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Reviews
Dartworth (2011)
Oh, I wanted to like this film, but...
The concept behind this film sounds quite interesting: a maverick student joins an exclusive private school and upsets its tradition-bound power structures. It could have been quite good, in an If sort of fashion. But somewhere it all just went a bit wrong.
Ian McFadyen is excellent as the tyrannical teacher nicknamed "The Spider". The film lights up whenever he's on screen, alternately taunting and teasing his students. Liam Nunan gives good value as the misfit catalyst for change, Julian Mitchell. The rest of the cast is a bit variable, but mostly provides adequate support.
Unfortunately the storyline goes off in some odd directions which aren't really believable, and like many an Australian film it doesn't end properly. The editing is a bit lumpy, with odd fades to black here and there (presumably to facilitate a TV screening with ad breaks). The film is obviously shot on the cheap, and it shows in the occasional poor grading of shots. More obviously, one never gets a sense that there's much of a school behind the one senior year the film focuses on, due to a lack of other students and teachers.
Worth seeing once, if only for McFadyen's performance. But I think the director and screenwriter owe us a few R&Rs.
The Elegant Gentleman's Guide to Knife Fighting (2013)
No.
Really just not good enough. Certainly not good enough for prime time on ABC1. It would barely pass muster tucked away late at night on ABC2.
The fundamental problem here is that almost every sketch is based on a "Wouldn't be funny if..." premise, and then goes on to illustrate that premise in a deadly unfunny manner with as few jokes as possible in order to beat any possible humour out of the concept. The gag twists are always painfully obvious and can be seen coming a mile off. It's acted and directed like a series of faux-dramatic vignettes, allowing for little comedy to arise from the presentation of the material.
This series been promoted as containing dark, edgy humour. The writers seem to think that shoehorning the occasional reference to AIDS or cancer makes it so, but there's precious little genuinely dark comedy on display. One promising sketch in episode two, set on an aircraft with two annoying kids, had the potential to go much further and much darker, which would have given the punchline more power, but the creative team pulled their punches instead.
Ultimately this is a joyless, jokeless wasteland. I thought the ABC had reached the nadir of sketch comedy with the ill-fated Flipside, but The Elegant Gentleman's etc has plumbed a new low.
Next time, ABC, before you commission a sketch comedy show, get the writers to sit down and watch some of the successful comedies of the last 50 years to see how it should be done.
The Chaser (1928)
Well, the first four reels are good...
It seems very de rigueur to hate "The Chaser", so I went into this with expectations suitably lowered. Plus, while I loved Langdon's "The Strong Man", "Tramp Tramp Tramp" had suffered from long stretches of not being funny at all, so my trepidation towards Langdon features was quite high. Nevertheless, "The Chaser" sounded so fascinating from other reviews that I had a morbid curiosity to see it.
Perhaps I have a twisted sense of humour, but I thought the first two-thirds of the film were great. There are some fabulous routines here: the sequence at the start with the phone, the section where Harry can't get away from the business end of his wife's revolver, and the charming routine where a nonplussed Harry tries to get his chicken to lay an egg for his wife's breakfast.
I found the bits where the tradesmen keep mistaking the obviously-not-female Harry for a housewife very funny, which built into a traditional 1-2-3 comedic structure with classic twist payoff. The suicide scene is acted brilliantly by Langdon, as Harry alternates between his determination to do away with himself and his fear of pain and death. The legendary shot of Harry lying on the floor waiting to die didn't seem too long at all - in fact, given that Langdon's most famous routines are praised precisely because of his lack of action, it seems odd to criticize this gag for exactly the same thing. On the other hand, I will agree that the crying wife bit goes on for too long, and it's not helped by the obvious jump-cut in the middle of it.
It's shortly after that point that the film goes horribly wrong. Having spent four reels being a mildly sophisticated black comedy, the film takes a dog-leg left turn and becomes a hokey bit of slapstick set on a golf course. There doesn't seem to be much here that's relevant to the original premise of the film; or indeed particularly funny. It also shares the same cliffhanger cheat with "Tramp Tramp Tramp" whereby a sheer cliff suddenly turns into a lengthy incline once Harry goes over the edge. Boo hiss!
One wonders what caused this huge deviation from the main thrust of the film. It scarcely seems credible that it was scripted this way. In fact, it would only take one or two changed shots to join the end of reel 4 (where Harry is kissed by the milkman) onto the "happy" ending starting from where Harry is inundated with flour. Perhaps the final two reels were added after a preview to try and add a more traditional slapstick finale to an unconventional film. Maybe Landgon and his team ran out of inspiration on the set, didn't get as much footage from the original scenario as they expected, and had to pad the film out to length.
Up until the golf course shenanigans, I was thinking that this could well be my favourite of the Langdon features. It's badly let down by the last 20 minutes, but the rest of the film is well worth seeing. "The Chaser" may well have been massively out of step with the public's taste in 1928, but for my money the main storyline of the film holds up well, and I only wish that Langdon and co had had the courage of their conviction to stay on-plot though the entire film.
It's definitely a film that deserves a major re-evaluation. I urge you to take a look at the film (especialy now it's out on DVD in a mostly nice crisp print) and judge for yourself. Who knows - like me, you might even get a laugh out of it!
Genevieve (1953)
Pure class
This is one of those films I can just watch time and time again, as indeed we did this evening. It must be 25 years since I first saw Genevieve as an kid; I daren't guess how many times I've seen it since. But every time it still works its magic.
It's a comedy, but a gentle one - there's a few real belly laughs to be had, but mostly I'm left with a beatific smile of pure pleasure throughout. The one exception is the scene where dear old Arthur Wontner stops the McKims to admire Genevieve at a crucial point in proceedings; that scene has me welling up with tears every time.
The script from William Rose is perfectly judged and paced, and there's enough detail in there to reward multiple viewings. It's quite risqué for 1953, but done in a splendidly subtle way that can only be described as a forgotten art. And as usual, I shall be whistling Larry Adler's magnificent score for days after viewing.
I laughed, I cried, I loved the old cars. What more could you ask from a movie? Quite possibly the closest thing to perfection you're likely to see in a movie - and it didn't need special CGI effects and a cast of thousands, just four extremely talented actors, a few old cars and the glorious post-war English countryside.
11 out of 10. No, 12! 13!
Blunder (2006)
Awesomely bad
The most aptly named show on the box. Just when you thought catchphrase comedy couldn't get any worse, along comes this garbage. It makes Little Britain look like Cook & Moore.
David Mitchell is clearly slumming it here; he's capable of far far better, as seen in the recent That Mitchell And Webb Look. Some might claim that he's the show's sole redeeming feature, but to be honest most of his characters are as weak as the rest of this mire. The Nigel Livid sketches, though, featuring a character marching into C4 to berate them about their dire programming, achieve a kind of brilliant irony.
It's inconceivable that anyone involved in this production can be looking at the end result and thinking "Yes, we've really done some first-class work here". It seems to be a soullessly constructed replica of a sketch show, made without any understanding of how the content is actually supposed to work.
Tom Meehan should be very concerned that his knackers are getting better laughs than his material. Still, at least the show has that reliable comedy standard, pædophiles, to fall back on...
Movie Crazy (1932)
Sad to say, disappointing
I've been working my way through the wonderful DVD box set of Harold Lloyd, and I have to say that his silents are superb and I love them to bits. Until the advent of DVD, the only sound Lloyd I'd seen was 'The Milky Way', which was surprisingly enjoyable. So I figured that Lloyd had made the silent-to-sound transition reasonably well, and was eager to see more of the sound features.
Alas, 'Movie Crazy' is a particular disappointment, probably because it's been hyped as Lloyd's best sound film. Lloyd seems to fall into the same trap that Buster Keaton succumbed to - the lead character has become a dimwit. One of the greatest joys of the Lloyd silents is seeing his character think up some nimble bit of wit to get out of a jam - think hitching an ambulance ride to work in 'Safety Last' or rounding up a gang of crooks to come to prayers in 'For Heaven's Sake' - but this Harold, this audible Harold, is an unrelenting klutz. It's hardly plausible that he couldn't distinguish between Mary in her civilian clothes and in make-up on set; the kid must need glasses... oh.
Maybe it's because the character is moving at the speed of sound, rather than having the slightly fantastic under-cranked zip of silence; maybe it's because this Harold is a stuttering, stumbling, unsure boob rather than the confident, intelligent boy of yesteryear; maybe it's just because Lloyd was running out of ideas; but this is far from his best sound film, let alone being his best film of all. This was the last film with his characteristic young-go-getter persona, although by this time all the go had already got up and gone, and Lloyd himself was a less than youthful 38. Things improved a bit once Lloyd started playing a different kind of role in a different kind of film, in 'Cat's Paw' and 'Milky Way' but it was too late for a full-scale revival of his stardom.
The annoying thing about 'Movie Crazy' is that you can see how the gag sequences could have been shot in a silent film, and would have been much funnier if performed with a bit more pace and without the awkward dialogue. A prime example is the scene towards the start of the film where Harold first smashes up O'Brien's straw boater. It's just too slow and the dialogue is unnecessary. Ditto for the later scene of Harold destroying O'Brien's office - a scene which is very reminiscent of one in Keaton's 'The Cameraman' of 1928.
Apparently the original US release of this film was only 84 mins. The restored DVD version is 98 mins, and I can't help thinking that knocking a quarter of an hour out of it could help a great deal. It may well be that the reason the film has received such exalted praise in the past is because people have hitherto only seen the shorter edit. Lloyd was noted for previewing his films to bring them to perfection, and if he decreed that it should have been trimmed to 84 mins in 1932, it should have been kept that way on DVD.
I'd be keen to see the short version and give 'Movie Crazy' a second chance. This long version wears out its welcome far too quickly, and I can't believe that this cut is what Harold Lloyd wanted audiences to see.
Forgotten Silver (1995)
What is real anyway?
Documentary is all about taking real life and shaping it into a story. 'Forgotten Silver' suggests that real part doesn't even have to be real, as long as the story's good.
I watched this again tonight - probably the 4th or 5th time I've seen it since it was first screened as an (allegedly) true doco back in 1996. Despite knowing the whole thing was cod, I was quite surprised to find tears in my eyes as NZ pioneer film-maker Colin McKenzie accidentally filmed his own death in Spain, so drawn was I into the story.
Once you strip away the hype over the hoax factor, what's left is just a great story about a struggling film maker facing and almost overcoming insurmountable obstacles to create a work of mad genius. Anyone expecting belly laughs from 'Forgotten Silver' is probably going to be disappointed, because viewed as a story, this isn't a comedy - it's a tragedy. It's no wonder so many people were sucked into believing it when it first screened - the Colin McKenzie saga has an emotional depth which is heartbreaking.
Bonus points for a brilliant musical score, some superb technical effects (especially the corroded, bubbling, self-destructing nitrate film; most filmmakers would have settled for a couple of cliché tramlines to make the footage look old), and the gorgeous Thomas Robbins as Colin McKenzie.
Strange Bedfellows (2004)
Funniest thing I've seen all year
I like a good farce. It's a very simple formula, you wonder why so many films get it wrong. It starts with a small lie... and then a slightly bigger lie to cover the first one, and so on and so on. The secret is to make the underlying situation very serious. In this instance, the threat isn't being "outed" to the township, it's taxation fraud and the potential of being sent to jail that underpins the frantic farceurs.
I watched the DVD of 'Strange Bedfellows' tonight with my partner and we both laughed like hyenas throughout. Even though most of the plot twists are obvious, half the pleasure comes from predicting what's going to happen next, and then seeing it actually happen as poor Vince and Ralph are plunged deeper into their charade. Michael Caton is brilliant, and Paul Hogan shines too, a few slightly wooden scenes notwithstanding. The rest of the cast allows anyone who's grown up with Aussie TV to play a quick game of "Ooh, isn't that...?"
The tax law reform which sets the plot in motion is very improbable - now moreso than when the film was made just last year - but it's clearly just a mcguffin to get the plot rolling, and it's not worth slamming the film for it.
Some people have been saying that the film is full of negative gay stereotypes; since the only part of the film with "real" gays (as opposed to Vince and Ralph's hilariously inept mincing) is set in Oxford St Sydney on a Friday(?) night, it's hardly surprising everyone's all frocked up for a night out. The important lesson here is that once Vince and Ralph sit and talk with them and get to know them, the gay guys are just, well, guys. Which is pretty much the moral of the story. Strip away the glitter and the glam, forget about who does what to whom in the bedroom - if you just stop and look, people are all just people.
I loved this - it's the Australian 'In And Out'. More like this, please.