As you might remember from another
contribution on this blog, I’ve recently moved to South
West Rocks . It’s something of a beachside retirement village, situated
almost exactly halfway between Sydney and Brisbane. The local cinema is a
single-screen affair in what looks to be a repurposed town hall. Unusually for
such a small cinema, it is fully outfitted to show 3D films. It’s nice to have
something available locally, but the single screen and the audience
demographics mean that I often have to travel more than an hour north (Nambucca
Heads) or south (Port Macquarie) to see even relatively mainstream films. This
week’s major release Creed isn’t
playing in either of those locations, so I suppose I’ll be waiting for a VOD
(Video on Demand) release for that one.
My location doesn’t stop me from watching
interesting films, but it does mean I sometimes have to get a little creative
to see them. I’ll be using this space as a diary, with weekly updates on what
I’ve been watching and where I’ve been finding the films.
Monday
By random chance a few weeks ago I came
across a Facebook post about a limited edition Blu Ray release of the
low-budget 2011 Australian horror film The Tunnel. The film was being given
away free to those willing to pay $10 shipping. The disc is professionally
produced, with a good collection of interviews and documentaries, and is
hand-numbered on the spine. (Mine is 306/1000). The physical release is rare
due to the film’s unique distribution method: It’s one of the only films ever
to be officially released for free download via torrent websites, which are
usually the illegal method of access.
The film itself is less interesting than
its distribution history. It’s a handheld film about a news crew exploring the
abandoned tunnels underneath St. James station in Sydney. There’s a
vaguely-defined conspiracy theory about the Government hiding the truth about
the tunnels, including an amusing scene where the actors have turned up at a
real press conference featuring then-PM Julia Gillard, and filmed their own
story on the side while occasionally panning over to include her in the shot.
Once we get into the tunnels, it’s the same
lost-in-the-dark movie we’ve seen many times, with the only real draw being the
creepiness of seeing a horrific beast prowling beneath streets we recognise.
It’s interesting, but I can’t recommend it too strongly.
Tuesday
The low point of the week was American
Ultra, an ugly action-comedy which isn’t half as funny as it intends to
be. Jesse Eisenberg and Kristen Stewart play a young couple stuck in boring
dead-end jobs who sit at home smoking pot. Eisenberg has a panic attack every
time he tries to leave town, and it turns out this is because he’s a
CIA-trained sleeper agent. A group of trained assassins try to kill him and he
kills them instead. This repeats. The film is surprisingly violent and bloody,
but not enough to make it stand out. I’m sure it’s supposed to be hilarious,
but I didn’t even crack a smile.
The film had a brief release in Australia
in September, for which I’m told there were no media screenings. It didn’t open
wide enough for me to see it up here, so I caught up with it on U.S. streaming
site Vudu. This is a good place to rent movies which aren’t available in
Australia yet. The methods used to access these sites are beyond the scope of
this article, but you can figure it out easily enough with Google. Prime
Minister Malcolm Turnbull has very usefully stated that it’s legal to do so,
which is nice for those of us who’d struggle to find some films otherwise.
Wednesday
I stepped back in time to the silent era to
watch Robert J. Flaherty’s silent quasi-documentary Nanook of the North. The
story as I understand it is that Flaherty had filmed real documentary footage
of Inuit hunters in Northern Canada, but when he came home to edit the film he
dropped a lit cigarette and the entire print burned up. He returned to reshoot
the same scenes, and had an Inuit family act out some of what he’d lost in the
fire. Real or not, it’s remarkable footage, showing Nanook (not his real name)
and his family making their way through a harsh landscape in an attempt to
survive, building igloos for shelter and spearing seals for food. The hunting
scenes are tough to watch, since they spare no detail. It’s a real survival
story, made more haunting by the knowledge that the family seen onscreen
actually froze to death before the film was ever shown.
I’ve been watching a number of silent films
recently, including several of D.W. Griffith’s works and Fritz Lang’s Dr.
Mabuse The Gambler, which runs for over four hours. I’ve been working my
way through a list of all films included in the various editions of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
(626/1177 currently), and at the moment I’m going through the early years in
order. Nanook of the North is
available on a high-quality Criterion disc, but I found it on Youtube instead. Due
to the nature of public domain, you can find almost any silent film you care to
name steaming freely online these days.
Later that night I returned to Vudu to
watch Giulio Paradisi’s 1979 sci-fi film The Visitor, which I was attracted
to by some psychedelic cover art. There are hints of Jodorowsky in the plot,
which follows the clash between a cosmic religious figure and a young Earth
girl who is the daughter of a space-devil called Sateen. The girl has a pet
hawk which she uses to attack people. It’s crazy, but not crazy enough to
warrant seeking it out. What we have here is a more unhinged version of The Omen, with occasional glimpses of
the bizarre. The film wasn’t seen uncut in the United States until a pair of
recent re-releases by Code Red and Drafthouse Films, the latter of which is
also responsible for it appearing on VOD sites.
Thursday
The Intern is a
charming new feature from writer-director Nancy Meyers, whose work is has been
mostly unseen by me. Robert De Niro gives his best performance in years as Ben,
a 70-year-old widower who has grown bored of retired life. In an unlikely turn
of events, he finds a new lease of life working as a ‘senior intern’ for an
online fashion sales website built from the ground up by Jules (another strong
performance from Anne Hathaway). Jules has no time for an intern, but Ben is so
gentlemanly and displays such wisdom that they become close friends anyway. The Intern could have coasted by on the
strength of this relationship and been a pleasant enough film, but certain
late-game revelations offer much greater staying power. It goes to some really
interesting places, and I was left very impressed. It’s unfortunate that the
film is occasionally undercut by big Hollywood comedic moments, none of which
work at all, but there’s more than enough here to recommend.
The
Intern is a good indicator of my local cinema’s
release schedule: It opened widely across Australia on October 1st, but this
November 26th screening was the first local session.
Friday
The other local cinema release this week
was Denis Villeneuve’s marvelous Sicario, which I had previously seen
on a trip south back in September. I try to make a point of rewatching all of
my favourite films from each year, and Sicario
absolutely qualifies. Emily Blunt gives a career-best performance FBI agent
Kate Macer who becomes heavily entangled in a cross-border war with a drug
cartel. Roger Deakins reminds us that he’s one of the world’s best
cinematographers and Jóhann Jóhannsson’s score ranges from silent to blaring, making
the audience feel as overwhelmed as Macer when it truly kicks into gear. It’s a
technical masterwork, and the screenplay offers exactly the same level of
quality. Villeneuve’s recent output has been consistently excellent, from Incendies to Prisoners to Enemy, but Sicario is his best film, and it’s one
of the best of the year.
Saturday
I closed out the week with another Youtube-sourced
silent semi-documentary in the form of Benjamin Christensen’s Häxan:
Witchcraft Through the Ages. It’s more of an essay than a documentary,
really, arguing for reason over superstition and suggesting that women
diagnosed with hysteria in the 1920s would have been condemned as witches had
they been born earlier. Christensen presents medieval artworks of witches,
showing both their purported actions and their horrific punishments. This is
intercut with a series of narrative vignettes, most of which are less
compelling than the documentary portions, though some of them offer memorable
visuals. It’s been interesting to see some of the documentaries made in the
early years of cinema, before the form was fully defined.
That’s it for full-length films this week,
but I also came across an interesting short documentary called Smut Hounds on ABC iView, in which David
Stratton describes some of his experience fighting censorship as director of
the Sydney Film Festival. The short played at this year’s festival, but I missed
it there. You can find it here until December 5th:
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