Monday new releases: 9 December 2024

It’s a very slow week for new releases so I’m going to make this update free to every­one as I’m doing a bit of recyc­ling. The low-budget hor­ror, Your Monster was also released to cinemas this week­end but not in Wellington and I’ve tried to review the spe­cial cinema launches of animé series like Solo Level – Reawakening in the past and failed to wrap my head around them so that one misses out, too.

The Problem with People played in the recent British & Irish Film Festival which I pre­viewed here:

This is an Irish crowd-pleaser with two well-known faces up front (Colm Meaney and Paul Reiser, who also co-wrote the screenplay).

Knowingly inspired by Yankee fish-out-of-water films like Local Hero, it sees New York prop­erty developer Barry (Reiser) invited by his cous­in Ciáran (Meaney) to vis­it the old coun­try and try and bridge the multi-generational divide that has kept the American and Irish sides of the fam­ily apart.

An easy­going allegory about how stub­born­ness and mis­un­der­stand­ings can breed fresh dis­cord, even while you’re try­ing to heal the old ones, the pleas­ure here is mainly in watch­ing these vet­er­ans in action and in see­ing how this sort of fiddle-dee-dee Irishness is being updated for the mod­ern world. Same sex mar­riages and all that, to be sure.

(Also in that pre­view were Lies We Tell which I liked less, Made in England: The Films of Powell & Pressburger which is com­ing to DocPlay in the new year and the Merchant-Ivory clas­sic Howards End.

On the hunt for some­thing to talk about on the radio last Friday night, I came upon this new rent­al release called The Movie Teller and I’m jolly glad I did. The para­graphs below are adap­ted from a tran­script of my con­ver­sa­tion with Emile Donovan about the pic­ture on Nights so apo­lo­gies for the lack of polish:

It’s a Spanish, Chilean, Brazilian co-production called The Movie Teller that played at the Toronto International Film Festival last year. We don’t have a Latin American or Spanish lan­guage film fest­iv­al any­more here in New Zealand so there’s no obvi­ous place for it to land in terms of fest­ivals and it’s too com­mer­cial for the New Zealand International Film Festival.

It’s real crowd pleas­er – a bit of a weepy – and it’s set in 1960 in Chile in a small min­ing com­munity where a young girl dis­cov­ers that she has a tal­ent for nar­rat­ing the stor­ies of the movies because, you know, not every­body can afford to go to the cinema in this small town, and also you prob­ably can’t afford to go more than once so – even if you have seen the film and you want to relive it – she is the per­son that you go to. She will tell you the story of these films like The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, Paths of Glory, Some Like It Hot, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, etc.

So it’s a film that starts off being about the love of movies them­selves, about escap­ism – that’s the theme that we’ve got for tonight – it’s the the fact that movies can take us away from a home life that might be foun­ded on hard work or dis­ab­il­ity or poverty. Her fath­er ends up being a para­ple­gic after a min­ing acci­dent and so her skill at telling the stor­ies of the movies actu­ally is what ends up feed­ing the fam­ily for quite a few years.

It’s just a lovely film, and it really is about how storytelling and movies in par­tic­u­lar can help take us away from our lives for a little while.

What’s inter­est­ing is the film is set in Chile, but stars Bérénice Bejo (The Artist), a French-Argentinian act­ress. Daniel Brühl (Inglourious Basterds, Goodbye Lenin) is German – he plays the German boss of the min­ing com­pany – he’s got per­fectly good Spanish. There’s anoth­er Spanish act­or (Antonio de la Torre) play­ing the father.

It’s also writ­ten by a Brazilian called Walter Salles who’s a won­der­ful dir­ect­or in his own right (The Motorcycle Diaries) and it’s dir­ec­ted by a Dane, Lone Scherfig (An Education) so it really is a United Nations of a film.

On the sub­ject of escap­ism, we also talked about the TV series Chris Tarrant: Extreme Railways and the long-running Māori+ series Hunting Aotearoa.