The freewheeling, anything-goes ethos of the Internet has given way to a bland echo chamber of ego-stroking. But maybe that’s what’s happened: On Facebook, we can only “like” things that people post; on Tumblr, there’s likewise only a “heart” button to indicate our approval. Twitter has a star.

When people write things on Facebook or Tumblr or Twitter that we disagree with or simply find disagreeable, we can block them without their knowledge of our disapproval, and we never again have to see their posts about how much Going Rogue speaks to them.

via The Warm-Fuzzy Web — Daily Intel.

I swear I’m not this person. I proudly align myself with shows like Mad Men—shows that don’t require defending, shows that affirm my impeccable tastes. But something happens to me over the course of an episode of Glee. An eerie calm. After ten minutes or so, I stop harrumphing at implausible turns in the plot, I stop pointing at the screen and saying Come on! to the empty room. I am pacified, wiggling my toes like a child as I wait for each new song, plunging with no self-consciousness into every melody.

It’s the times like this, when the songs have all ended and I’ve quickly flipped to MSNBC that thoughts come back, embarrassed thoughts like, What the hell just happened? I need some sort of explanation for my burgeoning, passionate relationship with a musical TV show. I have been sad lately—fairly broke and in a new place, giving into a quarter-life crisis and the prospect of a jobless future. And now add to that picture a weekly date with FOX to watch a bunch of unknowns rehash the Top 40. While it is tempting to locate Glee on a pretty hefty list of things I do and am ashamed of, there must be something deeper going on.

From On Glee by Lucas Mann in Wag’s Revue.

The subtleties of Avatar’s 3-D do contribute to the viewer’s immersion into an alien environment, but it’s not the only thing that’s doing that, or even necessary. Use the fanciest 3-D you want without a competent grasp of basic tools like absorbing characters, story, etc. and no one’s going to be immersed in your “world” no matter what. The “flatness” of Avatar’s 3-D also begs the question, “why even use it in the first place?” I was immersed in Aliens without 3-D. I was immersed in Jurassic Park without 3-D. What other level of immersion do you need to enjoy a film??

More at fatblog: Flight of the Na’vi-gator

As Roger Ebert recently tweeted, 2009 has been “one of those magic movie years, like 1939 or 1976.” He’s not wrong; here are my picks for…

The ten best films of the year:

1. A Serious Man (dir. & scr. Joel Coen, Ethan Coen)

In which Roger Deakins (once again) delivers some of the most beautiful cinematic images of the year; Michael Stuhlbarg gives the performance of the year, and in which the Coens once again deliver a helping of Minnesota nice—except this time, it’s painfully (and hilariously) Jewish.



2. (500) Days of Summer (dir. Marc Webb, scr. Scott Neustadter, Michael H. Weber)

In which a marquee reads “Part Vampire, Part Giant: VAGIANT.” Also, Zooey Deschanel is very attractive, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt is quite the song-and-dance man.



3. The Limits of Control (dir. & scr. Jim Jarmusch, inspired by William Burroughs’ essay of the same name)

Stunning scenery meets sparsely-populated script. Cinematic perfection ensues. “La vida non vale nada,” indeed.



4. Moon (dir. Duncan Jones, scr. Jones, Nathan Parker)

In which Sam Rockwell confronts his own mortality. One of the best science-fiction films since Primer.



5. Where The Wild Things Are (dir. Spike Jonze, scr. Jonze, Dave Eggers from the book by Maurice Sendak)

In which a kid sails across the sea to a land of outsized, loveably manic-depressive monsters. A sense of child-like wonder and boundless enthusiasm seeps from every gorgeous frame. One of the most faithful feature-length adaptations ever—a task made all the more difficult by the fact that the source text runs not much longer than a haiku. An impressive, lush soundtrack and score by Karen O. and Carter Burwell—but the film’s too scary for young kids, and occasionally snooze-inducing in adults.



6. UP (dir. Pete Docter, co-dir. Bob Peterson, scr. Docter, Peterson, Thomas McCarthy)

In which a chubby Asian-American kid latches onto the side of an octogenerian’s house. The old coot has attached thousands of helium-filled balloons to the fireplace in order to finally travel to his late wife’s holiday spot; beautiful adventure ensues.



7. Adventureland (dir. & scr. Gregg Mottola)

In which Kristen Stewart plays a cute-as-a-button stoner (maybe not acting?), and Jesse Eisenberg cements his place as his generation’s Anthony Michael Hall. Eisenberg’s second flick this year ending in -land and set at least partly in a theme park. Perfect casting all-round, and a lovingly-detailed ’80s milleu to match.



8. Inglourious Basterds (dir. & scr. Quentin Tarantino)

In which Nazi-scalping Jews scalp Nazis, and it is awesome.



9. Star Trek (dir. JJ Abrams, scr. Roberto Orci, Alex Kurtzman)

In which frenetic camerawork and an abundance of lens flares dazzles and pummels the audience into orgiastic submission. Abrams’ franchise reboot was one of the most exciting cinema experiences of the year.



10. Antichrist (dir. & scr. Lars von Trier)

In which that crazy mofo Charlotte Gainsbourg violently attacks genitalia (both her own and her husband’s) with rusty garden tools. The thirteenth feature film by the Danish auteur terrible, and this year’s Cannes scandal, turns out to be not actually so shocking as to cause physical reactions, and quite beautiful to boot.

Honorable mentions, in no particular order:

• 2012 (dir. Roland Emmerich, scr. Emmerich, Harald Kloser)

Only German master of disaster Emmerich (Independence Day, Godzilla, The Day After Tomorrow) could take such a ludicrous concept—the ancient Mayan end-times prophecy—and make it so deliriously, spectacularly entertaining. John Cusack is perfectly cast as the hapless has-been writer who has to save the day, and so is Woody Harrelson as an AM-radio transmitting nutbar living in out of an RV in Yellowstone. At the other end of the casting scale, having a French actress badly voice a Ruski Paris Hilton wasn’t a good call—and I’d like to have seen the ending where everyone dies because, like, there’s really no way anyone’s that into the film that they’d actually be rooting for Amanda Peet, the rest of her family and that blonde bimbo and her yappy little handbag-sized bitch. Also, you know you’re taking your solar apocalypse movie a little too seriously when you make Danny Glover an ersatz Obama but fail to give him the chance to say “I’m getting too old for this shit!” You’re a-splodin’ the whole wide world; at least let us laugh a bit—not at the movie, but with the characters/actors trapped inside it. Hopefully J.B. Smoove and Jimmi Simpson are cast in the Lost-esque spinoff TV series, 2013.



• 意外 (Accident) (dir. Soi Cheang, scr. Szeto Kam-Yuen, Nicholl Tang)

Soi’s masterfully-directed film about a gun-for-hire who frames his hits as if they were accidental is a ponderous and oftentimes wonderfully philosophical character study.



• Public Enemies (dir. Michael Mann, scr. Mann, Ronan Bennett, Ann Biderman)

Mann’s eye for detail is put to good use, but the film ultimately seems like a collection of vingettes, albeit very entertaining ones; characters aren’t developed enough for us to care about them, but at least we have fun watching Dillinger doing what he does best: robbing banks and making love.

Bromances:

• I Love You, Man (dir. John Hamburg, scr. Hamburg, Larry Levin)
• The Hangover (dir. Todd Philips, scr. Jon Lucas, Scott Moore)

Both were very funny, but despite an awesome cameo from Andy Samberg, Paul “Slappin’ da bass” Rudd and Jason Segel narrowly lose out to Zach Galafinakis’ innate awesomeness, and Ken Jeong’s wise career change.

Stop-motion/animation:

• Coraline (dir. & scr. Henry Selick from the novella by Neil Gaiman)
• The Fantastic Mr. Fox (dir. Wes Anderson, scr. Anderson, Noah Baumbach from the novel by Roald Dahl)
• Mary and Max (dir. & scr. Adam Elliot)

• 9 (dir. Shane Acker, scr. Acker, Pamela Pettler)
• 崖の上のポニョ (Gake no ue no Ponyo/Ponyo on the Cliff by the Sea) (dir & scr. Hayao Miyazaki)

Selick’s film beats both Mr. Fox and Mary and Max on technical competency and storytelling alone, but Anderson’s film is more spritely, and has his usual British Invasion soundtrack, and some awesome voice work—Elliot’s, though, is more emotionally resonant than either Fox or Coraline. Meanwhile, Acker’s CGI/craftwork mashup should have remained in short-film purgatory, and Miyazaki delivers a beautifully pastel-toned but disappointingly one-dimensional re-telling of the Hansel & Gretel fable.

The undead:

• Thirst
• Jennifer’s Body
  
• Zombieland

All three of these were scary, stylish and hilarious. Sometimes they were all three at once: stylarious. (Paranormal Activity, on the other hand, is funnier than it is scary—largely because of a changed ending that whacks the audience over the head unnecessarily.)

• Away We Go (dir. Sam Mendes, scr. Dave Eggers, Vendela Vida)

A hipster-targeted road rom-com with more than enough entertaining cameos—Allison Janney, Catherine O’Hara, Jim Gaffifigan, Jeff Daniels, Chris Messina, Melanie Lynskey, Maggie Gyllenhaal—to keep it chugging along.

• 竊聽風雲 (Overheard)
• Bright Star
• Disgrace
• Humpday
  
• An Education
• The Cove
• Examined Life
• Winnebago Man
• The September Issue
  
• Los abrazos rotos (Broken Embraces)

• Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) (dir. & scr. Michael Hanneke)
• L’heure d’été (Summer Hours) (dir. & scr. Olivier Assayas)
• Aruitemo aruitemo (Still Walking / Even if You Walk and Walk) (dir. & scr. Hirokazu Kore-eda)
• Män som hatar kvinnor (Men Who Hate Women/ The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo) (dir. Niels Arden, scr. Oplev Nikolaj Arcel, Rasmus Heisterberg, from the novel by Stieg Larsson)
• Der Baader Meinhof Komplex (dir. Uli Edel, scr. Edel, Bernd Eichinger from the book by Stefan Aust)

Films that would be on these lists, had they been released in New Zealand:

• Whatever Works (dir. & scr. Woody Allen)
• House of the Devil (dir. & scr. Ti West)
• A Town Called Panic (dir. & scr. Stéphane Aubier, Vincent Patar)
• Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans (dir. Werner Herzog, scr. William Finkelstein, partly from an earlier film written by Victor Argo, Paul Calderon, Abel Ferrara and Zoë Lund)
• The Goods: Live Hard, Sell Hard (dir. Neil Brennan, scr. Andy Stock, Rick Stempson)
• Me and Orson Welles (dir. Richard Linklater, scr. Vincent Palmo Jr., Holly Gent Palmo from the novel by Robert Kaplow)
• The Road (dir. John Hillcoat, scr. Joe Penhall from the novel by Cormac McCarthy)
• Black Dynamite (dir. Scott Sanders, scr. Sanders, Michael Jai White, Byron Minns)
• The Box (dir. & scr. Richard Kelly from the short story “Button, Button” by Richard Matheson)
• The Messenger (dir. Oren Moverman, scr. Moverman, Alessandro Camon)
• The Girlfriend Experience (dir. Steven Soderbergh, scr. David Levien, Brian Koppelman)
  
• A Single Man (dir. & scr. Tom Ford from the novel by Christopher Isherwood)
• La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) (dir. & scr. Lucrecia Martel)
• Tetro (dir. & scr. Francis Ford Coppola)
• The Last Station (dir. & scr. Michael Hoffman from the novel by Jay Parini)
• The Hurt Locker (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, scr. Mark Boal)

• Nine (dir. Rob Marshall, scr. Michael Tolkin, Anthony Minghella from the Broadway musical by Arthur Kopit, Maury Yeston and Mario Fratti) (Opens limited January 28)
• Julia (dir. Erick Zonca, scr. Zonca, Aude Py, Roger Bohbot, Michael Collins, Camille Natta) (Opens January 28 at the Academy)

[Ineligible, because they were released in 2008 in the US: Rachel Getting Married, Synecdoche, New York, Milk, Revolutionary Road, The Wrestler, The Class, Wendy and Lucy, In Search of a Midnight Kiss, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Doubt, Slumdog Millionaire, Frost/Nixon.]

The worst films of the year:
Red Cliff, Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen, Year One, Taking Woodstock, The Founding of a Republic, The Informant!, Funny People, Religulous, Easy Virtue, The Boat That Rocked, The Invention of Lying, I’m Not Harry Jenson, The Imaginarium of Dr Parnassus, The Wackness, Paper Heart, The Taking of Pelham 1,2,3, Duplicity, Capitalism: A Love Story.

The absolute rock-bottom worst films of this or any year:

The Vintner’s Luck, Feng sheng (The Message), Knowing, Surrogates, X-Men Origins: Wolverine, The Shinjuku Incident. (I haven’t seen Twilight: New Moon, but I’m gonna go ahead and assume it’s un-watchably bad.)

James Cameron’s new film might be technically impressive but gets stuck uncomfortably between sci-fi epic and action spectacular, writes Hugh Lilly

Director James Cameron is best known for making the first two films in the Terminator franchise; the action flick True Lies, and the 1997 film Titanic—which was, at the time, the highest-grossing film ever. He began writing Avatar, an action-sci-fi adventure, in 1994 and has been working on it steadily since, developing new camera technologies and awaiting CGI techniques in order to have his vision realised.

The film is set in a future 145 years from now where Earth has been basically destroyed—presumably by global warming; the script doesn’t bother to explain—and a military fleet is despatched to Pandora, a moon near Earth which is home to magnificent flora and fauna—and an indigenous population known as the Na’vi: tall blue monkey-like creatures who wear Native American goatskins and have feathers in their long, black hair.

The British-born Australian actor Sam Worthington, whose only previous claim to fame was an appearance in the instantly forgettable, McG-directed Terminator Salvation, plays the jarhead Marine protagonist who possesses arrogance and astounding ignorance in equal measure—and a spinal cord injury that has left him paralyzed from the waist down. He’s therefore a perfect candidate for the newly-invented ‘avatar’ programme in which humans lie in a sort of sensory-deprivation chamber and can remotely control bodies that appear to be identical to the Aborigines. Worthington and a group of scientists—including one played by Sigourney Weaver—enter the natives’ world via these avatars in order to learn about their society and the strong spiritual connection the Na’vi have to their ancestors and their planet.

But while the scientists want to explore Pandora, the army—comprised of the imposing stage actor Stephen Lang, the tomboyish Michelle Rodriguez, and a whinier-than-usual Giovanni Ribisi—just want to destroy it and mine the soil for a rare, extremely valuable mineral with the egregiously unimaginative name ‘Unobtainium’. While a political argument persists between the two internal factions, Worthington’s jock character breaks all the rules and falls in love with Neytiri (Zoe Saldaña, most recently seen in J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek), a Pandora native whose parents just happen to be the king and queen of the Na’vi. From here the film vacillates between the Pocahontas-like sci-fi love story and the action-adventure military story—between an extravagantly-detailed fluorescent CGI world and an amazing stereoscopic 3-D ‘real life’ world, and, although the latter is a tremendous achievement from a technical standpoint, it becomes increasingly gimmicky as the film unfolds.

In Avatar, Cameron has tried to make both a sci-fi epic and a fast-paced action extravaganza—but the script’s clunky dialogue, lack of character development and cop-out voice-over—not to mention atrocious acting from Worthington—disrupt the otherwise enjoyable experience. James Horner’s score seems to have two settings: one suitably ethnic, the other almost obscenely bombastic—and neither quite complement the mise-en-scène particularly well. The director has been forced to opt for dazzle over substance, making the film tremendously fun to look at, but not much fun to think about—especially over 161 minutes.

Dirty Projectors performing at Brookyln’s Pool Parties in July 2009

Sean O’Neal at the Onion A.V. Club, on one of my favourite records of the year, Bitte Orca, and the decade that was:

There’s no better yardstick for measuring the artistic leaps and bounds of the past decade than with an evolutionary chart of “New York buzz bands” spanning The Strokes to Dirty Projectors. We kicked off the decade stoked on purist, backward-looking rock ’n’ roll; we ended it debating 3/2 time signatures and throwing around heretofore-alien terms like “kwassa kwassa picking” and “vocal hocketing.” And even though the current obsession with over-intellectualizing pop music will inevitably give way to another minimalist revolt, Bitte Orca proves that just because an album is slightly pretentious in its construction doesn’t mean it has to be joyless. Sometimes it can be a ragged, fascinating mess even when it’s planned to an inhuman degree, and sometimes genre mash-ups that resemble the Icarus-like overreaching of music-comp majors (“We’ll start with West African-inspired guitar patterns, Timbaland beats, and cut-up harmonies that sound like live Steve Reich remixes, then make them into an R&B song!”) become visceral, throw-your-hands-in-the-air moments on record. Apparently we’ve learned a lot this decade.

• The Best Music of the Decade – The Onion A.V. Club

I don’t really like Stephen King that much, but the cover design for his new novel, Under the Dome, is amazing:

My friend Rosabel has a thing for words. Also, a way with words:

Words are hard. Some are so ferverently inspirational that they leave you feeling quietly disgruntled, while others are infused with so much fuck-you-i’m-just-a-badass-teen attitude that they make you cringe with embarrassment for ever having read them.

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.