Idiocracy.

Dir: Mike Judge
Starring: Luke Wilson, Maya Rudolph, Dax Shepard.
2006, colour, 79 mins.


As with most everyone else on the planet my first doorway into Mike Judge's mind was Beavis & Butthead, two gentlemen that need no introduction. Through the show, feature film and spin off series King of the Hill, Judge was able to refine his sense of humour from inane toilet jokes to his current biting satirical style. When B&B's world opened up in the feature film it was a chance for Mike to show off what would eventually end up in his films: his commentary on America and commercial society. Most of his material is bent toward this in one way or another with forays into similar areas like corporate life (Office Space) and the newest "green" movement (The Goode Family). There's not much from him that I haven't enjoyed and I think he's an underrated talent who doesn't always get what he needs to fully complete his various visions. Idiocracy is a prime example of this. I ignored (read: was totally oblivious to) it for a long time because:

a. The cover doesn't grab you - plain yellow cover with Luke Wilson shrugging on it. Seriously. Which leads to point b.
b. Luke Wilson doesn't grab you - he's a nice guy but it always feels like he's playing himself...the nice guy. He is unable to be nasty. He's just too nice.
c. There's not a lot of talk out there about it - besides Micah who recommended the film to me, none of my friends had mentioned it, pointed it out in a video story or anything.

It took browsing through JB with someone I never browse JB with (my pal Micah) for me to do a double take on this baddie and it was so cheap that I figured it wasn't a huge gamble. I mean, the guy made Office Space for crying out loud. Surely if this film sucked there would still be joy to be had somewhere within due to the talent involved. Luckily, Micah's recommendation paid off.

Luke Wilson is Corporal Joe Bauers, a US army librarian selected to be a part of a Government hibernation experiment alongside Rita, a prostitute plucked from the street who the Army assumes no one would care about if they disappeared. Joe is picked because he is supremely average - according to the Head of Research for the project, "the most average man in the entire US army" - and therefore the best person to use. All seems to be going fine as Rita and Joe head into the capsules however after a few months the department is shut down and everything is buried. They wake up 500 years later where the world has become populated with stupidity: a TV show called "Ow! My Balls!" where the main character simply gets in many situations where his testicles are injuried, an Academy Award winning film named "Ass" that consists of a shot of an arse onscreen farting for the entire 90 minute duration and all manner of other ridiculous and stupid things. The President is a muscle-bound black dude who is also a Wrestling champion with a presidential cabinet know even less than him and Joe quickly becomes the smartest man in the world, being put under pressure to fix all of Earth's problems (crops not growing due to a sports drink replacing water for nearly every application, for example).

The first thing you notice about the film is the surprisingly high production values. For such a low budget film - the actors must have been working for peanuts - Judge manages to pack a lot of impressive visual doodads in there. A large amount of practical and some digital set extension merge pretty much seamlessly in a slightly cartoonish hyper-real way. I was waiting for the quality to slack off but it's pretty darn consistent and a tribute to Mike really wanting to create the world of a future which feels so much like the present but is just much, much stupider. You have to watch the film a few times to pick up on all the little goodies that are stuffed into each scene and frame but it's worth some pausing on your DVD player, rest assured - some of the smaller visual details are funnier than the more broad strokes throughout the rest of the film.

As for the script: it's not brilliant but I think that's the point. Joe is the straight man against all the ridiculously stupid potty humour and lame jokes which are there in the film not to amuse but to point out exactly how weak those kinds of laughs can be. It sets up the world as a depraved place to live and a dystopian view of the future: to miss the point behind the presence of these lame gags means you probably won't get much out of it all. Due to it being a gigantic jab at American and consumer culture in general it had a lot of trouble getting much of a push from 20th Century Fox and as a result didn't see much light of day, nowhere near recouping its' budget of about $7.5 mil. Strong life on DVD for this has probably allowed Judge to continue on making shows and films which is the same way Kevin Smith stays afloat.

Overall, it's hard to make the next Citizen Kane in 79 minutes and using what Mike Judge had to work with he's done just about the best you could with this idea. It's not up to Office Space standards but hey, what is?


**1/2 out of ****

Inglourious Basterds.

Dir: Quentin Tarantino
Starring: Christoph Waltz, Brad Pitt, Melanie Laurent, Michael Fassbender, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger.
2009, colour, 152 mins.


My oldest memory of Quentin Tarantino is probably seeing the cover for Reservoir Dogs in a Movieland video store when I was younger. I remember noticing that it was rated R and thinking it was super badarse but having no idea what it was about. Later on I'd find the Pulp Fiction soundtrack in the cd collection of the place where my Father was living at the time and I became obsessed with "Girl, You'll Be A Woman Soon". I didn't know why, I just loved it. My first Tarantino film became Kill Bill Vol. 1 which my Father took me to see in 2003 even though I was 15 at the time and it was rated R. I felt super badarse. I then watched Vol. 2 when it came out the year after and in time my friend Ben showed me Pulp Fiction & Reservoir Dogs. Later, I was excited for Grindhouse, eagerly awaiting the projected release date of April 24, 2007. Suddenly, it disappeared from the release calendar and all promotional material vanished from the foyer of each cinema I visited. I was puzzled and annoyed until I discovered it had performed poorly at the US box office and so was being cut in half - removing half the experience in the process - and putting each film out seperately. While Planet Terror never materialized on Australian screens (except some cinemas including the Astor in Melbourne, who have taken to showing screenings of the complete double feature with trailers & fake advertisements often), I won a free pass to the Coburg drive-in to see Death Proof when it was finally released in September of that year. Couldn't have picked a better location to see it, but as a film it was a let down.

This was Quentin "Pulp Fiction" Tarantino. Despite the amazing car chase and the odd patch of quality dialogue it was too big of a departure and QT went down a notch in my books. Whisperings of Inglourious Basterds actually being made surfaced not long after Kill Bill had concluded (talk had begun many years before that of the script alone) but knowing his habit of teasing projects that never happen and considering the talk came mostly from the writer/director himself, I wasn't holding my breath. It became the holy grail of Tarantino scripts. The project many thought would never get made for a huge variety of reasons had rumours about its' details flying around left and right. At one stage it was planned as a long series of films because of the scope before it was pared down and finished mid-2008. It was rushed into production immediately to be ready in time for Cannes the following year (which happens in May). That time frame would have scared anyone but amazingly, they pulled it off and here I sit having already viewed it 3 times.

Pitt is Lt. Aldo Raine and he & his cohorts "The Basterds" are in France, killing Nazis. Their reason for being there doesn't extend much beyond that except later on being involved in Operation Kino, the key plot point of the film involving a plot to kill Hitler. Eli Roth is Sgt. Donnie Donowitz who has built his reputation as the "Bear Jew" and Til Schweiger is Hugo Stiglitz, both are Basterds. Laurent is Shoshanna Dreyfuss/Emmanuelle Mimieux; massacre survivor and cinema owner in Paris with an axe to grind. Fassbender is Lt. Archie Hicox, a British film critic turned spy for the army and key player in Operation Kino. Krueger plays a popular German actress by the name of Bridget von Hammersmark who is also a British spy and assists in Kino. Waltz is a detective for the SS/SD named Col. Hans Landa (nicknamed "The Jew Hunter") who's job is to basically track down Jews avoiding discovery in France. Oh, and he covers all four languages - French, Italian, English & German - spoken in the film.

This is a talkie in the best sense of the word. Tarantino is flexing his dialogue muscle here to the point of bursting and in terms of action-to-talking ratio in this film you're looking in Pulp Fiction territory. That's not all there is here but it's a good way of simplifying it. Being such a film lover tends toward the film also being outstanding technically; the colours are vibrant despite being appropriate for the period, the detail incredibly fine and I challenge you to find a poorly focused or framed shot in the whole darn thing. Surprisingly spared of much of his typical cinematographical (word?) flair Quentin here sticks mostly to solid master shots that usually pit characters in their respective combative corners according to the conversations being had...very Western. For example, in the already famous opening scene it's rare to find a shot that nestles the farmer Perrier LaPadite anywhere near Hans Landa though they are the only two people in the scene. Being pitched as his Western it's not unusual that QT has picked Leone as a stylistic reference (call it inspiration if you want) and it's written all over the production.

Waltz destroys every actor playing against him. He controls the film but not in a distracting or grandstanding way: his character is the largest and most interesting and he obviously keeps that in mind with every nuance he's injected into this performance. The conversations he has with other people almost always involve him spiralling down from seemingly inane yet charming banter into scalpel-like precision in extracting exactly what he needs which is usually a confession or admission of guilt. Everyone else is efficient - Fassbender and August Diehl are probably the biggest standouts of the other key players. Pitt, besides being the main marquee name doesn't have too much to do and behaves accordingly. He's fun. Krueger is probably the weakest, playing her character as if she was reading a script. I don't think she intended it to be taken that way but I suppose that's what happens when a performance is poor and you're an actress playing another actress. Perhaps she got confused and forgot to even bring the towel to throw in. Alright, so she's not that bad but she doesn't hold a torch to Laurent in terms of the feminine sector, who reacts more than acts but in the best way. Schweiger is a lot of fun and a nifty cameo from Mike Myers is pretty sweet. And what QT film is complete without Samuel L Jackson? As our sporadic narrator he doesn't say much but his voice still kills it every time.

As for the implications of the story...it's a tricky one. Some critics have called it Jewish Revenge Porn but I think that kind of misses the point. The film is almost entirely about revenge, that much is true but it's almost lighthearted while being quite heavyhanded. The story is never a joke despite spatterings of humour and never deadly serious as shown by the story itself which involves mostly fictional characters and turns of events which run contrary to what we all know happened around this period. The tone is never self important and you never feel like there's a deeper lesson to be learned. I personally didn't enjoy hearing laughter at one of the later more crucial scenes because I didn't think it was really anything to laugh at. It's hard to make a strong point about it in this review without giving away major plot movements though so forget I even mentioned it. Ha!

For some reason, you actually kinda believe all of it even though suspension of disbelief - especially in the face of recorded history of the kind dealt with here - happens rarely these days. It's a pleasure to walk out of a movie theatre with something to talk about as opposed to "That was crap", "That looked cool" or "That was awesome". It's films like this that force you to pin down exactly why you think any of those things about them and in my experience this film has encouraged a lot of discussion.

I'm very happy that Tarantino is back to his form. Maybe we won't have to wait so long next time, eh?


***1/2 out of ****

Apocalypto.

Dir: Mel Gibson
Starring: Rudy Youngblood, Raoul Trujilo, Gerardo Taracena.
2006, colour, 135 mins.


For some reason, when this film came out I had no interest in seeing it. I'd seen the trailers and it just didn't grab me. The poster (left) looked cool and Mel Gibson as a director had slight appeal but overall, neh. Recently a few of my friends have been telling me to give it a second chance so when I saw it at JB as part of a 3 for 2 offer I figured "why not?"

Jaguar Paw is a tribesman in the Mesoamerican jungle. He has a child and a wife pregnant with another. He and his tribe live a simple life and a sense of humour seems to be prevalent in the village as displayed via the opening sequence where a fellow hunter (who appears to continually be the butt of jokes) is told to devour the testicles of a boar which he does so rather graphically. Another tribe encounters Jaguar Paw and his hunters, asking for permission to pass through their section of the jungle. They seem quite afraid, hesitant. The next morning, the camp is attacked by outsiders who kill some of the tribesman but take most hostage. Jaguar Paw manages to hide his wife and child in a well and promises to return for them but becomes captured himself. The remainder of the film is basically his journey to get back to his family.

Having no real expectations before watching this film made it a rewarding experience that I don't get very often. I'd never heard strong opinions one way or another in contrast to most of the time seeing a film with some idea of the kinds of friends of mine like it and those that don't, or the kinds of critics that like it and the kind that don't. Gibson surprised me with his handling of it all. He's a good director. He seems to have a desire not to gloss over brutal realism and all of the violence depicted in this film is a testament to that. I think that's probably what impressed me the most in a sickening kind of way: it makes you take the violence seriously because of how visceral it is. When the hearts are removed from the tribesmen, their heads are cut off and thrown down the steps of the pyramid followed by their bodies you believe it's happening. I think the suspension of disbelief is amplified by the use of Mayan as the language for the film. Imagine if it had been english? You probably wouldn't have cared about anything that was happening. Subtitles can get a bit tiring after a while but it helps you to engage because it's so foreign to you. You have to rely on someone else for the meaning of the words so you don't invest as much time into picking apart all other aspects of the film.

This is probably the best use of digital film I've seen and I attribute that to the fact that most of the film takes place in well lit environments with vivid colours. Film would have been nicer because the high action sequences tend to blur in an unnatural way, taking you out of the film for brief moments while you contemplate the inconsistency in visuals. Or maybe that's just me. The cast are good: none of them really overplay and Youngblood does a solid job carrying the film on his shoulders and everyone supporting him do well too. None stand out more than the other. The production design is something to behold though. The majority of what happens onscreen is done with physical effects and the visual effects tend to blend in to it all. The level of detail is great.

There's not much to dislike here. No flashy direction gets out of the way of the simplicity of the story and the efficiency of the action. There's heartwrenching moments, gag-enducing moments and moments where you cheer for what's happening. This is not a film you watch casually, you have to engage in it totally. If you do, you'll be rewarded.


*** out of ****

Rosemary's Baby.

Dir: Roman Polanski
Starring: Mia Farrow, John Cassevetes, Ruth Gordon, Sidney Blackmer, Ralph Bellamy.
1968, colour, 131 mins.


Roman Polanski was always an oddity to me. My father rented The Two Jakes in the late nineties and I remember the cover saying it was the sequel to Chinatown. The next time we went to the video store I searched out the cover for it with its' amazing green-smoke-haired Faye Dunaway coming from Jack Nicholson's cigarette. The first film I saw of his was The Ninth Gate which is, in retrospect, an odd first choice however I didn't know it was his at the time let alone who he was and what he'd done. I didn't think much of it when I saw it because to be honest, it's not much of a film and I forgot it quickly. A few years later in 2005 my friend Ben told me I could select a thing or two from JB Hi-Fi for my birthday. I chose this dreadful stand up comedy box set and a Roman Polanski boxset containing Knife In The Water, Cul De Sac and Repulsion. Umbrella (Australia) now offer this same boxset however in a Amary case, the version I had was in an awesomely designed digipak. I sold it a few years later having never watched any of the three. As you can imagine, I regret that now.

When I first saw The Pianist a few months ago I wondered how I'd never spent time on Polanski or his films before. He is a master. No director has a perfect track record (except perhaps Paul Thomas Anderson but that's a pretty controversial statement) and Roman is no exception however his best films make you completely forget about his worst. Seeing Chinatown for the first time a few weeks ago made me fall in love with his visual style. I actually sought out seeing Rosemary's Baby before Chinatown (until I read Easy Riders, Raging Bulls & The Boy Stays In The Picture), trying to find it cheaply from JB or Borders but never having success. Finally I found it for $10 the other day at JB.

Farrow plays Rosemary who is married to Guy (John Cassevetes), a struggling actor in New York City. The film opens with them inspecting an apartment to purchase to begin a home life together and hopefully a family. The building has an odd history of tenants and even some of the current tenants are a little on the off side. They (reluctantly) make friends with an elderly couple in the building, Minnie and Roman Castevet who are well travelled and world weary bizzaros. While struggling to get a gig Guy decides he wants to take starting a family more seriously, much to Rosemary's delight. Unbeknownst to her though, Guy makes a deal with the devil for fame and luck with his career in exchange for his wife carrying a son for the prince of darkness, Satan himself.

The first thing that struck me about this film is that it has barely aged a day. The performances are so natural - with the exception of the intentionally theatrical final scene - and excellent that they stand so far apart from the expectation of a horror film, especially one of this era. Cassevetes and Farrow are well matched and neither fight for control of their scenes; understatement is the name of the game under Polanski's direction in this and everyone plays ball. I don't know how Roman pulled a cast with an amazing array of Golden Age actors and actresses together with one or two young faces, but it makes a great film even better. A special mention to Charles Grodin who caught me off guard in a later scene, his cynicism and bitter tone a prophecy of the majority of his future roles.

In Chinatown, the director set a warm and dreamy LA-in-the-summer mood with a visual style to match and he sets an appropriate tone here as well. There's nothing to jump out at you, nothing out of the ordinary in the muted colour palette painting New York City as not much of a character at all which is right in this scenario. It's only a backdrop. The location is of no consequence at all. Polanski shows no gore, nothing to make you go "eww". There are disturbing moments such as the 'dream' sequence in which Rosemary becomes inpregnated and the famous closing scene with Farrow's pitch-perfect reaction to her offspring. All throughout the horror built is contained within Rosemary's womb and mind. I suppose the problem with pulling off the same feat today is that it's mostly all been done before and to come up with a compelling more-than-paper-thin-setup, it seems, is getting harder and harder.

Watching Rosemary's Baby made me long for the same subtlety to be deployed in modern terror. It just doesn't happen enough anymore.


**** out of ****.