The Film Brief

A Muppet of a Movie

2012-01-20T13:32:00.001+11:00

The Muppets

By Jonathan Fisher, January 20, 2012

The Muppets have always held a bizarre place in the public psyche. A little too twisted to be entirely for children, and a little too PG to be directly targeted at adults, the Muppets have managed to gain a faithful, loving following in both demographics. They've also been inordinately successful in attracting celebrities to their cause -- The Muppet Show was all about having a special celebrity guest each week, and their other productions often turned out some fine work from the best thespians around. A Muppet Christmas Carol is, oddly enough, one of the best adaptations of the Dickens novel yet produced, and Michael Caine is possibly the best Scrooge we've seen. So this element of celebrity collaboration and name-dropping remains in The Muppets, which features so many blink-and-you'll-miss it cameos from notable actors that it's the least the film-makers can do to insert a Rolodex joke.

This newest movie retains the self-reflexivity and twisted humour that made all of the previous instalments so lovable. This film follows the plight of Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), the world's biggest Muppet fan, born into a human family who don't seem to even notice that he's a Jim Henson puppet. Despite his very close relationship with his brother Gary (Jason Segel), Walter appears stuck in arrested development (quite literally -- he hasn't grown an inch since about the age of 6), unsure of his place in the world. After Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) take him to Los Angeles to tour Muppet studios, Walter discovers that -- horror of horrors! -- the world has forgotten about the Muppets, their studio is almost completely run down, and a transparently evil oil baron named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) is planning to buy the land and drill underneath it for oil. All of this is inevitable... Unless, of course, the Muppets find a way to raise $10 million to save their theatre. Thus, Walter and his brother embark on a mission to reunite all of the Muppet crew for one... last... show.

It's a very familiar premise, but what The Muppets lacks in narrative creativity, it makes up for in its knack for absurdist comedy. The tone of this film is so bizarre that one just has to laugh. Jason Segel is really the only human actor who could pull off the role of the wholesome and naive Gary, and all of the Muppets retain their spirit from the earlier, admittedly more classic films (A Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, among others). Chris Cooper, one of the finest actors around, lends his considerable talent to Tex Richman, who has many of the best lines and certainly one of the strangest, most hilarious songs.

Narratively, this film is a bit of a shambles, but it gets away with it because it knows it. The plot moves at a fair clip, with plenty of convenient twists and turns that beggar belief to the point of annoyance -- annoyance that subsides once the characters make a clever joke about the fact that they're in a movie about themselves. It's all very meta, in an endearing rather than irritating way.

The Muppets harks back to the kind of comedy that was made pretty regularly in the 1980s. With its completely absurdist sensibility, and in-built goodwill towards all of the characters, it shouldn't be any surprise that the world has welcomed the Muppets back in a big way. This edition of the Muppets is not as hilarious, creative, or consistently on the money as a few of the other Muppet adventures, but the spirit and humour have remained intact.

The Muppets Trailer:

Changes a-comin'/Hugo and Sherlock 2

2012-01-03T21:09:00.001+11:00

It's been dead quiet round these here parts for the last few weeks. There are a number of reasons for this -- the primary one is that I'm still overseas and in between boosting my Heathrow injection with Christmas and New Year food and drink, I've also been travelling around the lovely UK country side.I'm planning to get back into reviewing and podcasting from January 13, and hopefully by the end of the month there will be some quite big news about the site.I may as well provide SOME kind of movie criticism while I'm here. In the last few weeks I've seen Hugo and Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows. In short, loved the former, a bit indifferent about the latter. Hugo is a wonderful heart-warmer, with Dickensian flourishes and a massive appreciation for the beauty and power of the history and medium of cinema.As for Sherlock -- it was a bit of a much of a muchness for me. I was a marginal fan of the first one, thinking that Robert Downey's performance was just about worth the price of admission. This new instalment is just an extension foe the first film, and as such many of the same observations can be made about it -- hip, whimsical execution, a fun soundtrack, and a nicely recreated London of old. Moriarty, Sherlock's arch-nemesis, is the primary villain here. I didn't find him that menacing. As for the rest of the story, it's a bit convoluted. I didn't think it was really worth caring all that much about.Alright, this is the best I can do sitting on a couch in the Cotswolds, typing on an awkward iPad keyboard. I'll go into more depth in the next few weeks.

RIP Christopher Hitchens 1949-2011

2011-12-16T21:47:00.002+11:00

"I know what's coming, I know no one beats these odds. It's a matter of getting used to that, growing up and realising that you're expelled from your mother's uterus as if shot from a cannon, towards a barn door studded with old nail files and rusty hooks. It's a matter of how you use up the intervening time in an intelligent and ironic way. And try not to do anything dastardly to your fellow creatures."

Christopher Hitchens said that absolutely plastered, on the side of a road, recorded by a fan of his on a camera phone. It takes a very special intellect to come up with quite a worthy life's mantra in such a state. Hitch was/is a great influence on my writing, my thinking, and my perspective on the Universe. I'll miss him greatly.

Five Innovative Features

2011-12-15T21:06:00.002+11:00

This is an article by guest-writer Leanne Miller on five of the most innovative films of modern times. If you'd like to get in touch with Leanne about her writing, reach her at leanne.miller82@gmail.com.

The world of cinema is continuously growing and fans are constantly dazzled by the lengths producers will go to create a truly impressive movie.

Special effects, computer animation and clever cinematographic techniques are all the rage these days, so to celebrate this timeless art form, let’s take a look at 5 of the most innovative movies of modern times.

Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit

The brain child of Nick Park, Wallace & Gromit are a loveable duo created using clever stop-motion animation. The first feature-length movie,Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit [2005] brought the duo to the big screen for the first time, and quickly became one of the most popular “clay-mation” movies of all time.

Using a laborious but rewarding procedure, the film was created by moving each plasticine character a bit at a time and filming each frame. Every frame was then played back in quick succession to create the illusion of movement. Each character also had to be duplicated in different poses and in a multitude of costumes depending on each scene. The final product beams with the ingenuity of its creators.

Avatar

Avatar is one of the most visually captivating movies to have ever been made, and it was on just about everyone's tongue -- and everyone's movie review site -- upon its release in December 2009. An epic science fiction film written and directed by James Cameron, work began on the movie in 1994 and broke unimaginable new technical ground. Production design took many years and everyone from fantasy illustrators to concept artists got in on the game. A new language was carefully devised for the film’s Na’vi aliens and 3D techniques were put to the test.

Shrek

An incredibly popular computer-animated fantasy film, Shrek was brought to the big screen by DreamWorks in 2001 and this visually stunning family comedy went on to gross nearly half a billion dollars worldwide. Surprisingly, the film was originally going to be created using the same stop-motion technique as Wallace and Gromit, however, the production team were apparently not satisfied with the facial expressiveness of the main character. Art directors reportedly visited Hearst Castle and Dordogne for inspiration into the look of Duloc and the results really are captivating.

Titanic

Titanic first hit the big screen in 1997 and blew people away with the quality of its special effects. Many lengths were taken to create an epic production including scale models, computer-generated imagery and footage of the actual Titanic wreck. At the time it was the most expensive movie ever made, coming in at around $200 million, and had people running to the cinema to see what all the fuss was about. The film news sections were packed full of stories about this tragic tale and the movie is still incredibly popular today. Titanic's enduring popularity is exemplified with the news that the film will be re-released and given the 3-D treatment in mid-2012.

The Lord of the Rings trilogy

The Lord of the Rings trilogy is perhaps best-known for its spectacular scenery, with most parts of the epic drama being filmed in New Zealand. Fight and sword choreography took hours to design and illustrations were carefully drawn up to create the backdrop of the set. Unbelievably, the New Zealand Army even helped build Hobbiton months before filming and the flowers even had a chance to grow. Apparently 1,800 pairs of Hobbit feet were created by special effects outfit Weta Workshop and around 19,000 costumes were woven. A truly impressive achievement that garnered Weta monumental acclaim and led to innumerable job opportunities for its engineers. The workshop has since provided its services to The Chronicles of Narnia series, Avatar, District 9, and most recently, The Adventures of TinTin: Secret of the Unicorn.

Blockbusters today seems to have an endless bag of tricks with which to wow filmgoers. It is worth remembering the paths of those that paved the way.

25th Hour

2011-12-03T03:25:00.001+11:00

This is the first in a new breed of post that will come up on the site from time to time. I feel compelled to share my favourite shots from my favourite movies, with my favourite quotes from that movie. Here is the first.

‎"You have a son, maybe you name him James. It's a good strong name. And maybe, one day, years from now, long after I'm dead and gone, reunited with your dear mother, you gather your whole family together, and tell them the truth. Who you are. Where you come from. You tell them the whole story. Then you ask them if they know how lucky they are to be there.

It all came so close to never happening. This life came so close to never happening."

-- 25th Hour [2002]

Podcast: Arbie/The Film Brief on iTunes!

2011-11-25T21:19:00.001+11:00

This week's podcast, in which Jonathan and Tim discuss "Matilda: The Musical" (words and music by Aussie Tim Minchin), "Contagion", "Melancholia", "Cars 2", Julie Taymor's "The Tempest", and we meet Tim's pet rabbit Arbie.

Subscribe to The Film Brief on iTunes here, and you'll get the next episode delivered to your PC in your sleep.

(or if, for some reason, you still want to download the podcast via the old website, you can do so here)

Email us at thefilmbrief@live.com and follow us on Twitter @thefilmbrief.

It's not the cough that carries you off...

2011-11-10T05:15:00.000+11:00

Contagion
By Jonathan Fisher, November 9th, 2011

Steven Soderbergh's Contagion is a brilliant film that appeals to our deepest, darkest fears, imprinted into each of us by evolution. It envisages the worst-case scenario of a viral epidemic, on roughly the scale of the Spanish influenza of 1918 that killed 3% of the world's population, and infected 27%. 'Realism' is an adjective that has been bandied about in just about every review of Contagion. Realism is right. This is not a sensationalist fiction, like Outbreak, a fine and entertaining movie in its own right that played the scenario as a thriller. Instead of aiming to excite the viewer, Contagion wants us to merely consider. Consider, what would happen if every citizen in our overpopulated world saw every other citizen as a threat to their health? How would our technologically advanced society deal with nature at its most threatening? How would the psychological stress of a widespread outbreak take its toll on those we charge with protecting us in such instances? Contagion isn't a thriller. It's a Medical Scenario Presentation (a new genre?).

Steven Soderbergh is at his best when he applies his pared-back, no-unnecessary-frills style to these high-concept ideas. It's an irony that his art-house style works best on blockbuster ideas, but when he applies it to art-house flicks (The Girlfriend Experience, Bubble) he has a tendency to become pretentious and overbearing with his deliberation. There's no such pretension in Contagion, which focuses on a group of characters experiencing the outbreak of a bat/pig influenza strain with the potential to punch a very great hole in civilisation. There's Mitch (Matt Damon), an upper-middle class American who loses his unfaithful wife Beth (Gwyneth Paltrow) to the virus. There's Dr. Cheever (Laurence Fishburne) and Dr. Mears (Kate Winslet), two reps from the Centre for Disease Control who are trying to get a handle on the situation. There's also Dr. Orantes (Marion Cotillard), a WHO representative tracking the virus in Asia, and finally, Jude Law as a blogger who expounds conspiracy theories about "them" (the 1%?) profiting from fabricating a deadly supervirus.

About Jude Law. I think he's playing an Australian. He plays it with what is singularly the worst Australian accent I've ever heard. He also features an odd prosthetic front tooth. The strange attention to detail Soderbergh went to with this character makes me wonder if the wretched performance from Law was deliberate. No matter. His character's arc is fascinating. The internet may be one of the most extraordinary achievements of the human race, but Law's character represents the Internet's other side -- paranoia-inducing, ill-informed, rambling and moronic. Like David Icke, his business is spinning bullshit, and being charismatic and believable while doing so. Panic would reign supreme in a global epidemic without the Internet -- in today's world, people like Law's character would hasten the collapse of reason.

The film has just enough of insider-sounding language to come across as credible, and it certainly doesn't sensationalise the possibilities it lays before us. Dr. Cheever is a calculating, rational man, who understands that it isn't the cough that will carry us off -- it's the panic. This is a disease that will likely kill just 1% of the world's population. That's 70 million people. A lot of perished souls, and a massive natural disaster, to be sure. But that in itself shouldn't threaten our global civilisation. It would be the panic, the breakdown in law and order, the unimaginable fear of our fellow human being, that would destroy this bizarre and orderly society we have created for ourselves.

The scenes in which health officials attempt to track the origin of the virus and its progress are deeply fascinating. This is a puzzle movie as much as a Medical Scenario Presentation. Soderbergh's camera glides as slickly and as indifferently as the virus itself.

That is just what makes Contagion such an effective film: its indifference. The film isn't even concerned with the wall of immortality that usually surrounds the major characters in movies -- many characters die medias in res, well before their plot strands are tied up. It's not a conscious attempt to subvert, just a way of emphasising that our individual, human pursuits -- raising a family, tracking and preventing the spread of a virus -- engulf our entire beings and seem so important... and then we catch a cold and die.

Despite this indifference, Contagion is not a downer of a film. It allows itself to bask in a faint gleam of hope. Horrible things have, do, and will continue to happen to humanity, but we have an amazing tendency to bounce back. We live in a world where we almost feel we deserve convenience. Got a cold? Pop a pill. Want to go to the coast? Rent a car. Don't want to cook dinner? Order in.

It seems like when all this convenience collapses (as it inevitably will), we'll be at a complete loss. The reality is, though -- and Contagion knows this -- is that our expectations and perceptions of what happiness and well-being is will change. Life will go on.

Until it doesn't.

Contagion Trailer

Great snakes!

2011-11-10T03:08:00.000+11:00

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn
By Jonathan Fisher, November 7th, 2011

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn is the first animated film that Steven Spielberg has made as director, and boy, does he push the format to its limits. Spielberg is one of the most confident, assured, fluent directors that we've ever seen. Even his flops are fine exponents of the art of making a populist entertainment. For instance, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, about which he remarked, "Blame George [Lucas]. I was done with this", was damned in the court of public opinion. It featured a horrible performance by Cate Blanchett, aliens plonked into a mythology that was doing fine without them, and even guaranteed the death of Indiana Jones by radiation after that scene:

Despite its unevenness, Crystal Skull still beamed with Spielberg's energy. Even in the scene above, Spielberg makes a ludicrous sequence of events immediate and exciting.

Onto TinTin. Hergé (real name Georges Remi), the Belgian creator of the TinTin series, named Steven Spielberg as his preferred director for any adaptation of his work. The same year that Hergé died - 1983 - Speilberg acquired the rights for a TinTin feature film. Nearly 30 years later, that film is finally here, and it's quite a dandy of an adventure movie.

With 65 TinTin titles to choose from, Spielberg and co. (producer Peter Jackson and screenwriters Steven Moffat, Edgar Wright and Joe Cornish) decided to merge three of the most popular issues -- The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham's Treatures -- into one adaptation. The storyline is both quintessentially TinTin and Spielberg. A mysterious talisman (a model of the Unicorn) leads the young, spry reporter TinTin (Jamie Bell) and his puppy sidekick Snowy on a chase to uncover a strange, dangerous and bombastic conspiracy involving a loud Scottish sea captain named Haddock (Andy Serkis) and a mysterious foreigner named Ivanovich (Daniel Craig).

TinTin is a complete joy from start to finish. The opening credits, very reminiscent of Spielberg's creds for Catch Me if You Can, bob and weave excitedly, not forgetting those little touches that made the original comic series so charming. The opening scene is all Spielberg. Unlike Crystal Skull, his heart is well and truly in this one. He knows just how to reveal TinTin, the character, to us, simultaneously grabbing our interest with a peripheral story of a crafty pickpocket.

The pickpocket, at first glance, appears to be an unimportant oddity, a meander that Spielberg allows himself out of playful indulgence. The character actually turns out to be quite important, and his apparent superfluence is just the point. Spielberg knows how to lull us into a movie, how to make us enjoy it just for the sake of watching a movie. Sooner or later, all those little touches we thought were unnecessary come back to surprise us.

TinTin is another addition to the burgeoning sub-genre of stop-motion animation, and Spielberg shows us how its done. There is one chase sequence in particular -- you'll know the one when you see it -- that exemplifies the fluency, confidence, audacity and simultaneous populism of Spielberg's films. It's one hell of a ride.

The prospect of a TinTin film was exciting, to be sure, but I personally was unsure how Spielberg was going to approach some of the more distasteful aspects of the TinTin comics. Aside from the constant intimations of pederasty, Hergé was certainly a product of his time (as David Brent would say: that was back in the old days, when racism was alright), and constantly resorted to tasteless, derogatory characterisations of foreigners. Here's a couple of panels that exemplifies both of these tendencies:

Spielberg, wisely, ignores it.

TinTin is a brilliant entertainment, and certainly has the 'wow' factor we were all hoping for. Sure, it's not perfect. The story is Anglicised very heavily, with TinTin turned into (shock!) a Brit. Some of the more cartoonish aspects of the comic books like Haddock's recollection of his descendant's run-in with Red Rackham, come across as a bit weird and out-of-place in the world that Spielberg creates. But this is a return to form for Spielberg -- he can still dazzle the hell out of the world from behind a camera. Even if he's not filming real people.

The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn Trailer:

Jonathan the Jermophobe

2011-11-08T05:54:00.002+11:00

This week's podcast, in which Jonathan reviews The Adventures of TinTin: The Secret of the Unicorn, Tim frightens Jonathan's germophobic tendencies with his description of "Contagion", and the gang review Midnight in Paris (including a terrible Owen Wilson impersonation).

Still working on the iTunes feed. Sorry folks. I'm just a monkey tapping keys on a magic box. I know not how the box works. I need someone who knows how the magic-box and Internets work. Until I find him, I'm going to keep posting them like this. Thanks for sticking with it. Remember you can follow The Film Brief on twitter @thefilmbrief, and you can email questions or rants to thefilmbrief@live.com.

Here is where you can direct download the podcast.

Best statistics question ever.

2011-11-02T00:52:00.004+11:00

This I came across via www.floatingdata.com.

Halloween Special

2011-10-31T08:12:00.001+11:00

The latest podcast, a Halloween special, is now live. In it, Tim and I discuss a wide range of movies appropriate for the time of year. I also do a horrible Werner Herzog impersonation at one point.

As usual, you can stream the episode below or download it here.

And here's the Werner Herzog-read edition of Go the F*** to Sleep.

The 3rd Annual AFCA Writing Awards

2011-10-29T23:04:00.000+11:00

This coming Monday, entries for the 3rd Annual Australian Film Critic's Association awards will open. I'll be promoting this event a bit on the site, and will also be submitting an entry or two of my own. For more information, feel free to visit www.afca.org.au. They're a great organisation, and have been very good to me over the years.

Golden Age Thinking

2011-10-25T11:03:00.000+11:00

Midnight in Paris
By Jonathan Fisher, October 25th, 2011

Midnight in Paris is the 41st film that Woody Allen has directed in as many years. Quite a staggering number. The man is, unbelievably, 75 years old now, and still has the work ethic of his much younger, equally neurotic self. Allen's career is an extraordinary case study -- is it possible for an artist to create so many works that he just flat runs out of things to say, feelings to express and parts of himself to share with the world? I feel that one of the most depressing sagas in recent film history has been the demise of Woody Allen's career. A film-maker who began his career as a reflective, funny, philosophically and cinematically literate artist has allowed his work become self-indulgent, repetitive and distastefully narcissistic. People praise his prolific work ethic (I am aware that I'm equally guilty of this at the head of this article), but would it have been better for his career and legacy if he just piped down every now and then?

There have been occasional recent successes but most of Allen's films post-1990 have been a wretched combination of bland and pretentious. Match Point hit the mark. It was incisive in its cynicism and border-line nihilism, and combined elegant direction with an addictive narrative and fine performances from an attractive cast (including the City of London itself). Small Time Crooks, conversely, was as fine a slapstick comedy as Allen has made. But for every Match Point and Small Time Crooks there has been a Cassandra's Dream (a thriller that needed at least a couple of rewrites) or a Scoop (a lame-duck comedy that should have stayed in the 'unfilmed manuscripts' tray at Allen's house).

This one, a romance/comedy/fantasy film about a neurotic young screenwriter vacationing in Paris with his fiancee, is worth watching. It features so many of the Allen's favourite themes (insecurity, nostalgia, a disdain for pseudo-intellectualism), and explores them sweetly and breezily. Owen Wilson cheekily plays the lead role as Gil, a writer holidaying in Paris with his fiancee, the pretentiously named Inez (Rachel McAdams). The couple bumps into some mutual friends, including an insufferable know-it-all played subtly and hilariously by Michael Sheen, and Gil separates from the group after a night out. Drunkenly trying to find his way back to his hotel, Gil gets lost in the streets of Paris, before being picked up by a 1920s Peugot carrying two characters claiming to be F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. They take Gil to a party featuring a kind of 'greatest hits' of the world's artistic figures.

It's a fantasy world, of course (or is it?). Gil returns again and again to it, making friends with Salvador Dali (oddly played by Adrien Brody), Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates -- Oscar-worthy), Pablo Picasso (Marcial Di Fonzo), Luis Bunuel (Adrien de Van), and especially Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stoll). He develops a romantic relationship with Adriana (Marion Cotillard), who shows him that nostalgia for another time is the path of least resistance.

I loved this world, and the way that Gil interacts with it. There's a deftness of touch about Midnight in Paris. The philosophical musings that could so easily become tiresome and pretentious are eased by Owen Wilson's relaxed presence.

Wilson is the inevitable Allen alter ego. There's one in just about every Allen film. Sometimes actors revert to just doing a Woody Allen impersonation, which Kenneth Branagh did to magnificent effect (in a magnificently ineffective film) in Celebrity. Wilson here channels Allen's spirit, but not his persona. The film is richer for it.

Gil desperately wants to join this troupe of literary icons, and when he first starts hanging out with them, he sticks out like a sore thumb. By the end of the film, he almost blends into the wallpaper. Midnight in Paris, despite the fantasy and theatrics, is nothing more than the story of a man trying to get comfortable in his own skin. Allen has been toying with that idea in a number of ways for more than 40 years, and while it's easy to become nostalgic for the film-maker he once was, perhaps it would be wise to accept Allen as what he now is. After all, as Michael Sheen's character says, "nostalgia is denial of the painful present -- the erroneous notion that a different time period is better than the one we're living in."

That may sound like Allen trying to cover his own ass, but in my experience people usually hate an insufferable know-it-all because they know that 95% of the time, he's right. Allen may be an oddball director who never shuts up and indulges himself more than he should, but he is who he is, and that's all we can really ask for from an artist.

Midnight in Paris Trailer:

What von Trier really said about the Nazis...

2011-10-24T10:00:00.000+11:00

Further to last week's podcast in which Tim and I discuss (among other things) Lars von Trier's doomed rant at the Cannes film festival, here is exactly what the Dane said at that infamous press conference.

It doesn't come across well. I still think that he was partially undone by the pressure of the spotlight (let's not forget this is a man with a very fragile personality, having spent inordinate amounts of time in psychiatric wards for extreme anxiety, neuroses and depression) and also let down by his command of English, but watching it is really cringe-inducing.

Also, this is the 300th post on The Film Brief. Yyyaaayyy *blows party whistle*

Podcast: There's a Strange Person Lurking in Your Room...

2011-10-18T01:03:00.001+11:00

In which Tim and I dissect the Pantheon, Jonathan defends Lars von Trier's apparently pro-Nazi outburst at the Cannes Film Festival, and we discuss whether it's ever okay to depict a baby being raped in a movie.

Still having some issues getting The Film Brief podcast on iTunes. It'll hopefully happen for the next instalment. In the meantime, you can download this episode for your mp3 player here. Your patience and effort is greatly appreciated. Soon the latest episode will download in your sleep.

I also apologise for the opening couple of minutes -- Tim's voice is very low in volume, and it didn't show until the podcast was posted. It clears up at around the three-minute mark.

Here's an article confirming (kind of) the Ridley Scott-helmed Blade Runner sequel.

Happy Birthday Buster

2011-10-04T19:12:00.000+11:00

Buster Keaton was born on this day in 1895. A trailblazer, a consummate comedian, a daring stuntman, a cinematic lexicographer. Thank goodness for this man.

The Final Word on 3D

2011-10-04T00:40:00.004+11:00

Comedian David Mitchell is someone I agree with more often than not, and I can always rely on him to summon the grumpiness and cantankerousness that I can't be bothered summoning (for social reasons as much as laziness).

Here he is eviscerating 3D. I don't think I need to say, or write, anymore on the subject.

Podcast: Jane Eyre starring Mike Wazowski

2011-10-01T00:49:00.000+10:00

Did I mention that I'm Kevin Bacon, playing a mutant super-villain? Don't tell Don.

Wherein our hosts make like Citizens of the Future, conduct a conversation thousands of kilometres apart, and freak out at Kevin Bacon playing a mutant supervillain.

You can download the episode for your mp3 player here. Coming soon: The Film Brief on iTunes...so you won't have to go through the effort and bother of manually downloading every episode, as if it were pre-2003 or some other horrible time in human history.

Addendum: North by Northwest's rapid-fire ending (it's the first four minutes or so of the clip, unfortunately couldn't find a video that I could embed)

Tinker Tailor Soldier... Huh?

2011-09-27T20:24:00.001+10:00

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
By Jonathan Fisher, September 27, 2011

Here's a dilemma -- is it possible to regard a film as competently produced and performed while feeling absolutely nothing for it? Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy has a ridiculous pedigree. It's like the cutest pure-bred puppy you've ever seen. Just looking at it, you know that the people that created it knew what they were doing. Directed by the consummate Swede Tomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In), starring Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, Tom Hardy, Mark Strong, Toby Jones, John Hurt, and Ciaran Hinds, and based upon the legendary book by former real-life spy John Le Carre, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy invites high expectations.

I didn't understand it. I understood it -- the characters were speaking eloquent English, and the subtitles were coherent -- but I was at a complete loss narratively. I understood the basic premise -- MI6 agent George Smiley (Gary Oldman) is brought back from the brink of retirement to uncover the identity of a Soviet mole working in the upper echelons of the agency's management at the height of the Cold War.

A movie is (or should be, anyway) about so much more than what it's about, so I can forgive a little narrative fuzziness here and there. I also accept that some movies just require you to concentrate really, really hard to know what is going on. Some movies even wilfully refuse to pander to the average viewer's preconceptions of what a 'plot' should be and how it should unfold (think Tarkovsky's Andrei Rublev, an excerpt of which is below).

That's fine. In Tarkovsky's case, more than fine. The guy was a visionary genius, and not in the way that Zack Snyder is a visionary for directing 300. The problem I had with Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, however, is that it's just obtuse. There are so many middle-aged men that look almost exactly the same, with similar-sounding names, and the movie is so reliant on dialogue (i.e. some of these middle-aged, bland-looking characters talking about the other middle-aged, bland-looking characters) that it's nigh impossible to tell who is who and who did what to who.

I did read the novel, many years ago. I vaguely recalled the key events of the story. I was still disadvantaged by the somnambulant, verbose style of story-telling. I was also shocked that Tomas Alfredson, who so beautifully directed the Swedish vampire story Let the Right One In, opted for such a bland style. Is it the language barrier? Perhaps. The visuals of this movie (visuals are, of course, the language of cinema that transcends dialect) are brilliant. The threatening shades of brown, the framing of the world closing in on these paranoid people trying to second-guess everyone around them. That stuff is all gorgeous. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy gets the music right, but not the words.

Editor's note: I am fully aware that John Le Carre has an accent acute over the last e. I can't, for the life of me, work out how to insert one of these into a Blogger post without ruining the html and thus the look of the entire post. I'd love it for a reader to enlighten me.

The Pantheon (2011)

2011-09-22T21:24:00.002+10:00

#1 The Third Man

It's Pantheon time again! Good list this year. Thanks to Rollie Schott (@wideangleiris) for collating our results and compiling this rather handsome list with stills.

Jon's Picks
Rollan's Picks

1. The Third Man (-) Carol Reed, 1949
2. 2001: A Space Odyssey (-) Stanley Kubrick, 1968
3. Citizen Kane (-) Orson Welles, 1944

4. The Passion of Joan of Arc (+2) Carl Th. Dreyer, 1928

5. City Lights (-1) Charlie Chaplin, 1931

6. Taxi Driver (-1) Martin Scorsese, 1976

7. Vertigo (+2) Alfred Hitchcock, 1958

8. Rear Window (-) Alfred Hitchcock, 1954

9. Stalker (+3) Andrei Tarkovsky, 1979

10. Magnolia (-) P.T. Anderson, 1999

11. Apocalypse Now (-4) Francis Ford Coppola, 1979

12. Goodfellas (-1) Martin Scorsese, 1990

13. Raging Bull (-) Martin Scorsese, 1980

14. Ugetsu Monogatari (New) Kenji Mizoguchi, 1953

#15 La Dolce Vita

15. La Dolce Vita (+6) Federico Fellini, 1960

16. A Fish Called Wanda (-1) Charles Crichton, 1988

17. Sunset Blvd. (-) Billy Wilder, 1950

18. The General (-2) Buster Keaton, 1926

19. 12 Angry Men (+12) Sydney Lumet, 1957

20. Aguirre: The Wrath of God (-) Werner Herzog, 1972

21. Persona (+18) Ingmar Bergman, 1966

22. Do the Right Thing (-) Spike Lee, 1989

23. It's a Wonderful Life (-4) Frank Capra, 1946

24. The Night of the Hunter (+33) Charles Laughton, 1955

25. Some Like it Hot (-) Billy Wilder, 1959

26. Psycho (-) Alfred Hitchcock, 1960

27. Schindler's List (-4) Steven Spielberg, 1993

28. Sherlock Jr. (New) Buster Keaton, 1924

29. Casablanca (-2) Michael Curtiz, 1942

#30 Children of Paradise

30. Children of Paradise (+7) Marcel Carne, 1945

31. The Godfather (-3) Francis Ford Coppola, 1972

32. 35 Shots of Rum (-18) Claire Denis, 2010

33. The Bicycle Thieves (-3) Vittorio De Sica, 1948

34. Barry Lyndon (+12) Stanley Kubrick, 1975

35. The Shining (-1) Stanley Kubrick, 1980

36. Masculin Feminin (New) Jean-Luc Godard, 1966

37. North by Northwest (+44) Alfred Hitchcock, 1959

38. Dark City (-) Alex Proyas, 1998

39. Double Indemnity (-4) Billy Wilder, 1944

40. Sansho the Bailiff (New) Kenji Mizoguchi, 1954

41. Manhattan (+12) Woody Allen, 1979

42. Annie Hall (-2) Woody Allen, 1977

43. Monty Python's Life of Brian (-1) Terry Jones, 1979

44. Late Spring (+32) Yasujiro Ozu, 1949

#45 Fanny & Alexander

45. Fanny & Alexander (+3) Ingmar Bergman, 1982

46. King Kong (-3) Peter Jackson, 2005

47. Singin in the Rain (-18) Stanley Donen & Gene Kelly, 1952

48. Chinatown (-3) Roman Polanski, 1974

49. Dr. Strangelove: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (-2) Stanley Kubrick, 1964

50. Breathless (-26) Jean-Luc Godard, 1960

51. This is Spinal Tap (-1) Rob Reiner, 1984

52. Point Blank (+48) John Boorman, 1967

53. Pickpocket (+25) Robert Bresson, 1959

54. The 'Up' Documentaries (-3) Michael Apted, 1970, 77, 85, 91, 98, 2005

55. Touch of Evil (-) Orson Welles, 1958

56. The Wild Bunch (-12) Sam Peckinpah, 1969

57. L'Avventura (+27) Michaelangelo Antonioni, 1960

58. Amadeus (-) Milos Forman, 1984

59. Once Upon a Time in America (-) Sergio Leone, 1984

#60 Contempt

60. Contempt (New) Jean-Luc Godard, 1963

61. The Shawshank Redemption (-28) Frank Darabont, 1994

62. The Great Dictator (New) Charles Chaplin, 1939

63. All About Eve (-2) Joseph Mankiewicz, 1950

64. Tokyo Story (-23) Yasujiro Ozu, 1953

65. Pulp Fiction (-2) Quentin Tarantino, 1994

66. Duck Soup (+3) The Marx Brothers, 1933

67. Nosferatu: Eine Symphonie des Grauens (-2) F. W. Murnau, 1922

68. The Mirror (-4) Andrei Tarkovsky, 1975

69. My Neighbor Totoro (New) Hayao Miyazaki, 1988

70. American Beauty (-3) Sam Mendes, 1999

71. The Player (-1) Robert Altman, 1992

72. Dead Man (New) Jim Jarmusch, 1995

73. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (New) Luis Bunuel, 1972

74. The Stranger (-3) Orson Welles, 1946

#75 The Big Sleep

75. The Big Sleep (-1) Howard Hawkes, 1944

76. The Sacrifice (New) Andrei Tarkovsky, 1986

77. Le Bonheur (New) Agnes Varda, 1965

78. Shadow of a Doubt (-3) Alfred Hitchcock, 1943

79. Nashville (-2) Robert Altman, 1975

80. The Rules of the Game (New) Jean Renoir, 1939

81. The Three Colors Trilogy (+6) Krysztof Kieslowski, 1993-94

82. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (-3) Milos Forman, 1975

83. Monty Python & The Holy Grail (-1) Terry Gilliam, 1975

84. Au Hasard Balthazar (-22) Robert Bresson, 1966

85. On the Waterfront (-2) Elia Kazan, 1954

86. The Seventh Seal (-26) Ingmar Bergman, 1957

87. Children of Men (-1) Alfonso Cuaron, 2006

88. The Searchers (New) John Ford, 1956

89. Metropolis (+8) Fritz Lang, 1927

#90 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans

90. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (New) F. W. Murnau (1927)

91. M (New) Fritz Lang, 1931

92. The Lord of the Rings Trilogy (-60) Peter Jackson, 2001-03

93. Brokeback Mountain (-8) Ang Lee, 2005

94. The War Zone (-4) Tim Roth, 1999

95. King Kong (-4) Marion C. Cooper & Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933

96. Bonnie & Clyde (-23) Arthur Penn, 1967

97. American Graffiti (-41) George Lucas, 1973

98. Waiting for Guffman (-4) Christopher Guest, 1998

99. United 93 (-3) Paul Greengrass, 2006

100. Beau Travail (-51) Claire Denis, 2000

Scream 4, the new Spurlock doc, and a few more...

2011-09-21T21:40:00.001+10:00

I write from my new home (until January, at least) in London, where I'll be studying how to teach little kids how to read and write, in the hopes that one day they'll be smart enough to avoid doing this.

All the travel has meant that I have had neither the time nor funds (my media pass isn't accepted by the Brits, who have far higher standards than to recognise the likes of me...) to see any new releases. I did see quite a few movies on the plane, though. I hate watching movies on planes. For one thing, I'm a nervous flyer, so every time there's some rough air I completely lose focus on the film in front of me as I double check my nearest exit and practice the brace position. My moderate fear of flying aside, planes are just the worst. The air is dry and sterile, space is limited (particularly when you're almost 6'4"), the screens are tiny and the earphones the airline gives you work intermittently at best. Despite all this, I did my best to focus critically on a few movies.

Scream 4

The horror genre has been hijacked in the last fifteen years by sadistic hacks. It's easy to forget that Wes Craven, at one point, was quite a master of this sort of film. Unfortunately, it's easy to remember that Craven's career has also declined badly over the last decade or so. To be fair, Craven was never Hitchcock. Even at his peak (movies like Last House on the Left and the original two The Hills Have Eyes films), he did nothing more than produce competently made slasher movies. I'd argue that someone like John Carpenter did way more for the horror genre than Craven. But I digress...

The opening shot (and subsequent scene) of Scream 4 offered some hope. A pretty teenage girl (Anna Paquin, no less), wandering around a massive house in an affluent American suburb, settling down to watch a horror movie with a friend. As always with Craven, there is darkly comic twist upon twist just to remind you that he's both taking the mickey out of the genre while also trying to craft his own mythology. Unfortunately he takes it too far, and it goes from being a cute post-modern twist to being flat-out annoying. The rest of the movie has its occasional pleasures -- I liked the way that Craven mocked the way that modern teenagers abuse social networking, for instance -- but the revelations at the end of the film beggar belief. The Scream franchise is all about irony, but there has to be at least a smidgen of credibility.

On a side note, Scream 4 really reminded me just how seminal Heath Ledger's role as the Joker in The Dark Knight is becoming. The sadism and even style of line delivery of the killer over the phone in this movie is unmistakeably Ledger-esque.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold

Morgan Spurlock's documentary is utterly bizarre and completely brilliant. Spurlock both reveals the evil tricks that advertisers employ and embraces it by advertising products throughout the entire movie. I don't think this would work with very many other film-makers, but Spurlock is so likable, cheeky and subversive that he won me over. The Greatest Movie Ever Sold is definitely a head-spin. Spurlock snatches up POM, a company that makes pomegranate juice, as the primary advertiser for his flick

My favourite segment -- the exposé Spurlock does on Sao Paulo in Brazil, a city that completely banned public advertising. This case study completely decimates the company line we keep getting fed that advertising which screws with our psychology is just what we get for living in a free and open market. Spurlock interviews local businesses, and the common response is that rather than aiming to get their name out there by any means, businesses re-focused their efforts on providing good products in the hopes that word-of-mouth (one of the most effective forms of advertising) would help their brand to expand.

X-Men: First Class

The trailers (which I usually try to avoid, but failed in this instance) for the latest X-Men instalment made my mouth water. This film looked dark, mysterious, philosophical even. It is none of those things, so don't get your hopes up.

About twenty minutes into this one, I realised that rather than being The Dark Knight of the X-Men series, First Class is just a very well put together, kind of silly adventure movie. Recently, Captain America hit gold by placing its action in a well-realised, nostalgic World War II setting. Matthew Vaughn (director of Layer Cake, Stardust and Kickass) sets this origin story in the always-interesting, Mad Men period of the early 1960s. James McAvoy and Michael Fassbender, two very engaging actors, play the young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr (Magneto for the uninitiated). The legends-to-be meet each other in the plight to rid the world of the evils of super-villain Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon... yes, KEVIN BACON as a mutant super-villain!!). In the process they recruit a large number of young mutants, and the usual themes of racial politics, ethics and the politics of anger come into play.

X-Men: First Class is a lot of fun. Yes, it's schlocky, and at points it feels like Kevin Bacon's character is going to grow a moustache to start twiddling (he's that over-written), but Matthew Vaughn knows how to frame and pace an action movie.

Also, on my second day in London, I saw James McAvoy go into the Gap store at Angel, Islington. True story.

Mars Needs Moms

Okay, so maybe I lose some man-points for opting to watch this on the plane ahead of some other, more substantial fare.

Mars Needs Moms was a movie that seemed to come and go without much impact in Australia a little while ago. I figured it as a seat-filler project during a period of the year where not much is going on, barring the kids on school holidays. That it is, I suppose. It's a family film in the vein of Despicable Me and Megamind -- second-tier family fare without the consistency and bite of the Pixar films. With regards to its plot, it's actually a fairly bold premise. A kid (voiced by Seth Green, of all people) who doesn't appreciate his mother wakes up as she is abducted by Martians. What with one thing and another, he winds up on (well, underneath the surface of) Mars, where he discovers a decaying civilisation with a severe matriarchal shortage. He meets another human (rather amusingly played by Dan Fogler) who assists him in rescuing his Mum (Joan Cusack).

Not really much to say about this one -- it's not a life-changer. It's nicely done, rather well animated, and executes a pretty nice message about the importance of family.

Off to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy this evening. Stay tuned. I'm a bit too much of an impoverished student to see every movie that comes out these days, but I'll try to post more consistently now that I've developed a routine over here.

Podcast: Jim Thome is my Homey

2011-08-21T11:20:00.000+10:00

Here is this week's podcast, in which Tim Hoar and I review Cowboys and Aliens, as well as discuss Captain America, True Grit and blab about baseball and cricket for a few minutes. You can listen below or click here to download the podcast for your mp3 player. Email us with questions or rants at thefilmbrief@live.com, and follow me on twitter @thefilmbrief, and Tim @timc_hoar.

Podcast: The Beaver

2011-08-15T20:04:00.000+10:00

This week's podcast: wherein our heroes review a bizarre Mel Gibson movie.

Stream it below, or click here to download it for your mp3 player.

Podcast: Harry Potterphiles

2011-08-09T17:36:00.000+10:00

August 9th, 2011

Evolution then...

... And now.

Ooh, chimpanzee that, MONKEY NEWS!!!

In the midst of some pretty harrowing events in the world, Tim and I talk about Rise of the Planet of the Apes, Harry Potter and much, much more.

Stream it below, or download it for your mp3 player here.

Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold

2011-08-09T15:37:00.003+10:00

I was going to post a couple of reviews for Captain America and Rise of the Planet of the Apes, but I've felt too distracted by the global events of the last two or three days to focus on something as trivial as movies. The state of the world is concerning, saddening, and frightening me. I feel like this guy:

Last Friday, global shares tumbled. Really tumbled. I'm not an economist. I'm a layman. I know very little about the operations of global share markets, bonds, derivatives and such. I joke to my friends that I probably know about as much as economists do, which puts me at a disadvantage.

I know that the sovereign debt crisis gripping Europe is redefining the word "concerning", and being a US political junkie, I am all too aware of the depressing state of both the U.S.'s debt/deficit nightmare and its declining political discourse. On Saturday, ratings agency Standard & Poor's downgraded the U.S's credit rating for the first time in history. Alarm bells went off in my head. I knew, just knew, that on Monday things were going to get a whole lot worse before they got better. Sure enough, they did get worse, some say even worse than expected. To the average person, so far removed from the global brain that makes the decisions effecting these sorts of things, it seems that America is on an apparently permanent downward spiral. Fifty years ago, the United States was a prosperous, happy, intelligent nation. Now their overspending has reached truly unsustainable limits, their poor education system has produced a generation of people without the critical thinking skills needed to run a superpower. The Roman Empire collapsed, in part, because it overextended and undereducated itself. The United States, with its Tea Party-ism and seemingly insurmountable problems appears, at least on my worst days, destined for the same fate.

In London there have been unprecedented riots. It all began as a relatively peaceful protest over the matter of a 29-year-old Tottenham man being shot dead by police officers in disputed circumstances. Whispers turned into rabble, rabble into rumblings, rumblings into roars, which turned into Molotov cocktails and mob mentality gripping pockets of England's capital before spreading to other major cities. How far will it go? The police, from all the way down here in Australia, seem completely overwhelmed and powerless. Most disturbing of all, the violence is now so far removed from the original issue that it has taken upon a life of its own. This is not the work of a group of economically disenfranchised citizens outraged at governmental austerity measures, desperately battling the cost of living. These youths are not (for the most part) looting supermarkets, or other stores that provide life's basics. The looters are predominantly targeting luxury stores, stealing flat screen televisions and sportswear. This is madness. Where will it end?

Half a turn around our cosmic rock, Somalians face another humanitarian crisis. They have no food to eat. Famine (possibly exacerbated by the effects of human climate change, although it is admittedly difficult to tell) seems to have sealed the fate of this poverty-stricken country. The West could help them, were it not for the civil war ravaging their country. Somalian forces are making it too hard for food aid to reach some pockets of the worst-effected regions.

Still another half-turn around the globe lies Japan, a country still reeling from its natural catastrophes ('disaster' doesn't quite seem to capture it) from earlier this year, while also grappling with an economic deficit that is a staggering 150% of their total GDP. Tens of thousands of people are displaced, living in makeshift safety shelters, awaiting word of when, if ever, they can return to their destitute towns and cities. The Fukushima Daiichi power plant still spews radiation into the Atlantic Ocean and the atmosphere. The attitude of Tepco seems to have shifted permanently from "It's not as bad as it looks", to "Okay, it's bad. Really bad. Way worse than we let on initially. And we don't really know how to deal with it."

The knock-on effects of this are more than environmental. Power cuts across Japan in the middle of a sweltering summer, as well as Japanese frugality in the wake of a collapsing economy, have caused 7,000 people to be hospitalised since June. Many elderly people have died.

Here in Australia, life seems to be pretty rosy in comparison to most other parts of the world. We're arguing over a carbon tax that would effect the CPI by about 0.7%, but for the most part, we're doing alright. We have a decent education and health system and unemployment is around 5%. Sure, our whole economy and way of life is based on a high-carbon economy that is contributing the overflow of the global atmospheric sinks, and our political discourse is intellectually anemic and rather ineffective at the moment. But at heart, we're a fairly peaceful society.

... But, a question nags in the back of my mind -- if the UK could descend into such violent and disastrous chaos in the space of a couple of days (even if it, hopefully, is only short-term), is it possible that we could follow suit? If the United States could go from being a prosperous economic powerhouse (which it was, even until the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008) to a has-been superpower that can't employ, educate, or care for its population effectively in the space of three short years, is Australia really that immune?

Boy, this has been a negative post. I didn't really intend it to be that way. Here, I suppose, is where the positive message comes into it. I'm looking out my window right now, and all is well. A young couple just passed my house, hand-in-hand, walking their dog. It's sunny. Perhaps unseasonably sunny, which in this period of alarm and panic could be reason for concern at our CO2 emissions, but I'm going to go ahead and assume it's a lucky break in the middle of a cold, rainy week. My struggling Baltimore Orioles nearly beat the White Sox today. That may not seem reason enough to celebrate, but if you've seen the way they've been playing recently, a near-win is at least a step in the right direction...

Even in the middle of this horrible, horrible situation (or rather, series of situations) the world is finding itself in, there is still fun to be had. On second thoughts, maybe I will get on those reviews...

Seeing stars

2011-08-04T23:43:00.002+10:00

How can I stay mad at you...

On a podcast with Luke a little while ago, the issue of awarding stars to movies reviewed popped up. I declared that I'd given up on giving out stars, that I found them restrictive and more than a little pompous. You spent ten years on a project from conception to completion? Your dedication and competence is no match for this film student and his ability to apportion arbitrary symbols to things!

But, having reflected on it... I think Luke is right. Stars are a good thing. They allow me to organise my thoughts, and definitely allow for ease of statistical tracking. I'm a huge baseball fan, so it's no wonder that statistics are this important to me. I love going through Roger Ebert, Peter Travers and James Berardinelli's back catalogue, lining up and comparing what they gave certain movies with what I would have given them. It feels like the movies.

So I'm bringing them back. From now on, I'll be reviewing movies on a star-by-star basis. Anything less than one-and-a-half stars is a total loss, two stars is a failure with some redeeming qualities, two-and-a-half is a border-line call, three stars is a qualified recommendation, three-and-a-half is a near-rave review, and the coveted four-star rating is reserved for the best 10-15 movies of the year. Of course, all of this comes with the caveat that people actually read the review to hear my justification of the rating. I will, of course, keep the four-star, American-style rating system rather than the five-star Australian rating system. I look, sound, and talk like an Aussie. I love cricket, barbecues and Coopers Pale Ale. But I'm also a bit of a Yank at heart -- I love my Baltimore Orioles, Philly Cheese Steaks, and old-school editorial rating systems, dammit.

Some ratings of recent movies that I've reviewed:

Kung Fu Panda 2

Tree of Life

Catfish

Unknown White Male

From Time to Time

Super 8

Transformers 3

Restrepo

Man, this is already more fun....

Podcast: Everyone's from Queanbeyan.

2011-07-28T10:10:00.000+10:00

Hi all, Luke is away for a few weeks jetsetting across America (check his travel journal out here). Guest host Tim Hoar and I discuss Kung Fu Panda 2, the prospect of a fourth Jurassic Park film, debate who the best Bond is, and wonder whether Austin Powers still has an audience. You can listen to the podcast embedded below or download it for your portable music player here.

Tim's fine movie blog is called Not Now, I'm Drinking a Beer and Watching a Movie. Rolls off the tongue, doesn't it?

Kung Fu Panda 2 Trailer:

Age of the Rockumentary

2011-07-20T10:35:00.001+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, 15 July 2011

Does Doug Benson really suffer from complete retrograde amnesia?

Warning: Spoilers abound in this article. I would urge you to watch both Catfish and Unknown White Male before reading on. And if you don't understand the title of this article, add This is Spinal Tap to your list, too.

Documentarians, it is said, value and seek truth. In recent weeks, I've seen a couple of challenging docos that made me question the motives of their subjects and film-makers. The first is a relatively recent film called Catfish (which Luke Elliott and I discussed to some length in a recent podcast episode), about a young man who forms an intimate online relationship with a distant family via Facebook. When he springs a surprise visit on the aforementioned family, he learns the hard way the dangers of living your emotional life on the internet. The second film is Unknown White Male, a documentary about Doug Benson, a man who falls victim to complete retrograde amnesia. He 'awakens' one night on the New York subway system, unable to remember anything about who he is. He has forgotten all of his life experiences, has forgotten who his friends and loved ones are, and basically has to rediscover himself and the world from scratch. When he meets his parents, family and friends, he feels no emotional connection to them apart from mere curiosity at the machinations of his previous life.

The directors and producers of both Catfish and Unknown White Male assure us that they are 'real' documentaries -- by 'real', I mean that they purport to present factual events that occurred to people that are not acting for the cameras. Were the cameras not present, these events would have unfolded exactly as they did.

Or would they? While I found both films riveting -- Catfish for its car-crash like fascination with the psychology of lying on the internet, Unknown White Male for the perplexing questions it raised about consciousness and the sense of self -- there was something slightly fishy about the pair of them. To be fair, I'm sceptically inclined anyway, but something seemed off in both films. I don't mean this article to be a point-by-point dissection of the veracity of these films (I've included a reference list at the bottom of the article if you're interested), but it did seem peculiar to me just how neatly Catfish unfolded. The camera is present at absolutely every important 'moment' of the story, and a final articulate monologue that explains the film's title comes from the unlikeliest of 'characters' -- a man who up until that point seemed, as Kevin Smith put it in an episode of his podcast Plus One, "a sandwich or two shy of a full picnic".

Similarly, with Unknown White Male, throughout the entire movie I caught myself wondering, "Has this guy really forgotten all of his life experiences and memories?" The talking head scenes in which Doug describes how it feels to completely forget who you are almost feel like evidence hearings, as if he is defending his extraordinary claim. He begins to film his own experiences as he re-learns about the world and re-develops his relationship with himself and his family. We see his excitement as he sees snow for the first time, falls in love for the first time, and discovers the vast diversity of the planet's countries, cultures, food, people, and so forth. It's almost as though he's an alien with a clean slate, ready to learn all he can about the human race. All of this, as in Catfish, unfolds magnificently. It's a thrilling movie, but it does all feel awfully convenient, although Andy Dusfresne might remind us that if the films are innocent of fraud, it is decidedly inconvenient that it all looks like a set-up.

Why am I (and much of the internet) so intent on revealing everything to be a fake? Suspicion of the veracity of documentaries is certainly nothing new. Orson Welles, way back in 1973, masterfully demonstrated how easily audiences can be duped into trusting documentaries in his F for Fake. But today, this jaded cynicism and refusal to accept anything at face value seems to pervade everything. I mean, did anyone really think that I'm Still Here was real even before it was released?

Did anyone really think this was for real?

I partly blame Michael Moore, and partly blame the internet. Michael Moore's films, I think, are terrific. They're entertaining as hell, make audiences keen to learn more about the issues they raise, and Moore is one of the few people that can work the 'middle-aged, fat guy wearing baseball cap' look. I would hesitate to call his films documentaries. I prefer the term 'cinematic essay' or 'selective polemic' for his projects. Moore himself admits to manipulating facts and figures to suit the purposes of whatever his agenda is, and there are examples of this strewn in all of his films. A classic example was the massaging of Charlton Heston's exclamation of "From my cold, dead hands!" while addressing an NRA meeting. Moore shows this footage directly after a vignette about a young child killed by a gun at a primary school in a small town that was slated to host an NRA meeting. Watching the film, the uninformed viewer would infer that Heston's defiant address was delivered in the same town, just weeks after a young child was lost thanks to gun deregulation... Thus making him look like a total jerk. In reality, Heston delivered that line at an NRA convention months before the incident took place, and the NRA convention held in the town in question was a much more subdued affair, out of respect for the dead. If you watch closely, you can even see Heston's tie change between cuts.

The internet also shoulders some of the responsibility for this resurgence of scepticism. Who could blame us? The world is now constantly inundated with videos purporting to be amazing, real-life events caught on camera. So many of these turn out to be fake. Like all of these. Even the real videos are... well, downright unbelievable. Of course, manipulation of facts a la Michael Moore is one thing. Elaborately setting up a fictional narrative in the guise of revealing truth (which, after all, is what documentaries are supposed to do), is another. Now, after the advent of I'm Still Here, there is precedent for a documentary doing this. In the Internet age, someone is always trying to pull one over on us, and our collective rationalism and scepticism has adapted to this. Now, nothing is taken at face value. This isn't necessarily a bad thing.

I don't think it really matters whether Catfish or Unknown White Male are elaborate hoaxes. They're riveting watches, and the reflections they prompted in me were real, regardless of whether their content is or not. Mark Twain, possibly the most quotable person in human history (maybe except for George W. Bush), once said "Never let the facts get in the way of a good story." If Catfish and Unknown White Male really do misrepresent the truth, I at least commend them for doing it with style.

Links worth visiting about the veracity of Catfish and Unknown White Male:

Catfish: Real or Fake? It's a Fake... Sort of

Catfish filmmakers respond to "Is it Real?" Debate

www.iscatfishfake.com

Unknown White Male: Extraordinary Film or Hoax? (editor's note: can't it be both?)

Roger Ebert: Is this documentary a fake? (Unknown White Male)
Is it a good doc or merely a mock? (follow up to the above article)

Podcast: That's the Mystery of the Light-Making Device Solved...

2011-07-11T11:18:00.000+10:00

From Time to Time: This montage of a young boy and his Grandma playing dress-ups with jewellery they find goes for far, far, far too long.

Below is this week's podcast, in which Luke and I reflect on how mobile devices have changed our toilet habits (in lieu of the big-screen adaptation of Angry Birds), and rag on a horrible time-travel period movie.

The podcast can be downloaded for your portable music player here. E-mail us with questions or rants at thefilmbrief@live.com. Come visit me on twitter @thefilmbrief.

Editors notes:

Further to our on-air discussion, "Game of Thrones" will air on Showcase Australia from July 17, 2011.

From Time to Time Trailer

Game of Thrones Season 1 Trailer

Podcast: The Tree of Life... With Patrick Swayze, and the terrifying Catfish

2011-07-06T12:08:00.003+10:00

No one lies on the internet... Right?

The podcast is a little late this week due to Luke being out of town last weekend. Below is the embedded file of this week's podcast, in which I get scared by Catfish (while doubting its authenticity), Luke and I disagree (kinda) about The Tree of Life, and I go to town on Transformers: Dark of the Moon. You can also download the episode for your portable music player here. Email us with questions or rants at thefilmbrief@live.com.

Notes:

Here is the article Luke references about Michael Bay recycling footage from his other movies in the new Transformers.

... and here is the article I refer to about a possible fourth instalment of the Toy Story series.

The Tree of Life -- A Brief History of Time

2011-07-02T15:35:00.004+10:00

The Tree of Life
By Jonathan Fisher, July 2nd, 2011

The Tree of Life -- is it possible for human life to have meaning when this is the ultimate fate of our planet?

Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is an exploration of the macro and the micro of life's Big Questions. It's a wide-reaching visual history of the birth, magnificent life, and death of the universe. It is not a modest film. When it isn't re-telling our cosmic story, it emphasises both the puniness and extraordinary beauty and complexity of life on a tiny planet in an unremarkable solar system, explained via the evolution of life on Earth in general, and the lives of a 1950s suburban American family in particular.

The Tree of Life is a monstrously audacious film, told in a style relying primarily on visuals, frame composition and soundtrack editing to create its meditations on life, the universe, and everything. This is not a 'run-of-the-mill', narrative-driven film. It aims to challenge, and of course will be accused (perhaps correctly) of pretension by those conditioned to view easy-to-digest A-leads-to-B-leads-to-C studio films. So out of the mainstream is The Tree of Life that some cinemas have posted warnings about the adverse experiences some movie-goers may have. This film is about a lot, and while it may not completely achieve all of its aims -- certainly not to the same extent of comparable movies such as Tarkovsky's Solaris and Kubrick's 2001 -- it has the same flawed ambition and genius of those pictures. This is a movie made by a guy who knows that the high-brow film community respects him. He knows he can take his time with his projects, which is why this one has taken over a decade to reach the screen, and why Malick has only directed five films in nearly 30 years.

As stated earlier, this film is about a lot. A lot. The Tree of Life opens with an epigraph from the Bible -- ominously taken from the Book of Job ("Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the Earth?"), followed by a shimmering pattern of light that represents... what? The condition of the Universe before the Big Bang? God? Does it even represent anything relevant? As this somewhat flaky (but very beautiful) opening suggests, The Tree of Life is a tough movie to follow. Its human story of the lives of a family led by a loving but brutal patriarch (Brad Pitt) is sloppily handled from a narrative perspective. It's tough to even know which child is which -- although the black-haired protagonist is clearly Jack, who we also see as a grown man played by Sean Penn in a surprisingly tiny role. The family story also features a kid from the neighbourhood with severe burns on his head. Again, who this child is is never made clear, nor is his significance in Jack's formative years (if any) explained.

A part of me was frustrated by how little context and explanation Terrence Malick gives us, but another part wonders if this was an active directorial choice. Jack's early life is presented as if it were a dream because, as we all know, life (at least, conscious life) is really just a series of dream-like memories. Perhaps Jack's childhood as presented by Malick is a filmed daydream. The boy with the burns on his head features because that is just how Jack's memory recalls him -- no context and no explanation of his appearance.

The vague, detail-less narrative of the story at the heart of The Tree of Life creates mood that is central to the movie's effect. This is a sombre, mournful picture of what it is to live as a human being, a tiny infinitesimal speck in a vast cosmic sea. Our lives are so small from a cosmic perspective, so large from a human perspective, and they slip away from active participation to foggy memory more and more as each second passes -- how do we reconcile this? Many humans find that happiness comes when you accept your tiny place in the universe, focusing on achieving happiness by connecting with fellow creatures that find themselves in the same existential situation. We develop extensive social networks, find love, and have children. There is comfort in numbers.

The spectre of mortality and impending death hangs over The Tree of Life hangs over everything, but not necessarily in a depressing way. This film takes no stance on the deepest existentialist questions. We are born, we live, and we die -- and always in that order, thanks to the arrow of time. We can't do much about that. We are given the briefest of glimpses into our surroundings -- we are aware of the billions of stars and galaxies that surround us, and, from our lonely point in the cosmos, have been able to peer back to a brief moment in time after the beginning of the universe. Pretty extraordinary things for an ape with an over-developed brain to achieve (we're also a very vain species, who like talking about how clever they are as I just did -- even as our species battles a myriad of threats of our own moronic and avoidable making).

Sometimes The Tree of Life, as navel-gazing auteured high-brow cinema can be, is downright odd. For instance, a brief interlude that focuses on the evolution of the dinosaurs on Earth appears to be hinting at a message that I just didn't receive. All I saw was a Terrence Malick mood-fest turn into Jurassic Park for fifteen minutes. And the imagery of the last fifteen minutes or so (in which older Jack plays a game of cat-and-mouse with his younger self near the Grand Canyon), while possibly trying to evoke what Fellini did in the last act of 8 1/2, came across to me as banal and grandiloquent.

The Tree of Life certainly appealed to my philosophical side. Would I take it any day of the week over a movie like Source Code, a junky film that I quite enjoyed? Probably not. I'm as conditioned to Hollywood-backed drivel as the next fan. I would only classify this as a partial success, but then, I've felt the same way after my first viewing of nearly all Malick's films. After subsequent viewings I have come to accept Malick's talents as a visionary (and visual) director. Malick is a film-maker that, on first look, appears to raise more questions than he answers, only to reveal more and more answers on repeat viewings. Perhaps The Tree of Life is like that, and I've written this article too soon.

The Tree of Life trailer

Podcast: Super 8 rocks, Transformers 3 Pre-Emptively Sucks

2011-06-26T17:32:00.003+10:00

Luke Elliott and I see Cars 2 together, embrace the nostalgia of Super 8, mock Transformers: Dark of the Moon before admitting that we're both going to see it, wonder why the fourth Pirates movie needed to be 140 minutes hours long, and big up the sistas behind Bridesmaids. Stream the episode below or download it for your portable music player here.

E-mail us with questions or rants at thefilmbrief@live.com.

Editor's notes:

Here is a link to the article I mention in which Michael Bay apologises for Transformers 2.

Dirk's Dominance

2011-06-22T17:16:00.002+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, June 22, 2011

Rollie Schott and I get swept up by the NBA Playoffs, and discuss Restrepo and other films from recent times.

28 Days Prior...

2011-06-19T21:56:00.000+10:00

Behold! The first podcast in a llooonnng time, in which Luke Elliott and I chat about upcoming movies, spoil Source Code for everyone (don't listen to the last five minutes if you haven't seen it), discuss Danny Boyle's 127 Hours and resort to making fart noises when comparing Battle: Los Angeles to Battlefield Earth. You can download the mp3 of the episode to play on your portable player here.

Luke and I are going to make the podcast a weekly occurrence from now on. And I'm going to get off my ass and start writing regularly. I'm thinking the days for new content will be Wednesday, Friday and Sunday. Wednesdays will feature a general column (either a review of a random movie or an article on anything else that is on my mind at the time), Friday will feature reviews of new movies and Sunday will be podcast day.

Appendices:

Here's a link to the article I mention about Warner Brothers apologising for the first trailer for The Green Lantern

Here's the first part of a six-part YouTube series in which Aron Rolston returns to the canyon in which he was forced to amputate his own arm to survive (can't embed this one, unfortunately).

And here is Luke's short film, Flickan fran Aland:

Flickan från Åland - English from Luke Elliott on Vimeo.

March/April Recap

2011-05-17T10:16:00.003+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, May 17 2011

In between learning how to teach young kids to read and write and finding a school for me to do my internship, I managed to see a few movies. I didn't manage to find any real time to write about them, which disappointed me. University can be a pretty stressful place. I miss being able to switch off for an hour or two a night and engage with a medium that made me interested in writing in the first place.

I've finally forced myself to find time to write (which I'll be able to do a little more of as the semester winds down), and while it's not quite as detailed as I would have liked, here are my thoughts on some of the films I've seen since the last time I posted:

127 Hours: I don't know why it took me so long to get around to seeing this one. As much as I love director Danny Boyle (28 Days Later, Trainspotting, Slumdog Millionaire), I couldn't get myself excited for a film about a man who gets his hand stuck under a rock for five days. It's an exercise in the unfilmable. Usually I think it's a bad policy to skip a movie based on nothing more than a bad feeling, but I'm ashamed to say that I gave in to prejudice this time, and paid the price for it. When I finally did watch 127 Hours, I was pleasantly surprised. The film doesn't kick into high gear until about the quarter-way point (I found the set-up just a tad overdone -- Boyle loves his kinetic montages and bouncing soundtracks, but sometimes they feel like an easy out stylistically), and strangely enough, it wasn't until Aron Ralston (James Franco) found himself trapped that the movie grabbed my attention. Boyle does a nice job of making the solo scenes compelling and moving, using his simple fantastical deft touch that he also employed in Millions to make us feel what Ralston must have been going through. This is a story of the human life force at its most insistent, and James Franco does exceptionally well as the headstrong, determined hiker who has to make a pretty horrific sacrifice in order to survive.

Battle: Los Angeles: Long, laboured, cheesy and boring, this is the worst alien invasion movie since Battlefield Earth. No more needs to be said, or seen. Now try to avoid watching the trailer.

Babies: An interesting documentary, but I found my patience wearing thin by the end credits. Male partners be warned -- this movie is 80 minutes of baby stuff. It doesn't even have a commentary track by the documentary makers. We just watch babies do baby stuff for 80 minutes. Sociologically it was actually quite interesting -- we follow the first year of life of four babies, each from vastly different cultures and economic contexts. Much of the film is interesting in the sense that we view first-hand the staggering magnitude of self-discovery that occurs in the first year of life... And then there are funny, adorable moments, like a kid licking a dog's tongue. There are plenty of those.

Buried: This is a film that slipped under my radar when it came out in 2010, and I skipped it for the same reason I skipped 127 Hours -- it was difficult to force myself to be interested in a movie set entirely in a coffin six feet underground. Unfortunately, this one is nowhere near as interesting as 127 Hours. The premise is simple and pretty Hitchcockian -- a man wakes up buried alive. The first few minutes are interesting in a morbidly realistic way, and fortunately there isn't any awkward narration on the part of the protagonist, Twilight Zone-style ("Oh look, I'm buried alive. I'd better start vocalising all of my thoughts..."), but once a mobile phone that the man finds in the coffin becomes involved, the movie becomes pretty contrived, pretty quickly.

Insidious: I'm in two minds about this one. I enjoyed the hell out of some parts of it, and at times it felt as though James Wan (the Australian director of the original Saw) might be throwing back to the early part of M. Night Shyamalan's career -- you know, back before he went completely insane. Insidious, produced by Oren Peli (director of Paranormal Activity), is an attempt to actually make a good Haunted House movie, something that hasn't been done since... well, Paranormal Activity. The storyline is similar (maybe a little too similar) to Peli's film -- a couple with a young family move into an old house, and weird shit starts happening. James Wan spins a good yarn at times, but doesn't quite seem to know what he's trying to do. The opening credits and soundtrack made me wonder if the whole exercise was a homage to the schlocky horror films of the 1930s, but the rest of the film definitely seemed to apply a more modern style. Most of the movie is a straight-down-the-line horror film, but occasionally there are strange bursts of over-emphasised comic relief. The tone of the film is tough to pin down, which for me made it less effective.

In the end, Insidious tries to have it both ways. It tries to be a Shyamalan-esque spooker while also trying to take itself lightly, a la Sam Raimi in the Evil Dead movies or Drag me to Hell. I can't bring myself to completely hate Insidious and I admired the way that it, in parts, manipulated the mechanics of cinema to make me jump, but it didn't have enough tricks up its sleeve to stop my eyes rolling by the time the end credits rolled.

The Lincoln Lawyer: A legal procedural about a man accused of murder that is pretty much what you would expect -- a passable story of murder and power with the occasional twist and turn that strains credibility a bit too much. Not a bad performance from Matthew McConaughey here, but overall The Lincoln Lawyer is kind of cynical in the way it employs every well-trodden narrative trick that this kind of movie calls for. There's even a 'surprise witness', something that always mildly irritates me -- unless it's in an episode of Boston Legal, which is all about being laughable.

Paul: I laughed regularly and hard at this one, but as always, comedy is such a subjective genre and is kind of useless to critique. Some might think that the character of Paul is too 'ordinary' to be funny (I know that Roger Ebert, as well as some of my friends did), but I liked the fact that Paul was a movie about pop culture, particularly dorky pop culture like Back to the Future, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and The X-Files.

Source Code: This is the second film by Duncan Jones, director of Moon, real name Zowie Bowie -- a moniker that he has chosen to shaken, either because he wants to distance himself from his father David's success, or because he wishes that his Dad wasn't high when filling out the birth certificate. Source Code is a bit of a cracker. A thriller about an amnesic army officer (Jake Gyllenhaal) who finds himself reliving the last eight minutes of a fatal train bombing through the eyes of one of the victims, Source Code does a masterful job of setting up a ton of questions, and answering them convincingly while keeping the tension sky-high. The great Jeffrey Wright, who rarely does any movies these days, also features in an enjoyable role here that seems to channel Orson Welles. It's rare these days for a movie from this genre to be done this well -- check it out.

E-mail me at thefilmbrief@live.com

Come visit me on twitter @thefilmbrief

Forget it, Rango -- it's Las Vegas.

2011-03-10T15:35:00.000+11:00

By Jonathan Fisher, March 10th, 2011

Rango is a schizophrenic family movie with an enormous appetite for the absurd and more than a little knowledge about its cinematic ancestors. When I first saw the film's trailer, I noticed the film's obvious nods to Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas -- Rango's Hawaiian shirt, the barren, almost Dali-esque desert landscapes, and of course the presence of cast member Johnny Depp. Pleasantly, the actual film is a little more substantial than superficial nods, although there is quite a nice brief moment early in the film in which the two heroes of Fear and Loathing seem to appear on a highway in their unmistakeable red convertible. This movie does have an appreciation for the manic traits of Terry Gilliam's adaptation of the novel by the inimitable Hunter S. Thompson. I can imagine director Gore Verbinski (director of the Pirates of the Caribbean series and the vastly under-rated Nicolas Cage vehicle The Weather Man) telling Johnny Depp to simply rehash the mental state he captured in Fear and Loathing when recording his lines. Rango perpetually sounds like he's been interrupted taking a hit from a crack pipe.

Rango (the movie that is, not the character) loves Fear and Loathing, that much is clear. Even Rango's desperate existential yearning for an identity, and the movie's Spanish owl band's constant morbid (but funny) reminders that Rango will, in fact, die, be it at the end of the movie or somewhere else down the line, feels like it's been pulled from that source. The good thing about Rango is that its love for movies doesn't stop at Fear and Loathing, which is good from my perspective, as I'm a bit of a naysayer about that cult classic. Rango draws its inspiration from any number of Westerns, primarily from the zany Mel Brooks comedy Blazing Saddles. There's even a bit of Polanski's Chinatown in Rango, as the town of Dirt's mayor bears an unmistakeable resemblance to the vile Noah Cross, played in Chinatown by the iconic John Huston. Ned Beatty's voice work as the mayor of Dirt even evokes Huston's husky, menacing tones.

John Huston in Roman Polanski's Chinatown

The Mayor of Dirt in Rango

Rango's plot even echoes Chinatown. Rango, a pet lizard who finds himself fending for himself in the Mojave Desert after a car accident, stumbles across the town of Dirt, inhabited by... animals, I guess. These aren't the cute and cuddle animals of Walt Disney lore. Some of these animals are so mangled by their harsh environment that I couldn't even tell what they were supposed to be. The water supply in dirt is running critically low, although Rango and one of the town's citizens named Beans witness a giant pipe dumping water wastefully in the middle of the desert away from the town. It was at this point that I was expecting a badger voiced by Roman Polanski to appear and slice poor Rango's nose off.

The movie moves in a few strange directions, some more interesting than others, but even when it wasn't quite working, it kept me guessing. The last third gets a little action-heavy, as these movies tend to be. Most of the time Rango is passable, occasionally coughing up a scene that is kind of inspired (I loved the scene in which Rango introduces himself to the pub patrons of Dirt, for instance). Gore Verbinski is a strange director. When we look at his CV, we see that he has a deft hand at both smaller, 'arthouse' pictures (The Mexican, The Weather Man) while also being able to wow audiences and studio executives with big-budget extravaganzas like the Pirates of the Caribbean films. This is a double edged sword. I loved the first Pirates movie, but does anyone remember the "Attack of the 40 Foot Woman" moment in the third Pirates film? Just awful. The good news is that he's not taking the helm of the fourth Pirates film. Thankfully he seems to have shaken the franchise trap.

Rango himself is an endearing, if somewhat addled, hero. Johnny Depp, as everyone knows by now, is a terrific performer, and that applies even when he's only acting with half of his faculties, lending his voice instead of his physical presence. The film has a nice enough visual style, relying on a warped sense of reality to create its mood than on any mind-bogglingly impressive CGI or, thank goodness, 3-D. What I really liked about Rango is that while it works as a standalone comedy/adventure (one that is definitely more suitable to young adults than children), it knows its stuff. It's not haphazard, it integrates its knowledge about cinema into a fairly original and completely bizarre story that overturns what we expect when we walk into an animated family movie.

Rango trailer:

You're a Very Nosy Fella, Kitty-Kat:

Poetry through a Lens

2011-02-25T10:57:00.001+11:00

By Camiele White, February 25th, 2011

Alfonso Cuaron

Whether we want to believe it or not, the most prevalent aspect of the human sequence is poetry. Its reach is limitless and transcends media. Whether on paper or canvas, through hands or mouths, Bach or the Beastie Boys, ever aspect of our existence is predicated on the need to express what the heart wills itself to feel. It’s this desire to give form and function to emotion that allows poetry to manoeuvre itself into everything that we see, hear, taste, smell. It’s our emotion that drives us. Orthodox scientists would have you think otherwise, but it’s their will to prove the arbitrary nature of emotion that drives them to discover and create.

If, indeed, poetry is the outlet of the heart, there is no greater proponent of the craft than Alfonso Cuarón. His work is exploratory, honest, and raw. It delves deep into the physical wetness of the human psyche and its madness. Some of his most notable films take the seemingly innocent and give it edge (or take the socially unacceptable and give it virgin-like softness). But no matter his goals or his director’s intuition, it’s his soul that gives every character portrayed, word written, and blade of grass arc and perspective.

Something that continues to amaze me about Cuarón’s work is his dedication to exposing something honest about a piece. Not every action film has to rely on violence. Not every love story is one-dimensional. His courage and his boundless mind provide the audience with an experience that they can remember and take with them from the moment the curtain rises and the lights dim.

It’s no great surprise to me that Cuarón is from a school of photography and film that’s moulded and broken the platform of film and given it depth that exceeds expectation. As part of the Nuevo Cine Mexicano (or New Mexican Cinema) movement that had its birth in 1990, Cuarón along with an innovative class of artists (such as Guillermo del Toro, Selma Hayek, Gael García Bernal, and Diego Luna) saw the opportunity to open the film industry to something more primal than the golden glitz of its predecessors.

Cuarón and del Toro would go on to found a production company (Esperanto Films) that produced some of the most epic, moving, and controversial films released in the 2000s. Most notable among these are Y Tu Mamá Tambien, El Laberinto del Fauno (Pan's Labyrinth), and The Assassination of Richard Nixon. Of course, the film that converted me to the religion of beauty was Y Tu Mamá Tambien. The work is forceful, yet there’s a gentleness that soothes away any feelings of discomfort. It’s not a film for those who have staunch, old-fashioned ideologies about sexuality and its place in the world. The power of the film isn’t the sex, though it is unapologetic. Instead, the true grit of the film is its honesty. It forces the viewer to be in tune with the hormones and emotions of two teenage boys while also allowing access to the tortures of a woman who’s come to the realisation that her husband is no longer in love with her. The reach and pull of the film took me miles away from my bedroom and laid me in the arms of a rough, uncompromising, emotional lover, cuddling me with symphonies of gray and blue.

Burgeoning sexuality and middle-class guilt in Y Tu Mama Tambien

Though the mainstream world was looking to expand its poetic vocabulary, Cuarón met the viewing public at the front door, directing the third instalment of the Harry Potter series, The Prisoner of Azkaban. Gone were the days of chubby faced innocence that the three stars portrayed in Harry Potters one and two. In its place was the depth and despair of a teenager understanding his place in the world, the darkness that surrounds him as the shroud of the Dementors. With every crushed flower you could feel the heartache in the film, the need to be loved in a world of slate and coldness.

Cuaron's instalment of the Harry Potter franchise brings emotional maturity and visual beauty to the series.

Yes, there is poetry in everything. There are a select few, however, who truly dig deeper within themselves to produce it. Cuarón, along with his noble compatriots, have managed to reach inward and pull something out that’s at once melodious and discordant, something that’s as soft as it is covered in barbed wire. It’s the poetry of humanity that each of us has inside that Cuarón has manifested on celluloid, forever rendering the human microscope clear and precise.

Camiele White desires something new and wonderful in this world. In order to remedy her intellectual depression, she delves head first into films. Right now she writes for Star Costumes. If you want to engage in a little conversation (at your own risk) she can be reached at cmlewhite at gmail [dot] com.

It's a YouTube clip, but is it art?

2011-02-21T14:28:00.005+11:00

By Jonathan Fisher, February 21st, 2010

TropFest's winning director, Damon Gameau. (Photo is from his excellent performance in the excellent Balibo.)

TropFest -- the self-proclaimed largest short film competition on the planet -- has walked into a potential storm of controversy, awarding its annual prize to a short film named Animal Beatbox written and directed by Balibo and Underbelly actor Damon Gameau. I strongly urge you to watch it before reading on:

This is going to be a controversial one, alright. A cursory glance at the various media outlets, the internet, Facebook, Twitter and all those other newfangled (and far from reliable) indicators of something's popularity/artistic merit makes it clear as day that people are divided on this. Is it a cute, sweet ode to the animal kingdom that the human species don't treasure anywhere near enough, or is it a cheap, forgettable, annoying novelty video?

Let's look at the film itself. It's a stop-motion affair, and technically, it's reasonably impressive, despite the fact that it only cost around $80. It looks simple enough. There's a bit of cellophane, some cardboard, and a series of photos that could probably have been found by searching "monkey" or "whale" in Google. That aside, it's relatively seamless, nicely sequenced and framed.

So that's the good -- give it a tick on the technical side. Does it have much to offer outside of that? This morning I heard Gameau on ABC 24 being interviewed about his film. I didn't have a pen on me at the time, so I will only paraphrase what Gameau said of his intentions with the film:

I look at the state the world is in now, and my film is an attempt to step back and take a light-hearted look at the beautiful animal kingdom that surrounds us.

At least Gameau acknowledges his film's flippancy. Is it really possible to say anything meaningful about the wonderful, rich, beautiful complexity of the living world around us by merely repeating "dogs and cats and dogs and cats" and overlaying the names of other animals with an occasional vapid, juvenile visual gag (for instance, the monk and key that appear during one of the song's, er, verses)? The film concludes with a rather sweet-natured reminder to "LOVE YOUR KINGDOM", but apart from that, there is very little evidence that this film has anything to do with appreciating the wondrous, mind-bogglingly improbable and beautiful natural world around us. What we're left with is a cheaply made, relatively cheap looking, juvenile rap that certainly doesn't enchant the imagination or inspire awe and wonder.

If you have the time or inclination, check out this music video which, I think, does inspire awe and wonder. It uses auto-tune to create a lovely, moving ode to nature in the words of the world's greatest scientists and naturalists. Now, I'm not saying this is necessarily art either, but the film's producer wrote the music, melodies, and also employs some clever editing. Are YouTube videos now overtaking award-winning short films in the artistic stakes?

There is a school of thought that films like Animal Beatbox and the 2006 TropFest winner Carmichael and Shane usually get the gong because they are outside the mainstream and represent something different to the fare that usually cleans up at film festivals. These films win in part because they're unlike anything we've seen before. I'd put my perspective this way: give me something I haven't seen before, but don't expect me to like anything I haven't seen before.

Is this something we haven't seen before, though? Have a look at this YouTube clip that did the rounds, I recall, when I was in high school about ten years ago.

Gameau claims to never have heard of the "Badgers" video, but even if he had, it's beside the point. His film unmistakeably mirrors the mildly amusing but completely inane YouTube clip -- even if we grant that Gameau's film has more technical craft and prowess behind it than the tacky-looking flash video clip -- and that is not a good comparison for a TropFest winning film to draw. The closer we look at things, the more laughable it seems that Animal Beatbox took out the top prize.

I have nothing against Damon Gameau or his desire to be a film-maker. There is always something to admire in a person who risks making themselves vulnerable by entering their creation into competition. Gameau clearly worked hard (at least on the technical aspects) on his film, and being a fan of his acting work, I can find it in myself to be happy for him. I'll even admit that his film briefly made me smile. But if Animal Beatbox really was the best film at the 2011 TropFest festival, the future of the Australian film industry is in deep, deep trouble.

Update: This video was brought to my attention by an anonymous reader. I'll let it speak for itself.

The Best Films of 2010

2011-02-18T09:34:00.000+11:00

February 17th, 2011

For the first time in a good long while, Rollie Schott and I sat down and talked about movies. I've missed that. Here is the fruit of our labours -- our top tens of 2011. As usual with the podcast, you can listen to it on the site below, or download it via the links included in each segment.

Number 10:

Number 9:

Number 8:

Number 7:

Number 6:

Number 5:

Number 4:

Number 3:

Number 2:

Number 1:

Top Ten Lists:

Fisher

10. Monsters

9. Toy Story 3

8. Let Me In

7. 35 Shots of Rum

6. A Prophet

5. The Ghost Writer

4. The King's Speech

3. Shutter Island

2. Black Swan

1. The Social Network

Schott

10. The Kids Are Alright

9. Sweetgrass

8. A Town Called Panic

7. A Prophet

6. The Ghost Writer

5. The White Ribbon

4. Restrepo

3. The Social Network

2. Black Swan

1. 35 Shots of Rum

Read more of Rollie's exceptional prose at Wide Angle Iris.

October/November Wrap-Up

2010-12-19T18:10:00.001+11:00

By Jonathan Fisher, December 19th, 2010

Oscar season marches relentlessly towards us. I've been away and/or otherwise engaged over the last six weeks, and have been criminally negligent in posting reviews of films that might contend at February's awards ceremony. I haven't completely submersed my head in the sand, though, and figured that my first post in six weeks should be a little run-down of the better films that I've seen recently. Here's a list of recent movies that I think either will be in contention or should be.

Oscar 2011 Contenders Wrap:

The Social Network

About a year ago, the Internet reacted with indifference to the news that David Fincher was going to 'do a Facebook movie'. I heard a lot of people dismiss the idea as boring and inherently uncinematic, but for me the story of Facebook is intriguing -- the stuff of great drama, if done correctly. I don't mean the story of the creation of Facebook, although The Social Network makes the wheelings and dealings of Zuckerberg and the Winklevoss' (Winklevi?) entertaining and compelling. The story of Facebook itself is fascinating, its development into an entity both conscious and unconscious, benign and powerful, and the way in which it has transplanted everything about human relationships in the real world -- economic class, social status, the innate urge to categorise one's self with all those ubiquitous "Like"s) -- to the online world. Aaron Sorkin's zippy, almost affectation-less dialogue reads like an Instant Messaging conversation, and that's just the point. Shaun Parker (played more than ably by pop star Justin Timberlake) proclaims that "We lived on farms, then we lived in cities. Now we're going to live on the Internet." This line, to me, highlights The Social Network's ambivalence about its main character and his creation. Parker delivers the line almost victoriously -- The Social Network presents this line almost cautiously.

The Social Network trailer:

The American

The American: Anton Corbijn's second feature film (his first was the edgy Ian Curtis biopic Control) is a mixed bag. It opens with a bang and ends with a rather powerful whimper, but it's the stuff in between that kept me in two minds. George Clooney is, as usual, terrific in the lead role as an American hit-man who attempts to escape his dangerous life by moving to a small Italian village on the pretense of being an American photographer. Corbijn's film is elevated by his soft, patient and exploratory style, even if the bare bones of the plot are a bit bland and unoriginal (Clooney falls in love with a prostitute with a heart of gold, and develops a pseudo-friendship with a priest in which many existential discussions are had). At times, The American is a powerful drama about a man whose occupation simply doesn't allow him the common graces of life, but on occasion you might wish that Corbijn would stop lingering on the impeccable cinematography and get on with the story.

The American trailer:

Fair Game

Fair Game: A thriller about an outdated issue (the reasons for going to Iraq) that has gained a newfound relevance in the wake of the WikiLeaks saga, Doug Liman's Fair Game is an effective thriller, well-acted and well-written enough to make you feel a pang of outrage at things you probably resolved your feelings about years ago. Naomi Watts plays a CIA agent whose identity is ousted after her husband (Sean Penn in yet another splendid turn) writes a whistle-blowing New York Times article claiming that there was no evidence that Libya was selling yellowcake to Saddam, and that the Bush administration was guilty of massaging intelligence to justify a pre-determined invasion of Iraq. This, like Paul Greengrass' Green Zone earlier this year, probably would have felt more appropriate four or five years ago. The issues addressed in Fair Game are long gone. We know we were deceived, and it's almost universally accepted that the Bush administration manipulated intelligence for its own agenda. The focus is no longer on the injustice of why we went to Iraq, but on how we can get out of there. The Julian Assange/WikiLeaks saga rejuvenates Fair Game a little, as it deals rather elegantly with issues of information, how much should be made available to the public and how much right a Government has to secrecy.

Fair Game trailer:

Monsters

Monsters: This almost certainly won't do any contending at the Oscars next February, but I think Monsters, despite its unimaginative and really misleading title, joins District 9 at the top of the recent science-fiction bunch. Despite its title, this is much more a film about the growth of a relationship between two likable people as they navigate a dangerous journey than it is about aliens overtaking the Earth. Set six years after a probe sent deep into the bowels of the Solar System to investigate signs of extraterrestrial life, Monsters paints a rich, realistic world in which its aliens aren't simply scare-machines that jump out of the dark every so often. Monsters cares about what might actually happen if extra-terrestrial physiology, the properties of which we could not imagine, made its way onto our blue planet. This movie is also an independent success story, managing to look, feel and sound like a big-budget spectacular when, in reality, it was made for less than $20,000.

Monsters trailer:

The Town

The Town: Ben Affleck's directorial debut Gone Baby Gone is a near-perfect genre piece, emotionally engaging, morally confronting, and downright thrilling. The Town invites comparison to Gone Baby Gone -- it's set in the same part of Boston, its characters feel pulled out of the same neighbourhood, and its themes of nature vs. nurture and personal responsibility certainly overlap. The Town, though, in spite of its polished look, solid cast and general pedigree, doesn't quite stack up. Jon Hamm is far too clean-cut and innately honourable to convincingly play a hard-ass FBI agent who doesn't care about the rule book, and while we're meant to root for Ben Affleck's character in spite of his flaws, the guy is just... kind of a jackass. As a heist movie, The Town is riveting in parts, featuring an extended car chase sequence that succeeds in creating urgency and tension, as well as a final show-down between the police and one of the main characters that emanates Shakespearian pathos. A solid effort from Affleck that reminds us that it's no fluke that he's an Academy Award winner, but I have a feeling his best is yet to come.

The Town trailer:

I don't drink... chocolate milk.

2010-10-27T12:48:00.002+11:00

By Jonathan Fisher
October 26th, 2010

Matt Reeves' Let Me In poses a set of questions of concern to many movie-goers and fans -- is it creatively corrupt to remake a film? Is it even more creatively corrupt to remake a relatively little-known foreign film for American audiences just months after the original was released? The palpable frustration on the internet over the decision to remake Swede Thomas Alfredson's masterful Let the Right One In for American audiences seemed to concern itself with the "American-ness" of the remake. There's an unfortunate perception these days to equate American cinema with 'dumb' cinema. Perhaps a perception of Hollywood's own making, but an unfair one nonetheless. This is the industry that allowed Alfred Hitchcock to truly flourish, Charlie Chaplin to critique the Third Reich, and has continued to allow film-makers like Martin Scorsese to express their unique, powerful perspectives on religion, politics, war, and other 'big' topics. The story of American cinema is one of innovation and ideas, interspersed with piles of aesthetically meaningless excrement that... well, makes people happy.

It's natural to be cautious when someone decides to tinker with a film you hold dear, but movie-going is an activity that requires open minds and hearts. I'll admit that Matt Reeves -- whose popcorny entertainment Cloverfield was big on thrills but small on subtlety -- seemed an odd choice to re-jig the story of a friendship between a vampire and a young boy with an American slant. But in setting the story in Reagan-era 1983, filling it with nuclear paranoia and underscoring the story with religious zealotry, Reeves has turned Let the Right One In from a Swedish story into an American one. In addition to that, it's a truly moving picture, managing to be elegant even when it's being horrifically violent.

Los Alamos in New Mexico is now the backdrop for this story of a young boy named Owen (played by Aussie Kodi Smit-McPhee) from a broken home, bullied mercilessly at school, with a nearly non-existent, devoutly religious mother who spends most of her time getting drunk. A strange young girl named Abby (Kickass's Chloe Moretz) moves in next door. It's difficult to say who reaches out to who first. Both of these kids are alienated, even if their routes to alienation are radically different. From here, Let Me In plays as a sort of relationship movie, as the friendship deepens between Abby and Owen. The film is also a superb thriller, as a police officer played by the kind-faced Elias Kosteas investigates the string of murders left in the wake of Abby's carer, played by Six Feet Under's Richard Jenkins.

The personal story of Owen and Abby is very moving, albeit punctuated by moments of terribly confronting gore. This is the story of a vampire, after all, and the vampires in this universe are like any other predators. Abby can keep her desires in check for so long, but she is designed (perhaps by evolution?) to maim, slash and devour. What is really interesting in Let Me In, though, is the context that Matt Reeves places it in. This is a movie about evil, societal perceptions of evil, and the quintissentially 1980s American perspective that within America exists no evil -- evil is something foreign, otherly. We hear excerpts of Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech early in the film, and its sentiments echo throughout the rest of the film. Owen lives in a microcosmic environment. He's told that evil cannot exist within American society, yet he is beaten at school, punished when he stands up for himself, and has a mother that concerns herself more with bottles of wine and spirits than her own son. On the other hand, the 'otherly' presence of Abby looks evil, sounds evil, and sometimes acts evil, yet has an ambience that is overwhelmingly good. Owen is learning that these concepts aren't as black and white as the political tides paint them to be.

Let Me In retains the spirit of Alfredson's original, echoing its elegant colour palate and even regurgitating certain shots and scenes. There are some changes to the story that I feel will be appreciated, rather than reviled, by fans of the original. This is a film with the heart of the Swedish original, but the brain of American society circa-1983. It isn't better than the original, nor is it in any way worse. It is an American movie in the truest sense of the word, and that is its greatest strength.

Let Me In trailer:

Ronald Reagan's "Evil Empire" speech:

Tony Curtis - 1925-2010

2010-10-01T12:39:00.000+10:00

Tony Curtis, the man who gave one of the greatest comedic performances of all time in Some Like it Hot, has died at the age of 85. A reminder that even the most talented and gregarious among us have a finite shelf life. Keep on laughing.

Who is John Galt? ... Er, I mean Evelyn Salt

2010-09-16T13:54:00.000+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, September 16, 2010

People who view movies as more than lights flickering on a screen are often accused of 'reading into things' too much. I usually take these comments with a grain of salt (I couldn't resist), because they translate to 'you apply too much rational thought to these things which are intended as entertainments'. I don't have a problem with applying my brain to things, but I also am aware that when it comes to movies (like teaching), you've got to let a lot of things slide. Salt may be many things -- as Jim Emerson put it, "It's a movie! It's a spy! It's a nuclear nonproliferation treaty!" -- but first and foremost, it's an action thriller. It bends and twists, as movies of this nature should. It contorts itself into a mangled web of double-agents, double-double agents, and (I think) double-double-double agents. Often it's implausible, and most of the time it doesn't make a whole lot of sense, but somehow it's a thriller that's... well, thrilling.

Angelina Jolie plays the eponymous Evelyn Salt, an American CIA agent working undercover for an American oil company. When a Russian national storms into the place claiming that he is the mastermind of an elaborate Soviet mission to implant Russian agents into the American populace -- claiming that Evelyn Salt is one of them -- her identity, and motives, come into question. The film's tagline, "Who is Evelyn Salt?", nicely hints at the central question of the movie while also referencing (I hope deliberately) the enigmatic heart of Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged. It is an important question in the movie, as even after we definitively find out whether Salt is a Soviet spy or not, we're not sure of her motives.

Salt is a bit of a schizophrenic experience. I can't remember the last time I disliked a movie so much in its first half, only to end up enjoying the hell out of it. Suspension of disbelief is a must in Russian spy movies (on a tangential note -- why are Russians the villains du jours these days? Eastern Promises, Casino Royale, Iron Man 2, etc...), but the first half of Salt will test your suspension cables to the point of snappage. A constant irritant for me was just how supremely incompetent the Secret Service and CIA were made out to be. In the first half of this movie, they allow a self-confessed Soviet spy whose aim is to destroy America to escape, they allow the Russian President to be assassinated (or do they...?), and allow Salt -- under suspicion of being another Soviet spy -- to obliterate several blocks of New York City while also allowing her to escape. Twice. In all of these instances, the American agents in question have these people exactly where they want them. They've seen once how resourceful and explosive Salt can be. Couldn't the CIA invest in a straitjacket?

Surprisingly, my annoyance at these problems gradually faded away, and I became more and more engrossed in Salt's motives. The second half of Salt, if the rational part of your brain can make it through the first half, is actually quite enjoyable. I particularly enjoyed the final fifteen minutes, in which a flurry of twists and revelations left me breathless. I think part of the movie's secret to success is director Phillip Noyce's appreciation of clarity. This is an action movie that doesn't jiggle about during car chases, and uses a Steadicam during fight sequences that are choreographed and timed well enough to get away with it. The end result is a movie that we can actually see -- imagine that!

Salt trailer:

War of the Worlds (without aliens)

2010-09-02T14:58:00.002+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, September 2nd, 2010

What a burden of responsibility lies on Stuart Beattie's shoulders. Tomorrow When the War Began is as iconic a piece of adolescent literature as Australia has produced, and seventeen years after its first publication, a big screen adaptation has finally been produced. As a film, Tomorrow Where the War Began is a perfect indicator of the strange place that Australian cinema is at. Gone are the days in which our staple productions were dark personal dramas. The new fare appears to be more populist, high-budget, and (for better or worse) action-oriented -- in other words, more American. There is a problem, though. We don't have the depth of young talent, nor the experience, of Hollywood. Most young Australian actors worth their salt are making a living on American silver screens or television. As a result, the cast of Tomorrow When the War Began -- while attractive and talented -- reads like a who's who of Australian soap operas.

Despite the perils of attempting such a large-scale, lavish action movie with this cast of young up-and-comers, Tomorrow When the War Began is a good film, even if it's clunky at times. The basic premise of the film is this: a group of teenagers from a small Australian town go camping for a weekend. While they are away, a foreign power invades Australia and, when the teens return, their once secure and stable society has completely collapsed.

It was a brilliant premise in John Marsden's book, and it's a brilliant premise again here. The concept of society completely disintegrating is an innately fascinating one; particularly as the world has recently become more willing to accept that all of this affluence could collapse more easily than we'd like to think. The catalyst of society's collapse in this film is an invasion by a foreign power -- a shadowy Asian force, presumably China, or perhaps Japan. A part of me shudders when I consider that it may be North Korea. In other stories it's been invasion by aliens (War of the Worlds), or an epidemic of global proportions (28 Days Later... and Zombieland, which shares some oblique thematic similarities to Tomorrow When the War Began).

Tomorrow When the War Began has an added twist in that its protagonists are young teenagers. The books have a particular appeal (or, at least, they did to me) in that they depict teenagers -- so used to being told that responsibility and maturity are for other people -- demonstrating skills that they are so eager to display: self-reliance, quick thinking, compassion and resourcefulness.

Director Stuart Beattie (an accomplished member of the Australian film industry -- screenwriter of the mega-blockbuster Pirates of the Caribbean and the Michael Mann-directed film Collateral) takes a rather schizophrenic approach to this material. On the one hand, he builds a hugely believable scenario, and does the right thing in revealing scant details of the foreign invasion. There are no news broadcasts or other mediums that inform the characters, and us, what is going on. The closest we come to discovering just what has happened is through a frantic cameo by Colin Friels as the local dentist, and a scatter-brained recollection of a bad experience by the local stoner, Chris. There are one or two action sequences (a battle between two fighter jets observed by the teens, a high-stakes road chase involving a garbage truck and several spider-like battle vehicles) that remind us just how far things have fallen through the floor. They are very effective, and the film is worth viewing simply as an example of a brilliant, Australian-made high-budget thriller.

The film's problems lie in its inability (or rather, its limited ability) to really engage with the contentious issues it tries to embrace. Religion, for instance, appears early on to be a subject the film is willing to take a few risks about. One of the teenagers is a devout Christian (or, rather, her parents are devout Christians and... well, monkey see, monkey do), and briefly raises ethical concerns about murdering others to ensure her own survival. This is discussed between the teenagers for the briefest of moments (and with the superficiality that a brief discussion ensures), and then is shelved. Shelved, that is, until the same character has a change of heart and guns down several opposition soldiers. What exactly is the movie saying here? That killing is alright in times of war? That may (or may not) be true, but I was disappointed that in a movie that clearly could say a lot about how ill-equipped teenagers are to deal with the philosophical quandaries posed by religion, decided to almost completely opt out.

With regards to addressing that irritating question (is Tomorrow When the War Began worth watching?), my answer would be yes. I'd also add that if you read, and loved, the book as a teenager, then it's likely that you'll enjoy this adaptation. This is a sturdy, well-made, sometimes thrilling movie. But it could have been a whole lot more. It also could have been a whole lot worse.

Encounters at the End of the Mind

2010-08-14T11:31:00.003+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, August 13th, 2010

When I first saw Inception a few weeks ago, I knew that for better or worse, this was the picture of the summer. I knew that well in advance of seeing it for the first time, which posed some problems. Before Inception had even been released in Australia (or, indeed, in the United States), a divide had grown in the critic community. Inception, it seems, is either the masterpiece of 21st century cinema thus far, or an overblown, over-hyped piece of garbage. If you listen to the internet (or rather, "the internetz" -- there is a distinction), there is no middle ground.

When I first saw Inception, my first instinct was to love it. I kind of knew that I would, and that's just the problem. Cinema does not exist in a vacuum, as many critics claim. When one walks into a movie, one brings all the baggage that comes with being a film fan, or a casual moviegoer. I walked into Inception knowing that Christopher Nolan is a man I admire very much. When I was about 15, his film Memento was one the films that first caused me to think of movies critically. I adore, despite what some critics vehemently argue, the direction that he has taken the Batman films. On the flip side, I'm sure that Jim Emerson walked into Inception fully aware that his aversion to The Dark Knight made it more likely that he would cast an unforgiving, some might say pedantic (I would) eye over Nolan's latest offering.

Positive and negative bias is a part of being human, and to pretend otherwise is disingenuous and insults readers' intelligence. Good critics acknowledge that, while other critics pretend to be 'objective' and 'fair-minded'. Good critics also are open to having their expectations overturned (for instance, who'd have thought that Colin Farrell would give the performance he delivered in the 2008 masterpiece In Bruges?).

That open-mindedness should go both ways. As my readers will be aware, I'm not sure about the existence of God, but Martin Scorsese is, in a way, my deity, and his films my sacrament. Does that mean I went into Shutter Island expecting to love it? Unfortunately, it does. But I admit that, and you can make of my comments of his films what you will.

This article was supposed to, in part, be a review of Inception, but I feel that enough has been written about that movie. I don't have much new to add that you couldn't read in a variety of sources (good articles, both for and against Inception, are listed below). I will say that it is probably not the masterpiece that the Internetz claims it to be. Nolan delivers a brilliantly choreographed gimmick, but I was disappointed. The most interesting character in the movie was Cillian Murphy's, but he was neither a pro- nor antagonist. He was a pawn, lacking any control of his own destiny, while believing his catharsis was self-motivated.

On the plus side, the multi-layered (dream layers, that is) zero gravity fight scene is as good a piece of stand-alone film-making as I've seen in a while. Hans Zimmer's soundtrack is both beautiful and beautifully nuanced (did anyone else notice how the recurring Piaf song slowed down depending on what layer of dream we were in?), and Nolan's production values -- including the performances of all his principals -- are almost inevitably first-rate.

When it comes down to it, though, most of the characters in Inception aren't really characters. What do we really know of Dom Cobb (diCaprio), except for the fact that he is so psychologically scarred by the loss of his wife that he is willing to lead his entire team into mortal danger, all the while telling them that they are in no mortal danger? How did Saito use his corporate might to mobilise the team's mission in such a short space of time, in a world where mergers and take-overs take months to finalise? Ariadne (Ellen Page) jumps on board with Cobb's plan with absolutely no hesitation or suspicion. Again, why?

And why on Earth was the brilliantly, mercurially talented Joseph Gordon-Levitt cast in a role that requires him to do little more than float around and push buttons? (Incidentally, I have a feeling that Gordon-Levitt's role was initially intended for the late Heath Ledger, which added an unintended layer of pathos to Inception for me)

I will say, though, that Nolan ends Inception on a more poignant and thrilling note than he did The Dark Knight, The Prestige and even Memento. If there is one image that stays with me, nearly a month after seeing Inception, it's that spinning top, wobbling slightly on its axis, determining Cobb's (and our) fate. Does that wobble resolve all those pesky questions about Inception's true reality (if it exists at all... I have a theory that the first layer of the film, the 'real' layer, is actually the limbo that Cobb so fears)? It might, it might not. Despite Inception's flaws, I still cared. Cobb may have been a border-line sociopath determined to seek his own agenda with complete disregard to his team's safety, but he was my sociopath.

Some Inception Articles Worth Reading:

David Bordwell, davidbordwell.net

David Edelstein, NY Mag

Jim Emerson, scanners

Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com

Stephanie Zacharek, movieline.com

"Duck Tales" cartoon strip from 2003: Was Christopher Nolan a victim of Inception himself?

Inception trailer:

Predators

2010-07-13T11:44:00.000+10:00

Predators

By Jonathan Fisher, July 13th, 2010

Predators hits the ground running, which is just what you want from an action movie. The opening scene is an intriguing one -- a mercenary named Royce (Adrien Brody) gains consciousness several thousand feet above the surface of a mysterious, dangerous jungle. When he lands, he discovers that several other people have found themselves in the same predicament. Their occupations share common, violent ideals -- a Japanese Yakuza member, a death squad member from Sierra Leone, a Serbian soldier, a South American mercenary and a female American special operative. Eventually they come across a doctor (played by Topher Grace), breaking the pattern, but then without Grace, who would provide the movie's comic relief?

The group discover that they all have no recollection of how they came to arrive at this strange place, but they (correctly) suspect it's not for an innocuous reason. An early attack from a pack of weird hog-creatures confirms their suspicions, as does the discovery that this new planet has a sun that does not move, as well as several enormous moons that are visible in daylight. Royce cleverly deduces that they are being hunted by something.

What follows from this set-up is a passably entertaining cat-and-mouse story that might not live up to the original brilliance of the 1987 Predator, but at least cleanses the palate of the dreadful Alien vs Predator franchise. For the uninitiated, Predators are highly evolved aliens (aliens that apparently evolved independently into bi-pedal vertebrates, just like us) that can do all sorts of scary things -- laser vision, invisibility, spine-ripping strength.

Predators director Nimrod Antal does the wise thing of keeping the Predators in the shadows for most of his movie. As soon as we get a chance to get a really good look at the Predators, though, they lose their menace and intrigue. The Predators are brilliant villains for the first half of the film, as the characters try to work out exactly what is hunting them. After a couple of Predator-laden scenes, we remember that we're just watching another monster movie.

That really is all that Predators is -- a monster movie. Most of it is passably entertaining, and well-acted by Adrien Brody and his co-stars (including an amusing little cameo by Laurence Fishburne). The final third unfortunately blows a good start, as the film decides to overload us with hand-to-hand combat scenes between the humans and the Predators. The film may have been better served to continue taking a leaf out of Steven Spielberg's playbook. The best villains in movie history hardly get any screen-time at all. Hannibal Lecter was in Silence of the Lambs for seventeen minutes. The shark in Jaws is never seen. Tell is better than show. For the first hour or so, Predators is all tell, and no show. The last act is all show and no tell, and that is just the movie's problem.

Predators Trailer:

It's That Time of Year again...

2010-07-10T13:13:00.001+10:00

Rollie and I are circling the drain of the annual Pantheon Draft, wherein we utilize a highly advanced and complicated system of back-and-forths, averaging, compromising, and eliminating to create a hybrid list of elite "favorite" movies. Last year's list can be found here. The lists, after probably the first five, will be radically different. This is not because the movies have so fluctuated in quality over the course of a single year, but because the term "favorite" is abstract and fluid and impossible to approach consistently. I think of Ebert's definition - which movie do I want to see again right now, right this very moment (in preferential order from one to a hundred)? I think of Jonathan Rosenbaum's definition - which great film is freshest in my mind, right now, right this very minute? Even the slightest variation in approach to our "favourite" movies can alter the substance of our list radically. More than a collection of great movies (indeed the greatest), Ghost on Screen's Pantheon is more an illustration of the way that our personal tastes develop, change, evolve and, again, fluctuate. Expect the new list to materialize sometime by the end of the month.

Shrek Forever After

2010-07-02T10:16:00.002+10:00

Shrek Forever After

By Jonathan Fisher, July 2nd, 2010

Shrek Forever After (or Shrek 4, which is what it really is) borrows liberally from Frank Capra's classic parable It's a Wonderful Life, as it posits the question: what would have happened if Shrek didn't rescue Fiona from her curse way back in the first film. Indeed, what would have happened if Shrek had never been born at all?

From a film buff's perspective this is what would have happened: we would have all missed out on one of the best of modern family films in the first Shrek, but we also would have avoided the horrendous third installment. Swings and roundabouts.

Shrek Forever After is no classic. The series has been declining steadily ever since Dreamworks' unsurprising decision to come back for a sequel in 2004. Shrek Forever After does, however, avoid becoming a total disaster, thanks in part to some funny writing and a whole lot of previously concocted good will on the part of the audience.

Shrek Forever begins with a prologue, set around the time of the first movie, in which Fiona's parents approach the vile Rumpelstiltskin (Walt Dohrn), who has the means to cure Fiona of her curse. Rumpelstiltskin is a crafty salesman, the sort who always finds a way to twist a seemingly benign contract in his favour. He forces Fiona's parents to surrender the kingdom of Far, Far, Away in exchange for their daughter's rescue. Just as the monarchs are about to sign the contract, word comes through that Shrek has saved Fiona, eliminating the need to Rumpelstiltskin's contract. Rumpelstiltskin is, of course, furious, and pledges to gain revenge on Shrek, if it's the last thing he does, yada yada yada.

This coda is, in a sense, shameless cheating, as it creates a long-standing villain from thin air. Oh sure, we've never seen Rumpelstiltskin before in this series, but apparently he's been planning his big move since before the first film.

Meanwhile, jumping back in the franchise's timeline, Shrek and Fiona have settled down to a life of domestic bliss with three small children. Shrek begins to get bored by the monotony and repetition in his life, and after he has a big blow-up with Fiona, Rumpelstiltskin arranges a 'chance' encounter with the ogre. He promises Shrek the chance to live, for a day, as the fearsome ogre he once was. In exchange, all Shrek has to do is give up a day of his earlier life. Rumpelstiltskin tricks Shrek into giving up the day he was born, thus sending Shrek into a world in which he never existed. The only way to rectify things for Shrek is to find Fiona and give her (you guessed it) True Love's Kiss.

Shrek Forever After is no revelatory experience. It certainly isn't, for instance, the touching masterpiece that Toy Story 3 is. The soul of Shrek has taken a battering over the last two movies, with each incarnation feeling more and more like the last paling of a dissipating well. This one is much the same, but the writing is marginally funnier, the story slightly more touching and less irritating. The voice acting is, as usual, ably delivered by Mike Myers, Eddie Murphy, Cameron Diaz and company, and the animation, while not soaring to the level of recent Pixar films, is competently delivered.

In a world without movies like Up and Ponyo are the competition, franchises like Shrek pale in comparison a bit. There just isn't the same level of emotional depth or multi-layered comedy in the Dreamworks vehicle. Shrek Forever After is passable entertainment, and will probably keep kids quiet and entertained for 90 minutes. Adults, though, will probably shift in their seats with more discomfort than they would in a screening of Toy Story 3.

Shrek Forever After trailer:

Toy Story 3

2010-06-30T19:28:00.003+10:00

Editor's note: I've written this review as if you've already seen Toy Story and Toy Story 2. Don't complain that you don't know who voices Woody or Buzz. If you don't know this, or (even worse) who Woody and Buzz are, shame on you.

Toy Story 3

By Jonathan Fisher, June 30, 2010

Toy Story 3 might be the first family film made with people in their early 20s specifically in mind. I was nine years old when the first Toy Story movie was released. Most of the current crop of children weren't even a lustful thought in their father's mind when the first two Toy Story films were made. How fitting it is that this sequel is, in part, about the painful transitory period from childhood to adulthood, a period in which we shed our dependence, our awkwardness, and -- most tragically of all -- our toys.

Despite this treacherous subject matter, Toy Story 3 is a terrific family film -- funny, sweet, action-packed. Kids of just about all ages will, I'm sure, love it (although some segments might be a tad dark for under-5s). But I felt like this one was made almost specifically for me. Kind of like Pixar's 'thank you' to the generation of kids that bought the tickets that began their meteoric rise.

The movie begins just as Toy Story 2 began, at the end of an (imagined) adventure featuring Woody, Buzz, Mr. Potato Head and the rest of Andy's group of beloved toys. We soon learn that Andy is now 17 and about to ship out to college. Woody and the group feel neglected. Andy hasn't played with them in years, and the gang are reduced to concocting elaborate traps ("Operation Playtime", in which the toys steal Andy's cell phone, and make it ring in his toy chest) in order to receive the attention and affection they so desperately long for.

It isn't long before a divide forms in the group. Most of the toys believe that Andy has outgrown them, and think their best bet to find love again is to be donated to the local day care centre. Woody keeps the faith, believing that Andy still loves them, and that it'd be wrong and remiss of the group to abandon their owner.

After a series of events too humorous and delightful to go into in this review, the gang eventually find themselves in Sunnydale Day Care Centre after Andy's mother inadvertently donates them. The toys at the centre are led by Lotso (Ned Beatty), an apparently benevolent teddy bear who promises Andy's toys that they will find children who will love them just as much as Andy once did. Lotso even raises a tantalising prospect for the gang. They'll never be abandoned in the way that Andy abandoned them, because as soon as one group of children grows up and leaves, another one shows up to take their place.

To me, moments like this are evidence of the fact that Toy Story 3 was made with fans like me in mind. It's very tough to watch Toy Story 3 and not reflect on the way you viewed the first two films as a younger person. Every child will eventually grow into an adult, but they don't always know that. I don't think I completely understood that. We all once thought that our toys were always going to be the most important things in our lives. Toy Story 3 is bittersweet in that it reminds us of what we've lost -- but it simultaneously reassures us, because only grown-ups can realise just how great being a grown-up can be.

Toy Story 3 flies (or falls with style) for the same reasons that its predecessors did. A solid story, a sturdy emotional foundation, and enough interesting new characters to prevent it all from feeling a bit stale. Michael Keaton, particularly, does a brilliantly funny job in voicing a flamboyantly stylish Ken doll. There is, of course, a moral compass underpinning everything that happens in Toy Story 3, but Pixar once again differentiate themselves from the rest of the pack because they deal with their material with subtlety. Kids are smart. They'll pick up on the film's messages about friendship, loyalty, forgiveness and kindness. No need to resort to the sledgehammer mentality of movies like Happy Feet, in which the film's message is crammed into the last five minutes.

The toys eventually hatch a plan to escape from the day care centre and return to Andy. There are, of course, the usual dramatic obstacles in their way, including one very dark, but touching sequence in which the toys essentially concede defeat and accept the fact that they're about to be blasted to smithereens. Maudlin toy-mortality exploration aside, Toy Story 3 is done with a lot of good humour, pathos and visual creativity. And, of course, there is even an environmental message as the toys find themselves as first-person witnesses to what garbage has to go through before it winds up in landfill. I always wonder how children respond to these images. They probably assume that all that gross stuff that the grown-ups do is for a good reason. It isn't, really, other than to live beyond our (and the planet's) means.

Andy's mother weeps at the end of the film when he packs up and heads to college, and I did too. It was partly because it was just so nice to see all the gang together again, but mostly because Toy Story 3 nails exactly how it feels to reflect on one's childhood and realise that the happy, carefree child we all once were doesn't exist anymore. I don't mean to make it sound like Toy Story 3 made me sad, or depressed. There was an element of comfort in the natural cycle of the world in the way director Lee Unkrich wrapped up his story. Pixar's movies guided me through my childhood. I wasn't expecting them to guide me through my early 20s, too.

Toy Story 3 Trailer:

Sex and the City 2, Legion, Creation, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time

2010-06-14T17:33:00.000+10:00

Hello all, apologies that this one is a few days late... Alicia and I actually recorded it last week, but I've just been so flat out on my block prac for uni (teaching kiddies about Venn Diagrams and the true meaning of the football World Cup) that I just didn't have time to edit and upload it! Here it finally is. I'm done with my block prac in a week and a half, and then am on holidays for about 6 weeks, so prepare for the recent lull in activity on the site to be made up to you in spades. I have a truckload of interviews coming up in the next few weeks, as well as more print reviews and podcasts. In the meantime, enjoy this week's podcast, published below.

Sex and the City 2:

Malone says: As long as the four girls are on screen, wearing amazing shoes and flirting with hot men, fans like me will be happy. See it!
Fisher says: Oh dear, Alicia. This movie is a total story-telling disaster. Skip it.

Legion:

Fisher says: This movie is as brainless as it is unintentionally hilarious. Legion is one of the worst movies of the year and probably can only be enjoyed when on any number of mind-altering substances. Avoid it like the plague.
Malone says: This was a ridiculous movie. It's just ludicrous. Skip it.

Creation:

Malone says: A stellar performance from Paul Bettany. See it.
Fisher says: Bettany is very good in this movie. Creation is an interesting look at the social impact of Darwin's work as well as an engrossing drama. See it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time:

Fisher says: I had a bit of fun with this one, but nowhere near enough to wish it upon anyone else. I found myself wishing I was playing the video game rather than watching the movie. Skip it.
Malone says: Unless you're a fan of Jake Gyllenhaal and fancy a bit of a perv, skip this one. Strange exposition made the movie feel like a video game, as it almost instructed the audience about what to do to proceed to the next scene.

Robin Hood, How to Train Your Dragon, Iron Man 2 and Wog Boy 2

2010-05-30T22:58:00.001+10:00

By Jonathan Fisher, May 30th, 2010

It's been a little while since the last podcast, so Alicia and I figured we'd do a round-up of the big releases of the last six weeks or so... Or at least, that's my attempt to explain why some of the movies on today's show have been in theatres for several weeks.

I've also tried something new with this week's podcast, publishing each review individually. Hopefully this way it'll be easier for you to navigate your way through to the review that you'd like to hear, rather than having to wait for a 20-minute episode to buffer just so you can hear the last review of the episode. One drawback of this new publishing format is that there isn't a file that you'll be able to download for your mp3 player, although I've provided a download link for those who want to download the capsule reviews.

Let me know what you think of the new format, and feel free to offer suggestions.

Robin Hood

Fisher says: This feels like sullen, joyless, warmed-up "Braveheart" leftovers. Skip it.
Malone says: Disappointing to say 'skip it' about a movie like this, but it's a disappointment.

How to Train Your Dragon

Malone says: I cried at the end! See it.
Fisher says: This is a really cute story. See it.

Iron Man 2

Fisher says: Not as inspired as the first film, but solid mid-year superhero fare. See it.
Malone say: Robert Downey, Jr. is brilliant. Guys want to be him and girls definitely want to be with him. See it!

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

Malone says: This would have been a much better film if it stayed out of the same familiar territory and mined some new comedy gold. Skip it.
Fisher says: Funny in parts, but too many jokes fall flat - and when they fall flat, they really fall flat. Skip it.

Harry Brown

2010-05-27T20:36:00.001+10:00

Harry Brown

By Jonathan Fisher, May 27th, 2010

Michael Caine is riveting in Harry Brown. This is a hell of a performance. Every minute detail of the character is nailed dead-on. Caine is 77 years old now, but has the fortitude and bravery to take on a role like Harry Brown and give it his all. The promotional posters for Harry Brown proclaim "Michael Caine IS Harry Brown", and indeed Michael Caine IS Harry Brown.

This is the first feature film by Daniel Barber, nominated for an Academy Award for his short film The Tonto Woman. It concerns the plight of Harry Brown (Caine), a geriatric pensioner who is a war veteran, living in a raucous housing estate somewhere in lower middle-class London. He and his friend Leonard (David Bradley) pass their time sinking pints and playing chess at the dodgy local pub -- the meeting place for any number of drug dealers and hoodlums. Leonard is constantly terrorised by violent street youths. Eventually, they murder him. Harry knows who is responsible. We know who is responsible. The police know who is responsible, although they are loathe to take action. The case is handled by two detectives -- one kind-hearted truth-seeker (Emily Mortimer), and another more cynical (realistic?) and jaded officer played by Charlie Creed-Miles.

After Leonard's death, Harry decides to take matters into his own hands, tracking down the people responsible for Leonard's death and making them pay. It's here that the movie ventures into well-trodden narrative territory -- movies like Death Wish, Gran Torino and even Taxi Driver precede it. Daniel Barber shows us this vengeance/vigilante story in an interesting way, though. Everything about Harry's method is believable. This is an old man in a young man's world, and that is reflected in everything from the look on Harry's face when he busts a major marijuana plant operation, to the way that he interrogates the thugs (at one point, one of the thugs reveals he has information about Leonard's killer on his mobile phone. Harry pulls it out, looks at it with confusion, then gives it back to the youngster and says, "Go on... make it work.").

I've tried to think of another actor that could have played Harry with the same passion, the same nuance, and the same emotional power of Michael Caine. For the life of me, I can't come up with anyone. As directed by Daniel Barber, Harry Brown is confronting. Often its morality is all over the shop, but Michael Caine is always there to put a human face on Harry. Harry does some awful things, perhaps even some immoral things, but I can imagine sitting down for a pint with him and can see him say to me, "Sure it was a terrible thing... But what was I supposed to do?"

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

2010-05-27T14:50:00.001+10:00

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2

By Jonathan Fisher, May 27th, 2010

Here's a sequel I didn't know we needed. Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 is Nick Giannopolous' return to the silver screen as Steve, the lovable Greek-Australian who has copped stick his whole life for being a 'wog' -- and is proud of it.

The first Wog Boy movie was a long time ago -- ten years, in fact. I remember chuckling at it with my high school friends, and I also recall that there was a bit of a movement amongst Greek-Australians at my school to reclaim the word 'wog' in the same way that Nick Giannopolous did in that first movie. Ten years later, Giannopolous has wheeled out the same character. This one will probably remind Giannopolous' core audience how much they like him, as it's a passably funny movie with just enough juice to satisfy an established fan, but perhaps not enough to earn many new ones over the age of 15.

The film opens with Steve (Giannopolous) leading his proudly Greek-Australian life in much the same way as he did at the end of the first Wog Boy movie. He's in love with his car, and his bromance with fellow wog, the Italian-Australian Frank (Vince Colosimo) is in full swing. Early in the film, Steve discovers that he has a long-lost uncle in Mykonos who has recently passed away, leaving Steve a beach worth a fair chunk of change -- 2 million euros, a sum that the Greek economy would happily take for free at the moment.

Steve and Frank head over to Mykonos to attempt to claim Steve's inheritance, and the film turns into an interesting vignette of what it must be like for first or second generation Greek-Australians to return to their motherland for the first time. In the stunning island of Mykonos, Steve and Frank have several misadventures. The first involves their efforts to claim the inheritance, thwarted by local businessman Mihali (Andrew Dimitriades) and systemic bureaucratic Greek corruption. This movie has a peculiarly prescient subtext about the manner in which the Greek economy is run ("Greekonomics", as Steve calls it in the film). There's a funny moment in which Steve tells his patrons at his newly-inherited seaside cafe that even though they're family, they'll have to pay for their meals because the cafe is going broke. Everyone stands up, furious, and leaves. All the joke needed was for a few E.U. officials to wander around the restaurant, picking up the tab for all the Greek revelers.

The second adventure involves the two boys chasing after women, Miss Italy (Cosima Coppola) for Frank, and Zoe (Zeta Makrypoulia) for Steve. The romances, in parts, are sweet-hearted, but hardly ground-shaking, and all the ogling of the two women in skimpy bikinis, while pleasant enough, becomes kind of smarmy. Almost as smarmy as the "King of Mykonos" that Frank is trying to dethrone, a gross middle-aged Italian guy named Pierluigi (played by Hercules himself, Kevin Sorbo) who claims to have bedded 43 of those lovely Mykonos lasses in just a month.

Despite Nick Giannopolous' sweet nature as Steve (he really is quite an endearing character up there on screen), Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 was not quite my cup of tea. The female objectification got just a little too strong, the jokes were more miss than hit, and most of the jokes weren't unfunny because they were offensive... they were just lame. There were aspects of Wog Boy 2 that I liked -- the way in which the third act moves in a completely unpredictable direction, the aforementioned "Greekonomics" gag, and a side-splittingly funny scene in which Steve uses Gallipolli as inspiration for a motor race, only to be met with incredulity and confusion as the Greeks fail to understand why Australia celebrates a loss so grandly. Too often, though, Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 felt a little too much like a second-chance grab at an already established cash cow.

Kings of Mykonos: Wog Boy 2 trailer:

Nick Giannopolous -- Reclaiming the 'W' word

2010-05-27T09:16:00.002+10:00

Nick Giannopolous and Vince Colosimo are back in Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos

By Jonathan Fisher, May 23rd, 2010

If anything, Nick Giannopolous is even more laid-back and relaxed than his on-screen persona. After only a couple of minutes of conversation, it's clear that Giannopolous is a natural entertainer. It's that sense of laid-back confidence and the ability to laugh at oneself that has propelled much of Giannopolous' work.

There's a funny scene in Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos, in which Steve (Giannopolous) and Frank (Vince Colosimo) sit with a Greek relative and try to explain to him why they refer to each other as "wogs". "What is a wog?" asks the Greek relative. Steve replies, "It's an insult white Australians use to describe immigrants." replies Steve. "So this is what you do, you just go around insulting each other now?"

Steve and Frank look at each other before nodding in the affirmative. I asked Giannopolous if he actually believed that by using the 'wog' moniker so frequently in his work, he was insulting himself and the Greek-Australian community.

"Not at all. I like the irony of the term. I just use it as a descriptive term. But that scene was actually based on something that happened to me when I went to Mykonos in the early '90s and explained the term 'wog' to a Greek relative."

Talking to Giannopolous, it became clear that Wog Boy 2, like the first film, is a kind of catalogue of Giannopolous' own experiences as Greek Australian. Even some of the more outrageous aspects of Wog Boy 2 come from Giannopolous' own experience. The character of Pierluigi, a smarmy, aging womaniser who is the "King of Mykonos" because he bedded forty-three women in one month, was based on a fellow Giannopolous met in Mykonos who claimed to be a modern-day Casanova. "That was a really tough role to cast, because we had to find someone who looked physically capable of achieving such a Herculean task... so we thought, who better than Hercules himself?" (the character of Pierluigi is played by Kevin Sorbo, who played Hercules in the TV series "The Adventures of Hercules" and "Xena: Warrior Princess").

An interesting presence in Wog Boy 2: Kings of Mykonos is that of Vince Colosimo. Colosimo is an actor that has been with Nick Giannopolous pretty much throughout his career, but in the ten years since the first Wog Boy film Colosimo's star has risen sharply. He now gets regular work in Hollywood, working with the likes of Ridley Scott and the Spierig Brothers. I asked Giannopolous what it was that Colosimo -- an actor now renowned for his dramatic range -- brings as an actor to his comedies.

"Vince is just a great guy to have on set. He makes people happy. As an actor I think he really brings a raw honesty and unpredictability to his roles. You never know what he's going to do. We balance each other out somehow, and I think you see it in the film. It's tough to put into words though. Sometimes you get that connection with an actor, sometimes you don't. Maybe it's because I've known him and Andrew (Dimitriades, another prominent Australian thespian who regularly works with Giannopolous and appears in Wog Boy 2 as the movie's central villain) for such a long time. When you spend so much time travelling together, working together, living in hotel rooms together, eating together, any issues that we had with each other were resolved way back then. Now our relationship is very comfortable and quite organic. It's a lot of fun, too. And I think you get the sense in the movie that the crew was having fun making it, which we did."

Despite all the monetary success (the first Wog Boy took $16 million at the box office in 2000, and the sequel took nearly $2 million in its opening weekend a few days ago), Gianoppolous has struggled with critical acclaim. Sometimes his movies have been received with downright hostility. Erin Free of Film Ink magazine said of his movie The Wannabes, "It's more or less a comic abomination. That's a complete failure, that film."

Giannopolous is quite philosophical, touching even, about his job as an entertainer. "Reviews are often quite mixed, you're right in saying that. Comedy's always mixed. It's a subjective thing, and I think that's why you'll rarely see a comedy win an Academy Award. You're never going to please everybody. Not everyone loves Adam Sandler, or Will Ferrell. But that's just the nature of comedy. It you look at the American box office, or any box office, comedy's the mainstay. It's always in vogue, whereas horror or action movies sort of come in and out of vogue. But comedy is always there. All the way back to Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin, who pioneered comedy film-making, audiences have really enjoyed going to the movies after a long week at work, and just having a good night out.

"We should never forget, that's what comedy does. It releases the pressure. To be able to laugh consistently for an hour and a half, it just makes you feel a lot better. It's a tonic, a real tonic. That's why I like working in comedy. I did Shakespeare at one stage, and starred in Richard III. I was told it was the funniest version of Richard III people had ever seen... which it wasn't meant to be.

"But I've always gravitated towards comedy because I watched my parents struggle a lot as a kid, being migrants they had a lot of hardships. So we always tried to make each other laugh, to offset the bad times. We had no money, that sort of thing. That's why I love sitting in a cinema, watching people laugh. I figure, whatever has gone wrong this week, right now they're feeling good. I've just given them an hour and a half of 'good'."

Please hold....

2010-05-05T12:06:00.000+10:00

Hi all, just a quick message to let you know that I do still exist, despite the fact that my output over the last few weeks has been a bit disappointing. I'm studying full-time to be a primary school teacher, and in between preparing lesson plans for my practical, doing assignments (I have seven big ones due in the next three weeks), and getting ready for exams, I've hardly had a moment to call my own, let alone enough moments to donate to this site.

For the next 3 or 4 weeks it'll still be fairly quiet, but once June hits I'll be back to my usual opining ways. I've got another couple of interviews with some prominent actors and film-makers lined up, I have two or three great guest hosts for the podcast coming up, and am also going to be introducing a new sub-section of the site called "Television Worth Watching", where I'll write about TV shows that are worth watching (the clue is in the title).

Until next time, go watch a good movie. And don't, whatever you do, watch the trailer for The Human Centipede. (can you resist my link to it?)

For Your Consideration.... "George"

2010-05-02T10:48:00.004+10:00

Anyone want to put money on this one being nominated for Best Picture in 2011?

I love these things, and would suggest you look at the other notable 're-cut' trailers of recent times that I've listed below. What a brilliant exercise in demonstrating what some sneaky editing and some soundtrack changes can do. Apart from being funny little distractions on a Sunday morning when one should be completing university work, these re-cuts remind us just how illusory the cinema is. Sure, it seems funny that "Seinfeld" could be edited into a tear-jerking drama, or that Seven could be re-cut into a homosexual romantic comedy, or that Groundhog Day could beome a Requiem For a Dream-esque nightmare, but we only find it funny because these movies have done a good enough job of convincing us of their original tones. The truth is, they could well have been any of these things had their directors decided on a different soundtrack, the inclusion of a different piece of footage, or if they selectively edited their actor's lines and delivery.

Feel free to post any other re-cuts that you think are worth watching.

Also, don't these videos remind us just what an effective, beautiful and haunting score Thomas Newman composed for American Beauty? His work pops up over and over in these re-cut trailers.

Seven Re-Cut:

Groundhog Day Re-Cut:

Little Miss Sunshine Re-Cut:

The Shining Re-cut:

The Big Lebowski Re-Cut:

Iron Man 2

2010-04-30T10:31:00.005+10:00

Iron Man 2

By Jonathan Fisher, April 30th, 2010

As the climax of Iron Man 2 bore down on me, I asked myself, "Haven't I seen this before?" It seems to be becoming an unfortunate pattern of this franchise that its final battles are between two men in giant, iron, prosthetic suits. Not that I had that long to consider this, because Iron Man 2's final battle is mercifully short, and the movie goes on to tie up its loose ends faster than you can say North by Northwest (a movie that resolves its complicated plot in less than a minute... with a brilliantly hilarious final shot).

It was a nice feeling, because too often at movies these days are we subjected to overlong, tedious fights that exist purely to show off the incredible CGI that went into them. What about the people inside those suits? I liked Iron Man 2 because, even though it doesn't have the same feeling of boyish discovery about it that the first one did, I enjoyed watching these characters, old and new, talk and rush about for its duration.

Robert Downey, Jr. is back as everyone's favourite narcissistic superhero, Tony Stark/Iron Man. Iron Man 2 picks up where the first one left off, after Stark has dramatically (and casually) declared to the world, "I am Iron Man." Thus begins an opening unique to superhero movies -- a scenario in which the public knows the identity of its masked crusader. Now they know who to write out the compensation checks for all the inadvertant destruction superheroes inevitably cause.

Stark's revelation that he is Iron Man opens up several bags of worms. One is that he acts as a kind of nuclear deterrent (one amusing headline states triumphantly: "IRON MAN STABILISISES EAST-WEST CONFLICT"). Another is that the US Government believe that his suit and abilities should fall under the purview of the military. The Government's mission is led by one particularly unpleasant Senator (played by Garry Shandling, of the classic The Larry Sanders Show).

Then, inevitably, there are the people who want to tear Stark down. The first is Justin Hammer (the always engaging Sam Rockwell), a rival weapons manufacturer whose interest in destroying Stark is purely capitalistic. He doesn't really hold a grudge against Stark -- he just wants his market share.

The second villain is Ivan Vanko (Mickey Rourke, in his first role since The Wrestler), a physicist from the Eastern European bloc whose father worked with Tony's father, only to be screwed over and sent back to Europe after Stark discovered that he was in it for the money.

The usual suspects are also back -- Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow), the unrequited assistant to Tony Stark, Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), the head of a league of superheroes trying to keep Stark under control, and Happy Hogan (Jon Favreau, the director of the flick), who has more screen time here than in the first one, and capitalises on the extra minutes by cramming in the jokes.

The nice thing about Iron Man 2 is that its sense of humour remains intact. I laughed as much at this one as I did the first, because Tony Stark is still unashamedly misanthropic and narcissistic, and the movie is still unashamedly a piece of entertainment. It's a far more disposable piece of entertainment than the first film, which managed to mix action, laughs, and even ethical reflection in a way that was kind of brilliant. This one is a little less cerebral. Its Eastern European villain is fun and malevolent in a way that we haven't really seen since the Connery/Moore Bond films, its slimy capitalistic bad guy is topical but rather superficial, and Jon Favreau sticks to what he knows, mixing comedy with action.

Iron Man 2 lags a little in its mid-section. The jokes stall a bit, the action is non-existent, and for about 30 minutes it feels like it's just going from one point in the script to another. But all in all, Iron Man 2 does what the first one did, although not quite to the same extent. The world doesn't need another superhero movie, but we can tolerate one if the characters are funny enough. This one is funny enough.

My review of the first Iron Man

The Book of Eli

2010-04-17T12:41:00.003+10:00

The Book of Eli

By Jonathan Fisher, April 17th, 2010

The Book of Eli is going to ruffle a lot of feathers. The radical Christian right in the United States are claiming it as their own, a film about the veracity and importance of Christianity as the one, true religion. Some Atheists (though admittedly not many) are claiming just the opposite, that this is a movie dictating a belief against God's existence. Still others think that the religious subtext is irrelevant, and that what The Book of Eli is really about is the preservation of literacy and culture. If you visit Metacritic, you'll see that most reviewers use the word "religion" or "God" in the excerpt provided of their review. It's currently sitting at a very low 53%, which could also be read, I think, as "53% in favour of God!"

Denzel Washington plays a man wandering around the wasteland of a post-apocalyptic United States. Like the world depicted in The Road, this world is harsh and unforgiving. Life for 99% of creatures on the planet is a tough slog. Most life has to put up with famine, disease, predators, and ultimately a short life expectancy. The Book of Eli, like its cousin The Road, envisions a scenario in which humans lose their ranking as the one, priveliged species on the planet that doesn't need to worry about these things.

In Denzel's backpack, we see a K-Mart badge proclaiming "Hi! My name is Eli". It's not explained if that's actually his badge, but the movie's called The Book of Eli, so forgive me if I make an inference. Eli wanders this desolate landscape, killing cats and rats to survive. For the first third of the film, it seems unclear what he is after or where he is going. He constantly reads and reverently kisses a leather-bound copy of the Holy Bible, so we must assume he is a religious man or a believer of some sort. This assumption is solidified when he witnesses a helpless couple being raped and murdered by a pack of degenerate survivors. Rather than jumping to their rescue (we know that he's an excellent marksman and a handy knife-wielder courtesy of an earlier fight scene that unmistakably references Chan Wook-Park's Oldboy), Eli hides behind a rock and whispers, "Stick to the path, it's none of your concern."

Eli reaches an ugly-looking town, governed by an articulate but malevolent leader named Carnegie (Gary Oldman). Eli grabs the attention of Carnegie after another bloodbath in the town bar. After offering Eli a spot in his power structure -- which is refused -- Carnegie discovers that Eli is in possession of a copy of the Bible, something he has been searching for for many years. Carnegie's reasons are not spiritual, though -- he wants to Bible to brainwash his people into believing in God, to harness their desperation and desire for purpose to suit his own ends.

This set-up allows The Book of Eli to function in two fundamental ways. The first is as a piece of heart-pounding escapist fantasy. It succeeds spectacularly, thanks to the visual design -- courtesy of the Hughes Brothers, Albert and Allen, who previously directed the interestingly flawed From Hell -- as well as two sturdy performances from Denzel Washington and Gary Oldman. Oldman, particularly, sinks his teeth into the character of Carnegie. Oldman is one of our most valuable, under-appreciated character actors. As Carnegie, every facial tic, every movement of his body expresses pure malevolence, made even more unsettling since the character appears to have a great intellect.

But The Book of Eli is more than a brainless futuristic action movie. This movie has ideas. It doesn't create an organic, vivid futuristic wasteland simply to people it with human cannon fodder. This movie is about religion, but doesn't necessarily swing either way when it comes to the question of God's existence. The Book of Eli is more concerned about the nature and function of religion itself, how it flourishes in times of great human suffering, how it is exploited by power-hungry men who understand its power over the desperate.

Some have argued that The Book of Eli is explicitly a pro-Christian text, but I think it's far more ambiguous than that. It is honest about what faith is -- Eli says, when explaining to Carnegie's young, good-hearted step-daughter (Mila Kunis) who had no concept of religion before meeting Eli, that faith is "knowing that something is true, even when you don't know it." Later Kunis' character asks Eli curiously why he does what he does simply because "a voice in your head told you to".

These scenes are hardly propagandistic for religious belief, and Dawkins-loving Atheists could point to these as evidence of The Book of Eli's stance against the existence of God, or at the very least its stance for agnosticism. This movie point out the basic logic flaws in a belief in God(s). Whether you can make the leap of faith that religious belief requires, or if you look down on those that see unquestioning faith as a virtue will probably colour the way you respond to this movie.

Then there's the issue of the moral code that Eli lives by. Carnegie's step-daughter has no religious belief, nor does she base her moral code on any higher authority, yet she displays kindness and compassion. Eli betrays her at one point. What a fascinating paradox -- the man whose moral code is based on a religious text is accused of immorally lying by a person whose moral code is based on... well, something else. This question of whether religion gained its morals from humans, or vice versa, has been explored for hundreds of years. The Book of Eli doesn't short-change it. This layer of morality and the Bible again makes The Book of Eli far more complex than its dismissers give it credit for.

I've carefully tried to avoid giving away if I'm a religious man, an agnostic, or an Atheist. I think it's irrelevant, and if you approach The Book of Eli with a mind willing to think about theism, its function and its purpose in human evolution, this film has a lot to offer. I think the basic thesis of The Book of Eli is that religion will be around as long as there are humans to perpetuate it, and the mystery and complexity of its existence (by that I mean the existence of religion, not the existence of God) will reverberate until either evidence for God's existence is found, or humans evolve out of the need for theistic belief. Even after a nuclear bomb decimates our species, we'll be right back where we started from.

Date Night

2010-04-11T20:58:00.002+10:00

Date Night

By Jonathan Fisher, April 11th, 2010

As a fan of Seinfeld, please humour me while I invoke that show in discussing Date Night. There is an episode from the eighth season of that show called "The Yada Yada". In that episode, George dates a woman who does what many of us often do, skipping the details of a story to hop immediately to the point of what she is saying. George helpfully demonstrates this by recounting to Jerry one such tale -- "I spent some time with my ex-boyfriend last night... yada yada yada... I'm really tired today."

I bring this up in relation to Date Night because it feels like the movie was 'yada yada'-ed at the script pitching stage. A nice, modest, married Jersey couple go out for dinner one night... yada yada yada... they become embroiled in a tangled web of gang warfare, political corruption and mistaken identity. Never mind the details. It'll star Steve Carell and Tina Fey, and it will be funny. Shut up and give me my money.

The problem is, of course, that the 'yada yada' of that above premise is actually rather important. So many of the details of Date Night just don't add up, and the entire movie could have been avoided pretty early on in the piece with a five-minute conversation between two rational people. I don't expect comedies to be airtight, necessarily. Nor do I necessarily expect them to be ultra-intelligent. But they should at least make sense on some basic level. Very little about Date Night makes sense, to the point that when you should be concentrating on the jokes, all you're concerned about is the mantra that up here's for thinking. The characters in this thing are very, very dim.

There's another rather basic rule of comedy that Date Night violates. If you say something as if it's supposed to be funny, it is very rarely funny. The trick of comedy is saying something as if you don't necessarily know that it's funny, or that you don't care if people laugh at it or not. Acting funny in a normal situation isn't funny. Acting normal in a funny situation -- now, usually, that's funny. Not a moment of screen time goes by in Date Night that doesn't beg us to laugh. Admittedly, the movie has two very funny and talented lead actors in Steve Carell and Tina Fey. Their respective sitcoms (The Office and 30 Rock) are among the funniest shows of the last several years. This movie has a pedigree. But it's just so packaged. Even its meagre attempt to paint the relationship that these two normal people have rings false. The movie even resorts to an obnoxiously placed John Mayer song to distract us from the fact that there's nothing beneath the cliche-riddled dialogue.

Date Night is good for one or two laughs. Mark Wahlberg has an amusing few moments as a topless computer whiz who aids the married couple in their quest to escape the corrupt police officers who believe that they are involved in a plot to bring down the city's corrupt D.A. J.B. Smoove, who is very funny as Leon in Curb Your Enthusiasm, has a funny cameo as a cab driver who inadvertantly gets caught up in the film's action.

Date Night was directed by Shawn Levy, the man who directed both Night at the Museum movies and both Pink Panther movies (I use the terms 'directed' and 'movies' loosely there -- they could easily be replaced with 'built' and 'products'). Shawn Levy is the go-to guy for gap-stuffing seat-fillers in Hollywood. You go to a Shawn Levy movie, you get a neatly packaged Hollywood parcel, practically devoid of risk or mental challenges. I'm not bringing the guy down by saying that -- it's just what he does. He makes a very good living and, I'm sure, makes a lot of people happy. The Pink Panther movies exist so that parents can say to their kids, "sit down, shut up and watch this for 90 minutes". They're critic-proof, and they should be. They're just part of the Hollywood economy. They, like Date Night, are almost deliberately built so that at the end of the night you can say to your housemates, "Tonight, I went out, had dinner, saw a movie... yada, yada, yada... I'm home now."

Date Night is a 'yada yada' movie. You've been warned.

Date Night Trailer:

Podcast 20

2010-04-11T16:26:00.005+10:00

Hi all,

Today I sat down with Alicia Malone of FilmInk magazine andthe Movie Network on Foxtel and reviewed the big new releases of the last week or two. You can download the episode here, or listen to it embedded on the site below this paragraph. In the show we review The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, Date Night, Clash of the Titans and Kick-Ass.

Movie:                                        Fisher says:    Malone says:

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo        See it    See it

Date Night                                                            Skip it                                           Skip it

Clash of the Titans                                              See it                                            Skip it

Kick-Ass                                                                See it                                            See it

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2010-04-09T09:28:00.001+10:00

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

By Jonathan Fisher, April 6th, 2010

The give-away of a great thriller is its ability to first fool you into thinking that you're smarter than the story, and then to make you realise that you have no idea where it's going. The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a Swedish thriller that is perhaps longer than we're used to at two and a half hours, is also a whole lot better than we're used to. On one level, it's a whodunit, a detective story populated by two characters that don't act as if they are mere cogs in a cookie-cutter plot. On another level it's a confronting experience about the appalling consequences of misogyny.

The film opens with the tail-end of the trial of Mikael Blomkvist, an journalist being sued for libel against a prominent Swedish tycoon. He loses the case and is sentenced to three months in prison, to be served at some point in the next three months. After his sentencing, an elderly billionaire who lives on a forboding island contacts Blomkvist, asking him to further investigate the disappearance of his niece Harriet thirty years ago, who disappeared mysteriously on a day that the island was cut off from the mainland (shades of Shutter Island). The billionaire postulates that because the island was cut off on the day Harriet disappeared, her murderer must have been a member of his large, greedy and repulsive family.

Concurrently, a young hacker named Lisbeth Salander (the eponymous girl with the dragon tattoo, played by Noomi Rapace) is spying on Blomkvist. Lisbeth is one of the most distinct and original characters I've come across in a long time. Intense, hard-edged, but wounded, Noomi Rapace gives a stellar performance. Due to a psychologically turbulent past, Lisbeth has to report to a custodial guardian, a despicable man who forces her to perform degrading sexual acts in order for her to gain access to her own money.

Eventually Blomkvist becomes aware of Lisbeth's spying, and the two wind up investigating Harriet's disappearance. The two become a formidable detective team. The murder mystery is pretty straight-forward in a narrative sense, taking cues from any number of Agatha Christie stories. The ingenious thing about the movie is that even though it feels conventional, there comes a point where one realises that we have absolutely no idea where the story is going -- and the pay-off is more satisfying and intriguing than we could have imagined. Throughout its 150-minute duration, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo is spellbinding -- slickly produced, well performed and elegantly paced. It's one of the best films of this still young year.

The story of the trilogy of books is as amazing as JK Rowling's journey to her Harry Potter success. Stieg Larsson, a modest journalist, wrote the trilogy in his spare time, more for his personal enjoyment than anything else. He died in 2004 at the age of 44 of a massive heart attack, when the manuscripts were complete, but unpublished. His wife carried the torch, believing that the books were good enough to find an audience. How right she was -- six years later, the trilogy has sold around 30 million copies around the world, and has been turned into a successful film trilogy.

It's probably a good thing that the original translation of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo's Swedish name ("Män som hatar kvinnor" -- "Men who Hate Women") was cast aside for the film's title. While that inflammatory name hints at the cajones that this adaptation of Stieg Larsson's revelatory book has, it would probably put people off seeing it. This is a film with justified aggressive, angry feminist undertones. Another title for it could have been "Men who Hate Women. And Women who Hate Men... for Good Bloody Reason".