Aussie film not a sheltered worshop

My reply to Rachel Ward's Friday SMH opinion piece on the alleged campaign against her "fragile, beautiful egg" of a film, Beautiful Kate, is now online at Unleashed on the ABC website.

Polite request: comments welcome, but can you please post these on the ABC article rather than here? Many thanks.

Extract: "In a year that has seen films of the power and strength of Samson and Delilah and Balibo wowing both critics and audiences, it's hard to see how Ward's whining tone on behalf of Aussie films can be anything other than self-defeating. Instead of making viewers feel they are missing out on an exciting experience by seeing some of our best films, Ward has unhelpfully strengthened the image of filmmakers as living inside a sheltered workshop from whose vantage point consumer reality - the everyday market place of ticket sales - is seen as a 'bullying' place..."

Image: Ben Mendelsohn and Maeve Dermody in Beautiful Kate.

The greatest soul performance - and song - of all time

Is this the greatest soul vocal performance - and song - of all time? If you've never heard Lorraine Ellison's original Stay With Me Baby prepare to have your socks blasted off with Saturn V rocket force. If you have, you know exactly what I mean!


Now listen to this powerful version by British early '70s rocker Terry Reid, who turned down the chance to be the vocalist with Led Zeppelin. Neither Reid nor Ellison are well known today and even back then were hardly known at all by the public, their names mostly known to musicians, singers and critics who regarded them with reverence.

My eternal gratitude to Frank Howson for posting the Reid link on Facebook.


The Walker Brothers also recorded a terrific version of this amazing song featuring a mighty Phil Spector-style orchestral arrangement:

Pilger head-butts Balibo

POSTSCRIPT: I DRAW YOUR ATTENTION TO THE READERS COMMENTS - SOME VERY ASTUTE OBSERVATIONS AND RELEVANT INFORMATION.

Australian-born lefty journalist John Pilger has laid into the film Balibo for failing to detail the Australian government's involvement in the massacre of six Australian journalists during Indonesia's invasion of East Timor.

We have come to expect by now that Pilger will use any opportunity to lambast western governments for crimes against humanity - sometimes with very good reason. The interest here is that he's either spoken at some length with the film's co-scriptwriter David Williamson or read one or more of his earlier script drafts.

Extract:
"The Australian government's complicity in the journalists' murder and, above all, in a bloodbath greater proportionally than that perpetrated by Pol Pot in Cambodia has been cut almost entirely from a major new film, Balibo, which has begun its international release in Australia.

" Claiming to be a 'true story', it is a travesty of omissions. In eight of sixteen drafts of his screenplay, David Williamson, the distinguished Australian playwright, graphically depicted the chain of true events that began with the original radio intercepts by Australian intelligence and went all the way to prime minister Gough Whitlam, who believed East Timor should be "integrated" into Indonesia. This is reduced in the film to a fleeting image of Whitlam and Suharto in a newspaper wrapped around fish and chips.

"Williamson's original script described the effect of the cover up on the families of the murdered journalists and their anger and frustration at being denied information and despair at Canberra's scandalous decision to have the journalists' ashes buried in Jakarta with ambassador Woolcott, the arch apologist, reading the oration. What the government feared if the ashes came home was public outrage directed at the West's client in Jakarta. All this was cut..."

Thanks to Molly Malone for the link. (Image: inminds.co.uk)

Ward's "fragile egg" arrived broken

If you read the Sydney Morning Herald you probably read Beautiful Kate writer-director Rachel Ward's Friday opinion piece about her "fragile, beautiful egg" of a film, one she alleges is under fire, despite receiving a raft of favourable, even enthusiastic, reviews .

If you use Facebook/ Twitter, or read today's SMH, where negative commentary dominated the letters page, you''re doubtless aware of the stir Ward's whinge has quickly created.

My critical response should be appearing on Unleashed (the opinion section of the ABC website) on Monday or shortly after - I'll link to it here when it goes on-line (Postscript, Monday Aug 31 - it's now online here). In the meantime I recommend you read Billy Stevenson's strongly argued blog piece. I don't agree with every point but there's some astute observations in there..

Did other readers see Ward's piece? I'd be interested to see the reaction.

imdb plot summary of Richard Brooks's 1958 movie Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, based on the Tennesse Williams play of the same name. “Brick (Paul Newman), an alcoholic ex-football player, drinks his days away and resists the affections of his wife, Maggie. His reunion with his father, Big Daddy, who is dying of cancer, jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.”

Now here is my plot summary for Beautiful Kate. “Ned (Ben Mendelsohn), an irascible writer, resists the affections of his younger girlfriend. His reunion with his father, who is dying of cancer, jogs a host of memories and revelations for both father and son.”

Nothing wrong with recycling an archetypal, steamy melodrama of course (Ward’s script is actually based on a novel by US author Newton Thornburg). Ward and Thornburg added a sprinkle of hot spice – incest – in what I assume is an effort to make the story more “cutting edge” and “contemporary”, or at least a bit different.

I don't have a huge problem with this. I do have a problem with the tired "family dysfunction/ secret" type of story that keeps cropping up in Australian cinema, including some I've read at script stage that may or may not get made.

The problem is not just over-familiarity but triteness, the outmoded 20th century Freudian notion that all you need to do to understand a person and heal their problems is to find a critical secret incident in their past life which acts as a key to the door of their psyche.

Shine is an archtypal example. If you had to boil its story down to nine words, it would be: David Helfgott went mad because his Dad bullied him. (Helfgott's sister, Margaret, provided an extremely different counter-narrative in the form of a book called Out of Tune.) There's something annoyingly pat and simplistic about this approach to personal drama, and I include Hitchcock's Spellbound.

My other issue with Kate - which features some fine acting from both new and established performers - is to do with its flat approach to narrative. Most viewers will take no more than about 20 minutes to pick up the clearly flagged clues that Ned once had an incestuous relationship with his dead sister, Kate.

The rest of the film merely plods on dutifully, slowly filling in viewers with the details of what they've gleaned already. There's no surprises or major revelations, nothing to ramp up the drama in anything more than predictable ways.

The other problem, also located in the script, is the very problematic use of parallel narratives, ie. a present tense story continually interrupted by flashbacks to a parallel story set in the past. Ward, interviewed on the SBS film website, makes it clear she recognised the dangers inherent in the approach but for this viewer, at least, she fell straight into the hole she'd dug for herself. The flashbacks continually interrupt the small degree of momentum built up in the present day narrative - and vice versa.

It's interesting that two other of this year's Australian films also use parallel narratives - Mary and Max (where I think it's also an issue) and Balibo (where the writers make it work). I may return to this topic.

Dork alert

This is exactly what I meant when I described the blue creatures in James Cameron's 3D blockbuster Avatar as dorky.

Apparently the 3D footage looks far more impressive.

As it needs to...

MIFF chief Moore lashes out at Loach

Melbourne filmfest (MIFF) director Richard Moore has turned into something of a hero in the fight to keep festivals free of censorship.

Here's an extract from a rousingly unapologetic piece he's penned for The Guardian, where he talks of this year's disgraceful censorship efforts by China and Ken Loach.

"This curse must not be allowed to spread to other film festivals. Politics will always walk hand in hand with film, and with film festivals, but at the core of every festival, from Melbourne to Montreal, is the independence and integrity of the programme: it is a festival's primary asset and part of an inviolate bond of trust between a festival and its audience. To allow the personal politics of one filmmaker to proscribe a festival position would not only open a veritable floodgate, but also goes against the grain of what festivals stand for..."

On the Loach boycott (where the director withdrew his film because MIFF accepted a small travel grant from the Israeli Embassy), Moore echoes points I raised on this blog recently when reprinting correspondence between himself and Loach.: "...Far be it for me to act as an apologist for Israel but the logical extension of Loach's position is absurd.

"Aside from ignoring the fact that film festivals fulfil an important role in allowing filmmakers to circumvent national censors, is he saying we can continue to programme films from North Korea, from Iran, from China – but we must boycott Israel? On a moral relativity scale does that mean that Iran's treatment of women is acceptable? Should we keep quiet about how North Korea treats its citizens? Loach disagreed with George Bush's approach to foreign policy; so was it OK to programme American films during the Bush era?

"Loach's demands were beyond the pale. As a supporter of independent film and filmmaking he should be ashamed of himself." Well said that man.

Now see the link that Moore gives on Edinburgh Film Festival's unprincipled conduct, both recently (when Loach applied the same tactic) and in 2006 when Edinburgh returned a travel bursary funding flights for another Israeli director, Yoav Shamir, and even urged the director not to attend the festival despite having earlier invited him.

(Moore top image, guardian/ Moore and Rebiya Kadeer image: abc.net)

Basterds - Eyeswired delivers its verdict

I've just come back from seeing Inglourious Basterds. Here's my first very raw and unpolished observations.

I don't understand why a few critics have bashed it to death (see my earlier post), particularly at Cannes, other than the version screened there having been a slightly different edit. I do understand why audiences are warming to it .

Overall I found the film to have much of the brilliance of Pulp Fiction in dramatic terms. I'm thinking of its ability to hold an audience spellbound through sheer dramatic tension and inspired storytelling, including the script's very original use of structure, the way the story plays out using just a few very extended scenes.

In one sense, like Pulp Fiction again, it's a very postmodern work. Note the abrupt tonal shifts between drama and comedy, the continual ways it keeps pointing out it's a movie. Viz. the central motif of the cinema as the locale of an anti-Hitler plot; the use of recycled musical themes; the multiple film references, including a cheeky nod to UFA , the legendary German studio at Potsdam, just outside of Berlin, which is now called Babelsberg and where Tarantino shot all of the studio scenes.

But in another sense the film is suffused with an almost reassuringly old-fashioned belief in traditional cinematic values - fine performances and a belief that the audience can handle long scenes of dialogue if you structure the scenes appropriately. It revels in the joys of drama as opposed to special effects-driven spectacle (I make allowance for the cinema finale, which probably used a fair bit of CGI though you certainly can't sense its presence). The dialogue is often superb, not just because of its cleverness or wit or eccentricty (though those too), but because of the way it is deployed as a necessary building block of the drama. It may be "only a movie" but it makes you care about the fate of its characters.

I was also fascinated by Tarantino's development of major dramatic themes - masquerades (very QT, right back to Res.Dogs) and myth-making/ personal mythology - which help to make it much more rich and interesting than a simple revenge tale.

In star-making terms, Christoph Waltz (the Nazi "Jew Hunter") is this film's equivalent of Pulp Fiction's Samuel Jackson. The film's Pam Grier is Melanie Laurent (pictured above), who plays the French Jewish cinema owner. Watch the drama playing out on her face through long periods where she doesn't have a word of dialogue: extraordinary. I've just checked her credits and though I've seen a couple of her films (Days of Glory and The Beat That My Heart Skipped) I didn't recognise her at all.

I assume that was Michael Fassbender playing the English film critic on the secret msision (didn't recognise him either); he was terrific, in any case. Brad Pitt? One dimensional and silly. Luckily he isn't in it too often.

Finally, music: I love the opening music theme - The Green Leaves of Summer from The Alamo retooled for a Spaghetti western - but I've always been a sucker for that tune. Some critics have objected to the use of David Bowie's Putting Out the Fire from Paul Schrader's Cat People, and indeed it is a little strange. But then this is not a movie that is concerned with tonal balance. What it is concerned with is getting the tonal imbalances exactly right, ie. keeping the jolts in check, so they're not over-used.

I usually have moral qualms with some parts of QT's films and here my queasiness was not so much about the killing of Nazis as the rejoicing in sadism (if you've seen the movie you'll know the scenes I'm talking about). I've always found that side of QT - not the violence so much as the celebration of it - ugly. For me it spoils this film's climax.

Sure, it's "only a movie", as it keeps on winking to us. But there again, not. Imagine if the heroes had not been Jewish avengers but Nazis. Would it still have been "only a movie"? I think not.

Barber on Twitter, denies "hypocrisy" claims

Lynden "I'm so never going to sign up to effing Tw*&&#r" Barber has been on Twitter for about a week and quite enjoying it. Just thought you should know.

Avatar trailer online

Fifteen minutes of advance footage were screened for media last week and now a trailer for Jim Cameron's years-in-development 3D project Avatar is up at Timesonline.

Starts out well then begins to look increasingly crap - full of dorky blue creatures and a general sense that we're watching an animation, which is an issue when the film is set up in the opening sequence (and yes, that is Australian Sam Worthington) as live action.

The Wire's classical aesthetic

Great insight into The Wire from Laura Miller on Salon:

"In a way, it doesn't make sense to talk of The Wire as the best American television show because it's not very American. The characters in American popular culture are rarely shown to be subject to forces completely beyond their control. American culture is fundamentally Romantic, individualistic and Christian; when it's not exhorting you to "follow your dream" it's reassuring us that in the eleventh hour, we will be saved. American culture is a perpetual pep talk, trafficking in tales of personal redemption and the ultimate triumph of good over evil. We don't do doom. The Wire is not Romantic but classical; what matters most in its universe is fulfilling your duty and facing the inexorable with dignity."

The SFF revolving door spins around on cue

You can almost set your watches to this one.

I was just thinking it must be time for the annual "Sydney Film Festival CEO Quits" headline and well, what do you know?

"Sydney Film Festival chief executive Mark Sarfaty has resigned, just over one year since his appointment to the position..." reports Inside Film.

Yes, and the Taliban attacked another US convoy and the Republican right launched another attack on Obama's health plans and...oh well, so it goes, same old same old .

"The festival has had several chief executives over the past five years with Sarfaty initially stepping into the position after Fiona Cameron left three months into the job to take a position at Screen Australia in June 2008."

OK, lets wind back. Before Cameron there was Clare Stewart (appointed joint CEO and artistic director for about a year before being relieved of the CEO title). Before her was Tony Grierson, in the job about 5 months.

Before Grierson was Antony Jeffrey as temporary CEO for several months, sharing the duties with three then-board members including...shurely shome mishtake, Mark Sarfaty (pictured below left).
Before Jeffrey was Jennifer Naughton, who followed on from Fiona Allan, who followed ..... oh damn, I've lost track, but who could blame me?

I left the Artistic Director's position in 2006 after serving out what many people thought was a relatively brief two year contract. In retrospect I appear to have been one of the longest serving SFF executives in recent memory...

(Images: door - cai.stopcorporateabuse.org/ Sarfaty - intotheshadowsmovie.com)

Alexandra's Project revisited

My appreciation of Rolf de Heer's extremely interesting Alexandra's Project is up at the National Film and Sound Archive's australian screen website.

Edited extract:

"At a casual glance Alexandra’s Project might appear to have emerged from the militant feminism of the 1970s and ’80s, the kind of provocative film that the Netherlands’ Marleen Gorris (A Question of Silence, 1982), might have directed...

"In using the device of the videotape the script implicitly recalls the feminist film academic Laura Mulvey’s once-influential theory of the 'male gaze’, in which cinema was seen as representing a male view of women. With her initial striptease routine, Alexandra cleverly exploits the male gaze only to then powerfully subvert it.....

"However, the film is far more complex – and interesting – than any of the above might imply...

Trailer for Michael Moore's Capitalism: a Love Story

Aussie cinema, the audience question - SMH weighs in

Big piece in today's SMH by Garry Maddox on the trouble Australian films are having in getting an audience - a subject close to the heart of this blog and many of its readers.

Don' have time to comment yet but the piece contains some chewy comments from the likes of Phil Noyce and George Mill

Publish Post

er.

Critics go to war over Tarantino's Basterds

Haven't had a chance to see Tarantino's Inglourious Basterds yet - I'm tackling a work project requiring a large amount of research - but I'm intrigued by how polarised the reactions are.

In the UK's New Statesman, for example, Ryan Gilbey calls the WW2 vengeance tale "a return to form" for the director.

Meanwhile over at the SBS film website, my colleague Craig Mathieson dons his finest steel-toecapped boots to lay into "a failure so complete that it is infuriating as opposed to merely disappointing..."
and "the third consecutive miss – following 2004’s Kill Bill: Vol. 2 and 2007’s Death Proof – from a filmmaker who was once a major voice in the contemporary cinema...."
and "dismal..."
and "Virtually nothing works to the degree that scenes or performances actually cohere into something more."
And so on.

Backing the sense of critical disparity comes SBS's unusual decision to run Mathieson's review alongside Mary Colbert's original, three star review of the film at its Cannes premiere screening in May. Colbert criticised Basterds for its lack of narrative tension and coherence but praised some scenes for being "brilliant."

In the US, where the film has also just opened, reviews swing between, "the only hope for Inglourious Basterds is that audiences will embrace it the way the Broadway crowd did Springtime for Hitler: because it's so bad they think it's good" (Michael Sragow, Baltimore Sun) and "Whether it's parody, farce or a fever dream is anyone's guess" (Joanne Kaufman,Wall Street Journal), to "a big, bold, audacious war movie that will annoy some, startle others and demonstrate once again that he’s (Tarantino) the real thing, a director of quixotic delights" (Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times).

All of which propels me back to Cannes in 1994 when Pulp Fiction won the Palme d'Or. I forget the director's exact words on receiving the award to a mixture of loud boos and wild cheers, but it was close to: "I never expected to win any award because my films split people apart, they don't bring people together." Clearly that still applies.

You have entered ...the QUIET ZONE

Notices to patrons of Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas.

I want to see these everywhere. Now.

Thanks to Jim Emerson's Scanners.

Canada Day

It hath been decreed: today is Canada Day at Eyes Wired Open - the earlier item about Toronto filmfest reminded me this year's Possible Worlds - Canadian Film Festival opened in Sydney on Thursday and continues through to next Wednesday. Program and details here.

Toronto ga-ga for Oz films

Balibo joins the list now that Toronto filmfest has unveiled its final line-up, which contains a record 17 films from Australia.

Congrats to director Robert Connolly and all the other local filmmakers to get through to North America's biggest and most influential film festival. The full media release is here.

Visiting Berlin in June I asked New Zealand-born Berlinale (Berlin filmfestival) programmer Maryanne Redpath if she felt the Australian film revival had begun. Her reply was a cautious "not yet" (though note that she wont get to see the latest crop until she visits Australia next month).

Toronto seems to be answering that question in the affirmative.

It hit me as strange that Balibo seemed to have been snubbed when the first list of local films invited to the Canadian event came through. The festival has a well-established interest in new Australian cinema.

Not sure if Claire McCarthy's Indian-set The Waiting City - starring Radha Mitchell and Joel Edgerton - had been previously announced, but note that it gets a prestigious "Special Presentation" slot alongside the work of three far better-known Aussie directors - Bruce Beresford (Mao's Last Dancer), Scott Hicks (The Boys are Back) and Jane Campion (Bright Star).

McCarthy (pictured above right) directed the low-budget, privately funded street drama Cross Life, set around Sydney's King's Cross, which had some festival exposure a couple of years ago.

Balibo, Blessed (Ana Kokkinos), Bran Nue Dae (Rachel Perkins) and My Year Without Sex (Sarah Watt) screen in the Contemporary World Cinema program.

The Discovery program - for emerging filmmakers - includes Beautiful Kate (Rachel Ward), Last Ride (Glendyn Ivin), My Tehran for Sale (Granaz Moussavi), and Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton).

The Midnight Madness program features Daybreakers (Michael Spierig and Peter Spierig), and The Loved Ones (Sean Byrne).

Wake in Fright (Ted Kotcheff ) and Sweetie (Jane Campion) will be presented as part of Dialogues: Talking with Pictures, a series curated and introduced by well-known directors invited to select and discuss films that have inspired them.

The Real to Reel non-fiction section features the documentary Stolen (Violeta Ayala).

The festival runs 10–19 September 2009.

The Age of Stupid is here

The UK climate change doco The Age of Stupid had its premiere in Sydney last night and is now screening at various Hoyts cinemas until next Thursday (August 27).

I've written about the film here at the SBS website. It's really a hybrid, part-documentary, part-fictional, with Peter Postlethwaite providing the role of a fictional narrator, shaking his head as he looks back at today's inertia over the issue from his perch in the future and pulling up different clips from a touch screen..

There's two unconventional things about this launch that other filmmakers and distributors should take notice of:

(i) the strictly limited season - increasingly an option for small, independent films wanting to maximise their PR profile ahead of the more lucrative DVD release; and
(ii) the eco-friendly "green carpet" premiere including satellite broadcast to other cinemas around Australia .

Extract:
"If the film, with its mixture of fiction and documentary, takes a strikingly original form, its “green carpet” launch in Sydney last night was no less mould-breaking. From its screening at the Sydney Theatre the film was beamed to more than 50 cinemas around the country and a claimed audience of more than 10,000, with guests arriving 'by bicycle, solar car, rickshaw or electric car'.

"Every aspect of the event – from transport to the heating to the drinks and the power supply – was genuinely green, says director Franny Armstrong, who adds that the film’s UK launch produced just 1 percent of the emissions of an average Hollywood premiere."

Omar Little - The Wire's mythological trickster character

"The trickster, in later folklore or modern popular culture, is a clever, mischievous person or creature, who survives in a dangerous world through use of trickery." - Wikipedia

The further I get into The Wire - I'm now nearly at the end of series 4 - the more complex and fascinating it becomes, less of a crime genre teleseries and more like a televisual equivalent of George Eliot's Middlemarch - a portrait of an entire town depicted through emblematic characters locked together in an intricate social dance.

One of the most fascinating characters is Omar Little (Michael Williams, pictured right), the mysterious gay character who lives by robbing the street druglords. Omar seems to be perpetually nowhere and everywhere, disappearing for long stretches before suddenly popping up, confronting the bad guys, and disappearing just as abruptly into his hidey hole.

He's a psychopath yet effortlessly charismatic and oddly likable, largely because he's an individual in a town where most everybody is in thrall to an oppressive collective - town hall politics, trade unions, the drug trade, the law. Although on the surface the series plays out within a naturalistic framework (I believe the correct cliche to deploy here is "gritty realism"), Omar is an almost magical figure whom we admire not because he's good, but because of the way he lives outside the system.

This is a man whose many enemies find it hard to find, and yet in one episode he memorably walks down the middle of the street early in the morning to buy some breakfast cereal dressed in nothing but an electric blue silk dressing gown. Those few who witness this quickly turn and run! An earlier scene has street kids playing at being Omar after they've witnessed him in a shoot-out (or perhaps merely heard about it), underlining that even on the mean streets of Baltimore he's recognised as having a mythological dimension.

There are many reasons why The Wire is essential viewing, exerting a heroin-like grip on its fans, and one of them is the way it taps into deeper mythological currents. Omar is a terrific variation on the classic "trickster" archetype found in many books, films, folk legends and myths. Other tricksters can be found on this page.

Back to Wikipedia: "Hynes and Doty, in Mythical Trickster Figures (1993) state that every trickster has several of the following six traits:^[1]

1. fundamentally ambiguous and anomalous
2. deceiver and trick-player
3. shape-shifter
4. situation-inverter
5. messenger and imitator of the gods
6. sacred and lewd bricoleur"

Change before it's too laaaaa......

Upcoming UK film In The Loop is being released in the US in theatres and on video-on-demand in the same week. There's a nice, short piece at Screen Daily by its producer, Kevin Loader, on how the film industry needs to think more along lines like this and change its business model before its too late.

Extract:
"Founding an entire global distribution system on the profitability of a couple of dozen tentpole movies per year is insanity. It’s also bad for the health of cinema. The canary in the independent film cage has all but stopped singing already..."

CW Stoneking - Jungle Blues

ADG award nominations - Thornton and Connolly not eligible

Noms for the ADG (Australian Directors Guild) just in and there's two strange omissions in the feature category - Warwick Thornton (Samson & Delilah) and Robert Connolly (Balibo). I've inquired as to whether this is due to some anomaly - were they both eligible? - and will report back as soon as I hear. If there's no obvious explanation then we have something of a scandal on our hands.

UPDATE, 4.40pm No scandal, folks
"Samson and Delilah wasn’t entered and Balibo wasn’t eligible for this year’s awards because of the cut-off date for 2009, but would be eligible for 2010." - ADG Awards publicist.

2nd UPDATE, Thursday:

Samson's producer Kath Shelper has emailed with the following: "Warwick isn't a member of the ADG and it was my understanding that you need to be a member to be eligible for the awards."

Congrats to all who have emerged with a nod, including those listed below.

Documentary (stand alone): Amiel Courtin-Wilson - Cicada/ Bentley Dean - Contact/ Scott Hicks Glass - A portrait of Philip in Twelve Parts

Documentary (series): Brian McKenzie - Ironing Man: Meet me at the Mango Tree/ Kay Pavlou - Armenia: Family Footsteps/ Rachel Perkins - Freedom for our Lifetime:

Feature Film: Serhat Caradee - Cedar Boys/ Adam Elliot - Mary and Max/ Glendyn Ivin - Last Ride/ Rachel Ward - Beautiful Kate
Full results now on ADG website .

Israel's occupation of Palestine = bad China's occupation of Tibet = OK?

Image: Scene from Israeli film Waltz with Bashir.

NOTE TO COMMENTERS: IF YOU WANT TO ACCUSE ANY OF THE PARTICIPANTS BELOW - WHETHER LOACH OR MOORE - OF "ANTI-SEMITISM" YOU ARE FREE TO TAKE YOUR COMMENTARY ELSEWHERE. THIS BLOG WILL NOT PUBLISH MATERIAL THAT IS DEFAMATORY.

Screen Daily has published the correspondence between Ken Loach (and two collaborators) and Melbourne Filmfest executive director Richard Moore that led to Loach pulling his film Looking for Eric from the line-up of this year's MIFF - after permission to screen the film had already been granted and the festival's booking catalogue had gone to print.

See Screen Daily for accompanying comment piece.

LETTER TO THE DIRECTOR OF MELBOURNE FILM FESTIVAL 2009

13th July 2009

Dear Richard Moore

Sadly, we learn that your festival is sponsored in part by the State of Israel.

As you are no doubt aware, many Palestinians, including artists and academics, have called for a boycott of events supported by Israel. There are many reasons for this; the illegal occupation of Palestinian land, destruction of homes and livelihoods, the massacres in Gaza, all are part of the continuing oppression of the Palestinian people.

We have no alternative but to respond to their appeal for help.

The Israeli poet, Aharon Shabtai, has said “I do not believe that a state that maintains an occupation, committing on a daily basis crimes against civilians, deserves to be invited to any kind of cultural event.”

This is not a boycott of independent Israeli films or filmmakers but of the Israeli state.

We hope you can reconsider accepting Israel as a sponsor. If not, then we feel obliged to withdraw our film, Looking For Eric, from the festival.

Yours sincerely,

Ken Loach - Director

Paul Laverty - Writer

Rebecca O’Brien - Producer

Sixteen Films

_____________________________________________________________________

REPLY FROM RICHARD MOORE

14th July 2009

Dear Rebecca,

Thank you for your letter and for informing me of your concerns.

I’m replying to inform you that the State of Israel has been a sponsor of the festival for a few years now, including last year when we played Mr Loach’s film ITS A FREE WORLD . Their sponsorship – like that of the British Council , the Goethe Institute , the Taipei Economic and Cultural Office , the Korean Ministry of Culture ,Sports and Tourism et al – is provided free of conditions and is , I believe , one of the many forms of cultural assistance they offer to Australian arts organisations – including the Adelaide film Festival , The Sydney Opera House et al , and indeed the Sydney Film Festival ( in past years) , which opened with LOOKING FOR ERIC this year .

As a festival we have a long tradition of programming films that present and examine various points of view on the Middle East including on the so called Israel Palestinian question.

This year such films include AMREEKA - a drama that outlines the difficulties that a contemporary Palestinian family faces adapting to life in mid west USA : YOUNG FREUD IN GAZA - the efforts of a young Palestinian psychiatrist to deal with psychological problems faced by Palestinians living under occupation and also forced to deal with internecine Palestinian power struggles.

In 2008 MIFF programmed a small programming stream called BORDER PATROL showing films that dealt with the Israel Palestinian question - Eran Riklis’s award winning THE LEMON TREE about a Palestinian woman’s fight for justice to stop the Israeli army destroying her lemon grove : THE SALT OF THE SEA - a Palestinian drama centred around a Palestinian’s attempts to reclaim their original home : WALTZ WITH BASHIR - a personal autobiographical account of an Israeli soldier and his involvement in one of Israel’s entries into Lebanon , ending with footage of the Shabra/ Shatilla massacres. and STRANGERS - a romantic liason between a Palestinian and an Israeli shot in and around the world cup finals in Germany .This small sample is illustrative of our wider concern to show films that deal with contemporary political issues and to allow audiences to judge these films on their own merits . We try to adhere to a policy of open dialogue in our dealings with all agencies ,embassies and cultural entities who offer to support our independent non profit organisation.

I understand that this issue is a particularly emotional one for people but we will not participate in a boycott against the State of Israel , just as we would not contemplate boycotting films from China or other nations involved in difficult long standing historical disputes.

I trust you will respect this decision.

Your sincerely


Richard
_________________________________________________
Richard Moore
Executive Director
58th MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL

__________________________________________________________________

2nd LETTER/REPLY SENT TO RICHARD MOORE

14th July 2009

Dear Richard

Thank for your email.

We understand that Israel is and has been a sponsor of many festivals, including some which have shown our films. However, situations change. It is the Palestinians themselves, writers, artists, academics, people from all walks of life who are calling for our support. We are forced to make a choice by those who are suffering such intolerable oppression.

The boycott of apartheid South Africa suffered similar criticisms to the ones you now make. But who would now say it was wrong?

Film festivals will reflect many points of view, which are often radical and progressive. It is also true that there are many brutal regimes and many governments, including our own, which have committed war crimes. But the cultural boycott called for by the Palestinians means that remaining sympathetic but detached observers is no longer an option. You either support the boycott or break it.

For us the choice is clear.

Yours sincerely

Ken Loach

Rebecca O’Brien

Paul Laverty

Lost Aussie gems of the 2000s - time for the revival

Last year's Cactus was generally received respectfully by critics but it failed miserably to gain traction at the box office.

I wrote on this blog at the time how depressing it was going to see this film on its opening weekend on a Sunday afternoon and finding myself and my partner to be literally the only customers in the large, downstairs theatre at Sydney's Chauvel. When we asked afterwards if this was typical, we were told by a staff member that we were the first paying customers in three sessions!

If you're looking for an explanation of why Sydney distributors and cinemas steered clear of Matthew Newton's Three Blind Mice, that dismal experience should provide some useful context.

Hopefully appreciative audiences for Samson and Delilah and Balibo are helping to reverse this perception that local films are worthy only of boycott and Cactus will go onto receive an appreciative audience on DVD. Or at least, get revived in some future, Not Quite Hollywood-inspired "lost Ozploitation classics of the 2000s" revival season. Maybe the imprimatur of Quentin Tarantino will do the trick.

My appreciation of the film is now up at the National Film and Sound Archive's australian screen website, complete with three video clips and commentary on the clips:

Extract:
The film is "one of a long line of road movies that reflects the central place of the car in Australian society, including Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max 2 (1981), True Love and Chaos (1997) and The Magician (2005), also about a kidnapper and his victim(s).

"But it also has strong echoes of a US sub-genre of 'desert noir’ that uses the isolation of desert locations to help intensify an atmosphere of doom and despair.

"The sub-genre began with movies like Detour (1945) and The Hitch-Hiker (1953) and continued in the 1980s and beyond with the likes of Delusion (1991), U-Turn (1997) and The Hitcher (1986) and its 2007 remake, which both added strong shades of horror.

"The desert and the outback in Australian cinema has long been a place of danger and the unknown, with Wolf Creek (2005) a vivid recent example. But Cactus, while full of thrills and suspense, never develops into a horror film, gradually revealing a more humanistic agenda as it employs genre conventions to explore notions of masculinity, class and power..."

The return of Aussie cinema's Prodigal Son - the audience

Opening figures for Robert Connolly's excellent Balibo have just come in - 206,000 in its first weekend, amounting to a very healthy average of nearly $9000 per screen.

The surprise is that Rachel Ward's Beautiful Kate has taken even more, with earnings of 238,000 this weekend and a good per screen average of $8200.

There are plenty of appreciative reviews of Balibo on the net and an interview with the director on Luke Buckmaster's Cinetology at crikey.com. I agreed totally with Paul Byrnes's review in the SMH, especially his praise for Anthony LaPaglia's lead performance as journalist Roger East.

LaPaglia is one major reason why people are responding so emotionally to this film - notwithstanding the strong script and direction (and let's not forget that the ability to create an environment where the cast can really shine is a large part of what makes a strong director).

Ever since enjoying his breakout performance in Betsy's Wedding, I've always respected LaPaglia without being a huge fan. His screen presence is undeniable but I felt locked out by his gruff performance in Lantana - too one-note for too much of the way - and felt similarly about his flamboyant, bad-guy banker in Connolly's The Bank. I felt as if he was twisting my arm.

But watching him in Balibo is like watching a different actor. It's a masterful performance, on a higher plane of acting. Check what he does in scenes set in an empty East Timorese restaurant, where he's not speaking or handling very few lines of dialogue. There's a world of expression in those eyes, those gestures.

I don't think it's too soon, or too hyperbolic, to be arguing that LaPaglia - and the film in general - deserves to be a major player come the next awards season - the Academy Awards, BAFTAs et el. Of course awards are always a crap shoot and the Oscars are hardly the ultimate measure of a film's worth. They're too often about sentimentality, hype, box office and Harvey Weinstein's ego.

But even a long-standing Oscar-sceptic such as Eyes Wired Open has to admit that when it comes it actors, they do sometimes get it right - at the nominations stage, at least. And sometimes a great performance in a small film can even win - witness Geoffrey Rush holding aloft his statuette for Shine or Daniel Day Lewis winning for My Left Foot. Now if only LaPaglia had played East from a wheelchair or with a mental disability.

Probiotics changed the way he felt now

If you ever wanted to know what the hell Joe Cocker was bellyaching about in that Beatles song, here at last is a translation. Very funny.

Everybody must get Stoned?

There's an interesting piece in the New York Times about independent filmmakers having to find new ways to get their films seen in cinemas, with Australians Steve Jacobs (Disgrace) and Rebecca Yeldham (Anvil!) getting a guernsey. Don't rely on distributors, because everything has become tougher, is the general message. It seems cuddling up to a hotel concierge is now part of the advised strategy.

The piece dovetails neatly into my recent posts on (a) the difficulty Matthew Newton and his associates had getting Three Blind Mice into a cinema in Sydney, despite international festival acclaim, and (b) US indie producer Ted Hope's detailed musings on the need for filmmakers to turn to social networking to build niche audiences from scratch.

A good example of this is the establishment in NSW of the Dungog Film Festival and the distribution company Australian Film Syndicate (AFS) by filmmakers Stavros Kazantzidis and Allanah Zitserman, dedicated to helping small Australian (often though not necessarily privately funded) films gain a profile and get into cinemas.

By chance I watched the upcoming AFS release, Stone Bros. , last night, then woke today to find a story plastered across the SMH and a media relase in my in-box in which filmmaker Richard Frankland and the AFS attack the Classification Board for giving the film an MA15+ certificate. (See post below for the media release in full) .

At first Stone Bros. looks like a typical dumb Hollywood teen "stoner comedy" trying hard to be Aboriginal (an early "sorry" gag is rather awkward) but it soon won me over with its comic energy - helped by the tremendous presence of cheeky co-star Leon Burchill (a natural on screen) and an Aboriginal perspective on the world that, far from being try-hard, comes over as natural, appealingly humorous and fresh.

In diving from wacky, Fat Pizza-style humour to stern message-making in the final stretch the film grinds its gears too abruptly - as if Frankland was already anticipating the trouble he might get from the ratings board.

But to get this into perspective, does the MA 15+ certificate restrict kids from seeing the film? It means that kids of any ages can go, but if they're under 15 they need a parent or legal guardian. In theory, at least - I'm not convinced all cinemas take these restrictions seriously. I'm also not convinced that many under 15s will want to go in the first place.

Perusing the OFLC (Office of Film and Literature Classification) guidelines, it's impossible to tell how the advisory M and restrictive MA15+ categories differ in their attitudes towards drug use. The lower M rating allows for "drug use in context", but so does the MA 15+ .

Note that: (i) the characters' excessive marijuana smoking is depicted as making them stupid.
(ii) the most recent Hollywood "stoner" comedy, Pineapple Express, was also rated MA15+ in Australia.,

Below you can find the official guidelines for MA 15+ (which took me ages to uncover on the OFLC website - they don't make them easy to find):

MA 15+ - MATURE ACCOMPANIED

Impact test

The impact of material classified MA 15+ should be no higher than strong.

Note: Material classified MA 15+ is considered unsuitable for persons under 15 years of age. It is a legally restricted category.

THEMES

The treatment of strong themes should be justified by context.

VIOLENCE

Violence should be justified by context.

Sexual violence may be implied, if justified by context.

SEX

Sexual activity may be implied.

LANGUAGE

Strong coarse language may be used.

Aggressive or very strong coarse language should be infrequent.

DRUG USE

Drug use should be justified by context.

NUDITY

Nudity should be justified by context.

Stone Bros MA15+ rating - media release

The following media release was issued by distributor AFS today:

STONE BROS.
Classification Board LOSES THE PLOT Over Pot.

'The classification board has placed an MA15+ (Strong Drug Use) on Richard J. Frankland’s Stone Bros. – a warm-hearted “roadcom” about two city-based blackfella’s reconnecting with their culture. 'Part of the Board’s reason for placing such a harsh classification on the film is based on an erroneous account of what actually is shown on the screen. The Board writes in its assessment, “The film opens with a montage in which marijuana is shown being cut from the plant, mixed with tobacco and formed into joints.” The fact is no marijuana plant is shown in the film.

'Says Richard J Frankland “I am astounded that the Board have taken such a harsh approach to the film, it is evident that the job of appraising the film was not done properly. Either someone within their office has made a terrible error or there is a bias against the film"

'To appeal against the Classification Board’s decision, the distributor Australian Film Syndicate (AFS) would need to pay a fee of $8,000. This is despite the fact that the Board have clearly made errors in their assessment. 'Allanah Zitserman, AFS Managing Director says “Stone Bros. is a landmark film, which will go a long way towards changing people’s views about Aboriginal Australia. It breaks down barriers through humour. It is really disappointing that young Australians will be restricted from seeing this film.”

'Writer/ Director Richard J. Frankland has expressed disappointment in what he sees as a complete misinterpretation of the themes and aim of his film. Through the use of humour, Frankland intends the film to clearly show that drug and alcohol addiction cause people to lose their way in life, linking the use of pot to negative consequences. For the two main characters in the film, their lives only start to turn around once they realise that they don’t need marijuana as a crutch, instead embracing their indigenous culture and connection to their ‘home’ as a far more fulfilling life choice.

'For Frankland, the MA 15+ rating immediately denies a key audience access to the film. His use of distinctly ‘black fella’ humour to ultimately portray a strong anti-drug and pro-culture message was intended to be seen, enjoined and owned by indigenous communities across Australia, by both young and older generations. Frankland sees his film as an important tool to encourage pride and confidence in a disaffected youth that struggles with a disconnection from its cultural roots.

'Into the wider population, Stone Bros. is also the first truly ‘post sorry’ film that takes a different direction from portraying the devastation amongst indigenous people in Australia. Through humour, Frankland pokes fun at the rift between indigenous and Anglo Australia, encouraging audiences, both young and old, to move away from stereotypical preconceptions and to get to know each other better through laughter. 'AFS, the film’s distributor, accepts that the film depicts marijuana smoking, but says that this is moderate in use and always within a context of humour.

'In its appeal to the Board AFS wrote: “The film does not glorify, encourage or condone drug use but rather presents scenes in a light-hearted way that depicts the negative repercussions of smoking marijuana to warn against its use.”

'Stavros Kazantzidis, AFS CEO says “I’m flabbergasted. The drug use is stronger in Harry Potter; where they are popping magic pills and transforming themselves all the time. The Board are totally out of sync with the public’s opinion on this. This is a humorous and important film that should be seen by everyone, but now it has been restricted.”

'Perhaps not everyone has a sense of humour." '

The trailer can be viewed at: http://www.stonebrosmovie.com.au/trailer/

Jean-Luc Godard vs River Phoenix

Here's something else I like about Melbourne - not just the laneways and the long narrow streets they often run into like Little Collins and Little Bourke, but the things you find in them. Such as this clothing shop, not only named after the Jean-Luc Godard science fiction classic but featuring a huge portrait of the auteur himself.

You wouldn't get that in Sydney - the shop managers there would just figure that JPG was too arty and in danger of transmitting an image of up-yourself-ness. In Melbourne it's seen as a measure of cool.

Before my fellow NSW cinephiles complain, that's not just theory, it's fact. Because there is, in fact, a branch of Alphaville in Sydney's Oxford Street (in the Verona/Academy Twin cinema strip) and in place of JPG are multiple portraits of River Phoenix.

Nothing wrong with that, except that it makes the shop a little less unexpected, a bit less on the edge - though perhaps a tiny bit more gay. Probably a wise move for the Sydney branch, of course.

Bertolucci seeding the next Iranian Revolution

A lot of western critics and filmgoers bagged Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers for what they considered its pretensions, but apparently it's become a must-see in anti-government circles in Iran for its it scenes of Paris 1968 street revolt.

The claim arrives in an interesting report from a Western journalist working undercover in Iran, published on Slate.

I don't suppose the film's general raciness, including frequent scenes of naked stud-muffins Louis Garrel and Michael Pitt and future Bond femme Eva Green, had anything to do with its appeal, given the sexual oppression enforced by that most cultured nation's authoritarian (and illegitimate) leader, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Extract:
"Look beyond the mullahs, ayatollahs, Sharia law, and head-to-toe chadors, and you'll find a stifled culture and a young population eager to embrace the West and the freedoms we represent.
"Take this last weekend, when I watched Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers. It was a big deal—not because the DVD was pirated (there are no copyright laws in Iran), but because in a country where shorts are banned and women are required to wear head scarves in public, I was watching an NC-17 art-house film bought off the streets. A friend tells me the movie is increasingly popular with young Iranians because of its scenes of the 1968 student protests in Paris.
"The night before, I was at a party held in a private apartment, where booze was served and dancing encouraged (both are forbidden in the Islamic Republic). At one point, two guys debated which exiled musician, Shahin Najafi or Kiosk, was most critical of the Ahmadinejad government—and, therefore, which they admired the most..."