WALL*E

Gosh Pixar are ambitious. I tend to find little to praise in animated features – I get stuck in the moralizing and generally find the aesthetic wave of computer-gen particularly uncompelling. Yet of the bunch, Pixar seem to get better and better, *almost* swaying my opinion with their consistent films and vocal fans.

I giggled my way through the animated short Presto that began the film - a great piece of animated slapstick based on a very simple magical trick, kinetically propelled towards insanity by the kawaii-eyed offspring of Bugs Bunny and an appropriately gentlemanly magician.

Wall*e is love story between two monosyllabic robots with a tonne of unexpected personality. The story of the environment in peril and much like in Happy Feet, it seems that only an insanely cute anthropomorphized digi-character to create a renewal of capital-H Humanity.

In story, the film relies heavily on gesture to articulate its narrative, an approach that means the film cannot be easily distilled into a series of comic catch-crys or ubiquitous caped costumes, which the child audience usually consumes and circulates with frenetic enthusiasm. I wondered if the film was at all accessible to the ‘child’ demographic, but decided this was largely irrelevant in the whole endeavor, because for all intents and purposes Wall*e was a really solid film with all signs of longevity.

The wonderful world of Hollywood (and Not Quite Hollywood) Comedies.

The wonderful world of Hollywood (and Not Quite Hollywood) Comedies.

Somehow lately, with a few well chosen exceptions, all my cinema outings have been to see concept comedies. Baby Mama, Tropic Thunder, the return of Harold and Kumar and the occasional deviation into the DVD territories of Semi Pro and Get Smart. I have heart felt anticipation for House Bunny (which I am convinced will be great) and Step Brothers. I was convinced that the later would be less than great until actually sitting through an episode of Rove, which is usually repulsive, just for the track-short wonders of Will and John C. I am also itching to get out to see Seth Rogen in what is surely a stoner tour de force in Pineapple Express.

Im not sure why these star vehicle comedies appeal to me so much (apart from the obvious break from rigorous academic they currently supply me with). I guess the impulse to entertainment lite, easy on the eyes, cortex and conscience, hits the basic appeals of entertainment. Add to this the often ambitious budgets of a film like Tropic Thunder and comedy becomes something that rests much closer to high concept than ever before. Simply, the gags have the scope to be more spectacular and funny than ever before. They can wreck cars, have people performing unimaginable CGI stunts and create psychedelic landscapes of interior life in unprecedented ways.

But wait. It was all done before – as Mark Hartley’s charming documentary Not Quite Hollywood chronicles. In my opinion exploitation has always made for the best comedy – collapsing the boundaries of body, mind, culture and taste into an anything-goes ensemble. Their comedy is created through rampant generic quotation, oddball characters and seemingly anarchic production, ambitious makeshift stunts, without the reason or rigour of safety standards, create an energy that could only be dreamed of by contemporary studio comedies

I was really pleased to see this exposition of the traditions of exploitation and genre film in Australia, which created a great history of the genre through talking heads of its makers, stars, stuffy critics and gushing fans (such as the compelling Quentin Tarantino in an excellent big-name cameo, one of few that seemed genuinely conscripted out of passion rather than to bolster ticket sales). As with most documentaries, its primary source, the many and varied film clips, provided its most interesting material from which, hopefully, we will see a flow on into greater DVD releases (come on Umbrella!)

Blooming Marvelous!

Baby Mama: Fey and Poehler are charmers, but as usual the trivial consumerism of American women and their quest for babies is less comic so much as a cultural horror show. While the comedy was obviously critical, it left a bad taste in my mouth (which may or may not have been poop).

***

Tropic Thunder: A surprisingly excellent jungle escapade. The self reflexive making of the movie plot had some genius moments, allowing the joke set-ups to show great variety within a contained narrative. The cast was great, managing to balance one-trick-pony Stiller with finesse. Even the possibly concerning black-face Downey Junior proved to be cringelessly comedic. The film gets an extra star for a ‘Tour of Duty’ come ‘Good Morning Vietnam’ soundtrack with prerequisite Credence Clearwater Revival.

****

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay: They smoke some weed, get mistaken for terrorists, fall in love, see Dougie Howser M.D. and end up in the utopia of Amsterdam. Amusing, but lacks the pity cross-cultural satire that made the first film a comedy classic.

**

Not Quite Hollywood:

****

film news

Happy collaborations announced! via Paste Magazine

David Lynch is collaborating not only with Werner Herzog in the near future, but also with the lost man of the avant-garde Alejandro Jodorowsky! *paramore*
I look forward to the likely metaphysical-suurealism that will result.



Also ACMI has announced the transformation of their lending library in 2009 with the elimination of paid membership and borrowing.

Instead, the service will be replaced with "a new resource centre at our Federation Square location, that will provide free genreal-public drop-in access to a wealth of Australian and International screen culture works."

I really hope that this enables greater access to the 16 and 35mm materials in the collection, because these really are the items that were difficult to access elsewhere. I really like any endeavors that will shift the resource from being something like an inner city video library into an actual resource. I am interested to see if and how they adapt library style viewing spaces into the Federation Square site.

The centre is also developing a free "major permanent exhibition that will chart the history and future of the moving image across all its forms - film, television, videogames and new media." Which hopefully will also reflect some of the more nostalgic technologies of pre-cinema from their earlier 'eyes, lies and illusions' exhibit.

MIFF 2008 - review

As the festival comes to a close I have come to the conclusion that what I find most exciting about the entire thing isn’t the films on offer but the sheer joy of seeing so many people getting excited about cinema. The lines that often spread across two city blocks were just amazing and you always found someone to talk to in them – their chatter preempting the films and taking the festival’s ‘everyone’s a critic’ advertising campaign to heart.

The only blights, for me, were the sheer number of screenings that I attended in the poorly managed and uncomfortable Greater Union cinemas. I was nostalgically reminded that this was the first cinema in which I had ever seen a film. It was Disney’s The Fox and the Hound in cinema 6. At the time, the impression that it left on me was a love of the sheer enormity of the image, an obsession with overwhelming and kinetic immersion which stays with me until this day. In the years between, many many years, we have all been treated to better seating than is still on offer there, and while I don’t expect lounge worthy chairs, it meant that if the film was a little dull my attention inevitably shifted to the most relieving forms of fidgeting. Sorry neighbors! Also, their policy of lining people up and getting them to exit via the fire escapes, meant that the festival bar ended up being a totally redundant feature that deprived me of many a possible chardonnay.

MIFF 2008 (The Night James Brown Saved Boston)

THE NIGHT JAMES BROWN SAVED BOSTON, David Leaf, 2008

This film made me remember how much I like documentaries, but also remember how often and easily they lose their mark.

The film centers around the incidents of rioting and dissent that occurred across the nation after the assignation of Martin Luther King in 1968. With a James Brown concert scheduled the following evening in a white populated area of Boston, the film explores the machinations around the event that transformed a possible crisis into a unifying experience for the citizens of Boston. Fearing that the city would be threatened by the influx of thousands of black citizens into the city, given the riots already occurring across the nation, Boston’s mayor decides to broadcast the concert on television – an unprecedented concept that eliminates traffic not only in the district but across the entire city. While James Brown was seen to be largely marginalized in this scheme, placated by a paycheck from the mayor (which it turns out was never paid), his performance nonetheless became a chronicle of a performer at the height of his career as well as a performance rendered in tribute to the late Dr. King. Through deploying concert footage and more general archival footage of the time the film attempts to depict the centrality of James Brown as an American cultural figure in the 1960’s, as a man mediating between the races as one of the first black performers to be accepted on their own terms as both a performer and an equally vocal political advocate.

Much of the film was taken up by talking-head segments of contemporary African American political leaders and the now aged concert attendees, which were often obnoxious, and would have been better if heavily edited. Further, while I am a huge fan of archival images and the historical placement of a documentary feature in a wider milieu, the net in this film seemed cast a little wide, the associations made flipped from self evident or over-emphasized to the tenuously linked. The star attraction of the film - James Brown and the telecast of the remarkable live concert – suffered from too little screen time and would have made an interesting feature release in and of itself. An amazing documentary, I believe, is always distinguished by intuitive editing. Something tells me this feature should have left at least 30 minutes in the recycle bin.

I feel good...

MIFF 2008 (Otto; Or Up with Dead People)

OTTO; OR UP WITH DEAD PEOPLE, Bruce La Bruce, 2008

I think that La Bruce’s feature The Raspberry Reich represents a certain apotheosis in contemporary avant-garde filmmaking because it merges the faultlessly playful and the fiercely intelligent. In bringing critical theory closer to queer and towards pleasure, it makes for a polemical film text that it actually fun to watch. Reich queered both sexuality and socialism into a crazy radical anarchist orgy. While many of the techniques and themes that made Reich so interesting, including the orgiastic, are carried over into Otto, the film seemed far less vital.

The plot revolves around a plague of homosexual zombies that descend on humankind, the ‘purple peril’, and their sympathetic documentary chronicler/ narrator Medea Yarn (Katharina Klewinghaus). Seems simple enough, until it is intercut with the ambling progress of the lead Otto (Jey Krisfar), a self styled zombie hero.

The film presents a multiplicity of voices and narratives, an excess of material and approaches that at times seems rich and at times seems confusing. It is an approach that works to great effect in Reich but left me flat in Otto, I was particularly off put by the loss of the possible subversive power of the zombie plague by relegating Otto’s zombie like state to an outcome of personal psychosis.

That said, Otto was visually evolved, presenting shots and scenes that were styled in a more artistic manner, which made the text often quite beautiful to watch. I particularly liked the rambling shots of Otto in the open spaces of the road and the forest, the prerequisite meaty carnage was completely disarming and the reappearance of Susanne Sachsse (the anarchist leader Gudrun from Reich) as silent screen necro-lesbian lover Hella Bent was particularly inspired.

MIFF 2008 (881)

881, Royston Tan, 2007

I can usually tell how much I am enjoying a film by how quickly it makes me cry. 881, Royston Tan’s campy epic about the Singaporean tradition of Getai singing, has my mascara streaked before the end of the opening credits and my cheeks moist throughout its entirety. The tone that Tan evokes is so genuine and endearing that it is hard to imagine even the hardest heart disliking this film, no matter how absurd it’s content.

881(pronounced in Chiense as ‘papaya’) chronicles the adopted sisterhood of the very fetching Big Papaya (Yan Yan Yeo) and Little Papaya (Mindee Ong) who follow their dreams of performing on the cutthroat Getai circuit. Steeped in a strange fusion of spirituality and fantasy, the Getai is a song and dance performance undertaken in the seventh month of the calendar to honor the spirits of the departed. Somehow in Singapore, this offering comes to take the form of performances over-embellished with lurid sequined costumes and sentimental Hokkien lyrics.

They are aided along their way to success by the irrepressible Auntie Ling’s (Ling Ling Liu) talents as a seamstress, Auntie’s estranged sister the ‘goddess of Getai’ (again Ling Ling Liu) who endows the sisters with magical voices, and Auntie Ling’s deaf-mute son who is described as a sex fiend who spends most of the film comically petting his pet ‘cock’. These performances are spot on, performed with great humor and pathos.

The Getai Godess!

As with all great tragedies, the plot oscillates between the key themes of love, death and (ultimately) transcendence. When the introductory narration tells us that Big Papaya will be dead before 25 of cancer, we know that the visual extravagance of the film (which could so easily be lost to surface) becomes the double for the irrepressible essence of the sisters celebrated through the joy of colour and song.

MIFF 2008 (Sukiyaki Western Django)

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO, Takashi Miike, 2007

The opening of this film begins with a tableau vivant, making great use of a painted backdrop and saturated colour lighting, of a cameo’ed Quentin Tarantino as the narrator of a highly stylized gunfight. The largely incomprehensible dialogue of this scene continues into the space of the rest of the film alongside its dry humour.

The beginning of Sukiyaki creates a backdrop that is uncannily similar to that seen in Tracey Moffatt’s Night Cries (1989) or her quintessential photographic series Something More (1989). The unexpected association became stronger when the plot latter featured a very unlikely didgeridoo. It is an association that is not unexpected in the anything-goes quotation of this film. To the initiated, the first half of the plot was a clear elaboration of Leone’s A Fistfull of Dollars (one of my favourites) merged into the Japanese traditions of samurai and street gangster films and every genre film in between.

Thoroughly within the tendencies of post modern film, the whole text was a collision of the eccentric: the dialogue was a tangle of colloquial western phrases in stunted accents, the characters unique and overt, the costuming anachronistic enough to be couture, the blood dramatic (as Mr. Miike will tend to do). A joyous mess held together by genre codes and slapstick humour.

Colour was used to great effect; the rival gangs hunting gold in a small mountain town were differentiated by red and white costumes of unexpected textures and tones. These bodies were set against the sepia background of the town which merged the architecture of the western pioneer town with that of the oriental temple. For such a visually interesting film, the piece suffered a little from poor film stock, which rather than evoking a classic western feel, just felt a cheap and under focused.

One aspect of the film that really interested me was excess of symbols that were alchemical. While I think that most were unintentional, it would certainly make for an interesting analysis.

MIFF 2008 (Let the right one in)

LET THE RIGHT ONE IN, Låt den rätte komma in, Tomas Alfredson, 2008

While this feature had many cute moments, mainly found in the innocent pathos between a young boy Oskar (Kåre Hedebrant) and his vampire protector the ageless and androgynous Eli (Lina Leandersson), it was a watchable but flawed endeavor.

Aesthetically the film didn’t click for me. The editing was inhibited - poorly timed cutting making the visual style of the film feel a little impotent. The potentially claustrophobic interiors were underplayed and the use of the snowy Swedish exteriors again felt dispossessed except as a double for the largely depressed cast.

The camera was a little grainy and the scenes largely realist in set up, which are fine in theory, except that a vampire-horror genre piece or a film with a child protagonist are generally given over to more fantastic visions. In trying to forge some point between the two, realism and the fantastic, nothing felt fully realized. Some of the most interesting scenes focused on the bodies of the child characters and the lengthened shot time in these sequences could have been extended to give a more contemplative tone to the entire film, or to give the entire scenario over to a sense of the uncanny.

What maintained the film was the story itself, adapted from the (apparently) exquisite book by John Adjvide Lindvquist (who also wrote the screenplay). It allowed the trajectory of the film to take a slow dive from bleak everyday life towards the colour of carnal horror without ever feeling like something other than a child’s film (which is quite an achievement in tone really). Alongside this redeeming consistency, the final scene is a rewarding watch. Including a swimming pool and a bully’s revenge it was joyously gratuitous – a dismembering worthy of both smiles and applause.

MIFF 2008 (Etoile Violette, MODS)

ÉTOLIE VIOLETTE, Axelle Ropert, 2005

MODS, Serge Bozon, 2002

It was a pity to see that the skinny legged, black coated hipsters who flocked to this screening seemed so disappointed by it – they shuffled out of the cinema and said as much as they teetered down Collins street – because these films were both ingenious and beautiful. They certainly lived up to the MIFF descriptions as “almost impossible to categorize”.

The double screening began with Étoile Violette, a visual exploration of solitude. A group of adults taking a nightclass on literature, entitled ‘The solitude of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’, find that the themes of the class, as well as their lives, is solitude. It is an isolation often expressed through bodily gestures, especially in the disjointed role-play performances that structure the class, which seem to depict compartmentalized psychic lives. The students stand apart, they obscure their faces, the lead Alexandre (played by writer-director Axelle Ropert) loses himself in the repetitive stitching of suits in his work as a tailor.

Similar gestures of isolation, in a more poignant manner, are founded in the musical vignettes that punctuate the text. They are set apart not only by sound, but by a tracking camera that defies the typical notion of character as centre by its mobility. Dwarfing them within unfolding spaces this camera unfurls from the centre of the protagonist towards the textures of the street, the adorned walls of a room, the infinite limbs of trees or the night sky. It was interesting insomuch as these sequences proved to be a more objective slip into reality, into the tangible world of objects (no matter that the style was artistically fantastical), than was offered by the characters. Alexandre in particular privileged a counterpoint that saw him ultimately slip into the psychic world of Rousseau - as was elaborated with a number of fantasy sequences between the two in a forest and a particularly experimental final sequence.

Largely, this film was engaging because the performances were and the interpretation of Rousseau that flows through the narrative was very amusing and reflexive.

MODS, which followed, was an ideal partner piece. An experimental play on rhythm and repetition, held together by a script that was similarly intelligent and witty, it was mainly about bodies and minds in momentum. The characters were unexpected and gave their personalities through performative gestures rather than narrative exploration. These gestures often shifted into mechanized choreographed dance sequences of both symmetry and variety, which were the most fascinating part of the film (and surely a nod to the New Wave, especially Bande a part). The impression was often ritualistic and presented a film text that would be readily available for Structuralist interpretation.

While there was a plot, it developed by continual visual repetition and pattern. It was unified in the final sequences in a charmingly simplistic manner, (again) a script by Ropert enfolding it into a temporal play of Chinese-whispers over a misunderstanding between a boy and a girl. What dialogue there was lyrical, again relying on repetition and the pattern of sounds, but it was rendered with the same thoughtfulness that made Étoile Violette so interesting.

While I found both of these films to be incredibly interesting (and unpretentious) jaunts, redeemed all the more by solid scripts, they will not be many peoples cup of tea. As always, for some, experimental is a warning word for wank, so if more classical story telling is in order look elsewhere. It would be interesting to see what comes next for Bozon, Ropert and their acting team as there was a great continuity between these pieces, especially to observe whether this focus on gesture remains a key storytelling device.

The images on this post were drawn from ALLOCINE, which is an excellent resource for French and European cinema, similar to the irrepresable IMDB.

Happy-Go-Lucky

HAPPY-GO-LUCKY, Mike Leigh, 2008

Is there an adjective that means more charming than charming? The complete overload of charm that is more endearing than cute and doesn’t slide slowly into sleazy? Because that is the one word that is needed for this film which I stumbled into seeing last night.

The ‘quirky indie character film’ genre, to which this belongs, is without fail a hit or miss enterprise. One cute anachronism too many and they become an exhausting show. Appropriate a little too heavily and you achieve cookie cut obnoxious-for-the-sake-of-it posers who are largely joyless to watch. Happy-Go-Luckily, manages to get the balance right, chiefly because of stellar casting. Tripping alongside the appropriately naïve Poppy’s (Sally Hawkins) encounters with off the wall adults, the film is definitely a reaffirmation of the fact that most people are completely nuts in their own little ways (the recurring plot in my own life melodrama). Her sister, best friend, flamenco teacher and driving instructor, were an engaging and faultless supporting cast. The acting gave the sense of the unscripted as there was a cacophony of dialogue that overflowed in every frame. It was a busyness that carried over into the style in a way that made the characters intense, or full, rather than being a potentially distracting feature.

I appreciated that they didn’t shy away from queering the plot a little and the cinematography was successfully playful – its focus on the contemplation of unexpected objects and faces gave great colour to the film. I was also quite enamored with costuming that balanced the colloquial and the creative. Everyone had an identifiable style, but did so without rehashing a current mode of alt-style, whatever that may be, that so often can date a film. The happy costuming of the lead is bright but unashamedly daggy and the particularly ‘chav’ style of Poppy’s sister never failed to have me chuckling, all of which added great personality to the script.

What was possibly the most interesting part of the film was the challenge it presented: how do people respond to someone who is truly happy? The response, by its nature, says a lot about the characters, and perhaps our own, relationship to happiness. There are a few moments in the film, Poppy’s encounter with a homeless man and a physiotherapist, which when coupled with her innocent attitude, really made me quite tense. I was waiting for the moment when everything was going to go wrong, the moment when optimism and friendliness wasn’t enough to offset the dangers of chance or the attitudes of others. Like the eventual trajectory of her relationship with her driving instructor, it was just a matter of waiting for the world to propel a come-down. This is a tension that is central to the plot, the threat that the elusive nature of happiness can present to those without; but the sense of waiting for trouble was aspect that was very personally amplified.

MIFF 2008 (Honeydripper)

HONEYDRIPPER, John Sayles, 2007

A simple charmer of a deep south gin house on the rocks. Mostly it sidesteps the possible insensitivities of mainsream cinema’s stylistic whitewash of what is, for all intents, still a race film. While these issues are given a place in the narrative, and are reconfirmed by the necessary clichés that imagine the America of the South such as the gospel church, the cotton pickers and the corrupt white law, they were de-emphasized and subsumed as the backdrop to the story of a man who has hit on hard times.

Tyrone (Danny Glover) runs Honeydrippers, an outskirts night spot for the local black community with a dated commitment to an aging Blues music culture that is losing patrons to another local juke-joint. Their customers are attracted by the vital sounds of the music played from the box, while Tyrone’s live music is going largely unheard. When he attempts to power up his own juke, he finds himself in for the shock and blackout of bad wiring. Electrification as a double for progress, as a potential for deception, and the bringing of a more personal light continues through the film, and the decaying state of Honeydrippers merely mimics his inner psychic state. As with most dramas, the transformation of space becomes the transformation of self.

Tyrone’s daughter China Doll (Yaya DaCosta) was well turned out as an attractive waif with big dreams, Maceo (Charles S. Dutton) was a far more charamatic business partner than Glover and I was more than a little pleased to see child-star Kel Mitchell (Nickelodeon ingénue of 1997s surreal Good Burger) looking as sweet as ever up on screen in a supporting role. There is a collection of excellent stills from the film on John Sayles flickr.





While the film rollicks along in a fairly unchallenging way, its appeal lies in its time and place, the evolution of a musical counter culture in America across the middle of the twentieth century. The audience is treated to the contrast of a number of typical musical renditions of the period, from the piano and performer traditions of Jazz and Blues, the vocal assemblies of gospel worship, as well as the percussive rhythms of electrified guitar and the coming of rock and roll. While none of the music in the film is particularly outstanding they are all musical genres that give me great pleasure to see historicized.

While it was an enjoyable watch for me, some far more transcendent renditions of these styles spring easily to mind.

The breathtaking sound of Mahalia Jackson accompanying to a funeral procession in Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life was one of my first introductions to what I would call true gospel singing. It began a long love affair not only with the genre, but also with its arguable master, Mahalia herself. It never fails to make me well up in tears.



I had the pleasure of walking into this scene in The Color Purple as a midday movie not to long ago. I had remembered the movie from along time before as somehow uncomfortable (which still found true for different reasons), but enjoyed it overall far more than I expected. This scene really drew me in not only with the amazing vocals of Shug Avery (Margaret Avery), who has something close to the effortless appeal of Erykah Badu’s best tracks, and the glamour-poverty fusion of space and costuming.

MIFF 2008 (The Drummer, Redacted)

*extra extra, newborn blog suffers as author struck with RSI...*

So, as one does, ihave been spending a little bit of time at MIFF over the weekend. I feel remarkably spoilt to be able to go to the cinema so often. The whole experience is definitely aided by dwelling near the city.

Thus far:

THE DRUMMER, Kenneth Bi, 2007
This definitely falls into the category of a beautiful film, with on the money pathos and a few quite transcendent scenes delivered by Bi.

The central character Sid, played by Jaycee Chan offspring of the preeminent Jackie, was the mobile pivot between the visual city/nature and thematic social/zen-individual dichotomy that is often typical of spiritual quest films. Here, Sid escapes from the troubles of having a gangster father, played by Tony Leung who was visually commanding though crafted unsympathetically in the script, and while in exile finds himself compelled to journey towards sounds in the mountains. Here he finds and joins a zen drumming group, their lessons and their drums helping him find his inner heart beat and self. A quintessential love plot was included without being a cloying addition to what is essentially is Sid's enlightened coming of age.

The visually commanding drumming sequences (which were placed somewhere between meditative or martial arts performance) would have been all the more compelling with a better sound mix. Both the soundtrack and the general sound quality were given a disappointing lack of emphasis considering the centrality of the transformative potentials of sound in the plot. Besides this small point, these dance like performances were the highlight of the film. They were as much about bodies as they were sound. Bi's interpretation of these bodies in movement and bodies as personality was right on the money.


REDACTED, Brian De Palma, 2007
I love De Palma, which is what attracted me to this film, unfortunately it was utterly problematic. While I was willing to allow that a film on the brutalities of the Iraq war wasn't likely to include a dose of his quintessential camping and excess, I don't feel like it offered any substantial substitute.

The film making felt uncomfortable and confused - which clearly was the point entirely of a film questioning the representational and narrative making processes surrounding the depiction of the Iraq conflict. But as an approach, I'm not sure that it worked. I felt antagonized as an spectator, rather than productively challenged, which made his polemic and its stylistic accompaniments difficult to swallow.

The proto-documentary style, which often slipped into artifice and tableau, made the 'realism' of a digital handheld camera seem just as constructed. Unfortunately it was also unwieldy to the point of vertiginous. The constant multiplication of narrators, occasional propaganda infusion, unfortunate actors, and random inclusion of war casualties in a tone of schlock-horror made it all the more noisy. Too much content, too much visual and thematic noise, meant that the politic was unheard, the atrocity from which it took its plot still ignored.



I also managed to catch HONEYDRIPPER, which I enjoyed alot and which you will surely hear my opinion of shortly :)

Introductions

As this girl sits contemplating when the MIFF catalogue will come online, or whether or not I will have to actually buy a copy of The Age to find it, alongside wondering how it is possible that I am developing a wrinkle on my nose, it seems an appropriately time (between the cinematic and the shallow) to introduce myself to my will-be readers.

Im a 23 year old mademoiselle from Melbourne who somehow finds that her life revolves around screens. Partly the result of the character flaw of complete occularcentrism (or ooooh-shiny-syndrome-x) and the fact that apparently my definition of hedonism is to stay at university indulging this trait as long as possible. Hello, why yes that is MA in cinema that traps me indoors like a house cat.

As a result I watch alot of films, television and surrounding internet paraphenalia. To offset this constant consumption I thought it was about time to produce something from it. Something readable as opposed to my many academic titles that go underground, apparently to Sweden.

I always say that my favorite film is the spaghetti classic The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, because every inch of the three hour celluloid makes me grin. Sometimes I wonder if it is just that the Ennio Morricone's opening theme really just sets me up joyously for everything that follows. I also really enjoy the stylization of the titles. Listen loud:



But I wonder that, shamefully, if I haven't watched this gem in at least two years can it really be the one?

I really think that the Leone classic is slowly being eclipsed (though its hanging on for the love of the Clint-poncho) by the magnificent Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7. Cleo is one of those films that just speaks straight to my heart and the films own obsession with mirrors just doubles how much of myself that I see in Cleo. I had the chance to get really intimate with it while writing my honors thesis and is now a rainy Sunday morning type of classic: comforting, inspiring and lyrical.
The beauty and vulnerability of Corinne Marchand is, for me, what really anchors the film. Apart from the delicious Parisian outfits, she really captures me with her movement and a gaze of quite etherial longing - always reaching up, up, up.

Mirror, mirror on the wall... Varda's amazing depth of frame

A surprisingly acrobatic apartment and angelic protagonist.

Surely, Cleo as a singer with a beautiful white apartment filled with kittens, sets off some deep longing for my life (given that decorating my abode in less that minimal chic, singing along to anything with a melody and petting fluffy animals are my main hobbies).

xoxo - gala hallelujah