MAN ABOUT TOWN

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...

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...

It's been a relatively quiet festival for me this year, and a quiet week on the blog-front too, I'm sorry. Promise I'll try and get up to speed soon! THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA (dir Rupert Julian, USA, 1925) It's not often you get to see a decent print of this silent horror classic starring 'the man of a thousand faces', Lon Chaney; let alone a screening in the suitably-chandeliered Regent Theatre with a live accompaniment on the Wurlitzer organ. It was with glee that I attended this second screening of the film on the second weekend of the festival; and with rapture that I took in the various delights the film had to offer, including some wonderful scene composition (typified by Christine's first descent to the Phantom's underground lair, deep below the opera house), lavish sets, the iconic unveiling of Chaney's skull-faced Phantom, and - a scene that I knew existed but had somehow forgotten - an early and striking sequence in primitive Technicolour ...

OUT OF THE BLUE (dir Robert Sarkies, New Zealand, 2006) This confronting and moving docu-drama details the events of a 1990 massacre in the New Zealan d village of Aramoana , in which thirteen people died at the hands of resident David Gray (Matthew Sunderland), an unemployed farmhand, a loner, and a gun collector. Boasting stunning cinematography and confident direction, the film slowly builds to the fateful events of November 13-14, when Gray stalked the town overnight, shooting at anyone who crossed his path. The lead performance by Sunderland is excellent; providing glimpses of humanity among the madness, so that while one doesn't feel sympathy for the character, there are nonetheless flashes of empathy for him (such as a scene early in the film where a terrified Gray hides from the postie, imagining her knock on the door to be armed police with baying dogs). Conversely, a scene where he sits down impassively to eat after shooting his victims conveys the character's almost...