Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, a film by Yaniv Raz

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Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, a film by Yaniv Raz

10 October 2022

James Whitman (Lucas Jade Zumann) is a troubled sixteen year old. With only one friend, Kwane (Odiseas Georgiadis), who sees the friendship as a social experiment more than anything else, James’ life is in turmoil following the disappearance of his older sister Jorie (Lily Donoghue), a month earlier.

If things were bad at home before Jorie vanished, they’ve taken a turn for the worse since. His father, Carl (Jason Isaacs), whom James refers to as “the brute” is an angry ex-navy officer, who won’t hesitate to hit his mother Elly, (Lily Donoghue) when he loses his temper.

Elly meanwhile is disillusioned with her life. In her younger days a promising career as an artist in New York City beckoned. But she was forced to abandon these ambitions because Carl wanted to move to a small town and open a sushi restaurant. Or so she tells James.

A ray of light arrives in the form of James’ classmate Sophie (Taylor Russell). Sophie is the editor of the school’s literature zine, and asks James if he can track down a poem Jorie promised to submit for publication before she disappeared. Sensing Sophie may be seeking more though, he’s happy to oblige.

While searching Jorie’s room — which Carl had placed out of bounds — for the poem, he instead finds a photo of Jorie with some friends, a few of whom James recognises. Believing they may know her whereabouts, he sets off with Sophie, who has agreed to help him, to locate his sister.

Despite its comedy billing, Dr. Bird’s Advice for Sad Poets, trailer, has more than a few dark moments. James is not as well as his father likes to believe, and as the pressure builds, James begins unravelling.

Light relief in the form of the titular Mr Bird, a pigeon voiced by Tom Wilkinson, who dispenses wisdom to the downtrodden James, lifts the mood. As do the musings of James’ hero Walt Whitman (voiced by Michael H. Cole), along with nods to the work of Wes Anderson, who is clearly a hero of director Yaniv Raz.

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The Stranger a film by Thomas M Wright with Joel Edgerton

8 October 2022

Daniel Morcombe, a thirteen year Sunshine Coast boy, went missing in December 2003, as he set off to do some Christmas shopping. In August 2011, after an extensive police investigation, and a sting operation, Brett Peter Cowan, who would later be convicted of Morcombe’s kidnapping and murder, was arrested by detectives.

The Stranger, trailer, directed by Thomas M Wright, is a dramatisation of the police operation to apprehend Cowan, and is based on the 2018 book, The Sting, by Kate Kyriacou. But The Stranger is not a direct re-telling of Morcombe’s disappearance. Instead it focuses on efforts to bring the person responsible to justice.

Australian actor and director Joel Edgerton stars as Mark, an undercover police officer, who befriends a man named Henry Teague. Teague is suspected of committing a serious crime, but police lack sufficient evidence to charge him. Mark sets about gaining Teague’s trust, and he hopes, an admission of Teague’s guilt.

A friendship forms between two strangers. For Henry Teague, worn down by a lifetime of physical labour, this is a dream come true. His new friend Mark becomes his saviour and ally. However, neither is who they appear to be, each carry secrets that threaten to ruin them and in the background, one of the nation’s largest police operations is closing in.

The Stranger is currently screening in Australian cinemas.

Andor will take you back to the Star Wars you grew up with

24 September 2022

The trailer makes Andor, the latest Star Wars streaming series by Disney, look fascinating, but as we all know, trailers sometimes over-sell the story they’re promoting.

Set in the five year period prior to Rouge One, Andor however promises to take us back to the Star Wars we grew up with, says Michael Idato, writing for The Sydney Morning Herald.

At the centre of the series is Cassian Andor, and his involvement with the then fledgling rebellion against the Galactic Empire:

The “Andor” series will explore a new perspective from the Star Wars galaxy, focusing on Cassian Andor’s journey to discover the difference he can make. The series brings forward the tale of the burgeoning rebellion against the Empire and how people and planets became involved. It’s an era filled with danger, deception and intrigue where Cassian will embark on the path that is destined to turn him into a rebel hero.

Andor has been screening since Wednesday 21 September 2022. Jack Seale, writing for The Guardian, describes it as the best Star Wars show since The Mandalorian… once it gets going:

In its third instalment, Andor finally becomes the gritty, kinetic spy thriller it has been billed as, after a surfeit of thoughtful world-building. Thankfully, somebody at Disney+ has their head screwed on, because Andor has debuted with a triple bill. Make it through that opening marathon and you have what’s shaping up to be the best Star Wars show since The Mandalorian.

A trailer for Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey by Rhys Waterfield

2 September 2022

Christopher Robin was one of the main characters in the Winnie-the-Pooh stories, originally written by British author A. A. Milne, nearly one hundred years ago. Together with a posse of friends — based on soft toys — including a teddy-bear called Winnie-the-Pooh, they lived in an imaginary forest called the Hundred Acre Wood. Readers of the books and poems written by Milne, will recall Christopher Robin one day left the forest to go to boarding school.

The parting of ways appeared to be quite amicable. Christopher Robin’s soft toy friends, including Piglet, Kanga, and Tigger, held a farewell party before he left. But it seems the geniality didn’t last, with Winnie-the-Pooh and Piglet later becoming resentful of Christopher Robin’s departure. So much so, that when the boy returns to Hundred Acre Wood as an adult with his girlfriend, they are intent on murdering their one time friend, and those close to him.

That’s the situation at least in Winnie-The-Pooh: Blood and Honey, trailer, by Rhys Waterfield. Never return to your past, what else is there to say? Think I’ll be sleeping with the lights on tonight though…

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Exquisite Gucci ad by Alessandro Michele a Stanley Kubrick homage

31 August 2022

Alessandro Michele, creative director of Gucci, shows off the Italian luxury fashion house’s latest designs and accessories in an advert blending numerous Stanley Kubrick films, as a homage to the late American filmmaker.

2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, The Shining, and Eyes Wide Shut, are among Kubrick’s work that Michele decided to re-inhabit:

As an act of love, I decided to reinhabit Kubrick’s films, pushing to the core this incendiary approach. I took the liberty of disassembling, blending, grafting and reassembling them. Sticking to my creative praxis, I seized those movies, resemanticizing them, populating them with my clothes.

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Trailer for 6 Festivals by Macario De Souza

24 August 2022

6 Festivals, trailer, is the latest feature from Australian filmmaker Macario De Souza:

Maxie, Summer and James share a deep bond and love for music. When James receives a devastating diagnosis, the friends throw themselves into a whirlwind of festivals in an attempt to escape reality.

De Souza’s debut was his 2007 documentary, Bra Boys, about the surf culture at Sydney’s Maroubra Beach, and a local gang called the Bra Boys, whose name derived from the last three letters of Maroubra. De Souza co-directed Bra Boys with Sunny Abberton, who founded the gang with his brothers Koby, Jai, and Dakota.

Trailer for Where Is Anne Frank by Ari Folman

22 August 2022

When writing her journal, World War II diarist Anne Frank imagined she was relating her experiences to a girl called Kitty. Kitty was not a real person, but Frank felt she needed to write to someone, rather than merely document her thoughts in a dairy she believed not a single person would ever see.

Seven decades later, Kitty has been bought to life by Israeli filmmaker Ari Folman, director of Waltz with Bashir, in his new animated feature Where Is Anne Frank, trailer.

The film follows the journey of Kitty, the imaginary friend to whom Anne Frank dedicated her diary. A fiery teenager, Kitty wakes up in the near future in Anne Frank’s house in Amsterdam and embarks on a journey to find Anne, who she believes is still alive, in today’s Europe. While the young girl is shocked by the modern world, she also comes across Anne’s legacy.

Talking of Anne Frank, reports have been surfacing on social media that Dairy of a Young Girl, the journal she wrote while in hiding with her family in Amsterdam from the Nazis during World War II, had been banned by a school district in Texas. While it is true a recently published graphic-novel version of Frank’s dairy has temporarily been removed from the shelves of school libraries in Texas, pending a review of its content, other versions of the title remain available for reading.

Trailer for My Old School a documentary about Brian MacKinnon

20 August 2022

Brian MacKinnon studied at Bearsden Academy, a school near Glasgow in Scotland, until his graduation at age seventeen in 1980. After leaving Bearsden, MacKinnon went to Glasgow University, but his enrolment was revoked after failing course exams. MacKinnon was bitterly disappointed, so he decided — quite literally — to start over again.

In 1993, at the age of thirty, he re-enrolled at Bearsden Academy, posing as a sixteen year old Canadian expatriate named Brandon Lee. For the year he spent there, no one saw through the ruse. None of his classmates were suspicious, nor the handful of original teachers still there, who had taught MacKinnon over a decade earlier.

The deception only came to light after “Lee” had left Bearsden for a second time. Now his story has been made into a documentary My Old School, trailer, by Jono McLeod, a former TV news reporter, who was a classmate of “Lee” in 1993.

[McLeod] says he always gets asked how he did not know that Brandon was an imposter at the time. “It is everyone’s nightmare to wake up at 30 years old and be back at school, so why would anyone choose to place themselves in that situation?” he says.

While parents of some students were alarmed that a thirty-year-old was in close proximity to teenagers, many people were certain MacKinnon’s motives were not untoward, including numerous former students and teachers. He sought only to right a perceived wrong.

While MacKinnon agreed to be interviewed for the documentary, he refused to be filmed, and instead actor Alan Cumming stands in for him. In perhaps attempting to rationalise the escapade, MacKinnon says: “the thing you have to do if you really want to prevail is do the unimaginable.”

Beginning by Dea Kulumbegashvili, how to explain the ending?

16 August 2022

Beginning, trailer, is the 2020 debut feature of Georgian filmmaker Dea Kulumbegashvili. Yana (Ia Sukhitashvili) is the wife of a Jehovah’s Witness minister, David (Rati Oneli). They have a young son Giorgi (Saba Gogichaishvili). But Yana begins to question her life after their small church is fire-bombed by a group of extremists, during a service one afternoon.

She is frustrated by local police who have little interest in investigating the attack, even though security camera footage clearly identifies the perpetrators. After being assaulted by a man, Alex (Kakha Kintsurashvili), who claims to be a police officer, Yana sinks deeper into despair, but also finds a steely, though grim, resolve. Beginning is equal parts meditative and unsettling. We sense Yana at times on the verge of catharsis, yet never quite attaining the peace of mind she seeks.

But what of Yana’s shocking act at the conclusion of the story? Is her victim intended as a surrogate for the police officer, Alex, whom we see die, possibly having been poisoned, on a dried out riverbed? Does Yana see the patriarchal abuse of women as a cycle with no end? But a cycle she’ll do the unthinkable to try and curb? This is what I saw in the final scenes of the film.

A Guide to Dating at the End of the World by Samuel Gay

13 August 2022

I couldn’t go passed the title… A Guide to Dating at the End of the World, trailer, the debut feature of Queensland, Australia, based filmmaker Samuel Gay, which is set in the state’s capital, Brisbane.

The story follows unlucky-in-love Alex (Kerith Atkinson), a thirty-something woman who wakes one morning to find she’s apparently alone in the city, after a Large Hadron Collider experiment somehow dissolves everyone else.

Alex meets John on a blind date set up by her friends, and declares that she ‘wouldn’t see him again even if he were the last man on earth!’ The next day Alex wakes to find that a scientific experiment seems to have wiped out the rest of humanity. The streets of Brisbane are deserted; her annoying boss has disappeared; no longer does she have to put up with her friends trying to set her up with losers. Alex finds that she has the City of Sunshine to herself — at first it’s bliss. No traffic, no queues, no deadlines — though the novelty wears thin after a few weeks of harmless carjacking, home-invasions and tinned food. Until Alex discovers that there is someone else still alive, and it’s John!

The premise reminds me a little of The Quiet Earth — made in 1985 by late New Zealand filmmaker Geoff Murphy — though minus the star crossed lovers. A Guide to Dating at the End of the World premieres in Brisbane on Friday 26 August 2022.

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