I recently caught up with John Curran’s Tracks and found myself marveling at star Mia Wasikowska. Not so much for her performance, although she is great in it, but rather how the Australian actress has somehow been able to carve a strong, viable, and successful career for herself making predominantly independent movies with the likes of David Cronenberg (Maps to the Stars), Jim Jarmusch (Only Lovers Left Alive), and Richard Ayoade (The Double). And that’s just in 2014. Oh sure, she has Alice in Wonderland to keep a steady big paycheck coming in, but she has become a sort of emblem for the way a generation of new filmmaking avenues – digital, independent, VOD, etc – when combined with the ever-expanding online news cycle granting wider coverage of an industry with a shrinking audience size, has allowed for her and other performers like her to have a newfound level of dictatorship over their own careers.

I thought similarly after having watched Peter Sattler’s debut film, Camp X-Ray. It’s a small movie and one that wouldn’t have gotten the amount of press it has received if it weren’t for starring Kristen Stewart, who, like Wasikowska, has a few giant blockbusters to her credit and is now parlaying that fame into a career that in 2014 has included an indie alzheimer’s drama gaining her Oscar buzz, a female-centric film from a French auteur, and this, a study of human moral conflict within the confines of Guantanamo Bay.

I am currently reading a Bette Davis biopic from the early 1980s, and it describes in details the many struggles that the famed actress had in finding films that she actually wanted to make. Held back, she felt, by a team at Warner Bros – the studio that had, in essence, purchased her in the day of star contracts – that were giving her bad scripts and not properly capitalizing on the fame she had amassed. I know it’s a long bow to stretch, but I find them a curious comparison, seeing how Stewart appears to be utilising her fame (even the face of sexist and ridiculous “just smile!” complaints) to now take on roles that challenge her idea of self and the narrative of her career.

Even if they’re not always successful (she was probably the best thing about the lackluster 2012 adaptation of On the Road), at least she is allowing herself to stake a claim on her own career in a way that wouldn’t have been possible to such an extent at any other time in the industry’s history. I like to consider it an influence of the newly globalized Hollywood that looks beyond it’s own industry walls and has proven through the likes of Nicole Kidman that you can be an important, influential movie-star without necessarily making movies that wring nine figures at the box office if you’re good enough, work hard enough, and try to work with interesting filmmakers. It’s an autonomy of self that is mirrored in the character Stewart portrays in the film; a woman who is finally being exposed to a larger world inspiring moral curiosities that will surely only continue to grow when she returns to the rather hypocritically labelled “real world”.

On that level of thinking, Camp X-Ray is a strong film, one made only better by the presence of Stewart, an actress whose seemingly trademarked sullenness provides an appropriate jumping off point for the character of Amy Cole, a guard at Gitmo who befriends a detainee (Peyman Moaadi from A Separation) and begins to question her loyalties. Furthermore, the film succeeds following in a grand tradition of cinema that doesn’t necessarily expose the folly of war, yet rather the more specific folly of sending young, still red-in-the-cheek soldiers into a war zone. While there are no battlefields with gunfights and landmines in this film, this war zone is one filled with confrontation, the spoken word, and even “shit cocktails”. These new recruits are coming face to face with the people they have been told are villains and enemies of America, but without any sort of life experience to properly judge what is good or evil outside of indoctrinated buzz speeches about freedom and liberty.

Stewart’s finest moment comes when she explains to her friend that she’s never even been out of the country let alone grown enough to form herself into a person with individual feelings, emotions, and ambitions. When she fights off a superior officer’s attempted rape she finds herself at odds not only with her job for the first time, but also America, and Sattler’s really quite sublimely detailed film explores how it won’t be her last. There are moments where the film gets sloppy and it’s hardly a subtle rendering of the topic, but it’s an important subject and one that merits to be told from the fresh perspective of a modern-day female soldier. The conversing between Stewart and Moaadi is particularly riveting, the actors’ own different worlds creating a spark that they then fold into their characters. Camp X-Ray may be dry to many viewers, but I found its distilled anger refreshing and the performances especially make it worth watching.

“Wow, look at this place. It’s like The Town that Dreaded Sundown.”
“Yeah I saw that movie. It’s about a killer in Texas, huh?”
-Sidney Prescott and Deputy Dewey, Scream

There’s certainly something to be said about expectations. I think everybody assumed The Town that Dreaded Sundown was a remake, and bound to be a decidedly average one at that, but it is actually a meta-sequel of sorts yet also works as a reworking of the Charles B. Pierce original from 1976. It in fact didn’t just overtake my expectations, but exceeded any possible best case scenarios I may have hazarded to predict.

Alfonso Gomez-Rejon’s 38-years-later return to the town of Texarkana – half on the side of Arkansas and half on the side of Texas that’d sound like a neat gimmick of a location if it weren’t actually a real place – and plays devilish games with the idea of remakes and sequels, making his film a surprisingly twisty revisit to both the original “Phantom” serial killer story and the 1976. Taking a similarly murderous winking tact to the original that Wes Craven’s New Nightmare had to its own franchise starter, it posits that the original Pierce film was in fact a real movie production that blew in to the town and made a film that capitalized on their very real grief. All of these years later, local teens consider the film a rural rite of passage rather than a horrific account of their hometown’s past. Little more than a moving picture postcard of their grandparents’ day for their amusement as they take dates with the hope of getting laid once the credits have rolled. For another example, the 1976 film is to the 2014 film as Stab was to the universe of Wes Craven’s Scream series, and I certainly didn’t expect that when I sat down in my nearly vacant Saturday afternoon cinema.

Much like 1994’s New Nightmare and 2011’s Scream 4, Gomez-Rejon’s The Town That Dreaded Sundown tries to examine the link between on screen violence and real-life violence when filtered through the prism of retrospection and nostalgia. Through a plethora of red herrings, it suggests that somebody from the past isn’t happy with either the film’s representation of the Phantom case (a real unsolved case from the ‘40s) or how much people in the town have turned the film into a reverential joke.

“These were real people”, says a preacher played by Edward Herrmann as he tries to persuade viewers from reveling in the horrors at a local drive-in. It’s a true statement of many films that try to eke viewer satisfaction from real life events that, for those involved, are never unforgettably traumatic. It’s also easy to assume that this is the director’s way of rebuking the original film’s comical take on the material, which had several tense, horrific scenes of brutal mayhem interspersed throughout comic ones such as when a cop dresses in drag as a lure for the killer.

While the film can’t replicate the muddy, visceral VHS-amplified terror of the original, the slickness of Michael Goi’s cinematography at least makes for its own sense of style, utilising colour and framing in ways that suggest more attention being paid than other recent examples of the genre. An early scene finds the camera using a slinking tracking shot to make its way over a drive-in movie screen and through a crowd of cars. Another uses aerial shots to distinguish who is where during a corn-field chase sequence that could have otherwise proven confusing.

Throughout the film, Gomez-Rejon and editor Joe Leonard splice in frames, shots, and even entire scenes of the original to not only make that connectedness even stronger, but to also remind viewers (or educate those who have not seen the original) of how linked the two films are. The film is a sequel, but the action is that of a remake. The soundtrack even occasionally splinters off into the sound of reels of celluloid flickering through a projector, a neat, minor trick that will make some audiences recall the time before cell phones and found footage while simultaneously hinting at potential motivations.

Of course, silly genre tropes frustrate. Why when your small town is being targeted by a killer who strikes at nighttime – and in a film titled The Town that Dreaded Sundown no less – do people continue to go out at night? Walking, driving, going to fancy banquets; it makes no sense and if the film has one big failure it’s that the sense of dread felt by the townspeople is only minimal. Likewise, the big climax reveal feels more like when a film such as Urban Legend tried to replicate Scream rather than it being its own unique beast. Furthermore, for as smart as Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s screenplay is, it does sometimes go a bit too far with its fanciful winking. For instance, Denis O’Hare plays Charles B. Pierce, Jr., otherwise known as the son of the 1976 original’s director. I can see the grin on their faces from here.

This sort of film, as evidenced by its release, isn’t the sort of horror fare that audiences appear to want these days, which is a shame. It’s one of the best examples of the genre I’ve seen in quite some time. Audiences in the future might be well-advised to pair the two films together as seeing one will ultimately make them appreciate the other (or not, I guess, but at least makes sense). The Town that Dreaded Sundown is perhaps the first of its kind: it is both a sequel and a remake, and in both cases it improves upon its original.

In this past month we’ve seen both David Fincher’s Gone Girl and Ruben Ostlund’s Force Majeure examine the relationships between men and women and the ways in which both parties delicately handle control. In both cases, those films feature male protagonists who think they’re in control as their spouses attempt to turn the screws (in polar-opposite ways) around them in order to confront their failures. While not in the same realm of dramatic scope or just plain old cinematic quality, Rowan Joffe’s Before I Go to Sleep also plays its hand at this concept of a husband believing he is in control of a woman who has stepped out of her society-bound role as masculine-observant to seek her own truth. It’s pulpy, but Joffe – who also adapted the screenplay from S.J. Watson’s novel – does a good job at giving his actors a playground that adheres strongly to genre conventions, but with a bit more mature leeway.

Nicole Kidman stars as Christine, a woman who suffered a head injury and now awakes every morning believing the man next to her is a one-night stand from her 20s. It’s only upon looking in the mirror and seeing the photographs on the bathroom wall that she realises something is amiss. “I’m your husband”, says Ben, played by Colin Firth in a quick return to the screen for The Railway Man pairing. Once he has spelled out the morning routine as he always does, he heads to work, which is when Christine receives a call from Dr Nasch, played by Mark Strong, a neurological specialist who has been secretly helping Christine without Ben’s knowledge. He informs her that she has been keeping a video diary of the clues and information she has been discovering on her quest to find out the truth of what happened to her.

Before I Go to Sleep is small-scale compared to the wildly flamboyant brushstrokes of Gone Girl, sure, but it succeeds in telling a story – one that has daft science behind it, I have no doubt – about a woman who is trying desperately to crawl herself out of the hole built around her by a men. Joffe’s film keenly plays with the casting of names like Firth and Strong as well as the expectation that they would be cast against-type. It’s a figure-eight effect where the shifting sands of the story make our loyalties and our readings of the central mystery ebb and flow. It’s a work of wonderful manipulation in that sense, but the film works more or less because no matter which of the two men (and there is a third whose brief appearances throughout are fleeting, yet pivotal) has taken the baton of red herring status as villain de jour, the story remains firmly about Christine and her desire to not let her ailment beat her and force her into a life of submission. Kidman’s best moment comes when she asks her husband what she does all day. “I just sit here?” she wonders as if her injury has not only sent her mind 20 years into the past, but her life back to the 1950s.

The actors are all doing fine work and without them I doubt Before I Go to Sleep would work half as well. Kidman and First especially play well off one another as believably exacerbated husband and wife. The chilly British locations add to it, too, lending a film an early Hitchcock vibe. It’s cliché to say something like that, and Before I Go to Sleep is no The 39 Steps, but I appreciated how British the film was and how determined it was to keep the drama and the thrills at a very human level. Nobody in this movie develops super-human abilities, nobody speeds through rush hour traffic in heart-racing car chases, and when somebody gets hit – which is frequently – they don’t instantly get back up. Christine’s safety is never assured and that’s a tricky maneuver to pull off. Without that down-to-Earth sensibility the film wouldn’t work and in a genre that rarely offers up a mystery in this way (even Gone Girl reveals its hands very early on) I appreciated its old-school charms. Whether you predict the ending or not, it is ultimately more about Christine’s discovery of self than anything else.

One of the biggest problems in Unbroken – and trust me, there are many – is that director Angelina Jolie and presumably her screenwriters (which include the Coen brothers and Richard LaGravanese) assume a sort of WWII shorthand with audiences. The central character of Louis Zamperini isn’t much of a character at all, but merely a vessel with which little is done yet with whom we are immediately meant to resonate with because he is a) American, b) handsome, and c) the lead character in the movie. Despite being played by the talented Jack O’Connell – so good in Starred Up and ’71 – the character is fairly interchangeable with all of the other young, handsome males of the cast (which includes Jai Courtney, Finn Wittrock, Alex Russell, and Luke Treadaway. The role likely could have been played by any of those actors, too, and not been any different. Louis Zamperini at times feels like a supporting character in his own story and I guess it was just because he wrote a book about his experiences that they made the film about him and not one of the other equally resilient characters. Certainly, in her desire to make this character as above-average as possible, Jolie pads the runtime with the film’s most laborious and unnecessary passage wherein Zamperini competes in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin. He didn’t win a medal, but it’s presumably shown to prove how much of the Human Spirit he has within him.

And, oh boy, is the Human Spirit alive and well in Unbroken. The entire film’s purpose appears to be to bask in the glow of this man’s Human Spirit. The cinematography of Roger Deakins even mimics this glow by positively roasting the actors in hideous Olympic-golden hues that appear to have been overly rendered in post-production to the degree that nothing quite looks real. It’s a visual concept that is as treacly as the material, slopped on thick like maple syrup. At least one can give the film points for consistency as this humdrum sentimentality certainly extends to the music with an appalling, pandering original credits song by Coldplay. Even Alexandre Desplat, usually a reliable bet to be better than the material, drowns in the banality of the film with a musical score of such bland unoriginality that it doesn’t sound just phoned in, but rather faxed. From 1984.

Of course, much of one’s satisfaction with the film will come down to an audience member’s hero-worship. Does merely fighting in and surviving WWII make Louis Zamperini one? And why, other than having written a book to base it on, does he get a film made about himself when there are surely plenty of other (yes, less straight, white and male) stories to be told about this oft-represented period in history? It’s especially curious since Jolie is at the held. Her last film was a Bosnian refugee drama spoken in a language other than English, and yet Unbroken is about a white guy who, much like Fury and Monuments Men also from this year, finds the courage to survive. Given the size and her obvious desire it’s mostly just disappointing that she didn’t take her moment of directorial courage to tell a story that doesn’t feel like it’s already been told many times before. I certainly knew every beat of what was going to happen long before it occurred on screen, and that was even without knowing much of his story. The way the material is handled doesn’t exactly give the impression that it could go any other way.

It would be easy to dismiss Unbroken‘s very blatant sentimentalism as lazy if it weren’t obvious that Jolie was trying so very hard. Jolie has assembled a top notch collective around her, but nobody around her seems to be trying as hard as she is and that chasm of a disconnect reflects badly. She does everything in her power to wring every potential last teardrop from the audience, but it falls flat. In one instance when Louis Zamperini attempts to prove once and for all that the evil, leering Japanese solider can’t break him, characters stand around and recite dialogue like “You can do it!” It’s nauseating. Then again, the film fits smack bang in the bland, featherweight territory that Jolie is mining these days. It’s the same direction that saw Maleficent become a film about a woman who realises the beauty and sacrifice that comes with being a mother. One needs a healthy dose of the Human Spirit to get through Unbroken, well, unbroken. It would seem that I am not that strong.

The most surprising thing about The Water Diviner isn’t that Russell Crowe directed it, but that in taking upon the extra role of director, and a debut director at that, Crowe somehow got one of the best performances out of himself in quite some time. Perhaps he’s not been giving a damn about the movies he has been appearing in lately and the chance to work on anything that was distinctly personal to him finally brought it out of him. And while the performance as a farmer who sets out to Turkey to find the bodies of his three children following the bloodshed on the beach of Gallipoli isn’t quite his best work, it’s certainly his most refreshing in a long time and a nice reminder that he can be subtle and can play a regular, normal human being again.

Crowe’s direction of The Water Diviner is certainly more impressive than another recent actor-turned-director: Angelina Jolie on Unbroken. Being an actor and working on sets day-in-day-out does not instantly afford somebody the knowledge of how to do certain things that are required of a director like how to extract performances like Yilmaz Erdogan’s, especially when actors are dealing with potentially silly dialogue (lord knows actors like Crowe have made enough bad movies to suggest they don’t always know what good dialogue looks like as an actor or as a director.)

And to be sure, The Water Diviner certainly has its problems. Take for instance the is-she-or-isn’t-she love interest character played by Olga Kurylenko that comes off as lazy scriptwriting, certainly not helped by the casting of the impossibly beautiful Kurylenko in a fashion that strikes as simple directorial wanking. Or the somewhat less interesting third act wherein Crowe tries his had at a prolonged action set-piece that ultimately doesn’t quite come off as the exciting climax he may have anticipated. And I will always want more Jacqueline McKenzie who just last year in Fell proved her abilities in brief, grief-stricken roles, yet even I was struck by how little she was actually in the film to justify the awards and nominations she has received for what amounts to a cameo. Crowe is most on point as a director when dealing with, well, himself. That could be a worrying sign for any future directing prospects ala Mel Gibson, but for now I’m just going to appreciate that he gives the strongest performance of the film. If his film is a direct attempt at going more back to basics with his acting and reminding people what he’s capable of in the face of Les Miserables and its kind then it’s mostly a job well done.

It’s a handsome movie, too, with cinematographer Andrew Lesnie on board to lens the film in a sea of rich oranges, golds and browns. He was wise to use the visuals to suggest that there’s actually not that all much different around Australia and Turkey, with both countries engulfed by sand and heat. The music by David Hirschfelder also impresses, but ultimately the really does rest on Crowe’s shoulders. If his performance wasn’t as strong as it is then The Water Diviner simply wouldn’t work at all and it would be harder to forgive some of his less impressive directorial judgements.

At this stage of the game, it seems impossible to be truly surprised by a Marvel film. That’s not necessarily a knock against the billion-dollar team that effectively changed the way people make and watch superhero movies when they introduced the now-fabled “Marvel Universe,” it’s just that, well, when you sit down for a Marvel movie you pretty much know exactly what you’re going to get in terms of drama, story, action, and character. That doesn’t change with Avengers: Age of Ultron, which brings about an end to the second phase in Marvel’s plan for world cinematic domination with the usual solid skills that we’ve come to expect.

I’ve enjoyed all the Marvel films that I have watched to more-or-less the same degree, but that doesn’t mean Marvel is infallible. Despite the overall enjoyment factor of the film, with this, its eleventh film, writer-director Joss Whedon seems intent on pushing some of Marvel Films’ more tiresome elements to the extreme. For instance, Avengers: Age of Ultron isn’t just full of whippy quips from its handsome, athletic cast — it’s positively drowning in them. Every single scene features at least two (usually several more) of the sarcastic, wise-cracking retorts, and by the film’s third hour (it is 141-minutes long) they have ceased to amuse and instead take the attention away from the whiz-bang effects and highlight the lazier-than-usual writing. Top points to that “Catholic rabbits” gag, though.

Read the rest at Weekly Gravy.

“This is very embarrassing”, says Adam Driver’s Jude to Alba Rohrwacher’s Mina in a confined toilet cubicle of a Chinese restaurant in the opening scene of Saverio Costanzo’s Hungry Hearts. It’s a sequence that sits at odds with the rest of the film and one that initially had me worried about the rest of the film. It’s, shall we say, pungent use of toilet humour initially coming off as an unpleasant palate setter. In retrospect, the scene is rather ingenious in the way it completely offsets the audience’s expectations. Knowing zero about the film going in as I did, and ten minutes in there is no possible way to know where it will end up, which only seeks to heighten the horrors when they eventually come flooding into the narrative after a speaker-busting use of Irena Cara’s “Flashdance… What a Feeling” and shotgun wedding filled with gaiety and love.

Mina and Jude are expecting a child and so she puts her career on hold and the two move in to her glorious top-floor apartment near 72nd Street in Manhattan. She visits a clairvoyant of sorts and collapses on a rooftop at a friend’s art exhibit. She underweight and so too is the child when he is eventually born. Mina’s concern over radiation and air pollution mean she and the baby never leave the confines of their apartment except to tend to the makeshift greenhouse that they have erected on the roof and cell-phones must be left at the bottom of the creaking staircase. Jude’s initial discomfort becomes terrified panic and it becomes clear that Mina’s paranoia is effectively killing their child. He begins taking the child out for walks, entering a church just to feed him ham and other meats in order to make him grow, but when Mina’s delusions become too much, the extreme nature of their situation becomes too much to bear.

Read the rest at FIPRESCI.

I find it interesting when people claim to have a hard time watching silent movies since more and more these days, movies find themselves in chaotic third act action sequence that feature barely a single spoken word in between the candy-coloured CGI and hyperactive editing. I guess then that it’s not so much dialogue that people are interested in, or even necessarily sound effects. Rather, it’s just noise. The comforting sound of noise that leads us to put the television on in the background while we cook dinner only to never even glance at the screen. The need for aural stimulation keeps us alert while we’re driving and working out at the gym, keeps us company while riding an elevator, and even soothes us if we use a public bathroom.

It’s fascinating then to plunge into the world of Miroslav Slaboshpitsky’s debut feature, The Tribe. It is a film in which character are not only deaf and do not speak, but one which doesn’t ease audiences into the murkiness of their world with subtitles. Rather all of the ‘dialogue’ is ‘spoken’ using sign language and it’s up to the audience to try and follow the story without the aid of cinematic elements we’ve come to expect. In a way it’s an extreme version of a silent picture as our understanding of what these characters are saying to one another frequently only comes in dribs and drabs (much like we might watch two characters in a silent film from the 1920s and only see inter-title cards that explain the very basic gist of their interaction), but there’s also no non-diegetic music. Much like The Artist, the 2012 Oscar winner that really was trying to copy the look and feel (and sound) of silent pictures, vocal dialogue does come into play in one minor, brief moment, but unlike that black and white Hollywood fable, the familiar sound of a human’s voice isn’t a moment of joy, but one of terror.

The Tribe is ultimately a compelling drama about a new boy at a school for the deaf who finds himself at first ostracized by the thuggish cool kids and then one of them. A boy who at first attempts to help a fellow student from being pimped out by another student, but who then becomes the pimp and purchasing sex from her with the proceeds. It’s a tough film, especially the two scenes in which characters cry out, and one that makes its audience feel as lost in its characters’ world as its characters might well be in ours. But it works on another level. One in which is asks the viewer to think about our relationship to cinema and more specifically our connection to it through words. We call movies that aren’t in English “foreign” even though English is only the third most spoken first language. I found The Tribe rather easy to follow once its world was created and the actions of its characters followed the well-beaten path of the corrupted teens. I suspect many viewers will be the same.

It’s amusing that I saw The Tribe just two days before catching up on the Aardman animated flick Shaun the Sheep Movie. Now, these two films have absolutely zero in common by most measures, except when it comes to language and dialogue. The world of Shaun the Sheep, a popular children’s show now being adapted to feature length, is a relatively non-verbal one where characters don’t so much talk as they do infer their meanings with grunts and mumbles. And not just the animals, either. It’s a refreshing take on the kid movie model that is these days nearly punishingly reliant on celebrity voices. The storytelling by writer-directors Mark Burton and Richard Starzak is remarkably efficient and traditional dialogue proves unnecessary. A fitting tribute to the zany worlds of Jacques Tati and his unspoken, bumbling Monsieur Hulot as well as the silent movie stars and comedies that came from the silent era onwards. Delightfully colourful and with only a few sequences that are likely to frighten younger audiences, Shaun the Sheep Movie proves to be a delightful film that once again proves manic hysteria needn’t be required to keep children (or adults) entertained.

The final film I wanted to discuss is Clu Gulager’s 17-minute A Day with the Boys. I came across this short film online and figured its reputation – Cannes contender, an inspiration for David Gordon Green – warranted a viewing. It turned out to be one of the best things I have watched a year. A stunningly simple tale of youth that uses its own lack of dialogue to its steely advantage, lending the final sequence a haunting quality that’s not too easy to forget. Its striking visuals, utilising a style that many would lazily label as a rip-off of Terrence Malick, a sea of golden skies reflecting dramatic innocence. It’s a truly a remarkable film and one that better than almost any I can recall makes the audience question our relationship to the necessity of words in cinema.

It turns out we do need another hero, and it comes in the guise of George Miller. The 70-year-old Australian director’s absence from the action genre since the proliferation of computer graphics is entirely what helps make his comeback, Mad Max: Fury Road, so deliciously entertaining. There hasn’t been a film in this franchise for 30 years, and that entry, Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome, was a compromised production on which Miller only co-directed, but if the man’s list of credits since then reads more like the family catalog of sublime inflight entertainment, let it be said that he never really gave up the ghost of darkness that swallows the characters in his latest film. Both Babe: Pig in the City and the two Happy Feet films were full of cruelty and sadness and issues that one doesn’t often associate with modern day ‘kids flicks’.

Nevertheless, Miller has come roaring back with the fourth entry in the franchise that he birthed in 1979 and Fury Road is the biggest one yet. Rather surprisingly handed a ginormous budget (these films were never particularly huge box office hits in America), Miller does what so few blockbuster filmmakers seem incapable of doing and actually letting audiences see the money. Despite being set in a post-apocalyptic desert wasteland (Namibia standing in for Australia after heavy rainfalls made the outback look too green!), every frame feels rich and decadent, full of imagination-stretching images that feel tangible. Miller’s insistence on practical stunt-work, effects, and sets where possible is plain to see as each rough-and-ready action scene full of hurtling, exploding, revved-up automobiles smash and crash into one another at breakneck speed and they were really tumbling around axis-over-hood in the desert sand. He allows the camera to follow the action in a way that only James Cameron can truly rival. The editing is similarly strong, with the action sequences, each more outlandishly devilish as the last, finding a riveting rhythm amidst the mayhem that makes the destruction easy to comprehend and follow.

Read the rest at Weekly Gravy.

The two-part miniseries Catching Milat follows a prick of a character. And I don’t mean convicted serial killer Ivan Milat. Peter Andrikidis’ drama, which just concluded on Channel 7, looks at the infamous backpacker murders predominantly from the side of the investigators and the police, most significantly that of Detective Paul Gordon (Richard Cawthorne) who ticks off just about every cliché of the rogue cop trope that you could possibly imagine. The world is against him! Why won’t anybody listen to him! He’s just an underling, but he knows the truth! Who cares about procedure because he’s going to do what he wants! He’s going to passive aggressively talk to the press! He’s going to interview suspects without authorisation! Why won’t people who have much more experience just listen to him?

This antagonistic approach to the character was disappointing and detrimental to the drama at hand. Especially so given how good Catching Milat had been in its first half (aired last week) without as much focus on Gordon and instead more of a panarama of the entire backpacker murder story as it unfolded. Full of dread and toxic frustration at the discovery of murdered bodies in a national forest, utilising real television news footage as well as top notch performances to tell a movie TV-friendly version of horrific true Australian crime that wasn’t as grotesquely disturbing as Snowtown or Wolf Creek, but which got a remarkable amount of palpable tension from the fact that its gruesome story was real and was being told with thorough conviction. The second half, however, felt like a collection of police procedural stereotypes piled on top of one another that all focused on this one character that, by his own admission in part one, wasn’t doing anything other than bad-mouthing his fellow officers. There’s only so many times one can see a character say he’s going to do the exact opposite of what his superior asked him to do before it becomes too hard to believe. In one scene, the character is even seen as getting angry as his superiors for suggesting he didn’t do a thorough enough job on a task so he flies off the handle only to admit in the next scene that they were right and that he passed over vital information. Was the audience meant to be on side with this detective? It failed, if we were.

 
Given this is a true story, and a very well-documented one at that, there’s probably more than an ounce of truth to this character’s portrayal, but I’m more inclined to believe that those real elements are his egomania rather than any belief in the greater truth. Dalton Dartmouth’s screenplay has constructed the story of the investigation behind Milat and his capture in such a way that it feels manipulated. Altered to adhere to a more traditional dramatic narrative about a fair dinkum cop who’s goes up against the man for the greater good. It’s not surprising to learn that the former detective, now a taxi driver in Brisbane, Paul Gordon was a consultant on the telefeature and that many former and still-serving members of the police force, as well as the NSW senior crown prosecutor who took Ivan Milat to trial where he was convicted and sentenced to seven consecutive life sentences, have said that the production isn’t telling the truth when it suggests the entire case was solved essentially by one single detective. The story of one man is apparently better entertainment than the story of many, apparently, it’s just a shame that that this one man hasn’t the hallmarks of a compelling character.

These dalliances with the truth aren’t entirely able to ruin the film, but they do fracture the spell that it occasionally casts thanks to the performances and occasionally quite beautiful and cinematic photography. It’s hard not to be moved by Leah Vandenberg as Ivan Milat’s girlfriend, or Sacha Horler in her single scene as Ivan’s ex-wife, abused and ignored by the police. Malcolm Kennard, too, is suitably compelling and sinisterly charismatic as Milat, one of the most infamous people in Australian criminal history. By the end credits, the toll of this incredible story is well and truly felt, but the contrived way that one man’s story was edited and molded to fit only seeks to dilute the potency.

In an unnamed country, Gregori (Vincent Cassel) rules over a clan of women and children with what could probably be best described as a gloved iron fist. He’s not a cruel person, rather he is attentive and caring, but as seen in one of Partisan’s best sequences, he is also not afraid to teach dissenters a brutal lesson while in another we’re shown what is perhaps the side effects of his tyrannical behaviour seen offscreen. The charismatic leader’s family as well as what appear to be a mass of runaway single mothers and their children are ensconced in a series of connected houses, built around and into a mountain as if they’re squatters in cliff-side dugouts from a distant war. They carry on their business away from the public eye while Gregori makes money by employing his own child, 11-year-old Alexander (Jeremy Chabriel), as a hired assassin for local businessmen.

The talented first-time feature director Ariel Kleiman made a name for himself on the festival circuit with short films such as Young Love and the multi-award-winning Deeper Than Yesterday. Those films were set and spoken in Hungary and Russia respectively, but for Partisan he has given his actors English-language dialogue despite obviously being set (and vocally accented) in Eastern Europe and externals being filmed in Georgia. Maybe he made this decision to bolster its box office potential, although perhaps ironically, this film’s only noteworthy festival appearance has been Sundance. Staggering, really, consider it is a work of immense quality. I have no doubt that if it had been made in Georgian (or any other European dialect) that it would be spoken of in higher esteem with a healthier festival life. But, then again, what else is new for Australian cinema?

Many will compare Partisan to Luc Besson’s Leon – and at a stretch, the cult dramas of The East and Martha Marcy May Marlene – and while the two do share a similar narrative hook, Kleiman’s film is far from that stylishly violent French film. This is a film of great restraint, one that chooses to take its time observing through the eyes of its young protagonist as his world expends not only to beyond the confines of the compound – a sequence in a delicatessen wherein the boy encounters ordinary people is rife with tension, although a sequence with a local boy is frustratingly cut short – but also to the questions of morality around the actions of his father and himself. The cinematography of Germain McMicking, a winner at Sundance, is vital to this as the camera navigates their world of dark colours, but most importantly it’s up to Chabriel. One of the finest child actor performances to come along in some time, he perfectly matches the charming intensity of Cassel who is almost too well cast as Gregori. One can sense the bond between the two, which helps make their relationship, and thus the foundation of the entire film’s narrative set-up, all the more tangible.

I am sure many will be frustrated by the 30-year-old director’s perceived preference for mood over actual substance, but I found that feeling of deeply foreboding dread that the style of the film permits was entirely part of the substance. It’s a film of somber grey emotions, sure, but one that has keen insights into motivations of its characters. It’s a striking feature debut and one that, especially when coupled with his early short work, announces a major global talent in the making.

Remakes can be many different things. Despite all the energy spent complaining about them, we wouldn’t probably have what we know as horror if it weren’t for remakes, and we certainly wouldn’t have many of the films that we now consider classics. I’m not as opposed to the idea of horror remakes are many others for this very reason, and just like every other film that has ever existed, there’s so much more that goes into whether a film is good or bad than just being based on a pre-existing property.

Still, if you’re going to remake a film – especially a famous one – you should probably go about having something different to say. Whether that be simply looking at an old text through new eyes that shine something new upon it, revamping it through new technology and advanced filmmaking skills, or contextualising it with the modern world. One of my favourite remakes is Marcus Nispel’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre of 2003 for those very reasons. Whatever you make of the Tobe Hooper undeniably classic original being given the remake treatment, it was ultimately a new take on the material. It exists as its own creature – for better or worse. Likewise Dawn of the Dead (for better) and Halloween (for worse).

Many far less inspired remakes have been made in the years since. Films by makers that seemingly had far less on their mind both thematically or visually than simply rehashing their original products. Films like A Nightmare on Elm Street, Carrie, The Fog and The Stepfather that were as uninspiring as recreations can get. Given the riches inherent in a property such as Tobe Hooper’s (or Steven Spielberg’s, let’s be honest) Poltergeist, one would have hoped that something slightly more invigorating than the final product would have wound up in cinemas. Instead of a reboot that takes advances in technology, the ever-expanding suburban sprawl or a clear audience desire for haunted houses, we’re left with little more than a faded photocopy.

In name, structure, even scene-to-scene, director Gil Kenan’s Poltergeist has little of its own identity. It truly is a wonder why they bothered. It does everything the 1982 original did, but just not as good. The visual effects are neither better nor worse than they were 33 years ago. The relationship between Sam Rockwell and Rosemarie DeWitt is isn’t any more complex than Craig T. Nelson and JoBeth Williams, although the film mysteriously doesn’t go into explaining how a family with no discernible income (he confesses to the real estate agent that he’s recently been laid off at home, while she’s a writer with no time to write) consider moving into the three-storey house in a nice neighbourhood with child bedrooms the size of a New York City apartment to be ‘downsizing’. The reworked novelty scares are fairly disappointing, too. Even the cinematography of the original, which had a wonderful juxtaposition between the sunny suburban landscape and the terrors of the night lacks a certain spark apart from one excellent tracking shot following the young Griffin being taken by the tree up a flight of stairs). The appearance of Jared Hess as a supernatural investigator from TV is a big letdown from Zelda Rubenstein’s work in the original, his brute masculinity only shifting momentarily in a brief exchange with the children about a scar on his forehead. The use of television as a connection medium between worlds is left largely alone, allowing 33 years of technology advances to be more or less confined to the wayside (except for a smart use of home-drone camera device). The other world is relegated to a sea of brown CGI corpses that hold no menace. “They’re here”? Don’t even bother.

It makes for quite a disappointing film. Even if a remake goes for broke and fails to impress over its original then at least he might have something interesting to latch a hold of. Not so here. Kenan and screenwriter David Lindsay-Abaire had stuck to the status quo. The lone new addition appears to be a credits sequence that’s played for laughs as if the makers were afraid of sending audiences home without whatever wits they’d somehow managed to scare away. Considering the circumstance, it’s little more than a cheap end to a film that nobody appears to have had any stakes in whatsoever.

This review was originally published on The Film Experience.

The history behind Mark Christopher’s wannabe decadent, sexually-charged disco epic 54 is almost as interesting as the real life nightclub it uses as its setting. Originally conceived as a disco-themed coming-of-age drama like Saturday Night Fever blended with the hedonistic dungeon-like underworld of Cruising, all signs pointed to the film being a crazed and sexy paean to a world that no longer exists. And then Miramax got involved. There’s a long history of director’s cuts of famous films or those from famous directors (Blade Runner, Apocalypse Now) or cult titles (Dark City). 54 was neither, so how did it get into this position?

After a few fated audience test screenings, Miramax decided to change tact with 54. Cutting out 40 minutes of footage that showed an openly queer antihero and replacing it with 25 minutes of newly filmed material aimed to exploit the exploding popularity of stars Ryan Phillippe and Neve Campbell. Released to scathing reviews, the film ultimately limped at the box office, Mike Myers had a supporting actor nomination rescinded by the New York Film Critics Circle (at least according to the director) and was likely never thought much of since. Mark Christopher’s career was essentially ruined in the process.

Yet, as if conjured by Conchita Wurst herself (she’d fit in perfectly), 54 has risen like a phoenix out of the ashes and returned in 54: The Director’s Cut. Christopher has cut out all of the studio-mandated reshoots and replaced them with over 35-minutes of the originally excised movie sequences. While some of which look like fifth-generation VHS quality rips, the kind you’d pass around your friends of an R-rated movie in school, Christopher has produced what is the closest to his original vision as you’re ever going to get. Even that rough quality adds a certain documentary quality to the nightclub footage as if it was some long-lost footage filmed by a patron of the real club.

It proves to be a gorgeously recreated world where fluid sexuality and disco take centre stage. Where bodies gyrate against bodies to the harmonies of Amii Stewart, Thelma Houston, and Blondie. Where the naked torso of a man against another against a woman’s against another woman is as natural as moving one’s hips and feet to a thumping rhythm on the dancefloor. It’s out and proud, not at all shying away from the sexual aggression of Phillippe’s character as he calmly removes his clothes for any gender. The period details of sequins and grime that so epitomised 1970s New York City are wonderfully realised, too, giving the film an authenticity that is missing from the likes of American Hustle. It’s like a rich, aged desert that took 20 years to reach its potential. We’re not going to get ahead of ourselves and say it reaches the complex world of Boogie Nights (an obvious inspiration), but this new version should find a place at the table of films about this wonderful era. And, honestly, who can forget the Stars on 54 cover of “If You Could Read My Mind”? There are no ghosts in wishing wells here, but there are silver hotpants and for that I’m thankful.

This review originally appeared on The Film Experience.

Kim Farrant’s Strangerland is deeply, uncomfortably Australian. In many ways, it goes right to the heart of the country as a family infiltrate a place that is unfamiliar and even hostile to their arrival. A family, all of whom hold secrets and potentially criminal pasts. They could have been dressed up in Colonial costumes and set 150 years ago without much of a narrative alteration, which is probably much the point of Farrant’s debut feature. How our convict pasts have manifested as a society that turns on its own as much as the other.

Strangerland has a fairly simple premise, but one that allows for some fairly wide-ranging readings. After having left their last post due to an ambiguously alluded to crime, Matthew (Joseph Fiennes) and Catherine Parker (Nicole Kidman) find themselves in the remote outback town of Nathgari. He’s a pharmacist and she’s a housewife, neither of whom are able to handle their 15-year-old daughter, Lily (Maddison Brown). When Lily and young son Tommy vanish in the middle of the night, the town deals them with suspicion while Catherine becomes more and more emotionally unhinged at the thought their children may have deliberately abandoned her.

Australian cinema has a history of critiquing its own as well as examining the role our unique landscape plays in the building of our character and our perceptions of the world around us, which are two things Farrant takes on. Think of Wake in Fright, Fair Game, or Shame for brutal take-downs of the masculine culture that has infiltrated the global idea of what it means to be Australian. Most of all, however, Strangerland reminded me most of all of the early features of Peter Weir. The aura of Picnic at Hanging Rock’s lingering natural menace mingled with repressed teenage female sexual awakening hovers heavily over this new film albeit in a more narrative-focused way. Weir’s The Last Wave, a film that has challenging ideas over the role that one of Earth’s oldest civilization and their subsequent genocidal mistreatment might play in our way of life, is also evoked although Farrant doesn’t go quite to the extent of that film’s chilling, apocalyptic ending.

It’s not by accidental that it isn’t the Aboriginal residents of Nathgari that are the Parker’s biggest problem, rather it is the white locals. It’s the white locals that suggest they murdered the children, that flaunt their rape of the daughter in the faces of the young girl’s parents, and in the film’s best scene, Catherine emerges out of the desert and stumbles down the main street of the town – a scene already highly symbolic of this country’s treatment of women and the body – rendering the white, male townsfolk speechless and agog while an Aboriginal woman emerges out of her workplace to throw a jacket over her naked body. These men have used and abused women’s bodies for so long that it’s ingrained in their culture – boys will be boys, larrikins will be larrikins – that when confronted with one in such a raw and emotionally human state they are awestruck. It’s a powerful sequence that takes everything that Farrant’s screenplay is attempting to say about society’s treatment of women, indigenous people, sexuality and the land as destructive and clueless and manifests it in such a visually and dramatically impactful way that it has stayed with me, and will likely stay with me for some time.

Despite the power of that particular scene and the performance of Kidman that crescendos in the dying sunset of the film’s final passages, Strangerland’s final act is still somewhat bungled in terms of its pacing. Hardly a new issue with Australian film as Farrant is clearly trying to leave a lasting impression of mood rather than a satisfying narrative conclusion, although the promise of the previously raised concept of mysticism isn’t fully delivered upon either. Likewise, the character of Lily is clearly one that we’ve seen before, most prominently in Rachel Ward’s Beautiful Kate (this could almost be a sequel), although her naff teen poetry is comically on point (“Their marriage is a farce / such a pain in the arse”, for instance). Still, I found so much to admire in the glowing, dusty cinematography of P.J. Dillon, Keefus Ciancia’s haunting music and the performances of Kidman, Hugo Weaving and Lisa Flanagan that I didn’t mind much at all. I was deeply impressed by Strangerland and likely for many of the reasons that others have not.

This review originally appeared on Weekly Gravy.

There’s something about the Terminator franchise that I truly dig. I like that it doesn’t pretend its science is anything other than ridiculous coming out of the mouths of muscle-bound beefcakes, yet still takes its concepts of ethics and cause-and-effect seriously. I like that, apart from the dour-faced Salvation, these films are aesthetically exciting, filling the screen with eye-popping action set-pieces and visual effects that allow us to actually see and follow what’s happening, rather than throwing graphics at the screen and expecting audiences to nod in glazed-eye approval. Perhaps most of all, I just like films with some actual imagination behind them. I can forgive the lapses into bad acting and nonsensical dialogue if it feels like somebody behind the scenes spent longer than a nanosecond on devising ways to entertain an audience rather than simply doing the same as before (like The Avengers: Age of Ultron) and expecting it not to notice.

It’s true that not a whole lot of Terminator Genisys makes sense when held up to close inspection, but part of the beauty of time travel is that doesn’t really need to. It makes sense in their world so, really, I’m not going to waste my energy attempting to decipher it. Where I thought it succeeded was in crafting a story that actually builds upon the themes of earlier franchise entries while being allowed to become its own thing (at least The Terminator and Terminator 2: Judgment Day – Rise of the Machines, Salvation and the TV-series The Sarah Conner Chronicles have been more or less scrapped from the timeline).

In that regard it is much better than Jurassic World, which essentially wanted to actually be its 1994 predecessor by simply mimicking its action and its plot points to the letter — without the finesse of Spielberg. And while director Alan Taylor is no James Cameron when it comes to the action or the drama, there’s a certainly enjoyment to be had in watching him play with the building blocks of Cameron’s first two Terminator films, up to and including directly recreating one famous sequence from the 1984 original, and then watching them morph into their own beasts with their own rules and boundaries. Yes, it’s a Terminator film in that Arnold Schwarzenegger is there as the titular robot with Sarah Connor (Game of Thrones‘ Emilia Clarke), John Connor (Jason Clarke), and Kyle Reese (a frequently unclothed Jai Courtney), too, and all of them attempt to save the day (or sometimes destroy it). What’s different is that this entry into the series has a desire to build its own future, its own timeline of events from amongst all the references and mythos and sly nods to the previous films.

Of course, if the themes of these Terminator flicks don’t strike you emotionally, then there’s every chance you’ll be bored by this flick’s insistence on extracting pathos out of the concepts of danger in technology, fate, destiny, and the ultimate futility of trying to stop war. By the time of the film’s climactic chase throughout the hive-like underground of Skynet, its story has been told and it becomes more of a tired retread that looks like any other film of its kind. But for most of Genisys’s two-hour plus runtime, it finds thrilling and fun ways to add something to its universe. But please, don’t ask me about why it’s spelled that way. That’s one mystery they don’t explain.

This review was originally published by Weekly Gravy.

Somebody let the dinosaurs into the liquor cabinet. Steven Spielberg’s original Jurassic Park turned 21 last year and, just like anybody allowed to drink for the first time, it’s gone a little bit awry. With Jurassic World, director Colin Trevorrow makes a defiant display of wannabe maturity, but his film is ultimately a bit of a mess as it so desperately attempts to replicate the popular original, but does so without any of the class that Spielberg brought to his ground-breaking special effects extravaganza of 1993. Perhaps in returning to the franchise, the powers that be shouldn’t have handed over the reins to somebody with such little experience – this is only Trevorrow’s second feature after the low-budget indie Safety Not Guaranteed, which is a bizarre leap. Maybe someone who had the honed skills equivalent to Spielberg when he was at the top of his blockbuster game should have been the one in charge.

Certainly somebody with more experience would have spotted the myriad of problems inherent in Jurassic World, most of which can be laid at the feet of the screenplay. A screenplay that took four people to write, which is an alarming statistic. When the script isn’t simply recreating famous scenes from the original with less engaging characters who speak a lot and yet say so very little, it’s blindly ignoring plot holes and conjuring up half-baked ideas like breeding raptors to take on terrorists, which is just as silly as the gymnastics routine from the first sequel The Lost World.

Elsewhere, Trevorrow throws a barrage of weightless computer-generated imagery at the screen. So much so that the dinosaurs look fake, the theme park looks fake, and even the people look fake. Also, Vincent D’Onofrio as a villain so obviously evil from the first scene that I’m surprised he wasn’t twirling a mustache and cackling like a mad man in a top hat. Meanwhile, some of the violence is curiously mean-spirited, reveling in a sadistic glee with some of its on-screen deaths that feels at odds with the more child-friendly concept of modern-day dinosaurs. No doubt many audiences will enjoy the sight of characters being thrown about mid-air between pterodactyls like a rag doll before being thrown into another, much larger dinosaur’s pen and being torn apart, but its inclusion speaks to a group of writers who aren’t so much in awe of dinosaurs but in awe with what they can do with their visual effects programs. Maybe it’s actually smart of Trevorrow to throw away the childlike splendor of dinosaurs that marked Spielberg’s first two Jurassic Park movies and replace it with plastic violence, since that’s seemingly what audiences that grew up with the original want these days.

In the lead role, Chris Pratt is handsome and has a way with pithy one-liners, but the character is written on autopilot. He’s a clichéd, sexist douchebag, and Bryce Dallas Howard as his uptight lady sidekick is horrendous, presented as a demanding bitch who, really, just wants to be loved and have children (plus run away from dinosaurs in high heels — for her sake I hope those were CGI). I was glad when the action-packed third act kicked off because it meant not having to listen to the awful dynamics between these characters, and it meant we got to see he actually do something intelligent beyond simply screaming, acting clueless, and being told she’s stupid for wearing business-appropriate attire at her job.

In spite of its many problems, there is still an enjoyment factor to Jurassic World on a purely superficial level. If the thrill of watching big ol’ dinosaurs traipsing around and fighting one another is ever not a thrill, then the cinema has failed. But it’s impossible to look past the fact that they have bungled what should be an easy slam dunk. It’s only a matter of time (and sequels) before the question of why they keep trying to bring these animals back to life when it’s obvious that they’re more trouble than they’re worth becomes too hard to ignore — no matter how many newfangled genetic mutant dinos they give us.

This review was originally published by The Film Experience.

Given what director Asif Kapadia was able to accomplish with the otherwise (to me) uninteresting world of vroom vroom speed racing in Senna, logic would dictate that when handling a subject of great interest to me that the results would be even more outstanding. That doesn’t quite prove to be the case with Amy, another scrapbook collection of archival footage presenting the life of somebody who lived fast and died young, Amy Winehouse, but one which lacks quite the same verve of the director’s predecessor.

Kapadia is in the unique position of making a documentary about somebody whose life isn’t just rife for the Hollywood biopic treatment, but which actually feels like it already has been. Is her story not almost note-for-note for Mark Rydell’s The Rose with Bette Midler? It’s curious as a viewer of a documentary to feel as if I’d seen it all before in a fiction film (albeit one highly inspired by a real life person) and being disappointed because it comes off second best.

It’s for this accidental, ironic familiarity – not just to The Rose, but many other stories including even the similarly structured Montage of Heck about Kurt Cobain from earlier this year – that made me wish Kapadia had perhaps diverted himself from his tried and trusted patchwork style that favours purely archival footage. This time Kapadia does include audio from newly recorded interviews (correcting Senna’s Oscar ineligibility factor?) but while he’s thankfully still avoided talking heads, he hasn’t coaxed anything revelatory out of the family members. Rather its teenage friend Juliette Ashby who delivers some of the more hard-hitting moments like when Amy told her, “It’s just no fun without drugs” after winning a Grammy.

Given a healthy amount of footage, it’s sometimes more curious what Kapadia and his editors leave out rather than what they put in. Why, for instance, do they not include anything from the press following her death despite having made such a point of her downfall in the news and talk show and stand-up comedy routines? It’s also unfortunate that once her fame skyrockets, the home videos that give the first half a potent intimacy dry up and the film relies on the occasional dots of live performance, official record company videos, and, in the third act, a repetitive use of paparazzi footage. While it serves the point of demonstrating the immense pressure Winehouse was under, it doesn’t quite have the same effect when the film essentially becomes one big wall of it. There’s a strange lack of any music videos, and quality performances that fans of the singer may wish there had been. Imagine if Senna had only including his bad races, but I guess that’s the nature of what Kapadia and editor Chris King were given.

I don’t meant to sound quite so negative, but being in the shadow of any of the film’s I have mentioned is not an enviable place. There are, of course, many scenes that work all too effectively including the early performances that strike at the heart of why Winehouse’s death was such a loss. Conversely, the Serbian concert footage that saw her finally reject the industry machine in front of thousands of people is truly heartbreaking? History repeats itself and it’s amazing that people found her tragic downward spiral a joke. What may ultimately be the true story of Amy is that it illuminates the path of many young women in the entertainment industry and its content should shock and shame the British press and music industries as well as her family who come off as opportunistic monsters. Amy is nonetheless a quality look at the life of an incredible musician whose talent was perhaps just too large to encompass and whose downfall was too spectacular to ignore. Watch alongside Montage of Heck and just feel miserable about what the world missed out on but be thankful of what they left behind.

This review is reworked from the original featured at SameSame.

Channing Tatum is back with his buddies – and minus his shirt – and they’re going on the road in Magic Mike XXL. Let’s start for a moment with that title, which is so keen at setting the goofy tone of the whole enterprise as well as following in the grand tradition of sequel titles actively referring to a character’s genitals like Goldmember and, ahem, City Slickers 2: The Legend of Curly’s Gold*. A franchise spin-off featuring Joe Manganiello’s ‘Big Dick Ritchie’ would see roman numerals back in a big way.

Now, as crazy as it is to imagine anybody being on the fence about whether they will venture out into the cold winter night to get all hot and bothered at the multiplex, we still have to try and say something to earn our money. “Earning money” is certainly something that Tatum and co. do here as they parade around in as little clothing as possible to work up your thirst. In the first five minutes alone we get a healthy dose of Tatum’s sweaty arms and thrusting hips as well as Joe Manganiello’s bare butt. Throughout you’ll see Matt Bomer down to his g-string, Adam Rodriguez shooting whipped cream from his crotch, and some of the finest fit stripping extras up there on the big screen. Channing’s charm is the film’s best asset beyond his bare flesh because it would be easy to be turned off by a film full of the sort of douchebag muscle queens you find at the gym on a daily basis, but while he may look like Kryten from Red Dwarf’s human cousin, but he still has the appeal of the high school jock that is nice to everyone and who everyone likes. Consider Zac Efron in Neighbours, but if he was actually a person you’d like to hang out with beyond locker-room ogling.

Director Gregory Jacobs – Steven Soderbergh’s go-to first assistant director whose previous directorial works were the English-language remake of Nine Queens and a thriller starring Emily Blunt that nobody saw – was wise to take the rise in popularity of its supporting actors, predominantly Manganiello and Bomer, and increase their roles. The former, especially, gives the film’s best and certainly most eye-poppingly memorable performance and shows off some superb comedic chops that show he should be a bigger star and more than just “that guy from True Blood”. His solo dance in a roadside convenience store is the film’s best scene and shows off not only his body, but his personality and his shameless comic timing. Bomer, too, gets some surprising dramatic moments in particular one involving a conversation with Donald Glover in which they discuss post-stripping work and he explains “I’m still pretty” to which the world responds with a resounding “Yes!”

The best new element to the Magic Mike formula is surprisingly Jada Pinkett-Smith! With Matthew McConaughey (and Alex Pettyfer, too) gone, the greatly under-utilised actress slides in and is a hoot as the female-empowering queen emcee. And in a small role, Andie MacDowell is even more surprising as a southern lush whose “Dayum!” at the tough of Joe Manganiello is something all audiences will likely be able to relate to.

It’s hard to be consistently entertained by a two-hour film where people discuss life and failures and walk down an industry memory lane most of us will have no experience in, but Magic Mike XXL finds a way. If you’re looking for the post-GFC themes of socio-economic uncertainty like the first then you’re going to be disappointed, and you’ll probably be raising genuine concerns like “I hope those women who got covered in chocolate sauce and whip cream brought a change of clothes” or wondering why they make fun of a Twilight­ themed stripper show to then turn around to use 50 Shades of Grey in their act, but if what you want is playfulness, energy, goofy glee, and a complete and utter lack of pretentiousness then Magic Mike is a Trojan (Horse) full of fun.

* That was a joke, folks.

It takes a special filmmaker to do what Lawrence Johnston does. There are certainly no Australian documentarians working today that I can think of doing what he does. He takes subjects of such a niche and specialised variety and treats them with the utmost of dedication and care by compiling sprawling cinematic examinations that strike at the historical heart of his subjects while also allowing for delight, fun, and even whimsy. Like prior films Eternity, Night, and Fallout, his films take life’s anecdotes and create a visually resplendent film, cinematic poems if you will, that fly in the face of what documentary cinema typically is in Australia. Neon is more traditional in structure and certainly less abstract than Night or Eternity, but no less a fluttering of style and panache that somehow makes the subject sing.

Johnston’s latest is indeed Neon, a candy-coloured journey through the American dream and how the simple product known as neon shone bright as a beacon for the hopes of a country. If that sounds somewhat hyperbolic then that’s because Johnston has done a wonderful job of collecting a dazzlingly giddy group of neon geeks. I don’t joke when I say one woman starts to cry when discussing the Pixar animation Cars, which told the story of a dying neon-infused town on Route 66. There are people who have opened museums to classic neon as well as modern electric neon art. There are people who tell stories of growing up in Las Vegas around the warming buzz of neon signs and being too distraught to watch them be torn down with the advancing of time. These people have made neon their life and they give the film an urgency and a necessity than even the most essential talking heads can sometimes miss in bigger, more important films.

Neon is a film for not only those who hold a beating, glowing love for Americana, but also enjoy surprising and unexpected historic jaunts. It’s a movie for film-lovers as it looks at how neon has played a part in cinema, particularly film-noir – one particularly humourous moment looks at Murder My Sweet and Scarlett Street and how anybody who finds themselves at a location with a buzzing neon sign must be down on their luck. It charts the ebbs and flows of public perception to the product as well as the efforts to save this wonderfully evocative artform.

If some of the transitions between subjects aren’t as elegant as they could be, or if some of the green screen work in the talking heads sequences are a bit wonky, then they don’t really take away from the core of the film. Johnston’s film works best when simply compiling montages of neon imagery, akin to what he did the romanticising of the midnight light in Night, in all of their flickering, buzzing glory. The film is predominantly American-set, but one sequence does see him look at neon’s beginnings in Europe, and another goes around the world to see how other countries have utilised it including Melbourne and its famed skipping girl neon sign. It is your friend who knows everything about one specific topic and won’t stop talking about it. Neon has the simple charm of a mid-west diner. It’s not Citizenfour, but what it does offer is something classic and yet unique. You’ll never know you needed this much information about neon signs, but that’s sometimes what the best documentaries can offer.

It’s impossible for Les Blank’s A Poem is a Naked Person to not be taken in by audiences as above all a time capsule. Emerging in 2015, 40 years after its initial completion due to legal and personal wrangling, the film’s primary service and entry point to modern audiences will likely be as a never-before-seen look at a time and place that in the years since has been romanticised and obituarised beyond rational comprehension. The film, and the story behind it for that matter, is far more interesting than that though and watching it now is a curious thing indeed for not just those time capsule elements that are indeed fascinating, but also for its historical context as an important work of non-fiction filmmaking due in large part to the radical formal experiments that Blank employs in the aid of what could have been a fairly rudimentary documentary about a genius but rudely temperamental artist that merely copies the structure of D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back.

A Poem is a Naked Person was completed in 1974 from some 60 hours of footage filmed by Blank while on the road in Oklahoma with blues and folk rock singer Leon Russell and his entourage. Disagreements between Blank and Russell lead to the film being effectively blackballed from release over rights issues and was only ever shown with Blank in attendance and with proceeds typically going to charity. He continued to tinker with the film until his death in 2013 and now, thankfully, has been allowed to see the light of day with the help of Blank’s son Harrod, an author and occasional filmmaker, as well as Leon Russell, who has admitted to not liking the film.

Russell may not have liked the product because he was ultimately not the main focus of Blank’s camera. While the live footage that is filtered throughout is marvelous – lit with bright red, the camera only ever briefly moving away from his bearded face and his body covered in denim-on-denim to flirtatiously catch sight of his band – A Poem is a Naked Person is ultimately more concerned with what is going on around this force of nature performer. Blank isn’t afraid of the artistic wrath that he may incur and rather than making a Leon Russell film, has made what is defiantly a Les Blank film full of all of the idiosyncrasies that one would expect. The film even begins and ends with other people and in many instances, these interlopers into Russell’s world are what makes the film the curious artifact that it is.

One sequence involving painter Jim Franklin casually strolling through an empty pool collecting scorpions before starting on a large, spiralling mural is truly wonderful and the sort of image that it’s hard to imagine the film without, but which was surely a strange detour at the time. Another involving Eric Anderson and Russell sparring over who they think was the rudest to each other has a dynamic tension to its backstage voyeurism that isn’t captured anywhere else and which helps form a broader picture of the performer. Viewing this film in the 1970s as intended would have likely left fans of the singer confounded and critics confused by Blank’s complex assemblage of footage into a somewhat experimental beast that veers away from being a another Woodstock. Hopefully audiences today who would go out of their way to watch something such as A Poem is a Naked Person will be struck by the way this marathon feature came to look so effortless and found a way to make Russell not so much the entire story, but rather the central figure in a living, breathing ecosystem.