Friday Night: it was time to watch some dudes fuckin'.
Humpday
Lynn Shelton's American refreshingly indie indie has a simple premise: two straight guys decide to make a porno where they sleep with each other. It managers to be as funny as it sounds, but not quite in the way you might expect.
Mark Duplass, of the mumblecore movement, plays Ben, a man just starting to try for a child with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). It's his last stop on the train to being a fully licenced suburbanite, when his college friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard, of The Blair Witch Project) knocks on his door at 2am, a drifter looking to reconnect. When Andrew ends up at a party full of free-spirited creative types, Ben joins him, and they are informed of a high-brow art-porn short film festival. In their drunken and drugged state, they decide to make a film together; Ben even books a hotel room. Over the next two days, the two refuse to back down to each other, both wanting to save face; neither wants to be seen to be boxed in by boundaries of sexuality or lack of artfulness.
It's a three-hander. All the humour in this film comes not from bawdy sex jokes (not that there's not room for that in cinema) but from the interactions of the three core cast members, who are uniformly hilarious. The Internet Movie Database doesn't have a writer credited; this may be a mistake, but the naturalness of the dialogue indicates that the film was fully improvised. It's also very easy to identify with the characters; the threat of becoming just another suburb-dweller is scary; this is what our characters are fighting against. While low-key indies of this type can be so low-key as to be impossible to get into, this has enough forward momentum and humour so it avoids that trap.
8/10
Saturday brought two more films, and two (!) sightings, at last, of Hugo Weaving.
The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh deserves credit for, in between studio efforts, experimenting with both storytelling and film distribution. The Girlfriend Experience is his latest effort, starring Sascha Grey as Chelsea, a high-class prostitute offering the experience of the title to her wealthy clients, while juggling a having a boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) and her business in a time of economic crisis. There's also a subplot of Chris going to Las Vegas with a group of businessmen as he tries to get ahead in the gym industry.
The Girlfriend Experience is competently done; it's got a handheld digital aesthetic that might put some people off but gives a nice sense of immediacy to proceedings. The acting is fine; Sascha Grey is carries the film well enough, but Chelsea is such a shut-off, unemotive character that this can't have been too much of a challenge. The themes explored are interesting enough: central is the idea of having a loving relationship when one party openly sleeps with a lot of other people, even if there is no emotional connection to those outside the relationship. It's also perhaps the first film to explicitly, and frequently, reference the current financial crisis. But the film is bogged down by an irritating, cut-up structure. It's not a difficult to follow story, exactly, even if it's not clear at what point in the story Chelsea's sexual encounters fit; perhaps this is the point. But it serves as a barrier to a viewer getting emotionally involved in the story. Again, perhaps this is the point, but it makes the movie an worthy experiment about a collection of interesting themes, rather than something to rush out and see.
5/10
Following The Girlfriend Experience was my only retrospective film of the festival.
Wake in Fright
Wake in Fright is an important film in Australian cinema history: were it not for Wake in Fright, there might not be Australian cinema today. While that might be an overstatement, the film kickstarted an industry that was nearly dead, with a willingness to show Australians in a light far from flattering. It took Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian, to do it.
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a teacher; an Englishman trapped at a school in the Australian outback. It's the end of the school year, and he's going to Sydney to see his fiance. To get to Sydney, he has to pass through the town of Bundanyabba: "The Yabba". He encounters the locals, among them the friendly but pushy digger Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), depressive Jannette (Sylvia Kay), and alcoholic Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence). Stranded there due to some foolish gambling attempts, John finds himself sucked into the town's fixation on a lifestyle of drinking, violence, and little else.
There isn't a huge amount in the film's plot that would classify it as a thriller, but that doesn't stop it from being an unsettling experience from start to end. Kotcheff captures the alcohol-drenched lifestyle from a sober point of view and drags his audience in, only to leave them in harsh sunlight at the end of it. The atmosphere of the film is spot on. Performances are uniformly excellent, especially Bond's headstrong and cold Grant and Pleasence's disturbing Doc Tydon. He's a character who's hard to shake from your mind after leaving the film. On a technical point of view, the film looks great: it was once thought lost, with only edited VHS and poor-quality bootlegs available. But the film was found in full form and remastered to perfection. Even if it wasn't so important to Australia's cinema history, Wake in Fright would remain vital viewing. A lost gem found.
9/10
After the film there was a question and answer question with Kotcheff, editor Anthony Buckley (responsible for tracking down the film) and actor Jack Thompson, whose first major screen role was in Wake in Fright. The story of tracking the film down is as amazing as the film itself: Buckley travelled the world to find the lost reels, arriving in England a week after it has been shipped away. He followed it to Pittsburgh, where it was in a vault marked "for destruction". Had he been a week late, the film would be gone forever. They discussed the restoration process. It had to be done frame by frame, as an automatic digital clean-up would remove flies from shots. Kotcheff talked about Chips Rafferty, an Australian actor who died after Wake in Fright was released. While other actors would drink non-alcoholic beer, Rafferty refused, drinking glass after glass with no effect.
Kotcheff's work on Weekend at Bernie's was not discussed.
Lessons Learned
Humpday
Lynn Shelton's American refreshingly indie indie has a simple premise: two straight guys decide to make a porno where they sleep with each other. It managers to be as funny as it sounds, but not quite in the way you might expect.
Mark Duplass, of the mumblecore movement, plays Ben, a man just starting to try for a child with his wife Anna (Alycia Delmore). It's his last stop on the train to being a fully licenced suburbanite, when his college friend Andrew (Joshua Leonard, of The Blair Witch Project) knocks on his door at 2am, a drifter looking to reconnect. When Andrew ends up at a party full of free-spirited creative types, Ben joins him, and they are informed of a high-brow art-porn short film festival. In their drunken and drugged state, they decide to make a film together; Ben even books a hotel room. Over the next two days, the two refuse to back down to each other, both wanting to save face; neither wants to be seen to be boxed in by boundaries of sexuality or lack of artfulness.
It's a three-hander. All the humour in this film comes not from bawdy sex jokes (not that there's not room for that in cinema) but from the interactions of the three core cast members, who are uniformly hilarious. The Internet Movie Database doesn't have a writer credited; this may be a mistake, but the naturalness of the dialogue indicates that the film was fully improvised. It's also very easy to identify with the characters; the threat of becoming just another suburb-dweller is scary; this is what our characters are fighting against. While low-key indies of this type can be so low-key as to be impossible to get into, this has enough forward momentum and humour so it avoids that trap.
8/10
Saturday brought two more films, and two (!) sightings, at last, of Hugo Weaving.
The Girlfriend Experience
Steven Soderbergh deserves credit for, in between studio efforts, experimenting with both storytelling and film distribution. The Girlfriend Experience is his latest effort, starring Sascha Grey as Chelsea, a high-class prostitute offering the experience of the title to her wealthy clients, while juggling a having a boyfriend Chris (Chris Santos) and her business in a time of economic crisis. There's also a subplot of Chris going to Las Vegas with a group of businessmen as he tries to get ahead in the gym industry.
The Girlfriend Experience is competently done; it's got a handheld digital aesthetic that might put some people off but gives a nice sense of immediacy to proceedings. The acting is fine; Sascha Grey is carries the film well enough, but Chelsea is such a shut-off, unemotive character that this can't have been too much of a challenge. The themes explored are interesting enough: central is the idea of having a loving relationship when one party openly sleeps with a lot of other people, even if there is no emotional connection to those outside the relationship. It's also perhaps the first film to explicitly, and frequently, reference the current financial crisis. But the film is bogged down by an irritating, cut-up structure. It's not a difficult to follow story, exactly, even if it's not clear at what point in the story Chelsea's sexual encounters fit; perhaps this is the point. But it serves as a barrier to a viewer getting emotionally involved in the story. Again, perhaps this is the point, but it makes the movie an worthy experiment about a collection of interesting themes, rather than something to rush out and see.
5/10
Following The Girlfriend Experience was my only retrospective film of the festival.
Wake in Fright
Wake in Fright is an important film in Australian cinema history: were it not for Wake in Fright, there might not be Australian cinema today. While that might be an overstatement, the film kickstarted an industry that was nearly dead, with a willingness to show Australians in a light far from flattering. It took Ted Kotcheff, a Canadian, to do it.
John Grant (Gary Bond) is a teacher; an Englishman trapped at a school in the Australian outback. It's the end of the school year, and he's going to Sydney to see his fiance. To get to Sydney, he has to pass through the town of Bundanyabba: "The Yabba". He encounters the locals, among them the friendly but pushy digger Jock Crawford (Chips Rafferty), depressive Jannette (Sylvia Kay), and alcoholic Doc Tydon (Donald Pleasence). Stranded there due to some foolish gambling attempts, John finds himself sucked into the town's fixation on a lifestyle of drinking, violence, and little else.
There isn't a huge amount in the film's plot that would classify it as a thriller, but that doesn't stop it from being an unsettling experience from start to end. Kotcheff captures the alcohol-drenched lifestyle from a sober point of view and drags his audience in, only to leave them in harsh sunlight at the end of it. The atmosphere of the film is spot on. Performances are uniformly excellent, especially Bond's headstrong and cold Grant and Pleasence's disturbing Doc Tydon. He's a character who's hard to shake from your mind after leaving the film. On a technical point of view, the film looks great: it was once thought lost, with only edited VHS and poor-quality bootlegs available. But the film was found in full form and remastered to perfection. Even if it wasn't so important to Australia's cinema history, Wake in Fright would remain vital viewing. A lost gem found.
9/10
After the film there was a question and answer question with Kotcheff, editor Anthony Buckley (responsible for tracking down the film) and actor Jack Thompson, whose first major screen role was in Wake in Fright. The story of tracking the film down is as amazing as the film itself: Buckley travelled the world to find the lost reels, arriving in England a week after it has been shipped away. He followed it to Pittsburgh, where it was in a vault marked "for destruction". Had he been a week late, the film would be gone forever. They discussed the restoration process. It had to be done frame by frame, as an automatic digital clean-up would remove flies from shots. Kotcheff talked about Chips Rafferty, an Australian actor who died after Wake in Fright was released. While other actors would drink non-alcoholic beer, Rafferty refused, drinking glass after glass with no effect.
Kotcheff's work on Weekend at Bernie's was not discussed.
Lessons Learned
- 10am is too early for a film.
- Or at least for a film as disappointing as The Girlfriend Experience.
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