Stephen Rowley

377 posts

Trumping Kane

Film Television

As an interesting little side-note to my piece on Errol Morris’ The Thin Blue Line, Morris’ website has a clip (here) from an interview he did with Donald Trump, focusing on Citizen Kane.

I don’t have much time for Trump, but he is pretty articulate in commenting on the movie, although I don’t know if “get yourself a different woman” is the message I’d take from the film. Nevertheless, it’s interesting to hear the comments of a modern-day William Randolph Hearst on the movie. It’s a shame that Morris’ interview is squirrelled away on the web and largely unseen, but Trump’s “you’re fired” shenanigans are on TV.

(My own main piece on Kane is here.)

They’re Coming to Get You, Barbara

Film

One of the holy grails of special effects for a few years now has been the fully realistic all-digital animated human. Computer animated human characters have been passed off as real for fleeting shots, most often to replace stunt people, but nobody has ever given one any kind of serious acting to do. Yet people have been assuming it was just around the corner for years, with the general assumption being that someone would use digital technology to try to bring back a deceased star (existing gestures in this direction, like Marlon Brando in Superman Returns, have always used manipulated footage of the original actor).

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Cold Feet

Film Film Reviews

Happy Feet (George Miller, 2006)

Happy Feet is a computer animated film about a free-spirited penguin, Mumble, who dances when all around him only sing. Watching it, I felt a sense of disconnection from my fellow filmgoers that matched that of its protagonist. This was a feel good dancing penguin movie, right? One which has been met by widespread audience and critical acclaim. One which, the ads insist, has “audiences floating out of the cinema on feel good clouds.” So what was the Happy Feet I saw? The film I saw was obviously well-intentioned, but it was poorly made, lamentably unmusical, and, well… depressing.

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Franconoir

Film Film Reviews

Rififi (Jules Dassin, 1955)

Original French Title: Du Rififi Chez Les Hommes

Note: This article includes some moderate spoilers.

As a French-made noir by an American-born writer-director, Jules Dassin’s Rififi is an example of the film noir movement coming full circle. The genre had been kicked off, in part, by the arrival in Hollywood of directors fleeing wartime Germany, such as Fritz Lang, Otto Preminger and Billy Wilder. Just a few years later, though, the flow of talent had been reversed. American-born Jules Dassin was blacklisted in the anti-communist hysteria of the early fifties, and was forced first to Britain and then France in the search for work. Rififi, his first French film, folds a Gallic sensibility back into the American / German generic hybrid of noir: it anticipates the French obsession with gangster pictures that emerged a few years later in New Wave films such as Godard’s Bande à part / Band of Outsiders. The result is a fascinating blend, and a definitive example of a classic film emerging from enormously difficult personal circumstances.

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What I Want for Christmas Next Year

Film

In a not very timely post, I wanted to take a moment to reflect on the films that I wish were available on DVD here in Australia but aren’t, and express the (belated) Christmas wish that we might see these before next year.

Generally I think that we’re actually pretty well off in this country, even given the lesser release schedules we get compared to the US. There are a couple of animation collections that I’m pretty much resigned to never seeing (further waves of Disney Treasures, for example), but generally it seems most of the things we want we eventually get. This is particularly the case with smaller distributors (notably Madman) getting up more steam and increasingly filling the niche that outfits like Criterion do in the US. (In fact, I watched their version of Rififi the other day, and my hunch is it is a port of the Criterion version).

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Die Hungry

Film

I believe the original Die Hard is one of the all-time classic bits of action cinema, but have no high hopes for the fourth film in the franchise, because, well, I have an ounce of common sense. It’s going to suck like the vacuum of space. Beyond that, all I will say is:

a) “Internet Terrorists” = Lame. Alan Rickman’s gloriously Eurotrashy Hans Gruber would have hung their nerdy hides out to dry.

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S-Bend Adventures

Film Film Reviews

Flushed Away (David Bowers & Sam Fell, 2006)

In the opening minutes of Flushed Away, the rat Roddy (voiced by Hugh Jackman), who spends a life of leisure as a solitary house pet, gets flushed down the toilet. He enters the sewers of London where he finds a whole society of rats: initially horrified, he wants nothing more than to escape from the proletarian rats (proletarirats?) and to reach the surface. But with the help of the attractive Rita (voiced by Kate Winslet) he comes to savour the company of his fellow rats.


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“This Never Happened to the Other Fellow:” Bond, Vesper and Tracy

Film

Note: the following article includes detailed spoilers for several Bond films and books, including the ending for both Casino Royale and On Her Majesty’s Secret Service. You have been warned.

The exciting thing about the newest Bond film, Casino Royale, is that it starts the cinematic James Bond series afresh. There has been much commentary on what this means for the Bond series going forward, centring on speculation as to whether this change in tone will carry into the next film. What I haven’t seen a great deal of discussion about, however, is what the events of Casino Royale, and the associated rebooting of the series, means for our understanding of who Bond is.

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Bond is Back

Film Film Reviews

Casino Royale (Martin Campbell, 2006)

The crucial line in the opening credits: “Based on the novel by Ian Fleming.”

Ian Fleming’s credit on the film Bond series has for years been simply “Ian Fleming’s James Bond in…” and then the title of the movie. There hasn’t been a Bond film that stayed anything close to one of his novels since 1969’s On Her Majesty’s Secret Service: in the seventies, the producers generally threw out Fleming’s plots, while by the 1980s the Bond films were taking the titles and a few incidents from his short stories but little more. All this time Casino Royale, the first Bond novel, remained unfilmed. The film rights were owned by different people to the rest of the series: they provided legal cover for a Bond spoof under the title in 1967, but yielded little else. In retrospect, given the level of farce the Bond series was reduced to through this period, the legal circumstances preventing an adaptation virtually amounted to protective custody. Now, though, corporate mergers and legal horse-trading has allowed its use as part of the “official” Bond series. And after the series hit a recent low with Die Another Day, the timing could not be better for a reintroduction of Fleming’s spirit to the series.


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Time to Leave

Film Film Reviews

Time to Leave (Francois Ozon, 2006)

The latest film from prolific French writer-director Francois Ozon is Time to Leave, a sensitive, low-key drama exploring themes of mortality and interpersonal relationships. It centres on Romain (Melvin Poupard), a somewhat self-centred photographer who discovers that he has terminal cancer. Already somewhat aloof from those around him, he withdraws further, concealing his illness and lashing out at family and his partner Sasha (Christian Sengewald). As the illness progresses, however, Romain is transformed.

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