August, 2009

In last week’s Sunday Age production editor Michael Coulter chastised the Australian film industry, writing despairingly about its apparently unrelenting penchant for doom-n-gloom productions. Coulter opened by reminiscing about Rolf de Heer’s Alexandra’s Project – in particular that he needed a cold shower after watching it, which is fair enough considering its uncomfortable relationship-revenge story and sticky-icky [...]

Over the past few months I’ve written extensively about how 2009 has shaped up to be a bright and eclectic year for Australian cinema, showcasing the fruits of a rare period of creative oomph that has seen an impressive batch of new titles as varied and assured as Balibo, Samson & Delilah, Mary and Max, [...]

Director Tony Scott’s high-strung heist movie The Taking of Pelham 123 has a bunch of moments in which characters talk up the New York subway as if they’re in some kind of subtle advertisement for public transport. When the mayor (James Gandolfini) learns of a hostage situation orchestrated by John Travolta – and JT’s in [...]

So this is what happens when Tarantino broaches history. In a berserk and shameless slice of delirious historical fiction – a signature QT wet dream punctuated by long derivative conversations and sharp lashings of violence – the ever-audacious ever-loquacious auteur presents an alternate version of WWII in which a group of elite macho killers scotched [...]

Movie posters are almost as old as the movies themselves. Sandwich boards and painted crates were among the earliest forms of movie advertising, but posters – with their capacity for dynamic designs and the ease with which they can be printed, hung and replaced – quickly proved a more effective means of advertising to the [...]

Note: most of us acknowledge that like many countries on earth China has a ghastly track record of human rights abuses. As organisers of this year’s Melbourne International Film Festival discovered, China also has an impressive arsenal of web-savvy supporters who have proven themselves remarkably adept in the art of hacking websites. While it is [...]

Debut feature filmmaker Neil Blomkamp proves there is much extraterrestrial life left in the well-worn genre of aliens-on-earth movies with District 9, a convention-bending SCI-FI romp that frames pulse-pounding action inside an allegorical context. A massive UFO hovers ominously over Johannesburg, South Africa, but this is no Independance Day: there are no lasers aimed at [...]

Balibo is writer/director Robert Connolly’s tight-as-a-snare-drum political sizzler that recreates events surrounding the murder of five Australian journalists in East Timor in 1975. Taut, gripping and intensely acted (read my review here) the film, which opened last month’s Melbourne International Film Festival, is a knocks-ya-socks-off wartime exposé rich with realism and technical savvy. Connolly and I sat [...]

Understanding Hollywood’s insatiable thirst for milking well-known brand names – for example, last month I wrote about Universal’s upcoming adaption of Atari’s 1979 video game Asteroids – I wasn’t surprised to hear murmurs around the cyber camp fire that a big screen Lego movie may be on the cards. And low and behold…it is. In [...]

Macabre visual inventions a-plenty litter the Henry Selick-directed stop motion animated strange-fest Coraline, which mingles a story about a child rebelling against her parents with a cautionary grass-is-greener message about the seemingly idyllic life on that other side of the fence. Or in this case, in the house next door connected by a tiny magical [...]

The theatrical trailer for Terry Gilliam’s much anticipated phantasmagorical head trip The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, which features Heath Ledger’s last screen performance, has hit the net. In terms of pure ocular thrills it’s easily one of the most stunning trailers we’ll see this year. Stocked to the gills with rich, prismatic, distinctively Gilliam-esque imagery, [...]

John Hughes, the popular and influential Hollywood writer/director best known for 80s charmers such as The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, passed away from a heart attack yesterday. He was 59. Hughes wrote and directed eight features – Sixteen Candles (1984), The Breakfast Club (1985), Weird Science (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), [...]

Grab a bucket of KFC and a large Big Mac meal then stroll into a screening of Food Inc. and sit back and watch as your eyes recoil in horror and your stomach catches up with your brain, one vomit-flavoured convulsion at a time. The film kicks off with the alarming claim that our food [...]

Director Michael Mann re-enters the biopic genre post-Ali (2001) with all tommy guns blazing in Public Enemies, a sentiment-stripped ode to the ego and exploits of notorious curt-talkin’ anti-establishment bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp). No Mann crime flick is complete without a man-on-man dynamic and here Christian Bale plays the cop to Depp’s robber; [...]

After three direct sequels and two hybrid sequels the Alien franchise is again being resuscitated back to life, this time via a prequel. What makes this announcement more interesting than, say, the impending development of Alien vs. Predator 3 is the attachment of director Ridley Scott, who helmed the original back in 1979. Why he [...]

The gritty and powerful crime-don’t-pay multicultural drama Cedar Boys (now playing in cinemas) will go down as one of the most explosive Australian films of ’09, which is continuing to be a mighty good stars-are-aligned year for local cinema. The film is the feature debut of writer/director Serhat Caradee and follows a trio of Australian-Lebanese [...]