A Berberian Ripper

One of the very best films that I saw at this year's Melbourne International Film Festival was Peter Strickland's ode of italo-horror of the 1970s and '80s, Berberian Sound Studio. It was a film that I, nor anybody else it turned out, had really heard all that much about and had chosen purely based on the central premise (which, admittedly, doesn't sound all that exciting). I admit I only chose it for a late evening mid-week slot because I love the art of sound editing - you'll find me at Oscar parties explaining what the difference between "sound effects editing" and "sound mixing" are like a total dweeb - and figured any film that put that process front and centre should be worth a look in. Even if I'm not a fan of Toby Jones.

Berberian Sound Studio is a very peculiar picture, and I sat there for a good chunk of its run time not really knowing what on Earth the whole point was. It was interesting, definitely, but I was waiting for something to happen. I mean, film generally dictates that stuff kinda has to happen. Even if at a film festival the potential is much lower. Still, waited patiently I did and while I was certainly getting a kick out of all the creepy, atmospheric ways that the director was able to utilise the art of sound editing I was eager for something, you know? By the time Strickland's film played out its magic dance around the maypole of looniness in its final act, I was in quiet awe. Not only was the film's final act something that the film needed in order to make its lasting impression, but it was something I personally needed.

I'd longed for a film all festival long that would give me the unnerving sense of the unknown. None of the "Night Shift" titles (essentially those devoted to genre elements, of which Berberian feels like a natural fit, alas...) really did that for me this year. At least none of the ones I saw. My friends and I basically all exited the cinema with a state of perplexed wonder. The rabbit hole of madness that the characters appear to collapse into throughout the second half are so fascinating to watch play out that I ended up having a hoot of a time. You'll never look at British nature documentaries the same! Also, it must be said, it was so great to experience a film and help turn it into one of the must see films of the festival. It's my understanding that people were promptly trying to make subsequent screenings after hearing about the success of the film from us early birds. Berberian Sound Studio is sure to be one of David Lynch's favourite films of the year!

The movie does have a local distributor and I hope for audiences' sake that it gets a theatrical release (those in Sydney will apparently get the chance to see it at the Sydney Underground Film Festival) because - for rather obvious reasons - it is a film that utilises sound design in such a manner that demands a cinema viewing setting. From the crunching of a watermelon with an axe, to the bloody-curling scream of an Italian dubbing actress, Berberian Sound Studio is a film to be enveloped by. It lives and dies on its sound design, and it passes with flying colours. The film itself will prove a confounding wonder for many and a boring mess for others, but its evocation of a very specific time and place had me enraptured. Loved it.

It was completely without coincidence then that some days after the festival I chose to sit down and watch a Blu-ray of Lucio Fulci's New York Ripper. The very sort of Italian horror flick that the aforementioned Berberian demonstrates the making-of process of, this is a nasty little flick albeit one whose power has surely been greatly reduced as a result of the very dated style. The heavy style and dubbed sound of films from this era will never not be confronting - at least initially - but I actually think Sound Studio made me appreciate Fulci's film a little bit more than I otherwise may have. Strickland's film is, I suppose, never not be perfect double feature fodder for a movie of this kind where the lips aren't in sync and the squishy, squashy sound effects are so noticeably over-the-top that you can all but see the chunks of leafy vegetables flying out of the screen.

Initially banned in Australia, New York Ripper follows a city entangled in the vice-like grip of a depraved killer. It certainly takes a more tourist-like look at the city than, say, William Lustig's Maniac - rarely does an establishing shot go by that doesn't feature an NYC landmark or sunny postcard shot, although the majority of the film was clearly not filmed on location ("grindhouse tourism" nails Slant - but that lends it a disconcerting atmosphere that works a treat. Where it doesn't succeed is in Fulci's troubling representation of sex and fetishes, which are treated as more or less demonic, deserving of punishment. There's certainly a filthy leery-eyed old man aesthetic to the whole thing that is rarely comfortable to watch. And then there are scenes where nipples are cut in half by razor blades. Yeah, make up whatever meaning you like for that. Various strands strain for relevance and others have genuine tension. It's a strange movie like that.

I guess it makes sense that I should follow up something like Berberian Sound Studio, itself little more than an expertly crafted technical display, with New York Ripper. Fulci's film is hardly scary, but there's still skill to be found to make it an involving experience. If somewhat limited, obviously.

MIFF 2012 Review: Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present

Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present

Dir. Matthew Akers

Country: USA

Aus Rating: N/A

Running Time: 106mins

It’s a shame that the people who really need to see Matthew Akers’ transfixing debut documentary, Marina Abramović: The Artist is Present, won’t go near it. If the years and years of time spent by newspaper opinion columns bemoaning the “waste” of taxpayer funding for what they deem an artist’s silly folly had been used instead to create something that moves and deeply effects just one person in this world then we’d surely be better off for it. The woman at the centre of The Artist is Present, Serbian born performance artist Marina Abramović, is a fascinating one and this documentary’s final 30 minutes is a testament to the power that her work has over people. As she sat gallantly in Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) for some 736.5 hours, her work took on the stature of legend, so it’s sad to think there are far too many out there who, as one news reporter featured within says, see her as little more than “some Yugoslavian provocateur.”

Read the rest at Trespass Magazine

Equalize This!

So, they're rebooting The Equalizer. Or, more to the point, they're adapting the original CBS television series, which ran from 1985-1989, into a new feature film. We're already off to a bad start as it is by pure virtue of this movie being made in the first place, but then consider that it's not a period piece, it's going to be filmed in Boston, and it already has 8 (EIGHT!) producers listed. While the chosen star, Denzel Washington, doesn't quite fit the same mold as Edward Woodward's original grey-haired baddie slayer, I can actually at least see him in the role as a modern day equivalent. Shame that "The Equalizer" of The Equalizer is just one quarter of why the original series worked so well.

Completely by coincidence I have actually been watching series one of The Equalizer for the past week. I've always had a particular fondness for the series, without ever being able to recall much about it other than it was set in New York City and starred a man with a really funny name. I remember being a wee tyke and when I should've been in bed I was spying on my parents watching The Equalizer in the living room. The images stuck. It's curious that this show was surely the first known existence of New York City and I happening upon one another and yet I grew an instant love for the city. I mean, The Equalizer doesn't exactly paint the rosiest of portraits for the greatest city in the world, and yet still something about those analogue city lights must have really gotten to me. I have distinct memories of the images, if not the stories. Of course, there is that blue fog shot from the opening credits that strikes me as rather iconic, too.

I'm not sure if The Equalizer could be made as a series today. The fact that it deals with rapists, murderers, kidnappers, fraudsters and stalkers certainly seems like prime time material in 2012, but the filming style and the evocative sense of time and place is - quite frankly - something that can't be replicated. The New York City of 2012 is a much different one to that of 1985. Sure, there are still all sorts of nasty crimes and villainous creeps out there, but the city, from a purely visual standpoint, had an aura that makes for some truly skeazy viewing. The opening credits (below) alone are a thrilling piece of decaying Manhattan imagery. It's just not going to be the same to see "The Equalizer" (whatever back story he may take) cleaning up the human trash of a city that's actually really sparkly. A city where a late night stroll down the street - hell, even under the Brooklyn Bridge! - is a picturesque night out rather than a terrifying, traumatic experience for all. The Equalizer in a city where looking behind you ever thirty seconds once the sun as set doesn't quite make sense. He was essentially cleaning up a dying city one scumbag at a time, but does the city need him that badly anymore? Wait, are we talking about The Equalizer or Christopher Nolan's Batman movies? In episode four a character walks through Times Square passed a theatre that is playing Bordello starring Linda Lovelace!


Similarly, one of the great aspects of the series is its frequent and recurring use of New York locations. Within the pilot episode alone we see the following shots. It's a glorious show to look at if, like me, you're a bit obsessed with New York City of all eras. Could a current television series even afford to do this? Girls is mostly Brooklyn, the Law & Order franchise don't make much use of big New York imagery, nor do any others that I can think of. There's a car chase on the Brooklyn Bridge for crying out loud!

Sorry, I got carried away. But what character, what atmosphere. That blue white light that the buildings have in the night sky is entrancing.

After Woodward, Manhattan, and 1985, the final element that truly made The Equalizer what it was was the music of Stewart Copeland. I think we can all agree that his work on this series was by far the greatest thing anybody associated with The Police ever did (okay, maybe "El Tango de Roxanne" from Moulin Rouge!, but oh my lord how much do I hate Sting and The Police? SO MUCH!) Much like Jan Hammer's work on Miami Vice before it, and Angelo Badalamenti's Twin Peaks afterwards, Copeland's score was the pulsating, electric beat that kept this dangerous city moving. And yet despite all of the blaring synthesizers and electric drums, there are unique and surprising instruments scattered about to make it really interesting. Love it.


"The Equalizer Busy Equalizing" | "Lurking Solo"
This new spin on The Equalizer being filmed in Boston is just crazy. Perhaps this new version, based on a script by Richard Wenk, will be set in Boston and they can utilise that city's look to their advantage, but then why bother even calling it The Equalizer? I know the series has a cult following, but I wasn't aware of it being all that much of a brand. Certainly not as much as some other series of the time that have already been turned into modern day features.

It's always good to see a classy thriller, and with a budget of just $50mil (Washington apparently getting $20mil of that so you can do the maths) it will fall into that mid-range sweet spot that studios seem to be finding themselves attracted to more and more as the budgets for their action blockbuster tentpoles skyrocket leaving less money to be spent elsewhere. Washington usually delivers the goods in these type of projects and perhaps whoever they assign to direct will be able to lend it a visual style that works in harmony with the memories of the original series. One name brought up in the linked article up top is Nicolas Winding Refn and I think we all know where I stand on him and his own retro masterpiece, Drive.

The odds, as Robert McCall might say, are certainly against them.

Black & White Friday: Gypsy 83

Perhaps a strange film to use for this series, but I'll explain way. Todd Stephen's 2001 film is an absolute stunner due to the power of its cast and the vision that is presented on screen. It's hardly the most radical of films and follows a very routine small-town-freaks-head-to-the-big-city-and-meet-crazy-characters-along-the-way plot (it's a sub-genre, okay!), but there's something so touching about the leads Sara Rue and Kett Turton together and the way the film feels truly independent and like it's set out to be its own magical beast. It never wants to settle for being the same old, despite it's familiar material. I appreciate that above mere ho-hum dialogue.


I decided to use it for the series, however, because spread through the movie are these black and white intervals filmed on an old handheld camera owned by the character of "Clive". It was this shot above that really made me wonder what the entire film might have looked like if filmed this way like an ultra-cheap underground movie made in the late '70s/early '80s in New York City by artists who live in apartments with no running water and who work in dead-end jobs Monday to Friday just to finance their art projects.


This seems like something underground filmmakers would do - set social "freaks" and "perverts" loose in a cemetery. Don't you think?


This looks more like a shot from a Divinyls video from 1990.


One thing that intrigued me about this movie what what year it was set. I know it was set in 2001 (the year it was released), but there are many moments like this that made me think it was set in the 1990s (this set looks just like a Curve video or somethin') and the 1980s (since the two lead characters look like they never left). But going with our theme of underground cinema, this does sorta look like the sorta "it's-a-set-but-not-a-set" those filmmakers may have come up with.


Karen Black terrifies me. Not just in this movie, but in general.



We all know the sort of underground indie films of the period were not shy about sex, particularly that that was deemed immoral or lewd, so I think some gay sex is more than expected. Of course, in Gypsy 83 the gay seduction is played so fantasy-like that it's one of the few moments that actually feels false, but it's still played so genuinely that I couldn't help but grin.


This was perhaps my favourite scene of the movie, as Clive puts on a show to The Cure's ace "Doing the Unstuck". The black and white feels quite appropriate.


I feel like this shot almost looks like a John Waters movie. No, Sara Rue doesn't look like Divine, but he is obviously drawn to less traditional images of beauty, isn't he? And the horrified expressions on their face just top that off.


This is a wonderful shot as they pass through the tunnel from New Jersey into Manhattan. The roughness of the photography and the high contrast of the whites and blacks do evoke those films from the underground movement that were shot on the fly and did whatever they needed to get a shot even if it wasn't perfect. It's a shot that feels so authentic.


Fittingly, I am finishing on a shot of New York City, this film's spiritual home. This whole idea of underground NYC cinema has been taken from the little of it that I gleaned from Celine Danhier's documentary Black City. Films that used New York in its most street-level natural form. I wish director Todd Stephens had spent a little less time on the road and little more time in New York City since I can only imagine what sort of images, dripping with nostalgia, he could have put up. Budgetary constraints, I imagine, stopped that from happening, but it's still nice to imagine.

Review: Me and Orson Welles

The career of cult director Richard Linklater has been a varied and often wonderful thing to behold. From the high school comedy of Dazed and Confused to the Parisian romance of Before Sunset and the animated science fiction of A Scanner Darkly, Linklater has scuttled from genre to genre with ease. Now he takes a detour back to 1930s New York to tell the tale of Orson Welles’ famed Broadway revival of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. It’s an at times ambitious, but frustratingly limited, film that gets by on the energy of its cast.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag
I don't have anything extra to say about this movie, really, other than what's in the review. B-

Review: New York, I Love You

New York, I Love Your
Dir. Fatih Akin, Yvan Attal, Allen Hughes, Shunji Iwai, Wen Jiang, Joshua Marsden, Mira Nair, Brett Ratner, Randall Balsmeyer, Shekhar Kapur & Natalie Portman
Year: 2010
Aus Rating: MA15+
Running Time: 103mins

One city, ten directors and a cast of familiar faces await audiences of New York, I Love You. This follow-up to Paris je t’aime, a surprise box office hit that saw famous directors craft odes to the city of love, will leave many disappointed. This so-called love letter to the Big Apple is a fizzer that doesn’t even come close to approaching the joie de vivre of its Parisian ancestor.

Read the rest at Trespass Mag

I am a New York "tragic", it's true. I have been twice - plan to go again in the next few years, hopefully/maybe - and I love movies to be set in New York. A movie such as The Exploding Girl can be so much better than it has any right to be simply by being set in NYC and allowing me to drown myself in the images and sounds. Barely any of the vignettes in New York, I Love You give that feeling of being surrounded by life like actually being in New York does. My favourite was the Maggie Q/Ethan Hawke sequence, which felt like a "New York Moment" more than, say, Natalie Portman's awful Jewish wedding piece.

One thing I mention in the review is the lack of any queer substance whatsoever. Watching the movie and I felt as if they were going out of their way to feature as many cultures and yet somehow gay people got left out. And in a film about the gay capital of the world (to be token and cliched). I also find it hilarious that the producers cut Scarlett Johansson's piece because it "didn’t jive with the rest of the shorts." I definitely think this film could have used more pieces that played outside of the box like it sounds ScarJo's did. Ah well. C-