Disgrace, a film by Steve Jacobs, with John Malkovich, Jessica Haines

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Disgrace, a film by Steve Jacobs, with John Malkovich, Jessica Haines

15 September 2010

Disgrace, trailer, is the second feature of filmmaker Steve Jacobs, who collaborated with his wife, Anna Maria Monticelli — who wrote the screenplay — to adapt Australian and South African author J.M. Coetzee’s 1999 novel of the same name.

Set in present day South Africa, mostly in Cape Town, and a remote farm on the Eastern Cape, Disgrace is — at times — a disturbing and confronting insight to the changing political and social dynamics of post-apartheid South Africa.

David Lurie (John Malkovich) is a middle-aged divorced white South African professor, who tutors poetry to less than enthused students at a Cape Town university. He is a self-indulgent, often blasé man, who seems to have no social life, and whose only friend is Soraya (Natalie Becker), a prostitute he sees regularly.

A chance encounter with one of his students, Melanie (Antoinette Engel), elsewhere on the campus, leads to an affair after he invites her out for a drink. The relationship however raises the ire of another student, Sidney (Antonio Fisher), and is soon brought to the attention of the university’s administrators, who duly dismiss David.

Yet it all seems like water off a duck’s back to David. Leaving Cape Town, he travels to his daughter, Lucy’s (Jessica Haines) isolated farm. He is surprised to learn she has split from her partner, another woman, and aside from Petrus (Eriq Ebouaney), a nearby neighbour, now lives alone.

After returning from a walk one afternoon David and Lucy are brutally attacked outside her house. David suffers burns after being dowsed with methylated spirits and set alight, while Lucy is raped. But it is the aftermath of the attack that leaves David especially displaced.

Petrus for instance, while concerned and sympathetic, otherwise seems little perturbed, and even Lucy, despite her ordeal, refuses to press charges even after learning who the attackers are. It seems she would much rather keep the peace than risk upsetting her neighbours.

Disgrace is a glimpse into many of the changes currently taking place in South Africa. For example we see ownership of Lucy’s farm transition from her control, to that of Petrus and his family. In a reversal of roles, Lucy ends up as his tenant, having previously been the land owner.

Disgrace is also the story of David coming to terms with, and taking responsibility for, the wrong doing he has caused. For a time he is adamant that those who attacked him and his daughter be brought to justice, despite – at first – having no interest in making amends for his transgressions.

Originally published Wednesday 15 September 2010.

The Kids are All Right, a film by Lisa Cholodenko, with Julianne Moore, Annette Bening

30 August 2010

The Kids are All Right, trailer, sees director Lisa Cholodenko take a leaf from her own life. She became pregnant and gave birth to a son by a sperm donor several years ago, in this story of a family with two mothers but no father, living in Los Angeles.

Same sex couple Nic (Annette Bening), and Jules (Julianne Moore), have both had a child each, through artificial insemination, with sperm from the same donor. Nic had a daughter Joni (Mia Wasikowska), now eighteen, while Jules had a son, Laser (Josh Hutcherson), now fifteen.

Laser has wanted to find his biological father for some time — but being too young — cannot do so himself. Instead he asks Joni, who is preparing for college, to call the sperm bank as a final favour before leaving home. While fearful of hurting her mothers’ feelings, Joni reluctantly agrees.

This eventually leads to a meeting with their “father”, Paul (Mark Ruffalo). Although in his late thirties, Paul remains something of a larrikin. He owns a restaurant and market garden, but has drifted from job to job, and seems to have a preference for dating women in their mid-twenties.

Despite an awkward initial meeting, the three nonetheless establish a connection and decide to stay in touch. Paul soon meets Nic and Jules, and gradually becomes more involved with the family. At first he offers a counterbalance to the highly controlling Nic, and the sometimes aimless Jules.

While Paul is mostly well intentioned, he spends ever more time with Joni and Laser, and later Jules, as he sees an opportunity to become part of the family he never had. But his constant presence soon gives rise to tensions within the family, that at one point threatens to tear it apart.

The Kids are All Right is perfectly balanced comedy drama, something Bening and Moore — who wear their roles like gloves — can largely take credit for. The fact this family is headed up by two women, two mothers, lesbians at that, barely seems to make a difference.

So — for want of a better term — family-like do they appear, that nothing looks or feels the least bit out of place here, they have the same arguments and foibles as any other family. But The Kids are All Right does not seek to make commentary on gay marriages or partnerships.

Instead what is on display is a family experiencing a series of upheavals as a result of the children not only growing towards adulthood and independence, but also meeting their biological father, and the changes in family and personal dynamics those events occasion.

Originally published Monday 30 August 2010.

The Nothing Men, a film by Mark Fitzpatrick, with Colin Friels, David Field

13 August 2010

The Nothing Men, trailer, (NSFW: profanities) is the first feature of Australian director and screenwriter Mark Fitzpatrick. Set mainly on the floor of a Sydney factory that is about to close, six bored men bide their time, as they are forced to wait two weeks for their redundancy payments.

Despite the fact there is no actual work to do, and the men have started to become a tad irritated with each other, their final weeks of literally sitting around haven’t been too bad. After all, very few companies effectively pay their staff to spend the day drinking and playing cards.

News that a worker, David Field (David Snedden), from head office is to join them for their final fortnight however unsettles the foreman, Jack Simpson (Colin Friels). David spent the week prior at another company site where a dozen workers were abruptly sacked, losing their severance payments in the process. Jack thinks he smells a rat.

David, who on first acquaintance seems normal enough, is though, as a draftsman, an odd placement for a factory workshop. When he starts making what he claims are private phone calls behind closed doors in the office, and seemingly going home during the day for personal reasons, everyone soon becomes unsettled.

The men fear David is a spy sent from head office to find excuses to sack them, so the company won’t have to pay out their redundancy money. Accordingly, they reluctantly agree to dispense with the beer and card games, and sit tight for the duration, while also keeping their distance from him.

David does manage to befriend Wesley Timms (Martin Dingle-Wall), the quieter, more studious, of the six, who is also a fellow chess player, and invites him back to his place for a game one evening. While there, Wesley makes a disturbing discovery, and also learns, unbeknownst to David, that they are linked by a past tragedy.

Anyone who has been in a situation similar to that facing the soon to be retrenched men, will understand how uncertainty, innuendo, and gossip, can combine to create fear and mistrust.

Compound that with the prospect that much anticipated redundancy payments are at risk, and the situation can quickly become insufferable. Are the fears of the factory workers justified though, or are they perhaps over reacting? The Nothing Men shows just how suddenly the seed of an idea — whether based in fact, or not — can get out of hand.

While equal parts drama and thriller, The Nothing Men is let down by several plot inconsistencies. There are also a number of red-herrings, intended to build up mystery around David that are just a tad too contrived, and at odds with the rest of the story. Still, the audience is left guessing as to what will happen, right up to the final frame.

Originally published Friday 13 August 2010.

The Waiting City, a film by Claire McCarthy, with Radha Mitchell, Joel Edgerton

12 July 2010

The Waiting City, trailer, the second full length feature of Sydney and Los Angeles based Australian filmmaker Claire McCarthy, has the distinction of being the first Australian produced movie to be filmed entirely in India. The story recounts the experiences of Fiona Simmons (Radha Mitchell), and husband Ben (Joel Edgerton), who travel to the city of Kolkata to adopt a baby girl.

While outwardly happy, the couple are as different as chalk and cheese. The “always on” Fiona continues working on client cases — through her mobile phone and laptop — as if she never left the office. This is in sharp contrast to the laid back, somewhat aimless Ben, who easily strikes up rapport with the locals through his music.

The adoption process, which the couple expect to be a mere formality — they only booked their Kolkata hotel for two weeks after all — turns out to be far more daunting than anticipated. Instead Fiona and Ben find themselves confronted by a rigid, and manual bureaucratic system, replete with delays and hold-ups, that are unexpected and unexplained.

Despite the reservations of others, particularly Krishna (Samrat Chakrabarti), a hotel worker with a direct manner whom they befriend, there is no doubt Ben and Fiona are eagerly awaiting the finalisation of the adoption process. The want nothing more than to take Lakshmi, their adoptive daughter, home to Australia.

But Ben’s chance meeting with the younger Scarlett (Isabel Lucas), a fellow musician from Australia, brings to light the first hint of trouble in his marriage with Fiona. This leads to a series of rifts between the two, which at one point sees the pair staying in separate hotels.

The growing discord between Ben and Fiona gradually results in the reopening of old wounds, and the uncovering of a long held secret. Their marital woes come to a head during a trip to Bhopal, Lakshmi’s birth place, leaving the couple questioning whether they should even be together, let alone adopting a child.

McCarthy is in no hurry to tell her story allowing us to take in the enthralling destinations that are Kolkata and the other places Ben and Fiona visit. Mitchell, who blends seamlessly into her role as the hopeful mother-to-be, together with the ever versatile Edgerton, put in stand out performances.

Visually, The Waiting City is a delight to watch, thanks to the work of cinematographer Denson Baker, whose soft, hazy camera work beautifully renders the locations. His use of close shots meanwhile, projects the bewilderment and turmoil first time travellers to unfamiliar places experience.

The Waiting City is more than a journey to exotic lands though, it is one of self discovery and coming to understand what you really want from life. To adapt a line from a well known quote, perhaps the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself first.

Update: I recently interviewed director Claire McCarthy about the making of The Waiting City.

Originally published Monday 12 July 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

We made it back to the future, but in a parallel universe

9 July 2010

If you’re a dyed-in-the-wool Back to the Future fan I hope you weren’t taken in by the claim that last Monday, 5 July, was “Future Day”. That being the day Marty McFly and Doc Brown arrived in the future when they travelled forward in time during 1989’s Back to the Future Part II.

The arrival of the time travellers from 1985 last Monday may not have been all bad though, had it have happened. In the twenty-five years since the release of Back to the Future, and only five years out from 2015 — the setting for much of Back to the Future Part II — we still have ground to make up in terms of matching some of the advances in technology seen in the movie trilogy.

So far we’re still lagging in the development of:

Flying cars (actually they exist, but are far from in everyday use)
Hoverboards
Time travel

We have however made advances in other areas, with the advent of:

The World Wide Web
Smart phones
High Definition TV (if that’s much of innovation really, considering we’ve had low-def TVs for years)

There’s still another five years to go though, perhaps by then we’ll at least have hoverboards that are able to match what we can do with skateboards today.

Originally published Friday 9 July 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Q&A with Claire McCarthy director of The Waiting City

30 June 2010

Fiona (Radha Mitchell), and Ben (Joel Edgerton) sit together on a bench, in a scene from The Waiting City, a film by Claire McCarthy. Fiona has curly hair and is wearing a blue top, while Ben has short hair and a serious expression, ans is dressed in a light-colored shirt. Behind them, a white cross adorns the wall.

Australian director Claire McCarthy’s latest film The Waiting City is a portrayal of an Australian couple Ben (Joel Edgerton), and Fiona (Radha Mitchell), who travel to Kolkata, India, to collect a baby they have adopted. But delays in finalising the process, together with the disorientation of an unknown city and unfamiliar culture, begin to take a strain on their marriage.

The Waiting City has the distinction of being the first Australian made movie to be filmed entirely in India. Recently Claire McCarthy (Instagram page) took some time out to answer a few of my questions about the making of her new film.

Q: To what degree did your experiences of living in India, and working in orphanages there, have in inspiring the film?

A: A great deal of the film is based on real life situations, friends and interview subjects although it is most certainly a work of fiction. The film is an amalgam of many formative experiences in my life.

Beginning with working in the slums of Kolkata with Mother Teresa’s nuns with my amazing sister Helena and at a turning point shooting a music video on the sweltering banks of the Ganges with my husband-to-be Denson Baker ACS as a test run for the real film, The Waiting City in many ways is an expression of many of my loves; of people, music, food, culture and importantly, of the city of Kolkata.

The documentary I made (called Sisters) also undeniably became a jumping off point for research and development of the fiction screenplay of The Waiting City and gave me insight into the people behind adoption as well as the people and city of Calcutta. I have gleaned so much inspiration from so many very remarkable and inspiring people who have allowed me to interview them and have shared their stories with me.

The inspiration for this story is personal, researched, observed and imagined.

Q: The Waiting City was filmed entirely in India, and accordingly we see nothing of the life of Ben and Fiona in Australia. Why was that?

A: My intention was to allow Fiona and Ben’s history to gradually bubble up to the surface through their experiences in India. This felt like a more elegant solution to expose the characters, and us the audience, to the world of India and that in doing so force them to question their lives and choices about themselves and their relationship.

Q: Aside from your past association with Kolkata, why did you choose to make this city the main setting for the story?

A: The personal connection I had with Kolkata was a big factor in setting the film in this city. It was crucial that the film had a unique rhythm, texture, colour palette and sense of exoticism that we as a Western audience had never seen before. Kolkata is a perfect for this as it has such a unique look and feel and so many contrasting locations and settings.

It was important that through the journey into this city that the main characters would be forced out of their comfort zones to be truly present experiencing each other and the city. The film is really inspired by the beauty, textures and unique rhythms of the city of Kolkata.

As another character in the film too Kolkata forces our main characters to really think about their projections and judgements and to look at their own lives back in Australia from a different vantage point. So it was an aesthetic, strategic, emotional and personal reason to shoot in the city of Kolkata.

Q: What for you was the biggest challenge in filming completely on an overseas location?

A: It was crucial to me that the team became like a family in the making of The Waiting City. We never wanted to be considered a ‘foreign’ film as such and were resistant to the idea of just coming into India and taking over the town. We wanted the film to be a collaborative process with a blending of ideas and resources.

This was one of the biggest challenges of the film; finding the time to ensure the creative process was not lost under the freight train of production pressures. The film is a very fine example of high level planning, collaboration and cultural exchange between incredible Australian and Indian creatives and technicians.

Q: Adoption is a key part of the story, were there any thoughts you wished to convey here, especially on the adoption of children from developing nations?

A: As a filmmaker it’s not my intention to be for or against adoption, it’s more to raise questions about what it means to take a child away from their culture and whether or not bringing them to another culture is a good or a bad thing. In the work I did in orphanages and the research I did about adoption, the one consistent factor I found was the protracted waiting period to receive a child.

Over and above the adoption process itself, the possibilities interested me of what might happen to a couple whilst they were waiting to receive their child.

So I began to look at that emotional stranglehold for both the parents and the child, which was of primary interest to me as a filmmaker over and above the adoption process itself. I started to consider that in waiting for a child a couple would inevitably be pulled in so many different directions and vulnerabilities would be exposed within their relationship.

So in the film the adoption process forces the relationship of the couple under a microscope and causes them to address other issues as well: motherhood, fertility, mortality, gender politics, different expressions of families and journeys to parenthood, spirituality and desire.

Thanks Claire.

Update: some behind the scenes video footage of The Waiting City just to hand.

Originally published Wednesday 30 June 2010, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

How does the Oscar nomination and voting process work?

16 February 2010

NOTE: this is a legacy article published in 2010. Much of the information presented is likely now out of date.

While the movie buff in me takes an avid interest in who wins what in the Academy Awards each year, I’ve never given much thought to how a film reaches the winning list, aside from the fact it must be good — or reasonably good — and was favoured by members of the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), who preside over the venerable award.

And as it turns out, after doing a little research into the process, garnering an AMPAS member’s favour is the very first thing a film must do, if it is to set itself along the Oscar winning pathway.

Favour, choices, AMPAS branches, and nominations

The nomination process commences when each of the 5,777 members of AMPAS, or the Academy, are asked to select their favourite eligible ¹ films — usually five — from the preceding year.

The Academy is split into 15 branches, which represent the various aspects of the film production process, and include actors, directors, writers, producers, and visual effects branches, to name a few.

Branch members are only able to nominate “in-house” however. For instance members of the Writers Branch can only nominate film writers for an award, they cannot, for example, choose actors or directors.

Member numbers can vary across branches, and the Academy as a whole, from year to year, and this can have an effect on the overall process, but more on that shortly.

Preferential voting and magic numbers

The choices made by branch members, which are ranked preferentially from one to five, are sent to accounting and auditing firm PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), who then count the selections — manually — and after much sifting of paper, eventually determine the top five choices — or nominations — in each Oscar category.

To be in the running a film must receive at least one number one ranking from a member, or it is eliminated from the count. PwC go through all the votes, or selections, short-listing the top five number one ranked films in each category.

Taking the Animated Feature Film category as an example, here’s how the nomination selection process might work. This year the Short Films and Feature Animation Branch of the AMPAS has 340 members.

PwC divides this number by 6 ², which equals about 56. To make the grade therefore, a film must secure at least 56 number one votes from members of this branch.

For example 63 members might have selected “Coraline” as their first choice. Another 62 might have chosen “Fantastic Mr. Fox” as their first choice, another 61 “The Princess and the Frog”, 60 “The Secret of Kells”, and finally 57 “Up” ³.

Any other animated features that may have been voted as a top choice by members of the branch are now eliminated, as they did not receive enough votes to make the top five in the category.

It gets complicated — sometimes very complicated — however if five movies do not reach the minimum vote threshold, and this is where the preferential voting system comes into play.

They [the PwC team] then look at the piles still left on the table and get rid of the one with the smallest amount of votes, redistributing them to other piles ranked on the 2nd favourite film on the ballots. If the number 2 choice has already been eliminated then they go to the 3rd choice and so on. Once that’s taken place they count again, if a film hits the magic number it’s taken off the table and is a nominee.

Changes to the number of Best Picture nominations

This year, for the first time since 1943, there are ten movies competing for the Best Picture gong, rather than the usual five, meaning the PwC team would have short-listed the top ten, rather than top five, number one voted films for this category.

The Visual Effects and Make Up categories are the only other exceptions to the five nominations per category rule this year, each sporting three contenders.

Voting and electing the winners

The final voting process is relatively similar to the nomination process.

Once nominations have been finalised, Academy members are sent ballot papers, and again using a preferential voting system, make their selections.

At this stage though, just two people at PwC are involved in counting the votes, and they remain the only ones to know the final results, until the winners are announced on Oscars night.

Controversy in Best Picture decisions

For all its mathematical precision, there is still no guarantee that the best film will be accorded the Best Picture award. 2005’s Brokeback Mountain, a superbly made movie in my opinion, could be considered a case in point.

Despite winning a slew of other film awards, and five Oscar nominations, it nevertheless missed the Best Picture award. It was suggested the Academy shunned the movie in the final round of voting as members were uncomfortable with a gay love story.

After “Brokeback Mountain” won an unprecedented number of precursor awards for best picture — 26 — it entered the Oscars with the most nominations and was considered a shoo-in to win best picture. That is, until the majority of its members — straight, ole, self-absorbed, guy geezers, as legend has it — refused to embrace the gay movie and so they gave their top prize to “Crash.”

That said, “Crash” was still a very good film.

And, to date, no science fiction or animated films, have received a Best Picture award, suggesting the Academy prefers only certain film genres.

Other factors influencing Oscar nominations

While nominations ultimately boil down to the individual tastes of the Academy’s 5,777 members, certain factors may sway their decision.

For example in 2008 sociologists from Harvard University, and the University of California, found female actors appearing in dramas, rather than comedies, were more likely than their contemporaries to score an Oscar nomination.

Academy Award nominations tend to go to performers in dramas, who are female, who have been nominated in the past and who command a high rank in the movie-credit pecking order.

And finally if I were a member of the Academy…

My ten choices — for Best Picture — this year would be:

An Education
Up
The Road
Up in the Air
Watchmen
Star Trek (a long shot, but…)
Looking For Eric
(500) Days of Summer
Beautiful Kate
Is Anybody There?

These are not, unfortunately, ranked preferentially (though “An Education” would still be very near the top), plus I’m not 100 per-cent sure that all titles are eligible for this year’s awards.

And just so you know, this year’s Oscar awards take place on Sunday, 7 March, 2010, or Monday afternoon, 8 March, as it will be in this part of the world.

(Sources: Wikipedia, Radio 1 Movies Blog, Academy Of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Live Science, Gold Derby.)

1. To qualify for an Oscar nomination, a film must open in the previous calendar year, from midnight of 1 January to midnight at the end of 31 December, in Los Angeles County, California. ↩
2. Dividing the total branch membership by six ensures there will be at least five nominees. If it were divided by five the qualifying vote threshold, or “magic number” may be too high, which could result in only four films making the grade. ↩
3. The numbers I have used here are of course fictitious. ↩

Originally published Tuesday 16 February 2010.

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You can travel no further back in time than 1955

18 August 2009

The Time Traveler’s Wife is the latest in a long line of time travel themed movies, and according to physicist Dave Goldberg, makes for a more realistic representation of time travel than most of the (fiction) served to date.

But this is interesting, time travel is (theoretically) only possible to points in time where a time machine already exists, according to Goldberg.

In other words, for Marty McFly to travel from 1985 to back to 1955, as he did in Back to the Future, a DeLorean like time machine would already need to have been in existence in 1955…

According to Einstein’s picture of the universe, space and time are curved and very closely related to each other. This means that traveling through time would be much like traveling through a tunnel in space — in which case you’d need both an entrance and an exit. As a time traveler, you can’t visit an era unless there’s already a time machine when you get there — an off-ramp. This helps explain why we’re not visited by time-traveling tourists from our own future. Futuristic humans don’t drop in for dinner because we haven’t yet invented time travel.

Of course the concept of time travel — in the form of the Flux Capacitor — did exist in 1955, it simply hadn’t taken physical form… does that count?

Originally published Tuesday 18 August 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Tastemakers to get a bite of Star Trek at Sydney Opera House

26 March 2009

The Sydney Opera House will host the world premiere of the new Star Trek movie, on Tuesday 7 April 2009, before an audience of 1600 tastemakers (Internet Archive link):

Director JJ Abrams’ new Star Trek movie will have its world premiere at the Sydney Opera House next month, presented by Aussie star Eric Bana. Abrams, Bana and co-stars Chris Pine, Zachary Quinto and Karl Urban will present the blockbuster to 1,600 tastemakers in art, design, entertainment, fashion, media and politics on April 7. It is only the third time a film has debuted at the Sydney Opera House, and the first time a premiere has been held in the concert hall.

I wonder what it takes to become a Star Trek tastemaker then?

Originally published Thursday 26 March 2009, with subsequent revisions, updates to lapsed URLs, etc.

Arthur C Clarke’s Newspad RSS news aggregator

30 May 2008

Author and futurist Arthur C Clarke is credited with predicting the emergence of a number of technologies, including a tablet-like device called a “Newspad”, which could serve the latest news stories from electronic versions of newspapers.

So far more has been said about comparing the Newspad to PDAs or Tablet PCs, but the Newpad also worked in a very similar way to today’s news aggregators, or RSS feed readers.

In the novelised version of 2001: A Space Odyssey, (chapter title “Moon Shuttle”, pg 66-67) Dr Heywood Floyd, chairman of the US National Council of Astronautics, spends time reading on his Newspad, while traveling to the Moon.

Floyd sometimes wondered if the Newspad, and the fantastic technology behind it, was the last word in man’s quest for perfect communications. Here he was, far out in space, speeding away from Earth at thousands of miles an hour, yet in a few milliseconds he could see the headlines of any newspaper he pleased. (That very word “newspaper,” of course, was an anachronistic hangover into the age of electronics.) The text was updated automatically on every hour; even if one read only the English versions, one could spend an entire lifetime doing nothing but absorbing the ever-changing flow of information from the news satellites.

Not only did Arthur C. Clarke predict PDAs and Tablet PCs, he also foresaw the emergence of news aggregators, and RSS technology.

Originally published Friday 30 May 2008.

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