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 2009-11-06
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 paint shop, putting 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 paint shop and consequently, I didn't understand whether the film was putting him through the ringer for abandoning his 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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MovieTime 2009-10-23
Published: 2009-10-22 10:00:00An Education Anyone who has had anything to do with teenage girls knows they can be more than a handful: the hormones, mood-swings, melodrama, and all that pressure worrying themselves to death about how they look -- exfoliating, dyeing, plucking, and starving themselves to fit in to whichever idea of womanhood currently dominates every television channel, magazine, newspaper, clothes shop, rock band, choir, bible, novel, and toothpaste commercial they encounter day in day out. Even the shy ones who don´t go boy-mad have a hard time opting out of the madness The Private Lives of Pippa Lee The Private Lives of Pippa Lee is like a late-coming-of-age movie. A middle-aged woman (Robin Wright Penn) comes to terms with the fact that she´s been playing a role that no longer fits, in a loving marriage that´s grown stale. Trash and Treasure: Noni Hazlehurst as Fran (1985) The 1985 film Fran begins with a long, prowling shot that scans the streets of suburban Perth from inside a car. The dashboard, the ornaments and the music set the scene, and the relentless predatory gaze eventually settles on a young Noni Hazlehurst in a phone box. She's feisty and vibrant, pissed off because her phone's been cut off, while fending off the character who gets out of the car and rubs up against her. Call and Response Call and Response is one of those clever films that takes a topic no-one wants to think about and spices it up just enough to make it palatable to the diabetic modern audiences it must reach. One of the highlights apart from the contributions of various singers and bands (it is directed and conceived by musician Justin Dillon) is Cornel West, the zany African-American academic whose riffs about the origin of the blues, modern rock, and the use of music to cry freedom, are as entertaining as they are insightful. In Search of Beethoven A conventionally structured documentary that tracks Beethoven's life from cradle to grave, with musicians and music historians explaining both the artistic genius and the personal idiosyncrasies of the great composer/musician. Particularly noteworthy are the performances -- many delivered in grand theatres, others done simply at a home piano, mid-interview, usually to illustrate a point. Interview: Phil Grabsky Jason Di Rosso spoke to documentary filmmaker Phil Grabsky about bringing the life of Beethoven to the big screen.
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MovieTime 2009-10-16
Published: 2009-10-15 10:00:00Extended interview at the Directors Uncut page Whatever Works Written 30 years ago and dusted off after four films made abroad, Whatever Works sees Allen return to the tropes and cadences of familiar territory — a Pygmalion comedy set in Manhattan wherein men and women are beset by the director's favourite neuroses and the moral conundrums that have always enchanted him — what is the right thing to do? Is it right to have sex with a girl young enough to be your granddaughter? In this case the Woody alter ego, Boris Yellnikoff, is played by Larry David, a sophisticated whinger of Woody proportions who has found fame through the creation of TV sitcoms such as Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Departures Death on screen is pretty commonplace but the physical interaction between the living and the dead is not something we see often. This is part of the macabre fascination of Departures, a Japanese film that takes us behind the scenes of a small business providing a very specific service in the highly codified tradition of the Japanese mourning ritual — namely the grooming of the deceased, at home and in front of the family. Trash & Treasure: The Kid Stakes (1927), silent film, urban backyards and ragamuffins The 1927 silent film The Kid Stakes is populated by goats, children, bumbling policemen and some silent slapstick. It centres upon the character Fatty Finn, created by cartoonist Syd Nichols. Into the shadows Why is the Australian film industry in such bad shape? Even if you don't agree with the premise of the question, this well-researched documentary, structured as a series of chapters tracking the evolution of our funding and distribution regimes, is thought-provoking stuff. It boasts an impressive array of talking heads, all key industry figures, from veteran producers like Tony Buckley and the trailblazing indie distributors like Andrew Pike, to the new guard of filmmakers like Brendan Cowell or Shane Abbess. A few clear bad guys are identified — step forward the big Hollywood `distribution cartels´ — but as it turns out, identifying our supposed woes is easier than identifying solutions. Into the shadows raises more questions than it answers — but this is not a bad thing. Interview: Paul Cox Dutch-born Australian filmmaker Paul Cox has made 18 feature films and documentaries, 11 shorts and three children´s movies, most of them on budgets so small they'd make your average filmmaker balk. He´s perhaps Australia´s best known auteur and his work has been widely screened and studied overseas. He was honoured earlier in the year by the Australian Directors Guild with the Cecil Holmes Award for his role as a mentor and inspiration to younger filmmakers. There was also a conference dedicated to his work in Melbourne earlier this year.
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