Despite Martin Scorsese’s recent reputation as a thoroughly mainstream filmmaker whose work attracts mass praise and awards – only one of his last five cinematic releases hasn’t received Best Picture and Director nominations, and he won for The Departed in 2006 plus three Emmys in 2012 – he has always been a daring filmmaking. One whose choice of material and use of technique have frequently put him at odds with audiences and even critics. It’s that spirit of cinematic chutzpah that imbues his latest feature, The Wolf of Wall Street. Unfortunately in this case, all of his charismatic filmmaking and brash style are in service of a story that feels particularly rote for this iconic filmmaker.

If his last film, Hugo, shined a light on an all too neglected part of history, then The Wolf of Wall Street sadly shines yet another light on an all too often seen part of history. The story may be knew to Scorsese, but the mechanics sure aren’t. Starring Leonardo DiCaprio as Jordon Belfort, a stockbroker with stars (and moons and planets and galaxies) in his eyes, it’s a story that Scorsese has told before and that other filmmakers have told before. Perhaps it hasn’t been told quite as profanely, but I’m not sure that’s exactly a good thing. Was there a reason that despicable Wall Street cronies needed another movie about their scandalous behaviour? There’s certainly nothing to learn from this go around the block. At least not when told in this fashion.

While the film may at first instance recall the likes of Casino and Goodfellas, it’s actually the much-maligned musical New York, New York that springs to mind as its most logical cousin. Robert DeNiro’s Jimmy Doyle from that 163-minute implosion of style from 1977 shares much in common with DiCaprio’s Belfort. Except, in that case there was a propulsive energy that came from a director furiously trying to bring a distinct and unique vision to light. Wolf on the other hand feels about as close as Scorsese could get to a throw away. If you can ever have a three-hour, $100mil throw away. I struggle to recognise what his unique point of view or fresh insight is with the material. Did he have one?

Stylistic tics and flourishes lack the zing they have elsewhere and the entire character of Jordan Belfort feels like the safe option when there were many riskier selections that could have been made. It would make for an entirely different film, sure, but Margot Robbie is dynamite as Belfort’s second wife Naomi and yet to the film’s detriment Terence Winter’s screenplay is only partially interested her resulting in her vanishing for long periods of time and sapping the film of her vivacious, electric performance. Likewise the likes of Joanna Lumley as a cash-trafficking duchess, Kyle Chandler as an FBI agent with the smarts to go after such a cunning charmer, and Jean Dujardin as a European bank chief all provide fun and interesting counter-points to the main story, but instead decides to have a boat capsizing sequence for no other reason than for the absurd factor, which in a three-hour motion picture renders it superfluous.

Much has been said about the film’s so-called endorsement of its sex-and-drugs-riddled actions (I guess after Zero Dark Thirty and now this it’s becoming an annual to do). While I think it’s silly to suggest that a filmmaker like Martin Scorsese – himself a recovered drug addict – is endorsing the way Wolf’s characters steal from innocent people for their own gain of sex, drugs and power, I do think that the film indulges in their actions to an alarming degree. That may very well be “the point”, but I also got “the point” after the third orgy and the second Quaalude trip. The crimes and misdemeanours of Jordan and team of bro dudes lose any potential social commentary once they begin to get repeated over and over again, and by the third hour too many other story elements have been shoved aside for an extended scene where drugs make DiCaprio replicate the symptoms of cerebral palsy. Umm, funny, right? That the near-sold out audience I saw the film with were laughing uproariously throughout most of the film’s most boldly amoral moments suggests to me that any satire there was in the piece got lost. Much like many said the message of The Great Gatsby got lost amidst Baz Luhrmann’s predilection for rowdy party sequences and distracting musical cues, so too does Scorsese get lost amongst his repetitious house parties, coke-fuelled mile high orgies and early ’90s top 40 rock music.

Leonardo DiCaprio really is excellent, however. If anyone is to thank for keeping the film afloat as much as it is then it is he. Not that the film allows anybody else to really try. He’s looser than he’s been since Catch Me If You Can, and has a way of acting with his entire body that I’m unsure I’ve seen from him since What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. There’s a fidgety nature that is embedded into the role’s DNA, but he takes the salacious element of the art and runs with it in a way that is surprising and, quite frankly, a relief. Too often DiCaprio falls into safe spots with his work, but not here and it’s his finest work yet from the five-film Scorsese and DiCaprio collaboration. Of course, DiCaprio may be acting with his body, but it’s the women with whom the screenplay is more interested body-wise. It’s actually a bit alarming how many of the female cast show off their entire bodies. Naturally, DiCaprio’s modestly is upheld thanks to some, shall we say, curious editing and Jonah Hill’s prosthetic penis isn’t worth much of a laugh if for no other reason than we know it’s a prosthetic.

With excellent costume and production design, The Wolf of Wall Street is an undeniable handsome film as Scorsese films always are, but I just worry that he’s perhaps grown accustomed to being handed large budget cheques. I’d love to see Scorsese reel back and force himself into something that feels urgent. Could he make another Bringing Out the Dead or The King of Comedy? Does he even want to? I wouldn’t hazard a guess, but for all his latest’s eye-popping wow factor, it’s a sadly disappointing creative achievement.

The Pet Shop Boys’ 1993 album, Very, is identified as their unofficial “coming out” record by fans given its musical and visual stylisation, lyrical content, and the fact that lead singer Neil Tennant had recently spoken publicly of his sexuality before confirming that he was gay in a 1994 interview with Attitude magazine. If this period confirmed what most already suspected, it wasn’t because he and bandmate Chris Lowe had been trying to hide it. The music, which through the 1980s had fit quite comfortably in with the mainstream world of Brit-pop before veering towards euro-trance and global influences of later albums, had always had a queer bent to it, their music videos were directed by Derek Jarman, and they even collaborated with Liza Minnelli.

One can only imagine how flamboyant It Couldn’t Happen Here would have been if made in 1993. Nevertheless, the Boys’ first and only film stands as a genuinely strange curiosity. An avant-garde novelty that hasn’t gained much in the way of sense since its debut in 1988 (including a 1987 premiere at the London Film Festival). Filled with moments of crass surrealism and plodding nonsense that nonetheless gives way to a fleetingly fascinating glimpse into the Pet Shop Boys’ world at the time. Directed by Jack Bond, It Couldn’t Happen Here exists in a strikingly strange anti-Catholic, anti-Thatcher AIDS wasteland that sees Tennant and Lowe on a nonsensical road trip to Kings Cross with musical detours at every turn and discombobulating comedic vignettes featuring Barbara Windsor, Gareth Hunt, Carmen du Sautoy and Joss Ackland in multiple, yet equally baffling, roles.

I almost can’t tell if It Couldn’t Happen Here is any good. Whether it is or not might be completely irrelevant in the grand scheme of things. It certainly doesn’t look good. The visuals are rather flat, reminiscent of cheap British TV and music videos. Unsurprisingly, the project started out as a longform music video before being stretched to feature-length and released theatrically on a perplexed (presumably limited) British public and even America (once upon a time this film was released in an AMC multiplex in Century City!) When the film enters musical mode, such as a guffaw-inducing piece of choreography set to their 1987 single “Rent”, it lacks reason, but so does everything else in the film. It’s experimental in structure if not visually.

Still, for as bizarre as the 1980s were in the pop world, something like It Couldn’t Happen Here is something altogether unique. It likely would have been easy for the Boys to have made a film that told a more conventional story with their music even if they did decline the prospect in the late ‘90s for a Mamma Mia! Style jukebox music based around their hit songs. What’s left then is a film of limited appeal that trades in symbolism and mood. It’s of little surprise that the director made a documentary with Salvador Dali and here he uses the film to take crooked jabs at Catholicism and Margaret Thatcher’s conservative decimation of England.

Tennant, a child of Catholic upbringing, surely felt a desire to take on the church given they had criticised the band’s “It’s a Sin” and the film’s staging – much different to Derek Jarmon’s video take – of a salacious stage performance with stripping nuns is the amongst the film’s most obvious moments. It recalls Bob Fosse’s childhood burlesque from All That Jazz. It’s also one of its more immediate moments as Bond’s low-key directing of Tennant and Lowe (who rarely appear singing on-screen) tries to skirt around their lack of acting ability. Sadly, as if countering that, the other actors appear to have turned up their acting to eleven, making for frequently nauseating experience. Songs like “Suburbia” feel shoehorned into the backdrop, but at least “West End Girls” is given a comical rap interpretation by three youths, presumably a thorn in Thatcher’s side.

By film’s end the Boys have arrived in a seemingly war-torn King’s Cross (unsurprisingly to Tennant’s soulful performance of “King’s Cross”, itself a notorious song in British culture due to its close links to the King’s Cross Fire in 1987) as military guards march by wilfully letting buildings burn. They enter an empty discotheque and it appears the Pet Shop Boys’ queer sensibilities were in full effect. Just two years later they would release “Being Boring”, inarguably one of the most touching ruminations on the AIDS crisis that the pop world produced, and I think they’re clearly making a comparison between Thatcher and AIDS and how they both targeted the most vulnerable members of society, hollowing out their minds and bodies and replacing them with their misguided new world order. “The hungry sheep look up and are not fed, but swollen with wind and rank mist they draw. Rot inwards and foul contagion spreads”, reads a bewigged limousine driver from a verse of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. No doubt deliberately placed side-by-side with the Pet Shop Boys’ own “King’s Cross” lyric, “Dead and wounded on either side / you know it’s only a matter of time.”

As bomb sirens whirl outside, Tennant and Lowe enter a vacated dancefloor singing “One More Chance”, eventually joined by seemingly wholesome, and yet sickly, ballroom dancers suggesting a world of closeted silence that Thatcher hath wrought. That the Pet Shop Boys were able to break free of the conservative shackles that had been placed upon England and not only continued to do make outstanding, popular music for decades to come, but did so while outwardly projecting their homosexuality is impressive. “It couldn’t happen here”, their titular song suggests. Sadly. It already had, but many just hadn’t noticed. In that case, the satire of the piece doesn’t necessarily work – I doubt any conservatives would find themselves in a theatre watching this film – but it’s admirable.

As a work of film, It Couldn’t Happen Here is crude and gangly. It’s doesn’t always work, is frequently hilarious for presumably unintentional reasons, and doesn’t succeed at putting forth an always compelling narrative (even an experimental one) for its scant 82 minutes. However, as a record of its time, it fascinates. As a defiantly queer work of subversive, experimental art it has the ability to engage. Whether the Pet Shop Boys’ pop melodies were necessary is debatable, but as a means of expressing their feelings towards what they clearly saw as a dangerous situation it proves surprisingly appropriate. Its ambitions outweigh its results, but it’s a rare experience indeed and unlike any other one might expect to find come out of an outfit as sublimely refined as the Pet Shop Boys.

For the second year in the row the humbly self-titled “Australian Oscars”, or the AACTA Awards, gave a single film all but one of the awards for which it was nominated. Last year’s belle of the ball was Wayne Blair’s The Sapphires, which won 11 awards from 12 nominations (it missed out on visual effects) including film, director, actor, actress, supporting actress, adapted screenplay and all the technical craft categories that one would think could have been divvied up amongst the competitors for the sake of fairness, transparency, and, well, maybe because other movies deserved them. This year’s big winner at the ceremony held last week in Sydney was Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, which stormed home winning 12 of the 14 awards it was nominated for as well as a special honorary award for the visual effects, a category that the AACTA people curiously decided to axe after last year’s ceremony despite being a truly globally recognised industry in which Australians are successful. The two categories it lost? Best actress, which went to Rose Byrne for a seven-minute performance in the portmanteau Tim Winton adaptation of The Turning, and supporting actress, which was a matter of Isla Fisher losing to Elizabeth Debecki so it doesn’t quite count. Such all-encompassing hauls hadn’t been seen since the infamous 2003 ceremony where one of the industry’s weakest years of record gave way to Somersault‘s 13 awards.

At the time of the nomination announcements I had said, “The Great Gatsby would feel like a strange winner given the rumblings about whether it even deserves to be called an Australian film”, and that “I think it will be between the tiny south-Asian charms ofThe Rocket and the mammoth undertaking of 3-hour omnibus ensemble The Turning for the win.” Given those two films were arguably the most high profile and critically acclaimed of not just the six-wide best film roster, but also of Australian film in general for 2013 (excluding Gatsby, of course, which had a bit of an unfair advantage in that arena), it seems perplexing that the AACTA voters would send them home with only one each (original screenplay and actress respectively) while showering trophies on Luhrmann’s extravagant, big-budget F. Scott Fitzgerald adaptation as if anybody is going to see its tally and think “Well now you’ve convinced me!”

Perplexing, and also worrying. No, it’s not the AACTA’s job to reward the little films that need the awards and the exposure (like Mystery Road or Dead Europe) over large-scale pictures with more money and resources behind them. However, in only the third year of their new existence as the Australian Academy of Cinema and Television Arts, the organization is in dire jeopardy of falling into the very trap that they had so desperately wanted to avoid: irrelevance.

By creating “the Academy”, the Australian Film Institute (yes, I know all these names are confusing, but bear with me – the AFI are AMPAS; the AACTA Awards are the Oscars) had hoped to find themselves a bigger slice of the international awards season pie and thus, in theory, allow for more exposure of the many people and films that Australians should be proud to call our own. In line with this more Americanised view of the world, they also moved the annual awards into the ceremony-heavy month of January (which means many actors likely wouldn’t be able to go, resulting in Luhrmann accepting on best actor winner Leonardo DiCaprio’s behalf because why would he care to go when he’s doing publicity to win an Oscar for The Wolf of Wall Street?) and created the bizarre, embarrassing folly of the international awards.

In three years they’ve seemingly squandered any good will the AFI Awards of old had in the way they were one of only maybe two or three places that local technicians, filmmakers and performers could see their work honored barring an. Nowadays it appears most of the organisation’s funds are being funneled into the back-patting international awards that this year awarded the likes of Gravity, 12 Years a Slave and American Hustle; awards that surely the recipients have little concept on, awards that nobody in Australia cares about, and awards that few on the lucrative Oscar watching circuit pay attention to, either. And now with the development of award sweeps by The Sapphires and The Great Gatsby, they are perilously close to deserting the industry altogether.

Now, I am not saying that the people behind these two movies were not deserving, and Catherine Martin especially was quite spot on in her acceptance speech citing that there’s plenty of room within this industry to encompass all sorts of visions not only of Australia, but of the world. However, the AACTA people are going to find it increasingly difficult to find support and sympathy amongst the industry for the ailing and cash-strapped awards if they continue to simply dole out statues to whatever made the most money or acquired the largest international distributer (The Sapphires, let’s remember, was picked up by The Weinstein Company as well as being the highest-grossing film of its year). It is all well and good for AACTA CEO Damian Trewhella and AFI Chair Alan Finney to complain about ambivalence towards the annual event when the voters – of which I used to be one, but not anymore – seem, at least superficially, more interested in glitz and click-bait attention-grabbing sweeps.

If the AACTA – or is it the AFI? – are truly interested in fostering local talent and building the industry into a globally-recognised brand, then giving 12 statues to The Great Gatsby is the exact wrong way about doing it. Nothing paints a more a dire portrait of the Australian film industry. The Great Gatsby is not just the best film of the year, but the best everything, apparently! And I’m one who wrote a 2013 article for Metro Magazine defending The Great Gatsby as well as its controversial status as an Australian film. I can’t imagine international producers and filmmakers looking at these results and thinking, “I want to make a film there!” Rather, these results say nothing else than, “Without the bucks and the buzz, there’s no point.” Even in 2011, the first year of the newly-coined awards, the best film prize was given to Red Dog, a massive box office hit that otherwise didn’t win a single award elsewhere (most went to Snowtown). Even when avoiding the sweeps of the last two years they seem to prize stature and size over everything else. In retrospect, that Red Dog win a disturbing harbinger of things to come.

Laurence Barber in The Guardian similarly observed that “it is a somewhat embarrassing reflection of what’s important to our industry to see the significance of money and celebrity placed on the ceremony’s highest pedestal.” Furthermore, as former AFI employee Rochelle Siemienowicz described in her report for ArtsHub, the night was one filled with “glistening buckets of Moët champagne”, a “ritzy three-course menu (including spanner crab, duck and barramundi)”, and plentiful, fervent jokes about the divide between the industry classes. Was Luhrmann the night’s event organiser?

That The Great Gatsby wasn’t exactly met by the feverish, ecstatic critical response that Luhrmann’s Strictly Ballroom (a best film winner in 1992) or Moulin Rouge! (a big tech winner, but losing to Lantana in the big categories in 2001) received makes the outcome even stranger. The “academy” certainly don’t owe Luhrmann anything, given he’s a seven-time nominee and two-time winner (plus the Byron Kennedy Award in 1999). Lest we forget they didn’t even nominate Australia, the second-highest grossing Australian film of all time, for film or directing prizes in 2009 following a misplaced wave of cultural cringe. And to further the point, Luhrmann received a weirdly out of place tribute that featured a performance of a song from Luhrmann’s only film to not be an official Australian production or co-production (that would be Romeo + Juliet) as well as one of “Lady Marmalade”. It was as if they cared none for the other nominees, and rather figured they’d place all their eggs in Baz’s silver-lined basket.

The omission of Australia from 2009′s nominees seems like a telling dividing line between the AFI Awards of old and the AACTA Awards that exist today. One year later the much-loved Animal Kingdom was big with voters as well as Oscar (Jacki Weaver was Oscar-nominated for best supporting actress) and one year after that Australia’s own Academy was forged and it’s hard not to see the parallels. It’s amusing, however, to note that at the same time this is happening, the Academy Awards are trending down in terms of sweeping epics, with several years in a row of several films scooping three or four trophies each.

Were this year’s awards merely a way to get Luhrmann and wife/collaborator Catherine Martin in the American press where she is fighting to become one of Australia’s most Oscared individuals with costume and production design nominations for The Great Gatsby? Were these awards a big sloppy thank you to Luhrmann and all the money he brought into the country, theaters (it made $29-million at the local box-office), and industry? Were they systematic attempts to officially stamp a new dawn of the Australian industry that actively chooses financial success over everything else? I guess we’ll never know, but perhaps signaling television’s more broad success, the top categories on the small screen side of the night were more evenly spread amongst the likes of of Top of the Lake, Please Like Me, Offspring, Nowhere Boys and Redfern Now with others like Miss Fisher’s Murder Mysteries and Mrs Briggs scooping deserved technical prizes.

Thankfully 2014 is looking up in terms of Australian cinema following the rather disastrous results of 2013 where the year’s second highest-grossing Australian film only needed one weekend to get there (that would be Transmission Films’ Boxing Day release The Railway Man with Colin Firth and Nicole Kidman). Jonathan Teplitzky’s WWII drama will undoubtedly feature prominently in next year’s AACTA Awards – and despite its 2013 release date, it will conveniently slot into next year’s eligibility period for the same year that The Weinstein Company will be pushing it for stateside awards success – alongside a healthy roster of titles that includes Venice premieres Tracks and Wolf Creek 2, David Michod’s The Rover, Kriv Stenders’ Kill Me Three Times with Simon Pegg, MIFF hit These Final Hours, Matthew Saville’s big screen return Felony (which I have seen and is really bloody good), WWII drama Canopy, the two Sundance titles The Babadook (which is excellent) and 52 Excellent (also excellent), I Frankenstein (which is not so excellent), Craig Monahan’s first film in a decade, The Healing, Rhys Graham’s buzzed Berlin screener Galore, Tony Ayres’ Cut Snake, Son of a Gun starring Ewan McGregor, The Reckoning with Luke Hemsworth, Rolf de Heer’s Charlie’s Country, the Spierig Brothers’ Predestination, Portia de Rossi comedy Now Add Honey, Robert Connelly’s Paper Planes,  and more all looking (or having already proven to be) solid hits with critics and hopefully audiences, too.

On one hand I do feel slightly bad for The Great Gatsby and everybody behind it since it has gotten somewhat unfairly tainted with a broad brush by most commentators that it was an undeserving winner. Whether one’s personal favourite won or didn’t isn’t really the point. Rather it’s about the attitude that appears to be developing that our national film awards, arguably the highest peak that many Australian films will reach in terms of peer recognition, are quickly becoming little more than a public victory lap for whichever single film managed to make its way through the cracks of cynical Australian audiences and became a hit that also isn’t entire embarrassing to reward (Kath & Kimderella, however…) To quote Guy Lodge of Variety and InContention on Twitter: “I know it wasn’t a *banner* year for Ozfilm, but…”

Congratulations to Baz and his team, but for the sake of Australian film, which I obviously love, I hope this isn’t something we’re going to have to get used to.

In Jerzy Kawalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels, the director places his camera in the figurative and literal position of God. In this Cannes-winning title from 1961, Kawalerowicz’s stunning, evocative images made of starkly contrasted black and whites – in a nicely twisted spin on the old black = evil, white = good cliche of symbolism – takes on the POV of a divine entity, suggesting a directorial statement that places the physical camera above all. In the 110 minutes of this arresting film, Kawalerowicz and his collaborators certainly worship the camera, making for one of the most visually ravishing films I can recall.

It’s perhaps an easy stretch to make when the film itself deals with the fracturing realities of religion and, perhaps even more importantly, faith. Kawalerowicz’s film follows a priest on his mission to a convent that is believed to have come under the possession of a demon, with his (both the priest and the demon/s’) attentions focused most intently on that of Mother Joan, the leader of the convent and the one believed to be the most possessed of all. Questions of whether the nuns are possessed at all are raised by the film, as if its characters are attempting to reveal their lying sins to the camera/God by performing acts of so-called possession that could be explained away by simply physics or logic, and many of Kawalerowicz’s recurring visual motifs give the illusion of a God-like presence.

Picking up blissfully quick after the opening credits, the action begins with the newly-arrived Father Suryn goes to enter the convent’s thick, ominously daunting walls. It’s at this moment where the camera truly takes upon a life of its own, entering the confines of the nun’s world not through the Earth-bound eyes of the priest, but rather by floating in like a majestic, spiritual being. The camera glides in through a beautiful tracking shot that, despite the initial belief that it is through Father Suryn’s POV, moves in a way that is wholly otherworldly. It’s a small moment, but one that suggests the audience shouldn’t assume that the action is being viewed simply through the eyes of the priest, but rather the omnipotent presence that hangs over the film’s middle-of-nowhere location like a heavy fog.

Throughout the rest of the film, characters routinely shy away from the camera with their backs turned as if scared to look directly out at the world through the lens. Mother Joan especially, and later on Father Suryn himself, shield their faces from the camera’s field of vision, as if the demon inside them is unable to look directly at the face of God without revealing their true selves. Almost every moment of close-up corresponds with the emergence of the demonic spirit within. The priest’s first meeting with Mother Joan in the convent dining hall is particularly noticeable for this as she eventually glares down the middle of the lens and shows God/the audience/Father Suryn what she really is before pulling a (very literal) slight of hand.

Another character, Sister Malgorzata, is one of obviously questionable faith and is shown repeating running away from the convent towards the camera as if desperately trying to find the God that she sees has deserted her fellow sisters. By film’s end, once she has committed a sin that she eventually realises is perhaps worse than anything the Satanic demons of the convent could have made her do, she is finally seen running away. Running away from God to hide her shame.

The imagery in Mother Joan of the Angels is full if robust symbolism and beautiful, if increasingly more complex and sinister, compositions. Even when the film threatens to enter camp, what with its convent of nuns doing wacky things including but not confined to hissing at the camera, shrieking upon being sprayed with holy water, and tumbling around on the floor like petulant children, it reconfigures itself into something more menacing thanks to a simple change of angle or a transforming, sting of a barb. Lucyna Winnicka as Mother Joan is particularly spectacular at these moments, turning her head or peeling away her habit to reveal a look or sling a Satanic verse that returns the action to its rightfully disturbing place.

Kawalerowicz is making a defining statement with the way he has shot Mother Joan of the Angels. By allowing the lens to act as the eye of God, he opens up the film from being a standard work of witchy horror, and rather allows it to become a statement about filmmakers, filmmaking, and the way art can capture things that could go otherwise unseen by the world and each other. Furthermore, what if characters in film were presented so plainly and cleanly with the face of God; what would it reveal? The vitality of its imagery and the immediacy of its actions suggest a director who seeks a more powerful truth even in a folly as potentially silly as possessed nuns, allowing it to take on a bigger, bolder, grander importance. By making his camera a very literal God for its characters to react to, Kawalerowicz reveals their inner demons just as well as their outer ones (like, for instance, the mental fragility of Father Suryn coupled with the physical weakness of his body as demonstrated early on by the sliver of bread he allows himself to eat). The director’s camera is looking upon these characters and allowing them to reveal everything, even if they don’t want to. There’s nowhere to hide for them as they’re confronted with the potential hypocrisy of their sins in the real world as opposed to a mystical one after death. A

It’s Laura Dern’s birthday today, which is cause for celebration. Hell, it should be a national holiday! On my old blog I used to have a tag labelled “The Facial Expressions of Laura Dern” because, well, nobody gives face quite like Laura Dern (Madonna would have to chance the lyrics to “Vogue” if it were made today). I met Laura Dern just last year at a luncheon to celebrate her father, Bruce Dern, and his eventually Oscar-nominated performance in Nebraska. She was a pleasure and a delight and allowed me to geek out about all things Lynch and Enlightened as we sat one-on-one after everybody else had left. She sipped on a coffee and I desperately tried to control with my mind the allergic reaction I was having to the the W 54th Street restaurant’s tree nut-tainted fondant dessert. I spoke of how I had visited the Twin Peaks convention in Seattle that past August and she spoke of potential new developments in the world of David Lynch. I mentioned I watched all of Enlighened in two days and purchased a copy of Wild at Heart on VHS when I found it in an antique store in the town where Twin Peaks was filmed. I even got a photo of her that you can see to your left. It has been my social media profile picture ever since for obvious reasons.

Anyway, as proof of Dern’s amazing face – and general amazing everything – here are 11 more of the best Laura Dern gifs.

Gosh, remember that opening scene of Enlightened? What a way to start a new series. And how about the weird spotlight sequence from Inland Empire. Somebody should host a Halloween party and just have that video sequence playing on a loop for hours on end. And I end on this amusing capsule gif from – again - Enlightened that is basically the exact opposite of all the gifs above, utilising Dern’s still face to just as good comic effect as the mascara-stained, frazzle-haired one above. Such a damned shame that show only lasted two season, but those two seasons are two of the most perfectly complete seasons of a show you could possibly get. It ended on such a great moment that in some ways it’s a good thing it finished when it did because there was no chance of the series’ magical spell ever getting lost or diluted. Laura Dern is 47 today and if directors like Mike White, David Lynch and John Curran keep being brave enough to cast her then we should have the sight of her face contorting and twisting itself into brilliant shapes for years to come.

Most of the images were sourced from the Laura Dern Face tumblr. A treasure-trove of beauty.

Marco Berger’s Hawaii is essentially 100 minutes of mental foreplay. A game between two men filled less with heated physical battles of strength and stamina, but rather secret glances, escalating desire, and heated eroticism. The kind of temperature rising sport that comes from sneaking a look at the object of affection when they least expect it. The thrill that comes from feeling like one has gotten away with a trickily maneuvered flirt. The boiling yet unspoken passion that can rise from the mere touch of flesh on flesh. The almost unbearable sexual tension that can emerge when we least expect it.

More impatient viewers may find the seemingly endless psychosexual flirtation of Berger’s protagonists, well-off Argentine writer Eugenio and homeless drifter Martin, too much. The yearning for release therefore extending beyond just the characters on screen, but to the audience where breathless heckles may make way for frustration. Others will find its gentle, melodic take on rekindled friendship to be sumptuously handled and deeply involving in spite of its long stretches of silence, meditative scenes of potentially one-sided lust, and unspoken love.

While it may lack a visual style to rival some of the greatest depictions of homosexual desire – think Claire Denis’ Beau Trevail - the handsome photography does more than enough to suggest Martin and Eugenio’s escalating desire. It helps that the rather sublime actors, Manuel Vignau and Mateo Chiarino, are beautifully handsome, the former with his scruffy beard and round-rimmed glasses, the latter with his buzzed hair and sweat-stained body.  The music score that occasionally enters the sound design is unnecessary and works best when playing exclusively with diegetic soundscapes.

As Berger’s story of reformed childhood friendships kicks into its second gear as Eugenio offers a spare bed at his uncle’s expansive home, the hormones fly thick and fast albeit rarely exhibited in more than a partial dart of the eye to the shifting image of naked flesh behind a shower screen door, or the tug of a pair of a shorts that could be purely instinctual or part of a greater plan of seduction. That both Eugenio and Martin seem ambiguously on and off with their interest and even their preference only elevates this. Martin finds photos of Eugenio with a woman and steals one to take to his homeless retreat off the main road, and as if knowing of his old friend’s feelings struts about in body-clinging shorts fresh out of the nearby swimming hole. But even when Martin’s feelings become equally obvious, perhaps he too is unsure and in a potential moment of back-tracking weakness caresses the cross that hangs across his frequently bare chest and at another moment claims it was “a gift from a girl I care about.”

Hawaii is a film of relative little action, yes. However, what could have like sufficed as nothing more than a short film has been expanded into a feature – Berger’s third after Plan B and the Teddy-winning Absent – with delicate ease. It’s a film that gets more drama out of the spark that comes from finally taking a step towards revealing your feelings than it does out of the eventual act of sex. It’s typical then that the title is only revealed to be of any tangential relevance late in the picture, which is perhaps the point: there’s more to the act of love – or even lust – than the immediate act of consummation, and sometimes not everything along the way may even matter. As a single man, I had what’s come to be known as “the feels” and I suspect many others will experience the same. A sort of blissful melancholy, as it were. For others, Hawaii will likely act as a 100 minutes of groin-stirring cinematic foreplay. Or, you know, both. In either case, the film is a wonderful creation that radiates and which allows audiences to experience its heart-pounding rhythms with every bit as much intensity as its characters. B+ / A-

Hawaii is on DVD and VOD from 18 February.

Like many modern films that fall into the niche genre game, Grand Piano and Blood Glacier owe much of their inceptions to other, old films. Thankfully, these two wonderfully audience-baiting flicks find new rhythms and maneuvers to allow them both to step out of the shadows of their obvious forebearers and become entertaining, even original, works. Despite indulging in the horror and thriller tropes, they become more than mere copying, spinning off into directions that are inspired by, but not beholden to, the classics.

Eugenio Mira’s Grand Piano has a thoroughly ridiculous premise that borrows liberally from films such as Jan de Bont’s Speed, David Fincher’s Panic Room, and, most strikingly, Joel Schumacher’s Phone Booth. Much like that 2002 thriller with Colin Farrell as a man stuck in a telephone booth with a sniper’s rifle fixed on him, Mira’s films features a more-or-less single location with a lone man aware of the stakes and an escalating tension that is seemingly at odds with its intimate focus. Needless to say, it is a better film than Phone Booth, but that may be because the Spanish director (Grand Piano is in fact a Spain/US co-production) decided to reference Brian De Palma more than his most direct influence, Alfred Hitchcock.

There’s a playfulness to Grand Piano that is deeply rewarding. It’s slick, 35mm lensing is drenched in bold colours, interesting compositions and in some sequences a sense of virtuosic camera trickery. Despite its compact confines, Mira’s film recalls the more heightened sense of Hitchcockian style that ebbs and flows throughout De Palma’s Blow Out, Body Double, or Dressed to Kill rather than the elegance of Hitchcock’s boutique thrills like Rope or The Lady Vanishes. It is a style that is perhaps too obvious for its own good, and yet one that works. It elevates the film and allows its moments of flight and fancy to not strike one as absurd or over-the-top. The entire film is working on a level of OTT sublime that is as much seat-grippingly intense as it is giggle-inducing.

Naturally, the more the story unfolds, the more the previously unseen villain (John Cusack in the Kiefer Sutherland role, I guess) emerges literally out of the shadows, and the more that the means and motivations of his plan are expanded on, the film loses some of its edge. At only 90-minutes (80 when you take out the long and slow end credits – although you’ll want to stay if just for the wonderful score that plays overtop) this isn’t so much a problem as other filmmakers might have had to juggle with. Eugenio Mira appears to know the limits to his story and never pushes it to be anything (ahem) grander than it is. It does, however, benefit from being seen on the big screen where its bombastic, musically-enhanced sound design and striking visuals create the most impact much like Xan Cassavetes’ Kiss of the Damned from last year. Although VOD and blu-ray, it’s likeliest home to most viewers, will hardly deplete the film of its charms.

Blood Glacier, which screened as a part of the Film Comment Selects series at Film Society at Lincoln Center, features nods to Ridley Scott’s Alien and Larry Fassenden’s The Last Winter (and perhaps Dead Snow, too, although I have never seen it), but takes its primary reference points from John Carpenter’s The Thing with an eco-horror twist. Hailing from Austria, although set in Italy, Marvin Kren’s Blood Glacier is surprisingly effective despite yet again succumbing to the plot of a group of hot-headed characters confined to an isolated house besieged by monsters. After the discovery of a mysterious organism with the potential to manifest in increasingly grotesque cross-pollenated monsters, it’s a battle to stay alive for a group of scientists and politicians in the Alps.

Blood Glacier thankfully finds interesting ways to get every ounce of dread out of its story despite the audience’s obvious knowledge of how these stories work. Increasingly unsettling camera work that manipulate the Italian locales into mysterious chasms where a new breed of danger could emerge from any nook or cranny at any moment, effectively timed jolts, and some inventive creature designs back up a story that is at least attempting to have something to say about where we’re going and the way humanity is going about setting up its own demise, even if they use methods that one can truly only describe as redonkulous (the final scene had my Saturday night crowd guffawing as the clock nudged Midnight). Of course, those detours into comedy are intentional. I mean, Blood Glacier is a film in which a woman tells a man to keep ahold of the giant mutant billy goat while she grabs a power drill. He does. She does. It’s gross. But it works. I found myself audibly cringing and recoiling at its concoctions while jumping into the back of my seat on more occasions than i care to admit, which is certainly mission accomplished. It just so happens that the grotesqueness on display actually isn’t Blood Glacier‘s only reason for existence.

I guess I should do this, yeah? I saw more films in 2013 than any year before – both films from 2013 and just films in general – so I at least feel like the following “ballot” is a more comprehensive list than I may have given years prior. All of that, of course, has to do with my moving to America and, most specifically, New York City. I got to see more new release films in cinemas than ever before, including obscure, little-known and all but invisible titles that Oscar voters likely have little time for. I was also able to attend various film festivals including Tribeca (within days of arriving in New York), San Francisco, and New York. It all allowed me access to films that in Australia would only be seen if you were lucky enough to pick the right festival schedule. Many of the films I saw in 2013 will never get a release in Australian cinemas, and will instead be relegated to home entertainment and direct-to-TV releases at some point over 2014.

I thought 2013 was a great year for cinema, although I don’t think my own personal tastes have aligned less with the Academy’s before (again, maybe just symptomatic of seeing more movies than usual). With the Oscars this Sunday (Monday in Australia) I thought it was finally time to publish this “best of” list that is in no way definitive and final. I will add to it over the years if I catch films that went under my radar (or, in the case of Asghar Farhadi’s The Past, rather inexcusably missed). But, as of now, this is a very good look at my time at the movies in 2013. These are the performances and technical achievements that I will associate most fondly with the past year. Some of my eligibility rules may appear lax: Oscar-qualifying runs count, Australian films released in 2013 (but 2014 in America) count. Some categories have six or seven because I thought they all really deserved it, plus it’s my blog I can do what I want to. Some of the best films I saw in 2013 - Hide Your Smiling Faces for instance – won’t get official releases until 2014 so they’re not featured. Films that I saw in 2012, but didn’t get American releases until this year - Lore, Berberian Sound Studio – are not included here.

* Image choice doesn’t necessarily denote who I’d pick as the winner. I’m not choosing “winners” apart from the top ten.

Best Picture
1. The Missing Picture (dir. Rithy Panh)
2. Spring Breakers (dir. Harmony Korine)
3. The Place Beyond the Pines (dir. Derek Cianfrance)
4. Laurence Anyways (dir. Xavier Dolan)
5. A Touch of Sin (dir. Jia Zhangke)
6. Gravity (dir. Alfonso Cuaron)
7. No (dir. Pablo Lorrain)
8. Una Noche (dir. Lucy Mulloy)
9. In the House (dir. Francois Ozon)
10. You’re Next (dir. Alex Wingard)

2o13 Oscar Prediction: 12 Years a Slave

Best Direct0r
Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity
Xavier Dolan, Laurence Anyways
Alain Guiraudie, Stranger by the Lake
Harmony Korine, Spring Breakers
Lucy Mulloy, Una Noche
Rithy Panh, The Missing Picture
Jia Zhangke, A Touch of Sin

Oscar Prediction: Alfonso Cuaron, Gravity

Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine
Suzanne Clement, Laurence Anyways
Adele Exarchopoulos, Blue is the Warmest Colour
Greta Gerwig, Frances Ha
Gabby Hoffman, Crystal Fairy
Brie Larson, Short Term 12

Oscar Prediction: Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine

Best Actor
Leonardo DiCaprio, The Wolf of Wall Street
Paul Eenhoorn, This is Martin Bonner
Mads Mikkelsen, The Hunt
Tye Sheridan, Mud
Miles Teller, The Spectacular Now

Oscar Prediction: Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club

Best Supporting Actress
Rose Byrne, The Turning
Nadezhda Markina, In the Fog
Joanna Scanlan, The Invisible Woman
Shari Sebbens, The Darkside
Emma Watson, The Bling Ring
Oprah Winfrey, Lee Daniels’ The Butler
Tao Zhao, A Touch of Sin
Lupita Nyong’o, Adepero Oduye and Sarah Paulson, 12 Years a Slave

Oscar Prediction: Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave

Best Supporting Actor
Ben Foster, Ain’t Them Bodies Saints
Ryan Gosling, The Place Beyond the Pines
Rutger Hauer, Il Futuro
Toby Irvine, Great Expectations
Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club
Christophe Paou, Stranger by the Lake

Oscar Prediction: Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club

Best Original Screenplay
Woody Allen, Blue Jasmine
Sebastian Lelio, Gloria
Malgorzata Szumowska and Michal Engler, In the Name Of
Destin Cretton, Short Term 12
Chad Hartigan and Tara Everhard, This is Martin Bonner

Oscar Prediction: Spike Jonze, Her

Best Adapted Screenplay
John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave
Sofia Coppola, The Bling Ring
Abdellatif Kechiche and Ghalia Lacroix, Blue is the Warmest Colour
Francois Ozon, In the House
Derek Cianfrance, Ben Coccio, Darius Marder, The Place Beyond the Pines
David Gordon Green, Prince Avalanche

Oscar Prediction: John Ridley, 12 Years a Slave

Best Cinematography
Nelson Yu Lik-wai, A Touch of Sin
Emmanuel Lubezki, Gravity
Yves Belanger, Laurence Anyways
Ivan Sen, Mystery Road
Sergio Armstrong, No
Benoit Debie, Spring Breakers

Oscar Prediction: Gravity

Best Production Design
Howard Cummings, Behind the Candelabra
Elena Zhukova, Faust
Catherine Martin and Beverley Dunne, The Great Gatsby
KK Barrett, Her
Anne Pritchard, Laurence Anyways

Oscar Prediction: The Great Gatsby

Best Costume Design
Stacey Battat, The Bling Ring
Catherine Martin, The Great Gatsby
Xavier Dolan and Francois Barbeau, Laurence Anyways
Karyn Wagner, Lovelace
Kurt and Bart, Stoker

Oscar Prediction: The Great Gatsby

Best Editing
Jennifer Lame, Frances Ha
Jem Cohen and Marc Vives, Museum Hours
Joel Cox and Gary Roach, Prisoners
Douglas Crise, Spring Breakers
Adam Wingard, You’re Next

Oscar Prediction: Captain Phillips

Best Visual Effects
The Conjuring
Gravity
Pacific Rim

Oscar Prediction: Gravity

Best Make-Up and Hairstyling
American Hustle
Behind the Candelabra
The Conjuring
The Great Gatsby
Laurence Anyways

Oscar Prediction: Dallas Buyers Club

Best Original Score
Giong Lim, A Touch of Sin
Daniel Hart, Ain’t them Bodies Saints
Lili Marchitelli, The Great Beauty
Richard Hartley, Great Expectations
Marc Marder, The Missing Picture

Oscar Prediction: Philomena

Best Original Song
Black Nativity, “He Loves Me Still”
Frozen, “Let it Go”
The Great Gatsby, “Young and Beautiful”
How I Live Now, “Garden’s Heart”
Short Term 12, “So You Know What It’s Like”

Oscar Prediction: Frozen

Best Sound Design
Gravity
The Missing Picture
Spring Breakers
Stoker
Una Noche

Oscar Prediction: Gravity

Best Sound Editing
All is Lost
Captain Phillips
Kiss of the Damned
Man of Steel
Stoker
World War Z

Oscar Prediction: Gravity

Best Foreign Language Film (Excluding Best Picture Nominees)
The Hunt (dir. Thomas Vinterberg, Denmark)
Stranger by the Lake (dir. Alain Guiraudie, France)
The Last Time I Saw Macao (dir. Joao Pedro Rodrigues, Portugal/France/Macao)
In the Name Of (dir. Margorzata Szumowska, Poland)
The Square (dir Jehane Noujaim, Egypt/USA)

Oscar Prediction: The Great Beauty

Best Documentary (Excluding Best Picture Nominees)
At Berkeley (dir. Fred Wiseman)
The End of Time (dir. Peter Mettler)
Kink (dir. Christina Voros)
The Square (dir. Jehane Noujaim)
Stories We Tell (dir. Sarah Polley)

Oscar Prediction: The Square

Best Short Film
Alberi (dir. Michelangelo Frammartino)
Gates of Life (dir. Hannes Vartiainen and Pekka Veikkolainen)
Just Before Losing Everything (dir. Xavier Legrand)
The Language of Love (dir. Laura Scrivano)
Long, Clear View (dir. Mia Wasikowska)
Rosalina (dir. Matias Pineiro)
The Swim Trunks (dir. Gerard Gutschmitd)
Tau Seru (dir. Rodd Rathjen)
Two Islands (dir. Jan Ijas)
Ziegenort (dir. Tomasz Popakul)

Oscar Predictions:
Live Action: Just Before Losing Everything
Animation: Mr Hublot
Documentary: The Woman in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Best Animated Film
An Oversimplification of Her Beauty
Frozen
Is the Man Who is Tall Happy?: An Animated Conversation with Noam Chomsky
The Wind Rises
Zeigenort

Oscar Prediction: Frozen

Best Breakthrough – Director
Hannah Fidell, A Teacher
Stacey Passon, Concussion
Matthew Johnson, The Dirties
Rama Burshtein, Fill the Void
Adam Leon and Jack Perribone, Gimme the Loot
Lake Bell, In a World…
Lucy Mulloy, Una Noche

Best Breakthrough – Performance
Elizabeth Debicki, The Great Gatsby
Kaitlyn Dever, Short Term 12
Toby Irvine, Great Expectations
Aja Naomi King, Four
Lupita Nyong’o, 12 Years a Slave

I should probably have included Adele Exarchopoulos, but the truth is that I noticed her a couple of years back in a small role in The Round-Up. I could never forget those eyes and those lips, could you?

Best Australian Film
The Darkside (dir. Warwick Thornton)
Exit (dir. Marek Polgar)
Fallout (dir. Lawrence Johnson)
Mystery Road (dir. Ivan Sen)
The Rocket (dir. Kim Mordaunt)

Best LGBT Film
Blue is the Warmest Colour (dir. Abdellatif Kechiche)
Concussion (dir. Stacey Passon)
God Loves Uganda (dir. Roger Ross Williams)
I Am Divine (dir. Jeffrey Schwartz)
In the Name Of (dir. Margorzata Szumowska
Out in the Dark (dir. Michael Mayer)
Pit Stop (dir. Yen Tan)
Laurence Anyways (dir. Xavier Dolan)
Stranger by the Lake (dir. Alain Guardaurie)
Una Noche (dir. Lucy Mulloy)

Best Unreleased Film
Everyday Objects (dir. Nicolas Wackerbarth)
Farah Goes Bang (dir. Meera Menon)
Hide Your Smiling Faces (dir. Daniel Patrick Carbone)
Nights with Theodore (dir. Sebastien Betbeder)
Stand Clear of the Closing Doors (dir. Sam Fleishner)

If the enemy of my enemy is my friend then what do we make of Enemy? When your enemy is yourself, does that mean you’re your own worst enemy and best friend? Thankfully for a film made of such origami-esque folds in logic as Denis Villeneuve’s Enemy, it’s never as convoluted as one might expect. In fact, the efficiently put together puzzle box – it’s 90-minute runtime is sweet relief compared to Prisoners’ 150 – is actually rather easy to follow, with its more mind-bending aspects better left dangling as ominous, lingering threads of unease and macabre menace. If you don’t fall under the quiet spell of this José Saramago adaptation then its occasional moments of excessive outré imagery will likely fall on deaf ears, but I found it captivating.

Perhaps the film is an allegory for Villeneuve’s own creative to-and-fro between the more mainstream-oriented worlds of Incendies and Prisoners and that of his more experimental artistic endeavors such as Polytechnique and his wonderfully grotesque short Next Floor. As duel Jake Gyllenhaals traverse around a murky Toronto – looking as it does as if it has been slathered with amber and frozen in a not-too-distant and not-quite-real time and space – fighting a soft-spoken battle for supremacy, its mysteries only deepen and its director’s whims get more refined. Villeneuve, working from a screenplay by Javier Gullón, has never felt this unobscured and singular in his vision. All of the elements work in perfect harmony, which is something I certainly didn’t think about PolyTechnique or Prisoners (the latter of which I really liked; the former not so much), which had elements that stuck out like sore thumbs amidst the world he had created. The dreaminess that Enemy revels in is perfectly in sync with the aforementioned darkened honey hues of cinematographer Nicolas Bolduc (nicely described as “uretic” by Guy Lodge), the austere production design of Patrice Vermette that appears as if it could unfold at any moment into a parallel dimension, and the blunt, discomforting score of Danny Bensi and Saunder Jurriaans.

Much like David Lynch by way of David Cronenberg (Dead Ringers is an obvious reference point, but I also found the disconnected urban metropolitan menace of Mulholland Drive and Crash a very palpable influence), whether its mysteries make all that sense – intentionally or otherwise – is hardly the point. Enemy feels quite distinctly as a mood piece, a ring of swirling colours and emotions that seems more intent on leaving a mental mark or scar on the viewer than anything resembling a sense of narrative fulfillment.

A lot of the lasting effect that Enemy holds over viewers – or, those viewers who are willing to fall under its spell – surely has to do with Jake Gyllenhaal. Maybe it was from having jumped straight from Villeneuve’s Prisoners into Enemy, but he’s able to hit the right notes immediately. The differences and eventual blurring of Adam and Anthony feel authentic and not like mere actorly technique. He finds a headspace for the performance that is alluring in its danger and exciting in its contrasts. As an audience cypher he’s an admittedly handsome (the film finds plenty of ways to get him out of his shirt) and relatable one whether it’s as the downtrodden history teacher or the energetic actor with a secret. One can only hope he’s done with chasing big Hollywood franchise bucks since his work is clearly at its strongest when wading in far more artistically inclined fare.

One likely could call into the question the film’s sexual politics when it comes to the two Jakes, Adam and Anthony, playing mindgames with their respective partners, but therein lies part of Enemy’s attraction. Despite the fact that the world these characters inhabit is far from lifelike, the characters react in ways that feel organic and true. The initial thrill, the eventual worry, the god-like playing with fire. I suspect the previously mentioned Cronenberg and Lynch would find its themes of identity, behavior, and what happens when we discover we’re perhaps not our only selves in this world, entirely thrilling. I know I did. I saw it two weeks back and it still creeps and crawls around my mind like a giant daddy longlegs hovering over a city as its spindly legs maneuver about. It’s a haunting film, but not because of any ghosts or possessions. Rather, it haunts because of the very real consequences it portrays from something so unnatural and unexpected.

Enemy is out now in American cinemas through A24.

Infamous bad movie Can’t Stop the Music is perhaps one of the strangest pictures ever made. Watching it today, whether for the first time or the seventh, it is impossible to look at it without the filter of dated camp. Even in 1980 its time had passed, what with the famed ‘Disco Demolition’ derby of 1979 still fresh in the memory, and The Village People’s success winding down. It’s such a ludicrously mounted production that it thrills me to no end that it was a hit in Australia and nowhere else. The soundtrack album, too, which went to no. 1 on the Kent Music Chart and has since become a late night television staple, typically on New Year’s Eve because networks expect drunken idiots to sit around and watch.

The film opens with Steve Guttenberg (ding), working in a record shop (ding ding) on roller skates (ding ding ding) as mad hordes of customers fight their way to the register to purchase the latest, hottest, chicest disco vinyl (ding ding ding ding we have a winner!). Quitting his job to become a composer and rolling down Broadway to the beat of David London’s “Sound of the City” as glitter-sparkle credits fly across the screen. It’s patently absurd and how anybody thought it was a good idea even then is mind-boggling. Still, Can’t Stop the Music is a curiously fascinating film to watch, which certainly helps explain its cult status. Much like the other famous terrible musical of 1980,Menahem Golan’s The Apple (which received zero Razzie nominations compared to Music‘s seven; explain that!), there’s a genuine sense of awe to be found in its ugly, chintzy excess and tone deaf style. To be a fly on the wall of this production would be an eye-opener.

Visually, it’s easy to see what they were attempting. It’s full of bright colours and bustling energy, juxtaposing its pulsating disco beats with the working class that were (supposedly) buying these records as escapist fantasy: New York City as a musical utopia unlike any other. The Village People may have told gay men to “go west”, but Can’t Stop the Music attempts to lay claim to New York as the place the be if you want to make it big, whether you’re a retail lackey or a construction worker. It’s a city where artists mingle and can be creative, where even amidst the skyscrapers and the office workers strolling to lunch meetings and coffee breaks the sound of a disco record can make it feel like a wide-eyed wonderland. I mean, there’s a scene where the Indian village person crawls through the window of his friend/neighbour/stranger and she says, “This is neighbourly New York.” This was the New York City that many wanted, when really they were getting The Equalizer.

Listen to the sound of the city, listen to the cars on the street
New York is the fans of the Yankees, New York is a cop on the beat
Listen to the sound of the city, listen to the steeple bells chime
New York is a city of magic, New York is a hip state of mind

When it came to selecting a favourite shot… well, that was hard. I may appreciate what it was going for visually more than most, but it’s still not a particularly well-shop film. It’s not marked with big visual moments, you know? It’s a movie that, watch somebody play a computer game, director Nancy Walker forgets that watching people dance is disco is far less interesting than actually dancing disco – and without the magnetic star energy of John Travolta in Saturday Night Fever with its raised competitive stakes, entire scenes go by that today only serve to bolster one’s Spotify playlists. I mean, the nightclub sequence that occurs 13mins in is hardly on par with Baz Luhrmann’s audaciously put together Moulin Rouge!

One scene, the “I Love You To Death” number is trying so hard for interesting visuals with bold, lavish splashes of red and glitter, although a later scene set to “Y.M.C.A.” that kind of recreates Gentlemen Prefer Blondes‘ famous gay gym workout number is absurd but nicely edited as these things go and the use of music video choreography, angles and slow-motion lends it at least some sort of visual style. Furthermore, the “Milkshake” number is probably the closest the film gets to an actual moment of visual class (even if it is still a Vaseline-lensed mess) as it attempts to blend The Village People with an old school musical. Still, only one shot really stood out as “worthy” of choosing as the best shot, and that was this:

Shameless. Cluttered. Scantily dressed. Completely irrelevant and unnecessary. Steve Guttenberg looking agog. Epitomises Can’t Stop the Music, wouldn’t you say?

Horror films are becoming more referential. This probably isn’t a surprise to anybody who watches these movie, not should it be a surprise given it’s only natural to recycle what one reveres. Still, the horror genre above all seems to not only embrace this borrowing style with more pride, but is also critiqued far more for doing so. It’s a knife’s edge with a fine line between success and failure. Tarantino hardly suffers from people saying they should simply watch the originals of the films he plucks from. Maybe it is because he twists his references into large-scale (some would say increasingly unwieldy) works of populist entertainment whereas the horror genre is typically confined to smaller, more intimate works and so suffer in the eyes of many as being simple copies of better films.

Whatever the case may be, there’s already been several so far this year. In February I discussed the rather obvious similarities between Grand Piano and the works of Brian de Palma as well as Blood Glacier (out now on home entertainment in Australia by the way) and John Carpenter. Carpenter is again at the centre of a new film’s focus: Jim Mickle’s Cold in July. It is this adherence to reference in Mickle’s fourth film that makes me consider it an artistic step backwards for the American filmmaker who so impressed me with his breath-of-fresh-air remake We Are What We Are (superior to its Mexican original, I say). Although Cold in July is a technically accomplished feature through and through – whether it’s the colour-saturated photography, the chilly score of Jeff Grace, or the stand-out performance of Michael C Hall – but it works best as a technical piece; a way for Mickle to get this Carpenter fixation out of his system.

This decision is ultimately what makes Cold in July not entirely work. The first two acts, especially the first, are wonderfully tight and take the characters in interesting and not entirely predictable territory while paying particularly strong debt to the stylings of Carpenter – particularly the score, with its piercing synthesisers. When Mickle and his co-writers Nick Damici and Joe R Lansdale attempt to veer off, they prove to have very little say, ultimately turning their film into a rather derivative revenge shoot-out narrative that feels neither fresh nor original or a fun referential take on another filmmaker (compare to the upcoming Blue Ruin and its shortcomings are only exacerbated). It’s disappointing especially since Michael C Hall is so good in the role of a man whose second amendment rights send him down a terrifying path when he shoots a robber in his home.

Far more successful in its references is Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook. Nowhere near as overt as Cold in July, this scary Australian horror film is more indebted to Roman Polanski in its look at the fear of motherhood, the lonely progression of grief, and the all-too damaging effect that society’s expectations have on a person that is expected to simply “get over it”, “move on” and continue on with life in a perfect, Stepford-esque existence. Polanki’s Repulsion, with its shifting sands of mental instability and (literally) expanding set design, feels like a film that hovers over the proceedings, much like the titular children’s book character hovers over the bed of its main character, Essie Davis’ traumatised Amelia, with its recurring, garbled refrain “baaa-baaa-dook-dook-dook”.

The Babadook is more than just a haunted house movie (is it even a haunted house movie?), but a film that, like many of the best works of the horror genre, uses the mechanics of horror to tell audiences something else entirely. The mature way that Kent and Davis handle the material feels revelatory for an Australian horror film, and with thanks to the impeccably on point production and character design (this is one of the scariest villains in quite some time thanks to his top hat and somewhat undefined figure, not to mention the book he’s housed in is the best since The Necromicon from The Evil Dead) and sound design it rises to the level of world-class. It’s boutique, yes, but it’s more refined than The Conjuring and stays in the brain much longer, too.

This is a rather exceptional work of cinema from Australia in a year that has already seen the likes of Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays and Aaron Wilson’s Canopy raise the bar for local filmmakers telling unique, interesting stories economically yet of an astonishing high standard. One can hope that the film finds the audience that it deserves. In a year that has seen our last great horror legend, Wolf Creek’s Mick Taylor, turned into a carnival freak show (for better or worse, I still liked Wolf Creek 2), Kent’s Babadook is a new frontier for local horror and a must-see for genre fans.

Subtlety is apparently not in writer/director DMW Greer’s repertoire if his debut feature, Burning Blue, is any indication. This is a well-intentioned drama about the development of and eventual ramifications of a relationship between two men in the American Navy before the removal of Don’t Ask Don’t Tell from the government law books that only fleetingly reaches the dramatic heights that its material is clearly striving for. Viewing now in the clear light of a post-DADT world and the grand-standing dialogue of Greer and co-writer Helene Kvale come off as weightless, drooping under the clichés and perceived inherent power of its story that is neither particularly romantic nor tragic beyond the very basic definitions of those words.

Yes, the situation that the two men – Trent Ford as Daniel, and Rob Mayes as Matthew – find themselves in, inspired as it were by a true story, was terrible and dehumanizing, but the material is given little in the way of shade and texture. It’s all fairly one note, only occasionally rising above the rather dry screenplay thanks to some impressive scale in its military sequences, as well as some nicely acted scenes involving the two men as they assess their own feelings while being very keenly aware of the consequences both professionally and personally. Secondary plots involving Daniel’s flying partner (Morgan Spector) and the betrayal he feels, as well as a girlfriend character who is dismissed from the plot faster than she is introduced feel, well, secondary but also take away impact from the central story. Likewise, the military investigation that takes over the second half of the narrative feels mishandled.

Funnily enough, one of Burning Blue’s most troubling aspects is in the casting. The male stars are all very handsome beings, but in casting a film without a single person of colour (at least for the first hour, and only then the lone black castmember is a homophobe) where the men all dress identical and all have names like Daniel, Matthew, Will and John it becomes almost impossible to distinguish who is who in the early stretches. When they mention the name of somebody who has died in a training exercise and the only real way of determining who it was was by seeing who shows up at the funeral and who does not. That’s how seemingly interchangeable these men are. The women, too, are all fairly identical with only the impressive features of Tammy Blanchard standing out amongst them, but for a while it is difficult to figure out what name goes with what face, and just what is happening to who. Rob Mayes, with his fuller frame, stands out the most.

While the story of Greer’s film is an important one, Burning Blue is perhaps a film that ought to have been made ten years (or more) ago. In fact it sort of already was in the 1995 TV movie Serving in Silence: The Margarethe Cammermeyer Story starring Glenn Close as a officer who is discharged after admitting her homosexuality, which won Glenn Close and Judy Davis Emmy Awards. Title cards that end the film mention Obama’s eradication of the primitive policies that kept LGBT citizens from performing their patriotic duties without fear of persecution and malice, and it is a sentiment that tugs are the heart. Sadly, the 100 minutes before it just aren’t strong enough to work as anything more than a minor telling of an important moment of gay history. Consider the recent HBO adaptation of The Normal Heart and think of how these historic gay stories can still resonate and impart on audiences a sense of pride and anger in equal measure. Burning Blue has a nice love affair at its centre, but Greer’s efforts at aiming for something more are undercut by the unremarkable way his film goes about them. C

By pure definition, a “found footage” film implies something that Willow Creek ultimately fails at. The basic idea behind of these films is that something terrible has happened and all that remains is videotape and that that videotape has then been found and assembled into a film by some invisible being that audiences are meant to watch and hopefully be terrified by. Obviously, we all know this isn’t how found footage horror movies actually work, and that they can be just as meticulously crafted and thought out as any other film, aiming to manipulate the viewer in ways that other films can or won’t, but it bears mentioning. They don’t always work for various reasons, but I find myself defending many of them. Not only for providing an effective way of eliminating the hurdle of disbelief that can come with films about ghosts, possessions, or – in this case – Bigfoot and putting an audience directly in the action, but also for the way they shirk the high-gloss HD digital look of their brethren. Today any film can look a million bucks, whether it’s detrimental to the film’s effect or not. Willow Creek certainly does not look a million bucks, nor should it. Thankfully.

If we’re to believe this line of thinking with found footage, however, then whoever found the footage of Jim (Bryce Johnson) and Kelly (Alexie Gilmore) out in the woods of California mustn’t have had much to work with. Willow Creek is 80 minutes long, but only 30 of that are actually scary. Or designed to be scary. Or attempt to even get to scary. The rest is made up of a seemingly endless prologue involving Jim’s intentions to make a movie about Bigfoot, and a second act of casual repartee between its (admittedly likable) leads. Furthermore, if Jim is wanting to make a film about Bigfoot then why didn’t he bring a tripod? Or proper sound recording products? And why keep filming the girlfriend if she doesn’t want to be in it. Willow Creek lacks real world logic, which is usually one thing that the found footage concept allows a filmmaker to circumvent to focus on other, scarier things.

I liked many individual aspects of Willow Creek, but I just wished they came together as a whole better than they do. I respected that the film is basically one big essay on why The Blair Witch Project still works so well and how it’s impossible to recreate it (attention Hollywood, I guess). I also thought the dynamic between Johnson and Gilmore was fun, which is important given how shapeless much of the film is. Without their personalities this film would be dead long before the end credits. The two share some funny dialogue that has the air of improvisation about it (I particularly enjoyed their riffing on a Bigfoot mural) and the progression of their relationship is in retrospect far more interesting than anything else in the film. Especially as director Bobcat Goldthwait appears far more interested in them than anything involving Bigfoot. Their scenes have a certain Joe Swanberg observational quality to them that would make for a nice film if Willow Creek weren’t also trying to be a horror film, which is ultimately where Goldthwait trips himself up. It’s all well and good to want to say things using the world of a horror movie, but it’s even better when you don’t forget to try and be scary for 75% of the runtime.

These elements are strung together in 50 minutes that barely even attempt at creating atmosphere and tension. At least the film’s final 30 minutes are excellent in the way sound is used to create a sense of dread and terror. One scene that runs for nearly 20 minutes, and will remain this film’s calling card for as long people remember it, in particular makes a perfect case for horror filmmakers only really needing a decent sound designer to send chills up an audience’s spine. Something like The Conjuring breaks records by throwing everything at the screen, but when Willow Creek works it does so by stripping everything away and relying on the things that in our own homes would scare us the most. The rustling of an unfamiliar sound, an unexpected animal cry, things that literally go bump in the night.

The end is abrupt and doesn’t have half the power of The Blair Witch Project’s (an image that haunts me to this day), but at least does something interesting and effectively scary. It’s just a shame that the rest of the movie is a limp attempt at recreating old glories. Goldthwait appears to be attempting at shoehorning subjects into the narrative like relationship isolation and the cost of mythbusting to storytelling most prominently, but as a horror film, there is not enough meat on the bones to justify its few moments of greatness. As a piece of found footage horror, it lacks its own internal logic and reason to work more than fleetingly.

The necessity for and the corruptibility of modern political activism is portrayed with beautiful formal imagery and slick editing in Ukraine is Not a Brothel. An Australian and Ukrainian co-production is directed by Kitty Green – whose only previous credit was as the stills photographer on Jonathan auf der Heide’s Van Dieman’s Land and various ABC documentary content; auf der Heide is a producer on this film – who only learned of Femen, the nude protest group at the center of her debut film, after spotting an article about them in discarded newspaper on a train in Melbourne. Being the home of her ancestors, Green obviously had a personal stake in the state of the Ukraine, but the film is ultimately much more than just an expose on the state of women’s rights and feminism in this nation, nor is it simply a behind the scenes look at a radical protest movement.

Watching Ukraine is Not a Brothel and one can really get a sense of how far the documentary ‘genre’ has come as an artform. This is a debut film made in a country where running water isn’t even necessarily an expected right, and yet Green’s film is a beauty to the eyes. She and her cinematography Michael Latham have composed beautiful images one right after the other that do more than just document the action. Rather, they help inform the drama and allow audiences to see a side of the Ukraine that they may otherwise not expect. It would have been easy to drown the film in ugly, realist tones of grey and brown, but they find interesting ways to view their subjects with a keen eye and it allows the film to remain a far more interesting visual experience than one might expect from a film about naked feminists, the sex trade, and patriarchy societies run amok in Eastern Europe.

As an Australian film it also warrants strong mention. Like Kim Mordaunt’s narrative feature The Rocket last year, as well as Baz Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby, Warwick Ross’s Red Obsession, Genevieve Bailey’s I Am Eleven, it goes further afield to find its story. In all the hubbub over what constitutes an Australian film or not (is it mere funding or a distinctly Australian story?), I think we should definitely be proud that we are building up filmmakers who can see beyond short-sighted patriotism when it comes to what is or isn’t worth of discussion and debate.

The true wonder of Green’s film that it is one that morphs from being about one thing into another thing right in front of your very eyes. The spectrum of topics all come with an inherent power, but while the message is important thankfully, much like the idea behind Femen’s naked anarchists, the vessel to tell it is one of unique beauty and surprising skill. By going inside Femen she has revealed more than anybody more interested in their bodies than their messages, but has also helped reveal the alarming ways that contemporary political movements have not learned from their forefathers and that despite all the good they can do and have done, internal squabbling and bickering may very well be an element of this world that is impossible to change. If Ukraine is a nation on the frontier of social change then the brash, bold protests of Femen would certainly be a world first method of getting there, but Ukraine is Not a Brothel it ultimately not about the protests themselves, or even about Ukraine, but rather the open and honest subjects of Femen that she has surrounded herself with. They make for funny, hypocritical, confused, sad pieces of a global puzzle. All with a soundtrack by – who else? – Boney M.

A hipster’s paradise. A societal mix-tape art project that utilises dream-like ‘90s aesthetics to tell the seemingly disconnected lives of young people at leisure. Set to the cooing sounds of a retro synth-pop soundtrack by John Atkinson and highly stylized, stilted dialogue, it’s the sort of film that begs for silly comparisons. “Baywatch meets Rohmer” said BAM when the film premiered there at their recent Cinemafest. “Like if Alex Ross Perry remade Spring Breakers”, noted David Ehrlich in his review out of the same festival. An anthropological experiment where The Room meets The OC was my initial mode of comparison given its deliberate self-conscious take on the easy-living lifestyles of its predominant water-based twenty-something Californians. Whatever form you think it takes, there’s certainly something altogether curious about its 16mm vignettes.

L for Leisure is a film that is blissfully in its own head and never for a second peeks out from behind itself to let viewers in on the gag. If there is a gag. Lev Kalman and Whitney Horn’s debut feature-length film (their prior effort, Blondes in the Jungle which I have not seen, runs a scant 48-minutes) certainly has an odd sense of humour about itself that too often gives way to pure weirdness. It’s bonkers, but that’s not necessarily a good thing when dealing with a structure such as this where one story can hold more interest than another. “I get bored and distracted easily”, says one character as she discussed tree spirits (because why not) and it’s a comment that could easily apply to many viewers. There will be times where they struggle to remain focused on anything but the style. And while I am very much a defender of style-for-style’s-sake films with no substance, a bit more of a narrative context may have helped keep the still relatively scant 72 minutes of L for Leisure from drifting off to the beat of its own synthetic drum.

As it stands, the film’s most memorable image for me was that of lasers striking through smoke in a dark room. Recalling the rave culture of the early 1990s setting of the film as well as science fiction of the decade prior, it’s evocative without calling attention to itself like so much of the rest of the film. Likewise, an extended sequence involving two groups of friends – one of men, another of women – meeting in a fast food restaurant carpark and engaging in a series of sexual dares, including a dance sequence that recalls Spring Breakers and has a woozy ease that feels like capturing magic in a bottle, was my favourite of the nine or so mini-movies that make up Kalman and Horn’s feature. It feels like a part of a greater whole as opposed to a fractured puzzle piece that doesn’t belong. It was transfixed by it, refreshed by its lack of irony (oh man, the rollerblades from the opening segment!), and could have easily watched more.

L for Leisure is a difficult film to get my head around. It has so many elements to beguile me and I frequently found myself taken in by this outré Palo Alto of sorts, but too often found it didn’t quite know what to do with the various successful elements. The parts that I liked I like a lot. The parts I didn’t care for I struggle to even remember; they slide out of the memory like the water off of a surfer’s wetsuit clad body like the man at film’s end. L for Leisure will likely be a film for cinephile hipsters who found Miranda July’s The Future just too mainstream for their tastes and who want to relive the era of Whit Stillman’s Metropolitan, but if its characters went to the beach and acted like aliens who had only observed human interactions from episodes of Saved by the Bell and MTV (hello most random Mariah Carey musical performance you’ll ever see). As its frequently inebriated (“I’m feeling really mellow” say multiple un-connected characters, the closest this film gets to a catch phrase, I guess) character drift wistfully about throughout each other’s’ existence, L for Leisure’s period comedy never really feels like it comes together. I don’t believe the filmmakers mean for any of the socio-political mumbo-jumbo to be taken seriously, it’s hard not to view it all as just a big joke.

I wonder if it’s for the best that the trilogy of acclaimed Tennessee Williams plays of the 1950s were all directed by different people, lest their power with themes of the repressed queer, simmering madness, and familial tensions be put into a lone director’s wheelhouse and criticized for repetitiveness. Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz brought to Suddenly, Last Summer the most overtly camp and over-the-top sensibility of the three in what is actually also my favourite of three. I like how he doesn’t try to plaster over the inherent goofiness of the story – Homosexuals! Cannibals! Incest! Lobotomy! Peadophilia! – but rather finds wildly expressive ways to show it while keeping the story true to its relatively confined minimalist structure (Williams’ play was a one-act play consisting of two monologues).

That Suddenly, Last Summer got made at all so soon after its original production in 1958 is a testament to Williams’ material and his stature. That they were able to get an Oscar-winning director (for All About Eve) and three of the best actors to have ever lived (Katharine Hepburn, Elizabeth Taylor – both Oscar nominated for Best Actress for their performances, although Hepburn would surely be “supporting” in today’s world – and Montgomery Clift) is even crazier to consider. “These are powers and passions without precedent in motion pictures” exclaimed the deliciously salacious poster, and it’s hard to argue.

As always when it comes to doing this feature, and especially so when it involves one of my absolute all-time favourite films, I had to whittle it down from several.

Perhaps the obvious choice, but a worthy one. With Katharine Hepburn’s familiar voice, fragile and shaking and yet regal, having been heard off-screen for mere seconds already makes so many images appear in one’s mind that seeing her actual face for the first time nine minutes into the picture is almost calming. The framing of cinematographer Jack Hildyard (who won an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai just two years prior) is really sublime in this shot as Hepburn’s Violet “Aunt Vi” Venebal descends into view and into the world of the audience and Clift’s Dr Cukrowicz never to be forgotten. Camera tilted slightly upwards, Clift’s body taking up the left third of the screen because Hepburn needs that make space to make her entrance. It’s a shot worthy of an entry for both an actor and a character of this esteem.

Then there is this shot, which I adore for the way it not only signals the claustrophobia of Violet Venebal’s home, but alludes to the symbolic savagery of the jungle that she nor her family could escape. “It’s a jungle out there”, or so they say. Mrs Venebal brought the jungle to her, to fight it and control it, but it wasn’t to be.

For the sheer beauty of this shot, moments after meeting Elizabeth Taylor’s asylum patient Catherine Holly. The shadow and light that bounces around the deceptively intricate production design (rightfully and surprisingly the film’s third of three nominations in 1959) is mirrored wonderfully with the idea of Hell not being something you sink into, but rather rise toward on a staircase. Entering a world where doctors poke (literally, into her brain) and prod at the secrets she has hidden inside.

Once again the body taking up the left third of the screen while a seemingly all-consuming force occupies the rest. This time it is the rabble of the asylum, that all too familiar sight of a pack of madness, echoing the vivid memories in her mind waiting to be unlocked.

I like this shot because I enjoy the juxtaposition between Catherine being given the “truth syrum” and the real story potentially about to come crashing out and the way the angle is angled to imply a wickedness, perhaps an uncertainness that should be questioned.

My favourite shot, however, comes during Taylor’s big final monologue as she finally recalls the truth behind what happened to her cousin Sebastian in Cabeza de Lobo. The frame switching between gorgeous close-ups of Taylor and shimmering Mediterranean flashbacks that take on the effect of a midday’s sun beaming down on the ocean, the two frequently becoming interlaced – two distinct moments in time crashing together. The boys of summer.

The lecherous lasciviousness is so overwhelmingly palpable in this shot as Taylor’s Catherine recalls the looks of lust from the local boys on the free beach as she emerged out of the sea in her transparent white one-piece bathing suit. It’s a shot that speaks to the film’s sublimely ridiculous sensibilities yet permeates with the seething sexuality and danger that the story cannot avoid. Taylor’s eyes as she peers back into her own memory at the images that have haunted the recesses of her mind looking like a cluttered closet of memories that are hard to make sense of and yet when put into context make all the sense in the world. This is the image of Catherine’s torment and she’s staring it directly in the face, attempting to emerge out onto the other side.

The way the Australian film industry is at the moment, it’s hardly surprising that there have been several filmmakers this year alone that are finding exceptional and even complex ways of telling minimal stories. One such film was Aaron Wilson’s Canopy, which had a brief Australian theatrical run earlier in the year and will receive the same in New York City at the end of August. Another title is Kasimir Burgess’ Fell, which receives a month-long release at ACMI starting this week through to September 27. While it’s not as strong as the aforementioned Canopy, nor Sophie Hyde’s 52 Tuesdays or Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook that were also released this year to box office grosses that did not reflect their superb qualities, Kasimir’s film is poignant and beautifully constructed film that once upon a time may have been seen as what was right with the local industry rather than a telltale sign of, supposedly, what’s wrong.

Fell isn’t exactly feel good, but it is certainly good, which is the most important thing of all. Kasimir and his screenwriter Natasha Pincus (both have music video experience, but you wouldn’t know it from the final product) explore grief, redemption, and forgiveness in the harsh Victorian hinterlands as two men, both mentally paralysed by a tormented soul attempt to forgive themselves and others following the death of a young girl. Thomas (Matt Nable), the girl’s father, retreats from society where his (ex?) wife appears briefly to lash out her grief onto him before a failed sexual encounter, eventually ending up working in the same logging district as the newly-released Luke (Daniel Henshall), who has done his time for the hit-and-run accident and now extols the almost born again virtues of being a father, having recently taken back care of his own five-year-old.

Thomas simmers, quietly observing Luke as he picks his daughter up from school and then later leaves her alone at night and visit the local pub and have sex on a car with a local woman. The two eventually find themselves working one-on-one with precarious ethics always in the forefront of Thomas’ mind. Does he have it in him to enact revenge?

Beautifully photographed by Marden Dean, he frequently lets the camera sit entirely still and allow nature to provide its own set of patterns and colours. Scenes of logging and the destruction of this very nature have a ghostly quality to them echoing the man-made turmoil at the centre of the film. Anybody and anything can be brought down in an instant; it’s a literal representation of the metaphor, but a poetic one and this connection with nature serves the drama well. There is very minimal traditional drama so to speak, with dialogue filling up the speakers less than the layered sounds of the wilderness as trees topple, machinery creaks, animals squeak and squawk, and silence cuts through like a knife. Much like Canopy in that sense, although not to quite the same degree, Fell takes the world around us to create a symphony of sorts far more intense and interesting to the ear than any traditional score could do.

Furthermore, Henshall’s performance is a remarkable, subtle piece of emotionally transfixing work. Far from what we saw in Snowtown, this working class character is a barely contained ball of grief as his mask of brute masculinity threatens to slip. Matt Nable is less successful as the grief-stricken father, but that is perhaps more likely to the withdrawn character he has been asked to play, given little chance to occupy more than a single register.

Kasimir Burgess is clearly a talented man, and like Aaron Wilson of Canopy, it will be interesting to see where he is able to go from here. This brand of micro Aussie features are hard to sustain a career out of, and several moments of somewhat heightened fantasy suggest with more money he may be able to do something even more significant. His strengths appear to lie in the way he allows characters to emerge with their relationship to the visuals. If it isn’t then Fell certainly gives it that allusion. This film is a hushed affair, but what it says with whispers is more than what other films can say with a yell.

Thomas Allen Harris’ Through a Lens Darkly: Black Photographers and the Emergence of a People feels more like an element of an art exhibit more than a stand-alone film. It’s unsurprising to learn that it is adapted from a book (Deborah Willis’ Reflections in Black: A History of Black Photographers, 1840 to the Present – Willis is also a co-producer on a film), and even the film’s title recalls that of an educational essay. And given the nature of its subject I can’t help but agree that it would probably work best as a feature of an art gallery. The imagery featured within Harris’ documentary is so captivating, so educational, so powerful that I wished I had the chance to view it for longer and notice more of the fine details that the film eloquently describes. As it stands the photographs that Harris chooses to show – and there are many – frequently go by at such a pace that their impact threatens to get lost.

The narrative of African American representation in society from the 19^th to the 21^st is a fascinating one and telling it through the disparity between white and black photographers is unique and one ripe for examination. Likewise, the Harris has assembled a fine collection of talking heads even if his own silky-voiced narration of the film occasionally goads the audience into slumber. Given its 90-minute runtime, I wish that some more attention had been given to more recent photography. As it stands the 1980s and later aren’t represented in any great dimension, which is a shame given the number of advancements that have happened in that time (hip-hop, social change, President Obama).

Through a Lens Darkly then is more a success for its subject than its filmmaking. Harris shines much-needed light on certain hidden corners of artistic history, but at times feels all too much like a supplemental part of a larger whole. Disappointingly, the subject is so under-represented (hardly surprising, sadly) in cinema and any mainstream way that the film, despite its shortcomings, is still a must-see for anybody interested in the history of race as well as those fans of the photography medium. I just wish that, given it’s a film about art, Through a Lens Darkly had taken a bit more of an artistic method to its message. It’s a filmed essay, and luckily for them the essay is one that we need to hear about.

Canopy begins with a five-minute sequence that sets the scene splendidly for the film to come, but may also test the patience of many viewers. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear of people leaving during it if for no other reason than nothing much happens. In fact, the first minute or two are a completely blank, black screen. This isn’t an oversight, however, but rather an effective way to instantly bring audiences into the world of Aaron Wilson’s film. Canopy is a movie rich of its own world, an 80-minute work of filmmaking that rises above mere war or survival films and becomes something unique. A rare film of the digital age that truly uses the medium to its advantages by crafting a work that is all-consuming and while perhaps minor in its dramatic aspirations – compare to, say, Jonathan Teplitzky’s The Railway Man, also dealing with WWII in the South-East Asia region, but doing so on a more heightened, sentimental fashion – is nevertheless a vital film and one that suggests a fresh point of view from a debut director.

Having ejected himself from his plane, an Australian flyboy (Khan Chittenden) lands in the canopy of the Singapore jungle. Quickly freeing himself from the parachute chords that have entangled themselves in the long-limbed trees of the Singapore jungle, he sets out on a course to somewhere he probably doesn’t even know. He finds a stream of dirty water and looks rather aimlessly at his military-provided waterproof map that does little to help his sense of direction. As night falls he runs – literally – into a Chinese soldier (Tzu-yi Mo) and as the two realise they are on the same side of the war (Japanese soldiers are rarely seen above chest-height) they forge ahead, eventually building an unlikely friendship that may or may not develop into a more deeply-felt companionship. The two don’t share a language, and in fact the entirely of Canopy’s dialogue could probably be written on a napkin, and it isn’t until several days into their journey that they decide to share names: Jim and Seng. Despite having a wife at home, Jim’s eyes tell a different story and this gives the film an extra layer to which its minimalist tale can unfold.

Obviously inspired by the contemplative works of Asian filmmakers like Tsia Ming-liang (certainly more so than Terrence Malick, who it would probably be easy to cite as a chief influence, but which I wouldn’t necessarily agree with), Canopy is a beautiful film to watch. Visually resplendent thanks in no small part to the natural beauty of the Singapore filming locations, but also thanks to Stefan Duscio. Much like another recent Australian film, Fell, Duscio’s camera surveys the landscape as keenly as a soldier might in unfamiliar territory. Frequently allowing its actors to camouflage their way into the scenery, the film is never more beautiful to look at than when a flare ignites across the sky in the middle of the night resulting in orange shadows dancing across Jim and Seng’s faces. Furthermore, the aural soundscapes that dominate the soundtrack are wondrous, too. The ceaseless explosions and rat-a-tat-tat poppings of war, native jungle sound effects, and ever-encroaching voices of enemy soldiers are perfectly blended into a full-on assault to the speakers.

A sequel was recently announced, which certainly made for surprising news given this film’s limited reach (sadly underseen upon its Australian release, but already a success abroad; hopefully its American roll-out through Monterey Media will allow it to be seen by more eyes). It will be a follow-up to the character of Jim (Chittenden and Edwina Wren who briefly appears in Canopy are both attached) and it will be interesting to see if the skills so wonderfully displayed here can be replicated in the Australian country. For now, however, Canopy is an incredibly strong film. It’s a small film, but one that isn’t held down by whatever budgetary limitations that it may have had. There’s so much skill on display here that easy to forget you’re watching a first time feature director at work.

I have been lucky in the last 12 months to have been able to see Wild Style, Beat Street, and Style Wars on the big screen. They are all exceptional films in their ways, and especially when viewed together they provide a wholly fascinating glimpse into a singular world – that of the Bronx in the mid-‘80s. A world of colourful graffiti, emerging hip-hop sounds, and people who don’t quite believe that they have the ability to be more than they’ve been assigned simply because they live where they do.

Offering a similar, and yet altogether different view of this landscape is Manfred Kirchheimer’s Stations of the Elevated. Filmed in 1977, released in 1981, two years before Wild Style and Style Wars shined a mainstream-leaning spotlight on the scene. Kirscheimer, a German native but raised from a young age in New York City, brings a clinically observational eye to his 46-minute film, beautifully restored and projected on screens again.

He appears far less interested in the people behind the images with his camera only occasionally drifting into the same orbit as human beings. Instead, Kirchheimer appears more interested in the way the subway interacts with urban life, cutting through neighbourhoods like a scalpel through flesh and how people have taken to the individual subway cars as canvases to educate, provoke, and infuriate. By painting these cars, these people are forcing those in the richer Manhattan to acknowledge them and to not act as if they don’t exist. Juxtaposing the so-called vandalism of subway cars with the far more respectable art of billboards (still hand-painted in that time), the film asks viewers to contemplate why it is that we think these graphic images aren’t valid art. Stations of the Elevated doesn’t say this explicitly of course – it doesn’t “say” anything – but the idea is explicitly there.

Unlike the other three films that I have mentioned, Kirchheimer doesn’t soundtrack his images with the scratches, beats, samples, raps, and crescendos of hip-hop music. Rather he chose jazz, which proves to be a rather ingenious choice. There is a certain structured freestyle edge to jazz that replicates that of the graffiti that adorned subway cars across the boroughs throughout the decade. Both the sounds and the images may at first appear on the fly and improvised, but rather they are planned down to finite details. The music, by jazz legend Charles Mingus, is as unpredictable as the film itself. Both veer and swerve in unexpected directions, looping back to previous notes that struck their fancy. I was reminded of D.A. Pennebaker’s 1953 short, Daybreak Express, probably my favourite short film ever it’s so swimmingly gorgeous, which also infused images of the New York subway with that of trumpets and saxophones.

That short film was created upon the realization that the elevated Third Avenue subway line in Manhattan was to be demolished. Kirschheimer’s subject, the graffitied train-cars that bundle about throughout the city collecting and disposing of passengers as if the traffic embodiment of a figure eight, still had a good decade of life left in it when filmed in 1977. Not only as seen through Wild Style, Style Wars, and Beat Street, but also prime time television series The Equalizer and numerous underground and low-budget NYC cinema. The city has successfully eradicated this, of course, and even movies have had, too – the adaptation of Rent could barely seem to replicate the image when they went into the depths of the subway system.

Offering a vision of New York that doesn’t fit into any preconceived box, whether that be romanticized or grittily to the fact, Stations of the Elevated is a curious film. Its images are fascinating to watch, although the film’s – yes – very jazz-like structure means viewers may drift in and out of what they may perceived as a lackadaisical form. Viewing it today some 33 years after it premiered at the New York Film Festival and Kirchheimer’s film is perhaps best seen as a nostalgic trip to a pre-gentrified New York rather than a quizzical look at the modern city. Either way it’s interesting and great documentation of a specific moment in time that shouldn’t be forgotten.