THE INFINITY LESSONS - We Be Forecasting.

The 2008 MIFF Preview continues, unabated, here, with another new strand in this year’s program.

“NIGHT SHIFT”

In an attempt to curate some kind of “midnight movie” neo-horror program MIFF have sought monster-ey tales, weirdo freaky madness, and craaaazy wack-a-doodle cockamamie nonsense. Apparently midnight is the hour of silly words.

DAI-NIPPONJIN — In what could be the breakout film of the festival, Japanese TV star Hitoshi Matsumoto has fashioned that rarest of work: one that no one can actually talk about properly. Ostensibly a melancholic mock/comedy about a bored/boring superhero, it actually sounds (when words meet cohesion) funny AND moving. Get excited, Melbourne.

DEAD DAUGHTERS — “Sweaty” performances? An “oppressive” 119 minutes? “The most distracting, show-offy cinematography yet in a modern cinema landscape that’s way too full of it“? It’s almost difficult to find any evidence of the hype that led to this Russian ghost film’s US remake rights being bought, but I guess we’ll see it here soon enough.

DONKEY PUNCH — Taking a definitively hackneyed plotline - a bunch of up-for-it lads in Spain, a boat and a dead girl - and fashioning a hackneyed-sounding film, this “slick commercial genre” horror is slowly winning some over, while others continue to ask “where was the yacht rock?“, whatever the fuck that means.

THE HORSEMAN — Are we actually enjoying a post-Wolf Creek outback-horror renaissance? And I mean that both ways: is it actually happening? If so, are we happier for it? Very little advance word on this very recently completed Australian feature, but its opening scene is already award-winning.

INSIDE — Already called “a neo-horror near-masterpiece” and “the beginning of a longer conversation about the poetic potentials of the visceral“, I’m already upset at having to see this fascinating-sounding nightmare. Don’t get me wrong - I’m looking forward to another Béatrice Dalle menacing, but I’m upset that I’m going to be so upset again. Maybe I shouldn’t go…*smirk*…oh, you…

JACK BROOKS: MONSTER SLAYER — The use of “campy” as an adjective always concerns me. It’s vague, is often somewhat derisive praise, and usually warns of sophomoric and under-crafted ‘Troma-esque’ humour somewhere in your near future. Also: “If Jack Brooks was made in the 80’s, it would be a cult classic by now” goes the MIFF program blogbite, and I genuinely can’t tell if that’s a good thing to say about a film or an awful awful thing to say about a film.

SPIDER BABY – Jack Hill, that old man of xploitation, never really experienced any real success in his creative life, but his legacy of heralded works - among them an awesome pair of sub-genre-defining works - is kinda singular amongst his generation of Roger-Corman-trained hatchetmen; Hill really the only one to achieve any later success within his original discipline, to use that term kinda loosely. Spider Baby, his culty-est, screens here all re-everything-ed, courtesy of Tarantino’s constant championing. It’s being remade, you know. And apparently it was a very off-Broadway musical indeed. Once.

SUKIYAKI WESTERN DJANGO – Takashi Miike is the Grant Morrison of the cinema: a character-driven genre-obsessed style-drenched genius, a genuine idea factory. He’s the kind of filmmaker whose awesomest misfires are still filled with the flaming madness of a creative wildfire, and being the most prolific filmmaker IN THE WORLD has got to count for something. “Fun you will have“? See y’all there.

SURVEILLANCE — I used to know this girl in high school who would defend Boxing Helena a lot. She also liked that dead fairy picture book, too. I kinda hated both. With the familiar sound of deafening criticism raining down on the other littler Lynch - this newest all “heavily strained, discordant dialogue“ and “inanity“ - she just hopes you don’t get distracted by her direction.

THE INFINITY LESSONS - The 2008 MIFF Preview

In case you missed The Infinity Lessons’ stated aim, see here. For those that know, the list doth grow; here, below:

“GEORGE ANDREW ROMERO”

The forefather of modern US horror, spotlit, at the first MIFF to feature horror front and centre. Whilst it’s not exhaustive, included in the program is all of his epochal “Dead” series, the Australian premiere of his newest, and his two most interesting non-Dead works. And, in case you didn’t know, he’ll actually be here for the whole festival. Get excited.

NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD — As this film’s influence on not only zombie films but on horror cinema and even genre cinema simply cannot be overstated, I will assume you have seen it, or will see it. It is, for the record, excellent.

JACK’S WIFE — His ‘mature filmmaker’ breakout, this witchcraft psuedo-drama came after his apparently awful second feature There’s Always Vanilla, one of only two only non-horrors he helmed, the only feature of his he didn’t write, and one “he doesn’t really care for“. This celebrated work, however, is one he does care for: he wants to remake it himself. As for which version will be screened, the cut of this work titled Jack’s Wife runs 104 minutes; the original 130 minute version - Hungry Wives - was for US theatres only, the later Season Of The Witch an 89 minute US home video cut.

THE CRAZIES — A large scale disaster in a small town involving military experiments and martial law is an awful way to ration a $275,000 budget (significantly more than any of his previous works’ allocations) but Romero makes with the hysteria like its free. Speaking to the “American love/hate relationship with authority“, it is the most significant work in Romero’s bloom as the 1970’s pre-eminent horror specialist.

MARTIN — Romero’s oddest film, his most melancholic, and possibly his most underrated. A re-drawing of the vampire myth in the light of a new era, it’s at once funny and sad. It’s Bill Murray.

DAWN OF THE DEAD — Capping a genuinely stellar progression of works, this, his most acclaimed film (his own favourite, even) is widely adored as the greatest of the Dead series. A scathing indictment of consumerism, it has helicopters, exploding heads, and other things that are exciting.

KNIGHTRIDERS — Perhaps Romero’s most audacious work - Arthurian myth meets motorcycle jousting - it is also one of his least seen and most overlooked.

DAY OF THE DEAD — For many years the Dead series’ whipping boy, its commercial and critical failure seemed to initiate Romero’s exile into the horror-anthology-ism of the 1980’s.

LAND OF THE DEAD — After Dawn Of The Dead’s 2004 studio remake, interest in another Dead was everywhere, but was outweighed by the outpouring of sentiment that greeted news of Romero’s return.

DIARY OF THE DEAD – His most recent work, premiering at MIFF. A group I believe nominally to be a “ragtag” one do the thing where they deal with a zombie holocaust thing and film it on a digital camera like the kids do “nowadays”. Comparisons to Cloverfield abound. Unfavourable ones. It has not been received well.

The Infinity Lessons

Fuck a 2008 Melbourne International Film Festival program/guide. Unlike that most untrustworthy of glossy-ass salesmen, ”Cut! No, no, no…” has yr real word - the Knowledge God truth. We have the media kit, and so starting today it’s the “Cut! No, no, no…” 2008 MIFF Preview, strand by strand.

It’s heavily researched, it’s heavily opinionated, and it’s yours in time for the program launch on July 11th. Gut hunches like McNulty. Radio chatter. Picking horses by silks like yr sister at the Melbourne Cup.

WE BE FORECASTING:

“FREE RADICALS”

Possibly already my festival highlight and MIFF’s newest strand, Free Radicals is a “showcase [of] the experimental, and the avant-garde without being obscure and unattainable”. Some copped-out sounding copy right there, but the proof is in the esoteric pudding, no?

BIRDSONG — Albert Serra’s debut Honor De Cavalleria (which screened at MIFF ‘07) was that year’s most challenging and rewarding work, and here’s what I thought then (scroll down) and later. Here, his newest is a cryptic B&W re-imagining of the biblical Magi (’the three wise men’) and their journey to Christ’s infamous farmyard entreé. Kasman liked it, and old neutered sabre-rattler l’Humanité (whilst quietly yet repeatedly disenchanted by its austerity) praised it as symbolic of Serra’s quest for cinema’s essence and described it as a work of major importance at Cannes this year.

CAPITALISM : SLAVERY AND CAPITALISM : CHILD LABOUR — Avant-garde icon Ken Jacobs‘ slave imagery diptych is, in fact, two very short films, and runs for six minutes; considerably shorter than his seven-hour found footage opus Star Spangled To Death.

EAT, FOR THIS IS MY BODY– Michelange Quay’s debut feature - its several-minute opening shot of the Haitian shoreline unbroken - announces itself instantly as the work of an ‘artist’ (and all that that connotes). A wildly contentious series of tableaux , it has divided camps into those generous enough to appreciate his dialectic, those who see only heavily coded pretension, and those who - perhaps rightly - see in Quay an artist more fascinating than his work.

MEMORIES — Much as the media kit says: a triptych of shorts from Harun Farocki, Eugène Green, and the celebrated Portugese minimalist Pedro Costa (the subject of a long overdue retrospective at The Melbourne Cinematheque this November).

MY WINNIPEG — Too many obscenely positive reviews to really bother choosing any particular ones, but this was rather exciting (from late last year): after his most recent and wonderful Brand Upon The Brain! played MIFF ‘07 sans the live accompaniment that some US cities enjoyed Guy Maddin told Twitch he would be here soon. Whether he meant to narrate My Winnipeg (the final work in his current trilogy of autobiographical works) as he had recently at the Toronoto Film Festival, or meant something else (or somewhere else!) is merely one of the unanswered questions here.

PAPER CANNOT WRAP UP EMBERS – Perhaps more gently pushing the experimental boundaries is this, Rithy Panh’s vérité documentary about a Cambodian brothel which, by all accounts, sounds no more experimental than Wiseman.

PROFIT MOTIVE AND THE WHISPERING WIND — Winner of the NSFC Best Experimental Film award earlier this year, and called ‘a masterpiece’ by at least one of my favourite film writers, John Gianvito’s “unconventional landscape film” has been compared to the work of maybe my favourite avant-gardist: James Benning.

REVUE – An archivist’s dream, Sergei Loznitsa’s compilation of 50’s-60’s Soviet propaganda is apparently a move away from the simpler presentation of his similar and acclaimed Blockade; the move being largely a structural one, one involving - gulp! - the shaping of viewers’ perspectives. Screened very recently at Sydney.

THE SILENCE BEFORE BACH – Obviously Pere Portabella has been too busy being a Spanish parliamentarian to make more than two films in thirty years. He has, however, helmed over a dozen works, and is to be the subject of a Queensland Art Gallery retrospective in August, but we Melbournians will seemingly only be getting this, his newest, an abstract and “reflective” meditation on the epochal music of Bach. But!: the return of Yo’s Alex Brendenmuhl!

“WE CANNOT EXIST IN THIS WORLD ALONE” — A live dialectic described as “lively” at NZFF very recently, this series of ten short works by Ben Rivers and Ben Russell involve 16mm prints AND strobe lights.

On Inurement

STANDARD OPERATING PROCEDURE

Errol Morris, 2008

Frederick Wiseman this is not. Nestled somewhere between effects-laden TVdocutainment and the awful personality-driven narratives of fucking Nick Broomfield (but nowhere actually near them) lies Errol Morris & The Interrotron. Whether you consider his super-stylised styles the epitome of created non-truth or the apex of fact-driven first-person revelation, one must volunteer that his tinkering with methodology and his consideration of subject is masterful, and in turning the art of interrogation on the original masters - Morris, here, investigating the prisoner torture and subsequent imagery that emerged from Abu Ghraib - he unveils one of this fascinating though supremely upsetting work’s sleeve-aces.

Ostensibly its own investigation into the investigation of the participants’ involvement with said imagery, it spends much time presenting us with proof of the evil that procedure made, leading to the shattering legal assertion that, actually, most of the images are often merely documents of military procedure, and therein lay his chief accusation: under the Bush regime’s war on terror, even basic military procedure is scandalous, and as Phillipa Hawker rightly asserts, there is at least as much power in the interrogative usage of the images - of the act itself - as there is in the subsequent images’ content.

Also, he has lately been pre-occupied with the nature of still imagery, particularly its relationship with the elastic affair of memory and, for far longer, has been pre-occupied with the notion of representation within the documentary structure, and both of these feed into one of Standard Operating Procedure’s other aces: it’s largely about horror film imagery, its thrust being that the horrific imagery that surfaced across the world in 2004 is the real deal; truly the true terror of so many lurid Saw’s and Hostel’s. Taking DP Robbie Richardson’s trademarked hot-ass highlights and shaping it into some arrestingly recreated re-enactments of most of the most controversial images (and scattering them amongst the nauseating originals), Morris slyly submerges us in the viewer’s contract; our role in the spectacle of cinema always one of participatory acceptance and, subsequently, the second-hand evolution stemming from such experience and the coping mechanisms that enable us to sleep that night, and the inference that these recreations are a narrative’s way of communicating the truth of these images speaks, awfully, to the strength and elasticity of human acceptance in the face of brutality.

 

Opens today at Cinema Nova.

Eyes, Horizon.

Indeed there was a short intermission ‘tween communiqués, Hawk-Eye. I am not at liberty to discuss the reasons.

So the MIFF launch was last week, and they be zeitgeist like some muhfuckas. Horror is rather the deal this year, from the Ozploitation centrepiece to the rather exciting George A. Romero retrospective (including Romero himself introducing his newest) to the regional focus on Romania’s recent (tho debatable) new wave of Ceauşescu-centric works of bleak and horrific austerity. Opening night Ozploitation doco Not Quite Hollywood is MIFF-produced and Melbourne-made; closing night work [REC] is, uh, another Spanish horror film, this one a lo-lo-budget body horror. Festival bossman Moore: “We love commercial cinema!”. For real, Dick.

Other highlights: the Cannes “Director’s Fortnight” tribute, the Edward Yang retrospective, a new experimental features program, and a confirmed screening of Terence Davies’ new work.

Some bad news: no Regent this year. As if you needed another reason to despise musical theatre - Wicked’s impending season will be occupying that particularly wonderful space this festival. Its replacement? The Kino! It’s indepenedent, nerdlinger, so buy yr pass.

Guide in The Age on July 11th (or 10th if yr a MIFF member).

Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

THE PAINTED VEIL

John Curran, 2006

Within the great hagiography of cine-theory and creative practice there is, seemingly, precious little progression to be made. What with the fair medium already in possession of a number of ‘golden’ ages and epochal movements and from-the-windows-to-the-fucking-wall masterpieces that will never be taken down off the collective museum walls of our minds, it seems, actually, kinda ignorant of that very history that Citizen Kane  (though, yes, amazing) will be cinema’s archaic zenith until someone shatters minds by elevating, like, The Godfather, or Schindler’s List to that most singular of listed places: The Greatest Film Ever Made [consensus]. Among other things, Mark Cousins’ excellent history book The Story Of Film charts the learned vocabulary and passed-down techniques of the various generations of celluloid craftspersons, and it is within this framework of once-removed schooling that he extrapolates his central thesis: that cinema’s archived and subsequently retrieved and restored and re-screened and endlessly revisited lessons have borne its makers an evolved technical language at once mysterious and exoteric, and with it a veritable bounty of eloquent expression.

As always, then, it seems odd that pseudo-Australian John Curran - whose 1998 feature debut Praise was a blazing near-formless revelation - has fashioned a rather old-fashioned Contemporary Period Piece from Somerset Maugham’s already ancient novel, one that spends as much time looking back (in many ways) as it does forward, ultimately tripping over and falling in the process.

Example: the work’s scenic entrée - the two leads’ arrival in rural China - is marred by a dizzying temporal to-and-fro, it fractured rather haphazardly with a brisk canter through Watts’ unhappy pre-marital homelife and subsequent marriage to Norton; its near-frantically paced expository backstory a constant double prescence amongst the opening act, both literally in the juxtaposed origins and subliminally in the scene-setting present-day; Curran seemingly opting for the quite contemporary methodology of telling AND showing. It also, here, in its oh-so-exotic!ness and its classist perspective, splays its dated period values and narrative values; its incorporating of the attendant imperialistic aspects and the subsequent national politics woven only, and if ever, into the backdrop; its themes of love and mortality at some odds with the protagonists’ place in events around them. But interesting and topical, of course, and rather photogenic.

Qualities such as these - itinerant locations, topical themes, even actual hard-learned morals - are, while present in Maugham’s works (and many texts of its era), nonetheless already an albatross ’round a contemporary work’s neck. Unlike genre-orientated works (and there is an argument to made that Maugham’s approach to the original text borders on this), which benefit greatly from their structural freedoms and are in fact actually designed to house these tangential concerns, lumbering affairs of the heart such as these, instead, engender in a viewer the notion that its central tenet - LOVE -  is to some degree, in fact, for shame; that most personal of narratives used as little more than the central conceit in a dry and unforgiving lesson about mortality’s many forms.

Rise With The Tide Towards Divinity - June 11th, 2008

In Melbourne’s cinemas this week: lots of interesting newness, some interesting nerdness. See something, viewer!

IN CINEMAS

New Releases

After a decade of truancy Hal Hartley re-ups his amazing Henry Fool with Fay Grim, a quasi-sequel that screened at MIFF last year. The word is: polarising. Nova only, Parker Posey fans.

Really, though: what do you actually do after The Matrix universe actually changes the damn world? Speed Racer was perhaps a fairly rational idea, and now “ultra-turquoise is the new black“. That may be overstating its influence, however; nobody is being terribly kind to this child. The Wachowski’s newest opens wide this week.

M. Night Shyamalan’s last film was in-fucking-sane, a debilitatingly personal crisis in several acts. His retreat into safety - The Happening - has Wahlberg, Zooey, and Shyamalan’s first US R-rating. Opens wide.

The Incredible Hulk is - they PROMISE this time, losers - the genuinely dull Hulk-by-numbers that y’all wanted after Ang Lee fucked everyone’s babies with his amazingly abstract and theatrical father-issues epic in 2003. Star Ed Norton is trying his actorly-ass hands at screenplay writing for the first time here, too, and if it goes really well I’m sure we’ll all be really amped for his next script: an adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s crime epic about a detective with Tourette’s. Look forward to it being touted as what’s right with literature/wrong with filmmaking today. Wide release, and enjoy.

Not Really New Releases

So: we have already discussed the adjusted Cathay program that wraps up tonight at Cinematheque, but hold up, xia nu fans - BOTH OF TONIGHT’S FILMS HAVE BEEN CANCELLED. And the craziest part: one of the replacements - Our Sister Hedy - was last week’s cancelled film! Instead romantic/comedy/musical June Bug (starring the so-cute Grace Chang) screens at 7pm, followed by Hedy at about 8:50pm. At ACMI, provided that hasn’t changed either.

The Event Of This Quiet Week: this friday night ACMI is screening Lynne Ramsay’s jaw-dropping second feature Morvern Callar. The purest of cinema, this acclaimed adaptation of Alan Warner’s all-narration debut it is that rarest of feats - at once the flesh’d out flesh of said literature’s internal voice and yet the surest example in recent cinema of that oldest of adages: Show, Don’t Tell. Screens at 10pm.

The now-huge Melbourne International Animation Festival opens on monday and runs til sunday. Highlights include special guest Marcy Page’s production masterclass (and a screening of her wonderful Madame Tutli-Putli), a hand-puppet animation retrospective, and the apparently very excellent omnibus Fear[s] Of The Dark. All happening at ACMI. Other ACMI biz: The Universe Of Keith Haring screens over the weekend on thurs/fri/sat night at 7pm, sun at 5:30.

Lewis Milestone’s 1930 milestone of anti-war gore All Quiet On The Western Front screens for free (!) at the NGV on friday at 1pm.

The Astor screen a Fritz Lang double on sunday night: Metropolis, of course, and then Dr. Mabuse, The Gambler. 7:30pm.

This friday night Time Capsules are screening Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s (no relation) acclaimed 1997 J-horror Cure. Another reason to see it: Kurosawa’s newest Tokyo Sonata just screened at Cannes (and is confirmed for MIFF), and is being spoken of highly indeed. Get yrself that contextual flavour for that MIFF queue argument.

AND, FINALLY

For anyone not a cinephilic film-licker who somehow missed the news: when rather large Mel-Gibson-owned company Icon were busy buying the Dendy cinema chain they were not busying themselves with buying Melbourne’s Kino Dendy cinema. Meaning? Technically, it is independent, but no one thinks much will change. But…it could, right?

Rise With The Tide Towards Divinity - June 4th, 2008

It’s the first week of winter, but there seems to be a distinct lack of Toro’s in the atmosphere. Melbourne’s cinemas will be busy, though, but there is very little to report on the nerdy front. Nonetheless: mush, wolves! Onwards through the blizzard!

IN CINEMAS

New Releases

Sex And The City will be so so huge. You all know whether this a good thing or not already. Opens absolutely everywhere.

The Chronicles Of Narnia: Prince Caspian will also be rather large. You all know whether this a good thing or not already. Also a very wide release.

Not Really New Releases

The Melbourne Cinematheque is post-AGM. While the dust re-settles they will continue their adjusted Cathay Studios program. This week they are screening the modernisation car-comedy Our Dream Car with Sister Long Legs, a “charming tale of star-crossed lovers…and a snapshot of the cultural influences of the West on the country’s emerging middle class”. Tonight, ACMI, 7pm.

Time-buried Lee Van Cleef vehicle Sabata screens at ACMI on friday night at 10pm. For a film with a near-mute hero it sure has an hilarious mouthful of a native title.

The Event Of This Quiet Week: on monday night The Astor is screening Visconti’s masterpiece Death In Venice. For the last time: just like Lolita is not about paedophilia, THIS FILM IS NOT ABOUT HOMOSEXUALITY. I could not recommend this life-changing work anywhere near as highly as I hold it, and considering the current Henson madness this is rather serendipitously timely. 7:30pm, and see you there.

Also at The Astor, this weird double: Curtiz’ excellent and classic Robin Hood with the original Ladykillers. Both great. Both entirely unrelated. Sunday night at 7:30pm.

Time Capsules is screening the apparently very naughty Desperate Remedies, a 1993 NZ film about drugs and bad kinds of sex. Friday at 8:45pm.

AND, FINALLY

MIFF 2008 passes are now on sale! As mentioned previously, they have scrapped their ‘early bird’ system in favour of a MIFF membership drive. Program launches June 17th, full program out July 10th.

And SFF opens tonight! Some program highlights: a Deborah Kerr retrospective, the inaugural Official Competition (featuring new works by “Cut! No, no, no…” favourites Carlos Reygadas [who, here, also has a mini-retrospective o' his own] and Nanni Moretti), and the first Australian screenings of Haneke’s Funny Games remake, the newest work by the Dardenne’s, and - by far the most exciting - Terence Davies’ new work (as well as a restored Distant Voices, Still Lives!).

*sigh*

Til then:

Rise With The Tide Towards Divinity - May 28th, 2008

It’s a cinema, playboy! And in Melbourne this week, the virtual festival of films playing abates none. None!

IN CINEMAS

New Releases

Clooney’s huge financial failure Leatherheads opens wide this week. The World Socialist Website - that bastion of filmic thought - says it’s “awful in several ways at once”. Clooney himself: “I had a great fear of being the ‘issues’ director”. Murrow is mad, George!

The Rolling Stones, like fucking dust itself, will never actually die. Scorsese’s newest documentary Shine A Light is both further proof and further cause. Wide release, parents.

Newest of the current Spanish horror canon The Orphanage is here to tide you over til the next one (or the US remake). Pretty wide release: Nova, Kino, Como, Brighton Bay, Westgarth, Rivoli and both Southland’s and Knox’s Cinema Europa.

Hou Hsiao-hsien’s wonderful new film The Flight Of The Red Balloon opens at the Nova and the Como. My thoughts from its French Film Festival screening earlier this year. Warning!: only in dreaded ”Nova Digital” at that particular cinema. Como, yo!

Koyaanisqatsi-like BBC Natural History Unit production Earth opens at the Nova. A $47 million nature documentary=you know if you’ll like it by now.

Not Really New Releases

The Nova’s Antonioni retrospective concludes thursday. Tonight: a collection of late-period shorts at 5:15pm, dense and fascinating pioneer video work The Oberwald Mystery at 7pm, and a pair of documentaries - Making A Film For Me Is To Live (a making-of of-sorts from Beyond The Clouds) and VERY rare doco The Gaze That Changed Cinema. Tomorrow night it closes with L’Avventura at 5pm and Zabriskie Point at 7:30pm. Vale!

The Melbourne Cinematheque begins its much-adjusted Cathay studios program with “Hong Kong cinema’s first musical masterpiece” Mambo Girl and Escort Over Tiger Hills, a stylistic kung-fu epic allegedly influenced by genius/martial arts auteur King Hu. Screenings at ACMI at 7pm, as always, but at 6:40pm, for any interested regulars, they will be having their Annual General Meeting in the cinema. Grab a flyer on wednesday for the details on the two altered screenings, which are next week’s and the following week’s.

African school/music competition documentary War/Dance - ACMI’s first Long Play for a while - opened on friday and continues all week (except tonight). Session times here.

Cory McAbee’s The American Astronaut is either doing really well or ACMI is flogging this culty horse to death, as it screens again on friday night at 10pm (and again in a month). Also at ACMI: after screening at the Queer Film Festival earlier this year, Ed Aldridge’s debut feature Tan Lines screens saturday at 4pm as part of their ongoing Australian Perspectives screenings. And John Badham’s fun time Wargames screens on sunday at early-ass 10:30am and 1pm. Coffee first, though.

The Astor concludes its quasi-focus on westerns this sunday with The Searchers and Blazing Saddles. 7:30pm. Monday night: La Dolce Vita. Again. 7:30pm. Request: some new prints, St. Michael’s Grammar!

Time Capsules is screening Pietro Germi’s very Italian Seduced And Abandoned on friday at 8:45pm. Hello to Dean.

ON DVD

‘Quirky comedy’ All My Friends Are Leaving Brisbane is released this week. I don’t know anyone who has seen this.

UK human trafficking ‘message’ film True North gets a DVD premiere following its 2007 MIFF screenings. I don’t know anyone who has seen this.

AND, FINALLY

Don’t forget to pay attention to the goings-on at the Sydney Film Festival, which opens next wednesday, as it will usually be a MIFF preview of-sorts.

And, in case you didn’t know: Sydney Pollack died.

SLEEP is not a film. (discuss)

BUBBLE

Steven Soderbergh, 2005 (!)

After a long-ass time, nu-auteur Soderbergh’s DV experiment has appeared at the good and reputable DVD stores of Melbourne, and with a viewing one can see why why it took so long to arrive.

This is not a word-of-mouth breakout, or an epochal game-changing vision. This is not Sex, Lies And Videotape. It is a difficult and esoteric single note, a demanding theoretical, a hypothesis borne flesh. Imagine: a murder/love triangle narrative stripped of dynamics, and performances freed of most notions of performance. With only Soderbergh’s reputation to really go on, it is a marketing team’s nightmare.

As a possible reaction to his surprisingly excellent though relatively rote studio work Bubble is a chore compared to the breezy charms of, say, the Ocean’s franchise, and rather the laboured point. Much like Fincher’s Zodiac - another work whose central premise and real-life narrative(s) dictated its unsatisfying and foot-shooting filmic representation - Bubble takes its core theme and shapes all adjacent conceits accordingly. Being a work actually about narrative representation (and that concept’s attendant contrivances) and its viewer-borne consequences, Soderbergh’s decision to disengage with all notions of drama and most notions of ‘disbelief suspension’, here, creates for the generous viewer the opportunity to engage with an emotional detachment made mandatory; an arena for naught but the obtuse reactions and casual involvement of tuesday morning’s newspaper over coffee.

If viewers so generous there be, of course.