Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Mira Nair
Starring: Naseeruddein Shah, Lillete Dubey, Shefali Shetty, Vijay Raaz, Tilotama Shome, Vasundhara Das

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.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:53 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: John Cameron Mitchell
Starring: John Cameron Mitchell, Michael Pitt, Miriam Shor, Stephen Trask

‘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.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:18 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Giuseppe Tornatore
Starring: Monica Bellucci, Giuseppe Sulfaro

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.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:21 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Joel Schumacher
Starring: Colin Farrell, Matthew Davis, Clifton Collins Jr, Thomas Guiry, Shea Whigham, Russel Richardson

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.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:22 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Julian Schnabel
Starring: Javier Bardem, Olivier Martinez, Andrea di Stefano, Michael Wincott, Johnny Depp

The rise of Fidel Castro and the fallout of the Cuban revolution have provided one of the richest stories of the twentieth century, inspiring some of our greatest writers and filmmakers to delve into the turmoil of the island only ninety miles off the Florida coast. Amongst all the missile crises and Bay of Pigs fiascos, however, there was a human revolution in Cuba, and a sexual revolution, which have largely gone untold outside its borders.

‘Before Night Falls’ is based on the memoirs of Reinaldo Arenas, one of Cuba’s most talented poets of recent times. It is the story of his journey from poverty to revolutionary to reluctant dissident and aging queen, watching the revolution for which he fought turn against him to such an extent that his books needed to be smuggled out of the country for publication.

The quiet sexual revolution of the 1960s, of which Arenas was a proud instigator, meant that he and his close-knit group of artists and friends were free to listen to Jacques Brel and bathe together in tight Speedos, but Castro’s regime is a violently homophobic one, and when the crackdown came, it came hard. The country, so rich in colour and inspiration, became a prison from which all attempts to escape ended in abject failure.

Javier Bardem’s performance, taking Arenas from a young optimistic library attendant to a dejected, persecuted ex-revolutionary poet wasting away from AIDS in a New York apartment building, is absolutely superlative, and more than deserving of the Oscar nomination which he garnered for his first major English language role. In fact, one wonders how Russell Crowe’s multi-faceted performance as a grumpy Gladiator could have even be considered in the same league as Bardem’s powerful, natural work here.

Films about dissident poets in communist countries can tend to be both pretentious and dull, but ‘Before Night Falls’ pulses with the rhythms of a Cuba gripped by the feverish optimism of the early days of Socialism. It is wickedly funny, and is not afraid to stoop to the occasional Farrelly Brothers gag to show how Arenas’ work is smuggled from prison. It is, ultimately, about the uneasy relationship between art and revolutionary politics, and the realisation that ebeautiful things have no place in a dictatorship’.

Director Julian Schnabel’s last film was the underrated ‘Basquiat’, another story of the tragedy of contemporary artists — Schnabel himself was part of a New York scene around which these people all gravitated, and it would not be surprising if he knew Arenas in his last days. But ‘Before Night Falls’ is a much more mature work than ‘Basquiat’, on a much broader scale. Salvador Parra’s wonderful production design, from Arenas’ childhood rural life to the nightclubs of Havana and decaying underground hideouts for persecuted souls, complements Schnabel’s compelling visual style, creating a world that brings us somewhat closer to understanding the people on the other side of a battle with America that almost brought the world to its knees.

Although ‘Before Night Falls’ could have done with some tighter editing to get it through its forty-year time span in a more spritely manner, and possibly unnecessary cameos from Sean Penn and Johnny Depp detract from the heart of the story, it is a bold, broad and hugely enjoyable journey, intent on capturing the poetry in Arenas’ own writings.

Arenas, guilty of nothing more than what he called his two edelicious vices’, writing and homosexuality, lived an outspoken, persecuted life, tainted with as much misery as it was blessed by talent. Schnabel’s film is testament to an amazing voice, and an amazing country, for too long misunderstood.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:26 PM | Permalink

Director: Jonathan Glazer
Starring: Ray Winstone, Ben Kingsley, Ian McShane, Amanda Redman, James Fox

There’s nothing quite like the sight of an Englishman abroad. All shirtless, sunburnt and peeling skin on oversized stomach hanging over tiny shorts, with an extravagant cocktail by his side, the Englishman abroad is a scary thing indeed, a sexy beast understood by nobody who hasn’t spent a summer in Bognor Regis.

Gal Dove (Ray Winstone) is an ex-con who wants nothing more than the life of an Englishman in deepest Spain, and he has it all — the tasteful villa, the young boy-servant, the trophy wife (Amanda Redman), brandy on tap and a swimming pool decorated with a mosaic love-heart pattern. But as he lies in the searing summer sun, sips on a beer and works on his sunburn, a boulder rolls down from the hill above his villa, flies over his cooking body and makes a crater in the bottom of his pool. Along with the boulder, Gal’s past is on its way to destroy his idyllic life as a retiree, and more than his pool is going to get smashed up.

‘Sexy Beast’ is the directorial debut of legendary music video director Jonathan Glazer — previously responsible for clips for Blur, Radiohead, Nick Cave, Massive Attack and most recently UNKLE (who are responsible for this film’s excellent score). It is, at its heart, an old-style British gangster film, drawing on a cast of characters straight from ‘Get Carter’ or ‘The Long Good Friday’. But it is also a subtle character exploration, tracking Gal’s descent back to his old gangster life as the skeletons in his closet manifest themselves in the form of Don Logan (Ben Kingsley), the incarnation of everything that is dangerous about a cockney gangster.

Kingsley, never anything less than a stellar actor, turns in a rare performance here, burning the character of Logan so deeply into your brain that you need to scrub it out with steel wool. Logan is a fragile but vicious psychotic sent to retrieve Gal from his retirement for “one last job” — a bank heist for Mr Big Teddy Bass (a wickedly evil turn from Ian McShane). Logan wants to be loved, and he wants to get along with Gal and his Spanish entourage, but there’s one thing Logan does not understand — the word “no”. Nobody turns down Don Logan — why would they want to? They’re mates!

Gal has no interest in returning to London, but his polite refusals only light Logan’s fuse, and firm rejections sent him into an apoplectic rage. Logan, who argues with himself in the mirror and picks fights with anybody who attempts to intrude on the alternate reality in which his mind lives, is not going home without getting his pal out of retirement, but it’s going to take something extraordinary to break Gal’s resolve.

‘Sexy Beast’ is a violent, bloody and profane mess of a film, but it’s the mess inside the heads of two fascinating characters. Winstone may be condemned to playing gangsters, wife-bashers and child abusers for the rest of his life, but there’s no denying his lovable qualities. Although this is Kingsley’s acting masterclass, his character only works playing off of the subtle bewilderment and stern resolve of Winstone, a man fighting to bury his demons, literally.

Glazer’s surreal, loose touch with the camera is certainly stylised in true first-time director tradition, but he is a mature enough filmmaker to realise the riches he has in front of the lens and not overwhelm them with slick contemporary vision. It is an incredibly funny film, and Logan is in many senses a comic character, blessed with an ability to make you laugh at four letter C words. But the power of ‘Sexy Beast’ is in that uncomfortable intersection between comedy and horror, where Logan’s psychosis stares Gal dead in the face.

Glazer will go on to do wonderful things from here, but starting your career with the best British gangster film since ‘The Long Good Friday’ is no bad way to go about things. See it or I’ll send Don Logan around to convince you.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:38 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Luke Greenfield
Starring: Rob Schneider, Colleen Haskell, Ed Asner, Michael Caton

Throughout its twenty-plus years on American television, ‘Saturday Night Live’ has produced some of the most important figures in screen comedy — legends such as Jon Belushi, Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Eddie Murphy, and Mike Myers to name just seven. But at the same time there have been countless hangers-on in the SNL cast who have dragged it through years of torturous sketches without punch lines. Among the worst offenders is Rob Schneider, a man who has done little but hang onto the coattails of more talented co-stars but has somehow ended up as one of the key leading men of the current batch of SNL alumni. ‘The Animal’ is formulaic gross-out comedy of the simplest kind — it may raise a few guffaws along the way, but you won’t remember a single line to quote the next day.

So this is what it says on the packet: Schneider, star of ‘Deuce Bigalow, Male Gigolo’, is Marvin Mange, a loser of the losingest kind — a guy who gets beaten up by six year-olds. Marvin, a lowly evidence clerk at the local police station, dreams of being a policeman like his dead father, but can’t conquer the obstacle course/granny bashing required to earn his badge. When he drives off of a cliff while trying to avoid a performing seal in the middle of the road, his injuries are so bad that there is no way he can survive. Unless, of course, a mad scientist (Michael Caton, on a break from ‘Hot Auctions’) comes along and replaces the broken bits with animal parts.

Remembering nothing of his surgery, Marvin returns to the police force, but his heightened animal senses and ability to smell what’s secreted away in the butt of a drug smuggler soon see him elevated to the status of supercop. There’s always a catch, however — the new animal instincts are running out of control, and Marvin is losing himself to the animals inside. Cue hilarious set-pieces involving sex with goats, sex with mailboxes, fisticuffs with angry orang-utans and meals of chewed up worms.

As much as it pains this reviewer to say this, Rob Schneider is no Adam Sandler. The halfway decent ick-factor comedies of Sandler, David Spade and the late, very great Chris Farley did much to resurrect the ailing reputation of SNL-related films in the mid-nineties. Schneider was always the lesser light in this lesser group of talent, and his attempts at a similar style of humour suggest that he was better off as their supporting player. The dumb-ass movie is a delicate art form, and those who make them cannot afford to be dumb-asses themselves — Schneider would do well to realise this.

It seems Caton’s scientist threw in a little bit of every animal in existence, and logically Marvin inherits the skills and instincts of all of them oSchneider gets to go through his full bestiary of impressions, swimming like a dolphin while sprinting like a cheetah and shagging mailboxes like a rabbit. Not that rabbits shag mailboxes. Much.

The focus of the more Freudian aspect of his animal nature is on local animal-lover and greeny tree-hugger Rianna (Colleen Haskell, last seen as the eleventh member of ‘Survivor’ to be voted off the island). Laughs ensue as Rianna takes our irrepressible animal out on a date to the localOe wait for itOe vegetarian restaurant! Haskell is surprisingly likeable, although her total lack of acting experience is painfully obvious at times. Nevertheless, playing opposite Rob Schneider means that it does not take much to stand out — many of the animals use this to their advantage.

It can be too easy to savage films like ‘The Animal’ for being too dumb for the tastes of the average critic, but the problem here is that it’s dumb done bad. Schneider, and first-time director-for-hire Luke Greenfield, need to look at some of the countless dumb comedy classics made by his fellow SNL graduates and take a few pointers on how to do it with style. May I suggest they start with ‘Animal House’ and work from there?

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:39 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Directors: Hironobu Sakaguchi and Motonori Sakakibara
Starring: Ming-Na, Alec Baldwin, Ving Rhames, Steve Buscemi, Donald Sutherland, James Woods (voices)

Like it or not, ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’ is destined to be a cinematic landmark. Its opening shot, a delicately rendered closeup of a human eye, reflecting with a million levels of translucency, draws you in to a visual experience quite unlike anything you’ve ever seen — the first ‘photorealistic’ computer-generated film.

The incredibly popular series of ‘Final Fantasy’ computer games have continuously raised the bar in computer game animation, bringing them ever nearer to representing something like reality. The next logical step after the visually stunning ‘Final Fantasy IX’ for director Hironuba Sakaguchi and the programmers at Square was to ditch the interactive element altogether and concentrate on refining their graphics for the next frontier — the big screen. And this what ‘Final Fantasy’ becomes in the end — an absolutely beautiful computer game with a nonsensical plot, sub-‘Pearl Harbour’ dialogue and cliché, and an overwhelming desire on the viewer’s part to grab a controller and make these amazing looking people do something more interesting.

The eye we open on belongs to Doctor Aki Ross (Ming Na — ‘E.R.’), our buxom heroine and feisty scientist. Marauding alien spirits, invisible without special equipment, have overtaken Aki’s future Earth. The last remnants of humanity are holed up behind a barrier shield in New York, where a military headed up by the battle-hungry General Hein (James Woods) is locked in a deep philosophical argument with earth-loving scientist Doctor Sid (Donald Sutherland), whose belief in the holistic theory of earth’s spirit — Gaia — may hold the key to salvation, if only the army don’t nuke everything first. Only crack military units with hunky leaders (Alec Baldwin) and wisecracking sidekicks (Steve Buscemi) venture beyond the barrier, collecting espirits’ which Doctor Sid can use to assemble a weapon that may save them all. And the answer is all in Aki’s strange dreams of a distant planet. Follow?

The great thing about computer-generated actors (in more excitable times, we might have called them evactors’) is that you can make them act out the most horrid of plots and they won’t complain. The actors voicing them are only reading lines into a microphone and don’t quite grasp the emotivation’, so they are unlikely to complain too much about lines such as ‘There’s a war on Doctor, nobody’s young anymore’. Our modern-day marionettes are happy to sacrifice themselves and tell their friends to go on without them when they are injured (but only if they are black), or proclaim that ethe city may be lost, but we are not’.

To risk a bad pun, the one thing ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within’ really lacks is any spirit of its own. Critics complain that computer animation is soulless, but this is a falsehood easily disproved by looking no further than ‘Shrek’ — a film infused with more spirit than a thousand Disney snoozefests. Computer animation is just a tool, no different to pen and ink or clay and stop-motion — it’s how you use it that makes the difference. From the tiniest details, such as delicate focus shifts and the way Aki’s hair blows in a breeze, to earth shattering explosions and fragments of ships hurtling through space, the hyper-reality of ‘Final Fantasy’ looks like nothing that has ever graced our screens. But after five minutes of being wowed by watching water ripple, the stilted, neo-eThunderbirds’ movement of the characters becomes obvious and the film needs something more to sustain it.

Sakaguchi and the film’s creative team are drawn almost entirely from the computer game arena, where you can still get away with half-baked theories of Gaia (represented in ‘Captain Planet’ by Whoopi Goldberg and here by a bubbling pit of blue slime) and ecollect eight components to assemble a superweapon’ plots. What ‘Final Fantasy’ needed, somewhere in its four plus years of production and 40 million dollars of computer hardware, was something the computer couldn’t generate — a script with a soul.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:41 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Dominic Sena
Starring: Hugh Jackman, John Travolta, Halle Berry, Don Cheadle, Vinnie Jones, Sam Shepard

Ever since a pimpled Matthew Broderick brought the world to the brink of thermonuclear destruction in ‘War Games’, Hollywood has been fascinated by the myth of the outlaw computer hacker. From Robert Redford and River Phoenix stealing spy codes in ‘Sneakers’ to Jonny Lee Miller and Angelina Jolie’s “righteous hacks” in ‘Hackers’, we’ve never been far away from another movie about the high-octane thrills and spills that are part and parcel of the average computer geek’s life.

‘Swordfish’ is this year’s blockbuster effort from Joel Silver, producer of everything from ‘The Matrix’ to ‘Demolition Man’. As befits a Silver film, particularly one directed by Dominic Sena, who last applied his slick, shallow directorial approach to the forgettable ‘Gone In 60 Seconds’, this was never going to be anything but a big dumb Toys for Boys romp with absolutely nothing lingering beneath the surface.

Hugh Jackman, who seems to be modelling his American image on a young Clint Eastwood (even down to the Man With No Name sneer), is Stanley Jobson, once the world’s greatest hacker — nonsensically described as “the hacker zeitgeist of 1996” — but now forbidden to even touch a computer after being caught messing with the FBI’s carnivore surveillance program. When Ginger Knowles (Halle Berry) comes calling with $100,000, a very short skirt, and an offer to get his kid back from his porn-star ex wife, he agrees to meet with her employer, the mysterious, fast-living Gabriel Shear (John Travolta with a terrible haircut).

After passing his initial test (break an encryption key in 60 seconds while having oral sex performed on your person), Gabriel recruits Stanley to code a worm that will steal several billion dollars worth of unused CIA funds, to be used to fund a shady project overseen by a slimy senator (Sam Shepard) who has already seen at least one young hacker killed to protect its secret. As our young Stanley finds himself embroiled in an increasingly high-stakes game of international intrigue (or something), big explosions, big chases and big stunts stand between him and the ultimate hack.

Beginning in half-focussed closeup on Travolta’s face as he espouses a manifesto of realism in cinema as it relates to ‘Dog Day Afternoon’, the opening three or four minutes of ‘Swordfish’ were genuinely exciting, and surprising. The scene quickly escalates into mayhem of monumental proportions, culminating in an explosion effect so overwhelming that this reviewer’s jaw was on the floor. Of course, everything which follows (told in flashback from this moment) could never live up to the opening, and one gets the feeling that they blew their effects budget so completely on one shot that they just had to put it at the front to show it off. Sena only ever livens up in his trademark frenzied quick-cut action sequences, and does not seem to know the first thing about directing for plot or emotion — only slick thrills and spills.

After his breakthrough in ‘The X-Men’, Aussie boy-done-good Jackman continues to show the kind of genuine star quality which is so rare in a Hollywood leading man. Part charisma, part brooding menace, the Clint Eastwood comparisons are no accident. Even contending with such a silly character as our hacker hero here, randomly banging at a keyboard while seemingly using a 3D graphics program to break into a bank, his natural presence wins through. Travolta, on the other hand, still smarting from the ‘Battlefield Earth’ debacle which we just don’t talk about, overacts and munches scenery to annoying degrees, having great fun firing machine guns and blowing shit up, but never uttering one believable line of dialogue. Berry, famously paid an extra half million for a gratuitous tit-shot, is oddly gratuitous overall in a pure eye-candy role which one would have thought she would be above by now — not a scene goes by where she isn’t flashing her underwear or sunning herself topless. Much more enjoyable in the supporting ensemble are Vinnie Jones, always good value as the token hardman, and Don Cheadle, playing a crusading cop once again — somebody give that man a lead role.

One day, we’ll get a hacker movie in which the target computer doesn’t flash up ‘ACCESS DENIED’ in giant red letters, while the hacker and his hackalicious babes fly through 3D computer space to crack the code — but it would just be boring, wouldn’t it? Nobody wants to watch a movie with a Unix command prompt as the most cutting edge computer graphic. ‘Swordfish’ is big, dumb and for the most part painfully short of any redeeming features, but as 90 minutes of eye candy with a couple of great effects moments, there are worse ways to kill time.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:56 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: David Mamet
Starring: Philip Seymour Hoffman, William H. Macy, Alec Baldwin, Sarah Jessica Parker, David Paymer, Julia Stiles, Rebecca Pidgeon, Charles Durning

The first advice given to any aspiring writer searching for a topic is always this — write what you know. David Mamet, easily one of America’s finest yet most brutal playwrights and screenwriters of the last fifty years, has known little in the last decade save for the absurdities of the movie industry, and ‘State and Main’ is the unexpected result — a gleeful, jaunty outpouring of incredulous observations and in-jokes.

Haven been driven from small-town New Hampshire while filming his latest opus ‘The Old Mill’, director Walt Price (William H. Macy) stumbles across the idyllic Vermont town of Waterford, complete with an authentic old mill and a bona fide Main Street USA. As the show business cavalry roll in, the town’s only hotel is transformed into a chaotic production office, and the locals abandon their local theatre productions to scramble for parts in the movie. Inevitably, hilarity ensues.

A David Mamet film would not be the same without the crackling dialogue which is his trademark, and buoyed by an incredible ensemble cast of wonderful, natural character actors, ‘State and Main’ bubbles along at a wonderful pace, throwing out perfect one-liners at a healthy rate. When heartthrob leading man Bob Barrenger (Alec Baldwin) reveals a penchant for 14-year-old girls, the crew are justly worried about what he might get up to with the local kids. Macy’s director, however — a classic Mamet character — is nonplussed: “he can’t have a 14 year old, get him half a 28 year old”.

As the locals begin reading ‘Variety’ and the producers wonder how to squeeze a product placement for a computer company into a story set in the 1890s, it comes as little surprise that Mamet, still writing what he knows, pushes the innocent young screenwriter into the role of romantic hero and moral centre. Joseph Turner White (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a renowned young playwright making his first foray into the Business, and his flowering relationship with a local bookstore owner (Mamet regular Rebecca Pidgeon) lies at the core of Mamet’s story. Hoffman’s screen presence is growing in stature with every film he steals from those billed higher than him, but it is a testament to inspired casting that he fits so easily into the sweet, innocent lead role. When he becomes the only person who can protect Barrenger from the consequences of a liaison with a local teenager (Julia Stiles, showing just how good an actress she can be when kept away from schmaltzy scripts), his moral dilemma exposes the schism between the moralities of Hollywood and Anytown America.

Mamet is an actors’ director, and a writers’ director — great dialogue and powerful ensemble dynamics are given precedence over flashy camerawork and Hollywood gloss. ‘State and Main’ is nothing more than a simple little film, the polar opposite of what ‘The Old Mill’ lampoons. From his films, such as ‘Homicide’, ‘Oleanna’ and ‘The Winslow Boy’ to plays such as ‘American Buffalo’ and ‘Glengarry Glen Ross’ and screenplays for ‘The Untouchables’ and ‘Wag the Dog’, it is Mamet’s ability to hit you in the face with harsh, brutal truths that makes his words linger long after you’ve left the theatre. ‘State and Main’ takes a turn away from this starkness and for this, it is unique — Mamet has only gone and made a film which plasters a smile on your face for its duration.

One day, audiences will tire of Hollywood churning out so many satires of itself, as if the only interesting thing in the world is the process of making a movie. Where so many recent showbiz satires have failed to get beyond the one-joke precept that showbiz is, like, crazy, Mamet’s sweet, delightful comedy is carried by the strength of an ensemble obviously having great fun, and his own razor-sharp pen, as eager as ever to poke out the eye of any deserving target.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:38 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Roger Donaldson
Starring: Kevin Costner, Bruce Greenwood, Steven Culp, Dylan Baker

There can have been few more critical periods in post-war world history than the thirteen days of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, when the USA and the USSR looked deep into each others’ eyes and wondered whether it was time to end the world. As the world teetered devastatingly close to the brink of total nuclear war, it was only the decision of one man, against all advice of his military advisors, to avoid a fight. In 1962, John F. Kennedy stopped being a young idealist and started down the road to assassination and sainthood. What we didn’t know, however, is that a good shoulder massage from Kevin Costner helped him on the way.

“Thirteen Days” tells the story of Kennedy’s diplomatic battles with his enemies, both domestic and foreign, from the point of view of old school-buddy, best mate and Presidential Aide Kenny O’Donnell (Costner). The terrible threesome of Kenny, John (Bruce Greenwood, “The Sweet Hereafter”) and little brother/attorney general Bobby (Steven Culp) turn to each other for comfort and guidance as conflicting advice flies from all directions, and they must decide whose agendas are being served.

Flawless in period detail, “Thirteen Days” captures the extreme threat and paranoia of the missile crisis wonderfully, building up almost unbearable tension as every decision brings the world one step closer to oblivion. But the thrill of the crisis is not reason enough to make a film, and there have been more than enough retellings of this story to demand further justification for its existence. Australian director Roger Donaldson (“Cocktail”, “Species”) seems to think that he is creating something very important, as he inexplicably shifts the film between black and white and colour at almost random intervals, implying some sort of historical, documentary element to what is essentially a bunch of fictionalised hokum.

This is a story of best buddies with that old Irish-American charm who can only talk in profound soundbites at all times, fighting against the big bad military chiefs who only want a war. Donaldson and screenwriter David Self ask the audience to believe that, when in need of something profound to say about the upcoming battle, Kennedy would quote Hsun Tzu’s “The Art of War” for inspiration.

Donaldson, so sure of the importance of every single moment of the film, bombards the audience with a never-ending soaring orchestra accompaniment, which attempts to build even the smallest moment into an event of huge tension and importance. The damn violins don’t let up for the entire film, floating around Washington DC like a mischievous heavenly choir taunting the protagonists with their inspiring music.

Costner, with a slightly embarrassing Irish brogue, is watchable for most of the film, but eventually succumbs to the god-complex so evident in “The Postman” — O’Donnell is standard Costner ,ber-human with no flaws and only pure good in his heart. Greenwood, however, in the role of his career, is not willing to let Costner take centre stage in JFK’s story, and turns in a remarkable performance as a man torn in a thousand directions, none of which seem to end in peace. Equally strong is Culp’s Bobby, a little brother destined for greater things learning the true nature of life in politics’ inner sanctum. The backup ensemble, featuring such wonderful actors as Dylan Baker as Secretary of Defence Bob McNamara and Michael Fairman as Adlai Stevenson, the UN representative who forced Russia into submission.

Like most Costner projects of late, “Thirteen Days” falls over not because of any technical problems, or poor production — the military skirmishes in Cuba are visually stunning — but because everybody involved has forgotten that this is just a film, not a sacred text. There have been hundreds of thousands of pages written on these particular thirteen days, and it would take a bad director to fail to capitalise on such incredible tension and political intrigue. To Donaldson’s credit, he manages to convey Nikita Khrushchev’s similar dilemma sympathetically, implying that these were two men struggling less against each other, and more against their own advisors, who were desperate for some excitement.

The potential of this story, and of JFK’s years in power, will never truly be realised until somebody gets the guts to film James Ellroy’s “American Tabloid”, but, so long as you don’t treat it as fact, this all-American apple pie rendition of a President/God and his best buddy taking on the world and saving it remains a watchable, impeccably created piece of high-tension drama.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:31 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Hayao Miyazaki
Starring: YUji Matsuda, Yuriko Ishida, Y*ko Tanaka, Kaoru Kobayashi (voices)

It is some time in Japan’s Muromachi era, and the young and handsome Prince Ashitaka (YUji Matsuda) is patrolling his idyllic village kingdom. His peaceful wandering is interrupted by the arrival from the forest of a Boar God possessed by demons of vengeance, hell-bent on destroying all in its path. Ashitaka, a great warrior, subdues the boar, but not before becoming infected by its deadly curse, which takes root in his arm and condemns him to a slow but certain death.
Ashitaka’s villagers are sure that the only way for him to be saved is to leave the town and head to the forests of the far east, where the Deer God may speed his recovery. On his journey, he comes across an iron processing plant on the edge of the forest, run by the wiley Lady Eboshi (Y*ko Tanaka), a passionate advocate of technological advance, particularly in the areas of deforestation and gun manufacture. Eboshi has set up the plant as a refuge for society’s outcasts, buying up prostitutes from the cities to run the machinery and defend her land.

In the forest, Ashitaka discovers that the animal gods who have lived peacefully for an eternity are being destroyed by the industrial onslaught of Eboshi’s aggressive tactics. While the apes tirelessly replant trees every night, the wolves, led by feisty wolf-child San, the Princess Mononoke (Yuriko Ishida), attack Eboshi nightly, hoping to drive her from the land and leave the woods in peace. Through San, Ashitaka finally discovers the Deer God who may heal his arm, which has become increasingly possessed by rage and ultraviolence. At the same time, however, a shady group of hunters sent with orders from the Mikado are searching for the Deer God’s head, which is said to confer immortality. As the boars mobilise for attack on the humans, the humans hunt for the Deer God, and the apes lose their mind, all that stands between Eboshi and total destruction of the forest are Ashitaka, San and her wolves, and one final, almighty battle.

Hayao Miyazaki is quite rightly thought of as a god in animation circles, beating paths of innovation which Disney can only follow in delighted awe. The Japan across which Ashitaka travels is a backdrop of stunning watercolours, full of intricate detail and sweeping grandeur. Character movement is both graceful and studied, and the kaleidoscopic colour palette of the medieval setting makes for a landmark exploration of the possibilities of traditional animation.

At its heart, this is a tale of eco-adventure, with a moral that wouldn’t be out of place in ‘Fern Gully’. However, as trite as it is, in Miyazaki’s hands, the battle between the cute animals and spirits of the forest and the onslaught of human progress becomes far more compelling than it should rightly be. This isn’t Disney, and there is no need for a wisecracking sidekick to lighten the message’s burden for its youthful audience — there is only a forest full of confused, fearful animals ready to go to war to protect their future.

Miyazaki’s battle is not one between good and evil, and indeed Eboshi is not portrayed as a cartoon villain. Her iron town is a refuge for those with nothing else in life, and she truly believes that her actions in destroying the forest are with just cause. In the spirit world, the good guys quickly turn on their friends and are overrun by evil at the drop of a hat, as even Ashitaka’s increasingly murderous arm testifies.

Two hours of Japanese mythology wrapped in ever-increasing layers of unfamiliar custom can make for difficult viewing, particularly for the children it is intended for (apart from all the decapitations and mutilation and such). There is a dubbed version in circulation featuring the voices of Billy Crudup, Claire Danes and Gillian Anderson, with a script adapted by fantasy legend Neil Gaiman, which supposedly translates the message of ‘Mononoke’ into something more easily palatable for Western audiences. However, if given a chance to wash over you, this non-dubbed ‘Mononoke’ is a wild ride, unadulterated from Miyazaki’s groundbreaking vision.

Although it is now four years old, ‘Mononoke’ is a true landmark in animation. While Hollywood is rushing to computer-generated techniques to find the future of the genre with films such as ‘Shrek’ and ‘Final Fantasy’, Miyazaki’s mastery proves that there’s magic still to be found with such outdated tools as pen and ink.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:12 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Christopher Nolan
Starring: Guy Pearce, Carrie-Anne Moss, Joe Pantoliano

Film noir died as a genre when audiences stopped wondering what was going to happen next. Heady concoctions of dark, everyman detectives, mysterious femmes fatale and labyrinthine plots of betrayal can only ever end up in one place. As a hand flicks a blood-stained Polaroid, a picture capturing a scene of violent death, Christopher Nolan’s ‘Memento’ begins right there — at the logical end-point of an old hardboiled crime flick. As the colours drain from the picture, it leaps back into its camera, a bullet leaps back into a gun, and we are left wondering: we know what’s going to happen, but what the hell just happened?

Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce) is a man driven by an obsession — to find the man who raped and murdered his wife. Leonard, however, is not driven by logic or plans but by instinct — he has no short term memory, and must write everything down or he has no knowledge that it ever happened. Knowing only of his wife’s death because he has tattooed it across his chest, it is the first thing he sees every day as he looks in the mirror. With a system of notes and Polaroids, he constantly reminds himself of his purpose, and burns clues onto his flesh where they will never be lost. He does not question, he does only what his own notes tell him to do. The audience, along with him, travel backwards from the film’s brutal climax, moment by moment, with no knowledge of how Leonard arrived at that point.

The mysterious Natalie (Carrie-Anne Moss — ‘The Matrix’) helps Leonard’s quest, because, the Polaroid says, she feels sympathy. Teddy (Joe Pantoliano) seems at first to be Leonard’s sidekick, but perhaps he is playing the affliction to his own advantage — if somebody tells Leonard that they are friends, he (and the audience) can only assume that they are. All that is true is written down, and this must be trusted.

eMemento’ is a powerful exploration of the nature of identity, memory and perception. Nolan, in only his second film, takes the trick of playing out a film in reverse and makes it so much more than a painful gimmick. The delight of ‘Memento’ is not in who did it, or who gets killed in the end, but the chain of manipulation and deceit that turns a successful insurance investigator into an empty, vengeance-obsessed shell. The dynamite script, played out in scrawled notes and snatched snapshots, asks many more questions than it ever answers, but it expertly peels layer after layer from Leonard’s psyche, searching for the absolute truth his memory won’t let him have.

Pearce, whose Hollywood career post-eLA Confidential’ has been decidedly less stellar than co-star Russell Crowe’s, is presented with an enormous challenge in fleshing out the enigma of Shelby, but he handles it with stunning ease. Nobody ever expected Mike from ‘Neighbours’ to come this far, or to have the ability to own the screen with such raw power, yet this is truly the kind of role that should shoot him onto the A-list where he belongs. Moss, another superstar in the making, and Pantoliano, who has always been ethat other guy in that really good film’, do a fine job of playing Shelby’s tormentors and aides, never letting their characters stray too far into noir caricature.

The 29 year-old Nolan presented himself with a challenge in making this all stick together, yet it plays out impeccably. A sharp, edgy visual style belies great attention to detail, as insignificant gestures towards the story’s end take on devastating significance eearlier’ on. Its play with memory and obsession is reminiscent of Nicolas Roeg’s ‘Don’t Look Now’, only we know how it all finishes up. As the plot twists and turns in reverse, piled-up betrayals undo themselves, and the stack of Polaroids gets smaller, Shelby’s story still lurches into a kind of reverse self-destruction to which the audience, so riveted to his concept of truth, feel a certain identification.

It is not often that a film can do something genuinely new, particularly in such a moribund genre, but Memento is a surprising little treat. Just don’t let anybody tell you the beginning.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:19 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Steve Yeagar

Of all cinema’s most shocking scenes, from the razored eyeballs of ‘Un Chien Andalou’ to the ear removal of ‘Reservoir Dogs’, there is one moment that stands above them all, and one that will never be topped. Towards the end of John Waters’ 1972 cult classic ‘Pink Flamingos’, his drag queen star Divine, with eye makeup so outrageous that his hair had to be shaved to accommodate it, spies a poodle depositing its business on the street. In a single shot, he kneels down, collects this delectable treat from the ground, and eats it up like peanut butter. These kind of scenes, you just don’t forget.

‘Divine Trash’, a production for the Independent Film Channel, is neither a documentary about Waters’ career nor about Divine — it is about their lives up to the point where Divine and his shit-stained teeth stared gleefully into the camera, and cinema was changed forever. Through interviews with absolutely everybody involved with Waters’ early career, from make-up artists to film censors and parents who have never watched his films, as well as those who have followed and worshipped him, a story is pieced together about the life of a real underground film movement, and two men who would never be happy unless they were shocking everybody else.

Waters, growing up on trashy horror films, dropped out of film school and developed his love for film through worship of Kenneth Anger and Andy Warhol. Drawing inspiration from such seminal underground classics as ‘Sins of the Fleshapoids’, he began to shoot his own guerrilla 8mm masterworks, rounding up Baltimore’s fabulous freaks to take the leading roles. Chief amongst these was the 300-pound drag queen Divine, known to his mum as Glenn Milstead, destined to become the greatest and most controversial queen ever to hit the silver screen. Divine was to feature in all of Waters’ films until the late eighties, when he died of a sleep apnea one week after the opening of ‘Hairspray’.

As Waters’ earlier films, such as ‘Multiple Maniacs’, developed his reputation as a daringly different leader of the underground, he with the pencil-thin moustache precariously balanced on the top of his lip became a darling of the Maryland it-crowd. Learning all of his technical skills from the person who processed his film stock, Waters borrowed a large sum of money from his father to make ‘Pink Flamingos’, a story of a competition to win the crown of efilthiest person alive’. After filling his previous films with lobster-rapes and porno crucifixions, it only made sense that his feature debut would forever alter the limits of truly independent cinema.

Yeagar, keen to get the full story of these early years, has tracked down anybody with something even slightly interesting to say, and included far more than he needed to of any of them. Centred around interviews with Waters in 1972 and the present day, the film has a tendency to become an endless procession of talking heads saying exactly the same thing. It is interesting to hear Jim Jarmusch (eGhost Dog’, ‘Mystery Train’) talk about Waters’ influence on the underground, but then David O. Russell (eSpanking the Monkey’, ‘Three Kings’) shows up to say exactly the same thing. It is clear that everybody involved either loves or hates Waters to bits, but a few less interviews and a little more depth would have greatly improved the documentary.

After skirting through Waters’ life and covering ‘Pink Flamingos’ in extensive detail, interviewing even the set decorators, ‘Divine Trash’ goes no farther. It vaguely mentions Divine’s death, but no details, and makes no reference to any of Waters’ films after ‘Pink Flamingos’ save for a brief mention of 1998’s ‘Pecker’.

This poorly constructed, by-the-book documentary tells a fascinating story, but one that could have been so much more. Post-‘Flamingos’, Waters has gone on to become the ultimate Hollywood outsider, churning out gleefully subversive tributes to a world that never existed except in his head, where midgets and transvestites can live happily with two point four children, and freaks are society’s heroes. There is no doubt that Yeagar is a devoted fan of his early work, and for anybody else that is (and that should be everybody), this is well worth checking out, if only to learn just how they got the poodle to perform on demand.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:23 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Cameron Crowe
Starring: Patrick Fugit, Billy Crudup, Kate Hudson, Frances McDormand, Jason Lee, Anna Paquin, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Noah Taylor

It’s the seventies, and William Miller (Fugit) is just like any other kid. He lives his life in his bedroom, lost in rock and roll, and his overprotective mother (McDormand) worries that she will lose him to the guitar-headed beast. Only a truly twisted mother, however, believes that there is evil in Simon and Garfunkel. Being slightly more obsessed than most, William has been producing and writing for music fanzines, and a chance encounter with legendary rock critic Lester Bangs (Hoffman) opens up a world unknown to any other fifteen year old.

Bangs assigns William to interview Black Sabbath backstage for his magazine, but it is the support band, Stillwater, who win his heart. Becoming fast friends with the band, he is encouraged by Bangs to speak to Rolling Stone, who are so excited by this up and coming young writer that they arrange to send him on a nationwide tour with the band.

If this, and the rock and roll hijinks of the road movie that follow, sound like Cameron Crowe has taken a leaf out of the Disney school of emagical kid pitches for Major League baseball team’ writing, then it all becomes clearer when one realises that this is in fact loosely based around his own life n he was, indeed, writing liner notes for bands in his teens. ‘Almost Famous’ could not be further from Crowe’s previous films, ‘Jerry Maguire’ and ‘Singles’. If anything, it is closest in spirit to that classic of early eighties cinema which came from his pen, ‘Fast Times at Ridgmont High’.

Although Fugit is the true star of ‘Almost Famous’, giving a mesmeric yet innocent portrayal of a boy growing up all too quickly in the depths of rock depravity, it is the performances of those he meets along the way that make this film truly special. Stillwater, led by Russell (Billy Crudup) and Jeff (Jason Lee), and managed by Noah Taylor, are a true fair-to-middling rock band, full of a healthy mix of Spinal Tap excess and true grit and emotion n it is refreshing to see Lee playing a meaty role outside of Kevin Smith’s kingdom. The real star-making turn comes from Kate Hudson, the band’s chief groupie (or ‘Band Aide’) Penny Lane, who falls for Russell while William is falling for her. Hudson owns every inch of the screen whenever she appears, and with a bloodline that just screams “star”, she is certain to soon get past lazy critics mentioning her mother (Goldie Hawn) in every review.

Hoffman is also a real delight, proving again that he is the best actor, bar none, working in Hollywood n nobody else could so deeply inhabit such a complex old rocker as Bangs and place such pleasure in his neuroses. Surely, one day the world will wake up and flood Hoffman’s doorstep with leading roles and Academy Awards. One day.

While ‘Almost Famous’ veers dangerously close to becoming a love letter to Cameron Crowe, from Cameron Crowe, in the end it succeeds as a great rock and roll film, worthy of its Oscar nominations. Where ‘High Fidelity’ was a warning about the dangers of getting lost to the music, ‘Almost Famous’ revels in it, delivering one big, acid-drenched, fuck-off power chord to those who think rock can ever die. From a director who has previously specialised in maudlin romantic comedy (with a Gen X edge), nothing could be more refreshing.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:10 PM | Permalink

Starring: Kirsten Dunst, Eliza Dushku, Jesse Bradford, Gabrielle Union
Director: Peyton Reed

They’re sexy, they’re cute, and they’re popular to boot. They’re ch ch cheerleaders. They care not for the football team, they care only for competition cheerleading. Pom poms? Forget it, bud. This is gymnastics on speed, with bitchiness amped up to ten. Or at least, that’s what ‘Bring It On’ would like you to think. Seemingly conceived off the back of a ten-second pitch along the lines of ‘sassy, sassy, sassy’, ‘Bring It On’ is a bucketload of sass, tight skirts and candy-coated fun primed just right for its target demographic.

Dunst, recently so very wonderful in ‘The Virgin Suicides’, is Torrance, cheerleader captain, head choreographer and all-round popular girl personality type. Dushku, fresh from kicking vampire slayer’s ass as ‘Buffy”s arch-nemesis, Faith, is Missy, the inner-city kid fresh from LA, a ehardcore gymnast’ with a perky GenY attitude who cares not for the cheers but needs somewhere to practice her backflips. When Missy recognises the national champion cheerleaders as having secretly lifted their cheers from a Compton high school’s all-black cheerleading team, headed up by Isis (Union), who are too poor to make it to nationals, Torrance undergoes a personal ethical crisis, and the team must rebuild with new cheers in time for the next national finals.

Soundtracked by such fare as ‘Slang Dat Bottom’, ‘Booty Bounce’ and ‘Shake A Lil’ Somethin”, the usual cocktail of love interest, comedy montage sequences, lewd jokes and knowing winks keep the very simple plot motoring along for ninety minutes or so. Missy’s inner-city cynicism evaporates as soon as she straps on a pom pom, and soon enough she’s participating in fund-raising bikini car washes with the rest of the girls. And boys. Apparently these days boys get involved in the cheerleading as well, and only fifty per cent of them are gay. If nothing else, the film’s casual attitude to sexuality is refreshing. It was not, however, refreshing for the group of fifteen year old boys at the screening this reviewer attended, who recoiled in disgust as two boys flirted with each other. Young boys on a booty call do not wish to be interrupted by questioning of sexuality, one presumes.

The odd thing about this film, beyond its first-time-director teen film razz, perky soundtrack and incessant product placement, is the excessive presence of talent in the leading actors. What Dunst is doing here is her business alone, but one would have thought she was a little beyond the sassy-teen projects by now. Dushku and Union, however, are hardly huge cinematic names, and their talent seems far more natural and affecting than the cardboard “bitch” characters surrounding them. Of course, ‘Buffy’ fans have known for a long time just how much Faith rocks, but we’re still trying to convince the world that Sarah Michelle Gellar is the poo, so it’s nice to see that Dushku has taken it upon herself to move beyond.

There are plenty of cringe-worthy moments for anybody beyond their teenage years, but at least the film does not ask you to accept it for anything it is not. There are some cute attempts to deal with racism and acceptance, but mostly, you are asked to relax and enjoy the sights. Don’t demand anything more than a healthy dose of two dimensional sugar, and ‘Bring It On’ will bring it, for sure.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:25 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Starring: Anthony Hopkins, Jessica Lange, Alan Cumming, Jonathan Rhys-Meyers, Harry Lennix, Colm Feore, Osheen Jones
Director: Julie Taymor

From Peter Greenaway’s ‘Prospero’s Books’ to Baz Luhrmann’s ‘Romeo and Juliet’, there has been a rich tradition of loose interpretation in recent Shakespearian adaptations. New York avant garde theatre director Julie Taymor’s surreal take on ‘Titus Andronicus’, perhaps his least performed and least loved play, may prove to be one of the finest films we have had in the Shakespearian genre in some time.

The film opens with a young boy (Jones) at a kitchen table, growing increasingly manic as he gives up on dinner and squirts tomato sauce all over his toy soldiers. Suddenly, the window blasts in, flames rip through the house, and a hulk of a man dressed all in black runs through, grabs the boy, and heads out the front door… into a Roman coliseum. Marching by their thousands, in beautiful, robotic synchronicity, Roman soldiers are returning from war. One face, caked in mud, stands tall above the rest, and the boy goes to be near him. The great general Titus Andronicus (Hopkins) has returned from war against the Goths, glorious in victory. Accompanied by tanks, motorbikes and horses, he claims victory for Rome and has the queen of the Goths, Tamora (Lange) to prove it.

Taymor’s world is one in which coliseums and Pepsi cans exist side by side, truly a place of anytime. The young Goths may have a penchant for industrial music, but this is indeed an ancient time, and much of the action takes place in what now remains of once-grand Roman buildings. Although jarring for the first few minutes, it helps to create a truly unique space for Taymor to play our her vision of ‘Titus’, and as we wander through the story with the unspeaking boy, there are many delights to uncover.

This is without a doubt Shakespeare’s bloodiest play, obsessed as it is with amputation and body parts. As Titus returns from war, he must sacrifice one of his prisoners in celebration and devotion to Rome. Despite the tearful pleas of Tamora, he slays her eldest son before her eyes. As Tamora later plots revenge from within the ranks of Rome where she has become the wife of weaselly emperor Saturninus (Cumming), unspeakable horrors unfold. Along with her mischievous Moor lover, Aaron (Lennix), they hatch a plan to strip Titus of his children, and of his mind. Several rapes, murders and severed limbs later, Titus a broken man and his children a shadow of the people they once were. Avenging his own injustices, in what is probably Shakespeare’s most gruesome moment in all that he wrote, revenge is a dish best served piping hot, with a fine red to accompany.

Hopkins is of course wonderful as Titus, having no problems breezing through a role straight out of the Shakespearian top-shelf. This is no surprise, and Alan Cumming is also fine as the snivelling and selfish, although ultimately well-meaning, Saturninus. Unfortunately Lange delivers her lines as though she has no idea what they mean, in the finest tradition of year ten students everywhere. It’s not that hard to understand, kids.

Despite a few ill-advised surreal montage sequences, Taymor does a fine job of creating a visually inventive and in many ways innovative bit of Bard-work. ‘Titus’ was savaged on US release, by critics who had heard that it wasn’t a very good play to begin with, which is by no means true. ‘Titus Andronicus’ is Shakespeare at his darkest and most brutal, and certainly requires a strong stomach — Taymor does not shy away from the most gruesome aspects — and makes for compelling, fresh viewing.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:28 PM | Permalink

Director: Guy Ritchie
Starring: Jason Statham, Brad Pitt, Benicio Del Toro, Dennis Farina, Vinnie Jones, Rade Serbedzija, Alan Ford

The British film industry was a safe place to be a couple of years ago. Apart from the odd steel worker getting his gear out for the ladies, there was no danger in sight, and no real excitement — and then came ‘Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels’. With its ultra-stylised direction, big soundtrack and supercool dialogue, ‘Lock, Stock’ was a marketer’s dream — it was the film on which Cool Brittania could hang on the coat tails. Despite protestations that its laddish affectations and overlit bar scenes saw the film play out as an extended Heineken ad, Guy Ritchie’s debut spawned a monster: it was the film of the New Lad.

To the present day, and Ritchie attempts to follow up a cultural icon with, well, more of the same, only bigger, brasher, darker and cooler. Sticking with what he knows, this is another yarn of coincidence and stupidity in the London underworld, only with a much more spectacular cast.

The farce kicks off with Franky Four Fingers (Del Toro) heisting a diamond eas big as your fist’ from Belgium, with intent to make American dealer Avi (Farina) very happy. Stopping off in London with the rock in a case cuffed to his wrist, Franky is sidetracked by his love for a good gambleOe Turkish (Statham), an unlicensed boxing promoter, is warming one of his boxers up for a fight against the stable of Brick Top (Ford), a nasty gangster with a penchant for piggery. Deciding that he needs a new caravan to work from, he arranges to purchase one from local pikey One Punch Mickey (Pitt). Meanwhile, Avi is in London, and along with the nutcase assistance of Bullet Tooth Tony (Jones), there’s a missing diamond to be found.

Treading a fine line between farce and thriller, Ritchie’s world is populated by cartoon nutters who turn from wisecracking blokes to psychos with razor blades at the blink of an eyelid. Of course, Vinnie Jones is never going to hint at any sort of depth in any character he portrays, but the real surprise is the power of Pitt’s performance. Like Tyler Durden with a comedy Irish accent a thousand times worse than the one he attempted in ‘The Devil’s Own’, Pitt is wickedly funny as the mischievous bare-knuckle boxing gypsy, but when Brick Top’s overzealous use of muscle shatters his world, and that of his caravan community, the real actor in him comes out, and the mix of menace and dread beneath the playful pikey’s surface bubbles over in the sweaty surrealism of the boxing ring.

Like a British Tarantino with more eye candy, Ritchie uses the same tricks as ‘Lock, Stock’ to liven up the party — the hyper-kinetic editing and woozy movements through freeze frames are tricks which several films and countless ads have attempted (and failed) to imitate. In a strange alternative world where the female is practically non-existent, his lads and hardcases play out the farce with a sense of inevitability.

The problem with ‘Snatch’ is that, for all Ritchie’s eye popping ability as a director, there isn’t exactly much scope in his writing. While the dialogue is witty and cutting, and the plot is sharp and spritely, we are treading over exactly the same territory as ‘Lock, Stock’, only it’s no longer fresh and exciting. There’s nothing inherently wrong with resorting to extreme violence and gags about dead bodies for a laugh, but it tends to signify a writer stretching for ideas.

‘Snatch’ is hilarious, stylish, and technically accomplished, and at times it lurches into incredibly dark territory, but Ritchie has used his eget out of jail free’ card to get past the difficult second movie. He won’t be allowed to get away with the same film three times in a row.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 3:00 PM | Permalink

Originally published in Hype Magazine

Director: Andrew Dominik
Starring: Eric Bana, Simon Lyndon, David Field, Daniel Wyllie, Vince Colosimo, Kate Beahan
Rated: R

By rights, this should have been a bad film. A combination of Michael Gudinski’s Mushroom Pictures, with only the very questionable ‘Cut’ to their name, Andrew Dominik, a music video director still wet behind the ears, and Eric ‘Ray Martin’ Bana, does not exactly scream pedigree. What a delight, then, to discover a truly great film which might just save an otherwise embarrassing year for Australian cinema (and let’s nobody mention ‘Sample People’).

Pentridge Prison, 1978: we open to the sounds of Frankie Laine crooning ‘Don’t Fence Me In’, the clouds in the sky speed past the imposing grey buildings as time marches by so quickly that it hardly moves at all. A young Mark Brandon ‘Chopper’ Read, so cocky and assured of his own notoriety that he takes great pleasure in using his full name, including nickname, at any opportunity, thumbs his nose at rival crims. A standover man around the Melbourne tracks, he is keen to assert his authority on the inside. From nowhere, a shiv, bloodshed, double crosses, surgery, paranoia.

Melbourne, 1986: Read stumbles out into the harsh light of freedom, filled half with regret and half with adrenaline, and with less ears than when he last saw the outside. Needing money, absolution and maybe a little love, he revisits his old haunts (in overlit, bleached out harsh-reality vision), gets a few scams on the go, and sets himself on the trail to murder and straight back inside.

The usual suspects of recent Australian film (Lyndon, Field, Colosimo) provide a very strong backdrop, but this is Eric Bana’s film. On no previous evidence and very little justification, this is one of those odd moments of casting genius that makes you believe in a higher power. Eric Bana, Chopper Read. Chopper Read, Eric Bana. This does not make sense. Bana’s performance, however, captures depths which the real Chopper probably never knew, creating a character who can slice someone to pieces and then offer them a cigarette, a larrikin who is in no way sympathetic or lovable, but just is.

If ever there was a man that defined the schizophrenia of Australia’s heritage, it is Read. Having the outsiders’ luxury of knowing nothing of Read or his legend, it is easy to see how the Australian public so readily identify with him as the lovable face of bloody murder. Chopper does right by his mates, doesn’t mind a good yarn, and always wins in the end, even if that takes a good few deaths and stints in prison. A good old no bullshit crim, only ever charged with a single murder.

Dominik, with the able assistance of a great pub-rock soundtrack and Mick Harvey’s wonderful score, proves himself to be a very assured director, finding a delicate balance between the first-time director’s love for visual fireworks and a more studied, distanced story — like Bana’s performance, and like Read’s tall tales, Dominik does not judge, nor condemn, nor celebrate, he merely tells it how it is. Or might have been, if everybody wasn’t telling porkies.

We don’t need to know what happens after the film decides to leave (getting pissed on ‘McFeast’ and buying a farm in Tasmania doesn’t make good cinema), but from Pentridge through to his ‘Sixty Minutes’ interview in the early nineties, Chopper’s life makes for a riveting, hilarious story of blood, death, misery and beer — everything a good film needs.

Posted by Patrick Pittman at 2:27 PM | Permalink

Director: ‘Thomas Lee’
Starring: James Spader, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster, Lou Diamond Phillips, Robin Tunney, Wilson Cruz, Peter Facinelli

Traditionally, when directors have wished to have their name removed from films, it has been replaced by the pseudonym ‘Alan Smithee’. An Alan Smithee film is an assurance that the person primarily responsible for its creation wants no association with it. Figuring that many people have cottoned on to the Smithee game, the Director’s Guild have created a new pseudonym, making its maiden voyage here on this floating hulk of metal.

‘Thomas Lee’ is in fact a bizarre chimera, a hybrid of Walter e48 Hrs’ Hill and one Francis Ford Coppola, who came on board in post-production to attempt to piece together Hill’s mess. When the man who directed ‘Brewster’s Millions’ doesn’t want his name associated with a movie, the signs are ominous.
It’s deep space in the year something, and a bored medical crew are floating through space, passing the time by wisecracking, playing chess