peteg's blog 2009-05-23-LastOfTheMohicans.autumn

To Die For

Many years ago, someone told me that this was Nicole Kidman's finest performance: because her character is so close to what her legions of detractors imagine her very own personality to be, it almost seeems like she isn't acting. Well, perhaps. Skilfully made, though the story is quite vacuous.

Double Indemnity

I got this noir on the strength of the high IMDB ranking, and it is indeed not bad. The sassy rapid-fire dialogue from the actuary, amongst many other devices, make this fairly straightfoward tale of insurance fraud into more than just that. I have never seen the lead actors before and remain unconvinced.

The Asphalt Jungle

On the strength of it being highly rated on IMDB and Sterling Hayden. It is also a vehicle for a young Marilyn Monroe. A heist movie, not as dexterous as The Killing but similar in many ways.

Team America

It is so strange, the passing of the Bush era.

Samson and Delilah

Well, I must say I am glad I did not rush out to the cinema to see this one, and can't fathom the five-star reviews from the At the Movies pair, even allowing for their boosterism. I grant that it is beautifully shot, the actors luminous, and the material worthy, and yet... I needed more dialogue, I needed an exploration of Delilah's need for servitude. As it was, I would have expected the commentariat to have made more of the essential vein of misogyny she is cast into. Both, or indeed all, characters never had a chance of doing anything much at all.

The structure is a fairly standard nothing-ever-happens-so-we-iterate-it opening sequence, and the denouement is the only redemptive moment. Perhaps I've been watching too many tell-don't-show movies to really appreciate this one.

The drug thematics are strongly reminiscent of Requiem for a Dream: the thrones are already broken and the hair is being cut. Trainspotting this is not.

Robocop

First time I have seen this schlock. I thought Verhoeven had been unfairly savaged by the taste police on the strength of having only seen Total Recall and his recent up-market effort Zwartboek (Black Book), but now I would have the pitchforks out for him too, if this were 1987.

On the up, the shameless efforts of some B and C grade actors were good to see. Some soon picked up their game for David Lynch's Twin Peaks. The special effects have the same special cheese as McDonald's. There are a couple of blunderbuss side-jokes: the creator of the ED-209 death machine is a Dr McNamara, though Arnie would not recognise his hummer in the SUX 6000.

My Left Foot

The story of Christy Brown, amazingly rendered by Jim Sheridan. Daniel Day-Lewis and Brenda Fricker really earned their oscars for their efforts here. It would have been so easy to slide into sentimentality and mush, but it never does.

Foxy Brown

Ah, blaxploitation, Pam Grier in her heyday. Entirely as one would expect.

The End of Violence

On the strength of Bill Pullman and some vague memories of its release more than a decade ago. Directed by Wim Wenders, it is strangely dissociated, really just a soundtrack looking for a movie. The dialogue is all school-boy suggestion and no connection. MacDowell is precisely her beauty, nothing more.

The Remains of the Day

I had to see this after identifying Emma Thompson as the lustrous lawyer of In the Name of the Father. The inoffensively poetic title had me rapt too.

Thompson is fine, albeit labouring with a quite limited character. Similarly Hopkins has the tricky task of portraying an almost entirely characterless man. Some time in the first half I realised that the art of this movie is in starting with promise and sliding into emptiness, a sort of anti-character development.

The thematic seam is rich, with everyone and everything on the wrong side of history. The moral superiority of the upper classes is severely questioned, as are the ideas of an ethically servile underclass and gentlemanly international relations post World War I. The Nazi-sympathiser stuff is clunky, and I could imagine the book doing a much better job there.

Overall I found it dreary, more a piece of well-executed art than anything especially inventive. Sometimes the sentimentality became too much. Also I got lost in the temporal gap: what happened to the couple in the seaside town after they moved away from the house? — a daughter, sure, but what did they do for money? What became of their boarding house aspiration?

Perhaps sadly, while I can see that Ishiguro almost certainly did a better job with this material than this movie did, I have no great interest in revisiting it.

Mary and Max

I finally got around to seeing this stop-mation which got massive media coverage earlier in the year. Like the preceding Harvie Krumpet, the characters are few, oddball and inhabit a not entirely satisfying narrative. The craftsmanship is painstaking, and I really wanted to like more of it than the fine incidental observation-humour.

Casino

I though I'd seen this before. It must be one of Scorcese's finest directorial efforts, keeping the plot ticking over while seemlessly splicing in all sorts of things. The characters develop and the audience remains engaged. My only beef is that it is impossible to empathise with any of the characters here. I'd go so far as to say that this is de Niro's biggest failing as an actor, his incapacity to make us genuinely give a shit about his scumsuckers.

Was this a retread of Goodfellas? Heh, seems I haven't seen that for a long time either.

Witches of Eastwick

What we have here is Nicholson trying to channel his character from The Shining and failing. Updike's story aims to shock middling-upper-class NYC society ladies, and tends to the banal; is there anyone left who can take this cartoonish misogyny, religious and sexual deviancy, for anything more than a feeble provocation? The narrative is stock: devil gets girls, devil loses girls, girls apply a supernatural restraining order on devil.

This positively discourages me from reading any Updike at all ever.

A Serious Man

Splurged my freebie Palace Cinemas ticket (the one I got for joining their movie club) on this, the latest Cohen brothers anti-adventure, at a late-afternoon screening at the Academy Twin. The theatre was almost empty, making me wonder why they bother with these daytime sessions. More thematic than character-driven, with a weak narrative arc that allows everyone to wallow in the mud and not really amount to much at all. Some of the situations are sharply satirical, though I have to wonder if it has any lasting merit.

Yi ngoi (Accident)

A Hong Kong thriller I picked up on the strength of the consensus of the At The Movies pair that this was a truly awesome piece of cinema. I liked the premise, of staging purchased fatalities as accidents, but lost interest as the paranoia rose. I was hanging at the end, waiting for the twist — surely the eradication of the gang was a staged accident, an out-sophistication of the Brain? — but found no fat lady laughing.

The Killing

I think I first saw this one at the Astor in Melbourne back in 2002 or so. A breathless plot starring Sterling Heyden (he of the precious bodily fluids), classically rendered by Kubrick in black and white.

Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse

Documents the making of Apocalypse Now. Both share the same aesthetic, and this is as rivetting a trip as its counterpart. Amusingly, the original screenwriter, John Milius, went on to write and direct Conan the Barbarian and was entangled in the Dirty Harrys.

Dead Man

Just as good the second or third time around, at least with a few years in between. Jarmusch is remarkably restrained here, not too weird and quite patiently linear in his meditation on cataclysmic transformation. His cinematography is as good as it gets, and even Depp's fine efforts can't always draw the eye away from the scenery.

End of Days

Arnie saves the world... again. Entirely mediocre. I thought Gabriel Byrne has more screen time than he does.

In the Name of the Father

Absolutely captivating, even on the second time around. The casting is perfect, direction spot-on, and script as well structured as any other. I would have liked a bit more legal background at some points, but heh, that's what Wikipedia is for. Unbelievably not in the IMDB top-250.

Elementarteilchen

The worst German movie I can remember seeing. The characters are shallowly drawn and abandoned to their various overtly-signalled fates. As a study in how people are inscrutably drawn together and separated, there's a lot of superficiality here.

Donnie Brasco

Somehow not delivering on the promise of the two lead actors: Depp is unusally bland, and Pacino seems quite defeated by his role as a washed up mafioso. Unlike the better gangster movies, there is not enough action here to justify the plotlines; too much telling, not enough showing. What did all those goons do for money? — and where was the comeuppance for the Florida sellout?

Where the Buffalo Roam

A not-so-great aggrandisement of the lamentably late Hunter S. Thompson, with Bill Murray playing out Hunter's imagined life. I wasn't aware of this movie before reading Ralph Steadman's book, where it gets a serve for not featuring the author himself as the artist in the pseudo-Rolling Stone office.

The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus

At The Ritz with Rob. As dissociated as the reviews would have you believe.

The Black Balloon

Ah, suburban Australia in the late eighties and early nineties of my childhood. As a coming-of-age story it ambles along OK, though with some more continuity and contextualisation, such as giving Thomas some male friends, the narrative may have flowed more credibly.

Up the Yangtse

A Canadian reality-movie doco about some young Chinese people working on a hefty cruiser tripping up the Yangtse. Also charts the impact of the Three-Gorges Dam on the peasants. A bit heart-wrenching at times, such as when the family is moving from their hut on the banks of the river to a seemingly tiny house in the city. I pitied the poor kitten getting a right scrubbing by Shui Yu and hope she has more opportunity to crank geometry now.

Okuribito (Departures)

A well-made Japanese flick on the topic of helping people get on with their afterlives. Sentimentality threatens to swamp the other, more carefully wrought aspects at times, and the humour dries up as business is gotten down to in the last third. The acting is all-round superb, and the director makes Japan look like paradise (even during the season of peak business).

The Deer Hunter

I've seen this before, probably back in the days of VHS. At three hours it's a real slog. The opening 80 minutes or so is something like the wedding scene in The Godfather slowed down and drained of any moment. It does pick up around the 2 hour mark though.

Ararat

I saw this because Eric Bogosian is in it. (I remember seeing Igby Goes Down, which he's also in, more recently than Talk Radio, but must have forgotten to blog it.) It just might be possible that he has done or can do something truly great on film.

Ararat is a worthy movie, necessitating its creation and complicating any commentary on it. The cinematography is occasionally excellent, the acting fairly stodgy, and the present-day story a bit too fantastical and oblique to credit. Some of the historical scenes are brutal, others are deftly handled. The subject matter — the genocide of Armenians by Turks during World War I — required more historical perspective than I had to really get to grips with, and the movie didn't help on that front.

As always, IMDB has many perceptive user comments. There's an article in Foreign Policy on what's been happening there recently.

Moon

At the dear old Verona with Dave. I don't think the cinemas have been renovated since I've been in Sydney, though their new-ish café-bar is comfortable and cute, especially on a rainy evening.

Moon is a little bit of quite a few movies: Blade Runner, Fight Club, 2001, and some District 9-esque corporation loathing. Sam's vehicle looked like the venerable Moon Patrol. Someone pointed at Alien, though the one where Ripley has her self-encounters is more apposite.

The aesthetic of the moonbase interiors is fine, but the exterior design is a total cliche. Gerty was a bit uninventive, and its motivations remain obscure; Kevin Spacey is not the best choice for voicing a robot. The communication amongst the characters was fairly random, and why they didn't discuss more stuff is unclear. Rockwell's acting is excellent, though.

Overall this was a bit disappointing after the review on the ABC's movie show last night. I just don't see this as a majorly original premise or execution or aesthetic or anything.

The Rebel

Hong Kong-style kung fu from Việt Nam. Beautifully shot, with a narrative so formulaic that the gaps in it do not need to be filled. The cinematography and scenery are top-notch.

Killshot

Straight-to-DVD schlock thriller. I got this on the strength of the Mickey Rourke revival, and Mr Brick, who unfortunately is merely channelling Brad Pitt at his trashiest. The NRA couldn't have written a better script for more guns in society.

Festen

On Dave's recommendation. Perhaps the epitome of the Dogme 95 style. Extremely well constructed, albeit a little too King Lear at times. #230 in IMDB's top-250.

Apocalypse Now (Redux)

Over two nights, as three hours is too long to sit still for. I last watched this about two years ago. It remains unique to me: literate, not entirely coherent, knowing, expansive. I have grown to like the redux version, especially the encounter with the French, where the visceral attachment to their ancestral land is explored in more depth and ambiguity than modern cinema seems capable of.

Lukas Moodysson: Mammoth

Moodysson goes to Hollywood, New York City, Bangkok, the Philippines, and the locals everywhere go aah... The parallels with Babel are several and manifest, and both are mediocre ruminations on globalisation. At his best Moodysson is unsubtle and troubling, whereas this work is merely coarse, riffing on misunderestimating the intelligence of international English audiences.

Mammoth

I watched this by complete accident; I had intended to view Moodysson's latest of the same name. This one's a turkey, for the Summer Glau fans only.

The Man Who Fell To Earth

Mid-70s David Bowie anti-classic. If anything the plot gets in the way of a thoroughly mediocre piece of cinema. They may as well have followed Bowie around doing his everyday sort of thing, and pretended this was some sort of doco. Ah, I see it was directed by Roeg, who did Walkabout.

District 9

At the apparently unbranded last-cinema-standing on the venerable George St strip, whose box office area now looks like the guts of an old Grace Bros store. It was a spur-of-the-moment thing with Jacob after a fine meal at the incredibly popular Mamak.

In many ways this is precisely the movie one might expect to emerge from modern South Africa, a coarse tale leavened with many sharp insights told with unflinching firmness. Issues of race and origins are never far from the surface, nor is the possibility of transmogrification. The plot was a bit holey but my brain didn't object too strenuously.

Planet Terror

The superior half of the Grindhouse pair. Rodriguez has a lot of fun here, leavening his self-aware splatter horror with corn and myriad semidressed chicks with guns. Effortlessly trashy cinema.

Jackie Brown

Recovering from an overly large night with Albert and Sandy, I got sucked into this, the most feeble of the first three (the canonical three?) Tarantino efforts. The plot is almost entirely linear, and there's not much going on beyond the twisty heist. I last saw this back in 2004 on LaserDisc.

Death Proof

A turkey, and it is clear why I didn't pay any attention to this movie back in 2007. Tarantino's purpose here is to launch Zoë Bell, a long-time stuntette of his, into a career of serious actoring. The film itself is not worth reflecting on, but as beautifully photographed as ever, with all those signature Sergio Leone angles.

Time to pull out some oldie-but-goodie...

Inglourious Basterds

At The Ritz's early evening session with Dave. Much better than the reviews had led me to believe. Dave observed that Brad Pitt has become his own caricature. Cristoph Waltz was amazing, as was Michael Fassbender, last seen in Hunger.

The Adventures of Barry McKenzie

An embarassing turkey. Beresford is a decent director, but his partnership with Barry Humphries turned out a moronic celebration of bogan (née yobbo) culture in the mother country. I have no idea who is into his Edna Everidge creation, for she seems to be precisely what John Howard would have found attractive. I grant she is a vehicle for his real achievement, the zero-entendre joke. Philip Adams probably claims to have revived the Australian film scene on the back of this, which seems quite astonishing from this point in history. I hope all involved enjoyed their junkets.

Praise

I saw this movie ages ago and quite liked it, perhaps essentially due to the lethargic gracelessness of Fenton, who shuffles around with puffer in one hand and fag in the other. The Dirty Three provide a killer soundtrack. Horler is unbelievably good here, and the film sags when she departs the frame for good. Brisvegas gets a bit of a raw deal as the film is mostly set indoors.

Knowing

Execrable, predictable dreck. For every passable Lord of War, Nick Cage is in ten turds, and Alex Proyas's achievements are now buried under his non-achievements. The premise itself is abstractly interesting — cf Newcomb's paradoxical problem — but this stodgy vehicle is mired in treacly sentimentality. Poor Rose Byrne, her character is incoherent.

Revanche

An Austrian bucolic cops-and-robbers flick. Tightly constructed if a tad implausible at a critical juncture or two. Ultimately the narrative evaporates, and life apparently goes on. Beautiful cinematography.

Walkabout

I passed up on seeing this at a cinema with German-Albert-formerly-at-Optus a few months ago. Find here all the Australian cliches, beautifully photographed and spread as sparsely as the landscape.

Public Enemies

At 10am at The Ritz, on their at-most-<$8 />-for-anyone day. I was sorely disappointed by this movie; the narrative arc rarely strayed from the entirely predictable, the characters were mostly meh, and the spaghetti camera work got too much too often. Johnny Depp tried his best to turn Dillinger into something, anything, more than a cardboard cutout. Christian Bale channelled Keanu Reeves, who at least knows his own limitations.

The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara

As promised, I sat through this again, and found it just as absorbing as the first time. His strident claims about rationality reveal he had no comprehension of behavioural economics.

Ambiently I'm chugging through Fred Kaplan's The Wizards of Armageddon but have yet to get to the part on Robert S. McNamara's time as Defence Secretary. More when I do.

Der Baader Meinhof Komplex

Too long, but well made.

The Big Hit

The big cheesefest. A Marky-Mark classic, where he almost out-Arnies Arnie as a ham actor. Lou Diamond Phillips in peak form. I note Elliott Gould appears in the drunken Jewish father role.

I think I've seen it twice before, and I wish my memory was worse.

Wake in Fright

As mrak has accused me of posting too many things of tweet length (the horror), I'll have to start padding out the movie log with extraneous bullshit like this.

At the Chauvel at the pensioner hour of 11am, on the day of the week that everyone gets in for <$9 />. The last thing I saw there was apparently The Passenger almost three years ago. The last thing I remember seeing there was a collection of student shorts, specifically the fantastically provincial Beef Off, many years ago.

Of course I went on the back of the hugely inflated ratings awarded by the review crowd, and not because Nick Cave claimed it to be "[t]he best and most terrifying film about Australia in existence" (the grab on the flyer for the movie). Dare I buck the trend slightly and assert the plot is spaghetti, the characters generally unbelievably one-dimensional, and wonder at how anyone can take it to be saying much about anything. Sure, people in the bush go shooting, but I strongly doubt they drink more than urbanites. I wonder if we're (collectively) going up or down in the per capita rankings. People are cruel everywhere, and there are plenty of places that are aggressively hospitable to people of Anglo stock. The acting is occasionally fun.

The cinematography is sometimes enjoyable, reminding me of the towns of my childhood.

Bugsy

Ennio Morricone did the music.

From Dusk Till Dawn

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The horror, the horror. It is one thing to pay homage to a style of movie and quite another to vacuously and resolutely clone it. I have never been a Harrison Ford fan, indeed never saw the point in him, and all I see here is an effort to fatten various bank accounts. I failed to recognise Cate Blanchett and am shocked, absolutely shocked, that she would deign to be in dreck like this. Shocked, I tell you. Good thing she did it in commie drag (or perhaps her customary anti-fame camo streetwear).

Twelve Monkeys

Not as good as I remembered from my last viewing, approximately a decade ago for a first-year philosophy class. I am now convinced that even with the premise of time travel into the past, Bruce Willis should have no involvement.

Bread and Roses

Another Ken Loach effort, sentimentalising the workers and brutally simplifying the bastardry of the lower echelons of management. A bit cloying but otherwise not too bad. Kind-of, sort-of, It's a Free World with lost angels.

State of Play

At 10am in a small theatre at The Ritz, with quite a few oldies.

Abigail's Party

An early Mike Leigh made-for-TV. Quite clunky by his later standards, a bit hackneyed and all too clearly failing to improve on Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?.

Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines

On Channel9, perfect for an empty mind while minding the cat.

The Hangover

At the Australia Theatre in Orange, with Dave, at the just-before-school-gets-out hour of 3pm. I think the last thing I saw there was the Footrot Flats movie, back in 1986 or so. For a while in the not-to-distant-past Orange had two cinemas, but Dave tells me the other one shut down, albeit not before inflicting another four or five theatres on this venerable edifice.

High Hopes

Another pre-Naked Mike Leigh effort. Not as good as what came later, but not bad.

Transformers

Definitely not worth a second viewing. The CGI is still pretty amazing, perhaps due to the spaghetti camera work that makes the action quite difficult to follow.

I got thinking that it summarised the Bush era pretty well: a love affair with the military, particularly the grunts on the ground; a fascination with vacuous youth culture; strip-mining the 80s for franchises to blockbuster; unfriendly treatment of aliens, even friendly ones; and so forth. Doubtlessly there's a PhD thesis out there on precisely this.

I miss the cheese.

Ghost in the Shell

Cyberpunk? Perhaps, but for mine sliding into the post- category. The soundtrack is quite good, almost making up for the too much talking and not enough showing. What was that Don Marquis quote again? Ah, yes...

Terminator Salvation

At the after-school session at The Ritz. It committed the ultimate movie sin of being boring, almost entirely illogical and uninteresting in the sum total, which was unfortunate as a lot of the elements held promise. Structurally the first two movies held our interest as there were only a very few antagonists, one of which was almost indestructable by the others. When there's a metric shirtload of terminating devices the suspense cannot be sustained, and this viewer left feeling that without the classic aesthetics this would have gone straight to DVD. Arnie's presence is not only totally fake but entirely tokenistic, perhaps the first time the big man has been so completely ridden.

On the ha-ha-they're-such-serious-artists front, we have Sam Worthington claiming there's some truth and reality to be had here, and I throw my lot in with whoever first observed that Christian Bale's blow-up is the most convincing part of his performance.

New Rose Hotel

Last of the Mohicans

eXistenZ

Sunshine

The Da Vinci Code

Star Trek

At the after-school session at The Ritz.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine

At the obscene time of 10am in the almost-entirely-empty main theatre of the The Ritz.

X Men 3: The Last Stand

X-Men 2

X-Men

Centre of the World

L.A. Confidential

Code 46

Jude

Talk Radio

An early outing of the trademark Oliver Stone blunderbuss. Bogosian robustly voices endless schtick that is trite and cliched at this distance. The plot has an arc that wouldn't surprise a goldfish. Might've been better on the stage, or as a radio production.

Cape Fear

Harvie Krumpet

The Reader

Michael Collins

Dark City

Appaloosa

Traitor

Watchmen

At the afternoon session at The Ritz.

Let the right one in

Eller på svenska, Låt den rätte komma in. Very well constructed, but Moodysson can be that creepy without recourse to the supernatural.

Zoolander

Zach and Miri Make a Porno

Ghost Town

Valkyrie

RocknRolla

Absolute dreck. Guy Richie must've needed to pony up some cash to pay off Madonna.

The Machinist

W.

Fairly tedious. I got the feeling that George H. W. Bush would have made a more interesting subject than Junior. It pushes all the buttons, too many buttons, unconvincingly. Brolin is as good as could be hoped for.

Hunger

Much better than it had a right to be; not much happens, the narrative is entirely predictable to anyone who knows anything about the IRA and Bobby Sands. The scene in the middle, a twenty-minute plus dialogue between Sands and the priest, makes the movie. The lead actor must have a huge future, like Christian Bale (cf The Machinist) before him.

Day Watch

The International

At The Ritz with Jen.

Revolutionary Road

Choke

JCVD

Sin City

Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan

Old Boy

Milk

Romeo is Bleeding

The Zero Effect

Just as good the second time around. Thanks again, Dave.

The Interview

Gran Torino

Interview with the Vampire

The Wrestler

Aronofsky is maturing; this one never flinches, being full of trademark gore and nowhere as feeble as his previous effort. I wish his auxiliary characters had more character.

Slumdog Millionaire

The stucture of this reminded me of Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, with the TV show standing in for the pickling, and the historiography reduced to one person's life. Danny Boyle always has a thumping soundtrack.