The title may not inspire, but The Home Song Stories is a wonderfully moving personal reflection of a boy’s life with his demanding, manipulative and captivating mother. Tony Ayres, who won much acclaim for his 2002 film Walking on Water, takes the bold step of pointing the camera at his own childhood. Ayres came to Australia in 1964 with his older sister and mother, and it is the story of their life in Melbourne in the early 1970’s that lies at the heart of this film.
The story opens in a lush and smoky Shanghai nightclub where Rose (Joan Chen) sings with sensual and translucent beauty. But we quickly discover the pattern of Rose’s life, shifting between various “uncles” with whom she trades her charisma, stunning looks and presumably her bed, for financial support. After meeting an Australian sailor, Bill (Steven Vidler), she brings her son Tom (Joel Lok) and daughter May (Irene Chen) to Melbourne to get married. But Rose cannot escape her tragic disposition, and the cycle of moving house and moving uncles continues in this foreign land until, with her looks beginning to fade, she finds herself living in almost pitiful conditions with a much younger man, Joe (Yuwu Qi), a chef in a small Chinese restaurant, and an illegal immigrant in Australia.
Rose wanders the predominantly Anglo-Australian suburbs in revealing cheongsams. She smokes elegantly and convinces the local Chinese community that she was once a star. She tickles and coaxes her children, and makes noodles for Joe. But there is a fatalistic brittleness in everything she does, and in an instant she can turn tiger, savaging her lover, her daughter, and putting down all those around her with an ugly contempt. Watching all of these moments is the eleven-year-old Tom, unsure of what to do or say, unable to comprehend this kind of person, this form of love – this mother.
The film belongs to Joan Chen, and it’s worth seeing it for her performance alone. Rose is a complex woman: resourceful, manipulative and explosive, yet fragile and frequently remorseful. It would be easy to lose the character to melodrama, or take refuge with safe choices. Yet Chen is both daring and understanding, layering the beautiful and dangerous woman she plays with intricacies borne from a secret past, one that is revealed late in the film with a flashback of Rose’s life as a young woman in China. Chen has never been better than this.
Director Ayres brings a painterly and measured eye to the film and carefully manages to steer away from portraying his mother with sentimentality, except in the flashback scene, which is tinged with an exotic nostalgia – perhaps because it is a story told by Rose herself. Ayres extracts strong performances from the two youngsters, both in debut roles, and Qi too brings depth and intensity to the young lover Joe, excited at being with Rose yet driven to desperation at her increasingly demanding behaviour.
Strangely, Ayres chooses to include some dream sequences of the young Tom’s fantasies of being a mythological Chinese hero - the kind he reads about in comic books. He flies through the air fighting off the evil forces in his life – and although we understand why he would want to live in this fantasy world, these sequences fit rather uncomfortably in an otherwise carefully designed and photographed film. The voice-over too – from the writer that the young Tom presumably becomes - is also unnecessary at times. Joan Chen’s brilliant performance is enough to show us the difficulties her son was witness to, and the complex emotional memories that would have resulted.
Thursday, September 13, 2007
Interview with Pete Postlethwaite
Pete Postlethwaite wants to tell a story, an Australian story. Like all good stories, it goes back a long way, borne of what he calls “happenstance”. And like all good stories it comes from the heart, from a deeply personal experience that has changed the English actor’s life. But what’s most interesting about this story is that Postlethwaite believes it’s one that all Australian’s should know. There’s a touch of zeal in his voice. “How is it we can’t see what’s in front of our eyes” he wonders. He wants to change our world a little.
Postlethwaite was born in Warrington on the River Mersey in England, half way between Liverpool and Manchester. He trained as a teacher and spent five years in a seminary before switching to acting school. After treading the boards with the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Postlethwaite turned to film. He became a household name when he was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in In the Name of the Father. A flood of movie roles followed, in films as varied as The Usual Suspects, Romeo & Juliet, Alien3 and The Omen. He has the unforgettable face of a sensitive madman, all cheekbones and nose, with eyes that can look right through you and take you to the heart of things. Steven Spielberg once called him the greatest actor in the world (although Postlethwaite modestly suggests that what Spielberg actually said was “Pete Postlethwaite thinks he's the greatest actor in the world.”) For many people he will always be best remembered as Danny, the bandleader in Brassed Off, a film about an old coal-mining town facing an uncertain future as the government plans to close the pit.
Postlethwaite’s Australian story is also about governments and traditions. It involves a film called Liyarn Ngarn that opened this month around Australia, but the whole story is much more than the film. It all stared the first time Postlethwaite came to Australia in 2003, when he was touring a play called Scaramouche Jones. Postlethwaite explains: “It was the opening night in Perth and a man came to the stage door and gave me a film script. I was terrified about the show because it was designed for an intimate space, but we were in a 1200 seater, and so I didn’t take any notice of this man at the time. It wasn’t until after the show, when I relaxed, that I suddenly realised that inside this older man with grey hair was a much younger man I knew from thirty years before. It was Bill Johnson, and he’d been in the seminary with me, when we were both training to be Catholic priests. I had no idea he’d come to Australia. Luckily he left his phone number on the script.”
Postlethwaite and Johnson spent time together, catching up on the missing years, and it was during this time together that Postlethwaite heard about the tragedy of Louis St John, Johnson’s adopted son. Louis had been one of the stolen generation of Aboriginal children, and had been adopted in Alice Springs by Bill Johnson and his wife Pauline before he was two years old. On the day of his 19th birthday, in January 1992, Louis was walking home from a party when he was attacked and beaten to death. He was only a few blocks from his home in a quiet affluent beach suburb of northern Perth, and two young Englishmen were convicted of his murder. It was reported that they told the police Louis was killed “because he was black.” It was a revenge killing of sorts, retaliation for one of their mates apparently being assaulted by blacks.
Postlethwaite was deeply moved by the personal tragedy and its wider context in Aboriginal history since white settlement, particularly because Louis’ murderers were English. “Because I was so shocked and unaware of the situation, Bill thought it would be a good idea for me to come back and have a look around. I thought it would be a great idea to walk the country, see people and talk to them and try and understand what has happened.” Johnson wanted Postlethwaite to have an Aboriginal guide and so introduced him to an old friend, singer-songwriter Archie Roach, suggesting that the two of them make the journey. Postlethwaite explains that the idea of a film was in the air. “At this stage we were already thinking about making a documentary, but we priced a professional crew and realised we couldn’t afford it. Then someone suggested the media department at Murdoch University, so we agreed to shoot the film with students, using their tutor Martin Mhando as director, making sure the set-ups and shots were done properly.”
It was about this time that Pat Dodson met Postlethwaite. Dodson is one of the fathers of reconciliation in Australia and was a Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, as well as being a former catholic priest. It was Dodson who recognized Postlethwaite at Broome airport one day. “It was an absolute coincidence,” says Dodson, “a few weeks before this I’d watched Brassed Off, and I admired him in his role dealing with the adversity of miners being screwed down by a fascist government. I walked up to him and said ‘you’re the bloke from Brassed Off.’ We got talking and he said he was thinking about going on a journey in Australia with Archie Roach and he would be amenable if I would play some role helping him interpret what the heck he was encountering. I thought if I could add anything to the interpretation and the encounter that Pete and Archie were going to find on the road, then I’d be more than happy to join in.”
So the journey of the three men began. But it wasn’t long before Postlethwaite realised it wasn’t going to plan. “We thought we knew what were doing, and knew where we were going, but within a couple of weeks of starting the journey the things we encountered were bigger and more important and more emotional than any of us. We had a kind a plan: the story of Bill’s son was the springboard, and the idea for the documentary was to look at the historical, political and spiritual context of the whole indigenous situation. There wasn’t really an agenda, but the deeper we went into the heart of darkness, the more the agenda suggested itself to us. It changed us. I’m still struggling to come to terms with it – its unfathomable.”
Postlethwaite takes a deep raspy breath. He seems lost for words. What he found on the journey was the complex emotional centre of Australian race relations, a path littered with difficult phrases: terra nullius, land dispossession, lost generation, Aboriginal deaths in custody, shared responsibility agreements. As a recent OBE recipient Postlethwaite felt a strange personal responsibility “Here was I, an officer of the British Empire - forced to face what that meant. I mean, we started the whole problem with terra nullius, and I had to question what damage was caused by the colonialism and pastoralism of the colonies”
Dodson agrees that there was something important about Postlethwaite’s OBE status. “There’s a whole lot of unfinished business about the British involvement in Australia as far as I am concerned, and it was opportune that a leading member of the British Empire – and a master at acting - was interested at looking at the lot of aboriginal people after 200 years of the benefits of Westernisation. It should spark every non-aboriginal Australian person’s interest in why things haven’t changed.”
While Dodson speaks eloquently of the big picture, Postlethwaite keeps coming back to his personal response to the things he saw and heard. “I’m not same person as when I started this journey. I’m not a clever man particularly, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what is going on here. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to loose a culture with an extraordinary breadth, depth and colour. That’s the way it’s heading.”
By the time Postlethwaite, Roach and Dodson finished their journey, they had captured over 100 hours of film. Various attempts were made to edit the final story for the screen, but Postlethwaite and his travelling companions weren’t happy with the results. “It was a difficult time,” says Postlethwaite, “we knew we didn’t want a polemic, or a historical documentary or even anything educational – which is what the first edit looked like - so eventually the three people in charge – Archie, Pat and myself - said that we’d have a go at it. So we sat with the editor, David Teale, and we brought out the emotional side of the story. That is what we wanted. That’s what Liyarn Ngarn is. People aren’t calling it a documentary anymore. They call it a film.”
According to Dodson, Liyarn Ngarn literally means a meeting of the hearts, minds and spirit of the two unique peoples of Australia: Aboriginal and non-aboriginal. “But I prefer Archie Roach’s explanation. He described it as two stories becoming one, the white fella story and the aboriginal story, where total respect is given for each side of the storytelling.”
Postlethwaite agrees that this sentiment is at the heart of what must happen next. “It’s a fantastic country, I’ve been welcomed by people of all races and all walks of life. Australia has the potential to be a really great country, but you can’t raise yourself into a really, really great nation until you embrace the history of that nation – and that is what we’re trying to do with the film. That’s the story.”
Postlethwaite was born in Warrington on the River Mersey in England, half way between Liverpool and Manchester. He trained as a teacher and spent five years in a seminary before switching to acting school. After treading the boards with the Bristol Old Vic and the Royal Shakespeare Company, Postlethwaite turned to film. He became a household name when he was nominated for an Academy Award for his performance in In the Name of the Father. A flood of movie roles followed, in films as varied as The Usual Suspects, Romeo & Juliet, Alien3 and The Omen. He has the unforgettable face of a sensitive madman, all cheekbones and nose, with eyes that can look right through you and take you to the heart of things. Steven Spielberg once called him the greatest actor in the world (although Postlethwaite modestly suggests that what Spielberg actually said was “Pete Postlethwaite thinks he's the greatest actor in the world.”) For many people he will always be best remembered as Danny, the bandleader in Brassed Off, a film about an old coal-mining town facing an uncertain future as the government plans to close the pit.
Postlethwaite’s Australian story is also about governments and traditions. It involves a film called Liyarn Ngarn that opened this month around Australia, but the whole story is much more than the film. It all stared the first time Postlethwaite came to Australia in 2003, when he was touring a play called Scaramouche Jones. Postlethwaite explains: “It was the opening night in Perth and a man came to the stage door and gave me a film script. I was terrified about the show because it was designed for an intimate space, but we were in a 1200 seater, and so I didn’t take any notice of this man at the time. It wasn’t until after the show, when I relaxed, that I suddenly realised that inside this older man with grey hair was a much younger man I knew from thirty years before. It was Bill Johnson, and he’d been in the seminary with me, when we were both training to be Catholic priests. I had no idea he’d come to Australia. Luckily he left his phone number on the script.”
Postlethwaite and Johnson spent time together, catching up on the missing years, and it was during this time together that Postlethwaite heard about the tragedy of Louis St John, Johnson’s adopted son. Louis had been one of the stolen generation of Aboriginal children, and had been adopted in Alice Springs by Bill Johnson and his wife Pauline before he was two years old. On the day of his 19th birthday, in January 1992, Louis was walking home from a party when he was attacked and beaten to death. He was only a few blocks from his home in a quiet affluent beach suburb of northern Perth, and two young Englishmen were convicted of his murder. It was reported that they told the police Louis was killed “because he was black.” It was a revenge killing of sorts, retaliation for one of their mates apparently being assaulted by blacks.
Postlethwaite was deeply moved by the personal tragedy and its wider context in Aboriginal history since white settlement, particularly because Louis’ murderers were English. “Because I was so shocked and unaware of the situation, Bill thought it would be a good idea for me to come back and have a look around. I thought it would be a great idea to walk the country, see people and talk to them and try and understand what has happened.” Johnson wanted Postlethwaite to have an Aboriginal guide and so introduced him to an old friend, singer-songwriter Archie Roach, suggesting that the two of them make the journey. Postlethwaite explains that the idea of a film was in the air. “At this stage we were already thinking about making a documentary, but we priced a professional crew and realised we couldn’t afford it. Then someone suggested the media department at Murdoch University, so we agreed to shoot the film with students, using their tutor Martin Mhando as director, making sure the set-ups and shots were done properly.”
It was about this time that Pat Dodson met Postlethwaite. Dodson is one of the fathers of reconciliation in Australia and was a Commissioner into Aboriginal Deaths in Custody, as well as being a former catholic priest. It was Dodson who recognized Postlethwaite at Broome airport one day. “It was an absolute coincidence,” says Dodson, “a few weeks before this I’d watched Brassed Off, and I admired him in his role dealing with the adversity of miners being screwed down by a fascist government. I walked up to him and said ‘you’re the bloke from Brassed Off.’ We got talking and he said he was thinking about going on a journey in Australia with Archie Roach and he would be amenable if I would play some role helping him interpret what the heck he was encountering. I thought if I could add anything to the interpretation and the encounter that Pete and Archie were going to find on the road, then I’d be more than happy to join in.”
So the journey of the three men began. But it wasn’t long before Postlethwaite realised it wasn’t going to plan. “We thought we knew what were doing, and knew where we were going, but within a couple of weeks of starting the journey the things we encountered were bigger and more important and more emotional than any of us. We had a kind a plan: the story of Bill’s son was the springboard, and the idea for the documentary was to look at the historical, political and spiritual context of the whole indigenous situation. There wasn’t really an agenda, but the deeper we went into the heart of darkness, the more the agenda suggested itself to us. It changed us. I’m still struggling to come to terms with it – its unfathomable.”
Postlethwaite takes a deep raspy breath. He seems lost for words. What he found on the journey was the complex emotional centre of Australian race relations, a path littered with difficult phrases: terra nullius, land dispossession, lost generation, Aboriginal deaths in custody, shared responsibility agreements. As a recent OBE recipient Postlethwaite felt a strange personal responsibility “Here was I, an officer of the British Empire - forced to face what that meant. I mean, we started the whole problem with terra nullius, and I had to question what damage was caused by the colonialism and pastoralism of the colonies”
Dodson agrees that there was something important about Postlethwaite’s OBE status. “There’s a whole lot of unfinished business about the British involvement in Australia as far as I am concerned, and it was opportune that a leading member of the British Empire – and a master at acting - was interested at looking at the lot of aboriginal people after 200 years of the benefits of Westernisation. It should spark every non-aboriginal Australian person’s interest in why things haven’t changed.”
While Dodson speaks eloquently of the big picture, Postlethwaite keeps coming back to his personal response to the things he saw and heard. “I’m not same person as when I started this journey. I’m not a clever man particularly, but you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to see what is going on here. If we aren’t careful, we’re going to loose a culture with an extraordinary breadth, depth and colour. That’s the way it’s heading.”
By the time Postlethwaite, Roach and Dodson finished their journey, they had captured over 100 hours of film. Various attempts were made to edit the final story for the screen, but Postlethwaite and his travelling companions weren’t happy with the results. “It was a difficult time,” says Postlethwaite, “we knew we didn’t want a polemic, or a historical documentary or even anything educational – which is what the first edit looked like - so eventually the three people in charge – Archie, Pat and myself - said that we’d have a go at it. So we sat with the editor, David Teale, and we brought out the emotional side of the story. That is what we wanted. That’s what Liyarn Ngarn is. People aren’t calling it a documentary anymore. They call it a film.”
According to Dodson, Liyarn Ngarn literally means a meeting of the hearts, minds and spirit of the two unique peoples of Australia: Aboriginal and non-aboriginal. “But I prefer Archie Roach’s explanation. He described it as two stories becoming one, the white fella story and the aboriginal story, where total respect is given for each side of the storytelling.”
Postlethwaite agrees that this sentiment is at the heart of what must happen next. “It’s a fantastic country, I’ve been welcomed by people of all races and all walks of life. Australia has the potential to be a really great country, but you can’t raise yourself into a really, really great nation until you embrace the history of that nation – and that is what we’re trying to do with the film. That’s the story.”
Review of "The Final Winter"
The Final Winter opens with all the gravitas of an epic war film. Tough men, it seems, are preparing for battle. Honour, pride and glory are at stake. They are the last of a special breed of warrior, driven by the traditions of the past and blind to the tumultuous changes ahead. But hang on, this is not Thermopylae but Newtown, and the battle is Australian rugby league, the way it was played in the era of the biff in the 1980s, before sponsorship, professional players and multi-million dollar television rights.
The story centres on two brothers, Grub (Mathew Nable - who also wrote the screenplay) and Trent (Nathaniel Dean) who grew up playing first grade for the Newtown Jets. Grub is older and a hardened player with 200 games under his belt – a kind of Tommy Raudonikis character – for whom taking out the opposition is as much a part of the game as scoring tries. He doesn’t listen to his coach Jack (really well portrayed by ex-rugby league player Matt Johns) and he’s completely at odds with the new club chairman, real-estate agent Murray Perry (John Jarratt). Grub’s much younger brother Trent has more flair and has left the club because he doesn’t like the way Grub plays the game. There’s no love lost between the two brothers - caused as much by past problems at home, as their different attitude to the game. As the season comes to an end, Grub is under mounting pressure from all sides – a symbol of everything that is about to be swept away in the new era of corporate sponsorship and disciplinary tribunals.
The film is soundly enough made, but like the recent Australian film West, one has to believe that we have moved on from these kinds of stories with Ocker male characters drinking and fighting whilst their wives and girlfriends do the washing up or serve the beers. David Williamson’s The Club, directed by Bruce Beresford, set a high benchmark for the football story back in 1980 with its sharp exploration of backroom politics in the VFL. Of course, The Final Winter film is deliberately intended to be a nostalgic look back at a bygone era of footy, but ultimately it’s not about the game but about a handful of characters, and they are thinly drawn in a largely unimaginative screenplay. Directors Brian Andrews and Jane Forrest film most of the action indoors in tight scenes and let the cast overact – Jarratt in particular is unsubtle and unbelievable. The result is more like a television drama with few cinematographic moments.
The story centres on two brothers, Grub (Mathew Nable - who also wrote the screenplay) and Trent (Nathaniel Dean) who grew up playing first grade for the Newtown Jets. Grub is older and a hardened player with 200 games under his belt – a kind of Tommy Raudonikis character – for whom taking out the opposition is as much a part of the game as scoring tries. He doesn’t listen to his coach Jack (really well portrayed by ex-rugby league player Matt Johns) and he’s completely at odds with the new club chairman, real-estate agent Murray Perry (John Jarratt). Grub’s much younger brother Trent has more flair and has left the club because he doesn’t like the way Grub plays the game. There’s no love lost between the two brothers - caused as much by past problems at home, as their different attitude to the game. As the season comes to an end, Grub is under mounting pressure from all sides – a symbol of everything that is about to be swept away in the new era of corporate sponsorship and disciplinary tribunals.
The film is soundly enough made, but like the recent Australian film West, one has to believe that we have moved on from these kinds of stories with Ocker male characters drinking and fighting whilst their wives and girlfriends do the washing up or serve the beers. David Williamson’s The Club, directed by Bruce Beresford, set a high benchmark for the football story back in 1980 with its sharp exploration of backroom politics in the VFL. Of course, The Final Winter film is deliberately intended to be a nostalgic look back at a bygone era of footy, but ultimately it’s not about the game but about a handful of characters, and they are thinly drawn in a largely unimaginative screenplay. Directors Brian Andrews and Jane Forrest film most of the action indoors in tight scenes and let the cast overact – Jarratt in particular is unsubtle and unbelievable. The result is more like a television drama with few cinematographic moments.
Review of "Once"
It was Cervantes who said that ‘he who sings frightens away his woes’, and that is what Glen Hansard and Marketa Irglova do in this tender and poignant love story, studded with heartbreaking ballads from beginning to end.
Hansard and Irglova play two unnamed musicians living on the cheap in present day Ireland. He’s a vacuum repairman by day and a busker by night, singing his heart out and trying to forget his girlfriend who’s left for England. Irglova plays a Czech migrant living with her mother in a dingy flat, and selling flowers on the street to pay the bills. Although she is a pianist, she can only play for an hour at lunchtime when the owner of a friendly music shop lets her sit at one of the pianos. These two characters cross paths in the busy malls of Dublin and slowly discover each other, and each other’s existing obligations, through their music.
Despite the badly lit handheld photography (it gets very poor in night-time interior scenes) it’s hard not to be moved by the touching nature of the story, the delightful balance of Hansard’s tortured guy and Irglova’s free-spirited girl, and of course the music; mostly instrumental power ballads with a bit of Mendelssohn piano thrown in for extra depth. (And watch out for the wonderful song “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy” that Hansard sings on the bus to explain his situation to his new friend).
Hansard’s music credentials are impeccable: he’s the lead singer of the Irish band The Frames, and also starred as the guitarist in that other film about Irish musicians The Commitments (although that’s where the similarities end). He and Irglova wrote just about all the music for the film and the real aching moments in the story happen when they are playing for each other - singing away their woes while the other looks on.
Writer and director John Carney made the film on a shoestring budget and the writing is strong enough to withstand the many shortcuts taken to get the story to the screen. There’s a wonderful honesty about everything here – the performances, the lingering realism of the camera work and most importantly the direction the story takes once it’s underway.
Hansard and Irglova play two unnamed musicians living on the cheap in present day Ireland. He’s a vacuum repairman by day and a busker by night, singing his heart out and trying to forget his girlfriend who’s left for England. Irglova plays a Czech migrant living with her mother in a dingy flat, and selling flowers on the street to pay the bills. Although she is a pianist, she can only play for an hour at lunchtime when the owner of a friendly music shop lets her sit at one of the pianos. These two characters cross paths in the busy malls of Dublin and slowly discover each other, and each other’s existing obligations, through their music.
Despite the badly lit handheld photography (it gets very poor in night-time interior scenes) it’s hard not to be moved by the touching nature of the story, the delightful balance of Hansard’s tortured guy and Irglova’s free-spirited girl, and of course the music; mostly instrumental power ballads with a bit of Mendelssohn piano thrown in for extra depth. (And watch out for the wonderful song “Broken Hearted Hoover Fixer Sucker Guy” that Hansard sings on the bus to explain his situation to his new friend).
Hansard’s music credentials are impeccable: he’s the lead singer of the Irish band The Frames, and also starred as the guitarist in that other film about Irish musicians The Commitments (although that’s where the similarities end). He and Irglova wrote just about all the music for the film and the real aching moments in the story happen when they are playing for each other - singing away their woes while the other looks on.
Writer and director John Carney made the film on a shoestring budget and the writing is strong enough to withstand the many shortcuts taken to get the story to the screen. There’s a wonderful honesty about everything here – the performances, the lingering realism of the camera work and most importantly the direction the story takes once it’s underway.
Review of "Surf's Up"
It’s fresh, it’s fun and it’s family friendly – the first animated surfing mocumentary in history, and it might just start a new trend. Over the years, animators have had their favourite creatures: we’ve had swarms of insects and bugs, enough monsters and ogres to fill a castle, and now it seems to be penguins who are top of the pecking order.
Surf’s Up follows the exploits of penguin surfing champ wannabe Cody Maverick (voice of Shia LeBouef) who was born small and who has something to prove to his conservative family, his dull fish-collecting hometown of Shiverpool, and to himself. As a young penguin chick he was awestruck by the legendary Big Z (voice of Jeff Bridges), the world’s greatest surfer. But Big Z was wiped out without a trace in the World Finals by self-assured penguin surfer Tank Evans (voice of Diedrich Bader), and his take-no-prisoners approach to winning. That was ten years ago and no one has beaten Tank since. After being spotted by the hilarious talent scouting duo of Mikey (voice of Marion Cantone) and Reggie (voice of James Woods), Cody finds himself in the water with the penguin world’s best surfers including Tank and Chicken Joe (voice of Jon Heder), the most laid back chook and surfer dude you’ll ever see - so laid back that he somehow manages to pass as a penguin. Helping Cody from the beach – and sometimes in the water - is surf lifesaver Lani (Zooey Deschanel).
The exuberant freshness and energy of the film comes from the use of the documentary format to skip us around the story and its truly endearing collection of characters. The narrative never gets too seriously grounded – except for the inevitable falling- in-love sequence where traditional story-telling takes over – and directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck (both with long credentials in animation) play the low key, ironic humour for all its worth. They also add their own voices as the filmmakers who don’t always get it right, and find time for some hilarious side adventures with Chicken Joe and a tribe of feral penguins when things do get serious – in fact Chicken Joe steals the movie from right under the penguins’ flippers. The voice-over work is lively and full of sparkle, and you get the very real sense that the cast enjoyed doing this together. It’s a real charmer and should be enjoyed by young and old, even if you thought you’d had enough of penguins on the screen.
Surf’s Up follows the exploits of penguin surfing champ wannabe Cody Maverick (voice of Shia LeBouef) who was born small and who has something to prove to his conservative family, his dull fish-collecting hometown of Shiverpool, and to himself. As a young penguin chick he was awestruck by the legendary Big Z (voice of Jeff Bridges), the world’s greatest surfer. But Big Z was wiped out without a trace in the World Finals by self-assured penguin surfer Tank Evans (voice of Diedrich Bader), and his take-no-prisoners approach to winning. That was ten years ago and no one has beaten Tank since. After being spotted by the hilarious talent scouting duo of Mikey (voice of Marion Cantone) and Reggie (voice of James Woods), Cody finds himself in the water with the penguin world’s best surfers including Tank and Chicken Joe (voice of Jon Heder), the most laid back chook and surfer dude you’ll ever see - so laid back that he somehow manages to pass as a penguin. Helping Cody from the beach – and sometimes in the water - is surf lifesaver Lani (Zooey Deschanel).
The exuberant freshness and energy of the film comes from the use of the documentary format to skip us around the story and its truly endearing collection of characters. The narrative never gets too seriously grounded – except for the inevitable falling- in-love sequence where traditional story-telling takes over – and directors Ash Brannon and Chris Buck (both with long credentials in animation) play the low key, ironic humour for all its worth. They also add their own voices as the filmmakers who don’t always get it right, and find time for some hilarious side adventures with Chicken Joe and a tribe of feral penguins when things do get serious – in fact Chicken Joe steals the movie from right under the penguins’ flippers. The voice-over work is lively and full of sparkle, and you get the very real sense that the cast enjoyed doing this together. It’s a real charmer and should be enjoyed by young and old, even if you thought you’d had enough of penguins on the screen.
Thursday, August 9, 2007
Review of "Sicko"
He’s not pretty and he’s certainly not subtle, but Michael Moore knows how to ask a loaded question. After the global success of his documentaries Bowling for Columbine and Fahrenheit 9/11, the new target for Moore’s unusual brand of polemic is America’s health care system and the private insurance companies that dominate its landscape. The weapons of choice that he uses to brandish his affable form of left-wing patriotism at the subject are the usual collection of suffering ordinary people, comparisons to other systems around the world, and his clever but naughty use of sarcasm.
Sicko starts at ground level, introducing us to a handful of people who have fallen foul of a health care system that depends upon insurance companies as middlemen between patient and doctor. With returns to shareholders as their primary agenda, Moore exposes the way these companies are geared to declining help for people in need. He rounds up a call centre operator who weeps recalling the people she rejected. He rounds up a Medical Director admitting the error of her ways at a Congressional hearing, and he rounds us up with some truly heart-wrenching case studies. Take some tissues.
Moore then moves onwards and upwards: to Canada where health care is free and where people live in fear of falling sick on a day-trip to the USA. Then to Britain where people laugh at his questions about what they pay for medical services. Pay? Then to France, where they shrug with vague contempt before relaxing with a glass of red and the certain knowledge that they will outlive their average American counterpart. In his coup de grace, Moore visits Cuba with a boatload of sickly American heroes, and discovers how America’s closest enemy treats these people who cannot get health care in their own country.
It’s a fascinating film, with Moore in a low-key and reflective mood, but it’s not without its problems. There’s no voice given to the other side of the story, no attempt to really explain why the system evolved that way (other than a quick glossing over of some Nixon-era policy decisions), and there is some very ordinary cinematography. But these don’t matter to Moore: as almost the lone voice of the left in the USA, he just wants to make it clear that the system doesn’t work. As he points out, Americans copy or buy everything that’s good from everywhere else in the world – the food, the wine, the cars, the technology. Why not copy the universal, free health care systems that work so well elsewhere? It’s a very good question.
Sicko starts at ground level, introducing us to a handful of people who have fallen foul of a health care system that depends upon insurance companies as middlemen between patient and doctor. With returns to shareholders as their primary agenda, Moore exposes the way these companies are geared to declining help for people in need. He rounds up a call centre operator who weeps recalling the people she rejected. He rounds up a Medical Director admitting the error of her ways at a Congressional hearing, and he rounds us up with some truly heart-wrenching case studies. Take some tissues.
Moore then moves onwards and upwards: to Canada where health care is free and where people live in fear of falling sick on a day-trip to the USA. Then to Britain where people laugh at his questions about what they pay for medical services. Pay? Then to France, where they shrug with vague contempt before relaxing with a glass of red and the certain knowledge that they will outlive their average American counterpart. In his coup de grace, Moore visits Cuba with a boatload of sickly American heroes, and discovers how America’s closest enemy treats these people who cannot get health care in their own country.
It’s a fascinating film, with Moore in a low-key and reflective mood, but it’s not without its problems. There’s no voice given to the other side of the story, no attempt to really explain why the system evolved that way (other than a quick glossing over of some Nixon-era policy decisions), and there is some very ordinary cinematography. But these don’t matter to Moore: as almost the lone voice of the left in the USA, he just wants to make it clear that the system doesn’t work. As he points out, Americans copy or buy everything that’s good from everywhere else in the world – the food, the wine, the cars, the technology. Why not copy the universal, free health care systems that work so well elsewhere? It’s a very good question.
Thursday, August 2, 2007
Review of 'Black Snake Moan'
This is one of those films likely to divide audiences. It could be described as a Southern tale of sin, redemption and the blues. Or as sexist trash. Either way there’s no denying the powerful work done by Samuel L. Jackson and Christina Ricci in two wonderful central performances that undoubtedly help to make the film more than it really is.
Ricci plays Rae, a young woman unable to deal with a terrible force that, as she says, “starts in mah head, spreads to mah belly and then goes lower.” With her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) away in the army, her sexual urges lead her to strutting around the steamy Tennessee town in cut off shorts and top, in search of something that will help scratch her itch. Anyone, it seems, will do. After a wild drug-fueled night, she is found unconscious, beaten up and near naked by Lazarus (Jackson), an old blues guitarist barely able to hold in his own passions after his wife has left him for another man. Lazarus decides that Rae is a sign from God and is determined to purge her evil ways in order to redeem himself. This involves chaining her inside his house and playing her some good ol’ Memphis blues. Music, it seems, is the best way to keep the black snake of infidelity from your door.
Writer/director Craig Brewer (who also made Hustle & Flow) works the first half of the film as black comedy and it’s delicious in parts. Ricci’s sexy waif and Jackson’s tortured bluesman are finely supported by John Cothran Jr. who plays the local Reverend, called in to pour holy water on the fires of desire. But the second half, when Ronnie returns home early from his tour of duty and when Ricci starts to wear clothes, switches to a more conventional and less successful romance narrative, with Lazarus now in charge of saving the fragile Ronnie as well. But thanks to some toe-tapping blues and because Jackson and Ricci have painted such endearing portraits for their two lost souls, there’s enough good will to get the ending over the line.
Ricci plays Rae, a young woman unable to deal with a terrible force that, as she says, “starts in mah head, spreads to mah belly and then goes lower.” With her boyfriend Ronnie (Justin Timberlake) away in the army, her sexual urges lead her to strutting around the steamy Tennessee town in cut off shorts and top, in search of something that will help scratch her itch. Anyone, it seems, will do. After a wild drug-fueled night, she is found unconscious, beaten up and near naked by Lazarus (Jackson), an old blues guitarist barely able to hold in his own passions after his wife has left him for another man. Lazarus decides that Rae is a sign from God and is determined to purge her evil ways in order to redeem himself. This involves chaining her inside his house and playing her some good ol’ Memphis blues. Music, it seems, is the best way to keep the black snake of infidelity from your door.
Writer/director Craig Brewer (who also made Hustle & Flow) works the first half of the film as black comedy and it’s delicious in parts. Ricci’s sexy waif and Jackson’s tortured bluesman are finely supported by John Cothran Jr. who plays the local Reverend, called in to pour holy water on the fires of desire. But the second half, when Ronnie returns home early from his tour of duty and when Ricci starts to wear clothes, switches to a more conventional and less successful romance narrative, with Lazarus now in charge of saving the fragile Ronnie as well. But thanks to some toe-tapping blues and because Jackson and Ricci have painted such endearing portraits for their two lost souls, there’s enough good will to get the ending over the line.
Review of 'Mr. Brooks"
The man named Mr. Brooks (Kevin Costner) has a problem: although he’s rich, successful, good looking, with a beautiful wife and daughter, he’s a serial killer. But the film named Mr. Brooks has an even more serious problem: although it’s stylishly photographed in a collection of classy locations with a well-known cast, it is utterly ludicrous. Man and film are beyond comprehension or redemption.
Serial killer films can head in a few directions. There are whodunits where the audience tries to stay one step ahead of the police investigation. Or there’s the psychological thriller, where we know who’s doing the killing but enjoy the slow and appalling revelation about why. There are also the grisly slasher and erotic mystery versions, where the kicks are more visceral. Mr. Brooks is none of these, although it offers some bloody and some sexy moments. For all its many (far too many) storylines, it neither provides any suspense, nor tries to explain what is going on in the minds of any of the characters involved. And what a bunch they are! Firstly there’s Mr. Brooks himself, who is accompanied by his alter ego - or more likely his alter-id - Marshall (William Hurt) who pops up like an annoying jack-in-the box to explain the plot for anyone who might have fallen asleep. Then there’s Detective Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) a beautiful multi-millionaire police detective chasing Brooks whilst fending off an ex-husband and a second serial killer named Meeks (Matt Schulze) who’s on the loose. Then there is Mr. Smith (Dane Cook), a serial killer in training who joins Brooks and the pop-up Marshall in the hunt for fresh targets. Lastly there’s Brooks’ daughter Jane, who seems to suffer from the same serial killing condition as Brooks senior, Marshall, Meeks and Smith. With all these killers, there may have been an opportunity to make this a black comedy – but there’s not a shred of humour in sight.
Writer and Director Bruce A. Evans was nominated for an Oscar back in 1986 for his writing on Stand By Me, but has really fallen short of the mark on this one. The performances are universally contrived and wooden, and everyone delivers their lines as if speaking to a dimwitted and hard of hearing aunt – particularly Hurt who manages to turn what should be the driving force of mania into a smarmy side-kick. Most strange however is the unresolved ending, which staggers from high action shoot-out to gothic graveyard horror before trying to convince us that Mr. Brooks is actually just a family man we’re meant to like and feel sorry for. Give us a break.
Serial killer films can head in a few directions. There are whodunits where the audience tries to stay one step ahead of the police investigation. Or there’s the psychological thriller, where we know who’s doing the killing but enjoy the slow and appalling revelation about why. There are also the grisly slasher and erotic mystery versions, where the kicks are more visceral. Mr. Brooks is none of these, although it offers some bloody and some sexy moments. For all its many (far too many) storylines, it neither provides any suspense, nor tries to explain what is going on in the minds of any of the characters involved. And what a bunch they are! Firstly there’s Mr. Brooks himself, who is accompanied by his alter ego - or more likely his alter-id - Marshall (William Hurt) who pops up like an annoying jack-in-the box to explain the plot for anyone who might have fallen asleep. Then there’s Detective Tracy Atwood (Demi Moore) a beautiful multi-millionaire police detective chasing Brooks whilst fending off an ex-husband and a second serial killer named Meeks (Matt Schulze) who’s on the loose. Then there is Mr. Smith (Dane Cook), a serial killer in training who joins Brooks and the pop-up Marshall in the hunt for fresh targets. Lastly there’s Brooks’ daughter Jane, who seems to suffer from the same serial killing condition as Brooks senior, Marshall, Meeks and Smith. With all these killers, there may have been an opportunity to make this a black comedy – but there’s not a shred of humour in sight.
Writer and Director Bruce A. Evans was nominated for an Oscar back in 1986 for his writing on Stand By Me, but has really fallen short of the mark on this one. The performances are universally contrived and wooden, and everyone delivers their lines as if speaking to a dimwitted and hard of hearing aunt – particularly Hurt who manages to turn what should be the driving force of mania into a smarmy side-kick. Most strange however is the unresolved ending, which staggers from high action shoot-out to gothic graveyard horror before trying to convince us that Mr. Brooks is actually just a family man we’re meant to like and feel sorry for. Give us a break.
Review of "The Simpsons Movie'
From the first glimpse of the famous Twentieth Century Fox logo to the last frame of the credits, the verbal, visual and musical gags just keep coming. “Why would anyone go to the movies and watch something that they can stay at home and watch on television for free?” complains Homer to the audience. Because it’s very clever comedy from the team that have dominated prime time, sit-com television for most of the last twenty years, that’s why! Welcome to the widescreen, feature length world of Springfield, and its most famous dysfunctional family – the Simpsons.
With a clear play on current environmental concerns, The Simpsons Movie opens on Springfield threatened by an ecological disaster. Homer (voice of Dan Castellaneta) takes the problem over the tipping point when he dumps his pet pig’s poo in the local lake whilst rushing for free doughnuts. Faced with catastrophe, President Arnold Schwarzenegger (voice of Harry Shearer) and Environmental Protection Agency boss Russ Cargill (voice of Albert Brooks) decide to close Springfield down for good. The angry residents (there are apparently more than 300 individual character cameos in the shot) descend on the Simpson’s house, but the family escapes to the wilderness where Homer must decide whether to return and save Springfield from anarchy and destruction, whilst working out how to restore his family’s belief in him as father and husband.
There’s nothing extraordinary in the story: it’s merely a structure for the savage wit and animated antics that Simpsons fans have come to love and expect. Director David Silverman and a team of eleven credited writers make full use of the wide screen format, and mercilessly poke fun at the cinema medium, along with other regular targets such as religion, the government and – in one inspired sequence – Disney-style animation. It’s these gags that fuel the film and give it an almost non-stop energy. Hans Zimmer also has some fun with the music and some of the adapted songs – particularly the ‘Spider-pig’ lyrics sung by Homer – are priceless. As for the characters, well, this is indeed the Simpsons’ movie, with other Springfield regulars relegated to very minor roles – even the dastardly Mr. Burns. The focus is definitely back to the core family of Homer, Marge (voice of Julie Kavner), Lisa (voice of Yeardley Smith), Bart and Maggie (both voiced by Nancy Cartright. Yes, Maggie does finally say something!), and ultimately it’s a massive Simpsons episode. But who cares when such a talented team of writers creates so much to laugh at. Eeeeexcellent.
With a clear play on current environmental concerns, The Simpsons Movie opens on Springfield threatened by an ecological disaster. Homer (voice of Dan Castellaneta) takes the problem over the tipping point when he dumps his pet pig’s poo in the local lake whilst rushing for free doughnuts. Faced with catastrophe, President Arnold Schwarzenegger (voice of Harry Shearer) and Environmental Protection Agency boss Russ Cargill (voice of Albert Brooks) decide to close Springfield down for good. The angry residents (there are apparently more than 300 individual character cameos in the shot) descend on the Simpson’s house, but the family escapes to the wilderness where Homer must decide whether to return and save Springfield from anarchy and destruction, whilst working out how to restore his family’s belief in him as father and husband.
There’s nothing extraordinary in the story: it’s merely a structure for the savage wit and animated antics that Simpsons fans have come to love and expect. Director David Silverman and a team of eleven credited writers make full use of the wide screen format, and mercilessly poke fun at the cinema medium, along with other regular targets such as religion, the government and – in one inspired sequence – Disney-style animation. It’s these gags that fuel the film and give it an almost non-stop energy. Hans Zimmer also has some fun with the music and some of the adapted songs – particularly the ‘Spider-pig’ lyrics sung by Homer – are priceless. As for the characters, well, this is indeed the Simpsons’ movie, with other Springfield regulars relegated to very minor roles – even the dastardly Mr. Burns. The focus is definitely back to the core family of Homer, Marge (voice of Julie Kavner), Lisa (voice of Yeardley Smith), Bart and Maggie (both voiced by Nancy Cartright. Yes, Maggie does finally say something!), and ultimately it’s a massive Simpsons episode. But who cares when such a talented team of writers creates so much to laugh at. Eeeeexcellent.
Wednesday, July 11, 2007
Review of 'Lucky Miles'
Premiering at this year’s Adelaide Film Festival, Lucky Miles recently took out the People’s Choice Award at the Sydney Film Festival, and its easy to see why: it’s a humane, endearing and gently funny film that’s been carefully crafted by Director Michael Rowland and beautifully shot by Geoff Burton. It deals with a group of illegal immigrants who are dumped on the coast of Western Australia by people smugglers, and the film touches on some topical issues about asylum seekers without ever getting preachy. Ultimately it’s a character piece, and the design of those characters is the key to the film’s warmth, and probably the reason it resonates so strongly with audiences.
Set in 1990, the story opens on a stunning Australian beach. A scruffy bunch of Indonesian people smugglers, led by Muluk (Sawung Jabo), land two groups of illegal immigrants. The first are Cambodians, gently led by Arun (Kenneth Moreleda), a young man who has an Australian father he has never met living in Perth. The second group are Iraquis, escaping the regime of Saddam Hussein. They are much more temperamental, and within moments are arguing about their national soccer team. In their party is Youssif (Rodney Afif), a professional engineer seeking asylum.
They are all told to climb the massive sand dune ahead of them, and wait for a bus that will take them to Perth. As they climb, the boat disappears across the bay, and at the top they find that they are in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The two groups head off in different directions, in search of their dreams and a little drinking water.
To add a little more spice to the story, and to provide the Australian cultural contrast to the new arrivals, is a motley crew of three Army Reservists who are commissioned to track the immigrants. The film shifts from group to group following their trials and tribulations through some stunning desert landscape. It’s here that we get to know the characters and join their extraordinary journey.
It’s Rowland's first feature film from a script he co-wrote with Helen Barnes, and he has managed to extract some superb work from his little known cast, carefully defining the different characters without ever stereotyping national characteristics for the sake of a laugh. Afif’s passionate, proud and easily frustrated Yousiff is the outstanding performance amongst many. This is a heart-warming film where the humour is never far from the surface, and it’s also refreshing to watch an Australian film where the typical Aussie characters take a back seat to some of the other nationalities we share the land with.
Set in 1990, the story opens on a stunning Australian beach. A scruffy bunch of Indonesian people smugglers, led by Muluk (Sawung Jabo), land two groups of illegal immigrants. The first are Cambodians, gently led by Arun (Kenneth Moreleda), a young man who has an Australian father he has never met living in Perth. The second group are Iraquis, escaping the regime of Saddam Hussein. They are much more temperamental, and within moments are arguing about their national soccer team. In their party is Youssif (Rodney Afif), a professional engineer seeking asylum.
They are all told to climb the massive sand dune ahead of them, and wait for a bus that will take them to Perth. As they climb, the boat disappears across the bay, and at the top they find that they are in the middle of absolutely nowhere. The two groups head off in different directions, in search of their dreams and a little drinking water.
To add a little more spice to the story, and to provide the Australian cultural contrast to the new arrivals, is a motley crew of three Army Reservists who are commissioned to track the immigrants. The film shifts from group to group following their trials and tribulations through some stunning desert landscape. It’s here that we get to know the characters and join their extraordinary journey.
It’s Rowland's first feature film from a script he co-wrote with Helen Barnes, and he has managed to extract some superb work from his little known cast, carefully defining the different characters without ever stereotyping national characteristics for the sake of a laugh. Afif’s passionate, proud and easily frustrated Yousiff is the outstanding performance amongst many. This is a heart-warming film where the humour is never far from the surface, and it’s also refreshing to watch an Australian film where the typical Aussie characters take a back seat to some of the other nationalities we share the land with.
Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Review of 'Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix'
The packed, mostly teen crowd eagerly applauded the slow parting of the red curtain, such was their excited anticipation. But once the lights fell dim and the stark cold reality of Harry’s world was there on the screen, there was barely a sound. And it stayed that way throughout, apart from a couple of laughs at made-for-laughing moments.
This is a sober and measured Harry Potter world. Gone are the pranks of childhood, (apart from the irrepressible Weasley twins) and the easily celebrated games of the schoolyard. The grand story – five parts through the seven books - has wormed its way into the quiet gloomy place of political adult struggle, smug inquisitors on one side, quiet believers on the other, pushing the main event (Harry’s struggle with Lord Voldemort) to the background and to the next two films.
There’s still the same crowd: Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), now back at a Hogwarts under the scrutiny of Delores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton). Sporting a pink twin-suit and a tight smile, she’s the wonderfully despotic face of The Ministry of Magic which, under the leadership of Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) refuses to believe that you-know-who is back. As with many a repressive regime, the media – in this case the animated Daily Prophet - is to put to use to undermine Harry, Dumbledore, Sirius Black and others who would speak out. When all adult avenues for action seem cut off, Harry starts to train supporters from the ranks of Hogwarts. With these secret lessons he finds a new friend in Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch – watch out for her!) and finally finds time for a kiss with old flame Cho Chang (Katie Leung). All this training - and all the friendships made - help as the storm clouds gather for a show down of wands at twenty paces.
Director David Yates has rejected the playfulness and showiness that characterized the first four films and focuses on telling a more somber story in a more classic way. It builds slowly – with heavy-handed use of the score - and never takes an easy way out, playing for a laugh or a gimmick. This puts plenty of pressure on the three young stars who are constantly shown up by a stellar cast of Britain’s finest adult actors - Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Griffiths, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, and the list goes on. At times the film cried out for more screen time from some of these names, many of whom have made their characters the real heart of the movie series. But don’t worry, it maybe dark and steady, but it’s powerful and it’s back.
This is a sober and measured Harry Potter world. Gone are the pranks of childhood, (apart from the irrepressible Weasley twins) and the easily celebrated games of the schoolyard. The grand story – five parts through the seven books - has wormed its way into the quiet gloomy place of political adult struggle, smug inquisitors on one side, quiet believers on the other, pushing the main event (Harry’s struggle with Lord Voldemort) to the background and to the next two films.
There’s still the same crowd: Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), Ron (Rupert Grint) and Hermione (Emma Watson), now back at a Hogwarts under the scrutiny of Delores Umbridge (Imelda Staunton). Sporting a pink twin-suit and a tight smile, she’s the wonderfully despotic face of The Ministry of Magic which, under the leadership of Cornelius Fudge (Robert Hardy) refuses to believe that you-know-who is back. As with many a repressive regime, the media – in this case the animated Daily Prophet - is to put to use to undermine Harry, Dumbledore, Sirius Black and others who would speak out. When all adult avenues for action seem cut off, Harry starts to train supporters from the ranks of Hogwarts. With these secret lessons he finds a new friend in Luna Lovegood (Evanna Lynch – watch out for her!) and finally finds time for a kiss with old flame Cho Chang (Katie Leung). All this training - and all the friendships made - help as the storm clouds gather for a show down of wands at twenty paces.
Director David Yates has rejected the playfulness and showiness that characterized the first four films and focuses on telling a more somber story in a more classic way. It builds slowly – with heavy-handed use of the score - and never takes an easy way out, playing for a laugh or a gimmick. This puts plenty of pressure on the three young stars who are constantly shown up by a stellar cast of Britain’s finest adult actors - Gary Oldman, Alan Rickman, Helena Bonham Carter, Ralph Fiennes, Richard Griffiths, Maggie Smith, Michael Gambon, and the list goes on. At times the film cried out for more screen time from some of these names, many of whom have made their characters the real heart of the movie series. But don’t worry, it maybe dark and steady, but it’s powerful and it’s back.
Monday, July 9, 2007
Review of 'The Lives of Others'
Set in 1984, presumably to recall George Orwell’s dystopic vision of totalitarianism, writer and director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck recreates East Germany five years before the fall of the Berlin wall. The Ministry for State Security – or Stasi – one of the most effective intelligence operations in the world, used a huge network of spies and informers to know everything about its citizens and act as the “Shield and Sword” of the state. Von Donnersmarck eases us into this soulless, drab world of surveillance and suspicion through the lives of a group of writers and actors and, once there, spins an intensely dramatic and beautifully human story – one worthy of its many awards, including an Oscar for Best Foreign Film earlier this year.
Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a successful and seemingly loyal playwright in the German Democratic Republic. He is a confident and poised figure who has never put a political foot wrong in the carefully watched world of artists, despite seeing a number of talented friends blacklisted and unable to either work or travel to the West. But it is this squeaky-clean reputation, and his choice of actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) as girlfriend, that brings him to the attention of senior party officials, men who believe they have a nose for treachery. After a few whispers in an empty theatre, Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is assigned to spy on Dreyman and find anything that could be used to incriminate him as disloyal. Wiesner is a hardened professional who appears to be the very embodiment of the passionless, clinical system that preys upon the tiny human weaknesses we all surrender to in our daily lives.
After skillfully establishing his surveillance operation, Wiesler spends his days and nights watching and listening to the writer and actress in their small apartment filled with books and paintings and piano. He notes down matters of significance in his reports. Nothing is overlooked. Even their lovemaking is reduced to a typewritten sentence on a clean page of a secret report. It is here – in the relationship between the watcher and the watched - that Von Donnersmarck skillfully explores the real drama at work in the story. Reduced to monitoring the lives of others in a joyless state, Wiesler begins to feel something towards the couple, whose passionate lives are laid out in stark contrast to his own empty existence. And having developed feelings, he is forced to choose between intervening to help the couple against the silent and destructive forces that have crushed his own humanity, or risk his own career and reputation.
It’s a masterful work for a first-time director, combining intelligence and emotional insight in a story full of characters we care for and plot developments that steadily propel you to the edge of your seat. Ulrich Mühe’s portrayal of the hollowed out Stasi officer who carefully rekindles a version of humanity, is spellbinding, and only one of many beautifully observed performances. The production design and music also make a significant contribution to this evocative study of the human condition in a world without trust.
Georg Dreyman (Sebastian Koch) is a successful and seemingly loyal playwright in the German Democratic Republic. He is a confident and poised figure who has never put a political foot wrong in the carefully watched world of artists, despite seeing a number of talented friends blacklisted and unable to either work or travel to the West. But it is this squeaky-clean reputation, and his choice of actress Christa-Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck) as girlfriend, that brings him to the attention of senior party officials, men who believe they have a nose for treachery. After a few whispers in an empty theatre, Stasi Captain Gerd Wiesler (Ulrich Mühe) is assigned to spy on Dreyman and find anything that could be used to incriminate him as disloyal. Wiesner is a hardened professional who appears to be the very embodiment of the passionless, clinical system that preys upon the tiny human weaknesses we all surrender to in our daily lives.
After skillfully establishing his surveillance operation, Wiesler spends his days and nights watching and listening to the writer and actress in their small apartment filled with books and paintings and piano. He notes down matters of significance in his reports. Nothing is overlooked. Even their lovemaking is reduced to a typewritten sentence on a clean page of a secret report. It is here – in the relationship between the watcher and the watched - that Von Donnersmarck skillfully explores the real drama at work in the story. Reduced to monitoring the lives of others in a joyless state, Wiesler begins to feel something towards the couple, whose passionate lives are laid out in stark contrast to his own empty existence. And having developed feelings, he is forced to choose between intervening to help the couple against the silent and destructive forces that have crushed his own humanity, or risk his own career and reputation.
It’s a masterful work for a first-time director, combining intelligence and emotional insight in a story full of characters we care for and plot developments that steadily propel you to the edge of your seat. Ulrich Mühe’s portrayal of the hollowed out Stasi officer who carefully rekindles a version of humanity, is spellbinding, and only one of many beautifully observed performances. The production design and music also make a significant contribution to this evocative study of the human condition in a world without trust.
Saturday, July 7, 2007
Review of 'Knocked Up'
If you liked 'The 40 Year Old Virgin' (and plenty of people did) then you know what you’re in for with writer/director Jude Apatow’s second feature Knocked Up. It’s the dialogue-based Hollywood world of likeable losers and toilet-bowl humour, sprinkled through liberally with middle-American honesty and grunge-free freshness. If this were food, it would be in a box in nice convenient bite-sized pieces. Nothing difficult to chew on, please!
The film opens like a screwball comedy, with classy, stunning, career-minded Alison (Katherine Heigl) finding herself in an unlikely one-night stand with an overweight, unemployed, wise-cracking, dopehead called Ben (Seth Rogen). The film’s poster says it all – “what if this guy got you pregnant?” Of course he does, and having made Ben so un-cool and so, so unwantable, Apatow has to work hard for the rest of the film to make us – and Alison - like him. We follow their pregnancy from start to finish and, when the main story flags – which it does often in the second half – we fall back on the sub-cultural lives of Ben’s pot-smoking porn buddies, and the more conventional, but no less happy lives of Alison’s sister and brother-in-law, (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd) with whom she lives.
The first half of the film is quite different to the second, as the often very clever and sometimes gross humour of the set-up gives way to the more sentimental and sober business of heading towards the delivery room. As the foetus grows and develops, the chasm between Alison and Ben, revealed (along with Ben’s butt size) on the morning after, is steadily closed with the aid of lashings of sentimental music and a few warm words from Ben’s Dad (Harold Ramis). Do we believe it? Probably not, but by the time the closing credits hit, we’re in deep sloppy, newborn baby slush - in a different film from where we started - but almost certainly feeling warm and gooey.
This is an overly long, formula-driven sit-com on steriods that bumps steadily from scene to scene, some irrelevant, some excellent. The performances throughout are strongly focused around delivery of the comic dialogue with a dry ironic nonchalance, at the expense of any deeper characterisation. Alison and Ben are a very unlikely pair and ultimately Stone and Heigl don’t really have the depth to make us feel that they could fall for each other or make their relationship work in the long term. But with a newborn delivered right in front of you, you’re not meant to worry about this kind of detail.
The film opens like a screwball comedy, with classy, stunning, career-minded Alison (Katherine Heigl) finding herself in an unlikely one-night stand with an overweight, unemployed, wise-cracking, dopehead called Ben (Seth Rogen). The film’s poster says it all – “what if this guy got you pregnant?” Of course he does, and having made Ben so un-cool and so, so unwantable, Apatow has to work hard for the rest of the film to make us – and Alison - like him. We follow their pregnancy from start to finish and, when the main story flags – which it does often in the second half – we fall back on the sub-cultural lives of Ben’s pot-smoking porn buddies, and the more conventional, but no less happy lives of Alison’s sister and brother-in-law, (Leslie Mann and Paul Rudd) with whom she lives.
The first half of the film is quite different to the second, as the often very clever and sometimes gross humour of the set-up gives way to the more sentimental and sober business of heading towards the delivery room. As the foetus grows and develops, the chasm between Alison and Ben, revealed (along with Ben’s butt size) on the morning after, is steadily closed with the aid of lashings of sentimental music and a few warm words from Ben’s Dad (Harold Ramis). Do we believe it? Probably not, but by the time the closing credits hit, we’re in deep sloppy, newborn baby slush - in a different film from where we started - but almost certainly feeling warm and gooey.
This is an overly long, formula-driven sit-com on steriods that bumps steadily from scene to scene, some irrelevant, some excellent. The performances throughout are strongly focused around delivery of the comic dialogue with a dry ironic nonchalance, at the expense of any deeper characterisation. Alison and Ben are a very unlikely pair and ultimately Stone and Heigl don’t really have the depth to make us feel that they could fall for each other or make their relationship work in the long term. But with a newborn delivered right in front of you, you’re not meant to worry about this kind of detail.
Wednesday, July 4, 2007
'Pirates of the Carribean' - An interview with Geoffrey Rush
Geoffrey Rush never played pirates as a child. “Instead I had a towel tied round my neck with my arms outstretched, running around like Superman” says Rush. “It was because the George Reeves superman series was on television.” This was back in the 1960’s in Queensland where Rush grew up. He was then like any other backyard boy. “We also watched Rawhide and Gunsmoke, and so we played a lot of Cowboys and Indians – but no pirates I’m afraid.”
Rush is now about as far from being a backyard Brisbane boy as you can get. He’s a Hollywood name, sought out for complex character roles on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s been the Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, the manic depressive Peter Sellers, the unrestrained Marquis de Sade, and is now revived as the villainous pirate Hector Barbossa for the third film in the Pirates of The Caribbean series. So he does know a thing or two about pirates and, like most of us, grew up with a clear idea of what pirates looked like and what they did.
“It’s amazing that even before the success of the first Pirates of The Caribbean film, the pirate gene has always remained alive,” says Rush. “It has been firmly held in place with Captain Hook and Long John Silver, the two great pirate characters.” These two famous fictional pirates – from J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island - both appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century, about 200 years after what is known as The Golden Age of Piracy. Rush is aware of the significance of the time delay. “We’ve been passed down a highly romanticised version of how ugly it really would have been.”
Highly romantic too are the swashbuckling Pirates of The Caribbean films, set in the mid 1700’s at the end of that Golden Age of Piracy, a period that grew out of the massive increase in shipping that passed through the Caribbean when the slave trade was at its peak. The end of a long European war fuelled the increase in piracy, as English sailors were discharged from naval duty. Thousands of idle trained seafarers were snapped up - by pirate captains and privateers with names like Blackbeard, Black Bart and Calico Jack – and put to use plundering passing ships. Rush’s villain is Captain Barbossa, a name influenced by another real life pirate – Barbarossa, or Redbeard – a Turkish corsair from the 15th century.
Rush believes that the most successful pirates focused carefully on building their reputation. “The famous ones were very smart at creating their brand identity so that a legend would build up around their name,” he says. “In the first film there was one actor in my crew who had to have a permanently smoking beard. This was inspired by the real Blackbeard – a man named Edward Teach - who liked to have smoke coming out of his beard so he looked like the devil and frightened people. In our film we had to wait for the crew to get a bunch of josticks alight before we could shoot the scene.”
Rush sees three very different pirate identities at work in the main characters in The Pirates of the Caribbean films. “There’s a certain heritage that Orlando Bloom has to bring to Will Turner, with a background in Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. For my character Barbossa, the ancestry is more like Robert Newton as Long John Silver or Basil Rathbone as one of his villains. And then, of course, Johnny Depp has very smartly created a completely new iconic pirate figure for the character of Jack Sparrow.”
In the first film of the series, Rush’s Captain Barbossa is pitched as the villain of the piece, a man who stole Sparrow’s ship The Black Pearl in a mutiny, leaving the unfortunate Sparrow on a desert island with only a gun, one bullet, and a clear suggestion as to what to shoot. Yet Sparrow has his revenge and, at the end of the first film, he kills Barbossa with the same gun, same bullet. It came as a great surprise to many when Rush mysteriously re-appeared as Barbossa at the end of the second film, eating his trademark apple. Rush explains that this isn’t a cynical Hollywood revival of the dead in order to make a sequel. “It’s not cheap movie magic, and I’d need two and a half hours to explain how exactly I get back and where I’ve been,” he jokes. “But seriously, it’s great scriptwriting. The writers very cleverly created a thrilling cliff hanger at the end of part two, with its ‘to be continued’ energy, and you’ll love where part three goes.” Rush clearly enjoyed making this Hollywood blockbuster franchise – one that has hauled in treasures to the tune of a billion and a half dollars as it has circumnavigated the world’s screens. “Part three becomes very mythological,” says Rush, “with sea monsters, the battle at the end of the world, and a meeting of all the great pirate families.”
As well as these pirate storylines, there are multiple other plot lines to be pulled together in the third film: the love triangle between Will Turner, Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann (played by Keira Knightley); Will’s dilemma with his father; and the return of Captain James Norrington (Jack Davenport), who originally proposed to Elizabeth, and who has now been promoted and put in charge of the East India Company fleet. “It’s like an elaborate chess game” says Rush, “and anyone who makes a wrong move risks being suddenly checkmated from the other side of the board.”
But Rush – who admits he hasn’t yet seen the final cut of the film – isn’t about to give too much away. He refuses to be drawn on whether Barbossa joins forces with Jack Sparrow, switching sides in the good versus evil showdown. “I’ll leave that to you to find out – but I think your expectations about Barbossa will meet with great surprise,” he says with a mischievous edge, worthy of any buccaneer.
The inspiration for Barbossa came not from any of the real pirates of the Golden Age, but from a visual source. “The production designer and costume designer were strongly influenced by a well known pirate artist who did these fantastic drawings” says Rush. “They give you a very playful, theatrical sense of what pirates were like, but in the colour plates you can see the toughness and grittiness of these characters.” Barbossa, it seems, was built from his clothes up, and Rush says it was the wide brimmed hat – complete with ostrich feather - that made the man. “They told me never to take the hat off. That’s the source of his power.”
Rush says that the rest was in the script. “There is one guy in the first film who says that Barbossa was ‘spat back out from hell’, and so I realised that I had to find something that warranted that,” he says. But Rush isn’t the kind of actor to rely upon one dimension for building a character. “At the same time you can see Barbossa’s delusional, romantic notion that he might one day be Commodore,” says Rush with an air of pride. “He’s got this self-importance and charm, he’s not dumb, and he has a level of language that is quite urbane.” Rush tells a story of how he came across one of Barbossa’s famous lines. “I dropped into a chat room on the net to see what the kids were talking about, and I discovered that they no longer say ‘no’ in response to others. They say ‘I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request’, and I thought for a moment how great it was for Barbossa have raised the level of debate on the Internet.”
It’s been a long ride for Rush from his days working on the stage with a young Mel Gibson in Waiting For Godot. He was tall and scrawny then, and fresh from a stint learning a very physical form of performance at the famous Jacques Lecoq Theatre school in Paris. He didn’t move into film until late in his career. “I partly fell into it,” he says. “I was physically the wrong type for many years. I remember thinking when Cowra Breakout was being made in 1984 that I could finally play a part - as a prisoner of war. I had the right skeletal look!” But it was more than ten years later – in 1995 - when Rush really made a mark on the screen. In a twelve-month period he made On Our Selection, Children of The Revolution, and of course Shine, the film that gave him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Since then there’s been no turning back, and he’s been able to divide his time between the larger than life characters of American and British films and some quieter roles in Australia. “It’s lovely when I get to chance to play parts in films like Lantana or Candy,” he says. “In a way, these are more suited to my actor’s palette. I get to be quieter and internalise the emotions.”
For now, however, there’s no holding back. With a brace of pistols in his waistband, a cutlass by his side, an apple near to hand, and of course his wide-brimmed hat, Rush has created a classic seafaring brigand who has come back from both the un-dead and the dead. Hector Barbossa is now alive and in charge of a deadly pirate crew, sailing to World’s End. Perhaps even George Reeves’ Superman couldn’t stop him.
Rush is now about as far from being a backyard Brisbane boy as you can get. He’s a Hollywood name, sought out for complex character roles on both sides of the Atlantic. He’s been the Elizabethan spymaster Sir Francis Walsingham, the manic depressive Peter Sellers, the unrestrained Marquis de Sade, and is now revived as the villainous pirate Hector Barbossa for the third film in the Pirates of The Caribbean series. So he does know a thing or two about pirates and, like most of us, grew up with a clear idea of what pirates looked like and what they did.
“It’s amazing that even before the success of the first Pirates of The Caribbean film, the pirate gene has always remained alive,” says Rush. “It has been firmly held in place with Captain Hook and Long John Silver, the two great pirate characters.” These two famous fictional pirates – from J.M. Barrie’s play Peter Pan and Robert Louis Stevenson’s novel Treasure Island - both appeared at the turn of the nineteenth century, about 200 years after what is known as The Golden Age of Piracy. Rush is aware of the significance of the time delay. “We’ve been passed down a highly romanticised version of how ugly it really would have been.”
Highly romantic too are the swashbuckling Pirates of The Caribbean films, set in the mid 1700’s at the end of that Golden Age of Piracy, a period that grew out of the massive increase in shipping that passed through the Caribbean when the slave trade was at its peak. The end of a long European war fuelled the increase in piracy, as English sailors were discharged from naval duty. Thousands of idle trained seafarers were snapped up - by pirate captains and privateers with names like Blackbeard, Black Bart and Calico Jack – and put to use plundering passing ships. Rush’s villain is Captain Barbossa, a name influenced by another real life pirate – Barbarossa, or Redbeard – a Turkish corsair from the 15th century.
Rush believes that the most successful pirates focused carefully on building their reputation. “The famous ones were very smart at creating their brand identity so that a legend would build up around their name,” he says. “In the first film there was one actor in my crew who had to have a permanently smoking beard. This was inspired by the real Blackbeard – a man named Edward Teach - who liked to have smoke coming out of his beard so he looked like the devil and frightened people. In our film we had to wait for the crew to get a bunch of josticks alight before we could shoot the scene.”
Rush sees three very different pirate identities at work in the main characters in The Pirates of the Caribbean films. “There’s a certain heritage that Orlando Bloom has to bring to Will Turner, with a background in Errol Flynn or Tyrone Power. For my character Barbossa, the ancestry is more like Robert Newton as Long John Silver or Basil Rathbone as one of his villains. And then, of course, Johnny Depp has very smartly created a completely new iconic pirate figure for the character of Jack Sparrow.”
In the first film of the series, Rush’s Captain Barbossa is pitched as the villain of the piece, a man who stole Sparrow’s ship The Black Pearl in a mutiny, leaving the unfortunate Sparrow on a desert island with only a gun, one bullet, and a clear suggestion as to what to shoot. Yet Sparrow has his revenge and, at the end of the first film, he kills Barbossa with the same gun, same bullet. It came as a great surprise to many when Rush mysteriously re-appeared as Barbossa at the end of the second film, eating his trademark apple. Rush explains that this isn’t a cynical Hollywood revival of the dead in order to make a sequel. “It’s not cheap movie magic, and I’d need two and a half hours to explain how exactly I get back and where I’ve been,” he jokes. “But seriously, it’s great scriptwriting. The writers very cleverly created a thrilling cliff hanger at the end of part two, with its ‘to be continued’ energy, and you’ll love where part three goes.” Rush clearly enjoyed making this Hollywood blockbuster franchise – one that has hauled in treasures to the tune of a billion and a half dollars as it has circumnavigated the world’s screens. “Part three becomes very mythological,” says Rush, “with sea monsters, the battle at the end of the world, and a meeting of all the great pirate families.”
As well as these pirate storylines, there are multiple other plot lines to be pulled together in the third film: the love triangle between Will Turner, Jack Sparrow and Elizabeth Swann (played by Keira Knightley); Will’s dilemma with his father; and the return of Captain James Norrington (Jack Davenport), who originally proposed to Elizabeth, and who has now been promoted and put in charge of the East India Company fleet. “It’s like an elaborate chess game” says Rush, “and anyone who makes a wrong move risks being suddenly checkmated from the other side of the board.”
But Rush – who admits he hasn’t yet seen the final cut of the film – isn’t about to give too much away. He refuses to be drawn on whether Barbossa joins forces with Jack Sparrow, switching sides in the good versus evil showdown. “I’ll leave that to you to find out – but I think your expectations about Barbossa will meet with great surprise,” he says with a mischievous edge, worthy of any buccaneer.
The inspiration for Barbossa came not from any of the real pirates of the Golden Age, but from a visual source. “The production designer and costume designer were strongly influenced by a well known pirate artist who did these fantastic drawings” says Rush. “They give you a very playful, theatrical sense of what pirates were like, but in the colour plates you can see the toughness and grittiness of these characters.” Barbossa, it seems, was built from his clothes up, and Rush says it was the wide brimmed hat – complete with ostrich feather - that made the man. “They told me never to take the hat off. That’s the source of his power.”
Rush says that the rest was in the script. “There is one guy in the first film who says that Barbossa was ‘spat back out from hell’, and so I realised that I had to find something that warranted that,” he says. But Rush isn’t the kind of actor to rely upon one dimension for building a character. “At the same time you can see Barbossa’s delusional, romantic notion that he might one day be Commodore,” says Rush with an air of pride. “He’s got this self-importance and charm, he’s not dumb, and he has a level of language that is quite urbane.” Rush tells a story of how he came across one of Barbossa’s famous lines. “I dropped into a chat room on the net to see what the kids were talking about, and I discovered that they no longer say ‘no’ in response to others. They say ‘I am disinclined to acquiesce to your request’, and I thought for a moment how great it was for Barbossa have raised the level of debate on the Internet.”
It’s been a long ride for Rush from his days working on the stage with a young Mel Gibson in Waiting For Godot. He was tall and scrawny then, and fresh from a stint learning a very physical form of performance at the famous Jacques Lecoq Theatre school in Paris. He didn’t move into film until late in his career. “I partly fell into it,” he says. “I was physically the wrong type for many years. I remember thinking when Cowra Breakout was being made in 1984 that I could finally play a part - as a prisoner of war. I had the right skeletal look!” But it was more than ten years later – in 1995 - when Rush really made a mark on the screen. In a twelve-month period he made On Our Selection, Children of The Revolution, and of course Shine, the film that gave him an Academy Award for Best Actor. Since then there’s been no turning back, and he’s been able to divide his time between the larger than life characters of American and British films and some quieter roles in Australia. “It’s lovely when I get to chance to play parts in films like Lantana or Candy,” he says. “In a way, these are more suited to my actor’s palette. I get to be quieter and internalise the emotions.”
For now, however, there’s no holding back. With a brace of pistols in his waistband, a cutlass by his side, an apple near to hand, and of course his wide-brimmed hat, Rush has created a classic seafaring brigand who has come back from both the un-dead and the dead. Hector Barbossa is now alive and in charge of a deadly pirate crew, sailing to World’s End. Perhaps even George Reeves’ Superman couldn’t stop him.
WEST - An interview with Director Dan Krige
West of Sydney are the Blue Mountains. They rise steeply once you cross the Hawkesbury River, and from there you can look back down over the congested suburban sprawl that stretches from Parramatta to Penrith. It is there, now the geographical heartland of Sydney, that writer/director Dan Krige set his new film West. “I grew up in the Blue Mountains and my cousins – a whole truckload of them - lived in Merrylands near Parramatta,” he says. “As a kid, I would wag school and hang out with them.”
The film, about two young men who are friends and cousins, and who indeed ‘hang out’ together for much of the story, has a distinct personal feel to it. There are incidents and details that could only have come from an intimate knowledge of the urban landscape and social rituals of Sydney’s West. Yet Krige is careful to make it clear that it’s not a true story about himself. “It’s personal in the sense that it’s been with me for a very long time,” he explains. “I wrote the first draft when I was sixteen, and it was inspired by my friendship with my cousin. But in the intervening years and the many re-writes, the narrative has changed. The story as a whole isn’t real, it just includes bits and bobs of my life.”
One of the more tragic bits of Krige’s life that found itself co-incidentally reflected in the script was the death of his brother, Michael. “I’d finished the final version of the script in 1994,” says Krige, “and Michael died in 2004. He suffered depression and took his own life. It was like a terminal illness for him.” But it was the nature of his brother’s death that really effected Krige. “He took his life by jumping in front of a train, the way a character does in the film. It was already in the script,” he says.
At the same time, the financing for the film fell through and Krige felt it was never going to get made. “We had all the money, we were casting, and then Michael died and the money fell through. When that happened I thought that it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t make the movie anyway. I thought that life couldn’t get any worse. I went to Thailand for a while.”
After a break overseas, Krige came back and spoke to an old friend and mentor Sue Smith, writer of some of Australia’s best television mini-series, including Bastard Boys and Brides of Christ. “Sue told me not to decide so quickly,” says Krige, “and then she said, ‘if you are going to do it, do it for him’, and I suddenly saw how it was going to work.” After that, Krige found a new strength for the project. “The whole vision of the film, the whole way that it finally came out was suddenly clear to me,” says Krige. “I realised that I could hit people with this story in the same way that I had been hit, with the same energy.”
From that point on it seemed like plain sailing. The film was re-financed and Krige started casting again. He settled on two young men with bright futures to play the lead roles: Kahn Chittenden who is only 22 but has already starred in Club Land and The Caterpillar Wish, and Nathan Phillips who is most widely known for his work in Wolf Creek and Snakes on a Plane. Alongside them, is Gillian Alexy who plays the girl in the dangerous space between these two troubled men. “For me she’s the standout discovery of the film”, says Krige. “ The character is vulnerable and beautiful, and I wanted to find someone who could make us believe that two boys would fall in love with her, yet someone who wasn’t so special that she could escape the place. I had this gut feeling that Gillian was the right person when I first saw her,” says Krige.
To help the actors understand the world they had to create for the film, Krige took them west. “I drove Gillian and Khan out to Penrith and invited a whole bunch of my most feral friends,” says Krige with a wild laugh. “There are women out there who you wouldn’t pick a fight with. They have a different energy. And when we came back,” continues Krige “Gillian said to me she knew how to play the character. She realised that the girls there have a male energy, that they’re like blokes. And from then on she got the role perfectly. This is a girl who stands up to the boys.”
Despite thinking about using the currently popular handheld and grunge style of cinematography, Krige opted to film with a more classical beauty. “Because the story is confronting, I wanted it to be easy to look at, to bring the audience into the world slowly. The Western Suburbs of Sydney has a particular character to it. It’s a place where people do it tough, where the sun seems to be brighter, the nights darker – it’s really the heart and soul of the place we call Sydney. And I wanted to capture this character on film, in particular the places I hung out as a teenager.”
The film, about two young men who are friends and cousins, and who indeed ‘hang out’ together for much of the story, has a distinct personal feel to it. There are incidents and details that could only have come from an intimate knowledge of the urban landscape and social rituals of Sydney’s West. Yet Krige is careful to make it clear that it’s not a true story about himself. “It’s personal in the sense that it’s been with me for a very long time,” he explains. “I wrote the first draft when I was sixteen, and it was inspired by my friendship with my cousin. But in the intervening years and the many re-writes, the narrative has changed. The story as a whole isn’t real, it just includes bits and bobs of my life.”
One of the more tragic bits of Krige’s life that found itself co-incidentally reflected in the script was the death of his brother, Michael. “I’d finished the final version of the script in 1994,” says Krige, “and Michael died in 2004. He suffered depression and took his own life. It was like a terminal illness for him.” But it was the nature of his brother’s death that really effected Krige. “He took his life by jumping in front of a train, the way a character does in the film. It was already in the script,” he says.
At the same time, the financing for the film fell through and Krige felt it was never going to get made. “We had all the money, we were casting, and then Michael died and the money fell through. When that happened I thought that it didn’t matter, because I couldn’t make the movie anyway. I thought that life couldn’t get any worse. I went to Thailand for a while.”
After a break overseas, Krige came back and spoke to an old friend and mentor Sue Smith, writer of some of Australia’s best television mini-series, including Bastard Boys and Brides of Christ. “Sue told me not to decide so quickly,” says Krige, “and then she said, ‘if you are going to do it, do it for him’, and I suddenly saw how it was going to work.” After that, Krige found a new strength for the project. “The whole vision of the film, the whole way that it finally came out was suddenly clear to me,” says Krige. “I realised that I could hit people with this story in the same way that I had been hit, with the same energy.”
From that point on it seemed like plain sailing. The film was re-financed and Krige started casting again. He settled on two young men with bright futures to play the lead roles: Kahn Chittenden who is only 22 but has already starred in Club Land and The Caterpillar Wish, and Nathan Phillips who is most widely known for his work in Wolf Creek and Snakes on a Plane. Alongside them, is Gillian Alexy who plays the girl in the dangerous space between these two troubled men. “For me she’s the standout discovery of the film”, says Krige. “ The character is vulnerable and beautiful, and I wanted to find someone who could make us believe that two boys would fall in love with her, yet someone who wasn’t so special that she could escape the place. I had this gut feeling that Gillian was the right person when I first saw her,” says Krige.
To help the actors understand the world they had to create for the film, Krige took them west. “I drove Gillian and Khan out to Penrith and invited a whole bunch of my most feral friends,” says Krige with a wild laugh. “There are women out there who you wouldn’t pick a fight with. They have a different energy. And when we came back,” continues Krige “Gillian said to me she knew how to play the character. She realised that the girls there have a male energy, that they’re like blokes. And from then on she got the role perfectly. This is a girl who stands up to the boys.”
Despite thinking about using the currently popular handheld and grunge style of cinematography, Krige opted to film with a more classical beauty. “Because the story is confronting, I wanted it to be easy to look at, to bring the audience into the world slowly. The Western Suburbs of Sydney has a particular character to it. It’s a place where people do it tough, where the sun seems to be brighter, the nights darker – it’s really the heart and soul of the place we call Sydney. And I wanted to capture this character on film, in particular the places I hung out as a teenager.”
Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Review of 'Breach'
At home Robert Hanssen lived a double life. He was a suburban father of six and strict Catholic member of Opus Dei, but also a man who secretly filmed his own sex-life and had a bizarre long-term relationship with a stripper. This duplicity extended to his work life: he was a well-respected FBI employee with 25 years service, but sold secrets to the Russians for most of that time. The information he sold – for US$1.4 million in cash and diamonds - became known as the worst breach of American intelligence in history and was responsible for the deaths of at least two people. It is Hanssen’s story that forms the basis of the film Breach.
With so much already known about the real case, director Billy Ray decided to focus on the relationship between Hanssen and Eric O’Neill, the young agent who was secretly assigned to be Hanssen’s assistant and spy on him, hoping to expose his traitorous activities. Ray was fortunate enough to involve the real Eric O’Neill to help create a tense story of two men and the extent to which they trust can and should trust each other.
Chris Cooper is brilliant as the enigmatic and grumpy spy Hanssen, playing out the most dangerous game in the world in the last days of his career. Although he knows he shouldn’t trust O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the two men connect, partly through their faith, but mostly because of O’Neill’s decision to play it straight with Hanssen, disarming him with his naïve honesty and a genuine respect for the older man who he comes to admire. The screenplay is a long way from of the action-packed James Bond variety of espionage, but rather tackles the genre from the inside, building tension from the psychological stakes between the two men, and focusing on the small moments that could give away everything, even a life.
Ultimately though, the film doesn’t quite break its own restraints. It’s subtle and slow to get going, more mouse than cat in the game of spy versus spy. Director Ray carefully avoids making Hanssen a monster, but chooses not to explore some rich avenues of his character – his Catholicism and strange sexual behaviour, his bitterness and brilliance – all which may have added the complexity we needed to understand his motivations for a lifetime of deception, a question ultimately left unanswered. We leave with a sense of how the game is played, but not why.
With so much already known about the real case, director Billy Ray decided to focus on the relationship between Hanssen and Eric O’Neill, the young agent who was secretly assigned to be Hanssen’s assistant and spy on him, hoping to expose his traitorous activities. Ray was fortunate enough to involve the real Eric O’Neill to help create a tense story of two men and the extent to which they trust can and should trust each other.
Chris Cooper is brilliant as the enigmatic and grumpy spy Hanssen, playing out the most dangerous game in the world in the last days of his career. Although he knows he shouldn’t trust O’Neill (Ryan Phillippe), the two men connect, partly through their faith, but mostly because of O’Neill’s decision to play it straight with Hanssen, disarming him with his naïve honesty and a genuine respect for the older man who he comes to admire. The screenplay is a long way from of the action-packed James Bond variety of espionage, but rather tackles the genre from the inside, building tension from the psychological stakes between the two men, and focusing on the small moments that could give away everything, even a life.
Ultimately though, the film doesn’t quite break its own restraints. It’s subtle and slow to get going, more mouse than cat in the game of spy versus spy. Director Ray carefully avoids making Hanssen a monster, but chooses not to explore some rich avenues of his character – his Catholicism and strange sexual behaviour, his bitterness and brilliance – all which may have added the complexity we needed to understand his motivations for a lifetime of deception, a question ultimately left unanswered. We leave with a sense of how the game is played, but not why.
Wednesday, June 27, 2007
Review of 'The Italian'
There is probably no more emotional subject than lost family, the search for a mother, and the hope of re-unification of parent and child. This Russian film, set in the grime and grit of a bleak wintry Russian landscape, is – with the exception of the last few moments – a gripping and superbly accomplished story about a young boy’s search for a mother he has never known, but only seen in his dreams. Director Andrei Kravchuk creates an astonishingly real yet tender world, at the centre of which is a small boy Vanya, brilliantly brought to life by Kolya Spiridonov.
Vanya is only six years old and one of many orphans living in a harsh schizophrenic world of bedtime stories and teenage prostitution. He and the other castaways in his seedy rural orphanage idle away their time waiting for an inevitable future of petty crime and vagrancy. They are carelessly presided over by drunken officials who leave the orphanage to be managed by the older boys who run rackets and hand out beatings for non-compliance with their adolescent rules. The only way out of this harsh reality is the unlikely prospect of adoption by a wealthy overseas family. When an Italian couple chooses Vanya, he has two months to get used to the idea of leaving everything he has ever known before his new parents return to collect him.
But when another mother comes to the orphanage too late to reclaim her son who has already been adopted out, Vanya comes to imagine that he too may have a real mother somewhere – the one he dreams of - and he sets out to find her, with children traffickers and corrupt police on his trail.
What is astonishing about the film is how all the characters in the story come fully drawn. In an instant we feel that the people of this world – however small their part in Vanya’s journey - are laden with life, its small joys and its burdens. There is a similar solemn depth to the cinematography, often shot for poignancy through glass windows or framed by doors, the way a child might view the harsh adult world outside. The performances, big and small alike, are exceptional, real and knowing, and help Kravchuk and his writer Andrei Romanov create a Dickensian modern Russia with great care and an eye for detail. I have to admit though to being surprised that this level of care didn’t extend to the very ending of the film which – without giving anything away – closed the story in a manner very different to the way the rest of it was played out on screen. Despite this, it remains a beautiful and touching film.
Vanya is only six years old and one of many orphans living in a harsh schizophrenic world of bedtime stories and teenage prostitution. He and the other castaways in his seedy rural orphanage idle away their time waiting for an inevitable future of petty crime and vagrancy. They are carelessly presided over by drunken officials who leave the orphanage to be managed by the older boys who run rackets and hand out beatings for non-compliance with their adolescent rules. The only way out of this harsh reality is the unlikely prospect of adoption by a wealthy overseas family. When an Italian couple chooses Vanya, he has two months to get used to the idea of leaving everything he has ever known before his new parents return to collect him.
But when another mother comes to the orphanage too late to reclaim her son who has already been adopted out, Vanya comes to imagine that he too may have a real mother somewhere – the one he dreams of - and he sets out to find her, with children traffickers and corrupt police on his trail.
What is astonishing about the film is how all the characters in the story come fully drawn. In an instant we feel that the people of this world – however small their part in Vanya’s journey - are laden with life, its small joys and its burdens. There is a similar solemn depth to the cinematography, often shot for poignancy through glass windows or framed by doors, the way a child might view the harsh adult world outside. The performances, big and small alike, are exceptional, real and knowing, and help Kravchuk and his writer Andrei Romanov create a Dickensian modern Russia with great care and an eye for detail. I have to admit though to being surprised that this level of care didn’t extend to the very ending of the film which – without giving anything away – closed the story in a manner very different to the way the rest of it was played out on screen. Despite this, it remains a beautiful and touching film.
Review of 'The Dead Girl'
Films with multiple intersecting storylines often sacrifice character complexity in order to cover the extra ground of the narrative. Not so with the moody and tragic story of The Dead Girl. In a stunning debut as writer/director, Karen Moncrieff keeps the story simple and creates five compelling female roles in a film about faded hopes, longing and the hollow reality of lives gone awry.
Australian Toni Collette is looking after her spiteful mother in a small town when she stumbles across the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and dumped in a field. The discovery is enough to make her re-think her life and she sees an opportunity for change in the form of an obsessive delivery man (Josh Brolin). Meanwhile, the body of the dead girl ends up at the city morgue where a forensics student (Rose Byrne) hopes that it is her sister, missing for 15 years. But when the real girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives, we start to learn what really happened on that fateful last day of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life. Housewife (Mary Beth Hurt), in a truly mesmerizing performance as an unloved and dismal wife, helps put the final piece of the bleak and fractured jigsaw together.
Although some of the stories are forced a little in places to maintain the connections between characters, the performances – particularly from Collette and Hurt – keep you totally engrossed in the gloomy space that this film inhabits. These are women living at the dimly lit end of social consequence: without families, partners who care, or independence. Ultimately they have few choices in their damaged lives, and the dead girl who lies in the field is more than a simple narrative link between them.
The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Grady, with much of the action taking place at night where these troubled and complex characters move between the light and the shadow, hiding their inadequacies from the world. A haunting musical score from Adam Gorgoni completes the moody candid sadness of the film.
Australian Toni Collette is looking after her spiteful mother in a small town when she stumbles across the body of a young woman, brutally murdered and dumped in a field. The discovery is enough to make her re-think her life and she sees an opportunity for change in the form of an obsessive delivery man (Josh Brolin). Meanwhile, the body of the dead girl ends up at the city morgue where a forensics student (Rose Byrne) hopes that it is her sister, missing for 15 years. But when the real girl’s mother (Marcia Gay Harden) arrives, we start to learn what really happened on that fateful last day of the dead girl’s (Brittany Murphy) life. Housewife (Mary Beth Hurt), in a truly mesmerizing performance as an unloved and dismal wife, helps put the final piece of the bleak and fractured jigsaw together.
Although some of the stories are forced a little in places to maintain the connections between characters, the performances – particularly from Collette and Hurt – keep you totally engrossed in the gloomy space that this film inhabits. These are women living at the dimly lit end of social consequence: without families, partners who care, or independence. Ultimately they have few choices in their damaged lives, and the dead girl who lies in the field is more than a simple narrative link between them.
The film is beautifully shot by cinematographer Michael Grady, with much of the action taking place at night where these troubled and complex characters move between the light and the shadow, hiding their inadequacies from the world. A haunting musical score from Adam Gorgoni completes the moody candid sadness of the film.
Burke & Wills - An Interview with Mathew Zeremes
What do you do when you’re fresh out of acting school and can’t get a lead role in a feature film? This was the question facing Oliver Torr and Matt Zeremes, graduates from the Queensland University of Technology. The answer they came up with was to write, finance and direct their own film – now a festival hit called Burke & Wills.
Zeremes is totally down-to-earth about how it happened. “Ollie and I just got out of acting school, and were trying to do as much proactive stuff as we could to get our careers going,” he says. “We’d got a spot at a theatre to put on a play we were working on about two guys called Burke and Wills who share a house. Then one day Ollie said to me ‘this would work pretty well as a film’ and I agreed.” The two actors, who’d met in Brisbane, sprang into action immediately. “That afternoon I was ringing around getting quotes for film and camera hire,” says Zeremes who plays Wills. Five weeks later they we ready to start shooting.
It’s a story of guerrilla filmmaking at its best: two driven actors with a clear idea of what they wanted and a simple yet compelling story to work with. They made the film for less than $20,000.“We knew the kind of film we wanted to make and we changed the original story quite a bit because we were now working with cinema”, says Zeremes. “The play was lighter. For the film we wanted something more dramatic but with touches of humour. We also started adding things that would really challenge us as actors. It seemed a perfect opportunity and silly not to play to our strength.”
The result is an intense character study of two young men who share a house in suburban Sydney. Burke is unemployed and dreams of travel and girls. Wills is less wistful, a troubled soul who seems nourished only by visits to his grandmother. As Burke seems to grow, Wills slides into the darker spaces of life. It’s a candid drama, laced with a black, honest humour. But the most distinctive feature of the film is its style, shot in black and white with long takes using wide-angle lenses. The final look is reminiscent of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films – Coffee and Cigarettes or Stranger Than Paradise. Yet what drove the style was the need to keep the budget down. “ We were quite insistent that we shot on film,” says Zeremes, “but we could only afford 20 rolls.” So the two first time directors realised that they would have to minimise shooting, filming as many of the scenes as possible with one shot and in one take. As an actor, Zeremes was happy with this limitation, one that would turn many film directors off. “We knew very early on that we had to play with fixed cameras and wide lenses. This set up a space a bit like a theatre, and as long as the actors stayed within the boundaries it worked really well.”
Despite the choice of name for the film, there is no particular connection to the Australian pioneers who died in the outback. “Things didn’t work out so well for the explorers,” says Zeremes, “and they don’t work out so well for our characters, but really we just liked the way that the names worked together. They’re the kind of names people take notice of.”
Yet when the film was finished in 2004, there weren’t many people taking notice of it. Zeremes was worried. “We entered a few festivals and shopped it around to Australian distributors. We had one screening, but nothing eventuated,” he says. “After two years, we thought that maybe it had run its course.” As a last hope, they sent the film to the Tribecca Film Festival based in New York. Then they forgot about it. “Out of the blue we got a call that we’d been accepted,” says Zeremes. “They flew us over there and we had four screenings that were all packed. It was the first time we’d screened the film in front of people, and suddenly we knew that we had a film that worked when people laughed in the right spots. It was amazing.”
After the success of Tribecca, the Australian media showed strong interest in the film and this helped to finally secure a distribution deal. Zeremes now realises how much work is needed once a film is finished. “I think that if we’d known what had to be done before we started, we wouldn’t have done it. It’s such a hard thing, but we just learnt everything on the job.”
And although the learning is proving useful for the next film project, the pair is finding it difficult to get finance. “Even though people know who we are now, it’s tough,” says Zeremes. A second script is ready to go, one that places them once again in the lead roles. But Zeremes wont let a little problem like money get in the way.” We directed and produced Burke & Wills because of our desire to play a lead role on film. We’re certainly happy to do that again if we need to.”
Zeremes is totally down-to-earth about how it happened. “Ollie and I just got out of acting school, and were trying to do as much proactive stuff as we could to get our careers going,” he says. “We’d got a spot at a theatre to put on a play we were working on about two guys called Burke and Wills who share a house. Then one day Ollie said to me ‘this would work pretty well as a film’ and I agreed.” The two actors, who’d met in Brisbane, sprang into action immediately. “That afternoon I was ringing around getting quotes for film and camera hire,” says Zeremes who plays Wills. Five weeks later they we ready to start shooting.
It’s a story of guerrilla filmmaking at its best: two driven actors with a clear idea of what they wanted and a simple yet compelling story to work with. They made the film for less than $20,000.“We knew the kind of film we wanted to make and we changed the original story quite a bit because we were now working with cinema”, says Zeremes. “The play was lighter. For the film we wanted something more dramatic but with touches of humour. We also started adding things that would really challenge us as actors. It seemed a perfect opportunity and silly not to play to our strength.”
The result is an intense character study of two young men who share a house in suburban Sydney. Burke is unemployed and dreams of travel and girls. Wills is less wistful, a troubled soul who seems nourished only by visits to his grandmother. As Burke seems to grow, Wills slides into the darker spaces of life. It’s a candid drama, laced with a black, honest humour. But the most distinctive feature of the film is its style, shot in black and white with long takes using wide-angle lenses. The final look is reminiscent of some of Jim Jarmusch’s films – Coffee and Cigarettes or Stranger Than Paradise. Yet what drove the style was the need to keep the budget down. “ We were quite insistent that we shot on film,” says Zeremes, “but we could only afford 20 rolls.” So the two first time directors realised that they would have to minimise shooting, filming as many of the scenes as possible with one shot and in one take. As an actor, Zeremes was happy with this limitation, one that would turn many film directors off. “We knew very early on that we had to play with fixed cameras and wide lenses. This set up a space a bit like a theatre, and as long as the actors stayed within the boundaries it worked really well.”
Despite the choice of name for the film, there is no particular connection to the Australian pioneers who died in the outback. “Things didn’t work out so well for the explorers,” says Zeremes, “and they don’t work out so well for our characters, but really we just liked the way that the names worked together. They’re the kind of names people take notice of.”
Yet when the film was finished in 2004, there weren’t many people taking notice of it. Zeremes was worried. “We entered a few festivals and shopped it around to Australian distributors. We had one screening, but nothing eventuated,” he says. “After two years, we thought that maybe it had run its course.” As a last hope, they sent the film to the Tribecca Film Festival based in New York. Then they forgot about it. “Out of the blue we got a call that we’d been accepted,” says Zeremes. “They flew us over there and we had four screenings that were all packed. It was the first time we’d screened the film in front of people, and suddenly we knew that we had a film that worked when people laughed in the right spots. It was amazing.”
After the success of Tribecca, the Australian media showed strong interest in the film and this helped to finally secure a distribution deal. Zeremes now realises how much work is needed once a film is finished. “I think that if we’d known what had to be done before we started, we wouldn’t have done it. It’s such a hard thing, but we just learnt everything on the job.”
And although the learning is proving useful for the next film project, the pair is finding it difficult to get finance. “Even though people know who we are now, it’s tough,” says Zeremes. A second script is ready to go, one that places them once again in the lead roles. But Zeremes wont let a little problem like money get in the way.” We directed and produced Burke & Wills because of our desire to play a lead role on film. We’re certainly happy to do that again if we need to.”
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