Review: Hot Tub Time Machine

Hot Tub Time Machine
Dir. Steve Pink
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 100mins

Two weeks ago cinemagoers had Steve Carell and Tina Fey starring in Date Night, a movie with a plot that came directly out of 1986. This week fans of dopey comedies can, quite literally, go back in time to 1986 with Hot Tub Time Machine, a terminally unfunny piece of nostalgic time travel that throws everything except the kitchen sink into the hot tub resulting in nothing more than a soggy mess. When the title is the funniest thing about a movie, you know there’s trouble afoot.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag.


I had mentioned to fellow Melbourne film man Luke Buckmaster before the screening that I was not looking forward to this movie and, lo and behold, it turned out to be as bad as I expected. I truly, honestly did not laugh one single time. Say what you will about Date Night, I already did, but at least I laughed during that one in spite on how badly made it was. This one is just drab and uninteresting and doesn't even seem to raise a sweat, but here chugs along at its own pace and then ends. et voila. One thing I didn't get space to write about is Lizzy Caplan. She shows up in 1986 as a woman that steals John Cusack's heart, but then when we see her in 2010 (or whatever year it is set since the maths is way off) she looks exactly the same. In those 20 years did she invent a product that stopped aging? It was kinda scary. D-

Review: Animal Kingdom

Animal Kingdom
Dir. David Michôd
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 112mins

Australians love a good crime drama. Hell, judging from the TV ratings they love even bad crime dramas, crime documentaries, crime comedies, crime anything as long as it features people getting themselves in too deep with drugs, violence, sex or the inability to drive properly. And yet crime seems to only pay on the small screen, what with big locally made hits such as Underbelly, Border Patrol and City Homicide sitting pretty alongside international fare like Bones and Midsummer Murders at the top of the ratings heard. Give audiences a body - or, preferably, an ever-increasing pile of them - and they're on board.

For some reason, this predilection to crime hasn't jumped to the big screen in any major way, until now, with David Michôd's debut feature Animal Kingdom. Sure, Matthew Saville ventured there with Noise (the second best Aussie film of the last decade) sort of went there, but not to the level of Animal Kingdom. Lazy people - such as myself, I admit - will describe it as "Underbelly on the big screen" and they're not too far off the mark if you mean a slickly produced, invigorating product featuring a bevy of talented acting heavyweights of the Australian acting industry.


Set in Melbourne, Animal Kingdom begins with teenager Joshua "J" Cody (James Frencheville) being moved to live his grandmother (Jacki Weaver) after the death of his single mother. The mother who had intentionally sheltered J from the life of his grandmother and uncles. He soon becomes indoctrinated into the family business of armed robbery and drugs. The young and easily influenced J is quickly pounced upon by police Senior Sergeant Leckie (Guy Pearce) and is caught between his family and the law. Michôd's screenplay is such a fine, solid base and yet it weaves unexpected sidetracks alongside the intricate plot. Michôd has a knack for dialogue here and each character has such a strong, defined persona, which is something that a lot of films tend to lack. These characters live and breathe, and feel as if they have been for decades.

The movie is impeccably made from a technical standpoint with Adam Arkapaw's cinematography looking so crisp, there are several shots worthy of art. The sound work was, I found, particularly note worthy as was the editing by Luke Doolan who manages to wring so much tension and shock, especially during one scene in which Clayton Jacobson reverses out of his garage. Sounds simply, you will understand when you see it, but it walks such a delicate line of nail-biting suspense. Impressive too is the wonderful cast that Michôd has assembled. Perhaps Ben Mendelsohn is miscast as the elderly brother Pope, and perhaps Frencheville has some strange character traits that are hard to define (is he autistic?), but Joel Edgerton is excellent in a role that I am sure many will spoil, but I will do no such thing. Luke Ford, the brother from The Black Balloon, impresses in what is probably the weakest character while Sullivan Stapleton, Susan Prior and Laura Wheelhouse provide great support too.

The performance of the film, however, is Australian acting legend Jacki Weaver. Instantly recalling recent towering performances by the likes of Mo'Nique, Weaver spends much of the film's first half being quietly creepy and, at times, even gothic, but she proves to be merely biding her time before unleashing a flood of evil in scene after scene leading up to the film's haunting conclusion. The way her lips curl as she tries to keep a motherly smile on her face as she extorts, blackmails and manipulates the walls that are crumbling around her is a sight to behold. It is sure to be remembered as one of the finest displays of acting ever committed to an Australian film.


Unfortunately, I do think that the character of J is what lets the film down during these final passages. His character, not necessarily Frencheville himself, feels messy towards the end and the way the character navigates the twists that the film has in store isn't done as cleanly as one would expect from this otherwise finely crafted film. Sure to become a definitive title of Australian film for what it's trying to - and mostly does - achieve, Animal Kingdom is a superb film that should once and for all get audiences excited about Australian cinema once again (even though they already should be). B+

Animal Kingdom is release 3 June, but I'll remind you about it so don't worry!

Review: Were the World Mine

Were the World Mine
Dir. Tom Gustafson
Year: 2008
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 95mins

The likes of Todd Haynes, Derek Jarman and Gregg Araki have a lot to answer for. If it weren't for directors like them and other vital names of the New Queer Cinema movement - and even those like Gus Van Sant and John Cameron Mitchell who have come to prominence with quality gay cinema after that early '90s heyday - then it might be acceptable to find films such as Were the World Mine quality representations of gay life on screen. Such as it is, however, and Tom Gustafson's teen musical is embarrassing, stupid, cliched to the extreme and inept in almost every conceivable way.

I am of the strong and unwavering belief that the segment of gay cinemagoers who cheer on movies such as Another Gay Movie would not be so kind if they were about heterosexual characters. With Were the World Mine, we are being asked to give unlikeable characters, unfathomably bad writing, lousy camerawork, baffling character and plot development, obvious song choices (Mika? Really?), tacky and forced raunch, unsexy eroticism and lapses in logic, common sense and sanity. Sorry, no can do. No amount of watching pretty boys pash each other, as fun as that can be to watch from time to time, can make me ignore, for instance, a scene in which the drama teacher puts a magic hush spell over a group of outraged parents.


Is it even worth discussing the plot? The flimsy amount of it that there is could easily be written about and still only fill half of a post-it note. So, there's this all boys' school and they're putting on a show of A Midsummer's Night Dream and then the school's resident queer boy puts a spell on everyone and they go all gay like. That's it. Oh, I guess he realises the errors of conformity? Or he realises that love is not something to be played with? Or he realises that homoerotic all boys schools are hotbeds of steamy lust just begging to be set free?

Oh who cares, writer and director Gustafson (he co-wrote with Cory James Krueckeber) clearly don't and are instead more interested in seeing HOT BOYS MAKE OUT AND OLD QUEER-HATERS GET THEIR COMEUPPANCE YEAH!!! Oy. The former is uninteresting because it comes off as soft-core porn and nothing even close to realism and passion or sensuality. And it's as if the makers thought the only people who would see this movie were easily-excitable gay people who wouldn't care that even the homophobes are so thinly painted with broad strokes of weak paint.

All of this could have possibly been forgiven, although only slightly, if Gustafson were interested in telling a tale of a boy growing up gay. I'm far from being the sort of person who thinks all gay cinema should be about having AIDS or being gay-bashed, but when Were the World Mine decides to ditch any semblance of drama in favour of OMGLOOKATTHEHOTBOYSKISSING!!! it ceases to hold any interest. There is no conflict, no urgency and no reason to keep watching unless you like watching, you guessed it, cute boys kissing while singing wishy-washy songs with tedious lyrics.


One good musical number and an actually nice lead performance from Tanner Cohen are all that stops Were the World Mine from descending into truly F-grade territory. As it is, I'm left here wondering why there only appears to be one school in this entire town, and an all boys one at that, or why there never appear to be any other teachers or students at this school other than the main characters. Or why characters talk about the town it is set in having a population of "10,000" and yet somehow someone can make a career out of selling Avon type products door to door? Honestly, this movie is not interested in answering any of these so why am I asking? Because I'm not so easily distracted by guys with no shirts on that I can so calmly forget such inept filmmaking, that's why. D-

Review: Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky

Chanel Coco & Igor Stravinsky
Dir. Jan Kounen
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 120mins

Fans of cinema may be experiencing a bit of deja vu lately. First there was Jim Sheridan's Brothers, which was a remake of Susanne Bier's Brødre. Then at the start of April we had Philippe Lioret's Welcome, which was, generally speaking, a better (and French) version of The Blind Side. Now comes Chanel Coco & Igor Stravisky (conveniently being shortened to Coco & Igor), which picks up directly after last year's Coco avant Chanel left off with the death of Coco's lover "Boy". These two films about Coco Chanel were made completely independent of one another and yet here they year, less than a year between release dates and sharing so many similarities, it's uncanny.

Thankfully, Coco & Igor jettisons the biopic-fodder that filled Coco avant Chanel's opening passages - the orphanage, the jazz bars, the career buildup - and dives right in to when Chanel began her love affair with Igor Stravinsky, the famed Russian composer and married father. On that basis I am thankful, but unfortunately this latest film suffers from many of the same problems that plagued last year's box office hit (Coco avant Chanel was the highest grossing foreign language film in Australia and the USA in 2009) such as its been-there-done-that feel. Except this time it's not the growing-up-in-poverty-before-making-good storyline that has been done before, it's the beginning-an-affair-with-a-married-man-in-a-time-when-women-were-only-meant-to-wear-pretty-hats that we've seen time and time again.


Anna Mouglalis gives by far the best performance of Coco Chanel that we've seen lately. She trumps Audrey Tautou's vague, limp reading of the fashion icon as well as the bombastic one of Shirley MacLaine in the made-for-TV movie Coco Chanel. Mouglalis' deep, throaty voice makes her stand out and gives an aura of authority that Tautou couldn't even attempt. Mads Mikkelsen is fair, if a little one-note, as Stravinsky, while Yelena Morozova impresses as his patient put upon wife, but nobody's performance breaks out from the framing that attempts to suffocate them.

The film is actually much more concerned with Igor than it is Coco, who is merely a more recognisable name to hang the curtains of the movie upon. Little to no attention is paid to Chanel's growing business apart from a few scenes in her Parisian shop, although there is a subplot involving the creation of Chanel No. 5 that feels superfluous, as if writer Chris Greenhalgh - also the author of the biography that the film is based on - and director Jan Kounen felt that they weren't putting in enough of Coco. As if they owed something to the audiences who had purchased a ticket based on the name of Coco Chanel. Chanel is by far the most interesting character in this or Coco avant Chanel and yet none of these filmmakers seem to be able to get her right. Her aloof independence surely doesn't help, but was this all her life really was? Screwing a married man in the study of her country estate? At least Coco avant Chanel played somewhat with the idea of Chanel's radical achievements.

Just as with the other Chanel film, the costumes in Coco & Igor are exceptional, with costume design by Chattoune and Fab (yes, those are their names) and even featuring an original Karl Largerfeld design for all you fashion crazies out there. Try and spot it! The art direction of the country estate makes it feel effectively lived in and the sound design is also of special note. Each step a person takes on the hardwood floors and every note played on the piano rings out of the speakers and helps the film feel more intimate than it really is. Unfortunately, David Ungaro's cinematography is incredibly dark at times and it's particularly bothersome during several early scenes when the audience is trying to figure out who everyone is. Meanwhile, I wouldn't be surprised to see Gabriel Yared show up on Oscar's radar for his musical score.


Coco & Igor is book-ended by two exceptional sequences. The first is a recital of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring with choreography by Vaslav Nijinski, which will thrill and delight many, both for visual wow factor and as a fascinating way of figuring out who all these noteworthy people are circling one another. The film ends with a five-minute montage sequence that makes a better case for the beautiful, dramatic and all too bitterly sad life that Coco lead than anything in the 110 or so minutes before it. It's a gorgeous sequence that almost had me re-evaluating the rest of the movie. I saw this movie nearly a month ago and this scene still lingers in my mind with its beautiful images set to Yared's wonderful score. Stay tuned until the end of the credits, too, as there is a little nugget of a scene that ties a neat little bow onto the life story of Coco Chanel. C

Review: Date Night

Date Night
Dir. Shawn Levy
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Tine: 88mins

The thought of spending 90 minutes with Steve Carell (The 40-Year-Old Virgin) and Tina Fey (Mean Girls) would normally be a fun thing to do with your evening. In the case of Date Night, however, director Shawn Levy (cinematic travesties Just Married and Cheaper by the Dozen) appears to have done his best to make even these two funny and talented lead performers unpalatable.

Read the rest over at Trespass Mag.
The friend that I dragged along to see Date Night had a much harder time reconciling his feelings towards Date Night as I. There definitely were quite a few moments that I found myself laughing quite heartily, but the film is just so poorly done. Anytime it descends into sentimental pap then it just falls into a black hole of awfulness. Thank god Carell and Fey have adlibbing skills!

And, lastly, hasn't the resurrection of James Franco from pretty-but-bland James Dean wannabe into sensitive-and-yet-hysterical character actor been one of the most fascinating things to watch these last few years. Throw his cameo in Date Night alongside Pineapple Express, Milk and (apparently) Howl and his career looks far more impressive than when he was making those terrible movies like Annapolis and Tristan + Isolde. And let's face it, he's not bad to look at either. If only he'd taken his shirt off for extended periods of time instead of Mark Wahlberg.

Review: Micmacs

Micmacs [Micmacs à tire-larigot]
Dir. Jean-Pierre Jeunet
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: M
Running Time: 105mins

By this stage of the game, I imagine cinema audiences who are aware of the work of Jean-Pierre Jeunet would fall into one of three camps. They could be big fans and will continue to be big fans for as long as he keeps working. They could have never been particularly fond of Jeunet's whimsy via art direction fantasia and probably won't ever be for as long as he keeps working. And then there is the final option, that they could have been fans once upon a time, but by now feel he has lost the fire. I suspected I was all set to fall into the third camp before seeing his latest French quirk-fest, Micmacs; I couldn't have been more wrong.

Micmacs, Jeunet's first film since the uncharacteristically dramatic A Very Long Engagement in 2004, is not going to create any Jean-Pierre converts, but for this longtime fan of the director it was a delightful and pleasing jolt of energy. I thought for sure that this man's penchant for extreme distorted goggle closeups, beaucoup oddities and surreal touches of absurdity would have worn thin by now as even he himself seemed to have tired of it during Engagement, a movie that was aimed squarely at the American awards market. What I found instead with Micmacs was a film that did indeed live up to its French title of "non-stop madness" and proves to be a truly joyful and triumphantly jubilant experience.


Billed as a satire of the world arms trade, Micmacs stars Dany Boon as Bazil, a man who loses his job and apartment when he spends a lengthy stay in a hospital after being shot in the head. That we see his father killed by a landmine in the opening scene and it doesn't take long to realise he has some bad luck. However, he soon ends up in the company of an underground team of social outcasts who live in a cave made from scrap metal and appliances. It's not too long before the group, which includes Jeunet regulars such as Dominique Pinon and Yolande Moreau, come together to help Bazil reap his madcap revenge upon the landmine manufacturers responsible for his father's death and the ammunition corporation responsible for the bullet lodged in his head.

What follows is an increasingly elaborate, excitingly eccentric and hilariously entertaining series of events as this group of misfits band together on one nasty, yet startlingly original, trick after another. There's really no way to truly explain how giddy Micmacs made me with its sheer imagination. Filled to the brim with typical Jeunet novelties like Aline Bonetto's wacky art direction - long gone is Jeunet's former collaborator Marc Caro, but his influence remains - the kooky cinematography by Tetsuo Nagata as well as any number of singular quirks. How about the appearance of billboards throughout Micmacs advertising the very movie that we are watching? How about the alien-like sign language that character seem fluent in. The black and white film credits featuring music by Max Steiner or a scene involving an orchestra that would feel cynical in the arms of another director.


Comedies in a foreign language can be tricky for audiences since so much of what one nationality may find uproarious can be anything but to another. Micmacs successfully avoids this trap and proves to be a winning bout of absurdist fun. It's a true joy to watch the imagination found within the screenplay by Jeunet and Guillaume Laurant unfold. While I am sure that Jeunet's detractors will continue to be bitten by the grouch bug, there's no reason for everyone else to not go out and revel in the fun that is to be had. Micmacs is a treat! A-