Dogs, dreams and all things brass crop up around every pallid corner in You, the Living, a surreal twist on human life in all its depressing glory from Swedish writer and director Roy Andersson. A series of nutty vignettes – all of which may or may not have something to do with the bass drummer and tuba player of the Louisiana Brass Band – uncovers the lighter side of neuroses and finds anxieties in everyday communication. The long, artfully composed shots and the spare dialogue mean You, the Living feels a little like a chain of comic sketches, but the catastrophic weather, fascist imagery, unwavering irony and impossibly wan faces ensure that the greasy, filthy core beneath never remains hidden for too long.

I have always found it odd that sex, something that is so natural and crucial to human existence, gets such bizarre treatment in cinema. On the one hand, there are the art films that scream and shout out their exploration of sexual taboos, and consequently only serve to perpetuate those very taboos. Suddenly sex moves from the enjoyable to the painstakingly depressing. (Not that I have a problem necessarily with this approach). Or, on the other hand, you get the bump and grind variety that manages to reduce sex to something rigorously unsexy, (and frequently exploitative), and yet is still a taboo – hidden away in curtained video rooms, and dark alleyways. So it seems potentially refreshing that a film like Destricted challenges some well known artists and filmmakers to reclaim sex on film, make some short films that can be intellectually challenging, yet also interesting (perhaps even fun) to watch. Granted, it does feel like an exercise that the Cinema of Transgression/American avant-garde have been doing for years. Some of the directors on show here did it well; others certainly did not. I guess that’s the way with compilation films.

Paprika, the latest love-letter to cinema from writer/director Satoshi Kon (Perfect Blue, Tokyo Godfathers), cements his reputation as the most versatile and intelligent auteur in anime today. His take on an anime staple – the devastating effects the intrusion of science has on the natural order – requires multiple viewings, to make sense of a brain-bending plot but also to soak in the exquisite details of a richly rendered deluge of imagery and to play spot-the-allusion (à la Millenium Actress). Kon’s mastery of genre covers the detective story, spy film, oddball romance, pyschological thriller and sci-fi epic, and a heady host of homages range from the traditionally Japanese (Maneki Neko, the Monkey King) to Hollywood (Tarzan, The Greatest Show on Earth).

Fans of director Patrice Leconte (Intimate Strangers, The Man on the Train) will be pleased to see that he hasn’t stopped filming unlikely relationships. But My Best Friend’s premise, set up so swiftly you barely get the chance to reflect on how ridiculous it is, sounds like something more up the alley of Francois Veber (The Closet, Ruby and Quentin), who last directed Daniel Auteuil alongside Dany Boon to hilarious effect in The Valet. In a city where the locals are notoriously rude yet even the most casual acquaintances are greeted with kisses, this comedy of manners meditates on the problems with the tightest social bond – friendship.

JACOB POWELL moves onto digital shorts as part of this year’s “Homegrown: Works on Video” programme.

TNZIFF 2007’s Homegrown: Works on Video programme presents somewhat of a mixed bag, replete with shorts that take you from contemplative musing to shock and anger, heart-warming smiles to several minutes of cringefest. Themes and genres are also widespread, covering comedy, horror-western, shockumentary, experimental and stylised drama-cum-mystery. Overall, the standard was reasonably high – complementing the trend in the Works on Film section of the Homegrown programme.

SIMON SWEETMAN considers the bizarre career path and unsung genius of Scott Walker: 30 Century Man in this candid look at the making of his first album in over a decade.

“Basically Army of Shadows with tits and ass, Verhoeven’s film trades regularly in nudity and sex. For the Dutchman, neither is complete without the titillation of violence, and there’s something reckless, if not dangerously arousing about his penchant for flesh and blood while dealing in the historical gravity of WWII. But it’s through such a treacherous minefield of moral ambiguities and the blurring of friend and foe... that Verhoeven manages to deliver more truths about the war than the self-righteousness of Schindler’s List, or the numbing combat realism of Saving Private Ryan. More than a Darryl F. Zanuck throwback, Black Book is in fact the kind of movie Steven Spielberg used to make: loud, pulpy, wildly inflated, and utterly gripping. It also understands the decadence of war by simply allowing itself to entertain. Guilt is part of its pleasure, and Verhoeven wrote the book on spectacular bad movies. I wouldn’t write off Black Book though; so ballsy and unadulterated in execution, you’ll struggle to put it down.” TIM WONG’s praise continues....[Read More]

Rarely is there middle ground with Paul Verhoeven, and in contrast KATE BLACKHURST determines Black Book as “one-dimensional” and “The well-lit scenes appear staged and with dramatic music underscoring fight scenes, it felt like watching West Side Story.” In further head-to-heads, TIM WONG describes I Served the King of England as “A two-hour Stella Artois commercial,” while JOE SHEPPARD adds “The whimsical humour has a charming and timeless appeal to it... Served celebrates life’s pleasures, and the appreciation of food, women, money and Pilsner is realised gorgeously.” Also on Tekkonkinkreet: “The imagination and effort behind the detail, colour and shape of this epic behemoth is stunning.” KIM CHOE chimes in with: “Aesthetically, Tekkonkinkreet is proof that you don’t have to be Japanese to make good anime.” She concludes: “The film’s story and its message could have been delivered far more effectively without half an hour’s worth of fire and monsters. It’s a shame, because it’s so textured with symbolism and allegory that it would easily stand up to multiple viewings otherwise.”

SIMON SWEETMAN casts his eye over another music documentary: “I’m Your Man is essentially a live concert show with some talking-head interview slots fleshing it out just enough to justify it as a documentary. Nonetheless it’s a great glimpse in to the world of Leonard Cohen. As a confessional writer, Cohen has always allowed plenty of his psyche in to his work, but only measured amounts of his actual life, so anyone disappointed at the fact that this music doco doesn’t quite dish the dirt is missing the point... to celebrate the man’s work, something Cohen seems incapable of doing himself, hardly touring, recording only sporadically and never, as he basically says himself, looking back.” “Wow. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness was all that I hoped it might be,” echoes JACOB POWELL in more enthusiasm for the Scottish gem.

Black Book claims to be inspired by true events; there was a World War, which ended in 1945; there was a resistance movement; and the Netherlands were occupied, but for all the credibility it delivers, that is about as far as it goes. It is conducted as a flashback, from a Kibbutz in Israel, 1956, so we always know the heroine has survived. Indeed, the human instinct for survival is at the heart of the film. Rachel Stein (Carice van Houten), as a Jew in occupied territory, is constantly forced into hiding and subterfuge, doing things she abhors in order to live, from learning to recite passages of the New Testament, to seducing Ludwig Muntze (Sebastian Koch) the head of the Gestapo in The Hague.

Chris Kraus’ Four Minutes left me cold. I’d read other reviews prior to the screening, the bulk of which promised a complex, “believable and engaging” exploration of human relationships, to which our film festival’s official synopsis nodded eagerly, saying yes, yes, it would “seduce (even) the most cynical hearts”. So I was quite unsettled in the full, darkened theatre while Four Minutes unfolded, when despite having made an earnest effort to care, even towards the end, I really just couldn’t.

There’s a lot about Stephanie Daley that’s uncomfortable – the subject matter (teen pregnancy), the cinematography (a prevalence of close-up, hand-held shots that force the viewer into the characters’ proximity), and the fact that one must subject oneself to a cinema full of overly sympathetic, middle-aged women in order to watch it. But that is perhaps what makes this film so effective. It’s a tense drama that doesn’t try to shield the audience from its characters’ experiences just for the sake of making it more digestible. Stephanie (Amber Tamblyn) is a sheltered Christian teenager who is accused of killing her baby after giving birth to it, and then burying it, while on a school ski trip. However, she insists she had no idea she was pregnant, and it falls to psychologist Lydie (Tilda Swinton) to determine whether or not she’s telling the truth. The interview sessions cause both women to confront their own fears and denials in a story that explores female strength and vulnerability but doesn’t weaken or victimise the characters. The bulk of Stephanie’s story is told through a series of flashbacks, which draw unexpected parallels to Lydie’s current experiences. Swinton and Tamblyn deliver muted but extremely effective performances that carry the film without needing much assistance. Tamblyn’s portrayal of an innocent young girl giving birth in a public toilet makes for particularly harrowing cinema. It’s not an easy film to watch, but writer/director Hilary Brougher has crafted such a compelling story that it’s impossible not to let yourself be drawn into this darker side of suburban America.—Kim Choe

A documentary unearthing the uncertain memory of Danny Williams, A Walk into the Sea was made by Williams’ filmmaker niece (Esther Robinson) who seeks to build a picture of the uncle she never knew. Her enlightening film leads us backwards from his mysterious disappearance in his twenties (his body was never found) to his life in the midst of one of New York’s most well-known artistic hubs – Andy Warhol’s Factory. Backgrounded by swathes of Williams’ little-seen black and white film footage, various members of Warhol’s inner circle wax ponderously upon Danny’s place and person within The Factory scene. Including interviews with Factory intimates Billy Name, Paul Morrissey, Brigid Berlin, and Velvet Underground member John Cale (amongst others), Robinson rolls into a bubbling melange of egos, suspicion, and drug induced confusion. People give garbled and conflicting accounts; one moment claiming not to remember him at all, the next declaring with utter certainty the truth of some particular detail. These are interviewed alongside Danny’s family members who have built up their own myths surrounding his life and untimely death – some even speculating upon the veracity of the latter state. Robinson skilfully crafts together this multitude of spoken threads into a cohesive story of a talented and vulnerable young man who became a close companion to Andy Warhol whilst remaining an outsider in his world. Highlighting the imperfect mechanism of human memory A Walk into the Sea simultaneously showcases the enigmatic cinematic work of a man ahead of his time.

In related reading, ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Juliet Binoche about Michael Haneke, Hou Hsiao-hsien, being Tom Cruise’s chick, and her latest film A Few Days in September, screening this July and August at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals....[Read More] (links to The Film Reader)

In a New Zealand exclusive, ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Juliet Binoche about Haneke, Hou and being Tom Cruise’s chick. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

“In a film like Killer of Sheep, and reportedly in [Charles Burnett’s] other films too, it is possible to see the influence of filmmakers like Jean Renoir, and his line “everybody has their reasons.” “It was one of the films that he did, The Southerner, that really affected me a lot. It was about two itinerant farmers, a black family and a white family, and it was first time both of them were treated humanely and equally. If it was made by an American, it would have been focused on the white family and told through their eyes. The film was criticised for that [approach]. But in later years I realised that it was because he didn’t fit the mould, he didn’t perpetuate the racist mould that you find in a lot of directors of that time.” BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM’s interview with Charles Burnett continues....[Read More]

More dailies from JOE SHEPPARD in Wellington: on Homegrown: Works on Film (“For all the films, the post-production was beautiful and sophisticated, but it did jar a little with the idealised view of provincial New Zealand on offer. I know there’s still plenty of VHS tapes and kitsch wallpaper out there, but haven’t we moved on from milkmen and glass bottles?”) Manufactured Landscapes (“Burtynsky divines deep beauty even among the dusty Yangtze cities, dismantled brick-by-brick to make way for the Great Dam of China: urgent questions of enormous social and economic change have never been posed so prettily”) and The Bothersome Man (“The script is as sharp as a switchblade, the humour brutally deadpan, and the scores from Ginge and Grieg achingly beautiful”).

DAVID LEVINSON on TV Junkie: “What ultimately saves [Rick] Kirkham’s story from the glossy endzone of a million other wreck stories like it, is his chronic self-chronicling, having captured on home video the before, during and after of years’ worth of highs; totalling 3000 hours worth of footage, filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, in an endurance test of editing, have streamlined this mountain of avowal down into the hellish-but-laboured 90 minutes.” And DARREN BEVAN on a vampire epic: “Given how Night Watch ended with the central character losing his son after he allied himself with the forces of darkness, I had half expected to sit through a sequel in the vein of a supernatural Kramer vs Kramer – but I needn’t have worried. Day Watch is by turns brilliant and completely bonkers.”

The opening chase scene – when street urchins Shiro (White) and Kuro (Black) playfully bound through chaotic traffic to lure two rival streetkids into a trap sprung by a giant clock, with Hindu elephant god Ganesh as the cuckoo – is a quick introduction to the central character of Tekkonkinkreet: Treasure Town, a cosmopolis equal parts seedy and sublime, where pagodas poke out from neon jungles and mosques jostle with steampunk slums. The imagination and effort behind the detail, colour and shape of this epic behemoth is stunning, and well worth forking out for on its own. The story isn’t so bad either: orphaned teenager Kuro lords over the streets as the black-hearted Batman of this Gotham until the yakuza muscle in on his turf, but even they can’t stop the aliens behind the construction of the biggest racket in town – the mega-Disneyland that threatens the integrity and history of what everyone calls ‘my city’. Noirish boss Suzuki is the best of the crooks: one step ahead of everyone else, he issues his commands based on horoscopes. Though a little saccharine at times, the themes are universal – innocence and experience, reason and madness, good and evil – and ultimately question the possibility of balancing any binary opposites in a world of plurality.

Treasure Town is dying – the quaint streets are strewn with litter, and the bright lights of commercial enterprise are threatening to engulf the struggling metropolis. Two street orphans, Black and White, are racing to protect their territory from the Rat – a property developer with gang connections, who will stop at nothing in his quest for dominance. What starts off as child’s play quickly spirals into something much more sinister, as they become embroiled in a fight against greed and corporatisation. Aesthetically, Tekkonkinkreet is proof that you don’t have to be Japanese to make good anime. American director Michael Arias (with art director Shinji Kimura) creates a stunning, haphazard world that at once owns, and is owned by, the two young boys. As their names suggest, they represent two of the opposing forces in the film, a classic good vs. evil tale that will be familiar to anime fans. Their friendship brings a warm heart to the unforgiving city, but also creates the most tension in it, with each one pulling and pushing the other to the point of destruction. The admirable characterisation makes even the most fundamentally menacing ones believable. The film is much darker than other well-known anime releases like Howl’s Moving Castle – dangerously too dark. The fantasy sequences, while dramatic, slow the narrative down too much. The film’s story and its message could have been delivered far more effectively without half an hour’s worth of fire and monsters. It’s a shame, because it’s so textured with symbolism and allegory that it would easily stand up to multiple viewings otherwise.—Kim Choe

“On their own, [Edward] Burtynsky’s photographs are both pleasing to the eye and terrifying. But his wide scope has a tendency to dehumanize. A disappointed labourer comments on not being able to make himself out in a photo: “It’s very broad. It’s hard to see the detail.” Seen alongside Mettler and Powis’s footage, we see how Burtynsky can cut through industrial smog, sharpen edges and colours. It is though the stylish combination of these three men’s work and the associated interviews that we are confronted. While it largely avoids “we have to take responsibility” soundbytes, Manufactured Landscapes amounts to a trenchant criticism of galloping global consumption. China got legs, who can stop it?” CATHERINE BISLEY’s review continues....[Read More]

Surmising our most recent torrent of festival columns and reviews, JACOB POWELL (“Free from documentary restraint, the master director occasionally overindulges his melodramatic tendencies with the odd scene which could have leapt straight out of An Officer and a Gentleman, or even worse, a Steven Seagal film”) and TIM WONG (“In the weathered hands of Herzog... such concessions are almost entirely forgivable, and while amiably servicing the film’s commercial needs, he also circumvents any pressure to mythologize Dieter Dengler’s capture and escape”) offer a head-to-head on Rescue Dawn. Also from TIM WONG: The Boss of it All (“jarring, consistently hilarious, and ridiculous beyond belief – indeed, there’s only so clowning around a film can take before its backlog of absurdity starts to cancel itself out”) and Venus (“A geriatric male fantasy... Harold and Maude with a sexual understanding”).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM: “You have to wonder what would compel a director to make a sequel to a film forty years later, particularly given that the original, Belle de Jour, is one of the most iconic films of the 1960s, and its director, Luis Buñuel, one of the greatest of all-time... But this distance from the original adds a new dimension to the tale, and Oliveira’s own background infuses Belle toujours with a tinge of nostalgia and age-old wisdom.” And additional thoughts on Explorations of Folded Time: Leighton Pierce (“does highlight the intellectual and artistic explorations that film can indeed facilitate”) and Freedom’s Fury (“An ultimately solid, if unspectacular film that reiterates no matter how much we try and pretend otherwise, sport and politics do indeed mix”).

Comedies from the Czech Republic come with high expectations nowadays, and the period class-farce I Served the King of England, from Oscar winners Jirí Menzel and Bohumil Hrabal, certainly didn’t disappoint. The whimsical humour has a charming and timeless appeal to it, and the wistful philosophy provides amusing diversion rather than real distraction. Served celebrates life’s pleasures, and the appreciation of food, women, money and Pilsner is realised gorgeously in a series of staggeringly opulent visual feasts (including a highly imaginative use of a Lazy Susie). The Prague hospo scene in the 30s and 40s yields beautiful Jugendstil sets, unlimited opportunies for mischief, and a rainbow of stunning costumes. Even when pint-sized protagonist Jan Díte was just earning small beer selling hotdogs at the train station, he knew all he ever wanted to be was a millionaire. Ivan Barnev is impossibly likeable as the crafty but clueless young Díte, who manages to turn an unlikely profit even during the Nazi occupation of Czechoslovakia. The Aryan stud farm is probably the most far-fetched of many picaresque set-ups, but the Germans are pilloried so mercilessly that even the stiffest salutes and purest eugenics – particularly from the excellent Julia Jentsch (The Edukators, Sophie Scholl) – are only laughable to the merry, indomitable Czechs. Highly recommended.

Leonard Cohen’s 70th is celebrated by peers and performers in this concert documentary framed around 2005’s tribute at the Sydney Opera House. SIMON SWEETMAN reviews I’m Your Man.

Wow. Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness was all that I hoped it might be, but thought, from the programme notes, it might not. Descriptors like “oddball” and “wacky” instantly conjure up (for me) thoughts of slightly left of centre mainstream Hollywood productions brought to life by the likes of Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore etc). There is nothing wrong with this in itself, but Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness held the tentative promise of being much, much more interesting.

Reviewed by Brannavan Gnanalingam

The Simpsons is the greatest TV show of all-time. No question. Not a doubt about that statement. No television programme has matched it for longevity, layered humour or social commentary, and all the other comedy greats in recent times have been left scrambling in its wake. Admittedly, the show has peaked, and current seasons are pale shadows of what they once were, despite still maintaining the occasional moment of hilarity. And the movie unfortunately as a result, is simply ten years too late. That’s not to say this movie isn’t funny though – it most certainly is. But we are so used to the purposefully two-dimensional characters by now, especially since the show has rung humour out of their two-dimensionality for years – Homer does stupid things, Moe is a loser, Grandpa is senile etc. – that this big screen version suffers from over-familiarity. Ardent fans of the show will be able to point plot structures and characters to older episodes – Spider-pig replaces Mr. Pinchy, Russ Cargill is a Hank Scorpio etc. Or how many times have we seen Homer do something stupid, Marge get angry and threaten to leave, and Homer tries to make amends (essentially the plot of this movie)?

A two-hour Stella Artois commercial replete with weathered European men, amorous women, and frothy pints of beer, I Served the King of England also happens to satirise the absurdity of war, offend the Jewish, and lionise small people the world over. Yet it’s a much less outlandish retrospective of Nazism than Paul Verhoeven’s Black Book: a bold, brawny feminist war epic starring the drop-dead gorgeous Carice van Houten in an unapologetic performance of sexual gambit and brute emotional force. Nobody objectifies the female form quite like Verhoeven, and for a time, his heroine finds herself sucked into the vacuum left by Elizabeth Berkley and Sharon Stone. Ogle her private parts we might, but it’s those eyes that hit all the right spots, and van Houten transcends any lurid necessity with chutzpah and a degree of self-ownership; indeed, hers is the rarest of roles, a constructive, non-submissive Jew who isn’t going to take this shit lying down (except when seducing the Gestapo’s top brass).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talks to Charles Burnett about Killer of Sheep, the social climate in which it was made, and the changes that have taken place in American society since the release of his classic film.

The five shorts in Homegrown: Works on Film were unified by a common focus on the eccentricities and creativity of New Zealand’s youth, stifled but never fully suffocated by intrusions from the Real World. Of course, Wellington’s celebrated Oscar dozer most famously showed how richly this recipe can be realised if personal touches are balanced against the limits of such a perspective and format. And if verisimilitude is the key, then Mark Albiston’s Run wins for extolling experimental shenanigans while Dad’s passed out drunk. Very funny at times, superb performances from kids and adults alike, and a nice piano score too. The other Cannes veteran, Fog, posed a depressing question: What if you grew up trawling fish at dawn in the middle of nowhere (i.e. Ngawi)? The crashing sea and the thick, blank fog speak as much as the young leads, whose defiance of authority is equally elemental. In Clean Linen, Daddy should have hidden his pornos better, because when mum finds out what the kids have been watching, the repercussions are dire. It was nice to see that for all the cultural differences, the expectations of the parents and the dynamics of the family – first generation Indian New Zealanders – paralleled their Kiwi counterparts and families the world around. For all the films, the post-production (courtesy of Park Road) was beautiful and sophisticated, but it did jar a little with the idealised view of provincial New Zealand on offer. I know there’s still plenty of VHS tapes and kitsch wallpaper out there, but haven’t we moved on from milkmen and glass bottles?

In a year abound with bad dads - from Alec Baldwin’s phone blowup to the leaked tape of a puffy, slurring Hasselhoff shot by his 16-year old daughter - it’s ex-crack-addict Rick Kirkham who steals the show. As a billowy-haired reporter for Inside Edition during the ‘80s, Kirkham was first introduced to crack cocaine by officers on drug busts, and in light of his jetset excess and needy glamour he was hooked before you could say bad-career-move. But even as he eventually traded the glitz for married life, he couldn’t shake his love for the white lady. What ultimately saves Kirkham’s story from the glossy endzone of a million other wreck stories like it, is his chronic self-chronicling, having captured on home video the before, during and after of years’ worth of highs; totalling 3000 hours worth of footage, filmmakers Michael Cain and Matt Radecki, in an endurance test of editing, have streamlined this mountain of avowal down into the hellish-but-laboured 90 minutes that make up TV Junkie.

Industrial wastelands and China’s insatiable appetite for growth are the sites of concern for Manufactured Landscapes and its subject, photographer Edward Burtynsky, whose large format images bring global consumption into sharp focus. CATHERINE BISLEY reviews.

I remember the interschool waterpolo final in my first form. We lost the final by one goal against a team that had no problem dunking us, pulling our hair and kicking us in the balls. Man those girls were brutal. Having grown up obsessed with the Olympics, for a moment I felt like the Hungarian waterpolo team after that bitter loss. I had been especially fascinated by that game that the historians always seemed to talk about, the so-called bloodiest game in Olympic history, the one with the iconic picture of the Hungarian player (Ervin Zádor) with blood streaming from his eye. I felt like I’d taken part in a game like that in the final I played, though in later years, I realised the full extent of the tensions of that fateful game in 1956. And of course, my own team’s vengeful vows and bitter memories were utterly trivial in hindsight.

Leighton Pierce is a former musician who has been making avant-garde shorts on 16mm and digital for some time now, and the Festival managed to grab a curation of some of his more recent work; a collection of films from 2002-2004, and a wee gem from 2007, where it felt like an audience member had to sit back and let the images and sound wash over them. If the film was successful, it can be pieced together afterwards; if not, you’re still left with little moments of beauty. Pierce’s films are very sensory, and capture all these little fragmentary moments in life. He also maintains a strong focus on the elements, water, air, fire, wind and earth all make appearances and form a major backbone of his imagery. This is particularly evident in the opening film ‘Wood’, where fire and water intermingle to renew life by the final image, yet also according to Pierce, seeks to maintain “an overlapping acoustic environment”. ‘Evaporation’ feels like a child noticing little patterns of water that an adult probably would pass over.

Given how Night Watch ended with the central character losing his son after he allied himself with the forces of darkness, I had half expected to sit through a sequel in the vein of a supernatural Kramer vs Kramer – but I needn’t have worried. Day Watch is by turns brilliant and completely bonkers. Which is what you would expect of a film that concerns itself with an ancient mystical artifact known as the Chalk of Fate. As for the plot, The Light Others continue to monitor the Dark Others as the fragile truce between the two sides teeters on the bring. Again, the action centres around Konstantin Khabensky as Anton, who is plagued by the loss of his son Yegor, and finds himself slap bang in the middle of the oncoming war. As if that wasn’t bad enough, he’s being asked to trace a Great Dark Other who is causing chaos, attacking humans, and eluding those trying to identify him. Couple that with the fact he has to train a Great Light Other who could restore the balance, and you can understand why he’s having a particularly hard time. But the problems really start when Anton is falsely accused and framed for the murder of one of the Dark Others – an action which could end the fragile truce and plunge both sides into war. As Anton tries to extricate himself from the conspiracy against him, he finds himself drawn deeper into the quest to find the Chalk of Fate (a mythical piece of white chalk which holds the key to the world).

TIM WONG reflects on another first day at the Wellington International Film Festival.

MIMING Little Dieter Needs to Fly almost note-for-note, Rescue Dawn is a faithful and formidable prisoner of war ordeal book-ended by a weakness for military and Hollywood clichés. In the weathered hands of Werner Herzog, however, such concessions are almost entirely forgivable, and while amiably servicing the film’s commercial needs, he also circumvents any pressure to mythologize Dieter Dengler’s capture and escape into a Commando serial of pungent patriotism and chest-beating heroism. Christian Bale, himself a fine example of method madness and mainstream nous, embodies the rabid life-force of Dengler, particularly the ex-pat German’s propensity to talk, and the performance itself becomes a model for the obsession Herzog regularly warps his cinema with. The consumption of snakes and maggots, extreme emaciation, and an excruciating scene involving leeches are just some of the lengths Bale goes to for authenticity’s sake, and evidently also, in honour of Denger’s memory. The film’s other magnificent obsession is ‘Little Dieter’s’ need to fly – or in the context of the captivity, take flight – and there’s something morally precarious at times about his compulsion to escape at the risk and expense of others. Nature fetish aside, Herzog turns out a robust, riveting big screen movie that omits some of the more overt distinguishing features of his oeuvre, and it’s at least surprising he resisted the temptation to include one of the documentary’s more surreal – and indeed, Herzognian – moments of altered reality: when Dengler, exhausted and near-death, witnesses a grizzly bear emerge from the jungle overgrowth.

A dramatised retelling of the story he first explored in his 1997 documentary Little Dieter Needs to Fly, Rescue Dawn retreads the path of many a Vietnam War POW story – albeit one imbued with Werner Herzog’s inimitable love for, and masterful grasp of, aural and visual details. Dieter Dengler (Christian Bale) is a German-born man who emigrated post-WWII to America following a near death experience that left him with the unquenchable desire to become a pilot. In his first military action in this role we see him shot down while on a black ops mission inside of Laos; later, from the confines of a primitive jungle prison run by desperate slowly starving locals, he leads a daring escape with several other POWs also being held in the camp – some upwards of two years (prior to the official beginning of the war!)

You have to wonder what would compel a director to make a sequel to a film forty years on, particularly given that the original, Belle de Jour, is one of the most iconic films of the 1960s, and its director, Luis Buñuel, of the greatest directors of all-time. And especially when the new director himself is ninety-eight years old, and has been making films since the silent era. But this distance from the original adds a new dimension to the tale, and Oliveira’s own background infuses Belle toujours with a tinge of nostalgia and age-old wisdom.

Based on a well known series of fantasy novels – penned over more than a 20 year period (1968-1990) by American author Ursula K Le Guin – Tales From Earthsea is the feature debut of anime filmmaker Goro Miyazaki. Attempting to emerge from the shadow of a father who achieved greatness in the same field, I expected to meet with a work possessed of some new and unique qualities; unfortunately I was confronted with stock Studio Ghibli fare. Not being a great fan of anime, I can’t give as informed comment as others on Tales from Earthsea from that perspective. I am, however, familiar with the more popular recent films of Hayao Miyazaki (Howl’s Moving Castle, Spirited Away, Princess Mononoke), and really saw nothing (excepting for the source material storylines) from Miyazaki junior which hadn’t already been covered – and covered well.

“[Chris] Sivertson’s invitation to the Kiwi festival screenings of The Lost could not have been better timed. While his adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s novel is yet to see mainstream release in the United States, Sivertson’s follow-up movie I Know Who Killed Me releases on 1500 screens across his homeland, a few days after The Lost’s Wellington showings. “If I was in LA this week, all I would be thinking is “what’s the release going to be like,” Sivertson told me... Having only just got off the plane from a rushed visit to Auckland, Sivertson handled my questions in a spirit of both openness and calm, even after my opening gambit of spinning the tape recorder onto the concrete and losing a battery down the storm-drain.” IAN PRYOR’s interview with Chris Sivertson continues....[Read More]

“It’s with hard-to-contain fondness that I can report, following last night’s pre-festival Gala, on the irresistible geekery of Taika Waititi’s lionhearted comedy... Though Waititi appears to be grafting the skin of a Michel Gondry concoction onto Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the film’s soft-spoken modesty – a shy thing hiding behind the curtain, as introduced by its director – underlines it culturally. As for anyone seeking an antidote to the buffoonery of Sione’s Wedding, its appeal will be immense.” TIM WONG forwards early impressions on Eagle vs Shark from Wellington’s Russell McVeagh Gala event.

Also in Wellington, JOE SHEPPARD kicked proceedings off with Hand Painted Under Camera, “an auspicious opener to 2007’s celebration of all things film, with enough ideas, styles and voices in 69 minutes to sustain a whole festival,” and followed it up with Bamako (“a trial drama where the defendants are no less than Capitalism and Globalisation themselves, but the most vehement excoriation is reserved for the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the G8”) and Tales From Earthsea (“Another stunningly designed and magical milieu has sprung perfectly formed from the fertile and original minds at Studio Ghibli”).

Meantime, JACOB POWELL takes a second bite at Tales From Earthsea (“Probably the thing I appreciated most... is Goro Miyazaki’s easy combination of distinctly Japanese and Western components/character traits into a seamless whole. The heart of Le Guin’s stories remain intact inside a very Japanese flavoured retelling”) and Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates (“With an obvious eye for setting gorgeously beguiling shots, the director and his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, at turns impress and frustrate. Five minutes in, I was ready to praise this as possibly one of the most beautifully shot pieces I had seen; five minutes further along I was wringing my hands in annoyance”); DARREN BEVAN observes the reaction to Death of a President (“A clever mix of digitally edited footage gets Mr Bush in the thick of the action to start with, but as the opening shot explains, there was no co-operation from the White House or the Secret Service – something which raised a titter from the audience”); BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM checks out a selection of Sundance talent from the festival’s World of Shorts compilation.

IAN PRYOR engages visiting American director Chris Sivertson on his breakout feature film, The Lost, a contentious psychological thriller of small town murders.

Courtesy of the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, The Lumière Reader has a double pass to giveaway to The Edge of Heaven in Auckland (Sat July 28, 8.30pm/Civic) and Wellington (Sun Aug 5, 8pm/Embassy). UPDATE: congratulations to A. Levarre-Waters and S. Darlington; your tickets are in the mail. Meanwhile, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reviews The Edge of Heaven for Lumière....[Read More]

JOE SHEPPARD reflects on Day One of the Wellington International Film Festival.

Hand Painted Under Camera provided me with an auspicious opener to 2007’s celebration of all things film, with enough ideas, styles and voices in 69 minutes to sustain a whole festival. When every frame is hand-painted, you’d think everything would be streamlined as economically as possible, but the lyrical centerpiece Alexander Petrov’s of ‘My Love’ unfolded with all the richness and decadence of a dozen Russian Empires. Weaving an oneiric tale of upstairs-downstairs passions, Petrov has lovingly painted a gallery of impressionistic landscapes and portraits but never forgotten the real focus on depth of theme and character. Well worth the admission price on its own. Also deserving mention: Martha Colburn’s ‘Destiny Manifesto’, which connects the twitchy Wild West and the moribund Middle East with red ribbons of guilty post-colonial blood.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM previews six short films from the Sundance Film Festival.

SHORT FILMS are an exceedingly difficult medium to do well. Not that I’m saying short stories are easy to write (on the contrary), but short stories can capture wider issues and themes a lot easier than a short film. So to see this art-form done well is certainly pleasurable. Perhaps there is also an added element that few filmmakers once they’ve started making features, return back to the short form – consequently, it’s frequently young and vibrant filmmakers out to make a point who utilise the shorter form. And that seems to be the general trend here with this enjoyable collection of short films.

(Contains Spoilers)
Feted upon release for its controversial content, Death of a President looks into the realm of possibility if George W. Bush were to be assassinated. Given how contentious the President’s policies have been both at home and abroad, it’s not a difficult leap to make. On the eve of a speech in downtown Chicago, Bush’s motorcade is met with fierce opposition as thousands of barely controlled protestors take to the streets to vent their fury at his stance on the war in Iraq. Director Gabriel Range accurately conveys the mob mentality and the claustrophobia – as well as the simmering hatred – within the protests. It’s no spoiler to reveal the President ends up dying, but the rest of the film concerns itself with the after effects – and how quickly the assassination becomes a focal point for change in Government policy both at home and abroad.

For the purposes of remaining on the right side of an embargo, Eagle vs Shark will get the full review treatment at a later date. But it’s with hard-to-contain fondness that I can report, following last night’s pre-festival Gala, on the irresistible geekery of Taika Waititi’s lionhearted comedy. More so than spotting Napoleon Dynamite cribbage, what seems to have been lost in translation amongst a slew of glib, offshore criticism is the inherent New Zealandness of the film; something the Embassy’s parochial audience had no trouble interpreting. As well as transcending the cringe factor of provincial Kiwi vernacular, Waititi cushions the oft-told whimsy of an awkward romance with a higher appreciation of the lowbrow, and a weakness for all things Wellington. Another testament to the city’s incestuous creative community, the sights are lived-in, personalised and not at all obnoxiously touristy, while the sounds – The Phoenix Foundation, chiefly – are nothing if not tailor-made for the incandesce of cinema. Pooling local talent, Jemaine Clement is quite obviously at home playing a candlestick-making dweeb, but it’s Loren Horsley as The Girl who surprises and surpasses with an improbably infectious performance; at once gentle and exaggerated, it’s the stuff of an unfathomable crush. Though Waititi appears to be grafting the skin of a Michel Gondry concoction onto Once Upon a Time in the Midlands, the film’s soft-spoken modesty – a shy thing hiding behind the curtain, as introduced by its director – underlines it culturally. As for anyone seeking an antidote to the buffoonery of Sione’s Wedding, its appeal will be immense.—Tim Wong

“A Civilised Society charts the reversal of values in New Zealand’s education system driven by the free market reforms of successive Labour and National governments from 1984. In the documentary filmmaker Alister Barry demonstrates and laments the erosion of the right to free education in order to realise one’s fullest potential, and the resulting loss of the values of equal opportunity and community. It is also a film of protest and peaceful, but by no means passive, resistance to the policies of successive governments by teachers and their unions. Barry’s belief that “A high quality universal public education system is a fundamental requirement of an egalitarian society” pervades the film” writes HELEN SIMS in her dialogue with Alister Barry....[Read More]

In first impressions out of Auckland, JACOB POWELL in won over by this year’s Homegrown: Works on Film programme; is similarly impressed with The Secret Life of Words (“A slow-burn, bittersweet story with an aesthetic depth to easily immerse oneself in... one of my sleeper picks for Festival 2007”); and reports back from Day One via Death at a Funeral, Red Road, Cocaine Cowboys and A Mighty Heart. Also out of Auckland, DAVID LEVINSON offers a third take on Red Road: “In camoflauging the basis of the relationship between Jackie, a CCTV operator, and the mystery man she stakes out though, the film is piloted less by moral ambition, and more by a lust for atmospherics.”

Further previews come from BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM on Half Moon (“Reportedly based on Mozart’s Requiem, the film manages to wrest the desolation and supposed despair of the Kurdistan landscape and infuse it with a celebration of art, a tribute to the human spirit and a simple joy of being”), and TIM WONG on The Matsugane Potshot Affair (“Unlike previous outings, [Nobuhiro] Yamashita’s deadpan manoeuvrings don’t quite achieve the same comic abruptness, but the situations are just as awkward, the mood as always unpredictable, and the spare and observant humour resoundingly unconventional”) and Syndromes and a Century (“Apichatpong Weerasethakul’s most breathtaking film to date... a singular, spellbinding duplex of urban and tropical harmonies”). And in related coverage, Lumière’s ALEXANDER BISLEY (also film critic for the Sunday Star Times) talks the Festival with Mark Broatch online at stuff.co.nz.

Forget dialogue and forget plot; Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s Climates is all about the camera. A camera which constantly intrudes into the action, firmly and unashamedly directing the viewer’s gaze and attention. With an obvious eye for setting gorgeously beguiling shots, the director and his cinematographer, Gökhan Tiryaki, at turns impress and frustrate. Five minutes in, I was ready to praise this as possibly one of the most beautifully shot pieces I had seen; five minutes further along I was wringing my hands in annoyance.

Sarah Polley rejoins writer-director Isabel Coixet in The Secret Life of Words, an immersive, bittersweet ‘sleeper’ about the damaged emotional interior of an oil rig nurse. JACOB POWELL reviews.

Kurdish filmmaker Bhaman Ghobadi has achieved international acclaim with his previous films A Time for Drunken Horses, Marooned in Iraq and Turtles Can Fly. In his latest, Half Moon, Ghobadi uses the rugged Kurdistan landscape, and makes it into a moving, and emotionally rich film. Reportedly based on Mozart’s Requiem, the film manages to wrest the desolation and supposed despair of the Kurdistan landscape and infuse it with a celebration of art, a tribute to the human spirit and a simple joy of being.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Fuller’s personal favourite.

SAM FULLER started off in journalism at the age of twelve. He was a copy boy, then a crime reporter by the age of seventeen. You can feel his newspaper experience seeping into this film, a passion for the ink, the machinery the people. While Park Row is certainly minor Fuller, and a little problematic, it is also possibly the most purely enjoyable film of this year’s Film Society programme thus far.

HELEN SIMS offers both an appraisal of A Civilised Society and a dialogue with its director, Alister Barry, on the documentary’s chronicle of free market reforms and education upheaval in the eighties.

(Contains Spoilers)
Turns out the red road is also the high road in Andrea Arnold’s Cannes heavyweight – a panopticon thriller which, borrowing a leaf from the Dardennes’ fablebook, dares its heroine to forgive. In camouflaging the basis of the relationship between Jackie, a CCTV operator, and the mystery man she stakes out though, the film is piloted less by moral ambition, and more by a lust for atmospherics: Indeed, the first 3/4 are spent hung out in free-floating anxiety, surfing between the refuge of her security room and the concrete migraine of a Glasgow housing estate.

JACOB POWELL reflects on Day One of the Auckland International Film Festival.

DAY ONE of TNZIFF 2007 saw me chew through four titles. Actually, the first film, Death at a Funeral, played the gala opening the Thursday night before official “day one”. Downstairs from the Civic Theatre in the pleasant surrounds Wintergarden festival lounge we were treated to some fine Triplebank wine and sponsor cocktails and a very reasonable opening speech delivered by Helen Clark – a step up from Judith Tizard’s appearance last year. The Prime Minister managed to be succinct (a definite bonus) while also displaying a very real interest in film. You got the feeling that she would be making her way to at least a few movies this festival.

Winding down from the ecstatic high-notes of Linda Linda Linda, Nobuhiro Yamashita renews his fascination with social misfits in this quasi-Fargo affair involving a hit-and-run victim, a decapitated head, blackmail, rat poison, gold bullion, and backwater sexual mores. Clearly there’s something in Matsugane’s H20, a snow-covered provincial town whose local hairdresser pimps out her pregnant daughter to customers, and where a dead body on the side of the road is an opportunity for a feel-up. Meanwhile, two lowlife criminals coerce the twin brother of a police officer into helping them retrieve something valuable from beneath a frozen lake. Unlike previous outings, Yamashita’s deadpan manoeuvrings don’t quite achieve the same comic abruptness, but the situations are just as awkward, the mood as always unpredictable, and the spare and observant humour resoundingly unconventional.

JACOB POWELL finds short films in strength at this year’s “Homegrown: Works on Film” programme.

PLAYING early in this year’s festival programme, 2007’s Homegrown: Works on Film selection (presented c/o the wonderful crew at MIC Toi Rerehiko) is quite inspiring. Last year there were a few good little pieces amongst some so-so ones; this year there were some really moving examples amongst a stable full of starters. No newbies this year, but a couple of second-time directors, including a return by 2006 entrant Tearepa Kahi with his new short Taua. Raising the bar further on an already impressive standard, this is not a year to miss out on our NZ short film catalogue!

“Alexander Greenhough and Elric Kane are enthusiastic about talking about film, but get them talking about their own work, and the words flow out like hyperactive children who’ve just found out they’re going to Disneyland for the first time. They love film, not only watching and analysing it... but they’re also starting to make a name for themselves as fine filmmakers in their own right in New Zealand. Kissy Kissy is the duo’s third film in the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals, and is arguably their finest achievement so far in their rather young career. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM talked to Greenhough and Kane in a barely populated bar, and coupled with the dulcet tones of Rod Stewart swooping around the room, made for a highly energetic and lively interview.”...[Read More]

In further impressions from BRANNAVAN: “With an oddball title, and a premise that plays between fiction and reality, How is Your Fish Today? might be seen as a Chinese riff on Charlie Kaufmann, or could just as easily be tarred with that reductive label ‘quirky’. However, this would be to ignore the film’s thematic concerns and meditative mood, and ultimately its rather subversive streak.” And on his cemetery fetish: “I love going to cemeteries. There’s something majestic, something foolhardy, something particular vain about the human condition that gets represented in them. It’s an attempt to reverse the mutability of life with an ever-lasting monument. Dutch documentary maker Heddy Honigmann seems to share similar views... and wanders Père-Lachaise capturing moments of life and transcendence. It’s [Forever] a beautiful work that aims to show that by looking at death, we can also find traces of life.”

First thoughts from our Auckland Festival correspondent, DAVID LEVINSON: “In a bid to outdo the turbo-hormones and beersoaked euphoria of most male bonding, Falkenberg Farewell opts for a hippy forlornness that’s equally contrived (and a whole lot more cloying) than its more American counterpart.” And on Audience of One: “Herzogian song of thwarted ambition this is not... Nor, however, is it an hysterical left-wing grenade à la Jesus Camp or Deliver Us from Evil.” Having recently completed another tour-of-duty of Cannes, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN offers an appraisal of the cultural divide – and reconciliation – in Fatih Akin’s follow-up to Head-On: “The Edge of Heaven is often a string of sparse frames, shot with a refreshing economy of words. The picture’s near flawless performances add to its overall appeal.”

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN traverses the cultural divide in Fatih Akin’s follow-up to Head-On, The Edge of Heaven, a film to reconcile German and Turkish differences.

I love going to cemeteries. There’s something majestic, something foolhardy, something particular vain about the human condition that gets represented in them. It’s an attempt to reverse the mutability of life with an ever-lasting monument. I’ve never been to Père-Lachaise, but when I go to Paris one day, this cemetery will be one of the first places I go to. Dutch documentary maker Heddy Honigmann seems to share similar views about cemeteries, and wanders Père-Lachaise capturing moments of life and transcendence. It’s a beautiful work that aims to show that by looking at death, we can also find traces of life.

In his only New Zealand interview, Seth Rogen talks to ALEXANDER BISLEY about getting Knocked Up, Judd Apatow’s riotous follow-up to the The 40 Year Old Virgin. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

The third feature in a durable filmmaking partnership, Kissy Kissy completes Alexander Greenhough and Elric Kane’s loose trilogy on twenty-something ennui, while giving further legs to the trademarked ‘Aro Film Movement’. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM interviews the co-directors on the eve of their film’s premiere at the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals.

In today’s Godless world, the claim for divine inspiration as genuine artistic kudos may be a dead limb, but hell... some shit really does write itself. For instance, the story of one Richard Gazowsky, a Pentecostal minister from San Francisco, who, upon receiving the green light from above, embarks on a mission to seed the gospel by way of the box office. In this case, Gazowsky must’ve accidentally channeled Don Simpson, because getting his vision for a Christ-core Star Wars (Gravity: The Shadow of Joseph) off the ground requires a purported $200 million (a cool $50 million more than Transformers) – no doubt to encompass such pointless extravagances as shooting in 70mm, as well as flying the entire production company (hilariously titled What You See is What You Get, or “Wizzywig” for short) to Italy.

With an oddball title, and a premise that plays between fiction and reality, How is Your Fish Today? might be seen as a Chinese riff on Charlie Kaufmann, or could just as easily be tarred with that reductive label ‘quirky’. However, this would be to ignore the film’s thematic concerns and meditative mood, and ultimately its rather subversive streak (especially considering its Chinese origins). It looks at a struggling scriptwriter, Rao Hui (played by Rao Hui), who gets a commission to write a story about Lin Hao (played by Lin Hao), a man who in the fictional story murdered his wife in Southern China. His first script is rubbished, and consequently Rao draws himself into the proceedings more and more as he writes again. Eventually the film becomes a blur of real and make-believe, and ultimately, what images are shown, cannot be trusted as being true. In this respect, the film questions the veracity of propaganda, and exults in the disrepute of images.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Samuel Fuller goes to war.

DESPITE Samuel Fuller’s Fixed Bayonets ostensibly being based on John Brophy’s novel (which was previously filmed in 1943), you can feel the grip of Norman Mailer’s 1948 opus, The Naked and the Dead. Men whose fears are viciously exposed in battle, the atavistic ignorance demanded of good soldiers, and the dynamics of soldiers tested to the breaking point by particular circumstances. In fact, Fuller even includes inner monologues by the actors – a non-too subtle approach – but one that emphasises the flicker of humanity in a de-humanised and cruel environment. It’s a highly masculine world, but one where man and environment (in spite of its obvious studio setting) become scarcely distinguishable.

“With The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, Kunuk and Cohn have done away with almost all traces of the primary storytelling structure of Atanarjuat, liberating the film to explore the ebbs and flows, moods and rhythms of these intermittent encounters, which have been distilled to fascinating conversations within the cramped spaces of Avva’s warmly-lit sod-hut, interrupted only when the camera ventures outside in the snow-covered landscape to observe daily life in the colony, usually accompanied by Avva’s fantastic narrations of his experiences as a shaman, a position which now nears extinction due to encroaching Christianity” writes MUBARAK ALI...[Read More]

Meanwhile, TIM WONG on Jia Zhang-ke’s latest: “Six years on from the extraordinary Platform, Still Life retains a cogency in national commentary, remains eye opening and occasionally amusing in its social illustrations, and continues to show compassion for those caught in the maelstrom – all the while forging onwards as a potential departure point in its director’s ourvre.” Fresh from Cannes, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN offers impressions on Gus Van Sant and Paranoid Park: “Van Sant’s latest film... does not disturb as much as Elephant did with its questions of why seemingly harmless, dull and uninspiring youngsters suddenly turn hostile and brutal... [but] still makes one a trifle uneasy.” And continuing the trend of new films by established festival favourites, SIMON WOOD considers Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first foray into digital video: “Although flawed, Climates wallows in its own anxiety and there’s a certain thrill in seeing cynicism portrayed with such enthusiastic accuracy and ironic beauty.”

Of lesser artistic, but greater thrill value, JOE SHEPPARD concedes to the “puerile logic and cult factor” of Death Note + Death Note: The Last Note, a back-to-back screening we’re quietly claiming as a replacement for Grindhouse’s currently dismantled distribution form. Sheppard assures us of the Death Notes that “you’re guaranteed a good time one way or another, but you might want to check any adulthood you’re carrying at the door on the way into the theatre.”

These, along with the 25+ films we’ve covered to date, and the complete 160+ festival programme, open for business this Friday at the Auckland leg of the Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals. Wellington’ turn begins the following Friday. Our daily coverage continues uninterrupted throughout.

Climates, Turkish director Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s first foray into the digital format, is “a painful, unapologetically downbeat film... at once respulsive and attention-grabbing,” says SIMON WOOD.

JOE SHEPPARD gives into the “puerile logic and cult factor” of Death Note and its sequel, Death Note: The Last Name, brought to us back-to-back under the auspices of Ant Timpson’s That’s Incredible Cinema.

Visionary Chinese filmmaker Jia Zhang-ke casts his eye again on the landscape of China’s accelerated economy, rapid social change, and erosion of old to make way for new. TIM WONG is in awe of the director’s latest, Still Life, set amongst the developing Three Gorges Dam.

GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN considers Gus Van Sant’s career – an oeuvre dominated by outsiders often ensnared in obsessive solitude – and its most recent addition, “Paranoid Park”.

GUS VAN SANT caught my eye in 1995 with To Die For. Based on a novel by Joyce Maynard of the same name, Van Sant’s film was a dark look at a young American woman whose ruthless ambition and boredom with her married life pushed her to the edge, and, tragically, beyond. Maynard’s fiction, inspired a great deal by the true story of a teacher who seduced her young lover into killing her husband, had an element of satire that Van Sant borrowed for the celluloid version. But the movie was far more spine tingling than the book, and, if I am right, Nicole Kidman, who was a weather girl – not a teacher – shot into limelight with this work. Co-starring with Matt Dillon and Joaquin Phoenix, Kidman created a sensation with her remarkable performance that drew attention to the evils of consumerism. And Van Sant’s label as a “bard of dysfunction” became even more apparent with this film.

Zacharias Kunuk’s and Norman Cohn’s follow-up to Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner chronicles the investigations of anthropologist Knud Rasmussen, and his research into Inuit folklore, culture, and history during the 1920s. MUBARAK ALI offers a reading of The Journals of Knud Rasmussen.

Anticipating Werner Herzog’s “Rescue Dawn”, TIM WONG revisits its source, the extraordinary true story of Dieter Dengler.

A REMARKABLE documentary of soaring human resilience, Little Dieter Needs to Fly lacks one distinguishing feature: its director’s classic lunge into frame. That Werner Herzog is nowhere to be seen in this harrowing tale of survival has prompted some to label it the least ‘Herzogian’ of the German’s non-fiction films – a misnomer given a career’s worth of flirtation in front of the camera, among subjects, and between make-believe and reality. Whether projecting an alternate ego in Klaus Kinski or latter day reincarnations such as Timothy Treadwell, Herzog is never far from the limelight – instances of self-parody (Incident at Loch Ness), self-confession (Burden of Dreams), or self-announcement (watch him randomly appear in Wim Wender’s Tokyo-Ga) demonstrate an almost pathological desire to imprint himself on celluloid itself, sometimes going as far as to directly interfere in its un-spooling. But whereas Herzog may have had reason to veto a recording of Treadwell’s mauling in Grizzly Man, or withhold footage of a waterfall’s sacred cavity in The White Diamond, he has too much respect for his subject, Dieter Dengler, to intervene.

In related reading, TIM WONG describes Little Dieter Needs to Fly as “a remarkable documentary of soaring human resilience... a memoir told with pathos and visible emotion, and other times with cool detachment, much like the captive résistance hero in Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped – all of which is coaxed to the surface by Herzog’s decision to escort Dengler back to the sites of his trauma as a prisoner of war.” More on the extraordinary true story of Dieter Dengler as a prelude to Werner Herzog’s Rescue Dawn, screening this July and August at the Telecom New Zealand International Film Festivals....[Read More] (links to The Film Reader)

“Quietly announcing its intended pace and tone in the very first image – an extended shot of a withered pine forest penetrated by waning light and the slow-dancing colours of dusk, an opening that vaguely recalls Aleksandr Sokurov’s unforgettable entry into his Spiritual Voices – Nanouk Leopold’s Wolfsbergen (the Dutch filmmaker’s third feature film) slowly begins to set up a series of moments and micro-events involving a quadri-generational family in the midst of a crisis – a process that would continue until the very last image,” writes MUBARAK ALI...[Read More]

In other newly added festival reviews and commentary: TIM WONG samples a brace of tough-as-nails Korean gangster pictures in No Mercy for the Rude (“occasionally straddles an artful line between humour and seriousness”) and A Dirty Carnival (“Propelled by one extraordinarily brutal scene of turf war... that can only be described as Braveheart with baseball bats meets (Alan Clarke’s) The Firm”), plus a neighbouring documentary in The Great Happiness Space: Tale of an Osaka Love Thief, about a new class of Japanese ‘host boy’ (“[a film that] gets under the skin of what on the surface appears to be just another throwaway leisure pursuit of the rich and emotionally needy”).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM latest viewings include Falkenberg Farewell (“this quietly beautiful film captures that limbo between youth and adulthood, a time of no direction, promise, confusion, loss, dreams... a highly emotional, moving and haunting film that captures this crucial moment of life so well”) and Brazilian broadside Manda Bala (“[Jason] Kohn takes a sweeping look at the corruption and inequality rife in Brazil, and makes a cogent and powerful documentary in the process”). SIMON SWEETMAN also offers second thoughts on Jesus Camp (“frequently hilarious and often downright frightening... another winner from the people who made the acclaimed film The Boys Of Baraka”).

It’d be fair to say that Jason Kohn is probably not the most popular man in Brazil at the moment. Maker of the Sundance-winning Manda Bala (Send a Bullet), Kohn takes a sweeping look at the corruption and inequality rife in Brazil, and makes a cogent and powerful documentary in the process. Kohn used to be a researcher for documentary legend Errol Morris, and Morris has been a big mentor in Kohn’s filmmaking career. You can also see traces of Morris’ style in the film – off-centre interviews, the inclusion of translators into the shot (reportedly based on an interview Morris did with Mikhail Gorbachev), and an almost pitiless approach to some of his subjects. Indeed a major criticism of Morris has been an apparent tendency to make fun of some of his ‘weirder’ subjects, and Kohn arguably at times treads this line (particularly with the plastic surgeon). For the most part however, he manages to get some fascinating testimony from a wide variety of his sources.

In When a Woman Ascends the Stairs, Mikio Naruse draws us into a world often intimated in movies but rarely ever fleshed out: that of the Japanese bar hostess. A postwar offshoot of the Geisha tradition, these bars serviced men through the company of women and the comfort of drink. Forty years on, and the mizo shobai, or “water trade”, has come to evolve once more: catering exclusively for female clientele, somewhere deep within Osaka’s nightlife district resides Café Rakkyo, a club occupied by an elite brethren of ‘host boys’, and their magnetic, if ultimately tragic leader, Issei. Like Naruse’s mama-san Keiko, Issei’s patience as head host and self-confessed love thief is tested daily: the vigilance of fashion and appearance; the harvesting and feigning of relationships; the constant drunken nights out; the necessity of shrewd business instinct. Cultural change however has given birth to a new monster entirely, and The Great Happiness Space gets under the skin of what on the surface appears to be just another throwaway leisure pursuit of the rich and emotionally needy.

Fraught with uncertainty, life’s crucial transition into adulthood is evoked through the restless youth of five Swedish young men in Falkenberg Farewell. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM relives the moment.

Tough-as-nails gangster/revenge pictures are to Korean Cinema what horror movies peddling vengeful spirits and supernatural curses were to Japan: phenomenally successful on the heels of a breakout international hit; a viral strain of knockoffs and remakes in the aftermath; a fad that’s presently run out of steam. A brace of new films attempting to breath life back into Korea’s criminal underworld deliver mixed results; the less effective of the two, No Mercy for the Rude, spoofs a genre already made fun of by the likes of A Bittersweet Life, which in its overearnest appreciation of chivalry and machismo, became an accidental parody in and of itself. Park Chulhee’s film occasionally straddles an artful line between humour and seriousness – the kind of tonal shift Bong Joon-ho (The Host) has a patent on – but his comic elements are essentially restricted to absurd caricatures: a ballet-dancing contract killer for one, while the film’s doomed lead, a mute hitman saving money for a speech-correcting operation, is played by none other than Shin Hakyun. Whether a lazy typecast or an admirer’s nod to Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, Park has a certain eccentricity in mind, but never quite finds the right balance: the black comedy a second thought rather than the impetus behind a film that concedes ultimately, if ruefully, to the final image of a dying man, flailing in blood, cradled in the arms of his lover to the melodrama of orchestra strings.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Maggie Cheung’s swansong.

FORMER CRITIC, French director Olivier Assayas, is one of France’s most erratic talents. When he is good however (Irma Vep), he is simply fantastic. Clean, while certainly not hitting the giddy heights of Irma, is a quietly compelling and fascinating tale. Its central pleasure, of course, is a stellar performance by the brilliant Maggie Cheung.

Family dysfunction is rooted in news of a pending suicide in Nanouk Leopold’s measured Wolfsbergen: a film seemingly about death, both in its literal and figurative forms, discovers MUBARAK ALI.

Jesus Camp looks at evangelical followers of the Christian faith who believe that the future of religion is their children. Kids as young as six years old are being groomed to believe in God and to follow blindly as a soldier in his army. Rachel Grady and Heidi Ewing’s film is captivating – not because the hypocritical evangelist Becky Fischer is so frightening; not because of the massed sight of young children crying when being brain-washed to fight against abortion and not because of the footage of an overly precocious nine-year-old walking up to a complete stranger in a bowling alley and telling the adult that everything is going to be okay because God has a special plan for her. Those are all magical moments, and crucial to an understanding of this film’s motive – but what makes the movie is Ewing and Grady’s fly-on-the-wall approach.

“Broadly drawn but intimate in scope, Killer of Sheep is populated by miniature moments – eye movements, bursts of happiness, small crushing failures (e.g. the memorable picnic scene). It also feels authentic – documentary-like with its muted black and white imagery, yet tightly scripted and structured. Consequently, some of the non-actors’ work is a little wooden, but that also allows for a story that doesn’t exploit its characters or its setting. It’s consequently highly political in its effect and tone. But even more, it’s a rare privilege to see such a piece of filmmaking that shows real-life as bleak, funny, high-spirited, crushing, happy and angry. In essence, as life really is.”...[Read More]

Also from BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM: Scottish surprise Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness, “a beautiful, moving and hilarious work” on one man’s earnest attempts to introduce a mobile disco to the people of the Scottish Highlands. SIMON SWEETMAN on the late Arthur Lee’s cult psychedelic band: “Love Story is not quite as personal as The Devil And Daniel Johnston or the splendid Roky Erikson film from last year – but it’s a similar story; one of a musical act falling apart at the seams. Kerry and Hall, British filmmakers, do not really get at the dissipation of the band – the drug issue is raised – and though this never falls in to total hagiography it is intended to be a loving portrait of an important, but overlooked band.”

Plus, TIM WONG with further short ends: documentaries Con Man Confidential (on Germany’s equivalent of Nigerian fraudsters), Comrades in Dreams (on cinema’s mobilization of audiences and exhibitors alike) and Jia Zhang-ke’s Still Life companion piece, Dong (on painter Liu Ziao-dong and the extraterrestrial Three Gorges Dam); plus a trio in feature film debutants in Andrea Arnold’s CCTV stalker movie Red Road, Jorge Sánchez-Cabezudo’s consumate Spanish thriller The Night of the Sunflowers, and under auspices of Johnnie To’s Milkyway productions, Yau Nai-hoi’s more genre-oriented surveillance policier Eye in the Sky.

A roundup of the current best and rest in DVD. In this installment: Kubrick Triple Feature (Full Metal Jacket/A Clockwork Orange/2001: A Space Odyssey), Straight Time, The Yakuza, Lust for Life, Body Heat.

Not quite the Orwellian proxy its programme notes will have you believe, Red Road nevertheless transfers some of 1984’s high anxiety to the present day, where in the wake of London’s subway bombings and a pervading terrorist threat, CCTV outposts cast an eye over every nook and cranny of the urban terrain. In Glasgow, Scotland – a city of conspicuous grayscale malaise – a lonely surveillance operator happens upon a man from her past, first staking him out via a network of cameras at her disposal, before pursuing him directly in a confrontation that turns every rape-revenge movie on its head.

Charles Burnett’s blaxploitation retort is a microscopic, politically-charged authentication of Black American life. Largely unseen, it screens belatedly in retrospect. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM introduces us to Killer of Sheep’s restored importance.