Richard Kelly and Harry Knowles at Cannes; 2006
The cinematic mindscape (external) for Melbourne’s next week. We be forecasting.
IN CINEMAS
New Releases
John Curran, who in 1998 directed Praise – one of the greatest films ever made in this country – has followed up on his unremarkable US debut We Don’t Live Here Anymore with a motherfucking Somerset Maugham adaptation. The Painted Veil opens very wide indeed for a period affectation; Village, Hoyts, the whole deal…
Smart People is a film of mild resemblances and bankable tones. Comparisons to basically all of the last few year’s indie comedy success stories abound. Wide! Village and Hoyts, and Palace.
Mark Bomback has a great name for a scriptwriter, but the last three things he’s had produced were the awful awful Godsend, the Live Free Or Die Hard shambles (perhaps that isn’t entirely on him), and Deception, a kinda lame-sounding sex-club thriller which opens wide this week. Hopefully he won’t do too much damage to a great great book.
The Edge Of Heaven is getting some wonderful reviews, and opens at Nova, The Classic, Kino, Como. and The Rivoli.
Not Really New Releases
Visconti’s wonderful and melancholic epic The Leopard screens sunday night at The Astor, 7:30. You won’t make the last train home.
And the next night, The Astor screens Kurosawa’s hugely entertaining Yojimbo and its also-fun sequel Sanjuro. 7:30pm, please.
ACMI’s Russian Centenary of Cinema wraps up, with screenings of classic Eisenstein (Battleship Potempkin, Alexander Nevsky), Tarkovsky’s dazzling tho accessible Stalker, the apparently amazing The Ascent, another ”tour-de-force” Ptushko (Sadko), The Cranes Are Flying and Kalatazov’s subsequent masterpiece The Letter Never Sent, and the always overrated Konchalovsky’s overrated Uncle Vanya.
Cinematheque also concludes its Truffaut retrospective next Wednesday with the epochal 400 Blows and Les Deux Anglaises Et Le Continent. ACMI, 7pm, as always.
Time Capsules screens Jack Clayton’s classic The Innocents. Friday, ABC Gallery, 8:45pm. Say hi to Dean.
ON DVD
Of course, the big news of the week is that Richard Kelly’s now-infamous Southland Tales is going straight to yr local dvd store. For the two of you not in the know: Richard Kelly was the creator of the genuine cult freak-hit Donnie Darko. Four years later, Kelly - by then the in-demand darling of bleeding edge scriptwriting, with a Darren Aronofsky project, a Tony Scott “biopic”, and a Vonnegut book adaptation all on the horizon - premiered a rough cut of Southland Tales at Cannes ‘06 as the new Shane Black. To say that its 160 minutes was poorly received is an understatement; it being compared on reception to the (very underrated, but that’s another post) Vincent Gallo masterpiece The Brown Bunny. Kelly’s 145 minute cut made it to US cinemas, where it was just as badly received. Here, we get something calling itself a 138 minute version, and is allegedly still a bold and sprawling mess. Yay!
2007 MIFF selection Brothers Of The Head, a totally ridiculous “punk” quasi-sci-fi spazzout, hits shelves this week. The Brothers Polish they are not.
After screening at last year’s La Mirada, dull Viggo-Mortensen-starring period-actioner Alatriste is also released. Director Agustín Díaz Yanes said of his $24,000,000Euro budget: “this is the most expensive Spanish film ever made, enough for a European super-production and an American rubbish-production.” See you at the Goya’s, homefry.
