Willie's Bar and Grill

At first glance, Willie's Bar and Grill looks rather nondescript... there's a bus rushing past on the front and the front cover blurb simply says "a rock 'n' roll tour of North America in the age of terror". I'd walk past this book all the time in the bookstore and would just glance over it, not really giving it a thought. Eventually, one day, I read the back cover and realised it that the author, Rob Hirst, was Midnight Oil's drummer and that this was a tour journal of their last tour of America. Well, why didn't you say so?!

Firstly, I love Midnight Oil. They're a great band. They've been around for 30 odd years so I'm sure they've got a few good stories up their sleeves. Unfortunately, hardly any of said good stories are to be found here - I guess you'd be better off reading the Midnight Oil biography Beds are Burning for that. This autobiographical book solely concerns their 2002 American tour and is as much travel literature as it is musical biography. As it says on the cover, it's also about America's post-9/11 angst. Allegedly.

I didn't really enjoy this book, I was kind of disappointed. It doesn't really know where it's going, it's neither here nor there... it's too freewheeling and all-encompassing for my tastes. I think I was hoping for something a bit more, I don't know, coherent? If this was simply a tour journal complete with diary entries then I'd probably be a bit more forgiving and open to random observations of America, but Hirst has had a good go at re-writing his notes into something a bit more high-brow - arranging various subjects into themed chapters. Sure, there are a few funny and interesting anecdotes and well-reproduced band conversations but it's all tied up and hidden amongst reams of eclectic observations and over-egged prose.

The book's back cover assures me that :the twist in this tale is when, after more than twenty-five years together, the band's charismatic lead vocalist, Peter Garrett, calls it a day:. Sounds dramatic doesn't it? Well, three entire pages at the book's end concern this, and for the rest of the book Garrett might as well not be even there, so focused is Hirst on recounting what food he ate where and why it's tough to sleep in a wide range of hotels. See? Even the book's publisher didn't know what to do with it - they had to talk up something that's tacked onto the end of the book in order to make it sound more interesting then it really is. And as for that blurb on the front cover... don't pick this book up expecting an interesting take on Americans dealing with 9/11, I don't know what the deal with that is or why Hirst even bothers to mention it every now and again, it all just amounts to worthless observation and very little substance.

Look, Rob Hirst isn't a bum. He can write... the book is probably a little too verbose for it's own good at times but no one could really say it's written poorly. I guess I just didn't get the point of this book. It should've been more focused - and I think the publishers would probably agree, Willie's Bar and Grill ended up in a lot of bargain book piles after it's release, I picked it up for less than 20% of it's original price.

Drunken Master

"No one calls my dad's kung fu shit!"

There's something special about kung fu films from the 70s and 80s... the hairstyles, the dodgy facial hair, the exagerrated sound effects (even punches that don't connect make a dull whooshing sound through the air), the overdubbing, the dramatic zoom-ins, wacky comedic characters and freeze-frame scene endings are all vital and wrong-sounding ingredients to a recipe that defies the laws of good taste to create something magical and delicious. A lot of this sort of thing can be attributed to (and is found in) Drunken Master, Jackie Chan's first big super-hit as actor and stunt co-ordinator. It's a film that continued on the promise of Chan's previous film (Snake in the Eagle's Shadow) in that it combined kung fu with more comedic elements, a stylistic decision that went a long way to solidifying Chan's success and screen persona whilst also ensuring the survival of the kung fu genre in the wake of Bruce Lee's death.

Chan plays Wong Fei-Hung (or Freddy, if you're going off the English dub), the resident clown of his kung fu school. We follow his cocky and mischievous misadventures as he shows off his kung fu knowledge and gets into scrapes with other troublemakers from a rival kung fu school. When Fei-Hung's misbehaviour becomes too shameful for his father to bear he is entrusted into the care of his uncle Su Hai (Yuen Siu Tien), a drunken beggar to be both feared and ridiculed. Su Hai proceeds to teach and train Fei-Hung in a secret martial art style known as 'the Eight Drunken Immortals', a skill that he will need to call on if he is protect his father from the assassin known as Thunderleg (Hwang Jang Lee).

Wong Fei-Hung is actually a real historical figure from relatively recent Chinese history, a folk hero from the late 19th century who specialised in the Hung Ga style of martial arts. You wouldn't know it from this film though, Chan portrays the character as a loveable but insolent teenager who must be humiliated before he will accept his uncle's brutal and unorthodox training techniques. He gets disowned by his father for both good and bad reasons, whether we see him as a hero or not is entirely dependent on Chan's charisma and impressive comedic timing. The scene where Fei-Hung is first defeated by Thunderleg in battle becomes important tragi-comic dramatic fodder, with our unlikely hero later reliving the lowpoints of this battle in his mind as shamelessly manipulative music echoes plaintively. Chan isn't afraid to really run with this in the grand over-the-top manner of film history's great comedians. In fact, a lot of this film's success is due to Chan's willingness to break so completely free from the Bruce Lee tradition of the stoic martial arts hero - no joke is too crude for Chan to exploit!

Another great aspects of this film is So Hai, who is built up before his appearance as some kind of monster and then appears contrary to our expectations as a drunken and good-natured old man afflicted with the DTs if he fails to get his daily wine. Also, the film makes entertaining use of a variety of hilarious and semi-real kung fu styles - the "devil's kick", "ironhead style", "monkey" kung fu, "five animal style", and of course - the eight "drunken" styles employed by Fei-Hung in the film's climactic battle. A lot of this stuff is energetically and intricately choreographed by Chan, who was eager to make his mark at the time - leading to some amazing and deceptively-effortless looking fight sequences. The camera does it's best to keep up by using some interesting angles to capture what it can, but all the talent is in Chan's rhythm. He would go on to stage an exponentially dangerous series of stunts for his blockbuster films in the 1980s, but it's these late 70s 'traditional' kung fu films where you really see him pushing his body to its limits.

DIRECTOR: Yuen Woo-Ping
WRITER/SOURCE: Lung Hsiao, Yuen Woo-Ping and Ng See-Yuen.
KEY ACTORS: Jackie Chan, Yuen Siu-Tien, Hwang Jang Lee.

RELATED TEXTS:
- Chan and director Yuen Woo-Ping pioneered the comedy/kung fu crossover genre in Snake in the Eagle's Shadow before hitting the big time with Drunken Master.
- Fearless Hyena, another late 70s Jackie Chan vehicle, is virtually a complete retread of Drunken Master.
- Chan reprised his character for a 1994 sequel, The Legend of Drunken Master.
- Yuen Siu-Tien also reprised his character for a series of spinoff films; Dance of the Drunk Mantis, Story of Drunken Master and World of the Drunken Master. Siu-Tien also directed the recent prequel film, True Legend, but doesn't actually appear as it features a young version of his character.
- There have been quite a few knock offs of this film, including but not limited to: The Drunken Fighter, Shaolin Drunken Monk, Drunken Tai Chai, Revenge of the Drunken Master and Drunken Master III.

The Ring

At the time of it's release, the Hollywood remake of the Japanese horror smash Ringu was the spearhead of a new wave of horror for the west. It was everything the genre has been crying out for in the last decade. I can't help but feel that Scream was not the godsend most felt it to be, humour was the last thing that horror needed (at the least, that sort of gen-x self-referential post-modernist humour). The Ring was great if only for taking the focus off teens and slasher-style villains... it was the best thing that could've happened. The Ring was (as far 'the West' is concerned) one of the keystones of this resurgence in sophisticated and mature horror (led by the massively successful The Sixth Sense), humourlessly atmospheric and never once degrading itself by winking to its audience.

The story of The Ring is mysterious at best, an enigmatic series of disquietening events centreing on a cursed video 'nasty', investigated by a busy and negligent mother (Naomi Watts, with a strong performance) who must unravel the origins of the video before she and her son succumb to its horrific will. The atmosphere and editing throughout the film is haunting and creepy, and leaves a disturbing residue of imagery in the brain afterwards. The idea succeeds because it remains mysterious enough throughout to leave chills, whilst giving enough answers to satisfy on a logical level.

It's a more sophisticated form of 'scary' then the straight-up shock butchery that has become such a part of post-70s horror films. The Ring evokes feelings of watching things you shouldn’t, like a child watching violent R-rated films without permission. The fact that it leaves parts up to interpretation and doesn’t neatly answer all questions are what makes it so effective in it’s 'scares' (more a slow-burn, disturbing feel than actual shocks). The thematic undercurrent of child-neglect also goes a fair way towards reinforcing the film's success in achieving a depth that has seldom been seen on Hollywood's side of the genre since the likes of The Exorcist.

The kid who played Watts' son is a little annoying, he seemed to be mirroring Haley Joel Osment's memorable character from The Sixth Sense, and the script certainly didn't help him avoid this either. The rest of the cast were great though, especially Watts. Brian Cox and Jane Alexander were equally brilliant as well in their important yet smallish parts. The Ring really exceeded all my expectations... I'm generally not really affected by films that want to scare you, and whilst this is no exception, it at least managed to disturb and unsettle me.

HIGHLIGHTS: The video of the piece itself, every bit as creepy as it should be.

DIRECTOR: Gore Verbinski
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Ehren Kruger and Scott Frank, based on the book by Koji Suzuki.
KEY ACTORS: Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson, David Dorfman, Brian Cox, Jane Alexander, Amber Tanblyn,

RELATED TEXTS:
- Based on the Japanese film Ringu (Ring), which was based on a novel by Koji Suzuki (also called Ring).
- Naomi Watts and David Dorfman reprised their roles in The Ring Two, directed by Hideo Nakata (the director of the original Japanese version).
- The Japanese version was followed by the sequels Spiral and Ring 2, as well as a prequel called Ring 0: Birthday.
- There was also a Korean remake, The Ring Virus.
- Other American remakes of late 90s/early 00s Japanese horror films: The Grudge and Dark Water.

On Deadly Ground

Once upon a time there was a ridiculous pony-tailed man named Steven Seagal. He made his name as a martial arts expert and stunt co-ordinator in 1980s Hollywood before getting a crack at being an onscreen action hero in the 1988 film Above the Law. After this he had a couple of moderate successes before becoming a superstar with the film Under Seige. Its popularity went to his head, and the over-achieving Seagal exploited the opportunities afforded to him by this success to seek auteur status by producing, directing and starring in a film called On Deadly Ground. In much the same way that this film depicts corporate greed as a force that exploits our world's natural resources, Steven Seagal's greed for artistic recognition became a force that would rape cinema itself. On Deadly Ground is Seagal's magnum opus, and boy does it suck.

The film opens on a magnificent bald eagle and the pro-nature message couldn't be made any clearer. This is the 1990s in all its politically-correct glory, the worst of the era exemplified in a single film = environmental issues, electric blue credit titles, Steven Seagal, evil corporations, computers being used to solve plot holes with lightning speed. It's all there. Add to this Seagal's egotistical need to portray himself as some sort of messiah for the Native American peoples and his complete lack of a sense of humour and you have one of the most mindnumbing big budget action films ever made. In the past I always felt a little sorry for Steven Seagal when people mocked him... but then I saw this movie.

The plot has Seagal as an oil fire expert who cottons on to his industrial employer (represented by Michael Caine) cutting corners at the expense of the Alaskan wilderness and its natives. You haven't suffered until you've witnessed the sheer idiocy of Seagal's introduction scene, the dramatic upwards pan that reveals him recklessly lighting a cigarette at the site of a massive fire as he quips, "Hey Hugh, what's cooking?" It's so bad you can't even parody it. Oh, and Seagal's character's name is 'Forrest', because he's gonna save the forest, geddit? And if Seagal's acting isn't bad enough for you, this film will also introduce you to his ineptitude as a director.

Filmmaking doesn't get much more obvious and contrived than On Deadly Ground. Seagal mournfully emotes "What does it take to change the essence of a man?" with minimal expression whilst engaging a plot-irrelevant tough guy in a hand-slapping contest that reduces said tough guy to tears (look it up on youtube if you must!) That's just one small scene. Every major action beat in On Deadly Ground is filmed in jerky slow motion, there's no freakin' martial arts to be seen because Seagal seems to think everyone is more interested in his 'acting', and a soul-destroying half hour in the middle of the film is devoted to his character hanging out with eskimos and embarking on a spirit quest to become one with the bear.

Not even Michael Caine can save this film. Caine has weird plastered-down black hair (so we can tell that he's the villain) and a somewhat dodgy American accent. He does his best to liven things up as the entertainingly evil corporate scumbag with no conscience, but no matter how good his performance could be it would never cancel out the rubbishness of this entire film. The same goes for the rest of the unusually distinguished cast (John C. McGinley, Joan Chen, R. Lee Ermey). Finally, this review would not be complete without mentioning the infamous closing monologue. All the idiotic things that I previously mentioned in this review are nothing in comparison to the neverending lecture that Seagal gives at the end of the film, he talks about things like dying plankton and electric cars whilst his audience of Native Americans (wearing traditional dress) all nod their heads in agreeance, and we get a montage of stock footage that shows polluted cities and industrial practices all over the world. It's hard to imagine a worse way to end a film, and it's hard to imagine that Seagal made any fans by doing it, and it feels like it goes for a longer amount of time than all the other scenes in the film combined.

DIRECTOR: Steven Seagal
WRITER/SOURCE: Ed Horowitz and Robert U. Russin
KEY ACTORS: Steven Seagal, Michael Caine, John C. McGinley, Joan Chen, R. Lee Ermey, Sven-Ole Thorsen, Mike Starr, Billy Bob Thornton, Richard Hamilton

RELATED TEXTS:
- The blatant environmental themes and general earnestness reminds me a lot of the animated 1990s television series Captain Planet.
- One sequence of the film where Seagal outsmarts some mercenaries in the forest is a lot like First Blood.
- Other films about corporate greed and pollution: A Civil Action, Erin Brockavich, The Constant Gardener and Silkwood.

Wild Strawberries

Despite being on an impossible mission to watch nearly everything ever made that's worth watching, sometimes I can't help but have an idea in my head of how a film should be. I've grown up in Australia, exposed to western media in much the same way as anyone else in Australia has been (which I imagine isn't too dissimilar to those who live in the U.S.A., Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, or any other English-language speaking country). I have this ingrained idea of how films should be structured... it's an almost unconscious expectation and it sometimes interferes with me when I watch European films, so when I sit down to watch a well-known film like Wild Strawberries I do my best not to hype it up too much because it makes me close-minded.

So I watched this film whilst fighting against my own expectations. As a result I'm finding it a bit hard to start this review because while I was watching Wild Strawberries I felt rather nonchalant towards it, I kept trying to anticipate the whole point of the film because I was finding it difficult to get a frame of reference so I could connect with it. But then something magical happened.

Even as I was grappling with my overactive need to analyse and understand it, Wild Strawberries provoked a completely unexpected emotional response within me and only by the very end did I appreciate all that had come before it. The sheer weight of what director Ingmar Bergman and actor Victor Sjostrom created together in this film swept me up and affected me profoundly. I didn't think films could grab me like that anymore, but this wonderfully bittersweet yet uplifting piece of cinema encapsulates loneliness, mortality and love so beautifully... well, it's hard to even put it in words. Part of it is in the dialogue, part of it in Sjostrom's performance. It's in the pacing, the editing, the close-ups, symbolism. It's a perfectly flawless film that stands as an example of the things that only a film can say or do. And as intellectually stimulating as it might be, it's biggest achievement is in the way it evokes certain feelings.


Professor Isak Borg (Sjostrom) is an old man who has devoted his life to medical science. He's a creature of habit, isolated and without any close familial ties, seen (by other characters) as selfish, ruthless, aloof, principled and obstinate. We're told that he's "cold as ice" despite his warm age-mellowed veneer... he's a man who keeps himself distant from other people's problems because he has no time for it. But where has all this gotten him? Although it's never really addressed directly, the price of his cold heart has bought him a distinct loneliness in his old age. Wild Strawberries follows a day in the professor's life as he travels across the countryside to recieve an honorary degree for his achievements in medicine - a journey that prompts him to assess and come to terms with his life and how other people see him.

Isak picks up some young hitchhikers on his journey as he revisits his childhood and relives the memories of his idyllic youth. The connection he forges with these young travellers prompts and feeds his introspection, and his daughter-in-law Marianne (Ingrid Thulin) forces him to face the consequences of his way of life and how it has affected his relationship with his estranged son, Evald (Gunner Bjornstrand). It's strange at first when the nice Marianne tells Isak how little she likes him as Sjostrom's slightly grouchy but charismatic performance endears him to the audience. But this is very much a 'trick' of the film, it's somewhat telling that those who know him the least (such as the audience and the young hitchhikers) are the ones who like him the most.

We learn who Isak truly is through the way that other people (such as Marianne and his son Evald) percieve him, rather than how he sees himself. It's a wonderfully three-dimensional achievement in characterisation, to portray such an apparently unlikeable man with such vivid warmth. It's a perfectly realised exercise in perception, and for a relatively brief film (ninety minutes) it builds a fairly complete picture of a man and his entire life.


Of particular note are the various dream sequences... the opening dream puts Isak in a world with no one else in it, and he discovers that he doesn't like such a concept (there's that loneliness again). It's quite disturbing, especially the bit where a coffin falls in the street in front of him and his own corpse tries to beckon him in. Later dream sequences afford similar insights into the parts of his mind that he fears to articulate in the real world, such as the deep worry that his life's work won't be ratified by his colleagues in the medical profession (rendering his entire life worthless).

Besides this character study there's a lot else to observe in Wild Strawberries... Bergman and his cinematographer demonstrate the crisp wonder of nature, and the film gets to the heart of life in ways that American movies seldom touch by utilising a direct style of dialogue that comes without any fanfare. The way the characters speak and philosophise with each other might not be completely realistic, but as it's delivered in such an undramatic fashion it seems to cut through any Hollywood-like sense of artifice. I also appreciated the way that Isak's flashbacks actually featured him physically looking on, as if he was trying to position his present self within his own memories - it gave me a sense that I was only ever seeing the smallest parts of an entire life.

It's an amazing thing, for a film of such length to say so much about one (albeit fictional) life. The final shot of Isak in his bed, coming to terms with life's disappointments as he revels in and recalls its triumphs, is the sort of thing that would tread a fine line between the twee and the contrived in most films. In Wild Strawberries it's absolutely beautiful.

SIDENOTE: I know this doesn't really fit with everything else I tried to say in the review above but I couldn't help but laugh at the rather sombre character of Evald... what's with these dreary Swedes? They're all mopey and "life is hell" whilst they ride around the countryside in their volkswagons with their beautiful blonde wives, dudes need to cheer up!

DIRECTOR: Ingmar Bergman
WRITER/SOURCE: Ingmar Bergman
KEY ACTORS: Victor Sjostrom, Bibi Andersson, Ingrid Thulin, Gunnar Bjornstrand, Max Von Sydow

RELATED TEXTS:
- Amazingly, Wild Strawberries was released only ten months after another classic Ingmar Bergman film, The Seventh Seal.
- Woody Allen took his cues from (and paid tribute to) Wild Strawberries with the film Another Woman.
- See also The Trip to Bountiful, Harry and Tonto, Everybody's Fine and About Schmidt.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated Best Original Screenplay.
BAFTAs - nominated Best Film and Best Foreign Actor (Victor Sjostrom).
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Film.
Venice Film Festival - won Film Critics Award (Ingmar Bergman)

Easy A

This is one of those cutting edge comedies about high school where the students look mature-age and the sassy heroine finds herself standing on the outside of the system, Easy A is an upfront update of The Scarlet Letter where Olive (Emma Stone) is a senior student accused of sluttiness despite actually being a virgin. She goes along with the misunderstanding as an experiment in reputation vs. truth, but soon the lies spiral out of control and she finds herself increasingly osctracised as we take a jolly rollercoaster ride through high school cliques and school scandals.

I really wanted to like Easy A but there was a lot in it that I found annoying. I can handle self-consciously hip dialogue and characters talking directly to the camera, but when you're trying to tune into today's youth it helps to employ some degree of realism. The whole film is naively built upon the supposition that hardly any high school students have sex, and works off this in a fairly hysterical and melodramatic fashion. It also does that irritating self-reflexive thing where the film constantly has to remind the audience how clever it is by saying it directly in the dialogue, which ironically renders all its cleverness null and void.

For instance, it's cool that Easy A wants to avoid the cliches of the teen movie genre but calling attention to said avoidances just doesn't do the trick. I found Olive's parents to be particularly groanworthy... there seems to be this ongoing assumption on Hollywood's part that people from California are the wackiest and most interesting people in the world. Another appalling facet of the film is the convenient exposition that it spoonfeeds to the audience... the moment that Olive's black younger brother is introduced, the kid and her dad play out a droll exchange that explains it just for our benefit. Furthermore, the film relies on the plot point of all these lies about Olive's reputation getting out of hand but the numerous reasons given for why she goes along with it are never watertight enough to be all that convincing. A lot of it is just a plain old cop out.

It's not all bad... Emma Stone is charismatic, and Thomas Haden Church has a good role despite having some godawful dialogue where he references all the 1980s film-teacher cliches. The lip service Easy A pays to John Hughes films is welcome, as is its subversion of great American literature (The Scarlet Letter, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) for the purposes of creating something akin to new pop art. It's just a shame that the film didn't think highly enough of its audience to tone down the fourth wall breaking footnotes. I'm quite enthusiastic for Hollywood to make these clever, satirical and thought-provoking high school movies... they just need to be a bit more subtle about it.

DIRECTOR: Will Gluck
WRITER: Bill V. Royal, drawing inspiration from the novel The Scarlet Letter.
KEY ACTORS: Emma Stone, Amanda Bynes, Thomas Haden Church, Malcolm McDowell, Lisa Kudrow, Patricia Clarkson, Stanley Tucci, Penn Badgley, Alu Michalka

RELATED TEXTS:
- Loosely based on the classic novel The Scarlet Letter by Nathanial Hawthorne. Bill V. Royal had/has plans to also similarly update the play Cyrano de Bergerac by Edmond Rostand and The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens.
- Gluck's next film is Friends With Benefits, featuring some of the same cast.
- The most obvious comparison to make with Easy A is Juno, both have post-modern senses of humour and breakout performances from young female leads. Assassination of a High School President also deals with themes related to cliques and social outsiders.
- Also see the TV series Veronica Mars.

AWARDS
Golden Globes - Best Actress - Musical or Comedy (Emma Stone).

Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Hands down, no questions, this is easily my favourite Harry Potter book. It's the book where the series takes it's first real turn towards a darker tone and really begins to step things up a notch. It's also the Harry Potter book that happened to win the prestigous Whitbread Award, and perhaps where the series first began to recieve widespread recognition.

Sirius Black, the evil Voldemort's one-time right hand man and doer of *very bad deeds* (not revealed here in the interest of not spoiling anything for anyone), has escaped from Azkaban - the hell-like prison for criminal wizards. Meanwhile, Harry and his pals return to Hogwarts for their third year, where the wraith-like Dementors (Azkaban's guards) have taken up residence in order to protect the school from Sirius Black. And true to form, there's a new Defence Against the Dark Arts teacher - the mysterious Lupin, who seeks to teach his new students by giving them some 'hands on' experience!

There's a lot more going on of course, lots of little subplots run along side by side and they DO all tie up rather neatly by the end. Most satisfyingly, some big answers are finally given to some of the questions most readers are probably asking by this point of the series, and we get the long-awaited back story of Harry's parents and their peers. In fact, I'd probably even go as far as to say that this is the most self-contained yet exciting of the Potter novels... the first two novels are just as self-contained but they seem to lack the punch of Azkaban, whereas the later novels might have punch but they lack the rewarding feeling of fulfillment that comes with a well-structured novel. I'm not saying the later novels are poorly structured, it's more that they segue into one another and are more concerned with a bigger picture. Azkaban is the tightest and most thrilling of all the books.

However, be warned, if you read the Harry Potter series and make it as far as Azkaban, well, there's probably no turning back. You'll be hooked. Once I read this book I turned into a miserably obsessed Potter fan... uncaring of the stigma attached to the series by many fellow adults, scornful of all the unsuspecting muggles around me, and forever indebted to the individuals who put me onto these books in the first place.

Oh, and on a sidenote... and the film is actually pretty faithful to this one too. It feels a bit crammed in I think, and I'm not sure how well I might've followed it if I hadn't read the book, but it's probably also my favourite of the films too - it's dark and scary and doesn't feel as sugary as the first two movies.

Last Night

As you might guess from the title, Last Night is an examination of the last night on Earth, as imagined by writer-director-actor Don McKellar (who looks and acts like a cross between Andy Garcia and John Cusack). In funereal terms it's part eulogy and part wake, a poignant look at the full extent of human nature and an affirmation of life in the face of impending and absolute death. I wouldn't call it a depressing film, it actually has a lot of humour in it althought it's not actually a comedy. The humour comes as an extension of the human experience - it's everything our real lives are and with all the possibilities and emotions of which we're capable.

The world is ending at midnight and Last Night charts the last six hours of life for a small group of interconnected characters in Toronto, Canada. Our protagonists are Sandra (Sandra Oh), a newlywed who is having difficulty getting back home after her car is destroyed, and Patrick (Don McKeller), a slightly myopic widower who wants to spend his last night alone. Their paths cross as the night ticks away and their fates intertwine as it becomes impossible for Sandra to get home in time to be with her husband (played by famed director David Cronenberg in one of his occasional acting roles). Other characters include Patrick's friend Craig (Callum Keith Rennie), who is working his way through a to-do list of diverse sexual partners, and Donna (Tracy Wright), a lonely woman who works for a gas company.

Unlike a lot of other apocalyptic films, the emphasis here is on the human drama scenarios that would play out in the event that humanity came to the realisation that the world would suddenly end. There aren't any special effects and there aren't any explanations as to why or how the world is ending (one clue though is that the sun is still up at midnight). Most of all, there's no way out for any of these characters and they all know it, which means we can move past the boring hysteria and get to the juicy stuff - what would you do if you knew the world was soon about to end? Everything you could pretty much imagine (murder, sex, suicide, love, fame) gets covered in this film and we get to see the best and worst aspects humanity. The scenario puts people into situations they wouldn't normally be in and doing things they wouldn't normally do, ever. A lack of consequences is a real game changer, and as a result (in the case of Last Night) the audience never quite knows what's going to happen next.

At first I thought this film was just going to be a series of twisted comedy sketches working off a shared theme, but the film builds into something a lot more affecting and vulnerable. It's dark but there's a strange humour in it that paints a melancholic and absurd portrait of human futility, bravado and resignation. Best of all, Last Night also manages to completely avoid coming across as pretentious. It feels realistic both in terms of the performances and the scripting. Sandra Oh is fantastic and Rennie is amusingly earnest as a man on a sex-mission. The only weak point is probably McKellar's leading turn... I'm not familiar with any of his other work but judging from this film I'd say his strength lies more in writing and directing, his performance felt to me like it was too underplayed. That aside though, this is a fantastic film.

DIRECTOR: Don McKellar
WRITER/SOURCE: Don McKellar
KEY ACTORS: Don McKellar, Sandra Oh, Callum Keith Rennie, Sarah Polley, Genevieve Bujold, Tracy Wright, David Cronenberg

RELATED TEXTS:
- Don McKeller first came to notice for writing the script to the film Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould.
- Other films about the end of the world include: Miracle Mile, The Quiet Earth and Testament.
- Also see the 1980s TV miniseries The Day After.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won Award of the Youth.

The Great Train Robbery

Often cited as one of the earliest standouts in the history of cinema (the only earlier example is usually A Trip to the Moon), The Great Train Robbery is a ten minute western that thrilled and excited early filmgoers. It has also become valued amongst film historians as being an important step towards several narrative-building techniques that have become an intrinsic part of film storytelling (such as cross cutting). A lot of it might now seem simplistic or indicative of the typical theatrics that were part-and-parcel of the silent film era, but it's important to remember the sheer distance of time that seperates The Great Train Robbery from our modern lives (it was made nearly 110 years ago) and I think it retains some extra worth as a tangible link to another time - a window into the past that has been preserved for future generations to enjoy.

I'll break down the plot into it's five main sections for interest's sake...

• The film starts out with some cowboys who rob a train and its passengers before escaping on horseback.
• A little girl then frees the tied-up trainguard.
• Meanwhile, the police are having a little dance in a saloon with their wives. The trainguard bursts in and alerts them to what has happened.
• The police catch up with the cowboys and have a climactic gunfight in the woods.
• The film ends with one of the cowboys firing directly into the camera - a dramatic full stop that amazed early 20th century audiences, and remains the most influential aspect of the film.
  

What I found impressive was the scene where the train rolls into the station in the background (you can see it through a window as the main action carries on in the foreground). We take this kind of thing for granted now but it would've been carefully organised and staged by the director, and it's the sort of thing that can only be done in film... what impressed me about it most was that it's done in such an offhand, understated way. The focus is on the characters interacting in the foreground as this very real train moves past the window - it's just not something that audiences at the time would've been accustomed to seeing, their closest frame of reference would be a theatre or stage experience where the action is very static and certainly didn't involve real trains. I think that's pretty cool.

Also of note are the theatrical deaths of a train guard and an escaped passenger. They seem very over the top now, but the action is compensating for a lack of sound - it's larger than life because it's like a mime show. I think The Great Train Robbery also gets points for having explosions and an actual fight on top of a moving train (the first in cinema?), making it the precursor for all action films.

DIRECTOR: Edwin S. Porter
WRITER/SOURCE: Edwin S. Porter and Scott Marble, based on the play by Scott Marble.
KEY ACTORS: Gilbert M. Anderson, Donald Gallaher, A.C. Abadie, Justus D. Barnes

RELATED TEXTS:
- This film originated as a stage play of the same name, in 1896.
- Edwin S. Porter was heavily influenced by the British film A Daring Daylight Robbery, made earlier the same year.
- Producer Thomas Edison also had Edwin S. Porter direct The Little Train Robbery in 1905, a parody version that featured an all-child cast.
- Another train robbery-themed western was produced in 1923, called The Great K & A Train Robbery.

Octopussy

(Here be spoilers if you are yet to see the James Bond movies...)

The Mission
The theft and smuggling of priceless Faberge eggs leads James Bond into an ongoing investigation that involved the death of agent 009. He follows one such egg to a dodgy prince named Kamel Khan (Louis Jordan), who has connections to a mysterious crime kingpin (queenpin?) named Octopussy (Maud Adams). Behind this, 007 soon uncovers a devastating plot masterminded by a rogue Soviet general who plans to open Europe up to Russian conquest.

Jimmy Bond Yo!
If there's one thing I love about Roger Moore's 007 it's how much he seems to really be enjoying it. Moore's Bond isn't a dark character by any means, and there's a part of me that really admires an actor who can play such an uncomplicated role with enthusiasm and sophistication. That's Moore through-and-through. His Bond is always a risktaker, he bids recklessly high on a Faberge Egg just to see how high his target will go, and he doesn't bat an eyelid when he gets stabbed in the chest by a bizarre Indian instrument (it turns out it hit his wallet, hence the lack of blood).

Amusingly, Bond uses a high tech camera to zoom in on a woman's cleavage (much to Q's annoyance), and is visible disgusted by the prospect of eating a stuffed sheep's head. He doesn't get a lot of character moments in this film due to the high amount of secondary characters, but the end sequence where he has to operate entirely on his own and is racing against time to defuse a nuclear bomb is fantastic stuff - we rarely get to see him in a situation where he's truly desperate. He even has to hitchike at one point, and also steals a civillian's car. He dons Russian peasant garb to disguise himself, has his first train top fight (and it's about time), and breaks his leg at the film's end (his first break of the series?)

Villainy
Okay... let's try and get our heads around this. The main villain of the piece is General Orlov (Steven Berkoff), a warmongering Soviet commander who is feeds a Faberge egg to a smuggling ring in exchange for their co-operation in planting an atomic bomb at the centre of a German circus. He's your typically fascistic fanatic, not quite up to the grand eugenics of Hugo Drax (Moonraker) or Karl Stromberg (The Spy Who Loved Me), but still quite cavalier in his attitude towards human life. He's representative of all the West's worst fears about the Soviet military.

The other main villain is Prince Kamal Khan, a dapper exile from Afghanistan who lives the high life in India through the buying and selling of high art and other expensive artefacts (such as Faberge eggs). A far more traditional Bond villain than Orlov, he's duplicitous, cheats at high-stakes backgammon, doesn't have any qualms about helping level a sizeable portion of Germany with a nuclear bomb, and is also quite happy to betray his colleagues. Most of the time he's flanked by a towering Sikh henchman named Gobinda (Kabir Bedi), who wields a scimitar and has connections to a Thuggee-like cult of Indian assassins. These assassins are deployed at one point to get rid of Bond, and featured among them are a chuckling one-eyed man and a dude with an awesome bandsaw-like device attached to his hand that can be flicked out like a grappling hook. Khan has also two extra henchmen in Europe, the knife-throwing Russian circus twins Mischka and Grischka (David and Anthony Meyer).

Buddies and Babes
I guess the main 'Bond girl' for this film is the lady of the title, Octopussy. She doesn't really show up in the film until about halfway through, and is presented as a possible villain at first (it's initially suggested that Khan is in thrall to her). She lives on an island in a lake in Udaipur, India, and has cultivated an air of mystery around herself. Her opulent hideout is decorated with octopus motifs and she keeps a deadly blue-ringed octopus in a tank. She also commands an army of beautiful female devotees who wear ludicrous bright red lycra suits with an 'O' imprinted on them (making them look a bit like comic book characters). 007 was responsible for the demise of her father but she doesn't seek revenge as Bond gave her father the option of 'settling his affairs' before being arrested. Her empire is fuelled by a jewellery smuggling ring that operates between India and Europe. She's unaware of Orlov and Khan's plans to detonate a nuclear bomb in East Germany.

The other main girl featured is Magda (Kristina Wayborn), a henchwoman of Octopussy's who steals the Faberge egg off Bond. She's fairly forgettable. As always, Miss Moneypenny (Lois Maxwell) also puts in an appearance, but this time she is accompanied by a sexy young assistant named Penelope Smallbone (Michaela Clavell), an obvious concessi0n on the part of the filmmakers to the fact that Moneypenny is starting to get on a bit.

M (Robert Brown) returns after an absence in the last film (due to the death of actor Bernard Lee). He's played by a different actor and is a bit more subdued but it's clearly meant to be the exact same character in the same way that Bond is the same character, as opposed to a new man assigned to the 'M' designation. Q (Desmond Llewelyn) shows up as well, and actually gets to help 007 in the field rather extensively for the first time, helping to pilot a hot air balloon for Bond's raid on Khan's palace. Bond is also helped in India by an Indian MI6 contact named Vijay (played by Indian tennis player Vijay Amritraj).


Locations
The opening sequence takes place in an un-named Latin American country but it's pretty clear (by the uniforms of the soldiers and the lay of the land) that it's meant to be Cuba. It probably isn't named as such due the still very real tensions between America and Cuba at the time of filming, but the location fits with Octopussy's cold war themes. We also get some scenes (though not featuring Bond) set within the Soviet Union, featuring a rather impressive concrete military bunker set.

The two major locations for this film are East Berlin and India, tenously linked by the film's smuggling-ring plot. India is brought to life rather vividly with scenes of the Taj Mahal and features elements such as cricket, snake charmers, backgammon, beds of nails, thronging streets, elephants and dodgy thuggee-like assassins. The East Berlin parts of the film are a bit more lacklustre, the circus and train sequences might as well take place in any country east of Germany (no doubt due to the fact that these parts of the film were actually shot in England!)

Gadgets and Tricks of the Trade
Our man James Bond comes adequately prepared for this mission - making use of a foldaway jet, a homing device/bug that he hides inside the Faberge egg, and a special pen with an earpiece that allows him to listen in on said bug. He also sneaks onto Octopussy's island by hiding himself inside a submarine-like artificial crocodile.

Ever the master of disguise, Bond starts out the adventure by disguising himself as an officer in the Cuban army (complete with moustache). He later also disguises himself as a clown in order to get into the German circus whilst being pursued by the authorities. He calls upon his wits at various points to outsmart his opponents - pulling the parachute cords on two soldiers who attack him in the back of an open-topped truck (sending them up into the air) and buying himself some space in the Indian streets by throwing money onto the road to cause a commotion.

Licence to Kill
Bond's first kill of the film comes a while into it when he throws a man onto a bed of nails in an Indian marketplace. He also slams a thug into Octopussy's octopus tank where the deadly octopus within latches onto his face and kills him. He feeds another man to a crocodile in a lake, knocks one of the Russian twins dead by bringing a massive cannon down on his head, and throws a knife into the other as revenge for the death of 009. In the raid on Khan's palace at the end he machine-guns at least five men and later knocks Gobinda off the wing of Khan's plane whilst in flight.

Shag-Rate
Magda 'seduces' Bond in his hotel room in order to get to the Faberge egg but is unaware that Bond actually wants her to take it. Bond later beds Octopussy on her octopus-shaped bed, and gets busy with her again on her barge at the film's end.

Quotes
MONEYPENNY (as Bond offers a rose to Penelope Smallbone): Take it dear, it's all you'll ever get from him.

JAMES BOND: Vijay, we have company.
VIJAY: No problem. This is a company car.

JAMES BOND: The jewellery sir, I think is - if you'll forgive the analogy - only the tip of the tentacle.

GENERAL GOGOL: World socialism will be achieved peacefully.

JAMES BOND: Suppose, for argument's sake, I don't feel like talking?
KAMEL KHAN: Oh, you will.

Q (whilst Octopussy's girls kiss and hug him): What are you doing? Cut it out, we have no time for that. Later, perhaps.

Q: 007 on an island populated exclusively by women? We won't see him 'til dawn!

How Does It Rate?
I don't know where to start with Octopussy, on the one hand it has all this great stuff set in India, which is a welcome change of scenery from the usual Caribbean and European locations, but it's also very all over the place in terms of pacing and plot. Director John Glen continues his restructuring of the franchise as something more cold war-orientated, and I can dig that as something that reflects the 80s in a serious way (I mean, it could've been worse - we could've had James Bond fighting South African diplomats to a synth-pop soundtrack whilst teaming up with Eddie Murphy). Octopussy is also to be commended for not portraying the Soviets as uniformly evil... General Gogol is a nice contrast to the villain, General Orlov. The other great aspect of this film is the climactic chase through East Germany; watching James Bond running from the authorities whilst also running against the clock makes for an interesting change of style for Bond - he's usually so cool and collected in the face of danger that it's quite thrilling to see him forced into such a desperate situation for once.

But, like a lot of Roger Moore's James Bond films, the attempts at humour are just downright silly - from a sampled Tarzan-yell as 007 swings from a vine to shots of turning Indian heads watching Bond fight as if it's a tennis match, these 'jokes' are just juvenile and they wreck the serious tone that Glen otherwise seems to be aiming for. Also, I struggle to grasp why the film even needs the character of Octopussy in it... at first she seems like the hidden supervillain of the piece, which makes sense in terms of the evolution of female protagonists over the last few Bond films, but then she turns out to be just another ally/love interest (albeit a more empowered one than usual, considering she has her own cult of worshippers). She's almost superfluous to the plot, and the heirarchy of villains in Octopussy is unneccessarily complicated as it is without chucking in this morally-grey temptress.

I think this movie should've been a lot more like Live and Let Die. Where Live and Let Die riffed on the blaxploitation genre, this film could've been a dark Indian tale of Gunga Din-like proprotions ala Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Instead it's like two completely different films forced into one; an exotic Indian adventure with a mysterious villainess, and a serious cold war thriller involving the circus. They should've dropped the Soviet stuff and stuck it out with just one plot, it would've been much less of a mess.

Visit my James Bond page.

DIRECTOR: John Glen
WRITER/SOURCE: George MacDonald Fraser, Richard Maibaum and Michael G. Wilson. Loosely based on two short stories by Ian Fleming.
KEY ACTORS: Roger Moore, Maud Adams, Louis Jordan, Kabir Bedi, Steven Berkoff, Lois Maxwell, Desmond Llewelyn, David Meyer, Tony Meyer, Kristina Wayborn, Robert Brown, Walter Gotell, Vijay Amritraj, Geoffrey Keen

RELATED TEXTS:
- The two James Bond short stories used as a basis for this film were Octopussy and The Property of a Lady.
- Maud Adams previously appeared in the James Bond film The Man With the Golden Gun, as the girlfriend of Scaramanga.
- As mentioned in my review above, I couldn't help but think of the Indian adventure films Gunga Din and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.
- George MacDonald Fraser is best known for writing the colonialist-themed Flashman novels.

The Best Years of Our Lives

"Last year it was kill japs. This year it's make more money"

The Best Years of Our Lives is one of the cornerstones of American cinema and is probably the earliest mainstream example of an American film that deals directly with the trauma associated with war service. Coming only two years after the end of WWII, director William Wyler had the audacity to confront these issues in a climate that wasn't neccessarily receptive to such concepts. A tightly observed ensemble drama, The Best Years of Our Lives examines the post-war lives of three returning servicemen. Each comes from a different sector of the armed forces, and each is from very different walks of life. Despite not actually knowing each other during the war, their shared experiences see them bond upon their return to the fictional midwestern township of Boone City (it could be any American community) and we follow their lives as they attempt and struggle with re-adjusting to civillian life.

Our three protagonists are Al (Fredric March), Fred (Dana Andrews) and Homer (Harold Russell). Al is an older sergeant, a family man who has been married for twenty years and is returning to a job as a bank manager. Fred is a young man returning to his war-bride, he comes from a poor family and is surprised to find that his wife has become independent in his absence. Homer is a simple, happy-go-lucky midwestern kid who lost both arms during the war and is apprehensive about seeing his high school sweetheart again. All three are nervous about reuniting with their families after several years away, and all three are initially yet to grasp the full extent of how the war has impacted on them. Fred in particular bears psychological wounds from his time as a bombardier, and Homer's capable, uncomplicated nature is at odds with how others deal with him now that both his arms have been replaced with prosthetic clasping devices. Al is happy to see his family again but in some ways he has become a stranger to them, and he has difficulty reconciling the practices of his employer with his own personal views of community outreach.

The best thing about this film is that it doesn't tackle these ideas in a melodramatic fashion. Wyler has gone out of his way to make it as realistic as possible, he doesn't sugarcoat anything and even though certain aspects might be toned down for 1940s audiences (such as Al's use of alcohol as a coping mechanism) they're still there for modern audiences to uncover. One scene that I found somewhat shocking was the bit where Peggy (Teresa Wright) exclaims that she is going to break Fred's marriage up so that she can be with him. It would've been shocking for 1940s audiences because the sanctity of marriage was taken a lot more for granted then and adultery was a very taboo topic in the media at that time. It's shocking now for different reasons, Wright is such a sweet apple pie heroine that we don't expect her to be so unabashedly dark and ugly. It's a certain realism that's at odds with 1940s 'golden era' Hollywood... witness also the scenes where Al's family are uncomfortable and awkward around his drinking, or when Homer nervously stumbles on his wedding vows, or even little things like Al burping (it's hardly the sort of thing you even see outside of comedies these days, let alone in a serious 1946 drama).

If those aren't good enough reasons for you to watch this film then you should watch it just for Harold Russell's subplot as Homer, the all-American kid who made a sacrifice for his country and lost both of his arms. Harold Russell wasn't actually an actor when he was cast as Homer, he was a real-life serviceman who really did lose both his arms in a war-related accident. Big kudos go to the production team for casting a real-life amputee in the role, and extra big kudos go to both them and Russell for not turning it into an over-the-top tragedy. Homer is a capable and likeable 'kid', perfectly at ease with his disability up until the point where other people start treating him differently. As far as films that deal with disabilities go, it's way ahead of it's time and it still stands up today as realistic and unsensationalised. Having said that though, I just kept wanting to go back to Homer's story throughout the whole film... it was easily the most interesting part of it, and out of all three characters he (naturally) draws the most sympathy from the audience. My heart broke at how he always saw the upswing of the situation; "I'm lucky I have my elbows, some of the boys don't", even when people around him became socially awkward.

I half expected The Best Years of Our Lives to be a fairly black and white view of people on the home front being 'bad' or inconsiderate towards returning soldiers... but, of course, this is a film made by the public for the public, so it doesn't take such a straight-shooting stance - it's more complicated and balanced. Dramatically, it's forward thinking but (in keeping with its era and context) it's still firmly patriotic on the surface. No matter how bad things sometimes seem for these three WWII veterans, none of them really ever get all that angry at the situation they've been put in - there's no sense of these guys blaming anyone for what's happened. I guess America wasn't really ready for an angry returned serviceman... they could deal with sad and depressed by the 1950s (The Men) but angry didn't really come around until the late 1970s (Coming Home). Despite all this though, I think there's an argument to be made that there is an understated subtext in this film about the failure of America as an institution... Al's frustration in regards to the bank he works for, and the fact that Homer's wedding takes place inside his house rather than a living room, suggests some degree of America's returned servicemen rejecting or being rejected by the system. The biggest indication of this is the film's title - "the best years of our lives" is paraphrased once by a civillian character who expresses dismay at the years of her life that the war took away. There's a certain caustic irony in the fact that it's a civillian who says this, whilst the bulk of the film portrays our three war heroes suffering in silence.

DIRECTOR: William Wyler
WRITER/SOURCE: Script by Robert Sherwood, based on an article/novel by MacKinlay Kantor.
KEY ACTORS: Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Harold Russell, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael

RELATED TEXTS:
- The film started life as an article in Time magazine. This was expanded into a novella, Glory for Me, which was later adapted into the film.
- Other significant films about soldiers returning home from war include The Men, Coming Home, Born on the Fourth of July, Act of Violence and The Burmese Harp.
- William Wyler previously directed Mrs. Miniver at the beginning of America's involvement in WWII.
- Also see The Hurt Locker, for a modern perspective on the way war affects people.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Best Film, Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music, Best Screenplay and an additional Honorary Award (Harold Russell). Also nominated for Best Sound.
BAFTAs - won Best Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Film (Drama) and a Special Award (Harold Russell).

The Green Hornet

The film version of The Green Hornet has been one of those projects that's floundered in 'development hell' for a long time, versions of it have been in production from as early as 1992 with actors like Eddie Murphy, George Clooney, Vince Vaughn, Mark Wahlberg and Jet Li attached at various points. It got very close to being made with Kevin Smith as a director in 2004 before Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg (the writing team behind Superbad and Pineapple Express) took over script and production duties. Even from this point the film seemed like it was never going to get made... comedic martial arts superstar Stephen Chow was brought on board to both play Kato and direct the film, but creative differences eventually led to his departure (I wish I could travel to an alternate dimension where this version actually got made). The final version, which got to our screens this year, is directed by Michel Gondry - whose keen visual eye and flair for pop filmmaking helps energise what could've been quite an anticlimax.

Britt Reid (Seth Rogen) is the hard-partying heir to a newspaper empire who finds himself at a loss when his 'douchebag' father (Tom Wilkinson) suddenly dies due to a fatal bee sting. Reid's quest for a decent cup of coffee leads him to Kato (Jay Chou), his father's driver and a brilliant inventor with a mindbending talent in martial arts. They become friends and Reid's quest for a life direction inadvertantly leads them into becoming a crime-fighting duo; the Green Hornet and Kato. It's a great plan except for a few setbacks - L.A. is presided over by insecure uber-ganglord Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz), Reid's newly inherited newspaper has issues with the local D.A. (David Harbour), and both Reid and Kato are interested in the same girl (Cameron Diaz).

The third paragraph of my review is usually where I try to pull the film apart or talk about it in more depth, but all I really want to say about The Green Hornet is that it's really frickin' cool. Seth Rogen is pretty much playing his usual character (IE. Himself) but that's okay because Rogen is one of the few actor-comedians who comes across to me as a real guy that I'd actually want to hang out with. He cracks me up, and I could watch him do anything. It's nice to see him stretching himself by taking his usual schtick into a new genre (the superhero-action film) but by the same token I like that he hasn't tried to be your standard square-jawed alpha-male or some 'dark' action hero. One of the best things this film has going for it is that it's a superhero movie with Seth Rogen in it. It's exactly what that sounds like. It's not a parody or a stoner 'bromance' comedy, it's a modern superhero film but with Rogen in the place of Christian Bale or Toby Maguire.

Gondry pulls out a few cool tricks but by and large he plays mostly by the book. The script is witty and cliche-free enough for him to not have to try and be gimmicky, he just lets the action and acting do all the work and as a result it's a slightly shambolic but ultimately fun ride. The characters of The Green Hornet don't really have the cult following that a lot of other superhero properties have, so the production team had a free hand to just do their own thing with it. I think that's pretty refreshing, and as a result the film is everything you would want it to be and a lot more. I have big hopes that Rogen and co. follow it up with a sequel, there's a lot more that could be done with the dynamic between Rogen's enthusiastically clueless Hornet and Chou's hip and prickly Kato.

DIRECTOR: Michel Gondry
WRITER/SOURCE: Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg, based on the characters created by George W. Trendle.
KEY ACTORS: Seth Rogen, Jay Chou, Christoph Waltz, Cameron Diaz, Tom Wilkinson, Edward James Olmos, David Harper, James Franco, Edward Furlong

RELATED TEXTS:
- Originated as a radio serial in the 1930s, written by George W. Trendle and Fran Striker. They also wrote the original Lone Ranger radio series.
- Much of The Green Hornet's more recent popularity can attributed to its shortlived 1960s television revival. This is mostly due to Bruce Lee's breakout role as Kato, in which he was so popular back in Hong Kong that the show was retitled The Kato Show.
- The Green Hornet was also adapted into two film serials in the early 1940s - The Green Hornet and The Green Hornet Strikes Again.
- There was also a short film version, The Green Hornet, made in France in 2006.
- Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg's first major project together was the 'bromance' Superbad. After this they made the stoner comedy-action film hybrid Pineapple Express, which can be seen very much as a precursor to their version of The Green Hornet.

The Spook's Secret

The Spook's Secret is the third book in Joseph DeLaney's excellent and horrifying series, The Wardstone Chronicles. Like the previous two books, The Spook's Curse and The Spook's Apprentice, The Spook's Secret lays the atmosphere on thick and wastes no time in launching straight into the action. It also continues to draw on various facets of British folklore, obscure and otherwise, to great effect.

Continuing on not too far from where the last book ended, this volume begins with the Spook and his apprentice Tom Ward heading off to the Spook's other house in Anglezarke for the winter. Anglezarke is a cold, harsh and oppressively miserable place... the people aren't too friendly (especially not to Spooks) and the place is overrun with all sorts of misbegotten forces of the dark. Upon arrival Tom surprisingly discovers that this other house is inhabited by a woman, a domesticated Lamia-witch named Meg (who was alluded to in the previous book). Is this the secret of the title? Hardly.

DeLaney uses the book's title to throw all sorts of new revelations at us, as well as one or two red herrings. A lot of the Spook's past is made clear to us, and Tom's apprenticeship continues along it's dangerous and harrowing path. Further developments also take place with Tom's family, setting up some big changes for the following book in the series, The Spook's Battle. There's not much I can say about this entry in the series without spoiling it, so I'll speak a little more about the plot's set-up.

This book isn't as linear and straightforward as the previous books in the series . It takes place over a longer amount of time and is more episodic, running several subplots along with its main plot. The main plot concerns itself with Morgan, a mysterious one-time apprentice of the Spook who has turned to necromancy (a magic concerned with the dead). Morgan is obsessed with Golgoth - the sleeping and destructive Old God of Winter - and will stop at nothing to see this all-powerful evil rise again. The horror element isn't as full-on as the previous two books, though there are one of two moments of shocking abject terror, and the images conjured up by both DeLaney's succinct writing and the illustrator's shadowy line-drawings do little to counter this.

I enjoyed this book a lot. I knocked it over in little more than a day, and it really made me pine for the next installment - for which I'll had to wait a good five months! My only sticking point (and this is with the overall series) is with the little blurb about the 'Wardstone' at each book's beginning... so far (at the time of writing there are seven books in the series) there have been very few clues as to why the series is called The Wardstone Chronicles. I've read conflicting reports at one or two different websites over the years in regards to how long this series will run... one site said that there will be at least six books, whilst another stated that book 4 would be the last. I'm guessing it won't be ending anytime soon as they haven't even started talking about this mysterious Wardstone yet. And I want more, lots more, adventures with Tom and the Spook. The Spook's such a great character too... it's an askew and slightly subversive take on a fantasy archetype (the grouchy, hardened but likeable old wise man - EG. Gandalf, Dumbledore, Obi-Wan Kenobi, Yoda, The First Doctor in Doctor Who, etc, etc) and I want to hear more and more about him in plenty more tales of binding Boggarts and witches into pits of salt and iron, and all the other bizarre and obscure ways he takes on the forces of the Dark.

This really is an excellent series. Highly reccomended.

Flirting

John Duigan's sequel to his critical hit The Year My Voice Broke is a continuation of the story of Danny Embling (Noah Taylor) - the quintessential intellectual outsider in rural 1960s Australia. Tonally, it shifts into a little more of a lively gear than the previous film and doesn't quite manage to achieve the same nostalgic/melancholy atmosphere. That said, it's a very worthy continuation of Danny's story and is still very much a great film on it's own terms.



It's a year or two since the events of The Year My Voice Broke and Danny is now doing it tough in a country boarding school. The 1960s are marching on in the outside world but the isolated nature of rural Australia means that the outside world may as well not exist for Danny's school. He's disliked by the headmaster (Marshall Napier), who takes exception to Danny's long-ish hair and suspected subversiveness, and the majority of his peers bully him. But Danny is a martyr - he knows how to take a beating and he stands strong in the hope of retaining his individualism in such a conformist environment. Danny's world is about to be turned upsisde down by the arrival of a Ugandan student at a nearby girl's school; the exotic and sophisticated Thandiwe (a young Thandie Newton), who is drawn to Danny's intelligence and anti-herd mentality.



This is a brilliant film that seems deceptively uncomplicated on the surface but manages to sum so much up in just under 100 minutes. Duigan captures the hopefulness and insular nature of teenage life so perfectly that it could be set in any era. Taylor builds on his terrific characterisation of Danny by introducing a slight stammer to his urbane disposition, suggesting that he's not as confident as he seems or wants to be. It's an easy (if unlikely) hero-figure to identify with - who didn't want to be cool at that age? The rest of the cast is perfectly pitched, each character feels real and complex despite the brevity of their screentime. Nicole Kidman is well cast as the snooty alpha-female, her presence is a nice reversal of the dynamic of the previous film. She's the upper class female equivalent of Ben Mendelsohn's character - an unknown quantity and unexpected ally to Thandiwe.



Flirting starts out with the caption "rural Australia" and this shouldn't be glossed over. The use of such a bland descriptor suggests that it's just one place... it speaks more of a feeling than a real location, and it surmises the distance and isolationism that makes up a big part of the Australian national character. The introduction of an African character and an interracial teenage love affair in the 1960s would've made almost any other film into a tract on racism and civil rights, but here it's oddly a non-issue that furtehr contributes to Duigan's deft command of atmosphere. The Ugandan angle is used to some effect, feeding into a subtext about Australia's then-naive relationship with the rest of the world - if we were to look at it as symbolic, Danny would be Australia's awakening spirit of 1960s freedom and social upheaval, and Thandiwe would represent the rest of the world that Australia finally got in touch with on it's own terms (and it's no coincidence that she's from a former British colony and sounds like a British private school girl, if I had more time I'd go off on a tangent about colonialism here).



I can't emphasise enough how much I would've loved a third and final film in John Duigan's proposed Danny Embling trilogy. It's a shame that the story didn't continue (and I'd be interested in hearing from anyone who knows why this didn't happen) but at least we have Flirting and The Year My Voice Broke to enjoy, together they're a rare cinematic Australian treasure.



NOTE: The poster above the review is a fairly typical representation of how Australian films are often misrepresented by advertisers... the wacky writing and choice of photo doesn't really do the film justice, but unfortunately this is the best of a bad bunch. The other posters were even worse, three of the other designs indicate that the film stars Nicole Kidman and that it's all about her character. Whilst it's true that she has a major part in the film, her role is purely a supporting one and I think it's fairly poor form that not a single one of the five or so poster designs I could find even mention Noah Taylor's name let alone show his face, and he's meant to be the star!



DIRECTOR: John Duigan

WRITER/SOURCE: John Duigan, semi-autobiographical.

KEY ACTORS: Noah Taylor, Thandiwe Newton, Nicole Kidman, Marshall Napier, Jeff Truman, Les Hill, Naomi Watts, Kym Wilson, Bartholomew Rose



RELATED TEXTS:

- Flirting is the sequel to The Year My Voice Broke. As mentioned in the above review, John Duigan intended there to be a third and final film but it never eventuated.

- Boxing, private schools, Africa and a small but strong-willed hero... could this be The Power of One? There are a few superficial similarities between both films but I'd be uncomfortable with saying that one was better than the other.

- For a 1980s look at coming-of-age in school days Australia, check out Puberty Blues.

- Noah Taylor and Bartholomew Rose both appeared in another Australian coming-of-age drama two years later; The Nostradamus Kid.



AWARDS

AFIs - won three Best Film, Best Editing and Best Production Design. Also nominated for Best Cinematography, Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor (Bartholomew Rose).

The Rescuers

A quick look at The Rescuers today will reveal an odd Disney-hybrid that bears little resemblance to both the classic early Disney films of the 1940s and the equally popular blockbusting efforts from the 1990s. It would be fair to say that Disney lost their way a little in the 1970s and the early 1980s, the adoption of a more detailed and less stylised visual tone for The Rescuers makes it feel historically isolated, and it probably didn't help that this was a transitionary period that saw the old guard of Disney's animators make way for newer and less experienced talent. There are a lot of other aspects to this film that nostalgically links it to the 1970s, but overall it seems to have lost touch with what makes the best Disney films so great (despite it's success at the time of its release)

We have a dramatic painting-like opening credits sequence that pre-supposes the drab and more realistic look of the overall production. I just can't get excited about animation that seeks to recreate reality to some degree, it also doesn't help that The Rescuers is set in the contemporary world. Cars, escalators, helicopters, grimy cityscapes - there unfortunately just isn't much awe or wonder in a realistic vision of the 1970s, even if there are some talking mice in it. The latter part of the film concerns itself with the dark swamps of New Orleans, which might've been a cool excuse for a certain flavour of story or some exciting set pieces, but beyond a couple of fat crocodiles there isn't much of note.

The film takes an adventure/mystery format and puts some 'unlikely' heroes at its centre (the lowly janitor Bernard, a [shock, horror] female rescuer named Bianca, and the clumsy albatross Orville) but their heroics take a backseat to the antics of the ugly, trashy villainess Madame Medusa (Geraldine Page) and the child she kidnaps. Actually, while we're on that subject, the little kidnapped girl is a shamelessly manipulative character in terms of design and execution... for a start, she's a typically Disney-fied 'cute' kid. To compound our natural instinct to want to see her protected though she's also a toddler, an orphan, very earnest, has some teeth missing and carries around a teddy bear. It tugs at your heartstrings no matter how aware you might be of how cynical it is, probably due to the side effects of nostalgia evoked by how closely it's tied to the 1970s (helped in spades by the dated music and the fact that it's also set in the 1970s). The sophisticated Bianca is also very much a conscious post-women's lib heroine, a prototype for the kind of proactive female protagonists that would rise with Disney's comeback in the late 1980s (hello Little Mermaid).

I'm hesitant to bag out The Rescuers too much, it was obviously successful enough to spawn Disney's first (and so far only) cinematically-released animated sequel, and I guess it has a certain 70s charm to it. I just found it a little underwhelming and I can't help being cynical in response to its muted colour palette.

DIRECTOR: Wolfgang Reitherman, John Lounsbery, Art Stevens.

WRITER/SOURCE: Larry Clemmons, Vance Gerry, Ken Anderson, Frank Thomas, Burny Mattinson, Fred Lucky, Dick Sebast and Dave Michener. Based on a series of novels by Margery Sharp.

KEY ACTORS: Bob Newhart, Eva Gabor, Geraldine Page, Bernard Fox

RELATED TEXTS:

- The children's series The Rescuers by Margery Sharp, in particular the first two novels: The Rescuers and Miss Bianca.

- Disney followed this film up with a sequel, The Rescuers Down Under.

- The villain Medusa was originally intended to be Cruella de Vil from 101 Dalmations.

- Oliver and Company(a 1980s Disney film) was originally going to follow up on the character of the little kidnapped girl and her cat Rufus, but this was changed in the pre-production stage.

- Also see the animated Disney TV series Chip n Dale Rescue Rangers.

AWARDS

Academy Awards - nominated Best Song (Someone's Waiting for You).