BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: archaic adventure.

IN THESE supposedly depraved times, it’s easy to forget that Hollywood was once viewed as the antithesis to morality and good taste. This concern brought about the Production Code, where by 1933, anything people find remotely interesting was cast out in favour of coy entertainment. The Yellow Ticket bears traces of this earlier utopia of free expression – themes of prostitution, pick-up lines, storylines, flashes of nudity for the pervs. Who am I kidding; this film is as dated as last week’s rubbish. The film was too scared to mention anything too daring, and the word “prostitute” was never mentioned. But all this did make The Yellow Ticket a lot of camp fun.

Wes Anderson/USA/2007; R4
Roadshow, $19.95 (until 25/11) | Reviewed by David Levinson

ARRIVING part-and-parcel with the waves of hype that precede it, backlash is an integral part of the natural order of criticism – a Darwinian acid-test that separates the fad from the bona fide. Those that withstand its lashings will usually reveal their caster for the attention-starved grinch they are, while in other less propitious cases the bad buzz might help stop a runaway bandwagon. Not all trajectories are that simple, of course, but as someone who found fame during an age of pre-blog boosterism, Wes Anderson has survived critical exaltation (as well as hip-kid endorsement) thanks to the sincere emotional yearning that lurks beneath his tchotchke-like surfaces. Coasting on his quirks (which at this stage, veer dangerously close to self-parody), Anderson’s fifth feature, The Darjeeling Limited, is hardly an attempt to defy nature: Like a rearranged Mondrian grid, the film is drawn from the same life signs (a hard-on for sad-happy ’60s pop; broken family templates; and a decorative sense of composition) that set the benchmark for arch close to a decade ago, with the release of his sophomore hit Rushmore. Once again though, it’s the film’s heartfelt ode to family dysfunction which shines through, ensuring longevity in the face of its more fleeting visual pleasures.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Tarkovsky’s looking glass.

ANDREI TARKOVSKY is not the easiest filmmaker to watch, and his films, for unsuspecting viewers, can veer from the spectacular (Andrei Rublev) to the downright awful (Solaris). The Mirror is seen as his most personal film and is a convenient middle point from his more detached earlier work (Ivan’s Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris) and his more ‘spiritually’ focused later work (Stalker, Nostalghia, The Sacrifice). The Mirror eschews the linearity of his other work, composing his film like a visual fugue in order to explore Tarkovsky’s notions of memory. A melange of his father’s poetry, archival footage, multi-generational storytelling and dreams, the film washes over like a wave. It pays not to think too much about this film, and let the beautifully composed imagery and carefully-constructed sound design work its magic. It’s not surprising that it wasn’t too popular with the Soviet authorities for its perceived elitist leanings.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Taken, Body of Lies, Young at Heart, Caramel, In Bruges (Film); The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, War/Dance, Tintin and I, I’m Not There, Sex and the City: The Movie (DVD).

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: mad Australians.

TALES told in asylums or about madness are nothing new, and some of cinema’s most famous moments have dabbled with these narrative settings. Rather than using it for horror, Australian film Cosi adapts it for comedy and musicality. It doesn’t quite work. A rather clichéd story of people overcoming adversity to prove themselves to people who are patronising to them, paradoxically, the film’s primary source of humour comes from laughing at the “mad” people.

Alister Barry/NZ/2008; R4
NZ$39.95 | Reviewed by David Lenny Kempkers

WHEN FILMMAKERS convert non-fiction books into documentaries, they tend to do so to achieve one or more of the following goals: to expose the book’s thesis to a wider audience; to make some money; to bring (visual) life to the text; and to uncover or produce new material that extends or reinforces the book’s thesis.

STEVE GARDEN’s DVD appreciation of ‘Vampyr’ on the Eureka Masters of Cinema label.

FILM CAN mark you for life. In the late 70s I became aware of cinema – not just movies, but film-as-art. It may not have happened if it wasn’t for the Film Society; the 8th Wellington Film Festival; and a chance viewing of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Mirror (1974). This seemingly plotless film (a rather cryptic and decidedly Russian expression of personal and collective memory) went right over my head... or so I thought. In terms of the movie expectations I had at the time, Mirror made little obvious sense, and yet I left the theatre exhilarated. It was an epiphanic, near-religious experience, a life-changing encounter with a language that spoke directly and intimately through sound and image. It wasn’t just what was being said, but how. Mirror required full concentration, perception and intuition, a film one had to discern rather than simply wait to be entertained by.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take four.

The King and the Clown was a taboo buster in Korea, and it also became the biggest box office hit in Korean history. The film demonstrates the generic hybridity that typifies a number of big Korean hits, as it straddles the conventions of melodrama, historical epics, romance, slapstick comedy and action. The film looks at two clowns (Gong-gil and Jang-sang) who decide to satirise the despotic head of the Chosun Dynasty in order to improve their impoverished lot. The rather wildly unpredictable repercussions result in chaos, love, obsession, revenge and ultimately a societal shift. Art does indeed effect political change, if The King and the Clown is to be believed.

CATHERINE BISLEY samples the offerings at the 13th Italian Film Festival, touring centres until late November.

FILLED with (mainly) beautiful women and the odd handsome man, Manual of Love 2 taught me nothing of its professed subject. The film consists of four stories which segue together in glaringly fabricated coincidence. Threading through them all is the radio show from which the title derives; at the office of Manual of Love, everyone sits around smiling and nodding as the DJ muses over Eros. Manual of Love 2 suffers from too much self-congratulation.

David Lynch/USA/2006; R4, 2-disc set
Madman, $34.95 | Reviewed by Steve Garden

DAVID LYNCH likes abstract ideas. He says he doesn’t always know what they mean, but in the course of making a film they become clearer. He also says that this understanding is strictly his, and viewers must be free to use their intuition to discover meaning for themselves. He wants them to trust their own judgment, and encourages an active (rather than passive) approach to film viewing. He never explains his films because to do so would rob the viewer of discovery and (crucially) a personal connection with the work. All he will say about his latest film Inland Empire is that it’s a mystery about a woman in trouble.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take three.

GEORGE LUCAS, I think, infamously once said that the way to make an audience feel emotional was to choke a kitten on-screen. It wouldn’t work for me, that’s how much I fall on the dog side in the perennial cat vs dog debate. So it was a good thing Barking Dogs Never Bite opened with a warning stating that no dogs were harmed in the making of this film. Though I was slightly dubious as the film progressed, as a bunch of ratty looking dogs were thrust over balconies, cut up for soup or threatened with hanging. However my canine concerns aside, the film ultimately is a free-wheeling satire, a dark comedy, and a sharp take on Korean social stratification and gender roles.

Adam McKay’s new comedy Step Brothers, and the man-child odysseys of Judd Apatow, don’t see eye-to-eye, according to DAVID LEVINSON.

TIM WONG considers if Circa Theatre’s new stage production of “Wait Until Dark” holds a candle to the play’s 1966 film version.

RISING quietly above the ‘psycho-biddy’ histrionics of Bette Davis and Joan Crawford – grand actresses whose dwindling careers gained unexpected traction through notoriety in such hag horror classics as Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, Hush Hush Sweet Charlotte, and Strait Jacket – Terence Young’s screen version of Wait Until Dark is a controlled, hermetically-sealed thriller. If conventionally lumped into the same women-in-peril bracket of sixties cinema – its home intrusion premise a cousin of Lady in a Cage’s handicapped dame in terror, where a frazzled Olivia de Havilland, trapped inside her mezzanine elevator, is traumatised by a psychotic James Cann – it’s important to note the picture circumvents these cruder tropes. Through its elegant, headstrong lead (Audrey Hepburn), scenery-chewing adversary (Alan Arkin, the unhinged star of the film), and micromanaged turn of events, Wait Until Dark is not in the least bit lurid, but a superior, clockwork suspenser that neither overreaches nor degenerates like its campier peers. While the film holds up as a gripping chamber piece, how would it fare transposed back to its original stage setting? Until November 8, Circa’s presentation of the Frederick Knott play tests this water, with variable results.

GREGOR CAMERON reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take two.

A DIRTY thought makes the world spin around, but a decent moral sets a stable tone. There’s something very alluring about circling the darker side of human sexuality and Kim Dae-Woo’s film Forbidden Quest gets it just right. He leads us into the seedy world, involves us in the dialogue about the rights and wrongs of it, without ever descending into the deliberately prurient.

Taika Waititi is shooting The Volcano, a full-length redux of Two Cars, One Night, in March. The setting: beautiful Waihau Bay, where Taika grew up and Tama Poata/Barry Barclay’s awesome Ngati was shot. ALEXANDER BISLEY asked Taika five quick questions.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Korea, take one.

KOREA has undoubtedly been making some of the great art/cult/commercial cinema of the last decade, assisted no doubt by the rigid quota systems (which unfortunately is being eroded), heavy investment, and a commercially sustainable population. The Film Society has decided to show a mini-collection of Korean films, from recent years, and provides a chance to see some Korean films which haven’t made the Film Festival or much of a dent on the local circuit. Driving With My Wife’s Lover mines similar territories to the great Hong Sang-soo, with a symmetrical(ish) structure, ménage-a-trois/quatre, and a beady depiction of contemporary Korean relationships. While it doesn’t have the resonance or overall sharpness of Hong, the film is a wry, fractured take on masculinity.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: priming Rain of the Childen.

VINCENT WARD is probably the closest figure to an auteur in New Zealand, which means even his noble failures (such as River Queen) are worthy of consideration. His visual palettes and the understated yet complex moods are brilliantly constructed, and he was able to maintain these tropes even within his mixed American career. Given the release of Rain of the Children, the Film Society in a nice piece of foresight, screened two of Ward’s earlier films – A State of Siege based on a Janet Frame story, and In Spring One Plants Alone, the documentary that forms the basis of Rain of the Children.

A roundup/recap of the current best and rest in film and DVD. In this installment: Underbelly, Donnie Darko: Collector’s Edition, The Chaser’s War on Everything, The War on Democracy, The Investigator, Secret Diary of a Call Girl (DVD); Up the Yangtze, Paris; 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days (Film).

With the long overdue release of Seasons Three and Four to DVD, HBO’s extraordinary The Wire continues on its rightful format. BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM extols the show’s progress to date. (contains spoilers)

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: life through a lens.

ROSS MCELWEE’s particular brand of angst reaches its apogee in Time Indefinite. A mix of philosophical ruminations, self-deprecating humour, and personal filmmaking, Ross McElwee’s tragicomic documentary carries on the storylines he set up in his previous work. And while the film does drag at points near the end (you feel like you know him and his family really really well after seeing all these films), this is a poignant and wonderful piece of work.

George Andrews/NZ/2008; R0
GA Productions, $49.95 | Reviewed by Andy Palmer

AT LAST we, as a nation, are starting to celebrate our intellectuals; those who have left their mark internationally outside of the sporting arena. Allan Wilson: Evolutionary is a documentary about a man who helped develop and strengthen evolutionary theory. Or, as the publicity puts it, a “groundbreaking researcher and a lightning rod for controversy, [who] revolutionized science and galvanized the scientific community”.

Steven Soderbergh/USA/2005; R4
Madman, $29.95 | Reviewed by Simon Wood

STEVEN SODERBERGH is the exception that proves auteur theory correct. No matter how diverse his projects in scope, they have to be superlative; the biggest cast, the most relevant political argument, the biggest stars. Now we have Bubble, the indiest film he could have possibly made.

Reviewed by David Levinson

IN The Dark Knight – Christopher Nolan’s second outing at the helm of the Batman franchise – the caped crusader may sport a fetishist’s dream of high-tech, tailor-made weaponry, but nothing unleashed on Gotham’s crime populace proves more alluring than the film’s grim publicity-hook: Namely, the fact that it marks the final complete performance by once-rising star Heath Ledger, whose career was tragically cut short by a sleeping pill overdose on completion of filming.

An election on the horizon, Alister Barry’s documentary expose (from Nicky Hager’s book) gets a timely rerun at Wellington’s Paramount Theatre, from September 18.

“SURE WE COULD play the race card, but how would we run the country on Monday?” Jim Bolger wisely said. Yet under Brash-Key the party of Doug Graham centred their 2005 campaign on exploiting and encouraging racism and bigotry. Alister Barry (Someone Else’s Country) skilfully adapts Nicky Hager’s dynamite book; like Orewa Speech author Peter Keenan’s email that he hates the race-based privilege line. Keenan described the slogan as ludicrous given Maori are at the bottom of the heap.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: brief encounters.

THE FILM SOCIETY’s playing of New Zealand short films this year has been a bonus. Too often, the short film has been marginalised as an art-form and within film criticism or exhibition (admittedly, I have neglected to cover the short films in my reviews). This also means short films are often neglected by the artists themselves – for many (and this seems especially true for New Zealand Film Commission funded shorts) it’s seen as a stepping stone for feature films. This means the shorts are merely an excuse to throw in as many ‘quirky’ camera angles as possible, or rely on clichéd or dull storytelling (perhaps the reason why Taika Waititi’s Two Cars, One Night was so good was because it understood what a short film should be doing). It’s a shame as the short film can be just as poignant or thought-provoking as a feature. The Film Society presented six “classic” New Zealand short films, and each had varying degree of success in justifying this classic label.

The Lumière Reader winds down its New Zealand International Film Festivals coverage for 2008 with a series of illustrations by LYNDON BARROIS and ADDOLEY DZEGEDE. The Festival itself (in condensed form) continues to tour these remaining centres: New Plymouth (Sept 4-17), Nelson (Sept 11-25), Greymouth (Oct 2-8), Masterton (Oct 15-29), Queenstown (Oct 23-Nov 5), Gisborne (Nov 6-19), Whangarei (Nov 13-26). The Editor’s Post-Festival Wrap will follow shortly (previous years’ reports can be surveyed here); in the meantime, Lumière’s 70+ film reviews, along with visiting filmmaker interviews, can be revisited via our NZIFF ’08 A-Z Guide.

Grooming and torture in the Middle East. By NINA FOWLER.

DIRECTOR Nadine Labaki’s debut feature is candid and charming. The plot is standard romantic comedy; the film as a whole a dusty, beautiful sweep of the lives of women in Beirut. Labaki herself plays salon-owner Layale, torn between her role as a dutiful Christian daughter and her troubled love for a married man. Beautician Nisrine (Yasmine Al Masri) faces a Muslim wedding night sans hymen. Jamale struggles to come to terms with her age; spinster Rose (Sihame Haddad) gets a last chance at romance. The supporting cast is familiar: cute cop, crazy old woman and handsome American. Where Caramel gets interesting is the intersection of these rom-com cliches with the reality of everyday life in Lebanon. Easy to identify with relationship and work troubles, less easy to relate to an armed soldier tapping on the window of your car.

BRANNAVAN GNANALINGAM reports from the Wellington Film Society. This week: Bergman, in passing.

Persona’s opening sequence would probably have had Film Society patrons wondering if the technical difficulties that beset previous weeks’ films had continued with this one. The famous montage shatters the notion of cinema, the idea that we’re comfortably going to suture ourselves into whatever film is playing. And he starts with light (not really in a biblical sense) and splices in clips from the ‘beginning’ of cinema. He moves onto animation, slapstick comedy, horror, pornography (Fight Club wasn’t so anarchic in that respect). Film is instead imaged as a violent art-form, something which tears, destroys, kills. Bergman adopts the idea that cinema captures death – what we see is no longer living, it stopped living the moment it was captured by a camera – and all we see are ghosts of the original trace. Throw in explorations of the tyrannical artist, charting the alienation of human contact, and an emphasis on the frailty/constructed nature of the visual image and you have one of the all-time masterpieces of world cinema.

Nuri Bilge Ceylan’s brooding, inclement film noir. By STEVE GARDEN.

I LIKE good wine, but there’s a difference between tasting it and drinking it. Many wines are designed to impress at a tasting, but they may not drink as well in front of the fire. And of course, good wine reveals itself over time. At the risk of pushing a strained analogy, the New Zealand International Film Festivals can be like a tasting, but for me it’s always a taste of things to come. I return to many of the films again – sometimes often – and invariably there is much more to discover.

Eric Rohmer’s last wave. By STEVE GARDEN.

NO OTHER film in this year’s Festival arrived with more divided critical opinion than Eric Rohmer’s The Romance of Astrea and Céladon. Rohmer has intimated that this will be his last film, so critics and reviewers have looked to it for the kind of life’s-work summation that neatly enables them to acclaim the artistic continuity of one of the great auteurs. However, many haven’t been able to get past what they regard as its banal anachronistic superficiality. It’s unlikely that Rohmer set out to scuttle them, but this one-time critic has nevertheless produced a work that appears to challenge the cine-literacy of many film commentators. Admittedly, it isn’t immediately apparent where Rohmer is going with this relatively straightforward tale of a romantic misunderstanding that inevitably works out happily-ever-after. We’ve seen it all before, and we’re bound to see it many more times before we see nothing at all, but I wager that few filmmakers will manage such buoyancy and critical potency. Contrary to its seeming triviality, there’s a teasing sense of subtext behind every frame of this deceptively simple film.