On UK DVD and Blu-ray - Fiona Mackie reviews 'a special film' OUT OF BLUE (Carol Morley, USA, 2019)

Based on Martin Amis's 1997 novel Night Train, it spoils nothing for me to say how well the inter-blend of crime and post-quantum physics serves the outcome.  And while Schrodinger's Cat perhaps haunts the narrative a fraction too frequently, the black holes and multiple universes weave a spell that blends well with visual traces reflecting the New Orleans of the film's setting.

But there is no cashing in on the kind of scenic scoring of New Orleans streetscapes that could have milked, but would have marred the focus and integrity of the film.  It's in the mood that New Orleans is evoked, and in the crime, with just an occasional glimpse of the French Quarter.

Intricate and profound, gentle and riveting, the film is a triumph of pace, conveying the deep bond between director (Carol Morley) and main character Detective Mike Hoolihan (Patricia Clarkson) through which that pace and rhythm have been orchestrated.

For a lover of crime novels, another aspect of the film's uniqueness is how much honour it pays to a novel's capacity to interweave elements and to reverence internal moods and states as well as external clues and discoveries.  It centres this, too, on the psychic and sometimes near-psychotic insights and understandings of the central detective.  In these many ways its translation of novel to film surpasses, in my view, so many attempts at that conversion, and adds significantly to what the novel had to offer.  And like all good crime tales, it keeps you gripped, unfolding its secrets only slowly, yet inclusively.

But with all that detail, I have told you nothing, really, of the plot, which centres on the corpse of a female Professor of Physics, found in the observatory where she worked and taught.  A range of murder suspects includes the African American Professor, Duncan J Reynolds (Jonathan Majors), who was her lover; and who, when questioned exhibits a burst of sudden violence.

Fine performances are offered by the well-known actors Toby Jones, whose presence in the observatory spreads an ugly and unsettling vibe; and James Caan, who is not immediately recognisable in his brooding portrayal of the father of the victim.

And then there is Jackie Weaver, the victim's mother.  As ever, Weaver is able to embody a complex space that few could convey without blurring and reducing it.  Instead, she lights up and inhabits a character who, without her, might have remained opaque, or simply squashed.  And that would have been greatly to the detriment of the film's achievement; so, a triumph of casting, here.

The context, the colours, the shifting moods constantly challenge one's engagement.  Other than that, I only want to say, don't miss this film, because they are blowing no trumpets for themselves, and therefore they may get scant coverage and attention.

And that would be a vast shame.

Definitely a special film.

The Current Cinema - John Snadden tracks down two films under the radar DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE (S. Craig Zahler, USA) and NE ZHA ( Yu Yang, China)

Editor's Note: Since this review was published David Stratton has sent through a note to say: Dear Mr G

I’ve just noticed that a certain John Snadden favourably reviews DRAGGED ACROSS CONCRETE and says that it’s a film ‘our dinosaur media has seen fit to ignore.’  He should be advised that I gave the film a lengthy 4-star review in The Weekend Australian on August 24-25.  I also wrote about the film from the 2018 Venice Film Festival.  

Best

Strat

E

Another tale of two excellent films which our dinosaur media has seen fit to ignore.

Dragged Across Concrete is the latest pic from S. Craig Zahler (Bone Tomahawk, Brawl in Cell Block 99) which features two big name stars Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn as long serving inner-city detectives who for different reasons set out to rob a small time drug dealer. 

Zahler builds and sustains suspense exceptionally well as we watch the officers cross the line and then find themselves unable to go back. A long violent sequence which takes place in a hollowed out industrial estate has the fervid atmosphere of a Jim Thompson narrative, as the main players begin to spiral out of control when fear and greed become the driving forces of the film. 

For a tough, visceral crime movie it's not overly violent and the most disturbing moments are implied. Definitely a film for the cineastes and genre buffs.

Ne Zha is an animated film from mainland China which has been cleaning up big time at box-offices worldwide - Melbourne is no exception. 

The story is culled from Chinese mythology and the title character is like a human version of the infamous Monkey King. Non-Asian viewers shouldn't try too hard to follow the convoluted story-line. 

Ne Zha is a smart mouthed, bad tempered demon in a human's body. He's also a pawn in a power struggle between heaven and earth and the shackled monsters of the underworld. He has a goofy protector and a doting mother and father, who all try to keep him on the straight and narrow - a full-time job! 

For most of the pic the animation is nothing special and won't have Disney executives losing sleep. But the final 30 minutes is in a class of its own as the sky darkens and the demons from the underworld are unleashed. Fire, thunder and ice are the weapons of choice in this protracted and stunning End of Days conflagration. 

Although, midway through this sequence the film deliberately stops for a prolonged fart joke - and where the kids in the audience roared their approval! Then the battle continues....

Ne Zha is a movie carefully aimed at the young at heart - no matter what your age.

Editor's Note: Don Groves reported in Inside Film this week:"Distributed by CMC, Chinese director/co-writer Yu Yang’s fantasy/adventure Ne Zha conjured up $188,000 in its third, raising the total to an impressive $1.8 million."

Streaming on SBS on Demand - IN ORDER OF DISAPPEARANCE (Hans Petter Moland, Norway, 2014)

Twenty five years ago Hans Petter Moland attracted attention with Zero Kelvin. It starred Stellan Skarsgård. It was the first of a number of collaborations between the two, one of which was In Order of Disappearance made in Norway in 2014. Moland remade the film in America with Liam Neeson and it went out around the world in February this year. I didn’t see it.

But, its precursor is now streaming on SBS On Demand. When I watched it had 3 ad breaks of around a minute each, far fewer interruptions than you get when you watch an episode of Spiral on the same service.

Skarsgård plays a Swede living in the backblocks of Norway whose job it is to drive a snowplough to keep a main road open. The vehicle almost resembles something out of Mad Max. He’s so integral to the town that he’s just had an evening out to accept an award for citizen of the year. That night his son, who drives the freight trolley at the local airport, is murdered via an overdose of heroin. The police close the case but Skarsgård is suspicious. His wife accepts the police version of a drug overdose and Skarsgård himself gets so depressed he contemplates suicide until a friend of his son, and a drug dealer, turns up to tell him that his kid was murdered. 

Skarsgård’s wife leaves him and he sets out on a course of bloody revenge. It has taken about half an hour to get to this point, which includes a couple of early revenge murders on low level drug couriers. So far so Scandi noir…. 

Then the complications start to ensue and the film turns away from grim brutality into a dramatic comedy of mishap, misunderstanding and misadventure. The drug community thinks it knows who is breaking the rules. By ‘chance’ Skarsgård’s brother is a reformed crim who knows the ins and outs of the local drug trade. His Chinese girlfriend is not happy. The drug kingpin’s ex-wife, the scrumptious Birgitte Hjort Sorensen (from Borgen), is not impressed with her child’s welfare when he’s in the care of the drug kingpin. A bunch of Serbs, ruled over by an aging Bruno Ganz, who had previously kept to their patch, object to one of their members being offed. The crosses mount up to signify chapter endings. There are a couple of dozen by the end…

It’s almost into Donald Westlake territory and makes you chortle quite a lot…I’m curious enough now to want to see the Moland/Neeson/US remake.

Streaming on Stan - Rod Bishop reviews THE LOUDEST VOICE (7 Episodes directed by Kari Skoglan, Jeremy Podeswa, Scott Z Burns & Stephen Frears, USA, 2019)

Here’s something you don’t see every day. 

Rupert Murdoch getting pushed around. 

Russell Crowe, Simon McBurney, The Loudest Voice

Firstly, by the frightening Republican bully Roger Ailes (Russell Crowe) and later - to a lesser degree - by the Michelle-Obama-adoring Wendi Deng (Julee Cerda).

For most Australians, however, The Loudest Voice’s biggest problem is the ridiculously unconvincing Rupert Murdoch. Played by Simon McBurney, the English thespian produces the worst Australian accent since … well, since forever. The timbre of McBurney’s voice is nothing like Murdoch’s and, a few facial features aside, he doesn’t look much like dear old Rupert. To make matters worse, he calls everyone “mate” and is portrayed as the wimpiest media tycoon imaginable.

Lachlan Murdoch, played by American Barry Watson, at least vaguely resembles the anointed son, but that’s more to do with the skills of the wardrobe department, than anything else. Watson doesn’t sound remotely Australian either.

On this front at least, Russell Crowe and Naomi Watts show the rest of the cast how to convincingly impersonate American accents. It’s said Watts had to work hard to make her Minnesota accent acceptable, but this may only be of interest to Minnesotans. 

Years ago, bemused at the way our Aussie actors seemed to fly into the States, adopt an American accent and get away with it, I asked a longtime friend in Los Angeles how this was possible. He set me straight: “When we hear an American accent we haven’t heard before; we just assume it’s from some part of the country we’ve never been to.” That simple, it seems.

Playing Ailes and Gretchen Carlson, Crowe and Watts have the best roles they have had in a while and deserve to figure prominently at the Emmys. 

Ailes, we are told, single handedly created Fox News. He hires and fires, he runs the programming schedule, the news room, the television production studios and even writes some of the “journalism”. He coaches prospective “personalities” like Sean Hannity, he advices on colour schemes for the sets and during program breaks, even stops makeup artists from taking sweat off interviewees faces.

And he’s a monster. He humiliates, abuses, belittles and sexually harasses. He’s a bigot and a racist and a misogynist, but when his voice drops and he puts on his best puppy dog eyes, he excels at passive aggression. 

The series painstakingly details his right-wing fanaticism and his decades-long sexual harassment of female employees. He’s convinced Obama is “a Muslim in the White House”; that anyone with leftist causes who chooses activism is a “communist”; that all the major print and news outlets in the USA are run by liberal elites. He believes Fox News is balanced and fair because it is counteracting (that is, “balancing”) the leftist monolith of news organisations in the rest of the country.

He alone decides to push the bogus weapons-of-mass-destruction in Iraq with Dick Cheney’s full cooperation, despite both men knowing there is not a single piece of evidence to substantiate the claim. He champions Trump and gets rid of anyone who disagrees with him. Not being able to fire Rupert Murdoch, he either belligerently shouts his boss down until he gets his way, or, failing that, gets petulant and threatens to resign. Rupert backs down every time. 

Except for one. At his last audience with Murdoch, James and Lachlan are in attendance. Ailes looks at them: “What are they doing here?” “I just came to watch” replies Lachlan. Never imagined Lachlan Murdoch might have a sense of humour.

TWO FOR THE ROAD TO PORDENONE- Barrie Pattison reports on one off screenings of ANOTHER CHILD (Yoon-seok Kim, South Korea) and MARIA AND THE OTHERS (Nely Reguera. Spain)

Here’s two for the road before I set out for Paris and Pordenone, films from a couple of the one-off screenings that are becoming the core of my experience of new movies.

Koreans are now doing six hundred films a year. The KOFFIA  Korean Film Festival delivered Miseongnyeon /Another Child directed by Yoon-seok Kim one of their leading stars whose work we know from the violent thrillers Hwanghae/Yellow Sea(2010)  and The Chaser/Chugyeogja (2008).

This one pivots on feckless (usually shown feckful) dad Kim who is having an affair with So-jin Kim owner of a roasted duck restaurant without his church going wife knowing. The wife has made a killing in the real estate market by buying their flat in her own name.

Film opens with the couple’s school girl daughter caught spying on the restaurant. The situation is complicated by the fact that dad’s tootsie’s own daughter Se-jin Kim goes to the same school. Their encounters include a face off on the school roof, an area roped off after the girls started using it to smoke, and a punch up which crashes through a re-enforced glass door. After that one, the girls finish the movie with cuts healing on their faces. Their ineffectual, baton waving teacher Hee-won Kim, seethes with frustration at his lack of authority in the situation. 

The men in this film tend to be contemptible. Se-jin Kim’s own dad shows up mainly interested in squeezing some money out of his estranged family and is upset to realise that his daughter is too young to take out a credit card in his name.

Complications multiply stoked by messages on lost cell ‘phones. The pregnant restaurateur has to be rushed to hospital by her rival who picks up the bill for her upgrade to a better ward and is shown (nice touch) mopping up the blood on her car seat afterwards. Se-jin Kim insists on repaying her out of the family’s thin bank roll. At the hospital dad Kim hides from the girls, marking time behind a pillar on a moving escalator.

The mix of comedy of embarrassment and touching moments is a tough act for a new director to pull off.

You’re unlikely to see this one but the rest would be a spoiler if it did ever show up.

Finally, it's only his two sisters who get to see the premature baby in its incubator. Sister Se-jin Kim  starts washing bootees and resolves to quit school, the way her own mother did, and raise him herself when none of the parents show willing but they come to the ward to find his incubator empty. The child has not been adopted as they feared but died and been packed in a cardboard box for the crematorium.

They pursue van driver Jong-jun Jeong (finally a sympathetic male character) who lets them ride along and gives them the box containing the remains which Se-jin Kim  brings to school causing another clash with her fellow daughter.

Jeong-eun Lee has thrown dad out and So-jin Kim, embarrassed by the breast milk showing through her blouse, has realised that he’s not going to settle with her. Scene of him being mugged at the sea side resort where he thought his friend would put him up but instead pushy local woman Jeong-eun Lee hits him up with a fee for parking in front of her home on the breakwater and the bike kids waylay him at night. Finally, his estranged wife has to pay his cab fare back and drive him from the flat he no longer shares to the hospital with a suspected broken arm.

Ends with the two girls in an abandoned fun fair deciding the fate of the less than a hand full of the dead baby’s ashes.

Sharp, well-chosen images emphasize nicely shaded characters, making the piece more than normally promising but they can’t get through it all before attention becomes strained.

The Cervantes Institute gave us a viewing of the 2016 María (y los demás)/Maria and the Others, the first feature of former assistant director Nely Reguera, a vehicle for great looking Bárbara Lennie, known for Todos lo saben/Everybody Knows(2018)  and particularly as the TV host in El rein /The Candidate2018) now making a try at a lead with the responsibility for carrying a production. 

At thirty-five Lennie is the support of her aging father José Ángel Egido, fussing about his diet and medication while holding down a job with a small publishing venture where she hosts signings for their authors as well as stacking the books.

In the nature of these films, she finds herself being sidelined when dad’s fifty-ish Argentinian nurse Marina Skell becomes his fiancée, without showing suitable concern about his gastric reflux, and the happy couple plan on selling the now closed family restaurant. Lennie’s brother is tired of working for others as a chief kitchen hand in London and had designs on re-opening the place. Meanwhile her publisher boss has lined up a novel by an established author to take the place in their schedule that Lennie wanted to fill with the book she has been working on since college. 

Things aren’t so good with her lover Julián Villagrán either. He won’t introduce her to his little daughters. Coyly framed sex scenes suggest senorita Lennie isn’t going to reward her fans but she does get around to a nude scene.

A series of events accelerates her discontent. Arrangements for the wedding mean digging out the Sabima tree that has always been in the family yard. Selecting the wedding dress has Barbara looking killer in the demo model she’s trying on, outshining the bride. Sending the glamorous selfie off isn’t received well when she’s trying to force the issue with the boyfriend. (“she brought a teddy bear” one of his little girls observes) It all increases her felling of frustration. Having to rescue Skell from the surf just stokes resentment.

Barbara oversleeps and the wedding arrangements go to pieces - “There are no canapes. The guests have nothing to eat.” She lets them get on without her.

Performances are good and the piece is exactly set in Galacia but they can’t convince us that what we are seeing is serious drama rather than handsomely mounted soap.

CINEMA REBORN 2020 - 30 April-3 May, the Randwick Ritz

Federico Fellini was born 100 years ago in 1920

Cinema Reborn 2020

The Organising Committee of Cinema Reborn announced today that the 2020 season will take place at the Randwick Ritz cinema from Thursday 30 April to Sunday 3 May.

 

Cinema Reborn began in 2018 and is dedicated to presenting digital restorations of classic cinema from around the world. The festival has now become part of an ever-growing circuit of film events devoted to showcasing the restoration work of the world’s major production companies and international film archives. 

 

Ernst Lubitsch

Program

Highlights of the previous Cinema Reborn programs included Memories of Underdevelopment(Tomás Gutiérrez Alea), Yol–The Full Version (Yilmaz Güney), Wanda(Barbara Loden), Sons of Matthew(Charles Chauvel), A Matter of Life and Death(Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger), In a Lonely Place (Nicholas Ray), Sans Lendemain (Max Ophuls), The Crime of M. Lange (Jean Renoir), One From the Heart(Francis Ford Coppola), Woman on the Run(Norman Foster), People of the Australian Western Desert(Ian Dunlop), Between Wars(Michael Thornhill), In a Year of 13 Moons (Rainer Werner Fassbinder) and The Night of Counting the Years(Shadi Abdel Salam) .

                                                                                

Cinema Reborn 2020 will present a program of eleven films over four days.  The full program will be announced in February 2020

 

Ida Lupino

Venue - The Randwick Ritz

Cinema Reborn is especially pleased that for a second year the event will take place at Randwick’s iconic art deco Ritz Cinema, a venue with state of the art projection equipment and one of the few remaining theatres in Sydney able to screen both digital copies and 35mm.

 

Cinema Reborn once again appreciates the support of the dedicated staff of the Ritz.

 

Eddie Tamir, the proprietor of The Ritz and of Melbourne’s Classic, Lido and Cameo cinemas has indicated his continuing enthusiasm for the project and commented: “We love having the greatest films of the past playing alongside the best films of today.”

 

Luis Bunuel

Subscription Ticketing

To assist our patrons and supporters to enjoy the event to the maximum, in Cinema Reborn 2020 will offer the opportunity to purchase a dedicated budget-priced subscription ticket which will admit to all screenings.

 

Billy Wilder

Charitable Donations

Cinema Reborn is greatly assisted by charitable donations and a dedicated fund will again be set up to accept tax-deductible gifts from donors. Donations are accepted throughout the year from those not seeking tax deductibility and parties interested in donating, supporting screenings or offering sponsorship of any kind should contact the festival directly at the contact points below. 

 

Interstate Venues

Negotiations are underway to present Cinema Reborn 2020 at interstate venues and there will be further announcements when these details have been settled.

 

 

For further information:

 

Contact

 

Geoff Gardner

Chair, Organising Committee

CINEMA REBORN

 

Email: filmalert101@gmail.com

Ph: 0416 912 567

Bergman & Hitchcock - 25-27 October - A three film retrospective presented by the Canberra International Film Festival - Canberra

Andrew Pike, Director of the Canberra International Film Festival draws attention to the event being presented by CIFF in October, a screening of three films  made together by star Ingrid Bergman and director Alfred Hitchcock. Click on the link to go to the CIFF website for more information, bookings etc. 

Andrew writes:

Hitchcock gained notoriety for mistreating his actresses, but with Ingrid Bergman, he seems to have met his match:  she was committed to her career and her craft, and wanted to be challenged creatively by working with the great directors of the time.

Under Capricorn

Both Bergman and Hitchcock did some of their best work in a succession of films of enduring fascination. It seems to have been a collaboration from which both gained a great deal:  Bergman was stretched creatively in three films of great emotional intensity, and Hitchcock was driven to express some of his own personal anguish for the first time in his work.

Spellbound

The trio of films is an odd one:  SPELLBOUND and NOTORIOUS were major box-office successes, nominated for many Oscars and still applauded by critics today. 

Notorious

In counterpoint, UNDER CAPRICORN, was an expensive Technicolor production which failed commercially and virtually disappeared from view for many decades;  initially poorly reviewed, it is now increasingly finding avid supporters and is ripe for re-appraisal. The selection of stills below are taken from UNDER CAPRICORN.