Lust = Passion = Murder.

I don't know if I'm used to the Australian industry, where even after a hit film it'll take you roughly four and a half centuries to get another film up, but I don't think that's entirely it. I actually think Kim Ki-duk is a fairly prolific director. I mean, 15 feature films since 1996 seems like a fair number, right? Though, his last film was in 2009 - interestingly, the only other year since his debut that he hasn't released a film was 1999, so maybe it's a '9' thing. Maybe that's the year of each decade he takes a nap.


I was fascinated by his 2003 release Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... And Spring when it was on release in Australia, though I again never got to see it, probably because of the title. What does it mean? Why is it so long? How damn cool is it for a title for a film?

The answer to the first question is that it means exactly what it seems to mean. The seasons in the title refer to the episodes of life, broken down from birth (spring) to rebirth (spring again.) A monk lives in a temple sitting in the middle of a lake, with a very young monk-in-training. The entire film takes place on, in and directly around this lake, following the monks as the young monk progresses through these seasons of life - summer is his first blossoming of love and his escape from the lake; autumn sees his arrest for a heinous crime and the eventual death of the master; winter sees the young monk (now not so young) return to the lake and take charge of the temple; and spring again sees him take on a new apprentice, replicating the beginning of the film, showing that the circle of this young monk's life is now complete.


It is a beautiful and simple story, told with few words yet a lot of emotion. The old monk does not judge, he simply accepts stoically the mistakes and humanity of the young monk, and his ultimate death seems to imply that his acceptance is possibly born from the fact that he, too, has made similar mistakes and trodden similar paths through his lifetime before arriving at the enlightened spiritual state he appears to inhabit. And the pursuit of a modern kind of happiness by the young monk, only to return at the end to the simple life he once scorned, is almost a reflection of so many adult desires to return to a younger life where things were simple, where life was easier.


Wonderfully shot, sometimes the performance of the various actors playing the young monk does have holes in it, but with so little really demanded of the performers on the whole this doesn't really trouble you - the majority of the portrayal is pulled off perfectly, so those moments not up to par are few. The affecting story is what grabs you and draws you in - again, it lulls you into a state where you can position yourself within that lake and you begin to wish for the simple things again. 


It is the way cinema so rarely is, beautiful and intoxicating without appearing to have an underlying motive of superiority or moral high ground. There is no judgement here, only a story, beautifully told. 4.5 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.

You Can't Eat The Venetian Blinds.

Chinatown was Roman Polanski's first foray back into Hollywood after the brutal murder of his wife Sharon Tate by the Manson gang in 1969, and what a return it was. Despite the fact that he was apparently very nervous about the whole experience and returned to Europe to direct a stage play, I believe, whilst post-production was going on, Chinatown has gone on to become a true classic of modern cinema.

Jake Gittes (Jack Nicholson) is a private investigator, an ex-cop. Initially hired to investigate the assumed extra-marital affair of LA water magnate Hollis Mulwray (Darrell Zwerling) by a woman posing to be his wife, he is then in turn hired by the real Mrs Evelyn Mulwray (Faye Dunaway) to cover tracks. When her husband is then found at the bottom of one of his dams, it turns into an investigation into his murder, which the coroner is initially calling an accident.


All of it comes back to water. LA is on the edge of a desert, and needs a lot of water to grow. The first dam apparently isn't enough - then why are thousands of gallons of water being dumped each night? Apparently it is unavoidable run-off created when some of the water is secretly diverted to orange groves outside of the city to help them out with a crippling drought - but then why is there no water going to the orange groves? And why are all of the groves being bought out very cheaply, ahead of the dam being built?


It's a twisty, turny little story, strangely and interestingly revolving around water - if there is a less likely candidate for being the centre of a fantastic murder mystery, I'd like to know it. But it is all entirely plausible. The finer points start to threaten to give the film away, and will definitely take away from some of the joy of watching it, but let it be said that the screenplay, by New Hollywood wunderkid Robert Towne, is terrific, though he apparently argued for a happy ending (Polanski, still despairing at the loss of Tate, insisted on the tragic ending of the film, something that Towne has said in retrospect is better.) It is a sea of characters, none of whom you want to trust, and with so many interlinking subplots as to make your head hurt. But your head doesn't, actually, hurt, so masterfully is the film crafted.


Nicholson kicks off the character that will suit him many times, ably playing the sleuth almost innocently caught up in it all who then takes a personal interest. Dunaway is superb as the femme fatale of this neo-noir thriller, while John Huston turns up towards the end as Dunaway's father, throwing his weight around.


That the film only won an Oscar for Towne is remarkable, and probably in another year it would have triumphed in some other major categories also (it was up against the juggernaut that was The Godfather Part II... so... it didn't really stand a chance.) Coming at arguably the pinnacle of the New Hollywood period, it is a triumphant and valiant piece of filmmaking. While no one is saying what Polanski did following is excusable, it would have been nice to see him work some more in Hollywood, to see what may have come of it. Regardless, his subsequent body of work from Europe is quite exceptional - again, without trying to come to his defense, here's hoping he does get to make some more. 5 stars.

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.

What Kind Of Friend Is Always Hiding?

My love for Y Tu Mamá También is not a secret (look here and here), and as it kept popping up in those best of the 00s lists I had a craving to see it again. Plus, I think one film with Gael García Bernal is never enough.

By the time También came around, director Alfonso Cuarón had already helmed one Hollywood production: the moderately successful Great Expectations three years earlier. He has obviously since returned to Hollywood (or at least English-language productions) with the third Harry Potter installment and Children of Men. In fact, maybe the surprising thing is that he hasn't returned to Mexico, after También broke opening weekend box office records there.


This film, probably more so than Amores Perros, made Bernal known around the world (probably because he keeps getting nekked in it - how unfortunate...) Indeed, it is still his third highest grossing film at the US box office after the Brad Pitt/Cate Blanchett helmed Babel and the wildly acclaimed The Motorcycle Diaries. In También, Bernal plays Julio, young, and best friends with Tenoch (Diego Luna, who hasn't done too badly out of the film himself, though I believe he was the bigger star in Mexico going into production.) The pair meet the wife of Tenoch's cousin Luisa (Maribel Verdú), fresh in Mexico from Spain, at Tenoch's sister's wedding, where they inform them of their just-hatched plan to go to a beautiful, pristine beach known as Heaven's Mouth in the coming days, inviting her along with them.


Luisa shortly receives a call from her husband, away on business, informing her of his infidelity, and she phones Tenoch to take him up on the boys' offer. After madly trying to find a place that could pass as the fictional Heaven's Mouth, the boys pick Luisa up and they start off on their road trip, each dreaming of bedding the beauty.


The trip begins benignly enough, but quickly descends into fighting, aggravation, hatred, confessions of indiscretions with the others' girlfriends, and out and out hostility. Luisa gives up on them both, storming off on a deserted road, but they convince her to get back in the car on the condition that they give up on arguing and accept that what she says goes.

Because one picture is TOTALLY not enough.

Finally, they miraculously stumble across a perfect beach, and quickly all animosity seems to resolve itself, until the aftermath of their final night...


The film is an incredible study of friendship and of how it can go awry. A grown-up road trip about teenagers, it dares to mine emotional territory that so many other films of this ilk coming out of the studio system would never dream to go near. Sexuality in all its forms, death, drugs - it's all there for the taking. These two friends, with Luisa in the middle, who until then thought they knew everything about each other quickly come to realise that for two people from opposite sides of the proverbial track (Tenoch being rich, Julio being poor) there will almost always be things that the other can't understand. But beyond that, regardless of their class differences, there are so many things that human nature will dictate regardless. Jealousy and the havoc it can wreak on an otherwise unassailable bond is in the foreground here.


Luisa, nursing a secret, serves as a means to an end. By being older and wiser, she draws from them an attempt to prove themselves capable of understanding and relating to her, despite the attempts of the other to cut them down in a childish display of immaturity - whether lighthearted or not. Her willingness to surrender herself to the charms of the boys may seem initially cruel of her, like she is taking advantage of them to gain her own revenge, but when her secret comes out as the final scene of the film plays out you realise that she is not. Or if she is taking advantage of them, it is not from malevolence or vengeance or anything approaching it. She is as much a victim of the world they are all inhabiting as Julio and Tenoch.

How much do you want to be Maribel Verdú? About 4000 muches.

Bernal and Luna are superb in their roles. Every second of their friendship reeks achingly true, whether they are sharing a joint or screaming at each other. Verdú wonderfully inhabits Luisa, carrying off brevity when her face needs to be brave but rendering her heartache in private without a moment of artifice. Cuarón draws out the story, with a voiceover digressional narrative that could almost be out of place were its revelations not so beautiful and poignant, and plants you right in that car with them. The hand held camerawork from the CRIMINALLY UNDERRATED (you heard it here first... or at least most recently) Emmanuel Lubezki means that you actually are right there in the car with them, or at least running alongside.


Truly, nothing puts a foot wrong. The entirely diegetic score is not often there but always pitch-perfect, the crafting of the film (from editing to various on- and off-screen design elements) is spot on. 


It's rare, I think, that a film on the surface so light but underneath so deep comes along and plays like this one. The beauty and youthfulness holds hands and skips strongly along with the darker coming of age themes of the age of the boys and the secret of Luisa. It's 5 stars all the way, and after writing this I kind of want to go and watch it again.

Don't Let's Spoil Everything, We've Only Just Met.

Michaelangelo Antonioni has a Golden Lion (for Il Deserto Rosso) and a Golden Bear (for La Notte), but only one Palme d'Or (from five nominations) for Blow-Up, his first English-language film from 1966. It is also the only film to net him Oscar nominations - two of them, for the screenplay and direction.

The film was quite controversial in its time, especially in the States, where it is purported to be the first film to receive a release despite featuring full-frontal female nudity (I kept my eye out for this nudity, and the only place I could pick it possibly being was so damn brief and improbable that it doesn't surprise me it was not an issue...) Taking place in the drug-fuelled 60s, the film follows a photographer, Thomas (David Hemmings), who, whilst inspecting an antique shop he wants to buy because the gays are moving into the area and he feels he can make a fortune off them, happens up to a park where he takes some photos of a couple cavorting. The female member of this couple, Jane (Vanessa Redgrave), confronts him, trying to get the photos off him, obviously paranoid about what they will reveal.


Jane follows Thomas back to his studio and again confronts him. Thomas is obviously quite successful - his studio is spacious, he has models coming in and out and girls begging to have their photographs taken - and he is not used to being spoken to like this. He hands her a different roll of film and she leaves. He then sets about developing the photos, and as he does he notices that there appears to be a man in the bushes with a gun. Later, with photos he took after the confrontation, he sees what he assumes to be a dead body, lying off in the distance.


Amidst a haze of parties and groupies, he grows more and more paranoid, especially when he returns to his studio to find the prints he had laid out destroyed and the original negatives gone - his whole place has been ransacked. He goes to the park and sees the dead body - he goes to his agent, who is at a party, and tries to bring him along to show him, but the agent is way too fucked to care, and Thomas stays at the party. The next morning, the body is gone - or was it ever there?


It's a hard film to peg down. What exactly is it about? It seems to me to be a riff on the times. Drugs were everywhere, celebrity was everywhere, parties were everywhere. Everyone who did anything and made any money off it was somebody, and that was Thomas. How many drugs had he consumed leading up to the episode of his life that takes place in the film? Who cares. Was there really a dead body? Who cares! What was Jane's motivation? Should it be seen that the burglary of Thomas' home means something untoward did go down in that park? Who cares. Maybe she was just with someone she didn't want to be photographed with. Really, really didn't want to be photographed with. And then maybe Thomas made it all up. But maybe he didn't. What's important is that Antonioni takes us inside this paranoia without resorting to tricks of psychology. He shows it as it is, luring us into a film that may not really mean anything, but by portraying what it portrays, means a hell of a lot.


It bears, I think, resemblance to films like Elephant, in that it doesn't try and explain. What it shows on screen is what it shows on screen. Yes, it tries to delve into what Thomas sees (or thinks he sees), but it never judges, it never tries to come up with reasons. It just is. And it is beautiful for it.


A compelling film, interesting, mesmerising, thought-provoking and intelligent, yet not so intelligent as to be self-indulgent. I'm dead certain it influenced a whole generation of filmmakers in some way, and I'm sure that, provided it is watched, will continue to influence those to come. Like so many of the major works of master filmmakers, the historicism of the film's placement within society is not important, because it is entirely irrelevant. What matters here is what happens between the lights going down and the lights going up, not on screen, but in the viewer. 5 stars.

Some Heavy Shit's Going Down.

I brought up Gus Van Sant's 'Death' trilogy when I wrote about Gerry, and after watching it I couldn't get Elephant out of my head, so I rewatched it. (Actually, in the last week and with another coming up, I've done a bit of rewatching recently. I think it's all these 'Best of the 00s' lists coming in thick and strong at the moment - reminding me of what I've loved over the last decade and getting me craving to check them out again. Hold tight, as I'll more than likely rewatch Requiem For A Dream, Mulholland Drive and Dancer In The Dark shortly. They're all top ten of the noughties for me, I reckon.)

Anyway, Elephant would be right up as one of my favs from the last ten years. I didn't know a great deal about it coming into my first viewing back at the beginning of 2004 when it released in Australia, other than that it had won the Palme d'Or that year. And I was suitably gobsmacked by it. It was, and remains, such an amazingly powerful film, so relevant (and it's sad that it is still relevant today, showing a true ongoing tragedy both in youth, schooling and gun control), so beautiful (something its unofficial and much lesser 'remake' of sorts 2:37 tried to match but just couldn't) and so singularly striking in composition, tone and subject.


Elephant centers around a high school, just your average, run-of-the-mill American high school on an average day with nothing special going on, when suddenly 'some heavy shit' does, in fact, go on. John (John Robinson) is taken to his school late by his drunk father, and gets in trouble with the principal. Eli has been off taking photographs, and goes into the lab to develop them. Michelle has just been blasted by her gym teacher for wearing pants in gym instead of shorts like the rest of them. Nathan and Carrie are checking themselves out of school to, presumably, go for a bit of rumpy-pumpy. Jordan, Nicole and Brittany are stuffing themselves on lettuce before they decide they're too full to continue, and must purge. Eric and Alex and walking up to the school with camo uniforms on and bags full of guns. Just a normal day at school.


The film takes places with tremendously long tracking shots following each character or character set individually, watching as they cross over and move into their days. Harris Savides controls the light perfectly, rendering stunning images as the camera moves from inside to outside, room to room, character to character, slo-mo to real-mo. It's truly astonishing work that I can't begin to describe adequately so I'm going to leave it there. the performances from the primarily amateur cast are astonishing, creating characters that you know and understand (because they do entirely work off stereotypes, something entirely necessary when you're dealing with such tragedy and so many people in such a short space of time) in a very short space of time.


Despite the short space of time, Van Sant manages to explore many themes about and directed at youth, many elements troubling them. Michelle is clearly plagued with body image issues. Ditto Jordan, Nicole and Brittany. John is struggling with personal family problems that he doesn't really seem to be able to talk about. And then Eric and Alex - well, none of what you might think apply. Alex plays classical piano. They read. They joke around. Yes, they watch a documentary on Goebbels and the propaganda movement in Nazi Germany, but they also make out in the shower on the day of the shooting. There are no judgement calls here - nothing they do (short of ordering guns online - how is it that they're able to do that? And how can a delivery man just ask a kid to sign for something obviously not ordered by him? - and then shooting them) is really different to what so many kids their age would be doing in their spare time. Van Sant answers no questions - he just shows it how it is.


I think the most moving part of the story for me is the truncated episode starring Benny. He only appears right at the very end as the massacre is under way. We follow him curiously wandering the halls, apparently ignoring the fleeing students around him. He helps a girl out of a window and then keeps exploring, not a word spoken, before he is finally shot. It simply reinforces the horrific randomness of incidents like this. We hadn't seen him before, and he's shot suddenly and without thought. It is true tragedy.


5 stars all round for this film. It's one of those perfect moments of cinema where everything falls into place to create something to effective, which remains effective time after time and years later. Hats off to Van Sant.

It's Called Love, Son.

Shane Meadows introduced us to Thomas Turgoose in This Is England in 2006, and brought him back for his follow-up Somers Town in 2008. A short feature (IMDb.com calls it 71 minutes, but I'm sure the DVD said 63), it follows young Tomo (Turgoose), who has come to London from the Midlands with no explanation (outside the fact that he doesn't have anything to go back to at home), and his relationship with Polish immigrant Marek (Piotr Jagiello.) 

Tomo has spent his first night in London on the streets after being beaten up and robbed by three older English boys, and is in a cafe when he happens across Marek, who is looking through photos he has taken. They strike up a friendship, spending the day together, and as the day draws to a close Tomo convinces Marek to let him stay with his and his father - though his father is not to know. Tomo hides under the bed, being smuggled food by Marek, and they continue to spend time together, stealing a bag of (mostly) women's clothes, doing some work for a pittance for Marek's neighbour, and fantasising about each of them getting together with French waitress Maria (Elisa Lasowski.) After trying to surprise her with a picnic they discover, to their dismay and collective heartbreak, that she has left, and the two enjoy the wine they have purchased and then much of Marek's father's vodka before Tomo is kicked out. 


It is a very simple story, one of friendship, and one driven by the unlikely charisma of Turgoose. In only a couple of years from his This Is England debut, he has grown leaps and bounds as a performer and carries this story (which, in the hands of lesser performers and filmmakers, could be thought of as weak) almost entirely on his own. Jagiello is suitably stumbling for someone performing in broken English, which I'm assuming is not merely performance, but his role is also much less demanding, and indeed he rarely imbues it with anything more than childlike inquisitiveness and stoicism. 


Apparently the film started as a short, funded by Eurostar, the European rail service known mostly in the UK as a fast link between London and Paris, designed to show up the new Eurostar terminal at St Pancras, where Marek's father works and where their apartment looks over. It grew into the short feature, and I'm glad it did. The story, really, could have been squished into a short, but by stretching it out it allows for the characters to grow, and for you to become involved with them. Similarly, I think another thirty minutes to make it more of a standard feature would have impeded its effectiveness. As it stands, it's a nice way to spend an hour. There are no fireworks, but there aren't really any disappointments, either. 3.5 stars.

If You Existed I'd Divorce You.

Mike Nichols made his directorial debut in a searing fashion, helming super-couple Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton in the film version of Edward Albee's stage production Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (That question mark at the end is an awful thing to do to anyone hoping to then write about the film - it completely alters the perceived meaning of any sentence! Cruel, Albee. Cruel.)

Taylor and Burton, happily ensconced in the first incarnation of their marriage, play Martha and George in this four-hander, a couple together for years who have become so familiar with each other as to appear completely and irreparably dysfunctional - except that they're not. After a dinner party at Martha's father's house (who is the head of the college at which George is a member of the history department), the couple, already quite drunk, retire home, where Martha reveals that a new member of the faculty and his wife are shortly to join them, also coming from said party. The couple continue to argue as they drink, Martha superficially tidying the house, and are quite entrenched in a screaming match when the new couple, Nick and Honey (whose names I don't remember being mentioned once in the film, played by George Segal and Sandy Dennis) arrive. Initially uncomfortable (something that really doesn't change throughout the film) they are effectively coerced into staying by the fact that Nick's boss is Martha's mother.


The four play games around each other, full of vitriol and slander, innuendo and tension, as they gradually get drunker and drunker. Secrets are revealed, people are sick - it's almost like watching an American frat party movie, except that the stakes here are much higher. The wordplay back and forth, and the revelations of their relationships to each other, each character with each other character separately and together, is remarkable. It's a wonderfully rich screenplay (with striking similarities to Nichols' 2004 picture and stage adaptation, Closer) and masterfully performed by all involved - consequently, this must be one of very few films where every credited member of the cast was nominated for an Oscar, and deservingly so.


Taylor and Dennis won Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively, and I would rank Taylor's performance as one for the ages. The film itself lost out to Fred Zinnerman's A Man For All Seasons (as it did for Director and Adapted Screenplay), but coming just as the New Hollywood revolution was about to sweep American cinema, it did push many boundaries. Apparently, the first film to use the word 'bugger' in its dialogue. In fact, many of the words uttered struck me as being very controversial for a film of this time (1966), but it powered through the classification body with very few changes, probably not hurt by the incredible star wattage and, presumably, influence of the Taylor-Burton combo. Haskell Wexler's Oscar-winning black and white cinematography was superb, rendering the film timeless despite the fact that colour films were about at the time, and the look of the film is spot-on. Nichols manages to, for the most part, avoid the feeling that it is a filmed play (the dialogue and back-and-forthing of the repartee does diminish this, but the words and performances are so rich as to make one overlook it), but it is those performances that I keep coming back to. The performances, and the film's examination of what it is that keeps couple ticking over. What holds them together. The fact that under the demonstrated hatred and ire expressed between Martha and George, there are so many other deep feelings of love and respect that are almost darker than the anger they elucidate. Their happiness is buried so deep inside, only at times of intense emotional turmoil do they really come out.


A glorious example of filmmaking, and very highly recommended. 5 stars.

Troubles.

It does trouble me that this is happening whilst this is going on. The enormous controversy over the Bill Henson pictures in question has been adequately documented, in Australia at least, and should be quite easy to find. Basically, non-sexualised images of minors caused a mammoth uproar, a gallery closing, other galleries with his pictures in their collections under investigation, and the tarnishing of one of the most successful photographers to come out of Australia, who had been doing similar work without a problem for a couple of decades. Yet it's ok to plaster Lautner around, sexualised, buff, half-naked, when he is also a minor. Sure, he's not showing his doodle, but the principle remains.


Look, I don't really have a problem with Lautner being used like this. I don't. Whatever. My problem is with the hypocrisy. Do you think anyone put up a fight about those Twilight images being used in Australia? No. But god-forbid an acclaimed photographer should take a photo of a naked teenager in a gloomy setting, almost post-apocalyptic, that no normal person would find titillating. I'm sure there are pedophiles out there who got a kick out of it. And I'm sure the same people are reaching into their pants every time that Twilight trailer comes on. 


Come on, people. Use your heads. The destruction of art isn't the answer. Appropriateness for audience and mass-consumption is more relevant than a gallery artist. Tens of thousands of people saw Henson's exhibition at the Art Gallery of NSW, and then a couple of years later one person takes issue with an invitation sent out to the opening of his new collection at a small, independent art gallery and criminal charges are laid (though I don't believe they ever came to fruition.)


Excuse the crudity, but if there had been a second person in the image, and they were suggestively posed, or there was a boy with a hard-on or something, then sure, charge away. You'd have my full support, and I dare say that of most of the artistic community worldwide. But these images are so far from sexual it's absurd.


End rant.