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dir: Bart Layton
Chameleon eyes
At their worst, documentaries cover something that happened in the most turgid, lifeless manner possible, sending the facts even further out of reach and serving the self-interests of people trying to impose their horrible view of humanity all over the rest of us.

At their best, they illuminate the confusion that confronts all of us in the face of not what happened at particular points in time, but why. It’s not the sole purpose of documentaries to answer questions, or to say “This, then this, then this”. Sometimes they succeed best when they still leave us wondering “what the hell were these people thinking?”

The Imposter is a documentary about something that really happened, in which most of the facts are not in dispute. Let’s say 99% of the facts are not disputed. With the family involved, and the imposter of the title, none of them are denying that any of this happened. What none of them can genuinely answer is the “why” of it all, and that doesn’t detract from the experience in the slightest.

A boy goes missing in Texas, in the 1990s. A ‘boy’ in Spain is found by police, who claims, eventually, to be the missing Texan boy, Nicholas Barclay.

How bizarre, eh? We’re not under any confusion as to whether this chap was actually Nicholas Barclay. I mean, the documentary is called The Imposter. Also, this guy, who talks directly to the camera, has a strong French accent. He has brown eyes, whereas Nicholas has blue eyes. This guy’s also clearly an adult.

There are actors in this, in small recreated bits, but mostly we see the family of Nicholas Barclay, his sister and mother, the FBI agent who become involved, and, in the main, pseudo-Nicholas Barclay with his oily French non-charm, admitting what an unrepentant scumbag he was from the beginning to the end of this saga.

dir: Jake Schreier

2012
Marry me, dear robot
Films about old guys battling dementia don’t sound like a lot of fun. If you saw that flick, at least I thought it was an actual movie, of Clint Eastwood getting into an argument with a chair last year and losing, then you know how sad it can be.

Really sad. But where there’s inspiration, there’s hope. Someone fairly clever came up with a sci-fi premise that does what the best kinds of science-fiction stories do: they use some kind of presently non-existent technology to tell us a story relatable to the people of today.

Frank (Frank Langella) is a grumpy old bastard, as if there’s any other kind of old guy in movies. The first thing we see him doing is burglarising a house. He’s pretty rough at it, but he knows what he’s doing. As he’s extracting everything of worth through lockpicking and brute force, he spies a picture in a frame, and wonders how a picture of himself as a younger man with his kids has found it into his target’s house.

It takes a while, but he figures out, too late, that he’s been knocking off his own house in the middle of the night.

So, yeah, we get to see two things: he’s a thief by nature, and he’s got some kind of neurological/cognitive issues, especially as they relate to memory.

He has a son who fusses over him (James Marsden), and who visits him weekly, but he has to drive five hours there and five back each time. Clearly there are limits to filial piety. He has a daughter as well (Liv Tyler), whose whiny voice and ethnic clothing makes her the classic cinematic cliché of a trust fund hippie. She fusses from a safe distance, as safe a distance away as Tajikistan, or Kyrgyzstan, or one of the many ‘stans to choose from.

The concerned son, the good son, decides that you can buy your way out of a difficult situation. Money can assuage guilt, it's possible, or at least that's what this film champions as an ideal in life. The son buys the father a robot. It's far enough in the future where robots are now adept at carrying out all the tasks a senile old man and a crafty thief could ever ask for. Frank's not enamoured with the purchase, because, as with most people who are either old or suffering from dementia or both, they deny they have a problem and they at least pretend to resent any attempts towards helping them (while whining simultaneously if you stop trying to help).

dir: Ang Lee
Just chillin' and illin' on the high seas
A lot of what I’m going to say about this beautiful movie is going to sound churlish, ungrateful and unfair. So be it. Someone has to do it. So much of the rest of the world is tripping over itself saying what a wondrous movie this is, that I can’t help but be a little contrary.

But until that time when I let rip with both barrels, let me lull you into a false sense of security by praising this film’s many virtues.

No, Life of Pi is not about pies, or about the mathematical constant of π. The diameter or circumference of no circles was calculated during the making of this movie. It’s about a guy whose nickname is Pi (Irrfhan Khan) who survived a harrowing experience and lived to tell the story to a writer (Rafe Spall). Lucky for the writer, eh, because he would have been stuffed otherwise, and we would have been none the wiser or entertained.

No, don’t go thinking this flick has anything to do with a true story of any description. Almost every implausible movie that gets made, from Zero Dark Thirty to Titanic to Transformers, practically has an opening title assuring us that what we are about to watch is based on true events. That’s not what Life of Pi is aiming for. It aims to tell an amazing, unbelievable story in the most visually stunning manner possible.

And, oh, is it stunning. Seen in 3D, using the full capabilities of this ‘new’ old technique in the cinema is the quintessential cinematic experience. It’s the most impressive and immersive use of 3D I’ve seen thus far, and it doesn’t just add an aesthetic sheen to the visuals: it makes the visuals visceral and encompassing in a way other films don’t.

When Pi is telling the story, he’s an older man, but the story he’s telling is about his younger self (Suraj Sharma), growing up in Pondicherry, at the time a region of India controlled somehow by the French. I say ‘somehow’ because while I don’t dispute that the French controlled this place up until the 50s, it just doesn’t seem like something those brave and noble Gauls would do.

I mean, I can’t imagine the French ever trying to rule some colonial place and having it explode in their and everyone else’s faces, can you? Maybe the Americans came along and politely asked them to leave?

dir: Andrea Arnold
Heathcliff, it's me, Floppy, Come Home!
There are probably a million versions of this story, and yet this is the first I’ve watched the whole way through. I know there’s versions with chronic overactors like Laurence Olivier and Ralph Fiennes playing the smouldering Heathcliff, but none of them have ever been compelling enough to compel me to watch them.

I don’t have a good reason as to why. As a pseudo-intellectual pretentious wanker (First Class) who also happens to make millions on the side from writing film reviews read by scores of people, it’s almost a negligent crime to not have read and seen at least fifteen versions of Wuthering Heights by now. I should really turn in my union card before the Goth Union comes after me.

Still, I’ve heard the Kate Bush song hundreds of times, and the even funnier Mr Floppy parody version of Kate Bush’s song, so I thought I’d totally be up on all the details upon finally watching a Wuthering Heights film.

Jeez Louise! I never knew Emily Bronte had such a dirty mouth! They should dig her up and wash her fingertips out with soap for all the shocking, shocking language on aural display here.

There was a moment while watching the film where I kind of clicked that maybe this film had varied somewhat from the established text, when Heathcliff screams at a bunch of toffy aristocrats, in a heavy Yorkshire accent, “Fook all you, you pack o’ koontz”. You thought the biggest variation was having Heathcliff played by a black actor, well, the script seems to be a tad more radical than that particular casting decision.

I never realised how bleak this story was, how vicious and cruel. You hear or read the words “doomed love story” and it conjures images of lovers star-crossed though they be eventually submitting to a cruel fate that conspires to only allow them a brief time of happiness before crushing them utterly. Wuthering Heights doesn’t even have that “brief time of happiness”, it’s about love, but it’s all misery from beginning to end.

dir: Kieran Darcy-Smith
They look like they're having fun
Wow, did I get this one wrong.

This flick was completely not what I thought it would be, either in style or content. For some reason I had this idea it was a light-hearted romantic drama about two Australian couples travelling overseas and finding out stuff about each other and coming to terms with stuff etc.

Spectacularly wrong, incandescently wrong. I could not have been more wrong if I’d thought I was about to watch a film clip for Pink Floyd’s song Wish You Were Here, sung by Christina Aguilera as Lady Gaga spanks her with a rhesus monkey.

It turns out it’s a sly reference to the postcard one used to be able to send, saying the title, as in, Really, I’m Glad That You’re Not Here, But I Just Wanted to Rub Your Nose In the Fact That I’m Here and You’re Not. That’s what it’s always meant in reality, but this flick, which has a black streak through it a mile wide.

There’s a darkness to this flick, a dread which precludes hints at levity or humour, and we’re not sure why at all until the very end. We’re not sure because the flick uses an aggressive editing style to keep us unbalanced and offside, and a non-chronological approach in order to keep us confused and in the dark throughout. There are also hints, feints, red herrings and dead ends throughout the script to keep us guessing, or at least it kept me guessing constantly. Of course it all makes sense in the end, but it’s the getting there that’s the harrowing part.

As the flick starts, as far as we know it starts, we know something has happened. One of the four of a group of Australians has gone missing. We don’t know what’s happened to him, and the three people who return to Australia from Cambodia don’t seem to know what’s happened either.

The waiting’s not the hardest part; it’s the gnawing anxiety that eats away at your insides waiting for something horrible to be found out by the ones you love most. Dave (Joel Edgerton) and Alice (Felicity Price) returned all right, it seems, but they’re clearly worried about what happened to their friend Jeremy (Antony Starr), and they’re really hoping he’s found soon. Clearly.

dir: Jonathan Dayton & Valerie Faris
Bloody caveman writers
Being a deeply neurotic person, I regularly fall prey to a panoply of fears. One of the most fundamental for me is either not being seen as a person, or failing to see other people as real people.

I'm sure that probably sounds a bit weird. I mean, there are a bunch of far more reasonable and likely things to be terrified of. Spiders, for one, insanity, earthquakes, tsunamis, radiation, cancer, germs; there's a lot out there, and they're just the simplistic ones. People with elaborate and expansive imaginations can think of plenty more crap on a second-by-second basis to be horrified at the prospect of.

My fear about forgetting to see the inherent humanness of people and just seeing them as objects is a powerful one, because I think it's so easy.

You forget, sometimes, don't you, when you're dealing with someone who seems more like a collection of annoyances rather than a living, breathing person, to see them as they deserve to be seen, as a whole person? Or when you fixate on some other aspects of their being, and completely forget about their personhood, and instead bliss out at whatever aspect / fetish takes your fancy?

And what if you do this overwhelmingly to the people you're meant to be closest to in your life, like your own partner or family?

When Ruby Sparks first came out, I recall reading various conversations about how some people were seeing this film as a takedown, a deconstruction of the so-called "Manic Pixie Dream Girl" character that permeates the entertainment sphere. The character, almost always written into screenplays by male writers, tends to reduce female characters to idiotic and simplistic caricatures of femininity just to help a dull male character our of their funk. Sure, fiction is a form of fantasy, but these characters tend to be seen explicitly as a male fantasy of what a superficial but desirable 'woman' would really be like.

This construct, this 'thing' they play has nothing to do with the physical: it comes down to how mindlessly and without agency they act. The bipolar energy, the tweeness, the flightiness, the 24-hour sexual availability, the borderline psychoticness are all, somehow, meant to be desirable to us, the viewer, looking through the eyes of the male protagonist. It's strange, I know, but there you have it.

If you're still not sure what I'm talking about, here's a list of manic pixie dream girls that I can think of off the top of my head: anything played by Zooey Deschanel in everything she's ever done, (often) Maggie Gyllenhaal, Meg Ryan in her heyday, a lot of Natalie Portman's crapper roles, and basically any role where the character's sole purpose is a feisty 'feminine' function that wouldn’t seem to exist except that the main character needs her to.

The writer of this film, however, Zoe Kazan, granddaughter of the legendary and infamous director Elia Kazan, rejects this outright. Ruby Sparks, for her, and she should know, isn't about the propensity for screenwriters to write these empty characters; it's about the danger of idealising the people we're romantically involved with.

She also plays Ruby, so I guess we have to take her word as law. As in, she's the Judge Dredd of this endeavour, and if she says 'manic pixie dream girl' is a misogynistic and reductive term, and that it doesn't exist really as a phenomenon in movies, then She is the Law, and must be right.

dir: Lorene Scafaria
I don't think they have turntables where you're going
If the world was going to literally end, and we knew about it in advance, and we knew exactly when it was going to happen, what would we all do with the time we had left? It’s a compelling what if? of a thought experiment, and usually, in art at least, it’s reserved to “if you were going to die, what stuff would you do finally that you never had the courage to do before?”

This time, though, everyone’s going to die. Every living thing extinguished in a cataclysm that won’t be averted with a couple of seconds to go, apparently, since this is what the film tells us from the opening minutes. A man (Steve Carrell) and his wife (Nancy Carrell) listen blankly as the radio in their car outlines the failure of some last-ditch attempt to avert the disaster. A meteor called Matilda, which is as good a name as any for something fixing to permanently end your present world, continues on its course towards Earth, where it will obliterate all life, perhaps.

The couple sit grimly in the car, until the wife bails, never to return. Why would she? The point the flick makes sometimes bluntly, sometimes eloquently, is that knowing the end is actually nigh would render most of the underpinnings of the social contract utterly null and void. Why be faithful to your husband or wife; the world’s ending in a few weeks, what difference will it make? Why go to work: is money going to stop Matilda? Why not take hard drugs and take part in uncomfortable orgies? Addictions not going to matter, STDs aren’t going to matter, unintended pregnancies aren’t going to matter.

Social conventions, infrastructure, the value of being courteous to each other: all of it falls apart even when the coming apocalypse doesn’t involve zombies, vampires or mutants.

This is a time where the end of things sits heavily on the minds of writers, screenwriters and the hard drives and Kindles et al of a lot of viewers and readers. If there are too many superhero flicks coming out, then there are even more ‘too many’ apocalyptic or post-apocalyptic movies that have been coming out for far too long.

In Seeking a Friend for the End of the World, it’s not used as an excuse for cool head-exploding special effects or fight choreography. It’s solely used as the pretty big trigger for a whole bunch of people, being all of humanity, to start deciding what is and isn’t important to them in these last days.

dir: Jonathan Teplitzky
You should really let a doctor have a look at that
This Australian film from last year has nothing to do with the week-long Burning Man festival in the States which happens every year (which coincidentally starts today, Aug 27th) and is capped off with a massive effigy of a burning man. It is, however, about a man who is burning.

He is burning with desire, with the clap and probably a few other factors are making him blaze, but as the film opens, what he’s burning with is actual fire.

Tom (Matthew Goode) is a chef, and like all chefs depicted in film, is a hard-charging hyper-caffeinated arsehole. Well, maybe it’s not fair to say all of them on film are Type A personality arrogant arseholes. I think there was one who wasn’t. It might have been Remy the rat from Ratatouille. But all of the rest of them tend to be shown as alcoholics and drug abusers who shag anyone at any time.

Anyone who has spent time with people like this in real life knows how false a picture of the food services industry this truly is. I mean, I’ve known stacks of people working like this in high pressure kitchens, and they NEVER drank on the job or smoked dope during a break or shagged co-workers in the alley behind the restaurant. Also, they never get trashed after work every other night, nor is Monday the night when they tend to go completely crazy, since they’ve usually worked all weekend.

It’s a tough environment to work in. Margins are razor thin, staff can be undependable and turnover is high, and your restaurant can live or die on the quality of a day’s produce, or be murdered by a single stinky review. It produces exceedingly talented people, but it also makes some bush league level arseholes into Parliamentary – International level arseholes.

Arseholes like Tom. We see a lot of disjointed images at the beginning, ones that seem to be jumping all over the place time-wise. We’re not sure what’s happening and when it’s meant to be happening, and it takes a long time for the story to coalesce for us.

This deliberate fractured narrative is intended, I think, to give us the setup first: How much of an arsehole is Tom, who also seems to be heading for a fiery death, and how did this all come about?

There are a lot of women shown briefly at the beginning, giving us a sense that Tom is a player of the highest order, just like all chefs, but as the story progresses it illuminates the elements of his character, so that time (as in, when something happens) tells us more about Tom rather than the element itself.

For much of the flick’s length I thought the flick was trying to explain why Tom ended up where he seemed like he was going to end up. Instead it’s trying to explain why a seemingly high-strung man is always angry. Turns out that he has a bloody good reason.

dir: Lasse Hallstrom
I'm wondering whether the title is just a sleazy euphemism for some nasty sex act. From the joy on their faces, I think it is
This title is a blatant rip-off of the band Trout Fishing in Quebec, but I’ll forgive it that. I won’t forgive it much else along the way. Lasse Hallstrom is responsible for some truly terribly treacly flicks in the past, but somehow he was able to pull out before making a horrible mess this time.

I have not and will never read the book this flick is based on, but I’m virtually certain at least one thing about the book doesn’t carry over to the film. The character that McGregor plays has to have been older than the one he plays here, otherwise it makes no sense. Well, I guess it makes some sense if he has Asperger’s, or is just emotionally retarded, but then again, he’s a guy, so it’s hard to tell the difference.

Dr Alfred Jones (McGregor) is an expert on fish, and lives and breathes their fishy world as if it were his own. It’s humans he can’t stand. Even though he’s so curmudgeonly that it hurts the eyeballs, he has somehow managed to marry a woman who, for most of the film, is as emotionless and proper as he is, so they’re an ideal match.

Ewan's great, like he always is, but even he acts so stuffy at times that he almost looks disgusted with himself. He is one of those actors, like Johnny Depp, like R. Lee Ermy, that the womenfolk, in my humble estimation, will watch and adore in anything they do, no matter how good or lame. Maybe not former Marine Drill Sergeant R. Lee Ermy. He'd scare women into having orgasms, as opposed to the firm but gentle coaxing methods Depp and McGregor would be responsible for.

dir: Jason Reitman
No, it's not Paris Hilton; it's someone way worse
Charlize Theron was terrifying in Monster, where she played serial killer Aileen Wuornos all those years ago, snagging an Oscar for her performance.

There are scenes in Young Adult where she’s even more horrifying.

She does this thing with her eyes where she leeches them of all human sentiment or human feeling. They transform into the eyes of some infinitely old and infinitely cold alien who observes our species with nothing but contempt.

And then she just acts like a self-centred brat who’s never grown up from being the high school mean/popular girl, who is doomed to be nothing but this for the rest of her life.

When Mavis (Charlize Theron) receives a group e-mail announcing the birth of her married, high-school boyfriend’s daughter, who has been out of her life for decades, she somehow twists this to mean that now is the time for her to return to her shitty home town to rescue him from a life of domesticity and human feeling.

She is a piece of work, a true piece of work. Her alcoholism is only one of her many estimable qualities. When she piles in to her car in order to drive back home to Mercury, Minnesota, with miniature dog in tow, she puts in a tape that dates back to her glory days, to the halcyon, to the peak of existence.

That tape, a mixtape, is just one of the many testaments to a certain age, here. What kids make mixtapes these days? I would hazard a guess that there’s possibly only about five people constructing even ‘mixtape’ CDs worldwide, and they’re probably just perverts.

What’s the contemporary equivalent? Sending a text message with a playlist that has links to the torrentz where some songs could be downloaded? Cram that up your iPod’s nethers and smoke to it, freaks and groovers.

Mavis plays the same song again and again. Actually, not even the entire song. She keeps repeating the intro mostly, again and again, just to hear the words “She wears denim wherever she goes / says she’s gonna get some records by The Status Quo oh yeah / Oh Yeah.”

Oh, yes indeed, it’s a great song from a great album, being The Concept from Bandwagonesque by Teenage Fanclub. It’s meant to date not the film but the protagonist. The strangest thing, for me at least, is that it perfectly situated me in a time and place so I could understand the exact era these halcyon days of hers were meant to be from: the early 90s. If it had been a Nirvana song, that would have been too broad, and too on the nose, too easy. But this song narrowed it down even more.

It’s the way that she keeps playing the first bit of the song that’s even more telling, or possibly even more telling. She can’t even let the rest of the song play, or the tape itself. As if that wasn’t subtle enough, the song plays a key part later on as well.

dir: Josh Trank
Murky morally and visually
With great power comes great responsibility, as well as a great opportunity to get back at everyone who ever did us wrong, right?

Chronicle is a pretty keen take on the superhero genre, told through the non-narrative construct of handheld camera / found footage telling us the story. For that to work, it means that the person filming, at least initially, has to have some reason other than what’s about to happen for filming themselves. At least in theory.

That person is Andrew (Dane DeHaan), a pale and isolated jerk in high school, as are all Andrews, really. Has he got a decent reason for being a loner jerk who films himself with a camera? Well, maybe. The first instance we see worthy of immortalisation, which opens the flick, is him filming himself and his bedroom door, because his violent drunken jerk of a father (Michael Kelly) is threatening him through that door.

We also find out that Andrew’s mother is dying, very slowly, so things aren’t going that well for any of them. And at school, naturally, the other teenage scum sense his vulnerability, and bully the heck out of him. He does have, at least, a cousin who’s on friendly terms with him, which makes him seem like the only person in the world who gives a damn. Matt (Alex Russell) seems like a kid too tall and popular to give a damn about a scrawny skeleton like Andrew, but care he does, all the same. Inexplicably.

Perhaps in efforts to decrease his own burden, Matt insists that Andrew come to a rave with him, so he can get out there and alienate a whole new bunch of people. At that rave, which seems oh so 1990s, Matt, Andrew and another student called Steve (Michael B. Jordan) find some strange rock / crystalline thing down a hole which changes them profoundly.

No, it’s not a metaphor for hot guy-on-guy sex. Wait, maybe it is.

dir: Alexander Payne
I wonder how high up on People magazine's Hottest 100 Bachelors list I am this year...
I was so surprised when this didn’t turn out to be a biopic-documentary about the great punk band The Descendents, from whose ashes rose other punk superstars Black Flag and All, blessing the world with their fast, brutal pop-punk noise, inspiring a legion of teenage boys in Akron, Ohio and Ringwood, Melbourne, to pick up guitars in their bedrooms and then put them down again once they finished their chemistry and engineering degrees.

No. That would have been too real, too awesome. Instead, here’s George Clooney Clooning things up for the rest of us, based on the novel of the same name by Kaui Hart Cummings.

We see, for the briefest instant, a woman riding on a jet ski, who seems very happy. That’s the happiest we’re going to see her, because Clooney’s sonorous voiceover ensures that we will know quick smart that these people aren’t or can’t be happy for very long.

It turns out that the woman we beheld in all her glory is now in a coma, and her husband, Matt King (Cloons) is looking after her, and dealing more so with the fact that he now has to reengage with his family, being two daughters, which he thinks he’s not ready to do. The youngest, Scottie (Amara Miller) is getting in trouble for acting out (by saying ever so rude and hurtful things to other girls), and his elder daughter Alex (Shailene Woodley) has her own problems unsuccessfully hidden away at her elite boarding school.

Though he uses and abuses voiceover throughout the flick, Matt’s main problem, and Payne’s intention, as it often is the case with his films, is to point out that even with people living in paradise, which is what a lot of people would consider Hawaii to be, their lives can still suck a bit, and they can do shitty things to each other.

I’m not sure that’s going to come as a surprise to anyone, but maybe it needed to be said. I never really thought life was easier for emotionally distanced people living in a hot, tropical place, because I always assumed the humidity and heat would drive residents into semi-regular alcoholic rages.