Cast: Nicole Kidman, Hugh Jackman, Brandon Walters
Director: Baz Lhurmann
Screenplay: Baz Lhurmann
Running time: 3 hrs
Genre: Romance/Western/Drama
CRITIQUE:
Critics has been slating the romance epic Australia as “derivate”, “overblown, overwrought, and over-sentimental", and given the poor box-office performance across the pond, apparently it’s not what America desired. And not to mention the length of three hours, a bummer in which mainstream audience would fidget in their seats watching kangaroos, cattle, Ayers rocks, Aussie fisticuffs and aborigines. It also self-righteously defies categorisation, leaping from one genre to another, starting as fish-out-of-water comedy, then Western, then romance, blending drama, action, folklore, racial commentary, and war film – a high-flyer of a pastiche that might prove Baz Lhurmann as plain, pure mental.
Except that he is not. The visionary, who revolutionised Shakespearean ethos into post-punk-rock generation of Romeo + Juliet, and took a postmodernist approach on musicals by an attack of the sight-and-sound senses, his arguable masterpiece Moulin Rouge!, has returned back to his home country whilst nodding to the good old epics of the Hollywood golden age. Derivative it might be, it is saddled with Gone with the Wind comparisons via Out of Africa, but it surprisingly stands on its own, in fact, a tale centred on the Stolen Generations. Anyone complaining about its being “overblown, overwrought” and “too-long” should literally recheck Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia and Wizard of Oz – aren’t these films overblown, overwrought and a tad too sore for the bum cheeks? It is obvious that the generation of High School Musical tweens and sad, sorry, sentimental Twilight campers wouldn’t comprehend the crucial ethos of Australia: it is harking back to the dying breed of epic filmmaking, where vistas play important roles as its characters, in the panoramas of David Lean, David O. Selznick and Cecil B. DeMille. If that in understood before watching the film, then you’ll be swept away into a time and place filled with ravishing romance and adventure in this hugely entertaining, wondrously sweeping, who-cares-what-the-heck film. It is grand in staggering scale, ambitious, and works as a reminder that sometimes a dose of romanticism is OK, and that this kind of filmmaking should be revived and reinvigorated.
Clichés are everywhere in Australia, but this writer wonders how would it fare to the cinema if it was made in the 40s? The point is not originality but the homage to the great Westerns, gone but not forgotten. The seven riders in the cattle-drove in a nifty nod to The Magnificent Seven, and if there’s anything innovative in this element, it’s that heart-in-the-mouth cattle stampede sequence, leading to the death cliff. It’s a colossal setpiece blending suspense, action and mysticism that’s worth the entrance alone.
And what a scenery Australia is. Every shot is a glorious palette, the framing is impeccable, even the colouring of sunsets reminds us of the plantation horizons of Gone with the Wind. The tale is formulaic, English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley travels to the land down under to save his husband’s cattle farm only to discover him dead, and then falls in love, although with bickering and a dead kangaroo along the way, with the rough-hewn Drover. She imposes as prim and proper, cold and officious, only to be melted with by the Drover’s heart of gold. There is even a point where Mrs Boss and Drover separates, leaving conflicts unsolved, a stark rendition of Scarlett and Rhett.
But that’s where the comparisons end. Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman deliver performances that contest the beauty of their backdrops. Kidman transforms from a naive foreigner to a feisty heroine who harbours maternal love to the half-blood aboriginal boy Nullah. This is a turn we rarely see from this actress, like Moulin Rouge!, it showcases her comedic timing wonderfully played in the brassiere outburst scene in the beginning. The Drover lets us see the leading man making of Jackman, and he is unforgettable in the role. But the two lovers set in the conflict of the booming World War II are merely backdrop in the story of Nullah (a stunning performance by Australian wonder discovery Brandon Walters), who narrates his story. Here, Lhurmann’s gives an affecting love-letter to the aborigines of Australia, the real inhabitants of the distant land, in their search for identity. Somehow, the nod to Wizard of Oz’s score is appropriate: Australia is the magical Oz, and it is a land “somewhere over the rainbow.” Reality is heightened, if not stylised, and that is just part of its aesthetic. As one critic deftly puts it, Australia is an “ode to a place (exotic to some, familiar to others), yes, but more than that, Australia is state of mind: wonderment, grandeur, beauty, love, escape, hope.”
VERDICT:
The most misunderstood film of 2008. Australia is a ravishingly beautiful panorama with an astonishing scope and radiant performances. This is Lhurmann’s homage to the dying breed of Westerns and the Golden Age epic filmmaking. The problem is not the movie, but the mainstream audience, who are mostly cynical at this day and age. It may not be a classic - but it's a damn good film.
RATING: A+
Cast: Michael Fassbender, Liam Cunningham
Director: Steve McQueen
Screenplay: Enda Walsh, Steve McQueen
Running time: 1 hr 36 mins
Genre: British Film/Drama
CRITIQUE:
For a film that has snatched the Camera D’Or at Cannes Film Festival and twenty other European awards this year, and to highlight its remarkable top billing at Sight & Sound’s ten best films of 2008 list, clearly there is something extraordinary going on here. Time will tell if Hunger will penetrate the Oscar plot. For the entirety of its making, Hunger is a rock-solid blow that will leave cinephiles breathless, mainstream audience dumbfounded and visual artists ignited. This is a cinematic achievement in its own right; unflinchingly brutal and disarmingly human – a rare event for the British contemporary cinema that is visually stylised yet at the same time hauntingly real. At this crossroad, where British cinema is swarmed with socialist dramas, here lies a passage of transformation that a contemporary piece such as this can be elevated as a work of art.
Gallery-artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen takes his camera from making video arts to this authoritative debut feature that most amateurs would run away from. He tackles a bleak, dark material of the IRA episode in Northern Ireland, particularly the harrowing state of affairs in Maze prison where “political prisoners” are held captive. Despite of the complex politics of the 80s, we are barely shown the outside world, the noise barrage of pot lids at the prologue of the film and the Margaret Thatcher’s sonorous speeches echo in a few scenes, rebuffing republican liberty – the real focus of this film is from within. And here the details are excruciatingly disturbing: the excrement-smeared prison walls, the urine-washed cell corridors, and the shocking corpse-like bodies of its inmates. It’s all explicit, yet at the same time, implicit. In its use of imagery gives room for visual poetry, with psychological and philosophical resonance. The use of shit daubed on walls represents the even shittier situations outside it. A police’s quiet meditation outside, as the snow falls in his callous hands, facing responsibility and extinction. An inmate’s encounter with a fly in a hole of his cell bars implies a minute contact of the outside. A new police recruit breaks down to tears, hiding on a wall, where a riot of torture is happening on the other side.
In the first few scenes, we are reminded that silence has the power words cannot express fully. The narrative structure shifts from a police warden, a wordless look into his daily routine, then to a new inmate as he discovers the ruthless, grim reality within the walls, and finally to the film’s axis, where the moral issues rotate, the character of Bobby Sands and his ordeal to initiate hunger strike, his final defiance. Then it gives a dramatic flood of words at the middle-half of the film, a notable aspect in which it manages to say a lot about serious issues of politics, religion, humanity, life and death by showing very little. Stunningly exemplified in a static camera shot, 24-minute talk-a-thon, showing a dialogue interplay between Michael Fassbender’s Bobby Sands and the priest he calls forth to spread the message out to the crumbling world, debating the ethos and morality of his defiance, the hunger strike.
In his belief that “freedom is everything”, when taken away, they turned into themselves and use their most basic bodily function as their way of protest, the basic human need for survival by resisting food, clothing and sanitation. It’s suffering for a cause, an ill-received protest which caused the lives of its protesters. These philosophies creep behind the scenes and come into full magnitude when McQueen takes off the camera to shock audience in its documentary-approach torture scenes. The result is startling.
The final third of the film steps into the province of the personal, from the heavy politics of the first to the philosophies of the second. The death of Bobby Sands, to which Fassbender staggeringly drops body weight and shows a squeezed ribcage (rivals that of Christian Bale’s in The Machinist), is dealt with sidestepping over-sentimentality. Instead, it transcends into poetic justice, Sands recalling his boyhood cross-country running and the symbolic bird flying, the power of anguish and final step to freedom is compacted into beautiful silence.
VERDICT:
The year’s most harrowing, most startling, most visually astounding experience. It also manages to be poetic and philosophical despite of its minimalism. A true work of art; consolidated by McQueen’s passionate direction and Fassbender’s stalwart performance that needs a cry for an Oscar.
RATING: A+
Cast: Thomas Jane, Marcia Gay Harden
Director: Frank Darabont
Screenplay: Frank Darabont
Running time: 2 hr 7 mins
Genre: Horror/Suspense
CRITIQUE:
Frank Darabont rammed home with multi-streak gold in his The Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile, two classic weepies only broken by the unintentional saccharine sentimentality with the Jim Carrey starrer The Majestic. So when he announced that he’s adapting yet another Stephen King work, this one an all-out horror story, we’re holding for dear life that it won’t end up in the wrong side of the alloyed tracks. The Mist very nearly trips to conventional territory, local townsfolk trapped in a supermarket terrorised by an unseen external force and all goes madcap in some undomesticated antics, showcased in Romero’s Day of the Dead and other copycats in celluloid. But, like good horror films, Darabont doesn’t really give a shit about the horror outside (look at the awful CGI of monster tentacles and creepy-crawlies, thanks to the mist concealing the technical flaws), and instead zooms in shuddering hand-held to the monsters that lurk within the humans of this film. The titular mist spookily envelops the whole town (perhaps the world) and unleashes unseen hellish creatures. There are seat-gripping sequences; the flying insects attach on the supermarket windows, and the venture into the chilly pharmacy. And the cast is more than able; Thomas Jane, common to Stephen King character canon, plays the hero in standard class, but it’s Marcia Gay Harden’s religious, Bible-verse-spitting extremist that takes centre stage, preaching for a vengeful God. And there’s that harrowing, enormously infuriating conclusion that will surely leave anyone speechless. Surely people with a fair amount of intelligence would realise that a film isn’t only about its ending, and in The Mist, Darabont interpolates darker issues of modern day politics, embodied in Toby Jones’ resonating line: “Humans are inherently insane. That’s why we invented politics and religion.”
VERDICT:
A flawed freakshow, blundered with dodgy CGI, but handled by Darabont with confidence, fuelled by an insightful script and a study of how fear brings the worst out of people, showing that humans are more frightening than monsters.
RATING: B+
Genre: Indie Rock
Label: Mercury
CRITIQUE:
From the Vegas indie boys who rocked for Hot Fuss, the Brit-friendly band then moved Western front for their epic-smash follow-up Sam’s Town, an all-pervasive, stadium-filling leviathan of a record that is arguably their masterpiece. Dropping the eyeliners, putting on beards and desert boots – from Mr Brightside to bonkers lyrics, Day and Age is their comeback. The panoramic scale of their sophomore effort feels almost like a mirage, for this recent one sounds like an experiment, albeit a good one. Human, perhaps the best track in the album, is not only wrought with unexpected emotion, but is also ridden with kooky, brow-raising lyrics: “Are we human, or are we dancer?” No philosophy, please. It veers between a dance-floor sweeper and a contemplative piece. And speaking of impenetrable songwriting, Brandon Flowers continue crooning about being “ripped away from my bed” in Spaceman, and "Cinderella looking for a nightgown” in A Dustland Fairytale . This is utterly ridiculous, but forgivable for their harking back to the 80s beats and synths. There are eccentric chunks here; a feel-good nod to the jazz-funk in Joyride (discovering the function of a saxophone), an outlandish This Is Your Life (quirky African-Safari journey of a song), and the strangely wonderful I Can’t Stay (very The Cure-ish).
VERDICT:
Outlandish The Killers, bonkers, indecipherable lyrics, but far from a bad record. This is a concept that nods to the 80s beats – feel-good and still excellent.
RATING: B+
Cast: Catherine Deneuve, Nino Castelnuovo
Director: Jacques Demy
Screenplay/Music: Jacques Demy, Michel Legrand
Running time: 1 hr 40 mins
Genre: Musical/Drama
CRITIQUE:
West Side Story, Singing in the Rain, The Sound of Music, these are Hollywood musicals that captured the imagination of the popular culture – but the answer was different from a certain Nouvelle Vague director Jacques Demy, as expected from a French director, he sticks two fingers back to the American studios and make something, well, typically French. Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, or The Umbrellas of Cherbourg was his riposte and at the same time, his homage. He drops the dialogue and instead, integrates it to the musical sequences where everything is sung. It might appear off-putting to mainstream audience, but in the hands of Demy, the inspired baton of Michel Legrand, and the voices of the two gorgeous leads, the result is disarmingly effective.
Unabashedly romantic, it is idiosyncratically French as the two young lovers, Guy and Geneviè (the captivating leads Nino Castelnuovo and Catherine Deneuve), clinch for a young, rapturous love – both goes to theatre, walk arms around each other in streets and sigh “je t’aime” like pet names. This is a tale of first love, broken by the sheer realities of life. Whilst a musical, it happens to heighten reality and one would expect overstatement of the tale, yet it remains simplistically grounded, believable and even heartbreaking, filled with slices of life perhaps clichéd now but not in 1963. Its dialogues in the songs don’t even sound lyrically embellished as most of it come from everyday language and discourse. The hyperbole lies in the exuberant visuals, the use of highly striking colours as though Demy planned to encompass every shade in the rainbow. Nevertheless, it evokes emotional vivacity that is set in contrast with the melancholic presence of the ever-raining town of Cherbourg, exemplified in the genius opening sequence of the rain and umbrellas and that haunting, extraordinary score. Of all its cotton-candy, Smarties-factory-themed wrappings, this is an exquisite piece of cinema as beautiful, as tragic, as rare as first love.
VERDICT:
Rapturous celebration of romanticism, the cinema and anything French, crooned to perfection by Deneuve and Castelnuovo. This may be one of the greatest, rarest musicals ever made. Melodramatic yet bittersweet. You’ll never see anything like it.
RATING: A+
Cast: Kyle MacLachlan, Dennis Hopper, Isabella Rossellini, Laura Dern
Director: David Lynch
Screenplay: David Lynch
Running time: 2 hrs 4 mins
Genre: Drama/Thriller
CRITIQUE:
Blue Velvet is an eerie, freakish experience – and that is both a compliment and a critique. The cinema of David Lynch, after all, is inundated with oddities that pretty much go against the standard of reasons. But surprisingly, dissimilar to Mulholland Drive, which has a jumbled narrative flow, Blue Velvet has a chronological approach to storytelling. Nevertheless, it retains the dark elements that would soon serve as the bedrock for his more recent masterstroke. A tale of psychotic sexual awakening beyond the neat hedges and well-trimmed lawns of American suburbia (quite close to Hollywood), Lynch draws deeply dark strokes on his psychologically disturbing canvas, and finds terrific performances from Isabella Rossellini as the sexually repressed chanteuse and Dennis Hopper as the all-out megalomaniac. The film’s weight, however, lies on the shoulders of the clean-cut Kyle MacLachlan as Jeffrey, the young college student hopping around in pseudo-detective work, whilst maintaining an off-kilter romance with Laura Dern.
Lynch’s visual palette is so heavy with dark hues that it looks a noir. In fact, there are noirish elements everywhere in this film; a baffled, ambiguous hero, a morally subversive villain, and a cerebral femme fatale. Whilst a very flawed film, and certainly cannot compare to the brilliance of Mulholland Drive, this is still a significant Lynch celluloid. How it influenced Donnie Darko’s dark heart is a thing to marvel at. Even Lynch’s almost obsessive criticism to Hollywood life starts from here, as he continues to rework the theme in his future films. The main stumble here is a rather tidy ending, so contradictory to the entire grim affair.
VERDICT:
An eclectic mix of noir, detective fiction, a bit of Hitchcock, and a dash of the bizarre; not Lynch’s best but watchable and disquieting.
RATING: B+
