Change Your Image
willywilly
Reviews
Upstream Color (2013)
Metafictional quest for understanding.
It's not every day you get to puzzle out a serious experiment in cinematic narrative, so here's your chance. Crimes are committed using some sort of telepathising mind-worm and two victims get together to solve, revenge and repair what was done to them. There's more to it than that but it's not immediately apparent what. It's a sci-fi concept that eschews exposition and, for much of its length, dialogue.
Figuring out what's going on is itself a theme of the story, and it's what the characters are doing too, so it is metafictional in that way. And it's less likely this fact than the repeated use of the same ambient soundtrack material (produced by director Shane Carruth who also shoots the parts he's not acting in) that lends the film a soporific quality. Upstream Color intrigues, but to a greater degree than it entertains.
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The Tree (2010)
Largely pointless tale without a message. MAJOR SPOILERS
A family live in a house too close to an enormous tree. Why? Who knows. (Ironically the father shifts houses for a living).
The neighbours have managed to do the same. Why? Who knows.
A 30 year old father dies of a heart attack. Why? Who knows.
His ghost inhabits the tree and appears to be a selfish jealous spirit taking its anger out on the house and family. Why? Who knows.
A big storm comes. Why? Who knows.
They leave the house and the mother leaves her lover. Why? Who knows. Where are they going? Why? Who knows.
Probably worked as a novel.
Boxing Day (2007)
Watch this space.
Stenders is a heroic filmmaker. He's doing R&D for the rest of us timid, eager to please, pussy type auteurs. Kriv is here not only to ask 'what if' but to do the work and find out. Necessity is the mother of invention and the necessities of his budgetary constraints mean we now know how a film that is (what looks like) one take, with largely improvising actors, can work. While good, this isn't the greatest film ever made, but Stenders is mining promising territory with his experiments and I'm waiting for him to strike gold with the right components applied to the right idea, and a bit of luck. I'd like to see him use his freedom to try bolder subject matter. The family secret in this film felt a little too familiar in today's media-sphere. Still, I can't think of another Australian filmmaker still working in Australia as worth keeping an eye on as Stenders, except maybe the guys who made Black Water.
Black Water (2007)
Asks the question
This movie sets out to do something very particular, it also sets out not to do certain things. In short it has a definite premeditated trajectory - to deal with the idea of facing death (with very few choices and all of them bad) as grave and real rather than something casual or amusing. In search of that realism it has eschewed certain conventions such as obvious character arcs and hooks. It not about the characters so much as about the human condition. Never mind what the actors would do... what would YOU do in their situation?
Open Water may have been a starting notion for this movie but it goes a lot further. Unlike that film it doesn't cheat the audience in the end when you find out there aren't really any sharks to speak of at all. This has a real monster, not just the idea of a monster and not just an animated stand in. It also has fine production values given what these very resourceful filmmakers had to work with. And again in contrast to that other film it has some exhilarating and brilliantly rendered action at it's climax. And let's not forget the, shall we say 'dazzling', screen presence of its youngest star. She may prove to be quite a discovery.
Hidden (2005)
crafty
This is actually a very innovative little production and comprises a solid manifesto of one way to execute an action film. The 'making of' is a gift to filmmakers, particularly the examination of the camera rigs.
Unfortunately all this skill and cleverness wasn't applied to a good story. For all that I liked about it, I couldn't endure the duration of the movie and wound up fast forwarding to the few cool bits, my favourite being the guy scaling the telegraph tower then crawling like a spider across thin air.
Also well worth it just for the extras.
Sunshine (2007)
sci fi lives!
It's all been said by now and I'm in the 'tragedy of the third act' camp, but I want to point out sci-fi film has nearly been killed off by all the marvel and DC comic movies in recent years. Sunshine raised the flag for serious sci-fi cinema in the 21stC, so I'm waving a flag for Sunshine.
A lot of credit has to go to the cinematographer. I was mainly seduced from the start by the visual beauty of this film, so much so that I wanted to bow down before the messiah and wished for it to take me somewhere worth going. It also succeeds as a 'religious' film, which is an achievement in that I think it's so much harder to be positive and to build something up than to be negative and tear something down.
In the end it reveals an old truth, that a film cannot transcend its script
But give me something that dared to dream over something safe any day.