Category: non-fest

First film back at the GFT since coronavirus lockdown, and this is exactly the type of film I wanted to see. Totally weird, an unknown entity, and best appreciated in the cinema.

Max Richter’s Sleep is a documentary about an 8-hour piece of music meant to be experienced while sleeping. Never heard of it. So I was looking forward to coming to this knowing nothing.

Now, I love pretentious shit, you just have to set your wank tolerance quite high. This is a deeply beautiful piece of music, so just let go of the Instagramming audience members doing yoga, and Tai Chi, and journalling, and meditating, and rollerblading.

The idea was to compose a piece of music that spoke to a universal human experience. It uses only the same frequencies the sleeping mind processes, the same ones fetuses can hear in the womb. It ebbs and flows with the slowing of brainwaves through the cycles of sleep. It is bookended with movements intended to guide you in and out of sleep. It uses our cultural and scientific understanding of sleep to create a piece which the listener interacts with on a non-conscious level.

Which makes staging the live performances quite the task. First you gotta find a venue that will let you book an overnight 8-hour gig. Then it has to sleep an audience, literally on campbeds or mattresses or bunks.

And the performances have this real ritualistic quality to them. Max’s wife Yulia, who took a lot to do with the piece, talks about how her family were refugees, and in this deeply divided and unempathetic time, she wanted to create something which emphasised the universal human experience, to be experienced collectively. So you have these really basic beds, where people come and sleep in their hundreds next to total strangers, place themselves in a state of absolute vulnerability and trust in an unfamiliar environment, and then collectively experience this music about something which unifies them all.

Please ignore the exclusive and expensive nature of participating in such an event (which number 7 in total so far).

The film itself oscillates between giving a serious interview explaining the philosophies and practicalities in making the piece, giving time to actually listening to the music, and presenting thoughts on the piece in a dreamlike fashion, to mimic the experience of the sleeping listener. It kinda works best when it sticks to the first thing. But to be commended nonetheless for trying to showcase, explain, and translate a musical experience intended for the sleeping mind, which is not the easiest subject for a film.

Worth sticking your head round the door to see what’s happening.

So, we’re in quarantine, all the cinemas are closed and several festivals have had to cancel or cut themselves short. Does this mean I won’t review new films I desperately wanted to see at the cinema, but are now available on demand? Does it fuck!

Just watched Color Out of Space. It’s actually really good. The direction manages to steer away from the goofy, and create this atmosphere of ever increasingly malevolent warping by an unseen hand.

The trouble with adaptations of Lovecraft is that his horror hinges on the incomprehensible, something so beyond your ken that you would go mad just to see it. And movies are all about seeing. You couldn’t make a movie in which no one could comprehend what they were looking at, and it still be a successful movie.

In some ways what the director does with Color Out of Space is a happy medium. The colour appearing on screen always preludes something fucking awful happening, but it is not, in itself, the thing you are afraid of. Whatever the creature is, all we can see of it in our dimension is the colour.

The female lead, Madeleine Arthur, is excellent, and conveys the sense of horror and helplessness in the face of cosmic forces utterly indifferent to your tiny existence. Like death, they are unstoppable, unnegiotable, and unconcerned with how they impact you.

Thumbs up.

It is an examination of the invention and propagation of psychological torture techniques. As you can imagine, grim.

It starts with the experiments carried out by Scottish psychiatrist Ewen Cameron on Canadian mental patients in the 1950s. God only knows what he was trying to do, but his ideas for rewiring the brain were taking vulnerable, fragile people who came to him for help, and immobilising them in a state of sensory depravation for months and years, with tapes of disembodied voices forced into their ears all day or night. No one was told they were being experimented on or consented to be part of the experiments. Needless to say, it was a good way to drive people mad.

His ideas got picked up by MKUltra, and were disseminated between Canada, the UK and the USA. In the UK, these techniques were picked up and used against Irish detainees during the Troubles in the 1970s. Basically British soldiers just lifted you, put a bag over your head, and kept you in stress positions, sleep-deprived, naked, and drugged. The media labelled the victims ‘The Hooded Men’ and they are still trying, to this day, to get what was done to them recognised as torture.

When the Hooded Men took their case to court, the European Court of Human Rights declared that what they experienced was “inhumane and degrading treatment” but not officially torture. And this has set the legal precedent around the world that psychological torture is not really torture. It is quoted in the document drawing up the legal basis for the torture of Guantanamo detainees.

The film is very interesting and illuminating in the genesis and the ‘selling’ of psychological torture as an acceptable and effective form of less-than-torture. I could have done with a less stylised presentation, but I guess they thought no one would sit through such grimness were it not presented with a little bit of a flourish.

Wish I could say any of this was in any way surprising but we are currently living through a bit of a renaissance for torture and it is actively endorsed by Western heads of state. But one positive thing to take away from it is, the Powers That Be only do what they think they can get away with – so don’t let them get away with anything. Don’t let the fear of the Other, the madman, the terrorist, the Islamic extremist, all these bogeymen, dampen your empathy for a human being in pain. Don’t allow it to be done in your name.

The one thing everyone knows about The Nightingale is its depiction of sexual violence. I understand that for some people this can be triggering and, if that’s the case, fine, don’t watch this movie. But this is a depiction portrayed from the female character’s perspective, by a female director, to shine a light on the treatment of real women whose stories have been buried in history. That’s the best reason I can think of to expose such events on screen.

The violence generally in this film is pretty constant, but to be honest, I didn’t find it as shocking as some have purported. To be shocked by this film, you’d have to know nothing about the history of Australia or the conduct of the British Empire abroad generally.

Around 200 indigenous languages were lost during the colonisation of Australia. Do you know how many people you have to kill to wipe out 200 languages?

The main character Clare starts the film with a husband and child, and spends the bulk of the film seeking revenge against the British soldiers who come to her house one night. She is accompanied in this by an Aboriginal tracker Billy. Over the course of the film, they go from a place of mutual distrust to a shared sense of common grief.

This is a raw, bare nerve of a film, in which the horror is at how everyday extraordinary cruelty is. The director is the lassie who did the Babadook, and this is another film about the screaming howl of unstoppable grief, expertly told with abundant humanity. And the performances are amazing. Every one award-worthy.

Aisling Franciosi gives a gut-wrenching performance as Clare. Baykali Ganambarr just conveys a wealth of unspeakable injustice as Billy. Even the baddies are amazing in their turn. Sam Claflin is basically in the running for all time greatest bastard in Australian cinema history. And Damon Herriman, a massively underrated dramatic actor, also brings a brilliant depiction of the worst of humanity.

Yet I think what I like most about the film is the unwillingness to simply be the straight revenge tale it should. Instead it struggles with the inability for revenge to heal, for anything to heal what cannot heal, and where to go to from there, for there to be any after. I like it for not letting itself off the hook with that. It makes the last quarter of the film more muted than some might want, given that we’re used to seeing vengeance narratives all ending in resolved catharsis. But this is a movie about the characters, and its important that the conclusion of the film is on them, not the perpetrators.

A good film, if you are willing to come to it knowing you won’t be spared from the parts of history we don’t speak about.

Q: What do you get if you cross a mentally ill person with a society that abandons them?

A: You get exactly what you fucking deserve.

This is the mission statement of Joker.

Gotta say, when this movie first started, I didn’t think I was gonna like it. The writing is obvious and heavy-handed, to a cringe-worthy degree at times. The directing is likewise, with scenes full of posters or signs with giant letters literally spelling out words relevant to the scene. You can almost hear the director sucking his teeth, and saying, “But do you think the audience’ll get it unless I put in a giant sign saying what the scene’s about?” This film is not subtle or clever.

What it is is bowled over by the shear force of Joaquin Phoenix’s performance. The success of this film is entirely down to him – period. Frances Conroy gives a great performance. Glenn Fleshler also gives a strong contribution in a relatively small role. But the centrepiece of this film is the character Phoenix channels with every ounce of his being. Even fighting over the clunkiness of the script to deliver what the lines should have been, what it really means despite the words.

And it just pulls you along. Despite the script, despite the direction, despite how much the movie seems to be talking at you rather than showing you, Phoenix’s Joker just wins you over. And the sheer rage that radiates out of him like liberation is dazzling.

The ending is an obliterating wave of exultation, conquering all reservations I had about the film. It basks in the ecstatics of the freedom that comes with letting go and losing your mind.

So many scenes were identifiable to anyone who’s dealt with mental health services. Sitting in appointments thinking, now I understand why folk stab nurses. The cure’ll make you crazy.

Joker is a juggernaut of one actor’s embodiment of a character over every obstacle.

The opening shot of this movie stands for the whole. It begins with the director filming her baby daughter in the hospital, playing with her as the baby tries to chew her own feet, when suddenly BANG! and she’s up and carrying the baby out the room, a friend takes her and yells, “Get downstairs!” as the hallway fills with smoke and soot, she grabs at others, helping them, as their feet go downstairs, across rumble, into the wards, where children lie on the floor, wounded and dying, and she loses sight of her friend and cries out, “Where’s Sama?!”, and the light goes out and the machines beep and the doctors have to manually ventilate patients, and in the darkness she cries, “Where’s Sama?!”, and down into the basement, through the crowd of frightened and disoriented people looking for shelter, pushing through them, she cries, “Where’s Sama?!” and then suddenly she sees her, being bounced on her friend’s lap, gurgling, smiling up when she sees her mother, like nothing is wrong.

This film is incredible and everyone should see it as soon as you can. Heartbreaking, inspiring, enraging and hopeful, I gret until it felt like my eyes were burning. Everyone in the audience was crying. It is a film of cracked open raw humanity.

The film takes the form of a letter from the director to her newborn daughter, Sama. She tells Sama, this is the story of you, and why your life is the way it is, and the decisions me and your father made that led to things being this way. The film primarily takes place across the first year of Sama’s life as her father, a doctor, struggles to keep going what becomes the last remaining hospital in east Aleppo, and her mother, a journalist, tries to document the struggle for freedom from the Assad regime.

It does flash back at points to before her birth to tell how her parents met at university, an ordinary story, and took part in the peaceful protests of the Arab Spring. They were so convinced that, like Tunisia and Egypt, with only some pushback from security forces, the huge numbers of their movement would prevail, and the regime would crumble.

In 2016, the view is not so bright, as Aleppo comes under seige. Realisation starts to dawn that they are no longer an uprising against a regime, but just civilians being slaughtered in a pen. They aren’t going to win. And into this Sama is born. And the story becomes one of hope in the darkest of times. Of what we live for. Of what’s worth dying to give our children.

This is a profoundly moving film, that you will never forget. Please go see it when it’s out on general release next week at the GFT.

Really liked it. It has more of an arthouse feel than Hereditary, and its pacing is slower and more soporific. I can understand why some audiences wouldn’t be expecting that, and wanted more action, but I really dug it.

It’s been most frequently compared to the Wicker Man, but I think that’s mostly because it’s the most well known folk horror. I actually found it closer to Get Out, with an outsider coming into a seemingly welcoming community, done with a lot of humour as well as horror. The main character Dani, is twice an outsider, as she arrives with a group who don’t even want her.

This is kind of more a character journey, as Dani eventually lets go of her extremely shitty boyfriend, while the cult horror plays out the traumas of needing to belong, the need to feel wanted, and the lengths people will go to, and sacrifice, to have that.

FYI, this movie is trauma right out the gate, so be prepared early.

I love going to see shit horror movies with my sister. So imagine my disappointment when our plans were thwarted as we discovered that Ma is actually good. And not, good for a shit horror movie good. But actually good. Good for a horror, good for a drama.

Rather than being about teens versus the villain, it is a character study of a woman whose trauma has lived inside her so long, growing, that containing it has warped her. This is very much the last chapter of a long story, in which poison has boiled unseen, until the slightest discomfit sends it spewing in all directions.

And of course, the person you have to thank for that is Octavia Spencer, who is excellent in this. She is able to really hold your sympathy, even as she spins ever deeper into violence. She just plays this with such pain and yearning, you’re rooting for her to pull out of this for her own sake, save herself from being utterly consumed by her demons.

This is not the binary heroes/villains teen horror movie you might think it is. The teens are nice people. Ma was a nice person once. But bad things happen to good people for no reason.

A powerful documentary film about Nadia Murad, a survivor of the Yazidi genocide. It is a film about the performance of trauma, how it is necessary for the media to spread awareness of an issue effectively and to bring the reality of abstract policy to politicians. But also how damaging, and at times surreal, it is for those who have do it, who have to tell their stories over and over again.

The life Nadia has found herself in is one of a strange kind of celebrity. Among the Yazidi diaspora community she is an icon and a hero, bringing their despair to the world’s attention. It is a burden that weighs on her heavily and that she takes very seriously. But the actual practicalities of her day-to-day life doing that involve getting her hair done, picking out outfits, timing her speeches, and posing for photo after photo. She is this strange mix of model and actress, which contrasts starkly with her whole reason for being there, which she is ever conscious of.

The perpetual churn of media interviews and speeches at the UN and speeches at activist events makes you wonder how much longer this woman, barely into adulthood, can keep reliving the worst day of her life. And why she should have to. Why each media channel needs the same story with its own branding on it, why each committee needs the same testimony reiterated to it. But the bite of it is, it is effective. Her oration, her delivery, moves for bipartisan support for Yazidi refugees in the Canadian Parliament and an investigation into the genocide by the UN. But at what cost to her?

The film concludes with Nadia becoming the first UN Goodwill Ambassador for the Dignity of Survivors of Human Trafficking who is themselves a survivor of human trafficking. She wants only the chance to return to her homeland and rebuild her village. But whether her sacrifices, the exposure of her wounds again and again to public scrutiny, will actually reap tangible change for her people is a question that remains unanswered.

Documentary about the American Supreme Court judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg. Very interesting. At 85, she’s doing push-ups and holding planks and writing dissenting opinions on sexist and racist rulings. She does seem like a machine, getting about 2 hours sleep some nights, and not missing a day at work despite suffering from ass and pancreas cancer. She does seem like someone with extraordinary drive – in the 1950s she sat her second year at Harvard Law School, coming top quarter of her class, while simultaneously raising a 2-year-old and caring for her husband who was undergoing cancer radiation therapy, while also organising his mates to take notes for him during lectures, so she could type them up for him to read so he would also graduate alongside her. I mean fuck, that’s impressive.