Market penetration

A LONG time ago, in a land far away, The Blob was one of my favourite movies. Apparently they're doing a remake. That's about all I can be bothered finding out about the remake of the The Blob at this stage.

If you want to know more go and look it up yourself. There are stacks of online resources where you can get all the information you could ever possibly want - and never possibly need - about The Blob and the remake of The Blob. All the goss, all the speculation, all the dross that's unfit to print, but that's so easy and painless to publish online.

And herein lies a problem. The web is awash with too much publicity for nothing worth promoting. Too much spin masquerading as informed opinion. Today movie marketing and film culture are interchangeable, indistinguishable. It is almost exclusively a commercialised sphere - not exactly news in an era of unprecedented penetration of the market into everyday life, almost everywhere on Earth.

American cinema, in particular, is looking wan and tired as its big screen epics heave and clumber round the cineplexes, creating carefully staged ripples of soon-to-be-forgotten pyrotechnic spectacle. As a mass cultural phenomenon, The Movie seems to be losing its conceptual lustre before our very eyes, fragmenting into re-usable chunks of corporate output, part of a matrix of cultural products that includes games, DVDs, marketing and merchandise. Profits are up, gravitas is down.

The surging games industry, now a bigger entertainment "sector" in raw market terms, is itself driving much movie content, while throwing up a greater challenge to the global cultural hegemony of "Hollywood" than TV ever did in the '60s. TV's challenge spurred a financial crisis in the movie business. Today its challenge is one of relevance, supercession and obsolescence. If Hollywood doesn't speak for America Inc. or serve the nation as Washington's mouthpiece anymore, who does it speak for? Moreover, who cares?

The US movie business is geared to serving shareholders and corporate masters over audiences. In fact they're in the business of creating audiences; it's the audience that's the product, not the movie; it's the audience that delivers the profit, not the movie. Most movies are just steaming piles of creative and intellectual waste made only to deliver us - and we're just here to be seduced then abandoned (A.K.A. entertained). This is rarely a satisfactory contract, and irreparable disconnect is imminent, if not already upon us. Even in the face of unprecedented competition for entertainment dollar, the movie business appears on a mission to drive away its key profit driver - its audience - through sheer boredom and indifference.

In other words, enough words wasted on the remake of The Blob. I may catch it on cable in a year or two. Then I'll forget it immediately.

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Ken Burns: oxymoronic hybrid

Dubbed the world's most influential documentary film-maker, Ken Burns has made his name and fortune bringing the past to life. "I've become so influential," Burns told The Bulletin, "that one of our most respected historians said recently that more Americans get their history from me than from anywhere else, to paraphrase the [American] ABC news slogan."
Burns delivered the keynote address at the 2002 NSW Premier's History Awards last Friday. Premier Bob Carr had been trying to get Burns to Australia since he instituted the awards in 1997. He was booked to come last year but September 11 intervened. Yet the director of the most watched documentary in television history, the epic nine-part The Civil War, admits he is "completely untrained in American history".
"I'm an amateur historian, a popular historian at best, but I have a huge, huge following in the States. We estimate that over 75 million Americans have seen The Civil War, 50 million saw Baseball and more than 35 million watched Jazz, and that's an amazing testament to the power of television." Burns puts his success down to an ability "to touch the popular nerve" and to produce films that "rather than express an already arrived-at end, are rather about me sharing with the audience a process of discovery".
But it also takes a magician's skill: "I mean I've got these dead, morbid still photographs, these first-person quotes lying dusty in an archive; I've got the commentary of scholars who over the course of a two-hour interview might be as dry as toast; I've got some narration and I'm trying to make a historical event come alive. It's what I do to those materials that hopefully makes you feel for a moment what it was like to be there." Burns recently redigitised every photograph in The Civil War, and added new voice¬overs and remastered the sound for the series' DVD release. The revised program has just been rebroadcast in the US, again with record ratings.
Carr hosted a dinner for Burns last week which included self-confessed US history "tragics", former federal opposition leader Kim Beazley and former Wran government minister Rodney Cavalier. Burns was apparently impressed with his host's depth of knowledge of American history. "I don't come to Australia with any expectations, but I'm thrilled to be here because a politician in your country not only has a love of history, which is rare, but of American history, which is even rarer. My films have actually done extraordinarily well here; The Civil War had higher ratings here [for SBS] than in the US – and it remains the highest-rating program ever aired on PBS [the US Public Broadcasting Service]."
Burns originally wanted to be a Hollywood director but discovered non-fiction in college. He moved 25 years ago to rural New Hampshire where "I could live for nothing and have the luxury of being unconcerned with the marketplace". But working in the public sector is no impediment to wealth in the land of the profit motive. "I've actually made a huge amount of money and I've paid back all my grants. I'm a unique oxymoronic hybrid – a documentary film-maker who is actually known and has made money."
He spent Friday with Carr in Port Macquarie for the announcement of the awards, where Nadia Wheatley won the $15,000 Premier's History Prize for her 2001 biography of post-war author and columnist Charmian Clift.
Of slight build but determined disposition, Burns has the tenacity to see his multi-hour epics to completion not over months but years. "You never know it's going to be 19 hours long going in. Jazz took 6½ years to finish, to the day." His schedule is all booked up for the next 10 years, with a major series on Martin Luther King in development and another on World War II slated to air in 2009 or 2010. "I have a lot on my plate." Meanwhile, Burns' 2001 four-hour biography of Mark Twain airs next year on ABC-TV.
And the next target for NSW's impresario premier, who previously brought Gore Vidal to Sydney for the 1998 Sydney Writers' Festival, is historian and former JFK speech-writer Arthur Schlesinger jnr.
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First published in The Bulletin

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Interview: Ben Mendelsohn

For a professional actor on a mid-career surge, Ben Mendelsohn is uncharacteristically modest... “I’ve been doing this (acting) since pretty much the beginning of my teenage years, and I’ve been financially independent since I was fifteen but it’s not really a career, is it? It’s a series of jobs, is what it is! I mean, you will never get to be ‘Head of South East Asian acting’. You might have a great life but it’s not a career.”

It’s mid-morning and we’re talking in a café overlooking Bondi Beach. “Bondi’s got a bit hectic – I’m shifting basically. I remember seeing this great TV special when I was 12, it was about Penthouse Pets and one of ‘em lived in Bondi – and I remember all these shots on the beach and I thought what a promised land – Bondi! I love living here but it’s getting very hectic.”

Mendelsohn is dressed smart casual, freshly shaved, hair combed and still wet from his morning shower. His world weary delivery, punctuated by a steady succession of ‘Styvo Reds’, are at odds with his image, which is reminiscent of a naughty boy wagging Sunday school. How refreshing, we comment, to find an actor not obsessed with his public image; a thespian, no less, unencumbered by “vaulting ambition”. Oops, spoke too soon…

“Oh, I have very unhealthy ambitions,” he protests, “but I don’t see the point in advertising ‘em, y’know? I don’t see the point in sitting down and telling you (slipping into mock American accent) what I’m gonna do next. Coz if I do it I’ll do it and we’ll know about it then.

"I can just see that quote coming up – ‘I have a lot of unhealthy ambitions’.”

If there’s blood coursing in his veins he should. On the back of good notices for his supporting role in the Hollywood blockbuster VERTICAL LIMIT, Mendelsohn is on a roll, with last year’s SAMPLE PEOPLE garnering him favourable press and anticipation high for his new release, a comedy drama called MULLET, which reunites the actor with David Caesar, his director in the 1995 hit, IDIOT BOX. And with CHILD STAR, his third film with director Nadia Tass, set for release in a couple of months, now is a good a time as any for ambition.

“Since the whole Vertical Limit thing my face has been back in the newspapers, and I’ve had a few more scripts come my way. I mean I’ve been in this business so long that I’m not expecting that much. It’s about working, y’know? About getting a bit of money in the bank, enough to not have to work for a while. I mean I don’t give a fuck – y’know? I don’t give a fuck.

“I hang out with a couple of actors but most of my time isn’t spent with other actors. My private life is not in the business. I’m not a big networker and luckily I’m not in a position where I need to do that and I’m glad about that. You’d go fucking mad – all you talk about is how much you’re working or how much you’re not working – I think about that stuff enough, I don’t need to pump it up any more.”

Having spent half his young life in the limelight, he’s more than accustomed to the drill. A new film, a round of publicity, same old questions: “It’s all bullshit, mate,” he intimates in reassuringly hushed tones.

Mendelsohn has been in the public’s consciousness since he was 15 and the HENDERSON KIDS was a hit on our TV screens. And it’s been more than 14 years since his remarkable film debut in the director John Duigan’s groundbreaking THE YEAR MY VOICE BROKE, a film that also launched the career of his contemporary, Noah Taylor.

He remembers the film fondly. “It was slated as a telemovie, in amongst a bunch of films that Kennedy Miller were doing for TEN. They loved it so much in the first weeks that decided to go ahead and make it into a feature. I had no idea it was going to be so big.

“Duigan was fuckin’ great! He’s like a horse whisperer. He’s got the abilty to point you in a direction and just let you go. They’re the ones I like to work with, and look at the performances he got out of us – they’re pretty fucken on the money!”

Mendelsohn won the first of his AFI Awards for the role, and a string of distinguished performances ensued in some of the local industry’s best films of the late 1980’s and 1990s - THE BIG STEAL, SPOTSWOOD, MAP OF THE HUMAN HEART, SIRENS, METAL SKIN (attracting his second AFI Award), COSI, and IDIOT BOX. He’s an actor that relies on his natural gift and sheer charisma. You can drop all that method "bullshit"!

“One of the misconceptions about performance is the idea that you can get it perfect, that the more you wring your hands about it the better it’s gonna be – that’s bullshit. If a director or another actor asks me what my motivation is, well, I tell ‘em it’s got nothing to do with them.

“I wanted to be a spy when I was a kid,” he says straight-faced, which somehow figures perfectly. “I left school at 15, and I haven’t ever formally studied acting. I mean talking about acting is a bit like fucking for chastity, y’know?” He checks for a second, and is obviously keen to impress that he’s still very serious about his work: “That doesn’t mean I don’t do whatever I need to do to get the performance up there, I just think there’s a certain cult that focuses more on the preparation than on the actual result whereas I think here’s a lot to be said for just jumping in and doing it. I do like to think I’m getting better at it, but I don’t know that! I’m very critical of my own work and I see the bits that don’t work before the bits that do.”

Mendelsohn’s aim is to be ‘in the moment’ when the camera is rolling, a characteristic self-evident in his easygoing performance in MULLET, a modest but moving comedy drama set in a small south coast fishing village. Headlining a bevy of accomplished Australian actors like Susie Porter, Andrew S Gilbert and Steve L Marquand, Mendelsohn carries the film with an easy Aussie charm. He plays the lead role of a bloke in his late twenties who returns home from the Big Smoke. When Mullet upped and left after three years earlier he didn’t tell a soul, and so his friends, family and ex-girlfriend don’t exactly accept him back into the fold with open arms.

“Mullet’s a guy whose taken a turn in life and he can’t go forward without taking a counter turn… and so he has to go back home and try and reconcile what it is he’s trying to leave behind. Which is place, where he comes from, the situation with his family.”

Mendelsohn himself comes from Melbourne, but he’s been “living in Sydney close on ten years. I lived back in Melbourne in 96/97 for a year or so… I still see myself as an expatriate Melbournite more than a Sydney boy."

And after the exposure afforded by VERTICAL LIMIT, what about the ‘States? “Yeah, what about the ‘States? I dunno, I guess I’ll go over and have a look. I was there recently very briefly, saw a couple a people. I’ve got an agent there but I don’t talk to her. I got an agent in Britain too, but I don’t talk to her either.

“I’m Australian based until I’m not. More or less.”

One thing’s for sure, when he does do it, we’ll be the first to know.

MICHAEL HUTAK
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First published in Australian Style

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Moulin Rouge Splits Genders

A new poll has found that Baz Lurhmann’s MOULIN ROUGE has sparked a rift between the sexes, with women and men split equally for or against the controversial ‘Hollywood on the Harbour’ production. The snap survey of close friends and associates, taken at the weekend, reveals that of those who had actually seen the movie, sisters universally saw Lurhmann as a girl’s best friend, while for the masculine gender, it’s a case of ‘no Can-Can do’, Baz-boy.

Women, without exception, said that they “loved” the film. Some reported “feelings of joy” upon exiting the cinema, others hailed it “a creative triumph.” One Bondi-based IT consultant, who can’t be identified, declared it “the chick flick for a digital generation”. Fellow Bondi resident, Suze, claimed the film’s emphasis on “decoration, singing and dancing, tragic fantasy, and cultivating community” all reflect largely, if not exclusively, “chick aspirations.”

“It’s about the triumph of fashion over formula, of largesse over logic,” said Suze, a media advisor for a public agency. “Watching it was like leafing through the pages of a beautiful magazine.” Jodi, a skincare consultant from Bondi Junction, agreed. “It’s primarily concerned with looking good – and you know I can appreciate that.” Her friend Rachel, a photographic agent from Darlinghurst, declared Rouge “a romp” with canny Scotsman Ewan Macgregor oozing the “it” factor.

“Ewan is so dreamy,” sighed Rachel, prompting a loud scoff from her husband, Andrew. “It’s greatest sin is that it’s just plain boring!” said the self-described “tech-wreck survivor”. Like all the men polled, Andrew rejected the film outright, branding it “rococoesque and shallow”. Geoff, a commercial photographer from Petersham, said he simply failed to suspend disbelief: “The few moments of exhilarating spectacle are dwarfed by a maudlin landscape of overwrought sentimentality."

Josie, who actually works in the film industry, told The Bulletin she copped the full brunt of the emerging gender split first hand. “I walked out calling it visionary and the boy I saw it with ridiculed me for the next two days. “But seriously, putting aside the hype, I think if this film had emerged out of nowhere we'd all be calling it visionary,” Josie added. “And for anyone who grew up in the 1980’s the soundtrack is just fantastic.”

“That’s the problem” countered Alister, a print manager from Summer Hill. "It’s just postmodern pap. It’s got nothing to do with the real, historical Moulin Rouge. There’s no real connection with Paris, or the French, or the Belle Epoque!

“And there’s no CAN-CAN! Lurhmann should hang his head in shame,” Alister exagerated.

The only odd woman out in the poll was Catherine, a TV writer from Surry Hills, who vowed to “never ever” see the film. She blamed the climate of conflicting word of mouth for her indifference.

“I’m getting on with life,” she said. “Barring acts of god, I shan’t be going.”

-MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in "The Bulletin"

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Traffic (2000)

Dir: Stephen Soderbergh

...never fails to seduce.

It's beyond trite to say this is an landmark film, even though it is one of the most gripping and suspenseful thrillers I've ever sat through. This stylish and multi-faceted film sees Stephen Soderbergh display a command of the director’s craft that he only promised in earlier films like sex lies and videotape, King of the Hill or The Underneath. Latterly we have become accustomed to him bringing his independent smarts to the studio system in films like Out of Sight, or his crossover mainstream hit of last year, Erin Brockovich, a film which forced me to flip my view of Julia Roberts from appalling to appealing, such is the maestro's skill.

But Traffic is something else again - a film so accomplished it attracts critical clichés like moths to a flame. It is nothing less than the most authentic portrait of America’s drug trade yet committed to celluloid. With an all-star ensemble cast, filmed in 8 different cities and over 110 locations, it is a vast undertaking that takes the viewer on an exhilarating ride of intrigue, suspense and drama. Traffic’s tableaux is populated by characters which traverse all strata of the supply and consumption of illicit drugs, from the highest officials - both honest and corrupt - to the frontline victims of hard core addiction. Sparing us sermons on why people shouldn’t take drugs, the film ultimately demonstrates how America’s policy of waging an unwinnable supply-side "war against drugs” has only ended up entrenching organized crime, corrupting the public sector, and punishing the victims of addiction, while doing precisely nothing to stem the rising destructive tide of drug use at all levels of society.

Such a thesis is built quietly, subtly by a screenplay that intertwines three stories: an honest cop (Benicio Del Toro) trying to function within a “entrepreneurial” police force corrupted by the ruthless cartels that traffic drugs across the US/Mexico border; a conservative judge (Michael Douglas), whose appointment as the President's new national anti-drug czar coincides with his daughter's (Erika Christensen) slide into addiction; and a naïve society matron (Catherine Zeta-Jones) whose bourgeois life is thrown into turmoil when her husband is arrested for drug trafficking. Hitherto, she thought he was an upstanding pillar of society.

Soderbergh mixes up the cinematic styles for each thread of the narrative, for instance the Mexican sequences are given a dreamy treatment, shot hand-held by Soderbergh himself in saturated colours on a stock so grainy it could be Super 8. The sequences where Douglas’s anti-drug czar goes on a fact-finding mission to “the frontline”, inspecting border crossings, or high tech anti-trafficking facilities have a semi-documentary feel, again shot hand held. Zeta-Jones sequences are shot like movie-of-the-week, as her lady-that-lunches, faced with losing everything, must swot up on the family business of engaging hit men, laundering money and dealing with the Tijuana cartels.

The detailed portrayal of police work rings true, in fact the whole films proffers a “no bullshit” authenticity, wrapped in the hip, contemporary apparel of independent filmmaking. This is intelligent cinema that assumes - and demands - an engaged and interested audience. That said, it flows freely and with ease and never fails to seduce. The cast is so good they render superlatives meaningless. Just go and see it. Then we can talk.

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First published in Australian Style.

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2001: A Space Odyssey

Dir: Stanley Kubrick

Released at the height of psychedelic hysteria, Kubrick’s supra-philosophical mind fuck was billed as the ultimate trip, but was dismissed by critics as little more than a ponderous light-show with a few riddles thrown in for diversionm, and thus didn't rate even a nomination for Best Picture at the 1969 Oscars. Carol Reed’s musical, Oliver! won that year, with Kubrick nominated for Best Director but also losing out to Reed. Thirty three years later, if you haven’t seen 2001 on the big screen, then take the chance while it’s going. But if you’re all Kubricked out - and who isn’t after the orgy of hype surrounding the maestro’s death and the release of Eyes Wide Shut - rent Oliver! instead and see what all the fuss was about.
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First published in Australian Style magazine, national. April 2000

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A Pure Formality (Una Pura formalità) 1994

Dir: Giuseppe Tornatore; Stars: Gerard Depardiue, Roman Polanski

professional and manipulative

Gifted Italian writer/director Tornatore admits he has been a little in limbo since his celebrated memoir Cinema Paradiso trumpeted his arrival on the international scene in 1988. But if such a creative hiatus can guarantee films as good as A Pure Formality, then writer's block should be added without delay to every film school syllabus.

Tornatore echoes these struggles in his main character of Onoff (Depardieu), a once-celebrated but now-defeated writer who has been living unproductively in rural isolation for some six years.

After a murder is committed near Onoff's farmhouse, police pick him up wandering the forest in the rain, deluded, and without ID. Dragged off to a suitably desolate police station, he is interrogated by a strange Inspector (Polanski), who, being the genius writer's greatest fan, brutally ridicules the suspect for impersonating his hero. The tables turn once it dawns on the Inspector that his hero and suspect are one and the same, and the film settles into a see-sawing psychological joust as the inspector tries to extract a confession from the uncooperative, unhinged poet.

The film isn't driven by suspense or an unravelling plot but by performances and dialogue which amount to extraordinary studies in character. Rendered in luscious, bleak cinematography, Depardieu cuts an unforgettable figure: a brooding, ranting beast of a poet, haunted by memories of the murder, unsure if he committed it or merely wrote it. Polanski's Inspector is his perfect dramatic foil: sycophantic yet cruel, professional and manipulative.

Indeed, Polanski's mere prescence recalls the claustrophobia of some his most memorable films as director, such as Repulsion (1964) or The Tenant (1976). And Tornatore's own masterful choreography of the elements of film only invites such comparisons - from the screenplay right through to his own astonishing work as editor. This is a melancholic but uplifting film, as rich in detail as it is in wisdom.

Add a shrieking, luminous score from Ennio Morricone and A Pure Formality becomes, without question, one of the most perfectly complete examples of film art to emerge this or any year.

Rated 'A plus'.

First published in Who Weekly, Australia, Time Inc.

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A Judgement in Stone (La Ceremonie) (1995)

Dir: Claude Chabrol

Refreshingly unsentimental

Now that it's 'eyes right' down in Canberra, those in the ruling class planning on whooping it up would be well advised to first take a sobering look at this truly subversive psychological thriller from veteran French director Claude Chabrol.

You simply can't get good help these days. Just ask the Lelievre family, a self-satisfied bourgeois nuclear unit who live in high-cultured good taste on their comfortable Brittany estate. The new housekeeper of their model home is the stoic Sophie (Sandrine Bonnaire). A loner fond only of chocolate and tabloid TV, the near mute Sophie serves her new masters with skill but dispassion, fearing they will soon discover she is illiterate and sack her, as other employers have.

Madame Lelievre (Jacqueline Bisset) thinks she's "a bit odd but a real pearl", but when Sophie forms a liberating bond with town rebel and local postie, Jeanne (Isabelle Huppert), she raises the suspicion of the Master of the House (Jean-Pierre Cassel), who believes Jeanne is secretly opening his mail. From here the narrative pivots around a series of increasingly odious revelations, unsettlingly delivered by Chabrol with an almost transparent touch. Suffice to say that the class war is alive and well, as those who are denied by life's lottery seek 'judgement' on those born to hold the winning tickets.

Chabrol, a former film critic who along with Godard and Truffaut was in the vanguard of the French New Wave in the late fifties, based his script on a 1963 Ruth Rendell novel (way before Inspector Wexford found fame). He weaves a quiet, austere tale which steadily builds its ironies and suspense to an unexpected climax, aided and abetted by some on-the-money acting. Bonnaire's surgical portrait of the sullen Sophie deservedly earned a Best Actress award at the French Oscars. As Jeanne, Huppert lays a rich psychological complexity beneath the character's sunny surface. Both realise dark yet unnervingly sympathetic portraits of feminist defiance and class solidarity.

Refreshingly unsentimental, A Judgement in Stone leaves its mark well beyond the cinema with a lingering sense that uncomfortable truths have been uncovered without fear of the consequences. Rich bastards will leave the cinema shaken. The rest of us will merely be stirred... perhaps into action. Only, a word of warning: don't try this at home.

Beat Magazine, Sydney. September, 1996

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Metal Skin (1994)

Stars Aden Young, Ben Mendelsohn, Tara Morice, Nadine Garner

Australian writer/director Geoffrey Wright's new film has been a long-time-coming and judging by it's savagery, he's had plenty on his mind. Like his promising 1992 debut Romper Stomper, it takes place on society's frayed edges, but where Romper's forthright engagement with racism struck a nerve, Metal Skin's confused and ugly vision of the world risks alienating audiences with its jaundiced world view.


Motorheads expecting "Days of Thunder Down Under" will be disappointed. The hotted up Chargers and GTR-XU1's career impressively around desolate streets but are secondary in screen-time to the main game: broken lives, doomed love, social disintegration. The kids are bad, their parents are mad, and everyone's one push away from the edge.

Set in the inner-urban wastelands of a bleaker-than-usual contemporary Melbourne, Metal Skin follows four troubled twenty-somethings as they walk the tightrope of love and fall off, one by one. There's lots of snogging and lots of sex, but all four are either unloved, unlovable or degrees of both.

Revhead misfit 'Psycho' Joey (Young) is in love with Roslyn (Garner), but she's in an destructive relationship with drag-racing anti-hero Dazey (Mendelsohn). Sevina (Morice), a delusional black magic devotee, in turn loves Dazey, who uses, then rejects her.

After an impressive first half spent chiselling these characters, building their connections and their world, Wright literally loses the plot, lets the whole shebang off the leash and the film spins out into a series of gory, ugly and hysterical episodes.

This is a pity for the gifted Young, who continues to deliver outstanding performances in ordinary films. Morice, Mendelsohn and Garner also do extremely well to draw genuine pathos from their near comic-book characters.

On a technical level the film is equally impressive in design, cinematography, and editing, with action sequences that pack a punch not seen in local cinema since Mad Max 1. But all these noble efforts of cast and crew are wasted in a script which gives in to the decadence it seeks to portray, lamely opting to trundle out a bunch of downbeat melodramatic cliches - from an homage to the "tower scene" in Hitchcock's Vertigo down to the ultra-violent car chase finale.

Metal Skin is a glorious failure, an exiting disappointment. It's own newspaper ads admit as much when they scream that "everything is about to got totally out of control. "And so it does, but to what end remains a mystery.

Rating B-.

- MICHAEL HUTAK
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First published in Beat Magazine

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Interview: Alex de la Inglesia

Alex de la Inglesia interviewed by Michael Hutak, September 1995

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If nothing else, Spanish filmmaker Alex de la Inglesia is in your face.

“I hate the real violence but I love the violence in the cinema. Violence is necessary in all artistic creation. Violence is part of humanity. Shakespeare works with the same idea. There is no drama without violence. My mum is violent, my dad is violent - the best thing to do is laugh.”

Emerging from the patronage of countryman Pedro Almodovar, Inglesia is on the phone promoting his latest film, Day of the Beast, an occult/sci-fi/splatter black comedy, which won six Spanish Academy Awards and has just opened locally. It tells the unlikely tale of a middle aged Madrid priest who discovers the antichrist is about to be born. He enlists the services of a tabloid TV host and a death metal freak in a desperate and hilarious attempt to stave off Satan and save the world. In the best Spanish traditions of the theatre of cruelty, gory, grizzly, and garish are words that spring to mind. And funny. Very funny.

“Day of the Beast is a local story - a story about the chaos that exists today in Spain. I set myself a hard task - to make an action film with an old man as the star. It is black humour - oil and water. The old man discovers a big secret, that the world is going to end, and this is too big a task for him.”

Portrayed as a decaying, morally bankrupt sespit, Madrid comes off very poorly in Inglesia’s vision, but “it’s not just a critique of cities, the problem is the people. When you put so many people together.

“The worst people are the normal people - who watch TV and go to the supermarket. I prefer people who say ‘I am not normal’. I’m afraid of the people who are satisfied.” When I ask if these people aren’t precisely his audience he lets out a strangely evil laugh, like I’ve caught him out. “I don’t think of my audience. I think of me. I try to explain the story, that’s all - like Hitchcock, the best director in the world,” he says, before adding cheerfully, “People enjoy it when you insult them. Ha, ha.”

While he may have disdain for the common man, his two features to date have been box office hits with the great unwashed in his native country. Day of the Beast, which cost just $US2 million, was the most successful local film in Spain last season. His first film, Militant Action, produced by Almodovar, was also a hit. “It was about handicapped terrorists who attack normal people. It’s a black comedy.”

Inglesia describes himself as a country boy who went to Madrid to draw comic books. He then started working in film, first as a set designer, then as an art director, before he got his big break when Spanish film’s most famous bad boy Almodovar read his script for Militant Action and offered to produce. “This is the best thing about Almodovar,” says Inglesia without missing a beat, “We have nothing in common at all. He loves Douglas Sirk. He is homosexual. Almodovar is not a person who likes followers.”

Talking from Mexico on the set of his latest film, Inglesia’s enthusiasm for his chosen craft pummels infectiously down the phoneline, his pidgen English struggling to match the obvious speed with which the ideas are coursing maniacly through his head.

“I have one or two proposals in Hollywood. Little movies I can make in Spain. I can do anything I want in Spain. I have no limits.” Coincidental to Australia, Spain swung to the right in elections earlier this year after 13 years of socialist government. “It was a very open country,” he laments, “in the last 20 years it was a cultural paradise, now it’s like the finish - the party’s over.

“That’s why I’m working in Mexico. In my next movie all the people are talking about God. It’s so funny. It’s a road movie with an android sex slave and a nymphomaniac girl of 12 years. But we needed more money - the budget is $US6 million which is very expensive for Spain so we are making it in America. Ciby2000 has the rights.”

“If I work in Hollywood I want a big budget. The most thing I love is sci-fi movies. But I want to do something not commercial - very violent, very sexy. Sci fi now is pathetic. When you have $US50 million budgets you have to make a family movie. This is not me.

“I work fast, I’m afraid to respect things. It is dangerous. I don't believe in talent, I only believe in work. I am only learning now - I have only made two movies. Movies aren’t mystical, they are work. I think if you make 80 movies, then you are a good director. The most important thing is work.”

MICHAEL HUTAK

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First published in Beat magazine

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New dimension for Tokyo filmmaker

INSIDE SYDNEY: The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
The visiting Japanese filmmaker Keita Kurosaka has made a whirlwind visit to Sydney where he was special guest at Matinaze, a survey of independent films screening this month at the Art Gallery of NSW.
Kurosaka - a leading figure in Japanese independent film and a lecturer at Musashino University near Tokyo - said his first visit to Sydney had added a new dimension to his work.
"I am encouraged by Australians," he explained. "I have new confidence that my films can communicate with overseas people, rather than just for the Japanese.
"Back home people take my films very seriously and are too self-conscious to laugh.
"But here they laughed spontaneously - and the difference was very stimulating. It was a cheerful, open and lighthearted response."
However, the harbour city left Kurosaka with some curious impressions. "I am particularly surprised that the public toilets are so clean | In fact, your city is very clean and well-organised. But where are all the people? There are hardly any people |"
He explained his dazzling animations: "I want to give new possibilities to the things we take for granted. I want new angles on daily life."
While he acknowledged a debt to traditional Japanese ways, Kurosaka said"the past is not so important - we use what is good and ignore the rest. More and more in Japan, it is not past versus present but commercial versus non-commercial. TV has all the power in Japan."
Considering its population, Kurosaka said Japanese citizens give much less public support to independent cinema than Australians - and it showed in the confidence of our films and filmmakers.
"Your young filmmakers, their themes and styles are not rigid but more relaxed and smooth," he summed up.
The Matinaze screenings continue on Saturday with a program of Japanese films including Kurosaka's latest work The Age of Box.
Caption: Port: Keita Kurosaka explained that his Sydney visit would add a new dimension to his work. Picture by PAUL JONES
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Publication: Sydney Morning Herald
Publication date: 18-5-1993
Edition: Late
Page no: 2
Section: News and Features
Length: 465
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First published in The Sydney Morning Herald

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Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Dir. Francis Ford Coppola

As we have come to expect, Coppola has procured excellence from cast and crew to realise a work that is undeniable; in a word: BIG. Shot entirely on the Sony soundstage, this is a physical film, a juggernaut one endures rather than simply consumes: the sound design bodily assaults; the camera is forever dancing, trance-like and manic forcing the viewer to read the film; the use of colour is lurid, sensual, and oh so bloody red, as the costume design and art direction burn the idea of this Dracula deep into the memory.
Bar the appalling Keanu Reeves, the acting is exemplary with Gary Oldman again delving into his nether-regions to produce a genuinely enigmatic performance as the tragic, lusty Count Dracula. Playing opposite is winsome Winona Ryder who suffers from occasional
bouts of overactus hollywoodenae in amongst probably her most impressive role to date, while the supporting cast is led in cavalier fashion by the ever brilliant Anthony Hopkins, and impressive newcomer, English actress Sophie Frost.
Coppola's decision to tell this traditional screen romance by avoiding modern special FX technology (such as computer animation, morphing or blue-screen matteing, etc) in favour of old fashioned in-camera, "trick photography" (such as reversing footage and multiple exposure) works extremely well. The mood is like a Hammer film with production values raised to
the Nth degree but without the camp sensibilty in fact Dracula offers a lexicon of pre-cinema photographic illusionism. All FX were performed by second unit director, Roman Coppola, F.F.'s 27 year old son, continuing the rich tradition of creative nepotism that runs through his oeuvre.
On the level of performance Dracula bears no flaws, gaps, or gaffes: it's seamless, entertaining and engaging. Still all the brilliance doesn't seem to drag the resonance of the script above the archaic, perhaps because it keeps so true to Stoker's Victorian novel.
It IS a period piece and comes replete with Victorian social and moral baggage, but it begs the question: of what contemporary relevance is this?
Why do we need this movie now, today?
Just to clear Coppola's debts? Digging for clues, one interesting move is the backstage role christianity plays in the plot's denouement: the Count is a sort of underworld stand-in for Christ, forgoing immortality in the name of life rather than the other way round. It's a truly subversive moral manouvre: Dracula willfully brings about his own demise in the name of Love, not in the face of God's power. This is admirable but instead of being driven home it lays meekly buried 'neath all that silver screen "magic". Desperate for other sweeping metaphors, the AIDS epidemic is obvious: Blood + Sex = Death. But if it's Coppola's intention to draw his Dracula as a parable on the mythic, primeval link that humans make between sex and death then he's obscured it behind some extremely fancy footwork. Somehow a great film gets lost behind its dazzling archive of performance.

MICHAEL HUTAK
First published in Filmnews, 1989

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The Super '80s: Australian Super 8 Films of the 1980s

San Francisco Cinematheque, 31 May 1990
Curated and presented by Michael Hutak

Program notes:

This program charts particular moves within a peculiar film scene: Australian Super-8mm film in the '80s. Historically, the emergence of a renewed local Super-8 film culture around the turn of the decade sprang from a perceived winding down of 16mm activity in the late '70s. Super-8 was championed by practitioners as almost a democratic medium offering direct and easy access to the contemporary image maker. After the success of the first Annual Sydney Super-8 Film Festival in 1980 a new scene was quickly defined and promoted as the "Super-8 Phenomenon."

Local art journals such as On The Beach and Tension were in the forefront of promoting the scene as straddling both independent film and the visual arts, with many artists, writers, and mixed-media artists trying their hands in both theory and practice. The scene reached a peak of activity around 1984-85 with the festivals of those years giving birth to a notorious "theatre of cruelty." Here any film which exhibited a sincere or self-important posture was greeted with howls of derisive laughter from the rowdy audience. The festival was replaced with a mixed-media event — The Sydney Film & Video Event — in 1988 and Super-8 as a popular phenomenon has been on the decline ever since.

The works which sprang from this milieu had at least one thing in common: absolute diversity. Therefore this program makes no claim to represent any wider field of practice but rather displays some of the more engaging films by artists who produced a body of work during the period.

One significant feature which the artists here do share is an absence of a self-conscious foregrounding of national identity: Australia is more a state of mind than a birthright, and while not easily denied, can certainly be ignored. Made by citizens of the worid, these films celebrate the decade when the world went global!

— Michael Hutak, 1990

Carumba! (1986), by Nick Meyers; Super-8mm, color, sound, 4 minutes.
Hoard (1981), by Stephen Harrop; Super-8mm, 9 minutes.
Twisted Legend (1985), by Richard De Souza & Rhondda Kelly; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Untitled (1984), by Merilyn Fairskye; Super-8mm, 3 minutes.
Suspect Filmmaker (1984), by Rowan Woods; Super-8mm, 10 minutes.
S.S.S. (1986), by Andrew Frost; Super-8mm, 6 minutes.
Shock Corridor (1985), by Mark Titmarsh; Super-8mm, 4 minutes.
Westworld Story (1984-5), by Catherine Lowing; Super-Smm, 6 minutes.
Ropo's Movie Night (1986), by The Marine Biologists; Super-8mm, 15 minutes.
Macbeth's Greatest Hits (1987), by Michael Hutak; super-8mm, 22 minutes.

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Mystic Pizza (1989)

(USA 1989;dist: Newvision Film; rt 104 mins)

Mystic Pizza has modest aspirations: it aims to draw the viewer's identification only, it seems, for the film's duration. Beyond that it enters the realm of the forgettable: that ever-growing catalogue of 'films-I-have-seen'. Rack up another one. Get ready for the next.
Not that this viewer's identification was ever held with gay abandon. Mystic Pizza plays out a string of Hollywood cliches all aimed at clinching the sale - ie.getting you to love the characters and be right in there gunning for the predictably happy outcome to their trials. This is a feel-good-again movie, where everyone's happy by film's end, leaving you with a feeling in your stomach like too much cheesecake.
Lip service has been paid to '80s shifts in mores - there's swearing, open talk of contraception, the central characters are all women, etc. But that's where contemporaneity ends - it's all 'seek and ye shall find', 'diligence will be rewarded', 'follow your feelings', like some scripted version of Snakes and Ladders. And, like a dutiful daughter, the film effaces it's technical performance directing the viewer to transparently concentrate on the story.
To be fair, the film isn't irredeemable: it is well paced, cinematography is of a high standard, all the actors try hard and are, indeed likeable, but, really, this film is made for Americans, who really go for this sort of thing. However, if life-decisions, blossoming adulthood, and sexual awakening among the post-pubescent of a fishing village in New England sounds like fun to you then Mystic Pizza is recommended. Others might find the pastry thiick with too much cheese buried under layers of overcooked ham.
-Michael Hutak

First published in Filmnews

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