Karen O. & The Kids—Where The Wild Things Are
(DCG/Interscope Records, 2009)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Earlier this decade, Karen Orzolek, the front woman of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs better known with her last name initialised, recorded a series of acoustic demos at her home and burned them to a CD as a gift for the producer and TV On The Radio guitarist Dave Sitek. K.O. At Home, now bootlegged and floating in the digital ether, is a collection of 14 incredibly glum home-spun tunes. A world away from the punky, raucous art-rock of the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, the songs pair the timid side of O’s voice with a variety of charmingly out-of-tune guitars, a mouth organ, a scattering of light percussion, and even a French horn.

O returns to a similarly playful territory in her music for Spike Jonze’s forthcoming Where The Wild Things Are, a film based on Maurice Sendak’s much-loved children’s book of the same name. Working with Deerhunter’s Bradford Cox, members of the Raconteurs, The Dead Weather and Yeah Yeah Yeahs—including former bandmate Imaad Wasif—and Jonze’s regular composer Carter Burwell, O’s soundtrack resonates a childlike wonder and perfectly captures the spirit of Sendak’s nine-year-old protagonist Max, King of the Wild Things.

O is backed by an untrained children’s choir—“The Kids”—for most of the album, and the soundtrack incorporates a few dialogue selections from the film, opening with Catherine Keener saying to Max, “I could use a story…” This leads into “Igloo,” a simple melody hummed by the awesomely-named Max Records, the star of the film, before “All Is Love,” the soundtrack’s single, jubilantly bursts forth. Hand claps and jangle-pop guitars imbue the record with a sense of joyousness, and this even extends to “Lost Fur,” the only track taken directly from the score. Here Burwell’s music—normally more in sync with the labyrinthine psychological screenplays of Charlie Kaufman, another of Jonze’s frequent collaborators—is given a levity and grace by O, while at the same time retaining Burwell’s trademark introspectiveness.

“Capsize” and “Cliffs,” two tracks not included in the film, are alternately boisterous and delicate, and a cover of Daniel Johnston’s “Worried Shoes” is absolutely enchanting. “Heads Up,” perhaps the best track on the album, borrows from Britt Daniel’s songbook, riffing on Spoon’s rollicking jazzy pop style, and the brief closer “Sailing Home” brings the record full circle, combining Max’s plaintive hummed melody with the upbeat, rhythmic attitude on display throughout the record. While it probably won’t stand up well outside the context of the film, it’s clear that O and her collaborators have successfully created a self-contained aural landscape that superbly reflects Sendak and Jonze’s vision.

Lynn Barber, a British newspaper columnist, wrote her autobiographical memoirs earlier this year. Before they were published, filming was complete on Lone Sherfig’s film adaptation. Nick Hornby, the author of the novels High Fidelity, About A Boy and Fever Pitch—all of which have been turned into successful films—has adapted the book at the same time as he was writing his new novel Juliet, Naked. Unfortunately, multi-tasking doesn’t appear to be his forte: An Education is an occasionally witty but mostly irritating film that tries to balance the tightrope between drama and comedy, but unfortunately for the most part falls headlong into the latter part of that equation, trying too hard for obvious laughs rather than creating well-developed characters.

Jenny, a doe-eyed 16-year-old schoolgirl, is seduced by David, played perfectly by Peter Sarsgaard, a conniving but suave man twice her age, who compulsively lies—about almost anything, it seems—to get her into bed. But far from being apprehensive about his proposition, Jenny uses it as an opportunity to show him off to her classmates—and, for that matter, her teachers and headmistress. Putting on hold her plans to read English at Oxford, she goes on romantic sojourns to European capitals and generally flaunts her newly-acquired debonair man about town. She conspicuously smokes Gauloises, and taunts her friends with plans to live a rarefied, cultured life in Paris, “speaking French all the time and watching lots of French films.” David gets along very well with her father, and finds it disturbingly easy to convince her parents of his suitability for their daughter—in fact, Barber, now a cantankerous sexagenarian nearing retirement, has vociferously blamed her very elderly parents for very nearly ruining her life.

The would-be bachelor extraordinaire takes Jenny on expensive soirées—concerts, dinners and day trips to the countryside—but beneath all the come-ons, faux high-society aspirations and professions of ‘true’ love lies a deeply damaged, conflicted man. Sarsgaard plays him with unnerving conviction but, again due to Hornby’s insistence on infusing the film with a gratuitous, blunt comic edge, has to contend with silly, interruptive gags and outright implausible lines of dialogue. Hornby includes both dreamlike, starry-eyed interludes and moments of tense drama but goes a bit far when he also tries to cram in outsized comedy. There are magnificent instances when drama, humour and romance collide fantastically, and, conversely, moments when the absolute goofiness of certain scenes—telegraphed by the over-the-top score that accompanies the opening titles—is annoyingly overbearing.

The sublimely beautiful 24-year-old actress Carey Mulligan, in her first major role in a feature film, is just not quite right for the part of Jenny. Mulligan plays the character with an all-too-knowing edge—she imbues Jenny with verve and jouissance entirely unbecoming a character of such a young age. Her Jenny is worldly, experienced and not at all the naïve waif that one suspects Barber would like to think she once was. Her accent, while not out-of-place, is annoyingly modern; the story, set in early-’60s London, calls for a slightly less contemporary, more stiff-upper-lip cadence. The supporting cast, happily, is terrific: Emma Thompson (Stranger Than Fiction, Angels in America) is well-cast as Jenny’s headmistress, and Rosamund Pike (Die Another Day) is brilliant in the role of Helen, David’s dim-witted wannabe socialite friend. Cara Seymour (The Savages, Birth) and Alfred Molina are superb as Jenny’s parents, newly-minted members of the upper-middle-class adjusting to their newfound ordinariness. Interestingly, this is not yet the swinging ’60s: the film is set in a London still coming to terms with its deep-seated repression, in an England that has not yet adjusted the bearings of its moral compass.

Danish filmmaker Lone Sherfig’s best known previous films, Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself and the Dogme95 film Italian for Beginners, deal with vaguely similar thematic terrain, but An Education lacks the nuanced performances of those previous films—largely, sadly, because of Hornby’s muddled script. The film endlessly panders to an audience of middle-aged women, with certain crudely out-of-place jokes and a number of scenes that beg to be described as “lovely” or “delightful”. Paul Englishby’s pompous, overly emotive score doesn’t help much either. For all its faults, though, it does get some things right: there are picture postcard moments of cinematic beauty—particularly in Paris and around the more affluent areas of London—and many of the performances are top-notch. It’s just a shame that Hornby’s deflated, uninspired script has all the subtlety of a brick thrown through a plate glass window, and not much more intelligence than Miley Cyrus, Britney Spears and Miss Teen South Carolina combined.

Abbreviated by its cult fans as MST3K, this long-running comic sci-fi television series follows the adventures of a man sent into space by a mad, evil scientist. The unlucky space traveller—named Joel in the first few seasons, Mike thereafter—and his robot companions are trapped aboard the Satellite of Love, and are forced to watch Z-grade sci-fi movies. With nothing much else to do, they heckle the characters on screen and comment on the obviously completely awful quality of the acting, sets, effects, music and, most of all, the terrible writing.

Watching First Spaceship on Venus, Laserblast, Werewolf or the horrendously bad Future War with Joel, Mike, Tom Servo and Crow T. Robot riffing along makes for oddly fascinating and hilarious viewing. A 20^th anniversary collection with those four feature-length episodes—spanning the series’ entire run from the late-’80s to 1999—is available from vendettafilms.co.nz, and includes an extensive three-part documentary on the series as well as 2008 San Diego Comic-Con panel material and trailers.

The horror director’s television series, which ran from for ten years from 1955, helped shape the modern TV crime drama. So, ultimately, Hitch can be thanked for Miami Vice, and blamed for David Caruso’s consistently terrible one-liners on CSI: Miami. You know the kind—he says them while taking off his Matrix-esque sunglasses right before The Who’s “Won’t Get Fooled Again” opens the title credits with Roger Daltry’s manic “YEEAAAAAAHHH!!”. Anyway, Hitchcock’s series was much better made than Jerry Bruckheimer’s franchise, although obviously not as flashy.

The half-hour show featured many well-known actors, including Joseph Cotten, Bette Davis, Charles Bronson, John Cassavetes, Walter Matthau, Steve McQueen, Burt Reynolds, Robert Redford and William Shatner. Yep, that William Shatner. Only about a third of the episodes were directed by Hitch himself, but all feature a sardonic opening monologue from the director in the style of William Castle, and an epilogue that functions mostly to wrap up plot lines, as the brief running time gave the writers little opportunity for narrative digression. The first season is available now from madman.co.nz in a deluxe six-disc set.

The titular duo of temporarily unemployable thespian alcoholics subsist in Camden Town, London at the tail end of the ’60s. Their apartment, more or less swamped by absolute squalor, is as cold, unforgiving and dispiriting as the drab, grey weather outside. So they swap one drizzly clime for another, and go on holiday “by mistake” to Withnail’s rotund homosexual uncle’s home in the countryside. That’s about the extent of the plot, but the film is filled with so many memorable, quotable lines that the story becomes a secondary concern.

Richard E. Grant, in his first feature film role, is superb as Withnail, as is Richard Griffiths as his uncle. Ralph Brown, who plays Danny, the drug-addled layabout who takes over Withnail’s apartment while they’re away, has some of the best lines, including: “You have done something to your brain: you have made it high.” The character recurs in Wayne’s World 2 as Del Preston, who rambles nonsensically in the most hilarious British accent about the time he, Jeff Beck and Keith Moon got Ozzy Osbourne “one thousand brown M&Ms” so he’d go onstage and why Keith Richards cannot be killed by conventional weapons.

This uproarious, unforgettable film is available in a special two-disc edition from vendettafilms.co.nz—with cover art by Ralph Steadman. It comes with a host of extra features including a half-hour retrospective documentary, Withnail and Us, and two audio commentaries.

Todd Solondz is a director perhaps best known for his 1998 film Happiness, a disturbingly bleak yet brilliantly comic film which takes pride of place near the top of lists like The A.V. Club’s “Not Again: 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice”. His 1996 feature début, available for the first time on DVD, could almost sit alongside its successor—except that it aims to elicit many more laughs from the viewer, rather than just making him squirm. Richard Linklater’s landmark 1992 film Slacker had paved the way for Kevin Smith’s Clerks to be greenlit, which in turn opened the door for Todd Solondz to enter the independent film realm with Welcome to the Dollhouse, a daring coming-of-age black comedy that centres on 13-year-old Dawn Weiner, an awkward teenager in every sense of the word.

Relentlessly tormented by bullies at school, she becomes infatuated with the Jim Morrison-esque lead singer of her nerdy brother’s band, and her sister is kidnapped because Dawn deliberately forgets to give her a message from their mother. The soundtrack is a bizarrely compelling mix of rough-around-the-edges garage rock and selections from Tchaikovsky’s ballet Swan Lake. In many ways, the film can be read as a prequel to the 1988 ur-teen-black-comedy, Heathers, wherein Winona Ryder and Christian Slater conspire to eradicate—with bullets, and at point blank range—a high school clique made up of airhead bimbos who address one another as Heather. The world Solondz creates in Dollhouse is enveloped in the same sense of inescapable adolescent ennui and frustration as Penelope Spheeris’ Suburbia and Jonathan Kaplan’s once-banned 1979 cult classic Over The Edge.

The critic and video essayist Matt Zoller Seitz, talking about the TV series Freaks and Geeks, noted that “adolescence [is] a period that grows rosy in the memory but sucks ass when you’re actually living through it.” To its credit, Dollhouse, like Geeks, has that morose ambience down pat. The film was universally praised by critics and won the Grand Jury Prize at Sundance in 1996. Its brand of pointed dark humour reappears in Solondz’s remarkable but difficult-to-watch 2004 film Palindromes, which references Dollhouse with a title card that reads “In Loving Memory of Dawn Wiener.” Palindromes opens with Dawn’s funeral, revealing that she went to college, gained a lot of weight and eventually committed suicide.

Anthology films are commonplace in the anime genre. Perhaps the most notable recent collection is Memorîzu, re-released after the success of The Animatrix. Genius Party combines the talents of seven anime directors, each of whom has been involved in projects as varied as Akira, Steamboy, Tekken Kinkreet, Perfect Blue and Cowboy Bebop.

Their films range from the weird, like Shinji Kimura’s Deathtic 4, which combines a steampunk attitude with Real Monsters-like visuals, to the sublime—like Hideki Futamura’s Limit Cycle, an enchantingly psychedelic meditation on life, the universe and everything that is a collage of still photography, computer graphics and manipulated traditional animation. There are no overarching themes—stylistic or otherwise—so it’s best to treat each instalment as a stand-alone short film, dipping in and out of the collection rather than watching all of them consecutively.

A second disc pairs animatics, storyboards and hand-drawn work-in-progress versions of the shorts with commentary from the director and lead animators. The sequel, Genius Party Beyond, is made up of five films that were not included in the original collection, and screened at the International Film Festival in July; it’ll be out on DVD sometime next year.

A collection of Family Guy cut-away scenes rescued from the cutting-room floor; each is about two minutes long and the disc runs about 50 minutes total. Almost all of them arrive at their punch line by way of an anthropomorphised animal or a rip-off of a Hanna-Barbera cartoon or Jim Henson creation. They represent some of the most crude, disgusting, unimaginatively-titled, offensive and defamatory vignettes MacFarlane has ever produced—a fairly inane series entitled “Sex with…” and an execrably bad bit piece called “Fred Flinstone Takes a Shit” are among the worst—and only about a third of all of them are funny. Sadly, it’s not hard to envisage most of these asides being incorporated back into the series when MacFarlane and his writers run out of gags and the show starts devouring its own entrails, Ouroboros-style, midway through its tenth season.

The best by far—because, paradoxically for MacFarlane, it contains no swear words and comes closest to employing subtle wit, something American humorists find almost impossible to fathom—is called “Backstage with Bob Dylan,” wherein the singer chats with Tom Waits, Popeye and Mohamed Ali. If you can’t envisage the joke, it’s on YouTube, along with a bunch of other Cavalcade scenes—and it’s not prefaced by nearly five minutes of unintentionally hilarious anti-piracy ‘warnings’ that double as self-promotional FOX adverts.

Review by Hugh Lilly

“This is a story of boy meets girl, but you should know up front: this is not a love story.” So proclaims the deep-voiced narrator at the start of (500) Days of Summer, the début feature by music video director Marc Webb. The protagonist, Tom, is played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt, a rising star since breaking away from the “that kid from 3^rd Rock” label with Brick four years ago. He’s a young man toiling away at a greeting-card company, with aspirations to be an architect and a mildly bleak outlook on life fostered by two things: a love for gloomy ’80s Mancunian pop—he wears both Unknown Pleasures and “Love Will Tear Us Apart” t-shirts, and listens endlessly to Morrisey’s bittersweet balladry—and “a total misreading of the movie The Graduate”. He also reads the essayist, novelist and pseudo-philosopher Alain de Botton, but whether that has any impact on his disposition is left unsaid.

Summer, played by the unfortunately now-typecast Zooey Deschanel, starts work at Tom’s company one day, and—for him, at least—it’s love at first sight. The conceit behind the parenthetical ‘500’ in the title is that Tom and Summer’s relationship lasts for that many days; the film flits back and forward between days, signalled by title cards that flick over like the flight announcement signage in airports. The story is therefore told out of order, in a way—except that it still ticks all the basic three-act ‘conflict–development–resolution’ storytelling boxes, and in that order too.

The soundtrack—like the characters’ costumes, and the film’s mise-en-scène—is calculated to appeal to a certain audience: Feist, Regina Spektor (twice), The Black Lips, The Smiths (also twice) Doves, Spoon, The Clash—and even an unexpectedly perfect use of “Quelqu’un m’a dit” by Carla Bruni help keep the story buoyant. Deschanel seems intent on showing off her singing skills any chance she gets—see also the recent Jim Carrey flop Yes Man—and here she fits in a syrupy karaoke rendition of Nancy Sinatra’s “Sugartown”. (As a bonus, the soundtrack CD includes Deschanel and M. Ward’s reverb-filled rendition of The Smiths’ “Please, Please, Please Let Me Get What I Want”.) Summer quotes Belle and Sebastian under her high-school yearbook photo, and Simon and Garfunkel make an appearance, too, through Webb’s carefully chosen quotation of the final scene of Mike Nichols’ The Graduate set to the achingly beautiful title track from Bookends; the lyrics couldn’t be more fitting, either: “Time it was, and what a time it was it was / A time of innocence a time of confidences.” Other filmic references include a re-playing of Fellini’s La Strada and Gordon-Levitt and Deschanel’s hilarious lampooning of Bergman’s Persona and The Seventh Seal that play when Tom goes to the movies. Tom’s spontaneous dance number in the middle of the second act is silly but enjoyable, and the spritely, piano-driven score, by Little Miss Sunshine composer Mychael Danna and basso profundo narrator-cum-co-composer Rob Simonsen, perfectly complements the film’s mood.

The writers, Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber, only have one prior credit thus far: the second instalment of the horrendous Steve Martin remake of The Pink Panther franchise. Without the constrictions of a prior story though, their abilities shine through: the slyly-implemented jokes are just crude enough to seem fresh, and the way the story is told is relatively original—at least in the romantic comedy genre. Webb’s hands-off direction and simple camerawork—the incorporation of 16mm Polaroid footage, for example, and his utterly brilliant use of dual-plotline split screen at a climactic point in the narrative—is not as flashy as might be expected given his background.

Any number of actresses could have played Summer—Olivia Thirlby, Jenna Malone, Emma Stone (the redhead from Superbad) or maybe even Ellen Page, for but a few examples—but only Deschanel can lend her the requisite chic, mid-’60s London mod vibe; only she could pull off that hairdo and the myriad little pale blue summer dresses the character wears—a different one every scene, just about. Similarly, only Gordon-Levitt could have played Tom; it’s nearly impossible to imagine any other actor of this generation in the role.

Chief among the film’s many surprising elements is its unconventional use of architecture. The film is set in Los Angeles, the most photographed city in the world, but what shines through is not the city’s messy tangle of congested sprawling concrete freeways but rather a verdant, hipster mecca Williamsburg-equivalent subsection of L.A., complete with neatly-maintained, meticulously-designed ‘vintage’ apartments with wrought-iron gates and spectacular views. The historic, exquisitely-designed Bradbury Building, used in the climactic scene of Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, appears at the end of the film where it plays an architecture firm where Tom has an interview.

Throwing labels like ‘quirky’ and ‘offbeat’ at a film like this isn’t really helpful, as they wouldn’t stick. (500) Days of Summer might not appeal to everyone—that’s certainly not its ambition—but those who will really enjoy it have probably been anticipating its release for a while now, and for anyone else the trailer should help you decide pretty quickly. The only problem with the film comes at the end—but to explore that here would ruin the experience; suffice it to say that the world keeps on turning, and seasons inevitably change.

Diane Birch—Bible Belt (S-Curve Records, 2009)
Review by Hugh Lilly

Diane Birch moved around a lot when she was growing up—her father, a pastor, was born in South Africa, and the family moved from Michigan to Zimbabwe, and then Australia, when Birch was still in elementary school. At age 10, the family moved back to the US and settled in Portland, Oregon. They were deeply religious—to the point of not interacting with their secular neighbours; thus Birch grew up with little knowledge of pop culture or music outside of the classical repertoire—she learnt to play the piano by ear from age 7—save for church hymns and gospel songs.

It’s not in the least surprising, then, that her début album would be drenched in a gospel sound—Mahalia Jackson and Joan Armatrading loom over the record like spiritual aural Godmothers—but there are numerous other influences as well. Her first foray into popular culture—what she described as losing her “musical virginity”—was seeing the music video for “Bad” by Michael Jackson, which ignited in her “a sort of primal mystery” that cast its spell over her “like never before or since.”

“I stood there watching in complete disbelief,” she recalls. “I remember the feeling so vividly: ‘Was this a real human? What was he wearing? Was he the devil?’” She soon branched out and discovered The Carpenters, Fleetwood Mac, The Beatles and, judging from the influences stamped on the record, soul music and the mid-’70s singer-songwriter Laurel Canyon sound—Joni Mitchell, James Taylor et al.

But perhaps one of her biggest influences would come from the opposite coast: Brooklyn-born songstress Carole King released her ground-breaking masterpiece Tapestry in March of 1971, after almost a decade of success writing for The Drifters, The Crystals and Dusty Springfield, among others, in the Brill Building. The rock critic Robert Christgau says about the landmark record that it “liberated [the female voice] from technical decorum”.

On Tapestry, King re-tooled a song she had co-written for The Shirelles, “Will You Love Me Tomorrow?” and made a massive impact with the soulful, era-defining “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman” and “Too Late”. King’s influence on Birch is evident on nearly every track, from the opener “Fire Escape”—which builds from a basic, Dusty Springfield-esque vocal to a pleading, rhapsodic waltz soaked in Rhodes piano and lavish strings—to the closer, “Magic View,” a quiet piano ballad that sees Birch also incorporate the vocal stylings of Sia Furler, the Australian singer who rose to prominence through her work with Zero 7—and, to top it off, there’s a hint of the raspy curl of Beth Gibbons, the lead singer of Portishead.

Another white girl with bangs, and someone the blog Brooklyn Vegan once called an “indie sexpot,” Jenny Lewis took a break from her band Rilo Kiley in 2006 and joined up with The Watson Twins to make one of the best albums of the decade, Rabbit Fur Coat. Replete with a multi-tracked call-and-response gospel choir sound, and brushed with a touch of country, the record alternates between sad songs and songs that are genuinely—but beautifully—depressing. While Bible Belt doesn’t share the same morbid fascination lyrically, there are occasional echoes of Lewis’ style in Birch’s voice, and there are similar themes: Lewis’ religious upbringing figures prominently in songs such as “Born Secular” and “Rise Up With Fists!!”

“Ariel,” the standout track on Bible Belt, echoes early Elton John both superficially in its single-word-man’s-name title—à la “Daniel” and “Levon”—and more tangibly in Birch’s double-tracked vocal delivery, which imitates John’s nuances—particularly at the end of phrases and in the bridge passage. But while it might be melodically reminiscent of early-’70s classics like “Tiny Dancer” and “My Father’s Gun,” the song’s lyrics have obviously been written with our digital age of instant, always-on social networking in mind: “I got news today that you’re go see the Great Wall of China / I guess I’ll see all the pictures on your page… / Does it hurt more to lose you or to love you baby / Or does it hurt more to look at you on my screen?”

Not every track is flawless, though: the Michelle Branch-esque “Mirror, Mirror” has an awful easy-listening commercial gloss to it, and will probably enter regular rotation on The Breeze radio station about a year from now. Elsewhere, “Photograph” is largely forgettable, but is redeemed by a brilliant gospel-inspired coda; “Valentino,” “Choo Choo” and the lead single “Rise Up” are all jaunty, brassy hymns that unfortunately lack a solid core but are enjoyable nonetheless. Birch’s gospel penchant is again indulged on the rambunctious “Don’t Wait Up,” and “Forgiveness” is a sublime horn-filled odyssey with a superb, pulsing bass line and jubilant backing chorus.

A number of critics have erroneously compared Birch to Stevie Nicks; while the Fleetwood Mac lead singer is arguably an aesthetic influence on Birch—not least her imitation of Nicks’ mid-’70s Charlie’s Angel’s-like hairdo—there’s no basis for a musical comparison. Birch has a significantly warmer, more rounded, soulful and upbeat tone to her voice; the only possible point of comparison would be Nicks circa 1973/74 on the album Buckingham Nicks—but even then, before she all but destroyed it with copious cocaine consumption, Nicks’ voice was enveloped in a pronounced Arizona twang.

Birch wrote every track on the album, and the production—by the R ‘n’ B singer Betty Wright and the same engineer who propelled Joss Stone toward stardom—is second-to-none. This is particularly obvious on “Nothing But a Miracle” and “Fools”; in the background of the latter, the session musicians, including Patti Smith’s guitarist Lenny Kaye, tool about splendidly.

Bible Belt encompasses a wide range of influences and sounds—and, perhaps most remarkably for a début, showcases just as wide a range of soulful vocal styles. The record is an auspicious, praiseworthy first album from a massively talented young artist who deserves to be thrust head-on into the spotlight, however reluctantly she might greet it.

Postscript: Birch’s stunning cover of “What is Love?”—the song which served as one of the theme tunes to the magnificent Will Ferrell vehicle A Night at the Roxbury—is well worth watching.

Ang Lee’s Taking Woodstock has it all: a motel commandeered by a band of hippies, an extravagant music festival, an experimental theatre troupe, and Liev Schrieber in a dress. Why, then, does it leave audiences wanting more? Hugh Lilly explains.

Woodstock was an era-defining event; it’s the yardstick to which all future music festivals try and measure up. Forty years ago, half a million grass-smokin’, guitar-totin’, probably somewhat smelly hippies descended upon the town of Bethel, New York, and enjoyed three days of “peace, love and music” on Max Yasgur’s farm, in the process defining the mood and moral outlook of their generation. At least that’s how the story goes. A new film by Ang Lee (Brokeback Mountain, The Ice Storm) tells the story of a motel owner’s son and the mob that overtook his parents’ motel for a weekend in July 1969.

Taking Woodstock is not about the music, a subject already well-documented in Michael Wadleigh’s 1970 film, but looks rather at the hundreds of millions of people who flooded into upstate New York through the eyes of Elliot Tiber (né Teichberg), an aspiring interior decorator and heir to a run-down motel in Bethel, NY, whose book of the same title formed the basis for the film’s script. Teichberg, using his position as head of the Bethel Chamber of Commerce, allowed Michael Lang’s Woodstock Ventures company to take over Bethel, a town on the opposite side of the Catskill Mountains to Woodstock, after the nearby town of Wallkill killed his buzz by denying him a permit.

The film opens in a flat, anaemic mood as Lee laboriously establishes all the characters with gratuitous exposition and sets the tone. Demetri Martin, a painfully unfunny—supposedly ‘quirky’—stand-up comic, plays Elliott. His wooden appearance and staccato line delivery make the character far more anxious than is necessary; only at one point—sliding around in the mud mid-trip on the Sunday—does he look comfortable in the role. Paul Dano (There Will Be Blood) and Kelly Garner (Thumbsucker) appear momentarily as a couple who give Elliot his first acid tab; the ensuing trip inside the couple’s VW Combi van is about as clichéd as has ever been committed to film. Not only is it a bore to watch, but it obscures the one thing everyone came to see: the performances on stage.

Music seems to function only as background noise in the film. Danny Elfman’s flaccid, wallpaper-like score that oscillates between dull acoustic tinkering and pandering psychedelic flourishes seems pointless—why not just use contemporaneous tracks from the era, the kind of songs people expect to hear in a film about the world’s biggest music festival? If Lee had no intention of ever showing the stage, why not at least compensate by having some of the music punctuate certain scenes? To be fair, there is one shot which uses a Crosby, Stills & Nash song to great effect—although the only reason it seems so enjoyable is because the audience is denied anything else, starved for any kind of musical sustinence.

The script is full of problems—clunky dialogue and the like—but its major problem is that it allows certain plotlines to simply evaporate. Why show us Liev Schrieber in full drag, announce his ambition to be a dedicated, tough-yet-benevolent ambisexual security guard—and then have him disappear? Why have Elliott kiss a man in a bar, and never again explore his blatant homosexual leanings, except for a brief moment waking up next to a man after the festival? Similarly, Emile Hirsch’s continuously stoned shell-shocked Vietnam veteran is relegated to the sidelines of the film, only to appear briefly every so often in cartoonish manner, making his portrayal just a notch above “despicable caricature”. Elliott’s mother, a neurotic Jewish woman, is given the same treatment, appearing only at opportune times to remind the audience that she’s a money-grubbing, strict matriarch who deserves respect.

One of Taking Woodstock’s saving graces, though, is its cinematography: Lee takes 16mm footage from Wadleigh’s original film and meticulously matches it with recreations of scenes; his use of split screen—partly in homage to Wadleigh—and the few Steadicam tracking shots in the film are perfectly constructed. Emanuel Levy is superbly cast as the farmer Max Yasgur, as is Elliot’s father Jake, played by the British TV actor Henry Goodman.

Let down by a poorly-articulated story and some acting as tremendously boring as the décor in the Teichberg family’s motel, Taking Woodstock has little to offer in the way of entertainment, and if it’s music you’re after you’d be better just putting on a record or watching the original documentary. If you’re really adventurous, go out and get the new six-disc anthology Woodstock 40 Years on: Back to Yasgur’s Farm—it’d be a far more rewarding trip.

UP
Pixar’s latest spectacle tells the story of Carl Fredricksen, an octogenarian who ties balloons to his house and flies away to South America, a place he and his late wife wanted to visit together. But Carl’s life is made difficult by Russell, a kid who, while trying to get his ‘assisting the elderly’ Boy Scout badge, stows away on his front porch. Hilarity ensues, in typical Pixar style. Although the film is obviously aimed at children there’s much for all viewers to marvel at and while UP doesn’t have anything on the studio’s crowning achievement thus far, last year’s WALL●E, it is nonetheless enjoyable on multiple levels.

Inglourious Basterds
Quentin Tarantino’s marauding band of Nazi-scalping Basterds, comprised of Brad Pitt, B.J. Novak and Michael Fassbender—and assisted by the torture porn director Eli Roth as Sgt. Donny Donowitz, ‘The Bear Jew’—face off against Col. Hans Landa, played in a star-making turn by the Austrian television actor Christoph Waltz.

Daniel Brühl (The Edukators) plays a German actor starring in a Nazi-glorifying film that will première at a Parisian cinema operated by Shoshanna Dreyfuss (the beautiful Mélanie Laurent, De Battre mon Coeur s’est Arête), a Jew hiding in France whose family is brutally executed by Landa in the film’s first scene. The Basterds conspire to bomb the theatre, in the process killing every upper member of the Third Reich in attendance, including Hitler, while at the same time Shoshanna plans to burn a gigantic pile of highly-flammable nitrate celluloid negative film.

Tarantino exposes his cinephilia here more than in any other of his films to date; Inglourious Basterds is a film more about the cinema, and the explosive power it wields, than about the Holocaust, World War II, or anything else. In the film’s final shot, Brad Pitt stares straight down the barrel of the camera as he looks upon a freshly-carved Swastika in a Nazi’s forehead—a signature of his—and remarks, “This might just be my masterpiece.” Well, Quentin, it just might be.

竊聽風雲 (Qie Ting Feng Yun/Overheard)
The Hong Kong film industry has long punched above its own weight, and was one of the largest in the world for much of the 20^th century. However, this status has faced major challenges in recent years: greater competition from the emerging film industries of its neighbours; depressed economic fortunes following the Asian Financial Crisis, and the increasing popularity of Western movies amongst the rising Hong Kong middle classes.

Nevertheless, films like Overheard show that Hong Kong may be down but not out. The film reunites director Alan Mak and writer Felix Chong, the makers of the stunning Infernal Affairs trilogy, and centres on a police taskforce monitoring illegal stock trading activities. Mak and Chong have successfully assembled an all-star cast, bringing together Sean Lau Ching-Wan—a mainstay of Hong Kong cop television and movie dramas—and his long-time collaborators Louis Koo (Protégé; Election I & II) and the incredibly versatile Daniel Wu (The Banquet; Shinjuku Incident).

Sadly, due to my assumptions based upon the fantastic casting and production team, I was disappointed. While the cinematography uses the limitations of Hong Kong’s tight urban sprawl to tremendous advantage, the plot simply had one too many clichéd twists and turns. While I would heartily recommend the film as a taste of modern Hong Kong cinema, do not enter expect an equal to Infernal Affairs. (Oliver Woods)

Amy Millan—Masters of the Burial (Arts & Crafts, 2009)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Amy Millan is a Canadian singer-songwriter who has been in the indie super group Broken Social Scene and the band Stars, as well as contributing to albums by Kevin Drew and Jason Collett; most recently she appeared on Gomez’s A New Tide. This is her second solo album after 2006’s Honey from the Tombs, and marks a departure toward a more rustic, country tone. Its sound is especially distinct from Stars’ modulated jangles—my iTunes has one of their albums classified as “chamber pop”—and the varied sounds of Broken Social Scene, who flit between quiet, baroque experimental tracks and a sort of rough, explosive—but exciting and danceable—aural bombardment.

While most of the tracks on Tombs could quite easily be called folk-pop, Burial, with its more pronounced banjo and steel guitars, is both more considered and relaxed—ultimately, more fragile. Unlike Tombs, which had Millan double-tracking or with at least one backup singer on nearly every track, the new album sees her mostly alone at the mic, accompanied only on a few tracks—and at least once by Leslie Feist, a fellow Broken Social Scene alumnus.

“Day to Day,” a cover of a song by fellow Canadian Jenny Whiteley, is here given a hollow, odd cadence: Millan’s vocals are backed only by fuzzy, coldly electronic percussion. “Towers,” a spare acoustic track with banjo and mandolin, is reminiscent of Bic Runga circa Drive, only not as emphatically emotional. A country-fied cover version of Death Cab for Cutie’s “I Will Follow You into the Dark,” almost drowned in sumptuous pedal steel, is initially a bit out of step with the other tracks but reveals a gentle sweetness upon multiple listens—in fact, it stands out as one of the best tracks on the album.

“Broken,” the record’s closer, is, like the opener “Bruised Ghosts,” a slow, fiddle-driven country song in the vein of Norah Jones and some of Gillian Welch’s more handsome, less folksy songs. The record’s maudlin title telegraphs the fact that, like its 2006 predecessor, Millan’s second solo outing isn’t lyrically upbeat—but that doesn’t preclude it from being endlessly entertaining.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Joe Wright’s third film after Pride & Prejudice and Atonement seems to be trying to tell two competing stories. One is about a schizophrenic homeless man, played with vivacity by Jamie Foxx, who hears cacophonous voices in his head and speaks in a similar, stream-of-consciousness-like hobo patter. He also happens to be an extraordinarily talented cellist who at one time studied at the Juilliard School in New York City.

The other story is that of a newspaper columnist in search of material for a daily column—an unusually aloof performance from Robert Downey, jr. In discovering the homeless man’s ‘hidden’ talent, the journalist finds his story, and, by extension, the larger situation: namely, how Los Angeles deals with its homeless—essentially, it’s against the law to be of no fixed abode.

The film could have quite neatly and effortlessly dovetailed the two plots—indeed, the latter, which could allow for the presentation of a wider story about the ever-increasing divide between rich and poor in the world’s eighth-largest economy, would have made for an interesting film. Unfortunately, partly because it tries to foreground (and therefore necessarily ‘jazz up’) the journalist’s mundane existence, it fails, spectacularly.

An abundance of overly emotional scenes makes the film vacillate between moments of light comedy, tender encounters and completely over-the-top absurd spectacles—including what can at best be termed an ill-advised Kubrickian light show in the middle of a performance of Beethoven’s third meant to signify some sort of near-religious melding of mind and music.

Wright’s frankly idiotic penchant for long, single-take shots of expansive scenes (seen in Atonement’s recreation of the Battle of Dunkirk) is here indulged, albeit to a lesser degree—only here homeless men and women and their ramshackle surroundings take the place of soldiers on a beach. Sadly, overall, though it contains some terrific performances and is sure to be nominated for a number of Oscars, The Soloist fails on the most fundamental of levels: basic, coherent storytelling.

Review by Hugh Lilly

In the television series Wild Weekends, Theroux reveals an obsessive, kooky America by seeking out its most zany, cult-like denizens. The historian Simon Schama, in his perplexingly-titled The American Future: A History, adapted from his book, looks to the States’ future through the prism of its past. Like his fellow Britons, the comedian, actor, and author Stephen Fry has recently ventured across the Atlantic to explore the USA. In Stephen Fry in America, he successfully blends those two kinds of travel journalism, engaging with the weird—such as a segment on voodoo in New Orleans—and the more intellectual, by grounding one in every three or four segments in an historical and sociological context.

Fry, who opens the programme by saying he was “very nearly born an American—and therefore ‘Steve’,” travels the length and breadth of the country, “from California to the New York island / from the Redwood forests to the Gulf Stream waters,” as Woody Guthrie sang. Starting in the “New World,” (Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont) he stops off in New York, DC, Pennsylvania, Florida, and then makes his way up the Mississippi. He zigzags vertically up and down the continent, border to border, until he reaches the opposite side, where California juts into the Pacific—then, finally, to what Homer Simpson once called “the freak states,” Alaska and Hawaii.

Along the way Fry meets an engaging, varied cast of Americans, some famous—like Morgan Freeman in a bar in Louisiana—and some not-so-famous, like a couple of former hippies who live in a decommissioned nuclear bunker in New Mexico. An avid Twitterer, Fry indulges his passion for technology, talking to Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales in New York City, and Apple design guru Jonathan Ive in San Francisco.

One of the gimmicks is that he drives up and down the country in a black London cab, apparently the same kind of car he drives back home, which marks him at once as British, and attracts a lot of comments from those he interviews. Although it cannot accommodate any deep exploration of a particular state or group of people, the six-hour series is able to present a picture of America as a multitudinous land of extremes, brimming with idiosyncrasies and disparities yet somehow forming a coherent, grandiose whole. Fry is a wonderful tour guide, continually witty and amusing. As an exploration of modern America, this series stands as one of the most accessible and entertaining of its kind to date.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, whose previous film was the abysmally moronic Paris Hilton vehicle House of Wax, has managed to make a bearable—if paint-by-numbers—horror-thriller in Orphan. Esther, the oddly-dressed, fear-inducing parentless child of the title, is adopted by a respectable Connecticut family. Vera Farmiga, whose previous film Joshua also dealt with unruly offspring, plays the mother, Kate, and Peter Sarsgaard (Elegy; Jarhead) plays John, the father.

Reeling from having recently lost a child in stillbirth, the family adopt Esther from a local orphanage, and welcome her with open arms. The girl, played with an awful Eastern European accent by an American actress, has a murky past and a tendency to be in the vicinity of grisly murders, house fires and the like—although there’s never any evidence linking her to the crimes. Kate becomes suspicious of Esther early on, though, this being a horror film, no one believes her until it’s too late.

The film is constructed well, cliché genre conventions aside, and although Farmiga’s portrayal of the mother is top notch, the same cannot be said of the other actors—especially Sarsgaard, who seems like he’s sleep-walking (sleep-acting?) through nearly every scene. The main plot twist, although excitingly innovative on paper, is handled clumsily, and over-the-top score and sound design telegraph every shocking “jump-out-of-your-seat” moment before they happen.

The “creepy kid” as plot device has long been a staple of the horror-thriller genre, and occasionally, as with the 2007 Spanish film El Orfanato, it is possible to breathe new life into it. Unfortunately, apart from the child’s “insane” charcoal drawings—seemingly obligatory to the “creepy kid” sub-genre—which are given an interesting new dimension, Orphan is stultifying unoriginal.

“Being Hal Ashby” by Nick Dawson

Review by Hugh Lilly

The director Hal Ashby was somewhat of an anomaly in Hollywood: someone who could make heartfelt, carefully crafted personal films within the confines of the studio system. Although Ashby frequently ignored box-office forecasts in favour of relentlessly pursuing an artistic vision, many of his films were equally well-received by critics and cinemagoers alike, and a couple are worthy of the tag ‘cultural touchstone’.

In his exhaustively-researched book “Being Hal Ashby: Life of a Hollywood Rebel,” ex-pat Brit Nick Dawson tracks Ashby’s tumultuous life from his Mormon upbringing in Ogden, Utah through his untimely death in 1988 at the age of 56. Between those years Ashby won many awards, consumed a heck of a lot of drugs, was married not once or twice but five times, and made some of the best films of the late-’60s and ’70s. Films like Harold and Maude, Being There and Shampoo became massive successes both financially and critically.

After a rough childhood (his father died when Ashby was only 12), Ashby worked his way up from the bottom rung of the movie business. He landed a job as an editor—it would become his passion, moreso perhaps than directing—and, in 1967, won an Academy Award for Film Editing for Norman Jewison’s In the Heat of the Night. From there it was a relatively simple hop, skip and a jump across to the director’s seat, and in 1970 The Landlord, Ashby’s directorial début, was released. Marketed poorly and at the wrong demographic, the sex comedy starring Beau Bridges and a young Lou Gossett, Jr. floundered and is more or less forgotten today.

Over the next ten years, while slipping in and out of countless relationships and various drug-induced states, Ashby made some of the best films of the decade, including the social satire Being There with Peter Sellers and the unusual and hugely influential romantic comedy Harold and Maude which made a star of Bud Cort and introduced the singer-songwriter Cat Stevens to an American audience. Coming Home, Ashby’s Vietnam war picture, commercially successful despite its political outlook, was written alongside his frequent collaborator Robert Towne, one of the best screenwriters in the business at that time.

Shampoo, a 1975 political satire set on the eve of the first election of Richard Nixon, was for the most part a vehicle for its star, Warren Beatty, but nonetheless retained the feeling of “a Hal Ashby picture,” and was the director’s most commercially successful film. In 1976 Bound For Glory, a biopic of the dustbowl folk troubadour Woody Guthrie starring David Carradine, won Oscars for Cinematography—it was the first feature film to incorporate Steadicam technology—and Music. The aforementioned Being There, starring the incomparable Peter Sellers, is in many respects Ashby’s masterwork and would be his creative zenith. From there, his career moved slowly but surely downhill.

In the ’80s he was attached to a multitude of projects but only a few saw the light of day—most languished in development hell until finally being released years or even decades after they were first sold to studios. In 1981, Ashby directed a (now long out-of-print) Rolling Stones concert film, Let’s Spend the Night Together, and in September of 1983 made a film of a show from Neil Young’s Solo Trans tour. The few films he made that decade were either handled badly by manipulative movie execs or ended up being edited or re-made against Ashby’s wishes. Sadly, in 1988 Ashby discovered he had a form of asbestos-related lung cancer, and he died a few months later.

Dawson painstakingly researched almost every facet of Ashby’s life, and brings together a considerable amount of material in an entertaining fashion. First-hand interviews with Ashby’s family and figures like Dustin Hoffman and Sean Penn are cited alongside countless articles, profiles and contemporaneous reviews. Peter Biskind’s seminal book Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, an examination of the New Hollywood movement of the ’70s, is also consulted along with other similar material.

A hippy at heart and an important counterculture figure, Ashby was never one to set aside his artist’s instinct at the expense of projected profits. Although we will never know what he would have made in the intervening years since his death, his body of work remains as important and affecting as each film was upon its release, if not moreso; Ashby’s sense of emotion on screen and his technical construction are highly influential and can be felt in the work of contemporary film artists like Wes Anderson and the Coen brothers, to name but a few. Dawson’s brilliantly-written biography will long remain the definitive literary exploration of Ashby’s work.

By Hugh Lilly

Coraline, directed by Henry Selick

Gake no ue no Ponyo, directed by Hayao Miyazaki

Lewis Carroll’s “Alice In Wonderland” has inspired myriad literary, filmic and stage adaptations. It’s also inspired songs like Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit”—and music videos, like Tom Petty’s undeniably awesome “Don’t Come Around Here No More,” featuring numerous drug allusions and Petty atop a ludicrously enormous mushroom. Tim Burton’s newest film, due to be released early next year, follows Alice, now 19, back down the rabbit hole to the magical, enchanted world Carroll created more than a hundred and forty years ago. The science-fiction author Neil Gaiman must have had “Alice” in mind when he wrote “Coraline,” his fantasy-horror novella that follows a young girl’s adventures as she discovers a secret, alternate world—complete with talking cat in a (dead) tree—at the other end of a tunnel accessed through a tiny door. Continuing the adaptation trend, Stephin Merritt of the band The Magnetic Fields has written the music for a Broadway version of Gaiman’s story which opened earlier this year.

Henry Selick, the director of Tim Burton’s magical The Nightmare Before Christmas, is a master in the art of stop-motion filmmaking. Aside from that film, Selick directed James and the Giant Peach and animated the stop-motion seahorses and other creatures in Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou. He also has assisted on many other animation and stop-motion pictures since the early ’80s. Selick’s latest film is a lively stop-motion adaptation of Gaiman’s novella, shot in 3-D.

The story follows the titular character, a twelve-year-old girl, gratingly-voiced by Dakota Fanning. Her workaholic parents—voiced by Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman—who’ve just moved into a new, isolated old house, practically ignore her. So she goes to find her own fun and meets ‘Wybie’—a wild-eyed boy who rides around on a souped-up BMX bike with ihs mangy cat seeking out trouble. Her neighbours, Mr. Bobinsky—a heavily-accented acrobatic Russian man (voiced by Ian McShane from TV’s Deadwood) with a penchant for training mice for a miniature circus—and, downstairs, a duo of ex-theatre actresses: Ms. Spink and Ms. Forcible, voiced by French and Saunders. Keith David, perhaps best known for his voice work and small roles in films such as Requiem for a Dream, Reality Bites and Platoon, voices the aforementioned anthropomorphised feline.

While exploring the new house one day, Coraline discovers a small door covered up by wallpaper. She nags her mother for the key, and, in the dead of night, opens the door. At the other end of a long, ominously-glowing paper lampshade-like tunnel she finds an alternate universe peopled by imitations of her parents and neighbours. This new world is wonderful, from Coraline’s point of view: the inhabitants are the opposite of those in Coraline’s normal life. Her ‘other’ parents are attentive and interesting to talk to—her ‘other’ mother is a great cook and her ‘other’ father, instead of being a distant writer, is a composer and gardener. There’s one important distinction, though: everyone in this other world has buttons for eyes, and they’re trying to convince her to let them sew big black buttons in her eye sockets too, so she can fit in and be “just like everyone else”.

The music, by composer Bruno Coulais and the experimental pop group They Might Be Giants, is both spritely and melancholic—apparently TMBG wrote ten songs for the film and were set to use almost all of them when Selick and the other filmmakers opted for a darker soundscape; Coulais’ music has an ethereal, slightly eastern tone and makes certain scenes a little too creepy. The visuals are fantastic—though the 3-D lends little of value to the picture; see it in a regular projection if possible—and there are homages to art (Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” is terrifically riffed-upon toward the end) and to Shakespeare: Hamlet’s “What a piece of work is man!” monologue is used in a terrific theatre performance by the ‘other’ downstairs neighbours. Coraline is about as fantastic and vivid as kids could hope for, and the world around the title character almost outshines that of her predecessor, the cemetery-dwelling chanteur Jake Skellington.

Another filmmaker who trades in wonder, fantasy and child-like amazement is the Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki. His tenth film for the animation studio Ghibli is Gake no ue no Ponyo—Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea. After the Oscar-winning success of films like Spirited Away and Howl’s Moving Castle—not to mention a gigantic body of work dating from the early ’70s—it is somewhat of a disappointment.

Although stylistically the film retains that “classic Miyazaki look and feel,” so-to-speak, the story, written by the director himself, is too simplistic to appeal to anyone but very small children. Of course all his films are directed at kids, but there’s usually something in many of them to entertain older viewers. The story follows Sōsuke, a five-year-old boy who finds a goldfish washed up on the shore; he takes her home and names her Ponyo. A kind of cat-and-mouse game ensues between Sōsuke and the underwater overlord who gave ‘birth’ to Ponyo. This is (probably) entertaining for small children, but there’s nothing much here for adult animation fans, unlike the (comparatively) elegant plots of say, Howl’s or Castle in the Sky.

Ponyo enjoyed the widest-local release for any domestic film to date—481 screens on July 19, 2008—and has Studio Ghibli’s highest-grossing opening-month figures thus far. Even with its faults the film is visually fantastic, and Miyazaki’s under-recognised composer, Joe Hisaishi, has here created a magnificent score that evokes Stravinsky and Wagner’s Die Walküre—indeed, the story partially alludes to that opera. Overall, though, Ponyo disappoints on the most basic level: storytelling.

Coraline is the best animated film of the year so far, and should easily entertain young and old alike. Ponyo, on the other hand, would perhaps be better left to the kids.

Coraline is in theatres now.

Ponyo screened recently at the New Zealand International Film Festivals. The American overdub, voiced variously by Cate Blanchett, Matt Damon, Lily Tomlin, Tina Fey, Noah (brother of Miley) Cyrus, and one of the less-annoying Jonases, was released last week in the US and will begin shipping out to other markets next month; those wanting to hear the film in its original Japanese may have to wait for the DVD.

“X Saves The World” by Jeff Gordinier

“Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood’s Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers” by Derek Hill

A few years ago Jeff Gordinier, a writer at Details and Entertainment Weekly magazines, was asked by his editor to look into what had become of his generation. The resulting book, subtitled “How Generation X Got The Shaft But Can Still Keep Everything From Sucking,” is a rambling, discursive examination of the high and lows Generation X has experienced.

Born between 1964 and 1977, the children of baby boomers were finally given a title when, in 1991, Canadian author Douglas Coupland wrote the (superb) novel “Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture”. This was also the year that Nirvana released “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” a song that would become anthemic and meaningful to the flannel-clad slacker generation that never had much use for concrete meaning, nor much desire to discover it. They had a healthy disdain for cliché, and a taste for irony, however, and Richard Linklater’s seminal film Slacker, which also came out that year, would help them discover that. It is around these three pop culture artefacts that Gordinier structures his book.

“X Saves The World” is broken into three chunks: “In Bloom,” “Idiots Rule” and “I Will Dare”. The first section looks at what the author sees as the golden age of his generation: 1991-1999. He goes to Woodstock II in 1994, where he sees Sheryl Crow and Joe Cocker onstage, and discovers that the festival had “very little to do with the ethos of Gen X, but a lot to do with boomers reasserting their market dominance in a world that had replaced ‘I Want to Hold Your Hand’ with ‘I Want to Fuck You Like an Animal’.” He argues a solid case for Gen X being the driving force behind the mid-nineties dot-com boom in Silicon Valley, and visits Darren Aronofsky on the set of Requiem for a Dream, where he finds the director recounting his youth growing up “in the shadow of Coney Island”.

The book opens with a note warning the reader to expect unsubstantiated generalisations, and it’s easy to see why when reading “Idiots Rule,” the middle section of the book. Here, Gordinier makes clear his utter distaste for the “easily amused” millennial generation, a group now more commonly (lazily) given the nomenclature “Generation Y”. Unrepentantly narcissistic, this generation apparently loves nothing more than the sound of their own voice, and spends much of their time slavishly tinkering with various online profiles in between mindlessly consuming yet another episode of American Idol, which he hilariously labels “totalitarian kitsch”. Gordinier concludes the section by catching a Las Vegas performance of Cirque du Soleil’s god-awful Beatles: LOVE acrobatic show. It is a cringe-worthy cultural travesty and a visual (and sonic) nightmare, and he ultimately draws the conclusion of, to (mis)quote The Simpsons: “Can’t sleep, George Martin’ll eat me”.

The final section, “I Will Dare,” is more or less structured around two ideas: firstly, that Xers are inventing social web phenomena like YouTube and Wikipedia, and that these are saving the world; keeping it from “sucking”. Secondly, that newspapers like The Onion, TV shows like Matt Stone and Trey Parker’s South Park, and Comedy Central’s “dyspeptic duo” of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert are stopping the 24-hour news cycle from suffocating on its own tail. Gen-X comedians are saving the world through biting satire, proposes the author.

Gordinier is Chuck Klosterman lite: he has the same savvy with pop culture references, but not the underlying, continual strain of humour that persists under the surface of Klosterman’s writing. Still, the snippets of humour here and there, and the globe-trotting pace with which the book proceeds make it greatly enjoyable.

Toward the middle of the first section of “X Saves The World,” Gordinier says:

“Everywhere you looked in 1999, young movie directors and screenwriters were firing a big, swervy slug into the cinematic rule book. Spike Jonze, Charlie Kaufman, Kimberly Peirce, Sofia Coppola, Kevin Smith, David Fincher, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Alexander Payne, Richard Linklater, Paul Thomas Anderson—they’d been shaking things up for a decade, but this was their annus mirabilis. Their weird-science visions didn’t just dot the landscape. They dominated it.”

It is this group of filmmakers, plus a few related outliers, that Derek Hill explores in his new book about young trendsetting, game-changing filmmakers. Subtitled “An Excursion into the American New Wave,” this slender, esoteric examination of current innovations in modern American cinema begins by looking at previous movements such as the French New Wave and Hollywood’s second Golden Age (a.k.a. The New Hollywood) in the seventies, which included such influential directors as Hal Ashby, Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg. Back then, films like The Graduate and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? blew the lid off the establishment. Dennis Hopper’s seminal 1969 film Easy Rider, in Hill’s words “a financial and cultural juggernaut,” paved the way for future explorers of the cinematic avant garde.

Richard Linklater’s first full-length film Slacker, which appeared at the apex of grunge, did the same thing for his generation, argues Hill. Steven Soderbergh’s intoxicating sex, lies and videotape opened at Sundance in 1989 to rave reviews, and filmmakers like Paul Thomas Anderson (Magnolia, Boogie Nights) and Quentin Tarantino, influenced by ’60s counterculture and ’70s rawness, made films that were not only oblivious to mainstream cinema, but occasionally downright derisive of it.

Hill devotes more space to some films than others—for example, David O. Russell and his idiosyncratic existential comedy I ♥ Huckabees receives more space than Richard Kelly’s momentous cult hit Donnie Darko. Alongside extensive analyses of the work of Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola and particularly insightful commentary on the films of Wes Anderson, there are explorations of David Gordon Green’s underappreciated art films and Michel Gondry’s fabulous, whimsical creations. Underlying it all and tying together most of the strands of the book is an appreciation of Charlie Kaufman, the “wizard of id,” in Hill’s words. Kaufman is the extraordinarily gifted screenwriter of Being John Malkovich, Adaptation., Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. His most recent film, Synecdoche, New York, is his first as director, and is mentioned in passing toward the book’s end.

Also mentioned, briefly, is Roman Coppola’s under-seen and unjustly maligned 2001 film CQ, about a young man who moves to Paris to make sci-fi films. The film is not without its faults, but, as one incisive IMDb reviewer puts it, CQ is “A likable love letter to 1960s Eurocinema”.

Hill’s pensive analysis may at first seem impenetrable, but as the book progresses his train of thought is simple enough to follow. Perhaps the best thing about Hill’s book is that it is one of the first thorough essay collections outside of academia to group together these restless young cineastes and give them proper billing, front and centre on a marquee of their own design.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Michael Mann’s new film is the fifth time the story of John Dillinger will be played out on the silver screen. The first was in 1947 and starred Lawrence Tierney; the second was Marco Ferreri’s Dillinger is Dead, in 1969, which starred Anita Pallenberg and used documentary newsreel footage of the infamous bank robber.

The third—and best to date—was John Milius’ Dillinger, in 1973, with Warren Oates as a scruffy backwater country hick Dillinger. Lewis Teague’s mostly forgotten 1979 film The Lady In Red looks at the story from the point of view of Dillinger’s love interest.

Now, in 2009, Michael Mann—director of Collateral, Heat and The Insider, and creator of one of the best TV series of the ’80s, Miami Vice—has adapted Bryan Burrough’s book “Public Enemies: America’s Greatest Crime Wave and the Birth of the FBI, 1933-43,” for the screen, starring Johnny Depp, Christian Bale and Marion Cotillard.

Depp is superb in the title role, smirking and conniving his way in and out of jails, handcuffs, and the loving arms of various women. Dillinger, in between bank robberies, spies Billie Frenchette (Cotillard) at a restaurant one night. He falls for her instantly, and she asks him to dance, while Diana Krall sings “Bye Bye Blackbird” onstage behind them. Over the next few months, Dillinger tries to outrun and outwit the law, and keep Billie safe. He manages to rob a few more banks and loses a few men along the way, all the while eluding the watchful eye of G-man Melvin Purvis (Bale) of J. Edgar Hoover’s then-nascent Federal Bureau of Investigation.

Public Enemies is shot in high definition—like both Collateral and the Miami Vice film before it—and Dante Spinotti’s cinematography is absolutely a sight to behold. Critics have intimated that Spinotti and Mann are attempting to change the way cinema looks, and Public Enemies may prove in time to be the catalyst for the uptake of HD by a number of other (prominent) filmmakers. Although the look of the film may be initially disconcerting, it’s not hard to appreciate the benefits afforded by small handheld cameras: close-ups are employed in nearly every scene—to terrific narrative effect.

While the costumes and set design are flawless, the film is let down mostly by the plot, and on the writers’ (Mann, Ronan Bennett and Ann Biderman) insistence on trying to cram too much into the film. The result is a series of fragments, a collection of vignettes wherein the actors try their best to convey fleshed-out characters but—because there is a need to move the story along as quickly as possible—don’t quite have time. Also—and perhaps ironically—at 139 minutes, the film seems too long, by at least a fifth.

There are a number of historical inaccuracies in the film, such as the order in which certain of Dillinger’s gang are killed—Public Enemies notably opens with a jailbreak and the death of Charles Arthur “Pretty Boy” Floyd; in Milius’ film Floyd doesn’t die til near the end of the story. These digressions are minor in the scheme of things, though.

The performances are, for the most part, spectacular, except for Bale who, alas, overacts—all constantly-furrowed brow and “serious actor voice”. Though he thankfully doesn’t employ his gravelly ‘Dark Knight voice,’ he does attempt a South Carolina drawl, with mostly horrible results.

The soundtrack is somewhat of a mixed bag, ranging from well-employed jazz and swing (Billie Holliday’s “Am I Blue?”) to contemporary blues (Otis Taylor’s “Ten Million Slaves” opens the film to great effect) to Elliot Goldenthal’s brief, mostly syrupy, sentimental score, which unsubtly pipes up only at precise moments to elicit emotion from the audience.

The film’s greatest achievement is its atmosphere and attention to detail: Mann has created a completely watertight world for his characters, and the viewer is completely drawn in. Even with its flaws, Public Enemies, while necessarily not as explosive, perhaps, as his other work, is an interesting addition to the work of a director who is continually innovative and willing to step slightly out of the mainstream.

Public Enemies opens on Thursday.

NZIFF 2009 Roundup

By Hugh Lilly

Los Abrazos Rotos (Broken Embraces)

Spanish director Pedro Almodóvar’s latest is a dramatic, cinema-obsessed film noir with Penélope Cruz as the femme fatale. The film, which begins with a blind screenwriter living in the present day under his nom de plume “Harry Caine”, is modelled on the hard-boiled detective noirs of the 40s and 50s, its most obvious ancestor being Nicholas Ray’s sublime 1951 film In A Lonely Place, in which Humphrey Bogart plays a screenwriter.

Events lead the story to unravel backwards in time to the early-90s, where “Harry Caine” is a film director still using his real name, Mateo Blanco. He casts Lena (Cruz), a call girl, in his new film, which is being financed by a millionaire, Ernesto Martel. Both the director and the millionaire begin relationships with Lena, with tragic consequences.

Spectacular cinematography, an interesting soundtrack—including great use of a Cat Power track, and a wonderful score by Almodóvar regular Alberto Iglesias—and a superb lead performance from Cruz along with moments of genuine humour make Broken Embraces tremendously entertaining. Almodóvar’s cinephilia and exquisite attention to detail and are on display constantly in this film, perhaps more so than in any of his other work until now. Cut down to 128 mins from 180-something, the film still feels a little long, and much of the dénouement could have been tightened. Still, Broken Embraces stands as his most entertaining film since All About My Mother. Expect a late-August release at art house cinemas.

The Limits of Control

Jim Jarmusch’s new film is the tale of a mostly-silent lone assassin, played expertly by Isaach De Bankolé (Jarmusch’s Night on Earth, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and Coffee and Cigarettes; Lars von Trier’s Manderlay). The film follows this “Lone Man” As he travels around Spain and goes about his daily routine: going to a café where he orders two espressos (in two separate cups) and meets with a messenger to exchange matchboxes. From their matchbox he takes out and memorises a secret code which leads to his next meeting point. Sometimes, he goes to an art gallery, but contemplates only one painting per visit.

The mysterious messengers are variously played by Tilda Swinton, Gael García Bernal, and John Hurt; a nude Paz de la Huerta hangs around his hotel room, occasionally donning a see-through raincoat. Ultimately, his target (like the boss at the end of a Nintendo-64 game) is Bill Murray, doing his best impersonation of a smug billionaire.

The film is slow, mostly quiet, and utterly beautiful. References to other films abound—particularly to Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1969 masterpiece Le Samouraï and Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker. The film’s terrific, atmospheric soundtrack features tracks by the experimental (and mostly instrumental) Japanese rock group Boris, as well as Sunn o))) and Bad Rabbit; the mind-blowingly perfect cinematography is by Christopher Doyle, Wong kar-Wai’s right-hand man. Many critics have lamented the film’s lack of substance—there’s not much of a story here—but sometimes it’s nice to just sit back and soak up some cinematic style. Limits opens October 1 at the Academy Cinemas on Lorne St.

Disgrace

Based on J. M. Coetzee’s Booker prize-winning novel, Disgrace follows a Cape Town university professor (John Malkovich) who has an affair with a student and moves out to the countryside to live with his daughter. The film exposes the political reality of a post-apartheid South Africa where race is still very much at the forefront of everyday life. Director Steve Jacobs and writer Anna Maria Monticelli are both Australian, and the film was shot almost entirely on location in South Africa.

Although Malkovich turns in a respectable performance—and certainly the other characters are well-cast, and the cinematography and set design admirable—it’s difficult, at times, to move beyond his (valiant) attempt at a South African accent; he seems almost as uncomfortable playing the character as we are watching him. Disgrace opens October 8.

Antichrist

It’s difficult to see how this film made four audience members faint at Cannes earlier this year. Brutal and shocking, but not scary, Lars von Trier’s latest film is dedicated to the late Andrei Tarkovsky, and certain scenes—particularly near the start—mirror the Russian filmmaker’s style. The self-proclaimed “best director in the world,” von Trier wrote the film as a form of therapy after a long, deep depression.

The story is of therapist Willem Dafoe and his wife Charlotte Gainsbourg, a couple who have recently lost their son. She is utterly inconsolable, so he suggests that they retreat to a cabin in the woods to expose her to her fears so that she might overcome them. She had previously been at the cabin with her son, working on a thesis on gynocide. Nature turns against them, and they against one another, as the woods—named ‘Eden’ in the film—become a living hell.

For all its ostensible gore and gratuitous genital mutilation, the film contains moments of utter beauty—namely the opening and closing black-and-white segments in slow motion—and the grim but magnificent cinematography by Anthony Dod Mantle is a world away from the overly colourful flashes of Slumdog Millionaire.

It is his most overtly misogynistic, but this is by no means von Trier’s best film, nor is it even objectively good: the biggest stumbling block is the film’s religious symbolism, which is delivered with too heavy a hand—and at one point an (unintentionally?) hilarious talking fox (voiced, of course, by the director) ominously intones “chaos reigns”. The film’s international reception has been polarized. Alternately praised by critics (“a grotesque masterpiece”) and argued about by detractors (“a master director’s failed work”) the film has (understandably) come under fire for its extreme, explicit violence, pornography and masochistic spirit.

For all its faults, though, Antichrist is an undeniably powerful, visceral and occasionally oddly beautiful viewing experience. It has been classified by the Censor (R18 for “explicit sex, graphic violence and genital mutilation”) so it should get a release date soon—unless Bob McCoskrie and his Family First lobby group have anything to say about it, as they inevitably will.

More Festival coverage, including pieces on The Cove, Largo, RiP!: A Remix Manifesto, In The Loop, Louise Bourgeois, Examined Life and Winnebago Man are at Craccum.co.nz

The Cove, a superbly well-made, important film about whaling and dolphin slaughter in Japan, opens August 27.

Visual Acoustics: The Modernism of Julius Shulman, about the late architectural photographer, opens October 22 after the Architecture Week film festival.

Mary and Max, Adam Elliot’s clay-mation follow-up to 2003’s Harvie Krumpet, follows two unlikely pen-pals: Mary, an eight-year-old girl living in Melbourne, and Max, a forty-four-year old Jewish man living in New York, voiced by Toni Collette and Philip Seymour Hoffman respectively, opens on November 26.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Largo—an intimate LA club that keeps its roster of performers under wraps until you’re inside—is the subject of a new concert film by Mark Flanagan and Andrew van Baal. Filmed in 2008, it features performances by Fiona Apple, Jackson Browne, Colin Hay, Aimee Mann, Nickel Creek and Flight of the Conchords, among others, as well as appearances by stand up comedians Zach Galifinakis, John C. Reilly, Greg Proops, Sarah Silverman, and SNL’s Fred Armisen.

The film feels almost like attending an evening there, though without the drinks and the atmosphere. Perhaps if the film had better established the setting and the historic relevance of the club, it would feel more personal and amiable—and much less like a series of brief, anonymous YouTube clips uploaded from a cell phone in the front row.

Largo is well-structured, but there are no title cards, meaning a wait until the end credits to identify the less familiar performers. That it is shot in black and white is no problem but, irritatingly, the film is photographed as if destined to be seen on an iPhone or other very small screen, thus severely hampering the ‘you are there’ feeling the film would ideally want to create.

The only time the camera moves from its stationary (near-extreme) close-up is during two virtuoso performances by Jon Brion and whistler extraordinaire Andrew Bird; both involve complex looping and multiple instruments, and break the tedium bought on by showing one too many singer-songwriters in a row. The musical performances are, on the whole, terrific—but the comedians, particularly Patton Oswalt and Louis CK, are incongruously crass and wholly gratuitous. Overall, Largo is merely a satisfying experience that could quite easily have been made much more enjoyable.

(dir. Louie Psihoyos | USA | 2009 | 90 mins)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Both a call to arms and an alternately devastating and thrilling exposé, The Cove is a superbly well-made, important film about whaling and dolphin slaughter in Japan.

More than two and a half thousand dolphins are slaughtered every September in a secluded cove in Taiji, a small whaling town in Wakayama, Japan. Their meat, which contains poisonously high levels of mercury due to environmental changes brought about by global warming, was sold to the national school lunch programme. Until this film was released, local government denied that the levels were dangerous; the dolphin meat programme has since stopped.

The film interweaves the mission to expose the practises in Taiji with the story of Ric O’Barry, a dolphin trainer on the 1960s TV series Flipper. Once O’Barry realised that keeping dolphins in captivity was unusually cruel, he started a crusade to free dolphins around the world, in theme parks and elsewhere.

Aided by a couple of free divers, O’Barry, and some technology on loan from Industrial Light & Magic, former National Geographic photographer Louis Psihoyos and his crew planted hidden high-definition cameras in the area around the cove in order to capture the cruelty that occurs there annually. The result is both terrifying and illuminating, and makes for utterly captivating viewing.

The film opens in New York and Los Angeles July 31; a limited release in New Zealand is set for late August.

(dir Yann Arthus-Bertrand | France | 2009 | 95mins/120 mins)

Review by Hugh Lilly

Financed by French multinational conglomerate PPR, Yann Arthus-Bertrand’s global-warming documentary Home is quite different to most others; for one thing, the entire film is available free online. (It was available on YouTube until July 15th; LegalTorrents is one of many sites still hosting the film.)

Less cloying and sentimental than Disney’s Earth (which was culled from the BBC series Planet Earth) the film has more in common with Godfrey Reggio’s Qatsi trilogy than it does Richard Attenborough’s thickly-narrated exposés of the natural world.

Narrated by Glenn Close, Home looks at the impact humans are having on the planet, and pairs already well-known statistics (20% of the world’s population uses 80% of its resources) with new information about the state of trade around the world, and amazing shots unseen anywhere else, captured in staggering high-definition.

The film looks at different cities around the world—New York, Dubai, Las Vegas, LA, Shenzen, Mumbai and Tokyo—and examines the ways in which we as a species are harming the planet, and each other.

Alongside doom-and-gloom factoids (the US spends 20 times more on its military than it does foreign aid; by the year 2050 it is expected that there will be 200 million ‘climate refugees’) Home concludes with an optimistic outlook: information about various forms of renewable energy, education about global warming, and international co-operation on and environmental issues.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Greg Mottola’s Adventureland is not your typical romantic comedy. It’s also nothing like his previous film, Superbad. Where that film revelled in juvenile hijinks and high-school pranks, Adventureland is a much more accomplished, mature story; a tender coming-of-age tale set in the summer of 1987.

Jesse Eisenberg (The Squid and the Whale, the forthcoming Kill Your Darlings) plays James, a recent college graduate en route to NYC to study Journalism at Columbia grad school. After he finds himself unable to afford a vacation to Europe after graduation, he gets a job at the titular amusement park, where he falls for a girl named Em and tries to fit in with the misfit group of fellow Adventureland denizens.

An amusing cast of characters exists almost in their own little world at Adventureland. The couple in charge is played brilliantly by Mottola regulars and SNL stars Bill Hader—sporting a funky moustache—and the ever-quirky Kristen Wiig.

Martin Starr (TV’s short-lived but brilliant Freaks and Geeks) plays Joel, a bespectacled philosopher-in-training lumped with a crappy summer job just like everyone else. Ryan Reynolds (Just Friends, TV’s Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place) plays Connell, the park’s maintenance guy with a penchant for telling people an anecdote about how he once jammed with Lou Reed.

Kristen Stewart (Undertow, next year’s Joan Jett biopic The Runaways) as James’ love interest Em is attractive in a sort of awkward, perpetually-hungover kinda way, and although she isn’t exactly the greatest actress of her generation—she mumbles her way through most every line in the film—her starry-eyed, pot-induced nonchalance fits the character well.

The film’s soundtrack is one of its highlights. Incidental music is by Yo La Tengo, and The Velvet Underground features prominently: Em wears Lou Reed t-shirts and has a Transformer poster on her wall, and “Pale Blue Eyes” is used, poignantly, not once but twice.

Although the rest of the music ranges from the enjoyably cheesy (Wang Chung’s “Dance Hall Days”; “Here I Go Again” by Whitesnake; “Rock Me Amadeus,” the latter of which issues forth ceaselessly from the theme park’s speakers) to the tender and unexpected (Big Star’s “I’m in Love with a Girl”, “Don’t Dream It’s Over” by Crowded House) none of it ever seems clichéd or hackneyed.

That it is true to its setting—it feels as much like the ’80s as did Donnie Darko—and features a cross-section of emerging actors and established comedians, and that they are cast as characters their own age (as opposed to squeezing into high school caricatures) makes the film all the more enjoyable.

As a more grown-up Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist, Adventureland is a refreshingly honest take on John Hughes’ style of romantic comedy that never resorts to the sorts of corny jokes and derivative situations that audiences have been conditioned to expect by mainstream filmmakers. Be sure to stay through the credits for an hilarious fake TV ad for the theme park.

Review by Hugh Lilly

Duncan Jones, born Zowie Bowie (son of David), has made one of the best science fiction films of the past decade. In a future where the Earth gets 70 per-cent of its energy supply from a single corporation which extracts solar power stored in rocks on the moon, Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell, Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) is the lone caretaker of a lunar mining station.

While out on patrol checking one of the harvesters, he crashes his vehicle and wakes up in the infirmary, where a HAL-like robot called Gerty—voiced in perfect deadpan by the inimitable Kevin Spacey—informs him about the accident, and his ensuing memory loss. After recuperating, he spies Gerty communicating live with corporate officials back on Earth. Only as far as Sam knows, the satellite used for live transmissions is on the blink.

Sam starts to hallucinate, and discovers odd video recordings made by people who look like him in the station’s archives, but he doesn’t remember making them. These are only the first pieces of a puzzle that Sam must solve in order to regain his sanity and work out how to safely return home.

Clint Mansell’s sparingly-employed, beautiful score is just as haunting and precise as his work on Darren Aronofsky’s The Fountain and Requiem for a Dream, although the themes here are less grandiose. Borrowing all the best bits from other sci-fi films—most notably 2001: A Space Odyssey and Solyaris—Moon is an astounding début from a promising young director.

Moon screens on Monday July 13^th at 4.45pm.

Reviews by Hugh Lilly

Bright Star

Jane Campion, who hasn’t made a film since 2003’s disastrous In The Cut, returns with a solid period piece that is beautifully photographed but moves at an almost unbearably glacial pace. The story is of the poet John Keats and his ill-fated whirlwind romance with the girl next door, Fanny Brawne.

Ben Wishaw gives a great performance as the Romantic poet, and Abbie Cornish, terrific opposite Heath Ledger in Candy, plays his lover with genuine tenderness; her emotion in reacting to news of Keats’ death toward the end is palpable. Paul Schneider (David Gordon Green’s All The Real Girls and Sam Mendes’ forthcoming Away We Go) plays Keats’ friend Charles Brown. An erstwhile poet, Mr. Brown is irritable Scot with a penchant for annoying everyone in sight, and Ms. Brawne is often the subject of his tactless jokes.

Shot in Australia with mostly British funds, there is no denying the film’s visual appeal: a soft palette of pastels collides beautifully with verdant landscapes. Although the film is certainly interesting—and frequently witty—it is perhaps a bit long; at nearly two hours, this slow-moving mid-nineteenth century drama risks slipping into tedium.

Thirst

Park Chan-wook, director of the ultra-violent cult hit Oldboy, the equally violent Vengeance trilogy and the unusual romantic comedy I’m A Cyborg, But That’s OK, returns with a vampire tale unlike any other. An absurd tale of vampiric amour fou, Thirst tells the story of a Priest, who offers to undergo an experimental medical procedure aiming to provide a cure for a disease. The procedure fails, and, through drinking the blood of a comatose patient, the Priest is turned into a vampire. He is called upon to pray for a patient who, it turns out, he knew as a child.

He becomes close again with the patient and his family, and has a love affair with the patient’s wife. From here the story spirals—awesomely—into depravity and insanity as his bloodlust overtakes his once-objective mind. The film’s hyper-stylised camerawork is, particularly in the first third, spectacular. By turns outrageously hilarious and somewhat cringe-inducing—but never a gratuitous gore-fest— Thirst is a welcome rush of energy for a genre saturated by mediocre TV series (Alan Ball’s True Blood) and vapid tweenage abstinence fantasies (the Twilight series).

For screening times, see the Festival’s website.

(dir. Astra Taylor | Canada | 2008 | 87 min.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

It is a rare thing that a film rooted in academia can both inform and entertain its audience. Astra Taylor, a Canadian filmmaker, whose début feature was a study of the heavily-accented Slovenian psychoanalyst and cultural critic Slavoj Žižek, returns with a film that presents a wider picture of modern thinking, interviewing eight philosophers about their areas of expertise. The film’s tagline is “Philosophy is in the streets,” and this is reflected in the unusual way Taylor presents her interviewees; they walk around the streets of metropolises talking directly to the camera—a world away from the cloistered environment of academia. The film takes its title from Socrates’ famous line in Plato’s Apology, “the life which is unexamined is not worth living”.

Each philosopher gets about ten minutes of screen time, and the film opens and closes with segments featuring the existentialist Cornel West, probably the best known of the film’s subjects. The existentialist philosopher, with his slightly-greying afro bouncing around, leans forward from the back of a car in rush hour New York traffic, preaching about the futility of life and explains how blues music influences his work.

NYU professor Avital Ronell is perhaps the most self-absorbed and pretentious speaker. Suspicious “historically and intellectually of the promise of meaning” in philosophy, she walks around Central Park critically debating little more than the film itself and Taylor’s expectations of her subjects. The Australian applied ethics expert Peter Singer ponders the morality of consumerism and the ethics of affluence on Fifth Avenue, one of the world’s most expensive shopping districts. Set to the bustling rhythms of midday Manhattan streets—and cut to the swirling sounds of the blind jazz composer Moondog—this segment is among the film’s most entertaining.

There is a recurring question in Taylor’s collected conversations: “Is philosophy a search for meaning?” This is never quite answered—not that it could be in such a limited time frame. Instead, each interviewee has free reign on their ten minutes at the podium. This leads to interesting commentary that probably would not have emerged had the speakers been limited to specific topics. Kwame Anthony Appiah, a Ghanaian/British thinker on cosmopolitanism, discusses the complexities of modern life. With globalisation, he argues, “travelling through an airport, you pass more people in a few minutes than our most remote human ancestors would have seen in their entire lives.”

Martha Nussbaum discusses social justice, welfare and disabilities while strolling along a lakefront walkway. Taylor then changes location entirely, switching to Slavoj Žižek in a garbage dump, discussing a new approach to ecology. Žižek, who is always enjoyable—his film The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema was massively entertaining—argues that humans should “move away from trying to find our roots in nature,” and instead focus on becoming more alienated from the earth; more artificial. The sci-fi aspect of his comments segues nicely into a segment on the limits of the body with the post-structuralist feminist Judith Butler in San Francisco.

Butler is joined by the director’s sister, Sunaura Taylor, an activist for disability rights. Taylor, who is herself disabled, said she moved to San Francisco from Brooklyn because it is a more accessible city than New York. She and Butler discuss stigmas attached to disability, and the extent to which the disabled are dependent upon others. They also discuss the body and its functions, and the question of where the body ends and artifice takes over, which links both to Žižek’s comments on ecology and Nussbaum’s thoughts about human capabilities.

Examined Life is an unconventional ‘talking heads-type documentary that is engrossing despite its brevity. It removes philosophy from its stigmatised ivory tower and makes it accessible—although, thankfully, it never dumbs down its subject or strays into pop philosophy; Taylor’s film retains the intellectual feel of a piece of academic writing while at the same time conveying ideas and thoughts in an easily-understood manner.

Examined Life screens at the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland on July 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th at various times.

(dir. Ben Steinbauer | USA | 2009 | 87 mins.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

In 1989, Jack Rebney, an imposingly tall man with a loud ‘made for radio’ voice, made a series of industrial commercials for Winnebago, a company that builds motor homes and recreational vehicles. Filmed at the height of a boiling Iowan summer and with a largely inexperienced crew, tempers flared. The shoot was eventually completed, though, and Rebney left Winnebago and retreated to the serenity of the hills above California.

But outtakes from the shoot, featuring Rebney’s booming tenor spouting a series of unintentionally hilarious expletives at the camera man and other crew members, became infamous, making Rebney an underground star. Ben Steinbauer’s film tells the tale of the outtakes, and Rebney’s re-entry to the limelight, alongside a brief history of the viral video.

Rebney’s colourful catchphrases quickly became a pop culture phenomenon, spreading around the world through pre-Internet TV clip shows, offbeat little bric-a-brac film festivals and, eventually video sites like YouTube. References started appearing in TV shows like 30 Rock—the episode where Alec Baldwin’s character is taping a promo and keeps forgetting his lines—and Rebney’s antics were parodied by amateurs and professionals alike, most hilariously by an Italian YouTube enthusiast.

The film, made last year, finds Rebney living what looks like a peaceful, calm existence in a cabin in the woods above L.A. The director confronts Rebney with the fact that he’s become famous for something that happened twenty years ago, and is now known to a legion of fans variously as The Angriest Man In The World, The World’s Angriest RV Salesman or simply Winnebago Man.

Steinbauer convinces a reluctant Rebney to appear at a screening of the foul-mouthed outtakes at the Found Footage Festival in San Francisco, where he realises that the people who adore him aren’t just Internet ‘wackos’. Winnebago Man is an uproarious look at how pop culture phenomena are born, and the lasting effects they have on their unwitting stars.

Winnebago Man screens at the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festival in Auckland on Wednesday 15th and Thursday 16th July.

The September Issue

(dir. R.J. Cutler | USA | 2008 | 90 mins.)

Review by Hugh Lilly

A profile of Vogue editor-in-chief Anna Wintour and the making of the September 2008 issue of the magazine, R.J. Cutler’s new documentary is chock full of style—which unfortunately means there’s not much room left for substance. Playing out like a considerably extended episode of Queer Eye for the Straight Guy or one of Louis Theroux’s more esoteric Weird Weekends, the film presents Wintour as an unapproachable, cold authority figure at the head of the world’s “fashion bible.”

The titular issue is, we’re informed, the most important of the year: “In the fashion world, September is January,” remarks a commentator near the beginning. The final tally for the issue was 840 pages—the biggest in the magazine’s history to that point—and, to its detriment, Cutler’s 9-month odyssey leading up to the publication of that issue would have those unfamiliar with the magazine believe that its glossy pages are composed almost entirely of photographs and advertising. There are no interviews with any writers, and the film doesn’t explore in any particular depth any of the photographers or other artists or stylists. It does, however, follow quite closely Grace Coddington, a former model for the magazine-turned editorial stylist. Coddington, essentially Wintour’s right-hand woman, sets up and directs the magazine’s photoshoots and becomes the film’s focus. Her story and persona is a welcome relief from the stereotypes that populate the rest of the film.

British-born Wintour, notorious for being an ‘ice queen,’ is shown as such; aloof and “accessible only to those who she needs to be accessible to,” it almost seems as if the angularly-coiffed, heavily-botoxed icon of the fashion world is putting on a show for the cameras; surely someone in as presumably enjoyable a job as hers, jet-setting around the world and meeting titans of industry wouldn’t really be that unhappy? Because she almost never lets her guard down, Wintour presents herself almost as self-parody, and this quickly becomes tiresome.

The film travels with Coddington and her team as they chase photographers, stylists and that month’s cover girl Sienna Miller around Europe, scouting locations and preparing shoots. There’s a shoot in Rome, and one at Versailles, a much-used location recently fetishised in Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette and visited by the makers of Annie Leibovitz: Life Through A Lens—a far more in-depth, fascinating documentary about fashion, celebrity and artistry than The September Issue. Cutler’s film is clearly designed to appeal to a specific market: devotees of fashion and entertainment television networks like E!, and in this it succeeds, albeit not admirably.

The film looks the part—it won the ‘Best Cinematography (US Documentary)’ award at Sundance last year—but unfortunately its flashiness cannot make up for its flaws and anaemic pseudo-insight. The September Issue is entertaining, to be sure, but it explores its subject matter superficially, trying to cover up the fact with quick-cut editing and an oh-so-hip roster of indie pop on its soundtrack. Cutler, whose 1992 documentary The War Room was an illuminating and insightful account of Bill Clinton’s Presidential campaign, has here regrettably substituted glossiness for substance, never once provoking his subjects lest they admonish him, and opting for Office-like ‘reality’ camerawork which yields nothing new; traditional ‘talking-head’ interview footage, which is used for barely ten per cent of the film, would doubtless have given audiences something to think about, instead of being mindlessly entertained by flashing lights and zippy editing. For an industry that many see as ridiculous and pompous to be presented as such is unfortunate to say the least. Perhaps the rarefied world of haute-couture will be better served by Matt Tyranauer’s Valentino: The Last Emperor, a profile of the world-renowned Italian designer.

The September Issue screens in the upcoming New Zealand International Film Festivals in Auckland’s Civic Theatre on Friday July 10^th at 2pm, and Saturday July 11^th at 7pm.