We Don't Stop Here.

Ok, so in moments of tiredness and laziness I tend to fall back on ol' favs. Hence returning to R + J just recently. I also went back to one of my favourite films of the noughties, Mulholland Drive.


David Lynch is a genius. Let's just get it out there. And Mulholloand Drive is, quite obviously, the work of a genius at the peak of his nutcase powers. I am yet to see Inland Empire (bad me), but I understand it is also quite cray cray, so I'm going to assume that he's still at his peak. And Blue Velvet and Lost Highway were damn fine pieces of cinema, so he's been at the peak for, what, pretty much his entire career. We all love Twin Peaks. Sure there have been some minor misfires (we all remember what I thought of Wild At Heart), but in general I pick up a David Lynch film I know I'm at the very least going to be in for a wild ride. (On that note, I simply MUST check out The Straight Story, because it just sounds too different to miss.)

Meanwhile. Mulholland Drive. It started out as a pilot for a new television series, which wasn't picked up, but some people chucked some more money at him and asked him to make a film out of it. That film I saw back in the break between high school and uni in 2001/02 (it was late one year or early the next - I forget which.) I remember the film ending, and me turning to the two friends I was with and saying 'I have no idea what that was about, but I know that it was brilliant.' A number of years and many viewings later, I think I have some idea, but I don't know how much I will go into it for fear of ruining the experience for anyone who may stumble across here without having experienced the full magnificence of the film.


Naomi Watts scored her breakout role here as Betty/Diana. As the film begins, she is a young ingenue in from the mid-West, staying at her aunt's house in Hollywood while her aunt is out of town shooting a picture. Randomly, one evening, Rita/Camilla (Laura Elena Harring) is in a horrible car accident on Mulholland Drive and stumbles down to collapse, concussed, in the front yard of the aunt's building. The next morning, she wakes to find the aunt leaving - what a coincidence, she manages to sneak into the apartment that Betty shall soon occupy. Betty's good nature means that she only wants to help Rita, and the two become friends, even though Rita is not her real name and she has no idea who she is or what happened to her. So begins a long and twisted tormented journey into what may or may not be really going on - is the reality of the beginning a fiction brought on by Diana's own failings and jealousy at Camilla's success? The lesbian undertones are alluded to with the addition of director Adam (Justin Theroux), a presumably talented man who sells his soul to get his film made. Cowboys, man speaking care of tubes and spat out espressos are all too common in this fable about Hollywood, and anything is possible in a world where Ann Miller is the landlady of an apartment complex that once housed a prized boxing kangaroo. Hell, even Billy Ray Cyrus pops up.


This is an absolute tour de force. The mind that came up with it (that would be our dear friend Mr Lynch) should probably be hospitalised, but that would be such a waste to all of us waiting with bated breath for his next move. Watts' performance made her a star, literally overnight. Her audition scene, going from sweet and naive to sultry and malicious was and remains stunning, an incredible indication of the turning point that will send the movie spiraling into insanity (or reality.) And the Spanish performance of Roy Orbison's 'Crying' by Rebekah del Rio never fails to move me to tears in its power, beauty and the trick of falsity.


There is so little to say about the film outside of the fact that it will go down as one of the most unique pieces of truly compelling filmmaking in the history of cinema. Watching it goes past a must. 5 stars.

How Much For My Other Kid?

Woops. Turns out my weekend wasn't spent catching up on here after all.


Syriana. I see what writer/director Stephen Gaghan was trying to do. It worked so well for him with his screenplay for Traffic, after all. But it didn't work for me here. All those multiple narrative strands revolving around oil and the Middle East - it was noble, a valiant effort, but ultimately it was just too much going on, making it damned hard to actually know what the hell was going on.

George Clooney plays a CIA agent assigned to assassinate various people in Iran, but keeps doing things to upset his employer. Matt Damon is a Swiss based energy analyst whose son dies at a party thrown by an Emir, and out of sympathy his company wins a big oil contract. Damon becomes his economic advisor as he tries to modernise and bring his country away from its dependence of oil in the long term for growth. Chris Cooper is the head of a major American energy company merging with a smaller power, who are currently losing their grip on the oil fields of the same Emirate after said Emir grants a contract to a Chinese company. The merger is shady, but they have a big law firm (headed by Christopher Plummer) give the impression of due diligence by going through all of their documents and files. Unfortunately for them, the lawyer in charge, Jeffrey Wright, is too damn good and starts to find stuff out.


I guess that's about it. It's a great cast (also with Amanda Peet and William Hurt), and they all do fine. Strangely, I particularly liked Damon - his conflicted father throwing himself into work in the aftermath of tragedy was very well crafted. I don't fully understand the acclaim given to Clooney - he was fine, but there was nothing really exciting in his performance. It was just there. Wright I'm slowly falling in love with, each performance I'm seeing adding to my respect for him. Why he's not a bigger star is anybody's guess.


Score by Alexandre Desplat. I'm getting to a point where I think I'll just assume every score is by Desplat. Seriously, does the man never sleep? And they're always good! Damn him and his talent and work ethic. Robert Elswit makes the film kind of look like Traffic. It was nice lensing, but it didn't bring much of a new look to the region. Also reminded me a bit of films like Three Kings and Jarhead.


All up, a bit meh. One of those films that would probably make a lot more sense if I watched it again, but for this I just don't have the inspiration. Unlike, say, Mulholland Drive, which I didn't really understand but I knew I loved it and had to watch it repeatedly, Syriana probably won't become a brilliant film if I watch it again - it'll just give me clarity of storyline. And that's now what narratives are all about. 2.5 stars.

You Got Me Hotter Than Georgia Asphalt.

I'm a big David Lynch fan. Mulholland Drive is one of my favourite films. Twin Peaks is one of my favourite television shows. Blue Velvet, The Elephant Man - love 'em.


So it was with a great deal of expectation that I approached his Wild At Heart, his 1990 picture that brought him home the Palme d'Or. And... maybe my expectation did bad things. It just didn't really do it for me.

Sure, it was filled with Lynchian moments, but even they seemed a bit dulled down. Yes, it was over the top, the performances were extreme and caricatured in his distinctively twisted way. But it didn't have the through-line I wanted, it didn't leave me gasping with want for clarity, it didn't seem to have everything and anything going on below the surface. It seemed, in a way, to almost be a straight story told in a kooky way. And David, you're better than that.


Nicholas Cage plays Sailor, a con released back into the arms of his lover Lula (Laura Dern.) Very much against the wishes of Lula's nymphomaniac alcoholic mother Marietta (Diane Ladd) the two run off to California, trailed by private investigator Johnnie (Harry Dean Stanton), who has been in love with Lula for a long time, and gangster Marcelles Santos (J.E. Freeman), both hired independently by Marietta. En route, Sailor and Lula come across the aftermath of a car accident, with the lone survivor dying in front of them, which Lula sees as a bad omen and begs to stop at a town called Big Tuna in Texas to rest up for a bit - she's also become quite ill, strangely mostly in the morning...


While there, Sailor drops in on an old friend Perdita (Isabella Rossellini), as he's strapped for cash and hoping to make some more. He also meets Bobby Peru (Willem Dafoe), an intriguing character working with Perdita who asks him to go in on a simple feed store job for some quick cash. After Bobby blows away the two clerks unnecessarily, he announces that he's been hired to kill Sailor before being shot by sheriff officers who have turned up at the scene, then accidentally (and quite graphically) blowing his own head off. Sailor is arrested and spends another five years in jail whilst his young son with Lula grows up. Lula and child meet Sailor at the train station on his release, and Sailor quickly realises that he is not what they need now, before being beaten up by a street gang, discovering with a Wizard Of Oz hallucination that he is wrong, and runs over car roofs back to Lula, singing to her as the credits roll.


You see? It just doesn't quite sound crazy enough. And it plays so straight as well. Cage is fine as Sailor, playing an early installment of the same character he will riff off for a long time, while Dern is similarly acceptable as Lula, though somewhat over the top to the extent where any semblance of truth in her character kind of drowns (except for the late scene at the train station, which I found strangely moving.) The real highlights were Ladd as the mother (netting an Oscar nomination) and Dafoe as Bobby, beautifully chilling, seedy, sleazy and memorable.


Other than that, though, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot to say about the film. It's just not particularly memorable, really. Muddles its way through without a great deal of remarkability. 2.5 stars.

Greed Is Our Downfall.

I must say I found myself a little confused by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul's (say what?) 2004 Cannes Jury Prize winning film Tropical Malady. Which isn't to say that I didn't like it. Actually, maybe confused is the wrong word. (And maybe I should actually go back and edit my post, rather than rambling on in stream of consciousness fashion. You know what? No.) Intrigued would be a good word. There are other good words, but moving right along.

What I got from the film is that is is essentially two stories, a real story at the beginning and a myth at the end, featuring the same actors, the myth acting allegorically for the story at the beginning. I must say that the blurb on the DVD is terrible in terms of trying to ascertain what the film is about - it made the narrative structure sound more Mulholland Drive than anything else, so I kept waiting for various random and confusing, fantastical threads to start coming through, which obviously didn't happen. That's not a bad thing, just a note to whoever is writing copy on DVDs that if you start dicking around with the reality of what the film is, you're just going to piss people off.


So, the real story is about two guys in love (one, two, three: awww), one in the army, one not. Their story moves quite slowly, without much real drama, but it's really sweet nonetheless. Things like going to the movies, sitting in the jungle, talking and just generally enjoying what does look like the early flushes of romance and a relationship. Weerasethakul really works to make sure you're as enamoured with the couple and what they have going on as the couple is themselves.


The second part of the film comes in, however, and ditches these two lovers as they were, turning them into a soldier (again), sent to a village and subsequently hunting down a shapeshifting shaman who is able to turn himself into a tiger. Here, there is a love affair of sorts going on, and the allegorical use could seem to speak to the truth of the relationship preceding - is it more of a fascination that a love affair? Are they each merely serving as an entertainment, an aside, a challenge? After all, Tong, the non-soldier in the initial story, never seems to return the proclamations of Keng. While he does seem to be enjoying their friendship, Keng is the one turning it from friendship into something more, maybe somewhat against Tong's wishes.


It's an interesting film. It looks and feels beautiful, all those jungles. And tonally it's very good - the rhythm flows naturally and lulls you into this world where nothing seems to matter. This is then picked up at the end for the tenser scenes between the soldier and the tiger/shaman. A valiant effort, I can't help but feel that it is a little disjointed, that the latter story could have been incorporated or felt more relevant if the technique of simply slashing down the middle hadn't been employed. There were times as well when the love story seemed to drag, clawing for material to sustain it to pad the film into something feature length.


I don't want this to come off as a negative write-up, because I did quite like the film, I'm going to give it 3.5 stars. But you need to be prepared going in.

If Only...

Nanni Moretti is a fairly major name in Italian cinema, known as an actor, producer, director and writer, who has starred in many of his own films (something that often frustrates me...) I must confess I only had a passing knowledge of his name prior to a couple of months ago, and The Son's Room (La Stanza Del Figlio) is, I'm pretty sure, the only film I have seen either featuring him or made by him. As such, there is a distinct possibility that my appreciation of his performance in this film is not tempered by having seen him in other films, especially his own, something that I think affects my appreciation of the performances of other actor/directors such as Woody Allen or Clint Eastwood.

The Son's Room is about Giovanni (Moretti), and his reaction to the sudden, unexpected death of his son Andrea (Giuseppe Sanfelice.) Giovanni is a psychiatrist, seemingly well off, with a beautiful wife Paola (Laura Morante) and two children, Andrea and Irene (Jasmine Trinca.) Andrea is in some trouble at school, but it isn't really that bad, while Giovanni has some difficult patients, one of whom calls him out on a Sunday. On his return he is informed that Andrea had died unexpectedly in a diving accident whilst he was with his patient.


Giovanni, naturally, doesn't take it well. Paola is devastated, while Irene seems to be disocciating and trying to hold the family unit together, but Giovanni is blaming himself and the patient who drew him away from his family on that Sunday. He imagines what the day may have entailed should he have said no to this patient, and they are all happy endings - running with his son, enjoying an ice cream, just generally keeping him away from the sea. He quickly goes back to work and proves particularly unable to deal with his patients problems - to him they all seem so trivial and pathetic when he is dealing with the loss of someone so dear to him, and his passion is now gone. With his son gone and his lust for his work gone, his wife a mess and his daughter struggling to hold it all together, he seems destined for a tragic spiral toward the bottom.


A letter appears from a girl called Arianna (Sofia Vigliar), a love letter. Andrea and Arianna had crossed over for a day at a camp a few months earlier, and she does not know about his death. When she arrives at the family door, at the behest of Paola, things begin to come back together for the family as they take a quick trip to the French border to drop hitchhiking Arianna and her friend off.


The Son's Room is a beautiful little portrait of loss and hope, of dreams and reality. It in no way overextends itself, content to dwell on the immediate reactions and responses of the three remaining family members, all to eager to cling to the well of discovery offered reluctantly by Arianna. With the exception of the patients Giovanni is seeing, the characterisations and performances are subtle and underplayed, and in some ways the hysteria of his patients is a soothing antidote to this - they're in a way offering up the illogical thoughts and grief that the family, particularly Giovanni and Irene, aren't as willing, or perhaps aren't able, to show. Yes, the patients are very stereotypical crazies, but as facets of Giovanni there is no other way to portray them.


The film won the Palme d'Or in 2001 over such films as Moulin Rouge!, Mulholland Drive and La Pianiste (and Shrek! Shrek was up for the Palme d'Or!), as well as many other lesser known titles, and I'm not about to come out and say it was more deserving than any one of them - though how often does the Palme d'Or go to a film that seems to have the general opinion behind it? I will say it is a solid character study, a well-crafted film about a moment and how that can affect people within a short space of time. Flashes of unexpected human beauty come through with Giovanni's imaginings of what could have been, and they are truly beautiful. Simple, but, strangely, lovely. 4 stars.

I Like The Lines Around My Eyes. I Don't Know If He Does, But I Do.

Ray Lawrence took his sweet-arse time coming up with his second feature after the critical triumph of Bliss in 1985, but when he finally got around to making another film, goddamn but it was good.

Lantana launched itself onto the scene in 2001 and promptly blew the country away. It was a freaking stellar year for Australian film (we had Moulin Rouge! and The Bank doing excellent box office business as well), but it was Lantana that took out all of the awards at the same time as managing to make AUD$10mil at the local box office. That's a big deal in Australia. Especially when you consider that this film is a cut-and-dry adult drama. There is NOTHING in here that would appeal to your typical kid, who tend to at least be partly responsible for a decent box office.


The film, written by acclaimed playwright Andrew Bovell (who was also responsible for The Book Of Revelation and Blessed in filmworld, but don't hate him for that - it's all worth it for Lantana! I promise!), moves through the same sort of narrative structure as Magnolia or Crash - it's a whole lot of independent stories that are all tangled together, like... well... lantana, really. (It's an hideous noxious weed that is a whole lot of vines, effectively.)


Detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) is a cop (duh), married to Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) with two children, but who is just beginning an affair as the film starts with someone from their dancing class, Jane (Rachael Blake.) Meanwhile, Dr Valerie Somers (Barbara Hershey), a psychiatrist, and her husband John Knox (Geoffrey Rush) have recently lost their eleven year old daughter to a murderer, prompting Valerie (who is incidentally treating Sonja) to write a book about it. Valerie goes missing one night, and Jane notices her neighbour Nik (Vince Colosimo) throwing something into the lantana growing on the vacant lot opposite her house, and opens a rift between herself and Nik's wife Paula (Daniela Farinacci), who had previously been quite friendly.


This, I guess, is the cruz of the story, but there are further subplots going on involving Leon's partner Det. Claudia Wiss (Leah Purcell), another of Valerie's patients Patrick (Peter Phelps) and Sonja's estranged husband Pete (Glen Robbins.) Still paying attention? That is one HELL of a cast. Outside of LaPaglia, Rush and Hershey it probably doesn't mean a huge amount to non-Australians, but they are basically an enormous pile of who were some of the most recognisable faces on Australian big and small screens at the time. And as such, they won an enormous pile of awards, both individually and as an ensemble, becoming the first film, I believe, to win all four acting awards at the Australian Film Institute Awards (something matched by Somersault a few years later, but much less deservedly.)


The script is unashamedly adult. It does not pander to you, you do have to pay attention to get everything that's going on all of the time. It does owe an obvious debt to Magnolia before it, but it is, I would argue, better handled by Lawrence. Sydney is not overly fetishized - instead of the obvious harbour shots, the film sticks with an altogether urban environment or unadorned shots of more remote harbours and inlets, allowing the film to maintain a distinct Australian film whilst giving it the ability to, really, have been set anywhere. The score reminds me a lot of that by Angelo Badalamenti for Mulholland Drive, which is interesting considering some of the driving shots also remind me of that film. It can't be referential, however, as Lantana's first public outing at the Sydney Film Festival was less than a month after Mulholland Drive's premiere at Cannes.


It's a superb film in many, many ways, definitely one to hunt down if you haven't been able to see it already. There are a few moments where it does feel a little stagey (a couple of moments with Leah Purcell and, interestingly, Geoffrey Rush in particular), but it works a lot better than Lawrence's next outing a few years later, Jindabyne. And will someone please tell me why Daniela Farinacci isn't a monumental star? I've never seen her in anything (that I can remember) where she didn't absolutely blow me away with her intensity and talent. Hand her three Oscars. Immediately.


5 stars.