MAN ABOUT TOWN

“There is no Beat Generation,” poet Allen Ginsberg (James Franco) tells an anonymous interviewer in 1957. “Just a bunch of guys trying to get published.” The original Beats, including Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and William S. Burroughs were indeed all writers, whose biographical and self-mythologising works directly inspired a countercultural movement that scandalised the USA in the staid 1950s. The publication of Kerouac’s On the Road in 1957 was a key moment in Beat history, but the catalysing event which rocketed the Beats, Sputnik-like, to fame across the USA was the publication of Ginsberg’s Howl and Other Poems by San Francisco’s City Lights Press in 1956; and the court case the following year which saw its publisher, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, charged with obscenity. The trial was widely covered by the press, with articles appearing in both Time and Life magazine; and the decision by Judge Clayton W. Horn that ‘Howl’ was of “redeeming social importance” and was therefore “not obsce...

FIRST SQUAD: MOMENT OF TRUTH Screening as part of MIFF's animation program, this Japanese-Russian-Canadian co-production was an odd beast indeed: an occult retelling of the Nazi war machine’s 1942 invasion of Russia as seen through the eyes of a teenage psychic and her dead best friends. Nadya is the sole survivor of First Squad, a group of psychic soldiers trained by Russia’s mysterious Division 6 (a military branch dedicated to winning the war by magical means). Suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder and amnesia in the wake of her friends’ deaths, Nadia is sent to Moscow by a mysterious, Obi-Wan-like monk, where she is re-recruited by Division 6’s leader, General Below, and charged with an important mission. It seems that the Nazis too have a psychic division, the Ahnenerbe, whose dark sorcerers have summoned the spirit of an evil warlord from beyond the grave: Grandmaster Baron Von Wolff, the leader of a terrifying undead horde. Despite being under constan...

I've only seen nine sessions at the Melbourne Queer Film Festival so far this year, which is pretty poor by my usual standards. There were a couple more sessions today that I wanted to see, but ironically I missed out on them as I've been sitting in front of the computer all day writing reviews (my first Comedy Festival piece for The Age this morning, followed by several other reviews for this here blog this afternoon). I may as well continue in that vein, with a brief summary of the remaining sessions I've attended. Hopefully I get to see at least one more film tomorrow, before the Comedy Festival eats my life... SHORT FILMS I've seen three short film packages this year: Sex Drives and Videotape , a selection of edgy gay shorts exploring fetishes and the dark side of sexual desire; another collection of gay shorts, Short & Burly , and the lesbian shorts selection, Short & Girly . As always, an ecclectic range of films, none of them bad (in my opinion) but o...

DEAD SNOW (Dir. Tommy Wirkola, 2008) Screening as part of the festival’s ‘Night Shift’ program, the Norwegian horror-comedy Død Snø ( Dead Snow ) is light on thrills and heavy on laughs; a bloody romp involving horny medical students, an isolated cottage, and a battalion of Nazi zombies. The film opens with Sara (Ane Dahl Torp) chased by shadowy pursuers through a twilight of snow and skeletal branches, to the accompaniment of Edvard Grieg’s ‘In the Hall of the Mountain King’; one of several knowing winks made in the audience’s direction throughout the film. The joking tone is maintained a few minutes later, when one of a small group of holidaying medical students (who are traipsing through the wilderness intent on rendezvousing with Sara at her chalet) discovers that their group has no mobile phone coverage. “How many films start with a group of friends at a cabin with no cell phones?” he wonders aloud; an obvious reference to Sam Raimi’s Evil Dead trilogy and other films of that il...

Richard Watts chats with Australian animator Adam Elliot about his new feature film. In many ways, Adam Elliot sees his debut feature film, Mary and Max , as a coming out movie. “Mary’s a mary,” Elliot laughs over lunch at the Abbotsford Convent. “I’ve done a lot of interviews with different gay and lesbian mags and blogs and whatever, and I’ve been really relieved and reassured – because I thought they were just going to focus on [the character of] poor, old Damien Popodopolous, a stereotypical gay character – I thought, ‘Oh, they’re going to hate me.’ But they actually ignored me in a way and they’ve actually seen Mary’s story as a gay story. “She sees herself as different, and not fitting in, and marginalised and melancholic and suicidal and all these things that all people go through, but especially gay and lesbian people.” The bleak but beautiful Mary and Max – a feature length stop-motion animation made in the “wonky” style of Elliot’s 2003 Oscar-award winning short Harvie Krumpe...

Being that I'm on leave this week, I've been spending the last two days catching up on films, with more to see in the next few days before I head back to work next week. First off the rank was George Miller's animated epic about dancing penguins, Happy Feet . This is the story of Mumble (adequately but blandly voiced by Elijah 'Frodo' Wood), the alienated young Emperor penguin who is cast out by his tribe because he expresses himself through tapdancing instead of singing. Consequently our young hero embarks on the sort of standard hero's quest that we've come to expect in fantasy films, in search of the alien outsiders whom Mumble's believes is responsible for the fish shortage that is slowly starving his tribe . Along the way Mumble falls in with an endearing troupe of Adelie penguins, led by the irrepresible Ramon (Robin Williams) and faces off against a truly menacing leopard seal, a small pod of killer whales, extremely Ocker elephant seals, and even...