Once again, German DJ legend Claptone is preparing to hit Aussie shores, returning to deliver the latest edition of his international smash-hit soirée, The Masquerade. Popping up in Melbourne for the third time, the mysterious, multi-sensory event is being presented in collaboration with Untitled Group — the creative minds behind the likes of Ability Fest, Pitch Music & Arts and Beyond the Valley. Having toured a selection of cities worldwide over the past few years, The Masquerade's next stop is Burnley Circus Park in Melbourne on Saturday, April 13. It's set to transform the space into a den of revelry for one afternoon, featuring a heady mix of performances, acrobats, sounds and quirky characters you won't forget in a hurry. Promising to ramp up the intensity levels, all guests will be given masquerade face wear as they enter the event — a reference to Claptone's own signature golden mask.
Why drink at one watering hole, when you can head to two, three, six or more? That's always been the motivation behind everyone's favourite boozy journey, aka a pub crawl. And, it's the exact same type of thinking behind the Urban Wine Walk. Taking another wander around Melbourne, it's the bar-hopping excuse every vino lover needs — if you need an excuse, that is. From midday until 4.30pm on Saturday, May 11, you'll saunter around the city — and between the likes of Good Heavens, Union Electric, The Mill House, Jack & Bones and more — sampling wines and having a mighty fine time. As for the tipples, they'll be taken care of by a range of local and national producers. Tickets cost $65 and places are limited. This moving cellar door will not only serve up more than 35 wine tastings, but also your own tasting glass — plus a voucher for another beverage, and a guide to help you plan your mosey between bars. Image: Good Heavens.
Meet Patriot, Potomac, Primrose, Poppet and Phil. They're each cute as a button, and they just might become America's next hard-working, helpful guide dogs. Born at the headquarters of US organisation Guide Dogs for the Blind, these labrador puppies will learn what it takes to become a seeing-eye companion for a human in need. While they won't all end up assisting the visually impaired to live fuller lives, they'll each try their best and look adorable in the process. That's the story behind Pick of the Litter, the documentary that'll make you want to hug your own doggo, get one, or volunteer to help train pooches that become guide dogs. The movie is coming to the Astor Theatre, screening at 4pm on Sunday, February 17 — and if you think it's something your own pet pupper would like, you can bring it along with you. Yes, you can not only spend 81 minutes exclaiming "awwwwwww" at adorable, helpful dogs on-screen, but do so in four-legged company. And if you don't have your own furball, head along anyway — if everyone else brings theirs, you might get in a pats a few before and after the screening.
The DC Extended Universe is dead. With Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom, the comic book-to-screen franchise hardly swims out with a memorable farewell, hasn't washed up on a high and shouldn't have many tearful over its demise. More movies based on the company's superheroes are still on the way. They'll be badged the DC Universe instead, and start largely afresh; 2025's Superman: Legacy will be the first, with Pearl's David Corenswet as the eponymous figure, as directed by new DC Studios co-chairman and co-CEO James Gunn (The Suicide Squad). Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom ends up the 15-feature decade-long current regime about as expected, however: soggily, unable to make the most of its star, and stuck treading water between what it really wants to be and box-ticking saga formula. Led by Jason Momoa (Fast X) — not Adrian Grenier (Clickbait), as Entourage once put out into the world — the first Aquaman knew that it was goofy, playful fun. Its main man, plus filmmaker James Wan (Malignant), didn't splash around self-importance or sink into seriousness in giving DC Comics' aquatic hero his debut self-titled paddle across the silver screen (after Momoa played the same part in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and Justice League). Rather, they made an underwater space opera that was as giddily irreverent as that sounded — and, while it ebbed and flowed between colouring by numbers and getting winningly silly, the latter usually won out. Alas, exuberance loses the same battle in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom. In a film that sets sail upon a plodding plot and garish CGI, and can't make an octopus spy and Nicole Kidman (Faraway Downs) riding a robot shark entertaining, any sense of spirit is jettisoned overboard. Having spent its existence playing catch-up with the Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DCEU does exactly that for a final time here. It isn't subtle about it; see: calling Aquaman's imprisoned half-brother Orm (Patrick Wilson, Insidious: The Red Door) Loki and ripping off one of the most-famous throwaway MCU moments there is. As with 2023's fellow Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, there's also such a large debt owed to Star Wars that elements seem to be lifted wholesale from a galaxy far, far away (and from a competing company, although it was still terrible when Disney was plagiarising itself). Just try not to laugh at Jabba the Hutt as a sea creature, as voiced by Martin Short (Only Murders in the Building), introduced reclining in a familiar pose and, of course, surrounded by a school of amphibious ladies. Not intentionally by any means, it's Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom funniest moment. 2018's initial Aquaman used past intergalactic flicks as a diving-off point, too, including Jupiter Ascending, but with its own personality — no trace of which bobs up this time around. Wan helms again, switching to workman-like mode. While he's co-credited on the story with returning screenwriter David Leslie Johnson-McGoldrick (Orphan: First Kill), Momoa and Thomas Pa'a Sibbett (The Last Manhunt), there's little but being dragged out with the prevailing tide and tonal chaos on show. Worse: ideas from abandoned spinoff The Trench, which was first floated as a horror effort about a villainous Atlantean kingdom but later revealed to be a secret Black Manta (Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Ambulance) movie, get clunkily flushed in. While this should be Saw, Insidious and The Conjuring alum Wan's wheelhouse, Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom feels like the narrative equivalent of pouring the dregs of whatever's in Arthur Curry's liquor cabinet into one tankard. Now king of Atlantis as well as a father to Arthur Jr — the water-controlling Mera has become his wife, too, but that doesn't mean that Amber Heard (The Stand) says more than 50 words — the half-human, half-Atlantean best-known as Aquaman has another tussle with pirate David Kane to face. Bumped up to chief baddie, Black Manta is aided by dark magic manifested in the black trident, as found by a marine biologist (Randall Park, Totally Killer) who's endeavouring to prove that Atlantis exists. Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom's evil threat is also climate change, as exacerbated by its nefarious enemy on his vengeance mission after the events of the first movie. With the human and undersea realms alike beginning to boil, only Aquaman teaming up with Orm will give the planet a chance to survive. Pairing Momoa and Wilson odd-couple comedy-style like they're Hobbs and Shaw would've been one of Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom's best moves if the material was up to it. Their escapade amid the foliage on a volcanic South Pacific island — where the film wants to be a tropical creature feature, and also a Journey to the Centre of the Earth- and Jumanji-esque jaunt — is certainly the most promising visually. But here as across the entire flick, relying upon Momoa's charm to do the heavy lifting appears to be the number-one approach. In some pictures with some stars, that can work. Rom-com Anyone But You manages it thanks to Sydney Sweeney (Reality) and Glen Powell (Top Gun: Maverick), for instance. In Aquaman, Momoa had a mischievous ball and was a delight to watch. What everyone involved in Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom hasn't factored in is that this version of Arthur has swapped underdog roguishness for the overblown kind. Momoa remains visibly enthusiastic as the wettest of the DCEU's world-saving cohort, but Aquaman's cockiness is laid on as thickly as a kelp forest. Although there's no doubting that the movie's star can handle the part, it's a less-engaging, more one-note turn than his last jump into this ocean, and sells him short. Momoa commits, though, with the kind of gusto that Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom lacks virtually everywhere else. What happens when a film that clearly wants to be as ridiculous as it can be, or as dark, clashes with staying within the genre's routine lane? This shipwreck, which ends the franchise it's in and the saga's busiest year — after Shazam! Fury of the Gods, The Flash and Blue Beetle — with one of its worst entries. At least it didn't have to worry about setting up sequels or connecting to other DCEU fare, aka a welcome lifeboat.
There's no swapping faces in John Woo's latest English-language action-thriller. Instead, the iconic Hong Kong filmmaker brings guns, chases and a quest for revenge to the festive genre. As anyone who rightly considers Die Hard among the pinnacle of Christmas movies already knows, seasonal cinema offerings don't need to drip in schmaltz, holiday humour, or Santas and reindeers to be an end-of-year present. Still, in making his first Hollywood effort since 2003's Paycheck, the director behind Hard Target, Broken Arrow and Face/Off in the 90s — plus Mission: Impossible II in 2000 — keeps the ties of family gleaming in Silent Night. That said, from the moment that the picture opens with a man in a Rudolph-adorned jumper, fuzzy red pom-pom and all, in a battle on Texan back streets with gang members who've just torn his brood apart on Christmas Eve, Woo also goes the brutal route. Silent Night's name echoes in several ways. Recalling a tune that's all about the jolliest time of the year is just one. Setting scenes in a period when halls are decked with boughs of holly is merely another. If protagonist Brian Godlock (Joel Kinnaman, The Suicide Squad) gets his wish, there'll be no more noise — let alone violence and bloodshed — from the criminals responsible for killing his young son (Alex Briseño, A Million Miles Away) with a stray bullet from drive-by crossfire as the boy rode his new bike in the front yard. Woo's main stylistic conceit comes to fruition instantly, however, because Silent Night largely avoids dialogue. Aided by meticulous sound design, that choice isn't a gimmick purely for the sake of it. Rather, Robert Archer Lynn's (Already Dead) script has Brian lose the ability to speak in the introductory sequence's fallout. The film's propulsive arrival is all frenzy, mayhem and intensity as Brian runs, cars packed with armed men blasting with abandon can't fell him, but being shot in the throat by villainous head thug Playa (Harold Torres, Memory) heralds blackness. If there's any doubt that Woo is enjoying staging the chaos, his use of slow motion says plenty. So does spotting a red balloon drifting away. Elsewhere, while the filmmaker mightn't work in his trademark doves, a bird does flutter. With cinematographer Sharone Meir (Echo 3) doing the lensing, Silent Night realises that stripping out chatter means heightening the visual experience, whether the picture is in frenetic or plotting mode. But there's also an earnestness to the movie and its aesthetics; this is a grim and bloody Christmas flick, and it's well-aware in every inch. As Brian prepares for his vengeance mission in training montages, then endeavours to execute his plan, an emotional underpinning anchors Silent Night's almost total lack of words (text on-screen features via SMS messages, and the radio still blares), too. He's a man robbed of the ability to verbally process his trauma. He can't shout, swear, scream or cry out. There'll never be any catharsis from just uttering his feelings aloud to a kindly listener. So, he's driven to act. As played with expressive physicality by Kinnaman, he's obsessively haunted into doing the only thing that he thinks he can — even if it means that his marriage to the also-mourning Saya (Catalina Sandino Moreno, From) suffers, and regardless of police detective Dennis Vassell's (Scott Mescudi, Crater) request for his assistance to lawfully bring the culprits to justice. There's a full-circle touch to Silent Night's disdain for talking as well, given how stellar the clearly Woo-influenced John Wick films have proven by also letting actions say far more than words, albeit never to this degree. Before that, it was the similarly Keanu Reeves-led The Matrix movies that help cement Woo's brand of stylised imagery as a Tinseltown standard, as far too many imitators have continued to ape ever since. Although Woo has kept adding to his resume over the past two decades, thanks to two-part war epic Red Cliff, wuxia effort Reign of Assassins, the also-split The Crossing and action-thriller Manhunt, he makes his Hollywood comeback with passion. In its look and feel, Silent Night is a work of relish — and, in its staircase sequence alone, a reminder of what American cinema has missed while it has been content taking Woo's cues over boasting him behind the camera. The filmmaker, his flair and his knack for eschewing words have it, then — plus the committed Kinnaman and Moreno — more than the plot, no matter how well-grounded in Brian's situation it proves. Death Wish, Taken and their own mimics have mined dads dishing out retaliation before, after all. Indeed, as fellow 2023 release Retribution demonstrates, Liam Neeson has resided comfortably in the "father in a fray for his family" niche ever since busting out his particular set of skills 15 years back. Silent Night isn't here to hold up Brian as a hero gleaming as brightly as a star on a Christmas tree, though. In other hands, that might've been the vibe, but there's no doubting that he's unravelling in desperate pain as he fixates upon his vigilante rampage. Marco Beltrami's (Renfield) score has it, too: this is an action-melodrama as much as an action-thriller. Woo hasn't just switched conversation for an onslaught of operatic sights and grunting, crunching sound effects — amid the kinetic altercations, of which there's many, he also lingers on his cast to see what's getting his characters ticking, pondering, yearning, hurting and swirling. This film spies in silence what wouldn't be done justice in dialogue, with feelings simmering and steaming in looks and gestures. Silent Night's action choreography impresses, unsurprisingly, but so does its emotional dance. Pass the Parcel might be a birthday-party game rather than a Christmas one, but it sums up this movie: each layer offers a gift, some expected, some exquisite.
UPDATE, Friday, June 21, 2024: May December is available to stream via Binge, Prime Video, YouTube Movies and iTunes. A line about not having enough hot dogs might be one of its first, but May December is a movie of mirrors and butterflies. In the literal sense, director Todd Haynes wastes few chances to put either in his frames. The Velvet Goldmine, Carol and Dark Waters filmmaker doesn't shy away from symbolism, knowing two truths that stare back at his audience from his latest masterpiece: that what we see when we peer at ourselves in a looking glass isn't what the rest of the world observes, and that life's journey is always one of transformation. Inspired by the real-life Mary Kay Letourneau scandal, May December probes both of these facts as intently as anyone scrutinising their own reflection. Haynes asks viewers to do the same. Unpacking appearance and perception, and also their construction and performance, gazes from this potently thorny — and downright potent — film. That not all metamorphoses end with a beautiful flutter flickers through just as strongly. May December's basis springs from events that received ample press attention in the 90s: schoolteacher Letourneau's sexual relationship with her sixth-grade student Vili Fualaau. She was 34, he was 12. First-time screenwriter Samy Burch changes names and details in her Oscar-nominated script — for Best Original Screenplay, which is somehow the film's only nod by the Academy — but there's no doubting that it takes its cues from this case of grooming, which saw Letourneau arrested, give birth to the couple's two daughters in prison, then the pair eventually marry. 2000 TV movie All-American Girl: The Mary Kay Letourneau Story used the recreation route; however, that was never going to be a Haynes-helmed feature's approach. The comic mention of hot dogs isn't indicative of May December's overall vibe, either: this a savvily piercing film that sees the agonising impact upon the situation's victim, the story its perpetrator has spun around herself, and the relentless, ravenous way that people's lives and tragedies are consumed by the media and public. While Oscar nods mightn't have come of it, May December is also an acting masterclass by two thespians who already have one such shiny trophy on their mantles each, plus a performer who turns in a stunner of a portrayal that's his best yet. With Haynes behind the camera, this is no surprise: watching the talent before his lens, even when they're Barbie dolls in Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (the genuinely plastic rather than Margot Robbie kind), means bathing in pure emotion. In her fifth film for the director after Safe, Far From Heaven, I'm Not There and Wonderstruck, Julianne Moore (Sharper) perfects the clash of control and insecurity within Gracie Atherton-Yoo, the movie's Letourneau substitute. It's a magnificent effort from someone who is never anything less than that — and Natalie Portman (Thor: Love and Thunder), who plays a part so sharp that it cuts as Elizabeth Berry, an actor preparing to play Gracie in a new picture, is every bit her equal. With Charles Melton (Riverdale) as Gracie's husband Joe Yoo, there's a case of art imitating life, in a way. His character spends Elizabeth's visit and his entire time with Gracie coming second, and he's behind his co-stars in terms of fame, but it's Joe's plight that's the core of May December and also Melton's performance that hauntingly lingers. This film begins with faeces as well, which isn't emblematic of what's to come, either, but still an important inclusion. A package of it sits on the Yoo family's doorstep when Elizabeth arrives to meet them for the first time — and Gracie makes it clear that this has happened before. May December sets its narrative 23 years after Gracie and Joe were initially caught together. They were colleagues at a pet store aged 36 and 13, respectively. They now have three kids, one (Piper Curda, The Flash) at college and twins (debutant Gabriel Chung and Somewhere in Queens' Elizabeth Yu) graduating high school, and have built a life after Gracie's prison sentence. Still residing in Savannah, Georgia, as they always have, she baked cakes and he's most passionate about raising monarch butterflies. There's a wariness over Elizabeth's project among the Yoos, but reassurance that this will be a sensitive take is also part of her time with her latest subject and her spouse. Make no mistake, because Haynes and Burch don't: for the role that she's hoping will elevate her beyond the TV series that she's best-known for, Elizabeth sees Gracie and Joe as mere source material. She interviews others, such as Gracie's first husband (DW Moffett, Monarch) and her eldest son from that marriage (Cory Michael Smith, Incomplete), each conversation saying as much about the actor as the woman she's set to bring to the screen. As rigorously rendered by Portman, she also becomes enamoured with the scenario that she's unfurling. A moment where Elizabeth loses herself explaining sex scenes to school kids — and the conflict between portraying pleasure and pretending not to actually feel pleasure — is savagely revealing. As Killers of the Flower Moon also does, this deeply astute movie has much to say about how circumstances like Joe's become sensationalised news and entertainment fodder, what that betrays about society and why people lap it up; add reflecting on its own existence and purpose to May December's many profoundly intelligent layers. When mirrors appear, they're frequently used around Gracie and Elizabeth. Of course, the latter is being a mirror herself. Cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt — Kelly Reichardt's regular collaborator; see: Showing Up, First Cow, Certain Women, Night Moves and Meek's Cutoff — visually recalls Ingmar Bergman's 1966 psychological drama Persona, as the movie in general does, as the lines between its two women start to blur. May December is partly a movie about what Gracie and Elizabeth spy when they're studying what's in front of them, and how divorced from reality both are. Gracie embraces a carefully erected fantasy where there's nothing more than love to her relationship with Joe, regardless of her domination over their household and repeated dissolving into tears in their bedroom. Elizabeth only takes in how she can become Gracie to her own advantage. Although Haynes and Blauvelt ensure that Moore and Portman are everywhere, neither of their characters will or can confront themselves or their manipulations. Finally challenging everything that's been his daily existence since he was a child, and the role that he's been inhabiting whether he truly wanted to or not — or was capable of making that decision at such a young age — is the shy Joe. The only word that fits: devastation. May December knows this before Joe accepts it, which campy lines about frankfurters on bread accompanied by dramatic music — the film adapts and reorchestrates the score from 1971 Palme d'Or-winner The Go-Between, in fact — oh-so-cannily play into. With its rich and meticulous visuals, tonal seesawing that can court laughs and welcome melodrama, and evocatively grand music, Haynes' feature isn't being erratic. It's crafted with shrewd understanding that discomfort is the only way to respond to what it's depicting, and that there's no one mood that suits. So, Haynes plunges May December and its audience into the full emotional spectrum. Consider the film a cocoon where transformation takes place, to soaring results.
If David Dastmalchian ever tires of acting, which will hopefully never happen, he'd make an entrancing late-night television host. He even has the audition tape for it: Late Night with the Devil. Of course, the star who earned his first movie credit on The Dark Knight, and has stood out in Blade Runner 2049, The Suicide Squad, Dune and the third season of Twin Peaks — plus Boston Strangler, The Boogeyman, Oppenheimer and Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter all in 2023 alone, alongside Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania — might be hoping for a less eerie and unsettling gig IRL. Dastmalchian is a fan of horror anchors, writing an article for Fangoria about them. Here, putting in a helluva can't-look-away performance, he plays one. That said, the namesake of Night Owls with Jack Delroy isn't meant to fit the mould so unnervingly, nor is the series that he's on. Delroy is a Johnny Carson rival — and, because Australian filmmakers Cameron and Colin Cairnes (100 Bloody Acres, Scare Campaign) write and direct Late Night with the Devil, he's also a Don Lane-type talent — who isn't afraid of embracing the supernatural on his live talk show. On Halloween in 1977, airing his usual special episode for the occasion, he decides to attempt to arrest the flagging ratings of what was once a smash by booking four attention-grabbing guests. What occurs when Delroy, who is grieving the loss of his actor wife Madeleine Piper (Georgina Haig, NCIS Sydney) a year earlier, shares the stage with not only a famous skeptic and a psychic, but also with a parapsychologist and a girl who is reportedly possessed? That might sound like the setup for a joke, but it's this new Aussie horror gem's captivating premise. To be precise, it's the contents of the October 31 instalment of Night Owls with Jack Delroy, with Late Night with the Devil posed as a documentary about the broadcast that includes the entire show itself. With Michael Ironside (BlackBerry) on narration duties, Delroy gets some backstory first, stepping through Piper's lung cancer diagnosis despite never having smoked, plus Delroy's own affiliation with exclusive and highly questionable Californian men's club The Grove. The 70s gets some context, too, digging into its climate of fear and mistrust post-Manson family murders, and the anger of the decade's reckoning with race relations and the Vietnam War — all reasons put forward to explain why variety entertainment offering pure escapism is having a moment. The fortunes of the series itself from gleaming to flailing are also charted, justifying going all-in on the occult for the Sweeps Week episode that "shocked a nation", as presented in full as found footage from a master tape interspliced with behind-the-scenes material. If you've seen one evening talk show — from then, now or in-between; whether hailing from the US or Australia (Late Night with the Devil was shot in Melbourne, but packages its content as purely American) — then you know the basic format. Delroy monologues and banters charismatically to begin, albeit with an inescapable sadness that he's endeavouring to plaster over with a smile and 'the show must go on' bravado. So, he starts bringing on his guests. Medium Christou (Fayssal Bazzi, Prosper) foresees that something sinister is about to be afoot. Professional cynic Carmichael "the Conjurer" Haig (Ian Bliss, Safe Home), who was once a magician, is all doubt. There to spruik her book Conversations with the Devil, about a girl who was offered up as a Satanic sacrifice by a cult but survived, Dr June Ross-Mitchell (Laura Gordon, Foe) is wary that her text's subject Lilly (Ingrid Torelli, Force of Nature: The Dry 2) isn't ready for the exposure. But with the kid supposedly afflicted with demonic possession, and so much at stake for Delroy and the show, no one is letting her remain off the air. When The Blair Witch Project made found footage a horror movie go-to 25 years back, sparking too many imitators — most generic and/or terrible — it didn't create the format. Indeed, the gimmick of unearthing tales from previous documents hadn't only been seen on-screen, but is engrained in iconic gothic horror novels Frankenstein and Dracula, both of which deploy correspondence to unfurl their stories. In the post-Blair Witch era, however, inventive and exciting screen uses of the tactic have become increasingly rare. Enter: the Cairnes brothers. The duo also give riffing on Martin Scorsese's 1982 satire The King of Comedy, which Joker did as well, a fresh spin. Late Night with the Devil is the best kind of pastiche: one that knows it, loves it, adores everything that it's drawing upon and is committed to never merely aping its inspirations (which also span Scanners, as Ironside's involvement helps reinforce — plus four-time Oscar-winner Network, which sports a fellow Aussie connection in British Australian actor Peter Finch). Watching the Halloween chaos of Night Owls with Jack Delroy in real time is a masterstroke: viewers have no alternative but to have the same experience that the show's audience, both in the studio and at home, did at the fateful broadcast — and that Delroy, his crew and guests all shared. Late Night with the Devil is constructed from a raft of equally clever decisions, the most pivotal of which is casting the hypnotic Dastmalchian. There's an Alan Partridge-esque air to the film and its protagonist, transported into literal horror rather than the horrors of cringe comedy, and with the same go-for-broke commitment that's always marked Steve Coogan's (The Reckoning) best-known character. Within the picture's sole setting — another savvy move — Dastmalchian owns the screen. He also grounds Late Night with the Devil's examination of the relationship between celebrity and the attention that mass media brings, aka the cult of personality; it might be easy to paint the price of fame as a Faustian bargain, but it works. A performance this perfect and an idea this brilliant receives the execution to match, making sitting down to the movie virtually a time machine. The look, the feel, the detailed production design (by Otello Stolfo, Aunty Donna's Coffee Cafe) and costuming (Steph Hooke, The Wheel), the era-specific cinematography (Matthew Temple, Gold Diggers) and editing (by the Cairnes siblings themselves) choices, the commitment to practical effects when the spookfest kicks in after a tense and patient build up: they all ensure that Late Night with the Devil plays like it truly has been newly discovered in a pile of forgotten tapes from decades and decades back. As it conjures up that sensation, this is Cairnes' best film yet, and a delight of a wild ride to watch in one of two ways: in a packed cinema where everyone reacts to its contents like they're in the studio with Delroy; and at home on the couch, glued to the tube like Night Owls with Jack Delroy devotees. Whichever suits, no one is switching off.
For much of the six years that a new Hayao Miyazaki movie has been on the way, little was known except that the legendary Japanese animator was breaking his retirement after 2013's The Wind Rises. But there was a tentative title: How Do You Live?. While that isn't the name that the film's English-language release sports, both the moniker — which remains in Japan — and the nebulousness otherwise help sum up the gorgeous and staggering The Boy and the Heron. They also apply to the Studio Ghibli's co-founder's filmography overall. When a director and screenwriter escapes into imaginative realms as much as Miyazaki does, thrusting young characters still defining who they are away from everything they know into strange and surreal worlds, they ask how people exist, weather the chaos and trauma that's whisked their way, and bounce between whatever normality they're lucky to cling to and life's relentless uncertainties and heartbreaks. Miyazaki has long pondered how to navigate the fact that so little while we breathe proves a constant, and gets The Boy and the Heron spirited away by the same train of thought while climbing a tower of deeply resonant feelings. How Do You Live? is also a 1937 book by Genzaburo Yoshino, which Miyazaki was given by his mother as a child, and also earns a mention in his 12th feature. The Boy and the Heron isn't an adaptation; rather, it's a musing on that query that's the product of a great artist looking back at his life and achievements, plus his losses. The official blurb uses the term "semi-autobiographical fantasy", an elegant way to describe a movie that feels so authentic, and so tied to its creator, even though he can't have charted his current protagonist's exact path. Parts of the story are drawn from his youth, but it wouldn't likely surprise any Studio Ghibli fan if Miyazaki had magically had his Chihiro, Mei and Satsuki, or Howl moment, somehow living an adventure from Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro or Howl's Moving Castle. What definitely won't astonish anyone is that grappling with conjuring up these rich worlds and processing reality is far from simple, even for someone of Miyazaki's indisputable creative genius. Brilliance fills The Boy and the Heron visually, with its lush and entrancing hand-drawn animation both earthy and dreamlike, and its colour palette an emotional mood ring. Being trapped between two states, domains, zones and orbits recurs here in as many ways as Miyazaki can layer in. This is a film with a raging wartime fire that haunts with its flames, plus a traditional countryside home rendered with such detail that viewers can be forgiven for thinking they could step right into it — and of a tunnel where floating bubbles called warawara wait to be born, pelicans lament the circle of life and masses of people-eating oversized parakeets demand to enforce order. It's also a movie where the titular bird looks as a grey heron should, then flips its beak back like a hoodie to show something less standard loitering. Said fish-eating wader and the eponymous boy frequently make a pair, but the former is also the latter's white rabbit: following the feathered figure does indeed make everything curiouser and curiouser. Voiced by The Days' Soma Santoki in the Japanese original and No Hard Feelings' Luca Padovan in the English-language dub that's needless for adults but helpful for young children, Mahito Maki starts The Boy and the Heron in Tokyo in 1943 during World War II. And so it is that 2023 delivers two Japanese icons, Studio Ghibli and Godzilla, each harking back eight decades to spin stories steeped in loss and pain that never stops whispering in hearts and minds. As heralded by air-raid sirens, bombings leave 11-year-old Mahito without his mother. For viewers, the tragedy sees Miyazaki nodding to his own mourning for Isao Takahata, his Ghibli co-founder, who died in 2018. Grave of the Fireflies, the studio's greatest film — amid fierce competition and many fellow masterpieces — is not only set during the same conflict but is mirrored by The Boy and the Heron's early moments. How do you live? By knowing what to grasp to, Takahata's old friend posits. The Boy and the Heron plays like a mix of reverie and memory, as it is, albeit with the second beaming through in emotional truths more than narrative facts. Miyazaki evacuated Tokyo in the war as a boy, however, as Mahito does when his father Shoichi (The Swarm's Takuya Kimura and Amsterdam's Christian Bale) has a new bride in his wife's younger sister Natsuko (Avalanche's Yoshino Kimura and The Creator's Gemma Chan). The change doesn't usher in a reprieve from the quiet and lonely kid's longing for his mum. Instead, it brings the talking heron (Don't Call It Mystery: The Movie's Masaki Suda and The Batman's Robert Pattinson) and everywhere that the creature leads. In a feature with more thoughtful touches than a seemingly endless flock of parrots has feathers, that Mahito's mother and aunt's family estate springs from a great uncle said to have gone mad from reading too many books is quite the inclusion. Stories defined that relative's world, then, which Miyazaki makes literal. After beginning patiently, Miyazaki also makes following Mahito a tumble down the rabbit hole for his audience. Always inventive as a storyteller and a visionary, the Laputa: Castle in the Sky, Kiki's Delivery Service, Princess Mononoke and Ponyo helmer and scribe's return to cinema keeps besting its spectacle while giving Studio Ghibli some of its most breathtaking images (as set to a score by Joe Hisaishi, who's been doing the honours for the director for four decades, of course). There's no such thing as merely a pretty, dazzling or radiant picture for the great animation house, though. As meticulously controlled as its work is during its creation, with animators sketching in every single thing that's seen, Ghibli is unparalleled in understanding the expressive nature of its chosen medium. In conveying how war, growing up, death, love, fear, isolation, sadness, yearning, belonging, standing out, connecting and just life is a whirlwind of confusion, Miyazaki not only lets his imagination take flight, but his flair. The Boy and the Heron can be as trippy as his company's output gets — and as emotionally raw. Since 1984's Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind, no one has made movies like Miyazaki, other than Takahata. As The Boy and the Heron sails through light and darkness, hope and horror, serendipity and choice, and alienation and acceptance, it also bobs and weaves through many of its filmmaker's trademarks, gleaning that the elements that can unite people and features alike can manifest in as many different ways as an ocean has waves. The pull to retreat then return is the same, whether for a director saying that he's retiring several times (including in 1997 and 2001, after Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, respectively) or a lost child desperate to flee his hurt and bewilderment. An extraordinary return, and a personal one, The Boy and the Heron isn't expected to be Miyazaki's latest movie now that he's back behind the camera, but it's also the awe-inspiring piece of alchemy that it is because of that history.
Bouncing across the screen with charm, energy and an 80s sheen, Air says one name often: Michael Jordan. This film spins an origin story so closely linked to the NBA all-timer that the true tale simply wouldn't and couldn't have happened without him; however, it isn't actually the six-time championship-winning former Chicago Bulls player's own. Instead, Ben Affleck turns director again for the first time since 2016's Live By Night to recount how Jordan also became an icon in the footwear game. Think shoes, and everyone knows the word that usually follows this flick's title. Think Air Jordans, and Nike also springs to mind. Those sneakers are still being made almost four decades after first hitting stories — in fact, the brand is now notching up $5 billion in annual revenue, $150 million of which is going to its namesake — so Air answers the question no one knew they had until now: how did it initially happen? Sports endorsement deals mightn't sound like compelling cinema, but neither did scouting, signing and trading in the right baseball players before Moneyball demonstrated otherwise. Working with a script by screenwriting first-timer Alex Convery — who is also one of Air's co-producers — Affleck turns the quest to sign a then just-drafted Jordan by a struggling shoe company into infectiously entertaining viewing. The actor and filmmaker might be nearly as famous for Sad Affleck and Bored Affleck as he is for movies, but he knows how to please a crowd. Forget his facial expressions when he's unhappy talking about Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice or being at the 2023 Grammys with Jennifer Lopez; as Argo demonstrated back in 2012 to the tune of three Academy Awards including Best Picture, behind-the-lens Affleck is a feel-good wiz with lively and irresistible true tales. Indeed, give the Good Will Hunting screenwriting Oscar-winner an IRL event filled with tension and twists, and populated by vivid characters, then get him to replay it smoothly and at a snappy pace (and with ample talk): that's now not just a one-off Affleck formula. He's been helming films since 2007's Gone Baby Gone. He's up to five now, and he's also starred in them all since 2010's The Town. Also featuring Matt Damon, Jason Bateman, Chris Messina, Viola Davis and Chris Tucker on-screen, Air is one of Affleck's own greats as a director. Even from just the trailer, it's easy to see that he's in Argo mode again — welcomely so, as the end product shows. Somehow, we're currently living through a golden time for genuinely engaging pictures about corporate manoeuvring that could've just been expensive ads in lesser hands; see also: recent streaming release Tetris, which also stacked the right blocks into place. Air similarly heads back to the 80s, to 1984, when Jordan was a 21-year-old college standout newly in the NBA and facing a life-changing decision. Damian Young (Prom Night Flex) plays the basketball GOAT, but this is a movie about the making of a legend — so the pivotal character gets all the flick's admiration and praise while bounding into the boardroom wheeling and dealing. Crucially, Air doesn't block out Jordan. Rather, it pays tribute to his talent even without staging on-court scenes, and to the shrewd wrangling and negotiating that his no-nonsense mother Deloris (Davis, The Woman King) did on his behalf. The ultimate outcome is clearly well-known, because if there was no agreement, there'd be no Air Jordans and therefore no movie (and the Beaverton, Oregon-based Nike would still be best known for jogging shoes). But the slam dunk this endorsement proved for giving athletes their financial dues when their talents make bank for sponsoring companies is no minor matter, and nor is it treated as such. Working for founder and CEO Phil Knight (Affleck, Deep Water) four years after Nike went public, in-house basketball expert Sonny Vaccaro (Damon, The Last Duel) really just has one job: find the footwear outfit the right NBA name to tie their fortunes to, help them seem cool among the basketball crowd and get customers a-buying. His colleague Rob Strasser (Bateman, Ozark) wants three players, thinking that the company is already priced out of the market on top draft picks — and unalluring due to their paltry share of the market compared to Adidas and Converse. The stakes are high, albeit not Argo-level life-or-death high. The word is that Nike's basketball division will be scrapped if the next endorsement deal doesn't deliver. So, Sonny makes a bold suggestion. Instead of a trio of ballers, he's all-in on Jordan, certain that he's the future of the game and about to be its biggest-ever star. The latter's manager David Falk (Messina, Call Jane) won't entertain the prospect, though, which is what leads Sonny to courting Michael's parents Deloris and James (Julius Tennon, also The Woman King, as well as Davis' real-life husband). Sonny is a gambler, detouring to Las Vegas when he's scoping out college up-and-comers. On Jordan, he bets big. And, although Affleck ticks all the boxes that helped Argo become the hit and award-winner it is, Air isn't afraid to take its own chances. There's zero risk in the movie's spot-on aesthetic, which cinematographer Robert Richardson (Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) roves over lovingly. (Commercials from the era are also spliced in). There's also no flukes in the period-appropriate soundtrack, which is as obvious as they come yet also still works. But Air is as much about what it means to leave a legacy and be remembered as it is about the ins and outs of teaming up Nike and Jordan — and crafting the kicks that became must-wear apparel (Hello Tomorrow!'s Matthew Maher plays designer Peter Moore) — a choice that might've been a long shot or even a miss if it didn't sail meaningfully but still breezily through the hoop. Actually, don't forget Affleck's facial expressions after all — he's having a blast on-screen as the grape-coloured Porsche-driving Knight, especially in his scenes with Damon. It's been more than a quarter-century since Good Will Hunting, that script collaboration and them apples, plus more than three decades since they were both in School Ties before that, and they remain a dynamic duo to watch simply bicker and banter. Including Tucker (Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk) as fellow Nike employee Howard White and Marlon Wayans (Respect) as George Raveling, a 1984 Olympics assistant coach when Jordan was first on the US team, Air's cast is a dream, but Davis unsurprisingly gives the swishest of performances. This is always a film about showing the money to the greatest to ever do it rather than just using him as a corporate asset, too, and in a movie that earns its audience's cheers, she's the face of that important battle.
Being careful what you wish for sits at the heart of most superhero movies. As advice for Spider-Man, Stan Lee even penned an oft-quoted adage about that very notion. Shazam! Fury of the Gods' caped crusaders all know that using their super skills wisely is a duty — yes, with great power comes great responsibility — and they're aware that doing just that comes with struggles. They aren't great at unleashing their magical talents, however, earning the nickname "the Philadelphia Fiascos". But the folks truly realising they should've been more cautious with their dreams are this Shazam! sequel's viewers. Another riff on Big, The Goonies, Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Ghostbusters in DC Extended Universe packaging like its 2019 predecessor sounds a heap better than the forgettable superheroes-versus-gods fare that's eventuated — a movie that isn't that fussed with the powers it has and sports zero responsibility for barely managing to be average. Shazam! Fury of the Gods hasn't completely moved on from nodding to beloved 80s flicks, though, or from referencing other films in general. Early on, it gives 'Holding Out for a Hero', which was originally recorded for the OG Footloose, a perfunctory spin. And, where the first Shazam! instalment was earnest and enthusiastic around all those winks and all that pilfering, this second effort uses E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial's Reese's Pieces product placement as a guide for shoehorning in a Skittles commercial. When it isn't having someone yell "taste the rainbow", it also likes name-dropping titles owned by Warner Bros, which owns DC Studios — or movies connected to its on- and off-screen players. So, in a picture that's about kids and teens transforming into spandex-wearing saviours when they say "shazam!", then fighting the mythical Daughters of Atlas, audiences are subjected to clunky, self-conscious Game of Thrones shoutouts and Fast and Furious gags (a dragon sparks the former, and star Helen Mirren and co-screenwriter Chris Morgan's experience with Vin Diesel's high-octane saga revs up the latter). Speaking of F&F, Shazam! Fury of the Gods also goes all-in on family — but Billy Batson (Asher Angel, High School Musical: The Musical — The Series) and his pals are too young to knock back Coronas. Also, Shazam! Fury of the Gods isn't much concerned with Billy in his normal guise, giving his Shazam self (Zachary Levi, Apollo 10 1/2: A Space Age Childhood) the bulk of the character's screentime. The time for origin stories has been and gone here, but largely ditching Angel robs this franchise-within-a-franchise of one of its main points of difference in the DCEU. None of the series' other flicks are about awkward adolescents learning to grapple with power, and understanding that their wildest dreams aren't as easy as they'd always hoped. Shazam! Fury of the Gods still manages to hit some of those notes thanks to a bigger focus on Billy's best friend and fellow foster kid Freddy Freeman (Jack Dylan Grazer, We Are Who We Are), a person with disability, but sidelining the teenager who turns into Shazam is clumsy and noticeable. Similarly plain as day from scene one: that Shazam! Fury of the Gods got as lucky as any superhero movie can with its new cast members. The film opens at the Acropolis Museum in Greece, where two of Atlas' offspring are determined to get back the Wizard's (Djimon Hounsou, Black Adam) broken staff and reclaim their dad's magic — and those two daughters, Hespera and Kalypso, come in the form of Mirren (1923) and Lucy Liu (Strange World). Despite splashing around the film's fondness for dim lighting and dull CGI early, this introductory sequence lets its big-name talents make more of an imprint standing around in their costumes and looking formidable than much that follows. Indeed, whenever Mirren and Liu are on-screen, and West Side Story's Rachel Zegler as well, Shazam! Fury of the Gods makes a case for pushing aside not just Billy, but Shazam and everyone else. This is still a Shazam! movie, of course, and not solely a vehicle for Mirren, Liu and Zegler to play goddesses and have fun. So, returning director David F Sandberg (Lights Out, Annabelle: Creation) and screenwriters Morgan (Fast & Furious Presents: Hobbs & Shaw) and Henry Gayden (Earth to Echo) have motions to go through. Cue Billy aka Shazam, Freddy aka Captain Everypower (Adam Brody, Fleishman Is in Trouble), and their foster siblings Eugene (Fresh Off the Boat's Ian Chen, then 13 Reasons Why's Ross Butler as a superhero), Pedro (Snowfall's Jovan Armand and From Dusk Till Dawn: The Series' DJ Cotrona), Darla (This Is Us' Faithe Herman and Harlem's Meagan Good) and Mary (Fall's Grace Caroline Currey as both versions of the character) trying to save Philly. And, in the process, cue their efforts to work out how to be careful with their fantastical abilities. Amid the bland jokes, The Avengers get a callout. Rather than being cheeky or funny, that quip among many flat quips acts as a glaring reminder that caped-crusader team-ups are oh-so familiar. Marvel's and DC's superhero franchises both include several, with Shazam! Fury of the Gods hardly distinguishing itself from any apart from its magic utterances. The pixel-frenzy battle scenes definitely don't dazzle, whether or not they involve Skittles. That said, some might've if the monster menagerie conjured up by Hespera and Kalypso had boasted a Ray Harryhausen-style approach. Yes, there's a lot of woulda, coulda, shoulda about the Shazam! films' second outing, which might be its last depending on what new DC Studios heads James Gunn (the director of The Suicide Squad) and Peter Safran (a producer on the same flick, and on this, the first Shazam! and Aquaman) summon up. New head honchos, new era: that's where the DCEU currently stands, with Gunn and Safran taking up their jobs in late 2022. Changes have sprung swiftly, including badging what'll come after 2023's The Flash, Blue Beetle and Aquaman and the Lost Kingdom as just the DC Universe. Henry Cavill has been scrapped as Superman, but the Man of Steel will get a new flick helmed by Gunn. Also, more Black Adam is off the cards. The Batman will score a sequel, but there'll also be a Batman who isn't played by Robert Pattinson (and not just because The Flash co-stars Ben Affleck and Michael Keaton). It's little wonder then that Shazam! Fury of the Gods doesn't just feel routine — rarely has a big-budget franchise entry felt like it matters less. At least it gave us Mirren, Liu and Zegler, a trio that everyone should wish for, livening up a by-the-numbers affair.
The City of Darebin is set to be transformed into a playground of creativity and performance, with multi-arts festival FUSE kicking off its next autumn instalment. Descending on streets, parks, venues and galleries across the inner-north region from Saturday, March 11–Sunday, March 26, it will once again serve up a sparkling program of music, art and more. Helping get the fest going on Sunday, March 12 at Edwardes Lake Park is Out of the Park Picnic — a free, creatively-charged celebration of culture hosted by Queen Acknowledgements, aka Natarsha Bamblett. You'll catch tunes by Emma Donovan, Dorsal Fins and DJ Jumps, and can even join in an interactive performance by African Star Dance. [caption id="attachment_892098" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Dorsal Fins, by Alexander Gow[/caption] Specially commissioned works will feature throughout the duration of the festival — including Delia Poon's photography exhibition Exquisite Bias, which explores locals' takes on the idea of cultural identity, and an imagination-fuelled interactive installation dubbed THINGAMABOBS. Two podcasts — Darker and The Future Leaders — will debut as part of FUSE, while on Sunday, March 19, Preston City Hall plays host to a Meet the Makers showcase, complete with food stalls, wine tastings and live tunes. The fun starts to wrap up on Saturday, March 25 with a huge closing fiesta at Northcote Theatre, featuring The Last Dance by arts organisation All the Queens Men. Expect a high-energy celebration of LGBTQIA+ folk and their allies, with a disco-fuelled soundtrack delivered by acts like Wendy Stapleton, Miss Katalyna, 2joocee and Nefertiti LaNegra. [caption id="attachment_892097" align="alignnone" width="1920"] The Last Dance[/caption]
Until Sunday, October 1, a trip to the Australian Centre for the Moving Image means exploring a stunning world-premiere exhibition dedicated to femininity across screen history. The Federation Square's Goddess: Power, Glamour, Rebellion is splashing affection for women in cinema and television across its walls and halls in a big way — via more than 150 original costumes, objects, artworks, props and sketches, all championing oh-so-many female-identifying talents and their impact. That's the spectacular showcase's daily setup; however, three times over its run, it's also welcoming in visitors when evening falls. Fancy spending a night at the film and TV museum revelling in everyone from Pam Grier and Margot Robbie to Michelle Yeoh and Zendaya? That's where Goddess Nights comes in on select Thursdays. Locked in for May 25, July 27 and September 28, this events program pairs after-hours access to the exhibition with food, drinks, and femme-focused music and performances. On the bill: DJ JNETT, CD, POOKIE and Ayebatonye to get the shindigs started; then DJ Kalyani, Komang and DJ Mothafunk come winter; and also Claddy, DJ Brown Suga Princess, GLO and C.FRIM B2B Mirasai when spring hits. Each party kicks off at 7pm, with the tunes echoing until 1am — and a curated range of cuisine and booze is being put together just for each evening. 3D motion artist Mikaela Stafford is also taking care of the events' lighting and visuals, so expect a festive mood. Images: Phoebe Powell.
David Attenborough's nature documentaries are acclaimed and beloved viewing, including when they're recreating dinosaurs. Family-friendly fare adores cute critters, especially if they're talking as in The Lion King and Paddington movies. The horror genre also loves pushing animals to the front, with The Birds and Jaws among its unsettling masterpieces. Earth's creatures great and small are all around us on-screen, and also off — but in EO, a donkey drama by Polish filmmaker Jerzy Skolimowski (11 Minutes), humanity barely cares. The people in this Oscar-nominated mule musing might watch movies about pets and beasts. They may have actively shared parts of their own lives existence the animal kingdom; some, albeit only a rare few, do attempt exactly that with this flick's grey-haired, white-spotted, wide-eyed namesake. But one of the tragedies at the heart of this astonishing adventure is also just a plain fact of life on this pale blue dot while homo sapiens reign supreme: that animals are everywhere all the time but hardly anyone notices. EO notices. Making his first film in seven years, and co-writing with his wife and producer Ewa Piaskowska (Essential Killing), Skolimowski demands that his audience pays attention. This is both an episodic slice-of-life portrait of EO the donkey's days and a glimpse of the world from his perspective — sometimes, the glowing and gorgeous cinematography by Michal Dymek (Wolf) takes in the Sardinian creature in all his braying, trotting, carrot-eating glory; sometimes, it takes on 'donkey vision', which is just as mesmerising to look at. Skolimowski gets inspiration from Robert Bresson's 1966 feature Au Hasard Balthazar, too, a movie that also follows the life of a hoofed, long-eared mammal. Like that French great, EO sees hardship much too often for its titular creature; however, even at its most heartbreaking, it also spies an innate, immutable circle of life. It's amid strobing red lights that EO makes his debut, and in the embrace and safekeeping of the doting Kasandra (Sandra Drzymalska, Mental) at a travelling Polish circus. They perform, but they're also the best of friends beyond the big top, a bond that she doesn't ever want to end. Alas, swiftly after EO starts, protests engulf the donkey's home, with animal-rights campaigners striking and the troupe's management going bankrupt. Sold off with the other critters, the mule will meet his gentle and kind human pal again, but the movie's tale from here has almost as many strands as EO's own tail — including as he traverses the Polish and Italian countryside, complete with stints at a horse stable, a farm, wandering free, avoiding hunters, maybe bringing good luck to a local football team, definitely enraging their opposition, being accompanied by a young priest and more. After EO's liberation, the change of scenery doesn't initially seem too troubling or taxing. His next abode gets a fancy opening ceremony with dignitaries cutting ribbons, and gifts him a bountiful carrot necklace — the literal kind. But when he's startled by horses and knocks over a display stacked with trophies, he's moved on. There, he's offered just one chunky vegetable and appears despondent. Next comes a reunion, an opportune escape, the forest by night, feuding soccer clubs and awful violence, plus an animal hospital, a fur factory, the meat trade, a lonely truck driver (Mateusz Kosciukiewicz, Magnesium), that man of the cloth (Lorenzo Zurzolo, Under the Amalfi Sun) and a countess (Isabelle Huppert, Mrs Harris Goes to Paris) in a red dress in an Italian mansion. EO is also seen by spiders, frogs, owls, foxes and a Black Mirror-style robot dog. He canters across landscape sometimes left in its natural state, and sometimes blighted by humanity's footprint. And, while moseying through a town, he stops to neigh at fish in an aquarium. As with everything in EO's frames, that moment of communion between mule and goldfish is visually and emotionally striking. It also says oh-so much about Skolimowski's determination to let his eponymous critter just be an animal — more than that, about his success at achieving that feat, and also why. Viewers can read into EO's staring towards the glassed-in fish, and his braying, as an exchange between different types of creatures controlled by humans. The audience can also take it as a comment on the cages that people place around the animal kingdom, and how rare it is for them to be free of such influence. Or, it can be observed as simply a donkey reacting randomly because that's what a donkey, and all life, often does. The broader movie itself operates in the same fashion. It serves up ebbs and flows where one thing happens, then another, then more still, while so clearly and movingly knowing that that's just how being alive goes, and also always witnessing how EO's story takes the path it does because of humanity's dominance over the natural world. EO might boast the incomparable Huppert among its cast, but its stars to whinny about are Tako, Hola, Marietta, Ettore, Rocco and Mela. Skolimowski thanked them each by name when the movie shared the 2022 Cannes Film Festival's Jury Prize — coming in only behind Palme d'Or-winner Triangle of Sadness, then Grand Prix-recipients Close and Stars at Noon — and the care and notice that the veteran Le Départ, Deep End and The Shout filmmaker gave on the Croisette to the six donkeys who play EO is mirrored on-screen. This wouldn't and couldn't be so emotive, immersive and absorbing a film as it is if it didn't truly bask in its mules' presence with pure affection. For the feature's 87 minutes, this is their world, and EO's. For that running time, viewers see EO's donkey protagonist as animals are so scarcely seen: as everything, no matter the good and bad turns that come their way, and the life-and-death course they chart as we all do; as heroes in their own story, too. As a piece of contemplation about the relationship between humans and life around us, EO also brings documentary Gunda to mind. It's just as revelatory and wrenching as that dialogue-free, black-and-white farmyard doco — but, as set to an ever-changing, sometimes-pulsating score by Paweł Mykietyn (a veteran of Skolimowski's 11 Minutes and Essential Killing), it firmly makes the most of its sounds and colours. Everything clashes and crashes around EO, hues, textures, noises, tunes, camera angles and vantage points among them. In one especially stunning scene with an entrancing beat, the donkey scampers through and observes the woodland, green lasers from gunsights beaming bright in the dark of night against the leafiness and its inhabitants. The effect is otherworldly, as is the entirety of this haunting and touching film as it peers at life so often ignored, undervalued and exploited on this very earth.
Does your version of celebrating whichever occasion takes your fancy involve eating more of the things you love? Do pork belly, chicken schnitzels, chicken wings and German sausages fall into that category? If so, The Bavarian has an all-you-can-eat special that'll tempt your tastebuds — because a bottomless feast is on the menu. On Wednesdays, the German-themed chain is serving up all-you-can-eat meat platters. They come stacked with all of the aforementioned meats — and yes, the pork belly includes crackling — plus sauerkraut and gravy as sides. And, once you've finished your board, you'll get a whole new serving. On All-You-Can-Meat Wednesdays, there's no time limit to your eating, so you can pace yourself — and it'll cost you $35 per person. There is a two-person minimum, however, so you'll need to take at least one meat-loving pal along with you. Feel like you can fit in fries, mash and salad as well? That'll cost you an extra $5 for each one, or you can get all three for $10. You'll find The Bavarian at Knox and Highpoint. And if you want to pair all that meat with German brews — which is understandable — you'll pay extra for the drinks.
It's a great time to be a fan of movies and musicals, and of films that make the all-singing, all-dancing leap to the stage in particular. Think of a beloved flick and odds are that someone has turned it into a theatre production — including Cruel Intentions, Moulin Rouge!, Back to the Future, Frozen, 9 to 5, The Wedding Singer, Bring It On, Shrek and more. We could keep naming movies that've earned the musical treatment — Muriel's Wedding, An American in Paris and Hairspray, plus Round the Twist in the future, for instance — but we all know that it's a long list. Here's another one: Freaky Friday, the body-swap story that started out as a novel, has been brought to cinema screens multiple times, and is now heading to Melbourne as a musical in September. Whether you loved the 1972 book by Mary Rodgers as a kid, or you've watched and rewatched 2003's Lindsay Lohan and Jamie Lee Curtis-starring flick too many times — or the 1976 Jodie Foster-starring first movie adaptation, and the 1995 remake with Gaby Hoffman as well — you'll want to make a date to visit Chapel Off Chapel from Thursday, September 8–Sunday, September 18. That's when newly launched musical theatre company Theatrical is putting on the Victorian premiere of Freaky Friday in its musical form, based on the Disney stage version that first debuted in the US in 2016. Fans will already know the story. Here, a teenager and her mother get a bigger taste of each other's lives than they ever imagined possible when they find themselves not only in each other's shoes, literally, but bodies as well. Indeed, even if you've only seen the horror spin, Freaky, from a couple of years back, you'll also know the main two things: body swapping, and chaos afterwards. In this stage version, the tale has been updated to today, as set in Chicago — and this time the teen finding out what it's like to be her mum is called Ellie, not Annabel (in the book and first two movies) or Anna (in the Lohan-Curtis version). In its musical form, Freaky Friday features music and lyrics by Tom Kitt and Brian Yorkey, aka the Pulitzer Prize-winning composers of If/THEN and Next to Normal. And, for its Melbourne run, Lyla Digrazia plays Ellie and Stephanie Powell plays Katherine, her mother.
Across four days in September, Melbourne's Kino Cinema will dedicate its screens to ten films from one country: Ireland. The reason? The return of the Irish Film Festival as an in-person event, after not one but two years of hosting sessions online — and, for its big cinematic return between Thursday, September 1–Sunday, September 4, it has quite the drawcard on its lineup. Box office Gaelic-language smash The Quiet Girl leads this year's program, after it initially takes to the city's big screens at the Melbourne International Film Festival — so if you miss it then, this is your next chance to see it. The tender 80s-set drama, about a soft-spoken nine-year-old (newcomer Catherine Clinch) who is sent to stay with relatives for the summer, has been breaking box office records for Irish-language movies in Ireland and in the UK. It was also just picked as the country's submission in the Best International Feature category at next year's Oscars, and hits IFF before its general Australian release. The rest of the festival's selection isn't short on highlights either, including opening-night documentary Steps Of Freedom, about Irish dance and its worldwide popularity — plus Let the Wrong One In, a vampire comedy that fittingly boasts Buffy the Vampire Slayer's Anthony Head among the cast. Or, there's Love Yourself Today, which focuses on Damien Dempsey's music; You Are Not My Mother, about a mother's disappearance from a North Dublin housing estate; and Redemption Of A Rogue, a black comedy about salvation. And, 1992 classic Into the West is also on the bill, with the magical-realist fantasy about a mysterious white stallion featuring a cast that includes Gabriel Byrne (Hereditary) and Brendan Gleeson (The Tragedy of Macbeth). IFF will also keep an online component to this year's fest, screening digitally from Friday, September 30–Sunday, October 16.
What do you get when you blend immersive performance with compelling storytelling and a diverse menu of home-cooked dishes? Well, you can taste the final product yourself, when Double Delicious hits the stage at Bunjil Place this month. Showing Friday, May 20–Saturday, May 21, Contemporary Asian Australian Performance's smash-hit production sees five performers share their stories via a unique mix of theatre and cooking. They'll each take you on a deep dive into their past and culture while whipping up a signature dish that's particularly meaningful to their personal identity. And yes, you'll get to taste their culinary creations, too. Among the lineup is Valerie Berry, who shares her defining childhood experience of moving from Manila to outback South Australia; and writer and media personality Benjamin Law, who delivers a humorous look at growing up on the Sunshine Coast as the son of immigrant parents. Tickets to Double Delicious come in at $70, which includes tastings of all five performers' dishes. [caption id="attachment_853904" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Heather Jeong, by Clare Hawley[/caption] Images: Clare Hawley
If you're the kind of beer lover who feels like they've tried every brew ever — or you've made it your mission to achieve that yeasty goal — then you're probably a big fan of the Great Australasian Beer Spectapular. For more than a decade now, since it started off as a Melbourne-only celebration of ales, lagers, ciders and more, the event has been serving up weird, wild, wonderful and inventive varieties, many of which are made exclusively for the booze-sipping shindig. In 2022, that's set to be the case once more, with the beer fest returning for a tour of Australia's east coast capitals in May. GABS is considered to be one of the best craft beer and cider festivals in the Asia Pacific region for good reason, and this year it has at least 120 of them, because that's how many brews will be on offer. Prepare to knock back beers inspired by breakfast foods, savoury snacks, desserts, cocktails and more when the event hits the Royal Exhibition Building, Melbourne, over the weekend of Friday, May 27–Sunday, May 29. Some of the foods and drinks that this year's GABS brews are taking their cues from: peanut butter, coffee, earl grey tea, chicken salt, pizza, fairy floss, bubblegum and sour gummi bears. Confirmed highlights include Brouhaha's Baked and Wasted, a sour which uses wasted baked goods; Capital Brewing Co's experimental Smooches, which pairs cocao nibs with a strawberry kick; Mismatch Brewing Co's We Love NY Cheesecake stout, in case you've ever wondered what cheesecake in a glass tastes like; and The Catchment Brewing Co's Ra Ra Raspoutine, another stout that, yes, is brewed from chips, cheese and gravy. The event surveys both Australian and New Zealand breweries, with more than 70 set to be pouring their wares in Melbourne. As well as the aforementioned outfits, this year they'll also include Balter, Range, Otherside, Black Hops, Ballistic, Your Mates, Mountain Culture, One Drop and Little Creatures, as well as Colonial, Mountain Goat and Bentspoke — and NZ's Garage Project and Panhead Custom Ale. Also on the bill: other types of tipples, including non-alcoholic beers, seltzers, whiskey, gin, cocktails and wines (including by 19 Crimes Snoop Dog Cali Red). GABS is known for dishing up a hefty lineup of activities to accompanying all that sipping, too, which'll span a silent disco, roaming bands, circus and sideshow performers, games and panels with industry leaders in 2022, as well as local food trucks and vendors to line your stomach.
Talented pooches have been barking their way to big screen stardom since the birth of the medium, and Cannes Film Festival even gives out awards for ace pupper performances. In Australia for a few years now, we also celebrate the intersection of canines and cinema — via our very own dog-themed movie showcase. At the Top Dog Film Festival, doggos and puppers cement their status as humanity's favourite film stars in a touring program of pooch-centric shorts. For more than two hours, dogs will leap across screens in a curated selection of heartwarming flicks about humanity's best friend. Over the last few years, the lineup has included films about dog-powered sports, dogs in space, dogs hiking through the desert, senior dogs and more. The festival hits Melbourne's Astor Theatre on Sunday, July 31 as part of its 2022 run, and rushing after tickets the way your best four-legged friend rushes after a frisbee is recommended. Given how much we all love watching dog videos online, not to mention attending pupper-centric shindigs in general, this event is certain to be popular. You'd be barking mad to miss it, obviously.
This month, students from near and far are invited to celebrate the contribution international students make to the city at the inaugural Melbourne International Student Week. The week-long festival kicks off with a bumper opening weekend on May 7 and 8 at Federation Square, featuring an array of food, live entertainment and giveaways. The festival officially begins with a Welcome to Country and dance showcase by the Djirri Djirri dance group — Wurundjeri's only female dance company — while the two-day program at Fed Square also includes stand-up comedy by Annie Louey and He Huang, DJ sets, an international student photo exhibition and interactive salsa and K-pop dance workshops. You'll be able to stay fuelled with eats from a spread of international food trucks, free coffee and a dumpling giveaway — there'll be 1000 serves up for grabs — taking place on Saturday. Speaking of giveaways, there will also be 800 free hoodies given out at random times all weekend long. The weekend will be the start of a stacked week of events for Melbourne's international students, who can join wildlife sanctuary tours, museum tours and career coaching workshops and more. The best part? All events are free. Melbourne International Student Week kicks off on Saturday, May 7 with a two-day event at Federation Square. For more details and to see the full lineup, head to the website.
Twenty-six years ago, "do you like scary movies?" stopped being just an ordinary question. Posed by a wrong-number caller who happened to be a ghostface-masked killer with a fondness for kitchen knives, it was the snappiest and savviest line in one of the 90s' biggest horror films — a feature filled with snappy and savvy lines, too — and it's now one of cinema's iconic pieces of dialogue. It also perfectly summarised Scream's whole reason for being. The franchise-starting slasher flick didn't just like scary movies, though. It was one, plus a winking, nudging comedy, and it gleefully worshipped at the altar of all horror films that came before it. Wes Craven helmed plenty of those frightening features prior to Scream, so the A Nightmare on Elm Street and The Hills Have Eyes director was well-equipped to splash around love for the genre like his villain splashed around entrails — and to eagerly and happily satirise all of horror's well-known tropes in the stab-happy process. If you've seen the 1996 film or its three sequels till now, you've bathed in all that scary movie affection. You might've gleaned the horror basics from their rules and references; the OG film even had its characters watch Halloween and borrows the 70s classic's stellar score for key scenes. Geeking out over spooky cinema is the franchise's main personality trait, to the point that it has its own saga-within-a-saga, aka the Stab movies, and its fifth entry — also just called Scream — wouldn't dream of making that over. The famous question gets asked, obviously. Debates rage about the genre, enough other horror films are name-checked to fill a weekend-long movie marathon, cliches get skewered and dissected, and there's a Psycho-style shower scene. 'Elevated' horror standouts The Babadook, It Follows, The Witch and Hereditary earn a shoutout as well, but Scream itself just might be an elevator horror flick. It isn't set in one, but it crams in so much scary movie love that it always feels like it's stopping every few moments to let its nods and nerding-out disembark. In other words, you'd really best answer Scream's go-to query with the heartiest yes possible, and also like watching people keep nattering about all things horror. Taking over from Craven, who also directed 1997's Scream 2, 2000's Scream 3 and 2011's Scream 4 but died in 2015, Ready or Not's Matt Bettinelli-Olpin and Tyler Gillett task their next generation of slasher fodder with showing their devotion with all the subtlety of a masked murderer who can't stop taunting their prey. It's playful, irreverent, loving and meta but also overdone, even as the film has something savage to say about internet-era fandom and its non-stop demands (especially with big, popular and ongoing franchises like this). A little too often, the new Scream resembles chatting to that one person at a party who won't stop going on about the sole thing they adore, even if you love it with equal passion. One of those cinephile titbits that gets mentioned over and over: that the film considers itself a requel, aka a flick that keeps the same context as its predecessors — same timeline, same world and some legacy characters, too — but introduces fresh faces to give the original a remake. So it is that this Scream dispatches Ghostface upon today's Woodsboro high schoolers, because the fictional spot is up there with Sunnydale and Twin Peaks on the list of places that are flat-out hellish for teens. Scream 4 did the same, but the first new attack by the saga's killer is designed to lure home someone who's left town. Sam Carpenter (Melissa Barrera, In the Heights) hightailed it the moment she was old enough, fleeing a family secret, but is beckoned back when her sister Tara (Jenna Ortega, You) receives the feature's opening "do you like scary movies?" call. Soon, bodies are piling up, Ghostface gives Woodsboro that grim sense of deja vu again, and Tara's friends — including the horror film-obsessed Mindy (Jasmin Savoy Brown, Yellowjackets), her twin Chad (Mason Gooding, Love, Victor), his girlfriend Liv (Sonia Ammar, Jappeloup), and other pals Wes (Dylan Minnette, 13 Reasons Why) and Amber (Mikey Madison, Better Things) — are trying to both survive while basically cycling through the OG feature again, complete with a crucial location, and sleuth out the culprit using their scary movie knowledge. Everyone's a suspect, including Sam herself and her out-of-towner boyfriend Richie (Jack Quaid, The Boys), and also the begrudging resident expert on this exact situation: ex-sheriff Dewey Riley (David Arquette, Spree). The latter is the reason that morning show host Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox, Cougar Town) and initial Ghostface target Sidney Prescott (Skyscraper) make the trip back to Woodsboro again as well. Working with a script by Murder Mystery's James Vanderbilt and Ready or Not's Guy Busick, Bettinelli-Olpin and Gillett are in familiar territory several times over — their ace last release was all about attempting to outwit disturbed murderers, too — and they're well-aware that their audience knows it. "I've seen this movie before," Sidney slyly comments in one pivotal scene, which is this Scream's most telling moment. Just like the thin line between intriguing and unhinged in all those gravelly-voiced phone chats, the line between fun and repetitive is oh-so-slight here. Because this kind of sequel is currently Hollywood's favourite thing, Scream splits the difference between Ghostbusters: Afterlife and The Matrix Resurrections; it's never anywhere near as dull and grating as the first, but it's not as smart and ambitious as the second, either. It is gloriously gory, though. Blood, like horror movie references, flows thick and fast. Indeed, Scream 2022 is at its best when it's doing two things: staging those teased-out kills with stylish flair, which is where the flick's self-referential obsession gets its finest time to shine, and taking another slice at its three franchise mainstays' stories. Sidney and co are supporting players this time, as per requel rules, but they're the callbacks that are worth the price of admission over the Stab chatter and obligatory 'Red Right Hand' needle-drop. The new cast members put in a fair effort — Barrera and Savoy Brown especially; both have had a killer on-screen past 12 months anyway — but the bulk of the movie's first-timers always feel too disposable. Yes, this slasher sequel falls victim to unshakeable tropes far more than it successfully subverts them. It's still mostly entertaining enough, and the franchise had endured other average-at-best chapters (see: Scream 3 and Scream 4); however, looking self-satisfiedly backwards instead of leaping forwards, it's basically running up the stairs when it should be heading out the front door.
When Hollywood's biggest awards can run for 93 years and only give two female filmmakers its Best Director gong in that entire time so far, it's clear that gender diversity hasn't been big on the cinema industry's priorities for most of the last century. But for six years now, the Melbourne Women in Film Festival has been doing its part to celebrate women in film, as its name makes plain — and it's back for 2022 both in-person and online. The mixed format means that Melburnians can head along to ACMI from Thursday, February 10–Monday, February 14, while folks elsewhere — or those in Melbourne who can't make it physically — can watch along at home. On the bill, cinephiles will find a showcase of movies that champion female-guided on-screen comedy, a topic that'll also echo through the fest's conversations and skills-development programs. Screening highlights include short Groundhog Night, about a dad caring for his daughter with disability; 2018 Tropfest entry Paper Cut, which plays with gender experiences; and closing night's Love and Other Catastrophes, the 1996 indie classic starring Frances O'Connor and Radha Mitchell. Among the talks and workshops lineup, The Culture of Comedy will dive into using the genre to unite creatives and viewers from different backgrounds, while Creating Comedy Online will provide tips for women looking to make a digital splash by making viewers laugh.
Western Sydney could use a love letter right now, and that tribute arrives in Here Out West. The product of eight up-and-coming screenwriters from the area, it celebrates a place that has spent much of the past year garnering attention for a reason no one wanted: thanks to the tighter rules applied to the region during Sydney's four-month stretch of stay-at-home conditions in 2021, it was home to New South Wales' strictest lockdown of the pandemic to-date. Thankfully, COVID-19 isn't this movie's focus. Instead, as told in nine languages — Arabic, Bengali, Cantonese, Kurdish, Tagalog, Turkish, Vietnamese, Spanish and English — and helmed by five female filmmakers, Here Out West dwells in everyday lives. It champions by seeing and recognising, and by trumpeting voices that have always been there but are infrequently given a microphone. Of course, as thoughtful and meaningful as Here Out West is — and as welcome a move it makes with sincere multicultural representation in Australia — it really shouldn't stand out as much as it does. There shouldn't have needed to be a concerted effort to champion western Sydney voices to make a film like this. It shouldn't grab attention as a rarity, either, and it shouldn't feel so timely because of the events of the last 12 months. Here Out West does all of these things because it's an outlier in Australia's homegrown filmic output, but it also clearly makes a case that's already apparent and inherent anyway: that presenting more than just the stereotypical image of Australia, and opting for a genuine picture of the country as it actually is instead, should always be the baseline and status quo. Opening shots of suburban houses and looping highways set the scene: viewers aren't journeying to an Aussie beach or the nation's parched outback expanse, aka two of the prevailing visions of this sunburnt, sea-girt continent on-screen. Rather, Here Out West unfurls its octet of intertwined vignettes in spaces far more ordinary — not to downplay the importance of surveying western Sydney, but to clearly note that these are its daily playgrounds. It's here that mothers have babies, neighbours look after the kids next door, grandmothers worry about their grandchildren, dads struggle to connect with their sons, and sport and food are among the ways that people come together. It's here that adults bicker among themselves over love, and with their parents about their futures. It's where lives begin and end, and where folks with dreams both big and modest also try to start anew. And yes, all of these scenarios are covered by the film's narrative. Initially, Here Out West spends time with Nancy (Geneviève Lemon, The Tourist), who takes care of her eight-year-old neighbour Amirah (debutant Mia-Lore Bayeh), but wasn't actually planning to help out today. She has a newborn granddaughter to meet — one that the authorities are planning to take away, so Nancy makes a drastic decision that'll ripple throughout the community across the movie's one-day timeframe. In the film's second segment, hospital carpark security guard Jorge (fellow first-timer Christian Ravello) is brought into the wider story, and also gets a snapshot chapter of his own. His instalment then intersects with friends Rashid (Rahel Romahn, Moon Rock for Monday), Dino (Thuso Lekwape, Book Week) and Robi (Arka Das, Babyteeth), who run through the streets arguing about Rashid's cousin. Next, their section links in with Ashmita (Leah Vandenberg, The Hunting) and her dying Bengali-speaking father back at the local hospital. Returning to specific spots comes with territory, because it comes with living anywhere; paths cross, people are drawn to the same busy and central locations, and some facilities — such as Here Out West's pivotal hospital — are always a hive of activity in any community. That truth continues to drive the film as it meets Kurdish refugees Keko (De Lovan Zandy) and Xoxe (Befrin Axtjärn Jackson), who are hoping to make a new beginning that still involves his penchant for music and her skills hand-weaving carpets, before jumping to Tuan (Khoi Trinh) and his brother Andy (Brandon Nguyen), who possess varying ideas about what it means to be Vietnamese Australian. Then comes a glimpse at nurse Roxanne's (Christine Milo, It's a Cult!) day as she works a double shift and misses her family in The Philippines. And, there's also Winnie (Gabrielle Chan, Hungry Ghosts) and Angel (Jing-Xuan Chan, Neighbours) as the mother and daughter close their Chinese restaurant for the last time. The common threads linking Here Out West's chapters are the ties that bind everyone: family, place and hope. But writers Nisrine Amine, Das (who acts as well as pens his section of the film), Bina Bhattacharya, Matias Bolla, Claire Cao, Dee Dogan, Vonne Patiag and Tien Tran find their own takes on the movie's common elements, sometimes by drawing from experience — and, unsurprisingly, the feature frequently feels personal. That sensation connects each of the picture's segments, too, with every section peering intimately at western Sydney residents, their lives and their emotions, and showing both the specific and the universal in the process. That isn't a revolutionary overall approach, and has long made so many stories strike a chord on pages, stages and screens, but the way that Here Out West uses such sparks of recognition is equally astute and moving. As directed by feature first-timers Fadia Abboud, Lucy Gaffy and Julie Kalceff, as well as the more seasoned Ana Kokkinos (Blessed) and Leah Purcell (The Drover's Wife The Legend of Molly Johnson), Here Out West also charts a route that most anthologies do — because not every part matches the last or next. Each of its eight vignettes bring engaging people to the screen, and function as perceptively drawn character studies, but there's more to some than others. That's as fitting as the movie's naturalistically shot look, however, because that too reflects the reality that Here Out West so determinedly channels. Some tales are slight, others are immense and plenty sit in-between, but in this powerful, authentic, diversity-celebrating ode to western Sydney, they're all worth telling and sharing.
Describing a dance and a state of uncertainty alike, limbo is one of those always-intriguing words. Many terms boast multiple meanings, but this one skirts two ends of the spectrum — the party-fuelled joy of a parade of people trying to pass under a bar while bending over backwards, and the malaise of being stuck waiting and not knowing. Both require a degree of flexibility, though, to either complete physical feats or weather the fickleness of life (or, in limbo's religious usage, of being caught in an oblivion between heaven and hell). It's no wonder then that British writer/director Ben Sharrock chose the word for his second feature, following 2015's Pikadero. His Limbo lingers in a realm where men are made to contort themselves, biding one's time anticipating a decision is the status quo and feeling like you've been left in a void is inescapable. The fancy footsteps here are of the jumping-through-hoops kind, as Limbo ponders a revelatory question: what happens when refugees are sent to a Scottish island to await the results of their asylum applications? There's zero doubting how telling the movie's moniker is; for Syrian musician Omar (Amir El-Masry, Star Wars: Episode IX — The Rise of Skywalker) and his fellow new arrivals to Scotland, there's little to do in this emptiness between the past and the future but wait, sit at the bus stop, check out the children's playground and loiter near the pay phone. That, and navigate the wide range of reactions from the locals, which veer from offensive to thoughtful. Everything about the situation demands that Omar and his companions make all the expected moves, but it also forces them to potter around in purgatory and stomach whatever is thrown at them to do so. In Omar's case, he's made the trip with an actual case — physically, that is, thanks to his prized possession. He's brought his grandfather's oud with him, which he rarely lets slip from his grasp, and so he feels its weight where he goes. It's a canny part of Limbo's script in two ways. Whatever they're fleeing in search of a better life, every refugee has a case to be welcomed into safer lands that they carry around with them, but Sharrock manifests the idea in a tangible sense. With Omar's musical dreams, which the beloved oud also represents, in limbo as well, the ever-present instrument additionally acts as a constant reminder of the sacrifices that asylum seekers make in leaving their homes, even when there's no other option, and the costs they pay when they're met with less-than-open arms, then left waiting for their new existence to begin. Just as the term limbo means so much, so does that oud — and so does the feature it's in. A film can be heartbreaking, tender, insightful and amusing all at once, and Limbo is indeed all of those things. It's both dreamlike and lived-in, too, a blend that suits its title and story — and also the mental and emotional state shared by Omar and his other asylum seekers as they eke out their hope and resilience day after unchanging day, all while roaming and roving around an island that may as well be another world. The Scottish landscape around them looks like it could grace a postcard, and Sharrock has cinematographer Nick Cooke (Make Up) box it into an almost-square frame to make it resemble vacation snaps. That choice of 1.33:1 aspect ratio also confines the movie's characters in another fashion, of course, offering a blatant visual flipside to the holiday-perfect splendour; being trapped anywhere is bleak, even if it appears picturesque. Omar has company in his misery: in the run-down house he's installed into, Afghani Farhad (Vikash Bhai, Hanna) is more optimistic, while Abedi (Kwabena Ansah, Enterprice) from Ghana and Wasef (Ola Orebiyi, Cherry) from Nigeria wait the wait with them. The biggest events in their routines come via talks by Helga (Sidse Babett Knudsen, The Translators) and Boris (Kenneth Collard, Fanny Lye Deliver'd), government officials, about appropriate behaviour and 'cultural awareness' in the fresh lives they haven't get been given permission to start. If hell is other people, as Jean-Paul Sartre coined, limbo is being told what to do by other people while lacking the means and opportunity to do it. A film can be both heavy and light simultaneously as well, which is another of Limbo's strengths, with every dose of biting truth counterbalanced by a wry streak. Sharrock sees both seriousness and levity in his narrative, his characters and their plights, and recognises the nightmarish and the beautiful in tandem. Obviously, the latter especially applies to the feature's aforementioned haunting cinematography, which lenses a place that keeps Omar pals physically in limbo with a probing eye, but it also ruminates on the small delights. Limbo is a film about people first and foremost, and also spies the solace they bring each other — and the catharsis they find when they need to, including when they're so far from home, not really by choice, and endeavour to find themselves a new one. In a movie that's witty and perceptive, affectionate and poignant, and unwavering and clear-eyed, the tonal seesaw that Sharrock rides and perfects is just that: perfection. Trauma, racism and punishment by bureaucracy sit beside friendship, Freddie Mercury obsessions and binge-watching Friends; yes, whether Ross and Rachel were on a break comes up. Limbo's casting is perfection also, because so much hangs upon El-Masry's ability to convey the whirlwind of emotions torturing Omar inside. He's trying to reconcile where he's stuck now with what he's left, and watching him fight that battle — in scenes where he's calling home to talk to his mother especially — epitomises the film at its most moving. That's the movie overall, too, lingering as it is between knowing what's right, best, smart and safe, and wanting what the heart wants when blighted by pain and dreariness. Limbo is a feature about coping with that dance, and it's something to willingly dwell on.
There are a few different ways you could celebrate the start of summer. But if you fancy ringing in the new season with a couple of glasses of something fruity, fizzy and free, then there's just one place for you to be. This Thursday, December 1, the good folk at Moon Dog are treating fans to the ultimate summer starter — free serves of its Fizzer alcoholic seltzer varieties. Roll into either the OG Abbotsford digs (17 Duke Street, Abbotsford) or Moon Dog World (32 Chifley Drive, Preston) on that first day of summer with a BYO vessel in tow, and you can have it filled for free with takeaway Fizzer poured fresh from the taps. You can bring along any old drinking vessel you fancy, be it a watering can, water bottle or heck, even a hollowed-out upside-down pineapple — but keep in mind they'll only fill it up to 1140 millimetres. You'll also want to make sure your container of choice is clean, and water-tight to avoid any nasty leaks. And, as a special treat for anyone with especially big ideas, there's a whole slab of Tropical Crush Fizzer up for grabs for the punter with the most creative vessel at each venue. BYO Cup Day kicks off at Moon Dog World from 12pm and at Moon Dog OG from 4pm.
A new day-long, picnic-style music fest will take over Hanging Rock on Sunday, November 27, with the clear focus of showcasing and highlighting First Nations artists and performers. And First & Forever's jam-packed lineup, hand-picked by Briggs (with a thank you to Paul Kelly), features everyone from Baker Boy, Jessica Mauboy and Thelma Plum, through to Christine Anu, Sycco, Alice Skye, Busby Marou, Ziggy Ramo and Barkaa. In fact, there are more than 20 acts on the bill, spanning a whole range of genres and showcasing big-name talent alongside emerging stars. King Stingray, Budjerah, Dan Sultan, Electric Fields, Emma Donovan...the list goes on and on. [caption id="attachment_862591" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Electric Fields, by Morgan Sette[/caption] The specific Hanging Rock venue has been named The Gathering Place for the event, acknowledging the people of the Dja Wurrung, Taungurung and Wurundjeri Woi Wurrung who have long met there, and also the power of Country. What's more, First & Forever is paying tribute to the late Archie Roach by dubbing its sole stage the 'Uncle Archie Stage'. This contemporary celebration of Blak excellence in music and culture comes courtesy of Mushroom Group, the Victorian Government and Bad Apples Music. [caption id="attachment_872292" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Thelma Plum, by Georgia Wallace[/caption] Top Image: Sycco
We all know that the Mornington Peninsula is home to stunning natural wonders and hidden gems, but let's not forget about its booming industry of local talent. Packed with artists, designers and sustainable entrepreneurs, as well as brewers and winemakers, the Peninsula is a place ripe with creativity. To showcase this talent, Stoker Studio is bringing back its giant Design & Drink Market this month, showcasing creative talent and craft bevvies. [caption id="attachment_850818" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Kerri Greens Winery[/caption] Head along to Stoker Studio on Saturday, November 12 and you'll discover all that area has to offer in terms of small-batch and sustainable products, as well as local cheeses, craft beverages and artisanal spirits. A plethora of stallholders will be there to tempt your wallet, including textiles from Sundance Studio, wine from Kerri Greens and wares from Kate Bowman Ceramics. If you're using it as a chance to get a jump on your Christmas shopping, there will be a handy gift-wrapping station available. You can also expect live music and great vibes suitable for the whole family (including the pups). The market will run from 10am–4pm, and attendees are asked to come with some spare change — as entry is via gold coin donation, with the proceeds going to Jimmy's Youth Wellbeing Centre. Top images: Sundance Studio and Kate Bowman Ceramics - Supplied
UPDATE, December 16, 2022: Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths screens in Australian cinemas from Thursday, November 17, and streams via Netflix from Friday, December 16. Everyone wants to be the person at the party that the dance floor revolves around, and life in general as well, or so Alejandro González Iñárritu contends in Bardo, False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths. In one of the film's many spectacularly shot scenes — with the dual Best Director Oscar-winning Birdman and The Revenant helmer benefiting from astonishing lensing by Armageddon Time cinematographer Darius Khondji — the camera swirls and twirls around Silverio Gama (Daniel Giménez Cacho, Memoria), the movie's protagonist, making him the only person that matters in a heaving crowd. Isolated vocals from David Bowie's 'Let's Dance' boom, and with all the more power without music behind them, echoing as if they're only singing to Silverio. Iñárritu is right: everyone does want a moment like this. Amid the intoxicating visuals and vibe, he's also right that such instances are fleeting. And, across his sprawling and surreal 159-minute flick, he's right that such basking glory and lose-yourself-to-dance bliss can never be as fulfilling as anyone wants. That sequence comes partway through Bardo, one of several that stun through sheer beauty and atmosphere, and that Iñárritu layers with the disappointment of being himself. Everyone wants to be the filmmaker with all the fame and success, breaking records, winning prestigious awards and conquering Hollywood, he also contends. Alas, when you're this Mexican director, that isn't as joyous or uncomplicated an experience as it sounds. On-screen, his blatant alter ego is a feted documentarian rather than a helmer of prized fiction. He's a rare Latino recipient of a coveted accolade, one of Bardo's anchoring events. He's known to make ambitious works with hefty titles — False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths is both the IRL movie's subtitle and the name of Silverio's last project — and he's been largely based in the US for decades. Yes, parallels abound. While dubbing Bardo as semi-autobiographical is one of the easiest ways to describe it, simplicity isn't one of its truths, even if the film champions the small things in life as existential essentials. Another easy way to outline Bardo: Silverio faces his choices, regrets and achievements as that shiny trophy looms, and ponders where his career has taken him, who it's made him and what that all means to him. From the filmmaker who first earned attention for telling narratives in a fractured, multi-part fashion (see: his debut Amores Perros, plus 21 Grams and Babel), and lately has loved roving and roaming cinematography that unfurls in the lengthiest of takes (see: Birdman and The Revenant), this was never going to be a straightforward affair, though. And so he weaves and wanders, and has the silver-haired Silverio do the same, while weighing up what's brought them both to this point. Bardo opens by visibly recalling Birdman, with a bounding force casting a shadow upon an arid land, but it's an early glimpse at a house from above that encapsulates Iñárritu's approach best. The home initially resembles a miniature, which Silverio then flits through — and, given its lead often segues between places and times like he's stepping through a doorway, the movie functions in the same manner. Sometimes, he's in a hospital corridor as his wife Lucía (Griselda Siciliani, The People Upstairs) gives birth to a baby boy who whispers that the world is too broken for him to want to live in, and is then pushed back into the womb. Or, he's picturing how a big TV interview with a bitter ex-colleague could go wrong, or shrinking down to childhood size to chat with his deceased father. Sometimes, Silverio is in Los Angeles holding a bag of axolotls, or striding through Mexico City streets that are empty except for corpses. Elsewhere in Bardo, Silverio has an argument with a US Customs Agent about whether he can say he lives in America, as part of the feature's interrogation of what it means to straddle two countries. But, he also refuses to fight when the family's housekeeper isn't allowed to join them at a swanky resort, with the film carving into its protagonist's contradictions. Also popping up: Silverio and Lucía's twentysomething daughter Camila (Ximena Lamadrid, On the Rocks) and teenage son Lorenzo (first-timer Íker Sánchez Solano), who are similarly tussling with the chasm between their heritage and the nation they've mostly called home, in the movie's multigenerational flourish. And, Bardo includes a recreation of the Mexican-American War, albeit with a brass band; a conversation with Aztec Empire-toppling Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés; and news reports about Amazon buying Baja California, as approved by the US Government. As ideas to unpack, enforced control over Mexico and willingly giving up ownership of one's Mexican identity never stray far from the picture's gaze. A film can deeply contemplate weighty topics, personal and universal alike, and be told with rampant self-indulgence. Bardo is one such movie. Its best moments pull its audience into the frame emotionally and psychologically, and into Silverio's shoes, but it's also meandering and blighted by distance. Iñárritu isn't alone in trying to understand who he is by excavating his own story, of course. 'Tis the time for it, as James Gray has also done with Armageddon Time, Paul Thomas Anderson with Licorice Pizza, Kenneth Branagh with Belfast, and fellow Mexican filmmaker and two-time Best Director Oscar-winner Alfonso Cuarón with Roma. Iñárritu's first movie in the seven years since The Revenant, and his first set and shot in Mexico in more than two decades since Amores Perros, Bardo stands out by imagining its guiding force now looking back, rather than just looking back itself — and by veering so sharply between overdone and brilliant. Thankfully, whether Bardo is at its trippiest or laying its thoughts and feelings bare — nodding to Federico Fellini's 8 1/2 and Paolo Sorrentino's The Great Beauty no matter what fits — Giménez Cacho demands attention. In a performance that's never a case of an actor flattering his director, self-critical sadness radiates from his eyes as Silverio processes his trauma, plus confidence and ambition when he's wading through applause and acclaim. He's electric in that standout party scene, and thorny and tender when the feature calls for either, all seamlessly. Bardo doesn't want to be a seamless movie overall, though. It wants to gyrate, drift and whirl, and for that sensation to sweep up its audience like a man cutting loose at a shindig in his honour. It also wants to ruminate on battles internal and external, and jostle its viewers in every direction like a man conflicted. It does both and, as its title references, it loiters and lingers. Top image: SeoJu Park/Netflix © 2022
When King Richard III was killed in battle in the 15th century, did anyone wonder about a public holiday? Given the era and its working conditions, likely not. There's also the hardly minor fact that the monarch was slain by the forces of Henry Tudor, who promptly became England's ruler, so downing tools for a day of mourning probably wasn't a priority. The world has a frame of reference for grieving a British sovereign, though, and recently. When Queen Elizabeth II died in September 2022, pomp and ceremony reigned supreme. Dramatising the discovery of Richard III's remains, The Lost King wasn't made with the queen's passing in mind. Actually, it world-premiered a day afterwards. But the Stephen Frears (Victoria & Abdul)-directed, Steve Coogan- and Jeff Pope (Philomena)-scripted drama benefits from audiences knowing what's done now when whoever wears the crown is farewelled. The Lost King isn't about chasing a parade, pageantry, and a day off work for the masses in Britain and further afield. Charting the true tale of Richard III's location and exhumation 527 years after he breathed his last breath, it follows a quest for recognition and respect. When the film opens, Philippa Langley (Sally Hawkins, The Phantom of the Open) wants it for herself, as a woman over 40 overlooked for a promotion at work in favour of a younger, less-experienced colleague — and as someone with a medical condition, myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome, who's too easily dismissed due to her health. She's also newly separated from her husband John (Coogan, This Time with Alan Partridge), adding to her unappreciated feelings. It's no wonder that Richard III's plight catches her interest thanks to a production of Shakespeare's Richard III, aka one of the reasons that the king was long seen as a hunchbacked villain. Swiftly an amateur historian, Philippa objects to the characterisation of the last Plantagenet sovereign as monstrous, a usurper and a murderer, and the connection between this dim standing in the annals of history and being a person with a purported disability. As she researches via piles of books, zoom chats and the Richard III Society, aka the Ricardians, she questions what's fact and fiction — not just due to Shakespeare, but also Tudor propaganda from five centuries earlier. Arguing the case, including with dismissive academics, is one thing; however, taking on the search to find the monarch's long-lost skeleton is another. It's a two birds, one stone situation in The Lost King's neat screenplay: restore the denigrated ruler's reputation and put his remnants to rest, and show Philippa's own naysayers — or even just herself — what she can achieve. Yes, she follows a hunch. Yes, there's an obligatory gag about it British cinema loves an everyperson taking on the establishment, and underdogs in general. The past two years have also delivered The Dig and The Duke, after all. The first chronicled another extraordinary find by someone not deemed an expert, and the second delighted in its working-class protagonist's antics with Goya's Portrait of the Duke of Wellington — and, in a case of tonal seesawing, The Lost King recalls both. There's clearly a fascinating IRL story behind this flick, which ripples with intrigue whether or not you already know the details (or you've merely seen the trailer, which spells everything out). There's also a tussle between positioning the film as a bit of a caper and something more serious. Having Philippa see Richard III (Harry Lloyd, Brave New World) — being haunted by the play's version of him and talking to him, in fact — wavers between the two moods depending on the scene. Buried within The Lost King is a sense that Frears, Coogan and Pope — who all collaborated on Philomena, too — aren't always sure how they want the movie to land with audiences. They're patently keen for it to inspire rousing support for everyone who's ever been downplayed, cast aside or ignored, including for their gender and health. They're eager for the same emotions to spark up for anyone ever saddled with a pre-judged narrative about themselves that isn't accurate, as both Richard III and Philippa are, as well. And yet, there's also an air of not quite trusting that the true tale being relayed innately evokes those responses. It does, so everything feels simplified and smoothed out here, given too many quirks and rendered a tad cartoonish. Also noticeable: using the contemptuous academics as easy adversaries, perhaps as conveniently as Shakespeare is said to have demonised Richard III. Getting angry at seeing Philippa pushed aside and underestimated again and again is easy, but so is spotting how The Lost King itself is constructing its story. Thankfully, Frears does trust in Hawkins, the feature's MVP alongside its real-life details (and an on-screen treasure in everything from Happy-Go-Lucky and Submarine to The Shape of Water and the Paddington movies). The two-time Oscar-nominee serves up a winning, earnest and relatable blend of vulnerability, warmth, curiosity and determination, plus the kind of persistence that arises when someone has spent too long being forced to fight just to be seen, let alone valued. Indeed, even when The Lost King is at its slickest and most straightforward — or when it inexplicably focuses on whether John will get a new car — she's its anchor and heart. With Philomena in 2013, The Lost King's key creative trio also unearthed the past. As they do now, they similarly told of addressing secrets and redressing wrongs. And, they centred on a mature woman, enlisted a phenomenal leading lady to play the part, gave Coogan a prime role and set it all to an emphatic Alexandre Desplat (Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio) score. There's no doubting why their latest collaboration has a formulaic feel to it, then, despite the intriguing slice of history it brings to the screen. No one needs the type of intuition that guided Philippa to the Adult Social Services department's car park in Leicester, to a space marked 'R' for reserved, to spy those parallels. No one needs as much force and fantasy as The Lost King deploys, either, to understand that this is a rare and meaningful tale that's told with all the subtlety of the world's latest royal goodbye — so, very little. Richard III and Queen Elizabeth II's deaths mightn't have much in common but, via this still engaging-enough film, they do share that.
Open up your eager eyes, Melbourne: The Killers are headed our way. The Las Vegas-born rockers will hit up a heap of arenas Down Under to cap off 2022, and destiny is calling you to Rod Laver Arena on Tuesday, December 13 and Wednesday, December 14. Given the band's lengthy back catalogue, Brandon Flowers and company won't just be playing 'Mr Brightside' on repeat, but will be making a hot fuss over plenty of their hits — including tracks from their 2020 album Imploding the Mirage. The tour is named after that record, even though they released another one, Pressure Machine, in 2021. That's what happens when live gigs get put on hold during a pandemic, clearly. [caption id="attachment_831494" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Raph_PH via Wikimedia Commons[/caption] Remember: somebody told you that you'll be dancing along to 'Somebody Told Me', 'Smile Like You Mean It', 'When You Were Young', 'Bones', 'Human' and 'The Man' as well. Fancy seeing The Killers in a winery instead? They're also playing A Day on the Green show in Geelong.
So, you used up all your good present ideas on Christmas and now you're stuck on what to get your loved one for that fast-approaching annual celebration of romance? Fear not, Molly Rose is here to guide you with its Be My Valentine Market, which is popping up at the Collingwood brewery on Sunday, February 12. Two days out from Valentine's Day, it'll be brimming with nifty gifting options — but hey, also plenty of goodies to treat your own damn self with, too. We're talking choccies from Mörk and Planet Cocoa, sweet-smelling mists and oils from Happy Society, TRIKL's statement candles and a whole range of wares courtesy of Preston Apothecary. The team from Young Aunties Haus (founded by the minds behind Gammin Threads and Haus of Dizzy) will be slinging creations of their own, and you'll find accessories for all tastes gracing the stalls of Yuria, Sacreflux and SGS Jewellery. The market is dedicated entirely to local makers and creatives, which is a big win for conscious shoppers. And of course, the bar will be open and pouring a stack of Molly Rose brews right throughout the afternoon. [caption id="attachment_807467" align="alignnone" width="1920"] Amanda Santamaria[/caption]
On Sunday, December 3, Hecho en Mexico turns ten. And to celebrate, the crew at 16 Victoria venues (that's all its locations except for Ringwood) will be slinging $10 margaritas throughout the day. But if you want to take it up a notch, the flagship Fitzroy restaurant is throwing a much bigger birthday bash. On top of the $10 margs deal, all dishes and other cocktails will also be priced at $10. This includes all the big main meals, from nachos and burritos to paella and fajitas platters. And this isn't just for a tiny time window, either. The deal is available from 12pm–10pm, so you can spend your whole Sunday sipping on cocktails and feasting on Mexican eats at bargain prices. Adding to the festivities, the team has organised a mariachi band to play live tunes and will also be giving away bottles of tequila, dine-in vouchers and some Hecho merch.
After shutting down over the cooler months, The Craft & Co's distillery and brewery in Preston is finally reopening to the public on Saturday, November 18. To celebrate, the crew will be giving away 1,000 free pots of draught beer across the opening weekend. And this isn't just your stock standard lager or pilsner. Punters can sample something from the whole range — from Japanese rice lagers to hazy pales, sours and more. You can't just rock up on the day, so make sure you register for a free ticket ahead of the weekend. Once you've nabbed your free pot, stick around to sample a few more brews from the Craft & Co range, and have a hit of table tennis by the barrels. The brewery and distillery will also launch its new kitchen during the weekend, serving up woodfired pizzas and a selection of share plates for the first time since opening last year. Get around sticky pork belly bites, salt and pepper squid, mixed mushroom arancini and truffle parmesan fries — all top accompaniments with hoppy brews. Beers aren't the only bevs on the menu; for the opening weekend there'll be a heap of specials on their own spirits and cocktails too. Craft & Co will be serving up free beers on Saturday, November 18 and Sunday, November 19 at its brewery and distillery on 96 Chifley Drive, Preston. To nab the free pot of beer, secure your ticket from the venue's website beforehand.
For most, there isn't much in Alice Walker's Pulitzer Prize-winning 1982 novel The Color Purple that screams for the musical spin. Broadway still came calling. On the page, this tale always featured a jazz and blues singer as a key character. When it initially reached the screen in 1985 with Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans) directing, it also worked in an anthem that earned an Oscar nomination and has been much-covered since; Quincy Jones composed the film's score and produced the movie. But if the idea of lavish song-and-dance numbers peppered throughout such a bleak account of incest, rape, domestic abuse, racism, injustice, violence and poverty feels like hitting a wrong note, claims otherwise keep springing. First arrived 2005's Tony-winning stage adaptation, then 2015's also-awarded revival. Now, joining the ranks of books that became movies, then musicals, then musical movies just like the new Mean Girls, a second feature brings Walker's story to cinemas — this time with belted-out ballads and toe-tapping tunes. With each take, The Color Purple's narrative has predominantly remained the same as when it first hit bookshelves, crushing woe, infuriating prejudice and rampant inequity included. Musicals don't have to be cheery, but how does so much brutality give rise to anything but mournful songs? The answer here: by leaning into the rural Georgia-set tale's embrace of hope, resilience and self-discovery. Ghanaian director Blitz Bazawule follows up co-helming Beyoncé's Black Is King by heroing empowerment and emancipation in his version of The Color Purple — and while the film that results can't completely avoid an awkward tonal balance, it's easy to see the meaning behind its striving for a brighter outlook. When what its characters go through as Black women in America's south in the early 20th century is so unsparing, welcoming wherever light can pierce the gloom is a human reaction, and how Celie (American Idol-winner Fantasia Barrino in her feature film debut) copes. Although the sun streams, there's little that's merry about The Color Purple's protagonist's existence when the latest movie begins, or afterwards. On her second pregnancy to her bullying father Alfonso (Deon Cole, Black-ish), who sees her as mere property, the teen Celie (fellow first-timer Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, who was a writer on Grease: Rise of the Pink Ladies) knows that this baby will be snatched from her again. But at least she has her sister Nettie (Halle Bailey, The Little Mermaid) to dote on, cling to and protect — until she doesn't. Celie is traded to farmer Mister (Colman Domingo, Rustin) for a cow and a couple of eggs, after he asks for Nettie. The younger sibling soon comes knocking on the door after Celie is burdened with cooking, cleaning, mothering his existing kids and weathering more abuse; however, the sisters are forced apart when Mister still can't get what he wants. Heartbreak is The Color Purple's baseline: over Celie's abhorrent treatment by her dad, and then by Mister; at two girls with nothing else to rely on being torn so cruelly from each other; and at the onslaught of pain that keeps streaming, and widely. With Sofia (Oscar-nominee Danielle Brooks, Peacemaker), the wife of Mister's son Harpo (Corey Hawkins, Dracula: Voyage of the Demeter), Celie meets someone who is unapologetic about her place in the world — even in such a harsh and discriminatory world — only for the xenophobic use of the law to cut her down. With aforementioned crooner Shug Avery (Taraji P Henson, Abbott Elementary), who Mister would prefer to have by his side, she finds more than a push towards self-confidence, a true confidant and friendship; alas, happiness in any form is so frequently fleeting. This Marcus Gardley (I'm a Virgo)-penned The Color Purple might package its championing of persistence and sisterhood with emotion-dripping songs, but it still shares much with its big-screen predecessor beyond its plot. Many holdovers come via personnel. Spielberg and Jones return, both as producers. Oprah Winfrey does the same, swapping from playing Sofia in her acting debut the first time around, which earned her both Academy Award and Golden Globe nominations. Another of the original movie's key cast members pops up for a cameo appearance. Also a blatant commonality: that film iterations of this story continue to tamp down The Color Purple's queer romance. 'What About Love?', a duet between Celie and Shug, is a dreamy picture-stealer. As Shug helps Celie to finally value her own desires, Barrino and Henson make a glowing pair. There's passion in their rousing relationship — but if 2024 isn't the time to make their love more than a footnote, then when? Alongside getting audiences yearning for more of Celie and Shug together, that standout tune epitomises a facet of the film that's evident from the very moment that anyone starts singing: this is a stagey production. When musical numbers are pitched as lively escapist fantasies, which isn't rare, Bazawule appears to be making the choice purposefully. Again, although it doesn't always go as smoothly as planned, the reasoning tracks. For Celie and Sofia in particular, finding ways to persevere through everything that they endure, and to retain or regain any sense of spirit, means confronting big emotions. And just as it does in a theatre rather than a cinema, The Color Purple as a musical goes big when those feelings are released through song. (The movie also gets overly enthusiastic with its editing, which proved the case when Jon Poll took on the same role on The Greatest Showman as well.) Even when the exuberant tone doesn't land and emphasising the sets is clunky, Bazawule has compiled an exceptional cast. Barrino and Brooks reprise their turns from the stage, with considerable tasks following in Whoopi Goldberg (Harlem) and Oprah's footsteps — but their expressive performances, which make everything that courses through both Celie and Sofia ripple from the screen, are each rich, raw and resonant. Henson is entrancingly sultry and fierce as Shug, Bailey caring and determined as Nettie, Domingo monstrous but damaged as Mister and Hawkins accommodating as Harpo. Louis Gossett Jr (Kingdom Business) and Jon Batiste (an Academy Award-winner for Soul's score) also make an impression in small parts. This lineup of talent is reason enough to have The Color Purple flicker and echo as a movie musical. And when this reclamation of a grim tale shines brightest, it shines in the same way that Celie's life eventually does: through the right company.
If you're into high-class desserts and free stuff, head down to Atlas Dining on Tuesday, September 5, because you can score free s'mores by hatted chef Charlie Carrington. And if that's not enough to entice you, Atlas is sweetening the deal by giving away free Vodka Cruiser cocktails (if you're over 18). To mark the launch of its new premix cocktails, Vodka Cruiser has teamed up with Carrington — Atlas Dining's Head Chef — to create a range of canned meals to pair with its new canned cocktails. The star of the show? A twist on the traditional classic, transforming the s'more from a standard campfire staple into something "fancy-ish" — bringing together preserved raspberry, rosewater marshmallows and Dutch chocolate. The dish is designed to match the new Vodka Cruiser Raspberry Cosmopolitan and, of course, it comes in a can. You'll want to be quick though, as only the first 100 people to head to Atlas Dining after 12pm will be able to claim a free s'more (and a free cocktail from the new range). Other flavours include Passionfruit Daiquiri and Lime Margarita, created to invoke flavours of the Caribbean and Mexico, respectively. So, make sure to leave a blank space in your schedule around midday. It's not every day you get to try a fancy canned delight from a hatted chef. Pair that with a free Vodka Cruiser, and you've got yourself quite the Tuesday arvo.
What's more terrifying than standing out at high school? It Lives Inside scares up an answer. Here, fitting in with the popular kids has haunting costs — literally — as Indian American teen Samidha (Megan Suri, Never Have I Ever) discovers. Her story starts as all memorable movies should: with a sight that's rarely seen on-screen. While beauty routines are familiar-enough film fodder, watching Sam shave her arms, then use skin tone-lightening filters on her photos, instantly demonstrates the lengths that she's going to for schoolyard approval. Among the white girls that she now calls friends, she also prefers to go by Sam. At home, she's increasingly hesitant to speak Hindi with her parents Inesh (Vik Sahay, Lodge 49) and Poorna (Neeru Bajwa, Criminal). And when it comes to preparing for and celebrating the Hindu ritual of puja, Sam would rather be elsewhere with Russ (Gage Marsh, Big Sky), the boy that she's keen on. It Lives Inside's frights don't spring from razors and social media, or from shortened names and superficial classmates; however, each one underscores how far that Sam is moving away from her heritage. Worse: they indicate how eagerly she's willing to leave her culture behind, too, a decision that's affected her childhood bond with Tamira (Mohana Krishnan, The Summer I Turned Pretty). As their school's only students with Indian backgrounds, they were once happily inseparable. Now Sam considers Tamira a walking reminder of everything that she's trying to scrub from her American identity. Keeping to herself — skulking around clutching a jar filled with a strange black substance, and virtually hiding behind her unbrushed hair — the latter has become the class outcast. So, when she asks Sam for help, of course no is the answer. Making his feature debut after a sizeable list of shorts —and winning SXSW Austin's 2023 Audience Award in its Midnighters section with the unsettling results — writer/director Bishal Dutta loads It Lives Inside's early moments with gnawing unease. Everything that Sam is putting herself through doesn't sit cosily, nor is it meant to. Distress has been eating away at Tamira as well, as her horrified stare everywhere that Sam looks constantly makes plain. Wild and wide eyes shaped by fear and uncertainty may be one of this genre's staples, but Krishnan sports a perfectly petrified pair of peepers as she pleas for assistance. After Sam smashes the ever-grasped canister in anger, annoyance and disbelief, letting out the flesh-eating demonic entity inside, Suri joins in with her own frequently aghast eyeballs. Casting Get Out's Betty Gabriel as a concerned teacher at Sam and Tamira's school savvily reinforces what audiences can quickly spot with In Lives Inside: this is a social thriller just like Jordan Peele's Oscar-winner (and also Us and Nope), plus everything from Sorry to Bother You and Parasite. Here, with a moniker and a central stalking force that also brings It Follows to mind, cues similarly taken from The Babadook, plus high-school humiliation that'd do Carrie proud, it's the pressure to eschew one's roots to blend in that scores the horror treatment. The supernatural presence doing the spooking is a Pishacha, which hail from Hindu and Buddhist folklore — and, as it feeds on negative vibes, its targets aren't random. Indeed, in painting a portrait of the pains that accompany being caught between the traditions of your parents' homeland and the daily reality of the only place you've ever known and its homogenous demands, Dutta gets his movie sinking its teeth in. There's no doubting that It Lives Inside's feature filmmaking first-timer is a student of scary movies: conventions from English-language frightfests spanning decades keep peeking through. Accordingly, the plot co-penned by Dutta with Ashish Mehta (Hush Hush) does inescapably feel like plenty of other flicks, complete with being set in a Spielbergian-esque town. This film loves splashing around red hues to get nightmarish as well, and peering intently at everyone quivering in Pishacha's presence. Using alarmed and startled people on-screen to evoke the same sensations in viewers might be one of the simplest tricks in the book, but it works: empathy is one helluva horror-movie tool. Dutta understands that, and also how powerful it is to witness Sam being so visibly shaken by being trapped between her background and the Americanised ideal that she's decided is her future. Also working swimmingly: Suri and Krishnan, who both make expressive horror stars (as, given Dutta's affection for close-ups, they need to). When Tamira disappears, forcing Sam to take her otherworldly mythology tale and its life-and-death manifestation seriously, Suri keeps adding weight to It Lives Inside's layered emotional journey. Trying to erase your heritage because you think that's the only option and then grappling with what that truly means aren't easy things to deal with, with or without confronting a monster. While many of the movie's most potent moments don't involve the Pishacha in the frame, Suri sells it all — the angst, the facade, coping with her supposed pals thinking that speaking another language is cute, the frustration over her mum's disapproval and choices since moving stateside, the realisations, and the terror and panic all included. It Lives Inside isn't without its own chilling visual touches, though; proving that hinting works better than showing, one early altercation with the picture's boogeyman gives Dutta an instant resume highlight. And, that it's the situation and its significance rather than the actual murderous beast that lingers is 100-percent by design. Musing about immigration, displacement and conformity, and joining the ranks of culturally specific horror such as Under the Shadow and The Vigil, this is a tense and thoughtful film — even if it too, like Sam, is torn between two realms. Thankfully, the meaning that lives inside It Lives Inside gives freshness to a movie that knows it's working with a formula; filtering US teen horror through the Indian American experience is also one of Dutta's clear quests.
Everyone has a favourite kind of cocktail — and if yours is the good ol' trusty tipple that is the old fashioned, November is your time to shine. Every year, Woodford Reserve hosts Old Fashioned Week, which is about putting the brand's booze to work in a classic concoction. In 2023, it runs from Saturday, November 4–Saturday, November 18. Hailing from the alcohol label and showcasing one specific type of drink, the fest is popping up at more than 40 bars across Australia, including ten in Melbourne. Even better: there's a complimentary Woodford Reserve old fashioned up for grabs for everyone. To claim your sip, you will need to head to the event's website, enter your details, then activate your voucher when you're in one of the participating watering holes. Your places to hit up: Good Heavens, Roy Hammond, Grainery and The Carlton, as well as The Botanical Hotel, Black Kite Commune and Manchuria. The list also includes Mongkok Tea House, Mazo 128 and Strato. And, of course, whether you're drinking your free beverage or not, old fashioneds are firmly on the menu. Good Heavens images: Chip Mooney.
Whether or not Noora Niasari was ever explicitly told to write what she knew, the Iranian Australian filmmaker has taken that advice to heart. Her mother listened to the same guidance first, even if it was never spoken to her, either. The latter penned a memoir that has gone unpublished, but helped form the basis of the powerful and affecting Shayda. This account of a mum and her daughter attempting to start anew in a women's shelter doesn't entirely stick to the facts that writer/director Niasari and her mother lived through. The Sundance-premiering, Melbourne International Film Festival-opening, Oscar-contending feature — it's Australia's entry for Best International Feature Film at the 2024 Academy Awards — isn't afraid to fictionalise details in search of the best screen story. Still, the tale that's told of courage, resilience, rebuilding lives and finding a new community is deeply and patently personal. Perhaps even better, it's inescapably authentic. Add Shayda to the list of recent features that couldn't be more moving while flickering across the screen like they're projections of a memory. Aftersun, Past Lives and now this Melbourne-shot and -based effort sport not only that sensation but also that look. None closely visually resemble any of the others, and yet each plays like a window into their directors' histories. What a glorious trend that cinema is enjoying right now: films made by helmers grappling with and sharing their own stories, all crafted by feature first-timers and each hailing from female directors as well. A fourth movie bonded by the same elements is on its way in How to Have Sex, and may more follow. Also magnificent: how so much connects Aftersun, Past Lives, How to Have Sex and Shayda in spirit and origin, and yet each is its own exceptional film. In Shayda's case, Niasari peers back at being barely of primary-school age and making a new home. Fleeing to a women's shelter is the only option that the film's eponymous figure (Zar Amir Ebrahimi, 2022's Cannes Best Actress-winner for Holy Spider) has to get away from the abusive Hossein (Osamah Sami, Savage River), whose controlling nature is matched by that of their patriarchal culture. So, Shayda leaves with six-year-old Mona (debutant Selina Zahednia). As she waits for her divorce proceedings to go through — a complicated task under Iranian law and customs — she seeks refuge at a secret site overseen by the caring Joyce (Leah Purcell, The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart). Even surrounded by kindness and filled with desperation for a better future, every iota of Shayda's decision is fraught and tense; Niasari starts the film with Mona at an airport being told what to do if she's ever there with her father, should he try to take her not only away from her mum but also back to Iran. Exceptional French domestic thriller Custody also chronicled the difficulties faced by a woman striving to break free from a dissolving and dysfunctional marriage, including for her safety and that of her children. The setting varied, as did the cultural context. It wasn't additionally a picture about displacement, as Shayda is; however, it too rippled with anxiety and intensity that dripped from the screen. Niasari's film sees the terror and the trauma, as well as the infuriating bureaucracy that makes an already-distressing situation even more upsetting. It shreds nerves as Hossein receives unsupervised visitations with Mona, and simply as its namesake literally makes her way through the world with the fear of her husband's threatening presence always lurking over her shoulder. Again, this is a feature packed with been-there-seen-that minutiae, and made to echo from the screen with that very air. Shayda spies hope just as clearly, though. Someone endeavouring to spark a new existence half a world away from everything they've ever known has to possess that feeling, which the movie never loses sight of. Neither does cinematographer Sherwin Akbarzadeh (The Giants), who lenses a lived-in, closed-in but also visibly warm film — plus a fluidly shot feature, and yet one that knows how meaningful it is to sit in the moment. Accordingly, hope keeps lingering as Niasari's on-screen surrogate for her mum makes the utmost that she can of living with Joyce and fellow women needing a safe space, and as she fights for Mona, battles for independence and reclaims her agency, too. It's there as she still ensures that Farsi, Persian dance and celebrating Nowruz, or Persian New Year, remain entwined in her daughter's upbringing. Shayda isn't merely hoping for a brand-new way forward; she's doing everything that she can to be herself again, which still means cherishing her background and passing on its traditions. Among the talented women attached to this Sundance Audience Award recipient — emerging victorious in 2023's festival's World Cinema — Dramatic competition — Cate Blanchett is the best globally known name. The Tár and The New Boy actor executive produces, lending the kind of attention that her involvement can give a debut feature, but Shayda belongs to filmmaking star-on-the-rise Niasari, plus the always-wonderful Ebrahimi and fresh discovery Zahednia. With the film arriving so closely with Aftersun, Past Lives and How to Have Sex, it might seem as if making a movie that's so ripped from the heart and soul is easy, although that's unquestionably not true. Another thing that all four features have in common: they feel effortless to watch, but also like the product of hard, meticulous, all-in work. Here's one more: they also make something so personal resonate universally. With Shayda, conveying the fact that Shayda and Mona's plight sadly isn't unique is a clear but never heartstring-tugging aim. That Ebrahimi plays Niasari's lead so soon after winning Cannes' top acting prize is a pure stroke of lucky timing, with casting happening before that accolade. She would've been marvellous without the gong on her mantle already, of course — and marvellous she is. Quiet power shimmers in Shayda's strongest moments. Determination simmers silently even when the character is at her most fragile. Being resolute and being vulnerable aren't positioned as opposites in her devastatingly multi-layered performance. First-timer Zahednia is a find and also just as understated as Ebrahimi; their pairing as mother and daughter is a dream. Not that Shayda skimps on dialogue, but words aren't often needed thanks to their potent portrayals, including to see the world through Shayda and Mona's eyes.
It couldn't have been hard to cast Pete Davidson as a stoner in Dumb Money, but getting the Bupkis star playing a part that barely feels like a part on paper is perfect in this ripped-from-the-headlines film. He doesn't give the movie's top performance, which goes to lead Paul Dano (The Fabelmans), but he's satisfyingly great as the DoorDash driver who's often trolling his brother online and in-person. He's also an example in Cruella and I, Tonya director Craig Gillespie's entertaining feature of one of the ideas that this true tale heartily disproves. Viewers know what they're going to get from Davidson, and he delivers. Wall Street thought it knew what it was in for when small-time investors splashed their cash on stock for US video-game store chain GameStop, too, but the frenzy that resulted demonstrated otherwise. It was in 2019 IRL when DeepFuckingValue aka Roaring Kitty aka Keith Gill first posted on subreddit r/wallstreetbets that he'd bought stock in GameStop, the Texas-born brand that had been struggling but he thought was undervalued. Dumb Money tells this story from Keith's digital enthusiasm through to the impact upon the financial markets, plus the worldwide attention that followed. In 2021, the GameStop situation wasn't just news. It was a phenomenon, and one of the great modern-day David-versus-Goliath scenarios. There's a reason that this recent chapter of history been turned into a movie, and not just because it's an easy candidate to try to emulate The Big Short: the big end of town kept pulling its usual strings, the 99 percent played their own game instead and the status quo was upended — temporarily. Amid its array of memes, news clips and TikTok snippets, Dumb Money meets Keith in the pandemic, where empty commutes to his industry gig contrast with netizens hanging on his virtual chatter. As the hachimaki-wearing, beer-sipping Roaring Kitty, the Bostonian YouTuber streams from his basement, talking about how "Wall Street gets it wrong all the time" — and why GameSpot might be one of those instances. His wife Caroline (Shailene Woodley, Robots) is already supportive, and viewers and forum posters begin to agree. Enter a motley crew of characters all snapping up stock: Pittsburgh nurse and single mother Jenny (America Ferrera, Barbie) dreams of being able to comfortably take care of her children, Austin college students Riri (Myha'la Herrold, Black Mirror) and Harmony (Talia Ryder, Do Revenge) have tuition to pay, and Detroit GameStop worker Marcos (Anthony Ramos, Transformers: Rise of the Beasts) sports bigger ambitions than toeing the corporate line enforced by his by-the-book boss Brad (Dane DeHaan, Oppenheimer). Keith, Jenny and company comprise Dumb Money's titular term: it's what amateur individual investors are dubbed. On the supposedly "smart money" side sit the wealthy who want to get even wealthier. Hedge fund cronies Gabe Plotkin (Seth Rogen, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Mutant Mayhem), Steve Cohen (Vincent D'Onofrio, Godfather of Harlem) and Kenneth C Griffin (Nick Offerman, The Last of Us) are all spliced into the pacy narrative from luxurious abodes — Miami mansions, well-appointed offices and country clubs — while looking like money as well as living and breathing it. With GameStop, they're aiming to make more by betting the other way. They'll profit as shares fall, which Roaring Kitty, his acolytes and their efforts to drive up the price to cash in themselves threaten. Also in the slick-and-sweating camp are Vlad Tenev (Sebastian Stan, Sharper) and Baiju Bhatt (Rushi Kota, Never Have I Ever), creators of trading platform Robinhood, which is touted as a democratising advance and widely used by GameStop stock devotees, then shifts its allegiances. Rogen, Stan and Australian filmmaker Gillespe collaborated on Pam & Tommy, which also took a slice of actuality, broke down the details, unpacked the chaos and served it up engagingly. It was an underdog tale as well — not by splitting its time between its eponymous celebrities and the folks who leaked their sex tape, but because Pamela Anderson's fight to be seen as more than a sex symbol beat at its centre. Here, the hierarchy is straightforward. There's no doubting who's battling and who already possesses the power, although an off-screen tidbit does cast a shadow over the anti-establishment push, emphasising that money talks no matter what. Among the film's executive producers are Tyler and Cameron Winklevoss, the investors famous for being portrayed by Armie Hammer in The Social Network, plus everything that movie covered about their involvement in Facebook's early days. Penned by Orange Is the New Black alumni Lauren Schuker Blum and Rebecca Angelo, adapting Ben Mezrich's 2021 book The Antisocial Network: The GameStop Short Squeeze and the Ragtag Group of Amateur Traders That Brought Wall Street to Its Knees (the author's 2009 tome The Accidental Billionaires: The Founding of Facebook, a Tale of Sex, Money, Genius, and Betrayal was the basis for The Social Network), Dumb Money isn't the first time that the GameStop stock saga has reached screens. It also won't be the last. Two-part HBO documentary Gaming Wall Street arrived in 2022 with Succession's Kieran Culkin narrating, and doco film GameStop: Rise of the Players hit the same year. Reports have also swirled about a Netflix feature starring To All the Boys' Noah Centino and written by The Hurt Locker Oscar-winner Mark Boal, and another flick called To the Moon. Whatever else does follow, this version is clearly a Gillespe joint right down to the overt needle drops, which summed up Cruella in all the wrong ways — but style and substance find a better match here. Dumb Money keeps things snappy but never too sleek; it's lively and giddy but grounded; and it's about the rise to eat the rich, not just about rich who demand eating, even if reality's revolution hasn't been that ravenous. The narrative journey is all rollercoaster, as is the stock journey — rises, falls, soaring and dipping included — and Dano's key performance straps in for it all. He's calm, earnest, determined, passionate and likeable, selling Keith's growing folk-hero status as well as the fact that he's an everyman galvanising ordinary people from his suburban home while trying to carve out a better future for his family. Dano is also excellent when dealing with Davidson as Keith's gleefully shit-stirring brother Kevin, who borrows his car without asking to make his deliveries and skims off the orders he's ferrying around. This pair constantly prove apt in the film's story in multiple ways, including by conveying eagerness for more yet not dutifully buying what capitalism is slinging. Everyone around Dano and Davidson hits their marks, albeit without as much room for depth afforded by the screenplay, but Dumb Money is all the more compelling — and right on the money — for never forgetting that this is a collective tale.
UPDATE, Friday, October 27, 2023: Pain Hustlers screens in select cinemas from Thursday, October 19, and streams via Netflix from Friday, October 27. There's never been any need to be subtle about Emily Blunt's talents as an actor. A resume filled with My Summer of Love, The Devil Wears Prada, Sunshine Cleaning, Looper, Edge of Tomorrow, Sicario, Mary Poppins Returns, A Quiet Place and its sequel, plus The English on the small screen, keeps proving a helluva showcase. With those versatile roles and others — Oppenheimer and Jungle Cruise are her most-recent big screen credits — Blunt gives audiences a very particular and highly welcome present. Every part for every actor sees them play characters that are constantly adjusting to their situation, given that's just what life is all about, but watching Blunt convey that experience is quite the gift. As her filmography repeatedly demonstrates, she knows better than most how to weaponise a stare and a pause, convey uncertainty with a shift and a gesture, and use both tone and pace to dig in — and, in a long line of excellent Blunt performances, that knack is on full display in Pain Hustlers. This pharma drama's best star — Chris Evans (Ghosted), Catherine O'Hara (Elemental), Andy Garcia (Expend4bles), Brian d'Arcy James (Love & Death) and Chloe Coleman (Dungeons & Dragons: Honour Among Thieves) all leave an imprint as well, but Blunt is the movie's knockout — steps into the shoes of Liza Drake. Relentlessly adapting is the Floridian's normality; she's a single mother to teenager Phoebe (Coleman), who has epilepsy that requires surgical treatment that Liza can't afford, and also lives in her sister's garage while stringing together cash from whichever jobs she can find. It's at one such gig as an exotic dancer, where her talent for sizing up a scenario and making the most of it is rather handy, that Pete Brenner (Evans) crosses her path. He wants more than her barside banter, proposing that she comes to work for him. If he didn't want her to genuinely take it up, he shouldn't have made the offer. Also apparent in Pain Hustlers: the latest on-screen takedown of the pharmaceutical industry and corresponding interrogation of the opioid crisis, aka one of pop culture's current topics du jour. Indeed, in only his second non-Harry Potter and Fantastic Beasts film since 2007 (the other: The Legend of Tarzan), director David Yates happily relies upon the fact that this realm is common ire-inducing knowledge no matter whether you've read journalist Evan Hughes' coverage of Insys Therapeutics — including 'The Pain Hustlers', a New York Times Magazine article, then The Hard Sell: Crime and Punishment at an Opioid Startup, the non-fiction book that followed. First-time screenwriter Wells Tower draws upon both, but similarly knows that his fictionalisation rattles around a heavily populated domain. Stunning documentary All the Beauty and the Bloodshed earned an Oscar nomination, miniseries Dopesick picked up an Emmy, and both Painkiller and The Fall of the House of Usher have hit Netflix in 2023 — as will Pain Hustlers — while diving into the same subject. In reality, Insys marketed a fentanyl spray called subsys for pain management, then came under legal scrutiny for adopting a whatever-it-takes approach to encourage doctors to champion the fast-acting, strong and addictive opioid. That's the Pain Hustlers story as well, as intercut early with faux documentary-style chats with the film's characters to make it plain from the outset that there's comeuppance in store for their unscrupulous and infuriating actions. Pete is a hotshot at Zanna, a pharmaceutical startup under the guidance of widower doctor Jack Neel (Garcia) that's spruiking its own mist. In his strip-club employment pitch, Pete doesn't tell Liza that the company's days are numbered if medical professionals keep steering clear of their drug lonafen. During that chat, he also doesn't glean how determined that the ever-enterprising Liza is when she sets her mind on something. From a starting point of zero, Liza boosts lonafen's market penetration to 86 percent quickly in the rise portion of Pain Hustlers' tale. Again, viewers are well-primed that the fall will come, but this is a hustling-fuelled, capitalism-indicting, "what would you do?" type of telling. An amalgamation of a few IRL folks, Liza is the only person who finds an angle into medicine cabinets, getting lonely pain-clinic doc Lydell (James) over the line in no small part thanks to paying him attention. She's also the only character with questions about the corporate-sanctioned move into bribes, false claims, and flouting regulations in the pursuit of more and more success ("grow or die," implores Neel). Hollywood neatness lingers in her arc, as someone with an urgent need for money to help her family and sincerity in her belief that she's slinging a worthy product, while also enamoured with the upgrade from motel living to a palatial apartment, even hiring her mother (O'Hara), and proving exceptional and influential at her task. That's where Blunt, who is also one of Pain Hustlers' producers, couldn't be more crucial — selling every slippery, driven, desperate, calculating, American dream-chasing and well-meaning choice alike. In a version of this film that didn't feature Blunt, everything would suffer, including her co-stars. From Evans in Knives Out- and The Gray Man-esque skeezy terrain (so, worlds away from Captain America) to Garcia getting hopped up on greed, everyone in Pain Hustlers is at their best when they're reacting to her — and, of course, she's equally formidable whether she's in the centre of the glossily shot frame alone or flanked. Making workmanlike contributions, Yates and Tower prescribe only the expected otherwise. Apart from stressing that their movie isn't advocating pushing pills (well, sprays in this instance), their doco-leaning segments are gimmicky, even when they survey patients with horror stories. Pain Hustlers is still engaging enough, though, but it's the picture's terrifically cast lead that's compulsive to watch. When Liza, Pete and company — Jay Duplass (Industry) and Amit Shah (Happy Valley) are among Zanna's other employees — are making bank, the lonafen playbook isn't far removed from their competitors. In a film that recalls The Big Short and Martin Scorsese's work, there's a raging case of like plot, like movie as blatant as a bright-orange pill cylinder. Pain Hustlers doesn't just tread in Dopesick et al's footsteps, but in Goodfellas and The Wolf of Wall Street's as well. Liza could be a sibling to Erin Brockovich's namesake, too, with the performance to match. And, as it trades in horrific details yet never goes full horror like The Fall of the House of Usher, Succession also lingers. In one of Evans' great scenes, in fact, he takes to the stage in costume and raps the drug's praises. He's decked out like a lonafen spray, but he's firmly and gleefully in Kendall Roy territory. It's an entertaining moment, but also underscores the difference between watchable and spectacular.
In the breakout movie of 2022, Michelle Yeoh was everything and everywhere. Multiverses are like that. Now, the Oscar-winner voices a space-robot peregrine falcon in Transformers: Rise of the Beasts, and viewers should wish that this only existed in Everything Everywhere All At Once's kaleidoscope of realities. Alas, in this very realm, the newest Transformers film is indeed flickering through projectors. The toy-to-screen series it belongs to is now seven live-action entries in and — apart from 2018 spinoff-slash-prequel Bumblebee — largely still as dull as a smashed headlight. Set in 1994, the current instalment is a sequel to the last 1987-anchored franchise flick, which focused on the yellow-hued mechanised alien that can morph into a car, and also a prequel to 2007's saga-spawning Transformers. It draws upon the Transformers: Beast Wars animation, comics and video games, too, and feels in every frame like a picture that purely exists to service intellectual property that does big box-office business (2011's Transformers: Dark of the Moon and 2014's Transformers: Age of Extinction each made over a billion dollars). Michael Bay, Hollywood's go-to director for maximalist action carnage, might've been enthusiastic about Transformers when he started the silver-screen series nearly two decades back — the Ambulance filmmaker was definitely devoted to crashing together pixels replicating chrome in all five titles he helmed, including 2017's Transformers: The Last Knight — but these movies can't be anyone's passion projects. They show zero feeling, and seem to keep rolling out because the saga assembly line has already been established. New faces and a new guiding force behind the lens can't dislodge that sensation with Transformers: Rise of the Beasts. The five-person team responsible for the script give no signal that they even wanted to. The feature's latest two leads do resemble people better than most flesh-and-blood characters in the Transformers world, welcomely, although one gets a sick-kid backstory and another a bad boss. Were the Transformers themselves asked to write the most cliched screenplay they could? Anthony Ramos (In the Heights) and Dominique Fishback (Swarm) are Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' prime living-and-breathing figures, running, chasing and palling around with Autobots as Shia LaBeouf (Pieces of a Woman), Megan Fox (Good Mourning), Mark Wahlberg (Uncharted) and Hailee Steinfeld (Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse) all have before them. Ramos plays former solider Noah Diaz, who has that ailing younger brother (Dean Scott Vazquez, also an In the Heights alum) and massive medical bills to prove it. Fishback is archaeology intern Elena Wallace, whose vapid boss (Sarah Stiles, Billions) constantly cribs from. Both of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts' on-screen stars are excellent actors — Ramos was in Hamilton's debut Broadway cast, while Fishback has a BAFTA nomination for Judas and the Black Messiah — and the film benefits from their presence. Still, even the best thespians can only do so much when they're primarily tasked with rushing around and peering upwards at CGI chunks of walking, talking metal. That dashing and staring, and befriending extra-terrestrial machines in general, is the result of doing things that neither Noah nor Elena are meant to. They're strangers with Brooklyn in common, and soon trying to save existence as well. He gets light-fingered for a payday, attempting to steal a Porsche that's actually the Autobot Mirage (voiced by Pete Davidson, Bupkis). After hours, she's examining an unusual artefact with intriguing markings, which happens to be a key that lets the Transformers warp between different worlds, including back to their own. That discovery sets off a beacon in the sky, earning the attention of Optimus Prime (Peter Cullen, whose time in the role hails back to the OG 80s animated TV series) just as Noah and Mirage are getting acquainted. Also paying notice: Scourge (Peter Dinklage, Cyrano) from the nefarious Terrorcons, who wants to use the pivotal device to bring the planet-devouring (and -sized) Unicron (Colman Domingo, Fear the Walking Dead) to earth. The mission: fend off those evil shapeshifting droids, protect the gadget at all costs and, gratingly, talk about it while mentioning Autobots, Terrorcons and the transwarp key as much as possible. Director Steven Caple Jr (Creed II) endeavours to give Ramos and Fishback more character-building moments than their franchise predecessors, but they're always saddled with spouting rote, jargon-laced dialogue that somehow needed The Flash's Joby Harold, BMF's Darnell Metayer and Josh Peters, and The Meg's Erich Hoeber and Jon Hoeber to write. Given the hefty cast list, there's a wealth of talent reciting bland lines, including Ted Lasso's Cristo Fernández, Loot's Michaela Jaé Rodriguez and Poker Face's Ron Perlman among the Transformers. The latter voices Optimus Primal, the gorilla-esque leader of the Maximals, aka the animal robots that the movie's title references — and just one of the moves that the film makes to create a Hasbro Cinematic Universe. As plenty of franchises are woefully guilty of recently — see: the Marvel Cinematic Universe's Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania for one of the worst examples — Transformers: Rise of the Beasts has its focus on the future over polishing up its current instalment. Indeed, too much that's meant to give this robo-battle personality is lazily sprinkled in, such as the hip hop needle drops because it's the 90s (cue: A Tribe Called Quest, Nas, the Notorious BIG and LL Cool J) and pop-culture references (such as Super Mario Bros on Game Boy). A self-aware mention of Marky Mark leaving the Funky Bunch for acting falls flat, as does calling out Indiana Jones while aping that franchise's cave-searching adventure plots in Peru. In fact, namechecking Mario when it's been given the big-screen treatment again in 2023, plus Indy when that series' latest picture hits cinemas the same month as this, just reminds viewers that they might want to be watching other films. Much of Transformers: Rise of the Beasts incites that reaction anyway, especially its visually uninspired special effects and action sequences that look about as appealing as throwing household electronics in a bin. When they're undisguised junk for the eyes, every aspiring and actual blockbuster that follows Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse this year will spark one question: why is this live action? When animation can look as astonishing as all things Spider-Verse do, and when CGI can be as dreary as it is here, surely these space robots should go back to their cartoon roots. Thankfully, with 2024's Transformers One, they are. Unlike The Transformers: The Movie managed to score, no future animated flicks will ever boast Orson Welles among its voice cast, though — he loaned his tones to Unicron in that 1986 effort — but they also can't be as tedious as Transformers: Rise of the Beasts.
Has Jennifer Lawrence entered her Jennifer Coolidge era? With the spirit of American Pie lingering over No Hard Feelings like unpaid property taxes — a pivotal part of the movie's plot — the Silver Linings Playbook Oscar-winner and Winter's Bone, Hunger Games, X-Men and mother! star is flirting with that direction and loving it. No one sticks their genitalia in a warm home-baked dessert or talks about band camp in Lawrence's latest film, but it is a sex comedy about an inexperienced teenager that includes parents giving clumsy advice. It also involves getting lucky with an older woman; while Lawrence is only 32 and plays it here, an age gap — as well as the chasms between millennials and zoomers, and with the generations prior — is essential to the narrative. The spirit of Coolidge, a game Lawrence, gags about Hall & Oates' 1982 earworm 'Maneater' — a storyline that somewhat riffs on its lyrics, in fact — and battles over class, generational differences and gentrification: that's No Hard Feelings. Based on a real-life Craigslist ad, it's also the next movie from filmmaker Gene Stupnitsky, who penned Bad Teacher and made his feature directorial debut with Good Boys. Where the latter took a Superbad-esque setup but swapped 17-year-olds out for sixth graders, his second flick as a helmer tells a coming-of-age tale on two levels. Percy Becker (Andrew Barth Feldman, White Noise) is the introverted brainiac whose helicopter parents (Daybreak's Matthew Broderick and Life & Beth's Laura Benanti) want to live a little before he hits Princeton University, while Maddie Barker (Lawrence, Causeway) is the bartender and Uber driver who's been in a state of arrested development ever since giving up her plans to surf California's beaches when her mother got sick. Those taxes? Maddie owes them on her Montauk house, which she inherited from and remains in while the New York hamlet she grew up in is inundated by wealthy holidaymakers. And those tourists? Sweeping in for only part of the year, splashing around cash and causing property values to skyrocket while pushing locals out, they're the reason that Maddie's debt is so hefty. They're also why Percy and his family are in town for the summer. And, in general, those rich interlopers are a prime target for Maddie's anger, unsurprisingly. Still, usually the well-to-do influx helps boost her finances — driving folks around in a vacation town while the weather's right can be lucrative — but her car has just been repossessed, hence an advertisement offering a Buick Regal for dating and sleeping with Percy earning her attention. "These people use us, so why don't we use them?" is Maddie's pregnant pal Sara's (Natalie Morales, Dead to Me) take on the situation. Sporting that exact mindset, Maddie commits. The Beckers want her to bring their shy, reclusive and neurotic son out of his bedroom by taking him to bed — patriarch Laird fondly recalls his own first youthful fling, with Stupnitsky adding an extra layer by having Ferris Bueller's Day Off great Broderick in the role — and Percy has no idea about the deal. Whether Maddie is asking to touch his wiener at his animal-shelter volunteer job, inadvertently getting him suspecting that he's being kidnapped by offering him a lift in Sara's spouse Jim's (Scott MacArthur, Killing It) van filled with machetes and harpoons, teaching him how to drink Long Island iced teas, or taking him skinny dipping by moonlight and fighting the pranksters who try to steal their clothes in the nude, seducing the college-bound young man is far from an easy gig. Co-scripting with John Phillips (Dirty Grandpa), Stupnitsky also has both Percy and Maddie clutch onto the bonnet of speeding cars, and throws in hectic faux prom nights and eventful pre-uni parties; however, the raunchiest thing about No Hard Feelings is largely its premise. Bawdy humour still echoes, especially when Maddie is playing the libidinous part she's being paid to — but, as she genuinely starts to connect with Percy as a friend, so does earnestness. She's initially willing to slip between the sheets to get her life back on track, and pretends to be the stereotypical teen-boy fantasy to do so. He wants to talk, get to know her and build something physical out of a true emotional bond. Of course the film that results seesaws between the ribald and sweet, and of course it's never completely one or the other. That isn't a failure of nerve, but reflects the chaos that is growing up even when you're already supposed to be grown up. No Hard Feelings is rarely as consistently funny as it wants to be, but it'd be far more awkward than it's meant to be if Maddie and Percy weren't so well cast. The luminous Lawrence is a comic dream, no matter if Maddie is cringing at her own behaviour, bluntly decrying teens today and the ultra-rich always, attempting to climb stairs in rollerblades or turning on the sultriness. She serves up a physical comedy masterclass, and long may amusing movies that call upon her laugh-inducing skills keep joining her resume (well, other than the smug Don't Look Up). She's such a natural here that wanting No Hard Feelings to constantly ramp up the OTT antics stems wholly from her performance. (Also, as Coolidge keeps popping to mind, who wouldn't want to see Lawrence in The White Lotus in the future, whether in Thailand or wherever future seasons of the hit HBO series end up.) Feldman, who took time out from high school IRL to play the titular part in Dear Evan Hansen on Broadway for a spell and then from uni for this, brings nuance to what could've been a stock-standard nerdy character in other hands. The key to his performance, and to Lawrence's: amid the overtly comic moments, they each know that they're stepping into the shoes of people who are stuck and struggling in their own ways, and they're sincere about having Maddie and Percy work through that together. So, crucially, is the sunnily shot picture itself. Although it's better when Stupnitsky and Phillips put their faith the movie's central portrayals rather than getting thematically heavy-handed, and it's also gleefully formulaic, No Hard Feelings has film-stealing stark-naked brawls, Lawrence in go-for-broke comedic mode, and insight and heart.
Talented pooches have been barking their way to big-screen stardom since the birth of the medium, and Cannes Film Festival even gives out awards for ace pupper performances. In Australia for a few years now, we also celebrate the intersection of canines and cinema — via our very own dog-themed movie showcase. At the Top Dog Film Festival, doggos and puppers cement their status as humanity's favourite film stars in a touring program of pooch-centric shorts. For a couple of hours, dogs will leap across screens in a curated selection of heartwarming flicks about humanity's best friend. Over the last few years, the lineup has included films about dog-powered sports, dogs in space, dogs hiking through the desert, senior dogs and more — with this year's bill highlighting dolphin-spotting dogs, animal actors and mountain pups. The festival hits Melbourne's Astor Theatre on Tuesday, August 29 as part of its 2023 run, and rushing after tickets the way your best four-legged friend rushes after a frisbee is recommended. Given how much we all love watching dog videos online, not to mention attending pupper-centric shindigs in general, this event is certain to be popular. You'd be barking mad to miss it, obviously.
Old hat, new whip. No, that isn't Dr Henry Walton 'Indiana' Jones' shopping list, but a description of Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny. While the fifth film about the eponymous archaeologist is as familiar as Indy films come, it's kept somewhat snapping by the returning Harrison Ford's on-screen partnership with Fleabag's Phoebe Waller-Bridge. When this 15-years-later sequel to 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull begins — swinging into cinemas after 1981's Raiders of the Lost Ark, 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, too — Indy's trademark fedora and strip of leather have already enjoyed ample action. So has the George Lucas-created franchise's basic storyline. If you've seen one Indy outing in the past 42 years, you've seen the underlying mechanics of every other Indy outing. And yet, watching Ford flashing his crooked smile again, plus his bantering with Waller-Bridge, is almost enough to keep this new instalment whirring. Across the quintet of Indy flicks — a number contractually locked in at the outset, even if it took almost half a century to notch them all up — a trinket always needs recovering. Whether it's a relic, stone, cup, carving or, as here, a device by Ancient Greek mathematician, philosopher and inventor Archimedes that might facilitate time travel, nefarious forces (typically Nazis) always want said item as well. Also, only antics that've influenced the likes of Tomb Raider, National Treasure and Jungle Cruise can ensure that whatever whatsit is at the heart of whichever picture stays out of the wrong hands. The object in question falls into those mitts at some point, of course. Indy goes globetrotting and cave diving to save it, and skeletons and creepy-crawlies tend to get in his way. Reliably, he has female company. Frequently, there's a young offsider tagging along. A constant: the whole escapade bounding to the tune of John Williams' rousing theme, which is now acoustically synonymous with adventure. Lucas didn't come up with the story for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, though, in a first for the saga that he conjured up as a new version of 30s and 40s movie serials. Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans) similarly steps away from directing, which is also uncharted Indy territory. But Logan and Ford v Ferrari filmmaker James Mangold knows the drill, as do his co-screenwriters Jez Butterworth and John-Henry Butterworth (both alumni of the helmer's latter title), plus David Koepp (Kimi). To be fair, everyone knows the drill: see above. It isn't hard, then, for Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny to surpass the woeful Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, which it does. Still, it isn't easy for it avoid playing like a copy of Lucas and Spielberg at their much-earlier Indy best, something that it can't manage. Mangold and company's initial step is to start by pretending that they're making an Indy flick decades back with a younger Ford. Hollywood's digital de-aging technology gets its latest workout in Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's opening sequence — and a more-than-passable one — where it's 1944 and Nazis lurk. World War II is waning. Hitler is in his bunker. His underlings are scrounging up all the antiquities they can. Enter Indy spying with his British friend Basil Shaw (Toby Jones, Tetris); physicist Jürgen Voller (Mads Mikkelsen, Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore) being certain that he's found part of the Archimedes Dial, aka the Antikythera; and showdowns on a loot-filled train to get the titular object away from the Third Reich. From there, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny's bulk takes place in 1969. The film reteams with Indy as a moon-landing party wakes up the about-to-retire professor from a whisky-ushered, underwear-clad slumber in his armchair — and he isn't happy. Ford in cranky and cantankerous mode, but with tenderness inside, remains a gem to watch. It worked in TV series Shrinking earlier in 2023 (one of his two recent TV roles, alongside Yellowstone prequel 1923), and it would've been the heftiest surprise that the Indy movies have delivered if it didn't also shine in his current big-screen franchise revival of late (after Blade Runner and Star Wars, obviously). Ford bickering gruffly is equally gleaming, which is where Waller-Bridge fits in as Helena Shaw, Basil's daughter and Indy's goddaughter, who wisecracks back, can hold her own in a fray and car, and says she wants help locating the entire Antikythera. If everyone could be taken at their word, this wouldn't be an Indy entry, just like if the MacGuffin was simple to source and protect, travelling by map didn't feature and, since Raiders of the Lost Ark, well-loved faces stopped resurfacing. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny ticks all those boxes and always feels as if it's making a show of ticking them — regularly, gleefully, less gracefully and convincingly digging into the franchise's past Star Wars: Episode VII — The Force Awakens nod-and-reuse style. There's the old hat again, no matter what's atop Ford's head. Lacking Spielberg's knack for memorable action, many of the chases and puzzles have an urgent, immediate yet been-there-done-that air (and the setpieces keep coming, involving horse-and-motorcycle pursuits, subway tunnels, tuk tuks, underwater jaunts, eels, tombs and more). Mangold tries to patch over the boilerplate plot, but those efforts are as flimsy as anything that's ever threatened Indy's world-saving goals. Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny didn't need to stretch out this latest go-around to the series' longest running time yet — 154 minutes — but with Ford and Waller-Bridge at the movie's core, understanding that choice isn't difficult. Although they're better than the material again and again, as is Short Round replacement Teddy (Ethann Isidore, Mortel), it's entertaining to bask in the pair's back-and-forth as Indy and Helena zip through the franchise-standard challenges. There's the new whip, because Ford and Waller-Bridge are that crucial to giving Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny any spark and charge. While the five-film promise is now fulfilled and this has been dubbed the saga's star's last ride, a tighter and bolder follow-up with them at the centre wouldn't be unwelcome if there have to be more Indy movies, which money dictates there'll have to be. And if not, passing the satchel and leather jacket to Everything Everywhere All At Once Oscar-winner Ke Huy Quan, marking his return after making his acting debut in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, would be one of the Indy franchise's most cracking moves.
Calling all vegans and vegan-curious folk. The annual Vegan Market is back in Williamstown on Sunday, August 6. If you haven't checked this one out before, expect wall-to-wall vegan food, locally-designed items and live music. You'll find 100 local plant-based businesses selling everything from bliss balls and cupcakes to cannabis oil and ethical clothing. Vegan cacao, vegan ice-cream, vegan DJs – they're all here. The Vegan Market actually runs events in Canberra, Adelaide and Brisbane too. Melbourne's market is taking place at Seaworks in Williamstown, right next to the waterfront. It's a great excuse to cross the West Gate and entry is 100% free. Pro tip: save some room for some chips from Off The Pier, then eat them on the grass by the rotunda. Perfect Sunday afternoon right there. Small flag: dogs aren't allowed inside the market (for obvious cupcake-stealing reasons), but assistance animals are more than welcome. You can find more info on the website. Images: supplied.
In the spirit of NAIDOC Week, which this year runs from Sunday, July 2–Sunday, July 9, Koorie Heritage Trust (KHT) in Fed Square are celebrating with a jam-packed program of special events paying homage to First Nations culture and the important role Elders have played as knowledge holders and community leaders. This year's NAIDOC Week theme is 'For Our Elders'. The program kicks off on 1 July with a Feather Flower Workshop with Waddi Waddi, Ngarrindjeri and Yorta Yorta Elder, Aunty Glenda Nicholls. This is a kid-friendly class where you can learn about the cultural significance of flowers in Koorie communities. There's also Create Your Own Murnong Daisy Necklace with Wadawurrung woman Dr Deanne Gilson, basket weaving with Yorta Yorta woman Donna Blackall, and a free KHT x NGV community tour, which includes the current KHT exhibition, Second Skin: Essence of Country. You can browse the full KHT NAIDOC Week program over here. Most events only run for one day only, and everything wraps up on Sunday, July 9. Prices vary and there are several free school holiday events, so it's a great one for families. If you haven't explored Koorie Heritage Trust before, now's the perfect time. You'll find it tucked away in the Yarra Building at Fed Square. Images: Supplied
Show a little R-E-S-P-E-C-T and head to the one-day-only Aretha — A Love Letter to the Queen of Soul at Hamer Hall this July. On Sunday, July 2, there'll be two exclusive shows, chock-full of the extraordinary star's powerful hits. This special event will showcase Aretha Franklin's wide ranging vocal talents and her timeless anthems. A diverse multigenerational cast will perform 32 of the Queen's hits, guaranteed to have you dancing in your seat and singing along to iconic tunes like 'Respect' and 'You Make Me Feel Like (A Natural Woman)'. The stellar cast includes Montaigne, the ARIA-nominated Emma Donovan, Thndo, Thandi Phoenix and Ursula Yovich — with music direction by Joe Accaria and support from a nine-piece band. The show is both narrated and directed by Jada Alberts, who weaves in the stories of the artist's public success and personal struggles — which ultimately paved the way for other female and soul artists to make their own mark on the world. This event is a spectacular opportunity to hear of the beginning of Franklin's life. It'll take you from her gospel roots and rising fame, all the way to her reaching worldwide recognition. Her talents earned her many accolades, including 18 Grammy Awards and the title of Rolling Stone's 'Greatest Singer of All Time'. She's also sold over 75 million records. Head to Hamer Hall next month to celebrate the life of a woman who broke down barriers and made a lasting impact on the world of music. 'Aretha' is taking over Hamer Hall on Sunday, July 2 for two shows only. For more information and to secure your tickets, head to the website. Images: Cybele Malinowski.
If we didn't watch horror movies in cavernous darkened rooms, projected large on shimmering screens and with every noise echoing throughout the theatre, would they be as unsettling? If you've ever jumped out of your chair while staring at your TV at home, you'll already know the answer to that question: yes, yes they would. Still, there's nowhere better to see a scary flick, new or old, than at the cinema — where hopefully loud popcorn-munching is the only distraction. This Halloween, the Lido is taking that idea to heart with a Halloween Horror program. Four days, one big screen, four supremely spooky horror-movie classics: that's the bill from Friday, October 28–Monday, October 31. These aren't just any old eerie flicks. They're must-sees that've influenced almost every horror film ever made over the past five decades. In other words, if you're a movie buff, it's the perfect Halloween experience. Thanks to The Shining, you can see what happens when all work and no play help Jack Nicholson get creeped out in the Overlook Hotel — and learn why hedge mazes will always be chilling. Next, it's time for a date with a demon via The Exorcist. A word of advice: don't eat anything green beforehand. Maybe don't wear a red-and-green striped jumper, either, given that the original A Nightmare on Elm Street is also on the lineup in all of its supremely 80s glory. And, while it has spawned a heap of sequels — like almost everything in this program — nothing will ever live up to the OG The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. If you're easily frightened (and that isn't part of the fun for you), this film lineup isn't for you, clearly.
When it's claimed that Decision to Leave's Detective Hae-joon (Park Hae-il, Heaven: To the Land of Happiness) needs "murder and violence in order to be happy", it's easy to wonder if that statement similarly applies to Park Chan-wook, this stunning South Korean thriller's filmmaker. The director of Oldboy, Thirst, Stoker and The Handmaiden doesn't, surely. Still, his exceptional body of on-screen work glows when either fills its frames — which, in a career that also spans Joint Security Area, Sympathy for Mr Vengeance, Lady Vengeance and English-language TV miniseries The Little Drummer Girl, among other titles, is often. To be more accurate, perhaps Park needs to survey the grey areas that loiter around death and brutality, and surround love, lust, loss, and all matters of the brain, body and heart that bind humans together, to find cinematic fulfilment. Certainly, audiences should be glad if/that he does. In Decision to Leave, exploring such obsessions, and the entire notions of longing and obsession, brings a staggering, sinuously layered and seductively gorgeous movie to fruition — a film to obsess over if ever there was one. In this year's deserved Cannes Film Festival Best Director-winner, reserved insomniac Hae-joon is fixated from the outset, too: with his police job in Busan, where he works Monday–Friday before returning to Ipo on weekends to his wife (Lee Jung-hyun, Peninsula). That all-consuming focus sees his weekday walls plastered with grim photos from cases, and haunts the time he's meant to be spending — and having sex — with said spouse. Nonetheless, the latest dead body thrust his way isn't supposed to amplify his obsession. A businessman and experienced climber is found at the base of a mountain, and to most other cops the answer would be simple. It is to his offsider Soo-wan (Go Kyung-Pyo, Private Lives), but Hae-joon's interest is piqued when the deceased's enigmatic Chinese widow, the cool, calm but also bruised and scratched Seo-rae (Tang Wei, The Whistleblower), is brought in for questioning amid apologising for her imperfect Korean-language skills. In the precinct interrogation room, the detective and his potential suspect share a sushi dinner — and, in the lingering looks gazed each other's way even at this early stage, this may as well be a twisted first date. Hae-joon then surveils Seo-rae, including at her work caring for the elderly, which also provides her alibi. He keeps watching her at home, where her evenings involve television and ice cream. In stirring scenes of bravura and beauty, he envisages himself with her in the process, longing for the illusion he's building in his sleep-deprived mind. As for Seo-rae, she keeps stoking their chemistry, especially when she's somehow being both direct and evasive with her responses to his queries. She knows how small gestures leave an imprint, and she also knows when she and Hae-joon are both desperately hooked on each other. Every intelligently written (by Park and frequent co-scribe Chung Seo-kyung), evocatively shot (by cinematographer Kim Ji-Yong, Ashfall) moment in Decision to Leave is crucial; the film is made so meticulously, with a precision its protagonist would instantly admire, that cutting out even a second is unthinkable. Equally, every scene speaks volumes about this spellbinding movie — but here's three that help convey its simmering potency. In one, Hae-joon ascends up the victim's last cliff by rope, tied to Soo-wan, Busan looming in the background. In another, detailed blue-green wallpaper filled with mountains surrounds Seo-rae. And in yet another, she reaches into Hae-joon's pocket to grab his lip balm, then applies it to his mouth. Perspective is everything in this feature, Park stresses. Minutiae is everything, too. Intimacy is more than everything, actually, in a picture that's also grippingly, electrifying sensual. A police detective drawn to a possible murderer, a woman unable to let the married subject of her own infatuation go: if Decision to Leave was made in English in the 80s, it'd star Michael Douglas. With its tumbling fall, rock faces, thin line between observation and desire, midway twists, and mix of romance and noir, if it had been crafted even earlier back, it'd be an Alfred Hitchcock film. Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction or Vertigo but South Korean, Park's pining, aching new jewel isn't, though. Exquisitely intricate aesthetically, emotionally, psychologically and thematically, it's one of the director's absolute best. He's never needed a hammer or live octopus to make a splash, either, even if it worked so strikingly with Oldboy nearly two decades ago; here, for example, a literal fish-eye lens is astounding. With every breathtaking visual composition and choice, including against cliffs and seas aplenty, Park keeps besting and challenging himself, and also utterly wowing his viewers. Already picked as South Korea's entry for the Best International Feature Film award at 2023's Oscars — a gong the country last won in 2020 with Parasite — Decision to Leave is as spectacular as it is sophisticated. It's an ambitious sight to behold, no matter which stylistic tricks it's pulling and deep-seated secrets it's spilling in tandem — and also as tender as it is melancholy, a swirling, yearning mood that the use of Jung Hoon Hee's 'Mist' on the soundtrack only cements. The film's core duo is deployed just as devastatingly well, so much so that it's impossible to imagine any other actors inhabiting the parts. Both Park Hae-il and Tang Wei have dazzled elsewhere, him in Bong Joon Ho's Memories of Murder and The Host, her in Ang Lee's Lust, Caution, but they're as sublime as actors can be as wearied, troubled souls bouncing towards and repelling away from each other like revolving magnets. Formidable, revelatory and bold, too, are Decision to Leave's versions of two noir staples: complicated cops and femme fatales. That duo is virtually synonymous with the genre, so much so that Park wants viewers to believe that they already know all they need about Hae-joon and Seo-rae going in — only to keep unpacking them, their motivations and their feelings, as the pair unpack each other. How exhilarating, intoxicating and all-consuming that experience is, for the movie's characters and for its audience. How powerfully it ripples and resonates. How phenomenal an addition to South Korea's national filmography, and to Park's, Decision to Leave proves. Deciding that you never want it to leave your memory is a given.
UPDATE, November 11, 2022: Fire of Love is available to stream via Disney+. Spewing fire is so hot right now, and literally always — and dragons aren't the only ones doing it. House of the Dragon and Blaze can have their flame-breathing creatures, and Fire of Love can have something that also seems fantastical but is one of the earth's raging wonders. The mix of awe, astonishment, adoration, fear, fascination and unflinching existential terror that volcanoes inspire is this documentary's playground. It was Katia and Maurice Krafft's daily mood, including before they met, became red beanie-wearing volcanologists, built a life chasing eruptions — The Life Volcanic, you could dub it — and devoted themselves to studying lava-spurting ruptures in the planet's crust. Any great doco on a topic such as this, and with subjects like these, should make viewers experience the same thrills, spills, joys and worries, and that's a radiant feat this Sundance award-winner easily achieves. What a delight it would be to trawl through the Kraffts' archives, sift through every video featuring the French duo and their work, and witness them doing their highly risky jobs against spectacular surroundings for hours, days and more. That's the task filmmaker Sara Dosa (The Seer and the Unseen) took up to make this superb film. This isn't the only such doco — legendary German director Werner Herzog has made his own, called The Fire Within: A Requiem for Katia and Maurice Krafft, after featuring the couple in 2016's Into the Inferno — but Fire of Love is a glorious, sensitive, entrancing and affecting ode to two remarkable people and their love, passion and impact. While history already dictates how the pair's tale ends, together and exactly as it seemed fated to, retracing their steps and celebrating their importance will never stop sparking new pleasures. For newcomers to the Kraffts, their lives comprised quite the adventure — one with two volcano-obsessed souls who instantly felt like they were destined to meet, bonded over a mutual love of Mount Etna, then dedicated their days afterwards to understanding the natural geological formations that filled their dreams. Early in their time together, the couple gravitated to what they called 'red volcanoes', with their enticing scarlet-hued lava flows. What a phenomenon to explore when romance beats in the air, and when geochemist Katia and geologist Maurice are beginning their life together. From there, however, they moved to analysing what they named 'grey volcanoes'. Those don't visually encapsulate the pair's relationship; they're the craggy peaks that produce masses of ash when they erupt — Iceland's Eyjafjallajokull, for instance — and often a body count. As narrated by actor and Kajillionaire filmmaker Miranda July, Fire of Love starts with blazing infatuation and devotion — between the Kraffts for each other, and for their field of interest — then establishes their legacy. Both aspects could fuel their own movies, and both linger and haunt in their own ways. And, as magnificent as this incredibly thoughtful, informative and stirring documentary is, it makes you wonder what a sci-fi flick made from the same footage would look like. The 16-millimetre imagery captured during the Kraffts' research trips around the globe, whittled down here from 200 hours to fill just 98 minutes, puts even the most state-of-the-art special effects in a different realm. Pixels can be used to paint gorgeous sights, and cinema has no shortage of movies that shimmer with that exact truth, but there really is no substitute for reality. During Fire of Love's first half, those easy visions of science fiction just keep flickering; if someone else had Dosa's access, and had July employ her dreamy voice to spin an otherworldly narrative, movie magic would likely explode. There's a particular sequence that cements that idea, set to the also-ethereal sounds of Air — layering French icons upon French icons — and featuring the Kraffts walking around against red lava in their futuristic-looking protective silver suits. They wander, they risk their lives, and pure actuality beams back. It's nothing short of extraordinary, as well as enchanting. Fittingly, the film's entire score springs from Air's Nicolas Godin, and it couldn't better set the mood; that said, these visuals and this story would prove enrapturing if nary a sound was heard, let alone a note or a word. Other segments ripple with sheer incredulity — not the several riffs on Katia and Maurice's meet-cute, though, or how he worked the publicity angles to fund their work while she pumped out their books. (In a doco stitched together from archival materials rather than contemporary talking-head interviews, those past TV chats come in handy, too). When Maurice and one of the duo's offsiders decide chalk up the first-ever sailing trip across a lake of sulphuric acid in just a rubber dinghy, floating around the crater of Java's Ijen, jaws can only drop. The footage is breathtaking, and more petrifying than any horror flick. That Katia refused to hop onto the raft also helps spell out the pair's differences. No chemist would trust their life to a bath of acid, yet the geologists are willing to take the chance. Fire of Love falls head over heels for the Kraffts' similarities and mutual fixations, but Dosa, her co-writers/editors Erin Casper (The Vow) and Jocelyne Chaput (Fractured Land), plus producer/fellow co-scribe Shane Boris (Stray), also see where they went their own ways. When Fire of Love focuses on the Kraffts' groundbreaking observations, it's even more astounding. The film covers the crucial life-or-death impact of their work on grey volcanoes, after attempting to educate towns and cities in the vicinity of such masses — so they could react appropriately and in a timely manner to avoid casualties — became a key part of their mission. Spying the fallout when the couple's warnings about potential fatalities went unheeded, including their cautions about deadly mudslides, is simply heartbreaking. Witnessing how one pyroclastic flow from Japan's Mount Unzen in 1991 forever ended the Kraffts' own narratives, albeit not for the same reason, is just as moving. What an existence Katia and Maurice shared — and what a stunningly compiled and edited tribute this is to them, the rock they called home as we all do, the land features they adored, the ash and fire those volcanoes expel into the sky, and the fragility of life, love and, well, everything.
