Review: Disgrace

Disgrace
Dir. Steve Jacobs
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 121mins

Some movies have such interesting heritage. Disgrace is an Australian financed film, adapted from a book written by a South African, starring an American and a Frenchman while also written, directed and co-produced by a pair of Italian Australians. This mix of nationalities is a far cry from the previous film from husband and wife team director Steve Jacobs and writer Anna Maria Monticelli, La Spagnola. They have spent eight years since that more frothy title navigating the terrain of JM Coetzee's novel Disgrace, getting the rights and adapting it to the screen. On a strictly emotional and intellectual level, the film aims at a higher level, but it also reaches for loftier ground in a pure movie-making sense. It succeeds far more than it doesn't, and that is cause to be thankful.

Set in South Africa after the demise of Apartheid, Disgrace stars John Malkovich as Davie Lurie, a poetry professor at the university of Cape Town, a position he uses to his advantage to get one student, a fine Antoinette Engel, into his bed. His dismissal - and, yes, his disgrace - sends him to the fringes of society from there he decides to move in with his lesbian daughter Lucy, an exceptional Jessica Haines, who lives in the country with only her property's maintenance manager Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney) as company. The political, gender and sexual politics that are already rife due to Lurie's indiscretions are further.


The audience's sympathies, empathies and thoughts are constantly changing and that is one of the film's strongest assets. Just who, if anybody, is right? While it is understandable to take Lurie's position when it comes to the decisions his daughter is making in regards to dealing with the violence heaped upon her situation, one must also ask themselves if we should be trusting anything this man says or thinks, since he has no problem crossing ethical boundaries. And while we may sit confused at the daughter's decisions, at other times it feels as if she is the only sane one. And then there is the character of Petrus, who represents the black Africa that was thwarted for so many years under the rule of Apartheid. Just what is their place in this new South Africa where people's houses - whites and blacks alike - are lined with gates within gates and how one black man can turn on another for misdeeds when they, as a people, have been ostracised for so long.

This tricky web of lofty dramatics could very easily be a turn off, and it's easy to see how an audience member could find it hard to find interest in any of the characters in here. I can't say I liked any of them either, but I found their situations, their motivations and their actions fascinating. A late scene involving Lurie and a dog he has befriended at a kennel is of particular note and perhaps the most important in the whole film. Just what has he learned from the ordeal and are incidents like it just going to further tear apart at a nation already ripped apart by race.

I have not read the novel that Jacobs' film is based on, but I am lead to believe that it is an incredibly faithful work of adaptation. So while I can't come at it from the perspective of somebody who has the read the novel, to which is the littlest of scenes can mean a lot, I could tell where I felt the film had issues and that, perhaps, the elimination of some scenes and the lengthening of others may have been the way to go. By the final act of the film there are many scenes of no great length and of no apparent strong necessity yet they are there and they help to bring it down. Heavy symbolism takes took this viewer out of the film and I felt as if a large amount of the intensity that the film had in spades at the start disappears. Scenes feel almost abstract in their intention, although as I move further away from the film I realise that that is probably the reason for them. The final shot is particularly breath-taking and leaves the film of a mixture of hope, sadness and anger.


Performances are all exceptional with Malkovich proving that he actually is still capable of a good performance after being embarrassing on more than a few occasions recently (Colour Me Kubrick comes to mind). It is probably his finest work yet. Newcomer Haines is quite a find and she presents her characters dueling emotions well. Another to astound is Fiona Press as a vet worker who uses Lurie for her own needs in a wonderful twist to their characters. Photography by Steve Arnold of the South African landscape is wonderful, but thankfully resists the obvious temptation to make it a series of postcards. Music by Antony Partos is effective, while the art direction has a wonderful authenticity about it. That flower garden has a gorgeous juxtaposed quality to it, don't you think?

Disgrace could be a hard slog to sit through for some, but if you are willing to invest your energy in this evocative story then you should be rewarded with a thought-provoking experience. While the final act doesn't meet the rest of the film's high standard, the lasting effects of the film as a whole are well worth the effort put into delving into it. B

Review: My Blood Valentine 3D

My Bloody Valentine 3D
Dir. Patrick Lussier
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: R18+
Running Time: 101mins

Sometimes when one is sick, one just wants to sit down and watch some silly bimbos and idiotic jocks get murdered in increasingly "suspense-filled" ways. So it was with that idea in mind that I sat down to watch My Bloody Valentine last night. I attempted to watch it in 3D with a flimsy pair of painful glasses that came with my copy of Friday the 13th Part III - my Valentine DVD did not come properly equipped with glasses of its own - but they didn't work so I promptly flipped the disc over and watch it in standard 2D. I can't say the 3D would have given the film much hope of being any better than it was, and watching 3D movies in 2D always holds some amusement to me. The sight of people waving things around in front of themselves for no reason elicits chuckles from me.

The movie, let's face it, isn't the rocket science equivalent of a horror movie, but it held some interest with me. I was glad to finally watch a horror movie from recent times that could be described as "slasher". In my formative movie-watching years the big horror hits were titles like Scream, I Know What You Did Last Summer, The Faculty, Halloween H20 and Urban Legend. At the same time I was discovering older titles like Friday the 13th and Halloween and so it grew that these were my favourite kind of scary movie. All on VHS too! They were rarely genuinely great movies (sometimes they very much were), but they provided a few scares and a whole lotta fun. Perhaps there's just something about a person in a mask with a sharp weapon that is much more enjoyable than Japanese twin sisters or sadistic mind games. You can't say many (if any at all) of the horror movies released in the last few years could be described as "fun". So, yes, it was nice to see a horror title try and be fun again. Not every time I sit down to watch a fright flick do I want to feel like slashing my wrists from the miserable hopelessness of it all (as much as I can actually like those sort of scary movies).


Starting ten years ago we get the deaths of a good 30 or so characters in about fifteen minutes. There are explosions, pick-axe murders and open-heart guttings. Charming. However, the highlight of this opening passage is seeing the likes of Jensen Ackles (29 years old), Jaime King (30 years old) and Kerr Smith (37 years old!) portray teenagers. The film promptly jumps forward ten years, which makes the actors look far less ridiculous, although the image of Smith wearing a backwards baseball cap and pretending to act like he's still on Dawson's Creek would have made the whole affair, perhaps, even more fun. It also reminded me of the days when these movies were filled with casts made up of the entirety of WB's teen program lineups as opposed to nameless nobodies whose entire career will be heretofore made up of direct-to-DVD Saw sequels.

The film follows the expected pattern. Various characters start getting murdered by a man in a gas mask wielding a pick-axe, but this time in 3D! Eyes pop out at the screen, gun barrels are aimed directly at the audience's face, blood splatters in various directions like you're in the front row of a play that requires you to bring your own coat. There's even 3D breasts, which is perhaps the film's most bizarrely hilarious moment. Betsy Rue (what a name!) gets to strut around completely starkers before running away - still completely starkers - from the murderous villain. It'd be offensive if it wasn't so stupidly whack.


(black bars added by me - this blog has some decency ya know!)
Of course, once the final act rolls around and it brings out more and more of the old slasher chestnuts it starts to derail. The red herrings aren't well-played and the big reveal somehow succeeds in being more disappointingly handled than realising it was actually Rebecca Gayheart's giant hair under that woolly parker the entire time! It's around this time that the movie's overriding sense of fun dissipates and ends up as a more cynically motivated piece of trickery. Still, director (and co-editor) Patrick Lussier keeps the film moving at a quick pace - working on Wes Craven's Scream films clearly helped - and visually the techs are well done, even if the 3D effects appear to be entirely superfluous. I know I'd rather spend time with this splatter town than I would the mean-spirited and nasty ones of recent times. C+

Review: Last Ride

Last Ride
Dir. Glendyn Ivin
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 90mins

A large number of working directors in Australia hail from backgrounds in short films. Not many have gotten quite the level of success that Glendyn Ivin though, who won the Palme d'Or at Cannes for Cracker Bag in 2003. An auspicious beginning to a career, no doubt, but having now seen his debut feature, the well-tread tale of Last Ride, I'm not sure he's utilised it to his advantage. While the story told in this film may appeal to the nodding heads of the Australian film industry who think to be worthy of accolades you must be raw and tough, I couldn't help but feel it was another case of a director telling a story we've all seen plenty of times before.

Another example of wallowing in lower class miserabilism without the tact, beauty and poignancy of this years Samson and Delilah or the horror and ferocity of Rowan Woods' The Boys. I understand it is meant to be some "harsh" and "powerful" portrayal of the "real" and "uncompromising" Australia that our filmmakers just love to force upon us, but I wanted to throw my hands up into the air and yell "I KNOW!" Australia is filled with a lot of terrible people who do terrible things. I don't need to see this again and especially when it's done like this. Much like the dreaded coming-of-age genre, this sub-section of Australian film has grown immensely tiresome and there's only so far that pretty (if still rather ho-hum) cinematography can get you.


Seemingly on the run from something, Hugo Weaving and newcomer Tom Russell play father and son Kev and Chook. What details Ivin does give us about their past come in quick bursts and they actually provide the film with its strongest moments. Essentially a road movie, Last Ride follows these guys as they navigate the harsh landscape of Australia and Greig Fraser's cinematography does an impressive job of expressing the ideas that Ivin has. Slowly revealing their former life in flashbacks, we soon discover the secrets behind the mysterious character of "Max" (John Brumpton) and why Kev is so desperate to not be found.

Tellingly, the film's best moments are indeed these tiny fragments that shoehorn themselves into the tale. The small flashbacks we get of Weaving and Russell before they ran away are the strongest aspect and hold one of the film's key moments, but it is barely expanded upon. A character played by the impressive Anita Hegh, a former flame of Kev, is another strong aspect, but is quickly disposed of by the film for more scenes of these two guys staring out of car windows at barren terrain. It doesn't help that Weaving is far from his best. He's done this performance before and could do it in his sleep. The standout, however, is ten-year-old Tom Russell who displays more conflicted emotions bubbling underneath his surface than a lot of adult actors could manage.


As the film progresses to it's natural conclusion I eventually stopped caring about the story Ivin was telling. More equating of masculinity to violence and more ponderous hypothesising about the bond between father and son. Weaving's Kev is a vile man and a cliched representation of a real Aussie bloke. Bashing his son for wearing make-up, teaching him to shoot and being abusive to perfectly innocent people. It's not so much tough viewing as just unpleasant. Perhaps that's a personal bug I must bear, but Ivin just does not do enough to warrant telling this story of a man so un-equipped for fatherhood yet again. Only in a sequence of quiet beauty at a location called Lake Gairdner - great location scouting there - does it all seem to actually come together and feel truly organic and less like a tired excursion into woe.

I can't imagine any regular filmgoer wanting to subject themselves to this. It doesn't have the power of other films of this kind and as the current box office success of Samson and Delilah proves, you really need to be spectacular to get audiences to see these gritty tales of life and hardships on the fringes. Last Ride just does not do enough to warrant sitting through it. D+

Black + White Friday: Pulp Fiction (Part I)

What if Quentin Tarantino's revolutionary Pulp Fiction was, in actual fact, just another cheap pulp knock-off from a studio who had a bunch of has-been actors on their books with contracts to complete before being tossed aside. What if said pulp film became a Cannes and Oscar-winning classic?

As I was going through and taking the screencaps I realised I was only about an hour into the movie so I decided to do two entries devoted to Pulp Fiction, because... really, why not?


Things we can learn from this experiment. Amanda Plummer looks just as crazy and deranged in black and white as she does in colour.


Remember when Samuel L Jackson was good? I try to as often as I can, but all he keeps making is shit and it gets harder and harder with each ever-frequent franchise that he signs himself up for.


See, this is why I love QT! Just small simple things like giving Ving Rhames' character a bandaid on the back of his neck. It's not entirely necessary, but I still dig them all.


I bet that, after many movies now of constant incredibly overt references to old school cinema, many forgot this scene was in Pulp Fiction. If he were to do it now people would say he's worshiping at the alter of bad cinema (as always, thankfully) and that it "takes you out of the movie" or whatever.


What would a pulpy B-movie be without a cigarette-smoking femme fatale? Uma Thurman is just so amazing in this movie, isn't she? It's staggering that Tarantino is the only director to have been able to harness her into multiple great performances.


I could have done this entire entry based around caps from the Jack Rabbit Slims sequence, but I chose not to. The entire scene is just brilliant. Everything from the acting to the writing to the composition to the dance to... everything.


I love how this looks like it belongs to a long lost scene from Sunset Boulevard! Except maybe without the Edwyn Collins on the soundtrack.


It's weird to say, but isn't this one of Christopher Walken's least insane performances?


I just love this shot.


I don't think they had guns like that in the 1950s, but it's fun to imagine isn't it? Something like Kiss Me Deadly would look a whole lot different, wouldn't it?

Part II will arrive, hopefully, next Friday.

Black + White Friday: The Doom Generation

Sitting down watching Gregg Araki's oddly fascinating and increasingly bizarre love triangle The Doom Generation I couldn't help but wonder how he got such a gorgeous looking film and why indie movies of today look so much worse in comparison. This is a no-budget true-independent film about sex and violence and yet it somehow manages to be more visually interesting that those of today, which have sufficiently more resources at their disposal. Independent film sure has gone downhill, hasn't it? I tend to lay blame of the cheap affordability of digital cameras and filmmaking software for the demise, but I could be wrong.

Nevertheless, the fact is that the movie looks great. I personally loved all the hints to film-noir with its camera angles, plays with shadow and, that old prerequisite, a woman smoking (a lot).


This was originally going to be an entry dedicated solely to Rose McGowen because she's actually very wonderful in it - she was Independent Spirit Award-nominated for best debut performance one year before she got trapped in a kitty-cat-flap in horror classic Scream - but I decided to use for "Black + White Friday" 'cuz.


I don't have anything to say about this.


This is Parker Posey. Not much to say in regards to this, I just thought it was worth mentioning. I always hope that people discover Parker Posey in one her big movies and then go back to watch her old movies and then come across things like this and end up shocked and slightly deranged.


Neon just looks good in black and white, okay. It sort of feels like a Hitchcock reference - how apt considering the movie we're talking about here - and I love that shit. In fact, just yesterday on Twitter a some-time commenter here and some-time blogger at Sugacoobs made a note (I mentioned the Hitchcockian illusions in the Shutter Island trailer) that " People's fear of being called a Hitch-copycat has resulted in a Hitch-drout [sic]." How true is that? Brian DePalma needs to make another thinly-veiled Hitchcock remake pronto. :)


There are a lot of shots of Rose McGowen smoking like she's in a Wong Kar-Wai film. I withheld the urge and only capped three of them!


Sometimes movie references, such as this one to Night of the Hunter, are so obvious that hurt, but I think they get away with it. The character gets away with it, actually.


I'm not sure why Araki decided to make this scene of James Duval playing with a YoYo so artful, but he did and I thank him for it. Looks like something out of Eraserhead.


Oh the things Russ Meyer could have done with Rose McGowen!


I just really liked this shot, don't you?


Just so people don't think I advocate it or anything: Smoking kills... but looks hot on screen! Hmm, maybe all those talking heads who say movie characters smoking encourages young people to do it. But, then again, not all young people are Rose Mc-fucken-Gowen, okay!?!

Review: Corroboree

Corroboree
Dir. Ben Hackworth
Year: 2007 (production) / 2009 (release)
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 90mins

Ben Hackworth's Corroboree is impenetrable. I'm sure that it means something quite profound, but by film's end that meaning remains as mysterious as it does at the start. That's not to say that the movie is particularly terrible, but there came a point when I stopped caring about how pretty it looks or the few strands of understanding I was getting from it. It premiered over two years ago at film festivals around Australia and is only now getting a DVD release, which is hardly unsurprising since it is not made for anybody other than Hackworth himself. It, in fact, ends up feeling a lot like Charlie Kaufman's Synecdoche, New York, mixed with Fellini's 8½ as if made by Gillian Armstrong in the 1970s.

Corroboree revolves around a director (a shadowy barely-seen Ian Scott) holding a weekend retreat of sorts with an inexperienced actor (Conor O'Hanlon, unsurprisingly in his first role) being forced head-first into a living piece of performance art with five actresses, amongst them Rebecca Frith, Susan Lyons and Natasha Herbert. It appears that these women all have assigned parts to play from the life of the director and that that the young male actor, who bares a striking resemblance at times to Michael Pitt (take that however you like), is oblivious to and must react "naturally" to their performances. Whatever that means. All of this, meanwhile, is being filmed secretly by the director in a last-ditch effort of work out his issues with women on screen before his increasingly inevitable death. You know these creative types, unable to express words off screen.


Of course, within any story of this kind, there is the obligatory "art imitating life imitating art" stuff and all sorts of conversations begging to be asked such as about the blurring of the lines between life and death. Of course there's also the old-as-time argument that just because one atones, or attempts to, in a creative form does not mean that it's worth much of anything and that the whole endeavour is flawed from the outset. I, however, couldn't particularly be bothered with trying to go down these paths as Hackworth seemed intent on turning off viewers with his increasingly cold style.

It is filled with long takes to represent hidden cameras, arch (and at times just plain bad) acting and an air of pompous arrogance that is the sign of a director having a wank on film. I have not seen Hackworth's short films, but I can tell there is some underlying talent within the man, it is just hard to see underneath all the layers, as transparent and obviously "arty" as they are.


There are individual moments in the film that stand out, but they generally feel at odds with the movie surrounding them. The opening passage is a gorgeous way to start a picture and other early scenes have a hypnotic, mysterious quality that is intriguing and its fun to watch the cast maneuver about the set, which acts as a more compact and country-side version of the giant theatre studio from the aforementioned Synecdoche (a movie made after this one I had to keep reminding myself). The illusion doesn't last long and I soon realised that the film had its head so far up its own arse it could see sunshine. Any overtly positive feelings ideas I originally had were well and truly dashed by the final scenes, a bizarre series of events portraying a directors need to remain forever that ends with the film's star covered in blood standing in a garden completely starkers. "He is the director" and so on.

And yet I still don't think the movie is completely worthless. It has... a quality. It's hard to point out, but it's there, it's just so unfortunate that it's so hard to find when surrounded by all this prosaic artifice. I don't know what any of it means outside of general vague meanderings and half-baked ideas about "our place on Earth" and I have no qualms with admitting that. It's cryptic for the sake of being cryptic and it flaunts it. C-

Black + White Friday: Scream

I wanted to experiment with Wes Craven's violent slasher flick and see if I could turn it into some sort of 1950s monster movie. A monster moving involving a monster with a ghost face, apparently. The experiment will most likely fail. The Scream movies hold such a special place in me, more than I can ever fully express, so this'll be interesting.


"Oh no! A person wearing a funny-looking mask is staring at me! NOOOO!"


"AAAAAGH! It's a giant horrible gelatinous blob! Whatever will I do?!"


Sidney: "My gosh Randy, who are you going to the Prom with? I'm just so happy to have found my dreamboat of a date!"
Tatum: "The Prom committee won't let me wear a dress this short to the dance, but I'm a fun-loving woman of the future so I'll wear what I want!"
Billy: "I can't believe I left my sweater-vest at home!"
Stuart: "Have you heard about the disaster at the nuclear plant?"
Randy: "DID YOU REALLY PUT HER LIVER IN THE MAILBOX? 'Cause I heard they found her liver in the mailbox, next to her spleen and her pancreas."
Everyone: "..."


"What is that on the horizon? A pack of wild radioactive animals?!? Why yes it is!"


"It is true you know what happened to Old Man Willard on his farm and that he is involved in a secret government plot to inject human lab rats with radioactive waste?"


"This is the uniform headdress that is worn by the secretive cult who worship aliens that police believe are behind the plot to murder all the young people of this pure, perfect American hamlet."


"Due to my boyish all-American looks and police uniform you can believe everything I say because a brave member of the Police force in the United States of America would never lie. It's those damned Communists!"


"Even though there is a monster killing all the teenagers in town and tomorrow is the one-year anniversary of the suspicious unexplained death of my mother I think I will go to that big party tonight held at a house in the middle of nowhere filled with all the major characters from this story. All this despite my psychic abilities telling me something dreadful is going to happen there. Oh yes."


"I truly thought nothing could have possibly gone wrong with this idea! How could I, the fun-loving girl that every boy wants to get to third base with, end up in such a predicament?"


"AAAGH! Apparently this final monster comes equipped with a deadly fan! Those horrible radioactive animal-like communist cult monsters sure do come prepared. Oh, wait, it's just a false alarm. Now that we have beaten the evil commy cult monsters, this sleepy 1950s American town can live without fear... except the fear of GAY MARRIAGE!!"

*dun dun duuuunn*

{fin}

Review: RiP: A Remix Manifesto

RiP: A Remix Manifesto
Dir. Brett Gaylor
Year: 2009
Aus Rating: PG
Running Time: 80mins

One shouldn't go into Brett Gaylor's RiP: A Remix Manifesto expecting an even argument. This documentary about copyright laws and their hindering of musical culture is most definitely in the "against" camp and doesn't even attempt to present an even-sided view. In that regard, this documentary isn't very good, but the one-sided affair that is presented is done so quite nicely. I suppose it helps that I err on the side that Gaylor is arguing, but it's also nice because there is plenty of great music within and an energetic central figure in the form of mash-up artist Girl Talk.

This is Gaylor's first film and it shows. The doco has a distinct DIY feel to it that is both apt, considering the focus of the film, and frustrating. There are wonderfully done opening credits and title card sequences and there is some great live performance footage. Unfortunately Gaylor inserts himself into the picture far too often when the more interesting person is Girl Talk (aka Gregg Gillis). Gaylor does not have a strong enough voice for the film's narration and there is no need to see him sitting opposite his interview subjects (something that is happening more and more in documentary filmmaking).


And as interesting as the history of copyright is - that's actually true, I'm not being sarcastic - it's as if Gaylor couldn't quite pick out the more interesting aspects of it to focus on. While the film focuses on Girl Talk there is a great rhythm and the music will surely keep your focus, but he is hardly the first artist to use samples. Nary a mention of Erik B and Rakim? DJ Shadow? The Avalanches? And famous copyright cases such as The Verve vs The Rolling Stones barely even touched upon? Or what about the case of The Fugees vs Enya, which occurred even before that? Sloppy research? Perhaps not, but the film's lack of scope in this area was disappointing.

The film's strongest moments, however, are during a sojourn to Brazil with it's energetic and eclectic musical taste pushed front and centre. These scenes are so overflowing with musical passion that it would take the sternest of "kids these days" head-shakers to not get caught up in it. Elsewhere law professor Lawrence Lessig proves to be the most knowledgeable on the debate and his arguments hold up best. Such moments of wisdom like 'People quote books all the time in everything from movies to school essays with nothing more than a citation, so why can't a musician use a two-second loop of a song just the same?' provide much food for thought. Dan O'Neill, a famed underground cartoonish, is another welcome addition and provides a well-needed laugh.


It's such a shame that this documentary feels held back by Gaylor and the fact that it's such a small project. It could have definitely benefited from a larger scope and less of the director himself. He, himself, presents facts too straight-forwardly and it becomes obvious that that sort of stuff is better left to the entertaining people he has surrounded himself with. And even though I think his argument is important and worthy, presenting the other side in a fair manner would have made it even stronger. B-

Befitting the film, Gaylor has actually allowed people to download the movie from the official website for a suggested fee. It receives a limited release in Australia from Thursday.