Look, it’s been way too long, I really apologise for the lack of updates. For a while I think most of us gave up on the site and at one point I was considering closing it because we didn’t have much motivation to work on it or a reason to keep it online. We’ve lost touch with some of the Projectorheads, hence why their Top 10s aren’t on the page anymore. At the moment it’s just Dom, myself and Bown contributing, but we’re looking to include a few friends of ours into the staff.

I know that in my case I got a bit distracted by stuff marginally related to Projectorheads, such as the short film I’m trying to make, “Pineapple Face”. It’s related to Projectorheads in that Alex Tweedale and I have named our film production unit “Projectorheads Studios”, but the plan was always to implement this into the site. We always post film stuff we’ve done on the site, anyway (and that reminds me, I have something that I will post after this) Also, I started writing movie reviews for a local newspaper called “The Leader” (it has a circulation around Hamilton/Islington), though I’m still not sure how that works regarding copyright, if I can repost the reviews here. I’m sure there would be no problem scanning the newspaper clippings and posting them, but there might be complications if I publish the reviews verbatim.

Anyway, on the forum we’ve been doing “mini-reviews” for a fair while, but I thought it would be a good way of keeping the main page alive if we made weekly posts talking about movies we’d seen in that week. I might post a few from last week for the hell of it.

The Hole

I want to kiss Ming-liang Tsai’s feet. For me his films haven’t been immediate hits, but they’ve all lingered over me. Goodbye Dragon Inn was a grower but not as much as What Time Is It There, which haunted me for two solid weeks. It had some similarities with Goodbye Dragon Inn in terms of its humour (one bit felt straight out of it, or at least staged in the same cinema) and its melancholic feeling, but far stronger. With each movie I think Tsai fulfils that same astonishment I felt when I first watched Hidden, trying to figure out how a director could achieve so much while being so slight. I know I still have the “great” Hsiao-hsien Hou movies to go (City of Sadness, The Puppetmaster, A Time To Live A Time To Die) but it irritates me a little that Hou can make movies that feel so empty and half-arsed (I’m thinking Millennium Mambo, which would have five minutes of genuine character development and then fifteen minutes of the girl smoking in her apartment) while Tsai puts out movies even more minimalistic but they also happen to be hilarious, memorable and heartbreaking. Hsiao-Kang is like a Taiwanese M. Hulot. Even though I still prefer Yi Yi and A Brighter Summer Day over the Tsai movies (not by much though, and I’ve said that I’ve found Edward Yang’s other stuff a LOT less interesting), I concede, Tsai is thus far the most gifted Taiwanese filmmaker I’ve come across. The Hole ROCKS. The musical interludes are so good and would really make the film suffer if they weren’t there. I can’t talk about it without getting all ecstatic about how fantastic Tsai’s ideas are. He is a god at shot composition and creating believable, otherworldly atmospheres, letting you drain in the details of his worlds. I’d say that from what I’ve seen, this would be the best Tsai to start with.

Rating: .

Ghost World

Two cooler-than-thou outsider girls brush off college and start planning what they’ll be doing with their lives after they graduate from high school. Seems like something that’d piss me off by design, but…it was really good. All the characters were compelling, well-written and well-acted (especially Steve Buscemi as the blues record collector), and the scariest part for me was how much Thora Birch reminded me of a girl I had a crush on in high school, right down to what she wore and how she acted and sounded. It’s true that the movie has a kind of self-awareness about it but for the first time ever I actually like that self-awareness. In a way, Ghost World feels like a live action Daria.

Rating: .

The Wind Will Carry Us

I enjoyed bits of it, and Kiarostami again shows his talent for directing children, but a fair chunk seemed like Kiarostami was just trying too hard to be lyrical. It’s not like what he did in A Taste of Cherry, where the reflections on the world around him and driving through the sparse, beautiful hills just added to the character’s despair and confusion. Beautiful movie, but I didn’t find it nearly as emotional as some of his others.

Rating: .

The Wayward Cloud

It has the most intriguing synopsis of all the Tsais: Following What Time Is It There, Hsiao-Kang becomes a porn actor, Shiang-chyi arrives back from France and Taiwan suffers a drought so severe that everyone has to live off watermelons. I ended up watching this twice: first time I saw it I was shattered by the end, not necessarily in a good way, and I wasn’t sure that it added up to a solid whole by the end. I’m still not sure if it does, but it’s grown on me a lot. I find the musical sequences funnier than the ones in The Hole, in particular the one of Hsiao-Kang dancing around in a penis mask while a group of choreographed dancing girls thrust toilet plungers at him. The ending does work, and I’ve come to like it now, but for someone who was so enraptured and moved by What Time Is It There I was really taken aback by where the characters ended up. You pretty much see the high and low ends of the moral compass. I’d say it’s probably as inaccessible as Goodbye Dragon Inn, for non-Tsai fans.

Rating:

Wings of Desire

The title was a bit of a misnomer, I was expecting some bird fucking on par with Pink Flamingos. This is the first Wim Wenders movie I’ve seen other than his short in the ensemble film 8 (although when I was a kid I watched my dad’s VHS copy of Buena Vista Social Club. My memories of it are too vague for me to have an opinion though). I loved the atmosphere of the first half, in fact I probably would’ve been satisfied if the movie had no plot and was simply of angels listening to people’s thoughts. It was good, but I did lose interest by the end, I’ve gotta admit. I think the “human” part of the film was maybe a little too off-kilter with the tone of the angel part. It was very consistent until then.

Rating:

A History of Violence

Cronenberg tapped into a formula with The Fly that reached its peak in Dead Ringers, and he’s pretty much continued to follow the formula since. It’s applied here: A subtle dynamic between dark, absurd humour and serious drama, Howard Shore’s brooding scores, and acting that’s solid as hell. It’s strange, the dialogue on paper seems really bland but it suits the acting so well. I think what attracts me (and simultaneously repels me) about his movies is that they’re so primal. A History of Violence is about survival of the fittest, which culminates in a great scene where we realise Tom’s deep-seeded violent tendencies have been genetically passed onto his son. His pre-Fly movies that I’ve seen (just Scanners, now I think about it) check-out with what Cronenberg himself says: he was great at directing special effects and giving them a kind of humanity, but not his actors. All that has changed. The whole cast is excellent but Viggo Mortensen suits the character perfectly. He’s got a real jutting, hard face that’s capable of softness, but he’s the very definition of masculinity.

Rating:

Boy A

My timing is crazy. I went to Video Ezy with my dad and saw this, grabbed it on my teacher’s recommendation, and after I watched it I went on Google to read up on the case that inspired it to find that the guy had just been arrested for possession of child pornography that day. Even stranger is that I went to get American Splendour, thinking it was a Terry Zwigoff movie (I’m not that stupid for assuming that though, it looks like one), remembered it wasn’t, left it on the shelf and came home to find that the author of American Splendour had died. That day. The main actor in Boy A was incredible, and I mean, I know the movie deals with controversial subject matter but I found myself sympathising with him so deeply. It’s hard not to when you’re presented with the scenes of the two kids, and how his life was screwed up by something he was naively led into. You have to wonder if he was aware of what he was doing and what the consequences would be. I realise that the movie Boy A is a lot less disturbing than the actual events, and his grownup portrayal is nothing like his real life counterpart (otherwise it would have to be a very, VERY good movie to make me sympathise with him), but man, the IMDB discussion boards on the movie, talk about a lake of fire. People tell me that since I didn’t cry in Toy Story 3 and the Shawshank Redemption, I have no soul. Well, I found it in me to sympathise with Boy A, so boo-urns. Forgive me for feeling sympathy for people with complex, inescapable problems than toys afflicted with stockholm syndrome.

Rating:

On that note:

Toy Story 3

Yeah, I did like it, it’s hard to be offended by something so inoffensive. But it was literally 3 minutes before I was dealt the “you have no soul” card, which just makes me want to tear my pubic hair out. I admit that I haven’t had the emotional/nostalgic attachment to the characters as most people my age have. I was too busy with Miyazaki and other Ghibli animators (the Totoro cameo was kind of cool, thinking about it now). One criticism is that because of the enormous fanboy hype, the general consensus that it had an epic sweep to it and the length of time Pixar spent making the movie, I got to the end of the “escaping the nursery” bit and thought “Sweet, that’s the end of this plot, now Woody will make the journey to college to meet up with Andy”… but that was the end of the film. Was that really worth 10 years of production? I thought they could’ve taken it to a higher level.

Rating:

21 Grams

Completely unnecessary non-linear narrative, but I will admit that I found it effective a few times, mainly because we spend so much time putting together who the characters are, wondering how they end up where they do, and then suddenly a character will flat-out die and we feel the shock of that, but it’s not a story that requires this form of storytelling. Good performance from Del Toro though.

Rating:

Barton Fink

I liked this a lot, though for the first half an hour I was dreading giving it a score because it shared so much in common with Naked Lunch, which I love to bits. I’m not kidding: the plot is very similar, with the writer in his apartment trying his hardest to write while the lines between reality and fiction blur; the surreal 50s setting; the release date (both were out in 1991) and the supporting actress (Judy Davis). I do prefer Naked Lunch but there were some sudden score-changing scenes that creeped up on me a couple of times. I’m specifically referring to “I’LL SHOW YOU THE LIFE OF THE MIND” which was far and away the most impressive moment for me.

Rating:

Inception

A character informs us early on that an hour in the dream world equates to five minutes in reality. Numerous events occur in their subconscious states as they strive to achieve their goal, their car plummets from a bridge into the river below while in the real world they sleep soundly on a plane bound for the US. It’s pretty darn effective as a thriller, but whether it’s an accurate depiction of how the subconscious works is up for discussion. It was difficult for me to accept the dream worlds as “dreams”, perhaps because of how they conformed to cinematic conventions, and I wasn’t sure I accepted how events in the real world influenced the subconscious. But if there are discrepancies they don’t really take away from the experience. You can argue that the level of immersion we reach when watching a great movie is similar to a dream state, we find ourselves suspending our belief system and perception of time, and while we might be sharing a journey with characters that spans over days, in our reality only hours pass. I’m not sure my belief system was completely suspended but Inception is well worth the ticket money. One of my criticisms seems to be part of a popular theory: a bunch of characters (Ellen Page particularly) are suspiciously undeveloped and get thrown into the movie suddenly. Some people think that’s intentional on Nolan’s part, after all, there’s a scene where DiCaprio runs his plans past Page and asks her to recall how she ended up at the cafe with him, to point out that she’s dreaming. This kind of thing leaves the film open to interpretation as to how many of the scenes are dreamt up. If we’re interpreting the lack of character development as intentional, well, it’s interesting but it’s the sort of thing that’s less impressive on screen than it is on paper. Thomas Vinterberg’s It’s All About Love is an example, it’s arguable that the stilted roboticness of the acting is a comment on the cold, unfeeling reality they inhabit, but it’s also arguable that it’s a terrible movie. Despite what I said though, DiCaprio’s subplot with his wife (Solaris in other words) gives an insight into his character and this provides his later scenes with an emotional wallop. Inception might’ve suffered if it wasn’t for this compensating subplot. I say these things as a pedantic viewer, despite its flaws it’s the kind of movie that makes me hope for a revival of quality prevalent in 70s Hollywood, the Hollywood of Scorsese, Lucas, Malick and Coppola. A large amount of acclaimed Hollywood movies of last decade (ignoring the Coens and Nolan himself) came from filmmakers of the 70s period. Hopefully films of this calibre lead the way to a new Hollywood.

Rating:

See you guys next week.

Minor spoilers.

Todd Solondz’s films have always have this certain inimitable style – one I like to call “Solondzian”, but that nobody else in the world does. Not including the one I can’t remember the name of but that Liam will probably tell me once he reads this, his films have been famous for their sympathetic brand of dark comedy, and going further with it than most folks, especially Americans – what other American film asked you to feel sympathy for a pedophile (and an ACTIVE one at that) before Happiness, and how many have since? Being a big fan of Solondz, I sat down to watch his newest feature, a sequel to Happiness, with great anticipation. After it had finished, I was satisfied, but a little confused. It felt almost like Solondz, who had presented such a natural (if horrifying) style with his last four films, had become almost too self-aware.

It’s not there all the time, and it’s subtle, but I noticed it. With his earlier films, aside from maybe a brighter colour scheme than most, the visual style and cinematography didn’t seem to hint at anything out of the ordinary; a direct contrast to the disturbing events. There are a few times in Life During Wartime where Solondz almost seems to be saying “hey, this is a bit weird, huh?” One example is the opening scene, where Joy (the eldest sister from Happiness) and Allen (the guy who came on the wall in Happiness and was originally obsessed with Helen but is now married to Joy despite finding love with someone else at the end of Happiness I dunno) are eating at a restaurant. While the scene is very similar to the opening of the film’s predecessor, it feels very claustrophobic and closed-in, which stuck out to me straight away as being a little too…obvious, I suppose. There are moments like this throughout the rest of the film, and it’s so odd to see Solondz stylising his work in such a cliched manner.

The plot again revolves around the lives of the three sisters from Happiness and their families. Trish raises her children and finds a new boyfriend while her pedophile ex-husband Bill gets released from prison. Joy visits Trish to take a break from Allen, and is haunted by visions of a previous suitor who committed suicide. Helen is only in one scene but is as whiny as before; most of the film is about Trish and her young son, Timmy, as he deals with the news that his father isn’t dead, as he was told, and was locked up for abusing boys Timmy’s age. All the roles are recast from Happiness, but some work better than others – Alison Janney as Trish is great, but Ciaran Hinds as Bill isn’t suitable at all, unless you tell yourself that prison has made him think of himself as a monster or something. The oddest one is definitely Philip Seymour Hoffman being replaced by Michael K. Williams (aka Omar in The Wire) as Allen. Solondz said in interviews the movie was more “politically overt” than his previous films, but that seems to simply consist of a few characters talking about Iraq occasionally, and doesn’t really add anything to the proceedings.

The truth is, Life During Wartime is a good movie, and it has a lot of effective scenes that fit with Solondz’s usual standard. Unfortunately, it also has quite a few shortcomings. Firstly, it’s something that no Solondz movie has ever been; predictable. I saw one character, thought “I bet he kills himself later”, and he did. It’s almost like he’s fulfilling what audiences expect of him. The second, and possibly the biggest, fault of the movie revolves around the fact that it’s pretty much all despair, all the time. What made a film like Happiness work wasn’t the shocking moments as much as it was the way they suddenly showed up and interrupted these characters idyllic existences; we, the audience, were almost anticipating the next thing. Life During Wartime is the opposite, and it almost feels as if Solondz was throwing everything he could at the wall and hoping something fits. There’s very little joy in this film, which makes the big scenes feel more like “oh, okay” than anything else.

Before I saw this film, I didn’t think Solondz was capable of making a less-than-great movie. I still don’t think he’s capable of making a bad one, but it’s possible he needs to look back and see what made his previous flicks so fantastic. This isn’t relatable like Welcome To The Dollhouse, isn’t quietly devastating like Happiness and Palindromes, and doesn’t make you think like Storytelling. It’s just there, being interesting, being funny, but not being much else.

Rating:

‘I think that’s the best Swedish film I’ve seen!”
“…That’s the only Swedish film I’ve seen!

Said two elderly men behind us as Dom and I left the cinema, having just seen The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. While we were talking over the themes of the movie, female abuse being one of them (the original Swedish title is “Men Who Hate Women”), we walked past a bolted nightclub that had been abandoned for as long as I can remember. It’s usually on our path whenever we walk home from Film Society on Sundays. As we were a few metres away from it, we heard a girl yelling from inside. We stood rooted to the spot, put our heads against the bolted door and listened. There was a long pause which was broken by another scream. Both stunned by the coincidence, we walked out of earshot and rang the police. While we were letting our imaginations go crazy as to what was going on between those walls, a friendly asian man got out of a tour bus and walked up to us. He said “Hello, my friends” and asked us if we knew where “Newcastle Pot” was. After a few minutes we figured he wanted to get to a restaurant in Newcastle Port, Queen’s Wharf, directed him as best we could and said goodbye. He got back into the bus and drove off. In retrospect this was very comical, but at the time we were in a haze of disbelief and concern. Fifteen minutes later the police came around to tell us nothing was wrong, and that the noises were being made by some homeless men staying the wreckage of the club. We could’ve sworn the voice was female, but our imaginations were probably influenced by the movie we’d just seen. So we started walking home again through an empty car park. A single, wavering voice seranaded us through a PA system: Engelbert Humperdink singing “Please release me, let me go”.

It’s pretty awesome then that after these memorable events, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo lost none of its impact. It is intoxicating and compulsively watchable for its two and half hour runtime. I have a real penchant for movies that deal with unseen details and clues, like the blowing up of negatives to uncover secrets. It’s a source of endless intrigue for me, Michael Haneke’s Cache being another recent example. The frame by frame stills of Harriet looking across the road and making a face of recognition; the photos of the parade from different angles revealing new leads – it’s like Antonioni’s Blowup, that incredibly unsettling feeling of having accidentally photographed a murder or something in connection with murder. The repeated photo of Harriet and excerpts from her diary gave off a Laura Palmer vibe, too, which again is a point of interest for me.

But for this review I feel like I have to resurrect an age old argument, which I know won’t have any real effect but I do it in the hope that it will change at least one person’s attitude. If you’re forced out of your comfort zone by changes or cuts in an adaptation of your favourite book, you won’t like this movie. Cinema is a separate entity to literature and does not exist solely to visualise what you have read. That’s what the human imagination is for. Are there any fans of the Psycho novel who are disappointed with Hitchcock’s film? Coppola’s The Godfather? Tarkovsky’s Solaris? The two most inventive adaptations I can think of are 1) Adaptation, which you probably saw coming, for integrating Charlie Kaufman’s creative process and personal life into the book he was hired to adapt to screen, and 2) Naked Lunch, which only marginally adapts the novel while tying in William S Burroughs’ life story and past works. In doing this David Cronenberg evokes Burroughs’ style so well, somehow retaining the overall feeling of the novel. It is in this sense one of the most successful adaptations I have seen and goes to show that a director or a screenwriter’s interpretation should never be a 100% clean conversion. A more contemporary example is Alfonso Cuaron’s adaptation of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which was a massive leap in quality from Chris Columbus’ previous two because Cuaron realised his own unique vision. Maybe the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy film wasn’t the greatest adaptation ever, but compare it to the television series where the screenwriters attempted to cram in every single gag and observation. If it’s going to be literally the book in visual form, just read the goddamn book.

Regardless of any feelings you have regarding the changes, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a powerful movie and it smacks you about with force. Author Stieg Larsson was influenced by Val McDermid’s novels, and I have to wonder if this influence extends to director Niels Arden Oplev’s stylistic choices. One very pivotal scene has very similar lighting and photography to the first episode of the TV series Wire in the Blood, which is interesting because in the book, Mikael reads the Val McDermid novel “The Mermaids Singing” which the Wire in the Blood episode is based on. It shares a lot in common with the production of Wire in the Blood, employing similar techniques, though it never drops off into the schizophrenic, distracting editing of the later Wire in the Blood series. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is an impeccably made thriller that (to paraphrase Engelbert Humperdink again) holds onto you and doesn’t let you go.

The Vanger family history and the Swedish connections to Nazism are fascinating to learn of. It always seems strange, seeing these ultra right wing families in a nation that is arguably the most leftist nation in the world, but it’s easy to forget Sweden’s stance of the time, and other European countries, a time where a young Ingmar Bergman was enraptured by a Hitler speech, and as Roy Andersson hilariously reminds us in You, the Living, younger generations are so ashamed of their family’s Nazi heritage that they (literally) sweep it under the tablecloth. But after forty years of confusion, Mikael picks up from where the police left off and the secrets begin bubbling to the surface.

I hear there’s an American remake in the works. I’m not necessarily opposed to the idea, David Fincher is directing so we can guess that it’ll be a competently directed thriller, but things like the family’s allegience with the Nazis seems to make more sense within a Scandinavian context, or even just a European context. Let the Right One In, another recent Swedish hit had a similar thing going. The story is so appropriate for Sweden that you can’t really envision how an American version could function as well. Then again, I’m shooting myself in the foot after what I wrote regarding film adaptations, it’s not like Fincher should translate the book verbatim to screen. But if he did, not only would it fail to be interesting, it would not work. And even though Carey Mulligan’s acting has been impressive so far, I doubt that she’s chameleonic enough to pull off Lisbeth’s character, unlike Noomi Rapace who is utterly stunning and leaves a lasting impression. And Nyqvist is good. I like Nyqvist. Critics seem to think that he elicits nothing but phoniness but I got the right vibe from his performance. There’s a brilliant dynamic between their team.

It excites me greatly knowing that there are two more films coming, but until this morning I hadn’t realised that the trilogy has been shot, edited and screened overseas. We only have to wait a few months between each film in Australia, which is just fantastic.

Rating:

P.S. One of the biggest twists for us was discovering that Ewa Froling, notable for her role as Emilie Ekdahl in Fanny and Alexander played a character. We noticed the eyebrows first.