landofthelongwhitelight

Bad Ideas for March

2012-03-03T23:45:00.000-08:00

George Clooney has done and said some interesting things politically. For one, he has seemed to be quite serious about making a difference in Darfur.

As far as Barack Obama is concerned: “I’m a firm believer in sticking by and sticking up for the people you’ve elected,” he told ABC News.

That means he doesn’t thinks Obama is perfect, but he’s the man Clooney voted for - and punted - and he’s standing by him, which is admirable.

Furthermore, he has made it quite clear that he’s aware of the fact that the US media are polarized in terms of which paper or TV channel supports which party, so in The Ides of March “we wanted to talk about how we elect people and the deals we make along the way.”

That certainly happens. Clooney seems almost obsessed with the mechanisms of (American) power, and he knows how to portray them effectively. Ryan Gosling and Philip Seymour Hoffman and their opponent, played by Paul Giamatti, deliver flawless performances as campaign managers of one ethical stripe or another. Note that it’s mainly a boys’ affair.

Seymour Hoffman’s speech on political loyalty is something to savour, as is Alexandre Desplat’s soundtrack, but here lies the rub. Clooney: “I knew that the only way I was going to be allowed to [make the film] - because I’m a Democrat and I’ve been sort of loud about it at times - was that I’d make [my presidential candidate] a Democrat so that the flaws are [those] of a Democrat.”

And boy, his Mike Morris sounds almost too good to be true, even as a Democrat. He’s into the kind of technology that wouldn’t require oil; he isn’t a Christian or a Muslim; the only thing he believes in is upholding the US Constitution. In fact, he seems to believe in everything someone else believes in: George Clooney.

Then, after a real homey scene with his screen wife (Jennifer Ehle as the lovely power-background wife), we discover that he’s as big a shithead as John Edwards, who was getting an intern pregnant and trying to cover it up while his wife was dying of cancer. Good luck, and good night Mr Edwards.

But this is not clever politics, let alone controversial. In fact, it’s effectively an admission of failure on Clooney’s behalf. If he, with all his star power, couldn’t make a film that goes beyond what Noam Chomsky calls “manufactured consent”, then where does that leave him? Or us? Do we care about the American electoral system? Do Americans? Will the majority of them, just because he’s in it? Perhaps.

But then they might just take him literally when he praises the Republicans’ effective (but appalling) strategies and shows us that atheist Democrats are not to be trusted. And again, does the rest of the world really care for this kind of exceptionalist drama, one way or the other?

Neil Sonnekus

Actor in Search of a Character

2012-02-26T00:43:00.000-08:00

Michael Fassbender has a very strange quality. Unlike most famous actors, he looks like several personae in one.

From one angle he resembles the great German actor Maximilian Schell, which is not so far-fetched because he actually has a German mother and was born in her country.

From another angle he looks and acts a bit like Ed Harris, though he isn't blond and grew up Irish. But then Fassbender doesn't look or sound like a traditional white Irishman either. There are passing resemblances to Daniel Day-Lewis and Anthony Hopkins too.

So the big difference between him and these actors is that he doesn't exactly look like, well, himself. Neither is any of this helped along by the fact that the two films I saw him in this week had such contradictory and indeterminate characters in them.

In Jane Eyre he plays a man who is torn between his pre-industrial sense of decency towards an ex-wife who has clearly gone bonkers and his desire for that great no-no: the governess. This unnatural state of affairs leaves him deeply misanthropic, if not filled with self-loathing, but his real character - through no fault of his own - seems to be somewhere else. Meanwhile, Mia Wasikowska delivers a fine performance of a woman who knows what she is and wants in a time when she was meant to serve and basically shut up.

In Shame he has even less to work with as a character. Brandon is a sex addict, someone who has an indeterminate corporate job and oozes a kind of cold, robotic sexuality. The fine soundtrack by Harry Escott tells us that he is a tragic character from the start, and this slowly reveals itself to be true. He is indeed an empty shell.

Director Steve McQueen saves us the background story as to why this man and his sister, played by Carey Mulligan, are so messed up. Almost everything happens slowly, which is not a criticism. Far from it. Her rendition of the rousing New York, New York is painfully slow and slowly brilliant. You can almost hear souls breaking.

If anything, it's Mulligan who is the real find here. Up to now she's played somewhat moon-ish, cardigan-wearing-type characters, but not this time. Her Sissy is nothing short of fucked up, so much so that I didn't recognize her at first, and that's not only because she was stark naked, as Fassbender is full-frontally for much of the movie.

All we are waiting for is to see how the penny is going to drop for this man whose work and home computer is stuffed with porn, as is his mind. Anything to keep whatever humiliated him in the past at a distance, and that includes his sister, who obviously only reminds him of that trauma. One of the few things that happens fast is a montage of the smut Brandon finally tries to eject from his life. It's almost subliminial cutting, but the image of an anus in big close-up remains. This is Brandon's psyche: the arse end of everything.

But the only clue we get to any interiority is the fact that he listens, somewhat implausibly, to Bach, and when he develops any feelings for a woman he can't get his considerable schlong up. That that women should be black (like the director), warm and have a character might also be forcing things a bit.

If we're meant to feel anything for this man whose lovemaking finally assumes a grimacing, ape-like desperation it's difficult at the time, just as it's difficult to believe that one of Sissy's more serious traumas (not for the first time) is going to be enough to change him. He will need something much more cathartic than that, but for all this there is something mesmerising, brave and finally moving about this film and its two siblings who - in the final analysis - only have each other.

And that's a real shame.

Neil Sonnekus

Silence Ain't Always Golden

2012-02-18T12:12:00.000-08:00

It’s amazing how vicious and self-righteous certain members of the self-appointed Left have been over the death of Whitney Houston last week, as if she never had a smidgen of talent and operated in an industry that is a veritable rose garden.

Another industry that comes up smelling of morning dew, film, would have been as dismissive about its silent era stars with the advent of talkies. Many lives were destroyed, as we know, yet those stars were probably as guilty of vanity and pride as Houston was.

So is George Valentin (the much-nominated Jean Dujardin), who just cannot see the writing on the wall. Yet, as he is riding the last crest of silent stardom, he literally bumps into the young Peppy Miller (Argentinian-born Berenice Bejo), who truly has the effervescence of another era.

As his life falls to pieces, so her star doesn’t just rise, it rockets. And, in true Hollywood style, Bejo just happens to be wife of the director (Lithuanian-born Michel Hazanavicius). So far so predictable. Morever, a cynic would say that at least they don't have to dub their French accents into American. But what about the story?

Most of us aren’t old enough to remember the real era, apart from the only artist who surpassed it, Charlie Chaplin, so we’re looking at that time not with nostalgia but with a talkie, TV and social media consciousness. Yes, it’s very sweet and helped along by the cutest dog in all creation, Jack, as in Russell, but does it add to that/or and this era?

Taking the route of homage, Hazanavicius goes soft and merely tries to imitate that time, complete with a forced happy ending. It isn’t even an ironic conclusion, it’s a reward for the audience, he says, for sitting through a “difficult film”.

The words, from my point of view, are more like boring and implausible than difficult. Would someone with such a meteoric career have had time to love and care for such a self-pitying egotist? Possibly, but not likely.

Whatever the case, The Artist needn’t have taken this route, though it certainly is earning plenty of nominations and plaudits. But the only anchor through a film that is destined for a dusty shelf like those it emulates, finally, is Bejo's wry, sideways smile. That, for this twitchy viewer at least, is enough to launch a thousand careers.

Neil Sonnekus

Needle in the Eye

2012-02-12T00:58:00.000-08:00

After I’d seen Blind Terror starring Mia Farrow in 1971 I swore I’d never watch a horror movie again. I was about 15 at the time, but I broke that oath quite often and did so again this weekend.

The thing about Farrow is that she probably brought out the protective instinct in older men with her fragile voice and porcelain-doll looks, but if memory serves (and it doesn’t very well, as we all know), there weren’t any point-of-view shots. That would have meant the screen had to go black because she was as blind as a bat from the start.

Things are slightly different in Julia’s Eyes, a film the marketeers go to great lengths to say was produced by Mexican master Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth).

For one the titular Julia (Belen Rueda) has fading sight, a POV we often see, but when she goes completely blind we still have black POV shots – to great effect. This is all enhanced by the excellent cinematography of Oscar Faura, who also shot Del Toro’s haunting The Orphanage.

Secondly, there is nothing doll-like about Rueda. She is a blonde, full-blown Spanish woman and she is infinitely desirable. Yes, she’s a little overwrought, like the film itself, but who cares? We will do anything to, well, see that she finds her twin sister’s killer, if indeed he or she exists. Sometimes these Latinos can imagine all kinds of morbid things, you know, especially if they have a Catalunian disposition like director Guillem Morales.

So, a film that's also about seeing. There are even references to that iconic image of an eyeball being slit in Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali’s Un Chien Andalou. This time, however, it’s a syringe that enters said orb, though it might have been more effective if we didn’t see the needle actually piercing what looks like material. Morales should have studied his Cronenburg. Suggestion might have been more effective. A slight popping sound perhaps?

But imagine having to act blind while your killer has a very sharp knife millimetres away from your pupil, testing you. Rueda does a great job and has us on her side from start to finish.

But is it a good story? Well, it’s full of twists and turns that certainly kept me on the edge of my seat, but the plot did start getting implausible towards the end. Julia was starting to do quite a lot for a blind and blindfolded person and, frankly, if my killer offered me a mug of boiling water filled with poison and I knew it, locked up in his (or her) house, I would simply chuck it in their eyes and brain them with anything at hand.

Another Dali-esque reference pertains to Julia’s husband (Lluis Homar) seeing the universe in her eyes, literally. That, and the conceit that the more emotional Julia gets the more her eyesight will deteriorate, is much more acceptable than Lars von Trier’s twaddle about planet Melancholia heading our way to destroy our Danish angst.

Neil Sonnekus

Not All Men Have Islands

2012-02-03T10:52:00.000-08:00

A radio critic recently said director Alexander Payne (born Papadopoulos) tends to make male buddy movies, like Sideways, which is obviously true. But his masterpiece, in my humble opinion, is about a woman, a very simple but determined postwoman from San Diego who has always had this thing about France.

Speaking the most cringeworthy, American-accented but nevertheless accurate French, 14e Arrondissement in Paris, Je’Taime might only be about 10 minutes long, but it says everything about loneliness and bravery that needs to be said.

Anyway, here Payne gets back to a male protagonist and this time he’s no ageing star like Jack Nicholson or anti-star like Paul Giamatti, he’s George Clooney. The cinema was packed with wine-drinking women and they were there to see their man with his matinee idol good looks, no matter what he did.

When his Matt King hears that his wife had an affair prior to her water-skiing accident you can almost hear him (and his fans) thinking: but who could be better or more handsome than me/him? Which is probably the whole point Payne was trying to make, for King is no angel. He’s a land baron on Hawaii.

Just to rub it in, the man she had an affair with is not exactly an oil painting - and he’s an estate agent. This is all very sly and gently ironic. The only difference is that Clooney gets a lot of screen time to let us warm to him while his reportedly adventurous wife, played statuesquely by Patricia Hastie, gets a non-talking opening shot of about 10 seconds, after which she spends the rest of the movie as a vegetable. Even her teenage daughter, Alexandra (Shailene Woodley), hates her for what she did.

The only person who can and does come to her defence is her father, since her mother has Alzheimer’s and thinks everything’s wonderful. Robert Forster’s small but important role is deeply affecting and somehow feels more real than a film that is pleasant enough to watch and makes all the right noises about indigenous land ownership, but swings a little uncomfortably between family tragedy and comedy.

Also, Alexandra’s rather lovable jerk of a friend Sid (Nick Krause) suddenly disappears towards the end of the movie, almost as if he might spoil any possibility of a sad-but-united tableau. Clooney, of course, is never going to entirely lose his rag or spill his guts at his loss, but then there are hordes who will forgive him for much, much more than that.

Neil Sonnekus

Tinker, Tamper, Dawdle, Sigh

2012-01-27T11:15:00.000-08:00

From the few John le Carre novels I’ve read – and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy is not one of them – I’d say his books are as much about spying as they are about being British.

So I found it interesting that a Scandinavian director will try, and be allowed, to “capture” this quintessentially English writer’s work. Le Carre is one of the executive producers (and features in the party scene, according to the credits), so he obviously gave the director his blessing.

It didn’t take long before I was bored, though. Not having read the book, like most viewers, I only had the film in front of me and a lot of it didn’t make much sense.

For starters, there were a lot of pointless scenes at the beginning that supposedly served to show the endless routine of a civil servant’s life. But they went on in a manner that had more to do with making Magritte-like compositions than reflecting the very ritualistic nature of such a life.

British restraint is one thing, but without what Harold Pinter called the weasel under the cocktail cabinet it falls flat. So here we have a European film, then, and it’s somewhat indulgent. No wonder the English don’t want to join the eurozone.

Gary Oldman, of course, does an excellent job as an ex-spy who comes out of semi-retirement to find the mole in MI6. Most of the time he just has to be pointedly blank, but his George Smiley does eventually reveal himself to an extent and it’s a fine study in minimalism.

However, there are four characters under suspicion at the “Circus”, according to Control (John Hurt, who cunningly looks like an older version of Oldman), and he has stuck small photographs of them on chess pieces.

Now, I have played more chess games than read Le Carre novels and the former have certainly been tenser than the film, no matter how many people appear uninvited in Smiley’s house. After a while you can start discerning your online opponent’s personality through his or her style, but we get to know absolutely zip about our four suspects.

There are no concrete clues, just long visual teases. When the mole is finally outed and we think, well, obviously it had to be him, it’s got more to do with the actor than what the script gave him and therefore us.

Moreover, Swedish director Thomas Alfredson (Let the Right One In) sees no point in giving Smiley’s wife a face, let alone a personality, even though she is a source of great – but virtually unseen – pain to Smiley.

The result is a film that looks good but feels like someone rather loosely moving a bunch of chess pieces around on a board. I don’t think Le Carre intended to draw Smiley - playing black - in quite that way.

Neil Sonnekus

Heart of Darkness, and Light

2012-01-12T13:27:00.000-08:00

The ending of every story is its full stop and its value indicator. The way you conclude your story is loaded with what you want it to mean, even if you want it to mean nothing.

Most stories end happily because most of us are optimists (or deluded) or, as Joseph Campbell might have it, by telling a story and ending it happily we are reaffirming our triumph over the innate tragedy of existence.

So if Viva Riva! were to end in quite a few other ways it wouldn’t have half the impact it does, but its protagonist (this is a definite plot spoiler) dies. Yes, it’s a very defiant, Iago-like death, but this swaggering penis, full of African machismo, ends up being not much better than his porn-watching rival.

Remember, we are watching a film set in a place Joseph Conrad called the heart of darkness – a view the news doesn’t do much to dispel over a century later. Think of soldiers raping and pillaging at random in the eastern parts of the country and you get the picture.

But then you just have to look at what the Democratic Republic of Congo’s capital, Kinshasa, looks like in this film. Most of the city is in darkness at night, most of the roads are rutted and littered with refuse, most of the buildings seem on the brink of collapse. It’s a vibrancy only the most well-meaning humanitarian would appreciate. Corruption is rife. The film’s tagline, Kinshasa is Calling, veritably drips with irony.

Director Djo Munga might revel in this darkness and even mock Conrad’s dictum in a scene where Riva (Patsha Bay) fornicates with two prostitutes, bodies painted white with clay, wearing masks and clearly in a trance, but then there’s the ending. There’s also plenty of other, varied sex reminiscent of a rap video.

The lack of petrol and the domination of the US dollar permeate the film, as does Manie Malone’s beautiful moll and Hoji Fortuna’s Angolan dealer and vicious gangster, Cesar, surely one of the oddest and most chilling thugs seen on screen lately.

Contrary to what a lot of critics say, the film is not well made. In fact, it is decidedly clumsy. The editing is sometimes jarring, the music is occasionally downright weird, people are shot without us seeing what happens to them so that they can later virtually resurrect themselves – and a killing in a church might get a more vociferous response in other parts of the continent, like Rwanda, than elsewhere. It doesn’t have a patch on other gangster-going-down films like, say, Brian da Palma’s Scarface.

But Munga knows what he’s saying and should be applauded for it. He agrees with the white-suited Cesar and Conrad: the DRC is rotten to the core.

The First Grader is marketed as the story of a sweet old African who wants to learn how to read. This is clearly meant to appeal to those who have mushy feelings about Africa – as long as they’re as far away from it as possible.

Based on the latest primary reason for seeing a film, a true story, it’s also about an ex-Mau Mau fighter who lost his wife and child and then, come uhuru, was typically forgotten. Until now. The government has decreed (we learn via a DJ, about whom more later on) that the portals of education will be open to all.

According to the film, Kimani N’gan’ga Maruge (the perfectly cast Oliver Litondo) never remarried after his wife and child were killed by the colonial forces back in the Fifties. According to Wikipedia, he had 30 grandchildren, which sounds about right. So the “based on” part seems to be very, very loose.

All of the above, however, is quibbling. The image of a limping old man determined to practise his new right is unbearably moving, and that’s only the beginning of the movie. By the end you feel like you want to insist on this film being shown to every African and impoverished child across the world, as an inspiration to them and a warning to every stupid little bureaucrat that you cannot mess with eager minds, not even an 84-year-olds’.

Set in the Rift Valley of Kenya and directed by Justin Chadwick (The Other Boleyn Girl), any sense of romance is instantly dispelled by the modern wind turbines on the hills and the plastic bags stuck in those beautiful thorn trees. South African-born writer Ann Peacock’s script is shot through with an absolutely essential and delicious, home-grown sense of humour, and Naomie Harris’s compassionate teacher, Jane Obinchu, is a marvel.

DJ Masha, the ironically named Dan "Churchill" Ndambuki, reminds us that Africa is primarily a vocal culture. Without him and the old farts' club drinking on the liquor store's pavement, The First Grader would be so much the poorer.

See this film. Buy this film. Listen to this film. Watch it once a year to remind yourself that all is not darkness and desperation in Africa. Quite the contrary.

Neil Sonnekus

Stuck in the Provinces

2012-01-09T18:28:00.000-08:00

The only famous name in Anton Chekhov’s The Duel is in the title and I’m sure the good doctor/writer would have been quite amused. Whether he would have been entertained by this handsomely shot, set and costumed interpretation of his work is another matter.

Though I haven’t read the novella upon which the film is based, most of the themes of the great plays like The Seagull and Three Sisters are there.

Firstly, there is the provincial boor living out his meaningless life in the Caucasus: broke, idle, full of passion and useless pursuits like drinking and gambling - and ungrateful for the beautiful live-in mistress he has. In fact, he almost despises her as much as he does himself.

Andrew Scott does a fine job as Laevsky, or rather, as good as his screenwriter, Mary Bing, and director Dover Koshashvili allow him. A local critic called his character “a prick” and said it was therefore difficult to identify with him. Not that one has to, but the whole point of Chekhov’s characters is that they and their bursts of suppressed passion are funny. We cannot but help laughing at them for the simple reason that they mirror our own middle class foibles. When this doesn’t happen the work is in big trouble.

A modern equivalent of Laevsky would be Frasier who, along with his utterly pretentious brother, is a cad of note. But do we hate them? Never. They are two of the most lovable douche bags ever created. Their hearts might be in the right place, it’s just that the minds are completely screwed up.

Fiona Glascott as the beautiful Nadia has even less with which to work. The only time she longs for Moscow, like one of the three sisters, is when she’s in a bit of a fever. Surely this should be a much more prominent part of her psychological make-up for being stuck out in the middle of nowhere with a handsome wastrel and an ever-diminishing, small-town reputation?

If the man of reason and science is ably represented by Tobias Mentzies as the equally absurd Von Koren, the background to Chekhov’s era is missing completely. Always lurking in the distance is the possibility of revolutionary change, of peasant revolt, which is why Chekhov worked so well in Afrikaans in the South Africa of the Seventies and Eighties. The laughter was both smug with class identification and nervous with the recognition that apartheid and its attendant bourgeois comforts would end as surely as day precedes night.

Without that double edge the titular duel is not going to work (a bungled suicide in one of the other works springs to mind) and the film, like a stuffed seagull, cannot take off.

Neil Sonnekus

Something Smells Really, Really Funny in Denmark

2011-12-29T14:48:00.000-08:00

The worst movie of the year, without a doubt, is Drive. Made for every wannabe Jeremy Clarkson by Danish-born Nicholas Winding Refn, it’s the worst because it’s trying to be the new Charles Bronson and Jason Statham revenge flick, but tries very hard to pose as art as well. In the end it’s nothing but violent, stupid, closeted homoeroticism with a soft porn soundtrack.

Not far behind it is another Danish film, the winner of this year’s Oscar for best foreign film. In a Better World is bristling with good intentions but ends up being as patronising as those images you get in the so-called developed world of starving, big-eyed black children. They need your help because that is all Africa is: a victim. Conversely, it has spectacular scenery. But don’t think ordinary people live there, not on your Nelly Mandela.

Someone had a similar sense of humour to Danish auteur Lars von Trier when s/he let Melancholia open two days before Christmas. Von Trier hates America so much that he uses American actors to say so. Obviously names like Kirsten Dunst and Kiefer Sutherland might attract some existential Yanks to the cinema - ie encourage sales - because the story certainly won’t. Lightened to an extent by some droll humour, like a stretch limo getting stuck on a narrow road on an exclusive golf estate, Von Trier is still on his philosophically shaky thesis that all people are evil, which he doesn’t bother to explain or argue. By the way, that planet heading towards Earth is going to destroy it, and duly does. Followed by the end credits.

If something is clearly rotten in the state of Denmark then Another Year seems to be saying that all is sexless sense and sensibility in the UK. Mike Leigh’s script was nominated for an Oscar and lost to the s-s-s-stuttering one with its closeted Nazi sympathies. But for all its realistic speech it still ends up being a crashing, middle-aged bore.

The first real Facebook movie was Catfish and people either thought it was the movie Hitchcock would have made or a massive con. Manipulating us into believing that we were watching a thriller unfold, it ended up being the story of some lonely soul out in the back of beyond. It was a massive con.

You get children’s movies that are just for children and some that include adults - like Horton Hears a Who! - and some that use an adult sensibility to patronise children. Rango falls into the latter category. Full of its own cleverness, it makes jokes about writing screenplays and probing prostates, as if children really know or give a damn about such things. Great animation, lousy story.

Riddled with every conceivable ballet cliché – narcissism, lesbianism, controlling mothers and teachers - Black Swan will probably end up being a camp classic.

Certified Copy has a married couple talking in Tuscany and then talking some more and, because it was made by an Iranian auteur, it’s supposed to be art but it was actually quite boring.

The Bang Bang Club failed to frame (sorry) three of its four South African photographers and their picture editor and tried too hard to cover too much ground. But at the very least that country's history is being engaged - however skewly.

Australian artist and Jane Campion protégé Julia Leigh's Sleeping Beauty touched on all kinds of interesting feminist issues in a novel, even memorable way but failed to distil any of them, which a film I failed to mention last week did. Though Emma Stone is miscast in The Help, it is still a powerful and necessary flick with great performances from Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Bryce Dallas Howard.

And on that positive note I hope you all have a happy New Year.

Neil Sonnekus

A Very Good Year

2011-12-22T19:28:00.000-08:00

1. The best movie of 2011 is, without a doubt, the Spanish masterpiece Biutiful.

In it, Javier Bardem plays a man who lives in Barcelona with its incomplete cathedral, the Sagrada Familia, and that is what he is and has. Like all of us, he isn’t perfect or complete. Professionally he is an agent for illegal labourers, but he is dying, his ex-wife has mental health issues, so how are their two young children going to cope?

Then he still has African clients who are suffering European racism and, just to crown it all, he helps bring a catastrophe upon his Chinese clients. Woven into this is his part-time calling of helping the dead communicate their last wishes with their loved ones.

Biutiful also wins because Africans are not portrayed as victims or perpetrators but as human beings who are as capable of making moral choices as everybody else. Out of this long, complex, working-class struggle rises a film that ends up deeply deserving of its title.

2. More upbeat and equally as uplifting is The Fighter, which should have got much more than its two Oscars for best supporting actors. If Melissa Leo as the hard-as-nails mother and Christian Bale as her drug-taking former boxing champion son deserved their statuettes, then so did David O. Russell for directing, Mark Wahlberg for acting and producing, as did Amy Adams for playing a passionate young barmaid. The Fighter also wins because it is American cinema at its best. It is direct, pacy and very entertaining.

3. Third on the list is the darkest of this year’s movies and, again, it is rooted in reality. A Lebanese-Canadian woman leaves a simple will for her twin children, which leads them from the cold and damp First World to the sunny but depraved Middle East. Incendies is a harrowing film that doesn’t indulge its horror, nor does it pull its punches. Like a Greek tragedy, it has a cleansing, purging effect, and the only reason why it wouldn’t have beaten Biutiful for best foreign film Oscar – if I’d been a judge - is because it isn’t quite as universal. In the end neither of these two brilliant movies won; instead the honours went to some well-meaning nonsense that will be on next week’s Worst Movies of the Year.

4. A South African acquaintance of mine said this has been a bad year for movies, but I beg to differ. There have been such good films that I’ve got 15 good movies and then I'm going to put quite a few of them into one category for fourth place. Documentaries.

There were the excellent biographies on ex-Beatle George Harrison, racing driver Ayrton Senna, and comedians Joan Rivers and the New Zealander Billy T. Anyone who wants a quick and entertaining introduction to this country could do worse than to see the latter and realise that all is not quite cricket (or rugby) here. Then there was the other local doco Brother Number One, which dealt with a Kiwi confronting what one of Pol Pot’s henchmen did to his brother in Cambodia. It is directed with a steady hand about a very painful subject. And lastly, The Insider showed us how a bunch of Wall Street suits screwed the global economy and fully deserved its Oscar. They, of course, are still fully employed.

5. Still working purely from memory, a tiny film called Cairo Time sat staring at me on the DVD shelf for a long time before the delectable Patricia Clarkson persuaded me to have a look. This minute story, set in the titular city before Tahrir Square leapt into the world’s consciousness, is so beautifully simple that I am as much in awe of it as visitors are to the pyramids. Egyptian-Canadian director Ruba Nadda has done a fine job of showing how West and Middle East don’t just clash but, more importantly, end up falling for each other. Big time.

6. Another uncompromising film was Never Let Me Go, the scary story by Anglo-Japanese writer Kazuo Ishiguro in which children are bred for the sole purpose of becoming organ donors. If its dystopian world is not entirely convincing, then its premise (in a world of seven billion people, and counting) is horribly prophetic. Also, I finally believed Keira Knightley can act. And how.

7. The Debt was marketed as a Nazi-hunting movie but turned out to be as much about Jews' persecution in the past as Israel's very troubled present. It is also a taut, sexy thriller that is rightly caustic about such dangerous creatures as patriotism.

8. Comedies were few and far between and Woody Allen’s latest offering might have won if it didn’t have Owen Wilson whining his way through it, but down in distant New Zealand there was a film called My Wedding and Other Secrets. Featuring a beanpole of a white boy falling for a tiny (but infinitely tough and resourceful) Chinese girl, and vice versa, the film deals with the very topical themes of migration and the meeting of cultures, but it does so with something lacking in most movies these days. That is, charm.

9. Another small movie with a beautifully ageing actress in it was Copacabana, which I saw because I missed something else and because Isabelle Huppert was in it. Turns out to be a funny look at just how hard and shitty the real Europe can be, whether towards migrants or – in this case – its own. It’s one of those tiny films that just won’t leave you alone.

10. Nicole Kidman fought long and hard to make Rabbit Hole, about a couple losing their child, probably because her character doesn’t resort to religion to ease her considerable pain. In fact, she takes a rather strong anti-God stance, and the world is still turning. Also, her husband gets stoned and laughs out loud at someone else's grief. Edgy stuff in seemingly perfect suburbia. But it’s how the story is revealed that is as intriguing as anything else.

11. Two men working at a polar weather station doesn’t sound like much fun, but this slow Russian thriller works a treat as the older and younger men play out their real game of chess against a landscape that is wildly beautiful, and dangerous. How I Ended This Summer is about just that – the endgame.

12. This year’s Oscar entry from New Zealand is set in Samoa. Its hero is a dwarf who took in a woman who became pregnant and, instead of aborting her daughter, fled her village and family. Full of sensual imagery, The Orator is not Hollywood’s idea of the South Pacific being peopled by friendly, dancing natives. Life is as hard here as anywhere else but it has its own rules, one of which is that debates (in Samoan) can be waged in the village square, as I’ve seen in films from places as far away as Senegal.

When the kind but surly Saili’s wife’s corpse is effectively abducted to be buried in her home village for purely superstitious reasons, he has to speak his mind and show his true feelings. In this showdown it is not about who can draw their pistols the fastest, it’s who can present the most morally persuasive argument.

13. Robert Duvall is another independent-minded actor/producer who brought us a backwoods tale about an old curmudgeon who sticks to a principle that is way out of date, but we cannot but help admire him for sticking to it. Get Low is a gem.

14. It may be a B-grade movie, but Machete is not just about breast, blood and bullet counts. It’s also dealing with the issue of drug running across the US/Mexico border, and it’s so well put together that any student of film would do well to study it.

15. Finally, the last movie of the year is not a movie but a TV series with at least one big-name movie star in it. If Downton Abbey started out promisingly, then it was starting to resemble Dallas in a Castle half way through the second season. But it’s impossible to believe that if The Borgias has a second season it’ll go that way. Firstly, it’s written and executive produced by master storyteller/filmmaker Neil Jordan; secondly, one suspects the subject matter lends itself to many more real and very bloody intrigues. All of which would be nought if the whole thing wasn’t being commandeered by Jeremy Irons, magnificently depraved as Pope Alexander Vl.

Bad year at the movies (and on the box)? I think not.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, the worst movies of the year, three of them by Danes!

Drive(l) and Divinity

2011-12-15T15:47:00.001-08:00

The theme of this week’s two movies is racing cars.

Let’s first get the rubbish out of the way. A whole lot of boys, who really should know better, are getting a hard-on about Drive.

It has been called brilliant, which has become a meaningless word, and intelligent, which is laughable. Actually, it’s the biggest load of homoerotic hooey I’ve seen in a long time.

Danish-born director Nicholas Winding Refn is on record for saying that “the thing with Ryan [Gosling], you can look at him for hours.”

I beg to differ. After about the third searching shot of Gosling’s sculpted and toothpicked visage sitting in a car, moving or not, it was quite clear that Refn, apart from his self-delusion that we all like looking endlessly at Gosling as he clearly does, was trying to make up screen time.

Someone should have reminded him that the man can actually act, as in Blue Valentine, not just pose. But Refn is clearly trying to create The Man With No Name for the 21st century, and he fails. Dismally.

Then there is the love interest. Carey Mulligan is the woman who has a child and lives next door. Her husband is in jail, like all Latinos clearly should be, and her and Gosling’s White Anglo-Saxon Paths will cross.

Here’s an example of an exchange between them. He is sitting on a windowsill with the city behind him and the light lovingly caressing his sculpted features: He: “I’m not doing anything this weekend.”

A long pause ensues in which more screen time is filled to the accompaniment of what can only be described as soft porn music. “If you want to do something,” he finally continues.

Mulligan, who has become somewhat typecast as playing the straight who either goes over to the other side but mostly yearns for it, stares at him. And smiles. For a long time.

The funniest scene is where they’re in a lift with another man, a seriously dangerous looking individual. He’s packing heat, as they say. But this is the moment where Gosling decides he’s going to give Mulligan that kiss that’s been brewing between them for a very, very long screen time.

They have their kiss, which is admittedly quite a good snog - even if it’s in the wrong context - and then he beats the man to a bloody pulp.

But wait. This is supposed to be a film about driving. I am not a big car and racing fan, but there isn’t all that much of it here anyway. Hell, the Bourne chases are, in my limited opinion, way superior. Or is it about the precious male drive to protect women and children at all costs? Ho-hum.

Somehow it doesn’t surprise me that Refn has failed his driver’s licence eight times and doesn’t drive himself. This is clearly his rather infantile way of expressing his frustration.

But there is one good thing he did in this film: Albert Brooks makes a truly scary thug, which renders Gosling’s reaction to this razor fiend all the more puzzling. Why turn your back on the man who’s handiwork you’ve just witnessed?

Intelligent? My arse.

***

To reiterate, I am not much of a car or racing fan, but I do like a good drama and that is what Senna is, documentary or not.

In fact, it has its own special brilliance that doesn’t require you to be a fan of either at all.

Why is this? Assembled entirely of found footage and a few voice-over interviews, the makers of this film have put together a universal drama of clashing types.

On the one hand you have the French rationalist, the political player, the survivor, Alain Prost. On the other you have the divine genius, the religious national hero of Brazil, Ayrton Senna.

Towards the end of the movie I felt on edge every time a race and a date came up, knowing the man was going to die, but not knowing when.

In fact, the film is so cleverly put together that it manages to “capture” Senna’s unease in the cockpit just before he’s about to have that fatal, almost Christ-like crash.

What glues it all together, of course, is that seriously neglected aspect of film, its music. The score by Antonio Pinto does a great job filling in all the blank spaces in that very special Brazilian way.

Strangely, in last week’s documentary on George Harrison there was a description of racing by Jackie Stewart which really gives an insight into the sport. He said racing would heighten his senses to such an extent that once he approached a corner, smelled grass and knew there’d been an accident and that he had to be careful - at about 250km/h!

After seeing Senna I drove to see that other piece of junk in the genius's winning weather, the rain, and felt the sensual thrill of driving a car again. It really is a great movie.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, the best movies of the year.

Within You & Without You

2011-12-09T12:14:00.000-08:00

The woman in the DVD store reckoned that the reason why the George Harrison doco by Martin Scorsese was out so quickly was that it wouldn’t be such a popular film; it must have gone directly to the shelf.

She, for example, wasn’t a Beatles fan. I was gobsmacked. She wasn’t much younger than me and my children weren’t the only ones who liked the Beatles: quite a few of my friends’ children had also taken to those tunes like proverbial ducks.

I felt like asking her whether she hated music or speaking English – so integral I’d mistakenly thought the Beatles were to both - but kept my mouth shut for the sake of each to her own and all that.

The only other small problem I foresaw was that I hadn’t liked Scorsese’s film on Bob Dylan, which I’d found static and dry, or the Rolling Stones, which was just a recording of a live concert or two.

But none of that is evident here. The youngest and quietest Beatle gets a proper treatment which, at over 200 minutes, doesn’t feel long at all. Using previously unused footage and photographs, and cobbling them together with existing interviews and some of his own, including one with the weird and now imprisoned Phil Spector, Scorsese persuades at least this reviewer that Harrison wasn’t just a wishy-washy “spiritualist” but was genuinely grounded in his beliefs.

And that’s only one aspect of a man who produced some great films like Time Bandits, loved gardening, motor racing (world champion Jacky Stewart’s testimony to his friend is very touching), and wrote some of the most memorable and sung songs, like Something, ever. Among others.

One reviewer called Harrison the third-most talented after Lennon and McCartney, which is like saying Beethoven was the third-most talented after Mozart and Bach.

If a song like Got My Mind Set On You is a glaring omission, probably because it wasn't written by Harrison, Living in the Material World is still a great film and slice of history. It had me walking around in a daze and liking people I was convinced I never would. It also left me grateful that I could grow up - and younger - with the likes of George Harrison.

Neil Sonnekus

Laughter and Bleakness

2011-11-29T14:20:00.000-08:00

Teenagers, according to the October edition of National Geographic, will do almost anything to impress their peers, including risk their lives.

This we know, but the reason proffered is that they’re investing in their future. After all, they’re going to spend more time with their friends as time goes by than with their parents.

Come to think of it, they already do. Home is where they eat, sleep, facebook (v.) and get their washing done.

So when Oliver Tate (Craig Roberts) wants to keep his parents’ little nuclear family unit intact in a small Welsh town, it’s not so much out of love as self-interest.

Hell, home does have its uses. You can, for example, lose your virginity there while mum is giving her New Age ex a handjob on the beach.

Dad (Noah Taylor) is a marine scientist who is as excitable as those squids in which he takes such a keen interest. Ma is all submerged Eighties passion and played by Sally Hawkins, who could act a soup can and make it interesting.

If the plot of Submarine is predictable (boy meets girl, loses girl, gets girl back) then it is done with typically quirky Anglo understatement that is, initially anyway, very funny. But after a while I started sensing an older (sensitive, self-deprecating) writer behind this teenage wannabe intellectual.

And really, how many more of these do we have to endure? Could we stop having so much of this parochial me stuff (the film is executive produced by Ben Stiller) and a little more teen spirit? A little more revolution?

***

If you hadn’t heard of the German choreographer Pina Bausch (I hadn't) then you’ve probably heard of Wim Wenders (if you’re over a certain age and/or of a certain disposition). Wenders, of course, is the maker of the masterful Buena Vista Social Club.

Bausch, who died in 2009 at 68, tried to find new ways of expressing oneself through dance, much as Wenders et al tried to find new ways of telling stories that didn’t reflect the above, very Americanised, plot.

Her work is quite obsessive, quite grim, occasionally joyous, but never predictable. Nor is it fashionably anti-male, though the one dance in which a group of men grope a woman on every part of her body except her privates makes the metaphor of rape perfectly clear. If she loved men deeply it doesn’t mean she was blind to their faults.

Wenders has taken the dances public: they are no longer confined to the Wuppertal Tanztheater, which Bausch ran, though she might have taken the dances on to the streets as well. So you can see a beautiful dance take place at a quarry, beneath a monorail or in a glass hall in a forest to some very interesting music.

When the dancers talk about Bausch we hear what they say and see them reacting to what they’re saying, which has a rather interesting effect.

Pina is a slightly long documentary, but it is never boring. If it lacks humour then it is still a celebration of that thing which happens between men and women, and it shows us that Bausch did so with a constantly questing, unflinching honesty.

Neil Sonnekus

Replaying Old Debts

2011-11-18T13:11:00.000-08:00

The Debt has been marketed as a Nazi-hunting thriller, which has been done quite a few times before, sometimes good, often bad.

But it’s got the likes of Helen Mirren, Tom Wilkinson and Ciaran Hinds in it, the latter once again playing a doomed Mossad agent as he did in Munich.

Furthermore, the film is a remake and even the trailer for the remake of The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo looked pretty pointless, the titular “girl” looking completely wrong compared with the real “thing”.

But this is a remake of an Israeli film, Ha-Hov, which is unusual, and it’s directed by John Madden, who is not exactly a lightweight, whatever one might think of films like Shakespeare in Love and Mrs Brown.

Moreover, it has three very interesting (and attractive) new actors in it, Californian Jessica Chastain, Kiwi Martin Csokas and Australian Sam Worthington as the younger versions of the more senior actors above.

What’s it all about? Back in the mid-Sixties three Mossad agents tried to abduct a Nazi from East Berlin and take him to Israel to stand trial. In the present the one agent’s daughter has published a book on that heroic episode and is very proud of her mother, Rachel (Mirren).

But it’s not quite as cut and dried as that. Switching back and forth between two eras, one of the things the film effectively shows is how passion, beauty and ideals can fade into bitter, recriminatory middle age, as symbolized - among others - by the angry scar on Rachel’s face.

The three younger actors do a brilliant job of playing agents holed up in an apartment in communist East Germany, looking after their Nazi captive. The paranoia and sexual tension is palpable and the horrible truth is that they have become their captive’s captives, which he milks to its violent extreme.

The beauty of the story is that its marketing will have attracted many of those who might want to see a very watchable, sensual but safe historical thriller. They might be in for a surprise, for with Biblical simplicity and ingenuity The Debt is not so much about redressing past injustices perpetrated against Jews as it is a sobering allegory on Israel’s very troubled present.

Neil Sonnekus

Do Not Touch

2011-11-11T11:14:00.000-08:00

Steven Soderbergh is a producer’s dream: he brings his movies in on time and budget.

He makes films like the commercially successful Ocean’s franchise and in turn makes more arty film like Kafka, which I haven’t seen, and The Limey, which I did. It sank like a stone, but that’s probably because it’s a very intelligent meditation on revenge, using some intriguing editing techniques.

The man is clearly no fool. Hell, some of his movies even manage to combine commerce and message, as in the “iconic” Erin Brockovich, which had a nice feminist and topical public health angle to it.

And now there is Contagion, which tries to combine the latter two films, and some. Marketed as a thriller, it is also an industrial flick, which shows us just how a disease spreads. And it's a music video - to keep the beat going for that long, initial section where people all over the globe are attacked by this invisible thing and not much dialogue is required.

Borrowing heavily from Hitchcock, le directeur also quickly dispatches of a heavyweight leading lady or two, in one case showing us just how pretty - Cronenburg-like - the inner flap of her skull might be. One woman in the cinema almost choked on the popcorn she was so loudly munching, which kind of made up for the loss of an actress who has a very sexy voice and is married to a singer from a terrible band.

Anyway, if Matt Damon plays the new Mr Reliable after the semi-retirement of Harrison Ford, then he isn’t really given much with which to work and the hero of the story is, refreshingly, an unassuming scientist. Jennifer Ehle plays her quiet character to perfection – and she doesn’t have much to work with either.

This is the second time Soderbergh has worked with Damon and writer Scott Z. Burns; their previous outing was The Informant! a slow, droll corporate comedy that involved a lot of cellphone calls and meetings in boardrooms. So too this film, which becomes a little boring after a while, even if it is only a very considerate 106 minutes long.

But we persevere because Oscar Wilde said the next war would be fought with test tubes, even though the film’s premise is paradoxical. On the one hand it’s saying we must be very, very afraid of who and what we touch, on the other it doesn’t want to freak us out too much, so it shows us how clever and brave one scientist (working in America, of course) is.

If the virus were to continue its trajectory it would wipe out about 70 million people, which is a lot, but nothing if you think that we’ve just reached the 7 billion mark. And who’s the antagonist here anyway? The virus? The somewhat nutty blogger (Jude Law doing a kind of crytpo-Julian Assange number), saying it’s a conspiracy, it’s just the pharmaceutical companies trying to make more money? The companies themselves?

No, dear friends. We in the West must get rid of all bugs, for they serve no purpose, and we really mustn’t touch those darned Chinese, whence all diseases come.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week there will be a review of the exceptional The Debt, starring Helen Mirren, a passionately intelligent meditation on the nature of revenge and lies in the troubled land of Israel.

** The photograph above is not from Contagion but from the TV series Downton Abbey. Early-20th century England suddenly became postmodern New Zealand. The photograph was taken with my cellphone off the TV set. Series three has already been commissioned.

Whining and Dining

2011-11-03T20:18:00.000-07:00

Film, by its very plastic nature, lends itself to playing with the space/time continuum.

It can jump from one era or reality to another just like we can believe that someone closing their front door at home and then walking into their office across town is continuous because all the stuff in between is superfluous, boring and implicit anyway

There have been some very good and many abominable films playing with these elements. One that truly milks the medium intelligently is David Cronenburg’s eXistenZ, in which one soon has no idea what is “real” and what is video game anymore – and that’s only one of the reasons why it’s good.

On the other hand, you have something like the horrendous Déjà Vu in which Denzel Washington as an FBI agent travels back in time to save a woman and, of course, falls in love with her - without the slightest hint of irony.

Someone had to send all of this up and who else but Woody Allen, who might well have found his alter ego in the pouting Owen Wilson. If the two don’t exactly look like each other (across the space/time continuum), they do have about the same pitch when they whine - and does Wilson's Gil whine in Midnight in Paris.

Then again, he does have plenty to whinge about. First of all, he’s a successful Hollywood scriptwriter, which is enough to depress anyone. Secondly, he’s got a bad novel with which he’s stuck. But he has a beautiful fiancée, Inez (Rachel McAdam). On the other hand, her parents, who they’re accompanying to Paris, are rabid Republicans.

Then, just to crown everything, they bump into Inez’s professor friend Paul (Michael Sheen) and his virtually mute wife. Like so many academics, the man’s not only in love with his own voice, he also thinks all the world’s a lecture hall.

So you can’t exactly blame Gil for being bored, irritated and restless. He wants, not quite as convincingly as his writer/director perhaps, to stop being an American. He wants to experience Paris for itself, not through the brash, daytime eyes of an American.

The main character here, of course, is the city itself. This is not a Paris with any social problems, though the American ones are rattled off by Paul, lest Allen be accused of having no social conscience whatsoever. But it is a perfectly convincing ode to a city, a love song whose premise is that the city is more durable and magical than its problems.

It is, as Gil says, quoting Ernest Hemingway, a moveable feast - and this is where most critics stop discussing the plot because Gil’s discontent with the present is so profound that he ends up, seamlessly, in the Paris of the 1920s!

That “really” is the young Hemingway, played very convincingly by Corey Stoll, drinking wine and talking about death without adjectives. They’re all there. Scott and the insecure, talented and suicidal Zelda (Fitzgerald). Cole (Porter). Gertrude (Stein). Pablo (Picasso). Among others.

And Gil, dressed in the usual writer’s uniform of ill-fitting trousers, a dull tie and check jacket in 2010, fits perfectly into the era!

Allen is clearly tired of everything that America or American film stands for, and if his Christina Vicky Barcelona was laced with Hispano clichés, then his praise song to Paris is laced with much better ones.

Carla Bruni does a perfectly natural tour guide and Lea Seydoux as a young shop assistant oozes unassuming charm. So, not only can the old guy still make a gently funny film with not a drop of overt violence or invective in it, but having removed himself from the equation he finally makes his women – and their city of light - glow.

Neil Sonnekus

Not Just Anybody's Help

2011-10-27T23:28:00.000-07:00

If racism is a male invention, then one of the strengths of The Help lies in showing how that construct suits certain sections of the so-called opposite sex too.

White madams like Bryce Dallas Howard’s Hilly might allow maids like Octavia Spencer’s Minny to effectively rear their precious white babies, but the latter still have to use “separate but equal” toilets. In fact, the former has one specially built for her maid, typically expecting gratitude into the bargain.

Their performances, too, are nothing short of spot-on. This goes for 99% of the cast.

As a South African, of course, this is strikingly familiar. All the shades are there in this film which doesn’t feel long, though it is well over two hours; or for women only, though it mainly concerns women and most of the men are either ineffectual or insignificant.

The vastly under-utilised Sissy Spacek gives a wonderfully comic performance to lighten things up occasionally, while Viola Davis gives a seering performance as Abilene who, like most African domestic workers, can’t help loving the spoilt white brats she helps through their most important years. That her son was killed in a racist attack when he was 24 haunts every pore of her performance.

Some may say that this is American history and there are other issues that need addressing, but it’s a problem that is as alive today in South Africa as it is for, say, Philippinas in Saudi Arabia.

My only reservation is with the very watchable Emma Stone’s Skeeter and her back story, in which her mother (Charlotte Phelan) fired a loyal maid (Cicely Tyson) who had effectively been Skeeter's real mother. Skeeter's mother had done so to save face in front of some women’s association friends, and she did it in front of the old maid’s daughter.

When Skeeter finally confronts her mother about this painful incident and wants to make amends to the woman, she discovers that old Constantine Jefferson has died in the very meantime. It’s all very contrite and made up among the white mother and daughter, but no repairs are made to the maid’s daughter, who witnessed that humiliation. A single sentence would have repaired that damage.

Lastly, if Stone took to her role of schoolyard "hussy" in Easy A like a fish to water, then she seems a little out of her depth here. She looks a little too Seventies Romance Illustrated with her shaggy red curls as opposed to a Sixties young woman who is slowly becoming aware of - and doing something about - a social injustice.

She does all the right things by starting to record these women’s painful experiences and sharing her royalties with them, but she seems emotionally quite removed from the whole business. She seems much clearer about what she thinks of Southern men than just how committed she is to the women she has anonymously immortalised.

Even at the end she doesn’t seem terribly convinced that she will stay with them and is easily persuaded to not do so. She is given an oblique camera angle and she doesn’t even hug these women who have, at great risk, bared their souls to her.

If the film was trying to make a point about certain kinds of ambitious writers or liberals, whose concern is directly proportional to their distance from the problem, then it would have been fine. But one would have somehow expected more warmth here, more fire.

***

New Zealand has won the Rugby World Cup for a second time, at home, and everyone’s in a bit of a daze. People and the media seem reluctant to let it go, the former by still flying their tired flags on their cars and porches, the latter by squeezing every bit of mileage out of it that they can.

It’s all deserved, of course, what with most visitors having had a wonderful time. But the curious thing about the media is that every time they so desperately zoomed in on a potential hero, the poor bugger got injured.

First it was Dan Carter (aka Jesus), then his replacement, Colin Slade, then his replacement, cancer survivor Aaron Cruden, until last choice Stephen Donald had to come on in the final and – much to his surprise - kick the winning penalty.

Thank God (aka Richie McCaw) the captain's foot and gouged eye held out. Had he and the boys failed, who knows how many Pacific women would have had bruised eyes too?

***

Also on our screens at the moment are two addictive series. Season two of Downton Abbey has arrived with Dame Maggie Smith saying everything everybody else thinks, as has The Borgias, starring a magnificently depraved Jeremy Irons as Pope Alexander, the head of “the original crime family”.

The tagline says it all: Sex. Power. Murder. Amen. And it feels so much more authentic than The Tudors, dripping as it does with the blood and ideas of 15th century Italy, which gave birth to the likes of the fiery Savonarola (Steven Berkoff) and astute Niccolo Machiavelli (Julian Bleach).

But then it’s written and executive produced by that master Irish-Catholic storyteller, Neil Jordan, and you can't get much better than that, can you?

Neil Sonnekus

Cussing Comedy

2011-10-21T21:56:00.000-07:00

Two offbeat DVD movies this week.

The first, I Love You Phillip Morris, involves a straight American cop who is everything but straight. Not only is he gay but he’s also crooked, which certain quarters would say is the same thing.

I do not know the ideological arguments of two straight men playing gays, portrayed by Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor, but from where I stand they seem to do an excellent job.

In fact, if there was ever an argument to remake Some Like It Hot, producers need look no further than these two fine actors.

Carrey’s cop is just camp enough when he’s straight to indicate that he might be closeted, while McGregor gives his Phillip a recognizable kind of steely delicacy someone like Carrey’s Steven might fall for.

Directed by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra, who wrote another subversive delight, Bad Santa, the film takes its digs at everything that gets in its exuberant protagonist’s way. Christians, lawyers, criminals (the lines blur), you name it. Nothing is spared, not even dying of Aids.

So, a love story of a very special kind. Steven’s love may be blind but at least it’s passionate and inventive - and there’s always a price to pay for that.

Not quite as slick but still as tongue in cheek and entertaining is Paul, starring an established comic duo, English actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost.

They will do such very unEnglish things as attend a sci-fi convention in America and then travel to the country’s UFO heartland. The last thing they really expect is to run into a real alien, especially one that is sassy, has a paunch, smokes pot and has superpowers.

Christians get a much rougher treatment by way of convert to cussing Kristen Wiig, which is another thing these two films have in common: an almost depressing amount of swearing.

Neil Sonnekus

From Miserable to Magical

2011-10-13T20:21:00.000-07:00

This week I watched two DVDs about that one thing Hollywood generally avoids like the plague: middle-aged life.

Such people, of course, also have lives and loves. Hell, sometimes they even have sex.

The one film is much lauded and really bad. The other is much less awarded but quietly brilliant. Let’s get the former out of the way as soon as possible.

The script for Mike Leigh’s Another Year was nominated for an Oscar and the film got a special mention at Cannes. It should have got the Dorothy Parker treatment. That is, it shouldn’t have been tossed aside lightly. It should have been hurled across the room with great force.

Tom (Jim Broadbent) and Gerri (Ruth Sheen) are quietly happy and content. Their names are probably a gentle dig at Hollywood cartoons, but that’s the least of the film’s irritations.

He’s a geological engineer and she’s a therapist. Their son is a lawyer for the under-privileged. Oh, and they have a black friend too. She’s a doctor. All very cozy, very correct, very middle class.

Tom and Gerri are all cuddles, quiet contentment and endless patience as they work on their allotment in London in their spare time, but they seem to be living in a bubble. There is no news of the outside world in their lives - not regional, national or international. They do not discuss that outside world whatsoever, and they either have perfect sex or, perhaps being British, are happy not to have it all.

Whatever the case, there is not even the slightest smidgen of tension between them, whether sexual, social or familial. Perhaps this is Leigh’s attempt at celebrating the great and alleged sense and sensibility of being English.

But Tom and Gerri are surrounded by human miseries. One of their best friends and certainly the most frequent one is a woman who works with Ruth. Mary, the deservedly lauded Lesley Mandeville, is one of those neurotics who is so self-obsessed that she undermines her own natural beauty.

We are subjected to the endless minutiae of her dull, uptight existence. She’s in her forties and life is rapidly slipping by. It’s a very astute portrait of such a type but by emphasizing it at the end Leigh is either condemning her or saying we should all try to be like Tom and Gerri, who mysteriously don’t spend any time on screen with people of their own social and professional standing.

If that is the case then they are not merely tolerant of all the struggling miscreants around them, they’re just unbelievably good – or intensely patronising - souls.

Another Year makes the occasional attempt at comedy but it isn’t funny and Chekhov was much, much better at this kind of existential farce. Nor is it the realism Leigh is supposed to be a master at – it’s Britain with its head right up its own deluded, white, liberal arse.

***

By contrast, Cairo Time stars one of the sexiest women on the planet, Patricia Clarkson. At the “ripe old” age of 51 this American actress isn’t sexy because she looks so much younger than her age but because she’s so confident and strong in her age.

Her wide mouth, corn-coloured hair and calm confidence express an American generosity that certainly echoes a more golden age of that country, let alone its film industry. But if the likes of Marilyn Monroe represented a tragic glamour, Clarkson represents a real, up-to-the-minute one.

Here she plays Juliette, the wife of a United Nations official, who is going to meet her husband for a holiday in Cairo. But he gets stuck in Gaza and asks his assistant, Tareq (Sudanese-born Alexander Siddig), to keep her company and, well, blonde West meets swarthy Middle East.

There are all kinds of tensions in the air. She finds it difficult to comprehend the fact that men openly leer at her on the streets, though she is not entirely disgusted by the fact. So too the fact that there are men-only restaurants, that women wear burkas in that heat, that underage girls work on the kinds of carpets she nevertheless has at home.

In one very telling scene Tareq asks her how many hours a day she works on her women’s magazine. After admitting that she can work up to twelve hours a day in that work-obsessed country, he replies in that understated Afro-Arabic accent of his: “This does not sound like a good life.”

If she is represented by a slightly sentimental French piano soundtrack, he’s represented by that mesmerising Middle Eastern music that is shot through with sensuality and danger.

The big question, of course, is: are they going to have an affair or not? There is no hint that she and her husband are unhappy. If she and Tareq do have a sexual affair there are those who will call her liberated and others who will say if her husband did the same he’d be an adulterous bastard.

Like life in the Middle East, it’s all very tenuous, tense - and deeply erotic.

Though it has some negligible continuity mistakes and even less seems to happen in this film than in the aforementioned mess, Canadian director Ruba Nadda comes up with such a quiet, elegant solution to the “problem” of these two individuals that it might well leave you gasping at its powerful simplicity.

It certainly made my week after the Springboks and their comical coach, Peter de Villiers, seen below right before the Samoa match and with rising star Pat Lambie practising in the background, were beaten by Australia and a New Zealand referee.

Neil Sonnekus

Unsuitable Fellows

2011-10-06T19:13:00.000-07:00

Since everything is so macho in New Zealand at the moment, I thought I’d take a look at two DVD thrillers.

The Lincoln Lawyer stars Matthew McConaughey as L.A. defence attorney Mick Haller who keeps people out of jail, mostly the innocent (his personalised number-plate is NTGUILTY) but not entirely.

In one case he’s actually got an innocent man into prison. That the man is Hispanic might say quite a lot about justice in that neck of the woods.

Coming into his galaxy is trouble in the guise of baby-faced millionaire estate agent Louis Roulet (Ryan Philippe). It’s the man’s profession that should have got Haller’s alarm bells ringing, but then he can’t turn down a client either.

Based on the eponymous Michael Connolly thriller, this is not a study on why the killer does what he (or she) does, it’s more about how slick Haller is at getting himself out of a tight situation.

Supported by the ever watchable Marisa Tomei as his ex-wife – she’s a prosecutor – and mother of their child, and the wonderfully craggy William H Macey, McConaughey doesn’t quite pull off the role.

This is because he looks a lot like Paul Newman but without the determined lower jaw and the wardrobe lady insists on dressing him in a suit that emphasises his shortness.

That is debut director Brad Furman’s fault in allowing bad angles and full-length shots to undermine his star, who is a very attractive man - from the waist up.

But at least this ex-music video director gets the retro opening sequence right with Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City by Bobby Bland. It‘s the kind of song and sequence that promises much, like the beginning of To Live and Die in L.A., which does deliver.

But if your film is only memorable for its title sequence you’re in trouble.

***

The Hit List, starring Cuba Gooding Jr, also has a retro opening sequence, but it looks like - and is as dated as – an old James Bond flick's. Its accompanying song, 47 Ways to Die, is also pretty forgettable.

In fact, the only cliché the entire movie avoids – and it’s also at the beginning of the film - is the one of someone sitting up directly from a nightmare.

Gooding’s Jonas is obviously a troubled man, but he’s also fighting a wardrobe lady. She too will emphasise his shortness – and the fact that he’s growing a little sideways. This is not good.

But she was obviously trying to echo Tom Cruise’s slick grey number in Collateral, since it’s a similar kind of story and, again, it’s the director’s fault.

William Kaufman blows things further by casting Cole Hauser as the man who’s getting royally screwed by everyone and might therefore want them dead: the man evokes no sympathy whatsoever.

That he can still talk straight after five full glasses of Jack Daniel’s is also his director’s fault, just like spilling coffee on to his groin and ending up with a messy shirt top is.

Gooding does his best to elevate his role of an avenging angel, but there’s too much militating against him, even though he has one or two good lines like "the trigger's like a fast-forward button. I just skip to the end credits of other people's lives."

One wonders, though, having won an Oscar for best supporting actor in Jerry Maguire and effectively playing in B-grade movies ever since, how much subtext there is when he says somewhat bitterly: “Fame doesn’t make you invincible.”

Neil Sonnekus

The Rugby Will Be Televised

2011-09-29T15:11:00.000-07:00

The Rugby World Cup did not start very auspiciously for us.

My son and I tried to catch the local train to Party Central. The first one was full but we were told the next one was a mere five minutes behind it. It was, but it too was packed. So we went home and watched the opening ceremony on TV.

Then we rushed to a hill overlooking the city to watch the fireworks. The owner of the closest house had put a speaker out on his car roof so that we could all hear the commentary. There was a rather charming, old fashioned community feeling about the whole thing. My daughter was in her pyjamas.

When the commentator said the fireworks were an “orgy of colour” everyone burst out laughing. Kiwis, as a South African-born work coach told us, can hear the grass growing. Then we rushed home to watch the opening match, which was a crashing bore.

The next day I had to work in the city and thought I’d better take the train, since town would be jammed. I went an hour early, just in case, but the train was dead on time. "Town" was relatively quiet.

The government had stepped in and used its special powers to go over Auckland supercity mayor Len Brown’s bald head to ensure there wouldn’t be a transport problem again. If this were South Africa they would be accused of being unilateral racists, since they’re mostly white and he’s half Maori. Town was relatively quiet. So was Party Central. The long white cloud looked more like a mutant caterpillar.

Two weeks later my wife and I decided to take the train to town on our way to the big match between N’Zealand and France. If you had a match ticket you got free bus and train rides.

The train was punctual and the announcement matched what was happening. Auckland was bending over backwards to be efficient, and it was working

There was a good vibe on the train. The French fans were relaxed, but then they would be. We took the Fan Trail, which is a good 4.5km walk through the city.

Every restaurant, café and bar had a giant screen showing the match between England and someone else. The fine art and architectural faculties had installations in a park. They had drama students interacting with those installations in a way that Drama 101 students always seem required to do. They writhed.

People were sitting out in their front yards, having barbeques (bahbies, or braais) and drinks, exchanging pleasantries with the passers-by. Most houses were draped in flags, mostly of mixed loyalties. First the homeland, then the new land, New Zealand.

Quite a few French fans wore blue, white and red cocks on their heads. Others dressed up like musketeers or Vikings. They sang. They joked and flirted with the neon stewards, who were all over the place. They were incredibly friendly for people who were being paid nothing.

It was cold but a bunch of Frenchman wore grass skirts, skimpy bras, wigs and nothing else. They were carrying a banner that said Tahiti. Most of the All Blacks supporters wore black. Kiwis do this most of the time anyway.

Always one for the big occasion, I had a stomach bug. I drank water and Coke and couldn’t touch the tasty-looking sandwiches my wife had made, nor the dry wors (sausage) I had bought.

The feeling inside the newly refurbished Eden Park was amazing. The French were singing lustily and we had a seat behind one of the trylines. The seats were very narrow. My wife perved Dan Carter warming up on the field through the binoculars and I perved a French girl in the next row.

I offered the two Kiwis sitting next to us a stick of dry wors each. They politely said they’d share one. They ate it. A bit later they offered me the only beer we were allowed to drink, Heineken, which I had to decline.

“This [sausage] goes well with the beer,” the one said. “That's why it’s our national diet,” I replied.

The game was about to begin. After the anthems there was an electronic countdown on the big screen and the ref blew his whistle. The French attacked well for a while, but their backs ran at half speed. Unsurprisingly, they were smeared.

The first All Blacks try was scored right under our noses. After each score there was an electronic trumpet signal. “Ole!” everyone shouted. But then a lot of black cars with their multi-national flags look like bulls that have been pierced by banderillas.

During boring patches there were Mexican waves. This happened twice. After each referral to the video ref, electronic drums would beat dramatically, as if this were a Roman arena, care of Hollywood, awaiting Caesar’s thumbs up or down.

“All hail king Richard,” a wag said behind us, referring to Richie McCaw, also known as God, playing his 100th test match. The joker sounded like a local drunk.

Soon the French were trailing and every time their fans chanted “allez bleu” he responded, “nineteen-nil”. I looked around and saw a young, red-haired yuppie with his partner. He was probably a very quiet person in the week. Amazing how a bit of beer and crowd anonymity can bring out the joker in one.

Sitting directly behind my right ear was an older woman who clearly knew the rules of the game and kept on coming up with such quiet gems as: “Kill him. Kill him.”

The rest of the match happened so far away that I guiltily watched it on the big screen, trying not to think how much I’d spent on being at this game. Then it was over. We got out easily, passing rows upon rows of buses there to ferry fans wherever. We stepped on to the train and it pulled away. In town we did the same thing, all the while being guided by almost over-friendly officials. It was a relief to be home but I had to do this all over the next day.

It was raining cats and dogs, but my daughter and I caught the train anyway. It was packed with Samoan and Fiji fans. This was going to be the great inter-island war, I had reasoned. My daughter didn’t stop talking and giggling, but then fathers will forgive much, much more than that.

The train stopped at a distant outside platform, which meant we had to walk for about 15 minutes to catch the next train to Eden Park. But the supercity had laid on buses to take us that short distance. We decided to walk and I started thinking there was no way the city was going to make a profit like this.

The train took us to Eden Park and a Fijian brass band was plying Macarena on the street. The men wore sandals, white skirts, stiff blue military tops and white caps. They had a certain swagger to them that got heaps of applause. The rain kept on coming down.

We’d be sitting on the highest stand, held up by a complex of aluminum pipes. We had lunch under the stand, spoke to some South Africans. Amazing how little we had in common. I sat next to a Brazilian who only wore a short-sleeved shirt. He rumbled his feet and slapped his arms for the rest of the game to stay warm. Five young Fijian fans slid past us ten minutes into the game. They ranged from white to Indian to black. One of them had a deeply moronic laugh.

They would scarcely be sitting down before they’d leave again to buy a Heineken or snort a line in the toilets. Sitting this high up we could see better than sitting so low the night before. Pity the game was so boring. There were endless handling mistakes, so there were endless Mexican waves. Every time they approached us people rumbled their feet and I thought about the aluminum pipes.

The sun finally came out, the Brazilian thanked God, my daughter looked happy to have been there and we took a bus and then train back to our station.

Tonight my son and I are going to surprise our two Samoan relatives and take them to the Springboks-Samoa match. My family will be able to say we all attended the Rugby World Cup 2011 tournament.

After that I’m going to watch sport on the people’s medium: Maori TV.

Since most of its viewers are indigent they're showing all the games, free. I’ll be able to stretch my legs, drink the beer of my choice, save a lot of money, mute the commercials, laugh at my son's send-up of local accents and at least see the tries - in countless replays.

Neil Sonnekus

Somewhat Limited

2011-09-22T18:15:00.000-07:00

What would you do if you were a down and out writer and were suddenly given a miracle drug that would unleash the other 80% of your brain you don’t use?

This is not a question Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper) loses much sleep about in Limitless (out on DVD).

When he gets the miracle drug, NZT, he does what most writers apparently would do. He starts trading with stocks and, like Faustus, seeks and gets power - in the form of money, cash, moola.

He doesn’t decide to become a Nobel-winning author or a philosopher, for example. He doesn’t try to solve the world’s moral or material problems. No, he becomes a trader. But then writers are such fickle creatures. Oh, he does also learn the piano and a couple of languages in a matter of days, so he’s not completely uncultured.

But if his girlfriend (Abbie Cornish) drops him because he is all blocked up, then she’s quick to take him back once he’s gone straight again. That is, rich. And what’s the next logical step for a man of wealth in the United States of America? Why, the White House of course.

If this broad summary sounds cynical then I’d like to add hastily that this is a very entertaining film too. Made by the highly imaginative writer/director Neil Burger (The Illusionist), the story has amazing visuals and effects to match Inception – and it’s less indulgent: it clips along at a good, thriller-like pace.

Burger also very cleverly changes the lighting when Morra is “on” as opposed to when he’s just a struggling hack, and there’s a great soundtrack to be heard.

Obviously drugs like NZT don’t come without snags and where there’s money to be made the worms will come out of the woodwork. This is what gives the film its tension and urgency, but it could have been a little more satirical about that handful of people on Wall Street who are, after all, screwing us so royally.

***

Across the Atlantic there is the “explosive thriller” Incendiary (also on DVD), starring Michelle Williams and Ewan McGregor.

Interestingly, Williams’ character doesn’t have a name, though the backside of her jeans tells us she’s a Sexy Mama. If this is chauvinistic then it’s of a very special kind, because the director is a woman.

Sharon Maguire spends much too much time establishing that there’s a special relationship between what the IMDB calls a Young Mother and The Boy. The first visuals of the two of them trying to outstare each other without blinking at bedtime is tender and more than enough. But other scenes carry on, though admittedly they also illustrate how lonely and isolated this woman is. But it all eats up time.

In her voice-over, Williams tells us she’s a typical chav, watches Top Gear and her and her family’s religion is Arsenal Football Club. Fair enough. Her husband does have a name for some reason. Lenny (Nicholas Gleaves) is a bomb disposal officer and “tense and remote” doesn’t even begin to describe what he’s like.

This leaves Williams on her own much of the time and she will start having an affair with the man, Jasper Black (McGregor), who lives across the road. He’s a journalist and drives an Aston Martin or something equally ostentatious, and he isn’t even an economics reporter or editor.

Anyway, in the middle of coitus the unthinkable happens: there’s a bomb explosion at an Arsenal vs Chelsea match her husband and child are attending.

That’s the explosive part of the film, and there’s no Russian connection, but there’s no thriller part either because director Maguire constantly dwells on the maddening pain of loss Williams is going through. That makes it a drama.

She now befriends the Muslim child of a suspected terrorist and, to cut a very long story short, she ends up in hospital for a second time, which becomes unintentionally funny.

Moreover, her shrink has told her to write letters to Osama bin Laden and we hear those in voiceover too. The final nail in the coffin of this film is when she tells the now late Bin Laden that if he could see her and Black’s newborn infidel his heart would soften.

Neil Sonnekus

* The photographs on this page were taken at the brilliantly refurbished Auckland Art Gallery and feature the works of South Korean artist Choi Jeong Hwa, among others. The installation on the right, Flower Chandelier, “breathes”. Furthermore, there is a promised gift from American philanthropists Julian and Josie Robinson and features works by the likes of Picasso, Dali and Cezanne, among many others. But then it can’t be that important because, unlike the Rugby World Cup, entry is free.

Come back, Oliver Stone

2011-09-16T02:41:00.000-07:00

Isn’t it strange how so many films about South Africa are made by non-indigenes or, failing that, South Africans who live abroad?

Why would this be? There’s a very simple reason for it. It’s because the National Film and Video Foundation is so busy playing politics and signing co-production agreements in five-star hotels at far-flung festivals overseas that, at the end of the day, very little of that money makes it on to the screen.

And if it does, the final product is usually a pile of politically correct crap.

Anything critical of the present order, like the uneven but powerful Jerusalema, is not going to get a blue farthing because, well, some fellow filmmakers and apparatchiks thought that, “objectively”, it didn’t warrant funding.

I have some personal experience of this. I submitted a script and was told that as a thriller it was “ridiculous”. The gatekeeper, apparently an Iranian-American, was right of course. It didn’t work as a thriller because it was actually a romantic comedy.

So the next best thing for a filmmaker to do is go and live abroad, which most of those who have any talent and money have done, where it’s difficult enough to raise funding for a film as it is.

Then, once they have achieved that and got some big names attached to product Struggle South Africa, they might get some local funding via the Department of Trade and Industry, which will then hasten to stipulate that it doesn’t necessarily agree with the contents of the product.

And so you get a film like The Bang Bang Club, based on the eponymous book by photographers Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva.

I have worked with two of the people depicted in this film and they’re not like they're shown at all, which needn’t be a problem but in this case it is. After all, this film is only “based” on a true story. The end credits assure us that all the characters in this film are fictitious, no doubt for legal reasons.

Marinovich, played by Ryan Philippe, in real life talks fast and walks fast. Maybe it has to do with the fact that if you stand still for too long in a war zone you might get killed, as he almost did – a few times.

But Philippe, who is not a bad actor at all, is directed to talk like what New Zealanders call a “Yarpie” (Japie). Obviously the accent is all over the place, which still needn’t be a problem, though Marinovich ends up looking and sounding more like another local photographer, who isn’t featured in the film anyway.

The next person to get a mauling is Robyn Comley, played by Malin Akerman, who is clearly in the film to provide a bit of female “colour”. As integral as she is to the boys in the “club”, she doesn’t get a postscript (she still works as a picture editor, at The Times in Johannesburg) and has more little devils running around in that blonde head of hers than Silver clearly can begin to imagine.

The point is, he is treading on hallowed territory and I’m not talking about South Africa or its townships. I’m talking about Oliver Stone turf. Say what you like about him, but a film like Salvador “captured” all the fear and madness of war and reporting on it that Bang Bang tries and generally fails to do.

But Silver does succeed in making the romantic depictions between Marinovich and Comley as cringe-worthy of Stone, who nevertheless was/is an expert at depicting contradictory male characters and could have had a field day here.

Silver has four mad glory boys here and fails 75% to delineate them and their private and professional lives. Two of the men are played by local actors, Frank Rautenbach and Neels van Jaarsveld, who still don’t work and I don’t think it’s their fault.

So this is not a let-South-Africans-be-played-by-South-Africans-and-death-to-all-foreigners argument, which is still very prevalent in certain circles there. Ken Oosterbroek (Rautenbach) is supposed to be the main victim of the club, yet he is not given enough background or build-up for us to pity him.

In fact, his fatal shooting is treated as secondary to Marinovich’s wound, which is crazy.

Silva (Van Jaarsveld) seems to tag along until the end, when he suddenly loses his cool, but again, no proper build-up to that moment. Presumably the film was already done by the time he lost both his legs in Afghanistan, because that is not mentioned in the postscript either.

Now, I didn’t know Kevin Carter, but Taylor Kitsch as the talented and morally confused photographer “captures” a little of the universal lunacy and confusion of the profession – even some dopey, Cape Town-like pretension. It’s far from a perfect role, but it does show some kind of vulnerability, some kind of humanity.

Yes, the film tries to address the ethics of clicking away while people are being killed, dying or dead, and yes it covers the territory of why should we care about four photographers' precious whites hides when black lives appear to be so much cheaper. But that should be actively implicit, not showing a red flag that it's trying to cover all bases.

Anyway, it was good to see Fiona Ramsay on screen and not just as having a voice-coach credit. She and Patrick Shai, Vusi Kunene and Russel Savadier, among others, prove that they don’t have to stand back for any international "stars" whatsoever.

So, a failure that succeeds in bringing a little more of South Africa’s troubled history to the world. Hell, one day that country might even succeed in doing so all by itself, but don’t hold your breath - especially not about the mess it's in at present.

Neil Sonnekus

A Country - and Game - of Two Halves

2011-09-08T18:07:00.000-07:00

New Zealanders are already quietly preparing themselves for their team’s dismal failure at this year’s Rugby World Cup.

Never mind the fact that they have the best team in the world - on paper and on the field - their loyal fans are privately getting ready to be as positive as possible about losing abysmally.

How does one know this? That reliable old crutch of a quiet day at the newsroom, the survey, proves it. About 450 children at one school in admittedly our largest city, Auckland, were asked whether they thought their team would win the William Webb Ellis trophy this time round. In that rather charming way that children have they said no.

They did add, however, that the All Blacks would get to the final, which really is no consolation at all. But because the survey said so it has to be universally true, even though we all know that 7.86 people out of a sample of 10 innately distrust surveys.

But there’s another thing that drives the Kiwis quietly insane. They know that, even if they do win the cup this year - and it’s a big if - they still won’t have proven much. They know that if they win that elusive trophy they will only have won it on home ground - just like the only other time they ever kissed it, back in the mists of 1987.

After all, their three biggest opponents, the Wallabies, the English and the Springboks have taken it on foreign soil. But not the Kiwis, haunted as they are by another fact: the Boks did not play in 1987. It is this “away” factor that torments the outer reaches of Kiwis’ overly decent dreams in a country whose largest export is not mutton, of course, but milk.

So what do New Zealand’s supporters do before they fall into a fitful, feverish sleep every night? Why, they pray, of course. Not on their knees or anything quite so demonstrative, but they pray nevertheless. What do they pray about? They pray that nothing will happen to their two iconic players, captain Richie McCaw and flyhalf Dan Carter.

So much hinges on these two top-notch but injury-prone athletes that a mere bruise to a ligament becomes national news, on all channels, as if they were real icons that have been damaged in a Romanian church by some deranged pornographer.

But there could be a Maori explanation for all of this. Might an absence of those ultra-cool tribal tattoos on these two gentlemen not be the real bad mana, karma, voodoo or spirit for the team? Quite possibly. How do we know that they don’t have any major tattoos? Because they’re always whipping off their clothes to advertise this deodorant or that refreshing sports drink on our TV screens and billboards, that’s why.

Whatever the case, most of the rugby fans here in tiny New Zealand will be waiting to see these giants of the game perform their awesome haka with their team-mates and hopefully not choke against the more brutish, aforementioned opponents - let alone those, no, let us rather not even mention the French and the nightmare of 2007.

That could only open a can of frogs’ legs.

But here they are, the French, and the Romanians. Everybody’s here now, even the Scots, who were the last to arrive. Was it because they really are tightfisted or because they’re being hosted in Invercargill, the town that is the furthest south and therefore the coldest and thus the most like home?

Whatever the case, they were so overwhelmed by the warm reception they got there, what with bagpipes blaring and open-faced children performing a welcoming haka, that they insisted on taking that area’s prize foodstuff – oysters – right off their menu.

Meanwhile, a Maori professor has said that all immigrants from South Africa, the UK and US should be denied entry because they’re racists. She has a point, of course, because there are some racists in Browns Bay, Auckland, but then there are lots of Saffers who get on better with Maoris than Pakehas (whites) for the simple reason that they’re more used to mixing with other races than the local Pakehas.

Professor Mutu also seems oblivious of the fact that plenty of Saffers here are not white: they’re Indian and Coloured. But she does have a point, just like someone would have a point that Maori men should be banned for bashing their babies, wives and partners, especially when their teams lose.

It’s a known fact that medical teams are actually on standby for this eventuality, but then I went up One Tree Hill with Haare Williams last Sunday, and I’ll bet my bottom dollar (if I still had one) that that poet, sage and leader has never touched a woman in anger in his life.

Anyway, all of this just so happens to coincide with the Pacific Nations Forum, in which the environment and Fiji were top of the agenda. Maybe people are more tolerant of each other here because they have an enemy that is much greater than them. That's not China, but nature. Some of the islands are being threatened by rising oceanic levels and it must be quite hard to discriminate against others when you're drowning.

As for Fiji, sanctions will remain in place against this military-run island until it has democratic elections again. None of its players with military connections were allowed to enter the country and partake, so the last one resigned from his post a week before the finals so that he too could play. Would one be surprised to learn that he resumed his role after the tournament? Hell, yes.

Which brings us to tonight’s opening match between Tonga and N’Zealand, as Prime Minister John Key tends to pronounce it. The former country’s resident and visiting citizens take the prize for the most colourful and enthusiastic supporters so far. We’ve been promised a “physical” match, which comes as a great relief: imagine a psychic game of rugby, with millions just visualising the game.

Then again, it could become a great hit in, say, India.

Obviously there are split loyalties here, since this is a largely a country of immigrants. First you shout for your homeland, if you’re from elsewhere, then for New Zealand.

Or, if you’re a Kiwi you shout (and pray, and hope, and pray again) for New Zealand, and then for your country or island of origin, like the man whose entrance, with its Kiwi and Irish flags I photographed.

When I asked him if I could take a picture of it so that I could share it with my millions of readers worldwide, he responded with all the grace and generosity of this distant country’s people, even though he could hear I was a South African.

Then he rather tellingly added this proviso: “Just don’t win the Cup.”

Neil Sonnekus

Funny Bones

2011-09-01T20:18:00.000-07:00

Today’s two movies are comedies, but the one is a work of fiction and the other is a documentary.

The Guard has been compared with Martin McDonagh’s brilliant In Bruges because not only is it similar in tone, casting and structure, it’s also made by his brother, John Michael.

But is The Guard really as good as In Bruges, which has attained virtual cult status?

Well, no, which doesn’t mean it’s bad at all, but the latter had a great setting and a relationship between two men that was not only hilarious but also perfectly touching.

The Guard goes the gruff route, yet again starring Brendan Gleeson. This time he’s a provocative Irish cop who has to team up with an American agent, come all the way to Ireland to prevent a drug consignment from the States getting in.

Big white faux bigot and thin black American. For one, I struggled to hear everything that Gleeson was saying, so colloquial was it. Secondly, the sunny Tijuana music had an extremely tenuous connection with what was happening in overcast Eire, nor did it quite work as ironic counterpoint. Three, women once again don’t feature much, except as secondary characters, if that: Gleeson’s mum is dying and he consorts with prostitutes.

On the plus side it's a very cleverly plotted film, the dialogue is sharp - especially when delivered by Mark Strong's watchable, educated thug - and it's good to see Cheadle playing a hard-nosed character for a change.

***

Much more complex and moving is the documentary Billy T: Te Movie.

Every country seems to produce its iconic joker and Billy T seems to have been it for New Zealand. When William James Te Wehi Taitoko started making waves it was still unusual to see a Maori on TV. People would talk about a once-off appearance for weeks afterwards. This was as recent as the mid-Seventies.

But the man was so talented he couldn’t be stopped. If a country like, say, South Africa, actively barred people from doing their thing because of their colour, then it was completely different in Aotearoa. It seems Maori were politely included and effectively neutralised.

Billy T’s joke of him being half Maori and half Scottish – “the one half of me wants to get pissed and the other half doesn’t want to pay” - is extremely telling. It takes a swipe at both parties’ ills but does so with what South Africa’s forced icon, Leon Schuster, lacks. That is, charm.

But that joke still sums up the friendly but uneasy relationship between an indigenous minority and a predominantly Scots-based majority, not to mention the yellow danger, at which Billy T's folksy character also takes very funny, un-PC swipes.

If only he could have stepped out of the screen and time and told the macho douche bag sitting next to me that he wasn't at a restaurant where he could talk at will: he was in a cinema.

The docco also explores that quality most highly successful entertainers seem to have. They’ve usually got sad backgrounds and their real family is the audience they feed off. Without that they’re dead, literally.

Director Ian Mune has done an affectionate and entertaining but comprehensive job of summing up an era, a massive talent and a friend.

Neil Sonnekus

Fierce Hearts in Icy Climes

2011-08-25T20:27:00.000-07:00

One of the similarities between today’s two movies is that they take place in isolated places.

The first, How I Ended This Summer, takes place on an island in the Arctic circle; the second, Ondine (out on DVD now), takes place in a remote Irish village.

Summer features two meteorologists, a senior and his junior, Gulybin (Sergei Puskepalis) and Davilov (Grigory Dobrygin), respectively. Their only connection to the outside world is a radio.

To say they are isolated and dwarfed by this hard, icy landscape doesn’t begin to explain it. Think of your index finger on your local cinema’s screen and you more or less have the scale.

Gulybin is a bear of a man, a boor and a bully. Davilov makes mistakes, he retreats behind his earphones and earring, and gets the odd smack when he makes wrong readings. So when he hears a bit of bad news about his boss, via the radio, he keeps it to himself. It’s the only power he’s got, and this simple omission gives the film its freezing tension.

The key to all of this is the pace. Nothing happens quickly in the Arctic wastes. The first third of the movie is all about their dull routine, but it’s fraught with expectation. Why, for example, doesn’t Davilov take a rifle with him when he goes outside? Does he not think there are real bears out there too? Or is he so bored, if not unhinged, already that he doesn’t care anymore?

Of course, a slow movie has to deliver the goods as much as a fast one has to. If the former has to reward our patience the latter has to convince us that it’s not just trying to bedazzle us.

How I Ended This Summer, directed by Aleksei Popugrebsky, delivers in a way that becomes a masterful display of deliberate, chess-like patience. There are no quick moves, nor are there any wasted ones. Every cliché is avoided as the film slowly becomes a metaphor for the old and the new Russia, with an endgame and conclusion that is startling in its simplicity.

***

Still on the theme of that country, Colin Farrell starred as a Russian recently, in Peter Weir’s The Way Back (also out on DVD now). If the others are political prisoners in the wastes of Siberia, circa 1941, he’s a lowdown Moscow gangster with comrades Stalin and Lenin tattooed on his chest. At least they care about his circumstances, Valka says.

When these escapees reach the border he cannot conceive of a life beyond Mother Russia and stays behind. The movie dies a kind of death at that point, because he is without a doubt the most interesting character in it.

In Ondine he plays Syracuse, a simple Irish fisherman who is divorced and has a daughter who has to have kidney dialysis. One fine day, however, he catches a woman in his nets and his daughter thinks she’s a mermaid.

The key here is that Neil Jordan (The Crying Game, Interview With the Vampire), is the director: he who can make a woman getting dressed look as sexy as a woman getting undressed is cliched.

If his smart young protagonist, Annie (Alison Barry), looks a little like a fish in the most beautiful possible way, then he adorns his gorgeous leading lady, Ondine (Alicja Bachleda), in a dress that not only accentuates her considerable curves but also her "mermaid-ness".

After all, when she sings her strange songs, out-of-season fish seem to magically appear in Syracuse’s nets. So who says his daughter’s belief is so far-fetched? And there are many who say that when the Atlantians left the ocean, the first land they stepped on to was that of Eire.

That may be one truth, but it’s not the only one. The “real” truth is as much in the headlines (Eastern Europeans flocking to Ireland during that short-lived boom) as it is in How I Ended This Summer (nuclear radiation, poisoning the food of “traitors”).

If Ondine is a bit too long, though Summer is longer, then they have another similarity: they both beat with a fierce, original heart.

More Notes on Rabbit Hole and Chess

Last week I mentioned that Nicole Kidman had to fight to get Rabbit Hole made. Due to the pressure of a ridiculously self-imposed deadline, it only occurred to me afterwards that producers probably objected to her character’s opinion about God in a country obsessed with creationism.

During a group session of bereavement a woman says God wanted her little angel. Becca says if he wanted an angel he could just have made another one – he’s God, after all. Later on, in a conversation with her mother, she calls him “a sadistic prick”. Talk about a woman scorned.

Nor would the PC brigade have liked the fact that Becca’s husband, Howie (Aaron Eckhart), and another woman, played by Sandra Oh, smoke a joint before a session and burst out laughing as someone talks about losing a child to leukemia!

So more power to Ms Kidman for making a very brave, quietly subversive movie.

***

Moaning about a doccy during the recent New Zealand Film Festival, I forgot to mention that there is an excellent film that captures the independent spirit of something mentioned in Bobby Fischer Versus the World. That is, after the sixth game his opponent, Boris Spassky, joined the audience in applauding the American genius’s victory, Cold War or not.

That spirit is perfectly captured in The Luzhin Defence (2000) as a whole and in a moment when an Italian GM is offered a bribe in order to win. Fabio Sartor’s look of withering contempt is a cinematic moment to savour for life.

Directed by Marleen Gorris and starring John Turturro and Emily Watson, the film is based on the novel by that lepidopterist Vladimir Nabokov, who was also clearly obsessed with chess. Like the man who made the bribe, of course, he was Russian.

Neil Sonnekus

Fire in the Hole

2011-08-18T16:34:00.000-07:00

John Cameron Mitchell’s first feature film concerned a transsexual punk rocker, his second film started off with a very flexible man giving himself a blowjob, and his third film deals with a middle-class couple losing their child.

Some may say he’s gone soft and others might say he’s matured. What is certain is that he’s extremely talented. His treatment of sex is frank without being offensive, which is quite a feat in puritanical America.

In his latest film, Rabbit Hole, there is no sex, yet it is all about sex. More about this later.

Apparently his executive producer and leading lady, Nicole Kidman, had to fight to get this project off the ground, which is commendable, and chose Mitchell to direct it, which is just plain smart. She should have won her Oscar for it rather than Natalie Portman, who can act but not dance. But then Kidman won the statuette for playing Virginia Woolf, which was a mistake on all fronts through no fault of hers.

Kidman, whom a lot of woman don’t like, interestingly, plays the kind of role in which - from a male point of view - she excels. That is, a repressed woman. You could see it in the hugely underrated and terrifying The Others and you can see it here. The more she keeps it in the more she oozes one thing and one thing only. Sex.

As for the story, Mitchell takes us from the obscure to the known in startling ways. Kidman’s Becca sees a boy in a bus and effectively starts stalking him. It’s only much later that we realise he’s the boy who accidentally killed her son. That technique applies to the truth about losing loved ones too. It takes her mother, played by the superb Dianne Wiest, to finally deliver the sad, hard truth that the pain of loss doesn’t go away, you just learn to live with it.

Aaron Eckhart’s Howie wants to hang on to every visible reminder of his dead son but, eight months on, he also understandably wants sex. Becca, however, wants to get rid of every reminder of her son, because she doesn’t frankly need it to remind her of a child she can see and feel everywhere, but is not interested in sex, whether for its own sake or replacing her dead son with another child. So there you have your classic marital stalemate.

Unfortunately we don’t get to know what Howie does for their rather ideal lifestyle, except that he works in an office that brings in enough moola to afford a double-storey house by a lake and two very expensive German cars. This weakens and limits the drama a little because a lot of people would simply not be interested in what could be described as their comfortable misery.

But as a portrait of a marriage in difficulty it is spot-on, yet it is also more sexual than Mitchell’s second feature, Shortbus, which is as explicit as you can get. After all, even Kidman has said that “you don’t have to be naked to be sexy”.

Exactly, Nicole. Exactly.

***

Also out on DVD now is Restrepo, a documentary featuring an American platoon in the Korengal Valley, apparently the most dangerous area in war-torn Afghanistan.

Made by Sebastian Junger and Tim Hetherington, who was killed in Libya this year, we spend a year with these soldiers in what is described as the real The Hurt Locker, about which I beg to differ.

The latter, though fiction, is unbearably tense, and it is set in Iraq. Those are two vastly different “theatres of operation”, but neither addresses the question of why their soldiers are there.

This means they implicitly legitimise the American presence, rightly or wrongly, but therefore the latter especially fails, since it’s supposed to be a journalistic work. We have seen enough films that give us the “feel” of war – Platoon, Full Metal Jacket – to want to know more.

Restrepo, named after one of the soldiers who was killed during that year, doesn’t have a voice-over but gives us the basic facts in text on a black background. Other than that, the soldiers speak directly to camera, mostly after their “tour” is over, which further diminishes the so-called tension.

The camera also annoyingly stays on their eyes, in close up, waiting for these boys to cry. It is a particularly nauseating journalistic technique, which was handled well in the New Zealand doco Brother Number One, reviewed a few weeks ago.

If Junger and Hetherington should be commended for getting as close to the line of fire as possible, then the reason why Inside Job got the Oscar was because it showed us - often entertainingly - just how corrupt the upper echelons of American society are while their working-class compatriots kill and die for them in faraway, oil-rich countries.

Neil Sonnekus

Loving the Americas

2011-08-11T21:50:00.000-07:00

Florian Habicht is a German-New Zealander who spent a year’s residency in the Big Apple in 2009 and, though he was under no obligation to make a film, he did.

What is the film “about”? Well, it concerns this guy who sees a woman walking in the street with a slice of cake on a plate. He becomes obsessed with the Russian-born actress, Masha Yakovenko, and starts filming their “relationship”.

Having no idea for a plot he asks people on the street to help him with it, so Love Story becomes just that about a city, too.

Startling things come to light. One man says he believes we come back as animals after we've died. A black woman gives us a philosophy of joy that is sounder than most philosophy. Another man says he doesn’t like New Zealanders. A tramp tells us about his first love. A muscular transvestite, like most of his/her fellow New Yorkers, has a proclivity for romance. A female stockbroker tells Florian to go real slow – that way he’ll get what he wants.

A lot of people suggest that when the sex scene comes (sorry), he should discover that she’s a he, because he wants it to be a letdown. That scene is one of the funniest and also gives us the biggest fright in the film.

At one stage Florian seems to be truly falling for Masha, but by then we don’t know what is “real” or not. He looks genuinely let down when she tells him that he must realise she’s only acting, and she does it with such naturalness – singing a Russian folk song half naked - that you couldn’t exactly blame him if he really did.

Also there to help him with the plot is his very open-minded and enthusiastic father back in New Zealand or Germany, dispensing encouragement from that cyber country, Skype. His enthusiasm has clearly rubbed off on his lanky, dishevelled son, whose offbeat goodwill keeps the film running through the slow spots, and they are there occasionally.

The whole project is helped along by a wonderfully moody soundtrack from other films and eras, and you do come out of the film feeling much better about most things – including Americans, if New Yorkers are indeed such.

***

About a month ago I missed a festival film and thought I’ll see Copacabana with Isabelle Huppert as an alternative. I like her (lots) and the title promised something bright and, well, festive - which I needed.

But I should have known it was a trap. After all, it’s a French movie, directed by Marc Fitoussi.

The film is set mainly in Oostende, a grey harbour city in Belgium, which is as pleasing on the eye as an old wet rag. I felt a little cheated, but the story has stuck with me.

Huppert plays a freewheeling, middle-aged woman who has travelled the world doing odd jobs. The problem is she had a daughter during those wandering years and Esmerelda (played, I think, by Huppert’s real-life daughter, Lolita Chammah) is so embarrassed by her mother that she doesn’t want her at her wedding. Esmerelda’s going to marry an accountant and settle down to a boring little middle-class life.

Mama decides to prove that she can hold a job and ends up trying to sell timeshares in Oostende, one of those places Keith Richards would call the arse end of the world.

Whence the title, one might ask. Well, Mama wants to go to the country and city of samba once she’s made some money, which she proves she can - rather well. And she does go there in the end, kind of.

But her natural deviance, if not humanity, gets in the way, and if ever there was an indictment of capitalist greed then it’s this droll little comedy, which shows us that it can be as grey and nasty (but sexy, in the guise of chief saleslady Aure Atika) as any socialist dystopia.

Try to remember watching it if you ever see it in your specialist video store. It’ll stay with you like that mother or daughter you neglected.

Neil Sonnekus

The Sweet Here and Now

2011-08-05T00:56:00.000-07:00

Who would ever have thought of Clint Eastwood wondering out visually what happens to us after we die?

More than that, who would ever have thought he’d make a Claude Lelouch-like film about fate bringing three people together?

Knowing nothing about the film, out on DVD now, I wasn’t expecting it to invert Sam Goldwyn’s famous dictum that you should start with an earthquake and build towards a climax.

Well, Eastwood starts off with the result of a quake, a shocking tsunami, and builds towards A Man and a Woman handshake.

You can only do that kind of thing in Hollywood because you’re Eastwood, who delivers the goods as usual in that steady, assured way of his. Only he can take two comedy actors, Richard Kind (of Spin City fame) and Jay Mohr (of Gary Unmarried fame) and cast them in serious roles.

Eastwood and Matt Damon obviously clicked on Invictus and here Damon plays a San Francisco psychic who doesn’t like seeing into other people’s lives. After all, most of it is misery anyway. So he works as a labourer at a sugar mill instead.

Bryce Dallas Howard plays a smallish part as his cooking partner and proves, once again, that she’s a very good (and very beautiful) young actress.

The third strand to the story is a young boy whose mother’s a London junkie and his twin brother is killed by a truck after running away from a gang of young louts. He also misses a metro train bomb thanks to his brother’s cap being swept off his head.

So there you have it. Five things you’ve seen on your TV set recently. A tsunami, talking to the dead via a “medium”, a cooking masterclass, gang warfare on the streets of London – though a knife death would have been more pertinent right now - and terror bombs.

How will le directeur bring a laid-off American labourer with a strange talent, a high-powered French journalist who’s had an after-death experience (played by Belgian-born actress Cecille de France) and a sad little Pom together?

That creates about the only tension in this story, whose premise you either buy or don't, but it's really about unimportant things – politics, career - falling away and finding your inner courage. And that is still firmly Eastwood territory.

If the little-boy section of Hereafter is not entirely convincing, it’s still a gentle, slyly witty and highly original romance that doesn’t ignore the ugly realities of early-21st century life. But then neither does it celebrate or indulge them.

Neil Sonnekus

Stealing Beauty

2011-07-28T22:45:00.000-07:00

One of the horrible truths the Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa produced was the knowledge that many of the perpetrators and victims of atrocities were never punished or compensated appropriately, if at all.

If an apartheid-era assassin still languishes in jail after more or less full disclosure, then the man he represented, ex-Chief of the Defence Force General Magnus Malan, was acquitted for lack of evidence in 1996 and died peacefully in his sleep on Nelson Mandela’s birthday this year.

Still, the perpetrators and the victims got their chance to disclose their deeds or express their pain, respectively, and that is better than nothing. Just. So, too, the War Crimes Tribunal in Cambodia concerning the Khmer Rouge regime of Pol Pot, many of whose cronies still serve in the present government.

The New Zealand connection is the horror story of Kerry Hamill (pictured), whose boat was blown into Kampuchean waters in 1978. He and Englishman John Dewhirst were captured, tortured for two months into making absurd confessions about being CIA spies and “crushed”, meaning executed.

When Kerry’s brother, transatlantic rowing champion Rob, was offered the chance to give a victim statement in Phnom Penh, he jumped at the chance to do something for his "beautiful brother" and director Annie Goldson documented that journey, and more.

This would obviously be an emotional trip and how she treated that arc would to a large extent determine the power of the film. There is nothing more embarrassing than a camera relentlessly waiting for someone to cry, but Goldson clearly built up such a good rapport with Hamill that it feels perfectly natural and non-intrusive when he does.

Another plus of Brother Number One is that it is not just about Hamill but also his Cambodian translator and a handful of survivors. The former, for example, is very clear about what should be done to Comrade Duch. He should be crushed, like most of her family was.

On a purely formal level, the film is attractively shot, well structured and effectively scored by ex-South African and Bright Blue guitarist Tom Fox and his musical partner, Marshall Smith.

But has any good come out of this depressingly familiar tale, in which Duch only got 19 years instead of life? Well, yes. If he might still one day leave jail alive, then at least four more killers have been brought out of the woodwork, including a woman, as a result of this trial: the work of some very dedicated human rights lawyers. Some truth, at least, will out.

Secondly, as long as trials like these exist and persist, political killers will know that there is a possibility that they might be indicted and live out their last days in confined shame, however comfortably.

And, on a personal level, it brought into perspective a friendly young barista who asked me about my accent. When I grumbled about how I was struggling to find work, Michael chun Long Yip told me about how his pregnant mother fled the killing fields of Cambodia and how he was born in a refugee camp in Mairuth, Thailand, in 1980.

Today their family runs the Espresso Workshop in Epsom, Auckland.

***

The Bobby Fischer Versus the World doco more or less tells us what we already know in the “troubled genius” vein. Granted, it does explain what makes the game so addictive to chess nuts (guilty, your honour), but it never attempts to defend the man. Some of his early comments are deeply astute, and if fellow world champion Mikhail Tal called him a perfect chess gentleman, then I’m more inclined to believe him than this film's maker, who doesn't seem prepared to explore that observation.

***

Werner Herzog’s Cave of Forgotten Dreams also doesn’t quite work for me, mainly because his philosophical musings are somewhat dull and the amazing 30 000-year-old images of the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc caves are repeated once too often. But he does come into his own in the postscript, showing a nuclear power station not far from the caves producing albino crocodiles in an artificial jungle powered by steam from the plant. Maybe if he’d played the two off against each other throughout we’d be on more solid, Herzogian ground.

***

Lastly, there is the problematic Australian feature film Sleeping Beauty.

In it a student goes to strange lengths to make money. Starting arrestingly with Lucy (Emily Browning) putting a thin medical pipe down her throat in a lab and almost choking, she "graduates" to being drugged so that rich old men can do anything with her except penetrate her naked, sleeping figure, hence the title. These lurid and often violent fantasies are then shown.

(It didn’t help that some prick next to me insisted on squeakily rubbing his bus ticket and ignoring me when I asked him to stop it. No one supported me either. Tolerance is one thing, slavish good manners another).

But how this non-penetration is monitored is never explained, since we never see these acts being observed by a third-party or their camera. Trust hardly seems to hold much currency here. Maybe that makes us, the viewers, the “guardian” or even “censor”, certainly the voyeur, which opens up a multitude of questions.

Place is not particularly important either. The Italian-style house Lucy goes to could be anywhere in the world, though the accents are obviously Australian.

After these sessions she goes home to her very passive boyfriend. When he takes an overdose she does not try to help him but holds him and weeps until he’s “gone”. She gets upset, too, when an old man decides to commit suicide next to her sleeping body, but otherwise nothing fazes her.

Jane Campion, who mentored author Julia Leigh in the making of this film, seems very much to favour the idea of passive or shackled males and called the film “sensuous”. One critic said it could not be made by a man, though whether that’s because the man would be “unafraid” to make it or be accused of sadism is another matter.

Entering the arena of (male-made) films like Eyes Wide Shut, Never Let Me Go and David Cronenburg’s Crash in tone and surreality, if not consistency, it’s difficult to gauge what the film is saying. Is it art or is it just a well acted, high-class excuse to look at a marble-like beauty?

There are certainly plenty of young naked female and old male bodies in it, but whether this constitutes sensuality free from any ideological biases is moot. Just because a woman shows us her sex as being fascinatingly compliant and men as disgusting pigs doesn’t necessarily make it art, liberated or liberating.

It is an "intriguing" if rather slow film, but the box office might not be quite as forgiving, and beauty without viewers tends to equate what viewers of porn tend to do with themselves, doesn't it?

Neil Sonnekus

Incomparable

2011-07-21T18:33:00.000-07:00

One shudders to think what was going through the mind of those judges who had to decide which was the best film for the foreign Oscar this year.

Would it be that piece of paternalistic claptrap in which a Danish doctor helps the starving black masses, or would it be a masterpiece like Biutiful or the apparently brilliant Dogtooth from Greece -or Incendies, a Canadian film which stays with you like a dream that is so disturbing and important that it doesn’t have to be written down.

The judges obviously settled for In a Better World with its comfortable, anti-Muslim view of Africa just dying to be helped by a good bwana. But there is nothing comfortable about Incendies, which roughly means scorched, having just finished at the New Zealand International Film Festival and coming to cinemas next month.

It's a devastating metaphor for the Middle East, but the judges probably didn't like the fact that it's finger isn't pointed at Muslims this time, but Christians. As if it matters, for God's sake. Fanaticism is fanaticism.

What starts off as a slightly strange reading of a will in a Canadian notary’s office leads us slowly and surely into a maze of horror in the Lebanese south that, as one character later on says, it would be better not to know about. But by then we are so far into this journey, so mesmerized, that we can’t let go.

To say what exactly the film is “about” would be doing it a great disservice, not because it would be spoiling the plot but because the subject matter is so delicate and can so easily sound trite – or sensational - that it would cheapen it.

Director Denis Villeneuve steers his actors through this emotional labyrinth with a sober, steady hand, using no fancy lighting, and gets performances that are breathtaking. It would be almost unfair to single anyone out, but Lubna Azabal’s performance as the central character is so good that her haunted look, like that dream, will not go away.

If at the beginning we might think she’s having a slightly over-dramatic moment at a public swimming pool, when we finally know why it seems like an act of superhuman restraint. How can she not burst, let alone live, having been through so much?

One of the great ironies of the film is that “civilized” Canada is shown as dark, cold, rainy and sterile, whereas rural Lebanon is depicted as sunny and passionate – but rotten with religious and moral depravity. As for those who think film cannot convey depth,complexity and catharsis, here's proof to the contrary.

See this film if you want to know what’s happening in the Middle East, from whatever point of view. It’s all the same. But its greatest accomplishment is that if the audience was making audible sounds of disbelief and horror, not one of us left. We couldn’t. It’s too vital, like a Greek tragedy, to walk away from or to avoid.

Incendies has to be seen. Period.

Neil Sonnekus

Knock, Knock, Who's There?

2011-07-15T05:08:00.000-07:00

The New Zealand International Film Festival only really starts today, so I had to decide what to review before a host of mainly foreign, not-such-mainstream movies hit Auckland.

It was a toss-up between Robert Redford’s two-hour-long history drama, The Conspirator, or Unknown, another Liam Neeson Euro-thriller, out on DVD now.

Redford’s drama didn’t seem to have much to do with contemporary matters like the trials of the Guantanamo Bay prisoners in a way that Arthur Miller’s The Crucible echoed the McCarthy anti-communist witch-hunts, so I decided to go with Unknown at the shorter “approximately 109 minutes”.

Neeson’s previous outing in Taken had him as a retired American special agent tracking down his teenage daughter, who gets abducted in Paris, and saving her from those throat-slitting damned Ayrabs. It was a really slick thriller and quietly racist too.

Now Dr Martin Harris (Neeson) and his wife, Elizabeth (January Jones), go to Berlin to attend a biotechnology conference, but when they get to a fancy hotel he realizes he’s forgotten his briefcase at the airport and catches a taxi back there without telling his wife. He’ll call her, he thinks, but – ta, da – his phone’s been disconnected. Something’s up. The music tells us thus.

Before you can say Sturm und Drang the taxi crashes and he knocks his head badly, but fortunately Diane Kruger is the taxi driver and saves him from the city’s icy river. Now, however, nobody believes that he is who he says and thinks he is. Cool idea. This could be good.

When Harris does finally track down the able taxi driver, Gina (Kruger), she avoids him like the plague because she is a gastarbeiter who doesn’t have her papers in order, but her one colleague, Biko (Clint Dyer), will play the nice black guy who can always be relied upon in these situations. Biko? Look, it’s not unusual to name your children after this or that hero, but a little context might have helped. Anyway, Biko goes the way of all nice, reliable black helpers.

One of the big clues in the movie is that this scientist turns out to be quite able with his fists and driving skills, but the best lines are given to veteran Swiss actor Bruno Ganz playing an ex-Stasi official. “We Germans are very good at forgetting. We forgot the war, we forgot forty years of communism…”

At least he doesn’t have to contend with Harris’s line to him: “I need you to help me prove I’m…me.” You can see Neeson had to do that one quite a few times. He seemed to be grimacing too when he asked Gina whether he could "crash" at her place. You could just imagine a typical Germanic response. "But we've crashed already once, why again?" But then she is Croatian and they know exactly what that old Sixties word stands for.

Things are not what they seem, of course, and when Frank Langella’s Rodney Cole visits Ganz’s Ernst Jürgen it becomes the best scene in the movie, fraught with tension and a clever surprise by cleverly echoing what Joseph Goebbels and Martin Bormann allegedly did in the same city, circa May 1945.

Don’t read further if you don't want more plot giveaways, because Harris turns out to be an…assassin, whose knock on the head actually had him believing he was really married to Liz, loved her and was a biotechnologist. It’s all been a brilliant set-up, or such are the attractions of the bourgeoisie.

Now Harris, who has killed numerous others, suddenly decides to save a German scientist who is about to give the world free, pesticide-resistant grain - with the generous backing of an Arab prince, almost as if to make up for that other bit of anti-Muslim filmmaking.

So you see what a knock to the head can do for you. You can change your personality, get exonerated for all the people you killed and then hop on to the bullet train with a new identity and great-looking blonde babe as the end credits start rolling. Simple.

Neil Sonnekus

Fudged French Farce

2011-07-07T16:48:00.000-07:00

Francois Ozon’s mystery-thriller Swimming Pool had a lot going for it. It had the incomparably sexy Charlotte Rampling facing off against a much younger woman and winning in ways the latter couldn't even begin to imagine.

Starting off as a power play it ended up as metaphor for a writer’s reality, which can best be illustrated by another famous French writer on his deathbed, enquiring after the wellbeing of one of his fictional creations.

Another Ozon film, 8 Women, was set in the Fifties and had eight of the top French actresses of the time working out who murdered a man they were all related to in one way or another. Catherine Deneuve, Isabelle Huppert, Fanny Ardant and Emmanuelle Beart were four of those women.

But what made the film unusual was the fact that they would variously burst into song every now and again.

Ozon clearly likes working with women and vice versa, and in Potiche he teams up with Deneuve again. This one is set in the Seventies and starts off with the 67-year-old housewife jogging along a country road in a red tracksuit – and curlers. She is well-off housewife Suzanne Pujol, who also jots down poems, which are excruciatingly bad. We soon learn that she is a compliant trophy wife, une potiche.

Her husband, Robert (Fabrice Luchini), is a typical bourgeois boor. He married her so that he could get his grubby little hands on her father’s umbrella factory and have an affair with his younger, busty secretary. But the workers are giving him such uphill that he has a heart attack and Madame Pujol takes over, agreeing with and to many of the workers’ demands.

Helping her is an old flame, the socialist MP and mayor of the town, Maurice (a very corpulent Gerard Depardieu). Will they restart their old love? Is her son possibly his?

From being a suburban goddess Mrs Pujol becomes a flag bearer for women in the workplace, which is all very well, but she seems to have sentimental leanings towards the way her father did business, which was to give your worker a gold watch and a signed photograph of yourself after years of loyal service as a farewell present. Seriously.

But this is supposed to be a farce. Luchini’s character doesn’t quite crack the modern equivalent of a Molierian miser, which is not his fault. Yes, the ever elegant Deneuve could be a metaphor for, say, a contemporary Christine Lagarde, but Deneuve has never done poker-faced French comedy, let alone maternal warmth, very well.

So there’s very little to laugh out loud about in this rather long attempt to send up the French bourgeoisie. This could be because it’s taking its own, not exactly new or sophisticated political message way too seriously.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week this time the New Zealand International Film Festival begins.

You Talking to Me?

2011-06-30T21:52:00.000-07:00

Enough of all this arty-fartsy, namby-pamby, hoity-toity, Marxy-parksy kind of stuff. Let’s get down to some low down and dirty Joe Bob Briggs territory for a change.

You know, how many explosions, decapitations, bullets, litres of fake blood, real breasts, fake breasts, hotpants, sex scenes - the whole drill - can we see.

Well, B-grade specialist Robert Rodriguez (El Mariachi) doesn’t disappoint, but then I’ve always thought he’s much more of an artist than his better-known pal, Quentin Tarantino.

Anyway, you just want to get into the aesthetics of the first New Mexico shot when a rundown car with our hero and a fellow Fed drives into frame and within seconds loyalties are affirmed and heads lose theirs to various thugs’ bodies.

Our hero,who is the closest thing we've got to Charles Bronson these days, doesn’t believe in guns when he can use the old slice,stab and twist technique – and he likes talking about his own myth in the third person. Danny Trejo as Machete Cortez performs the bad acting of the exploitation movies this one’s based upon down to a T, if you know what I mean and I think you do.

So does Robert de Niro, though whether Lindsay Lohan and Steven Seagal are actually trying to act badly is moot. The only thing one can say about him is that he’s very big, and she only comes to life once she’s in a nun’s garb and packing some pouting blonde heat. Being naked and stoned on screen is too much like real life, so that doesn’t count.

But the interesting thing is that there is, in fact, quite a serious theme underlying all of this. Mexicans want to get into America for a better life, God help them, and the Feds want to stop them. The drug lords want to help the Feds by erecting a huge wall, but for their own perverse reasons. They know that as much as the desperadoes want to get in, so does much of the American population want its drugs from down south to filter through.

Put up a wall and it chases up the price of narcotics and the lords sit pretty - which is exactly what the war on them seems to be doing anyway.

Moreover, anyone vaguely interested in how a movie is made could do worse than to marvel at how this one is put together. It’s got a good grungy soundtrack, fresh Mojave-Catholic visuals, a tongue firmly in its cheek - “and introducing Don Johnson” - and has such a good rhythm that it breathes like some heaving, sweating organism.

Like its long-haired, middle-aged peasant hero, in fact.

Moreover, it was made for $10-million and earned $14-million on its opening weekend. This could be because there’s plenty of blood, guns, crucifixes, hot rods, motorbikes and female flesh to be seen – though not much for the women, as it should be.

At first I was puzzled that Rodriguez prissily faded to black every time he got to a sex scene, but then it dawned on me that the whole film is legit porn anyway. I therefore have no hesitation in pronouncing Machete* a masterpiece.

Neil Sonnekus

* Out on DVD now.

The Manor Maketh the Man

2011-06-23T17:25:00.000-07:00

Kahukura by Robyn Kahukiwa

Ever since he won the screenplay Oscar for his somewhat populous Gosford Park in 2001, it seems like screenwriter Julian Fellowes has been making to-the-manner-born TV series and films. Truth is, he also co-writes stuff like the dire The Tourist, but never mind.

His supreme achievement, in my humble opinion, is a series that has just ended. The first season of Downton Abbey has left me somewhat breathless. Another eight episodes have been commissioned and I can’t wait, partially because I can watch it at home and shout at my children if they eat sweets as noisily as people do here in cinemas.

But why is it so good? Partially because it at least acknowledges that British society did not (it is set just before the Great War) and does not merely consists of the rich, royal, famous and boring.

Robert Crawley, the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville), runs the manor and seems to spend most of his time being humane to his many servants, who have lives and secrets of their own. The rest of his time is spent being run by his three daughters.

Oddly, in Fellowes’ current feature film, From Time to Time, Bonneville appears as a humane captain at sea who brings a friend home for his blind daughter. That friend is black and his wife, a Dutch woman (Carice van Houten), is outraged. She rather likes gambling, which is rather un-Dutch, but never mind again.

But the big glue in both instances is Maggie Smith. In Abbey she can turn the most innocuous line into a comic feast of irony, ambiguity and manipulation. In the final episode the manor gets a telephone and electricity and Violet, Dowager Countess of Grantham, says she feels like she’s living in an HG Wells novel as if nothing could possibly be worse.

In the feature film (as people crinkle their lolly papers), a young boy visits his granny (Smith) and awaits his father’s return from World War Two. But he can see ghosts from the past and it turns out to be a good old fashioned spook mystery. It’s also shot a bit like a dusty novel from before the war, but one constantly has to remind oneself that Smith is playing a nice old lady here, not Violet.

In the series she is simply magnificent.

What we want to know in it, of course, and among many others, is who is going to inherit the bloody manor; are Lady Mary Crawley (Michelle Dockery) and her solicitor cousin Matthew Crawley (Dan Stevens) going to finally get together; is the enigmatic butler John Bates (Brendan Coyle) going to stop being so bloody honourable and marry the maid Anna (Joanne Froggat); and are the nasty toff, Lady Edith Crawley (Laura Carmichael), wicked (and gay) first footman Thomas (Rob James-Collier) and scheming Irish maid Sarah O’Brien (Siobhan Finneran) going to get their comeuppance?

And those are just some of the plots; there are many more.

But the main reasons why the series works so well is because it is set in a real manor, not a TV studio acting as New York; and it is exceptionally well written, directed and acted, easily accommodating no less than 16 main characters. It will not survive a Marxist reading, even though one of the drivers is a socialist, but it is still class entertainment, pun fully intended.

In the meantime, we’ll have to do with the breathless excitement (not to mention unintended comedy) of David Attenborough’s First Life on Sunday Night Prime. At 85 the man is unstoppable.

The featured screenprint's title is the Maori name for the red admiral butterfly. It's part of a Native New Zealand series artist Kahukiwa has been doing over the last 10 years in various media. Most of the images, she says, feature Maori women with native flora and fauna.

Neil Sonnekus

And Now, Ladies and Gentlemen...

2011-06-16T20:09:00.000-07:00

Even if you haven’t seen or heard Joan Rivers live or recorded, and I hadn’t, if you’re of a certain age you would have heard or read about her. She has a reputation.

You know she’s known for being vulgar and brash: over the top. So when the doco on her life, A Piece of Work, came out on DVD recently, it was time to find out who exactly the woman is.

Made over the course of her 75th year, she often talks directly to the camera and gives us a portrait of herself as much as the industry in which she works. It’s not a pretty picture.

We learn that she was Johnny Carson’s favourite person until she got her own show to rival his, after which he never spoke to her again.

Ever.

We see her manager and best friend drop her like a ton of bricks for no apparent reason in the course of that year. We’d expect her to take it in her stride, thanks to her reputation, and she does. But she’s also genuinely devastated.

It’s not nice being betrayed, especially not when you’re getting on. But then the old girl has a fighting spirit and almost pathological need to work and be loved. We get to find out how her husband cracked after a bad deal and committed suicide, leaving her and her daughter to carry on by themselves.

But is this pure hagiography by directors Ricki Stern and Anne Sundberg? Well, not quite. They don't mind showing us that her show bombs in London and she will therefore not put it on in New York. If they clearly love their subject matter they don’t mind including Ms Rivers ending up in Wisconsin – such is her need to carry on working - to give a show for a bunch of Bible thumpers.

A man in the audience tells her her joke about disability isn’t funny: he has a deaf son. She curses him and tells him about her deaf mother and late husband. “Where the fuck would we be if we couldn’t laugh about 9/11?” she retorts. Applause. Talk about turning the moral majority around.

Deeply insecure, she even endures grating jokes about her many, many plastic surgery ops on live TV shows – as long as she can be seen. Then again, on Thanksgiving Day she dispenses food to the needy and visits a once-famous photographer, Flo Fox, who is now incapacitated by multiple sclerosis.

So it’s a pretty comprehensive, warts-and-all portrait of Joan Rivers, I'd say. She’s a piece of work alright. And she's a mensch.

Neil Sonnekus

Duddy Revisited, Sort of

2011-06-10T17:25:00.000-07:00

The dominant memory I think most people have of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz (1974) is Richard Dreyfuss’s immense energy, informed by huge doses of chutzpah.

Apparently Dreyfuss thought his debut-feature performance was the end of his career, but he was thankfully wrong.

There was also the famous scene in which avant-garde film-maker Friar, played to drunken, dissolute perfection by the late Denholm Elliott, makes a video for the ambitious Duddy’s company, which specialises in bar mitzvahs.

According to one site he intercuts African dances and circumcision rites in his work of “art”. I seem to remember him using World War ll themes with screaming German Stukas. Maybe that was included, maybe it’s another movie. These are the tricks memory plays on us.

Anyway, Barney’s Version has very much the same feel. Our protagonist is still in the film business, running a company called Totally Unnecessary Productions. He also has an important male figure who my old man would have called a “character”. Dustin Hoffman just gets less mannered and therefore better and his slightly corrupt, retired cop and father Izzy is a pleasure to behold.

But then the whole thing teems with memorable characters, though Africans might be offended that the one person who gets no continuity happens to be black. If he gets Barney’s first wife pregnant and gets a deserved whack for it, then Scott Speedman’s drunken, drugged-up writer shtups Barney’s second wife but our dubious hero remains loyal to him. Just saying…

Barney is a hard-drinking, perpetual cigar-smoking, ice hockey-loving, capitalist, Jewish Canadian. The big secret to his character is his passion, his chutzpah because, let’s face it, the portly and hirsute Paul Giamatti is not exactly leading-man material.

Granted, he has to play Barney from about 25 to 65, and he did get his Golden Globe for that, but whether the beautiful and slim Rosamund Pike’s Miriam would be as attracted to and tolerant of him as she is, level-headed though her radio announcer persona might be, is debatable. And if she is so tolerant of his many vices, why then does she leave him and their children for a single lapse of discretion by Barney?

Lastly, what other version is there? The one in which a detective tries to prove that Barney actually murdered that useless writer friend of his? It's not a really developed version, though it takes a delicious swipe at the media for getting the story all cock-eyed.

If the film is never boring, often hilarious and a rich tapestry of characters and mores, then it's a sometimes uneven echo of Duddy - and it requires a little suspension of romantic disbelief.

Neil Sonnekus

A Modin Tragedie

2011-06-02T15:38:00.000-07:00

Mexican director Alejandro Inarritu’s first film, Amores Perros Life’s a Bitch), had an urgency and the sweep of destiny about it.

It also had a very memorable line: if you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans.

His (Inarritu's) next two films tried very hard to be about the interrelatedness of us all and had very big names and exotic locations in them.

21 Grams and Babel were very much butterfly effect movies – what happens outside Casablanca affects what happens in New York via Tokyo - and they were insufferably serious. For all their internationalism, they were also quite forgettable.

Inarritu’s fourth film is even more serious and grim, but that grimness is at least informed by a Catalunian fatalism, which might be another reason why it’s everything but forgettable. In fact, it’s a masterpiece because you don’t come out of the cinema weeping or depressed but renewed, alive. That makes it a modern tragedy.

Javier Bardem plays Uxbal, a man who lives in a city we only later discover is Barcelona. His life is so desperately focused on the lower-class here and now that there is no time for pretty cityscapes. It is not a part of the city the Olympic committee or Fifa would want you to see.

With his big head, recalling countless Picasso-esque minotaurs, Uxbal operates on various levels. First of all, he’s a father. He has a daughter and younger son, who constantly wets his bed. This is not a happy, unified unit.

Mama, it transpires, is not just a ditz. She is bipolar. The one moment she is a beautiful, passionate, caring woman. The next she is a smoking motor mouth who is sleeping with Uxbal’s brother, among others. The poor woman cannot help herself. She is not reliable or consistent. It’s a mesmerising, compassionate performance by Maricel Alvarez.

So a Chinese woman with a baby looks after the kids after school. Her life is not a bed of roses either.

Uxbal is a go-between. He organizes work for unqualified and illegal Chinese immigrants (hence the babysitter) on construction sites and takes his cut. He then pays a sickeningly corrupt cop his cut. That cop is not a fat,greasy Spaniard. He is repulsive in that he is sleek, macho, red-haired, unshaven, sexy. The married Chinese boss, too, is not just a sexless, aloof exploiter. He’s having a rampant affair with another man.

Uxbal also organizes work and accommodation for African migrants. Again, he takes his cut; he has a family to feed. A police raid on the migrants trading illegally in a square brilliantly captures the utter chaos - and racism - of such a venture.

If Uxbal is a businessman, then he tends to care a little about those he’s exploiting. He engages with them, too, passionately. That is more than most can say. When economics drive his basic compassion too much the consequences are horrific.

But he is also a spiritual go-between. People pay him to convey their late, deceased loved ones’ last thoughts and wishes. In turn, he goes to his guide, a clear-eyed, older woman who tells him he knows what he must do. He knows he is dying and he knows he must get his affairs in order. Sane, hard, psychic advice.

If his son is wetting his pants because of his mother, then Uxbal is wetting his pants from prostate cancer. To not mention this fact would be feeding the myth of that particular disease (though Uxbal might be a bit young for it).

After all, did Elizabethans attend Hamlet to see why he’s so upset or did they go to see how he handles his father’s murder? For that matter, does one die “after losing a long battle with cancer”, or do you celebrate a life which, like all things, ended, one way or the other? Hence Biutiful.

However, no amount of spiritual knowledge is enough to console Uxbal that his two children will be alright. His father also died when he was young, running from the dictator, Franco. It’s not pretty but, again, it’s real.

The way Inarritu solves Uxbal’s desperate dilemma is as simple and profound an observation about Africa as the makers In a Better World couldn’t even begin to imagine.

Only about three-quarters of a way through the film do we see the church of the Sagrada Familia, the sacred family, incomplete, a work of art in progress, beautiful. Like Uxbal’s family, like Uxbal, who can’t spell that word, like a man, like all of us.

If Inarritu’s characters were all over the world in his previous two movies, now the world comes to them, to Uxbal, in Barcelona. One individual as the world is less pretentious, more real and somewhat cheaper than trying to out-location James Bond.

If the film could do with a few minor cuts here and there - and a little humour, even for Catalonia - then Bardem’s perfectly directed performance is still one of a lifetime in a truly great work of cinema.

Neil Sonnekus

* Bardem was nominated for an Oscar and won the best actor award at Cannes.

Brighton the Surface

2011-05-30T16:22:00.000-07:00

The main problem a director faces in making Graham Greene’s eminently cinematic Brighton Rock, of course, is that its lead character is 17 years old.

Even if a young Gary Oldman or Leonardo diCaprio were around, they’d still be a hard sell to the money folk. So director Rowan Joffe settled for the untrained Sam Riley, 29 at the time, who had nevertheless garnered a lot of critical praise for his rather romantic portrayal, in retrospect, of punk rocker Ian Curtis of Joy Division in Control.

It was probably the best choice there was, even though Riley looks more like a young and well-fed TS Eliot than having the “starved intensity” of Pinkie, who accurately reflects Hitler’s rise (the book was published in 1938) and pre-dates punk rock by a good 40 years.

If Riley doesn’t quite fit the bill, he has to and does sort of carry the film, and that’s important too. (The only 1947 version of the film in Auckland is in a box on video in an upstairs storeroom at Videon and might take a week to find, I was told, so I can’t compare Riley’s performance with the young Richard Attenborough’s).

What Riley certainly “captures” is Pinkie’s misogynistic revulsion of Rose, even if he isn’t allowed to communicate to us what it is about her that he hates so much. In the film’s most telling scene, as far as Pinkie and Rose (Andrea Riseborough) are concerned, he has to stand in a booth on the pier and record a message of love to her on an instant record-maker. She is standing outside the glass box, freshly married, looking at him with devoted adoration. Her love is not only blind, it’s deaf.

Inside he is spewing his repugnance of her, and all the writer or director needed to add was that he hated her because she reminded him of where he came from. That is, clumsy, tasteless, near-sighted, faithful, common. In short, everything he is and doesn’t want to be.

The other reason why he hates her, of course, is that she intuitively embodies the grace part of being a “Roman” (Catholic). Riseborough looks like any number of infinitely gentle, caring and forgiving Madonnas, eyes modestly lowered, celebrated by countless Italian artists over the ages and is absolutely perfect for the part, visually and otherwise. It is, simply, the most archetypal of the roles, hence its power.

Pinkie, as far as Green is concerned, comes from and is going to an "annihilating eternity".

The next problem is Ida Arnold, the antithesis to Pinkie and Rose. Helen Mirren is hardly in her 30s or 40 and, attractive as she still is in her 60s, you would hardly think of “sucking babies when you looked at her”, though she certainly conveys “an immense store of masculine experiences”.

But then the filmmakers once again had to think about the market, which is mainly American, and Dame Helen had won an Oscar and that counts for a lot in a country that recoiled from the film’s outright misogyny anyway – perhaps they prefer saccharine romance, which could be the same thing - if the IMDB.com 5.9 rating is anything to go by.

But her authoritative Prime Suspect residue, along with John Hurt’s salted Sam, do represent an England of common sense, above all, and in that sense they work a treat. But then, as JM Coetzee writes in his introduction to the Vintage Classics edition, “it is one of Greene’s subtler achievements to put [Ida’s triumph] in doubt as perhaps blinkered and tyrannical”.

The film’s way of echoing that is making her world seem jaded, the cracks in her face too covered over, too white and powdered, just as it manages to show that “the story belongs not to Ida but to Rose and Pinkie”.

They love and hate completely, respectively, and that contrast is evident in the way Brighton is portrayed too. On the surface all seems fun and festivities by the seaside, but under the boardwalk the flick knives are flashing. Blood is flowing. There is a battle for turf, power.

Director Joffe cleverly intercuts one of those vicious battles with the above-board festivities, which works a treat, never forgetting to show the primal power of the icy, night-time Atlantic rolling in too.

Pinkie is what Harold Pinter called “the weasel beneath the cocktail cabinet”. He may be vicious, but he is fighting a hopeless battle. He is punching way above his weight. He resides in places where Eliot’s “smells of steaks in [dank brown] passageways” are nauseating. We sit and watch his demise with fascination and something else: hope. We hope he’ll change, convert, whatever, knowing it will not be so.

Or rather, we ought to. But if this film is as handsome as its look and its lead, then it is not as sharp as his razor, nor as hard as the titular candy. A doomed 17-year-old has our sympathy, a doomed 30-year-old has choices.

All we can wonder at, finally, is how the director is going to portray the final “horror” of the book. How is he going to show Rose, pregnant with Pinkie’s probably malevolent seed, hearing what he recorded for her on the pier that day they got married?

Well, if it takes a little long to get there after the climax, then Joffe gives that bit of vitriol such a clever and ironic twist that a grave Green himself might be smiling with approval.

Neil Sonnekus

Mixed Messages

2011-05-19T17:19:00.000-07:00

Catfish is being hailed as the first film about what could happen if you're too free and easy on Facebook. It’s also supposed to be a documentary.

Nev (Yaniv Schulman) is a New York photographer who shoots stills of dancers and his brother, Rel (Ariel Schulman) and friend, Henry Joost (as Himself), are making a documentary about him.

Why they would want to make a doco about him, apart from this cute smile, beggars belief. But an 8-year-old girl contacts him and asks whether she can make paintings of his photographs. Of course she can, the easy-going if somewhat narcissistic Nev says, and thus begins a relationship that is obviously not what it seems - by the sheer inanity of it.

First of all, Nev never picks up that Abby is an incredibly literate little girl, even though she comes from the back of beyond in Michigan and about 21% of Americans are functionally illiterate. Never mind. We’re still in the realm of the possible.

Abby, of course, has a mother, Angela, and an older sister, Megan. In fact, Nev and Megan start getting the hots for each other – online. But fairly soon Nev and his two directors work out that Megan is lying to him.

Then he has to go shoot at a dance festival, which just happens to be close to where Abby and Co live on the other side of America. Again, it’s one hell of a coincidence, but funny things start happening when you make a film – or someone dies.

The way the film is constructed and scored we are led to believe that there is going to be a massive – possibly violent – conclusion or revelation, playing on our sense of other films and the ambiguity of whether it is in fact a documentary or not.

I am not supposed to give away the ending because everything hinges on it, but the best point the film makes, especially as a documentary, is that it’s good to move from ignorance to facts. In another era that knowledge would mean death, but here it means most people’s reality – and it isn’t pretty.

The build-up to the meeting with Abby’s mother, Angela (Melody C Roscher), is creepy in the extreme and continues to be for a while before the film literally segues into another genre. This is very ably done and the directors will be making Paranormal Activity 3 next for their pains.

Catfish’s title isn’t very satisfactorily explained at the end by Angela’s husband, who is creepy, pitiable and admirable, but many will feel cheated by this “documentary” which is as manipulative as its antagonist, if that's the word, and its medium.

Neil Sonnekus

Voortrekker

2011-05-11T18:53:00.000-07:00

Ray Winstone playing an Afrikaner? I had serious doubts, if not political prejudices, about that one.

But I was hooked from the moment this embittered Boer steps on to Kiwi soil, complete with hat, beard, rifle, coat and expression as grim as one could only be after the English have destroyed your farm and let your wife and three daughters die eating ground glass in a concentration camp, circa 1901.

There is a contemporary subtext to this as well, because the new wave of Afrikaner immigrants in New Zealand are often considered arrogant, though admittedly hard-working. Jokes fly about how ironic it is that they hang out in Auckland’s Browns Bay, minus the apostrophe, the implication being that they’re anti-“brown”. But then that reflects a mild resentment that the only South Africans here are Afrikaans, white and racist - whereas there are plenty of so-called Coloureds and Indians (and racist English) here too. And counting.

But Winstone plays his gruff, overweight Boer with all the slow cunning typical of what the BBC called the white tribe of Africa. Dutch writer Nicolas van Pallandt did most of his research so well that he even managed to cover a present-day polemic. If the Anglo- Boer War was predominantly a white man’s war, where does that leave Winstone’s Arjan van Diemen politically today?

Simple. Van Diemen’s bitterness extends to the fact that he was fighting for the freedom of himself and his Hottentot tracker, however paternalistic that may sound, but then Van Diemen’s white neighbour “hung” (he wouldn’t know it should be “hanged”) the tracker outside his house to show exactly where he stood on such future matters.

Without that little story Van Diemen is just another self-centred, bigoted Afrikaner. With it he and his quarry, Kereama (Temuera Morrison), are staunch anti-colonialists and have more in common than the minor difference of their skin colours. This becomes apparent as Van Diemen chases and then escorts, with variations, Kereama across the alpine beauty of the South Island.

Morrison plays his fugitive well, heading towards a confrontation with everything – most importantly himself via his ancestors - even though the make-up lady and director Ian Sharp thought it okay to always keep his hair well brushed.

It’s also a pity Winstone’s fairly open-minded character is called Van Diemen, causing confusion about whether he might be related to the man who established Van Diemen’s Land, the penal colony that was later renamed Tasmania. Why couldn’t he be a Botha, Van der Merwe or De Klerk or any of the many other common Afrikaans names? It’s confusing and unnecessary.

There are also a few technical glitches, of which the primary one is pace. This is a film in the same genre as The Fugitive and the excellent Seraphim Falls, but it starts slowly and sometimes continues thus – often clumsily. Also, one can often see the light changing in some of the shots, but then that’s the blink-of-an-eyelid weather in Aotearoa - and gratuitous aerial shots about a time when aircraft didn’t exist always niggle somewhat.

Lastly, there is Major Pritchard Carlysle (Gareth Reeves), who is portrayed as sharp enough to suspect that one of his troops is framing Kereama, but still goes to a hell of a lot of trouble to capture the latter. So no internal conflict of conscience versus king there, though it constantly seems to be on the verge of breaking out.

For all that, Tracker is a much more intelligent film than so much rubbish doing the rounds these days. It should be applauded for that as much as the fact that New Zealand has now been involved in two films about Afrikaners as characters instead of types - the other, of course, being District 9 - while in the new South Africa more than 3 000 of their kin have already been murdered on farms. But it has to be seen in the context of more blacks being murdered than whites, we’re told, as if one atrocity validates the other. And counting.

In the very meantime, ladies and gentlemen, hats off to Mr Winstone.

Neil Sonnekus

Until Lack of Clarity Us Do Part

2011-05-05T16:32:00.000-07:00

The prospect of seeing a film about the dissolution of a marriage is not exactly an enticing one, but Michelle Williams did get an Oscar nod for Blue Valentine and, more importantly, it’s still going strong at the arts box office.

Cindy (Williams) and Dean (Ryan Gosling) are middle-class Americans whose divorce is signalled from the opening shot with a horror-film feel when their daughter, Frankie, announces that her brother or sister is missing.

Turns out it’s her dog, but that doomed, creepy feeling persists. It is Frankie, after all, who is going to be the real victim if these two people can’t sort out their differences.

Dean happens to be one of those talented people who does nothing with it. Instead of becoming, say, a lawyer, he’s got a job moving furniture because it allows him to drink beer in the morning and be what he never thought he wanted to be: a husband and father.

And he’s a very good father at that, even if he smokes while he’s holding Frankie in his arms. The girl, of course, is nuts about her daddy.

Cindy, however, is studying to be a doctor and, it transpires, has been having sex since she was thirteen with “about” 20 lovers by the time she falls pregnant. That’s quite a lot of experience and then she’s not all that sure it’s Dean’s.

Why has she had so many sex partners at so young an age? Is it normal? Perhaps. On the other hand, it could be because she has a real dog of a father who talks to her mother like she’s trash and she could, therefore, have self-image problems.

She does have an affair with a fellow medical student, however, who looks a lot like Dean, but not only is he vicious (like her father), he’s not half as clever. Nor is she, letting him make love (to put it kindly) to her without a condom.

Dean can twist anything she says whichever way he likes, lawyer-like, but apart from that he’s a loving, caring guy.

Cleverly cutting back and forth between their affecting affair at the start and the beginning of the end of their marriage, the film builds towards the day they got married with her heavily pregnant, but tearily happy, and the last day of their marriage in the present.

Williams has that uncanny quality of looking common or glamorous, young or old when required, while Gosling should have got his nomination for a realism (he rightly got a Golden Globe nom) that is quite startling.

But if the film impresses with its assured execution, then it failed to convince me to feel any sympathy for Cindy - one could easily read the film as saying she’s an ambitious slut who gets to keep the child in the end, which I don’t think was the idea.

Most marriages break up because of ideological differences – how to handle opposing values about sex, money, religion, politics, living - and the film never quite put its finger on why Cindy is so repulsed, finally, by her husband. This could be because the person she’s really repulsed by is herself, but then that’s a completely different movie.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, Tracker with Ray Winstone and Temuera Morrison.

Why Old Men Are Mad

2011-05-02T14:32:00.000-07:00

If you really think about it, there are at least four problems with Robert Duvall’s latest film, Get Low.

For one, it is set in the 1920s, as if honour is something of the distant past and no longer applies. But it is a theme that constantly recurs among old men and its power may well have been greater had it been set in the present.

Felix Bush (Duvall) did something four decades prior to the film’s beginning for which he’s been punishing himself ever since. He has become a hermit; he has never married; never had children; and never had the pleasure of holding grandchildren, however clumsily.

What did he do? Well, the whole film rests on that and all he really did was fall in love. What’s so bad about that? Nothing. “Like a newborn baby it just happens every day,” singeth Sir Michael Jagger. The only problem is she was married and her husband found out. So did her sister, played by the beautifully aged Sissy Spacek, forty years on.

This leads us to the second problem. Film is a visual medium and we don’t want to hear about what happened in the past or any other time. We want to see it. Film should not be like bad radio melodramas, which are usually premised on events from the past.

In this case, however, it’s a mystery worth seeing played out in Duvall’s performance rather than seeing the actual event with younger stand-ins and so on.

Then there’s Bill Murray, whose funeral director is all over the place. We’re not sure whether he’s a bad opportunist or a charming one or a good con man or what. His persona is constantly getting in the way of his character. We expect the deadpan double entendre and it doesn’t always come, but he doesn’t quite manage to bury it either.

Lastly, Bush has a soft spot for a young man who is clearly the son or grandson he would have liked to have, but that relationship is more unresolved than necessarily subtle. Lucas Black gives an excellent performance as a good, honest man.

So what’s so good about Get Low after all that? Well, everything – even its minor mistakes. Duvall gives a beautiful performance of a man driven part mad, part saintly by his desperate solitude. His comedy is eccentric and inspired and when he is saintly director Aaron Schneider, an ex-cinematographer, merely helps to accentuate a light which is there anyway.

Ultimately the film's strength doesn't reside in the fact that Bush is an honourable man; it lies in the fact that this dear old curmudgeon has been living by a code that is hopelessly misguided, but he's stuck to it. And that is another reason why, WB Yeats might have agreed, old men are mad.

Spacek and Bill Cobbs as the Rev Charlie Jackson, the infinitely scratchy, grateful and patient friend, just add to the rich tapestry of this backwoods yarn of a carpenter (and let us not forget who else was one of those) who holds a party for his funeral before he dies.

Now, my son and I were going to see another film, but it hadn’t started yet and I told him he might prefer to go night skateboarding. I told him he wouldn’t like the film because it was about old people, for old people. But I was wrong. He would have been amused, entertained and instructed about his late grandfather, who would never forgive himself for one year forgetting his mother’s birthday.

Neil Sonnekus

The Tightfisted

2011-04-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

Ah, school holidays. The arrangements, the moods, the dramas…

I wanted my children to see some classic entertainment and there was a new Sylvain Chomet film in town, showing at the immaculately renovated Capitol on Dominion Road.

Who could forget Chomet’s mesmerizing The Triplets of Bellville? Do you still remember Grandmama with the built-up shoe who first tries to interest her ward in becoming a concert pianist? No? Well, perhaps it’s because she fails.

Then she notices that he keeps a signed picture of his father and mother lounging on the former’s bicycle. Further inspection leads her to discover an album filled with news clippings of the Tour de France.

Little Champion of the dark-ringed Gallic eyes is as delighted with his trike as he was with his dog, Bruno, who grows up into a slobbering mass that struggles up the stairs to bark at each passing train – without fail.

Do you remember that marvelous montage where Grandmama’s high peasant house is out in the country, with a distance view of the Eiffel Tower? Then an old Shackleton flies overhead in the autumnal air, followed by encroaching building cranes and two Boeings in the snowy winter, followed by a cut to the house having had to do a Pisa-like accommodation for the flyover railway track, giving Bruno his raison d’être?

Champion and Grandmama are no longer country folk. They have been swallowed by the city and she and Bruno assiduously assist Champion in becoming a star cyclist, bulging thighs, calves and all.

But Champion is abducted during the uphill stage of the Tour de France and taken to Bellville, where everybody eats hamburgers and is hugely, massively overweight. No prizes for guessing where that might be. He will now cycle on the spot, for money, and he will not try to escape. He will endure.

Grandmama and Bruno impossibly follow and end up with the very politically incorrect Triplets of yore, who are now three cheerful old crones, with a nod to the three uglies in that Scottish play. Un-PC? They drop hand grenades in water to catch frogs, which they eat. Macbethian witches? They lick their amphibians to hallucinate for kicks.

Grandmaternal and canine love – with a dose of triplesque élan - will triumph over all Mafia-like odds.

Now, it’s been well publicized that Chomet was so taken with Edinburgh that he decided to settle in Scotland, and The Illusionist was supposed to be a love story for and about that country.

Using the template of a script by the late Jacques Tati – he of the long legs, odd walk and good manners – our magician’s looks are clearly based on his original creator. In fact, somewhere in the film he happens into a cinema and there’s the “real” Tati on the screen.

The magician’s name is Tatischeff, no doubt a reference to Russian émigrés in Paris, but his breed of old fashioned magician is dying out and he’s saved by a perpetually drunk and cheerful Scot. Tatischeff heads to the land of the thistle, shown with all Chomet’s satisfying attention to detail and breathtaking watercolours.

In Scotland he will meet a young cleaner who will accompany him to Edinburgh, he will do everything and anything to buy her good clothes, and she will fall in love with a handsome Scot in the Sean Connery mould. Around them other artists will go to pieces. And Tatischeff becomes as tightfisted as a, well, Scot?

As with the Triplets, Tati and even Mr Bean, dialogue is paired down to a virtually redundant minimum, but my children and their friends were getting bored. So was I. In fact, I was so disappointed that I took out The Triplets of Bellville just to cheer us all up again.

Every expectation created in Chomet's second film was unfulfilled. There wasn’t a goal, as in training Champion up or him saving him from the clutches of capitalist greed. Having a “down” ending is all good and well, even for a film that is supposed to include children, but a bitter ending - like a happy one - still has to be deserved.

Neil Sonnekus

Note:

Last week I failed to mention the lead actress’s name in Never Let Me Go, even though it was on the accompanying publicity poster. Carey Mulligan’s performance was every bit as good as Keira Knightley’s.

I also failed to mention that the film was adapted from the novel by Kazuo Ishiguro. Though I haven’t read the book, I thought the film was brilliant – Immaculate Incompletion might have been a better headline - and probably truer to the original than the adaptation of another Ishiguro novel The Remains of the Day, whose makers Alan Parker called the Laura Ashley school of filmmaking.

Lastly, there is also something special in a department that is usually male-dominated. Rachel Portman’s score, especially at the beginning and end of the film, is exquisite.

Photograph:

Lacking publicity material I hereby post an earlier photograph of the honourable critic in the days when he still had property, some dark hair and money to afford a haircut. These days he is an emigre, like Monsieur Tatischeff.

Brilliant Incompletion

2011-04-14T17:48:00.000-07:00

It’s difficult to create an alternative universe and depict how it works without having to explain or signpost it. Some sort of isolation usually comes into play, as is the case with this profoundly disturbing film.

A bunch of children attend a rural English school and all is seemingly normal. There’s even a date to tell us we’re in the “real” world: 1978. Sure, there aren’t any male teachers, but that generally doesn’t apply to schools for young children anymore. Non-paedophile males generally don’t want to work with those ages, especially not at those salaries.

Director Mark Romanek makes a point of dwelling on the exquisite innocence of these children as they sing a hymn. It’s all so very English. Their principal is the still-divine Charlotte Rampling, but many of us cannot help remember her playing a woman who becomes turned on by her Nazi torturer conducting various “scientific” experiments on her in The Night Porter.

Children from Hailsham are special, she says. And we see how special they are by the fact that they wear electronic bracelets on their wrists. They are being monitored. Why? It takes a feeling teacher, played by the ever-impressive Sally Hawkins, to tell them that they will become organ donors. They will not lead normal lives. They will make two or three donations and then they will complete, the most terribly ironic euphemism for dying. They will die young.

The problem is they don’t understand. They see this as normal. But it’s a moot point that they are so brainwashed that they do not rebel against this unnatural order of things, especially later when Tommy (Andrew Garfield) and Ruth (Keira Knightley) start having sex. Surely they would want this to continue? Surely they would look around them and see that others have children. Surely they would want children later on, whether with each other or not? Surely they would want to know where their parents are?

Granted, it transpires later on that they come from the dregs of society. They are the unwanted children of junkies and prostitutes, but that wouldn’t necessarily put them off wanting children of their own. Some people desperately want to create what they did not have. There is no indication that any kind of enforcement takes place.

There are small uprisings. Tommy, for example, has a natural temper. He also happens to be a good artist, one of the few times that someone’s art on screen comes across as uniquely theirs.

Sure, they are kept in the country and in country houses, but they still have access to TV and porn magazines. They see other people getting old. It’s not like the whole world is like this. Surely this should lead at least one of them to want to go into the bigger, wider, outside world? Would their loyalty to each other be so strong that they’ll stick together, regardless? Can social brainwashing be so powerful? Perhaps.

But maybe it doesn’t matter, for if this film is not that successful a description of an alternative universe or dystopia then it is a strikingly original and painfully truthful metaphor for this one, English and beyond.

The three main characters’ innocence as adults is as shattering as seeing your own parent being unable to understand that they’ve just been given a death sentence by a neurologist. Tommy, Kathy and Ruth don’t know, for example, how to order food at a takeaway restaurant. And they are human enough to betray each other, as is so often the case in romantic triangles.

The photography and performances are all extremely fine, and I take back anything I ever said or thought about Knightley as an actress. Her post-operative speech, limping down a hospital corridor with the friend she betrayed, is a masterpiece of physical and existential shame.

It may all sound depressing, but seeing these beautiful young people going wide-eyed to their ends forces us to ask ourselves whether we are complete, now, and whether we will be the day we do just that: “complete”.

Neil Sonnekus

Crossing the Cultural Himalayas

2011-04-08T00:00:00.000-07:00

Matt Whelan and Michelle Ang.

Cross-cultural dramas and comedies have probably become increasingly popular because people are increasingly migrating to other places where they can be safer, better off and happier.

In the case of The Names of Love we are in France, where a dry zoological scientist, whose job it is to monitor possible outbreaks of bird flu, tries to hide his Jewish roots, whereas a gamine woman flaunts her Arabic ones - and her body.

This is because she was abused as a child by her French piano teacher and has become so scatty that she forgets to get dressed one fine day and walks naked down the road - she conveniently has shoes on - talking on her cellphone.

She would, of course, end up sitting opposite a strictly covered-up Muslim couple, burqa and all, on the train. After this episode, however, she is never absent-minded again.

Anyway, the film takes a while to get going as the two leads introduce their pasts to us, sometimes talking directly to camera, and the present and younger versions of themselves interacting with each other.

The school pupil Arthur Martin (Jacques Gamblin) makes a very good and possibly very Jewish point - his name is deliberately neutral - that maybe Jews don’t want to be commemorated on plaques for just the most miserable moments of their lives. Why not the happiest times?

Bahia Benmahmoud (Sara Forestier) also makes the point that not all Muslims are exactly the same, but it is her father who comes across as the more convincing character. Zinedine Soualem, who resembles a younger Cat Stevens, plays a man who has heaps of artistic talent but is more obsessed with doing any odd job to pay the rent. It didn’t help much seeing and sketching his grandfather being shot dead by French troops in Algeria.

Equally moving is Arthur in one of those anti-bacterial suits, standing in a dam with a dead white swan in his hands, getting a phone call and being told by his emotionless father that his mother has died.

If the film doesn’t all quite hang together at times, and even becomes a little didactic politically, it is at least a light, intelligent look at a somewhat heavy problem.

More of the same can be found in the ultimately charming local film, My Wedding and Other Secrets.

Here the conflict lies in the highly ambitious Emily Chu (Michelle Ang) falling in love – horror of horrors – with a white New Zealand boy, a Pakeha. This won’t do as far as her strict Chinese father is concerned, or at least so she thinks.

If she marries a whitey she'll be disowned. This leads to all kinds of complications, including never being able to sleep over at James's, even after they have secretly married.

But there’s another big and rather touching visual difference between them. James (Matt Whelan) is a tall, Edmund Hillary-like beanpole and Emily is vertically challenged. In short, short. If she is clearly an alter ego of her writer/director/producer, whose steely and possibly migrant determination shines through in more ways than one, then he is a dreamy computer games designer with two goofy mates one wishes were evident in Love Birds.

In fact, the characters all round are superbly drawn and Liang makes a feast of sending up Chinese kitsch – including kung fu movies - without once being patronising. If also a tad slow initially, it is still a satisfying romcom that is deservedly doing good business at the box office and bodes well for Ms Liang’s cinematic future.

Neil Sonnekus

Cast in Stone

2011-03-31T17:47:00.000-07:00

Flight Over the Tamaki, by Don Guy

I couldn’t drive to the cinema because my car licence had expired and it would cost me $200 if I was fined, like my wife had been for going over the limit – by a day. The powers that be would not negotiate, like you can in, say, Africa. She would pay the amount and that was that.

So it was off to the video store and there was a film I hadn’t heard of before, but it was starring Edward Norton and Robert De Niro. They had collaborated on The Score in 2001, a heist movie more memorable for Norton’s chameleonic skills and a fine jazz score by Howard Shore than the story – or even Marlon Brando’s weighty cameo.

Moreover, it was the same director, John Curran, who had made The Painted Veil with Norton in 2006. Based on a Somerset Maugham story and set in China, it was a drama that was as solid as it was unfashionable in these rather shrill times.

So, too, Stone. De Niro plays Jack, a parole officer who is essentially a hollow man. He does not believe in anything, he doesn’t know why he’s unhappy, and he’s not going to do anything about it. He doesn’t seem to hear the debates about free will, religious freedom and the right to bear arms on his car radio, though he does carry a little .38 snubnose.

By contrast, one of his potential parolees is starting to hear sounds. Norton plays the prisoner, Gregory, with just the right ambiguity. He could truly be hearing the sound that makes you become “God’s tuning fork”, or he could be softening Jack up to write him a favourable report.

It doesn’t help that we know he burnt his grandparents after his mates killed them, or that his wife, played by Milla Jovovic, is starting to work on Jack. Jovovic, who seems to have been reduced to making lucrative Part lll sci-fi flicks, plays the demonic seductress Lucetta at just the right pitch.

Frances Conroy, of Six Feet Under fame, plays the wife who has stuck with Jack all this time perfectly too. If there’s one thing director Curran seems to understand and is brave enough to explore it is the complexity of marriage. People don’t just stay together because of love. Or the children. Or faith. Nothing is ever that simple.

But there is something lifeless, almost deadening, about Stone. If Jack is a kind of aged Travis Bickle from Taxi Driver, then he is given no real conclusion, no catharsis. As surprising as the ending is in one sense, in another it’s almost as if its bleakness is not informed by an energy or artistry that helps transcend that emptiness, like a JM Coetzee novel.

Or maybe it’s just too real.

Thou Shalt Advertise?

Since we’re on the subject of faith or the lack thereof, a few months ago I wrote about the bad advertising poster the church on the corner of Greenlane and Great South Roads had. It went something like this: “Google does not have all the answers. God!” Well, they’ve either hired a new outfit or told them to try again. Now it goes like this. “Love. Jesus nailed it.” Surely that’s much better; more to the, er, point?

Flight Over the Tamaki

Since my blog address includes art in its title, as in moviesartbooks, I thought it was high time I included some. If you're interested in buying the above work or want to see more of the artist's work, contact him at donguy@vodafone.co.nz or +64 9 962 8195 or +64 22 627 3057.

Neil Sonnekus

Certifiably Boring

2011-03-24T21:02:00.000-07:00

An intellectual is going to give a speech in Italy on his latest book, which deals with artistic originality.

William Shimell, an opera baritone in (ha) real life, plays James, the intellectual. While he is giving the lecture a French woman, Elle (Juliette Binoche), and her son talk to each other via sign language, which gives the scene both its tension and distraction.

She then takes James on a trip to a small Tuscan village where people get married by the bucketloads in a beautiful church.

As they talk, though, he changes his position on what he wrote. Who says an original work of art is the original? Who says the model sitting for the artist isn’t more original than the work itself? What’s so bad about copies anyway, especially if they lead you to the original? And who says a copy or fake can’t have its own innate beauty?

This is not the position of the book and he rather arrogantly says, well, he’s got to think about the next book he’s going to write. Typical intellectual.

But who are these people? Well, it’s supposed to be a big revelation, but they’re actually a married couple. Visually there’s an amazingly long shot in which they drive and we look at them as well as the reflection of the landscape in which they're driving. All very deep.

So it's not surprising to learn that Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami has a bit of a thing about cars. You can sit in the comfort of your automobile with someone and you’re not facing each other, he says, you’ve got an amazing front and side view (especially in Tuscany), you can talk, and so on.

After visiting the church where they obviously got married they go to a restaurant and have a bit of an argument. He is forgetful, we have learned, so he didn’t remember their 15th wedding anniversary the night before. He fell asleep. Things change, he half barks. And he did not snore.

Elle is upset and clearly trying to save their marriage. She entices him into the hotel where they spent their honeymoon. He goes into the bathroom and looks at himself in the mirror, darkly, while two church bells ring in the background.

This is supposedly symbolic of their getting back together again, though the director leaves it anticlimactically open to interpretation. The one point he does make, however, is that if we were more tolerant of each other – this from James, who is better at having ideas than practising them – we would not always feel so alone.

But I have to confess I nodded off during this show, which insists on not using film's plastic possibilities to make its point, rendering it ambling, peripatetic, dull. Afterwards one old duck said to another (their husbands probably long gone if not non-existent), well, now they’ve seen it. Little chuckle.

So there you have it. A real film in the real world, but then it’s also only a Certified Copy of the original, which is not very original itself - if you get my meaning.

Neil Sonnekus

Screenwriting 101

2011-03-17T16:50:00.000-07:00

Yesterday was a very special day. It was St Patrick’s Day. It would also have been my father’s 93rd birthday. That’s the age he would have liked to reach, just like Nelson Mandela has.

But, as my friends now know up to a point approaching tedium, my father was murdered.

So it was a funny kind of day. I couldn’t write. I lost seven chess games in a row. I cooked a meal half-heartedly. I was late for this week’s movie.

I ran there, sat down and was about to switch my new cellphone to silent when I realised it was missing. It had cost me $200 the day before and was now my cell phone. I wasn’t going to enjoy this movie worrying about my wife worrying about $200.

On the screen there was a beautifully rendered chameleon in search of his own character, his own heroism. It sounded like Screenwriting 101. Did the creators of those few minutes really think children care about some screenwriter showing off some or other theory he or she has learned?

I had to go back on to the street to retrieve my cell phone. It wasn’t there. It wasn’t in my car. So I drove home and there it was, on the couch. So I grabbed a sausage and decided to go back to the movie. This was a good half an hour later, and I still had to go and relieve my bladder.

Rango (Johnny Depp) the chameleon was a liar who had become the sheriff of a very desperate town. The town was called Dirt. Someone had usurped Dirt’s water. Someone said you control the water you control everything. Very true, very topical. Many millions of litres of blood are still going to be spilled because of water.

Rango, the first animated film made by George Lucas’s company, Lucasfilm, is beautifully rendered. The characters are endearing and highly original. The writing, however, sucks. If this film is supposed to be for children, of all ages or not, how do the writers expect real children to understand jokes about gloves and prostates?

Then there’s Rango meeting up with a Clint Eastwood rendition, telling him he can’t escape his own story, hoarsely. Again, do children really care about what some writer feels like telegraphing about The Spirit of the West? I don’t think so. Obviously there was a chase across the desert that was reminiscent of that other Lucas vehicle for bad dialogue, Star Wars, but the chase was really done well.

Afterwards I went to an Irish pub and it was pumping. There were photographs of all the great Irish writers on the walls. Writers like Wilde, Yeats, Beckett. Lots of men were wearing funny hats, beards and green T-shirts and the tiny barmaid had a cheery glint in her eye.

I liked that, and I think my father would have too.

Neil Sonnekus

Entrenching Africa's Misery

2011-03-10T16:09:00.000-08:00

I somehow think that, having spent half a century in Africa, I am more entitled to criticize and defend that (choose your adjective: beleaguered? savage? beautiful?) continent than others.

It’s a ridiculous notion, I know, since in my home country of South Africa I am not even considered an indigene because of – irony of ironies - the colour of my skin. This by those who are working very hard at making Alan Paton’s worst nightmare become a slow reality.

But isn’t it strange how the latest Oscar winner for a foreign film has a white doctor helping all those suffering Africans while his marriage falls apart back in one of Hamlet’s industrialised hamlets?

Is this all Africa will ever amount to for Europeans: being the background scenery to their angst or, even worse, their patronisingly good intentions?

Susanne Bier's In a Better World falls into the first category, which is just another form of colonialism. Every time a film like this is made it further entrenches the notion that all Africa will ever amount to is a place of poverty and misery - though with lots of rhythm.

Films that fall into the second category usually have white men dying in Africa to somehow expurgate their historic guilt. Think Leonardo DiCaprio in Blood Diamond, Ralph Fiennes in The Constant Gardener, John Hurt in Shooting Dogs - just dying to, well, die in and for Africa, thank you, thank you.

The filmmaker’s argument might go that this is what happens in Africa, it’s real, and therefore it can be shown. Fine. But let’s look at one “real” little situation. Our good doctor Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) has to treat a local warlord, who happens to be a Muslim, and the doctor’s helpers tell him that he should let the bastard die.

He can’t, of course, because there’s something called the Hippocratic oath and back home he’s been teaching his son and his friend that revenge is a bad thing. (The original title of the film is, in fact, Revenge, but you’re not going to win Oscars with a negative, vigilante or ironic title like that, are you?)

But when the warlord really goes beyond the pale, as such, our doctor quite understandably loses it and thereby causes the village to vent its less civilized urges on a man who has been raping and slicing up their daughters.

End of that story - except that one warlord will replace another and the revenge on that village/camp will be swift and very bloody – and Muslim, the film implies – a la Darfur. But the film is too busy solving the problem of revenge back in the rotten state of Denmark to worry about this one, meaning - probably quite unintentionally, which is worse - revenge is somehow endemic in Africa, but can be dealt with back home.

Africa, it seems, can never be considered an equal and therefore praised, criticised or ridiculed - unless one of its tinpot dictators acts similarly to tinpot dictators everywhere else.

If that was the only problem with this film one could put it down to romantic or political naïvite, but it also asks us to believe that a European boy who is angry about his father’s response to his wife’s death by cancer will drive said boy to assault a bully, threaten him with a knife and then blow up someone’s car – just because the owner of that car bullied his bullied friend’s father, our good doctor Anton.

Maybe, but not necessarily. Perhaps the boy, vastly privileged, just has that killer instinct to become a future Chief Financial Officer of, say, a Danish furniture franchise. Why he feels the need to add nails to that bomb when all he wants to do is blow up a car is another matter.

Think of the clarity in another film, Heaven, playing with the same kind of themes. Think of Cate Blanchett planting a bomb in an office to kill a businessman who has become rich by selling drugs and destroying lives. Only problem is, he leaves his office before the allotted time and in walks a cleaner lady – and that’s only the beginning of Tom Tykwer’s masterly interpretation of the late Krzysztof Kieslowski’s profound script.

But what happens to our two boys? They survive, they’re contrite, all is forgiven, and all live happily ever after in Europe. Cut back to Africa and see just how happy those snotty little children of the earth (cheap clothes, dusty faces) are to see the resolved doctor bwana coming back to resume his good work amongst them.

After the film was over an old duck loudly said to a friend of hers about five pensioners down the row: “Trish, that was a thought-provoking film.” And she was right. It was exactly that, but if those thoughts were seductively presented they provoked a certain nausea in at least one of the few members in the audience that day.

Neil Sonnekus

Like a Duck to Water

2011-03-03T11:31:00.000-08:00

A Kiwi film technician, who shall remain anonymous for reasons that will become clear in about five seconds, once said that the New Zealand Film Commission is only interested in sponsoring films that feature a whale, a tree or a Maori.

Love Birds and a few others disprove that rather bitchy statement.

The second point I want to make is that last week I undertook to do a kind of mini roundup of Kiwi films on circuit right now, but something rather momentous happened: I was offered three days’ work.

Anyway, Rhys Darby plays Doug Gordon, a freak as far as being a white New Zealander is concerned, and I’m making the racial distinction for a particular reason.

But he’s a freak because he hasn’t done his OE – his overseas experience. This is because he doesn’t like flying, literally and figuratively.

In fact, he might be a bit of a freak as far as the world is concerned too: he’s quite content with his life, as is the wont of many a Kiwi. He loves his girlfriend and the rock band Queen, and he seems to like his job and his workmates, which include another Pakeha, a Sikh and a Maori.

Moreover, he lives in one of the safest, cleanest and most prosperous cities in the world, Auckland, so what’s to be unhappy about? Okay, it might be to hell and gone from the skirts of the mothership, England, as mentioned in the script, but that’s about it.

Darby, who usually plays slightly hysterical characters to good effect, or the officious Murray in Flight of the Conchords, is now required to play a romantic lead and of course we all want to know whether he can play it straight.

Let's just say he takes to it like the proverbial duck. It’s one of the many surprises of this film, which is really just a romantic comedy with its feet, as the visiting Don McClean implied about Kiwis, on the (shaky) ground.

If Doug’s social climber of a partner leaves him rather abruptly at the beginning of the film and he ends up with a real quacker as consolation, then his new romantic interest will have a child, like so many New Zealanders have too. And, like so many Aucklanders, she’s not from here. She’s from the UK.

But to get back to the issue of race: it is touched on by the Sikh guy (What do you call an Indian guy who flies a plane, he asks. A pilot), yet we don’t get to know much about his or his Maori workmate’s life. It’s the other Pakeha who’s also going to have a fling.

One could read all kinds of unnecessary, probably unintended but careless biases into what is, essentially, a light, fluffy comedy. Maybe it would have been better just to leave out that kind of theme - or give these guys slightly more developed characters. They could be married (to each other or others), divorced, whatever.

Right now they’re just background colour, no pun intended, with very little to do.

As for Doug’s romantic interest, Sally Hawkins is not just good at playing a woman who’s had her fair share of life’s little and larger blows, she also does a very sexy screen kiss.

If the film is a bit slow for a romcom and some of the dialogue is a bit forced – surely there’s a more creative way to make a cheerful Bryan Brown imply what a twitcher is – then Love Birds is still a warm-hearted film that will go on to do good business (and let us not forget that film is a business) in its secondary markets of TV and DVD.

Pity it was a week late for Valentine’s Day.

Shock, horror as blogger’s wish list almost matches Oscar winners!

The cynical view would be that The King’s Speech won the most categories (tying with Inception’s technical ones) because America needs to remain on good terms with the UK for the war effort in the Middle East, or maybe it’s that old nostalgia for the Nazi-sympathetic royals.

The good news is that winning screenwriter David Seidler has a Kiwi connection and that you too can win your first Oscar at 72, so keep writing, directing or sewing.

If I’m pleased about being wrong about one thing, then it’s that the documentary Inside Job was taken seriously. It’s time those greedy bastards who caused the recession were exposed for what they are, worldwide.

True Grit and 127 Hours scored nada, deservedly, and The Fighter is still the movie of the year in my book. It even proves that a good director can make a script-by-committee into something shit-hot.

Neil Sonnekus

The Great Outdoors Snore

2011-02-24T15:29:00.000-08:00

If anything indicates that Hollywood is running out of ideas, if it ever had any to begin with, then it’s the fact that so many films these days are based on or inspired by “real events” or “true stories”.

Maybe it’s easier to sell such an idea to a potential investor than it is to convince him or her about your creative genius. And, even though I’d like one such story to win the Oscar for best film, director, supporting actor and actress, namely The Fighter, most of them are instantly forgettable.

Our theme this week is survival and, like revenge, it is something we can all relate to on a very basic level. Both our films this week are set in the great outdoors.

Sanctum, whose only claim to fame is that it was executive produced by James “I Am the King of the World” Cameron, involves a bunch of cavers who want to find a route to the sea via a veritable underground labyrinth in Papua New Guinea (shot on Australia’s Gold Coast).

When a cyclone threatens their expedition it’s time to get out but, lo, a rock shuts off their escape route. Now they have to find a way to the sea – or die.

Richard Roxburgh plays tough-as-nails chief caver Frank McGuire well, but then all he has to do is reduce everything to its basic Darwinian components, like drown a fellow caver who is injured beyond repair, which is what his character loves.

That is what his financier alleges anyway, a suit played by Ioan Gruffud who typically wants all the fame if the expedition succeeds. He constantly breathes down Frank’s neck, like an insecure executive producer.

Frank’s son is played by Rhys Wakefield, a wuss who will predictably start off by hating his Kubla Khan-quoting father and eventually take over his mantel and become a “man”.

Unfortunately, Wakefield is better at playing tearful than manly, his impressive muscles notwithstanding; and the only reason why Coleridge’s opium-inspired poem is being used is because Frank’s wife used to quote it.

If this is the last link between the two of them, then the only link between the poem and the film is that the latter is swimming in its own “sunless sea” as opposed to towards the real, sun-shiny one.

I’m sure the visuals in 3-D were most impressive.

A rock is the culprit in the Oscar-nominated 127 Hours too, but this time it lands on an idiot who goes canyoning on his own. He slips and the rock pins his arm under it. Big oops. The first rule is: never dive, cave or climb alone.

We all know the story of Aaron Ralston who had to choose between dying or cutting off his one arm. There was no choice. We all know what he did. So why make a movie about it?

Well, it’s an interesting point, because we all know what happened to the two English climbers in Touching the Void, yet that documentary, with its dramatic reconstructions - which often don’t work - had me sitting all over my seat, laughing, crying, even though I knew the outcome.

But, apart from survivalist impulses, the latter touches on ethical issues – do you cut your friend and climbing partner to fall to his probable death or do you both possibly go down? – and maybe that’s the difference.

Maybe it’s also because there’s a tension between the reconstructed and the reflective: the two (real) climbers talking straight to the camera after the event. Maybe it’s even about the triumph of professionalism, let alone friendship.

But 127 Hours doesn’t have any conflict in it; it’s just James Franco stuck beneath a rock and talking to his video camera, flashing back to what a jerk he was and (on that note) trying to masturbate to footage he took of two fellow hikers earlier.

That doesn’t work, nor – for all the hype - does this beautifully shot movie.

And nooooooow, for the Oscars

Here’s my wishlist, for what it’s worth.

Best Film – The Fighter.

Best Actor – Colin Firth (The King’s Speech, among others).

Best Actress – Natalie Portman (Black Swan).

Best Supporting Actor – Christian Bale (The Fighter).

Best Supporting Actress – Melissa Leo and Amy Adams (The Fighter).

Best Director – David O Russell (The Fighter).

Best Cinematography – Danny Cohen (The King’s Speech).

Best Adapted Script – Aaron Sorkin, for excellent dialogue in The Social Network but not for being really economical with the truth.

Best Original Script – Mike Leigh, for Another Year, which I haven’t seen, but he deserves to win it just because he’s so anti-Hollywood; that ought to show him.

Best Soundtrack – Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for great funk in The Social Network.

Best Art Direction – Robert Stromberg for the rather sombre Alice in Wonderland.

Best Costume – Colleen Atwood for Alice in Wonderland.

Best Special Effects – Various for Inception.

Best Foreign Film – Don’t know, haven’t seen any of them yet.

Best Documentary – * Exit Through the Gift Shop (by Banksy)

*I saw this for pleasure because my son’s into graffiti and so didn't review it, but it turned out to be as delightfully subversive as the artist, and as elusive. It’s a great con.

But then I haven’t seen all the doccos, like Gasland, or even all the features, like Blue Valentine.

Some Notes:

If anyone was hard done by it is Julianne Moore. She should at least have got a nomination for best supporting actress, playing against type in The Kids Are All Right as well as A Single Man.

The Australian film Animal Kingdom showed at the New Zealand International Film Festival last year and was quite a hit. Running a gang of thugs in faded golf shirts was Jacki Weaver, playing a kind of black widow mom. This is very good news for her, film Down Under as well as debut director David Michôd.

Animal Kingdom was, of course, reviewed on your favourite blog.

If any film should get a special mention or prize or something then it’s Winter’ Bone, for excellent scripting and directing by Debra Granik, acting by Jennifer Lawrence and support from John Hawkes. But this is Hollywood’s way, perhaps, of saying we’ve got our eyes on you.

The big loser should (but will not necessarily) be True Grit. But then it might also be a red earring, as a French producer once sent to me, meaning, of course, red herring.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, an all-Kiwi affair, including Love Birds with Rhys Darby.

Running on Remakes

2011-02-17T13:58:00.000-08:00

I’m afraid I don’t see the point of this remake of a vaguely remembered John Wayne movie, and it doesn’t help much that one can’t really make out half of what Jeff Bridges is saying because he’s keeping much of what he's muttering on the insideofhisdurnmouthifyoutakemahmeaning.

The opening of this True Grit is slow and wordy and takes forever to establish that Rooster Cogburn (Bridges) is a sly old devil and young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) is a tough and canny negotiator. All good and well.

Add to the mix the overly officious Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, pronounced LeBeef by all and played well - as ever - by a heavily mustachioed Matt Damon, and you start getting the feeling that someone’s yanking your chain.

But it starts unravelling towards the end when, for example, Mattie is attacked not by one rattler down a dark hole, but at least three, and ole Rooster sure is going to get there in time to shoot ‘em to smithereens. Then he’s still got to get Mattie to a doctor and drive a horse to death and so on, all in the name of gruff chivalry.

Maybe this film was nominated for 10 Oscars as a red herring for much better works like The Fighter, or Hollywood thinks the Coen brothers should be rewarded for celebrating good old homespun Western values, like revenge.

But there is something deeply unsatisfying about the latter act when Mattie finally gets to shoot Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin in the cameo part). In fact, the only scene that really moved me, apart from the beautiful scenery, was when Rooster falls off his horse, pissed.

Wayne wouldn’t have been able to do that in a thousand years.

Which brings us to a black comedy. Or rather, an attempt at a black comedy, the first mission of which is to make the unacceptable palatable to us.

Think four Muslim fundamentalists bungling their explosive mission in Four Lions. We laugh ourselves silly despite knowing that any kind of fanatical fundamentalism like this isn’t really funny.

Wild Target is, like True Grit, a remake. In this case it’s a retelling of the 1993 French film Cible Emouvante by Pierre Salvadori. I haven’t seen that film, which also features a middle-aged man and a much younger woman, but it hardly works here.

If Emily Blunt blooms as a sexy, devious thief, then Bill Nighy does not sway as the French-learning, incredibly uptight, mother-dominated assassin. Yes, it is rather funny that his mother, played by the formidable Eileen Atkins, is worried that he’s starting to lose his touch as a cold-blooded killer, but sexy he is not.

Add to this uncomfortable mix Rupert Grint, whose character seems to be there solely as a device to connect plot dots rather than add any sexual or comic tension, and you have a rather slowly paced comedy that at least made a sextet of Auckland pensioners, no doubt yearning for the old country, chortle.

Oh, and Rupert Everett might just have found a middle-aged vocation: he makes a pleasantly sexy villain.

Neil Sonnekus

Caveat Emptor

2011-02-10T18:52:00.000-08:00

Unintended self-portrait with a cellphone.

I recently saw a film (out on DVD) about a bunch of Australian TV journalists - there was also a Kiwi cameraman amongst them - who went to East Timor to report on what was happening there at the height of that country’s problems.

After centuries of Portuguese occupation the country wanted independence, but Indonesia was about to invade it and claim it for itself - and it had the full support and knowledge of the likes of the US under President Gerald Ford and his Foreign Secretary, Henry Kissinger.

Australia was one of the few other countries that recognized the new East Timor.

Balibo, starring Anthoy LaPaglia and Oscar Isaac as eventual Nobel peace prize winner Jose Ramos-Horta, expects us to feel sorry for the journos who were out to prove that Indonesia had warships hovering around the country, and they were.

We are also meant to feel outrage that the Australian government knew about all of this, including the journos’ plight, and did what most countries do when they can profit from or be embarrassed by such a situation. They shut up - for a long time.

This is exactly what happened and the journalists were massacred, which is awful.

But wait a bit. They were given a chance to get out by the rebel forces, including Ramos-Horta, but no, they somehow thought they could fight advancing troops with cameras and mics and then plead journalistic rights.

This is insane. With all respect to the journos and the families involved, what history teaches us is that the truth comes out anyway, eventually, and in this case it didn’t have too much to do with whether our white boys were involved or not.

About a seventh of the East Timorese population was killed, regardless.

All of this is a rather long-winded way of saying that a similar sentiment is at work in Inside Job, the Oscar-nominated documentary by Charles Ferguson about how the current recession came about.

Yes, it was evil what the likes of Goldman Sachs were selling the world a future that did not exist – effectively a Ponzi scheme, as one commentator said - but then the world, meaning about six million gullible Americans, wasn’t forced to buy that dream.

They walked into the trap with their eyes wide open and their minds tightly shut. They wanted that dream house so badly that they never wondered why they wouldn’t have to pay off on it for the first two years.

For believing all the economic bilge the banks and the ratings agencies spoke, they lost their houses and the rest of us tightened our belts considerably, worldwide, and I speak from personal experience.

South Africa was one of the few countries that wasn’t such a willing participant in that global gang bang, but then if the rest of that country’s government had been as astute as its finance minister we’d still be talking about the miracle, not the monsters.

What makes the film important is that it shows how money people talk complete and utter rubbish, from the highest echelons of Wall Street to those in academe but, even more sickening, how those who caused so much pain were not punished but promoted, just as it is politically in South Africa.

And the madness didn’t stop with George W Bush; all those big players are now advisers in Barack Obama’s government, bless their thousand dollar socks.

Should there be more regulation, as the film, narrated by Matt Damon, argues? The likes of Alan Greenspan – who politely declined to be interviewed for this film, just like all the others who have now been appointed by Obama - were vehemently against it.

They argue that market forces should determine the economy, even though they are the ones who are now effectively running it – and therefore the body politic and thus the world, for now – and they are right.

Caveat emptor. The buyer should (always) be aware.

Regulators can be just as corrupt as these greedy bastards and, as long as ordinary folk vote for systems and people that allow CEOs to give themselves half a billion dollar annual bonuses, they get what they deserve.

***

Ad-ditionally

There has been a series of rather delightful ads on New Zealand TV, featuring a (childless, it seems) married couple. She’s your average Sarah, he’s your hairy, bearded redhead Jim of Scottish extraction and not exactly lean.

In the one ad he’s mowing the lawn and she’s watching him, giving him the sexual come-on. By the time he swaggers into the house, clearly ready to do the caveman thing in just his shorts, the parents-in-laws have arrived, mouths gaping.

In another the couple are playing charades with the folks, at the folks’ house, and Jim, not being a delicate fella, is trying to get them to guess what movie he’s enacting, threatening to tip the precious china vase in the process. But they just don’t get it.

Jim finally grabs a porcelain aeroplane and a model gorilla, which just happens to be at hand, and the old man shouts, desperately, “Kong! King Kong!” Just don’t break the bloody china.

This is clever because it refers to Kiwi uber-director Peter Jackson’s remake of that famous film, thus engendering further pride in the local film culture, and it manages to convey a world of underlying family relationships in a matter of moments – with a great deal of charm.

But then it’s not so clever from the advertiser’s point of view, since I cannot for the life of me remember what the name is of the insurance company being advertised.

Neil Sonnekus

Corpse de Ballet

2011-02-03T17:11:00.000-08:00

Since my daughter has been doing ballet for almost a decade and she’s only 12, I feel I can talk about that demanding art form with some knowledge. Hell, I even did honours in dance myself, but then I preferred the pas de qwerty of writing.

So that’s where I’m coming from and the best I can say about the almost anorexic Natalie Portman in Black Swan is that she’s a very good actress and that she’ll probably get her Oscar, but - no matter what tricks of the cinematic trade director Darren Aronofsky employed, and they are varied and brilliant – she is not a prima ballerina.

This is a perennial problem with dance and sport films. You’re either starring as yourself in a medium that is not yours, or you are a good actor and portray a great dancer or athlete by proxy, though Chi Cao proves the exception in Australian director Bruce Beresford’s latest outing.

Mao’s Last Dancer (out on DVD for a while now) is a much finer film than the critics will have you believe, whether in its depiction of Li Cunxin’s journey from hinterland Chinese peasantry to Sydney, Australia, via Houston, Texas, or in its even-handed take on Zedong’s Great Leap Forward.

Perhaps the critics wanted Chi to play a Westerner, not Chinese.

Anyway, the latter is a tale of survival, using the notion of beauty to guide its protagonist; Black Swan is a tale of being destroyed, almost willingly, by the notion to render that beauty perfect.

The idea of dying for, or being killed by, one’s art is a massive cliché, of course, and Aronofsky’s way of getting there is typically obsessive, repetitive and melodramatic.

There is once again the problematic mother, but this time she’s not high on speed and financial hope, as in the masterful Requiem for a Dream; this time she’s high on that bitter cul-de-sac of parental achievement by proxy.

Barbara Hershey plays the woman who gave up her career so that she could have her Nina, who could then succeed where she failed. That mama did so when her career was almost over is irrelevant to her; she made the sacrifice and now it’s payback time.

She is the true baby-boom witch in her black dress with her hair pulled back severely, showing us the Websterian skull beneath the ageing, pock-marked skin. Loosen her hair and she’s ever the gentle but strong, attractive woman again.

There is also the obsession with physical changes. If in Requiem it was the dilating pupils after ingesting narcotics and literally losing half an arm as a result of abusing them, then here it’s the bleeding feet of a ballerina, the loose skin around the fingernails chewed and ripped off to a bloody mess, not to mention the wings threatening to burst out of her scapulae – and then not together but alternately.

To say this film captures something would be to use completely the wrong cliché; it mirrors everything. There are mirrors all over the place because that is what ballerinas do endlessly: look at themselves - even the smudged, Perspex-like reflection of a subway train window will do.

If that look is critical, it does always run the risk of the kind of obsessive trait Aronofsky would pounce upon: narcissism.

One of the Swan Lake productions he alludes to is English choreographer Matthew Bourne’s version, which deals with male love, where the corps is all male and which is referenced at the end of Billy Elliot. But here Aronofsky turns it around and deals with that great male fantasy, lesbian desire, confirming every grunt’s perception that that is what all those girls, along with most female sportswomen, are.

Vincent Cassel plays the maestro who has been in the States long enough to have almost lost his accent Francaise and forces Nina to explore and confront her dark side, her Odile, without ever sleeping with her. He is straight and probably the most cliché-free character in the movie - and the dullest.

(Incidentally, it was heartening seeing Bruce Greenwood in a similar role finally getting a top credit as a character in Mao’s Last Dancer, instead of the Kennedy-handsome Washington bureaucrat he usually plays).

Nina, of course, loses her marbles for reasons that are not entirely clear. Maybe the thesis is that, in order to play Odette and Odile perfectly, as required, you have to become a schizophrenic. Maybe it’s because her nutty mother drove her that way.

But don’t expect Nina to look for a father figure in her maestro or anyone else – Aronofsky clearly has no experience of or faith in that line of enquiry. Maybe it threatens him to such an extent that by omitting it he thinks it strengthens his argument.

But what he manages to elicit from his leading lady is one of those shy, repressed people who will, if pushed, go beyond a happy ending, and his oddly grainy film perfectly "captures" the fraught, underlying hysteria that goes with an aesthetic that paradoxically transcends the normal female bodily functions.

Black Swan is an overly ambitious film that will mainly attract women - especially those who faithfully take their daughters to their ballet classes (the cinema I was in consisted mainly of women) - but then it does allow its director to executive-produce another Oscar-nominated film, one that deals with a much cruder art form: The Fighter.

Neil Sonnekus

The Lost Measure of Khartoum

2011-02-03T12:08:00.000-08:00

Leila Aboulela

Snowflakes fall outside, the grey December day unfolding in a series of sirens and car horns. In her publisher’s offices high above London’s Covent Garden, the Sudanese writer Leila Aboulela is telling me about her uncle Hassan Awad, a celebrated poet whose verse was turned into popular song.

He’s the inspiration behind her latest novel, Lyrics Alley, a family saga set in 1950s Sudan. Tipped to take over his father’s business empire, Hassan was paralysed in a swimming accident while studying in Egypt, his dreams of a golden future dashed.

In the novel he is Nur, the brilliant son of Mahmoud Bey, patriarch of the powerful Abuzeid dynasty. As British rule nears its end in Sudan, the clash between traditional Islamic culture and the West takes centre stage.

Soraya, Nur’s sweetheart, is desperate to go to university but her father insists she marries instead; Waheeba, his mother, forces the genital mutilation of her stepdaughter, Ferial, despite the fact that female circumcision has been outlawed under the British.

Nur’s accident traumatises the family further. It’s only when Nur begins to assert himself as a poet that both his own spirit and the frayed bonds of his family begin to mend.

“The character of Nur was triggered by hearing my aunt Rahma, Hassan’s sister, reciting his first poem, Travel is the Cause”, Aboulela says. “It contains the line ‘In you, Egypt, are the causes of my injury. And in Sudan my burden and solace.’ I was captivated. Here was one writer addressing another across the passage of time. It was strong, it was good. I completely believed in him.”

The poem also resonated with Aboulela because of her double heritage. “I’m the daughter of a Sudanese man and an Egyptian woman. At one point in my youth my mum departed for Egypt because she was trying to draw the family back there. So the poem’s Egypt/Sudan dichotomy – something of that found its way into the Lyrics Alley storyline, too.”

Aboulela has always been attuned to cultural nuances. Born in Cairo in 1964, she grew up in Khartoum in a Westernised, middle-class family of businessmen and traders. She studied economics at Khartoum University, then statistics at the London School of Economics. She took a job teaching statistics but soon decided it wasn’t the career for her.

She started to write after a move to Aberdeen as a young married woman left her with an acute sense of geographical and cultural displacement.

“I needed to express myself. I was 24 years old and stuck in a strange place with two boisterous little boys and a husband working offshore as an engineer on the oil rigs. It was a life for which I wasn’t prepared.”

She speaks of a “shattering of confidence” on arriving in Britain. “There was the Gulf war and a lot in the papers criticising Islam and it used to hurt me. Now I’m hardened to these things.”

Aboulela’s fiction quickly won acclaim. An early story, The Museum (from the collection Coloured Lights), won the first Caine Prize for African Writing in 2000. The Translator, which draws on her disorientating experiences as a Muslim woman living in Scotland, was praised by JM Coetzee and longlisted for the Orange Prize.

Her 2005 novel, Minaret, which centres on a Western-oriented Muslim girl from Khartoum who moves to London and takes up the veil, was also longlisted for the Orange and the IMPAC Dublin Award.

These works provide a unique perspective on the life of a Muslim woman in Britain, while deftly evoking very different locations: icy, bleak Aberdeen; the teeming multiculturalism of London; the heat and conviviality of Khartoum. They allow readers to imagine something of what it must be like to live in the diaspora as an African – a dislocating experience where, despite having access to different identities, migrants can end up feeling they’re unable to lay full claim to any.

They have also been read by some critics and academics as being assertive of a certain kind of Muslim cultural identity in the West. Aboulelah is philosophical about this interpretation but says she’s always been more interested in writing about faith.

“Focusing on the politicised aspects of Islam is a distraction from the real thing. In my fiction, I want rather to try to show the state of mind and emotions of a person who has faith. I’m interested in going deep.”

Perhaps because of its non-Western setting, Lyrics Alley – of all her writing – makes this point most clearly. Aboulela writes with a tenderness and sensitivity to the fragility of life, and the unbearable randomness of fate. Her characters are not ideals or role models; they do not necessarily behave as ‘good’ Muslims.

As she puts it: “They are flawed, trying to practise their faith or make sense of God’s will in difficult circumstances.”

As our conversation draws to a close, she adjusts her headscarf, which is patterned with a global map – a nod, perhaps, towards the numerous places where she has spent her life, from Sudan, Egypt, London and Aberdeen to Indonesia and Dubai.

Although she went back to Sudan while writing Lyrics Alley, her affiliation to the country is conflicted.

“I feel very sad, looking back – in the 1950s, Sudan was just about to be independent, it had huge potential: mineral resources; the fertile land; the Nile. Men like my father, who studied abroad at Dublin’s Trinity College, were going to come back and modernise this new young country, but that dream was shattered. You think: ‘We’ve been given all this and, thanks to politics and bad government, we’ve made a mess of it’.”

Now she lives in Qatar, a migrant long-displaced from the continent in which she grew up.

“It still moves me,” she says. “I used to measure everything against the Khartoum I knew, wherever I was in the world – why is the day so short out here, why is the sun so small and weak? And those early years of my life in Sudan are still my bearing and measure. But I went in a different direction; that was my fate.”

Melissa de Villiers

• Lyrics Alley is published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson

The Prince and the Pugilist

2011-01-27T20:40:00.000-08:00

The King's Speech and The Fighter were released in New Zealand at the same time and there's much about them that is similar and, of course, not.

They both deal with men in a time of crisis who are then helped by another man and woman. Both have problems with their siblings. Both are triumphant.

But that is more or less where the similarities end.

Their differences are that the former is English and the latter American, the first about royalty and the second about commoners, The King's Speech a little like a filmed play and The Fighter by those who understand that you can make magic with the right people, pictures and sound.

JG Ballard rejected being given a CBE, dismissing it as a "Ruritanian charade", but you are not going to persuade royalists that people can solve their problems without the help of a small group of people who generally do very little and talk with plummy accents.

So, apart from all that, is the film any good? Well, it wouldn't be nominated for an Oscar if it were altogether bad and Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush give absolutely flawless and touching performances.

Helena Bonham Carter, too, gives a finer performance than the loyal, supporting wife she's portrayed as in the trailer. To a non-royalist, she comes across as a lively, astute and accurate portrayal of the woman we used to see in newsreels and Firth in an interview said took 186 years to die.

Interestingly, there is a kind of geopolitical subtext to this story in that an American, Wallace Simpson, leads to the abdication of the king and a failed, lowly Australian actor, leads to his triumph. That Rush's Logue comes from Perth, which is now one of the wealthiest new districts in the Commonwealth, is a very timely coincidence indeed.

In fact, the film also holds up an unsettling mirror to Kiwi society, which on the one hand can't quite bring itself to let go of the distant mother (is)land, whereas on the other it embraces American culture just up to that point where it might get too loud.

But there are dull spots in the slower-than-its-trailer film, especially - and oddly - with Michael Gambon, playing George's overbearing father. The scene doesn't seem as well oiled as most of the other scenes are, many of which are long and some of which occasionally border on becoming a tad boring.

That fine composer, Alexandre Desplat, has been nominated for an Oscar, but his music from the dire Birth and Roman Polanski's excellent The Ghost Writer was much better - and it doesn't help that when the king of England tells his nation that they must brace for war, it is a German composer's sublime music - the immortal allegretto from Beethoven's Seventh Symphony - that fills out that speech.

Still, it's a very beautiful film, with great performances and it should at least get an Oscar for best actor.

The Fighter reminded me of sitting in a Swiss festival cinema about eight years ago and seeing a film by an Australian, Eddie Edwards, who'd been living in South Africa for a decade. I can't remember its title but it was a documentary about a black boxer from the Crossroads squatter camp in Cape Town and his low-class Afrikaans trainer.

The boxer had to win to feed his family and, it being about South Africa at one of those human rights kind of fests, I was expecting the worst. But the boxer won! And his white trainer and I laughed! Through tears! Agh!

Well, that's the kind of film The Fighter is. Golden Globe winner Christian Bale's Dicky Eklund takes you by the scruff of the neck and drags you into this lowlife boxing story and before you know it you're in love with his half-brother, Micky Ward, his girlfriend, their streetsmart Momma, her seven ugly daughters, the works.

Wahlberg's Micky slowly emerges as somewhat screwed up but always dignified. It is one of the greatest "quiet" roles played in a long time, but then he's been nominated for a producer's Oscar, since this has been his baby for a long time.

Charlene, the barmaid Micky falls in love with, played straight down the line by Amy Adams, is perfect. Her catfight on the porch with one of the sisters is almost as feral as Faye Dunaway's in Barfly, with which this film shares a great deal of addiction humour. Alice, Micky's mother, played by an unrecognizable-from-the-Homicide: Life-on-the-Streets-series Melissa Leo, is painfully on the money, peroxided hairdo and all.

She and Adams clearly deserve their nominations.

The Fighter does what a motion picture is supposed to do: it moves. It doesn't just move the action, it moves our heads and hearts in ways that are neither soppy nor royal, showing just how messy (and funny) things can get when you mix family and business, athletics and drugs.

If The King's Speech is a royalist film, then The Fighter is a people's film.

There was one moment when Wahlberg wanted to put his head against a doorpost to signify dejection. You can actually see him rejecting the notion, and that is what this film is about: avoiding every acting and boxing-film cliche you can conjure up. Unless you're a boxing historian or fanatic, you really don't know what's going to happen at the end.

If there is one minuscule criticism then it is that Dicky has his moment of rehabilitation - which for a junkie usually means admission, art or, in this case, Jesus - too briefly, and in silhouette. We needed to see his eyes receiving "the light", but the reason why he won that Globe and should get the big one is because for the first time one of his many lizard-like characters is ablaze with his illusions, failures and hopes.

In short, he is passionately human.

Neil Sonnekus

*Next week I'll review one of the Oscar contenders for best actress, Black Swan.

** Since I'll be publishing on Friday 25 February anyway - that is, two days before the Oscar evening - I'll be giving my predictions and wish list, which are like chalk and cheese. Please feel free to do so, too.

The Parents Are Frazzled

2011-01-20T11:58:00.000-08:00

Picture by Leo Sonnekus

Back from a relaxing holiday at Hot Water Beach and the pleasures of sandflies, sand in the anti-itch cream, bed and ears, toe-jam showers, teenage texting and wondering - in the middle of the night - where the bladder hell you left the torch.

Then there was still the weird image of adults walking to the beach with spades, passing the tsunami evacuation route signs, gathering on the shoreline at low tide like religious zealots to start digging for that heat rising up from two kays underground into the foam.

But there was also that otherwordly massage in Whitianga after reaching it by ferry, the hollow but oddly comforting sounds of bamboo scraping in the windbreak and, finally, sunrise at the edge of the world.

It was definitely time to get back to watching movies, and The Kids Are All Right was still showing, having garnered a best actress Golden Globe for Annette Bening. But is it any good? Well yes, going forward it's great entertainment about a lesbian couple who each have a child by the same, nameless sperm donor.

Bening plays Nic, the "male", alpha, controlling or financially stable one as a doctor, and Julianne Moore plays Jules, the more "feminine", insecure, less successful one as a landscape designer. As far as I'm concerned she should have got the award for playing against type, showing a more humane side to the usual kind of role she plays. Slightly New Age ditzy, as only some LA and Cape Town types can be, but with her heart in absolutely the right place.

But now her son wants to meet his donor father and the sister is old enough to contact him legally. A meeting is set up and much hilarious awkwardness ensues. Mark Ruffalo is allowed to play the sexy man he can be, as in Jane Campion's In the Cut, but once again he is emasculated.

The reason for this is that Jules falls for him, briefly, and they have amazingly funny sex, a welcome relief from the usually embarrassing dreck that Hollywood can dish up. Naturally this causes all kinds of trouble in the household, the family, and Jules has to sleep on the couch, lower back pain and all, until she apologises.

She doesn't, however, apologise to or reinstate the Mexican gardener she fired in a fit of guilty passion.

And when Ruffalo's character, Paul, offers an apology to the children and family, it isn't accepted. He is told to go and start his own bloody family, which is a point, but only half a point. In fact, from being a rather nice, easygoing kind of guy who makes the mistake of falling for a lesbian, he is vilified, and just to underline what a bastard he is he tells his occasional sleeping partner that it's over.

Is it a coincidence that she's black and that this just goes to show what a prick he is? Maybe not, but it is a little reminiscent of those Oxfam appeals to charity which feature black peasant woman, thereby implying that poverty and victimhood are the sole province of Africans.

So, from the start it's a very funny comedy, good entertainment, a nice light way to start the year; looking back it looks like needless point-scoring in the usual battle of the sexes, using family values (which will nevertheless have every patriarchal fundamentalist choking in his beard) as its weapon.

As far as The Tourist is concerned, just how the director of the masterful The Lives of Others ended up making this dated caper only Florian Henkel von Donnersmarck will know. He has tried to make an old fashioned romantic thriller in the grand old Hollywood style, but it ends up being neither and was deservedly ripped off by Ricky Gervais at the Golden Globes evening.

Angelina Jolie stutters along in her impossibly high shoes, oozing designer gowns, while Johnny Depp looks more like an EngLit associate professor, specialising in the romantic poets, than a mathematician. Yes, the idea is that he affects this character, but it's not like he suddenly goes from effete to International Man of Mystery in his last few minutes of the film.

He and Jolie are ably supported by ex-Bond Timothy Dalton and Paul Bettany, growing in stature, and controversial playwright Steven Berkoff, growing in girth and his I'm-only-reprising-my-Beverly-Hills-Cop-villain-for-the-money smile. Also, it helps having Venice as a backdrop, but we all know that Angelina is going to go back to Brad and Johnny is going to go back across the border to France.

Then, for those who like their fare much less touchy-feely, there's Unstoppable, starring the man. Or rather, that's why I went to see Denzel Washington, in his fifth movie with Tony Scott, but he wasn't quite doing the Man on Fire thing this time.

Starring alongside Chris Pine, they are going to spend time in a goods train and work out their past and present resentments while trying to stop a runaway chook-chook with chemicals on board.

Will it be a good thriller, cranking up the pace in that classic Scott mode? Yes it will. Will our engineer and conductor do the business? Of course they will. Will we remember this film tomorrow? Of course we won't. Will people still insist on seeing it? Yes they will. Why? Because it's got the man in it, playing a little too subdued with his perfect teeth for anyone's good.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, The Fighter and The King's Speech, which had better be better than its virtually tell-all trailer.

See You on the Other Side

2010-12-30T15:42:00.000-08:00

It happens towards the end of every year. You know, you think if you see one more movie you're going to puke all over your jandals, but after a short break you feel that old excitement of seeing a flick's opening titles again.

So the only reason why I'm doing a "best and worst of" summary of the year's movies is because I'm frankly too slack to go and see The Kids Are All Right and then still write about it.

I started this blog halfway through the year so I don't have to worry about what went before that, but I think The Secret In Their Eyes is the best movie of the year anyway. It had drama, comedy, romance and insight, which is always better than any special effect.

This Argentinean film should have won the Oscar for best film - in any language.

Biting at its heels was a tiny, low-budget film that the New Zealand Film Commission didn't deem good enough to produce, but Rosemary and Mike Riddell's The Insatiable Moon had the same qualities as the aforementioned work and is still proving its worth at that great leveller, the box office.

Though I went a bit overboard with four "excellent"s in my review, a very camp Pacific Islander kind of echoed that when he told a rather stiff Pakeha couple in the queue ahead of him that it was "brilliant".

Another great, disturbing and even more contemporary film was A Prophet, giving us a glimpse into how casual but sustained prejudice against Islam merely leads to its increasing radicalisation. Done in that almost blank style of some French movies and maybe a tad too long, its message comes across loudly and clearly.

In fact, it was a very good year for French movies, what with the wonderfully laconic Farewell, starring that great director Emir Kusturica, and the uplifting The Concert deserving all the praise that was lavished upon them. Both their stories had fascinating Russian connections, which made a welcome change from the usual Anglo-American axis.

France-based Roman Polanski also made a welcome return to form with his vicious political satire on that very relationship in The Ghost Writer, starring Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan. It, too, has no special effects but is doing steady business at the box office.

The Social Network is still doing well at the BO, but can anyone remember any kind of story? And does it matter to the Attention Deficit generation? Apparently not. They seem to like their bites short, simultaneous and, uh, well, like, you know...

Lastly, two low-budget dramas that punched way above their weight had this reviewer gaping at their quality of old fashioned storytelling. Winter's Bone is as chilling as its title suggests and has everyone sitting up and taking notice of its director, Debra Granik, and star Jennifer Lawrence.

The Disappearance of Alice Creed is surely the lowest-budget movie of the year, but it's as taut as a crossbow string on either side of the arrow, pointing straight at that little point between your eyes.

There weren't many notable comedies this year, partially because they are so difficult to make and easy to forget because they're usually so bad, but the Coen brothers made a masterpiece in A Serious Man. If it's slightly too Jewish for some people's taste, it's still an ultra-clever bit of fatalism.

Not far behind it was the German comedy Soul Kitchen by Fatih Akin, describing just how resilient and funny the life of a migrant worker can be.

As for dogs of the year, with all respect to canines, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest must surely rank as the most allergy-inducing study in entitlement of a woman, not a girl, in 2010. Due Date was without a doubt the most over-hyped and under-delivering comedy.

They really strained one's patience, not to mention pocket.

Talking about hype, The King's Speech has got so much of it so long before its release - January 20 - that one wonders whether its trailer is also better than the real thing.

Whatever the case, it stars Colin Firth who has had one hell of a productive period with films like Genova, Dorian Gray and A Single Man, a film that is right up there with the rest of this year's more intelligent fare.

According to an interview seen on TV recently, Firth reckons that if you chant "Oscar" often enough you'll win it, but he should get it as much for his talent as for one of his many self-deprecating quotes. Here's one from the Internet Movie Database:

"People will tell you they act because they want to heal mankind or, you know, explore the nature of the human psyche. Yes, maybe. But basically we [actors] just want to put on a frock and dance."

And now I'm going on holiday to practise my thousand-yard stare for two weeks, so there'll be nothing doing on this blog until I get back.

Happy New Year.

Neil Sonnekus

A is for Ass-kicking

2010-12-23T16:13:00.000-08:00

Two movies in which women aren't support systems for men but getting up to all kinds of trouble of their own, and that during the stupid season.

In the more commercial Easy A, Emma Stone plays "an average school girl" who tells a lie about losing her virginity as a joke and sets off a rumour mill that spirals way out of control. The book she is studying at school happens to be The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, which exposes Puritanical America's sour little heart to the core.

This film cleverly continues that fine tradition with something most films these days lack: charm.

Stone, of course, does not look or act like an average school girl. She is the all-American redhead - tall, wide mouth, slight lisp, knowing voice over. She could play anything from a slightly older Lolita to a Kathleen Turner who launched a murderer in Body Heat. She is so charged with suburban sexuality that she just has to walk to exude her own erotic subtext.

Secondly, it's a pity that her very hip parents, played very well and wackily by Stanley Tucci and Patricia Clarkson, had to adopt a black child, who doesn't work. He's just there. Then again, the story is generally so clever that this becomes quite a slap in the direction of over-well-meaning liberals.

Neither does Lisa Kudrow exactly convince as a serious school counsellor; we expect her to be wacky and she insists on being seriously neurotic. Or rather, her writer/director Will Gluck does, which is a pity.

But those are side issues: the main thing is that this isn't a comedy that starts off with cheap jokes and ends with a car chase. It's confident enough in itself to let the laughs come filtering through from the halfway mark on, and it takes such a savage swipe at modern fundamentalist Christianity that one wonders whether the suits who green-lighted it actually understood what they were doing.

Maybe the producer told them it was a high-school comedy about how gossip can spiral out of control and showed them the talented Stone's audition reel instead of the script.

At the very other end of the scale financially, and across the Atlantic geographically, is The Disappearance of Alice Creed.

Starring exactly three people - there aren't even extras - it is not boring for one second. Two men kidnap a woman and take her to a flat they have specially furnished for their needs: a soundproof room with a strong, bolted bed and plenty of handcuffs. They've even thought about her toiletry needs.

But slowly some interesting facts start emerging. As with so many crimes, there's a personal element to this one. One of the kidnappers, Danny (Martin Compston), actually knows the rich daddy's girl, Alice (Gemma Arterton).

Loves her, in fact. Or rather, he says so. And when she discovers it's him, she also says so. But Vic (Eddie Marsan) also has some involvement here, and he senses that the weaker Danny is having all kinds of doubts, or maybe he's just acting that way. And then, hello, the two men also have something a little more than just a mutual criminal mission going on between them.

Arterton plays her part to perfection, using the little scope she has to the utmost: her body and her wiles.

If the first 10 minutes are unnecessarily contrived - why don't Danny and Vic talk to each other, and why would there be lighting and working toilets in a very high, unused block of flats? - then we forgive that because this is a low-budget movie that is as much about crime as it is about sexual politics.

Every film student who is serious about making a break into the industry should watch this flick to see just how three people in a couple of locations can have you squirming in your seat, wondering what the hell is going to happen next.

Neil Sonnekus

The Bones of Hollowood

2010-12-16T15:43:00.000-08:00

It is to Sofia Coppola's credit that she makes films about the excessive privilege she seems so well accustomed to instead of professing any kind of concern about, say, the poor, and so she must be criticised or praised accordingly.

In the case of her latest film, unfortunately, there is very little to praise. In fact, the very first image of Somewhere pretty much sums up 90% of the movie: a black Ferrari speeds round and round a dirt track, the camera perfectly still and letting the car roar in and out of frame. This happens about five times and there are no credits, just the monotonous sound of the car and a view of the desert outside Los Angeles.

Then Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) gets out of his car and we can see that he's no flashy dresser. In fact, he's going to wear the same old boots, jeans and various check shirts throughout this film. Unlike the kind of actor who has come up through the ranks of college and theatre productions, he was clearly one of those good-luck stories of going to a film audition for a laugh, getting the part and becoming spectacularly rich and famous.

When an actor asks him about Method acting at one of those interminable La La Land parties, Johnny can scarcely answer him, except to say something like hang in there. Women throw themselves at him but he is so bored that he falls asleep with his head between a woman's thighs.

If there are such moments of droll humour, they are very few and far between. A lot of the film is made up of Johnny sitting on the couch in his famous artist's hotel and smoking. And drinking a beer. And lighting another cigarette.

Or his head is covered in latex for a special effect. He sits on a chair, with only his nostrils showing, and the camera slowly, ever so slowly, tracks in on his monstrous white face while he breathes. The whole idea is that when he sees the final result, himself as an ugly old man, it will spark an existential crisis, but just how laboured does it have to be?

What might have saved him is his lovely daughter, played by the delightfully natural Elle Fanning, who is only tagged along when he is more or less given no other choice but to comply. And when he does half-heartedly apologise to her about maybe not being the most responsible kind of father around, his voice is drowned out by the publicity helicopter droning behind him.

On and on it goes, until he finally realises that his life is - hello - empty.

Coppola seems to be making an homage to her father and especially his Italian contemporaries' existential movies of the Seventies. The only problem is they did it much better and that was then, this is now and the rich still have to earn our sympathy - just as it ever was.

At the very other end of the scale in every respect is Winter's Bone, also by a woman director, Debra Granik.

Unlike Johnny Marco, Ree Dolly (Jennifer Lawrence) does not have the luxury of money or time. Her father is a drug dealer who had been caught and posted his house as collateral to get him out on bail. Now he's disappeared and if Ree can't find him she and her mother and two younger siblings are out on the bones of their arses in a week's time.

The mother has retreated into herself or maybe her brains are just fried by the kind of stuff her husband cooks, so it's all down to 17-year-old Ree.

The setting is the grim Ozark mountain region of southern Missouri and always in the wintry background guns are being fired. They could be hunters' rifles, or they could be drug deals gone wrong. If the mountains are beautiful then people's yards are full of broken caravans and disused tyres.

Usually a film about something that is off-screen doesn't work; here it works a treat, just adding to the menace and uncertainty of Ree's predicament. We actually want to see the father and have him held to account.

But no one will tell Ree where her father is and Granik manages to persuade us that as mean and nasty as these Deliverance-type folks are, the women as much as the men, there is also something innately decent about them.

It's a paradox that is beautifully exemplified by Ree's uncle, Teardrop (John Hawkes), a nasty piece of work on the edge of excessive violence and genuine pity. When she tells him that she's never really trusted him he replies that's because she's a smart girl.

At one stage she is so desperate that she decides to join the army for the $40 000 inducement, but she's too young and the recruiting officer gives her some surprisingly good advice. So not even that ironic course of action will provide a way out.

And so there's the heavy metal music in the background, the forest settings of slasher movies as well as their implements: axes and an electric saw. But it is the realism of the story that makes this film and its final discovery so chilling, even if the ending is a little drawn out.

Winter's Bone didn't win the Sundance Film Festival Prize for nothing, and it and Lawrence have also been nominated for Golden Globe Awards. Somewhere hasn't and probably won't and definitely shouldn't.

But there you have it. Those who are rich and bored out of their minds, and those who will become cannon fodder to help their dependants. Hollywood and America. You either love it or you hate it.

Neil Sonnekus

*Matter of Fact: In my review of Due Date I neglected to mention that the first name of that fine actor Downey Jr is, in fact, Robert. And in last week's review of the dire The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest I inferred that the capital of Sweden is Oslo, which of course it's not. It is Stockholm.

The Girl With the Attitude Problem

2010-12-09T15:28:00.000-08:00

Sweden. - Julian Assange is being accused of sexual molestation in that country and "hacktivists" are trying to paralyse the likes of Mastercard and Visa for withdrawing support from his WikiLeaks.

More importantly, however, hacker and sexual victim Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is fighting for her life after surviving a night underground with a bullet in her head, among others.

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the final episode of the Millennium trilogy, based on the late Stieg Larsson's airport thrillers which, in cinematic terms, started off well and, like most sequels, deteriorated rapidly. Here we are scraping the bottom of the barrel beneath the icy, dirty waters of Oslo.

Lisbeth is going to spend much of the movie recovering in hospital, where she responds blankly to the kind of doctor who comes around once in a, well, millennium. Played by I don't know who because the Internet Movie Database doesn't provide a photograph or his title as a clue, all I know is he's one of those kind, level-headed European doctors who will not get even the slightest glimpse of gratitude from madam, who has rapidly used up all of her sympathy quota.

Meanwhile, a lot of old men with Nazi links have endless meetings about how she must be stopped and re-committed to the loony bin, where she was clearly abused by another doctor, another old man.

And then there is the ever-persistent journalist Michael Nyqvist (Mikhael Blomkvist) and his editor and on/off partner Erika Berger (the beautiful Lena Endre), working tirelessly for Lisbeth via his ego.

Yes, there is a lot of atmosphere in the film. We constantly wonder when Lisbeth, Erika, Michael or his pregnant sister, another nameless wonder for the same above reasons, are going to be taken out by some awful Eastern Europeans on those grim, wintry streets.

There is exactly one action sequence and that's when one of the latter almost succeeds in killing Michael in a restaurant. But that, apart from Lisbeth's surly giant of a half-brother who goes around psychopathing everyone, is about it.

The whole thing is going to build towards a court case in which all the old fogeys are relying on the fact that, up to now, Lisbeth has refused to open her mouth in her own defence. And guess what she's going to do in court? Why, she's going to open it, and she's going to show us just how good she is at semantics.

Most absurd of all is that Michael's sister is going to defend Lisbeth. Maybe they don't have conflict-of-interest practices in Sweden, but I very much doubt it. Still, it's very nice seeing Michael looking upon Lisbeth altruistically in the dock in her full black punk regalia, having provided his sister with most of the information they need, and she about to pop a baby just to give it all that extra frisson.

Obviously they win - but does Lisbeth look relieved, happy, grateful? not on your nelly - and by now we are way past the two-hour mark and my Hitchcockian bladder is bursting and I actually have to get to work of the paying variety, but Lisbeth has one more thing to do.

She has to go to a remote barn in the country where her half-brother is hiding out and he, well, I suppose he tosses her about for the benefit of those who like that sort of thing until he ends up hanging from that hook we're shown as she enters, but I can't be sure because by then I'd left for the above reasons and because this franchise was now ready for what Rowan Atkinson calls glorious television.

Neil Sonnekus

Slashing Those Poppies

2010-12-02T02:04:00.000-08:00

One of the reasons why Flight of the Conchords is such a cult success beyond its own boundaries is that it sends up the very notion of white New Zealandness.

Murray's obsession with bureaucratic form (roll calls for three), Jemaine's compressed yesses ("Yis") and Bret's inability to express his innate decency, except perhaps through song, seem to be Kiwi to the core. These three lovable miseries are not just characters but also national characteristics, which includes that obsession with our bigger, louder neighbour.

By the same token, the reason why Once Were Warriors was such a success was because it was as primal as, well, a haka. If it dealt with the universal theme of male abuse in the family, then it did so from an unashamedly Maori perspective. There was no liberal, politically correct white pussyfooting; it was the real thing, and it worked, it sold. It was also just one story.

The Insatiable Moon is another film that will transcend its own boundaries, in the sense that I could watch it as a South African and see it deal with a subject echoing that country's Truth and Reconciliation Commission hearings in a way that is pertinent, witty and wise.

None of the above films or TV series has an overseas actor in a leading role, which is amazing.

But now we get to films like Matariki by Michael Bennett and Predicament by Jason Stutter. The former, made very much in the ensemble style of Short Cuts and Crash (the Oscar winner, not the more interesting Cronenburg one) in which various people's lives intersect, is set in South Auckland and features the lives and loves of quite a few people. Too many, in fact.

First, there is a pair of teenagers who have the kind of cringe-worthy dialogue of which Jemaine and Bret are acutely aware, some of it giving the impression that it's meant to shock more than necessarily be realistic or logical, let alone funny. This doesn't mean they aren't charming - they are -but we never really get to know why, for example, the Chinese girl doesn't like home: she just stays away.

Then there is Sara Wiseman playing a cop whose Maori husband spends most of his screen time in a coma. What is this very capable and watchable actress expected to do? Emote, and she does it very well, but who is she? All we can deduce is that she wants to be alone with her husband, which is understandable, to the exclusion of his family, which is problematic. She doesn't seem to be on bad terms with them, but that's about all we're going to learn about her.

Likewise, there's a young woman who looks about 11 months pregnant, but when the child does finally come the boyfriend skedaddles and she's not really interested in baba either. Why? Because her junkie man has left her? In the end she leaves both of them, but exactly what her motivations are is not entirely clear.

Matariki is not a "bad" film by any stretch of the imagination: the way a baby stirs a protective instinct in a gay man and how that white baby inveigles its way into a loving Maori family (another positive) that has to make the unenviable decision of turning off someone's life-support system, is profoundly moving.

But the film is trying to keep so many other balls in the air - of which I've only mentioned a few - that it cannot focus on and therefore thoroughly explore this one primal event.

In Predicament there is a man who has the wonderfully weird obsession of building a wooden tower in his back yard to the exclusion of everything and everyone else. His story arc ends (and I don't care what happened in the book) with him starting to talk to everyone around him again, and destroying his dream, his tall, hallucinogenic...poppy.

The film flopped at the box office.

Similarly, in Matariki there is a funky, catchy song called Look What Love Can Do. But it's featured smack bang in the middle of the movie, in a daytime market scene of a mostly night-time movie, and then again over the end titles.

Wrong.

The other thing it doesn't do is let rip, in a Jennifer Hudson kind of way. It really is a spill-your-guts kind of dance-floor number, which could have been a national hit. Did it ever make it to the radio? Did anyone ever push it that way or use it as a promotional tool in a TV spot? Nothing seems to have filtered through.

The long and the short of it is that Matariki and Predicament are similar in that they have a consensual, almost polite feeling about them, especially the latter. They don't seem to be driven by a central artistic vision - a tall poppy, if you will - and this is not entirely the relatively young directors' faults.

Put in another way, it looks as if those films' producers were administering epidurals instead of delivering those babies bloody, screaming and healthy on to our screens.

Neil Sonnekus

Comedy by Committee

2010-11-25T13:05:00.000-08:00

I had gone off on some hare-brained adventure to Whakatane that would put my late father to rest, but it was a bit of a disaster and the question was whether I should still watch a movie for my usual Friday deadline or postpone it until Monday. Might as well try some laughter, I thought, and ended up watching Due Date, another bit of a disaster about fathers and sons, in Tauranga.

Architect Peter Highman (Downey Jr) has just crossed paths with Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galafianakis) and his dog at an airport in Dallas, Texas. The latter has caused the former to be shot by a rubber bullet within the first 10 minutes of the movie, but fate and necessity have supposedly thrown them together, for Peter has to get to his wife in Los Angeles, who's about to have their baby. Ethan has to be at a meeting with an agent on the same day, same city.

All good and well. But aspiring actor Ethan has his father's ashes in a coffee tin and rather movingly convinces us that this was a very important person in his life. Yet, when Peter tells how his father asked him to wake him early one morning so that the old man could leave Peter and his mother, forever, Ethan starts laughing. It's a long and forced laugh and no one thought about cutting it.

It's a deeply false note in a movie whose trailer is a comic gem, whereas the real thing becomes tiresome in the extreme. Soon Peter will have a broken arm from a crash (Ethan falls asleep while driving), then he'll survive another crash in a mobile prison caravan that rolls head-over-end (Ethan again) at high speed because he's supposedly relaxed from pain killers, then he'll accidentally get shot in the leg (ditto) and hobble into hospital hours later, but will the child be his and blah blah blah.

The writers (four of them, including the director) of this mess clearly ran out of ideas and resorted to the old trick of inserting a car chase, though it's not featured in the trailer.

Then there is the little question of Ethan's sexuality. It seems like the committee wanted him to be gay - the pink hair brush in the back pocket, the half mincing walk, the ugly but cute pooch - but that it would never become an "issue" between him and Peter. So just avoid him talking about any significant other at all. He's just a camp, absentminded actor who happens to smoke pot for his glaucoma. Talking of which, Downey Jr is pretty camp when the movie starts too.

So there you have it. You can see Due Date in any small town in most countries across the globe, but I prefer the bit of footage I shot on my cellphone while getting drunk in Whakatane. What those good people say is much more funny and real than anything in the movie - and they made me feel welcome in their town and my new country.

Neil Sonnekus

* If you want to see a really good buddy movie try Martin Brest's 1988 Midnight Run with Robert De Niro and Charles Grodin.

The Medium is the Message

2010-11-18T12:19:00.001-08:00

An old varsity connection recently requested that we become friends on Facebook and I noticed that the symbol or logo - as opposed to a photograph - he used to identify himself was a hammer breaking the Microsoft flag.

The hammer clearly denoted the communist one and the flag presumably represented evil capitalism. But it was a very hi-tech image and I couldn't help wondering why the world's second-most-vitriolic anti-Americans (the first obviously being radical Muslims) always happily employ American technology and/or actually live in the big Satan. They don't go and work in, say, Minsk, Chengdu or Douala and start a workers' revolt from there.

Seeing The Social Network will no doubt fuel their anti-capitalism because it doesn't paint a very flattering portrait of how the latest social revolution came about, one in which you are free to mention your sore nose or share the latest brilliant idea.

Students of Screenwriting 101 will also be delighted to point out that the film starts with a big no-no: a very long conversation. Ah, but the lecturer might reply, it's because David Fincher (Seven, Fight Club) is directing: he can get away with it. Which is probably true.

His film also doesn't really have a protagonist. Instead its focus is on the founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg (Jesse Eisenberg), the youngest billionaire on the planet. In that initial conversation he proves himself to be a completely charmless little misogynist. Sharp, but charmless, badly dressed and unattractive. So much so that his girlfriend tells him to get lost and doesn't change her mind when he becomes ultra-rich. Maybe the point is that in the world of business and/or IT there are only absentee protagonists.

Almost half of the film consists of lawsuits being conducted against Zuckerberg, surrounded by men and women in stiff grey suits according to their sex, while he maintains his shapeless jeans and those hideous single-strap plastic sandals sports people used to (or maybe still) wear.

What was his crime? Well, according to the film it's a bit of a grey area. It's not like he stole anyone's idea directly. Yes, there already was an electronic network connecting students on campus, but it wasn't being used to decide who's the hottest girl around, or which animal she resembles. For that, Mr Zuckerberg had the brains to write the program exclusively.

So, not a nice piece of work, our Mr Zuckerberg, about whose background we learn absolutely zip.

But every Bill Gates needs a couple of co-founders who will become faceless co-billionaires. Enter Sean Parker, the founder of the failed Napster and, according to the film, a real little shit. Justin Timberlake has become surprisingly adept at playing these morally vacant characters, but according to Vanity Fair the person he portrays so well is not such a turd.

Sure, he likes to party hard - and Fincher is a master at making that kind of American decadence look extremely attractive - but he knows how to sell and realise an idea and, according to the real Parker, "it's technology, not business or government, that's the driving force behind large-scale societal shifts".

What he neglects to say is that nothing just pops up of out nowhere and changes the world, but he doesn't come across as the spineless little slimeball that we see in the movie either. What he has, of course, is exactly what Zuckerberg doesn't, namely social skills, charm.

But if the real Parker is not being portrayed accurately, why should we believe that Zuckerberg is? What exactly would screenwriting heavyweight Aaron Sorkin (West Wing) and Fincher be trying to say? Obviously the film wasn't made without covering all legal loopholes, which Zuckerberg seems pretty good at finding, so what does this story boil down to in the end? A bit of business history, perhaps, a little mythmaking? Maybe not.

Someone playing the aforementioned Gates is featured in a cameo and we all know that the richest man in the world, along with the second richest, Warren Buffett, is giving away the equivalent of small countries' GDP to causes such as the eradication of polio and malaria, and the fight against HIV/Aids.

Judging by this film, one wouldn't be surprised if Zuckerberg were to sell all our personal details to the CIA or whoever else wants to watch us and has enough money, like those Chinese securocrats who think they're fighting a winning battle against a technology - and therefore consciousness - that renders them positively dinosaurian.

But at least The Social Network isn't one of those nauseating college romances, and maybe Fincher used the oldest trick in the cinematic book to convince Zuckerberg, whether face to face or not, that this film needed to be made.

Maybe he, like Parker, appealed to the young billionaire's desperate need for social acceptance, and this time round they both won, since the film is making a killing at the box office.

Neil Sonnekus

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A Passage in India

Jaipur, Rajasthan's capital, is not the place to go to if you want to catch a glimpse of India's headlong rush into modernity. A fixture on the tourist circuit, it is best known for its pink-walled old city, its 18th-century forts, its traditional jewellery and technicolour textiles. But for a few days each January, the city provides a conduit to the people and debates at the very heart of contemporary literature.

Set in the grounds of a beautiful heritage property, Diggi Palace, the DSC Jaipur Literature Festival has grown rapidly in the past six years from a small, regional affair to one of international stature that has attracted the likes of Salman Rushdie and Ian McEwan.

Last year, it attracted more than 20 000 people and more than 200 speakers. The five days of reading and panel discussions have become an increasingly important stop for writers looking to showcase their work, and for agents and publishers on the lookout for the Next Big Thing.

Crucially, though, it maintains its local feel. As anyone who has been to Hay knows, the problem with the major lit festivals is that they are usually just a vehicle to sell books and the closest they get to any excitement is when the author fluffs his lines while reading an extract from his latest work.

There's often a sense of "we must pull in the celebrities at any price" - as when Hay spent $168 000 to have Bill Clinton speak in 2001. By contrast, Jaipur has remained largely non-commercial. No one is paid a fee and, more to the point, the entire festival is free to attend. Instead of relying on ticket sales, the fest has managed to shame or cajole institutions like Merrill Lynch into becoming major sponsors, along with the usual suspects like the British Council.

To cap it off, excellent Indian cuisine is served to thousands of participants free of charge and superb live music is performed into the small hours every night. Authors mingle informally with the public too, while there is plenty of networking.

Jaipur is directed by the respected author William Dalrymple, and this January he's managed to attract Orhan Pamuk, JM Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Richard Ford, Anthony Beever, Jay McInerney, Mohsin Hamid, Monica Ali, Jung Chang, Fatima Bhutto, Candace Bushnell and Germaine Greer - to name only a few - to Diggi Palace, along with book lovers from all over Asia and abroad.

It's definitely worth checking out, not least to see whether Tina Brown was right when she called it "the greatest literary show on earth".

Melissa de Villiers

* The Jaipur Literature Festival runs from 21 - 25 January 2011. For more details, go to: http://jaipurliteraturefestival.org/

A Singular Man

2010-11-07T14:21:00.000-08:00

Back in Johannesburg there was a little grey accountant who helped struggling artists because he was a good man and because he had always wanted to study literature. Cyril Fisher dutifully became an accountant, as his father had instructed, but many years later he got his degree in English literature by correspondence through the University of South Africa and proudly displayed it in his beige office.

The only other picture in that room I can recall is a photograph of his wife. She wanted to go to the Alps before they grew too old, but she became ill in Austria and was only going to go to one hospital and that was the Rosebank Clinic back in the City of Gold. After her operation the doctor made his inspection and angrily asked one of the nurses where the old lady's drip was.

Up the ill Mrs Fisher piped and said: "He's sitting right here."

How did I come to hear this story? Mr Fisher told it me, smiling fondly. So I can understand that a sweet old man like that might sit down in his chair one night, only a few months after his beloved partner had died, and simply expire due to a lack of interest, missing his beautiful wife, his heart breaking.

But I find it a bit difficult to process that a good-looking man in his mid-50s - and a professor of literature, to further tenuously link the above story - will decide to do himself in because his partner has died. Does it matter that he's gay? Well, this is one of the questions Tom Ford's adaptation of the Christopher Isherwood novel, A Single Man, asks.

Colin Firth's George describes his intention as somewhat "melodramatic", but he's going to proceed to blow his head off anyway, and he does so with all the obsessive attention to detail that probably made Ford one of the top fashion designers in the world. (Talent, of course, helps too.) A pathologist might have told the director that the barrel should aim at the brain, not the spine, but that's a minor detail.

Obviously we sit there wondering when George is going to do himself in, which adds a kind of languid tension to the whole affair.

More importantly, is Ford saying that gays are melodramatic? Maybe just a little, and then there's enough self-deprecation to balance it out with statements like "I'm English, we like to be wet and cold." But, as George says, he doesn't want to live in a world "without sentiment". Not sentimentality, mind, sentiment. There's a difference.

Who does George run to when he hears the terrible news of his lover's death in a car accident? He runs to Charley, played by a slightly heavier-than-usual Julianne Moore. It's a very beautiful scene. There is lovely music (by Abel Korzeniowski), there is rain, there is no speech and there is grief.

But she is his ex, even sexually. And, like so many fag hags, she is still secretly in love with him, still hoping he's going to turn straight so that they can have a "real" relationship, she later confesses - high on gin, wealth and indolence. Naturally it's a statement that infuriates him, but they are friends and he forgives her.

At worst, it seems like the film is aimed very much at a straight market, or at best wants to include it, for the many shots of a floating naked man never show what Keith Richards calls his todger, and even the poster suggests that this could be a film about the relationship between George and Charley. That really is secondary.

Moore's performance of a brash, superficial woman is spot-on and halfway towards what she should have been in Savage Grace. But where are his gay friends? He doesn't seem to have any, and this is not a criticism. One of the important things the film seems to be saying is that George might as well have been married and settled down in suburbia with his loving partner, Jim, played warmly and convincingly by Matthew Goode.

All they really wanted to do was live happily ever after. The only difference is that he's gay and can't stomach the straight neighbours' son, a little corporate soldier in the making. Yet he likes the little girl and so a portrait of a type starts emerging. He likes women, as long as he doesn't have to sleep with them, and he loathes the kind of straight men corporate America was breeding after the war. Fair enough.

And then there is a very telling scene where he walks with an admiring student and watches a man play tennis. There are the usual slow-motion close-ups on pecs and abdomen, but he's still a grieving man. He's not interested in sex right now, but he can still look, which is beyond straight or gay. It's just plain masculine. It's also incredibly gauche.

As for the suicide scene, it's one of the drollest bits of humour seen on film in a long time. George is so busy fussing about things - this feels like Ford the obsessive compulsive going on about details again - that he, well, see it for yourself.

There's even a bit of toilet humour when he literally sits on one, still wearing his tie, watching the neighbours.

Should a straight man play a gay man? There is a camp (pun only half intended) that says it's a no-no and they have a point, much like we don't expect to see a white man playing Othello anymore. But an interesting thing happens with Firth. He is one of the most "natural" actors around, yet here he seems fraught with contradictions, tension; even his gait seems awkward, contrived. It's either a happy accident or a very clever bit of casting.

But what the film does manage to achieve, after all the artifice, is something quite touching. It manages to surpass its own "gayness", its own neuroses, melodramas and deprecations, and boil down to a grieving man (this is not giving the plot away entirely) who can finally give up his sentimentality without forfeiting his sentiment.

In short, it's a moving portrait of a man whose mildness, in the final analysis, is very different to that of the kind and late Mr Fisher.

Neil Sonnekus

* Next week, The Social Network

The Real Slap's Still in the Closet

2010-11-04T14:21:00.001-07:00

I wanted to like this book. I really did. It sounded so intriguing. Reviewers either adored it or hated it - there seemed not to be a moderate reaction among them.

And then there were the prizes. Not only did the novel win Christos Tsiolkas the Commonwealth Writers' Award for Best Novel 2009, it made the Booker longlist this year as well.

Stephen Romei, editor of The Australian Literary Review, called it "a rare quadrella in publishing: a page turner that sells a lot of copies, gets great reviews and then wins literary awards".

So where did we go wrong, The Slap and I?

Okay, there's a dynamite narrative hook at the start - the slapping of a brattish four-year-old (who is still being breastfed, incidentally) at a barbecue in suburban Melbourne.

Within a day the parents of the slapped child have the slapper arrested. But then the plot broadens, spooling out over nearly 500 pages in its ambitious attempt to lay out modern, liberal, multicultural Australia across the rack.

Several factors traduce the book's ambitions. There's the soap structure, for starters; with each chapter, Tsiolkas shifts his point of view to a different character who was present at the barbecue - a Greek immigrant in his 70s, an ex-hippy-turned-suburban-mum, an adolescent girl in the first flush of love, an Aboriginal convert to Islam.

Most of these characters are unpleasant in a wide variety of ways, but that's not the problem - they're cardboard cutouts that talk in cliches. Although suburban violence and anger is one of the book's key themes, everyone seems to get angry in exactly the same tone, even in the same words. Perhaps this is Tsiolkas's point, but the repetition means he doesn't make it very effectively.

Characters are constantly describing how they long to smash their fists "into the face staring back at him" or to smash the kid against the wall", or "to smash a cricket bat...once, twice, a hundred times into the little fucker's head, made him pulp and blood."

Or, just for variation: "Harry did not take his eyes off the cunt. If he could only smash his fists into her pretty face."

Then there are the sex scenes, which are cringe-making. This is porn sex, really, a seemingly endless loop of thrusting cocks, grateful cunts, moans and groans. No matter how hardcore the experience, Tsiolkas's women lap it up - after one particularly relentless session the man apologises to his wife and she meekly replies, "but I like making love to you."

Tsiolkas, who is gay, told an interviewer from the London Times that he relied on advice for these scenes from three women writer friends, one of whom read an early draft and told him: "The women are orgasming like men. Women don't come that quickly. Dial it back."

Blimey. So this is the dialled-back version.

And the prose is too often clunky. On holiday in Indonesia, one character is struck by the "gentle smiles" of the locals, the "cheer and fearlessness of the children". Or: "She did not look her age but looked fantastic."

Somewhere within The Slap there's a thoughtful state-of-the-nation novel trying to get out, one that highlights the casual racism that lurks within Australian culture; the tensions within an uneasily assimilated multicultural society; the contradictions of liberalism.

But the quality of the writing too often lets it down. And, although Tsiolkas assembles a diverse cast, what he doesn't do is make their ethnicity or class count for very much, or investigate in any detail these different worlds.

He's good at plot twists and turns, and that's what kept me reading until the end - on that level, the book delivers the same kind of satisfaction one gets from a well-crafted airport thriller. But "a tour de force...a novel of immense power and scope"? (Colm Toibin)

Slap me and wake me up. I must be dreaming.

Melissa de Villiers

Peace Be Upon You

2010-10-27T14:38:00.000-07:00

One of the reasons why I liked Ridley Scott's Body of Lies was that it showed Leonardo DiCaprio actually playing a sexual being, not just someone who has the obligatory romantic interest.

That the object of his desire was a Muslim woman was telling. His character had in fact been seduced by the Middle East, for all its complexities, which is a far cry from the usual American denial of showing how "our" boys are suffering in one of those wars instead of asking why they're actually there in the first place.

Films like The Hurt Locker.

In fact, a salient but understated point Scott makes is that the Middle East has an erotic charge about it, and it's worth investigating that, along with all the other geopolitical considerations.

Once people start falling in love across races, cultures and religions life becomes infinitely more interesting - and complex. On a micro-scale, you can't get more political than getting married.

But in the two films under discussion today there is no love lost, let alone glimpsed or even desired. In the first, A Prophet, which won the Grand Prize of the Jury at Cannes, a Bafta, the Golden Globe and has been rightly nominated for a foreign Oscar, there is a warning, a cautionary.

What makes it so powerful is that Malik (Tahar Rahim) is a nonentity when Jacques Audiard's film begins. The only thing that distinguishes him from other French people is that he speaks Arabic, but he comes from the streets. He has no parents, no political or religions affiliations.

But the first criminal and symbolic act he has to perform for the Corsican mob inside is kill an Arab - who might snitch on them - to ensure his own safety. This is virtually the only time we see him feeling anything, not because the man is an Arab, but because Malik is not a killer. So he does what has to be done, but then that man comes to "visit" him thereafter, to guide him, mentor him, praising God.

Though a very long movie, the shift from Malik's complete subservience to utter power in six years is almost imperceptible, his face showing very little again.

And if the implicitly Catholic mob, as represented by Niels Arestrup's obscenely brilliant prison don, are always violent towards Malik, then the Muslims offer him something that is central to their faith. Family. And I don't mean the family of man, or men, I mean his friend is dying of cancer and offers Malik his beautiful wife and child. What street urchin would say no?

So if ever there was an allegory on how Islam became radicalised, this is it. It's very scary, and very necessary.

On completely the other end of the scale is Chris Morris's scathing satire Four Lions. Note, it is not a comedy, it is a satire, which means it is there to highlight the absurdities of something. In this case it is a quartet of blithering, fundamentalist Muslims idiots with Sheffield accents.

Using all the techniques of farce and slapstick, Morris sends up some of their more ridiculous ideas, often using news-like camera zooms.

On a domestic level, when the imam comes to visit the leader of the revolutionaries, Waj (Kayvan Novak), he has to shield his eyes from seeing Waj's (very beautiful) wife, Sophia (Preeya Kalidas). The scene ends up in a suburban water-pistol fight between the married couple and their imam because he finds it repulsive to be in the same room as a woman, but otherwise he's a peaceful sort who doesn't intend blowing people up.

Sophia, however, discusses her husband's martyrdom as if they're planning a Sunday morning picnic.

Extremism takes a knock, literally, when Barry (Nigel Lindsay) suggests they should blow up a mosque so that they can radicalise and mobilise more Muslims. Waj says that is akin to hitting yourself and finally persuades Barry to do just that, giving himself a blood nose.

But always there is the reality that bombs are bombs and they can completely spoil your day and, even though Morris only half covers himself from a fatwa by showing just how stupidly dogmatic the English are as well, one wonders what Muslims would think of this film. Would they laugh as much as Westerners? It would be interesting.

On a purely formal level, this outrageous flick starts losing steam towards the end, but it has more laughs in it than most Hollywood comedies put together anyway.

And then there is the question of who has the last word. The satirist or the historian? It is quite conceivable that the latter might one day come to the disturbing conclusion that the man who almost single-handedly dragged Islam into the spotlit glare of global scrutiny, George W Bush, was also a blithering, fundamentalist idiot.

Neil Sonnekus

Going to Town

2010-10-15T12:20:00.000-07:00

Ben Affleck's directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, was a revelation. It showed maturity, courage and intelligence. It also showed that he knows how to pull a performance, in that case from his brother, Casey.

Furthermore, he had a fine understanding of how menace works, and he was competing against another contemporaneous masterpiece of menace set in Boston: Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winning The Departed.

All of that skill is still apparent in The Town, but it's kind of watered down.

This could be because he is rather self-consciously hauling his own, rather awkward tall frame through the lens, but he is still pulling those performances from others - notably Rebecca Hall as Claire, Blake Lively as a hard-done-by Krista and Jeremy Renner, fresh from his acclaimed showing in The Hurt Locker, as her brother, James.

Anyway, the titular town is Charlestown, a Boston suburb which apparently produces the most bank robbers anywhere. So it is not a very upmarket kind of place, yet Affleck (pardon the pun) goes to town with expensive aerial shots of the city and the titular suburb.

It may be a small point, but it's wrong. These people don't see life from above, they see it from down below, like Scorsese's characters. They're too busy in their cesspool of survival to have a bird, God or Trump's eye view of the whole affair.

Those are the negatives, bar one.

On the positive side there is the rather engaging relationship between Doug (Affleck) and Claire, a bank manager who is briefly taken hostage by him during a robbery (he's behind a skeleton mask) but treated humanely.

If his effort to engage her afterwards is somewhat contrived, then one does get a sense of the tentativeness of a new affair. Initially, of course, he only wants to know whether she saw anything identifiable about the thieves, since she's been questioned by the cops.

The only thing she saw of the robbers was one of their tattoos, belonging to the always dangerous James, on the back of his neck. So along he comes, in broad daylight, and joins them at an open air restaurant, the tattoo quite visible.

It's masterly. Will she she see it or not? Has he been spying on his virtual blood brother or not?

Doug's history is economically referred to and made integral to the story, and the fact that the kingpin of these parts fronts as a florist, played by the prunish Pete Postlethwaite, is another excellent touch.

Moreover, Affleck the director has a wonderfully realistic streak to him in that some of his characters actually get hit in the crossfire; if someone gets smacked over the head with a rifle's butt they actually bleed; if Jon Hamm's FBI Agent Frawley blasts a getaway car's tyres with a shotgun they actually burst.

How refreshing.

So this is not the worst or most most mediocre heist film you'll ever see, far from it, but there is a danger that it could become a cult movie in the distant future for all the wrong reasons.

A bunch of aliens might worship its hidden message that, forsooth, we only see Affleck and new "it" actor Hamm every third day of this story, for both of them sport such a designer stubble virtually all the time, and that just ain't real.

Neil Sonnekus

Soul Food

2010-10-12T13:21:00.001-07:00

It's supposed to be an oxymoron, a German comedy, even though Oscar-nominated Oliver Schmitz assures me that he makes a living in Berlin as a director of TV comedies when he isn't making serious dramas about black South Africans.

But then Soul Kitchen goes a step further and turns out to be a romantic comedy. Could this be possible? Could it possibly work? Well, yes, actually. Rather well. And the reason why it works might well be the same as why the German national football team is so much more interesting these days.

That is, it no longer consists of only Schweinsteigers, Schillers and Schumachers. Not only are there a couple of Polish names in there now, but also quite a few Turkish ones, even an African. In other words, the team is no longer purely European. The old gene pool is being given a shake-up.

Hamburg-based director Fatih Akin is of Turkish extraction - his parents were probably so-called guest labourers (Gastarbeiter) - and his leading actor and fellow scriptwriter is clearly not echt Deutsch with a Greek name like Adam Bousdoukos.

So the latter as Zinos Kazantsakis has a restaurant that sells bad food to appreciative people. The only problem is that he has a brother, Illias, who's a criminal, played by Moritz Bleibtreu, who always has that air of Fassbinderian decadence and intelligence about him.

Zinos also has a purely Aryan girlfriend, Pheline Roggan, who is as precious (but okay) as the day is long; and he has an elderly tenant, Sokrates (Demir Gokgol), who verbally abuses him and never pays the rent. Such is life.

Everything seems to go wrong when Zinos slips a disc in his back and spends the rest of the movie walking like, as Illias says about someone else, he has a carrot up his arse. It's very funny because Zinos just happens to look a lot like Jim Morrison of The Doors - in other words, a god.

That is about the only thing the title of the movie and the song by that band has in common, nor does it really deliver on its promise of being a soul music-themed movie. It's way too inclusive for that. There's everything from the stuff you'll hear in elevators to the beats you'll get in an Istanbul disco.

And just to add to the tasty stew, there is Zinos's precious chef. Birol Unel as Shayn Weiss is every millilitre the kitchen dictator, stylish fringe, camp rage and all; and who wouldn't fall for Zinos's Turkish physio, Anna (Dorka Gryllus)?

If the film is predictable in its romance and plot - Aryan property developer wants to take over by means foul - and if the device as to how Zinos wins back his restaurant after brother Illias gambles it away is utterly contrived, then it scores in the areas that count.

That is, not only is it a celebration of the new world citizen, the migrant; it is also a reminder that some of us are - or once were - young, wild, beautiful and divinely cuckoo.

Neil Sonnekus

* Not to blow our Yamaha too much, but do note that we featured an interview of new Man Booker prizewinner Howard Jacobson a week before he won that hallowed prize for The Finkler Question. Now is that sharp or is it sharp?