Films

Use any old scraps lying about the house to create an arty and stylish placemat.

By Simone Ubaldi

In rapid cuts, oblique camera angles and bleeding light, Wong Kar Wai’s Chungking Express tells the story of two lonely cops in Hong Kong’s concrete jungle with the sense of Goddard and the prescient soul of Eternal Sunshine.

Like all of his films currently screening in ACMI’s retrospective, it beguiles and delights with a combination of narrative obscurity and bullish romantic overtones, never quite in your grasp but terribly, terrifically beautiful. It is probably the most lightweight film in Wong Kar Wai’s oeuvre, but it is also one of the most accessible, and certainly the funniest.

Lonely cop 223, slumped with youthful charm by Takeshi Kaneshiro, spends his nights at the Chungking takeaway making non-committal phone calls to the family of an ex who has long since departed, while a vamped up mystery woman runs in circles around him on the trail of some missing drug mules. His sloppy innocence and her hardened isolation collide in a bar, where the cop falls in love and eventually cleans her shoes. In the second act, a misfit Chungking employee with a Mammas & The Pappas addiction falls for lonely cop 633 (played by inestimably lovely Wong Kar Wai favourite Tony Leung), whose heart has been broken by a stewardess. The awkward ingénue breaks into his apartment and insinuates herself into his life with stealthy and obsessive housekeeping, until the dispassionate cop takes the hint and falls in love.

The tired truck was able to lean against a pair of cowboys just when it needed a breather.

By Simone Ubaldi

I’m not trying to be difficult, but Brokeback Mountain is a ridiculously overhyped film that fails at every turn to evoke the intensity of feeling implied by Heath Ledger’s furrowed brow as he stammers sincerely on the red carpet.

A gay cowboy movie may be a novel concept (although you could happily argue that cowboy movies often have gay subtext, this is just the first film to slap you about the face with it) but Ang Lee’s melodrama-through-the-ages love story fails at the very things it most needs to give the whole gay cowboys gimmick credibility: it doesn’t feel passionate and it certainly doesn’t ring true.

Ledger, apparently suffering from some form of lockjaw, plays a young man from the Midwest who is paired up with a stranger (Jake Gyllenhaal) for a summer of sheep-tending on a mountain’s edge in the late 1960s. The boys fumble through a burgeoning attraction, muttering vacant cowboyisms to each other over baked beans, until one night when they are suddenly and violently overwhelmed by their big gay instincts. At summer’s end they part ways, both drifting into the kind of loveless hetero marriages that were acceptable at the time, presumably intending to forget their affair, but the bond between them is undeniable (apparently). Eventually, the cowboys fall into the habit of taking fishing trips together, braving the suspicion of their partners and fanning the flames of their love.

I didn't mention the bats. The poor bastard would see them soon enough.

Director Wayne Ewing filmed the original Gonzo journalist Hunter S Thompson over the course of sixteen years and the resulting 90 minute cinema verite portrait has proved to be The Final Record of the life of one of the 20th century’s most vital and influential iconoclasts.

Thompson’s recent death has rendered this intimate recording of his life a much more poignant and revealing portrait than it otherwise might have been, but the strength of this film lies in the director’s conviction to put something together rather than the subject’s participation.

Having spent all their gas money on stuffed koala toys, the tourists decided to sit around looking pensive.

By Simone Ubaldi

Bondi Tsunami is almost unspeakably awful. Painful, pretentious and gut-wrenchingly boring, the film is a hyperactively edited homage to high-end advertising whose flashy and soulless cinematography is nothing more than means of distracting the audience from the complete lack of authentic narrative.

It is vacuous postering, riding high on cultural references that have no contextual meaning and do not extend one second beyond the frame, and it is repugnant.

A Jeans West road movie that was “inspired by the Japanese surfing subculture in Australia” (the fucking what?), the film follows three bronzed Japanese drifters whose trip up the East coast of Australia is mapped out in photo op rest stops. Predominantly dialogue-free, the Radio Australia soundtrack is punctuated by the esoteric narrative dribble of zen pop surfer guru Shark.

Nicole Kidman displays her startlingly broad acting range.

By Simone Ubaldi

From the faultless precision of his debut, Sexy Beast, Jonathan Glazer has graduated to the sort of compelling, contentious mess of psychoanalytic cinema that film academics go wild for and the rest of us find disturbing and opaque.

Birth is the story of an upper-Westside New Yorker and a 10-year-old boy who introduces himself to her as the reincarnation of her dead husband. A small portion of the film is given over to determining if the boy is who he says he is, but eventually we understand that the truth is irrelevant, as it and we are consumed by the hypnotic powers of pain and possibility.

Neither a persuasive mystery nor a particularly affecting drama, Birth is a cold study of grief and hope taken to inhuman extremes. If there is a point to this film, it may be to illustrate how closely related these things can be, but there is more likely no point at all. Like so many of its kind, it is a blank canvas of tacit motivations, murky relationships and pregnant silences that viewers can fill with their own prejudices and presumptions. What is interesting here, as with all of these pretentious, high-art pieces, is how oddly engrossing all this beautiful nonsense can be.

A truly inspired performance from a previously unremarkable Nicole Kidman contributes mightily to the awful fascination of Birth; her wildly expressive composure giving depth to the moneyed stillness of her environment, signposting an unresolved obsession that her character must feel for her late husband, which the script avoids addressing directly. Kidman has been called engaging, but she is only so far as she is allowed to be. Like all of the characters in her cloistered Manhattan family, she is muzzled. As a result, her mysterious emotions, while clearly tearing her to pieces, engage our intellect but not our empathy.

Are you in marketing? You know what to do.

By Simone Ubaldi

Twenty years since he started screaming in America, the legacy of Bill Hicks, stand-up comedian and voice of a generation, has been distilled in a three and a half hour DVD, featuring One Night Stand, Relentless and the evangelical Revelations, plus the documentary on Hicks’ influence It’s Just A Ride.

The days of passing worn out VHS copies of Relentless around and down to the kids who hadn’t heard the Prophet of Rage are over, and with them pass the illusion that Bill Hicks’ message is timeless. Politicians still lie and non-smokers are still militant, but the comedic value of a sweaty fat man miming forcing a girl to such his cock is a little worn. Bill Hicks was brilliant, but he was a fucking pig, too.

Bill Hicks was also not the only voice of dissent in the 20th century. He borrowed his glimpse of the true America from Lenny Bruce, Hunter S. Thompson and the Beat generation; he just sucked the poetry out of it. But this is why he was loved: his bluntness and simplicity seemed more honest than poetry. Honest and uncomplicated, Hicks taught us that drugs are great, rock and roll is pure, advertising is pornography and fundamentalist Christians are ignorant. The only problem is that when you grow up, you figure out that the world is naturally complicated, and anyone who takes as blinkered a position as life according to bible of Bill Hicks is likely to be wrong about a lot of things.

Despite hours of fruitless searching, Greg was unable to find his golf ball.

By Melanie Sheridan

The Office of Film and Literature Censorship (the C used to stand for Classification) – stacked with aspiring popes and virgin mothers by our unshakeable leader – exists to inform our choices. So we are told before every movie we see.

The problem with this pithy slogan is that only children and imbeciles need guidance with regards to the choices they make; adults, on the whole, can inform their own choices without too much effort.

Now, like all self-respecting femocratic green leftie pinko Liberal-hating liberals, I dutifully get all righteously frothy whenever the OFLC infringes upon my freedom to choose what I want to see. How dare they tell me I can't make a suitably self-informed choice to see Ken Park, or Irreversible?! (Like all self-respecting femocratic green leftie pinko Liberal-hating liberals, I take each decision they make very personally.)

Thus, I was poised to do my Cujo impersonation when news came in about the classification of venerated artiste Michael Winterbottom's (24 Hour Party People, Welcome To Sarajevo, Wonderland, Jude etc) new film, 9 Songs.

But I can't. Unlike Ken Park, which was denied classification by the OFLC and therefore banned, 9 Songs has been classified; it's beengiven an X rating, so you can see it, you'll just have to do so via Canberra . Accent Films, the local distributor, are appealing this on the grounds that 9 Songs was awarded a mainstream certificate in Britain (rated R) – where it is the first sexually explicit film to do so – and because it has that nebulous quality called artistic value.

Deepa Mehta - smiling because she's impressed by Hans' brilliance?

Hans Fruck talks to Deepa Metha about dogma, despair, and death threats.

In 2000 director Deepa Mehta was filming Water in the Indian city of Varanasi when an angry mob of 2000 Hindu fundamentalists descended on the film location, burning sets and issuing death threats against Mehta and her cast. Despite this combustible environment, Mehta doggedly tried to muster support for her film. She failed. Production of Water was suspended.

Have I got something

in my teeth?

I braved a McDonald's sundae (in violation of a three-year-old pact to boycott the company responsible for the most insidious use of Satan in marketing) right before I went to see Morgan Spurlock's Super Size Me, a documentary about the aforementioned McGiant and the fast-food fattening of America (and, coincidentally, my ass).

My fudge-laden gesture was in support of a man willing to poison himself in pursuit of compelling evidence: Spurlock, a jackass for justice, spent 30 days eating nothing - and I mean nothing - but McDonald's in an attempt to understand how the US became the most overweight country in the world. Thanks to his novel approach, Super Size Me is not about pointing the finger so much as swallowing the truth.