If you can’t beat them, join them. That’s the approach sensationalist documentarian Morgan Spurlock (Supersize Me, Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden?) takes in his latest project, a film all about advertising and product placement. The gimmick this time around is that the entire film was funded by, and is brimming with, product placement and advertising. Revelling in its own ridiculousness, POM Wonderful Presents: The Greatest Movie Ever [...]
It’s hard to imagine that I’ll see many other films this year as morally complex or achingly real as Asghar Farhadi’s A Separation [Nadir and Simin, A Separation]. Winner of Best Picture Awards at numerous international film festivals including Sydney, Berlin and Fajr in its native Iran, the film is an intimate drama about conflict within and between two families of vastly different social and economic standings. Superbly written, acted [...]
Exhausting. That’s the word I’d use to describe my weekend. At this point I’m roughly half-way through my Melbourne International Film Festival experience, with the six festival films I saw over the past two days (five of them in the span of less than twelve hours!) bringing my grand total to an even sixteen overall. So without further adieu, let’s dive in to what I’ve been up to.
When you [...]
In this sweet and very funny coming of age story from Norway, we are introduced to thirteen year old Jo, played by young actor Ask von der Hagen. Prone to elaborate and extremely pessimistic flights of fancy – often spurred on by his overprotective mother, or after receiving ‘special attention’ from the school bully – Jo’s life is thrown into further turmoil with the arrival of Mari, a pretty young [...]
Although it features all of director Ken Loach’s typical filmmaking and storytelling trademarks, Route Irish has the same basic plot — and the same ultimate point — as countless other post 9/11 thrillers and episodes of 24.
After his best friend Frankie (John Bishop) is killed in Iraq, Fergus (Mark Womack), haunted by flashbacks of his own time in the war, begins to suspect that the private army for which they [...]
Judging purely by the quality of the films I have seen, days five through nine at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) have been a marked improvement on my bumpy days one to four. With a combination of intriguing documentaries, moving dramas and one outrageous comedy, in the last five days I have seen six films, almost all of which have managed to live up to my [...]
Feudal Japan: a time when war was a way to wisdom, loyalty was a way of life, and dishonour was punishable by death. It is during this perilous period that the prolific and often controversial director Takashi Miike (Audition, Ichi the Killer) sets his latest project 13 Assassins; an ambitious Samurai film brimming with all the poetic dialogue and unflinching violence of the time. Loosely based on historical events and [...]
A tale so outrageous, unjust and unbelievable that it could only be true, Give Up Tomorrow is a jaw-dropping tale of corruption in the Filipino courts. Documenting the trail – if such a term can even be applied – of Paco Larranaga, a man, amongst seven others, sentenced to death for a crime he did not commit, director Michael Collins chronicles the investigation, prosecution and the decade long quest for [...]
