Yep, Its Father Geek here in the scorching heat of the central Texas summer posting another report from that world of evolutionary oddities, and time anomalies, the world past hope and fear where winter is in full bloom. Yes, fellow geeks its time for another weekend edition of AICN's weekly movie-news column, The Downunder Report, and our sometimes intrepid reporter/editor Latauro's somewhat twisted attempts at something approaching mainstream humor...
Somehow "I told you so" just doesn't quite say it.
AICN-DOWNUNDER
AICN-DOWNUNDER
No, I have not been to anything at MIFF this year. I was going to try to hide the fact, but screw it: I've not been. Why? It's partly a time thing. But also, the majority of the films I was going to move Heaven and Earth to get to are going to be on general release soon, so I'm going to attempt to catch the ones that aren't. I say again: attempt. My success, or lack thereof, will be apparent in the coming weeks' reviews. In the meantime...
NEWS
Russell Crowe is taking on the lead role in the adaptation of Murray Bail's novel "Eucalyptus", to be directed by Jocelyn Moorehouse (HOW TO MAKE AN AMERICAN QUILT, A THOUSAND ACRES). The story takes place in New South Wales, where a widower's daughter falls in love with a New Zealand man who tells her a different story to correspond with each eucalyptus tree on her father's property. Moorehouse previously directed Crowe in the 1991 Australian film PROOF, alongside Hugo Weaving.
Oh, joy. The World Wrestling Entertainment group's film offset WWE films have now set up shop at Warner Roadshow Studios. This comes alongside the news that two WWE films - THE MARINE and EYE SCREAM MAN - will lens in Queensland. Which wrestling stars will headline the features? Only my buddy Luke really cares...
FAHRENHEIT 9/11 has beaten records held by previous documentaries SUPERSIZE ME, BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE, and, um, THE REAL CANCUN. Not a bad effort given the film doesn't come out until next week. Yes, the first of two preview weekends managed to smash records with an average of $12 000 per screen. And in some cases, more people are getting turned away from sold-out screenings than are actually in the cinemas themselves. Look for my completely not-at-all-redundant-even-at-this-stage review in coming weeks.
AWARDS AND FESTIVALS
2004 AUSTRALIAN FILM INSTITUTE AWARDS
A paltry ten Australian feature films have been entered to this year's AFI awards: A COLD SUMMER, LOVE'S BROTHER, ONE PERFECT DAY, SOMERSAULT, THE FINISHED PEOPLE, THE HONOURABLE WALLY NORMAN, THE OLD MAN WHO READ LOVE STORIES, THUNDERSTRUCK, TOM WHITE and UNDER THE RADAR, which comes out next week. The awards will be broadcast on October 29.
BOX OFFICE
Bruckheimer's epic took the top spot without much competition. Newcomer STEPFORD WIVES debuted in fourth spot despite its wide release, with FAHRENHEIT 9/11 taking sixth spot two weeks before its release. Documentary TOUCHING THE VOID came in at ninth spot; impressive given the number of screens it's playing on.
So the big money winners are...
- 1. KING ARTHUR
- 2. SPIDER-MAN 2
- 3. SHREK 2
- 4. THE STEPFORD WIVES
- 5. HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN
RELEASED THIS WEEK
Czech director Vladimir Michalek sells out and makes a comedy-drama about an elderly man battling his decrepit body, Alex Proyas gets some Big Asimovvy Style, and James Bond marries Maude Lebowski.
Annnnd once again here are the new releases down here...
- AUTUMN SPRING
- I, ROBOT
- LAWS OF ATTRACTION
REVIEWS
I was chatting with occasional AICN-D contributor blair_271 recently, and he mentioned he was thinking about going to see THE CREMASTER CYCLE, playing in its entirety at the Astor Theatre in Melbourne. "Excellent," I said, "would you consider doing a review for me?" "Sure," he replied, "no problem." Then added: "Do you want to come?" "Nah," I said, "it looks like shite." CREMASTER CYCLE is a collection of five art films by Matthew Barney, running for roughly ten hours all up. So was it good? Was it worth it? Is Barney the next Stan Brackage, or were Latauro's instincts right? Below is blair's review, followed by my own look at some recent releases.
THE CREMASTER CYCLE
Reviewed by blair_271
Before I start, I'd like to clarify one thing: I am not a film critic. I am not a film theorist or academic or even student. Sure, I could spend pages rabbitting on about the binary opposition present in the socio-political dichotomy of the central character that reflects films' core theme that is the biorhythmic cycle of homogeny through dysphoria and finally symbiotic bi-polarity, but it really wouldn't amount to much. I would therefore like you to consider this as less of a "review" and more of a "response".
For anyone considering seeing Matthew Barney's Meisterwerk THE CREMASTER CYCLE, there are two things I feel I should inform you of before you make your decision.
1) Matthew Barney is not a filmmaker. He is an artist and makes work across many media, one of which is Cinema.
2) THE CREMASTER CYCLE is not strictly a film or a collection of films. Whilst five of the pieces are cinematic, the cycle also includes photography, sculpture and installation works.
This differentiation does not serve to categorize the work or invalidate it in anyway. I am mentioning this because in order to get the full effect of THE CREMASTER CYCLE, you need to be well prepared, researched and have a clear understanding of just what you are getting yourself into. My experience of CREMASTER went as follows:
I spend the day before doing some research, trying to get into the right headspace to survive what I am all but certain will be a five and a half hour struggle to stay awake. I walk that thin line between knowing enough so that I could find and hold on to some thin shred of narrative and knowing too much so as to spoil the rare moments where the film might take a sudden, intriguing twist. I walk to the cinema. I buy my ticket. I sit down in a seat that I know would become a medieval torture device after a few hours and hope to God that somehow I will get through this with only a mild headache.
The final piece, CREMASTER FIVE, concludes. The house lights go up and I leave the cinema. I walk down the road breathing the air and all I can think is "Thank Christ that's over". Sure, I had some fun times, and there were moments when I thought "maybe there is some sort of glorious cohesive story and in a few scenes, he's going to reveal it - SHAWSHANK REDEMPTION-style". But no such luck.
It's about ten or fifteen minutes after leaving the cinema that it sets in. I realize something - I survived THE CREMASTER CYCLE. Like some compulsory high school camping trip where you spent every moment wishing it were over and now that it is, you're not happy about it at all.
It gets worse. Soon, things I remember hating and thinking were utterly insufferable become fascinating. I wanted more. I want to go see CREMASTERS 6, 7, 8, 9 and 10. I want to buy the book, play the computer game. I wonder if Criterion will do the DVD. I thought I was just watching some weird plotless Art-Film, some exercise in pretension that padded twenty minutes of interesting story with five hours of conceptual hot air. How wrong I was.
I start sifting through the pieces to find everything you missed. Were those cars driving around in the lobby of the Chrysler building really just randomly smashing into things, or was there some sort of pattern in the way they moved; what kind of strange symbols would their tires map out
This goes on for days. When I came out, it was simply something that needed to be done. Now it was looking at overtaking SPIDER-MAN 2 as the best film I'd seen all year*.
I try to keep some perspective. I feel you owed it to myself when I was sitting through CREMASTER 4 watching the Longhorn Candidate crawl through miles of white plastic tunnels filled with Vaseline and hoping my left leg would wake up before my right one fell asleep again.
This is silly. I mean, sure, time changes things. I remember walking out of LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMENT thinking "Yeah, it was good for a laugh", and within three days I found I would periodically burst out laughing when I was reminded that someone had gone to the trouble of making that festering pile cat vomit.
Now, nearly a week later, I have managed to narrow down the cause of this effect to one three possible factors.
a) Subliminal messages.
b) MDMA
c) That in some horribly conceited way, the film changed me, and that the new me likes the film a lot more than the old me.
Geez. Why don't I just end it right here with the epitaph: "I never was the same after that summer"?
All that being said, I'm still of two minds as whether or not to recommend it. This is Art-Cinema at its purest - it makes ERASERHEAD look like SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE, and not everyone liked ERASERHEAD or SLEEPLESS IN SEATTLE. As much as Matthew Barney would like you to think that each film tells a story, complete with character arcs, subplots and a three-act structure, he is simply lying. The various myths and tales THE CREMASTER CYCLE clings to merely serve as the bread in this sandwich, and serve no real purpose outside of simply trying to convince the viewer that they exist. But this is not necessarily a bad thing. Dogme 95 managed to convince plenty of people that production values were irrelevant and ultimately detracted from the quality of the film. Perhaps Barney is simply doing for script and narrative what Lars Von Trier did for cinematography and production design.
Unfortunately, it's one of those things where there's no way of knowing what you're going to think of it. And even after you've seen it, there's no guarantee you're going to feel the same way about it tomorrow. Who knows, this could merely be the result of some temporary euphoria brought on by opiates in the popcorn.
If you're an artist with a high tolerance for the avant-garde then, you never know, it might blow your mind. But if you just can't do without those tiresome clichés like plot, dialogue or cause and effect, then think twice before committing to THE CREMASTER CYCLE.
* No way, Sam Raimi is God.
KING ARTHUR
Reviewed by Latauro
I think that, like most critics, I was looking forward to lambasting the supposed "true" nature of the film, really stick it to Bruckheimer and his "historical accuracy". And I'm sort-of going to do that, but not to the extent I'd planned. See, I'm not a historian. I do know that one of the many inspirations for the legend of King Arthur came from around 500AD. I know that there is evidence to suggest that women from that area and that part of the world may well have gone into battle semi-nude and painted blue.
But you know what else I know? That if you're going to use the tagline "The True Story That Inspired The Legend", you need to do better than this. You can't take some basic facts that, as the eagre and preemptive title cards tell us, "historians all agree on" and then add the Bruckheimer Brand Hollywood Gloss. This is faux grit, a shiny surface sprayed with a thin layer of synthetic dirt. Instead of seeing an even vaguely realistic depiction of violence, we get a character shooting an arrow an impossibly long distance so it lodges itself in the chest of a betraying character (who, by the way, Arthur and his knights seemed to have no knowledge of until it was time to kill him in an horrific attempt at an "amusing and deserved death"). Instead of rounded Saxon characters, we get a father-and-son duet of villains, each more evil than the other. See, the son wants his men to rape all the women. The father says they can't pollute their precious genes by impregnating the locals, and orders that the woman he just saved be killed. From the moment we meet them, we know that Arthur will kill the Big Bad in battle, whereas the second-tier villain will be slayed by Lancelot. It's so depressingly by-the-numbers, you feel sorry for the poor saps who are going to watch it and believe this is what genuinely happened.
Okay, rant over.
What is it like as a film?
Well, it blows. In aiming for historical accuracy (and, for my money, failing pretty miserably at that), they've stripped away everything interesting about the story. Why does it have to be so "real"? Did they look at the script they had and think, "Yes, this is much better than wizards and medieval England"?. They try to shoe-horn in an implied love triangle between Arthur-Guinevere-Lancelot, but it fails. Lancelot looks at Guinevere longingly, then looks away. This is before Lancelot realises there's an Arthur-Guinevere thing going on. Hell, this is before Arthur has shown an interest in her. It creates zero conflict, and is not only unnecessary, but question-raising: If this is the story that inspired the legend, are you telling me that the whole love triangle story came from a brief glance that no one was around to see? How do we know that nothing happens after the end of the film? Because one of the characters dies.
Sorry, I'll stop talking about its supposed basis in fact. After all, there's so much else to trash. Like the battle scenes. With the exception of the battle-on-ice, which is handled nicely, this is the most boringly-directed film I've seen in a long while. Antoine Fuqua seems to have no idea what he's doing there, other than making a Bruckheimer Summer Tent Pole Release. The big final battle is easily the most tedious battle scene I've ever witnessed, with little-to-no continuity and a design so lame it's sleep-inducing. But then, Fuqua is a respected director of actors, no? He helmed Denzel to an Oscar win, didn't he? Well, either Fuqua had nothing to do with that or he had nothing to work with here, because the acting is bad beyond description.
The man who would be Bond (if the fan community had anything to do with it, and in this instance let's be glad it doesn't), Clive Owen, gives such a bored AND boring performance, I wondered why he didn't just up and leave for Rome straight away. This is not a "classic hard man". Robert Mitchum never looked bored, he was nonchalant. Casual, but never disengaged. Clive Owen delivers lines like he's reading them off a cue-card. Keira Knightly, good in other films, has nothing to work with here. Ioan Gruffudd, entertaining in HORNBLOWER, is so ridiculously miscast you have to wonder why Fuqua thought that "the moment he walked in the door, we knew we'd found our Lancelot". Why? He's just a pretty boy in this, and gives no weight to the role. He gives no example of why he's one of the most renowned knights in the world. He just hangs around, hits a few people with his sword, and then dies. Oops, gave it away. My bad.
Clearly, what's really to blame is the script. A script with archaic, anachronistic dialogue that obviously comes from Microsoft ScriptWriter's Historical Epic patch. Where we keep hearing jokes about how the knights fathered each others' children. About how big their penises are. I don't care, make as many penis jokes as you want, just make them funny! Don't rest on the idea that everyone was so uptight in the past, but listen to these guys talk about their dicks! It's a lame script, that predictably resorts to the oh-so-tired pre-battle rousing speech. "Let history remember that we fought as free men!" TROY, move over, we have a new winner.
The cinematography is nice, but not nice enough to warrant seeing it again. Or even for the first time. A tragic misfire that wants to have its cake and eat it to, but instead drops it in the gutter and ends up with nothing.
OWNING MAHONEY
Reviewed by Latauro
Ah, Philip Seymour Hoffman. The man who always plays the most interesting supporting character (Phil Parma in MAGNOLIA, George Willis Junior in SCENT OF A WOMAN, Lester Bangs in ALMOST FAMOUS) finally takes on a lead role. He plays Dan Mahoney, a bank manager with a severe gambling problem, who steals phenomenal amounts of money in order to support his habit. And, straight off the bat, that's the ballsiest thing about this film. It would have been a lot easier to turn his girlfriend into the main character, cast Gwyneth Paltrow, and show Mahoney's obsession through the eyes of someone who doesn't suffer from it. But then we wouldn't understand, we'd be quicker to judge. The way this film is constructed, we are forced to see everything through Mahoney's eyes, and his desire to gamble becomes our desire. We want to see him gamble, we want to see him win. After all, early on in the film his only other option is he gets caught and goes to jail.
The direction by Richard Kwietniowski (LOVE AND DEATH ON LONG ISLAND) looks like he really want it to be a kitchen sink drama. Like he wants to emulate p.t. anderson and Martin Scorsese, but wants it bleaker. It's only at the tail end of the second act that his style breaks through and suddenly we're watching a skillfully-constructed work. The film goes from very good to excellent, and it's tremendously engaging. I've not seen any other films by Kwietniowski, but I'm interested to see which of these two directors he more frequently inhabits. The first is good, the second is fascinating.
But ultimately, it's an actors' film. Hoffman gives the performance you'd expect: flawed, physically unappealing, nuanced, understated. It's his most understated to date. There are shots where he doesn't move at all, there's not even a slight flicker in his countenance, and yet you're blown away by the power of his performance. There's still something there. There's always something there, even if we don't see where it's coming from. Minnie Driver, so maligned, starts off well but still seems uncomfortable in the role. Towards the end, she settles into it, looking more comfortable in her performance whilst her character seems more uncomfortable in her own life. John Hurt channels J. K. Simmons from SPIDER-MAN, as well as Robert Mitchum in DEAD MAN (which Hurt also starred in). It's an enjoyable performance, but somehow out-of-place, too cartooney.
This film, which came out Stateside over a year ago, is superb in its single-mindedness. It's all about Mahoney and his gambling problem, it doesn't try to fill the void with sub-plots or his romantic life. His relationship with his girlfriend is a central part to the story, but it's not tacked on... it's only relevant in its relation to his gambling problem. It's a film that's worth seeing, particularly if you want to see an actor of Hoffman's talent at the height of his game.
I, ROBOT
Reviewed by Latauro
The following list contains some of the problems I had with this film:
- Will Smith, in one of the most inappropriate pieces of casting in recent history, takes a role that should have been given Deckard-like weight and instead gives us Big Willy Style, replete with out-of-place humour.
- The nonsensical plot, which contrives an elaborate mystery that is not only unengaging, but also hole-filled.
- The racism subtext, which Alex Proyas was joyfully describing in a recent interview. He liked the idea of a black man as the character with the prejudice. That's fine, but if you think about it for more than ten seconds, you realise that HE TURNS OUT TO BE RIGHT. If the subtext is racism, then shouldn't Detective Spooner discover that there is no massive conspiracy by the robot race? If the subtext is racism, then the message is that more people should be wary of those different to us.
- Alex Proyas, who made the phenomenal THE CROW and, my personal favourite, DARK CITY. Everything that worked in those films didn't work here. His spot-on casting, and subsequently, his spot-on characterisation is out the window in I, ROBOT.
- Chi McBride's head, which is a funny shape. I missed the dialogue in every close up he had.
- The vision of the future. This idea that in thirty years, we will have parking garages such as the ones we saw, and that everything will be sparkling clean and chrome. Personally, I'm more taken by the futuristic visions in BLADE RUNNER, ALIEN, ALIENS, 2001, and the Soderbergh version of SOLARIS.
- The overall message of the film. What was it? Anyone? At one point, it seems to be that we should stop trying to create life in machines, and they should be simple beings that do our bidding. At other times, it's that we need to recognise them as our equals. Or that power corrupts absolutely. The message was as muddled as the plot.
- That "last thing that Dr Lanning asked Sonny to do". Why, exactly? No motive. Just a random mystery with a random explanation.
- The fact that it was called I, ROBOT. I know Asimov's work hasn't been butt-shagged as badly as a lot of Philip K. Dick's stuff, but surely if you're going to change this much, go back to calling it HARDWIRED, yeah?
- Sonny's dream. Er, why were we told it meant one thing only to find out it meant another? Was the end a setup for the sequel? Do the filmmakers understand what the dream was about?
- The tired device of a supporting character (in this case, Spooner's grandmother) saying some randomly tenuous comment (the bread crumbs) and the main character (Spooner) declaring the genius of the supporting character ("You're a genius!"), and having it lead to the clues that solve the mystery. Made worse is the fact that the clues made no sense, and the mystery was, as I stated above, unengaging and hole-ridden.
- The most ridiculous and laughable piece of product placement in any film, ever. More blatant than the Dr Evil's Starbucks, and worked into the plot with less believability.
- Seriously, Will Smith was really miscast.
What did I like?
I can't think of anything. I mean, there were moments that I liked, but I can't think of them off-hand. I'm struggling to find a scene or moment that got me excited above "Well, that didn't suck too much". I mean, it's fairly inoffensive, and I certainly enjoyed it more than KING ARTHUR, but I'm not going to meet the film halfway. A film is either good or it isn't, and this one isn't.
NEXT WEEK
- Timothy Hutton to play an ordinary man who unexpectedly becomes the new Pope, in Robert Redford's comedy sequel ORDINARY PAPAL
- King Arthur (Clive Owen) teams up with Robin Hood (Ashton Kutcher) and Jesus Christ (Halle Berry) to take on the cousin of Stellan Skarsgard's character from the first film (played by Jeremy Irons) in the historically-accurate KING ARTHUR WITH A VENGEANCE
- Adam Goldberg plays a Rabbi who believes that robots are taking over the world in OY, ROBOT, which he will film directly after wrapping up work on musical GOYS AND DOLLS
