Beneath India’s schizophrenic collision of high technology and ancient tradition, and from its stuffy old-Raj sensibilities to the explosion of sound and colour that hits you in the face as you stumble between bars and bazaars, there can be few more intense, sensory places on earth. Although its film industry has a (deserved) reputation for turning out an endless supply of incomprehensible four-hour gangster musicals, a long and proud tradition outside of the Bollywood machine, from the masterful work in of Satyajit Ray throughout the second half of the last century to Deepa Mehta’s spectacular ‘Fire’ and ‘Earth’, suggests that India has the potential to be a sleeping giant of world cinema.

Mira Nair (‘Mississippi Masala’, ‘Salaam Bombay!’) has had an impeccable knack for creating films which cross over from India to the global market, while never compromising on their frank examinations of contemporary Indian culture. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ takes place in New Delhi, a city located firmly on the truly Indian cusp of old and new. Centred on the wedding of Aditi (Vasundhara Das) and Hemant (Parvin Dabas), it is an Altman-esque story which spirals around the sprawling family of Aditi’s father, Lalit Verma (Naseeruddin Shah). As a Punjabi family, weddings are by no means registry office affairs for the Vermas, and with four days left and guests arriving from all over the world, Lalit and his wedding planner P.K. Dubey (Vijay Raaz) are beginning to run out of time to get everything ready.

Weddings are hardly the most challenging of subject matters, and with the comedy focussing on the beguiling, marigold-eating Dubey, this could have been a subcontinental ‘Wedding Planner’ in lesser hands. But Nair is a director with a social conscience, and Aditi’s wedding is, in her eyes, a barometer for social change in India. Confronting issues of sexuality and, more seriously, a crumbling class system, Nair paints a loving, if critical, portrait of a country heading in too many directions at the same time. As the dialogue slips effortlessly between English and Hindi mid-sentence, people with little experience of Indian culture may have a hard time tuning in, but an impeccable subtitling job deals well with the constant language shifting and keeps things on track.

Shot mostly with hand-held cameras, Nair captures the vibrancy and colour of an Indian wedding, as the monsoon pounds, soaking everyone, and the song and dance carries on. ‘Monsoon Wedding’ feels warm, natural and immediate in its exploration of family values, but all is bound by Naseeruddin Shah’s wonderfully understated performance as a father trying to maintain his family’s dignity, and somehow hold all the chaos together.

Nair’s film is wickedly contemporary, continually hilarious and always delightful. Avoiding all the clichés of Indian cinema, and of those who attempt to describe the country but only end up describing how colourful the clothes are, the film does not care for catering to any particular audience, or fulfilling anybody’s expectations of what India should be — it is a film about the joy and the horror of family, and the kind of rapturous celebration that only a wedding in the pouring rain can bring about.

The nineties were a relatively quiet decade for the Priest musically, after the departure in controversial circumstances of legendary vocalist Rob Halford in 1992 and the general downturn in the classic metal scene. After their sonically brutal 1997 comeback effort ‘Jugulator’, the band needed a new approach. Four years later, the release of ‘Demolition’ sees the band expressing themselves in new ways, with near-ballads such as ‘Close To You’ nestled alongside more traditional extreme metal fare such as ‘Bloodsuckers’, ‘Metal Messiah’ and ‘Devil Digger’.

“It goes back to ‘Jugulator’,” Hill says. “When Rob left, the band didn’t do anything really. There were seven years between ‘Painkiller’ and ‘Jugulator’, and because of the steps forward we keep trying to make between every album, there were at least two albums missing in that period.

“We had to decide where we would be if those two albums had been there,’ he continues, eand with “Painkiller” being such a heavy, brutal album as it was, the logical step was to ‘Jugulator’, which was a very, very hard album. But if there was one thing missing on that album, it was the subtle passages and ballads which we’ve also been known for over the years, so we decided to rectify that with ‘Demolition’.”

Judas Priest were not the only metal band to have a hard time in the 1990s, as the whirlwind that was Nirvana washed the decks of the old guard, fundamentally altering the alternative musical landscape and killing off some of the more excessive excesses of the 1980s. Heavy metal, one the great 1980s icons, found the new landscape tough going.

“A lot of other bands didn’t do a great deal either,” Hill explains. “[Iron] Maiden went their separate ways, and all the standard classic bands all stopped playing for some reason. This left the door open for the new wave of metallers coming through, and I think metal’s better for it as well. These new bands have a lot to offer — if you take the make-up and the bullshit away, you’ve got a damn good heavy metal band underneath it all,” he laughs.

The story of Judas Priest in the last seven years has been the story of Ripper Owens, the man plucked from the obscurity of a Judas Priest etribute’ band to replace his hero, Rob Halford, as the frontman to carry the band into the next millennium. Owens only got the job when the band chanced upon a video of an Ohio man with a Judas Priest tattoo, and it blew them away.

“He was a great find when we found him,” Hill says. “When Rob left, it knocked the wind out of our sails. I don’t think there were any of us who didn’t think at some stage that it was about time to hang our hats up.

“When we found Ripper and discovered his capabilities, he gave everybody the drive and incentive to carry on. It was very much a fresh start for us.”

According to Hill, ‘Demolition’ reflects Ripper’s growing stature, as the band’s Halford-tinged history is finally consigned to the past.

“eJugulator’ was written for a vocalist, any vocalist, because we didn’t know who was going to end up singing on it,” he says. “But with ‘Demolition’, we knew his capabilities so we could write material accordingly. I think it shows, there’s a lot more confidence coming from Ripper.”

If Ripper’s story sounds familiar, you have probably been reading reviews of the Mark Wahlberg film ‘Rock Star’. While both sides have played down the Priest element to the film, the links are obvious to the neutral observer. Any similarity to any persons, living or deadOe

“It started out as a story about Ripper joining the band, from a New York Times piece,” Hill explains. “The production company bought the rights to the story, and next thing you know, all over the internet, it says these people are putting out the story of Judas Priest and Ripper joining them!

“Our management thought that if they were going to do a film about Priest, it might be a good idea for them to talk to us, and find out what the characters are like — if somebody’s portraying you on film, you want to have at least a little bit of control over it.

“They were contacted but they didn’t want to know,’ he continues. ‘They wanted total artistic freedom and all this business. So we said that if they were going to do that, they couldn’t use the name Judas Priest. The story’s basically the same, with somebody playing in a cover band who gets to play with their favourite rock stars that they’ve been following ever since adolescence. That’s as far as it goes, but any similarities end there.”

Thirty years on, Hill sees no end in sight for a rejuvenated Priest with Ripper at the helm, and only opportunity in the future.

“It gets to the point where you can’t imagine yourself doing anything else,” he says. “Some of the songs we play on the stage are 20-odd years old, but when you see the reaction to them, if we dropped any, we’d probably get lynched. It’s that reaction that gives us the incentive to carry on playing.”

‘The Roger Dean album cover came about because Festival Mushroom Records bowdlerised our original concept which was a triple album,’ Barassi explains. ‘Do you know that young people these days don’t even know about triple albums? They don’t understand what it was like opening Yes songs with the huge gatefold cover opening to reveal the El Greco-like vista that was Roger Dean’s work.’

‘Our album was in fact a triple album called Finger album — a dedication to the great Finger bands of rock,’ Flaubert elaborates. ‘Badfinger, Snakefinger and Powderfinger. The album was tentatively titled “Give Your Mates A Sniff. TISM: The Finger Album”, however FMR decided not to go with that.

‘In fact, what you get in ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is merely the ghostly remains of that great masterwork.’

Ghostly remains or not, ‘De Rigeurmortis’, TISM’s first album in three years, is as loaded as ever with their trademark savage wit, angry rants and cheesy beats. From the anti-dance music tirades of ‘Come Back DJ, Your Record is Scratched’ and ‘Fat Boy Slim Dusty’ to the more general tirades of ‘If You’re Not Famous at Fourteen, You’re Finished’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Britney Spear’, TISM fans have more than enough to satisfy them until the band get pissed off enough for another release. But the real standout is saved for the bonus disc of the connoisseur’s edition — a disc devoted solely to the sprawling 40-minute rock opera e2Pot Screama’.

‘Were you aware that Britney’s actually got a novel out?’ Flaubert asks. ‘It’s co-written with her mum. I’ve always felt that when you get to the stage of being able to write a novel, you’ve transcended the sort of one-dimensional rubbish that they’re peddling.

‘This is why I feel that Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately put out a pop album,’ Barassi suggests. ‘For too long, Cormac McCarthy has been satisfied with merely being the most innovative and deeply serious novelist working in the American literary scene. That can’t satisfy him for very long and I think Cormac McCarthy needs to immediately rush out there and record a pop album with his mumnMrs McCarthynto really try and beat Britney at her own game.’

TISM’s last album, 1998’s ewww.tism.wanker.com’, met with infamy through its lead single, a track which even Triple J would not play: ‘I Might Be A Cunt, But I’m Not A Fucking Cunt’. The C word sent such powerful shockwaves through the country that they even received an irate letter from Bruce Ruxton. But that was back in their days on Shock Records, and their new label have something of a different outlook, the boys claim:

‘We’ve really toned it down because we are aware that Festival Mushroom are funding a number of right-wing military juntas in South America,’ Flaubert says. ‘The sort of damage they could do to our kneecaps if we encountered the ire of the conservative right in this country cannot be overestimated.’

Humphrey B. Flaubert wonders how people could possibly be interested in questions about their music, or themselves.

‘It isn’t beer and skittles what we do, in fact it’s very unglamorous,’ he points out. ‘What we wanted was to get attention from good-looking girls. That really hasn’t eventuated, so everything after that is a disappointment. Being in a rock band would be great, but unfortunately we’re not in one!’

For a band so unashamedly non-rock, TISM take great pride in the production quality of their recordings. For ‘De Rigeurmortis’, they drew on the legendary production talents of Paul McKercher and Phillip McKellar to knock the album into shape.

‘Oh yes, they’re very rock,’ Flaubert says. ‘They were rock people but we had to communicate with them through an interpreter. Neither of us understood each other’s language.’

‘They’re not very nice men,’ Barassi points out. ‘Phil and Paul take themselves very seriously — we had to explain to them that if they didn’t drop their pretty boy rock and roll attitude straight away and get down slumming it with the dorky guys from TISM, they’d be out that door.

‘As they made their way towards their door, we begged them to come back.’

Serendipity arranges it so that ‘De Rigeurmortis’ is released just as bullshit is circulating at its 3 year-high on the electoral cycle — as perfect a time as any for TISM’s spleen to be vented.

‘There was a little while there when we were a bit afraid the fires were burning out,’ Barassi says, ebut all you have to do is hear the voice of Phillip Ruddock and you think yep, the hatred is as strong as ever. That sort of pompous, disaffected, soulless inability to empathise with anyone else and to persecute people less well off for your own base self-interest, I think that’s what it’s all about.

‘If Phillip Ruddock ran a record company, we’d join.’

‘Don’t you know me Kansas City, I’m the new Berlin wall! Try and tear me down!’

From the moment her voice rips over the scribbled credits, it is clear that ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ is going to take you to places you never expected. And when the guitars kick in, well, let’s just say it’s rock and roll.

It’s the mid-sixties, and a young boy named Hansel lives on the East Berlin side of the wall, with a mother who believes Hitler died for our sins. Lying in the oven in their small apartment, Hansel listens to the songs of Lou Reed and David Bowie, dreaming of an American myth, and a walk on the wild side. Hansel’s American dreams turn to possibility when a GI finds him sunning on a broken piece of church and falls in love, promising to marry and take him to America. There is, however, one condition: he has the operation and takes on his mother’s name — Hedwig.

One botched operation later, Hedwig and her eangry inch’ are left to rot in a Kansas trailer park, and her own pursuit of the American dream begins.

‘Hedwig’ was adapted from John Cameron Mitchell’s cult off-Broadway musical. As a very personal project for Mitchell, he takes on the directing, writing and starring roles in his first venture into film, throwing out the rulebooks on all of the above and letting a genuinely new, exciting film explode onto the screen. His performance as Hedwig is both vicious and tender, creating a character certain to live on outside the constrictions of celluloid.

Hedwig’s story is told in flashback from the stage, as she tours America through a chain of bankrupt restaurants and distant stages in far-off fields at festivals. Mostly, it is told through the songs, which are nothing short of superb. One of the reasons Hedwig succeeded so well on the stage was that it did something stellar, and unusual, with the music — it rocked. Backed by such luminaries as the legendary Bob Mould (Sugar, H,sker D,), Mitchell belts out songs with an intense glam-rock sensibility, exorcising demons in a way only a truly kick-ass power chord can. If you have the urge to jump up in the cinema and scream ekick out the jams, motherfucker!’ don’t be surprised.

The hand scribbled animations of Emily Hubley play a unique but very compelling role as the stories and the songs unfold, and Hedwig’s bizarre life is laid bare for her diner audiences to digest. Her interpretations of Mitchell’s words create an abstract but moving alternate world in which Hedwig’s confusions are more literally and movingly interpreted. The integration between animation and live-action is seamless in a film ruled in its visuals by the surreal and mischievous storytelling whims of a pissed off transgendered rock singer who knows that there is no such thing as truth.

With any stage translation, it can be a battle to transcend the limitations of the original script. Mitchell succeeds for ninety percent of ‘Hedwig’ by pushing things to an extreme in the way only a first time director can — breaking rules because he doesn’t know they exist, and challenging the limitations of the medium with the vivacity of a child who has just picked up a crayon for the first time. Unfortunately his energy runs out by the film’s coda, as the film’s more profound moments of revelation are played out profoundly stagey.

The obvious namecheck for ‘Hedwig and the Angry Inch’ is ‘Rocky Horror’, these being two of the very few films in the tradition of the glam-rock musical. But while ‘Rocky Horror’ rocked, and was infinitely fun in its own camp way, Hedwig is these things and more. It draws on a rich vein of insurgent Broadway musicals and blatantly invokes the spirit of Bob Fosse (eCabaret’, ‘All That Jazz’), only without the dancing. It is an intensely moving story, but at the same time it is more fun than any film in recent memory.

‘Hedwig’ won both the audience award and the judges award at Sundance, a rare moment for any festival when the crowd and the critics agree. It is an injection of adrenaline for jaded moviegoers, and a transgendered rock opus deservedly destined for cult status.

Rating: 2

In a Sicilian seaside town in 1940, as Il Duce’s voice declares the march to war on the radio, a group of adolescent boys have discovered something so perfect it has no place in their town — the luscious Maléna (Monica Bellucci), whose sultry sway provides perfect masturbation material for the men, young and old, who observe her. While most of the boys use their imaginations of Maléna for their own nefarious purposes, our narrator Renato (Giuseppe Sulfaro) sees her as more than a sexual object, and his growing obsession with her, or his dream of her, provides the backdrop for a coming of age story, not just for a boy but for a town, and a country.

Maléna’s husband has been called up to fight Mussolini’s war, and is presumed dead in an African operation. As vicious gossip puts her in the beds of half the men, married or otherwise, in the town, she must eventually abandon her job and turn to sex to pay the bills, much to the horror of the onlooking Renato. Fraternising with German soldiers and taking up residence in the bordello, Maléna becomes a figure of ridicule and shame in the town, in the eyes of all but our young hero.

Maléna is the opening film of Perth’s inaugural Italian Film Festival, which will bring several acclaimed contemporary films to the screens of Cinema Paradiso over the next fortnight, allowing us a rare opportunity to experience the broader output of one of the world’s greatest filmmaking countries. The festival will close on November 6 with Gabriele Muccino’s anticipated ‘L’Ultimo Bacio’, an Italian box-office smash and winner of six David di Donatello awards.
Director Giuseppe Tornatore (eCinema Paradiso’) presumably intended to make ‘Maléna’ a story about coming of age, and about pride and redemption. What he has made, with the backing of the Miramax machine which turns all foreign films it touches into superficial eye-candy, is a saccharine-sweet Hallmark card of a film, obsessed with surface values and never reaching the deeper meanings it seems to be shooting for.

Tornatore’s camera loves the shape of Bellucci’s body, and the shape of the beautiful Sicilian buildings, but we get to know neither as much as we should. Bellucci saunters through the story looking sad, wistful, sexy, sad and then happy, as though she were a supermodel trying out facial expressions in the mirror. To her credit, this is all that the film demands of her. Tornatore’s point is that the young Renato has not fallen in love with a woman, but with an idea of perfection. Unfortunately, Renato’s perspective limits us to never finding anything beyond this idea, and fractured moments of meaning which connect into a fine picture book, but nothing approximating a real story.

When the women of the town turn against Maléna in the square as the American soldiers roll in to liberate Sicily, we are meant to be shocked by the brutality to which she is subjected. But Maléna has done nothing to deserve punishment of this proportion — it seems Tornatore just needed to follow a story arc that would finish with a Hollywood chestnut: eand ultimately, redemption’.

In ‘Cinema Paradiso’, Tornatore captured the confusion and magic of childhood almost perfectly, creating one of the finest Italian films to have crossed into the Hollywood market since the days of Fellini. But Maléna follows the Academy Award-baiting formula of Miramax’s foreign language films, masking lack of substance with beautiful production values, stunning cinematography and a sweeping score — just the things American audiences want from a foreign film. The words don’t matter; you would have to read those from the bottom of the screen.

Maléna’s score is particularly fine, coming from the pen of the legendary Ennio Morricone. His Oscar-nominated music works tirelessly to develop emotions in a story which has little of substance, masking the shortcomings of the film in a way only a master screen composer can.

In the end, however, a fine score does not a good film make, and Tornatore’s lightweight take on the old, old subject of adolescent sexual obsessions is a waste of talent, and of a great performance from the young Sulfaro. Tornatore has always shown a desire to be a modern day Fellini, and the nostalgic tone herein evokes nothing more strongly than that great master. But this is no ‘8 1/2’, it is faux-art of the most sugary kind — all surface, no feeling.

What do you do when you’re having a mid-life crisis and you already own the flash cars, the motorbike and the Hollywood lifestyle? Joel Schumacher has, for almost twenty years, been a purveyor of unflinchingly offensive Big Movies, from ‘St. Elmo’s Fire’, ‘Flatliners’ and ‘The Lost Boys’ to ‘8mm’ and ‘Batman and Robin’, undoubtedly the nadir of nineties cinema. But then something strange happened — he remembered how to make a good film. And he did it by losing everything. The underrated ‘Flawless’, a quite remarkable and delicate character study which brought the best out of Robert De Niro and Philip Seymour Hoffman, was the first step in his recovery program, but it could not prepare you for the spectacular paradigm shift Schumacher’s work undergoes with ‘Tigerland’.

With a band of mostly unknown actors, a 16mm camera and the brattish skills of wunderkind director of photography Matthew Libatique (‘Pi’, ‘Requiem for a Dream’), Schumacher takes us back to 1971 and the midst of Vietnam, to the eponymous ‘Tigerland’, where conscripted kids are turned into killing machines in a most hellish of boot camps, before being shipped out to a war which has lost public support and all hope of victory.

Like Stanley Kubrick’s ‘Full Metal Jacket’, ‘Tigerland’ is at its heart a character driven piece, exploring the depths to which a mind can sink when it is being asked to kill other human beings in the name of politics. Private Bozz (‘Ballykissangel’ star Colin Farrell) is a traditional agitator with a murky background, willing to do anything he can to get kicked out rather than shipped out. Bozz’s defiance in the face of savage beatings and humiliation is documented by the fascinated Private Paxton (Matthew Davis), who enlisted for the war in order to give him inspiration in his writing.

While Bozz uses his skills and impeccable knowledge of military law to get others home to their families, he can do nothing to save himself from what lies ahead, and his actions drive an increasingly large wedge into the ranks of A-Company. When so many men are so consumed by fear and paranoia, eventually something has to snap, and when it does, there is nobody there to save them but themselves.

Schumacher was inspired to make ‘Tigerland’ after stumbling across the Dogma manifesto and the films of Lars von Trier. Shot in a month, without traditional lighting, special effects or overbearing music, ‘Tigerland’ feels uncomfortably real. Libatique’s obsessions with overexposure and colour saturation lend the film a surreal, almost painterly feel, which sits at odds with the edgy handheld movements to give Spielberg a lesson in how to really convey the dirtiness of battle.

Boot camp dramas are nothing new, and are always destined to be compared to ‘Full Metal Jacket’, a high-water mark which Schumacher wisely stays well away from. The greatest achievement of ‘Tigerland’ is that it conveys the true horror of battle while firing hardly a shot, or even following the characters to the war. The film’s turmoil is internal, and all its battles are mental. Screenwriter Ross Klavan spent time as a young soldier in the real ‘Tigerland’ and it is real experience which informs his savage exploration of a military machine which was concerned with little else but throwing more and more bodies at the war.

‘Tigerland’ is a prescient warning of what the world may face in times not far away, and its raw, powerful performances from every single actor only add to its cinema verite documentary feel. Let us all hope Schumacher does not return to the Hollywood machine after his brief stint slumming it in the arthouses — his last two films have shown that rather than a great moviemaker, he may actually surprise us all by becoming a great filmmaker.

‘The Fast and the Furious’ infiltrates the shady drag-racing underworld through the eyes of young undercover cop Brian O’Conner (Paul Walker — ‘The Skulls’), who in true ‘21 Jump Street’ tradition, has been assigned to befriend the racers and find out who is behind a series of truck-jackings. The high stakes, ultra-high octane world depicted so frenetically in the movie, as big and loud as any you’ll likely see, is not as much of a fantasy as it seems, Walker argues.

‘Apart from the semi-truck jackings, this stuff really does happen,’ he says. ‘The after-market industry for these import Japanese cars has gone up 30 or 40 per cent, at least in California, since the release of this film.

‘I’ve contacted guys involved in that market, because we had a lot of them working as technical consultants, and they called me up dozens of times to say “man, because of your movie, we’re making so much money”.’

Walker and the film’s other young stars (Vin Diesel, Michelle Rodriguez) needed to do a lot of their own driving in this film, as director Rob Cohen attempted to make a genuinely new car movie.

‘I’m a gearhead and I love cars,’ Walker says. ‘I had to do a bit of research with the Japanese cars, but cars are really one and the same. My grandfather actually raced stock cars for Ford, and ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been fascinated with them. I did a lot of my own driving — I had my own stunt driver, naturally, who made me look really cool.

‘A big part of the reason Rob decided to do this movie was that he had a vision of a lot of shots that were never really captured before on film,’ he continues. ‘When you think how many car films with great sequences have been shot over the years, such as Ronin or Bullitt, and you think that just about everything’s been done, Rob realised the only way he could do something original or different was to just have the actors behind the wheel.’

Walker worked with Cohen on ‘The Skulls’, and has formed a close relationship with the producer-turned-director (eDragonheart’, ‘Daylight’) and a strong desire to work closely with him.

‘He’s an asshole,’ Walker laughs. ‘I was really reluctant to sign on and do the movie, because I don’t really have a lot of experience yet, and just knowing that I was going to have second billing, I was really quite nervous. I actually told him at one point that I didn’t think I wanted to do it. Rob has a fatherly approach that I really appreciate and like. He’ll come up and put his arm around you and pull you aside and talk you through things.’

Of a slightly less harmonious nature was Walker’s relationship with co-star Vin Diesel (eSaving Private Ryan’, ‘Pitch Black’), as egos from opposite sides of the country collided.

‘It took us a while to feel each other out,’ he admits. ‘He’s pretty intense and he takes his job very seriously. Initially I really didn’t know how to take him, and I was a bit concerned going in because it was a “hot cast”.

‘But Vin and I are getting along really well, and I think the reason it took a while is because he’s unlike anybody I ever grew up with. I’m extreme West Coast, and he’s extreme East Coast. The only guys I ever knew like him were the guys I saw in the movies.’

As well as competing with the egos of the other stars on ‘The Fast and the Furious’, Walker also had to compete with the real stars of the movie — the imported supercars flying around the set like rockets. For the race scenes, the producers needed to call on the help of the fanatics who were more than eager to show off their customised rods.

‘The principal cars were actually modelled after real cars,’ Walker says. ‘Those other cars were owned by the general public — they did a lot of research and advertised the filming of this import car movie in all of the import car magazines. It said to come and meet us on the Universal lot, and we’ll interview you and take a look at your car. Kids turned out in their droves, and they turned away so many. They had the pick of the litter.’

Paul Walker has found himself with a lead billing only a few films into his career, which seems to be speeding faster than a souped-up Ducatti with nitro injections, and ‘The Fast and the Furious’ is big, loud, and exhilarating in a way that other recent car chase movies (like ‘Gone in 60 Seconds’) have utterly failed to be.