In an ongoing series, Lumière asks a diverse range of film critics about the movie(s) that got them into movies.

COSTA BOTES: As I drift inexorably into middle age, I am rather proud to assert that I continue to enjoy goofy, improbable, and even downright silly movies; which is just as well, because it’s getting increasingly difficult to find any other kind.

The movie that got me into the movies was made in 1966. Hollywood director Richard Fleischer was already a veteran of one underwater epic, 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea, when he was persuaded to get his feet wet with another submarine caper.

In an ongoing series, Lumière asks a diverse range of film critics about the movie(s) that got them into movies.

ANDREW LANGRIDGE: Movies have been getting me (deeper) into movies all my life, and I couldn’t possibly limit myself to a single one, but here are some personal rabbitholes from which there has been no escape.

Scream and Scream Again (Gordon Hessler): When I was eight, I decided to become a horror movie aficionado after inexplicably receiving a couple of books about the genre for Christmas. This was the first one I saw, but all I remember now are two great shocks (only two?) involving involuntary dismemberment. Longer lasting treasures from my early gorehound phase were Roger Corman’s lush Masque of the Red Death and Michael Reeve’s scabrous The Sorcerers.

Media Release
Back for a sixth wildly successful year, the V 24 Hour Movie Marathon (presented by 95BFM and Radio Active) is THE movie-geek event of the year. A celebration of wild and wicked celluloid that caters to film-fiends who wanna party in a cinema from dusk 'til dawn – and back to dusk again.

Reviewed by Gautaman Bhaskaran

OFTEN, Ken Loach has been labeled a Leftist. Now he is now being lambasted as anti-British for his Cannes winner, The Wind That Shakes the Barley, a mind-boggling work on the Irish resistance.

Loach’s cinema has always fought for the underdog. It could be an out-of-work former alcoholic in My Name is Joe, an illegal Latino immigrant janitor in America in Bread and Roses, or an unemployed man deeply attached to his family and desperately trying to get a new dress for his daughter’s communion in Raining Stones. Or, Loach’s hero can even be a young Communist fighting Fascism in the Spanish Civil War in Land and Freedom, or a doctor opposing the Irish peace treaty in the 1920s in The Wind That Shakes the Barley.

Opening the 11th Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, Manual of Love is a textbook of contemporary Italian cinema; a vibrant romantic comedy fraught with the pitfalls and consequences of falling in love. MELODY NIXON reviews.

Manuale d’Amore screened at the opening night of the Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, Wellington. As well as vino Italiano the opening night audience was treated to the announcement of the winner of the film festival’s inaugural Scholarship. This Scholarship will be awarded yearly to a suitable New Zealand filmmaker. The winner gains the opportunity to attend the Venice Film Festival, and have periods of internship at Due A, Italian film production house and the National Museum of Cinema, Turin. This year’s recipient is actor, director and one-time Shortland Street star Paolo Rotondo. (Yes, a curiously Italian name. Paolo is in fact half-Italian and half-kiwi, and speaks fluent Italian.) The Wellington audience was given a viewing of Rotondo’s short film Dead Letters, which also screened at this year’s New Zealand International Film Festival. More information about the annual Scholarship, including application details for 2007’s round, can be found at italianfilmfestival.co.nz.—Melody Nixon

Beginning an ongoing series, Lumière asks a diverse range of film critics about the movie(s) that got them into movies.

ROBERT SMITH: I considered the movies that had really got to me in some way, from Star Wars and Dawn of the Dead to 2001 and Withnail and I. I realised there was only one movie that really, really got me into movies. I had just joined the Dunedin Film Society back in 1996 when they did a Lindsay Anderson retrospective. I loved This Sporting Life and If..., but when I saw O Lucky Man!, it really just blew me away.

As niche film festivals in this country continue to mutate, we do our best to keep tabs on the latest fixtures on the calendar. We however have let one festival slip through the cracks: the Wairoa Maori Film Festival, which concludes this Labour Weekend. The second festival outing for Wairoa, this year's programme gathers a contingent of local and internationally relevant films to mark the beginning of the long East Coast summer. Encore screenings of New Zealand International Film Festival selections Squeegee Bandit, The Last Resort, Ten Canoes, Ans Westra: Private Journeys/Public Signposts, and Time & Tide are amongst the offerings. Films more synonymous with Maori culture – namely, Whale Rider, River Queen, and The Maori Merchant of Venice – also reappear. Events run until Monday night. All is revealed at www.manawairoa.com.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

CERTAINLY the most hardened New Zealand film to emerge since Once Were Warriors, Out of the Blue is signposted by a series of innocuous coastal panoramas that belie its underlying trauma. At regular intervals, director Robert Sarkies reverts back to these sites of tidal calm – idyllic shorelines, undulating landscapes, blazoned sunsets on the horizon – as if to provide respite amidst the unfurling tragedy of November 13, 1990. But as touristy images synonymous with the ‘greenbelt’ of New Zealand cinema, they are in their postcard ubiquity a timely reminder of the darker stories that remain hidden and untold. In its scarcity, a film of this nature also highlights a reluctance to tell such stories, if not an unwillingness to abandon the safety net of ‘regionalism’ in favour of a less conservative, more divisive filmmaking – the kind freely divorced from a pervading national stereotype of scenic beauty and perpetually friendly people.

Elia Kazan/USA/1951; R4, 2-disc SE
Warner Bros, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by David Levinson

THE LEGACY of New Orleans seems doomed to rest along its faultlines: Just fifty-four years before the levees broke, sending the city caterwauling into a watery inferno, Marlon Brando’s Stanley Kowalski was making life a living hell for wife Stella (Kim Hunter) and her sister Blanche (Vivien Leigh). Set alongside the stately wail of of-the-era blues, as an expression of white-man soul-torment A Streetcar Named Desire is genuinely hysterical, its crested plea of “Steeeeellllaaaa” shadowing guitar-slung muddy-waters like a Zeppelin. Yet, the hot-hot-heat of emotion soaked thick through shirt fibre should hardly come as a surprise: For Tennessee Williams, desire has always been a stock market of human ruin, and, Norma Desmond notwithstanding, Blanche may be one of the most desperate visions of self-idolatry in movie memory; like a crippled spider, she spins words into broken webs of resistance, and while merely ostentatious at first, her powdered Southern-belle act soon takes on a masochistic fixation.

John Ford/USA/1956; R4, 50th Anniversary SE
Warner Bros, NZ$19.95 | Reviewed by Shahir Daud

IT MAY BE difficult to pinpoint, or even moot to suggest, but where is the nexus between a filmmaker and their work? When do the films of an auteur become the auteur themselves? Do these questions have any real relevance to anyone wanting to figure out if The Searchers is the right movie for them? Perhaps not, since regardless of your opinion of John Ford’s polemic, The Searchers is quite a masterful stroke of filmmaking, both beautiful and thoughtful. Heralded as one of the greatest films of all time several times over by many ‘important’ critical polls (AFI, Sight and Sound), The Searchers comes with enough critical and commercial backing to make it a must see for most cinephiles.

James McTeigue/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$34.95 | Reviewed by Simon Sweetman

COMIC BOOK adaptations? Hit and miss. Except these days the source material is given the lofty reverence of being called a graphic novel – does that change things? Well in the case of V For Vendetta it certainly does, because Alan Moore’s early 1980s story about V was set against the backdrop of Thatcherism and was most definitely a comic book for adults; rather than a Spiderman or Superman character-tale that kids and adults could bond over. V is vengeful – he is both hero and anti-hero combined, his form of vigilantism sits closest to Batman in terms of association with established comic/graphic novel heroes; but V is a creation that is fuelled by a hatred for society’s actions against him in a physical sense, where is Gotham’s Dark Knight is all about suppressing a rage within by acting out at society’s condemnation for itself. There are overlaps and underlays, both figures could be accused of being as much the problem as the solution – and that of course is prevalent in a dissection of vigilantism; it might well be a rising force to fight against conservatism and communism, but it could just as easily bring with it a tide of fascism – an ethos that is really just communism in shabbier clothes.

Gaylene Preston – New Zealand’s filmmaker laureate – is admired both for her films (the touchstone War Stories, the underrated Perfect Strangers) and her generosity towards other artists. In the context of Perfect Strangers’ March 2004 release, Lumiere Associate Editor ALEXANDER BISLEY and Preston discussed turangawaewae, complexity, why filmmaking is addictive, and critics.

Yet another addition to the ever-increasing local film festival calendar: French Documentary Month, vis-à-vis The Festival of Festivals 2006, returns to present eight documentary films courtesy of the Embassy of France and Alliance Française. This, the third edition of the documentary festival, tours various centres throughout November and December. The dates we were given and are listed below don’t quite match those listed on the festival website – we suggest confirming with your corresponding venue closer to the time. Fresh from the European festival circuit, major acquisitions this time around include Clair Denis’ dance documentary Towards Mathidle (the great French choreographer Mathidle Monnier its subject), and Avi Mograbi’s Avenge But One of My Two Eyes, an encore from the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals earlier this year. Programme and itinerary follows. More details at ambafrance-nz.org

Reviewed by Tim Wong

THOUGH of comparatively sane disposition, Junebug’s Ashley Johnsten shares a certain commonality with 3 Women’s Pinky Rose: both diminutive, redheaded Southern Belles, each happen upon a thoroughly modern woman who is to become the object of their obsession. In the Robert Altman film, Sissy Spacek’s idolization of Millie Lammoreaux goes beyond appreciation, culminating in a spell of attempted suicide and identity theft. Smitten with new sister-in-law Madeleine – a high-society art dealer visiting her low-brow in-laws for the first time – Ashley’s enthusiasm for her gal pal’s cosmo chic doesn’t quite pledge her to the alumnae of cinema’s most fanatical females (Sandra Bernhard being the queen bee of that sorority), but she’s got a screw loose all the same. Not unlike Pinky’s eagerness for all things childishly mundane – idle wheelchairs, miniature golf, bubbles in soda – Ashley’s inner little girl, of coltish fascination with African merekats and toenail polish, makes for a somewhat unbalanced mother-to-be, a woman on the verge of something, one minute adorable, the next downright irritating.

Reviewed by Tim Wong

WITH Fast Food Nation, Richard Linklater resumes his journey to the center of the earth: an ugly America of franchise eyesore, prefabricated sprawl, and hamburgers made of shit. Reupping the doom and gloom of not-so-distant future noir A Scanner Darkly, his new film lays forth an alarming tableau that’s cause for concern. Grafted from Eric Scholosser’s bestselling expose are the underpaid teen minions beneath the golden arches; the corporate operatives who serve the almighty dollar; the notorious meat factories, grind houses closeting sub-human work conditions and unsanitary health practices; and the assembly line drones, border-hopping immigrants exploited in the name of the quarter-pound patty. Goaded by the book’s muckraking precedent – of scandalous malpractice in an industry high on greed – Linklater aims to spread onto hamburgers the same guilt-factor currently smearing the likes of Burberry fur and diamonds from Sierra Leone. Given fast food’s ubiquity, his narrative adaptation has the potential to turn legions of carnivores off flesh altogether. Not only is it a vegetarian conversion tool, but an appetite killer on par with Salo.

The Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival’s streamlined frame glides from top to bottom for the 11th time this year, opening in Auckland this Thursday before making six visits by way of Wellington (Oct 18th), Christchurch (25th), Dunedin (November 1st), Nelson (8th), Napier (15th), and Hamilton (22nd). A reflection on the trendline of Italian Cinema if anything, this is a festival that rarely surprises or provokes, though is enormously likeable, striking a cord with audiences who lust after a little Mediterranean flair, or come October, have had quite enough of winter’s depressiing gray hues. On The Festival Reader, Italian aficionado MELODY NIXON introduces the 2006 Programme, and gets first glimpse at Gianni Amelio’s Keys to the House.

At the 11th Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival, Gianni Amelio’s Keys to the House launched the 2006 programme in style. MELODY NIXON got first glimpse.

The Cathay Pacific Italian Film Festival brings the latest Italian films to New Zealand’s towns and cities. Each year Italophiles, romantics, and those interested in European culture are spoilt by the range of films on offer. From comedy to romantic comedy and drama to, err, romantic drama, the Italian Film Festival presents a menu completa of the most popular in contemporary Italian cinema.