Get a life - be rude to a Twitterer

What is it with this cultural moment and the obsession with the accelerated 'now'?

(thanks to marie for cliptip)

Being an entire decade older

I'm finding it very scary that Being John Malkovich (left) is now 10 fricking years old.

Having just seen Disgrace (trailer below), I'm finding it even scarier that John Malkovich doesn't look a day older than he did then. This South African-set Australian production, adapted from J.M.Coetzee's Booker Prize-winner, is released in Australia on June 25, a full nine months after its world premiere at Toronto. I'll be reviewing it for Limelight so no premature comment here...

You've seen the cinema, now experience the vitality of Iranian music

Ensemble Dastan & Salar Aghili
The Endless Ocean
Network 495120

Iranian cinema has deservedly earned a dedicated following around the world but more fuss should be made about its music from the evidence of this melancholy yet ecstatically intense music by Iran’s most famous classical ensemble and renowned singer Salar Aghili. While they exhibit the odd slower moment, these nine pieces tend towards the ferociously rhythmic, the ensemble’s two oud players and single violinist approaching their instruments with a physicality habitually associated with flamenco. Add to this the fierce interplay of two virtuoso percussionists and Aghili’s ear-bending ululations and you have a remarkable recording. _ Lynden Barber

First published in Limelight, May 2008

Ensemble Dastan's official website is here

Death of newspapers - part 299

Time magazine has published an annotated list of the Top 10 US newspapers likely to stop publishing print editions or fold entirely in the next 18 months.

The list soberingly includes some big names such as The Miami Herald (up for sale but no buyer), The Boston Globe (losing US$1 million a week), The San Francisco Chronicle (lost US$70 million last year) and The Chicago Sun-Times (parent company trading at a paltry 3 cents per share and CEO and most of the board have been ditched).

Of course, throwing the print edition overboard is hardly the same as closing uop shop - and ultimately makes a lot of sense for many publications in the age of broadband.

Meanwhile Sydney's Daily Telegraph lives another day, no doubt to print another load of junky pictures purporting to be of a naked politician at a time when they had yet to enter public life - all, of course, in the public interest.

For an excellent US blog on the future of newspaper and periodical publishing, I recommend Eat Sleep Publish. Sample from its latest post: "

"Linking out to other sites

"This is a practice that gets a lot of crap, and I think it comes mostly from the competitive mentality that has been front & center in the news business for decades. It used to be that if you didn’t write it, you didn’t acknowledge that it existed.

"Now, when everything is just a click away, and it doesn’t make sense to compete with content you can’t compete with (why should you write a piece from your desk when another news organization has a story from a reporter on the scene?), the link makes a lot of sense.

"In the words of Jeff Jarvis, “do what you do best and link to the rest.”

(Image: historyofeconomics.files.wordpress.com)

Seraphine de Senlis - a taster

The French film Seraphine , a biography of "naive" early 20th century painter, Seraphine de Senlis, that swept this year's Cesar awards (the French Oscars), is being released in Australia on June 1.

I'll be writing about it nearer the release date but in the meantime here's a little taster in the form of three of the artist's extraordinary works.

Carlos Reygadas - DVD review

DVD REVIEW:
Silent Light
Battle in Heaven
Japon

Director: Carlos Reygadas.
Distributor: Kojo

Mainstream accounts of the rise of the new Mexican cinema tend to focus on the filmmakers who’ve worked in Hollywood - Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu (Babel), Guillermo del Toro (Pan’s Labyrinth) and Alfonso Cuaron (Y Tu Mama Tambien), leaving out the fourth significant talent, Carlos Reygadas. But perhaps that’s unsurprising given his determinedly uncommercial aims. His three films to date are clearly influenced by such late masters as Denmark’s Carl Dreyer, Russia’s Andrei Tarkovsky, France’s Robert Bresson and Spain’s Luis Bunuel, which is to say they’re serious and aesthetically ambitious, sometimes difficult and problematic and sometimes quite extraordinary.

The opening of the recent Silent Light is one for the ages - a breathtakingly arresting, six minute shot that starts on the stars before slowly panning down to a rural landscape that only gradually comes into view as dawn breaks. Not only a technical tour de force, it metaphorically captures the spiritual framework in which events will play out - that of deeply religious people aiming to live peacefully with God and the universe yet struggling with all-too earthbound human frailities. And yes, it looks amazing on DVD too.

The story, set in a Mexican Mennonite community (a traditional, Amish-like religious sect), concerns an farmer torn apart by the conflict between an adulterous affair and his conscience. Not that any of this is announced using anything so literal as dialogue. The story features some extraordinary moments of high drama, the magical, Dreyer-derived finale especially. Yet for much of its playing time Reygadas is more interested in exploring the texture of experiences and feelings than the twists and turns of narrative. Every shot is carefully framed, the pacing deliberate, the acting (using a Mennonite cast) underplayed.

Reygadas’s first two films, also made using non-professional casts, raised some hostility for their transgressive sex scenes. In 2002’s austere Japon, a middle-aged man walks into remote hill country to commit suicide and makes love to an elderly peasant woman. That debut remains the work of a promising director whose reach initially exceeded his grasp. The startling follow-up, Battle in Heaven (pictured top), was a challenging stew of sex, violence, class, religion and national symbolism that caused ructions at Cannes for its scenes of a wealthy, teenage beauty fellating an obese. middle-aged male. What seemed to offend was not just its explicitness but the sight of less than perfect bodies, the provocative intermingling of young and old flesh.

Intractable and provocative (it is, as the saying goes, not for all tastes), Heaven remains nonetheless unforgettable. But with Silent Light Reygadas ditches the confrontation and goes all-out for film-as–transcendental experience. Here for the first time are extraordinarily affecting love scenes that express the characters’ powerfully conflicting emotional needs. Apart from the opening, at least one other scene will stay with me for years: in torrential rain the farmer waits by a busy highway as his wife, devastated by his affair, runs into a field and -- well, see it for yourselves._ Lynden Barber

First published in Limelight, December 2008. Republished with kind permission.

Recommended: Josh Wheatley's fascinatingly erudite analysis of Battle in Heaven at 5 Sprocket.

One for the chaps

After watching Peter O'Toole's character in Dean Spanley having his newspaper ironed for him every morning at his gentleman's club, I have decided to become a toff.

Today I was introduced to the hallowed halls of a bona fide gentleman's establishment, The Australian Club, which hides discreetly behind a plain wooden door in Sydney's Macquarie Street. What an interesting experience it was. I had assumed these 19th century institutions only existed still in Melbourne, with its old money pretentions. How wrong I was.

Having been forewarned to wear a tie, I chose a yellow affair that may have been considered a trifle brash, being set against a black shirt. My major error however lay in turning up on this hot day not wearing a suit jacket, entrance to the dining room being barred to those without one.

Luckily the club held a wardrobe containing a few spares, so I selected one that vaguely fitted, waited to be signed in as a guest by my distinguished elder companion, and proceeded to the upstairs dining chamber where upon we sat adjacent to the window to gain a glorous view of the harbour and the Domain.

On the way up in the elevator - this I should point out is a modern institution - I was informed that of course, since this is a gentleman's club, women are not allowed. Thus my shock when, entering a room populated almost entirely by elderly and similarly besuited males, I immediately spotted a lady seated at a nearby table. Women guests, it turns out, are allowed. What is the world, I wondered, coming to.

Despite being "sexist, imperialist and so on", the club held a certain appeal for my companion and I can understand why. It is a usefully quiet spot to come when preparing to go out on the town, and the food is excellent.

I will be requiring my copy of The Young Fogey to be ironed very carefully, Jeeves.

(Image: sarafreeze.com)

Only one in four Australians goes to the cinema

Here's a statistic worth bearing in mind the next time a film distributor crows about its latest blockbuster smashing previous earning records (totally meaninglessly, since the figures are never inflation-adjusted) .

In the last 10 years the proportion of Australians attending the cinema has fallen by 13 per cent
to reach a mere 26 per cent of the population, according to research conducted by Roy Morgan.

This may or may not be connected to the fact that the proportion of Australians who used the internet within a month of being surveyed rose from 35 per cent in 1999 to 75 per cent last December. And 55 per cent of all Australians aged from 14 upwards go online daily, up from 15 per cent a decade ago.

(Image: the age.com)

All sausage, no sizzle

I'm not infrequently surprised by what other reviewers say about new films in release and this week I'm finding it hard to believe that reviewers at Screen Daily and the Sydney Morning Herald could find Michael Clayton writer-director Tony Gilroy's tab at a romantic spy comedy, Duplicity, to be anything other than an overly laboured confection.

For a somewhat more downbeat assessment of the film, which stars Clive Owen and Julia Roberts and opened on Thursday, see my review on the SBS movie website.

(All comments welcome, whether friendly or hostile, but I'd like to respectfully request that commenters leave their remarks at the bottom of the review on the SBS website first - thanks.)

Screenwriters of the world unite!

It's an old screenwriters axiom that when a film is proclaimed a success, its director take all the credit, but if it fails, the screenwriter is held to blame.

A recent example of the former: Before the Devil Knows You're Dead was widely celebrated as marking the return to form of its veteran director, Sidney Lumet, while the name of the much younger writer responsible for its ingenious screenplay, Kelly Masterson, tended to fall by the wayside.

More recently Frost-Nixon was frequently described as "a Ron Howard film" when that director had far less to do with its outcome than did Peter Morgan, who adapted the screenplay from his own stage play. Any one of 30 or more competent Hollywood directors could have achieved very similar results, especially given the film's stars, Frank Langella and Michael Sheen, had played the same roles in the New York stage production. The project landed in Howard's lap as a package.

The UK's Financial Times reports on the bitter split of the Mexican filmmaking team responsible for Amores Peros, 21 Grams and Babel - after director Alejandro Iñárritu allegedly retreated from an agremeent with screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga (pictured right) to share credit.

Arriaga told the FT the problems began early on after the pair made Amores Perros.' "I am not a writer for hire. I do not ‘work for’ a director. These are original stories and when Alejandro began to say, ‘This is my film’, I said, ‘This is not what I think is right.’ We didn’t share the original creative vision. These are personal works that come from my own life.”

'They split up before Babel began shooting. Will they work again? “Never. Never. The ways are parted.” '

Incredible, when you consider that without Arriaga's strikingly original scripts, with their ambitious juggling of different temporal and geographical frames, Iñárritu (pictured with Golden Globe for Babel) would not have a career. But alas this seems to be common behaviour among directors still drunk on the far-reaching influence of Francois Truffaut's "politique des auteurs."

(images: production shot of Naomi Watts in 21 Grams/ Arriaga - newsimg.bbc.co.uk/ Iñárritu - cbc.ca)

Another load of film junk?

My recent visit to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image's exhibition on film production design intensified my doubts about the worth of such events - doubts first aroused by visits to the Berlin Film Museum and ACMI's 2006 blockbuster exhibition devoted to Stanley Kubrick, in effect a collection of meaningless Kubrickian memorabilia.

In this New Matilda piece I lay down my objections.

Extract: "Such exhibition practice is not worthy of any institution that lays claim to a mantle of artistic seriousness. The idea that a dead assemblage of plywood from a film set or a series of sketches will magically spring to life and exert a special aura when displayed is mistaken. This paraphernalia does not belong in a gallery space. These are static, lifeless chunks of memorabilia, mere fetish objects intended to trigger nostalgia. Unlike the paintings and sculptures in an art gallery there is no authentic art object that springs to life before the eyes. A prop is a prop is a prop."

(PERSONAL REQUEST: can anyone who has commented or plans to do so please also cut and paste their comment into the article's comments box on the New Matilda website? Its editors commissioned the piece so I don't really want to start a separate discussion that isn't also on the New Matilda site if I can help it. Many thanks!)

(Images: flickr; pluaustralia.files.wordpress.com)

Of Time and the City

Last August I raved about Terence Davies's Of Time and the City after seeing it in the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). The film has just opened in limited release in Australian cities. I urge viewers to rush to see it before it goes to DVD.

I'm republishing my earlier remarks below:

Terence Davies's magisterial Of Time and the City, a cinematic poem dedicated to his native Liverpool (and no, I don't mean the south western Sydney suburb), is his first documentary.

But it makes more sense to me to regard it less as a unique new flowering than the third film in a trilogy begun by Distant Voices, Still Lives(1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). That is, a poetic reverie of images, sounds and - especially - music drawn from his youthful memories of growing up an aesthete in a harsh working class environment. That makes it in effect his second tryptich following 1984's The Terence Davies Trilogy.

Davies's film - see here for the official website - draws from a wealth of archival footage to create a personal history (with the emphasis on personal) of post-WW2 Liverpool, and shows an uncanny ability to discover great beauty within ugliness. No pretence here of following an official narrative, of celebrating the city of The Beatles and Merseybeat, which he dismisses as cursorily as possible, confessing this was where he stepped off the popular music bus.

When it comes to the use of music Davies is second to none as a filmmaker. He does make two mistakes here: the brief sequence devoted to the Beatles tries to get away with passing off The Swinging Blue Jeans' Hippy Hippy Shake as a Fab Four song. His use of The Hollies' He Ain't Heavy, He's My Brother over a sequence recalling his brother's going off to fight in Korea, which is overly literal and obvious. And maybe I'm quibbling, but it seems odd to use a tune by Manchester's premiere pop group of the mid-60s when you don't have a single tune by Liverpool's globally revered musical emissaries - even if, as I strongly suspect, the cost of The Beatles' music rights may have had something to do with the decision.

But it's easy to forgive all this thanks to Davies's sublime selections of image and music - mostly but not exclusively classical - elsewhere, none so perfect as Peggy Lee singing Oscar Hammerstein and Jerome Kern's The Folks Who Live on the Hill - a beautifully melancholy evocation of ordinary folks dreaming of a better future that will most likely never come - over footage of the mass slum clearance programs where entire working class districts were bulldozed to make way for hideous blocks of flats - back then seeing as a utopian solution to the housing problem.

Now that's what I call cinema.


See here for CinemaScope's interview with Davies, and here for a conversation between the film-maker and screenwriter and fellow Liverpudlian Frank Cottrell Boyce.

Dumb and dumberer - the sequel

On the list of rhetorical turns of phrases that drive me mad, "people aren't stupid, you know?" is near the top. People are often extremely stupid. How could anyone not notice this?

For a start you see it on the roads every day. Any driver in the city will know the regular experience of having to suddenly brake to avoid suicide-cases who walk out into the road without even looking once in the direction of approaching traffic - and then not even looking up when you screech to a halt only a metre away and hit the horn.

Then there's the stupid drivers. Less than a month while driving home from a concert through Sydney's Darlinghurst a driver not only reversed from a side road into the main road on which I was driving but did so in an attempt to get right cross two lanes of traffic in one go.

Result: the car directly in front of me was forced to do an emergency stop to avoid ramming directly into the suicidal lunatic's side door and possibly killing his passenger. I was a fraction of a second too tardy in hitting the brake and went into the driver's rear end. Our two vehicles were damaged, mine quite badly, but at least no-one was injured. Meanwhile the reckless moron who caused the incident drove off without stopping. Well he would, wouldn't he? (Pic on left is of unrelated incident, found at new-insurancetips.com)

As for stupid behaviour in bush fire season, don't get me started. The most recent edition of The Weekend Australian Magazine had a feature by Kate Legge sprinkled with stories of jaw-droppingly stupid behaviour on Victoria's recent Black Saturday of rural firestorms (no hyperlink because it isn't on-line). Most of these concerned city folks who had driven into the danger zone for a nice little weekend away and then sat around the resort swimming pool and the such like, even ignoring huge plumes of smoke in the air, orange-red skies and other alarming signs of coming apocalypse.

The incredible thing is that this was despite plentiful warnings at least 24 hours ahead from Victorian premier John Brumby that the state faced the danger of another Ash Wednesday, with temperatures expected to reach an almost inconceivable 46 degrees along with high winds. Brumby not only warned of the fire danger, he even advised Victorians to stay indoors! Yet owners of guest houses and resorts in the danger zone reported virtually no last minute visitor cancellations.

Legge quotes a guest house owner Phillip White, who at 4.10pm took one look at the rust-red sky and bolted, realising his home was too old and big to defend against the flames. His view on the behaviour of so many of the city visitors? "A lot of people are generally thick."

Now I certainly wouldn't accuse the owners of Woodlands Rainforest Retreat, 16 km out of the fire-razed town of Marysville, of stupid behaviour. I have no idea how they reacted on Black Saturday. As I suggested above, many of the locals who live in the fire region seem to have been relatively fire-aware.

But I had to gasp in amazement at another story by Legge this weekend, this time in the news pages, that quoted the owners of the Woodlands resort (pictured right) complaining about a severe lack of custom since the fire disasters. It wasn't so much their comments that galled - no-one wants to see more people go out of business from this disaster - so much as the accompanying photo (which unfortunately is not reproduced in the paper's on-line edition).

This made it clear that despite evcerything thta happened down the road a few weeks ago, this timber-built eco-retreat is still closely surrounded by dense forest. The image posted above right (courtesy of ozbedandbreakfast.com) is older but if there's been extensive chopping of trees from the resort since the fires, this weekend's photo didn't show it.

It may be that the resort's anti-fire arrangements are much more sound than the photo makes it appear. Timber for building can be retreated with flame retardant, for example, and the resort's evacuation and water supply may be impressive for all I know.

But given the Dresden-like ferocity of those firestorms it's surely bleeding obvious why no-one is wanting to stay in Victorian forest lodges with trees and bushes creeping right to the very edge of the timber buildings - even if the fire threat appears to have receded for now.

(top image: .berkeleydailyplanet.com)

Watchmen vs Slumdog - compare and contrast

Having now seen Watchmen, which opened in Australia today, I find that I agree wholeheartedly with the criticisms of the US reviewers I quoted in my earlier post and thoroughly disagree with my two correspondents who found it captivating. We can arm wrestle over this, or I can lay out my objections and anyone who wants to tussle with them can do so here, is that a deal?

The movie is fatally hobbled in my view by several problems incluidng laughably bad and often pretentious 'B' grade dialogue - delivered indifferently at the very best - and a surfeit of violence-porn only marginally softened by its stylised context.

Like The Dark Knight this is an ambitious attempt at constructing a comic-strip film around dark themes but one of the chief reasons why the Nolan brothers' film worked so effectively was the astounding performance of Heath Ledger as The Joker and the more-than solid supporting cast. It also helped that it took as its central influence - both stylistically and thematically - a genuine cinematic masterpiece,namely Michael Mann's Heat, without being constrained from building a detailed world all of its own.But it's obvious from as early as Watchmen's pre-credits sequence that director Zack Snyder (300) has absolutely no idea of how to direct actors delivering dialogue. To take just one instance, Robert Wisden, who plays Richard Nixon, is allowed to make the fatal mistake of doing what Frank Langella so carefully avoids doing in Frost/Nixon, ie. he mounts an impersonation rather than a performance (and not a very good impersonation at that).

The film's narrative problems have been accurately dissected by several US critics. They tend to suggest, quite correctly, that in attempting to be slavishly faithful to the Alan Moore graphic novel on which it is based, the movie fails to reimagine the material in filmic terms. The narrative is really little more than an endless series of digressions, flash backs and flash forwards. I didn't find this confusing or especially hard to follow, but I did find that it prevented any sense of urgency or narrative tension from developing - the kind needed to drive along a movie lasting a bum-numbing two and a half hours-plus.

Slumdog Millionaire would make an interesting compare and contrast. It also uses a complex series of flashes backwards and forwards and builds a detailed back story for its principal characters. But crucially all this temporal jumping about is structured with an elegance that makes perfect sense to a movie audience unfamiliar with its Indian source novel. And the film has a crucial pivot point, a kind of movie present day that shows what is happening to the hero "now", in which we are asked to wonder, 'will the hero be allowed back on the game show and will he then go on to win and regain contact with his beloved?' et cetera. The present and past-tense sequences play against each other with an energetic dynamism lacking from Watchmen's ponderous temporal dislocations.

While Watchmen hangs on a plot point involving no less than total nuclear war and the annihilation of mankind, it's hard to identify any central standpoint, a present tense "movie now" from where the central narrative tension builds. The fear that mankind is about to be erased from the planet is given about as much dramatic weight as any other sequence. It's usually not clear how one relates to the other.

Now for the characters and actors. The two performances that carried some weight for me were those of Jeffrey Dean Morgan (think of a more thuggish Robert Downey Junior) and Jackie Earle Haley, respectively playing The Comedian and Rorschach, right-wing sociopaths both. Haley's verbal delivery is monotonous while he's wearing his character's mask. But when it's whipped off you remember how effectively creepy and yet pathetic he was in his Oscar-nominated comeback role as the friendly neighbourhood paedophile in Little Children.

As Silk Spectre II, Malin Akerman displays villain-crushing thighs that frequently invite base thoughts best left unspoken. As an actor, she now has a great chance of snaring a long-term role in The Bold and the Beautiful. Patrick Wilson (Kate Winslet's adulterous lover in Little Children) is equally bland as as Nite Owl II (pictured at top), so there's poetic justice in these two characters getting it together.

If you think Nite Owl II looks nerdy wait till you meet Matthew Goode's Ozymandias, the most flagrantly high camp character, with a twerpy costume lifted from a 1930s science fiction vision of the future (say, Things to Come) plus monster quiff and effeteness lifted from David Bowie in his Low and Station to Station period or perhaps former Thatcher-era British politician Michael Heseltine.

SPOILER SENTENCE. Indeed he's so gay that his turning out to be the villain starts to look suspiciously like homophobia

Finally as Dr Manhattan, a glowingly radioactive human iceberg-cum walking nuclear bomb metaphor (if I read this correctly), the filmmakers have given a second career chance to Billy Crudup. The reason Crudup's movie career sputtered after a few breakout roles a few years ago is surely not because he's a bad actor or his surname invites playground sniggering but because his face is so unmemorable that he looks exactly like every other good-looking, well-chiselled guy on US TV. (Yes, that one.)

Dr Manhattan has the most evocative sequence - an extended flashback memory experienced while he's chilling out on Mars, kind of like Jesus in the desert, accompanied by one of the best bits of Philip Glass's very splendid Koyaanisqatsi soundtrack. This creates a wonderfully unusual effect.

But the digital effects used to create Dr Manhattan's icy blue glow are sadly emblematic of the problems sometimes encountered when filmmakers try to recreate fantasy comic book characters with real life actors.

Comic books work from a high level of stylisation - it's part of their essential appeal. But to achieve this kind of stylisation on film, Snyder employs digital effects that frequently create a half-way house between conventional naturalistic representation and animation - kind of like Jar Jar Binks in The Phantom Menace.

In some cases this works - witness Rorschach's mask with its dalmation-like spots that constantly move. But in other cases so compromised is the end result that it provokes an obvious question: why the hell didn't he go the whole hog and adapt Watchmen as an animated movie?

Sure, it would have still needed a far more movie-friendly narrative. But it might have been a good way of avoiding a gang of superheroes who - with the exception of our two psychotic friends - resemble a bunch of dorks.

Bruni Tedeschi emerging as major figure of the French cinema

Of all the wave of French actresses to have emerged in the last decade or so, it's the Italian-born Valeria Bruni Tedeschi who has exerted the most hypnotic fascination for this viewer, the one who has appeared so clearly to be a major figure of the French cinema.

Her screen presence is invariably intense and can sometimes be overpoweringly sensual, yet she can also be somewhat mysterious and strange, qualities displayed to various degrees in Le Grand Alibi and the self-directed Actresses, both on the program of this year's Alliance Francaise French Film Festival, which opened tonight in Sydney and tomorrow in Melbourne (Thursday March 5) and also screens in Canberra, Brisbane, Perth and Adelaide.

In November I had the chance to interview Bruni Tedeschi about her acting and directing career in Paris and she proved a candid interviewee, as you can see from my feature on her just published on the super-duper new SBS film website. (SBS appears to be sinking some serious resources into building this into a major web site focussed on foreign and cult film.)

Brief extract:
"Before interviewing her in Paris I am told Bruni Tedeschi clams up when asked about her sister, Carla Bruni, the wife of French President Nicolas Sarkozy (a query about her family is indeed politely batted away), but I immediately discover she can be alarmingly candid when talking about acting. No sooner do I mention the tryptich Tickets than she tells me how 'terrible'' an experience it had been working for the revered Tree of Wooden Clogs director Ermanno Olmi, 'the only time in my life,' she says, 'that I was completely disappointed – and by a BIG director...' "

Watchmen - it's a thumbs down

At a Sydney media comference for Watchmen in November, clips suggested a superhero movie like no other. But at the same time the fight sequences were laughably inept, reproducing the clunky, robotic movements of the stick figures in countless video games. These clips were presented in an unfinished form, so it's hard to know how these scenes look in the finished film.

The Zack Snyder-directed movie is being treated with geeky regard by the fanboys for its faithfulness to its 1980s graphic novel source, but elsewhere the verdict is a downturned thumb.

Screen Daily: "...the film is a lesson on the perils of overstuffed big screen translations. Fitfully touching on a variety of complex issues, but never entirely satisfyingly so, Watchmen is shockingly devoid of natural narrative pull -- a beautifully constructed rocket that never quite gets off the ground...

"A lot of what made Watchmen a landmark achievement in the comic book realm -- its imaginative density, philosophical grappling and embrace of different modes of storytelling - helps make the film feel bloated and unfocused. David Hayter and Alex Tse's script seems faithful to a degree that handcuffs any substantive exploration of the chief narrative dilemmas, and the curious result is an exercise in tension-free antics and noir styling."

Hollywood Reporter: "As stimulating as it was to see the superhero movie enter the realm of crime fiction in The Dark Knight, Watchmen enters into a realm that is both nihilistic and campy. The two make odd companions. The film...will test the limits of superhero movie fans. If you're not already invested in these characters because of the original graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, nothing this movie does is likely to change that predicament...

"Snyder and writers David Hayter and Alex Tse never find a reason for those unfamiliar with the graphic novel to care about any of this nonsense. And it is nonsense...

"The set pieces are surprisingly flat and the characters have little resonance. Fight scenes don't hold a candle to Asian action. Even the digital effects are ho-hum. Armageddon never looked so cheesy."

Newsweek: "C

onfusing, maddeningly inconsistent and fighting a long, losing battle to establish an identity of its own. "

Variety: "Auds (audiences) unfamiliar with Moore’s brilliantly bleak, psychologically subversive fiction may get lost amid all the sinewy exposition and multiple flashbacks. After a victorious opening weekend, the pic’s B.O. future looks promising but less certain beyond its core fanbase...

"...the movie is ultimately undone by its own reverence; there’s simply no room for these characters and stories to breathe of their own accord, and even the most fastidiously replicated scenes can feel glib and truncated."

New Yorker: "Incoherent, overblown, and grimy with misogyny, Watchmen marks the final demolition of the comic strip, and it leaves you wondering: where did the comedy go? "

New York magazine: "Elements come to fleeting life, but numbness overtakes all...They’ve made the most reverent adaptation of a graphic novel ever. But this kind of reverence kills what it seeks to preserve. The movie is embalmed."

Quote of the week - the end of empire

David Simon, creator of HBO's The Wire, quoted in the Sydney Morning Herald's The Guide today (no link because it's not on-line):

"I'm not going to suggest that I don't in many ways admire Barack Obama, but I do think the problems are systemic and the level of reform that is required is too painful and too comprehensive for this country.

"I really do believe there are so many forces arrayed against the common good and rational policy that America is going to be hard pressed to recover its standing in the world. I really do believe that we're in a moment that is very much like the end of empire."

Talking of which, how is it for several months I've found it impossible to find The Wire for hire in any of my several regular DVD haunts? Yes, I know I can download it ( but not without busting my monthly download limit) and I know I can order it from amazon (but I'm trying to save for among other things a new laptop and an overseas trip so I want cheap-as-possible).

Is asking for DVDs of one of the best-reviewed teleseries of all time be kept in stock such an unreasonable demand of a DVD-hire outlet? And if not, is this an indication of why these shops are rapidly going out of business - and in fact deserve to do so?

French box office thrives while ours dives

As I reported yesterday in The Weekend Australian, while Australian cinema is failing signally to draw audiences, French cinema is riding a wave of popularity both domestically and in foreign markets.

"In French cinemas, locally produced films beat Hollywood films last year by selling a mighty 47.3per cent of all tickets, compared with 45.4 per cent for US productions.

"Figures for 2008 are expected to show that French films attracted a record 80 million admissions worldwide. In Australia, audiences for French films have grown strongly in the past three years, with 2.6 million admissions in 2008, compared with less than 500,000 in 2005."

It's impossible to attribute this simplistically to one or two factors. In the article I look to several explanations, including the following: "As veteran director Bertrand Tavernier told Australian journalists recently, filmmakers and unions have fought vigorously against free trade concessions to the US and to preserve a government funding system that, significantly, does not come directly from general tax revenue. It draws instead on a tax on cinema tickets, and a legal requirement that TV stations invest a certain percentage of funds on film production. This makes film funding less politically sensitive than it can be here."

For other reasons see the article...

Postscript: Matt Ravier, from festival organisers The Festivalists and the excellent film blog Last Night with Riviera, has sent in some pertinent observations.

"Other factors that should be taken into account:

"- In France film exhibitors are subsidised if they show a certain percentage of arthouse films. Some, who show classics or arthouse films exlusively, are able to run at a loss thanks to government subsidy.

"- There is a much stronger focus on film literacy and education. Film is an important part of the French curriculum, as early as primary school.

"- The French press treats French films with respect and fairness. Good films are championed, bad films are constructively criticized. The Australian press seems, on the other hand, to maintain an ambivalent relationship with Australian films. Witness the harsh comments recently about the poor performance of local films at the box office and, conversely, Australia, which is one of the highest grossing Australian films of all time.

"The French approach has always been that film is art, not just commerce, and that a film culture needs to be fostered, not just a film industry. French governments, whether from the left of the right, have stuck to their guns about excluding culture from free trade agreements. Like Australia, France is a fierce believer in free trade, but unlike Australia, it does not believe arthouse and national cinema can compete in the global marketplace without protectionist measures."

(image of Vincent Cassel is from the two part Public Enemy Number One, screening in this year's Alliance Francaise French Film Festival)