If you’re in Melbourne and if you hurry, you’ll catch 99 Homes at the Nova in Carlton. It’s brilliant.
Set in America in wake of the sub-prime housing market crash, it’s about decent people losing their houses. It’s a mixture of Mephistopheles, Zola and Thomas Hardy combined as a recently-unemployed single father struggles to regain possession of his home and becomes forced into becoming something and someone he detests.
Brilliant, but sick-of-your-stomach, anxious, clammy, rage-inducing viewing.
Based on her book Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power (2004), this is the story of Mary Mapes, the producer of Sixty Minutes in America. She produced the segment, presented by Dan Rather, that questioned George W. Bush’s selection for enlistment and later performance in the Texas Air National Guard which allowed him to avoid being drafted for Vietnam. The film follows the uncovering and verification of documents and the search for evidence to back up the story. After the segment was aired, questions were raised about the authenticity of the documents, and three CBS producers, including Mapes, were fired. Dan Rather resigned soon after.
I must confess that I’m not particularly aware of the role of producers in news programs and the distinction between a producer and a presenter. I looked through the list of producers in the Wikipedia entry on Four Corners (probably the Australian program most comparable to that depicted in the film) and while some names were familiar, others weren’t.
I had been hoping that this film would be more like the excellent BBC Series The Hour (alas, we’ll never know what happened to Freddie…) or Good Night and Good Luck. Truth did not have the tautness of either of these programs and was too schmaltzy. Although you’re left with questions at the end of the film, you feel more suffocated than lacerated.
It’s a brilliant cast, with Cate Blanchett and an increasingly wrinkly Robert Redford, but the roles didn’t seem to stretch them at all. It was a surprise to see Noni Hazlehurst there- yes our Noni- and she played her small role really well.
I’m pleased to see that Cinema Nova is still screening the Australian movie ‘Holding the Man’ twice each day. I saw it about six weeks ago and expected that it would have finished by now.
I don’t know much about homosexual relationships or the gay scene during the AIDS ‘epidemic’ but certainly the attention to detail in depicting late 70s-1980s Melbourne is exquisite- right down to the ‘Web of Life’ textbook in the locker room at Xavier. I can only assume that its fidelity in other areas is just as sound. I hadn’t seen either of the lead actors before (which may say more about me than them), but the supporting cast is a veritable ‘who’s-who’: Anthony La Paglia, Sarah Snook, Kerry Fox, Guy Pearce and even Geoffrey Rush pops up as well. Go to see it while it’s still on.
I’ve been taking advantage of the cheap day to go to the movies but I didn’t pay any price at all for this movie because I received two free tickets as a prize in a Council of Adult Education competition.
It’s good. It’s worth going to see for Ian McKellan alone, who is just brilliant with that wrinkled, earnest face registering a flood of emotions at times, and taking on the blankness of old age at other times. The young boy, Milo Parker, is excellent as well and looks the quintessential Edwardian schoolboy. It’s beautifully filmed, with evocative music.
Shall I channel Margaret Pomerantz? 4.5 stars for mine.
Yep, the setting of this film sure is far from men. Far from anything, really. And yet, somehow children line up outside this small rural (the word doesn’t do justice to the isolation!) Algerian school, nestled between the bare Atlas mountains, where they are taught by their quiet, self-contained teacher.
But Algeria in 1954 is a dangerous place for anyone to be, even in this god-forsaken place. When Daru the teacher is coerced into assuming custody of Mohammed, an Arab villager accused of murder, the lines between jailer and prisoner dissolve and both are forced to make decisions. There’s lots of shooting and violence in this starkly beautiful setting. It’s based on a short story “The Guest” by Camus, and it felt deceptively like a Western, but with layers, just as you’d expect from a Camus story.
This is a very different Paris than the one I dream of. Where is the Eiffel Tower? The Louvre? The Arc de Triomphe? Where is the elfin Amelie-type mademoiselle, with a pixie haircut and a dimple? Not a sign of any of them. Instead we have the high-rise social housing in suburban Paris outside the central city, with windswept barren gardens, concrete and a large gang of African -French girls.
Marieme is sixteen years old, living with her violent, menacing older brother and younger sisters in a single-parent family where the mother is often absent working in a hotel. She is doing poorly in school, but resists the idea of vocational education or working in the hotel alongside her mother. There seems to be no structure to her life. If she’s at school at all, it’s marginal to the rest of her life, and her all-girl gang dabbles in shoplifting, drinking and fighting. Re-named ‘Vic’ (for Victory) by her gang, she escapes her brother but becomes involved in drug-dealing. However, she retains some degree of agency and makes choices, although the ending is ambiguous.
As you can guess, this is a pretty grim film, showing a Paris that is barely recognizable to tourists, and focussing on a Parisian demographic that is rarely depicted in the media at all.
This is advertised as ‘Last Days’ at Cinema Nova, so I suspect that I’ve caught it just before it disappears.
I hadn’t seen the 1960s version of Far from the Madding Crowd, nor have I read the book. I really had no idea what it was about, although I assumed (correctly as it turned out) that it would be yet another of Thomas Hardy’s Wessex tales. I’d enjoyed Tess of the D’Urbervilles as a first-year university student in the 1970s; came out thoroughly depressed from the movie Jude based on Jude the Obscure and I’ve never read The Mayor of Casterbridge.
At choir the other night, our choirmaster distributed ‘God Only Knows’, the Beach Boys song. I’ve always loved this song and its complexity is writ large in the myriad guitar chord changes shown on the sheet music. As often happens with songs we sing at choir, it’s been stuck in my head ever since, and was even more firmly cemented there after seeing the biopic of Brian Wilson in ‘Love and Mercy’. It’s still on at Cinema Nova (‘Last Days!) but probably won’t be for much longer.
Brian Wilson’s story is told in two intercut storylines, one from 1966 during the taping of Pet Sounds, and the other from the 1980s when Wilson is a heavily medicated shell of a man. The 1960s thread is shot in Super 16 film and has that saccharine look of American beach movies, while the 1980s vision is sharper and cleaner. Two different actors play Brian Wilson. Paul Dano, who plays the young Brian looks quite similar to the real man, but John Cusack playing 1980s Brian looks nothing like him. I must confess that I found it hard to suspend my awareness of the pasty, empty Brian Wilson that we see today when faced with an actor who looked almost Dustin Hoffman-esque. An excellent story though, that has you despising the bad buys (and realizing the dangers of power of legal and medical attorney) and cheering for the good guys who in this case are good women.
And just to keep ‘God Only Knows’ in YOUR head too, here’s the film clip. Having seen the movie, I’m more aware of the studio-engineered complexity of the orchestration which references the contribution of the backing session players, themselves featuring in the coming documentary The Wrecking Crew. I’m also more alert to the redundancy of the other Beach Boys in this film clip and particularly the resentful irrelevance of Mike Love in the right hand corner.
Freedom Stories won’t be on for much longer and its season has already been extended at Cinema Nova. It’s a documentary that follows a number of Australians who arrived during 2001 as asylum-seekers and, under the policies in force at the time, spent time in detention centres before being released under Temporary Protection Visas.
It was strange to see suburban settings juxtaposed against the images that the government didn’t want us to see of Baxter and Curtin detention centres. It gives these people back their names, instead of the numbers they were dehumanized by. The film-maker’s (Steve Thomas) presence is quite obvious, with each separate story starting with a computer screen-shot and a running sheet.
The documentary starts with a customer collecting his car from the mechanic after having it serviced. “What do you know about Mustafa?” asks the film-maker. “Oh, he comes from- was it Afghanistan, Mustafa? That’s about it really…”
I found myself looking a little more closely at the people on the footpath as I walked back from Parkville to the city. They were from so many countries and cultures: each of them with a story. The participants in this documentary are good new citizens, working hard, optimistic. What on earth are we doing to people with our refugee policies?
I don’t really think of myself as a retired person, but I suppose that I am. And what does a retired person do but go to the movies during the week, taking advantage of Miserly Monday or Tight-Ass Tuesday to avoid paying full price to watch a movie?
I’d wanted to see this for some time, and it’s now listed as ‘final days’ at Cinema Nova (my cinema of choice). I read the book at uni some 35 years ago but I don’t remember seeing any other movie adaptation of Madame Bovary. I remembered the plot, theme and the characterization (especially of Emma) but was not particularly aware of the setting, beyond the boredom it induced in her.
Film captures setting beautifully and this is certainly the case in this book. Village life was muddy and it was a much smaller village than I remembered: just a single street in effect. The houses were dimly lit at night, and rather grubby. Emma was fetchingly decked out in orange in many scenes and, set against the forested setting, the framing of many shots reminded me of a pre-Raphaelite painting.
It was a very quiet movie and rather emotionally dead. I expected to shed a tear (I am an emotional old thing, after all), but I felt oddly detached from her fate.
The Resident Judge of Port Phillip 