Cultural Pilgrim » Film

Langorous yet sumptuous: Film review of South Solitary

Andres Kabel — Tue, 19 Oct 2010 04:49:27 +0000

The star of South Solitary, an Australian film by director Shirley Barrett that zapped across our cinema screens for scant weeks, is its setting, a lighthouse on a bleak, remote island. Cinematographer Anna Howard captures the austere scenery and interior of the evocative lighthouse with great aplomb; it helped that I’d recently seen one of the two locations, Cape Otway on the southwest coast of Victoria. The storyline is simple, if not slow: Meredith, a young, hesitant woman (played with wonderful subtlety by Miranda Otto) with some kind of secret past, arrives by boat, accompanying her uncle, the new lighthouse keeper (a fine performance by Barry Otto). Meredith becomes entangled in the lives of the other two lighthouse workers, a slick Casanova and his family, and a World War I wreck (the real star of the film, played with aching empathy by Marton Csokas). Since not much really happens, I won’t reveal more, but suffice to say there is tragedy, isolation, danger and a whiff of love. Barrett’s direction is languorous but my usual impatience was conquered by the mix of setting and gentle character development.

South Solitary is, in its own minor way, a sumptuous treat. 3 stars.

Brilliant & captivating: DVD review of Sam Mendes’s Away We Go

Andres Kabel — Tue, 28 Sep 2010 20:00:46 +0000

Oh to live in New York and see movies like Away We Go, directed by young Sam Mendesand powered by a Dave Eggers/Vendela Vida script, as they are released, in the glory of a cinema! Away We Go came out in 2009 but never made it into Australian multiplexes; only now, a year later, was I able to view it on DVD. And it’s a winner, a quirky, finely paced, life-affirming example of the best of American filmmaking. Anchored by a simple plotline – a 30s-something couple touring different American cities to pick where they might settle – it is at once a gentle satire about American families, a fascinating sociological travelogue, a paean to love, and an exploration of existential meaning. Yet it’s not weighty by any means – brilliant acting by John Krasinski (as the geeky but tough, naive but wise husband) and Maya Rudolph (the emotional, strong wife) centre us first and foremost in the lives of the characters, and some of the scenes are delightfully humorous. Out of last month’s crop of 2009-2010 films watched on DVD, Away We Go stands out as superlative.

As entertaining and profound as the best literary novels. 4 stars.

Pity about the script: DVD review of The Invention of Lying

Andres Kabel — Wed, 22 Sep 2010 20:00:47 +0000

Ricky Gervais is a hero to me, his brand of savage, ironic humour a lifeline to someone who rarely finds funny what others do. So I watched The Invention of Lying (Gervais co-wrote, co-directed and starred) as soon as it came to Australia on DVD (its cinema season was an eyeblink). Alas, this is a travesty of a comedy. The basic premise – a world where no one can lie, except a retrenched, loveless loser (Gervais) who suddenly conceives of being untruthful – is a winner, but the script is execrable, without sense (the ending is especially lame) or tension. Gervais acquits himself well despite few lines or scenes of merit, but the rest of the actors struggle with the poor material. I chuckled at some of the nifty consequences of a world without fabrication, and Gervais manages some funny moments, and in truth I rather enjoyed the gentle sweep of the film, but none of that was enough.

Great idea, pity about the script. 1½ stars.

Visually lush but undisciplined: DVD review of The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus

Andres Kabel — Sat, 18 Sep 2010 20:00:42 +0000

I didn’t borrow Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus because of its now universal tagline, ‘Heath Ledger’s last film,’ but because of some intriguing reviews read in retrospect. And I was in the mood for something visually arresting. Imaginarium proved to be wonderful eye candy, a lovely fable plot, and some fine ensemble acting. I was especially taken with Tom Waits as the over-the-top inscrutable devil. The storyline is a little silly in retrospect – Doctor Parnassus is a travelling entertainer, letting customers enter his mind and choose there between a good option and an evil option – but it works well enough in the moment, and the key subplot, a coming-of-age story of Parnassus’s daughter, is well sustained. There is plenty of dry or quirky humour as well. Substituting a trio of stars – Law, Depp and Farrell – for Ledger in the latter parts of the film also works well. If my comments above suggest lukewarm praise, that’s because Gilliam’s rein over the film is sloppy, so that some of the splendid scenes are let down by indulgent or cursory transitions. Since the film is very much a product of Gilliam’s creativity, such ‘un-Hollywood’ looseness can add to the charm but it also, in my opinion, leaches out the vitality of his vision.

Weird, visually brilliant, well acted, but slightly sapped of pizazz. 2½ stars.

Great sci-fi concept: DVD review of Surrogates

Andres Kabel — Tue, 14 Sep 2010 20:00:32 +0000

My current hunger for sci-fi, in all its forms, led me to last year’s Surrogates. Casting Bruce Willis as lead automatically indicates a film that is less sci-fi and more mindless thriller, but, to his credit, in Surrogates he plays a restrained role. The plotline is pure Philip K. Dick (the second time I’ve written that recently, showing how pervasive Dick’s sci-fi legacy remains): in a futuristic world in which many humans lie indoors and live through androids they control mentally, a bed-ridden human is killed when his ‘surrogate’ is, leading to a hunt (by Willis and his rather insipid co-star Radha Mitchell) for a new super-weapon. I found the overall concept wonderfully seductive and was able to brush aside some clunky script elements because of director Jonathan Mostow’s frenetic pace and fine staging of the android-based scenes. A serious thematic thread of man versus machine is rather clumsily addressed, to the extent of a so-so ending, but here again I excused it all for the sheer delight of a wonderful idea expressed in film.

Acceptable filmic entertainment buoyed by a bedazzling sci-fi bedrock. 2½ stars.

Comic book cinema that works: DVD review of Iron Man

Andres Kabel — Wed, 08 Sep 2010 20:00:55 +0000

Movies based on comic books are almost always bad, ruined by sappiness beyond even what the original comic stretched to. Nonetheless I’m a sucker to try the ones I recall from a childhood spent nose in comic. Iron Man was in my second tier of action heroes, never original enough to really excite me but a sturdy, consistent creation. I couldn’t make myself see the first Jon Favreau film Iron Man in the cinemas, but my son persuaded my to finally try the DVD. And I’m most glad, for this is a guileless, comic-book-style rendering that somehow feels traditional (Iron Man is such an ancient concept) and modernistic at the same time. You know the premise, a tycoon who encases himself in armour and flies in to save the world, but Favreau slots that premise into modern Middle Eastern warfare. The pace is suitably frenetic, with few ‘groan out loud’ moments, the technology is cool, the action scenes are tumultuous, and the ending worked for me. But the one element Iron Manthat saves it from ho-hum is the razor-sharp, quick-voiced acting of Robert Downey Jr. This actor makes an impression, he somehow gets into the skin of even this comic hero, and I couldn’t get enough of him.

Unexpectedly snappy and entertaining. 3 stars.

Beauty and intensity: DVD review of Last Ride

Andres Kabel — Tue, 31 Aug 2010 20:00:50 +0000

Several friends have been at me for ages to watch Last Ride, the road movie of a violent father fleeing across the vast expanse of Australia with his ten-year-old son, but somehow I’ve felt the need to be in a certain mood to finally rent the DVD. (Far better would have been to see it on its release but its local season was unforgivably short and I missed it.) Well, all the plaudits are spot on. The script, by Mac Gudgeon, is paced to perfection from the opening frame, and Glendyn Ivin’s direction wonderfully combines action, judicious flashback and sweeping cinematography. Tom Harding plays the ardent, confused little boy with great maturity, but it’s Hugo Weaving’s performance that lifts Last Ride from just another edgy Australian drama to something special. His portrayal of a tattooed loser literally unable to bring up his son with wisdom or compassion, but suffused with love for the boy, is heartbreaking. I found the build-up of tension, towards what we always sense will be a harsh ending, a wrenching experience, but somehow the movie manages to infuse the finale with the hope of the young.

Stark, brilliant and worthy of an alt-Oscar. 4 stars.

Grandiose sci-fi that sings: Film review of Inception

Andres Kabel — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 20:00:22 +0000

I’m in a backlash frame of mind, keen after focusing on the high and mighty to indulge in my great genre loves, crime and sci-fi. Luckily the science fiction scene keeps throwing up wonderments to latch onto. None speaks louder than Christopher Nolan’s over-the-top futuristic thriller Inception. What a brilliant concept, straight from the pen of Philip K. Dick! Dom Cobb (intensely rendered by Leonardo DiCaprio, an actor I’m belatedly coming to admire) is a dream thief, an expert at invading the dreams of his targets in order to extract secrets useful in the waking world. But his past holds a consuming tragedy and when a tycoon challenges him to go one step further with dream manipulation, Dom assembles a multi-talented team (rather like a Mission Impossible band, with some excellent supporting acting performances) to construct a dream within a dream within a dream within . . . you get the drift – a plot conceit that could have flopped irretrievably within minutes. Yet Inception pulls it off, blasting the viewer from a stunning opening scene right through its two and a half hours of length. A massively heavy-handed music score, relentless shoot-em-up scenes, brain-twisting plot complexity . . . all these could have derailed the film but instead add to its surreal, clunky grandeur. I couldn’t wipe the smile off my face, so absorbed was I in the sumptuous otherworld I was thrust into.

Like Avatar, Inception is grand sci-fi moviemaking at its best: unbridled Wagnerian pomp that somehow works magically. 4 stars.

Banal but rousing: Film review of Predators

Andres Kabel — Tue, 10 Aug 2010 19:29:59 +0000

Predators opens with a rush: battle-hardened men and women plummeting towards ground, desperately opening parachutes, snatched from separate lives across the globe. The underlying sci-fi concept – of warriors teleported to become the sport on an alien game reserve – is as old (and, I must say, as satisfying) as sci-fi itself. I haven’t seen the other instalments of what has become the ‘predator’ franchise, not even the original Arnie version, so I cannot compare, but this instalment is simultaneously banal and shallow, kinetic and exciting. Scenes of crap characterisation (Adrian Brody is formulaic as the head hero, Laurence Fishburne does a fine cameo, and the other actors are just passable), lame plotting, and ridiculous alien gore alternate with pell-mell action scenes (director Nimród Antal sure knows how to choreograph battles) evocative filming. In short Predators, is almost as bad as, but ultimately better than, the run-of-the-mill sci-fi thriller.

Not outstanding but a rousing refuge from D&M (‘deep and meaningful’). 2½ stars.

Brilliant storytelling: Film review of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo

Andres Kabel — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 20:00:06 +0000

One approaches franchise books and films gingerly: ‘massively popular’ often indeed means ‘crap’. But instant franchise books can signal an artistic creation that has seized the public imagination because it is brilliant, at least in some aspects. Take Harry Potter – it succeeds because it deserves to. Stieg Larsson’s Millennium series is another example. The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo spread globally like a super virus, readers engulfed by its potent combination of intricate, raw plots and intensely individualistic characters observed in minute detail. (Here I’m indebted to perceptive analysis by Laura Miller.)

I read the second in the series, The Girl who Played with Fire for a book group, and enjoyed the experience without falling in love with the series. Too many endless details, I sniffed. But now I’ve seen the film of the first, The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo, and I wonder if I was mistaken. For the movie is a humdinger. Casting is a primary strength – Noomi Rapace is perfect as the emotionally fragile but unstoppable super hacker, Lisbeth Salander, and Michael Nyqvist steals every scene as the dogged investigator Mikael Blomkvist. By necessity the film version truncates the exhaustive plot of the book but under the direction of Niels Arden Oplev, it maintains a kinetic pace while constantly revealing the characters. The lovingly shot Swedish countryside and cities, plus the exotic (to my ears) Swedish language, convey Larsson’s fascinating Swedishness. Not peppered with violence like most modern thriller, the film nonetheless is graphically raw when it depicts one of Larsson’s major themes, that of male violence toward women. All of this intoxicating package unfurls at the best movies do – two and a half hours vanished from my life.

It is now clear to me that Larsson does indeed weave modern storytelling magic, and the film version of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo captures that magic triumphantly. 4 stars.