TIFF Part One: Jennifer's Body Review

I've been a bad, bad blogger. Currently in my hostel in Toronto. Before that, Vancouver, seeing friends I've not seen in a long time, which was wonderful. Before that, Portland, which after two nights became my favourite city in the USA. But now, Toronto. I was there three years ago but am seeing more of the city this time. It's big; bigger than I remember. It is not as welcoming as it seemed last time, although the hostel (The Clarence Castle) is great. Even if it is far away from Ryerson University, where the Midnight Madness screenings take place.

Midnight Madness seems to open with the big ones. in 2006 it was Borat, and this time, Jennifer's Body and its accompanying media circus. Megan Fox is the titular Jennifer, and dozens of photographers were there to confirm that, yes, she can still pout, and, indeed, still has breasts. Of the actors on stage for the Q&A, it must be said, she held the room better than the others, and even managed to be, once or twice, funny. Adam Brody didn't say that much, and Amanda "The Only Good Thing in Mamma Mia" Seyfried and Johnny "I Was in Hotel For Dogs and Will Soon Be in Scott Pilgrim; How's That for a Trade Up?" Simmons were charmingly shy. Writer Diablo Cody was as outspoken as you'd expect, and director Karyn Kusama ran things well. The Q&A was amusing enough, but the endless questions to Fox and Seyfried about lesbian shit grew tiresome.

So how was the film?

Jennifer's Body

For a genre seen to be so aimed at males, it is worth noting just how many main characters in these films are female. Jennifer's Body has women in the roles of writer (Diablo Cody), director (Karyn Kusama), hero (Amanda Seyfried) and villain (Megan Fox). It's refreshing, and should happen more often; perhaps it could next time result in a better film.

Needy (Seyfried) and Jennifer (Fox) are long time best friends, now in high school. Needy is dating Chip (Johnny Simmons), while Jennifer sleeps around while wielding power over her friend. As best friends, they don't match; Needy is the high school movie version of a nerd while Jennifer is the high school movie version of a beautiful and popular girl. And yet, they share a bond. This bond leads to Jennifer dragging Needy to a seedy bar to see a band, headed by Nikolai (Adam Brody). a fire burns the bar down, and an in-shock Jennifer by the band. When she returns, she's different. And covered in blood. And, it seems, demonic.

The two most audience-grabbing things of this film are the presence of Fox, and a script from the writer of Juno. Fox is fine; the way she plays evil is bored and pretty, which suits the character; she is almost playing a murderous version of her own public persona. Cody's script is a bigger issue. Juno split audiences, but those who like it do so not just for its wordplay, but its heart. Her TV series, The United States of Tara, proved that the heart of Juno can be, at least in part, attributed to Cody's writing. Her script here, however, just has the wordplay. Jennifer's Body is funny enough to be a decent - but not brilliant - comedy, but is too self-aware, winking too much at the audience, to pack any emotional punch, or to be a very good horror movie. Points are also lost for unnecessary narration and flashback structure. Scream proved that self-aware horror can be scary; the Buffy series proved that funny and self-aware can also be emotionally arresting. Jennifer's Body seems content to be without these elements. Kusama's direction takes Cody's script to the next logical level; scenes that could have been scary are played, instead, as parodies of horror tropes. Questions can also be raised about how much of the film was constructed around public awareness of Cody and Fox rather than being created in a more organic way. Were the Cody-isms increased upon the success of Juno? Would the lesbian elements have been so played up were Fox not so fetishised by the media for being hot and pouty?

Seyfried, as usual, is very good, and Needy and Chip's relationship is cute and believable. Cody's script, as much as it lacks what it needs to be a good horror film, is far more frank and honest about sex than any teen film in recent memory. JK Simmons and Amy Sedaris are as funny as expected in small roles.

Jennifer's Body is a servicable comedy with okay gore, loosely explained paranormal elements, and a few great one-liners that. It could have been a memorable horror film, but isn't. It isn't as bad as its soundtrack - full of Fallout Boy-inspired pop-rock - would suggest, but on the echelon of great high school horror films, Jennifer's Body won't rank very high.

6/10

I owe some reviews. They're be here soon, I swear.

Drag Me to Bruno

The Nine Network have just launched a new drama series. It's called Rescue: Special Ops. I haven't caught it, and won't seek it out, but it's just great that it has such a thrilling title. Rescue: Special Ops. So out there! A team of writers must have come up with that one! I'm going to pitch the network a police drama now, called Cops Arresting People.

Movie reviews!!!

Bruno

Bruno, Larry Charles and Sasha Baron Cohen's follow up to Borat, is a film with many issues. Should these issues matter when the end product is hilarious? Well, kind of.

Yes, the film is very funny. Cohen's Bruno is a gay, Austrian fashion-obsessed TV host who heads to America after being shamed at a Milan catwalk event. His reasons for going to the US are to discover fame, which is where the first of the film's big two themes comes into play. The obsession with celebrity, and people's desire to be celebrities (or for their children to be), are mocked without mercy. There is also a brief trip to the middle east: Bruno decides he will achieve fame by solving Palestine/Israeli crisis. The second target arrives when Bruno heads to middle America: homophobia. Here, Bruno meets army cadets,a macho karate instructor, small-minded hunters and preachers who "cure" homosexuality. Cohen makes it his mission allow these people to tie there own nooses by playing to their worst, cliche-ridden fears.

It doesn't sound hilarious, but if you know Cohen, you'd be aware it often it is. The laughs come from Cohen's outrageous caricature as well as his victim's often unbelievable reactions, such as stage parents agreeing to let dangerous things happen to their babies for a photo shoot, or the gay converter's blank response to being told he has "amazing blowjob lips". It's also often shocking and upsetting; the audience reaction in the final wrestling match is downright scary. And while the majority of the real people embarrassed and vilified in the film do deserve it, you can't help but think perhaps a few aren't reacting to Bruno's sexuality, rather the cameras filming him and making it clear to them they are being pranked. This is a minor quibble; a bigger issue is the constant question of who is in on the joke. What is on screen tends to be funny either way, but thinking about what's real and what isn't takes you out of the movie.

It's very funny, and worth seeing, even if it is too similar to Borat, following to the letter the exact same plot arc, to the extent that Bruno is even left by his assistant character halfway through the film, to be reunited for the climax. And with the reliance on shock humour, it is difficult to imagine it being as good on any subsequent viewings. It's a good enough film, but just the once.

7/10

I'm quite weirded out by some reactions to the film. People have been disgusted by it. I understand that it's not to all tastes. I wouldn't send my mother out to see it. But people who have bought their tickets... did they not know? Did they not see the rating, or any of the endless publicity before the film's release? It's hard to imagine they didn't know what they were getting into. Were they expecting a Merchant Ivory production?

One woman at the end of my screening said to her friend "That was so shit it was funny!" She had been laughing all the way through, but it seems that she thought that the film wasn't in on the joke of itself, as if Bruno was a serious character and the audience was enjoying it the same was as a Uwe Boll film.

People are strange.

Drag Me to Hell

After Spider-man 3, Sam Raimi could have tackled another big-budget film, or a smaller, more restrained effort akin to his work before that trilogy such as The Gift or A Simple Plan. Instead, he traveled back even further into his past to bring Drag Me to Hell, a callback to his glorious Evil Dead days, hinted at by the surgery scene in Spider-man 2. While it copped a PG-13 rating - the same as the Spider-man trilogy - it's almost as much fun as his early work: over-the-top, violent, gross, and ruthless. In other words, it's great.

Alison Lohman plays Christine Brown, a former country girl now angling for a promotion at the bank where she works, while dating a well-bred college professor, Clay Dalton (Justin Long) whose parents disapprove of her. In an effort to seem tougher for her boss (David Paymer), Christine refuses a mortgage extension to an old gypsy woman, Mrs Ganesh (Lorna Raver). Ganesh promptly attacks Christine in her car, gums her chin (!) and curses her to three days of torment before being taken to hell, for eternity.

There's not a lot below the surface of this film. There's no subtext; it's not a metaphor for anything. The plot is just an excuse for a series of horror sequences which tend to be frightening, stomach-churning and hilarious in equal measure. Lohman does fine work treading the admittedly predictable path from meek to badass, while showing a gift for comedy: see her reaction to the question "you mean you have a cat... right?" Lorna Raver is hysterical as Mrs Ganesh, and Dileep Rao is amusing as the psychic Rham Jas who tries his best to help Christine.

There's a lot less blood, and stop-motion has been replaced by CG, but the spirit of the Evil Dead series has returned to Raimi, and it's something to celebrate.

9/10

Then yesterday I watched Evil Dead 2 again. It's still amazing. Now I just need to get my a sexy, feature-packed import of Army of Darkness.

Finally, I highly recommend reading the source novel A Simple Plan. The movie is very good, but the book is amazing, and has ten times the tension.

3D: Changing the Face of Cinema

3D is fucking rad. This is an objective statement, like “water is wet”, or “Nickelback are evidence of Satan’s reign on Earth”. What’s not there for a filmmaker to love? You get to make the audience feel like shit coming from the screen will hit them in the head, and they just sit there with their glasses on, covering their face from nothing! It’s enough to give any director a boner or, in the case of Jane Campion, a lady-boner.

The My Bloody Valentine remake proves just how fucking rad 3D is. There are pickaxes coming through the screen, an eyeball popping out, and titties with nipples that would damn near take your eye out were it not for the glasses.

So “fucking rad” does not always equal “good”, then.

My trusty associate Sam and I rented out My Bloody Valentine: 3D on DVD for a shittastic film experience. We put on our 3D glasses – one lens red, one cyan, and with an ad for Saw motherfucking VI on the side – put in the disc, and prepared to have our minds blown.

My Bloody Valentine: Sort of Blurry would be a more accurate title. The 3D used in cinemas today involves polarising glasses; none of that two-colour crap. This 3D can’t be recreated on a home system because most people don’t own two projectors capable of playing films at forty eight frames per second synced up and aimed at a special polarising screen. And if anyone does, I hate them. Therefore, 3D on any DVDs they release today have to use to the old two-colour system, so even if the effect works, the film looks terrible and washed out. Also the effect doesn’t work. It’s two-and-a-half dimensions, at best. Perhaps even less. I’m starting to doubt even the film’s second dimension.

If you check out the IMDb Message Boards – always a fun place to go if you feel like losing all faith in humanity and can’t get Fox News – you’ll see people confused that the 3D glasses they stole from the cinema aren’t working on their DVD. Why? The same reason they won’t make a book magically leap off the page and act itself out in front of you if you read it with them on: they’re not made of fucking fairy dust.

We lasted fifteen minutes before flipping the disc over to watch the 2D version. Sam actually only lasted a couple of minutes before removing her glasses, but I was in the mood for a headache so kept them on until we changed it. What happens to a 3D movie when you watch it in 2D?

This does:

Every part that’s intended to be in 3D yells at you: “LOOK I’M COMING OUT OF THE SCREEN!!! OOOOH SCARY! BOO! BOO!!!!”.

Here’s some more, but these are from Friday the 13th Part III and Jaws 3, because they’re funnier. They have the red/green effect on them, but you get the point.

Go out and see Friday the 13th Part III if you haven’t already: it’s the greatest bad movie of all time.

So the film calls attention to itself for all the wrong reasons. In a hilarious way, but this still wasn’t the intention.

Coraline is a film that does 3D right. How? It doesn’t draw attention to itself. It’s a great film, but not because of the 3D effect. It’s great in a way that works no matter how it is viewed. There’s not a beat in it that won’t work if watched on a regular DVD on a small screen. So for all this talk that 3D is going to change the way we watch movies, the only way it can be done without making it feel a total and complete gimmick is to make it invisible. That somehow doesn’t sound like changing the face of cinema to me.

The fun of seeing all the shitty 3D is reflected in the rest of the content of the film. It’s the most violent American slasher film in quite a while where the violence is of the fun variety, where a girl gets a pickaxe through the skull rather than being tied to a chair and tortured with it for twenty minutes. The body count is intense; so many people die or are found dead in the first fifteen minutes it feels like you’ve been dumped in right at the climax of a bad eighties slasher. The whole film feels out of the eighties, except this one has the dude from Supernatural in it. Advantage: eighties.

Hopefully director Patrick Lussier is a complete imbecile with no idea how to make a film – it’s more enjoyable to laugh at that way – but he probably intended to make it as ridiculous as it is. There’s a ten minute chase scene with a completely nude, just-fucked girl, which also involves the slaughter of a big-titted midget, and it’s even funnier if the man behind the camera thought he was making cinema, not schlock. I have a bad feeling that the fucker knew all along, though. A shame.

There is still joy to be found in the film. It has a flimsy mystery that ends when – spoiler! – the fucker from Supernatural, heretofore the hero, is revealed to be evil because he’s got some multiple personality shit going on, and then, even better, attempts to play evil, despite being about as threatening as a hungry Labrador puppy. And by the way, writers: multiple personality disorder twist? Really? We’re still not fucking past that? That’s over, guys, stop the fuck using it. There’s also the most ineffectual final girl in the history of horror cinema, essayed by Jaime King, who enjoys staring at a door where a killer just was rather than running; who, while running, will run into a freezer; and who thinks a good way to save your husband from a madman who she has witnessed kill a whole bunch of people is to stand pointing a gun and crying at it. Your husband is from Dawson’s Creek, so I understand her desire to see him die, but it’s still weak. Kudos, Ms King.

So, if you watch the film, skip the glasses, even though you’ll still get a kick out of the 3D. And don’t do it alone. Not because it’s scary. It’s less scary than Hotel for Dogs, or an episode of Supernatural. It’s just a lot more fun if you’ve got someone with whom to wallow in the spectacular mediocrity that is My Bloody Valentine.

Sydney Film Festival: Day 11

It had to happen some time. The last day of the festival, and three films to finish it off.

Nollywood Babylon

Nollywood refers to the Nigerian movie business, one which has boomed since the early nineties and is now only second to Bollywood as the largest film industry in the world. There are hundreds of these movies released every month, filmed on the cheapest stock available: these days, that means digital video. It’s fascinating stuff, and has allowed directors Ben Addelman and Samir Mallal to explore many aspects of not just Nollywood but Nigeria itself: the poverty, the religious fanaticism, the superstitions. Nollywood Babylon, however, opportunity wasted. The film is worth watching for its subject matter, but as a documentary, it’s too unfocused to be called a success. It opens up the world of Nollywood, but there are other documentaries out there on the subject that are, hopefully, more adeptly handled than this one.

5/10

I’ve already discussed my experience of Che at the State Theatre, but here’s an actual review!

Che

Soderbergh’s second film of the festival was two films in itself: a four hour long biopic of Ernesto “Che” Guevara, played by Benicio del Toro, divided into two films. The Argentine deals with his time as a guerrilla in Cuba, helping Fidel Castro (here played by Demián Bichir) overthrow the Batista regime. The Guerrilla follows his similar struggles in the jungles of Bolivia. The whole thing is played in a straightforward manner, with both films focusing on the drudgeries of the campaigns - living off the map, the dangerous battles - more than the politics of them.

The films are based on the writings of Guevara himself, so they have authenticity (save for a jarring Matt Damon cameo in The Guerrilla). This can make for a challenging four hours: by showing in miniature Che and the guerrillas living in the jungle, we really get a feel for how hard this life was. The consequence is that both films are made up of largely slow-moving scenes of said difficulty, punctuated by (quite thrilling) action sequences. Del Toro disappears into the role, and he's surrounded by similarly impressive, for the most part lesser-known character actors. It's all very admirable: Soderbergh has made a movie with an anti-commercial movie with a sizable budget which mixes very well made action set-pieces with slow character study. It is, in fact, more admirable than it is successful as a cinematic experience. A worthy film, and worth seeing... but just the once.

6/10

From a highbrow study of one of the 20th Century's most important and divisive figures from an indie auteur to... Nazi zombies. Should be the most perfect way to end the festival, right?

Dead Snow

Nazi zombies. Nazi zombies, chainsaws, disembowelment, and snowmobiles. In motherfucking Norway. This should be the greatest movie of all time. It should be a movie so amazing that they stop teaching Citizen Kane in film theory classes; this becomes the film that defines cinematic storytelling for a generation; perhaps for all time. But on the pantheon of horror-comedy, Dead Snow is not alongside Brain Dead, the film it wants to be. In quality, it's closer to Club Dread. Or Cut.

Tommy Wirkola's film has a group of eight medical students holidaying in a remote cabin in the Norwegian mountains. We know from the start something's wrong, when one of the eight doesn't arrive at the cabin, attacked and killed in the opening scene. The others are none the wiser until the arrival of a man credited as The Wanderer (Bjørn Sundquist) but who should have been named Mr. Fucking Stupid Exposition. He tells our group that the land they're on was once overrun by Nazis who terrorised a nearby town, but were killed by its vengeful inhabitants. He soon leaves, and the Nazis - now, without reason, undead - arrive.

Dead Snow redefines the term "one-note". It's a movie made by a fan of horror films, which can often lead to greatness - see Shaun of the Dead - but it can also lead to a Rob Zombie film. There's plenty of mayhem, a lot of violence, and a surprising amount of intestinal matter on display. Somehow, though, it's just not as fun as it should be. It aims to be so over the top that it's funny, but it doesn't get there. The biggest sin of the film is wasting the Nazi zombies. How do we know the zombies are Nazis? Other than Mr Fucking Stupid Exposition talking about the Nazi infestation, they have swastikas on their arms. That's it. There could have been some boundaries pushed. There could have been some really off-colour humour at play. It doesn't help that the film is Norwegian, so every last character is so Aryan that they'd make a card-carrying KKK member blush, but the bloody destruction of already dead Nazis could have been so much more satisfying if there was some sort of revenge at play. They're barely even zombies! They run, they talk, they fucking plan things! A film that promises Nazi zombies essentially delivers neither of these things!

There are a few fun moments, some creative gore, and there are worse horror-comedies around - Lesbian Vampire Killers has recently clawed its way to the top of that shit heap. Dead Snow, however, just isn't the romp it should be.

4/10

And thats it. The festival ended not with a bang, but with the splutter of a dying chainsaw.

Lessons Learned

• Che Guevara must have been the hungriest Marxist ever.

• Franke Potente of Run Lola Run can pass for South American.

• With Dead Snow following Cold Prey (and Cold Prey II!) Norwegians really like naming their half-arsed horror movies after the weather.

Sydney Film Festival: Days 9 and 10

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

• 10am is too early for a film.

• Or at least for a film as disappointing as The Girlfriend Experience.
  

Sydney Film Festival: Day 5

Still no Hugo Weaving, the bastard. I had to settle for gritty Australian convict cannibalism and fake blaxploitation instead.

Van Diemen's Land

Alexander Pierce has influenced a lot of entertainment of late; it's like he's a volcano and it's the mid-nineties. Earlier in the year, ABC screened a factual film, The Confession of Alexander Pearce, and his legend was used as the basis for the awful Dying Breed, where his descendants are the villains. Now Van Diemen's Land shows his story as it played out: a group of eight convicts, upon escaping their penal colony, resort to cannibalism to stave of starvation. If you ever wanted a film that could make cannibalism boring, Van Diemen's Land has granted your wish.

The Sydney Film Festival's organizers have put the film alongside Dead Snow and Paranormal Activity in the horror strand. Their failing here can't be held against the film; that would the same as begrudging Finding Nemo after being told it was a film noir. It's not scary or fast moving, but it's not supposed to be. It's barely even a thriller: it's a drama. While Van Diemen's Land cannot be faulted for being a genre film without tension, it can be faulted for being a drama without tension. We start the film by meeting eight convicts in the mid-1800s in what now is Tasmania. They escape, led by one who doesn't appear to actually know where he is heading. It is out of desperation that the idea of cannibalism is raised.

The production values here are great. It almost does feel as if the filmmakers – it's Jonathan auf der Heide's feature debut – were dropped into the bushland a century and a half ago, and hired local actors. Authenticity is high; everything's dirty and dangerous, and any romanticised ideas of Australian colonial life are thrown out the window. Here, the straightforwardness of the story lets it down. Events simply unfold without any turns. The convicts walk; one is killed and eaten, they walk some more, then another is offed. Ethical questions aren't really raised, although that may have made this film Alive 2: The Convicts, so we can be thankful for that. It would have helped were we given a character to let us into the story. Pearce himself (Oscar Redding, who cowrote the film with auf der Heide), is the closest to a lead character, but no attempts beyond the occasional arty voiceover are made to help us to understand him. Auf der Heide is happy to just show the slow journey and the forces of nature instead.

The problem is the story. "Convicts resort to cannibalism" makes an interesting sentence, but not a two-hour feature, when that's all that happens. In prose form, with access to the inner workings of the convicts, but that lacks here. Despite the impressive production and the fine acting, this film just doesn't grab. It aims for bleak, but hits dreary.

4/10

Since seeing Van Diemen's Land I've come across more positive reviews than negative, and after talking to other festival-goers who have seen it, I seem to be in the minority in my opinion. Turns out I'm an artless pleb.

Black Dynamite

Jive suckers.

Sick of spoofs yet? When those motherfuckers Seltzer and Goldberg churn out a new [Blank] Movie every thirty seconds that lampoon the most fleeting elements of pop culture simply be recreating them; when the Wayans brothers are ripping of those two, who were ripping them off in the first place; when even David Zucker has lost his touch, by celebrating US conservatism and, even worse, not being funny when he does so, we're in trouble. That's what makes Black Dynamite so refreshing: it won't date, as it actually feels like it comes from the period it's spoofing, and belongs to the genre: 70s blaxploitation. The jokes will still work in a decade's time. Also: it's fucking hilarious. That helps things.

The titular Black Dynamite (Michael Jai White, who also cowrote) is a badass former CIA agent from the CIA who sets out to avenge the death of his brother, after promising in adolescence to their dying mother that he'll never let him die. He follows the trail from his local neighbourhood, soon uncovering a nefarious honky plot that leads to China and all the way to Washington. Black Dynamite is a funny character in himself, but at the same time, is a genuine action figure. This helps cement the film in the seventies, as if it were actually made then – and at times it's easy to forget that it wasn't. It does this as well as Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which takes apart bad 80s television horror, but is even funnier.

There's some slight lag in the middle of the film but laughs still come throughout. The soundtrack, by Adrian Younge, deserves special praise too, not just (as with everything on display) for feeling so period-real, but for being so spot-on funny. Director Scott Sanders has done such good work here, if the film weren't so perfectly contained, I wouldn't complain about him handling a number of sequels chronicling Black Dynamite's further adventures. As it is, the film is destined for cult status. It is deserved.

8/10

I was running out of synonyms for "funny" there. Word suggested "mirthful". Fuck you, Word.

Lessons Learned

• Cannibalism isn't as glamorous as Anthony Hopkins will have you believe.
  
• Cannibalism isn't as funny as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 would have you believe.
  
• People still have to try a lot harder if they want to beat Dying Breed at being the worst thing inspired by Alexander Pearce
  

Sydney Film Festival: Day 4

We're having a Hugo Weaving spotting competition at the festival. Whoever sees Hugo Weaving most frequently at the festival wins, and gets to be master of the universe.

So far, I'm losing.

500 Days of Summer

Films have, in the past, capitalized on the delightfulness of Zooey Deschanel, but 500 Days of Summer is the first to use it as a premise. Here, she plays Summer, a free spirited girl who catches the eye of Tom (Joseph Gordon Levitt), a trained architect earning a living by working for card company. This is, at first glance, a romantic comedy, although that's not quite accurate. Tom falls for Summer, Summer seems to return his affections. But while Tom believes in true love and fate, Summer doesn't, nor does she even believe in giving their relationship a name.

The film is Marc Webb's debut feature. He comes from a music video background, and it shows; it's all very visually impressive. There's also some experimentation in storytelling: the film is out of order, with each sequence preceded by a title card of which day of Tom knowing Summer it is. Scenes of his happiest times are put next to his worst. There are other flourishes: Tom finds himself in a French New Wave film; there's a split-screen sequence where Tom's expectations are played right alongside what actually happens.

If this sounds gimmicky, it is. It's not enough to sink the film (and, in the case of the fantasy dance number to Hall and Oates, it can be brilliant) but 500 Day's strengths aren't in its postmodern techniques. The film captures emotions perfectly: that lift from falling for someone; the heartbreak when they don't fall back. It captures these emotions as well as recent films such as Eternal Sunshine and Before Sunset have. When most films labeled as "romantic" "comedies" fall about as far from romance as the Hostel films and are as authentic about relationships as Teletubbies is about rural British life, this comes as a refreshing change.

Gorden Levitt doesn't need to prove himself an excellent actor after Brick and Mysterious Skin, but here he shows he can carry a crowd pleasing film, while Deschanel is wonderful – she'd have to be, as only M. Night Shyamalan can make her otherwise. The films biggest failing comes from Scott Neustadter and Michael Weber's script. It's far from terrible, but it doesn't soar. One-liners should be snappier, supporting characters should be more fleshed out. Tom is the lead character here, and everything we see is through his subjective viewpoint, but we never properly get to know Summer, despite the movie being named for her. It's still well handled enough to be an enjoyable film, but if more effort had been put into these elements rather than the scripts stylistic choices, 500 Days of Summer could have been great rather than merely good.

7/10

By the way, 500 Days of Summer really is Stuff White People Like: the movie. It doesn't belong on the list; it is the list.

Lessons Learned

• Hugo Weaving prefers Norwegian nazi zombies to capital-I Indie romance.
  

Sydney Film Festival: Day 3

Friday night brought one of the most anticipated films of the festival, based on a brilliant UK series; it was preceded by an Australian short film featuring a number of Australian comedians that may, at first glance, seem a tad self indulgent. Guess which one was better!

The Last Supper

Angus Sampson's short film reimagines the titular last supper as a bawdy work lunch populated by a number of Australia's favourite comedians and Leigh Whannel, the guy largely responsible for the Saw series. It's togas and goblets, but our characters don't fit into the period.

There are a couple of laughs here, and the man who played Jesus – who is the elderly indigenous actor Jack Charles, for some reason – has real presence. However, this is a Tropfest concept stretched out for twice as long as a Tropfest film. When the seven minutes of a Tropfest film often feels like too much, you haven't experienced it for fifteen of them. The film is lumbered with a post-script scene after what feels like the ending that, in the tradition of the film, goes for far too long; then there's more stuff in the credits that, once again, runs too long. Cute concept, but much more (or less) was needed to make it a successful piece of comedy.

3/10

In the Loop

Armando Ianucci's series The Thick of It is probably the best British comedy of the last decade, and one of the most mean-spirited series ever made. It highlights on the spin and inadequacies of government by focusing on its lower levels; members of cabinet, their advisors, and, most memorably, the Prime Minister's Chief Enforcer, Malcolm Tucker (Peter Capaldi): a terrifying, foul-mouthed Scot, always in complete control of everything around him.

Tucker makes to transition to the big screen for In the Loop, a spin-off feature film that's as good as the series; that is to say, it's brilliant.

We don't quite have The Thick of It: The Movie here. Only Tucker, his second-in-command Jamie MacDonald (Paul Higgins) – an even angrier Scot – and, very briefly, reporter Angela Heaney (Lucinda Raikes) return from the series. That said, most of the rest of the cast return in some capacity, playing new, if similar. A new element is added in the form of the US government: the film centres around relations between the United States and the United Kingdom, and their movements towards a war in the Middle East.

Everyone here is spot on: newcomers to the cast include Tom Hollander as the hapless minister Simon Foster and Gina McKee as his bitchy head of media Judy; on the other side of the pond, James Gandolfini is as scary as he is funny as Lt. General George Miller, and Anna Chlumsky – yes, from My Girl – does good work as a congresswoman's harried assistant Liza Weld. Returning players in new roles – Chris Addison, James Smith, among others – are absolutely as good as they were in series.

The strength of the cast is matched by the quality of the script, and the improvisations they bring to it. In the Loop is one of the most quotable films in years, with some of the finest abusive language ever to hit cinema screens. The plot itself might take more than one viewing to properly grasp: the outcome is clear, but the machinations that lead up to it are so intricate and the film so quickly paced that it takes a second look to work out who's backstabbing who, and when. In the Loop is good enough for a second viewing, however, and a number more. It's fitting that one of the best UK comedy films in years arises from one of its best shows.

9/10

If you haven't seen the series, track it down. You won't regret it.

Lessons Learned

• Swearing makes everything funnier.

• There is a way to make a Tropfest film even worse.

The Dawn of a New Blog

Was it a love of film which started this blog? A desire to wax lyrical on all things cinematic, coupled with a narcissistic desire to have people actually read my words? To inform people on the celluloid treats they might just be missing.

Maybe those things are at the heart of it, but they weren't the catalyst.

That would be Lesbian Vampire Killers.

I saw this film, with my friend Sam, for free, thanks to the kind people behind the great Night of Horror film festival, which runs in Sydney every March. They do good work to try to bring the kind of horror films that don't tend to make Australian cinema screens – they're not remakes or Saw sequels, see – like foreign horror films or English-language indie ones. Foreign and indie films seem to exist in the higher range of film respectability, and horror in the lower, so these movies exist in an awkward place.

The point is that the Night of Horror folk are fantastic, and they can't be held responsible. Especially after they showed Splinter earlier this year, which was absolutely tops. This showing of Lesbian Vampire Killers was a press screening, just one with no actual press. The large Fox Studios cinema was less full than a Sydney stadium during an AFL game. Even tumbleweeds were too embarrassed to be there.

Here's some context. Previous films I recently haven't paid for include 17 Again (for a review) and Twilight (for a laugh). I made it to the end of those. So, with that in mind, here's a review.

The first forty-five minutes of Lesbian Vampire Killers

Shaun (Simon Pegg) is having problems. His girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) has just left him, and not even his best friend Ed (Nick Frost) and a few rounds of beers can get him out of the dumps. The pair soon find themselves facing hoards of the undead in this hilarious (and, yes, sometimes scary) horror-comedy directed by Edgar Wright.

Sorry, that's a review of Shaun of the Dead, the film Lesbian Vampire Killers wants to be. It attempts the same character dynamic, the same comedy mix of slacker humour and over the top violence (although mostly without the money-shots), the Edgar Wright smash-wipes. Director Phil Claydon, two writers from Balls of Steel and everyone else involved on the production, down to the runners, get all of it wrong. Here, best friends Jimmy (Mathew Horne) and Fletch (James Corden) have just been dumped and fired respectively, and go hiking in a remote village to forget their troubles. Here they come across a bevy of European girls – presumably from the nation of Genericia – and a lesbian vampire curse. Low-rent mayhem ensues!

The horror elements not working here may have been forgivable. It's a horror comedy that puts the comedy first; a lot of films of the type get away with not being scary. They get away with it by being funny, though, which is the second-last adjective that could ever be applied to Lesbian Vampire Killers. The last is "good". The only way anyone could find this shit amusing would be if Zoo Weekly magazine is a little too subtle for their tastes.

Horne and Corden have been good elsewhere, but not here. Horne brings whiny neediness to heights never before reached in cinema, while Corden's lout is so unlikeable you pray for his death the second the wanders onscreen. The budget is clearly low, but that needn't mean the gore should be kept hidden like it is here. The violence level is high, yes, but for the most part, it happens just offscreen. The only bit of proper gore involves a vampire running around with an axe in her head, but the choreography is so bad of this little action that the moment is completely wasted.

The biggest crime of the film, perhaps, is that it can't even be enjoyed ironically. It's so bad, it's not even worthy of being laughed at. Despite all logic, the movie actually, in its own strange little way, takes itself seriously. The innumerable clichés in the film aren't even used to mock horror conventions; they're just there. It aims for the cult status reserved for Shaun of the Dead when it should be going for the cult status reserved for Uwe Boll or latter-day Shyamalan. It gets neither, existing in a black hole of jaw-gaping misery. (The film's other biggest crime is wasting its title, which could have been attached to a much more enjoyable film.)

There's a scene near the beginning where our two heroes first encounter the four European girls getting into their van. Wolfmother's Woman cranks up while the camera ogles their bodies. Halfway through the excruciating minute this bit lasts, the realisation comes: this is not supposed to be us laughing at these blokes and their reaction to these girls. This is for us, the audience. Our thoughts are not supposed to be "what idiots! They'll never have a chance, but it sure will be wacky to see them try!", but "titties titties boobies titties boobies titties boobs". The girls had good bodies, yes, but this is not an FHM shoot, it's a fucking movie, one that's supposed to be aiming for laughs. There's a perfectly good corner of the internet for that sort of thing, but if it's not funny, keep it out of the comedy. Lesbian Vampire Killers assumes its audience is as stupid as the film itself is.

There's a taboo with reviewing a movie after walking out. You haven't experienced the whole thing, so an honest score cannot be given. Lesbian Vampire Killers, then, is the exception proves to rule. Unless the rest of the film gave a step-by-step guide to ending world hunger, or contained a formula for curing cancer, or somehow actually brought the entire audience to climax, actually made them come where they sat, so they need to wipe up after, then it is of no use to anybody, ever. Apparently it contained a lot of Mathew Horne tied to a tree while James Corden runs around.

I rest my case.

1/10

Proper shit. I guess there's a minor blessing in that a non-franchise non-remake horror movie made general Australian cinema release, but it's still pretty unforgivable. If distributors want to give us a little horror comedy, then the bastards should release Drag Me to Hell.

In happier news, the Sydney Film Festival starts this week, and the line-up is pretty sexy. Not quite as sexy as the Melbourne International Film Festival's list so far – and they have more to announce – but it's a good-looking bunch of movies.