Ask Me about my Vow of Silence

Take Shelter

2011-10-12T22:33:00.001+10:30

Bloody brilliant. Read the review and then go see it.

Red State

2011-10-12T22:31:00.001+10:30

Kevin Smith tries something new, and succeeds beyond expectation. Read the review here.

Project Nim

2011-09-30T11:15:00.002+09:30

A fairly depressing story about a chimp that was taught sign language. There's a reason ethics committees exist now, and this is a perfect case study. Read the review here.

Tabloid

2011-09-23T13:47:00.002+09:30

Just like a tabloid, this is an entertaining, lurid, grubby and somewhat exploitative tale of some very weird real life events. It's hysterical and uncomfortable in equal amounts. Read the review here.

Hobo with a Shotgun

2011-09-15T10:10:00.001+09:30

Rutger Hauer as a crazed hobo dealing justice one shell at a time. What's not to like? Read the review here.

The Guard

2011-09-12T17:12:00.002+09:30

Brendan Gleeson's best turn since The General. This is standard stuff, but damn if Gleeson doesn't turn it into something greater. Read the review here.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

2011-09-12T17:11:00.004+09:30

Have your cake and eat it too, that's what this film is all about, and it's pretty smart about it too. Read more here.

Tucker and Dale vs Evil

2011-09-12T17:09:00.001+09:30

Smarter in concept than execution, but still a heap of fun. Read the review here.

13 Assassins

2011-09-12T17:07:00.002+09:30

Samurai carnage like you've never seen before. A solid hour of crazed battle. Read the review here.

MIFF Day 17

2011-08-07T22:47:00.002+09:30

This would have to be my spottiest MIFF ever. Three days skipped, yesterday for my aunt's 60th. Happy birthday Aunty Ali! MIFF is 60 too. :)

BEN LEE: CATCH MY DISEASE

12 years in the making, this is a remarkably complete document about the life and times of Ben Lee, famously described by Bernard Fanning as a "precocious little c#nt". That quote is put in the context of Ben beating Powderfinger to a number one spot on the charts, but there's no denying he provoked it. He speaks freely about the awful headspace of having fans scream in adoration while having fairly low self-esteem and the things it did to him. He also talks about wanting to tackle the cultural cringe/tall poppy syndrome of Australia, where nobody seems comfortable with success. It's very much a warts and all documentary, and Ben is amazingly self-aware and articulate about himself and the environment he moves through. It doesn't dig into why he and Claire Danes broke up, but it does look at what the did to him as a person, his move to India and getting a guru, etc. In the end, it serves to give a deeper understanding to a kid who liked to shitstir and then grew up. I found I thought better of him after watching it, which suggests it's a very successful documentary.

ANOTHER EARTH

A girl, Rhoda, is driving while listening to the radio. It announces that an Earth-like planet has just been discovered and if you look up you can see it. She looks and dreams, and crashes into another car. A child and a woman are killed, and a man is put into a coma. Four years later, Rhoda is released from prison and gets a job as a cleaner at a high school. She tracks down John, the man whose family she killed, and goes to apologise. But she loses her nerve, and pretends to be from a cleaning service instead. He lets her in and she cleans the house. The rest of the story is paint by numbers, his life gets back on track as she brings order to his house, they fall in love, and then finally she confesses and he kicks her out, devastated for a second time. The difference with this story is that they discover the Earth-like planet is actually a parallel Earth, and everyone on Earth 2 is a parallel version of the person Earth 1. So maybe, on that other Earth, things didn't work out the same way, and maybe that offers a way to undo some of the damage of the past. It's not exactly mind-blowingly original science fiction, but its aware of that fact and is simply an interesting story told without pretension or any sense of self-importance. It's a bit of a disappointment given some of the hype that surrounded it, but taken on its own merits its a solid little film that doesn't fully exploit its material but is still enjoyable to watch.

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI

My final film of the festival, and a fitting one given I've been more or less disappointed overall with the standard of films this year. This is a great film about one man's pursuit of perfection. Jiro Ono is the oldest man to be awarded 3 Michelin stars, and also for the smallest restaurant. It only seats 10, doesn't even have a bathroom on site, but you need to book a month in advance to get in. Jiro speaks candidly about his belief in innovation, and also in repetition. His son Yoshikazu points out that they don't do anything particularly extraordinary, but they bring focus to their task to make their sushi the best it can be, and they don't accept anything less. It's a tough environment to work in, one of the apprentices speaks of learning how to make Egg Sushi, and having his first 200 or so attempts rejected. But once he nails it, the satisfaction is enormous. The dedication to craft, the enormous effort and the unwillingness to accept anything less than the best, that is what makes Jiro and those he trains stand out. The shadow he casts is long, and his sons Yoshikazu and Takashi (who runs his own restaurant), while equally as skilled, must deal with the fact that they will never measure up to their father in the eyes of customers. Though interestingly, it's revealed that it was Yoshikazu who prepared the sushi that garnered the restaurant its 3 Michelin stars. In a festival where I've become somewhat cranky at the lack of care, craft or innovation on display in a few too many of the films I saw, this hymn to the pursuit of perfection was the antidote I needed. A lovely way to close out the festival.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-06T07:12:00.002+09:30

You know what, it doesn't suck. Actually, it's pretty fun. Surprising given it's a prequel that seemed to be a cash-in on a franchise. Read the review here.

MIFF Day 15

2011-08-05T23:14:00.002+09:30

A detective story with no resolution and a crime thriller with no clue.

THE BENGALI DETECTIVE

Rajesh Ji is a fascinating guy. He runs a private detective firm in Kolkata (Calcutta) specialising mainly in brand protection, but also covering affairs and murders. And in this hugely entertaining documentary, we get to see all three types of investigation. Rajesh is also a huge dance nut, and enters his entire detective team into a television dance competition, so in between investigations they turn up to the dance studio to practice with their choreographer. This really is a one of a kind story, and it doesn't flinch from showing the state of crime in Bengal. The police are disinterested in pursuing the murder case they're covering, so that runs into a dead end. The wife has her suspicions confirmed and is left trying to decide what to do about a broken marriage. And the brand protection is possibly the saddest of all. Rajesh is quite candid about the fact that carrying out raids on people selling counterfeit goods doesn't do anything except hurt the poor, the people selling the goods. But he's stuck in the middle, with no way out besides going out of business. It's a broadly comic story peppered with sad moments and genuine tragedies, and it's really worth a look.

KILL LIST

Umm, yeah. In short, first half is a bit dull, second half is just weird. It begins as a domestic drama about a former soldier (or mercenary, it's never made clear) whose marriage is falling apart as he hasn't worked in eight months and the bills are piling up. Then his mate shows up with a job offer, assassinate a bunch of people. He takes the job with his wife's blessing, and off they go killing what turns out to be a paedophile ring. But there's something weird about the whole thing, they were chosen for the job for a reason, and then a bunch of satanists get thrown into the mix and it turns into a weirdarse horror flick that clearly wants to be a modern version of The Wicker Man. I can't say it's a good film, because it really isn't, but I didn't hate it. I'm just nonplussed by the whole experience. It's a nothing story that's sort of entertaining most of the time, but it never feels like anyone has a clue what they're doing. Mystery can work if it intrigues, but when it's as bloody-minded and pointless as this, it smacks more of ineptitude.

MIFF Day 14

2011-08-05T00:40:00.002+09:30

Curiosity is good, it leads you to excellent films...

BEING ELMO

Have you ever heard of Kevin Clash? No? He's the puppeteer behind Elmo, so you might want to punch him in the face. But probably not after you've watched this excellent documentary. Fascinated by puppets from an early age, he'd sit close to the television to try and work out how they made the puppets on shows like Captain Kangaroo and Sesame Street. And his passion paid off, ending up working on both shows and now being a major player behind the scenes on Sesame Street. His passion is infectious, and he's a really likeable guy. The doco skips over the impact his workaholism had on his family, with an ex-wife and a daughter who had to email him to point out that she's only got a few years until college and then his chances to see her will be gone. That side of things is glossed, as it's meant to be a happy film about the man who makes children the world over smile. And it succeeds at that. A little more balance would have been good, but it's an energetic and informative doco about a guy who went from watching Sesame Street as a kid to actually turning down his idol, Jim Henson, when he asked him to work on The Dark Crystal. Luckily he got to work on Labyrinth, and from there the rest is history. If you've ever wondered what makes a great puppeteer great, this is the doco that will spell it out for you.

THE MILL AND THE CROSS

Normally, people adapt books or comics to the screen. This is the first time I can think of a painting being adapted. Based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's The Way to Calvary, it features Rutger Hauer as Bruegel travelling through his painting and explaining how he's going to render the scene. It's an immersive art tour, as the 500 characters of the painting are brought to life and their stories played out across the screen. The way the history of the time and the intentions of the work come together in the composition and detail are brilliantly explicated. It's a fascinating film that will no doubt feature in art history curriculums for years to come.

MIFF Day 13

2011-08-03T23:50:00.002+09:30

After missing a day thanks to a car accident and a brief stay in hospital, I'm back. (And I can now verify that those facing the ceiling POV shots in films are an accurate depiction of the experience of being wheeled around on a stretcher.)

ESSENTIAL KILLING

I picked this film on the basis that it stars Vincent Gallo. He's an interesting guy, not as successful as some other actors, but it's a shame since he's a talented guy. Sadly, he doesn't get to do much in this film except look confused and afraid. It starts off promisingly enough, with Gallo as an Arab guerrilla fighter who blows up three Americans with an RPG and is captured, tortured and transported to Poland for some reason. It's there the vehicle he's in rolls off a cliff and he escapes. The whole film up to here is beautifully handled, mostly dialogue free, and packed with clever and interesting action. Unfortunately it starts to unravel once he's on the run through the snow. I was initially thinking it was a thinking man's First Blood, an arthouse survivalist movie, but it quickly peters out and starts to bore. There are no characters, we never learn anything about this guy, we just watch him run and try to survive. And close to the end he meets a mute girl who helps him for reasons unknown and then she packs him off on a horse where he promptly coughs up blood and dies. I imagine the filmmakers thought they were making some profound statement on war, or something like that, but they forgot to let the audience in on it. Much like The Hunter in last year's MIFF, this is a film that fails its promise. It's a shame too, because the first half is exceptionally well made and full of potential.

TROLL HUNTER

I groaned inwardly when the first title card came up on this, claiming it was found footage that had been verified. I know it's a gag, but it's 2011, aren't we all a bit too old for this? But then the film began, and the technique works perfectly for the material. It's not a gimmick, it's a storytelling device. A trio of film students out to make a documentary on the licensed bear hunters hired by the government to keep populations in check hear about a poacher in the area. The hunters all bitch about him, though nobody has seen him. Their interest piqued, they track the man down and start following him. Finally, they catch him at work and he tells them he's no poacher. He's the field agent of the Troll Security Service, a government department that controls Troll numbers and kills them when they break out of their territory. Unlike other found footage films, this one doesn't dick you around with obscured shots and cameras pointed at running feet. You get to see all kinds of Trolls, Forest and Mountain breeds both, and they're nasty and big. It's a thrilling and incredibly funny film, with great performances and a really smart script. An absolute winner of a film.

MIFF Day 11

2011-08-01T23:35:00.003+09:30

Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me...

POLISSE

Starting off my annual round of birthday movies, Polisse is based around actual cases from the Paris Child Protection Unit. How do you make an entertaining film about a unit that arrests paedophiles, pimps and other child abusers? The answer is to make the film about the police themselves, and focus less on the crimes and more on the black humour they use to cope, as well as the ways in which the job has screwed them up. And it works. It's a surprisingly fun film about some pretty awful stuff, and I'm amazed that it managed to do so without trivialising its subject matter. The end is out of left field and fairly pointless, but everything that comes before it is really engaging. Somehow it manages to maintain a hopeful tone despite the awfulness that the officers are combating.

THE FUTURE

Miranda July's Me and You and Everyone We Know hit me out of left field a number of years ago and was one of the standout films of MIFF that year. I'm not sure The Future sits with me in the same way, though I think it's a lot smarter than it initially appears. Covered in oddball whimsy and narrated by a cat in an animal shelter, it's the story of Sophie (July) and Jason (Hamish Linklater), two 35 year olds who realise that they're close to middle age and have done nothing with their lives. Given I turned 35 today, there's a certain resonance for me in it all. Quitting their jobs, they go to seek meaning in their lives, but while Jason manages to go and enjoy life, Sophie is paralysed. She wants to create a dance video for youtube that will give her a small amount of fame, but she can't really dance. So she ends up having an affair and leaving Jason instead. The joy of attention versus the responsibility to someone you love is teased at more than explored, but there's some very wise words said about struggling through the awful things we can do to each other, as well as looking at the false pressures we place on ourselves and the ways we waste our time. Being a film by a performance artist, narrative isn't exactly it's strong point, and the end jars tonally with the rest of the film, but reflecting on it I find a lot to appreciate. It's at once more mature and less focused than Me and You and Everyone We Know, so I'm still unable to decide on it completely. But for all its faults, I liked it. I just didn't love it the way I immediately did her first film.

OUTRAGE

Takeshi Kitano returns to the Yakuza thriller genre he pretty much owned throughout the 90s and 2000s. And he's bored. Outrage is a fun film, and the audience I saw it with filled the cinema with plenty of gasps, laughs and cheers as several warring factions of Yakuza screw each other over and kill each other in a mad scramble to the top of the pile, but it's only good, not great. It's nowhere near the same level as Kitano's earlier films, and even Brother was better than this. The problem lies in the fact that there's nobody to root for, or hate, we just watch as people kill each other and do gangster things like stand over businesses, blackmail government officials, cut off their fingers and bash each other. It's more of a fishbowl experience, looking in but completely removed. You could maybe argue it's about the pointlessness of it all, but that point was made far better back in Sonatine and with a great deal more elan. Even Kitano's usually careful framing of shots is missing. After a trilogy of experimental films (Takeshis, Glory to the Filmmaker and Achilles and the Tortoise) I wonder if he just needed to turn a profit on a film. It's good fun, and entertaining enough, but from a master of the genre, this is much less than expected.

MIFF Day 10

2011-07-31T23:27:00.002+09:30

Officially past the midpoint now, and the last of the crazy five film days. I'm getting old...

TATSUMI

Based on Yoshihiro Tatsumi's Eisner award winning autobiographical graphic novel, A Drifting Life, as well as a number of his other works, Tatsumi is a beautifully animated introduction to a side of manga and anime we don't often see. Gekiga, a more adult form of manga, is what this is, and Tatsumi is credited with inventing it. Rumour even has it that Osamu Tezuka was so jealous of its success he fell down the stairs of his house. The stories told are mature, thoughtful and disturbing. Adult here doesn't mean pornographic, it means for adults. There's a photographer who documents the aftermath of Hiroshima, taking an iconic photo only to discover its meaning to be far sinister than he thought. There's a sexually repressed manga artist who becomes obsessed with the crudely drawn pornography on a toilet wall. A retiring salaryman longs for one fling before he finds himself trapped at home in his loveless marriage. Most disturbing is the story of a girl who sleeps with American GI's, and is hassled by her father. The stories are all grim, but full of the beauty of fallen humanity. I was lamenting the lack of animation at this year's festival, but Tatsumi makes up for it. I loved it.

PAGE ONE: INSIDE THE NEW YORK TIMES

Print journalism is fighting for its life, everyone can see this, but that doesn't mean it's a good thing. This insightful documentary examines life behind the scenes at the New York Times as it struggles with maintaining a high standard of journalism in the face of diminishing revenue. It covers their involvement with Wikileaks, as well as their failures with two serious scandals as journalists turn out to be faking stories or neglecting their investigative duty. You see how serious these people are about quality journalism, and their fears about what it would mean for print journalism to go away. One of the most pointed moments occurs in a debate between Michael Wolff, the founder of Newser.com, and David Carr, the NYT media reporter. Wolff disparages "old media", but is silenced when Carr shows him what the front page of his website would look like without all the articles culled from newspapers... An almost empty page. It's a striking image that shows how dependent (or is that parasitic?) "new media" news sites are on print journalists for their content. It's a thoughtful documentary that leaves you wondering what the future holds for actual, quality journalism. As they say in the film, 1000 bloggers quoting each other isn't the same as someone actually going into a warzone to report on what's going on. Go see this when it his mainstream release, if only to watch David Carr lay the smackdown on half a dozen blogging punks. It really is glorious to watch.

POSITION AMONG THE STARS

The third in a trilogy of documentaries (which I haven't seen), I'm not entirely convinced this is documentary in the traditional sense of the word. There's too much editing between shots, standard angle/reverse angle stuff as well as establishing shots, etc. It feels a bit staged. But at the same time, I don't doubt the truth of what we see. Some of it might be re-enactments of events, but I think it's mostly telling the truth of life in the slums of Jakarta. It's a slice of life story, a bit bleak, a bit hopeful, a bit funny. There's no narrative running through it, it's just stuff happening, but it's engaging and the subjects are all interesting people.

BEGINNERS

Christopher Plummer plays Hal, who at 75 comes out to his son Oliver, played by Ewen McGregor. He's known he's been gay his whole life, and so did his wife, but she didn't care and proposed to him anyway. It's a light and airy story about finding yourself, breaking free of the restrictive ways of your past and embracing life. Though with the amount of lo-fi visual gimmickry used, it feels to me too much like a whimsical 90's American indie film. Director Mike Mills gets away with it, and it really is a very lovely film, but the style feels like a throwback. Halfway through MIFF, I'm starting to wonder if there are still filmmakers out there interested in advancing the medium.

HOBO WITH A SHOTGUN

Having just bemoaned the mimicry of older film fads, there's this fun little number that glories in seedy grindhouse style. Though truthfully, while this film, like Machete, was first born as a trailer for the Tarantino/Rodriguez Grindhouse project, grindhouse isn't quite where this film finds its DNA. It's more a Troma film with good actors and a budget. Rutger Hauer is the titular Hobo, and it's not long before he's found himself a hooker with a heart of gold to be his sidekick. The cliches come thick and fast, as do the grotesque one-liners and splat-tacular gore and violence. It's a genuinely unhinged film, complete with armoured demon bounty hunters with a pet tentacle beast. An audience film for sure, you'll want to be laughing and cheering with others as it gets more and more absurd and over-the-top. Good silly fun.

MIFF Day 9

2011-07-31T00:53:00.002+09:30

I skipped Day 8. I didn't want to, but it was MIFF or Pulp. Pulp won (and was bloody awesome).

HANEZU

At the end of Hanezu there's a title card letting you know the film is dedicated to the spirits of an ancient Japanese capital that's currently being excavated. When I read that, all I wanted to know was what those spirits had done to the filmmaker to make her hate them so much. Walkouts used to be a common thing at MIFF, but less so in recent years. This film brought those memories flooding back as people kept getting up to leave. I stuck it out, but there was nothing redeeming about the experience. It's a ponderously arty story about a woman seeing two men, and screwing them both over while professing to love them. But it's so boring you just don't care. How you take a love triangle and make it boring I don't know, but I saw it happen. Awful awful film.

DREILEBEN - DON'T FOLLOW ME AROUND

The second of three supposedly standalone films set in a town where a killer is hiding in the woods. Either this one was poorly written, or else it's not really a standalone film. There was a lot going on that I knew obviously referred to other events, even though the characters were clearly only part of this episode of the series. I'm thinking of it as the German Red Riding trilogy, but it felt less successful. That said, it wasn't a bad film. The main plot concerns two friends who discover they dated the same guy at the same time before they met each other. There's some pretty serious leaps of logic in character motivation, and the grand reveal is obvious from the beginning, but it was enjoyable enough. I wish I'd booked myself in for the trilogy now, because I'm intrigued. On its own though, not a great film, but it passed the time pleasantly enough.

ANIMATION SHORTS

If I have one major complaint about MIFF this year, it's the lack of an animation sidebar. It's not like there isn't a whole bunch of astonishingly good feature animations out there at the moment, and I was dying to see them. But no such luck, there's very little this year. And there was very little on show here too, sadly. Out of the 10 short films shown, only 3 really stood out. The Mechanism of Spring was a little charmer from Japan, no plot to speak of, just a stream of consciousness with an infectious joy to it. Specky Four Eyes was a French black and white work about a boy who prefers to see the world without his glasses, a world where the blurred images form another world. It was a brilliant little piece about childhood imagination, and the things we lose when we grow up. Miss Remarkable & Her Career was a Swedish film about a young woman struggling with the weight of parental expectation on her life. Smartly using the medium to advance the storytelling, it surreally depicts her struggles with depression and inadequacy, showing her unique perspective on life. A really great piece.

POM WONDERFUL PRESENTS: THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

Morgan Spurlock is back, and in fine form. After the debacle that was Where In The World Is Osama Bin Laden, he's back tackling a subject his gonzo approach is well suited to: product placement. A film about product placement in film, fully financed by corporate partners advertising their wares in the film, Spurlock flies Jet Blue, stays at Hyatt hotels, and drinks a lot of Pom. It's a brilliant example of having your cake and eating it too. While he's very respectful to the brands he's promoting in the film, he also gets to make you aware of how much effort goes into getting brands attached to films, and the science that's behind it. Knowing that there are people showing people ads while they're in an MRI machine so they can better structure movie trailers is both absurdly funny and disturbing. And that's pretty much what this film is, funny and disturbing. Another great and unusual doco from a great and unusual filmmaker.

Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-07-30T12:05:00.002+09:30

The subtitle is stupid, and obviously just a marketing gimmick for next year's The Avengers, but ignore the marketing and enjoy the film, it's great fun. Review here.

MIFF Day 7

2011-07-28T23:23:00.002+09:30

Is it the absence of daylight that attracts strange mutant creatures to MIFF?

OKI'S MOVIE

There was a very strange man sitting next to me during this movie. He had breathing problems, laughed maniacally for about a minute at the beginning and then talked at the screen every now and again. He looked like an overweight Michael Rymer (who has a film at MIFF this year). Strange.

And then there was the film. For the love of God, would filmmakers stop thinking that films about filmmaking are interesting! It's narcissism of epic proportions. And bloody lazy writing. That said, while Hong Sang Soo is on my shitlist for severe cinematic wankery, I kinda liked Oki's Movie a bit too. There's plenty to hate, and hate it I do, but there's also some great scenes. Overall it's kinda like Littlerock. I didn't mind it at an emotional level, but I despise much of it on a formal level. Total wank, but not unpleasant to watch in parts.

KHODORKOVSKY

I remember hearing about Mikhail Khodorkovsky when he was arrested back in 2003. He was described as a political prisoner who had run afoul of Vladimir Putin. This doco delves not just into his imprisonment, but also how he came to be the richest man in Russia. What unfolds is the story of a man who isn't exactly a hero to the oppressed. He's one of the men who seized the chance to take possession of state assets, unquestionably via corrupt means, and transformed it into something great. But as his wealth grew, so apparently did his social conscience. And then he made the mistake of taking on Putin. There's little doubt that the charges against him are mostly trumped up, but what's interesting is the speculation around why he chose to return to Russia, having been warned he was going to be arrested. The idea that he has political ambitions, and that prison will give him credentials that his wealth couldn't buy is an interesting one. He's in prison for at least another six years, but it will be interesting to see what happens to him once Putin is gone and he is released.

THE REDEMPTION OF GENERAL BUTT NAKED

I'm only midway through MIFF, but I'm calling this the best documentary of the festival. Joshua Milton Blahyi was known as General Butt Naked during the Liberian civil war. He and his soldiers ran into battle naked, terrifying their enemies and committing countless atrocities on the civilian population. By his own estimate, he's responsible for at least 20,000 deaths. But something happened. A local Bishop felt called by God to tell him he needed to repent of his sins. And he did, and then he vanished. Ten years later he reappeared in the capital as an evangelist preaching the love of God and seeking the forgiveness of everyone whose lives he destroyed. I personally have the view that no repentance is genuine unless the person has a complete acceptance of the consequences of their actions. And Blahyi seems to. He was the first person to testify at the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, fully aware that he might be put on trial for his crimes with his confession used as evidence against him. He sought out his former child soldiers and rescued them from the streets they were living on, got them off drugs and set up a group home to help them. But then death threats were made against him and he fled to Ghana. Some of the men he was helping ended up back on the streets, some of them didn't. And in the end, he can't take the guilt of running away and comes back. It's an extraordinary portrait of the struggles of a man who has done unspeakable things to cope with his guilt, his faith and his past. He's anything but perfect, and half the time you wonder if he might be faking the whole thing, but that idea doesn't stack up against everything he does. He knows what he did, and he knows it's never going to leave him, but he's doing his best to atone. It'll test the limits of your faith, if you have one, and make you think hard about what it takes to genuinely turn a life around. Confronting, provocative and completely brilliant filmmaking.

MIFF Day 6

2011-07-28T00:05:00.002+09:30

Truth is stranger than fiction...

PROJECT NIM

The story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee taken from his mother at birth and raised as a human, taught sign language and then abandoned when that experiment ran its course. This all happened before ethics boards I'm assuming, since most of what took place was adhoc and ill-considered. He's first placed in a family but given no structure for learning, though he's given pot. Then he's taken away, raised by others and taught to sign properly, but they don't understand he's a wild animal until he starts assaulting them, almost killing two research assistants. The plug is pulled on the project and Nim is returned to a cage where he's miserable. From there he's sold to an animal testing lab, only to be rescued by well-meaning but completely clueless animal activists who lock him up in another cage. Finally, he lives out his final days with a few other chimps and while it's not perfect, it's pretty good. The story is crazy, and a lot of the people involved are crazy too. There's some pretty damning admissions, and disturbing footage of animal testing. And all in all it's a very sad story of the cost on an animal of the pursuit of knowledge.

BUNCE

A short film written by Stephen Fry, immortalising his debt to a boy named Bunce who once upon a yesteryear helped a young Stephen Fry indulge his love of sweets. It's funny to see the now elder Fry play a headmaster telling "himself" off, and the writing is as sharp as you'd expect from such a wit. Good fun.

THE GUARD

A showcase for how awesome Brendan Gleeson is (though The General proved that point over a decade ago), The Guard is the story of Gerry Boyle, the local cop in a small village that is suddenly the focus of a major operation to catch some drug smugglers. Gerry glides through, making inappropriate comments, sampling the wares and cleverly disguising the fact that he's a lot smarter than everyone else. Don Cheadle as the FBI agent sent across is just there to be the straight man, but he plays it very well. It's a very Irish sense of humour that pervades, dry and black, with wall to wall laughs. It's out in a week or two, so go check it out, it's a cack.

INTO ETERNITY

In Finland, it's been decided that the way to deal with their nuclear waste is to build a massive underground bunker and store it there, filling it back up with rock and sealing it for the next 100,000 years. This doco is meant to be a message to anyone who comes upon the site and imagines it's anything other than one of the most deadly places on earth and tries to excavate. I personally found the whole thing rather patronising and foolish, as it's structured and presented as if speaking to little children, telling fairytales about how deadly the place is. I was told after the screening by someone that's it's fairly normal behaviour for the Northern Europeans, no ambiguity. So it's probably just me. But still, I found it a ponderous and pretentious piece of work, though the information within was genuinely grim and thought provoking.

TABLOID

I had no idea what to expect from this one. All I knew was it was Errol Morris. The man has a talent for finding odd subjects, and this one is out there. Joyce McKinney, a former beauty queen, falls in love with a mormon who promptly vanishes on her. She hires detectives to find him, and discovers he's in England. He didn't vanish, he just went on mission. So she goes over there, kidnaps him, straps him to a bed and they have sex for three days. At least, that's what's alleged. Her version is that he left willingly, then had guilt over the sex, convinced he would be excommunicated from the church, and thus lied to cover himself. The British tabloids got a hold of the story and ran with it. The whole thing is so fantastical you couldn't make it up, especially once more and more of Joyce's past catches up with her. Allegations fly back and forth, with both sides claiming their evidence has in the subsequent years been lost. The film falters as it shifts into Joyce's second run with notoriety, when she has her dead dog cloned in Korea, but it recovers. The whole thing in incredibly weird and funny, but you do feel a little dirty when you laugh. There's a level of exploitation going on here that makes the film's title very appropriate.

OPERATION 8

New Zealand has a reputation as being one of the most progressive and sensible countries around. This solidly constructed documentary annihilates that image. In 2007 the police raided and arrested an eclectic group of activists. Everyone from anarchists to indigenous rights activists were charged with terrorism offenses and locked up. But the evidence didn't stack up, so the Crown refused to prosecute. That wasn't the end though, and it's still being dragged through the courts to this day. It's a depressing vision of a nation, with police informers caught inciting crime, a retired undercover police officer admitting to fabricating evidence and claiming a culture of deception in the police, as well as private security firms spying on and infiltrating activist groups to protect commercial interests. It's a sad and pathetic state of affairs, but with people are trying to justify their paychecks, it seems unlikely sanity will prevail in the near term.

MIFF Day 5

2011-07-27T00:31:00.002+09:30

Old friends come to visit, some not so welcome...

A STOKER

Alexei Balabanov impressed me several years ago with a film called Cargo 200. It wasn't a nice film, and it had its flaws, but it was a dark and impressive film. His followup Morphia was just as dark, though not nearly as impressive. The finale was just lame, though that could have been a reaction against the MIFF guide calling the final shot the most impressive of the festival. Silly people. A Stoker is another dark skewering of Russian history, but this time it's almost a comedy, almost. You have the Major, a shellshocked former soldier who now spends his days stoking fires at a boilerhouse. Some old colleagues occasionally bring in dead bodies to burn. They tell him they're killing bad people, that they're the good guys. In truth, they're just assassins for some gangsters. It's a comedy of errors, as one of the men, Bison, is shagging the Major's daughter, as well as the daughter of his partner in crime. The two girls run a business together. Then the partner's daughter discovers Bison isn't just hers, and demands the Major's daughter be removed from the picture. And everything unravels from there. It's a black as pitch comedy about the awfulness of modern Russia, as well as touching on the historical oppression of the Yakut people. I get the feeling Balabanov really loves his country, three films seething with anger at the messed up things that go on there isn't just coincidence.

LITTLEROCK

Ah, mumblecore, how do I hate thee? Let me count the ways... If I'd known this was a mumblecore flick I'd have stayed away, but I'm almost glad I didn't. The story of two Japanese tourists stuck in a dead end town for a couple of days, Atsuko and Rintaro are befriended by Cory, a complete dropkick of a human being who you want to smack upside the head. But he's optimistic, undaunted and oblivious to his many failings, and almost ends up being charming in a gormless way. Nothing much happens, as is the way with mumblecore, with a few good scenes holding your attention while others just feel like padding. But what I didn't expect was a suckerpunch of a final line, with enough emotional weight to make me almost forgive how unlikeable and dull the characters were for most of the runtime. Almost. The end is really strong, though I'm not convinced the journey was entirely worth it.

ROUTE IRISH

And from a bad film elevated by a good ending, to a good film let down by a bad one. Ken Loach's return to MIFF (apparently Israel isn't paying the airfare of a filmmaker this year, so he's got nothing to complain about), Route Irish is a solid, if by the numbers, thriller about the dodgy dealings of private military contractors in Iraq. A man is killed, his friend thinks he was set up to be killed, and as he digs deeper he discovers that yes, he was set up. So then it's about revenge. Loach remains a potent and angry director, and the film is full of horror and fury at the abuses these companies carry out, but surprisingly it does go a little way to explaining how they can happen, and how it's not always as simple as black and white. Granted it's only a tiny concession in one scene, as one man begs for his life and tries to justify himself, but it struck me as interesting all the same since there was an earnestness to it. Unfortunately, despite the strong performances and everything else, it's still a hackneyed storyline with a finale so lame it beggars belief. I don't know why I expected better, possibly because it initially seemed a bit smarter than all that. I dunno. It's a good film, just let down by a weak ending.

13 ASSASSINS

Takashi Miike is responsible for some of my worst experiences at MIFF. He's also been responsible for some of my best. Prolific and highly variable, you're never quite sure what you're gonna get from him. This is his homage to Kurosawa's Seven Samurai. Basically, all you need to know is that it's two hours long, spends about an hour setting up the fact that the Shogun's half-brother is a vile bastard who needs to die, and that 13 men have tasked themselves with achieving this, and then spends the next hour in an orgy of swordplay. This is a samurai action fan's wet dream. Seriously, it's crazy, funny and full of amazing setpieces. There's little characterisation beyond what's needed to get things going, so it's never going to compare with Kurosawa's best-known film, but it's still bloody awesome fun.

MIFF Day 4

2011-07-26T00:15:00.002+09:30

No theme today, just good fun.

RESURRECT DEAD: THE MYSTERY OF THE TOYNBEE TILES

Across the USA and even in South America, tiles with a strange message have been appearing since the early 1980s. Are they the rantings of a madman, a prank that's still running or some colossal art project? The message itself is bizarre, but the ways in which it has affected peoples lives is even stranger. Justin Duerr, Colin Smith and Steve Weinik are obsessed with finding out the truth behind this strange message:

TOYNBEE IDEA
IN KUBRICK'S 2001
RESURRECT DEAD
ON PLANET JUPITER

As it turns out, even David Mamet is involved in this, albeit tangentially. What's amazing about this doco is that it actually lucks out in finding some plausible answers through some amazing coincidences and pure dogged investigation. Justin, Colin and Steve are meticulous, and uncover a wealth of information. It's wonderfully told, with an appropriately strange Elfmanesque score. The things you'll learn are completely bizarre, but I don't want to spoil it. Seek this one out and discover it for yourself.

WIN WIN

Paul Giamatti is pretty much a guarantee of a good film, and this is no exception. It's a bog standard mid-budget American indie comedy with a good heart and a few flawed characters screwing up massively while remaining decent human beings. It's nothing special, but it's entertaining and really funny.

THE FUTURE WILL NOT BE CAPITALIST

A short film about the history of the headquarters of the French Communist Party. A study in architecture, it's pretty cool to see such an interestingly designed building.

DETROIT WILD CITY

Basically a vision of America eating itself alive, this is a film about the death of Detroit. Stripped of industry, the city is slowly being cannibalised for scrap while whole areas are overtaken by crime, or nature, or both. There's people who have taken over derelict spaces and turned them into farms for the local community, others are destroying crack houses and turning them into public parks, and still others are just leaving. Plenty of people still work in the city, but few actually live there. It never really comes to a point, but its varied vignettes give an insight into the death of American industry, and what that's meant for the place of its birth.

END OF ANIMAL

God bless the Koreans and their crazy cinematic ways. This little gem is small, focused and really weird. While riding in a cab on the way to stay with her mother, a strange man joins Soon Young and starts counting down the seconds. And then the world ends. The strange man is gone, but communicates with Soon Young via the only working piece of technology remaining, a walkie talkie. She meets other people who are all pretty nasty pieces of work, and ignores every piece of advice the strange man gives her, to her detriment. It's hard to like a film where everyone is either evil or just too damn willfully stupid to be sympathetic, but that's kinda the point here. For much of the runtime, I was thinking this was some kind of allegory about people refusing to listen to God, choosing their own way rather than accepting a well-intentioned direction. But while the stranger says he loves everyone, God isn't the only one who loves a sinner. It's a nifty little story with some nice ideas to chew on.

THE UNJUST

Good fun, but about half an hour too long, this is a story of a corrupt cop and a corrupt public prosecutor locked in a battle of wits. It's actually pretty cool, since the people they're taking kickbacks from are locked in a war over a property deal, so they're each trying to knock the other out to let their side win. Add in a case about a child-murderer they're both assigned to and you've got a really twisty and tense thriller. Sadly, it gets a little too twisty towards the end and starts to lose itself as what is meant to be karma biting back feels a little too contrived, especially as one corrupt cop seems fine with bribes but is suddenly not cool with executing gangsters. Great concept, and a solid film for the most part, but too long and too silly at the end. There'll probably be a Hollywood remake sometime ala Infernal Affairs. Hopefully it'll go the same way and improve on the weaknesses in the original.

MIFF Day 3

2011-07-24T23:37:00.003+09:30

If mental illness was the theme yesterday, pretension was it for today.

OUTSIDE SATAN

I think this was the story of a fallen angel who left Hell and now roams the countryside being nice to people and punishing evil. Maybe. I dunno. It's one of those films that has long, slow takes of scenery with a person in the far distance walking along, very little dialogue and occasional moments of violence. In fact, it's pretty much what this year's MIFF trailer parodies. An hour in I was getting a bit sick of it. But by the time it finished, I actually quite liked it. There's no answers, just a sense that a potentially evil being has some good in him, and has a soft spot for victims. You'd never see this outside of a film festival, but I'm glad I got the chance. I doubt I'd have the patience for this if I was watching it on SBS, and it would've been my loss.

YOU ARE HERE

A sort of story about the nature of consciousness, it's a collection of thought experiments conceptualising identity, and I think also a parody of the idea that there's an order and meaning to life. Some of it is very good, especially an over-complicated approach to a Turing test that demonstrates that right response is not the same as conscious thought. It's very light in tone, with a lot of comedy and all kinds of weirdness going on. Another film you'd never see outside a festival, but another one you're glad you had the chance to experience.

THE SOLITUDE OF PRIME NUMBERS

On the other hand, there are films you'd never see outside a festival that you wonder if they should even be in the festival. I assume either the book is rubbish, or something was lost in translation, but this is a very well made trainwreck. It adds up to nothing, though it seems to think it had something to say, and sections of it a truly awful. The use of snap zooms like a bad soap opera are painful in the few sections they're used, and the jumping around in time doesn't really add a lot to the proceedings. It's meant to be the anti-love story of Mattias and Alice, two people who can't be apart but can't be together for some reason either. They're both damaged by childhood traumas, now she's bulimic and he cuts himself. But you don't really care. There's some beautifully staged sequences, and the music is by Mike Patton (which is why I chanced a film with such a wanky name) so it's not all bad. But it all ends up a bit mystifying, going nowhere. I suspect people who have read the novel would get more out of it.

PRESSPAUSEPLAY

The only doco for the day, and an interesting one. Computers and the Internet have given everyone a voice, so now everyone is an artist. Does that mean we're seeing an explosion of talent or are we about to down in an ocean of mediocrity? Interviewing a wide range of artists, critics and cultural theorists, the doco give a good overview to the good and the bad of the modern communication age. From things like the loss of craft, as people rely on digital tools to fix up their mistakes, to the possibilities of collaboration and cross-promotion, it shows how messy and full of potential and horror the modern age can be. While siding firmly on the side of those who think that the ease with which people can now create is going to be a positive, it does let those who think this is leading to a cult of the amateur have a voice. Personally, I'm disappointed it didn't cover off one fairly obvious point. If everyone is creating and publishing their work themselves, with the crap drowning out of the gems, surely the next major art movement will be found in the curators. Those people who wade through the garbage to get to the good, the lasting and the genuinely great. It would be interesting to imagine a world where that in itself became legitmised as a form of artistic expression. There's a brief discussion around hype and backlash, the next big thing that quickly becomes yesterday's old news, but a bit more of that would have been good. Definitely a good starting point for a lot of arguments between friends.

MIFF Day 2

2011-07-24T00:18:00.003+09:30

Disorders of the mind seem to be the order of the day...

OLD CATS

I loved The Maid when it showed at MIFF back in 2009, and Sebastian Silva is back with a new film, just as good. The same dark humour, the same love for his characters. This time it's the story of Isadora, who is beginning to feel the onset of dementia. Her husband Enrique does his best to look after her, but it's getting worse. Then her immature and fairly selfish daughter Rosario shows up and tries to get her to sign a power of attorney so she can take over the apartment, move Mum into a home and move in with her girlfriend Hugo. Hijinks ensue, as Enrique catches Rosario trying to trick her Mum, and it all just spirals out from there. It's a small film about people who love each other screwing each other over, and black as it gets, it's still a warm and human film. Silva is two for two now. He's a gifted filmmaker.

EL VELADOR

My only doco of the day, and a disappointing one. In concept, it sounds brilliant, a view of the Mexican drug wars through the eyes of the nightwatchman of the cemetery where most of the drug lords are buried. Great idea, pity it didn't really do much with it. The cinematography is gorgeous, and the long takes let you appreciate how well the shots are composed. But there's little information, and no character or soul to the piece. I get the feeling it was meant to be a meditative film, musing on the bizarre celebrations of the dead and the obscenely ornate mausoleums built for them, just meters away from men living in shacks. But it missed the mark, and instead of a rhythmic view of daily life at a place for the dead, a place rapidly filling as the drug wars rage, we get a lugubrious film that says nothing we don't already know and fails to give any insight into anything much at all. Very disappointing.

SUBMARINE

Richard Ayoade has already establishing himself as a comic actor and director. Garth Marenghi's Darkplace is a cult (and personal) favourite. Now we finally have his feature film debut, and it's a ripper. A coming of age tale where young Oliver Tate has to wrestle with his belief that his parents marriage is on the rocks, and also navigate his own new romance, it's got a quirky tone that never actually seems all that quirky. Performances are brilliant across the board, though Paddy Considine takes the cake for being completely unrecognisable as the possible lothario threatening Oliver's parents marriage. It captures perfectly the confusion of growing up, and the strange ways people try to make sense of it all. It'll be coming to cinemas soon, no doubt, so keep an eye out.

TAKE SHELTER

This was my pick for the festival, and I wasn't disappointed. Shotgun Stories was a film I saw years ago at MIFF and it blew me away. Here director Jeff Nichols reteams with Michael Shannon for one of the greatest films about mental illness I've seen. Curtis LaForche's mother abandoned him when he was ten, left him in the car when she had a paranoid schizophrenic episode and didn't show up until a week later. He swore he would never abandon his family. But when visions of an apocalyptic storm haunt his dreams, and break into his daily life, he's torn between his belief in them, and his knowledge that he's probably losing his mind. The ways he struggles to hold it together, to quiet the demons in his head so that he can stay with his family, that's the bulk of the film. And it's a powerhouse performance. Everyone is good, but if Shannon doesn't get an Oscar nod for this there's no justice in the world. It's an incredible film that takes a highly unusual approach in dealing with its subject matter. The end will either leave you pissed off or thoughtful, and it's guaranteed to cause arguments between friends. Was it the right ending or not? I think it works, but I can see how people could disagree. Either way, it's an amazing film.

MIFF Day 1

2011-07-23T00:12:00.002+09:30

I sat down in the cinema and it was like the last year hadn't happened. The same faces, the same seats, the same queues. Sometimes it seems like only the sponsors change. But it's a new year, a new Festival Director and a new lineup of movies. It's off to a good start too!

SENNA

Made up of racing footage, interviews and home movies taken while Ayrton Senna was still living, this is an excellent documentary for the fan or the uninitiated alike. Director Asif Kapadia charts Senna's rise from a go-cart racer to the king of Formula One, his rivalry with Alain Prost and the politics of the world he inhabited. The insight into the behind-the-scenes machinations of Formula One is fascinating, with Senna and Prost's competition providing the narrative to frame the game behind the sport. And seeing footage taken from Senna's race cam on a big screen is exhilarating, and a must for racing fans. You really appreciate the skill and reflexes involved when you're thrown into the driver's seat like that. It borders on hagiography, but it's a great doco.

POOL PARTY

What starts off feeling like a bubblegum doco about a bunch of concerts held in an abandoned public pool in Brooklyn surprises as it expands into a really thoughtful examination of gentrification and sense of community. The McCarren pool was built in the 30s, and eventually abandoned in the 70s. A group of activists campaigned for it's renewal, but were shouted down by local residents who feared a revitalised pool would draw in "undesireables" from the housing projects in nearby suburbs. So instead it was abandoned, until artists and hipsters moved into the neighbourhood seeking cheap rent and suddenly the place was trendy. Artists used the site for dance performances, etc and then live gigs began. Finally, the area became so trendy that nobody opposed the pool being re-opened. Except of course, the people who were enjoying the gigs. But since the area is being redeveloped out of their wage bracket... It doesn't take sides, but it takes a single public space and turns it into a reflection on modern man's migration patterns and the economic and social impacts it has on a community. It also has a lot of excellent artists playing live, so it really is the full package.

5 Days of War

2011-07-23T00:10:00.002+09:30

A bit of smart and a lot of stupid, it's nonetheless an interesting if unsuccessful attempt at fusing big budget action cinema with social issue cinema. Read my conflicted thoughts on the subject here.

Stake Land

2011-06-25T11:41:00.002+09:30

A post-apocalyptic vampire hunting road movie that delivers on all levels. Damn this one is good. Go see it.

Blame

2011-06-15T22:48:00.001+09:30

A little Aussie thriller that smartly skewers the sense of self-righteousness that lies at the heart of revenge. Read the review here.

Super 8

2011-06-09T22:14:00.002+09:30

It's good, but it holds itself back from greatness by trying to imitate the films that inspired it. At least, that's how it felt. Read the review here.

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-02T23:03:00.000+09:30

Or more appropriately, X-Men: No Class. Sad, just really really sad...

Here I Am

2011-06-02T23:02:00.001+09:30

It has it's flaws, but you get over them quickly since the core performance and story is so good. Read the review here.

Get Low

2011-05-29T16:30:00.001+09:30

A small film, but not an insignificant one. A truly lovely and very funny story of a man struggling to come to terms with his past. Read the review here.

Source Code

2011-05-29T16:29:00.002+09:30

A ripper little science fiction film. Big ideas in the background, people in the foreground. Just as it should be. Read my review here.

The Mechanic

2011-03-31T17:42:00.001+10:30

It's not as smart as it thinks it is, but it's still a lot of fun. Review here.

Red Riding Hood

2011-03-31T17:37:00.001+10:30

It's trash, but half the time it's campy fun trash. Unfortunately the rest of the time it's genuinely awful. Pity.

Never Let Me Go

2011-03-31T17:36:00.001+10:30

Best SF film since Children of Men, seriously. Go see it now, or read this review.

Battle: Los Angeles

2011-03-16T22:49:00.002+10:30

There's a reason the trailers didn't tell us about the characters or the plot... But still, things go boom in a very satisfying manner. Read more of what I think here.

Wasted on the Young

2011-03-03T21:44:00.002+10:30

The feel-bad hit of the summer. Read the review here.

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-03-03T21:42:00.001+10:30

Philip K Dick adapted into a movie. Is it Total Recall or Screamers? Find out here.

I Am Number Four

2011-02-24T21:39:00.002+10:30

I wanted to walk out on this film, it's awful. But I stayed, and was rewarded with some bloody awesome action scenes. Pity about the rest of the film. It's genuinely stupid, but enjoyable, sorta. For more on how conflicted I am about this film, read the review here.

127 Hours

2011-02-10T23:03:00.002+10:30

For a film about a guy trapped under a rock, it's surprisingly dynamic. Read the review here.

Faster

2011-02-04T23:02:00.002+10:30

Don't waste time on the movie, but go listen to the soundtrack, it's great. For a short essay on why this isn't a good film, click here.

Sanctum

2011-02-03T22:29:00.002+10:30

The 3D is some of the best I've seen. The diving and caving excellently directed. If only they didn't talk and ruin the whole thing. The writers should be locked in a dark room and forced to listen to the dialogue on repeat for a week... Read the review here.

The Fighter

2011-02-03T22:28:00.003+10:30

This could've been a telemovie, or a cheap Rocky knockoff. But with a great cast and an amazing director it becomes something else entirely. Read the review here.

The Green Hornet

2011-02-03T22:25:00.001+10:30

The ideas are really smart, the characters cleverly constructed, the action fun and exciting. And yet... Still, it's fun. Read the review here.

Black Swan

2011-02-03T22:23:00.001+10:30

Aronofsky finally achieves his dream of replicating the vibe of a Shinya Tsukamoto film... Body horror with ballet. Read the review here.

Enter the Void

2010-12-05T22:18:00.002+10:30

A truly stunning work of artistic ambition, let down by a complete lack of discipline. A conundrum, since you have to see it, but you'll regret sitting through the whole thing. Allow me to explicate further...

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

2010-12-05T22:16:00.003+10:30

The most awesome Christmas story since Bad Santa, and this Santa is waaaaay badder than Billy Bob Thornton. In fact, he's Evil Santa. Definitely worth a look. Read the review here.

Devil

2010-12-05T22:15:00.002+10:30

It doesn't totally suck. In fact, it's kinda enjoyable if you're in the right mood. Who woulda thunk it? Read the review here.

Winter's Bone

2010-11-11T22:43:00.001+10:30

A seriously impressive piece of American Gothic. Go see it. Read the review if you need convincing.

Wild Target

2010-11-11T22:42:00.002+10:30

As remakes go, this one is pretty fun. It wouldn't work without Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt, but they're in it, so it does. Read the review here.

Machete

2010-11-11T22:40:00.001+10:30

Robert Rodriguez has a lot of fun with Danny Trejo, doing another Mexican Western, this time without a mariachi in sight. Read the review here.

The Loved Ones

2010-11-04T20:27:00.001+10:30

Aussie horror can hold it's head high thanks to this little gem. Read the review here.

Buried

2010-10-10T10:45:00.001+10:30

Trapped for 90 minutes with Ryan Reynolds talking on his mobile phone. It's a lot better than it sounds. Read the review here.

The Tree

2010-09-30T21:40:00.001+09:30

I've already said it's the worst film of the year. Now read me picking over the inert body of this pompous waste of celluloid.

Dinner for Schmucks

2010-09-30T21:39:00.001+09:30

I was surprised. I enjoyed this way more than I expected to. Read the review here.

I'm Still Here

2010-09-17T18:25:00.003+09:30

Sure it's fake, but it's real too. The joke got away from them, and that's why it's still worth debating how much is real and how much is fake. What do you do when a prank makes you a national laughing stock instead of a genius? The film doesn't say, but it definitely adds to the interest. Read the review here.

The Other Guys

2010-09-17T18:24:00.002+09:30

I laughed, and I lamented. And I lamented more than I laughed... Read the review here.

Piranha 3D

2010-08-26T22:12:00.004+09:30

Gleefully silly, and hysterically funny, it's very honest about what it is and dives in with wild abandon. Cheesy, entertaining 3D makes a comeback. Read the review here.

UPDATE: The film is THIS good. Fair sentiment really, especially for Elizabeth Shue.

Four Lions

2010-08-19T21:40:00.001+09:30

Chris Morris's blackest moment since Paedogeddon, and also incredibly funny. Well worth checking out. Read the review here.

The Clinic

2010-08-19T21:38:00.002+09:30

A genuinely twisted idea set inside a relatively conventional horror/thriller, a bit more inventiveness could have seen this one really make a mark, but it's still alright. Not one for expectant mothers. Read the review here.

The Expendables

2010-08-15T18:34:00.003+09:30

Go get your action fix and lament how anaemic most action films seem by comparison. Review here.

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

2010-08-12T18:53:00.000+09:30

Go see it. NOW!

Splice

2010-08-12T18:51:00.002+09:30

An appropriate title, there's a bit of Cronenberg DNA hiding in this fun little film. Well worth it. Read the review here.

MIFF Day 17

2010-08-08T22:52:00.003+09:30

The last day of the festival, sniff...

SUMMER WARS

Wow, I had no idea what to expect with this one. It was anime, and that was enough. But I've seen enough bad anime to be ready for disappointment. This is a ripper story. Expertly blending teen romance, hacker fantasy, family drama, apocalyptic disaster and a generous heaping of comedy, Summer Wars is highly original both in storytelling and in visuals. The bare ingredients are nothing new, but the way they've been assembled makes for a very satisfying story, and an incredible visual experience. It's not perfect, there's a slight lag towards the end of the second act, but it picks up again quick enough not to matter too much. I believe it will be showing at the Nova in early September as part of the Reel Anime festival, go see it.

WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY

The strength and the failure of this doco is that it's an insider account of the period when Disney Animation went from being a joke headed for the scrapheap (The Black Cauldron) to a major force once again (The Lion King). 1984 to 1994 effectively. The level of access is great, as it's all the guys who worked there telling their own history, and rarely pulling punches in how they disliked their new management, how overworked they became, and how egos at the top ended up ruining everything. But because it's an insider story, there's a level of presumed knowledge that isn't going to be present in every audience member. It's not a brilliantly made doco, rather it's a collage of old footage dubbed with the reminiscences of some of the key players, either recorded from the time, or sometimes specially for the doco. The way the studio turned itself around isn't really explained or explored in any depth, it just happened with some new management apparently. Again, perhaps if you were there you wouldn't think that needed to be explained, but to the viewing public a bit more information would have helped. Interesting, but frustrating as it gives us just enough to want to know more, then pulls back.

CATERPILLAR

Early on, I thought this was going to turn into a horror film. The basic story is this, a Japanese soldier, injured in WWII, is returned home. He's lost all four of his limbs and is deaf and half-dumb. It turns out he used to be quite abusive to his wife, who is now tasked with caring for him. Apparently this involves a lot of moderately graphic amputee sex, and feeding him. Slowly, she becomes more abusive to him as he becomes more and more demanding. But this isn't the story, as the film only has these moments in fragments. The real story is that war is awful, making heroes of its victims to continue its cycle. And Caterpillar bludgeons you over the head with this fact repeatedly. So much so that what felt like the end of the film turns out to be the end of the second act. There's a whole (and totally pointless) third act to restate this over and over again. It doesn't amount to a whole lot in the end, diluting a potentially powerful story of two people, both victims of violence, struggling to cope with the effects. Instead, we get a fairly tepid anti-war propaganda piece. And it's really badly shot too, an ugly video to film transfer. Such a missed opportunity.

SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD

Oh hell yeah! Edgar Wright is a DJ, remixing the awesomeness that is the Scott Pilgrim comic series, blending in his own rhythms and beats and transforming it into something different yet familiar and still totally awesome. I'll be doing a full review for this on Cinephilia for its release this Thursday, but don't wait to read it, just go. It's great.

MIFF Day 16

2010-08-07T21:19:00.003+09:30

One sleep to go until Scott Pilgrim!!!

THE HUNTER

This is what you call a "Festival Film". I doubt it would successfully screen anywhere else. It's too sketchy to be a crowd-pleaser and not smart enough to be an arthouse success. It does have an effective use of Radiohead's Hunting Bears (off Amnesiac) as a recurring score, the lone twang of the electric guitar working well to highlight the loneliness of our protagonist, Ali. But really that's the highlight. Rafi Pitts plays Ali, as well as writing and directing. Possibly he thought his on-screen charisma would be enough to carry the underwritten material, but like The Robber, the film never really allows us access to Ali, so sympathy is limited. The basic ideas are good, a humble man, a former prisoner, works night shifts to provide for his wife and daughter. When they're killed in the crossfire between insurgents and police, he retaliates by killing a few police officers and then gets hunted. But he's a hunter, so in theory the chase should be interesting. It's not. Instead we get a crappy third act where two corrupt officers capture him almost immediately then march him around the forest while they bicker. Maybe it was meant to be an expose of how the police are corrupt and incompetent, but it doesn't really work. Ultimately none of it connects. It's enjoyable enough while you still think there might be some intelligence about to surface, there's a sense of it bubbling below the surface. But that's why it's a "Film Festival" film. It teases with a sense of its own importance, but never delivers. Disappointing.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT

A beautiful and disturbing meditation on history and its importance in our lives. Beginning with some spectacular shots of a telescope in the middle of the Atacama desert in Chile, it had me thinking this would go well with Baraka. The time-lapse nightscapes are spectacular and the deep-space photography is gorgeous. But then it surprises, as an astronomer compares himself to an archaeologist, both deal in the past. The light received through the telescope is a record of something in the past. And history fills the Atacama desert, as an archaeologist discusses the rock carvings and mummified remains found there. All this serves a purpose, as the film turns its attention to the atrocities under the reign of General Pinochet, and the countless thousands of "disappeared", many of whom were put into mass graves in the same desert. Shifting to the wives and daughters of missing men who comb the desert hoping to find the bodies of their beloveds, director Patricio Guzman speaks of the need to learn from history, to examine it and to remember it. He is clearly bothered by people's desire to move on without examining the past, and contrasts the learnings from science with the refusal to learn from the nation's violent history, something he does not shy away from showing in graphic and disturbing detail. The film is not 100% successful in making the connection, but it's a visually beautiful and original take on the importance of history in our lives, and a disturbing reminder of the horrors that for some Chileans have still not been put to rest.

MIFF Day 15

2010-08-06T22:13:00.002+09:30

Dammit, somehow I've done my neck. Hopefully it goes away before tomorrow...

MY DOG TULIP

Anyone who has ever owned a dog should see this film. Gross and disgusting in the most charming way possible, it's magical the way it takes all the little things, the annoyances and the joys of pet ownership, and transforms them into something wonderful. J.R. Ackerley's fictionalised memoir of his time with his Alsatian Tulip (in real life her name was Queenie) is brought to life with an idiosyncratic animation style, mixing fully coloured scenes with others resembling pencil tests and notebook scribblings. It all works together seamlessly to evoke the different emotions or ideas of the novel, read aloud by Christopher Plummer. All the more impressive is the fact the film is almost solely the work of a husband and wife team, Paul and Sandra Fierlinger. This really is a gem of a film, visualising one man's account of the only constant and reliable relationship he ever seemed to have, and the joy it brought him.

THE BLACKS

Genocide is awful, even for the perpetrators, so this film tells us. It's an oppressive, claustrophobic story, detailing an illegal mission to kill some Serbians after a ceasefire has been decreed. The mission fails, and we then flashback to the events leading up to it. There's the leader, who kills people in his garage and hides it from his wife, a convict who has lied that he knows how to use explosives in order to be released from prison, and sundry others who are all traumatised in their own ways. There's not much to the story, just people being miserable yet unwilling to step out of the cycle of violence. The mood is expertly handled and conveys how trapped these men are. It doesn't ask for sympathy, instead showing how ordinary people are capable of awful things. Not a nice film, and not particularly enjoyable, but it's not a bad one either.

MIFF Day 14

2010-08-05T23:48:00.002+09:30

A sequel that's not exactly a sequel, mumblemumblemumble, a thriller...

LIFE DURING WARTIME

Todd Solondz has his shtick down perfectly these days, awkward and blackly funny character interactions full of horrific people being mundanely awful to each other. It's what he does, and he does it well. But where do you go when everyone knows what to expect? Apparently he makes a sequel to his most famous film, Happiness, with an entirely new cast playing the character. Philip Seymour Hoffman's phone pervert Allen is played by a thin black man (Michael Kenneth Williams), now married to Joy (Shirley Henderson, and originally played by Jane Adams). She's "taking a break" from the marriage after discovering he's still secretly menacing women over the phone, his shame and fear both funny and deeply touching. She's also menaced by the ghost of her ex-boyfriend Andy, while her sister Trish (Allison Janney) is trying to move on with her life after her husband went to prison for child molesting, she's met a new man she intends to marry. Her son Timmy, now about the age of Billy back in Happiness, discovers his dad isn't dead like he was told, and learns he's the son of a convicted paedophile. The confusion and fear that all the characters experience as they struggle with ideas of forgiveness and reconciliation is fully exploited for humour as abrasive as paint stripper, but damn if it isn't funny. But Solondz is still stuck with his problem, he's doing what people expect of him. How do you shock your audience when they know all your tricks? He pulls off a brilliant move, which initially annoyed me but now I'm starting to admire it. He stops being nasty, and ends with a sad and genuine moment of lostness and grief. The end is abrupt, giving no closure, leaving your with nothing but the overwhelming sadness of the characters and not a single laugh to let out the tension. From exploiting the evils of the world for pitch black comedy, Solondz suddenly renders it starkly as the awful human tragedy that it is. It's new territory for Solondz, and I'm impressed.

BEESWAX

Why the hell did I book this film? I hate mumblecore films. I really really really really hate them. Why did I book it? Because I saw Funny Ha Ha a few years ago by accident when it was a last-minute replacement for another film I'd planned to see. Andrew Bujalski impressed me then, because for its many flaws, I really enjoyed it. This film isn't as good, though it has its moments. Mostly it just wears on you however, as the um/uh/hmm/yeah/iknow dialogue delivery method has long since worn out its welcome. Mumblecore is the new Dogma, a way of pretending crap filmmaking has merit. Though I'll be fair, Beeswax has some good moments, engaging characters, and a semblance of a plot. But it runs too long, and the end is crap. I'm disappointed, Bujalski has done better in the past.

BLAME

A fun little aussie thriller, as a bunch of school friends attempt to murder their dead friend's piano teacher. Apparently he'd had an affair with her when she was sixteen, and three years later she's suicided, and they're out for revenge. The plan is simple, attack him, fake a suicide and then be on their way. But what starts out looking fairly straightforward becomes more and more complex as the truth of the situation is teased out, and the poor bastard just won't die. The real villain is easy to pick from the get go, but the tension is whether the other characters will work this out. It's not gonna rock your world, but it's the best made aussie entry to the festival I've seen, and beats the more hyped Red Hill and The Tree for solid craftsmanship and genuinely good storytelling.

MIFF Day 13

2010-08-04T23:49:00.004+09:30

Thirteen is my lucky number...

SWEETGRASS

Into Great Silence for sheep farmers. This is a gentle and contemplative film that evocatively shows a way of life that has now passed into history. Between 2001 and 2003, the filmmakers recorded the ritual of farmers herding sheep high up into the Montana Rockies to graze over summer. A practice no longer allowed. Watching the men and women ride their horses up into the mountains, their sheep a giant cloud of white moving across the green hills, the tents that become home, the nightly watch guarding against bears or worse, all these things are filmed with delicate beauty. There is a sense of awe in the landscape they inhabit, leavened by the cowboys swearing their heads off at the intractable sheep refusing to stay where they want them. It's a slow film, but a wonderful one.

GARBO: THE SPY

Joan Pujol Garcia was a Spanish-born, London-based agent for Germany during the Second World War. Or at least, that's what the German's thought. Determined to be of use during the war, he approached the British and offered his services and was refused. Undeterred, he went straight to the Germans and got a job with them. He invented fake informants, a massive network of agents of which he was the spymaster, and fed his German controllers a steady stream of information. Information he faked by reading newspapers and magazines and crossing his fingers they believed him. Then he went to the British again, and was refused again. So he tried the Americans, who contacted the British, and finally someone realised the potential of Joan and brought him to England. With his British spymaster, Garbo became pivotal in feeding the Germans as much junk information as possible, while still telling the truth enough to remain credible. So successful were his deceptions that he convinced them that the D-Day invasion of Normandy was a simple feint to distract attention from the Allies real target of Pas De Calais. The Germans held their forces back from Normandy, allowing the Allies to turn the tide of the war. Little is known about the man, but his exploits are amazing, all done without a single shot being fired. He received the Iron Cross after the war, the Germans never suspecting he had been a double agent. When the British learned this, they gave him an MBE. The film blends narration, interviews and footage from old spy films to tell the fantastic tale, which gives it a wonderful kick. Well worth a look.

LEMMY

It's a film about Lemmy, what more do you need to know? I could easily criticise the structure of the film, there's a false ending about two thirds of the way through, then a sudden re-start of more talking-heads and new revelations about the man and his way of life, but it gets away with it because it's all about Lemmy. The man is fascinating, a living legend. Check it out.

WHEN YOU'RE STRANGE: A FILM ABOUT THE DOORS

Consisting entirely of archival footage narrated by Johnny Depp (channelling the tone he used to deliver "The Great Wave" monologue in Fear & Loathing in Las Vegas), this is an enlightening story of a band that only existed for 54 months. Interspersed are pieces of footage of Morrison from the 1969 film HWY: An American Pastoral, seemingly to suggest he's still roaming the American backroads, which is cute but kind of unnecessary. The total absence of any talking head interviews is an interesting choice, making it a story told entirely in narration and image. The trick works, with Depp's voice lending an authoritative tone to the film, a genuine history of a band and a singer who struggled to cope with his fame while feeding on it as well. It's astonishing that so much footage of the band exists, but it's a boon to the audience, as we see the band on stage and in recording sessions. Most music docos would kill for this kind of access, to get it so long after the fact is a minor miracle. A great document of a band whose impact is felt to this day.

MIFF Day 12

2010-08-03T22:11:00.002+09:30

Only two films today, that's effectively a breather.

THE SECOND CIVIL WAR

Made for HBO, Joe Dante's 1997 political satire is a bit muddled but amazingly prescient. Dante himself commented in his introduction that the film doesn't seem to date, elements may be less obvious at some times than others, but it's packed with so many things that remain current issues that it's depressing. It analyses the impact of the 24 hour news network on politics, the lack of time to absorb and think on information, image politics, sex scandals, military triumphalism and national identity. The fears of a nation overrun with immigrants is played to hilarious effect, with nobody in LA speaking English, just Mexican, and Rhode Island dominated by Chinese refugees who don't want any more immigrants. The basic story is that Idaho closes its borders to a group of Pakistani refugees, which triggers a constitutional crisis ending in a second civil war. There's a lot to love, with great performances from Beau Bridges as the Governor of Idaho, and Phil Hartman as the puppet President. Unfortunately, it starts to lose its way towards the end, and becomes maudlin and sentimental as it views the horrors unleashed by political chicanery, which grates with the fairly savage tone the rest of the film maintains. This results in the final misunderstanding that causes open hostilities not being nearly as funny as it could be. Still, very entertaining and unlikely to date anytime soon, more's the shame.

COLLAPSE

Michael Ruppert has been variously described as a prophet, a conspiracy theorist, and batshit insane. This film is really just a monologue, as Ruppert explains how his understanding of Peak Oil and economic theory has led him to the conclusion that society is destined for collapse. There's nothing new in what he says, but one thing that sadly isn't explored is how he did predict, from his analysis, the economic meltdown that hit the US. He was warning about mortgage-backed derivatives long before anyone else realised they were worse than junk bonds. I would have liked to have heard more about his analytical process, but beyond him ranting that mainstream media isn't worth listening to, you don't learn anything about his information sources or research methods. Those things could have lent him a lot of credibility, but instead we just listen to him rave like a mad preacher. By the end of the film, it's hard to escape the conclusion that this is a very lonely man who is slightly unhinged. His most emotional moment comes when he speaks about the power of community to save us, and I felt it was as much a plea as a statement. Since the documentary was made, he's given up the doomsday business and writes music, while struggling to pay his rent. It doesn't tell you anything you don't know already, but it's a good character study of someone driven slightly mad by the impotence of his situation.

MIFF Day 11

2010-08-03T00:14:00.003+09:30

A solid day of entertaining films, not a dud amongst them. Woohoo!

THE ROBBER

Based on a true story, this is the life and crimes of Johann Rettenberger, a man who won marathons and robbed banks. The film begins with him running in circles around the prison yard, then follows him as he's released and begins a new string of bank robberies. It's like a perverse form of training, as he runs to escape the police with a heart monitor strapped on. The film is entertaining, directed with confidence and an eye for an exciting chase sequence, but it never lets us inside. Why he did what he did remains enigmatic. The most likely answer is that he just wanted the thrill of winning, the sense of beating the system, but the film gives no answers and never really even tries to ask the question. It just follows a life lived on an adrenaline high, and so is unsurprisingly a great ride.

WILD TARGET

Remakes of French screwball comedies are risky business, but occasionally they come off spectacularly. True Lies is the obvious example, a film vastly superior to the clever but rather dull original. Wild Target is a similar example, at least from my movie-overloaded memory. I recall watching the original and not liking it a lot, but I'll have to revisit it after sitting through this laugh-fest. Bill Nighy and Emily Blunt are key to the enjoyment, their performances are pitch perfect, and nobody can do a sudden 180 degree turn on the spot more comically than Nighy (check out Shaun of the Dead). The plot is simple but fun, a hitman finds himself unable to kill his target, but can't explain why. He's in love, obviously, but the feeling is so new to him he can't acknowledge it. The story plays with this a little, to great comic effect, as he wonders if he's not attracted to his new (male) apprentice. Director Jonathan Lynn has had a spotty record as a director, but here he nails it with a very funny crowd pleaser.

LOVE IN A PUFF

Pang Ho Cheung is one of my favourite directors. I've long lamented I skipped the MIFF screening of his first film, You Shoot, I Shoot for a job interview. I would have loved to have experienced that in a packed out cinema. I did get the job though, so at least I got a consolation prize. We haven't seen his films at MIFF for a while now, the last I remember was Beyond our Ken, a black comedy about relationships. Love in a Puff revisits that territory, but this time tells a love story instead of destroying one. The conceit is great too; with smoking outlawed in almost all public places, smokers congregate in alleys and stairwells to share a smoke. This forced camaraderie leads to Jimmy and Cherie meeting and striking up a friendship that slowly develops into something more. All the while, they live like fugitives, hiding from police as they smoke. There's some awesome visual gags showing the lengths to which people will go to get away with a smoke, and anyone who remembers the run on corner stores when the cigarette tax went up will nod in sympathy with the third act. Incredibly funny, touching and sweet, Pang remains a director I love.

RUBBER

No Reason. That's what this film celebrates. In an opening monologue, a police officer explains that "No Reason" is a core part of life, and of all great cinema. And this is definitely great cinema, as well as being the most entertaining meta-narrative analysing the storytelling process I've seen since Jose Chung's From Outer Space, way back when The X-Files was an interesting show to watch. Rubber is unadulterated, unhinged insane genius. The story of Robert the psychotic tyre who can explode your head with his psychic powers is destined to become a cult classic, a film you keep on DVD to show anyone unlucky enough to not have seen it yet. And unlike most off-the-wall films, this one has excellent acting, awesome special effects and cinematography (by the director himself) so good that Soderbergh would be jealous. The most original film I've seen in years, and one of the funniest.

MIFF Day 10

2010-08-02T00:31:00.002+09:30

Happy Birthday to me, Happy Birthday to me... Ah, what a good birthday it was, mostly.

THE WOMAN WITH THE FIVE ELEPHANTS

Svetlana Geier is a remarkable woman. Born in the Ukraine, her father was a victim of Stalin's purges, but was one of barely 1000 who were released from prison. He died later due to his injuries sustained during torture. Things looked bad for Svetlana and her mother, but then the Germans invaded, and were hailed as liberators. Svetlana and her mother went to work for the Germans, and she translated from Russian to German and vice versa for the occupying forces while her mother kept house for the top brass. She speaks of the terrible moment when her Jewish friends were killed. Nobody believed such a thing could happen, that the rumours were simply anti-German propaganda. It did happen, but to this day she cannot connect the horror of the massacre to the officer she served. She's obviously upset, but she has her reasons for believing in the decency of her employer. With the war against Russia going badly, the Germans sent her and her mother to Freiburg, and at great personal risk got them German non-resident passports as well as a scholarship to study. The result of this was that the men who showed her and her mother kindness were sent to the Eastern Front to die fighting Russia. Svetlana says that for all the horrors she knows the German Army perpetrated, she will always remain grateful to those men for the life they allowed her to lead, free from Stalin and the victimisation she would have suffered simply for being her father's daughter. They did not have to do it, but they put themselves on the line for her, and suffered the consequences. Now a grandmother, Svetlana still lives in Germany and teaches and translates. She has translated the works of Dostoyevsky - her 5 elephants. And in this she speaks of his themes, of the need for personal freedom, and the cost of it. Of purity of action as well as of motive. And also of the need to do more than simply translate word for word, but to see the work as a whole and translate that. Her outlook on life is fascinating, and her view that language is a force for change and for understanding is a compelling one. She is a remarkable and thoughtful woman, and if you get the chance to see this doco you should take it, because some people illuminate the world and she is definitely one of them.

ANIMATION SHORTS 2

Superior in every way to yesterday's offering, there are two that stand head and shoulders above everything else. The Astronomer's Sun is a beautifully designed stop-motion, brief and powerful, you'll be in tears by the end. And Maska is the latest short by the Quay Brothers, those masters of surrealist stop-motion, based on a short story by Stanislaw Lem. It's beautiful, lurid and totally awesome. I hadn't realised we'd be getting a Quay Brother's piece, and the surprise of it just increased my enjoyment.

LIKE A DREAM

I've often made the point that the end of a film is more important than the start, since the end defines that path just taken, while the beginning is allowed to be uncertain. Often it's more interesting that way. Cut twenty minutes from this and it would be a decent film, but to quote myself again, as I said with The Tree yesterday, Magic Realism is very hard to get right. The story of a man who repeatedly dreams of a girl, then meets her in Shanghai, only to discover she is a fairly crude factory worker, not the refined girl of his dreams. As the two of them try to find the real girl from his dreams, the story takes the promising path of learning to accept reality rather than fantasy, and embrace life rather than hide from it in dreams. Sadly, it decides to go all weird, with the girl of his dreams actually being a real person who dreamed of him too, in a strange third act reveal of their psychic connection. It's rubbish, and all the worst parts of the film exist here. Add to that some truly awful acting by supporting characters, a few misjudged monologues and a sense that too many filmmakers worship Wong Kar Wai, and well, this just fails. Which is a shame, because there's a good film hiding inside it all and the two leads are really great.

SPLICE

I like Vincenzo Natali, Cube was a great little film, Cypher was a lot of fun, and you have to see Nothing, a comedy about solipsism and misanthropy that's just awesome. Splice is his latest film, and with a bigger budget than usual, he's delivered a fun little monster movie. Adrian Brody and Sarah Polley star as Clive and Elsa, biotech researchers working for NERD (gotta love the humour). They've created a new lifeform to create vaccines and medicines that can be patented and sold, but now they want to take things to the next level and include human DNA in their creations. Told no, but doing it anyhow, they create Dren (spell it backwards...) a weird creature that rapidly grows up into a strange and oddly beautiful young woman, assuming you find multi-jointed legs and a tail with a venomous stinger at the end attractive. What follows is closer to Cronenberg's The Fly than Shelley's Frankenstein, but both have clearly influenced the story. It's a clever mix of horror and family comedy, though the comedy is very black and the family is very messed up. It won't set your world on fire, but it's a really enjoyable film with some great performances, cool effects and some surprising twists in its tail.

MIFF Day 9

2010-07-31T22:11:00.002+09:30

I got to see my second most anticipated film today, and it didn't disappoint!

THE ILLUSIONIST

Sylvain Chomet made Belleville Rendezvous (aka The Triplettes of Belleville) roughly 7 years ago. It's one of my most beloved animated films. Now, he takes on a script by the great Jacques Tati and delivers another gem. The masterful storytelling, where words are irrelevant and infrequent, lets us into the lonely world of Tatischeff, a master magician in an era where rock bands and television have killed of vaudeville acts. Hired to work in a remote Scottish village, he enchants a local girl who believes his tricks are real. She stows away when he leaves and then expects him to provide for her with his magic. He obliges, adoring the attention he no longer receives from his audiences, but the expense sends him broke and he ends up leaving, giving up his trade for an uncertain future. It's a work of subtle gestures and complex emotions, encompassing loneliness, need, the death of wonder and the end of an age. A beautiful, funny and sad film with a light touch that's immediately my top pick for the festival thus far.

WELCOME TO THE RILEYS

Also known as the "Girl from Twilight stripper movie". This is all kinds of messed up. Doug and Lois Riley lost their daughter in a car accident, and have been slowly falling apart ever since. When Doug meets Mallory at a strip club, he strikes up a friendship and practically adopts her, though he really doesn't know what he wants. Lois joins them, and they form a very screwed up family that allows Doug and Lois to work through their issues, while Mallory remains as screwed up as ever, a victim of their kindness as much as her own circumstance as they re-enact the complexes that indirectly led to their daughter's death. It's blackly funny, with a mocking analysis of parental control. Unfortunately, the perfect ending is ruined by continuing with a coda to try and give an upbeat ending. Nothing changes, everyone is exactly in the same situation they were a few minutes earlier, but now we're meant to feel like there's hope. It leaves a slightly sour aftertaste to what is otherwise an incredibly assured and interesting work.

THE TREE

Dreck. Magic Realism is a very hard thing to get right, but this managed to get everything wrong. Bad acting, unsympathetic characters and pissweak scripting combine to make this the worst film I've seen all year.

ANIMATION SHORTS 1

A mixed bag of animated short films. The Lost Thing was the main attraction, a CG animated rendering of Shaun Tan's well-loved book. The design was good, but overall it wasn't that impressive, something in the animation just failed to engage, and Tim Minchin's voiceover lacks personality. Far more interesting was The Incident at Tower 37, much more expressive and engaging, if not as pretty to look at. Pivot was an exercise in kineticism, with style to match. Dreams from the Woods was my other favourite, a shadow puppet story with beautiful music and an excellent dreamlike quality.

MIFF Day 8

2010-07-31T00:32:00.003+09:30

Today was a day for screwed up love stories...

PAJU

The first half of Paju really tries your patience. It jumps back and forward in time, characters blur into each other and a guy who initially seems really dodgy is treated like a saint for no apparent reason. Then things slowly coalesce into a very sad story of sibling jealousy and love. It reminded me in some ways of Atonement, but far more compassionate. A brother-in-law, grieving the death of his wife, refuses to tell his much younger sister-in-law how she died, lying about what happened. He does it all to protect her from the truth that a spiteful act by her caused it. But the sister discovers the lie, although not the truth, and turns him in to the police. This all plays out against a backdrop of corruption and resistance to the demolition of a set of apartment blocks. None of that story really gels, but main story of the family does resolve in a satisfying way. A confused ode to self-sacrificing love, jealousy and selfishness.

I LOVE YOU, PHILLIP MORRIS

John Requa and Glen Ficarra are two writers I really enjoy. From their work on the Angry Beavers animated series, to Cats & Dogs and Bad Santa, I've enjoyed everything they've done. And I enjoyed this a lot too. Based on a true story, this is a very funny story about two men in love, and the insane things one of them will do to keep them together. Steven Russell (Jim Carrey) narrates his life, as he moves from being a town cop with a wife and kid to being the campiest definition of gay possible. But as he observes, being gay is really expensive. So he commits fraud, gets jailed and meets Phillip Morris (Ewen McGregor). What follows is completely mad, apparently true, and a lot of fun. It's a comedy you'd expect from the writers of Bad Santa, but surprisingly there are moments where it's also an affecting love story. Great fun.

ENTER THE VOID

Gaspar Noe is the arthouse equivalent of a shock jock, at least that's how it seems on the basis of this undisciplined, overlong and overindulgent film. The reaction I had was "I see what you were going for, but..." The first half is stunning, a pov tale that places us inside the head of Oscar. We see him tripping on drugs, walking the streets and talking with his friends, then getting shot and killed. And still we remain with him, seeing through his eyes as his spirit wanders a strangely desolate Tokyo, flitting between memories of how he reached this point, and following his family and friends in the aftermath. It mixes lyrical and assaultive visuals with some genuinely interesting storytelling, but unfortunately it's an hour too long, and the visual gimmickry wears on you quickly. It's lame when you know exactly how a scene will play out and exactly where and how it will transition, but Noe's playbook is on repeat past the 90 minute mark (some would argue even earlier). There's only so many cg assisted tracking shots you can take before getting seriously bored. And as Noe escalates the graphic nature of the imagery, you sense desperation rather than inspiration. Given the audience was engrossed initially, but was laughing at, rather than with, Enter the Void by the end, I'd call it an admirable failure.

MIFF Day 7

2010-07-29T23:21:00.002+09:30

Weird fake docos and an awesome serial killer film today.

THE JUCHE IDEA

Juche is the official ideology of North Korea, and in its service Kim Jong Il has written extensively on the art of cinema and its relationship to the socialist struggle. The Red Chapel quoted his work a bit as it felt its way around for a structure. This film goes one better and is an embodiment of his philosophies as well as a parody. Mind you, the ideas are worthy of ridicule anyhow, so even if it was completely in earnest it would still be a parody by necessity, at least to my western capitalist pig eyes. Ostensibly a doco about a South Korean who has moved to North Korea to participate in an arts internship, we sit through "lessons" in how a film should carry its ideological payload and deliver it. Extensive quotes from various edicts by Kim, along with examples from North Korean cinema are both funny and illustrative of the points. Then there are the exercises by the "student", as she attempts to implement Juche into her own short films. It's only an hour long, which is fortunate since it can labour the point at times, but the payoff at the end is worthwhile: A fully realised Juche film celebrating Kim Jong Il that is completely ridiculous and kinda fun too.

THE KILLER INSIDE ME

I can't call this the greatest serial killer / psychopath film of all time, since Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer trumps it, but only barely. It's a ripper of a film, brilliantly realised with a palette that recalls pulp novel covers of the 50s and 60s, and an impressionistic editing flow that provides you with enough information to understand, but not enough to get inside Lou (Casey Affleck) Ford's head. Instead, he constantly surprises as he acts in ways that seem irrational at first, but are slowly revealed to have a sick logic to them. Short flashbacks give us some suggestion to how he's come to be this way, but the emotional distance the film plays at means compassion is absent, only slight understanding seems possible. The film has a dry and quiet demeanour to it, with a streak of black humour that leavens the tension. Affleck plays cool and creepy very well, but the surprises are Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson as his two lovers. Each is excellent and incredibly game, given the graphic nature of some of their scenes. The denouement is let down slightly by a few poor effects shots, but that's a minor quibble in what is a masterful film.

FIRST SQUAD: THE MOMENT OF TRUTH

Incredibly silly, this is a fairly classic sort of anime tale. During World War 2, German mystics summon the spirit of an ancient warrior, Baron Von Wolff, who swore to destroy Russia. If he succeeds in crossing over to the land of the living, he will annihilate the Russian forces and Germany will rule all of Europe. The Russian counter-offensive involves the First Squad of the Sixth Division, an intelligence unit dedicated to psychic powers. Most of the First Squad were killed at the start of the war, so the only surviving member must journey to the land of the dead, contact her comrades and bring them back to defeat Von Wolff. The story is full of potential, but evidently there wasn't much money for the production. It's short, and peppered with live action interviews of actors portraying psychologists, war historians and veterans in an attempt to counterpoint the animated tale and inject some sense of realism to it all (and pad out the runtime to something vaguely respectable). It's not very successful. This could have been an epic tale of war, science and sorcery if someone had invested in a solid script and more money for animation. Instead, it's an interesting experiment.

MIFF Day 6

2010-07-29T00:14:00.002+09:30

Narrative cinema swings back strong today, about time too.

BOY

Taika Waititi's followup to his loveable geekfest Eagle vs Shark, this is a coming of age story set in 1984. ET and Michael Jackson are the cultural touchstones, as Boy's father comes home from prison, looking for the money he hid before being arrested, and trying to spend some quality time with his two children. It's light and airy, with whimsical moments and genuine love on display for the very human and flawed characters. A real charmer. And be sure to stick around for the Thriller inspired haka at the end.

THE UNLOVED

Samantha Morton proves she's a talent behind as well as in front of the camera in this beautifully made film about her childhood as a ward of the state. The film opens with Lucy (Molly Windsor) getting beaten by her father (Robert Carlyle), then going into foster care. What unfolds from there is positively dreamlike, with a strange beauty to it. Much like Bibliotheque Pascal, this is a film where truly awful things happen, but visually they are executed with such beauty that you're torn between fear and awe. Morton has said she's diluted her experiences to prevent the film becoming a horror movie, which to be honest is what I expected. Instead there's no sense of threat, and though you fear it could be just around the corner it never comes. It's a beautiful and thought-provoking film meditating on how society fails its most vulnerable.

THE TROTSKY

Leon Bronstein thinks he's the reincarnation of Leon Trotsky. He tries to unionise his father's factory, and when that fails he decides to make his school's student union into a real union. Naturally with comic results. He has his whole life mapped out, and he's determined to play along with his destiny. This film owes more than a small debt to Rushmore, but it's clever in its examination of the death of radical politics in the modern age. Jay Baruchel's vulnerable yet obsessive performance is just right, and it's a very very funny film.

FOUR LIONS

Chris Morris is responsible for some of the most confronting comedy every to grace the screen. Black barely begins to describe it. He was behind Brasseye, a current affairs spoof that caused a major controversy in the UK when it aired a special named Paedogeddon, a faked expose of paedophiles that featured Simon Pegg as a child molester locked up in stocks saying he wouldn't have sex with Morris's (fake) son because "he's not my type". So going in, you know this film isn't going to pull any punches. We witness the misadventures of five incompetent wannabe suicide bombers as they screw up everything from blowing up a reconnaissance drone attacking their training camp, to blowing themselves up. (There's a reason it's called Four Lions...) The highlight is an evilly funny family moment as one of the men sits with his wife and son as they encourage him to carry through the plan, to follow his heart and blow up the kaffirs. The warm happy family moment turned on its head. They're all complete morons of course, but so are the police and everyone else in this insanely funny film. There's no reprieve, and it really does follow through on what it promises to show, but even then Morris finds a way to make some truly awful and horrible things incredibly funny. He's walked a fine line here, and once again proves he really is a comic genius.

BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO

A look at the Japanese obsession with insects, as people buy, sell, trap and breed them in what turns out to be a major industry. One of the subjects of the film drives a Ferrari bought with the money he's made selling bugs! The film wants to be an exploration of Japanese culture through the prism of one of its more unique pastimes, but it doesn't always click. Meditations on nature, life and change are intriguing but go nowhere, fortunately we also learn about the history of insects in Japanese literature and poetry. The stories of how Dragonflies were viewed as noble and Fireflies as symbols of fleeting love are great. It's a lovely little film despite its flaws, and the inventive ways the insect trappers go about gathering their merchandise are interesting to watch.

MIFF Day 5

2010-07-28T00:05:00.003+09:30

Delusion and fantasy seemed to be the theme today, sometimes beautiful, sometimes horrific.

THE GENIUS AND THE BOYS

Daniel Carleton Gajdusek won the Nobel Prize in 1976 for his work on the Kuru disease affecting cannibal tribes in the highlands of New Guinea. His work proved the existence of Prions, a non-genetic means of disease transmission. He mentored young boys, some of whom went on to become world famous scientists. People such as Benoit Mandelbrot, the discoverer of fractal geometry. He was a genius, no doubt. He adopted many children from New Guinea and other places, taking them to America for their education. Many of them say that without him, they would not be the successes they are today. But then one of the children came forward and alleged that Gajdusek molested him. For much of the running time, you're wondering if he really did anything or not, many of his adopted children defend him, and his friends say he was affectionate to his kids, but not abusive. But then things get murkier, as some of his friends start talking about how adult/child sex was common where the children were from, so if anything untoward did happen, it was within a cultural context. As if that made it okay. And then it hits you with the sucker punch. A spittle-laden outburst by Gajdusek himself, proudly declaring his crimes and insisting that if everyone did it the world would be a better place. My one criticism of the film is that it didn't take this footage and capture the reaction of his peers to it, after all their defences of him. It's horrific to see the man defend himself in such a delusional manner, but it's even worse to see people state bluntly that they don't want to know if he was really that bad, because his contribution to society was so great. I'm not sure who's more deluded, him or his friends. It's left to his brother to state the obvious, he was a criminal who convinced himself that manipulating confused adolescents was loving. A solid portrait of both the achievements and the crimes of a complex and troubled man.

BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL

From the horror of denial to the denial of horror, this is a great film that sits alongside Tideland as a deeply uncomfortable experience. Depicting dark events with visual whimsy, it tells the story of Mona, a Hungarian woman who drifts through a miserable life but transforms it into wonderful tales. The first half of the film is a delight, the second half a descent into hell, but both are equally striking. The control of mise-en-scene is powerful and it's easily the most imaginative and visually striking film of the festival so far. The comparisons to Gilliam are well placed. With an end that is both uplifting and slightly sad, and I'll be very interested in seeing what director Szabolcs Hajdu does next.

HOMECOMING

The Masters of Horror anthology series has yet to really convince me the title is deserved. This is no exception. Joe Dante gives us a lame execution of a neat concept, dead soldiers rise from the dead to vote against George Bush Jnr in an attempt to end the war in Iraq. The acting is sub-standard, the camerawork is weak and only the presence of Robert Picardo does anything to make this worth your attention.

IT'S A GOOD LIFE

Another Dante made-for-tv episode. This time for The Twilight Zone. The end is a bit odd, but the rest of it is great fun. A live-action cartoon where people are trapped in a house by a boy who can make anything he wishes for appear. They live in fear of him, and he's too naive to realise he's being selfish. At least until the heroine arrives and starts behaving like a real mother to him. Some great visuals, but it doesn't amount to much.

LIGHTNING

Fortunately, the best was left until last in the Dante omnibus screening. A lovely tale of a wild west prospector and his horse Lightning, a horse with a talent for detecting trouble. Lightning's talents come in useful when two claim jumpers set out to rip off his owner. The central performance of Brian Keith is the highlight, a man who knows westerns like few other actors and sells us his grizzled prospector with ease. But the story has a few great twists and Ron Perlman is great as the villain too. The projection quality wasn't the greatest, it appears to be an old videotape copy, but it was a genuinely enjoyable half hour.

MIFF Day 4

2010-07-26T23:55:00.002+09:30

Today began my Joe Dante kick, though I'm only managing to fit in the ones I haven't seen before.

MATINEE

I'm very glad I saw the William Castle doco before this loving tribute to the man. Dante's 1993 film features John Goodman playing Lawrence Woolsey, a Castle-like film producer who is premiering his new film Mant! in Key West. But then the Cuban Missile Crisis hits, and a crowded theatre of kids and a paranoid theatre owner combine for chaos when his stage gimmicks get confused for nuclear attack. It's very much a classic Dante flick, children, nostalgia, a sense of adventure and a bit of threat. Not exactly his greatest film mind you, but a solid bit of fun.

THE MESSENGER

Iraq war films are a genre unto themselves now. Most are pretty lousy too. This could easily have been one of them, but it's saved by the central performances of Woody Harrelson and Ben Foster. The idea is decent too, the two men are detailed to giving death notices to the next of kin of soldiers killed in Iraq. It shows a side of war that's often examined, but the device lets it look at it in a different way. There's a plot that runs through it all involving Foster's relationship to his ex (Jena Malone, unrecognisable in a bob cut) and his growing attachment to a widow (Samantha Morton) he notifies, but it's all fairly inconsequential. What's really on offer is two great performances, and they're worth the time.

SPACE TOURISTS

Based on a book of photographs documenting the Russian Space Program from a unique perspective, this film shows the process followed in training the space tourists who pay $20 million each to travel to the International Space Station. It also examines the fallout of the collapse of the Soviet Union on the program, and the weird ecology the rocket launches have created. From scrap metal hunters who chase the falling booster rockets to farmers who live in the trajectory of the debris, it paints an intriguing picture of how everyone struggles to make ends meet now that the money is harder to come by. It falters slightly, detouring to tell the story of some entrants in the X Prize who attempt to land a module on the moon, but the whole is held together by the fascination space holds, and the ambitions of so many to reach it. The photography from the portholes of the ISS alone make this worth watching, but the stories of the people in Kazakstan who live off these launches is what makes it truly interesting.

WORLD'S GREATEST DAD

I had no idea what this was about, other than that it was a father with a kid who's into seriously deviant porn. I wasn't expecting what it became. And because that was part of the joy of the film, I won't say too much about it. It's a wonderfully dark comedy, black as pitch and yet with a warmth running through it that's surprising. Bobcat Goldthwaite has made a really great film, though it's a niche audience that will love it. But the cinema I was in was roaring with laughter. It's out on DVD now, so watch it if you love your comedy dark, twisted and teetering on the nice side of cynical.

BLANK CITY

A retrospective on the No Wave movement of the 70s and early 80s in New York, where punk, cinema and art collided. You know the format, people speak fondly of the days before everyone became famous and they made films just for themselves and success was unimportant. John Lurie evens goes so far as to single out Basquiat for wrecking the whole thing by making having money cool. It's an interesting collection of memories, and manages to puncture romanticised nostalgia by closing with Jim Jarmusch saying the past is over, get on with making the future. Given the tendency for films like this to over-sentimentalise and lament the passing of a golden era, it's a bold way to close. For that reason, I love the film.

MIFF Day 3

2010-07-25T23:46:00.002+09:30

It was a documentary day today, mostly depressing in a "this is the world we live in?" kind of way.

VIDEOCRACY

Promoted as an examination of Berlusconi's Italy, the abuse of power with a president owning 90% of the nation's media, this was a surprise. Namely because it's mostly fairly kind to the man, avoiding an in-depth look at how his media machine functions. There's no mention of a fairly infamous moment when he rang the network and cut short a program critical of him. Instead, this film investigates the complicity of everyone in the machine of celebrity. It paints a fairly despairing picture of vacuous citizens whose only dream is to be rich and famous television celebrities. The girls dream of marrying footballers and the guys dream of being on Big Brother or winning a singing contest. One hapless guy dreams of becoming a blend of Van Damme and Ricky Martin. It's savage in its criticisms, showing up so-called opponents of the culture of celebrity to be nothing more than jealous. Given a chance, everyone jumps on board, they're all desperate for the limelight. It offers little insight into the political implications of state media dominance, but it does paint an horrific image of a celebrity obsessed culture.

THE RED CHAPEL

Danish humour seems to be uniformly black, at least based on what I've seen. This documentary is no exception, with one person early on describing it as the worst thing he's ever done. The ruse is simple, two Danish-Korean comedians, one an 18-year old with cerebral palsy, will travel to North Korea to stage a show that subtly mocks and exposes the horrors of the North Korean dictatorship. It's an incredibly mean-spirited exercise, because they're unable to get anywhere near anyone where their antics would serve to lampoon the regime. Instead, they're stage-managed by people who know they'll be killed if anything goes awry. Director Mads and his two comedians struggle, and while Mads remains intent on mocking the regime somehow, his two comedians begin to sympathise and grieve for their minders. It does succeed in exposing the dark heart of the regime however. Everyone acts through fear, everyone is spying on everyone else, and nobody is safe. It's genuinely heartbreaking to see people who are obviously good and decent trapped in such a hell. In the end there are moments of laughter, but what you leave with is the horror of seeing such a dehumanising system at work.

PETITION

Withdrawn from last year's festival, allegedly in protest of the screening of The 10 Conditions of Love, but given the director was rumoured to have gone into hiding, more likely due to state censorship, this is heartbreaking stuff. The technique can be faulted easily, the film is overlong and poorly structured, but it's substance is shocking; a terrifying expose of the corruption that lies at the heart of the Chinese system of government. When people in towns and villages are denied justice, they can petition their case at the central courts in Beijing. Local governments are disciplined based on how many petitioners are received, so "Retrievers" are employed by those councils and cadres to hunt down Petitioners and force them back home, turn them away from the court, or kill them. And the film shows unflinchingly the grisly aftermath of one such incident, while the officials in Beijing turn a blind eye to the whole event. Their disinterest oversees the mental breakdown of some and the arrest and abuse of others. People who break the rules succeed, but those who believe in the laws of their country are driven to insanity by a system that denies basic rights unless you pay the right bribe. A horrifying account of a corrupt system destroying the lives of people whose only mistake was to put their trust in the system that claims to care for them.

WAR GAMES AND THE MAN WHO STOPPED THEM

The story of a Polish army officer, Ryszard Kuklinski, who managed to supply the CIA with roughly 40,000 top secret documents outlining the Warsaw Pact plans to take on NATO. With interviews with both the CIA and Warsaw Pact officers involved, it's an interesting story, though the logic of how his actions saved the world from WW3 isn't always clear. His CIA handlers insist this is the case, though how his information translated into action is never satisfactorily explored, which is disappointing. Interesting enough, but somehow lacking the weight that the presence of such heavyweight interviewees suggests the story should possess.

THE INVENTION OF DR NAKAMATS

Dr Nakamatsu invented the floppy disk. If for no other reason, that should cement his place in history. But he has over 3000 other patents to his name. He's an eccentric 80 year old, who plans to live until 144, sleeps only 4 hours a day, eats one meal a day and comes up with his best ideas when starving his brain of oxygen at the bottom of a swimming pool. Somewhat unfairly, we only get to see the whimsical and strange side of this remarkable man's life. A man responsible for the plastic hand pump you find at the hardware store, as well as a bike that features a water-powered electrical engine. I would have liked them to dwell a little on the science behind his achievements, since you don't invent major innovations in technology without serious intelligence. But the film is light in tone, and it's really more of a character sketch of an endearing but odd genius.

MIFF Day 2

2010-07-24T23:42:00.002+09:30

Four films in and it's Documentary 2, Narrative 0. Disappointing, but hopefully not predictive... On to the movies.

THE BOYS: THE SHERMAN BROTHERS STORY

I'd never heard of these guys, but I've heard a mountain of their songs. Almost every song in "classic" Disney era films was by these two brothers. Mary Poppins, Winnie the Pooh, the It's a Small World ride song, all the work of Robert and Richard Sherman. And they also wrote the songs for Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, explaining why I keep mistaking it for a Disney film. But despite their prodigious output and roaring success, they couldn't really stand each other and would sit on opposite sides of a theatre at their premieres. The film documents their successful working relationship far better than their personal hostilities, but that's probably because even they can't explain why they don't get along. All in all a fascinating document of two immensely talented brothers who have had an incredible impact on the lives of children worldwide for generations.

THE HOUSEMAID

Im Sang Soo is a director of rare talent. A Good Lawyer's Wife remains one of the most impressive films of the new Korean cinema, a shocking yet tender tale of a family destroyed by infidelity. Technically he's on familiar ground in this disappointing attempt at an erotic thriller. It begins promisingly as an examination of power and class in modern day Korea. The husband's power proves an aphrodisiac to the new housemaid and they begin an affair of sorts. But their infidelity provokes the wife's mother to plot against the housemaid in a very Lady Macbeth scheme to maintain her daughter's privilege. The house becomes a microcosm for the struggles of the poor to achieve success, and the way the system conspires to corrupt everyone. The family's elderly housekeeper in particular stands out as a fascinating character torn between a desire to use her employer's power to advance her son's career, and the knowledge that she has sold her soul. Sadly, what starts out as intriguing becomes more and more on the nose, and the ridiculous finale and nonsensical coda undermine what could have been a solid film.

SPINE TINGLER! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY

William Castle was a legendary showman, he put buzzers under the seats for one of his films, and they went off at a crucial moment to set the audience shrieking. He paid actors to pretend to be so scared that they ran screaming from the theatre at a pre-determined moment. He came up with all kinds of gimmicks to sell his movies, and he made a fortune for himself and Columbia Pictures. He also produced Rosemary's Baby, his "A" film. This is an affectionate retrospective on his career, narrated in the main by his daughter who clearly loves her father, as does everyone else. It's no hagiography, and honestly examines the fears that drove his showmanship and need to be loved, but it's never petty or cruel. The second great doco for the day on an underacknowledged yet significant presence in the history of cinema.

MIFF Day 1

2010-07-24T00:05:00.002+09:30

MIFF 2010 is on, and kicking off the festival for me was a film I had high hopes of...

RED HILL

The trailer for this had me excited, it looked gorgeous and suggested a modern day western set up in the hill country of Victoria. It starts promisingly, with stunning vistas and the hint of supernatural menace in the hills. But once news of a prison break hits the local television it quickly shifts into a revenge outlaw story, with our hero Shane (Ryan Kwanten) the hapless new cop (his first day no less) stuck between escaped murderer Jimmy (Tom E Lewis) and the men of Red Hill, led by the local police chief Bill (Steve Bisley). Director Patrick Hughes frames the action well, stages some impressive setpiece moments and kicks things along at a good clip. But the story is slight, and occasionally stupid. Why the hell a bunch of men with guns are so terrified of a man that they can't even shoot him in the back eludes me. There are moments so inane I was groaning in disbelief. Fortunately that's only about 20 minutes in the middle of the film, and the rest of the story rocks along a bit more steadily. Solid enough genre fare, good fun, and did I mention the cinematography is bloody awesome?

Inception

2010-07-22T12:26:00.001+09:30

A flawed gem of a film, but the flaws make it sparkle. Read my review here.

Predators

2010-07-09T16:04:00.002+09:30

Am I being too harsh, expecting a sequel with Robert Rodriguez's imprimatur to be more than a clever fanwank restyling of the original in a new setting? I'd like to think not. Good fun, but also disappointing, a conflicting film. Read the review here.

A dream

2010-06-27T21:36:00.000+09:30

He was lonely so he stepped outside. Throwing a net over the passing moon, he fixed himself in a basket and rode the night upwards. Gazing over the earth beneath he looked for signs of life, but nothing stirred. Near the apogee of darkness he cut the strings holding his basket to the net and fell through the emptiness. The basket tumbled through space and soon dropped away from him. Drifting towards land he spied a light beyond and swam towards it. The light grew brighter and warmer, flowing like water with hot peaks of foam. Splashing into the sun he swam through tides of liquid gold then dove beneath to seek the core. At the heart of the sun was another land, and setting foot upon it he felt strangely at home. Walking along he found a house much like his own, so he stepped inside. There was a warm scent drifting from the kitchen that promised a meal, and looking in there were two bowls of warm stew cooling on the table. Somehow confident of a welcome, he sat down to wait for his host.

Iron Man 2

2010-05-04T23:08:00.002+09:30

More of the same, but somehow lesser for the fact of it. Needed more things exploding and less Indiana Jones wank discoveries of new technologies. War Machine is cool though. Read the review here.

Bunny and the Bull

2010-05-04T23:06:00.001+09:30

Full points for ambition, minus a couple for execution. Some people have a cinematic eye, other's seem trapped in television. Still worth a look on DVD though. Read the review here.

Mother

2010-04-18T14:43:00.001+09:30

The best family-centred thriller since The Limey, with just as potent a sting in its tail. Read my review here.

Kick Ass

2010-04-08T22:45:00.002+09:30

Just go see it, seriously, the name says it all. Superior to the comic in every conceivable way. Read my review here if you need convincing.

Clash of the Titans

2010-04-02T17:08:00.000+10:30

Dire...

In The Loop

2010-01-23T21:47:00.002+10:30

I am now officially a massive fan of The Thick Of It, the tv series this film is spun from. This has the most entertaining verbal abuse I've heard in years, it's bloody awesome. Go see it now.

Avatar

2009-12-17T18:20:00.003+10:30

It's Cameron's weakest film script-wise, but it's his most visually ambitious. It makes Titanic seem witty and clever, but even so it's enjoyable. Read the review here.

Paranormal Activity

2009-12-03T21:07:00.001+10:30

Unnerving. It seems kinda hokey, but when you go to bed the night after seeing it, see if you don't feel slightly anxious. Read the review here.

The Informant!

2009-12-03T21:06:00.001+10:30

Funny and over-the-top, it really goes to show how strange reality can be, or at least some of the people who don't seem to quite inhabit it. Read my review here.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

2009-11-01T01:12:00.002+10:30

Gilliam has finally been let free to create, and it's a joy to behold. His most visually fantastic film since Munchausen. Read my review here.

It Might Get Loud

2009-11-01T01:08:00.004+10:30

The Edge, Jack White and Jimmy Page talk about their relationship with their guitars. Murderface still has 'em beat, but Jack White definitely could give him a run for his money. Read about it here.

Moon

2009-11-01T01:08:00.001+10:30

Disappointing...

Che Parts 1 & 2

2009-10-01T10:57:00.002+09:30

Well made, but with a disappointing scope given a total runtime of near 4 and a half hours. Still, would make a good box set with The Motorcycle Diaries. Read my review here.

District 9

2009-08-13T21:59:00.002+09:30

GO SEE IT NOW!!! Seriously, in a year of lame-arse big budget scifi, this film restores your faith. Read the review here, or just get yourself to the cinema. I wanna go again, it's the goods. The smartest scifi actioner since Starship Troopers, and just as wry and cynical too.

MIFF Day 16

2009-08-09T23:14:00.002+09:30

Another festival ends, a bit more controversial than normal, what with the Chinese protesting non-stop and trying to hack the website, etc. And to think that originally people were worried about Ken Loach pulling his film because Israel sponsored the festival this year. Still, overall, I think this wasn't as great as some years. Overall the majority of films were okay, but nothing brilliant. There's been a few good ones, but there hasn't been that jaw-dropping moment that's happened occasionally in past festivals. Still, it was a good bunch of films and I had a good time. On to my thoughts on the final four:

Bran Nu Dae

An very enjoyable, silly and raucous musical about an Aboriginal youth sent to a church school to become a priest. He runs away, and most of the film follows his journey back home to Broome. The film is full of great songs, clever and infectious humour, and a generally silly air that's really fun. The Aussie films this year have been pretty much all good, it's nice to see the industry picking up a bit. And especially good to see that MIFF has been co-funding the best ones, like this and The Loved Ones.

Nak

A fairly throwaway CG kids film about a group of spirits who band together to save a small boy from the clutches of a group of evil spirits bent on world domination. The character designs are good, but about halfway through it turns into a giant action sequence where the spirits gain or lose powers with no rhyme or reason. There's some great Sadako jokes for Ring fans, but overall it was a disappointing hour and a half.

A Town Called Panic

But the disappointment was short lived. This lo-fi stop motion is bugnuts crazy and completely awesome. A group of toy figures are used as the characters in the story. Cowboy and Indian live with Horse in a house, Horse is in love with the local music teacher, another Horse, while a Farmer and his Wife live across the way and send their animal to the music school. After Cowboy and Indian destroy their house, Horse and they rebuild, but the walls keep getting stolen. When they investigate, some creatures who live underwater turn out to have been sneaking out of the pond and stealing them. It's random, weird and competely my kind of humour. There's no way to guess what will happen next, simply because it just keeps inventing weirder and weirder plot twists. I'm gonna buy the DVD as soon as Madman release it. Apparently there's a TV series as well, I wanna check it out.

Mother

Bong Joon-Ho leapt onto the scene with Memories of Murder, a striking serial killer film based on real events. It had a dark sense of humour running throughout the tense thriller that really worked. Then he made The Host, which again had a dark sense of humour running through a quite original monster movie. Now with Mother, he's done a noir thriller, as an over-protective mother tries to prove her mentally retarded son innocent of a murder the police have stitched him up for. Kim Hye Ja is incredible as the obsessed mother, determined to do anything to prove her son innocent. I picked the "twist" pretty early on, but that doesn't in any way diminish the film. It's just as funny as his previous films, and just as intricate and well cast. The actors are all great, and the red-herrings are really well handled. Definitely one of the highlights of the festival, and a great film to end another year of MIFF.

MIFF Day 15

2009-08-08T23:29:00.002+09:30

Murch: Walter Murch on Editing

Amateurish on-the-nose directing detracts from what is essentially a class by Walter Murch on film editing, and his theories on the matter. He's an engaging and articulate speaker, but when he talks about jump cuts the film jump cuts, when he talks about layered sound the film layers his speech, it's pointless wankery by two directors obviously keen to intrude on the subject and remind the audience that they're the ones interviewing the great man. But he is great, and the potted history of American Zoetrope, the birth of 5.1 audio (designed for Apocalypse Now), his experiments with sound design and his issues with being called a Film Editor are all great stuff. He's not my favourite editor in the world, (I think Lou Lombardo was a far more significant figure in the history of film editing), but I do appreciate what he has to say.

The Maid

A maid/nanny has been with a family for almost 20 years, and she's a little bit of a psychopath. Coming to believe that she's part of the family, and that he has more authority than she really does, she makes life hell for the daughter, abuses and torments other staff hired to help her, and somehow still have the love and devotion of the mother of the household. Slowly, you realise that though she's obsessive and paranoid, the work for the family is what has made her that way. She believes they can't cope without her, and will do anything to stop them from diminishing her role in their lives. It's an accomplished film, as it moves from depicting a figure of comic insanity into a well-rounded person that you ultimately come to love. And it's funny as all hell too. Though on I'm starting to hate hand-held digitally shot films. The over-exposed white just irritates me, is it too much to ask for a DP who knows how to fiddle the white balance and get a bit of beauty in the colour of the image?

The Sky Crawlers

Is Mamoru Oshii the most over-rated anime director alive? The Patlabor films were cool, albeit foundered by their philosophical moments, but ever since then he's given us pretentious and boring crap. Ghost in the Shell is not a touchstone film, it's just well-animated and stupid. This is his worst to date though. Impressive CG airial scenes, fairly weak cell animation and what sounds like an interesting setting and story are all irrelevant in the end. This is a monumentally boring film, full of itself, and even the dogfights aren't all that inventive or exciting. Drag in musings on love, life, reincarnation and pilots who remain perpetual children because why grow up when you're just going to die anyway and you have a mountain of frustrations. It could have been incredible, the material was right there, but it's shit.

The Chaser

Finally! A Korean film I can rave about. This ruthless and energized serial killer film is highly original and intensely paced. Instead of the typical hunt for a serial killer, he's caught almost immediately. The rush is to find his last victim, who may still be alive, and to gather enough evidence to guarantee a conviction since it turns out he's been caught twice before. The prevailing view of the other two cases was he was a nuisance confessor, but the cops know better. Unfortunately, this is a film of bureaucratic incompetence, political positioning and general disinterest. The violence is harsh and bloody, the characters are likeable, or at the very least understandable, and the story unfolds with a clinical horror for the injustice that comes from so many different agendas conflicting. It's not quite Memories of Murder, but it comes close. I loved it.