Multi-racial, psychedelic cult band Love mourned the death of their frontman, Arthur Lee, in 2006. Love Story, SIMON SWEETMAN writes, tells the tale of their music, their influence, and their heart-breaking latter years.

Neither Hollywood grifters nor smooth-talking David Mamet racketeers, four pathological opportunists form the rotten core of Con Man Confidential, a revealing, infuriating journey into the dangerous minds of real life fraudsters. Often gloating, occasionally remorseful, the documentary’s subjects confess to their crimes of deception with a common disdain for the greedy and bourgeois. They’d make great characters in a Michael Haneke movie if only they weren’t seduced by the colour of money themselves. Ironically, the foursome also try to con us with the rationale that if you’re gullible, you deserve to be cleaned out. This time, they’re fooling nobody.

This utter odd-ball gem from Scotland will no doubt disappear from view unless its highly talented director (Laurin Federlein) or actor/musician Magnus Aronson strike it big later on. But in theory the accolades should be for Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness alone – a beautiful, moving and hilarious work. It opens with Vincent (Aronson) trying to convince a local about a great plan of his. He’s not particularly convincing – nervous, stilted and to be honest a terrible salesman. Is he a conman? Deluded? A visionary? He seems to fail, but a musical interlude carries him away, and he travels through the Scottish highlands on a wee scooter. As the film progresses you realise he’s utterly earnest and totally believes in what he’s trying to do – he believes the people in the Scottish Highlands are lonely, so he decides to make a mobile disco to unite the people and show them a good time. Unfortunately for Vincent, the people seem happy enough.

“In this slow moving indie flick each line that goes unsaid is worth the weight of a hundred lines in any other, more verbose film. Old Joy is a minimalist study in spirit-filled, natural imagery, and emotion; its moments of detached discontent contain both exuberant and mournful glimpses into the darker side of peace. That is, peace how Fellini’s La Dolce Vita character Steiner describes it; “a thin cover, stretched across an abyss”. Old Joy is joy gone stale, and joy that is afraid of the spark it has lost.”...[Read More]

Complementing her estatic review, MELODY NIXON offers parallel insight into one half of Old Joy’s journeymen – folk singing, sometimes-acting poet and musician, Will Oldham – with a personal and praise-filled Appreciation (filed on The Arts Reader).

In further festival previews in the lead-up to Auckland’s Opening Night (A Might Heart) on July 13, SIMON SWEETMAN listens to a punk serenade in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, The Clash frontman who he describes as “A spiritual man, a musical magpie, a quintessential punk who, by virtue of his literal lust for life, transcended the punk subculture”. And on the film itself: “[Julien] Temple, having documented the odyssey of The Sex Pistols... is the perfect person to collect and collate these views on Strummer... Temple is both a filmmaker and a scenester, a hip player with an eye for the detail of how it should be but a head already full of the awareness of the way it was.”

Further still, TIM WONG gets reacquainted with a festival staple, Isabelle Huppert, in Private Property, while BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM checks out two idiosyncratic oddities: raw Mexican talent in The Violin, and Brand upon the Brain!, the latest from an unclassifiable favourite, Guy Maddin. Lumière’s critics also list their Ticklish Tens, or: their ten most anticipated festival films.

Mexico is one of the hottest filmmaking countries at the moment, and this internationally acclaimed work does its bit to enhance that reputation. The Violin is a poetic and slow-burning film, and garnered a Best Actor award at the Un Certain Regard section in Cannes in 2006 for 81-year-old non-actor Angel Tavira. Tavira was the subject of a documentary by Vargas, an actual violinist who lost his hand when he was thirteen, and offers a wonderfully moving performance as a violinist (Don Plutarco) who sells his art to the occupying military force in order to allow Plutarco to smuggle weapons to guerilla forces behind the military’s back.

“Old Joy’s rhythmic contemplation will pull you right down inside it, almost painfully, but ultimately in uplifting and surprising ways,” writes MELODY NIXON of Kelly Reichardt’s spiritual, minimalist revelation.

KIM CHOE wonders what makes the University of Auckland Film Production Group tick, a lively – and so far, productive – collaborative of film students, whose feature film Be Sharp, See Flat is a current resume highlight.

Bless Canadian director Guy Maddin. Without his crazy surreal silent films, contemporary filmmaking would be a whole lot more boring. And while it’d be easy to relegate his peculiar brand of expressionism in Brand upon the Brain! as a throwback to 1920s filmmaking, this film plays like a hyper-kinetic DJ mixing his favourite scenes from his memory. Maddin claims this film is 96% autobiographical. I’m not entirely sure if he ever grew up in a lighthouse on a desolate island, or fell in love with a brother/sister duo sent to uncover Maddin’s mad scientist father’s experiments on an orphanage on the island. Also I’m not sure if his relationship with his mother or sister were exactly as depicted in the film. No matter, it was highly entertaining no matter what. The film ultimately constructed a highly inventive and disturbing depiction of childhood.

Isabelle Huppert, a festival staple, has never entirely convinced as a mother on screen – at least, not one who exudes traditional maternal instincts. Christophe Honoré understood it best when he cast her as the incestuously corruptive parent to Louis Garrel’s whiny, Catholic repressed schoolboy in Ma mère – although chances are the director was just as blatantly trading off Huppert’s psychosexual heat in The Piano Teacher. Residue from those two films initially threatens to overthrow Private Property, where Huppert can be seen modeling a skimpy negligee in the opening scenes. Standing behind her, sons Thierry and Francois (real-life brothers Jérémie and Yannick Renier) josh her whorish appearance while seemingly ogling her ageless figure; later, dumb and dumber tease her for inviting their neighbour over by role-playing some doggy-style intercourse.

The life and times of rock ‘n’ roll frontman, rude boy, and departed punk legend are preserved in Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Julien Temple’s ode to The Clash, their lead singer, and his close friend. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews.

“While [Jesus Camp] isn’t without moments of absurdist humour – namely, the worshipping of George W. Bush, God’s 2IC who graces the camp in spirit as a cardboard cutout – it remains a candidate for the most terrifying film of the year. The children, however, cannot be labeled helpless victims in all of this: impressionable as they may be, some are clearly strong-minded enough to one day gain back their personal autonomy. As for the kid who admits to his peers that he still watches Harry Potter movies despite the boy wizard’s blacklisting as the devil? He’s already halfway there.”...[Read More]

Also from TIM WONG: programme launch revelations, plus thoughts on Deep Water (“not another tall tale of survival, but a quiet revelation of human fallibility, fraudulence, and compelling oceanic adventure”) and Old Joy (“economical, gloriously sparse, and ever so closely observed”). And from SIMON SWEETMAN, reviewing a reasoned and well-considered Michael Moore retort: “Manufacturing Dissent is a quiet marvel of even-handed filmmaking. Finally the Michael Moore backlash really has some grunt, for here are two fans of his work doing their best to understand his motives.”

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

Move over Big B. Here comes Royal Rajnikanth. The once Bangalore bus conductor-turned-actor still sells tickets, only these are for films in which he acts. His latest blockbuster in Tamil, Sivaji – The Boss, made at a whopping Rs 80 crores (even Bollywood’s Devdas in 1992 cost only Rs 50 crores) opened June 15 on 900 screens across India, collecting a record Rs 1.7 crores on the first day.

Bush’s America has never vegetated so much green in Old Joy, a spiritual roadtrip of two old yet fading friends en route to a hot springs concealed somewhere deep in the foothills of Oregon’s majestic Cascade mountain ranges. With not a duelling banjo in sight, the mates – one, a full bearded salt-of-the-earth clinging to the leftist ideal, the other a father-to-be who’s abandoned his activist youth for the pragmatism of family life – get reacquainted on a weekend camping excursion of lost trails, roadside diners, campfire confessions, and ecological tranquillity as their pilgrimage into a seemingly uncharted emerald forest of fern leaves and shimmering creeks might as well have been cribbed straight from the New Zealand’s Middle Earth.

Programmes browsed, circled, dog-eared and fingered-through, Lumière’s editors and contributors compile their ten most wanted films in anticipation of July’s Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals.

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.

COMING MONDAYS (25/6, 8+23/4): TIM WONG extends Lumière’s Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage to the airwaves, previewing Old Joy, Red Road, Still Life and The Great Happiness Space. Podcasts of these and previous reviews can be downloaded at accessradio.org.nz.

TIM WONG reports from the Wellington International Film Festival programme launch.

Sturdy without scaling new heights, this year’s programme unveil nevertheless managed to invoke surprise: the lack of controversial content, for one; the news that Telecom will not be renewing their naming-rights sponsorship (which means what for attracting international guests?); the long-overdue introduction of a festival concession ticket. Such points of discussion, though, were superseded by the event’s feature presentation. Sensing another middling, all-purpose documentary on the launch invite (Dave Chappelle’s Block Party aside, recent years have seen attendees humoured by the likes of Double Dare and Touching the Void), the night’s real bombshell was, against all expectations, the film itself: not another tall tale of survival, but a quiet revelation of human fallibility, fraudulence, and compelling oceanic adventure.

Eschewing conspiracy theory and flagrant bullshitery, filmmakers Rick Caine and Debbie Melnyk pursue documentarian Michael Moore in their reasoned and well-considered retort, Manufacturing Dissent. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews.

DARREN BEVAN previews Series 2 of “Extras”, premiering on Prime this coming Monday.

LAST TIME we saw Ricky Gervais’ bumbling extra Andy Millman, he’d managed to secure himself a BBC Sitcom – despite overwhelming odds in the shape of his blundering agent Darren Lamb (Stephen Merchant) and hapless naif of a friend Maggie (Ashley Jensen). But Andy’s about to learn everything comes at a price – and you need to be careful of what you wish for.

“Never mind the frigid climate and inane rugby obsession that comes with the following months: this July and August, winter plays host again to the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, a savior from the cold in its annual torrent of world and experimental cinema, documentaries, animation and retrospective offerings. The much-anticipated programme hits streets officially this week, although scouts will have already discovered the majority of titles announced online. Privy to the confirmed lineup, it’s with equal parts excitement and curiosity that we can reveal some of its potential highlights.”...[Read More]

And so begins The Lumière Reader’s festival coverage, continuing uninhabited through until the end of August. TIM WONG offers his Opening Thoughts on the colossal programme – launched tonight in Auckland, and Wellington on Thursday – spying several early event movies, including David Lynch’s Inland Empire, a rather outrageous subtitute for the now-defunct Grindhouse double-bill in Death Note + Death Note: The Last Name back-to-back, and the festival’s annual retrospective element, this year a tantalizing revival of American seventies cinema; Electra Glide in Blue, The Hired Hand, and The Last Picture Show his essentials from the ten film programme.

The festival begins in Auckland (July 13-29), followed by Wellington (July 20-August 5), Dunedin (July 27-August 12), Christchurch (August 2-19), and remainder of the country thereafter. Full details online at nzff.telecom.co.nz.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: a girl and a gun.

IN 1968, Jean-Luc Godard was about to give up mainstream filmmaking, and become an even more militant figure with his Dziga Vertov group. But while he moved over into obscurity, a new generation of filmmakers worldwide were using Godard’s techniques to challenge institutions that were arguably more overbearing than the ones Godard was railing against. Red Light Bandit (Bandido da Luz Vermelha), is one of those films, where Godard’s famous maxim of a movie only needing “a girl and a gun” formed the major basis of the plot. However, Red Light Bandit was also made under highly oppressive conditions – it was at the cusp of increasing repressiveness in Brazil (under the AI5, a government decree that curbed political freedom) and many artists were forced to either renounce their previous opposition or go underground and making highly symbolic and coded films.

TIM WONG previews with enthusiasm a winter savior, the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals programme, due out to much anticipation this week.

Star, producer, director: Helena Ignez is synonymous with Brazilian Cinema. A beacon of the Cinema Novo, she talked to BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM during her recent invitation to New Zealand for the Film Society’s Brazilian season.

Indexed capsule reviews and summaries of every film seen by Lumière staffers at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals. Cross-referenced links to existing features, reviews and columns on The Lumière Reader + our ‘recommended’ and ‘favourite’ stamps-of-approval accompany each film in our at-a-glance festival guide, updated throughout. (Last Update: 11/8)

Indexed capsule reviews and summaries of every film seen by Lumière staffers at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals. Cross-referenced links to existing features, reviews and columns on The Lumière Reader + our ‘recommended’ and ‘favourite’ stamps-of-approval accompany each film in our at-a-glance festival guide, updated throughout. (Last Update: 12/8)

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: cannibal-tropicalism.

WHO WOULD HAVE ever thought that a cinema could ever have a “cannibal-tropicalist” phase (outside of the Italians). Well the Brazilians did, and a whole bunch of films were made challenging political ideas via outrageous symbolism and grostesque storylines. As Brazil became more and more politically censoring, the Cinema Novo movement was forced to adapt. Macunaíma is considered a key film in this movement, and is indeed wickedly funny and I must admit, rather bizarre.

Reviewed by David Levinson

EXTOLLING the sentiment behind Richard Connell’s short story, The Most Dangerous Game, the uncaptured Zodiac Killer, who, across Northern California drew a known body count of five (in addition to other, “inconclusively proposed” killings), explains that he kills for much the same reason Connell’s character does: “[B]ecause it is so much fun. It is more fun than killing wild game in the forest, because man is the most dangerous animal of all...” The message is delivered via cipher to The San Francisco Chronicle, decoded by an elderly couple from Salina, Kansas, and, as far as psychological profiles go, is about all you’ll get in Fincher’s own hand-wringing of history’s threads (aside, of course, from one reporter’s suggestion that the killer is a “latent homosexual”).

Out of India, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers the current Indian and Bollywood Cinema.

INDIA WAS bashed at the Cannes Film Festival. Journalists and others agreed that the country’s presence at the festival was sadly confined to glamour and the red carpet. India could not participate where it really mattered: the festival’s two most important segments, Competition and A Certain Regard. For a country that clinched the Festival’s Grand Prize in 1946 with Chetan Anand’s Neecha Nagar and the Best Human Document Award ten years later with Satyajit Ray’s Pather Panchali, the slide seems awful. Besides, India has had eminent people on the Cannes jury, and they included Ritwick Ghatak, Mrinal Sen and Mira Nair.

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

CHRIS KNOX: I didn’t get to see this, the mother of all monster movies, until well into my so-called adult life. Probably on VHS initially but definitely at a 16mm screening at the Ponsonby Community Centre or some such with my infant daughter in the early ‘80s. So how did it get me into the movies?

The Lumière Reader’s extensive coverage begins late June. The festival’s all-new website, now boasting programme teasers, confirmations and other news, can be visited at nzff.telecom.co.nz.

“Do people only to go the cinema for entertainment or to view things that affect them personally? Must an ‘issue’ have big budget celebrity endorsement (think Al Gore, Bob Geldof, George Clooney) before we care? Is it just my cynicism or is this a sad indictment of the fact that we really only care about ourselves and aren’t interested in other people’s problems?”....[Read More]

In post-Human Rights Film Festival coverage, KATE BLACKHURST looks back on the third edition of this annual event, the problems it explored – and on occasion encountered – in bringing urgent and pertinent issues to attention. She also reviews several documentary films: Goal Dreams, on the Palestinian football team; Outlawed, a short but hard-hitting story of two men who survive secret detention and torture by the United States government; Race is a Four Letter Word, an unmasking of the racial divide; and Sign of the Times, documenting sign language’s struggle for official recognition in New Zealand.

KATE BLACKHURST looks back on the problems explored, and on occasion encountered, by the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

THE HUMAN RIGHTS NETWORK sponsored the recent Human Rights Film Festival at The Paramount (in addition to the Academy Cinema in Auckland, and the Regent in Christchurch) which brought a plethora of problems exploding onto the screen. Many of these films made uncomfortable viewing and all of them were inspiring. The range was varied and international, including a couple of New Zealand documentaries.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

NEW ZEALAND sign language became an official language of New Zealand in April 2006. The Act has limited legal consequences and basically permits sign language to be used in court if a deaf person is on trial. It has far more social repercussions, however, as it is a safeguard for sign language and will guarantee its continuation and development. Sign language has led to a more assertive political consciousness, ensuring that deaf people need not be cut off from society.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

SOBAZ BENJAMIN with the assistance of the National Film Board of Canada has produced a fascinating documentary about race which questions, “Why is race the primary thing that defines me?” He mixes the personal and the political to illustrate that race has a lot to do with identity and a sense of belonging.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

THIS 2006 USA documentary from director Gillian Caldwell is only 26 minutes long, but the images and issues raised will last much longer. Filmed as a succession of harrowing interviews, the filmmaker examines the CIA Rendition Program. The chief architect of the rendition program and former head of the Osama Bin Laden unit at the CIA, Michael Scheuer, claims the program was initially established to get documents and information about people travelling and that, “Interrogation was never a central goal,” but that changed after 9/11.

Matt Groening/USA/1997-98; R4 (4-disc set)
Fox/RS, NZ$59.95 | Reviewed by Graeme Edgeler

The Simpsons: Season 9 saw its 200th episode – the Emmy Award-winning “Trash of the Titans”. This milestone season receives a timely DVD release this year – with the Simpsons 18th season, currently airing, to see episode 400, and the long-awaited Simpsons Movie in cinemas July.

KATE BLACKHURST reports belatedly from the third Human Rights Film Festival in May.

WHEN IS A film about sport, not about sport? When it’s about the Palestinian football team. This is not a joke but a serious and thought-provoking documentary charting the amazing struggle the team undergoes to compete internationally. With no training facilities, domestic league, nor home ground, the team dreams of qualifying for the 2006 World Cup and triumphing over adversity, but there is a big difference between dreaming and reality.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN’s final dispatch from Cannes rounds up the prize winners following the festival-ending awards ceremony: Romanian Palme d’Or triumph Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days, and close relative California Dreamin’, another Romanian success in A Certain Regard; Gus Van Sant’s Paranoid Park, recipient of the festival’s 60th Anniversary Award; a surprise Grand Prix for Naomi Kawase’s The Mourning Forest; acting honours for The Banishment and Secret Sunshine; a Jury Prize for outré Mexican filmmaker Carlos Reygadas’ Silent Night; Best Screenplay and Best Directing acknowledgements for Fatih Akin’s The Edge of Heaven and Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly respectively.

NEW THIS WEEK: the Outtakes Film Festival, now in Wellington (by way of Auckland) through until June 10, followed by Christchurch from June 7-13. Filled out with the usual under-the-radar queer fare, there are also notable oddities and some heftier instances: a trio of Asian imports (Spider Lilies, Taiwan; Hatsukoi, Japan (World Premiere); and The King and the Clown, returning from the Korean Film Festival), a trashy lesbian sexploitation compliation (Lezploitation) that’s a something of a throwback to the bygone Incredible Film Festival era, and for big screen fun, two retrospective screenings of Calamity Jane. The Lumière Reader’s Doris Day scholar, TIM WONG relays his thoughts on the camp classic....[Read More]

TIM WONG imparts some straight talk on “Calamity Jane”, screening as part of this year’s Outtakes Film Festival.

HAVING RECENTLY completed a mini-retrospective of Doris Day vehicles – including The Pajama Game, Young Man With a Horn, and two out of three of Day’s couplings with ironic screen stallion Rock Hudson – there’s little doubt that programming hammy musical-western Calamity Jane into Outtakes 2007 is a stroke of camp genius. On a scale of butchness, Day may be entirely unconvincing as the legendary bruiser and brawler of the Old West, but as far as gay subtext goes, this is about as queer as a movie gets without it knowing so. In fact, almost inadvertently within its opening passages – marked by mediocre drag act ‘Frances Fryer’ taking to the stage – the film threatens to become a westernised Peking Opera Blues, complete with gender inversions and musical numbers performed largely by men. The star of that film, the incomparable Brigitte Lin, generated an indelible niche career out of transgendered roles, playing everything from martial arts women disguised as men (Dragon Inn), to invincible eunuchs (Swordsman II), to the male lead in a classic Chinese romantic melodrama (The Dream of the Red Chamber, a lesbian film festival candidate if ever there was one). What Day lacks in Lin’s beguiling androgyny though, she makes up for in sheer spread-legged gusto, turning in an almost vaudeville impression of what she thinks it means to be Jane: the crotch-swinging walk, the frog in the throat… it’s at once embarrassing, valiant, and strangely endearing.