Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Skipping Town

Film Film Reviews

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (Marina Zenovich, 2008)

The entry in the Melbourne International Film Festival program for Marina Zenovich’s documentary about the trial of Roman Polanksi for unlawful sex with a thirteen year old girl film poses the question: “Was Polanski guilty, or was it the case of a trial judge seeking personal notoriety?” It’s an idiotic question: of course Polanski was guilty. He plead guilty at the time, has always admitted to having sex with the girl, and there is no suggestion otherwise in the documentary.

This basic fact hangs uneasily over the whole film, and despite it being quite sympathetic to Polanski, there’s little doubt that he wouldn’t relish the case being thrust back into the public eye: I can’t think of anyone else who has been rehabilitated into public life like Polanski has been after such a crime. And while the documentary is entertaining and interesting for its full length, I felt uncomfortable in its first half at the apparent implication that Polanski had in some ways been a victim of the trial process. In the early stretches, Polanski’s difficulties seemed merely to be the expected firestorm of publicity and the obvious problems that would accompany being charged with a serious crime, and I was having trouble making sense of the allusions to Polanksi’s apparently unjust treatment.

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Renegade Planner Lives on the Edge

Television Urban Planning

Press release: For Immediate Release

Premiering on Nine next Month, fresh from its Emmy award-winning debut season in the US, is the hit drama Material Detriment, set in the high stakes, high pressure world of urban planning. The series follows the life – and loves – of planners in a tough inner urban municipality, as they battle petty one-off developers and the larger, more sinister Mendoza Development Group (MDG).

Material Detriment centres on the tumultuous lives of its four leads:

Senior Planner Jack Detriment (Kiefer Sutherland) is a tough, street-wise planner. Abrasive and argumentative, he is committed to doing whatever it takes to keep his neighbourhood orderly and proper. He has little patience with the pen-pushing bureaucrats who seem to be emerging from Planning Academy, and just wants to get on with clearing the unresolved applications off his books. If he has to bend a few rules to get there, so be it.

Cadet Planner Dwight Rosewood (Jesse Spencer) is an idealistic rookie planner, straight out of the Academy. He graduated top of his class and his knowledge of the key planning texts is unparalleled. Strongly committed to appropriate statutory process, he is partnered with Detriment in the hope of reigning in his senior officer’s more extreme methods. Out in the “real world” for the first time, he learns a few lessons about life, loyalty… and love.

Team Leader John Taggart (Brian Dennehy) is the grizzled, cynical head of the branch, and the man responsible for pairing Detriment and Rosewood. Just 6 weeks from retirement, he is constantly exasperated by Detriment’s methods, warning him that one of these days, he’ll have to hand in his ID card. Yet he secretly respects his star officer, grudgingly acknowledging that without him, the branch’s processing times would be much longer. Gunned down in the 2 part series finale.

Junior Planner Tiffany Summers (Katherine Heigl) is the rising star of the branch, still fighting to make headway in the testosterone-filled halls of the Planning Branch. Raised in an exclusive suburb and the daughter of the Planning Minister, she constantly riles against the assumption that her wealth and connections got her the job, and that she plans on sleeping her way to the top. Her love / hate relationship with Detriment (source of much “will they or won’t they” discussion amongst the series’ fanbase) comes to a head when they attend an interstate Planning conference together.

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Worth Your Attention

Film

Just a quick morning post for two things that have caught my interest – totally unrelated to each other, but both worth a look.

The first is this post by Benjamin Wright over at his blog Aspect Ratio, which talks about the role of Imax in popular cinema, and the importance of The Dark Knight in particular. I touched on this in my review but Wright goes into a lot more detail, including screenshots that give a sense of the difference in composition between the Imax and general release versions. Twenty years from now, once the – justified – hype over Ledger has subsided, the film’s pioneering use of Imax might be what it is best remembered for.

Also, I just wanted to point readers to an Australian film blog of which I have only just become aware: Glenn Dunks’ Stale Popcorn. Dunks is offering a very entertaining mix of proper film connoisseurship and more lighthearted posts, and its well worth a look. So I’ll add Stale Popcorn to my list of really good online local reads, which includes InFilm, Hoopla, Melbourne Film Blog, Last Night With Riviera, Cinephilia, and Urban CineFile (which I must admit lost me when it went subscription and never got me back). Are there any others out there that, like Stale Popcorn, have thus far escaped my attention (or which I’ve forgotten here)?

My MIFF

Film

I’m aware that my previous coverage of MIFF hasn’t been very helpful, since I frequently don’t end up writing about films until after they’ve had all their screenings – last year the whole festival was over before I wrote up a lot of the films I saw. Once again, I’d recommend Paul Martin’s blog for information that’s actually useful, like his list of films that are likely to get a commercial release anyway, and his monitoring of what is about to get sold out.

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Batman Continues

Film Film Reviews

The Dark Knight (Christopher Nolan, 2008)

I was not one of those who flipped for Christopher Nolan’s Batman Begins: as I said in a brief write-up at the time, I thought it was poorly shot and thematically muddled. But the more serious problem was just that it was too not fun. That, of course, was supposed to be the point: Nolan was taking us back to a dark version of the Batman character after the more comic bookish 80s and 90s movie version (although I can remember when Burton’s 1989 take was considered the return to a dark take on the character). However, while I applaud the concept of taking a genre project seriously, part of doing a serious superhero film is that you have to make the superhero side of the equation work also. In Batman Begins, Nolan and his co-screenwriter David S. Goyer dropped that ball through their determination to make Batman plausible as something other than a genre conceit. There was a feeling that they were ticking off explanations for things the audiences would have taken for granted: look – it kind of makes sense that he has all these gadgets, because the Wayne foundation has this big R&D branch! Look – here’s an explanation of how he can use his cape to fly! Look – here he is putting together his damn suit! We didn’t need to see that stuff, and by seeming simultaneously apologetic about Batman’s ridiculousness, while at the same time trying to make the most earnest Batman movie ever, I think Nolan came across as a little foolish. A Batman film can explore serious themes, sure, but at the end of the day it is still, as Jaime Weinman put it, about “a rich kid with no powers who decides to avenge his parents by fighting crime in a bat suit.” The best way to sell that kind of idea is to relax and have fun with it, and on that score I don’t think Batman Begins worked very well at all.

By now you have probably heard that Nolan’s sequel The Dark Knight is the ultimate descent into hell for Batman, and you are probably thinking that I would feel it suffered the same problem. It is after all, a very grim film indeed, in which Heath Ledger’s psychotic Joker wreaks widespread havoc and inflicts real and lasting harm to several major characters. Yet, oddly, despite all the carnage that unfolds, The Dark Knight is much more fun than its predecessor. And it’s the nifty trick of making such a dark film so enjoyable that makes it something really worthwhile.

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Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil! Touch of Evil!

Film

Hot on the heels (at least in the order I found out about them) of the restored Metropolis comes the news that Touch of Evil will get a new DVD release carrying three versions of the film. The current DVD features only a highly speculative “restoration,” which even the people who made it felt should not have replaced the earlier versions, as noted by Jonathan Rosenbaum:

I was a consultant on the third version–a re-edit by Walter Murch based on a memo written by Welles to Universal in the 50s–and it was never the intention of Murch, me, or our producer Rick Schmidlin to replace the film’s original release version or the longer preview version that supplanted it in the 70s. We were hoping that all three could be released in a DVD box set.

Well, now we have that set, correcting one of the worst bits of DVD butchery we’ve seen for a while. That’s sensational news. Click the image below to order it.

The Coolest Movie News Since… Ever?

Film Urban Planning and Film

You’ve probably seen this already, since it’s one of those rare pieces of news about film restoration that was so earth-shattering it made the mainstream media: a near-complete version of Metropolis has turned up. Ain’t It Cool have images here.

I love Metropolis: I’m a fan of city movies, and silent movies, and big epic special effects movies, and science fiction movies, so it really does have everything for me. Everything except, of course, about a quarter of its footage: the previous best-available version used intertitles to give a sense of what was missing. That DVD was released by Kino overseas, and seems to be the basis of the version released by Madman in Australia. Kino were already planning a re-release (with a Blu-Ray version) in 2009; that has been hastily revised to include the rediscovered footage. Obviously the new footage is likely to be in poor shape, visually, but its historical importance is extraordinary.

What could possibly be next: the ten hour version of Greed?

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Can’t Wait for the Sequel: Kung Pow Chicken

Film Film Reviews

Kung Fu Panda (Mark Osborne & John Stevenson, 2008)

Sometimes a title is its own review. Certainly Kung Fu Panda is about what you’d expect. There’s a panda. He likes kung fu. Everyone doubts the panda can do kung fu. The panda triumphs by doing kung fu. And at the end, they play “kung fu fighting” over pictures of pandas. So if you like kung fu, and like pandas, there’s a fair bit going on here for you.

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The Melbourne 2030 Audit and the Urgency of Debate

Urban Planning

Originally published as an editorial under a joint by line with Tim Westcott and Gida Di Vincenzo in Planning News 34, no. 6 (July 2008): 4.

It is a busy time in planning. The government’s announcement last month of new “Development Assessment Committees” (DACs) to make planning decisions in Melbourne 2030’s Principal Activity Centres (and other – as yet unspecified – sites of metropolitan significance) is just one aspect of a fast-changing planning environment. It occurs alongside the potentially game-changing review of the residential zones; the introduction of the Urban Growth Zone; the fallout from the Eddington Report; and with the still-mysterious review of the Act looming on the horizon.

In this context, it’s a shame that the kerfuffle over the proposed DACs largely overshadowed one of the most important recent attempts to pause and take stock. The report of the Melbourne 2030 Audit Expert Group (AEG) was released simultaneously with the government’s response to it, and it was overshadowed by the story of the DACs and their implicit threat to the role of local government. This is unfortunate, as the AEG report is a solid, well-considered stock take of where we now stand. It mounts a spirited defence of the core ideas of Melbourne 2030, but is also admirably clear in spelling out how its implementation has fallen short.

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Quantum of Solace Trailer

Film

Here’s the new trailer for Quantum of Solace (aka the Bond movie with the title that makes everyone snicker but which has actually kind of grown on me).

I’ve said way to much about Bond over the years for it to be worth any detailed comment, but it is kind of cool. I love that finally we have some linkage between the films, in a way we haven’t had since the sixties. This looks like it could be the Bond revenge story that should have, but didn’t, follow the best Bond movie of all, On Her Majesty’s Secret Service.

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