Dubbed the most international Oscars in years, Sunday’s Academy Awards ceremony shall be remembered, at least by this writer, as one of the most culturally ignorant on record. In a major faux pas that’s sure to agitate tensions between player haters China and Japan just that little bit more, the Awards announcer, upon hearing William Monahan’s name read from the envelope for Best Adapted Screenplay, proceeded to broadcast to millions of viewers worldwide that he had just won for writing The Departed, a remake of *Japanese* film Infernal Affairs. Japan, with their strongest representation at the Oscars in Babel’s Rinko Kikuchi and Letters From Iwo Jima, lucked out elsewhere, but got to steal Hong Kong’s thunder on the night, while the dunce notion that all Asians look and some the same perpetuated like a bad smell. What really stunk though was Al Gore’s green campaign amidst all the gold, lobbied egregiously by interns Leonardo DiCaprio and Melissa Etheridge, who also got to sing her Oscar-winning song “I Need to Wake Up” to a PowerPoint presentation. The problem isn’t the serious concern made over global warming; it’s the duplicity of an industry built on consumption and excess, and its choice to publicly come clean on the one night it blows out on every conceivable expense. Punctuating the absurdity even further was DiCaprio’s role in all of this, the star of Blood Diamond on stage in front of an audience where any number of gowns could have been adorned with Sierra Leone bling. The real winner of the evening was Martin Scorsese, who got a statuette handed to him on a plate for a film that’s far from his best. No one doubts for a moment that it’s long overdue and thoroughly deserved, yet the triumph doesn’t quite match the picture in this case, given there are at least ten other films in the Scorsese oeuvre that better his last. Rolling with the punches, the Academy also voted The Departed Best Film, shoes Babel, Little Miss Sunshine and Letters From Iwo Jima could have easily and more adequately filled. Of course this is the Oscars, and it’s all about taking turns. Now you know why they present every award as “The Oscar goes too...” instead of “And the winner is...”.—Tim Wong

A tale of grim teen hegemony, murder, secret societies and historical fervor: Like Minds is a sort of emo-kid utopia inhabiting a Da Vinci Code world. The film might also be the most un-Australian of Australian films showing at this year’s World Cinema Showcase. The esoteric plot of this physiological-thriller, a debut feature from writer-director Gregory J. Read, hinges on the investigation of 17-year-old Alex Forbes, who has been charged with the death of schoolmate Nigel. Detective McKenzine (Richard Roxburgh) appoints forensic physiologist Sally Rowe (Toni Collette) to determine whether sufficient evidence exists to find Alex guilty. Building on this intriguing prelude, the film flashes back to examine the troubled relationship between boarding school roommates Alex and Nigel, and their unhealthy obsession with dissecting animals, incest, the 13th-century Cathars, Knights Templar and gestalt philosophy. That these outlandish factors don’t come off as entirely-farcical is testament to Read’s taught screenplay, and the compelling performances of Eddie Redmayne (as Alex) and Tom Sturridge (Nigel). Meanwhile, Richard Roxburgh and Toni Collette – both Australian acting mainstays – are at ease, if somewhat unspectacular, in their roles as British cops. Shot primarily on gothic locations in Yorkshire, northeast England, the film’s atmosphere and stylised cinematography is suitably sinister. A terrific score from Carlo Giacco compounds the sense of menace, suggesting truly dark deeds on the horizon. Like Minds’ final sequence – a gathering of its many threads – does descend into clichéd thriller territory, however the film’s conclusion is agreeably haunting. A fascinating and refreshingly unique alternative to the current crop of Australian films.—Caleb Starrenburg

Doug Ellin/USA/2004-2005; R4 (2/3-disc)
Warner Bros, NZ$59.95 | Reviewed by Tim Wong

MALIGNED by blokes who could actually learn a thing or two about the vagina, Sex and the City chronicled the socialite tales of four thoroughly modern women and their frank sexual escapades. Now, the tables have been turned in HBO’s riotous Entourage: men can finally invite each other over to congregate around something other than sport; women can re-educate themselves on the horny urban male and why guys run in packs. The show is pure wish fulfilment for the FHM player: rising rapidly up the Hollywood exchange, actor Vincent Chase negotiates the ebb and flow – or should that be tits and ass – of Tinsletown with his three best mates. His fame is their fortune: plucky Eric is out to make it as the manager of a hot commodity; loutish Turtle is the mooching chauffeur and errand boy; older brother Johnny is the far less successful actor tailgating Vince’s ride. Together, they are Swingers in a Humvee with too much money, too much action, and way too much booty. The spoils are rich for the Entourage crew; however exorbitant the lifestyle, there’s certainly pleasure to be had in such guilt. All of which is enough to make a slut out of a man, so it’s with great relief that the show’s interrogation of Hollywood cuts close to the bone of all that is vapid, bruising, and absurd about this factory of dreams.

In association with The Lumière Reader, The Zone, a bright new local show hosted by The Silkworm Girl, curating the best in art, music, film and theatre reviews, as well as interviews, special guests and the a cache of giveaways, presents a fortnightly film reviewed by the talking heads at Lumière. The Zone broadcasts every Monday from 5.30-6pm. Tune in to Access Radio on 783AM, stream live, or congregate at The Zone’s MySpace page.

THIS MONDAY (26/2): TIM WONG reviews the The Science of Sleep, the latest cardboard and cellophane mash-up from music video mastermind Michel Gondry.

David Slade/USA/2005; R4
Warner Bros, NZ$29.95 | Reviewed by Mythily Meher

THERE IS THAT Flash inspired by stories about paedophiles who get away with it: a thick lurch in the gut; a fiery fleshy glimmer of rage; raised hackles; and the desire to make that sick fuck suffer. Hard Candy’s sort-of heroine follows the flash through. The film’s premise is simple: him and her at his place. Him, a photographer, a charmer sprinkled with sleaze. Her, a flirty 14-year-old come guerrilla-vigilante, bent on extracting a confession and exacting revenge.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

CLINT EASTWOOD’s purple patch continues with Letters From Iwo Jima. The iconic American director gave new life to the war movie with Flags of Our Fathers. Now he provocatively tells the bloody World War Two end-battle from a Japanese perspective. Particularly Saigo, Nishi and Shimizu, who are grunts, and General Tadamichi Kuribayashi (Ken Watanabe), who was the real Japanese soldier in charge on the island. (Sadist Lieutenant Ito represents the uncompromising kamikaze, suicide bombing view.) Kuribayashi is an urbane, perceptive man who spent time in America before the war. Watanabe, wasted in the condescending, muttonheaded The Last Samurai, puts in an exceptional performance. It’s not quite Burt Lancaster’s magnificent The Leopard, but a sense of history, culture and mortality moves through Kuribayashi.

“There is a sort of gritty, cartoonish polish to the way that Suburban Mayhem’s overriding aesthetic quality is a stylised version of middle class white trashdom. Katrina (Emily Barclay) – all bad girl, disproportionately endowed with sexual power, literally leading the local male populace around by their collective suburban phallus – possesses a kind of mythic quality you’d usually equate with a (sub)urban legend,” writes JACOB POWELL....[Read More]

Also reviewed: We Feed The World, a severe document of the globalised food industry that CALEB STARRENBURG describes as “visually striking” and “perversely fascinating”. Interviewed last August, IMOGEN NEALE talked to Suburban Mayhem’s Emily Barclay, also worth revisiting.

Emily Barclay comes of age in the slimy and scandalous Suburban Mayhem, a new Australian take on the god-awful ’burbs so successfuly portrayed in the likes of Chopper and The Boys. Destined for the World Cinema Showcase in March and April, JACOB POWELL reviews.

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

“SOMEONE once asked me, ‘Why don’t they put a ‘the’ in front of CIA?’ And I said to him, ‘do you put a ‘the’ in front of God?’” CIA surely is a remarkable institution, The Good Shepherd grapples with its formation through and after World War Two, through the eyes of fictional composite character Edward Wilson (Matt Damon). Wilson, who is recruited by Robert De Niro’s spy master, heads overseas counter-intelligence. It is a role that consumes his life, stultifying his marriage with Angelina Jolie’s fetching high society wife. The part is inspired – not in the insipid Pursuit of Happyness way – by the real lives of major spooks James Jesus Angleton and Richard Bissell. A host of good actors, particularly De Niro himself, add weight to proceedings as spies and players around the espionage scene. Alec Baldwin is again notable as one agent; as in The Departed dialogue between him and Damon scores.

In We Feed The World, our daily bread literally goes down the tube, just a fraction of the excess and waste created by multinational corporations with a foothold on the global production of food. CALEB STARRENBURG uncovers some of this documentary’s sobering truths, screening at this year’s World Cinema Showcase in March and April.

With a new season of Film Society upon us, converting newcomers to this weekly ritual is often greeted with the same question: why, when I can rent most of these movies at the video store? In a pervading digital age, where more films, past and present, are available and within reach than ever before, the need to preserve ‘live cinema’ gathers an urgency all of its own. If radioactive multiplexes, popcorn encrusted seating, grossly inflated ticket prices and insolent teens are just some of the reasons behind punters opting for the comfort of their own living rooms, let a Film Society membership restore their faith in theatres once more. Respectable, well attended, affordable, and certain to enrich any jaded moviegoer’s palette, we can’t recommend it enough.

TIM WONG admires the films of Samuel Fuller and François Truffaut, presented in retrospect as part of the 2007 Film Society season.

A BRUTE FORCE of American Cinema, Samuel Fuller made B-pictures with a capital ‘A’: cluster bombs that exploded on screen, sending shrapnel into the audience and shock waves far abroad. Insubordinate, they reverberated with the French New Wave, a movement in awe of Fuller’s thunderbolts. These were films that drew their current directly from the loins: raw, caustic, they were made not with brains, but balls. Jean Luc Godard’s admiration extended further to a rather amusing cameo appearance for Fuller in Pierrot le fou, while the director’s imprint on the greater Nouvelle Vague can perhaps be read in their disobedience, and bristling, freshly squeezed energy that the films of Godard and his contemporaries oozed. François Truffaut, one of the New Wave’s founding cineastes, wrote passionately about Hollywood’s unsung genre exponents – Fuller among them – in the famed Cahiers du cinema, before forging his own cinematic career, most notably with The 400 Blows (1959).

Bruno Dumont/France/2003; R4
Accent/RS, $24.95 | Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

THERE weren’t many people who liked this film when it was shown at the 2004 New Zealand International Film Festival. I think I was one of five people that I knew who actually liked it – most other people had a rather extreme reaction against it. It’d be easy to see why: it’s slow, repetitive and ultimately brutal. But it also works. There’s something about its tone, its vision of mankind that’s ultimately a rather distressing and disturbing one, and even for people who hated it, sticks with them for a long time after.

A juicy entrant in this country's ever-burgeoning film festival season, the French Film Festival forwards eleven features heralding from that most European of film industries. If its modest offerings seem beside the point in the face of bigger international programmes (namely, the NZIFF), one only need to look at the list of recent French films that never made it to our screens, crawling their way onto DVD several years later if we're lucky. Among those: previous films by Claude Chabrol and Alain Resnais, two masters represented aptly here with Private Fears in Public Places and A Comedy of Power respectively. Their latest works, along with the sleek and taut thriller The Page Turner, headline a programme balanced elsewhere with lighter fare: comedy (Hey Good Looking!), romance (Twice upon a time), and more comedy (The Story of My Life). Punctuating proceedings are two harder-edged offerings from Xavier Beauvois (The Young Lieutenant) and Lucas Belvaux (The Right of the Weakest). The festival makes its way to Rialto screens in Auckland (Feb 28-March 6) and Wellington (March 2-6) later this month. Full details by way of the festival's official website, frenchfilmfestival.co.nz.

Those hanging on the prospect of a ‘third act’ to Roseanne Liang’s deeply personal, yet universally defiant account of cross-cultural love ought to relish the documentary’s recent release to DVD, graced rather aptly with a 30-minute epilogue to Roseanne and Stephen’s constant forge. The idea, however, that the couple will forever struggle to gain the approval of traditional Chinese parents seems almost void in the wake of this genuine happy ending: not only a great wedding video, but something of an antidote to the cultural cringe of the film's ‘banana’ trademark. Defining assimilated Chinese as yellow on the outside and white on the inside, the epilogue's euphoric endpoint all but evaporates this notion of cultural confusion or duplicity, conquering it (as cheesy as it sounds) with the power of two people in love. Last we heard, Roseanne is turning her story into a feature film.

Courtesy of the director herself, The Lumière Reader has six copies of Banana in a Nutshell on DVD to giveaway. UPDATED 7/3/07: Congratulations to B. Lea, H. Wells, K. Corner, N. Loh, O. Yalcintas and T. Ng Chie. Your DVDs are in the mail.

Visit banana-film.com for more information on the film and DVD, or read Tze Ming Mok’s original review of Banana in a Nutshell...[here]

Reviewed by Alexander Bisley

“I AIN’T Jo Bloggs window washer. I’m hardcore.” Squeegee Bandit documents Starfish, aka Kevin Whana, a colourful window washer working the cars on South Auckland’s streets. Empathetically and imaginatively directed by Sándor Lau (Behaviours of the Backpacker), the documentary charts a year of Starfish’s fiery life. He’s a Taranaki Maori, a descendent of the formidable warrior chief Titokowaru (whose “I shall not die” speech was recorded in River Queen) and son of a 28th Battalion soldier. Lau contextualises Starfish’s demons with his tough life, including colonisation’s collateral damage. He was adopted out as a child and bullied by his foster mother, forced to wear soiled underwear on his head in front of his friends.

“[Journey From the Fall] may be financed by producers Stateside, but the American influence is otherwise non-existent: there are no marines or platoons; no embittered war veterans in wheelchairs; nor is there the overbearing presence of an Oliver Stone. He may not admit to it, but Journey From the Fall is also Tran’s backlash against imperialism: just as Americans are compelled to impose themselves on every conflict overseas, so to are they insistent on making them into movies from their own perspective. A film about Vietnamese, by Vietnamese, this is an imprint of war that’s thirty years overdue, yet fresh off the boat,” writes TIM WONG....[Read More]

Also new on The Festival Reader: impressions on Christophe Honoré’s sweet and sour Dans Paris, a New Wavy soufflé with Roman Duris in the throws of a post-relationship depression, and Louis Garrel as his skirt-chasing younger brother, and Dominik Moll’s Lemming, another typecast for Charlotte Rampling, nevertheless in shrill form as the unwelcome guest in Laurent Lucus and Charlotte Rampling’s blissful South-of-France abode. The WCS website, worldcinemashowcase.co.nz, is also now updated and live, with one change to the programme: replacing Black Gold is Li Tao’s excellent documentary about Chinese exchange students in New Zealand, Waves, returning from last year’s New Zealand International Film Festivals.

Polished, forthright, and very moving, Ham Tran’s Journey From the Fall ought to stand on its own two feet despite offhanded comparisons to Schindler’s List. It is by turns a tough and tender survival story of Vietnamese boat people that’s more intimate, less remorseful, and not in slightest bit self-righteous. It concerns the plight of the Nguyen family post-Vietnam war: husband Long is imprisoned in a series of grueling re-education camps, forced into hard labour and the regularly fatal practice of clearing landmines; meanwhile his wife, mother and son defect via an overcrowded vessel headed anywhere but ‘Nam. Initially harrowing and without hope, the film relocates at its mid-point to California in the eighties, where the family have immigrated successfully, albeit uneasily, with the undertow of those left behind a heavy burden to bear. Crucially, Tran narrows the focus from the outset, allaying the broad chaos and resentment of a war-ravaged country in favour of the closeness of his four affected family members – the universality of their flight bound to resonate with most Vietnamese (9 out of 10 in the US, for instance, either were or knew boat people), as well as anyone who’s sought refuge from their tarnished homeland. With a generous budget, this is impressively fielded in scale, yet maintains a modesty that’s humbling. It may be financed by producers Stateside, but the American influence is otherwise non-existent: there are no marines or platoons; no embittered war veterans in wheelchairs; nor is there the overbearing presence of an Oliver Stone. He may not admit to it, but Journey From the Fall is also Tran’s backlash against imperialism: just as Americans are compelled to impose themselves on every conflict overseas, so to are they insistent on making them into movies from their own perspective. A film about Vietnamese, by Vietnamese, this is an imprint of war that’s thirty years overdue, yet fresh off the boat.—Tim Wong

With calculated cool, Dominik Moll’s Lemming reveals itself as a hall of mirrors haunted by the spectre of Charlotte Rampling; her glacial presence anticipated by an anomalous Scandinavian rodent. Having discovered a lemming in the S-bend of their kitchen sink, the Gettys, Alain (Laurent Lucus) and Benedicte (Charlotte Gainsbourg), soon find themselves stalked by the boss’ wife, played with stereotypical shrill by the predatory Rampling. An unwelcome houseguest, by turns seductive and abrasive, she imitates the titular creature right down to throwing herself off the proverbial ‘cliff’. In the tradition of David Lynch, that’s only the half of it. Typecast once again as an icicle bitch, the real twist of the film is watching the Gainsbourg – such a delicate, blithe spirit in The Science of Sleep – become slowly possessed by Rampling’s lingering feral soul, while Moll’s clinical visuals manage to unnerve at key moments, an eerie tension exasperated by dueling technological and supernatural forces. All things considered, this comes across as more sub-Chabrol than neo-Lynch – not quite screwed up enough, yet too aloof for its own good. Its symbolic critters, however, are bound to get right under your skin.—Tim Wong

A roundup of the current best and rest in film. In this installment: The Descent, Volver, For Your Consideration, A Prairie Home Companion.