Film

264 posts

Coming of Age

Film Film Reviews

Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi & Vincent Paronnaud, 2007)

Even those who love animation are prone to dark speculation about its shortcomings as a medium. The lack of live actors and the associated hindrance to truly subtle performances, in particular, is often cited as limiting the potential for serious dramatic work in animated films. The fear is that the relative paucity of full length, adult-oriented dramatic features might not only be due to a lack of courage and imagination on the part of directors and studio executives, but might also reflect actual limitations of animation itself. Thank goodness, then, for Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.

The film is an adaptation of Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel of the same name, and tells the story of her childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in Iran and Europe, set against the background of Iran’s turbulent politics. It’s difficult material, requiring sensitivity not just to the personal coming-of-age story, but also to the story of Iran through this period. The film is triumphant on both counts. Along the way it demonstrates that the medium of animation not only can overcome its limitations, but actually has some crucial advantages over live action in telling this story.

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Guided MIFFile

Film

(Can I pass off my appalling MIFF puns as a tribute to the bad puns of old cartoon titles? No? Oh.)

Well, I’ve finished MIFF with three films back-to-back this afternoon; all good (or at least enjoyable), thankfully. I also saw two on Friday. So I might as well wrap them up briefly while the thoughts are fresh.

Persepolis (Marjana Satrapi, 2007)

I’ll do a fuller review of this in the next week or so (hopefully), so more on this later. But suffice to say it’s brilliant, and you absolutely should see it when it comes out.

Encounters at the End of the World (Werner Herzog, 2007)

I didn’t dislike this to the same extent Mark Lavercombe at Hoopla did, but it was disappointing. Sharing more than a little in common with Herzog’s earlier science-fiction / documentary / head-scratcher The Wild Blue Yonder (which I covered at a previous MIFF, see here), it sees Herzog travel to Antarctica to talk to various research scientists. Herzog is, of course, an eccentric of long standing, and sometimes (most recently in Grizzly Man) his off-kilter perspective can be strangely brilliant. Here, though, he generally comes across as foolish. He has some interesting interview subjects, and certainly gets some great footage in the scenes of diving under ice (it’s here the film resembles Wild Blue Yonder – it may even reuse some of the same footage). But he consistently seems the least intelligent person in the room: his narration ruminates on humanity’s relationship with the environment, but his interview subjects are vastly more informed than he is on the topic. Funny, often beautiful, and Herzog is never a waste of time; but there’s a sense that Herzog is resting on his laurels as one of the great documentarians, rather than really chasing down a great story as he did back in Grizzly Man.

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MIFFarama

Film

I’ve seen only four MIFF films thus far (once again, my viewing seems loaded towards the end, with three films on the last day). This year, I’ve actually written slightly fuller reviews of two, which complicates the format of my usual MIFF round-up.

Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008)

Review here.

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

Review here.

Ashes of Time Redux (Wong Kar Wei, 1994/2008)

Nobody likes to seem stupid, so there can sometimes be a reluctance by critics to admit they just didn’t get a film; and at an individual level, it can be hard to decide whether comprehension problems lie with the viewer or the film. So as I wandered, confused, out of Wong Kar Wei’s Ashes of Time Redux (I have not seen the 1994 cut) I wasn’t sure whether I hadn’t gotten into it because it was confusing, or if it was confusing because I hadn’t really gotten into it. (It’s a bad sign when you find yourself making a mental note of a photogenic camel). It was a bit of a relief to find even complimentary reviews (like this one) making reference to the confusing plot. The film always looks good, as you’d expect from one of the great director / cinematographer teams (Wong and cinematographer Christopher Doyle) but the disjointed narrative was inherently distancing. Apparently, it was a troubled production, and that’s ultimately what it feels like: confusing not out of pretension, but because it was an expensive epic that was never quite put together properly. I was going to suggest that in that sense it was like a Hong Kong Heaven’s Gate, but it’s not that bad: it says something that despite my disorientation, I remained interested throughout.

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The Real Warren Perso

Film Film Reviews

Not Quite Hollywood (Mark Hartley, 2008)

Mark Hartley’s documentary on “Ozploitation” – Australian exploitation movies of the 70s and early 80s – should find an enthusiastic audience. It is great fun, largely because it reproduces all the best moments form a body of work that is probably more a lot more enjoyable to reminisce about, and see highlights from, than it is to actually sit through in its entirety. After briefly setting the historical context, it starts with what I think are the best remembered sub-genre, the “ocker” and sex comedies from the 1970s (Stork, Alvin Purple, the Barry McKenzie films, and so on), and then works through horror films and action films (the films’ structure gives the impression that the filmmakers had an eye on being able to break the film up into separate episodes of a TV show). So we get basically all the sauciest and funniest moments from the sex comedies, followed by the most outrageous scenes from the horrors, and the best stunts from the action films. As a highlights package, it’s fabulous, and Hartley intersperses interviews with many key participants (plus Quentin Tarantino representing the fan’s perspective as only he can).

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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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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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