Category Archives: film review

[Thursday 3pm #32] The week in texts

05 Thursday Nov 2009

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On Saturday night I saw The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, famous for being Heath Ledger’s final film. (Interestingly, to me at least, my cousin is married to his cousin.) I’m always disappointed by Terry Gilliam films – they promise a lot, have fascinating moments and concepts, but are undisciplined, unfocused. The struggling travelling caravan of the immortal Dr Parnassus making its way around London is fascinating and the strange worlds of people’s fantasies as they enter his mirror are enjoyable. Just don’t expect too much sense.

On Tuesday night I watched Darren Aronofsky’s 2008 film The Wrestler. I was underwhelmed. It’s a well directed, well acted drama about a washed up wrestler who has nothing to live for but his wrestling, with a parallel drawn between his physical performance in the ring and those of his stripper friend. It is strongly realist, in stark contrast to his other films, Pi, Requiem for a Dream and Fountain, all of which are surreal.

On Wednesday I read in The Australian Literary Review with great interest a writer I like a lot – Lionel Shriver – writing about my favourite writer, Paul Auster. She claims to know his work quite well, and praises him as a great storyteller. She puts her finger on one important quality of his work:

The word “readable” doesn’t do this quality justice. Auster has such a sweet, clear, inviting voice that his novels go down like lemonade. While his characters are vivid, his genius is plot, of which readers of literary fiction are too often starved.

But she thinks he falls short of Philip Roth; unlike Roth, one comes away from Auster – she contends – with an ‘absence of an intellectual, psychological or political souvenir’. His stories are just stories – no meat, just lemonade.

Hmmm. I think she’s wrong. At his best, Auster has a lot of psychological insight into the way we live our lives, the way we respond to choices and circumstances. His souvenirs – for me – are existential, clues to the conduct of life. A sense that someone else lives in the kind of world I live in. But I think I know what she means.

All through the week I’ve been reading Don Watson’s book about America. I’ve been dissatisfied, even a narrative like this is no substitute for reading a novel at the same time. (I had just given up on Geraldine Brooks’ People of the Book; I found her prose too annoying, slipping between colloquial and formal, and the feel of popular fiction, with its cliches and a certain kind of first person voice.) I have been thinking about moving to nonfiction for my next book after the library novel. I think it may bring together the two sides of my personality/ interests better than fiction – the researcher in me. But it wouldn’t be the kind of book Watson is writing. It would be less personal, and not have opinions in it.

Watson’s is a rambling travelogue, beautifully written, that keeps recurring around the centrality of fundamentalist Christianity to the experience of living in America. I have an endless fascination and horror with fundamentalist Christianity, and so I find this interesting, all the things he hears on the radio and sees on the telly, all the signs he sees about Jesus. There’s a lot more to it, of course, it’s just as much about politics and history and travel.

[Thursday 3pm #31] The Towering Inferno

29 Thursday Oct 2009

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On the night of the opening of the world’s tallest skyscraper – San Francisco’s elite all on the top floor at the party – a fire breaks out because of the shortcuts taken in the wiring. The principled architect (Paul Newman) and the brave fire chief (Steve McQueen) fight to get everyone out alive. It’s an all star-cast blockbuster from 1974, and it runs a marathonic 160 minutes or so.

The first time I started watching The Towering Inferno, I was about eleven and staying at my grandparents’ house. I used to love sleeping in their spare room, with the foldout couch and the television. (It seemed the ultimate decadence, to have a television in one’s room.) The movie was on commerical television and I came in late; one of the first things I saw was a couple catching on fire and falling through a window sixty floors up. I was hooked. For the next couple of hours, I fought against tiredness as the increasing commercials bloated its length. I didn’t make it through. I had to sleep.

I got it out on video in 2003, when I was living in the decaying sharehouse with my brother. About halfway through, the dodgy VCR I had bought secondhand (what was I thinking?) snared the tape and actually somehow recorded SBS on about thirty seconds worth, even though the plugs weren’t covered. The videostore didn’t charge me, which was kind of them (already videos were on their way out) but I still didn’t get to see the rest of it.

Then, last weekend my wife really wanted to see it, because it was about buildings and she works these days with buildings. People at work told her it was the film every project manager had to see. This time – in two installments – I watched the entire film.

There is something comforting for me to enter the seventies, this world that existed just before I was born. The Towering Inferno has just about every star of its time in it; it’s sad to think of their fates 35 years later. Steve McQueen died in 1980 – what a shock that would have been, the action hero of his time; he seems indestructible as the fire chief in this film. The other lead, Paul Newman, died a reasonably old man this year. (How can the action star of a blockbuster turn into ‘a reasonably old man’?) Fred Astaire, dead of course; that woman who we thought was Elizabeth Taylor is actually Jennifer Jones, but she’s not dead, just 90 and not so remembered. Faye Dunaway – her beauty in this film looks like it will last forever, but she’s now in her sixties. Then there’s O.J. Simpson, who doesn’t appear in so many films these days. Richard Chamberlain? I remember him best as the Indiana Jones rip-off (or vice-versa, given how old the books are), Alan Quartermain, in the 1980s; his star doesn’t shine brightly these days either.

I love the blinking lights of the computer; the wood panelling of the walls; the curious manner men speak to women – always trying to come up with a fresh line, as if that was the way to a woman’s heart. I love the strange sort of indolence that hangs over the scenes early in the film, the spacious sets they made, which just don’t ring true with what the interior of houses or hotels look like, not even in films today; the massive headphone radio the kid has over his ears so that he can’t hear what his mum is saying – ‘kids and their gadgets these days!’. I love the painted film posters they used to do.

I imagined I was watching the film at the drive-in, taking it seriously (not that I’m taking it unseriously, but I’m not watching it as it was made, I’m not watching it as a blockbuster, as the latest, greatest thing, which is what it is always meant to be), I watched it like it was new, and in those moments I was time travelling.

[Thursday 3pm #23] Possession: the novel and the film

03 Thursday Sep 2009

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Novel: Possession: A Romance / A.S. Byatt (1990)
Film: Possession (2002)

The novel

I found Possession an engrossing novel. It is the story of two contemporary literary scholars – Roland Mitchell and Maud Bailey – who discover a secret affair between two (fictional) nineteenth century poets – Randolph Ash and Christobel LaMotte. The scholarly world is captured with all its interesting intrigues.

At one level, the novel’s title refers to questions of ownership over history and historical figures and their traces. The theme is illuminated by Roland Mitchell’s initial act of theft of a draft of a letter from Ash to LaMotte when he discovers it in a book Ash once owned. Mitchell feels it’s his discovery and he should ‘possess’ it; a feeling intensified as he enlists Maud’s help and they find themselves on the run from other Randolph Ash scholars, including the American collector Mortimer Cropper whose massive cheque-book allows him to ‘possess’ many Ash relics.

The word ‘possession’ also sums up the exploration of romance and relationships. In both the nineteenth century affair between Ash and LaMotte and the contemporary one between Roland and Maud, the lovers struggle with the nature of love. Is it about possessing the other?

The nineteenth century narrative is created purely through documents (with the exception of the epilogue) – including letters written by the lovers, diaries by their respective partners (Ash’s wife, LaMotte’s lesbian partner), and pages and pages of their poems. The poems read just like nineteenth century poems; an incredible achievement. But they bored me and I skipped over pages of them – I wanted to read a novel, not poems!

The film

The film version of Possession takes just 98 minutes to adapt a 511 page novel. It is both a simplification and a ‘greatest hits’ collection of scenes that on its own – without knowledge of the novel – lacks emotional power and significance. Trying to develop two parallel romances in different centuries in that short amount of time is impossible, and the film makers barely even try – Maud and Roland, the present day lovers, are reduced to one awkward encounter and then discussion of it.

The thriller element of the novel, with different parties pursuing the secret of Ash and LaMotte is only lightly used in the film, a strange decision given its cinematic potential. The film-makers do use the dramatic grave robbing climax, but in a truncated and disappointing scene which doesn’t make much sense. Roland Mitchell wrestles the box from Cropper and takes it away to look at it with Maud, no more ethical than Cropper himself.

The most disconcerting aspect of the film is the casting of big jawed hunk Aaron Eckhart as the supposedly shy and bookish unemployed scholar Roland Mitchell. In the book his girlfriend calls him ‘Mole’, a name no-one would apply to Aaron Eckhart’s character. Probably to appeal to the American audience, he has also become American, when his Englishness was so central to his character in the novel.

[Thursday 3pm #16] Film reviews : W and Last Ride

16 Thursday Jul 2009

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W. – Oliver Stone’s latest film has just come out on DVD. It’s a biopic of George W. Bush, focusing on the family dynamics that – in this story at least – pushed him into wanting to be president and into invading Iraq. Stone’s take is that Bush was haunted by his early mess-ups, his drunkenness and occupational failures, and wanted to prove himself to his disproving father, who always preferred older brother Jeb. I found it interesting for its attempt to dramatise such recent history and the uncanny moments of resemblance to their real life counterparts in the different actors’ performances. But it lacks bite; it never touches the profound and never seems to resolve just what tone it is capturing or what it is trying to say. A good, watchable film, when I half expected something brilliant. 3/5

Last Ride – an Australian film currently showing in arthouse cinemas, it tells the story of a man on the run with his son somewhere between Port Augusta and Adelaide. The narrative tension is strong even as things move slowly, as pieces of their past are unfurled and the police close in. It is a visually interesting – at times beautiful – film with a good script and great performances. But it made me think that I like best films with articulate heroes and transcendence, not the inarticulate hero and bleak, full sun realism. 3.5/5

[Thursday 3pm #13] A weekend of assassination texts : Libra, JFK and Death of a President

25 Thursday Jun 2009

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On Saturday, I finished DeLillo’s Libra and the Kennedy assassination was going through my mind so much, I was desperate to finally watch JFK. But Nicole had already seen it, so I also got out Death of a President as well, a mock documentary made in 2006 about the assassination of George W. Bush. Death of a President was so weak, Nicole went to bed after half an hour and I turned it off to start watching JFK. I stayed up late, but still only got halfway through. I woke up early and put it on at 7am to watch the second half, the earliest I’ve ever seen a film. I think I was dreaming about it all.

Libra and JFK make for interesting comparison. DeLillo uses the contradictions and paradoxes of the assassination and of what we know of Lee Oswald to create a complex situation and a paradoxical character, represented by the scales of Libra – a man weighing contradictory things at the same time, ready to tip one way or the other. The paradoxes make for a postmodern novel, a postmodern character, a postmodern world like DeLillo always evokes.

In JFK, Stone takes the same contradictions and paradoxes and irons them out with a much more elaborate conspiracy theory. A surface reading makes it much more convincing than DeLillo’s vision, but that is exactly because it is so neat, so unwilling to accept that the truth of JFK’s assassination might be impossible to get to.

So, for example, what are we to make of Oswald setting up a pro-Castro organisation in the same building as Guy Bannister, a far-right private detective working against Castro? For DeLillo, it is about Oswald’s own contradictions, wanting attention and taking it wherever he can get it, giving some information to FBI agents, applying for work with a  man like Guy Bannister – anything to get noticed. For DeLillo, pro- and anti- Castro forces in this context are not opposing forces, but two sides of the scales, the same type of men, disenchanted, extreme men. In Libra, Oswald doesn’t know what he actually wants, beyond being listened to, glory, vindication of his genius, of his confused view of the world. And this, in its own way, is utterly convincing.

Stone’s interpretation of the same event? Jim Garrison, the DA heading the New Orleans investigation, sees it as clear proof that Oswald is not a communist at all, but an undercover agent for a nefarious coalition of the Office of Naval Intelligence, the FBI, the CIA, all three with offices within a block of the building. Which, in the context of a conspiracy thriller is, in its own way, utterly convincing.

While Libra is a brilliant novel and JFK is an excellent film, Death of a President is a competent waste of time. It has the exact feel of what a decent, uninspired documentary might be like if George W. Bush had been assassinated in 2007. As I watched, I imagined how fooled a class of sixteen year olds would be in a few years if I was an English teacher showing it to them. It has all the tedious overnarration and overexplanation of certain documentaries, intercutting each action scene with interviews with key players. Utterly convincing; but because we know none of it happened, rather boring.

It needed an edge to it. Think Woody Allen’s Zelig, the fake documentary of a man with chameleon abilities who manages to make it into every significant event of the early twentieth century. It was worthwhile because it was funny, the fake documentary had a purpose.

But they didn’t have to make this one funny. They could have made it hallucinatory and surreal, using the plausibility of the documentary style to lead the viewer not just over a tedious fake assassination but one with outrageous elements. Or it could have been political, with some interesting point about either Bush or the anti-Bush protestors, about what it meant for a country to live under his rule for eight years. But it studiously avoided doing this. It did exactly what it was trying to do and gets marks for that, but what it was trying to do was so unremarkable.

A film about everything: a review of Synecdoche, New York

18 Monday May 2009

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Spoiler alert

Synecdoche, New York is one of the most ambitious films I’ve ever seen. It has a span of decades and attempts to depict, on a huge scale, themes of mortality, loss, the meaning of life and the relationship of art to life. It’s the directorial debut of my favourite screenwriter Charlie Kaufman (Adaptation; Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and stars my favourite actor, Philip Seymor Hoffman (Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead; Capote; Charlie Wilson’s War).

The film begins mutedly. A sad, poetic meditation comes over the clock radio announcing the first day of fall and reflecting on the decline of all things. The main character, theatre director Caden, is entering the ‘fall’ of his life. Over breakfast each morning he reads a new obituary of someone famous dying.

The mode is mainly realist in these early scenes, as Kaufman skilfully documents the breakdown of Caden’s marriage and the way the small success of his production of Death of a Salesman is unfulfilling. There are beautifully handled, bleakly funny scenes of domestic drama and conflict – driving in the car, their daughter becomes distressed when Caden tells her she has blood running through her body. His wife Adele assures her she doesn’t have blood; Caden tells her it’s not good to tell her daughter she doesn’t have blood.

As Caden’s health deteriorates and he visits doctors in dark Kafkaesque corridors (another text mentioned early is Kafka’s The Trial) his wife leaves for Berlin with their daughter. His search for his daughter becomes a recurring subplot for the rest of the film, a surreal nightmare as he reads of her being tattooed, sees a poster of her as a stripper and final only meets her again as a dying middle-aged women who blames him for what happens.

If I’m getting ahead of the film it’s because from here the narrative fragments further and further; time and reality become unstable. Rather than a cause and effect narrative, we have echoes, recurrences and variations of themes, played out on a loose narrative.

The loose narrative is this: just as Caden’s life has unraveled, he receives a genius fellowship, a massive grant to do something important for his community. He buys a massive warehouse to stage his biggest production ever. Working with a burgeoning cast of actors, he begins rehearsals that are to go on for the rest of his life. He is attempting to recreate the experience of life itself on the stage, with hundreds of scenes in different buildings running simultaneously. The play just keeps on expanding, a new warehouse built over the top of the city to engulf the previous warehouse and blocks of the city, and then another.

Meanwhile, he becomes entangled in a love triangle that has a key part in the film, a triangle that evokes the spirit of Woody Allen, albeit played out in a surreal universe. Over the decades he switches between the two women, but the relationships are further tangled as actors are recruited to play their parts in the play.

Caden’s own part begins to be taken over, first by the man, Sammy, we’ve glimpsed throughout the film, a man who has dedicated years of his life to following Caden, observing everything he does and is now capable of assuming his role in the great play. The idea of Sammy, of an observer who cares about everything someone does, is one which has fascinated me in the past: if only there was someone watching and remembering, then what we do wouldn’t be forgotten and wouldn’t be wasted.

Life and art inevitably blur; what is being staged and what is being lived? I let go of any attempts to completely comprehend what I was watching and just let the scenes delight me in their variations on the themes Kaufman set up.

Just as the whole thing seems impossible to end, more time passes; Caden moves out of the director’s chair and a final apocalyptic scene ends things perfectly. The last years of his life, Caden has what perhaps we might sometimes long for: a director speaking to him through an earpiece, telling him exactly what do next, right down to the final command, ‘Die now.’

9/10

A Swedish vampire film: review of Let the Right One In

20 Monday Apr 2009

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I saw an advance screening of the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In on the weekend. It is getting rave reviews (it’s in the 90s on the Rotten Tomatoes review aggregator) and a huge fan base (it’s in the all time top 250 for imdb.com, based on user ratings).

The film opens with a black screen in silence. Then snow starts falling. It’s an icy setting appropriate to the film. One review said that it will warm your heart as it chills your blood, but I only got the second feeling. A bullied 12 year old boy, Oskar, makes friends with a strange 12 year old girl named Eli as a series of gruesome murders happen around the area. It’s in the awkward adolescent friendship of two outsiders that we’re meant to have our heart warmed, but I didn’t connect with them. Oskar is too dazed and passive for me to care about him much, and, to heighten the suspense, the director holds us back from learning too much about Eli.

It’s a strange and chilling story and a final twist is still resonating with me (but only after my wife explained it to me).  The direction was original, with constant defamiliarisations, throwing us into scenes we don’t immediately understand. (An effect heightened by reading the dialogue off subtitles.)

The best vampire film I’ve ever seen, but that’s not saying much.

7/10

On turning 28: a ramble

05 Thursday Mar 2009

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She calls me the Birthday Nazi because I always expect too much of birthdays. I remember when I was seven I thought it so unfair that a girl called Courtney got made to write lines on her birthday. We should be immune from getting into trouble on our birthdays. Our spouses should have unlimited patience. Our bosses should show inexhaustible generosity. The cars on the road should slow down and let us through.

I have a tradition of seeing films on my birthday. I haven’t done it every year and nor can I remember each one. But I can remember most of them. In 1999, it was Shakespeare in Love. In 2000, American Beauty for the second time. (How appropriate, then, that this year I’m going to see Sam Mendes’ latest film.) In 2002, Iris. In 2003, perhaps it was at the Adelaide Nova Cinema, the one about the nurse who believes the comatose patient loves him and he rapes her. Two birthdays in Adelaide – 2008, I was at the Adelaide Writers’ Festival for my birthday and saw (in the absence of much choice) Valley of Elah. 2006, Capote. 2007, anomalously on video at home, Kiss or Kill.

For years now I’ve felt so old. I guess I am pessimistic about the chances of my thirties being nearly as fun as my twenties. So much responsibility. How can I embrace responsibility? What are its rewards? I thought responsibility would make me feel authentic. It does not. (And I fear responsibility is a code word for compromise with the world. Perhaps the real problem is I still have the values of a 22 year old dissident while living the life of an old married man.)

Death used to be so far away, such a remote possibility. But the last few years it’s come to live in my soul, something near, whispering its certainty all day. I cultivate it, I was checking the recent deaths page on Wikipedia every day for a while. I’ve stopped doing that. I only check it a couple of times a month now.

My top 10 films of 2008

26 Friday Dec 2008

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These are the ten films I rate highest from 2008 – but it’s from everything I watched, not from the release date. I haven’t included films I re-watched though, otherwise I’d be obliged to have The Big Lebowski etc clogging up the list every year.

I have had a glorious year of cinema. So many wonderful nights spent engrossed in these and other films.

1. I’m Not There (2007) – Bob Dylan’s life retold as an ensemble of intercut myths; film doesn’t get much better than this.

2. Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead (2008 ) – a nasty thriller which unravels from a seemingly simple opening robbery scene into something more and more complicated until you finally realise the significance of what you first saw.

3. The Dark Knight (2008 ) – as good as the hype, an epic vision, satisfyingly complex.

4. The Apostle – a decade old now, but I couldn’t take my eyes off Robert Duvall as a fundamentalist preacher full of hypocrisy and violence and yet earnest and charming with all the language of the fundamentalist world down pat.

5. Charlie Wilson’s War (2008 ) – a political drama with brilliant dialogue and moral ambiguity.

6. The Counterfeiters (2008 ) – set in a German concentration camp, it made me realise how hard it is to be heroic, made me think in all likelihood I wouldn’t be defying Nazis in that situation.

7. The Darjeeling Limited (2007) – at times quirkily poignant as three brothers set out across India to find their mother.

8. Hey Hey It’s Esther Blueberger (2008 ) – charming Australian coming of age film as a Jewish girl finds herself.

9. Be Kind, Rewind (2008 ) – not the masterpiece I hoped for, but a silly, funny film as some video store clerks set out to reshoot all the videos in their store.

10. The Assassination of Richard Nixon (2005) – captures the 1970s very well in tracing the deterioration of a lonely man into madness as he finds himself at odds with the world and decides to get rid of the man behind it all – Nixon.

Honourable mentions: The Bothersome Man; King of Kong; The Italian; Bonnie and Clyde; There Will Be Blood.

Film review: Infamous

12 Thursday Jun 2008

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I’ve read Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, seen the film adaptation, and now also seen two films about Capote’s writing of it. The murders of the Clutter family and the characters of the two murderers, Dick and Perry, have taken on a mythical hue.

But Infamous didn’t gel with me, and I think it’s because I was too annoyed by Capote’s character (‘a talking brussel sprout’, a character playing Gore Vidal calls him) and jolted by the unexpected mix of genres this film presents – mock documentary, comedy, drama, romance.

An interesting theme is Capote’s friend Harper Lee struggling with her writing. As she helps Capote collate facts on the murders, she is waiting for To Kill A Mockingbird to come out. But she’s already impatient, and wanting to get started on her second novel. The novel which was never written.

I was thinking of her, co-incidentally, on the weekend. I think about her often, and what it means when a writer of her evident talent and with all the time to write in the world never publishes another book. I struggle against seeing it as the worst thing that could happen to a writer. (Maybe as a writer, but not as a human being.)

Capote goes through something similar; you could take it different ways – he exploited the Perry and Dick or he was shattered by the experience of writing about them. Whatever the case, he never finished another full length work in the twenty odd years he was to live.

Just before the end, Sandra Bullock’s Harper Lee delivers these poignant words:

It’s true for writers too who hope to create something lasting. They die a little getting it right. And then the book comes out. And there’s a dinner, maybe they give you a prize and then comes the inevitable and very American question : ‘What’s next?’ But the next thing can be so hard because now you know what it demands.

The best scene in the film is the execution scene and it disturbed me deeply. There was the chaplain piously reading out Psalm 23, an agent of the state, as Dick and Perry are hung.

The prisoners are shown as deeply scared by their impending death. No bravery, they’re crying out and vulnerable. It makes it so much more horrific than the stoic macho hero going to his death.

There’s another scene I like a lot, where a local offers his opinion on the Clutter murders, in a soliloquy that sits somewhere between Cormac McCarthy and the Coen brothers:

I’ve always believed that whenever you do something right it gives you a little bit of weight, you come to feel rooted to this Earth, secure. What scares me is, well sometimes, I don’t know where, a bad wind blows up. Could be cancer, could be drink, could be some woman who don’t belong to you. And despite the weight holding you to the ground, when that wind comes, it picks you up light as a leaf, and takes you where it wants. We’re in control until we’re not. Then we’re helpless.