MELBOURNE INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2010
6th Aug 10
ZERO-G'S 2010 MIFFADVENTURES
Here's my list of the unusual suspects - which is to say, films I think are of particular interest to Zero-G: Science Fiction, Fantasy & Historical Radio (3RRR FM, Mondays, 1-2 pm) listeners. They're alphabetically listed for convenience's sake, although in the broadcast episodes of my show I tackled them by genre.
I've had the chance to preview a chunk of these and, in being open to anything that captures the spirit of genre 'otherness', haven't had too many disappointments....
Although I don't normally use the star system out of five for films it's useful shorthand here:
On the other shorthand, I also like my Yeah/Nah/Maybe system, which allows me to rate a definitively awful film like, say, "Plan 9 From Outer Space" as being so awful that it creeps around the scale and is worth seeing...
AIR DOLL - (FANTASY) *** Yeah
PICTURE - AIR DOLL - BAE DOONA AS NOZOMI
DIRECTED BY HIROKAZU NOREEDA 2009
"Air Doll" about an inflatable lady who does a Pygmallion....she's played by the archer from "The Host", actress Bae Du-na, who certainly has the whimsical role covered like a blankey...
BEETLE QUEEN CONQUERS TOKYO (DOCUMENTARY) **** Yeah
An amusingly philosophically rich doco about the Japanese hobby of collecting insects. The bittersweet transcient beauty of the wee beasties is captivating, ironically preserved in the collections of millions of hobbyists. (Hai, there are vending machines!) The paraphenalia encomp...asses a bewildering array of particularly neat presentation boxes and field equipment...no surprise!
BIBLIOTHEQUE PASCAL (FANTASY)
THE BLACKS (HISTORICAL)
CAIRO GARBAGE (DOCUMENTARY)
Just how does the teeming Mega-city deal with its mega mountain of garbage?
CANE TOADS: THE CONQUEST (DOCUMENTARY) **** Yeah
The cane toad infestation is another classic Aussie environmental stuff up which began in the 1930s when the beasties were imported to take care of Greyback beetles in the sugar cane crop. The beetles, it turned out, lived high up the stalks mostly out of reach of the toads, which
then hopped fourth and multiplied across Australia's top end as they bred like submersible bunnies until the original 102 individuals descendants now number an estimated 1.5 billion!
This documentary is a well balanced mixture of the serious (the pesticide used to control the beetles after the toads failed was later banned as a carginogen) and the light hearted (stuffed cane toads dressed in little costumes as whimsical art!) as it presents information about the many facets of the growing problem that the rest of Australia may not be aware of. There are many eccentric facts brought to light. In the literally mind boggling category, although I was aware that several domestic animals had died from eating the poisonous toads I had no dea that some pets (dogs in particular) were deliberately seeking psychedelic experiences by licking non fatal doses of secretions from the toads backs! One confirmed toad related human death is even more tragically bizaare and involved accidental electrocution when the unfortunate victim, killing toads with an improvised metal spear and pierced a power cable.
An essentially 'ribbeting' and at times whimsically entertaining documentary jam packed with diverting and disturbing facts.
CATERPILLAR (HISTORICAL)
CITY OF LIFE AND DEATH (DOCUMENTARY)
THE CLINIC (HORROR)
COLLAPSE (DOCUMENTARY) ** Maybe
Thought this one was a bit predictable in its too-easy approach to interviewing a famous conspiracy journalist.
THE DISAPPEARANCE OF ALICE CREED (HORROR)
DISPICABLE ME (SCIENCE FICTION)
Big budget USA animation about the world’s number two supervillian who inherits a group of orphaned little girls, who are presumably going to become the worlds number one supervillians.
DREAM HOME (HORROR)
DREAMLAND (SCIENCE FICTION) ***Maybe
Dreamland is a black and white film by Australian director Ivan Sen which tells of American UFO spotter Dan Freeman’s obsessive and personally costly quest for the meaning of life-as-we-don’t-know it as his sky-watching blends existentialism with extra-terrestrials. Ironically, and perhaps traditionally, it’s clear that this pursuit interfers with how he relates to the rest of Mankind. The price of elusive otherworldly spaceships seems to be down to Earth relationships.
It’s a beautifully shot film with the monochrome footage rendering both desert setting and human character as rugged, starkly defined landscapes. The American desert appears as life imitating art, since it’s been the convenient location of choice for decades of U.S science fiction movies and television shows. Indeed, there’s been more than one story that’s had marooned astronauts THINKING they’re on some alien world, simply because they’ve crashed in the Badlands of the American West.
This mood piece mostly ignores a traditional storyline and indeed, character dialogue, replacing the latter more often than not with radio carrier waves and neatly clipped, well chosen intercepts of military frequency chatter. Stock rocketry and spaceflight footage provide validation of the reality of human spaceflight against the unproven hypothesis of alien visitations and it’s clear that Freeman’s ‘thousand light year stare’ comes from not having seen too much but from not having seen enough of what remains frustratingly absent.
Dreamland documents an elusively unfinished quest where no amount of Stanley Kubrick referencing starjump special effects can satisfyingly substitute for actual proven first contact with aliens. Still, for all of that, it’s clear that Freeman’s desert wanderings and parallel close encounters with the very clear and present natural world are things more than worth doing in themselves.
ELEANOR’S SECRET (FANTASY) **** Yeah
ENTER THE VOID (FANTASY)
A FILM UNFINISHED (DOCUMENTARY)
FIRST SQUAD : MOMENT OF TRUTH (FANTASY)
If the main female character in this eclectic Japanese/Russian animation lived to have children she’d have to take a deep and thoughtful breath before answering the classic question: “Mummy, what did you do in the war...?”
“Well, dears...in the Great Patriotic War, when the Nazi occultists summoned 12th Century Teutonic zombies to fight the Soviet Union, mother took her magic sword and led the counterattack upon the Castle of the Dead in Gloomy Valley, which, before you ask, was a kind of low rent Valhalla where warriors went on holiday after they were killed in battle...”
And so on...
Nadia is her name and psychic visions are her game; actually at first slice she's a rather unconvincing girl Hero-Of-The-Soviet Union when it comes to blade work. (And why IS it a Japanese katana, and not, say, a Cossack cavalry sabre?) No worries, she’s plucky, lucky and somehow, more than a match for even the pair of buxom Rhine maiden assassin-acrobats (Ach du lieber himmel!) the Nazis send her way. Anyway, Nadia works for the top secret Russian Division 6, a covert unit for whom the term ‘spooks’ might have been coined. They’re the Eastern equivalent of the “Hellboy” comics United States Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defence. Just as ruthless, and just as dedicated to battling evil Nazi monsters whether they’re human, inhuman or....undecided!
First Squad was created by Japan’s Studio 4C (Halo Legends, The Animatrix, Spriggan, etc.) and the Russian based Molot Entertainment and harnessed the talents of Russian animators Mikhail Spritz and Aleksey Klimov and Japanese director Yoshiharu Asino. If you know your history you may recall that Russia and Japan have had more than a few military stoushes in the past so I’m encouraged by their co-operating on this movie. Both countries are known for an understandable preoccupation with the Second World War, which in the area of animation frequently manifests in a fascination for period aviation and other technology. In this case, it served the artists well, as I kept spotting all sorts of characteristic well detailed hardware in the background, including the dreaded Katyusha truck mounted rocket battery. The art design also references the kind of industrial rendering popular in W.W.II Hollywood propaganda cartoons, alongside a definite stylistic influence that looks to be gleaned from Soviet patriotic posters.
It’s always a bit of a mind-muncher when anime and zombies meet but in this case the Undead are almost overshadowed by the apocalyptic scale of the greater conventional war raging around them. Fortunately the Nazis mages are too focused upon their latest super-weapon to worry about winning anything as mundane as normal battles!
However, a zombie related feature of this film that works particularly well involves live action mock interviews with 'war veterans'. Interwoven with the animated footage these helped elevate an otherwise relatively average supernatural pastiche, reminding me of Max Brook’s terrific “World War Z” novel, which collects anecdotal stories from the survivors of a global zombie holocaust. Way cool!
First Squad is a slightly awkward piece but that’s exactly why I was pleased to catch up with it at MIFF. It's a bit inconclusive, clearly meant to be a part of a series, but I won't hold that against it.
Besides: Sword wielding Soviets battling Nazi zombies? It’s more than my geekdom is worth to miss that!
5150 ELM’S WAY (HORROR) **** Yeah
FOUR LIONS (COMEDY SATIRE)
GHOST WRITER (DRAMA)
THE HOUSEMAID (HORROR) (THERE ARE TWO VERSIONS OF THIS)
THE INVENTION OF DOCTOR NAKAMATS (DOCUMENTARY) **** Yeah!
PICTURE - THE INVENTION OF DR. NAKAMATS
DIRECTED BY KASPAR ASTRUP SCHROEDER 2009
THE INVENTION OF DR. NAKAMATS, revolving around the zany Japanese 'inventor' of the floppy disc, spring loaded shoes, the 'Love Jet' and the Soy Sauce Kitchen Pump. Holder of over 3000 patents he gets his best ideas when underwater holding his breath to starve his brain of oxygen. ...you couldn't make this bloke up! Daffiness with Dignity subverted by shameless self promotion...
THE ILLUSIONIST (FANTASY)
IN THE ATTIC: WHO HAS A BIRTHDAY TODAY? (FANTASY) *****Yeah!
THE JUCHE IDEA (MOCKUMENTARY) ** Maybe.
It's hard to satirise the North Korean regime, since it fills that role so perfectly itself, and in some ways it's a bit like sending up Gilbert & Sullivan. I thought Red Chapel (also screening in the festival) which really was set in N.K, did a more effective job exposing the absurdities...
THE KILLER INSIDE OF ME (HORROR)
L.A ZOMBIE (HORROR) (CANCELLED!! BANNED BY CENSORS!)
LSD (FANTASY)
LEBANON (HISTORICAL) ***** Hell yeah!
PICTURE - LEBANON
DIRECTED BY SAMUEL MOAZ
-LEBANON-
Directed By Samuel Maoz
In Samuel Maoz's "Lebanon" an Israeli Defence Force 4-man Centurion tank crew get 'Das Booted' in the '82 war when their Armoured Fighting Vehicle and the paratrooper squad they're supporting gets cut off from the main line of advance.
Lebanon is a powerful film set almost entirely within the fighting compartment of a metal monster that must read as claustrophobic for anyone who doesn't have a turtle component in their blood and a singular obsession with armour of all kinds. ( Well, I did know what kind of tank it was without having to check, y’know?) I referenced the classic submarine movie ‘Das Boot’ deliberately, Maoz’s experiences as a conscript in the ‘82 war have informed his ultra realistic depiction of the interior of an operational tank down to the last manky, clanky, rusty detail. Condensation, blood, sweat, urine, grease and just about every other liquid known to man or metal beast swill around the feet of the crew in the bottom of the turret’s basket. This evil brew, along with the stench of expended shell propellants and engine fumes form a stinking fug, always unpleasant to start with before you throw in the constant vibration of the engine and clatter of the tracks.
Hell. On treads.
In the film the soldiers view of the outside world (to perhaps a lesser than realistic extent; tank crews like to pop their hatches whenever possible) is totally confined to prismatic periscopes and gun sights. Though Maoz never falls into the trap of thereby making everything a target in a macabre hi-tech video game, he does underline the grim potential of the tankers’ never-to-be underestimated ability to comprehensively ‘fuck up’ anything and anyone they do choose to fire upon. The tank may be metal but the crew are flesh and blood and far from invulnerable. Their Dalek like P.O.V is rudely violated any number of times as officers, prisoners and corpses breach their far from cosy shell.
They’re not a happy crew to begin with, thanks to a last minute replacement, on top of the always present moral ambiguities of the mission they’re ordered to perform. In one ironic scene we learn that international law has forbidden the use of white phosphorus incendiary rounds so their commanding officer, as a concession, coyly renames it “Flaming Smoke”. It all comes apart at the welded seams when these knights in less than shining armour are forcibly reminded why tanks in urban areas are only ever as safe as their infantry support can make them.
I wouldn’t care to be smug about it, but this is the kind of exceptionally well made. completely horrifying anti war (and how could anything that told the truth not be?) movie that makes me especially relieved not to be personally entangled in the ongoing running sore of Middle-Eastern frightfulness.
Whew!
MACHETTE MAIDENS UNLEASHED !! (CINEMA DOCUMENTARY) ***** Yeah!
Does for the Phillipines based exploitation cinema industry of the 1970s what "Not Quite Hollywood" did for our understanding of the similar Aussie beasty of the same era.
MAI MAI MIRACLE (FANTASY) ***** Hell yeah!
It's marketing shorthand to compare every fine Japanese animation to the sublime Miyazaki's work so instead I'll mention Mamoru Hosoda's delicate "The Girl Who Leapt Through Time" in the same breathless whimsy as "Mai Mai Miracle". Little girls, linked across 1000 years of time, seperately discover echoes of friendships in the ancient Imperial Court and ten years after World War II in rural Japan. A timeless gem!
MAMMUTH (COMEDY) **** Yeah
Directed by Benoît Delépine and Gustave de Kervern.
If this droll French satire were any dryer you could replace your clothesline with it and beat those winter washing blues. As it is, the two directors have knowingly built upon their 2004 road movie, Aaltra, to produce a neatly rambling coming-of-old-age comedy built around the cross-country travels of a freshly retired meat processing plant worker.
The film’s title describes both larger than life Gérard Depardieu AND the classic iron horse motorcycle he rides , ably supported by other veterans of French cinema, including Isabelle Adjani and some familiar names from of New Wave French horror such as Yolande Moreau (The Pack) and Philippe Nahon (The Pack & Haute Tension).
Though I’m not precisely sure how the French pension system works (S’okay, neither are the French!) you pick up during the course of the film that much depends upon securing the correct paperwork from retirement funds connected to previous employers. To tick the the boxes Depardieu has to unroll his life’s paper trail as he tools around the country trying to elicit the proper receipts from uncaring, indifferent, defunct and just plain staggeringly rude individuals and companies. Somehow, he takes it all in his implacable stride, whilst managing to make the often absurdly surreal best of several remarkable diversions along the way, including one where his wife, holding the fort back home, sets out to murder a woman who stole her perambulating husband’s mobile phone. There are well observed depths to our wandering biker's character that Depardieu deftly plumbs, often with no more than stolid shrug of his shoulders or a hefty sigh that somehow sums it all up, while a central, traumatic event that influenced the character's life before he married is revealed in well measured flashbacks.
“Mammuth” is a simply staged, easy riding, slow burn comedy, which I couldn’t help but embrace in celebration of its whimsical empowerment of retirees.
MARWENCOL (DOCUMENTARY) *****Yeah!
Touching MIFF doco about a bloke who's brain was damaged in a bar assault and who has gone on to create a new life in miniature in his backyard with expensive 1/6th scale action figures (Zero-G writes jealously!), repurposed Barbie dolls and a highly detailed World War II model village. His photographic set ups, poses and scenarios are impressive and it doesn't signify whether this is art or therapy when it results in a body of work as quirkily absorbing as this...
MONSTERS (SCIENCE FICTION)
'Illegal alien' squid monsters south of the border...what's not to like?
MY DOG TULIP (FANTASY) *****Yeah!
“Unable to love each other, the English turn naturally to dogs”
My Dog Tulip is an American independent animated feature directed and animated by Paul Fierlinger and his wife Sandra. The director has created several canine based works before (Still Life With Animated Dogs) and his affinity for the subject matter clearly wags the tail of this charming bow-wowgraphy based on the 1956 novel by British author J.R. Ackerley.
Ackerley’s Alsatian bitch, was actually named Queenie, in the original story, but the writer’s editors insisted it be changed to Tulip, to avoid unfortunate jokes riffing on Ackerley’s sexuality, who was openly gay. A rose by any other name, Tulip proves a problem pet, the legacy of her early life being spent largely confined to a small backyard by inattentive owners who didn’t socialise her with outside contact or walks. Ackerley, a curmudgeon himself, rapidly finds his newly acquired housemate dominating his life, amusingly defining any and all human relationships against a background of the less adorable habits of dogs that you definitely won’t see in a Disney animation.
This makes for a refreshingly adult cartoon, with, for a change, no concessions to the juvenile it’s full of insights into the grumblingly mundane ways of the pet owning bitch and moderately famous....
The drawings are at once both fussy and fanciful, contrasting the dog’s unfettered romping with her notional master’s rumpled stolidity. The animation occasionally reverts to naughty pencil sketches recorded in a journal that make me wonder what Tulip’s account of her master’s life would be like.
Amiable but first rate voice acting by notables like Christopher Plummer, Lyn Redgrave and Isabella Rossellini round out what’s a very engaging feature that offers particular pleasures of affirmation to those who are besotted with pets and those who are not, so that both factions can point at the screen and say, "See! That's WHY!!"
Cat people may now smile smugly.
Picture: My Dog Tulip Directed by Paul Fierlinger
PETITION (HISTORICAL) *****Yeah...but...this is VERY hard viewing.
Chinese petitioners live in shanty towns (if they're lucky) for months and years to bring their case before implacable authorities in Bejing. Absolutely harrowing...
PSYCHO (HORROR) *****Hell yeah!
THE RED CHAPEL (COMEDY SATIRE) ****Yeah
RUBBER (HORROR)
A killer tyre rolls holey horror....
THE MESSENGER (DRAMA)
RED HILL (HORROR)
SCOTT PILGRIM VS THE WORLD (SCIENCE FICTION)
Edgar Wright does for superheroes what he did for Zombies in Shaun of The Dead and country coppers in Hot Fuzz.
THE SILENT HOUSE (HORROR)
SPACE TOURISTS (DOCUMENTARY) *****Hell yeah! A biitersweet capsule for space buffs.
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A rusty/shiny (the metallic equivalent of 'bittersweet') MIFF doco about the fallen glory of the former Soviet space programme interwoven with the contrastingly 'uplifting' story of the rise in space tourism that's injecting new funds into the Russian Space Programme. Striking imagery: from shepherds living in yurts made from rocket booster casings to an engineer revelling in freefall aboard the I.S.S. Space buffs don't miss this!
SPINE TINGLER ! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY (DOCUMENTARY) *****Hell yeah!
Spine Tingler: The William Castle Story!" What a showman! (NOW, in terrifying CASTLEO vision! You will be AMAZED and ASTOUNDED by the life story of the legendary HORROR FILM director, producer and gimmicky publicity GENIUS!! (OR YOUR MONEY BACK!! But not from me. ) SCREAM. SCREAM for your LIFE!!
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SPLICE (SCIENCE FICTION) - From the director of the clever Sci-Fi low budget movie THE CUBE.
SUMMER WARS (FANTASY)
Techno Tokyo V.R futurism by The Girl Who Leapt Through Time anime director Mamoru Hosoda.
SYMBOL (FANTASY COMEDY) *****Hell yeah!
This is essentially bug brain crazy...but I loved it! Gloriously surreal Terry Gilliam like mayhem from one of Japan's great physical comedians.
SURVIVAL OF THE DEAD (SCIENCE FICTION) ***Maybe
Directed By George A. Romero.
“Survival Of The Dead” is George A. Romero’s sixth zombie film to stagger in company with his original “Night Of The Living Dead”, assuming you don’t count “The Crazies” as a fellow shambler; the maniacs in that last being surely one rabid misstep away from the Undead.
The setting of this new movie does remind me of “The Crazies”, with its expansive rural location where a handful of survivors, who happen to include the scruffy rogue militia that the student filmmakers encountered in “Diary Of The Dead”, retreat to an island in hopes of weathering the zombie holocaust. Trouble is, Plum Island (No, we’re not in Pittsburgh anymore!) is already inhabited, and not just by zombies! It’s been weeks since civilization began its downwards spiral and in that time the two resident feuding Irish-American clans have taken the collapse in their stride, incorporating its walking dead victims into their already skewed world view. Well, the Muldoons and the O’Flynns are farmers and fisher folk, and it’s really just a matter of getting used to handling a new kind of..unlivestock. Our anti-heroes, still led by the cynically opportunistic Alan van Sprang, drop into this unholy mixing pot, rather like a band of somewhat battle fatigued Tarantino film veterans. You just know they’re not going to fare well.
“Survival” doesn’t play quite as subtext rich to me, as some of the previous films in the series, and there’s something of an over fixation on the idea that it's not JUST the Undead who are stuck in their grooves forever. Yeah, I get it; if even the dead can learn to change their ways why can’t the living?
There are, admittedly some coolly executed ideas about zombies. You have to give George credit for following up on themes of zombie domestication that he developed as long ago as “Dawn Of The Dead”, However the zombie comedies "Fido" and “Shaun Of The Dead” have since played the household zombie angle smarter and funnier, although Romero’s take on the gruesome subject has a suitably nastier and simultaneously laconic edge to it. (A cowboy is a cowboy, after all, no matter what they're a-wranglin'!) There’s at least one new (to me) spectacular tactic shown for extinguishing a zombie, plus we’re treated to an unusually unsettling way for a zedhead to carry on doing something that they enjoyed in life. We also find out what happens if a live human turns the culinary tables and takes a bite out of a zombie. (Well, what did you EXPECT would happen? Ick!) It's actually quite remarkable that this many years and films on that the director has yet to run out of macabre invention.
I did enjoy the way this offshoot dovetailed with the previous film, giving the series more of a sense of an ongoing narrative, but overall felt it often lacked a genuine sense of menace, which is a shame. On the other rotting hand, the final insanity validating scene was certainly worth sticking around for, and although we never quite get a good grip on the film’s other characters, Kenneth Welsh and Richard Fitzpatrick are certainly madly barking larger than life (and death) as the respective vengeful patriarchs.
Not the best of the series, though certainly not the worst, “Survival Of The Dead” doesn’t quite make it all the way out of the grave. Still, given the HUGE 'body' of zombie genre films inspired by Mr Romero, is it any wonder that there's a lot more competition around to push...shove...bite....and tear at even the Maestro's latest offering? He's the bloke who raised the bar so high in the first place.
Respect!
TETRO (DRAMA) ***Yeah
Francis Ford Coppola's amusingly opera referencing film is itself essentially operatic in tone, enriched with theatrical like detail brought out by the black and white treatment.
TRASH HUMPERS (UM..??) *Nah
A hundred years ago, I used to joke, in art school, that experimental art films had their own set of cliches: People declaiming in high pitched voices, wearing funny masks and doing nauseating things. Ahh well.
UNINHABITED (HORROR) ***Maybe
WAKING SLEEPING BEAUTY (CINEMA DOCUMENTARY)
WILD TARGET (COMEDY)
WORLD ON A WIRE (SCIENCE FICTION) ****Yeah
PICTURE: WORLD ON A WIRE
DIRECTED BY RAINER WERNER FASSBINDER 1973
Werner Fassbinder's 1973 long German telly drama "World On A Wire" is a cerebral precursor to The Matrix/Avatar and many Virtual Reality large and small screen scenarios with echoes all the way down to the current hit, Inception. From a Daniel Galouye S.F novel, also adapted as the inadequate "The 13th Floor". Slow, measured, stylishly lensed. Not everyone's cuppa as it eschews SFX action for Noirish paranoia ala Alphaville, and LOTS of existential angst.
ALL OF THE JOE DANTE RETROSPECTIVE FILMS. You know the drill, Gremlins, Innerspace, Toy Soldiers, the It's A Good Life episode of the Twilight Zone movie...and more!!
(Haven' t had time to check out the short programmes this year.)