Category: Film Review

It is not often that I hear my own department at the University of Sydney mentioned on stage, but it is in this production.

We entered committed to dogs in the eternal world war between the canine and feline, at the end we had to admit that the cat stole the show.
But as any dog will say, the problem with the first part of the title above is that there was NO dog. What is a dog to do if it is not there? That sounds like a Zen question. Moving on.
The staging was exhilarating. The players were exuberant and mournful by turns as we charted the ups and downs of the love lives of the principals.
It is sold out for the remainder of this season but there is a waiting list for cancellations. That might be worth a try.
I booked long ago after reading a review, but when Herself asked me on the night why I had wanted to go I had forgotten the substance of the review. It didn’t matter. The show sold itself. No mediation required.

Dear diary,
We went to see ‘Mr Holmes’ at the Newtown Dendy last night. I am glad we went but I found the film a disappointment. First, the molasses, and then the vinegar.

It was a pleasure to watch Ian McKellen hold the camera. Marvellous is this old trouper. And what knees he has for a man born in 1939.
The story does draw from the well of Sherlockiana. Holmes did retire to keep bees on the south coast near Dover. He did have a brother Mycroft whose reach was international. And there were nice touches, e.g., that 221B Baker Street was a false address to mislead curiosity seekers. The glass harmonica pricked my interest and off I went to Wikipedia to be informed. We also cackled at the film within the film, in part because it looked like more fun.
After Hamlet and Henry IV, Holmes must be among the most sought after roles in British drama. Yet having said that there is no Holmes from Laurence Olivier and the other celluloid knights. McKellen certainly lives up to the standard. It was because of him we went, as it was because of Robert Downey that we did not go see his 2009 travesty,
McKellen at 77 convincingly handles the various flashbacks and forwards from 93 to 58. Though what the point of the flashbacks and forwards was, that was lost on us. It just seemed pointless to put Holmes in Hiroshima. The film is based on the novel ‘A Slight Trick of the Mind’ (2006) by Mitch Cullen for those who want to make up their own minds. Perhaps it makes more sense there.

The supporting players were fine, though it was all so predictable. Mrs Munro was just cardboard. Full marks for transforming American beauty Laura Lynney into this Devonshire frump. Roger goes from monosyllabic to articulate in one scene. Me thinks also, the author of the screen play has not spent much time with the elderly. It is not just not remembering but not knowing that one is not remembering. When it is gone; it is all gone. One does not struggle to remember, rather it is gone without a trace.

The mystery of beehive murders, now that would certainly have been enough plot for a good film, about Holmes passing the baton — the deerstalker — to Roger, but that was nearly lost in the all the flashes this way and that until it was needed to find somewhere to end.
The setting along the white cliffs was nice but throughout the cinematography was washed out and blurred.

Thanks to the miracle of SBS Television we went to Japan last night and got back in time to go to bed, watching ‘Departures,’ a life-affirming film with cello music about death. Slow, meticulous, and accessible with some travelogue, the story of young Daigo Kobayashi’s transition from mediocre cello player to encoffiner is related, and the effects of the move on those around him, starting with his loyal, but taxed wife.
‘Encoffiner’ is one word Noah Webster did not get. In this case it means laying out of dead person to be placed into a coffin. This is a task performed before the undertaker disposes of the body. ‘Task,’ no, not the right word. Ritual is the word, a performance before the deceased’s family. It is done with the decorum, grace, and precision of the best of Japanese culture, but achieving that takes time and practice, and sometimes the difficulty is compounded by the emotions which the death has unleashed in the family. All of this, and more, is carefully documented as Daigo, reluctantly, enters this world.

He is broke, in debt far beyond Mika’s, his wife, wildest guess: celli are expensive. The ready money NK Agents offers is too tempting to refuse.
His initial revulsion at both the physical and social aspect of the work is gradually overcome when he realises slowly that the ceremony is of great solace to many families. In time he finds solace of his own in the task. Though it does take a longtime to close the loops and there is more repetition than I liked. Robert Ebert reviewed it in 2009 and gave it four stars out of four and wrote his usual perceptive comments with some comparisons to other films.
Yojiro Takita, the director with the Oscar for best Foreign Picture.
We could have watched Computer Generated Images slug it out on 7MATE but we preferred something about life and people, not comic strip nonsense made by prepubescent boys for prepubescent boys, or is that the other way around. Or we could have been hectored by an ABC journalist firmly brandishing one end, usually the wrong end, of a stick. So many choices.
I record a selection of SBS free-to-air movies based on David Stratton’s comments in ‘TV Week.’ I use his comments and not his ratings, which I find too high, though he has recently changed the method and I am still trying to gauge his new approach of categorising rather than numbering.

This is a feature film from Finland, the land of low-key but often very interesting and accessible movies.
Genre? Mockumentary, I guess. It is told deadpan. A Finn writes to a tango club in Buenos Aires, claiming that the tango originated in Finland, and supplies a long and detailed history of its evolution in the far north of the far north. While the Argentines laugh it off, it is, well, curious, and what, after all, is Finland like that these people would make such a stupid claim.

Three of them club together — a guitar player, a singer, and a dancer — to head north to the land of midnight sun, endless forests that all look alike, wrong turns, language barriers, a dead battery, and reindeer on the road.
They find something they never found in Buenos Aires, peace-and-quiet, and also people who have plenty of time for them to get past that language barrier and they learn some things about themselves, Finland, and even the tango, as they finally admit. The explanation of why Finnish men like the tango is perfect.


Completely unpretentious, no plot twists, plenty of travelogue, first in Buenos Aires and then Lapland. That deity of film criticism Roger Ebert would certainly give it all thumbs up, and so do I.
Fiction? Well not quite. See Wikipedia for an entry on the Finnish tango, and be enlightened.
I read a charming review of this Finnish film about a year ago, and determined to have a look at it. I tried to get it on iTunes but failed. It could not be sold into the Australian market. I even tried to fool iTunes by logging in while in the States to no avail. Though it was available for purchase, I could not purchase it. Frustrating. Yet another chance to develop my patience. (Yes, I know about VPN, but my needs are few.)
I thought that by June 2015 it would surely be available. I was assuming it would be screened at the Sydney Film Festival, since it seemed perfect for that, and then have a commercial release and we could see it on the wide screen. I checked with a Film Festivalian of my acquaintance, who said no, it was not on the program. Rats!
I tried again to locate it for purchase and lo and behold I found a vendor and ordered it toute suite! It promptly arrived and we gave it a spin.

Robert van Gulik (1910-1967), a Dutchman, wrote a series of krimies featuring Dee. Gulik was an orientalist and lived most of his life in the Far East. Scrupulously following the trail of historical authenticity in the novels, Gulik’s Dee is a judge, rather like a circuit court judge who travels around China finding wrongs and righting them, and not a detective. One supposes that the label ‘detective’ is used to make Dee accessible to contemporary audiences, unlikely to know their own history. Having read a couple over the years, when I saw this title in the SBS line up, I was curious to see what contemporary Chinese would make of a European’s appropriation of their society fifty years ago.
Robert van Gulik
The short answer is not much. This is an original story, per the IMDB information, and the title does not match any of Gulik’s at my glance. I rather think this film takes more liberties with Chinese historical accuracy than did Gulik. It seems as free as a Hollywood script, veering this way and that, with talking animals, ghosts, and other excuses for CGI, CGI, and more CGI, without a meaningful story line or characters with any depth. A moving comic book, but then Stan Lee has ascended to royalty on that. I let it run but assigned only 1% cognitive attention to it while plowing through the NYT Sunday crossword puzzle.

IMDB scores is 6.6 and some reviewers found it ‘enthralling’ and ‘sumptuous.’ I found it repetitive, predictable, incomprehensible, and boring by turns. Something for everyone then.
There are ghosts in the Dee stories I know, but inevitably it turns out that some villain is trading on the belief in ghosts to get up to some dastardly deed, and the no-nonsense Judge Dee soon settles that!

Reading about Vichy France reminded me of this film, so I watched it again.

Love the film, but not the many historical inaccuracies in it, though it is easy to forgive them, still we should not forget them. Here are a few.

1.There were Germans in Morocco to monitor the neutrality of the Vichy Administration, but none were permitted to wear uniforms.
2.The Germans dressed in mufti and were confined to poor hotels in Rabat, not Casablanca.
3.The Germans were permitted out and about only when escorted by many French soldiers, almost as though they were prisoners. Had they travelled to Casablanca, they would have had a large French military escort.
4.The French governor of Morocco in Rabat, General Auguste Noguès, had in 1940 advocated continuing the war from North Africa, and he made as many difficulties as possible for the Germans in Morocco, while following the letter of his orders to cooperate. There were complaints by the Germans, but the matter was too low a priority for pressure to be exerted.
5.Ergo there would have been no singing in nightclubs.
6.No questioning of travellers.
7.No truckloads of German soldiers.
8.That immutable letter of transit is wrong, too. De Gaulle’s signature would have landed the bearer in the slammer. Pėtain’s signature perhaps.
9.There was little if any unity among the anti-Nazis within a single country let alone internationally as depicted in the film. No Norwegian would not flash the cross of Lorraine to anyone let alone a Czech.
10. There was a sizeable language barrier between Norwegians, Bulgarians, Czechs, French.
The deep ambiguity of the situation is certainly true and Casablanca was perhaps, I do not know, a magnet for refuges.
Hitler’s only interest in the French Empire was to keep it and its colonial army, warships at anchor, and other military, financial, and natural resources from the Allies. Germany did not have the troops or the access to the four corners of the globe directly to do this, but if the paper-mâché regime at Vichy could effect those exclusions, it was worth the comic opera pretence that it was independent.  
There is another ambiguity, too, that of the Roosevelt’s enduring effort to maintain diplomatic relations with Vichy, first when both it and the USA were neutral, and when the USA entered the war he tried hard to maintain diplomatic relations with the still neutral Vichy. Ergo there may well have been an American consul in Casablanca. 
FDR also undermined de Gaulle for years, even after the invasion of North Africa, when much to the chagrin of some advisors to FDR, the French troops there responded to de Gaulle, and not the puppet they had put up instead.
These ambiguities muddle the clean lines of the story from the first shooting in front of the poster of Pėtain’s to the bottle of Vichy water at the end, but they explain how confused and confusing the situation was for those individuals. 
It is unlikely that the screenwriters had this detailed knowledge. And finally, who cares! It is entertainment not a history lesson.

A Danish drama courtesy of SBS. The title translates as Murk.

It is a study in ambiguity and the viewer’s sympathies flow back and forth between Jacob and Anker. Is Jacob, the tall dark, handsome, and assured Copenhagen journalist, an obsessive nut case, while the fat, ugly, placid farmer Anker the victim of circumstances? Or is Anker a devious serial murderer several steps ahead of Jacob, who was right about him all along? Most of the action occurs in the village of Murk (indeed) in Jutland, flat, wet, brooding skies, the smell of farms (manure)…. Be glad there is no Smell-O-Vision. [Remember that? Just wait; it will come again.]

The local plod cannot believe Jacob’s wild accusations, and he certainly is unstable by then. But Anker is on a mission and he cannot deviate….
With the resolution at the end, a number of loose ends arise: Did Hanne make the last phone call? Where is the razor blade or knife?
Maybe we need a little more of Anker to understand the mission. Is it because he, too, is outcast by his looks and so knows what his victims really want even if they never say it, may not ever say it. Why did Jacob keep waking up to answer the phone that did not ring?

In Denmark, one of the most regulated societies, could a serial widower like Anker pass unnoticed by the police, media, and the vigilantes of the blogosphere? Still less in the small villages where he passed. But what if he could….

Another gem from SBS world movies, which I recorded years ago and just got around to watching. A feature film from Brazil without slums, guns, drugs, or violence, it is a rarity indeed.

Brazilian film makers seem as fixated on guns as the prepubescent boys of Hollywood.

The film offers a set of character studies, and a daring one at that for the characters neither intersect nor interact, though we keep expecting that they will since that is the film convention invoked. Instead São Paulo Stories sums it up. Along the way there is a travelogue of São Paulo, much of it from the air, Google earth, and the streets, too. It moves slowly. The director is in no hurry and establishes the place before the people.
Centro, São Paulo
Three sad, frustrated, and bereaved people make the best of it and get on with life. These are real people, not the products of the adolescent mind of a script writer. What a treat. By the end, Ênio reunites with his daughter. Pedro comes to terms with his grief. Lúcia quits her job and finds the cloud lifting.
There is one surprising almost staggering moment, and I suppose this is a spoiler of sorts. Be warned.
When Pedro and Lúcia pose for a picture against a great vista it seems they are reaching an understanding that they can help one another. Then later she discovers, by chance, that he has photoshopped her out of the picture and inserted his deceased girlfriend, and indeed perhaps the whole trip to the vista and the photograph had the purpose of getting that pose so that she, Lúcia, could be removed, or so she might well conclude. She is, to say the least, stunned, hurt, angry…. How would you liked to be photoshopped out of a picture by someone you cared about?
The opening titles and then first scenes establish the thesis. Oh, yes, there is a thesis in the film. It is that we and all around us flow through time and space, here illustrated with São Paulo’s road traffic.
” The traffic
The traffic controller, Ênio, at work
Fluid dynamics provides a model for both traffic flow, and human interaction. There is no intent and yet there is order. Chance creates meaning, I would say, contrary to the title, in Portuguese ‘Não Por Acaso’ which is literally ‘Not by Chance.’ Whether that phrase has an idiomatic meaning in Portuguese, I cannot say.
The effort of Pedro to plan ahead his pool games, and of Ênio to foresee and avert traffic jams, and Lúcia to predict the commodities market, these actions can influence events, they can divert the flow, but they cannot change the fundamental dynamic. The sequence when Pedro realises his plan for the pool game is wonderfully rendered. It is the payoff of earlier preparations both by Pedro and the film maker.
Philippe Barcinski
This film is Philippe Barcinski’s first feature length movie and yet is assured and controlled as if by an old pro.

All trip but no arrival. Wait! That is not quite right. There is a charming end.
Toufic wanders around Beirut by night, leaving work at an internet café to got to a party where he hopes to meet Yasmina. He stops home to change clothes (one grungy tee-shirt for another) where he has a loving mother and a younger brother who worships him and a father who provides well for them all. All perfectly Main Street. On the way, while fuelling his moped he sees in the middle distance a kidnapping, from which he averts his eyes once he (and the viewer) realises what is happening. He crosses the city, past the neon lights, the lines of sedans at traffic lights, fast food joints, bars. Buses with workers going home. It could be a city anywhere. Note it is all set at night and so many of the images are dark, very dark.

At the party in a private apartment the misadventures begin when one of his buddies flies into a jealous rage and has to be placated. There is an argument in the parking lot over a dented fender. One of the antagonist deliberately batters his moped.
Testosterone now rising, the mild mannered Tou seeks out a weapon with which to deal with this malefactor. He travels on the damaged moped along the famous Corniche around the bay. He encounters a friendly garage owner who helps out with the moped, an officious paramilitary policeman who is heavily armed for a traffic cop, an arms dealer who pines for the good old days when the private armies bought big-time, some unpleasant goons, while his buddy, now back to normal, seeks him out to stop him doing anything stupid.
There is much back and forth and in the end Tou, though he now has a weapon, goes home and plays with his younger brother, and the two of them fall asleep. The End.
While the story in the foreground is a staple ‘what Toc did last night’ it is placed in the context of street kidnappings, trigger happy cops, and psychotic merchants of death. It was made fifteen years after the last war fought in Lebanon and about four years before the next one, a time of relative calm and normality. These twenty somethings lust after one another, dance to the latest European craze, talk of American block buster movies, the girls strut their stuff, and the lads admire it up close. They speak Arabic but act like Europeans in every way. See, normal. Yet just a few feet outside the bubble are the guns, kidnappers, paramilitary thugs, and street gangs looking for easy meat. There are few words of French with some visitors.
Writer and director Michel Kammoun
It had a surprisingly good but superficial and mostly descriptive review in ‘Variety’ I found on the IMDB.
I recorded it from SBS because of its origin in Lebanon at a time of (relative) normality.

A combined performance of Legs on the Wall, Vox, and the Sydney Philharmonia Choirs for the Sydney Festival 2015 at the Riverside Theatre in Parramatta. I went to a matinee to see the alto do her stuff. I class this entry as a Film Review for my convenience.
The lobby card.
What singing! What energy! What colour and movement? And some of it was in black-and-white, too. It had everything.
The Riverside Theatre, the one in Parramatta, not Milwaukee or San Francisco.
It is presented as one continuous piece with breaks for applause. There were several distinct parts. The opening reminded me of ‘West Side Story,’ later there was a one-note ’Space Odyssey,’ a soprano ascendant, a Strauss waltz, lost souls in the haze à la Dante’s ‘Inferno,’ some aerial fish on harnesses, and — best for last — a superb, creative use of iPhone cameras which I thought was delightful, and apt with the app! All done in about an hour.
The black-and-white were shadows projected on the wall. Having recently seen the relevant episode of ‘Rectify’ I agreed, Plato was on to something. [You either get it or you don’t.]
Wait there is more! The audience entered through the tradesman’s door and snaked down a maze of hallways to sit on the stage with the performers. I had already instructed me to seek the high ground and I found out why later. In stagecraft-speak that is supposed to break down the barrier between audience and performer. Hmm. Reduce it yes, conceded.
This piece has been the Sydney Festival for 2015 for us. Kate has had numerous rehearsal with much get ready and wait along with seven (7) performances, sequins and all in the haze.
It was blisteringly hot day in the centre of Sydney, Parramatta being the geographical and historical centre of the greater Sydney metropolitan area.
The red flag at the top edge centre left is the Sydney CBD with Parramatta in foreground.
I took the train back to Newtown, glad of the air conditioning on board. Kate had to stay for the evening performance, returning much later ready for a large one.