Reviews

Rachael Blake plays a novelist who's extremely pleased with herself and makes a point of being either sour or enigmatic or both simultaneously. She and her publisher (Vince Colossimo) visit her country mansion so she can write her second novel without distractions. He seems extremely dim - for a publisher. But that's handy because all she seems to want from him is sex, or to be able to humiliate him. Nothing much happens for the first half hour. Except we meet the standard menacing local bloke in a flannelette shirt, and there are flashes of past somethings - very brief, too brief to stimulate much anticipation. Then the novelist's fun-loving besty (Susie Porter) turns up, and larger hints are made about the dark secret of their past, but not much happens that you don't expect will happen. A triangle develops, the dark secret is gradually revealed, but are the "shocking" scenes we see part of the novel being written, or are they really happening? I didn't care. This is one of those 20 minute stories that are chopped up into 90 minute jigsaw puzzles in the hope that you won't notice that not much is going on. As far as interesting characters or story are concerned, "The Second" woefully neglects its audience.

The makers of this plotty, glossy thriller have based their work on an excellent, dark novel by Patricia Highsmith. Unfortunately, the movie doesn't even come close to representing Highsmith's carefully constructed murky little world. The main problem - apart from the over-egged art direction and false, icon-ridden recreation of the mid-1950s - is the characterisations. In Highsmith's original, the main character of Walter (Patrick Wilson, on good form) and his relationship with his neurotic wife, Clara (Jessica Biel, lost) is complex and fascinating. As is the relationship between Walter and his new amour, Ellie (in the book she's a modest, sincere music teacher; in the movie she's a phoney hipster, singer). The movie relationships are diluted to the simplest terms, as though this were a trailer for what they could be. The most sinister character ( well-portrayed by Eddie Marsan), Walter Kimmel, is simply sinister without any exploration of his relationships with anyone else or his view of the world. Most of Highsmith's plot is intact, but rather than moan on about this travesty, I suggest you read the book, "The Blunderer", it's excellent on so many levels.

This viewer did not believe a single character in this, not their jobs, their social status, their relationship to each other, their clunkily exposed past, the town/country they lived in...it's all highly manufactured, self-conscious drama for drama's sake with everyone concerned striving for tragedy or meaning, but looking faker and faker as one pretentious scene follows another. None of the personnel involved escape the curse of this contrived world from the very first scene.

To be honest, I only watched 15 minutes of Episode One, but I was astounded by the number of levels on which this comedy-drama drove itself into a ditch and stayed there, writhing with wrongness. Scripting, characterisation, casting, direction, costume design, production design, art-direction, photography, colour, acting... all are a series of horrible mistakes wrought by people who seem to have no idea of drama. Really! It's like being a passenger in a car which heads the wrong way from the start of the journey; doesn't even try to find the right way, and keeps driving up dead-end streets, and doing u-turns in the hope that merciless quirkiness will amuse. I'm sure a lot of people worked very hard to make this, so please forgive my damnation, but...wow! Perhaps the drama suddenly found its way after the 15 minutes for which I viewed it, but it was not an auspicious quarter of an hour. It did occur to me that Newton's Law is a strategic move in the alleged plan for Michelle Guthrie to destroy the ABC.

The Kettering Incident suffers from the ancient Aussie curse of under-developed characters, thin plotting and too much scenery. A troubled Tasmanian medic returns (from London) to her native hamlet, where many years ago, as a teenager, in the bush, she had a traumatic close encounter with mysterious lights. She has long been held responsible for the death of a young girl, her companion at the time. Medic's return is not popular. Most of the locals are sullen and monosyllabic caricatures, who constantly avoid answering questions, and loathe our heroine. During the first three hours there's an occasional outburst of plot, and/or a local telling her to go back where she came from, and there are some more oogly-boogly lights, rednecks, greenies and non-syllabic, menacing lumps of wood, and quite a few hams (it's amazing how some actors can be hammy just standing still with their back to you in a long shot). Not only are the first three hours repetitive, but they're very, very slow. I get the feeling that the film-makers believe every scene is loaded with simmering significance or something, but if it is, I missed it. Simmering is okay, but things must eventually come to the boil. I've seen too many similar stories done so much better, particularly in terms of pace. This could probably be an exciting two hours. But after three hours of not much, I've given up.

This drama about a dysfunctional family could be used as lesson 101 in how not to write drama. There is so little for the audience to discover as all the characters not only tells us who they are, but who everyone else is; as they all gabble on and on, bickering and clashing. Catherine Deneuve is well cast as a repressed bourgeoise, as she's an actress not famed for her emotional range. Daniel Auteuil is perfectly competent as a self-indulgent smart-arse, and the rest of the cast is efficient; but I neither believe them nor care about them, because they're cardboard fabrications created to cause dreary conflicts. Don't worry, it's not all bicker and angst; there are some box-office mandatories: sex, gratuitous nudity; almost-lesbianism, biff, dementia, divorce, but none of it convinces, not even for a second. The director has made a few similar films, all of which fail to convince by dint of his preference for pretension.

Although it's a good-looking Technicolor western; this film attempts to explore the effect war has on one man, a colonel, (played by Glenn Ford) and those who fall foul of his obsessive behaviour. Although Ford is a bit one-note in his portrayal of an officer unhinged by power and blood-lust, it's interesting to see him play a nutter, while his friend, William Holden, is (for the most part) a bland good guy. I have a feeling that this western - one of the earliest with a "psychological" theme - wanted to say a lot more about the way people are deranged by the horrors of war, but it was probably constricted by the need to tell a box-office yarn. The direction is stolid; the colour is lavish, and there are some excellent confrontational scenes between Ford and the victims of his mania. Ellen Drew doesn't have much to do as the girl loved by both Ford and Holden. The ending is suitably melodramatic. It's just a shame we aren't able to see a little further into why Ford has turned into a monster; or the circumstances which have led him to his state. There's a bit too much of him twitching and glaring every time someone suggests he might be a bit loopy - we're always on the outside; if we were more on the inside it could have been a touching tragedy.

This is a curiously lame re-versioning of a French film, which was much more successful on many levels, the most important being the direction. WTTS is an awkward experience for this audience member; it's full of good farcical ideas and nice, broad characters, but it never really comes to life, because the staging, the timing and the acting all miss the mark. You can see how good it could have been, how many of the scenes, played differently would have worked. Alas it's mostly flat, overly sentimental but cheerful. The only actor in the cast with whom I'm familiar is Angela Finocchiaro, whom I very much admired in "Don't Tell" - in which she gave a funny and moving performance. Here she's not given much to do beyond acting out the demands of of her caricatured character and the unlikely turns of the plot. I kept expecting her to be funny, but I was always disappointed. I attribute this to poor writing and even poorer direction. It's often extraordinary how certain scenes are staged - as though the director is anti-comedy.

There's not an awful lot that's credible in Truffaut's re-writing of William Irish's plotty thriller. The attractive leads, the mise-en-scene and the location carry interest for about half of the film, by which time it just becomes silly. I'm not sure what Truffaut intended, because from the start Monsieur Belmondo does not convince that he's a man who's spent his life on Reunion Isalnd, running a cigarette factory. Even less convincing is Mlle Deneuve as an ex-reform school adventuress - perfectly groomed with Yves St Laurent outfits, her delicate skin and unemotional expressions. Much of the potentially intriguing plot is told instead of shown; there are ludicrous coincidences and character transformations, and a central relationship that's uninteresting. Nevertheless there are sequences which have that good old Truffaut oomph; and sequences which have that bad old Truffaut pfft. Camera work and music are splendid.

Although he's done admirable work in the past, Mr Redford stumbles through this 'thriller' in more ways than one. The story treads a fairly well-worn and clichéd path, and has an overall feeling of old Hollywood corn. Redford plays an old radical, who's hiding out in Albany NY, with a surgically enhanced face and a 12 year old daughter. It's very difficult to believe their relationship because Redford's performance is so unconvincing when he's playing scenes with her; most of the scenes are based on sentimental bull****, as opposed to the actual problems which might face father and daughter, after the mother has died, and father has to abandon daughter to go on the run and prove his innocence. Shia La Boeuf - well cast - plays a pushy, weasel of a reporter who greedily uncovers as much 'truth' as he can, egged on or not, in time-honoured fashion by an editor (Stanley Tucci) with the cleanest, neatest shirt in journalism and the least conviction in his eyes as he delivers the time-honoured lines which every editor since the advent of talkies has uttered. After an interesting start, this viewer soon became bored with the old radical-on-the-run scenario, mainly because Redford is so-o dull. Julie Christie also turns up, also with a surgically enhanced face, and is pleasantly believable - for a change. The best performances are by Susan Sarandon, Brendan Gleeson, Anna Kendrick, Brit Marling and Chris Cooper, but alas they are not worth the price of admission.

It's hard to believe in any of the situations in this portmanteau of character sketches, because the writing is clever rather than dramatic, and the scenes are played self-consciously by actors and a director, who must think they're being a lot more charming/interesting/amusing than I did. There's smugness, and meanness in the way that these hapless 40 somethings are portrayed as they struggle with their lives in the kind of urban artificial situations usually presented in comedy sketches. The non-cinematic style is suited to a radio play, but most radio plays would give these kind of interactions a bit more pace; there's too much pausing - for us to laugh? There were very few titters in the cinema when I saw it. And I get the feeling we were supposed to laugh at, not with the characters. The last two sketches are cross-cut, as two separate women tell two separate male friends about their husbands' shortcomings. We (the audience) have no emotional investment in either the husbands or the wives, so why should we care about the husbands' impotence/violence/jealousy and its effect on the women? It's like being party to bitchy gossip about someone you don't know. The film left me with a sour taste; apart from not really believing in any of the characters, I didn't like them. This is one for cold metroplolitans.

Don't be put off by the opening of this movie, which shows four privileged thirty-somethings indulging themselves on a SE Asian holiday; followed by more self-conscious family life in pretty Sydney surroundings. Then it appears not all is well. One of the four, a businessman, has gone missing, and other things which happened on the holiday begin to be revealed. Excellent performances from Teresa Palmer and Joel Edgerton, and a skillful withholding of information, keep this mystery/emotional drama ticking over. The prettiness of the photography is a nice irony, contrasting with the increasingly murky revelations. There's a slight over-indulgence in arty camera angles when you'd like to get closer to the characters and their feelings; the performances by the missing man's parents are unconvincing, and the the lead female performance is often curiously detached. Nevertheless this is one of those stories which slowly grows stronger; its twists are credible and powerful. Good work!

Starts well with some very trendy opening credits for 1959, then it quickly establishes itself in cardboard Hollywoodland with lots of dialogue to tell the story. (It seems like Warner Brothers were trying to make a movie star out of James Garner, who was the lead in their TV western series 'Maverick', but they've confined him to a low budget and lashings of TV-type dialogue.) He's suitably smarmy as a dodgy businessman, but not particularly convincing, neither are the sets. Much attention from wardrobe and make-up departments is lavished on Natalie Wood (his love interest) and she looks gorgeous. Her father Dean Jagger is supposed to be a successful businessman who has built up a plastics business from nothing, but he plays it (as written) like a sweet old uncle. Henry Jones is nicely ironic, and Nina Foch, as always, is delightful. There's a flashback encounter between Natalie and James: they meet at a dance in Maine; later she suddenly appears in Maine cabin, soaked from the torrential rain outside, he goes into the bathroom to get her a robe, and she takes off all her clothes - knowing that he's coming back. He sees her, likes what he sees; she's humiliated, puts on the robe, and dashes back into the rain, later claiming that he made her feel 'cheap'. Very silly. The rest of the film is not silly, just dull: well-paced business dealings, some romance,some pithy lines and tons of talk, in a completely artificial world.