The film begins with a title card that reads “inspired by some shit that actually happened”. It’s not clear whether this is a reference to real life or just the movies that first time writer/director Óskar Thór Axelsson borrows heavily from – in any case, the plot of the film largely follows the rise of inexperienced gangster Stebbi (Thorvaldur David Kristjansson) in the Icelandic drug trade in the months before the new millennium. The script peddles in all the typical clichés, from Stebbi’s induction by a charismatic thug (Johannes Haukur Johannesson), his ill-fated tryst with a lascivious blonde (María Birta, a dead ringer for Elisha Cuthbert), an inevitable addiction to the narcotics he peddles, and his eventual downfall brought about by the increasing erratic and violent behaviour of the gangs half-psychotic leader (a very creepy Damon Younger).

It’s fitting that Axelsson set his film at the tail end of the 1990s, since every directorial decision he makes feels like it’s been inspired by the legions of post-Tarantino knock-offs that arrived in cinemas at the same time that Pulp Fiction posters were replacing images of Scarface as the number one accessory on college dorm walls. Split screens, freeze frames and jump cuts all abound; particularly galling moments of thievery include a near exact recreation of the famous helicopter sequence (minus the helicopter) from Goodfellas, and a scene in which characters name-drop The Godfather even as Axelsson imitates Tarantino’s signature “trunk-shot”.

Indeed, so unashamed is this films re-appropriation that one could generously read it as a kind of Super 8-style tribute. Although if that were the case, Axelsson should have waited another twenty or so years, until this kind filmmaking seemed quaint and nostalgic, rather than just really, really outdated. That said, there’s a reason that this approach was popular. As derivative as it is, there’s an inherent energy to the films style that makes it impossible to be totally unengaged. But given that it’s shameless mimicry of genre conventions means you know exactly where the story is going anyway, I’d personally rather sit back on the couch and rewatch Snatch on DVD.

—

Black’s Game was reviewed as part of our coverage of the 41^st International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR).

You can read all of Tom Clift’s coverage of the festival here.

Room 514 (IFFR Review)

Ace Attorney (IFFR Review)

Kotoko (IFFR Review)

When the Lights Went Out (IFFR Review)

38 Witnesses [38 Témoins] (IFFR Review)

Early scenes around the kitchen table demonstrate the relative contentment within the LaForche household. Curtis has a steady job managing a construction site, while his wife Samantha (Jessica Chastain; The Tree of Life) makes hand-sewn crafts to sell at a weekend market. Their pre-school aged daughter Hannah (Tova Stewart) is deaf, but an upcoming operation aims to restore her hearing. There is love in this family; real, tender, easy-going love. But the threads begin unwind once Curtis starts to suffer from intense nightmares and hallucinations. Fearing that the same mental illness that consumed his mother in her thirties has begun to affect him, he hides his paranoia from his friends and family, and becomes obsessed with expanding the hurricane shelter in his backyard.

The dream sequences in Take Shelter are reminiscent of the very best kind of psychological horror films, as Nichol’s combines sights and sounds to create a climate of suffocating tension. Eerie images of oily rain and darkening thunder clouds fill Curtis’ head, and as his mind deteriorates further, the hallucinations turn violent — first his dog attacks him, then it’s people. The sublime score by David Wingo combines low strings and what sounds like wind chimes, as if the music is signalling the approaching storm.

Unfortunately, Nichols’ changes tact after the opening act, scaling back the nightmares to focus more on the family drama. There’s subtext in spades, as the film discusses not just mental illness, but also climate change, faith, economics and the American healthcare system. But the drop-off in intensity is noticeable, and the low-key narrative is not always enough to hold your attention when the atmosphere ceases to build.  That said, when the climax touches ground it is nothing short of spectacular, and rocks the picture with hurricane force.

Speaking of force, Michael Shannon has never been better. At one point Curtis mentions how he was raised by his father, and it is clear that he has inherited the typical male inability to express his feelings. When the delusions start, the terror and desperation is present in his eyes even as he tries to mask it with stoicism and deceit. As Curtis’ paranoia increases, Shannon’s performance grows grander and grander, before exploding in a whirlwind of fear, frustration and rage. As a counter point to Curtis’ maleness, Jessica Chastain plays Samantha with maternal understanding and steady determination. Between her work in The Tree of Life, The Help and now Take Shelter, there is little doubt that the heretofore unknown Chastain is one of the great discoveries of 2011.

But while Take Shelter is a marvellously composed film, it is also one that holds you at a distance. You are asked to admire the craft; to appreciate the immaculate framing, the beautiful music, the thought-provoking metaphor and the career best performances. But the amalgamation of these qualities never comes close to the sum total of its parts, and as a result the film is rarely as compelling or capable of conjuring the same emotion of a Black Swan or Shutter Island. To be fair Nichols isn’t trying to make those films, but at times I wish he had been. Those films grip you on a visceral level, one that the clinical Take Shelter simply does not equal.

–

Take Shelter is playing at the Mercury Cinema, Adelaide as part of the Summer Scoops Festival. For more information, visit their website.

(This review was originally posted on Oct 23, 2011.)

2011 Online Film Critics Society Awards

Australian Box Office 13/3/2011: Rango has The Rite

Burning Man (Review)

The Tree of Life (Video Review)

Australian Box Office 20/2/2011: Audiences loveth Gnomeo & Juliet

The year is 1973 and the Cold War has yet to thaw. Gary Oldman (Red Riding Hood) stars as George Smiley, a former member of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service who is brought out of retirement after his dying ex-boss, codenamed Control (John Hurt; Melancholia), begins to suspect that a senior spy within the agency was leaking intelligence to the Soviets. Through secret interviews with past and present members of MI6, Smiley begins compiling a profile on each of the four suspects: Bill Haydon (Colin Firth; The King’s Speech), Roy Bland (Ciarán Hinds; The Rite), Toby Esterhase (David Dencik; The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo), and the new head of the agency, Percy Alleline (Toby Jones; Captain America).

I’ve made it sound simple. The truth is it’s anything but.  This is not the kind of movie you see after a long day’s work, or on a date where your attention might be elsewhere. Alfredson’s follow-up to Let the Right One In demands your undivided attention, and even if you manage to give it that, don’t be surprised if you still get lost. After all, before John LeCarre’s 1974 novel was brought to the big screen, it was adapted into a five hour BBC miniseries. So, to put it mildly, there’s a lot of ground to cover.

In the film’s defence, I can’t imagine singling out a mole amongst some of the brainiest men in the country being a terribly quick or easy process. In fact, if you were to depict it as a slow, tortuous and frequently baffling experience like Alfredson does, you’d probably be bang on the money. The story unfolds via endless bouts of dialogue and flashbacks that are hard to distinguish from the present. The screenplay by Bridget O’Conner (Mrs. Ratcliffe’s Revolution) and  Peter Straughan (The Debt) doesn’t piece itself together like we’ve come to expect screen mysteries to do; no one turns around at any point and goes over what’s happening, or what’s happened, to make things easier for the audience. There are even key players who aren’t given a formal introduction simply because Smiley already knows who they are, and it’s therefore (unreasonably) expected that we do too. In other words, this is the kind of movie you’d want to watch with a rewind button handy. Actually, at 127 painfully paced minutes, a fast-forward button might help too.

If someone turned around and said that the movie was shot in 1973, I probably wouldn’t bat an eyelid. Well, I might have wondered why Gary Oldman was going grey at age 15, but my point is this: the movie looks remarkably authentic. You would be lucky to witness finer cinematography and production design this year, or any year. As for the performances, it can be hard to tell if Oldman is acting with superb restraint or merely on the verge of falling asleep. Everyone else is similarly understated, which makes for convincing performances, but not terribly engaging ones. In fact, of all the characters portrayed, only two had me caring: Tom Hardy (Warrior) as Ricki Tarr, a field agent in hiding, and Benedict Cumberbatch (The Whistleblower) as Peter Guillam, who aids Smiley’s investigation from within MI6. They’re the only two who don’t keep the audience at arm’s length, exhibiting things normal people do like fear and affection. The rest keep their emotions firmly in check, which I suppose is key to the makings of a good spy, but not quite as key to the makings of a good spy movie.

Australian Box Office 27/3/2011: Basket full for Hood

Australian Box Office 13/3/2011: Rango has The Rite

Australian Box Office 20/3/2011: Battle LA conquers Rango, Limitless

Red Riding Hood (Review)

Australian Box Office 13/2/11: ‘No Strings Attached’ pulls ahead

Director Tony Kravitz has crafted a film that is elegant looking and expertly edited, but one that also feels somewhat rote in its storytelling. The interviews subjects – who include a police union representative, a pro-bono lawyer and various members of Doomadgee’s family and community – all offer surface insight into the events of Doomadgee’s death. But Kravitz rarely pushes them further, never asking the hard questions that really needed to be asked. The dark storm-cloud of Australian race relations hangs heavily over the entire film, but Kravtiz seems more interested in recounting the story than exploring the issues behind it. As a result, The Tall Man plays more like a vaguely exploitative mystery than it does a social indictment of any kind.

The story of Cameron Doomadgee and Sergeant Christopher Hurley is a tragic one. But without much of a thesis, and running only seventy-nine minutes long, the movie about it feels more like a television doco than it does a theatrical film.

Red Dog (Review)

This Is Not A Film (Review)

The Hurt Locker (Review)

Pride and Glory (Guest Review)

Room 514 (IFFR Review)

The titular “number” in question refers to the number of people one has slept with, or at least, the number that is deemed to be acceptable. According to a magazine Ally Darling (Faris) reads immediately after getting fired, women who sleep with over twenty men are much less likely to land themselves a marriage proposal than those at the “national average of 10.5″. Seeing as she’s teetering on the precipice of that particular statistic at a total of 19 partners, and seeing as she’s helping her younger sister Daisy (Ari Graynor; Whip It) plan her wedding, Ally decides to sift through her former lovers to see if any have evolved into anything worthy of revisiting. Assisting Ally in her silly (and episodic) quest is Colin (Chris Evans; Captain America), her womanizing and almost always shirtless neighbour. Ally wades through the rejects, battles her overbearing mother (Blythe Danner; Little Fockers) and trips over herself the requisite amount of times for a romantic comedy, all the while oblivious to the man of her dreams right under her nose. If you’re on a quest for innovation and originality, you’ll not be finding it here.

That being said, however, I found myself enjoying my time with What’s Your Number? Anna Faris is, as always, the right amount of endearingly-ditzy blonde. Her malleable face, the always-surprised eyes, and her ability to actually incite laughter while taking a pratfall; they all work wonders in her favour. While I didn’t feel any sort of profound emotional connection to Ally, at least one can safely say that she’s enjoyable and amusing company. Colin too is hardly a deviation from the usual rom-com womaniser-until-he-meets-our-heroine romantic lead, but Chris Evans does a pleasingly charismatic and likable job of portraying him. Ally and Colin share and engage in the usual plot points one would expect; lazing and laughing around the house together, a romantic drink on a rooftop, a night of crazy daring antics — Break into a basketball stadium! Jump into the harbour! — to cement their emotional connection, an argument right when they’re oh so close to getting together, and (of course) a post-fight sprint through the city in which Ally destroys a perfectly awful dress as she races back to the man of her dreams.

What’s irritating about What’s Your Number? isn’t that it’s not enjoyable for what it is, but because of the missed opportunities littered throughout. Ally’s run-ins with her ex-boyfriends are for the most part funny, but they really could have been much funnier (Andy Samberg in particular is sorely underused). Similarly, after the film’s opening, I was hoping for some social commentary regarding the double standard for men and women when it comes to “sleeping around”, or at least something a little insightful as to what constitutes a “whore” or a failure vs marriage material. I suppose as a message “you’ll find a man who loves you for who you are no matter how much you’ve slept around” is a good one in the end. Unfortunately, in place of insight and edginess was fluff, and a spunky female lead on a frantic quest to find a husband before she becomes some sort of ruined woman. Disappointing, to say the least. Admittedly, these gripes surface during 95% of rom-coms I watch, but it was of particular irritation during What’s Your Number? given the premise, and therefore the opportunity for interesting observations. With all that  in mind however, it’s testament to Anna Faris and Chris Evans that I actually forgot my complaints and actually had a right old laugh at a fair few points. Of particular hilarity is a sequence featuring Martin Freeman, which sees Ally’s fake British accent descend into the realms of Eliza Doolittle and, yes, Borat.

What’s Your Number? isn’t going to blow you away. It’s not raunchy enough, it’s not insightful enough, and it could have been funnier. Still, the performances and chemistry of the leads do wonders to elevate the material, as do a number of the ex-boyfriends encountered. This is the latest in the slew of female-driven raunchy rom-coms, but unfortunately Bridesmaids it is not. Better luck next time, Ms Faris.

How Do You Know (Review)

Observe and Report (Review)

Australian Box Office 14/8/11: Green Lantern the brightest star

One Day (Review)

Captain America: The First Avenger (Review)

The biggest hindrance to Crazy, Stupid, Love is that attempts too much. Too many plot lines, too many romances, and as a result, none of them quite get the attention they deserve. For starters you’ve got Cal (Steve Carrel), a dweebish family man whose life is thrown into turmoil when his wife Emily (Julianne Moore) reveals she had an affair with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon) and wants a divorce. Drowning his sorrows in a trendy bar, Cal meets Jacob (Ryan Gosling), a charming ladies-man who takes pity on Cal’s sob story and decides to help get him back in the dating game, new attitude, wardrobe and all. Not long after, however, Jacob finds himself questioning his own outlook when he meets and starts to fall in love with spunky law student Hannah (Emma Stone). Then, running parallel to all this, we get the story of Cal and Emily’s thirteen year old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo), who harbours an unrequited crush on his seventeen year old babysitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who herself harbours an unrequited crush on Cal.

While there is plenty to enjoy in all the different narrative threads, I can’t help but feel the film would have been better had it narrowed its focus to just Carrel, Moore, Gosling and Stone. The babysitter plotline, although funny, feels largely disconnected from the rest of what’s going on. Similarly, as much as I love both Marisa Tomei and Kevin Bacon, I’m not convinced their minor characters justified the time that was given to them. With trims such as these, Requa and Ficarra could have spent longer developing the key relationships – Moore and Carrel, Carrel and Gosling, Gosling and Stone – and given us a bit more to chew on. Stone especially doesn’t become an integral part of the film until far too late, and the head-over-heels romance between her and Ryan Gosling comes about too quickly to believe even with the pair’s considerable chemistry.

Nevertheless, the cast is unquestionably where the film makes up for most of its flaws. Steve Carrel pulls out a more restrained version of his normal awkward funny-guy shtick, blending goofy laughs with scenes of more weighted and melancholy drama. Julianne Moore is similarly strong, and although her character seemed at times a little thin, the film does well never making her the villain. Emma Stone – as previously mentioned – isn’t in the picture for nearly as long as I would have liked, but in the moments she does have she continues to prove herself as one of the most watchable young performers working today. Finally, Ryan Gosling is easily the films most valuable player; charming, funny and naturally talented, the film is always at its best when he is on the screen.

While far from a landmark effort in the careers of anyone involved, there is more than enough heart and humour in Crazy, Stupid, Love to make it worthwhile. A tender telephone call between Carrel and Moore is especially poignant, while the scene in which Stone attempts to seduce Gosling is the perfect combination of funny, sweet and sexy (I heard audible murmurs of appreciation from female audience members when Gosling popped his shirt off). The ending runs a little long, driving home the point that the cure to most of the films problems lay in the editing room, where at least ten to fifteen minutes could have, and should have been cut. But while the film is not quite as brisk and focused as it should be, the cast makes it funny and romantic enough.

The Ides of March (Review)

Australian Box Office 30/10/2011: JT not just NSync but In Time for top spot

Blue Valentine (Review)

Drive (Cannes Review)

Drive (Review 2)

In the post Bourne cinematic era, greedy military contractors have become the go-to villain for political thrillers, allowing liberally minded filmmakers to gripe against global injustice without placing the blame at the feet of any one particular nation or government. As such, the villains in Kobricki’s film, of both the sleazy sex trafficking and suit-and-tie wearing variety, carry out their repulsive acts with typically one-dimensional immorality. Weisz’s performance is excellent as per usual, but her character is not well developed – her nobleness is a plot requisite, while the mentions of her estranged daughter feel forced, and are dropped entirely by the conclusion of the film.

The Whistleblower is also a serious contender for the most visually ugly movie of the year. Kondracki, in an ill-advised attempt to enhance the already grim quality of the subject matter, shoots the picture like a ten dollar snuff film. The camera wobbles interminably, images frequently blur in and out of focus, and bright, unfiltered light shines harshly into the lens – truly, the optical cacophony is so unpleasant that it nearly renders the film unwatchable.

Yet in spite of these complaints, as a by-the-numbers political thriller – the comfort food of movie genres – The Whistleblower doesn’t fail to satisfy. Never dull, it proves that it is practically impossible to make an uninteresting movie about sex slavery; the stakes are as high as they come, and there is at least some measure of suspense in the third act where our heroine’s righteous cause comes increasingly under threat. It’s low praise, but that’s all it deserves.  As it stands it’s enough to earn the film a very mild recommendation.

Ages of Love [Manuale d'am3re] (Review)

Senna (Review)

Room 514 (IFFR Review)

Frost/Nixon (Review)

State of Play (Review)

So yes, The Change-Up is all kinds of nasty. That much we’ve established.  But is it funny? Well, in a juvenile, racist, sexist, and child-abusive kind of way, I daresay it can be hilarious. I’m not particularly proud of laughing at this vulgar cliché of a movie, but dammit, laugh I did. And at the end of the day, making you laugh is just about all a comedy really needs to do.

Still, a touch of originality would have been nice. We’ve seen the body-swap setup play out so many times, the genre just about fills its own bargain bin at K-mart.  That being said, The Change-Up does deserve credit for being the first body-swap movie to explore the question of sex without any restraint. For instance, if your mind is placed in someone else’s body, and you sleep with someone other than your usual partner, is that considered cheating? And is it wrong to masturbate using somebody else’s tackle?

These are the questions facing family man Dave (Jason Bateman; Horrible Bosses) and his womanising best friend Mitch (Ryan Reynolds; Green Lantern). Dave is an ambitious lawyer by day, married father-of-three by night who often ponders – usually in the presence of his saucy secretary Sabrina (Olivia Wilde; Cowboys and Aliens) — what his life would be like if he hadn’t put a ring on it. (It being Leslie Mann’s finger.) Mitch, meanwhile, is a lazy pot-headed bachelor who sleeps with all kinds of girls he knows only on a first-name basis (if that).  Whilst relieving themselves in a fountain one drunken night, the two profess a desire for each other’s lives. Sure enough, the fountain abides. Dave is now Mitch and Mitch is now Dave. Or, more to the point, Dave is now single and Mitch is now married. Dilemma!

For actors, the lure of body-swap comedies is that they essentially get to play two very different characters in the same movie. Before the switch, Bateman and Reynolds play the same characters they’ve always played, but after the switch, Bateman becomes a foul-mouthed man-child, while Reynolds develops a moral conscience. It’s fun to watch the two effectively parody each other, and it’s abundantly clear they’re having a blast doing so too. It’s undeniable that, alongside a wilful Oliva Wilde and sympathetic Leslie Mann, Bateman and Reynolds considerably elevate what is otherwise fairly derivative stuff.

As the film’s marketing campaign is quick to declare, the folks responsible for the screenplay are Jon Lucas and Scott Moore, aka the chaps behind The Hangover. That film became an instant classic due to its unpredictability, whereas The Change-Up is about as predictable as a movie gets. Thankfully, though, these guys still understand crude comedy, and director David Dobkin (The Wedding Crashers) understands how best to film it. They also know that if they want to stand out from all the other crude comedies this year, they’re going to have to be extra filthy. So filthy, it’s rumoured they scrawled the screenplay on the back of a doped-up hooker with a tattoo gun! (Not really, although that does just about describe a scene from the movie. As I said: filthy!)

So don’t say you weren’t warned: this movie isn’t for everyone. That much was clear when Universal offered critics complimentary beer and pizza prior to screening the film, which is their roundabout way of saying that this is one for the boys. Oh, and that it’s best enjoyed drunk. But you already knew that, right?

Australian Box Office 4/9/2011: Horrible Bosses still on top

Australian Box Office 28/8/11: Horrible Bosses relates

Horrible Bosses (Review)

Australian Box Office 14/8/11: Green Lantern the brightest star

Film Spiel #14: Hangover 2, The Tunnel

If you think that sounds like faint praise, you’d be right: Nispel’s Conan is generic, mindless and often unintentionally hilarious. But I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t amusingly gruesome and occasionally thrilling as well. In fact, there were a few moments peppered throughout this action-packed epic where I actually found myself – *gulp* — having fun. But please, keep that to yourselves, because if there’s any pleasure to be had watching a movie like this, it’s almost certainly of the guilty variety. And having previously enjoyed Fast Five this year, I’m feeling guilty enough already.

I mentioned earlier that this is a remake, but that’s not entirely true. Both this film and the 1982 original are adaptations of Robert E. Howard’s fantasy tales from the 30s, and as far as I can tell, Nispel’s is more in line with the tone and mythos of Howard’s vision. The ‘story’, for lack of a better word, begins with Conan (Jason Momoa; Game of Thrones) being prematurely plucked from his mother’s wounded womb during battle, a scene that manages to be far funnier than the entirety of Your Highness without ever intending to be. Over the years, Conan becomes a promising young Cimmerian warrior under the mentorship of his father (Ron Perlman; Hellboy), but his training is cut short when the power-hungry warlord Khalar Zym (Stephen Lang; Avatar) wipes out their village, killing dad in the process. This does not amuse Conan in the slightest, who spends the next decade pumping iron and guzzling protein shakes so that he’ll look damn good shirtless when he finally enacts his revenge. Zym, meanwhile, is busy trying to resurrect his dead witch of a wife, a process that requires the sacrifice of a pure-blooded monk named Tamara (Rachel Nichols; Star Trek). Tamara would much prefer it if this sacrificial ritual did not happen, so she teams up with Mr C. Barbarian as he endeavors to separate Zym’s head from the rest of his body.

Rather than rehashing Arnold Schwarzenegger’s mechanised rendition of Conan, Jason Momoa brings a welcome dash of humanity to the titular character, making his otherwise cheerless, misogynistic and mass-murdering qualities that little bit more palatable. Momoa also hacks and slashes with greater vitality and fewer tennis-playing grunts than Arnie, even if his biceps don’t quite compare.

After spending the first fifteen minutes developing the bond between Conan and his father, the three writers obviously grew weary of petty things like characterisation and plotting, opting instead to let Conan’s swinging arm resolve any remaining conflicts, and fill any remaining plot holes. The action, in spite of the rapid-fire editing and murky 3D, is appropriately grisly and intense, with one scuffle involving an army of teleporting sand warriors proving to be the most fun. Still, there’s only so many ways a sword can kill a man — and only so much CGI blood that can be shed in the process – until the action starts to become something of a chore to sit through.

But, like I said earlier, Conan remains watchable. And as someone who knows all too well what an unwatchable film is like to watch, that’s good enough for me.

New CONAN THE BARBARIAN trailer unleashed!

Australian Box Office 28/8/11: Horrible Bosses relates

Fright Night [2011] (Review)

Australian Box Office 14/8/11: Green Lantern the brightest star

Competition: Win TAMARA DREWE tickets!

Rutger Hauer (The Rite), apparently unaware of the kind of movie that he’s in, gives a surprisingly strong and weighty dramatic performance as the titular hobo who rides into Hope Town on the rails. A breeding ground for corruption and misery like you wouldn’t believe, the city is ruled by the dictatorial and certifiably insane “The Drake”, who at the outset of the film decapitates his own brother just to prove a point. Even more dangerous are his two sadistic sons, walking 80s clichés Slick and Ivan, who rape, torture and murder people for their own sick amusement. After coming to the rescue of a hooker-with-a-heart of gold named Abby inadvertently puts him in The Drake’s firing line, the hobo decides to clean up the streets of Hope Town once and for all, the only way he knows how.

Packed with gratuitous violence, insane drug-use and truly unprintable dialogue, Hobo With A Shotgun would probably have been genuinely more entertaining as a fifteen-minute plot-less montage of all its best bits strung together. The money shots in this film – and there are a lot of them – are brilliantly over-the-top, holding nothing sacred and nothing back. But everything else is just kind of a bore. I understand that much of the relationship between the hobo and Abby is meant to be funny in an absurd, so-bad-it’s-good kind of way, and normally I love that kind of garbage. But here it just doesn’t work.

At a certain point, even the violence becomes unexciting. Watching blood splatter over the camera lens again and again, however outrageously funny it might have been the first time, eventually becomes repetitive, and after Slick and Ivan flamethrower a whole busload of schoolchildren — brilliant, by the way — there aren’t many places the film can escalate to from there. Fun to a point, but by about the hour mark I was more than ready to check out.

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Tom Clift is a web-based film journalist from Melbourne, Australia. Visit his website here: http://reviewsbytom.blogspot.com.

You can read all of Tom Clift’s coverage of MIFF 2011 here.

The Liverpool Goalie (MIFF Mini Review)

MIFF 2011 Diary: Days 10-12

Route Irish (MIFF Review)

Give Up Tomorrow (MIFF Review)

The Redemption of General Butt Naked (MIFF Review)

On one of these rare visits, he stops by the funeral home, run by the shrewd Frank Quinn (Bill Murray) and his earnest young apprentice, Buddy (Lucas Black). In desperate need of the money, they accept his bizarre proposal to hold a funeral for him before he dies. He wants it to be a big celebration, where anyone with a story about him can come and tell it, so he can confront his accusers publicly and finally ease his conscience. In short, it’s his one and only chance to set the record straight.

What follows is a quirky and low-key character-driven piece, in an evocative and tenderly rendered setting – with a structure that condemns it to slowly crawl to the expected outcome. The elements of the central mystery, involving renewed ties with a loving old acquaintance, are gradually, tantalizingly unveiled, but by the time we reach the big reveal, it doesn’t amount to very much. The character of a man with a shady past aching for redemption, remaining tight-lipped while those around him propagate damaging rumours as they wait for an explanation, has been explored plenty of times before (see Levity, Hard Eight, or the powerful I’ve Loved You So Long, where the central character is a woman), but it’s confounding why Felix has allowed his reputation to be dragged through the dirt as long as he has.

The elegiac tone is obviously no accident, however, and the ponderous route of the film is livened up by the presence of the deadpan Bill Murray, doing what he does best and providing a lot of the film’s charm. The performances can certainly not be faulted, with Duvall sinking his teeth into a role far meatier than the supporting parts he is restricted to in recent films like Crazy Heart and The Road. Fellow old-timer Sissy Spacek brightens every scene she’s in – unlike the rather bland Lucas Black (who, as a child actor, appeared in Sling Blade with Duvall some thirteen years earlier).

It took some time for Get Low to secure a cinema release; one reason for this may be that it is a difficult film to classify. And any American movie that tries to tackle themes of regret, atonement, and ultimately death, has its work cut out for it with regard to reaching a large audience. While all the pieces don’t add up to an entirely satisfying whole, it’s hard to dislike a film with characters as warm, witty and wrinkled as these. Moonshine served in selected cinemas.

Gran Torino (Review)

Cinema Releases – January 22, 2009

Trailer Talk: Clint Eastwood’s ‘Hereafter’

Crazy Heart (Review)

Trailer Talk: The Beaver

Incorporating his fascination for empty rituals and depression, Melancholia explores the idea of a planet colliding with Earth, centering on sisters Justine (Kirsten Dunst) and Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) as they try to come to terms with the world, and their lives, coming to an end. Justine’s marriage to Michael (Alexander Skarsgård) goes horribly awry soon after the reception, yet as a result of her worsening state of depression, she doesn’t seem to care. Once excited by the prospect of a fairytale wedding, we eventually see Justine draw parallels with her unceremonious mother Gabby (Charlotte Rampling), who doesn’t see the point in celebrating when the end is so nigh.

After charting Justine’s worsening depression in Part One, the film shifts focus to her sister Claire (Charlotte Gainsbourg) in Part Two. Claire, initially presented as someone with a level head, grows increasingly distressed by the impending doomsday, despite her haughty husband John (Kiefer Sutherland) insisting that the planets won’t collide after all.

It’s in the tail-end of the film that things take a turn for the unexpected, likely dividing those who will get behind Melancholia and those who will lambast it.

Dunst was a late replacement for Penelope Cruz, but she does well to create a façade for Justine. Von Trier had previously stated that Dundst actually benefited from suffering her own spell of depression during filming by enhancing the authenticity of her performance. Alongside the ever-so-talented Gainsbourg, Dundst is standout amongst the strong ensemble cast, von Trier also eliciting top performances from Sutherland and young Cameron Spurr as Claire’s son Leo. Visually, von Trier lends a visceral yet dreamlike vision of Doomsday, while the ominous overture of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde” cleverly foreshadows later events. Slow-motion sequences, drawn faces and a warped vision of reality; the elements of a von Trier ideal are all there. But Melancholia is a film where determining a definite opinion proves difficult, and to judge it on a first viewing is perhaps unfair to von Trier. Exploring it again to understand his thoughts on the end of our existence would serve it better.

Verdict

Unlike von Trier himself, Melancholia is surprisingly uncontroversial in content, but remains an interesting take on the psychology of the apocalypse.

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For more of Katina’s coverage of the 2011 Cannes film festival, click here.

Melancholia (MIFF Review)

Competition at Cannes: oh the controversy!

Cannes diary: Thursday May 19th (Day Four)

Cannes 2011 – The Lowdown

Cannes Classics: Le Sauvage (1975)

After smoothing out a few misunderstandings with a little finesse and a big smirk, Mick Haller (McConaughey) lands himself one of those apparently open-and-shut cases that legal thrillers often use as their launching pad. Blonde-haired, blue-eyed rich boy Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillippe; MacGruber) is accused of savagely beating a woman he met in a bar, but he insists he’s been framed. Together with his investigator Frank (a long-haired and typically solid William H. Macy; Shorts), Mick delves into the evidence and discovers similarities with an earlier assault and murder – for which one of his previous clients was convicted. A cat and mouse game ensues between the lawyer and the real killer (and if you’ve seen the trailer, you’ll already know who it is), as Mick keeps running into the impenetrable wall of attorney-client privilege.

Meanwhile, between copious amounts of whiskey and quickly overcome hangovers, he shuttles his little-seen daughter back and forth with his level-headed ex-wife Maggie (Marisa Tomei; The Wrestler), also a lawyer. We don’t get much background on their relationship, although it’s easy to fill in the blanks, and the angst of their failed marriage (gathering steam for round two, naturally) is unusually restrained. In fact, the presence of the family mainly serves to show that the sly and ruthless Mick does have a heart – although it’s his liver that keeps taking a beating.

In The Verdict (1982), Paul Newman played an alcoholic, ambulance-chasing lawyer trying to earn some self-respect with a desperate shot at redemption. But Lincoln is neither grim nor does it aim for such lofty heights, and unlike Newman’s crusty crusader, Mick is young, hip and (the film constantly tries to convince us) streetwise. McConaughey plays the role of the charming hustler with relish; rarely offscreen, he carries the film through all its twists, turns and tumbles. His costar Phillippe, however, seems to be channelling Keanu Reeves in a characteristically wooden performance, although the role lacks credibility – Roulet is pretty much just a cardboard villain.

This is the second adaptation of a novel by prolific crime fiction writer Michael Connelly, after the rather bland and routine Blood Work, starring Clint Eastwood. At times, Lincoln plays like a TV legal drama, and it suffers from a range of vague and underwritten minor characters – perhaps another case of trying to shoehorn a convoluted bestseller into a two-hour narrative with mixed results. This might also account for the way it piles on the endings and neglects to thread all the characters together effectively. The overenthusiastic zoom lens and hyperactive handheld camera are also distracting. But for all these relatively minor complaints, The Lincoln Lawyer delivers on its promise and emerges a cool, slick and entertaining courtroom drama with enough punch to hold its own in an overcrowded genre. Just don’t analyse it too much – make sure your popcorn lasts until the final reel and you should be satisfied.

Australian Box Office 10/4/11: Rio rules the roost

Red Dog (Review)

Ace Attorney (IFFR Review)

Australian Box Office 27/3/2011: Basket full for Hood

Fracture (Review)

A Useful Life sets the scene instantly: Jorge (Jorge Jellinek) has worked at the Cinemateca for almost thirty years. He runs their local radio show and helps with the general maintenance but even that’s not enough to save the place from closure. As Jorge learns of his fate he evolves into a different person, following the steps of famous on-screen legends (Fred Astaire and the like) into becoming a shadow of his former self. The film, shot in b&w, splits Jorge’s personalities straight down the middle as much as the story itself.

Director Federico Veiroj gives us a crawling film with minimal plot as an auteur, but it somehow comes out with a lot of (intended) meaning – about the fate of cinema and how a person can draw from it. Cinemateca owner Martinez’s (Manuel Martinez Carril) radio discussion is the most obvious example, but Jorge’s exploration of himself and his abilities is where the film hits its highest note. The film changes dramatically for the second half; an interesting paradox to the bleak cinema is the lively law school where Jorge tries chasing crush Paola (Paola Venditto). A bonus for Veiroj was getting Jellinek (a real-life Uruguayan critic) on board.

Verdict:

A Useful Life has a lot of validity to it, but even at 67 minutes it feels drawn out.

A Useful Life screens as part of the 2011 Bigpond Adelaide Film Festival. Read all of our BAFF11 coverage here.

Alamar [To The Sea] (Review)

The Recipe [2010] (BAFF Review)

In A Better World [Hævnen] (Review)

The Illusionist [L'illusionniste] (BAFF Review)

Home (Review)