A CAT IN PARIS (UNE VIE DE CHAT)

France, 2010, 70 minutes, Colour.
Dominique Blanc, Bernadette Lafont.
Directed by Jean- Loup Felicioli, Alain Gagnol.

Hard to tell whether this is an animation film for younger audiences (some scenes too frightening as a little girl is a central character) or for older audiences (a police investigation of a robbery and the threats of a gangster to waylay a sculpture en route to a museum).

The animation style is quite striking and the plot keeps moving. It has a brief running time.

And the cat? He is the pet of a little girl whose father, a policeman, has been killed and whose mother is in charge of the investigations. The cat goes out at night and meets up with a cat burglar who skims over the roofs of Paris with feline ease. One night the little girl follows the cat which leads to all kinds of trouble with the gangsters and the police – and the cat burglar being nicer than we at first thought.

One of those films that is interesting enough to watch but not memorable.

AGES OF LOVE (MANUALE D’AM3RE)

Italy, 2010, 125 minutes, Colour.
Robert de Niro, Monica Bellucci, Ricardo Scarmarcio, Michele Placido.
Directed by Giovanni Veronese'

Robert de Nero in an Italian film – and speaking Italian as well as English – and with Monica Bellucci. Must be something special. No, not exactly.

This is the third film in a series called, in Italy, Manuale d’Amore. (Hence the title, Manuale d' Am3re.) If this is a manual for love, we are in a sorry state. Rather, this is a series of stories which take up issues of love or, in this film, issues of sexuality and betrayal.

During the screening, a word came into my mind, ‘slightweight’, even less significant than ‘lightweight’.

The first Age of Love is ‘Youth’ although it is about a young, ambitious lawyer, engaged to a vivacious young woman, who goes to the provinces to persuade an elderly couple to take a payout on their house which is the middle of land intended for an exclusive golf club. He allows himself (pretty easily and quickly, in fact) to be seduced by the local vamp. Will he repent? Will his fiancée forgive him? A story of the Italian roving eye which is too easily taken for granted.

The second story (Middle Age) concerns a vain TV announcer, married with a daughter (rather smugly obnoxious these two) who is stalked and allows himself (again too easily and quickly) to be seduced, with some dire comic consequences in terms of the action of the story, but not for him when he discovers the pathology of his stalker.

Robert de Niro and Monica Bellucci are in the third story. He is a widowed academic living in Rome. She is the daughter of the buildings caretaker – and has what is called a colourful past. The stars give their best but, once again, the love story (a bit more genuine this time) is really not much of a story.

‘Slightweight’ comes to mind again.

SANTA’S APPRENTICE

Australia/ France, 2010, 80 minutes, Colour.
Voices of Shane Jacobson, Magda Szubanski, Max Cullen.
Directed by Luc Vinciguerra

A Christmas story for very young audiences (and not too long for parents and grandparents). Easy to look at animation. And Australian voices for the local version, French for the French.

It has good credentials. It won the special UNICEF award at the 2011 Annecy International Animation Festival in France. This prestigious award recognizes the best animation which highlights the goals of the Convention on the Rights of the Child.

There have been so many Santa stories, it is hard to find another one. Here we have a Santa who has a time limit on his role and must train an apprentice, just as he was trained in the past. He is rather unwilling to give up his year job, but the old retiree Santas remind him that rules are rules. But, where can he find an apprentice whose name is Nicholas, is an orphan and who is pure of heart?

Well, the filmmakers have decided that there would be such a boy – in Sydney. Nicholas is a nice boy but can be put upon by a bully (whose name happens to be Nicholas as well). When the Santas do their research and settle on Sydney, it is the bad Nicholas who wants the job and takes over. It is not long before Santa (and the put-upon reindeers) realises that he has the wrong apprentice. Good Nicholas goes to work in Santa’s factory, prepares the gifts and travels on Christmas Eve, even to the orphanage where all is made smooth.

No objections to this variation on the Santa theme (except to lament that Christmas shows no connection to the story that gave it its name and meaning, Christmas without Christ yet again).

Some pleasing Australian voices, with Shane Jacobson as Santa and Magda Szubanski as Beatrice and Jack Versace a nice Nicholas.

The message is obviously, be good, be kind – and look what happens when you are!

THE WOMAN

US, 2011, 101 minutes, Colour.
Pollyanna Mc Intosh, Sean Bridgers, Angela Bettis.
Directed by Lucky Mc Kee.

This is a disturbing film, not for audiences who do not want to be disturbed. And, it is disturbing on several levels.

The film opens quite surreastically. A woman in the wild is glimpsed. A baby is glimpsed. There are sounds of barking and baying of animals. Images merge into one another for several minutes. When the title comes up, there is a rapid transition to a technicoloured middle American world around a swimming pool, where families are gathered and enjoying a meal and get-together. Chris, the father, seems very genial, though he tends to commands everyone, especially his compliant wife, Belle, to obey his orders and whims. His teenage daughter looks depressed and solitary. His early adolescent son shoots basketballs. There is also a little daughter. Chris is a local lawyer who tries to help people, especially an elderly lady who wants to sell the pool. The contrast between the family and the wild woman is immense.

Chris is also a hunter, sights the woman, goes home to alter the cellar for her and then goes to net her. He installs her, roped and bound, and invites the family to meet his trophy whom he intends to civilise.

The film is a critique of the patriarchal American family, nuclear, not in the family that stays together sense, but more in the potentially explosive sense.

Sequences veer between the ‘normal’ which get less normal as the film progresses showing the feeding, washing and abusing of the captured woman. She is both desperate and vengeful while being humiliated.

Gradually, in school scenes, playground scenes, meals at home and chores around the house, the unease becomes palpable, the tyranny of the father, his blandly charming exterior contrasting with his demands, the meekly submissive housewife, the situation of the daughter and the horrible spectacle of the boy, encouraged by his father, becoming more and more like him. Eventually, the explosion happens with the visit of a concerned teacher. At this stage, violence in a bloody and gory struggle may become too much for some audiences who have been following the drama with interest. But, that is what the film is trying to say, that the polite and even religious and civic veneer will crack, the centre cannot hold and more violence than anticipated will erupt.

By the end, the audience is well aware that this is a film targeting misogyny as the father’s behaviour and attitude’s become more extreme.

Small-budget, with a range of popular songs accompanying the action (the sound seems to clash with the action, the lyrics making comment on it), the film is based on a novel by the director and writer, Jack Ketchum. It is a stand-alone sequel to his film Offspring. He also wrote Red, which Lucky Mc Kee directed, and the torture story, The Girl Next Door. Some commentators have dismissed The Woman as ugly trash. It is often ugly, but the makers and performers are trying to communicate something more serious than trash.

THE GREATEST MOVIE EVER SOLD

US, 2011, 90 minutes, Colour.
Directed by Morgan Spurlock.

Morgan Spurlock has proven himself as a documentarist but also as film-maker with a sly sense of humour and with his tongue in his cheek. This was true of his previous spoof on the search for the leader of Al Quaeda, ‘Where in the Hell is Osama bin Laden?’. He had to take his tongue out of his cheek a bit for the film before that, ‘Supersize Me’, so that he could go on a month’s opposite of a Mc Donalds’ Ramadan, by eating only at the fast food outlets and indulging in Supersizing to discover what it would do to him. He had his satire while he ate it.

This time, a lesser effort than the previous two, he is able to have his cake and eat it too. That is, he spoofs a subject that he is dependent on for making his film.

Making a play on The Greatest Story Ever Told, he indulges it so that all advertising in the film is ‘the greatest’ of everything. And that is what the film is about, advertising, specifically, product placement in the movies.

The film is about the making of the film – but mainly before the film is made. Spurlock genially, sometimes self-deprecatingly, takes us through a process of making a pitch to companies to become sponsors for his film and contribute to the budget. He also approaches marketing experts, program analysis experts and legal advisers. We sit in on all these discussions. Lots of being turned down. Then with Pom Wonderful (a drinks – or, as they say in the US – a beverage company) coming on board, he is off and running fast.

This means that the bulk of the film is about the process and looking behind the scenes of the marketing world – with a number of references to movies. Finally, there are some commercials for the sponsors and a gig on late night television with Jimmy Fallon promoting the film (and we see the extent of all possible locations for promotion, literally everywhere) which becomes part of the film itself.

Spurlock also consults Noam Chomsky and interviews Ralph Nader – and there is an enjoyable gag at the end with Ralph Nader accepting a sponsor’s gift.

We probably knew quite a bit of this already or, at least, suspected it. But, it is enjoyable to watch it in action, extraverted American style.

HOP

US, 2011, 95 minutes, Colour.
Voices of James Marsden, Russell Brand, Kaley Cuoco, Hank Azaria, Gary Cole, Elizabeth Perkins, Hugh Laurie, David Hasselhoff, Chelsea Handler.
Directed by. Tim Hill.


This one is for younger audiences whose horizons for Christmas and Easter are bound by Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny.

While one does not want to be too sanctimonious about it, it is still a great pity that we read surveys being done about children’s knowledge of biblical characters and stories and the findings that so many have no real awareness of them (a cultural lack even if religion is not involved). That being said, back to Hop.

While Santa has the north pole for his workshops, easter eggs are manufactured at, where else, Easter Island! Hop is the young son of the old Easter Bunny but would rather go to LA, where else, to play the drums. Off he goes and runs into, literally, slacker, Fred O’Hare? (no relation!), played with cheerful oomph by James Marsden.

This is one of those interactive films, animation and live action (like the director’s previous Alvin and the Chipmunks). Hop has his more than mischievous side (especially as voiced so well by Russell Brand) and causes Fred to miss appointments for jobs which his father (Gary Cole) is hounding him to get.

Wouldn’t you know it, but Fred’s ambition, since he was little and glimpsed the old Easter Bunny on his rounds, was to be, of course, an Easter Bunny.

Meanwhile, on Easter Island, a revolution is brewing. The chicks who fly the Bunny’s sleigh, led by the dominating Carlos, are being marshalled into protest and revolt. After some adventures, both Fred and Hop arrive on Easter Island, are tied up (fortunately, Fred is tied with licorice and makes a bite-through escape) but overcome Carlos and his engagingly dumb sidekick (sidechick), Phil, who is ground control for the sleigh but is easily distracted and the revolution comes to a literal crashing halt. Since both Carlos and Phil are voiced by Hank Azaria, they are both amusing characters and are a foil to Hugh Laurie who voices the Easter Bunny.

Sounds a bit better than might have been thought – and it is, though strictly for the little child, it could be for adults and for the real children.

FRANKENSTEIN

UK, 2011, Colour.
Benedict Cumberbatch, Jonny Lee Miller.
National Theatre UK Live.
Directed by Danny Boyle.

During its season at the National Theatre in London, the roles of Victor Frankenstein and the Creature were performed alternately by Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. This review is of the Cumberbatch as Creature and Miller as Frankenstein performance.

The filming of live performances from London for overseas viewing has proven a very successful program. The advantage for the cinema audience to compensate for the experience of not being actually in the theatre is that of close-ups of actors, of differing angles of photography, including overhead, making for a strong impact.

The credentials for this play are very good (as explained in a documentary preceding the screening with interviews, discussions of Mary Shelley and her work with scenes from the 1931 film version). Nick Dear has written a strongly verbal play which requires attentiveness for the richness of the themes. Danny Boyle, collaborating with cast and an arrestingly elaborate staging, has brought the 19th century into the 21st.

Benedict Cumberbatch is a somewhat gangly actor. He capitalises on this in an extraordinary opening where he mimes being born, struggling to find his feet and balance, finally being able to stand and face life. He continues this ability to present a very physical creature but one who grows in capacity for reflection, for education, for cultural awareness, for acknowledging his loneliness and his need for a bride like himself. There is a great deal of pathos in his characterisation. When all seems to go well for him and the Doctor creates a bride and then destroys it, the Creature seeks and wreaks revenge, acknowledging that he has truly become a man because he has learnt hatred, lying and shocking, violating violence. Nick Dear and Danny Boyle point out that in the Frankenstein films, the Creature does not or cannot speak. This play restores his voice.

Jonny Lee Miller comes more into his own as Frankenstein in the latter part of the play. The first half is more devoted to the Creature, his self-discovery, the friendly encounter with the Blind Hermit, the fear and loathing of ordinary people. His encounter with little William we can acknowledge as sad. But it introduces us to the proud, yet cowardly, Frankenstein, who does not know how to relate, even to his family, to his fiancée, Elizabeth (Naomie Harris), or to love anyone. He is reclusive, obsessive, arrogant in the name of science, going to Scotland and finding corpses to create the Bride, defying the Creature maliciously and returning to marry only to find that the Creature has destroyed his future. By the end of the play, the audience understands Frankenstein more but can feel little sympathy for his fate.

Ideas were important for Mary Shelley, coming into the Romantic era of the 19th century after the Enlightenment and the Age of Reason of the 18th. Can a mere human, no matter how brilliantly intelligent, have the right to create life? Is this not God’s role? And what is the result of this hubris? Only destruction. The Frankenstein story, which has become a significant myth or archetypal story, is always cautionary about the potential for science and its claims for bettering the world and the human condition (but at what physical, mental, moral and religious cost?).

All these issues are voiced in the play. In the context of the drama, they can be heard from the different points of view. Interestingly, it is Elizabeth who does not recoil in horror from the Creature but admires what her husband has achieved, but it is also she who raises the God and hubris question. They seem more important, as Nick Dear and Danny Boyle discuss in the initial documentary, because of the increasingly less presence of God in modern discourse, especially about science. Mary Shelley’s work is even more relevant in modern times.

WASTED ON THE YOUNG

Australia, 2010, 97 minutes, Colour.
Oliver Ackland, Adelaide Clemens, Alex Russell, Rhonda Findleton, T. J. Power
Directed by. Ben C. Lucas.

We all know that youth is wasted on the young. This look at high school students (in Perth) seems to prove that this is the case, especially when they themselves become ‘wasted’.

It was something of a surprise to find that the students we are watching are not from poor homes or inner city slums. They are from quite wealthy homes (which boast of their affluence) and attend an expensive private school – demonstrating very little credit for their educational abilities. As with films like Larry Clark’s quite scathing look at New York youngsters and their behaviour (especially with drugs and sexuality), Kids (1995), there are no adults to be seen in this film. Parents are mentioned but absent. The principal’s office is seen but not the principal. There seem to be no teachers or supervisors, especially when brutal fights (signalled by instant multiple text messaging) break out in the school grounds. No police.

So, is this a film for the kinds of characters shown in the film? Or, is it a film for parents or teachers? It certainly would be interesting to be a fly on the wall were students, parents and teachers to watch the film together and then discuss it. And to hear how ‘realistic’ it is.

Come to think of it, variations on this kind of story make their way to newspapers and television reports.
The audience has to be alert at times as the narrative is not simply linear, especially with the opening and three boys leaving a girl on the hills near the sea (our initial suspicions are later justified), then the plot building up to this episode (with some later sequences clarifying what happened). In fact, there are a number of sudden, without warning, shifts in time.

Basically, this is a story of two boys in their final year at school who become stepbrothers as their parents marry. Zack (Alex Russell in a credible interpretation of high school arrogant bullying, presumption and untouchability) is the swimming jock, centre of popularity and unscrupulous sexually. Darren (Oliver Ackland, looking a bit too old for his high school age but presenting a serious and brooding, basically decent young man) is preoccupied with his computers and science project. The other central characters is Xandrie (Adelaide Clemens who has the difficult role of being nice but then a very hard done by victim) who is keen on Darren but is set on by Zack and his swimming champion buddy, Brook (T.J. Power who does arrogant and nasty, especially in his violent attack on Darren, all too obnoxiously).

There are a number of other characters, friends and girls, who show how shallow young people’s outlooks can be, keen on the good time, voyeurs of brutality, gathering like sheep at the ring of their mobiles. (The film is constantly reminding us that we live in a technological age and the young are dependent on social networking.)

Finally, there are echoes of the Columbine High School shootings and the inherent violence underlying arrogance and exploitation even at high school level. Some commentators have said that the writer-director is too pessimistic about today’s young people. Maybe, but his drama is meant to mirror and to warn.

INSIDE JOB

US, 2010, 105 minutes, Colour.
Narrated by Matt Damon.
Directed by. Charles Ferguson)

For most of us, the world economic meltdown of 2008 seems incomprehensible as it raises so many questions as to how alleged financial experts could have been so wrong, so deceitful, so greedy, so amoral if not immoral, in their playing with, unscrupulously gambling, with people’s, institutions’ and nations’ money.

I would not like to have to do an exam on what I learned and remember from watching Inside Job, the details and the intricacies, let alone the terminologies, were too much for me. But, I am glad (in a morbid kind of way) that I have seen the film.

For those in the money know, there is a lot of information about how the American banks, especially, the bankers, the financial advisers to the Bush, Clinton, Bush and Obama administrations got their positions and maintained them, despite the upheavals. While many of the top people involved declined to be interviewed for the film, there are enough interviews to explain what went on. (The academics from American universities who sit or sat on bank boards, wrote highly paid papers and acted as government consultants, come across as an alarming group of mercenary types as well.)

Interestingly, the film opens with the crisis in Iceland and its bankruptcy in 2008 offering some background as to how this could come about. This gets us in the vein to explore the American situation and its consequences. As we listen (without always understanding the detail and keeping abreast of the events), we realise that we are not looking at a group of naive innocents who were doing their best in terms of honesty and open fair dealing. We are looking at a culture that fostered greed and risk, that was made up of many men (more than women) who aspired to a lavish, sometimes decadent, lifestyle, many of whom still do not have the decency to be honest and who remain in positions of power and influence. Statistics about bonuses (to which we have become accustomed, perhaps) are still appalling in the huge (sometimes ultra-huge) amounts that individuals walk away with even as Lehman Brothers, Goldman Sachs, AIG and so many others are in dire straits.

Communism collapsed at the end of the 1980s. Capitalism has been thoroughly shaken by this global meltdown. While human nature remains corruptible, we owe a debt to the media (which does not always avoid corruptibility either) which can produce articles which analyse and warn, interviews that alert us to dangers as well as showing confessions of wrongdoing, documentaries that assemble facts and figures which can inform and influence for change.

This film could be a companion piece to Michael Moore’s 2009 Capitalism: A Love Story. (And for those who prefer a movie story that dramatises these issues, Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps (with Gordon Gecko’s reminder, ‘I once said, ‘Greed is good’; now it’s legal’.) and the drama of investment risk, Margin Call, with Kevin Spacey and Jeremy Irons.)

WIND AND FOG

Iran, 2011, 74 minutes, Colour.
Directed by. Mohammad Ali Talebi.

During the 1990s, Iran made quite a number of films that focused on little children. They had an international appeal as well and won many awards. They included The White Balloon, Children of Heaven and The Colour of Paradise. Wind and Fog seems a throwback to those times, but is welcome nonetheless.

The setting is the outbreak of the Iran-Iraq? war of the 1980s, a harsh and traumatic time for Iran, and still a subject for so many of the films coming from that country.

The basic plot here is timeless. A widowed father (from the war bombardments) brings his two children to stay with their grandfather in the mountains. He had previously worked on the gasfields. The little girl is bright and is solicitous for her younger brother who is not quite right mentally. He is bullied at school where she stands up for him. One day, during the hunting season, while the grandfather takes them fishing, the little boy comes across a wounded goose and is fascinated. Watching her brother and the goose is the occasion for flashbacks to their previous life where the little boy was also bullied as the children flew kites on the harsh and hot surroundings of the gas pipes.

Later, the girl is welcomed back at school, but the little boy goes off in the night to search for the goose and he becomes lost. His sister and a girl who had been hurtful search for the boy – aided by the flock of geese.

So, a film of charm as well as of people’s insensitivity, inviting audiences to be understanding and compassionate. The mountain and forest scenery is beautiful, a refuge from the war that has devastating effect elsewhere (and on the national psyche and memory).