully ridiculous ends.

But don’t be suckered by the (bafflingly) positive reception to Piranha 3D: despite possessing a maturity level on par with caviar, Braindead this gory romp ain’t. The best horror comedies notch their mark by having more than just blood and guts and T&A on their minds, as An American Werewolf in London and Shaun of the Dead attest. Given the nasty ends so many of his revellers meet, it could be argued that Aja is taking broad swipe at his core demographic (the tequila slamming, sex-crazed, party-like-tomorrow-is-our-parents’-problem set), but really, the scenes of en masse debauchery are likely to encourage far more post-movie blow-outs than the sight of that up-chucked member is quiet moments of self-reflection.

Thankfully, Piranha 3D makes no pretense to anything other than what it is: diverting, disposable trash. Don’t be surprised if the DVD arrives with nothing more than a blood-sopped pair of bikini-clad breasts on its cover.

Speaking of which, Aja does manage one sequence which might be enough to claw Piranha 3D into infamy: a riotously gratuitous, all-nude, girl-on-girl aquatic frolic set to the operatic strains of Delibes’ ‘The Flower Duet.’ Self-respecting connoisseurs of cinematic sex scenes will get a laugh as they identify the lesbian love theme from The Hunger in the film’s sliest and subtlest gag. Everyone else will be held rapt for sixty languidly elapsing seconds by the gentle billowing of 3D boobs.

DIRECTOR: Alejandre Aja

SCREENWRITERS: Pete Goldfinger & Josh Stolberg

CAST: Elizabeth Shue, Jerry O’Connell, Ving Rhames, Steven R. McQueen, Kelly Brook, Jessica Szohr

RATING: MA15+

RUN TIME: 88 minutes

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

Four Frames: Before Sunrise

2010-09-11T19:37:00.002+10:00

Reel Anime 2010 Round-Up

2010-09-10T18:39:00.005+10:00

Madman’s Reel Anime festival is officially underway for 2010. Here’s what I thought of the titles on offer this year.

Redline (dir. Takeshi Koike) – World premiere. Studio Madhouse (The Animatrix, Batman: Gotham Knight) have pulled out all stops with Redline, a high-octane collision of Lichtensteinian pop pulp cyclonics, racy Heavy Metal-style visual vocab, and an eye for creature creation to rival the original Star Wars. The throttling death race setting enables some seriously eye-widening setpieces, which inevitably mandate that story and character should recline in the passenger seats. It’s an unabashed exercise in sensory acceleration, and if taken as such, Redline’s sure to quicken a lot of pulses.

King of Thorn (dir. Kazuyoshi Katayama) – Australian premiere. This sci-fi/horror/action amalgam moves at the clip of the videogames from which it borrows its grind-and-advance narrative mechanics. The plot – killer plague sees a clutch of the usual genre suspects (cute kid, mysterious bad boy, shifty intellectual etc.) entering cryo-freeze only to awaken and find themselves besieged by alien nasties – is pure, recycled pulp. It’s a fact done no favours by a reliance on an overstated Sleeping Beauty motif and tedious it’s-all-a-dream-no-it’s-not!-or-is-it? perceptual rug-pulling. But if you’ve ever pined for a film in which autonomous brambles take the form of a botanical dragon and ensnare Edinburgh Castle, King of Thorn will scratch that itch but good.

Summer Wars (dir. Mamoru Hosoda) – The stand-out of Reel Anime 2010 is the gorgeous Summer Wars, which straddles two worlds – both visually and within its own diegetic sphere. The first is the real world of teen tech whiz Kenji, who finds himself improbably recruited by the girl of his dreams to holiday at her grandmother’s bucolic estate in celebration the old woman’s 90^th birthday. The second is the virtual realm of Kenji’s employer OZ, an online peer-to-peer universe where people are signified by a vibrant miscellany of cartoon avatars, and where digital transactions carry very real implications on society. Mixing social commentary and gentle coming-of-age drama with videogame action, and possessing an admirably un-saccharine sense for heart-swelling poetry of the everyday, Summer Wars plays like Scott Pilgrim vs. The World meets Still Walking. Will appeal to lovers of Studio Ghibli.

Evangelion 2.0 You Can [Not] Advance. (dir. Hideaki Anno & Masayuki & Kazuya Tsurumak) – The real genius of Evangelion was never its outré visions of sky-scraping robots and celestial harbingers of doom seemingly torn from the id of Storm Thorgerson, but the crystalline perfection of its giant-mechs-as-adolescence metaphor. Teenagers – callow, impetuous, angst-crippled teens – were given charge of cyclopean fighting machines and tasked with nothing less than defending the world. Kids thrust into ungainly new bodies with frightening, exciting new powers? It was The Wonder Years with collateral damage. Fifteen years after its television debut, the ambitious cinematic Evangelion rebuild – which commenced with last year’s Evangelion: 1.0 You Are [Not] Alone – continues with Evangelion: 2.0 You Can [Not] Advance, which furthers the visual sprucing and narrative compaction established by its precursor. But unlike part 1.0, which adhered stanchly to the plot progression of its revered televisual source, 2.0 urges the story into unfamiliar terrain. It lacks the scope and complexity of Evangelion proper, but with its slate of surprises and awesomely upgraded animation, You Can [Not] Advance should both slake Eva die-hards itching for a mech/monster fix, and spark the interest of curious newcomers.

For more on Reel Anime 2010, visit its official site.

[Cross-published at Desktop Magazine]

RIP Glenn Shadix

2010-09-10T11:20:00.007+10:00

I was saddened this week to learn of the passing of Glenn Shadix, favoured around these parts for being part of the early Burton stable. Shadix voiced Halloweentown’s Mayor in The Nightmare Before Christmas, appeared in Heathers, Seinfeld and HBO’s Carnivàle, but will arguably be best remembered for his high-camp turn as Beetlejuice’s interior designer slash self-styled paranormal authority, Otho. “I know just as much about the supernatural as I do about interior design.” Classic.

For what precious little it’s worth, I dedicated my story at last night’s Burton Club event at ACMI to the late performer. Rest in peace, Glenn.

Critical Failure @ The Wheeler Centre

2010-09-05T08:36:00.007+10:00

Australia’s preeminent screen authority Adrian Martin heads a panel of local film theorists to discuss the current state of Australian film criticism tomorrow night at The Wheeler Centre in Melbourne. It’s part of the Wheeler’s alarmingly titled Critical Failure week, which aims to shove the ailing role of the Australian arts critic into the spotlight to be probed, prodded and scrutinised for proof of life. Joining Martin is director Gillian Armstrong and film writers Fenella Kernebone and Mel Campbell. It’s bound to be stimulating stuff.

The event is free and filling fast. Register here.

Reel Anime Giveaway

2010-08-30T21:45:00.011+10:00

The competition has now ended. Thanks to all who entered. Winners have been notified by email.

- gerard.

Thanks to the fine folk at Madman, celluloid tongue has two Evangelion DVD prize packs up for grabs to coincide with Reel Anime 2010.

The prize packs consist of the seven-disc set, Neon Genesis Evangelion (Platinum Collection), and the first film in the epic Evangelion rebuild, Evangelion 1.0 You Are [Not] Alone, which returns to theatres in an encore presentation at Reel Anime 2010.

To enter, email me your name, postal address and an answer to the following:

In Evangelion, what is the motto of NERV – the organisation charged with defending Earth against the invading Angels – and where does it come from?

The prize packs will be awarded to the first two correct respondents, who will be notified via return email. The competition is open to Australian residents only.

The four films rounding out this year’s Reel Anime program promise “the best Japan’s new wave of anime has to offer.” The titles on show in are:

Evangelion 2.0 You Can [Not] Advance
Summer Wars
King of Thorn
Redline

Reel Anime screens at the following locations around Australia and New Zealand from the dates specified:

AUSTRALIA
September 2-15
SYDNEY – Dendy Newtown
MELBOURNE – Cinema Nova
BRISBANE – Dendy Portside
CANBERRA – Dendy Canberra
ADELAIDE – Palace Nova Eastend Cinemas
AVOCA BEACH – Avoca Beach Picture Theatre
HOBART – State Cinema

September 16-29
PERTH – Luna Leederville

NEW ZEALAND
September 9-22
AUCKLAND - Rialto Cinemas Newmarket
CHRISTCHURCH - Rialto Cinemas Christchurch
DUNEDIN - Rialto Cinemas Dunedin
WELLINGTON - Paramount Theatre

For more on the festival, visit its official site.

I’ll have a brief reviews run-down on the films of Reel Anime 2010 going up at Desktop in the days ahead.

Further Apologies...

2010-08-30T21:26:00.002+10:00

...for continued absence. Still moving. I’ll get a Piranha 3D review up soon (because that’s the last thing I’ve managed to see. I know. The shame.)

- gerard.

Four Frames: House on Haunted Hill (1959)

2010-08-26T18:13:00.000+10:00

Never Let Me Go Posters

2010-08-26T17:47:00.001+10:00

The official site for Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go has debuted a triptych of character one-sheets for the film.

Enlarge:

Suitably moody and mysterious, I think. Liking that fractured typography on the latter.

Happy Birthday, Tim Burton

2010-08-25T00:31:00.007+10:00

Born on this day in 1958 was one Tim Burton, personal sentimental fave and current toast of Melbourne (or ‘MelBurton,’ as our mizzly city has officially been temporarily rechristened) thanks to ACMI’s blockbuster Tim Burton: The Exhibition.

Since it strikes as a possible source of inspiration to Burbank’s favourite son, I post Heinrich Hoffman’s 1845 ‘Struwwelpeter’ (‘Shock-Headed Peter’) from the children’s book of the same name. With his mangy mane and pronged digits, there’s no denying Hoffman’s unkempt ragamuffin bears a passing resemblance to Burton’s defining on-screen surrogate, Edward Scissorhands.

The poem translates as:

Just look at him! There he stands,
With his nasty hair and hands.
See! his nails are never cut;
They are grim’d as black as soot;
And the sloven, I declare,
Never once has comb’d his hair;
Any thing to me is sweeter
Than to see Shock-Headed Peter.

The disobedient youths of Hoffman’s book are each dealt quite severe comeuppance for their wayward ways (Little Suck-a-Thumb, for instance, finds his offending digits snipped clean off) – a mordant pedagogical literary tradition later picked up and perfected by Burton muses, Edward Gorey (cf. The Gashlycrumb Tinies) and Roald Dahl (cf. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory). Burton provided his own idiosyncratic spin on the moral fable with his illustrated The Melancholy Death of Oyster Boy and Other Stories, whose wicked catch sees its cast of tragical children punished for nothing more than their wryly metaphoric physical disfigurements.

For my money, Burton’s Scissorhands employs the blade-fingered imagery to much more elegant effect. (Hoffman is, after all, merely embellishing the perils of forgoing good hygiene with ‘Struwwelpeter’.) But combine the aesthetic similarities shared by Peter and Edward with Hoffman’s dark – yet still PG-rated – wit and I think it’s safe to suspect Struwwelpeter might hold a place in Burton’s gallery of influences.

Four Frames: Last Life in the Universe

2010-08-21T17:14:00.000+10:00

Burton Bags Wood Writers for Animated Addams’

2010-08-21T17:08:00.008+10:00

Here’s some good news: Tim Burton’s recently announced stop-motion-animated Addams Family feature will see the filmmaker reunited with Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski, screenwriters of Ed Wood.

“We want the tone to be as darkly funny and subversive as the Addams drawings,” Karaszewski told Deadline. “We've come up with an approach that nobody has ever done before.”

Read more here, including details of Alexander and Karaszewski’s Margaret Keane biopic Big Eyes, which Burton has committed to produce. (Between you and I, I wish he’d also wrangle his way into the director’s seat for this. It sounds like just the surprise maneuver his career could use after a recent string of characteristically ‘Burtonesque’ projects*.)

*Most of which I’ll cheerfully admit to having enjoyed enormously. And I still maintain that Sweeney Todd rounds out Burton’s top three.

Wordpressure...

2010-08-21T16:47:00.001+10:00

I’m toying with making the leap to WordPress in the not-too-distant future. Any and all opining appreciated.

- gerard.

Four Frames: The Power of Emotion

2010-08-19T08:16:00.003+10:00

The Other Film Festival: August 25-29

2010-08-19T07:55:00.002+10:00

The Other Film Festival is Australia’s only film festival dedicated exclusively to “new cinema by, with and about people with a disability.” The program is comprised of a selection of shorts packages, workshops and presentations, the highlight of which this year promises to be the Eyeborg demonstrations by mono-optic Canadian filmmaker Rob Spence, who, with the help of engineer Kosta Grammatis, has implanted a video camera and transmitter into his own prosthetic eye.

The full roster of events is available at the festival’s official site.

The Other Film Festival takes place at the Melbourne Museum from August 25^th – 29^th.

Learn more about Rob Spence and the Eyeborg project at the Eyebog Blog.

Four Frames: Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky

2010-08-18T12:23:00.002+10:00

Black Swan Trailer, One-Sheet

2010-08-18T12:08:00.021+10:00

It’s recently occurred to me that I have a thing for dance films. Perhaps not dance films, per se – that suggests things like Centre Stage and Step Up 2 the Streets, which exist primarily as showcases for sustained sequences of dazzling hoofing. Films centred in or around the world of professional dance might be a more apposite way of putting it. It’s unlikely – the only live dance I’ve ever willfully attended was Matthew Bourne’s interpretation of Edward Scissorhands, for obvious reasons – but with All That Jazz, The Red Shoes and Suspiria amongst my favourite films of all time, it’s a fact I can’t deny.

I think it’s owed partly to the way dance, like singing, has always seemed something of a black art to a tone deaf, coordination deficit maladroit like myself. I have, over the years, come to regard it as one of the most ineffable forms of human expression, so when it’s used to bolster a gripping narrative, you can pop me beneath the Christmas tree – I’m rapt. To the untrained observer, good dance appears visceral, emotive and deeply dramatic, despite the highly precise and demanding nature of the art. I’ve long been drawn to stories about anxious creatives, and the high-stress setting of a ballet academy or Broadway’s back stage has proved fertile ground for filmmakers looking to probe the artistic temperament for all of its unique psychoses and neuroses.

All of this is preface for my saying that I’m really looking forward to Darren Aronofsky’s Black Swan, which seems primed to inherit the tiara of ‘The New Suspiria.’ Tantalisingly, it’s being billed as “a supernatural thriller set in the world of New York City Ballet” and stars Natalie Portman in a front-and-centre dramatic role. To recap, that’s a hot-off-The Wrestler Darren Aronofsky; a tale of creative meltdown with potentially supernatural underpinnings; dramatic Portman; New York; and a high-profile ballet milieu. In other words: yes, you want to watch the film’s first trailer, which debuted this morning at Apple. It paints the thing as a verité giallo. Like I said: tantalising.

From the same source comes Black Swan’s fittingly striking first poster:

I’ll take one for my wall, please.

Open Mic Night @ ACMI’s Burton Club

2010-08-18T11:40:00.004+10:00

If you’re in Melbourne and of a similar disposition to myself, it’s possible we’ve unwittingly shared a shadowy Thursday night over these past few weeks taking in the ghoulish cool at ACMI’s Burton Club. (It’s been running concurrent to late-night access to Tim Burton: The Exhibition, for those not in the know.) Recently announced is that the Burton Club is giving its coterie of quirky chanteuses, undead acrobats and macabre carnies a well-earned week off on September 9^th to open the stage to creepy creatives of all persuasions for a decidedly Burtonesque open mic night.

From the press release:

“Applications from all forms of performance and art are encouraged, as are performers and artists of all ages and skill levels. In order to receive applications as diverse as possible, ACMI has placed minimal parameters around involvement with stipulations including; the act be shorter than 15 minutes, have minimal audio-visual requirements, have no water, fire or animals involved and perhaps most importantly, the act must be Burtonesque!

Original work in music, DJ’s, VJ’s, dance, theatre, performance art, spoken word, comedy, poetry, magic, circus, impersonators, cartoonists and even fashion parades are all encouraged.

Taking part in the Burton Club is voluntary but there will be rewards for the most Burtonesque acts on the night.

To apply, simply email burtonclub@acmi.net.au. Examples of performances can be submitted on video via URL or photos can be emailed (no larger than 2mb), but this is not essential.”

I’ve dusted off a very old, shamelessly Poe-etic spook story of my own which I’ll be performing on the night. Why not set the date aside, press your cobwebby best dress and come get into the spirit of things?

Read more about the Burton Club at ACMI Online.

Status Update...

2010-08-18T11:32:00.001+10:00

I’ll be moving home across the month ahead, so apologies if things get a little erratic around here again. I’ve also decided to begin using this space a little differently than I have been hitherto. Nothing drastic, but please do let me know what you think of the changes once they begin to arrive.

- gerard.

Film Review - Scott Pilgrim vs. The World

2010-08-12T17:20:00.009+10:00

With an ace 8-bit mod of the Universal logo and fanfare ushering in its opening titles, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World plunges you into its rhapsodically hyper-pop universe before the film proper has even pressed ‘Start.’

It’s a heroic feat of reality ramping that Britcom wunderkind Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz) sustains throughout this, his first feature produced outside of his native UK. At no point do we slip from ‘the real world’ into the hyperactive headspace of the film’s titular twenty-something slacker. Rather, Pilgrim’s dazzling comic-book-by-way-of-Nintendo aesthetic is the reality its cast of Gen Y-ers navigate day-to-day, fittingly amplified by the brio of youth for, like, maximum awesomeness.

Video game power-ups appear overhead to reward moments of self-awakening. Characters don’t remark upon how a moment seems straight out of Seinfeld; they live their own sitcom instead. And when Scott (Michael Cera) and his indie rock outfit Sex Bob-Omb thrash their way through a raucous living room rehearsal set, thunderbolts don’t just zap from the amps because it looks cool on screen. Wright’s every stylistic flourish – from the onomatopoetic estimations of sound effects (THWAK! KROWW! etc.) that flit across the frame to the hilarious appropriation of well-known soundtrack cues – serves to externalise the intensely pop-culture-coloured inner worlds of new media savvy millennials. Intertextuality has been the new originality for decades, and gleefully leading this generation’s vanguard is Wright.

The film is an adaptation of Bryan Lee O’Malley’s sextet of graphic novels, which pit sometime bass player/full-time heartbreaker Scott Pilgrim against the seven former flames of aloof beauty Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead, whose chameleonic follicles here recall Kate Winslet’s Clementine in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), the literal girl of his dreams. In keeping with the universal heightening of affairs (all is more keenly felt by the callow, after all) it’s not through rhetoric or wits that Scott must defeat Ramona’s tetchy exes, but via a blistering string of high impact death bouts visually motivated by a video game gamut which spans from Street Fighter to Guitar Hero.

And so Cera – whose gauche appeal makes the at-times maddeningly responsibility-phobic Scott easy to root for – widens his repertoire to include ‘acrobatic bringer of thunder’ in eye-scorching skirmishes with the likes of Chris Evans as a conceited Hollywood jock; Jason Schwartman, who provides a characteristically fine line in insidious smarm; and the screen’s most recent Superman, Brandon Routh, as a vegan imbued with explosive superhuman abilities. It’s enough of a variation on his typical on-screen persona to stave off any accusations of resting on his Arrested Development laurels.

On top of all this, Wright juggles subplots involving Scott’s gay housemate and platonic bedfellow, Wallace Wells (a wry Keiran Culkan, who claims many of the film’s snappiest quips); Scott’s own heart-stomping ex cum chart-storming rock goddess, Envy Adams (Brie Larson); his 17-year-old soon-to-be-newest-ex-girlfriend, schoolgirl Knives Chau (Ellen Wong); and his dismissive older sis, Stacey (Anna Kendrick).

It sounds like attention-deficit, directorial button-mashing of the highest order – doubly so when the fact Wright changes aspect ratios more frequently than his film does reels is considered. But as his back catalogue attests, Wright has such a sense for both character and the loving skewing of his own demographic as to never lose hold of the reins. From the spot-on jibes at youthful malaise (“At least it will give us something to complain about,” suggests one of Scott’s bandmates when deliberating whether or not to attend an unappetising party) to the literalisation of love’s ineffable power to dust the world with magic (see snow melt in Ramona’s wake), Scott Pilgrim high scores as the work of a neo-auteur enraptured by the possibilities offered by life, by youth, by love and – perhaps most of all – by the movies.

DIRECTOR: Edgar Wright

SCREENWRITERS: Michael Bacall & Edgar Wright

CAST: Michael Cera, Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ellen Wong, Keiran Culkin, Jason Schwartman, Anna Kendrick, Chris Evans, Aubrey Plaza, Brandon Routh

RATING: M

RUN TIME: 112 minutes

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

Dreams Come True: The Art of Disney’s Classic Fairy Tales @ ACMI in November

2010-08-12T16:08:00.004+10:00

My love for classic Disney animation is no secret, but even my nearest and dearest would probably have recoiled in disgust if they’d sighted the excitable tot my inner child was reduced to upon reading news of ACMI’s next exhibition last week. Dreams Come True: The Art of Disney’s Classic Fairy Tales will immediately follow on from Tim Burton: The Exhibition, with its tenure commencing November 18^th and continuing until April 26^th 2011.

From the press release:

“Conceived by John Lasseter, Chief Creative Officer, Disney/Pixar Animation Studios, as a cultural gift to the people of post-Katrina New Orleans and originally curated by Lella Smith, Creative Director, Disney Animation Research Library, the exhibition features over 600 original artworks, maquettes and animation cels from Disney's much-loved adaptations of traditional European fairy tales.

Visitors will be able to go behind the scenes of the on-screen magic and explore the artworks and innovations that gave birth to the animated feature film. The exhibition includes early conceptual and creative artworks from legendary features including Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, The Princess and the Frog, and the yet to be released Tangled.”

Have I mentioned before how much I love ACMI? I love ACMI.

Read the full announcement here.

Getting to Know Godard

2010-08-07T14:10:00.012+10:00

Excepting Breathless, Contempt, Bande à part and Alphaville, the work of French iconoclast Jean-Luc Godard has always been something of a blind spot for me, which is a distinction I wear with humility. I’m more acquainted with the life and philosophies of the infamously blunt and hugely influential Nouvelle Vague radicalist than I am with the contents of his mile-long oeuvre. I’m making moves to rectify this, however, commencing in a few hours with a screening of his latest (and suspected last) rarefied offering Film Socialisme at the MIFF. It’s perhaps precarious ground for a Godard ignoramus such as myself, if word from the film’s polarising showing at Cannes earlier this year is any indication, but hey——I’m game. I’ll then continue my Godard education at ACMI post-MIFF with screenings of the newly-restored Made in U.S.A. and the documentary Two in the Wave, which details the filmmaker’s very public falling out with his ideologically incongruent contemporary, Francois Truffaut.

Further viewing recommendations are warmly welcomed.

MIFF Review - Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo

2010-08-05T11:11:00.015+10:00

From Mothra to the forthcoming Insect Detective Yoshimi Yoshida, Japan’s unique fascination with insects has been diversely reflected by cinema for decades.

Despite the intimations of what proves to be its ironic title (all that’s absent is an exclamation point), Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo is not a new addition to the nation’s durable canon of rampaging monster movies. Rather, it’s an attempt to resolve this collective bug love – which remains as pervasive today as ever – with the philosophical mores on which Japanese culture was founded.

Charting the evolution of a national ontology through a people’s shared obsession with insects is certainly a singular proposition, particularly when closing focus on such a people-dense capital as Tokyo, whose towering highrises suggest human honeycombs and whose citizens, when viewed from a moth’s-eye vantage, seem to navigate the city’s teeming urban channels like drone ants. It’s a shame, then, that American documentarian Jessica Oreck – an animal keeper at New York’s American Museum of Natural History – struggles to maintain both audience interest and a cogent thesis throughout her feature debut. Thanks to the inherent otherworldliness of the bugs themselves (a miscellany ranging from stag beetles and moon moths to hornets and silkworms appear); some stylish, trance-like transitional interludes; and a quirky score which appropriately shrills with synthesised chirrups, Beetle Queen might move to the pleasing rhythms of a J-pop daydream, but its slender poetry is achieved at the expense of insight.

A breathy, Japanese-language voice over exhaustively explicates the historical origins of Japan’s infatuation with all things six-legged. We learn of the notion of mono no aware – which approximates “a sympathy to transience” – and hear haiku after haiku after haiku after haiku authored in honour of a venerable, minimalist Japan that “rejoices in the miniscule.” (Hence the traditions of bonsai, zen gardens and yes, haiku, which downscale the unfathomably great so as to permit human contemplation). An affinity with the ephemeral and an ennobling of the Lilliputian, it seems, have informed the Japanese consciousness for centuries. With this context, a collective enchantment with insects is easy to understand.

It’s all interesting enough, but glaringly ignored is the more pertinent issue of how this once deferential relationship has of late been perverted by the rising westernisation of Japanese culture. While the Emperors of old once commissioned versical tributes to noble dragonflies and were then happy to leave nature to its course, Beetle Queen reveals – seemingly by accident – a modern industry of insect enthusiasts apathetic to the ecological implications of their pastime. We’re shown bustling beetle bazaars, meet profiteering bug hunters (“Bugs paid for this Ferrari,” boasts one) and visit specialty dealerships dedicated to the vending of rare and exotic specimens. All the while, the narration insists the enthusiasm remains age-old and respectful, but Oreck’s footage betrays a contradictory actuality: gone is the spiritual affiliation with insects so stubbornly averred by the filmmaker and fêted those bygone poets; in its place is an obsession as plainly commercial as Pokémon.

There’s a compelling parallel to be drawn between the commodification of insect interest and Tokyo’s latter-last-century emergence as one of the world’s most rampantly consumerist metropolises, but that’s perhaps fodder for a cannier film. Oreck declines scrutinising her two-legged subjects too closely, and instead contents in parading cute cultural curios and nostalgia-cocooned antiquity. Her Beetle Queen tests the patience for this, but at least its director seems so at bliss, off, as she is, with the fireflies.

DIRECTOR: Jessica Oreck
SCREENWRITER: Jessica Oreck
RATING: TBC
RUN TIME: 90 minutes

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

MIFF in Micro: Part Two

2010-07-26T20:57:00.019+10:00

Machete Maidens Unleashed!

B-movie maestro Roger Corman and former Philippine dictator Ferdinand Marcos might seem like improbable bedfellows, but as Mark Hartley’s (of Not Quite Hollywood fame) newest schlock doc Machete Maidens Unleashed! makes manifest, if there’s one industry where weird is endemic, it’s the movies. Shifting his shit-seeking gaze from the skeletons in his homeland’s cinematic closet to the louche clutch of splatter riots and T&A titillators Corman’s New World Pictures shot in the sweltering jungles of the circa-1970s Philippines, Hartley presents an incongruous, invisible history wherein the opportunistic rogues of New Hollywood capitalised on the cheap local workforce and ultimately held the Filipino military at beck and call as a standby pyrotechnics squad——all this as the nation trembled under martial law. Hartley, however, is less concerned with interrogating the dubious politics of the scenario than he is with exhuming the lurid bounty of whacked-out genre oddities produced under this questionable regime. This rift in interest means Machete Maidens Unleashed! is not quite up to snuff with its riotous forerunner, but with cult luminaries like Joe Dante, John Landis and Corman himself offering wry reminiscences, it still makes for a hell of a ride.

Life During Wartime

In Palindromes, Todd Solondz enlisted ten different actors distinguished by race, age and gender to portray the same twelve-year-old girl. Life During Wartime finds the acerbic essayist of suburban perversion delving deeper still into his own self-reflexivist’s rabbit hole by re-peopling his showpiece to-date, Happiness, with a new-look cast and surveying the psychological aftermath of that film’s shattering (if acridly observed) domestic trauma. But to what end? If the decision is intended to emphasise how such harrowing events alter us ineffably on a fundamental level, then the change is purely cosmetic in the case of Solondz’s gallery of bourgeois grotesques. These are, by and large, the same unstable, arrested and emotionally strangled tragics we left with their heads in their hands in 1998. The difference then was that Solondz seemed to see beyond the abjectly fractured exteriors to empathise with the lonely and tormented souls that spurred his characters to such sickening extremities. Here he simply seems content to scribble stink lines and stuck-out tongues onto postcard visions of idyllic Americana, and the result – though eminently watchable thanks to the odd moment of mordant wit or resonant pathos delivered by a first-rate cast (Allison Janney, Ciarán Hinds and Paul Reubens, take a bow) – is something the former enfant terrible of the American indie has always bent over backwards to avoid: unmemorably dull.

MIFF in Micro: Part One

2010-07-24T14:15:00.028+10:00

Dreamland

A man’s search for life among the stars analogises the human pursuit of purpose in the lyrical next-to-no-budget tone poem, Dreamland. There’s no conventional narrative to speak of in this, director Ivan Sen’s long overdue follow-up to 2002’s should’ve-been-a-classic, Beneath Clouds; instead, accomplished polydisciplinarian Sen (here credited as writer, director, D.P., editor, sound designer and score composer) concocts a heady double-helix of audio and image to ensure the thinkspace of the wandering spirit at Dreamland’s heart (Daniel Roberts) is as all-absorbing for audiences as the stark and otherworldy Nevada terrain he singly traverses proves for him. Those with low tolerance for possibility-prodding experimental filmmaking need not apply, but for anyone in-tune with Sen’s singular ambitions, a magnetic, enriching and quietly profound experience is waiting to be had.

Splice

Too exasperatingly dumb to be fun; not gleefully dumb enough to be dumb fun——that’s Vincenzo Natali’s cautionary creature feature, Splice. With the ace pairing of Sarah Polley and Adrien Brody front-and-centre, a memorably alluring monster, and a zeitgeist-milking story of corporate-endorsed rogue science, this man-plays-god morality horror outwardly boasts the genetic makeup of a surefire genre hit. Pity, then, that the choices made by its characters degenerate from palatable, par-for-the-course plot-launching follies to the kind of preposterously impossible gaffes and lapses of judgement that are, in the real world, only ever actually perpetrated by indolent screenwriters.

My MIFF Roster

2010-07-24T07:57:00.004+10:00

Apologies for the scarcity of posts of late. I’ve been busy (that old feeble alibi). There are a few things which will be coming your way from mine soon enough, but for now, with the good ship MIFF already champagne-spattered and chasing the distance, I thought I’d (finally) disclose my itinerary.

I’ve so far seen Dreamland (which I found admirably ambitious and really quite lingering) and Splice (which was disappointingly dumb and derivative). I’ll endeavour to get capsule reviews of these up this afternoon. The rest of my schedule is as follows:

• Machete Maidens Unleashed!
• Life During Wartime
• And Everything is Going Fine
• Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo
• Enter the Void
• The Hole
• Blank City
• World on a Wire
• Air Doll
• Rubber
• Trash Humpers
• Beeswax
• Lebanon
• Symbol
• Cane Toads: The Conquest
• Monsters
• Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

There are still a few titles I’d love to squeeze in should time and finances permit.

Furthermore, since becoming an iPhone owner I’ve slowly and rather unintentionally inched away from the blog’s Twitter account in favour of simply using my own. (What can I say? It’s just easier.) If you tweet, find me @gerardelson and let’s talk #MIFF.

Inception...

2010-07-24T07:52:00.002+10:00

What did we think? Despite my profound lack of time, I’m halfway through writing a review of my own, but realistically, after glancing at my calendar, I can’t see myself tying it off any time before Tuesday. I’ll say now that I enjoyed the heck out of it, and while it’s neither perfect nor a masterpiece (wildly unreasonable expectations both), it is one of the most memorable trips I’ve made to the movies this year. Grand, tricksy and ambitious. A Christopher Nolan blockbuster, then.

Film Review - Survival of the Dead

2010-07-18T17:13:00.009+10:00

Time was when zombies were totally punk rock——the seditious, skull-sucking cousins of the more readily palatable gallery of ghouls – such as vampires and werewolves – who enjoyed much wider silver screen celebrity. Time was also when George A. Romero – the undisputed doyen of the dead – used the cadaverous shufflers as rotten-fleshed ciphers for scathing, finger-on-pulse social critique. This, the sixth – and hopefully final – addition to his zombie dossier, finds the former master with precious little meat left to his rhetoric.

To be fair, Survival is nowhere near as grating as crudely didactic handicam disaster that was Diary of the Dead, but it certainly makes one thing clear: it’s high time Romero let his screen fiend of choice rest in peace.

For completists only.

DIRECTOR: George A. Romero

SCREENWRITER: George A. Romero

CAST: Alan Van Sprang, Kenneth Welsh, Kathleen Munroe, Devon Bostick, Richard Fitzpatrick, Athena Karkanis

RATING: TBC

RUN TIME: 90 minutes

MIFF Talk @ Desktop

2010-07-16T21:49:00.003+10:00

My MIFF itinerary to date is now up at Desktop, along with micro reviews for the handful of titles screening at this year’s festival which I’ve already had chance to see, namely: The Illusionist, Women Without Men, The Killer Inside Me, Waking Sleeping Beauty, Love in a Puff, Boy and Survival of the Dead. Of the first block of titles listed in the post (ie. the ones Desktop will be covering) I myself will be submitting words on Beetle Queen Conquers Tokyo, Enter the Void, Trash Humpers and Lebanon.

Read it here.

I’ll relay my MIFF line-up in full once it’s finalised next week.

The Loved Ones Trailer, One-Sheet

2010-07-10T18:30:00.007+10:00

While I’m certainly of the camp that suspects the newly-minted trailer for the homegrown highschool-formal-from-hell horror The Loved Ones might pack too many deliriously demented narrative spoilers into its fleet two minute run-time, I just as surely can’t recommend abstaining from viewing the thing. Really. If you’re at all anticipating writer/director Sean Byrne’s debut – or especially if you’re unfamiliar with it – you need to know just how cartwheelingly bugscrew crazy this thing promises to be. (Or, alternatively, take my word for it and save the surprises for the cinema.)

Can’t wait? See for yourself here thanks to Madman.

Additionally, the film’s first one-sheet has been made available concurrently. Enlarge it below:

The Loved Ones crashes the party locally on September 30^th and will screen at London’s Frightfest in August.

MIFF 2010 Launches Program

2010-07-09T23:58:00.005+10:00

It’s here. There’s too much to be excited about to outline now. Keep an eye on Desktop early next week for my picks of the MIFF.

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As a quick status update: it’s a frantic weekend on this side of the screen, but there’s some good stuff coming soon. Promise. (To bring you up to speed: I, along with all of my then-fellow workers, was ignominiously and unexpectedly retrenched a few weeks ago. I’ve since secured an ace new job I’m enjoying very much, but, due to reverting once more to part-time employment, I’m now in the position of having to move house ASAP and will thus be surrendering any time off to inspecting potential rentals. But there really is some good stuff on the way. Cross my heart. Until then, go and see The Horseman.)

The Horseman Giveaway

2010-07-03T15:56:00.004+10:00

Thanks to writer/director Steven Kastrissios, celluloid tongue has three in-season double passes for the gutsy homegrown revenge thriller The Horseman up for grabs.

The film is on limited release from Thursday July 8^th and is screening exclusively at the following locations:

Sydney - Chauvel Cinema
Brisbane - Tribal Theatre
Melbourne - Cinema Nova (only screening Fri/Sat late sessions)

I was quite taken by the film when I caught it at ACMI last October. At the time I wrote:

“The Horseman is by no means the obvious product of its humble spend. Kastrissios has deftly tailored his tale to the production’s fiscal limitations, so it’s exactly the kind of raw and unpolished its stark story so flatly demands.”

Read my full review here.

To enter, email me your name, postal address and the answer to the following question:

Name three other films stuntman Chris Anderson has worked on.

The first three entrants to answer correctly will be notified via return email.

For more on The Horseman, visit its official site or watch its trailer on YouTube.

Let Me In Trailer

2010-07-03T14:41:00.006+10:00

The first trailer for Let Me In – the American remake of Let the Right One In (AKA The Best Damn Vampire Movie Since Trouble Every Day™) – has shown up on YouTube and would seem to suggest this is one redo which won’t stray too far from its source. Usually this would be cause for minor celebration, but with Matt Reeves’ retread coming so close on the heels of Thomas Alfredson’s beloved original, the shot-for-shot hyper-reverence works to erase any desire to actually bother with seeing it. Here’s hoping more is made of the film’s New Mexico setting, or that Reeves and co. have looked beyond Alfredson’s adaptation and back to John Ajvide Lindqvist’s source novel with hungrier eyes, than this first taste implies.

Watch it here.

Let Me In releases October 14^th.

Sydney’s Possible Worlds Film Festival Announces Program

2010-07-03T14:05:00.004+10:00

If you will or can be in Sydney between August 2^nd and 8^th, consider yourself envied by yours truly. The 5^th Canadian Film Festival, Possible Worlds, will be in full roaring swing and if its newly announced program is any indication, it should be cooler than a Montreal March.

Of immediate personal interest are Atom Egoyan’s erotic thriller, Chloe; Cannes stormer, I Killed My Mother, the feature debut of the then-19-year-old Xavier Dolan; Margaret Atwood documentary, In the Wake of the Flood; nuts-looking role-play thriller, The Wild Hunt; pulp satire Leslie, My Name is Evil, which circles the trial of Manson Family murderess, Leslie Van Houten; genre junkie Brian Trenchard-Smith’s newest B-movie bonanza, Arctic Blast; and the rockin’ vampire comedy, Suck, which counts the likes of Iggy Pop, Alice Cooper, Henry Rollins and Carole Pope amongst its shadowy cast of supporting players.

Buy tickets and peruse the program in full at the festival’s official site.

Rango Trailer and One-Sheet

2010-06-30T14:25:00.005+10:00

Having spent the past six months somewhat to the side of the movie news road I’d almost forgotten about Gore Verbinski’s Rango. All that was revealed about the animated family flick at the time of its announcement was that Verbinski had wrangled his Pirates of the Caribbean star, Johnny Depp, to voice the lead——a household pet who would be brought to life using some cutting-edge performance-capture animation techniques.

We now have a trailer up at Apple and the first thing that strikes is how heavily this seems to draw on Depp’s own filmography for its visual inspiration. The star is certainly no stranger to the sort of desert vistas on show here (Dead Man; Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas; Before Night Falls etc.), and — awesomely (remember: this is a kid’s movie!) — there are quite obvious allusions to Depp’s late hero and friend, Hunter S. Thompson. (Given Rango’s reptilian lead, is it too much to expect a cheeky reworking of this classic scene?) Throw in a floating fish straight out of Arizona Dream and the only things missing are a bottle of rum, an angora sweater, some pies filled with people and a set of scissorhands.

In short, Rango looks wonderfully offbeat and eclectic. Watch the trailer for yourself here.

Elsewhere, the film’s first poster recently showed up at IMPAwards:

Should be fun. Rango releases April 7^th, 2011.

Film Review - Toy Story 3 3-D

2010-06-26T14:36:00.018+10:00

In spite of its plentiful charms, you might spend the first two thirds of Toy Story 3 wondering ‘Is this it?’ Across a pair of no less than enchanting – yet never more than dependably so – opening acts a gentle case of sequelitis seems to have beset the usually unimpeachable dreamweavers at Pixar. In taking the regressive step of going back to the toy chest for a third turn of play time with the lovable, huggable and fully poseable stable who first skyrocketed the studio to household namedom way back in 1995, Toy Story 3 initially suggests Pixar might be putting their creatively propulsive ambitions on hold to reach for the wallets of today’s nostalgia-possessed market of moviegoers——a truly disheartening prospect, no matter how blithely delightful the outcome may be.

But breathe easy: the Pixar crew are too clever let their newest Toy idle in in-store-demo mode, and the concluding adventure of Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and their collectible co. upholds the coruscating record of its predecessors by virtue of a five-star – and five-tissue – finale.

Following the laudable forward motion of WALL•E and Up – two pictures that deftly married emotional maturity and social conscience with envelope-nudging narrative experimentation (for flagship family films, at least) – the more humble ambitions of Toy Story 3 give the film the unmistakable sense of being a breather after the frying of bigger fish. And why not? Few studios in history can claim to have been as era-defining as Pixar, and they certainly gained new ground with their last pair of Oscar winners. The warm familiarity of Toy Story 3 affords the toon mavens from Emeryville safe vantage to survey their brave new terrain and consider their next course of action.

None of which would matter a battery if Toy Story 3 weren’t so downright appealing, but even when playing well within their comfort zone, Pixar continue to outstrip their competitors. Unlike the too-lengthily-flogged Shrek series, whose fairytale folk seem to inhabit the same temporal twilight zone in which most animated characters are left to eternally linger, Toy Story 3’s set-up actually suggests finality by acknowledging two simple facts: time passes and things change.

In a poignant play, director Lee Unkrich and screenwriter Michael Arndt (an Oscar-winner for Little Miss Sunshine) have elected to age our heroes’ owner Andy in almost real-time. He was an energetic eight year-old when we left him at the end of the franchise’s second entry in 1999; now 2010 finds him aged seventeen and shipping off for college. It’s perhaps the most logical place to take a franchise about children’s playthings, but the decision adds a resonant urgency to the series’ prime ontological concerns of purpose and accepting transience.

An accident sees the group – a few of whom have been lost over time – donated to the drooling and unruly toddlers of Sunnyside Daycare. Cue giggle-inducing sequences of excitable tots recast as hulking tormentors. Operating instructions are ignored. Accessories are misplaced. The now-de-rigueur 3-D presentation is justified.

Sunnyside’s play room is governed by the avuncular Lots-o’-Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty) and his right-hand man-doll, Ken (Michael Keaton). The latter – a preening metrosexual pretty boy in Keaton’s keen comic hands – makes for many of the film’s biggest laughs. The former – just like Toy Story 2’s duplicitous Prospector – might not be as cuddly as he seems…

For most of its duration, Arndt’s script, co-written with Unkrich and Pixar veterans John Lasseter and Andrew Stanton, leans heavily on the narrative schema laid down by its precursors. It’s another rescue mission story, but Toy Story 3 ups the ante by going for broke and becoming a god’s-honest jailbreak movie——replete with a king’s ransom of subtle cinephilic homages.

The déjà vu means the final product is the least of the trilogy, yet considering its company, that’s hardly a slight. Minor protests of plot recycling aside, Toy Story 3 scores big for being fast on its feet, vibrantly animated and generously bejeweled with inspired gags and character beats. (Special mention must go to the vending machine that’s repurposed as a seedy speakeasy; the tortilla that proves a toy is more than the sum of its parts; and the gallant, flamenco-stepping suave of Buzz Lightyear on Spanish-language setting. Olé!)

Then there’s that finale——a twenty-minute masterclass in both how to remind an audience of how much they’ve invested in a beloved set of characters, as well as how to farewell those characters with grace. Make no mistake: once the Play-Doh hits the fan and the gang from Andy’s room realise they’re surely about to meet their manufacturers, throats will lump and tears will swell. It’s an exquisite farewell, and Pixar should be thanked for ensuring the series which commenced fifteen years ago with the perfect buddy movie goes out on such an emotionally satisfying affirmation of unity and friendship.

DIRECTOR: Lee Unkrich
SCREENWRITERS: Michael Arndt and John Lasseter, Lee Unkrich & Andrew Stanton
CAST: Tom Hanks, Tim Allen, Joan Cusack, Ned Beatty, Michael Keaton, Wallace Shawn, Don Rickles, Estelle Harris, Blake Clarke
RATING: G
RUN TIME: 103 minutes

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

Interview: Hélène Cattet & Bruno Forzani, Writer/Directors of Amer

2010-06-17T15:23:00.016+10:00

The giallo gained notoriety as a grisly staple of the Italian cinema of the 1970s. The lurid, sexually audacious (and often patently misogynistic) psychological thrillers of Mario Bava, Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci matched daring feats of aesthetic bravado and technical dexterity with the plot conventions of procedural whodunits to initiate a genre remarkable for its unflinching dedication to extremity. It’s an extremity not just of cinematographic technique and thematic philosophy (especially where women and sex are concerned), but an extremity of explicitly sanguineous imagery. Even in today’s desensitised market, where the repugnant Saw franchise has become an indefatigable box-office champion, it’s the elaborately-mounted sequences of extravagant bloodletting for which the classic gialli remain infamous. At their best — that is, their most outlandishly unhinged — these prolonged scenes of corporeal trauma achieve a nightmarish sublimity by the very intensity of their savagery.

It’s this heady cocktail of style, method and subject that holds fascination for French filmmakers Hélène Cattet and Bruno Forzani. Their trance-like “neo-giallo” Amer is a fragmentary exploration of female sexual awakening as glimpsed through a prism of traditional giallo convention. It’s one of the most singular films I’ve seen in 2010, so I was very thankful when the pair found time to respond to an email interview for celluloid tongue.

“Amer” means “bitter” in French, which makes it an intriguing namesake for a film as provocative and deliberately crafted as yours. Can you explain the choice of title?

The film is a sensorial movie. Taste is one of the five senses and “bitter” is the taste that the character has at the end of her life (but not at the end of the film!).

Then in French, “amer” sounds like “la mère” (which means “the mother”), which is one of the main characters in the movie. It also sounds like “la mer” (“the sea”), which is one of the main elements of the film. In the same way, the movie can have several meanings depending the way you look at it.

You’re both clearly great lovers of the gialli that Italian directors like Dario Argento, Mario Bava and Lucio Fulci were producing in the 1960s, 70s and 80s. What is it about such a niche and culturally-specific subgenre that struck you as being ripe for revisiting today?

Before making Amer, we had made five short films with no money which were shot in our apartment with four friends. They are all experiments around giallo. We have always tried to develop intimate subjects through giallo’s universe and its cinematographic language. For us, giallo was a unique kind of cinema which mixed entertainment and experiment. Even if it was exploitation movies, there was a kind of free spirit at work which gave us incredible sequences via their directing and excesses. It’s that spirit that we love and which gives us the faith to make movies!

The film is a French-Belgian production – surely that’s a first for a giallo film? How difficult was it to get Amer in front of cameras? Has the finished product been a hard film to sell?

It was quite hard to finance the film. We wanted to make a feature which finalised the work we have made with our short films across six years. We didn’t want to make compromises. Otherwise, what is the point of making shorts if you have to abandon your universe when you make a feature?

We started the project with our Belgian producer, Eve Commenge, who created her company to produce Amer. Then we had to go looking for a French co-producer because we couldn’t do the project with just Belgian money. We met François Cognard, the French co-producer.

At the end of the financial research we only found a third of the original budget. As we were used to making films without money, the producers trusted us to go ahead anyway.

Now we are very happy. The film has a beautiful life: it’s travelling a lot in festivals and it’s already sold in North America for a theatrical release in October 2010 and a DVD release in the UK and Germany.

As cultural outsiders to the genre, were you determined to bring something fresh to the equation, or did you initially set out to make as authentic a traditional giallo as possible?

Our goal was not to make a fan tribute and copy exactly what giallo should be. We have chosen our favourite elements and played with them to develop a personal subject. Our approach is a bit the same as the “assassino” character in gialli — the “fetishist” — who focusses on particular aspects of his victim! One of the aspects we focus on is the giallo’s iconography, with its incredible shots and its cinematography.

There is maybe something nostalgic in the atmosphere of the film because Bruno comes from the south of France at the French/Italian border where some gialli were shot in the 70s. They have the same settings as the super 8mm family films that Bruno’s parents shot at the same time. That’s why we wanted to shoot Amer there: to rebuild that universe of Bruno’s childhood region that has totally changed today.

The film is divided into three very distinct acts, each depicting the formative stages in the troubled erotic life of the protagonist, Ana. The fragmentary structure – along with the sparing use of dialogue – really bolsters the abstract, hallucinatory nature of the film. How difficult is it to write a film like Amer, where the bulk of the effort comes down to the shoot and the edit, and only so much can be conveyed on the page?

We wanted to tell the story not with words but with the audio-visual language. It was important to drive the story of Ana in a visceral way to communicate her sexual awaking through the sensations because, for us, it’s the better way to express that subject. And the construction of the story in three parts — like a kind of “sketches film” construction — permits us to drive the story only in a cinematographic way. But the script was essentially all cold, technical description and no one is used to reading that kind of script. That’s why it was so difficult to find financiers!

The film is so meticulously crafted – in terms of both its visual and sound design – it could easily be mistaken as a genuine artefact from the past. Can you share a little about how the film was produced?

The film was shot on the Riviera — both the French and Italian sides — and in Belgium, too. It took thirty-nine days to shoot.

We made nine hundred shots and there are 2200 cuts in the film. We made HUGE preparations because we didn’t have the luxury to doubt during the shooting — there was not a lot of money, and a lot of shots to make a day. So we tested all the storyboards with a DV-cam and tested all the camera settings before the shoot. We shot the total film with the two of us acting all the characters! So nothing was unexpected.

All the sound has been recreated in post-production. We didn’t take sound recording during the shooting, except for the sequences with dialogue. It’s a way of working that we have learnt on our first shorts which were shot on still frame cameras, which made it impossible to record the sound during the shooting!

What was it about the concept of erotic awareness that you thought lent itself to the giallo style?

We wanted to do something metaphoric about this intense experience of sexual awakening, discoveries of body and desire, and to make an intimate portrait of a girl with her fears and desires. And what could be more appropriate to talk about “fear and desire” than giallo’s iconography?

Gialli are often accused of being misogynistic and perpetuating damaging representations of female sexuality, particularly where the correlation between lust and extreme violence is concerned. Have you encountered any resistance to the film as an upshot of this? Did this shape the way you developed Amer?

No, we never encountered any resistance about that. The film is about a girl who is tortured by her erotic universe. It’s an intimate subject which has nothing to do with a moral or anything.

We thought we may have problem appealing to macho guys because in Amer we reverse the traditional giallo situation: here it’s the man who is an object of desire or of fantasy. We are presenting a feminine point of view. But for the moment we have had no complaints about that!

Amer eschews an original score in favour of using old soundtrack cues from giallo composers such as Ennio Morricone and Bruno Nicolai. Did you consider soliciting a new score for the film, or did you decide to use old favourites early on?

We are soundtrack collectors and we were listening to those scores when we were writing the script at home, so they inspired us. At the end we couldn’t imagine the sequences without them! It was funny to re-use the music far from its original context and to change its meaning. (For instance, picking a poliziottesco [Italian crime movie centred on a typically male “tough cop” character] tune to demonstrate the intimacy of a young girl).

You two are a couple. What’s it like immersing yourself in a project that deals so darkly with notions of sexual awakening, titillation, desire and dread with the person you love? Could either of you have made this film with anyone else?

It’s because we are a couple that we can work together. It would have been impossible to make the film with someone else. We trust in each other and we can speak honestly about intimate things. That’s why we can collaborate.

How have audiences – many of whom might never have seen an original giallo – been responding to Amer?

As we drive the film in a cinematographic way — there is no explicative dialogue — the images can keep a rich polysemic value and offer different levels of reading. That creates a very unique relationship between the film and the spectator. The audience has to take their place in the movie by this open way of seeing the film. It’s a personal experience each time.

But in general, we can say that the audience who knows giallo movies is more focussed on how we have used giallo iconography, while the audience who doesn’t know them is more focused on the subject of the film.

How can people see Amer? Any word on a possible Australian release?

We know that there are negotiations with Australian distributors. But we don’t know more than that for the moment.

Finally, what’s next for you both? Are you done with giallo, or do you intend to experiment further with the genre?

With our next feature, we want to explore the detective aspect of the giallo, but still with our “introspective universe.” And from a male point of view this time!

Learn more about Amer at the film’s official website.

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

Somewhere Trailer

2010-06-16T23:37:00.014+10:00

Sofia Coppola has found her thematic niche (apathy as consequence of affluence) and as the hypnagogic trailer for Somewhere attests, she’s certainly sticking to it. I’ve never been one to find a filmmaker’s patent — or even chronic — psychological baggage an impediment to connecting with their work (quite the opposite, in fact), so rather than meeting this first taste of Coppola’s latest lyrically-lensed iteration of her preferred emotional tropes with skyward eyes, I’m happy to report Somewhere is looking like something to look forward to.

Stephen Dorff already seems perfectly placed as the brattish A-lister shacked up in the palatial Chateau Marmont, and Coppola’s celebrated eye and irreproachable ear are each present and accounted for. Cynics are dubbing it Lost in Translation Again. I’m wondering what could be wrong with a spiritual sequel to an enduring modern favourite.

Watch at Apple Trailers.

Never Let Me Go Trailer

2010-06-16T15:23:00.012+10:00

Much of the joy of Kazuo Ishiguro’s most gentle of science-fiction fables, Never Let Me Go, was the modesty with which the author revealed the defining differences between his not-too-distant-future and the here and now. The first look at Mark Romanek’s exceptionally-cast film adaptation has arrived at Apple, and while things are looking tonally spot-on, I’d advise those who lack familiarity with the novel to tread with caution: Ishiguro’s restraint and sense of mystery have not been observed in the cutting of this trailer. It’s hardly surprising, considering the film is being pushed as a ‘dramatic thriller’ — which, in a sense, it is — but preserving a little more narrative obscurity for the theatre certainly wouldn’t have gone astray.

Find the trailer here.

Never Let Me Go stars Carey Mulligan, Keira Knightley, Andrew Garfield, Sally Hawkins and Charlotte Rampling. It is yet to set an Australian release date.

Not Yet Dead (or; What I’ll Be Seeing in Sydney)

2010-06-09T18:28:00.008+10:00

I just binned a lengthy, repentant post which accounts for my ongoing absence. You don’t need me to lay on the couch for you. (No matter how cathartic it may have been to write.) All you need to know is that I’m heading to Sydney tomorrow night for a long weekend at the Sydney Film Festival.

On the dance card are:

• Women Without Men
• Police, Adjective
• The Illusionist
• I Am Love
• The Killer Inside Me
• Love in a Puff
• Undertow
• Henri-Georges Clouzot’s Inferno

I’ll provide a wrap-up upon my return next week. The keen-eyed reader will notice a number of films on my roster which have already secured local release dates, as well as one particular stunner which floored me when I caught it in New York. What can I say? I’ll have Ange in the seat beside me and the chief impetus for the trip is leisure, so we’re sticking to what we’re most keen on. I’ll be more adventuresome come the MIFF.

If you’re after a general release recommendation, I haven’t seen much, but can vouch for Andrea Arnold’s poetically lensed splinter of Brit-grit social realism, Fish Tank. Despite being hampered by a dopey decision or two and wanting for narrative surprises, it manages to leave quite a mark thanks in most to the performances of its tenderfoot star, Katie Jarvis, and champion stride-finder, Michael Fassbender, who continues to shift from strength to strength.

For the record, I’m still yet to see Animal Kingdom. Next week. I hope.

Inception Banners

2010-06-09T18:08:00.005+10:00

Sorry, Toy Story 3. While I’m sure you’ll impress, I have to confess Inception is the monster release I’m most hotly anticipating for the remainder of 2010. Maybe it’s the cast: Leonardo DiCaprio, Ken Watanabe, Marion Cotillard, Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Cillian Murphy, Tom Hardy and Michael Caine. Maybe it’s the fact I still have no idea what I’m in for, aside from stomach-lurching sights of folding cityscapes and some seriously Escheresque tricks with perspective. Mostly, I think, it’s the compounded knowledge that the aforementioned are reaching the screen under the meticulous eye of Christopher Nolan. At any rate, July 22^nd can’t come soon enough. Until then, here are four new banners for the film courtesy of JoBlo.

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I like.

Dennis Hopper RIP

2010-06-01T09:05:00.005+10:00

For the duration of his lengthy and polymathic career, Dennis Hopper rode hard but seldom took the easy road. Over the weekend, he succumbed to prostate cancer at age 74. Last night I commemorated his passing by attending The Astor’s screening of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet, a film I’d never before had the pleasure of being subjected to in a cinema. 19 years later, Hopper still terrifies as the petulant sadist, Frank Booth. It’s impossible to find a person in that performance.

The Novel Challenge

2010-05-27T10:18:00.005+10:00

I always enjoyed the MS Readathon as a kid, so when Ange discovered its adult equivalent in The Novel Challenge, I gladly accepted her invitation to join Team LiteraryMinded. With the exception of our three upcoming days at the Sydney Film Festival in June, cinema going will take a backseat to the voracious consumption of literature. Which means blog neglect will continue for much of June, with a handful of (hopefully) interesting exceptions. Apologies.

I’m taking The Novel Challenge as an opportunity to burn through a few of the more slender tomes in my towering and ever-escalating ‘to read’ pile. I’ve kicked things off with a cinematic link, of sorts, in the form of Werner Herzog’s hiking journal, Of Walking in Ice.

You can track my progress at my profile page, where you can also make a donation to what’s a very worthy cause. Multiple Sclerosis affects an estimated 18,000 Australians and over two million people worldwide. As its cause remains unknown, there’s no known cure. No donation is too small.

Exit Through the Gift Shop Review @ Desktop

2010-05-19T11:26:00.002+10:00

Myself and John Raptis have locked our sights on Banksy’s Exit Through the Gift Shop for Desktop Magazine.

Read it here.

Tim Burton @ MoMA

2010-05-05T22:19:00.015+10:00

I wrote the majority of this during my time in New York, when the exhibition was still on show at the MoMA. It closed its doors last week, but as free time is lately hard to come by, I haven’t rewritten to account for this. So please forgive any quizzical usage of tense, and know the exhibition has indeed finished its New York residence, and is presently on its way to Melbourne.

As his latest——and perhaps most significant——accolade attests, Tim Burton is the ultimate pariah made good. For over two decades his wildly distinctive filmic fancies have found ardent fans in all corners of the globe, frequently turning up box-office gold, initially seemingly in spite of——though now no doubt because of——their mordantly macabre idiosyncrasies.

Yet there’s no denying Hollywood’s preeminent goth/pop auteur still makes for a decidedly offbeat candidate to be honoured with an expansive retrospective at New York’s venerable Museum of Modern Art. Foremost, Burton is most notable for his work as a commercial filmmaker. And——let’s be honest——even Burton die-hards will concede his singular sensibilities seem too unabashedly, well, lowbrow for the chin-stroking art-world intelligentsia, who’ve surely grown accustomed to a dependable diet of less populist, pop-culture enthused subjects to motivate the museum’s prestigious feature exhibitions——until, that is, a cursory investigation reveals the museum’s noble history of animated art and film exhibits, including (although certainly not limited to) 2005’s Pixar: 20 Years of Animation and 1985’s That’s Not All Folks! Warner Bros. Animation.

Shrewdly timed to ride the surge of expectation for the filmmaker’s Alice in Wonderland, Tim Burton has proved a phenomenal success for the MoMA, whose Special Exhibitions Gallery has been swollen with sell-out crowds since rolling out the red carpet——or more accurately, the monster tongue——in late November of last year.

And not, one can happily report, without due reason.

As a visually annotated circuit through the surprising career of the most famous of former Disney animators, Tim Burton is cloud nine for casual fans and aficionados. It’s an engrossing blockbuster exhibit that takes its curatorial cue from Andy Warhol’s assertion that “pop art is for everyone”——that is, big on show-stoppers and rarely-seen offcuts and curios, light on explicatory insight. In fact, when densely bedecked with the colourful, curlicued and candy-striped creations of his famously restless imagination, the gallery itself becomes a wonderland to rival any of Burton’s celebrated on-screen environs.

Entry is through the cavernous, carnivorous maw of a typically Burtonesque beastie. Once inside, the mood is sustained by a series of newly commissioned compositions by Burton mainstay Danny Elfman, whose carnival waltzes play on ambient loop in various sections of the exhibition space. Indeed, admirable effort has been exerted to ensure the exhibition itself is an experience of commensurate tenor to Burton’s films. In addition to the soundtrack, a number of his sketches and watercolours have been fully dimensionalised as large-scale sculptures and dioramas, which inhabit the gallery with the odd dignity of the absurd, art deco monuments that populate the Gotham City of his Batman Returns. The most arresting of these is a ceiling-suspended black-light carousel, which, when coupled with the screwy aural stylings of Elfman, becomes the kind of creepy/cute apparition it’s tempting to suspect of having tormented the infant Burton during many a nervous night.

Largely, however, Tim Burton is comprised of paintings, pen and ink illustrations, sketchbook scribblings and a vast spread of project-specific artwork. The coterie of misfits and maniacs encountered are both familiar and new, and span numerous modes and mediums, from oversized Polaroids, to caricatures (Joey Ramone and Ronald Reagan amongst them), through to the developmental art for a great many of Burton’s unrealised ventures, including animated shorts like Little Dead Riding Hood and Trick or Treat, and the ill-fated feature, Superman Lives.

What becomes quickly apparent is the sheer prolificacy Burton continues to maintain, with the preponderance of what’s on display having been exhumed from his own exhaustive private archives. By his own admission, most of these pieces were never intended for public inspection. Naturally, then, those expecting refined works of consistent quality——comparable, say, to the Henri Cartier-Bresson photographic exhibit with which Tim Burton currently shares MoMA staging honours——might leave feeling shortchanged.

What makes the Burton show so fascinating for the less exacting audience isn’t simply the smattering of ‘finished’ original pieces. It’s the occasion to trace the iconic stylistic trajectory of one of Hollywood’s most enduring, endearing and significant figures. That the young Burton was a rapacious student of monster movies and Rankin/Bass animation is by now universally known. Yet the influence ‘legitimate’ artists such as Francis Bacon, Pablo Picasso and Hieronymus Bosch held on the stripling cartoonist isn’t nearly so widely documented. Finding decades-old evidence of this scattered across the teeming walls of the MoMA carries the validating sense of genuine insight.

Exegetically, little attention is paid to Burton’s social context and his own considerable stamp on popular culture, and if Tim Burton is to be taken an art exhibition——as its tenure at the MoMA suggests——and not simply a memorabilia showcase, the absence is felt. The exhibition program justly credits Burton with “influencing a generation of young artists working in film, video, and graphics” today, though no evidence is offered to substantiate this. Although no doubt the upshot of considered curatorial deliberation, the oversight feels like a missed occasion to assert Burton’s standing as the unlikely yet long-shadowed pop doyen it’s now easy to forget that he is.

As stirring as it is to find oneself in the audience of the foam latex cast of The Nightmare Before Christmas, or face-to-blade with a 1:1 scale Edward Scissorhands (complete with Colleen Atwood’s original costume, as worn by Johnny Depp), there’s a niggling sense the exhibition might have put its surprisingly limited capacity to more satisfying use. That such a draw card as Burton’s bizarre 1982 chop-socky rendering of Hansel and Gretel——which, at forty-five minutes in length, aired on US television only once and has never since been available in the public domain, until now——is relegated to a tiny screen cornered away in a claustrophobic nook of the gallery is a major misgiving. Such viewing conditions are fine for more concise audio/visual content——such as the 1979 pencil animation Stalk of the Celery Monster, and the tantalising (and regrettably vetoed) animation trials from the undervalued Mars Attacks!, in which a resplendently cheesy stop-motion Martian gleefully obliterates a hapless suburbanite——but make watching anything of length in full (including the World of Stainboy Flash cartoons) a frustratingly off-putting prospect.

Furthermore, it should be noted that Burton’s more sanguineous and subversive adult-oriented fare is largely unrepresented——presumably a case of omission by design to bolster Tim Burton’s hefty potential for all-ages appeal.

Ultimately, these scruples are all but rendered moot by the compulsive creativity on show. Between the bevy of buxom blue science-fiction super-babes, the coulrophobic rogues’ gallery of slaughterous clowns, and the medley of emotionally-arrested innocents and noble tragics who pout, leer and peer from every wall, Tim Burton has something to charm the inner child of every fan of the Dream Factory, be they as easily amazed as Edward Scissorhands, or as callous as Sweeney Todd. It’s a rare opportunity to rummage through the attic of an icon——or, perhaps in this case, the dungeon.

Tim Burton is on show at Melbourne’s Australian Centre for the Moving Image from June 24^th through October 10^th. For more information and to book tickets, visit the exhibition’s website.

[Cross published at Desktop Magazine]

Splice One-Sheet

2010-05-05T21:17:00.004+10:00

Here’s the very ‘80s teaser poster for Vincenzo Natali’s man-plays-god morality horror, Splice, courtesy of Rope of Silicon.

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Reminds me of the old VHS covers for Child’s Play and its sequels…

Tim Burton in Conversation @ ACMI in June

2010-04-30T10:04:00.002+10:00

Calling all antipodean Tim Burton fans: Melbourne’s ACMI has announced two in-person events with the filmmaker as part of their upcoming ‘Winter Masterpieces’ exhibition, Tim Burton.

On June 22^nd, Burton will speak on his five favourite-ever films with Spicks and Specks’ Alan Brough in the latest in ACMI’s Desert Island Flicks series. Book tickets here. Then, two nights later on June 24^th, Margaret Pomeranz will discuss with Burton his creative process in the Masterclass with Tim Burton event, tickets for which are available here.

With just 400 seats available for each session, these are bound to sell out quickly. Get in early to avoid disappointment.

Tim Burton will be on show at ACMI from June 24^th-October 10^th.