Wake in Fright

"What's the matter with you people, uh? You sponge off you, you burn your house down, murder your wife, rape your child... that's alright. Don't have a drink with you, don't have a flaming bloody drink with you - that's a criminal offence. The end of the bloody world!"

Quite possibly the greatest film ever made about Australia, Wake in Fright won't sit well with the average Aussie viewer. In fact, upon it's release it was shunned by sectors of the Australian film-consuming community and didn't quite make the impact it should've, perhaps due to the fact that it cut a little close to the bone. It's my firm belief that this is a film that should be studied in schools, both in the context of what it says directly about the Australian character and what our reaction to it says about the Australian character. Wake in Fright was more or less the first film to put modern Australia on the silver screen as it truly was... prior to this the Australian film industry was basically non-existent. Up until the '40s it had acted as a satellite film industry to England, depicting Australians who were for all intents and purposes displaced British citizens. There were a sprinkling of Hollywood productions made on Australian soil in the late '50s, but it wasn't until the British-financed Wake in Fright that it suddenly seemed possibly for Australia to have a self-sufficient industry of its own. Wake in Fright's importance and impact was so big that it spawned two parallel lines of cinema in the '70s and beyond - the artistically-inclined Australian New Wave (spearheaded by Peter Weir, Fred Schepisi and Bruce Beresford) and the crowd-pleasingly low brow films that have come to be known as the Ozploitation movement. Wake in Fright has elements of both these waves of filmmaking, and is just a damn fine film to boot.

John (Gary Bond) is an upper class schoolteacher serving his time in the isolated outback town of Tiboonda. He resents being stationed so far from what he deems to be civilisation, and when the school holidays come around he aims to return to Sydney for a reprieve. Along his journey he comes to Bundanyabba (AKA "the Yabba"'), an outback town where he stops to rest and have a quiet drink. Some locals at the Yabba introduce him to an underground two-up ring, where he gets a taste for gambling. John sees a chance to make enough money to free him from his outback teaching post, but he ends up losing everything instead. As a result he's stranded in the Yabba, without a dollar to his name and unable to even get to the next town. He falls in with some 'friendly' locals, and they initiate him into their way of life... a kind of hell from which there seems to be no escape.

Wake in Fright's biggest weapon is its subtle use of irony to examine the widening gap between intellectualism and the working class in Australia, perhaps most immediately evident in the contrast between the gentle music that plays throughout the opening credits and the first line of dialogue; an abrupt 'Shut up!' that foreshadows the barely restrained tension that bubbles under the affable manner of the average Australian country character. As John travels out of Tiboonda he finds himself invited to drink with a group of drunken locals on the train, which he politely declines in favour of sitting by himself. It's this aloofness that is his only really defence, and dropping it will be his undoing. An interesting side note of this early train-set scene full of 'friendly' Aussies is that there's also an aboriginal man sitting by himself - a keen visual reminder of the seperatist reality of Australian culture. This simple truth gets blown up to magnificent proportions throughout the course of the film, almost to a point where it's literally too hard to look at.


In a film full of contrasts - such as the juxtaposition of the jovial nature of the Australian character with the desolated, sand-blasted environment - it's perhaps the contrast between the intellectual teacher and the working class rural Australians that is most dangerous. The Yabba townsfolk don't take too kindly to John's resentment of their habitat and culture. His arrogance leads him to unashamedly label two-up as a "simple-minded game". Nearly everything he says and does makes it obvious that he looks down on the Yabba, he even casts the 'fair go' temperement of the locals as the "arrogance of stupid people". The flipside of this is what comes to be termed as the "aggressive hospitality" of the rural Australian, a subtle and cunning strategy the Yabba folk employ to trap their prey. It's never made explicit or said outright, all this stuff happens just under the surface through the narrowing of eyes and some deceptively friendly phases. John may be an unsympathetic protagonist when the film begins, but by the end the balance of power has tipped well out of his favour and I couldn't help but feel sorry for him despite his deficiencies. The Yabba men toy with him, for all his cleverness they're always in control of his life. They take his money, destroy his concept of time, and degrade him completely. To them he's uneducated because he has no understanding of their lifestyle. When they take him shooting he wants to claim his kill, but they tell him there's no point because all the foxes are mangy in the outback, and he realises the pointlessness of his assimilation. By this point it's also too late, a kind of stockholm syndrome has taken hold of him - leading to a disturbingly barbaric roo-shooting sequence. By the end of his transformation he even throws his beloved books away, all the civilisation is washed out of him, and escape becomes nothing more than a fantasy.

Of the actors it's probably Chips Rafferty and Donald Pleasance that stand out the most. Rafferty (in his last film) has an important supporting role as the local representative of the law, and Pleasance (with a perfect Australian accent) plays an alcoholic doctor. The 'good' doctor admits that his 'disease' (alcoholism) prevents him from practicing in Sydney but that in the Yabba this affliction is barely noticeable. It's a sadly acute observation that all but labels Australia's propensity for drinking as an outright blight on our national character. Along with a talent for beerswilling, the Australian character is further represented by several other tropes - a reverence for the ANZACs, two up, mateship, and pokermachines as a 'healthy' tradition. Add to this a friendliness that only really exists as long as you fit the unspoken rules of the friendly atmosphere, and the aforementioned "aggressive hospitality", and you have an image of the Australian that fits a little too uncomfortably. There's also the suggestion that an Australian man must be masculine in order to be a 'true Australian'; an idea that also feeds into the divide between intellectualism and the working class. John finds that he actually has more in common with the reserved daughter of one of his new 'friends' than he does with any of the males he meets, further highlighting his 'unaustralian-ness' in comparison to the Yabba blokes.

I'm sure quite a lot could be written about this film, such as its use of visual motifs like blinding lights to represent the sun and heat of the outback, or the way it passes its comments with minimal judgement for either side of the aforementioned divides. It's actually quite a serious piece of anthropology under all the mindless drinking, punching and humiliation, the dark flipside to films like Dimboola and The Adventures of Barry McKenzie.

TRIVIA: The film was internationally known as Outback at the time of it's initial release.

DIRECTOR: Ted Kotcheff
WRITER/SOURCE: Evan Jones, based on a book by Kenneth Cook.
KEY ACTORS: Gary Bond, Donald Pleasance, Chips Rafferty, Sylvia Kay, John Meillon, Jack Thompson, Peter Whittle, Dawn Lake

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1961 novel Wake in Fright by Kenneth Cook.
- The other big early '70s Australian film of artistic note is Walkabout.
- Some other '70s films that examine the Australian character were Dimboola, The Adventures of Barry McKenzie, Don's Party, Last of the Knucklemen, Sunday Too Far Away and Stork.
- Director Ted Kotcheff's most famous film is probably First Blood.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - nominated for the Palme d'Or.

#omgimtrending

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

As you might gather from the title, this film is so current and up-to-date in terms of social networking trends and youth culture that it can't help but adopt a mode of tongue-in-cheek humour. As a result it's a comically dense but superficial odyssey, surprisingly epic despite it's short length and seeking to encompass as many aspects of contemporary pop culture as possible (vampires, zombies and unicorns all feature). Think of it as part Juno, part Terry Gilliam and part Scott Pilgrim.

The script is very clever in the way it satirises social networking, and the comedic timing of all involved is great. Fletch Finn (Patrick Alan Davis) embarks on a life-changing journey through this distorted version of reality, encountering supernatural beings and ex-girlfriends in his search for a beloved pushbike, but it's all a little too hip for its own good. It's weird that I feel so neutral about this because I kinda enjoyed it on a surface level, but I found the tone and idealogy to be inherently annoying and quite self-destructive. The hipsterism in this film is absolutely rampant, the cast is filled with hipster stereotypes but it's so annoyingly hip that it's ironic, and this irony in turn makes it even more annoyingly hip. I wasn't sure if the stereotypes were a criticism of hipsters, or if this was an ironically-vain hipster attempt at self-appraisal. Either way, I found the film as effortlessly hateable as hipsters themselves, with both employing an vapid subversiveness that deliberately invites scorn. This phenomenon makes post-ironic works like #omgimtrending inherently hard to like, despite their obvious entertainment value.

So, whilst the film is, on one level, enjoyable to watch and very well put together, I just found everything about it on an ideological level to be too much of a turn off. Whether it's shallow or a supreme work of mockery ceases to matter if each resembles the other so closely that they're completely indistinguishable.

DIRECTOR: Jorge Enrique Ponce
WRITER/SOURCE: Jorge Enrique Ponce
KEY ACTORS: Patrick Alan Davis, Olivia Harewood, Rya Meyers, Lizzy Davis, Sterling Price, Tony Calle

RELATED TEXTS
- Jorge Enrique Ponce has also made the following short films... Meatshake: A Musical, The Awakening of Spring and My Boy.
- For more hipster-orientated films, see also Juno and Scott Pilgrim Vs. The World .

Robinson Crusoe on Mars

Pretty much exactly what the title says... a man and his monkey crashland on Mars in this sci-fi adaptation of the famous novel of survival. It's probably for the best if you go into this film with low expectations regarding scientific accuracy... it was already known in the 1950s that Mars was quite cold, and that it didn't have a breathable atmosphere, but if you pretend this is another completely unknown planet then you'll be fine. The film plays by its own rules very strictly, it sets up boundaries and then sticks to them religiously, so regardless of any issues of real world authenticity it's actually quite a smart film and I really got into it the high adventure of it all. There's something about survival stories, about a man against the elements with only his wits to rely on, that just makes for great watching and reading. There's no need to get hung up on character development or a real world context, it's just about a guy trying to survive - and I think that's a really universal theme and should appeal to a wide range of people.

Robinson Crusoe On Mars starts out in space, with things like zero gravity and tubes filled with food used to remind the audience that this is a serious sci-fi film (rather than the hokey stuff usually marketed as sci-fi in the '50s). Once Commander Kit Draper (Paul Mantee) is marooned on Mars the first major challenge for him is the thin atmosphere. His oxygen tank only has enough air in it for 60 hours, and he needs to find shelter and heat as well. The next step after this is the quest for food and water, and after this he begins to combat isolation and loneliness. One subsequent part of this film that really stood out for me was the image of Kit playing his invented musical instrument as he marches across a barren landscape with his monkey in tow, a stark composition that combines elements of humour and tragedy to remind the viewer of the basic human need of companionship. The rest of the film is part exploration, part survival, with Kit eventually meeting his Man Friday (Victor Lundin) - an escaped alien slave who, for all intents and purposes, may as well be a Native American (even his language sounds Native American).

Friday is reluctant to learn English and talk, and I had to laugh at this unexpected piece of dialogue from Kit; "Listen retard, I don't know what you're trying to tell me but we're not budging from this spot until you some words, A-OK?" I was kind of disappointed at the introduction of the slaver aliens, represented only by superfast spaceships equipped with deathrays, but I guess some extra jeopardy was needed to up the stakes once Kit had gotten relatively comfortable. The other odd element was the floating fireball seen at the film's beginning... this phenomenon is not seen or heard from again, nor are they explained.

The special effects are generally of a high standard, I just love the matte work they used in sci-fi films from the '40s, '50s and '60s... a really good matte painting is pretty much timeless, and evokes a nostalgic form of alien-ness for me. Anyway, a great movie!

DIRECTOR: Byron Haskin
WRITER/SOURCE: John C. Higgins and Ip Melchior. Based on a novel by Daniel Defoe.
KEY ACTORS: Paul Mantee, Victor Lundin, Adam West

RELATED TEXTS
- Robinson Crusoe, the first English language novel ever written.
- Director Byron Haskin also directed several episodes of the science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits. His other sci-fi films include: The War of the Worlds, From the Earth to the Moon, Conquest of Space and The Power.
- Other film adaptations of the novel: Robinson Crusoe (a silent film from 1927), Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (directed by Luis Bunuel), Lt. Robin Crusoe, U.S.N. (a modern Disney version) and Robinson Crusoe (starring Pierce Brosnan).
- See also Cast Away, 127 Hours and Alive for more tales of survival against the odds.

Terri

"Life's a mess dude, we're all just doing the best we can"

Terri is one of those sleeper indie flicks that fly under the radar. A film firmly about 'The teenage years' in all their awkwardness and comic tragedy, Terri tells the story of a social outsider (played by Jacob Wysocki) who gets befriended by his school pincipal (John C. Reilly). It's about the kids who get treated like monsters because they're that little bit different, and the teacher who wants to help them by teaching them self-esteem and self-respect. It's a bit like Rushmore, only the unlikely friendship between student and teacher isn't built on any veins of intellectualism. Terri is a large but gentle boy who lives with his mentally ill uncle and wears pyjamas to school, and John C. Reilly is less the urbane and burnt out teacher and more a working class man with genuinely good intentions (despite his own personal issues).

This isn't really a coming-of-age film in the typical sense, as Terri's story isn't really a point of viewer identification. Terri is about school life for the different, with all the elements of bullying and freedom of choice thrown in for good measure. It's very much a film of happy sadness, striking a carefully negotiated tone that evokes some degree of awkward nostalgia and realistic comedy. Terri is an observer with no real agency, and his journey is primarily about getting him to a point where he can think and act independently with confidence.

The highlight of the film is quite easily John C. Reilly as Mr. Fitzgerald. Reilly just does his usual thing, which is entertainment in itself, but it makes for a great teacher and it's quite easy to imagine Reilly as a real-life teacher. In a way Terri is really a film about Mr. Fitzgerald, a real life hero just doing his job in helping the disenfranchised. Anyway, this is a great and underrated film that hasn't garnered the attention it deserves, both genuinely funny and genuinely moving. It doesn't have any real edge that makes it unique, it's just a really well made film that doesn't fall into cliches.

DIRECTOR: Azazel Jacobs
WRITER/SOURCE: Patrick DeWitt
KEY ACTORS: John C. Reilly, Jacob Wysocki, Bridger Zadina, Creed Batton, Olivia Crocicchia

RELATED TEXTS:
- Azazel Jacobs has made three other feature length films; Nobody Needs to Know, The GoodTimes Kid and Momma's Man, all of which were low budget and independently made.
- See also the TV series Freaks and Geeks, and other films about teenage awkwardness and independence such as Rushmore, Precious, Angus, Local Color, Thumbsucker and Motel.

AWARDS
Sundance Film Festival - nominated for Grand Jury Prize.

Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

*mild spoilers ahead*

As a gay Thai man living in Thailand, I can't help but think that Apichatpong Weerasethakul has a rather unique voice in cinema. His identity and artistic skills mean that he has things to say, and ways to say them, that no one else in the world might have previously considered. With this in mind, I urge you to check out this unique film. Perhaps even calling this a 'film' is to do it a disservice, as it's more like a piece of art to experience. The narrative doesn't fit into the conventions of Western cinema, and perhaps the idea that it even has a narrative is counter-productive to the film's purpose. Suffice to say, it's a beautiful and mysterious cinematic accomplishment.

It's hard to describe the 'plot' of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives. Boonmee (Thanapat Saisaymar) is a fruit farmer who is getting closer to the end of his life. He has poor kidneys and needs to use a dialysis machine regularly, and believes that this illness is a result of bad karma due to his role in killing communists back in 1965. His sister-in-law Jen (Jenjira Pongpas) comes to visit him, and at dinner one night they are visited by supernatural beings from their past - the ghost of Boonmee's wife (Natthakarn Aphaiwong), and his son Boonsong (Jeerasak Kulhon), a man who has transformed into an otherworldy ape-like creature after obsessively tracking monkey ghosts in the forest for many years. It's like the tragedies of their past have been brought back to them by Boonmee's imminent death and his closeness to the 'next world'. At certain points in this story the film shifts to other stories that seem to have no direct connection to the main narrative, such as a scene set far into the past where a woman meets a talking catfish.



Despite the elements of fantasy this is a rather sombre and thoughtful film, evoking a funereal tone of regret and strange mystery as it explores the otherwordliness of Thailand's Isan district and its distinct culture. There are things in this film that you will see only here and nowhere else, such as a deformed woman having sex with a talking catfish, but these things aren't put across in a shocking or illicit way. It pushes the boundaries of film narrative in order to give a literal representation of Thai folk beliefs in the modern world; communion with animals and communion with the dead are taken for granted and depicted as such. It's very much a Thai film about Thailand that has been made for an international audience, but it can't all be understood and I sense that trying to fit it all together is probably to miss the point - it's a piece of art that should be experienced more than once, open to multiple interpretations, and passing comment on ideas relating to the power of memory and the ending of a life.

In a way the film is about humanity and the things and relationships we build in order to lighten our burdens. Weerasethakul has also said that his film is also about the death of cinema itself in the wake of the digital age, and he utilises different styles of filmmaking to create something that approaches a 21st century multimedia experience - mixing static tableuxs with documentary-style camera work, and genre-hopping from realism to fantasy to historical costume drama. There's a brilliant scene a little way into the film where Boonmee and Jen are sitting at the dinner table on their outdoor verandah and the spirit of his wife just slowly melts into existence next to them. It's a genuinely shocking moment, gently executed but absolutely heartstopping, and Weerasethakul uses these slow double exposures on several occasions to give the film an etherel, dreamlike elegance. It's all very strange and enigmatic, but Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives contains some of the most unshowy yet visually striking imagery I've ever seen put to screen. It's truly memorable, and left me thinking about the film for a long time afterwards.


DIRECTOR: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
WRITER/SOURCE: Apichatpong Weerasethakul
KEY ACTORS: Thanapat Saisaymar, Jenjiri Pongpas, Sakda Kaewbuadee, Jeerasak Kulhong, Kanokporn Thongparan, Natthakarn Aphaiwong

RELATED TEXTS
- The film started out as a pair of short films, A Letter to Uncle Boonmee and Phantoms of Nabua.
- Very loosely based (0r inspired) by the 1983 memoir of a real life man named Boonmee, called A Man Who Can Recall His Past Lives.
- Other films by Weerasethakul: Syndromes and a Century, Tropical Malady, The Adventures of Iron Pussy, Blissfully Yours and Mysterious Object at Noon.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won Palme d'Or.
Independent Spirit Awards - nominated for Best Foreign Film.

Can I Ask You a Personal Question?

Books and parties aren't exactly synonymous. In fact, you might even say they were exact opposites... but sometimes a handy little book with a good gimmick can help break the ice.

Can I Ask You a Personal Question? (subtitled "how to REALLY get to know your friends") by Jonny Steele is this exact book. It can be useful for grilling your partner, some friends, or getting a few laughs from a large group of people. It contains 1000 pertinent questions that can be asked of anyone, and - so long as nobody lies - it can be a lot of fun. The back of the book says of these questions, "Many are amusing, others are thought-provoking or even a little embarrassing. All will help you get to know yourself, your friends and your lover better".

Here are some random sample questions so you can get an idea of what sort of questions this book might ask you...

• "Can you name a sexy scene in a film?"
• "When do you wish you hadn't cried?"
• "Have you ever shoplifted?"
• "What's been playing on your mind today?"
• "Who do you know who smells?"
• "Can you shoot a gun?"
• "When did you last go out with your parents?"
• "What's the largest amount of money you would bet on a horse race?"
• "How do your reject the offer of a date?"
• "Do you have a pet name for your private parts?"

All good stuff, as you can see... some of the answers you get (or even answer yourself) might surprise you. That's the object of the book - I played this with a large group of people and it was hysterical and eye-opening. Sometimes people would struggle to answer truthfully, but that's partof the fun.

It can be a bit tricky to find in bookstores, so here is the barcode number is 9780143002710 to help you find it. Have fun!

The Lost World

I have to admit that I don't really like The Lost World all that much. I think the film's music pretty much sums it up, swapping the trumpet-laden awe and wonder of Jurassic Park's score for attention-getting tribal drums and tension. Spielberg isn't afraid to branch out when it comes to sequels (see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) so he goes more for all-out action in this big adventure. The theme is still very much about the evils of messing with nature, represented by the villains' attempts to control nature through capturing and imprisoning dinosaurs. It's up to Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum, returning from the first film) and his wayward girlfriend, Dr Sarah Harding (Julianne Moore, as a character who just so happens to be a paleontologist), to save the day after being lured onto a new dinosaur-ridden island.

I guess the major problem with The Lost World is that, instead of a simple story of characters trying to escape dinosaurs, this sequel has to come up with some rather convoluted ideas just to get some 'good guys' interacting with dinosaurs. Several new characters are introduced, including Vince Vaughn as some kind of dino-freedom fighter and Goldblum's African-American daughter, Kelly (Vanessa Lee Chester). Kelly serves no real function in the plot whatsoever and I still don't really know why she's in the film. Perhaps the worst piece of characterisation of all is Goldblum's return as Malcolm, here the mathematician is a jittery worrywort who has more in common with Goldblum's character from Independence Day than the rock star-ish character the actor played in Jurassic Park. On the flipside, we get the wonderful Pete Postlethwaite as a great white hunter-type, though he doesn't feature in the film anywhere near as much as I would've liked.

Overall I think there's too much action, too many characters (a lot of whom are barely developed), and the dinosaurs don't seem as real due to an increased reliance on CGI. It's a lot gorier than the first movie, and the whilst the rampaging T-rex ending is a lot of fun it's also morally unfair - we're expected to sympathise with the dinosaurs due to the fact that they're depicted as animals rather than monsters, and yet the T-rex is shown brutally eating innocent people back in LA! I guess it was always going to be hard to do a sequel to a film that had a heavy reliance on the audience being shown something they'd never seen before, and perhaps Spielberg was wise not to attempt a retread of this. There are some great set pieces to watch out for (the T-rexes attacking the caravan, and the Compsognathuses menacing and attacking Peter Stormare's character), but that's all they are: set pieces. Leftover sequences that could be shoehorned into any of the Jurassic Park films (this is a phenomenon that would continue into the third film as well), suggesting that a narratively-sound sequel might be a relative impossibility.

DIRECTOR: Steven Spielberg
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by David Koepp, based on the novel by Michael Crichton.
KEY ACTORS: Jeff Goldblum, Julianne Moore, Pete Postlethwaite, Arliss Howard, Richard Attenborough, Vince Vaughn, Vanessa Lee Chester, Peter Stormare, Thomas F. Duffy

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel The Lost World by Michael Crichton, sequel to his original novel: Jurassic Park.
- This film is the sequel to the film Jurassic Park, and is followed by a third film, Jurassic Park III.
- For more rampaging dinosaurs, see Godzilla and The Valley of Gwangi.
- The title and concept of this film alludes to Arthur Conan Doyle's novel, The Lost World.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Visual Effects.

Sharfik

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

I was initially eager to get stuck into this animated short as I usually automatically assume that a fair bit of time and enthusiasm has gone into animated projects, and that the filmmakers will have something different to say (or a different way to say the usual things). Unfortunately, Sharfik kind of disappointed me. The short is a dialogue-free depiction of one family slowly falling apart during the WWII seige of Stalingrad, and focuses on the family's youngest son as he struggles to survive ( though he doesn't really have any understanding of what's happening).

There's a universalness to this sort of subject, and I guess that's why it's completely free of dialogue. The use of a child's perspective is obviously designed to push the viewer's emotional buttons in a big way... it seems to be very much influenced by the depressing anime opus Grave of the Fireflies (if only Grave of the Fireflies had been this short!) Alas, Sharfik isn't up to scratch in terms of that film's quality, with the animation and camera movements seeming amateurish and a little too close to Adobe Flash for my tastes.

I think I would've liked more context to the story rather than long, empty stretches of suffering. I can see what the filmmakers were aiming for but I guess I'm just numb and cynical towards the message due to overexposure to the subject matter and the film's unexciting execution.

DIRECTOR: Karina Gazizova
WRITER/SOURCE: Karina Gazizova

RELATED TEXTS
- See Grave of the Fireflies for a similar story told in almost the exact same way, only much better.
- Karina Gazizova previously worked as an animator on the TV series Good Vibes and the TV children's game show BrainSurge.

An Andalusian Dog

This short silent film is (in)famous for a gutchurningly realistic image of a woman's eyeball being sliced open by a razor. It comes near the beginning of the film as a way of getting the viewer's attention, and the film holds this attention for the remainder of its 16 minutes despite the apparent absence of any real plot or characters. Spanish director Luis Bunuel (in his directorial debut) collaborated with famed artist Salvador Dali for this piece, and the two create a delightfully surrealistic series of scenes that act as a cinematic counterpart to certain techniques being pioneered in modernist literature during the 1920s. More specifically, it's a dreamlike sense of free association that sees the film tumble across unconnected scenes like a stream of consciousness.

It's actually quite accessible to modern viewers as it plays like the world's first MTV music video, and the way An Andalusian Dog fluidly segues from, say, an apartment to a beach feels like the precursor to pop music videos that would be created some 50-60 years later. It's a very strange experience, dissolving into new and unpredictable images and gleefully revelling in sex and violence to establish a riveting and distinctly visual tableux. One particular aspect that sheds some light on what the film might be trying to say (though this is really anybody's guess) is the predominance of body horror - the eye scene, a shot of ants crawling from a wound in a man's palm, a disembodied hand, etc. What it's supposed to be about isn't really all that important though, the emphasis is on using the developing scope of cinema in a new and artistically original way.

DIRECTOR: Luis Bunuel
WRITER/SOURCE: Luis Bunuel and Salvador Dali
KEY ACTORS: Pierre Batcheff, Simone Mareuil, Luis Bunuel, Salvador Dali

RELATED TEXTS
- Bunuel followed up his debut with a longer surrealist film, The Age of Gold, in 1930. Some of his later surrealist films are The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie and The Phantom of Liberty.
- Other famous surrealist films: The Smiling Madame Beudet, The Seashell and the Clergyman, Rose Hobart, El Topo, The Holy Mountain, Eraserhead and Videodrome.

The Stunt Man

"All they care about is story"

You've got to admire any film that opens on a dog licking its own balls. The Stunt Man is a hilarious and blackly cynical satire on relationships of power in filmmaking. Unlike a lot of other Hollywood films about filmmaking the emphasis here is very much on character, giving the film a certain timelessness that a relatively trivial film like What Just Happened is unable to match. The other big selling point for The Stunt Man that seperates it from lesser films is a great Oscar-nominated performance from Peter O'Toole. Coming from 1980, the film operates in a twilight between the golden new wave of American filmmaking of the '70s and the more entertainment-orientated pieces of quirk found in the thick of the '80s.

Cameron (Steve Railsbeck) is a disenfranchised Vietnam veteran on the run from the law. Eli (Peter O'Toole) is a megalomaniacal film director who's just covered up the death of a stunt man on his film. When the two meet, Eli strikes up an amicable deal - Cameron will assume the identity of the dead stunt man in order to hide from local law enforcement. At first it seems like a good deal, with Cameron getting to mingle with big name stars on the set of a movie, but Eli will stop at nothing to create the film he wants to make - a process that involves him manipulating both Cameron and the leading lady, Nina (Barbara Hershey), through external means. And as Cameron is off the radar this places him in a pretty dangerous position, and soon his sanity is hanging by a thread.

As I mentioned before, the characterisation is the key to this film's success in an arena where a lot of other films fail. The film's opening credits feature a motif that highlights the relationship between animal and master... dogs doing tricks, dogs trained to only like their owner, a buzzard shoed off a telegraph pole and fatally driven into the path of a helicopter. Cameron is very much the dog to Eli's master... as a soldier he's already predispossed to following orders, and his first appearance in the film has him looking very much like a stray mongrel. He also isn't too bright, and operates mostly on instinct, so his intellectual defences against Eli are fairly minimal. By contrast, Hershey's character is a method actor parody, but it's played realistically enough and with enough charm to not feel like an overt joke. The layers of method to her character actually serve a function in the script as well, providing enough enigma to intrigue and confuse Cameron.

And then there's Eli, played by O'Toole with that wonderfully aristocratic voice. O'Toole apparently based the character on David Lean (who famously directed O'Toole in Lawrence of Arabia), creating a satirical devil of a man referred to by his cast and crew as 'Eli the Terrible'. When he says, "This film is my child", it's 100% believable, with that maniacal gleam in his eye and a creative confidence that puts an easy smile on his face while he literally calls the shots. As the film spirals out of control and gets more insanely ridiculous, so too do Eli's mindgames with Cameron and Nina. It echoes the folly of infamous projects like Heaven's Gate (also made in 1980) and One From the Heart, where acclaimed directors went off the rails when given too much power. Eli's film within this film reflects the director's creative dilemma when tackling controversial subjects; he wanted to make an anti-war picture during the Vietnam War but wasn't allowed to, and now that he can there's no longer a war to criticise.

The power struggle between Eli and Cameron cleverly balances between comedy and tragedy, never once tipping too far in either direction. I can see at least one major reason for this sublime tone, being that it keeps the audience on edge - we don't quite know what to expect, and the film doesn't let us know if it's a comedy or tragedy until the very last couple of minutes. The Stunt Man gets right to the core of the magic of movies by continuously playing with the viewer's perception of what's happening. It segues between real stuntwork to Railsbeck pretending to perform this stuntwork, and then shows us these stunts being faked in-film, though we also know that outside of the film's narrative the stunts are being performed by real stuntmen. On top of this, there are also questions regarding the safety of these stunts in the context of the film's story - we don't know for sure just how safe Cameron is in the hands of Eli. It's all very meta and clever. A real gem of a film.

DIRECTOR: Richard Rush
WRITER/SOURCE: Richard Rush and Lawrence B. Marcus. Based on a novel by Paul Brodeur.
KEY ACTORS: Peter O'Toole, Steve Railsbeck, Barbara Hershey, Allen Garfield, Alex Rocco, Sharon Farrell

RELATED TEXTS
- The 1970 novel The Stunt Man by Paul Brodeur.
- The only other film Richard Rush made after this was Colour of Night, which also played with ideas relating to perception.
- A documentary was made in 2001, The Sinister Saga of Making 'The Stunt Man'.
- Films about stunt work; The Devil Dared Me To, Stunt Rock and Stunts.
- Films about filmmaking; What Just Happened, The Bad and the Beautiful, Mistress, Special Effects, Swimming With Sharks and The Player.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Director, Best Actor (Peter O'Toole) and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Golden Globes - won Best Original Score. Nominated for Best Film (Drama), Best Director, Best Actor - Drama (Peter O'Toole), Best Screenplay and Best New Star (Steve Railsbeck)

Green Lantern

After so many recent, great popcorn comic films (Thor, Captain America, Kick Ass) I guess it had to happen that one of these big event movies would be a disappointment. Green Lantern has the makings of a fun adventure, and there are one or two zing moments, but overall it's a tonal mishmash that just doesn't work. It also suffers from that old chestnut of a problem that often plagues comic book movies: too many villains, characters and subplots. When will these Hollywood chumps learn to ignore the fans and just make a solid movie with a solid plot?

A brief outline of the story for any noobs... Hal Jordan (Ryan Reynolds) is a test pilot who wants to be like his dad (a test pilot killed in a freak accident when Hal was young). Hal is fearless, but this also gets him into trouble when he destroys a new fighter jet in some simulated war games and embarrasses the American government. Enter the Green Lantern Corps - an intergalactic police force that uses a mystical green power fuelled by willpower. When a Green Lantern named Abin Sur (Temuera Morrison) is fatally wounded he flies his ship to Earth to seek out a replacement, and finds Hal. Hal is inducted into the Green Lantern Corps and finds himself learning how to use his new powers whilst defending the Earth against an all-powerful entity named Parallax (Clancy Brown), an alien-infected mad scientist named Hector (Peter Sarsgaard), and a rival faction of the Corps seeking to use a dangerous yellow power source fuelled by fear.

It sounds like a mess, doesn't it? It is. Ryan Reynolds does his best to bring a light, angst-free touch to a fun story, but he isn't given a whole lot of room to breathe. They really should've started the film with Hal rather than all the space-myth stuff. By starting in space with all the big concepts it's like the film is showing its hand too early, and it also misses a trick in setting Hal up as the audience's identification figure. On top of all this the film also tries to explore the impact of father-child relationships through the three main human characters (Hal, Hector, and the love interest Carol) but it doesn't actually say anything of interest about this theme because there's so much else going on.

So what did I like? I liked the way it occasionally subverted the rules of the superhero genre... Hal thinks no one will recognise him when he dons the Green Lantern's eyemask, and I had to laugh when Carol sees right through it straight away. I also loved Peter Sarsgaard's performance as Hector, he's such a brilliant and underrated actor, and it was a shame that he couldn't be the sole villain in the film.

With its three villains Green Lantern just tries to do too much. It's stuff like this and Iron Man 2 that bums me out on superhero movies... the directors and writers are so caught up in ticking off all the boxes for the fans that they fail to tell a decent story. Green Lantern just needed to be a bit more focused. It also doesn't help that the film is kind of silly too... it tries to have this big, serious, dramatic end-of-the-world plot but the nature of Green Lantern's power means that Hal creates glowing green items from his imagination, and it's inherently goofy - like giant glowing green cars and stupid stuff like that. The ring itself and the power of 'will' is also fairly dated as far as ideas go... I mean, it's not something a modern writer would ever expect to get away with in a modern film, you just know it's something that was thought up in the '40s. Maybe what I'm trying to say is; was it really neccessary for this film adaptation to have even been made in the first place? It just seems nuts to try and sell this idea to modern audiences, and I suspect this is a big part of why the film ultimately failed both critically and commercially.

DIRECTOR: Martin Campbell
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Greg Berlanti, Michael Green, Marc Guggenheim and Michael Goldenberg. Based on the characters created by John Broome and Gil Kane.
KEY ACTORS: Ryan Reynolds, Blake Lively, Mark Strong, Peter Sarsgaard, Tim Robbins, Angela Bassett, Temeura Morrison, Taika Waititi, Geoffrey Rush, Michael Clarke Duncan, Clancy Brown

RELATED TEXTS
- Green Lantern, a DC comics title that has been running since 1940, and was 'rebooted' with Hal Jordan as the protagonist in the '60s.
- DC comics haven't been as successful as Marvel in the film stakes lately, but they do still retain the two big superstars of the comic world - Superman and Batman. The last Superman film was Superman Returns, and Batman was recently rebooted with great success in Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Both are due to hit the screen again in a big way with The Dark Knight Rises and Man of Steel.
- The other most recent DC films were Watchmen and Jonah Hex.
- Ryan Reynolds previously dabbled with playing comic book characters in Blade Trinity and X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Bicycle Thieves

"There's a cure for anything... except death"

A tale of tenacity and desperation in the downtrodden streets of post-war Italy, Bicycle Thieves is considered by many to be one of the greatest films ever made. In this humble film, one man and his son spend a day searching for their stolen bike, an object that represents gainful employment in a poverty-stricken city. The mode is one of realism, and Vittorio De Sica's film is a highly influential entry in the Italian neo-realist movement - a post-war period of cinema started by the director Roberto Rosselini a few years earlier, where cinema shifted focus to and themes of social justice and the concerns and plights of the common man. The point of this new cinema was to eschew the glamour and artiface of Hollywood-style movie-making in favour of increased naturalism.

De Sica achieves this naturalism with several techniques. Foremost amongst these is perhaps the casting of non-actors in the main roles... De Sica originally contemplated Cary Grant or Henry Fonda for the role of Antonio before deciding on using amateurs. I don't think it would've been anywhere near as effective with stars of that calibre, the key to De Sica's illusion of realism is the suspension of disbelief, somethingthat would've been much harder to attain with the involvement of recognisable actors.

Another effective technique is the director's attention to detail... for instance, the roads remain wet after a period of rain, and the location-filming features hundreds of extras all going about their business as if this were a documentary about Rome in the 1940s. There are also long sections of the film that take place in real time, making the it feel like it isn't working off a script with constructed scenes - a lot of the time it's more a case of the camera just unintrusively following these characters.

Bicycle Thieves looks deceptively simple on the surface. True, the film is just about one man searching for his stolen bike as time runs out for him to claim a job (a precious commodity in this era of Europe's history; where Italy has been sucked dry by the war to end all wars), but it's also a story of social injustice and the value of things. Antonio (Lamberto Maggiorani) puts his son through poor weather and exposes him to various dangers in his myopic quest, and is even reduced to hitting the boy as the bike becomes an overriding symbol in his mind. These two characters are really put through the ringer, with Antonio beginning to question his perspective and only holding the most tenuous grip on his status as a responsible citizen. The film is, inevitably, about his transformation from the lowest part of the working class to criminal... in a strictly Catholic nation like Italy it must've been shocking for Italian audiences to see Antonio acting so disrespectfully inside a church, grilling an old man relentlessly for information about his bike while the clergy try to deliver their mass for the poor. Soon he resorts to vigilante justice, placing himself outside of the law, and it's only a small step from here for him to turn into the same kind of villain he himself has spent the best part of the film hunting.

When Antonio finds his thief it shouldn't, by this point, come as a surprise that the criminal is worse off than he is. Antonio has tried to do the right thing but the system and society is against him, the inequality of wealth in this society has created a criminal class. Poverty begets crime, and it becomes less a question of morality and more a point of giving in to one's survival instinct. The point where Antonio steals a bike for himself (only to be promptly caught) is a devastating payoff to a slow and meaningful construction of a detailed picture. It's both horrible and englightening, and as a lesson in reality and the mechanics of criminal origins, it couldn't be more convincing. If only all education could be administered with such emotional punch!

DIRECTOR: Vittorio De Sica
WRITER/SOURCE: Vittorio De Sica, Cesare Zavattini, Suso Cecchi d'Amico, Gerardo Guerrieri, Oreste Biancholi and Adolfo Franci. Based on a novel by Luigi Bartolini.
KEY ACTORS: Lamberto Maggiorani, Enzo Staiola, Lianella Carell

RELATED TEXTS
- The novel Bicycle Thieves by painter, poet and writer Luigi Bartolini.
- Bicycle Thieves has inspired several other films in world cinema about poverty: Beijing Bicycle, Pather Panchali, Two Acres of Land, Polladhavan,
- The Italian neorealism movement started with the film Rome: Open City. Other early examples include Shoeshine, Paisa and Germany: Year Zero.
- Neorealism was partially satirised in the '80s film The Icicle Thief.
- For more on poverty in the big city, see Umberto D, The Crowd, Messenger, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and Killer of Sheep.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - won Honorary Award. Nominated for Best Screenplay.
BAFTAs - won Best Film.
Golden Globes - won Best Foreign Film.

North Country

"What do you do when the ones with all the power are hurting those with none?"

What do you do when you're a nobody and you win an Oscar and you're suddenly famous? Well, you make another Oscar-baiting film to prove that you're worthy of the prize you just won. This is what Charlize Theron did not too long after winning the Best Actress Oscar for Monster, driving this based-on-a-true-story vehicle about working class civil rights and delivering the kind of emotive and button-pushing performance needed to incite the audience's sympathetic anger. It's hard to tell just how much of this story is really true, I suspect that some elements of it have been tweaked in the interest of making a 'good' film, and I guess at the end of the day authenticity only matters if this is the only criteria on which you're judging the film. The simple fact of the matter is that it tells of a great injustice that did happen, and whatever button-pushing has been used to get the audience on side is probably vindicated by a need to tell these kinds of stories and to ensure such injustice is named and shamed. In short, as far as companies like Eveleth Taconite go: screw these guys.

Theron plays Josey, a single mother seeking a second chance at life and trying to make something of herself. She moves back to her home town in Minesota and throws herself into the family tradition: working for the town's mining company. Recent sexual equality laws have opened up the company for female employees, something that the company and its workforce accepts only begrudgingly. Once Josie and her female co-workers are hired they find themselves subject to systemic discrimination and harassment. Furthermore, the higher echelons are deaf to any complaints and Josie soon finds herself ousted from the company for 'causing trouble' when she decides to push the issue, and this leads to ostracisation in the wider community.

There aren't a great deal of films that actively deal with working class 'work life', and those that do (Silkwood, Norma Rae) inevitably deal with inequality in the work place or conspiracies. North Country is not really any different to these films - it's largely based on a landmark 1988 court case that changed workplace policy and practices forever (the first sexual harrassment class action that brought the hidden world of industrial power relations into the open). A big part of North Country's appeal is the left-wing political subtext that it willingly embraces - from the film's poster, which markets the film like a piece of optimistic socialist propaganda, to the use of Bob Dylan songs in the soundtrack, suggesting a direct kinship to the civil rights movement of the '60s. It's not all beer and skittles though, another part of the film's strength is that it also shines a light on the true nature of unionism and elitism in tight-knit working class communities - it's the sort of thing that usually gets lionised in pop culture, but North Country gets to the ugly truth and demonstrates that these arenas aren't always pretty.

The cast is exceptional too, here's my thoughts on the principle players:

• Charlize Theron is believable with her working class mullet, and doesn't overdo it.
• Jeremy Renner is suitably despicable and cocky, foreshadowing his work in films like The Hurt Locker and The Town.
• Frances McDormand is good and understated in what could've been a really over-the-top role.
• Sissy Spacek's role is quite small but she suits her character to a T and even uses the Minesota accent.
• Richard Jenkins is great in the disgruntled father role. He really pushes it but this is also the key to him providing one of the film's biggest emotional moments.
• Sean Bean turns up in an important role, and is good value as always. It's weird to hear him without his usual accent.
• Also look out for Woody Harrelson in a large-ish but rather thankless role. This film is the beginning of Woody's renaissance as a celebrated character actor (carried on through films like A Scanner Darkly, Defendor, Zombieland).
• 
  

I really enjoyed this film a lot, it's the kind of bread-and-butter tale of injustice that I just can't help but get swept up in. I've always been a sucker for films like this, and North Country is a film about bigotry and assumption that's very much in the tradition of In The Name of The Father or A Time To Kill, two films that have always been able to really suck me in. I felt like some aspects of North Country (such as the rape subplot) were a step or two away from the truth of the real court case... I can't be sure, but some of these story elements may have been included to tweak audience sympathy even further. I didn't really mind. The film takes a structure that uses the court case as a framing device for the narrative... I wasn't a fan of this at first, as it starts without a context and the reasons for the court case and its tone don't really become clear until much later on. But who am I to argue when the last half hour is such a gutting and emotionally overwhelming tour-de-force? Everything falls into place and it hit me in a big way. I know it's all constructed to get this sort of reaction out of me, but I like having this reaction to a film - it's passionate, and I don't mind being manipulated in that kind of way, so I guess it depends on your personal taste or what kind of viewer you are.

DIRECTOR: Niki Caro
WRITER/SOURCE: Screenplay by Michael Seitzman, based on a non-fiction book that chronicled the case of Jenson vs. Eveleth Taconite Company.
KEY ACTORS: Charlize Theron, Thomas Curtis, Frances McDormand, Richard Jenkins, Jeremy Renner, Woody Harrelson, Michelle Monaghan, Sean Bean, Sissy Spacek, Rusty Schwimmer, Amber Heard

RELATED TEXTS
- The non-fiction book Class Action by Clara Bingham and Laura Leedy Gansler.
- Hostile Advances is a 1996 telemovie that's also based on a landmark case about sexual harrassment.
- Director Niki Caro previously made the critically acclaimed Whale Rider.
- Other films about unionism, whistle-blowing and the working class: Silkwood, Norma Rae, The Angry Silence, Blue Collar, Michael Clayton, The Insider, Made in Dagenham, Billy Elliot, Bread and Roses, F.I.S.T., On the Waterfront and Man of Iron.
- See also Erin Brockavich and The Accused, which also focus on court cases and injustice.

AWARDS
Academy Awards - nominated for Best Actress (Charlize Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (Frances McDormand).
BAFTAs - nominated for Best Actress (Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (McDormand).
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Actress - Drama (Theron) and Best Supporting Actress (McDormand).

After Ever After

"Love can't be defined. It can only be experienced"

This review is part of an ongoing series of reviews I am writing about the nominees for the Beneath the Earth Film Festival, all of which are short films. For more info, go here.

After Ever After is, like fellow Beneath the Earth nominee Chase In Prose, a seemingly semi-autobiographical effort where the director/writer makes a short film about something he knows. In this case it's the process of loss and healing that a man goes through after coming out of a long relationship. The film is presented to the viewer in stages - 1) Grass is Greener, 2) Alone With Your Thoughts, 3) Reality, and 4) Accepting It. The film is actually mostly wordless, full of arresting and inventive imagery, and just lets all the action and editing do the speaking. There's some really clever use of repetition in the way it all hangs together, and Jeff Pinilla has made quite a solid film, and I applaud him for making a film about a guy falling out of love that doesn't end with said guy hooking up with a new girl.

So yeah, I thought this was quite well done, full of great and unique imagery, but I do have to say that it fell just short of greatness for me because it lagged in the middle... a good 17 minutes of the 28 minute runtime was just this one guy moping in silence. It's technically excellent, and quite dazzling in a really professional way, but I think it could've been just that little bit shorter and sharper. One of my three favourites of the competition though, and a very deserving winner of the festival's Audience Award.

DIRECTOR: Jeff Pinilla
WRITER/SOURCE: Jeff Pinilla, Dan Owens
KEY ACTORS: Michael Furlong, Dan Owens, Sara Cicilian, Sanam Erfani

RELATED TEXTS
- Jeff Pinilla previously wrote and directed the short film Dulcet Conversation.
- Pinilla also worked as an editor on the US-Ecuadorian film Bushwick.

Yol

"There's pity in one corner of my heart, and hatred in the other"

When I think of Turkish cinema I usually imagine Bollywood-esque posters on the windows of Middle Eastern shops in Fairfield. These posters are always faded, and look like they've been rescued from some alternative universe where the world never left the early 1980s behind. They're garish and mythic-looking, appealing to a captive Turkish-language audience uninfected with cynicism. It's a parallel cinema that gets next to zero coverage from western film critics... when was the last time Roger Ebert reviewed a Bollywood or populist arabic-language film? Probably never. Anyway, I digress... Yol doesn't really fit into this paradigm, it's probably the most internationally famous Turkish film of all time, coming from a political context that sets it outside of mainstream Turkish culture. It's a film about working class Turks living in prison, made by Yilmaz Guney, a Kurdish political dissident who (as he was in prison at the time of the film's production) had to instruct his assistant by mail on how he wanted Yol directed. Guney then escaped from prison and fled to Switzerland, where he edited the film in post-production. The Turkish government at the time banned it, and it went on to win the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival.

Yol is a story about the post-coup Turkey of the early '80s, the new regime, and the people live under it. The protagonists of this film are imprisoned Turks who have been given some holiday leave from prison in order to visit their families. These guys aren't really criminals in the western sense, they're mostly regular people who have turned to crime due to poverty, and are poor because they're mostly uneducated. These brothers-of-the-road return to their changed family lives in a changed Turkey, and must adjust to the world that has moved on in their absence. Through this handful of characters Yol looks at various aspects of Turkish life... the city, the country, the oppression of the Kurds by the Turkish military, amateur dentistry, and notions of honour and fidelity in a culture that's still inherently conservative despite the superficial freedoms they're allowed. Also, everyone has a moustache and everyone smokes (even the children)... it's a cultural thing.

In a way, Yol is a film about Turkish culture that has been made for the rest of the world to witness. There's an awkward contrast of values in this culture that fuels much of the underlying tragedy in each character's life... on the surface Turkey looks much like a typical European country; modern cities, advanced political infrastructure, and a certain worldy awareness that sets the country apart from other predominantly Islamic Middle Eastern nations. But there's still a code of customs relating to honour and shame that underpins everything, and in a way Gunay implies that this is the true source of each character's misery. Yol starts out optimistic but also foreboding, with the prisoners sharing jokes as they anticipate seeing their families again with some degree of hope. This tone gradually deteriorates as they all come to realise that Turkey isn't a welcoming or forgiving place, and they're each beset by personal tragedies. These are men who become increasinly aware that they will have to live with their sins for a long time yet.

There's Mehmet (Halil Ergun), put in jail because of his involvement in a jewellery heist, who emerges into the outside world to face an even greater crime - the betrayal of his brother-in-law. This act carries a seperate sentence for him, with his inlaws refusing to allow him to see his wife. Another prisoner is Omer (Necmettin Cobanoglu), who comes home to find his Kurdish village desolate and locked down by soldiers - he plans to try and cross the border to Syria to avoid returning to prison. The other main character is Seyit (Tarik Akan), returns home to find that his wife has dishonoured his family by working as a prostitute and abandoning their son. She is kept chained up in a remote location, awaiting his return so he can administer an honour killing. This leads to one of the most starkly unforgiving and harsh sequences in the film, with Seyit leading his wife and son through a blizzard-swept wilderness, whipping her as they drag her through the snow so that she won't fall asleep and die. Custom dictates that he should let her die, but all the fight has gone out of him, and he keeps his wedding ring on as a reminder of the small measure of happiness he once had.

Some of Yol's more memorable scenes include the following:

• Mehmet and his wife attempt to have sex in a train toilet but an angry mob beseiges them due to the 'evil' and 'shameful' nature of this act.
• Seyit whips his tired horse to death in the winter wilderness before shooting it, foreshadowing his meeting with his dishonourable wife. The audience expects him to treat his wife in a similar fashion, but this expectation is turned on its head at the last possible moment.
• The border massacre where soldiers apologise afterwards and ask the Kurdish villagers to check the flyblown corpses for relatives.
  

Guney and his assistant Serif Goren are no bums when it comes to directing, the film has a doco-like feel that rumbles along at a fairly energetic pace in the first act, reinforced by neverending incidental music that's a mix between traditional turkish arrangements and ominous-sounding synthesiser. Yol goes from here into some fairly dense subplots that have little relation to one another, demonstrating a thopught-provoking cultural exploration that shows rather than tells. It's worth keeping in mind that the point isn't to damn Turkish culture in its entirety, the traditions that Guney rallies against are presented as sources of social misery in need ot ref0rm. The martial-law/police state elements are also at the forefront of this. It's an often shocking film, but its all presented in a such a matter-of-fact and undidactic way that it's quite easy to accept this depiction of Turkey as sincere and morose rather than exaggerated and angry. Does that make sense? I guess you'll have to see it to make up your mind. Nevertheless, there's a reason why this is the most critically-acclaimed Turkish film ever made, and I found it to be a moving experience.

DIRECTOR: Yilmaz Guney, Serif Goren
WRITER/SOURCE: Yilmaz Guney
KEY ACTORS: Tarik Akan, Halil Ergun, Necmettin Cobanoglu, Serif Sezer, Meril Orhonsay

RELATED TEXTS:
- Some other major films by Yilmez Guney: Umut, The Enemy and The Wall.
- A Time for Drunken Horses, Turtles Can Fly, Half Moon and Marooned in Iraq is are more recent Iranian films that look specifically at Kurdish concerns.

AWARDS
Cannes Film Festival - won the FIPRESCI Prize, the Palme d'Or, a Special Mention from the Ecumenical Jury.
Golden Globes - nominated for Best Foreign Film.

Red State

"Anal penetration = eternal damnation"

Kevin Smith tries to reinvent himself with a low budget digi-indie attempt at rural Hitchcock by way of Quentin Tarantino. Shunning the dick and fart jokes that have long been his bread and butter (and trying to distance himself from the stench of his last film, Cop Out), Smith turns his ire onto the Westboro Baptists in this genre-bending horror flick. The result is a cinematic free-for-all that hits all of the director's conservative targets yet sadly feels like one heck of a misfire. Despite the heightened violence it isn't really even a true horror film, Smith breaks so many narrative conventions that it feels dramatically deficient rather than intentionally groundbreaking.

Red State starts out in traditional slasher mode, with three horny teenaged boys travelling into the backwoods of Cooper's Dell one night - lured by the promise of sex with an older woman. This turns out to be a trap laid by an attention-seeking right wing sect of Christians known as the Five Points Church, an abhorent and hateful cluster of bigots who carry out secret executions of sinners during their nighttime masses. Eventually the ATF are attracted to the cult's stronghold when it becomes apparent that a seige is under way, but bureacracy intervenes when the cult is redesignated as a 'domestic terrorist cell' and everything goes FUBAR from here.

This is Smith's tribute to everything that's wrong with America - gun laws, religion, homohobia, bureacratic complications in law enforcement, and governments using fear of terrorism to control the populace. The inclusion of John Goodman's character (and his references to the American Constitution) makes Smith's message pretty clear - he sees America as powerless to stop crazed cults like the Westboro Baptists or the Branch Davidians from existing. All the government can do is wait for tragedies to start and then intervene after the fact. What this says about free speech, I don't quite know. I'm not sure Smith quite knows either... he's opinionated enough to put his thoughts quite clearly on the screen, but he lacks the eloquence to really sell them to anyone who isn't already on his side. Much like Abin Cooper (Michael Parks), Smith's preaching to the converted. I appreciate some of the elements of the script's construction, like the idea that it's a gay man who inadvertantly comes to the rescue of the kidnapped boys, and that it's the fact that this man is in the closet that eventually holds him back, but overall the film just isn't incisive enough.

It's entirely worth watching still, it's just so crazy and out there that it's hard not to see it as a real B-movie gem, and I sense that it will gain some cult appeal in years to come for reasons that Smith probably didn't anticipate. Michael Parks is a big part of this, he's so fantastic and full of charm and twisted love as Pastor Abin Cooper... a siky-voiced monster who's frightening because he believes in what he's doing. John Goodman on the other hand tries his best, but he's looking quite old and worn out, and I'm not sure if this was part of the character or just a case of Goodman getting a bit long in the tooth. The supporting cast is filled with familiar and talented faces, but none of them are really given enough focus to do anything worthwhile with their characters.

Smith has a better eye for editing here than one might expect, no doubt honed from his experience of filming comedy and capturing the rhythm and comic timing of his dialogue. The change of pace that he aims for here is coloured by tension, and whilst the film is certainly quite disturbing at times, the slow build of tension that he aims for doesn't really come off. The film is neutered by odd shifts between subplots, and the unexpected killing-off of one or two major characters (shades of Hitchcock's Psycho probably intended). I think that whilst the film is never predictable it also doesn't make a whole lot of sense, it just feels too disjointed. This last ditch grab for some critical acclaim just comes off as a failure, and I think Smith knows his time as a filmmaker is now up. I guess we'll have to wait for his alleged last film, Hit Somebody, to see if he's able to truly redeem himself as a director.

TRIVIA: Smith actually made quite a fool of himself after announcing at the Sundance Film Festival that he would be auctioning off the distribution rights to Red State. The idea was lambasted by the media after the film got poor reviews, and Smith changed his mind about the auction (probably after sensing that no one was going to buy his film) and opted to distribute the film himself. Red State subsequently only appeared on the big screen for about a week, at one cinema, courtesy of his mate Quentin Tarantino (who owns said cinema)

DIRECTOR: Kevin Smith
WRITER/SOURCE: Kevin Smith
KEY ACTORS: Michael Parks, Michael Angarano, John Goodman, Kevin Pollak, Melissa Leo, Ralph Garmen, Kerry Bishe, Kyle Gallner, Nicholas Braun, Harley Ramm, Stephen Root, Kevin Alejandro

RELATED TEXTS
- Smith's last attempt to 'reinvent' himself was with the box office bomb Jersey Girl.
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Where the Forest Meets the Sea

Environment vs. progress, the oncoming spread of civilisation, the displacement of a world heritage site, the hidden history of a rainforest, the passing down of wisdom through generations... these aren't really the typical themes you might find in a picture book for children with minimal text, but then again Where the Forest Meets the Sea isn't your typical children's book.

I remember this one from way back when I was extra little and in primary school, it was a great book then and it's still a great book now. Its biggest asset is, no doubt, the iconic illustration style - a kind of layered cut-n-paste panorama that uses material to give the pictures a three-dimensional feel. The author (and illustrator) Jeannie Baker uses this style in all her books.


Where the Forest meets the Sea is set in Australia's only surviving rainforest, the Daintree, and follows the explorations of a boy who takes a boatride through the forest with his grandfather. The boy imagines/sees various dinosaurs and forgotten peoples who once inhabited the forest, along with some of the forest's current animal inhabitants, and the final cautioning image of the book shows a city superimposed over the once beautiful coastline. It's a much needed wake up call in regards to a rainforest that is disappearing all-too-fast and I'm glad that this book has remained popular enough in it's twenty-something years to stay in print, and the more children who read it, well, maybe it'll mean more people will grow up knowing how special a place like this is.

I went to the Daintree a couple of years ago, and it was astounding. This book does a remarkable job of showing it in all its glory and I'll be a very sad panda if places like this continue to become rarer and rarer. Go give this book to a kid!