Film Shapes

Popped down to Palace cinema in the city for a packed screening of Sand Land , part of the Japanese Film Festival Australia . Created by Akira Toriyama (of Dragon Ball fame), this started as a manga book series in 2000. It seems this film was made slightly before, or at the same time as a TV series covering similar ground. That ground being a Mad Max style wasteland where the water supply is controlled and sold by a rotund King (Chafûrin). An old, local sherriff, Rao (Kazuhiro Yamaji), suspects there's a source of water in the desert a few days drive away and so decides to investigate. Knowing he'll need help, he approaches the gang of demons who live nearby. The demons chosen to accompany Rao are the keen Beelzebub (Mutsumi Tamura) and the less enthused Thief (Chô). The trio head off but are soon beset by issues, including enormous sand snakes, marauding punks and the King's military units. As their vehicles tyres were punctured by said punks, Rao commandeers a tank, set...

The idea of having a doppelganger replace us has been around for ages, at least since Dostoevsky wrote his famous novel, The Double , possibly even earlier. Great films like The Machinist , Fight Club , Enemy , Stranger Than Fiction and  Infernal Affairs have all taken inspiration from the source. It's hard, though, to imagine it being done with more verve and ridiculousness than in Aaron Schimberg's A Different Man . This film is a treat. It stars Sebastian Stan as Edward, who has a form of neurofibromatosis (a condition that affects the nervous system), which causes his face to swell up in lumpy tumours. Early on, he meets a new neighbour, Ingrid (Renate Reinsve), and they become close friends, bonding over their shared passion for the theatre - he's a struggling actor, she's a hopeful playwright.  Partially due to this new relationship (and maybe the hope of furthering it), partly due to fatigue at his 'abnormal' life, Edward decides to try an experimental n...

This is a very strange film - is it a domestic violence comedy? A neo-realist fantasy? A kitchen-sink musical? All of these sound wrong but director (and star), Paola Cortellesi manages to combine the disparate elements into a unique concoction. Set in post-war Rome, the film opens with Delia (Cortellesi) saying good morning in bed to her husband, Ivano (Valerio Mastandrea), only to receive a hefty backhander. Her reaction tells us this is not an unusual occurrence in her life, as the rest of the family are introduced - a couple of shit-headed boys, a grown-up daughter, and an irascible father-in-law. Cue a glorious slow-motion credit sequence of Delia walking along her local street, getting on with the day's duties. The accompanying musical track is pretty incongruous, another oddity in this head-scratcher of a film (though not as surprising as when an Outkast song bursts in). The story revels in the time and place, and the black and white cinematography, by Davide Leone, is exqui...

We Were Children (or Eravamo Bambini ) is a Calabrian-set drama/thriller about childhood trauma and regrets. A group of thirty-somethings return to the small seaside town of their youth to confront a situation that has affected their lives since the moment it happened twenty years before. The film begins with a police patrol coming across a suspicious bloke in the bushes beside a villa one night. He threatens them with a huge hunting knife and is summarily arrested and taken in for questioning. The story unfurls from here, with detained postie Antonio (Francesco Russo) giving the police some details, and flashbacks helping us with others. These past scenes show a group of friends going through regular teenage issues. Margherita and Gianluca are a sweetly fumbling couple, though Walter might be a spoke in their wheel. Andrea is Margherita's irritating younger brother, and Peppino is the local senator's boy. The sun-tinged Calabrian past is juxtaposed with the more aggressively ...

He Ain't Heavy is the debut feature from Perth writer/director, David Vincent Smith. It's a very prosaic look at addiction and what it can do to the family unit. In this case, the addicted person is Max, played by Sam Corlett. His mum, Bev, is played by Aussie/Italian/British (in that order) screen legend, Greta Scacchi. But the lead, and heart of the film, is Jade, a fantastic Leila George. She's the strung-out, desperate sister of Max, who hits upon a slightly controversial way of trying to get her brother clean. The confronting opening scene sets up the rest of the film - Jade arrives at a house where a ruckus is occurring, namely Max trying to violently force his way into his mum's house. Eventually, he succeeds and buggers off in Bev's car, only to smash it a few metres down the road. Max scarpers quick smart, mum collapses and is briefly taken to hospital. Jade is at the end of her tether and the chance to clear out her recently passed away Grandma's hous...

Woof, it was hard work getting through this one. Francis Ford Coppola, paterfamilias of a filmmaking dynasty (many of whom are a part of this mess), has been sitting on this idea for decades. The kernel comes from the Catilinarian conspiracy of 63 BCE (thanks again Wikipedia) where a Roman politician, Catalina attempted to overthrow Cicero. By transposing this story over the crumbling American Empire, Coppola is biting off a lot. You'd think if anyone can chew all this, it'd be this guy, who not only gave us the Godfather films, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now , but also paved the way for the new wave of young tearaways of US cinema in the 1970s and 80s. George Lucas, Brian De Palma, Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, among others, all owe some debt to the ground-laying of Coppola. So what happened with Megalopolis ? There's a film in here but you have to clear away the extraneous clumps of dirt hanging onto the edges of it. For argument's sake, let's say t...

Trepidation was the key feeling going into this screening of Todd Phillips' sequel to his 2019 hit Joker .  After a kooky animated opening (made by French animator, Sylvain Chomet), the film begins with Arthur Fleck in Arkham Asylum, waiting for a decision on whether he's fit for trial or not. The events of the first film aren't too far back and a lot of this edition covers the court case - a neat way to bring us up to speed, but also a huge part of this film's issues. You see, I think this whole film is a 'mea culpa' for the first Joker . The court scenes build up to an expected crescendo of action, or at the very least some sort of vindication for Arthur/Joker. But the actual climax is a damp squib, followed by a dramatically undeserved denouement. The whole final third felt like a cop-out. Did Phillips take note of some of the criticism of Joker and plan a filmic apology for all the 'nihilism'? Or had he always planned this kind of absolution? I gues...