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February 2008

Review: The Bucket List, Jumper, Rescue Dawn, Goodbye Bafana, We Own the Night and Delirious

By Cinema, Conflict of Interest and Reviews

The Bucket List posterThe trail­er for The Bucket List has been play­ing for weeks now, indu­cing groans at every appear­ance. By col­lect­ing a series of Jack Nicholson’s now trade­mark Jack-isms plus Morgan Freeman’s reg­u­lar, twinkly, wise old man schtick and then sprinkled with plenty of schmaltz, the trail­er made me act­ively want to avoid a film that looked like a lame set of sac­char­ine clichés and tired ham act­ing – cyn­ic­al Hollywood at its worst.

I am pleased to report, how­ever, that The Bucket List is a much more enjoy­able film than I was expect­ing. There is some excel­lent work from Nicholson and Freeman who are well coached by dir­ect­or Rob Reiner, with the help of a script by Justin Zackham that has sev­er­al decent moments. Nicholson plays mis­an­throp­ic health tycoon Edward Cole who is dia­gnosed with brain can­cer and forced, due to his own tight-fisted policies, to share a room with car mech­an­ic and lung can­cer patient Freeman. When he dis­cov­ers Freeman has a wish-list of things to do before he dies, he takes it upon him­self to make them come true using the bil­lions he has accu­mu­lated in the cor­rupt American health care sys­tem.

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The Return of the Incredibly Strange? [UPDATED]

By Cinema

Filmhead Ant Timpson has let slip that we may see the return of a stand-alone Incredibly Strange Film Festival. He has set up a Facebook group called Incredibly Strange with the manifesto:

This is the base of all things Incredibly Strange in New Zealand.

- Incredibly Strange Film Festival
– Incredibly Strange TV
– Incredibly Strange Video
– Incredibly Strange Movie Marathon

Join up and keep up to date with all things strange­ness in New Zealand.

Below that he makes the comment:

Methinks I for­got to press the ‘keep secret’ but­ton for the group. Oh well… the cat will be out of the bag soon enough.

The last Becks Incredible Film Festival was in 2004. Since then it has been absorbed into the International Film Festival, under the That’s Incredible ban­ner, but it nev­er had quite the same anarch­ic reck­less­ness that made it essen­tial view­ing. If it’s back, that would be cause for some rejoicing.

Update (24 March 2008): It would appear from sources close to the situ­ation that the Festival is not com­ing back (at least not as an inde­pend­ent event). The That’s Incredible com­pon­ent of the International Festival is likely to be re-branded Incredibly Strange to take advant­age of cer­tain tele­visu­al syn­er­gies avail­able to organ­iser Ant Timpson. Watch this space.

Barry Barclay: an appreciation

By Cinema, NZ, TV and Wellington

Documentary film­maker, and Dom-Post movie review­er, Graeme Tuckett kindly gave me per­mis­sion to post this lovely appre­ci­ation of Barry Barclay:

Tangata Whenua director Barry Barclay during the filming of The Neglected Miracle in 1985Its been a couple of days now since the phone rang, and I heard from his sis­ter Pauline that Barry Barclay had died. Barry was – and remains – an abso­lute giant in New Zealand and the World’s film com­munit­ies. He is widely and fam­ously regarded as the first mem­ber of an Indigenous nation to dir­ect a fea­ture film, and often held up in New Zealand as being pos­sibly our greatest and most influ­en­tial doc­u­ment­ary maker. But I think its import­ant to remem­ber now that Barry’s more cel­eb­rated achieve­ments -Ngati, The Tangata Whenua series, The Feathers of Peace- were foun­ded on the back of a long and com­pas­sion­ate jour­ney of dis­cov­ery of self, of oth­ers and a rig­or­ous, vig­or­ous, dis­arm­ingly play­ful and pun­ish­ingly sharp mind. “Barry is a thinker” was one decept­ively obvi­ous little nug­get that cropped up dur­ing an inter­view in Auckland a few months ago. Obvious on the face of it; but how many people can we really apply the epi­thet to? Barry was cap­able – and though he would nev­er men­tion it, he had both the train­ing and the firepower- of great and ori­gin­al philo­soph­ic­al thought. Get your­self a copy of Mana Tuturu- I’m sure Unity books will have them in a win­dow dis­play by now, even if Whitcoulls can not bring them­selves to stock it – and read the open­ing chapters. Marvel and laugh as Barry affec­tion­ately and accur­ately accuses Captain Cook of ‘home inva­sion’- and then goes on to con­vin­cingly and eleg­antly prove bey­ond any talk­back hosts wild­est polem­ic exactly why ‘coun­try’ and ‘nation’ are two very dif­fer­ent con­cepts. All of that in the open­ing pages, and there’s still 300 to go…Enjoy. Or make the pil­grim­age to the film archive’s base­ment, and treat your­self to a view­ing of Barry’s early and wildly exper­i­ment­al doco’s Ashes, Autumn Fires, or The Town That Lost a Miracle. They are still head and shoulders above most of the pub­lic­ally fun­ded obvi­ous­ness that gets passed off as doc­u­ment­ary today, and so far bey­ond the grasp of any­thing our cur­rent crop of ‘pro­viders and fun­ders’ would ever con­tem­plate as to beg­gar belief. Not just records of anoth­er time; these films roll out like broad­casts from anoth­er plan­et: A place where ‘pitch­ing con­tests’ and ‘expec­ted out­comes’ would be classed as crim­in­al activ­it­ies. Barry made films from the pos­i­tion that the film­maker was abso­lute; that everything was in the ser­vice of the film, and that the film (and its makers) served only truth. His approach to doc­u­ment­ary espe­cially was com­pletely uncom­prom­ising, but some­how still mal­le­able, adapt­able, chaot­ic, and funny as all hell. His shoots were char­ac­ter­ised by great humour and a con­stant sense of winging it with the best of them- but the res­ults were sear­ingly intel­li­gent, pro­voc­at­ive, idio­syn­crat­ic and time­less. I nev­er actu­ally heard Bazz say ‘Damn the Torpedoes’ – though I know he loved the sen­ti­ment – but I cer­tainly heard him mut­ter ‘bug­ger the producer/broadcaster/funder a few times.

Barry BarclayIn his last couple of years, Bazz was hit­ting his straps with a gentle fury that prob­ably looked like fun to the unini­ti­ated. He was migh­tily enthused by the pos­sib­il­it­ies of cheap digit­al cam­er­as and edit­ing sys­tems, and by the know­ledge that soon the film­makers would have everything they needed to make a fea­ture or a doc­u­ment­ary right in their own – or their communities- hands. He had a dream of a cam­era, an edit suite, and a broad­band con­nec­tion avail­able to every marae, and a cent­ral server- admin­istered from the NZ Film Archive- that could col­late and store every second of foot­age that came down the pipe. I don’t doubt for a moment that, gran­ted anoth­er year or two of life, Bazz would have made it hap­pen. Will one of us pick up that load now?

Over the last few days- and I guess a few more times in the days ahead, you’ll hear and read a bunch of trib­utes that will invari­ably begin ‘Barry Barclay, the dir­ect­or of the film Ngati…” Well yes, Ngati is a stag­ger­ing and gor­geous achieve­ment (Hell, Bazz die­ing might even spur the NZFC into finally mak­ing it avail­able on DVD…) But right now, maybe its time to acknow­ledge some of the man’s work that might be about to van­ish into the base­ments and memor­ies of the many of us that he made friends of. I was a bar­man when I first met him, I saw the tail end of the deluge, and I’ve heard some­thing of the dam­age and grief that a man of Bazz’s size can cause when he’s blun­der­ing in the fog. But for me its the jokes, the games of chess, the (ginger) beers, the sly charm, the right­eous anger and the per­fectly uncon­tra­dicted Marxism and spir­itu­al­ity that seemed to me to inform every word he spoke and frame he com­posed. They say ‑well, someone does- that the best way to mourn a man is to carry on his work. It’ll take all of us and then some to do a half of what Bazz might have done. But that’s no reas­on not to try.

Tama Poata, John O’Shea, Wi Kuki Kaa, Michael King and now Barry. There is a clear­ing where a forest once stood.

Graeme has just com­pleted a doc­u­ment­ary about Barry for Maori TV.

Review: There Will Be Blood, 27 Dresses, Rogue Assassin and Red Road

By Cinema and Reviews

There Will Be Blood posterLike the buses on Courtenay Place after 8 o’clock on a Sunday night, you can wait what seems like forever for a cinema mas­ter­piece and then two come along at once. Like No Country for Old Men, P. T. Anderson’s There Will Be Blood is an American clas­sic and you’d be hard-pushed to slip a play­ing card between them in terms of quality.

Dedicated to Anderson’s hero, Robert Altman, Blood is a beast of a dif­fer­ent col­our to Old Men: a heavy-weight Western-style epic pour­ing oil on the myth of the American dream and then drop­ping a match on it. The amaz­ing Daniel Day-Lewis plays inde­pend­ent pro­spect­or, oil man and mis­an­thrope Daniel Plainview. Determined to sep­ar­ate simple people from the oil under their feet he uses his adop­ted child in order to resemble an hon­est fam­ily man while he plots the down­fall of his enemies.

There Will Be Blood ruth­lessly dis­sects the two com­pet­ing powers of 20th Century American life: cap­it­al­ism and reli­gion, each as cyn­ic­al and cor­rupt as the oth­er. Paul Dano (the com­ic­ally mute son in Little Miss Sunshine) is a rev­el­a­tion as cha­ris­mat­ic pas­tor Eli Sunday, the only char­ac­ter strong enough to mer­it a battle of wills with Plainview – a battle to the finish.

27 Dresses posterListless rom-com 27 Dresses comes to life for one amus­ing mont­age of wed­dings and dresses (about half way in) but oth­er­wise this star-vehicle for Katherine Heigl (Knocked Up) seems under-powered. She’s joined in the film by James Marsden (Enchanted) (not nor­mally a cause for rejoicing, and so it proves once again here) and Malin Akerman (The Heartbreak Kid) who isn’t nearly as funny as she thinks she is. Heigl plays a sup­posedly plain, self-effacing, young woman who organ­ises the lives (and wed­dings) of all those around her while secretly pin­ing for a wed­ding of her own with Boss Ed Burns.

Rogue Assassin posterRogue Assassin is big and dumb and doesn’t even suc­ceed on it’s own lim­ited terms. Former mem­ber of the British Olympic Diving Team, Jason Statham (Crank) plays an inex­plic­ably English-accented FBI agent in the Asian Crime Unit. He’s on the trail of an ex-CIA hit­man named Rogue (Jet Li) who is engaged in a Yojimbo-like plot to des­troy San Francisco’s Yakuza and Triad gangs. Fans of Jet Li’s trade­mark bal­let­ic mar­tial arts will be dis­ap­poin­ted as any­thing more than stand­ing around look­ing stern seems to be bey­ond him now. The daft twist at the end will provide some much-needed amusement.

Red Road posterDanish pro­vocateur dir­ect­or Lars von Trier recently announced his retire­ment from film­mak­ing due to depres­sion. He hasn’t ceased involve­ment in film, though, as his com­pany Zentropa is still pro­du­cing some of the most unusu­al and chal­len­ging films around and Red Road is a per­fect example, the first release in a new pro­ject called The Advance Party. Zentropa pro­du­cers Lone Scherfig & Anders Thomas Jensen (Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself) cre­ated sev­er­al char­ac­ters and then gave those char­ac­ters (and a set of rules about how they should be used) to three writer-directors in the hope that the three films togeth­er would prove great­er than the sum of the parts.

The first film, Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, isn’t just an inter­est­ing exper­i­ment, it’s actu­ally very good. Lonely Glasgow CCTV oper­at­or Jackie (Kate Dickie) is haunted by an unspe­cified tragedy from her past. When she sees an unex­pec­ted face on her mon­it­or she, in spite of her­self, is forced to con­front him and her own grief. The Red Road coun­cil estate, that gives the film it’s name, makes Newtown Park Flats look like the Isle of Capri, and the whole thing has a Loach-ian grit that is hap­pily well-balanced by some beau­ti­ful cine­ma­to­graphy. The film itself plays out slowly, but not inev­it­ably, and the sur­prise rev­el­a­tion at the end is less power­ful but some­how more mov­ing than you expect.

Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 20 February, 2008.

Notes on screen­ing con­di­tions: There Will Be Blood screened at Rialto Wellington on Saturday after­noon. The image was incor­rectly masked so that the ver­tic­al cyan soundtrack along the left of the screen was clearly vis­ible through­out. The pro­jec­tion­ist was aler­ted but he shrugged his shoulders and said there was noth­ing he could do about it. We have about six more weeks of Rialto Wellington and I volun­teer to swing the first wrecking-ball.

Barry Barclay passes

By Cinema and NZ

200802191519.jpg I’ve just seen the news that film­maker Barry Barclay has passed away. 63 is no sort of age really.

Ngati was one of the first NZ films I ever saw and it left a great impres­sion on me.

He will be missed.

Dom-Post film review­er Graeme Tuckett has almost com­pleted a doc­u­ment­ary for Maori TV on Barry’s life and work which I expect will also screen at the Festival this year.

2008: A Trek Odyssey (Update)

By TV

200802191453.jpg A month ago I announced to an un-expectant world my inten­tion to watch every moment from the Star Trek can­on in chro­no­lo­gic­al order of story before J. J. Abrams new Star Trek XI pre­quel comes out at Christmas. One com­menter poin­ted out that this would involve a great deal of tele­vi­sion watch­ing, argu­ably more than I had allowed for, but that it was a cool idea.

Four weeks in to the pro­ject I can announce that I have ticked off First Contact (and the inven­tion of the warp drive) and all four sea­sons of “Enterprise”. I have a soft spot for “Enterprise” and I grew to appre­ci­ate the wooden per­form­ances (Dominic Keating as Lt. Malcolm Reed may well be the worst act­or ever to wear Starfleet uni­form) and the reg­u­lar sprink­ling of ter­rible pseudo-technical guff about plasma con­duits and EPS relays and the like, not to men­tion the too-frequent reli­ance on time travel and par­al­lel uni­verses to get around plot problems.

A couple of genu­inely great epis­odes per sea­son seems to be as much as one can hope for (Similitude in Season 3 is as good any­thing in the can­on) but it was fun watch­ing the writers of Season 4 try and pre­pare the ground for The Original Series which was about 100 years away in chro­no­logy: the lack of cra­ni­al ridges on Klingons due to a human DNA cure for a Klingon vir­us was a par­tic­u­larly big stretch.

With three sea­sons of TOS, two of the Animated Series, sev­en each of of TNG, DS9 and Voyager plus all the films I was not expect­ing to be able to pull this off, until Paramount announced last week that the release of Star Trek XI was being pushed back to May 2009 which gives me a whole five extra months to com­plete the Marathon.

So, onwards to The Original Series we go. I’m sure that I have already seen all of these dur­ing the nearly 36 years since I saw my first but you nev­er know.