Movie Time
MovieTime is a program for everyone who loves movies. It's a lively, entertaining and comprehensive wrap of movie reviews, interviews and behind-the-scenes information. Presenter Julie Rigg has covered film for ABC Radio National as a broadcaster and critic since 1991. Her respected interview style and deep knowledge of film have secured her interviews with many of the world's leading film-makers. MovieTime is published every Thursday.
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4 Episodes of this Podcast:
MovieTime 2009-11-20
Published: 2009-11-19 09:00:00Twilight Sage: New Moon The original director Catherine Hardwicke lost out on the sequel to Chris Weiz, whose previous works, such as the The Golden Compass, should have warned the producers that he has no idea of dramatic structure. Despite the urgings of the teenage girl inside me, it was all I could do to sit through two hours and ten minutes without drinking my own blood. What a bloated, self-important, crashing bore! The film is so long it literally leaves the actors straining for credulity. I was willing to stay with the moaning and quivering and heavy breathing for the first hour or so but the story is so repetitive not even a hundred naked male torsos could keep me from yawning. Even poor Kristen Stewart, who really is an excellent actress and carries the whole film, couldn´t be in every scene to keep it alive. Nor is it the first time a girl has discovered that the boys in town are a pack of animals. Even if the special fx on the were-wolves are spectacular, there comes a point where red contact lenses and ghoulish makeup can´t substitute for the genuine thrills of a plot. A Serious Man A Serious Man is about faith. It´s about a man struggling against the pull of other people´s moral orbits. It is also an ode to the Mid West Jewish American suburbs where Joel and Ethan Coen grew up in the late 60s, a world built on a grid of newly asphalted streets, with billiard-table front lawns and sparse gardens. The houses are modest and box-like, without architectural embellishments or bright colours. It´s the portrait of suburban blandness, where you´d almost expect people to become obsessed with finding ways to transgress, to break the rules, just to buck the mundane cycle. Trash &Treasure: Bigger than Life (1956) The 1950s is a period too often stereotyped and reduced to visual and other shorthand: picket fences and aprons, big skirts and suburban politeness. But today´s film, Nicholas Ray´s Bigger than Life, shows another side to those images. It may be melodrama, but there's a lot going on. Topp Twins: Untouchable Girls The Topp Twins, Jools and Lynda Topp, were a New Zealand phenomenon in the 1980s who managed to turn a street act into an international comedy sensation. There was something irrepressible and wholesome about these boisterous cowgirls which rendered their leftie politics, lesbian preferences, and gentle spoofs of populist archetypes so palatable they became mainstream national treasures. And they are still going strong, sending up the status quo, and the patriarchy, with the same gay abandon as they did when they captured people´s hearts as busking teenagers. Amreeka Borrowing its title from the Arabic word for America, this is the migrant genre movie dusted off and given a new coat of paint for the new millennium -- not the Irish, Italian or Polish American stories we´re used to, but familiar all the same. Set in the lead-up to the invasion of Iraq, it´s the story of Muna, a Palestinian woman who migrates to the US with her teenage son to live with her sister on the semi-rural Chicago fringe. As played by the big-haired, big-boned Palestinian actress Nisreen Faour, she´s a woman who faces challenges with a smile and resolute will -- a boxer´s stamina and courage she´s no doubt learned, in part, as a single mum. Interview: Cherien Dabis Writer-director Cherien Dabis's first feature, Amreeka, is a modern retelling of the migrant genre movie through the eyes of a Palestinian woman and her teenage son who come to Chicago to start a new life. A Palestinian-American herself, Dabis draws on personal experience to tell the story.
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MovieTime 2009-11-13
Published: 2009-11-12 09:00:00The Boys Are Back This film could well win a legion of fans because the subject matter is so rarely traversed on the big screen -- what happens to fatherhood when no motherhood is on the scene? It´s undeniably difficult for solo parents, and the raw material is on hand for a gutsy, moving and honest film. Clive Owen plays Joe Warr, an English sports journalist and modern dad who has always derived his whole sense of identity from his career, with parenting coming second. You can only father this way if Mum takes up the slack, so when his young Australian wife dies he is a wreck (she annoyingly hangs about as a ghost, which is just what happens to the grieving widower in Michael Winterbottom´s Genova -- what is that about?). Suddenly faced with looking after his 6-year-old son, he finds he doesn´t have a clue. 2012 2012 is a lurid nightmare -- and it´s long: 158 minutes. But that´s not to say it isn´t a whole heap of fun. Science fiction satirist Douglas Adams knew the end of the world was the ultimate spectacle when he created his Restaurant at the End of the Universe, and director Roland Emmerich seems to share this view. Here, he´s conjured an extravagant scenario of earthquakes, solar flares and tsunamis, pegged to a mysterious, foreboding date -- 2012 -- said to be the year that the Mayan Indians (themselves unable to predict their own demise at the hands of the Conquistadors) earmarked as the End of Days. Interview: Roland Emmerich Hollywood based German writer-director Roland Emmerich has made such disaster and action blockbusters as Independence Day and The Day after Tomorrow -- now he's back with his most spectacular film yet: 2012. It´s about the end of the world and the date that's said to correspond to an ancient Mayan Indian doomsday prediction. Jason Di Rosso asks what the Apocalypse myth means to him. Amelia This clunky aeronautical fizzer about the life of the fascinating Amelia Earhart is so lavishly designed the stars (Hilary Swank and Richard Gere) seem to be swimming through aspic. Their seductive smiles and corny lines ooze off the screen, while the well oiled story slips through its gears with nary a puff of dirt or grit. The Brothers Bloom After his wonderful high school noir Brick, the world has waited with baited breath for Rian Johnson´s second feature. Now it´s here, I feel underwhelmed. The Brothers Bloom embraces a kind of stylised whimsy that makes the playful genre hopping in Brick look like social realism. Not that the deliberately fey, aristocratic tone is per se a bad idea. A couple of dandy con men brothers (Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo), aided by a beautiful Japanese explosives expert (Rinko Kikuchi), set up an elaborate plan to rob an heiress (Rachel Weisz). But the con goes awry when one of the brothers falls for the victim. At its core, the story is about the unbalanced dynamic between two siblings, and how we always hurt the people we love most. Fine. But the whole thing becomes an exercise in too-clever-by-half plot twists and an empty exoticism that has the characters globetrotting through far flung locations without ever really engaging with their surroundings. It´s the kind of wry, picturesque fable that recalls the work of Hal Ashby, with the difference that the late, great master had the red blood of political conviction running through his veins. This is a bloodless corpse by comparison. Interview: Dennis Hopper Dennis Hopper and the New Hollywood is an exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image showcasing the work of the actor, writer, director, artist and photographer, as well as his collaborations and personal art collection. There´s a corner dedicated to the 1976 Australian bushranger film Mad Dog Morgan in which he starred opposite Jack Thompson. Hopper was supposed to be coming to Australia for the show, but had to withdraw to undergo special new treatment for prostate cancer at the University of Southern California. Still, he found the time to call us for a chat.
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MovieTime 2009-11-06
Published: 2009-11-05 09:00:00Capitalism: A Love Story It would stretch the talents of Seinfeld, Tina Fey and Good News Week all working together to create a comedy out of the story of American capitalism and how the cowboys running the show galloped off with $700 billion just last year. Paul Thomas Anderson had a bash and came up with the grimly salutary There Will Be Blood but, love him or be irritated by him, maverick documentary-maker Michael Moore has the genius to cut together a cohesive if wildly imaginative grab-bag of facts from ancient Rome to Bernie Madoff that makes sense -- show me an economist or politician who can do that in less than two hours! The Time Traveler's Wife I tip my hat to any filmmaker who tries to adapt a bestselling novel for the screen. It´s hard knowing that your two-hour movie must compare to the perfect film, directed by every reader in his or her own head. I´d come to the screening of The Time Traveler´s Wife hearing the rumbles of discontent. `Not as good as the book´, cried the hardcore. Well, yes, this film has faults. But I´m here to tell you that it is also not that bad. In fact, it´s very watchable. Trash and Treasure: Divine Intervention (2002), and the black humour of Palestine Elia Suleiman's 2002 film Divine Intervention takes a stylised, blackly-humorous look at the situation in Palestine. Arts writer Chrisoula Lionis argues that it is a film that can be read in terms of collective humour and collective trauma. Sister Smile (Soeur Sourire) A Franco-Belgian biopic about the Singing Nun Jeanine Deckers, who became a brief chart phenomenon with her brand of middle-brow religious pop folk in the 1960s, but sank into a hole of debt and chart-failure after she left the convent and started to write songs espousing more libertarian attitudes. Cecile De France plays Deckers like an overgrown tomboy with a stubborn temper -- if she can´t get her way, she´s liable to throw something. The character is not particularly sympathetic until a lesbian romance develops outside the nunnery walls. The affair simmers rather than boils because it clashes with Deckers' prudish, repressed sexuality, but it sets the scene for a breakdown that´s fascinating to watch. This is an uneven, difficult film at times, but its exploration of sexual repression and the quest for fame offers some worthwhile insights. Interview: Stijn Coninx Writer-director Stijn Coninx talks about his biopic Sister Smile, the story of Catholic nun and pop star Jeanine Deckers, an 'interesting, boring' person. Prime Mover Australian writer-director David Caesar´s latest film is a bruising thriller with generous dollops of wry humour and magic realism. Young Dubbo man Thomas (Michael Dorman) works in a detailing workshop, painting delicate swirls and flourishes on to the sides of trucks. He dreams of two things: getting behind the wheel of his own rig and seducing the young woman who works at the local roadhouse, Melissa (Emily Barclay). These wishes come true, but he´s soon foundering: unable to meet the repayments on the dodgy loan he´s taken out to buy his truck, and too busy to spend time with Melissa, who becomes his wife and mother of their child. The loan sharks come circling and Thomas puts in ridiculous hours at the wheel, but he can´t avoid a nasty showdown, with a few unexpected twists. It's a fairly diverting moral tale, made all the more interesting as our hero's thoughts are externalised in visions and hallucinations, but nowhere does the film take flight and soar. The problem is twofold: Thomas's convoluted personal story, and a rather unlikable performance from Dorman who struggles to channel the idealistic, hard-as-steel spirit of his character. As it stands, I had trouble buying the early turning point of him leaving the workshop and consequently, I didn't understand whether the film was putting him through the ringer for abandoning his artistic talent, or for being overambitious. Perhaps it's a bit of both, which is fine in theory, but in practice, at least here, it feels a little awkward. Case 39 Case 39 reworks the familiar horror territory, loading such normal joys as family, parenthood, and childhood with extreme malice. Director Christian Alvart all but embalms Renée Zellweger´s habitual good cheer in a million cliches as the film explores, in effect, what kind of mental illness might lead someone to kill a child. Horrid enough for you? At first childless and, as we later learn, motherless social worker Zellweger is obsessed with saving a child (played by the unfortunate young Canadian actress Jodelle Ferland) from the monsters who have raised her and tried to cook her in an oven (and bury her in the basement, and God knows what else).
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MovieTime 2009-10-30
Published: 2009-10-29 10:00:00The Box This lovingly art-directed paranoid fantasy from Donnie Darko director Richard Kelly taps in to an array of twentieth century neuroses, particularly the peculiar claustrophobia of the 1950s with its repressive mix of post-war prosperity and patriarchal anxiety. Based on a short story written in 1970 and made into a Twilight Zone episode, the film is a lot more fun if subjected to a feminist Freudian reading: we have a beautiful woman with a deformity which reminds us of Chinese foot binding practices, and a man with half a face missing (a very creepy Frank Langella) who knocks on the door offering a package which could make all her dreams come true. Unwrapping the package she is confronted by 'the box' which sports a big red button (clearly her missing sexual fulfillment). Even though she is told someone else somewhere will die if she presses it (what the French call 'the little death' perhaps?) she can´t resist the temptation, thereby proving that if you allow women access to orgasms they will run amok, wanting more and thereby ruin the status quo. Then she and her lily-livered husband (played by James Marsden) who should have smashed the box if he was a real man, or at least pressed the red button himself, have to endure an agonising guilt trip for 'wanting what they shouldn´t have' and a deluge of symbolic events ensue: nosebleeds with a menstrual ferocity; kidnappings (because of course an emancipated woman is a threat to the patriarchal interpretation of motherhood); and eventually orgasmic blasts of time travelling ectoplasm which engulf the hero. It´s all tosh of course which explains why Kelly doesn´t manage to resolve it with a satisfying climax. But it´s also unfair. Cameron gets absolutely no joy from pressing the red button, and I think that´s just mean. The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus In Terry Gilliam´s latest movie, a centuries old monk-turned-showman travels about contemporary London in a rickety horse-drawn carriage with a troupe of players who resemble a medieval pantomime show. Their performance centres on a magic mirror, through which audience members can enter a surreal world: the projection of their innermost desires. There, they face a choice. Succumb to their baser, more cowardly wishes, or opt to follow their more noble side. Trash & Treasure: East German cult film Solo Sunny (1980) Today's Trash and Treasure heads behind the so-called Iron Curtain, to see what was happening on the silver screen. East German film Solo Sunny tells the story of a young woman living in one of the artistic avant-garde suburbs of Berlin, working as a singer with a travelling troupe of musicians and performers. She chose an alternative to the factories and lived a defiant, independent life -- not without its doubts, sorrows, and difficulties. This is It This documentary, made from footage shot during the preparations for what would have been Michael Jackson´s last tour, might be described as a concert movie without an audience. What´s missing in the electricity of a live crowd, however, is more than made up for with behind-the-scenes insights into Michael Jackson´s extraordinary talent. There are some amazing performers on stage with him too, of course. I particularly loved his Australian female lead guitarist: her performance of the notoriously difficult solo from Beat It is a great moment. Most alarmingly, though, the emaciated figure of Michael Jackson is like a grotesque marionette -- prompting the question: who´s pulling the strings? Of course, this documentary doesn´t tell you -- it´s very much an official tribute. But we get some insight through glimpses of the film's director, Kenny Ortega, who is also a renowned choreographer and Jackson's stage manager. A middle-aged, soft-spoken man who calls his boss 'Sir', he is nevertheless a very subtle symbol of the outside pressures that drove the performer to the edge. The Marriage of Figaro This is a wedding movie that drags out all the old clichés about reluctant grooms, nagging fiancés and disapproving mothers-in-law -- and rises above its limitations. Reg Figaro (Tony Hill) is a biker who´s been with his de facto wife Sheree (Jacqueline Cook) for eight years, and fathered two children with her. He´s happy enough as things are, but she wants the wedding ring and he'll do anything to make her happy. Little does he know, tying the knot will prove one of the most stressful things he's ever done. Interview: Chris Moon Writer, director and cinematographer Chris Moon remortgaged his house to finance his ultra low budget comedy The Marriage of Figaro. The film has been making good box office averages on just a couple of screens in Adelaide for over a month and now it's been picked up by a national distributor. Is it the next Kenny? Genova A recently widowed Colin Firth and his two daughters flee to Italy to take up residence in the labyrinthine old city of Geneva. At first they experience a sense of liberation among the completely foreign sights and sounds, and the film shimmers with improvisational looseness and authenticity as they are introduced to their new living quarters by an old friend, an American academic (Catherine Keenan) who delights in showing them around. But their grief is inescapable and the holiday feeling is soon absorbed by the dark alleys of fear, loathing, guilt and frustration. Firth´s Joe is angry and frightened, and who can blame him? He´s been left with two daughters he doesn´t understand. The youngest daughter is terrified by apparitions of her dead mother at night, and the eldest rebelliously prefers the company of young Italian boys on motor bikes. His anguish slowly devolves into a sort of bitter misogyny as he flirts with a pretty student and spurns his old friend´s offers of help. The problem is Winterbottom´s screenplay doesn´t take us any further than this bottleneck of fraught emotions, and there´s something frustrating about the way the film ends. But perhaps it has served its purpose -- a delightful sojourn for one indie filmmaker and his cast and crew in a fascinating old Italian town.
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