Film Shapes

Got along to an advance screening of  The Translators  at the Luna in Leederville a few nights ago. It's a mystery set in the world of literary publishing and the story takes a little getting the old bonce around. Broadly, a group of nine translators are seconded to a high security bunker to translate the third book in a massively popular series, Daedalus, written by the reclusive Oscar Brach (strangely subtitled as 'Bach'). Pretty soon, it's found that 10 pages have somehow been smuggled out to the Internet, setting off a series of events that land the publisher Eric Angstrom, among others, in shtuck.  Angstrom is played by the hawk-nosed yet serpentine, Lambert Wilson, who has a swathe of shite films to his credit ( Babylon A.D. , anyone?). This is the best film I've seen him in, but I'm certainly not a Wilson completist, so there must be other passable works. Some of the translators are reasonably well known, especially in their home 'markets'. Olga K...

After more than two years of postponed release dates, The New Mutants finally arrives in cinemas. Re-shoots, schedule clashes with other films, Disney's purchase of 20th Century Fox and covid-related cinema closures all contributed to the limbo the film found itself in. So was the wait worth it? I'd say sure. It's no world beater but it has a neatly contained story with some creepy elements (mainly down to the work of DOP, Peter Deming, whose first feature was Evil Dead 2 ) and nicely pitched performances. Let's have a roll call of these younglings, then. The first credit (though not the protagonist) is Maisie Williams as Rahne Sinclair [WOLFSBANE]. Anya Taylor-Joy plays Illyana Rasputin [MAGIK]. The real lead is Blu Hunt, who plays Danielle Moonstar [MIRAGE]. Charlie Heaton plays Sam Guthrie [CANNONBALL] and Henry Zaga plays Roberto da Costa [SUNSPOT]. And aside from Alice Braga as their doctor/monitor, that's about it for the cast. They all bounce off each oth...

With the release of Tenet, I thought I might rip off many film mags/websites and do a top ten of Nolan's films. For the sake of cleanliness, I've forgone his first feature,  Following  (assume it's 11th) and all his shorts. Let's go. 10.  Insomnia  (2002) This is a remake of a 1997 Norwegian film starring Stellan Skarsgard in the Pacino role. Williams and Pacino are great and this is a pretty good film, but I prefer the others. 9.  The Dark Knight   (2008) This might be an unpopular choice but, again, I actually liked this film, just not as much as the first or third in this Batman series. Ledger is spectacular and the set pieces are fantastic but it lost me with the Harvey Dent subplot and the ferry sequence was too portentous. 8.  The Prestige  (2006) Clever, well-paced thriller, stacked with big names putting in sterling performances. I'm actually going to watch it again soon to try and figure out why so many people ...

After delay upon delay, Christopher Nolan's Tenet opens in Australia this weekend. It starts with a pumping opera siege and clicks along at a fair old pace, trying to get its premise across and mostly succeeding. John David Washington (from BlacKkKlansman and the loins of Denzel) stars with Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and Kenneth Branagh but the story is boss here, and it's familiar ground for Nolan, dealing with the fiddly intricacies of time. In fact, it seems like he has lifted the structure of Memento and plonked it visually on screen, with the actual end of that film manifested as the big, clunky time inversion turntables in Oslo and Russia in this film. Watch Nolan talk through this blackboard sketch of the 'timeline' of Memento for more explanation. The gimmick of time inversion - backwards walking and driving, bullets flying out of walls into guns, buildings 'unexploding' - is actually quite fun and not too overdone. The combination of for...

For the benefits of brevity, I've consolidated these two Alien films into one block, as I saw both of them back to back at the Luna Monday Double screening recently. I remember Alien more clearly, probably because I've seen it more often and more recently than its sequel. In fact, there were a few scenes in Aliens that I'm pretty sure I'd never seen before, this screening being the Director's Cut version. So, if I'm comparing these two iconic films, I'm still of a mind to say that I much prefer the first one. It's a compact, grungy, flipping scary horror film. Some scenes - the creature stuff, in the main - don't really hold up to today's modern gaze, but back in 1979, I imagine folks were gobsmacked. The famous John Hurt scene is still shocking and the alien's life cycle was a cracking idea for some fun with the visuals, mostly due to H.R. Giger's design work. Sigourney Weaver, as Ripley, holds the whole contraption toget...

Here's a nice little oddity. The fella behind Mr. Oizo's Flat Beat from 1999 has turned out a wacky, violent, comic farce, starring the Oscar-winning Jean Dujardin and the excellent Adele Haenel (from Portrait of a Lady on Fire ). Mr. Oizo (or Quentin Dupieux, if you prefer) isn't new to the caper, with a few feature credits to his name, but I wonder if making Dujardin's Georges a novice filmmaker wasn't a bit of a slyly autobiographical flourish. Deerskin is a warped tale of the very male rejection coping mechanisms of exceptionalism and brutality. Dujardin plays Georges as a post-football Eric Cantona physically, and the 'kung-fu', 'seagulls after the trawler' Cantona emotionally. Put simply, he's beardy, violent and prone to philosophical bullshitting. He stays on in a small Alpine town after buying an expensive deerskin jacket, which becomes the third lead of the film. I admit to knowing sod all about fashion, but this jacket he adores...

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...