Screening somewhere - Rod Bishop retrieves the overlooked THIS MUST BE THE PLACE (Paolo Sorrentino, Italy, 2011)

Robert Smith, the creator, writer, and vocalist of British band The Cure has made no public comment about this Sorrentino film. 

But Smith’s face-painted, lip-sticked, gothic, ragged visage has clearly been lifted by the Italian director for Sean Penn’s Cheyenne: a dissolute, squeaky-voiced, former rock god who gave up the profession after a couple of young brothers committed suicide from listening to his angst-ridden “depressed songs for depressed kids”.

Sorrentino has said: “I saw [Robert Smith] backstage after a concert in Rome…it’s a disconcerting dichotomy to see a guy of fifty years with the look of a sixteen-year-old, you don’t know what to focus on. Apparently Robert Smith keeps this look because his wife loves it, so he has that look all day, not only when he goes to a concert.”

Cheyenne is living a lonely life in a Dublin mansion with his wife Jane (Francis McDormand), who loves him and his “look”. If the idea of a Robert Smith lookalike shacking up with Francis McDormand seems unbelievable, well yes, it is. Sorrentino clearly knows it’s unbelievable, but he has only just started playing games with his audience.

Unfortunately, the first act is almost as bad as the film’s title. Sometimes, a song title for a film title isn’t a great idea, even if this one does come from Talking Heads. Serious audience endurance is required for the rambling first 40 mins, but the film does eventually take a dramatic tonal shift as Cheyenne travels to New York to see his dead father, a former survivor of Auschwitz. Cheyenne then enlists the help of a veteran Nazi hunter (Judd Hirsch), clearly modelled on Simon Wiestenthal, and pursues his father’s on-the-run Nazi tormenter, through New Mexico and Utah. 

It’s incongruous, of course – seeing a Robert Smith look-alike drag his suitcase through desert and mountain landscapes, to take revenge on a World War II monster, but Sorrentino pulls off a final confrontation between the goth and the 95-year-old Nazi, that’s as memorable as most things in cinema.

Made on a budget of $28 million, it grossed a ridiculous $144,000 in the USA, despite the presence of Oscar-winners Penn and McDormand and a soundtrack and live performance from David Byrne. 

However, it did take $8 million in Italy and close to a million in both Germany and France. It’s a film about the USA for Europeans.

The weirdness of This Must Be the Place is reminiscent of a small group of other notable Americana road movies written and directed by Europeans that tanked at the box office.

US friends of mine were scathing about Paris, Texas (1984) from the German Wim Wenders, sneering at what they perceived as an Americana fetishization of billboard signage. It didn’t appear that way to Europeans, however, who promptly gave the film the Palme d’Or.

The prolific Spanish director Bigus Luna also had a go at Americana in Reborn (1982). Dennis Hopper is a television evangelist who enlists the Italian mafia to supply him with a stigmatist to help him reap in donations at Texan church meetings. A real Italian woman who can’t speak English but who can bleed at Christ’s crucifixion wounds turns up, and Hopper’s evangelist abruptly turns virtually catatonic. Reborn is almost certainly the only time in the cinema where three petrol pump jockeys appear as The Three Wise Men. The film never made it past VHS and is now only available in dodgy bootlegs.

The crazed Serbian filmmaker Emir Kusturica, twice winner of the Palme d’Or, went all Americana in 1993 with the surrealist Arizona Dream, casting Johnny Depp as a flying fish expert who loves listening to the dreams of fish while working for New York’s Department of Fish and Game. He journeys to Douglas, Arizona, to work in a car dealership (run by Jerry Lewis) and becomes romantically involved with a husband-killer (Faye Dunaway), who is trying to build a flying machine, and with her daughter (Lili Taylor) who plays accordion to her pet turtles. It’s a film about magic realism and dreamers, and was very cooly received in the USA and elsewhere. 

Made for a budget of $19 million, it played in only three cinemas in the USA for a ridiculous gross of $112,000. The New Zealand box office gross was $24. Europeans, however, gave it the Special Jury Prize at Berlin.

These weird USA road movies by Europeans for Europeans - despite the star power of Penn, Depp, Dunaway, McDormand, Hopper, Jerry Lewis and David Byrne - haven’t come within a coo-ee of covering their budgets. Paris, Texas did the best, even though Harry Dean Stanton and Nastassja Kinski can’t be classed as star power. It grossed $3.5 mill worldwide and on a budget of $1.8 mill, it might have broken even. But for the backroom executives, $3.5 mill is a poor return on a Palme d’Or winner.

But who wants to live in a world where Arizona Dream, This Must Be the Place, Reborn and Paris, Texas can’t be made?

AT THE FESTIVAL OF DANGEROUS IDEAS - Read Jane Mills introduction to the screening of SALO OR THE 120 DAYS OF SODOM (Pier Paolo Pasolini, Italy, 1975)

Editor's Note: Jane Mills wishes to note the superb contribution to discussion of Salo by Professor Catherine Lumby when the film screened at the Randwick Ritz as part of an earlier extensive season of Pasolini's films supported by Cinema Reborn. 

                                                            ***********************************

Introduction to Pasolini’s Salò, or the 120 days of Sodom (1975) by Associate Professor Jane Mills at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, Dendy Cinema, 29 August 2026

 

I know of no work of art  as shocking as Pasolini’s Salò.

Murder, torture, sexual abuse are all depicted.

Most shocking of all is the depiction of absolute power and its abuse:

Abuse by for libertines -- an aristocrat, a bishop,  a magistrate and a high financier, representing the State, the Church, the Law and Big Business. Their power underpinned by  a network of informers and collaborators.  Their victims reduced to commodities, owned and disposed at whim. 
[Were Pasolini making the film today, would he,  I wonder, have included a media magnate?]

 

Salò is  shocking –and dangerous –  not only because of what it tells but how it tells. So many dangerous ideas inform how  it was made. 

·       Pasolini uses the classic writings of the Marquis de Sade and Dante to create a dark allegory to critique fascism, capitalist consumerism, and absolute power.

·       His sets display elegant art deco décor and avant garde artwork – art that the Nazis banned as decadent— to highlight the ugly brutality of the libertines.

·       The film’s creative cinematography positions audiences not as the victims (which might invite us to empathise with them), but as the abusers,- thereby making us, the audience, collaborators.

These are dangerous ideas, pushing filmmaking ideas to their limits. 

 

But even more dangerous than Pasolini’s  ideas opposing fascism and neoliberal consumerist economics, are these ideas themselves. De Sade’s sadomasochism shows how power reduces the human body to a commodity. Neo-capitalist consumerism requires the brutal destruction, enslavement, and extermination of indigenous and traditional societies – i.e. what Pasolini called “anthropological genocide.” 

 

These dangerous ideas aren’t  why  the film was persistently banned in Australia. But before outlining the Australian history of censoring Salò, let’s remind purselves that in 1966,  the Roman Catholic Church abolished its Index of Forbidden Books and Films.  It shifted its philosophy from enforced institutional censorship to trusting the mature moral conscience of individual believers.

Not so Australian governments. Our Film Classification Board might state: “adults should be able to read, hear, see and play what they want.”  But on this, it doesn’t deliver.

The film was released in 1975 – three days after Pasolini was tortured and murdered.  In 1976 Australia banned it.  A year later. No one could buy, sell, import, exhibit or see it – it offended, was obscene.

In 1993, it was unbanned. The classifiers deemed it: “a serious work of art pursuing a serious political purpose.” The sky didn’t fall in, but in the mid ’90s, “reason began to slumber, and monsters gathered.”  A revised classification code now ordained artistic merit was no longer permissible as a major defense. 

And in 1998, Salò was re-banned.

In 2010 it was unbanned. Salò received a R18+ rating.  Which should mean anyone over the age of 18 can see it.  More on this later.

 

The censors’ language justifying the bans often makes no sense. 

1.         You should know the Classification Board does NOT ban or censor, it only “classifies.” However, one of the categories is RC, meaning ‘Refused Classification.’  This means it can’t be sold, hired, advertised, distributed, or shown publicly without potentially incurring a fine of up to $825,000 and/or 10 years’ imprisonment.

I’m no English language scholar. But I can spot a euphemism when I see one. And as George Orwell wrote:  “political language has to consist largely of euphemism…and sheer cloudy vagueness to make brutal actions sound acceptable.”

2.         Obscene supposedly  means “to cause or give offence.”  To offend means: “saying or doing something rude, upsetting or embarrassing.”  It also means: “to go against a law, duty, or standard.”

·       Hopefully, fascism does go against our laws. 

·       I also hope it  goes against the moral standard to which most Australians adhere.

But this is an entirely circular argument: You “offend” by going against a law, duty or standard by going against a law, duty or standard. And Logic 101  teaches that using the conclusion of an argument as its own premise, is a logical fallacy. More evidence, I suggest, of what happens when reason slumbers. 

 

3.         As to the “revolting fetishes” of which you're about to see plenty.

Are audiences –are you– really going to rush home afterwards to eat poo and ask your partner to wee on you?  And if you do?  I should care –let alone mind? 

(Pasolini’s recipe incidentally: melted Swiss chocolate, condensed milk, broken biscuits and marmalade. And a mixture of weak tea and apple juice for the pee.)

 

4.         Then there’s  “artistic intent”: I am completely certain Pasolini had no intention of ‘offending.’  His intentions were to shock, disgust, revolt  Or, as he put it: “to awaken a slumbering society and remind audiences of past horrors.”

These horrors were Salò, the puppet Nazi state that ruled most of Italy from September 1943 to April 1945. Pasolini applies “obscenity” metaphorically to the absence of the rule of law under fascism. 

 

5.         As for the film’s offensive “cruelty with high impact”? Can the impact for seeing it even approach the actual impact during the 17 months of Salò?

·       The 9,000 Jews and 30,000 political opponents, partisans and workers arrested and deported? 

·       90% of whom who died in Nazi extermination camps?

·       The 70,000 civilians and resistance members killed in reprisal massacres by German and Italian Republic forces?

 

6.         Lastly, that R18+ ruling: Adults can now only see Salò as a home video package, containing contextualizing material – such as essays and documentaries. (Don’t get me wrong, the documentaries and essays with the Criterion BluRay  are excellent.) But this patronizing attitude sincerely offends me. Since when has adult education been mandatory in Australia? 

Similarly Cinema Screenings are permitted at festivals only if contextualizing critical analysis is provided. I, ladies and Gtntlement, am your mandatory adult education! This ruling contributes yet more “cloudy vagueness”  aiming make censoring actions censorship acceptable.

~~~<<>>~~~

When I saw Salò again recently (for the third time), the film awakened me not just to past horrors but to present horrors.

The film’s arguably comic ‘beautiful bum contest’, evoked television reality shows where contestants willingly participate in their own commodification.  And the film’s absurdist weddings reminded me of ‘Married at First Sight.’

They’re perfect examples of Pasolini’s notion of anthropological genocide which he defined as “a form of destruction that homogenizes society and destroys authentic human relationships by turning the human body itself into a marketable commodity.”

And how could I not think of:

·       the absence of the rule of law in today’s internment camps and occupied territories, 

·       current leaders remaining in power despite arrest warrants for committing genocide and other war crimes?   

·       a President actively renaming art centres and campaigning to disable the International Criminal Court? 

To my amazement, for the first time, I also saw some tenderness and protest, even some hope.  

Now, this is NOT  what Pasolini intended.  He intended to shock us from our complacent, complicit slumbers while powerholders abuse with impunity. 

I recently likened Salò’s relationship with Australian Classification Board to game of ping pong. I regret making this comparison. Censorship is not a game. 

Salò awakens audiences to the dangerous idea that in a world fearful of ideas, the biggest threat to democracy is not the portrayal of violence and evil, but the silencing of those who express dangerous ideas like accountability, freedom, equality.

This is a film that’s unwatchable and must be watched.

IN BRISBANE - THE FIFTH ANNUAL FILM NOIR FESTIVAL

Brisbane's very own supercinephile Joel Archer is once again presenting his unique festival of film noir. 

Joel Writes:This has come around so fast, but we are thrilled to announce Brisbane's Annual Film Noir Festival will be returning for its 5th year; Noir November 2026: Les Dames En Noir!

10 films from Friday 13th to Sunday 15th of November 2026 at Palace Cinema James St & our Mystery Noir Double Bill now at Milton Common Brewery. 

This year's program is by far our most diverse year yet and with the generous support of Pulp Fiction Books (Terrific Alternative Book Store in BNE CBD) and 4MBS Classic FM we will bringing you a rare South American Noir from Argentina, an obscure dark silent from Czech, Gritty B Noirs and Iconic American Classics. 

For cinema lovers this will not be a weekend to miss, also for those this year who do The Festival Passes we have even more bonus on top of your 8 Discounted Tickets at Palace, Free Ticket to Mystery Double Bill at Milton Common Brewery, Hard Cover Book, Keyring and more.

The full program, session times and tickets are all available from the below link. 

The full program, session times and tickets are all available from this link.

Any questions about the festival don't hesitate to get in contact. We can not wait to see you all at Noir November 2026:

Streaming on Apple TV, Prime Video - Rod Bishop recommends DTF ST. LOUIS (Steven Conrad, USA, 2026)

It sounds a lot like a US police series, but ignore the awful title. DTF St. Louis does have a police procedural sub-plot, but it’s definitely not generic television. 

Tennessee Williams once said: “America has only three cities: New York, San Francisco and New Orleans. Everywhere else is Cleveland.” Suburban Missouri looks as normal as most America suburbs can get. However, in this common-or-garden part of St. Louis, a weird, middle-class wife-swapping threesome holds court.

Local TV weather man Clark (Jason Bateman) has become best buddies with his on-air American Sign Language translator Floyd (David Harbour). Floyd is constantly shamed by his weight, and has lost any sexual interest in his wife Carol (Linda Cardellini) after she begins wearing baseball umpire attire. Clark coaxes Floyd into joining an app for married people wanting sexual hookups without commitment, and nothing is ever the same again.

Jason Bateman (left) Linda Cardellini (middle) David Harbour (right)

A minor character, played by Peter Saarsgard, who calls himself “Modern Love” while using a social media avatar of David Bowie in a dress, delivers the defining one-liner: “No-one’s normal. It just looks that way from across the street”.

Showrunner Steven Conrad, writes all seven episodes, his black humour and pathos never falling into cheap satire. Instead, his characters are all fully formed and congruent, and his empathetic dialogue underpins their aching, compassionate loneliness. 

Bateman, and especially Harbour, excel in developing a strange and weird, but ultimately loving relationship between the two men. Cardellini, deadpans her way as Carol and the police (Richard Jenkins and Joy Sunday) can only fumble, wide-eyed through their interviews, destabilized by the people they investigate over an apparent murder.

Richard Jenkins (left) Joy Sunday (right)

It’s brave television, if at times seemingly repetitive and occasionally meandering. 

*Soundtrack: Needle-drops include Marvin Gaye, Carole King, Bob Dylan, The Kinks, Aretha Franklin, Cream, Frankie Valli, The Zombies and The Temptations. The opening title music is The 5th Dimension’s version of Let The Sunshine In, and as the final episode concludes there’s an exhilarating The Flesh Failures (Let The Sunshine In). A little difficult to track down, it comes from the original 1968 Broadway cast recording of Hair, sung by cast member Melba Moore, and can be found on YouTube. Among the many comments: 

“I finally found it! I got here from DTF St. Louis”

“Crazy how hard it was to find this song from DTF St. Louis…awesome”

 “DTF brought me here…I had chills when this song came on at the end of the last episode”

“This is more beautiful than anything I’ve ever heard”

 “Great song, great artist, great series”.

 

The Current Cinema - Barrie Pattison urges you to make haste to KUNG FU SOCCER (Stephen Chow, China, 2026)

 

REVENGE OF THE CHINESE MOVIE

Currently in Sydney’s Event Centre and probably other venues that run Chinese movies here, we are getting Stephen Chow Chin-chi’s  Gong fu nv zu/Kung Fu Soccer, his first film in seven years.

Stephen Chow had been one of the greats of Hong Kong film and his 2001 Siu Lam juk kau/ Shaolin Soccer was his major work. What he had done since had been over shadowed by that, so the new film offered hopes of a return to form and fears of a lazy cash-in. What we get is neither.

The earlier movie pivoted on the idea that Shaolin disciples had seen respect for their traditions fade away in the contemporary world, so Stephen retrieves a group of forgotten Shaolin masters from the obscurity of their slum community to form a champion soccer team, using their super powers to dominate the game. It was a great, ridiculous concept beautifully realised. The question is, can it stand another go-round?

The new Kung Fu Soccer has two initial surprises. Here, rather than starring, now sixty-year-old director-producer-writer Chow only momentarily figures, a couple of gag appearances. Second, the picture quality is exceptional. In China they are playing it at IMAX and it’s the number two hit of the year.

 This time the idea has been retreaded for a female soccer team (oh, oh!) in the Asian Women's Champions League but trendy ideology proves minimal. In the opening stages, the plot centers on Zhang Xiaofei, the captain of China’s low status Emei team and Dilraba Dilmurat  as Yu Long, their star striker. Their friendship is failing. Everyone tells the players that, now in their thirties, they are too old for championship matches. They however maintain that it takes decades to acquire their skills. The rookies are not being given a chance and quit and Zhang Xiaofei falls out with her dream-boat love interest, who switches his support to the rival team. All this pretty tame. However the preposterous effects work is already good for a giggle - the kick which sends the ball into the path of an airliner flying over the field. That and the black and white flashbacks provide reminders of Shaolin Soccer - which outclasses this one.

Developments like the supervision of mahjong-playing Grand Master Carina Lau (Infernal Affairs - at last a familiar face) are equally uninvolving. However, a few interesting subplots emerge - the conflict of the earnest captain determined to win and the new recruit who plays for the fun of the game. More importantly, the effects work becomes increasingly flamboyant. The film even develops some suspense as the ball repeatedly trembles on the painted goal line in front of the net. All this meshes with the imposing Olympic Stadium nicely.

Stephen Chow has had a quarter century to refine the Shaolin Soccer concept and in that time Chinese laboratory work has had a chance to do catch-up. We get the magical illusion of a shower of soccer balls defeated by sending in the blind goal keeper, the athletes in the impossible human array pyramids from the wu xia films or the opposing team, who also have superpowers, transforming into a savage cheetah, the big cat racing through the players without attracting the referee’s red card, all both nicely nostalgic and cheerworthy elements for the film’s matches. They represent a triple threat - fun plot developments, an impressive display of film technique and frequently striking imagery that can hold its own with Hollywood’s current strip-cartoon hero movies. The effects make the film well worth the seat price, even if they take a while to obscure the clunky plot.

It’s not all good news however. Kung Fu Soccer has a disturbingly brutal streak. The injuries to the comics and mind games and physical violence the lead couple visit on one another are unsettling to an outside audience and there’s an element of racism in the depiction of the unappealing types who make up the opposing teams. This is unfamiliar in Stephen Chow’s work and, without knowing its intention, it is disturbing. The film is not the great fun outing his earlier work offered. That can only be disappointing.

There was a light opening night attendance. Chow’s admirers are advised to move fast. There is no guarantee it will get past Wednesday.

Streaming on Archive.org - SOHO INCIDENT (aka SPIN A DARK WEB, Vernon Sewell, UK, 1956)

Trawling round the remarkable archive.org site looking for a copy of one particular film, the search engine delivered me Soho Incident (aka in the USA Spin A Dark Web) directed by Vernon Sewell.  Click on the film title and it's yours to watch or download. All totally legit.

It came at a propitious moment. My good friend, the now departed Tony Rayns had long been a champion of Sewell's work, regarding him as a cut above the other Brit B-film directors who made a living churning out low budget stuff at Merton Park and elsewhere. Tony had even championed him to the extent of refusing to participate  in a prestigious retrospective season of Brit films of the fifties because there was no place for Sewell in the survey. That was Tony.

Strongroom

Last year in Bologna it looked like Sewell's moment in the sun may be arriving when among the "Recovered and Restored" selections was Strongroom restored by the BFI National Archive. Nobody yet seems to have taken up the opportunity to screen the restored film in Australia (including Cinema Reborn). 

But otherwise there seems to still be little recognition being accorded to Sewell's work. In his notes on Strongroom, linked above, James Bell has a quick run through his key features made between 1943 and 1971. Wikipedia adds a few more details. "Sewell was born in London, England, and was educated at Marlborough College. He directed more than 30 films during his career, starting with Morgenrot (1933) and ending with Burke and Hare (1971). He worked chiefly in B-movies, some of which were, according to the BFI Screenonline "well above the usual cut-price standards of film-making at this level."

James Bell notes that the usual suspects, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese, as well as Edgar Wright have "hailed publicly" Sewell's work.

Lee Patterson, Rona Anderson, Soho Incident

Soho Incident is a quickfire little crime film about a newly arrived Canadian, Jim Bankley, in London (Lee Patterson) trying to find work. An old mate (Robert Arden, goodness from Welles' Mr Arkadin/Confidential Report) gets him a job with a gangster cum gambler who uses Bankley's engineering skills to run a scheme to cheat the bookmakers and get better odds on his horse running at Ascot.  Bad things happen throughout and everybody turns on each other at the end. The American Faith Domergue plays the femme fatale in a genteel way. 

"genteel" Faith Domergue, Soho Incident

One of the characters is a boxing trainer/manager with an Australian accent  played by an Australian-born actor Joss Ambler who had never previously registered with me but whose filmography indicates a career of solid employment in Brit pictures from 1937 to 1958, including a number for Vernon Sewell. Whether he used his Australian accent in the other 60+ movies he made I dont know. Perhaps Barrie Pattison can help out.

The Current Cinema - Helen Madden is most unimpressed by THE ODYSSEY (Christopher Nolan, USA, 2026)

Oh what a dull, hollowed-out hero is Nolan’s Odysseus. What a dead-eyed gloomy Matt Damon...

This Odysseus is certainly a Christian pilgrim, burdened by sin, plagued with guilt and obsessed with redemption .

Where is that quicksilvered hero of high emotion, unquenchable curiosity, the subversive up-ender of things and agog at the wonders of the world ?

Homer’s Odysseus is the world’s first described demobilised soldier, freed from the bloody walls of windy Troy, amazed now, just to be alive and to sail the seas, not quite so desperate to get home , but home is the destination. He is astonished at the beauty and marvel of the world, its goddesses and its horrors, happily waylaid by the possibility of another one, ever another opening of his eyes.

And the wit and humour of the man? All gone.

Gone too are the precious scenes with the wild and beautiful women who have been disappeared. Where is Nausicaa, the teenage princess whom Odysseus discovers when he is shipwrecked on the shores of Ogygia, playing ball with her friends? Where Odysseus plays out one of the most entrancing scenes in literature, clutching a branch to hide his nakedness he wins over the alarmed young woman with sparkling words, soothing and smooching with wit, irony and tenderness.

Nolan’s Calypso, the dangerous nymph with glossy braids, is barely conscious. While seductive Circe, the goddess of fabulous beauty, is now a grubby witch. Her physically reshaping of Odysseus’ men into pigs is a sickly vomit-inducing image and accompanied with the man-hating rant it’s the most egregious example of the crude token wokeness of the film.

So many 'fucks' but no actual fucking in this Christian’s progress. All that fun, Calypso bedding him every night for seven years, Circe every night for one year. This simpering Penelope is only allowed a few minutes in bed on his return. A night Homer describes as the longest night in the history of the universe ..as Athena held back the dawn for them.

Unbelievably, Helen is punished by Nolan as he inscribes guilt on the face that launched a thousand ships with gruesome scarring. In Homer’s Odyssey Helen survives intact, protected and loved by Menelaus. That thousands of soldiers die while Helen lives and loves is Homer’s brilliant insight into the brutality and arbitrariness of war...

And the truth of Homer’s Odyssey? This tale of a man who in the end, bereft of friends and companions, faces Ithaca, the future, alone – is literature’s first intimation of that psychological truth, that we are all, in the end, stranded on the shore and alone.