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This year in film

1. The Kid With a Bike (Le Gamin au vélo)

Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne, Belgium-France-Italy

2011 may be the year that 3D came into its own with auteurs from Spielberg and Scorsese to Wenders and Herzog making admirable contributions to the medium. However, this year belongs to a modestly analogue film about an eleven-year-old boy abandoned by his father and taken in by a young woman. The filmmaking of The Kid With a Bike is unshowy yet wildly kinetic, driven by the camera’s need to follow a boy whose desperation sends him running with the velocity of a wild animal. With this astonishing film, the Dardennes remind us that cinema’s true greatness lies not in technological advancements but in ideas and stories. ... read more

Written by Brad Nguyen on 21-12-2011, No comments

The Hunger Games and rebellion

Here’s another small straw in the wind.

This is the trailer for The Hunger Games movie.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 17-11-2011, 4 user comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Toomelah

toomelahToomelah
Director: Ivan Sen
★★★

Ivan Sen’s debut feature film was 2002’s Beneath Clouds: a road movie about two Indigenous Australian teenagers trying to escape the depressing realities of their lives by fleeing to Sydney. It’s a solid film and I was thoroughly looking forward to Sen’s third feature, Toomelah. Especially as it was the only Australian feature I chose to see at the festival. Not for lack of choice and possible quality mind you; Scarlet Road, which I wanted to see, was sold out and I knew Sleeping Beauty would be in theatres soon. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 28-06-2011, 2 user comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Cave of Forgotten Dreams

Cave of Forgotten DreamsCave of Forgotten Dreams
Dir: Werner Herzog
★★★★

In 1994 three French speleologists discovered a cave hidden behind an old rockslide in southern France. Inside they found a particularly beautiful cave with rock paintings eventually dated to 32 000 years before the present. They are the oldest known cave paintings, preserved so well because of the rockslide protecting what was once an open cave from the elements, animals and humans. It is called Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave after one of its discoverers, Jean-Marie Chauvet, and a natural rock arch nearby. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 24-06-2011, No comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Surviving Life

Surviving_life_posterSurviving Life
Director: Jan Švankmajer
★★★

Czech director Jan Švankmajer’s Surviving Life is a whole movie in the style of Terry Gilliam’s animations. Or, more accurately, Gilliam’s animations are in the style of Švankmajer, who was a major influence on the Monty Python member. In an amusing introduction Švankmajer explains the film is a ‘psychoanalytic comedy’. He continues to say that the stop-motion style has been used in place of live-action because that was too expensive. The story has its origin, he says, in one dream he had, which he then wrote the rest of the scenes around. Whether this is true or not is irrelevant; Surviving Life is a surrealist film where the only reality is dreams. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 23-06-2011, No comments

At the Sydney Film Festival: Armadillo and The Tree of Life

ArmadilloArmadillo
Director: Janus Metz
★★★★

Janus Metz’s Armadillo takes its name from a forward operating base in Helmand province. The documentary focuses on a platoon of Danish soldiers and their deployment from February to August 2009. The impression given of the Afghanistan War during their tour is a war by inches. The Taliban are less than a kilometre from the base and throughout the film the troops fight over and win and lose a few tiny villages and farmland. In this stalemate the Taliban seem to have the upper hand: the stalemate being a goal in itself. ... read more

Written by Peter Francis on 20-06-2011, 1 user comment

The language of war

On 26 February 2009, novelist and journalist Nick McDowell began his embed with the United States Army’s 1st Cavalry Division in Mosul, northern Iraq. He was to spend two weeks researching a report for Time magazine and his book The End of Major Combat Operations. Most of that time was spent accompanying the units he was assigned to on counterinsurgency missions and grappling with a language he had no understanding of – military slang. A common experience among journalists new to the war zones of Afghanistan and Iraq is their shock at how difficult it is to understand not what the locals are saying, but the coalition forces. ... read more

Written by Chris Flynn on 1-10-2010, 3 user comments

On atrocities and equivocal jokes

So anyway, as I was passing through Brisbane last week at the end of a long journey, I caught up with a friend of mine who reads my blogs. Brisbane always seems to me to be a city where a great catastrophe has at some time taken place, a catastrophe that no one wants to speak of. And there is still a sense in the air that something terrible happened there once, if we could just remember what it was. We were sitting in a hideous cafe in a hideous building at a university – hideous in a way that only universities can accomplish – when my friend said to me, vis-à-vis the blogs, ‘I really like your blog writing. But why don’t you write more about what you think about the solutions to the problems you write about? It’s like you’re complaining – and there’s lots to complain about – but I never know what you really think.’ ... read more

Written by Stephen Wright on 21-07-2010, 12 user comments

On copyright and Australian cinema

The Meanland essay in Overland 199 is written by author, SPUNC President and Wet Ink fiction editor, Emmett Stinson. ‘The pirate code’ delves into the underbelly of copyright during the digital revolution – and comes to some surprising conclusions:

Right now publishers are abuzz with discussions of ‘book futures’ and the digital revolution, but there is still an almost complete uncertainty surrounding even the most basic issues. What, if any, devices will become standard for electronic reading? How will books be distributed? What formats will be used? A recent stand-off over pricing resulted in all of Pan Macmillan’s e-book titles being temporarily unavailable on Amazon’s website, demonstrating that the industry can’t even agree on what digital books should cost.

... read more

Written by Editorial team on 29-06-2010, 1 user comment

Thanks Michael Winterbottom, but I’ll spend my money elsewhere

Just as the Sydney Writers’ Festival has packed itself up for another year, the Sydney Film Festival has rolled into town to cater for the needs of those not satisfied by Dan Brown adaptations and cooking shows (thank you, Mr Carey). What a grand thing the festival is too, if for no other reason than it gives everyone the opportunity to visit the opulent State Theatre for a tenner. SFF brings with it this year the prerequisite controversial offering: Michael Winterbottom’s The Killer Inside Me in which Casey Affleck plays a sheriff who spends his downtime beating women to death. The controversy – as one would guess – is about the explicit depiction of these beatings, namely two scenes which detail the repeated kicking and punching of actresses Jessica Alba and Kate Hudson respectively. The scenes are ‘aided by such realistic prosthetics that Alba is, by the end, a bloody mess and unrecognisable’. ... read more

Written by Claire Zorn on 10-06-2010, 6 user comments

Friday music thread

Last night I saw the Malthouse's production of Threepenny Opera, and I've been singing 'Mack the Knife' ever since. And that led me to this.

Anyway, consider this an open music thread, particularly for music in film or theatre.

... read more

Written by Jeff Sparrow on 4-06-2010, 25 user comments

Israel, film festivals and the BDS

I have an article up at Drum about the Melbourne International Film Festival and their cultural partner, the state of Israel. It begins:

The Melbourne International Film Festival is receiving Liberty Victoria's free speech award, the Voltaire award, for its "refusal to buckle in the face of intense pressure from a foreign government and a left-wing filmmaker last year".

The "foreign government" was China, which urged MIFF not to screen a documentary on Rebiya Kadeer, a Uighur Independence leader who was also a guest of the festival. The award seems valid here: MIFF allowed for a minority voice to be heard, and didn't kowtow to governmental bullying.

On the other hand, the "left-wing filmmaker" was Ken Loach, whose series of written exchanges questioned MIFF's decision to accept funding from "cultural partner", the state of Israel. Loach wrote:

As you are no doubt aware, many Palestinians, including artists and academics, have called for a boycott of events supported by Israel. There are many reasons for this; the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, destruction of homes and livelihoods, the massacres in Gaza, all are part of the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people. We hope you can reconsider accepting Israel as a sponsor.

... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 3-06-2010, No comments

Of books and reading and timey-wimey stuff – pt 1

The interesting thing about a novel is, that like the Tardis, it’s much bigger on the inside than on the outside. Books look linear, and we are often tricked, as readers and writers, into making them linear. Novels muck about with time, and time is never as straightforward as it appears. Curre

Written by Stephen Wright on 28-04-2010, 20 user comments

Festival season

There’s supposed to be a number of ‘signs’ that the dry season has finally banished the wet season, or the build down season for another year. (There’s some argument as to how many seasons there are in the Top End. Some say the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’, others the ‘build up’, the ‘wet’ and ‘dry’ and others say there’s the ‘dry’, the ‘build up’, the ‘wet’ and the ‘build down’. Indigenous people say there are six seasons.)

One of the alleged signs is an increase in dragonflies, but I’ve seen swarms of dragonflies when there’s still a good month or so of sweaty sleep to go before the dry even looks like letting a cool breeze caress the morning air. Another signifier is said to be the increase in young backpackers cramming the supermarket isles, their foreign tongues rolling past the packets of noodles in sweet harmony. The return of yachts anchored off the sailing club after their long hibernation in the marina or up Sandgroves creek, hiding from the monsoon is said to be another. ... read more

Written by Rohan Wightman on 27-04-2010, 2 user comments

There’s no censorship here

(I should preface this post with a disclosure: I’m a long-time Melbourne International Film Festival [MIFF] attendee, and am quite partial to cinema.)

This week we learned that Richard Moore’s position as executive director of the Melbourne International Film Festival will not be renewed.

Finally, I thought, there is some kind of justice in Melbourne.

It isn’t new, this animosity I have toward Moore. It started when he first took over MIFF and I noticed the ‘State of Israel’ logo appearing on pamphlets and at screenings, next to the inscrutable term: cultural partner. ... read more

Written by Jacinda Woodhead on 11-02-2010, 3 user comments