Blue Valentine

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 23, 2010.

An odd TV memory returned to me in the midst of this gruelling drama: a show about the making of Home and Away, in which a script editor urged one of her writers to beef up the dialogue with some “real good emotional stuff”.

Blue Valentine, directed by Derek Cianfrance, is filled with such emotional stuff. Michelle Williams and Ryan Gosling play Cindy and Dean, two poor but idealistic young folk from Scranton, Pennsylvania who get together in their early twenties. She's studying to be a doctor, while he supports himself as a furniture removalist; they meet at a nursing home where her grandmother is staying, and from then on their life is a rollercoaster ride of highs and lows.

Six years later, they're married with a daughter (Faith Wladyka) and the thrills are gone. Cindy is now a nurse, but hasn't abandoned her ambitions; Dean is still working in dead-end jobs that allow him to drink beer in the morning, but claims to be content as a husband and father. On the evening of their anniversary, they check into a cheesy sex motel where they wind up in the ominously-named Future Room, patterned like the inside of a spaceship and flooded with lurid blue light.

For Dean and Cindy, it's a chance to ponder both the future and the past. Cianfrance shuffles scenes out of chronological order, switching from warm 16mm film to digital video as he flashes between the start of this love affair and its possible end. But he struggles to generate dramatic interest from a story which essentially concludes before it begins. The present-day sequences feel especially strained: short on bold plot moves, long on shouting and close-ups.

The strength of the film lies in its actors, in particular the gifted Williams – though even her greatest admirers may grow weary of scenes designed to showcase her fragile yet tough restraint. Gosling too is a forceful presence, or can be given the right director. But his needy hipster character is so unappealing it's hard to invest much in the survival of the couple's relationship.

Whether or not the pair are improvising on camera, they've clearly been encouraged to come up with their own material. Gosling strums the ukelele, Williams tells an off-colour joke, lines of dialogue get repeated over and over. Like Dean, the film keeps trying to demonstrate its own sincerity: the sexual frankness, the nervous camerawork, the sense of claustrophobia all seem contrived to give the impression of something raw and deeply felt. But while Blue Valentine has an undeniable impact, it's more exhausting than affecting – like an imitation of a wrong idea of what the films of John Cassavetes were like.

Somewhere

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 18, 2010.

Some directors specialise in supernatural thrillers, or talky comedies about men struggling to grow up. Sofia Coppola makes girlish reveries that explore the plight of the idle rich – films that manage to be both romantic and cynical, naïve and knowing. After the slight detour that was Marie Antoinette (2006), she's back on home turf with Somewhere, a top prizewinner at this year's Venice Film Festival, and for me her best work yet.

While Somewhere may not be directly autobiographical, the material is certainly close to Coppola's heart. Several plot elements recall Life Without Zoe (1989), the short film she co-scripted at the age of sixteen, directed by her famous father Francis Ford Coppola. The setting is the Chateau Marmont hotel on Sunset Boulevard, a haven for real-life celebrities from Greta Garbo to Lindsay Lohan. Here, it serves as home base for the thirtysomething movie star Johnny Marco – played by the 1990s It Boy Stephen Dorff, wearing permanent stubble and a sleepy, vacant smile.

Like Casey Affleck's recent mockumentary I'm Not There, Somewhere unabashedly trades on a popular mythology of celebrity excess. Johnny is a character we can all recognise, if only from gossip in tabloid magazines. Coppola has taken a calcuated risk by casting an actor as limited as Dorff, who functions as a walking alienation device; deliberately, there's no hint of depth beneath his slightly faded good looks and affably wasted manner.

Pampered and feted wherever he goes, Johnny can have virtually anything his heart desires; the film's chief joke lies in his limited imagination. Wish-fulfilment for him means popping pills, playing Guitar Hero, and watching twin strippers cavort at the foot of his bed (they bring their own fold-out poles). Actual sex seems to be more of a tiresome duty, like posing for publicity shots; he drifts from one casual liaison to another, but women tend to pursue him rather than the other way around.

Johnny may be banality personified, but there's nothing exactly malicious about his sense of entitlement; compared to the hustlers and blowhards who circle around him, he seems like a figure of Zen calm. If anyone can get him out of his benignly egotistic rut, it's Cleo (Elle Fanning) his eleven-year-old daughter from a former relationship. An ice-skater and a Twilight fan, Cleo is far less of a brat than her father – level-headed and clever without being too precocious.

When the pair are obliged to spend a few days together, the film looks set to turn into a comedy of bad parenting – but in fact the presence of Cleo seems to bring out the best in Johnny. Unlike his more obnoxious friends, he doesn't taunt her with adult jokes, and he tries to keep the seamier side of his life out of her way. For much of the film, father and daughter simply and happily hang out together: they eat icecream, go swimming, and take a trip to Milan, where Cleo gets to stay in a still more luxurious apartment and watch an Italian-dubbed episode of Friends.

Like Tokyo in Coppola's Lost in Translation (2003) the Los Angeles of Somewhere is a prison and a paradise at the same time. Johnny goes through the motions of his ritzy existence as if unwilling to acknowledge his own boredom; Cleo has her bouts of frustration, but for the most part remains both amused and entranced.

Similarly, Coppola is able to satirise a world of privilege without denying its allure. Her films get their charge precisely from the sense of hovering between one attitude and another, much as her characters are constantly shown in “transitional” states – driving round town, waking from sleep. Stylistically, Somewhere is her most minimal film: frequent wide shots, not much camera movement, a lulling use of inane dialogue and “dead time”. Radiantly shot by Harris Savides, the film resembles an album of still photographs, evoking a sense of constant possibility that rarely turns into action.

It's undeniable that Coppola is better at mood than she is at drama. Still, there's a sense of foreboding hovering over the film, an expectation that sooner or later the dream will come to an end. Ultimately, Johnny's life seems set to change, but the final scenes give no idea where he might be headed; it's an open question whether someday Coppola, too, will have to break out of her bubble and try to imagine a different kind of freedom.

No Problem

A version of this review appeared in The Age, 16 December, 2010.

Set in South Africa for no obvious reason, Anees Bazmee's Bollywood farce speaks the universal language of dumb slapstick: speeded-up chases, blaring horns, cartoonishly violent scenes where characters are shot, electrocuted or set on fire. As Raj, a small-time crook who's not ashamed to frock up, Akshaye Khanna has the exact worried look of Graeme Blundell in the heyday of Alvin Purple.

The story kicks off when Raj and his partner Yash (Sanjay Dutt) fleece a bank manager from the sticks (Paresh Rawal) who trails them to the bayside city of Durban. Here, all three cross paths with a preening cop played by Anil Kapoor from Slumdog Millionaire, and his wife (Sushmita Sen) who suffers from regular bouts of homicidal mania. Also on the scene are another, much nastier gang of crooks chasing a stolen bag of diamonds – as well as a farting gorilla and a little girl who gets carried aloft by a bunch of helium balloons.

There are the obligatory romantic interludes and musical numbers, but none of the moralising one might expect to balance the silliness. The disjointed plot is simply a framework for gags, with an ending that suggests Bazmee abruptly ran out of either inspiration or money. Typically for a Bollywood film set abroad, there's scarcely a non-Indian in sight; still, local viewers may blink when a mishap involving black shoe polish sparks a racial clash on the beach. “It used to happen in Australia,” someone observes. “Now it's starting here.”

Desert Flower

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 9, 2010.

Waris Dirie's 1998 autobiography Desert Flower had all the ingredients for a bestseller: uplift, showbiz glitz and a touch of exotic shock value. Born into a nomadic clan in Somalia, Dirie fled across the desert to escape an arranged marriage at the age of thirteen; taking refuge in the UK, she was “discovered” by the photographer Terence Donovan (played here by Timothy Spall) and shot to international fame. Ten years later, she was one of the first celebrities in the West to speak out about her childhood experience of ritual genital mutilation, and today she continues to campaign to bring the practice to an end.

Executive produced by Dirie herself, this adaptation is frankly a “message movie,” though its central subject is politically and emotionally so tricky that the German writer-director Sherry Horman lets it drop for much of the running time. Dirie is played by the Ethiopian model Liya Kebebe, who conveys graceful vulnerability but little more. For the most part, the character is seen from the “normal” perspective of Marilyn (Sally Hawkins), a London shopgirl who offers her a shoulder to cry on and a place to stay. Briefly, their friendship is threatened when Waris catches her chum with a one-night stand – leading to the declaration that “only a cut woman is a good woman.” But after a cathartic bonding session and a trip to a nightclub, she's seemingly more ready to accept the morality of the West.

Still, for this injured Cinderella, sex can hardly be anything but a threat. She's understandably appalled when a lanky do-gooder (Craig Parkinson) coaxes her into a marriage of convenience then tries to exploit the situation. Likewise, she's portrayed as a wide-eyed innocent in the world of high fashion – an industry that sets its own rigid standards for women's bodies, as we're reminded when a high-handed modelling agent (Juliet Stevenson) briskly appraises her new employee's bottom (“You'll have to get rid of that”).

Horman must be aware of the ironies here, but doesn't quite know how to deal with them; the feelgood formula obscures a potentially more interesting story about a woman learning to manipulate her own image. To the end, Waris remains a chaste victim, defined by her beauty and her wound, whose ability to strike alluring poses is understood as an instinctive gift rather than a deliberately acquired art.

Megamind

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 4, 2010.

Some day Hollywood's obsession with superheroes is bound to fade (at least, I hope so). But there seems no end to the comic potential of supervillains, particularly the insecure, bumbling kind. After Despicable Me, Tom McGrath's Megamind is the second digitally-animated comedy of the year to draw on this theme; Will Ferrell supplies the voice of the titular anti-hero, a blue-skinned genius from a galaxy far far away. As a child, he's strapped into a space capsule by his parents and launched into the cosmos, eventually landing on Earth in the tautologically-named Metro City.

Raised by prisoners in the city jail, Megamind grows into a gaunt mad scientist distinguished by his high-collared cape, bulging cranium and vertical goatee – a descendant of Marvin the Martian from the old Warner Brothers cartoons, or a cousin to one of the horrid little creatures from Mars Attacks (1996). Rejected by his peers, he commits early to the cause of evil, retreating to his secret hideout with his wisecracking fish sidekick Minion (David Cross), and venturing out occasionally to do battle with Metro Man, a preening Superman clone voiced by no less than Brad Pitt. As comic-book convention dictates, good triumphs over evil every time – until the miraculous day when Megamind's latest plan to remove his nemesis from the picture actually succeeds. But when he has the city at his feet, the triumph proves hollow; brooding in his laboratory, he yearns for a new enemy to fight.

It's understandable that many of the children in the audience seemed restless at the Megamind preview I attended. Much of the humour depends on evoking an adult feeling of exhaustion: Metro Man and Megamind are simply going through the motions of a game they've played countless times before. Likewise, the screenwriters Brett Simons and Alan Schoolcraft seem all too aware of the familiarity of the material, mined most recently and effectively in Joss Whedon's Internet smash Doctor Horrible's Singalong Blog. The basic joke is that Megamind is a self-loathing nerd who secretly just wants to lose – an interesting idea, but perhaps not a great premise for a big-budget family entertainment.

Visually, the character works best in the early scenes that show him as a tortured adolescent: smooth-skinned, resentful, as sensitive as a Twilight vampire. As an adult, he's stiff and rather unappealing – and in general the 3D animation lacks the creative brio of, say, Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs, probably the best recent cartoon in this broadly comic vein. Ferrell has fun with Megamind's plummy diction (and frequent malapropisms) but as an actor who specialises in portraying confident idiots he seems a bit miscast; Ben Stiller, who's credited as an executive producer, might have been an apter choice. Tina Fey is much warmer and more appealing as the know-it-all girl reporter Roxanne Ritchie, even if her character isn't much more than a stock damsel in distress; Jonah Hill rants away as usual as a nerdy cameraman with a crush on Roxanne, who serves the function of making Megamind look good by comparison.

Internal logic is the last thing to expect of a film like this, but it's frustrating all the same that certain questions about Megamind's “outsider” status are deliberately glossed over. Metro Man hails from outer space, but otherwise he's a human being with enhancements – whereas the physically freakish Megamind seems much less probable as a romantic interest for Roxanne. (That said, he already has a life partner in Minion, who possesses an evident jealous streak.) In the context of children's entertainment, there's a subversive tinge to the idea that bad guys can readily change into good guys and vice versa – and that in a world where dual identities are the norm there's no difficulty in being good and bad at once.

But the film never quite arrives at the logical conclusion that “superheroes” and “supervillains” are equally dangerous and undesirable (the approximate message of Alan Moore's graphic novel Watchmen, rather muffled in Zack Snyder's screen adaptation). The regular folk of Metro City play little role in the story beyond applauding or cowering in fear. Still, there's at least a hint of political subtext in the running gag of putting Megamind's face on posters spoofing the Obama election campaign. As a would-be ruler, he may seem weak and indecisive; but when he finally turns his life around, the filmmakers are casting a vote for change you can believe in.

Lebanon

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 2, 2010.

A thrilling if gruelling experience, this first feature from the Israeli writer-director Samuel Maoz is the most remarkable war movie since Kathryn Bigelow's The Hurt Locker – and unlike Bigelow, Maoz is drawing directly on his own memories of combat. The setting is Lebanon is 1982. The combatants are four Israeli soldiers, all young and panicked; their commanding officer, Assi (Itay Tiran) is possibly the least experienced of all.

Virtually the entire film unfolds inside their tank, which resembles a horrific womb – moist, dark and filthy, with water dripping from the roof. Their faces are smeared with mud; close-ups linger on their frightened eyes. They smoke continually and urinate into a tin box (it's awful enough just to imagine the smell) as their vehicle ploughs its way through a series of chaotic encounters with soldiers and civilians alike.

There are intermittent efforts to portray Assi and his men as rounded individuals, but essentially these characters are audience surrogates allowing us to share the battlefield experience, a point Maoz emphasises by treating their viewfinder as a constantly panning camera. For all the horrors outside the tank and discomforts within, the film can't help but convey the thrill of dealing out death from a position of relative safety: the glimpses of bloodied victims are shockingly immediate yet strangely unreal.

On a formal level, Lebanon has much in common with a pseudo-documentary like Cloverfield, which similarly uses first-person perspective to make us feel both involved and detached, scared and secure. In this sense, the film follows the tradition launched by Alfred Hitchcock in Rear Window (1952), insisting that spectatorship carries its own moral responsibilities. War is never simply a theme park ride – or if it is, then the ticket price is higher than most of us would want to pay.

Rare Exports: A Christmas Tale

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 2, 2010.

Reindeer carcasses and scrawny, naked old men aren't standard ingredients of family entertainment, but this offbeat fairy tale from the Finnish director Jalmari Helander demonstrates that even the magic of Christmas has its sinister side. Drilling into the snowy mountain of Korvatunturi in Lapland, a team of archeologists happen upon something massive and ancient buried in the ice. Pietari (Onni Tommila), the young son of a local hunter, sets out to solve the mystery surrounding the dig, and hits on a plan to revive his family's fortunes along the way.

Korvatunturi, in Finnish legend, is the ancestral home of Santa Claus, though the menacing figure envisaged here is a far cry from the chortling senior citizen of modern global pop culture. While Santa may belong to the world, Helander shows a certain defiant national pride in putting his own stamp on the myth.

Stylistically, the film isn't too far from the mainstream of commercial fantasy cinema. There's a touch of Steven Spielberg (or his protégé Joe Dante) in the use of low angles and “magical” lighting to induce a childlike sense of awe. The pop-up-book grotesqueries also recall Jean-Pierre Jeunet, who incorporated a spooky Santa impersonator into The City of Lost Children (1995). Adults who demand logic may be perplexed by the dreamlike climax, but for children who are old enough to read subtitles – and tough enough to cope with, say, the Christmas episodes of Doctor Who – Rare Exports qualifies as an unusual holiday treat.

Devil

A version of this review appeared in The Age, December 2, 2010.

“From the mind of M. Night Shyamalan,” reads the tagline on posters advertising this supernatural thriller – a typical flourish for a filmmaker who has never shied away from self-promotion. In fact Shyalaman did no more than supply the basic story for Devil, which was written by Brian Nelson and directed by the brothers Drew and John Erick Dowdle. Still, the finished product incorporates many of his hallmarks: a grief-stricken hero (Chris Messina), a grim view of human nature, and a solemn faith in the redemptive power of narrative.

The gimmicky premise is the kind you'd expect to see in an old Twilight Zone episode: five strangers find themselves trapped in a lift in a city office building, in between the twenty-second and twenty-third floors. The line-up includes a security guard (Bokeem Woodbine), a former Marine (Logan Marshall-Green), an obnoxious mattress salesman (Geoffrey Arend), a suspicious old biddy (Jenny O'Hara) and a mysterious young woman (Bojana Novakovic) who doesn't like to be touched. When the lights go out, there's a sudden, inexplicable burst of violence. Before long, it's clear that all of these ordinary folk have things to hide, but which of them really poses a threat?

Hampered by awful dialogue, Devil is at best a minor entry in the Shyamalan canon. Still, the Dowdles handle their assignment competently, panning rapidly between actors to create visual excitement in a confined space. Rather than restricting itself to a single cramped location, the film frequently cuts to a second group of characters, who monitor events via a surveillance camera and propose their own interpretations of the mystery; again, this device is typical of Shyamalan, who tends to frame his pulp stories in explicitly didactic terms. A superstitious guard (Jacob Vargas) proves particularly helpful, spelling out the theological lessons he conveniently learned at his mother's knee.

International Relations

My review of Tomorrow, When the War Began appears in issue 100 of Realtime alongside some expanded thoughts on Crook.

Australian Editors

A version of this article appeared in The Age, November 30, 2010.

“The only difference between a jigsaw puzzle and what a film editor does is that the jigsaw puzzle picture always ends up exactly the same,” says Nick Beauman. “But if you gave the same material to ten different editors, you would get ten different outcomes.”

Beauman is one of Australia's most experienced film editors, known in particular for his collaborations with the director Gillian Armstrong, from The Singer and the Dancer (1977) to this year's Love, Lust and Lies. Though he has concentrated on fiction features for most of his career, since 2006 he has won two Australian Editing Awards for his work in documentary, which he regards as a “far more challenging” area.

This year he serves as one of the judges of the awards, due to be announced on December 5. How far can even the most informed outsider hope to assess an editor's contribution to a film, without seeing the original rushes? “It is really quite hard to tell,” Beauman concedes. “Nine times out of ten, editing awards go to fast-cut pictures, simply because they dazzle.”

As the newly announced president of the Australian Screen Editors Guild, Jason Ballantine agrees that ultimately the only person who can judge an editor's work on a given film is the director. “And at the end of the day that's all you really need...because they're effectively your employer on your next job.”

After a long stint as a cutting room assistant, Ballantine established a reputation as an editor in his own right with his work on Greg McLean's hit slasher movie Wolf Creek. Since then he's specialised in horror and suspense, although he's keen to move into other fields: “Mutilating teenagers has nothing to do with my interests on weekends.”

For Ballantine, the basic principles of editing hold good across genres, particularly the need to control and vary a film's rhythm. “Every scene has its own internal metronome,” he says, citing a shot of car headlights disappearing into the darkness at a key moment of Wolf Creek. “You kind of reach that point where people are thinking 'Where's the next shot?' And when it's over-held they start to read into it, and think, 'Wow, this must be of some significance.'”

Despite his professional involvement in bloody mayhem, Ballantine cites “emotional intelligence” as a key trait of a good editor, especially when it comes to assessing actors' performances. “If I'm not in their moment, then I'll spoil their moment, because I won't choose it.” Other vital qualities are modesty and tact. “You'll often find yourself the meat in a sandwich between a director and a producer arguing -- where you have to back someone and you have to make a decision. There's a lot of cutting room etiquette and politics that are at play even on enjoyable films.”

For Denise Haratzis, another of Australia's top editors, the most important thing is to empathise with the goals of the director. “If you don't really get where they're coming from, then I think it can be problematic.” In between working on TV shows such as Offspring, Haratzis has teamed with some of Australia's most original narrative filmmakers, including Shirley Barrett (South Solitary) and Sarah Watt (My Year Without Sex). “Conventional storytelling, when it's done well, is really satisfying and enjoyable,” she says. “But as time goes on, you do find yourself wanting to be surprised.”

A period romance set on a windswept island, South Solitary was criticised by some for its lack of momentum. But Haratzis says that her approach flowed naturally from the material. “You're under a lot of pressure, these days, to make films pacy, and there was no way that that film would ever have worked being pacy,” she says. “It was always about the slow burn.”

Haratzis faced the opposite challenge with My Year Without Sex, a fast-paced comedy with an unusual episodic structure. “Things would end abruptly and hopefully throw you forward in time,” she says. “It becomes really challenging, because you don't want to make it so abrupt that people feel like there's a misstep.”

With the wide availability of digital editing software on home computers, arguably the public is more alert to tricks of the trade than ever before (Haratzis is an admitted fan of some of the homemade work she's seen on YouTube). Still, the nature of the job guarantees that much of any editor's best work will go unnoticed. “The process of filmmaking has become so open, in some ways I think it's better there's a bit of a mystery,” says Beauman. Haratzis is similarly philosophical: “Mostly, I think we're happy with our lot. Being in the background, but getting to have all the fun.”

Red Hill

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 25, 2010.

If there's one lesson to be learnt from the latest crop of Australian genre films, it's that country towns are dangerous places for the younger generation. The gang in Tomorrow, When The War Began were faced with an invading army, the teenage hero of The Loved Ones was kidnapped by an unlikely psycho – and now Patrick Hughes' action-thriller Red Hill introduces us to Shane Cooper (Ryan Kwanten), a fresh-faced constable whose courage and integrity are put to the ultimate test.

Shane is a city boy, but for the sake of his very pregnant wife (Claire van der Boom) he's applied for a transfer to the sleepy mountain town of Red Hill, where he's greeted with instant suspicion by his new boss Bill (Steve Bisley), a blustering old-school ocker. But their differences are set aside as word comes through that the convicted killer Jimmy Conway (Tom E. Lewis) has escaped from prison. By Bill's reckoning, he's headed straight for Red Hill, to wreak revenge on the men who put him away.

As writer, director and editor, Hughes draws on the traditions of the Western with invention and skill. The plot unfolds across roughly twenty-four hours; a leisurely opening movement follows Shane's first day on the job, familiarising us with much of the terrain that will be fought over after dark. Best remembered as the murderous Aboriginal protagonist of Fred Schepisi's The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith (1980), Lewis is effectively used as a comic-book figure of menace – heavily scarred, practically mute, and almost supernatural in his ability to appear and vanish from one shot to the next.

Potentially, the political stakes of the story are quite high. But as the body count rises and Dmitri Golovko's pastiche score goes into overdrive, Hughes seems bent on reassuring us that the film is nothing more than silly fun. In some respects Shane and Jimmy are mirror images of each another, but the implications of this doubling are never seriously examined; I almost wish that Hughes had made Jimmy a straightforward avenging hero, like Danny Trejo in Machete, rather than assigning the central role to a bland cadet.

Due Date

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 25, 2010.

As modern Hollywood comedies go, Todd Phillips' follow-up to his highly successful The Hangover is a standard, no-frills package: loosely shaped, full of apparent ad-libs, alternating between politically incorrect shock gags and strained moments of uplift. Robert Downey Jr stars as Peter Highman, an architect travelling home to Los Angeles. At the airport, he encounters Ethan Tremblay (Zach Galifianakis), a pot-addled aspiring actor whose misbehaviour gets both of them kicked off the flight – and so these unlikely buddies set out on a road trip across America.

In other words, this is basically Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987) for the 21st century, or Rain Man (1988) without the autism – or maybe Bringing Up Baby (1936) with Galifianakis in the Katherine Hepburn role. Add that Ethan is dealing with the death of his father, while Peter is awaiting the birth of his first child, and it's clear that the scenario offers ample opportunity for male bonding as well as hijinks.

Your enjoyment of Due Date will largely depend on your tolerance for the inexplicably popular Galifianakis – a stocky, bearded fellow with the look of a defective teddy bear and a penchant for ironic crybaby hysteria. Like many stand-up comedians, Galifianakis struggles to express “sincere” feeling with any conviction. Yet when disruptive energy is called for, he stays soft and limp, as if blandness were a joke in itself. Ethan is meant to be annoying but the character never amounts to more than a bundle of unlikely affectations – a scarf, a sashaying walk, a horrid little dog. It's hard to care about his supposed grief when he barely seems real enough to have a family in the first place.

If the film remains watchable, it's wholly thanks to Downey, a master of comic timing who finds multiple ways of playing with and against the formulaic material. Peter may have been written as a square with an anger management problem, but Downey can't help making him the smartest guy in any room – maintaining a finicky precision in the midst of chaos, while treating Ethan's dullness as a spur to his own wit.

The Last Exorcism

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 20, 2010.

When The Blair Witch Project became a surprise hit in 1999, no-one could have predicted what would follow. Daniel Stamm's ingeniously nasty, unusually well-acted The Last Exorcism is just the latest addition to a long list of notable subsequent horror films that masquerade as home movies or documentaries, including Paranormal Activity (2007) and Australia's own Lake Mungo (2008).

Though the term “mockumentary” often implies satirical distance (as in Christopher Guest's films) the technique can as easily be used to enhance our direct connection with events on screen. The device of locating the implied viewer within a fictional universe might even be considered a low-budget answer to 3D – replacing tinted glasses with a raw improvisational style, a limited first-person perspective, and a sense that the film apparatus itself may be subject to attack.

Scripted by mockumentary specialists Huck Botko and Andrew Gurland, this tale of apparent demonic possession also owes a debt to films like The Wicker Man (1973) that pit a relatively sane outsider against the representatives of crazed, primitive faith – the outsider in this case being the Reverend Cotton Marcus (Patrick Fabian), an evangelical preacher and exorcist from Baton Rouge who has long since stopped believing his own glib sales pitch. Even as he ponders a new career in real estate, he agrees to perform just one more exorcism on camera to demonstrate the whole business is nothing but a scam.

Once Stamm persuades us to swallow this contrived premise, the real fun can begin. Selecting a letter at random from his pile of requests, Cotton heads out to the backwoods of Louisiana to meet Louis Sweetzer (Louis Herthum) a pious widower baffled by repeated attacks on his livestock. Against his will, Louis has come to suspects that demons have possessed his daughter Nell (Ashley Bell), a wide-eyed sixteen-year-old who has barely left her father's property since he removed her from an overly liberal Sunday school.

Trained since childhood in the art of hocus pocus, the affably cynical Cotton arrives at the Sweetzer farmhouse with a library of pre-recorded demonic sound effects to accompany his conjuror's patter. “This'll rattle nicely,” he confides to the camera upon appraising a four-poster bed. It hardly needs saying that his performance doesn't go to plan – but has he finally come into contact with genuine supernatural evil, or is he being duped in turn? Either way, layers of mystery surround the Sweetzer family, which also includes Louis' sullen younger son Caleb (Caleb Landry Jones). Every time Cotton tries to exit the narrative, he finds himself dragged back in, along with his opinionated producer (Iris Bahr) and his increasingly perturbed camera operator (Adam Grimes).

Largely reliant on carefully paced plot twists, The Last Exorcism lacks the visceral impact of the most powerful films in the horror mockumentary genre; like Cotton, Stamm and his collaborators are showmen rather than true believers, but unlike him they don't expect anyone to mistake their act for the real thing. Rather, the film succeeds as a campfire yarn, a display of traditional storytelling skill. After eighty-five minutes of build-up, the punchline feels a little familiar, but at least Stamm manages to deliver it in a fresh way.

Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia

My print-only review of Jonathan Rosenbaum's Goodbye Cinema, Hello Cinephilia: Film Culture in Transition appears in the December 2010 issue of Australian Book Review.

Gasland

A version of this review appeared in The Age, November 18, 2010.

These days, environmental documentaries seem like the scariest horror films of all. The latest entry in the genre is Gasland, shot by the theatre director Josh Fox, who was offered a large financial inducement to permit exploratory drilling for natural gas on his family property in Pennsylvania. Subsequently, Fox decided to take a first-hand look at the damage wrought by the hundreds of thousands of drilling rigs across America that use the technique of hydraulic fracturing – creating fractures in rocks by injecting millions of gallons of chemically treated water into the earth. The sights he encountered on his journey suggest a prequel to John Hillcoat's post-apocalyptic The Road: acid rain, polluted rivers, dying animals, residents permanently affected by chemicals in the water and air.

Like the films of Michael Moore, Gasland doesn't pretend to objectivity; it doesn't take much Googling to learn that its more damaging claims have been fiercely contested online. No technical expert in the field, Fox himself wavers on some crucial points: can “fracking” can be made safe through regulation, at least in the United States? Or does energy production on this scale necessarily come at an environmental price?

Gasland also has problems on the level of craft. Fox delivers the wordy narration in a dull monotone; crediting himself as principal cameraman, he seems unable to focus on anything for more than a few seconds without nervously zooming in or panning away. Worst of all is the scene where he tries the Moore-style stunt of phoning up Halliburton – one of the main corporations involved in fracking – to request an interview. When they put him on hold, he decides to entertain himself while waiting by playing the banjo; given the abundance of depressing material in Gasland, at least we could have been spared this.