filmism

chinatown

2008-07-03T15:17:00.002+10:00

i suspect this is one of the finest films ever made. in a way it works like a well-constructed sonnet; the body of the film like a series of coolly uncovered revelations; the ending punchline - 'it's chinatown' - like a severed rhyming couplet that functions to wearily justify what has gone before. nicholson's final loaded facial expression, staring into the car where dunaway has just been shot, mixes acceptance, fatigue, anger. anger because he's lost another potential kindred spirit to the perils of the chinatown miasma, acceptance because he's also looking at what cross (john huston) has claimed as his own - the future. huston gropes the writhing daughter away from the car; his enormous hands smother discordant and horrible screams; he is back in control of secrets. it struck me watching the film again recently that the last words heard here are actually not 'it's chinatown', but the bellowed orders of a cop ordering bystanders to 'stand back' and to 'get off the street' as the police sirens arrive. it's the staple of so many action films to end in the glow of sirens & blue/red police lights; they signify that atypical narrative chaos is over & that the authorities are here both to recognise the discord in their own terms & to reclaim control. as he does throughout the film, polanksi toys with genre by introducing the screaming police sirens here. in this context the cops do the inverse of comforting the spectator - rather they ensure that the site of cross's reclamation is undisturbed by onlookers or people who might obstruct the inevitable advancement of rich men - "get off the street!". as dunaway wails moments before she is killed: "he (cross) owns the police!".

manhunter

2007-12-17T19:11:00.000+11:00

michael mann is an american master & this is a wonderful film. i made the fatal error of seeing the 'red dragon' remake a few years back & 'manhunter' follows almost precisely the same plot line (tho mann excludes the emphasis on Blakean decryption that dominates the remake). already knowing the outcome of various investigative revelation scenes didn't much help in my appreciation of 'manhunter' as a geuinely 'scary' film, tho i'm sure it was at the time.

i love directors that basically riff on a theme. in this respect 'manhunter' as a title is interesting. it's probably the worst title of mann's career (& it appears as if it was changed at the last minute to encourage some box office attraction), but it has slight ramifications for the rest of mann's career. his best films (heat/the insider/miami vice) have him 'hunting' after the spirit of brilliantly talented 'men' who can only become the men they want or can become by sacrificing connections with the women in their lives. it is probably the principal fault of mann as a dramatist that his women characters consistenly threaten to become little more than angelic obstacles to the proper exercise of male vocations. but this is slightly unfair; diane venora's character in 'heat' delivers the key soliloquy of that epic, summarising all that is grotesque about husband pacino's lifestyle, & the women in 'miami vice' are as much 'players' of the hyper-cool undercover game as the male leads. at the level of character development, however, 'manhunter' is almost wholly about will graham's ability to suspend familial easefulness such that he might get back on the 'manhunt'. indeed, momentary sequences (such as an astounding close-up of graham's disturbed face interlaced with scenes of mother/son innocence) hint at the potential impossibility of any reconciliation between what graham 'does' for a living with any form of familial ambition.

in 'heat' this impossibility is pronounced at the film's climax. de niro/pacino leave their respective women at the moment of potentially mending connection to conclude the 'hunt' once & for all (in pacino's case this instant is shown in a stunning, silent dash down a flight of steps). the 'hunt' ends in the only way it can, in a final shot suggesting perpetually combative asymmetry; one man dead, slouched, facing in one direction; the other holding the combatant's hand limply, facing in the opposite direction. what's fascinating is that 'manhunter' opens with exactly the same composition; two men sitting on a beachside log; will graham facing camera, his boss seated in the opposite direction attempting to coax him back into the 'male game'. all gestures at cross-connection are ultra-tentative; the boss's hand slides some photographs of the murder victims part-way across the pallidly fragile log, quasi-flirtatiously. the 'wife & son' arrive on the scene & an affair is delayed.

it's one of many examples (really, every scene is an example) of the stupendous suggestiveness of 'manhunter's' cinematography. i'll get to that soon enough.

the family stone

2006-01-06T21:48:00.000+11:00

excepting the last extraneous 8 minutes or so, there is something genuinely moving and meritorious about this little bit of xmas fodder.

it's always a pity when a decent film can't sustain what it's attempting to do through a full 100 minutes or so. 'the family stone' falls slightly short of being a seriously good drama thanks to a few horrendously underwritten final scenes (the claire danes/mulroney 'love' scene in particular), as well as a tacked-on, semi-explanatory epilogue. sure, tight-knit comedy/dramas like this seem to demand some kind of pleasurable explanation - if the characters are at all memorable we want to know what became of them beyond the sunset future. the writing & the acting & the development of the characters up to a kind of blissful but ambiguous & still fallible xmas-night ending was just right - to go & spoil the lot by repeating what we already knew seemed both insulting & saddening. i mean you can literally see the spot where they should've called a final cut - luke wilson & sarah jessica-parker, lying together in the first grips of a weird love; wilson grinning, repeating to himself & pondering that ridiculous but oddly relevant line from 'joy to the world': "repeat the sounding joy". gorgeous scene.

back to what i think this film was 'attempting to do', then. the story gets its template from the countless 'boyfriend/girlfriend meets family for the first time' films that've emerged in the last 20 years; 'father of the bride', 'meet the parents' etc. the only ones i can remember are outright comedies. 'the family stone' puts some mild emphasis on the gags, but i'm pretty sure i heard more sobbing than laughing in the cinema i was in. which is just the thing - the meaningful reinforcement of some dramatic moral is usually just tacked-on in films like this. in 'the family stone' it's the comedy that's tacked on, if not seamlessly integrated into scenes of (honestly) tear-jerking drama. diane keaton (via 'father of the bride') has a history in films like this; she knows how to hold the whole together, allowing the supporting actors/actresses do their bit. & they're ALL good. claire danes is radiant; rachel mcadams is almost as good as she was in 'mean girls' (see it if you haven't); dermot mulroney, in one scene in particular, does some great crying.

not bad.

war of the worlds

2005-12-28T20:32:00.000+11:00

the usual disclaimer then - i know nothing about previous incarnations of 'war of the worlds'. i approached spielberg's remake looking for a bit of apocalyptic fun. i came away thinking it's one of the better spielberg films i've ever seen. better, because it's simply interesting & eyebrow-raising on a number of levels.

the apocalyptic genre went into a weird overdrive in the late 90's. at the time it seemed like spielberg missed the boat - known as the first great blockbuster director, i think he was too busy knuckling down on 'saving private ryan' to notice the surge of ultra-hyped films like 'independence day' & 'armageddon'. the other film contemporaneous to this lot was 'deep impact', which, though it cashed in on the tidal-wave-drenching-manhattan money shot, was a strangely intimate & emotional piece (when robert duvall starts reciting melville on the world-saving spaceship, you know something different is going on). 'independence day' & 'armageddon' were hilariously panoramic, all-devouring visions of against-all-odds collective human effort, complete with that mandatory montage of the 'arabs'/'russians'/'japanese'/'english' doing their military bit for the sake of humanity. 'armageddon' was unmistakeably the worst offender of this bunch - the characters & action came at you at such a ludicrous, music-video pace that you walked out of the cinema feeling slightly saturated.

'war of the worlds' is all interior, mysterious microcosm to 'independence day's' macrocosm of fighting-back fervour. & this is where things get interesting. while it is a kind of analytical cliche, 'war of the worlds' does make a successful effort to trace the growth of its main character (tom cruise) over the course of these quite sublime events. cruise has appeared in two spielberg films since 'eyes wide shut', since the death of kubrick ('minority report' & 'war of the worlds'). i can't help but think that spielberg saw kubrick did something interesting to cruise in 'eyes wide shut'; brought him back to a kind of meditative, emotional acting earth; took him back to square one; taught him that you can get just as much of your character across by an anxious, prolonged stare than you can doing the kind of things cruise characters have always been renowned for - sprinting ridiculously, winning a fight or an argument with a compact, ideal rejoinder.

'minority report' got the ball rolling, to some extent - yes, cruise's character in that film does a lot of running & problem-solving, but he also does enough serious deliberation with himself that you can't help but be moved by it all. in 'war of the worlds', it's as if spielberg (and his script writers, and his art designers) come to the introspective party as well. 'minority report' was neat & tidy; it had a plot of pristine resolution. 'war of the worlds' is, plot-wise, quite daringly panic-stricken for a 'blockbuster' film. through certain stages there's an ostensible similarity to another suspenseful, slightly left-of-centre blockbuster film based around a dysfunctional small family unit - m. night shyamalan's 'signs' - in which the terrifyingly fantastic things going on in an invisible wider world are chanelled solely through the experience of a few key characters. what 'war of the worlds' and 'signs' share, i suspect, is a lack of repeated watchability - they are both emotionally quite affecting films on first viewing, but for various reasons they lack punch on repeated viewings.

backtracking, then, it's through 'war of the worlds's' lead character that the film gains its most noteworthy edge. one is at pains to really identify at all with cruise's character at first - to be blunt, he's purposely played as a desultory cunt. & to some extent he only marginally 'improves' himself as the film goes on, his heroic son doing a lot of the work for him. spielberg deserves credit for running with this lead who never really responds ideally or heroically to any of the various terrifying set-pieces through the film.

what also helps 'war' on its way is an extravagant special-effects budget. & it's not as if the money is put to waste - importantly, the key design of the staple special-effect figure, the tripod, is toweringly terrifying; in its movements & its sonorous howling it is surely reminiscent of the original 'jurassic park' t-rex; sublime & awe-inspiring.

undeniably the film seems to lose its way towards a kind of tacked-on & abrupt climax; all said, given the way 'war' tries to defy certain apocalyptic audience expectations (and cinematic conventions), it's worth taking seriously.

the saint (with digression)

2005-09-28T15:44:00.000+10:00

let me preface by saying I know nothing about the original tv series of ‘the saint’.

from memory the film performed underwhelmingly at the box office when it came out around 1997. I was attracted to it just recently for a few reasons – a) I have a weakness for what blurbs call ‘intelligent’ action/dramas, b) the lead baddie is played by the same actor who went on to play the grotesque costume-shop owner in ‘eyes wide shut’ (indeed, not wanting to exaggerate, but the two characters are almost EXACTLY the same), & needless to say anything that pricked kubrick’s interest in formulating his final dream-epic deserves attention, c) ‘the saint’s’ treatment of its female co-lead is interesting in comparison to another recent-ish sophisticated thriller, ‘the bourne identity’.

a) & c) should be our main focus here. to be honest it’s hard to know what kubrick was thinking with relation to b). I’ve always suspected that ‘eyes wide shut’ has more to say about pop culture than people imagine (indeed, given his late-in-life reputation as uber-esoteric recluse, it’s intriguing to note the number of times kubrick references &/or subtly critiques ‘popular culture’ in his ‘mature films’, whether it’s US marines singing the mickey mouse club tune, jack torrance sardonically criticizing ‘television’ for teaching his distant son about cannibalism, alex the droog confidently wandering a hyper-coloured pop-record store in search of some ‘in-out’ – you can’t let kubrick’s stylistic straightness blind you to the fact he knew & had a lot to say about the mainstream; anecdotes suggest that for decades he had the latest sitcoms, series & even commercials mailed to his hideaway in England). I’ve said elsewhere that I think cruise’s character in ‘eyes wide shut’ was mildly influenced by his character in ‘the firm’, & there are other things – ‘strangers in the night’ playing wistfully in the background as cruise’s masked female-hero orders him to escape the sex mansion ‘before it’s too late!’ (which leads to the ridiculously anti-serious ‘I am ready to redeem him!’ scene); the fact ‘baby did a bad bad thing’ - sung by the most self-conscious crooner in recent memory, chris isaak – backs the only ‘sex’ scene between the leads in the whole film; the fact the film’s ‘fuck’ finale is set in a shopping mall during Christmas rush hour. frankly there’s a case for arguing that it’s kubrick’s most socially engaged film – the whole thing is underpinned by a commentary on the US class ladder, cruise’s status as a ‘medical professional’ (note the number of times he flashes his ‘medical card’) granting him access to nearly all arenas of urban life EXCEPT the house of complete sexual bliss, which is reserved for a kind of shady, impossible aristocracy – remember that the only actual ‘physical infidelity’ he partakes in is that beautifully rendered lip-kiss with a HIV-positive prostitute living in a seedy flat. the costume-shop owner, the bloke we are supposed to be talking about, as I say, it’s hard to know what he’s meant to represent – but the inference seems to be that he belongs to a grotesque underclass with a different sexual culture altogether; we of course discover late in the film that he’s happily selling off his daughter’s sexuality to a pair of completely comic & improbable Asian men. perhaps there was something about the bearded burbling of ‘the saint’s’ ribald bad-guy that kubrick was attracted to. perhaps.

I got sidetracked. I’ll cover a) & c) another time.

21st

2005-08-25T13:22:00.000+10:00

In Eltham I ask for grass & a girl
says ‘You are in Eltham’.
‘So I’m like the foot soldier in City Hall
in the movie version
of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,
when he wants a cigarette & gets cartons
of regular & menthol?’

‘Yeah. So what are you after?’

We grow on our acre.
A rock remains a cool pillow
you don’t have to turn over.
‘That’s smooth for a ceramic bong’.
She runs craft classes
at a child care centre.
‘Guess you’re used to hydroponics;
all the chemical fertiliser’.

Told dad later about their in-ground pool.
Told him there’s green leaves for a jungle feel,
& he said ‘Sure!
Such an ecosystem takes time.’

Next to hair of cane kelp I recited:
“I was much further out than you thought”.
Kookaburras in the boarded house
belly-laughed a nightclub theme.

toyota echo

2005-07-28T15:24:00.000+10:00

My youngest sister & I, forever aggressively planet-xish
with regards our massive, disparate familial solar system
(there is a sitcom cool about everyone’s interaction –
we only acknowledge connections or cry at the reunions)
we are 8am commuting together to respective workplaces
in Geelong. This involves Australia’s most boring drive,
one hour along four west-headed lanes with immense auction-
group car yards, the furtherest urban outliers and, eventually,
the yellowed Port Phillip flatlands as scenery. You try
(I’m not driving) to make something out of it, imagining
what goes on in lonely highway-side paddocks at night,
whether some starry-eyed wits-end type has ever parked their car
illegally and wandered without a torch towards
the indiscernible horizon. I would want a windy cigarette
after twenty yards & I suspect it would be tough
keeping the nervous shit tingling from your arse. This
one time at school camp, the teachers made us sit
about half a K apart from each other in national park dark.
The first thing I did was piss, then sit down, then laugh
for the required half an hour at how the class bullies
had held hands & cried in response to the task. It was hilarious.

recurring dreams

2005-06-17T15:09:00.000+10:00

Just as me & Caz are left bemoaning the Big 4 Caravan Park,
the hilariously persistent Gideons,
the blue vinyl book of local attractions like
the sausage meat pizza we got
& scampered to scoff in front of
the city news, the threat posed to her Birkenstocks
by the unglamorous Bass Strait tide
& the big broken-off rocks beachcombers need to climb

the shore of the Med is stone, she said

So there are still millions
utterly blind to the cynicism
espoused by us who had all this as kids:
Commodores between each family cabin,
the drive from Melbourne to yr bit of ocean
not exactly that long but a cinematic marathon,
photos of flywire doors & dynasties of four,
boredom & worldliness left to future generations.

untitled

2005-06-07T21:31:00.000+10:00

Your silhouette stood to attention
against the luxuriating streetlight unmoved
in its diffusion through the bedroom when
we met for I was in a suit with that
stretch your gait a little further feeling
all guys get unfailingly at 3am when
every presentation is a success

off the record less than transcendent investor yes
it is unconventional in my experience
for instantaneous interest to be expressed
I must warn you before I forget next morning
most blokes will have you as an odalisque
a fallback the constant possibility of sex
& if you think my saying that in shockingly
cad dispatches means different do not

after 1979

2005-05-30T12:53:00.000+10:00

The way you want its
lane-marking drum line not to end’s

like the first time you listen
to Blur’s Coffee & TV;

bring on the highway,
the hedonistic drawl

of Corgan’s limp wrist
out the passenger-side window.

For the tallish boy we all destroyed
who hugged his Melon Collie double set

as young Joaqin Phoenix clutched
his porn in Parenthood –

I always thought he hoped the song
was where his older brother had gone,

hit by a semi-trailer while
fielding a cricket ball on Christmas Eve,

carried along to where Tooronga Road
turns into Dandenong & eternity.

Sorry. This is getting a bit Stand By Me.

Minutes

2005-05-16T11:28:00.000+10:00

Can’t be sure, can we,
that the following’s not prohibited
by the first confidentiality agreement I’ve
been oddly hot to sign, as if it were
a financier’s manly handshake before
an Antarctica of secrets.

Watching the entrepreneur
spruik a gospel of developing world goodwill
listen, India’s a brilliant source of human capital
I, retaining what Whitmanian retro chops
the expansive eye of the bothered unAustralian
& an infuriating ability to go along

begin to recognise what
stuff like ‘service industries’ really means.
The movies, the restaurants, less the catalogues
of those still required to spot than
the well-clipped salesman or waiter
who fucking hate their jobs & clientele

all your grand transacting schemata
of the working poor & goal-setting best
is there to farm one key interest:
the fecundity & comfort of our corporate activists.
If I could pass on one lesson on behalf
of, well, you wouldn’t even call it a niche market,

it’d be: for fuck’s sake, just try & relax.
Ditch the gaudy colour photos saying VISION.
You are smarter than this, young businessmen
& women. Revel that your works are but
extensions of a power to charm. The blessed
couldn’t care less what depths they are regarded from.

untitled

2005-05-03T16:12:00.000+10:00

Like me, weed has laid him low.
Finally,
a drug that justifies one’s genetic desire
to stay at home via
the intensified appeal
of the private everyday:
meals, music, video games & tv shows.
Cannabis for us implies less
an angry flight from reality
than a rare shot at omniscience;
(being privately schooled suburban kids,
criticism, judgement & expertise
are habits you have to qualify
before a disbelieving panel
badges you with belief.)
Thus. Is it such a sin
that we supplement our indolence
with the feeling that everything is
either, a)
perfectly, brilliantly, happily intense,
or b) soul-destroying shit rich-deserving
all the hilarious disdain it gets?

untitled

2005-04-21T01:49:00.000+10:00

Reassuringly I’ve thought
to trace my nauseous anxiety
back to the fact I was born
with what the doctors & dad
said was a ‘wet lung’,

concomitant possibly
to my disappointing inability
to scull, to smoke anything more
than a quarter of a cone
& to eat in tiny portions
that say anal austerity
over twentysomething gluttony.

& then when the television
salesperson bemoans the
third of the world that will
never learn to breath properly
your revelatory detective goes
a-ha & jots another origin.

You know when I get time away
from the ironic small-scale
anti-self-help-sales-culture crusade,
there’s nothing I like more
than to try & meekly metaphorise
my private nausea as relating
to an overriding aversion
against complete digestion;

I prefer surfaces & textures
& skipping along the aisles of love.
I am not conscious of heavy
Adamsonian aesthetic influences
except Stanley Kubrick, whose
straight lines & exact canvasses
make me freak & sparkle

& when marijuana’s exaggerated
complacencies become too much
you can find me wandering
around wailing GET OUT
in front of my chuckling &
wonderful friends. Today
two lives for the price of one.

filmism is changing tack

2005-04-19T23:45:00.000+10:00

films are getting me down. from now on i'm going to intersperse poems between rare reviews. something didactic to start with.

Untitled

PC’s not even a police force

inspiring a quick hit the lights
here comes the principal type
of don’t show & tell

Geez dead end streets
suburban sprawls
the shy stand-offish torches
of a tarmac night
must make policework impossible

the young & slacker-naturally enlightened
are forced into Orwellian son &
daughter assumptions, draconic
detectives accidentally questing
to get riled every time
old farts slip up. Plain-clothed
in my DUI time tend to pose
a more appalling fear anyway

So keep a siren in yr oversized
pockets, partner to what narcotics
& confusing technology
& never a photo of wrong-headed
antecedents. We will inherit
an earth parsimonious in its
open-heartedness, pathetic
in its brick veneer of ignorance.
What we bring is implicitness,
a seen-it-all-before self-evidence,
a wisdom dating back to that
Thomas Jefferson lost
in yr bullshit gossip columns.

runaway jury

2005-03-21T16:15:00.000+11:00

make-a-movie-by-numbers & not a hint of innovation in this one. still, i find grisham movies fun, if only because he loves portraying ordinary folks as hard-working out-thinkers of enormous organisations. & there is such networking, montage-driven narrative verve in the out-thinking. i have seen 'the firm' that many times & it remains a gorgeously high-strung winner of a film, every intelligent storyline string tying towards a climax that is pleasurable less in the guttural action-movie sense of drive that knife/gun into the embodiment of wrong & more like i cannot believe how beautifully & perfectly this plan has been synchronised. sydney pollack is virtuosic in the way he makes 'the firm' work - recruiting tom cruise for starters; that master of the short & aspiring & young & courteous bourgeois performance (i maintain in my spare time that there are aspects of kubrick's 'eyes wide shut' undoubtedly & oddly influenced by 'the firm' - 'eyes wide shut' seemingly concerning itself with revealing the cliche that is cruise's typical big-screen hero, the intelligent & dapper professional - or, you might say, 'eyes wide shut' is about what the quintessential cruise character imagines at night). pollack also does perfectly to realise you need nought beside solid performances & some zippy editing to make a grisham movie work - extraneous artistic demands need not impinge - listen to 'the firm's' minimalistic but driven piano score for confirmation. it's a simple sonic consistent. perhaps it's too much to suggest that kubrick's decision to use ligeti's aggressively minimalistic 'musica ricercata' as eyes wide shut's primary musical motif was influenced, again, by 'the firm'? is that enough kubrick references for one entry?

so, to runaway jury. it's a far less forgiving yarn to convert to film than 'the firm' - there's a multitude of primary and secondary characters; casting must have been a nightmare, i.e. whether to go with big-names in the roles of the lead defence & prosecution attorneys, since the film is not really about the court-case as it is about the moral plight of the surrounding characters. further, the film depends for the most part on things that aren't dramatically exciting, or are somewhat flimsy - e.g. gene hackman's jury surveillance team, his own all-seeing 'expertise', a clairvoyancy that seems horrendously cliched. & how rare for hollywood to even want to attempt the underlying premise, that of a leftist anti-gun couple attempting to sabotage the legal system. at least it seems odd until you realise the film was released on the brink of 'bowling for columbine' mania. inevitably, big names feature - hoffman, hackman as a less-than-convincing villain (i'm not sure about hackman-as-villain, to be honest), cusack as a less bourgeois but funnier & more intelligent cruise.

'the firm' is better.

grosse pointe blank

2005-02-16T22:28:00.000+11:00

it's all tight & compact perfection, this film. i can't recommend it enough. admittedly it has liberal splashings of every plot device i've come to love in films - intensely over-stylised & 'cool' violence & dialogue (no one in real life wields a gun or talks like this), romance of 21st-century physicality & rhetorical interplay (the lovers almost too cool for touch, always skirting around the edges of outright heart-professions by way of sarcasm & irony, but the world around them always an abnormal sphere of less-impressiveness), & a story that moves towards revelation, outcome, & a sunset. i love it.

in a strange way the film draws comparisons with a movie i lambasted elsewhere on this blog - 'collateral'. fundamentally different films, of course - as a director michael mann loves scenic evocation as much as script & character devices, & the way he intermingles these two filmic desires can be jarring &/or brilliant. 'grosse pointe blank' works on a bedrock of scripted wit & concrete character development (the writer/director makes sure we learn everything about cusack's character & past, even if it seems extraneous, i.e. cusack pouring booze onto his father's grave), & treats the professional killing thing as the unreal & funny & unknowable prop it is - something so cliched through years of gangster anti-heroes that it's hard to depict dramatically anymore. 'grosse pointe blank' can teach 'collateral' something about over-seriousness, about falling too much in love with gunfights & less with the dialogic shit in between. the comparison is a bit strained, come to think of it.

every performance is spot-on, both from the leads (cusack & minnie driver, who interact & work off each other on a chemical level that suggests utter mutual respect for one another as performers), & the bit-part players (cusack's ex-teacher, who features in one 90-second scene, is wonderfully sharp; dan ackroyd is viciously superb (watch for the scene between he & cusack over 'breakfast'); jeremy niven as cusack's angsty old high-school friend is fuckin hilarious (it's not surprising to find the two came through the theatre circuit together); etc etc.

so the gun-toting conclusion is a bit much. so the post-shootout marriage proposal is a bit much. who cares. there is so much to be excited about here. not least the discovery of what can happen when writers/directors/performers strive to combine genres & create a kinda dramatic overlap that says: laughs, action, & love in 90 minutes. you gotta see this film.

dodgeball

2005-02-07T14:16:00.000+11:00

hmm. the first comedy to feature on filmism? i think so.

dodgeball is not very good. even though he co-produced the picture, you get the feeling this is a minor aside of a movie for ben stiller, whose best & likely most influential work is done in the guise of the downtrodden hard-luck nice guy ('something about mary', 'meet the parents') around whom the most ridiculous shit happens. the polar opposite of such performances sees stiller as the centre & source of all that is ridiculous - zoolander, dodgeball's 'white goodman' - in which a lot of the comedy comes from realising this is stiller (the usually loveable & lame hero) camping things up to the extreme. or, to put it better, part of the lameness of a 'normal' stiller character seems to live on in his more ludicrous incarnations. no matter how outlandish his 'big' characters are, you can still see 'little stiller' in there somewhere - especially in his voice, which he modulates beautifully to make characters like 'white goodman' seem almost self-conscious or unsure of their own stupidity. in the midst of goodman's most nefarious proclamations you catch a little twang that makes it seem like we are watching greg focker trying to be funny. it's loveable hilarity.

it's also an interestingly crude kind of hilarity. i don't find the self-conscious thematic aspect of the film that interesting at all - insofar as the film tries to subvert/make fun of the underdog comedy genre, it does nothing to avoid it. the film is as 'sister act'/'major league' etc formulaic as you can imagine. it's in the little lashings of impromptu dialogue or action - scattered, as it were, over the generic template - that we might discover whether this film is halfway decent. but there's not enough mustard for mine. think of 'there's something about mary' - there's really not one minor character ("step into my office! why? because you're fucking fired!") or comic set-piece that isn't funny. in 'dodgeball', there's a few. if anything there's too many minor characters in 'dodgeball' - the 'pirate' is hideously under-written; a funny pirate needs to be really funny nowadays, we can all do decent pirate impressions - & there's just one too many underdog idiot to come to terms with.

but getting back to the crudity aspect. i guess 'south park' (&, in a way, 'something about mary') really raised the bar in terms of just how far comedy could go to get a laugh. political correctness is a thing of the past when it comes to comedy - one suspects kenny's 're-birth' sequence in the 'south park' movie was the beginning of the end - & 'dodgeball' is certainly at its funniest when it embraces the 'south park' spirit: the german dodgeball team coached by a hilariously fuhrer-esque david hasselhoff, the japanese 'kamikaze' team wearing 'diapers' on court, the senile coach 'patches o'houlihan' imploring his star player to come back to his room for some 'prostitutes', christine taylor vomiting into her mouth after being hit upon by white goodman etc. one also notes the 'south park' (& 'simpsons)-esque willingness to refer randomly to popular figures - chuck norris's classic cameo, for example, or lance armstrong's brilliant barside lecture (errrm, has lance had acting training? because his delivery was damn good). as i say, though, these comic sprinklings are hit & miss, & the whole seems watered down for the fact the film is about, well, a 'dodgeball' tournament. in 'something about mary' there was a beautiful freedom about the 'plot' - boy chases girl - that allowed for some brilliant visual & dialogic asides. 'dodgeball' races towards its 90-minute climax with all the regularity we expect from an underdog film, & one is stuck as to whether to try & laugh at the bit-pieces or savour the inevitable victory of the 'average joe's'.

contact

2005-01-24T13:22:00.000+11:00

for our first date, i once asked a girl if she'd like to come around & 'watch a video'. i'd seen 'contact' for the first time a few days before this enthralling offer was made, & i, umm, wanted to watch it again. terrible. anyway - we watched it, i had a great time, & the relationship lasted about a fortnight.

what made me love this movie so much? part of it can be put down to cultural context. the movie's release coincided with the rise of the whole 'i want to believe' feeling among kids - i.e., 'the x-files'. for a few years there in high school you'd always look forward to wednesday nights, when every episode would seem to reveal answers but end up raising more questions, when mulder's faith & scully's doubt would be tested, when it was fun & ephemeral to believe in whatever supernatural sub-genre you enjoyed. the catchcry 'i want to believe' - which appeared during the title sequence of every show - symbolised something of this newfound desire to seemingly consume each conspiracy; each bit of skewed proof bolstering your belief in the world of truth lurking beneath the paternal, protective veneer of the cover-up. far be it from me to envisage a golden age of somewhat more imaginative kids, but it was only eight or so years ago that shopping malls around the country were bursting with teenagers trying to catch a glimpse of 'special agent dana scully', not the latest batch of big brother contestants. oh well.

'contact' is an x-files episode writ extremely large. first & foremost, it actually presumes to imagine an answer to that over-arching 'x-file' (the one that only ever popped up in the season finales) - life on other planets. second, the lead characters are almost a mirror image of scully & mulder - mulder (believer in supernatural possibility) vs. scully (believer in science, medicine, evidence); jodie foster (believer in science & extraterrestrial possibility) vs. matthew howeveryouspellhisname (believer in god). &, just as in the x-files, the whole thing is supplemented not only by the possibility of love, but by the fact foster (mulder) is always pitted against a larger, organised & suspiciously sceptical authority (for mulder, the FBI; for foster, the government)

of course one doubts the directors/writers/whatever of 'contact' would appreciate the comparison. they take their characters & character development extremely seriously, foster recruited to give the occasionally simplistic script some depth. & she excels, both at being passionate & at enlivening the adventure side of the story. indeed it's probably during the most action-climactic scene in the film - the journey through the 'wormhole', that she does her best work. the scene demands of her an emotional & physical soliloquy of sorts - sitting on a chair in the middle of a hollywood set trying to convince us that she's travelling at the speed of light towards a weird celestial epiphany: it must have been bloody hard work. what results is the best ten or so minutes of the picture - the gorgeous, gorgeous special effects combining with foster's teary wonder & curiosity, the decently-performed meeting between foster & her dead father (or genius 'vegan') set against a heavenly, beautifully rendered background; the whole thing rounded out by one of those undeniable hollywood messages of goodwill - 'your race is interesting, capable of the beautiful & the terrible' etc. it's hard to counter this scene with cynicism, unless you are completely averse to science-fiction &/or ethereal matters. watching the film for the first time in a while the other night, i found myself guffawing for the most part. but during this sequence the best you can really do is shrug yr shoulders & just appreciate the imagistic, imaginative & moral bravura (or is it bravado?) of it all.

in the line of fire

2005-01-13T13:53:00.000+11:00

'in the line of fire' is about as straight-down-the-line formulaic a film as you'll find. but in keeping with the premise of this unfortunately irregular blog, i'd best mention certain things that, in pop-critical parlance, take this from being a 2 & a half star action flick to a 4 (i despise the gutlessness of a 2 & a half star review, by the way, so commonplace in newspaper reviews - critics need to tear stuff apart, not sit on the starry fence).

i love an action/drama flick that uses establishing shots of the big washington monuments as kind of visual/thematic bedrock (why do you think i've watched 'jfk' four billion times? kevin costner strolling sternly in front of lincoln's statue - i'm happy). 'in the line of fire' doesn't muck around, rushing through its opening credits with the aid of an equally rushed score (no frills, this film - the score is completely forgettable), & planting its title, in the blandest font imaginable, across the traditional head-on view of the whitehouse.

'ok, that'll do', the director seems to say - 'let's get these characters established!'. first scene, therefore, is your usual cop-movie fare: heroic but troubled lead in full-flight, killing a few counterfeiters & arresting a ringleader, saving his wide-eyed partner's life etc. the role of the wide-eyed one is taken by dylan mcdermott, who plays it well enough - wife, kids, new recruit, nervous (unnecessary tears) = destined to die. inevitable death of partner (i can still hear it now; whenever these innocent types died in action films, my mum would always say, 'oh no! he was such a nice man!) is what tips gruff lead over the edge. character antecedents = holly hunter's love interest in 'copycat', jeff daniels in 'speed' etc.

'gruff lead' is what clint eastwood does best, though, & the writer knew this. i like certain of his lines - 'i gotta put all that shit back on!', after stripping down his white-collar-copper-clobber before abandoned sex - & his nice impatience with our brilliant villain's rhetoric - 'how much longer do i need to listen to this shit?'. what eastwood does really well (in his old age) is constantly contradict his diminishing physicality with a fierce, short-of-words streak that's always surprising. & the initially weird relationship with rene russo (where is she, by the way?) is saved by some quite nice writing - again, the surprise factor is important; for such a tawdry, cliched-lonely-spirit-swilling-detective character, his genuine interest in russo is refreshing, his romanticism kind of sparse, don't-expect-much & unexpected at the same time. sitting in front of the lincoln statue, he pines, 'if she turns around, she's interested...come on, turn around'. this romantic-glance motif carries through nicely into their piano-side love scene - the whole matter is rather pleasant, actually. & what's more (& this may sound, what, boyish?) the love-stuff doesn't ever interfere with the action side of things, as often happens in an action-drama - new couple have fight over hero's priorities, eventual reconciliation, sunset prioritisation etc.

that's all well & good. obviously the real feature of this film is john malkovich as our crazed but rhetorically controlled, nihilistic villain. he relates to eastwood (over the phone) in regards their mutual abjectness; malkovich as renegade CIA operative, eastwood as failed secret service agent (the 'failed to protect kennedy' theme is a bit jarring, i must say). & i guess the thing that separates the two men is russo; having found someone to brighten up the abjectness in his day, someone to, errrm, live for, we get that nice little postscript scene - russo & eastwood quietly walking out of the detective's desolate, dreary apartment as malkovich's voice prattles away on the answering machine - the ghost-voice of the villain now haunting the former haunt of the formerly nihilistic, deadpan detective. this last scene is a nice effort at character-thematics - again, it's something that takes this film over the 2 & a half star barrier. & it's bought off because of decent performers. watch this film if you haven't.

heat

2004-12-07T11:49:00.000+11:00

forgive the quietude. literary business has taken precedence.

hmm. so the other night i finally completed a marathon 1.5GB download of michael mann's sixth (& probably most popular) film. it's a gorgeous, gorgeous, gorgeous widescreen DVD version of the 160-odd-minute man vs. man, good crim vs. good cop drama-action. when not struck again with wonder at the crispness & classiness of the night-time cinematography (as a 15 year-old i remember thinking 'good grief, this is visually a class above most US action films going around'), i couldn't help but think how bloody hard it is to find fault with this film. sure, the script (written by mann) is a bit too cute in parts (unsubtle in the way it stresses the similarities between pacino/de niro, overloaded with sub-characters & sub-plots, generic in the smooth rhetorical perfection it grants the two leads), the score is underdone (incidentally, mann would go on to work with different composers for his next films, 'ali', & 'the insider'), some of the symbology is cliched (pacino chasing his own shadow during the film's climax) & by golly it takes itself seriously (tho pacino's initially jarring comic-over-the-topness offsets the seriousness a bit). but these are, in spite of appearances, minor qualms. it's a rich, character-deep, crystalline action epic of a film.

in reality 'heat' deserves a thorough going-over by an expert in the epic & tragic genres. it'd be interesting to read up on mann's pre-filmic history (it's always nice to learn about what great directors did before coming to film; kubrick, for example, was a skilled photographer) to see if he had some kinda stage experience. 'heat' needs a dramatis personae - there are that many minor but compelling characters floating around, all played in turn by really interesting & really decent actors & actresses (val kilmer, great; tom sizemore, a beacon of sunglassed skill compared to his effort in 'saving private ryan'; ashley judd, impressive; de niro's wife, a regular in the mann 'troupe', honestly high-strung; amy breneman, wonderfully nice & wonderfully shot (her overflowing curls suggest an adventurousness that de niro loves); jon voight as an omnipresent, untouchable crime-organiser, absolutely ideal; a very young natalie portman is good; & the guy who plays 'waynegro' is masterfully evil, he exists like this weird devilish upsetter-of-equilibriums). where i waffled on a few months ago that 'the fugitive' had a decent minor cast, 'heat' blows it out of the water. & it's not like these minor-characters/big-name actors try to steal the show; they just do what they're told, cast as interesting people against whom we measure the two leads (&, as in some shakespeare, the 'minor cast' is split into two camps, half the characters loyal to de niro, half to pacino).

what of the two leads, then? as aforementioned, early on you get the feeling pacino is over-cooking things, playing along with an over-written part (too much sudden hollering for mine). by comparison de niro is mild-mannered & authoritative, believeably falling for breneman in some of the better scenes of the film (tho i always thought it disappointing that their 'first kiss' scene was played to a blue-screen backdrop of LA at night). thinking about it again, though, one senses pacino loosens up the film a little with his idiosyncracies. of course i'm no expert on acting, but i'm not sure mann would care - i think one of the real achievements of 'heat' is the way it draws attention to itself as a drama-action film, not an action-drama film. it wants us to analyse its characters, their relationships. upon release in 1995 mann made a lot of the fact the film featured two 'greats of the american screen together for the first time!' reports always mentioned how it took mann something like two takes to film their long coffee-house encounter (which in any case isn't really written that well; it stresses too overtly the way the two men are mirror-images of one another).

fundamentally he deserves full marks (& heat deserves to be watched several times, just so one can pick up on the little symbolic cinematographic flourishes scattered throughout) for sabotaging the action genre in the name of character-epic. the action scenes are memorable, if not idealistic (like swordfights really). but the drama is where the heart is, even if that heart beats bathed in the ultra-cool light of mann's dramatic-realist omniscience. with every kid he managed to sway away from all-out-action-film-devotion to something approaching character-appreciation, he did well.

collateral

2004-11-12T11:24:00.000+11:00

i'm an unabashed michael mann fan. stupidly i'd seen only two of his films before 'collateral' came along - 'heat' & 'the insider' - but they alone were enough to confirm him in my mind as a kind of latter-day kubrick. actually, let me rephrase. i think i appreciate mann's films in the same way i appreciate kubrick films. both provide enigmatic, indefensible pleasures. i doubt you'd ever catch me 'reviewing' a kubrick film on this blog - far too hard to encapsulate what on earth i'm feeling during his most extraordinary sequences: barry lyndon's first encounter with lady lyndon, 2001's space dance, pretty much all of 'eyes wide shut' etc. too difficult to separate irrational love & distanced critique.

i would say mann is as assured in his sensibilities as kubrick. he knows what he's good at - (primarily) male character study, supplemented by the most well-honed visual sense of the city in modern cinema - & he'll happily repeat himself until he can get it spot-on every time. let's extend on these two points. unlike kubrick, who more often than not focussed his films around a sole lead male, mann enjoys the dual character study: pacino/de niro (heat), pacino/crowe (the insider), tom cruise/some guy i don't know (collateral). 'heat' is a study of male conflict - its mildly over-heated epic ending hints at subtle similarities between the warring parties. in 'the insider' a war is fought along moral lines - journalist pacino bringing corporation-man crowe up to speed with issues of modern-day moral courage.

& so we come to 'collateral', in which we 'get to know' cruise & his taxi driver over the course of one evening. a very violent evening at that. which is where the problems begin. this is, at least to my knowledge, the first film in which mann works within a really limited time frame. it desperately restricts the amount of time we get to spend with the individual characters - the majority of the 'character study' takes place between the two men inside the taxi. in 'heat' & 'the insider' we got to know the respective leads by way of their behaviour within their own spheres - pacino as brilliant detective, de niro as brilliant criminal; pacino as wide-awake, savvy journo, crowe as anguished family man. in 'collateral' we have two somewhat ambiguous chaps (cruise plays the most mysterious, unlikely character mann has given us) thrown together for the whole film. kudos, certainly, to mann for setting himself a new character-challenge - a more direct, face-to-face, intense encounter than we've come to expect. but the writing (not done by mann) just ain't up to the challenge (at least i don't think so; another viewing & i might change my tune). some mild tension is created in certain exchanges - cruise challenging the taxi driver's lifestyle & dreams, the taxi driver defying & denying cruise's fundamental inhumanity - but all this proves subservient to what is a very un-mann-ish plot. it's a plot more typical of unmeditative, impatient, fast-paced & character-less action-thrillers, a plot dependent on a climactic, out-of-nowhere revelation-device, a plot that requires mann pack more style into cruise's execution-moves than the aesthetic sprawl he truly loves: the american city.

how sad it is to see mann's delicious urban-neon-high-rise-power-line-at-night-time sensibility drowned out by the demands of an action plot. i love what he loves about the urban: the artificial lustre of a city at night, the cold mass of colour as seen from a cowardly omniscient distance - i've no idea of the intimacies being played out within that high-rise sprawl, but such mystery just adds to the technological spectacle. surely part of the attraction of 'collateral's' script was that it was set over one night in L.A. plenty of visual material, mann must've thought - & sure enough, early in the film, things are looking up. gorgeous helicopter shots, shots of random night-time traffic, as always backed by a somewhat prim electronic score ('the insider's' soundtrack is just a masterpiece of visual affiliation). but this whole aesthetic premise seems to get lost along the way. jammed in from time to time are a few meditative camera-pans - not only do they seem extraneous to the violent narrative, they are accompanied by some of the worst backing-score choices of mann's career. what on earth audioslave's 'shadow on the sun' is doing in this film i'll never know.

i'll watch it again, no doubt, but first impressions are of a disappointing misfire.

donnie darko

2004-10-15T13:34:00.000+10:00

people have been raving about this film for a while now, & the DVD cover isn't exactly empty of praise: "a compelling motion picture", "a shattering, hypnotic work" etc. triple j (an australian 'youth' radio station) & now SBS's central movie buff, megan spencer, proclaimed it "one of those rare movie gems. truly flawless, unforgettable, & exciting". i expected something more formally risque than the sleek intelligent teenage page-turner 'donnie darko' turned out to be.

'donnie darko' is more seamless than flawless. it successfully combines bits & pieces from various niche-genres which festered throughout the 90's - the teenage horror-thriller (admittedly these have been around for bloody ages, but they had a serious resurgence around the time of 'scream'), the detective-fiction-inspired whodunnit-multi-plot-mystery (in which various plot strands/characters combine & culminate in an explanatory ending that's only 'exciting' once; see 'the sixth sense', 'the usual suspects' etc), the fast-talking, quick-scripted pop-culture-savvy-bourgeois-adolescent/mid-twenties drama (see a kevin smith flick, or maybe 'reality bites') & the music video (donnie darko makes apparently amazing use of short, tracking-shot set pieces backed by famous 80's tunes; these are interesting but hardly artistically formidable, & they only work to distract us from the old-hat linearity of the film as a whole). indeed it probably derives its mildly exciting linear style (i.e. chapter-title-like headings, "2 october 1988, 20 days remain" etc, every 20 minutes or so) from kubrick's 'the shining', even tho kubrick's 'chapters' are far more effective because they have such an ambiguous temporal function.

ambiguity is good, filmmakers! ambiguity is not the very 'american beauty'-ish electro-piano score that seeks to infuse every scene with a sense of neat-suburban sadness. ambiguity is not in the ambivalence of this film's 'edward scissorhands' stylistic attitude to small-suburbia itself; it's all very well to shed a laughable light over suburban homes/schools & personalities, but to then unashamedly utilise almost every american-suruban-teen-film plot/character device available (the 'different' but cool lead character, his disenchanted but intelligent lover, the two dumb-talking court-jester kids (through whom is best expressed the kevin smith slacker script-spirit), the two rude & equally stupid 'bad guys', the completely off-the-planet gym teacher, & the mildly off-the-planet but loving & stable parental unit) - what does this say of the director/writer's underlying motivations? that he overlaid this movie's 80's-based-strange-time-travel-slasher-detective-fiction-subject-matter on an essentially generic (read: unambiguous & unchallenging) linear-narrative template. this film ain't nothing new. it's "ferris bueller's day off" + the stylistic/narrative influences i mentioned above. which is not necessarily a bad thing.

& yet there's potential in various aspects of this film - the wonderful performances & chemistry between gyllenhaal & jena malone, the fine song-selection in certain scenes (the final 'mad world' montage is moving, in spite of it being based on an archaic & out-of-place omniscience), the pristine outdoor lighting - to suggest a truly hypnotic & unforgettable step forward for the artform might be just around the corner. perhaps.

the elephant man

2004-10-14T11:56:00.000+10:00

this film is troubling me. not so much for its psychological impact (isn't lynch lauded as the great weird/freaky/psychological auteur of our time?) but because i can't resist thinking it's a pretty mediocre movie. it's so very odd the way it drops away beyond that wonderful first 30 minutes i mentioned the other day. a gradual disintegration of depth, focus, power, pace, cinematographic care & narrative flair.

lynch likes it better when we can't see john merrick's face. he does the initial freakshow tension wonderfully well - the mystery of the flashback/explanatory prologue (featuring the extremely effective motif of merrick's mother screaming with the elephant; a sexual, sonic impregnation, i guess) compounded by the gorgeous 19th-century fair/freakshow & industrial settings. anthony hopkins has this first half hour all to himself, & he simply owns the screen. to kick things off, he does this brilliant swivel towards the camera - figuring himself in the role of an oddly introspective, medicinal impresario (a role he regrets later in the film). his initial examination of merrick is interesting for various reasons - the sound of merrick's breathing dominates the scene (perhaps inspired by kubrick's heavy-breathing spacemen in 2001?): this kind of concern for auditory detail is an impressive feature of the film's early stages (lynch strikes me as being a very auditory director, & rightly so; for goodness sake, so few film-makers harness what is an obvious dramatic advantage of their art - it can tap into/manipulate nearly every human sense!). the scene is interrupted by a knock at the door; merrick's breathing becomes fast-paced, intense - as viewers we have no idea what's going on inside that bag on his head (complete with extraneous black hat & a small, suggestive hole, it's a very memorable prop). hopkins ducks outside & a friend mentions that he must have "quite a find in there!". when we re-enter the examination office we get this superb shot of the room as a whole - one's eye searches around for the hidden elephant, cowering gently in a dark corner.

this scene, the scene previous (the 'private showing' of merrick by the theatrically manic owner/proprieter) & the scene following (the john merrick lecture to some kind of scientific society - hopkins's high-point) - are surely the best of the film. as an audience we still have no idea what merrick looks like - this tension jars against the very fine rendering of genteel, 19th-century men of science. it's when the bag is lifted & we first see merrick (via the effective device of the innocent, breakfast-serving nurse) that things start to fall apart. suddenly we (& lynch, it seems) care more for character study than evocative social horror. such character study entails a wave of dramatic low & high points, sad & happy points - merrick's revelatory eloquence & intelligence, his befriending of various high-society figures, counteracted by undeniably disturbing scenes of mass bullying & exhibitionism, culminating in his re-kidnapping by the owner/proprieter. this kidnapping kick-starts an extremely uneven freakshow sequence, in which merrick suddenly escapes his owner with the help of other 'freaks' & is seen traversing across 'the continent' & back to england on a ship. it's almost amateurish the way merrick's ultimate proclamation - "i am not an animal! i am a human being" - comes at the end of this poorly paced montage-sequence. it completely detracts from the character drama we're supposed to be appreciating.

which is the primary problem with this film - i'm not sure whether lynch wanted it to be a full-scale psychological horror-portrait (something he might have easily achieved had he kept up the industrial-auditory thematics of the film's early stages, & perhaps honed in on merrick's subtly-suggested sexuality), or a full-scale freak/other-being-accepted-back-into-society character drama. either way the eventual acceptance of merrick into aristocratic english society seems strange & unlikely. there are real dramatic possibilities in hopkins's self-conflict over his role as well-mannered freakshow impresario (the culmination of his guilt might've been the standing ovation (?!) merrick receives while sitting in a box at the theatre), but this theme, as well as, criminally, hopkins himself, are drowned out by our concern with merrick's plight (which reminds of a side-note i wanted to make; merrick reminds me a lot of HAL from 2001; perhaps it's the perfect politeness or something), & the concentration on certain side characters who work only as devices (amazingly, john gielgud seems to struggle through his first few scenes).

i really can't think of more appropriate subject material for a so-called psychological master than merrick's story - the ostricised, deformed but polite freak living in industrial-gothic, hostile times. the move to black & white was a step in the right direction, no doubt, & the first 30 minutes are superbly executed - but the rest of the movie just doesn't do it for me. the painful final suicide/sleep scene (complete with a very 2001-ish imagistic re-birth epilogue) is certainly sad, but pretty much anything can seem sad when backed by barber's 'adagio for strings'.

woops

2004-10-10T11:34:00.000+10:00

it's been a while since i've updated - sorry. been well & truly sidetracked by literary (& political, ugh) matters. will try & get around to watching something soon.

having said that, i did arrive home stoned the other night to find lynch's 'the elephant man' was on tv. never seen it before (i've stupidly ignored lynch for too long), & after watching the first half hour or so before passing out, i came to the conclusion it's in a different stratosphere to most films. impeccably crafted, filled with a meditative kubrickian tension - twas bloody ludicrously good.

i promise to review something in full soon.

jfk

2004-09-27T14:27:00.000+10:00

interesting that i should choose to 'review' oliver stone's paranoid epic on the heels of my curtailed 'casino' review. both films push the 3-hour mark. both are packed full of facts & characters & general madness such that first-time viewing is, if anything, a chore. but both, my god, both are such good films. wonderfully sustained dramatic tapestries of fact & mistruth. wonderfully evocative of their respective periods - in jfk's case, the mid-60's. & while any comparison of the two would see scorcese win out as the more masterful 'tapestrist' (?) (casino is better-paced than jfk, less dependent on extended conversations/extraneous character development, & more alive with flair, energy) jfk retains an almost film noir-ish sense of conspiracy-theory fun.

& getting back to my point about first-time viewing. must've been 1991. for some bizarre reason (i was, what, 9 or 10 years old?) i tagged along with my mum & her mum to see 'jfk' at the camperdown cinema. camperdown is a smallish country town about 2 & a half hours west of melbourne (a pretty town, actually, set below this big dormant volcano/crater-lake ) - as a kid we used to cruise down there two or three times a year & stay on a family farm.

from memory the theatre was empty. it was night. a summerish night, & they opened the side doors of the cinema to let a gorgeous breeze thru the place. i sat between my mum & my grandma & was mildly contented to find i was the only one to stay awake until the credits. my grandma gave in about the time kevin costner (whose face now adorns my bedroom wall courtesy of the movie poster) started interviewing donald sutherland - oh, sorry, 'X' - a vital half-hour sustained only by the fedoras & experienced urgency of sutherland's delivery. my mum relaxed into breezy sleep after double-checking with me that her mum was still alive - my grandma had really settled in, her mouth alarmingly open in repose. i'm near-certain there's a poem in this whole episode.

it wasn't that i was entranced that i managed to sit thru the full 3 hours. back then nothing really soaked in. there were a lot of names, a lot of connections, & a bit of action by way of flashbacks & the horrendous 'zapruder film' of the actual assassination, which we see towards the end of the film. more than anything i garnered a sense of intense, classy drama from the whole thing - especially from the black & white flashbacks, the very neatly edited packages of action that tend to accompany costner's voiceovers (inside & outside the courtroom).

i've sat thru 'jfk' about 10 times since. for a while there i embarrassed myself into believing much of what the film claims - that oswald didn't act alone, that he was indeed a 'patsy', as he claimed, & that kennedy was killed by way of an incredibly speculative & ludicrously multi-layered conspiracy involving about 1000 people, including LBJ. in high school i'd prattle onto various history teachers about my 'theories', ripped straight from the closing courtroom presentation of costner & co.

what a shock i got when i decided to 'read around', to see what people thought of the film, to see how costner's character (new orleans DA jim garrison) is judged by conspiracy-theorists & lone-gunman-believers alike. needless to say, the general consensus was incredibly & often eloquently unkind. watch the film, then spend half an hour reading a website like 'One Hundred Errors of Fact and Judgment in Oliver Stone's JFK':

http://www.jfk-online.com/jfk100menu.html

& you begin to realise just how negligent & irresponsible a film 'jfk' really is. it's a stupidly speculative, wildly inaccurate & revoltingly libelous vision (stone - via garrison - essentially lays the blame for kennedy's death at the feet of innocent, ordinary & conveniently dead men). & yet inexplicably i cannot stop acknowledging it as a masterpiece of detective/P.I. fiction (with admittedly jarring patriotic overtones).

perhaps it's the performances. costner is good because he's dull; stone knows the real interest lies in the surrounding cast (perhaps the oddest yet most ordinary set of real-life people ever portrayed on screen) - the same cast don delillo utilises in his 'libra'. tommy lee jones as the king conspirator, 'clay shaw'; entepreneur & socialite - such a fine, upright but arrogant performance. joe pesci as david ferrie - a rare instance wherein pesci doesn't play joe pesci, but an openly insecure, aggressive, ludicrously high-strung idiot. so many little cameo roles for people who would never have imagined they'd EVER be portrayed by hollywood stars on the big screen. & therein probably lies the secret behind the power of certain performances - pesci, lee jones etc realised that they were playing figures from history who are not really that special. they had to make them seem important in order to add to the gravity of this 'history as lightning' tale we're told. thus the powerful sense of farce about guys like shaw/ferrie/dean andrews/even oswald.

but all blame, both for the film's wild inaccuracies & its dramatic successes, its fundamental ability to get us interested in such a convoluted tale, must rest with oliver stone. he's quoted somewhere as saying he loved the story for its mystery, its dramatic & stylistic possibilities - a plot traced to a random pistol-whipping in a P.I.'s office on a rainy night, a cross-texas drive in a massive thunderstorm. it's this kind of noir-ish spirit he combines so well with a paranoid patriotism to create such a horrendously flawed but compelling epic.

casino

2004-09-20T11:47:00.000+10:00

my repeated viewings of this rollicking, virtuosic epic have always been tinged with the memory of the critical maudlin of my first-year film studies lecturer - she wouldn't be swayed in her belief that it was one of scorcese's worst. which is immensely suprising, by the way - scorcese is basically the GOD of undergraduate film study, which is part of the reason i gave it up after about six months. most of the lectures were devoted to early scorcese, with theoretical dabblings in french film. & a COMPLETE ignorance of kubrick, as if he was just this big enigmatic cinematic black hole who didn't exist or wasn't worth the trouble of tackling.

& since i never summoned up the courage to ask this particular lecturer about her disdain for 'casino', i've always been curious as to how it might be seen as a failure. one theory i've come up with is that it's a strangely flippant film. it deals with fundamentally horrible underworld folk in a really watchable, super-stylised & often funny way. de niro & particularly joe pesci both play not-nice people in scorcese's house-style - fast-talking, swear-word-interjecting, stupendously street-wise: the dramatic anti-heroic. if one was wont to take a moralistic line, you could say that in 'real life' these two guys were probably just violent & efficient idiots. that scorcese succeeds too much in making them so watchable & even (in de niro's case) loveable/respectable; that he should've tried harder to tackle the question of just how sincere/troubled/frustrated a narrator sam goldstein (de niro) really is. that if there are 'emotional truths' behind the goldstein character (as are only hinted at in his constant talk of 'trust', his frustrated 'love' for his wife, his tricky & tormented status as a jew in the underworld) they are overshadowed by the documentary-style, voiceover-dominated music-video pace of the film. & that this, combined with the lack of lengthy emotional dialogues & even close-ups prevents us from getting to know these central characters beyond the crazy las vegas world they live in.

but to say this is to ignore just how wonderfully crafted, how well-put-together, how brilliant 'looking' it is as a film. it's a realist-novel grand-narrative period-piece for the 1970's/80's - characters constantly introduced, names flying everywhere, details & connections all over the place - everything & everyone working & relating & getting along & getting killed with a fictional efficicency. very early on in the film, i think pesci is describing goldstein's work as a bookie 'back home years ago' - scorcese actually flashes the words 'back home years ago' on the screen in exuberant font. this bit of farce is neat evidence that scorcese just loves the whole story - loves the pure self-indulgence & selfish 'world' these crims live in, loves it so much that he wants to share it with us gift-wrapped with all its self-indulgencies & narrative largesse.

more ought to be said about this film, but i need some lunch. how about some comments? how can 'casino' possibly be seen as a bad movie?

pollock

2004-09-16T16:41:00.000+10:00

saw this film about 3 nights ago so it's not totally fresh in my memory. mediocrity is never memorable.

this is an average film. it lacks guts & complexity. where bio-pics such as 'the life & death of peter sellers' have been criticised for being convoluted, for trying too much, for interspersing weird flashbacks/meditations into the linear mix, 'pollock' is formulaic dross. if anything it borrows its formula from underdog-comedies - underdog (read drunk, lonely pollock) inspired by a newcomer (here, lee krasner, over-played by an actress who tries too hard to be lee krasner) to realise his talents, have success (his first solo show, funded by peggy guggenhiem - again over-played to the point where she becomes a kind of historical novelty, not a character) have a down-point (fuelled by alcoholism) have even better success (the horribly executed 'drip' revelation) & another down-point. the only thing that sets this film apart (formula-wise) from 'the mighty ducks' is the fact jackson dies at the end.

it's a tale that's absolutely ripe for the screen (maybe his life has been made into a feature before, i'm not sure). but it's done with such dull hollywood regularity, with such a classically tame appreciation of the art & the way artists come to have their revelations & achieve success that it's almost laughable in parts. which is a pity - i don't mind ed harris (particularly as the mission control guy in 'apollo 13') & we oughta be grateful that he doesn't fill his first film (is it his first film?) with cinematic silliness - i can think of only one over-the-top cinematographic conceit: the krasner/pollock foreplay/sex scene, unnecessarily 'symbolic'. & he plays pollock with some aplomb (not an easy character to play, considering he was such a crudely simple man on the outside) - he does drunk & disturbed pollock pretty well.

but my god, he completely misfires in regards to the art. the scenes in which he paints the brilliant, brilliant 'mural' (for peggy guggenheim's place) are all montage; shots of the thinking, perturbed artist, the artist waiting for inspiration, & finally the artist getting to work (by the way, i can't fault harris's pollock-ian painting line; it's quite convincing). not sure at all that montage does what would've been a intensely dramatic process (for pollock) much justice. & the SCORE! the SCORE! zippy, fast-paced, seinfeld-theme-song-type pap, completely & utterly inappropriate given the scale & sublimity & grandeur of pollock's work. p.s. - pollock painted 'mural' on the floor.

the discovery of the 'drip' is even worse. having kicked the drink, having 'settled down' with krasner out in the country somewhere, having become a productive, workaday artist (symbolised pathetically in montage-shots of krasner & pollock planting seeds in the garden?!) pollock discovers 'the drip' by way of cliched revelation - he drops some white paint on the ground accidentally. oh gawd.

it's a gimmicky film. historical-gimmicky. it features historical cameos - val kilmer as willem de kooning, some other guy as clement greenberg (who by the way gets treated VERY kindly by harris; he's a big beacon of critical sense & solidity), & i've already mentioned krasner & guggenheim. & the way greenberg/guggenheim & others take one look at pollock's paintings & utter words like 'genius' after 5 seconds. like the film as a whole - only a superficial glimpse at a ludicrously complex painter. the finale couldn't come quick enough, it seems - harris wraps things up straight after pollock's car speeds off the road. an abrupt, mildly effective end to an all-too-abrupt movie.

the insider

2004-09-13T19:44:00.000+10:00

this superlative film deserves a lengthy essay. too busy just now so here's an 'insider'-inspired poem i wrote this arvo. beginning with a word from rimbaud.

The last innocence and the last timidity. It’s settled. Not to display my betrayals and disgusts to the world.

How much this short-lived stance
informed what the 20th-century’s best
rallied against:
forgetfulness in settlement,
omnipresent in our country since
so many millions got penned in
above the burning plain.

Al Pacino was right to rip
into Russell Crowe the way he did.
Such timidity in stuttering
he could never become a man of science
because of his wife & kids.
Such innocence in that asthma
you cure & propagate.

Which is The Insider’s great
update to an age-old
confessional debate –
occupational confidentiality (comfort)
troped as a betrayal of what trust
disgust prefigures in the first place:
yr mind does the ideological stuff
& you're meant to be a mouthpiece.

The day we learnt complaint
(about the price of petrol, let’s say)
& forgot the (somewhat florid) skill
inherent in confession & polemic
was the day everything bourgeois
sought recourse in suburbia.

duel

2004-09-08T15:51:00.000+10:00

criminally, last night was the first time i'd ever seen 'duel'. what a great little film. i can't say i've ever enjoyed a spielberg film so much - though the first time i saw 'jurassic park' (as a 13-year old, admittedly) was special in a sublime, fantastic way.

'duel' seems to me to be very un-spielbergian. that is, it's an intensely mental/cerebral film, subtextually concerned with issues of masculine paranoia, sexual frustration. everything's centered around our businessman/salesman central character. one can't help but think that spielberg's making a very rare political comment via this flimsy, weird figure - if he reminds me of any other cinematic character, it's michael douglas's anguished/uptight/high-strung businessman in 'the game': a film that deals with similar issues (capitalist-individualist paranoia & frustration, sexual & physical confrontation & 'release') in far more elaborate ways. 'duel' is the story of a capitalist pedant/family-man/hard-working-husband forced to discover dormant, aggressive, 'masculine' depths within himself by way of a 'duel' (a great, purposely archaic title, by the way, suggesting a medieval male showdown, a chivalric ritual designed to uncover just who is the more virile, worthy man); a showdown with a myterious, grumbling, rusty, massive (dare i say it?) phallis of a truck. a truck which might only exist as a sexual/physical threat in our protagonist's mind, much like 'the game' douglas plays.

all these themes are perhaps explored more coherently in the story upon which the film is based. i've no doubt they've been explored in countless cultural/film/gender-studies spielberg essays.

what needs to be celebrated here is the way spielberg, a cinematic first-timer (at least i think this is his first film), is able to suggest & reinforce these themes while still managing, a) to fill the film with a first-timer's cinematographic enthusiasm, & b) to keep things hurtling along, keep us, as ever with spielberg, on the edge of our seats. the two above points work hand-in-hand, in my opinion. it's not at all EASY to sustain a car chase for ninety minutes (give or a take a few rest stops), but spielberg pulls it off BECAUSE of the youthful/enthusiastic daring of the cinematography & the editing. look at some of the wonderful, dramatic shots he gets from cameras mounted on both the truck & the car. look at the way he intersperses roadside shots of the two cars chasing each other (at what still seems a quite incredible & scary pace, even by today's special effects standards). look at the quality of the shots of our 'hero' driving his car; often intimate, often side-on & distanced, often kubrickian-crazy (during the VERY sexual-orgasmic radiator-killing hill-climb, the camera seems almost to be sitting in weaver's lap, looking up).

essentially, what we see in 'duel' is a young director showing us his virtuosic bag of tricks WHILE AT THE SAME TIME providing us with a multi-layered mental tale. the opening shots of the film, for example - seemingly innocuous shots of a highway taken from a camera mounted on the car's front bumper. but no - there's more going on here. spielberg actually uses this intro to establish his lead character in a really subtle, classy way. we hear a radio, some music, but then we hear weaver (or could it be the disgruntled anti-capitalist truck driver?!) changing the station every time an advertisement comes on. already we get a sense of what an impatient, frustrated bloke weaver is - he instinctively changes the station the moment he hears his own working culture (a sales/advertising culture) intruding into his private sphere.

he loves this sphere. he probably loves driving, loves the chance to get away from the 'wife & kids'. (note the way he's so touchy about his car, repeatedly telling the school-bus kids to get off the bonnet). & note the way his telephone call to his wife is mere obligation, nothing else (lovely camera conceit during this scene, also). as i've mentioned, when this nomadic male sphere is inexplicably threatened by an enormous truck, he has no idea how to react. he wrongly identifies the truck driver in 'chuck's cafe' (a great little scene, featuring a really daring initial hand-held tracking shot as weaver walks into the cafe, & some wonderful close-up focus-pulling. having said that, i suspect weaver overacts a bit as the somewhat unnecessary voiceover takes over). he tries repeatedly to alert that ever-dependable source of (mainly male) authority - the police. in one incredibly dramatic & well-shot scene, the truck actually plows through the public phone box weaver is calling from. the truck seems less interested in 'killing' weaver (as he repeatedly says to himself & others) than in ensuring this is a true duel between men - no inteference from outside authorities such as the police is permitted.

& in the end, after the conflict becomes almost a father-son thing (the truck trying to push the infantile red car into the path of a train, & the red (read fiery) car - the son - resisting this suicidal rite of passage), when the fight dies down as weaver hides his car in a semi-junkyard (the suggestive shots of old, decrepit cars suggest weaver's infertility, his cowardly sterility), & when it is reignited after a very suggestive glimpse of the truck's huge undercarraige axle, weaver finally wins a hollow victory. he doesn't actually meet his enemy head-on, instead sacrificing his male 'sphere' by sending it head-first (with the help of his briefcase - another capitalist symbol?) into the truck (weaver jumps out before impact). the truck flies over a cliff-face - defeated & mangled but also having achieved what it wanted to achieve: the complete destruction of the smaller prey. watching the truck's huge wheel slowly come to a stop (a wonderfully effective imagistic conceit) you get the feeling it's meant to symbolise a film reel, & the shots of weaver shortly afterward would seem to confirm this. he's been through a crazy, fantastic, cinematic experience - good guy vs. bad guy - but also a weirdly private, paranoid, even masturbatory experience. it's not the kind of victory/experience he's going to celebrate with others (i.e. masturbation). he's instead left on his own, in the middle of nowhere - his world just as privately frustrated as it was before.

if only spielberg could've made a few more cerebral, suggestive, semi-freudian films like 'duel' before he became the spectacularly dull hollywood director of choice.

terminator 2

2004-09-07T13:28:00.000+10:00

thanks kindly to a writer friend, sly, for jogging my memory in regards to T2. sly runs an australian-football oriented site which also features his writing & reviews from time to time - http://members.optusnet.com.au/~rant101/

his primary argument is that T2 gets worse with each viewing. it does.

i first saw it on video when i was very young (too young to see it at the cinemas). as a ten-year-old it was an incredible, important, imagistic experience. the violence was spectacular and stylish - an important quality: kids bought up in hollywood homes are often connoisseurs of violence. as an example - arnie's shotgun work seemed supreme. friends of mine literally went wild when he reloaded his 'shottie' while continuing to steer his harley-davidson - the way he flung the whole gun around one finger & got off the next round with scary accuracy. for many of us this had wider lifestyle implications - the most sought-after T2 bedroom-wall movie poster featured arnie, shottie in hand, sitting astride his motorbike wearing black leather & opaque sunglasses. no surprise also that the shotgun became everyone's weapon of choice when first-person-shooter computer games such as 'wolfenstein', 'duke nukem 3d', & 'doom' burst onto the scene in about 1993.

i jest not - kids at school were raving for months about the amazing arsenal arnie commands in T2. that small, seemingly lightweight grenade launcher (at one stage late in the film someone is struggling to open a locked door with a key; arnie steps in with his grenade launcher & says, 'here, let me try mine'), & the mother of all machine guns, the 'mini-gun'. all made wonderfully effective sounds, sounds which you'd hear echoing around every schoolyard in the early nineties: the fatally understated 'fffffffhhhhhpop!' of the grenade launcer, the deafening, high-pitched 'bwwwwwrrrinnnngggg!' of the mini-gun, & everyone's favourite, the 'schhtick-schhtick-BOOM!' of the pump-action shotgun.

while these counted among the more carnal attractions of the picture, the film carried themes which seemed life-or-death important to primary school kids - basically, if sarah & john connor & arnie didn't come thru with the goods, we'd all die, courtesy of nuclear war & the rise of super-intelligent, violent robots. the nuclear war thing was especially terrifying to young kids - strangely enough, the only scene in T2 that me & my friends would think twice about watching (i.e. the only scene during which we'd subtly cover our eyes), was sarah connor's nuclear explosion nightmare. watching someone get their flesh blown off - leaving only a screaming skeleton behind - was just too much. we were much happier watching the very neat killing techniques of arnie & his arch-nemesis, the T1000.

these themes i speak of were given real resonance by a few different things - the urgency & desperation of the sarah connor character (in retrospect, awkwardly & aggressively overplayed by linda hamilton); a wonderful dramatic score, at once heart-poundingly simple & broodingly sad; & best of all, some wonderful lighting. lighting-wise, the film works around two opposites - LA during the daytime (the early scenes are bathed in an over-sunny californian glow, & the strange scenes at the desert weapons compound are similarly 'sunny'), & pristine/foreboding LA during the night-time. the night scenes, lavishly lit in artificial blue (very reminiscent of the blue kubrick uses in 'eyes wide shut'), remain memorable. it's as if the pristine colour-scheme justifies the neatness/efficiency of the battle being raged between two expert killing machines. & then of course when we are transported - during the film's climax - into a nondescript steel plant, the primary light turns from blue to fiery/sparkish-orange, signifying a boiling-point encounter, a less orderly showdown.

i sense the character of john connor (played by eddie furlong) was created in order to get kids closer to the somewhat foreboding arnie character (in that regard he plays a similar role to the excruciating jar jar binks in star wars 1; a 'fun' character designed to get the uninitiated young interested in the stars wars concept). just like jar jar, john connor's a complete disaster. even as a ten-year-old, he came across as a moralising, high-pitched annoyance. eddie furlong's not really to blame - some of the lines he gets are quasi-teenage-cool horrendous: 'time out, time out, stop the bike' etc.

as it turns out, it's another somewhat untested actor, robert patrick, who does his best to give the film a really classy, dramatic edge. aided by some ludicrously good special effects, his T1000 character stalks & sprints through the film with memorable, mostly silent aplomb. & it's worth watching this film a few times for those two reasons - patrick's performance, & the still-impressive special effects. & in order to appreciate just why it might've captivated you as a ten-year-old.

die hard

2004-09-04T13:39:00.000+10:00

forgiveth me this string of action flicks. you gotta understand, they formed my cultural backbone as a kid.

i'm hoping down the track i can sift thru the current-day implications of an 'action-film', or, moreover, a 'hollywood' upbringing. i'd hint at this early stage that, for example, montage has had an semi-negative affect on my workaday perspective. i.e. action/drama characters seemed to do things so easy via montage. hard work compressed into 2 minutes of well-edited glimpses + fast-tracked score. why can't my working/academic/poetic life function thus?

right now, allow me to treasure the occasional hollywood gem for surprising reasons. 'die hard' is a gem. much like 'the fugitive', it's carried over that line between unwatchable dross & re-watchable formulaic class because of certain production subtleties. little things. unblockbuster-ish things. let's list them.

a) the support cast. basically, bruce willis ain't much of a leading man (critically he hit his peak on the back of a bit-part in 'pulp fiction'). in spite of the dirty-singlet/greasy bicep chic, he needed a good support crew around him here. he gets it. few action films manage to pack in so many memorable side-characters. first & foremost of course is alan rickman as the bad guy, 'hans gruber'. surely one of the best villains in action-film history, he is much less 'hateable' than the average bad guy, simply because he's so bloody 'watchable'. he is skilfully introduced into the film via silence - he says nothing for quite a while, instead ordering his troops around via underhand glances & little shifts in his facial hair. when finally he does open his mouth, the cinematographer (who i'll laud later) frames him in such a way as to reveal rickman as the REAL star of this film - standing behind an invisible pulpit, bible-diary held gracefully in one hand, addressing his captive congregation. wisely the writer grants rickman (an established shakesperean actor & reputed bastard, from all reports) a chance to give the gruber character a bit of depth - some funny, classy, witty lines (quoting the classics, praising the tailored suit of a hostage etc), some flashes of near-humanity (the genuinely anguished look on his face when he's told one of his hostages is a heavily pregnant woman), & signs of instinctive intelligence (the way he shifts so quickly into the cowering american businessman-role as a disguise). efficient, intelligent but insecure (read: HUMAN) villains are the best, & gruber is great because he's basically a better-than-average bank robber with the manner & dress-sense of a nasty executive.

(to digress, the 'bank robber' bit need not be underplayed: the slapstick-ian nature of certain moments (a SWAT team member stopped in his tracks by a rose thorn, a mean-looking henchman distracted in the heat of battle by a chocolate bar, the crazy limo-driver kid) makes one wonder if 'die hard' isn't just a funny/serious bank-heist movie writ large. either way, the light-heartedness of certain moments distracts us from the silly un-reality of several things; willis & his mate, 'al powell', having extended, sentimental conversations over a walkie-talkie; the lunacy & impossibility of certain stunts; the way willis is taken so un-seriously by 'deputy chief dwayne robinson', another semi-slapstick-ian character)

as well as rickman, there are numerous other side-characters i can go on about (as mentioned earlier, what other action film gives us such an array of minor figures?). holly, willis's ex-wife - a hard-nosed & eloquent & intelligent character. mr.takagi (spelling?), the executive of the nakatomi corporation, played with a really genuine dignity & integrity early in the film. ellis (spelling?), the corporate lowlife who we see sniffing cocaine at one stage - a high-strung idiot, killed prematurely during a memorably tense scene between him & rickman. the similarly intense & idiotic newsreader, played by the guy who played a near-identical idiot in 'ghostbusters'. the long-blonde-haired maniac henchman who battles valiantly & madly with willis towards the end of the film (incidentally, the actor who played this guy died in about 1995/96; for some reason i remember a really gentle, moving obituary to him in melbourne's 'age' newspaper; you see, people came to love these characters). even the two FBI agents - who arrive on the scene with a real over-bearing sense of seriousness - are brought down to earth, made memorably human: riding in a chopper at full-tilt towards the nakatomi building, one screams 'wooohooo! this is just like nam!', to which the other replies, very smoothly, 'i was in junior high, dickhead'.

b) the second 'subtle' reason why this film is so effective: the cinematography. the director of photography on 'die hard' was a bloke named jan de bont (i think that's how you spell it), the same guy who went on to direct 'speed', an equally superlative, if not slightly more serious, action film. i implore you to watch closely some of the cinematographic work done in this film - it makes such a difference to the overall class & feel of the picture. from the wonderful opening ten minutes or so, which are bathed in a beautiful semi-hellish natural californian corporate light, right up to the climax - the super, super slo-motion shot of gruber falling from a 30th floor window (i can't say i've seen this shot bettered by any action film since - it still looks so real) - the whole film is so dramatically shot, capturing so well the complete neatness & under-contrstruction aspects of the office building.

c) fundamentally, the film is incredily fun (the same virtue that made 'die hard 3' so enjoyable, even if the jeremy irons villain was somewhat too virile & serious for my liking). watch it again & again.

ronin

2004-09-02T13:18:00.000+10:00

films involving guns & violent men are flavour of the month, it seems.

i recall seeing the promotional guff for 'ronin' back when it was released in 1997/98 or thereabouts. huge, brooding, greyish photos of the film's characters, hung high along the walls of melbourne's newly redeveloped 'jam factory' multiplex. ah, the jam factory - scene of so many nervous first-daters, so many teenage eastern suburb private school toughs in their ghetto fatigues, so many odd self-conscious wannabe-wanderers like me who i suspect still love the multiplex for what it represented as a ten-year-old - a weirdly warm, dimly-lit, dark-carpeted & magical den.

the big photos had accompanying captions - the names of each character &, from memory, their military 'speciality'; their 'role'. it was meant as a first glimpse at the concept of 'ronin' - a japanese term referring to samurai warriors whose masters had been murdered. 'ronin' subsequently went on solo revenge adventures, slaughtering all & sundry & eventually killing themselves when they felt vengeance had been achieved. here then, up on the wall, were 5 or 6 modern-day 'ronin'. not that any of this samurai stuff matters. the key points made by the posters were - a) robert de niro was in the film, & b) the range of terroristic talents on display ('explosives specialist', 'driver', 'weapons specialist' etc) promised one helluva classy bloodbath. i myself was happy to see the french actor jean reno had his own poster. after his wonderful effort alongside gary oldman & a very young natalie portman in 'the professional' (at the time i thought it one of the best films i'd ever seen, tho admittedly i haven't seen it since), i knew reno would be courted by hollywood for a blockbuster action role. after 'ronin' he even appeared in 'mission impossible', proof positive that he'd 'made it'.

thankfully he retains some class in a film that attempts to be too classy, too smart. the european locales (we start out in a rather quaint paris bar where the 'ronin' first gather, warily) are largely extraneous, even gratuitous - e.g. the paris tunnel in which princess di died features prominently in one of the film's boring, overlong car chases. character & plot-wise, this is an american action-film fantasy superimposed on european surrounds. the 'diverse & enigmatic but brilliant military talents joining forces' idea is classic action-film stuff, suited much better to blatant, up-front & effective bloodletting films like 'predator'. the 'action' in ronin is adjusted to meet apparently classy, european needs, i.e. the gunfighting is no-nonense, accurate & short-lived (the final confontration ends with only one boring bullet & an even boring-er last-line from the bad guy!). the ludicrous suggestion at the conclusion of the film - that the work of the 'ronin' has helped bring about a northern ireland peace accord - goes completely against the grain of what the film tries to achieve for its first two hours: a sense of independently volatile fighting geniuses. such an ending smacks of the big american action-film moral 'wrap-up'. (incidentally, the best cinematic evocation of the 'independent killers working together' idea is michael mann's 'heat' - a superlative film (also featuring de niro) which benefits from being completely oblivious to a larger world picture; it is purely a selfish character study focussed utterly on its underworld subject/subjects.)

the film might've been better had it completely ditched the whole 'ronin' premise, which by the way is introduced to us in big, over-important typeface before the movie starts. the director/writer seems to have thought that just by titling the film according to the premise, audiences would instinctively attribute more ambiguous depths to the characters involved. it doesn't work out, & even though the film tries to reinforce the theme by way of a reflective 'ronin' moment during a lull in the action, & by way of a 'ronin-esque' denial-of-romance plotline, the japanese connection remains strained.

probably worth watching once.

the fugitive (2)

2004-08-30T12:06:00.000+10:00

sorry for the mild break in transmission. weekends are harrowing & unproductive. though i did read, in saturday's 'age' (at least i think it was in the age), a review which lauded a critic for inspiring readers/viewers to see/read what the aforesaid critic was reviewing. ah yes, i remember now - twas an owen richardson review of barbara creed's recently released introduction to film theory text. something of a pertinent book, one might say, though i can't see myself reading it anytime soon.

it's a good critical quality i reckon - contagious critical enthusiasm. i recall back in year 10 or thereabouts after a ludicrously overlong 'class presentation' on kubrick, the english teacher told me about a week later that i'd 'inspired' her to go see kubrick's films again (something which is vital if you're to love kubrick, i might add - constant re-watching). 'contagious enthusiasm' she called it. ever since, i've found less & less to get enthused about as far as films go. having said that, of course, when i DO get enthused, look out.

p.s. fair to say that the majority of the academic literary criticism i read lacks any such enthusiasm. rather one constantly comes across the dull tone of a writer who knows his/her readership expects no fanfare. 'if you're so academically specialised as to actually want to read this article, you're probably already committed to/excited about the text in question'. maybe. but what a limiting (dare i say cliquey?) way to go about things.

where were we? 'the fugitive'. the efficiency & 'tightness' of the support cast, in particular, lee jones's crew. i love their interaction. a zippy, intelligent, co-operative investigate effort. the images of this group effort balance so nicely next to the wonderful montages of harrison ford going it alone in the windy city - at once trying to evade capture & solve his wife's murder. the montages are a serious highlight for me, backed as they are by james newton howard's urban, pacey & again, 'efficient' classical score. incorporating snare & tom drums & classy percussion alongside normal orchestral sounds gives the chicago montages a really 'busy', dramatic & gritty edge. it's a classical sound which i think has influenced a lot of films/tv-series since. newton howard would go on to write the very 'busy', percussion-dominated opening theme to the hugely successful series 'ER'.

HAVING SAID THAT, there are also moments of real windy-city melancholy in the soundtrack. the opening theme, for example, heard over the top of really quite beautiful helicopter-shots of chicago at night - it builds to a quite emotional cymbal-assisted crescendo. it's actually one of the most effective opening credit sequences i can remember. mildly tragic but (& the wail of police sirens heard thru the opening theme reinforces this) essentially dramatic.

& then of course there's that moment during one of many montages (these montages, coincidentally, give off a real sense of chicago's 'greyness' & low-rise grittiness, which i love) when you hear a crazy but contained saxophone, wailing away behind a brooding section of the score. my god that sax sounds good, i decided after about the tenth time i'd seen the film. after buying the film soundtrack about a year ago i found out the sax-player was actually wayne shorter, apparently one of the better jazz players of the last few decades. you only hear him for about 30 seconds, but he provides a tiny bit of tang to an otherwise speedy, percussive score.

& speaking of cameos. another subtle reason why this film is formulaic-great is a 5-minute appearance from julianne moore as, that word again, a very 'busy' nurse. this may have been the first film she ever appeared in. either way, even though she only has about ten lines, you can't help but sit up & take notice. every one of those ten lines is delivered with such genuine nurse-ish routine authority. watch the way she reveals to lee jones that ford (dr. kimble) saved a boy's life on his fugitive dash through the hospital. it's a vital line - one that reinforces kimble's distinctly uncriminal humanity to the still-stern-faced detective. 'he saved his life', she says with such tired conviction.

these are the little background reasons, then, why 'the fugitive' is worth watching & re-watching. it's not a film that's going to revolutionise the artform, but it is a film that proves just how effective formula can be if directors/producers pay attention to subtle details - score, pace, support cast, use of montage, location. the fact it's a rollicking good story also helps.

the fugitive

2004-08-26T19:46:00.000+10:00

before i go on, allow me to express a concern. thus far i've only focussed on films full of 'leading men'. films about men. 'the thin red line' is a male film. indeed, the actress miranda otto i mentioned in my review below is one of about 2 women in that entire film - & she has about three lines total (voiceover lines at that). kubrick - who i've only just started celebrating, let me assure you - basically all his films are about men. which is why nicole kidman seems so strikingly odd the first time you see her in 'eyes wide shut'. it was the first time stanley had given a woman a real defining role in a film. not THE defining role, tho - cruise is the jet-black-haired centrepoint of that brilliant rainbow dream of a movie. it's gotta be said - women very much took a back seat to men in the majority of kubrick's films. shelley duvall, who played jack nicholson's wife in 'the shining', she's interestingly stated on occasions that her character never really got a chance to evolve over the course of filming - indeed she found working on 'the shining' to be one of the most emotionally exhausting experiences of her life, since she basically just ran around screaming/bawling hysterically the entire time.

just sitting back & thinking this over again, though, i guess kubrick did, on occasion, give women strangely powerful minor roles in his films. one is reminded of the aggressive & flexible 'cat woman' in 'a clockwork orange', who is eventually bludgeoned to death by an enormous penis sculpture. one is reminded of barry lyndon's mother in 'barry lyndon', a vital, subtly domineering woman. one is reminded of the vietnamese sniper in 'full metal jacket', around whose dying body the film's stilted, disappointing climax occurs.

all interesting characters, no doubt. the fact remains, though, that when one thinks of kubrick's films, one thinks instantly of male roles, male characters, male tales. has my love of kubrick thus affected my general filmic taste? i fancy so. grant me another indulgence, then - i want to celebrate another utterly male-dominated film, 1994's 'the fugitive'.

'the fugitive' is formulaic detective/mystery drama at its absolute peak. it just doesn't miss a beat. i know nothing of the original tv series. perhaps this ignorance makes things all the more compelling.

i recall when this film was up for best picture nomination at the oscars alongside, from memory, 'pulp fiction', 'schindler's list' & a few other movies. ah, 1994, back when the oscars seemed such an annual cultural pinnacle for this weird 12 year old. the academy figured 'the fugitive's' worth in its action-packed dramatic explosiveness. bah. the train-crashing-into-bus sequence, the promos ran, was surely one of the best action sequences ever. bah. the jumping-off-dam stunt one of the most daring stunts ever attempted on film. bah.

for mine there's really subtle, background reasons as to why this film remains a winner. for starters, let's not doubt it - the film REALLY swings into gear the moment tommy lee jones steps out of his U.S. marshal's car & states, hard-texas-workin-man-sardonically, 'my, my, my, what a mess'. in a wonderful, wonderful 2-3 minute sequence, he not only comandeers the escaped fugitive case from a befuddled local trooper, everything about his character comes into focus. he's a smart, proficient, coolly intelligent man. one's tempted to label him an 'intelligent bastard', but he never struck me as a bastard in this film. he's certainly not a 'bad guy'. indeed we end up loving him just as much as the anxiously intelligent harrison ford character. the director/writer does well not to paint jones with a 'bad guy' brush. early on, giving us glimpses of the way he interacts with his loyal support team, for example, the viewer suddenly starts thinking 'hey hang on - this is the bloke who's supposed to be hunting our innocent hero? but he's a decent fella, if not a tad obsessive! what's going on?'

but it's that support crew i want to waffle about a bit more. harrison is less of a figurehead in this film than a fleeting, verbally stifled & shocked professional on the run (he does it well). he needed a good support cast, & he got one. lee jones won an oscar for best supporting actor, first & foremost, but it's the really minor support characters who, i feel, make the film. we've got lee jones's detective crew, most of whom we get to know on a first-name basis by the end of the film. they deliver their lines with a cool proficiency. they are like mini-lee-jones's. all the interaction is great. the scene in which they analyse the harrison ford telephone recording - locked inside a nicely-lit conference room, it's as if all the minor characters are mental projections of lee jones, working quickly, sophisticatedly to figure out what this recording's all about. great scene.

i'll write some more tomorrow.

the thin red line (2)

2004-08-26T13:31:00.000+10:00

for those taken aback by my somewhat idiosyncratic love of malick's film, fear not. 'the thin red line' succeeds on a conventional level, no doubt. if you've no time for its reflective episodes (e.g. the kinda guy/gal who'll say 'oh christ the pacific islanders are dancing again, here we go', 'zzzz the two lovers are doing their weird flashback sexual dance thing again') the film is pure adrenalin-filled entertainment in patches. the prolonged charge up the guadalcanal hill easily rivals spielberg's over-lauded 'saving private ryan' opening for sheer drama & surprise value. the subsequent small-party attack on a machine gun emplacement is a wonderfully intense little sequence, filmed almost purely from the perspective of a hypothetical US soldier, crouching behind rock for cover, glancing occasionally out at the emplacement, peering up at the sky warily for the incoming artillery barrage. again, it's worth remembering that the 'camera shot from behind the barrel of a gun' was mastered by kubrick in, oddly enough, 'dr.strangelove'. at least i'm pretty sure it was one of the first instances a director said 'ok bugger it, let's film this from the actual perspective of a regular soldier on the ground, tentative & hesitant behind his weapon'. that said, malick doesn't waver from his 'face aesthetic' in these sequences, every now & again giving us an anguished close-up (e.g. cavaziel's strange look of bewilderment as he contemplates his wounded comrade near the gun emplacement).

but it's the reflective in-between episodes i really want people to savour. this is a film that makes flashbacks/fantasies work. we get a good taste early on. with dulcet american-boy voiceover going, we see images of pastoral innocence before the war - the soldier as child, gloriously happy in the wheatfields it seems. there's a bit of winslow homer about this short-lived image - 'the veteran in a new field' comes to mind, the clear but breezy blue sky. just as there's a teeny bit of edward hopper domestic lighting in the later flashbacks, involving the australian actress miranda otto & the actor guy who's name i can't recall. these, for me, count among the most beautiful visions of my film-viewing life. a beautiful utilisation of natural, palish-orangey light, filtered thru the omnipresent set of dull curtains constantly ebbing & flowing in an open window's wind. the suggestion is of breeze, domestic bedroom light at noon, & a summery, erotic heat. the two lovers, fully-clothed, we get the feeling they've been indulging forever in this semi-prudish feeling-out of one another, this preparatory eroticism. it's not quite foreplay, though, is it - sex is never explicitly suggested. these are two people just loving one another's physical company. a teenage conceit. is not so much teenage lust driven by the incredible erotic shock of first-time touch? we see each lover peering fixedly at their own hands, not at one another, as their fingers wrestle. we see her (& make no mistake, otto pulls off these scenes, or at least the faces required during these scenes, with serious aplomb) face overcome momentarily with shock as he takes the balletic grinding at once too far & not far enough. this is wonderful, wonderful cinema.

these fantasies/flashbacks, of which there are more later in the film (the 'love, where did it come from? who lit this flame in us?' episode is probably the best minute of the picture) - they fill me with confidence as to the artful possibilities of combining moving image-voiceover-score. kubrick made the first step, juxtapositioning the most unlikely sound with image. malick has incorporated words, or, moreover, a humble poetry, & succeeded brilliantly for a few minutes. now of course many directors might've done this before - please, if they have, i'd love to know when & whom. no doubt i'm exasperatingly naive about such aesthetic antecedents, & also probably overly enthused about malick's 'innovation' here. but i remain convinced that this is superlative film-making.

the thin red line

2004-08-25T12:29:00.000+10:00

i am as biased towards this film as i am towards any stanley kubrick film. it is indescribably beautiful & brilliant. in a recent doco on kubrick, one commentator noted that lovers of stanley love him for very minute, detailed, unique reasons. this commentator was right. me, (sorry for the digression, no, stanley didn't direct 'the thin red line') i love stanley not for one film in particular, not for the breadth of his entire ouevre, not for the fact he revolutionised the use of music in film, not for such general-critical reasons. i love him for certain moments. moments which take my breath away every time. steven spielberg has said that, if you sit down to watch a kubrick film, you always end up watching the entire film thru to the end. can't say i agree with him. it might be cheating, but more often than not my experiences of kubrick come in glimpses. certainly, i've watched his films right thru, many times. but nowadays it's the moments which matter. the wonderfully stilted but courteous conversation between space professors/engineers on the space station hilton in '2001' (everyone is so beautifully courteous in kubrick films, it's almost as if he over-directed them to be robotically polite to one another). the ludicrously beautiful sequence when we first see the jupiter mission craft - the accompanying cello music like enormously mournful brushstrokes. from 'barry lyndon' i can name a dozen such moments. it is my favourite film of all time. i can't remember not crying during barry & lady lyndon's first gambling-table encounter. but enough.

'the thin red line' has become for me a kubrickian equivalent. it is an amazingly kubrickian work, only it is far more fluid & unrestrained than any kubrick picture. its classical score is diverse & free-wheeling, oftentimes extraneous - something kubrick just wouldn't have allowed. its ending is ambiguous, metaphorical even. kubrick's endings were notoriously ambiguous, but it was always a loaded ambiguity. you walked away thinking, devising solutions, re-thinking. you walk away from 'the thin red line' with a filmic vista in your mind. its voiceovers (various character's voices are heard as voiceovers) are far more florid & ambivalent than anything kubrick would've considered. which is not to say that they're not utterly, utterly honest & effective & apt.

where 'the thin red line' really turns kubrickian is in the use of faces. it is a film of faces. stupendously rendered faces. the bloke who went on to win an oscar in 'the pianist' - i forget his name - he was apparently shocked & appalled when he saw the premiere & realised he only had about 1 line in the film. but that was terence malick's point. his character - fyfe i think is his name - we remember his enormous, terrified eyes for eternity. just like i remember jim cavaziel's (that how you spell it?) wonderfully, wonderfully humane, gentle, & sometimes deadly expressions. he is like a latter-day warrior whitman. pensive, loved, loving, immeasurably brave. & what of nick nolte? surely the best film he's ever done. his character is established very early on via comparison - as we see him striding around a ship's bridge beside his superior (john travolta), we note the sadness, the concern, the worry in his face. it stands out so perfectly next to travolta's overplayed aloofness. & he has the voice to match it; a wonderfully senior, barking noise of a voice which echoes thru the picture. when malick finally captures him in a private, mournful moment (as he does throughout the picture - this film is almost a documentary, malick seems to drift thru the battalion like a documentary-maker, giving us snippets of the soldier's most intense moments of reflection), the effect is stunning. nolte heaves an enormous, stifled sigh, his mouth mildly open. any smoker would know that sigh, the one that makes you kinda swallow for breath deep down the back of yr throat. malick captures it.

enough for now. more must be said, tomorrow perhaps.

8mm

2004-08-19T16:24:00.000+10:00

this rather grisly little joel schumacher thriller/mystery thing came out about 7 years ago from memory, just as nick cage was riding a wave of action/drama-film success after his oscar for 'leaving las vegas'. 8mm wasn't exactly a box-office smash, & the critics reacted coolly at the time, dubbing it (again from memory) as almost TOO dark, TOO nasty.

but it's the dark shit in this film i love. no doubt it's an average film, completely conventional in spite of its snuffish subject-matter. but the lighting in some scenes is just beautiful. where hollywood directors tend to bathe 'family scenes' in a semi-bright, vapid glow, all the family scenes in 8mm are dark, brooding, enveloped in an x-files-inspired-tightly-clustered-pine-trees-theme that's straight outta maine. it also helps that cage's wife, played by someone (can anyone help?!), pulls one of the better performances in the picture (behind wuckin phoenix's hypo porn-store clerk & the guy who plays the canniving attorney). she is a quietly controlled & semi-aggressively concerned wife to her roaming P.I. husband. & she does a good job trying to inject some life into her scenes with cage, who's remarkably flat through the majority of the film. schumacher (or whoever wrote the picture) subtly manages to establish within about 5 minutes just how in love the young couple are. they just look at each other & say 'i love you'. it's probably cage's best moment in the film.

HAVING SAID THAT, what he does do extremely well in the end is bring off the 'man-on-a-mission' 'anti-snuff-crusader' character. having seen his investigative friend, max california (wuckin phoenix) meet a premature death, he suddenly becomes a nicely aggressive man. when he eventually gets to lay the boots into the villains, when he stealthily sneaks a knife into the abdomens of various enemies, you WANT him to. he's the master of the aggressive, vengeful grimace. the face of someone who can't quite believe he's actually enacting vengeance.

which is the key to cage's character - he's an everyday blue-collar fella who can't believe what he's seeing, who can't believe the world he's investigating, but who oddly WANTS to discover WHY this kind of world exists. in the words of tobey maguire's peter parker, he's both 'excited and terrified' by this lascivious world of porn & violence. thus his gunpoint debate with the really evil bespectacled attorney 'longdale' (probably the best scene in the film) becomes both a revelation & a disappointment for him. the dead industrial czar (longdale's boss) had the snuff film made, had the girl killed on camera, 'because he could', says longdale. 'were you expecting a different answer?', he asks a baffled cage.

while this is an interesting & ambivalent twist in 8mm's tale, it's oddly disappointing & unnecessary that the film is drawn out such that cage eventually tracks down & battles one-on-one with 'machine', the masked super-bad-guy who killed the snuff film girl in the first place. it's a vindicating end for cage's character - 'machine' admits that he actually enjoys what he does. he's not in it for the money, not in it for the power thing - he finds the whole thing pleasurable. symbollically killing him in a graveyard, we ourselves feel a sordid pleasure that this white trash example of 'living death' incarnate is dead. but it brings things to a very good vs. evil cliched end.

full credit to schumacher tho for making a solid generic P.I./dark detective film. i've heard around the traps that there's a lot of cynicism surrounding schumacher as a director. i'm unsure why - did he direct something really shit? can anyone help? one thing's for damn sure - he really failed to bring cage into line in this picture. nicholas is all over the shop.

in summary, it's worth a watch. rather a tense & well-lit mystery. nothing special tho.

wall street

2004-08-18T14:09:00.000+10:00

watched this one in glimpses for the first time a while back. watched it more comprehensively about a week ago.

let's see. what did it win. michael douglas as gecko got himself a best actor oscar. which is fair enough, you fancy. he's very good in this film, kickstarting a career-full of similar performances - the angsty but oddly charismatic middle-aged men of films such as 'the game', 'basic instinct' & 'traffic'.

but he's far & away the highlight of the movie. it's a film full of faults. douglas is good, no doubt, but he's on an olivier-like level compared to his co-stars. charlie sheen is lukewarm & absolutely freezing from scene to scene. he does the slick-haired young go-getter thing nicely early on in the film, but degenerates badly as his character is challenged by the hidden non-niceties of the street. here in wall street, cast primarily i suspect for the charlie/martin curiosity factor, charlie had a chance to assume a mantle tom cruise would eventually master for the next decade - that of the first-choice actor for young-turbulent-but-talented-professional roles. he had the preferred black hair & everything.

but cruise, while not brilliant, does the intensity thing so much better. after inadvertently discovering that gecko plans to rip his dad's company to shreds, charlie stumbles from the board of director's meeting & onto 'the street', where stone frames him slightly from below, sighing heavily & leaning against a tree. 'oh look', one is tempted to say, 'charlie is leaning against a tree. that's nice'. such is the 'drama' of the moment.

similarly about two minutes later, sheen (now drunk & doing an appallingly crap drunk at that) & his love-interest, darryl hannah, come to verbal blows over the virtues of the money-game. it's easily the worst scene in the film, & surely one of the worst scenes in stone's ouevre. it's also one of the only times sheen & hannah are on camera alone together - something we should be thankful for. throughout the film hannah delivers one of the worst performances i've ever seen (she arrives in the film interestingly enough, as a sharply-spoken interior designer), but is dreadful when trying to counter sheen's equally shit drunken outbursts against gecko. storming out of their apartment ("you walk out that door, i'm changin the locks!" screams sheen convincingly), hannah ends up seeing herself in a disjointed hallway mirror shortly afterwards. cue the imagistic cliches oliver! ugh!

& in part that's one of the main problems with the film. it's full of weak cinematographic conceits which seem so contrived when you realise this is a conventional rags-to-riches-to-rags melodrama overlaid with stone's own anti-capitalist didacticisms. heated exchange between sheen & douglas - ohh, cut to shot from gecko's perspective, looking 'out' at sheen from a limousine or pristine office, thus suggesting the true underlying gulf between gecko's & fox's (sheen's) world. the character-study stuff just doesn't stack up beside the monolithic presence of the film's true capitalist anti-hero - gecko. he is the film. the shareholder's meeting 'greed is good' speech - best scene in the film, no doubt. stone, framing douglas electioneering among the shareholders from the perspective of the overpaid vice-presidents on the stage, encapsulates nicely the sense that these stock-giants like to think of themselves as people's people. gecko is a convincing capitalist politician. the characters around him? just devices. ways of driving the surrounding tale. even terence stamp, such an accomplished actor, wavers in his portrayal of gecko's rival capitalist monster. he has this weird english/australian way of talking (strangely interspersing 'mate' a lot in his arguments with gecko), & ends up coming across as a philanthropic good-guy by the end of the film. an odd character.

kudos to stone, tho, for his handling of the film's more dramatic sequences. it takes technical talent to make the stockmarket exciting, talent to make the frenzied buying & selling of 'Bluestar Airlines' (late in the film) seem intense. & i love the vision of the buyers/sellers on the floor of the exchange itself. stone really gets us in amongst them at times. truly dramatic.

probably worth watching for the 'good solid yarn' factor.

intro

2004-08-18T13:52:00.000+10:00

wilkommen to filmism. i've decided i waste so much of my life watching crap old & new movies, i may as well start up a blog dissecting & criticising them all.

my background is in poetry. i'm a widely published poet/writer. current postgrad student in english at melbourne university. i come to film as a kind of estranged onlooker. i both love & hate film. i was obsessed with cinema late in high school, & then totally lost interest when i realised what a shitful/infantile art form it is compared to literature/poetry/writing in general. i'm convinced film could do so much more than it does.

having said that, let it be known that i've been brought up purely on US cinema. this explains my filmic cynicism, & one thing i hope to achieve via this blog is relate my slow conversion to european & world cinematics. the kind of cinema which might allay my fears in regards to the art form as a whole.

all the same, i wanna kick things off by blogging on & on about all the US films i see weekly. they deserve attention & dismissal. primarily i'm here to help you decide what's a complete & utter waste of time, & what might enrich yr life.

i IMPLORE any readers out there to anti-review my reviews, i.e. if you don't agree with what i say, tear me to shreds! i'm no expert, & if you want to provide additional insights/arguments/whatever regarding the films i review, feel free to use the comments feature. even better, if you want to recommend films - any films - to us all, go ahead. i'm always keen to learn/hear about new stuff.

finally, bloggin inspiration props have gotta go out to alison croggon & ron silliman - two poetic/intellectual heroes of mine, whose blogs are bloomin incredible. n.b. alison's 'theatre notes': http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com, & ron's blog: http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/

wish me luck.