CURNBLOG ARCHIVES

Month: August 2012

  • The Fortune: A lost classic

    The Fortune: A lost classic

    Last night I continued my movie marathon at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) with The Fortune (1975), a lost comedy classic from the legendary Mike Nichols. Nichols is one of those truly rare auteurs who have managed to produce consistently brilliant films throughout their career. With a body of work that includes The Graduate (1967), Catch 22 (1970), Primary Colors (1998) and Closer (2004), my expectations of this one were very high. Fortunately, I wasn’t disappointed.

    The Fortune follows two hustlers during the 1920s (Jack Nicholson & Warren Beatty) as they fight over the affections and fortune of a woman (Stockard Channing) that has become embroiled in their endless schemes. Giving away any more than this would spoil the fun – it’s the increasingly outrageous behaviour of these three characters that really makes the film – but it’s the pitch perfect tone that elevates it to truly classic status.

    Nichols knowingly invokes the comedic genius of the silent comedy greats. Structurally, it takes the form of a series of vignettes, most based largely on physical comedy akin to that found in the work of Charlie Chaplin. As the narrative becomes increasingly dark, and the characters begin to make decisions that would have been thought unthinkable at the beginning of the film, it is this bubbly physical element that enables the film to maintain a light comedic tone. It’s impossible to take the movie TOO seriously when it features moments like the one in which Nicholson happily elects to climb on to the wing of a flying plane in order to impress the woman inside.

    Channing delivers a fine performance as the woman at the centre of the chaos, but the movie definitely belongs to the predictably brilliant Nicholson and Beatty. Beatty’s babbling alpha-male is unforgettable, as is Nicholson’s unusual turn as his weak and feeble-minded companion.

    Definitely worth searching for a copy of this one… if you can find it. A disastrous box-office result sealed its fate as a rarely seen gem.

  • The Sapphires: Australia’s answer to The Supremes

    The Sapphires: Australia’s answer to The Supremes

    Last Thursday I had the good fortune to attend the Australian red carpet premiere of the new Australian film, The Sapphires, at the opening night gala of the Melbourne International Film Festival. Aside from minor damage done to my liver at the after party (hence the delay in blogging the event), it was a fantastic night and I was pleasantly surprised by the quality of the film.

    The Sapphires, which screened at this year’s Cannes Film Festival to a ten-minute standing ovation, is the first feature from aboriginal director, Wayne Blaire. The film is based on the true story of four aboriginal sisters (Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Miranda Tapsell, Shari Sebbens) who form a soul group in the 1960s to entertain US troops in Vietnam. Managed by Dave (Chris O’Dowd), a charismatic and drunken Irishman, the group escape the restrictions that race places on them in 1960s Australia to become hugely popular with African American troops in Vietnam.

    Based on my experiences of the last Australian musical feature I had seen, Bran Nue Dae (also about racism in 1960s Oz), I had expected this film to be poorly written, acted and directed. I wasn’t totally off the mark – the acting in The Sapphires is merely adequate (Mailman and O’Dowd are exceptions); the directing tends to lack creative flair; and it is impossible to ignore the fact that the plot lacks tension of any kind (every time a dramatic problem arises, it is immediately resolved in the subsequent scene, thereby negating the movie’s narrative force). However, The Sapphires generates enough positivity and goodwill around its central characters that these problems seem to dissipate into nothingness while watching the film.

    As The Sapphires sing their way through the film, rattling off a huge number of classic soul hits, it is impossible to find time to be bored. This is in part due to a brief running time (which I do not believe is the 104 minutes indicated on IMDB) and the incredible comedic performance delivered by O’Dowd. O’Dowd, best known for his work in Bridesmaids and The IT Crowd carries the film with impeccable comic timing and expert delivery. Indeed, whenever O’Dowd is not on screen it becomes patently obvious that the film begins to sag under its own weight. Thankfully, such moments are relatively brief.

    Of course, one of the reasons that this film is generating as much of a positive response as it is, is the fact that the script deals with the disenfranchisement of aboriginal people in Australia in a manner that addresses the problems of the past while also providing a message of hope for the future. This is particularly important in Australia obviously, where the anger and resentments over past mistakes (and their ongoing consequences) are still patently obvious. Many recent and frequently incredible films have presented a more severe, angry and horrifying vision of the aboriginal experience in Australian history (The Proposition, The Tracker, Rabbit-Proof Fence, Samson and Delilah). Perhaps The Sapphires can be viewed as a response to these narratives, one that enables aboriginal people to begin to reclaim what was long ago taken from them.

    While I suspect that the positivity that this film radiates might have been at least partly drawn from the energy of an enthusiastic crowd on opening night – filled with Australian and international celebrities (including the majority of the cast), politicians, and people excited by what the film symbolises more than by the film itself – for the moment I’ll say that The Sapphires was a great way to start my filmic marathon at the Melbourne International Film Festival.

  • Pixelschatten: A man with a movie camera

    Pixelschatten: A man with a movie camera

    There is a long-standing tradition in cinema for filmmaker’s to produce films that address their own mode of production. Since Dziga Vertov turned the camera on itself with Man with a Movie Camera (1929), we’ve revelled in the playful irony that the moving image allowed. This tendency becomes more pronounced with every filmic technological innovation, from the first movie camera to the webcam.

    Unfortunately, most of these films have tended towards exploitation. It was in 1980 that the Italians produced the first found footage film, Cannibal Holocaust, which detailed the rather horrific misfortunes of an amoral film crew that bump into a tribe of cannibals in the Amazon. This morally reprehensible and all too realistic abomination (which led to the director being mistakenly arrested for murder at the premiere) paved the way for a range of imitators. Years later, with the production of portable video cameras, The Blair Witch Project (1999) followed a similar narrative (albeit more tastefully), as three documentary filmmakers are hunted down by the apparition of a long-deceased witch. The tradition continued as cameras became smaller and cheaper with movies like Cloverfield (2008), Diary of the Dead (2007) and a host of other “found footage” films.

    Recently, as social media has grown to gargantuan proportions and with video cameras now available in every single phone, our relationship with the moving image has become far more intimate than ever before. No doubt there are many horror films that have already embraced this new technology, and certainly recent movies like The Social Network have begun to interrogate the medium, but recently I had the good fortune to view a small independent German film that elected to utilise contemporary social media in a far more interesting and authentic way – Pixelschatten.

    Pixelschatten follows Pixel, a kind of minor celebrity in his hometown, where his blog has earned him a certain amount of notoriety. As the film commences (the film is made entirely from footage found on the blog and the viewer comments that follow), Pixel’s popularity is waning, and many are beginning to tire of his need to post the most intimate details of their lives on his blog. In response, Pixel seems to become more aggressive in his approach, crossing moral and possibly legal boundaries in his attempts to maintain what he perceives to be his artistic integrity.

    Of course, what makes the film interesting is that Pixel’s notion of artistic integrity begins to directly conflict with social etiquette and common decency. What is it about Pixel’s blog that allows him to sit outside of his own world and make decisions that he would not make within it? And how is it that Pixel’s attempts to document reality have led to his alienation from it?

    In a world overrun by rather tired formulae, it’s great to see young filmmakers taking such an innovative approach to the representation of the world of social media while still achieving a relatively commercial style. Pixelschatten is an excellent look at the attraction of social media, the dangers it represents, and the problematic nature of attempting to represent ‘the truth’ in one’s art, whatever that might mean.

    For more info I’d recommend checking out the film’s website, http://www.pixelschatten.com/ or even contacting the filmmakers on Twitter at @ourlifeisonline.