Five Again Take Three.

Take Three of about a million and a half, at this rate. I've watched four more films since the last one, so I'm not really getting far ahead...

This was unexpected. I've watched most of David Lynch's films (with Eraserhead coming up, it leaves Inland Empire and Dune as the only two features left - I finished reading Dune a month or two ago, so I'll have to hit that up some time.) Known for his crazy, dense, almost incomprehensible films, The Straight Story was a blast from left-field for Lynch, being, as it were, a straight story. Simply, it is the story of Alvin Straight, an old man who travels six weeks on a ride-on lawnmower to visit his dying estranged brother. Going blind and with only minor use of his legs, it is a heartwarming story of tenacity and family, and the personal rewards that come from doing something everyone says you can't. Richard Farnsworth was Academy Award nominated for his role, and was backed up very well by Sissy Spacek as his mentally disabled but very bright and caring daughter. A beautiful story well told, and a surprising entry into David Lynch's catalogue, further cementing his 'great' status. 4 stars.

The DVD for Brighton Rock was another floating around the living room when I didn't have anything to watch, and I'd heard something about the remake in the preceding few days, so I thought I'd check it out. And it was quite good. A very young Richard Attenborough takes on the lead role of Pinkie in this inter-war crime film set in the eponymous English seaside town of Brighton. Pinkie is the precocious leader of his gang, showing very little fear in the face of anything that comes his way, who marries beautiful waitress Rose (Carol Marsh) to keep her quiet. As he starts to lose his grip on his gang and on the Brighton scene, he becomes more and more desperate and violent. Attenborough is terrifying in his role, precipitating a long and fruitful career both in front of and behind the camera. The remake (or should I say readaptation of Graham Greene's source novel) doesn't seem to be getting the same props as this 1947 production, so it's well worth checking out. 4 stars.



Ah, Harmony Korine and Lars von Trier. Dogme 95 was previously explored here, and looked at Korine here. Korine (uncredited) was writer and director on Julien Donkey Boy, the sixth entry in the Dogme 95 movement, about a severely dysfunctional family comprised of undiagnosed schizophrenic Julien (Ewen Bremner), his sister Pearl (Chloe Sevigny) who is also carrying Julien's child, his brother Chris (Evan Neumann) and deranged father (Werner Herzog - brilliant.) It's a wholly disturbing film complete with the Dogme look of verging-on-amateur, though the gravity of the story and depth of the performances ensures you're never fooled into believing this is anything but the real thing. Korine has a way of making films that are quite physically unsettling, and I find them often quite hard to sit through, though that isn't to take away from the power of his stories. 3 stars.

1969 - what a year. Costa-Gavras' Z powered into the Oscars with five nominations, including for both Foreign Language Film and Best Picture, taking home both the former and Best Editing. A not-so-subtle indictment of the Greek government at the time (though officially a work of fiction, I believe, with a starting disclaimer that any resemblance to real life is entirely deliberate), the film examines judicial and governmental moves to silence a burgeoning leftist movement in the unnamed country (again, definitely meant to be Greece, though the film was primarily shot in Algiers and is in French...) It's a brilliant piece of filmmaking, throttling the viewer with its viewpoint and forcing your engagement every step of the way. I'm not familiar with the rest of Gavras' work, but I'm definitely keen to rectify that. 5 stars.

In my head, 24 Hour Party People was a totally different film. I can't think now of what I was getting it confused with, but it certainly wasn't what I watched, which is why I put it off for so long. The story of the Manchester club and music scene in the late 80s and early 90s, the film primarily focuses on Tony Wilson (Steve Coogan), a journalist who becomes a budding promoter and club owner, brought up and down by his own hedonistic decadence and belief in himself, at the same time seeming to compromise the very vision he pioneered and propagated. Looking also at the rise and fall of bands such as Joy Division, Happy Mondays and New Order, it is a fascinating and very entertaining look at this time, filled with frequent fourth wall breakages to insert actual memories and commentary on the time. Director Michael Winterbottom and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce both work splendidly to create this masterful biopic of an era, as told through one man. 4.5 stars.

How P.C.

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He came. He skated.

And then he shot himself.

Such is the beginning of Ken Park, Larry Clark's 2002 feature. I've been wanting to see Ken Park since the Office of Film & Literature Classification refused to give it a certificate for release in Australia, even stopping the Sydney Film Festival from screening the film (ordinarily, festivals have been given fairly free reign to screen whatever they want, especially the majors, presumably because they're not about to show blatant pornography.) The fiasco almost got the venerable Margaret Pomeranz arrested, after police shut down a highly publicised screening of the film she was involved with at, if my memory serves me, was at the Balmain Town Hall. (And here's a little article about the controversy...)

Again, if my memory serves me correctly, Ken Park was refused classification not because if contained actual sex (something that was quite controversial for a while in Australia, and saw much campaigning on both sides), but because the characters having this actual sex were under-age, even while the actors may not have been. The sex, however, is not particularly erotic - the first sex scene is a teenager performing cunnilingus on his girlfriend's mother, seems more educational to the young male. Ultimately, the entire film is about the home life of the teenagers, and the sex (of which, really, there isn't much of) is another facet of their immaturity and their growing up. None of the sex acts (until the final threesome scene) occurs without risk and danger involved - the risk of a parent, or a husband, or a lover walking in. The repercussions of these acts are often brutal and traumatic. In the end, three of the teenagers find happiness in uncomplicated sex with each other without the risk of discovery or judgement, and it's actually kind of beautiful.

Sex aside, the film is fine. It's not a spectacular work of cinematic genius or anything. It's just a film that kind of tries to muddle its way through the ideas of teenage isolation in a post-angst world, and, to some extent succeeds, though its success is somewhat flat, possibly because of the apathetic world of youth it takes place in. This isn't 1995, remember, when Clark made his debut with Kids, a searing work with much better commentary - probably because, right then, we're looking at the years before the internet when escape for teenagers was through music and the year before Kurt Cobain had dies. Possibly an overly simplistic take, but I think this is the world that Clark and writer Harmony Korine inhabit. Ken Park is set in the naughties - does anyone really care?

To this end, though, it does capture it. The character of Shawn doesn't overly care that he's carrying on an illicit affair with his girlfriend's MILF. The character of Peaches lies to her dad simply and keeps doing what she wants to do on the sly. Claude is probably the most dramatic, but he too takes the easy route out. So, yeah. It probably does capture that apathy. But that just makes it kind of hard to care.

Look, it was a decent film. I don't think it was tight enough, though it of course looked beautiful (with Ed Lachman lensing and co-directing, it would be disappointing if it didn't.) I'm going to give it a middling 2.5 stars, because I think it was that kind of film. The controversy, however, will keep it in the minds of Australian cinephiles for much longer - epic fail on the OFLC front.