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Reviews
Movie 43 (2013)
More sinned against than sinning
The portmanteau movie was a fad in the 1960s and early 70s. It never worked - as a whole the narrative discontinuities, the shifts in tone and style left no-one satisfied. If a typical narrative movie takes its viewers on a journey, the portmanteau film took them as far as the airport then left them in the departure lounge until further notice. So, knowing that it has been mercilessly pilloried in its home market, I was expecting little from Movie 43. I was pleasantly surprised.
If you go to see this film because you're attracted by the names of top shelf actors such as Kate Winslet, Liev Schreiber, Naomi Watts and Richard Gere you'll be sorely disappointed. Movie 43, whose provenance is in the Peter Farelly school of gross-out comedy is about as far away from cinema as a dramatic art as you're ever likely to get. If, on the other hand, you have a taste for humour that contravenes every shibboleth of polite society, then this is the movie for you - it's politically incorrect, flagrantly ridiculous, and persistently crass. It's also cleverly done. I am not familiar with the work of Seth 'Family Guy" MacFarlane who has a cameo here but from what I've heard of it, this film is in the same spirit.
After we get the framing intro with Quaid and Kinnear playing it tongue-in-cheek, the first segment gives us Kate Winslet on a blind date with Hugh Jackman, who is devilishly handsome but has one anomalous feature - a shaven scrotum growing out of his neck like a turkey wattle. This set-up tells you everything you need to know about what awaits you in Movie 43. The scene itself it is funny like Seth's dick-drawing fixation in Superbad but what makes it so much better than just being outlandish is that whilst, of course, the well-bred young woman can't keep her eyes off the misplaced testes, everyone else, including their owner, is oblivious to them. Winslet captures the dilemma of her character perfectly as she grows increasingly desperate for someone to acknowledge her would-beau's neck balls, yet is unable to come straight out and say anything that might be inappropriate.
This is followed by a segment in which real-life couple Liev Schreiber and Naomi Watts recount to some new neighbours their regime for home schooling their own teenage son. The loving parents, to make sure that their boy gets a rounded eduction, have carefully reproduced every humiliating, degrading and awkward moment of high school. Comedy is often described as the bringing together of incongruent ideas and this is exactly what makes Movie 43 work. Perhaps the funniest segment, however, is one in which Terrence Howard plays a coach for the first black high school basketball team in US history and tries to explain to his long-segregated players that they are bound to win because they are black.
Not all the segments work as well as these and there is a tendency, as is so often for comedies of this frenetic stripe, to run a little ragged at the end. The final segment involving a Garfield-like cartoon cat with sexual designs on its owner was for me the weakest of them and one with a coprophilic fixation I could have done without.
If you don't like gross-out comedy definitely give Movie 43 a wide berth but if you do, seeing this sort of thing done by a quality cast is an appealing twist.
10Terrorists (2012)
Innovative Australian Indie comedy
10 Terrorists is a comedy, not about terrorism but about reality television. In its broadest sense it is a reductio ad absurdum of capitalism's insatiable need to exploit. In this case, it is the very last unappropriated territory left to it - its own demise. In other words it's a Dr Strangelove for our economically rationalist, media-saturated, 21st century world. And like Kubrick's film, it's damn funny. If irony is your style of humour, that is. Irony is not something which Australian film is noted for nor is something that fills the multiplexes but 10 Terrorists is a small gem - knowingly irreverent, and energetically inventive, it is a real kick in the pants to the tiredness which has overtaken our comedies in recent years.
Although this is only her second film in Australia, Ms McLachlan had a substantial career as a documentary and feature film-maker in both South Africa and the US before coming here. That the film was shot with only eight days of principal photography is a testament to her well-honed skills. Another of the keys to the film's success is the collaboration that has gone into it. This was not just something that went on behind the camera with many of the creatives, including cinematographer Peter Falk amongst others, reuniting from The Jammed. Although based on a story developed by McLachlan with co-producer Lenny de Vries, the script involves considerable input from the cast themselves, all of whom do a first class job. "Political" films can easily founder in preaching polemics but the improvised nature of the in-character dialogue keeps us in the :reality" of what we are witnessing.
If Ms McLachlan deserves credit for her directorial skills she has also functioned as editor and if anything, her contribution here is even more telling. There is no irony without wit and wit does not solicit the guffaw. What makes 10 Terrorists such a comedic delight is that it plays with, rather than brays at, its audience. Whilst the core concept endows proceedings with a continuously underlying absurdity, the explicit jokes are always obliquely made, more quirks in the corner of the screen than front and centre "ha-ha's" . And they are dotted throughout the film frequently enough to keep one wryly smiling throughout. And if the shaping of the raw material is felicitous, the post-production enhancements through the use of graphics and interpellated footage are impressive. The realization that 10 Terrorists was made for $300,000 is quite staggering when one sees the result on screen. Let's hope that more than a handful of people get to have that experience as a result of a canny distributor getting behind this richly-rewarding film.
The Sapphires (2012)
An all-stops-out feel-good musical with a jukebox soundtrack
The Sapphires is adapted from a 2005 play by Tony Briggs, who wrote the screenplay with Keith Thompson, it is based on the real-life odyssey of Briggs's mother and three aunts from an outback Aboriginal mission to Vietnam, barely a year after a referendum gave citizenship rights to indigenous Australians.
Directed by actor, theatre director and first-time filmmaker, Wayne Blair, it is an upbeat charmer with excellent performances, impressive production values and a terrific clutch of 60s soul hits. Although one can't help but feel, at least at times, that the real life story has been over-romanticized and subsumed by political tendentiousness and regret in places that Blair trowels on the heart-warming sentimentality so thickly, there's no denying that the film has plenty of sparkle. Everything about the production, from script to costume design and lighting (Warwick Thornton, director of Samson & Delilah. was D.O.P) works to bring this about. Whilst no Apocalypse Now, even the re-creation of war-torn Vietnam is impressively staged.
Like Muriel's Wedding, The Sapphires is not so much a musical as a film in which the music is an integral element. Deborah Mailman, Jessica Mauboy, Shari Sebbens, Miranda Tapsell are excellent as the four singers, with Mauboy doing a first class job carrying the lead vocal part. The outstanding stroke of good fortune, however, was the casting of Chris O'Dowd as the girl's manager. His self-deprecating Oirish sense of humour (the character as originally written was English) is infectious and he makes for a delightfully amusing contrast to Mailman's irascible Gail.
Given the huge popularity of television talent shows like Australian Idol (Mauboy was one of its finalists in 2006), and The Voice amongst younger people, The Sapphires with its seamless road to fame (Vietcong mortars aside) should resonate with starry-eyed youngsters, whilst older audiences will appreciate the trip back to the days when pop music really did have soul. Let's hope that, like the 2010 indigenous musical Bran Nue Dae, the film wins audience it well deserves.