BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: in bad company.

LIFE ISN’T the easiest for poor Philippe Seigner. Having worked so hard to get into a hotshot management firm (Macgregors), he’s forced to do the dirty work in trying to restructure a moderately successful company, Janson, out in the provinces. He has no friends, everyone at the company hates him because they rightly feel their jobs are being threatened, and he’s missing his new girlfriend. Plus there’s also the little matter of his conscience – it’s essentially a choice between giving up everything he’s ever worked for or selling a whole bunch of people’s careers short.

Guillermo del Toro/Mexico-Spain/2006; R4 (2-disc DE)
Hopscotch/RS, NZ$34.95 | Reviewed by Rose Rees-Owen

GUILLERMO del Toro has succeeded in creating a dark but magical world in this chilling fairytale; a contrast between the cruel reality of post-Franco Spain and the mystical realm of Pan that makes Pan’s Labyrinth so visually enjoyable and enchanting to watch. It follows the story of a young girl, Ophelia, and her pregnant mother who travel to live with Captain Vidal: a cruel fascist, but also her stepfather and father to her unborn brother. On the way, her ill mother has to stop for fresh air and Ophelia wanders into the forest and replaces a missing piece of a statue to which a rather ugly looking dragonfly pops out. At night, the dragonfly visits Ophelia and morphs into a fairy urging Ophelia into the labyrinth where she meets a magical faun, Pan. Pan tells her that she is the reincarnation of the princess of the underworld and if she wants to return she has to complete three magical tasks.

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

IT’S AN Indian summer at the Toronto International Film Festival this year, which screened five Indian movies. Among them, Adoor Gopalakrishnan’s Four Women (Naalu Pennungal) in Malayalam and Buddhadeb Dasgupta’s The Voyeurs (Ami, Yasin Arr Amar Madhubala) in Bengali were part of the prestigious Masters Programme. Shivajee Chandrabhushan’s first feature in Ladakhi and Hindi, Frozen, played in the Discovery Section. Rituparno Ghosh’s The Last Lear with the Lear himself (why Mr Bachchan, of course) and Santosh Sivan’s Before The Rains (with Nandita Das and Rahul Bose) formed the rest of the Indian celluloid brigade.

ALEXANDER BISLEY talks to Noland Walker about promise, monuments versus movements, honouring Jonestown’s ghosts and what Martin Luther King means today. Illustration by LYNDON BARROIS.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: the waning thirties.

I FIND Steven Soderbergh a fascinating director to watch – he’s either wildly overrated (sex, lies and videotape, Out of Sight, Erin Brockovich) or wildly underrated (The Limey, Solaris, Schizopolis). He’s one of the most eclectic Hollywood directors too, experimenting with digital cameras at the same time he’s making a big budget blockbuster. King of the Hill is Soderbergh’s third feature film (the first two being sex, lies and videotape which essentially made his career, and the second Kafka). King of the Hill fits into the underrated category, a sweet but hard-edged film looking at a young boy growing up in the Depression.

While Werner Herzog guided New Zealand International Film Festival goers through the jungles of Laos, frequenters of the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival could find the director extraordinaire as an Anglican priest in Harmonie Korine’s (Gummo, Julien Donkey Boy) latest freakshow, Mister Lonely, a film our correspondent felt “had really just tossed scraps of Peter Greenaway, Disney and Michel Gondry in a blender and served us up a thick shake of awkward, contrived and phantasmagorical slop.” Reporting for The Lumière Reader across the Tasman, JESSICA BORRELLE discovered this, and other gorge-worthy films at a festival that admittedly steals a little of the NZIFF’s thunder every year (it straddles July and August), but also provides plenty of crossover and a chance to compare notes.

Set into motion by MIFF’s gala presentation (“Dogged by accusations of megalomania, manipulation and selective editing, Moore’s decision to edit down his quite dominating voice was highly regarded by the opening-night audience, those who were at the screening objecting only to the length and not the breadth of Sicko”), JESSICA’s festival sortie included Tom Kalin’s Savage Grace (“Kalin’s pet topics – decadence and depravity – were lightly surveyed, the film relying heavily on the telegenic Julianne Moore’s consummate acting”), Kim Ki-duk’s Time (“the dialogue... often surrenders to a kind of soap-operality that is a little distracting from the plot (completely cuckoo – yet not improbable) and though it is self-effacing and plucky it does hamper the Freudian hilarity of the plastic surgery love battle that occurs between a young modern moneyed Asian couple in pursuit of ul-jjang (a perfect face)”), and also seen by NZIFF attenders, You, the Living (“[Roy] Andersson’s wry, gloomy humour is consistent – with more emphasis on the fatalistic, tentatively hopeful despair of his players than the capitalist critique present in Songs”) and Radiant City (“Surburbia’s voracious consumption of the American landscape with its ‘zombie monoculture’ is magnified through this intimate yet calculated representation... swish and informative; a repository of good celluloid.”)

You’ll find more Notes from the Melbourne International Film Festival on The Festival Reader, as you will dispatches from our roaming associate abroad, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN, who’s filed his thoughts from the 75th Venice Film Festival; commentary that surveys Atonement, controversy in Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution and Brian De Palma’s Redacted, In the Valley of Elah, The Secret of the Grain, George Clooney in Michael Clayton, and new British material in Ken Loach’s It’s a Free World and Kenneth Branagh’s Sleuth.

Somehow, amongst the many offerings of the 2007 Melbourne International Film Festival, bleary-eyed correspondent JESSICA BORRELLE managed to find a way to have her cake and eat it too.

At the 75th Venice Film Festival, GAUTAMAN BHASKARAN reports back on the controversy and the panache.

THE Venice Film Festival rolled out its 75th anniversary on August 29 with a cascade of stars gracing the red carpet. George Clooney, Woody Allen and Keira Knightly were some, and the opening movie, Joe Wright’s Atonement set the mood for the 12-day cinema event on Lido, off Venice.

GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: living with the dead.

WHAT IF... the rapture worked backwards?

As an alternate to the shock and blood spatter genre of zombie Robin Campillo has written and directed a fascinating slow boiler of a horror movie that plays with some seriously philosophical questions. Right from the beginning we are treated to a classic zombie shot of them walking along the road from the cemetery. But here’s the difference: they appear to be immaculate. So what has happened? Cleverly, Campillo stays away from the material we can not know and thus opens up the film to both believers and others. He does however bring a number of interesting references into play.

In our final dispatch of the year, we close the book on Telecom 2007 New Zealand International Film Festivals with two constrasting post-festival reports. TIM WONG wonders whether it is “a sign of a benign programme when Paul Verhoeven rocks your boat?”, while JACOB POWELL notes that “[for] fear of being underwhelmed at every turn redundant, I was consistently impressed by the quality of films that, in all honesty, I was expecting to be a little average.” And whereas his fortnight in Auckland consisted of “a whole swag of highlights with only two minor disappointments,” enthusiasm was harder to come by in Wellington: “for all the decorative fixtures at the TNZIFF 2007, movies to marvel at were in shorter supply.”

TIM WONG’s festival favourites included Black Book (“Verhoeven, never one to make concessions or ply the middle ground, insisted we all sit up and take notice: if not for his compulsive flesh and bloodletting, or the sexual artillery of leading lady Carice van Houten, then for the single, revitalising statement that war can be fun”), Inland Empire (“[David] Lynch may be losing his marbles, but there’s such vitality – and indeed, truth – to his filmmaking that he can never be accused of being arbitrary”) and Still Life (“the best in show, and a beacon above what was a significantly weakened Asian selection this year”), while JACOB POWELL’s highlights ranged from Deep Water (“lodged itself inside my brain and wouldn’t shift”), Build a Ship, Sail to Sadness (“a creative watershed turning humour, guilt, lo-fi production, and quasi-doco styling into a tragic and moving piece of cinema”) and The Edge of Heaven (“Fatih Akin takes his various plot strands and orchestrates a beautifully unfolding narrative ballet which unquestionably satisfies whilst subverting the traditional cinematic ‘need’ for tidy closure.”)

Their respective festival reports, Black & Blue and Redeeming Features, conclude The Lumière Reader’s TNZIFF coverage for 2007. An overview via our TNZIFF 2007 Debrief collates all features, interviews, reviews and festival commentaries published over the past three months. With the festival still touring smaller centres in reduced form until November, coverage can also be summarized by month (June/July/August), browsed via the Form Guide, or recapped by way of these TNZIFF Dispatches.

Reviewed by David Levinson

AFTER floundering through arrested development in this year’s Knocked Up, Seth Rogen has handed the baton over to a new wave of dropout with Superbad – a high school comedy all about (duh) getting laid. Co-written by Rogen (along with Evan Goldberg), the movie tempers its sharp guy-girl dynamics with liberal fixes of crudity, in a way that doesn’t really differ from the “new sincerity” of Judd Apatow (who produced). But where as Apatow’s manchild odysseys are so obsessively rooted in the now (Spider-Man 3, anyone?), Superbad takes aim in a bonghazy past: Closing the gap between the single-day rigour of Linklater, and the fluffy liberalism of American Pie, it arrives at a view of the teenage libido that’s always amusing, but too contrived to really nail the zeitgest.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: German Expressionism.

THE GERMAN Expressionism movement in film is still today one of the most fascinating movie periods in film history. Academics still write about it, whether it’s the sociological implications (the film movement occurred just after World War One, and was said to express the trauma of the German psyche) or the stylistic traits, the influence of which could be seen in film noir and horror films. The first major success was the Cabinet of Dr. Caligari from 1919 which is the archetypal Expressionist film in its tale within a tale of madness and striking visuals. Yet despite that film supposedly being the standard for Expressionism, it’s also interesting to see how few films actually take Caligari’s innovative visuals as a template, and when watching a film like Waxworks you can tell how much the movement had changed within five years.

Reviewed by Robert Metcalf

Joy Division is a promising debut feature from British director Reg Traviss; a mixture of sixties spy story and the brutal recreation of the Second World War’s Eastern Front, with the narrative shifting between the two. These settings are so different, and the central character so changed, that the two strands of the narrative at times feel like two separate films.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in cinemas. In this installment: Romulus, My Father, Amazing Grace, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Day Watch, Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Stephanie Daley, Deep Water, Inland Empire.