Only a week ago I listened to two older teenage girls lamenting the taste of 12 year-olds. “They’ve never even heard of S Club 7,” says one, “or the Spice Girls!” “Ohmygod” says the other with disgust. “They probably, like, only listen to Hannah Montana!” And if you’ve neither seen nor heard of the Disney Channel phenomenon, you now have the chance to catch up with the concept and the girl herself on the big screen –it’s a seductively charming outing, bound to please young fans and win a few grown-up hearts as well. (more…)
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Over the last twenty years, film adaptations of Booker prize winning novels have been few and far between, and rarely a success (The English Patient is the great exception). It’s been ten years since J.M. Coetzee wrote his masterpiece Disgrace – voted the greatest novel of the last 25 years by a collection of English luminaries in 2006 - and the world’s greatest filmmakers never rushed to bring it to the screen. It’s the complex, subtle and sometimes disturbing story of David Lurie, a bored, divorced, middle-aged academic who is shamed after an affair with a student at his South African university. (more…)
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After some indulgent side trips (Grindhouse, Deathproof), Quentin Tarantino is back to form with this World War II fantasy fiasco. It’s mad, it’s bad and it’s thoroughly entertaining, with some of the most disciplined storytelling Tarantino has produced – even though it’s still nearly three hours long (152 minutes at The 2009 Cannes Film Festival) – taking him one step in the direction of the Coen Brothers style of black humour. (more…)
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When film editor Anthony Buckley saw the first batch of footage for Wake In Fright, he knew he was looking at something very special. It was of a professional kangaroo cull that had been shot by cinematographer John Maclean. “It was beautifully photographed,” says Buckley, recalling the moment back in 1970, “and it was all shot well before any of the actors involved in the film had started work so that we could work out how to stage what the actors had to do to match the action. I edited the two parts together – the professional kangaroo shoot and the actors pretending to shoot them - to create the final sequence.” (more…)
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If you can cast your memory back to the good ol’ days of 1970’s trash television, you might remember such titles as H.R. Pufnstuf, The Donny & Marie Show and perhaps even Land of The Lost – a sci-fi adventure series about a family who are sucked down a huge waterfall into an alternative world. These were all products of wacky TV producing brothers, Sid and Marty Krofft, and Land of The Lost was successful enough (in a B-grade sci-fi kind of way) to be revived in the 1990’s. It’s now been brought to the big screen – updated with the latest special effects, animated monsters and Will Ferrell. (more…)
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This is a delicate and naïve piece of French confection – part love story, part morality tale, and part bedroom farce – all very much in the style of writer-director-actor Emmanuel Mouret – a kind of comatose Woody Allen character, who had considerable international success with Change of Address in 2006. (more…)
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Coming of age films are a dime a dozen, but you’d be hard pressed to find one that gets it quite a right as Greg Mottola does in his semi-autobiographical film Adventureland. Having just graduated college, James (Jesse Eisenberg) has his life mapped out, beginning with a summer backpacking around Europe, then a degree in journalism from Columbia to prepare him for a career writing travel prose that, Dickens or Orwell, unearths the world of the downtrodden classes. (more…)
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With a name like Lesbian Vampire Killers, you imagine this film is going to go one of two ways – either a Sapphic Van Helsing who kills heterosexually identifying vampires, Lesbian Vampire-Killers, or about people who kill gay vampires, Lesbian-Vampire Killers. This is the later. These aren’t your Tarago-driving, Folk Festival ticket holding lesbians, however. These are the mythic lesbians as imagined by FHM-reading blokes, lesbians who can’t go on a night of blood-sucking evil without dressing up like they’re starring in a Samantha Fox film clip in frilly French knickers, no tops and a full face of make-up. (more…)
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John Hamburg made a career of writing and directing truly mediocre comedies (Along came Polly, Meet the Parents) but he successfully punches above his weight with the classy, heart-warming I love you man. Peter Klaven (Paul Rudd) is a real estate agent with aspirations to move into property development though perhaps lacking in the self-esteem to bring his dreams to fruition. When he proposes to Zooey (Rashida Jones), she calls her closest hundred or so friends to share the happy news, and Peter realises that having put effort into his work or his girlfriends over the years, he let his male friendships fall by the wayside, and he doesn’t have even one close male friend he might want to tell, much less to ask to be his best man. (more…)
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The contemporary media like to paint a picture of terrorists as ‘other’, a picture designed to make us feel safer in our middle class suburban homes. These others are somehow different from us. In the comfort of middle-class Germany in the late 1960s, a terrorist organisation sprang up from the suburbs, its army the educated children of the middle classes. Uli Edel’s uncompromising film examines how this was possible. Beginning with newsreel and television clips that place us in the era – grim footage being fed back from Vietnam, the assassinations of Robert Kennedy and Malcolm X, Edel evokes the spirit of the age. (more…)
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