MAN ABOUT TOWN

Based on the best-selling children’s fantasy novel by CS Lewis, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is the third film in the Chronicles of Narnia series, and a none-too-subtle Christian allegory about the quest for a spiritual life. As in the first two films ( The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian ), the film’s protagonists are children from our world – specifically England during World War II – who find themselves drawn into the magical world of Narnia, where animals talk and mythological creatures such as dragons and fauns coexist with human beings. In this latest installment of the franchise, filmed in Queensland, Edmund Pevensie (Skandar Keynes) and his younger sister Lucy (Georgie Henley), along with their odious cousin Eustace Scrubb (Will Poulter), are swallowed by a painting and transported back to Narnia, only to find themselves floundering in the Great Eastern Ocean, far from land. Rescued from drowning by King Caspian (Ben Barnes, returning to the...

I can't remember life before Doctor Who . The iconic British science fiction program, which premiered in the UK on this day, November 23rd in 1963, has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. While there were periods where my love for the program waned (such as the mid-to-late 1980s, after I moved out of home in January 1986 at the age of 17 into a share house with no television, meaning that I missed almost all of the Sixth Doctor and the entire run of Sylvester McCoy's mischievous and manipulative Seventh Doctor; nor did I see the Doctor Who telemovie when it screened on the ABC on July 7, 1996, the day after my 29th birthday) the series - and its mad, time-travelling protagonist in his stolen blue box - has always been close to my heart. According to my mum, our family accidentally discovered Doctor Who some time in the very early 1970s, when Jon Pertwee was playing the role of the Third Doctor. We were, she tells me, collectively hooked after just one episod...

This is Australian actor Ryan Kwanten, probably best know for getting his kit off in Alan Ball's Southern Gothic vampire series, True Blood : And so is this: And this: That last photo is a publicity still for the new Australian film Red Hill , which opens in cinemas next week. Last Friday I interviewed Ryan Kwanten naked. As in, I was naked, not him. The phone interview was scheduled for 4.55pm, so at 4pm I went to bed for a quick power nap, with the alarm set for 4.30pm. And yes, I sleep naked, deal with it. At 4.25pm I was woken by a phone call from the publicist asking if I can do the interview now. "Umm, give me five minutes," I mumble, half awake. I then proceed to race around my flat grabbing my list of questions, my tape recorder, my phone pick-up microphone etc. There's no time to get dressed before the phone rings. Consequently, I interviewed Ryan - and Red Hill director Patrick Hughes, who I wasn't expecting to speak with - naked. Ironic, much? Update: ...

All cities have their slums. In The Animals & Children Took to the Streets , set in a prosperous and cultured city “where art is spelled with a capital R”, the slum’s dark heart is the festering and fetid district around Redherring Street, and in particular, the stinking, sprawling Bayou Mansions. A cavernous and decaying apartment building where the rooms are so small there’s no room to swing a rat, the Bayou is populated by swarming cockroaches, curtain-twitching perverts, angry swarms of feral children, and the Caretaker – a miserable fellow whose only goal in life is to save up for a one-way ticket out of Redherring Street. When attractive art therapist Agnes Eames and her daughter Evie move into the Bayou Mansions, the Caretaker suddenly finds himself with a new goal in life – especially when Evie Eames goes missing. Like poor Evie, the Caretaker is swept up in the piratical plots of Zelda, the leader of a particularly anarchic gang of Redherring Street child...

A rare collaboration between two of Melbourne's most important creative spaces, Mari Lourey's Bare Witness is a joint presentation by La Mama Theatre and fortyfivedownstairs, in the latter organisation's bunker-like venue beneath Flinders Lane. The space suits the work admirably, for Bare Witness is an expressionistic exploration of the experiences of a diverse group of photojournalists in three different war zones: Bosnia in the early 1990s, Timor Leste in the dark days before its independence from Indonesia, and contemporary Iraq. The audience's introduction to this blood, developing fluid and adrenaline-soaked world is Australian photographer Dani Hill (Daniela Farinacci), who in a short space of time goes from snapping hats and frocks at Flemington race course to photographing corpses and grieving widows in the Balkans. Years later, Dani looks back through her old photographs, recalling the stories behind the 11 most powerful shots; stories which are then played ou...

An evocative though not entirely successful site-specific work by Melbourne company Peepshow Inc , The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum draws on the history and atmosphere of the Abbotsford Convent , where Peepshow have been based since 2005, to tell a story of hope, deprivation, and religious devotion. Like the company’s earlier work, The Mysteries of the Convent , this new production is a meticulously researched and historically accurate rendering of the lives of real people: nuns, prostitutes, penitents and others, whose stories have been woven into a theatrical presentation incorporating a range of disciplines. Puppetry plays a key role in a number of scenes, acrobatic skills are also called into play, while lighting and sound design are judiciously employed to enrich the performances of the two players, Teresa Blake and Carole Patullo. The Lost Story of the Magdalen Asylum is set in a portion of the former Convent of the Good Shepherd that – unlike other areas o...

First published in 1993, teacher turned author John Marsden’s YA-adventure novel Tomorrow, When the War Began was very much the Harry Potter of its day; an international publishing success story that sold millions of copies world-wide, spawning six sequels and a spin-off trilogy in the process. Immensely popular among teenage readers, any adaptation of the book must naturally tread carefully in order to avoid alienating its legion of loyal fans, but screenwriter turned director Stuart Beattie ( 30 Days of Night , Pirates of the Caribbean , Australia ) has done a generally sterling job in bringing Marsden’s much-loved novel to the screen. Set in and around the small country town of Wirrawee (population 3871), the film follows the adventures of a suspiciously photogenic group of teenagers led by the resourceful Ellie Linton (Caitlin Stasey, Neighbours ) as they head bush for a camping trip; coincidentally on the same weekend that Australia is invaded by a brutal occupyi...

The outspoken entertainer Ian Dury was a remarkable and memorable figure on the British music scene; a proto-punk who came to fame in the era of The Sex Pistols and The Damned, and who was quick to lash out at anyone foolish enough to patronise or pity him. Stricken by polio as a child, he walked with difficulty, with the aid of a cane and callipers, but was never one to let his disability prevent him from living a rich and full life – and a somewhat decadent, selfish and self-obsessed life, if this film is to be believed. Together with his band The Blockheads, Dury had several hit songs in the UK music charts in the late 1970s and early 1980s, including the 1979 number one, ‘Hit Me With Your Rhythm Stick’, as well as the singles ‘Reasons to be Cheerful, Part 3’, ‘I Wanna Be Straight’, and the anthemic ‘Sex & Drugs & Rock & Roll’, which was banned by the BBC upon its release in 1977. Many such songs feature on the soundtrack of Sex & Drugs & Rock ...

While this year’s MIFF may have lacked the breadth of international guests seen in previous years, the festival’s program of special events was certainly impressive, including as it did everything from drive-in movie nights at Docklands, a 50th anniversary screening of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho (with a live score performed by the Bates Motel Orchestra) and this very special screening of Buster Keaton’s 1927 classic, The General . Screened at the Melbourne Recital Centre, and featuring the world premiere of a new score performed live by five-piece band The Blue Grassy Knoll, The General is Keaton’s most ambitious film: a 79 minute epic set in the American Civil War and featuring everything a film buff could ask for, including inventive camera work, vividly realised set pieces, dramatic chases, romance, explosions and some truly spectacular stunts. The plot sees Keaton’s typically deadpan train driver, Johnny Gray, rejected by his girlfriend Annabelle Lee (Marion Mack) w...

In the 19th Century the world’s population was divided up into adults and children, but with the dawning of the 20th Century a new social strata began to develop, fuelled by novels such as Booth Tarkington’s Seventeen (published in 1916) and films such as 1937’s A Family Affair (starring a 17 year old Mickey Rooney). Together with the social changes wrought by the availability of the automobile and increased retention rates in secondary schools, these expressions of popular culture helped give birth to a gangly new creature: the American teenager. By the 1950s the teen was firmly ensconced in popular culture, with films such as The Blackboard Jungle and Rebel Without a Cause recognising teenagers as a discrete, separate age group with their own rituals, rights and demands, but also acknowledging their parents’ concerns around issues such as juvenile delinquency and adolescent rebellion. Parents are nowhere to be seen in David Robert Mitchell’s The Myth of the American...

Screening as part of the festival’s Next Gen program of ‘mature, intelligent cinema chosen for the young and the young-at-heart,’ Taika Waititi’s latest feature, Boy is a delightful, engaging and thoroughly charming coming-of-age story about an 11-year-old Maori boy whose heroes are his absent father and pop star Michael Jackson. When his dad – who Boy imagines as a rugby captain, deep sea diver and war hero – arrives home unexpectedly after spending the last seven years in jail, our young hero is forced to confront the truth about the man he thought he knew and must face the future without the hero he’d been hoping for. Set in 1984 on the East Coast of New Zealand, and beautifully evoking both period and sense of place, at its heart Boy is a story about families and the nature of love, though it begins as a comedy, and a very funny comedy at that thanks to Waititi’s superb ear for dialogue and strong performances throughout. Childhood flights of fantasy are brought to life through ...

ACCELERATOR (Part One) The Melbourne International Film Festival’s Accelerator initiative is an annual professional development program for emerging filmmakers; an immersive environment providing the invited participants with access to exclusive workshops, seminars and networking opportunities. The Accelerator program also features two MIFF screenings, in which the short films of the current crop of Accelerator participants are screened to an appreciative audience composed of cast and crew members, industry peers, and the general public. These screenings are always one of my personal highlights at MIFF, providing an insight into the current state of play of the industry and a look at the early works of (theoretically) notable filmmakers of the future. Unfortunately I only made it to one Accelerator screening this year, but it was definitely a rewarding experience. PINION A haunting period piece written, directed and produced by VCA student Asuka Sylvie, and focussing on Lloyd, a yo...

Australian director Ivan Sen first came to prominence with his 2002 road movie about two Indigenous teenage runaways, Beneath Clouds . A contemplative, episodic drama, there are distinct echoes of that film’s style in Sen’s new feature, the moody tone poem, Dreamland . A low budget black and white feature filmed in the US state of Nevada, Dreamland stars Daniel Roberts ( Underbelly: The Golden Mile ) as Dan Freeman, an obsessive UFO hunter roaming the desert around the legendary Area 51, a top secret US military base rumoured to house the remains of an alien spacecraft that crashed near Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. Nicknamed ‘Dreamland’, the base’s official purpose is the development and testing of experimental aircraft and weapons systems. Dwarfed by the rugged mountains, driving endless down the so-called ‘Extra Terrestrial Highway’, Dan seems almost hypnotised by his quest for the truth about alien life. Not even the unexpected appearance of his wife April (Tasma Walton, City Homic...

The old saw that real life is stranger than fiction is confirmed with remarkable cinematic dexterity in this charming rom-com about conman and serial prison escapee Steven Russell , currently serving a 144 year prison sentence in a Texas penitentiary for charges including felony escape and embezzlement. Written and directed by Glenn Ficarra and John Requa (who also co-wrote the screenplay for the scabrous comedy Bad Santa ), I Love You Phillip Morris is a frenetically paced, deviously plotted, blackly comic, and deeply romantic account of Russell’s love-fuelled life of crime. That its overt gay content has caused it to be shelved by its US distributors for months – a similar situation exists here in Australia, where it will probably go straight to DVD – is a crying shame, for I Love You Phillip Morris is truly one of the funniest comedies I have seen in years. When we first meet Steven Russell (played with exuberant flair by Jim Carrey) he is lying in a hospital bed, apparently dyin...

TO DIE LIKE A MAN The latest film from Portuguese director João Pedro Rodrigues is, like his first two features, O Fantasma (2000) and Odete , a queer-themed drama that borders on melodrama; but unlike his earlier films, To Die Like a Man is filmed in such a stylised and fragmented way as to drain almost all emotion from the story in progress. It opens with a group of camouflage-clad soldiers on a night-time training exercise in a forest. Two of the men creep away from their comrades, and once alone, fall into a passionate embrace which leads quickly to sex, and then to violence. Next we meet Tonia (Fernando Santos), an aging drag queen dealing simultaneously with two major dramas: his loss of status in the nightclub where he has worked for years, and a highly strung junkie boyfriend, Rosario (Alexander David), who is young enough to be his own son. At Rosario’s insistence, Tonia is contemplating having a full sex change; a procedure which is explained to viewers in detail early in t...

SPINE TINGER! THE WILLIAM CASTLE STORY In 1950s’s Hollywood, horror film maker William Castle fancied himself as a low-budget Hitchcock; a larger-than-life personality whose suspenseful movie titles – including The Tingler , House on Haunted Hill , 13 Ghosts – were marketed with originality and flair. Unfortunately for Castle, while his movies were hugely successful at the box office, the showman-like gimmicks he employed – buzzing seats, flying skeletons, life insurance policies to cover the possibility of his audience members dying of fright – totally overshadowed his directorial flair. The Hollywood establishment snubbed him, and history relegated him to the B-list – until now. Director and producer Jeffrey Schwarz’s loving tribute to William Castle features a wide range of interviews with Castle’s friends, family and fans – including the likes of directors John Waters and Joe Dante, whose love of Castle’s work influenced their own filmmaking careers later in life – a...

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...

If you've come here looking for my thoughts and impressions of some of the films screening at MIFF this year, as will probably be the case for new visitors who have come here via Google searches (and welcome! Feel free to comment, provide me with links to your own blogs, etc), I thought I'd take this opportunity to point you in the direction of a few other folk who are blogging the festival also. My very dear friend Cerise Howard (who joins me on 3RRR every second Thursday to discuss screen culture events in our 'Fistful of Celluloid' segment) has just recently joined the blogosphere. Very recently indeed, in fact. You can catch her MIFF impressions - as well as a very handy list of films that are getting a general release , whether at the cinema or on DVD - at her new blog, A Little Lie Down . Critic and raconteur Thomas Caldwell is detailing his MIFF adventures over at Cinema Autopsy - expect informed decisions and insightful analysis from him. Over at Screen Machin...