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After an incident with her mother’s boyfriend, 16 year old Heidi leaves her home and soon arrives in the Australian snowfield town of Jindabyne, alone with no money and nothing but the power of her budding sexuality. From this very dangerous and desperate place Heidi soon finds Joe, a wealthy landowners son, 10 years her senior, with whom she commences a precarious relationship.
With our eyes and ears, through some kind of miracle of sensory association, we not only see and hear, but taste, touch and smell the world Heidi inhabits. The distinct visual style of cinematographer, Bob Humphries and director, Kate Shortland, heavily derived from pop culture magazine aesthetics, is compelling and blends beautifully with a mesmerizing sound scape from Sydney electronic band, Decoder Ring. Themes of sexual politics, identity, isolation and connection are explored as Heidi (played beautifully by Abby Cornish), with a kind of transient teen emotional retardation (or mild autism), tries to connect with Joe and the world around her. Trapped in his two dimensional, Aussie macho exterior Joe (played with depth by Sam Worthington) is also trying to connect as the faltering attempts at intimacy play out between them. Emotionally complex with a tight, believable script and some strong supporting performances, Somersault is probably the best Australian art house movies in years.
A high school teen flick ugly/pretty girl formulae superimposed on a hammed up comedy treatment of the fashion industry, this film is base brain stimulation at best. A smart, fashion unconscious, aspiring journalist, Andy (Anne Hathoway), finds work as PA for the callous and superficial Miranda Priestly (Meryll Streep), editor of ‘it’ New York Fashion magazine, Runway. Andy finds it hard, becomes a fashion diva for acceptance and, entering more deeply into this backstabbing world, starts loosing contact with her ‘authentic’ friends and boyfriend - the plot proceeds predictably.
The drab/glam comparative introductory sequence: our plain protagonist and the girls of Runway fashion dressing for work, followed by the overacted superficiality of Streep, Stanley Tucci (playing art director, Nigel) and the supporting cast at Runway, is so hackneyed it hurts and things don’t improve dramatically. Hathoway, Streep, Tucci and Simon Baker (playing Andy’s journalist love interest), being good actors, with time become more human, however, and slick editing and attractive cinematography do make for a visually stimulating ride. But the pap-film obligatory ‘gee isn’t this bad’ montage followed by the, ‘look at me I’m transforming into a fashion diva’, sequence are a sign. Switch off, enjoy the eye candy and allow your self to be emotionally puppeteered. This is not a time for thinking.
This comic horror film, once a mainstream blockbuster, is now like a cult classic to children of the 80’s - a quirky tale of vampires, vixens and, with it being the 80’s, the obligatory tough team of teen heroes. It’s summer time and two brothers explore the city and beach side boardwalk showground of their new home, the fictional Californian coastal town of Santa Carla. The eldest son, Michael (Jason Patric), in pursuit of a hot young female, soon finds himself fooled into blood consumption with a posse of vampires in their vampire lair. With his mother being courted by a bespectacled white goods shop owner and his brother slowly becoming one of the un-dead, the youngest Sam (Corey Haim), with the aid of his new found comic book store vampire slayer friends (Corey Feldman and Jamison Newlander) sets out to bring down the bloodsuckers.
Fear and foreboding is beautifully generated with a brooding soundtrack, bat like cinematography, shifting camera perspectives and a menacing performance from Vampire leader Keifer Sutherland (David). But the Lost Boys is all about having fun and the Coreys, that 80’s teen movie duo, are in fine form - comic one-liners in the face of death supplying the happy triumph of the ego. Fear peals away into laughter then returns with a scream in a film that successfully champions blockbuster escapism.
The bushman of the Kalahari have suffered much from their forced assimilation with modern culture. No longer free to hunt and gather they live precariously as farmers and cattle ranchers in settlements on the deserts fringe. The Gods Must Be Crazy (1980) portrays a much better, possibly idealised, past in which Bushman Xixo and his tribe experience their first encounter with western civilisation – a coke bottle that falls from the sky. The bottle, a useful tool they assumed to have been sent by the gods, soon generates conflict among the tribe and Xixo begins a Homeresk journey to throw it off the edge of the earth. A desert biologist, newly arrived village schoolteacher and guerrilla hostage drama await him on his path.
This film is pure slapstick pleasure, exploring, with the aid of a comedic documentary voice over, the ludicrous nature of modern man, his damaging effect on a people once beautifully attuned with their environment and the intensely militaristic elements of southern Africa. Under Jamie Uys treatment (fast forward cinematography is used to hilarious effect) even violent and bloody military sequences are somehow rendered comical. The light-hearted, heroic tale of the beautiful schoolteacher, bumbling biologist, his friend and their new bushman acquaintance, thereby free of any negative hindrance, is free to shine in a comedy so funny it just must be a gift from the gods
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Comment by Ben Connor
on Somersault
Film Thinking
Definitely should check it out hey. Is a bit arty, so you got a like that kind of thing, but is nicely done I reckon.
Thanks again,
Ben