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