The day after Au Contraire! a group of us went to the Weta Cave. It was very cool, and it was great to see the actual weapons and armour used in the various movies that Weta has worked on. We were also privileged enough to get to chat with the guy who designed and made Dr. Grordborts Infallible Aether Oscillators. You can check out a few photos of our trip here.
Goemon is one strange movie. It is a huge rambling high-energy big-budget feudal Japan ninja/war movie. The movie starts out as one type of movie, but turns into another type. At first I enjoyed it hugely – with the extraordinary CGI scenery and cityscapes, and the exciting ninja hijinks. This first part reminded me strongly of Zorro and Robin Hood, with the same ‘steal from the rich and give to the poor’ ethos. And in fact I discovered when I got home that Goemon is indeed the Japanese version of this legend, and it is considered the man himself really did exist.
Towards the end of the ninja part of the story, the movie began to lose me, because the ninja acrobatics went from only just beyond what a human could actually achieve, to way, way, way over the top. By the end of this sequence the principals were to all intents and purposes flying, which cut the strings holding up my willing suspension of disbelief, and made me wonder why the hero bothered with walking and horses and stuff when he could just fly everywhere. Another downside of this section was the CGI: for all the money this movie has behind it, they didn’t quite have enough to do the flying ninja scenes convincingly.
Several times you think the movie is drawing to a close only to find it suddenly opening up again into a different but related story. What starts as a small story about ninjas turns into a huge story about clashing warlords. The main theme in this section is, “Will the terrible fighting ever stop? Each warlord deposes the last claiming to want to bring peace to the land, but all that happens is that the fighting begins anew.” This anti-war rhetoric is framed (of course) by savage stylized battles between vast armies. The soldiers of the two opposing armies – facing each other across a nearly featureless plain – are almost caricatures: one army is dressed in black, with the soldiers looking almost like orcs. The other army is dressed in white, with the soldiers looking almost like stormtroopers. And the hero (in red) tries to bring peace by killing everyone.
A strange movie, but great fun.
In 1954 in Christchurch two fifteen year-old girls, Juliet Hulme and Pauline Parker, murdered Parker’s mother. After some five years in jail the women were released and both left New Zealand. Their assumed identities were a mystery until, quite recently, Anne Perry (a successful crime novelist) was revealed to be Juliet Hulme. Anne Perry – Interiors is a documentary portraying the daily life of Perry/Hulme, now in her seventies.
The movie theatre was near full, which I guess is to be expected given the local connection. The audience was predominately elderly too, and I couldn’t help wondering if perhaps someone in the audience actually knew Parker&Hulme at the time of the murder…
It was a fascinating glimpse into her life. It was part fly-on-the-wall doco, part one-sided conversation with Perry and members of her small but devoted entourage. This devotion perhaps attains worrying proportions in the form of Meg, Perry’s one friend. Meg, who lives just across the lane from Perry, said that she couldn’t move on until she had made Perry happy. Although the similarities weren’t pointed out, it was easy to see an echo of Pauline Parker’s devotion to Juliet Hulme in Meg’s devotion to Perry. Perry/Hulme is clearly a woman who arouses fierce loyalties in those around her.
Perry spends her days in her gorgeous rambling stone farmhouse in the barren Scottish countryside, working on her novels, being looked after by her brother (acting as her secretary), typist, gardener, driver/odd-jobs man, and two or three dogs. It was interesting to see her work process: she does all her writing sitting in an old leather reclining chair, writing by hand on a pad resting on a book resting on a giant cushion resting on her lap. She gives the hand-written pages to her typist, who types them up on a computer in the wonderful loft/study – a long thin room with steeply-sloping wall/ceilings that are interrupted regularly by skylights. The typist frequently has trouble reading Perry’s handwriting. (“I’ve gotten used to it, but sometimes I can’t make out a word. And sometimes Anne can’t either.”)
Despite her devoted and doting entourage, the film imparts a sense that Perry is very much alone. This seems to be deliberate on the part of the doco makers, as there are lots of shots from outside the house showing Perry inside in a room alone, and long shots of her walking alone along country lanes.
Most of the doco is about her life now, with only occasional veiled references to “that thing that happened”. Right at the end Perry talks a little about the murder, claiming that she was convinced that Parker would kill herself if they didn’t perform the murder, and that she knew it was wrong but felt she had no choice. Whether this was true or an after-the-fact rationalization I couldn’t decide.
A Single Man is a very stylish movie about a middle-aged gay man in 1962 who struggles to deal with the death of his lover. Although stylish, I found the movie very dull. I could admire the artistry of the film and the excellence of the acting, and the 60s is such an endlessly fascinating era so it was interesting to see the houses and the cars and the fashion and the attitudes and – particularly – the incessant smoking, but the story itself left me cold.
The World Cinema Showcase has rolled around once again, and brings with it a couple of movies I’m dead keen to see. I plan to see five in total this year. First up: Cairo Time.
Cairo Time is a lovely, gentle love story about two people meeting for the first time and spending time together in Cairo. It’s a great demonstration of the difference between Film Festival and Mainstream movies. It is very, very slow, with long static shots of not very much, and it tells nearly the simplest story possible. It’s enchanting. All the footage of life in Cairo made me feel really nostalgic: I want to go back! A great start to the festival.
I watched Forbidden Planet, a seminal 1956 Science Fiction movie, with Helen&Andrew a couple of nights ago. I was appalled.
Now, don’t get me wrong: it’s a decent movie that has stood the test of time remarkably well. But therein lies the problem. It seems that many of Science Fiction’s standard tropes were already in place and fully-formed, way back in 1956. Starships? Check. Hyperspace? Check. Blasters? Check. Force-fields? Check. Personal communicators? Check. Hot chicks in skimpy outfits? Check. Robots? Check. Long-vanished civilizations? Check. Self-repairing alien machines still running after “two thousand centuries”? Check. Scientific hubris? Check. It was all there. In 1956.
The special effects were noticably inferior to today’s movies of course, but even then they weren’t as lame as I was expecting. The only other really jarring thing I noticed was the fact that the crew of the starship was all male. If you took Forbidden Planet, smartened up the special effects and the ham acting, de-greased the hairstyles and addressed the gender imbalance you’d have a modern SF blockbuster.
I like to think of SF as the most progressive and inventive of the genres, and so I found it quite depressing that (in the “space opera” sub-genre anyway), nothing major seems to have happened for 50 years…
Encounters is an uneven doco about Antarctica. While it has several worthwhile wildlife sequences, the movie is more about the people who choose the live and work on the continent. The guy who made the film certainly found some interesting folk to talk to, such as the linguist working on a continent with no languages to study, or the guy described as “Philosopher, Fork-lift Driver”. A common theme from these people concerned the type of people drawn to Antarctica, from the guy who recognized his traveling kind when he first arrived, to the guy who has a 20-kg rucksack (including tent, sleeping bag, and inflatable canoe) permanently packed so that he can be off on the next adventure at a moments notice. The type was best described by the guy who said that “everyone in the world who is not tied down eventually falls to the bottom of the world.”
I was horrified by the appearance of McMurdo Base. What a dreadful festering eyesore of a place. Certainly well out of kilter with Antarctica’s pristine image. Sure people have to live somewhere and have to move around, but does it really have to be such a grot-hole?
So the doco has much to recommend it, but I felt it let itself down in significant ways. The doco had no cohesion or overriding story to it. The film maker started by posing seemingly irrelevant and pointless questions (Why do we wear masks to disguise ourselves? Why don’t monkeys ride goats?) which he not only didn’t answer, but made no attempt to explore further.
But my biggest objection was to the disrespectful way the film maker treated some of his subjects. On two or three occasions he recorded his own summaries of their stories over the top of their own tellings. Fair enough if their (invariably interesting) stories had to be summarized for the sake of brevity, but there was no reason to do it in a way that suggested that the people being interviewed were long-winded bores.
I didn’t find the doco boring, but the three distinct sets of snoring from the audience suggested other people did.
So, while it was good to see what life is really like in Antarctica, this film could have and should have been much more than it was.
OSS 117 is a sly French spoof of (1960s-era) James Bond movies. I find that spoofs work best when they are played straight, and this movie frequently veers too far into over-the-top spoof (such as when OSS 117 tries to spit-roast a crocodile to prove his manliness). The movie is at its best and funniest when OSS 117 plays it straight: particularly the frequent scenes where the secret agent reveals himself to be an ignorant racist misogynist pillock, while simultaneously expecting everyone in the room to love him by rights. Good fun.
Oh my goodness. Camino is astounding, one of the best movies I’ve ever seen. It’s pretty hard to describe. It is ‘inspired by’ (and I should imagine only very very loosely) the true story of a 14 year girl who died of cancer in 1985 and who is now in the process of being beatified. So the bulk of the story concerns the family’s tragedy as the the little girl deteriorates over the last few months of her life. The family is intensely, intensely Catholic, and the family is embedded in an intensely Catholic community. Everything is about God, leading to some spectacular mental contortions as people try to paint the unfolding tragedy in a good light. Added to this are the girl’s vision/dreams, which range from prosaic to downright creepy and disturbing. Another thread is the normal lives of the girl’s classmates, as they prepare to stage a school play.
The death scene is exceptional, and means one thing to one of those present and something completely different to the others.
A smaller side-story shows the life of Camino’s older sister in an Opus Dei chapter house, and the strange goings-on there.
The girl playing Camino is a gorgeous wee kid, and a terrific actor: I wouldn’t be surprised if we see more of her.
Red Cliff is a vast, sprawling, hugely entertaining Chinese war epic with a cast of thousands. It is nominally set in Imperial China in about 300AD. As well as chocker with action, it was surprisingly and frequently funny. The humour arises sometimes from the dialogue, but more often from the howlingly improbable action sequences. These are carried out with such panache that you are happy to just laugh and hang on for the ride.
I found the almost incessant fight sequences very hard to follow, especially at first, and I had to give up trying to figure out who were the goodies and who were the baddies and who was winning and just sit back and watch the arrows and spears fly.
As entertaining as the movie is, I found the cinematography appalling. The colour palette was very odd, it used a very limited depth of field (meaning that the amazing Chinese scenery was mostly reduced to fuzzy blobs), and the long CGI shots of vast armies and navies seemed deliberately blurred. I guess they were trying to give a sense of scale, but what it actually did was give a sense that they didn’t know how to use cameras.
But this didn’t matter much: for two and a bit hours of daft fun this movie can’t be beat.
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