Sydney Film Festival: Unconventional Creature Features

Glenn here offering some final thoughts on films at the Sydney Film Festival...

Let's talk about a couple of new documentaries and a horror-romance hybrid. 

The Russian Woodpecker
Chad Garcia’s The Russian Woodpecker is fascinating. It’s a wholly unexpected surprise from this debut director that not only presents an involving story that links the nuclear devastation of Chernobyl to the modern day revolution of Ukraine with plenty of conspiracy theory intrigue, but also presents it in a formally adventurous way. The film’s central figure is the eccentric artist Fedor Alexandrovich and he’s the sort of man that would drift through a party before promptly leaving and making everybody turn to each other and say, “Well he was a character!” If this wasn’t a documentary he would almost be too hard to believe as he rattles off his (as it turns out, not entirely absurd) theory that the Chernobyl nuclear disaster was a planned plot by the Russian government to disguise the failure of a nearby Soviet-built radar tower that emitted a persistent clicking sound known as “the Russian woodpecker”.

Alexandrovich’s amateur sleuth skills are hardly credible, but his growing unease at his proposed discoveries – his interviews with former workers of the radar tower seethe with barely contained tension – leads brilliantly into a navigation of the current political unrest on the streets of Kiev and his growing unease with choosing to bring these Russian grievances to light. Visually arresting, Garcia’s film is an uncomfortable must-see.

Oscar? I'd like to think it can find a general release and compete for Oscar. After a few years of music and sport films winning, perhaps last year's win for Citizenfour will turn them back to politics. Barring The Look of Silence, nothing has emerged out of the festival circuit looking like a winner so it's an open playing field.

Horror on the Italian seaside and an elephant in Hawaii after the jump...

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The Troubled Musical Tribute to 'Amy'

Glenn here offering some thoughts on films at the Sydney Film Festival. Here he is discussing the music documentary 'Amy'.

Given what director Asif Kapadia was able to accomplish with the otherwise (to me) uninteresting world of vroom vroom speed racing in Senna, logic would dictate that when handling a subject of great interest to me that the results would be even more outstanding. That doesn’t quite prove to be the case with Amy, another scrapbook collection of archival footage presenting the life of somebody who lived fast and died young, Amy Winehouse, but one which lacks quite the same verve of the director’s predecessor.

Kapadia is in the unique position of making a documentary about somebody whose life isn’t just rife for the Hollywood biopic treatment, but which actually feels like it already has been. Is her story not almost note-for-note for Mark Rydell’s The Rose with Bette Midler? It’s curious as a viewer of a documentary to feel as if I’d seen it all before in a fiction film (albeit one highly inspired by a real life person) and being disappointed because it comes off second best.

The Rose, Kurt Cobain and more after the jump...

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Podcast: Two Transatlantic Conversations

This new unconventional episode of the podcast features two guests and two conversations. First Nathaniel calls Australia to check in with Glenn Dunks to see what he's been up to cinematically since leaving NYC. And then a conversation with Guy Lodge in London about his experience at this year's Cannes Film Festival.

Contents

• 00:01 - 02:30 Intro: Nathaniel (feat. Annie Lennox)
• 02:26 - 19:15  Glenn From Australia: Mad Max Fury Road, The English Patient, Nicole Kidman in Strangerland, 54 The Director's Cut, Film Preservation
• 19:16 - Guy from London: Loving Arabian Nights, The Lobster and Todd Haynes' Carol, Cannes Jury Prizes, The Assassin, Son of Saul and the Foreign Film race, Maryland, and hating Paolo Sorrentino's Youth

Please to enjoy and continue the conversation in the comments. You can listen at the bottom of this post or download from iTunes tomorrow.  

Cannes, London, and Australia

What's Better Than Sex? David Wenham in 'Better Than Sex'!

For The Lusty Month of May, we're looking at a few sex scenes. Here's Glenn...

 Can we take a moment to appreciate David Wenham as a sex object? I mean, I’m sure most of you have already done so, probably around the time he threw his clothes off and replaced them with abdominal-enhancing body make-up on 300, but for me it’s all about sex. Better than Sex, I mean, his 2000 romantic comedy with Susie Porter that marked the directorial debut of Jonathan Teplitzky (The Railway Man). The entertaining box office hit came on the heels of the television series SeaChange that saw him embrace the handsome, charming personality that he imbued in real life after a series of film roles that screamed Thespian with a capital T, bringing proper David Wenham appreciation to the (locally, at least for the time being) masses where it belonged.

He was the type who’d bake you scrambled eggs for breakfast in the buff and make you laugh at dorky jokes before sending you to heaven. Amen to that! 

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10th Anniversary of 'Mysterious Skin' and Joseph Gordon-Levitt: Actor

Glenn here. Look, we all know Joseph Gordon-Levitt was a child actor, and a pretty good one, too (that scene where he got skate in the face in Halloween: H20 is very memorable). But let's not kid around here. It wasn't until the release of Gregg Araki's Mysterious Skin in 2005 that most really started to take him seriously. One year later he starred in Brick and he's only continued to rise up the ranks as a popular and critically respected actor. Looking back, I can't recall if his presence was as exciting to me in this film as Michelle Trachtenburg from Buffy, but looking back now he's certainly one of the reasons the film holds up.

It's actually rather appropriate that the 10th anniversary of Mysterious Skin should occur now at around the same time as New York Magazine's article entitled “Why You Should Go to the Movies (and Do Other Stuff) Alone” has been getting shared around on social media. You see, Araki's film was the first film I ever went to see at the cinema by myself. I travelled to Melbourne all on my lonesome, without friends or family who I usually convinced to join me for a day at the arthouse, and caught a screening of the movie that had amassed so much controversy in the local media. There were threats of it being banned after a 'family organization' (code for fundamentalist "won't somebody think of the children" noddies) demanded a review of its already very restrictive R18+ rating which is the Australian equivalent of an NC-17. Given the history of sexually graphic films being banned after similar action - titles like Romance and Baise-Moi - I knew I had to see this film. And fast!

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