Sydney Film Festival: A Second Take on 'Strangerland'

Glenn here offering some thoughts on films at the Sydney Film Festival including this second take on Strangerland after Nathaniel's initial negative review from Sundance.

Kim Farrant’s Strangerland is deeply, uncomfortably Australian. In many ways, it goes right to the heart of the country as a family infiltrate a place that is unfamiliar and even hostile to their arrival. A family, all of whom hold secrets and potentially criminal pasts. They could have been dressed up in Colonial costumes and set 150 years ago without much of a narrative alteration, which is probably much the point of Farrant’s debut feature. How our convict pasts have manifested as a society that turns on its own as much as the other.

Strangerland has a fairly simple premise, but one that allows for some fairly wide-ranging readings. After having left their last post due to an ambiguously alluded to crime, Matthew (Joseph Fiennes) and Catherine Parker (Nicole Kidman) find themselves in the remote outback town of Nathgari. He’s a pharmacist and she’s a housewife, neither of whom are able to handle their 15-year-old daughter, Lily (Maddison Brown). When Lily and young son Tommy vanish in the middle of the night, the town deals them with suspicion while Catherine becomes more and more emotionally unhinged at the thought their children may have deliberately abandoned her.

Peter Weir, Kidman and more after the jump...

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Identity Crisis: Sense8's NSFW Evolutions

What to do about the Wachowskis? Lana and Andy started so strong and sexy with their lesbian grift noir Bound (1996) - which remains their best work -- and then captured the whole world's attention with the reality-bending sci-fi The Matrix (1999). The global success of that influential movie seemed to give them carte blanche and blank checks going forward and the freedom doesn't appear to have been good for them; the size of their ambitions and geektastic dumb/coolness of their concepts (like college students getting stoned and talking superheroes and theology all night long) is undermined every time by messy storytelling. That's so strange for filmmakers who started with such a tightly constructed narrative piece like Bound.

Daryl Hannah is the Octomom !!!

Tim will be reviewing Sense8 proper for us when he's finished with the first season but for now I want to talk about what I do love about this aggravatingly slow series and that is its radical sexuality. I've never seen the like in American mainstream film or television. NSFW business after the jump...

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ICYMI: Cara Seymour and More and More

Before we get too far ahead of ourselves into Halfway Mark Festivities and Emmy Nomination Balloting Week (that's next week!) I want to take this time to thank Cara Seymour ("The Knick") for her guest-blogging. She shared a great portrait her acclaimed photographer husband shot of her on the set of An Education, she let us into her research process on one of her most indelible characters yet (Sister Harriett on "The Knick"), shared a few movie and music recommendations, and she even interviewed her American Psycho director Mary Harron! Thanks again to a wildly underrated actress for taking a small break between filming The Knick's second season and a new movie, to visit us.

Other June Highlights...
Tony Award Fashions bold colors + giddy showoffs
1979 Smackdown Kramer vs Kramer holds up beautifully but how about Breaking Away and Manhattan?
Best Original Songs of the 1990s - a movie list whim 
Silence / Silencio - two new movies from top auteurs
Best Supporting Actress in a Drama - your most competitive Emmy race 
MacBeth - the new trailer

Coming in the Second Half of June
Kate Winslet Corseted, Pixar's Inside Out, A 1948 Retrospective including Hamlet, Key Largo, I Remember Mama, The Red Shoes and the next Supporting Smackdown, the Halfway Mark "Best of" 2015 (thus far) lists, and Oscar Chart Updates...

And our next Fabulous Actress Guest!

The awesomely gifted Ann Dowd (Compliance, Garden State, Masters of Sex, True Detective) who malevolently stared Justin Theroux down so memorably as The Guilty Remnant's leader on The Leftovers this past year. She'll be taking over the reins of The Film Experience for one day next week - one day only! It'll be Tuesday or Wednesday so don't miss it. 

FYC: Gwendoline Christie for Best Supporting Actress in a Drama

 Members of Team Experience were asked to share personal dream picks for this year's impending Emmy nominations (with the caveat that they can't have already won the Emmy in that category). Here's Michael C...

 Aren’t you just marvelous! Absolutely singular.”
- Lady Olenna upon meeting Brienne of Tarth

I’m guessing the reactions of a great many audience members mirrored that of Diana Rigg’s Queen of Thorns when they first saw Gwendoline Christie as Brienne of Tarth. She cuts such a striking figure, and the match of actress to role is such a flawless one, that it might have taken a few episodes to move beyond fascination with her presence and notice the skill. In a show with numerous longstanding mysteries, Christie has turned the character of Brienne into one of the most consistently compelling. What drives this astonishing woman with her fierce loyalty and her unshakable sense of honor?

This most recent season has offered glimpses into her past, particularly Christie’s moving monologue about the humiliation she received as a youth, but such a wonderfully complex character can’t be reduced to a single anecdote. Brienne is the closest thing to a pure hero that George R.R. Martin’s brutal worldview will allow and Christie manages to keeps her multi-dimensional enough that she is not out of place on such an unsentimental canvas. The actress articulates every wrinkle of Brienne’s prickly personality careful not to skip over her flaws like her stubbornness or the idealism that verges on naïveté. 

Her Brienne of Tarth also stands as a magnificent piece of physical acting. Christie doesn’t just sell her character’s legendary fighting prowess – no small accomplishment – she is able to modulate her fighting style to Brienne’s state of mind. 

In lesser hands Brienne might have come off as more of a concept than a person. A self-conscious attempt to toy with Martin’s favorite theme of outsiders with no place in society. But Christie keeps her so specific that the idea of tokenism never enters into it. She isn’t just the idea of a female warrior there for symbolic value. She is, as The Hound memorably put it, Brienne of fucking Tarth.

Previously on our Emmy series
The Americans, Best Drama | Jane the Virgin, Best Comedy | Lisa Kudrow, Actress | Jon Hamm, Actor | Ruth Wilson, Actress | Matt Czuchry, Supporting Actor and... Cara Seymour on creating "Sister Harriet" on The Knick and that insanely competitive Supporting Actress in a Drama Series Race   

Tim's Toons: A century of dinosaur movies

Tim here. Jurassic World opens this weekend, tapping into our unflagging cultural love of dinosaurs. How unflagging? In 2015, we celebrate the 101st anniversary of the first dinosaurs in the movies, in the form of Winsor McKay's animated Gertie the Dinosaur and D.W. Griffith's live-action Brute Force. The enormous prehistoric creatures have had a grip on filmmakers' imaginations ever since.

To celebrate that history, I present this short tour of four different animated movies about dinosaurs from across the ages, bearing witness to all the scientific and artistic evolution that went by in the course of dino-cinema’s first century. The tour is after the jump...

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