Category Archives: film review

Film review: Pride

05 Wednesday Nov 2014

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Pride, in cinemas now, tells the story of a small group of gay and lesbian activists who raise money for striking miners in Thatcher’s 1984 Britain and in their solidarity with a Welsh coalmining village, develop unlikely life-changing friendships. The previews play up the comedy, which is there, but this is actually drama first and foremost. Indeed, it is an example of the power of well-made drama, as it balances the individual challenges of the characters (coming out, developing confidence, seeking love) against the bigger scale political conflict. The universal acclaim for the film reflects its accomplished filmmaking. Each character is complex and interesting. The tone is just right, managing to inspire and move, while knowing when to pull back and avoid seeming over-earnest. One thing which isn’t even exactly a criticism, but an observation: it recreates the eighties so well that it would be easy to miss the way the film brings the contemporary near consensus on sexuality to that period, and makes the characters on the wrong side of history seem merely mean or stupid.  Perhaps related to that, the process of growing acceptance and eventual embrace among the Welsh villagers for the homosexuals is a microcosm of the same process among broader society over the the period since the film. This is a film which will inspire and challenge while audiences laugh and cry.

Some notes on House of Cards

09 Monday Jun 2014

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I have reached the end of series 1 of House of Cards. For the uninitiated, it’s a thirteen episode story of the rise and revenge of a ruthlessly ambitious politician, Frank Underwood, set in present-day Washington, but based on a British novel and TV series.

Engrossed, I still ask myself what it means. (And what it means that I like it so much.) In the same way I ask myself why I care so much about the machinations of federal politics in Australia. I can excuse my interest in ideology, and policy, but why do I care so much about the personalities, and the ‘politics’ in the derogatory sense of the word? Oh, no doubt it’s the Machiavelli in me.

My aside to the audience, Frank style: There used to be no Frank in me at all; I determinedly lived as the lamb to the slaughter, playing life with an open hand for all to see. One can only do that for so long, for so many times. But most would-be-Franks are not as subtle as they think. Nor can they see as far ahead as him.

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Why did Joel Schumacher come along and wreck two episodes in the middle? He is the worst director in Hollywood. Reference: Batman and Robin, the movie which spoiled my adolescence. He squandered most of what was good about the show in his two outings. He made them feel like episodes of West Wing on a bad day, the episodes of Frank vs. the education union, fizzing out in that predictable American subplot of the hero finding an innovation to solve the day (‘let’s stage the gala party outside’; ‘let’s offer food to the protestors’). House of Cards is not about cute punchlines. Go away, Joel Schumacher, and do not come again.

David Fincher, on the other hand, you are welcome any time.

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Did you know Robin Wright, so tall and skinny and middle-aged in this, was Buttercup in The Princess Bride? I certainly didn’t, till IMDB told me. That’s messed up; I didn’t know so many years had gone by. Don’t get me wrong: she is beautiful still. But somewhere, surely, Buttercup’s still young.

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Back to meaning. What it ‘means’. Back to drama. Is there more to it than carthasis? Is it mere diversion? Of course it is. It’s about how we live and why we live. House of Cards is a masterpiece of the screen because in it we have all of life. We live out our own dilemmas writ large, and our own anxieties, and our cultural identity. Perhaps it is vicarious living, but in a way which makes us think more deeply about our own life, or should. It is all the spheres of life – marriage, politics, the office, recreation. It hints at things we don’t know in ourselves and in each other. It has enough depth to justify those eleven hours of my life.

Recaps: constructing pasts from memory

06 Friday Jun 2014

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I’ve been caught up in the US version of House of Cards. You can choose to watch each episode with or without ‘recaps’. I choose with. The recaps shift entirely each episode, highlighting a different thread of the long and involved narrative. You suddenly remember one of the minor characters and the brewing subplot which hasn’t been touched for an episode or two. The recap is determined by the episode you’re in. And the thing is that memory is like that too. Whenever I make a change in life and find myself in a different context, I make a new narrative, dredging up memories which were dormant in the previous episode but now make sense. An example: I moved to an Anglican church last year for the first time in my life. Suddenly I’m seeing new foreshadowings, a book I read at eighteen which nearly convinced me, the times I visited the cathedral with my grandfather the rector. Connections to other Anglicans. I’m finding in the mass of memory a subplot which made this inevitable. The difference is that in House of Cards, in almost any fictional narrative, there are no dead-ends, there are no superfluous events or characters.

The Hannah Arendt film: an undramatic misfire

16 Sunday Mar 2014

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Hannah Arendt is a misfire of a film, an unfortunate squandering of so much dramatic potential. It tells the story of philosopher Arendt’s controversial reportage on the Eichmann trial of 1961, and her insistence that he was simply a mediocre man, following orders and unable to ‘think’ for himself. The subplot concerns her affair and troubled relationship with Nazi-sympathiser, the philosopher Heidegger. In both cases, the drama is lost in a series of flat, over-talky scenes. The Heidegger subplot needed far more development; but even the main plot does not become clear until the halfway mark. Throughout, the audience was tittering uneasily at some of the dialogue which (awkwardly) approached humour, because it just didn’t know how to take scenes which lacked both drama and comedy. The plot feels muddy, with developments that seem like they will be significant only to fizzle out. It’s a great pity, as the themes are worthy and the story significant.

Twelve Years A Slave – Or, The Passion of the Christ II

05 Wednesday Mar 2014

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For my birthday, I went to see Twelve Years A Slave. But on reflection, maybe I really went because it’s Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent –  the film reminded me most of all of Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Both are important, worthy films, which involve a harrowing of the audience in the watching. You are asked as an audience to participate in the suffering of an innocent man – and in both cases, there is much extreme whipping.

Its great achievement is to give us a two hour taste of what it might have been to be a slave in the USA in the mid-nineteenth century. I wonder to what extent, though, it works as drama. There is very little hope in this film, and very little agency. It steers clear of the feel-good trajectory in which Solomon may have kept impressing his initial slave-owner to the point of achieving freedom. (It had to of course- I presume it was sticking to the outline of his real life account.) One by one, all his efforts to achieve his freedom come to naught. As a consequence, the rescue is really a kind of deus ex machina. Perhaps this is truer to life than dramatic form would demand. Perhaps it is not a drama so much as an example of a genre I shall dub ‘harrowings’.

 

The death of Philip Seymour Hoffman

03 Monday Feb 2014

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Since I saw that Philip Seymour Hoffman, my favourite actor, was dead on the television news-ticker this morning, my mind has kept hiccuping: PSH is dead! Initially the hiccups were strong and happened every five minutes; by now, they’re less frequent and less violent.

Is it grief I feel when a celebrity I admire dies? Is it a less intense version of what happens when someone I know dies? Or something else entirely, given the ‘relationship’ with the celebrity runs only one way? I don’t know.

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(Note on the news ticker, saying ‘breaking news’: it was a delayed broadcast from the east, three hours old, and the presenters didn’t even know about it, the news hadn’t hit them yet. This is what happens when WA is three hours behind the east: sometimes a time bubble opens up, and one becomes aware of watching something from the past, different in an important way to the present.)

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Hoffman was amazing – he appears in so  many of my favourite films, lighting up so many of them. We watch him age in Synecdoche, New York, and it feels like we have followed him through a lifetime. We want him to be innocent in Doubt. We live in fear of him in Punch-Drunk Love. I don’t think it’s going too far to say he was the quintessential face of film in the first thirteen years of the century.

 

Inside Llewyn Davis: existence as repetitive and unresolved

12 Sunday Jan 2014

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Spoiler Alert: this is a discussion of the film for those who have seen it, or will never see it, or don’t need to be surprised by a film.

Luna’s small screen #2 wasn’t even full for the 7:10pm Sunday sneak preview screening of the Coen Brothers’ new film, Inside Llewyn Davis. It should have been full; it’s a profound film, a bleak, existential film tempered by the Coens’ humour.

The film is like life: repetitive, with so many unresolved threads. It follows struggling, self-destructive folk singer Llewyn Davis from couch to couch across New York and to Chicago in 1961. The road trip to Chicago is a case in point. He hitches a ride with a mysterious beat poet and a madman played by John Goodman. After the beat poet is arrested, he leaves John Goodman overdosed in the car. We never return to the characters; there is no resolution or explanation – just like life. The scene of Llewyn driving back to New York through the night in the snow is beautiful. He sees the lights of Akron, where his two year old child lives, a child he has only just discovered exists. We see him contemplating turning off the road to visit, and in a lesser film, or at least in a more conventional film, he would have. But in this film, he keeps driving. He can only see a little way ahead, and the snow is drifting down. He hits a shape on the road; it looks like the cat he abandoned. Coincidence drives the film, but it’s coincidence that leads nowhere – Llewyn loses a ginger cat, finds a different ginger cat, and runs over a ginger cat in the course of the narrative. It has significance for him, but it doesn’t resolve anything.

Coen brothers’ canon is remarkable for its diversity and unity. There is something distinctive about their vision, whether they’re making a low-key musical drama or a brutal thriller. This film resembles most two of my favourites – The Man Who Wasn’t There (2001) and A Serious Man (2009) – a trilogy of films about loners up against a hostile world at different points in the twentieth century. We don’t have to like Llewyn or identify with him to see a brutal truth about the cruelty of life in his story, in his missed opportunities, in his self-destruction, in the fickleness of fate.

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As a footnote, given it was a film driven by co-incidence, I felt a strange pleasure in the Coens using my surname for two of the characters – Elizabeth Hobby the middle-aged folk singer and her husband, the mysterious Mr Hobby who gives Llewyn a good punch in the face to bookend the film.

From Lincoln to Little Dizzle: My favourite films in 2013

31 Tuesday Dec 2013

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American Hustle

 New Films

1. American Hustle – a film of surprises, lit up by Amy Adams’ performance, with a script which knows how to use the conventions of drama while also being fresh and strange. The playful evocation of the seventies fascinated me.

2. Lincoln – the sort of serious drama I appreciate more and more as I get older. Review here.

3. The Great Gatsby – I thought at first the drama would be lost in the glitz, but in the second half, the film hits hard. Particularly devastating for me is the realisation that Daisy is not a good person.

4. The Turning – the adaptation of Tim Winton’s short story collection (my favourite work of his) misses the connections between the stories because each story is individually adapted by different creative teams, with different actors for the same characters. But this is also the film’s strength, a kaleidoscope of Australian talent around the theme of remembering the town you grew up in from middle age.

5. Mystery Road – this film noir set in the Australian outback makes my list on the proviso that I understand the ending next time I see it, because I was just confused. But it is an atmospheric clash of genre and setting as an Aboriginal detective returns to the town he grew up in to solve a murder mystery.

On DVD

1. Safety Not Guaranteed – a quirky drama-comedy about a reporter and his two sidekicks who go to answer a classified ad looking for people to accompany a time-traveller. It’s not about time travel at all; it’s about outsiders finding meaning in life. It stars one of my favourite TV actors (Aubrey Plaza) and is a surprise delight.

2. Seeking a Friend For the End of the World – a film which shares some of the same tone of Safety Not Guaranteed. It brings together two wonderful actors – Keira Knightley and Steve Carell (US Office) – wondering what to do when there’s only a couple of weeks left to live. It’s dark but funny and made me cry. A lot of critics didn’t like it; I respectfully disagree.

3. The Immaculate Conception of Little Dizzle – this is one of the strangest films I’ve ever seen, and makes it on the list for being so bewilderingly interesting. My wife saw it on the videostore shelf and thought it worth trying; I’m glad of her serendipitous find. It’s like Fight Club meets David Cronenberg. After becoming addicted to experimental cookies discarded in a lab, an anarchist cleaner obsessed with the meaning of life gives birth to a blue fish creature. Obviously not a film for everyone. Unfortunately, it ends suddenly and unconvincingly, but even that’s part of the charm – like a dream which you suddenly wake up from.

A good man compromising: a review of Lincoln

04 Monday Mar 2013

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Lincoln covers the last period of Abraham Lincoln’s life as he attempts to pass an amendment through Congress abolishing slavery before a Civil War peace treaty makes such a prospect impossible. It is a riveting dilemma: peace vs the end of slavery. Daniel Day Lewis’s Lincoln is a complex messiah and, more than anything, a good man. His compassion for people and his wisdom shine through in a superb performance.

It is also a film extolling compromise. The sort of compromise that would lead Lincoln to approve buying votes, playing games with words and truth, and which leads the idealistic radical Stevens to finally deny racial equality to help the amendment pass. If the message is that the end justifies the means, it is a message I disagree with. But as much as a message it is drama of the best kind: a portrait of good people torn by impossible dilemmas.

 

My Top 10 Films of 2011

02 Monday Jan 2012

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Unlike my antiquated novel list, these are films which were actually released in 2011.

10. Contagion –an effective, chilling account of the spread of a pandemic. Marks off for Jude Law’s annoying character.

9. I Love You Philip Morris – the most surprising film I saw all year; an offbeat, strange comedy about a man who keeps breaking out of prison.

8. True Grit – a Western by the Coen Brothers.

7. The Debt – stylish, quality thriller about the assassination of a concentration camp doctor.

6. Melancholia – a film I need to see again, but I don’t have the endurance required for it. The way von Trier shows the planet moving closer and closer until it engulfs the Earth is truly frightening. The whole film is disturbing.

5. Higher Ground – a woman begins to doubt the 1980s evangelical world she is immersed in. For anyone who knows the world and is willing to hold it up to the light, this will surely be engaging.

4. Black Swan – an intense thriller about an obsessive ballerina losing her grip on reality.

3. The Guard – black, black comedy about an Irish policeman with his own contrary code of honour. I laughed so hard at all the outrageous things he says and does.

2. Source Code – a man keeps up waking up inside someone else’s body in a train about to explode. A science fiction thriller which will probably come apart under scrutiny, but it gripped me like no other film this year.

1. Tree of Life – it’s difficult and sometimes boring, but it’s brilliant because it captures as much about the meaning of life as a film can hope to do. It also shows what it is to be a child, giving us an experience of life through a boy’s eyes.

Honourable mentions:

  • Ides of March – it really is very good and probably belongs in the top 10.
  • Voyage of the Dawntreader – far better than Prince Caspian, I enjoyed this Narnia film.
  • Anonymous – a likeable, loud historical conspiracy thriller about the ‘real’ author of Shakespeare’s plays.
  • We Need To Talk About Kevin – a fine adaptation of Lionel Shriver’s novel, but without its beauty or compulsion.
  • Incendies – melodramatic but fascinating drama.
  • The Eye of the Storm – an interesting attempt to film Patrick White.

The most underwhelming films of the year: 

  • Get Low – a boring, competent film about a hermit who stages his own funeral.
  • Red State – Kevin Smith bombs out with this crazy, rather pointless shoot ’em up.