Film: We Got Motherfucking CLERKS!

It ended at midnight. It should have ended about an hour earlier, which is why I was getting on a bus to get home, instead of a train, but the trains had stopped running. Waiting for the bus, me and my friend were approached by an odd little man.

"Want a toke?"

He was being charitable with the joint he was smoking outside the Queen Victoria Building, which was nice of him. We said no, but another guy waiting for the bus ended up deciding not to catch it, opting to hang out with his brand new friend. It was appropriate, considering the movie we'd just watched.

Clerks II

It's really sad that this is the first Kevin Smith film I'd seen in a cinema. I first became a fan after Dogma was out on video- I know that's late, but I'm young, I don't think eight-year-old me would have appreciated Clerks when it first came out. For whatever reason I didn't see Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back at the movies, and I skipped Jersey Girl like everybody else. Jersey Girl remains the one Smith film I haven't seen; not that I refuse to see it, I'm just rather lazy.



Clerks II is funny. That's what matters most here. The funny is either broad or film-geek specific (including a showstopping Silence of the Lambs reference), so it worked for me. It's not nearly as dry as Clerks was, but this is a vastly different film to Clerks. It's not a bad thing. The films compliment each other, they just sit apart. Thinking back, I think the best comparison I can make (and this is a really weird comparison, so forgive me) is that Clerks II is to Clerks what Before Sunset is to Before Sunrise. Except with a donkey show.

It's like revisiting old friends, this movie. Smith clearly saw it that way, which had a minor downside. To watch this movie you have to accept that Dante (Brian O'Halloran) and Randal (Jeff Anderson) are not only still clerks, but they're not working a fast food place. The Quick Stop burned down, you see, so they had to movie elsehwere. So they're in their thirties and flipping burgers. These guys, no doubt, I can see in dead-end jobs, but the two of them doing this sort of work requires a rather large suspension of belief. But then, so do many many other films, so, look past it. These guys are still so much fun to watch- especially Randal- that it's worth it. He's still the adorable ball of hate he was in Clerks, only now he has a workmate to torture (rather than his customers) in the form of Elias, played by Trevor Fehrman.

Elias brings my biggest disappointment in the film, in that it's horrible that he's never been in a View Askewniverse film before, and this might be the last one. He's a fantastic new edition, the polar opposite of Randal- a naive Christian with a very positive world view. His obsession with Lord of the Rings brings some geekery, geekery heightened when Marshall from Alias cameos and discusses the trilogy with him.



The other major additions to the cast come in the form of the two women who hold Dante's heart: Rosario Dawson's Becky and Jennifer Shwalbach Smith's Emma. Character-wise, Rosario fares better; Emma is sweet, but extremely controlling, and Becky is a funny, sarcastic firecracker who looks like Rosario Dawson. Rosario Dawson! I know some people don't dig on her, but I do, here especially.

The new cast members are great, as are the returning Jay and Silent Bob, and Randal is better than ever. The weakest link, it's a shame to say, is Dante. O'Halloran is by no means a movie-destroying presence, but his inexperience as an actor combined with the whiny nature of the character of Dante (although we only ever meet Dante when he's having a bad day) does provide a minor flaw in the film.

So, it's a very good film. It has an almost alarming amount of plot compared to its predecessor, and could be accused of over-sentimentality, but it's still definitely worth watching. It's not nearly as groundbreaking as Clerks, nor will it be as remembered. But it was never going to be. So it's best to just sit back and enjoy the ride. And the adorable dance sequence. And the donkey show.

8/10

And then Kevin Smith spoke for two and a half hours. While wearing Silent Bob's green overcoat and shorts. He's a pretty fantastic storyteller, although I would have enjoyed it more were I not checking my watch for the last half hour. I was going to miss my train! And then I did.

On the news front, he said his next film will be a horror movie. He didn't go into details, unfortunately, but he said he wanted to do something completely different. He's also got one coming up called Ranger Danger and the Danger Rangers, which will be a comic book type movie. He also didn't rule out returning to the world of Jay and Silent Bob, with perhaps a Clerks 3 visiting Dante and Randal as forty year olds. Although seeing Jay and Silent Bob as forty year olds would be sort of a downer.

He also said that a lot of plans he makes simply don't come to fruition... so don't hold your breath for any of that above stuff.

He told stories of Jason Mewes, and his struggles with drugs, and his own struggles with Mewes's struggle with drugs, and somehow it was funny at the end. He's all clean now, though, so, happy endings.

The best bit of the session was when a guy from New Jersey took the floor to ask Smith a question.

Jersey Dude: Hey, my old English teacher's claim to fame is that he once dated your sister.

Smith: Your English teacher? What was his name?

JD: He was Mr Jackson*.

Smith: Did you ask him is she did anal?

Yeah. All class. (The * is because I forgot the dude's teacher's name, because how am I to remember that shit? I'm writing this a week later. None of the words are actually verbatim, although Smith's final line is.) And then it turned out that Smith actually dated the teacher's sister. No word on whether she did anal, though.

He went on for hours and I could rack my brains and try to remember other shit, but it's funnier when he said it, so why bother? Seek out the Evening With Kevin Smith DVDs if you want to hear him, though, I've heard good things. Plus he's got a blog somewhere. I can't remember, go google it. Maybe kevinsmith.com. Plus, whack on one of his commentaries. Those are gold, especially when he bags out Ben Affleck.

Last Friday I saw Snakes on a Plane, and today I saw United 93. Both had planes. Both had dangerous situations. And yet... somehow... they were different. I can't quite put my finger on how, though.

Silent Bob Isn't

Tonight I saw Clerks 2 followed by a Q&A with Kevin Smith. These things are normally the same price as any movie ticket, but this was $35, because the talk afterwards was to go for ninety minutes.

Then it went for two and a half hours. Man, that was a marathon. I'm tired, and start uni early, and so the report on this should be up in a day or two, hopefully.

The movie, I really, really liked. Although perhaps a Kevin Smith fan watching a Kevin Smith film with about one thousand other Kevin Smith Fans (it was a really big theatre) isn't the best way to objectively view a movie. Oh well. I had maybe the most fun I've had at the cinema this year.

Film: Maybe I'll Just Sit Here and Bleed At You

I'm drowning in a sea of bad television here, and I don't know that I can take it. Two televisions where I am have Pay TV- something I don't usually have access to- and The Daily Show starts in mere minutes.

One TV currently has CSI. The other? Law and Order. A fun fact: crime shows are shit. Call this a matter of opinion, I call it fact. We are in the days where TV drama is adapting and advancing. Showrunners nowadays, if they so choose, pretty much have the power to basically have their own neverending movie. Story arcs have more time to play out than in movies, and twisting a story, making a huge revelation, can have a devastating effect, in a really good way. They can take their characters where they want to, giving them arcs that last years, creating their own world and if they're talented enough this world is unforgettable for viewers.

Or they can carbon copy the same story week after week, with minor variations, with character development limited to Grissom going from clean-shaven to bearded. I give you: CSI, CSI Miami, CSI New York, Law and Order, Law and Order Special Victims Unit, Law and Order Criminal Intent, Cold Case, on and on and on forever. People have the opportunity to watch the exact same story, ten times every week. What joy.

At least I watched a fantastic movie today. And now I gush horrendously.

Brick

If you're on the internet and reading a movie site, you've heard of Brick. This is the opposite of if you're a member of the Australian public, because nobody anywhere is advertising this gem. And it is a gem.



Joseph Gordon-Levitt would have a career best performance here had he not starred in Mysterious Skin. He plays Brendan, a high school outcast- although it seems he was the one who cast himself out. He investigates the disappearance of Emily (Emilie de Ravin), his former girlfriend, while inhabiting a universe where people talk like they're from a 1940s detective film, and making me wish in my high school people talked like they're from a 1940s detective film, because it's really cool. This teen neo-noir makes Veronica Mars look about as noir as a Wiggles concert. (Not that Veronica Mars isn't still completely fantastic.)

The plot of the film can be hard to follow. It's not as hard to follow as the plot of the film I last reviewed- Miami Vice- but even if it was, you care here. You want to know what's going on, who's playing who. This is down to not only the formerly mentioned (really fucking cool) dialogue, but also how enormously entertaining the characters are to watch. Lukas Haas plays the villain The Pin as both low key and threatening, while Nora Zehetner is the femme fetale of the piece: the seductive, dangerous (and hot) Laura.

So, the writing's great. The acting is strong. The direction matches in quality. Not only is it an extremely assured and confident turn for the first time writer/director Rian Johnson- and with difficult material- but it looks great. This is thanks to the photography as well, but the fact that this cost just half a million dollars does not show at all.

I'd been looking forward to this film for longer than I can remember. As the fantastic buzz trickled through the one thing I didn't hear much about (and this only comes as a shock to me after seeing the movie) was the music. Nathan Johnson and the Cinematic Underground- a band I hadn't head of before Brick- have put together a fantastic score. The CD Soundtrack cover tells me they used kitchen utensils and broken pianos, and, against all odds, it's beautiful. The characters Brendan encounters have their own themes, and as the film progresses, the themes vary. It helps the story but on top of this it's just great music, especially Laura's theme.



The reason everything comes together so well is the fact that it's all played straight. This could have just looked completely stupid- the thought of teenagers spouting hard-boiled words like this brings to mind an amatuer high school adapation of Kiss Me Deadly or something, but from the first moments the dialogue feels somehow natural.

This isn't our universe these kids are inhabiting; it's not supposed to be. It's a romanticised version of teen angst; everything is as big as it felt back then. And it's fantastic. And finally, the closing line is a killer.

10/10

For the sake of truth in journalism (not that this is journalism), I wrote the first half of this entry two days ago, with the review just finished tonight. So the review was not written on the night of crime show doom. Rather, it was written the night David Tench Tonight crashed and burned. Andrew Denton, hang your head. Or just blame network interference. And whose idea was it to open the show with Pat Rafter being interviewed? Nice guy, sure, but boring! I wouldn't have wanted to watch a legitimately funny interviewer handle him, certainly not for half an hour. Really, was this ever going to work?

I edit for correction: apparently there were two guests tonight, the other being Ella Hooper, of the band Killing Heidi, if they still exist. So that's slightly less ludicrous than a half hour interview of one (uninteresting) guest. Still: must be funnier, Mr Tench.

Also, I ended up getting to watch not only The Daily Show, but also Kenny vs. Spenny, the greatest Canadian show ever, so that rant is also sort of a lie. I wrote it before I got to watch these things, though. And not that I've seen another Canadian show to compare Kenny vs. Spenny to, but I doubt they'd compare. But, the stuff about that genre of drama being shit still stands, and always will, forever and ever.

TV: Bryan Brown, You're On Notice

Tonight, almost a year late, premieres Two Twisted (Channel 9, 9:35), producer Bryan Brown's follow up to Twisted Tales, an Australian Twilight Zone-esque anthology series from the mid nineties.

It's a year late, so let's go back eighteen months, to when it was then only supposed months away. Brown put forth a call for scripts for the series from anyone willing to write one. There were rules, mostly for budgetary and time limitations. The script had to be no longer than twenty-two pages, could only feature two major characters (although other minor characters were allowed), only three locations, and a minimum of nighttime exterior scenes. On top of this, every script was required to have a twist. The scripts were due in May 2005, with the show slated to air late in the year. Obviously, this didn't happen.

So, I wrote on and while waiting for the rejection letter (which ultimately came in the form of the script being mailed back and its name not appearing on the list posted on the show's website), Twisted Tales was re-aired.



I remembered really liking the show. It originally aired in a time when I was, I shamefully admit, big into the writings of RL Stine, so it appealled. Hey, remember that Fear Street where there were wicked and sinister goings on around Fear Street? That was great.

Years after RL's influence had worn away, I'm watching the original Twisted Tales, week after week. With both the old and current series, two air at a time, but in its repeat form, four are put back to back. And they're awful. Almost stunningly so.

Maybe it's a case of the stories aging really badly. Maybe it was always bad, and it's just one of those things that everyone has, where you remember loving something, only to revisit it years later to find out how bad it really is. Maybe it was the stories. There was one where this robot, played by Kimberly Davies (from Psycho Beach Party!), went around killing people, and I think the twist was that she was a robot, despite it being obvious from the start. In another, possibly the worst of the lot, a man is jealous of his ex wife's new life, and in the end, dances with air, or a blow-up doll, or a something else I forget. I don't know, it was really stupid. And then I got rejected.

Not that I'm bitter.

I shall be watching eagerly tonight. Television drama has become a lot more cinematic, even since the mid nineties. Australian TV drama has... given us McLeod's Daughters and... more Home and Away and Neighbours... but also some stuff that's not complete worthless shit, like Love My Way on Foxtel. Let's hope Two Twisted falls into the latter camp, quality-wise. Tonight, Melissa George stars. Uh oh.

The main thing I'm watching for is the quality of the scripts themselves. If there is a single story that ends in "and it turns out he was DEAD ALL ALONG" I will throw a brick through the TV screen. If a single story ends with "and it turns out his OTHER PERSONALITY DID IT. Because he had MORE THAN ONE OF THOSE", I will through a brick through the TV, and then I'll deliberately breathe in all the tiny shards of the shattered cathode ray tube, which will shred my lungs, killing me painfully.

Not that I'm bitter.

Meanwhile, on Wednesday (ABC, 9pm), we finally get Ricky Gervais and Stephen Merchant's spectacularly good Extras. It's maybe as good as The Office. Maybe. Kate Winslet's episode, which will air in a week or two, is maybe the best episode of TV ever. Maybe. Winslet's final few moments of the episode are some of the finest minutes I've ever witnessed on a screen. Possibly.



It's pretty hot.

Watch it, or better yet, buy the fucker. Import it from England, or wait until Thursday, when it's available here, or if you're not here or in England, choose where you want to import it from, and then do so. But keep in mind that our DVDs are marked by huge glaring ratings symbols, like this:



Although if you're buying NCIS, you've got bigger issues to contend with than ugly ratings symbols.

Because it's shite.

In conclusion, Ricky Gervais, Stephen Merchant and Kate Winslet are all better than you.

Miami Vice

I went into this one as neutral as I get before entering a cinema. I had no idea what the series of Miami Vice was all about, beyond cops who wore white suits, or something. I'm over this remake of seventies things, but was allowing to ignore that here because of the involvement of Michael Mann, who executive produced (produced executively?) the original series, making it more than just a quick lazy cash in. And while I do like Michael Mann, I don't regard him as highly as a lot of people seem to. Keep this quiet, too, but I think Heat was overrated. So, it was not a complete clean slate I went in with, but the positives and the negatives in my mind mostly balanced each other.

Miami Vice

Miami Vice presents us with these two cops, one of whom is played by Jamie Foxx, and the other by Colin Farrell. They're undercover, but don't do accents or wigs or fake beards or anything like that, at least not while we're watching. They do things. There's drugs involved, mostly, that's what they're trying to stop, and there are guns too, and money, and sex, and white supremacists. I really don't know, though, because I stopped following the whole affair.



There is nothing inherently wrong with Miami Vice. Acting isn't stunning, but it's not awful, so it does the job. There are a couple of pretty funny one-liners, but they don't undercut what is an almost overly serious film. Similar films have felt like the plot is there just to take us from one action sequence to another, but I didn't get that impression here. It was advertised as an action movie, which it isn't, but a few sequences, particularly the one at the trailer park, were suspensful enough.

Miami Vice was shot on HD, making it feel very realistic. This is one of the least slick hugely budgeted films I've seen, and that's the point. There's no running away from explosions in slow motion. For a while it seemed like it would, in fact, be explosion-free. And while it's gritty, that's not to say it's without gorgeous moments. There are some stunning visuals, the one that stood out most being a huge waterfall that cascades beside the main bad guy's villa.

This sums up the main problem of the film, though. Firstly, the fact that my favourite thing about the film was a few of the beautiful locations (and some Naomie Harris side-on nudity), and secondly, the fact that I just called the main bad guy "the main bad guy". I cannot remember a single character's name, not even the leads. I do remember the main woman was played by Gong Li, because her first name is Gong, and that amuses me. The plot was rather obscenely difficult to follow, but the fact that I didn't care about the fates of any of the characters, or what they were fighting for, made me just give up on attempting to figure out what was going on.

So, I cannot say that writer/director Michael Mann dropped the ball. Maybe the film just wasn't a fit with me, which is not something I can exactly fault it for. A second viewing would probably clear up a lot of the plot issues, and perhaps a clearer plot makes for an increased interest in the characters within it. But, really, I could not be bothered.

5/10

The next movie I see will probably be Brick. I saw it at the Sydney International Film Festival, and loved it there, and am very much looking forward to loving it again.

TV: The Wedge needs to follow Yasmine out

In perhaps the worst news in the history of Australian history, The Wedge has been renewed for a second series. If you consider that to be good news, stop reading, because I hate you. If you have no idea what The Wedge is, you’re not Australian, so I envy you. Now, accuse me of hyperbole here, but I do think this show is possible one of the worst every screened in this country. And we even get According to Jim down here. We have a show hosted by someone named Hotdogs.

It’s a sketch show. It’s called The Wedge because the skits are about recurring characters of a fiction suburb called Wedgedale. It’s supposed to allude to wedgies, I guess, which is would be cutting edge if conceived by a first grader.

I caught five minutes of it- all I could handle- tonight. We’re at a spelling be. An adult dressed as a child walks to an oversized microphone. A disembodied voice says the word is ventriloquist. The child character then spells the word without opening his mouth.

No, it’s not funnier when you see it.

No, that’s not as awful as it gets.

We have these two bogan (that’s Australian for hick) women who sit at pokies and… make various noises, this sportsman who creates scandals while his lawyer tries to explain them away at press conferences (with hilarious results!!!), and this fat British girl. There are others too, I guess, but I try to scrub my mind clean of them.

There was a glut of these sketch shows here a few years ago, and these tended to rely on punchlines. Sketch after sketch remained joke free until the very end, when BAM! It hit… and then usually wasn’t very funny. Not offensively bad, just not all that funny, which is something any comedy usually needs. I’ve watched an episode or two of How I Met Your Mother and that’s minorly watchable without being funny, but that’s a unique case, and it might just be the lingering effects of the thing I had for Alyson Hannigan in Buffy. Red-haired and quirky is hot.

So The Wedge seems to be a response to these shows, being catchphrase and repetition based. The pokies woman seem to say “lucky” a lot; a sportsman always gets words wrong, making his lawyer’s words of defence meaningless. Over and over and over. Oh, they say “lucky” in a high pitched voice, if that increases the humorousness of the situation. (It doesn’t.) Sameness is a substitute for humour.

Plus, it’s mean. I like my humour as dark as it can get, but only when it’s clever, or there’s at least there’s a love or sympathy for the characters or situations. The Wedge wants to be Little Britain, but as awful a character Vicky Pollard may be, Matt Lucas, who plays her, loves her, as should the audience, unless they’re humourless prudes. The Wedge is the televisual equivalent of Nelson Muntz pointing at someone stupid or poor or fat and saying “ha ha!”

Network Ten is the channel responsible for renewing this abortion of comedy, but they’re also the ones who have just cancelled a reality show of similar quality- Yasmine’s Getting Bukkak- sorry, Yasmine’s Getting Married. This mercy killing happened after just four episodes- less than a week- after the premiere. Yasmine is your average girl in her late twenties: bubbly, career-minded, willing to find a man to marry in the space of nine weeks so the search and ceremony can be aired in an act that’s about an inch away from prostitution.

Or, that’s what she would have done, had the show lasted more than a week. Ten is still willing to pay for the ceremony, though, should it eventuate.

Now, I may get things wrong here, having only watched about twenty minutes of the show in total from a couple of episodes. But I’m not getting payed to write this thing, and I don’t have a strong gag reflex. The show was aired live, with a panel consisting of a regular hostess and three or so different famewhores per evening, who would dissect the things they saw. The things they saw involved Yasmine- who didn’t appear to ever pop up on the panel- whether she be organising the nuptials or going on dates. Now, these dates were decided by the viewers. People voted on who the Yasmeister would see judging by snippets of about fifteen seconds in length, with guys trying to be witty (in a Perfect Match sort of way) on why Yasmine should marry them. So you vote and Yasmine dates and decides for herself if it should go any further.

One thing never addressed was how Yasmine could get to know these guys, really get to know them, on the dates with a huge camera in her face and a boom mic above her head. Or maybe they had radio mics, I don’t know. There was likely a director and lighting crew just offscreen, as well. And this is supposed to be Yasmine deciding who she’ll be with forever!

There was also something intensely creepy about the way the panel dissected Yasmine’s every move. If I were Yasmine- and thank fuck I’m not, because can you imagine the humiliation?- and I saw these people watching me like this and talking like they know me, I’d be intensely creeped out. But then, she signed up for it.

And now it’s gone. It was on nightly but is now replaced by Futurama, which would be awesome if I didn’t have the DVDs already, but an episode of that cartoon I’d seen one thousand times before is still an improvement on Yasmine’s little debacle. The best part of the situation is how, now, it's like Yasmine never existed. "Who's Yasmine? Futurama's on in the 7pm timeslot, silly!" It's so unceremonious, especially after the extreme hype generated for the show. Months ago, the ads began, and now, no mention. It's all very Big Brother. The 1984 'character', I mean, not the show. Nicely done, Ten. Now you’ve just got the world’s worst sketch show to queef out, and the world will be right again.

Sorry, Yas.

Thank You For Smoking

A flip of a coin had decided that I not attend a Q&A of Thank You For Smoking, but a second session the night after allowed me to eat my cake and have it too. I'd also heard that sitting in the session for the first night- the one I wasn't at- was Richard Wilkins, currently battling it out with Angela Bishop as Australia's most irritating TV personality. And we have a lot of reality TV contestants still vying for fame, so that's a pretty impressive achievement.

Thank You For Smoking



Satire should be two things: funny and smart. Thank You For Smoking is both these things, but it's not the best film of the year.

Aaron Eckhart plays Nick Naylor, tobacco lobbyist. He'd be completely hated if he weren't such a good talker. He runs rings around those we should like, those trying to take down the industry, while flat out lying about the deaths it causes. His closest- only, in fact- friends are the other Merchants of Death: Mario Bello as an alcoholic alcohol lobbyist and David Koechner as thegun mad lobbyist for everyone's right to bear arms.

In one scene the "MoD Squad" fight over whose industry in fact causes the most death- Nick proudly accepts his victory. And yet, we like them. William H. Macy plays Nick's most vocal opponent, Senator Ortalon K. Finistirre, and he's likable too, if only because he's William H. Macy... but we still sort of want Nick to win.

At one stage Nick makes a trip to Hollywood from Washington DC, with his son, played by Cameron Bright, who isn't scary in this. This relationship, by the way, becomes the emotional anchor in the film. He makes this trip to visit super-agent Rob Lowe, to try and make smoking in the movies sexy again. For a while here it looks like this will be the film's main plot, until it sort of fades away. And this is the biggest problem of the film- we have good characters, we have the funny, but we never really get a huge driving plot. It's based on a book by Christopher Buckley, and the fact that it's from a novel really show. This sort of loose plotting works in book form; less so on film.

The whole time watching this movie there was a speck on the screen. It was dust on the lens of the projector, probably, and it kept distracting me, and maybe a more engaging plot would have helped me to ignore this speck, but my eyes just kept moving back to it.

And that sounds like a really harsh judgement, a judgement reserved for a much less enjoyable film. I did have a lot of fun here. It's nicely dark, although it could have been a lot darker, and I barely scratched the surface of how good the cast was. There's also Katie Holmes, but try to look beyond that. Besides, this is pre-crazy, and she gets to say "fuck" a bunch, even if she is too young for a role of an unscrupulous hard-hitting reporter.

So there's a lot of fun to be had here. It could have been tighter, but there are a lot of laughs. Plus, it really made me want to read the book.

8/10

The Q&A began with two short films from the director Jason (Ivan Jr) Reitman, the first of which had the worst boom work ever. Seriously, the microphone was halfway down the fame sometimes, and this was not just some MiniDV thing shot by a bunch of teenagers who'd seen too much Jackass and decided to skateboard naked and blindfolded down a hill into a creek, it was professional and on film and expensive! It was very distracting.

Reitman was funny, as a comedy director probably should be, riffing with the audience well. He mentioned how closely he did stick to the book- he wrote the script too- the only part added being Nick's relationship with his son- this was considerably less present in the book. He'd wanted to adapt the story since the nineties, and finally got the opportunity after the short film of boom got him the attention he needed around Hollywood.

He found his cast to be a dream to work with- William H. Macy apparently gets it right on the first take, every time. Reitman found himself doing second takes with him just because they had the film. He didn't mention the Katie Holmes crazy, but I think this was before the whole Cruise thing.

There's a shot in the film of Aaron Eckhart lying semi naked in the lap of the Lincoln Monument. That's perhaps one of the funniest shots in the film, and I've just ruined it for you. You can thank me later. They are first wanted to have, instead, Eckhart floating unconcious in the pool in front of the Washington Monument, but weren't allowed to get this. When the Lincoln Monument moment was concieved, they found out they weren't allowed to film that, either. Reitman instead took a shot on his digital camera, and Eckhart was blue screened onto that, later. So a shot in the finished film is taken directly front a normal digital camera. I liked that story.

Reitman's next film sounds like it'll be decent. It's called Juno, and it's about a young pregnant girl and her relationship with the people she plans to adopt the baby out to. This sounds like the plot of a painfully saccharine Hallmark Channel film, or one of the subplots in the final season of Friends- you know, that season that aired about five years after that show was still worth watching- but he's describing it as a pretty dark comedy. Sounds a lot better now.

Next time I'm going to doing a special TV edition. Except without the "special" part. The second worst show on Australian TV has been cancelled... while the worst show on Australian TV has been renewed for another season. Stay tuned.

2:37

The decision was nearly impossible. Last Monday night in Sydney, there were two question and answer sessions: films being screened followed by a chat between the audience and the director. Both these films were ones I had been waiting on for some time; the Australian high school drama 2:37 and the US satire Thank You For Smoking.

2:37 was written and directed by Murali K. Thalluri. Thalluri is twenty one. He was even younger when he made this movie. Until this month it had been nigh on impossible to find information about the guy and how he managed such a task. Thank You For Smoking was also directed by a first-timer: Ivan Reitman's son Jason. While it's also being hailed as an impressive debut, there's no way it could have as interesting a backstory as 2:37- I wonder how Jason managed to get the funding?!?

But 2:37 is Australian, and while Australian films have been improving of late (last year was fantastic, this year might be just as good) it's still a risky bet, especially from a filmmaker with so little experience. Thank You For Smoking is getting a lot of good reviews and seemed to be just my kind of dark comedy.

So a coin decided for me. 2:37 it was. It was arranged. And the next morning, I found out that there was a second Q&A screening of Thank You For Smoking on the Tuesday night- review to come later. Thank you, trusty coin flip!

2:37



Giving too much away here would be criminal, so I'll only tell the first few minutes. At the start of the film, we have the discovery of a body in a high school. We don't see the body, just the blood, but we understand that someone has taken their own life. We then go back to the beginning of the day, where we are introduced to six students at the school. If you were in the shoes of any of these kids, you might consider taking your own life too.

2:37 is being compared to Gus Van Sant's Elephant. Both feature long following shots, with time constantly overlapping with multiple points of view, and both end in tragedy. Elephant shows kids meandering through the day, bored and disconnected. 2:37, however, isn't light on plot like Elephant- not that this is an attack on Elephant, which I quite enjoyed. The kids here are all at the peaks of occasionally unimaginable crises. We are presented with pretty huge plot twists over the course of the film, although these relevations that aren't quite as unpredictable as they could have been, being minorly foreshadowed early in the film. The two biggest turns in the film I had predicted to some degree, although the friend I saw the film with didn't.

The narrative is interspersed with black and white interview footage of the six students. A lot of the exposition is handled in the scenes, which could be seen as something of a cop-out, but fortunately it doesn't interrupt the flow of the film and allows for some characters to reveal parts of themselves that wouldn't be seen otherwise, with the film having such a limited timespan.

Quality of the acting varies. Melody, played by Teresa Palmer, probably fares the best here. She resembles Abbie Cornish and is perhaps just as fantastic an actress. Charles Baird, as "Uneven" Steven, is also great, and will break your heart. The weakest actor is Frank Sweet, son of Australian TV star Gary, who himself appears briefly as a teacher. Sweet the Younger, however, has the most difficult character to work with. Marcus is a slightly awkward, extremely academically focused boy, pressured by his father (unlike his sister Melody, who is ignored) but there's more to his character than this, making it a very difficult role to play. I'll also make special mention of Clementine Miller as Kelly, a character with relatively little screen time, who judging by her performance here deserves to have big things coming her way. All of the actors were inexperienced when they filmed, so even the weaker performances can't be faulted too heavily.

And now for a complaint I never thought I'd make for a film: 2:37 has too much swearing. Or perhaps it's not that there's too much of it, it just often seems randomly placed in the film, f-bombs interrupting the flow of the dialogue far too often. Now, I love a good swear, I really do. But all the characters here overuse it, and this is probably where Thalluri shows his age. The dialogue all over is the weakest part of the film.

That said, this is a stunning debut. The story is brave, the camera moves through the school like a dream, and the whole film, although few experiences would be nearly as melodramatic, really does bring right back what it was like to be at school and to feel completely alone. The film is flawed, without doubt, and perhaps from another filmmaker these flaws would be less exusable, but with the film's background taken into consideration, and the passion for the project that is so so clear when watching the film, I have to give this high marks.

9/10

This is one of the times I'm happy with the Australian film industry's shitty marketing practices. The official site of 2:37 is here, and it contains cast and crew information, a tiny image gallery, and the trailer.

Do not watch the trailer.

I've not seen the trailer play before anything. The film's R18+ rating (an equivilant to NC17) would be a limitation, but even so, before it was slapped with this rating they could have played it before Cars if they wanted to. While this trailer doesn't appear to give too much away, but it gives big hints. You'll be watching for certain moments, and it is likely to make you realise things that are revealed towards the end before the halfway point. It's well cut, but also paints 2:37 as a much faster paced movie.

(On a side note, at least it's a much better trailer than the one for the upcoming Brisbane-set 48 Shades, which is apparently based on a book called 48 Shades of Brown. This trailer is indeed a lot of shades of brown, from the voice over that feels like it belongs over a movie from the early eighties or earlier to the fact that it contains an arse shot of that annoying guy from the Greater Union ads. I think beneath it lurks a film that might be decent (not great, but decent) but people who judge what they'll see based on trailers alone will give this one a miss. And I've seen it screened twice in front of movies. Including Over the Hedge for some reason. Oh yeah, and www.48shades.com is a porn site, as I've just discovered. I don't know why it's called that.)

The final credit in the film tells us that the film was not at all government funded. Most Australian films get at least some money from the government, so there's a reason this was pointed out to us, and it was something addressed in the Q&A. Thalluri applied for a grant, but being so young and so inexperienced, he was understandable (even he admits this) turned down. So, in order to make the film, he basically doorknocked the richest people in Adelaide (his hometown, and the Creepy Murder Capital of Australia) and asked for cash.

What really came through in the Q&A was just how determined Thalluri is. He was a really energetic speaker, and funny, but also willing to tell extremely personal stories about his life. You can read all about his life on the website, and all of this stuff he talked about, really candidly, in front of an audience of a couple of hundred people.

He talked about the casting process- rather than have intimidating auditions, that would weed out good performers who may just be too nervous for this, he enrolled in acting classes and found his actors that way. Another thing he mentioned was how he wanted the film to be set anywhere. We're not presented with a typical view of Australiana, so the only thing that really gives away where we are is the accents- watch the film without sound and it could be a school anywhere in the world. A question I didn't think of until after was why Thullari has given us the whitest school in Australia. Even the extras are caucasian. I've never been to Adelaide- maybe that's a less multicultural place than Sydney- or perhaps because the school appears to be fairly affluent it's a comment on that, I'm not sure.

As mentioned earlier, the film is rated R18+, the highest rating a film can get in Australia without being porn. Thullari mentioned the rating being a shock to him, but I'm going to be controversial and say the film deserved the rating. The suicide scene itself is very graphic, but beyond the suicide scene, there are themes and scenes that would be perfectly at home in a Todd Solodnz film. Watching 2:37 is, at times, a difficult task. If it didn't get an R rating, it would have got MA15+, meaning anyone could watch it if with parents.

But more than anything, Thullari said he wants the film to save lives, meaning the most important audience is teenagers. And teenagers really should see this film. I do believe it could save lives. Thullari said he'd willingly create an edited version of the film, one suitible for a lower rating, although I can imagine this to be a very hard thing to do. So, beyond an overhaul of our ratings system, I'd suggest everyone under eighteen, get a fake ID. Or find a cinema that isn't particularly strict on ratings laws. Wait to DVD and rent it out- kids who work at video stores don't care about ratings. This film should be seen.

Just this morning, as I'm editing this, I've seen newspaper ads for the film, which doesn't open for almost two weeks. It's getting advertising, at last. It could be a successful movie. Or its target audience could just go see Click again. Let's hope its the former.

Bandwagons Are Fun

Maybe I'll become addicted to this thing. Perhaps I'll forget it altogether. All I know is that the internet, and specifically, Web 2.0 (according to the mega useful communications degree I'm doing) allows for anyone and everyone to create their own little world on the web despite how uninteresting that little world might be.

So here we are.

I'm a Sydney university student (but not a University of Sydney student) who wants to get into film who watches films and loves film. Also, TV is neat too, when it wants to be. So that's what this will be about. I'm going to the Toronto Film Festival in a month's time (just don't tell my uni that) and decided that I should keep some sort of log of things seen, and figured, hey, why not copy my friend Glenn and do a whole blog devoted to everything I watch?

And that's the story. Coming soon: reports from the two Q&A screenings I attended this week- 2:37 and Thank You For Smoking.