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dir: Peter Hedges
The Odd Life of Timothy Green was even more painful to watch than to write about
I’m all for whimsy. No, scratch that, the word alone gives me a piercing headache. What I should have said is that I’m not completely averse to sweetness in movies, because, hell, life’s way too short to just watch movies where people’s heads get routinely blown off by so-called heroes, or where a demented surgeon captures some poor folk and sows them, one to the other, in an unholy form of intelligent yet malevolent design.

The sweetness I can tolerate, not wanting to get diabetes, has to be well delivered. Too much and it drowns the viewer in treacle and regret. Too little and there’s no flavour in an otherwise unpalatable affair.

The Odd Life of Timothy Green tries to be some modern kind of fable, generously brought to us by the Disney Corporation, offering us a little sweetness within a tortured tale about a couple who desperately yearn to be parents. What it ends up being is an argument as to why some people should never be allowed to become parents, and probably a healthy argument for abortion as well.

How the hell did Joel Edgerton end up in this? Jennifer Garner, she of the perpetually sucked-in cheeks, was probably genetically created in a lab for roles like this. Her “I just escaped from a concentration camp, and I feel Fabulous!” looks and her warped-through-unnecessary-surgery face is what Disney’s Labs have been working to perfect for close to a century, thanks very much Uncle Walt. But Joel? Australia’s Own Joel Edgerton? I guess he’ll take anything.

Who am I kidding, who wouldn’t? He probably made even for this mawkish piece of tripe what it would take me over a decade to earn. Although, soulless as my work is, at least I didn’t have to emote next to Garner or mumble through terrible All American clichés with a fairly dodgy American accent.

These two chumps play the central married couple, living in an American town torn forth from a Norman Rockwell painting, all autumn leaves and idyllic hues. This place, called Stanleyville, has one source of income, being a pencil factory. This pencil factory dominates everything, including the majority of the conversations had by people in the film.

A pencil factory? As a symbol of America’s decline in blue collar jobs through the offshoring of manufacturing jobs to Mexico and China, couldn’t they have found an example slightly more pathetic and anachronistic? Maybe a whalebone corset factory, or a maker of cassette Walkmans? What else would inspire as much feeling as a goddamn pencil factory? Pencil Factory? Are you fucking kidding me? It was almost as if the film had been made with money from an actual pencil factory, wanting to inspire and guilt people into casting aside their smartphones and Ipads in order to take up the trusty wooden and graphite tool of yesteryear.

dir: Tarsem Singh
Get thee both to a nunnery, then set fire to the nunnery
If The Dictator inspired profound feelings of ‘meh’ in me, this film left me with the profound feeling of ‘yeurgh’.

Sometimes you get exactly the crap you expect you’re going to get, as with eating at KFC, or the “Dirty Bird”, as a good friend of mine calls it, when you already have plenty of experience backing up your expectations. When you buy dirty bird, you expect dirty bird, and dirty bird is what you get.

That’s not entirely true, gentle reader. I’m telling one of those things I’m told humans call a “lie”. Yes, a little white lie. In truth, even when I have the dirty bird in my grubby little hands, the grease running down my fingers, eventually to be coursing through my veins, I still expect it to be great. No matter how many times I’ve been betrayed, I still think “Maybe this time, it’ll be different.”

I did have completely unrealistic expectations regarding this film, and, as per usual, I have no idea why. And again as per usual, it hardly matters to the film makers or the rest of the world, because what I want doesn’t knock the world’s axis out of joint or pull the sun from the sky.

Nothing from the advertising for it, or the reviews, or the presence of Julia Roberts should have made me think I was getting anything other than dirty bird.

But still, but still… the human capacity for self-delusional is almost infinite, and I’m one of its most skilled practitioners.

I thought (again, I don’t know why I had this impression) there was going to be something radically new in the retelling of the story of Snow White. I don’t have any particular fixation on these fairy tales, although I have been reading a lot of them over the last five years to my daughter, and as such they play an important role in teaching her about what people used to think the status of women used to be in society: as subhumans with little of value other than beauty and, more importantly, their virginity intact so they could be traded to other families for money, property or cows.

Pretty much exactly where we are these days, except with worse shoes.

It’s a story that’s been told so often, and to great effect, I guess, that it’s more than a widely-known fairy tale, it’s an iconic story. Obviously, having been exposed to it this often, and having seen so many goddamn versions of it, I’m interested in (or desperate for) alternatives, reinterpretations, distortions, eviscerations that tell the same stories in radically different ways.

dir: Martin Scorsese
Here's Time, making fools of us all
With delight, I watched this, with great delight in my heart.

If you’re reading this review, you know that I watch a lot of films, and a lot of them I even review. Those reviews, you would know, are to my benefit and to your detriment as a reader. I’m sorry about that. Really, I am. I wish I were a better reviewer; someone who could encapsulate succinctly and with wit what is great and what is less great about certain movies in this artistic medium I prize the most, after literature, puppetry and the accordion, of course. And I wish I could say it all without having to resort to the boring bullshit a billion other (paid) bunglers routinely trot out to justify their verbosity.

No, honestly, I wish I were a better reviewer, so that I could credibly explain why I loved Hugo so much, so that you, too, could feel the joy that I felt, and get a glimpse of how it felt to watch it. Yes, even cynical old me feels joy whilst watching a film, very rarely, but it happens. Aiming that high dooms any enterprise to failure, no doubt, but it should be perfectly obvious that failing at something doesn’t stop me from doing it. Au contraire, to get into the vernacular of it, au contraire, mes amis.

Hugo is based on The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick, and it should come as no surprise that this film is about a boy called Hugo who lives in the Gare Montparnasse train station, in the 1930s. He doesn’t just hang out there, dodging the dogged and limping local constable (Sacha Baron Cohen), and trying to eke out a meagre existence by stealing: he literally lives within the walls and towers of the train station, keeping the clocks running on time.

dir: Rob Marshall
You wish he was smiling because he was thinking about you. All he's thinking about is being 55 million dollars richer
When Elizabeth Taylor was paid $1,000,000 to star in Cleopatra back in ’64, it was considered both a record and a travesty. When man mountain Marlon Brando was paid $3.7 million and a percentage of profits for a few minutes of screen time in Superman, it was considered a fiasco and a symbol of how the days of Hollywood were numbered, seeing as it was starting to resemble the last days of Rome.

In the present day, Johnny Depp gets paid $55 million dollars to appear in another Pirates of the Caribbean flick, and it’s no big deal. Business as usual. Whatever.

And why? Well, surely it’s because these are the most beloved flicks of all time, and Depp, for playing the character of Captain Jack Sparrow, deserves every bloody well-earned penny? Surely?

Isn’t it a bit obscene, though? I don’t want to come across all ‘Workers Unite!’ and like some retrograde commie-pinko wanker, but is there really anything in this world that justifies getting paid that much? For that amount of money you’d think he was getting paid to sexually service, to the point of guaranteed happy ending, every person who steps into the theatre, anywhere in the world, any way they want.

The only calculation that justifies paying anyone that unholy amount of cash is the fairly basic economic one of ROI (Return on Investment). In the wash up, when it’s shown that it cost $55 million to keep Depp on board, $200 mil or so to make the goddamn flick, and it made over 1 billion dollars at the box office, you’ve achieved the pinnacle of capitalism at its finest. If they’d paid Depp some LeBron James – David Beckham style payday of $400 million for a few month’s work, Disney would still be way, way ahead in the scheme of things, and laughing all the way to the organ bank.

It’s fascinating. At least, these issues or questions are fascinating to me. Probably not to you, or to any other sane person with time to be apportioned and enjoyed in the most productive manner possible. At the very least, it’s more interesting thinking about these issues than it is thinking about this flick.

I have watched this flick, that’s true. Watching a flick usually means I feel entitled and qualified to review it thenceforth, having paid the due required. Again, that’s debateable. But I can’t really tell you much about it. There’s not much there there.

Oh, there’s certainly a lot of colour, movement, actors, special effects, rum drinking, music and ye olde ships and cannon-fire. Oh, and there’s lots of Captain Jack flouncing about. And there’s a plot, I guess.

dir: Catherine Hardwicke
Lots of red, virtually no riding, and barely any hood
So, chicks dig this stuff, huh? Tame mixtures of the supernatural and the melodramatic, and the direct competition of two hunky lunkheads wanting to kill each other over you, and that’s the ticket for fiddly remembrances in the bath?

Surely women have higher standards than that? Surely it takes more to satisfy them than that?

I’m going to quote famous dead film critic Pauline Kael for a second, but not in a filmic capacity. She once expressed surprise and shock that Nixon won re-election, because she didn’t know a single person who voted for him. Of course, this quote has been used more to show how self-selecting her circle of acquaintances was, rather than the validity of her knowing what a likely political outcome would be.

In that spirit of same insular cluelessness, I don’t know a single girl or woman who likes this kind of supernatural – romantic bullshit, whether it’s explicitly Twilight or not, or ersatz Twilight like this movie. Not a one. Sure, most of the women I’ve ever known are too intelligent for this bullshit, but can I really use them as my sample size for judging the population of women?

Surely not, since someone has to buy those mentally defective celeb magazines, and those products promising eternal youth, eternal desirability and bras more torture device than structural support. And it’s not me.

To capitalise on the perceived Twi market of Twi-teens and Twi-moms and Twi-handbaggers, they’ve recrafted the Little Red Riding Hood fairy tale to allow for the insertion of both an anti-religious / fascist theme as well as having two doofuses with contemporary hairstyles to fight over our little lady who’s trembling on the cusp of womanhood.

dir: Gaspar Noè
Sure, enter the void if you want, but how the hell do you get out?
What a crazy, fucked-up film.

Preparing yourself for a Gaspar Noè film is not something that is genuinely possible. Having seen others of his flicks, none of which I will ever see again, I was determined to not see this flick ever as well. Since I’m reviewing it, well, that means something changed in my thinking, and I’m glad, to an extent, that it happened. Not too proud to admit when I’m wrong.

A friend of a friend who works in the film industry told me she saw the flick at a festival, and that it was quite an amazing experience. Though I knew nothing about her before that day, her thoughts, conveyed to me over a long and boozy conversation on a Saturday afternoon at a local pub, regarding flicks in general (that she’d worked on in New Zealand, being those flicks involving children wandering into a Witch-filled wardrobe and a Jesus-substitute lion called Aslan) and this flick itself intrigued me. They intrigued me to the point where my absolute determination to never again be violated by a Gaspar Noè flick wavered, and over time led to a confident ‘maybe?’

And in the end I caved. I’m not entirely happy with the experience, because, as I should have expected, there are certain sights and sounds in this amazing flick that I wish I’d never seen and experienced, and which alcohol will now have to delete for me (in its usual sporadic and haphazard manner). But overall I think, I hope, the experience was a compelling and affecting one, and thus worthwhile.

Make no mistake: it is a stunning, tedious, amazing, excruciating film. The sounds and visuals are calculated and amped up deliberately to arouse and bludgeon the senses of the viewer. Even the opening credits transport the viewer to a bad place even after only four or so minutes of strobing neon staccato and mania.

And then the drug-addled flick begins. We see everything, almost everything, from the perspective of Oscar (Nathaniel Brown), and what isn’t from his perspective directly, is with the camera filming him from behind (in third person perspective, so to speak) , so that he is always either viewing things directly or seeing himself. He is a drug-using drug dealer in Tokyo, who spends the first half hour of this long-arsed flick out of his mind on drugs. We see his very trippy hallucinations, and the droning thoughts in his empty head. He lives with his sister Linda (Paz de la Huerta), who cares so very much about him.

dir: Mike Newell
Beefcake heartthrob pulmonary thrombosis
For me there’s an element of watching your kid performing onstage during the Christmas pageant or something similar, in terms of watching this flick. I mean it in the sense that I’m going to be more forgiving in my expectations, and that I’m actively going to like something that others will grind their teeth through.

My fandom for the whole Prince of Persia enterprise goes far back enough that I was but knee-high to a grasshopper; an ancient Persian grasshopper on some grass stalks in the ye old deserts of another time and age.

Yes, I’m talking about the computer games, the many games that have come out with a highly limber and acrobatic protagonist who leaps about defying gravity and fighting bad guys with his scimitar. I’ve played all of them, from the Apple IIe version, through to the Commodore 64 version, and the three million or so versions on PC. I even played the last one, Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands, which proved, to me at least, that I’ll practically buy anything with those fated words scrawled across the cover in fancy script. If they bring out a desert topping and floor cleaner called Prince of Persia, I’ll probably end up buying that too.

I wasn’t too ecstatic when I heard they were going to make a film version, because I thought the likelihood would be that it would suck. That’s not just because of the longstanding prejudice against game adaptations, which claims that they always suck. But, let’s face it, most flicks suck, so the likelihood would be high regardless of where it originated from.

So while I was happy for Jordan Mechner to get a hefty payday (the original creator of the ‘property’, as they call it), I didn’t think I’d have even moderate expectations going in. In reality, I love the setting and the character so much (regardless of its half dozen incarnations) that I was always going to be too eager.

Naturally, even if I try to apologise for it through gritted teeth, or try to convince you that my kids singing a terrible Christmas carol aren’t tone deaf, you’re going to see through it. So I’ll be honest about it: it’s not a good flick.

dir: Scott Stewart
A gun and a sword seems a bit much, don't you think?
Legion is, and this probably is not going to surprise any of you, a deeply stupid goddamn flick. There’s never been a flick with angels in it that has ever worked worth a damn except for two profound exceptions: It’s a Wonderful Life, and Wings of Desire.

But those are dramas, albeit romantic ones, with a bit of darkness in them.

This angel-filled fiasco belongs to the sub-genre of fantasy films whereby angels, either enacting or contradicting the will of God, decide to either eliminate humanity or at least battle it out on our planet’s surface.

If you’re of a certain age, and inclination, like me you might remember such 90s movies as The Prophecy trilogy, which had Christopher Walken trying to kill us all while playing the Archangel Gabriel (I don’t think he knew the cameras were on). If you’re even older, you might be boring enough, like me, to have read Milton’s Paradise Lost, and have heard it badly quoted a million times by pretentious shmucks in movies for the last 100 years.

And if you’ve ever been a godbotherer, or been bothered by godbotherers, you might know that the secret surprise at the end of the Bible is that we’re all going to die only after the torments of the time of tribulation, except for a select few bunch of goodie-two-shoeses.

So the idea of angels raining down fire and destruction upon us is nothing new. What this here film manages to do is render all of that crap in the most incompetent fashion imaginable.

dir: Spike Jonze
Wild chasing the Wild
Where the Wild Things Are is a beautiful film. It’s touching and sweet, scary but deeply felt, but I don’t really think it’s for children. I don’t even think most kids under the age of ten would really get that the Maurice Sendak book, of twenty or so pages, really connects with this film apart from the similarity in the merchandising. Sure, the imagery is the same, but the story has been greatly transformed by Spike Jonze, David Eggers and the forests and beaches of Victoria.

I have happily read the book to my daughter a stack of times, and so I know how profoundly expanded the story is in the movie. As to whether it’s true in spirit and intent to the book, you’d have to ask noted and thoroughly aged curmudgeon Maurice Sendak, who’s still alive, who wrote and drew the book nearly fifty years ago, and who I’m sure is happy to collect cheques for the film rights. I suspect deep down Sendak would hate this film if he ever sat through it, that’s just my gut instinct.

My instincts are often wrong, I have to admit. What I don’t think I’m wrong about is that this really couldn’t connect with kids for fairly serious and pervasive reasons, self-same reasons that would make it appeal perhaps to their elders.

There’s something simultaneously intellectual, inspired and childish about Spike Jonze and the flicks he’s been responsible for. He has tremendous control of the visual medium that he earns his crust from, but he’s more than happy to aim those skills at the ‘kid’ inside adults rather than the kid in kids.

My only real evidence for this is that his rendering of Where The Wild Things Are is completely lacking in treacle or schmaltzy saccharine, but is not averse to being incredibly twee and cutesy, and so goddamn hip that it hurts. But even more than that, the flick is suffused with such keen melancholy, and such a golden, halcyon longing for the freedom and joy of childhood that of course it would have to look strange to the kiddies.

dir: David Fincher
CGI, CGI will tear us apart, again
David Fincher almost gets a lifetime pass from me for Fight Club. It’s a film so goddamn good that it elevates him into the lofty heights of directors whom I’ll defend even if they make twenty shitty films compared to their one or two masterpieces. Brad Pitt has no such pass from me, lifetime or otherwise. I have such a deep antipathy for his brand of actoring that he is usually the weakest link (for me) even in the strongest of films.

This flick, right off the bat, I enjoyed, very much so, despite the fact that there is less going on here than meets the eye. The premise sounds like it’s high concept enough, but it’s used more for its ironic sense than anything else. A F. Scott Fitzgerald short story is the origin of the film’s screenplay, but it has been fleshed out and elaborated upon in order to make it a serious, prestige Oscarbait contender, instead of the Twilight Zone half-hour that it probably warranted instead.

In the early part of the 20th Century, a clockmaker grieves over the death of his son in the Great War. He constructs a clock for a train station that runs backwards instead of forwards, with the (poetic, not literal) hope that such a clock going backwards would reverse time and resurrect the many sons who died needlessly, bringing them home to their devastated families.

It is, without doubt, the most touching moment of the movie. It occurs in the first few minutes, and, truth be told, the flick never matches or exceeds those moments from there onwards. It does, however, remain interesting.