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.
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