Film Shapes

On a fairly wet and windy night, we got along to the Windsor Twin Cinema in Nedlands for a preview screening of  The Burnt Orange Heresy . Big thanks to the Luna Palace Cinemas once more. This is an Italian/English co-production, directed by Giuseppi Capotondi and adapted by Scott B. Smith from the Charles Willeford novel. I'll admit to not knowing any of these geezers but Capotondi has directed a few episodes of  Suburra  (TV) and Willeford wrote the book that the under-rated  Miami Blues  was based on. So a reasonably eclectic bunch of folk were involved in this, and we haven't even looked at the cast yet. The story starts with art historian/critic, James Figueras giving a too-clever-by-half presentation to a group of tourists in Milan. Here he meets Berenice Hollis, a mysterious woman who just wandered in 'for the free potato chips'. Claes Bang and Elizabeth Debicki play the two leads, and the film, fairly briskly, gets them into bed and then on to Lak...

For the eighth streaming choice, this time as part of the Australian Movies collection on ABC iView (in Australia only), we watched  Wake in Fright , a recently re-discovered and digitally restored version of the 1971 outback drama. It's directed by Canadian Ted Kotcheff and adapted from the Kenneth Cook novel by Jamaican-born Evan Jones. While Cook was Australian, the 'outsider eye' of the screenwriter and director lend the film a curiosity value of a foreigner's peek into the culture of Australia at the time. The fact that the film was not well-liked on initial release shouldn't surprise so much. Wake in Fright  follows a young English teacher, played by Gary Bond, and his attempts to get to Sydney for his summer holiday. Told like this, it sounds like a jovial romp, possibly a  Carry On  style film. But this is about as far as you get from a romp. The teacher, John Grant, is a stroppy, superior bell-end and the people he meets are, for the most part, yobbis...

After a short hiatus, here's the 7th film in the lockdown streaming series. The Goldfinch is showing on Netflix and Amazon Prime in Australia. It's a somewhat laboured adaptation of the Pulitzer prize winning novel by Donna Tarrt and it's directed by John Crowley. The story follows Theo Decker, played young by Oakes Fegley and slightly older by Ansel Elgort (and yep, these are some wired names but have a crack at Wolfhard and Kleintank!). A rando-bomb explodes in a museum, killing his mum and so he half-inches a famous painting, the titular Goldfinch, painted by Carel Fabritius, who also died in an explosion (which the painting may also have been in). The coincidences don't stop there but I'll leave you to them. This is all about grief and blame and possibly the role of facsimiles or substitutes in life and art. Theo eventually becomes an antique dealer under the mentor-ship of Jeffrey Wright's Hobie, whom he met after another brush with fate. I found ...

My second return to the cinema was to see  A White, White Day , a blackly comic Icelandic drama directed by Hlynur Palmason. Once more, big thanks to the Luna in Leederville for the screening. Incidentally, I only recently found out that the old Cinema Paradiso in Northbridge (run by the Palace Cinema group) has closed for good. Sad news. I'm pretty sure Emmanuelle Beart doesn't remember locking eyes with me there as I struggled to wipe choc bomb remnants off my face, but I do. To be fair to her, she just about managed to hide her disgust with a polite smile. Anyway, it was a fine cinema and its loss just makes the Luna that much more essential. Accursed ramblings! Onto the film. This is the second feature from Palmason and he appears to be at the forefront, along with Benedikt Erlingsson, of a mini-wave of Icelandic films*. ( *This could be complete bollocks - I admit to a paucity of knowledge of Icelandic films ). The film's name is explained in an opening title: ...