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.