Clip of the Week - ha one, ha two, ha one two three four....

Capital 'A' Amazing clip from the New York-based outfit Animusic, which has created an entire series of similar music clips using invented instruments - there's a selection up on YouTube and they're also available for sale in DVD form.

This rave review from the New York Times is reprinted from the company's website:

"From the Desk of David Pogue
Computer-Generated Wonder
Published: November 30, 2005

"One bummer about growing older is that you don't feel a sense of wonder very often. When you're a kid, everything is new, so you're blown away all the time. But as your life experience grows, you feel those rushes of wonder less and less frequently.

"A few weeks ago, though, I encountered a piece of high-tech art that's unlike anything that's come before. It's a DVD called Animusic. Its blend of music, visuals, humor and science is so new and so brilliant, it triggered feelings of fascination, laughter, amazement--and, yes, wonder.

"And I'm not alone. When my wife and I played this DVD for guests and relatives over Thanksgiving, everyone was suddenly talking and exclaiming. Our elementary-schoolers have watched it repeatedly, announcing when the good parts are coming. And our 14-month-old baby dances, stomps and twirls, waggling his hands in the air, possessed by the purest response of all.

"So what is Animusic? It's hard to describe, of course, because it's not like anything else--that's the whole point. But this much is safe to say: it's a DVD of music videos--computer-generated, photorealistic animation (think Pixar).

"There are no people or animals, and there's no dialogue or even singing; instead, you see fantastic, fanciful, gleaming, futuristic, alien instruments being played either by robots, pulsing lasers or by themselves. In "Resonant Chamber," delicate, birdlike robotic pluckers play a guitar with nine necks; in "Pipe Dream," a favorite of Animusic fans, various string and percussion instruments are struck by balls fired from pipe cannons with impeccable timing; in "Pogo Sticks," a family of self-plucking, two-string, bodyless bass-like instruments balance on one wheel as they cruise and boogie through a 3-D, tunneled landscape.

"The core idea is entirely new, but the spices include "Metropolis," "Alien," video games, Disney World, laser shows, Spielberg, MTV, Electric Light Orchestra, science museums and great cathedrals. Several of the videos are weird and sci-fi enough that you would actually get the creeps, if it weren't for the music. The music--most of it rhythmic, layered, building, techno rock--serves as an interplanetary, interspecies language that makes you feel a bizarre kinship with these foreign and wildly talented music machines.

"Animusic is the creation, passion and sole occupation of a programmer/composer named Wayne Lytle (rhymes with title), who works at home and has spent over a decade perfecting this extremely nichey art form. What's wild about the process is that his proprietary, custom-written software, called Animusic Studio, generates the animation automatically--that is, manipulates the fingers, hammers and pluckers of the robots--when fed the MIDI file of his music. "If the music is changed, the animation is regenerated effortlessly," according to the production notes.

"For that reason, the instruments are sonically correct: every time a given drum is struck or key is pressed, it always produces the same pitch. (There's still plenty of hand animation, of course, primarily having to do with the lighting, "camera moves," set and character movements.)

"The best part of Animusic--both the original DVD and the newly released, richer and more sophisticated Animusic 2--is people's reactions. First they just gape in amazement.

"Then they start wondering what it's for, or what Lytle "ought to do" with it. "Play it on big plasmas in dance clubs!" someone will say. Or "Music teachers in schools should show this to the kids!" Or, "He should sell it to Pixar!"

"At the educational-technology conference where I first saw Animusic, the educators asked similarly off-the-point questions. "What's the target age group?" "What's your educational philosophy?" "How come it's not interactive?"

"Mr Lytle answered as politely as he could, but the answers all boiled down to, "I don't know, it's just cool."

"That it is. And--if viewer conversation, discussion and thinking are part of the definition--it's art.

"You can see and hear segments of the Animusic tracks at www.animusic.com, although you should remember that the effect is 100 times more powerful when played on a TV (especially a big one) and through a sound system, preferably 5.1 Dolby surround. That Web site is where you can buy the DVD's, too ($20 each, or $35 for the pair--a great holiday present, if you ask me); Mr Lytle says he's sold 60,000 copies of the first disc over the years, as the cult of Animusic fans has grown virally.

"Wayne Lytle and his team could be poster children for the way that technology can give a voice and a canvas to otherwise undiscovered talent. In the case of Animusic, that talent is prodigious, and the resulting works of art are awe-inspiring."

Del Toro confirmed as The Hobbit director

No surprises here, since this has long been known to be in the pipeline, but Mexico's Guillermo del Toro (Pan's Labyrinth, The Devil's Backbone) has been confirmed as the director of
The Hobbit, the planned film version of JRR Tolkien's literary predecessor to The Lord of The Rings.

The two films are to be filmed Lord of the Rings style, ie. back to back in New Zealand with the trilogy's Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh serving as executive producers. See here for full story.

Cannes 2008 - Critics' Week line-up

Cannes 2008 Critics' Week line-up is now in, which completes the announcements of all official titles (not including the Market, where anything can screen.)

Good to see the name of Mexico's Fernando Eimbke, whose delightfully deadpan, Jarmusch-esque Duck Season screened at Sydney Film Festival in 2005.


Feature films in Competition
Christophe Van Rompaey - Moscow, Belgium (Belgium)
Emily Atef - The Stranger In Me (Germany)
Duane Hopkins - Better Things (UK)
Pablo Fendrik - Blood Appears (Argentina-France-Germany)
Aida Begic – Snow (Bosnia-Herzegovina-Germany-France)
Anna Novion - Grown Ups (France-Sweden)
Valeria Gaia Germanica - Everybody Dies But Me (Russia)


Opening film: Ronit Elkabetz and Shlomi Elkabetz - Seven Days (Israel-France)

Closing film: Rodrigo Pla – The Desert Within (Mexico)

Special screening: Dominique Abel and Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy - Rumba (Belgium-France)

Event screening: Fernando Eimbcke - Lake Tahoe (Mexico)

Cannes 2008 - Directors Fortnight line-up

The line-up for Cannes' Directors Fortnight has just been announced. It's heavy on Latin American and, especially, French productions and co-productions.

Note there's no Australian titles this year.

(Asterisk indicates director's first feature.)

Opening film: Four Nights With Anna (Poland-France), dir: Jerzy Skolimowski
Closing film: The Pleasure Of Being Robbed (US), dir: Josh Safdie

Competition

Acne* (Uruguay-Argentina-Spain-Mexico), dir: Federico Veiroj
Aquele Querido Mes De Agosto (Portugal-France), dir: Miguel Gomes
Boogie (Romania), dir: Radu Muntean
Les Bureaux De Dieu (France), dir: Claire Simon
El Cant Dels Ocells (Spain), dir: Albert Serra
De La Guerre (France), dir: Bertrand Bonello
Dernier Maquis (France-Algeria), dir: Rabah Ameur-Zaimeche
Eldorado (Belgium-France), dir: Bouli Lanners
Eleve Libre (Belgium-France), dir: Joachim Lafosse
Liverpool (Argentina-France-Netherlands-Spain-Germany), dir: Lisandro Alonso
Monsieur Morimoto (France), dir: Nicola Sornaga
Knitting (China), dir: Yin Lichuan
Now Showing (Philippines, France), dir: Raya Martin
Il Resto Della Notte (Italy), dir: Francesco Munzi
Salamandra* (Argentina-France-Germany) dir: Pablo Aguero
Shultes* (Russia), dir: Bakur Bakuradze
Blind Lovers* (Slovakia), dir: Kiraj Lehotsky
Lonely Tune Of Tehran (Iran), dir: Saman Salour
Tony Manero (Chile-Brazil), dir: Pablo Larrain
Le Voyage Aux Pyrenees (France), dirs: Jean-Marie and Arnaud Larrieu

Special Screenings
40x15 , dir: Olivier Jahan (France)
Milestones , dirs: Robert Kramer and John Douglas (US)

The Fortnight was set up as a result of the riots and strikes that brought much of France (including the Cannes film festival) to a halt in 1968. The section will mark its 40th anniversary on May 18 by screening 40x15 by Olivier Jahan, which traces the history of the Directors Fortnight.

And Along Come Tourists - a fresh new approach to the Holocaust

Here's the first few paragraphs of my latest post on the Audi Festival of German Films See the blog page on the festival website to read the full review.
With a subject as overwhelmingly powerful as the Holocaust there is always new cinematic ground to break. While that means we have to witness such offensive sentimentalism as Roberto Benigni’s Life is Beautiful, fortunately more sensitive filmmakers are continuing to search for new ways of approaching the inexpressible.

Some are now looking at the subject by sidestepping direct examinations and looking at the way such dark history affects contemporary life. A notable example is British documentary filmmaker Rex Bloomfield’s quietly powerful 2005 film KZ, which examined the effect of the former Austrian death camp of Mauthausen on the local townsfolk, the tourists and the guides who take them around the site. (The same year another UK filmmaker, Jes Benstock, made a similarly themed 10 minute short, The Holocaust Tourist.)

Screening as part of the Audi Festival of German films is And Along Come Tourists (Am Ende kommen Touristen) a subtle and thoughtful fictional film from German writer-director Robert Thalheim and his script collaborators Bernd Lange and Hans-Christian Schmid, inspired by Thalheim’s experiences working as a tourist guide at the former death camp at Auschwitz.

News just in - Cannes 2008 line-up announced

Note the lack of titles from Australia* but note also that the line-up for Director's Fortnight (responsible for launching films like Proof and Muriel's Wedding onto the world stage) has yet to be announced.

(*Postscript, Thursday 1.10am: the AFC has just announced that two short films, My Rabbit Hoppy, written and directed by Anthony Lucas, and Jerrycan,
written and directed by Julius Avery, will screen in the Shorts Competition as part of the Official Selection.)

(Post-postscript, Thursday 1.15am - Guardian headline announces 'Eastwood and Allen lead line-up' - how about that for US cultural imperisalism, and in a lefty British paper too...guess they feel Guardian readers don't want to be troubled by news of pesky foreign filmmakers like Turkey's Nuri Bilge Ceylan or Belgium's Dardenne brothers.)

Competition

Nuri Bilge Ceylan - Three Monkeys (Turkey-France-Italy)
Jean-Pierre & Luc Dardenne - Le Silence De Lorna (France-Belgium)
Arnaud Desplechin - A Christmas Story (France)
Clint Eastwood - Changeling (US)
Atom Egoyan - Adoration (Canada)
Ari Folman - Waltz With Bashir (Israel)
Philippe Garrel - La Frontiere De L'Aube (France)
Matteo Garrone - Gomorra (Italy)
Charlie Kaufman - Synecdoche, New York (US)
Eric Khoo - My Magic (Singapore)
Lucretia Martel - La Mujer Sin Cabeza (Argentina-Spain)
Brillante Mendoza - Serbis (The Philippines)
Kornel Mondruczo - Delta (Hungary-Germany)
Walter Salles & Daniela Thomas - Linha De Passe (Brazil)
Paolo Sorrentino - Il Divo (Italy)
Pablo Trapero - Leonera (Argentina-South Korea)
Wim Wenders - The Palermo Shooting (Germany)
Jia Zhangke - 24 City (China)
Steven Soderbergh - Che (US-Spain-France) -- one four-hour competion title comprised of Guerrilla and The Argentine

Out of competition
Steven Spielberg - Indiana Jones And The Kingdom Of The Crystal Skull (US)
Mark Osborne and John Stevenson - Kung Fu Panda (US)
Ji-Woon Kim - The Good, The Bad, The Weird (South Korean)
Woody Allen - Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Spain-US)

Special screenings
Marina Zenovich - Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired (US)
Wong Kar-wai - Ashes Of Time Redux (Hong Kong-China-Taiwan)
Daniel Leconte - C'est Dur D'etre Aime Par Des Cons (France)
Marco Tullio Giordana - Sangue Pazzo (Italy-France)
Terence Davies - Of Time And The City (UK)

Midnight Screenings
Emir Kusturica - Maradona (Spain)
Jennifer Lynch - Surveillance (US)
Hong-Jin Na - The Chaser (South Korea)

Special Jury President's screening
Alison Thompson - The Third Wave (US)

Main Jury
Sean Penn, president
Sergio Castellitto
Natalie Portman
Alfonso Cuaron
Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Alexandra Maria Lara
Rachid Bouchareb

Un Certain Regard 2008 line-up

Tokyo!, dir: Bong Joon Ho, Leos Carax, Michel Gondry (France)
*Afterschool, dir: Antonio Campos (US)
*Ting Che, dir: Chung Mong-Hong (Taiwan)
Soi Cowboy, dir: Thomas Clay (UK)
La Vie Moderne (Profils Paysans), dir: Raymond Depardon (France)
Wolke 9, dir: Andreas Dresen (Germany)
*Tulpan, dir: Sergey Dvortsevoy (Germany)
Los Bastardos, dir: Amat Escalante (Mexico)
Chelsea On The Rocks, dir: Abel Ferrera (US)
Je Veux Voir, dir: Joana Hadjithomas, Khalil Joreige (France)
O' Horten, dir: Bent Hamer (Norway-Germany)
*Milh Hadha Al-Bahr, dir: Annemarie Jacir (Palestine)
Tokyo Sonata, dir: Kiyoshi Kurosawa (Japan)
Yi Ban Haishui, Yi Ban Huoyan, dir: Fendou Liu (China)
*A Festa Da Menina Morta, dir: Matheus Nachtergaele (Brazil)
De Ofrivilliga, dir: Ruben Ostlund (Sweden)
Wendy And Lucy: dir: Kelly Reichardt (US)
Johnny Mad Dog, dir: Jean-Stephane Sauvaire (France)
*Versailles, dir: Pierre Schoeller (France)
Tyson, dir: James Toback (US)

*denotes first film, eligible for the Camera d'Or

Un Certain Regard jury president: Fatih Akin
Camera D'Or jury president: Bruno Dumont
Cinefondation jury president: Hou Hsiao-hsien

Another Mike Leigh quote of the week

I've always been baffled by people - there's a lot of them - who bracket together British filmmakers Mike Leigh and Ken Loach, or even worse, confuse them. What planet are they on? The moment you hear someone talking about the two filmmakers as if they were close stylistic cousins you can safely discount anything else they have to say.

Not only is Loach a capital 'P' Political filmmaker in a way that simply isn't true of Leigh, the former employs a naturalistic style whereas Leigh's approach is highly stylised, anti-naturalistic. The following clip from Leigh's latest, Happy-Go-Lucky (due for Australian release by Rialto on June 26), offers clear illustratation.



Call Sally Hawkins's performance caricatured, call it (as Leigh prefers) heightened reality, the effect is the same: an approach to acting - and indeed of seeing the world - that deliberately exaggerates in order to get at some deeper truths.


Mike Leigh talking about Happy-Go-Lucky, at Glasgow Film Theatre.

Now for the quote of the week. "Some film-makers say, 'I can't watch my films, I can't stand them.' My feeling, rather piously, is that if you don't like your own films, how the hell can you expect anybody else to like them?" - Mike Leigh.

The quote comes not from the clip above but a recent Guardian lecture at London's BFI Southbank.

It's an interesting read, not just for Leigh's comments, but also for the spectacle of an interviewer (Sarfaraz Manzoor) wading into quicksand. (Leigh even embarrasses Manzoor into apologising for asking a weak question a one point.) It's the second part of the session, where audience members get to ask the questions, that elicits the most interesting answers.

Woe betide the interviewer who turns up to interrogate Mike Leigh without some bloody good questions. At the Q&A after one of Secrets and Lies' Sydney Film Festival screenings around 12 years ago I recall Leigh abruptly shooting down a member of the audience who'd dared to suggest the relationship between two characters was difficult to ascertain because the ages of the actors didn't seem appropriate. "That's such a stupid question that I refuse to answer it," snapped the filmmaker.

Interviewing him for The Australian during the same visit I recall irking him with my second question - something about the methodology by which he had filmed a critical sequence.

Leigh snapped that I should have read Michael Coveney's book, The World According to Mike Leigh, because the answer was there (indeed I had - I'd wanted Leigh to explain in his own words, in retrospect not such a great idea).

This minor spat out of the way Leigh proceeded to give me a wonderful interview - generous, fascinating and often witty. At one point I recall him hilariously acting out (with appropriate accents) a recent conversation in which he'd been asked by a Hollywood producer to film an adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin on the basis that Secrets and Lies showed he could handle black characters!

Soon after I found interviewers from other media outlets had had remarkably similar experiences - the spiky reaction always to one of the first questions. It's as if he likes to set up his interlocutors with a challenge, see how well they handle it, and assuming they pass the test, get on with the job at hand. Power games also seem to be at work - letting the interviewers know who's really in charge. But when you're a gifted an artist as Leigh, this does not strike me as unreasonable.

The Edge of Heaven - Fatih Akin's dynamic follow up to Head-On (Gegen die Wand)

Trailer for The Edge of Heaven (Auf der andere Seite)

It was terrific to see Sydney’s Chauvel cinema packed out on Saturday evening for The Edge of Heaven , the latest feature from writer-director Fatih Akin, whose powerful Head-On (Gegen die Wand), announced to the world that German cinema was again on the creative upspring when it won the Berlinale’s Golden Bear in 2004.

This new feature is a gripping, briskly paced, compellingly acted and strikingly unpredictable film, marked by an impressively bold script that won Akin the best script prize at Cannes in 2007.

See my blog on Goethe-Institut Australia's website for the full review.

All hail stuartBowen1984 - we're not worthy!

If you don't normally bother playing the clips on this blog, do yourself a favour and make an exception. The above - which appears to have only just appeared on YouTube, credited to a certain stuartBowen1984 - is one of the most astonishingly edited collections of found footage I've ever seen.

Whoever the real stuartBowen1984 is, he/ she is obviously extremely talented and probably engaged as a professional editor working in films, TV series, trailers or TV commercials. Note that Bowen is the name of a town where part of Baz Luhrmann's upcoming epic Australia was filmed (see stuartBowen1984's spoof trailers of that film on the previous post). So Bowen is unlikely to be a real surname.

Baz Luhrmann on how to make a movie

Superbly edited spoof trailer for Australia

Inside Film's Simon de Bruyn reports today that Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann and Twentieth Century Fox "have launched a landmark series of video podcasts which aim to teach high school and university filmmakers about every aspect of filmmaking."


Set to Screen project's promotional YouTube clip

"The 10 part Set to Screen series, which launched with little fanfare earlier this week through Apple’s iTunes, will run until October and introduce aspiring filmmakers to each aspect of filmmaking, from costume design, to cinematography, scoring, and editing - all featuring key crew sharing their knowledge from the set of Luhrmann's epic film,Australia.

"The first video features on-set stills photographer James Fisher on the set of the film.

"Five of the episodes pose a creative challenge for students, and students will also be invited to create and share their own film projects – which also have the chance of ending up on the Australia DVD release. The site also features options for teachers to download lesson plans that correspond to the podcasts."

Nice to see Luhrmann hasn't forgotten his origins and is actively trying to encourage less experienced filmmakers. Sure, it can also be read as part of Luhrmann and Fox's promotional strategy for Australia , but there have to be many sexier and more commercial PR strategies than this one.

See here for the Apple announcement and here for the Australia website featuring more information about the project.

Now for the "real trailer"...

Absolute torch, torch and more torch plus a little bit of twang

"IN concert, k.d. lang comes so close to perfection that it's hard not to dissolve into gushing cliches. Dressed in a white suit, she walks on stage looking like a million dollars, oozing confidence and bonhomie, has the audience instantly eating out of the palm of her hand, and so on. And that's before she's even opened her mouth to sing.

"When she does, the effect is startling, no matter how prepared you think you are. Putting aside the obvious genre differences, is she perhaps the contemporary Frank Sinatra, the crooner beyond all compare?"

See The Australian's website for my full review of lang's concert at Sydney's State Theatre on Wednesday.

BTW if you think the review a bit gushy, take a look and listen to this exquisite clip, recorded in the UK this year, of lang singing Jane Siberry's The Valley. She's performing this on her Australian tour (sans strings). The only line I regret is the comparison to Sinatra. Her voice shits all over Frankie's.

Reclaim Your Brain - Hans Weingartner's satirical follow up to The Edukators

My post on Reclaim Your Brain, the follow up to The Edukators, is now on the official blog site for the Audi Festival of German Films...

An extract: Writer-director Hans Weingartner and his co-writing partner Katharina Held made an international reputation with 2004’s impressive The Edukators, in which radicals broke into bourgeois homes just to mess with the owners’ minds. Weingartner is still intrigued by counter-cultural rebellion, though his approach on his latest film, Reclaim Your Brain (also known in English as Free Rainer), could hardly be more different in tone...

US drama - get the girl, Aussie drama - aww, I like her, well, sorta, nah, won't bother, she's probably got a boyfriend...

If you want to know what powerful screen drama looks, feels and smells like, go see Before the Devil Knows You're Dead while it's in cinemas. Note the behaviour of the protagonists, two brothers played by Ethan Hawke and Phillip Seymour Hoffman - people of action (I don't mean in the Die Hard genre sense but in the true dramatic sense) who argue, make plans and put them into action to generally disastrous effect.

Do Australian film protagonists always behave like this? The lead character - a cop - of last year's Noise, superbly played by
Brendan Cowell , certainly didn't. Which is why I was intrigued to come across these comments from Cowell: "If you look at what a protagonist should be, it should be, if they don't get want they want, it's a huge crisis, whereas in Australia if they don't get what they want it's kind of alright. And that's the problem" - Brendan Cowell


Cowell is reiterating points made by interviewees in my January 2 piece for The Australian and in this blog on common Australian feature script problems. Cowell is quoted in a trailer for a documentary in production called Into The Shadows, which has its own website. (Thanks again to reader Syms Covington for drawing the film to my attention.)

Screenwriting teacher and script consultant Billy Marshall Stoneking, one of my interviewees in that original piece, now has his own website, Where's the Drama, devoted to screenwriting issues which I highly recommend.

Meanwhile here's more from Into the Shadows, starting with veteran director Bruce Beresford:

Producer-director Robert Connolly:


Independent distributor John L. Simpson (The Jammed):


Writer director Murali K. Thalluri (2:37) (incidentally, Murali - you accuse Australian filmmakers of making films the public doesn't want to see, including films about single mothers in the suburbs - but the public didn't want to see 2:37. Does that mean you were making the wrong film?):


Producer Sue Maslin (Japanese Story):


Director of MUFF (Melbourne Underground Film Festival) Richard Wolstencroft:

All together now - it's now or never....

Thanks to Deb Verhoeven for Facebooking (if I may be permitted to use such a hideous verb) this clip on the state of the Australian film industry - a trailer for an upcoming documentary.

The brief snatches of interview seem to confirm there's a feeling of exasperation within the industry, a sense that, despite a complete overhaul of funding arrangements, it's now or never - ie. get our act together or die.

Then again, interview a bunch of people whose films have failed commercially or failed to get funding (George Miller obviously not being one of them) and what else can you expect but bitching and worldweariness?

Filmmaking ain't easy. Never has been. Though there have been times when an Australian film was considered by some a failure when it "only" earned $5 million at the local box office (viz Cosi). Whereas now a film like The Black Balloon can receive rave reviews and enthusiastic feedback from viewers on websites like ninemsn and still be considered lucky to have reached gross earnings of $1.6 million.

German cinema experiences an extraordinary surge in popularity at home

A reminder that the Audi Festival of German Films kicks off this evening (Wednesday) in Sydney, Thursday in Melbourne, Perth on Friday and Brisbane next Wednesday. I'll be contributing regular blog updates to the Goethe-Institut's website (and linking from here), as will Peter Krausz in Melbourne.

Yesterday I interviewed director of the Goethe-Institut Sydney, Klaus Krischok, who is in overall charge of programming, and asked him about this year's program and why he thinks German films are doing so well at the German box ofice at the moment. 2008 has seen ticket sales in Germany increase by 30% over the same period last year, with nearly a quarter of tickets sold for German films - a statistic to make Australian filmmakers and distributors very jealous indeed.

You can find the interview (and blogsite) here and the festival program here

You Say Rotten Tom-ae-toes, I say Fresh Tom-art-oes

Plans are afoot to launch a local version of Rotten Tomatoes, the website that aggregates and links to reviews by US film critics, according to Syms Covington's Australian film blog. The new site will work in the same way, only linking to reviews by Australian critics. That means, of course, that Australian films will get a look in and not only those that happen to get released in the US.

Now I admit I nearly didn't link to this news since it comes amid a blog post dedicated to, um, this website (aw shucks) and a bit too much inter-textuality can seem a bit, well, unappealingly incestuous.

But the news, if indeed it is true, is worth spreading: a site like this will serve as a partial corrective to the Anglo-US bias afflicting net film coverage. Of the two current US sites summarising and linking to reviews (both net-only and those linked to print media) I prefer Metacritic, which has cleaner layout. It's also hard to complain about a service linking to new DVD, film and CD reviews all on the one page. But both sites serve useful functions.

Quote of the Week - Mike Leigh on remakes

"Life is too short to expend time, effort, energy or, most importantly, money, re-investigating characters when there are so many other films that one would like to make" - Mike Leigh in The Australian.

Now will someone please tell Michael Haneke (director of Funny Games (Austria 1997) and Funny Games (US 2008)?

3D = 2D + Headache

This piece by "Ian" arrived in today's Raatings, an e-news service circulating in the Australian film and TV industry. It provides an interestingly sceptical perspective on digital 3D amid all the hype for the new U2 3D concert film. I love the last line.

"Can someone please explain to the 3D movie buffs that there is no such thing as a '3D movie'.

"There are computer games where a virtual world is modelled in three
dimensions that the player can walk around in but there are no 3D movies. What
people mean when they talk about 3D movies are really “stereoscopic” movies, i.e.
movies shot with two lenses that mimic the separate pictures we receive from our two
eyes.

"Now we all know that the human brain receives a different picture from each
eye, which allows us to judge depth, but here’s the point - this only works for the first few metres. Once an object or a scene is more than a few metres away, both images are pretty much the same.

"Thus, while stereoscopic vision is useful for close-up tasks such as threading a needle or reaching for a wine glass, it has little or no effect on depth perception in the middle distance and beyond. This means that shooting spectacular movies in 3D is a spectacular waste of time. The truth is we can get the same depth information we get from stereoscopy simply by moving our heads from side to side and most of our sense of distance comes, along with perspective, from changes to our viewpoint. Movie directors have always realised this and use tracking and craning shots along with foreground objects to establish distance and spatial relations.

"The inability to get more visual information by changing viewpoints is why
stereoscopic – so called “3D” - photographs still look unrealistic. Even though objects seem to stand out from the background, you can’t move your head sideways to look round to see “behind” an object.

"This sends jarring messages to the brain because, in real life, the slightest head movement reveals a bit of what is occluded by the object. That problem, that no matter which way the viewer looks, or what they focus on, perspective and visual occlusion remains the same, will always bedevil stereoscopic motion pictures giving a strange and headachy illusion which could be called two and a half dimensions. In a true 3D movie, everyone in the audience would get a slightly different view of the action. This technology already exists: it’s called Theatre."

Cat Fights Dog - Dog Says Its Feelings Hurt

Reader Syms Covington has asked what I think of the spat this week between the Australian Writers Guild (AWG) and the Australian Directors Guild (ADG). The writers very publicly pulled out of industry lobby group the Australian Screen Council, accusing the directors body of "financial mismanagement".

According to Inside Film (IF), ADG chairman Ray Argall denies that "it has acted irresponsibly, and has for some years worked hard with the other member organisations; SPAA, MEAA and AWG to find common ground and present a united front on the major issues facing the industry.

"ADG regrets the comments reported to have been made by AWG. If the media reports are accurate, the comments are hurtful and untrue. However, ADG has no interest in adding fuel to the flames or in compounding the damage by engaging in any kind of tit for tat public debate with AWG.

"The policy work and research performed over several years has seen the ASC present a single voice to government on several important issues, most recently the establishment of Screen Australia and the Producer Offset."

Argall added that the ADG was "puzzled" as to why the Writer's Guild decided to resign "in such a public and highly damaging manner".

Answer to Covington: I don't have any inside information on this. I will say however that tension between the AWG and ADG seemed evident when AWG chief executive Jacqueline Woodman replied to my January 2 article in The Australian on problems with local feature screenwriting. Woodman didn't deny there was a screenwriting problem but in effect absolved her membership of any blame and instead blamed the membership of the directors' guild, arguing the excessive percentage of writer-directors making features was to blame. (See here to find the various blog posts and links to print articles on this.)

My other observation is that when ADG chief executive, Drew Macrae, resigned in January after only six months in the job, it was a clear signal that all was not well in the ranks of the organisation. Whatever the exact problem was, the ADG has managed to keep a lid on it.

How - or if - the writers' broadside at the ADG is directly connected to this is hard to figure from the outside. What is clear is that it's hardly an encouraging development for the local screen sector to have its writers so publicly at the throats of its directors. This is especially true given the launch of the new federal super-agency, Screen Australia, is only three months away - and almost certain to throw up the kinds of issues and uncertainties most helpfully addressed by a united screen industry lobby group.

Film criticism dies, world shrugs

Confession: I don't bother reading most newspaper film criticism I come across these days. I usually skim the first couple and last couple of paragraphs to get the gist and move on.

The reason? I want to know the writer's general feeling for the film but I don't want a blow by blow account. I'd rather experience the film - if I see it at all - unsullied by too much prior knowledge. David Strattton, critic for The Australian and ABC TV's At The Movies, said recently he even tries to avoid reading anything at all about films before seeing them.

Last weekend the Sydney Morning Herald's Paul Byrnes spent a good half page reviewing the latest Will Ferrell movie Semi-Pro, which he awarded one and a half stars out of five. No offence intended to Byrnes, a thoughtful and interesting critic, but I don't have the time and inclination to spend several minutes discovering why he thinks a minor Will Ferrell movie is a crock.

So can the imminent death of newspaper film criticism being discussed in the US media really be such a disaster? The latest article on the so-called "death of criticism" ran this week in the LA Times (the readers comments make particularly interesting reading).

I use inverted commas because there's a good counter-argument to the effect that those wanting a diversity of film criticism have never had it so good. From our computers we can access our favourite critics based anywhere in the world at any time. That's without counting the e-zines like Salon and Slate and hundreds of dedicated film websites including the merry blogging community of whch Eyes Wired Open is a proud member. So if we lose a few daily newspaper critics does it matter?

The most insightful criticism of films appearing in the Sydney Film Festival during my recent time as artistic director appeared not in a newspaper at all but in a blog - Matt Ravier's excellent Last Night With Riviera. (I don't just mean that he liked them - there were quite a few negative reviews and they were as well argued as the positive ones). Who cares if, say, Sydney tabloids The Sun Herald and Daily Telegraph end up cutting back on their film criticism due to declining revenues? Those of us wanting to dig out the penetrating, discursive writing can find it. Easily.

PS. It's a sign, perhaps, of how out of touch the LA Times is that it places at the head of its story a photo of the late New Yorker critic Pauline Kael (and her dog!) without bothering to supply her name - as if every one of their readers is so au fait with the appearance of the overly mythologised Kael that they don't even need to be told who she is. Sure, I recognise Kael and I suspect that goes for many of this blog's readers but how many ordinary LA Times readers will (not counting studio execs and screenwriters.)

Oasis - watch and weep

Pretty choked up by tonight's ABC documentary The Oasis - an extraordinarily intimate piece of patient, observational filmmaking about the work of Oasis, a centre for homeless youth in Sydney's inner-city Surry Hills - no more than five minutes walk from the safe and comfortable middle-class home where I sit typing this.

Even more extraordinary is the work of Paul and Robbin Moulds, the two Salvos who run the centre - both possessed of an almost saint-like optimism and determination in the teeth of daily disappointment.

Watching their battle to help kids acutely damaged by mental and emotional problems (often disastrously self-medicated with heroin and ice) was both inspiring and gut-wrenchingly sad. This is the most powerful Australian film on homelessness since Khoa Do's Finished People, which was filmed with homeless kids from Cabramattta playing fictionalised versions of themselves a few years ago.

Fortunately, those who missed Oasis can watch it on an ABC website set up to support the film. Sure it's tough. But it's also incredibly moving. Full credit to co-directors Ian Darling(who also produced) and Sascha Ettinger Epstein, also to executive producer Susan Mackinnon, and the ABC's Dasha Ross for commissioning the film.

Bach to the Future

It bugged me, in the various comments by readers of The Times to that piece on Hans Zimmer I posted on recently, that the conception of a contemporary soundtrack in the popular imagination seems limited to orchestral scores. So 20th century.

Where's Ry Cooder (Paris, Texas), Brian Eno (Heat), Michael Brook (Albino Alligator) and Cliff Martinez (sex, lies and videotape), all of whose work - albeit occasional - has given filmmakers a rich new palette of ambient sounds and atmospheres to work with.

Eno's awesomely beautiful piece Ascent (An Ending) was written as part of his soundtrack for moon landing documentary For All Mankind and it keeps cropping up in other places, Traffic and 28 Days Later included. According to YouTube viewers it also commonly features in British documentaries and was used over news footage of 9/11.

The piece is continuing to inspire visual artists. There may not yet be a word to describe the film clips posted on Youtube that match the Eno track to gorgeous photo-montages, but the evidence points to an exciting new, emerging art form. Start with the astonishingly gorgeous clip above and work your way down - then tell me you're not impressed.







I've always felt Eno's piece had an affinity with Bach - and long suspected it must have been inspired by the work of the master - partly because it is unique in Eno's work, partly because it's hard to believe a piece of music so harmonically sophisticated could come from an untrained musician. (Eno's innovations have been largely conceptual and intellectual, a development of the minimalist idea of music as process, rather than inspired in terms of harmonic invention.) Any hints or clues readers can provide will be much appreciated.

POSTSCRIPT:
Having just listened again to The Big Ship from Eno's 1975 album Another Green World (which satisfactorily merged his rock and ambient styles), I'm having a rethink about his supposed lack of harmonic sophistication. Hear this and An Ending (Ascent) - which followed several years later - seems far less of a leap out of nowhere.

Film Critics Go Down the Gurgler (Internet Destroys Everything ctd)

More on the slow death of dead-tree film criticism, from Anne Thompson in Variety.

Extract:

"For a generation of film lovers weaned on Pauline Kael and Roger Ebert, imagining a world where moviegoers make their pic choices without the help of film critics is nearly unthinkable.

"Fact is, that world is already here.

"My USC film criticism students -- who are film-obsessed and hardly representative of their non-cinephile peers -- can't name a working critic other than Ebert, and that's thanks to his TV fame.

"They scan Rolling Stone or Entertainment Weekly, but they don't know critics Peter Travers or Owen Gleiberman. They check out film rankings at Rotten Tomatoes or Metacritic and dip into some reviews, but they haven't found a particular film critic they trust to steer them straight.

"These young film lovers are just as likely to look up old (yes, even B&W) movies for their Netflix queue as new ones. On the Internet, the long tail prevails. (Snarky review site pajiba.com's "underappreciated gem" "Trading Places" grabbed 310 comments in two days.)

"They admire the auteurs Anderson and Coen, can parse Hitchcock's Psycho with the best of them, and have studied Truffaut and Godard. But they don't read newspapers, and never will.

"Many of them don't even frequent like-minded blogs that share their cinephilia.

"These students -- and today's youth auds in general -- more often get their movie info straight from the studio marketing departments, who couldn't be happier. These kids go to YouTube, Yahoo Movies and Apple to find trailers. As they surf the Web, bits of movie flotsam and visuals planted by the studios on MSN Movies or IGN or JoBlo eventually cross their eyeballs. But they also listen to their friends more than any authority figures, and distrust obvious studio hype.

"It's these kids' boomer parents who still read movie critics (whose average age is 55 to 65) and follow their guidance -- when there's something for them to see.

"Younger moviegoers are fickle; they're just as likely to play Guitar Hero or download episodes of "The Office" from iTunes. And the studios, for the most part, continue to bank on short-term, wide-release youth movies vs. riskier, execution-dependent movies for adults.

"Thus, as boomers age and their subscriptions expire, the increasingly desperate economics of newspaper publishing are forcing aging movie critics out the door. And younger ones too..."

Thompson's third par is a humdinger: the fact she actually teaces film criticism at university is astonishing enough, that her students can't name any newspaper critics other than Roger Ebert doubly so.

The Biggest Annual Women's Film Festival is in...

South Korea is the land of film festivals, the annual Pusan event having risen in not much more than a decade to become the most influential in Asia, despite challenges mounted by Hong Kong and Tokyo.

Now I've discovered that the world's biggest women's festival is in Korea too - The International Women's Film Festival in Seoul (WFFIS), which aims to see the world through women's eyes. Why Korea? Maybe it has something to do with the sexist atittudes said to be prevalent in Korean society.

Here's an extract from The Korea Times' interview with festival director Lee Hyae-kyoung.'':

" 'Film theorist Laura Mulvey said the camera services male viewpoints and caters to their desires by objectifying females,' she said. ``The women's film festival is related with the feminist movement. We aim to answer questions about how it would be to view the world driven by female desires and perspectives.

" 'It also goes beyond women's issues and fathoms what the female perspective means within the context of human and even non-human concerns, and what role it plays in creating new social systems and cultures.'

"Launched in 1997 as a humble biannual event, the film festival grew steadily. Unlike most festivals, WFFIS is not state-funded, though it now receives generous support from the government. But whether it was small or big, the festival was always very popular, garnering an average of over 90 percent capacity for screenings ― rare for any given film event in the world. This is phenomenal considering that it caters to a largely female audience.

" 'Our aim is to instill confidence in women, nurturing the soul for a year until the next festival. It's true we began as a separatist festival for women, with the female audience and filmmakers at the core. But we remained open and aimed to influence society with simultaneously separatist and mainstreaming efforts,' she said."

Hey Hey It's the Aussie Film Industry Nazis - You Vill Write Nice Reviews or Else

"It is not the job of film reviewers to "support" the local film industry. Any reviewer who claims it is cannot be trusted and should be sacked immediately. Absolute independence is crucial if you are to do this job properly. The only obligation the critic has is to render an honest, informed, unfettered opinion to the filmgoer who, after all, is the one who has to pay good money to go see a film." Jim Schembri

I loved Schembri's feisty reply on his Age blog to a reader who moronically complained that he shouldn't have slated the local film Hey Hey It's Esther Blueburger on the grounds that, and I quote, "even if it's a s*** film", he should be "supporting the local industry" and "give the makers a go at getting some money back".

What is it with this sense of entitlement with so many Australian filmmakers? What are they, a publicly listed charity?


I haven't seen Blueburger - with a title like that I don't have high expectations but I will see it out of duty and/or curiosity. But even if I end up liking it I absolutely defend Schembri's or any other critic's right to lay into local films if they feel they fall short. Indeed it's their duty.

I don't get this Australian-film-industry-as-sheltered-workshop" attitude - a feeble excuse for sub-mediocrity. If we can't rise above it there is no hope and we might as well give up lending public support to the film industry right now. Let's say it loud and clear: if local films can't hit the mark they deserve to die.

That doesn't mean I agree with Schembri's negative view of The Black Balloon, that other current Australian film copstarring Toni Collette, but I'll certainly defend his right to express it without being inveigled to "support" the local industry.

In his undated blog piece Schembri quotes a very interesting letter from the editor of The Australian Jewish News. It bears republishing here:

Hi Jim,

"I read with interest (and cheered loudly at) your review of Hey Hey it's Esther Blueburger. It was spot-on and echoed our critic's sentiments about the film. (To read Adam Kaimen's review go here.)

After publishing the review, I received a phone call from the film's producer, Miriam Stein, who questioned the credentials of our reviewer (who happens to write sport as well) and asked whether it was appropriate that a 30-year-old male should review a film about a 13-year-old's rite of passage.

It was an extraordinary claim to make.

Indeed, who would be "credentialed" to review Julian Schnabel's Oscar-nominated The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, a film about a man with locked-in syndrome whose only way of communicating is by blinking an eye?

The AJN doesn't have a 13-year-old girl on staff nor a person in a state of paralysis who blinks out reviews ... but we are accepting applications.

More disturbingly, she argued that we should support the film because it was locally produced and loaded with Jewish content. I told her our obligation was not to her bottom line, but to our readers, and perhaps she should be in another business if she can't handle someone else's opinion.

The AJN has since been inundated with phone calls and letters from the film's supporters, who instead of attacking points raised in the review, have taken personal swipes at our reviewer.

Reading your review proved that we weren't alone in condemning this film.

So thanks -- and keep up the good fight against bad cinema,

Darren Levin
Arts editor, The Australian Jewish News

There's probably a follow-up post on this on reviewers who have been blackballed for the forthrightness of their opinions. I was once banned from attending media previews by a major distributor after panning three of their films in the Sydney Morning Herald (The Hunt for Red October and Shirley Valentine - I forget the third). The argument - which they put in letter form - was that because the films had been "acclaimed" at the box office overseas, this proved "that your critic was wrong." Funny, but I never thought it was the function of critics to predict - or sheepishly follow - box office performance but to give a hopefully well-argued personal assessment.

The ban from screenings was accompanied by an implict threat to reduce the level of advertising but lasted no longer than three weeks. It ended when the arts editor had lunch with the head of publicity and explained that I would not only continue to review their films - by paying to see them at the cinema on the Thursday of their release, the fee to be reimbursed by the paper - but that the SMH's editor thought they had a hide and was planning to run a story about their decision.

Oddly the executive responsible was always polite to me after that. But what if I'd been a reviewer for a cash-strapped independent publication? No doubt the threat of losing vital advertising revenue would have had the desired effect. I'd be out on my ear and a reviewer of more toadying tendencies brought in as a replacment.

Any other readers had or heard of similar experiences?

Oh Darling, You Say the Most Sensual Things as You Humiliate and Threaten to Kill Me

Madman is planning to release Michael Haneke's US remake of his self-reflexive 1997 shocker Funny Games in Australia on August 1.

Is the company, I wonder, planning to use the following trailer? Note the word "sensual" flashing on the screen followed by brief shot of Naomi Watts removing her top.



Now view the following clip to understand the context:



So let me see if I get this right: a scene that depicts the brutal sexual assault of a woman is "sensual"?

We're used to seeing films misrepresented in their publicity. Remember the posters for Mike Leigh's Naked featuring a writhing, part-naked Katrin Cartlidge as if the film were a piece of steamy erotica? But this trailer for Haneke's film hits a new low. If the Austrian writer-director had anything to do with the publicity campaign, it makes his claims to be occupying the moral high ground with this movie - intended to force the audience to deal with their attraction to screen violence - look very thin.

What Date Did You Say it is it Today?

Google claims to have developed a program with predictive qualities. From the News Ltd website, April 1, 2009:

"A NEW Google program powered by artificial intelligence allows internet users to search web pages 24 hours before they're created, the company said today.

"Google Australia said the new beta search technology which drives the gDay search feature can accurately predict future internet content – and even future events.

"The gDay technology – developed in the company's Sydney engineering centre – uses machine learning and artificial intelligence techniques from a system called MATE, or Machine Automated Temporal Extrapolation.

"The feature then creates a sophisticated model of what the internet will look like 24 hours from a given point by using the company's index of historic, cached web content and a combination of recurrence plots and "fuzzy measure" analysis.

"By accessing web pages before they're actually created, users can view information from the future – including news events, share price movements and sporting results."

Lebanon Lifts Ban on Persepolis

Lebanon has lifted a ban on Vincent Paronnaud and Marjane Satrapi's animated film Perspolis - a recent Oscar nominee and Cannes Jury prize winner - after being accused of sucking up to Iran, according to the Lebanese Daily Star.


On Wednesday, General Wafiq Jizzini, head of the Interior Ministry's General Security department - which administers Lebanon's censorship regime - said he had decided to ban the film after Shiite officials expressed concern that its content was offensive to Muslims and to Iran. He hasn't elaborated on his reasons for changing his mind.

In Australia Roadshow has slated the film - about the experiences of a young girl during the Islamnic Revolution - for cinema release on July 1.

Another Film Critic Bites the Dust

They're going down like flies. Thanks to reader Syms Covington for following up my last post with the related news that prominent US film critic David Ansen of Newsweek has just taken voluntary redundancy - or "put out to pasture due to plummeting ad revenues and the general downswirling of dead-tree journalism", in the words of Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeffrey Wells.

The news comes only a days after Nathan Lee was laid off from The Village Voice for what the magazine calls economic reasons.

As Variety's Anne Thompson writes, "the current harsh publishing climate has been hard on film critics. Gone from newspaper staff reviewer ranks are The Chicago Reader's Jonathan Rosenbaum, Newsday's John Anderson, The Village Voice's Nathan Lee, The New York Daily News' Jami Bernard and Jack Mathews, The Chicago Tribune's Michael Wilmington and The Atlanta Journal Constitution's Eleanor Ringel Gillespie.

"Some have retired and some have been pushed out. 'It is scary; they're letting a lot of good people go these days,' said Ansen. 'It's like a return to the hard old days when I was growing up when anybody could be a movie critic, and they'd take somebody off the sports desk.'"