The fortunes of the Western rise with the tide of American cinema. During the 70’s indie renaissance we got rugged classics like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders, then in the 80’s and 90’s Clint Eastwood re-examined his own mythic West in Pale Rider and Unforgiven . (The less said about Young Guns 1 and 2 the better.)
The past 12 months have offered us two Westerns that are as good as any of the last 30 years: The Assassination of Jesse James and James Mangold’s homage to the classic 3:10 to Yuma which opened in Wellington last week.
Yuma is a story (by Elmore Leonard) with great bones: poor, honest, rancher Christian Bale is suffering because of the drought and for $200 takes on the desperate task of escorting captured outlaw Russell Crowe to Contention City, where he will catch the eponymous train to the gallows.
But Crowe’s gang are on the way to liberate him and Bale’s support is dwindling to nothing. The tension rises as the clock ticks towards three o’clock.
2008 is shaping up to be a year of great films about people being beastly to each other and the first cab off the rank is Tim Burton’s majestic adaptation of Sondheim’s broadway opera Sweeney Todd. Based on the true-ish story of the Victorian barber who murders his customers to provide fresh meat for his girlfriend’s pies, Sweeney Todd is positively Shakespearian in scale – meaty, savage, sinister and poignant. Johnny Depp plays the talented scissor-man who returns to London 15 years after he was transported to the colonies by crooked Judge Turpin (Alan Rickman) who had desires on his pretty wife. Consumed with a passion for revenge Todd goes back to work above the shop selling London’s worst pies, made by the redoubtable Mrs Lovett (Helena Bonham Carter). There, more by accident than design, they discover that his skills with a razor might be profitable in more ways than one.
Sondheim’s music and lyrics are as good as any other writing for the stage in the last century and the film version honours that talent unconditionally. When young Toby (Ed Sanders) sings “Not While I’m Around” (probably the most beautiful song ever written) to Mrs Lovett you can see the look in her eyes that shows he has just sealed his own fate, the temperature in the theatre seemed to drop a few degrees. Not just anyone can pull that off.
The best of the rest at the moment is Ridley Scott’s American Gangster, a pacy and observant look at the life of Frank Lucas (Denzel Washington), Harlem’s most notorious and successful drug dealer of the 1970s. Russell Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the only honest cop in New York. It’s an interesting story well told by three charismatic film personalities.
After the Wedding is a lovely, layered drama from Denmark starring the watchable Mads Mikkelsen (Casino Royale) as an aid worker at an Indian orphanage who is summoned back to Copenhagen by a mysterious billionaire (Rolf Lassgård). Lassgård wants to donate enough money to save the programme – millions of dollars – but there are strings attached. Those strings turn out to be less nefarious than they seem at first but the choice that Mikkelsen’s Jacob has to make is still a heart-breaking one. Totally recommended.
Totally un-recommended is the Australian comedy-drama Clubland about an unusual showbiz family led by domineering mother Brenda Blethyn. Asinine in conception and horrible in execution, it struggles to get one good performance out the entire cast put together.
Death at a Funeral isn’t much better, although a couple of performances (Peter Dinklage and a doughy Matthew McFadyen) rise above the cheap and nasty script. The funeral is for McFadyen’s father and various friends and family members have assembled to form a quorum of English stereotypes. Standard farce elements like mistaken identity and accidental drug-taking are shoe-horned together with the help of some poo jokes.
Alien vs. Predator: Requiem managed to disappear from my memory about as soon as I left the theatre with my ears still ringing from the noise. An Alien pod being transported across the galaxy crash lands in Colorado and starts laying eggs – cause that’s just how they roll. A creature from the Predator home-world tries to clean up the mess and a whole bunch of random citizens get caught in the middle. All the signature moments from the original Alien (the chest-bursting, the almost-kissing a whimpering young woman) are repeated often, to diminishing effect and, I know I sometimes see cinematic racism everywhere, is it really necessary for both malevolent extra-terrestrial races to look like big black men with dreadlocks?
There’s a factory in China, I’m sure, stamping out films like Elsa & Fred on a weekly basis, making subtle cultural and generational changes where necessary but preserving the formula like it’s Coca Cola. And fair enough as these films will always sell: un-challenging, easy to decipher, vaguely life-affirming. Elsa (China Zorrilla) is a batty old woman in a Madrid apartment block. Fred (Manuel Alexandre) is the quiet widower who moves in opposite. She decides to point him back the direction of life and he tries to make her dreams come true before it is too late.
Finally, Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution is an extremely well-made but overlong erotic thriller set in Japanese-occupied China during WWII. Stunning newcomer Wei Tang plays Wong Chia Chi, persuaded in a moment of youthful, patriotic weakness to join a student resistance group. She is sent undercover to try and woo the mysterious Mr Yee (Tony Leung) who is a senior official collaborating with the Japanese occupation forces. Unfortunately, for them both he is interested but a challenging mark and it is several years before she can get close enough to him (and believe me she gets very close) for the resistance to strike. Ang Lee is the poet of the stolen glance and he is in very good form – I just wish it hadn’t taken quite so long to get going.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 23 January, 2008.
Nature of Conflict: After the Wedding is distributed in NZ and Australia by Arkles Entertainment who I do some work for; Clubland is distributed in Australia and NZ by Palace whose NZ activities are looked after by the excellent Richard Dalton, who is a good mate.
At present Reading Cinemas are not offering press passes to the Capital Times. This means that their exclusive releases (such as Cloverfield) will go un-reviewed unless I can work something out with them or the distributor. Maybe I’ll just download them …
The world of Harry Potter takes on an Orwellian tone in The Order of the Phoenix, episode 5 in the Hogwarts soap, which sees the magic bureaucracy in London desperate to keep a lid on the news of Voldemort’s return.
If that last sentence didn’t mean very much to you then you will have a hard time enjoying the latest Harry Potter as very few efforts have been made to appeal to the tiny minority of us who haven’t read the books or seen the films. I shouldn’t really complain too much – the Star Trek universe is one that has always appealed to me and therefore I get pleasure immersing myself in it. It’s no different here, except this time I am not in the club.
For an outsider, though, this Harry Potter is not a hugely enjoyable experience. The young actors, despite lots of practice by now, haven’t got any better (poor Rupert Grint as Harry gets found out every time they point the camera at him). Daniel Radcliffe as Harry doesn’t seem to be able to carry the weight of the emotion or the action and Harry himself still seems like a bit of a wimp to be honest.
Which brings us to the story-telling, supposedly the series’ strength. Generally, screenwriters will tell you that introducing a new character half way through a film purely to solve a problem for the hero two scenes later is pretty poor form. Maybe it’s a weakness from the books, or a general difficulty with episodic fiction, either way its terribly unsatisfying for a neutral.
The picturesque seaside suburb of Maroubra in Sydney’s inner city is the setting for the compelling documentary Bra Boys, narrated by Russell Crowe.
Nestled between the sewage farm and Australia’s biggest prison, Maroubra was settled as state housing in the early 20th century, replacing the local tent slums. Despite the idyllic beachfront setting Maroubra is more South Central LA than Oriental Bay and, like any kids in the ‘Hood, the only way out is usually via a casket, a prison van or sport. Two of the four central characters, the Abberton brothers, made it as pro surfers (eldest Sunny is the writer and director) and some of the lunatic surfing footage is pretty exciting.
But Bra Boys is more than a surf movie: in its 90 minutes it veers from social history to family drama and then finally to political commentary, and the Boys’ story justifies every twist and turn. It gave me a lot to think about.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times, Wednesday 18 July, 2007. The Bra Boys review was cut for space reasons which is a shame as I think its worth seeing.
Films like Kenny are usually called “mockumentaries” for two reasons: they appear to be documentaries but they’re not really and (in films like Spinal Tap and TV’s “The Office”) they usually “mock” their subjects. This is different.
In a delightful first feature by the Jacobson Brothers, porta-loo plumber Kenny Smyth is a paragon of a man: he loves his family; takes pride in his job; and finds the bright side of situations that would force most of us to jump head first in to a bath of deoderant. The film follows our hero (played to perfection by Shane Jacobson) through a few weeks of an event-filled Melbourne spring, culminating in the big one: over 125,000 people at the Melbourne Cup. While he performs his (literally) thankless tasks, Kenny stoically puts up with an unreliable ex-wife, a co-worker with diarrhoea (of the verbal kind) and a father who is one of the great screen monsters of all time (played with an admirable absence of vanity by the real Jacobson pere, Ronald).
Kenny is a philosopher-plumber, a bard of the bathroom, and has that mastery of the vernacular that Australians seem to excel at: “Mate, there’s a smell in here that will outlast religion!” is my favourite but there’s plenty more.
Kenny is my number one film of the year and the funniest Australian picture since The Castle. Highly recommended to anyone who has ever taken a dump (or had a Henry-Pissinger).
2006 is the Year Of The Veteran and following Clint Eastwood’s outstanding Flags of Our Fathers we now have an Australian salute to the men who served in the Pacific in WWII. Kokoda is the story of the Australians in Papua New Guinea in 1942, when they really were the last line of defence between the Japanese and the mainland and it is a tremendous example of efficient and atmospheric story-telling.
The film benefits from a lack of familiar faces as unnecessary star power doesn’t get between us and the characters, though lead Jack Finsterer has a bit of the young Mel Gibson about him. I’m not convinced that every Australian soldier in the Pacific had NIDA cheekbones and gym-bunny pecs but that’s a minor quibble for a film that convincingly hits so many other marks. Even more remarkably, the film was made over a two year period by a group of 2004-vintage graduates of the Australian Film, TV and Radio School but it would be a great achievement by anyone, even a grizzled old veteran like Eastwood.
Finally, Ridley Scott re-unites with Strathmore’s finest, Russell Crowe, for A Good Year, a bosom-obsessed throwaway about a self-involved financial trader who inherits a broken-down château and vineyard owned by his Uncle (Albert Finney). All involved seem to have spent the entire project with one eye on knocking-off time and why not if you’re surrounded by red wine in Provence in Summer? Australian one-hit-wonder AbbyAbbie Cornish plays a beautiful Californian wine-expert who may be Uncle Henry’s illegitimate … sorry, I’ve lost you, haven’t I? A Good Year is about three months too long but it’s a Russell Crowe film and, by definition, they have to be epic these days no matter how slender the idea.
Printed in Wellington’s Capital Times on Wednesday 15 November, 2006.
The fortunes of the Western rise with the tide of American cinema. During the 70’s indie renaissance we got rugged classics like The Great Northfield Minnesota Raid and The Long Riders, then in the 80’s and 90’s Clint Eastwood re-examined his own mythic West in Pale Rider and Unforgiven . (The less said about Young Guns 1 and 2 the better.)
2008 is shaping up to be a year of great films about people being beastly to each other and the first cab off the rank is Tim Burton’s majestic adaptation of 
Films like 
2006 is the 
Finally,