Some time in 2006, almost half a decade ago, I started talking to a couple of guys from Australia who would quickly become two of my best friends in the world. They were just beginning a burgeoning interest into world cinema (which has now become a full-blown obsession) and they recommended me two films to watch – Lukas Moodysson’s Fucking Amal, and Satoshi Kon’s Perfect Blue. I downloaded and watched both of these, and that was it. I was headed down a road that’s shown me so many different viewpoints from so many different people in so many different countries, and gave me a love for film that I now wouldn’t trade for anything in the world. When I think of Satoshi Kon, I think of those dear friends, who I still speak to every day (and indeed, started a film criticism website with), and when I found out he had unexpectedly died of pancreatic cancer at the unthinkable age of 46, they were the first things to pop into my head.

I watched Kon’s Tokyo Godfathers for the first time in preparation for this article, and was moved by its warmth. The film has very little of the surrealism and reality-bending that Kon is known for, instead focusing on three vagrants who discover an abandoned child on Christmas Eve. Like some of the greatest movies, the characters in Tokyo Godfathers capture many different facets of humanity, and it deals with themes of guilt, despair, and the goodness inside all people. The works of Kon cannot fit into one genre – Perfect Blue is a psychological thriller, Millennium Actress is an epic love story, and Tokyo Godfathers is an intimate drama – yet all of them have a common theme: people, and who they are. He frequently blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, between the waking world and dreams, yet the truth is always discovered in the end. His stories always have a human core – his television series Paranoia Agent, a series about a ghost child on skates attacking people, ends up being about guilt and the loss of innocence that occurs when a girl enters womanhood – and his characters can find it in them to laugh even in the darkest moments.

Even working in anime, a style that allows one to do anything they wish, Kon’s ideas and style stood head and shoulders above most. He was brave, imaginative, and a true original. We can only hope that as he lived his final moments, perhaps preparing to fly into the unknown somewhere in his mind, Satoshi Kon was excited to continue the chase he loved. Goodbye, sir, and thank you.

“With feelings of gratitude for all that is good in this world, I put down my pen.

Well, I’ll be leaving now.”

His influence on music-in-film isn’t, all things considered, that well known. Especially over here in Australia, almost no musicians know who he is, which is a shame since he pretty much defined them for a new generation. Pre-Bruno movies that featured musicians usually focused on popular bands, with no major problems. Only films such as This is Spinal Tap had tried to show them as anything more. When Stroszek was released, though, it was perhaps the first major film to highlight the problem of being an outcast in the slums of Germany, with the loneliness and unrequited ambitions that came with it. For the first time, the freaks had a voice.

…oh shit, sorry, I got my wires crossed. “Doesn’t hit right. Give me obituary,” I can hear you murmur through a gas mask. Let me start again:

Bruno S. was a man who’d spent most of his life in mental institutions, teaching himself how to play piano, glockenspiel, handbells and the accordion. Werner Herzog discovered him and cast him in two films – The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser and Stroszek, the latter of which was quite biographical.

That doesn’t sound like much of a career, and for a traditional actor that would be pathetic. But Bruno S. wasn’t a traditional actor – he was a strange outcast from society who had odd, idiosyncratic talents. Herzog, always a lover of people differing from the norm (Klaus Kinski, the angriest actor in history, and a whole host of bizarre extras in films such as Cobra Verde), saw the true genius in Bruno. Here was the German underdog, the man whose talent was so personal and bizarre that it would be ignored unless someone of Herzog’s standing took him under his wing and displayed him to the public. When that happened, Bruno received a lot of attention in Berlin – and then, as soon as Herzog moved on from him, Bruno was back to being a nobody.

But he’s a nobody that we all know, and that’s what we truly value about him, and what we will miss.

Harmony Korine’s probably kicking himself now for never making a film with him.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5jaI1XOB-bs

Yessiree, it really is -

meets

Don’t get me wrong, this isn’t in any way a slight against it. We’ve known about Aronofsky’s love of Perfect Blue for years (c.f. when he bought the rights to it just so that he could replicate the bath scene for Requiem for a Dream – and look, there’s another bathtub scene in this trailer), and a darker, nastier, more psychological The Red Shoes is a pretty neat idea, as long as it still retained a lot of colour (ala Suspiria?). There doesn’t seem to be a great deal of colour in the trailer admittedly, but then we don’t see a lot of the dancing either. This is something much more visual and I hope Aronofsky pulls off what could be a not-so-amazing idea purely through visual splendour.

Oh, but here’s a slight against it; Natalie Portman. Frankly, I don’t think she can pull off a dual role like this, and the reason I think that is because she can’t even pull off a single role. She hasn’t displayed any notable talent since Leon, for god’s sake. I realise a lot of people find her (and the prospect of lesbian lovin’, as seen in the trailer) attractive, but to me it’ll amount to watching Mila Kunis wanking with a branch, almost as if she’s a far crazier, more insanely sexual version of the Log Lady from Twin Peaks.

Still, I’m willing to be impressed, and I’ll be watching this with some level of interest. Impress me, Portman. Do it, I dare you.

Cool promotional pic, by the way.

Directed and animated by Guy Collins. Music by Untitled Yoko Ono Project. Produced by Coredor (Liam O’Brien) and 5peed$nail (Alex Tweedale). Mixed and mastered by Adam J Wood. “40 Days” is from the upcoming album “Eatin’ Debussy”, out on Ugmo Records late 2010.

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: 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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: 4 out of 5 stars.

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: 3.5 out of 5 stars.

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: 4 out of 5 stars

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: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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: 4 out of 5 stars

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: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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: 3.5 out of 5 stars

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: 4 out of 5 stars

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: 4 out of 5 stars

See you guys next week.

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: 3.5 out of 5 stars

It has an incredibly dry Australian narration that undercuts the film beautifully. It’s almost poetic in its simplistic statements. There’s so little passion that I can’t imagine how on earth a blind person could be aroused by the film. I’m now imagining a porn film with a similar narration and laughing at the mere thought.

I didn’t note down everything she said, but here’s a selection of them:

INCREDIBLY POINTLESS DESCRIPTIONS

“Bella wakes up. A copy of Romeo and Juliet lies on her bed.”

“Her friends lean on a car.”

“Quill has short hair. Embry’s is long.”

“All the men have short hair.”

“Mike stumbles into a toilet.”

“His dreadlocks flail as he spins.”

VERY DRY ATTEMPTS AT MAKING THINGS OMINOUS

“Leafy branches loom overhead.”

“Bikers watch them.”

DESCRIPTIONS OF BELLA BEING A MORON

“She moves forward, and trips, falling facedown in the dirt. She straightens and crouches in the dirt.”

“Bella drives towards a cliff.”

“Bella waves back with her right hand.” (She was, of course, using her left hand in the visuals. I’m going to blame this not on faulty narration, but on Bella being a moron)

DESCRIPTIONS OF THE FILM’S NARRATIVE TRICKS

“Daytime. Bella’s truck is parked outside her house. The word ‘October’ appears on screen. Her room is messy. Bella sits motionless. The word ‘November’ appears on screen.”

“She watches them wrestle. On another day, she watches Jacob fix a motorbike.”

“…And the word “Moon” appears on gold on the dark half of the moon. The word ‘new’ appears before the ‘moon’, making the title ‘New Moon’. Gold glints.”

“As she sinks, Edward’s image appears beside her.”

LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF EDWARD CULLEN BEING SENSUAL

“His pale skin sparkles in the sunlight.”

“As Bella watches Edward lock his Volvo, she smiles and fidgets slightly. Edward is wearing a grey t-shirt that flaps in the breeze.”

LOVING DESCRIPTIONS OF EDWARD CULLEN DOING NOTHING IN PARTICULAR

“Edward stares at the photo. He wears a dark suit.”

“Edward lets his shirt fall down. A little girl sees him.”

“Edward turns slowly. A giant statue of Christ is behind him. He crushes the phone in his hand.”

EDITS BETWEEN SCENES GIVEN NO CONTEXT WHATSOEVER
Often the narrator will describe two scenes without even noting it’s a new scene or even pausing for breath. Such as:

“Bella studies Edward. They look at a painting in his home.”

“Edward turns and trudges away. Framed photos show demons attacking humans and a medieval autopsy.”

ACTION SCENES REDUCED TO BRIEF DESCRIPTIONS

“They pull off his head and arms.”

“Edward shoves Jasper. He lands on a piano.”

“The motorbike wobbles.”

“They smash a wooden table.” (Context: two werewolves are having a snarling, violent fight)

BLUNT SUMMING UP OF THE ACTING ON DISPLAY IN DRAMATIC SCENES

“Edward grins. Bella doesn’t.”

“Edward’s eyes are full of emotion.”

“He opens his mouth several times before he speaks.”

THE INCREDIBLE RECURRING SHIRTLESSNESS

“A man with a bare muscly chest carries Bella through the forest.”

“He frowns and looks away. His dark hair hangs on his muscular shoulders.”

“Four bare-chested men stand at the edge of the forest. Jacob’s breathing grows ragged.”

And how terrible the film would be if they ignored the…

BLATANT PRODUCT PLACEMENT
“The sun shines white as the Virgin aeroplane flies over the ground.”

My favourite thing about all of this is that a lot of the quotes say quite a lot about the appeal and/or inherent flaws (that’s putting it mildly) of the franchise. Here’s one final quote, which is effectively the series in a nutshell:

“Edward isn’t smiling.”

Ominous.

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: 4.5 out of 5 stars

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.

Enter the Void (Gaspar Noe)
Gaspar Noe’s hallucinatory astral-projection epic starring Nathaniel Brown and Paz de la Huerta. To no surprise the critical opinion is divided – after all his second film Irreversible was the most walked out on film in the Cannes Film Festival’s history. But from what I can tell, those who enjoyed (if you can even use that word) Irreversible and his other viscerally affecting works will not be disappointed by Enter the Void. If this joins the trash heap of foreign films that get sent to Australia but are refused cinema classification, I’ll cry. If I never see this in a cinema I’ll never forgive myself.

Enter the Void trailer:

Trash Humpers (Harmony Korine)
I bring up Trash Humpers next because it is the Toronto Film Festival’s most walked out on film in its history. Trash Humpers, according to Korine is meant to resemble more of a “found object” than a film, which explains the VHS format on which it was shot, the lack of soundtrack and anything you would naturally associate with the word “cinematic”. It might not compare to early works like Gummo (though it almost feels like a continuation of Gummo, as if the kids of Xenia grew old and found themselves unable to shake off old habits), and I initially had my doubts when the first trailer emerged, but for some reason the newest trailer gets under my skin in a way I haven’t been able to explain. For Australians: my prediction is that there is no chance in hell that this will get a cinema release, unless it’s through an independent cinema that’s willing to risk losing money. But there’s a DVD release set for September 2010, so if Imaginopolis (our underground cinema) is still running by then we will most likely screen it. I don’t think it has a very big audience. I mean, I guess if you’re looking for a film about elderly people having sex with garbage, Trash Humpers will deliver.

Trash Humpers trailer:

Socialisme (Jean-Luc Godard)
There’s something epic about the fact that Godard’s (reportedly) last film is called Socialisme. It’s even more appropriate that the directorial credits are spread equally among six other directors: Fabrice Aragno, Jean-Paul Battaggia, Pierre Binggeli, Paul Grivas, multiple-time collaborator and companion Anne-Marie Mieville and Louma Sanbar. Though recently word on the street is that Godard is looking to direct an adaptation of The Lost: A Search for Six of Six Million, the best selling Holocaust memoir.

Socialisme trailer:

The Turin Horse (Bela Tarr)
Another sad finale to a grandiose career, but compared to Godard it’s a career of quality over quantity (you know what I mean. Godard’s made over 90 different films, they aren’t all masterpieces). The Turin Horse is said to be the final directorial effort by Hungarian master Bela Tarr, who now has plans to become a film producer. Details relating to the film are scarce and no screenshots have leaked, so the production is largely shrouded in an exciting mystery. I guess we can guarantee a few hallmarks, though: black and white, Hungarian language, people walking for exceptional amounts of time and graceful steadycam operating. I am pumped to high heaven.

Gainsbourg vie Heroique (Joann Sfar)
Projectorheads was actually one of the first blogs on the net to start covering this production. It’s out in cinemas, technically, having screened in France and at the Sydney French Film Festival last month, but an Australia-wide cinema release is still up in the air. It and Micmacs were the headlining films of the festival and Micmacs has made its way to Australian cinemas, so we can only hope that the same lies in store for Gainsbourg. I don’t have to say much more on the subject, I’ve already written at least a few thousand words on why this film will push my Gainsbourg-worshipping buttons.

Gainsbourg vie Heroique teaser:

Life During Wartime (Todd Solondz)
Todd Solondz’s quasi-followup to Happiness. Most of the same characters in minor-tweaked situations played by a completely new cast. I admit that I am not really bowled over by the clips I’ve seen so far, but seriously, have you guys seen the original Happiness trailer? What’s amazing about it is that it completely misrepresents the tone of the movie. I hope this trailer is the same.

Life During Wartime trailer:

Original Happiness trailer:

The Overcoat (Yuri Norstein)
OK, there is no guarantee that this will come out this year, or even this decade. It’s been in production since 1981 and in that time only two low-resolution clips have surfaced. We might be waiting a while: it is more or less guaranteed that Norstein won’t rush the film to make a deadline, and that it will be as polished and perfect as his previous films. After all, they don’t call him “The Golden Snail” for nothing.

The Overcoat clip 1:

The Overcoat clip 2:

Melancholia (Lars von Trier)
A multi-million dollar sci-fi production fronted by the world’s most famous provocateur, starring an anti-gravity sex chamber and possibly Penelope Cruz, Charlotte Gainsbourg and Olga Kurylenko. Thumbs up.

Faust (Aleksandr Sokurov)
Sokurov becomes the umpteenth director (Jan Svankmajer, F.W. Murnau etc) to adapt the classic German legend. Another thing to keep your eyes peeled for is A Brother and Two Sisters, Sokurov’s final chapter to the trilogy that includes Mother & Son and Father & Son.

Now for some really odd upcoming releases:

Seven Samurai (Unknown)
Set for release in 2011, Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai is being remade to fit a modern day context: American mercenaries defending a Thai village. Stars George Clooney.

Cache (Martin Scorsese)
It was weirder when Ron Howard was scheduled to direct, but it seems that Martin Scorsese is remaking Michael Haneke’s Cache in the US. I remember thinking “how the hell is Howard going to pull off the racism angle” but since Scorsese has picked up the project, I don’t know, it could work. I guess he could bring more to the table in that respect than Ron Howard.

The Five Obstructions 2 (Lars von Trier/Martin Scorsese)
Speaking of Scorsese, it was rumoured recently that he was planning to remake Taxi Driver with Leonardo DiCaprio as Travis Bickle, with von Trier contributing to the screenplay. Now it appears the rumour makes more sense: von Trier is possibly embarking on another Five Obstructions movie, challenging Scorsese to remake his film 5 times under strict, occasionally nonsensical guidelines.

2001: A Space Odyssey (Steven Soderbergh)
First Solaris, now 2001. I honestly have no idea what Soderbergh is going to do, or if this is even going ahead. It’s still on the table.

I was wondering, after seeing this – Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s latest, zany effort – whether this is “another Jeunet”; whether it’s a film you attend knowing that it’s the latest Jeunet film, instead of watching it with no prior knowledge of the director at all. Unlike Amelie, which was a surprisingly cheerful sideways turn in Jeunet’s career and a film that not only marked the “second phase” of his career and swept up potentially hundreds of thousands of casual filmgoers, Micmacs a tire-larigot is Jeunet speaking to his diehard, “film buff” audience, one already primed to react to his films in a particular way and to not expect anything revolutionary or even different. When Amelie smashed its way into the marketplace in its effortlessly charming way, it became almost everyone’s default “foreign film” that they see every five years. People went out of their way to see it. Will that happen with Micmacs? It’s possible, but highly unlikely.

Still, this isn’t a problem in the slightest. To expect a massive upheaval only two films after Amelie would be disingenuous. Further down the track, if Jeunet’s still mixing up the same ingredients over and over, his fans may get bored, but I’m not even sure that’s likely either. Whereas someone like Tim Burton routinely gets shtick for honing in on his personal habits and churning out gothic-dark film after gothic-dark film, Jeunet is unlikely to receive the same treatment, and there’s a few reasons for that. The first is that, despite his debut Delicatessan coming out nearly twenty years ago now, Jeunet still feels like a fresh young talent, chiefly because his career has spanned fewer films, and also because when most people think of Amelie they’d think “Ah, that movie with Audrey Tatou being cute” rather than “Ah, that excellent Jeunet film.” Burton’s name is entrenched in his films; he’s more well-known nowadays than the films he makes, which is a bizarre achievement. The second is that Jeunet’s more immediately likable a person – like Tatou in Amelie, he’s prone to winking at the camera in a deliberately eccentric but at least charming way. Whereas Burton is more likely to put on his snazzy blue glasses and pose as if he’s been cast in a waxwork factory, all brood and darkness. And thus, we have our final reason; Burton’s put-upon goth persona is so wearying because there’s no self-awareness to it whatsoever. But Jeunet… Jeunet is fun. Jeunet is charming. His films, and this is the most important point of all, are funny.

Sometimes too funny. I’m fully aware that Tatou’s winking at camera alone annoyed many who saw Amelie, and Jeunet’s films are always overladen with in-your-face whackiness. Were this an American indie film, this’d be a turn-off, but Jeunet gets away with it. In fact, to hell with it; the French always get away with it, which is odd in itself because the stereotypical Frenchman sits around intellectualising rather than being strange and kooky. They’re also portrayed as bloodthirsty, and to be fair, just listen to their national anthem. But “charm” is also part of France’s stereotypical mandate, as paradoxical as that may seem, and Jeunet loves nothing more than revelling in what “France” is.

The Cannes jury rejected Amelie in 2001, and probably still hold a huge grudge against it for excelling overseas instead of, say, The Piano Teacher, another excellent but morose and gritty film. For a group of French film enthusiasts, a film portraying their country in a cartoony, ridiculous way, again, was just too much to bear. But it’s always hard to enjoy the absurdities of one’s international perception. I don’t think anyone who sees a Jeunet film seriously believes that France is as he represents it; everyone just wishes it was as he represents it. It’s an idealistic, strange world, one that plays to the rules of a cartoon but is filmed in live action. That’s why, even when Micmacs occasionally feels like it’s hoarding too heavily every possible joke and sight gag it can, it doesn’t truly matter because it’s a cartoon-with-real people. Its effortless charm combats any irritating facets the jokes may have taken on in a different context.

The strangest thing about its humour, then, is the sheer darkness of the world presented to us. Those who have seen Delicatessan will know Jeunet can have a penchant for dark humour mixed amongst his overt zaniness, but for those who started with Amelie (which, at its basest, makes a hilarious orgasm joke) and continued with A Very Long Engagement (which never portrays its wartime scenes as being humorous) will probably be shocked at the opening of Micmacs, where Bazil’s father steps on a landmine, Bazil’s family grieves, and then Bazil’s charming interactive viewing of Bogart and Bacall in The Big Sleep is cut short when he’s shot in the head by accident. As the film continues, Bazil learns that the perpetrators were two weapons dealers, and he vows to destroy their operations. So to get this straight; there’s weapons manufacture, there’s distinct Iraq references, and there’s even a moment where one of the villains (who doesn’t even look particularly villainous, and instead is simply a spiff bloke in a suit) apologies to women raped in wartime. Can Jeunet really do this? Can he really construct a world as cartoonish as this, then intersperse real-life concerns, and very serious concerns at that, and play them for laughs as well?

I’d say he can, and the tone shifts worked for me, but I know others who were very nonplussed by this. And that in itself is interesting. Delicatessan is well-known to be the “darkest” of Jeunet’s films, but its themes of cannibalism and kidnap are shoved into a futuristic dystopia that doesn’t correspond to the world as we know it. Micmacs is the first time that Jeunet’s allowed such darkness to seep into the world that we recognise as ours – even if we recognise that it’s not ours anyway, since it’s set in cartoon-France. It’s a strange and daring balance to seek, but Jeunet makes it work. Liam and I used to joke about Jeunet’s France and Gaspar Noe’s France being the exact same France, but the former is scenes from the daytime and the latter scenes from the underground at night – but if Micmacs is anything to go by, we might one day see a Jeunet who could quite happily team up with Noe at some point. The thought excites and scares me.

Despite all this, though, Micmacs is business as usual. It’s outright funnier than his last two films, it’s subtly darker than his last two films, but it looks the same (you may be surprised to learn that Jeunet’s usual director of photography didn’t work on this film – could you tell?), it speaks the same, and at the end of the day it makes you feel the same. It is nothing more or less than another great film from this master of the oddball.

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars