See the lonely boy,
Out on the weekend
Trying to make it pay.
Can’t relate to joy,
He tries to speak and
Can’t begin to say.
—Neil Young, “Out on the Weekend”

It’s Friday night. He’s at his friends’ place having a few drinks. Their daughter, his God-child, is having her fifth birthday party on Sunday afternoon, and they remind him to come along. He says he’s feeling tired, he’ll see them at the party, and heads home. On the way, he changes his mind, gets off the bus a couple of stops early, and heads into a club. He has a few more drinks—too many, eventually—and meets someone, decides he wants to go home with them. He probably needed those extra drinks: he’s (charmingly) shy. Cut to the morning after, at his flat: he’s making coffee in the kitchen, and sheepishly wanders into the bedroom, cups in hand, hungover as shit. For almost the next 48 hours—until the object of his affections leaves on the Sunday afternoon for Portland, Oregon, for a university art course—the two of them are basically inseparable. What was merely a one-night stand quickly blossoms into an out-and-out romance. They fight and have make-up sex; smoke pot and do lines of coke, and discuss just about everything—growing up, their parents, siblings, and friends; early sexual experiences, and so on. In short, they really get to know one another.

Outside of their mesmeric infatuation though, these aren’t exactly the world’s most interesting people, but in Andrew Haigh’s directorial feature début Weekend, Chris New and Tom Cullen imbue Russell and Glen with an irrefutable honesty. Theirs are two of the most beguilingly naturalistic performances in recent memory. The intimate moments they share are deeply felt, and the sex—of which there’s quite a bit in the film’s 97 minutes—is disarmingly frank, but there’s nothing overly moving or innovative here, nothing shocking. Instead, this is a deftly observed, lovingly crafted study of two characters who are, each in their own ways, magnetic.

That aside, the film’s only vaguely original aspect is that it’s about two guys, not a guy and girl. Apart from Glen’s admirably bolshie gay-rights stance—which informs some of the more interesting discussions the couple has and actually carries the narrative at one point but doesn’t, I don’t think, bleed into the film’s own political agenda—many of the conversations in the film have been done better elsewhere (Before Sunrise/Sunset, for but one recent example). Glen’s possibly made-up art project (tape-recording the aftermaths of his sexual trysts—morning-after reflections on the night before) might seem too convenient a narrative ploy, something to flesh out what would otherwise just be an hour and a half of two people getting to know each other—but somehow it just works, especially when it wraps around itself in the film’s final moments.

See this low-budget triumph not because it breaks new ground or because it’s emotionally devastating—it doesn’t, really, and it isn’t—but because its twin lead performances are so fantastically sincere. It’s a small film about small moments, with accented, glorious highs and melancholy, shallow lows, painted over in comparatively broad strokes: Russell’s compelling shyness in the blushing throes of new love; Glen’s incessant needling and his reluctant, momentary unwillingness to say goodbye; the mundane quotidian things—trying on a new pair of sneakers, for example—transformed marvellously into quietly reflective truths.

Weekend is in cinemas now.

Michel Hazanavicius’ not-so-silent silent movie charms for most of its 90-minute run time, but relies on a number of spectacular scenes to hold aloft a spare, bare-bones plot. The resultant entertainment is light on narrative and heavy on artifice—and therefore basically a pastiche. Filmed entirely in Hollywood, The Artist opens its story in 1927—the year twin silent masterworks Metropolis and Napoleon, and the first talkie, The Jazz Singer, were released, and the year in which m-g-m head Louis B. Mayer conceived of the Oscars.

The picture centres on a silent-film actor, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) who, worried that the arrival of talkies will bring about the end of his career, has his attention diverted when he bumps into a plucky ingénue (and aspiring actress), Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) at the première of his new film. George’s boss at Kinograph, the studio to which he’s contracted, is on the lookout for fresh youthful talent, and Peppy fits the bill. (In a spot of perfect bit-part casting, John Goodman plays the rotund studio head.) As Peppy’s star rises, George’s falls—and, over time, they fall for each other.

The French-Belgian co-production is light on story—its laboured third act, which sees George plunged into melodramatic despair, is almost a bore—but the film’s many wonderful, delightful moments are enough to sustain interest. First: a spectacular film-within-a-film opening in which we see George’s new movie inset in the frame—a technique later reprised in a more melancholy, reflective mood. An early sequence celebrates the fluidity of silent-movie camera movements as much as it does the beautiful architecture of the unmistakable Bradbury Building in downtown L.A. (See also (500) Days of Summer; Blade Runner.)

From its use of the boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio (most visibly employed in recent times by Kelly Reichardt and Andrea Arnold) to the 22 f.p.s. frame-rate (down from 24) employed throughout—save for the films within the film, which are even slower, as befits the limitations of the time—the film’s many period-faithful technical qualities are to be applauded. Elsewhere, iris wipes and other now-uncommon scene transitions (including what might be called a ‘windscreen’ wipe), as well as the art-deco typefaces used on the intertitles and credits are wonderful to behold on the big screen.

The film is not wholly ‘silent’: there are two key sequences which make use of Foley and sync sound respectively. The former, a moderately gimmicky affair, is a dream (or nightmare?) scene which, while it cleverly incorporates montage, gets by almost solely on its use of sound. The latter, at the tail end of the film’s big song-and-dance-without-the-song grand finalé—all jazz-hands and goofy expressions—needlessly exposes Dujardin’s French accent, and gives Goodman one of the film’s few lines of dialogue. (Rose Murphy’s version of “Pennies from Heaven,” which underscores a third-act montage, is the film’s other major use of non-diegetic, non-orchestral sound.)

Hazanavicius’ regular composer Ludovic Bource’s often jazzy, wide-ranging score is alternately thrilling, moody, romantic and warmly comedic, even as it relies heavily on extant film scores—which makes its climactic third-act interpolation of Bernard Herrmann’s “Scène d’amour” cue from his score to Vertigo all the more glaring. Hazanavicius’ et al.’s use of the piece is, above all, cheap. Bource’s music was perfectly fine; there was no need to pillage from film-music history in order to onerously sentimentalise what could have been a perfectly fine scene accompanied by a (semi-)original composition. As if in some kind of karmic retribution, Herrmann’s cue isn’t even long enough to underscore the whole scene: it runs out before the action in the sequence is complete, leaving its characters dangling with no underscore, unnecessarily playing out the remaining minutes in silence.

The Artist is, in the end, more of a pastiche (its cribbing from silent-film techniques and use of Foley and sync-sound techniques extend beyond mere homage) than a genuine, heartfelt love-letter to silent cinema. The film is all surface, no depth—charming, but artificial: not immersive or emotionally involving.

The Artist is in cinemas today.

In Alexander Payne’s comfy new indie, George Clooney plays Matt King, a Honolulu-based lawyer and the sole trustee of a large parcel of prime real estate (some 25,000 acres) on the island of Kauai that his family has owned since the 1860s. He is a direct descendant of King Kamehameha, and, with his extended network of cousins—among them, Hugh (Beau Bridges)—Matt must decide what to do with the land, which is valued at hundreds of millions of dollars: sell it to investors and see it be developed into condos and golf courses, or keep it for seven years (at which time the trust must, by law, be dissolved) and wait for a more suitable buyer to appear in the interim. All of the locals are watching the sale closely, and almost none of them want it to be handed over to ‘foreigners.’ They’d prefer the investment capital to come from (and stay in) Hawaii, rather than from a large Chicago-based conglomerate.

The land-sale, though, isn’t Matt’s number-one concern—that’d be his comatose wife Elizabeth, left in a vegetative state after a speedboating accident. She’s all but dead—or she will be, as soon as he and his two daughters, the precocious Scottie (10), and the apparently ‘rebellious’ Alexandra (or Alex; 17), pull the plug. Two of the film’s best scenes come early on, about twenty-five minutes into the story. After Matt has been told his wife won’t wake up, he relays this to Alex (the should-be-Oscar-nominated young actress Shailene Woodley) while she’s in the family’s leaf-filled swimming pool, with the added info that Elizabeth has a do-not-resuscitate clause in her will. (In response, she echoes Dustin Hoffman’s perplexed exasperation underwater in The Graduate.) Then, in a brilliantly performed speech, Alex delivers a shocking revelation: Matt’s wife had been having an affair. The film goes downhill from there, delving into the repercussions of Matt’s bad parenting accompanied by a parade of Hawaiian shirts and a soundtrack of twangy, carefree Hawaiian music that is as incessantly deployed and as annoying* as the film’s weather is muggy and damp.

More maddening and of more concern than those elements, though, is the film’s borderline-offensive gender politics: The Descendants—Payne’s fifth feature film since 1996, and his first in seven years—has an obtuse, outwardly ambivalent (if not quite disdainful) attitude towards most its female characters. Unlike Election, or the masterful About Schmidt, or even Sideways—which arguably all have at their core strong, powerful, even domineering women—Payne’s new film actively petitions for the audience to harbour a dislike (or, if it succeeds in its apparent mission, something more emphatic) toward Matt’s daughters, his wife, and even toward the wife of the man** with whom Elizabeth cheated on Matt. (She’s played by the always excellent Judy Greer.)

Alex doesn’t get much more character development than we glimpse at in those aforementioned scenes with Matt near the film’s outset, and while the other daughter, Scottie, is allowed a few scenes at her mother’s death-bed midway through the film in which to flourish, this is later negated when, as she’s being informed by a counsellor of her mother’s imminent death, Scottie isn’t given any dialogue: instead we hear yet another sombre ukulele quietly plinking away. Judy Greer’s scene at Elizabeth’s death-bed, which comes just before Clooney’s Oscar-goading big goodbye, is unpleasant: it’s a teary, hysterical rant full of misplaced guilt and errant emotions. (“I just have to forgive you, even though I should hate you!” she yells.)

For The Descendants—which, like much of his other work, has its origins in a novel—Payne ditched his regular co-writer Jim Taylor, and teamed up with bit-part actors Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, the latter of whom is additionally a one-time SNL writer. In Kaui Hart Hemmings’ book, the character of Alex is a former model and drug addict in the early stages of recovery. The film affords her not even as slender a description as that: Payne labels her ‘rebellious’ and expands on this only barely, by showing her drinking one night (ooh, naughty!) and having Matt explain that she goes to high school on a different Hawaiian island to where the family have their home. Her relationship with her boyfriend, Syd, was also disrupted in the transition to the screen: he’s recast simply as her friend—such a change becoming necessary because (apparently) Woodley and her co-star, Nick Krause, had no romantic chemistry. (In other words, he can’t act.) In a further missive from the sidelining-female-characters dept., Payne has Matt and Syd share a father-son like bonding moment—the one time in the film when Syd sounds like anything more than a dumb stoner-jock. (Matt’s haughty, irascible father-in-law also gets more screen time than he deserves.)

Reading the novel’s first chapter, it’s clear that Hemmings (who has a cameo in the film) gave Matt and his daughters a comparable level of exposure and visibility her narrative; Payne’s film, conversely, places Matt front-and-centre, and diminishes Alex and Scottie’s role in proceedings. (It also seems, from this extract, that Hemmings’ novel comments more than does the film adaptation on Matt and his family’s whiteness and the racial tensions that permanently simmer just below the surface—a fascinating secondary theme explored only fleetingly [and jokingly] in the film.) Aside from these glaring flaws in adaptation, Payne et al.’s script contains missed opportunities elsewhere: what could have been an expertly crafted, sensational dream sequence mid-way through the third act—even as it plainly apes Six Feet Under—turns out to be real life, and in service of nothing more than rudimentary plot advancement. Furthermore, the almost risible amount of aphoristic, expository voiceover—including the ‘woe-is-me’ line “What is it that makes the women in my life want to destroy themselves?” (which may or may not come from the source novel)—given to Matt at every turn quickly becomes not only exasperating to keep up with, but appears mostly unnecessary.

Although it looks lovely—Phedon Papamichael once again proves that his glorious cinematography (which here includes a small handful of sub-Malickian nature-shots and some wonderful vistas of the Hawaiian islands) can, ahem, ‘brighten up’ even the blandest of stories—there’s nothing particularly interesting or exciting about a story this uninspiring told in so relentlessly safe (and ultimately, to more than half its characters, disparaging) a manner. No wonder it’s near the top of the heap of Best Picture nominees.

The Descendants is in cinemas today.

*Though a lot of the songs are just shy of infuriating, especially those that are reprised often, Jeff Peterson’s slightly melancholy “Hawaiian Skies” sits nicely in the background in a second-act scene. Every other song—the soundtrack comprises no score, just an assortment original Hawaiian music—is bland and yawn-inducing.

**That man, as it happens, is a real estate mogul; he’s played by a surprisingly passable Matthew Lillard, who hasn’t appeared in anything noteworthy since Scream.

Wayne Wang’s twentieth motion picture is something of a flop. The film is a story of sisterhood illustrated by the same duo of actresses, playing three generations of themselves in three eras: in present-day Shanghai; as teenagers in 1997; and in Hunan province in 1829. Based in part on a novel by Lisa See, Wang has crossed this terrain before, with The Joy Luck Club almost two decades ago. That film interlocks its narratives much more tightly and with a great deal more precision than does Snow Flower and the Secret Fan. You sort of sense you’re in trouble when you realise, immediately, that the credits and intertitles are in Papyrus, surely the most mundane of default, standard-issue typefaces.

The inter-generational saga, which uses the same two actresses in all three time periods, begins in the present day, in Shanghai, with a multi-national conglomerate celebrating the opening of a new office in New York, to which one of the two sisters will be sent. Soon backtracking to 1997, and the girls’ adolescence, thence to 1829 and their ancestors’ ritual feet-binding ceremonies and their matching as ‘laotong’ (friends for eternity), the film establishes the bonds that will echo through the ages. There’s no beauty without pain, no peace without suffering, someone says in Hunan by way of explaining why these little girls’ feet must be painfully bound. Their modern-day counterparts’ pain is nowhere near as visible or external; instead, they suffer on the inside.

In 1829, they convey letters by writing on fans (herein the titular ‘secret’) pledging their eternal commitment to one another, while in 1997 they gossip about trivialities as the stock-market crash lingers as a backdrop of concern only to the adults. Arranged marriages, typhoid, and other material inconveniences pervade the nineteenth-century world, while modern Shanghai is sleek but congested. All three worlds are steeped in old-world values, but none feels wholly authentic. (The score—piano-heavy dinner-music for the contemporary scenes, overly zealous traditional instrumental accompaniment for 1829—doesn’t much help.) Physical and emotional sacrifices in service of tradition (1829); dotage and filial piety (1997); and the demands of corporate life (2011) prove all too much for Wang to cut between, and he really puts a spanner in the works by introducing to the contemporary scene Hugh Jackman, of all people, in what is surely the year’s most bizarre cameo (as a sleazy Australian businessman). Making matters worse, for much of the contemporary scenes, the two women speak a stilted, sometimes unintelligible English. (No, I’m not really sure why they weren’t just speaking Mandarin or Cantonese either).

From his first major film, the Cassavetes-like Chan is Missing in 1982, through to The Joy Luck Club and his two great collaborations with Paul Auster, Smoke and Blue in the Face, Wang proved both a competent and interesting filmmaker; over the last decade and a bit, as he’s increasingly turned toward what one can only assume are the financial comforts of commercial cinema, he’s lost the verve and spark he once had. His inability to articulate his message through weaving together the multi-generational stories, combined with often uninspired cinematography, results in an often puzzling, frequently banal film.

Snowflower and the Secret Fan is in cinemas today.

Steven Soderbergh, arguably one of the more interesting—and certainly among the most prolific—of modern American directors, attempts to give the virus-outbreak film a new sheen, but doesn’t actually add much to the conversation (as it were). Written by Scott Z. Burns, who also penned Soderbergh’s silly 2008 comedy The Informant!, Contagion tells of an avian-like flu emanating from Hong Kong, a contact-driven airborne virus that affects the respiratory system and causes a grotesque foaming at the mouth before killing the recipient.

Patient zero is a jarringly makeup-free Gwyneth Paltrow, on holiday in southeast Asia. We meet her on day two—in a sprawling metropolis that looks somewhat ethnically stereotyped to be a wretched hive of scum and… well, not quite villainy, but contamination at least—as she’s already showing the debilitating symptoms of the as-yet-unknown disease. Over the next 100 or so minutes, the film tracks life on the planet over the next 150-plus days before eventually re-winding to the incept date, when a bat drops a piece of fruit into a pig-sty; the animal (well, part of it) is later served to the virus’ first victim. The film’s gratuitously star-studded cast is ridiculous. Like a ’70s disaster pic—think The Towering Inferno or the long-running Airport franchise—transplanted to 2011, there are almost too many famous and semi-famous faces here to count: Paltrow’s distressed, quarantined widower is merely the first in a long line. Played by a chunky-looking Matt Damon, he is the film’s central character and is intended as something of an audience surrogate (or at least someone with whom we’re meant to identify, as hard as that is).

The loss of his wife, whose autopsy occasions the film’s most graphic scene, becomes the jumping-off point for what is, in the event, a pandemic of global proportions. He’s joined along the way by Laurence Fishburne, Marion Cotillard, and the increasingly recognisable character actor Enrico Colantoni, who play CDC and WHO officials of various stripes. John Hawkes pops up as a janitor concerned about his son’s ADHD (but also the virus, obvs.), and Bryan Cranston pokes his head in the room briefly as some sort of DHS officer. Unfunny comedian Demetri Martin and the underappreciated actress Jennifer Ehle are CDC lab-rats working alongside Dr. Ian Sussman (a memorable turn from Elliott Gould; as flippant a role as he’s been given, it great to see him back on the big screen). But wait, there’s more: Kate Winslet has a major role as an official drafted by the CDC to liase with federal and state agencies (among them FEMA and other governmental bodies) in order to understand and control the spread of the disease. She’s also a source for media sound-bites, and attempts to keep misinformation to a minimum, which is where…

…Jude Law comes in. More irritating in this film than he has been in years, his buck-toothed, cockney/Australian-accented blogger extraordinaire features prominently in an ultimately stupid subplot about a possible homeopathic remedy. (Here, the film gets in many ill-advised digs at “the blogosphere.”) Winslet’s cool, calm and collected official stands in stark contrast to Law’s YouTube-enabled rants and cries of corruption and censorship from on-high. The clear-eyed, documentarylike fashion in which the film is shot creates an initially exciting (hyper)realism, but this quickly fades once you start to hear the shoddiness of the script. The inclusion of media reports in an audio-only capacity—that is to say, we don’t see TV reports, only hear them—is an interesting choice, and, with the clarity of some of the security-camera footage reviewed by Cotillard’s official, lends technology a welcome higher importance.

For a film that is nominally as much about the rate of grisly infection as it is about the unattended proliferation of fear itself, the politics of misinformation and corporate and governmental interference too often take a back seat to mindless pure entertainment: the grim spectre of death is continually hovering over the alternate near-future of Contagion, but the zombielike ghost-streets and mass graves that start to bleed into the narrative in the third act feel all too familiar—and not just from virus-outbreak movies. An undercooked subplot about Cotillard’s character being kidnapped and removed to a small village (in order for her to be used to barter for the first wave of antibodies and cures) is, for example, dropped and picked up again seemingly at random. Much of the film is concerned with substandard suspense, and what’s more, some of the dialogue is truly moronic. “Someone doesn’t have to weaponize the bird-flu: the birds are already doing that,” sputters Fishburne’s guy-in-a-suit. Later, in the film’s penultimate scene, as he’s talking with John Hawkes and preparing an antidote for his son, Fishburne is given (something like) the following dumb line: explaining that “in the old days, people used to shake hands to show they weren’t carrying a weapon—I wonder if the virus knows that.” To make matters worse, at film’s end, with his daughter safe from harm (she was kept quarantined) and many thousands of people around the world six feet under, Damon’s protagonist sets about deleting the photos of his dead wife from the family’s digital camera. Downstairs, he’s set up a faux prom for his teen-age daughter and her recently-certified-virus-free boyfriend; playing on the stereo is U2’s “All I Want is You.” Yech. Cliff Martinez, who composed such great, perfectly atmospheric music for Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, here creates a grating sonic landscape that persists like a ringing in your ear.

From the underrated The Girlfriend Experience to last year’s Spalding Gray documentary farewell, And Everything is Going Fine, Soderbergh’s recent work has tended toward the experimental. If Contagion and Haywire (his other 2011 film) signal a return to traditional narrative, it is only a structural one: Contagion, at least, is still as visually alive and dazzlingly composed—the director is, once again, his own cinematographer—as were his last five pictures. No, the problem here is not so much in the film’s aesthetic construction, but in its lack of ambition: why crowd out a picture like this with umpteen name actors but give them nothing smart or particularly compelling to say, or so ‘been there, done that’ a world to inhabit?

Contagion is in cinemas today.

Time rise
Time fall
Time leaves you nothing,
nothing at all
—Cat Stevens, “Time”

“Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.”
—Steve Jobs^†

In 1987, one of the episodes of the pbs short-film anthology series American Playhouse was a sci-fi story called “The Price of Life.” The plot of the 40-minute episode—which starred a young Dustin Diamond—is relatively simple: in the near future, notes and coins are no longer legal currency; instead, goods and services are paid for in time. Everyone has these little calculator-like devices in holsters on their belts that perform transactions and keep a record of your ‘account balance,’ as it were. You’re born with a set amount; you can swap time with other people, and when your time’s up, you die.

The new film by writer-director Andrew Niccol—as much a star vehicle for Justin Timberlake (here dialling down the natural charisma that made his appearance in The Social Network so memorable) as it is another of the director’s attempts at melding thought-provoking sci-fi to a plausible concrete reality—is a silly, laughably poorly written piece of work that owes a huge debt to stories like “The Price of Life,” as well as to a swathe of sf-movie history. (It may even be directly appropriating the content of a Harlan Ellison novel.) As in the American Playhouse episode, Niccol’s characters in the simplistically named In Time die when their clocks run out, and can trade time (or steal it) from others. From the gaudy 1976 movie Logan’s Run, Niccol borrows the conceit of dying at a certain age: in that population-control Michael-York-starring eco-sci-fi myth, everyone died on their 30^th birthday when a flashing jewel embedded in their palm indicated their time was up. In In Time, no one ages past 25; they can still die of natural causes, but as long as they have enough time on their clocks—a nice bit of wetware, and one of the film’s cg highlights: bioluminescent monochrome-green digital timers emblazoned across their forearms which give new meaning to the phrase “body clock”—they can live for eons. (The forearm-countdown-timers double as an oblique, ultimately dumb holocaust reference.) Banks also store time in laser-scanning devices that half-resemble silver bricks.

Timberlake’s protagonist, Will Salas, has been twenty-five for three years. He lives in the ghetto in Dayton—though, for whatever reason, apparently not in Ohio—and wakes up each day wishing that he had more than 24 hours on his clock. His mother, played by a robotic Olivia Wilde, is in a fairly massive amount of debt, so he’s working double shifts to try and pay that off for her as well as trying to keep himself alive. With his shaved head, Will is reminiscent of the characters in THX-1138,and in giving the character a repetitive, conveyor-belt job (particularly in a couple of the shots of him and his fellow factory drones at work), you can see Niccol struggling to inset what is arguably a reference to Fritz Lang’s Metropolis. After a scuffle in a bar with a probable mobster, Will meets a man (Matt Bomer, tv’s Chuck) with more than a century on his clock. He’s 105, and he’s had enough life. While Will is asleep, this man transfers more than a century to him, and walks, in his final minutes, to an over-bridge from which his corpse falls after suffering the fatal heart attack that ultimately attends all the denizens of this unpleasant alternate future. Will is suspected of being a thief not only of time, but also of this man’s life.

He goes on the run, using the time he’s recently come into to travel across precinct borders known as time zones, each having a marked ‘time difference’—these are among the first in a long, eventually tiring line of time-related puns. Will goes through a dozen or so of these checkpoints, each one depleting more of his currency than the last, and eventually arrives at New Greenwich, an affluent suburb on the right side of the tracks. In the ghetto, people do everything fast; a popular pastime is arm-wrestling for spare change. (This sometimes ends fatally.) There’s a city mission that gives out time to those most desperately in need, something like a soup kitchen that doles out minutes. In New Greenwich, people have more money than sense, and therefore do everything at an almost ridiculously leisurely pace. So when Will eats too fast and walks a little too quickly, he sticks out like a sore thumb. One of the first people to notice him is Sylvia Weis (Amanda Seyfried, Chloe, Mamma Mia!), heiress to an enormous banking fortune. Will meets and, in one of the film’s better scenes, plays a tense game of poker with, her father (Vincent Kartheiser, tv’s Mad Men), a man who has been 25 for 85 years. Kartheiser introduces his poor-little-rich-girl daughter, his mother, and his sister; this occasions one of the film’s only good jokes (and one which necessarily echoes Chinatown). Following another round of lame puns (“You must come from time!”), Will absconds with his newfound love and sets out on a Bonnie-and-Clyde-style Robin-Hood-esque mission to redistribute the wealth from her father’s banking empire, all the while trying to outmanœuvre a Timekeeper (a brilliant Cillian Murphy) who, with his fellow hired goons, is in charge of policing and reclaiming lost and stolen time.

New-Zealand born Andrew Niccol’s previous work as writer and director includes, chronologically and in descending order of entertainment value, the superb script for The Truman Show, a film he also produced; the entertainingly pulpy thriller Gattaca; the ridiculously dumb S1m0ne (2002); the just-as-dumb script for the unendurable Tom Hanks vehicle The Terminal; and, second-most recently, the Nic Cage crapfest Lord of War (2005). He put together the screenplay for In Time—which was first named Im.mortal (geddit?), then Now, before settling on its final title—only a few short months before shooting, so perhaps it’s no wonder that it’s engorged with laughably silly time-filling puns which quickly become annoying. (Another example: when Murphy’s Timekeeper, who looks like he fell straight out of The Matrix, has lined up a group of possible informants, he tells one of his minions to “clean their clocks.”) Roger Deakins’ gorgeous widescreen compositions save the production visually; without his expertise behind the camera, the film would have been far more difficult to get through. He and Niccol occasionally throw in some interesting flourishes in the third act; one shot—an oblique angle with a washed-out tone intended to have the look of closed-circuit security-camera footage—is particularly notable. The film’s inappropriately syrupy, glossy score comes courtesy of Craig Armstrong, whose previous credits include some of Oliver Stone’s most recent and most poorly received films, along with the insipid rom-coms Love, Actually, and Must Love Dogs.

All this aside, it is the script that is the film’s biggest failing; not only does Niccol’s dialogue sound terrible coming out of the mouths of a bunch of young tv actors—perhaps his biggest error was not incorporating into the film’s central conceit an arena in which experienced actors could take part—but the world of the film is not adequately fleshed-out. Would that the script were overwritten, or bloated with exciting ideas, but we aren’t, for example, told why people in less affluent areas aren’t kept alive on a sustenance wage in order to work in the factories, or if Niccol even had Karl Marx in mind when he conceived of the film. (He almost certainly didn’t know when he was putting it together that this work, with its zeitgeisty premise, would have landed smack-bang in the middle of a nascent global anti-1% revolution.) It’s disheartening to see a filmmaker who, little more than a decade ago, showed so much promise deliver such a poorly-thought-out film. Although I’m not holding out too much hope for his next project (coming in 2013), an adaptation of Twilight scribe Stephenie Meyer’s ya novel The Host.

In Time is in cinemas today.

Justin Kurzel’s début feature is a dramatization of Australia’s most notorious serial-murder crime spree. Needless to say, the film is a remarkably unpleasant viewing experience—although, like all good horror-thrillers, it prefers unremitting tension to direct on-screen violence. In 2003, Australia’s most notorious serial killer, John Bunting, was convicted of committing eleven murders in and around Adelaide between August of 1992 and May of 1999. The media dubbed the case “the bodies in the barrels” murders after the manner in which Bunting stored the corpses of his victims: eight dismembered bodies were found in six plastic barrels of acid in a disused bank vault in the semi-rural community of Snowtown, 145km north of Adelaide, on May 20, 1999. According to Wikipedia, “more than 250 suppression orders prevented publication of details of the case.” In early 2011, a judge lifted the remaining orders in response to a request by Kurzel and his producers. Kurzel’s film, named for that town, is a chilling portrait of a serial killer and the despicably violent gang for whom he became something of a cult leader.

Working principally with first-time actors, Kurzel chillingly frames the story not around Bunting but around Jamie Vlassakis, a seventeen year old teenager whom the ringleader took under his wing (as it were), leading him into his grotesque, psychopathic world of murder and torture. (The film was shot almost exactly in sequence, which would have helped the actors tremendously.) Thematically and in its austere near-Outback setting, Snowtown recalls two other great Australian scary movies: Wake in Fright and Journey Among Women. The film is exceptionally well-crafted. Its fluid camerawork, much of it handheld, and its starkly beautiful photography is a sight to behold. The careful use of a slow-motion in a couple of key scenes, combined with some superb steadicam indoor-outdoor transitions, adds to the sense of dread, already palpable from the first frames—a blank screen with a groaning, ceaseless heartbeat-like pounding underneath is all we see for the first thirty seconds or so.

In its juxtaposition of quotidian banality and brutal psychopathy, it echoes another recent Australian crime-thriller from last year, David Michôd’s Animal Kingdom—except that the ratio of blandness to terror is heightened in Kurzel’s film, especially in its unwatchably horrific central scene of sustained torture, which is where I locate the filmmaker’s biggest error of judgement. As Out of the Blue may have done for some of the inhabitants of Aramoana, Kurzel’s film might bring closure to a small community in South Australia, but it’s difficult to see exactly why this story needed to be told on film, and particularly with such a torture-porn-like centrepiece. Some of the murders, the director repeatedly notes in his informative but expectedly subdued audio commentary, took place over two or more days, with Bunting and his fellow sado-masochists drawing out their victims’ anguish to gut-wrenching levels. As such, the film periodically slows down to near-real-time; this technique is shocking and repulsive in equal measure. If you’ve already built up an almost unbearable sense of dread through no more than the combined, obvious skill of your cast and crew, why go all-out in the middle? The film’s centrepiece has something of a wholly gratuitous ‘violence for the sake of violence’ feel to it.

Snowtown is out now on Blu-ray through Madman.

Special features include an audio commentary by the director; his short films Blue Tongue, Pulse, and Bell; a selection of deleted scenes with optional commentary; some original casting-couch footage; a textual account, in intertitles, of the details of the murders and their aftermath, including details of the apprehension and subsequent sentencing of the accused; and the film’s teaser and theatrical trailers.

Technical review: Adam Arkapaw’s beautiful cinematography is some of the best of the year; its faithful rendering on this disc is a wonder to behold (if that’s not too perverse a sentiment given the subject matter). The disc’s sound mix is also of a very high quality.

Animator Sylvain Chomet draws Jacques Tati in the character of M. Houlot.

Michael House’s hour-long documentary survey of the life and work of French director Jacques Tati—its title styled in homage to PlayTime, the director’s 1967 masterwork—is a handsomely produced, informative appreciation of French cinema’s first true comedian, a man whose idiosyncrasies, it was once said, embody “everything that commercial cinema doesn’t have time or space for.” The light, playful nature of the film is evident from the start: the first interviewee on screen isn’t the expected academic, film historian, or pop-culture buff, but (surprisingly) something of all three, combined: Frank Black of Pixies.

The film doesn’t touch on any of Tati’s influences, preferring instead to simply trace his rise from musical-hall mimicry and dance—accompanied by a possibly erroneous photograph of the Folies Bergères—as a straightforward series of events in their own right. The reason for this soon becomes clear: Tati, at least as he’s presented here, was always a filmmaker who worked outside traditional bounds. No one ever called him an auteur, although certainly the way he presented his brand of comedy was consistent from film to film. He often worked as an independent artist, without benefit of any major studio or central funding, opting to fund his most audacious project, PlayTime (on which more later) personally.

Tati began his career in the 1920s, when he taught himself to mime the movements and facial expressions of his fellow rugby players. He performed skits after matches, found that he had a knack for physical comedy, and developed his own routines—which helped him fall in easily with avant-garde and surrealism circles in Paris at the time. His four major, best-known features—Jour de Fête, Les Vacances de M. Hulot, Mon Oncle, and PlayTime—are explored in chronological order, with new insights presented along the way. House presents snippets from a little-seen 1995 colourised version of Jour de Fête; examines the whirlwind success of Les Vacances de M. Hulot, which lead to the popular and critical acceptance of his later work so eagerly desired by the director; as one interviewee in House’s film says, Mon Oncle was Tati’s bid to be recognised on the world stage, on a world-cinema platform exemplified no more clearly than by its sound track being recorded in two languages (English and French)—one for the home market, one for the US. The film deservedly won the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1959.

PlayTime, the director’s most ambitious project and the film now rightly recognised as his masterpiece, involved the building of a small city on disused land on the outskirts of Paris which would be dubbed “Tativille.” It was intended to be more or less permanent, like Cinecittà, but there was a motorway planned in its path, and Tati would be bankrupted spending almost half as much in tearing Tativille down as he had in erecting it. The film, shot on 70mm and in glorious Technicolor, was edited severely by the perfectionist Tati himself—not in a cutting room, but at a Parisian cinema; he trimmed more than 20 minutes from the film, content which is most probably lost to history. After his bankruptcy, he moved to the Netherlands and made Trafic, the final outing of his famed creation, Monsieur Hulot. A few unusual appearances on Swedish television, and the frustrating, uneven Parade (1974) were the tail ends of a career that sadly tapered off to almost nothing by the end of the ’70s.

House uses on old black-and-white photos the faux parallax-effect that has become commonplace in contemporary documentary—sometimes it works, but here it looks cheap and rough around the egdes, like it was compiled in a rush. A cadre of people who were close to Tati, as well as some of his living relatives, such as his daughter, are interviewed alongside artist-filmmaker Mike Mills (Thumbsucker, Beginners), and Sylvain Chomet (Les triplettes de Belleville), whose 2010 film L’illusioniste was based upon an undeveloped, dormant Tati script the director began in the ‘50s. (The main character is an animated caricature of Tati himself.) There’s also a fun, brief segment with a foley artist who explains the sound-recording process on Mon Oncle.

House’s film isn’t nearly as exhaustively well-researched or as strenuous an undertaking as was Tati’s daughter Sophie Tatischeff’s two-hour film In the Footsteps of Monsieur Hulot—made in 1989 and included on some DVD editions of Trafic—and not quite as stacked with tidbits as it ought to have been given that David Bellos’ biography of Tati is what inspired House to make the film. Nonetheless, this is more than merely an extended DVD supplement: as an accessible chronicle of the inner and outer life of Monsieur Hulot, one couldn’t really ask for anything more enjoyable.

The Magnificent TaTi is out now on DVD through Madman.

The special features are a brief interview with the film’s director, and extraneous footage taken during interviews with the actors in Tati’s final work, 1974′s Parade.

Woody Allen’s marvellous new film opens, in obvious reflection of his 1979 masterpiece Manhattan, with a three-and-a-half-minute sequence featuring shots of the city of light in daytime and fading into rainy night set to the Sidney Bechet tune “Si tu vois ma mère.”* In voiceover against a blank screen, we’re quickly introduced to Gil Pender (Owen Wilson), the Allen surrogate in this, the director’s forty-first feature film. Gil is a hack Hollywood screenwriter on vacation with his fiancée Inez (a miscast Rachel McAdams). He’s “in love with a fantasy” of Paris in the ’20s (Paris in the ’20s in the rain, specifically), and is having a hard time with the novel he’s always wanted to write (called “Out of the Past”), about a man who works in a nostalgia shop. To clear his head, he takes strolls around the city at night.

The film moves quickly into the escapist fantasy telegraphed musically and visually in the opening montage: twenty minutes in, and we’re in the ’20s. A perplexed Gil, annoyed by the faux intellectualism of his fiancée’s friend (an excellent Michael Sheen) and his ditzy wife, is strolling around the rain-slicked cobblestone streets. He sits at the foot of a set of concrete stairs, and, as the clock strikes twelve, sees a beautiful 1920 Peugeot Landaulet appear out of the darkness; the gaggle of bon vivants inside whisks him away, and he soon finds himself at a party for Jean Cocteau. This is where the film starts to incorporate a game of guess-the-famous-historical-personage: we meet the Fitzgeralds, Zelda and Scott—easy picks, and perfectly written and cast—especially the vivacious Alison Pill as Zelda, with her languorous Southern drawl.

In short order, we’re introduced to a variety of Jazz Age luminaries: Ernest Hemingway (a standout performance by the hitherto unknown Corey Stoll) who, like the Bogey apparition in Play it Again, Sam, serves as a man’s man to give Gil advice on manly matters; T.S. Eliot (“Prufrock is, like, my mantra,” Gil admiringly tells him); Cole Porter (whose love songs provide background music in the past, and nostalgic conversation fodder in the present); Luis Buñuel (to whom Gil humorously pitches El ángel exterminador); Picasso; Gertrude Stein (a tremendous Kathy Bates), from whom Gil gets writing advice; a stoic Man Ray (“I understand perfectly, [Gil]—you come from another time…”); and a scene-stealing Salvador Dalí, wonderfully played by Adrien Brody. We also meet Marion Cotillard’s character, whom the film eventually reveals as one of its true stars. She plays Adriana, something of an artist’s muse, and a sometime lover to both Hemingway and Picasso.

As the first of many nights in back in time draws to a close, Gil’s contemporary conundrums—of wondering whether Inez is right for him, and of how on Earth to finish his book—clash with Stein and Hemingway’s writing advice, and his budding infatuation with Adriana. We soon learn that she, in turn, is obsessed with la belle époque Paris: the 1890s, the time of Toulouse-Lautrec and Degas, of Gauguin and Matisse. Djuna Barnes, Alice B. Toklas, Joséphine Baker, Juan Belmonte and a number of others are discussed and/or seen. Adriana says she came to Paris from Bordeaux to work with Coco Chanel, and Gil, trying to sound intellectual, quotes Hemingway back at himself, repeating that line about all American literature having come from one book, Huckleberry Finn.

Back to the present, and to Inez cultivating a relationship with Michael Sheen’s pseudo-intellectual art historian. She’s without a doubt the film’s most poorly written character, but Woody’s never really been great with women. As if to make up for it, his cameo-casting of Carla Bruni as a tour-guide at the Rodin museum is inspired: sitting on a park bench with Gil, her reading in translation of a section of Adriana’s diaries is nothing short of mesmerising. Léa Seydoux (Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds) plays the age-old Allen variation on the mpdg stock type, of whom Mariel Hemingway in Manhattan was arguably an early iteration: a flirtatious, impressionable young blonde to whose charms Gil inevitably, wantonly succumbs.

As much as he might occasionally seem a bit too upbeat or perhaps even insular, Gil is still a typical Woody stand-in. An archetypal Allen character, exasperated and nervy in the same beat, he gives a bemused Zelda Fitzgerald a valium (calling it something like “the wonder-drug of the future”); confides in Hemingway, explaining his biggest fear is death; and worries that staying in the 1890s will have its drawbacks (no Zifromax, novocane, or antibiotics, you see). Wilson fits the Woody-surrogate role to a T, his quietly manic verbal tics and physical mannerisms—the way he nervously saunters around with his hands in his pockets—fleshing out the character from its on-the-page origins. What’s more, casting Kurt Fuller and Mimi Kennedy (In the Loop) as Inez’s acerbic, disapproving parents gives the film an extra jolt from time to time.

The city is as much a motivator here as it was in Allen’s great New York films of the ’70s and ’80s. Music plays a central role, too: Stephane Wrembel’s delightfully slide-filled Reinhardtesque piece “Bistro Fada” and a (slightly chintzy) love theme on accordion serve as underscore, as did Gershwin in Manhattan. Darius Khondji and Johanne Debas’ masterful, gloriously lush cinematography bathes the city of light in an eternal golden glow, and subtly embellishes its darker nocturnal corners. (This may mark the start of a continuing collaboration: Khondji is also shooting Allen’s next film, the Rome-set Nero Fiddled [initially titled Bop Decameron].)

When he started doing standup in the ’60s, Allen had a running bit about the Lost Generation; the personages (Hemingway, Stein, Picasso, the Fitzgeralds) and even the recurring punch line—pun intended—reappear in similar fashion in Midnight in Paris. He may once have adored New York City (and he may still today), but with his forty-first feature film—his warmest and most inviting in many years—it’s now clear that Woody Allen, being the irrepressible romantic he is, probably always wanted to live in Paris in the ’20s (in the rain).

Midnight in Paris is in cinemas now.

*As evidenced in Wild Man Blues, Woody has long been enamoured with Bechet.

Michael Shannon delivers yet another solid performance in Noah Buschel’s functionally flawed but visually arresting The Missing Person, a neo-noir that first toured the festival circuit two years ago and is finally being issued on DVD locally. Shannon plays a private-eye hired to tail a man from Chicago to L.A. When he gets there, he’s tasked with returning the man to his wife in New York City (via Mexico, briefly). Akin to many of the other characters Shannon has made his name playing, this chain-smoking alcoholic detective is full of nervous energy, a sullen, almost downtrodden wise-guy dealing with a heap of psychic pain—pain which emanates from an epoch-defining, trauma-causing event.*

Buschel has a film in post-production right now; his only notable prior credit is a poorly-received biopic of Neal Cassady that details his life after On the Road came out. Though its flaws radiate from the script out to some clunky delivery and a few poorly-edited sequences, The Missing Person shows that Buschel has an eye for detail and a very specific personal style—of which an early, magical dream-sequence homage to Edward Hopper’s New York Movie (a version of which painting reappears in the third act) is just one exquisite example.

The film’s locations—Union Station and greater downtown Los Angeles, and, later in the film, New York itself—are used almost as characters in their own right (though this isn’t exactly Miracle Mile or Drive). The film’s flubbed line deliveries (though none from the principals, which include the great character actress Amy Ryan) stick out like sore thumbs, but they’re few and far between: Buschel’s script is for the most part sharp and well-implemented. There is something of a sincerely-meant Lynchian mood throughout, amplified by a predominantly jazz-filled soundtrack—plus some carefully-placed Stravinsky. (There are also nods, both direct quotations and subtle allusions, to a small raft of pop-culture artefacts aside from the aforementioned Hopper painting: Serpico, Nathanael West, Chinatown, and Bogey—to name just a portion.)

Even with faults in the implementation of the writing, the lush visual style in The Missing Person, combined with its carefully-selected soundtrack, certainly makes for a visually engaging 90 minutes. Shannon’s performance is more than enough to hold the film together, and compensates for its few, altogether negligible shortcomings.

* To name that event would ruin one of the film’s key surprise; don’t read the blurb on the case.

The Missing Person is out now on DVD through Madman.

The bare-bones disc includes no special features.

The DVD looks pretty great: the film was shot by Ryan Samul, who counts among his cinematography credits Yeasayer’s aural odyssey Oddsac. His thoughtful, controlled compositions are beautifully retained, and the film’s crisp, largely de-saturated digital photography has transferred to disc well, but these highlights are offset by a couple of obvious, disappointingly hacky-looking green-screen shots. To boot, it would be generous to describe the sound mixing as ‘patchy.’ None of these adversely affect the film’s basic watchability, however.

The new film from actor-turned director Tom McCarthy is certainly the most Fox-Searchlighty of all the films on the studio’s current slate inasmuch as it’s a—probably(?) accidental—blend of the tried-and-true high-school sports triumphalism template with the main components of Little Miss Sunshine and Juno. It has kids who swear (in the first scene after the credits, a little girl mutters “shit!”); an almost unbearably bright colour palette (lots of vibrant, deliberately collegiate-athletic yellows and greens invade every corner of the frame throughout the bulk of the film); a teenaged character at its centre who delivers sometimes amusing jokes in monotonous deadpan, and, finally, a heavily sardonic patriarch who may as well as be as suicidal as Steve Carell’s character was in Little Miss Sunshine. The score and soundtrack are brimming with mundane, sub-Tom Petty-esque riffs and plinky acoustic guitar meanderings, and there are purposefully ‘quirky’ gags about Wii Golf.

With all this, McCarthy blends something of the small-town feel of his previous films—his début The Station Agent, and its follow-up, 2007’s under-seen The Visitor—into the fabric of Win-Win (despite it being set in suburban New Jersey). It’s a comfortable, utterly nice film with very little going for it outside of that. Paul Giamatti plays Mike, an elder-care lawyer who—this being yet another recession-era movie—is in need of some extra cash. For an ill-begotten $1500 a month, he becomes the court-appointed guardian of Leo, a septuagenarian experiencing the early stages of dementia played with considerable sympathy and some pathos by the character actor Burt Young.

Mike is also a wrestling coach at the local high-school, which is good as that gives Leo’s teenaged grandson Kyle—who comes unannounced from Ohio to stay with grandpa, fleeing an alcoholic (and probably drug-addicted) mother played by a hideously miscast Melanie Lynskey—something to do other than mope around Mike’s house. Kyle and his wrestling buddies are easily the best characters the film has to offer, but some of the best acting comes from the periphery: Jeffrey Tambor and Mike’s dopey pal Terry (Bobby Carnavale, ), who help coach the team, along with Amy Ryan as Mike’s wife, are the driving force behind much of the film’s comedy. There’s a legal battle over Kyle’s custody once his mother arrives in town, and things heat up when Mike discovers Kyle was a state championship wrestler back home. This is a sports movie with more heart and laughs than actual sport, but it ultimately adds up to something rather uninspiring.

It comes as only a small surprise to find that Giuseppe Capotondi got his start as a director of TV commercials and music videos: (small) portions of his début feature feel like a perfume ad, complete with forced romantic/dramatic embraces and swelling musical flourishes. Ostensibly a thriller and nominally something of a puzzle film, La doppia ora (The Double Hour) is actually above all a mystery about a chambermaid at a five-star Turin hotel, an immigrant from Ljubljana who becomes involved with a man she meets at a speed-dating event. He’s a park ranger of some description and records nature sounds as a hobby, but he has a shady past and is possibly tied to nefarious underworld figures. The title, explained as those times in the day when both hands on the clock align—more often digitally, and on a 24h clock: 23:23, or 14:14 are two examples in the script—becomes more prominent, and more important, as the film reaches its conclusion.

The narrative is a slipstream that sucks in events all around it: photos that were never taken; apparitions on security-camera monitors, blips in time that aren’t resolved until the end. This is conveyed visually through a series of short, sharp shocks, and aurally through pitch-perfect implementation of sound bridges and subliminal noises from upcoming and past scenes; Capotondi even incorporates something of a Lynchian hum—though it’s not quite as omnipresent as Lynch himself would have made it because it glides in and out of the acoustical frame. La doppia ora is a psychological puzzle film inasmuch as it’s full of visual, textual and aural clues which, added together, may help solve its central riddle—viewers should keep an eye on an inquisitive priest (who recognises our protagonist) and note the recurring use of a crimson bedspread as a signalling device in the narrative—but the ending will, to many, seem weak and almost contrived.

nziff ’11: Incendies
dir. Denis Villeneuve | Canada/France | 2010 | 130 mins.

The new film from Québécois director Denis Villeneuve is a deeply moving but harrowing—even at times gruelling—cinematic experience that absolutely lives up to its title. Based on a play by Lebanese-born Canadian playwright Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies is a forceful, passionate drama about two twins—brother and sister—in their late twenties in modern-day Canada who, upon her passing, are read their mother’s will and given two envelopes: one for the father they presumed dead, and one for a brother they never knew existed. The twins travel to a (deliberately) unidentified mid-East country where warring religious factions rule by force in order to explore her mother’s hitherto obscure past. This contemporary exploration is intercut with a re-telling of the mother’s story from her point of view; the benefits afforded by such a structure should be obvious, and are perfectly exploited. The film is a visual marvel: certain shots and scenes all but demand being seen in the darkest of theatres with the biggest of screens, although outside intrusions (like rain falling on the tin roof of the cinema, as happened in the press screening I attended) certainly add to the experience.

This is Villeneuve’s fourth feature film; his Polytechnique—about the École Polytechnique massacre in 1989—used similarly disarming/shocking tactics, especially in its traumatic opening scene. Grégoire Hetzel’s sombre if occasionally operatic score is blended perfectly with two Radiohead songs: “You and Whose Army?” fades in during the film’s powerful opening scene (pictured above), accompanying images of what we eventually find out are child soldiers having their heads shaved, and the disorienting, warped “Like Spinning Plates,” in which Thom Yorke’s already slippery vocals are transfused and reversed, is used briefly in the film’s third act. (There’s also something that sounds like a version of “You and Whose Army?” sung in French that appears at one point, I think.) Villeneuve has said that he felt the same way after first seeing Mouawad’s play as he had when he first watched Apocalypse Now; it would be giving the play—and this film version—far too much praise to compare the two, not least because of its overcooked dramaturgical conceits. But there is something of a similar amount of forcefulness in this, even if—as some astute viewers will—you predict the dénouement long before it comes to pass.

After its nzff screenings, Incendies is now in theatres around the country.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals ran in Auckland from July 14–August 3, and in Wellington from July 29–August 14. They are en route to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout the rest of August, then travel to Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, to Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Love Story
dir. Florian Habicht | New Zealand/USA | 2011 | 91 mins.

Florian Habicht’s Love Story, which blurs the line between real docu-drama and cinephilic fantasy, is partly a tongue-in-cheek ethnography of the denizens of New York City (who are given a writing credit), and partly an invented romantic drama presented as pseudo-documentary. The film, Habicht’s fifth feature and the first film in which he has a presence in front of the camera, began when the director was on the inaugural Harriet Friedlander Arts Grant, for which a New Zealand artist is given the opportunity to travel to nyc and be inspired by what they might find there. With no obligation to make art or do anything creative at all, they’re sent to simply experience all that the city has to offer. (The catch? They have to come back home to New Zealand afterwards.)

Habicht wasn’t planning on making a film, but decided to concoct something in his final months in the Empire state. The film’s opening posits the following conveniently quirky situation: that he found himself on a subway train one morning and caught the eye of a woman holding a piece of cake on a paper plate. They both got off at the same stop, and, after hanging out for a bit, they start dating—which is where the ethnographic aspect of the film comes into play. Alternating between his relationship with Masha and vox-pop interviews with people on the street, Habicht asks for advice on what to do next—for example, one night he has to run to the corner store for condoms. Wearing nothing but a pair of zebra-striped long-johns, he asks whoever he bumps into what should happen next in the story—he wants something to go wrong while he’s having sex with her (a gaggle of scene-stealing acting students suggests that it turns out he can’t get it up).

It’s these to-camera dollops of real-life—and not the contrived-seeming, charmless, bizarrely chemistry-free ‘relationship’ he has with Masha—that provide some of the most interesting and touching (not to mention hilarious) moments in the film. Other highlights: Habicht asks a young boy and his girlfriend what he should do now that he’s been seeing Masha for a few weeks. Her advice? “Take it to the next level!” Elsewhere, Habicht returns to a fascinating rotund man with a very strong Noo Yawk accent who dispenses wisdom like McD’s dispenses French fries, and an encounter with a shrewd, fiery redheaded stockbroker in the back of a cab (he knowingly climbed in after she had) sizzles with more dramatic (and sexual) tension than any of the film’s other scenes. An auditory ode to cinema, the film is scored with nouvelle vague tunes and music from Fellini’s films—pieces by Nino Rota, Ennio Morricone, Georges Delerue, and Mina. (Florian clearly adores Fellini, and in interviews at the start of the festival when asked what he was most looking forward to seeing, he always said Scorsese’s restoration of La Dolce Vita.) While this music is lovely—and about as romantic as you can get—some of it occasionally feels a bit overbearing.

Florian Skypes with his Dad back home in the Bay of Islands, which gives the film a nice local connection and a stylistic device to provide some semblance of grounding, but Love Story definitely suffers from a structureless made-on-the-fly style and lack of a cohesive aesthetic—although it’s certainly very nicely shot (digitally, by New Zealand-born visual artist Maria Ines Manchego). There are a couple of odd digressions that could have been curtailed or cut entirely during the edit, such as a Skype conversation with a Texan (called at random) that turns unpleasantly confrontational, and a few overly lingering Godard-like shots of the two lovers in bed. (Some thought the scene where Masha eats cereal out of Habicht’s hollow chest was discomfiting, but I was alright with it.)

At the film’s world première on the opening night of the film festival, the full house at Auckland’s majestic Civic Theatre erupted into applause and cheers when Florian rang Masha at 5am New York time to tell her it’d been warmly received. Steve Garden, writing at The Lumière Reader, remembers an anecdote from those festivities I don’t—and his retelling of it is, I think, particularly revealing:

Florian had everyone clapping and cheering down the phone-line, then one chap—so taken by it all—called from the balcony, “Tell her you love her.” Touché. What better endorsement could there be for a filmmaker than to be given such unequivocal proof of how successfully he suspended disbelief.

nziff ’11: Medianeras
Dir. Gustavo Taretto | Argentina/Germany/Spain | 2011 | 95 mins.

Gustavo Taretto’s first film blends a novel take on the city symphony with a fresh perspective on the rom-com—specifically, one in which “the lovers have yet to meet,” and in which the city is less a character than a presence to be observed from within. After a brief essayistic opening—an academic visual scribbling on how the makeup and construction of the architecture of Buenos Aires affects its inhabitants psychologically and physically—the film introduces its two main characters: a web designer (the guy) and a mannequin-wielding high-street window-dresser and aspiring architect. (She humps the mannequin at one point, but it’s more ‘funny ha-ha’ than ‘funny odd’ or ‘funny depressing.’)

They both suffer compulsions of some order. He’s a neat freak: the contents of his back-pack—including three Criterion edition JacquesTati films on DVD, and a laminated set of instructions on what to do in case of a panic attack—wouldn’t look out of place on the Things Organised Neatly tumblr. She, in the same vein, is obsessed with Where’s Wally? books, but can’t find Wally in the city—which is fodder for a cute (if telegraphed) sight gag at film’s close. The film is indebted to cinema: architectural sketches come to life in the mode of (500) Days of Summer, and portions of the film are reminiscent of the ambulant, freewheeling discoveries abundant in In the City of Sylvia. Woody Allen’s Manhattan is directly quoted in the third act when the characters watch it on tv. Light but far from vapid, Taretto’s début signals the start of what will hopefully be a lengthy, fruitful career.

Love Story opens around the country today. Check local listings for showtimes.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals ran in Auckland from July 14–August 3. They began in Wellington on July 29, and finish there next week, before travelling to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout the rest of August, then to Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, to Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

Welcome to Best Worst Podcast, covering the best and worst of cinema.
Aside from referencing Michael Stephenson’s 2009 documentary on the Troll 2 phenomenon, the podcast’s name refers to
our love of and interest in discussing both the very best of challenging auteurist cinema and the very worst of Z-grade trash!

‘Stayed’ by the Bell

From deep in the bowels of Auckland’s beautiful Civic theatre Doug & Jacob bring a near-the-end nzff 2011 report. As well as impromptu toilet-traffic directing, we race the bell to reach a bwp middle-ground of 14 films in 13 minutes. Well done us! We also stumble upon possibly the perfect Best Worst Podcast double feature selection to date.

NZIFF 2011 films discussed: Troll Hunter; Let The Bullets Fly; The Woman; My Joy; Tyrannosaur; Kill List; The Artists Cinema; The Turin Horse; Hobo With A Shotgun; I Saw The Devil; The Last Circus, and many, many more.

Doug Dillaman is a musician, filmmaker and cinephile who spends his days working as a film & television video editor.

Jacob Powell is a cinephile who works as a ‘media librarian’ dealing with archiving & delivery of digital media and who moonlights as a freelance writer/film critic.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals ran in Auckland from July 14–August 3. They began in Wellington on July 29, and finish there next week, before travelling to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout the rest of August, then to Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, to Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

This is a brilliant, incisive film that exposes the greed-clogged heart of the financial crisis: the banking industry’s so-powerful-it-oughta-be-illegal influence on Capitol Hill. Directed by documentarian Charles Ferguson—whose début No End in Sight examined the widespread ineptitude and officially-sanctioned criminality during the Bush administration’s invasion of Iraq—Inside Job is, thankfully, not as boorish or bluntly-delivered as was Michael Moore’s Capitalism: a Love Story. Where the buffoonish Moore pleaded ignorance and goofily accosted Wall St. traders, asking them to explain how a derivative works in a thirty-second sound-bite as they were leaving work at the end of the day, Ferguson calmly explains, with the aid of simple animated info-graphics, such heretofore relatively mysterious buzz-words as “credit default swaps,” the “sub-prime” mortgage crisis and the invention and trading of complex financial instruments in clear, simple language.

Narrated by Matt Damon, the film is divided into five sections which roughly run through how, why and when the crisis started; what actually happened in 2008; what happened in the aftermath of the bailouts (the bankers actually collected bonuses after completely failing at their jobs and screwing the economy); and what the Obama administration are doing about it now (not much—for one, Larry Summers is still lurking around the corridors of power). The film is similar in a way to last year’s The Cove, at least inasmuch as it’s a jarring wake-up-call that also happens to be incredibly entertaining. (Moore’s film on the other hand, far from being a wake-up call, was relative snooze-fest punctuated every so often by melodramatic bank foreclosure sob-stories—an arena Ferguson wisely side-steps altogether.) The crisis is about people losing their homes, sure, but not only are the economic facts more interesting, they’re also less manipulative. Instead of people crying about losing their houses, Ferguson opts for far more entertaining stories: ones about cocaine and hookers.

One of Ferguson’s aims, aside from making the content accessible to the widest possible range of viewers, was to make a film that looks nicer than documentaries of this type tend to. Along with his high-definition* interview content, he incorporates standard-definition archival news footage and other lower-grade material; in less capable hands, this would be intrusive and would look out of place with the majority of the rest of the film. Here, though, Ferguson crops and zooms the footage to fit in the centre of his chosen 2.35:1 ar, and upscales some of it to hi-def, resulting in an extremely stylised, visually sleek documentary. What’s more, whenever a newspaper clipping, written or e-mailed correspondence, or one of the film’s hundreds of research documents is quoted, it appears onscreen in computerised form, in a plain serif typeface against a light background with the relevant portions highlighted in a bold yellow. The animated ‘camera’ then pans, glides and zooms its way through text and charts, as effortlessly as with the aforementioned info-graphics. This is all in stark contrast to most heavily fact- and information-based documentaries which, usually through a misplaced guise of ‘realism,’ present newspaper clippings and other printed material either in their original (sometimes illegible) form, or by reading them word-for-word in narration.

Ferguson’s film uses tv footage and previously-existing sequences (transferred from 35mm prints) from other documentaries alongside interview material (shot around the US and the world in various offices and hotels, as well as in Ferguson’s New York City apartment), but it also incorporates a lot of newly-shot helicopter/aerial footage at its start, and returns to it frequently. This was mostly taken in New York City, but crews also went to Iceland (where the film opens), and Malaysia and Singapore, where Ferguson travelled to interview political figures and business commentators. The footage is most prominent in the opening credits, of which the director (in his audio commentary) is justifiably proud. Commenting on the zippy editing of the title sequence, which Ferguson spent hours poring over to get the colour-correction matched on each shot, he says “This reflects on my no-longer-so-secret mission to make rock videos.” (The titles are perfectly accompanied by Peter Gabriel’s 1986 hit “Big Time,” the hard-fought licensing of which accounted for five per cent of the documentary’s total budget. mgmt’s “Congratulations,” which adds to the sombre, reflective tone at film’s close, was reportedly much easier to license.)

Ferguson’s film deservedly won the Academy Award for Best Documentary earlier this year—hardly surprising given its slick construction and intelligent handling of the issues. The most fascinating, revealing section for many viewers will likely be the final 20 or so minutes, in which Ferguson steps away from the Global Financial Crisis for a moment to examine one of its root causes: the financial conflicts of interest that have crept, unchecked, into the world of business academia. This section, in which Ferguson asks the hardest questions, and has a difficult time getting straight answers, perhaps signals that he has another film up his sleeve—one about how the discipline of economics has become corrupted by insatiable greed for money and power (not to mention the teachings of the Milton Friedmans of the world).

In a week where the country that is home to the Chicago School of Economics has had its credit rating downgraded for the first time ever, Ferguson’s film only proves more vital, more important than it was upon release a year ago.

* Sony is unfortunately releasing the film only on DVD; no Blu-ray version will be available locally.

Inside Job is now out on DVD through Sony Pictures Home Entertainment.

Special features include extra interview material and the film’s theatrical trailer, as well as a brief (12-minute) making-of featurette, “Behind the Heist,” that incorporates as much commentary on the film from the director as it does from author Charles R. Morris.

The audio commentary from Ferguson and his producer Audrey Marrs contains some funny tidbits—Werner Herzog wondered why the film didn’t show more of the ‘widespread popular mania’ during the bubble at its height, for example—but it’s also full of massive gaps (a definite no-no in audio commentaries if ever the was one), and Ferguson’s observations are occasionally really dumb, such as when he points out that the building on screen is the Federal Reserve, right after an interviewee had just said exactly that. Aside from these (and a plethora of increasingly redundant conversations about how some of the footage was taken), the commentary does offer just as much insight into the research and planning process, which makes it worth a cursory listen.

If most of what you know of the Kennedy assassination comes from that one episode of Seinfeld and Oliver Stone’s flawed masterwork JFK—in other words, “Back, and to the left…”—this History channel documentary will be eye-opening, to say the least. The landmark three-hour film is divided in two parts of equal length; the first goes beyond the Zapruder footage to give an hour-by-hour account of the 24 hours following the assassination—starting at 9am on Friday, November 22^nd with Kennedy’s final speech. It ends with the murder of Lee Harvey Oswald by Jack Ruby, as Kennedy, dead, leaves the White House for the last time to lie in state.

The first section recounts some fascinating in-the-moment spectacles, among them conductor Erich Leinsdorf’s interruption of a concert by the Boston Symphony to announce the assassination. As a mark of respect, he leads the orchestra in a performance of the Funeral March from Beethoven’s 3^rd; this is mirrored in the film’s second part when Leonard Bernstein conducts the NY Philharmonic in a performance of Mahler’s 2^nd on live television. The first part ends with some interesting overseas coverage, from BBC and world newspapers, and flicks back and forth between news reports which mostly involve on-site examinations of the book depository and observe a garden of Don Draper-like newsmen hanging idly around waiting for the next tidbit. In an era when there was no 24-hour news cycle, it’s fascinating to see that there was still a relentless, indefatigable appetite for any information at all, no matter how miniscule.

The second half of the film discards the real-time programming and opts for a more traditional approach, though it maintains the knitted-together news-footage angle. Events covered include the trial of Jack Ruby and his later death, from cancer; the assassinations of MLK and RFK; and, after a segue to the Byrds show at the Monterrey Pop Festival in 1968, this portion devolves slides into the all-too-familiar procession of late-’60s zeitgeist imagery (Vietnam, etc., etc.) recognisable from countless period fiction films and an inordinate number of documentaries and TV specials. Garrison and Clay Shaw—familiar, no doubt to many, because they were the stuff of Stone’s film—get a look in, as does much more from the ensuring two decades, including a skit from the second season of SNL lampooning Ruby’s murder.

The film, thankfully discarding History’s usual preoccupation with computerised glitz and simplified, easy-to-understand voiceover, is composed entirely of television and some amateur film footage, and still photographs. Much of the footage has been cleaned up a bit, though none appears to have been fully restored.* Due to its lack of a voiceover and montage-like construction (unique among History documentaries), this is easily the least sensationalist, least dumbed-down film the channel has ever produced—and by default, then, one of the most informative and intelligent documentaries about JFK. With 3 Shots that Changed America, History (with a capital H) has truly made this turbulent period in modern American history come to vivid life.

* Typically for a film that combines material of various grades and types, some of the black-and-white footage is marred by a greenish hue while some of the colour footage is similarly at times toned pink.)

A stray thought on media, the recording of past time and the visual regurgitation, over and over, of the past:
There’s something about seeing Lee Harvey Oswald speak that’s hard to believe. His place in history has become mythological—not least because his death has now become fodder for cartoon throwaway gags. Seeing him say things we’ve heard many times before, and seeing events that are so familiar to us via countless other media, is (almost) shocking.

The JFK Collection is out now through Magna Home Entertainment.

The two documentaries are presented as-is, with no special features.

In the Simpsons episode #3F15, “A Fish Called Selma,” handsome has-been actor Troy McClure is cast in the lead role of an off-off-Broadway production called “Stop the Planet of the Apes, I Want to Get Off!” In the middle of a song, amid breakdancing apes and a funky ’80s beat riffing on “Rock Me Amadeus,” his character has an exchange with the smartest of the apes, Dr. Zaius: “Can I play the piano anymore?” “Of course you can!” “Well I couldn’t before!” The creators of the new Planet of the Apes reboot must’ve liked that joke, because their film incorporates that idea as a plot device.

Variously called Planet of the Apes: Genesis, Genesis: Apes, Caesar, Caesar: Rise of the Apes, Rise of the Apes, and finally given the unwieldy title Rise of the Planet of the Apes, the film has been in gestation since at least 2008, when Fox execs decided to reboot the series after Tim Burton’s muddled Mark-Wahlberg-starring 2001 remake failed to make much of an impact. Written by Rick Jaffa and Amanda Silver (Peter Hyams’ 1997 mess of a horror movie, The Relic), Rupert Wyatt’s film makes multiple references—some oblique, some (“Get your hands off me…!”) up-front—to the original, and does take some story elements from 1972’s Conquest of the Planet of the Apes, which was the fourth in what is now a seven-film franchise that branched out into a couple of spinoff TV series—including an animated one—and various comic-books and novelizations. Other than a few character names and basic a premise, though, this new film is an origin story with only one task: to clear the slate for a new series of films and spinoffs, merchandising and future profit-making. (As such, Rise breaks completely from Burton’s confused, unnecessary film of a decade ago, and has virtually nothing in common with French novelist Pierre Boulle’s La Planète des singes.)

In the pivotal character of Charles Rodman, John Lithgow is saddled with one of the least sympathetic portrayals of Alzheimer’s disease in cinema history. Charles’ son, Dr. Will Rodman (James Franco), is a scientist at GenSys (just where do these screenwriters come up with these fancy-sounding science-y corporation names?) who’s invented a miracle-drug to cure memory-related diseases in humans. (It also makes apes more intelligent.) After Bright Eyes, the first ape to receive alz-112, is shot when he becomes unruly and aggressive, Franco decides to take Bright Eyes’ progeny Caesar home in the hope of keeping him safe—and as a companion for his unwell father. Ceasar was passed alz-112 genetically, so he therefore displays progressively more developed cognitive powers than his fellow chimps.

Before Will ill-advisedly gives his father the drug, Charles is a muddled geriatric, a forgotten object of mild (audience) derision who struggles to work his way through a piano sonata; afterwards, with a hugely improved quality of life, he plays like Glenn Gould (minus the annoying humming and squeaky chair). When—surprise, surprise—Ceasar proves as fiery and unruly as his parent, he’s sent to an ape zoo where a decidedly Walter-Sobchak-looking Brian Cox and a surprisingly jock-like Draco Malfoy variously cage, tease, taser, and mistreat a few hundred of Ceasar’s closest relatives. Per the title (and all-too-revealing trailer), all hell expectedly breaks loose when Ceasar fashions a crude jail-breaking implement from a couple of sticks, some loose twine and a pocket-knife, and the apes head en masse across the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for the nearby redwood forest.

British director Rupert Wyatt came to attention when he made the prison-break thriller The Escapist with Brian Cox in 2008, but this new outing is very much a director-for-hire gig: there’s nothing even close to a directorial fingerprint anywhere near this. Rise of the Planet of the Apes is first and foremost a Weta Digital showcase: firing up their motion-capture equipment and once again enlisting the over-expressive facial muscles of ‘actor’ Andy Serkis, the special-effects company has laboured to create realistic-looking simians that interact in believable ways not only with their environment, but with the humans who populate it. The script makes way for bombastic set-pieces on so many occasions I lost count; when it sometimes resurfaces, the lines Franco, Lithgow and Freida Pinto (who pops up as an under-developed love interest) are perfunctory and expository at best.

Both Shia la Beouf and Tobey Maguire were attached to star at various stages, so we should be thankful that Franco could fit the film on his already full schedule, right next to that collaboration with dj /Rupture and Kalup Linzy. Franco is easily the second-best thing about the film (the first is the cgi/sfx), even though his character is side-lined in the third act to make way for the ensuing ape rampage. Patrick Doyle’s overwrought, manipulative action score is of the sort that has become standard for this sort of movie, so there’s little point even bringing it up. The camerawork (thankfully free of colour-correction) is mostly steady and calm—you can actually tell what’s happening in a given scene, unlike, say, a Michael Bay or Paul Greengrass film where frenzied, disruptive movement is the order of the day.

In a world where the film current rules, where you can (probably) calculate the profit of a film based on a formula, where the most a summer blockbuster has to aim to do is be loud enough and occasionally exciting enough to distract the teenagers who’ve paid to see it from their texting, talking, and tweeting—in this world, Rise of the Apes is a major success. By any other measure, though—and its technical, computer-driven achievements aside—the film is just another summer blockbuster. It happens to be the best of a bad crop, but when it comes down to it, this is just another vapid distraction from the monotony of life outside the multiplex.

At least, thank God, it wasn’t up-converted to 3-D.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is in cinemas now.

nziff ’11: Pina
dir. Wim Wenders | Germany/France | 2011 | 103 mins.

In 2008, quote-whore Richard Corliss called Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire “a buoyant hymn to life.” As most of us later found out, that was a completely ridiculous statement to make about a film that was, at best, merely enjoyable. Wim Wenders’ new 3-D documentary—among the first wave of European art-films to harness the technology for artful purposes rather than simply bombast—is definitely worthy of that level of praise, though. His Pina is more than just an acknowledgement of the late modern-dance choreographer’s work; it’s a full-blown resurrection, a vibrant, gloriously colourful celebration of the artist expressed in her own words (which aren’t actually words at all, of course—they’re movements).

The film’s sometimes tentative employment of 3-D will in the not too distant future undoubtedly be seen as rudimentary (scene-setting bookends resemble nothing so much as an early-’90s ‘interactive’ cd-rom!), but the added depth-of-field provided by the technology is here exploited to its limit throughout the film as we’re shown various of Bausch’s performances re-enacted on-stage, with portions broken out and given new life on the streets and surrounds of Wuppertal, Bausch’s home and creative center for more than 35 years.

Performed by members of the Ensemble of the Tanztheater Wuppertal with whom the choreographer worked for decades, the film incorporates excerpts from four of Bausch’s productions. “Café Müller,” which is usually performed without music but is given here given orchestral accompaniment, involves a charcoal stage filled with nothing but chairs and tables over which the performers stumble and fall. A sensuous setting of Stravinsky’s “Le Sacre du printemps” calls for the stage to be covered in a layer of dirt, while the lively “Vollmond” (“La Luna Llena,” or “Full Moon”) requires a huge, bean-shaped scraggly rock in the middle of the stage, as well as gallons of water and several plastic buckets. “Kontakthof,” which closes Wenders’ ‘show,’ incorporates the biggest number of performers as it inquisitively explores time and the ageing process with good humour and tenderness.

Portions of these performances cleave off from their staging and fly out into the world: there are performances on the Wuppertal Suspension Line (the city’s wonderful suspended monorails); in public spaces—the streets and sidewalks and roadsides of the city; and, in the film’s processional finalé, at what looks to be an industrial crater of some kind, atop a mountain of earth. Amid this there are segments which almost meet the definition of “standard biographical documentary”—reminisces of Pina from a half-dozen or so members of the ensemble delivered non-simultaneously (that is to say, we hear their voices but are shown their faces, sometimes smiling, sometimes impassioned, sometimes demure, without their lips moving.) This is all mixed in with selected archival footage of Bausch at work, the delivery of which places the audience (as with the bookends, somewhat gimickly) at a remove: it appears as if it were 16-mm footage being projected onto a screen in front of a small audience.

Bausch, who died suddenly and unexpectedly in June 2009, is paid loving tribute in this slightly flawed but invigorated cinematic experience. Not one to shy away from new avenues, Wenders has—with his countryman Werner Herzog, whose documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams is by all accounts characteristically entertaining and dazzling—eagerly if gingerly stepped into the realms of the third dimension, along the way giving the art-film a much needed defibrillation.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland, and finished there this past weekend; they started last week in Wellington, and travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, then Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton in September and October before finishing in Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

It takes a great deal of ambition to critically examine the relationship between a city and its inhabitants. It’s risky to attempt to do this with a wide range of characters, and even more risky to do so with only two characters. Gustavo Taretto does just this. With a fun opening that details the architectural styles of Buenos Aires and the many issues that arise from their peculiarities, the film moves to focus on the lives of two neurotic twenty-somethings, their aimlessness, and their troubled relationships.

This sounds like the beginnings of a romantic comedy—and Medianeras is a truly modern romantic comedy, only it goes much further than that. Taretto is much more concerned with the inability of his two protagonists to actually meet in this modern world, how their city defines them. The film still presents a “Will-they/won’t-they?” situation, but the question is more when our protagonists—played charmingly by Pilar López de Ayala and Javier Drolas—will meet, rather than whether they will become a couple.

We become invested in both of these flawed, sympathetic and hilarious people long before they first cross paths like ships in the night, and we are totally rooting for them to get together. The not-yet-met conceit is an interesting and vital injection of life into the standard romantic comedy formula, but also serves the themes of the film very well.

Taretto’s film deals intelligently and empathetically with how people use technology to socialise—particularly over short distances within the same area of a city—and how this ultimately comes to define their lives. To its credit, the film never judges its protagonists, preferring to simply observe their struggles to connect with other like-minded individuals.

Medianeras is not without its faults, though: it risks getting too precious at points—even as de Ayala’s character’s dilemma of never being able to solve a “Where’s Wally?” set in the city actually pays off massively. Taretto makes sure the film remains a vibrant, entertaining commentary on modern people and the technology that defines them—and how everything might actually be okay despite that.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland, and finish there this weekend; they started in Wellington yesterday, and travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, then Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton in September and October, before finishing in Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Martha Marcy May Marlene
dir. Sean Durkin | USA | 2011 | 101 mins.

The scariest of horror films take place in the realm of the mind, exploring the darkest recesses of the brain and the horrible things that lurk there. Martha Marcy May Marlene is not an out-and-out horror film, but definitely feels like one.

The film, which explores a woman whose mind has been bent and broken beyond all recognition, starts with a thrilling sequence in which Martha (Elizabeth Olsen) runs away from the cult she has been part of two years. Trembling, she asks her sister to come pick her up, all the while constantly back-pedalling and saying she’s fine. The phone call is representative of the film to come, which follows Martha’s recovery and also her time spent in the cult. First-time writer-director Sean Durkin cuts slickly between them, and what unfolds in one half is devastating: Martha is trying to regain some semblance of ‘normal’ life, but can’t.

Olsen carries the film on her very capable shoulders with a performance that is simultaneously watchful and brilliantly distracted. She plays Martha as both a woman who could buy into a cult, painting years of backstory with subtle strokes, but also as a woman who can’t take what the cult asks of her. There are two telephone scenes in the film, near the start and roughly towards the end, where she shifts masterfully through a wide range of emotions. Her Martha is a woman who has been broken time and time again, and this time she will probably never recover. The performances surrounding her are also very good and serve to colour in the shades of Martha’s world. This is especially true of John Hawkes as the charming, unnerving cult leader, who has the ability to quickly turn cold.

Durkin plays around with image and sound in ways that bring the tone closer to horror; he holds uncomfortably long on some of the film’s most chilling moments, and banal sounds become terrifying—like the ringing of a house phone late in the piece. Jody Lee Lipes’ cinematography is gorgeous and subtle, and emphasises one of the most prescient points the film has to make: Martha’s place of recovery is no less damaging than what she’s escaped from.

Martha Marcy May Marlene is one of the more impressive débuts in a festival full of them, and it takes some of the darkest stabs at society: cults and brainwashing are obviously dangerous, but the upper middle-class milieu may be no better. The film doesn’t labour on it, but it’s that message, and Olsen’s terrific debut, which lingers long after the credits roll.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland, and finish there this weekend; they started in Wellington yesterday, and travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, then Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton in September and October, before finishing in Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Space Battleship Yamato
dir. Yamazaki Takashi | Japan | 2010 | 131 mins.

Space Battleship Yamato is the most fun, ridiculous thing I’ve seen at the festival thus far. Directed by Yamazaki Takashi (who also did the ace visual effects), the film revolves around Earth—or Japan at least—being under attack from large alien creatures called Gamilas, and a last ditch attempt by Earth to find an anti-radiation device on a planet outside the Milky Way. It sounds silly, and it is, but the filmmaking skill on display makes it a genuinely worthwhile watch.

It takes massive cues from Battlestar Galactica, visible in the minimalist production design for the sparse Earth scenes, to the interior of the titular battleship and even some of the characters. (The grizzled captain Okita, for example, bears more than a passing resemblance to Adama from Galactica.) It doesn’t go nearly as far as that show in making an incisive social commentary, but it doesn’t skimp on the large-scale battle scenes in space.

Although this didn’t have the budget of a Hollywood special-effects epic, the designs of both ships and aliens here are inventive and interesting. The “Yamato” itself particularly stands out; if you ever wanted to see what a WWII-era battleship would look like if it were upgraded for space fighting, look no further.

The film suffers from a lot of things that routinely blight action-oriented science fiction films, namely some contrived plot developments—including a troubling one where the lead female character is straight-up objectified—and a few perfunctory characters whose only purpose is to spout one-liners and perform narrative functions. However Space Battleship Yamato delivers on what its title promises, and it is an immensely satisfying sci-fi action film with a boatloads of dazzling craft on display.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland, and finish there this weekend; they started in Wellington yesterday, and travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, then Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton in September and October, before finishing in Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

Burt Bacharach and Hal David were right: breaking up really is hard to do. The doomed relationship around which Blue Valentine orbits has its genesis in an unlikely place: a rest home. Cindy (Michelle Williams) is visiting her grandmother, when, peeking across the hall, she spies Dean (Ryan Gosling), a furniture mover, taking some cash from a nightstand. He goes over to her to assure her that he’s not stealing the money—that it’s a tip left him by the old man whose furniture he was moving—and gets his foot in the door just as she’s about to shut it in his face. They have a brief conversation, and in the following weeks he doggedly pursues her by going back to the rest home and asking her grandma who “that pretty blond girl” was.

But this isn’t where Derek Cianfrance’s second feature begins; the film opens six years after Dean and Cindy met. Over a single day regularly intercut with flashbacks to the relationship’s founding, we witness its dissolution—starting with an ominous scene: a little girl (their daughter) stands in an open field at dusk calling out for her missing dog. The momentary tension and dread in this scene never quite abates: it comes and goes in waves throughout the rest of the film as we flick back and forward between snippets of present and prologue. In the past, Dean woos Cindy with his goofy ukulele rendition of “You Always Hurt the Ones You Love.” In the present, as something of a last-ditch attempt at relationship rehab, he books a room at a themed sex-hotel. The futuristic room, which in Dean’s phrase “looks like a robot’s vagina,” is basically a Trekkie’s take on Austin Powers’ shag-pad—but there’s nothing comic about the tense debate that unfolds therein.

Cianfrance had been working on the film since 1998: he wrote the first draft after wrapping production on his previous feature, Brother Tied. 13 years later, after the stars aligned to bring together the perfect cast and crew, Blue Valentine has come to fruition. Cianfrance studied under experimental filmmaker Stan Brakhage at the University of Colorado, and, in the intervening years since the film’s first draft, has made short documentary portraits of Run DMC, Jam Master Jay and Puff Daddy, among others. Both of these sensibilities—the creative, output-driven aesthetic fringe and the observant, character-driven profile work—combine in the formal and structural characteristics of Blue Valentine: Cianfrance delivers a beautifully detailed rendering of the couple, while at the same time really listening to their interactions.

The film is structurally unusual, and has technical elements to match: scenes in the past were shot on Super-16 stock and were entirely handheld, whereas present-day scenes were shot on RED HD digital cameras mounted on tripods. These were placed at a distance from the actors but had long lenses affixed to them in order to, in Cianfrance’s words, “achieve suffocating close-ups.” Cinematographer Andrij Parekh (Cold Souls; Gosling’s previous big outing, Half Nelson) maintains an intense claustrophobia throughout the majority of the film, and this is especially palpable in virtually all the present-day sequences.

Cianfrance pairs music with emotion perfectly. Although they weren’t his first music choice, folk-rockers Grizzly Bear provide a mellow, lilting soundtrack composed of various extant songs of theirs. One of the film’s centrepieces is a sequence centred on the first track of a mix CD Dean makes for Cindy: sometime in the early-to-mid-’70s, a soul group called Penny & the Quarters recorded a number of demos; among them was a song called “You and Me.” Gosling heard the song and suggested to Cianfrance that it could be Dean and Cindy’s ‘song’—a special tune for the couple to treasure as a memento of their burgeoning romance.

Grizzly Bear’s “Alligator” (specifically the horn-filled, jazz-inspired ‘Choir Version’ from their 2007 EP Friend) is the perfect accompaniment to the film’s firecracker-filled end credits, which deservedly won an award for title design at SXSW—although the Brooklyn quartet’s delicate, percussive cover of The Crystals’ “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)” would have been equally as powerful. There’s genuine romanticism in Dean and Cindy’s courtship, but there’s no beauty in their eventual, inevitable break-up. This is an achingly tangible, heartbreaking depiction of separation made all the more poignant by the twin vantage points we are provided—and it contains two of the best performances Gosling and Williams have given to date.

Blue Valentine is now out on Blu-ray through Madman.

The key special feature here is an initially interesting audio commentary with director Derek Cianfrance and editor Jim Helton. The director, so obviously enamoured of his actors, focuses almost entirely on his quest for real-life moments; while this is informative for about the first third of the film, it quickly begins to become redundant as Cianfrance repeats himself (perhaps unknowingly) and trots out the same canned explanations he gave in almost every press interview for the film. The disc counts among its other extras a selection of deleted scenes, a Q & A session with the filmmakers, a making-of featurette, and the film’s theatrical trailer.

Technical review: It would be so simple to mess up a disc of this film, but Madman’s excellent Blu-ray transfer beautifully maintains much of the intended grain in its ‘past’ segments, while the contemporary break-up scenes are rendered in great clarity and with remarkable colour fidelity. The superb sound design, so carefully mixed for the film’s theatrical run, is maintained perfectly here.

nziff ’11: Sleeping Beauty
dir. Julia Leigh | Australia | 2011 | 101 mins.

The Tree of Life may have been the most audacious thing I’ve seen thus far at the festival—Melancholia is still to come, but Sleeping Beauty comes surprising close. The début film by Australian novelist Julia Leigh proves much more than the psycho-erotic thriller it’s been advertised as.

Early on, the film reveals itself to be a slow-moving clinical character study of a college student, Lucy, who works two jobs, and has shitty flatmates and an even shittier on-again/off-again boyfriend. Things change when she responds to an ad in her student paper and is taken into a world where lines like, “Your vagina is a temple” and “No penetration” are just part of the job.

As Lucy, Emily Browning finally proves herself as an actress. She straddles the line between girl and woman with a childlike innocence occasionally tempered with an adult’s disaffection with the world around her. It’s a starmaking performance that completely washes out the bitter taste of Sucker Punch. Beyond the nudity (of which there is a lot), Browning’s vulnerability and bravery in the role shows us a woman taking control of her life in whatever small way she can.

This is a deeply political film; it has a lot to say about how sex is treated in the Western world, and about how men and women relate to sex. The character of Lucy is constantly objectified by the men in the film; the most disturbing scene in the film comes when she does tests for a fellow science student and chokes for an excruciatingly long time.

Leigh takes pains to take the eroticism out of sex in this film: it is never shown, and the lead up to it is stilted and calculated. In some of the more extreme scenes, men are utterly powerless as they desire Lucy but are forbidden to do anything with her, they can merely meander and plod around her. However, the film makes the strongest statement, both politically and emotionally, with a repeated shot of Lucy lying asleep in her bed in the dead centre of the frame. Although she appears vulnerable, she dominates the frame and all those that look at it. Many parts of the film are still running around in my head a day later, but none moreso than this shot.

Daring and dazzling, Sleeping Beauty positions Julia Leigh as a talent to watch. She transcends her novelist background with one of the most visually ravishing films of the festival (though props should also be given to the cinematographer Geoffrey Simpson and the production designer Annie Beauchamp for the chilling palette they helped create). Perhaps most important of all, it is obvious that Leigh is a director with a clear sense of what she wants to say, and a deep understanding of the psychology behind her troubled, fascinating characters.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

Welcome to Best Worst Podcast, covering the best and worst of cinema.
Aside from referencing Michael Stephenson’s 2009 documentary on the Troll 2 phenomenon, the podcast’s name refers to
our love of and interest in discussing both the very best of challenging auteurist cinema and the very worst of Z-grade trash!

25 Films in only 9 minutes!

That’s right, just to confound you in this second episode, your hosts Jacob and Doug throw together a quickfire mid-fest report from the midst of New Zealand International Film Festival’s 2011 programme.

Recorded between screenings in a darkened alcove behind the Sky City Theatre, the boys dispense with lengthy informed discussion and give knee-jerk “thumbs up”/”thumbs down” responses to the 25 films they’ve seen thus far.

NZIFF 2011 films discussed: Attenberg; Sleeping Beauty; The Innkeepers; Terri; Page One; Submarine, and many, many more.

Doug Dillaman is a musician, filmmaker and cinephile who spends his days working as a film & television video editor.

Jacob Powell is a cinephile who works as a ‘media librarian’ dealing with archiving & delivery of digital media and who moonlights as a freelance writer/film critic.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: A torinói ló (The Turin Horse)
dir. Béla Tarr | Hungary/France/Switzerland/Germany | 2011 | 146 mins.

The Turin Horse, purportedly the final film by Hungarian maestro Béla Tarr, seems like it existed before cinema itself and has only now been discovered. Its long, slow takes are mesmeric: they put us deep inside the world of the film, to the point where the edges of the frame dissolve and we don’t just experience what happens to the characters, but we begin to feel as isolated, moribund and morose as they feel. Tarr’s films will affect you physically, if you let them*—as Anahí Arana confesses on her blog, Shoot the Critic, “My insides begin to empty out when I watch Tarr. I begin to let go of what makes me feel safe, because he shows me that it’s merely an illusion.”

In 1888, Frederich Neitzsche witnessed a stubborn horse being beaten on the side of the road, and leapt in to save it from further abuse. The philosopher was significantly affected by this: he subsequently had a mental breakdown and died little more than a decade later. Tarr’s film—supposed to be his final work—fictionalises a story of the horse and its owners in the years after this event. Co-directed by Tarr’s editor Ágnes Hranitzky, and co-written by his regular collaborator, the novelist László Krasznahorkai (he wrote Kárhozat (Damnation), A Londoni férfi, and the books upon which Sátántangó and Werckmeister harmóniák are based), the film follows the elderly man and his middle-aged daughter who carve out for themselves a meagre existence in an isolated old farmhouse in the middle of nowhere. They subsist on a diet of boiled potatoes (the father sometimes adds what looks like it might be a sort of sea-salt), and they seems to earn a scant living by taking trips to nearby villages with their horse and cart.

Over six days, metered out by title cards, we see them dress in layers of increasingly ragged clothes; we see the daughter collect water from their well; we see them take the horse out (or attempt to: he’s still quite stubborn, and possibly suicidal); we see them go to sleep each night; and we see them, from a different angle each time, eat their (only?) daily meal of a boiled potato. We become so accustomed, in fact, to the rhythms of their daily life, to the monotonous routine, and to their instinctive, non-verbal communication, that a visit by a neighbour—who’s come to talk politics, and fill up a bottle with pálinka—comes as a total shock. Like something out of a horror movie, his appearance is a jolt to the senses: an intrusive flurry of words and images. This is echoed again later by another group of equally unwelcome visitors: a band of gypsies who appear on the horizon and who come, it would seem, to steal water from the well. Their merriment is totally at odds with the nihilism that pervades the rest of the film, not to mention the howling apocalypse portended by the combination of the score and that incessant, droning wind.

The astonishing camerawork and breathtaking black-and-white cinematography is among the best in all cinema, and the film’s sound design—a cold windstorm howls around the house, day and night, as Mihály Vig’s churning, minimalist score recurs, almost eternally—is equally spectacular. It will doubtless be an extremely difficult (or outright impossible) watch for many^†, but for those who have the perseverance to stay with it, The Turin Horse will stand as one of their most rewarding cinema-going experiences. This is filmic soul food: pure cinema at its most bare and resonant.

The Turin Horse screens on Tuesday July 26 in Auckland, and on Thursday August 11 in Wellington. This thorough piece by the critic Robert Koehler is essential reading.

Side-note: New Zealand audiences are very, very lucky that the festival provides them the opportunity to see a film of this magnitude on a big screen. Depressingly, as with Apichatpong Weerasthakul’s Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives in last year’s nzff, a film like The Turin Horse will never play on a cinema screen in this country again unless it’s part of a festival retrospective, or organised by a Film Society—some of the latter of which have recently been providing the first cinema screenings in this country of the major works of Pedro Costa.

*…and if there isn’t someone in the seat next to you distractingly eating an ice-cream and spilling popcorn everywhere.

^† The film, which runs nearly two-and-a-half hours, is composed of only thirty shots; in the 2004 documentary The Cutting Edge: The Magic of Movie Editing, Walter Murch estimates that the standard Hollywood movie contains in excess of five thousand cuts.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: The Innkeepers
dir. Ti West | USA | 2011 | 102 mins.

Ti West’s third feature—after The Roost; 2009’s stunning ’80s-horror homage The House of the Devil, and a director-for-hire gig helming the second in the gross-out teen-gore Cabin Fever franchise, Cabin Fever 2:Spring Fever—is a haunted-hotel movie that immediately invites comparisons to The Shining. After it overcomes some early jitters, The Innkeepers is successful in creating an eerie atmosphere on a low budget while also delivering some deadpan jokes along the way. Like The House of the Devil—which focussed on just two characters and starred mumblecore darling Greta Gerwig—West’s new film is centred on just a few characters, and has a pretty blonde protagonist.

Our titular leads, Claire and Luke—played by Sara Paxton (the 2009 remake of Last House on the Left) and Pat Healy (The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford)—are minimum-wage front-desk employees of The Yankee Pedlar Inn in Torrington, ct, where West and his crew stayed while making The House of the Devil. They’re not just porters, though: Claire and Luke are also amateur ghost-hunters, and they pass time on the hotel’s final weekend—it’s going out of business—by planning evp-capturing sessions. (Luke has a website that catalogues the creaky old hotel’s paranormal goings-on; judging by its pre-Geocities monochrome-green design alone, the film is set in 1996.)

The entire third floor is already closed off—all the rooms are stripped of furniture—and there’s only one guest: a middle aged woman and her young son. Then, a 50-something former actress turned psychic—played by an almost unrecognisable Kelly McGillis—comes to stay the weekend. Alternately affable and rude, she progressively becomes a larger part of the story—as does an old man who comes to reminisce about the night he and his young bride spent in the hotel’s honeymoon suite.

The initially uneasy chemistry between the two leads slowly becomes more fluid and natural, improving as the film becomes more intense—and the comedy peppered throughout the film’s first act balloons into something more significant, too. Some of the early laughs come simply from the film’s flimsy construction: there are lines near the start that are almost Wiseau-esque; but, again, this gives way to building tension and helps Paxton and Healy delve more deeply into the Claire and Luke’s relationship. There are a few scares in unexpected places—not just pacing-wise, but visually too, thanks to the ingenious use of a few carefully-placed dutch angles—but West’s great gift here (as in House) is for creating an involving, almost unbearable tension on a modest budget.

The sound design is striking, and the low-fi visual aesthetic—which thankfully doesn’t resort to the found-footage/cctv tactics of flaccid mockumentaries like the Paranormal Activity franchise—rather than being distractingly cheap-looking, works in direct service of the story. The film’s awesome posters, incidentally, denote something of the retro ’70s vibe West achieves on screen, particularly in a brilliant Coppola-esque crane shot in the penultimate scene.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November. Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website. For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011” tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Terri
dir. Azazel Jacobs | USA | 2011 | 105 mins.

Azazel Jacobs’ new film might star John C. Reilly and be named after its fat-kid lead character, and that character might be portrayed by a young actor in a stunning first-feature performance—but this is no Cyrus or Precious. The tone of the comedy in this coming-of-age tale is much more subdued than that in which the Duplass brothers have come to trade, and the almost total lack of sentimentality (not feeling, but overbearing mawkishness) means that there’s none of the forced melodrama of that horrid Gabourey Sidibe vehicle from a couple of years ago.

Jacob Wysocki is quietly revelatory as the teenaged title character, an overweight miscreant who wears pyjamas to school, gets picked on just about daily, and has the hots for the cutest girl in class—but those aren’t his only problems: at home, Terri cares for his uncle (Creed Bratton, the US version of The Office) who’s showing the first signs of dementia. In one of director Jacobs’ favourite scenes, our protagonist gets called in to the principal’s office early on in the film for being late. That principal, Mr. Fitzgerald (John C. Reilly), yells at him but then lets on that he’s only pretending—he actually wants to be Terri’s buddy, and calls him one of the ‘good-hearted’ kids who needs to be looked out for.

It’s in the waiting room outside the principal’s office that we first meet Chad (Bridger Zadina)—a fellow social misfit who pulls out tufts of his hair in nonconformist protest—and Mr. Fitzgerald’s secretary, both of whom become increasingly important to Terri’s story as the film progresses. Having said that, there’s really not too much of a story per se in this character study; other people seem to just revolve around Terri and sometimes get caught up in his orbit—like his pretty blond classmate Heather (Olivia Crocicchia), whom he narrowly saves from being kicked out of school following an embarrassing public incident.

The supreme awkwardness that pervades much of the film and comes to a head with a beautifully honest scene in the third act is conveyed with amazing tenderness by Wysocki; Jacobs makes his performance an utter joy to watch. Written by Patrick deWitt from a story by deWitt and Jacobs, the film moves at a leisurely pace informed more by real life than by any ‘ordinary’ rules of movie-storytelling. In this respect, and in its respectful observance—sometimes at a distance—of its protagonist, it is of a piece with Jacobs’ previous films TheGoodTimesKid and Momma’s Man. Jacobs has more money to play with this time round, though, which means a step up in cinematography quality and skill, away from the sometimes necessarily harsh look of cheaper digital photography. The film’s cinematography, by Tobias Datum (Amreeka; additional photography on Miranda July’s The Future, also in this year’s nziff), has a lovely honeycomb/pastel aesthetic that nicely complements its overall muted feeling.

One nitpick is that the score is so generic as to be redundant—it would’ve been nicer to just have a few songs here and there (Daniel Johnston, perhaps?) rather than the light-piano motifs/folk combo that has become ubiquitous in the years since Little Miss Sunshine. This misstep aside, Terri announces a talent-to-watch in Wysocki, and shows Jacobs’ growing ability to maintain a strong personal touch while edging ever closer to the mainstream.

p.s. Watch out for a brief, funny cameo by Tim Heidecker of Tim & Eric fame.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench
dir. Damien Chazelle | USA | 2009 | 82 mins.

Shot on 16mm black-and-white stock and following the relationship of a young couple in modern-day Boston, Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench appears to be the filmic love child of Jean-Luc Godard and John Carney. In actuality, it’s the exquisite directorial début of Damien Chazelle, and was originally intended as his thesis film for Harvard Film School. It is basically a mash-up of the film styles and genres I love, casting a gritty cinema vérité light on the traditional MGM musical, using accomplished jazz musicians instead of professional actors, and featuring all-original music composed by Justin Hurwitz with lyrics by Chazelle, performed by the cast (often live).

The narrative follows the twentysomething title characters—Guy, a rising jazz trumpeter, and Madeline, an aimless introvert—and opens with a sequence that summarises their three-month whirlwind love affair. The film then tracks them as they separate, meet and spark up romances with new people, and eventually flirt with the idea of rekindling the relationship they once shared. While the story is very simple, it’s kept exciting by the unusual and unique little transitions from realist conversation to jazzy musical numbers and choreographed tap routines.

Guy and Madeline merges the trendy slacker sensibilities of indie film with documentary-style photography—i.e., mumblecore—and then completes the package by placing that storytelling style within the conventions of the big-budget musicals of Hollywood’s golden age, in the process paying homage to the glitz and glamour of all those old big production numbers. While it may sound like an uneasily eclectic mix, the film is truly distinctive and charming.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Attenberg
dir. Athina Rachel Tsangari | Greece | 2010 | 95 mins.

Attenberg is an attempt to examine the human species in the same way Sir David Attenborough observes animals in nature: with a desire to understand what makes them tick. Numerous clips from Attenborough’s shows are woven into the film, the title being a play on the mispronunciation of the British naturalist’s surname. Director Athina Rachel Tsangari has stated in interviews, “I don’t use psychology, I prefer biology or zoology. These are my tools.”

Against the backdrop of an industrial ghost town we meet Marina, a somewhat emotionally immature woman in her early twenties. She is an innocent, claiming that men repel her, but is intrigued enough by sex to find out more about it from her experienced best friend, Bella, who is more than happy to teach her all she knows. Other “subjects” of interest for the viewer are Marina’s atheist father, an architect being treated for (but slowly dying from) a cancerous tumour, and a young engineer who becomes the object of Marina’s sexual experimentation.

Spatially and emotionally closed off from the rest of the world, the characters are treated like animals in a zoo. Presented in a series of long, unbroken shots, Tsangari allows us to observe their movements closely, often avoiding direct emotion and giving the film a clinical, scientific feel.  Only towards the end of the film do Marina’s relationships become strained, finally allowing us to see a more human side of her.

In true art-house style the pacing is slow, but the subtly humorous moments, simplistic script, and powerful performances are enough to make Attenberg worth the watch.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Hot Coffee
dir. Susan Saladoff | USA | 2011 | 88 mins.

First-time filmmaker (and former medical malpractice attorney) Susan Saladoff serves up a boiling cup of provocative commentary in her documentary Hot Coffee, which looks at the impact of the tort reform on the US judicial system. Throughout the film, Saladoff offers an engaging presentation on how corporate America has made use of sensationalized lawsuit settlements to garner public opinion against “frivolous” cases.

The film’s opening section focuses on the notorious “McDonald’s case” in which an elderly woman was awarded millions for spilling a cup of hot coffee onto her lap. Saladoff includes a number of street interviews with the public which clearly indicate that the general opinion derives from an uninformed view of the case —people simply believe, having not been told all the details, that it was outrageous for someone to sue over hot coffee. This is predominantly to do with the mainstream media’s coverage of the debacle; the director delves deeper into the issue to expose what really went on and then broadening the issue of tort reform by including more seriously shocking incidents (one involving a gang rape). The film also addresses the issue of employee contracts with hidden clauses, and the problems surrounding corporate friendly judges being somewhat unfairly elected to appeals courts.

Saladoff handles the issues presented extremely well, turning what most would consider a boring topic into one that is interesting and informative as well as entertaining. By incorporating a wide range of interviews—including with luminaries such as Al Franken and John Grisham—along with explanations of the facts by the plaintiffs themselves the film leaves you feeling that you’ve gained an insight into the vulnerable position many Americans are in as a result of their tort system.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Norwegian Wood
dir. Tran Anh Hung | Japan | 2010 | 133 mins.

Oh Norwegian Wood, you beautiful bore. Admittedly I had high expectations, having heard from friends that the best-selling novel on which it is based (written by the marvellous Haruki Murakami) is incredible. Adapted for the screen by Vietnamese director Tran Anh Hung (Academy Award nominee for The Scent of Green Papaya), the film fails to deliver the same magic in the cinema as it (apparently) does in the pages of the book, summarising the story while still managing to be lacking in action and seemingly drawn out (it runs a tiring 133 minutes).

Set in late-’60s Tokyo (and dripping with nostalgia—see title), the story takes place with the tumultuous backdrop of students the world over getting all excited at the prospect of a revolution. Toru Watanabe’s personal life is in a similar state of commotion: after the tragic death, years earlier, of his best friend Kizuki, Watanabe forges a relationship with the dearly departed’s ex-girlfriend Naoko. Originally developing out of a shared sense of loss, their bond evolves: for Toru it becomes one of deep devotion, while for Naoko it only serves to intensify her grief. The couple’s relationship is under constant strain because of their complicated past, a situation that only becomes more challenging when Midori, an effervescent, self-confident girl (the supreme opposite of Naoko) enters Toru’s life.

Despite some breathtakingly beautiful cinematography and an interesting-enough narrative of loss, love, heartbreak, and all that jazz, the film just goes on and on, and at times feels repetitive. My advice? Save your pennies and visit your local library; I wish I had.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Page One: A Year Inside the New York Times
dir. Andrew Rossi | USA | 2011 | 88 mins.

Andrew Rossi’s documentary Page One is an out-and-out love letter to the Grey Lady, that bastion of journalism that is, like so much other old media, staring into an abyss-like uncertain future in the face of a rising digital culture. While its exploration of questions about the newspaper’s possible demise is rudimentary at best, the film does provide fascinating insight into the daily workings of the Times, showing how stories are made and re-made, and how the elements of a news item come together—often at just the right moment.

The star of the show is former-junkie-turned-intrepid-reporter David Carr, a gruff-voiced but amicable figure around whom a swirl of fellow Timespeople circulate, including the film’s three other main interviewees: Bruce Headlam, Carr’s editor on the media desk; Iraq-bound reporter Tim Arango; and twenty-something blogger-turned-professional-journalist Brian Stelter, the last of whom Carr is convinced is a robot sent to destroy him. (This joke probably falls flat without Carr’s idiosyncratic delivery.) Rossi and his film crew descended upon the paper at a time of crisis; there were challenges at every turn, with Julian Assange’s WikiLeaks ascendant, and a paywall on their website looking daily less like simply a talking point and more and more like an essential concession in order to weather the coming economic storm.

Alongside the WikiLeaks thread—which begins with a front-page piece by Stelter on the Collateral Murder video, one of the first mainstream reports, and the first to bring Assange’s loose ‘hacker’ conglomerate to public attention—the documentary delves into newspaper history, with mercifully brief high-school-level illustrations of the power of print journalism (Watergate; Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers) before switching tracks with a trip to SXSWi where fragments of interviews with @ev and @dens are shown in between panel discussions in which Carr shuts down any opposition to the Times’ seemingly untouchable status as the paper of record. (To his credit, Rossi mentions Jayson Blair’s plagiarism and Judith Miller’s dodgy reporting, but these are the only direct, prolonged criticisms of the Times the director allows.) The film, which though brisk is never incoherent, flits quickly from one salient point to the next. This works to its advantage, allowing for the delivery of a fast-paced and wide-ranging survey in under 90 minutes, rather than a documentary bogged down by extraneous minute detail.

More interesting than the panel discussions Carr appears on (though far less wit-filled) are a selection of government hearings about print media, committees on which David Simon features far too fleetingly—at least in Rossi’s edit—but which provide some old-media-versus-new-media starch to offset the fluffy aspect of much of the rest of the film. Jeff Jarvis and Clay Shirky are interviewed, but neither new-media expert says anything new; it feels mandatory to include them in a documentary discussing these issues, though. A point of contention is the film’s apparent demonstration of a potential gender imbalance at the Times, although this would seem to be less a result of any deliberate hiring policy and more a question of access: according to an interview with Headlam, his desk oversaw nine reporters at the time of the film’s production, two of whom were women. They both declined to be interviewed for the film. This is not to say there were no women interviewed, or that there are no women in significant roles at the paper: there were, and there are.

There is a better film about the newspaper business and its inevitable digital transmogrification waiting to be made, one that is less fawning and conciliatory—and certainly one that is focussed on the industry as a whole rather than its shining paragon—but Page One, with its acerbic star and its unprecedented inner-sanctum access, and even given its inner-ADD, is massively entertaining, and remarkably insightful. It is also far from the “lite current-affairs segment” certain reviews (including the paper’s own) might have lead you to perceive it as.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Mistérios de Lisboa (Mysteries of Lisbon)
dir. Raúl Ruiz | Portugal | 2010 | 272 mins.

Large, sumptuous costume-drama epics are a dying breed in cinema. The days when films such as Gone With The Wind, Lawrence of Arabia or even something on a smaller scale like Atonement could bring in truckloads of cash are long gone. Despite this, Portugese director Raúl Ruiz has, in Mysteries of Lisbon, given us a massive epic like none other in recent years.

Edited down from a six-hour television miniseries into a four-and-a-half hour feature film, Mysteries of Lisbon begins with an orphaned child, João, in 19^th century Portugal, who desperately wants to know who his father is, and reaches its tendrils out far beyond that. The people radiating this boy have their own stories, and as we get closer to one truth, more secrets are revealed and the layers are pulled back. It’s a credit to Ruiz—and to the strength of the source material, an 1852 Portuguese novel—that none of this feels awkward. One story flows effortlessly into the next; stories dovetail, and then break apart again. Facilitating this is the character of Padre Dinis, played with great charisma by Adriano Luz, who is frequently telling these stories or listening to people tell them. He is an effective audience surrogate: patient, watchful, and never rushing anything.

Early on the film João is seen playing with a little toy stage, moving around cardboard cut-outs of characters from side-to-side; it’s a lovely grace note, this character who has had his entire life predetermined controlling something for perhaps the first time. It also establishes a children’s-storybook aesthetic for the film: scenes are set-up to look like they could be taking place on this toy stage—you could take any scene out of this film and place it into a storybook and it would fit perfectly.

André Szankowski’s gorgeous digital cinematography captures every detail with an almost unnatural cleanliness, but this works to the film’s credit. There’s a painterly quality to the film, as if each frame had been pored over for weeks on end. This is even more remarkable considering Szankowski’s constant tracking through scenes, moving fluidly from room to room and around actors without ever cutting. It gives the film an unhurried, luxurious quality, but also lends a surprising amount of life as the audience can let the small parts of each scene sink in; the decorations on the wall, chattering socialites in the background. Along with the arresting costume and production design, the camerawork makes this epic an living, breathing creature, one that we’re happy to watch grow and develop.

Despite the gargantuan scope and length of the film, it definitely utilises every one of its 272-minute running time, capturing subtle emotions and tiny shifts in characters with great reverence. Ruiz’s epic is full of life, and full of palpably human characters struggling against a society that has already determined what is to become of them. It’s an elegant, truly beautiful piece of filmmaking that embraces all the complexities of humanity and the myriad ways in which all our lives can be rapidly changed at short notice, both for better and for worse.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Submarine
dir. Richard Ayoade | UK | 2010 | 97 mins.

Richard Ayoade, star of TV’s The I.T. Crowd and The Mighty Boosh—and co-creator of the great cult comedy Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace—has, in his début feature, created an utterly charming, visually dazzling coming-of-age comedy that stylishly nods to films and filmmakers past and present but never feels contrived or gratuitously sentimental. The plot, set in a permanently frigid late-’80s Swansea, revolves around 15-year-old Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts, Cary Fukunaga’s forthcoming Jane Eyre adaptation) as he multi-tasks, trying to keep his parents’ marriage from falling apart but simultaneously aiming to lose his virginity to the bob-haired, rosy-cheeked object of his affections, his classmate Jordana (Yasmin Paige), before his next birthday.

Roberts’ performance is sure to make him a hot property in the coming years, and Paige’s star will hopefully rise, too: they’re the perfect match, and not only because they have (sort of) matching duffle coats—his is a deep blue, hers a bright red over a giant maroon cable-knit jumper. Oliver’s parents are played by a bearded Noah Taylor and an alternately bashful and obstinate Sally Hawkins (like Jordana, hers is a bob hairdo), and while Ayoade doesn’t give them too many good one-liners, they do get quite a few choice moments in Oliver’s fantasy sequences. Paddy Considine plays Oliver’s neighbour—and the reason for his parents’ marriage teetring on the edge—a new-age mystic with a hideous mural on the site of his panel van, a ridiculous ’80s fauxhawk and a dubious moneymaking series of lectures on the importance of ‘light’ (possibly has a source of healing?), some of which he’s incorporated into a collection of SFX-heavy home videos. From a purely aesthetic standpoint, he could be the ur-Ed Hardy.

The film is a technical and visual achievement, as well: the cinematography, by Erik Wilson—who mostly works in TV but also shot Paddy Considine’s Tyrannosaur, also in the festival—is really beautiful, and the sometimes complex camerawork, particularly in a couple of fantasy sequences and in some of the Godard references, is equally spectacular. (There’s also a fun use of Philips’ freeze-motion ‘Carousel’ technology.) The incorporation of the mystic neighbour’s infomercial/self-help videotapes, in our retro/instant-on YouTube era, is brilliant; they seem like they could have been pulled from a witch-house video.

Five songs by Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys are used, some in montages, throughout the film, but the best is (probably on purpose) saved for the closing credits. Ayoade clearly loves movies more than anything, and his knowledge is damned near encyclopædic. The references he includes in this film—(fleetingly) to Les quatre cents coups and a small handful of other nouvelle vague films, including a recurring Godardian shot of Jordana twisting her hair around her little finger; (very briefly) to Charlie Kaufman’s writer-in-a-stream-of-consciousness mode; to Hal Ashby (indirectly, inasmuch as Oliver’s coat is something Bud Cort might’ve worn in Harold and Maude) and to Wes Anderson (directly, and more often); and to the wonderful way John Hughes put a few too many words in the mouths of his teenage characters to make them seem wise beyond their years—are more reverent (and considerably more subtle) than you’d expect for a first-time director.

There’s a twinned nod, I think, to Donnie Darko in a minor plot thread in the third act; similarly, the new-age mystic’s motivational speech doubles as this film’s fake motivational video-lecture/Sparkle Motion performance. (No Duran Duran here, though; there is, fascinatingly, almost no ‘yuppie’ feel to anything in this film aside from the goofy neighbour’s antics. Maybe Wales skipped the go-go ’80s entirely..?) The Andersonian reading-aloud of (typewritten) letters device—which narration comes wholesale from the novel and is condensed and trimmed; it’s not an invention of the screenplay—doesn’t feel inappropriate with the film’s overall rhythm, not least because it’s employed only twice. There are a couple of movie homages in the film’s production design, too: Oliver has a replica of the original poster for Le Samouraï on his bedroom ceiling and, anachronistically, this illustration of Woody Allen (or something that looks very much like it) stuck on a little noticeboard-type thing next to his bed with a bunch of other little magazine clippings.

It might superficially seem like wanton ‘quirky’ hipster-bait—what with the typewriters, the coy movie references, the fact that it’s set in the ’80s, the haircuts & the clothes, the 8-mm home movies they make, and the vaguely mopey singer-songwriter soundtrack, including Serge Gainsbourg, briefly—but Submarine genuinely is a sweet, authentic teenage love story that refreshingly delivers pure joy in spades.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

nziff ’11: Submarine
dir. Richard Ayoade | UK | 2010 | 97 mins.

The coming-of-age genre is a timeless one with a typical structure: A child, often a teenager, encounters a struggle or situation that propels them into adulthood—or at least their next stage in life. Richard Ayoade’s debut feature Submarine, based on the novel of the same name by Joe Dunthorne, doesn’t deviate too far from this structure but injects it with boatloads of quirk and an ostentatious style that often works to the film’s detriment. The story revolves around the dysfunctional life 15-year old Oliver Tate, charmingly played by Craig Roberts. His parents’ relationship is falling apart, and he has a crush on a girl in his class, Jordana Bevan (Yasmin Paige). He gets the girl relatively early on, and the rest of the film focuses on him trying to keep her and deal with—and then solve—his parents’ relationship problems.

Ayoade gets the audience into Oliver’s state of mind very effectively; it feels like we’re living inside a teenager’s head while watching this film. This isn’t always a good thing: there are copious amounts of voiceover which feels like it was written and rewritten by a writer, rather than feeling like the voice of a teenager. The film also constantly calls attention to itself—there are a lot of montages and knowing winks to the audience to make sure that they’re in on how this is a different coming-of-age film. There are times when this works—particularly in the scenes between Oliver and Jordana—but at other times, like when dealing with Oliver’s parents and his home life, it falls flat.

The film handles the relationship between Oliver and Jordana well; they act like you’d expect teenagers to act in their situation and it gives weight to their relationship without bogging down the whole enterprise with how important and serious it is. However, the film bungles the relationship between Oliver and his parents, played by the talented Sally Hawkins and Noah Taylor. Their characters are paper-thin and the few developments they have seem arbitrary and inorganic. Making matters worse is the interloper, Graham (Paddy Considine), a new-age guru who feels like he’d be great in a film that wasn’t trying so hard to be honest to the teenage experience, but in this he feels awkwardly shoehorned in for comic relief.

Ayoade shows a lot of promise as a filmmaker and obviously has an innate sense of style, although it’s overused here. He deals with the romantic relationship in the film with a surprising amount of maturity, and while the film is not without its pleasures, it leans too often on quirk to cohere as a truly good example of the coming-of-age genre.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals began on July 14 in Auckland; they start in Wellington on July 29, then travel to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

Welcome to Best Worst Podcast, covering the best and worst of cinema. Aside from referencing Michael Stephenson’s 2009 Troll 2 phenomena documentary Best Worst Movie the podcast name refers to our love of, and interest in discussing, both the very best of challenging auteurist cinema and the very worst of Z-grade trash!

In this first episode, your hosts Jacob and Doug try to figure out what the hell they’re doing then proceed with covering the highlights of the New Zealand International Film Festival’s 2011 programme, with a brief digression to explain the enigmatic “Circle of Quality.”

NZIFF 2011 films discussed: Attenberg; I Saw The Devil; Kid With A Bike; Tabloid (pictured above), and many, many more.

Doug Dillaman is a musician, filmmaker and cinephile who spends his days working as a film & television video editor.

Jacob Powell is a cinephile who works as a ‘media librarian’ dealing with archiving & delivery of digital media and who moonlights as a freelance writer/film critic.

This year’s film festival line-up looks to be the best in many years, with a record number of films direct from Cannes; four world premières of locally-made features—including Florian Habicht’s Love Story, which formally opens the festival in Auckland; strong “Worlds of Difference” and “New Directions” sections that present the very best of those branches of cinema, and a number of sterling new restorations of bona fide classics all vying for your hard-earned, festival-earmarked dollar.

On the surface there might not appear to be anything with as wide-ranging appeal as there have been in recent years (such as In the Loop or particularly last year’s Four Lions), but there are some gems hidden deep within the programme—and there may yet be some late announcements. The “Go Slow” section, showcasing the best of the slow-film movement, is more impressive than it was in ’09 and last year, bolstered noticeably by Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse. Ant Timpson’s carefully curated “Incredibly Strange” section is, as usual, teeming with an enticing, eclectic group of films from around the globe—ranging from the scary and creepy to the shocking and the downright bizarre.

Centrepieces
Direct from Cannes

The film at the top of many people’s lists will be Terrence Malick’s The Tree of Life (pictured), which, according to one review, “explores humanity’s need to find metaphysical, spiritual, or psychological solace in a physical, natural, phenomenal world whose God remains silent.” This is only Malick’s fifth feature in as many decades, and it’s been gestating since at least the late ’70s. (If I started writing about it in this post, I’d never stop, so I’ll move on.) Danish firebrand Lars von Trier got in a bit of trouble at Cannes this year—though this time it wasn’t for the film he’s made, but for momentarily aligning himself with Hitler. His new movie, Melancholia, which he describes as “a beautiful film about the end of the world,” stars Kirsten Dunst, Charlotte Gainsbourg, Charlotte Rampling, Stellan and Alexander Skarsgård, and John Hurt, among others.

At Cannes, Aki Kaurismäki’s comedy La Havre won the International Critics Prize, while The Kid with a Bike, the new Dardennes brothers film, won a Grand Prix. Other award-winning titles: Israeli film Footnote won the Best Screenplay award, and Andrey Zvyagintsev’s new film Elena was given a Special Jury Prize in the Un Certain Regard section. Australian novelist—and now first time writer-director—Julia Leigh’s Sleeping Beauty exploded onto the Internet a few months back with an enticing trailer; it didn’t take any awards at Cannes but elicited immediate acclaim from critics. Another new Australian film, Snowtown, looks to be more unsettling—for different reasons—than Leigh’s film. In Take Shelter, Michael Shannon (Revolutionary Road, TV’s Boardwalk Empire) stars alongside Jessica Chastain—who’s also in The Tree of Life—as a man plagued by a series of apocalyptic visions who doesn’t know if he should try and protect his family from an oncoming storm, or himself. Once Upon a Time in Anatolia, by Turkish filmmaker Nuri Bilge Ceylan, won a Grand Prix award at Cannes should, according to festival director Bill Gosden’s programme note, “engross and reward all who submit to its placid pace and steady accumulation of vivid detail.”

There are 14 films in the programme direct from Cannes—a record haul for the festival—and that number doesn’t even include a couple of others that played out of competition. If you’re in Wellington, you have the opportunity to take in two more: Mohammad Rasoulof’s Goodbye, and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, the latter of which stars Ryan Gosling (and gets a limited release in Auckland—and elsewhere around the country—in November).

Spotlight
Films you might not have spotted the first time you flicked through the booklet

Meek’s Cutoff (pictured) is the new film from Kelly Reichardt (Wendy and Lucy), and stars Michelle Williams, Bruce Greenwood, Zoe Kazan, and Shirley Henderson as stranded émigrés on the Oregon Trail in 1845. Actor Paddy Considine’s directorial début Tyrannosaur looks to be moderately harrowing but no doubt rewarding viewing, while its polar opposite might be A Useful Life (La vida ùtil), a film presented by the Auckland Film Society about a cinema programmer in Montevideo who has to adjust to life after his theatre is closed down. In Asghar Farhadi’s moral drama A Separation, “a secular, middle-class family is accused of a crime by an impoverished, religious one.”

Every great festival has a great architecture documentary, and How Much Does Your Building Weigh, Mr. Foster? fits the bill this year—it looks at the life and work of architect Norman Foster. Turning to slower films, Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow is British director Sophie Fiennes’ exploration of the work of German painter and sculptor Anselm Kiefer. “Fiennes immerses us in Kiefer’s world,” writes Bill Gosden, “simply and to haunting effect with stately camera movement and a minimal score by Jörg Widmann and György Ligeti.” Aita and Nainsukh, also in the “Go Slow” section, look inviting in their sparseness, while Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse (pictured) is possibly the final film by the Hungarian master and, as such, will be a highlight for many cinephiles. Michelangelo Frammartino’s Le Quattro Volte, “inspired by Pythagoras’s belief in four-fold transmigration—by which the soul is passed from human to animal to vegetable to mineral”—looks to be haungtingly beautiful, while Lech Majewski’s similarly enticing The Mill and the Cross marks Rutger Hauer’s first appearance in the programme—the other is at the opposite end of the spectrum, in the Incredibly Strange section.

Independent Highlights
Audience favourites and award winners from SXSW, Sundance, and other ‘indie’ festivals

The “New Directions” portion of this year’s lineup is packed with début features, including Submarine (pictured), a coming-of-age tale set in Swansea made by Richard Ayoade—he plays Moss on The IT Crowd—and Lena Dunham’s Tiny Furniture, which has been getting rave reviews since it first screened at SXSW in April last year. If you saw Dogtooth at the festival two years ago and weren’t so offended you had to walk out, Attenberg is probably right up your alley: its director, Athina Rachel Tsangari, produced Yorgos Lanthimos’ film, and he returns the favour here by playing a minor role. First-time director Sean Durkin’s tongue-twistingly-titled Martha Marcy May Marlene won awards at Sundance, and stars Elizabeth Olsen, who may yet become as famous as her twin sisters. Wellingtonians have the opportunity to see Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, which won a Special Jury Prize at Sundance.

Heartbeats is the new film from 22-year-old French filmmaker Xavier Dolan, whose I Killed My Mother was a minor hit at last year’s fest. The similarly prolific Hong Sang-soo (Hahaha) has two films in this year’s programme: Oki’s Movie and The Day He Arrives. Vietnamese director Anh Hung Tran (Xich lo; The Scent of Green Papaya) has adapted Haruki Murakami’s novel Norwegian Wood for the screen. Elsewhere, Mike Mills (Thumbsucker) returns with Beginners, and his counterpart in quirk, Miranda July (Me and You and Everyone We Know) also has a new film: The Future. (It’s narrated by a talking cat.)

New Zealand Firsts
World Premières

In addition to the regular selections of short films which precede the presentation of certain features, and their companion showcases, the festival hosts four world premières of local features, starting with Florian Habicht’s Love Story which opens the festival in Auckland. Brother Number One (pictured) is Annie Goldson’s documentary inquiry into the death of Olympian Rob Hamill’s brother Kerry, who died in Cambodia at the hands of the Khmer Rouge in the late ’70s. Korean filmmaker Park Kiyong captured the devastation of the Canterbury earthquake in his film Moving, and in Daytime Tiger Costa Botes profiles Kiwi author Michael Morrisey.

Grace Notes
Music-related movies

John Tuturro’s passion project Passione “presents a series of mini-dramas, staged in the streets and piazzas” of Naples. Merle Haggard and Levon Helm get profiled in Learning to Live with Myself and Ain’t in it for My Health, and Michael Rappaport’s semi-controversial documentary Beats, Rhymes & Life gets “uncomfortably close” to A Tribe Called Quest. Guy and Madeline on a Park Bench (pictured) is a black-and-white mumblecore feature that centres on a young jazz trumpeter, and while The Black Power Mixtape, 1967–1975 isn’t directly about music, ?uestlove did the soundtrack—so that counts, right?

Gastronomic Delights
Movies about food

A trio of films about food feature prominently: The Trip is Michael Winterbottom’s feature-length condensation of his BBC series starring Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as versions of themselves on a restaurant tour of England’s Lake District. Jiro Dreams of Sushi (pictured) is a documentary about a sushi-maker called Jiro who obviously works too hard because he apparently dreams about his job. Another doc profile, ex-pat Kiwi Sally Rowe’s A Matter of Taste looks at English-born star chef Paul Liebrandt’s struggles in the Big Apple, and tangentially at the New York Times food critic Frank Bruni.

From the Vaults
Restorations, retrospectives and other archival findings

The 30^th anniversary of Martin Scorsese’s Taxi Driver is celebrated in style, with a new restoration; German expressionism gets two outings, with the long-awaited ‘complete’ version of Metropolis, and Nosferatu: a Symphony of Horrors both screening, the latter with live orchestral accompaniment. (Outside the festival, Metropolis also screens on November 12^th with accompaniment by the Auckland Philharmonic.) The festival is also host to wonderful new restorations of La Dolce Vita (pictured) and Elia Kazan’s under-appreciated 1960 film Wild River, which stars Montgomery Clift and Lee Remick.

New Zealand filmmaker Merata Mita is posthumously honoured with a screening of her film Mana Waka, which premièred at the Commonwealth Games Arts Festival in 1990. The Wellington leg of the festival celebrates its fortieth birthday with screenings of two films which played back in the ’70s: Éric Rohmer’s Claire’s Knee, and a restoration of Cría Cuervos, Carlos Saura’s “gripping, profoundly mysterious” 1976 film.

Reel Life
Documentaries

The New York Times was tangentially exposed in the truly excellent Bill Cunningham New York (on now at select locations around the country), and in Page One (pictured), the Grey Lady is given the full bio-pic treatment. Errol Morris returns with Tabloid—which might pique a few more festival-goers’ interests given recent news—and Frederick Wiseman plonks his camera down in a boxing gym in Boxing Gym. The Apple Computer creation myth is explored from an alternate angle—that of the guys with financial control—at the centre of Something Ventured, which looks at the world of venture capitalism. Artyon Senna, Mikhail Khodorkovsky, and the late chess prodigy Bobby Fischer are all profiled in documentaries, while How to Die in Oregon and Hot Coffee look at euthanasia and tort reform, respectively.

Werner Herzog and Wim Wenders both have 3-D documentaries—about cave paintings (Cave of Forgotten Dreams) and a choreographer (Pina)—that push both cinema technology and the festival’s ordinary schedule to the limit: the Auckland leg goes into overtime on August 1^st so that Event Cinemas Queen St. can accommodate these special screenings.

Off the Wall
Incredibly Strange

Ant Timpson has once again pulled together a collection of the most wonderfully weird new movies for his Incredibly Strange section, every one of which, as usual, is worth checking out. Among this year’s group: Takashi Miike’s 13 Assassins, a remake of a 1963 film which was in itself an homage to The Seven Samurai; The Man from Nowhere and I Saw the Devil, which join Chaser director Hong-jin Na’s The Yellow Sea in the bursting-at-the-seams Korean-revenge-thriller subgenre; Sion Sono’s Cold Fish, a shorter film than his titillating four-hour extravaganza Love Exposure from a few years back, and Ti West (The House of the Devil) returns with The Innkeepers, a story of paranormal activity with a difference.

Jason Eisener’s violently colourful Hobo with a Shotgun (pictured) marks Rutger Hauer’s second appearance in the programme after The Mill and the Cross, and—as the title might suggest—he plays a homeless vigilante who, to the dismay of bad guys all over town, brandishes a loaded shotgun. While other I.S. entries Kill List, KNUCKLE, The Last Circus, and Troll Hunter all look to be enjoyable and crazy in their own ways, Lucky McKee’s The Woman looks terrifyingly batshit insane by comparison—like Antichrist taken to its (il)logical conclusion.

Time Out
The Film Café

Finally, a note on a new addition to the Auckland leg of the festival: Gina Dellabarca and the Show Me Shorts team have organised a cultural hub in the Civic’s elegant Wintergarden (pictured—though it probably won’t look that fancy the whole time) that runs from noon on weekdays and 2pm on weekends. The Film Café—aside from living up to its name by being home to an actual café and bar—will witness short film screenings, discussions with festival guests, and Script-to-Screen Filmmaker Talks, and much more. The Film Café’s events programme, which starts on Saturday evening with a film-centric pub-quiz style event, is on the festival’s website.

The New Zealand International Film Festivals begin tonight in Auckland with an opening gala featuring the world première of Florian Habicht’s Love Story before travelling to Wellington on July 29, thence to Dunedin, Christchurch, Palmerston North, and Hamilton throughout August, and Nelson, Tauranga, New Plymouth, Hawke’s Bay, Greymouth, Masterton, and, finally, Kerikeri in November.

Full information on all films in the programme is at the festival’s website.

For more reviews, browse the “New Zealand International Film Festivals 2011“
tag on this site, and check the Twitter hashtag #nzff.

An homage to “the no-reason,” helpfully elucidated upon in the film’s tantalising opening scene, the first feature-length film by French d.j. Quentin Dupieux is a very meta horror film about a homicidal car tyre with psycho-kinetic powers who ends his victims’ lives by quivering in their general direction. Robert, our deranged synthetic rubber protagonist, lays dormant in the California desert, baking in the sun. The film tells us his story, such as it is, at the same time as we’re shown another audience, armed with binoculars, who also watch his exploits. It’s best to go in to the film knowing not much more than what I’ve just explained, so I’ll not go any further—but suffice it to say that this is offbeat, truly inventive cinema at its best (and don’t worry, it’s really not all that gruesome). Plus, at only 85 minutes, it’s not exactly a time-consuming watch.

Rubber is out now on DVD through Madman.

A selection of the film’s trailers (teasers & theatrical) are included as bonus features.

In Up in the Air, George Clooney flew around the US firing people*, and we were supposed to feel for him when his job function/life/credit rating was rendered obsolete by Skype. In The Company Men, Ben Affleck’s rich douchebag gets fired and is forced to sell his Porsche, and we’re supposed to feel sorry for him. In Larry Crowne, nothing remotely entertaining happens to or with Tom Hanks for 98 minutes, and we’re supposed to sit there and be entertained by his painfully unfunny Dad-jokes.

While they may not prove to be among the very worst films of the year, two recent recession-era movies, The Company Men and Larry Crowne, are thoroughly unpalatable. The former has an excessively unlikeable protagonist—with whom, incredibly, we’re supposed to sympathise—while the latter’s lead character is so dull and simultaneously unbearably pleasant that it’s hard to believe anyone would wilfully subject themselves to being in his company.

The Company Men, TV producer John Wells’ directorial (and screenwriting) feature début, centres on a fictional ship-building conglomerate in the midst of a major round of corporate downsizing. The company’s CEO (Craig T. Nelson) sets in motion plans to fire hundreds of employees, from some 5,000-plus blue-collar ship-builders at plants across the country to salesmen, accountants, and other privileged white-collar bureaucrat paper-pushers of the upper echelons of the corporate sector. Words and phrases such as “consolidating divisions” and “necessary layoffs” are thrown around by the CEO and by mid-level boss Gene McClary (an enjoyable Tommy Lee Jones) as he fires his sales manager (and our protagonist) Bobby Walker (Ben Affleck) and, later, as Phil Woodward (Chris Cooper) is also laid off.

The major problem with the film is that Wells—who helped bring E.R. to the small screen, and took over from Aaron Sorkin after the writer-creator left The West Wing in 2003, to its detriment—attempted, in earnest, to focus on the plight of the wealthy few when they’re let go from their jobs, rather than the similarly-fired ordinary majority who make the ships that the higher-ups toy with via columns of numbers on sheets of paper. Put simply, Bobby Walker is a rich asshole who arrogantly assumes he’ll never be out of a job. He drives a Porsche, lives in an outsized McMansion in a leafy exurb of Boston—replete, the opening credits exhibit, with a counter-top overflowing with useless (and probably unused) expensive kitchen appliances—and earns in excess of US$120,000 (not counting bonuses and considerable stock options). We’re supposed to feel sorry for him—or at the very least, somehow identify with his ‘suffering’—when he loses his job? Yeah, right. Oh, and his son has to sell his X-Box because Dad can’t afford to keep paying the online-gaming subscription fee. (Yes, this is an actual plot point. Boo-bloody-hoo.) The whole thing comes across as smug and arrogant.

It speaks volumes that the crowd I saw the film with weren’t taking it seriously: in a scene in which Tommy Lee Jones finds Chris Cooper’s character sitting in a bar in the middle of the day, he asks why he’s dressed for work and why he’d bought his briefcase with him. He replies that he hasn’t told his wife that he was fired, so he has to make it look like he’s going to work each day—not least so the neighbours don’t suspect anything. When he explained this, most of the people in the row in front of me laughed out loud. Now, either the filmmakers meant this as a joke (unlikely, given the gravity of much of the rest of the film, including a sequence that immediately follows the one I’ve just described) or they completely goofed the tone of the scene: the audience in my screening were so removed from the characters’ emotions that the only response the film was able to elicit from them was laughter. The only actual joke in the film, for the record, comes when Bobby tells an overweight woman who’s interviewing him that she should “probably lay off the diet soda.” Real original wit, that.

One thing that irked me the most—and something that possibly exemplifies his overall attitude during the filmmaking process—is his abuse of a song by The National called “Fake Empire.” There’s a cheap montage (of BAffleck & co. playing football in the rain after he’s had what he thought was a successful job interview) set to the song—except, if you know the song well enough you’ll notice that Wells has, in his supreme laziness, taken the instrumental guts of it and slowed them down, stretched them out to fit the thirty-second timeframe of the sequence. This deliberate butchering seldom happens in such a blatant fashion (or at least not in feature films), and it’s emblematic of the arrogance of the script/story as a whole (or maybe Wells as a person), I think. It’s bad enough that Aaron Zigman’s crappy score variously (and shamelessly) apes New Order, Washed Out, The Postal Service and a smattering of breezy mid-’70s FM radio folk-rock; Wells didn’t need to go overboard and cheapen one of the best tracks on Boxer, too.

The script is pitifully bad in parts, and barely serviceable otherwise. One scene has Jones’ boss and some of his minions staring at a TV screen covered in financial jargon and news-tickers: “What does it all mean?” says a confused, insignificant drone. “Nothing good,” comes Jones’ lackadaisical reply. The film tries (but fails) to humanise Bobby in its third act when he’s forced to help out his builder brother-in-law (an egregiously miscast Kevin Costner) by putting up GIB board for what he probably assumes is near minimum wage. Other moronic decisions include putting Rosemarie de Witt (Rachel Getting Married) in the role of Bobby’s wife, and having the film set in Boston which means she’s forced to affect a terrible accent. (Affleck’s accent is somehow worse here than it would be in his own The Town.) In case you’re wondering, everything works out for Bobby in the end: he starts up a new rival shipping company—a small-time, all-American concern—with some of Tommy Lee Jones’ money.

Larry Crowne doesn’t leave the same kind of foul aftertaste as does The Company Men, but it’s definitely bottom-of-the-barrel summer-movie filler-material of the lowest, laziest order.† Recently divorced, relentlessly upbeat middle-aged white guy Larry Crowne (Tom Hanks) gets fired from his retail assistant job because he never went to college. (Stupid premise, but whatever; moving on…) He decides to go to community college to get back into the workforce, and one of his teachers (Julia Roberts) falls in love with him. That’s the entire plot; nothing else of consequence occurs in the film’s overlong 98 minutes. (OK, so stuff sort of happens: Hanks falls for a particularly vacant/moronic MPDG, and Bryan Cranston pops up momentarily as Roberts’ surly porn-surfing blogger husband—except, this being a PG-13 movie, the porn resembles nothing so much as a lingerie catalogue.) Mega-producer Hanks directed the film—his first active role behind the camera since 1996’s middling, vaguely irritating period comedy That Thing You Do!—and co-wrote the script with Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame, a film which, circuitously, Hanks produced and which contains precisely one joke. (“Yes. Inside the lump… was my twin.”)

You’d think after the complete and utter bomb that was I Hate Valentine’s Day, Vardalos would’ve been removed from the Rolodexes of all the important Hollywood big-wigs—even Tom Hanks—but no. I realise this kind of movie is meant as pure Escapism with a capital E, not realism—but where in the world would you find a community-college teacher (of brainy-sounding courses like “Shakespeare the Politican”) who’s this implausibly hot? Why would you have her give a pizza boy a $12 tip? Why would you cast Wilmer Valderrama as the leader of a biker (motor-scooter) gang? (Surely that alone should have sounded some alarms.) So many questions, so few answers. Clearly Hanks needs to stick to producing: I’d take a dozen more From the Earth to the Moons over yet another mid-level broad comedy of this sort.

After the dreadful Up in the Air and Oliver Stone’s botched revisit, two decades later, to the themes and supposedly timeless tribulations of Wall Street, these two new films don’t inspire confidence in Hollywood’s ability to relate to Joe Public’s experience of the Global Financial Crisis—but I guess at least they’re not all as terrible as Horrible Bosses apparently is. Maybe Everything Must Go will buck the trend?

The Company Men is in theatres now; Larry Crowne opens on August 4^th.

* Is that even a thing? A professional firer?
† In France, the film’s marketing is a little more direct.

Bolstered considerably by the original blues-rock of his band The Marbleheads and narrated by the people who knew him the most intimately, Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas’ feature-length exploration of the life and work of Bill Hicks is as brash, crude and uncompromising as its fitting title would have you expect. An American through and through, the story of how the Georgian native became a world-famous stand-up comedian is relayed through the standard one-two talking-heads-and-archival-footage combo, but there’s a neat pop-up-book aesthetic added here where 2–D photos are cut up and reworked into animated sequences peppered throughout the film; these are combined with regular photo-montages and pan-and-zooms, familiar as the stuff of just about every documentary based on someone’s life and made from family photos.

There’s also a wealth of moving-image material, from rough 16mm stuff to sketchy amateur-video footage, and it all forms a rich tapestry, illuminating the funny parts—like how Hicks snuck out of his parents’ house when he was a teenager to sneak into (and perform at) comedy clubs downtown—and the more downbeat segments. The best of his rants for personal freedoms; against anti-intellectualism; against right-wingers (Reagan in particular); against the military-industrial complex, anti-smoking and drug laws (marijuana in particular); and against (or for) just about everything else are all on display here, interwoven with the ebbs and flows of his continual battle with alcoholism. A moving, uplifting section in which sobriety gives Hicks a clear head and alleviates some of the nastier parts of his onstage persona is particularly moving on a very simple, human level, and though the film ends on a necessarily melancholy note, it’s nicely reflective of Hicks’ worldview, which is ultimately optimistic of the potential of the human race even as it’s couched in his own brand of deeply sardonic black comedy.

American: the Bill Hicks Story is out now on DVD through Madman.

Along with the usual selection of trailers and outtakes, of which there are a great many, the special features on this disc number in the dozens. Of particular note is a moving segment in which Hicks’ family, on holiday in England, visits Abbey Road studios and has some of Hicks’ home recordings remastered. The comedian was a life-long singer-songwriter, and the tracks presented (all too briefly) here are remarkably insightful. The name the family gives to the collection is “The Lo-Fi Troubadour,” and that nicely reflects the introspective, personal nature of the tunes sampled in the featurette—they are as moving and as revealing of who Bill Hicks really was as anything in the film proper.

Madman have for many years now been releasing films by Douglas Sirk, the grand old master of melodrama, and are now down to what can favourably be called some of his lesser work. Interlude was made in 1957, a few years before Sirk would leave America (and filmmaking) forever (but not before making one of his best pictures, Imitation of Life). This film, set in Salzburg and Munich, tells of a whirlwind romance between an impressionable young American woman and a world-renowned European conductor, and the complications that arise when other romantic interests enter the frame.

The acting is in parts sketchy, and some of the dialogue is a tad on-the-nose, but the cinematography (even as it’s here presented, rough around the edges—the picture lacks vibrancy and obviously hasn’t been restored, or at least hasn’t been intensely retouched) is impressive, at least inasmuch as it reveals the full scope and breadth of the original images as Sirk intended them to be seen. Bearing this all in mind, this is one, perhaps, only for Sirkian completists. Released under the banner of Madman’s always spectacular cinephile-focused Directors Suite label, the film unexpectedly includes a bonus disc, about which more in the note at the foot of this post.

Due probably as much to its warm reception at last year’s film festival as to its wide appeal, La Danse: the Paris Opéra Ballet is the first film by documentarian Frederick Wiseman to see the light of day on DVD in this country—a disheartening statistic, given that he’s been in the game since the late ’60s. (Judging by some brief research, not even his début, the critically admired Titicut Follies, is available to rent or own in New Zealand, although it can be purchased online from his website. But I digress…) This 152-minute opus looks at the inner workings and oft-hidden machinations of the world’s most famous (and one of the world’s oldest) ballets. Through Wiseman’s trademark passive exploration, the film examines the rehearsals, warm-ups and performances of seven ballets, the most exciting (for this reviewer at least, ahead of Wim Wenders’ much-anticipated documentary on the choreographer this year) being Pina Bausch’s Orphée and Eurydice. Wiseman is here fascinated by every facet of the opera, from administrators to performers and all those in between; the result is nothing short of intoxicating.

Now for something completely different: Sam Raimi’s Darkman trilogy terrified me when I accidentally watched a bit of the first one (at least I think it was the first one) on TV one night when I was about 8 or 9. I mean, come on, a scientist of some description (pictured above) who destroys his face by dissolving most of it in a new kind of skin treatment (mostly just acid, apparently) and gets around wrapped in bandages? Scary as hell. Permanently disfigured and looking for all the world like H. G. Wells’ Invisible Man, our hero in these action-filled, explosive adventures is played by (an of course largely unrecognisable) Liam Neeson. Interestingly (and happily), Coen Bros. favourite Frances McDormand also has a major role.

Turns out, of course, that these films aren’t actually scary at all, though; they’re actually quite brilliant in a pulpy, B-movie way—which was, one learns, always Raimi’s intention: the films were adapted from a short story (and later a rejected screenplay which was at the centre of bitter Hollywood production disputes and in-fighting) that Raimi wrote which paid homage to Universal’s horror films that were a staple for the studio in the 1930s. (The use of all three old Uni logos at the start of the first film, though it may have been standard for films of its era [1990], is the first of many nods to those gurgling black-and-white mummies and howling werewolves of yore.) Brimming with atmosphere and borne of an almost pathological comic-book obsession—evident in everything from the acting and the line delivery, right through to Danny Elfman’s superb score, of which special mention must be made—these films are a treat for (film) geeks and (comic-book) nerds of all stripes. Issued here without fanfare, as they perhaps ought to be, these unadorned discs contain no special features aside from each film’s trailer.

Although its outré direction becomes grating, and though at nearly eight hours its excessive length may try the patience of even those viewers with all the stamina in the world, Tony Palmer’s Wagner—an epic film meditation on the life and work of the great(est?) German composer shot across Europe and made at what one must assume to be terrific expense—contains some of the most fascinating and at times terrifyingly vivid performances ever committed to celluloid. Chief among them is, of course, Richard Burton’s lead portrayal; a bravura performance in every sense of the word, the role was, he said, the one he was “born to play.” This film, in fact, proved to be one of Burton’s last; what a way to go out. “I don’t write operas, I write music-dramas,” says the composer at one point. Palmer’s film certainly deserves to be called a music-drama of its own; a more thorough exultation of the life of a composer—indeed, of musical artist—would be more difficult to find.

The music in the film was recorded specifically for the occasion, under the baton of Sir Georg Solti at the height of his powers. In opposition to its less than appealing physical packaging (the hard-plastic case is unusually cumbersome for a Madman release), both the sound and picture have been beautifully restored—at least in comparison to screenshots and written accounts of the quality of older versions found online. The feature is split across three discs, with two lengthy bonus documentaries—fittingly, one (“In From the Cold?”) on Burton, and one of equal stature (“Parsifal: the Search for the Grail”) on the composer—rounding out the five-disc box set. (nb: A more in-depth review of this film will likely be posted on this site later in the year, after the yearly hub bub of the film festival has died down.)

Michael Powell and Emerich Pressburger were the dream-team of post-war British filmmaking. It’s hard to imagine a similar director-producer partnership flourishing—let alone enduring for as many years as did theirs, spanning the six decades between 1928 and 1978—in today’s largely bankrupt cinema climate. Made for the Rank Organisation, and many under the banner of their production company The Archers, Powell & Pressburger’s were arguably the ‘event’ films of their time, at least on that side of the Atlantic; their partnership reached its zenith with Black Narcissus (1947) and is seen in most glorious full flight in The Red Shoes (1948), easily the most celebrated of the duo’s 19 films together.

Two Powell-Pressburger films that are often overlooked, though, are A Canterbury Tale (1944) and I Know Where I’m Going! (1945). Both are now seeing release on DVD, with stellar picture—superbly restoring Erwin Hillier’s cinematography (these were his only two collaborations with Powell and Pressburger) as close, one imagines, to pristine—and sound quality for films of their age, and the Directors Suite’s usual booklets containing semi-academic article-essays that survey the production and reception of each film. A Canterbury Tale, as its name directs, takes its title from Chaucer’s story collection; the setting, though, became contemporaneous with the film’s production, with Britain in war-time standing in for 14th century Britain. At its most basic, this is a crime story—about a man who gets off the train at the wrong stop, is stranded and becomes involved in tracking down a mysterious bad guy. I Know Where I’m Going!, with its clumsy-seeming (to us, nowadays at least) title and old-fashioned romance, is a little harder to get into, though no less enjoyable; interestingly, some of the more fantasty-driven elements in the fabric of this make it an obvious stop en route to P&P’s later full-blown spectacles.

Of the assortment of films thrown together here by happenstance and the randomness of release schedules, Bertrand Tavernier’s latest film The Princess of Montpensier is certainly the most visually ravishing. A lush historical romance about a 16th century princess, Marie de Mézières, arranged to be married to a man she has never met but in love with someone else, the film’s greatest asset is its camerawork and cinematography, which is superlative, matching and at times even surpasses the sometimes overly dramatic portrayal given by the (also ravishing) lead actress, Mélanie Thierry. The costuming, as you might expect of a French costume drama, is made all the more stunning by (again), excellent technical work behind the camera. If Tavernier seems at times distracted by his surroundings and a little disinterested in, say, narrative, it’s probably (in this writer’s opinion) intentional: this is as much a film to look at as it is to become passionately involved with story-wise.

The above titles are available this month on DVD from Madman.

Various special features are included with each disc; at minimum a trailer. The Sirk film, impressively, boasts an additional disc containing John M. Stahl’s 1939 film When Tomorrow Comes, upon which Interlude was based. Also on that bonus disc: a featurette entitled Beyond Melodrama, in which Kathryn Bigelow espouses the virtues of Sirk and explains his influence on her own work.

The discs for Darkman and Wagner are of a disappointingly low quality for Madman, both in their screen-image presentation and in their physical packaging, although the Wagner film, which would have looked superb on Blu-ray, looks better than it might otherwise have. The two Powell-Pressburger films are exemplars of the distributors’ Directors’ Suite label, accompanied, as are most of the DS releases, with booklets containing insightful, accessible scholarly essays.

Lilian Franck and Robert Cibis’ documentary on Stefan Knüpfer, Steinway & Sons’ chief piano tuner in Austria, is as quiet and unassuming as its subject. Subtitled “In Search of the Perfect Sound,” the film tracks the eccentric, witty Knüpfer’s mission to prepare a number of different pianos for a recording of Bach’s unfinished masterpiece The Art of Fugue* by Pierre-Laurent Aimard in the Vienna Konzerthaus. (Lang Lang, Alfred Bendel, Rudolf Buchbinder and David Helfgott also make appearances, though it’s Aimard who occupies the most screen time.) Knüpfer goes to great lengths to manipulate the sound of a traditional Steinway grand (by preparing the strings with various machines, and a tennis ball attached to a length of wood, and by changing the hammer heads and putting extra felt into the body of the piano) so that it variously emulates the tone of an organ and a period clavichord, among other types of keyboard.

In one of the film’s most fascinating moments, he visits a collector to see a 400-year-old clavichord in action. To get one of the pianos to with the acoustics of a certain concert hall, Knüpfer constructs cantilevered arches out of frosted opaque glass that he then places on the piano in order to reflect the sound to the ceiling and into waiting microphones. Knüpfer’s determination to achieve absolute perfection might not sound like something that could be the stuff of an entertaining feature-length documentary, but it is—largely because of his self-effacing charisma and endless neuroses.

Pianomania is now out on DVD through Madman. 46 minutes’ worth of bonus scenes are included as special features.

*Bach’s The Art of Fugue is the subject of another (unrelated) documentary, Desert Fugue.

A history of la nouvelle vague as it sloshed around its two principal figures, François Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard. Directed by documentarian Emmanuel Laurent and written and narrated by film historian, Cahiers du Cinéma critic, and Truffaut biographer Antoine de Baecque, the film begins with Truffaut’s Les Quatre cents Coups winning the Palme d’Or, and from there moves to Godard’s À bout de souffle and the ups and downs of various other filmmakers and key works of the period. (Godard and Truffaut remain front-and-centre, however.)

Although the film—adroitly compiled from many hours’ worth of archival footage—focuses largely on the two key figures, their place in the movement and their power as filmmakers and critics is magnetic enough to have anyone else important be caught up in their orbit. The documentary’s scant coverage of Godard’s didactic, easily discarded post-May ’68 work might disappoint some viewers, but this isn’t what the film aims to talk about—and makes up for this by looking at the brief but vitrolic correspondence between the two after Godard stormed out of a screening of Truffaut’s 1974 film La Nuit Américaine that would eventually sever their relationship. (Truffaut: “You act like a shit. I don’t give a damn what you think of Day for Night. But what I do find pathetic on your part is that, even now, you go to films like that when you know very well in advance they don’t match your idea of cinema or your idea of life. It’s my turn to call you a liar.”)

The filmmakers have relatively unknown actress Isild Le Besco flipping through old photograph albums, looking through newspaper clippings, and traipsing around Paris (visiting the Cinémathèque, et cetera) in our stead, as if just showing us these places or putting the photos and articles up on the screen isn’t enough. She’s not directly related to anyone the film discusses—which would be the only good reason for her appearance—and the credits have her ‘starring’ in the film, which is absurd because she doesn’t say or do anything. Laurent’s explanation (in the press kit interview) for ‘casting’ her is that he wanted to create “a connection between the filmmakers’ youth and the youth of our time.” Why, then, would he not have her introduce (or “host”) the documentary? Baecque’s simplistically written, drily and timidly delivered narration seems deliberately superficial, glossing over the motivations (political and otherwise) of the film’s subjects, and the radical construction and profound impact of their work.

The film’s conceit that Jean-Pierre Léaud is a sort of cinematic love-child of Godard and Truffaut—that he grew up with the New Wave, playing the character of Antoine Doinel, nurtured by cinema and cinéastes—is novel and fascinating, and reaches its apex at film’s close, when he’s positioned as a child torn asunder by a messy divorce. Liberal use of passages (and sometimes whole scenes) from key nouvelle vague films and later entries in Truffaut and Godard’s filmographies accounts for much of the documentary’s 93-minute run time; had this footage been judiciously pared down as it should have been, the result could have (for example) ably occupied a spot as an extra feature on a Blu-ray release from an art-house label. As is, Two in the Wave is a passable but overlong introduction for those who know nothing at all of the history of (French) cinema. (A shorter version by half would be great for high-school students, for example.) For anyone else, though—and particularly for those who have anything more than a cursory knowledge of the subject—there’s very little here to discover.

Two in the Wave is now out on DVD through Madman.

The documentary’s theatrical trailer is the only special feature.

At 222 minutes (or 19,990 ft. of 35 mm film) in its original edit, Lawrence of Arabia is the longest film to have won Best Picture. A.O. Scott says in his great “Critics’ Pick” video-review for the New York Times that the sweeping epic “reminds us that the Arab Spring of 2011 is not the first time that political upheaval in the Middle East has captured the imagination.”

Wikipedia summarises Dr. Zhivago and its reputation best when it says that the “epic drama-romance-war film loosely based on the famous novel of the same name by Boris Pasternak… has remained popular for decades, and as of 2010 is the eighth highest-grossing film of all time in the United States (adjusted for inflation).”

Ryan’s Daughter, which Lean made in 1970, tells the story of a married Irish woman who has an affair with a British officer during World War I despite opposition from her nationalist neighbours. It is a very loose adaptation of Madame Bovary, and won two Oscars: for John Mills’ supporting role, and for Freddie Young‘s cinematography (the film was shot in Super Panavision 70).

In 1984—after a 14-year break from filmmaking—Lean embarked on his final work, the E. M. Forster adaptation A Passage to India. Vincent Canby wrote in the New York Times that he felt this was “[Lean's] best work since The Bridge on the River Kwai and Lawrence of Arabia and perhaps his most humane and moving film since Brief Encounter.” Roger Ebert called the film “one of the greatest screen adaptations I have ever seen.” It won a Supporting Actress award for Peggy Ashcroft, and the work of the composer Maurice Jarre, Lean’s regular collaborator, was finally recognised for with a Best Original Score Oscar.

The David Lean Season starts tomorrow; each film screens for a week.
See iconiccinemas.co.nz for session times.

The 2011 New Zealand International Film Festivals, which begin in Auckland on July 14, won’t be releasing their full programme until later this month, but they’ve made a number of announcements already. Full details on all of the films announced thus far are on the festival’s website, but here are the ones I’m really looking forward to:

Submarine

Richard Ayoade (the guy who plays Moss in The I.T. Crowd) has made a coming-of-age movie set in Swansea that looks equal parts Hal Ashby and Wes Anderson. Alex Turner of the Arctic Monkeys provides the film’s music. Here’s Vadim Rizov’s review from GreenCine Daily:

With his Bud Cort haircut and morbid sensibility, Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) is too smart for Swansea, Wales, an industrial city mired in some seriously mid-80s Thatcherite doldrums. The trouble with Oliver is that he knows he’s clever, which could justify anything: surreptitiously monitoring his parents’ sex life, taunting an overweight girl to make local cutie Jordana (Yasmin Paige) notice him as a real livewire, or trying to trash the house of downhill neighbor Graham Purvis (Paddy Considine) who may be having an affair with mom (Sally Hawkins).

Here’s the British trailer:

and here’s the US trailer:

Snowtown

At the opposite end of the scale is Australian director Justin Kurtzel’s début feature, which depicts the “bodies-in-barrels” murders that took place in the titular town in South Australia between 1992 and 1999:

Meek’s Cutoff

Kelly Reichardt’s new film after Old Joy and Wendy and Lucy, starring Michelle Williams as one of a group of pioneers on the Oregon Trail in 1845:

Bobby Fischer Against the World

A portrait of chess master Bobby Fischer and the game he played against Gary Kasparov in 1972:

Norwegian Wood

An adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s novel:

The Trip

Comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon star in this feature-length condensation of Michael Winterbottom’s BBC series as thinly-veiled versions of themselves on a restaurant tour of the Lake District:

Taxi Driver

The 35^th anniversary restoration:

The 2011 NZIFF starts in Auckland on July 14 before travelling around the country. Look out for the programme around town and online later this month, and come back to this site for full coverage of the festival from early July.

In this adaptation of Mordecai Richler’s final novel, Paul Giamatti stars as the bumbling schmuck of the title, Barney Panofsky, a 60-something Canadian TV producer and hockey nut. (He’s also a narcissistic douchebag who ruins almost every relationship he’s lucky enough to briefly have, but once you accept that he is who he is and he’s not going to change, he (and the film) becomes hilarious instead of annoying.) Much of Barney’s life story is told in flashback: we see his first promiscuous dalliances with love in ’70s Italy, and his brief first marriage there. At his second wedding a short while later (to Minnie Driver, called simply “The Second Mrs. P” in the credits), he meets—and instantly falls for—Miriam (a brilliant Rosamund Pike), the woman who would become his third wife. He calls her incessantly, asking her out to lunch every three months like a deranged stalker. He’s so nervous when he finally gets to see her that he writes out a list of talking points—memos to himself in case the conversation becomes stilted (“All the President’s Men” and “Herzog” among them), which, Barney being the bundle of jangled nerves he is, it does.

Throughout the long, winding narrative, Barney seeks romantic advice from his father—Dustin Hoffman, at the top of his game and wringing a lot out of what is arguably an underwritten character—and is accused of the murder of his best friend. The film is directed in a steady (if occasionally flat) manner by Richard J. Lewis, and photographed very nicely by Guy Dufaux: luscious Kodachromatic tones, all oranges and cream colours, are in place to evoke the ’70s, while the chilly air of modern-day Québec is coated in a cool blue. (Pleasantly, one contemporary scene briefly echoes Manhattan’s most famous shot.) Pasquale Catalano’s score is utilitarian but graceful where it needs to be, but the music choices leave something to be desired: the obvious, blunt use of “Taking Care of Business” and Donovan’s “Sunshine Superman” is almost made up for with a couple of Leonard Cohen tracks (“Dance Me to the End of Love” and “I’m Your Man”). In addition, Nina Simone’s beautiful rendition of “Turn Me On,” even if it is lazily employed in a montage, and Dusty Springfield’s “I Don’t Wanna Hear it Anymore”—used over the end titles—are both great tunes.

Cameos from David Cronenberg and Atom Egoyan reward the attentive cinephilic viewer, while supporting roles are well filled by Bruce Greenwood and Scott Speedman. (The wonderful Saul Rubinek also has a small part as Barney’s first father-in-law.) The film is long, but necessarily so given the rambling nature of Richler’s source material—how else can you tell Barney’s version of his story, with all its ups and downs, its many chapters and digressions, not to mention its three acts/wives? Barney’s slide into dementia praecox in the final portion of the film is incredibly moving—even as the memory loss that accompanies the disease’s onset is clumsily handled and milked for maximum sentimentality. Giamatti was rightly Oscar-nominated for this performance, and the film ends up being considerably funnier and more poignant than its marketing had let on.

Barney’s Version is in cinemas now.

The Auckland Film Society is screening three films by the Portugese filmmaker Pedro Costa, starting with his 1997 film Ossos (Bones) on Monday May 30^th, and continuing with No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) and Juventude em Marcha (Colossal Youth) in June. The three films—collectively the highlight of the society’s 2011 season—form a loose trilogy named after the shanty-town in which they’re set, a place that no longer exists: Fontaínhas, a slum on the outskirts of Lisbon. Costa is widely regarded as one of world cinema’s finest contemporary auteurs, yet aside from screenings of his most recent film (Ne Change Rien) at last year’s New Zealand International Film Festival, the director’s work has not been screened in this country; these film society presentations mark the first exposure local audiences will have to his work.

Costa’s works (and these three films in particular) blur the lines between genuine documentary and fiction, and between subject and form. To achieve this, Costa employs no actors and exclusively uses real people from the slums. The elliptical plot of Ossos—the first film of the trilogy exploring life in Fontaínhas, and Costa’s third feature after 1989’s O Sangue (Blood) and 1994’s Casa de Lava—centres on the newborn infant of two hapless teenagers. Faced with the suicidal tendencies of the baby’s mother, the young father decides to take matters into his own hands, and ends up wandering the neighbourhood’s dilapidated, crumbling streets and buildings in search of a solution to his predicament. Of the film, Costa has said:

Ossos comes from very familiar things, things you can easily recall. It comes from Chaplin, from the melodramas of the beginning of the cinema, a boy with a baby in the streets, speeding dangerous cars, a loaf of bread, a prostitute, two or three kitchens. And a strong desire to be close to reality, to documentary, to be close to these people who are not actors, people that are very similar to the ones they’re depicting. The boy was a poor junky in real life and the housekeeper is a housekeeper. But even if there’s a desire to make a sort of documentary, it’s nevertheless fiction that carries the film on, saving it. Fiction is always a door that we want to open or close; a door that keeps us guessing.

For his next film, Costa wanted to do away with all the unnecessary equipment, lighting, and extra personnel that ordinarily attend a professional shoot on location. So he shot everything himself with a handheld DV camera, using natural and available light, thus gaining intimate access to his drug-addict subjects. “Come, you’ll see what our lives are really like,” Vanda and her sister Zita told Costa, “You used to ask us to be quiet [on the set of Ossos]; now we’re going to talk, you’re going to listen. That’s all we do: talk and take drugs.” The resultant film, Quarto da Vanda, runs 178 minutes.

The plot of Juventude em Marcha, the trilogy’s concluding part, is as follows: “an exhausted but graceful Cape Verdean named Ventura wanders between the ruins of his old Fontaínhas slum (now destroyed) and the antiseptic new areas where the residents have been relocated, looking for his wife and home but finding only ghosts and memories.” The Pacific Film Archive notes that “there’s little boundary between fiction, documentary, and avant-garde filmmaking here; scenes are united only by the character’s constant search for a place to call home, and by Costa’s astonishing lighting and framing of decaying walls and rugged visages.”

Further reading:

1. Tim Wong’s essay “Introducing Pedro Costa” in The Lumière Reader
2. Ana Balona de Oliviera in Mute magazine
3. Bárbara Barroso on Ossos (Bones) for Senses of Cinema
4. Miguel Marías on No Quarto da Vanda (In Vanda’s Room) for Senses of Cinema
5. “Crossing the Threshold,” an interview with Costa by Kieron Corless for the BFI
6. “Colossal Cinema: The Films of Pedro Costa,” an interview in Art in America by Eugene Kotlyarenko
7. “Pedro Costa’s Fontaínhas Trilogy: Rooms for the Living and the Dead,” an essay by Cyril Neyrat for the Criterion Collection
8. An extensive interview with Costa at GreenCine by Michael Guillén
9. “A Closed Door That Leaves Us Guessing,” transcripts of lectures given by Costa at the Tokyo Film School in March of 2004

The Auckland Film Society presents Pedro Costa’s Fontaínhas Trilogy at the Academy Cinemas on Lorne St. Ossos screens on Monday May 30^th; Quarto da Vanda and Juventude em Marcha screen on June 7^th and 20^th respectively. Elsewhere, the Wellington Film Society presented Ossos on May 23^rd; Quarto da Vanda will screen on June 13^th, and Juventude em Marcha on June 27^th. The Hamilton Film Society presents Ossos on June 13^th, and the Dunedin Film Society presents Juventude em Marcha on June 1^st. All three films screen from 35mm prints.

Three-session passes for any three Auckland Film Society screenings are available for $30, and a 12-month membership in the society is $165 ($140 for students). Members are entitled to generous discounts at the World Cinema Showcase in April, the NZ Film Festival in July, and cheaper rates year-round at the Academy, Capitol, and Rialto Cinemas, and the Victoria Picture Palace. The AFS website has more information.

That Tom DiCillo’s 85-minute documentary on Jim Morrison and the Doors won “Best Long-Form Music Video” at the 53^rd Grammys should signal its intent to visually bewitch rather than intellectually satisfy. The film is composed primarily of restored and remastered segments of HWY: An American Pastoral,* a 50-minute experiment in direct cinema Morrison made with a group of friends in 1969. The way DiCillo reconstitutes it, the portions of the film that feature Morrison driving down a highway have him hearing his own death being reported and mourned by Jim Ladd on KLOS. (Whether HWY was totally restored during the making of this film is unknown; it would certainly have been an amazing special feature on the DVD.)

A fascinating conceit, but the film fails to do much with it—DiCillo instead prefers to fall back on traditional documentary tactics, using (admittedly nicely restored) unreleased 16mm archival footage and photographs to illustrate a pedestrian re-telling of Morrison’s ill-fated life. We see the band rehearsing in the studio, we see Morisson come in drunk every day, and we see him arrested on stage in Connecticut for lewd behaviour—but there’s no depth to any of it, no authority, no first-hand accounts of this “spectacle of self-destruction.”

If Johnny Depp’s monotonous delivery—a re-do, according to Wikipedia, because the initial version (which must’ve been truly horrendous) attracted so many complaints—doesn’t send you to sleep almost instantly, the script he has to read might. It’s plagued with hilariously bad lines that could be taken verbatim from some kid’s high-school project, lines like “A massive cultural earthquake is splitting the country wide open—and out of the crack steps a band called The Doors,” and “If the band has a surreal fairground air, it is Morrison who is the trapeze artist,” and “You can’t burn out if you’re not on fire.” This short documentary definitely presents a better image of Morrison than Oliver Stone’s unwatchable 1991 biopic, but that’s not exactly hard.

When You’re Strange is now out on DVD through Madman.

Special features include the film’s trailer and a short interview with Morrison’s sister and (more importantly) father, discussing his son for what is apparently “the first time ever.”

*Watch an unrestored version of HWY: An American Pastoral on Google Video.

Josh Fox’s first-person semi-amateur documentary Gasland deals with the havoc wreaked by natural gas wells—over 450,000 from Pennsylvania and New York state in the East to Wyoming and the Grand Tetons in the West—that produce bubbling, fizzing, and occasionally flammable water in the household drinking-water wells around their installation sites. Although the gas companies claim their processes are completely safe, the documentary evidence gathered here would seem to say otherwise. Fox—prompted to make the film because gas companies wanted to buy the land his parents built their house that sits on the Delaware river in upstate New York—zeroes in on the practice of “fracking,” which involves creating a mini-earthquake deep underground and then using some 556 chemicals (and gallon upon gallon of water) to extract the gas.

Dead, sick and dying animals and livestock (and humans) soon attend the installation of a new gas well—and the director goes to great lengths, geographically and otherwise, to get to the source of these problems, visiting gas fields like Jonah Field, and later incorporating Congressional hearings footage. Fox scores a coup when he gets the chance to sit and talk with Dr. Theo Colborn, but, aside from her insightful commentary, the film is marred by Fox’s deadpan narration and a resultant listlessness. Though its subject is of almost no direct relevance to New Zealand viewers, the documentary is nonetheless an interesting watch, if only to absorb the knowledge—and perhaps relish the conspiracy-busting—contained therein. [Edit: see comments; it turns out there is direct relevance to New Zealand: hydraulic fracturing is happening in Taranaki.]

Gasland is now out on DVD through Madman.

Special features include 45 minutes’ worth of bonus scenes, the film’s trailer, and an extended interview with Fox conducted by Australian reviewer David Stratton.