Category: Film

Compulsion is a terrible thing, taking over lives and robbing people of their humanity. Sexual compulsion is obviously one of the more private compulsions that one can have, and yet it can be more consuming than almost any other. Shame is about the obliteration of the self through the pursuit of sexual release.

Contrary to anything else that you may have heard, Shame is not about Michael Fassbender’s penis, although it is something that you see more than once. The plenitude of sex characteristics both primary and secondary on display belies one simple fact: Shame is one of the least sexy and erotic films about sexual acts ever made, rightfully and deliberately so.

The Australian R rating is an insult to director Steve McQueen, but there’s no fighting it: people got naked and engaged in a mechanical pantomime, and so we must protect all but the most rarefied from witnessing it.

The third day of the Japanese Film Festival was attacked from all sides, but featured two stalwarts of the nation’s cinematic output: the weepy dog story and the sugary tale of a pattissier in the making, more commonly recognised as “the chef’s journey”.

Star Watching Dog

Japanese films have a tendency of making up Japanese folklore where they feel necessary. Does the star watching dog exist? The idea goes that dogs watch the stars, not knowing they can never reach them. Therefore, they always aim for the top.

Japanese dogs never banked on Laika.

The second day of the Japanese Film Festival was a bumpy ride, with one of the films essentially fizzling and dying before my eyes and the other providing solid laughter but not much in the way of substance. It’s a tough life at the festival.

Princess Toyotomi

At first I thought that Princess Toyotomi simply didn’t translate, but as it progressed it became increasingly clear that the film I was watching was simply incoherent, and more than a little bit stupid. Realising that a film’s lack of quality is not a failing on your own part is a great source of relief, because it’s near impossible to describe Princess Toyotomi as anything approaching a good movie.

The Japanese Film Festival is always my favourite time of year. Any excuse to sit in a darkened room for up to eleven days is good enough for me, and Japan consistently releases some of my favourite style of films. Each year the JFF presents a selection – not always good, but normally always enough to raise a reaction from me.

This year the organisers went ahead with a plot to open the festival with a comedy, in stark contrast to the family melodrama of last year’s About Her Brother. While perhaps slightly too long (and not without a slight glitch), A Ghost Of A Chance was a fresh start for 2011, the festival’s fifteenth year.

Drive has been on the fingertips of everyone in Antipodean critical and festival circles for months. It wasn’t until this week, after being thoroughly sick of the hype, that I finally got to see it. Was it worth the wait? Definitely. Could I have done without Chris Murray introducing it in the same effusive tones as he did the execrable Kick-Ass last year? Indubitably.

Drive is a tonal delight, a package of constant surprises. Fortunately, its incredibly filmic nature means that the unwrapping can only happen before your eyes and not on my page. Drive is not perfect, but cumulative moments suggest that it very nearly is. It’s a film’s film, as only certain directors can make; it is most assuredly not an entry in the same canon as The Fast and the Furious.

Before I went to see The Help I braced myself for a horribly misguided racial nightmare, but in the final analysis I found myself quite surprised. While I can see where people would take issue with this movie’s themes and execution, I personally found that it was a fairly balanced and mostly unproblematic story about women discovering their agency in a terrible time and place in American history.

Despite the fact that I did a course called “Film in Black and White” I can’t pretend to be an expert on African American representation in cinema, and I will defer to other people on that, but The Help is a fundamentally good hearted movie that mostly fails to condescend; it aims only to drown out cinemas with the embarrassing sniffles of audience members who don’t know that they’re being played – overtly so, but not offensively.

One of the best films of the last few years is In Bruges, a melancholy comedy about a pair of Irish hit men who found themselves in Bruges. I was delighted then, to see Brendan Gleeson in a film so thoroughly unlike In Bruges while being simultaneously reminiscent of it. It wasn’t until the day after that the penny dropped: The Guard is the brother of In Bruges, just as its writer/director John Michael McDonagh is the brother of In Bruges’ writer/director Martin McDonagh. Funny, that.

The Guard, of course, hits an entirely different emotional key: that of endless and shameless laughter. It’s the sort of film that will suddenly attack you a couple of days later while you’re washing your hands and you’ll audibly crack up. It’s a haunting film, but not in the traditional sense of the word: it’s good enough to lodge itself into your brain, to store itself up for inopportune moments of hilarity.