Jon Landau

A version of this article appeared in The Age, March 30, 2012.

“A movie needs to fuel a flame of passion,” says Jon Landau. Fortunately for him, his passions are shared by many.  As the long-term producing partner of writer-director James Cameron, he was among the prime movers behind Titanic and Avatar, two of the biggest blockbusters in the history of the medium.

Landau is in town to promote the upcoming 3D re-release of Titanic, which he hopes will introduce the film to a whole new generation.  In person, he's a forceful presence: stocky, casually dressed, with dark, arresting eyes. He's extremely affable, but something suggests you wouldn't want him for an enemy.  In his spare time, interestingly, he plays poker, which apparently calls for many of the same skills as the movie business: “You're not playing the cards, you're playing the people.”

It would take some nerve to stand up to the famously wilful Cameron, who briefly tried to ban Landau from spending more than five minutes at a time on the Titanic set. “Jim is the auteur, Jim is the one who has the vision,” Landau says.  “But again, there are times when Jim needs that other voice in his ear and I try to facilitate that.”

As a duo, Landau and Cameron have changed the face of cinema: even before the success of Avatar, they played a leading role in getting the 21st-century 3D renaissance off the ground.  “Going back to 2000, when we approached Sony about creating cameras, no-one else was doing that.  No-one else was thinking about that.”

In turn, the technical demands of 3D encouraged exhibitors around the world to abandon their old-school film projectors and invest in digital equipment. “All of a sudden, the consumer could tell the difference, and a lot of people rallied behind that and made it all happen.”

On the topic of 3D, Landau becomes evangelical.  In the future, he maintains, every screen we look at will be 3D, from TV to computers to mobile phones.  “We see our lives in 3D,” he argues.  “It's only natural.” Still, he's against converting films to 3D in post-production, except for “library titles” made in the relatively distant past.  He'd like to see a 3D edition of The Godfather, for instance – or any number of Spielberg films, from E.T. to Schindler's List.  

The only stipulation is that the director be alive and keen to take part in the conversion process. To show me why, he starts shifting the pair of water bottles on the table between us. “If I shot this shot, I would remember where these bottles were,” he says.  “People who don't know that start putting things in the wrong three-dimensional space and it doesn't look right.”

While working on the Titanic conversion, he and Cameron resisted the temptation to restore deleted scenes or tweak the special effects using current technology.  “I don't think we could have improved,” Landau says.  “I mean, movies don't need to be perfect.  Movies just need to work.”

Moreover, he says, the reality of what they were shooting back in the 1990s – a forty-foot model of the doomed ship, hundreds of extras wading through freezing water – gave a “tactile” quality to the final product that could never be matched on a computer. “I would like to think that if we were making Titanic today we would be smart enough to know that we couldn't do it all digitally,” he says.  “I would hope we would still build as much of it as we did.”

Le Havre

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 29, 2012.

Sometimes it feels as if every second film that plays in Australian arthouses is a variation on the story of the Good Samaritan, in which two contrasting strangers come to each other's aid and realise they're not so different after all. It is hard to describe the excellent new comedy from the jovial Finnish pessimist Aki Kaurismaki without making it sound like this kind of schmaltz.

The hero is Marcel Marx (Andre Wilms), an unpretentious old gent who operates a shoeshine stand in the French port that gives the film its title; while his doting wife (Kari Outinen) is sick in the hospital, he crosses paths with Idrissa (Blondin Miguel) a young African refugee in flight from the authorities after crossing the Mediterranean in a shipping container. Aided by his buddies from the neighbourhood, Marcel gives the boy a place to stay and helps track down his family, while fending off the inquiries of the dogged Inspector Monet (Jean-Pierre Darroussin).

Despite appearances, Le Havre is not really an exercise in sentimentality – or rather, its sentimentality is held at a careful distance, indulged and ironised at the same time. Kaurismaki maintains a defiant attachment to an old-fashioned notion of working-class community, yet part of his artistic integrity lies in his respect for the spaces between people. The scenes of bonding between Idrissa and Marcel are almost thrown away, rather than laboured as they would be in a Hollywood movie. In fact, the pair don't have a lot to say to each other; despite himself, Marcel is impressed when Idrissa insists on addressing him as “sir,” on the grounds that they haven't been introduced.

Kaurismaki's “deadpan” style owes much to the art of the comic strip. His actors are deliberately stiff, his colour palette limited: Le Havre is dominated by metallic blues and greens to the point where nearly every shot subliminally evokes the feeling of looking out over a wintry sea. There's a wonderful no-fat simplicity about the framing and editing, though the plot leaves room for digressions such as a “trendy benefit concert” fronted by the rock-and-roll veteran “Little Bob”, a real-life cult figure who plays himself as just another local at the bar.

The wistful ambience is explicitly meant to recall the classics of French poetic realism: Marcel's wife is named “Arletty” after the famous star of Les Enfants du Paradis (1945). It would almost be possible to see Le Havre as a daydream in the vein of The Artist, nostalgic for a supposedly simpler era of both life and cinema.

Yet a gag about Idrissa's alleged ties to al-Qaeda brings us back, with a jolt, to the present day. Studiously heartwarming and quirky, the film nonetheless puts its audience in an uncomfortable moral position, as if Kaurismaki were daring us to ask ourselves why his story seems so fanciful. To help a stranger, would we run the kind of risk Marcel does? Would it even occur to us to try?

Mirror Mirror

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 29, 2012.

More than most fairy tales, Snow White seems tailor-made for the movies: a highly dramatic story about deadly rivalry between beautiful women, easily modified to fit any genre from Gothic horror to camp farce. Consistency of tone turns out to be a problem for this live-action adaptation directed by visual whiz Tarsem Singh Dhandwar, who often bills himself simply as “Tarsem”, and who apparently lives by the creed “Give me control of a film's imagery, and you can do what you like with the script.”

The family-friendly Mirror Mirror offers less scope for Tarsem's humourless but wild imagination than did his recent Immortals, a 3D action epic where the average shot looked like a Byzantine altar painting with more exploding heads. Here, he comes as close as anyone could to a live-action Disney cartoon: as usual, his lush, hieratic images are so blatantly artificial that every setting suggests either a painted backcloth or a digital illusion. There's no shortage either of his trademark quasi-surrealist touches: the wicked queen (Julia Roberts) plays human chess with her courtiers, and covers herself with creepy-crawlies as part of her beauty regime.

But if Tarsem wants to sweep us away on a magic carpet of wonder, the screenwriters Jason Keller and Melissa Wallack keep bringing things down to earth with weakly anachronistic gags that mock the very notion of fairy-tale romance. The actors are all at sea, especially the miscast Roberts, whose arch manner never suggests even a pantomime version of evil; conversely, Lily Collins makes an overly knowing Snow White, smirking demurely as if she'd just stepped off the set of Gossip Girl.  Clad in earth tones and perpetually bickering, the dwarves are a rather uncharming bunch; Armie Hammer clearly enjoys sending himself up rotten as a fatuous handsome prince, but assessment of his leading man potential will have to wait for another day.

The Raid

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 24, 2012.

Something tells me even viewers normally allergic to ultra-violence might enjoy this zestful bloodbath, made in Jakarta by the young Welsh writer-director Gareth Huw Evans. The premise is simple but ingenious, not least in the way it allows Evans to get maximum value from a single set: virtually the entire film unfolds within a high-rise tower ruled by Tama (Ray Sahetaphy), a powerful crime boss who offers protection to any lowlife who can pay the rent. For a long time the cops have steered clear – but now an elite special-forces team have decided to take the place by storm, all fifteen identical-looking floors.

Unfolding almost in “real time,” the plot focuses on Rama (Iko Uwais), a smooth-faced new recruit to the force who just happens to be a martial-arts virtuoso (in the opening scene, we see him laying into a punching bag with a fury that miraculously fails to waken his pregnant wife). Innocent as he looks, Rama is going into battle with an agenda of his own, not that he's the only team member with something to hide.

Monotony is a obvious risk in a film that consists in large part of semi-anonymous men racing along dimly lit corridors, with extras popping into frame to be shot, stabbed or thrown to the floor. Evans doesn't strain too hard to characterise the range of crooks in the building – the average bit player is credited as, say, “AK-47 Attacker #5” – but he's up to the challenge of varying the parameters of each encounter, making especially resourceful use of doorways and ledges.

Shoot-outs dominate the film's first act; as firepower runs down and corpses pile up, the focus shifts to hand-to-hand combat. Either way the action rarely pauses for breath, save for occasional interludes in the penthouse where Tara is poring over his bank of security cameras, flanked by his lieutenants Andi (Doni Alamsyah), the brains of the operation, and Mad Dog (Yayan Ruhian) whose name describes his function pretty well.

It's become a cliché to whinge about disorientating quick cutting in modern action cinema, but there's no question many directors have to work overtime to mask the limitations of stars without much athletic skill. Serving as his own editor, Evans keeps things moving briskly, but includes enough medium-to-long-shots to let us know that a fair proportion of the stunts are performed by the actors, not by doubles; for that matter, both Uwais and Ruhian had a hand in choreographing the fights.

Evans plainly dotes on his lead performers, tailoring his style and approach to their specific physical gifts: Iwais in particular sets a kind of egg-beater rhythm, with both arms in constant motion. The musical sense of pacing is enhanced by the mainly percussive score by Fajar Yuskemal and Aria Prayogi, and by other elements of the sound design: one heavy announces his presence by striking a machete against a wall, and several emit grunts and growls to spur themselves on.

Though impressively slick considering its low budget, The Raid retains an endearing “homemade” quality: none of the characters are built up as invulnerable, super-cool dudes. Even the fearsome Mad Dog is deceptively scrawny-looking, with the relaxed attitude of a guy who simply likes to fight, preferably at close quarters. “Squeezing a trigger is like ordering take-out,” he tells the foe he's just ushered into an empty room for a one-on-one battle to the death.

These big scenes are like splashy production numbers – and though Evans never quite lets the film descend into silliness, his conscious showmanship is enough to offset the superficially dour mood. There are even a couple of outright sight gags that trade on the contrast between the extreme and the mundane: early on, one of Tama's few harmless tenants fumbles with his keys at the building's entrance, oblivious to the gunmen gathering at his rear.

Jiro Dreams Of Sushi

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 22, 2012.

A spare, monkish figure in his eighties, Jiro Ono is widely regarded as the greatest living sushi chef; his basement restaurant in Tokyo – which seats just ten customers – consistently receives the highest possible Michelin rating. “There's no other three-star restaurant in the world like it,” says the food critic Masuhiro Yamamoto with almost proprietorial pride.

Understandably, the reverent atmosphere puts some visitors on edge; being served by the master himself must be a bit like sitting for an exam. Jiro is the definition of a perfectionist: after a lifetime of practice, he's still striving to improve, and has no plans to hand over the business to his middle-aged son.   

More than just another food documentary, David Gelb's film has a strong central theme: what kind of effort is needed to remain a champion? It's an essentially static portrait, inevitably given that Jiro has been doing the same thing almost every day for forty years. There are hints this dedication has taken its toll on his personal relationships, though Gelb tells us nothing about his subject's unseen wife.

But psychology fades into the background as the film goes into fascinating detail about the rituals of sushi preparation: fanning the rice, massaging the octopus for texture, fiddling to get the little parcels just so. Frequent close-up montage sequences are accompanied by a soundtrack ranging from Bach to Philip Glass; when someone describes Jiro as “the conductor of an orchestra,” it's clear this metaphor has been implicit all along.

21 Jump Street

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 15, 2012.

Dismissed as "borderline fascist" by its break-out star Johnny Depp, the youth-oriented TV crime drama 21 Jump Street is fondly remembered mainly by a narrow band of Generation Xers. This jokey big-screen adaptation kicks off with a metatextual gag about recycling old ideas, but essentially it's a stand-alone farce rather than a back-to-the-1980s theme party: after all, the premise of baby-faced cops going undercover to nab juvenile delinquents has been mined for its camp value as far back as 1958's High School Confidential.

This time round, the cops in question are Greg Jenko (Channing Tatum) and Morton Schmidt (Jonah Hill), who respectively match the stereotypes of meathead jock and angry nerd. When their latest assignment requires them to re-enrol in high school, they soon learn that such labels barely apply to the kids of today: it's now hip to sing show-tunes, support right-on causes and accept alternative sexualities, developments which Jenko sourly blames on the influence of Glee.

Hill and Tatum make a strong if obnoxious comedy team: both function as clowns in what might be called the post-Ferrell tradition, where the game is to maintain a semblance of psychological "realism" (very much in quotes) while delivering broadly ridiculous lines. 

Despite the nominal anti-drugs message, the film appears to be aimed chiefly at stoners (as was the case with the kid-friendly cartoon Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, an earlier showcase for the talents of directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller). The double standard built into the premise feels especially icky when Schmidt uses his fake identity to romance one of his classmates – played by 22-year-old Brie Larson, which doesn't make things very much more comfortable.  However gleefully our heroes embrace their renewed adolescence, in the end they're still working for The Man. 

But if silly gross-out humour is your bag, here is God's plenty: Lord and Miller seem to have asked themselves how to film each scene to maximise the laughs, even if the answer is most often a straightforward two-shot highlighting the tension between the leads. A bit where they squeeze into a toilet cubicle and try to make each other vomit is worthy of Dumb and Dumber.

In Search of Haydn

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 15, 2012.

We all know Mozart was a child prodigy, Beethoven went deaf, and Wagner influenced the Nazis – but ask a casual listener to cite a factoid about Joseph Haydn and you may well draw a blank. Serial populariser Phil Grabsky sets out to change this situation in his latest documentary, which begins with Haydn's birth in 1732 and moves in chronological sequence through a busy yet outwardly uneventful career spent mainly as court composer for the House of Esterhazy.

The biographical format could hardly be duller, but then In Search Of Haydn isn't intended as film art; it's more like an illustrated lecture, with Juliet Stevenson's narration accompanied by semi-relevant shots of the Esterhazy palaces or grass waving in the wind. Though assorted experts do their best to sound excited about Haydn, some seem to be fighting the sense that from a post-Romantic perspective his output, like his life, lacks a certain wow factor. The conductor Sir Roger Norrington enthuses over “this simple, honest, pleasant man writing this simple, honest, pleasant music” – which is delightful, but not an endorsement liable to create many new fans.

The boredom lifts occasionally, when we're allowed to listen to Haydn's works without distracting chatter, or when the sharper interviewees venture into the kind of quasi-technical analysis that genuinely aids appreciation. The American pianist Emanuel Ax offers an especially interesting riff on Haydn's trademark use of surprise – though he can't help mentioning Mozart did something similar in a subtler way.

Coriolanus

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 10, 2012.

It is odd to remember there was a time when Ralph Fiennes was bent on becoming a Major Movie Star, striking poses in a bowler hat in The Avengers, or flirting awkwardly with Jennifer Lopez in Maid in Manhattan. Fiennes is superb at conveying rage and bewilderment, but conspicuously lacks any kind of easy charm or willingness to meet an audience halfway.  This may account for some of his interest in Shakespeare's most forbidding tragic hero, Caius Martius, otherwise known as Coriolanus: a role he has played with success on stage and now reprises in his first film as director.

As imagined by Shakespeare, a larger-than-life warrior like Martius seems archaic even in ancient Rome, which paradoxically may account for his continuing appeal.  To a modern audience, his frank contempt for the mob, expressed in vividly brutal tirades, has the thrill of blasphemy.

Still, Fiennes and his screenwriter John Logan are keen to remind us that this isn't really a story about the ancient world. The action unfolds in a abstracted present-day setting, with Martius and his men darting around “a place that calls itself Rome”  – an imaginary war-torn city pieced together from mainly Eastern European locations – dodging explosions and gunfire in hectic sequences designed to recall TV news bulletins or The Hurt Locker. The updating is ingenious if sometimes a bit too cute: much of the exposition is delivered by newsreaders, and Martius' political prospects are assessed at one point by pundits on a panel show.  There are also some unexpected moments of lyricism: a dreamy, wordless scene of soldiers dancing around a campfire could almost be an outtake from a film by Claire Denis.

But most of the time the performances are the thing, though Fiennes understands how to use framing to maximise his physical presence.  As often as possible he films himself in close-up, typically from a slight low angle, as if the camera too were cowering at his scarred, shaven head, staring blue eyes, and permanent sneer.

Martius might easily be played as a swaggering brute, but Fiennes allows us to see the uncomprehending pain behind his disgust with most of humanity. There's a bit of Frankenstein's monster in the character, as there is in Clint Eastwood's version of J. Edgar Hoover, another punitive misfit with a hidden sensitive side. In a way, he's the dupe of a society which relies on his capacity for violence yet refuses to accept the consequences; having absorbed the martial virtues literally at his mother's knee, he turns out to be the only soldier in Rome fool enough to take them at face value.

Still, the film is far from being a one-man show.  There are finely judged contributions from Jessica Chastain as Martius' wife, Brian Cox as his closest friend, and Gerard Butler as his oddly affectionate arch-enemy.  Above all, there's Vanessa Redgrave as his mother Volumnia, her son's match in almost every sense; the film would be worth seeing just for this grand yet very "real" performance, with all its shading of tenderness and grief and willed decorum around an implacable core.

It helps that Logan is one of the few modern Hollywood screenwriters to take pleasure in language for its own sake, as his recent scripts for Rango and Hugo demonstrate. Though the Shakespearian text has been drastically trimmed, he has a reliable ear for which lines are too good to lose – as when Martius tells a group of protesters “Get you home, you fragments!” or when Volumnia boasts of her son's wounds that “Every gash was an enemy's grave.”

Part of the genius of the play is the way it builds in multiple interpretations of the central figure, giving directors and actors scope to find their own path through the text. “This Coriolanus has grown from man to dragon,” says Cox's character towards the end – though a couple of scenes earlier a messenger has described the transformed Martius as “a kind of nothing.”  The great thing is that Fiennes is up to the challenge of suggesting how both statements might be true.



Headhunters

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 8, 2012.

Unwittingly or by design, national cinemas can caricature themselves just as people do.  If Red Dog attempted to bottle the essence of life Down Under, Morten Tyldum's chilly thriller feels absurdly “Scandinavian”.

Jo Nesbo's original 2008 novel was narrated by a British expatriate named Roger Brown, working in Oslo as a corporate recruiter.  In the movie, Roger is played by Aksel Hennie, a born-and-bred Norwegian who looks like a miniature Christopher Walken and will surely turn up as a Bond villain sometime in the next decade.

Every aspect of Roger's life has a sleek, sterile glamour, from his modernist home to his statuesque wife Diana (Synnove Macody Lund) who seemingly has no idea that her husband finances her whims by moonlighting as an art thief. In the course of one of his heists, Roger discovers an unsettling secret about Diana, launching him on a series of misadventures that see him literally and figuratively plunged into the muck.

It's more than possible that Roger was originally named for Roger O. Thornhill, the ad-man played by Cary Grant in Hitchcock's freewheeling North By Northwest. Both Rogers are shallow suits forced to reinvent themselves on the run, even if Hennie's character is far less charismatic. Tyldum modifies the Hitchcock recipe by making everything much more gory and unpleasant, though not any more exciting or believable; the plot jigsaw clicks together neatly at the end, but at no point are we given any reason to care.

50/50

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 8, 2012.

A mild-mannered fellow with a job in public radio, Adam (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is stunned to be diagnosed with spinal cancer at the age of twenty-seven; the title of this hit-and-miss comedy-drama refers to his chances of recovery.  

Directed by Jonathan Levine (The Wackness) from an autobiographical script by Will Reiser, 50/50 has a presumably unconscious wish-fulfilment aspect: after all, cancer means never having to admit you're in the wrong. Adam's condition is the “hook” for a story that turns out to be largely about his issues with women, from his overbearing mother (Anjelica Huston) to his apparently doting girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard). Much of his repressed hostility is voiced by his workmate Kyle (Seth Rogen) who hovers at his shoulder like an oafish imaginary friend or a teddy bear with misogynist claws.

Rogen's signature blend of bonhomie and nerdy aggro grows ever more grating, but Levine seems to hedge his bets about how far Kyle should be viewed with suspicion. On the other hand, the film picks up whenever Adam pays a visit to his awkward young therapist Katherine, well-played by Anna Kendrick, who conveys an oddly winning discomfort with every word out of her mouth.

At some point, the question of whether Adam will recover becomes less intriguing than the prospect of seeing Katherine and Kyle go head to head. In the event, the possibilities are squandered; still, Levine's ability to shape interesting scenes out of crude material suggests he shouldn't be written off as a director just yet.

Africa United

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 8, 2012.

Good intentions lead to dubious results in this curious family film from a largely British creative team, in which a Rwandan boy with a gift for soccer (Roger Nsengiyumva) is invited to Johannesburg to take part in the opening ceremony of the World Cup. Determined not to miss this chance, he and his “manager” Dudu (Eriya Ndayambaje) sneak on to a bus that proves to be going in the wrong direction, forcing them to complete their journey by hitch-hiking or on foot. Along the way they make various new friends including a teenage sex slave (Sherrie Silver), and a former child soldier (Yves Dusenge).

Clearly, this is far from the usual subject-matter of children's fiction.  Still, the jolly tone suggests that we might as well be watching Dorothy and the Scarecrow striding towards the Emerald City. The script by the Welsh novelist Rhidian Brook is overstocked with cutesy running gags, most of them involving Dudu, a pint-sized dynamo who makes soccer balls out of condoms, wears an ill-fitting pin-stripe jacket, and entertains the gang with scatological fairy tales visualised in snippets of computer animation.

The young actors give the material everything they've got – and there's no reason that a film for all ages shouldn't touch on grim realities in a light, humorous way. But Brook and the director Debs Gardner-Paterson rely a little too heavily on the conventions of the serial adventure story, where every cliffhanger can be resolved by some variant on “one bound and he was free.”

A Separation

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 3, 2012.

A man and a woman sit side by side on matching wooden chairs, dividing the screen between them.  Refusing to look at each other, they take turns pleading to an unseen official – which is to say, directly into the camera. This shot, lasting three or four minutes, comes straight after the opening credits of A Separation, the fifth feature by the Iranian director Asghar Farhadi (though the first to be released in Australia).  He might as well have stuck a caption below the actors: “You be the judge.”

The woman in the case is the educated, upper-middle-class Simin (Leila Hatami) who is requesting a divorce from her husband Nader (Peyman Moaadi) – not because she's lost respect for him, but because she hopes to leave the country with their eleven-year-old daughter Termeh, played by the director's own daughter Sarina Farhadi.

“I don't want my child to grow up under these conditions,” Simin says. When the official asks what conditions she means, no answer is forthcoming – unless one is implicit in the entire drama to follow.

For his part, Nader wants to keep the family in Tehran for the sake of his elderly father (Ali-Asghar Shahbazi) now in an advanced stage of Alzheimer's. Without the husband's consent, no divorce can be granted; still, Simin moves out of the family apartment, forcing Nader, who works at a bank, to find someone else to stand in as carer during the day. Hastily, he hires a devout young woman named Razieh (Sareh Bayat), who's four months pregnant, subject to dizzy spells, and so desperate for money that she takes the job – several bus-rides from her home – without the knowledge of her own fiercely proud husband Hobjat (Shahab Hosseini). Inevitably, a string of catastrophes result, pitting the two couples against each other and drawing those around them – including various neighbours and Termeh's tutor (Merila Zarei) – into the fray.

The winner of the 2012 Best Foreign Film Oscar, A Separation is outwardly not too far from the conventions of Hollywood entertainment; there are moment when we could almost be watching the pilot of Law and Order: Iran. Yet Farhadi's style is rigorous enough to coax us into pondering a philosophical chestnut central to much Iranian cinema: what, after all, is truth?

Though seemingly meant to suggest documentary objectivity, the handheld camerawork reveals the limitations of any particular vantage point.  In public, the characters often vanish behind milling passers-by; in private, they're hemmed in by doorways and glass panels as well as by framing slightly too tight to give a clear sense of the overall space. Part of the trick of the film is that much of the second half is taken up wrangles relating to events which we viewers witnessed with our own eyes: or did we?  We're obliged to go back over what we think we saw, making us aware that we, too, may have mentally erased or distorted some vital detail – an aspect of the film that will vanish once DVD allows each of us to rewind and check the facts.

If there's a definite political message encoded in the story, we're similarly asked to find it for ourselves. Still, Iran is frankly portrayed as a society divided – like any other – along a range of lines, including those which separate the upper class from the lower, men from women, and one generation from the next. Though Farhadi tries to avoid playing favourites, he clearly sympathises most with those with the least power: Termeh gradually emerges as the moral centre of the story, despite her reluctance to take a side in the struggle between her mum and dad.

Throughout, Farhadi seeks out and emphasises the unexpected parallels between his characters, as if visually balancing the books. In a shot that harks back to the film's opening, Termeh and her grandfather sit side by side on a bed, their heads identically bowed.  He breathes heavily, and she reaches over, gently, to remove his tie.  Then they bow their heads as before; for once, nothing needs to be said.

Like Crazy

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 3, 2012.

Disappointingly, there's not a lot of craziness in this well-acted but bland love story from the young American director Drake Doremus. Anton Yelchin from the Fright Night remake plays Jacob, who's studying furniture design in Los Angeles when he meets Anna (Felicity Jones) a British exchange student majoring in journalism. Their first date is as awkward as first dates tend to be, but he praises her poetry and she turns out to share his love of Paul Simon. Soon they've fallen head over heels for each other, their joy marred only by the knowledge that eventually Anna's visa will run out and she'll have to go home.

Reportedly improvised by the actors from an outline, Like Crazy has some affinity with so-called “mumblecore” cinema: low-budget dramas about vaguely artistic twentysomethings, with dialogue that aims to reproduce the evasions and false starts of actual speech. The film's innovation is to combine the conventional trappings of movie romance – good-looking leads, gentle music, nuzzling on the seashore  – with this kind of seemingly unstudied naturalism, as if to ask how long such an idyll could continue in the real world. 

To his credit, Doremus doesn't insist that his characters are especially remarkable people; rather, he wants us to register the beauty and drama in an experience that doesn't differ so far from the norm. There's a certain integrity to this approach, but too often the film slides into unredeemed banality – like looking at somebody's old MySpace page for an hour and a half.

Carnage

A review of Roman Polanski's Carnage appears in the March 2012 issue of Australian Book Review (online for subscribers only).

Project X

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 1, 2012.

Corey Worthington's fifteen minutes of fame may have ticked by long ago, but the party boy from Narre Warren rides again in spirit with the release of this mockumentary from the producer of The Hangover, which aims to apply the Blair Witch Project formula to anarchic comedy rather than horror or sci-fi.

Three teenage geeks from Pasadena decide to boost their popularity by throwing the party of the century – a “game-changer,” according to Costa (Oliver Cooper), the obnoxious loudmouth of the group. Thanks to Costa's savvy use of social media, they succeed beyond their wildest dreams.  Well before dawn, the night has become legend, with aid from a swimming pool, a jumping castle, two DJs, a stolen stash of ecstasy, a hapless dog, and an army of girls willing to take their tops off.

Project X will not endear itself to viewers seeking complex plotting, subtle humour, or respect for the female half of the human race. It's a letdown that the director Nima Nourizadeh makes no real effort to simulate the raw texture of a YouTube video; worse, the enigmatic title turns out to mean nothing at all.

Still, this remains one of the more adventurous teen movies of recent years: once the party heats up, it's essentially a single epic montage sequence, testing how long the euphoria can be sustained. While the reality principle may kick in the next morning, there's no pretence that getting wasted and running wild is anything but a joy.

Sione's 2: Unfinished Business

A version of this review appeared in The Age, March 1, 2012.

The Kiwi comedy hit of 2006, Sione's Wedding made less of a splash on the Australian side of the pond. Confirmed fans as well as newcomers may be taken aback by the grim starting-point of the sequel, directed by Simon Bennett: family man Sione drops dead on a basketball court, leaving his mates – the same bumbling Polynesian bros who appeared in the first film – to tidy up any loose ends before his funeral.

In particular, they're duty-bound to seek out their missing friend Paul (Dave Fane), who seemingly blames himself for Sione's death. Their mock-heroic quest takes them all across Auckland, with pit-stops at a library, a hamburger joint, and any number of bars. Frequently sidetracked, the boys find plenty of time to bicker, reminisce, and ponder why they no longer hang out as a group.  Suave Michael (Robbie Magasiva) has spent the past few years chasing girls in Australia, nerdy Albert (co-writer Oscar Kightley) is focused on his job, and dim-witted Stanley (Iaheto Ah Hi) has signed up as a deacon for the dodgy-sounding Future Church.

The film has a likable modesty, but enjoyment will depend on your tolerance for daggy, intentionally laborious New Zealand humour: one of the funnier scenes involves a gang of would-be thugs who work in insurance and call themselves the Adjusters. Another subplot, hinging on Michael's involvement with the Aussie Mafia, may leave Melburnians wondering just how widely the Underbelly series has tarnished their city's good name.

Contraband

A version of this review appeared in The Age, February 23, 2012.

Based on the Icelandic hit Reykjavik-Rotterdam (2008), Baltasar Kormakur's thriller is in some ways the kind of project a director like Steven Soderbergh might have pursued – a study of one of the hidden systems that make the world go round. In this case, it's the maritime smuggling trade, the former vocation of New Orleans family man Chris Farraday (Mark Wahlberg). Happily married to Kate (Kate Beckinsale), Chris has left his old ways behind him – but in time-honoured fashion, circumstances force him to return for one last job.

Contraband is pacy, unpredictable and boasts an intriguing supporting cast, from Diego Luna as a cheery but ruthless gangster to Lucas Haas as Chris' right-hand man. The film works well for as long as it concentrates on the nuts and bolts of procedure: how to delay a ship from leaving the dock, or the importance of seeing that your counterfeit bills are printed on starch-free paper.

Aaron Guzikowski's screenplay has a few too many contrived twists, but I suspect the biggest problems here stem from Wahlberg, who doubles as a producer. A gifted actor with an evidently substantial ego, Wahlberg seems to gravitate to playing a particular kind of hero: profane, cynical, but utterly loyal to his family and friends. Though Chris may be technically a criminal, the film asks us to remain on his side without question; even when he and his partner are accessories to a massacre, there's no hint we should give the moral implications a second's thought.

Gone

A version of this review appeared in The Age, February 23, 2012.

You have to feel sorry for Amanda Seyfried, who has hardly made a decent film since 2004, when she had her moment of comic glory as an airhead in Mean Girls. Things are looking up, just slightly, with this thriller set in Portland, Oregon, directed by Brazil's Heitor Dhalia from a script by the prolific Allison Burnett (not a good writer, but a reliably eccentric one).

Seyfried plays Jill, a young waitress with mental problems that seemingly stem from her ordeal at the hands of a crazed kidnapper. When her sister Molly (Emily Wickersham) disappears, she assumes that the nightmare has started once more.  So she becomes an unlikely detective, following a breadcrumb trail of clues while dodging the cops who would like to lock her away for her own good.

Though not quite zany enough to rank with an instant schlock classic like the Lindsay Lohan vehicle I Know Who Killed Me (2007), Gone at best is an enjoyably silly ride. Dhalia is alert to the distinctive qualities of the setting – the decaying industrial areas, the surrounding forests, the men in strange beards – and manages to extract considerable tension from a central puzzle: is Jill totally crazy, or is she the only person in town able to recognise the truth? Seyfried's spacey manner keeps us guessing, particularly when her character proves to be an alarmingly fluent liar – spinning stories about an imaginary grandparent, or winning over a couple of schoolgirls by promising them tickets to a Justin Bieber show.

Killer Elite

A version of this review appeared in The Age, February 23, 2012.

“I'm done with killing.” “Yeah, well, maybe killing isn't done with you.” Matt Sherring's script for this middling action movie is rich in such gems, including “You can't run away from who you are,” “It wasn't personal, it was just business,” and, my favorite, “Killing's easy, living with it's the hard part.”

Set in 1980 and based on alleged fact, this Killer Elite has no connection with Sam Peckinpah's similarly titled 1975 potboiler. Instead, the plot involves a jaded mercenary (Jason Statham), blackmailed into a mission that pits him against a enforcer (Clive Owen) for a secret society of ex-SAS soldiers known as the Feather Men.

Roughly speaking, the director Gary McKendry is a minor but not untalented disciple of Michael Mann.  The nervous camerawork and editing stay on the right side of chaos; the colour palette alters in line with a plot that shifts from Oman to Britain to the Yarra Valley. Statham is his usual sardonic self, while the slumming Owen – with his nasal, plonking voice and a moustache like a dead caterpillar – seems to breathe an atmosphere of seedy gloom that can barely have existed on the page.

The pair suggest poor cousins of the Al Pacino and Robert De Niro characters in Mann's Heat (1995), and it can't be pure coincidence that De Niro himself turns up in a supporting role as Statham's most trusted colleague; he's easily the most laidback presence in a film full of stoic yet anxious men.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

A version of this review appeared in The Age, February 23, 2012.

Discounting allegories such as Cloverfield, there have been few successful American films about 9-11; even after a decade, the pain seems too raw. Stephen Daldry tries to solve the problem with whimsy in this cloying adaptation of a 2005 novel by Jonathan Safran Foer, scripted by Eric Roth, who's still most famous, or notorious, for Forrest Gump. Like Forrest, the narrator here is a fount of naïve wisdom: a precocious boy named Oskar (Thomas Horn), whose beloved dad (Tom Hanks) dies in the World Trade Centre attacks, leaving behind a mysterious key.

An obsessional neurotic in training, Oskar is determined to find the right lock – a quest that carries him all over New York City, accompanied by a mute, elderly neighbour known only as the Renter (Max von Sydow). This plot is oddly similar to Martin Scorsese's Hugo, in which another intrepid boy sets out to retrieve a message from his lost father, in the process helping heal an entire community of damaged souls.

But where Hugo has the brio and surface simplicity of a fairy tale, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close never rises above its maudlin, pseudo-poetic source. Oskar's voiceover is full of strained metaphors and conceits: “People aren't like numbers, they're like letters.  And these letters want to be stories.” Nothing could be less childlike, or more shamelessly contrived to suggest non-existent depth – though Horn has an apt kind of solemn sweetness, and deserves some kind of award just for memorising so many lines.

Music in Sofia Coppola

A version of this article appeared in The Age, February 18, 2012.

The director Sofia Coppola thinks a bit like a musician, and her movies are a bit like concept albums.  What she typically gives us is less a story than a series of riffs on a single dreamy notion – what life might be like for a burnt-out movie star, or for a group of teenage sisters too sensitive and beautiful for this world. The fragility of these “concepts” is part of their allure: everything depends on the sensibility of the director, and it would only take one wrong move to burst the bubble. There will always be sceptics willing to scoff at Coppola and her “poor little rich girl” pose; still, an upcoming retrospective at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image gives us an opportunity to be seduced by her body of work all over again.

Pop music is one of the main natural resources that sustains the eco-system of any Coppola movie – though she's not quite a “mix-tape” director like Quentin Tarantino or Wes Anderson, proudly showing off a lovingly curated selection of tracks. Usually there's an arch distance built into her musical choices, in the same way that the images of Scarlett Johansson in Lost In Translation (2003) have the studied candour of a lingerie ad, or the cast of Marie Antoinette (2007) could be participating in a dress-up photo-shoot for Vanity Fair.

The scores composed for her films by bands like Air and Phoenix often suggest bridge passages from imaginary hits of yesteryear, heavy on analogue synthesisers and distorted guitars, trembling on the brink of the absurd. The element of parody becomes explicit in set-piece sequences designed to resemble video clips, like the first appearance of teen stud Trip Fontaine (Josh Hartnett) in The Virgin Suicides (1999), perfectly matched to the shimmering 1970s rock of “Magic Man” by Heart. More notoriously, Marie Antoinette uses Bow Wow Wow's “I Want Candy” to accompany a fast-paced montage of the queen (Kirsten Dunst) and her friends living it up at the eighteenth-century court.

Coppola and her key collaborators – such as her regular music supervivor Brian Reitzell – always seem to be looking for complex, paradoxical effects, where sarcasm creates a sense of distance that ultimately reinforces nostalgia. When Johnny Marco (Stephen Dorff) longingly watches his young daughter Cleo (Elle Fanning) dance on the ice in Somewhere (2010), she's backed by Gwen Stefani's 2005 hit “Cool” - a 1980s throwback that combines a throbbing beat with ethereal vocals that seem at once intimate and mechanical.

Here as elsewhere, music is a way for Coppola to let us imagine a connection between her alienated characters, an idea literalised in The Virgin Suicides, where the heroines communicate with the neighbourhood boys by playing their favorite records over the phone. Amateur performance by the characters themselves is another device that Coppola uses in all her films: in Lost in Translation Bill Murray's kareoke rendition of Roxy Music's “More Than This” exposes his character's vulnerability more directly than dialogue could.

Though often deemed a relative failure, Marie Antoinette remains Coppola's most ambitious film, and the one which makes the most boldly disjunctive use of music. In defiance of logic, the punk and new wave tracks that accompany Marie's frolicking suggest both the “decadence” of the aristocracy – portrayed from an amused distance, but without moralising – and the fury of the unseen “masses” as they prepare to revolt. Coppola's achievement is to bring these contradictions together, so we can hardly distinguish between “authentic” feeling and the phoniness or self-indulgence she seems to mock.

Perhaps the most powerful sound-image combination in the film occurs in the sequence depicting Marie's candle-lit eighteenth birthday party, where the camera drifts past clinking glasses, lavish desserts, exotic circus performers and games of dice. In the midst of all this, the two-chord drone of New Order's “Ceremony” creates a mood at once uplifting and foreboding, above all imparting – as only music can – a sense of the transience of the moment. While the images shift, the beat stays the same; irony gives way to euphoria as the young queen and her friends rush out of the palace, into the garden to greet the dawn.