If you have kids and you live in Melbourne, take them to this film at ACMI in Federation Square. Made by the Horrible Histories guys, it’s very loosely-based on the story of William Shakespeare. If you know Horrible Histories, you’ll know what I mean. There are puns aplenty, multiple parts played by five or so actors and lots of quick visual and verbal jokes, some just for the grown ups. The humour is distinctly British, my favourite kind, and reminds me of Blackadder in its irreverence and dry subversion of English history. Continue reading
Tag Archives: 3.5 stars
It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)
StandardHow have I managed to get through 50 years without seeing this classic Christmas film? I don’t know. The Deniliquin Film Society screened it this month and so, with mince pies clutched in our hands, my whole family and several friends reclined on the sofas at the front of the venue and submitted to a good dose of Frank Capra wit and sentimentality. It’s a cracker of a film and much less saccharine than I was expecting. Continue reading
Mockingjay Part 2 (2015)
StandardI will admit right from the start that I think the recent fashion of splitting the final book of a series into two films is a good thing. Harry Potter was my first experience of the final-book-into-2-films trend. The cynical part of me knows that the purpose is to maximise revenue – from film-goers, through merch and DVD sales and ‘tie-ins’ – but I don’t really care as finally you can see a book brought to life mostly intact. And when it’s a great book, or at least a really good one, there is much jubilation and filmic enjoyment. So yes to The Deathly Hallows and Mockingjay, a ‘meh’ to The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn and an ‘oh my goodness what on earth were they thinking’ to The Hobbit. In fact that’s a great example of where it can all go wrong. If you have to pad a book out with misappropriated and invented characters then maybe you’ve gone too far. Continue reading
Winter’s Bone (2010)
StandardThis film has been on my list to watch for quite a while. The reviews were good and the Oscar-nominated lead role by a young Jennifer Lawrence had me intrigued. It is a bleached and gritty movie about the harsh realities of poverty and there is a realness to it that pulls you right into the world of Ree, a 17 year old eking out an existence in the Ozark Mountains in Missouri. You could perhaps dub this one ‘The Real Hunger Games’. Continue reading
Rear Window (1954)
StandardThere’s something special about Hitchcock films, they can be enjoyable and make you uneasy at the same time. This is my favourite and I was lucky enough to catch a screening last week at ACMI for the Melbourne Festival. It has all the elements of a good Hitchcock – tricky, stylish camerawork, dry humour, an interesting subtext and a bit of moral ambiguity. It also has Grace Kelly at her best in some very stylish outfits. Continue reading
Putuparri and the Rainmakers (2015)
StandardI’ve seen a few films in the past two weeks that have changed my view on something or at least given me a profound insight. This Australian documentary joins those ranks. I mentioned that Don’t Tell Me the Boy Was Mad made me think of the displacement of Australian Aboriginal people and this commonality has been reinforced by today’s film, Putuparri and the Rainmakers. Continue reading
Grey Gardens (1975)
StandardThis US documentary by the Maysles was made in 1975 and it shows that, if you have remarkable people, you only need to point a camera at them for long enough to get a story. We are flies on the wall of the crumbling East Hampton mansion, Grey Gardens, owned by Edith Bouvier Beale and her daughter, ‘Little Edie’. Edith is Jackie Kennedy’s aunt and we can see that she has come from old money and the American aristocracy. That is all in the past though, as the mansion is a squalid place, full of cats and raccoons and rubbish and Edith and Little Edie live an insular and co-dependent life within its walls. Continue reading
Love (2015)
StandardI still have the Satie music from this film in my head. This is a French film by Argentinian director Gaspar Noé and it was only on the way home that I realised Love really reminded me of Irreversible. A quick IMDb search and it turns out that was a Noé film too. If anyone reading this has seen Irreversible, you’ll know that Noé is a director who is fearless in his approach. The mood of this film was similar and the technique of beginning at the end, but where Irreversible was a harrowing look at the things we can’t change, Love approaches a similar theme in quite a different way. Continue reading
Mediterranea (2015)
StandardAnother multinational production – even Qatar gets a look in on this one – but I think it would be classified as Italian. It’s about Africans looking for a better life in Europe, though, so you feel as if you have been immersed in a melting pot of cultures, all looking for something better. Continue reading
Pioneer Heroes (Pionery-geroi) (2015)
StandardI got lost in this Russian film. Not lost as in ‘so absorbed with the story I lost sight of myself’, lost as in ‘I have no idea what’s happening’. It started well. We are in the 1980s Soviet Union watching children practicing to become Pioneer Heroes, the youth movement modelled on Lenin and the values of the Soviet Union. Three in particular we get to know – Sergeyev who wants to be like all the other kids but also wants to be a hero, Katya, who struggles to keep her grandfather’s bootlegging a secret as it is against the rules of the PH, and Olga, an anxious girl who relies heavily on Katya’s confidence and decisiveness. Continue reading
fillums 