Ticket stubs

After hearing the /filmcast discuss movie ticket stubs not too long ago, I feel like retelling the fascinating journey I have had with my own. After a long and arduous search many years ago, I managed to find every stub I have ever collected from the age of 10 till around the age of 18. I had them all neatly and safely packaged into card wallets, and were even sorted chronologically. Nearly every weekend my dad and I would go to see two films back to back, often quite stunning pieces of cinema such as The Peacemaker or Mouse Trap which generally ended in a discussion about how shit the films were, but these expeditions significantly expanded my collection. Anyway upon opening the wallet, after about 6 years of not even knowing where the damn things were, I was instantly reminded of my meticulous obsession with retaining these little flimsy excuses for a memory. This feeling was brief though. After pulling a few out to read the titles and dates, and laugh at how some of them were priced at $4.50 for an ADULT ticket in 1997 (now films here in Australia cost $18 for a regular ticket and $21 for 3D), I nearly started crying when I noticed that almost ALL of the stubs were blank. That's right, our cheap as fuck cinemas couldn't even print with ink that would last a decade. All of this collecting and storing had been for nothing. There were a few surprises though, as my ticket for The Matrix was quite legible, and all the Imax tickets were fine, but 90% of my precious keepsakes were completely blank. All that remains are the ads on the back. Awesome. Clearly there are a few things that have yet to hit our shores...

Understandably, for this reason I no longer keep my stubs...

*The photo you see is my ticket to the screening of Three Kings which aired at Southland, 23rd Jan 2000, for $9. NEARLY 11 YEARS AGO!!! That scares the shit out of me, but at the same time makes me realise that even at 14 I had a decent taste in movies. (Notice the film is R ;) Also it reminds me of why the film stuck with me, and of how long I've been waiting for David O' Russel to release another film since I Heart Huckabees (I have yet to see The Fighter but have read good things). Until next time...

Merry Xmas

I have recently emerged from a misty phase of viewing which has left me surprisingly moved, considering the clichéd genre of many of these titles. I started my convoy of films with Harry Brown, moved onto Darren Aronofsky's The Fountain, then the much hyped Buried, gave myself an emotional break (if you know me, that's sarcasm) with 1994's The Last Seduction, and concluded with the very surprising 44 Inch Chest. What a better way to celebrate Christmas than to punish myself with a torrent of emotional burden! Even a true masochist wouldn't be so brave... I must say though, confrontational cinema has little to no effect on many viewers these days. If a film is popular solely due to it's controversy, it doesn't automatically make it a masterpiece. Now onto the films. Harry Brown was let down by it's unnecessary twist ending, which turned a beautifully shot heartfelt (revenge) story about the problems with broken youth in London's estates into a forgettable bloodbath. Buried, a story about a man trapped for 90 minutes in a coffin with a phone and a zippo, gave a very unlikely setting for a film a decent run, but fell short in terms of believability. Now to The Fountain. Here is a film that has slipped through many cracks however is a testament to the fact that Aronofsky is incapable of making a poor film. Ever since I saw Pi I have followed his film career and only after hearing the news about his intent to direct the new Wolverine film (drumroll for the epic title please: The Wolverine) have I been unsure of what to expect. If he is attempting to follow in Nolan's footsteps and reinvent a series in a more mature and artistic manner then fair enough, but I would much rather the money and resources going into a film that changed the way I look at the world such as Requiem for a Dream. But hey that's just me... Before my tangent becomes unrecognisable from the seed from which is grew, The Fountain is very hard to describe, but is essentially is a story about love and life, and the nuances within, on a grand scale. I'd rather not say more, as with many films I had gone in blind and enjoyed it more than having a preconception that more often than not, jades the outcome.

44 Inch Chest is an interesting piece. It begins as what I perceived (without prior reading) as a British gangster revenge flick, but it ends up as an introspective look at love and forgiveness, and to a degree insanity. Also I commend the writers on the fact that it holds the record for the most 'c' bombs dropped on screen. 44 Inch Chest also falls into my much loved category of minimalistic settings ala Richard Linklater's Tape, or Sydney Lumet's 12 Angry Men. (by all means correct me if you feel a film needs a terrorised airport or a world war to create tension).

I feel the need to mention that I have Quickflix (Australian version of Netflix) to thank for a number of these titles, a free subscription helped me with a long list of films that I would otherwise not track down. Having dvd's delivered to your door is great, but I can't help but think how lazy we are that we'd rather wait 2 days for a film to be delivered than to go and rent it... Oh well, soon everything will be streamed directly to our screens like most of the content available in the US anyway =)

First short

I finally wrote, shot, and cut my first short. It took me about 10 minutes to write, 4 hours to shoot, and 30 hours to cut. Here it is:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q8QQQwr_T4A

From there you can see my first trial with my new 550D, a stop motion piece about a jealous murderous match. Yes, match. Now the reasons that this 3 1/2 minute short took 30 hours to cut are as follows:

1. I have never edited a film before, so the next time round I will be much more adept at the process
2. I was using Sony Vegas Pro which is one of the easier to grasp but still feature packed editing packages available, but this meant (just my luck) that I wasn't able to render videos that are using the 550D's H.264 *.MOV format. I had no time to track down and learn how to use another software package, as I only found this out after an entire night of cutting, and I didn't think to render it early as a test because the preview field was so good that it was basically already rendered. This meant that on the second night of editing, I had to re-encode the files into something that Vegas was able to handle. The Internets told me to use DivX or Mpeg, so I recompressed them into Mp4 as DivX is a far more compressed codec (Mp4 will leave them the closest to the original quality). 5 hours of re-encoding later I was ready to start again. This brings us to problem 3.
3. Vegas can render with Mp4, but it struggles to work with it. My preview field was set at the lowest possible quality and yet it was unable to give me anything better than a few frames per second. When moving scenes around, there was a huge lag that wasn't present whilst cutting with the *.MOV's. This also meant that when I was cutting the dialogue scene, I could hear when a word was completed and I could see it on the audio graph but I could not see where the characters eyes or hands where. What I had to do was render each few chunks of dialogue so that I could actually SEE how smooth the cut was. This added a lot of unnecessary time to the process. Why didn't I just try it with another format? I did not have time to re-encode. I'll get into this reason later.
4. Seeing as I had to start scratch with a new file format, I lost the first and best cut, and like with anything that you have to do over, I rushed the second cut but most importantly could not remember which angles I used the first cut. (and by rushed I mean hurried, it actually took me longer thanks to point 3) This scarred the film with a few dodgy transitions which I am still unhappy with.
5. Finally, seeing as I am currently working a 9-5 office job, I sit in front of a computer for 9 or so hours a day. To come home and do the same for another 5 hours a night was excruciating. My eyes were burning into the first few hours, and I honestly had no time to rest my eyes and (god forbid) go outside for a walk. On my fourth and final night of editing, when I setup my final render for authoring, I left the house and went for an hour long walk at around midnight. I was so relieved that it was finally over though I wasn't at all happy with the final product as my first cut which I had to discard was easily the best.

The reason I rushed this project was due to the fact that I was given one weeks notice for an interview with Swinburne, to which I needed to bring a reel of footage. I had nothing to bring therefore had to create. I was restricted by time and by budget therefore wrote a piece that could easily be shot and needed few actors and settings. I wrote the script on the night I found out, filmed it two days after, and spent the following 4 nights editing. The interview was Friday morning and as I had very little sleep over that week I felt like shit but luckily went in confident and nailed it.

Finally some decent Straine horror

I completely dismissed this film upon seeing the posters on our trams; it gave me a very Twilight vibe... The quote "Pretty in Pink meets Wolf Creek" made me avoid it even further until a friend of mine told me it was a fairly decent Aussie horror. A few minutes in I knew it was more than just decent, the characters were set up brilliantly and the cinematography was nothing short of stunning. The character development is so well done at the beginning that I nearly forgot it was about to turn into a horror, and that's rare these days. When we get's into the grit of the film it is fairly disturbing, though at times it's humor tends to make it even more unsettling as opposed to funny. My one qualm about this film is although it is set in Melbourne's outer suburbs, and we do sense that the Australian setting plays a part in the film, the characters themselves however do not feel distinctively Australian. We have a boozing goth chick, a couple of metal head stoners, and these could just as easily be set in the US. Then again our cultures aren't that dissimilar to begin with :p

Whilst browsing for the film's poster I stumbled upon this:

Doesn't the font look almost the same? Anyway I do hope that films such as 'The Loved Ones' do better on DVD (as it's run at the cinemas was fairly poor). It has made it's run on the international film festival circuit and has received grave reviews, let's hope this gives first time director Sean Byrne more cred to make another beautifully shot and directed film.

tFilm or not tFilm

tFilm, definately... erm I am silently celebrating my 1000th film reviewed on IMDB by-- um... watching more movies (and if judged on recent choices, slowly denigrating any last remnant of intelligence I care to project).

www.imdb.com/mymovies/list?l=14924202

Feel free to celebrate with me by commenting on just how many horrible movies I've seen, for example the fact that I have reviewed more films on McG's page than that of Hitchcock's. Resisting the urge of brisk suicide is difficult, let me assure you. But I have found the strength to soldier on.

Gilliam Kick

Last week I picked up 12 Monkeys on Blu-Ray and as I hadn't seen it in over 8 years and I wasn't surprised at how much better I understood the plot, even though I had no issues at the time. I enjoyed the style and slight lunacy so much, that it led me to watch a few other Terry Gilliam films, Brazil and Tideland. The first thing I noticed about these films is how different they were in terms of scope; Brazil being a futuristic nightmare played out through these elaborate sets while Tideland enacted a girls dream world but in the most minimalistic way. Both were very powerful films but I feel Brazil's political underton-- well actually they weren't undertones, it's message was about as subtle as a taser... But either way I feel it leaves viewers with more to ponder after the credits roll. Tideland leaves us with little sense of hope (somewhat like the beginning of the film where we see a young girl prepare and inject her father with heroin just as casually if she was bringing him the paper) and even though my desire for a happy ending is about as strong as it is for Justin Bieber to perform at my next birthday, my first instinct was to group it with other films where the journey hardly justifies the lack of a conclusion. Then again there are other films which critics have labelled as such but I did not agree with. Maybe it's all just subjective..?

Today was a strange day...

I don't think I've ever seen two films on such opposite sides of the spectrum as I witnessed today. Shortly after waking I endured A Serbian Film of which Scott Weinberg from Fear Net wrote "[It] is tragic, sickening, disturbing, twisted, absurd, infuriated, and actually quite intelligent. There are those who will be unable (or unwilling) to decipher even the most basic of 'messages' buried within [this film], but I believe it's one of the most legitimately fascinating films I've ever seen. I admire and detest it at the same time. And I will never watch it again. Ever." Yep that pretty much sums it up. The lackluster title aside, A Serbian Film has an extremely powerful message portrayed through certain acts which I never thought would be seen on film for legal reasons alone. Critics argue that the message is merely an excuse for the absurdity on screen, to which I somewhat agree, but judge for yourself. My next little escapist adventure was the long-awaited Toy Story 3, an adorable continuation of one of my own favourite childhood films. It was fairly depressing in comparison with the first two however this manifested in a deeper sympathy with the characters and shed many a tear (I know, stfu). The story was already spoiled in the trailers but this didn't make it less of a great romp, and I'm sure that with a less cynical eye (i.e that of a child) it will be loved just as much as any other recent animated film. Speaking of, How to Train Your Dragon and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs are far superior films on many levels, and I wish I had the time to write more but if you haven't seen these and have a soft spot for animation (digital or otherwise) give them a go. Their commercial failure can only be attributed to a failure in marketing, especially for the latter, but I cannot stress enough that THIS IS NOT A REFLECTION OF QUALITY. That is all.

i never thought id ever feel as good as i have now
and ill forever chase that feeling though i know its hardly found
for all the little parts of me
that cant forget the heart in me
need to take a breather and just enjoy the harmony
and if it fails to last or even falls to lust
ill be strong enough to let it go, we never breached our trust
against every better judgement im still chasing this roughness
the question is will i be strong enough to ever cut this
we've all been scarred before, some more than others
we can block out all our lovers and not let any one in
but im yet to disconnect when i chose who i will smother
(another reason why we might be wrong for one another)
but how vain of me though, to think that i can change you?
to think that you can fall for me and change the way you play you?
it really shows naivety but i have quickly snapped out
its not like im sixteen and want my feelings rapped out
if anything theyre baked in, caked with all the patience
that can only be described as something that i cannot trade in
i really have to say though, the hardest thing to deal with:
you holding me all night and waking telling me to beat it
it wasnt the first time for me and it wont be the last
and i know i can't complain, you've been hurt more in the past
but that doesn't explain why you feel no need to change
you haven't found the right one and fuck i feel the same
i just feel you need to let go, 'let the right one in'
the way you held me says more than your cheeky grin
the times i turned away from you and felt you grab me back
had all the passion i expected from a girl who loved me back
but what would i know?
i've never been with girls for fun
if anyones in my bed a relationships begun
so every single thing i felt for you that made me lose sleep
could be nothing more than hormones charging through me booze deep
that's exactly what i wanted to test and meet you sober
i could hardly believe when you invited yourself over
but by that point we were blind again and judgement was keeling
but we squeeled our way through once more with feeling
and for some reason all our clothes refrained from peeling off
i was merely inches away from fuckin' beating off
god forbid a hotter dish would offer me their bottom lip
and even then i might have trouble finding where the logic is
cause im as fucked as any other human on this planet
and it seems like somethings wrong with me if i dont sleep with you dammit

whats wrong with us when we get loose to be ourselves
so many insecurities that keep us all shelved
and its contageous, spreading with every new daughter or son
who cant stand the image that they see in morning sun
wake the fuck up really youre all beautiful
you're no unique snowflake but to love yourself is dutiful

spent half my life behind computers, how was i to suit her?
met her off my face and all but now i think she's cuter
now these words'll make you puke, yeah i can already tell
it's not the shit you wanna hear from this empty shell
see that sunny saturday seemed surreal as all fuck
its a shame you felt the need to approach me, balled up
but truly i would never change a thing if i could turn back all that time
and have another little stab at it again.
im starting to think, love is a construct of the mind
that tricks us into thinking that the world is all sublime
in reality that inkling in the back of minds to seep your juice
is simply biologic sense telling us to reproduce
so can i turn it off? i dunno, one way to find out
throw away emotions and fuck like rabbits. i count,
two times and ill be way more attached then ever
you'll throw mud on my face and expect me to live forever
the question is it worth the risk i think my answers yes
if anything itll make me stronger and make me feel blessed
everyone i know is strictly telling me to stay away
i hear what theyre all saying k but none of them were there that day
and even though i know i throw heaps more into everything
than needed; god all this shit sounds so conceded....

Morning! Can you believe I have watched a grand total of 1 film in the past 3 weeks? I know, I must be sick. Well in fact I may actually be cured. The last thing I've wanted to do recently is continue with my sitting-on-arse, but alas have been missing out on some decent viewing. Last night I watched An Education, something which I have been waiting to see for quite a few months. It pulled me in explicitly, every scene was simply beautiful to watch (not just for the lead Carey Mulligan who by the way is so adorable it made me feel guilty for feeling so even though the actor is 25) and the subject matter had me slightly wary the entire duration. 16 year old Jenny is seduced by the charming and rich David (Peter Sarsgaard who before this I really disliked), who ends up tricking the parents to let her spend weekends away with him. I was waiting for something horribly bad to happen until the very end, where technically it did but not in the Hollywood everything-explodes-and-the-villain-gets-impaled sort of way. This really is a beautiful coming-of-age story of a silly girl doing silly things at that silly age. Watch this film before it disappears into the "international arthouse" dust pile and is never referred to again so we can make blog and article space for the new Roland Emmerich disaster epic.

Shocking horror

Rottentomatoes.com posted their annual 'Best Of 2009' list not long ago; most titles being fairly well known however there were some supposed gems in the horror field which I sought after, trusting the mighty RT (tongue firmly in cheek). Two of which were House of the Devil, a very well directed homage to 80's moody horror, filmed and packaged exactly as such, and Pontypool, an original 'infected masses' flick (a genre which is becoming increasingly derivative). I highly recommend both, but I write this post with the intention of explaining my lack of faith in the horror genre... I rarely see anything purely original anymore so I assume the trick is to make something that's still able to disturb or 'gross out' the viewer. Sam Raimi's Drag Me to Hell did an amazing job at comically provoking dry heaves, and Pontypool gave me a claustrophobic sense of invisible uncertainty with a very satisfying (un-Hollywood) ending. So maybe I'm expecting too much... I keep hoping for another Evil Dead or The Thing which I doubt will ever happen but I can still be glad that a handfull of solid films are still being released. Few and far inbetween perhaps, but I suppose that's how it always was and always will be...

Not having read Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer Prize winning novel prior to seeing this film I was banking heavily on how much I loved the Coen Brother's adaptation of his earlier novel No Country For Old Men. The Road has a similar bleak feel and an equally close to hopeless journey (which is building to be Australian director John Hillcoat's signature style since The Proposition) where a father and son try to stay alive and head south towards a warmer climate in a post-apocalyptic North America.

I can really appreciate films like this which throw the viewer into a scenario without any explanation. We don't always need a strong political message or 30 minutes of exposition to understand what our characters are going through. Viggo Mortensen is strong enough here but perhaps not Oscar worthy as the rumours go, and his son Kodi Smit-McPhee (Romulus, My Father) acts well with an American accent and also resembles his on-screen mother to a degree. The CGI, set design and costumes were all top-notch, and the make-up was so convincing I wasn't aware both Robert Duvall and Omar from The Wire had roles till the credits..!

Unfortunately though, there were too many points at which I was taken completely out of the moment with distracting music cues, infuriating product placement, and some questionable casting choices (just like with last year's The Hurt Locker, Guy Pearce has a 'starring' role that lasts a total of 2 minutes). This may have been less obvious to your average movie-goer and judging by the TV spots it was aiming at a 'wider' audience, but it's still a worthy film I just can't help but notice the hammy Hollywood juice permeating through it's pores. Also I'm not sure how much creative freedom Hillcoat had so I won't blame this on him quite yet :p

Countdown to Liquor Day

If you have yet to see any of the TV show or the last feature film, Trailer Park Boys may be hard to get into as the humour is extremely subtle and easy to miss, but don't let that dissuade you. The story is largely irrelevant but it follows three unemployed, alcoholic, pot-smoking trailer park residents in Canada who are in and out of jail for drug dealing and petty robberies. After hundreds of stupid ploys to get rich quick, Julian (the one with a rum and coke in a glass with ice in EVERY scene, even whilst performing the robbery, which although we've come to expect still cracks me up) convinces his mates they can dress up as bank security guards and clean out the safe by imitating the weekly cash pickup. Their home-made uniforms are an absolute joke; bullet-proof vests made of cardboard wrapped in black gaffer tape that were so silly I almost hoped they would work. The film leads up to this robbery but focuses more on their day-to-day lives like the heinously alcoholic park owner, Lahey, who tries to destroy anything they set out to do. Mind you I don't think I've ever seen an actor play a crazy drunk as well as John Dunsworth, I'm not easily fooled but I think he may actually be tanked in these scenes. Other characters who are getting stoned genuinely look the part; and the films documentary style really makes you believe every second. Highly recommended if you are keen on dry intelligent humour.

'The Class' in English...

Perhaps I have been so well conditioned by American cinema that I was often waiting for certain disgruntled students to pull out a butterfly knife and take a literal stab at their teacher during Laurent Cantet's Entre Les Murs (The Class). I can't say I've ever seen a film which so poignantly displayed a 'modern' classroom, and managed to do so whilst crossing a cultural boundary as large as the French would be so quick to pronounce. At no point did I feel this snapshot could be pigeon-holed as French, or even European. Luckily our two languages have so many similarities the subtitles do a good job of translating cross-culturally. The brave but subtle realism of the student-teacher interaction reminded me of how simple things were whilst in high school; we knew what we liked, we knew what we hated, and didn't have qualms about verbalising either. Certain lines are blurred upon maturing as we feel the need to conform to social norms whether it be in a workplace, tertiary institute or even a social gathering. These kids have a certain honesty to life which I truly revere...

I found that many of the teacher's rebuttals to the unfounded statements made by cocky students made me quiver. This took me back to my adolescence and smacked me with the difference between what I understood and what I did not, reminding me of my father's repeating statement about how 'kids think they know everything'. It made the situation all the more intense, and if you allow me to be draconian in my criticism, the acting was believably 'real' and the classroom scenes were so enthralling I didn't want them to end. Any exposition involving the teachers seemed almost secondary yet it did give me a sense of what might have been going on behind closed doors at my own high school, such as emotional breakdowns or arguments over a students future. "We can't substitute ourselves for the parents" says a colleague, yet this is exactly what the lead teacher ties himself up in by saying the wrong things and becoming much too emotionally involved. It was brave for him to tell a goth who is trying to be 'different' that he's simply conforming himself, but he eventually goes too far.

Stunning film, highly recommended. This was released in 2008 so it shouldn't be difficult to get a hold of. For the purists I have used the French poster not the US DVD cover =P

Untitled, Unrelated

Between stretched leather
Bound by thoughts
Dog ears expose uncompleted leafs
Meanwhile days and dates
Inaudibly shriek to be remembered
Within these walls flat lined sheets
Scream to be fulfilled
Yearn to be discovered in forty years time
Rabid with content forgotten
If these bleached sheets could talk
What would they say?
“Remove me from my sheath
Cast a gust upon my skin
To exfoliate and disperse
Forty years of gathered dust
Peel open my innards
Blurred into wordage and coffee stainage
The pattern of my stomach lining
Tells my fortune, and possibly yours”

Is it acceptable check our brains at the cinema door?

I've watched countless films over the last decade which I knew were going to be horrific but which I sat through regardless (films such as X-Men Origins: Wolverine and the Saw series come to mind). I simply tell myself I'm not always in the mood for an intellectually stimulating film, but how often can one lower their expectations and simply go along for the ride before they find themselves questioning the motives of certain filmmakers? Can we just accept directors setting out to make mindless films?

There will always be various demographics of movie-goers. If a director makes a 2-part, 6 hour biopic of a Socialist revolutionary he is without a doubt inclined to lose a large chunk of the viewing public. So on a purely fiscal level, making a 100 minute action flick based on a comic book superhero makes sense. Though shouldn't we always expect quality regardless of which category a film falls into? We have recently been privy to exceptional comic book films and very bland biopics, so having to check your brain at the door can be read as an insult from the filmmakers: it's almost as if they set out to make a dumb film and have spent millions of dollars doing so. Wanted is a good example of such a film; solid action, half-decent acting, and a plot strong enough to keep you from being bored. Yet I can't help but look at it from a critical viewpoint and realise that aside from the action scenes it wasn't at all memorable, whereas films such as Terminator 2 succeed in being amazing showcases for action whilst still giving you something to think about after the credits.

The difference lies in the creators. Can we truly expect the same quality of film from the director of Nightwatch as we can from the director of Aliens? The answer is no, and anyone who says otherwise has delusions of a Utopian film industry. I shouldn't be ashamed of my love for certain mindless films but it's easy to lose credibility after exclaiming that you enjoyed the first Transformers or The Hills Have Eyes remake. Yes I had to check my brain in before the films commenced, but I honestly believe Michael Bay and Alexandre Aja both set out to make gawkable action and deeply disturbing horror respectively, therefore achieving their goal. What these films lack in intelligent dialogue or characters they make up for in tension and straight-up fun. If these two things are done well we should just accept certain people are going to seek certain films. Sure, 'done well' can be seen as subjective, but I'm referring to certain elements such as the CGI and the action choreography which are arguably stunning in Transformers, and obviously what the film was being marketed on.

Whether the lack of intelligence is intentional or not, mindless genre films will always be made. Some are better than others but we have to acknowledge that there are people who (believe it or not) don't want to think when they sit down to watch a film. This is an open market for 'popcorn' cinema which has been around since Charlie Chaplin, and yes there is good popcorn (Iron Man) and bad popcorn (G.I Joe: Rise of the Cobra), but we cannot expect everything to be at the same standard. If you don't agree with these arguments, don't watch these films. Make a stand and help fund smaller, independent studios who actually need your money, and don't blame filmmakers for creating trash when there is clearly a massive market for such films! If you read this please comment so we can have other points of view!