Muse by Craig Ranapia

The New Zealand Federation of Film Societies kicks off its 2011 season this week, from Auckland to Waitati in deepest darkest Otago (with the sad absence of Canterbury, which has cancelled all screenings until further notice for obvious reasons).  It's rather easy to dismiss the whole exercise as the cinematic equivalent of changing into black tie and formal gowns for dinner.  Pretentious, uncomfortable, expensive and really just a waste of time.

I may be a good free-market Tory, but this is one occasion where socialism - film socialism - is not only to be tolerated, but encouraged. (Disclosure: The Secretary of the Auckland Film Society would say that, wouldn't he?  Too fragging right. Carry on.)

Wallace Stevens looked at a blackbird thirteen ways, and Glenn Gould got thirty-two short films.  I'll split the difference and give you fourteen reasons to become a comrade.

JOIN THE FILM SOCIETY OR YOU'RE NOT A REAL KIWI!  Well, you'll miss out on Merata Mita's Patu!, a still stunning document of the anti- Springbok Tour protests in 1981 and much more including the traditional programme of New Zealand short films.  After twenty-eight years -- and with the Rugby World Cup bringing a more benign form of rugby madness to our shores -- Patu! still has the power to cause a post-match argument or two. Which is what the Film Society is all about.

EXPANDING YOUR MIND DOESN'T HURT. PROMISE. If you haven't heard of Portugal's Pedro Costa (and you should), you're not alone. And you're exceedingly unlikely to put Lisbon's Fontainhas on your holiday wish-list after seeing Bones (Ossos), In Vanda's Room (No quarto da Vanda) and Colossal Youth (Juventude em marcha).  But an important part of the Film Society mission to make accessible films like this whose chances of getting commercial releases in New Zealand in any format are very low, to utterly non existent. (Even here, it just wouldn't have been financially viable to bring these films to New Zealand without the generous, but not to be taken for granted support of Creative New Zealand. Or other organisations, governments and individuals who've been equally generous in their practical and financial support -- not least the members and volunteers who keep every film society ticking over. Hint hint. )

SEX! VIOLENCE! BABES! All in the best possible taste, of course.

It would take a couple of years to just work through Isabelle Huppert's filmography -- and Hollywood has no idea what to do with an actress whose considerable beauty and intelligence is allied with a fearless ability to play utter bitches who don't win (or want) easy sympathy. 

This year, there's a mini-season of three of her best films: The Lacemaker (La Dentellière, 1977) -- her breakout performance as a "a fragile young beautician blossoming in and broken by love" which transcends one of the most tiresome tropes of French cinema.  Then there's 1988's Une affaire de femmes (The Story of Women) -- the most starling of her many collaborations with "the French Hitchcock" Claude Chabrol.  Based on the story of Marie-Louise Girard, an amateur abortionist who was the last women guillotined in France by the Vichy government, anyone expecting a simple parable either pro- or anti-abortion will be disappointed.  The rest of you are in for a treat.

The last Huppert on offer -- Bertrand Tavernier's Clean Slate (Coup de Torchon) , a nimble transposition of Jim Thompson's cynical noir from Texas to Colonial French East Africa -- is a nice segue to the other French mini-season on offer.  For a national cinema often stereotyped as insular when it isn't downright xenophobic, French directors seem to spend a lot of time re-mixing popular American genres.  In recent years, torture porn horror, kinetic action movies and (more respectably) the ambiguous fascination with criminals of shows like The Wire and The Sopranos.

Less nerve-wracking, and more enjoyably for my taste, lie back and enjoy two fine French exercises in film noir: Touchez pas au grisbi (1954) -- a heist-gone-horribly-wrong flick that knocks Tarantino into a cocked beret -- and Le Dolous (1962).

SIZE QUEEN SATISFACTION GUARANTEED. I'm quite happy to compare DVD/BluRay collections any day of the week, but there are some itches even an forty inch screen and all the toys your overdraft can bear can't satisfy.    I'll happily wear a groove in my discs of The Red Shoes and Once Upon A Time in The West, but just between us they don't compare to the pure bliss of seeing them at Auckland's Mighty Civic last year.

Add to that list Terence Malick's un-Disney (and typically ravishing) take on the tale of Pocahontas and John Smith and Aleksandr Sokurov's Russian Ark, which sounds like a gimmick in synopsis (the film is a fantastically elaborate 95 minute, single-take tracking shot) but strangely moving.

The Film Society is also showing two anime that really aren't done justice by DVD: Hayao Miyazaki's sublime Oscar-winner Spirited Away  and the late Satoshi Kon's Millennium Actress.

THE TRUTH IS STRANGER THAN FICTION, AND MORE FUN  It's hardly surprising that documentaries -- at least one that don't feature Hitler and horny wildlife -- have consistently been popular both at film societies and on the festival circuit. You're not likely to see them anywhere else. 2011 is no different with eclectic programs from Canada and Germany.  The only scientist who resigned from the Manhattan Project on moral grounds? Check. Looking for the centre of Europe?  Us too. And that's just for starters.

BUT WAIT, THERE MORE! Wherever you are, and whatever your taste in movies, individual societies have made selections from contemporary world cinema and the Federation's own collection.

THERE'S EVEN SOME FILMS YOU CAN TAKE HOME TO MEET YOUR MOTHER.  If you prefer to kick it old school there are more classics than you can shake a box of Jaffas at.  Singin' in the Rain is the greatest musical Hollywood ever produced, and The Shop Around The Corner only proves how bad modern rom-coms (including the Tom-Hanks/Meg Ryan re-make You've Got Mail) really are.  But there's also lesser known classics from Roberto Rossellini, Akira Kurosawa and Kenji Mizoguchi.  

OK, THAT'S ALL VERY GOOD BUT THERE'S A RECESSION ON.   Putting on my Auckland Film Society hat, $165 for a full membership sounds like a lot. And it's not exactly chump change. (This is just an example, other societies charge differently so please check

But look at it like this: It works out at around six bucks a film.  Even if you only attend half the films in a season, that's still less than a full-price adult ticket anywhere else. 

TELL ME MORE...  And generous discounts for tickets for the World Cinema Showcase and International Film Festival?

CLOSER, BUT NO NICOTINE GUM... If you're out of town, free entry to any film society screening in New Zealand? (And, as a helpful reader has pointed out in comments, many have negotitated discounts with local cinemas if you must pollute yourself with commonplace cinema.)

BUT... My final offer. If you're a try before you buy type, there's a three film sampler. $30 for any three films, and when (not if) you upgrade to a full membership you just pay the difference.  What else do you want, blood?

WELL... Don't make me come down there and get Clockwork Orange on your arse.

You can find all the information you need about your local film society -- schedules, venues, contact details and detailed information about how to join -- via the links page on the New Zealand Federation of Film Societies website.  I'll meet you in the back row...

"Fuckity fuck fuck fucking fuck" is about the only (not particularly insightful) comment I've got on the Christchurch earthquake, and Russell has a series of useful links for those of us who can't do much except watch with stunned disbelief and wait to hear from our friends and loved ones.

But about the only thing that raised a wry smile yesterday was news that the Christchurch Art Gallery - one of the best in the country - is doing duty as a civil defence headquarters.  Which sounds oddly right for a city with such a proud - and living - history of literature, theatre and art. 

I'll throw open the comments for anyone in the arts to check in -- of course, it's most important to know people are safe and well.  But anyone who has pictures, observations, stories and well-wishes from the cultural tip is welcome to join in. (I will ask, however, please be very mindful who's reading this. Don't spread speculation or misinformation, especially about deaths or serious injuries. There's also a time and a place for politics - this is not it.)

Until then, all I can think of is a wonderful piece by Christchurch poet Bernadette Hall (from her 2004 collection The Merino Princess: Selected Poems [Victoria University Press]):

Trilogy: Be Still and Know
 (as painted by Joanna Margaret Paul)

The clouds stack up like gorgeous quilts on the horizon.
The body is the ship that will take us to an honest place.

I separate out the three paintings:   the brown cross-hatch
of a haystack, a sky smear crossed with a scarlet thread,

a green ripple of reeds. I spread them room by room
through the high house as if they might hold everything

together she’s gone and done her crazy thing again.
I change my mind, I give them back to one another

above the bed. If I stretch my head back on the pillow
the whole psalm is there quoniam ego sum deus.

The sky is a radiant lake; the cloud, a beautiful swimmer.
I fear the terrible dancing shoes, the blinded boy.

You hid small treasures in the patchwork’s tricky pattern.  
Maybe you just wanted to be able to find your way back.

November 2004

 

In the face of unspeakable tragedy on a scale that's hard to comprehend, something so intimate and domestic might seem so far from the point it's almost tasteless.  But I still hope Bernadette and so many others will find their way back.  And if you can point the way, you'll have my gratitude.

Just between us, I don't think I'm the only culture vulture feeling rather conflicted about the news that REDgroup Retail - which owns New Zealand's Whitcoulls, Borders and Bennetts bookstores, as well as Australia's larget bookstore chain, Angus & Robertson - has gone into voluntary administration. (In unrelated news, nobody in the book trade is surprised that Borders in the US has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection.)

It's too early to tell whether REDgroup Retail will even try to trade out of it, but it strikes me as wistful thinking that there won't be store closures and job losses.  That's a big part of why any schadenfreude on Muse will be in a minor key. Whitcoulls may have sucked in all kinds of ways -- not least the patchy customer service -- but taking any pleasure in people losing their jobs in a recession is 110-proof twatcockery.

I'll also throw it open to you for a more informed perspective on how this will affect published writers (you know the weirdos who actually write books), local publishing and other booksellers.  The comments are open, and anyone who'd like to submit a guest post is welcome to drop me a line.  (I'll also be updating links to reactions elsewhere, so all tips welcome.)

On the other hand, I honestly can't remember the last time I bought a full-list, non-sale book from Whitcoulls and Borders.  While teh eeevil interwebz is (predictably) being blamed, and online outfits beating the chains at their own no-margin game is a factor, that's nowhere near the whole story. All those think-pieces confidently predicting the death of the bricks-and-mortar-and-dead-trees bookshop stubbornly refuse to come true.  Everyone is struggling under the euphemistic "difficult retail environment" - and I don't know anyone in publishing or book retailing who won't tell you (quietly) that they're hanging on by their well-chewed finger nails.

As a consumer - and a Luddite one who doesn't have a credit card and still thinks the internet is for porn not shopping - the answer isa simpler expression of retailing Darwinianism, red inked in tooth and claw.  I live in Auckland, and while deep discounting is nice, depth and range of stock being sold by knowledgeable and pleasant staff is better.  Certainly worth paying a premium for. That's not just indie stores like Wellington and Auckland's Unity Books, though I strongly enourage Muse readers to patronise your local indie bookseller.  Dymocks and JB HiFi, in my experience, can pull it off too.

The personal touch and a human scale still matters. At least to me.

Thoughts? Did teh interwebz kill the retailing star?  Or is this free-market retailing Darwinism in action? Or none of the above?

LINKS:

• Wondering what the difference is between voluntary administration and good old fashioned bankruptcy? Don't say I do nothing for ya.

• Audio of useful Nine to Noon discussion featuring Otago University lecturer in print and design culture Noel Waite, and former publisher, bookseller (and book-blogger) Graham Beattie.

• Aussie writer John Birmingham has an interesting take from across the ditch. (H/T Rob Hosking in comments.)

 

Once upon a time, film geeks could get their festive eye-strain and chronic sleep-deprivation out of the way in a couple of weeks. Now, it might be slightly over the top to say there's a themed festival for everything but pretty damn close. 

The 2011 French Film Festival is winding down in Wellywood, heading to Auckland and kicks off in Christchurch later this month. Those of you who like your reel life with a dash of the real, the Documentary Edge Festival opens in Auckland today with screenings of The People vs. George Lucas (GUILTY!) and Oliver Stone's road trip South of the Border. 

The odds of seeing either - or pretty much anything else on the typically quirky and diverse program - on general release, or commercial FTA television are pretty much non-existent.  So haul arse.

I'm not going to be able to cover much of either - a combo of having three grand of dental work in the very near future, still getting the hang of bleging for comps and getting on mailing lists, and general incompetence -- but please feel free to post your picks, pans and rants in comments.  And if you're really got something to say, and can do it without boring me, never say never to a guest post.

RIP YOU DOB

I only met Frank Whitten once  -- and was shocked to hear he died after a typically private battle with cancer over the weekend.  But it quickly became obvious that there was some acting involved in his six wonderfully squalid years as Ted West, the manipulative, porn-loving eternally inappropriate patriarch of Outrageous Fortune.

He also obviously sucked at being an attention whoring luvvie, because I was mildly shocked on reading his biography at NZ On Air to see the range, and quality, of his work.  One definition of a character actor is someone whose face you're always glad to see, even if you can't quite put a name to it.  If that's true, Whitten was one of the best and Matt Nippert's 2007 Listener profile is a better tribute to the man than anything I've got to say.

OTHER LINKY LOVE

Jazz historian Ted Gioia marks SF/fantast master Fritz Lieber's centenntial by explaining how he was writing 'magical realism' before it was trendy. (h/t IO9's Annalee Newitz)

Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma? Alex Clark mourns "the lost art of editing" in a long Guardian piece - and avoids the "get off my lawn" tone this kind of piece often lapses into.

You think you've had a shitty day at work?  Take comfort from Wilfird Sheed's merciless comedy of bad workplace manners, Office Politics. Jonathan Yardley's appreciation is a nice teaser, and I promise it's an inexplicably out of print gem worth running to ground.

I like my sleazy Men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Hell trash the way I used to like an occasional hourly pint glass of equally cheap and nasty embalming sherry. Straight up, with a box of tissues and a bucket to hand. 

One of the formative experiences of my reel life was a double bill of Basic Instinct and Showgirls -- a heart-warming tale of a sociopath ingénue working her way up (and down and twirling round) the greasy stripper pole of Vegas terpsichore. The only thing stopping me from buying the 70's Italian Eurosleaze disasterpiece Malabimba: The Malicious Whore - nunsploitation! yay! - is the lingering suspicion nothing could live down to a title like that.   Tommy Lee Jones may rather pretend The Eyes of Laura Mars never happened, but I never will.

So let's assume my objection to Black Swan, Darren Aronofsky's latest lump of arthouse torture porn, isn't entirely on grounds of good taste.

To the contrary, on the face of it Black Swan should be right up my back passage: Girl on girl action! More oozing Cronenberg-lite body horror  than you can shake a server farm at (link contains mild spoilers)! Mommy issues! A dolly French stud who can say crap like this with a straight face: "I’ve got a little homework assignment for you: go home and touch yourself."

But therein lies the problem: I think I'm supposed to take all this dreadfully seriously, and I just can't.  If you're comfortable, boys and girls, shall we begin?

Once upon time, there was a pretty but uptight dancer called Nina (Natalie Portman). She lived in a girly pink dungeon with her Wicked Stage Mother (Barbara Hershey), who is really fucking creepy. But not as creepy as Thomas Leroy (Vincent Cassel), the artistic director of the company she works at.  As he tells her between bouts of workplace sexual harassment bordering on attempted rape, Nina's frigid perfectionism is perfect for the Swan Queen in his new production of Swan Lake.  But does she have the "passion" and "abandon" to dance both the White Swan, and her dark doppelgänger and ultimate destroyer, the Black Swan?  Perhaps another clammy grope will tell.  Yup.  Displaced older dancer Beth (Wynona Ryder) beg to differ - just before she throws herself in front of a cab as highly strung ballerinas gone the way of expired yoghurt are prone to do. 

By the time Mila Kunis shows up as Nina's "sensual" and "uninhibited" fren-emy/understudy, Lily (tattoos, smokes and comes from San Francisco = evil slutbag bitch), Black Swan has done a grand jeté into incoherence. Gorgeous incoherence, but incoherence none the less.

All the technical departments bring their A-game, particularly cinematographer Matthew Libatique. His jittery camera skitters though a world of scumbled ash, inky shadow and retina-searing artificial light.  The one serious error of judgement is Benjamin Millepied's competent but uninspired choreography -- we're told endlessly that Thomas LeGrope is one of the most respected choreographers on earth, and he's going to revitalise his troubled company by making a warhorse like Swan Lake "edgy".  Too much telling, Darren, not enough showing but even here Libatique's elegant close-up steadycam keeps your eye involved. 

Brian Emrich's aggressive sound design is also hellishly cheesy, but it also fits nicely with the parts of the film that actually work: A sleek nasty psycho bitch slasher-flick Aronofsky can't quite cop to making.

Because, in case you haven't noticed, Nina is also a self-harming wreck going down the drain of increasing vivid and murderous paranoid hallucinations. The final act of the film defies rational synopsis, but let's just say taking a roofie and getting in touch with your inner depraved bisexual the night before your big début is not going to end well. Hell no. (Hey, she's from San Francisco and you're psychotic. It doesn't count!)

The problem is that it's a distinction without a difference.  As much as I'm indifferent to Portman's acting -- which veers between Manic Pixie Dream Girl and fashion editorial not performance -- it's hard to hate on someone whose sole function in the Star Wars prequels was to get knocked up by the Jedi Jailbait and pass the bad hair-do gene to Carrie Fisher.  She's suffered enough.

But Portman has the thankless, and impossible, task of playing the same loaded deck Jack Nicholson and Shelley Duvall were handed in The Shining -- how the hell do do you go mad when you're already there?  Stanley Kubrick didn't care - he notoriously tortured Duvall and Nicholson into states of perpetual hysteria for months on end and it showed. That's all he was interested in putting on screen, and it's unfair to criticise two fine actors for doing what they were told.  I just didn't care in the end. 

And I don't believe in - or care about - Portman's Nina Sayers either: She's trying to dance in cement shoes and it matters when she's in every frame.  In an earlier draft of this review, I complained that Portman perpetually looked like she was being punched in the face between takes.  The technical dance aspects are handled well, but it's not entirely cynical to wonder if she's really going to get an expected best actress Oscar for merely surviving to collect it. If the director and his two co-writers can't be arsed placing Nina's scarifying descent from psychosis to homicidal mania in a context I can engage with - or Portman can tease into a performance - I'm not going to do it for them.

 I remain unconvinced Aronofsky gives a damn about ballet or has any real insight into why anyone would obsessively work over a dance combination -- or a paragraph or a line reading -- to the point of exhaustion and beyond.  Instead it's just a hook to hear Portman's bones crack like a stand of eucalyptus trees exploding in a fire-storm, as his fear of and contempt for the human body - and female sexuality - erupts like ever more baroque tumours. Individually, they're startling but they don't linger.  And, in the end, they no more make an engaging whole than a collection of flashy steps makes a dance. 

I took dance classes as a desperately ungainly youth, and while I never thought it was ever a career option I do remember the sheer joy of performance.  Anyone who has the time and energy to read Jennifer Homans' weighty but fascinating Apollo's Angels: A History of Ballet  will discover that, yes, ballet is now and always has been, full of pushy stage mothers, drama queens of all genders and impresarios who used sex as a very offensive weapon indeed but it also brings to life "why 'the steps' were never just the steps: they were a set of beliefs and a way of life."

Ironically enough, Moira Shearer - who was a professional dancer not an actress - gives a better performance than Portman in Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's delirious melodrama The Red Shoes (1948), which was one of the highlights of last year's film festival.  Like Nina, Vicky Page literally dies for her art.  But unlike Aronofky, Powell and Pressburger give their lushly over-produced, stratospherically high camp tragedy of the conflict between art and life a heart and mind. I could believe that Vicky Page would sacrifice her marriage for the claustrophobic world of the Ballet Lermontov and Anton Walbrook's  equally obsessive impresario.  Boris Lermentov doesn't need to need his hands between anyone's legs or talk dirty; his seduction begins in a much more dangerous place.

Black Swan is a pliéing turkey that tries - and ultimately fails - to have it both ways - it lacks the courage of its unpleasantness to be Showgirls en pointe, but can't take ballet seriously enough to meet The Red Shoes on its own turf.

ETA: Apologies for the badly FUBAR draft that was initially posted, due to human incompetence.  Muse's proof-reader and subeditor have been taken out for a sound thrashing. I promise not to enjoy it too much.