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.

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.

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.

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.

'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.

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.”

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.