Note: this blog post is not a strictly accurate account of the last moments of the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, for reasons that will become clear once/if you read it… In the early hours of Sunday morning, the final day of screenings for the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, I woke up from a [...]
August 8, 2011 – 11:02 am
On Saturday August 6, the official closing night of the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival, MIFF Artistic Director Michelle Carey addressed a champagne and truffle popcorn infused crowd in the main cinema of the Greater Union complex, rolling out a sincere set of thank you’s to many of the people associated with the prestigious festival’s [...]
And here it is. After two and a bit weeks, innumerable hours sitting in the dark and an accumulation of mental and physical defects, we finally arrive at the big number: 60. Turns out I didn’t need the full 17 days to watch and review 60 films. I did it in 16 days and one [...]
August 6, 2011 – 11:26 am
Just when I thought my Melbourne International Film Festival experience couldn’t get any weirder…it got weirder. I wrote a detailed post late last night about what happened to me yesterday after a screening of UK director Ben Wheatley’s assassin thriller Kill List. Let’s just say it involves Colonel Sanders and the long flabby arm of [...]
Read it up. Soak it all in. Cast your eye quickly over the copy and don’t pay much attention to the detail. Ignore typos, grammatical errors or whatever doesn’t take your fancy because – here’s the rub – I haven’t got much time. Tonight is not going be another night I spend lurching over my [...]
The first two episodes of ABC’s highly anticipated eight part adaptation of Christos Tsiolkas’s best-selling novel The Slap (film #53) were screened last night as part of the 2011 Melbourne International Film Festival. The evening got off on a shaky start, with the program’s producer/director Tony Ayres taking the gong for, by far, the longest [...]
You’ll be pleased to know, dear reader, that I recovered from my bout of food poisoning quite quickly (touch wood) and caught three sessions yesterday at MIFF: the anti-disaster disaster movie Innocent Saturday, the Ridley and Tony Scott produced Life in a Day and the first two episodes of ABC’s adaption of The Slap. Write-ups [...]
August 4, 2011 – 11:46 am
After triumphantly announcing my MIFF “second wind” yesterday I celebrated with a beer, a few films and what appears in hindsight to have been a piece of poisoned food (I am not for a moment suggesting the fine folk at Pie Face were involved, despite evidence…). Without going into the gory details, last night I [...]
August 3, 2011 – 11:18 am
They say in space, nobody can hear you scream. Well here’s a new one: in the cinema, nobody (to a point) can see what you’re wearing. If you’re spending up to 10 hours a day inside darkened auditoriums watching films from around the globe, as I have been doing now for nearly the last two [...]
August 2, 2011 – 11:29 am
As I wade through my 15th year as a film reviewer — these years, as they say, they run like rabbits — one question has recently bounced around my brain. How well do my readers know me? How well do they think they know me? What impressions might they have drawn about me through my [...]
August 2, 2011 – 11:25 am
See below for write-ups of yesterday’s cinematic diet: three documentaries (Boxing Gym, Buck and Khodorkovsky) and a racy French police drama. But please also read this post, an experiment of sorts in which I change the focus of the film review onto me, the reviewer, and hopefully share something valuable in the process. Onwards we [...]
Having now watched and reviewed 40 films in 10 days, I am now deep within the belly of the MIFF beast, and evidence that this extreme exercise in movie-watching may be having physical and psychological effects is mounting. Fellow MIFF blog-a-thoner Thomas Caldwell has confirmed a rumour bandied about town that, attacked by reality at [...]
The storyline of Top Floor, Left Wing (film #31) — a tight and peppy black comedy/hostage drama from French writer/director Angelo Cianci — is propelled by a misunderstanding. Police and a bailiff arrive at the flat of Mohand (Mohamed Felagg) to serve an eviction notice but his son Salem (Aymen Saïdi) assumes they’re there because [...]
The problem with yesterday’s screening of German/Polish drama Winter’s Daughter (review below) was not that it was half full of squawking high school students but that their curriculum, which this film is presumably a part of, did not include education about cinema etiquette. To be fair, the crowd was fairly well behaved, particularly given their [...]
Watching a plethora of bold films every day from the minds of interesting artists from various spots on the globe is, to a point — when, say, your eyes roll back into your head and your body develops deep vein thrombosis as a way of saying f-you, pal — nourishing for the mind but not [...]
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