Category Archives: Melbourne International Film Festival

Jodorowsky’s Dune: the greatest film ever not made?

Posted on September 1, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Original-Dune-posterThere are so many ways to read Jodorowsky’s Dune, the documentary of cult director Alejandro Jodorowsky’s doomed effort make the film version of Frank Herbert’s 1965 science fiction epic, Dune.

It is, by turns, a love letter to seventies science fiction; a study of the clash between Hollywood filmmaking culture and the mores of the European avant garde; and a celebration of unrestrained creativity and artistic determination. I don’t mean to sound trite, but it is a film every creative, whatever they do, should see. The overall effect, for this reviewer at least, was akin to artistic vitamin shot. I walked out thinking, ‘if Jodorowsky was prepared to go to such lengths to realise his vision, hell, I can, too’.

Jodorowsky’s Dune is also wonderful glimpse into one of the greatest films never made, a list that includes Stanley Kubrick’s adaption of the Umberto Eco’s Foucault’s Pendulum, Sergio Leonie’s M, the Rolling Stones’ short-lived attempt to make the little known but excellent 1964 dystopian novel Only Lovers Left Alive, and Terry Gilliam’s take on Don Quixote. But more on this particular aspect of the film later.

You can read the rest of this review here at the Overland Magazine site.… Read more

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Posted in Melbourne International Film Festival, Science fiction and fantasy

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Mud, madness and masculinity: William Friedkin’s Sorcerer

Posted on August 8, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 4 Comments

scheiderPerfect films usually only ever appear so in retrospect. A case in point is Sorcerer, William Friedkin’s 1977 reimagining of the Henri-Georges Clouzot 1953 classic, The Wages of Fear.

The gloriously remastered print of Sorcerer, showing as part of the Melbourne International Film Festivals ‘Masters and Restorations’ program, is an incredible tale of failed masculinity, predatory capitalism and madness.

It was a commercial flop upon release, only recouping nine million of its original twenty one million dollar budget, largely due to appearing at almost the exact same time as the first instalment of Star Wars. Friedkin viewed it as the toughest job of his career. Shooting was littered with accidents and problems, including the film’s riveting central scene, where trucks must cross a rickety rope and timber bridge over a raging river in the middle of a fierce tropical storm. The sequence, due to weather and other reasons, occurred over two countries and took three months to shoot.

Three men, on the run from past mistakes, have ended end up in a run down, impoverished town in an unspecified Latin American banana republic (the real location being the Dominican Republic, which at the time was under an actual military dictatorship).

Jackie (Roy Scheider) was part of a heist on a Catholic Church that ended in a car crash in which all the other members of the gang are killed.… Read more

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Posted in 1970s American crime films, Gene Hackman, Melbourne International Film Festival, Neo Noir, Robert Mitchum, Roy Scheider, William Friedkin

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My 2014 Melbourne International Film Festival top ten

Posted on July 27, 2014 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

sorcerer-truck-on-bridgeThe Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF) kicks off in few days. As usual, there’s a packed program full of cinematic goodness. If you’re wanting to check some films out but are stumped as to what to see, here’s my ten picks.

Sorcerer, 1977

The newly remastered print of Sorcerer, William Freidkin’s 1977 homage to Henri-Georges Clouzot’s 1953 classic, The Wages of Fear, is up there as one of my top MIFF picks for the festival. The story is about a group of four men, each of them on the run from various sins committed in their past life, who are hired to transport a truck load of volatile dynamite across an incredibly hostile stretch of Central American jungle. Freidkin may be better known as the director of The French Connection (1971) and The Exorcist (1973) but this hard boiled slice of pure cinematic noir is, in my opinion, his best film.

Electric Boogaloo: The Wild Untold Story of Cannon Films – 2014

I really enjoyed Mark Hartley’s documentaries, Not Quite Hollywood (2008), about Australia’s Ozsploitation film scene, and Machete Maidens Unleashed (2010), his look at American film making in the Philippines in the seventies and eighties, so expectations are high for this one. Electric Boogaloo is the story of Cannon Films, the Hollywood B-studio responsible for such cinema gems as Lifeforce (1985) and the pre-Rambo, Rambo film, Missing In Action (1984).… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from China, Crime fiction and film from South Korea, Crime film, Melbourne International Film Festival, True crime

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Screen memories & changing cinema culture

Posted on February 10, 2014 by Andrew Nette| 14 Comments

photo-1It wasn’t much to look at from the outside, but I loved the former Greater Union Cinema on Russell Street in Melbourne’s CBD.

The large screens and cavernous interior, the way the floor sloped so no one was directly in front of you, the seventies décor including the burnt orange colouring. Whenever possible, I’d avoid the other city multiplex cinemas and head to Greater Union where I could be assured of getting the place largely to myself.

Which is why its closure last year and looming demolition and replacement with a hotel and apartment complex, while incredibly sad, is no surprise.

Except for during the Melbourne International Film Festival, the Greater Union was nearly always empty. It lacked the passing traffic you got in a shopping complex and looked old and tired, retro but not quite retro enough. It was certainly no Emek, the historic Turkish cinema in Istanbul, which has been the subject of an ongoing local and international campaign ever since plans to demolish it were unveiled in 2012.

As friend and Melbourne film historian Dean Brandum puts it: “I’ll miss Greater Union but what’s amazing is that it held on so long. It used to be hugely popular. When I saw Can’t Stop the Music there in 1980 the queue stretched down Russell Street, into Bourke Street, all the way to Swanston.… Read more

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Posted in Forgotten Melbourne, Melbourne International Film Festival

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“We need gangsters to get things done”

Posted on August 8, 2013 by Andrew Nette| Leave a comment

Act of KillingFrom the first scene, a bizarre musical number involving dancers emerging from the mouth of a giant fish, to the last, an old man being physically sick at the memory of his actions (whether genuinely or not is unclear), The Act of Killing is a riveting, at times, unbelievable piece of documentary film making.

In 1965, the height of the Cold War, a section of the Indonesian military staged an unsuccessful coup. It was very quickly blamed on the influence of the then powerful Indonesian communist party. A massive campaign of killing targeted anyone suspected of being a communist, including trade unionists, farmers, intellectuals and ethnic Chinese, or anyone unlucky enough to be on the wrong side of a score that needed settling.

Up to a million people were murdered. The main assailants were paramilitary death squads. The killing was out of control and chillingly low-tech in its nature. As the film states at the beginning, the men who carried it out “have been in power and have persecuted their opponents ever since.”

US director, Joshua Oppenheimer, asked two of these men from Medan in North Sumatra, to recreate their actions on film. They do it with an enthusiasm that is sometimes hard to watch.

You can read the rest of this review here at the website for Overland Magazine.… Read more

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Posted in Crime fiction and film from Indonesia, Melbourne International Film Festival, True crime

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