alexmatte Reviews

Enoken no Tobisuke bôken ryokô (1949)

An elegy on How To Get There.

[8/10 · 16 October 2019]

A sweet, gentle fairy tale in a world of savagery, whether post-war 1949 or eternal-war 2019. Very reminiscent of The Wizard of Oz and just as charming. And, like it, it brings to mind the famous "How to Get There" cartoon by the genius that is Michael Leunig: "How to get there. Go to the end of the path until you get to the gate. Go through the gate and head straight out towards the horizon. Keep going towards the horizon. Sit down and have a rest every now and again. But keep on going. Just keep on with it. Keep on going as far as you can. That's how you get there."

No hatred, no resentment, no retribution. Just faith and courage. Beautiful.

American Graffiti (1973)

A symphony in neon

[10/10 · 25 September 2019]

American Graffiti takes us along a seemingly endless night, evening to daybreak, in early 1960s small-town California, through the eyes of teenagers about to fly their parochial coop the next day to head interstate for college. This is America's richest state at its peak moment of egalitarian wealth, with 18 year-olds able to afford to own and run cars the size of cruisers. And indeed to cruise around town lazily in them all night, doing or aspiring to do the sorts of things teenagers do. The whole film is a wonderfully sympathetic, nostalgic look at that moment in life, and that brief moment in post-war America - 1962, to be exact - when there still seemed to be hope for that nation. Director George Lucas shot the film in 1972, already acknowledging by his change of location away from the aptly-named Modesto, California - which is the inspiration for the film - that the times had changed beyond recognition.

Remarkably, the film introduces to the screen in one swoop the baby-faced Ron Howard, Harrison Ford and Richard Dreyfuss, all perfectly cast and delivering exceptionally mature, memorable performances, with all the other very young actors likewise brilliant. As in all exceptional films the musical score is a standout, even without being original - sensational c.1960 hits selected and edited in brilliantly. Above all, the visual potential for this longest valedictory night in early post-war America is fully and nostalgically exploited. A most beautiful, gentle, loving neon-lit ode to a time that will never return.

Daisies (1966)

Watch it, but only for its bravura visuals

[7/10 · 16 July 2019]

As a political statement, however approvingly interpreted by a vaguely feminist pan-artistic university academic at the gallery screening I saw this at, this film is a parody of itself. Yeah, women didn't run communist era Czechoslovakian society and politics... as they no doubt did for the eons before and of course in the capitalist nowadays. Dem commies are the root of all evil. Yeah, pointless puerile vacuousness and universally timeless decadence are clearly the better path and the antidote to rigid patriarchal communism. It's indeed actually the sort of banal-simplistic political statement you'd have expected the Communists themselves to have made to demonstrate the dangers of straying from their order. Unless you suffer from terminal nihilism. And the film's recurrent presumed-allegory of little girls sweetly leading various increasingly aged sugar daddies up the garden path is as much ambiguous as doubly-negatively amoral. Dem commie censors, how couldn't they have found this film edifying? Nihilist debauched decadence and conspicuous consumption beat personal and collective severity any day, Right? The film's meaningless and contempuous posture on anything serious is underlined by its trite use of WW2 imagery at its opening and closing scenes. Yeah, WW2 - the conflict in which tens of millions died, especially in Eastern Europe, only twenty years prior to when the film was made in 1966.

Moving on to the film's technical direction, editing, cinematography, special effects and total visual experience, yes, this is a visual feast (pun unintended) which makes it a must-see film. No doubt would be widely instead of niche- famous just for that, had it been made in the West say by a legendary genius like Kubrick. The editor, choreographer and director all deserve acclaim for this.

Watch it for the real virtuosity of its visuals and cinematographic techniques, but not for any moral guidance or valid political commentary. There's indeed no more scathing criticism possible in that regard than this film's pairing at my screening with the American 1964 experimental short "Meat Joy", truly a tour de force of putrid nihilism - though interestingly, in its quasi-solarized swirling colours, also quite visually compelling.

Finally, the facile philosophical message at end of Daisies, that it is "dedicated to all those whose sole source of indignation is a trampled-on trifle", inversely reminds one in Sydney, Australia, of the furore by young nihilists here over the pub "lockout laws" introduced mid this decade (after regular fatalities from horrible, random alcohol-fuelled street violence), restricting people from continuing to pub crawl beyond 2am. Those claiming the freedom to engage in that behaviour without restriction have been so outraged as to form a political party and elect a representative to government. Australia, and NSW in particular where all this has happened, have this decade become corrupt beyond description, in multiple different scandalous and critical ways. But our "Lockout Laws" indignants find little else to be outraged about than this one civilized act by parliament. Daisies' protagonists would, in contemporary Sydney, surely be proud card-carrying Anti-Lockout-Laws Party members.

Nebraska (2013)

About time for Casting and Location Oscars, don't you think?

[10/10 · 6 April 2019]

One of the most breathtakingly good films you will ever see. An excellent script that could only possiblity have been better with a perhaps punchier ending. Though the film's brilliance isn't derived from "punch" but from an extremely humane look at life.

An excellent "drawling" music score too, totally appropriate to this finest of "road" movies, even more brilliant in that genre than the fabulous "Paper Moon".

The performances, all two dozen of them, seem to me to cry out for major awards. Really, absolutely perfect. Reminiscent of "Blue Jasmine".

And where are the Oscars for Casting and Locations? Those responsible for these in this film need to win them, any year. The Casting especially is sensational, bringing to mind that of greatest-ever films such as "The Third Man", "One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest", "An Englishman Abroad" and "American Graffiti".

Someone said to me that this film reduced the cast and locations to a cliché. I know what he meant, but don't agree. This is Midwest America, when even non-Midwest America has sadly since the TV age increasingly portrayed itself as a cliché to outsiders from anywhere else - more Greek-masked performance than real life. It's actually difficult to see much actual individual freedom in the "land of the free". Let alone in the now economically ravaged, melancholic "Midwest". The truth is that the America of the last few decades is its own cliché, its own satire, and something that you could never make up if it weren't true.

To make such an utterly, profoundly humane and unsentimental film out of that human landscape is a work of true genius. Everyone involved in this production deserves Oscars.

The Death of Stalin (2017)

I await the sequels on Dick Cheney and J. Edgar H.

[6/10 · 29 March 2019]

Hey, a well crafted film. Yes, just like The Thick of It set in Stalinist times. Iannucci is a very good scriptwriter. Given that Beria so resembles Dick Cheney physically in this movie, can we expect a similar film by this production team on that other equally moral gentleman? With Wolfie and Perle in the other major roles. Or, lest anyone accuse those behind this film of bias, could we also have a film about the American Beria counterpart, J. Edgar Hoover, a man of equivalent scruples?

The scriptwriting here is good, let's see this team sink its teeth in these real-life historical American ghouls. Just for balance, like.

Dead Poets Society (1989)

Seamless scriptwriting, direction and performances, with a rousing, meaningful and convincing ending

[9/10 · 23 February 2019]

A very fine film well worth two hours of your life - you won't be checking your watch for one moment, such is the quality and of the seamless screenplay, direction and performances.

It is reminiscent of the magnificent "If", as far as being a portrayal of an establishment-fodder factory is concerned, and of many classic "schooling" films such as "Blackboard Jungle" (1955) and "From Sir With Love" (1967) in its theme of the heroic committed teacher going the extra miles purely out of conscientiousness.

It is however curious that the scripwriter could not find a better aphorism for independence of mind and non-conconformity - even admittedly in the context of a repressed and repressive institution such as the college portrayed - than "caveat emptor", an ethos associated more closely with self indulgence than with due principled rebellion against stultifying pseudo-conservative tradition. They are strange people, scriptwriters. At least this film got - unusually - a rousing, meaningful and convincing ending.

Like the stellar "One Flew Over a Cockoo's Best", it is remarkable that the producer and director managed to find an enlightened relevant institution willing to overlook the implied slight to itself too, lend itself to the project and supply its grounds (and, incredibly, in OFOTCCN, its staff and patients too) for it.

This is Robin William's finest performance, worthy of renown. As with other films employing teenage actors, most notably "American Graffiti" (1973), it's always interesting to spot the faces who became big. As, in "From Sir to Love" it was Lulu, here it's Ethan Hawke, primarily - scenes with Lara Flynn Boyle apparently having been deleted.

Leviathan (2014)

An authentic and masterful portrayal of post-Soviet Russia

[9/10 · 7 February 2019]

Somewhat unnecessarily long as this film manages to be, so well acted, directed and scripted it is that it easily passes the watch-checking criterion.

Like almost all Russian films since 1992 it cannot but refer to a common visual iconography: the melancholic ruins of an empire - or even empires. stretching back to Tsarist times - destroyed as much by robber-capitalism opportunism and corruption as by any mere winds of change. Portending the future, even as far back as the 1970s - as in Stalker (1979) - Russian film settings have at times turned surreal-dystopic, depicting social disrepair and environmental blight. Yet the northern arctic coastline in which Leviathan is set is hauntingly beautiful, which only serves to make the human drama even more distressing.

The characters and performances, not to mention the direction and cinematography, make for a film that flows magisterially from beginning to end. Even if there is the odd flaw in the storyline's coherence and stylishness.

One reason certainly to see it is for its fabulously authentic portrayal of the notoriously corrupt Russian Orthodox church's hierarchy and its often ultra wealthy, corrupt and hypocritical or medievally simple worshippers. Yes, just like other organised religions, but even more conspicuous in the inequality and distress of post-Soviet Russia. And something that must be stated no matter how much one - like me - respects the people and the culture. Coral Browne and John Schlesinger were right, in the almost matchless masterpiece that is An Englishman Abroad, to relegate all the good that can be assigned to Russian Orthodoxy to the mere if undisputed choreographic aestheticism of its services. Opium of the people indeed, and no film makes that more apparent.

Finally, a nod must always go to the genius of Phillip Glass' music and of its employment in any film. Leviathan joins an elite club, in company with The Fog of War and The Thin Blue Line, in this respect.

Babe (1995)

A splendid morality tale, a serious film more for adults than children

[10/10 · 3 August 2018]

Like The Simpsons, and to a degree its various US cartoon followers, Babe is a film sophisticated enough to be way too great for children, and still too good for many adults.

It isn't just the Saint-Saens organ symphony adaptation, If I Had Words, as its music score which marks it as a film to pay attention to. Or the fabulous character creations like Ferdinand. The simple but fundamental moral of the story is the profound truth that treating others as you would like to be treated yourself is the way to be. And that this works - just look at non-British-Capitalist Northern European nations' unmatched economic and social success in the latter half of the 20th century.

Yes, cooperation and good communication beat brutality any day, even if at the expense of all those individuals and corporations who live off hatred and contempt.

There's unfortunately no danger of Babe's philosophy making the world what it could be. That's the only reason it is a fairytale - and in any case not meant for children.

Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri (2017)

An acting masterclass from a flawed script

[8/10 · 5 March 2018]

An acting masterclass from a flawed script.

Like Blue Jasmine a few years ago (and as I correctly predicted then for that film in my imdb review), Three Billboards is an acting masterclass which deserves to win most of the acting Oscars soon in 2018.

This film also once again illustrates the strange, improbable fact that - incredibly - the rarest contemporary commodity in Hollywood is the simplest and most basic one, you would think: a scripted story which makes a worthwhile statement and wraps up nicely and convincingly at the end.

While we can go along with the proposed Dirty Harry Redneck philosophy up to a point, and enjoy the general redemption towards the end, the final scene crazily seems to have been adlibbed after the writer died suddenly before considering his options for it.

It would behove anyone studying to be a contemporary scriptwriter to sit down and have a look at The Third Man and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, to name just two masterpieces, to see how an ending is done.

Pity one should have to point such obviousness out, when so much else in this film - and certainly the several principal performances - is so memorably good and they will land Oscars tonight.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

A rare moment in cinema when everything goes well and every imaginable talent improbably comes together in unison to create a masterpiece

[10/10 · 11 December 2017]

A long-established legend such as this movie deservedly is needs no more reviews. Watching it again recently after many years, however, prompts me to add it to my reviews here.

Many Oscars seem to have been randomly awarded even in much more gilded ages of cinema than the last thirty years. How The Third Man could possibly have only won a single Oscar (deservedly, in 1951, for Robert Krasker's cinematography) has to remain an eternal mystery and embarrassment to the "Academy" - at least Cannes got it right there for that film in 1949. OFOTCNest is a prominent exception, fully deserving to sweep the major Oscars, in 1976 - or in ANY year, even more deservedly than It Happened One Night, in 1935... and certainly more so than the fairly mediocre but amazingly-awarded Silence of the Lambs, in 1992.

As with all the greatest films, OFOTCNest is distinguished by an unforgettable (though not very prominent, eerily piping in at the beginning and end of the film) musical score, by exceptional casting and acting performances, and - what's markedly lacking in most films - an unforgettable ending. And the story of its making, involving the full cooperation of an enlightened real-life psychiatric institution and its clinical director, is awesome too.

The performances of some of the actual inmates and of a brilliantly disturbed Danny DeVito are standouts, just as Nicholson's and Fletcher's are legendary and defining, and the artistic vision that was required in obtaining such excellence from the entire cast says plenty about the genius of director Milos Forman.

Brilliant as Michael Douglas is as an actor, I doubt anybody could point to a greater achievement than his as a producer of this risky project. Who wouldn't feel eternally successful in their life simply in total to have had such a role in the making of this masterpiece?

Of course, the world only swings between extremes. The archaic national mental health policy of inhuman institutionalization that this movie scathingly criticizes was - largely as a result of this very film - soon after terminated, merely releasing inmates onto the streets and condemning them to sleep under bridges.

Like The Third Man, this is a rare moment in the complicated art of cinema in which everything goes right, and every imaginable talent improbably comes together in unison to create an undying masterpiece.

L'uomo perfetto (2005)

An excellent script and performances make this a standout romantic comedy worthy of international release

[9/10 · 11 December 2017]

An excellent script, performances and direction make this a vastly better crafted, believable and more entertaining movie than most romantic comedies. Even the lesser characters, like the poor divorced Simone, are convincingly and charmingly portrayed.

Had this been a US release, in English and with distribution monopolies on its side, it would be at least as famous as all the Colin Firth/Renee Zellweger/Julia Roberts equivalents. Because it really is a surprisingly good film of its genre.

Well done.

Blue Jasmine (2013)

Amazing performances and some important statements made from a simple storyline

[10/10 · 1 January 2014]

One of the no doubt all too few films you'll see this decade which are well worth the admission price. Amazing, subtle AND powerful performances from not just Cate Blanchett but the entire cast surely demand Oscars in a couple of months. And the so- simple storyline conceals an exceptionally sophisticated script which, together with an as-good-as-ever-was Allen's masterful direction, delivers many profound messages with great sensitivity and without a hint of formulaic clichedness. Foremost among them: that we all lie along a grey scale of character strength and virtue rather than just black and white, and that some of the greatest human substance lies underneath ordinary and easily dismissable exteriors... and viceversa. And I suppose that real, dreadful human suffering results from the shady, wild-west financial dealings which deregulation and "globalisation" encourage. You'd strongly suspect it is a Woody Allen film by its subtle but definite resemblance to Hannah and Her Sisters (a more humorous but despite its quality much less memorable film than this one). It's good for once to look forward to an Oscar night shortlisting a contemporary film deserving serious respect and admiration.

Man with a Movie Camera (1929)

The genius of the Russian avant garde

[10/10 · 12 July 2013]

Anyone wanting to understand how that strange land that lies East of West and North of South, with its awesome admixture of Viking, Slavic, German, Jewish, Caucasian, Central and Far East Asian genes, was the intellectual, artistic, scientific, technological and even military powerhouse that it was for the last couple of centuries, should have a look at this phenomenally brilliant and entertaining film.

It's not a surprise that the founders of the American movie industry were almost to a man born in the Russian empire of tsarist days - this film could have been an outstanding work out of silent-era Hollywood as well.

The film score is presumably not original - but whomever created it for this film could not have done a more brilliant job... again, it's an Oscar winner any day. Just like could be said for the amazing and utterly appropriate score for the Soviet silent futurist masterpiece Aelita (1924).

There are few works in any art medium that better speak of the genius of the Russian avant garde in the first three decades of the 20th century than "Man with a Movie Camera". Not only will you never look at your watch during a screening of it, but you wouldn't do that were it twice as long.

The Bandit (1953)

A rare film well worth watching, if only for the haunting music score and B/W cinematography.

[8/10 · 16 March 2013]

Another great film that is characterised by a memorable music score. Not all films with great music are great films, but haunting or otherwise memorable scores are a feature of so many of the greatest films of all time - The Third Man, Jeux Interdits, High Noon, American Graffiti, most of the Kubrick opus, Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf and probably any documentary adopting Philip Glass' minimalism (The Thin Blue Line and The Fog of War) being prominent examples. This is so even when the music is not original but simply selected and edited in from classical music, popular or folk songs, as appropriate and evocative. Bets are that you won't be able to get the title folk song of O Cangaceiro out of your head for some time after you've finished watching it - it seems to affect every viewer that way.

This is a film reminiscent of The Wages of Fear, in its portrayal of poverty and the brutality, especially towards women, traditionally endemic in South America. No wonder Claude Levi-Strauss entitled his seminal ethnographic work based on travels in South America "Tristes Tropiques".

I had been warned of the brutality of the horse-dragging scene in this film - yet I can only say that it pales into insignificance with the graphic closing horse-dragging scene of The Cowboys - when I guess John Wayne was, as his career closed, ever more drawn to reactionary law-and-order neanderthalism.

A melancholic film with great B/W cinematography and even better music, depicting that eternal South American atmosphere of brutality and tragic sadness. A rare film well worth watching.

Alyonka (1962)

An achingly poignant film, about the now distant ghosts of a more valid yesterday

[10/10 · 26 October 2012]

One of the - unexpectedly - most poignant, moving films you will ever see, in its own right and more so if you bear in mind the historical perspective. It's 1955, 10-15 years after the total war of annihilation unleashed on the Soviet Union by the Nazis, with its 30 million (mostly non-combatant) Soviet dead, and 35 years before the selling off of the same country, in the name of freedom, to the assorted gangsters who largely own and run it today.

But in this luminous film (made in 1961, at the beginning of the most civilised and hope-inspiring global decade of the last 100+ years) we are in the boundless steppes of near-Eastern Russia, early in the 45-odd years in between these two disasters, in the years of advanced post-war reconstruction and hope which indeed were paralleled in the West.

The film opens with a virtuoso visual (oblique aerial) tracking shot, so effective and striking as to be reminiscent of the German tank's advance at the start of the classic "Ballad of a Soldier" (1959). It seems to be mid 19th century American West, with boundless and bountiful territory newly occupied by people of boundless optimism for the future.

And one is then emotionally captivated by the charm of the warm sunshine-yellow/sky-blue technicolor images, which matches the innate exuberance, brightness and lovableness of the film's eponymous little Alyonka (as the diminutive endearment form "Alenka" is pronounced in Russian).

Oblivious as most Westerners are to the far graver propaganda they themselves labour under in what is sold to them as free democracy, many reviewers will struggle to avoid being blinded by this film's presumed propaganda nature. As a matter of fact, though it was allowed to be made and then preserved, Alenka did not gather its brilliant director any kudos for propaganda value. That is because it was a very poetic look at contemporary Soviet life as it actually was, without being blind to its many hardships and imperfections.

What shine like suns in Alenka are the real characters and utterly moving dialogue and performances - especially of Alyonka and the young, idealistic but unlucky dentist from Riga. This is what the Soviet Union mostly consisted of before the contemporary New Russia (which still benefits from those earlier decades but is fast shedding all that heritage): utterly loyal, disciplined and so "old-fashioned" individuals, for whom ideals mattered more than anything else.

This is the poignancy of this film for us who are condemned to live in the 21st century whilst remembering the second half of the 20th. The prevailing ideals and personal standards in the heyday of the Soviet Union, so eloquently and beautifully illustrated here by Boris Barnet, are heart-rending in the context of our much less valid contemporary ethos. And they aren't coming back. It is like looking at remotely distant ghosts, even though it was all only yesterday.

Thank you Ronnie and your neocons - from Russia to Iraq and Chile to Central America, you always did know how to make the world a better place.

West and Soda (1965)

If this was out of an American studio it would duly be a legend...

[10/10 · 9 October 2012]

It's not (just) how good you are in life but what language you speak or where you are from... or whether you can get your product out there or not. If the Duomo di Monreale was in Rome or Florence or Paris it would be regarded as just about the greatest church in Christendom... but it is just outside Palermo in Sicily, so who cares? Dutch anthropologists apparently came up with symbolism over a generation before Levi-Strauss, but who reads Dutch? Australian films pre-war were some of the best in the world... before the US film studios stitched up distribution and killed them all off. And who cares what rubbish your fizzy carbonated drink is, as long as it is the only one which gets distributed?

Likewise it is with this gem of a cartoon Western, as fabulous at satirising the genre as all the Italian spaghetti Westerns of its time, most of the most famous of which it should vastly outrank in reputation. But it doesn't, and barely exists as a distant footnote in cinema history. Italy was not remotely a cartooning power like the US or Czechoslovakia, so how could they make a fabulous full-length cartoon Western spoof? In fact, it is memorably good - I saw it as a child and am still impressed over 40 years later - and mixes serious plot with parody. It is that clever mixture of proper Western drama with an unmistakable cartoon satire which ultimately gives it its winning character. The inevitable final gunslinging shootout in the street is pure genius, and so much more clever and artful than the equivalent end-scenes which some famous spaghetti Westerns are famous for.

One of the many obscure films which would constantly be celebrated if only they had and had had a wider audience. Out of an American studio.

The Fog of War (2003)

Chilling, disturbing portrayal of American foreign policy's pseudo thoughtfulness

[9/10 · 3 July 2012]

I can't remember when I last saw anything as chilling as this great documentary... maybe the original 1988 version of The Vanishing, which equally left one profoundly disturbed at how studied and artful yet gratuitous and without any ultimate meaning or purpose the genesis of certain evil is.

The lifetime analytical/"intellectual" opus of McNamara, on behalf of the US government, as portrayed in the records shown on the Fog of War, is eerily reminiscent of those obsessive Nazi written orders and documents that we see in WW2 documentaries. Everything counted and tabulated, percentualised and extrapolated. Such infinite trouble and such enormous pains taken, such an exemplary work ethic shown, such savage analysis and documentation undertaken... and all for what, other than the pursuit of goals actually lying between pure amorality and utter immorality?

It's understandable and thereby almost tolerable that one - nation state or individual - should fall into unforgivable amorality or immorality by default, by sloth, out of disorganisation, cluelessness or personal weakness. But to somehow achieve an utter darkness of spirit after such effort, study and personal severity is devastatingly eerie, perverse and perplexing.

McNamara does have a momentary tear in his eye as he recounts his decades of power across several utterly brutal wars, and it is for Jack Kennedy and his final Arlington resting place. Ultimately, he can be summed up via the school-captain smirk he wears standing next to Kennedy as he announces his appointment as Secretary of State in 1961. Power for the sake of power, success for the sake of success, any claims made to morality and right as meaningless as they are irrelevant. The man a perfect reflection of his country post WW2. Macchiavelli would consider himself surpassed.

These are conclusions that someone, ethically sensitive but not at all prejudiced here (indeed barely knowing anything about this man), can reach just by viewing what is effectively a documentary self-portrait. Director Errol Morris' genius consists in having allowed McNamara to reveal himself so eerily and damningly even while being given free use of a stage to lay out a grand sophistry of reflections, rationalizations and truisms to justify or expiate his lifetime's work.

Quite an unforgettable experience, and all the more because so unexpectedly and improbably given the self-portrait format. Phillip Glass' own genius should be acknowledged, as well as Morris' brilliance in exploiting it in The Fog of War, with eerie minimalism the perfect soundtrack here as in The Thin Blue Line 15 years earlier.

We may not quite have plumbed the depths of gut-emptying futility and Shakespearean despair with this documentary X-Ray of McNamara, but we are close. I can only think of Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Richard Perle and a few of the latters' soul mates as subjects that could supply an even more devastating moral experience and take us to rock bottom itself.

The Clock (2010)

Equally worthy of Museums of Contemporary Art and of fine cinemateques - brilliant!

[10/10 · 19 May 2012]

Is there anyone who has seen this who hasn't been astounded at its brilliance? Mesmerising is the first adjective on most people's lips, and by all accounts it seems that nobody can bring themselves to get up and terminate or interfere with this 24-hour loop experience, except under the duress of necessities such as work and home commitments, hunger, thirst and the need for sleep and toilet pit stops.

It is interesting that after two years this major "film work" should still only have a single review to date on IMDb, and that this second review should like the first be from Australia! I managed to see it over 24hours at a 55-hour opening marathon 17-19/5/12 held (partly to mark World Museums Day) by the Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) in Sydney's Circular Quay, opposite the Opera House. Get the feeling yet that it has hitherto been seen as a postmodern art "installation",and more akin to art collage than a real landmark of the moving image? It is in fact a profound experience for passionate film lovers, and I am reminded of the splendid end to "Cinema Paradiso", when the reel of parish priest-censured kisses is finally run; "Clock" is about as moving an homage to motion film, with the thousands of snippets taken from at least many hundreds of films serving as a strange "whole life flashing before your eyes" experience for the ardent film lover. So many of the most famous, memorable and important films are represented, interspersed with hundreds more of less known and significant ones; early 1900s film segments mixing with 21st century, B/W with colour, drama with comedy; European with US and Asian; and a roll call of most of the greatest film stars in the last 100 years rubbing shoulders with obscure actors.

This connection with viewers is heightened by the actual "raison d'etre" of "Clock", namely the minute by minute correlation of our universal day with time-stamped scenes in movies, and this aspect of it certainly contributes greatly to its mesmerizing quality and our inability to want to get up and leave - what will happen next in our day? "Clock" is thereby a work of art - or "installation" if you will (finally one that deserves profound respect!) - that deeply relates to all viewers, even without its own footage or storyline or actors. It remarkably finds a connection to our experiences and emotions without even targeting a demographic or knowing who we are in the audience. No doubt that is the hallmark of great art, why this film seems relatively unknown within IMDb - and why it yet deserves admiration here.

A film equally worthy of Museums of Contemporary Art and of fine cinemateques. Well done Christian Marclay and thank you MCA Sydney!

The Third Man (1949)

When EVERYTHING goes brilliantly in making a film...

[10/10 · 22 April 2011]

A serious contender for the crown of Greatest Film Ever, The Third Man is a rare moment in cinema which finds many extraordinary and perfectly apt talents fortuitously assembled, at individual zeniths and in perfect synergy. This taut, masterful and most atmospheric story of unreciprocated loyalty, persistence, opportunism and ultimate betrayal, brings together the MI6-influenced screenplay of none less than Graham Greene, the direction, production and script revision of an inspired Carol Reed, the Oscar-winning cinematography of Australian Robert Krasner, the legend-in-its-own right zither score of local Viennese beerhall musician (and remarkable Reed discovery) Anton Karas, the exceptional casting and defining performances of Joseph Cotten, Alida Valli, Trevor Howard and an already exasperating but ever genial Orson Welles, and the perfectly congruous melancholic atmosphere of a physically and morally war-damaged former grand dame of Europe, Vienna.

An Englishman Abroad (1983 TV Movie)

So much has never been said so powerfully and succinctly.

[10/10 · 22 April 2011]

An Englishman Abroad is, like The Third Man, one of those rarest of moments in cinema in which everything just drops into place, with all from the script to the direction and performances falling into the perfect hands. Coral Browne's recognition that her experiences during (and following) a theatrical tour of Russia, meeting Guy Burgess, were worth making a grand statement on life about was as inspired as the script she made of this. In a running time of just over an hour, exceptional performances by Browne herself and the late lamented Alan Bates, directed by none less than John Schlesinger, make a comprehensive statement about loyalty, betrayal, the cynicism and amorality of all governments across the political spectrum, and personal sacrifice in the cause of what one believes correct. And despite the bleakness with which the British government and establishment are duly portrayed, a wonderful contrast is drawn between truly British democratic values, as voiced by an old British bespoke shoemaker (and reminiscent of the civil service mandarin's words in the car at the end of the also brilliant A Very British Coup), and the foreigner-founded gentlemen's outfitter who merely apes Britishness by pandering to British aristocracy ("By Appointment to Her Majesty"). The cold war settings are very atmospheric, and Bate's role as a man who has sacrificed all the privilege he was born into for the sake of something he believed in paradoxically fits that British value too. His performance as a British establishment in-man of refined tastes, trying to stay sane in the utter impoverishment, loneliness and distrust of his new Soviet circumstance, is profoundly moving even without a hint of self pity or indulgence. And the scene where he, a gay and atheist, attends the Orthodox service for the profound aesthetic experience that it provides, represents - in Bates' peerless hands - an unforgettable portrayal of profound human emotion. Had Schlesinger and Browne padded this film out by a half to reach a respectable feature length, it might not be so obscure but known as one of the elite films of all time.

1960 (2010)

A wonderful and very interesting exploration of nostalgia.

[9/10 · 5 December 2010]

Trust the Italians to make such a wonderful nostalgic piece out of such a novel imaginative idea! Uses a trivial storyline (a young boy's relationship to his much older brother who has left their southern Italian village to find fame and fortune in the north of Italy) as a pretext to surreally stitch together 75 minutes of random, totally unrelated newsreels all shot in Italy in 1960. Difficult to believe how many historic events happened in one year - the making of Fellini's La Dolce Vita, the shooting down of the U2 plane as it spied on the Soviet Union, the Rome Olympics, the election of JFK, etc.

Watch it if only for the unrepeatable stylishness of a sunglasses-wearing Livio Berruti in B/W winning the 200m sprint final at the Rome Olympics, one of the defining mythical images of early post-war Italy (film buffs, read "A Roman Holiday", "La Dolce Vita", "8 1/2", "Umberto D", etc).

And don't be put off by not knowing Italian, if it doesn't have subtitles. It's the images that are mesmerizing, not the rather droll plot line or lightweight newsreel commentary.

Bad Day at Black Rock (1955)

So simple and yet so powerful

[9/10 · 30 March 2008]

Watching this concise and memorable film brings to mind so many other great themes and performances. Like all the essentials of "High Noon" (1952) from just three years before, eerily reinterpreted in a mid 20th century, post WW2 setting. The train's appointment with the 2-bit town, the cowardly population making themselves (at least initially) scarce when the hour to stand up for justice arrives, and the just man's refusal to take the easy way out and flee. And seeing Lee Marvin's trademark malice one is reminded of the later "The Man Who Killed Liberty Valance" (1962) and the just-previous "The Big Heat" (1953). Wonderful performances by all the cast, and a spectacular portrayal of both desert-fringe badlands and small-town fascism, including the propensity to perpetrate and defend outrages such as lynch-mob behaviour. For a perfect double on this latter theme see Spencer Tracy again at his best in Fritz Lang's "Fury" (1936), the German master's first American movie and apparently his favourite. Both films must have taken an enormous amount of guts to conceive and produce, given their scathing portrayal of the bleakest aspects of small/ignorant-town America... the polar opposite of the feel-good Frank Capra Wonderful Life/John Doe films.

Pépé le Moko (1937)

A wealth of cinematic connections, and cultural and historical conclusions.

[9/10 · 8 November 2006]

It is widely reported that Graham Greene, usually bitingly severe when it came to film criticism, was almost lost in praise for Pepe Le Moko. This is very interesting, as he effectively wrote and screen-adapted his own even more brilliant version a decade or so later, in the form of the incomparable The Third Man (1949). Jean Gabin's Pepe's effective imprisonment in the Kasbah becomes Orson Welles' Harry Lime's own condemnation to haunt only the Russian sector and the sewers of Vienna, where the Russians can use him and the British cannot reach him. Mireille Balin's Gaby becomes Alida Valli's Anna, respectively the direct and indirect causes for the downfall of the anti-heroes whom they love. The sly but ruthless inspector Slimane becomes the relentless Major Calloway. And the shadows and camera-work are in spirit transported from one film to the other, as are the little poignant moments like the child on the Kasbah lane, who becomes the Viennese little boy with the ball. Another classic with strong connections to Pepe Le Moko is The Wages of Fear (1953), with Yves Montand again a Frenchman for whom Paris is the universe, trapped this time by penury in a South American backwater that he hates, with death again in the last scene providing an alternative release from such bondage. And the unorthodox, opportunist and patient tactics of inspector Slimane recall the equally ruthless brooding intensity of Major Ali Tufan in Topkapi (1964) - both lawmen getting their European men. There is a much wider lesson in this, and never more so than at this time of Western capitulation in Iraq. These films, like also the brilliant Oeil Pour Oeil (An Eye For An Eye, 1957), are typical of a very long tradition by film-makers of keenly recognising the fact that the Islamic world generally made a very bad foe, and a very good grave, for Westerners. The imperial British in Afghanistan and Rudyard Kipling as their troubadour understood exactly as much, too. They may fight opportunistically and they may fight suicidally, but in the end their overwhelming asset is that they fight at home, against displaced Westerners who are as bewildered as they are abhorred by such alien lands. And the result is always the same, extendable by analogy to Viet Nam and other wars. Films such as all the above may be fiction, but their greatness lies in their profound observation and perspective on life and the real world. Perhaps every new government in Washington, Canberra and elsewhere should be sat down to such great examples of the cinematic art, on the off chance that they might have enough perspicacity to detect in them some of the fundamental truths about the world which they seem to have missed via other means.

Aelita, the Queen of Mars (1924)

A futurist masterpiece

[9/10 · 8 November 2006]

A remarkable film from 1924, of immense historical interest. See the turbulence of Russia as it was just a few years after the 1917 revolution and the subsequent war 1918-21 against the foreign-backed White Army. But see it all in the context of a most amazing futurist film, at least the equal of the other two equivalent futurist greats from Germany and Britain - Metropolis (1927) and High Treason (1928), respectively. Arguably it is the best of the three, with avant garde sets and costumes that could have come straight out of the Bauhaus' choreography workshop. The version shown on Australian TV had a presumably later added music score that was just so perfect and integrated to the film's plot and visuals that it could not possibly have been better had it been original. It had a mesmerising robotic, minimalist, mechanical and repetitive character that was simply made for a futurist and surreal film like this. The cyrillic characters of the silent narration only add (for us Westerners, at least) to the mystery and surreality of the whole story, and one can only feel sorry for those who, after all this tour-de-force, feel shortchanged from an unfulfilled need for a more banal storyline. Or aggrieved by the perception of the film as mere propaganda. There's always reruns of Rambo and The Green Berets for you, fellers! It's a pity most cinephiles are oblivious to the existence of this film, as wider availability and screening would ensure its fame as one of the greatest silent, futurist and early modern films.

The Children of Leningradsky (2005)

One for your conscience...

[10/10 · 7 March 2006]

Gosh, I'm from Canberra, Australia, too, and I wouldn't want the IMDb international community to think we are all hyper-rational insensitives here, who can't actually comment on a film in terms of the human experience it communicates and the emotions it elicits from us! The only Western viewer who could feel anything other than simply extreme sadness and, yes, guilt at this portrayal of these children's lives would be one unable to face a degree of responsibility for them. How so? By having been part of a political era in the West which only engaged communism and post-communism destructively, so as to create the social debacle that these children are the products of. It WOULD be more comfortable to be unaware of the details of such unfathomable misery on the doorstep of Western Europe, but documentaries like this (and an analogous recent one documenting the lives of homeless children in Bucharest, Romania) deny us such convenience. Its inevitable effect on you, if you still have a conscience, will remind you of the memorable scene in that immortal film, "the Third Man" (1949), with Martins (Joseph Cotten) being driven from the children's hospital by Major Calloway (Trevor Howard). He is speechless, and his face is frozen by the horror and pathos he has just witnessed in the dying children made ill by Harry Lime's tainted blackmarket penicillin. It's interesting how a byword for unadulterated evil and injustice is always the suffering of children. And this documentary is the MORE powerful for being brief and not getting lost in the commentary and analysis that get away from the essence of the agony portrayed. Go live the horror of these innocent lives as if yours was one of them, experience just how far in fact away from theirs is yours and that of everyone you know, and try then to say these 35 minutes didn't change your life a bit.