(Party Girl, Election)
Approaching the backend of the Nicholas Ray retrospective this week, one thing’s become clear: that crime and romance does mix. Maybe not so much in the throwaway heat of Robert Ryan and Ida Lupino in On Dangerous Ground – a scurry towards one of those scripted fade-to-black embraces that’s par-for-the-course when it comes to sealing things with a kiss – but when the groundwork’s laid from the very first frame (case in point: They Live By Night), there’s not a better cocktail of genres to be found. And in the hands of Ray, the clash of material doesn’t just fizzle, but pops, exploding from the screen with all the nucleus of a chemical reaction.

For those still kicking themselves for leaving it too late, or for others who've only just caught on to the word-of-mouth, extra screenings of the following popular festival titles have been scheduled for Wellington.

(Duck Season, Z Channel: A Magnificent Obsession)
If it weren’t for the fact that most teenage boys wouldn’t be caught dead with their mums in a public outing, Duck Season might have been the perfect mother-son movie. But let’s just say it is anyway. Anyone who’s ever been young, male and fourteen knows that whenever the parents left you an empty house, you partied like it was 1999. Fernando Eimbcke’s made a film about just that: being home, alone, and still young enough to know that you’ve got to make the most of it.

The best place to be during the Telecom Auckland International Film Festival is inside the cosy Civic when it’s cold outside. During a film you’ll occasionally look dreamily to the stars in the ceiling and the projected soft clouds hovering above. It's even better when you're there and it's packed full of people. There's a real buzz in the air. Saturday was one of those nights. Rize was the film.

It’s been suggested that Nicole Kidman chopped her locks off in Birth as some sort of homage to Mia Farrow in Rosemary’s Baby. Jonathan Glazer’s sophomore feature has all the trimmings of the Polanski film – New York apartment dwellings, scary little people, Euro sensibilities – and yet the reason for Kidman's elfish hairdo isn’t to further intertextualise things, but rather simply, to allow us to see more of her face. And Glazer’s clearly obsessed with her features, pausing orchestrally at one point to lock the camera on her noggin and literally squeeze and twist every pore of expression out of her, until it seems as if the very sides of the frame implode around her.

(The Ax, The Child)
Imagine, just for a moment, that David Brent, after losing his beloved job at the end of Season 2 of The Office, returned in the Christmas Specials not as a travelling salesman-cum-recording artist-cum-B celebrity, but as Travis Bickle toting a gun, a grudge and a whole lot of killing in mind. This is pretty much what Bruno gets up to The Ax. He’s in the paper business, gets made redundant courtesy of restructuring/downsizing/merging, goes unemployed for two years before realising this: that if he “eliminates” the competition (i.e. prospective candidates), he’ll be back pulping trees in no time. And you know what they say: pop a cap in their ass, and you’ll solve everything.

(Tony Takitani)
While it’s not my intention to climb atop of the soapbox here, criticism pertaining to the pace or the length of a film seems to me to be an often-dubious thing. Sometimes, it’s apparent that lambasting a film for its duration is simply a sign of a weak attention-span; other times, when a film is said to be “slow”, it’s actually meant to be, only those with accelerated lifestyles will fail to see it that way. Maybe it’s a generational thing (MTV aesthetics, machine gun editing, drive-thru this, 24/7 that), that we live in fast times (blame technology), or just plain human nature (or the deterioration of). Either way, the problem is akin to trying to get a small child to sit still, and the only way it’s ever going to be resolved is if, by some miracle of evolution, we can hit Alt-Ctrl-Delete.

(The Intruder, Mysterious Skin, Late Bloomer)
On Friday, I ditched planned screenings of Grizzly Man and The Lusty Men to employ a game of tennis or two (and make use of a rare fine day), since I’ve literally been sitting on my ass all week and eating nothing but cheap takeout and box office candy. That’s festival binging for you. But physical exercise aside, the festival’s had its fair share of vigorous, heart racing activity too – enough to suggest that, given the right choices, cinema-going can stand as something of a workout on its own.

In The Edukators, Hans Weigartner clearly has a bone to pick – but is it all in vain? The film itself stands as a pop-arthouse manifesto right down to its attractive leads and misfit-caper crux of little people in-over-their-head. Here, the prospect of Jan, Peter and Jule (our insurgent threesome) botching a home invasion-cum-activist statement-cum-all mighty grudge on some rich dude in a big fat house was bound to strike a chord with an audience consisting notably of Wellington’s so-called anarchists, Cuba Street freaks, the bypass-my-ass brigade and other recognisable artists, beats and socio-politically concerned potheads. Preaching to the converted, indeed.

(Mysterious Skin)
Decrying “exploitation” may only be as useful as your exploited’s state-of-being. ‘Cos if you will it hard enough, the boundaries of taste reveal themselves to be surprisingly permeable. That’s why porn-rap’s fantasy theatre gets the green card as soon as it’s flounced with a fratboy deus ex like “Naw I'm jus playin' less ya say I can/And I'm known to be a real nasty man”; that’s why real porn as surface-level-applied feminism is a brick wall. Children, on the other hand, remain something of a no-man’s-land (as long as you’re living anywhere that currently isn’t France).

Plastered with some of the longest faces known to man, it wouldn’t hurt for the characters in Whisky to smile once in a while, let alone laugh a little, but clearly something’s up, like the wind changed direction for real. Despondent workmates Jacabo and Marta – the former a sock factory owner, the latter a loyal clockwork employee – sift through a daily grind of awkward silences and mundane small talk, until Jacabo’s brother Herman comes to town (also a sock manufacturer).

Well over halfway through the Telecom 37th Auckland International Film Festival I am now beginning to lose track of days, times and cinemas. This last week has seen me take in my share of documentaries, and this year’s bunch has certainly not disappointed. Amongst my picks were: Tarnation, The Devil and Daniel Johnston, Overnight, and Grizzly Man. All of these were gripping cinematic experiences with very different styles of production but with one commonality – enthralling subject matter.

(Dumplings, Delamu, East of Eden)
Aaron may have beaten me to the punch on the whole “Yuck Cha” naming rights, but having stumbled from yesterday’s screening of Dumplings with an apparent taste of baby foetuses lodged in my throat, it occurred to me that Fruit Chan’s wicked and quite frankly unwholesome gibe at cosmetics, vanity and China’s own muddy social mores could quite effortlessly slot under any number of alternate titles. Like Bad Taste. The Goddess of Cookery. In China They Eat…. Because She’s Worth It.

(World Mirror Cinema, Moolaadé)
After the witnessing the fragility of celluloid in Decasia, watching Gustav Deutsch's World Mirror Cinema actively manipulate silent-era footage to breathe new meaning into it was a sublimely melancholic experience. In three episodes, Deutsch takes documentary footage of crowds of people outside a cinema, randomly (or not) zooms in on a face and creates a story, or rather a fleeting moment, behind the face using other documentary footage from the same era.

A native of the Aro Street community, Campbell Walker's third digital "indie" Little Bits of Light premiered in Wellington overnight. SHAHIR DAUD was there to sample the director's latest creation.

One of the treats of the festival, They Live By Night literally crackled in black and white, its heat fuelled considerably by the rare opportunity of seeing it on the big screen (well, Our Place). A pocket noir that skittles the gutter locale for the unbridled expanses of Americana, it’s a film that has all you could ever want: a boy and a girl; crime versus the law; characters with names like Keechie and Chicamaw.

Five of the best shorts from New Zealand's currently crop of talent make their nationwide premiere at the TNZIFF. The films – Official Cannes Selection Nothing Special, Taika Waititi's Tama Tu, Truant, The Little Things and No Ordinary Sun – arrive barely re-spooled from their overseas festival appearances, and screen as part of the Homegrown: Works on Film programme. BENJAMIN BARRETT samples the entrees.

There’s admittedly little else to be said about Hidden that hasn’t been motioned here already, but if one thing does need reiterating, it’s that this is a Michael Haneke film. Collective shrieks of horror aside, we’re talking cinema on a cerebral, coercive, conceptually superior playing field – the three C’s, if you will, that lead me to believe Haneke is just one of those guys who has it all worked out. Mostly, he scares me like no other director (not even Michael Bay); his discourse interrogative, aggressive, and not for the passive. Watch a Haneke film, and you’re a participant, whether you like it or not.

(The Ordeal, The Intruder)
A lot more fun – in the macabre scheme of things at least – than its unenticing title lets on, Fabrice du Welz’s The Ordeal maybe the hidden jewel of the That’s Incredible Cinema section. It’s one of the better, more interesting recent forays into the backwoods subgenre (which I am quite partial to), a black comedy-cum-rural nightmare that takes the perennially pillaged crazed-yokel milieu of Deliverance and whisks it into a savagely warped Polanski-inspired delight.

Alex Monteith's arresting documentary of the scars of Northern Island considers the visual imprints of place against the human recollection of past. JACOB POWELL reviews Chapter & Verse.

I’m amazed that A Hole in My Heart was able to pass under the radar of the Society for the Promotion of Fear and Ignorance [sic] unscathed, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s because they suffered a collective aneurysm while trying to tally everything that’s wrong with it. Regardless, we can all rest safe knowing that Moodysson is probably going to hell, where he’ll spend his days reconstructing labias with Leni Riefenstahl as his aid.

So Hayao Miyazaki is a feminist – I get that – but a feminizer? Drawing pockets of bemused laughter from a near-capacity Gala Opening crowd, the title character of Howl’s Moving Castle resembled little of the robust hero archetype we were probably expecting. A love story, the notion of the film’s girl – a fearless, determined wee thing by even Miyazaki’s standards – falling for a Prince Charming staple crossbred with Ziggy Stardust by way of Liberace by way of, errr, Paris Hilton, took some convincing, and I certainly can’t recall another time when bishonen (an attractive, effeminate male character in anime) played such a full frontal role in Miyazaki’s universe.

Please excuse the worst title I could come up with to preface Fruit Chan’s demented aborted-fetus-chomping shocker Dumplings, but being a 9-to-5er during film fest season and attempting to keep up an ongoing blog is starting to take its toll. It’s an apt description though, since it’s going to be a while before I can enjoy dim sum without having flashbacks of Bai Ling feeding finely chopped, boiled fetus flesh to Miriam Yeung, whose crunchy, crispy chewing suggests perhaps the bones weren’t extracted prior to mincing!

For those still undecided on what they should pen-in from festival's maze-like programme, Dominion Post film critic and regular Lumière contributor ALEXANDER BISLEY offers sixteen of his most recommended:

    » The Child
    » Kings and Queen
    » Shake Hands With The Devil
    » Moolaadé
    » Broken Flowers
    » Hidden
    » On Dangerous Ground
    » Darwin's Nightmare
    » Up and Down
    » 3-Iron
    » Delamu
    » Enron: The Smartest Guy in the Room
    » U-Carmen
    » Birth
    » The World

    Wild Cards:
    » Late Bloomer
    » The Intruder

(3-Iron, Godzilla: Final Wars)
An existential romance of sorts, Kim Ki-duk's 3-Iron could have been frustratingly self-aware, yet manages to be curiously heartfelt. As a film, 3-Iron exists somewhere on the gamut between Kim Ki-duk’s exploitive The Isle, and his pensive Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring. The mostly dialogue-free feature, which examines a romantic trice between an altruistic intruder and an abused wife, is agreeably unconventional without becoming too demanding. As 3-Iron progresses it slips gradually into the realms of magical realism, as the picture's protagonist, Tae-suk (Jae Hee), masters the enigmatic art of invisibility, or hiding just outside of the camera’s lens. This cinematic device could have been farcical, had it not been handled deftly by Kim Ki-duk. The director also appears realistically attuned to just how far he can push the possibilities of his speechless film; although requiring patience, 3-Iron is ultimately rewarding.

Alejando Amenábar's latest, The Sea Inside, is a far cry from Open Your Eyes and The Others. JOHN SPRY examines the film's portrait of one man's bid for freedom and release from his own broken form.

(9 Songs, Palindromes)
Censors have inadvertently become involved in a kind of audience baiting over their childish attempts at outlawing anything that springs more flesh than their pants can handle. Leaving 9 Songs was like being greeted by a bunch of nine-year old boys who had just discovered that their dad’s porn cabinet was actually filled with bundles of Cleo (if I was a betting man, Anatomy of Hell still holds the crown, following its incongruously creative use of gardening tools and fresh-off-the-operating-table gynecological footage).

(Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, 9 Songs)
I must admit that, walking into Alex Gibney’s Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room, I knew little about the largest corporate bankruptcy in history (and in turn, the largest corporate crime), and that the only reason I was drawn to it was because I smelt another one of those classic trainwreck tales with an irrestistible built-in gawk-factor.

Time, memory and loss converge in 2046: Wong Kar-wai's long-awaited, long-obsessed over "sequel" to In The Mood For Love. SHAHIR DAUD rediscovers his own infatuation with one of modern cinema's great auteurs.

(Hidden, Homegrown: Works on Film, 9 Songs)
As the festival grinds on, the dotted lines of the online screening schedule have come to slither across my computer screen, to animatedly dance around the coloured boxes of interest representing each film, leading me to dig deep into my pockets and re-evaluate my cinema-going plans. And if the past 4 days are anything to go by, it’s clear that a certain blind faith can be exhibited in the fest selection this year.

(Delamu, Murderball, The League of Gentlemen’s Apocalypse)
Not just a mere postcard-pretty travelogue into uncharted territory, Delamu observes with captivating intimacy and attentiveness the people who live around the periliously narrow and winding mountainside path of the ancient Tea-Horse Road in China. We hear moving personal stories from the villagers – including church pastors, mule wranglers, and a 104-year old woman – all revealing a unique history and way of life that make the sparingly glimpsed, awe-inspiring mist-covered landscapes all the more transporting and enthralling. The beautiful score – think Popol Vuh’s new age ambience meets Sigur Ros’ glacial beauty – doesn’t hurt either. File under: “If you enjoyed last year’s Story of the Weeping Camel...”

Reclining in the comfort of Village Hoyts Cinemas on a half-intoxicated Monday at noon is an event rife with depressing existential realisation and a slight sense of vertigo – little was I to know how this experience would be intensified by the sensory assault that is Bill Morrison and Michael Gordon’s Decasia. From the images of orphans moving slowly between two statuesque nuns to an on-camera birth that would be enough to make Steve Crow hard, Decasia is a picture of visual and aural dissonance, of almost attaining solidity, then, pock-marked by the stains of time, of slowly slipping away. A nauseating, disorienting experience to put the po back in mo, that brings together the in-the-nows of the last hundred years into a ravishing, destructively beautiful cinematic-symphonic pièce de résistance of experimental film-making.

For anyone who sat through Ghost in the Shell 2, you could be forgiven for wanting to kick your computer screen in if it means never having to come across another cheesy aphorism again. But bear with me, because the art=life stint took on a grim "fuck you" complexion opening night at the Civic on Friday, following the back-to-back screening of two riffs on terrorism, Hans Weingartner’s The Edukators and Michael Haneke’s Hidden (in order of awesomeness). Could have just been the size of the turf – the Haneke is as strategically vague as they come –, plus I’m generally against using grand historical incident as an emotional battery-pack. But bombings or not, it’s obvious that they form two totally different vantage points on terrorism as a m.o. in contemporary society.

(The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T, Ghost In The Shell 2: Innocence)
Props to those adventurous parents who brought their kids to the Saturday matinee screening of Roy Rowland’s wonderful 1953 Dr. Seuss fantasy The 5,000 Fingers of Dr. T where others might have lazily opted for creatively bankrupt multiplex fare like Madagascar. It’s a highly imaginative dream – or nightmare, to be more precise – that’s at its most deliriously fun when navigating the viewer through the secret passageways, unfinished structures and false directions of its striking Technicolor-burnished Expressionist sets.

Personally speaking, Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle was the film fest’s real opening night film. Following the draining Lost Highway-reimagined-by-Bresson-at-half speed doldrums of Michael Haneke’s Hidden, Hustle was a much-needed pick-me-up. An exhilarating pop culture gorging of ‘30s gangster melodramas, Road Runner cartoons and Shaw Brothers kung fu, Hustle cranks up the CGI assault merely hinted at in Chow’s previous Shaolin Soccer and really goes to town with it. But what’s still evident is Chow’s inventive comic staging, seemingly boundless supply of sight gags, and effortless tonal juggling of comedy and action.

This year sees the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals parent a whole family of youth-orientated movies, from the angst-idol of James Dean, to the torment of Mysterious Skin. In Part A, TIM WONG raided the programme to see what else he could find.

In Part B, TIM WONG guides us from the rebellion of Shanghai Dreams, to the modern alienation of The World.

Round #2 of TIM GRAY's annual Ticket Stub Scrawlings sees the Asian Cinema devotee tackle the short film horror triptych Three... Extremes: a three-point collaboration between marquee directors Takashi Miike, Park Chan-wook and Fruit Chan. It screens, along with thirteen other tyrannical films, as part of Ant Timpson's That's Incredible Cinema.

Part B of TIM GRAY's Three... Extremes dissection continues here.

Roseanne Liang is a Banana in a Nutshell: a Chinese woman in love for the last eight years with a white New Zealander. TZE MING MOK peels back the cross-cultural skin of this local doco.

In two startling boxing documentaries – Dan Klores and Ron Berger's Ring of Fire: The Emile Griffith Story, and Ken Burns' Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson – JOHN SPRY finds there's plenty to warrant the sports arena becoming a regular fixture on the festival circuit.

Those not already clued into the wee fact that the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals are just around the corner – kickstarting in Auckland this coming Friday (July 8), then Wellington the following week (July 15) – should make their way immediately to the nearest box office; if not to secure tickets to the festival's "event" movies (Howl's Moving Castle, Kung-Fu Hustle and Hidden being a mere three), then to reserve seats to many of its more rarified oddities. Indeed, much of the anticipation that comes from this time of year belongs not so much to the big-name Cannes selections, or the regular slew of "buzz" features – many of which distributors will bring back for seconds – but the inconspicuous gems that screen once, maybe twice, only never to return. Discovering these films for oneself is just part of the fun.

This July we get reacquainted with Tsai Ming-liang, a director long championed and appreciated by this festival and its patrons alike. The Wayward Cloud is the latest from the great Taiwanese filmmaker, and might just be his boldest and most challenging work to date. MUBARAK ALI finds out.