Hope discovers hope, by jupiter

Prolific US indie producer Ted Hope (The Unbelievable Truth, The Ice Storm, Happiness, 21 Grams, The Savages and tonnes of others) just gave an inspiring speech.

It didn't start out that way. Hope began by charting the imminent collapse of independent film distribution and audiences (but interestingly not of good filmmaking) as a result of today's technological and social revolution.

But just as his audience at the New York Foundation of the Arts prepared to commit ritual suicide, he switched to talking about the opportunities becoming available for filmmakers to actively build their audiences. Something similar has already happened in the music industry and even if film is different from music in some significant ways, there are lessons he suggests filmmakers should learn.

"If we embrace the active spirit of film-going, if we accept that there is a quiet dialogue running in the heads of all audiences, we are going to start to find some answers on how we – the filmmakers – survive this vast paradigm shift our culture is now engaged in – because I am confident we are not just going to survive, but we are going to prosper and bring better work to more audiences in all sorts of new ways."

Several paragraphs further on Hope writes that "for film to make sense as a business in today’s world, filmmakers must accept the responsibility of bringing their audience to their movie and to engage them in a meaningful way.

"Filmmakers must reprogram themselves to accept that it is their obligation to seed, corral, and drive their audience. The marketing, publicity, and distribution apparatus out there will build upon that audience foundation the filmmaker first developed, but in choosing what films they will take a risk on, these new collaborators will be motivated to work with the filmmakers who come with several wheels already rolling – those that have already built an audience foundation, a dependable fan base..."

And further on: "You don’t need anyone’s help to build an audience. You start to grow it yourself and soon others will join in. You just need to be willing to work, to reach out to others, to curate, to recommend, to listen, to make sure you have something to say that will excite others, to join them in a dialogue. There is no excuse not to engage with others through the multitude of social media that is available now for free to anyone. It is your obligation."

And there's much more in this vein - it's a long transcript but worth the effort.

Is the well-named Hope being hopelessly polyanna-ish? Truth is, no-one knows, but unless filmmakers start grabbing hold of the new media reigns and start building their relationship with niche audiences rather than leaving it to distributors, we'll never find out.

Of course some are already moving this way. In Australia I'm thinking of filmmakers like Glendyn Ivin with his blog documenting the making of the upcoming Last Ride (starring Hugo Weaving), Jonathan Ailey's blog on his coming doco on late Triffids singer-songwriter David McComb, and Serhat Caradee's use of Facebook to promote his Lebanese-Australian story Cedar Boys from way back in the production cycle. (Reminder: Last Ride and Cedar Boys are screening in the Sydney Filmfest, which opens on Wednesday.)

Mildly embarassing anecdote: working at the Sydney Film Festival in the mid-2000s I figured Hope would be a great contact but we had too little money to justify the expense of my attending the annual SPAA (Screen Producers Association of Australia) conference in Queensland, where he was headed. So I arranged with the conference organisers to pick up Hope when his flight from the US arrived in Sydney, so I could ferry him to the domestic terminal and spend some time chatting before his connecting flight.

So there I was at arrivals at the ungodly hour 6am. Since I wasn't too confident I could easily recongise him, I stood in the usual line of limo drivers clutching a cardboard sign featuring his texta-ed name. Bastard never came through. He'd taken a different flight and the message never reached me.

Here comes an even more embarrassing part of this post . Having ritually rubbished "effing Tw*##%r", I now have to sheepishly admit that I discovered Hope's speech on, um, mumble, a particular social networking site of a not entirely dissimilar name.

I had been recommended to check out Hope's "tweets" by a reliable source - thanks Megan - and indeed he is a most stimulating and well-informed Twitterer. By jupiter, I might even be joining up soon...

Question for the day: what does Michael Moore actually believe in?

....We know what Michael Moore doesnt like - greedy corporations, evil Bush, nasty gun-owners, evil Bush, bad Guantanamo, fascist security officers in downtown corporate headquarters who respond to his provocations by ejecting him, shaving, more evil Bush.

But what does he actually want? I dont mean just "better health care", I mean what kind of political system does he think can deliver it? Does he support The Democrats? The American Communist Party? Ralph Nader? Is he an Anarcho-Syndicalist? A Trotsykist? He never seems to make this clear. Or have I missed his declaration of principles?

Wajda returns to WW2

In Katyn, which today opened in Sydney ahead of a national rollout, Polish veteran Andrzej Wajda returns to the WW2 scene of his classic Warsaw Trilogy, which made his international reputation in the 1950s.

The film, which I review at the SBS film website. examines Stalin's long covered-up 1940 massacre of some 22,000 Poles in the Katyn forest with emphasis on the victims' families. If you feel you've seen enough Holocaust films, that's understandable, but this mass murder is one that hasn't received its due from the world's filmmakers.

Extract:
"...Despite endless revelations of Stalinist crimes in both war and peace, Communist totalitarianism has rarely been given the equivalence to Nazism that it deserves, largely the result of a lingering and unexamined romanticisation of communist ideals by the western left. Poles, having experienced at first hand the terrible consequences of both Nazism and Stalinism, have less room for illusion. The great strength then of Wajda’s film is its utter political clarity, its bracketing together of these twin evils as mirror images..."

Like Anna Karina's Retrospective

Melbourne Filmfest (MIFF) is running a retrospective devoted to Jean Luc-Godard's star and muse Anna Karina this year. Titles to screen include Alphaville, Anna, Living Together and Victoria.

I'm not sure if they're screening Vivre sa Vie (pictured) or Pierrot le Fou (essential titles, the latter being revived in London at the moment). The festival hasn't announced the full program yet.

Interestingly Karina is also featuring in the Sydney Filmfest, since she stars in Agnes Varda's Cleo de 5 a 7, part of a retro devoted to women filmmakers of the 1960s and '70s.

This seems as good an excuse as any to link to the highly readable US blogsite Like Anna Karina's Sweater, distinguished by its tantalising weekly screen-capture quizzes.

Why capitalists are bad - brought to you by Paramount

Just in: this media release (in edited form below) on Michael Moore's upcoming doco on the global financial crash.

l love the irony of it being from Paramount, though it's hardly the first time opponents of capitalism have been in bed with a large corporation, viz Marxist new wave band The Gang of Four being signed to EMI, Penguin publishing the autobiography of Leon Trotsky (pictured right):

"Overture Films and Paramount Vantage have announced that Oscar-winner Michael Moore’s new documentary feature will be released domestically on October 2, 2009. The as-yet-untitled film will explore the root causes of the global economic meltdown and take a comical look at the corporate and political shenanigans that culminated in what Moore has described as “the biggest robbery in the history of this country” – the massive transfer of U.S. taxpayer money to private financial institutions.

"On this, the 20-year anniversary of his masterpiece Roger & Me, Moore returns to the issue that began his career: the disastrous impact that corporate dominance and out-of-control profit motives have on the lives of Americans and citizens of the world. But this time the culprit is much bigger than General Motors, and the crime scene far wider than Flint, Michigan.

"Says Moore: "The wealthy, at some point, decided they didn't have enough wealth. They wanted more -- a lot more. So they systematically set about to fleece the American people out of their hard-earned money. Now, why would they do this? That is what I seek to discover in this movie."

"Moore’s new documentary, his first since 2007’s widely-praised Sicko, was first announced by Overture and Paramount Vantage International in May 2008 at the Cannes Film Festival and production began shortly afterward. "

US video gamers now outnumber filmgoers

"The percentage of American video game players (63%) now outnumbers those who have gone out to the movies in the past six months (53%), according to a survey conducted by market research firm NPD Group" - source, Digital Media Wire.

That certainly explains why so many blockbusters resemble video games in their deliver-a-regular-jolt dynamics.

It's also why there's such a generation gap between older viewers reared on classical Hollywood and modernist art film (not to mention primitive video games like Space Invaders and Asteroids), and younger audiences whose lives collapse if they can't locate their Playstation for more than a nano-second.

Discuss.

(image: www.myps3.com.au)

Kim Jong-il Needs Sub-Editor

Looks like I'm going to have to join up now. Even Kim Jong-il is on effing Tw&##@r ,
reports The Guardian in a story headlined Twitter with Kim and co: a portal into a paranoid state.

This contains a link to the front page of the Korean Central News Agency of DPRK (Democratic People's Republic of Korea).

Reading one of the stories, Kim Jong Il Enjoys Art Performance Given by KPA Company Soldiers, I was somewhat alarmed by the prose style adopted by Kim's editorial underling. Do the North Koreans always go in for 90 word sentences? Sub-editors - now is the time to offer your services to the beleaguered democratic republic!

"Through the performance replete with revolutionary enthusiasm and militant spirit and rich emotion the women soldiers enthusiastically sang of the worthwhile military service through which they fully enjoy happiness thanks to the profound loving care of Kim Jong Il and strikingly demonstrated the might of the heroic KPA which has grown to be a matchless army and the iron faith and will and militant spirit of the KPA to devotedly safeguard the headquarters of the revolution as a fortress and shield and accomplish the revolutionary cause of Juche with arms."

How is anyone going to fit that into a 140 character Tweet?

Group sex now a crime

I missed the Four Corners special on footie sex scandals a couple of weeks ago and found it hard to get a handle on the subsequent media furore.

My ingrained prejudices predispose me towards rejoicing in anything that shows up footie players' behaviour as sexist, bone-headed and moronic. However something about the media reports in this case struck me as peculiar. It seemed, as far as I could tell, that a bunch of players - most obviously Matthew Johns - were being excoriated for crimes that went way beyond mere licentiousness.

But what was really baffling was that the reports unambiguously stated that the most allegedly notorious incident, involving a Kiwi woman who had taken part in group sex with footie players and later severely regretted it to the point of becoming suicidal, had been consensual. If so, why did the media storm keep raging for days after the broadcast? What was the crime?

An Australian, Alex Paige, did see the broadcast and put this eloquent piece on Facebook. He's kindly given me permission to reproduce it here. In media terms this may be getting a bit "last week's news" but the issues it raises are important and deserve to be widely aired.

"I'm writing this," wrote Paige, "because I'm flummoxed by the unconditional support shown by ABC1's Media Watch on Monday night for the preceding Monday's Four Corners "football group sex scandal expose" report by Sarah Ferguson titled The Code of Silence.

"I've watched Media Watch since its first episode and this is the first time I can remember disagreeing so vehemently with the point of view expressed by the program and its presenter. (Boy, I suppose that puts me in a tiny minority, but anyway ...)

"As I found this particular Four Corners report both biased and unconvincing, I was surprised (to put it mildly) that Media Watch did not take Sarah Ferguson to task on the following points:

"1. The very obvious way she attempted to manipulate the viewer’s attitude towards group sex. Almost every time the term was used in the report it was preceded by the qualifier “degrading”. However no evidence was given to prove this assumption, it was simply presented as a lay-down misere.

"2. The way that Four Corners presented an extract of a psychiatrist’s report on the woman in question which mentioned she was suicidal and had bought a rope with the apparent intention of ending her life. The (undated!) extract did not indicate that these suicidal thoughts were a result of her participation in the group sex – for all we (the viewers) knew, she could have been suffering from suicidal thoughts/severe depression for years preceding her involvement with the footballers. (Which, if it was indeed the case, would clearly be relevant to the story).

"3. The way that the report tiptoed around the issue of the woman’s consent to the group sex. This would have made it blindingly obvious to most viewers that the woman probably had consented to the activity at the time but regretted it after the fact. Four Corners went on to argue (as did Media Watch) that the very (“degrading”) nature of the situation somehow abnegated the woman of personal responsibility and conversely (and illogically) placed all the responsibility on the men involved.

“If you’re a footballer and a sexually attractive woman not only comes onto you but says she wants to screw the whole team, you have a moral responsibility to refuse her on the grounds that you’re not prepared to be the instrument by which she degrades herself” is my understanding of the argument implied by the Four Corners report.

"This argument hinges on the understanding that group sexual activity is degrading per se (but apparently only to the woman involved, not the men). Yet Four Corners conspicuously failed to present a shred of evidence to prove this assertion.

"That the woman regrets her participation in the activity to the extent presented in her interview, certainly suggested (assuming we take her at her word) she now believes it to have been degrading – but does perception equal reality according to Four Corners? I believe very strongly that is not sufficient and that Four Corners needed to build a case which strongly argued that the woman was in fact degraded (as opposed to in perception). This the program failed to do.

"Four Corners went to great pains (as did, surprisingly, Media Watch) to make the woman’s consent to the activity a non-issue. Apparently this kind of group sex is degrading whether consensual or not. And here is where I am puzzled (and where the fact that I’m gay becomes relevant).

"If Sarah Ferguson considers group sex to be “degrading” per se, God knows what she would make of the numerous urban gay sex clubs and backrooms in which such activity is conducted on a regular basis.

"To take Sydney as an example, I can attest from personal observation/experience that group sex takes place regularly in all the city’s registered “sex on premises” venues which include Aarows, 357 Club Spa, Kens of Kensington, Signal, Bodyline and Headquarters to name a few.

"In fact a visit to the latter’s website (www.headquarters.com.au) will reveal that, shock/horror, “piss parties” are conducted several times a month, in which the participants not only have group sex but urinate onto each other and into each other’s mouths and anuses.

"Now if all this consensual group activity is by definition degrading (and I have included the above example precisely because we are all aware that lots of people would consider it degrading to be pissed on), I don’t know why there is still no sign of the Four Corners expose on same – the “steamy sleazy underside of the city’s gay community” etc.

"This also raises an obvious question: where are all the gay men suffering from severe psychological problems, suicidal tendencies brought on from their participation in these degrading activities? Or have they all died from AIDS?

"Flippancy aside, I think there is a real issue here. Are we to believe that gay men are so different from heterosexuals that they can happily participate in these activities without being psychologically scarred, when a heterosexual woman who does so is necessarily going to be traumatized even though she does so consensually?

"And what does it say about women’s emancipation if the responsibility for ensuring such group hetero activity doesn’t take place is expected to rest only on the male participants?

"It was also interesting to see that Four Corners reporter Sarah Ferguson seemed at pains to include a contrasting viewpoint in the form of a woman who happily participated in casual sex (though apparently not “degrading” group sex) with footballers on a regular basis. This woman, as was clear from her interview, did not consider herself either a victim or an object of degradation.

"Yet the reporter did not take the obvious next step and examine the attitudinal differences and assumptions which underlined the contrasting perceptions of the two women. If she had done so we may have had a far more interesting report, one which actually looked at the extent to which sexual repression contributes to psychological problems.

"It seems to me that sexual repression and “degrading” sexual activity are two very different things, yet one is frequently mistaken for the other."

(image: wpclipart.com)

77 Million Paintings

A few of the , I guess, 77 million Brian Eno-created digital images now on display at the Sydney Opera House Studio . Entrance is from the left-side walkway.

It's part of the Luminous Festival , itself nestling under a larger umbrella called Vivid. Eno's lighting of the Opera House "sails" also started tonight

From the Luminous website:

"Conceived as 'visual music' and using 'self-generating' software, three hundred of Eno's hand-drawn images are cut-up, rearranged and realigned to produce infinite variations. Completely random, entirely original, constantly evolving, the results come to life on luminous screens in a brilliant display of colour, shape and form. To complete the experience, layers of ambient sound interweave to create a mesmerising soundscape.

"Shown at the Venice Biennale and the Milan Triennale, as well as in Tokyo, London and San Francisco, 77 Million Paintings will run throughout the whole
of LUMINOUS as a free event in The Studio.

"Viewing numbers at any one time are limited; there may be queues."

Jon Hassell - blanking out the white noise

Last week I was privileged to interview the visionary US composer-musician Jon Hassell ahead of his visit to play the Brian Eno-curated Luminous festival at Sydney Opera House on June 6.

My feature on the non-iPod owning Hassell is published in The Australian today.

Extract:
"...In these days of ubiquitous music, with iPods and elevator muzak, intros and outros to cable news, it becomes a convention that everything has to have a musical cue, no matter how mundane it is," Hassell says. "We're living in an age of musical addiction." He blames the music industry's need to earn millions of dollars. "People think they have to have 20,000 songs on their lipstick-shaped iPods. But you have to put on the filter or you'll perish...

""Once you get into the glare of the electric light, and away from the flicker of the firelight, you get this white noise of the millions of pop songs with the same structure. A Martian would hear it and think it had no variation to it whatsoever: everything would sound as if it had the same structure, the same length." (Image: allaboutjazz.com)

Haneke wins Palme d'Or, Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah wins Camera d'Or

The Cannes Palme d'Or has gone to Michael Haneke's The White Ribbon, in line with my weekend prediction that the first prize would most likely go to one of the late-screening films in the program.

In line with another prediction - that an Australian title would win at least one award - the Camera d'Or, for best debut feature screening in the festival went to Samson & Delilah (writer-director Warwick Thornton) from a field of 26 eligible titles.

For all the prize winners see the Cannes official website.

Time's Richard and Mary Corliss called The White Ribbon "an austere and lacerating tale of collective brutality and guilt in a small German village two decades before Hitler took power. This is a pure art film, daunting and demanding, spare and unsparing, making no concession to the prevailing popular taste — except, perhaps, film-festival taste."

In the light of my previous post on film festival jury deliberations, Variety's commentary today on this year's awards makes for an especially intriguing read:

"Though several of the awards had largely been predicted and were generally seen as well deserved, many of the others were seen as among the quirkiest in recent memory," write Derek Elley and Justin Chang.

"All three of the Asian kudos (prizes) drew heavy booing from the assembled press corps. Biggest scorn was reserved for the director prize for Filipino Brillante Mendoza's rape-and-dismemberment drama Kinatay (of which even admiring jury member Hanif Kureishi admitted, "I don't ever want to see it again, myself"), followed by jeers for (Park Chan-wook's) Thirst and mainland Chinese director Lou Ye's "Spring Fever," which copped screenplay (generally seen as its weakest element).

"These awards appeared to have reflected deep divisions within the nine-member jury, which, apart from (jury president Isabelle) Huppert, included directors James Gray, Nuri Bilge Ceylan and Lee Chang-dong, writer Kureishi, and actresses Robin Wright Penn, Shu Qi, Asia Argento and Sharmila Tagore.

"Before the awards ceremony, rumors were already circulating that jury discussions had been particularly fraught. One member described it as the worst jury experience he'd ever had, while another was said to have described Huppert as a "fascist." Onstage, Huppert, looking visibly tense, referred to "an unforgettable week" and "several hours, uh, several moments of deliberation."

(image of Haneke and Huppert: Valery Hache / AFP / Getty)

Ladies and gentlemen, don't place your bets

Film festival competitions are a crap shoot . Yet every year the critics at Cannes love to pretend they know how to predict the prize winners.

This year Jacques Audiard's The Prophet and Jane Campion's Bright Star have been well liked by most reviewers so - presto! - they've become "the front-runners " for the Palme d'Or. They're like problem gamblers, these pundits - no matter how many times they fail to pick the winners, they just never seem to learn.

I'll spell it out, in the hope someone is listening: Cannes juries have a habit of giving the prize to films that aren't being tipped as favourites.

A number of possible reasons: for one, they're watching the films in an entirely different atmosphere to that of the media screenings. For two, it's a collective decision, which inevitably means unpredictable group dynamics and a lot of horse-trading and argument - "you support my first choice for the Palme and we'll give your favourite, which frankly I didn't care for that much, my support for the Jury prize - and how about we throw in a Best Actor as a sweetener?" There's no predicting how this kind of hard-boiled pragmatism is going to pan out,

Thirdly, though juries are supposed to be simply deciding on which handful of films are the most outstanding, other considerations can easily enter the equation, such as "I liked Jane Campion's film the most and yes, I agree the Ken Loach is terrific, but haven't they won before?"

Or there's "why give it to Pedro Almodovar when his films have a ready-made audience and adoring critics up the clacker? Shouldn't we live up to our responsibilities by encouraging small, unknown filmmakers whose vision is brave and pure?"

The latter reasoning is quite possibly why past Cannes juries have awarded major prizes to the Dardennes brothers and Romania's Cristian Mungiu at the expense of more widely admired films by big name directors (and I don't suggest for a second the little guys didn't deserve it) .

Then we have argument like, "Lars von Trier has delivered the most daring and visionary work but he's such a conceited little shit I could never vote for him". The converse, "Lars von Trier was booed when his film was at least provocative and full of imagination, so I'm voting for him" at least evens up the score.

To cut an already too-long post short (I haven't even gone into big "P" Political considerations), confident predictions are a mug's game. That said, I freely admit to being a mug, and punting is at least a fun game to play. So with absolute lack of confidence I predict that this weekend we will see:

1) At least one Australian winning a prize - I'm thinking Abbie Cornish for best actress in Campion's Bright Star and Warwick Thornton's Samson & Delilah getting Camera d'Or for best debut feature or film in Un Certain Regard. (POSTSCRIPT, Monday: Samson & Delilah won the Camera d'Or)

2) A couple of historical films coming out of left field (ie. unhyped by the critics) to bag prizes - say Amenabar's 4th century epic, Agora, or Marco Bellocchio's Mussolini-era Vincere - the precedent here being Polanski's "surprise" triumph with The Pianist.
(Postscript: this prediction proved completely wrong, but hey, 2 out of 3 isnt too bad)

3) A top prize going to at least one film screening right at (or near) the festival's end, as happened last year with Laurent Cantet's top winner, The Class or a few years ago with the Dardennes. This year that means Tsai Ming-liang's Face, Gaspar Noe's Enter the Void, or The Time That Remains from Palestine's Elia Suleiman are in with more than a good chance. All are directors with considerable reputations whose time might be considered to have come.

Similar things might also be said about Michael Haneke - he's previously won the director's prize (for Cache/ Hidden) and the Jury prize (for The Piano Teacher) but never the golden coconut tree. (Postscript, Monday: Haneke's The White Ribbon won the Palme d'Or)

The Golden Acid Bath to the first reader to comment that competitions are meaningless as you can't pit pomegranates against tomatoes so why I am I not discussing this instead? (Answer: because I am not a fruiterer.)

Intellectual copyright, RIP

Over at the SBS film website I review RIP: A Remix Manifesto, an unashamedly partisan documentary on copyright and intellectual property battles in the age of mash-ups, sampling and file sharing.

It's just opened at Sydney's Chauvel and rolls out progressively in other states starting May 28.

Extract: "(Director Brett) Gaylor makes a convincing case that copyright law needs major reform and that big corporations are exploiting their position in ways that inhibits musical artists from creating new works out of old material. I suspect many of us didn’t need much persuading of that in the first place. But when he starts getting carried away with the social utopian rhetoric, implying that we should abolish copyright to make everyone “free”, he sounds irritatingly naïve."

New Tarantino - it's not looking good

First reviews of Tarantino's WW2 story Inglourius Basterds are starting to come in and they're not looking pretty.

The Guardian calls it "awful. It is achtung-achtung-ach-mein-Gott atrocious. It isn't funny; it isn't exciting; it isn't a realistic war movie, yet neither is it an entertaining genre spoof or a clever counterfactual wartime yarn. It isn't emotionally involving or deliciously ironic or a brilliant tissue of trash-pop references. Nothing like that. Brad Pitt gives the worst performance of his life, with a permanent smirk as if he's had the left side of his jaw injected with cement, and which he must uncomfortably maintain for long scenes on camera without dialogue." And that's from a self-proclaimed "Tarantino fan".

Screen Daily: "An intermittently-inspired World War II epic which illustrates both Quentin Tarantino’s brilliance and his tendency towards indulgence, Inglourious Basterds is composed of a series of long-running vignettes strung together by a slender story thread. The problem is that no one character or set of characters runs through the entire two-and-a-half hour running time, and, with some of the scenes running up to half an hour each, the thread of the drama is left disjointed and the focus ever-changing."

Thurs 8.55am update: Variety calls it "an increasingly entertaining fantasia", "surprising, nutty, windy, audacious and a bit caught up in its own cleverness", and "a completely distinctive piece of American pop art with a strong Euro flavor that's new for the director." Unfortunately it's written by Todd McCarthy who infamously blew his wad all over Natural Born Killers.

Almodovar's tea goes cold?

Read between the lines of the Screen Daily review of Pedro Almodovar's Broken Embraces , screening in competition at Cannes, and it starts to sound like a pan - a guarded one, perhaps, but a pan nonetheless..

"A lavish, noirish melodrama sparkling with Pedro Almodovar’s trademark humour, Broken Embraces...will thrill his loyal fanbase but perhaps leave a more general public dazed rather than dazzled. Ravishing in its artifice and outfitted with all of Almodovar’s stylistic tricks, this tale of desire, power, duplicity and fate is self-consciously steeped in noir conventions and provides Penelope Cruz with a sleek post-Oscar vehicle...

Several paragraphs later the review concludes: "With the action moving ponderously towards a baffling denouement, we enter the terrain of high melodrama - sensational revelations and narrative twists. In the midst of all this, there’s an over-long clip from the quirky comedy film-within-a-film.

"It’s symptomatic of the strain in Broken Embraces, which sees the clashing genres of noir, melodrama and comedy vie for supremacy, but it’s a rollicking struggle that, in the hands of consummate ringmaster Almodovar, is a joy to watch."

Stylsitic tricks? Ravishing artifice? Over-the-top melodrama fighting for supremacy with comedy? Isn't this supposed to be a new film? Sounds like Almodovar re-running his greatest hits again. All it needs is a transsexual bullfighter and a retired porn star.

That final qualifier, "but it's a rollicking struggle..." sounds unconvincing, the kind of awkward softener a disappointed reviewer adds when they're all too aware of a director's status as an untouchable maestro.

Hollywood Reporter is a bit more upfront about the film's alleged disappontments - "not one of his greatest dramas," says Kirk Honeycutt in his video review. Now there's a man who isnt afraid to spit it out. And The Times concludes this is "a polished, handsomely-mounted picture which nevertheless leaves you with a sense of deflated emptiness." Evidence, perhaps, that the Almodovar cult isn't completely out of control.

Balibo to open MIFF

Balibo, Robert Connolly’s feature about the slaughter of Australian TV journalists by Indonesian invasion forces in East Timor, has been chosen as the July 24 gala opening night feature of the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF).

Should make for a cheerful after-party.

The August 8 closing night film will be Rachel Perkins’ musical, Bran Nue Dae.

This announcement explains why neither film appears on the Sydney Film Festival program. Both features received some financial backing from MIFF's Premiere Fund and are therefore contracturally obliged to premiere at Melbourne, which takes place after Sydney. More details at the MIFF site.

So where are the Cannes breakouts?

So far I've concentrated on reports from the Competition in Cannes, largely because it features an unusually large percentage of work this year from top of the range filmmakers.

Anyone who's ever been to that annual South of France madhouse however knows that much of the real news comes from exciting breakthrough films by lesser known directors screening in sections such as Un Certain Regard, Critics Week or Directors Fortnight (the latter really an independent festival sheltering under the Cannes nomenclature, its programmers not being appointed by the main festival administration).

This year so much attention is focused on the official competition - understandably enough - that it tends to overshadow any news of new discoveries even more than usual. So far these appear to be more or less absent. Whether it's because they're not being written about or because they're simply not there is impossible to say at this distance.

Still, for what it's worth, Peter Bradshaw of The Guardian raves about Certain Regard entry The Father of My Children (pictured above) by France-based actor-turned-director Mia Hansen-Løve, writing that "the clarity and maturity of the film was, for me, a marvel - one of the jewels of the festival so far," It's about a family trying to deal with the suicide of the father and husband, a film producer bankrupted by too many ambitious, artistically successful projects that failed to gain an audience.

Now that's a theme that should register in Cannes in this kind of economic climate.

Rogert Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times meanwhile declares that one of the best films he's seen at the festival is Lee Daniels' Precious, "the story of a physically and mentally abused poor black girl from the ghetto, who summons the inner strength to fight back for her future. It contains two great performances, by Gabourey "Gabby" Sidibe, in the title role, and Mo'Nique as her pathetic mother. Sidibe is the life force personified. Mo'Nique has a closing monologue that reduced some of us to tears."

Loach an under-rated master

Are British film reviewers a bit mean when it comes to assessing the work of one of their great veteran filmmakers, Ken Loach?

French critic Agnes Poirier certainly thinks so."The British have never fully appreciated their master director Ken Loach, often derided as a boring Trotskyite activist," she writes in The Guardian after witnessing the "rapturous" reception at the Cannes 8.30am media screening for his comedy, Looking for Eric, from 3,200 international journalists. "Applauding throughout the film (a rare thing), we couldn't suppress laughter at (soccer star Eric) Cantona's antics, and the film's screenwriter Paul Laverty's wit..."

She directly tackles (bad pun intentional) the newspaper's main film critic Peter Bradshaw for patronising the film as "'nice"' but "naive". It is none of these things, she writes: "it is masterly. When you've seen Quentin Tarantino laugh to tears, like some of us have this morning, you realise the universal appeal of this film." Which augurs well for the film's opening of the Sydney Film Festival on June 4.

The paper also also finds some enthusiasm from female quarters for Alejandro Amenabar's epic 4th century story, Agora, about Hypatia (Rachel Weisz), the first female mathematician and philosopher known to history, which below I reported had been called a bit Europuddingy.

While some - mostly male reviewers - have complained about the accents and dialogue not feeling right, in the view of arts reporter Charlotte Higgins the film "avoids some of the pitfalls of movies set in the ancient world. The characters behave naturally and speak normally, without either jolting archaisms or ridiculous anachronisms, and the world that has been created to stand in for Alexandria – a huge set on Malta – works well, with minimum CGI nastiness and an obvious attention to historical detail."

These two counter-reviews made me think about the dire lack of female voices in film criticism - yes, there's Manohla Dargis in the New York Times, but relatively few others in Anglophone journalism (step forward Radio National's Julie Rigg and the SMH's Sandra Hall). We could do with more female perspectives on film, and I include the blogosphere, where again we testosterone-driven humanoids tend to dominate.

Anyway, I'm keen to see Agora , if only because there's been a dire shortage of epics based around the lives of celebrated female philsopher-mathematicians of late.

(Image: Kes, directed by Loach)

Cannes, the half way mark

Reactions to Cannes premieres have been coming through faster than my ability to blog on them - the original intention, ha!

There's various ways of keeping up but one of the best I've found is The Guardian's coverage, which tells us, for example, that reaction to Campion's Bright Star was more mixed than the rave reviews might have suggested (but wasn't that the same with The Piano?). The usual suspects - Screen Daily, Hollywood Reporter and Variety - have regular reviews and sometimes blogs.

Best film of the competition so far? A solid consensus says this is Jacques Audiard's follow-up to The Beat That My Heart Skipped, The Prophet, said to be a tough story set in a jail with a sprawling cast. Ang Lee's lightweight, hippy-era Taking Woodstock seems to have offended nobody but knocked out nobody either.

That's not something that could be said about Lars von Trier's horror film Antichrist, which has excited strong views and elicited booing (apparently for the Dane's cheeky dedication in the end credits to that most serious and unhorror-like of directors, Andrei Tarkovsky). Reuters reports that "jeers and laughter broke out during scenes ranging from a talking fox to graphically-portrayed sexual mutilation."

Horror? This conjures up images of a ventriloquised creature from my TV-watching youth called Basil Brush (pictured above). But here to correct me is The Guardian's Xan Brooks: " 'Chaos reigns,' declares a mangy fox about midway through... The audience guffaws and then – whoops – we are pitched headlong into the abyss.

"Until then I'd been standing toe-to-toe with the film, which casts Charlotte Gainsbourg and Willem Dafoe as a bereaved couple going off the rails at their shack in the woods. But after that I'm senseless; my thoughts in tatters. There are squawking crows and pitch-black holes and an abattoir's worth of mutilation that I could only peer at through splayed fingers.

"Chaos reigns. I stumble out in a daze, momentarily unsure whether I loved it or loathed it. Abruptly I realise that I love it. Von Trier has slapped Cannes with an astonishing, extraordinary picture – shocking and comical; a funhouse of terrors (of primal nature, of female sexuality) that rattles the bones and fizzes the blood..."

Oh right. One of those films. Torture porn. Ken Loach's Looking for Eric (opening Sydney filmfest next month) is sounding audience-friendly and likable, in the vein of Riff-Raff perhaps, if hardly startling. Alejandro Amenabar's 4th century Alexandria epic, Agora, represents a demolition job on Christianity. That makes it sounds intriguing, but the film's style is allegedly old-fashioned and Europuddingy.

Lou Ye's follow-up to Summer Palace is likely to irk the Chinese censors again, this time for its strong images of gay sex, and seems to have impressed more French than Anglophone reviewers. From the UK, Andrea Arnold's Fish Tank (her follow up to Red Road) elicited a mixed set of responses, though one observer reckons it's the 2nd favourite for the Palme d'Or after Bright Star. Beware of this kind of punditry - it is invariably wrong, as festival juries usually seem to go one way, the critics another.

In Un Certain Regard of course is Samson & Delilah, which as you have doubtless already read in the Australian press, received a standing ovation.

Of course I haven't seen any of these. I'm just reporting what I'm reading. Don't blame me.

Samson a strong man in week one

Those breathless reviews for Warwick Thornton's feature debut Samson and Delilah certainly had an effect: the film earned a mighty $281,000 on only 12 screens in its first week in cinemas, which amounts to an average of $23,410 per screen, easily the highest average of the week.

This means screens exhibiting the film took more money per session than those showing the mass release Star Trek, which had the week's 2nd biggest per-screen average earnings of $19,000. Inside Film notes Samson, which cost a modest $1.6 million to make, has earned more in one week than the $8.5 million Two Fists, One Heart grossed in its entire theatrical run.

My review of Samson ran in the May editton of Limelight: "On one level indigenous writer-director Warwick Thornton’s debut feature about a pair of young aboriginal outcasts confirms everything that critics of the Australian film industry have been saying recently. It is for the most part a bleak tale with relatively narrow audience appeal.

"Yet so accomplished is its visual sophistication – amazingly there’s virtually no dialogue - and so deeply felt its lyricism that it readily transcends these literal-minded considerations to create one of the most affecting portraits of aboriginal life yet seen.

"Samson (Rowan McNamara) is no Biblical strong man, rather a youth in an isolated desert community so addicted to petrol sniffing that he’s sapped of all will power and direction. Even when he brings home a roo to eat it’s the result of an accident. When Samson commits a violent act he decides to flee the town by stealing a car, taking Delilah (Marissa Gibson), with whom he is besotted and who is in her own trouble from village elders.

"Reaching the city they increasingly depend on each other for survival. In Thornton’s view it’s women who have the strength in the aboriginal community and who give the film a vital message of hope."

The June issue of Limelight is out now featuring among other things my reviews of the South African-set local feature Disgrace, Art Linson and Barry Levinson's Hollywood satire What Just Happened?, and the DVD accompanying the excellent 1 Giant Leap pan-global music-and-ideas project, What About Me?

My CD reviews include Jon Hassell's latest, an outfit from Zanzibar called Culture Musical Club, and The Rough Guide to Afrobeat Revival.

Stanley Kubrick's Boxes screens on ABC2 on Sunday

Make sure to watch or record Jon Ronson's UK Channel 4 documentary, Stanley Kubrick's Boxes, on ABC 2 this Sunday (tomorrow) at 8.30pm.

Last July I recommended the film and linked to a live-streaming copy that has long since been removed. If you missed it then, here's your chance to explore the full extent of the late director's obsessiveness, as Ronson sorts through some of the 1000-odd boxes of research material in the great filmmaker's former UK home and muses upon his unconventional methods.

Cannes reviewers raving about Campion's Bright Star

Jane Campion is back to her 1990s Piano form according to the first reviews out of Cannes of her romantic tragedy Bright Star.

The Guardian (Peter Bradshaw): "Jane Campion has put herself in line for her second Palme d'Or here at the Cannes film festival with a film which I think could be the best of her career...this film looks unselfconsciously beautiful, and Campion and her cinematographer Greig Fraser never harangue the audience with their images. Poets, like musicians, need silence above all, and much of the film is played out in a deeply quiet calm..."

Screen Daily: "Sixteen years after The Piano, Jane Campion has found renewed artistic inspiration in a tragic romance to match the haunting intensity of that Palme d’Or winning feature.Bright Star tells the story of the love affair between (romantic poet) John Keats and Fanny Brawne with a classical poise, exquisite craftsmanship and a piercing tenderness...."

Variety: "The Jane Campion embraced by 1990s arthouse audiences but who's been missing of late makes an impressive return with Bright Star. Breaking through any period piece mustiness with piercing insight into the emotions and behavior of her characters, the writer-director examines the final years in the short life of 19th century romantic poet John Keats through the eyes of his beloved, Fanny Brawne, played by Abbie Cornish in an outstanding performance. Beautifully made film possesses solid appeal for specialised audience..."

Hollywood Reporter: "A treat for romantics and those who take their poetry seriously, Australian director Jane Campion's gorgeously filmed competition entry may not be a joy forever but it will do until the next joy comes along. ...Ben Whishaw plays Keats with impeccable tragedy and Abbie Cornish portrays winningly the beautiful seamstress Fanny..."

Enthusiastic Hollywood Reporter reviews too for Cannes opening film Up ("arguably the funniest Pixar effort ever"), and Coppola's Tetro (" a mostly triumphant return to his earlier filmmaking days".

Ambient 5: Music for Opera Houses

Brian Eno and Jon Hassell are two of the exciting highlights of the inaugural Luminous music and light festival taking place at the Sydney Opera House starting on May 26. The series of concerts being curated Eno and his lighting design for the Opera House are also being claimed as part of larger new "umbrella" event in the city called Vivid.

So what exactly are Luminous and Vivid and how do they relate to one another? Are they a sign that the NSW state government is finally taking the arts more seriously? And how come the marketing and branding (Vivid also includes separate events called Fire Water, Creative Sydney and Smart Light Sydney, all with their own web sites) such a confusing mess? I look at all of this and more in a feature in today's edition of The Australian.

Extract:
"Events NSW chief executive Geoff Parmenter is the first to admit that NSW had been years behind other states when it came to fully supporting and helping to create large-scale, attention-grabbing occasions. Victoria's equivalent was set up 18 years beforehand, he points out. Parmenter says Sydney dropped the ball after the 2000 Olympics .

"There was a feeling that the city already had a fantastic harbour and beaches; just add the Games and that would be enough to attract visitors. Eventually the penny dropped. The new view is that "Sydney has to be a lot more proactive in promoting itself".

"Part of the Events NSW brief is to develop a year-round events calendar, support existing events and help to create and attract new ones. A sports fixture such as a grand prix is off the table because it is too easily swiped by competitors. The aim is to help develop "large, signature events" unique to Sydney that could help attract tourists..."

Banging the tribal drum

Haven't been watching so many new feature films lately, but for a good reason: I've had my nose in series 1 and 2 of The Wire.

And yes, it lives up to the hype. I've been impressed by many different aspects of the series, including (a) its refusal to submit to standard climax-release genre norms, (b) its sophisticated sound design, and (c) treatment of the city as a series of sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping tribal groups. These groups and sub-groups are themselves complexly riven by factionalism and competing agendas.

These thoughts on tribalism were partly inspired by writer, screenwriting teacher and script editor Billy Marshall Stoneking's ideas about tribal storytelling, which (and here I perhaps overly simplify) require writers to steep themselves in the particular "tribal" (ie social or anthropological) groups they're writing about, either through writing from their life experience or deeply researching the social background of their subjects. (See link to Stoneking's website at the right of the page)

In The Wire series 2 the tribes and sub-tribes include:
1) the dockside union,
2) the Greeks and the Poles,
3) the Eastside and Westside drug crews,
4) the Eastside crew in prison under Avon Barksdale, and outside under Stringer Bell,
5) the various branches of the city police competing over who takes responsibility for 12 dead trafficked women from a shipping container,
6) the FBI and the local police, and
7) two competing sub-tribes within the FBI - the traditional criminal investigation cops, and the post 9-11 anti-terrorism cops.

Rather than simply showing these tribal groups as being in competition, the series further complicates things by showing the need for compromise and pragmatic cross-tribal alliances in order to have at least a hope of achieving anything.

These alliances are built not only between different police sections, but also between the major Baltimore drug gangs, viz. the co-operation Bell sets up between his own Eastside crew and his former rival Proposition's Joe's Westside outfit.

This theme of pragmatism-is-the-best-we-can-hope-for is given especially strong emphasis in the way series 1 asnd 2 resolve - not in complete victory, but partial, compromised successes - the glass is never more than half full.

Good UK blog post here on The Wire written by Gareth James , a PhD student specialising in the history of HBO original programming from 1997 to 2007.