X (2011)

director Jon Hewitt
viewed: 05/01/2013

I can’t recall exactly where I read about X or what I read about it, but I think it got me at “the seedy side of Sydney” and the King’s Cross area.  On my trip to Sydney a few years ago, that was the general neck of the woods that I stayed in, and so the idea of seeing a thriller set in recognizable locales piqued my curiosity.

X is a mixture of good and bad.  Some of its dramatic components, the story of the girl from up north and the would-be magician taxi driver, or the high class hooker who wants to get out of the business and go to Paris where her mother took her once, this is the stuff of bad television, hokey writing with characters whose whole description has been cribbed from ancient cliches.

But oddly enough, the actors are kind of good.  I think.  Because something is a bit more compelling here.  It’s not successfully gritty or realistic, though it tries to slum it good.  Viva Bianca is good as the world-weary hooker trying to get out.  Hanna Mangan Lawrence is not bad as the young naif fresh to the Sydney’s seamy side.  And the psycho killer cop guy, he’s good too.  And the young girl who befriends the newbie, telling her what a great friend she is for loaning her a dollar.  She was good too.

It sways back and forth into Pulp Fiction (1994)-like surprises and violence and more brain-dead character development.  So in the end, it’s far from a fully satisfying thing.  But it’s not without its points of interest.

As for the sleazy side of Sydney, King’s Cross in particular,… it’s kind of intriguing, a tad resonant for me.  Vague.

The Snowtown Murders (2011)

director Justin Kurzel
viewed: 10/21/2012

Based on the grisly true events of serial murder in South Australia in the 1990′s, The Snowtown Murders is a naturalistic, gritty portrayal of human evil.  The unusual thing about these serial crimes was that while it was driven by a single man, several people were complicit in the murders, quite a-typical of serial killers generally speaking.  But in sitting down to watch the film, I had kind of forgotten a good deal of the facts of the crimes and was watching with relative ignorance of what was to come.   Which is typically a good thing.

Watching The Snowtown Murders, though, it might help to know a bit more about the story ahead of time.  While it’s hardly any artsy stream-of-consciousness or non-linear narrative, the story is also not spelled out so explicitly that you’d necessarily understand the scope of the crimes or the significance of some of them.

Director Justin Kurzel,using mostly non-professional actors from the area of the film’s events, does a good job depicting a sense of menace in place and character, amid the poverty and mean times of the story.  Lucas Pittaway is one of the non-professional cast, playing James Vlassakis, a teenage boy drawn into different levels of human horror by different crimes and different criminals.  James and his younger brothers are sexually abused and exploited by a neighbor friend of their mother’s.  This spawns an assault of retribution, but not from the boys themselves, but from his mother and her eventual boyfriend, John Bunting (played by Daniel Henshall).

Bunting is the prime instigator.  Inspired by his homophobia and hatred for pedophiles, Bunting gave himself (and others) lease to mete out perceived justice in the form of torture killings of anyone to whom he took a dislike.  Kurzel depicts James at the center of the story, young, meek, and confused, in a world of tough places and brutal male role models.  Not many would be more brutal than Bunting.

Over a period of a number of years, Bunting and his crew tortured and killed at least 12 people, dragging James along, even killing James’ half-brother Troy, who had also sexually molested James.  It’s a gruesome story, sad and brutal.  But afterward, I found myself wanting to know what really happened.  Some of the things happen in stretches of time that mask the reality of it all.  And while the acting and overall film are good, I never got a good grasp on the whole.  Which I found myself wanting.  And which Wikipedia served to clarify.

Australia is like an alternate reality America in a lot of ways.

Animal Kingdom

(2010) director David Michôd
viewed: 01/22/11

This Aussie crime flick lives up to its earthy, gritty rep, especially Jacki Weaver, who plays the middle-aged matron behind this familial crew of criminals.  Partially based on real events and real criminals, Animal Kingdom is fairly conventional in its telling, but strikes a chord with unique, riveting characters, creating something fresh and compelling.

The film opens with a teenage boy, sitting watching a crummy game show, next to his mother who seems to be sleeping.  But suddenly, paramedics arrive and it turns out that his mother has overdosed on heroin, and he’s waiting for help to arrive, still immensely blase and perhaps more interested in the inane game show than his mother’s life hanging by a thread.  It’s a strange, jarring scene, that sets the landscape for him throughout the film.

He turns to his grandmother, Grandma Smurf (Weaver), who takes him in, his closest family left when his mother doesn’t recover from her OD.  Grandma has borne a whole clan of thugs, each a little less villainous than the one before him, with the eldest of the group, the hardened, heartless killer.  The younger ones are still going through varying degrees of initiation into this crime family, including the nephew.

Guy Pearce, who seems to only show up in good films, plays the good cop, the detective who tries to reach out to him to rat out his family and turn to the good side.   Things, as they typically do, escalate from bad to worse to worse, but the story is tied to this naive, young man, the innocent, coming of age to the brutality of the venal tribe.  And the question follows, where will he wind up.  Will he be transformed into a killer or side with humanity?  And in this sense, it’s fairly conventional.

But Weaver’s Grandma Smurf, with her cloying sweet, yet annoying voice, her kisses that linger a definite moment or two too long on her children’s lips, whose banal facade of common middle age belies a ruthlessness as deep as the ocean, she is the masterpiece of the film, and if anything, she pushes a solid drama into the realms of truly worth seeing.

The whole “animal kingdom” motif, however, seems a little trite.  The beastliness, the wild, untamed nature of these human animals, compared to lions and other predatory creatures…it’s perhaps a weak point in the film, which may perhaps prove out a less mature script and concept.  I won’t nitpick, though.  It’s a good flick.

Holy Smoke

(1999) dir. Jane Campion
viewed: 02/20/10

Since watching An Angel at My Table (1990) and Bright Star (2009) last year, I’ve been on a determined path to catch up by watching all of director Jane Campion’s films.  No real order to this, so I’ve selected a sort of odd film of hers here, 1999′s Holy Smoke which is perhaps most pointedly, compared to her other films, a comedy.  All of her films seem to have comic elements at times, but in this case, the whole cast is a bit of an over-the-top decpiction of the Australian family.

While Campion herself is from New Zealand, this film is about a suburban Sydney family who fears that their wayward daughter (played by always charming Kate Winslet) has fallen under the spell of an Indian mystic and has turned into a cultist.  They hire a hot-shot American deprogrammer (played by Harvey Keitel) to come out and break her.  The whole thing turns hurdy-gurdy and eventually climbs to pretty significant absurdist heights.

I’ve noted before, which may or may not be true but there seems in Australian cinema, a picture of Aussies as pretty freaking loopy.  The semi-nuclear family here features some broads caricatures of the gay brother and his boyfriend, the straight brother and his flowzy tart of a wife, the over-bearing but well-meaning mom, and a whole cast of other characters who I never fully got a grasp on their relationships.  To a big extent, this is one of the film’s main characteristics.

But the film is about the highly-confident deprogrammer who goes on his own Australian adventure, drawn in by the rebelious, sexy Winslet, who is both broken according to plan but also manages to “break” her deprogrammer too.

I’d say this film is by no means as strong as Campion’s other films, though it has its charms.  Winslet and Keitel are both compelling.  Winslet’s slutty sister-in-law, played by the tarty Sophie Lee is also quite funny.

But after having become a bit of an “Intervention” junky (the A&E television series that depicts real interventions, though not deprogrammings), some of the methodology and approach seemed kind of strange and suspect.  I guess it’s not really meant to be taken seriously, though it does raise some interesting points, such as whose reality is genuine?  I mean, her family lovingly commits to trying to bring her back, but they are a kook-fest of their own and Keitel’s version of reality becomes so compromised that it’s hard to know just what the grounding is for the ultimate return to “sanity”.  Though the film does find its way there eventually.

I’d say this is definitely a lesser Campion film, but one that might be interesting in an Australian cinema analysis.

An Angel at My Table

(1990) dir. Jane Campion
viewed: 09/27/09

This is one of those films that many people list among favorites, or remember fondly, one of those films that I’d never seen.  In fact, in the world of New Zealand director Jane Campion, I haven’t even seen her most famous film, The Piano (1993), either.  But with her current film, Bright Star (2009), getting such good reviews and driving me towards actually seeing it in the cinema, now’s as good a time as any to get started on her work.

I don’t know that I knew really anything about this movie, despite having known of it and the fact that a lot of people liked it.  I didn’t, for instance, know that it was based on the life of a real person, notable New Zealand writer Janet Frame, about whom I also knew nothing.  But in actuality, the film is adapted from three of Frame’s memoirs and structured in sequence about them.

At the most condensing and over-simplifying, her story fits within the true stories of women in the 20th Century who suffered at the hands of psychiatry in its raw, harsh, misogynistic worst, misdiagnosing and mistreating people with things so radical as electrical shock treatment and on the far side, lobotomy, which Ms. Frame came nearly a hair’s breadth away from receiving herself if not for winning a national writing award in time to have her brought from the internment.  In all, she spent 8 years in and out of hospitals, and spent many years in therapy thereafter in which her worst issue was the trauma that she’d suffered in being hospitalized and mistreated.

Her childhood has charms and dramas, and her adult life, discovering herself as a writer more significantly post-hospital and in Europe, adds to the strange and amazing tale of her life.  And the story is compelling in and of itself.

As can often be the case in films (either documentary or drama) that are about a true story, amazing in itself, is that the story can compel over the quality of the film, and often people blur the fascination of the story with the quality of the film.  But Campion shows great artistry in the process of the film, not simply with casting the three ages of curly readheds to play Frame, nor in merely telling the tale (which could easily have become either pedantic or melodramatic easily), but she does find that amazing place in which the film becomes larger than the story, the elegance of narrative style adds to the narrative itself, and something much richer emerges.

It’s easy to see why people have been moved and compelled by this film over the years.  It’s easy enough to understand why I might not have gotten around to seeing it, but it’s a bit of a shame, too.  That In the Cut (2003) was the only of Campion’s films that I’d managed to see before now, well, that is just a shame.  I am now quite keen to see The Piano and Bright Star and others of her earlier films like Sweetie (1989).  I often note that no matter how many films any film enthusiast, historian, fanatic, cinephile has seen, there are always going to be some glaring holes.  One less for me now.

Walkabout

(1971) dir. Nicolas Roeg
viewed: 08/25/09

After seeing the brilliant Wake in Fright (1971) in re-release in Sydney while visiting Australia, I was inspired to see Nicolas Roeg’s film Walkabout, which bested Wake in Fright in 1971 at Cannes.  Two great films about Australia released the same year, two films made by English directors.  Whereas Wake in Fright disappeared to near oblivion until recently restruck and re-released and celebrated, Walkabout has long been a film of note, made during director Nicolas Roeg’s finest period, in which he also directed Performance (1970), Don’t Look Now (1973), and The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976).  And that said, I don’t think I’d ever seen it.

Walkabout is the story of two English children, a 14 year old girl and her 7 year old (or so) brother, who become stranded in the outback in a strange and shocking way and are forced to walk in search of a return to civilization, surviving as best they can.  They are met by an Aboriginal boy who is doing a “walkabout”, which according to an intertitle at the beginning of the film, is a ritual that Aboriginal boys perform at the age of 16, going out into the outback on their own and hunting to survive, living off the land.  He befriends them and helps them along.

Roeg’s narrative style is effective and interesting, not giving a huge amount of background information, telling the story through the events, projecting ideas through juxtapositions and imagry.  There is a massive contrast between civilization and the purity of the Australian natural landscapes.  Roeg films just about every Australian animal you can possibly think of, representing the weirdness, the beauty, the danger, and freedom of the wild.

The “black boy”, played by the ubiquitous David Gulpilil, appears barely clad, but with numerous lizards hooked to his belt.  He hunts with a spear or a boomerang, he is a man at one with nature, teaching the two lost children how to literally drink water from the earth with a straw.  They quickly take to him, admiring the simplicity and purity of the natural world, stripping naked and swimming, becoming more and more at one with nature.  All this bridges a language barrier since Gulpilil speaks and understands no English and they understand none of his words.  Though eventually they learn a small amount, symbolizing an understanding of one another’s cultures and what those represent.

The film has a tragic, transformative quality, because as idealized and beautiful as the way of the Aboriginals are represented, the English/Australian culture is viewed as violent, artificial, and corrupting.  And while this point is made clearly, Roeg manages to evoke great power from his storytelling and the images of the children in the wild.

My one complaint would be the use of sound and music, which seems more steeped in the technology and tonality of the time of the film.  Roeg uses contrasts and jump-cut-like juxtapositions, visually and aurally, but for some reason the visuals seemed more powerful and timeless.  Some of the noises associated with the animals, meant, I think, to be representative rather than natural seem more contrived.

This is a nit to pick, clearly, in a brilliant, fascinating film.  It’s so different from Wake in Fright that it’s hard to imagine how one measures one film against another for “greatness” or “significance”.  Wake in Fright is much more about the character of the people, a scathing depiction, metaphorical of hell, whereas Walkabout is much more an ode to the Edenic quality of the natural world and humankind’s ability to be at one with that.  The religious symbology isn’t too pervassive, but it’s there.  The two films are both brilliant, excellent visions, and it’s an interesting thing that they came out the same year.