It's Better in the Dark

Top 10 - an eclectic selection from a not-so-frequent film reviewer

2011-12-30T12:01:00.000-08:00

It's been another hectic year where duties at the Australian Film Institute have sucked up most of my time and required me to watch a LOT of Australian features, documentaries, shorts and television dramas. I'm not complaining. Love it! But it makes my top ten a little skewed. Nevertheless, I managed to catch some festivals, some screeners, and even the odd regular film screening (radical!). Here's what I selected for my yearly wrap-up of films for The Big Issue magazine (edn. 396). Apart from the standout, they're in no particular order. They were selected from films that were on general release in Australia during 2011.

Standout Film: Melancholia

Lars von Trier’s Melancholia may well be the most perfect film ever made about the end of the world. The extended opening sequence, a masterpiece in itself, places the solemn strains of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde alongside extreme slow motion images that are gravely beautiful and strange: a huge green golf course overlooking the ocean; a sad and beautiful bride, floating dreamlike in a pond; a black horse sinking into the earth; and two planets, seen from space, on a collision course for disaster.

In a change of tone, the film reverts to the realistic and blackly comedic tone we expect from von Trier, as the newly married bride (Kirsten Dunst) and groom (Alexander Skarsgaard) giggle and kiss in the back of a ridiculously long stretch limo, which the driver is failing to maneuver around a bend. The seemingly happy couple is destined for a hideous wedding reception – complete with obnoxious guests and squabbling relatives (John Hurt and Charlotte Rampling play the bride’s monstrously bitter parents). But the main problem is the bride. She’s suffering from a malaise that makes the term ‘depression’ seem like a picnic. Meanwhile, the bride’s sister (Charlotte Gainsbourg) is worrying about the rogue planet that’s moving closer and closer to Earth.

A grand and exhilarating work, Melancholia never abandons the human elements. The closing scenes are bound to have you in tears, reaching for the hand of a loved one.

Brad Pitt is the enigmatic patriarch in Tree of Life.

Tree of Life

Another hugely ambitious film about the grand state of things (including more magnificent images from space), Terrence Malick’s masterpiece tackles life, the universe, faith, grace and innocence. Tree of Life frustrated those who need a straight, clear narrative thread, but for lovers of beauty and mystery, this was one of the year’s must-see films.

Red Dog

The Australian blockbuster of the year, Red Dog was a nostalgic but knowing tale of a dog that united a West Australian mining community in the 1970s. Funny, heartwarming and accessible for all ages, this was true family filmmaking. Let’s have more of it.

Mad Bastards

Another film set in spectacular north western Australia, Mad Bastards was an uplifting musical journey about an estranged father and son, with a catchy toe-tapping score from the Pigram Brothers. Set in the heart of a contemporary Indigenous community the film was hopeful without ever shying away from reality.

Bridesmaids

Hordes of laugh-hungry women warmed to this story of a single thirty-something chick struggling to cope with her best friend’s wedding plans. Like Sex and the City’s wrinkly but more likeable cousin, Bridesmaids had heart and soul – and some genuinely fat people in it.

Hanna

Part fairytale, part assassin thriller, Hanna was blood-pumpingly exciting chase tale. Saoirse Ronan shone as the flaxen-haired teen killer taught to survive by her father (Eric Bana), and hunted relentlessly by a red-haired Secret Service witch (Cate Blanchett). A jolly good action ride, all powered by a stunning Chemical Brothers soundtrack.

Saoirse Ronan in Hanna.

Bill Cunningham New York

An audience favourite around the world, this zesty documentary created an unlikely spiritual hero - the octogenarian bike-riding fashion photographer Bill Cunningham, whose passion and pursuit of beauty has an inspired and pure quality about it.

Jane Eyre

Mia Wasikowska was the perfect Jane Eyre in this adaptation of the beloved Bronte book. Serious and interestingly plain, her face lit up with genuine love and beauty when she encountered her glowering and mysterious Rochester (Michael Fassbender). This gets my vote for Best Sexual Chemistry on Screen this year.

Passionate moments in Jane Eyre.

Autoluminescent: Rowland S Howard

Certainly one of the year’s best music documentaries, this portrait of singer/songwriter Rowland S. Howard depicted not only a talented, self-aware and articulate individual, but a fascinating era in Melbourne’s early punk scene, with great interviews from the likes of Nick Cave, Mick Harvey and Wim Wenders.

We Need to Talk About Kevin

An excellent adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s bestselling book, this film succeeded in conveying the puzzles and ambiguities at the heart of the novel: Are killers born or made? And what part does a mother have in making them so? A strange kind of maternal love story with Tilda Swinton as the mother of the ‘monster’.

So there they are.

Below are some others not mentioned in the magazine wrap.

Honorable mentions to Source Code, Winter's Bone, The Chronicles of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader, Blue Valentine, Julia Leigh's erotic fairytale, Sleeping Beauty, Ivan Sen's heartbreaking but humourous Indigenous tale, Toomelah, the very under-seen Australian thriller set at sea, Caught Inside; and The Trip with a memorable turn from Steve Coogan, but too many funny voices and impressions for my liking.

Highlights from festival films, one-off screenings and DVDs: Xavier Dolan's I Killed My Mother and Heartbeats; Amiel Courtin-Wilson's extraordinary Hail; John Curran's much maligned Stone; the already awarded Irananian drama A Separation; the beautiful documentary about Sydney dancer Tanja Liedke, Life in Movement; and the surprising and frank French drama set in a police child protection unit, Polisse. I was thrilled too, to see on the big screen Cocteau's Beauty and the Beast - though the final scenes made me giggle at the now-dated special effects and costumes.

Heartbeats - from the precociously talented and beautiful Xavier Dolan

Greatest disappointments and bores: Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris and Wim Wenders Pina (I know, controversial!). Also, went to sleep in Kung Fu Panda 2, The Hunter (should I admit that? Might get me fired) and The Cup.

Here's to another year of films. Happy New Year!

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The Year in Films: 2011

2011-12-27T18:31:00.000-08:00

1): Westerns: True Grit / Meek’s Cutoff. Very different films – the former a traditional western, the latter a sedate look at a wagon train that’s hopelessly lost - but both used the landscape of the America west to unsettling effect.

2): Social degeneracy: Kaboom / Limitless. One’s about sex, the other’s about drugs, and they both say their respective vices are good and fun. Hurrah!

3): Dancing: Black Swan / Footloose. One involves dancing to feel good. The other… doesn’t.

4): Superheroes: Captain America / X Men: First Class / Fast & Furious 5 / Rise of the Planet of the Apes / 13 Assassins. Yes, Caesar the ape in Rise counts. So does Vin Diesel. And the samurai in the overlooked but amazingly action-packed 13 Assassins.

5): Comedy: Bridesmaids / The Trip. Yes, Bridesmaids was a massive hit (and rightly so), but for mine the Steve Coogan vs Rob Brydon battle of the Michael Caine impersonations was the funniest thing this year.

6): Spirituality: Higher Ground / Tree of Life / 127 Hours. Hey, if sawing your own arm off doesn’t put you in touch with a higher power, what will?

7): People dying: Fright Night / Source Code / Senna. The first was a great re-working of a horror classic; the second was a video game that reset every time our hero failed to defuse the bomb; the third was a brilliant documentary about a race car driver that… well, you can guess how that story ends.

8): Robots: Drive / Real Steel / Hanna. Okay, only the boxing robots in Real Steel were actual robots. But the leads in the other two were so blank (and so efficient at killing), it’s hard to credit them with humanity.

9): Woody Allen: Midnight in Paris. Hey, it’s nice to see Woody get one right after his hit and miss run of late.

10): Best film of the year: Take Shelter. Because this story of a man either losing his mind or having visions of the end of the world is one of the most haunting and terrifying things I’ve seen in a long, long time.

But just in case you were thinking 2011 was the dawn of some kind of new golden age of cinema, rest assured the stench of utter rubbish continued to billow out of cinemas at a steady rate. Especially cinemas screening the following, for which it was a very bad year…

1): Comedies about f**k buddies: No Strings Attached / Friends With Benefits. Because there’s no possible way to guess how all this is ever going to work out.

2): Comedies about anything else: Horrible Bosses / What’s Your Number: Yes, they contained the occasional laugh. With so much good comedy around, they didn’t have enough.

3): Young people: I Am Number 4 / Wasted on the Young / Abducted. Kids: either they’re on the run from aliens, on the run from spies, or on the run from their own despair at being super-rich yet socially isolated.

4): Sequels: Johnny English Reborn / Transformers: Dark of the Moon. Oh good, it’s another chance to get it right… that these films totally threw away.

5): Remakes: Arthur / The Thing / The Mechanic. What better way to salute the classics of the past than by turning them into slightly more polished turds?

6): Musicals: Sucker Punch / A Heartbeat Away. While Sucker Punch was a musical without the music; A Heartbeat Away was… just terrible. Another low point for Australian film

7): The olden days: Red Riding Hood / Burke & Hare. It seems that in the past, people were even worse actors than they are today. Nice outfits though.

8): Jim Carrey: Mr Popper’s Penguins. And the schmaltzy kids’ movie genre claims another once-great comedian. By the look in his eyes, he knows it too.

9): Cowboys & Aliens: Cowboys & Aliens. Two great tastes that taste like aimless, dull crap together.

10): Worst film of the year: Anonymous. Yes, there were others - many others - that were more painful or misguided or stupid. But this sloppy, meandering, pointless take on “what if Shakespeare was, uh, someone else” was the most boring film for 2011. And I’ll forgive a film anything but being boring.

Anthony Morris (this appeared in Forte #523)

To Infinity and Beyond: The end of the end of Harry Potter

2011-07-21T00:33:00.000-07:00

No-one would begrudge an eight-movie series the right to slap on a coda or two after finally wrapping up the story proper. The Lord of the Rings series had roughly half-a-dozen "endings" one after the other before the credits finally ran. But the final scene in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt 2 is a different kettle of fish from the conclusions to LotR or, say, The Matrix trilogy.

In case you haven't seen it yet, or read the books, or figured it out for yourself, after Voldemort is killed and his forces defeated... actually, ever wondered why villains are constantly killing off their underlings? It's because if they don't, the good guys will have to do the job (if Hitler had killed off his henchmen for failing him, we wouldn't have needed the Nuremberg Trials) and no-one wants to see Harry Potter shoveling bodies into a mass grave. So anyway, Voldemort is dead, the day is saved, and then suddenly it's 19 years later and we get to see the all-grown-up-and-married-off heroes somewhat glumly escorting their own offspring on their way to Hogwarts. Life goes on, the cycle continues, parents are boring, and so on.

The dodgy make-up and uncertain temporal location aside (are they 19 years in the future? was the whole series set 19 years in the past? will they ever get mobile phones?), this ending seems a bit... off. Sagas that have a firm ending either have a short coda that basically says "it's all over - or is it?" (The Matrix model) or trail off trying to tie up each and every loose end (The Lord of the Rings).

This one does neither, and while "happily ever after" pretty much sums it up, why be so specific as to everyone's future? Surely just having the characters hold hands and stare off into the dawn of a new day would get the job done just as well, especially considering many Potter fans would have widely diverging ideas of what an "happily ever after" ending would be. Some people might want to image Harry settling down, others might want him to continue battling evil, still more might want to think of him as a pathetic drunk living in the past; why nail his future down so firmly?

This ending (and yes, it is greatly reduced from the book, which details their careers as well as their relationships) seems largely designed to shut down any speculation by readers /viewers as to What Happens Next. The story itself is over, but the characters aren't free: their futures have to be firmly mapped out by the rights-holders to keep them under control. After seven novels and eight films, Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling aren't letting them go that easily.

It may not stick, of course. Literature and film is full of "endings" that didn't quite take - Sir Arthur Conan Doyle brought Sherlock Holmes back from the dead in the face of popular demand, while being staked at the end of Dracula hasn't stopped the vampire from returning over and over again. But they were created in the days before corporations realised copyright over successful characters was the gift that keeps on giving.

Even as the internet provides a massive boost to unauthorized fanfic and slash fiction (so very, very much of it set in the Potterverse), the official version refuses to let a second of its' characters' lives go uncharted. Rather than letting Potter live on wild and free in the minds of fans, the series lurches forward after it's clearly all said and done, staggering onwards into a totally unnecessary and uninspired future simply to make sure no-one else comes along with a better idea.

Anthony Morris

Cane Toads: The Conquest

2011-06-13T22:24:00.000-07:00

Well over a year since Avatar made it a must for blockbusters, 3D remains a controversial process. Often jacking up the ticket price for little visual reward, it’s constantly on the verge of reverting to the gimmick it was back in the 1950s. So what better way to champion the process and remind people of its full potential than to use it to film a whole bunch of cane toads on the march?

In this long awaited follow-up to his 1988 documentary Cane Toads: An Unnatural History, director Mark Lewis returns to give the much-reviled pest another chance to defend itself. Starting off with a brief history of how cane toads were introduced to Australia for no sensible reason – they were meant to eat a bug that attacked the tops of sugarcane and cane toads aren’t known for their climbing abilities – Lewis quickly gets to the real focus of his film: the effect cane toads have had on the people of northern Australia.

The environmental impact of cane toads is a serious matter. A travelling sideshow made up of dioramas using stuffed cane toads that are, amongst other things, playing AFL football, is not. And it’s a line this skilfully made and often very funny documentary walks with ease, even when telling the story of a man actually killed by a cane toad (not directly – he was electrocuted trying to spear one). Pets lick cane toads to get high, which is funny; a dog ate a toad and nearly died, which is somewhat less funny. But even there it’s the characters of the owners – the hen-pecked husband and the wife who loved her bossy dog – that add just that little bit extra to the story.

The 3D is never a cheap trick here. Instead, it’s used to bring viewers into the film – and the ground-level world of the slow-moving yet relentless cane toad. Lewis takes an episodic approach to the cane toad’s impact, using everything from maps and historical re-creations to talking heads and pets-eye views, but the film never feels disjointed thanks to Lewis’ clear point-of-view – one that’s more on the cane toads side than you might expect. We brought them here, he argues, so we need to figure out a way to deal with them. And if that involves wacking them with a golf club or running them over with a lawn mower, go for it!

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in The Big Issue #383)

Xavier Dolan's Heartbeats & I Killed My Mother

2011-04-15T18:27:00.000-07:00

Is there anything as annoying to a teenage boy as the sound of his mother eating? Or the sight of her messily scoffing a cream bun, with a gob of jam at the corner of her lipsticked mouth? This is the immediately recognisable scenario at the start of Xavier Dolan’s feature debut, I Killed My Mother. Dolan was a 17-year-old former child actor, living in the Montreal suburbs, and struggling to make the leap into adult roles. So he wrote and directed one for himself, appearing as the spoilt gay teenager, Hubert, fighting against his exasperated, and admittedly very annoying mother (played by Anne Dorval). The film received three awards and a standing ovation at Cannes in 2009.

Last year, the prodigiously talented and, it’s got to be said, quite stunningly handsome, 21-year-old Dolan followed up his debut with another wonderful film, Heartbeats – which won the $60,000 Sydney Film Prize (2010). Heartbeats proves again that the young French-Canadian actor/filmmaker has a gift for rendering familiar emotions with panache and humour – this time it’s unrequited love and jealousy as two friends fight for the affections of a third. Dolan is shamelessly ‘arty’ yet always accessible and never pretentious. A simple narrative wends its way through colour, music, straight-to-camera monologues and gorgeous clothes (Dolan also takes on the costume design and editing himself). I can’t wait to see what he does next.

Heartbeats and I Killed My Mother will screen together at Melbourne’s ACMI 7 – 28 April. Heartbeats will screen at Sydney’s Dendy Newtown from 31 March. Both films will release on DVD in August.

Note: This column originally appeared in The Big Issue, #377.

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The Girl Can't Help It: Sucker Punch

2011-04-04T23:41:00.000-07:00

The only chicken nugget in the puddle of cinematic gravy that is Sucker Punch is that it’s kinda sorta aware of what it’s doing. Of course, knowing that you’re making a film built entirely around putting woman in sexy outfits then having them act out adolescent boys' panel van art fantasies doesn’t exactly make it right, but viewed in a certain light it is sort of a step forward. After all, when the first Tomb Raider movie was made to be just as vacuous and pointlessly “sexy” as Sucker Punch, Hollywood claimed that it was merely “post-content” and therefore the future of cinema. Considering it’s now the future and we have Sucker Punch, perhaps they were right.

So, to get it out of the way: the story makes no sense. Well, it makes sense in a “Baby Doll (Emily Browning) is put in an insane asylum by her lecherous father after she accidentally kills her little sister (uh, what?), then tries to escape only to spend most of the movie re-imagining her escape attempts as a lurid fantasy where her captivity is represented by a strip club / brothel and her longing for freedom is symbolised by over-the-top fantasy action sequences.” Which makes it sound a lot more interesting than it actually is - that is to say, it makes it sound interesting.

For starters, who thinks like this? Well, writer director Zac Snyder (300, Watchmen) for one. So why not simply make a film where he’s the star dreaming up all this wacky stuff while being bored during Hollywood business meetings? The fantasy sequences are so out there and over the top they tell us nothing at all about the character of Baby Doll, let alone why we should give a crap about anything that happens to her – apart from the fact she’s kind of hot if you like pouty lips and vacant expressions.

But that’s the point; if Baby Doll had a character – if we knew anything at all about what kind of person she was apart from she doesn't like being lobotomies and thinking sexy dancing is a good way to get men's attention – then the fantasy sequences couldn’t just be enjoyed as spectacle. We’d be reading them looking for insights into why she was thinking about, say, a B-25 bomber fighting a dragon and a bunch of orcs, and that’d get in the way of thinking “Coooool”. Which is all the response this film is looking for from a viewer.

[if you’re unsure of why this film is sexist when it clearly shows a bunch of “empowered" women kicking ass while all the men are fat sweaty creeps, that’s why: without any characterisation to back it up, everyone in this film is just an image to be gazed at. And when the images of women are so PG-13 / Maxim Magazine “sexy”, this becomes nothing more than a wank fantasy, a caricature of female empowerment without the danger to the male viewer of any actual females being empowered. Basically, their bodies are all these women have to offer us: if Snyder didn’t want to be sexist, he should have spent some time lingering longingly over their minds]

Not that there was ever going to be much room for character development here, what with the sexy dancing and pop culture references crowding everything else out. Knowing that the whole “I’m escaping in my mind” plot is lifted from Brazil (along with the giant samurai who bleeds light) or that the two main villains are basically Boris and Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle doesn't add anything more to the film than does Scott Glenn’s inane “advice” as the fantasy all-girl kill-team’s supremo (though if he reminds you of Bill from Kill Bill, consider that another reference spotted). The references are here because they're cool, not because they say anything about anybody inside the film; they're merely another way this film works entirely as surface, finely crafted fantasy art that means less than a half-decent Iron Maiden album cover (my pick: Powerslave).

Without character though, every argument this film could try to make about being empowering falls in a heap. Yes, there aren’t a lot of obvious T&A shots in the film, but considering what it’s actually about that feels more like a cop-out than anything else: these women are in sexy outfits because they’ve been objectified by the male gaze, yet the male gaze doesn’t want to stare at their backsides? The metaphor for Baby Doll's sexy dance numbers and their impact on men is bizarre action sequences? Sorry, but when I see something supposedly jaw-droppingly sexy I don't think of gunning down a bunch of robots on a speeding train and I doubt many men do - and arguing that it's Baby Doll's metaphor for what she's doing might work if Baby Doll had any character to construct metaphor with. The film builds to a sexy dance, then cuts to an action scene: well, it certainly works as a symbol of how Hollywood works these days.

Occasionally there are glimpses of a more interesting film here. Baby Doll’s fantasies seem to almost slightly trace America’s involvement in global conflict – steampunk trench warfare for World War I, fantasy creatures versus a World War 2 bomber, a Vietnam-era helicopter versus killer robots on a futuristic train – but it’s so muddled there’s nothing else to be drawn from that. Setting it in the 50s seems to have been done solely for the opportunity to highlight the casual nature of devastating brain surgery performed back then, but as Baby Doll's fantasies are so unrooted in time (guns from her future! Don't they look cool?) the film's “real world” time period, like so much else here, is merely surface dressing to attempt to justify whatever the hell it is Snyder wants to throw up on screen at any given moment. The 1950s had cool cars and a Gothic atmosphere, so the 50s it is, even if it means Baby Doll's fantasy life is packed with elements that make no sense except that they're, you guessed it, "cool".

Once you get past the cool elements - which is remarkably easy to do, because they mean nothing (unless you actually believe that, say, cutting open a baby dragon's throat to obtain crystals to cause fire is an insightful metaphor for trying to steal someone's pocket lighter while they're hypnotised by a strip-tease, in which case I have a bridge you might like to purchase) and exist solely to make you think they're cool - all that’s left is a film that for the most part does what it sets out to do, but constantly tries to sneak in apologies for it. As is often the case, this would work better if it was more sleazy and unpleasant – and yet, even with the rumours of deleted scenes and heavy edits, it sounds like all we lost there (a sex scene between Browning and Jon Hamm) was more of the same. Giving strippers guns empowers them, huh? Not unless they get to shoot the audience gawping at them it doesn't.

It’s a gutless, arse-covering approach that means this ends up being a good time for no-one: relentlessly sexist but prudishly unwilling to have any fun with it, cravenly apologetic about the clumsy sleaze it desperately wants to revel in. The tag-line is "You Will Be Unprepared", but that's an abject lie: anyone who's seen an action movie in the last decade is fully prepared for yet another incoherent film packed with ball-busting hot chicks who dress to impress and shoot to kill without ever hitting a target that matters once the lights come up. At least they got the name right: it might make no sense as far as the film goes ("sucker punch" means "surprise blow"; nothing in this story comes as any kind of surprise, even to the characters themselves), but with Sucker right there in the title you can't say you weren't warned.

Missing the Point Entirely: Never Let Me Go

2011-03-24T02:32:00.000-07:00

The obvious thing to say about the science in the science-fiction film Never Let Me Go is this: it’s a metaphor. In fact, it is so obviously a metaphor that to try to engage with the science any further is a clear waste of time. And yet, and yet....

Yes, the (slight) science-fiction angle is used to sharpen the tale of young people for whom death comes too soon, who cling to relationships not out of love but of fear of being alone, who try to make things right in their lives only to discover that it’s too late, they’ve run out of time and the future they though they could reach thanks to the goodness in their hearts – well, society has in mind an entirely different use for their hearts. But that doesn’t mean the science doesn’t have to make some kind of sense.

The story itself is about Cathy (Carey Mulligan once she grows up) attending a strange and closed-off English boarding school in (a parallel world version of) the 1970s. Turns out it’s closed-off for a reason; advances in science reaching back as far as 1952 (so presumably it was a spin-off from Nazi science, and we all know how that operated) means that the average life-span of a human being in now over 100 years. But to live that long, they need regular “donations” – organs taken from clones, who rarely survive past the third or fourth ‘donation”. Cathy and her friends are clones, and an early death is all they have to look forward to.

Most of the film is taken up with their relationships (Cathy falls for a boy who is snatched away by her best friend; it’s not until the pair are broken by their donations while Cathy is a temporarily exempt ‘carer’ that she gets a second chance) and with exploring the unsettling but believable passivity with which they accept their fate.

Again, taken purely as a metaphor to heighten the poignancy of their plight (they don’t have long to live before they’re killed by a society that sees them as less than human), the science does its job. But this isn’t a fantasy film: it goes out of its way to create a realistic version of the rural England of the 70s and 80s, without a hovercar or lazer gun in sight.

So with that in mind, how does this life-saving medical breakthrough work? The clones aren’t clones of the people they’re donating to – the film makes clear that they’re “modelled” on the dregs of society, who’re hardly the ones at the head of the queue for life-saving medical procedures. So it’s not some kind of organ donation scheme as we know it - and how would trading individual organs prolong life in every single possible case, especially when they’re organs the donors seem to be able to do without?

More importantly, where are all the other clones? Even if each donor gives up four organs, and one new organ is all one regular person needs, you still need millions upon millions of donors. The school Cathy attends is identified as being special, the equivalent of a free-range farm, but still: you’d expect to see an awful lot of giant concrete towers in the background of the shots to store all the “battery” clones.

Okay, perhaps the organs are taken out and turned into a magic life-giving paste so you don’t really need that many clones. But if they don’t need that many clones, that’d make them kinda rare. Wouldn’t you keep them under lock and key? And the donors are able to wander around the countryside, doing pretty much what they want (though we are told later generations are kept like battery hens) – after such an investment, wouldn’t those responsible want to safeguard their investment? What if they get sick?

All of this is clearly not what the film wants you to pay attention to. But it’s a little like a magic trick: once you know how it’s done, you can’t go back to only seeing what you're supposed to. Knowing that the world in the background of this (generally effective) story doesn’t really work means the story itself loses a lot of its power. The locations become cheap sets, the emotions merely scripted words, and the heart-wrenching drama of people trapped in lives that end too soon… well, they were never really alive in the first place, were they?

Anthony Morris

Stop Using Sex As a Weapon: Hall Pass

2011-03-03T02:24:00.000-08:00

The concept behind Hall Pass is simple: a couple of guys are given a break from their marriages by their wives so they can cat around. Much like the other recent Hollywood relationship comedy No Strings Attached, it dangles the promise of fun outside the oh-so-narrow confines of a traditional relationship, only to yank it away: of course the guys are going to learn that being single is in fact a horrible nightmare and they’re going to rush back into the arms of their smug wives. Why are we watching this film again?

Just because we know how a journey’s going to end doesn’t men the trip's not worth taking though, but here what seems like it should be a wild and hilarious romp (well, hilarious by mainstream Hollywood sex comedy standards) largely turns out to be a dull, painful, trudging grind. Much of the blame needs to be laid at the feet of directors the Farrelly brothers, whose one classic film (There’s Something About Mary) is still getting them work despite their repeated inability to imbue their subsequent films with anything approaching that film’s charm, nuance, or comedy. Their films are, on a basic level, crude - they're filled with ugly characters and blunt situations, and they really need a nuance-free comedic set-up if they're going to work at all.

Mary worked because it had such a set-up: Mary was the girl of every man’s dreams, and so a whole bunch of weirdos and freaks fought over her. Hall Pass, on the other hand, is about that point in a marriage where things get stale and the good old days loom large. Who are we supposed to cheer for here: the guys who want to leave their wives and sleep around? The wives who let them, then get tempted themselves? How do we want this story to play out anyway? Their marriages have to be pretty flat for the guys to want to have a break, even for a short while – are we really going to cheer when they rush back in?

The film attempts to dodge this bullet the traditional way: one couple is the “real” couple, while the other is the “comedy” couple. As always, the comedy couple feels more real because they’re allowed to be pissed off and unhappy; the real couple is basically so happy it’s a bit of a puzzle why they’re getting into all this anyway.

This doesn’t really hide the fact that the guys are pretty much sleazebags, mind you; all they do up until they get the hall pass is perv on other women and make sexist comments. In a simpler film, this’d be a simple case of “be careful what you wish for”. These unlikable guys would be set free, discover being single is a nightmare, and at the end of the week run back to their wives swearing never to stray again.

[sadly, this is the state of play in Hollywood rom-coms. A film that seriously suggested that a bad marriage was one you should leave, or that some relationships aren’t worth saving, would be more than a little controversial. Even The Dilemma, which did feature a break-up, made sure to also present a successful relationship – two, if you count the bromance.]

Instead, this feels an obligation to have it both ways: the guys are actually offered hassle-free sex after less than a week on the market. You’d have to think with that kind of strike rate the temptation to stray next time the marriage is going through a dry spell would actually increase. Seriously, these guys have been on the market less than a week – more than half that time being taken up with over-eating, getting stoned, having penises waved in their faces at the gym and so on – and they still score? So this film is saying being single is good now? Well, sort of: plenty of bad things happen to them too, so the moral is… um… if you don’t want to have anything interesting happening in your life, stay married?

Of course, the real problem here is that this film is trying to be all things to all viewers. This concept would work as a film for men: two guys escape their battleaxe wives for a week, then return home having let off some steam. It’d work for women: two wives let their oafish partners off the leash, then laugh as they come crawling back. What it can’t do, no matter how hard the Farrelly’s try, is work for both audiences. The story’s being pulled in two directions; like listening to a guy trying to tell a joke he can’t get straight, eventually you stop caring.

Anthony Morris

Dead End: Death Sentence (DVD)

2011-01-30T03:43:00.000-08:00

Vigilante movies are as formulaic as movies get. That’s what gives them their power: they’re more like rituals than narratives. The audience is dragged through a series of emotional checkpoints and the film succeeds or fails not through innovation, but on how well it delivers what we’ve come to see.

The rules were laid down by 1974’s Death Wish: an average citizen has a family member or members bashed, mugged or killed by criminals. They swear half-thought-out revenge and start killing, tentatively at first then with increasing skill. The police – who were useless when it came time to prosecute the original criminals – soon get on the case, and the criminals start to fight back too.

Most of the variations on this formula, especially in recent years, have been minor ones. In The Brave One, the vigilante is female (Jodie Foster); in Harry Brown the vigilante is an old age pensioner (Michael Caine); in Paparazzi, the vigilante is a movie star hunting down life-threatening celebrity photographers (it’s actually better than it sounds).

So with the rules so firmly in place, why does Australian director James Wan (the original Saw) make Death Sentence – which in every other respect ticks the boxes as efficiently as any of the previous films - spend well over half its running time dwelling on what is the most obvious and least interesting part of the story: the hero’s decision to fight back? The entire point of the vigilante movie is to give the audience the satisfaction that comes from seeing scum get theirs: seeing the hero stand around for over an hour going “gee, I don’t know…” is missing the point by a wide margin.

Things start off in the traditional fashion, with roughly ten (seemingly endless) minutes of Nick Hume (Kevin Bacon) having fun with his loving, perfect family before he and his eldest son first encounter the gang of street scum; suffice to say, things don’t go well for the son.

When the resulting case goes to court, Hume’s faced with the grim facts of the justice system in vigilante movies: the man who killed his son (senselessly – despite looking like a robbery, it was in fact a gang initiation, bringing the vital element of senselessness into his death) is going to get off easy even if Hume’s testimony puts him away. What does Hume do? He says the killer didn’t do it so he’ll be put back on the streets where Hume can take care of him himself.

While this makes almost zero real-world sense (Hume is a pencil-pusher who within the space of five minutes decides to tackle a member of a violent gang on his own?), it’s perfectly logical within the vigilante movie genre – how else are we going to see some scum cleaned up off the streets?

Hume tracks down his son’s killer to his apartment block, confronts him, and after a clumsy scuffle where the killer pulls a knife, accidentally kills him. In a traditional vigilante film –Harry Brown, The Brave One, Paparazzi, all the way back to Death Wish – our hero gets the hang of killing quickly, and the film moves onto questions of who they’re going to kill and will the police catch up with them.

In Death Sentence though, Hume now becomes the hunted, as the gang decide to take revenge on their friend’s killer. They track Hume down, confront him, shoot wildly at him while he flees into a parking garage where he (again, accidentally) manages to kill a couple more of them. Throughout he’s on the back foot. He’s unleashed something he can’t control, is constantly looking for a way to make it all stop, and, as the police repeatedly and unhelpfully tell him, what comes next is his own fault.

In a better or more original film highlighting Hume’s fear as his scheme backfires might work. But in every other respect – thin characterisation of the family, generic street scum lacking all redeeming features, a laughably offhand view of the courts, action movie-style violence - Death Sentence is nothing more (or less) than a traditional vigilante movie. While Hume’s fear in the face of the gang’s retaliation is “realistic”, vigilante films work on an emotional level rather than a realistic one, as shown by his snap decision to deal with his son’s killer himself. Dragging out this stage of the story doesn’t feel like a natural outcome of the plot, or a post-modern attempt to tweak the genre; it’s just dull.

What comes next is (finally) what we came here to see: the gang break into his home and shoot everyone at point-blank range. Still, as seen in the earlier confrontation, they really are The Gang That Couldn’t Shoot Straight: Hume lives, as does his younger son (in a coma), leaving his wife the only one dead. Hume, finally realising what has to be done (and what kind of film he’s in), breaks out of hospital, buys a sackful of guns (ironically enough, from the crime gang’s Kingpin-style overlord [and father of its leader], played by John Goodman), and tracks down the bad guys to their lair in a disused mental hospital (of course).

It’s the traditional guns-a-blazin’ ending to a vigilante story, in the same way that the opening ‘happy family” scenes made for a traditional opening. So why waste so much time wavering on the question of “does violence solve anything” when we all know that here it not only solves everything, but is the sole reason for watching the film?

At first it seemed like the answer might lie in the source material. According to the credits, Death Sentence is based on “a novel by Brian Garfield” (it’s important to be specific, for reasons that will become clear). Garfield wrote Death Sentence back in the 70s as a sequel to his novel Death Wish, which the film was based on. Garfield has said publicly that the film – which had been a huge commercial hit, had a massive cultural impact in the US and went on to spawn four sequels – had glorified the idea of vigilante justice against his original intentions. He had intended Death Wish to be a cautionary tale: when everyone believes in “an eye for an eye”, eventually everyone ends up blind.

Cast in that light – and knowing that in a parallel world Hume was Kersey – the wavering that makes up two thirds of this film almost makes sense: a man who’s put his violent past behind him is forced to wonder whether the cycle of violence can ever really be broken. If Charles Bronson was able to reprise his most famous role, this could have been his version of Unforgiven, Clint Eastwood’s reflection on his western roles. After all, both revolve around a former killer dragged out of retirement to confront and re-assess his / the actor’s past.

[That said, Unforgiven has the advantage of an interesting setting, well thought-out supporting characters and a considered stance on violence; even if Bronson had somehow starred in Death Sentence as a direct reflection on his most iconic role, this film still has a one-dimensional supporting cast, generic settings, and pretty much nothing to say about violence past “shotguns are cool”.]

If this wider context had been available to Death Sentence, its drawn-out middle section would have had at least some point as far as raising questions about the usefulness of vigilante justice (before answering them the same way all vigilante films do: in a hail of gunfire cheered on by the audience). But in the film Hume has no violent past to reflect on, no history as a killer to add depth and context to his actions and concerns.

[And then, after I’d already written most of this review, I actually found a copy of Garfield’s Death Sentence novel in a secondhand store. If the movie’s based on a Garfield novel, it sure ain’t this one: the lead has no family and does not get in an eye-for-an-eye tussle with a street gang, but does have to deal with a rival vigilante, political grandstanding, social ramifications and… basically Death Wish 3 is a more faithful adaptation of Death Sentence than Wan’s film. They've taken the name and made up their own story to fit.]

So there's not even the lingering trace of a deeper meaning left over from the source material. This just simply takes forever to get to the point. Even if it seriously intended to say that vigilante violence was bad, Wan clearly loves violence (and in the unrated edition, gore) so much he can’t help himself. There’s no serious attempt here to tackle the idea that killing is bad rather than bad-ass: when all the violence is thrillingly shot with loads of bodies flying and blood spraying, the bland stretches where Hume refuses to man up and kill do nothing more than make him an annoying pain refusing to give us what we’ve come to see.

The result is notable solely as a failed experiment. There may very well be ways to tweak the vigilante formula to make it more crowd-pleasing or efficient; even Death Wish didn’t get it right first time (Kersey never kills the scum who killed his wife and raped his daughter; in pretty much every vigilante film since, the hero is solely out for personal revenge - though in my mind that makes them less interesting by far).

There may even be ways to make a vigilante film that seriously questions the nature of violence (presumably the “vigilante” would then have to be revealed for who he really is: a serial killer). But as a genre piece and as a piece of art, Death Sentence is nothing more than a dead end.

Anthony Morris

Us vs. Them: Another Year

2011-01-26T23:20:00.000-08:00

Mike Leigh’s latest film is full of warmth and humanity – so long as you’re on the right side of the line. There’s no serious arguing that the line isn’t there in this modern-day London of haves and have-nots: on one side are our nominal leads, content 60-somethings Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen), their son Joe (Oliver Maltman) and his bubbly partner Katie (Karina Fernandez), and contented mother Tanya (Michele Austin).

What puts them ahead of the pack isn’t so much their wealth – though they all seem to be doing ok – but their emotional well-being. They’re all happy with their lot, leading lives full of love and companionship. Meanwhile, sharing the same physical space but off in a world of hurt, are the have-nots: Mary (Lesley Manville), the somewhat scattered co-worker of Gerri and Tanya, and Ken (Peter Wright), Tom’s childhood friend. They’re crushingly sad, constantly alone, and more often than not hitting the booze a little too hard.

Set over the course of a year, the film basically charts Tom & Gerri’s social life as Mary outstays her welcome, Ken drops in for a visit, Joe finds a partner and eventually Tom’s brother Ronnie (David Bradley) appears on the scene after the sudden death of his wife. There’s no massive dramas here or large-scale character shifts, which makes its subtle distinctions all the more devastating: some people just live lives of warmth and happiness, and some don’t.

But why? What causes this sharp divide? A clue lies in the two characters that undergo serious change in their situation across the length of the film: Joe finds a girlfriend and Ronnie loses a wife (though we don’t actually see him while his wife was alive). It could be argued that these changes make no difference to their well-being: Joe seems pretty happy when we first meet him as a single man, and while we have no idea what Ronnie was like when his wife was alive, his non-existent relationship with his angry – and presumably single - son Carl (Martin Savage) suggests he wasn’t an ideal father.

If that’s the case though and having a partner makes no difference to Joes well-being, why does he find someone at all? Well, he’s clearly been looking for a girlfriend (not every single person is), and there’s no suggestion that she makes his life worse – according to Gerri & Tom, his having a partner is a distinct improvement over his being single. As for Ronnie, he’s not exactly jumping for joy over the death of his wife: suddenly becoming single is clearly not a step forward for him.

Joe’s finding a partner does fulfil another plot function: it separates him from Mary. When he’s single, she’s constantly making moves on him – moves he rebuffs, if gently. When his partner arrives on the scene, Mary sulks, and her hostility poisons her relationship with Tom & Gerri too.

You could also argue that Ken’s character’s role in the plot is also Mary-centric: he’s single, he hits on her, and she knocks him back. As the film develops the focus is increasingly on her: if everyone else is there simply to illustrate aspects of her character, then the only real divide here is between her and everyone else.

Unfortunately for that argument, while Mary is increasingly the film’s focus, there are enough scenes around Tom & Gerri (and without Mary) to make clear that this is a film about a group of people. And as a group, there are clear haves and have-nots. After all, if Ken is there simply to show that Mary rejects companionship, why make him so pathetic? Is a fellow lonely drunk the best she can expect? If so, that only re-enforces the divide: Gerri gets the warm-hearted Tom, Mary gets a drunk a brisk walk away from a heart attack.

As for Joe, his move into coupledom certainly distances him from Mary, but that also only re-enforces the divide: he escapes Mary and her sad drunken world not by getting a better job or an exciting new hobby, but by finding a partner. It’s made plain and clear - all the single people in this film are sad, all the people with partners are happy. Dark pasts and failed relationships might be hinted at to explain Mary and Ken's current state, but they're only hints: as far as what we're shown on the screen goes, they're single, therefore they're unhappy. And being single is their own fault. After all, Joe found a girl, and look how well that worked out.

That said, this is largely a film about older people: could it be that it’s their attitude to aging that’s depressing them? After all, Ken and Mary are still out and about trying to keep up with the kids; Tom & Gerri have settled down into a comfy later life, pottering around down the allotment and so on. Maybe accepting your age is the key to happiness here?

Trouble there is, both Ken and Mary are single, and trying to find a partner is a young person’s game. The film might archly suggest that they’re a bit past it as far as hanging around pubs goes, but how else are they supposed to find someone? They’re merely the last ones left at the life-long session of relationship musical chairs, going through the same motions to try and find someone long after everyone else has paired up and gone home.

All this wouldn’t be so bad if the film itself didn’t clearly take sides. Mary and Ken are seen as mildly annoying impositions on (and by) Tom & Gerri (in contrast, they love Joes’ new partner), while Mary and Ken seek out Tom & Gerri for friendship. It’s a world where single people hit the bottle and annoy their partnered friends, who tolerate their presence at best – usually while rolling their eyes the second they’re gone as they snuggle up together in a big cosy bed. Mary, on the other hand, gets a shit car.

Clearly, the clock is ticking: if you’re single and you don’t find someone, you’ll be left on the shelf. The consequences of which are spelt out plain for all to see across Another Year’s two hours: single people are ditzy, often drunk, pathetic and painfully needy, worthy of little more than subtle contempt and dismay from their paired-off “friends”.

If this wasn’t harsh enough, Another Year opens with Tanya (who’s a doctor) trying to help a clearly closed-off and clinically depressed woman (Imelda Staunton). She’s never seen again after the opening scene, but her pinched-off answers to Tanya’s questions suggest a world where people lock themselves into personal prisons and refuse all help to escape. You’re sad because you’re single, and being single is all your fault.

Anthony Morris

In The Company of Chumps: The Dilemma

2011-01-19T05:57:00.000-08:00

Over the last few years Vince Vaughn’s charted a course slightly askew from, well, pretty much everyone else in the romantic comedy business. Everyone else almost always focuses in on the beginning of relationships; he makes films that are a little more interested in what happens after the fun stops. Not that anyone’s going to confuse The Break-Up or Couples Retreat with Carnal Knowledge in a hurry, but compared to yet another tortureporn effort where some poor chump settles down with / has his nuts cut off by Katherine Heigl, at least he actually seems to be attracted to projects that spend at least a couple of seconds thinking about exactly what “happily ever after” actually entails.

So knowing that Vaughn tends to like making rom-coms that make you at least momentarily question the nature of romance (and more often the nature of comedy, considering their often more miss than hit approach to gags), the opening scene of The Dilemma brings with it zero surprises, Basically, the cast - Vince, Kevin James (clearly taking on the Jon Favreau [Vaughn's long-time cohort and co-star in Swingers, Made and more recently Couples Retreat] role), Winona Ryder as James' wife and Jennifer Connelly as Vaughn's girlfriend – sit around talking about honesty and its importance in a relationship. If you're even slightly familiar with the works of playwrights like Neil LaBute (and why hasn’t Vaughn teamed up with LaBute yet? Someone start that Facebook page), you'll recognise the gambit: everyone stakes out their views on honesty, and then circumstances contrive to make them either give up their principles and become hollow shells or stick by them and ruin their lives.

Problem here is, we then get ten minutes or so of crap "bromance" hijinks as it's established that Vaughn and James live in each others pockets (they have their own company together trying to make electric cars sound like muscle cars - but more on that later) and that Vaughn is a rapid-fire blabbermouth who thinks the best way to sell his rumbling engines to auto executives is by calling regular electric cars "gay". The "gay" line's an odd one, because we don't know how to respond: is it supposed to be funny (it's not, unless you're one Melbourne critic who all but pissed his already stained pants at it), or is it supposed to be as awkward for the characters on screen as it is in the cinema?

Either way would work for the film - Vaughn is playing a bit of a dickhead who lets his mouth run away with him so there's the drama covered, and the wacky work pitch is a comedy bit that often gets laughs - but because this film is staggering all over the place like a dog who's spent the day sucking up spilt beer we don't know. Last time I checked, being confused doesn't usually mean you're having a good time.

Anyway, the movie stumbles on with no real idea of what its trying to do - the guys' company is struggling and that's meant to be serious, but Queen Latifa is playing an inappropriately explicit auto executive saying stuff like "I want to have sex with your words" which is presumably funny but who can really tell - and then finally things click into gear when Vaughn, while planning out his marriage proposal in some giant greenhouse full of exotic plants, sees Ryder making out with some other guy. Serious moment, right? Not once Vaughn has finished crawling through poison plants to spy on them! Hah! Wait, no hah.

You can almost see what they're trying for here, and in a sillier film it would probably work. But this is a film that doesn't trust you enough to figure out that there's anything at stake here. In a regular comedy, film-makers just assume the audience knows that discovering that your best friend's wife is cheating on him is serious and sad, and then move onto being funny. But after this scene - which, like I said, almost works because he's actually seeing something serious while doing something stupid - the film just keeps on going on and on about how this is a really serious and sad situation before cracking a couple of lame jokes. It's like the film is a crap stand-up comedian prefacing every single one of his one-liners with "sorry your wife's a cheating skank": it kinda kills the mood.

Then it gets even stranger. "Serious grown-up issues" and "laugh-out-loud comedy" rarely go hand-in hand, but when Vaughn corners Ryder and confronts her about what he saw this goes out of its way to be grown-up about the whole thing. Turns out that James has been cold and distant to her no matter how hard she tries - so distant, in fact, that not only has he stopped shagging her, he's off down the Asian massage parlour every Thursday for a hand shandy. And this grim, tragic look inside a dying marriage is funny how?

Ryder does get to put this scene on her showreel though, as she suddenly turns into Satan's Daughter by turning on the fake waterworks to show how she'll lie her way out of it if Vaughn tells James about what happened. So she's the bad guy, right? We can cheer when she gets her eventual comeuppance - and more importantly, laugh as she ends up going through the wringer? Nope: she goes back to being a heart-wrenching figure of pity (or just someone who looks sad and seems trapped) in every single other scene she's in. So no laughs there.

And there's not a whole lot of laughs (let alone laffs) to be found when Vaughn follows James to the massage parlour and discovers that yes, his best mate has gone there to be wanked off by a massage parlour boss who basically comes out into the front of the place and says "we're going to give you an excellent hand-job tonight!". Geez, hope there are no law enforcement agents in a three block radius to overhear that.

Usually hand-job material is comedy gold, but don't forget: he's getting one while he's still married and his heart-broken wife knows about it. Urgh. Even those sitcoms where married couples just insult each other non-stop never went that far. So Vaughn is confiding in his girlfriend about all this shit, right? After all, in like the second scene of the film Ryder says to him something like "We really like her and she's not even one of my friends!" so you know there's no girl bond between Ryder and Connelly. Of course he's not: he lies to her like a maniac for no reason so she can start thinking he's gambling again. Hilarious!

Then we get a bunch of scenes where James acts like a dick - surprisingly well too, and to be fair the acting in this film is pretty sharp from top to bottom - just to make sure we know his crumbling relationship is his fault as well. Then Vaughn actually prays for guidance - again, begging God for help without a trace of irony is not exactly comedy gold - then suddenly he's pulling some stalker shit outside the house of the guy Ryder's f**king and guess what? He's a tattooed-idiot called Zip, so there goes the sympathy for her the film was trying so hard to create a few scenes back.

At this stage you might be thinking "is this even supposed to be a comedy?". Problem with writing this off as just a clumsy drama is that Zip (Channing Tatum) is actually on-purpose funny, which means he seems to have come from a completely different movie (one that mostly involves beating the crap out of Vaughn). One half-baked comedy intervention for Vaughn's gambling later and the secret's out, Ryder tearfully vanishes from the film forever and the true point is revealed: can James and Vaughn's friendship survive? Hang on, what?

This might have been a dilemma - geddit? - if James' cheating wife had been an evil skank. But hasn't half this film been telling us that their marriage was hurtling down shit creek sans paddle for both of them? If James is so massive a tool that he'd get pissed off at his friend for telling him his wife was sleeping around at the same time as he's got a regular booking down at the Five Fingers of Hope Saloon, why the f**k should we want Vaughn to stay friends with him?

The result is that there's just no drama there at all: the film was so desperate to avoid making Ryder the villain that there's no dramatic tension at all in whether the friendship survives. James has been an obvious shitbird, Vaughn hasn't been a whole lot better and they deserve each other so just end the damn film already. Only not with a bizarre scene where James knocks a hockey puck through a tiny target to win a prize and a giant hug from Vaughn because a guy firing a projectile through a tiny opening seems a little bit much like a sex thing.

One massive question remains (okay, two, the first being how the hell did two slobs like Vaughn and James land amazingly hot dames like Connelly and Ryder when they're clearly not even that interested in them): considering this is a movie that makes such a massive deal about the question of honesty - and, surprising no-one, comes down hard on the line that honesty is the policy to take out - why does it also make such a big deal about James and Vaughn's day job considering said day job is entirely based around making a car engine sound like something it's not. It's a, you know, deception? A big fat, bass-heavy rumbling lie?

That's right: in a film about being honest, their job is basically about lying to people. Is it a metaphor? A hint that while the characters conclude one thing about the importance of honestly, the film is saying something else? With something as all-over-the-shop as The Dilemma, who the f**k knows?

Anthony Morris

Best of the Year: 2010

2011-01-06T13:51:00.000-08:00

Standout Film

Toy Story 3

It’s hard to believe 15 years have passed since the first installment of Toy Story, the stunning Pixar animated film that delighted both adults and children. Sequels are notorious for being calculated rip-offs, but the beauty of Toy Story 3 is that this ‘threequel’ treats the now familiar characters with integrity, while advancing their story-lines in ways that entertain, surprise – and let’s be honest – scare the living daylights out of – the audience.

No other film this year has had me sobbing so uncontrollably. There’s a scene where the toys hold hands as they cling to a conveyor belt that’s hurtling towards an incinerator. Surely this is one of recent cinema’s most poignant depictions of the consolations of friendship as we confront our inevitable mortality. Reading too much into it? No. The Toy Story films have always been brave enough to tackle dark themes of abandonment – after all, the toys get left behind as their owners grow into adulthood. It’s tragic. Luckily, there are lots of laughs, inventive set-pieces (like the meeting between Ken and Barbie) and thrilling action sequences to leaven the bitter-sweet loaf. One of the most successful films at the 2010 box office, this proves it’s possible to please crowds with style, and dare I say it, profundity.

Other film highlights:

The Ghost Writer: Roman Polanksi’s beautifully paced and elegantly directed thriller about a ghost writer (Ewan McGregor) hired to write the memoirs of an ex Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) accused of war crimes, this is melancholy and sly.

Fish Tank: Powerful performances and a bleak urban beauty infuse a tough tale set in a British housing estate. Directed by Andrea Arnold (Red Road) Fish Tank portrays an angry and isolated 15-year-old girl (Katie Jarvis) who falls for her mum’s boyfriend (Michael Fassbender).

A Single Man: The directorial debut of fashion designer Tom Ford, this sublimely beautiful and moving film stars Colin Firth as a 1950s college professor the mourning the death of his lover (Matthew Goode). Set over the course of a day, it’s a lush meditation on life, love and lust.

The White Ribbon: Michael Haneke’s black and white masterpiece comments obliquely on the rise of Nazism with its tale of mysterious violent crimes occurring in a farming village at the onset of World War I.

Leap Year: Australian director Michael Rowe won the 2010 Cannes Camera d’Or for this confronting and sexually explicit Mexican film about a solitary young woman dealing with grief and loneliness.

I Am Love: Tilda Swinton is the respectable matriarch of a rich Milan family, until she falls desperately in love with her son’s best friend. A sumptuous and sensuous melodrama that pits passion against bourgeois convention.

The Kids are All Right: Julianne Moore and Annette Bening shine as a bickering lesbian couple whose family is rocked when their teenage children decide to meet their biological dad (Mark Ruffalo). Funny and affecting, it’s a comedy for anyone in a long-term relationship.

South Solitary: An Australian film that divided critics, South Solitary comes from the highly original writer/director Shirley Barrett (Love Serenade). The film features Miranda Otto in an adorable performance as a not-so-young woman who’s run out of options in 1920s society and finds herself living with her uncle (Barry Otto) in a remote lighthouse. Marton Csokas and Essie Davis also feature in a strange, halting and salty romance that’s very funny in its own quiet way.

Exit Through the Gift Shop: Real or hoax? It doesn’t really matter in this hilarious documentary about notorious graffiti artist ‘Banksy’ and the man who obsessively follows him with a video camera. A smart guerrilla expose of the pretentions and paradoxes of the art world.

Looking forward to 2011

Another documentary causing speculation about its authenticity is Catfish (27 Jan), a story of three friends who document a budding Facebook romance only to find that the woman involved may not be who she says she is. From the personal to the political, a documentary that’s set to terrify us all is Countdown to Zero (26 Jan) tracing the history of the atomic bomb and the current dangers we face in the case of accident, terrorism or failed diplomacy.

Fans of French auteur Claire Denis (Beau Travail) will be keen to catch her latest film White Material (limited release from Jan), which stars Isabelle Huppert as a plantation owner trying to keep her family together in a warring African country. Also in January, the Coen Bros’ latest offering, True Grit will hit screens on the 20th. Set in the Old West it stars Jeff Bridges and Matt Damon as two lawmen tracking down a murderer.

Other big name directors bringing out new titles include Mike Leigh, with comic drama Another Year (26 Jan); Clint Eastwood, with supernatural thriller Hereafter (Feb 10); Danny Boyle, with the true story of rock-climbing survival starring James Franco, 127 Hours (10 Feb); and Peter Weir’s much awaited escape drama The Way Back (24 Feb), a story based on fact about soldiers who break out of a Siberian gulag in 1940 and walk 4000 miles to freedom.

Here's to a new year at the cinema - and lots of resolutions to blog more often!

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(A version of this post originally appeared in edition #370 of The Big Issue magazine.)

So much for the afterglow: Love and Other Drugs

2010-12-19T18:48:00.000-08:00

There is one scene in Love and Other Drugs that sets up why this film looked so promising. Unfortunately, this scene isn’t currently commercially available as a stand-alone segment, which is a shame as every other moment in this film is good for little more than encouraging you to drive a railway spike through your forehead. But for one moment in one scene, you can almost maybe just see into a parallel world where this movie wasn’t a total waste of time.

In this scene, our leads Jamie (Jake Gyllenhall) and Maggie (Anne Hathaway) are lounging around in a post-coital fugue, talking about… well, it doesn’t really matter: every line of dialogue in this film falls like lead shot from the lips of the cast, usually hitting the ground with a muffled thud, occasionally creating a clanger that will endure until the sun grows cold (“She’s Thai. And I’m Thai-curious”). But here they’re both rolling around on the bed with a – for Hollywood – surprising ease as far as nudity (mostly Hathaway’s) goes, creating an atmosphere that we don’t often get in western films. Two people who seem to like each other have just had sex, and now they’re soaking up the afterglow.

It only seems like a smart moment in the context of prudish western film-making, with its L-shaped sheets and one-time-only kisses. It that context, even this film’s depiction of a kind of relationship that we all know from real life but never see on film – a relationship built almost entirely (at first) on sex – seems daring. But being the world’s tallest dwarf is nothing to be proud about, and this one brief moment of relative humanity only makes the robotic dreck that surrounds it all the more painful.

Story-wise there are actually two stories going on here: one involves Jamie’s efforts to become the best-darn salesman for Pfizer he can be, but you needn’t pay too much attention to that one because the film is set in the mid- to late-1990s so along comes Viagra and even the most disinterested Sportsgirl salesgirl could sell that. It’s actually hard to remember a recent mainstream film where so much effort is devoted to such a major plot thread that ends up going nowhere: it’s not like he’s a slacker who lucks into a product that sells itself, or a loser whose career is saved by this awesome self-selling product – he’s a good salesman, being a good salesman is important to his self-image, and then this drug comes along that takes away all the skill and ability from his profession and… it just doesn’t matter. His arch-nemesis in drug sales vanishes from the film, his co-worker (Oliver Platt) gets half a scene at the end that means nothing –

[Actually, let’s explain that: Platt wants to be a success so he can get a gig back in Chicago close to his family, and he thinks Jamie’s slick ways will get him there. Platt’s character pops up every now and again to crack wise and dispense job tips, Viagra comes along and it’s money in the bank, and then we get a scene where we learn that Jamie is going to Chicago but Platt’s character isn’t. Viagra sells itself (or so we’ve been told), so why is Jamie getting a bump over his more senior colleague? No doubt there could be a dozen reasons, but the only one we’re given (sez Platt: “they need me here”) is presented as nothing more than excuse-making by a broken man. It’s a sign of how sloppy this film is: Jamie strives for success in a world where things happen for no reason, and yet we’re still expected to care about his success.]

-and otherwise, a few cheap and nasty gags about how drug salesmen work aside, this side of things adds up to nothing more than a bauble Jamie can throw away at the end to prove how much he loves Maggie. Because that one brief, mostly-naked bedroom scene aside, this is the kind of romantic comedy that runs on rails to a destination that only looks attractive from a long, long way away.

We learn three things about Maggie when we first meet her in a doctor’s surgery: she’s sassy, she has early-onset Parkinson’s Disease, and she’s got nice breasts. Surprisingly, of those three things it turns out that being sassy is the least important, as, after some slightly more spiteful than usual banter, she promptly invites Jamie home to her sweet loft for some no-strings sex, which soon becomes a regular event. The frequent sex is another thing that might fool more gullible viewers into thinking this film is smarter than it actually is: whereas most Hollywood rom-coms restrict the sex scenes to one or (if they need to have the sex interrupted comically or start to go bad) two, this keeps ‘em coming well past the usual cut-off point.

The film makes no secret of the link it’s forging between her free-wheeling sexual ways and her illness. While it’s possible to see her illness as some kind of punishment for being a young woman who likes sex, lets give this film the benefit of the doubt and say that her illness (and awareness that for her, life as an able-bodied person is short) fuels her hunger for sex. It doesn’t fuel her appetite for much else tho – she’s an artist, she works in a café (good job paying for the sweet loft on that wage, especially as she can’t afford drugs and has to go to Canada on a bus for the cheap stuff), and there’s not a single “look at me and all the things I’m trying to cram into my life” montage anywhere to be found. She just likes to fuck. A lot.

Which, when you think about it, is pretty fortunate for her. After all, why else would Jamie want to be with someone with an incurable illness unless she was constantly up for it? There’s nothing else to her character her to suggest any other reason for him to fall in love with her, after all – she’s constantly pushing him away verbally, she’s got the whole illness thing going on – if she didn’t want to sleep with him all the time, why would he bother hanging around? Don’t blame me if this sounds offensive: while it may be possible to come up with another reading of the situation here, it’s hard to ignore the way this film constantly re-enforces the sexual nature of their relationship in a way that most other Hollywood romantic comedies and dramas don’t. Considering there’s almost nothing else to her character, it’s difficult not to read this as “hey, why else would you fall in love with a Parkinson’s sufferer?”

Offensive to both men and women this undoubtedly is, but at least it fits in somewhat with the jerk Jamie seems to be. And in some early scenes together their horrible, stilted, clichéd dialogue almost makes sense: he’s a heartless jerk, she’s a victim desperately trying to keep life at arm’s reach, no wonder their dialogue sounds clichéd: they’re both saying things they don’t really mean about emotions they’re not actually feeling. But then everyone sounds that bad all the time in every situation and it turns out the script is just really poorly written. Oh well.

Sadly, this film dubious approach to Parkinson’s doesn’t stop at the suggestion that the only way a sufferer can hope to get a man is by being extremely hot and sexually available. For a while its lightweight and unrealistic approach to the illness, while kind of annoying, is no more annoying than anything else here. She’s sick, only she’s the kind of sick that doesn’t actually seem to have any real affect on her life; oh well, back to bed we go. But then she goes to a meeting of Parkinson’s sufferers – presumably played by actual Parkinson’s sufferers – and things take a turn for the offensive. It’s one thing to drag an actual illness into a fantasy rom-com: it’s another thing entirely to try and justify it by bringing out actual real-life sufferers to bolster your offensive drivel.

[not to mention it’s a completely pointless scene: supposedly it empowers Maggie to take control of her life and illness, only to then be followed by a series of scenes where Jamie drags her around to doctors and clinics desperately trying to find a cure. Girl power!]

The result is a film that constantly plays around with elements it has no idea how to use. Time and time and time again it throws up a scene or idea that could be interesting, only to run away from the implications as fast as it can. Jamie and Maggie’s relationship can’t stay no-strings, it has to become a traditional rom-com relationship right down to the last minute dash by one partner to chase down and win back the other – seriously, in 2010 someone still thought this was a good way to end a movie.

We’re constantly told that there will be no cure for Maggie’s illness, but then we’re never shown her actually falling ill: the film’s final moments are just a touchy-feely montage, despite the fact that it’s set in the late 1990s so jumping forward to the present day would seem like the most logical ending in the world. Even if it was just to show Jamie still lovingly caring for a disabled Maggie, that would still be marginally more confronting that the total avoidance of the issue that this film serves up.

But surely there’s at least a few side elements that don’t completely stink up the cinema? Hell, no: from a totally insane running gag about a crazy homeless man who gets his life together thanks to taking anti-depressants he steals from a dumpster – which might have been funny in an Airplane!-style slapstick film, not a supposedly cynical real-world drama – to the amazingly unfunny no-name brand-Jack Black role of Jamie’s brother, this is all-to-wall painful.

This is, after all, a film whose idea of comedy is to have Jamie come home to find his brother – a former internet millionaire whose career has gone so far down the toilet he now lives with his brother, where his mission in life is to act like a total dipshit and whose character arc concludes with him discovering that he doesn’t actually like meaningless sex – masturbating to a sex tape Jamie and Maggie made. That’s right: he’s beating off to a tape of his own brother having sex. It’s very, very, very difficult to think of a film in which this kind of thing might be seen as comic relief. Salo perhaps?

By the end it’s hard to figure out why anyone involved thought this was a good film to make. It’s not like they’ve shown any real desire to follow through on any aspect of the story that’s being told. The relationship is blanded out as fast as possible, Jamie’s personal issues are totally glossed over or ignored, his career turns out to have meant nothing, the idea of actually educating the audience about how drug sales work in the US medical system is barely touched upon and then only in the most benign fashion, any possibility of a Vigara-based sex-farce is quickly squashed (there is one scene where Jamie rushes to the emergency room with an erection that won’t go away, but we never see the offending boner – or even a decent laugh-getting bulge in his shorts – and the scene just… ends, with no punchline beyond a nurses’ eye-rolling), Maggie’s character quickly degenerates into yet another mildly whiney victim who’s biggest problem isn’t the incurable and debilitating illness she suffers from but that she’s “afraid of love” (sigh), and the whole things ends in a way that leaves little more than the impression the film-makers had no idea how to end things.

This is a film where one lead suffers from a terminal illness but we hardly see her getting ill; the other is supposedly a self-absorbed, sex-obsessed cad who somehow becomes a devoted, self-sacrificing boyfriend at the earliest possible opportunity. A medical system run by drug salesmen is nothing to worry about, success in your career means nothing and has nothing to do with you anyway, drugs have no down side that isn’t funny and coming home to find your brother masturbating to a tape of you having sex is a minor glitch. Man, I need a drink.

Anthony Morris

In The Company Of Men: professional film reviewing in Melbourne

2010-12-09T18:27:00.000-08:00

(warning: this column contains no mention of the film In The Company of Men. Which is a shame as it's a great film)

Who knew that seeing movies for free and then getting paid to tell people what you thought about them was a job that required a penis? Okay, maybe it doesn’t (unless you’re reviewing the films down at the Shaft cinema), but you’d be forgiven for thinking otherwise if you’re getting your reviews from the Melbourne media.

Some context for this outlandish statement: at The Age, of the five regular (well, four and Craig Matheson, who’s the regular fill-in) film critics, one (Phillipa Hawker) is a woman. At The Herald-Sun, the two critics – the omnipresent Leigh Paatsch and Sunday’s McEachen , who is based in Sydney - are male. At the two street papers, the film critics – Greg King at Beat, Anthony Carew at Impress – are male. The host of RRRs Film Buffs Forecast is male, as is Thomas Caldwell, the reviewer on RRR’s The Breakfasters. Triple J’s film reviewer until the end of 2005 was the (mostly) Melbourne-based Megan Spencer; she was replaced by the Sydney-based Marc Fennell (who also reviews on the Melbourne-based morning show The Circle). Luke Buckmaster writes about film for Crikey.com; Sean Lynch reviews for Web Wombat.com. As they say, the list goes on

[In the interests of full male disclosure, I review films for Fairfax website The Vine.com, The Big Issue, and the Geelong-based street paper Forte; the other Geelong-based film professional critic is The Geelong Advertiser’s Guy Davis]

Thankfully, the Melbourne reviewing scene isn’t entirely devoid of women; my co-blogger Rochelle Siemienowicz is the film editor at The Big Issue, where Melbourne-based reviewers Tara Judah (who’s also appeared on Film Buffs Forecast) and Carly Miller also appear, while Clem Bastow has proven to be a passionate advocate for film at The Vine. But Rochelle’s day job has reduced the amount of time she’s had to write reviews in recent years, Tara recently returned to Melbourne after a number of years overseas, and Clem only started reviewing films in 2010. That’s right: this is what a good year looks like when it comes to female film critics in Melbourne.

[despite my best efforts, no doubt I’ve overlooked some female critics, including Sydney-based Big Issue regular Alice Tynan. So for balance I left a few males off the list as well.]

What makes this imbalance even harder to explain (unlike, say, the gender imbalance in sports reporting) is that pretty much every single job related to that of film reviewer seems to have a far more equitable gender balance. Obviously, plenty of women are actors (not as many are directors, but they’re there too), and loads of films are aimed primarily at women. Beyond that, film publicists are almost always women; in my 15 plus years of reviewing I can count the number of male publicists I’ve dealt with on a regular basis on one hand.

Entertainment editors are often women: at the moment I work with female editors at all three venues I regularly submit film reviews to, and at The Big Issue the other three arts editors (I handle DVDs; they cover books, film and music) are women. The current editor of The Age’s EG is a woman, as is the entire editorial staff of that paper’s Saturday supplement A2 (books editor aside); for many years Claire Sutherland was the editor of The Herald Sun’s Hit section.

Out in the writing world, entertainment writers across the board can be and frequently are women: Stephanie Bunbury writes pretty much all the Schembri-free in-depth film stories in the A2, EG and elsewhere in The Age, while Neala Johnson has moved across from music writing to handle film interviews at The Herald-Sun. Music is slightly more male dominated, but even there high-profile women aren’t hard to find: the current writer of the EG’s Sticky Carpet column is a woman, for one.

Even in reviewing that other realm of images on a screen, television reviewers are often women. The editor of The Age’s Green Guide is a woman; of that paper’s three television columnists (Green Guide, A2, Sunday Age), two are women. While the Herald-Sun’s daily television reviewer is male, as is the editor of the Herald-Sun’s TV guide, that guide’s sole television columnist and reviewer is Diane Butler.

[In fact, the only area of television reviewing that is male dominated are the movie reviews: Leigh Paatsch does them for the Herald-Sun, and when Scott Murray isn’t providing them in the Green Guide, Craig Matheson steps in.]

To be fair, perhaps all this (clearly anecdotal) evidence means nothing. Perhaps there is no real overlap between those positions and film reviewing and I might as well be discussing the gender of the projectionists and popcorn sellers. But let's pretend all this does mean something: so where are the female film reviewers?

Part of the problem is simply that there aren’t many film reviewers full stop: in Melbourne – and therefore all of Victoria – you’d be lucky to find five people making a full-time living from reviewing at any one time. And since at least the turn of the century three of those people are Tom Ryan, Jim Schembri and Leigh Paatsch.

Film reviewing is not a job that has a high turnover either; critics are generally seen to get more authoritative as they age (unlike, say, music writers, where youth is often an advantage), so once someone scores a good job, either they leave in a hurry (upon discovering it’s not for them), or they don’t leave at all. So unless some new high-profile positions are created, or someone (God forbid) falls under a bus, there isn’t going to be a shift at the top of the ladder in Melbourne any time soon.

That said, this is an issue that extends all the way down the line. There simply aren’t that many women turning up to media screenings to review films in a paid capacity. So what might be the factors that are keeping women away?

It could just be the obvious: film reviewing is poorly paid, often erratic work that requires you to be available at short notice to attend screenings at inconvenient times. But wouldn’t that keep men away as well? In the wider scheme of things, that kind of job description would make it more likely for women to be involved, not less. Maybe it’s the reverse: film reviewing is seen as a fun, glamourous, cushy job that everyone would grab with both hands given the opportunity. But if that’s the case why aren’t more women going for it, considering their prevalence in related fields and seemingly similar fields of review?

Let’s take a different tack. Based on my half-arsed observations, “film critic” doesn’t seem to be a job for the young – while there are a number of reviewers for community radio and small publications on the far side of 50, reviewers under 30 are pretty rare (I started when I was 22; to the best of my knowledge, I was the youngest regular professional film critic in Melbourne until I was well into my 30s, though there are more reviewers under 30 now). I have no idea why: maybe they have to go through an academic career studying film before they can review Jackass 3D; maybe they need to spend five years as an accountant before realizing film is their one true love.

Based on that, here’s a supposition: if film reviewing is a job that, with notable exceptions, requires an age with at least a “3” at the front, maybe the reviewing door is opening just at the time when wanting to have a family might come to mind? Obviously not for every woman (it’s a pressure that would apply to men too, and there have been stay-at-home dads who’ve juggled reviewing careers), but it could make the numerous downsides to reviewing loom large – and in a field as small as professional film reviewing, if it puts one or two people off, that could make a big difference.

Film reviewing is fairly unfriendly to family commitments in general, what with odd working hours, often last-minute deadlines, low pay, and so on. Running all over town catching movies while pregnant wouldn’t be fun, and with a child it would be all but impossible to go to screenings on a regular basis without some serious child care (I do remember one female critic who used to bring her baby to screenings years ago… that didn’t really work out ). Not to mention that other media jobs – television reviewing, for example – can be done from home, while movie reviewers actually have to physically go to the movies. So perhaps for women working inside a large media organization a film reviewing job just doesn’t look as enticing as covering other forms of media - especially if the jobs just aren't available in the first place.

After all, the current chances of getting to the top - “the top” being a living wage - are pretty slim whatever your gender. Schembri’s been at the Age for over 20 years now, with no sign of leaving (and if he did, he might not be replaced: four reviewers at one newspaper is a lot), and Paatsch could easily be at the Herald-Sun for another thirty years. hanging around waiting for someone to step aside to make a living wage at reviewing is a pretty thankless prospect whatever your gender: any additional pressure finance-wise certianly wouldn't encourage women to stick around.

But why stop there with the wild theories. Most of the current crop of reviewers, even the ones in steady work, started off freelancing. Could it be that freelancing itself isn’t female-friendly? Well, it does have crap hours and low pay, but so do a lot of other writing gigs that seem to attract women just fine. Freelancing is competitive, but one way to get started in the reviewing field in the past was to work in PR and make enough contacts so that the move to freelancer came with a certain amount of locked-in work. Film PR is a field dominated by women, yet none of them seem to want to (or be able to) cross the street.

Maybe film reviewing is seen as the province of creepy male nerds, thus putting off women? Probably not – there are plenty of female film bloggers out there and they don’t seem deterred by howls of outrage over the latest Spider-Man casting decision. Maybe men have more free time to go to media screenings? Well, having a supportive partner (or family) is pretty much vital if you’re not making a living wage (which again, most people don’t) as a full-time critic. Are women more likely to support their men in their crazy dream of telling the world what they thought of Love and Other Drugs? Could be.

Maybe it’s a top-down problem. Perhaps film reviewing is seen by the (always male) chief editors at major newspapers - or was seen a decade or more ago, when the current lot of big names started work – as “man’s work”. That is to say, film is a proper artistic field that demands serious consideration from a serious (read: male) writer, unlike frivolous entertainments like television or pop music. This seems the most stupid theory, so there’s probably some truth to it.

If that theory was true in the past (surely it couldn’t be true today?), maybe it’s simply a matter of attitudes not shifting far enough in time? Could the only real difference between film reviewing and television reviewing in Melbourne’s daily newspapers in 2010 be that the old film critics moved on or died in the early to mid 1990s, and so were replaced by the men who hold those jobs today, while the old long-time television writers (Ross Warneke at The Age, Robert Fidgeon at The Herald-Sun) held on until the 21st century, and so were replaced by women when they finally shuffled off?

Clearly I have no real idea. And obviously whether any of this is a problem depends on whether you think the gender of a critic is important. If it’s not, sorry to have wasted your time. If it is, is it more important than experience? Can an experienced reviewer transcend gender to write reviews that see past those issues, or will they always have blind spots they can’t address? Is it a problem when only male voices are reviewing the latest chick-targeted Katherine Heigl rom-com, or does that film’s sheer awfulness transcend gender? And is it ironic that a man wrote this article, or does my girlish figure make up for it?

Anthony Morris

News You Can Use: AFI on TV

2010-12-05T23:44:00.000-08:00

Australia's most prestigious movie awards returns to television this Saturday night with Channel Nine broadcasting the 2010 AFI Awards from 9.30pm. Hosted by Shane Jacobson (Kenny) at Melbourne's Regent Theatre, it promises to be a night filled with stars from both cinema and television saluting what's been a bumper year for both forms of entertainment locally.

A close to even share of representation across the feature film category reflects the impressive line up of contenders, with 10 feature films out of a possible 16 receiving nominations. Animal Kingdom, the debut feature film from Director David Michod, has had a standout response, receiving a record breaking 18 nominations across all categories it was eligible for, including the prestigious Samsung Mobile AFI Award for Best Film. Across its talented ensemble cast, actors Jacki Weaver, Ben Mendelsohn, Joel Edgerton, Guy Pearce, Sullivan Stapleton and Laura Wheelright have all received nods, with newcomer James Frecheville receiving 2 nominations for Best Lead Actor and AFI Young Actor Award.

Beneath Hill 60 has also been highly recognised with 12 nominations in total, including AFI Members' Choice, Best Direction, and all categories across the technical awards. Brendan Cowell is in the running for Best Lead Actor, and newcomer Harrison Gilbertson has taken away a nomination for the AFI Young Actor
Award.

Bright Star, Tomorrow When The War Began, Bran Nue Dae and The Tree have all received an impressive number of nominations, proving popular with audiences and their industry peers alike. The Boys Are Back, Daybreakers, Matching Jack and The Waiting City complete the roster of local productions that are in the running to take home one of the country's most esteemed annual screen industry awards.

A top billing of Australian actors have been recognised for their work in the international arena, with Simon Baker (The Mentalist), Ryan Kwanten (True Blood), Kodi Smit McPhee (The Road), and Sam Worthington (Avatar) in the running for AFI International Award for Best Actor. Toni Collette (United States Of Tara), Bojana Novakovic (Edge Of Darkness), Mia Wasikowska (Alice In Wonderland) and Naomi Watts (Mother And Child) have received recognition in the same category for Best Actress.

There's also a bumper crop of television nominated this year, with Network Ten's telemovie Hawke leading the way with 6 nominations, including Best Direction and Best Screenplay as well as Lead Actor in a Television Drama for Richard Roxburgh. Tangle from Showcase has received 5 nominations including Best Television Drama Series, and nods for Best Lead Actress for Justine Clarke and Catherine McClements. Best Television Comedy Series has been equally dominated by the ABC's Review With Myles Barlow and SBS's Wilfred II with three nominations each, and the ABC's Lowdown taking two nominations, while the nominees for Light Entertainment Series include The Gruen Transfer, Hungry Beast, MasterChef Australia and Talkin' 'Bout Your Generation.

For more information and a full list of nominees from all feature film, television and non feature categories, visit www.afi.org.au

Anthony Morris

Mood Swings and Roundabouts: Due Date

2010-11-24T23:02:00.000-08:00

When The Hangover hit big, it was a bit of a mystery to a lot of comedy fans. Sure, it was mildly funny, but weren’t we in the middle of a golden age of big screen major funny coming out of the US? Not if you liked your comedy simple and straightforward we weren’t, and so while once sure-fire hitmakers like Judd Apatow (with Funny People) and Will Ferrell (Semi-Pro) struggled at the box office with something a little different from the norm, The Hangover went big because it did exactly what it said on the box. Forget layering in serious drama or pushing stereotypical characters to the limits – this was a film where a bunch of loveable douchebags had wacky adventures, often involving naked Asian men or injuring a baby.

So approached from that angle, it’s more than a little surprising to discover that Due Date is – you guessed it – a film that layers in serious drama and pushes stereotypical characters to their limits. Not that it looks that way at first: Peter (Robert Downey Jr) is an uptight middle-class professional trying to fly home to L.A. in time for his wife to give birth to their first child. Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis) is a would-be actor and serious tool who screws up Peter’s plans by getting them both thrown off the plane. Two words: road trip! Oh wait, didn’t director Todd Phillips direct Road Trip back in 2000?

That’s an important element in Due Date’s construction that’s been glossed over with all the “by the director of The Hangover” publicity here: Phillips has been making comedy for well over a decade now, which in Hollywood terms makes him an old hand. Once you’ve made films like Old School and Starsky & Hutch, it’s hardly surprising if you start to seem a little jaded when it comes to getting laughs.

While Due Date’s basic plot promises the trad comedy riffs that made The Hangover so popular – and plot-wise it does tick all the road trip boxes, with various one-off wacky encounters with big name cameos (Juliette Lewis, Jamie Foxx, Danny McBride) and the usual car-crashes and quick getaways (oddly, no encounters with hot chicks tho; this is strictly a bromance) - where it diverges from the well-beaten track is in the characters of Pete and Ethan.

On the surface the double-act of a straight-laced uptight type and a freewheeling arty guy is about as old as they get. But instead of keeping them soft around the edges, Phillips pushes them about as far as they’ll go. Ethan is an annoying, pretentious moron, so we side with Peter – after all, he just wants to get home to his wife, while Ethan wants to go to Hollywood and become an actor, complete with wanky scarf, little dog and obsession with Two & a Half Men. Then Peter turns out to be the kind of guy who’ll gut-punch a little kid and spit on a dog, and we’re off into uncharted territory.

But that’s not exactly true, is it? There’s a long tradition of comedians deciding that this whole “comedy” thing is getting a bit boring. Peter Cook and Dudley Moore doing “Derek & Clive” is a prime example, where they pushed their usual double-act into a dark and obscenity-packed world simply because they (well, mostly Cook) were tired of just going for easy laughs. It’s a different thing to the trend for “dark” comedy in the early part of this century too: that was / is often about trying to get laughs from taboo subjects or being weird for weirdness’ sake. This sticks close to the road trip formula, generally plays it safe (drinking a dead man's ashes by mistake is about as taboo-busting as it gets) and is overall a lot less weird than a lot of mainstream US comedies – Step Brothers or Hot Rod are both a lot stranger (and funnier) than this.

Due Date is simply a film that often feels like it doesn’t care if you’re going to laugh at its characters or not. Yes, there are plenty of jokes and wacky set-ups, and excellent performances from Downey and Galifianakis; there are also a lot of mean, unpleasant or just plain dull moments, usually swiftly followed by an attempt to pluck at the heart strings (Ethan’s dad just died; Peter really wants to be there for the birth of his first child) and keep the audience on side.

It’s usually hard not to applaud someone trying to push a boundary or two with their film. In Due Date’s case though, for every step forward there’s a quick shuffle back followed by someone’s arse getting kicked by a war vet in a wheelchair. If there’s a reason why this patchy and uneven film really never comes together, it’s there: rather than having the courage to make its unpleasant characters seriously and consistently ugly, it’s constantly having them act like jerks then pulling back, right up until an ending that tries to pull off the “aww, now they’re best buddies” vibe but can’t make it stick and just gives up. We’re supposed to feel that they’ve mellowed towards each other bromance style for that warm, fuzzy feeling as we leave the cinema, but the tone of the film’s been so uneven for so long that the feeling we’re left with is that five minutes after the end credits one of them would be shitting in the others hat.

Anthony Morris

The Prisoner of Adaptation: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

2010-11-17T22:25:00.000-08:00

How do you judge a film adaptation of a novel when the novel isn’t all that good? Because much as we’d all like to think a film stands alone in the audience’s mind, when you start to get down the best-seller end of things it’s impossible to deny that for a lot of people what they’re coming to see on the big screen is the book. But what if staying faithful to the book results in a bad film?

The big problem with Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows isn’t that it only adapts the first half of the novel. On that level it actually works fairly well, ending on an ominous note without going flat-out for a cliffhanger, while the story structure – slam a whole bunch of action right up the front, then have our heroes on an extended camping trip for much of the second half – works just fine. It doesn’t even feel unbalanced dramatically: the slam-bang chases and attacks early on simply happen to the leads, while the countryside wanderings provides a chance for them to reflect on what they’re going through – the second half is when all the action actually has an impact on them, so in that sense there’s a balance to it all even if it feels a lot quieter.

The problem comes from J.K Rowling’s amazingly lazy plotting. Forget the now-typical “we’ve got to find this character that’s never even been mentioned before RIGHT NOW!!” moments and quests for amazingly powerful items no-one’s bothered to bring up once over the previous six books: There are at least two super-powered magic items / characters on the side of good who can literally turn up anywhere at any time. How can there be any sense of effort on the part of Harry and his buddies when, whenever they’re in a jam, something literally appears out of nowhere to help them? Of course the story up until now has all been about magic, but at least then the quests involved actually looking for people and items: here Harry et al just wander around kinda hoping something magic will turn up to push the plot forward, and aren’t they lucky when it does.

This kind of thing doesn’t just make for lazy story-telling – plenty of equally lazy films are still fun thanks to big effects or great performances or snappy dialogue – it strikes at the very core of what the Harry Potter story is supposed to be about. It’s a story about a boy becoming a man (becoming a werewolf… sorry, that's a 30 Rock reference there) – basically, a quest for adulthood, preferably one where he won’t be threatened / killed by the forces of evil.

As such, and in contrast to a story about, say, surviving a shipwreck (where how you survive is important, but the story still works whether you survive by your own actions, are rescues, or just fluke it), it’s vital that Harry does his own heavy lifting. It’s his story, it’s about him, and we want to see how he overcomes the challenges put in his way – otherwise it’s just a story about some entitled chump with friends he doesn’t deserve.

When those challenges are defeated by “oh look, that magic sword that can appear anywhere at any time has arrived just in time” or “thank goodness Dobby the teleporting elf has arrived to help teleport us out of here”, anyone could do them. And if anyone could do them, why are we watching a movie about Harry Potter, especially as pretty much every single other character in this film is more interesting than he is? After all, they all have a goal – to either protect or harm Harry Potter. Potter’s goal is to, um… smash a bunch of magic amulets?

Of course, by the seventh film in the series chances are you don’t need to be convinced that Harry is worth paying attention to. And if he doesn’t do much of anything in this installment, presumably he’ll make up for it in the next. But it’s still disappointing because clearly the extended period of countryside wandering the three main characters go through is meant to be the last big chance for us to get to know them as people. No doubt in the final film there’ll be too much action and magic explosions and special effects for us to get much breathing space to take note of the kind of people we’re cheering on, but the camping sequences here – which serve much the same purpose of meeting up with friends at a pub for a drink or two before all going off to a concert where you’ll be doing something fun together but won’t actually be interacting with each other much – seem to be just an excuse to make people think “oh look, Harry’s not in Hogwarts any more”.

Again, it’s not the film’s fault. There just isn’t all that much more to J.K. Rowling's characters than “Ron is decent and loves Hermione but is a little scared of her and isn’t great with his emotions” and "Hermione is serious and smart and a bit of a buzzkill but kind of knows it so she’s likable anyway”. And Harry is the chosen one, so that’s him sorted then. Supposedly the magic amulet thing with part of Voldemort’s soul turns them all surly and evil from exposure, but it’s only really Ron who suffers seriously from this, and he only storms off in huff so he can come back - there's never any real sense that we're being shown any hidden resentments at the core of his character, and his belief that Harry and Hermione are secretly getting it on might have worked if Harry actually seemed like someone who'd ever really get it on with anyone.

(that said, How cool would it have been to see Hermione really crack it with the guys? Oh wait, that’s her regular personality 80% of the time. No wonder this stuff drags.)

The end result is a film that’s so off-the-boil weird – pretty much every big fight / attack scene and sequence has almost no impact, but the opening dinner table chat with the forces of evil is amazingly disturbing and effective even though they just really just chat – that it's hard to tell if it's the most interesting or the least interesting film in the series. Some major characters die off-camera: others’ equally tragic deaths are lingered over at tear-jerking length. Subplots progress in dreams, everything stops for a wedding between two characters who barely figure in the story and for an extended period our three main characters are wearing other people’s faces. If J. K. Rowling knew what she was doing, all this would make a lot more sense – and be a lot less interesting for it.

Anthony Morris

For the Chop: Machete

2010-11-10T05:42:00.000-08:00

Nothing lives without a heart - okay, plants do, and some real estate agents, but let's run with this metaphor - and while it might be small and withered even the exploitation film needs a heart pumping blood through its veins to stop it from being nothing but a lifeless automaton. Unfortunately, whatever his merits as a writer and director - and most of those merits seem to involve making good-looking films fast and relatively cheap - Robert Rodriguez isn't someone known for putting any kind of heart in his films.

Still, it’s not like the exploitation genre requires a big personal statement or anything, right? And Machete (based on a fake trailer made for his and Quentin Tarantino's uneven Grindhouse experiment) certainly manages to look like everything you could ask for in an exploitation film. The story is certainly trashy enough, as machete-wielding Mexican Federale Machete (Danny Trejo) sees his family killed in front of him by an evil drug lord (Steven Seagal) then turns up three years later as a day labourer in a Texan border town where the forces of immigrant-bashing evil (a vigilante-leading Don Johnson, Robert DeNiro as a crooked senator) are up against "the network", an organisation led by a taco-shack owner (Michelle Rodriguez) that helps Mexicans cross the border. Machete gets hired to kill DeNiro's senator as part of a re-election scheme, only when they double-cross him it turns out Machete is hard to kill - unlike pretty much everyone he goes up against.

This is hardly an abject failure. Certainly individual scenes are over-the-top in all manner of enjoyable and entertaining ways. Having Machete get it on with every woman he comes across to the accompaniment of a sexy bass line never gets old, and most of the many machete-based executions are laughably excessive - as are most of the scenery chewing performances, though Seagal's "Mexican" accent deserves special acknowledgment. So what more do you want from an exploitation film? They’re meant to be churned out quickly and shoddily, so as long as you tick the right boxes it should all work just fine, right?

In that light, the appeal of the exploitation genre for Rodriguez is easy to fathom. Even when he takes his time he films tend to feel rushed and shallow, as if he was bored with them long before it came time to actually make them (which might explain why he has a co-director here, and he handed off his Predators script to another director entirely). But it’s also a fundamental misunderstanding of the exploitation genre, which is why Machete never really works.

Exploitation films were made fast and cheap and typically couldn’t afford the usual audience draws: decent acting, smart scripts, big effects and scenes. So often they’d grab hot-button topics - “Ripped from today’s headlines” – to spice things up. Rodriguez understands that much, which is why his story is built around illegal Mexican immigrants. But he doesn’t have the courage of his exploitation conviction here: rather than actually tap into the fears and tensions around this issue by, say, having the Mexican immigrants be out-and-out evil (like the Cubans in Chuck Norris’ Invasion USA), or having the evil white folks be just plain evil, there’s a whole load of double dealing as just about every bad guy turns out to be either breath-takingly cynical and / or in the thrall of Seagal’s drug lord, who is safely Mexican (okay, “Mexican”), so it’s okay for whites to hate him. The hot-button issue is safely defused – no-one’s going to get riled up over this vision of American border policy – but it drains the drama and excitement from the film as well.

Exploitation works best when it works with black and white. You don’t watch a Death Wish film for a nuanced look at the social problems that cause street crime: you watch it because you want to see scum blown away. The hero’s character might be paper-thin, but there’s always just enough there to motivate their brutal actions. But despite having his family killed in the opening minutes of the film, Machete isn’t really driven by anything: the next time we see him it’s three years later and he’s working as a day labourer! That isn’t the actions of a man driven to avenge the deaths of his loved ones – and in fact, his family are never mentioned again. The hero is at the heart of the exploitation genre, but here he’s a void, an empty space around which the massive supporting cast swirl.

It doesn’t help that in trying to shoe-horn in every one of the moments from the original trailer, Rodriguez makes many of them seem rushed and flat. The threesome between Machete and the wife and daughter of the sinister Jeff Fahey should have been a high point of the story, a scene where our hero displays his total dominance over the villain. Instead, it’s a throw-away scene that comes out of nowhere and means nothing. Same for Machete surfing an explosion on a motorbike with a minigun bolted to the front, same for Linsay Lohan as a killer nun, same for pretty much every cool moment in the original trailer. They’re all here, but they don’t mean anything.

Machete ends up a film that sounds cooler than it is. Even the trashiest exploitation films gave you a reason to care about – or be horrified by - what was going on: for all the blood splashed about on screen, this remains a disappointingly lifeless affair. Still, if nothing else, it remains a film you could make an awesome trailer from… oh, wait.

Anthony Morris

Hicks In Stix Nix Pix: American: The Bill Hicks Story

2010-11-03T05:29:00.000-07:00

Bill Hicks is a man with a church going up around him, and for some of us that doesn’t feel right. There are biographies of him; there is a book collecting his stand-up routines, interviews and articles; there are DVDs of his shows and about his life; the four albums he recorded during his life have been re-released and re-packaged numerous times, while other live shows (both official and bootleg) are also available. Funnier comedians and more popular comedians haven’t experienced nearly the range and depth of examination that Hicks has, nor have they received the same level of near-universal acclaim. So for some of us, the question going into American isn’t so much “will it be any good?” as it is “how much more hero worship does a dead guy need?”

For Hick’s “true” fans, the ones that believe he had a unique message to spread that went to the core of America and life itself, too much is never going to be enough. Parts of Hicks act played into this: for a comedian he certainly wasn’t above taking himself seriously when it came to the spiritual side of life. But blind hero-worship doesn’t really do him any favours either. Yes, he had a lot of insightful things to say about drugs and politics. He also made a lot of dick jokes. The dick jokes were usually funnier.

So for starters, it’s a relief that this film isn’t packed with celebrities talking about how amazing he was and how influential he is. Instead, this uses archival footage – Hicks recorded a lot of his work himself – interviews with family and (actual) friends, and bursts of animation to put together a comprehensive picture of his life. Like a lot of creative people, that life isn’t all that exciting: basically, he wanted to be a comedian a whole lot and he worked really really hard at it, while also getting stuck into booze and drugs for a while.

Unfortunately for those interested in the comedy side of things, Hicks’ persona requires that his material be largely presented as an amazingly ground-breaking surge of unspeakable material telling truth to power, rather than an offshoot of where American comedy was heading after the boom of the mid-to-late 80s. That’s not to say Hicks’ didn’t break ground in his own way, but in much the same way as Nirvana was the highly visible tip of a growing movement in music at around the same time, so too Hicks was a comedian who – after a lot of time touring and honing his material waiting for things to come his way – would have found America had come around to his way of thinking… if he hadn’t gone and died of cancer in 1994.

It’s possible to argue – not that this comprehensive but understandably uncritical documentary does so – that dying young and having his segment cut from the David Letterman show less than a year before his death were bigger factors in his posthumous fame than anything he actually said or did on stage. They shape the narrative of his life into something saleable: here was a comedian who, after years on the road and clearly no-longer giving much of a shit about saying anything but what he wanted to say, had come up with an act that expressed a lot of discontent with the way things were. Then, just when it looked like he was about to finally reach a wider audience with his act, corporate America censored him – proving his point about America - and he died.

Without those two things – the latter of which had nothing to do with his actual act (unless you think performing stand-up comedy gives you cancer), the former of which isn’t exactly unheard of in the world of American television – you couldn’t make a documentary like this. That doesn’t make it a bad film by any means. It just means that, on some level, it’s a film about a man who’s life is a good story, not the story of a man who led a particularly good life.

For example, when the press release for this film (currently showing at Melbourne’s ACMI) says “[Hicks] was poised to become a major voice in America when in June 1993 at the age of 31 Hicks was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer”, it’s not exactly a controversial statement amongst his fans (the "major voice" part that is - there's no debate at all about the cancer). Trying to predict what might have been is a mugs game, but the reality of comedy in America at the time of Hick’s death suggests he may have already peaked: the stand-up boom of the 1980s was all but over, and the biggest name in comedy at the time was Jerry Seinfeld. Unless Hicks made an unlikely move to television – Wayne’s World aside, comedy film in Hollywood wasn’t really thriving for most of the 1990s – he would have most likely found his US opportunities drying up. The next big thing in comedy wasn’t Hicks-style, “tell-it-like-it-is” material (even notorious Hicks-a-like Dennis Leary jumped off the comedy bandwagon for bad movies throughout most of the 1990s), but Friends; Hicks might have enjoyed George Carlin-like success to this very day, but Carlin died a year or so ago and no-one’s rushing out a movie about his (long & very interesting) life.

Put another way, one of the more obvious things to say about Hicks' stage act is that he liked to present himself as a cross between a rock’n roll legend (all those Hendrix references) and a preacher; the now all-but-forgotten 80s comedian Sam Kinison not only was an actual preacher before he became a comedian, he appeared on stage with rock bands and recorded below-average (but in one case, best-selling) singles. He said controversial things (one of his better-known rants was about how, instead of constantly sending food to Somalia, we should move the Somalians someplace where they wouldn’t constantly need food) and died young(ish) in a car crash in 1992. But he was also popular with the Andrew Dice Clay crowd of sexist frat boys, his crap music was high-profile (unlike Hicks’ below-par music on his CD Arizona Bay) and so hard to gloss over, and no-one tried to censor him. So no books, movies and adoring post-grave fanbase for you, Mr. Kinison.

None of this is to downplay Hicks’ skills as a comedian, and the parts of this documentary that focus on his comedy material are easily the most interesting. But it’s important to realise that for all his good work Hicks’ success from beyond the grave has more to do with factors outside his act, factors that enable people to package him as an easy symbol of rebellion, factors that don’t make him a better performer or human being. This is a solid, informative documentary that’s a great introduction to Hick’s work and full of footage that’ll be of interest even to long-time fans. It’s just a shame that a lot of other comedians who were (and are) just as funny and insightful don’t get the same treatment.

Anthony Morris

Trapped in the Closet: Paranormal Activity 2

2010-10-27T03:02:00.000-07:00

Despite what the people running the Saw franchise seem to think, horror is the one genre where you can't keep doing exactly the same thing over and over again and expect to get the same results. You have to mix things up, if only a little, if you expect to keep scaring people. But messing with success in horror is a tricky business, and it only takes a few tiny changes to turn a deeply frightening tale into yet another "boo!"-fest.

For example, for the most part Paranormal Activity 2 sticks closely to the template of the original: there's a small number of people in a big house where strange things are starting to happen. Video cameras are set up to capture the weirdness, creepy things are filmed, and suddenly things get out of hand. But beyond those broad strokes this gets everything wrong.

Firstly, it's not a realistically annoying young couple that're being haunted here: it's a bland-ed out regular family that exhibits only the barest amount of personality required to push the plot forward (the husband fires the Mexican nanny for her smoke-filled rituals to ward off evil spirits; the perky daughter breaks out the ouija board because she thinks the spirit might be her dead mum).

Some reviewers complained that the original couple got on their nerves, completely missing the point: in the real world, people who are stressed are often annoying, what with their worrying they’re going to die and everything. Going for “likable” over “interesting” characters totally undercuts the realism that went a long way towards making the original’s collection of slamming doors and spooky noises scary. This is a generic family here, without a single recognisable trait: why should we care in the slightest what happens to them? And so we don’t.

The original manufactured a compelling sense of dread through its night vision video camera scenes by showing the same scene over and over - a bedroom with an open door and a darkened corridor beyond - and slowly adding tiny changes: a moving door, someone getting up in their sleep, a thumping sound. Paranormal Activity 2 instead shifts the action all over the house, totally failing to build any location-based tension: should we be scared when it cuts to the pool? The Kitchen? The baby's room?

Maybe if we had some sense of the layout of the house itself, but – despite an actual tour at the beginning of the film – the geography is mostly confused. Which again, detracts from the atmosphere: few things are as frightening as thinking there’s something coming for you in the dark, but where the original’s straightforward layout (everything led to the bedroom) could make the shadows in a dark hall disturbing, this is just a mess.

Even when individual scenes work, they never build on each other to create the awful sense of something demonic groping towards a hideous goal that made the first film so unsettling. In the first film, the evil had a plan and the couple couldn't escape it, each night something to be feared because you knew the unseen force was getting closer to whatever it had planned. One night a door would open, the next there’d be a thumping noise, then there’d be a thumping noise and the door would open; whatever was coming next, it wasn’t good.

In this, some rooms have things happen that are unsettling at first but quickly lose their power once it becomes obvious they’re going nowhere. In the kitchen a pot falls down, later some cupboards fly open… and that’s it for the kitchen. Doors slam shut or fly open, but there’s not much sense that something behind them wants to get in. It’s like the film-makers didn’t realise that in the first film the events weren’t just frightening on their own, they actually suggested something even worse. Here a slamming door is just a slamming door..

No surprise then that this has to eventually resort to showing people being dragged into the closet by an unseen force, but even that doesn’t really work; yes, being pulled around by an unseen being would certainly scare the shit out of you if it happened to you, but just watching it on a screen happen to someone we don’t care about is more puzzling than scary. What’s the unseen force going to do? Use the cast as human dust-busters? This film completely fails to establish any sense that the supernatural force has an evil scheme – it’s just doing things because it can, and like kids coming back to egg your house every night this quickly goes from deeply disturbing to deathly dull.

It doesn’t help that the film actually spells out the exact reason why all this stuff is happening (it’s the supernatural version of being harassed by debt collectors). One more time: the first film worked because it suggested so much but explained so little. Knowledge is power, and it empowers the audience – which is not what a good horror movie does. A good horror movie makes us little kids scared of the dark, not people going “ahh, if I say these lines and wave this cross around all this crazy shit is over”.

If nothing else, this does get one thing right – it skilfully illustrates the difference between a film made by people who want to scare an audience and know what they’re doing, and a film made by people who just want to make a film that looks like the last one. The first Paranormal Activity was a surprise hit: this contains no surprises at all.

Anthony Morris

As a comedy this makes a great suicide note: Life As We Know It

2010-10-19T23:03:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take much to be a film critic, but one of the skills you do need to have is the ability to put yourself in someone else’s shoes. You personally might not be a fan of [insert genre here], but you need to at least be able to see what fans of that genre may or may not like about a certain film. That way, when some sneering idiot dismisses a negative review of a pile of crap they happen to like with “it’s not made for you”, it’s possible to counter with a): I’ve seen enough of [insert genre here] to know the difference between a good and bad example of it, and b): how the hell do you know what kind of films I like in my down time anyway? So trust me when I tell you that I’ve thought long and hard about the following sentence: Life As We Know It is a film made for Satan.

Don’t get me wrong: it’s not a film made by Satan. Satan knows what the Hell he’s doing. No, this is a film made for the enjoyment of demonic beings who hate life itself. In case you’ve wisely missed the advertising, this is a film where a married couple die in a car crash and leave their one year old baby with their two best friends - who just happen to hate each other. Hold it right there: they gave joint guardianship of their infant child to two people who hate each other? Surely this hatred was a secret, right? I mean, what kind of shit parents would go “hey, if we both die but the kid lives, why not force our two best friends who can’t stand each other to fight over her?” The parents in this movie, that’s who, as Holly (Katherine Heigl) and Messer (Josh Duhamel)went on a shit blind date in 2007 and have openly loathed each other ever since.

If this totally insane idea was this film’s only problem – come on, the dead parents want their child to grow up in a family where they know the adults HATE EACH OTHER - then it wouldn’t have any problems at all. Decent rom-coms have had more contrived set-ups. But this isn’t a decent anything – it’s a non-stop insult to the audience’s intelligence and their basic humanity, and this sloppy set-up is just one of a long, long list of areas where this film clearly does not give a shit about anything past separating you from your money and they already got that at the door. Hell, they already got that when you saw it stared Katherine Heigl, right?

Confession time: I don’t mind Heigl. I thought 27 Dresses was an above average rom-com. Even The Ugly Truth, which was rubbish, was made better quality rubbish by having her in it. She’s charming, she can be funny when the script lets her, and she’s often the best thing in her films. But here she’s nothing. It’s not even the character’s fault: yes, Holly is yet another uptight no-fun role model for women who’s sole goal in life is to lock a man down, but she gets some supposedly “funny” moments and never says anything that’s outright hateful (which makes a change from The Ugly Truth, for starters). And yet, she brings nothing to the role. It’s like even she’s tired of making this kind of film, playing this kind of character. Good to see she’s caught up with the rest of us then.

The gender politics on show here are as offensive as usual, but again, it’s still business as usual. Of course Messer and Holly are opposites – that’s how this kind of film works – but guess who changes to make the relationship work? Messer starts off with four things that define him: a): his best mate, b): he’s a womanizer, c): he rides a motorbike, and d): he loves sports so much he has a job broadcasting them. But by the end of the film, all four of those things have been taken away – he literally has no character left outside of the relationship he’s in.

(hilariously, his bike gets destroyed when Holly – under his guidance – tries to ride it. She slips the clutch, it roars off out from under her and flies across the road to crash into a mailbox. Then a bus comes along and it must be one of those new-fangled buses that don’t have brakes or a windshield the driver can see out of, because it runs right over it. Why not have it run over his penis while you’re at it?)

In contrast, Holly’s character consists of making a frowny face, liking to bake and wanting to expand her bakery into a restaurant. Oh, and she has a small car and drinks wine (once, on her hunky doctor’s orders – she can’t even take a drink without a man saying it’s ok!). That’s it. Presumably if she had more characteristics, then the Heigl fans couldn’t identify with her (“hey, she’s reading a comicbook! I don’t like reading comicbooks! She’s not like me at all!”), but it does leave Heigl with not a lot to work with. Still, she’s done more with less in other films, so why she’s phoning it in here is a bit of a mystery… unless she realised early on that actually acting in this turd would just be wasting her time.

Where this really goes wrong is with the basic concept: you have two people who don’t like each other, forced together to look after a one year old child. Somewhat logically then, roughly three quarters of this film consists of either a): a couple arguing, and / or b): a small child crying. In some thrillers you get to dread a conversation scene because you know they always end with someone getting shot: here you dread the conversations because they always end in a fight. It should be renamed WALKING ON EGGSHELLS for the number of times one character starts a regular conversation with the other only to discover that nope, it’s time for another yelling match about the shitty situation they’re stuck in. Isn’t this the kind of thing we go to the movies to escape?

It was at this point that I started to actively wonder who this film was aimed at. After all, if you wanted people to stick together for the sake of their kids – which is kinda the message here, thanks to a totally throw-away conclusion I’ll get to in a moment – wouldn’t you make a film that actually showed some fun moments between all the struggle? But then I realised there had been a bunch of fun moments, I just hadn’t read them that way because the “jokes” in this film are, in some ways, even worse than the arguments and screaming babies.

For example we get not one but two “whaaa?” gay jokes: When Holly is trying to track down a would-be boyfriend – having only a collection of business cards that say “Sam” to go on – she makes a bunch of comedy calls. You know the drill: a flustered Holly saying “no ma’am, I didn’t know Sam was your husband”, etc. But when she gets a woman, Holly’s next line is “yes, I’m single…” Hilarious! The Sam she's called is a girl, but still wants to go on a date! And is also the most predatory lesbian ever, as she’s hitting on a wrong number after less than ten seconds’ conversation.

Then at a neighbourhood gathering – featuring one relationship where a henpecked husband is at his demanding wife’s beck and call, and another where the slutty wife starts hitting on Messer the second she sees him while her clueless husband watches on, because that’s how relationships work, right? – one guy talks away about how when he first started going out with his partner they were having sex everywhere all the time, but now with the kids, well, who has the time? And then we see his partner and it’s another guy! Whaaa! They were talking about gay sex!! Who knew. Or laughed.

Let’s not forget this films rare example of gender equality: having a baby cover the cast with bodily waste. He gets thrown up on, she accidentally smears baby shit on her face. Oh wait, I forgot the time Messer’s favourite baseball cap is held under a shitting baby's bottom – guess that’s one more character-defining article he gets taken away from him. Kind of a shame they didn’t have some baby shit get inside one of Holly’s cakes though, just to even things up.

Anyway, the list could go on – opening a used nappy and saying “It’s like Slumdog Millionaire in there” is another comedy high point – but it’s safe to say that as a comedy this makes a great suicide note. Just look at the poster: there’s a baby in a nappy walking and a guy dressed exactly the same striking the same pose! Because men are big babies, except when you need them to lend you money to expand your business. Yes, that happens in the film (to be fair, Messer does make the offer unasked) – no wonder it’s so hostile towards men, it assumes women can’t do anything without them.

At this stage it’d almost be possible to pull off the “this film isn’t for you” argument simply because I happen to be male. Men still run our society, and it’s one of comedy’s roles in society to mock the powerful. Not that this is actually mocking the powerful all that well (it’s not like Messer starts out as an arrogant pig or anything), and it’s certainly not going after men in an area where men overall exert their power universally (a workplace comedy as firmly anti-men as this would make a lot more sense and probably be a lot funnier). Of course, you’d still have to assume that women actually enjoy watching household arguments and listening to a crying baby to make that case, but fortunately for my long-winded argument Life As We Know It then wraps up with a dash to the airport and the audience-hating status of this film is put beyond all reasonable doubt.

That’s right: the dramatic climax of this film involves a last minute dash to the airport to tell someone not to leave. In 2010, the "creatives" making this film thought the most tired, worn-out cliché in all of Hollywood was as good a way as any to finish off the film. In this day and age there is no possible way to read this ending as anything more than a weary “fuck you” to anyone who thought they were watching anything more than a scam designed to separate audiences from their cash. Even dramatically it makes no sense: what, they don’t have phones? It’s not like the person leaving is going to a communication black hole – shit, it’s not even like it’s the first time they left (they’d been gone for months and just came back for the kid’s birthday). If this is the best they could be bothered doing, they shouldn’t have been allowed to make this film. Or, for that matter, any other.

Anyway, it all ends happily, in that it finally ends. Slightly before that blessed moment, we see that the kid stops crying, Holly is still baking, Messer has every single thing that made him an individual taken away from him, and its hellish depiction of both suburbia and relationships reigns supreme. It’s tempting to say this was a film made by monsters for zombies, or by the pain-loving Cenobites from Hellraiser for their own amusement, but no: this is a film that hates life, a film that celebrates all that is ugly and cruel in humanity, a film that in the end shrugs off every possible complaint against it with a weary shrug and a cynical sneer. Life As We Know It is a film for Satan, and the life it depicts is a life in Hell.

Anthony Morris

Bogged Down and Buried

2010-10-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

Coming out of Buried, the friend with me said “that didn’t turn out the way I thought it would”. Even though I disagreed – it turned out exactly the way I thought it would, and the only way it ever could have turned out from about half an hour in – I knew exactly what he meant. Buried is a movie about a man (Ryan Renyolds) buried alive in a coffin: the last thing you’d expect from a synopsis like that is [SPOILER] he never gets out.

My friend went in expecting to see a Hollywood high-concept thriller much like any other, the kind where, for all the strengths of the high concept (they’re trapped on a bus that can’t slow down! They’re stuck on a plane with a killer!), the last 20 minutes end up being a chase after the bad guys who set up the high concept. Nobody really likes those endings, but in a thriller they’re needed: you can’t just let the bad guys get away now, can you? Unless you’re making the original version of The Vanishing, and even then [SPOILER] the buried alive ending there was a final shock twist, not something the entire film was built around.

Buried avoids the need for that kind of thriller payback ending – despite having at least one clear-cut villain - by stressing almost from the very beginning that this is a film about the Iraq war. It’s set in Iraq in 2006, our lead is a truck driver whose convoy was attacked, and he’s been buried alive as part of an extortion racket designed to extract money from the US.

Once that door is open narrative-wise, once you say “this is a film about something real, not just a man buried alive”, then the film is free to go in a different direction. In the real world hostages die; in a thriller, only the bad guys (and background characters) bite the dust. If the hero does die in a traditional thriller, it’s a heroic death that has real meaning; for all intents and purposes, Buried starts out with the lead already dead.

Part of the appeal of the “based on a true story” film is that it doesn’t have to follow traditional narrative structures. A plot twist that would be outlandish and laughable in a fictional movie becomes tolerable when we’re told it really did happen. Buried isn’t based on a true story, but by setting itself in a real place and time – a place and time where a lot of stories did end very badly – it’s able to successfully access a conclusion that wouldn’t be open to it if it had just been a generic thriller about someone buried in a box somewhere… well, generic.

Buried’s ending works because it’s set in a location where, for a number of years in the very recent past the very basis of the heroic ideal that thrillers are built upon has been proven to be a lie. Even then, it took years and years of the senseless waste of human lives in a war now generally seen as completely pointless to create one mainstream movie as up front about the failure of the thriller narrative (in contrast to the numerous and usually heavy-handed movies about the failure of the war itself) as Buried.

That’s more a sign of how safe and generic mainstream film-making has become in the 21st century than anything else (40 years ago a James Bond movie could end with Bond getting married then seeing his wife gunned down in front of him); hopefully future film-makers won’t need the equivalent of the Iraq War to take their stories somewhere beyond another final bad-guy beat-down. After all, it was that payback-driven attitude that helped start the Iraq War in the first place.

Anthony Morris

Race War!

2010-09-26T17:19:00.001-07:00

As Tomorrow When the War Began continues to rake in coin at the box office, one question remains firmly unasked by the mainstream media: isn’t having Australia invaded by a largely Asian force kind of, well, racist? Well, maybe not as racist as some of the alternatives: having the invaders come from the Middle East would be extremely inflammatory, thanks to both The War on Terror and the current hysteria around so-called “boat people”, while having the invaders come from Africa… yeah, that’s not a good idea. Though it’d be deserved after the Hey Hey it’s Saturday ‘blackface’ skit.

Having the bad guys be sinister white folk is the usual Western approach – evil Brits are usually the go-to, but Russians, South Africans, French and even Germans also work. But here that’d just raise more questions: if the invaders were Americans (or even British, to a lesser extent) you’d have a blatant Iraq war metaphor, and while that’d be interesting, it’d also make the film first and foremost about the Iraq war. As for other white nationalities… well, why wouldn’t they just migrate here? It’s not like the White Australia policy tried to keep them out (so long as they spoke English).

That’s what makes the choice of nationalities here so interesting: it actually says something about Australian society. Having the invaders be robots, or Nazis, or aliens, or some other fantasy group would certainly work as far as the central thrust of the film goes – what would you do, Mr or Ms Australian teenager, if your country was invaded? – but that’s all they’d bring to the table.

Having Asian invaders feels racist because is the light of Australia’s history it kinda is. But that’s a good thing: pulp fiction – which this most definitely is – gets its power from saying things “quality” entertainment is too classy to say out loud. Dealing with big issues in a clumsy, unfocused way is what trash does best; rather than condemning TWTWB’s racism, we should applaud it for making it an up-front point of discussion.

More importantly, the shock of realization you get when you discover that the invaders are Asian – that on one level this actually is the nightmare of a thousand Australian racists come true – is something to be applauded. What’s the alternative? Bland, generic story-telling that tells soothing fantasies about who we are. A film that refuses to make us think past “ooh, explosions”.

If nothing else, having the heroes of TWTWB fighting an Asian invading force makes this both easier to dismiss as a racist fantasy (at least the racism is obvious – it’s not like they’re the racial stereotype aliens in some science fiction films) and harder to accept as a jingoistic tale of national pride. Against robot aliens this’d be a simple tale of “we can’t be beaten” (with Angry Anderson singing same on the soundtrack); against a race traditionally demonized (to varying extents) in Australian culture over the years, it’s a little more complicated. And isn’t complicated story-telling a good thing?

Anthony Morris

Scott Pilgrim vs The World

2010-09-19T07:33:00.000-07:00

Every time someone complains that movies are just the same old crap, make them see this. Unfortunately, most people like going to see the same old crap – movies are both expensive and time-consuming, so why risk seeing something you might not like – so you might not have too much longer to see this on the big screen. But the big screen is where you should see it, preferably more than once, because there’s that much going on here one viewing simply isn’t enough.

The story is simple: Scott Pilgrim (Michael Cera) is a Canadian who plays bass in a shoddy three-piece band (The Sex Bob-ombs) and falls in love with the mysterious Ramona Flowers (Mary Elizabeth Winstead) after she roller-skates through his dreams. Unfortunately for Scott, if he wants to date her he’ll have to defeat her seven evil ex’s, and what started out as a quirky rom-com suddenly becomes something of an action flick.

The first thing to note is that this is funny from start to finish. Sure, a lot of the jokes and references are related to video games, but even non-gamers will get most of them and there’s plenty of every other kind of comedy going on here too. Director Edgar Wright (working from a series of graphic novels by Bryan Lee O’Malley) keeps the pace at breakneck speed, so you have to pay attention but if you can keep up you’ll notice that – for a video-game-influenced action film – this actually has a lot of heart to it.

“Metaphor” isn’t exactly something the movies do all that well these days, but this gets the idea of having to get over your partner’s past before you can move forward (and how frustrating that can be when they have a lot of past) down perfectly. Plus the fights are cool, the whole film looks brilliant, the casting is spot-on in every case and the whole thing is just plain more fun than anything else you’ll see in cinemas this year. So why are you still reading this?

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #483)

I'm Still Here vs Time To Go

2010-09-16T05:07:00.000-07:00

When it comes to film, “is it real” isn’t exactly the most illuminating question to ask. On the one hand, yes, it’s real: it’s a real film that’s been shot and edited in such a way as to highlight some aspects and downplay others as far as what took place in front of the cameras goes. On the other hand- and oh look, that hand has I’m Still Here written on it, which is, uh, handy – as far as a record of real-life events goes, it (like every single other form of recorded media) is going to leave some wriggle room as far as the whole “reality” question goes.

So maybe I’m Still Here is a big fat hoax, or maybe it’s a honest record of the year Joaquin Phoenix went nutty: unless you’re a massive fan of Mr Phoenix and really care deeply about his personal life, it’s not the most interesting thing about this only intermittently interesting film.

What is interesting about it to me is that it’s on some level a comedy of disintegration: the film gets laughs as Phoenix falls apart (basically, he gives up his acting career to be a hip-hop artist, a career for which he has no talent. He also gets fat, takes drugs, gropes hookers, makes a dick of himself constantly, and has pretty much the most realistic vomiting scene in the history of cinema. Seriously, if nothing else in this film is real, him throwing up was). It’s not really a genre the Americans have done a lot of, being a little dark for mainstream tastes, but in the UK it’s been fairly common over the last decade or so to see a moderately loved sitcom character – Alan Partridge, Dan Ashcroft on Nathan Barley – go off the rails to some extent.

The most relevant example that came to mind while watching I’m Still Here, mostly because it too involved a hoax, was the then media prankster (and now much-lauded director of suicide bomber comedy Four Lions) Chris Morris and his “Geefe” columns for The Observer in 1999.

Appearing as the work of “Richard Geefe” and under the heading Second Class Male, they started out as a relatively typical weekend paper personality column, only to fairly quickly take a bad turn as Geefe’s life rapidly fell apart. Seemingly on the brink of despair at the end of week 6 he didn’t return for week 7 – and when he did come back (under the new title Time To Go which clearly makes it a decade-too-soon sequel to I'm Still Here) it was with a confession: he’d tried to kill himself, it hadn’t worked, and the newspaper was paying him a huge sum to keep writing about the perils of suicide… just so long as he tried again (and succeeded) in six months time. Don’t look at me like that, they’re hilarious. See for yourself.

Phoenix doesn’t try to kill himself in I’m Still Here – just his career. But both the Geefe columns and I’m Still here get their energy in part from the question “is it real?” Seeing a wanker throw away everything isn’t really all that interesting – it needs the spark that comes from wondering if it’s really happening to keep our attention. In Morris’ case, it helps that the columns are funny and that he has some solid points to make: one of the running jokes is how Geefe’s personal problems are exploited by his editor and the media who refuse to offer him any useful help. In contrast, in I’m Still Here director (and Phoenix’s brother-in-law) Casey Affleck slowly withdraws from any real on-camera presence in the film, presumably to defuse the obvious question of why someone isn’t trying harder to stop Phoenix from acting like a tool.

On thing they do both have in common is a distain for the audience. Well, the section of the audience gullible enough or eager enough to believe what they’re seeing: in Geefe’s case, do we really believe a major UK newspaper would allow a journalist to commit slow-motion suicide in its pages? Thousands did believe: other columnists wrote about it in disgust.

In the case of I’m Still Here, why do we care about “Joaquin Phoenix”, who almost none of us know in any real sense, any more than we would any other character played by the same actor? The only reason to care – because his character is barely sketched out in the film, which is also the point (if the end product was slicker, it’d be less convincing as a “real” document) – is because we’re wondering “is it real?”. For all JP’s bad behaviour on screen, we’ve all seen actors do far worse in movies: it’s only shocking if we really believe it’s the “real” Phoenix up there.

What’s at stake here anyway? It’s not like this film’s going to trash his rep as a brooding, serious artist: either he really did go off the rails because he needed to fully express himself – he’s a serious artist, man! – or he spent a year acting like a nutcase for a movie – again, kind sorta the type of thing a serious artist would do. In contrast, Billy Crudup – to pick a name at random – didn’t seem to go mental for a year, and no-one’s talking anywhere near as much about whatever the hell he’s currently up to. Any publicity is meant to be good publicity.

The only place where going off the rails like this would seriously damage his rep is in the section of the media devoted to celebrity and their various sufferings. That’s where the contempt comes in: Phoenix clearly doesn’t care what fans of “him” (rather than of his work) think. If they’re sucked in by this, they deserve to be. If they think less of him because of this, who needs them anyway?

In the end, Geefe wins out in this all-in-my-head pitched battle simply because – to my eyes at least - it’s funnier. Though to be fair, Sean “Puffy” Combs is hilarious in I’m Still Here. After this and his work in Get Him to the Greek, he’s the breakout comedy star of 2010. When he's on screen, at least the laughs are real.

Anthony Morris

Splice

2010-09-13T07:21:00.000-07:00

It’s been a long, long time since we had a decent mad scientist movie, and then along comes Splice with not one but two scientific types driven by hubris to play God. The way it splits the mad scientist role in two and then plays one half off against the other is just one of the many things to like about this very smart – and sometimes ghoulishly funny – film.

Clive (Adrien Brody) and Elsa (Sarah Polley) are married scientists who’ve just created an altered life form out of the DNA of a bunch of different species. It secretes proteins that have dozens of commercial opportunities – so many that the company they work for wants to put its efforts into exploiting what they’ve got rather than continuing to push the boundaries. This isn’t enough for Elsa, and she creates one last creature – this time, with human DNA. Clive is horrified, especially as what was supposed to be a small scale test results in a living being that looks not quite human. Its' rapid growth means it can’t be hidden in their lab for long, but when they relocate to it an abandoned barn they soon discover the child-like creature – who they’ve named Dren (Delphine Chaneac) – is both more and less human than they thought.

The mix of the totally impossible with the creepily plausible is usually the best thing about mad scientist movie and Splice is no exception, making a little girl with cloven hooves and a demonic face seems utterly plausible, totally chilling and all-too human all at once. The way the relationship between the passive Clive and the take-charge Elsa plays out provides a string of surprising twists, and in case you forgot this was supposed to be a horror film there’s a bunch of gore-splattered scenes worth of Cronenberg at his body-horror best. It’s silly, it’s utterly serious, and it’s always edge-of-your-seat: Splice is a slice of horror genius.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #482)

Four Lions

2010-09-13T07:08:00.000-07:00

Lauded as a comedy genius in the UK for his television series Brass Eye but basically unknown here, Chris Morris specialises in making people laugh at things they think they shouldn’t. It’s hardly surprising then that his first feature is a full-on slapstick comedy centred on the misadventures of four completely serious – if only marginally competent – UK suicide bombers.

It’s a shocking conceit and writer / director Morris plays it to the hilt with bungled martyrdom videos, surreally stupid attempts at buying loads of explosive compounds and exploding crows. Plus there’s the “logic” that makes no logical sense: when angry white convert Barry (Nigel Lindsay) wants to bomb a mosque to radicalise UK Muslims, Omar (Riz Ahmed) points out that’s like trying to win a fight by punching yourself in the face. Their antics may be silly but the seriousness of what they intend is never ignored. Morris’ genius is in balancing the two, making a film that finds the humour in the reality of suicide bombers in the west. Turns out there’s an awful lot of humour there: this is easily one of the funniest films of the year.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #481)

Step Up 3D

2010-09-13T07:03:00.000-07:00

For those of you worried that fully engaging with the third instalment of the Step Up series would require an extensive knowledge of the plots of Step Up and Step Up 2 The Streets – and yes, characters from both those films do return in this film – fear not: apart from having the exact same plot, this really has nothing to do with the earlier films.

It’s the exact same plot because all dance movies have the exact same plot: a bunch of young, vaguely “street” characters hang out either at a dance school or some well equipped dance studio talking about how much they love to dance. There’s a girl (Australia’s own Sharni Vinson) and a guy (Rick Malambri) for the romance angle, and they’re usually white while everyone else comes from all four corners of the globe – including, in the case of Moose (Adam Sevani), geeksville. Then the good guys run out of cash so they need to win the contest to pay their debts (and beat the always present evil dance posse), there’s a betrayal or two, and all this is spaced out with a bunch of big dance numbers that are the only real reason anyone’s come to the cinema.

Being in 3D does makes some of the numbers impressive, but there are a few minor technical wobbles that occasionally make things seem a little too artificial – and as the whole point of watching dance is seeing people actually dance, it’s a serious hiccup. Still, as dance movies go this does what it’s supposed to with enjoyable slickness, which – until a 21st Century Fred Astaire comes along and really makes the genre sing – as about as good as it currently gets.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #481)

The Expendables

2010-09-13T06:59:00.000-07:00

Every now and again Hollywood tries to find out if one long-dead genre or another is ripe for a revival. They keep trying with westerns, the teen sex romp occasionally gets a push, and now we have The Expendables, in which director and star Sylvester Stallone assembles a cast mixing old 80s stars (Dolph Lungren, a cameo from Arnold Schwarzenegger that is easily the best moment in the film) with the current crop of action stars (Jason Statham, Jet Li) and a whole lot of wrestlers / UFC fighters (“Stone Cold” Steve Austin, Randy Couture) and then throws them into a story best described as “let’s remake Commando, only with five good guys instead of one”.

In case you don’t remember Commando – and if you don’t, why would you be watching this – basically the idea is that a shady CIA type (a cameo from Bruce Willis) hires Stallone’s band of mercenaries to take back a small island from Eric Roberts, who is using it to grow drugs. By all the rules of normal film-making this is a bit of a mess, with just about every character getting zero character development, the plot stops and starts a couple of times before getting to the final island beat-down, Mickey Rourke of all people supposedly provides the films “emotional heart” with a deathly-dull anecdote about how he lost his soul (doesn’t seem to stop him picking up trashy women though) and the whole thing is seemingly set on a version of Earth where steroids occur naturally in the water.

Once everything starts exploding none of that really matters. The action is suitably over-the-top and ridiculous CGI-blood flies everywhere, bad guys occasionally explode, and all the main villains die twice (you know the kind of thing – one’s shot then stabbed, another is shot then dropped from a great height, a third is set on fire then set on even more fire, and so on), so there’s that to enjoy too. In the end this is no-one’s idea of a classic, and by today’s action standards it’s a flabby mess. But with everything else 80s’wise coming back in style, maybe it’s time for 80s-era over-muscled action to make a comeback too.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #481)

Matching Jack

2010-09-13T06:56:00.000-07:00

For her first feature film in over a decade, director Nadia Tass (Malcolm, The Big Steal) sets herself a hard task: a lightweight comedy about children with leukaemia. Fortunately, pre-teen Jack (Tom Russell) has a pretty good chance of finding a bone marrow donor, thanks to the otherwise dubious blessing of having a father (Richard Roxburgh) who’s spent the last fifteen years cheating on his mother with half of Melbourne.

The numerous scenes where Jack’s mother Marissa (Jacinda Barrett) practically goes door-to-door looking for a bone marrow match from her partner’s endless liaisons are the source of much of this finely balanced film’s humour. They contrast nicely with those involving Irish sailor Connor (James Nesbitt), whose energetic efforts to raise the spirits of his ill son Finn (Kodi Smit-McPhee) may prove more successful in attracting Marissa’ attention. This is a gentle film rather than a hilarious one, but its warm tone goes some way towards smoothing over the occasional clunky moment. A film this character-driven needs truly stand-out performances to hold it together. Fortunately, both Barrett and Smit-McPhee shine. They guide this film’s sometimes wobbly script safely home.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #481)

Boy

2010-09-12T07:30:00.000-07:00

The year is 1984, the place is New Zealand’s Waihau Bay, and for Boy (James Rolleston) life is good. School is out for the holidays, his little brother thinks he has magic powers, and his Grandmother is taking a break for a week, leaving him in charge of a small army of siblings. Then suddenly his long absent father Alamein (writer / director Taika Waititi) drives up with the other two members of his unimpressive bikie “gang”, and Boy’s life is turned on its head.

Waititi’s second film (after the indie comedy Eagle vs Shark) isn’t exactly a coming of age film – it’s smarter and more subtle than that. For audiences trained to think in Hollywood rhythms, the arrival of Alamein – who clearly at least likes his kids, but is also just as clearly mostly there because he buried some money in a nearby paddock and can’t seem to find it – is a cause for dread. The first ten minutes of this film are as funny as anything you’ll see this year, and the return of an absent dad (fresh out of prison to boot) usually signals darker times ahead.

Instead, Alamein proves to be both a better and a worse father than expected, the comedy keeps on coming even when events eventually take on a slightly darker tinge, and the overall impression is one of a film that’s wholly original and totally charming. That’s thanks in large part to the utterly natural performances from the kids and Waititi’s own dorky charisma, and together with a sharp yet daggily funny script they make this a front-runner for comedy of the year.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #483)

The Kids Are All Right

2010-09-12T07:27:00.000-07:00

Nic (Annette Benning) and Jules (Julianne Moore) may not have a perfect relationship, but it works for them – and for their two kids, Joni (Australia’s own Mia Wasikowska) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson). But with Joni turning 18 (and about to leave home for university) there’s a worm in the apple: she’s now old enough to find out about (and get in contact with) the man who donated the sperm used to create her and her brother. She’s not that interested but Laser needs to know, so they’re introduced to Paul (Mark Ruffalo), the quasi-hippie owner of a wholefoods restaurant. But as Paul – who is a perfectly decent guy – comes further into their lives, fault lines start to appear in the family’s relationships, especially between the controlling Nic and the self-doubting Jules.

Writer / director Lisa Cholodenko (Laurel Canyon, High Art) does an excellent job of constructing her characters and then just letting them crash into each other. It’s rare to see a film that is able to stand as far back from its characters as this one: it’s hardly a ringing endorsement of the touchy-feely personal growth dialogue the adults spout, but there’s still a strong connection with the characters simply as people, no matter what bad or foolish choices they make. Good performances help too (Moore is especially impressive) and its re-creation of upper-middle-class Californian life rings true (and is often very funny). But for the most part this film impresses in the way a well-written novel does: by showing us people we might not like, but who we can understand.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #482)

Father of my Children

2010-09-12T07:24:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take long to figure out that Gregoire (Louis-Do de Lencquesaing) is a busy man. Juggling phone calls as he walks and drives the streets of Paris running his film production company Moon films, he’s clearly a man with a lot on his plate. But he also seems to be a warm and caring father and a loving husband – when he’s not on the phone trying to put out one work-related fire or another. Clearly he’s a man passionate about his work and film in general, but as the film progresses it starts to become clear that his juggling act has an increasing sense of desperation to it: money is tight, the business is running on credit that’s running out, and his options are narrowing.

At this point something happens upon which the entire film pivots: without giving too much away, everything changes and yet doesn’t change, as the films story (which, despite the title, turns out to be the story of Moon films rather than Gregoire's family) continues on its way. It’s certainly an interesting angle to take, but it does mean that a lot of the more personal plot threads are left dangling. It’s a look at a man’s life almost entirely through the lens of his work That makes it a somewhat restricted look, and though those restrictions are interesting in themselves, it does make this one of those films where the end is “a new beginning” – a beginning that seems more interesting than the film we just saw.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #482)

Me and Orson Welles

2010-09-12T06:42:00.000-07:00

You wouldn’t say that director Richard Linklater’s career has gone off the boil over the last few years, but the low-key run this film – starring Zac Efron, no less – is getting in this country hints at a step down from the days when he was mixing up comedies like School of Rock with lauded arthouse romances like Before Sunset. It’s an impression that Me and Orson Welles never quite manages to dispel: it’s fun, it’s pleasant, it’s engaging, it boasts one powerhouse performance, but it never quite manages to lodge in the memory the way many of his earlier films did.

The year is 1937 and actor Richard Samuels (Efron) scores a bit part in Orson Welles stage production of Julius Caesar. The usual backstage antics ensue thanks to various nutty actors, and before long love blooms between Samuels and Welles’ assistant Sonja Jones (Claire Danes). Problem there is, Welles (Christian McKay) doesn’t like anything going on that he’s not in complete control of. The pace is fast, the tone is light, the whole thing feels well-researched (in part it’s a salute to the hard work that goes into putting on a big performance) and McKay gives an amazing performance as Welles. It just never really adds up to a great deal, and unless you’re a): an Efron fan (he doesn’t exactly move out of his comfort zone, but he’s got charm to spare), b): a theatre buff, or c): interested in Orson Welles, it’s hard to see why you couldn’t wait for DVD here.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #480)

Greenberg

2010-09-12T06:35:00.000-07:00

Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is not a happy man. Problem is, he doesn’t really have a lot to be unhappy about either: a New Yorker who’s in L.A. to housesit for his well-off brother, despite his blunt nature it doesn’t take him long to start up (and then ruin) a relationship with his brother’s personal assistant Florence (Greta Gerwig).

The more time we spend with Greenberg, the more it seems like he’s driven to ruin whatever good things come his way. He was in a band that almost hit the big time before he knocked back a big record deal, and his friendship with his former bandmate (Rhys Ifans) is uneven at best. Greenberg holds the world to standards that seem fair enough as a teenager but are just annoying as a 40 year old, and his refusal to make a life for himself – rather than the nervous breakdown he seems to have had in New York – seems to be why he’s stuck in the dissatisfying limbo this film displays.

Director Noah Baumbach (The Squid and the Whale) is walking a fine line here, but while Greenberg is largely frustrating as a character the film (based on a script by Baumbach, Jennifer Jason Leigh and Stiller) gives us just enough space to avoid feeling trapped with this strident sourpuss. Stiller is good but not great here – it’s easy to imagine the role being played just as well by a number of actors – but his comedic charm goes a long way towards taking off the edges from a fairly unlikeable character: a better actor would have made this a worse film.

The supporting cast are all excellent, with Gerwig’s finely balanced mix of assertiveness and confusion coming as something of a revelation here as she balances out Greenberg’s studied rejection of pretty much everything with her awkward yet heartfelt refusal to shut herself off. Greenberg might not be that likable, but this often insightful film turns out to have more warmth and humanity than most upbeat “feel-good” comedies can muster.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #480)

Centurion

2010-09-12T06:32:00.000-07:00

Neil Marshall has a rock-solid track record when it comes to bloody good fun. From his first film Dog Soldiers (their soldiers… and they’re werewolves!) through The Descent and Doomsday, he rarely puts a foot wrong when it comes to serving up quality cheap thrills.

So Centurion might seem at first glance to be something of a chance of pace: based around the story of the Roman Ninth Legion, who marched into the wilds of Scotland in the first century AD and never came back, it sounds like it has at least bone foot based in reality – not an area Marshall’s previous films have had much time for. But here he manages to combine his love of all-action film-making with a thin (occasionally very thin) layer of historical accuracy to create perhaps his most satisfying film to date.

Quintus Dais (Michael Fassbender) is the commander of a small fort on the border between Roman-controlled Britain and the free lands to the north ruled by the Picts, savage tribespeople who don’t fight according to the Roman rules of warfare (and if you think that’s the last parallel this film has to make with the War on Terror, think again). For example, they overrun his fort during a night-time sneak attack, capturing Dais and taking him hostage. Meanwhile, General Virilus (Dominic West, AKA McNulty from The Wire) has been given the job of leading the Ninth Legion north and solving the Pict problem once and for all. The bad news is, the Picts are one step ahead of them all the way; the worst news is, soon Dais is leading a handful of survivors across the barren Scottish highlands as they desperately try to escape a pack of Picts lead by the silent but deadly Etain (Olga Kurylenko) who have sworn to track them down and kill them or die trying.

After the Iraq War analogies (and plenty of severed heads and spurting blood) of the first half, this segues into a tense and single-minded chase film that’s solidly effective despite the occasional cliché (such as jumping off a cliff into a river to avoid capture). The performances pump up the underwritten characters to good effect too, making this one of the best B-grade action thrillers this year.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #480)

Inception

2010-09-12T06:26:00.000-07:00

It doesn’t take long to realise the marketing for the latest film from writer / director Christopher Nolan (Memento, The Dark Knight) wasn’t being vague and mysterious simply to build anticipation: Inception defies easy summation in a way that’s increasingly – and refreshingly – rare.

It’s not exactly a plot you can spoil (in some ways it’s surprisingly straightforward), but learning as you go is one of the many pleasures this has to offer. Suffice then to say its set in a world where others can enter your dreams and (try to) steal your deepest secrets, but if you’re Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) your own secrets have a very real chance of getting in the way.

Despite the heavy psychological baggage and film noir / cyberpunk trappings, this turns out to be Nolan’s take on the light-hearted heist genre. Think Ocean’s 11 inside The Matrix and you’re halfway there. Some might argue that every character besides Cobb is barely two-dimensional and that much of the dialogue is raw exposition, but with a set-up this enjoyably mind-stretching it’s best to err on the side of clarity. Having a first class cast as Cobb’s back-up team (Including Ellen Page, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Tom Hardy and Ken Watanabe) goes a long way towards fleshing out the thin characters, and the visuals are just mind-bending enough to impress without distracting from the story-telling (unlike, say, a Terry Gilliam movie, the story moves forward too quickly to allow much time to soak in surreal imagery).

The plot is a rigourously planned-out puzzle-box that’s extremely compelling – so much so that in many ways’s the film’s greatest success is the high level of post-viewing discussion it sparks. Blockbuster film-making is rarely this smart and skillful, let alone actually about anything. Utterly unmissable.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #480)

The Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

2010-09-12T06:22:00.000-07:00

Writer / producer / star of Wog Boy 2 Nick Giannopoulos says in the press notes that originally this was going to be a stand-alone story, but then he decided this particular plot was a good way to bring back the original Wog Boy characters. Smart move: if this was a stand-alone movie then it'd be fair to say it's a massive and unwelcome return to the bad old days of Australian movie comedy, a film that you laugh at more than with, a film that plays its jokes so broad it's a wonder they fit on the screen - a film where, when one of the leads finally get the girl (though all he does is save her from drowning but that's as good a reason to pash as any) the donkey he was riding looks at the camera and winks. But as a sequel to the original Wog Boy, it's pretty much just more of the same.

The plot takes the two hold-overs from the first film - car-crazy Steve "Wog Boy" Karamitsis (Giannopoulos, who's performance consists largely of pulling a squinty face) and girl-crazy Frank (Vince Colosimo, who's performance is actually ok) - out of Melbourne's western suburbs and off to the Greek party island of Mykonos, where Steve may or may not have inherited a beach. While Frank starts out trying to break the Mykonos record of sleeping with 43 chicks in a month but ends up focusing on just one, Steve has to decide whether to sell to the sleazy property developer Mihali (Alex Dimitriades) or try to make a go of things himself against all the odds. Oh, and there's a subplot about goat shit.

There's the occasional funny moment but when the biggest laughs come from a pair of Germans basically saying they don't find the rest of the film funny you know you're in trouble. For all its many, many flaws the first Wog Boy at least was about the migrant experience and a clash of cultures (well, kinda): this doesn't really seem to be about anything past showing off Mykonos' impressive views.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #478)

Toy Story 3

2010-09-12T06:12:00.000-07:00

Pixar haven’t put a foot wrong in any serious fashion since the first Toy Story well over a decade ago, so for once the “3” in the title is not a massive flashing warning sign. We all know the score with Pixar (The Incredibles, Up, Finding Nemo) by now: of course it’s going to be well animated, of course it’s going to have plenty of thrilling action sequences (the opening sequence here is pretty much their best yet), of course it’s going to have a Randy Newman song or two in there - but are the characters still going to be interesting enough in their third feature-length outing to make this feel like a proper movie?

The good news is yes, and then even better news is that this one actually manages to make the three films feel like, if not a trilogy, then at least a proper series rather than just the same film three times over. The story here is simple: Andy, the owner of cowboy Woody (the voice of Tom Hanks), spaceman Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the rest of the toys (though not all of them: the cast has been thinned for this film) is old enough to go to college. Thanks to a packing mix-up, his toys end up donated to a day care center that only seems like the perfect place for them, while Woody - who knows there’s been a mistake, as he’s the only toy Andy’s chosen to take to college - tries to get everyone to return to Andy.

There are a few mildly scary moments that might be a bit much for very small kids (this feels like a film made with one eye on kids who grew up with the series) and one heart-in-mouth moment that will probably hit older viewers harder than kids, but this is pure Pixar entertainment all the way and the mix of comedy and drama and excitement is as pitch-perfect as you could ask for. But be warned: the ending, while perfectly in keeping with the rest of the film and in many ways the best possible result for all concerned, is also pretty much the most savage and brutal tear-jerker seen since the opening of Pixar's last film Up. It’s not a spoiler because the film lays it out from the very start, but still: if you have separation issues, bring tissues.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #479)

Grown Ups

2010-09-12T06:06:00.000-07:00

Adam Sandler likes to spread himself around. These days most stars only make one kind of film (A Russell Crowe film is pretty much the same thing every time), but Sandler – much like Will Smith, who’s his only rival when it comes to box office draw at the moment - has two or three fanbases on the go at once. Which makes reviewing his films a bit trickier than most: there’s no point slagging off a Sandler film for being a touchy-feely family comedy when that’s what he set out to make, even if you happen to think his edgier comedies are what he does best.

So to set things out clearly, this is not a Sandler movie where he plays an idiot manchild (Little Nicky, The Waterboy), nor is it a Sandler movie where he goes flat-out for laughs (Happy Gilmore, You Don’t Mess with the Zohan), nor is it a Sandler movie where he takes things a little seriously and reveals himself to be a pretty good actor (Punchdrunk Love, Funny People). This is one of those Sandler movies where he plays a nice guy, the story is usually about family and the importance thereof, there’s a couple of moments that are supposed to be kind of touching, and the whole thing can be wrapped up in a nice bow with “heart-warming” written on it. If you don’t like those kind of Sandler movies, get out now: there’s nothing for you here.

You might think having a cast made of up Sandler’s comedy buddies – David Spade, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider, and Kevin James, all firmly in their comedy comfort zones (only Rock is trying something different as a henpecked husband) – would push things down the funny end of the scale, and there is a fair amount of seemingly improvised riffing / ragging on each other here. There’s just nothing else: after the death of their high school basketball coach, the five grown-up (geddit?) members of the team are reunited for his funeral. As they’re seemingly the only people in their dead coach’s life, they stick around at a lakehouse to scatter his ashes and just… hang out.

Occasionally a glimmer of a storyline will pop-up, but they never go anywhere: the only real development is that Sandler’s snooty kids (he’s a ultra-wealthy Hollywood agent) learn to play outside. Sandler’s too canny a player to make a film but forget to make it about anything: presumably there’s a market for movies where you just get to spend a weekend with Sandler and his buddies doing not much for close to two hours.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #478)

The Runaways

2010-09-12T06:03:00.000-07:00

The problem with telling a true story is, whose side do you take? In fiction you can just have all the cool stuff happen to your lead: in real life things get a bit tricky. Unfortunately in The Runaways, director Floria Sigismondi’s adaptation of Cherie Curry’s book about her life as the lead singer of, you guessed it, The Runaways (of “Cherry Bomb” fame), pretty much all the cool stuff involves people other than Cherie.

Sure, the teenage Cherie (Dakota Fanning) has some vague dreams of becoming some kind of rock star, but next to the driven passion of Joan Jett (Twilight’s Kristen Stewart) you either go hard or go home. Meanwhile their flamboyant, kinda creepy, quasi-abusive svengali manager Kim Fowley (an excellent performance from Michael Shannon) deserves at least two movies all by himself as he puts the girls together, put through through hell (or as he calls it, “training”), and then unleashes them on the world as “jail-f**king-bait”.

So this look at early 70’s proto-punk gets a bit frustrating after a while as the focus keeps drifting back to the purposefully trashy but fairly vapid Cherie when both Jett and Fowley are the ones with drive and passion. It’s their story (as shown by their post-Runaway’s successes) Cherie just lives in it, and while there’s a few fun moments and enjoyably sleazy scenes here, the film’s hollow core gets the better of it well before the end credits.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #477)

Nightmare on Elm Street

2010-09-12T05:47:00.000-07:00

There's no reason why horror remakes have to be bad - they just seem to turn out that way. Unlike a lot of the recent remakes where the original's success was such a fluke that changing anything would (and does) ruin the film, Nightmare on Elm Street has a central idea strong enough to handle another swing at it.

That central idea is, of course, a monster (here burnt-up possible child-molestor Freddy Kruger, played by Jackie Earl Haley) who can kill you in your sleep: as one character puts it, "if you die in your dreams, you die in real life". The scariness comes from two directions: you have to fall alseep eventually so you can't escape, and inside your dreams anything (unpleasant) can happen. So with all that going for it, why is this remake little more than a lifeless, by-the-numbers chore to watch?

Apart from the usual fatal flaw of boring characters played by poor actors - not only are all these "teenagers" easily pushing thirty, not one of them is in the slightest bit memorable even when they're spurting blood - this film fails because it's actually too faithful to the original. The original is a classic make no mistake, but this treats the first film's set-up so reverentially that it feels like any possible originality has been strangled out of the film.

It doesn't help that most of the dream sequences are really just of the "you didn't realise you'd fallen asleep... and now you're dead" variety, with only a few moments of surreal horror to show what might have been. And with the invention of "micro-naps" (basically, you can fall asleep at any time and not know it), the film becomes yet another quick shock-packed affair rather than anything remotely disturbing. It's hardly the worst remake of recent times, but if you're going to re-do a classic you need to do better than this.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #477)

Harry Brown

2010-09-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

A good vigilante movie knows there's a formula involved and sticks to it like glue. So ignore the claims that this Michael Caine vehicle is the UK's answer to Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino: while they might both involve old folks taking on the young punks that have ruined their neighbourhoods, Harry Brown is a Death Wish remake in everything but name.

Harry (Caine) is a pensioner living in a high-rise estate where a gang of youthful drug dealers has staked a claim to a nearby underpass. After his wife dies (of old age) and his best mate dies (from messing with the gang), there's not a lot keeping Harry in check. Did he forget to mention he was a Royal Marine who was decorated for his work in Ulster back during The Troubles in Northern Ireland? Guess the local thugs picked on the wrong old age pensioner to mess with.

All your favourite vigilante cliches are here: Harry's first kill is in self-defence (but after that first one all bets are off), there's only one local cop who suspects him and she doesn't know whether to support him or bring him in, and the criminals are across-the-board scum lacked all redeeming features (especially the leader, played by UK rapper Plan B as A Current Affair's worst nightmare). The real draw here is Caine, who manages to be both a convincing badass and an old guy who's not really up to racking up a double-figure body count anymore. He's what you're coming to see, and he doesn't disappoint.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #477)

Robin Hood

2010-09-12T04:16:00.000-07:00

When you start to get up the expensive end of the blockbuster scale, a film's story becomes less about telling a story and more about juggling various demands. And when that blockbuster is called Robin Hood, the demands just keep on coming. It doesn't take long to realise that director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe really aren't that interested in making a film about the Robin Hood we know and love - presumably because we know and love him a little too well to be bothered going to see yet another film about him. So large chunks of this "prequel" to the Robin Hood story are the kind of movie they - or the people who hired them - wanted to make: a medieval version of Gladiator.

Crowe's Robin is the same character he plays in all these films: a low-voiced tough-guy who everyone looks to as a born leader even though he's basically a short mumbling brawler. Cate Blanchett's Marion is a scowling tough guy - uh, gal - herself, which actually makes her less interesting because revisionist or not, we've seen this kind of character before. But because the film is called Robin Hood no matter how badly they want to Scott and Crowe can't just have the French up and invade England so they can do a bows-and-arrows version of the beach landing from Saving Private Ryan.

They have to throw in a whole lot of bonus plot involving the chief villain (played by the current Mr Everywhere, Mark Strong) pretending to be working for new king John (Oscar Issac) as he rides around "collecting taxes" by murdering and pillaging and getting everyone pissed off at the foppish king. Meanwhile Robin (a working class bowman) is pretending to be Robin (a noble knight) to give back a sword and if all this stuff occasionally brushes up against the traditional Robin Hood story don't read too much into it because before long the film'll be back talking about how Robin's dad invented the Magna Carta.

Despite all that, this hangs together well enough to function as a solid, unspectacular, undemanding blockbuster you could happily take a less demanding family member along to see.Like Robin himself, it gets the job done without flair, glamour, or anything even remotely memorable.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #477)

The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

2010-07-07T05:08:00.000-07:00

There's something about the cold Scandinavian climate that makes it the perfect backdrop for murder. Well, fictional murder at least, as SBS's steady stream of ice-cold murder series proves. Based on the first of a series of best-sellers, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (which is soon to be re-made by Hollywood ) is a solid thriller that manages to keep the many twists and turns easy-to-follow without losing any of the grim and foreboding atmosphere.

Crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist) is heading for prison after losing a big-time defamation case, but before he's locked up he's offered a bit of freelance investigating work from a reclusive millionaire who believes that the killer of a long dead relative is taunting him. He wants to know who's sending him mementoes that only the dead girl knew about, but while Mikael is good at old-fashioned investigating he's not so flash with computers - which is where the titular girl Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) comes in. A hard-boiled hacker with a fashion sense that runs to leather and piercings, she's just the woman for the job - if she can get out of her parole officer's greasy grasp, that is.

Much of this movie, while slickly done and always engaging, is by-the-numbers conspiracy material; it's only Lisbeth's presence that really shakes things up and gives this film its edge. It's no wonder she became the star of the series, as while this is a good thriller, she's the only truly memorable thing about it.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #476)

Brothers

2010-07-07T05:07:00.001-07:00

The words "American remake" are usually enough to send a chill down the spine of even the toughest movie-goers. But with Brothers - a remake of a highly acclaimed 2004 Danish film - the whole thing comes off, due in no small part to the sheer class of the cast. The story begins in America's heartland, with Tommy (Jake Gyllenhaal) getting out of prison just in time to see his brother Sam (Tobey Maguire), a lieutenant in the Marines, off on another tour of duty in Afghanistan. Their father (Sam Shepard) takes every opportunity to remind Tommy just how useless he is in comparison to his brother, and Tommy's wife Grace (Natalie Portman) isn't his biggest fan either. But when Sam is reported dead, Tommy gradually steps up to take care of his brother's family and make a new man of himself. The good news is, Sam isn't dead - he's just a captive of the Taliban. The bad news is, both he and his family are going through so many changes that when they ever get back together again, there's a good chance they might not fit.

Maguire has the flashy role here, going from his usual nice-guy to a gaunt, mentally-scarred vet, but Gyllenhaal is equally impressive as he goes through his own changes. Portman too is excellent as a grieving widow and mother who can't allow herself to fall apart. It's a gruelling film at times, but director Jim Sheridan strikes just the right balance to keep a glimmer of hope running throughout. It's simplistic to say that as one brother falls the other rises, but there is a balance in this film, and it's not until the hard-hitting final scenes that this balance is finally broken.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #476)

The Rebound

2010-07-07T05:07:00.000-07:00

You know what makes The Rebound stand out in the sea of current romantic films? The way the male lead (Justin Bartha) keeps his shirt on (mostly). Disappointing though it may be for some segments of the audience, it's a sign that this particular romance is more interested in what's inside its characters than how good they look.

It's an approach that's also reflected in the relatively slow start to proceedings, as writer / director Bart Freundlich takes the time to firmly establish both our 40 year-old and newly single mother of two Sandy (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and our 24 year-old and newly single after being tricked into a Green Card marriage Aram (Bartha). While Sandy is soon starting a new life in New York , Aram - who works in the coffee shop below her new apartment - has pretty much given up on both love and life. why else would he take a job as a baby-sitter for Sandy ? Of course, feelings soon develop between the two, but will their relationship survive the age difference and the different stages they're at in life?

It's to this film's credit that you really do want to see this couple make it, thanks largely to excellent performances from Zeta-Jones and Bartha. The chemistry between them more than makes up for a fairly thin story - unfortunately, it's not quite enough to make up for a muddled ending that clearly wants to say one thing but can't really figure out how.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #476)

The Bounty Hunter

2010-07-07T05:06:00.000-07:00

Make no mistake, there's nothing exactly wrong with the idea of basing a romantic comedy on Midnight Run - it's just that this romantic comedy based on Midnight Run is just not that good. Midnight Run, for those who don't know, is a classic 80s comedy in which a bounty hunter (Robert DeNiro) and his captive (Charles Grodin) get into a lot of pretty hilarious trouble. And it's easy to see why the idea of taking the basic concept and putting a romantic spin on it would seem like a god idea: it's a buddy movie where the buddies can fall in love. But again, here it just does not work.

It'd be easy to blame the casting, but while Jennifer Aniston does have a string of duds to her name there's no denying that she can actually do good work even decent material. The same goes for Gerard Butler, even though to date the only examples of his good work have been in straight dramas (The Ugly Truth was just plain ugly). And the story itself moves along nicely, throwing in a decent amount of twists and turns as Aniston's hard-boiled journalist finds her investigation of a suspicious suicide constantly interrupted by the need to escape out of the boot of the car of her ex-cop turned bounty hunter ex-husband (Butler) as he tries to claim the bounty for her skipping bail over an assault charge.

But the characters are mostly annoying, the jokes almost never work, there's almost no chemistry between Butler and Aniston, the overly complicated and totally predictable story never once threatens to become exciting and the whole thing feels like a chore long before the final credits. Midnight Run isn't hard to come by; if you're looking for something to watch, The Bounty Hunter proves you could do a lot worse.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #476)

Cop Out

2010-07-07T05:05:00.000-07:00

Ok, so Cop Out looks exactly like a bad 80s buddy cop movie. But let's give the producers some credit here: they at least thought that by teaming Bruce Willis with 30 Rock's Tracy Morgan and director Kevin Smith, somehow some kind of cinematic magic would take place and all the old clapped out buddy cop cliches would magically seem fresh and new. It's not the worst idea to come out of Hollywood... unfortunately, all that results from this wishful thinking is scene after scene after scene that, while sort of entertaining individually, soon take on a dully predictable rhythm as it becomes obvious that there are no surprises whatsoever on offer here.

The story itself ticks over nicely, as Jim (Willis) and his partner Paul (Morgan) run around Brooklyn trying to retrieve Jim's fifty thousand dollar baseball card and maybe take down a Mexican crime lord on the side. At first, seeing Morgan doing his patented stream‑of‑consciousness yammering as a cop is kind of funny (the opening interrogation scene where his 'bad cop' act consists of ripped off lines from every movie ever made is pretty good), until it turns out that this movie has nothing else for him to do. Willis, on the other hand, just gets to be the same tough guy / angry dad (he's selling the baseball card so he, and not his daughter's sleazy stepfather, can pay for her wedding) that he always plays. Basically, Willis plays his Die Hard character and Morgan plays his 30 Rock character, only Cop Out is nowhere near as exciting or funny as either. The only high point is Seann William Scott as the world's most annoying cat burglar, and even his big scene is a throwaway one.

Kevin Smith does a surprisingly good job as an action director, and if – somehow – you’ve never seen a buddy cop movie before chances are you’ll have a good time here. But seriously, after twenty years of the genre, this brings nothing new to the party – which is also surprising, as you’d expect Smith to try and inject more of his style of humour into proceedings. It's doubtful any film could revive the buddy cop genre at this stage: it's just a shame Cop Out didn't try a little harder.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #476)

Love, Lust & Lies

2010-05-21T15:04:00.000-07:00

In 1976 Gillian Armstrong was a fresh young filmmaker just out of school. Commissioned by the South Australian Film Corporation to make a documentary about what it’s like to be a 14-year-old girl, she made Smokes and Lollies, a portrait of three naughty working class girls. Kerry, Josie and Diana proved to be funny, honest and spirited, and so a series of films were made, following them at 18, 26 and 33. Now the girls are 47-year-old women, and in some cases, they’re grandmothers. It’s been 14 years since we last caught up with them, and this instalment proves to be highly entertaining and revealing – as the title suggests.

Comparisons are bound to be made with the British 7-Up series, and it’s true there are similiar voyeuristic pleasures in seeing lives fast-forwarded and rewound. But Armstrong is warm and generous, with a unique focus on love, sex and mothering. She’s never condescending, even as she charts lives that have been constrained by early parenthood and lack of education. The resulting film is a beautiful and inspiring tribute to family, and to the universal yearning to create a better life for one’s children.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review appeared in #354 of The Big Issue, Australian edn.)

To read my interview with Gillian Armstrong at the Australian Film Institute click here.

Green Zone

2010-05-13T05:01:00.000-07:00

The invasion of Iraq is in its' first few weeks, and Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller (Damon) is leading a unit that’s scouring strife‑torn Baghdad for Weapons of Mass Destruction. Not surprisingly, Miller is getting a little frustrated at raiding supposed WMD bunkers and finding disused toilet factories. So when local resident 'Freddy' (Khalid Abdalla) says he saw a bunch of Iraq generals holding a secret meeting in a house in the next suburb over, Miller decides that it’s his big change to get some real WMD information direct from the source. He manages to get the information even as the general gets away, but he also gets into a world of trouble as Pentagon suit Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear) and CIA agent Martin Brown (Brendan Gleeson) decide that they can both use him to push their own agendas.

Brown thinks that keeping the Iraqi army together will help hold the crumbling country together; Poundstone is a neo‑con who thinks that democracy- and disbanding the army as soon as possible - will make Iraq into America Jr. Miller ends up siding with Brown (which we know is a bad move, as the Iraq army was disbanded soon after the invasion) and it starts to become obvious that, for all the wonder of this film extremely impressive re‑creation of Baghdad circa 2003, we’re basically watching a remake of Chinatown.

As in all good noir mysteries, our lead is a hardboiled hero trying to uncover the truth, while everyone he thought he could trust turns out to want the truth covered up, and there’s a sense of doom hanging over the place that makes it clear that there's no happy ending in sight even if he does solve the mystery of the WMDs – it’s Iraq circa 2003, the only way things can go is down. As seen from his excellent work directing the last two Bourne films, Paul Greengrass definitely knows how to put together scene after scene of exciting action. The fights here are way more realistic than anything Jason Bourne dished out, but they retain an impact that keep this film on the edge. Using real life events as plot devices in a thriller is a risky move, especially when they took place not so long ago, but here it pays off. Whatever your views on the war in Iraq , this is a gripping thriller that – the occasional flat moment aside – provides thrills from start to finish.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #475)

Remember Me

2010-05-13T04:55:00.000-07:00

It wasn't all that long ago that there was a steady trickle of this kind of indie film out of America . Not any more: these days it takes a name the size of Twilight's Robert Pattinson to get people interested in the small-scale tale of a young man haunted by the dead of his brother ,who happens to fall for a young woman named Ally (Emilie de Ravin), who just happens to be haunted by the shooting death of her mother. This isn't entirely a indy film, mind you, as eagle-eyed viewers will notice that after a bit of bar action and street violence (to let us know that our hero Tyler is both too deeply hurt to commit to the ladies and someone likely to spring into violent action a little too quickly to be well-adjusted), his relationship with Ally starts off in a very traditional rom-com fashion: as the result of a bet. That's right: there's a dark secret at the heart of their relationship that you just know will eventually be the trigger for a nasty break-up, followed by a tearful resolution.

What happens before all that tho works surprisingly well, as Pattinson gets to do a Brando imitation, de Ravin is an actually likeable quirky free spirit, and both of them get to work out their daddy issues (Chris Cooper plays Ally's tightly wound cop dad; Pierce Brosnan is Tyler's hi-flying but bottled up lawyer father). Most importantly, the two leads have real chemistry together, creating a true movie special effect: a cute couple. As the final ten minutes constitute something of a twist - a twist that's fairly easy to figure out if you're paying attention, but still - lets just say that the ending throws a new light on the film without taking away from what's come before.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #475)

Alice in Wonderland

2010-05-13T04:52:00.000-07:00

There's a long-standing Hollywood tradition where big name directors make one film for themselves then one film for their corporate masters. And for a long time Tim Burton's been the director to avoid when he's doing it for the money (remember Planet of the Apes? Charlie and the Chocolate Factory?). But because he's still seen as the master of "dark whimsy", even the knowledge that his version of Alice in Wonderland was a Disney production (they own the trademarks), and not something from the heart wasn't enough to dampen interest. The news that the story wasn't a direct adaptation of either of the original books but instead a all-new Hollywood-style follow-up featuring Alice (Mia Wasikowska) as a young woman might have worried a few people but hey, it's Tim Burton. And it's in 3D! With Johnny Depp!

In a result that will disappoint many but surprise no-one, this is yet another film where Burton 's vast visual skill is coupled with not much else to create an experience that looks amazing but is best enjoyed in the background while conversing with your friends about something else entirely. The story is pretty much the result of a Hollywood sausage factory, throwing various "greatest hits" characters and situations from the original books into a half-hearted but visually impressive story where various rebels battle to overthrow the evil rule of the Red Queen (Helena Bonham-Carter with a massive CGI head).

Having a film version of Alice in Wonderland that ends with a giant battle while Alice - in armour and wielding a sword - battles the Jabberwok is pretty much an insult to everything the original stood for, and the moral of the film makes no sense whatsoever: in the real world it's all girl-power that Alice avoids her destiny (to marry a Lord), yet in Wonderland it's presented as a good thing that she can't avoid her destiny (to battle the Jabberwok). Huh? Meanwhile, Depp's Mad Hatter gets annoying long before he performs perhaps the most gratuitous, painful dance number ever seen on film - seriously, it's literally unwatchable. If there's one of those big glossy "making-of" books with loads of images from the film available, read that instead of enduring this.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #475)

Dear John

2010-05-13T04:47:00.000-07:00

All you really need to know about this film is that it's based on a novel by the guy who wrote The Notebook. Even better, it also features a notebook! Though it does also help if you have a very poor memory, because otherwise you're probably going to spot the twist in a love story between a young would-be social worker (Amanda Seyfried) and a US special forces solider named John (Channing Tatum) set in America in 2001.

The lovebirds meet in a small town on the Gulf of Mexico - he's back in town to visit his autistic father, she's on spring break - and before you know it he's muscled out the dweeby guy she was hanging around with and it's a perfect holiday romance. They both don't want it to end, and he's only got another year to go in the Army, so why not stick together? And then before you know it he's stuck in a War Without End, and despite all the letter-writing back and forth (there are a lot of time-passing montages going on here) it becomes an open question as to whether she'll be waiting for him when - and if - he ever comes home.

As romances go this avoids most of the obvious traps when it comes to drawing things out, giving the impression of two good kids who love each other but keep being torn apart by an uncaring world. A sharper film might have made more of the fact that it's the War On Terror that's killing their love, or even the shoddy medical treatment the autistic Dad gets at one stage. But that's not what this film's about; the only battle it really cares about is the one for the human heart. If that makes you go "awww", then this is the film for you; if not, The Hurt Locker should still be showing somewhere.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #475)

A Single Man

2010-03-21T16:14:00.000-07:00

The amazing achievement of this film is that it manages to convey the grey heartsick emotion of grief while also depicting the moments of great clarity, beauty and even lust that grief can bestow. Colin Firth plays George, an English professor mourning the death of his long term lover (Matthew Goode) in 1960s California. His only friend is his neighbour Charley (Julianne Moore), a gin soaked divorcee who dreams of turning him straight.

Directed by fashion icon Tom Ford, and based loosely on the Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man is art-directed within an inch of its life, yet it works. Every single shot is luscious. The colours, the textures, the slow motion scenes of heart-breaking poignancy, these could even be compared to works of Wong Kar Wai. Lovers of period detail and fans of TV’s Mad Men will adore the film, as will fashionistas. The costuming is superb, as you’d expect, and Firth proves again that he knows how to work a perfect white shirt. But it’s the humanity and heart of the film and the superb performances that make this more than just an exercise in style. Sublime.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review appeared in #349 of The Big Issue, Australia)

Valentines' Day

2010-02-21T17:45:00.000-08:00

It's a rule of entertainment: first genres become popular, then they become formulaic, then they go out of style. Judging by Valentine's Day, the long, long reign of the romantic comedy is set to come to an end. What it looks like is what it is: an American version of Love, Actually, only set over the course of a single day (no prizes for guessing what day that is). But where the often sickening Love, Actually would occasionally throw in an unexpected storyline (the nude extras or Bill Nighy in the role that revived his career) or interesting twist (Alan Rickman cheating on Emma Thompson), this is mostly charmless and totally predictable right down the line.

If characters are single, who'll they'll pair off with is obvious from the first time they meet; if characters are lying or unsure about love, it's clear early on so their partners can move on; if you're a cute little kid wanting to give flowers to someone at your school, the least surprising twist is the one to expect, and so on. If the existence of gay men is a surprise to you the you might be mildly shocked with one or two of the developments here and the dim-witted teens played by Taylor Swift and Taylor Lautner are pretty funny (the Twilight star gets the best line of the film: "I'm not used to taking my shirt off in public"), but otherwise this is just a delivery system for a collection of romantic cliches most greeting card companies wouldn't touch these days.

It's actually depressing to realise that with close to a dozen storylines here not one contains anything approaching a fresh insight into romance or relationships - but realistically, if you're planning to see this you almost certainly don't care. But be warned: you're going to owe your boyfriend big time after this.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #474)

Precious

2010-02-21T17:43:00.000-08:00

You'd be forgiven for steering clear of Precious based on the plot alone: it's the late 1980s in New York City, and a isolated teenage girl with a shocking home life is rescued from grinding poverty and abuse by a gorgeous teacher who fills her life with hope. It was painful when it was called Dangerous Minds back in the mid 1990s and as stories go it hasn't gotten any better since: no wonder Oprah got behind this film.

But Precious forces life into it's many, many cliches by pushing them all as far as they can go - and then some. Precious herself (Gabourey Sidibe) isn't just poor: she's grossly overweight, has a down syndrome baby called Mongo - by her abusive father no less and she's pregnant with his second child. And things just keep on getting worse over the course of this film, but somehow the constant onslaught of bad news never gets tiring. Precious' mother Mary (Mo'Nique) is the scariest thing you'll see on screen this (or any other) year, a swearing, violent, TV throwing, baby dropping sexually abusive horror that'll haunt your nightmares. She's the best thing in this wildly uneven film.

From the early scenes where Precious steals dinner from a chicken shop through her wince inducing fantasies of fame until her mother's final shocking monologue to an appalled social worker (Mariah Carey no less), this film swings between being yet another trite "inspiring" tale of high school poverty to a raw knuckle attack on those very same stories. It's hardly enjoyable viewing, but in its intensity Precious is certainly unforgettable.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #473)

Law Abiding Citizen

2010-02-10T17:40:00.000-08:00

There are two kinds of vigilante movies: the ones where the hero - after seeing his or her family abused and murdered by criminal scum - declares war on criminals in general, and the ones where the hero declares war on the criminals directly responsible for his or her torment. One of the many reasons why Law Abiding Citizen doesn't work is because it's a strange mix of the two - but let's not get ahead of ourselves.

When nice guy Clyde Shelton (Gerald Butler) sees his family raped and murdered in front of him by a pair of home-invading thugs, he has ever right to expect justice. Slick lawyer Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), on the other hand, just wants to get the case out of the way so he can keep moving smoothly up the ladder. So surprise surprise, while the lesser of the two evil thugs gets the death sentence, the really nasty piece of work gets off because he cut a deal and gave evidence against his partner. Fast forward five years, Rice is now the DA, and when bad guy number two's execution goes horribly wrong no-one really cares all that much. When bad guy number one turns up chopped into little pieces tho, attention turns to Clyde - and so begins one of those games of cat and mouse that are totally silly the second you spend even one second thinking about them.

There are plenty of twists and turns here, especially once Clyde gets himself locked up just as the vigilante starts targeting members of the legal community, but in every single case the explanation is so ridiculous whatever tension or thrills this might have had vanish without a backwards glance. For example, it's one thing to kill someone with a remote-controlled robot in a graveyard, but how did the robot - which is basically a massive gun on wheels - get to the graveyard in the first place? Butler gets stuck playing a mild-mannered guy who is also a super-smart insanely evil genius, while Foxx is just a slick and unlikeable lawyer; can both guys lose? Actually, no they can't - no matter who wins, the audience is the real loser here.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #473)

Daybreakers

2010-02-03T17:35:00.000-08:00

Resolutely old-school in its approach to vampires - they eat people, they don't have reflections, and they burst into flames if they try to get a suntan - while science-fictional in tone, with Daybreakers the Australian Spierig brothers (Undead), have created the kind of solid B-movie thriller that wins fans worldwide. There's only one problem: it's not all that much fun.

There's plenty to admire in this grim tale of a no-so-futuristic world where almost everyone has been turned into a vampire. The Spierig's have clearly spent a lot of time figuring out how this world works, from armoured and camera covered cars so they can drive in daylight to forest fires started by vampiric animals wandering into the sunlight. The characters are well thought-out too: blood scientist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke) is a man-turned-vampire weighed down by the burden of having to drink blood to survive - if vampires don't drink blood they turn into mindless monsters, which is increasingly a problem as blood supplies are running out. Everyone’s a vampire, remember? His boss Charles Bromley (Sam Neill) is far more comfortable with being a vampire (he had a terminal illness when he was turned into one), so when Dalton stumbles into the grasp of a small band of non-vampires who just might have a cure for vampirism, it's a bit of a two-edged sword. No vampires means no worries about lack of blood; no vampires means you don't get to live forever.

It's this rigourous approach to plotting that makes this such a watchable film even as the relentless one-note nature of the story starts to take it's toll. Daybreakers takes itself totally seriously from start to finish which, considering it's about vampires milking humans for blood, does make you wish that occasionally someone would lighten up and crack a smile. Presumably Willem Dafoe (as the car-loving redneck who comes across a cure for vampirism) was meant to be that guy, but he turns in a sombre, desperate performance that, while totally appropriate for his character, isn't quite the barrel of laughs that this film occasionally needs. The end result is a vampire film that remains solidly consistent without ever really bursting into life. Which seems appropriate.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #473)

The Road

2010-01-26T13:58:00.000-08:00

Cormac McCarthy’s bleak post-apocalyptic thriller The Road was a surprise bestseller – spare, tender and devastating. Here Australian director John Hillcoat (The Proposition) faithfully recreates that story for the screen. A father (Viggo Mortensen) and son (Kodi Smit-McPhee from Romulus My Father) wander across an America that has been destroyed by some unnamed disaster. Ruined cities and dead forests are devoid of life, and where life survives it’s in the form of cannibal gangs who hunt human meat.

Into this grey world the boy has been born, and now the dying father is teaching to him to survive as they head towards the ocean and perhaps some kind of salvation. The future of kindness, humanity and hope all rest on the boy’s half-starved shoulders. It’s heart-wrenching, and flashbacks to the boy’s dead mother (Charlize Theron) underline the fact that even good people give up on this wretched existence.

At times The Road is almost unbearably tense and yes, bleak. But the experience is a beautiful and rewarding one, heightening our sense of how precious life is, and what we may lose if we destroy the conditions of our existence. And yes, there is hope.

Rochelle Siemienowicz
(This review first appeared in edition #346 of The Big Issue.

Rochelle's Top 10 Picks for 2009

2010-01-26T13:43:00.000-08:00

Here's my rather eclectic list, based on the fact that I didn't see nearly as many films as I should have. List compiled for The Big Issue Summer Edition #345. Only includes films that were given an Australian cinema release.

District 9 (pictured)

Most movies about alien ships landing on earth set the invasion somewhere in the vicinity of the White House – or certainly within the US. Much of the thrill of this (relatively) low budget sci fi adventure comes from seeing the action take place in the dusty grimy shanty-towns of Johannesburg, where the accents are all South African and the post-apartheid politics are complex. The aliens themselves are refugees. Their ship ran out of gas 20 years ago and now they live in segregated slums, serviced by Nigerian prostitutes, and with a disturbing penchant for cat food – cans and all. They look like a disgusting cross between lobsters and insects, and they’re nicknamed ‘prawns’. When a rather dim-witted human bureaucrat ,Wikus van der Merve (Sharlto Copley) becomes infected with alien DNA he finds refuge with the aliens and discovers his own heroism.

Directed by Peter Jackson protégé Neill Blomkamp, District 9 may not be the year’s most perfect film, but it’s certainly one of the most startling and original. Combining faux documentary footage, excellent CG effects and a central character whose journey reminds us of The Fly, it’s an exciting riff on themes of racism and xenophia.

Bright Star
True love has rarely been so beautifully evoked on screen as in this tale of the poet Keats (Ben Whishaw) and his romance with the sassy seamstress Fanny Brawne (Abbie Cornish). Visually glorious, Jane Campion’s return to filmmaking is simply sublime.

The September Issue
This documentary about the production of the September issue of US Vogue magazine is actually a portrait of two women: the legendary ice-queen Anna Wintour and the inspired art director, Grace Cossington Jones. The shallow world of fashion provides surprising insight into the nature of art, truth, beauty and commerce.

Disgrace
A pitch-perfect adaptation of JM Coetzee’s subtle and multi-layered masterpiece, this film sees John Malkovich in fine form as a disgraced middle-aged professor who flees the city to live with his adult daughter on her isolated South African farm. Directed by Steve Jacobs it’s deep, complex and surprisingly entertaining.

Samson & Delilah
This is certainly the most acclaimed Australian film of the year, and a surprising box office hit. Beautifully written, directed and shot by indigenous filmmaker Warwick Thornton it’s a tough love story about aboriginal teenagers in remote central Australia. Winner of this year’s Cannes Camera d’Or.

The Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls
Now in their fifties, Jules and Linda Topp are New Zealand’s famous singing, dancing lesbian twins. Involved in social justice and protest movements since their youth, this documentary shows them in all their wholesome home-knitted glory. It’s a joy to witness their cheerful good humour and their palpable sisterly bond.

Star Trek
JJ Abrams picks up the beloved franchise and runs with it, gleefully taking us back to a time when Kirk and Spock first meet as academy graduates. It’s a joy to see the familiar characters reinterpreted by hot young actors. A typically silly space opera plot is loads of fun, with Eric Bana as a seething Romulan villain.

Two Lovers
Joaquin Phoenix is at his best as a conflicted and troubled young man who can’t decide between two women. Tender, funny and true.

The Choir
Set in a harsh South African prison (South Africa seems the theme this year!) this uplifting documentary shows the transformative power of music as a charismatic choir master brings discipline and meaning into the lives of young prisoners.

Rachel Getting Married
Anne Hathaway proves she’s more than a fresh-faced ingénue. She trails tragedy and angst as a young woman who leaves rehab to attend her sister’s wedding. Directed by Jonathan Demme this is a small verite masterpiece.

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The year in films: 2009

2010-01-18T17:51:00.000-08:00

We all know that the whole point of these "Year's best and worst" lists is to get you all annoyed that your fave films didn't make the list while I get even more angry that I wasted so much of my life watching rubbish. So in an attempt to defuse the hate, let's group the year's best and worst into categories rather than singling out individuals for the love - or the hate. So to kick off with the love, 2009 was a good year for...

Clint Eastwood: Damn, but Grand Torino was a great film (caution: view not shared by Rochelle). Well, if you're a Clint fan it was - otherwise, it was just the story of a grumpy old racist.

Films that defy easy category: A classy movie about wrestling? The Wrestler. A crazy World War 2 mash-up? Inglorious Basterds. A serious mockmentary using aliens as a metaphor that turns into a ray-gun shoot-em up? District 9.

Australian film: Because whether you liked them or not, Sampson & Deliah and Mao's Last Dancer did exactly what they were supposed to.

3D films: Avatar might be getting all the press now, but where was the love for the excellent My Bloody Valentine 3D and The Final Destination 3D?

Horror films: Mostly because Paranormal Activities was amazingly creepy. Oh, and Unborn was the best evil kid movie of the year.

Comedy: Some people liked Funny People. Some people liked The Hangover or Observe and Report. Hell, some people even liked Borat. With so much to chose from, how could you go wrong?

Horror-comedies: Zombieland really looked like it was going to be a dud. Guess there's life in the undead yet. And Drag Me to Hell was this close to being the film of the year, it's that good.

Foreign Criminals: The Baader-Meinhof Complex and Gomorrah were both based in fact, and still managed to be more gripping than any number of so so "action" films (as listed below).

Disaster films: Because 2012 might have been dull once it stopped wrecking up the place, but when it was throwing LA into the ocean it was awesome.

And the film of the year... Star Trek. Whether you were a long-time fan or couldn't stand the adventures of Starfleet, this was pretty much the most fun you could have at a cinema in 2009.

Meanwhile, on the dark side of the moon, an awful lot of crap movies were lurking, waiting to pounce. And pounce these ones most certianly did...

Ricky Gervais: Remember when people still thought saying something clumsy and then lingering was funny? Ricky does. Everyone else moved on the second his clumsy twaddle - AKA The Invention of Lying - hit the screen.

Australian films: Because whether you like crime films or not, Two Fists One Heart and The Combination would have gone direct to DVD anywhere else in the world. Others like Last Ride simply proved we like our arthouse a little too much.

Vampires and Werewolves: Two great tastes that taste crap together. Twilight: New Moon was, er, not good - but really, neither was Underworld 3.

Horror films: Mostly because Friday the 13th was pointless. Oh, and Case 39 was the worst evil kid movie of the year.

Horror-comedies: Lesbian Vampire Killers sucked in all the wrong ways. And if you don't think Dance Flick belongs here, you didn't suffer through it.

Chick flicks: Sure, it's easy to pick on them - but that's because films like Bride Wars and He's Just Not That Into You and The Ugly Truth are just no damn good. Confessions of a Shopaholic did have its moments though.

Action films: 12 Rounds got a cinema release but Crank 2 and Punisher: War Zone didn't? Weak.

Spin-offs: They almost always suck. Still, you might have thought Wolverine would have got it right. And you'd have been wrong.

Remakes and sequels: They got The Taking of Pelham 123 right the first time - why do it again? Saw 6? Even the fans stayed away from that one. And don't even mention Terminator: Salvation.

And the worst film of the year? No question or doubt: All About Steve. It's only because she always has at least two movies in the pipline that Sandra Bullock even has a future after this nightmare of a stinker. And even her emergency planning shouldn't be enough to salvage her career after laying a turd this big.

Anthony Morris (this appeared in Forte #470)

Sherlock Holmes

2009-12-21T17:32:00.000-08:00

It’s no news flash that in making the 19th century Sherlock Holmes work as a movie character in the 21st century, director Guy Ritchie (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Swept Away) has had to make a few subtle (and a few not-so-subtle) changes. Part of the fun that comes from watching this particular version – and thankfully, this version is a lot of fun – is seeing the ways that Holmes has been updated while still keeping his core essence intact. For example, Holmes (played to the hilt by Robert Downey Jr) isn’t above going the punch, but by using his much-famed powers of deduction he can deduce the best ways to incapacitate his opponents. So while Holmes now gets involved in the kind of big action set-pieces movie-goers like to see these days, his core – that of a man who uses deduction to outsmart his opponents – remains for the most part intact.

Downey’s the current Hollywood champ as far as being a charming smart-arse while still hinting at depths within goes, which means you couldn’t ask for a better Holmes. Jude Law as Watson has a slightly more thankless role but he brings real life to it, and while the buddy-banter between Holmes and Watson isn’t perfect, they have real chemistry together. For the most part the story gives the cast plenty of space to be charming while providing a number of moderately interesting mysteries for Holmes to tackle in between dodging explosions and getting into punch-ups. The plot itself is a little thin – black magician and serial killer Lord Blackwood (Mark Stone) conducts an evil scheme seemingly from beyond the grave – but it moves fast, has enough twists to keep things engaging, and never forgets that for all the talk of magic and secret societies, Holmes is about explaining things logically. Anyway, the real fun in a Sherlock Holmes story is Holmes himself and this particular Holmes is a lot more fun to watch than most.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #470)

The Fantastic Mr. Fox

2009-11-21T17:29:00.000-08:00

This really shouldn’t work. Director Wes Anderson (Rushmore, The Life Aquatic) is known for a lot of things, but stop-motion animation and kids films aren’t two of them. And yet, his adaptation of the much-loved Roald Dahl tale is funny, exciting, and a flat-out joy from start to finish. While filling the film with his typical quirky and deadpan touches, Anderson sticks close to Dahl’s story of Mr. Fox (the voice of George Clooney) and the time he took on a trio of nasty local farmers in a battle that soon takes on epic proportions. So fans of the book have little to fear here; likewise, fans of Anderson’ earlier films will soon discover that – despite being both a children’s story, and done entirely in stop-motion animation – this is as much part of his own unique world as any of his other films (and not just because Bill Murray does the voice of Mr. Fox’s badger lawyer – Mr. Fox’s wife paints landscape with thunderstorms, which is about as Anderson-esque a touch as you can get). But while Anderson’s last few films have increasingly left the comedy side of things behind, this packs in a steady stream of jokes, one-liners, and just plain funny pieces of animation. If you’re already a fan of Anderson’s work just seeing various wild animals using his style of deadpan, self-depreciating comedy in a claymation replica of his quasi-1960s world is hilarious; even if you’re not, this extremely funny film for all ages is something special.

The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

2009-11-01T22:48:00.000-08:00

Good or bad – and lately it's been mostly bad (The Brothers Grimm, anyone?) – there's always one thing you can say about a Terry Gilliam film: it won't look like anything else out there. Telling an interesting story, on the other hand, isn't always his strong point. So the good news here is that Gilliam's created a story that does an excellent job of allowing his visual imagination free reign while giving us a reason to care about the characters walking through the results of that imagination.

The immortal Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer) travels London putting on a rickety carnival show that allows people to have their dreams reflected back to them. Unfortunately, Parnassus' various deals with the devil (Tom Waits) over the years means he now has to find five customers in three days or the Devil gets his daughter. Fortunately, he has the mysterious hanged amnesiac "George" (Heath Ledger, not on his best form here in what is really a supporting role) to help him. But what exactly is George's game?

Despite Ledger's death during filming the story holds together surprisingly well (Jude Law, Johnny Depp and Colin Firth play George inside Parnassus' dream world). It makes emotional rather than logical sense, but that's enough to support Gilliam's astounding and mind-bending fantasy landscapes. They're more than worth the price of admission; you won't see anything else one screen like the things you'll see here.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #466)

All About Steve

2009-11-01T22:45:00.000-08:00

When we're introduced to Mary Horowitz (Sandra Bullock) at the beginning of All About Steve, it'd be handy to know whether she's a hero we should cheer for or a total fruitloop we should laugh at. But instead of laying down those basic rules, we see her acting "quirky" - which basically means she wears red boots, talks all the time, lives with her parents (temporarily) and puts together crossword puzzles for a living. Annoying? yes. A complete freak? Hardly. Yet no sooner has the film begun than every single person she meets – including her boss and a bunch of kids at a careers day (why is a woman with no kids, no siblings and no friends at a school careers day?) – is telling her she's a loser because she doesn't have a man.

So when she goes on a blind date that very night and the guy turns out to be the hunky Steve (Brad Cooper), she tries to have sex with him in his car parked outside her parents house - before they go on the date. Steve isn't supposed to be gay, but still knocks back a sexually willing woman who looks like Sandra Bullock. So she decides to follow Steve across country as he works as the cameraman for roving news jerk Hughes (Thomas Haden Church), and suddenly it feels like we should be siding with Steve as the crazy stalker lady keeps turning up in his life.

Maybe if All About Steve was funny this wouldn't matter. However, this is a romantic comedy without either romance or comedy, and so scene after scene clunks along painfully until the whole story grinds to a halt with Mary at pretty much the exact same spot in her life she started at. Even Thomas Haden Church - always funny playing a self-obsessed jerk - can't make the dull dialogue work. Why would you go see this? Unless you hate yourself, you wouldn’t. And no-one hates themselves this much.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #466)

Whip It

2009-11-01T22:44:00.000-08:00

Sports movies are usually more miss than hit. Whip It bucks that trend, thanks to an obvious yet often overlooked approach: take the time to create characters we can care about. It doesn't hurt that the sport itself is exciting, or that the film actually manages to explain what's happening in a way that makes the matches interesting to watch. But the real story here is the coming of age of seventeen year old Bliss (Ellen Page), a misfit in small town Texas who endures her mother's obsession with beauty pageants but yearns for something more in her heart. Who knew that "something more" would turn out to be a trashy sport where burly tattooed women with fake tough-guy names race around a track putting the hurt on each other?

Once Bliss sees roller derby she's in love, but while a childhood spent on skates means she's a natural fit for the last-placed team The Hurl Scouts, the age restrictions mean she has to keep her teenage status a secret - the kind of secret you know will come back to haunt her. Her growing fame as roller derby star Babe Ruthless is giving her the confidence to crash-tackle obstacles at work and school, but at home her mother (Marsha Gay harden) could be a tougher nut to crack.

As a tale of female empowerment this is pretty much by the numbers, but Page has real charm and the supporting cast (including director Drew Barrymore, Juliette Lewis and Zoe Bell) is strong across the board. The sports scenes are fun too, and while at close to two hours it's a little long, it is juggling a lot - what with sports troubles, family troubles, boyfriend troubles, and so on. Barrymore holds it all together well: this comes alive in the on-track scenes, but if we didn't care about the characters it wouldn't matter one bit.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #465)

The Final Destination 3-D

2009-11-01T22:39:00.000-08:00

Ahh, gimmicks: is there nothing they can't improve? Even the Final Destination franchise, which had managed to turn out three surprisingly entertaining films (this is actually the fourth, despite 3-D being traditionally reserved for the third film in a series - this should really have been called Final Destination 4-d: The Fourth Dimension is Fear) out of perhaps the lamest horror-movie idea ever, turns out to look all shiny and new after a going over with the 3-D brush. As with every other Final Destination movie, the story remains exactly the same: a group of blandly good-looking young folk somehow manage to cheat Death, only to have Death - and that capital-D is there for a reason - decide he's got unfinished business with them.

Thing is, Death (who never actually appears in the film, but seems to be fond of heavy-handed puns appearing in newspapers, dialogue, movie titles and business names) doesn't just kill people via a heart attack or slow cancer, oh no. Death's all about the amazingly complicated chain of co-incidences Mousetrap board game style that end up with a pool drain sucking out your organs, a busted escalator chewing off your legs, a hospital therapy pool crashing through a ceiling onto your head or your guts being mashed through a egg-slicer-style fence. In 3-D! These movies are all about the death-traps and there's plenty of fun to be had trying to figure out exactly which bit of rickety wiring is going to explode and kill the next loser on Death's list. At 80-odd minutes it doesn't overstay it's welcome either - but we're probably not going to need a Final Destination 5 any time soon.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #465)

Mao's Last Dancer

2009-11-01T22:34:00.000-08:00

When Li Cunxin (Chi Cao) is sent to Texas as part of the Chinese ballet's cultural exchange program, he might as well be travelling to another planet. The year is 1979, disco rules the dance floor, and even poor English and a bad suit isn't enough to isolate a visitor from the temptations of the West when even the Chinese food is different. But for Li, who was taken from his isolated village as a child and has spent his entire life training to be both a dancer and a communist, it's not until he finds love that he finds what the West has to offer too much to resist. With the help of a few friends, he announced that he won't be returning to China - which is a nice idea in theory, but in practice the Chinese government doesn't just let it's prized dancers walk out the door.

Now living in Australia (and married to a former member of the Australia ballet), Cunxin's memoir has been a best-seller, and director Bruce Beresford has turned it into a solid, competent film that ticks all the boxes but only rarely leaps into life. Surprisingly, it's the largely dance-free scenes in China covering Cunxin's early life that are the most visually stunning and dramatically compelling moments in the film: in contrast Texas is ugly (it's hard to know whether the cheap look comes from budget costs or a totally accurate representation of the era's now-dated look), predictable, and populated by Australians putting on bad accents. It falls on Cao to hold the film together with a consistently convincing performance – a performance that's made all the more impressive when combined with a string of breath-taking dance numbers that make this sometimes blunt and occasionally clumsy effort rewarding viewing.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #464)

Stone Bros.

2009-11-01T22:12:00.000-08:00

Stoner comedies are hardy new in the rest of the world, but for some reason Australia has lagged behind when it comes to setting two choof-happy buddies out on an adventure. So not only is Stone Bros. ground-breaking in that direction, but as an indigenous comedy it's pretty much got that field all to itself too. As you'd expect, the story's simple: citified Eddie (Luke Carrol) is driving back to home town to see his uncle. Along for the ride is his cousin Charlie (Leon Burchill), a man with big hair and an even bigger bag full of pre-rolled joints. Their actual adventures along the way are pretty ramshackle stuff, but the duo themselves are fairly likeable - and more importantly for this kind of low-end comedy, the whole thing moves along smoothly so that when a joke tanks it's not the end of the world. There's not really enough going on here for a feature-length film (a lot of the subplot activity fails to fire), and like a lot of stoner comedies it runs out of puff well before the finish line. It's likeable enough to work if you're a fan of the genre, or maybe if you're in the mood to check out something different from the usual local films, but it's hardly going to change the course of your evening - let alone Australian cinema.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #464)

Charlie & Boots

2009-09-27T06:38:00.000-07:00

Maybe it's time to face facts: Paul Hogan just doesn't want to be funny any more. Or at least, he doesn't want to be funny like he used to be. Not for him the laugh-out-loud days of his various TV series and the first Crocodile Dundee: now he happily sticks to bland but watchable family films - and frustratingly, there's usually just enough going on to suggest that he could still get big laughs... if he wanted to.

So how much you'll enjoy this gentle tale of a recently widowed farmer (Hogan) whose estranged son (Shane Jacobson) decides to take him on a road trip from Warnambool to Cape York depends on you. Hoges fans will enjoy his quality grumpy old man work (no-one says "dickhead" like Hoges), the chemistry between him and Jacobson, and the occasional glimpse of Hoges' ability as a straight actor. Everyone else will be left watching a moderately fun travelogue through rural Australia that goes out of its way to leave no impression whatsoever on the viewer.

It’s hard to really say anything bad about this film, because it clearly achieves everything it sets out to do – it’s just that it sets out to make the kind of cozy, inoffensive movie that even those who enjoy will have difficulty remembering the next day. "Gentle" isn't an insult when it comes to this kind of film, but unless you have an elderly relative to take along you might look a little out of place. If Hoges ever sets out to make another full-on comedy he’ll be dangerous; until then, this is merely a reminder that he’s still got it… and can’t be bothered using it.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #461)

(500) Days of Summer

2009-09-27T06:20:00.000-07:00

There's a big difference between describing an event and actually having something to say about that event. 500 Days of Summer makes the mistake of thinking that a fancy structure - in this case, various days in a 500 day relationship are sometimes shown out of order so that we get a grumbly day 350 after a perky day 50 - adds depth to a fairly lightweight story. But like all relationships, it starts out strong as a greeting card writer (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) meets and falls for office assistant Summer (Zooey Deschanel), who kinda doesn't fall for him but goes along with it for a while.

There's a light touch to events (a dance number is a highlight) and the occasional shifts in time serve to highlight the roller-coaster nature of a relationship's early days and how jokes can go stale over time. But as the film progresses it doesn't get any deeper: we can see that Summer isn't into him as much as he's into her and when things go sour he's put through hell, but there's really nothing more to this film than that. It's too even-handed to really get into the pain of being dumped: we're shown that it's as much his fault as hers, and the single line where any kind of hurt is addressed ("you pretty much just do what you want") feels like the only true thing this film has to say.

It's nice for the characters that they're all so adult about things, but when a lightweight relationship segues into a lightweight breakup it makes for a fairly, well, lightweight viewing experience no matter how charming it seems.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #462)

Funny People

2009-09-26T08:35:00.000-07:00

In the past Judd Apatow has been really, really good at finding ways to find the comedy in real people. Much of it's thanks to his much-vaunted commitment to improvisation - anyone who's watched the extras to The 40 Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up will know that he lets his actors run on and on looking for the funny. But it also comes from telling stories that have a nugget of truth buried deep in the wacky set-ups and endless dick jokes. The 40 Year-Old Virgin was at it's heart the story of a guy becoming someone who could have a relationship, Knocked Up was about how tricky is it to become a father, and now with Funny People we get to see Apatow talking about what it takes to settle down into a proper adult life.

But being an Apatow film, it doesn't start off as a lecture on adult responsibilities: it starts off with would-be stand up comic Ira (Seth Rogen) trying to get his career going. While his flatmates seem to be climbing the career ladder just fine - Mark (Jason Schwartzman) is the star of a crappy sitcom called Yo, Teach! while Lee (Jonah Hill) seems to be free of self-doubt, perhaps because everyone loves a funny fat man - the slimmed down Ira is racked with doubt. Meanwhile, George Simmons (Adam Sandler) is a massive comedy star thanks to what seems to be a stream of fairly lame gimmick movies (he's a merman; he's a baby again) and yet lives alone in his huge mansion, perhaps because he doesn't exactly seem all that likeable. Then he gets a rare, fatal blood disease and through a chain of circumstances ends up hiring Ira as a joke writer because hey, he's not feeling all that funny at the moment.

What develops between them is the usual Apatow male bond, but Sandler - who's in amazing form here in a largely serious role - and Rogen bring a heavy core to their banter and gags that gives the film a heft Apatow's previous films didn't have. But just when you think you've got this film pegged as a serious tale made tolerable through humour, there's a twist: Simmons gets better. With a new lease on life, he decides to rectify the mistakes of the past. Namely letting true love Laura (Leslie Mann) get away. She's now married (to Eric Bana, who is hilarious here) but a new life is tempting, and suddenly we've gone from a film about struggling comics to a family drama.

The shift works even though most of the comedy falls away for a while, but it gives the film an odd rambling feel, like it would have worked better as a TV mini-series. But Apatow knows what he's doing, and he knows what he wants to say; if you're willing to go with it, you'll find there's a lot to like about Funny People.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #461)

Balibo

2009-08-12T07:01:00.000-07:00

Australian films are traditionally cool, calm and collected even when dealing with the most sensational subject matter (just check out the way Beautiful Kate deals with the biggest taboo around). Balibo runs against that trend: it's angry that five Australian journalists died at Balibo, it's angry that thousands of Timorese died in the invasion and its aftermath, and it's angry that the Australia government did nothing to prevent it from happening.

Our guide through the emotional roller-coaster of late 1975 is Australian journalist Roger East (Anthony LaPaglia), who goes from barely interested outsider to a man so passionately angry about the events of the Indonesian invasion that he's willing to risk everything to get the truth out there. As East heads out into the strife-torn countryside to investigate the disappearance of the Balibo Five the film becomes a gripping look at the horrors of war, and as such it's one of the most powerful Australian films of recent times.

The flashbacks to the Balibo Five's final few weeks are skilfully done and often deeply moving, and the depiction of East Timor's final few weeks of independence is surprisingly layered and complex. But just because it's powerful doesn't mean it's perfect: director Robert Connolly (The Bank, Three Dollars) is so committed to stirring up the audiences outrage that occasionally he oversteps the mark and goes from agiprop to outright parody. The film doesn't exactly end with someone being gunned down against the backdrop of an Australian flag left splattered with their blood... but it comes close.

Balibo is to be applauded for having the courage to want to make an audience feel strongly about an issue, and for being both a compelling wartime drama and a chilling reminder of the brutalities that have taken place on our doorstep in the recent past. But if you're looking for nuance or subtlety, look elsewhere.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #459)

Beautiful Kate

2009-08-12T06:55:00.000-07:00

How many more Australian films about families with dark secrets do we need? Usually the answer would be "none", but in Beautiful Kate's case there's a reasonable case for an exception. For one thing, first time feature writer / director Rachel Ward has put together a compelling collection of characters in her adaptation of the 1980's novel by Newton Thornberg. Shifting the location from a farm on the outskirts of Chicago to the fringes of the outback, she also takes full opportunity of the magnificent scenery (and the unsightly junk people have dumped there) to create a truly evocative backdrop for, well, a family with a dark secret in its past.

When Ned (Ben Mendelsohn) returns home to the family farm with a girlfriend (Maeve Dermody) half his age, the real surprise is that he's come back at all. His father (Bryan Brown, who also produces) might be dying but there's been no love lost between the pair since he left his family behind after the deaths of his brother and his twin sister Kate (Sophie Lowe). So while the surviving sister (Rachel Griffiths) looks after their still bitter father, the tensions between father and son rapidly return to their former intensity - even as returning home stirs up memories of the siblings coming-of-age, and how it all went tragically wrong.

With great performances all around (especially from newcomer Lowe) and a story that constantly moves forward this gets pretty much everything right... apart from the dark secret at the heart of the family. This particular secret is rapidly becoming a cliche in Australian film and, while plausible here, remains both jarring and a revelation that doesn't sit well with the rest of the film. There's no denying that Beautiful Kate is a class act all around, a well-crafted and visually stunning drama - but how many films about families with dark secrets does one country need?

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #458)

Drag Me to Hell

2009-08-12T06:43:00.000-07:00

Back before the Spider-Man series, writer / director Sam Raimi was best known for the Evil Dead movies, in which monsters, gore and goop were flung about with thrilling abandon. Whether Raimi wanted a break from superhero antics or just felt it was time to show the current crop of dour torture-porn-obsessed horror directors how it's done, his latest film Drag Me to Hell is about as good a time as it's possible to have watching someone get their face chewed on my a slobbering, toothless old lady - which turns out to be a heck of a lot.

Bank loans officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) is under the pump from all directions to get ahead in her career. Her boyfriend's family think she's a loser, and if she doesn't get an upcoming promotion she'll be working for the smarmiest guy ever. So when an old gypsy woman comes in looking for a third extension to her home loan, she grits her teeth and knocks her back - even when the gypsy is begging on her knees. But what's good in the work of banking isn't quite so good outside in her car: the gypsy attacks (in the first of many battles that are cartoony over-the-top yet jump-in-seat scary) and ends up laying a curse that means in three days Christine will be dragged to Hell. And, thanks to a pre-opening credit sequence where we see a Mexican boy foolish enough to steal a gypsy's silver chain suffer the same fate, we know the gypsy's not messing around.

Big on slime and goo and people vomiting maggots but not on gore or anything truly nasty, this is a thrill-ride in the best sense of the word, with plenty of touches of sly humour to let you know you're in safe hands once people start getting possessed and spraying co-workers with blood. But be warned: if you're the kind of person who wonders why someone would have an anvil dangling from the ceiling of their back shed (making it oh-so-handy for dropping onto a ghoul's head), you're in the wrong cinema.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #458)

Public Enemies

2009-08-12T06:39:00.000-07:00

When director Michael Mann (Heat, Miami Vice) embraced digital video cameras with his Tom Cruise thriller Collateral, it was seen as a legitimate stylistic choice for that film's gritty late-night urban setting. But using the same cutting-edge video cameras to film Public Enemies might raise a few eyebrows, seeing as it's the story of the last few months in the life of notorious bank robber and US public enemy number one John Dillinger (Johnny Depp), and last time anyone checked they weren't big on video cameras back in 1933. Once you get past the jarring nature of traditional gangster hijinks (complete with men in fedoras firing tommy guns from the running boards of speeding sedans) shot in hi-def video, there's a whole lot to enjoy in Mann's latest crime epic.

Basically it's yet another one of Mann's character studies where a hard-boiled crime professional faces off against his law-enforcement doppelganger (Christian Bale), though here the balance is slanted heavily towards the criminal side of life. There's some loose attempts to give Dillinger's final days some deeper meaning here, mostly in the form of a passable love story grafted onto his life and a subplot about how the rise of the professional mafia turned flamboyant crims like Dillinger into a liability for everyone, but you're here for Depp (who's great) and the shoot-outs (which are also great).

This isn't Mann's best work: the character side of things feels a little lightweight as we never really get under the skin of anyone involved, and despite the two hour plus running time (which flies by) the whole thing feels oddly superficial. Then again, so did the gangster films of the 1930s and this - while clearly an update in technical terms, and a firmly modern film in many ways - is also very much in that run-and-gun tradition. Heat still remains Mann's masterpiece, but a B+ from him is still A+ viewing.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #458)

Cedar Boys

2009-08-12T06:02:00.000-07:00

Take a group of young guys growing up in one of Australia's more macho ethnic communities, add some crime (often drug-related), throw in a blonde-haired, blue-eyed model-esque all-Aussie love interest, and you've got... well, at least three Australian films this year. Clearly it's a popular formula amongst film-makers at the moment and it's not hard to figure out why. Tight-knit communities like to see themselves up on the screen, so there's your core market, while on an artistic level crime films are a solid way of dramatising second-generation migrant's drive to make it in the wider community. Not to mention the guns, drugs, car chases, and numerous opportunities to film scenes in strip clubs. Cedar Boys works because, unlike the recent and somewhat similar Two Fists One Heart and The Combination, it's a crime film first. Mind you, director Serhat Caradee hasn't made a great crime film, but by keeping its stereotypical trio of young Sydney Lebs (one's nice, one's worried, one's reckless) focused on first stealing a drug dealer's stash and then selling the drugs, he ensures the story doesn't get bogged down in the kind of family dramas and issues of ethnic identity that are beyond its capabilities. It'd be easy to nit-pick at this films numerous flaws and (for one) the ending is far too cliched), but at it's heart it does what it sets out to do: tell a simple, straight-forward crime story based firmly in one of Australia's ethnic communities. There's a place for solid, undemanding entertainment in Australian film, and for a low-key pulp thriller this ticks all the right boxes.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #458)

Last Ride

2009-07-12T20:13:00.000-07:00

There are some things Australian films just don't do well, and they don't all involve big-budget alien invasions. For example, our films are usually lacking when it comes to generating suspense: you might want to know what happens next, but that's almost always because you've taken a liking to the characters, not because they're in a situation where you're actually anywhere near the edge of your seat. And while it might be fair to argue that Last Ride isn't really a suspense kind of film, focusing as it does on the relationship between Kev (Hugh Weaving) a fairly dodgy character who just happens to be taking his pre-teen son Chook (Tom Russell) on a low-budget cross-country journey to parts unknown, that's no reason for it to be as flat and half-hearted as it turns out to be. It gets all the things right that Australian film traditionally gets right: it's very well acted, extremely well shot, and takes full advantage of its setting (the outback of South Australia) to show off both the bush and the landscape itself in a visually interesting way. But fairly early on in the piece it becomes obvious that Kev is on the run from the cops, and as the story unfolds it's not unreasonable to assume that there's a pretty big manhunt going on for them. So for the story to then unfold in a manner that's almost completely lacking in suspense or drama is pretty much a calculated insult to the reasonable expectations of the audience. On the flip side, it's fair to argue that this is a film more about the relationship between father and son than a man on the run from the cops, but with plenty of long, drawn-out scenes that add little to either side of things there's no reason that this couldn't have done both. Last Ride remains a worthy film; unfortunately, we've already got more than enough of those.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #456)

Bruno

2009-07-12T19:24:00.000-07:00

UK comedian Sasha Baron Cohen's third movie (hands up who'd forgotten the one with Ali G) once again proves that context is pretty much everything when it comes to his style of comedy. Coming in at a tight 75-odd minutes - he packs so many jokes in you won't mind the short running time - the story is as thin as some of the outfits Austrian fashion reporter Bruno wears: after being kicked off Austrian television for ruining a fashion show, Bruno travels to America to become famous. Of course, this is just an excuse for various comedy set-pieces, from having gay sex with the ghost of his dead boyfriend Milli (from Milli Vanilli) and learning how to defend himself against a gay attacker welding a dildo to trying to broker Middle East peace by getting both sides to agree on humus and going on a hunting trip with a group of increasingly gay-unfriendly redneck hunters. Cohen's not afraid to push things to get a reaction and there's a number of images and scenes here that push the boundaries of good taste for the sake of a laugh, but it never feels gratuitous or overly nasty. Which is kind of a surprise, as various elements in the media seemed all set to denounce this as some kind of homophobic nightmare. Despite the pre-release drama, it turns out Bruno is too much of a sweet but utterly clueless airhead to be a symbol of any kind of lifestyle outside of one driven entirely by a lust for fame. As with Cohen's earlier film Borat, much of the impact comes from seeing the extremely camp and suggestive Bruno interact with real (often homophobic) people, but this time around we all know what to expect so if you're the kind of person who isn't all that good with taking things at face value - that is to say, if you're a bit of a humourless cynic - you'll probably want to annoy the hell out of your friends during the post-viewing discussion by going on about how much of this was staged. If, on the other hand, you're someone who actually enjoys laughing, then you'll get plenty of opportunities to do so here.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #458)

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

2009-07-11T20:17:00.000-07:00

Hollywood blockbusters are pretty much reviewer-proof and Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is no exception. That's because, like most blockbusters, it's amazingly good at lowering your expectations. Be honest: so long as you get to see a whole bunch of giant robots wrecking up the place, with a lot of explosions and the occasional shot of American fighter jets whooshing past thrown in, this will pretty much get the job done. And on that level this does everything you could ask for. There are more robot fights than in the first film, there are more robots than the first film, there are bigger robots than in the first film, and there's enough fighting and shouting and exploding going to make pretty much anyone not fully laden with energy drink feel like taking a nap once this all-action two and a half hours is over. But if you're interested in anything at all past the giant robot side of things - and there are a few brief scenes without giant robots here - then this is one big sloppy mess. The plot is one of those plots that's extremely complicated without ever actually getting interesting: the Decepticons (the bad robots) are constantly looking for stuff - their defeated leader Megatron, a bit of the All-Spark left over from the first movie, some giant machine that'll turn out the sun - while the Autobots (the good robots) are working with the humans to kill the Decepticons even though this is such a blatant commercial for US military might it's not exactly clear why the humans even need their robot friends 95% of the time. Then Shia LaBoeuf runs around doing something or other while shots of Megan Fox's arse flash up on the screen, and by the time we get an old man robot with a cane, two robots who talk in ebonics, and a close up shot of a transforming robots' testicles it's safe to conclude that everything that doesn't involve a robot fight is a waste of time. Sadly, because all the robots look basically the same and have this extremely complicated design that only looks cool when they're standing still, pretty much all the robot fights are just a blur of grey metal parts twisting and turning on screen until someone gets their head ripped off, which is nowhere near as exciting as it should be. As big budget spectacles go this is state-of-the-art: as a film for people to enjoy, it still has a lot of transforming to do.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #456)

The Hangover

2009-07-10T20:22:00.000-07:00

A bunch of mates go to Las Vegas for a bucks night, only to wake up the next morning with no memory of the night before and one of their party missing. Yep, it's Dude, Where's My Car, only with a guy in place of the car. That's actually a little unfair: with this kind of comedy it doesn't really matter what the actual plot is so long as you have some funny performers and some decent scenes for them to go nuts in. Which this does, though maybe not as many as it thinks it has. Guy-centric comedy might be the cool thing right now, but this film - from Old School director Todd Phillips - is actually pretty old-fashioned, despite the occasional currently-cool crude line or bewildering Mike Tyson cameo. And it's this slightly retro feel that makes this occasionally less impressive than you might expect: one of the reasons why a lot of the current film comedies work is a feeling that the guys involved are pushing boundaries and trying something a little new. It may not be strictly true, but it gives an energy to the performances and the script that The Hangover lacks. Again, to stress: this is still a mostly pretty funny film. Zach Galifianakis especially is constantly hysterical as the space case, with Ed Helms (from the US version of The Office) as the angry nerd Stu and Bradley Cooper as the once-cool guy turned frustrated family man not far behind. Any scene with kids and a taser is always going to be a laugh, likewise physical comedy involving smacking a baby's head with a car door. But when an Asian gambler character turns up with an amazingly camp accent, you'd be forgiven for wondering if it was 2009 or 1979, and not in a good way either. Which is the one flaw that stops this from being as flat-out funny as it so often comes close to being: the occasional sense that, rather than being a film where everyone involved is having a lot of fun being silly, they're just ticking boxes on a sheet labelled "Formula for Comedy Success".

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

The Choir

2009-06-20T04:10:00.000-07:00

A group of underprivileged people form a choir, their lives transformed by music under the guidance of a charismatic leader. Sound familiar? Well this isn’t the television series about the Choir of Hard Knocks. Instead, it’s a feature documentary following a group of prisoners in Johannesburg’s largest and harshest prison. Their choir leader is a fellow inmate, Coleman, jailed for 24 years for armed robbery. He’s a plump and balding middle-aged man, with teeth missing. He readily admits that his love of luxury is what got him to trouble. But here in the prison he’s a changed man, a mentor and disciplinarian to the group of singers, young damaged men, whom he grooms to compete in the National Prisoner Choir Competition.

Among the group is Jabulani, painfully thin and scarred by knives and bullets, and very very angry. He’s reluctant to submit to authority, and of course he hates being locked up in a place where there are 40 inmates to a cell, and two small meals a day. We hear of terrible violence, of an eye being gouged out by a broken lightbulb, and of men cooped up from 3pm every afternoon until the next morning, with very little supervision. When Jabulani tells of his poverty-stricken childhood, however, of being hungry and bored and hopeless, we see that life outside is not that much better.

Filmed over four years, with remarkable access, by Australian journalist and filmmaker Andrew Davie, The Choir begins as a simple though illuminating look at a prison choir working towards a singing competition. The format, if not the setting, is familiar, formulaic even: the backstories of the participants, the practising, the nerves and anticipation, the moment of performance and finally, the announcement of the winners. The film could have concluded at this point, and it would still be a fine documentary. But the beauty and power of it lie in the fact that it continues down the track, years after that climax. What happens to Coleman and Jabulani after they are released? Can they live in freedom without falling back into crime? What kind of place is South Africa these days, and what hope is there for children living in the shanty-towns of the major cities? Despite the harsh realities depicted, The Choir never loses hope, and reveals in a fresh way the human need to group together to create meaning and beauty in the midst of devastation.

The Choir had a limited (Aust) national release and will be on SBS TV and DVD later this year. A version of this review appeared in edition 331 of The Big Issue magazine.

Rochelle Siemienowicz

The Year My Voice Broke (21st Anniversary DVD release)

2009-06-20T02:13:00.000-07:00

Set in 1960s country-town Australia, this is the coming-of-age film that made Noah Taylor a star in 1987, and it’s no wonder. As 15-year-old Danny, a boy in love with his best friend Freya (Loene Carmen), he’s a wonderful mix of sensitivity, awkwardness and sexual longing. He can strum his guitar, wear dark glasses and dangle a cigarette from the side of his mouth, but he’ll never be able to compete with the town’s bad boy, Trevor (Ben Mendelsohn in hyperactive mode) when it comes to getting the girl to fall in love with him.

Written and directed by John Duigan, the film is beautifully shot by Geoff Burton, who captures the spirit of a hot golden summer where childhood dies and adult realities must be faced. A soundtrack heavy with squeaky violin is the only real drawback. This 21st Anniversary DVD contains a number of extras, the best of which is a conversation between Duigan and his three stars, now all grown up but still deeply affected by their experiences of making this film about the ‘summer when everything changed.’

Rochelle Siemienowicz

Terminator: Salvation

2009-06-14T07:55:00.000-07:00

A lot of elements went into making the first (and to a slightly lesser extent, the second) Terminator movies classics of the SF / action genre... and pretty much all of those elements are nowhere to be found in Terminator: Salvation. Which doesn't automatically make it a bad film: equalling the first Terminator is a pretty tough act, and within the tight confines of the 21st century action movie franchise there's plenty of things even a movie with 'Terminator' in the title just can't get away with.

What ends up making Terminator: Salvation a bad film - and it's one of those films that has you leaving the cinema thinking you've just had a pretty good time, only to discover that as the hours pass it melts away like a T-1000 dunked in molten steel - is the fact that despite being the first film set entirely in the machine-dominated future only hinted at in the earlier films, there's just no point to it. Again, not a new development: even the second film didn't really have much reason for existing apart from reminding us that director James Cameron was the most kick-ass action dirctor on the face of the planet. But at least the other films (even the much maligned third one) managed to come up up endings that had a bit of weight to them. This ends with our heroes going off into the sunset (seriously), with the War Against the Machines at pretty much the same stage it was when the opening credits rolled and the whole thing feeling like you just watched someone running on a treadmil for two hours. Of course, a few things do happen to space out the various action scenes between man and killer machine: it's the future, killer robots roam a post-nuclear world, and while resistance hero (but not yet leader) John Connor (Christian Bale) grits his teeth between killing robots, former death-row inmate Marcus (Sam Worthington) wakes up after fifteen years dead and wonders why everything's gone to hell. So actually, not a lot happens between the various action scenes. Luckily, those actions scenes are usually pretty good, with director McG showing some decent action chops without ever creating a truly memorable stand-out chase scene (the one thing all three previous films managed). The acting is actually pretty good too, though bad writing leaves just about everyone hamstrung to some extent. And some of the many, many, many callbacks to the previous films (seriously, if you liked a moment or line in the first two films, it's been tweaked and re-inserted here) are kinda fun. But without the time travel, memorable characters, sly humour, creepy horror, warm humanity and leather jackets that made the first film (and to a slightly lesser extent, the second one) so memorable, this is just another fourth installment in a franchise that should have wrapped up at least one film earlier.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

Sunshine Cleaning

2009-06-14T07:44:00.000-07:00

Rose Lorkowski (Amy Adams) used to be a high school cheerleader dating the head of the football team. Now she's a maid and a single mum in the same small town she grew up in having an affair with the former head of the football team (Steve Zahn), who's now a cop and married to someone else. So it's not all that surprising that she's not exactly content with her lot in life... unlike her younger sister Norah (Emily Blunt), who seems more than happy sleeping in, living with their father Joe (Alan Arkin), and going from dead-end job to dead-end job. Then Rose finds out that there's real money to be made in crime scene clean-ups, and while it's not an ideal way to make money, with her somewhat odd eight year-old son being kicked out of public school money for private school is what she needs. And so Sunshine Cleaning is born, as Rose drags the initially reluctant Norah to various scenes of violent and natural death to clean up what's left behind. For a while this film does a solid job of working the quirky indy groove, with the grim nature of Rose's job and her life in general providing a much-needed counterpoint to the occasionally too-cute or too-obvious moments that the story brought forward. Adams especially is a great performer, able to embody her characters perky charm while never fully concealing the flickering despair in her eyes. But as things trundle towards a conclusion two things become obvious: this really wants to jam in as many "heartfelt" moments as possible - even if putting them back-to-back is way too much for the viewer to take - and nobody really sat down to work out a proper ending (though to be fair, reportedly a lot of plot-mangling editing took places after this film's Sundance debut). It's not like the film just stops (though one character basically just... leaves), but for something that started out so strong, the way it winds down is a bit of a disappointment no matter how happy an ending for all involved it might be.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

I Love You Man

2009-06-14T07:38:00.000-07:00

Like every single trend since the dawn of time, Hollywood is going to run the current fad for crude yet emotionally heartfelt comedies into the ground. Foul-mouthed dudes and the women who love them have been getting a real good run at the cinemas since Judd Apatow hit it big with The 40 year-Old Virgin, and it's up to the individual to work out at which film the whole thing just stops being funny. But there's a pretty good chance that for a few people, I Love You Man just might be that film. Not because it's all that bad: it does everything this kind of comedy is supposed to, and with Paul Rudd and Jason Segel in the leads you have two of the current funniest guys in movies doing their best to keep things rolling along. There's even a decent concept behind all the comedy: Rudd is a fairly uptight guy who's about to get married, only he's been a "girlfriend guy" since his teens so he has to go out there and find a male best friend. Enter Segel, as a perfectly nice but kinda quirky guy who might only seem to be the solution to all of Rudd's problems. There are plenty of funny scenes here and the performances are top-notch, but after a while the story starts to wobble a bit - mostly because the central joke is that these two guys are having a platonic romance, and so the plot follows the usual plot of a romantic comedy. You know, they meet, they fall for each other, they split up over a misunderstanding / trivial matter, and get back together right at the end. But with two men it doesn't really work: either they'd ignore the problem, or if it was too big to ignore they'd just punch each other out or never speak to each other again. Which they can't do with this formula, so the final act feels a little weak as they just sorta drift apart a bit. This film’s minor wobbles aren’t anywhere near enough to say this genre is dead, but it's starting to look a little unsteady.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

Two Lovers

2009-06-14T07:30:00.000-07:00

It's love triangle time, as Leonard (Joaquin Phoenix) returns to New York and his Jewish parents after a relationship break-up that - together with his bipolar disorder - has left him occasionally suicidal, only to find two women vying for his heart. Well, maybe "vying" isn't the right word: Sandra (Vinessa Shaw) is the nice Jewish girl his parents set him up with, only it doesn't take much reading between the lines to notice that she was the one with her eye firmly on him even before his parents played matchmaker. Problem is, his new neighbour Michelle (Gwyneth Paltrow) has caught his eye, and he finds himself increasingly drawn to her despite the fact she's currently having an affair with a married man and might just be a little too fond of the drugs.

Director James Gray manages to keep a fairly straightforward love triangle tale interesting with a story that's frayed at the edges - not everything here actually means something, so there's plenty of elements you might expect to turn into something more that just end up being part of the texture of their lives. Phoenix gives yet another compelling performance, while both female leads make an impact. Unfortunately towards the end the rails the plot is running on start to become obvious, and the conclusion becomes obvious three or four scenes beforehand. But this is a film that's as much about mood and tone as it is how the romance ends up, and on that level this will stay with you long after the final scene.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

Adventureland

2009-06-14T07:19:00.000-07:00

The year is 1987, and James (Jesse Eisenberg) is fresh out of high school with a pocketful of dreams. Unfortunately, dreams are all that are left in his pocket after work trouble means his parents pull the plug on the money that would have enabled him to travel across Europe and he's forced to get a job at local - and very cruddy - amusement park Adventureland. There he gets to oversee various extremely rigged games, risk death at the hands of patrons who don't mind cheating - and going for a knife - when a "big-ass panda" is at stake, and generally feel like he's wasting his life. Things start to turn around once he gets a handle on his fellow workmates, including the musician / handyman who supposedly once jammed with Lou Reed, Mike (Ryan Renyolds), the pipe-smoking brainy dork Joel (Martin Starr from Freaks & Geeks), and most importantly, Em (Kristen Stewart from Twilight), an indy music chick with just the right attitude to pull the smart boys. So why she's secretly having an affair with the married Mike is a bit of a mystery. Not that James knows that as the bond between them grows and it slowly starts to look like he might finally get a chance to lose his virginity... if he doesn't screw it up, that is. Smart, funny, with a great (if seedy) atmosphere and a real feel for what it feels like to be waiting for your life to start, this does a first rate job of breaking out of the confines of the "summer that everything changed" genre. If you've ever felt like someone somewhere else was having a whole lot more fun than you then this will really resonate, and a string of great performances from a universally convincing cast help make this one of the most likeable entrants in the coming-of-age field in a long while.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #455)

Samson and Delilah

2009-05-24T20:04:00.000-07:00

There are movies we go to see because they look like a good time, and there are movies... no, actually people only go to the movies if they look like a good time. Mind you, that good time can be educational, or the good time that comes from putting yourself through an ordeal that you hope will broaden your view on the world. But usually people go to movies hoping to enjoy themselves, which is where the excellently made Australian film Samson and Delilah might find itself in a bit of trouble. To state the obvious up front: this is a first-rate piece of story-telling, and a clear front-runner for Australian film of the year. Basically a silent film for large stretches, it tells the story of two teenage Aborigines living in a small isolated community near Alice Springs . Samson (Rowan McNamara) lives in a concrete shack, sniffs petrol, and spends his days mucking around. Delilah (Marissa Gibson) is a more serious soul who passes her days helping her elderly grandmother with her dot paintings. Samson clearly likes Delilah, she tolerates him, and when a series of events sees them travel together to Alice Springs the pair are forced to get by in a world that has nothing for them.

Written and directed by Warwick Thornton, his first feature-length film draws you into a world many of us know nothing about, and in the early scenes there are moments of comedy and warmth that bring the leads (who both give compelling and completely believable performances) to well-rounded life. But this isn't just a character study, and once the duo relocate to Alice Springs it all comes crushing down in a series of extremely bleak scenes that turn this into the kind of blunt message film that most of us saw enough of at school. There's no denying that Thornton 's point is an important one, or that the events he shows are all-too-real. But when a film hammers away at the same note for as long as this one does, it's hard not to imagine some viewers choosing to disengage. Samson and Delilah contains some excellent film-making and an extremely powerful point. Unfortunately, the two don't always combine as well as they should.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #453)

Ghost of Girlfriends Past

2009-05-24T20:02:00.000-07:00

It sounds like the most painful idea for a movie ever: a slick womaniser (Matthew McConaughey) is visited Christmas Carol-style by the titular Ghosts (Past, Present, and Future) and ends up seeing the error of his sleazy ways. But in our very own Christmas Miracle - in May, no less - the end result turns out to be a lot more fun than anyone had any right to expect. And why? Through the simple application of one of the most basic rules of story-telling: if your story is about a bad guy who turns good, first off he has to actually be a bad guy. So for roughly the first half of the film we get to enjoy seeing the always charming (but rarely put to good use) McConaughey as the most sleazy man alive, riffing out pick-up lines that make no sense but thanks to his charm get the job done on-screen and seem all-too believable in real life. Meanwhile, the movie's plot moves forward briskly as he heads off to the mansion of his now-dead but still ghostly Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas, having a lot of fun as a old-style womaniser) for his brother's wedding, only to find his former true love (Jennifer Garner) there as the Maid of Honour. The ghostly goings on are Uncle Wayne's way to turning his nephew from his womanising course and into his true love's arms, which again sounds sappy but actually works thanks to just-enough self-awareness to prevent this from taking itself too seriously right up until the end, when full-on declarations of love are exactly what the story (and the audience) demand. Sure, it's a chick flick - and worse, one where the guy actually changes for a girl - but it's fun and funny, and a lot more entertaining than a concept this lame has any right to be.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #453)

Star Trek

2009-05-24T19:58:00.000-07:00

Writer / director J.J. Abrams (Mission Impossible 3, TV series Lost and Alias) is very good at what he does. But it's only now with Star Trek that's he's been given a project where what he does has matched what's required. He's brilliant with characters - so long as things are kept light, funny, and (sometimes) sexy. He can put together thrilling action - so long as we're not meant to think anyone's in real danger. And he can pace a film so you barely have time to catch your breath - which is only a good thing when the story and the characters don't require any kind of in-depth analysis. In his previous projects, these strengths have often verged on weakness: here's they're exactly what this reboot of the Star Trek franchise needed, and the result is one of the most fun and exciting Hollywood blockbusters of the decade. The story is surprisingly easy to follow, especially considering it involves time travel and two versions of one character walking around at the same time: when the evil Nero (Eric Bana) appears from the future in a giant spaceship and starts trashing the galaxy, it's up to cocky space cadet James T Kirk (Chris Pine) and the emotionless half-Vulcan Spock (Zachary Quinto) to figure out how to get along for long enough to save the galaxy from the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. All your favourite characters from the original Star Trek are here, and they all get just enough on-screen time to be both funny (Karl Urban as Dr 'Bones' McCoy is a kak) and competent, while the interplay between Kirk and Spock is the heart of the film and both actors play it to perfection. With a very large cast of characters (Spock's parents also get a look-in) and a lot of action to cram it something had to give and sadly it's Bana's role, which ends up being more of a plot device than a classic Trek villain. But that's the only flaw here and it's a very minor one: if there's a better blockbuster of any kind of this year then 2009 will be an amazingly good year for movies.

Anthony Morris (this review appeared in Forte #452)